Monthly gold update

Last month I came in at about 546k gold. This month:

Laktose!

Crescendo!

Piffle!

781,600! Whoa. 235,000 gold this month! That's a big difference compared to the previous month, which was about 140k profit - almost 67% more!

Playing dressup - it's not just for dolls!

The other day I posted a picture of my mage looking somewhat similar to Shredder. He just ended up with that gear by chance, it was all from garrison quests. I thought he looked pretty cool with just two exceptions: his cloak was too short and his weapon was totally derpy.

So the other night I decided I had had enough of not looking 100% dapper and decided I would visit one of the tranmog NPCs and fix the situation. There was only one problem ... apparently I have been vendoring/disenchanting every single piece of gear I replace. I had nothing to transmog. Nothing! Not a cloak, not a weapon, not a robe, not a hat ... nothing.

Fortunately there was an easy solution to this problem - there are a number of vendors that sell old PvP gear for honor. Oh, except I have no honor on my mage. Hm. Fortunately, I remembered stumbling upon some NPCs in Dalaran that sell old PvE gear. I ported to Dalaran, bought the cool looking stuff and then went to wowhead to see if there were some anywhere else. Sure enough, there are also a few in Orgrimmar!

The only problem was that they don't sell any good looking 2h weapons. The solution to that? I noticed a level 300 BoE staff in the Guild Bank that looked pretty sweet. For some reason I have the ability to withdraw 10 stacks a day, so ... uhh, yea. Anyway, here's the new and improved Piffle:

New cloak, weapon, and robe. Cloaks MUST be long!

The robe is very similar to before, just has a little more orange / yellow in it

I felt like that complimented both the new cloak and weapon

It wasn't until after I bought everything I wanted from the vendors that I realized I had spent seven thousand gold! Haha, woops. I went through the same process (with the Orgimmar vendors, at least. Dalaran is harder to get to if you can't just port yourself there) with my Priest and Druid as well, being a little more thrifty this time. I probably spent around 10k total on all of them:

The staff is actually what you get from salvage boxes!

Cape is probably the best looking one I have on any character!

The Chest and gloves are last season's PvP 

Not sure how crazy I am about the yellow / green scheme on my druid. But it's a fun change for now!

The next expansion has been previewed

I didn't see it myself, but someone put together this album which has some of the information that they showed: http://imgur.com/a/kiFqg

Some quick highlights:

• New class - Demon Hunter!
• Separate system for PvP talents / abilities
• Artifact weapon you level up
• Instead of single person garrisons, you'll be chilling in a specialized domain for your entire class

This ... this was creepy

So there I am in my garrison, collecting mission rewards and sending new ones off, when I notice something out of the corner of my eye come into my main hall. After exiting out of the mission interface I was able to get a better look at what it was that had floated in ...

You never take me out anymore!

... a kite!?


So strange.

When nobody wins ... everybody loses

What you're looking at here is the scoreboard at the end of an Arathi Basin rated battleground match. The game started off very poorly for us - the leader of the group decided on a strategy (all but two to Blacksmith!) and then when we saw where they sent all their troops (to Lumber Mill) he changed it ... which led to us getting neither of them, somehow. So we spent some time with just 1 and 2 bases at the beginning.

Somehow we made a great comeback, swiping 4 bases of our own for a time ... and losing one of them right at the end. This led to ... a tie!

And, as you can see in the rating change, everyone lost rating because of it. Kind of weird how that works, I would have thought no rating change.

A very late weekend update

Saturday was very productive, both from a WoW and real life perspective. The morning was all chores - mowing the grass, doing laundry, emptying the dishwasher, etc.

The afternoon led to some 2s play that was simultaneously pretty good and very frustrating (seriously, hunter comps are auto-lose). After a couple games though, we decided to try out ... LFR?

So, each raid has 4 difficulty levels - Looking For Raid, Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. Of those 4, LFR is the only one where you cannot pick and choose who you go with. It just puts you in a queue, similar to doing 5 man dungeons. LFR is gated, so only the first 6 or so bosses are available at this point (they release a new wing of Hellfire into LFR each week). We went through that and most of it was pretty easy, though there was a fight or two that was messy; my brother got an upgrade or two and said he had fun! Nice.

