One more thing...

I forgot to mention that after Kady gets her Violet Protodrake (Lade only needs one achievement from Children's week and then she'll have it, Kady needs Midsummer) I'm only doing the EASY holiday achievements on my other toons IF I FEEL LIKE IT. They're like chores at this point, especially the ones that you get from random drops. The ones that require you do things and then you get them, those are ok, but the fact that some meta achievements need you to get something completely random, that's not cool.

Speaking of random: I want to quickly tell you about my favorite Easter memory from this year (IRL of course). It actually happened Good Friday rather than on Easter, but w/e. I watched a bunch of (fully grown) military men do an Easter Egg Hunt. They didn't put it on for their kids, it was put on FOR THEM. It was HILARIOUS to watch all these guys in their military uniforms running around picking up eggs going "I GOT SIX! I GOT SEVEN!". Made my entire week. So funny.

That's all.

OMG EGGS!!!!! (An Achievement Junkie's Guide to Noblegarden)

I'm currently writing this while on the flightpoint taxi, doing Desert Rose. Noblegarden is pretty simple. To become a Noble Gardener, you don't even need all of the achievements for this holiday. That's pretty nice considering one of the achievements is based on what you randomly get from the eggs (Sunday's Finest). For the most part, the achievements themselves are straight forward. The hardest one is going to vary depending on your server. My PvP server made Hard Boiled really hard last year due to the amount of horde who were corpse-camping people. This year, not so much (I went at 7:30pm).

I think my biggest challenge last year (and will probably be this year) was Shake Your Bunny-Maker. Some horde females are really hard to find. Dwarf females are also somewhat hard to find, but usually there's a way of finding them in chat and stuff. It also doesn't help that the Spring Flowers used to put bunny ears on the females have a 5 min cooldown. That's not cool, it totally doesn't help you when you're running up and down the streets of Dalaran stalking females and trying to put bunny ears on them! If you find the last two females you need, you have to wait 5 min after getting one to get the other, they could have disappeared by then.

The biggest things with Noblegarden is: DON'T ACTUALLY BUY ANYTHING WITH YOUR CHOCOLATE. Except the egg to hide in Stormwind, that's ok. And if you have all the other achievements (including Chocoholic), buying the tuxedo pants and shirt is ok for Blushing Bride. What's nice is the clothes for that aren't soulbound, so you can trade with someone and you can both get the achievement. BUT DON'T BUY ANYTHING ELSE. Everything you need for the achievements comes in the eggs and will drop randomly. Including the rabbit pet. Eat your candy. Typically the stuff you need will drop by the time you've gathered up 105 chocolates anyway (remember, 5 to buy the egg to put in SW).

And that's my cheap guide to Noblegarden. In the time it took to write this post, I finished the achievement (I had already started, but w/e). ;)

Happy Egg Hunting!

Soooooo healing...that's still what I do, right?

It's been a while since I've posted anything about healing. So, here's a post about healing! :)

I have noticed that healing still comes most naturally to me. DPS and tanking are fun, and I seemed to pick them up fairly quickly (and for the most part hold my own, I'm not sure how good I actually am), but healing flows from these fingers onto my action bar and through my mouse-over macros (thanks Garaba). I one-handed healed a random heroic the other day because I was eating. It was H UP and I was only throwing up Renews and--wow, I don't even remember the name right now, it's #3 on my action bar, it's the jumpy-around-heal that goes to up to 5 people. Yeah, 3. Occasionally I'd use Circle but only because it was easier than putting my food down. My gearscore is pretty high now, so a lot of the older Northrend heroics are so easy to heal they're boring. Which is probably why I'm working on gearing my tank.

I was DPSing on my hunter in H VH not too long ago and the healer was a priest who never left Shadow spec. She Shadow-Healed the whole dungeon. Granted, health bars weren't topped off (like I like to do), but nobody died, even during boss fights. I'm apparently not the only one who's bored with the heroics. I guess this happens when an expansion is winding down. I started playing a month or two before Wrath came out, nowhere near the level cap when it hit, Wrath pretty much popped my cherry in a couple of ways.

Wrath is the first expansion that I got to move through with my guild, together. A lot of us were leveling at the same time, but some were farther than others (*cough*Darwe & Heap*cough*). We were all new 80's around the same time and experienced gearing up through heroics together, before Dungeon Finder. Our first guild raids were Naxxramas and Obsidian Sanctum. We were working on Ulduar when Kady got geared enough to help and became my main. We never did finish Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader came out before we could and that held our attention. Well, most of us. There are a couple of us (Garaba and I mostly) who want to go back and finish Ulduar to finish it, but that'll have to be a pug I suppose.

