On a Break Edition
This week was punctuated by intense frustration in my dungeon experiences. It seems that the release of Patch 4.1 the best players abandoned the heroic dungeon queues in favor of Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman leaving behind a handful of people who don’t have time for raid-length instances or people hoping for “easier” Valor grinds and a metric crapton of undergeared scrubs who can’t be bothered to crack a single website to learn the fights. The result is instances that were starting to become cakewalks suddenly dropping back into the incalculably frustrating realm. I spent so much time wiping on bosses that aren’t even that challenging like Dragha Shadowburner in Grim Batol and Vanessa VanCleef in Deadmines. Granted, Corla, Herald of Twilight in Blackrock Caverns is a tough fight and always has been, but there’s no reason I should have to burn through (no exaggeration) 14 other players ragequitting in frustration with each other in order to get her down. And of course I wasn’t going to give up because she drops one of the precious few wand upgrades that I’m still waiting for… which naturally didn’t even come up.
By the end of the week I had to take a self-imposed break on queuing heroics as the Mage in favor of working on other projects (mostly alts) or I was going to start being That Guy in the randoms who berates everyone else (conveniently overlooking his own faults) and generally gets kicked because people can’t stand him. And yeah, I wasn’t perfect through all these fights but when my meager gear is pulling 12K DPS and that’s four to eight thousand better than the second guy on the list and I catch myself being the only guy trying to fight the adds in the Erudax fight it’s hard not to get snippy. So yeah, I took a break.
The Alts
One thing I did last week was start PvPing with my Shaman. I know I sounded like I was finding healing boring last week but the truth is healing itself is terrific fun, kind of like a meta-game. But running dungeons with tons of players sporting BoA Heirloom gear or Twink alts who have a 50,000 gold bank alt feeding them the very best everything means healing isn’t exactly a taxing profession in the 30s and 40s. And hey, I’m no different with my full set of Heirlooms and generous guild bank. The result is dungeons as a healer entail casting Earth Shield on the tank and then spot healing for the occasional AoE attack or when some zealous Warlock pulls a few crits in a row and yanks aggro for a couple of seconds until a boss comes up. For instances like Dire Maul with loads of trash, it’s kind of a snoozer.
PvP is the flip side of that coin. All you have to do is find someone on your side and follow them for about thirty seconds and you’ll have some serious healing to do. And it’s all great, exciting fun. The plus side is you earn honor while you play and it’s much more exciting. The downside is the XP/hour rate is riskier since you don’t get much XP unless you win and XP only comes from achieving objectives so long matches also drop your leveling rate. Now, if you win, you get a slew of XP but unlike dungeons where the XP rate is somewhat predictable it’s not quite as sure of a thing.
I did try a new healing AddOn, Healium, to see if it helped with some of the slowness I was perceiving or if perhaps it made me a better healer. Basically it replaces the party/raid unit frames with its own unit frames that include a set of assignable hotkeys next to each unit. The idea is you put your spells in the key boxes and click the spell next to the player to auto-target and cast at once. It prevents the target shuffle from being a problem (especially the issue I have where my target defaults back to none if I loot anything and my next spell ends up being cast on myself) and allows you to react more quickly to incoming damage on DPS (as opposed to the tank which is where my primary focus usually lies).
The good thing about Healium is that it does what it advertises which is make you a more efficient healer, less prone to common healing mistakes. The bad parts, though, outnumber that benefit.
- Primarily the issue is it pulls your focus and your mouse away from the main play field which means you’re less likely to notice and/or react if you end up standing in the fire. Not a huge concern in the instances I’m running these days, but I don’t want to have Healium teach me bad habits I’ll have to unlearn later when fights become more difficult.
- Unlike my beloved Pitbull unit frames, Healium’s frames aren’t terribly customizable which means certain graphical issues like not being able to clearly see the first 15-25% of the damage bar behind the role icon aren’t easily fixable without sacrificing other functionality.
- Doesn’t really make healing any more exciting, in fact kind of the opposite.
So I don’t think I’ll continue using it, although it did convince me to modify my raid unit frames for PvP which was a pretty fun little project. One wish list for Pitbull would be some sort of sample frame option that let you see what party frames would look like without having to actually join a party since most groups I get into aren’t really that crazy about waiting around while I make minor tweaks to my UI.
Also on the Shaman, who is now level 46, I reached 300 Tailoring and 275 Enchanting. I need to hit level 50 before I can bump my skill to Master level and go beyond 300 on Tailoring which is a bummer because I’ve been relying on Tailoring to feed me disenchantable items to level Enchanting. I don’t want to waste precious mats making Tailored items that won’t net me skill advances so I’ve been spending too much money on the auction house to get Enchanting mats while I try to push toward level 50.
Meanwhile I pulled the Death Knight out of the starting zone (my overall impression of it was favorable but I felt the transition from Lich King lackey to free-will Horde member was kind of forced in that I would have rather had a slow burn of regret and remorse shift the position similar to what was hinted at in the quest where you have to kill the prisoner of your race; as it was the disloyalty to the LK felt pretty self-serving). I started jamming on Jewelcrafting and I made an executive decision to transition Inscriptioning over to him as well, orphaning my Paladin. I just don’t have the patience right now to do another alt from the very beginning and the Paladin doesn’t hold my interest so she’s going to get abandoned for now, though I think I’ll keep the toon for a while in case I ever want to try playing a Pally again later I don’t have to start from scratch.
The DK mechanics are intriguing but strike me as a bit overwrought. I get that they wanted the Hero Class to feel advanced, like it was something you needed WoW experience to be able to really do well, and I think it succeeds on that level but I can’t help feeling like it get very game-y in the process. I mean, explain to me in non-game-mechanics terms what the purpose of Death Runes and Runic Power is and what their difference could possibly be. I do like that the abilities are very combo-heavy (“if this is true, the ability does that; which allows other ability to do some other thing“) though in practice it ends up feeling like a strict rotation because you don’t ever want to use (say) Blood Strike until you’ve at least hit with Icy Touch and Plague Strike. And so on.
The good news is he’s a complete animal at waxing mobs in questing zones: The fel Orcs around Thrallmar in Hellfire Peninsula typically gave me some troubles when I was around level 60 on both the Warrior and the Mage. As the DK I churned through them without ever once stopping to heal, and that’s using the standard gear supplied by the quests in the DK starting zone. Very nice. Anyway, I can’t say I adore the DK the way I love the Mage and am growing to love the Shaman, but he’s a perfectly fun class to play and I’m just happy to be able to level alternate professions without having to grind all the way up. I intend to do some questing with this toon (as opposed to my queue-only policy on the Shaman), but also once I hit 60 I’ll drop into some BC dungeons and try my hand at tanking again. Maybe it will be better with a different class, I dunno.