Emboldened by my success in LFR, I joined a Normal raid for Hellfire later that night. Previously I had cleared the first three bosses but had been unable to get past Kilrogg in two different groups. The leader of this group made it clear from the beginning that this was not a "learning" raid. He was here to clear the instance and if you couldn't keep up (DPS or mechanics-wise) you were getting the boot. "It's not personal, it's just business." Of course, people say this all the time ... very few are able to actually follow through on it.

We got to Kilrogg and he went down easily; in fact, I'm not even sure we had a single person die. It was great! At that point I knew I had a good group. We continued on with a wipe here and there and before I knew it, had done all the bosses that were available in LFR.

Soul Remnant is for the legendary ring quest!

Admittedly, I have not watched videos on most of the fights in Hellfire. I had no idea what the next bosses were going to do, outside of reading a quick explanation in Blizzard's built-in Raid Guide. Nevertheless, I managed to not get kicked out of the group! Some other people did though, including the off-tank. We got through all the bosses except for the last one; at that point it was rather late and the leader called the raid (we had wiped ~3 times on Mannoroth, the second to last fight). Some of the other bosses:

Xhul'horac - kill the two guys on the outside first!

Mannoroth rises ...

... the beginning of the fight ...

... he dead!

Despite using every single bonus roll I had accumulated, I was unsuccessful in getting any set pieces. #sadface I did get a couple of other upgrades, though nothing monumental. Actually, funnily enough, I got a weapon upgrade ... except the only problem was that it was a 1her. And I don't have an off-hand. So at one point after a wipe while we were waiting to find another person, I hearthed to my garrison, took the portal to Warspear, and bought the PvP conquest offhand (iLvl 700). Of course, since I didn't want to keep that, I had to go back every 2 hours and re-sell it (only had to do this one other time during the raid).

I did try to get into a couple groups for the last boss on Sunday, but I didn't have a ton of time and those groups were being picky. Of the handful that were doing Archimonde, 2 required you to have the achievement for already beating him! Still, it's a complicated fight, so I guess I understand that (people did the same thing for the last boss in Highmaul on Heroic). I did get into one group, and then after one attempt they broke up - bleah. Here's the guide video for the fight, crazy, huh?!

Diversify your portfolio

Friday was a pretty uneventful night, so I ventured into the most recent raid - Hellfire Citadel. This was my second foray in on Normal. The first time I was with a guild that was making its first attempts and we got the first two bosses down before I had to leave.

This time was another partial guild run, but with a different group. We got the first 4 bosses down before running into the buzzsaw that is Kilrogg Deadeye. Some of the bosses were pretty cool. There was one that summoned giant deathly purple blobs that you had to dodge:

Here they come!

In fact, that boss drops tier tokens! He didn't drop a Druid token, but still, pretty cool! That's the first tier gear boss I've killed in ... oh, I don't know, 6 years-ish?

The gold "You won!" is from my bonus roll - gold is a loss, in this case.

I've been using a variety of PvP gear (660 and 700 ilvl), which is pretty solid. My iLvl is around 682, so I got a couple of nice upgrades on this run. And at the end, I hearthed back to my Garrison and found this in my mailbox:

Thanks Postmaster!

Apparently it had been on a corpse that I never looted. I sold it, because I will have the PvP belt fairly shortly which is a higher iLvl anyway. I also managed to get an upgrade from a garrison mission - not only was this one of the few slots I needed to upgrade, but it even has a socket! Now that is winning.

Awww yissss.

Honestly I really enjoyed raiding. I definitely fell into a funk for several weeks where I was so focused on doing all the daily stuff (profession, pet, garrison, AH, other random dailies) that I never got around to actually playing the game. Raiding is definitely something I enjoy, and I am kind of disappointed I never checked out BRF. I'm hoping to get through Hellfire on at least Normal!

Weekend PvP Update!

