New Toys

One of the many things I love about World of Warcraft is the ability to customize the user interface with all of the user made addons there are available for the game. I've said it before, I am an addon junky. Surprisingly I have never been completely burned by this addiction. I update my addon's every week, so far, when a patch has hit I have some minor hic-ups for the first few hours and by the end of the day all of my "essentials" are up and running again. My "essentials" include Bongos2 and Pitbull and for my Druid, Clique. Those three are probably the only three addons other than guild required things like a threat meter and Boss Mods that I actually NEED to play Warcraft.

This week with 2.4 hitting the biggest snag I ran into was for a little bit before I left for work on Tuesday night, Pitbull, was enabled but not working. That was it... well my damage meter isn't working either but I expected that with the overhaul blizzard has done to the default combat log.

Anyway, this post is about my new toy, really it is. My new toy is the Belkin N52te. I come from using a Saitek Pro Gamer Command Unit (Yes really ugly bulky name). I am in love with this speedpad. The Saitek has a few more buttons but, the east of programming the Belkin, the way that it fits my hand, and simply the more responsive the buttons are make the Belkin a much better choice. If you're looking into a speedpad, either this one or perhaps Belkin's older model the N52 (I have never used this one but my husband has and he says it's nice) is the way to go.

I also have some updates on Luna's progress I don't have time to write them out right now but good things have happened I promise!

/dance

Luna is a hair away from level 66, yesterday I respec'd her from Balance/Resto (something similar to Phae's resto leveling build) to a resto tree of life build. /dance is made of win in tree form.

I haven't really done anything spectacular lately, I spent last night wandering around BRD with a resto shaman friend of mine, we decided we'd get attuned for Molten Core for no reason. One of the Holy Paladins in the guild logged on and decided to join us, thank goodness she did because neither one of us has the shadowforged key so we were doing a lot of "Um, how do we get there without the key". So the three of us, three of the only girls in the guild, ventured into BRD and got our toons keyed for MC. Then we converted to raid and hopped in. Just the three of us. The resto shaman is a trouble maker you see, and she likes to get us into things that are over our heads. We pulled the first two mobs. To quote the shaman "Wow, for level 62 elites these things sure are... zomg run out run out" We had the holy paladin tanking, I was healing, and the shaman was off healing and dpsing. We didn't have enough dps between the three of us... I think we only managed to shave a teeny tiny bit off of the first one's life before we abandoned it.

It was a fun little foray into old world instances and a nice break from Underbog and Mana Tombs.

Speaking of Mana Tombs, there's a HUGE difference in my opinion between the difficulty of healing UB and the difficulty of healing Mana Tombs. I'm glad I had my discipline priest friend with me to off heal or we might have had to do a few more corpse runs. I think I can manage it better this time. I had never realized how insane some of those pulls really are.

I might be an addon junky

I'll be the first person to admit it. I'm an addon addict. If you were to look at my UI there's little to maybe nothing left of Blizzard's default UI. I've replaced everything, action bars, buff tracker, quest tracking, the mini map the unit frames... everything.

With my mage and warlock I have everything keybound and I use a Saitek Pro-Gamer Command Unit (the saitek version of belkins's speedpad) Now, this set up has served me well for all dps rolls, and when Luna was feral spec'd in the beginning it was very useful to me then however, I hate trying to heal that way. I'm not a big fan of making macros for every little thing I do and, to adapt my saitek style to how I'd ideally like to be healing, I'd have to make a crap-ton, yes a crap ton, of mouse-over macros.

I'm a lazy druid. I don't want to make a ton of macros so I needed a solution. Enter Clique.

I use Clique in combination with my favorite unitframe addon, Pitbull. There's no going back. In my opinion Clique, a decent Unitframe replacement and a mouse with a LOT of buttons is so the way to go. I have yet to play with making Clique macros, that could change my opinion of the addon, but I doubt it. I think I'm in love.

