Rep Ding! Exalted Therazane

What's new with Jal? Not much. I've been running daily normals for Justice Points, and wearing my Therazane tabard for rep. The daily rep quests were boring enough that I've been traveling up in Winterspring grinding Wintersaber Trainer rep instead as I wait for LFG, in part because I saw that, come 4.1, Wintersaber Trainer rep is getting nerfed, and when I say nerfed, I mean homogenized. I should also admit that I spent hours and hours in vanilla farming rugged and other leather from the frostsabers under the rock without ever knowing the trainer was up there, scowling at me killing the wild cats. It was a great place to farm. Rarely anyone there, and nobody really taking down the sabers, who would respawn very quickly. If I'd only known. I did wonder what my mount, a frostsaber, thought about it...

Even so, it didn't take long to get exalted with Therazane. After a few runs, I was just a few hundred points of rep away, and I went back for a final quest. That apparently makes for five exalted reps. Funny, I'm not sure what they are offhand. Therazane (shoulder enchants), Wildhammer (great rep gear for Cat), Sons of Hodir (LK shoulders)... um... (runs to Armory) Apparently the Alliance Vanguard and Stormwind. Who knew?



That said, who really cares? What a payoff!



Wow. Now you know why swag motivates workers, I guess. I remember when I worked at a shop that gave out bonuses for each additional billable hour you clocked, but if you did the math, the percentage of each hour you were bagging dropped after a certain point. If your own company doesn't value each extra hour of your time more, why should you want to give them? Well, that never stopped the company hawks. Anyhow... Looks like I'm susceptible after all.

And for those reading hoping this'll serve as a sort of guide, next is Tol Barad commendations for the Stump of Time, though I'll probably get the frostsaber mount first.

During my daily runs, I'm gradually performing better. The below Recount for Halls of Origination (I came in part-way) is pretty good, and I was off-healing much of the time for our ungeared Shammy.



Shammy follows:



It's not a big deal, and I don't mind our three wipes (!), but I was surprised to feel my own reaction when I saw the lack of enchants and gemming.



Though I didn't have a violent reaction and am actually happy to pull along newbies, I see now why people get so irate when undergeared folk try running heroics. And it's much easier to carry undergeared dps (not that I've been yelled at, as I've only run one heroic) than healz. She just couldn't keep up. So I went elven for a while and threw around some resto-ige (still spec'd balance) and had fun. I also have to take some grief for not knowing that Void Seekers heal themselves if you left two stay close to each other. Whoops.



In other news, Spinks has stopped playing. No big deal. I think it's funny to hear someone trying to figure out the distinction between quitting and quitting for a while. Goodness knows, if you've read this blog at all, you know I take breaks for months at a time. Blizzard expects you to at this point, I believe. Doesn't want you to, but expects it.

Ah yes, I also dodged the temptation to buy a MSI R6850 Cyclone PE/OC Radeon HD 6850 with a gig of VRAM for what's now under $170 with rebate. I decided this was what I wanted when I put together my new rig, but I've been sliding by with what's almost a four year-old card. I mean, look at the roller coaster heatsink! Still, $170 is just $70 shy of what I paid for a quad-core AMD Athlon II at 3 GHz, a new mobo, and four gigs of RAM. Crazy.



The only other thing I've got is that the Frostesaber Stalkers really have it in for the bunnies. I mean, wow. They'll leap four times their body length, it seems, to take one down, and then they don't even bother eating it. See the pic of three going after one at once. INSANE. ;^)



That last one looks stepped on.

Collage brought to you by the fine folk at Microsoft Paint.

Heroic Gearing: Poor Man's Enchants (and some glyphing)

Gear Update
Well, it's happened. A week or so ago, Jal finally got good enough gear to run heroics. I'm impressed with the new Armory's "advanced" view, shown above, which shows not only a quick snapshot with names of your current gear, but also yells at you for where you haven't enchanted. It's enough to drive even me to review my almost complete lack of enchants.

Most of the gear I've got comes from the Shifting Perspectives list I've been working from. I did finally shell out about 750g for the Bracers of Caustic Purification, and, after watching the AH for weeks, another 2500g for Blazewing's Furious Kilt. Those aren't horrible prices for good pre-raid gear, but I feel a little badly about the shortcut. But unlike the other slots, good pants and bracers didn't seem to be popping up without more work, so the squeaky wheels got the gold.

I've admittedly used a lot of Bloodied Wyrmhide to fill in spots I haven't earned yet. The resilience is worthless. The Wyrmhide has been slight upgrades over what I had anyhow, but I know on some level I'm using it not only to increase my leatherworking but also for the extra ilevel. I only have the chest and belt left. The belt will be replaced as soon as I'm done with Wildhammer rep, and the chestpiece will have to wait until I've got three Chaos Orbs and can fashion its replacement. I'm still running normals, and will try to run each normal at least once before going heroic, but running Grim Batol over and over with the "random" LFG is getting really really old. I'm up to four out of maybe six or seven runs now.

Poor Man's Enchanting
The enchanting lesson: Don't let your lack of time stop you from poor man's enchanting. I was going to run Therazane rep for the Cat shoulder enchant after I went exalted with Wildhammer (81% there now), and figured I'd do all my enchanting then. Dumb. I pity the fool who doesn't use Wrath enchants! I've had my Spaulders of the Endless Plains for weeks, and only now did it occur to me to run back by the Sons of Hodir for their enchants. The Greater Inscription of the Storm is 24 sp and 15 crit that I didn't have before. I bought two, just in case. Then I remembered that I was one arctic fur away from the spellpower fur lining for bracers. There's another 76 sp I was walking around without. I've also filled in too many slots with Savage Armor kits. I don't really need the extra STA, but with all the leather in Tol Barad, it's essentially free.

I did get a guildie to throw Avalanche on the Staff of Siphoned Essences. Stinks that the staff has its own glow and doesn't show the explosion of snow, but it looks like that should increase DPS by 3-4%. My next step is to install Recount again to see if I'm not doing better. Honestly, I've usually been just barely third on Recounts during PUG runs. I'm used to blowing folks out of the water in LK. I'm using Starfall and Typhoon a good deal. Though I do tend to off-heal when things get nasty, throw innervates when healz needs it, and "waste" my time on things that cause damage but don't hit my scale, I'm still lower than I'd like. I hope the enchants help enough to get me to second routinely (I've probably been an Avalanche behind), as well as the new gear (Blazewing, eg, is brand new).

Glyphs
I'll have to post on Glyphing later, but the quick lesson is that there are more purely positive glyphs than I remember from earlier. Before, it was a devil's deal. Get more damage, but lose range. Or typhoon gets more damage but doesn't push enemies back. Well, I often bank on those extra seconds to loot something (usually a keg of ale) or to throw half a starsurge. Now, there are (more?) unadulterated gains. The Wrath glyph is a must. +10% damage to Wrath. The end. Why I hadn't bothered before, I don't know. I'm hoping it changed from when I first played around with glyphs. Getting 50% of Innervate when you cast it on someone else is spiffy. And 50% faster swimming? Why not?

And here ends another unedited post brought to you by the panzerkin.

EDIT: Shifting Perspectives on enchants and glyphs. Sorry if this edit causes the post to pop back up in anyone's RSS feed.