Thursday night we decided to try some 3v3 with the new comp we want to run. Last season we did Jungle, which is basically Hunter (random), Feral Druid (me), and Healer. Given that my brother plays a priest, that worked out pretty well. We had some success with it, getting to around 1900 rating at our peak. I think both of us had varying degrees of frustration with the comp for different reasons.

For me, it was a combination of feeling like I wasn't as effective as the Hunter (basically any DPS class can perform decently when paired with a Hunter and a Healer because of how powerful hunters are), and feeling incredibly squishy when focused - which happened fairly often. For my brother, I think it was just the frustration of healing on what was considered one of the lower tier classes.

So this season we decided to switch it up and try out God Comp - Shadow Priest, Mage, and Resto Druid. This comp relies heavily coordinated CCs - between the sheeps, cyclones, roots, stuns, fears, horrifies, and two silences, there is an awful lot of CC! It is a top tier comp and has been for a while.

As you may have noticed though, this represents a role reversal from the last season. I've switched from melee dps to healing and my brother has switched from healing to DPSing. Both of us have performed these roles in Rated Battlegrounds before; in fact, they are the preferred spec for each of our class! Shadow, in particular, is very popular in RBGs now (and was toward the end of season 1 as well) - I actually think most teams prefer having 2!

But still, having played that spec in a 10v10 environment compared to a 3v3 environment is completely different. As a healer this is especially apparent to me. It starts with the basics of knowing when I need to use my cooldowns (in RBGs there are two other healers keeping people up, so it's very different than being the only healer), but extends to positioning as well. Positioning (to escape CCs or even DPS) is far more important in Arenas than it is in RBGs. If I get a sheeped in an RBG there are two other healers who can dispel me. If I get sheeped in an Arena? Uh oh.

So Thursday night we gave it a shot. We started off around 1500 mmr which seemed reasonable. And uhhh, we went 0-5. It was brutal. After the 5th game we all agreed to give up and we did some 2s to feel better about ourselves.

Sunday we decided to give it another shot. This time the mage that joined our group hopped in voice chat with us which was immensely helpful. The amount of communication and coordination was much better and we ended up going 10-6. There were certainly a number of games that we lost simply from lack of experience. "Ok, priest is at 75% health, I can sit in this stun ... oh he's down to 40% I should tri- oh. he's dead. Crap." There were at least two games that I can think of where one or more of us didn't use a defensive ability or a trinket or something that would have allowed us to survive ... and we simply died. Still, overall it was a very encouraging experience.

After doing 3s, we decided to try and raise our 2v2 rating high enough so that our weekly cap for Conquest will allow us to hit 7250 for the season - the number required to buy the weapon! Despite some internet issues that cost us a game (and close to half an hour?!?), we managed to go 9-5 and push our rating high enough. Epic weapons, here we come!

Tonight we dine on Turtle Soup

All he needs now are some claw-like fist weapons, and his Super Shredder Halloween costume will be complete!

Gold Update

Last month, I made sure to take note of my gold totals after buying July's token to see what sort of income I really have on a monthly basis. I was basically starting from 407k gold.

Backpacks from this month:

Cres

Piffle

Lak

Grand total around 546,000! Honestly, I am surprised. I was not expecting to have made that much; in fact, I had been planning to tell you why I had hardly made any money!

Three reasons I was expecting to not have made much money:

1) The Salvage Yard was nerfed. Basically, it was too good, so they decreased the likelihood of getting a crate and reduced what those crates contain. The Blue explanation is pretty awesome.

2) "Reduced the frequency of high-value gold missions appearing across multiple characters." Yup. They nerfed the gold generating missions for your garrison followers, too!

3) New crafting upgrades. So this one is interesting. 6.2 added two new levels up upgrades for the crafted gear. These recipes call for Felblight, easily obtainable if you kill Kazzak each week; 30 for the lower upgrade (Mighty), 60 for the highest (Savage). They also call for a similar number of [Particular Type] Essence. At ~400 per Felblight and ~40 for each essence, you're looking at about 13k and 26k in mats, respectively. This does not factor in the number of profession mats you need though (175 for the lower, 350 for the higher). At ~15 gold per mat, you're now looking at ~16k and ~32k ...