I still have things keybound. Right now, Luna is kind of an odd Balance/resto blend close to a dreamstate build but not dreamstate (I may be changing this around if I find the spec isn't working for me but so far I like it and I'm only doing the leveling 5 mans right now) so, on easier instances and during my solo (or rather light grouping I almost always have an elemental shaman with me) endeavors I use my speed pad for my balance spells. I also have some straight up modifier keys bound directly to my saitek in particular shift and alt are bound to keys 9 and 10 on my device. I'm not sure if I could do this with a belkin, although I havent tried it because the belkin has a few less buttons. I bound shift and alt to the saitek in my druid profile because... I'm a noob and kept hitting the windows key and basically alt tabbing out of the game while I was trying to heal. You don't want to be the noob that tells the rogue he died because as you were going to heal him you tabbed out of the game.

Happily HoTing everything

Well my guild is kind of on a break from raiding, four of our core raiders are deploying to Iraq this week and one of our healers just found out she's going to have a baby so we're not raiding because people's schedules are nuts and unfortunately we need to replace four people for the 15 months! they will be overseas (We all hope they will be safe over there, and they promised to stop by our forums now and then to check in)

So I've been leveling my alliance druid on the same server as my main. I find myself throughly enjoying happily HoTing my way through Ramparts and Blood Furnace with my elemental shaman leveling companion and Rez buddy lol. I wonder if I'd have a more difficult time finding a group for these instances if he wasn't there.

Now, I've been looking at the instance drops, and while there are some nice leather items it seems that the cloth items, to my untrained resto nooblet eye, have slightly better stats. Should I pass on these clothie upgrades and hold out for the leather ones since I essentially have no aggro dump, or resign to be completely dependent on my tank to save me when I draw the attention of some of our not so friendly PvE opponents? Ideally I wouldn't have to worry about as I shouldn't be taking damage, but this is BC, and we all know that BC means AoE lol. There have been a couple of instances, like the last boss in Ramparts for example where if my tank isn't particularly attentive of when the dragon lands I can easily be two shotted. Even though I tell the tank before hand that when that dragon lands he's coming straight for me, a lot of the PuGs we end up in... well they just don't listen or they don't care. I wonder if there's something I can do about this or if they are just nooblets and I should take the cloth drops.

On the flip side of things I've also started leveling another druid! Horde side on Bronzebeard. She's my stealthed feline assasin to offset Luna's peaceful HoTing. If you look closely you can see her stealthing up the stairs to dispatch a quick death to her most recent quest objective. I really wish I would have rolled a druid as my first toon. I enjoy this class so much more than my current main!

Through the Portal

The perfect place for a picnic? Well... maybe not, and hey! has anyone seen my shaman? Elemental Shaman, always keep you waiting and on valentine's day to boot!

My husband and I have gone through the dark portal at last. And yes, I still had that level thirty something quest reward staff... because I'm a cheap druid and I knew there'd be something nice waiting on the other side of a quest turn in for me.

My guild told me I was crazy for going resto as I leveled, they said I'd find it hard to kill things and do my quests by myself. I didn't run into that problem on the other side of the portal, and I haven't noticed a significant change in my damage output in fact it is probably better, gear does that for you. I wonder if it's going to get hard? Am I going to regret my heavy resto build? Should I instance hop my way to 70? I'll probably be fine even if I was a full tree build, My husband's shaman is now elemental and he pumps out a good amount of damage, and now that we're the same level again we can quest together.

I went to Ramparts right after dinging 60, that was only the second time I had healed an instance before. Our priest died twice, I felt so bad! She was just so squishy and died so fast! She's the only one who died the entire run. I guess that's ok? She did some off healing, I wonder how I'd do if I was the only healer, maybe we'd have wiped? I would really like to get lifebloom!

So I'm a level 60 nervous resto druid, riding in style!

Wow, I'm a terrible blogger

Wow, I completely forgot I had started this blog, and I had meant to keep up with my druid and didn't. So... let me catch up to where I am now and what I've done so far and I promise I'll be better at this. I swear!

So what HAVE I done with my druid. Well I've tried everything. I was feral from the moment I got bear form and placed my talent point up until around level 40 when I discovered, melee was not my thing, or perhaps it was that Uldaman run with some friends of mine and their utter refusal to listen to me when I told them "I have never tanked before please give me a second to figure this out" and the shadow priest ran along happily face melting everything. I had no hope of establishing aggro and it was just a frustrating experience.

