An Off Day

Warning: this might read oddly, I wrote it Wednesday before the raid, and since it’s Thursday just went back and added stuff to it.

So, I blanked this week and forgot it was Thanksgiving! So no Tues/Thurs raid this week. We’ll see tonight about my guild’s group, we have 5 signed up but our raid leader never accepts so I am assuming he is coming til start time and I don’t see him anywhere. Here’s hoping that if we are short I can snag some of my second group to come along tonight. But I am a big believer in not worrying about things that haven’t happened yet, so on to new things!

I am down to 1 pet drop left on the Timeless Isle. yay! Sadly, it’s that crab, which is a royal pain. Here’s hoping I can get it next week when I will have weekday mornings available during finals. I swear I am getting my priorities in line, I just want that pet…

So tonight I will be bringing my monk to raid, assuming it happens. I’m a little nervous because we’ve been 2-healing a lot and my druid rocks it out. I am much more accustomed to fistweaving and being a supporting healer rather than the main guy. Even if I can top meters with her. But again with the worrying. It’ll be fine, or I grab the druid. No harm, no foul.

What happened: took Renala to raid, had some trouble with the second boss. Immerseus went down very well. Protectors had a wipe, so our hunter switched to his priest and we downed it no issue. Norushen? Took a long time, I think several people weren’t at their best yesterday. One tank kept dieing, another took an orb without looking at the boss’ health to realize only 1 add was left and we would be fine, I died to stupid on my part. And I didn’t take an orb at all, so fistweaving was less effective and it made me cranky. I swear, our raid leader has the patience of a saint to put up with us.

On another healing note, I approached a guildie with some druid advice. I hope I didn’t upset him, he’s just such a good shammy healer I know he’s a great player, but his druid was not optimized. Just missed a haste breakpoint, reforging out of spirit to crit in some places. Poor direction there from an add-on, but I see he’s taken my advice. I hope to heal with him again and see if it’s made a difference. Since I recently dusted my shaman’s resto spec off I appreciate him all the more. So many buttons! Totems! I make a bad shaman :) 

Now to figure out how to approach our other druid… And first, figure out world of logs so I can see a few fights and decide if I really need to. I feel like I should simply because it feels ridiculous to do literally half the healing in fights with 3 healers. But that is a topic for another day. I am proud I worked up the courage to approach the first guy, and things went well.

I did get a healing compliment passed along that made me smile. I’ve been making some changes to how I monitor buffs, so now I get WeakAura shouting things at me too. Seems to have helped. Now to add some sound effects to my monk one, because a bright orange lightning bolt to the head just isn’t enough it seems.

I’ll let you know how it goes, if it goes.

Can’t open the world of logs client, don’t know if it’s a “me” issue of a mac issue. Might wait til I get home and ask my more computer-savvy boyfriend for help.

Made it to Nazgrim

It’s been a pretty good week. My second raid got to Nazgrim, and should be extending the lockout and hopefully getting him down on Tuesday. We are 3-tanking it, which I think is an issue. Hopefully we get it, we’re very close. I feel 2-tanking it would allow is to beat the enrage, but since it’s the mages that are killing us more than the enrage timer… Well, we will get it tomorrow. We’ve been alternating 2 and 3 healing, depending on how we feel. I’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

Our guild raid made it past Iron Juggernaut. I love looting the boxes, so I stealthed past and managed to get 3. Our hunter stayed around to laugh at me when I died, so in addition to picking up flasks I provided entertainment :) I imagine we will be starting fresh. I am hopeful we will have 10 people at the start, and not have to fish around. On the plus side, now the other healer and I know we can 2-heal 3 of the first 4 bosses.Might be possible to 2-heal Norushen too, maybe if we send him down with the first wave to get the healing buff… but anyway, I’ll worry about that on Wednesday.

Flex cleared wing 1 easily, and made it to Nazgrim. I have faith we will kill him tonight, and we should get past the first few bosses in 3 pretty easy. We’ll see how Thok goes, that might be tough.

And last night we got back in to challenge modes, snagging 2 more golds in Shado-Pan Monastery and Scarlet Monastery. SM was tough, we got the gold with 0 sec to spare. That leaves 4 left for most of us, and 3 to go back and do with the hunter who ended up coming along. I really need to make a point of watching the resto druid challenge mode videos. Right before our last pull and gold, I watched the start of one- and in the first 30 sec got a hint we weren’t doing that shaved off a minute on our boss kill. So yeah, I’ll make sure to be prepared next time.