Which is to say, fairly expensive. And this is all before realizing that only 2-3 of those upgrades are ever in the AH (on my server, at least) so people are free to make crazy markups if they like. This leads to a big problem: nobody ever buys them.

I had more than enough mats lying around, so I made some. In fact, I made one Mighty of every profession I have and two Savages for my Jewelcrafting/Inscription. I've got over 100,000 gold tied up in upgrades that I can't sell. Yet the price of simply creating the gear itself has plummeted so far that not having at least one upgrade in the AH doesn't make sense.

So yea, if those upgrades ever sell I will be sitting pretty.

Are you killing Kazzak every week on every character? Because you should be.

And not just for the #selfie opportunities.

No, I'm not dead, just playing with filters!

Kazzak drops loot once a week for every character you have. He requires a raid to kill, but that's pretty easy to find with the LFG tool. There are usually 1-3 groups running every time I have checked. Submit your name for acceptance, get accepted, chill in your garrison spamming "1" for a summon (don't actually spam, ask nicely!), click the table some gracious stranger dropped for the food buff, and then DPS / heal until he's dead. It takes maybe 5 minutes total.

Why should you do this? Well, most of all it's kind of fun. But if you're the type of person who hates fun, here are two other reasons to do it:

So much chat spam from loot pinatas!

1) He drops ilvl 705 gear. This matters a lot if you raid or do PvE content. If you PvP, maybe it only matters for completeness or transmog's sake. It is the easiest/cheapest way to get gear of that ilvl. That trinket in the screenshot is pretty sweet!

2) He drops 5-15 Felblight. Felblight is the new crafting material in 6.2, replacing Savage Blood in the new recipes. The price has already dropped significantly, but is now holding steady around 3-400 gold each. Even at just 300 gold each, 10 Felblight is almost 12k gold a month for one character. Do it on two characters and you just paid for a WoW token in just 10 minutes a week!

Alright, alright ... I admit, it's really just about the #selfies:

He dead.

A couple minor PvP differences

Last season, your first 3 rated battleground wins of the week would either provide you with an extra 50 conquest points or a random piece of epic gear. It was possible to not get a piece of gear, which is what happened more often than not (it seemed like, at least).

This season, each week you get a quest to win 3 games. Once you've completed the quest, you get a box with a guaranteed piece of epic PvP gear.

Long live the champ!

Overall, it seems like an improvement to be guaranteed a piece every week.

Are they jeggings? I hope they're jeggings!

In addition to that, there is a new weekly quest in Ashran as well. It requires you to win 4 events and then kill the opposite faction's leader:

Down goes Tremblade!

Given how atrocious Ashran was in the week between the end of season 1 and the start of season 2 when it wasn't possible to earn conquest (Horde refused to do anything but farm NPCs for fragments; they didn't even bother to try and win events!), I thought this quest would be impossible to complete. Turns out it's actually pretty easy! It rewards you with 500 conquest and another box which also holds a guaranteed epic piece.

So not only are you earning 1700+ conquest points a week, but also 2 pieces of epic gear! Seems like it should be really easy to gear up this season, right? So what's the catch?

The catch is (and of course there's a catch!) that all the gear with Versatility on it (Versatility is a secondary stat, like Crit, Haste, etc, that increases the damage you do, decreases the damage you take, and increases the amount you heal for; in short, it's awesome!) has been removed from the vendor. You simply cannot buy them anymore. Where did they go? Apparently, they can only be gotten from those quests.

So on the one hand, it will be faster to gear up to a full set of epic gear this way. On the other hand, it will take longer to get the specific stats you want - heck, it's even possible you could go all season without getting what you want!

I've gotten 3 epics this way (didn't do RBGs the first week, because I figured I wouldn't win a piece from my first 3 wins anyway ... woops!) and none of them are set pieces. I am not sure if it's possible to get set pieces from these boxes; I don't think the set pieces come with Versatility, so it's possible that you can only get non-set pieces from them. Then again, none of the three pieces I have gotten have Versatility anyway, so who knows!

