Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Cat durid is for fite!

Young Sephiroh my feral druid has been zooming her way towards 70 recently. I picked her up and dusted her off after a lengthy sojourn in Hellfire Peninsula at 61 and have fallen in love with playing the druid class all over again.

Don't tell anyone I said this *shifty eyes* but I'm finding playing her more challenging than my hunter Jez. Not playing within the class mechanics - huntering and shot rotations and trapping and pet management are plenty challenging thanks, but rather gearing and itemisation. As a hunter I'm used to a core set of statistics and what not that you focus on. This could also be because I've played my hunter a long time and done a lot of reading and so I'm very familiar with all these things whereas with druids I'm not. Then again I've been reading talk of 3:2 shot rotations by BM hunters using the new badge crossbow (which I have) Crossbow of Relentless Strikes  and confess that I'm not entirely sure how that all breaks down.

With my dear Seph however I'm constantly making gear choices across what I see as four possible roles: bear tank, cat DPS, boomkin and restoration. While I'm currently feral specced when choosing quest rewards and the like if I don't see an item that is an upgrade for my feral tank or DPS sets I also look at the healing options. I'm quite probably going to roll resto when I hit 70 so I'm gathering gear with that in mind and starting to broaden my druidic reading beyond all things feral. Two blogs I'm now going to add to my reading list are Resto4Life and 4 Haelz. There are literally dozens of great druid blogs out there so I'm sure my reading list will continue to grow. Which is a little problematic as I have a hard time keeping up with it at the moment.

So gearing up for different roles means I'm needing to learn about all of them. I admit I'm unlikely to roll boomkin since I already have a ranged DPS character, but 3 roles is still plenty. Luckily I have a knowledgeable bunch of guildies plus Emelin is also Broichan the druid of awesomeness when he isn't being an evil (and ugly human) lock so I get to ask him a lot of questions.

I'm looking forward to taking Seph to Kara with our regular weeknight group as soon as she dings and retiring Jez who I'm really quite frankly sick of taking to Kara. I feel like I could run that place blindfolded on her as it has all become so rote. With Seph and especially doing heals it will be a whole new ball game and an opportunity to learn new things about raid dynamics, boss strategies and the like.

While my blog posting has been sporadic *apologetic look* I have definitely been thinking about a lot of posts I want to write:

* Night Elf culture: Treehugging hippies?
* The 3rd in my UI series looking at the mods I use
* Jezrael's backstory and character description

I'm definitely intend to get there... I just need to get Seph to 70 first!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Roleplaying, miss Jez. Roleplaying! Let's see that character history or even the culture of the kal'dorei.

I'm curious of your perception of the kal'dorei, to be quite honest. Most people roleplay them as flighty nelves and very sweet/innocent, though if you look at the concept art for the race there's this great sketch Metzen made of a female kal'dorei (maybe a Sentinel) with blood liberally coating her face and throat. They're enigmatic, lofty, and mean bitches when they're irked.

My second kal'dorei (my cantankerous priestess) is actually around 12,000 years old and was around when Azshara released Sargeras into the world prior to the War of the Ancients. I like to imagine that pre-WotA kal'dorei civilization was much more structured and, well, civilized prior to then. The resulting chaos of the war fractured kal'dorei civilization (though to be honest it really began before then when magic began to be used much more liberally).

Anyways, intriguing ideas! I'm finding that despite my claims of being an avid theorycrafter, many of my blog posts reference my interest in roleplaying. Fun times.

Concerning Seph, I wish I knew more about druids -- specifically Restoration -- but they're the only class I haven't leveled and experienced. I almost got my first druid to 40 and then dropped her because I found Restoration healing very unenjoyable. I am considering, however, making that poor neglected tauren druid I've got languishing in the 20s bracket a Feral druid.