On the school front, this is the last week of classes. I am working to prepare for finals. I’m hoping everything goes well- I really want to go home. I don’t miss the cold, but I am ready for a break from school, and I want to see everyone again.

Settling Into a Groove

It’s been an odd week. We have only 1 more week of classes, and rather than studying I have been putting it off. Partly because of that, partly because last Monday was the first anniversary of my grandfather’s death, I’ve been in a crappy mood. Because of that I haven’t felt like doing anything, not even watching sitcoms on Netflix. When I am too uncaring to even sit there and watch TV, something’s wrong. I’ve also been snappy with my friends. I hope not much, I’ve mostly been locking myself up in my room, but I think some has leaked out. Right now I am trying to pull myself out of this funk and prepare for finals.

It really stinks to feel like you are going to fail all your finals, and you don’t care to study to change it. I’m not, I’m not that type of student, but I’m also not a great student. I’ll admit, I am not the vet student I would want to treat my pets right now. I am working on changing that. So I will be studying a lot more this week than I normally do.

On the WoW front, I have settled into a nice pattern of raiding normal 4 nights a week between 2 guilds, and 2 flex days. We’re actually close to the same point, one group working on Shamans, the other about to start Galakras tonight.  My awesome guildie has been tanking for my second group, and is doing a fantastic job. She seems to like it, so I am glad. 

In last night’s raid, we took out Juggernaut. I really need to work on taking bombs- more importantly, clicking my CD BEFORE I take one. Cause death because I forgot to click something is embarrassing. We three-healed shamans most of the night, just 2 attempts with me as DPS. I am proud to say I held my own as DPS, even though everyone else has 15-20 ilevels on me. Go Renala, kick things into submission! (well, nearly- that was a 5% wipe, then a 0% wipe)

On Elaylda’s raiding, we 2-healed 3 of the first 4 bosses. I am happy with that, and think I might suggest in the future our shaman going heals if we need her to. Or trying to have our hunter switch to his priest. Our shadow priest has been switching lately, and he’s not bad, but he’s not great either. On Norushen- with 3 healers- I did 50% of the healing on a few attempts. Without taking an orb to get the healing buff. So yeah, I’m going to be looking into getting our raids on World of Logs to see where I can improve, and offer suggestions to our other healers. Our raid leader is awesome, but has admitted sometimes the healing things aren’t his focus. I’ll tell ya, it made a difference on my monk when I realized my uptime on Renewing Mists was <50%. Yikes! Added something with WeakAuras, was 99% on our Iron Juggernaut attempts this time. Much improved.

So, the plan tonight: take down Galakras, get to Juggernaut, practice taking bombs on the druid (if necessary) which reminds me, I should make sure Might of Ursoc is in an accessible place, and decide if symbiosing the monk tank for Fortifying Brew of the hunter for Deterrence is better. I’ll update it sometime later with a progress report.

Weekend of Raiding

I had a pretty bull weekend. Today is going to be full of learning ocular, respiratory, and GI drugs to make up for it. I had a good time though, and all the groups I was in made progress. I did accomplish all my studying goals except the drug lists yesterday. It turned out to be a packed day.

Friday nights raid took out Norushen and Sha of Pride very quickly, and had some very good pulls on Galakras. We may have gotten it, if one of our cannons hadn't bugged out. I am looking forward to a good week of raiding next week with Icon.

On Saturday, our flex went better than usual. Took out wing 1 with no real wipes. We had one bad pull but half the raid ran out and lived, so I'm not counting that as a wipe. I was stuck doing kitty DPS since we had a surprise healer come along. He seemed very nice, and was putting up good numbers, and was confident about 3-healing for a group of 15. Which meant I was kitty for all but 2 fights. What I learned: my feral DPS barely cracks 100k on a good day. However, I managed to snag 1 flex upgrade and one LFR upgrade so here's hoping it improves. It occurs to me I will ned a good DPS set, one of the healers will have to switch for Spoils when we get there.

We ended flex half way through wing 2. Here's hoping on Monday we go back in, knock it out of the park and move on to wing 3. Following that I joined up with the OLRG and quickly knocked out Bastion of Twilight and Throne of Four Winds. Everything can be easy when you massively outgear the content, but it was fun to hang out with some friendly people.

That ended just in time for a quick 2-hour raid with my Tues/Thurs group where we knocked out Iron Juggernaut. Managed to get some bracers on a roll. Still my druid out-gears my monk, but both have at least reached 550 ilevel main spec, so yay! Got some good attempts in on the Shamans, but we were doing the 3-tank method and one of em was constantly DCing. And we locked a healer out on our first attempt, even though otherwise we did well. There was some talk of extending the lock-out, but I think the decision was to have one of the other healers switch toons and save the lockout if we needed it and start fresh on Tuesday. Since we breeze through the first 4 bosses in under an hour, I'm confident we'll end up at shamans by Thursday.