#alts #selfiestyle

I haven't really played around with the Selfie toy too much, but we did some Arena skirmishes on our alts so I figured why not.

Why skirmishes instead of the real deal? One of the new features in 6.2 is that every weekend there is an event that varies between PvE and PvP. This weekends event was a quest that gave 500 conquest points that did not count toward the cap if you won 10 skirmishes. This quest went really quickly on our mains and really slowly on our alts. Mostly the difference between having gear and not having gear, I think.

The main thing I'm taking away from this picture is how ugly my priest's gear is!

Easing back into it ...

I am nothing if not a creature of habit. Once I get into a routine for working out / dieting, I am pretty good at following it. Once my routine gets disrupted, everything kind of falls apart.


Apparently blogging is no different. It's not that I don't have anything to write about; on the contrary, there are actually quite a few things I had planned to detail here! But once I get out of the habit, it seems to be a tremendous chore to start back up again. No idea why.

At any rate, here goes nothing!

These were the titles I earned. Challenger is for 3v3 Arena and represents the top 35%. I believe we were roughly ~50 points away from getting Rival (top 10%); this is about 4 wins and would have been pretty easy to get had we actually just put the time in on the last weekend of the season. Oh well.

Soldier and Defender of the Horde are both for Rated Battlegrounds. Soldier is the top 35% and Defender is the top 10%. I've been using Defender of the Horde as my title for the time being.

What's in 6.2?

I will admit to having done very little research or reading on what was being released in 6.2. I've done a little exploring since the patch was released on Tuesday (and a little reading on wowhead!), and here's a brief outline of what I know so far:

• a new zone, Tanaan Jungle
• a new raid tier, Hellfire Citadel 
• Shipyard for the garrison; you build ships, send them out for missions, and can equip them with different upgrades to handle the obstacles the missions have for you. Each upgrade must be purchased for 500 garrison resources and then is used up when you equip it on a ship. To even have access to those upgrades, you must first find the Blueprint. Most of the Blueprints drop from rare mobs in Tanaan, but one drops from the new raid zone and one drops from a world raid boss (an epic shark, in fact - bringing Sharknado to WoW!)
• Sending missions with ships costs Oil, a new resource that you can get from regular garrison missions as well as quests in the new zone
• Many new mounts and battle pets from various vendors, rare mobs, and factions
• FLYING is back! You need to finish an achievement that requires you to have explored a number of areas, found a number of treasures, and reached Revered (I think) with the new factions in Tanaan
• New upgrades for crafting items - 700 and 715, I believe. Both of these take a new material (RIP Savage Blood) that can only be obtained with gathering professions in the new zone (Blizzard's attempt to revive the dead gathering professions); they can also be caught while fishing??!
• Several new factions in Tanaan; I'm not sure exactly what you get from these outside of some mounts, pets, and toys, but one of them requires Honored to buy the blueprint to the third type of ship for your Shipyard
• Rare mobs in Tanaan have a chance to drop Baleful gear tokens. Using them creates a 650 ilvl blue item for whatever spec you want and then you can upgrade them to iLvl 695 epics by purchasing upgrades for 20k Apexis Crystals (might be a gold component as well?). You can also buy any Baleful token for 5k Apexis Crystals
• Speaking of Apexis Crystals, the cap has been raised (removed?) and there is a pretty sweet mount available for 150,000 crystals. You can take a look at it here and read about how a very clever fellow got it the moment 6.2 was released!
• Obviously a new PvP season and new raid tier means new gear. Some of the new gear looks pretty sweet, some looks pretty dopey. I like the new Druid look! I think wowhead has a link to all of them on their front page if you are curious about a particular class.
• The new blue PvP gear bumps you to 710 iLvl ... I've already purchased the weapons on all of my characters! 
• Supposedly the Nemesis quests were supposed to change from 500 to 100 ... but the quest I was currently on is still at 500. I'm not sure if I need to drop it and retake it or if it just never happened.