So, I went to Stormwind and spoke to the druid trainer and walked away as the coolest looking owlbeast in stormwind... who immediately hopped a bird and headed off to Stranglethorn Vale.


And then I took a huge break from leveling my druid because of some guild drama, and looking for a new guild for my main was time consuming and I'm not even sure that I'm satisfied where I am but yeah, drama is teh suxorz and I will try my best to stay out of it in the future.

So, a good couple of months go by and now I'm back to being boomkin flying around from Moonglade and it's beautiful serene tones to Felwood, back to Feralas, then to Tanaris. I forgot how much flying around there is between level 40 and 58.

Now I mentioned before that my main is a fire mage, so being a Moonkin Druid is much like being a mage, nuke the target before it nukes you with the added bonus of being able to shift to caster form and heal yourself. It's quite awesome as a matter of fact, but it turns out that I wanted something different...

What was left, I pondered. I had intended on going resto at 60 but, I got bored so I found myself standing in Darnassus at the Druid trainer at level 50 with a balance/resto blended spec. And I LOVE it. I haven't stopped playing my druid since. I'm now finally level 58 and about to step through the dark portal. (And now that I'm looking at these images I should buy myself a new staff, I've been lugging that quest reward around since at least level 40)

I was so happy HoTing my way through Scholomance. The wonders of LFG with "Resto" in the comments. I was never able to get a PuG for Scholo or Strat as my mage! Next Up, "A Resto Noob and the Dark Portal!"

Shifting Perspectives

Leveling with a druid is more fun than I had expected it to be. I come to playing a druid from playing a mage, so I knew I'd be at home with the casting portion that consumes levels 1-10. I stayed around the night-elf starting area at first, mostly because I hadn't done those quests with my main and it's always fun to do something new but there's something I just can't stand about Teldrassil, maybe it's because of it's remote location or maybe it just makes me sleepy the music is so soothing it actually makes me tired... who knows. I just couldn't wait to get off that island. I stayed around because I figured since Night Elves are the only race in the alliance that can be druids, I'd have to come back to Darnassus quite a bit to pick up my class specific quests. I prefer the Draenei starting area over all others, the quests are just more entertaining for me, probably because they were added after Blizzard knew what was fun and what wasn't! So... I stayed on that little island until I finished my bear quest, those moonkins outside the cave hit pretty hard on a level 10 and the actual quest mob was much easier to kill than the Moonkins outside the cave.

After completing the quest and shifting into my first form I happy danced right off the dock as I awaited the boat for Azure Myst. I wasn't sticking around that darkshore any longer than I had to, and luckily there is a druid trainer right at the point where the boat docks, so If any other young druids prefer the quests in Azure Myst it's just a short boat ride away and there is a readily available druid trainer! Now, I'm sure bear form is a lot of fun at higher levels, I know there's a druid in my guild that's been feral since he rolled his character and he absolutely loves tanking but... for leveling bear form was not my favorite. I did most of my killing as a caster (which oddly was not what I expected to be doing) shifting into bear only if I was about to go out of mana or the monster was closing in on me. I have quite few alts and I must say levels 10-20 on a druid are SLOW going. It's a good thing the quests aren't that hard to do (aside from a couple of group quests) and the story is fun to follow. I started on Azure Myst even though the area was slightly under leveled for me, it gave me a big boost and fast quests to run through. It only took me two days to go from level 1-20, but I really pushed it. I was home sick from work so I had nothing else to do.

When I picked up my quest to get Aquatic Form I was so excited. Who wouldn't want to be a seal? How cute is that? I actually had never really seen a druid in aquatic form before... it's absolutely terrifying.
Look at those fangs! That thing is going to eat me! Wait... no... that is me, *shudder* though useful for picking stranglekelp and leaving that poor shaman I've been questing with to swim to the next island slowly and alone it's quite a frightening form. I think this particular shot in the blood red waters of BloodMyst Isle amplifies it's creepy-ness.

When I picked up cat form things started moving a little more quickly, I'm really enjoying stealthing around and the ability to pop out and give myself a quick heal and keep dealing death is so much fun! I can't wait to expereince some more with this versatile class!