After that, one of my friends logged on her tank and announced she was going to tank an LFR, so I joined up to give her a dedicated healer. We did surprisingly well for zoning in on a group with 4 stack of determination, but I was so tired I was saying a lot of crazy stuff. Only took 1-shot for us to get out Norushen and Sha of Pride, and even with a messy win a win's a win, so yay! Right up against the berserk timer for Sha. She snagged 2 upgrades, I got one. A successful night.

By that time it was after midnight for me, and running on 6 house of sleep the night before left me woozy and not making a lot of sense. I am hopeful the surprise healer might join our raid. He was a disc priest, which would be helpful to have. When I did switch I wasn't that far ahead of him even with 20 ilevels on him. I really would like to have a steady set of healers in our raid so I know what to expect each week. Plus a disc would be nice to bring along. I've actually looked into finishing the cloak on my own disc priest and getting him prepared to take Elay's spot if need be, so to not have to do that would be awesome. Of course what I might end up doing then is taking a good hard look at my shaman, but at the moment I'd rather stay on my druid. I am really looking forward to the change in lockouts in WoD where I could raid with my monk and still be able to take her into other raids to help out if need be. Being able to swap to something with a tad more DPS if needed would be good.

And now I have put off studying more than enough, so on to drugs!

Lots of Pondering

Alright, going back with Icon for our 3rd week of raiding. We managed to go in on Wednesday, but with our awesome lock unable to come, and the substitutes we have, decided to call it after the second boss and leave Norushen til Friday. A good idea, I needed sleep and we were also down a healer.

I am proud we managed to 2-heal Immersus. We did end up right at the enrage timer, due to loss of DPS, but we did it. Ended up having our shadow priest go healy for the Protectors, made the difference. Discovered my other healing partner had a UI issues, so he never saw stacks of Shadow Word: Bane to dispel just a glow indicating dispelling was needed, and was just dispelling at the wrong time. I think when he gets some better gear, we can 2-heal a lot more. I will have to remember to bring up my thoughts on that to our raid leader.

Here's a topic I don't know how to discuss: improvements for my healing partner. He's in between a haste break point (and had reforged to get there), and I don't think he's even started the legendary questline. I once mentioned he was missing a major glyph after the patch, and a week or two later, made it for him and gave it to him, and it still took another week to get it fixed. He's a nice guy, and not a bad healer, but I feel like he doesn't go that extra step sometimes. For example: we discovered that UI problem last night, when I explained to he shadow priest who was switching what was going on with dispelling. My fellow healer has been healing it in flex with me for weeks, and I know it was explained the first few weeks we went in. How did he not realize beforehand? Of course, maybe my explanations were at fault. I tend to be a horrible tutor, because once I explain something once, I expect you to get it. 

Maybe I am just too pushy for my own good here. Perhaps I should just leave well enough alone, unless we hit a healing block. I suppose alternatively I could try to recruit another healer, since we seem to only have 2 available. A third healer would help. Or maybe I should switch which toon is in which raid, and bring my monk along. But is 50-75k extra DPS really going to make the difference? If we have to 2-heal, I want my druid. I've been a tree since I started in Wrath, and tree is where I am most comfortable. 

Alternatively, I can talk to someone about this and get another opinion. I'm both not pushing as much for progression in our run because I am a bit further ahead in another, and frustrated that I can clear 4 bosses in an hour with another group, and be stuck on 3 all night in this one. Has absolutely nothing to do with wanting the pet from Sha of Pride, not at all :)

Speaking of the Tues/Thurs raid: made it to Iron Juggernaut this week. I think we would've gotten him down if we didn't have one laggy tank and a constantly DC'ing other one. And only an hour to raid. I did get to bring my guildie along, on her mage. The raid leader had asked me earlier if I knew this druid with a decent tank set in our guild, and if they were willing to tank for us on a steady basis. So it was nice to bring her along and let her meet everyone. I still don't know how she feels about tanking, but I know for sure she got the message, and can ponder it at her own pleasure. She did talk about needing to do her "tanking homework" so I hope she does join up with us. She's truly awesome. But I am trying not to be pushy.

Stepping back in to SoO tonight to work on Norushen, hopefully we'll get it tonight and take a good whack at Sha of Pride too.