And now we're raiding Ice Crown Citadel--which is the first endgame content for a lot of us. We were fairly geared as a guild when we started it, and we have a rather large learning curve, but we work well as a team and inevitably get through one boss after the next. Currently, we've gotten as far as defeating Rotface. We would have raided yesterday and hopefully gotten just as far again, but Hubby and I went to the movies (can't say no to free tickets to an early screening of "Clash of the Titans"!). I'm sure if I logged on right now, I could probably get in with Darwe's guild, but I'd rather wait for Hubby to get home with Little Caesar's and do some random heroics with him on our alts :)

So yeah, getting bored with conflicting raid schedules makes me roll alts while we wait for the new content to drop. I know I'm not alone. How do you kill time waiting for the next expansion?

Newest Level 80

Meet Emila, my new tank. A warrior to be specific. I'll post about her a little bit, but probably more on the viewpoint of the receiving end of healing. A tank's view of a healer, or at least, a reasonably critical tank's view of the healer. We'll see. So far, I've mostly been tanking high regular dungeons to get emblems and gear. I've tanked Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron in addition to the other Northrend dungeons. Have not yet taken on Halls of Reflection or Trial of the Champion (although I haven't done the latter because Dungeon Finder has not put me there yet), but I'm looking forward to it. I like tanking a lot, but not as much as healing. It's something to do on the side, when I need a break from healing, plus several people in the guild have alts they'd like to start bringing to raids and if I can get all 3 of my toons geared up, I will be pretty much interchangeable with anyone else in the raid :)

Dear Heals.

Dear Heals,

I need heals!

Love,
DPS

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Dear DPS,

I saw that you needed heals. I also saw that you refused to move out of the bright pink puddle of death. I decided that the tank needed my attention more.

Love,
Heals

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Dear Heals,

I'm going to pull the entire room at once. All 27 mobs. Handle it. K thnx bye.

Love,
Tank

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Dear Tank,

I'm going to sit and drink Kungaloosh while you pull the entire room. Have fun dying for not waiting until your healer's ready.

Love,
Heals

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Dear Heals,

I like to Life Tap myself to near death. I expect you to keep my health bar full, I need my mana to stay on top of the other DPS.

Love,
Your Favorite Warlock

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Dear Warlock,

I need my mana more than you do. Healing you when you Life Tap wastes my mana. Use a mana pot or learn to use your mana more efficiently. If I see you losing health, I will bubble you and that's it. You are not a melee class, you don't need my full attention.

Love,
Heals

New cell phone. One with a full keyboard. Hoping this will encourage me to blog more, especially since it looks like I can use more than 180 characters...

Healing Priests Get The Short End of the Gear-Stick... (QQ post)

Healing Priests get the short end of the stick when it comes to gear. Period.

First off, we're clothies. There is only one kind of gear we can use. We can't be like Druids and use leather AND cloth. Shammies get mail and lower, and Pallys get it all. Cloth, that's all we get. It's an exchange, yes, lower armor for more powerful heals, and yes, I chose to play a priest knowing the armor restrictions. That's not what I'm writing about today.

Today, I'd like to QQ a little bit about cloth gear with hit on it. In addition to only being able to wear cloth, healing priests have absolutely no need for hit and therefore gear with hit on it is not for them. If we want to roll on cloth gear with hit, it has to be offspec. Even if it's a huge upgrade. It doesn't work the other way around either. DPS classes that wear cloth can roll on any cloth gear and it's all mainspec for them, sometimes they don't even need the hit if they've reached their hit-cap. Healing priests already draw from a small gear pool, made even small by the fact that half the gear has hit on it.

Rolling against a DPS clothie is a pain, especially if there's no hit on the piece, because if I'm rolling on something, I need it, there is no other option for me. If I'm rolling on something, that's because it's 1 of maybe 10 things I can actually use from ICC or whatever the raid is. If I lose the roll on a piece of gear with no hit, I can't necessarily roll on the next piece of cloth, I definitely can't roll if it has hit (unless it's offspec).

Kady does have a couple of pieces of gear with hit on them, because all the stats were upgrades from what she had been wearing. My guild has yelled at me a couple of times for rolling mainspec on something with hit, mostly if it was against a pug or some other cloth DPS. I always end up getting the piece the third or fourth time it drops because everyone else has gotten it by then. I get third-generation leftovers, even though they're complete upgrades, all because of a few points to the hit stat.

I maintain that if cloth DPS can roll on gear without hit, I should be able to roll on gear with hit, especially if it's an upgrade. I'm talking a decent upgrade too, not a few extra points in intellect or something like that. If a few extra points in a stat is the only part of the upgrade, I'll roll offspec, but if it's a huge upgrade you better believe I'll roll on it. If Druids can roll on my cloth pieces because it's an upgrade for stats (and they'd be losing an armor class), then I can roll on DPS cloth pieces with hit.

/QQ