Sephiroh goes adventuring in Nagrand

We interrupt the great Night Elf debate of 2008 to bring you this update from Sephiroh. Our druidic correspondent is currently located in Nagrand and having a whale (bear? cat?) of a time...

Nagrand is I think my favourite zone in Outlands, it's a lovely verdant area with wide horizons, and for Sephiroh, full of lots of lovely skinnable creatures that the Nesingwary outfit pay her good coin to kill. You might think that a druid killing lots of animals isn't very well druidic but Sephiroh is all about the fragile balance of the ecosystem and if that means a little culling of the local fauna here and there then she's up for the challenge.

Sephiroh's varied adventures in Nagrand also included, amongst bouncing around in the sky trying to gather eggs for a little goblin bloke, the opportunity to practice the art of diplomacy.
Given the response received it's clear that her skills need work. Ah well, ogres are smelly anyway. At least she didn't try and convince them to kill any demons for her but perhaps the local representative of O.S.P.C.O. should be involved in the next diplomatic foray.

Whilst prowling around the perimeter of another ogre encampment (Nagrand is seriously over run with these lunkheads) Sephiroh happily bumped into a couple of friendly guild mates who convinced her that she should undertake the Ring of Blood challenges for "fun and profit" and "you need to get your staff". Having heard rumours of this Ring of Blood permeating the grass lands of Nagrand Sephiroh was willing to give it a try. As tank you say? Fine, let me shake out the bear suit, it's feeling a little unweildy after running around as rawrkitty all the time.

Sephiroh proceeded to growl and swipe and mangle and so forth as well as getting angry about certain people not allowing her to get aggro, yes you're level 70 and I'm level 67 and there's a little disparity there. Oh you died, whoops, guess you're squishier even if you're older. The final challenge against some Mor..person proved quite tricky with only four of us. We were a 70 lock, 70 resto druid, 68 ret pally and bear tank Seph. We got there in the end with the pally doing heals as well. Result: a glowing sense of achievement and a nice new staff.
Clearly the staff was a popular, if perhaps in some cases... odd, choice. Waving goodbye to her friends Sephiroh excused herself with important business to undertake and zoomed off, her cheetah form soon just a spotted speck in the distance.

Sephiroh was on a mission, well actually several missions but they all had one goal in mind: the attainment of flight form. It took some time and quite a few ogre kills (I did mention there is an absolute plague of ogres in Nagrand right?) but eventually Sephiroh was able to return to the Moonglade and her friendly (actually he's a little taciturn but Seph was in a great mood and didn't really notice) trainer to acquire amongst other new skills, the ability to shapeshift into a lovely black... crow? raven? No more land-locked running for this young druid! To the skies! Squeeeeee!

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!

Journey of a UI part one: in the beginning

I do a lot of reading of various WoW related stuff around the interwebs and see a lot of screenshots of different user interfaces (UIs). This has inspired me to both rework my current UI and write a series of posts discussing the evolution of my UI over the time that I have played Warcraft. Perhaps my experience is one shared by others.

I'm not a highly technical person and prior to playing WoW my greatest exposure to user generated content for a game was with the Sims series of games where I downloaded a LOT of user created objects to use.

When I first started playing WoW I was less concerned with how I could adapt and customise my UI as I was with learning how to play the game itself.

Unfortunately I don't have any examples of my UI back when I first started playing, however I do have some screenshots of Emelin's UI. Before Emelin was Emelin he was Broichan. The druid that Jez grew and learned with as we both explored Azeroth together.
So here it is, the default UI in all it's glory. You may remember it from when you first started playing. Not much going on yet, no need for extra action bars or any extra information. I still remember this moment. Broi and I had just ventured into the Wetlands and we stopped to rest on a hill top at Whelgar's Excavation and take in the view. We were as yet unaware of the delights ahead of us - the lush vale of Stranglethorn, the wilderness of Feralas. Of course I shouldn't forget the desolation of the Western Plaguelands and the buzzing humming irritating expanses of Sithilus.