Feeling lazy ...

So let's do picture book style!

First, one of the wins we had from our Sunday night arena! This was against a double dps team - note their matchmaking rating!

too lazy to crop, too!

I joined a group to do one of the Garrison raid mobs - recommended 10-40 people; I had never done one before, had no idea what it dropped. It ended up dropping garrison resources and apexis crystals, but also had a chance to drop lower iLvl raid gear (645-655 range maybe?). It doesn't seem worth doing much going forward, but trying it out once? Sure. Plus, I saw this guy, who looks like a total bad ass! The armor is from a previous expansion (MoP, I believe?) and no longer obtainable. The weapon is from Gold level Challenges, something I'd like to try at some point!

omg he looks SO COOL!

My mage's garrison followers are really starting to get up to speed - I've finally hit the cap of 25 and am now starting to replace the ones without the bonus gold trait (one a week). For a while I was pretty short on upgrades for them, but I've passed that point now. It's fun getting a 500 gold quest and being able to bump it up to 2k!

Speaking of gold, I bought my second token a week or so ago. I thought it would be interesting to see how much gold I actually make in a month, so I took screenshots of everyone's gold before I bought one. This is mostly for informational purposes. It's probably worth noting that one of the new additions in 6.2 is a vendor in your garrison that sells a variety of pets/toys/mounts. I bought most of them, and the two pets were 30k gold! So uhhh, we'll be sure to add that into the equation for next time:

Crescendo - so poor! Most of that was from Laktose

Piffle

Laktose

So roughly 461,000 gold. The token was 24k and the mounts were 30 ... so the starting point is about 407,000.

Season 2 begins today

And it is kind of bittersweet.

I ended the season with a 2v2 rating of 2060, a 3v3 rating of 1847, and a RBG rating of ~1820. Neither the 3v3 nor RBG were my season highs, nor were they high enough to get the titles I wanted. This is the sad part. I think I definitely could have pushed them high enough to get those ratings, I just didn't put the time in.

Part of that is because I've just been really busy, and I think part of it is because we didn't have quite the same success with 3s as we did in 2s ... and that was disappointing and frustrating. I also didn't realize the season was ending this week until after we spent Sunday night playing 2v2.

2s actually went really well. We went just 7-5 but it felt like we were far more successful than that; we pushed our rating almost 40 points higher than when we started and that was by far the highest we'd been all season. The difference was using Mind Control instead of Fear!

Mind Control has no cooldown, does not share diminishing returns with Cyclone, and is similar to Cyclone in the regard that the player that is MCed cannot be healed by their teammate! It is also hilarious. We had several games where we got some really good CC chains off - a full cyclone, followed by a Mind Control (running out of line of sight or auto attacking the teammate!), followed by switching the cyclone/MC to the other opponent.

It was a lot of fun and brought with it an element of control that we hadn't really felt too often. We still failed against the couple hunter teams we fought (le sigh), but it worked really well in the other games we had.

It's been a while!

Not only has this week been busy, hence the lack of posts, but this past weekend was also busy! In fact, it was so busy that I didn't really play at all. Nevertheless, I do have a PvP update!

About a week ago, I was waiting for my arena partner to hop on and decided to join an RBG group in the meantime. It took foreeeeever to get the last few members; so long, in fact, that my arena partner finally signed on by the time we got our third healer. He joined our group (shadow priests are OP in RBGs) and off we went!

I was really hoping to be able to crack 1800 and get to the next tier of groups in the LFG tool (generally they are restricted by your CR, so at 1800 I would have an easier time joining a group than at 1700). Our first match went really well! Not only did we win, and quite handily, but I led in healing and my SP partner led in damage!

Top 4 in damage are all DoT classes!

Druids usually also lead in over-healing

 This brought me to the familiar place of being one win away from breaking 1800. I've gotten to the 1790s 5-6 times this season, just to end up losing. This time actually turned out differently Not only did we win, but we also ended up leading in healing / damage again. We would go on to win five games in a row! It was pretty crazy. I've never been on a team that won that many games total, let alone in a row.