Update

I get antsy for spoilers. I play Magic: the Gathering, and sometimes I like reading spoilers more than playing. So all the comments about the next expansion have got me antsy about what we'll learn at blizzcon. I would be happy with more dranei lore- I'll admit,  I can be shallow and I think dranei just look awesome. The first toon I intentionally put a transmog together for was my dranei shaman (cause there are a lot more pretty mail options than leather) and I did it before reaching 90. Which meant I spent a lot of time leveling wishing my reforge mount let me transmog too. But she looks awesome, in my opinion.

A recap of the week so far, starting with WoW. Raided on Tuesday, knocked out the first 4 bosses in an hour, and spent the rest of the time bashing our heads against Galakras. Did make progress, so yay. I have no doubt we'll down in tonight. Or at least get the the second phase reliably. Ok, maybe I have some doubts, but only a few.

Wednesday's raid was cancelled due to lack of attendance, so my druid didn't get to play. Ended up doing an LFR with a friend. I've realized I've become very pushy and impatient, and spoiled this week with good flex groups that one-shot (or nearly) everything. So I hung around for the first 2 bosses in hopes of getting the pets, and left before Garrosh. And no pets, so maybe next week. 

Hoping Friday's raid goes off without a hitch, I know we'll get the first 2 down, and I think we'll make good progress on Norushen. 

Wasn't able to do challenge modes this week, but maybe we'll find some time on the weekend. I've been working on the Shado-Pan meta with my druid since I've realized it wasn't account wide, and I've got 3 left. Getting around with the shado-pan will take the most time. I gave up on these when i realized I needed a gold challenge mode, but now that I will probably get one... back to grinding those dailies.

On the school front: I'm upset about the pathology test, but I am getting past it. I did well enough, I just don't think it's fair to ask anatomy or parasitology questions on a pathology test. And there were 3. But anyway, other than that it's been a pretty nice week. Our parasit professor takes pleasure in showing gross videos of maggots in eyes, which Cuterebra in a bunny? Kinda creepy, and hard for me to watch. The opthamology lecture was hard enough last term, pictures of unheathy eyes are creepy.

Speaking of, our professor just loaded up a video and walked out of the room so she won't throw up. Lovely.  Indeed a gross video. I believe one of my classmates even called it "better than popping an abcess" which if you don't know, can be very gross. But yet rewarding, watching all that gunk come out and cleaning it up. Fun times.

Finally Raiding

We finally got a guild 10 man together for the first time this patch and stepped in to SoO. Managed to take down the first 2 bosses in a reasonable time, and get a few whacks at Norushen. Yay! One of our tanks was a little worried about being undergeared, which I thought was very sweet considering how undergeared most of the group is. Besides <flex> I'm an awesome healer, and his deaths were entirely due to me not paying attention when he pulled trash because I was alt tabbed checking something. Just because I'm right there jumping and /charge-ing one second, doesn't mean I won't pop away the next. Actually, I felt a little bad about that one. I had been right there, then I just mentally wandered off. And one of his deaths may have been because I stood too close on Immerseus and took a corrosive blast to the face. That wasn't a good thing. 

Then we did flex on Saturday. Both in raid and flex I kept dying to silly stuff- basically, mistweavers are not tanks, and I should quit trying. Totally accidental, and I will be more careful in the future. I know better than that, I think I just got excited.

I do think I am going to change to my druid for our guild's raids, and stick with the monk for the other raid I seem to have inadvertently joined. Going to double check with them, but if they raid Tues/Thurs now instead of Mon/Tues, I will be happy to keep coming along. Especially since I feel such a change is kinda my fault, since I told him I would be unavailable Mondays until an hour and a half after the raid was scheduled to start. Plus, I feel Elay is the better healer and until my cohorts in healing get some better gear, I'd rather have Elay there. I'd even feel comfortable 2-healing, if we had to, on the druid. I could do it on the monk, but since I mostly fistweave I'd have to adjust my style to manage 2-healing better. Not that I think we will have to, but I will let the raid leaders know my thoughts.

My real concern was this: do we need the little bit of extra DPS the fistweaving gives to clear stuff? And I think we'll be fine. We have a few DPS working on their legendaries still, and finishing that will really help them. But if people are dying to lack of heals on Norushen, then to the druid I will go! Plus, even though everyone calls me Renala now, and I love my monk, at heart I am still a druid. (Even though my feral DPS...needs work) I look forward to taking my tree self into SoO normal, even though I will miss healing spheres on Immerseus, I'm sure I will adjust.