Fast forward and here is Broichan at 60. The princess boss in UBRS successfully downed and a UI that is becoming more cluttered.At this point one mod has been introduced - CT Mod. Remember when CT was the bees knees? The mod that you had to have? More action bars are in play, but of course with the standard UI you only get to choose to have more, not where you want to place them. At this point play has become more complex but our raiding career has not yet begun and we haven't started to need information exposed that we don't yet know can be. Ah yes those days of innocence before I, at least, became a mod junkie. In my next post I'll explore the post TBC environment and focus specifically on my UI and the changes I've made.

Ve vill haf compliance!

I'd like to dedicate this post to Mr BRK just because I know how fond he is of the particular item of head wear my little magey has equipped in the picture below. I like to think that Katiya is looking particularly dashing as she salutes. Hopefully dashing and also militant enough to drive fear into the hearts of murlocs everywhere.

Katiya has now attained the mighty heights of 41, in no small thanks to friendly guildies who have been kind enough to run her through a few instances. I sometimes wonder if this is doing my learning of the mage class a disservice since I haven't really had to pull my weight in your typical 5-man as I've been leveling. I'm fairly confident that I'm getting the hang of things though.

Turning 40 was exciting for two reasons.

Firstly, I got in contact with my friendly dwarf paladin bank mule (got to level 4 before I gave up on her) and arranged for the purchase of my beautiful Black Stallion. Note to the wise: The lumbercamp in Elwynn is the place to get your riding skill but to get the black stallion head over to Menethil Harbour and the horse breeder near the stables. He always has a black stallion available.Secondly I reached the talent Ice Barrier in the frost tree. This spell is my new very bestest friend. It makes soloing soooo much easier and more efficient.

I also completed my mage quests so Kat is running around with her shiny new frost wand. If things keep on this way Katiya will soon pass poor Sephiroh who is currently mouldering in Outlands at 61.

Ice Ice Baby

Sometimes it's nice to take a break from your level 70 and run around on a 'lowbie'. I'd had enough of raiding, farming and PVPing this weekend and decided to log onto my sadly neglected frost mage. I had to spend some time configuring the UI since I hadn't set it up properly since the great primary disk drive meltdown of 08 but before long I was ready to start killing stuff.

It ended up being four of us on our alts running around STV hanging out with old friend Hemut Nessingwary jr. Amusingly all four of us are skinners so there was much fighting over the right to skin including some decidedly ninja like action by a certain rogue. By the end of the evening Katiya had gone from level 30 to 32. Hooray for faster experience gains!

It had been so long since I played Katiya that I had forgotton what all the different abilities were so I kind of had to relearn how to play her. I found myself spamming Frostbolt mostly and got to wondering if I was doing something wrong. It seems from my recent reading however that Frostbolt is pretty much the main damage attack for a frost mage - at least until you get Ice Lance. I threw in some Frost Nova's and Arcane Explosions and paid homage to my Ice Block on a few occasions too. Hooray for the mage version of feign death - bound to the same hot key as feign death is for my hunter hehe.

The next day Katiya also got an outing to the Scarlet Monastery with a group of high level characters. That was fun since I didn't have to watch threat quite so much and got to do AoE which is one of my favourite things about playing a mage I've decided. I also came away with the Tabard of the Scarlet Crusade which was pretty sweet plus a couple of upgrades for my gear.

I'd been wondering about gearing up as a mage and thankfully got some answers from a helpful mage guildie. I'd been running around in some tailor made threads (thanks Emelin) which gave me plus frost damage, however I'd started getting some other gear which had better spell damage and spell crit chance and I was uncertain whether I should stick with the frost specific gear or not. The answer I received was definitely 'or not' since a mage, even when frost specced will be using all schools of magic. This made a lot of sense to me once I thought about it. The hot tip from my mage friend was frost bolt, arcane explosion and scorch. I'd been using the first 2 but now I'll be throwing in a little scorch action too.

Funnily enough I'd had this kind of feeling that if I am specced frost then I shouldn't use fire spells. Kinda silly huh. I mean you're going to use your frost cast over time spell over a fire one but that shouldn't inhibit use of instant casts like Scorch. It's quite interesting really the kind of paradigms you'll build for yourself based on the limits of your knowledge. What I need to start doing now is playing with the newer abilities Katiya has like Cold Snap and Icy Veins and work out how I can use them to good advantage.

I have feeling Katiya will be seeing the light of day a bit more as I get re-enthused about playing my mage.