We ended up losing the last two we played, and people had started getting kind of antsy so everyone agreed it was a good idea to just stop there.

Alternative Arena

Last weekend we had some time to do Arenas and decided to start off with our alts first, and then go to our mains. I played my priest and my partner played his rogue; at first I started off shadow, with the idea that quicker games would be ideal.

Let me tell you, shadow priests with only a few pieces of PvP gear (and not even the 2 piece trinket bonus!) die really quickly. Heck, I didn't even have the CC breaking trinket at the beginning! I would get hit by a stun right away and be practically dead before it wore off.

After 4-5 games where I fell over dead just because the other team looked at me, I switched to Discipline. We did pretty well with that comp, even getting our MMR up into the 14-1500 range! We ended up cranking out 40+ games on our alts and never even switched to our mains. We went 27-17 overall, so probably won about 67% of our games as Disc/Rogue.

Boy is he ugly right now

Given our experience (one day!) and lack of gear, I was pretty impressed with the results. I did end up earning enough conquest by the end to purchase a trinket (2 piece bonus! - 15% reduced damage) and two pieces of armor to get the 4 piece bonus, but I still had a good 4-5 pieces that were just random blues from leveling up.

I actually sold the 2 armor pieces back at the end of the day (you have 2 hours after you purchase them) so that when I earn enough conquest overall I can buy the weapon right away (you can't buy the weapons until you've earned 7200 for the season). It's a neat little trick - help yourself out in the short term and the long term!

It was definitely a different experience, being on the other side of the dps/healer combo we usually run. I really felt the lack of CC though - all I have is fear which is on a cooldown. On my druid (both feral and resto), I have a stun which is on a similar length cd and also roots and cyclone, neither of which have a CD.

Once I get more used to the priest play-style, it will be interesting to see which healer pairs better with a rogue!

2 outta 3 aint bad ... I guess

I had 3 goals headed into this past weekend that I touched on here. I succeeded in getting Cres to 100, I not only finished off Gnomebane but also became a Manslayer ... but I tooooootally failed at pushing my RBG rating.

It had been several weeks since I had done RBGs. Being fully geared, the opportunity for an extra piece of conquest gear was unnecessary and getting into them can take some time. During my available time I'd been focused on Arena games. But back when I was doing them before, I had been very successful, winning what seems like 90% of my matches since I switched to Resto and only looking for groups intent on pushing rating.

I figured that success would continue this past weekend. Friday night I didn't see many groups in the queue, so I just focused on getting Gnomebane done. Saturday afternoon after hitting 100, I looked around for groups, and ... there weren't very many. I puttered around doing other things and finally found a group that was around my rating. We won our first game (quite handily!), putting me one win away 1800. There were warning signs though - our group comp was alllll over the place. People didn't sound confident in voice chat on strategy. We didn't have a target caller. Still, we had won and groups had been hard to come by, sooo ... I stayed for another!

We lost. I left the group because it didn't really seem like a situation that was going to be successful. It took me a while to find another group, but I finally did. We won our first! One win away from 1800 again! ... and then we lost two in a row. And then we won another! Again, one win away from 1800.

And then the leader and two other people who were from the server disconnected. They were still in voice chat, but apparently their server had crashed. It was midnight at this point, so after waiting 5 minutes they called it. Disappointing first night of attempts, but I still had all day Sunday!

Sunday afternoon, I hopped on, expecting there to be a good amount of groups. There was only 1! I waited in this group for two hours before we finally got a full 10. We lost, then won, then lost, and then the group broke up. It took me several hours to find another group, and we lost our first, won our second ... and then the leader said he was calling it because he "wasn't feeling it." Sigh. I ended right around where I had started.

I have no idea what the difference was. Maybe weekends are bad times to try and RBG? I know that the meta has shifted somewhat - the ideal healer composition is now two Monks and a Paladin, and DPS has taken a strong shift toward dot classes (2 shadowpriest and a warlock is pretty popular right now). It was very surprising to me how much trouble I had finding a group. It had never seemed that hard previously!