A couple of topics today, as I am totally scatterbrained:
3.1 Priest Stuff
The Hymn of Hope Glyph has, as of the most recent information, been nerfed so it’s merely twice the mana in half the time. Unless we all start becoming really desperate for mana in Ulduar, a pox on that glyph.
I logged on the PTR to hop around Ironforge a bit and realized that I forgot to transfer with enough gold to dual-spec. Hmm. I did manage to dig up the 40g to respec and play around a bit with the new trees. My Empowered Renew was healing up front for about 1800, which is.. I mean, it’s okay, but it’s hardly earth shattering. It makes Renew pretty nifty for throwing on DPS who took a little damage, but I’m going to need more spell power before Empowered Renew makes a difference on tanks and people taking persistent damage. In my perfect unbalanced world, 2500 would be a better number.
Priests who have been playing for any length of time expect Blizz to fluctuate annually on whether we should be stacking MP5 or Spirit, but I still made a little face at the PTR numbers. My out of combat regen dropped from 830 to 520 unbuffed. Blurgh. Now, mind you, lately on the live server I’ve been standing around watching my insane OOC regen and giggling to myself, but I enjoyed that feeling, dang it.
Anyway, if you’re a jewelcrafter I’d get a whole ton of MP5 gems ready for 3.1, because I forsee a lot of regemming. Here’s hoping that the stats on the gear in Ulduar reflects the new regen mechanics.
Raid Achievement Stuff
Last night we completed And They All Would Go Down Together, and it was extremely fun. We used the six tank and healer method described here, although in our case it was three tanks, three plate DPSers, five healers, and a healing boomkin.
The key to this fight was really just coordination. We had one person in the back calling the switches every three marks. In the front we designated one person in each of the two DPS groups to call the switch on the first meteor after two marks. There was a little shuffling around to get the DPS relatively even between front and back, and from 5% it was a bit of chaos with everyone just wildly hitting and shouting, “Kill them now!!!!” on Vent, but at the end of the day we did it. This Achievement involved moving, teamwork, and precision timing, which are three of the things I enjoy the most.
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So they’re removing the black and plagued proto-drakes in 3.1. Personally I think it’s too early, but I’m not as upset about it as some people are. It seems kind of the equivalent of taking out the Zul’Aman bears when Sunwell came out, which of course didn’t happen, so I think this caught us all by surprise. We were not prepared!
It seems pretty unlikely at this point that my guild will be able to get any raid drakes this round. (I can’t decide which is more unlikely: Sarth-10 3D, or successfully doing Thaddius-25 with no crossed polarities.). On the bright side now we know what Blizz has in mind for these achievements, and we can go for them right out of the gate in Ulduar. I think we’ve become pretty lackadaisical in our attitude towards raids in WotLK thus far, and ideally this will be a kick in the butt to view Ulduar immediately as a challenge that needs actual effort and hard work. (Because it does, right Blizz? Right?!)
