Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Return of the Bear

Now that Truny has retired to a comfortable spot by an Orgrimmar mailbox, making her Dreamcloths as they come off cooldown, she is excited for the upcoming patch. New gear and various mounts to runthenewdungeonutnilyoudontneedanymorefromit! Just kidding..sort of, I mean it'd be nice to actually run ZG and ZA at level! I believe the first raid I had ever done that was at level and at the same ilvl was when Onyxia was re-released. I did pug for a Kel'thuzad kill in Naxx when I actually needed upgrades from there, but I think the raid group themselves were slightly overgeared. Maybe not. Maybe Kel'thuzad was my first actual at level raid boss.

The next raid that I had completed at the appropriate times was on my druid, by healing a PUG TOC-10. This was back in the day when we only received two Triumph Badges from the daily heroic. It was probably that one encounter which got me into raiding and got me thinking "hey this isn't as l44t and h4rdk0r3 as people make it out to be!". Sure, it was only regular 10-man mode, nothing glorious and heroic but coming from a purely heroic-dungeons-casual-type-player this was a pretty significant jump. It was that encounter, where after downing Anub'arak there had been no druid upgrades but at that point I didn't even care because I had already helped to heal through it that Perdition dropped. A raid-level weapon, no way! I rolled and lost, but the Warlock who won it, the person who had been leading the raid traded it to me. No way, nice people exist!

Now, what was I talking about? *Looks back at title*.

Oh yeah! Why was I talking about first-encounter-raids again? I forget! Ok let's see...Truny's no longer active since fel armor sucks major dish and there isn't really anything to do anymore other than the daily cooking or fishing quest. Truny's exalted with most of the "important" BC reputation factions such as Netherwing and Sporregar. Yeah those are my priorities. The Sha'tari Skyguard seems like an ideal faction to grind rep with but there's something about having to kill those creepy birds that is stopping me from doing so. Though there's a minipet and many mounts to be obtained. Also, it seems that Truny is slowly transitioning out as my "main" character. Turby the hunter is closing in on Truny's achievement points (yeah, a shallow measurement system but a system nonetheless) with 6310 while Truny is sitting at 6340!

Turby has also officially tamed every single Spirit Beast in Azeroth! That will be an entry on its own over at Growl and Cower. I've been meaning to make some random random comics over there but..yeah you know what happens afterwards.

"What about this 'bear' thing you're speaking of? We don't really care about your other characters!"

Oh yeah!!

OK. I remember saying a while ago that I would regrettably ditch my druid FOREVER because Tree of Life is no longer permanent and Feral tanking felt clunky and weird. I couldn't do that, really! I didn't feel "useful" if I didn't have a go-to tank or heals playing at the same level as my DPS toons and my druid was already 85, 14 levels above my next potential tank/heals combo the Paladin.

I really do prefer resto-healing over feral-tanking but I refuse to since Tree of Life is gone. I glyphed so that when I use my cooldown I do turn into the old model but I like to heal at the top of my game and I usually don't even NEED to use that cooldown. I don't need to turn into what I want to look like. Whoa that was deep, or maybe it wasn't...

So tanking. I figured out why I thought it felt clunky despite the additional cooldowns: I tanked in Wrath.

Since dungeoning is no longer (to some extent) gogogoaoeeverything, I took my tanking mind to a calmer more methodical place and told it to "CALM THE HELL DOWN!". Everything became better again. As long as DPS gave me a good lead on threat, I'm liking the idea of our AOE bleed, and having something to do by stacking our lacerates and then pulverizing it away. It took me a while to figure out the purpose of Pulverize. It wasn't for damage but for "something to do and increases crit hence justifying that something to do."

Yesterday Turny tanked his first heroic: Shadowfang Keep. The big mobs of ghouls hit damn hard! We didn't have much trouble except for the first boss ignoring some of our interrupts but after 5 minutes of repeating on him he eventually became interruptable again. With the shield spray stuff has adds boss our DPS wasn't high enough to down his adds so we skipped him and the other two bosses were pretty simple stuff.

Turny the No Need to Look at Recount But Focused for Survival

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