Monday (17 Jan) - What Monday Brings

Monday (17 Jan) - What Monday Brings

Starting at the end of the day, I logged in around 9pm Monday night to give Sista a little more time. Well, I tried to login, anyway, but I couldn't because the server was down. After a little digging I learned that a good many servers had been taken offline due to some king of login issue. At 9:30pm Blizz was reporting that the problem had been found and fixed and that servers were being brought back up. Nice to know, but Silvermoon server was still offline. At 11pm I made one last check. All the servers were up - except for Silvermoon.

On Tuesday morning regular maintenance started at 5am - 11am.

So it was a good thing that Sista was able to get some in game time on Monday afternoon. She spent the time in Darkshore questing, collecting herbs, and skinning beasts, leveling from 22 to level 24. Darkshore is a fun place to level. There is a whole series of druid related quests to complete. The zone is one of those that was heavily impacted by Cata, turning a normal forest zone into land broken into multi-level pieces and fractured waterways. There are plenty of beasts to kill and skin, and a lot of herbs to collect. Sista did some serious skilling up of those professions.

Sista is loving her "Running Wild" ability, too. Worgen do not get a racial mount at level 20 like all other races do. Instead, she got "Running Wild,' an ability that allows her to run on all fours at the same speed as a regular mount. It uses mount mechanics, and it came with riding skill training included. Based on what I've read, worgen will be able to purchase higher level riding training at the appropriate levels to increase their running/mount speed. I couldn't find any specific information on worgen flying mounts. I doubt worgen will be flapping their arms using a "Flying Wild" ability, but they don't have a racial mount, either. My guess is that worgen will use their class flying mount. For Sista, that would be flying form since she's a druid. Picture Sista running at 200% speed on all fours and then instantly shapeshift into a bird and soar into the sky!

JB has continued to collect herbs in Mount Hyjal to feed the huge mat requirement to level alchemy. She's at skill 505/525 now. I don't know how Wild is going to afford the mat costs to make the raid caster flask, Draconic Mind, though. It takes THIRTY herbs to make ONE flask. Even with Flask/Elixir specialization, getting two flasks instead of one is not guaranteed like it was before. We're talking 300-500g PER FLASK, or hours and hours of herb gathering each week. JB's xp is at 37% now. I don't know if Wild will let her stop before she levels to 81, and she's reluctant to turn off her xp knowing that she ultimately needs to level to be able to collect more of the herbs Wild needs.

JB also had to do more research on enhancement shaman weapon use. Of course she is dual wielding, but I'm really confused over what weapons to use. Right now weapon procs are being buffed by spell power, and many shaman are using caster weapons in their main hand slot to take advantage of the weapon spell power. Blizz finally figured out how stupid that was and in 4.0.6 changes it to attack power instead. JB has a slow caster mace, a fast agi dagger, and a slow agi axe. See, she's trying to cover all her bases here. Traditionally melee shaman use two slow agi weapons, but I've seen plenty of posts that say that because of damage normalization weapon speed is not a factor anymore. And then there are posts that say slow weapons are still preferred. And more posts that say look at the DPS on the weapon and go by the higher one (assuming equivalent stats). JB is still trying to find the definitive answer. Whatever weapons she uses, she still plans to buff the main hand with Windfury and the off-hand with Flametongue.

She did find a stat priority: Hit (til cap at 17%) --> expertise (till cap at 26) --> Agi --> Mastery --> haste --> crit.

"Int" is no where in that equation, and I barely remember something about mana coming from attack power for enhancement? I know that JB has very little +int (and only from non-Cata gear she hasn't replaced yet), but in the few kills she has mana has not been an issue.

JB is already over the hit cap (she's at 24%) and expertise cap (at 30). JB should be able to reforge some of that hit for something else. JB did make a mistake in picking crit over mastery, so that is what she'll likely reforge into. Enhancement Mastery adds 20% additional damage (fire, frost, and nature damage) plus 2.5% more damage for every point of mastery. The mastery numbers can be confusing at first. JB's stats say she has 14.56 Mastery. The tooltip for mastery says that she has a mastery rating of 301, and that it's equivalent to 6.56 mastery. Here's how it works. Base mastery is 8.00. Mastery from gear adds 6.56 more mastery for a total of 14.56. I wonder if 20% plus (2.5% x 6 pts) = 20% + 30% = 50% increased damage? Wow, now I see why mastery is so good!

Update on Sista - she is level 25 now and killed a level 20 elite for her big quest in Darkshore. She should be moving on to Ashenvale pretty soon. She also belatedly realized that she has been skinning and flower pciking without getting any skill points because she forgot to visit the trainers when she maxed them out. Sigh. At least she was getting some nice xp for it.

Then there was a powerful night of dungeon runs with Unbleached (what nickname would you like?), Kiren, and Sista. The dungeon count was:

Unbleached - 1 (leveled to 30)
Sista - 3 (leveled to 27)
Kiren - 8 Eight!? (leveled to 31)

Sista will try to get to level 30 by next week's get together, but then Kiren might be 35 by then. ;-)

If Sista can't make it then Java could fill in. I don't know, though, Sista likes the idea of leveling past Java, which would make her the highest level alliance ever in the Wild family.

Wild may get his first chance at Cata Heroic dungeons Tuesday night. The guild has a raid scheduled for Baradin Hold. Afterword (or if the alliance holds Tol Barad) then we'll be doing some heroic runs. Wild has been moving deck chairs on the Titanic, trying to find the best combination of gear. He has an "int" config which maxes his mana; a "spi" config which maxes his mana regen; and a "maspi" config which maxes both spi and mastery. I'm leaning toward the "maspi" config. Wild also did a resto respec to place even more emphasis on bigger heals from nourish, healing touch, and regrowth. Wild may be using HT a lot more in heroics. I'm hoping that bigger heals (thru mastery) and more regen (thru spi) will trump the high int/mana setup I've been using. I'm pretty much resigned to running out of mana, so I'm pushing my regen up even further so that even at low mana my regen rate will keep heals on the tank if no one else.