Weekend (11 Apr) - Heroics and Perky Pug

Weekend (11 Apr) - Heroics and Perky Pug

Wild spent a boring Thursday evening going over his gear and agonizing over whether to spend the 60 frost badges he'd laboriously collected. There are three types of gear frost badges are used for: The i251 Lasherweave set; the i264 Sanctified Lasherweave set, which don't directly cost badges, but require a turn in of the Lasherweave i251 in order to get the Sanctified (along with a drop from ICC); and then there are select non-set items of i264 calibre.

Wild has two pieces of the Sanctified (shoulder and legs), which gets me the two piece set bonus. Druids are not all that impressed with the Sanctified set, which is sad because this is the Tier 10 set. Wild spent most of his badges on non-Tier gear once I had the two piece set bonus. The four piece set bonus is fairly nice, too, but the gear itself is sort of ho hum. So, while there are some i251 Lasherweave gear Wild could buy one of with his 60 frost badges, none of it is much of an improvement over non-set gear Wild already has. When Wild finished his assessment, there were three gear slot priorities, two of which cost 60 badges and one that cost 95.

The only Lasherweave piece Wild still wanted were the gloves. However, my best bet there is to wait until Wild gets a Sanctified drop in ICC before buying them. The other 60 badge item is the trinket [Purified Lunar Dust]. Wild is wearing a +98 spell power trinket, and the new one has +179 spell power. Kind of a no-brainer there, but the older trinket also had a chance to increase +haste. The large spell power upgrade outweighed that and Wild ended up buying the trinket.

Wild will now be saving up 95 frost badges to buy an i264 chest piece that is far better than the Sanctified chest equivalent. Slow but steady, Wild is getting there gear-wise.

On the moonkin side, Wild is building up his triumph badges to buy the higher end +hit trinket, which will allow him to use more crit gear instead of all the +hit gear he has to wear now. Wild can break over 3k in base spell power on his gear and over 20% base crit, but that is only for Heroics basically. Trying to hit a level 83+ elite in ICC, however, requires a lot of +hit in order not to miss, and when that is taken into account Wild drops to around 2900 spell power, but, more importantly, his crit falls down to under 14%, not good for a DPS class that is heavily dependant on crits.

Friday night was our pvp night, of course, and it was a good night to be horde.

We started with the 30s bracket team of Ando (level 39), Lao (38), and EZ (31). We make a pretty balanced team, with Ando doing the druid healing thing, Lao dealing ranged caster death as a shadow priest, and EZ mixing it up in close quarters as a melee shaman.

Our first match was in Warsong Gulch. EZ quickly became the favorite player on the team - the enemy alliance team, that is. At level 31 they just couldn't resist her, and one rogue in particular made it his sole task to lurk in stealth, waiting on EZ so he could backstab her and then slice her to shreds. We did kill that rogue a few times, but he spilled EZ's blood all over the field. It was a bit of a frustrating match in other ways, too, as the allies did what's called "turtle-ing" for much of the battle. "Turtle-ing" means keeping almost all of their team in or close to their own base, and basically playing only defense. It is almost always a fail strategy, since attacking and capping flags is what wins matches, and we did eventually win the match, 2-0, when time ran out.

An Arathi Basin match followed. When the match started a knot of horde headed for the nearby farm to capture that while our team, along with several others, made for the mine. Both are nearer to the horde starting point than the alliance. The battle at the farm went quickly in our favor, but the mine . . . Well, the alliance team hit it in force. It was one of the largest pitted battles I've seen in an AB match. Friend and foe mixing it up in a huge firefight. It was awesome! We lost the skirmish and the mine, but the team that had grabbed the farm also took the stables while the allies were busy at the mine. AB is all about holding on to resource areas, and we were one up on them.

There was another series of pitched battles at the blacksmith that raged over most of the latter half of the match. The allies were determined to take it, and the horde, with more resources ticking us toward victory, were determined to take a stand and stop them. EZ again shined as the favored player, this time by the horde. Why? Because EZ became the bait. Like WSG, the allies could not resist the "easy" kill of a level 31. However, EZ (with Ando's healing help) did not make it easy. EZ would drop a set of four totems, which included totems designed to slow the allies down and exploding totems to irritate them. The allies would charge us and EZ would wade in at the front, taking on all comers. EZ would die, of course, but not before the rest of the horde defenders had started decimating the distracted allie attackers. EZ led in deaths (ie, dying) and even healer Ando put up better DPS numbers, but it was good strategy and EZ loved it. We won.

With a Wintergrasp battle coming up, we switched to the team of DER (level 80), Philly (79) and Sis (78). Since patch 3.3.3 WG seems to have become even more popular than before as it can give a good chunk of honor - honor points are now even more important than before in pvp. I'd never been denied entry into WG because the raid was full, even one already in progress - until recently when Philly experienced that for the first (and so far only) time. All three of us got into the WG battle, but a few minutes into it Philly and then Sis were kicked out of our raid group to make way for level 80s. We got to stay in WG and continued to fight, but not being in a raid meant that we were not sharing in the spoils from kills or to meet quest requirements. I didn't even realize that's what had happened until DER explained it.

After WG Sis called it an evening. DER was after a new heirloom weapon and still needed some triumph badges to get it. Time for some Heroics. Philly went to bed and Wildshard joined DER. By the way, Philly is 37% of the way to level 80.

Wild usually does Heroics in moonkin form, and I was itching to see what that new +179 spell power trinket would do for Wild's DPS numbers, but it would be a lot quicker getting a group if Wild were healing. So Wild signed up as a healer, and we only had to wait a couple minutes for our first group.

The pally tank kept things moving a little too well. After our first boss kill Wild got distracted and his group left him behind. Now, I know Wild is easily distracted, but most groups figure out by this point in their lives that leaving the healer behind is not a good idea. They all died, and when they got back from the graveyard they made sure Wild got to where we were supposed to be. Wild apologized for getting lost, and one of the DPS left, but DPS are easy to get and we had a new one almost instantly. The pally still tended to over-aggro things, and Wild's detour didn't seem to phase him as the pally still managed to get too far ahead of everyone else, so Wild was constantly catching up on the healing. But that made things interesting, and it was a pretty fun run.

Wild and DER did one more Heroic. The tank in this one wanted to get an achievement, don't ask me which one, and it took us a bit longer to do than our usual rush through. Wild did die once when I got hammered during one of the boss fights. It was my fault completely for not getting out of the line of attack soon enough. The rest of the group were pretty amazing, though, hanging in there brilliantly. Only two were standing at the end, but we didn't wipe.

We called it an evening, and DER had his dagger. Wild also had is own surprise. In his mail was a new vanity pet, a little dog called Perky Pug. DER, I learned, already had one, which you win once you have done Heroics with at least one hundred different players. Pretty cool.

Philly's grind continued on Sunday - now 59% of the way to level 80.