I “Need” to sell it on the AH, if you disagree you’re just being greedy.

There are benefits that come with taking a brief hiatus from leveling a character, and also drawbacks. One excellent thing: rest bonus! The levels just fly by when you’re getting added XP. I started pugging this evening about half-way through level 28. Two instance runs later, and Vid’s reached another major milestone: Level 30!

The drawback is that the break I took did leave me noticeably rusty and a little unsure of some of my pally tools. (No, I didn’t lose my FoL button, fortunately. I did forget which key + click combination I was using for Divine Protection.) I know it sounds a bit silly, but I have trouble keeping track of the names of paladin things compared to the other classes I have leveled, but it may just be a question of familiarity. I know before I played a resto druid, all the regrowth, rejuv, lifebloom, etc. sounded the same to me. I wondered how druids could manage them. Mind you, at that time I’d never seriously committed to playing an arcane mage. Arcane blast? Missile? Barrage? Explosion? Oh, we’ve got your arcane covered.

But with the pally it’s more Hands/Seals/Blessings/Aura… there are more effects going than you can shake a stick at. I hoped that by leveling as I am, I’d have enough time to acclimatize in between levels but it can still be a bit overwhelming to get something like six new abilities at once. In any case, I now have Divine Favor, which I have macroed to FoL for the time being. My guild’s resident Holy pally, Ambriel, tells me that I will change this to Holy Shock in ten levels.

But that’s not what you want to read about, is it? You want to hear about how I went to Gnomeregan. I’m thinking I should change the blog’s name: “Straight Outta Gnomeregan.”

I logged in and tried to remember what my shiny buttons do. When I felt good and ready, I hopped in that queue. If you ever owned a classic NES, you’ll know what I mean when I say I was doing everything I could to picture this pug working. In the same way you used to blow air in the cartridge, turn the machine upside down, dance in a circle and hop on one foot, I crossed my fingers as I clicked accept. It went something like, “Please not Gnomeregan, please not Gnomeregan…”

Yes, Gnomeregan

You know how the next part of the story goes. We had three druids and a mage. One druid fancied being a bear, the other two were cats. The mage was a smartass, but we’re all kind of like that, really. This druid hadn’t read what Big Bear Butt has written about bear tanking at lower levels. But she wasn’t bad, she was struggling a bit and squishy to heal (relative to other tanks I’ve seen going through Gnomer). But I think her biggest problem was something I’m starting to think of as Pug Diffusion. It seems to happen especially if the tank isn’t a strong personality, or at least they aren’t in a role they’re as comfortable with. Tanks are under a lot of pressure, and it’s a big responsibility, even if a lot of folks don’t take it as such. When a tank seems uncertain or the least bit hesitant in these lowbie pugs, there are usually three other people entirely too willing to seize the reins and go charging off – in three different directions.

My rule is pretty simple. I stick with the tank. Even if they’re going the wrong way. In this case, one cat seemed to know the lay of the land, but would often head in a different direction from my bear. “This way,” and “Here,” and “No go here,” and I’m starting to be glad that the bear ass is easy to keep an eye on. I still managed to lose her in the room where you can clean gunk off an object and get a little present… she was standing meditatively in front of one of the machines, feeding one grimy lump after another into it while the rest of the group waited. I almost want to go back and do the same – I have 19 of those things. I said almost.

No animals were harmed in the taking of this screenshot.

The best part of this pug was when we were at one of the circular places…with the robots… and it was as if word had gotten out about the fleshy beings, because we sure got their attention. Each DPSer was tanking their own little pack of mobs while the bear stood in the middle, things were hitting me, him, her, and it felt like I’d stumbled into the Ringling Bros. Vidyala’s Traveling Circus! It became one of those intense, heal, heal, heal, mana potion, oh crap judge wisdom on this and try to swing a hit at it, heal, heal, moments. It was great! At the end, I was completely empty, and everyone lived. I even took a picture.

Not long after this, one of the DPS druids was voted out of the party. He kept needing on every green while people said things like, “Why did you need on that, you can’t even use swords??” I was still staring at the “Vote to kick” pop-up when the motion passed, apparently you only need a majority to do it. This is a major problem with some of these older instances, though… If you kick someone, it’s nigh-impossible to get a replacement in because they start at the very beginning. Assuming they aren’t like me, and bound to get hopelessly lost, they’ve still got to contend with pats, trash that didn’t get cleared, whatever. It isn’t worth it, and the rogue who joined our party agreed with me. After a brief, “Don’t go back and get him, come back here tank,” mini-drama, we went to kill Mekgineer whosits with four of us. It actually may have been the quickest Gnomeregan run I’ve had yet; or it’s also possible I’ve lost all sense of time.

Naughty Secrets!

Next, I encountered a dilemma. Our completed Gnomeregan run left me a mere bar of XP left to go until level 30. I’d really like to be level 30 very much. Another run of Gnomeregan much? Possibly… except I get lucky. I recognize that loading screen from the Hallow’s End event. Scarlet Monastery, Graveyard! This instance is short, sweet…and eerily silent. I haven’t encountered this at lower levels, although in 80 pugs I more or less expect it. Nobody answers my hello or says anything at all, some of these people are doing over 100 DPS – at least double what I’ve seen up until this point. We clear through handily, and the only thing of note is that the bear tank is wearing all heirloom cloth gear. I know that at lower levels, feral doesn’t have all the stuff they have at higher, but I think she’d have been easier to heal if she were at least wearing feral gear, if not using a feral spec. But who am I to talk? We cleared the instance in about ten minutes. It was smooth, and nothing eventful happened at all, and now my small pally is slightly bigger. Only 50 levels to go!

Advertisement

Go Gnome or Go Home

I haven’t had many new pugging adventures to relate, as the holidays meant that both myself and husband were on a break, and there wasn’t much incentive to play my little pally. Hey, I didn’t say I’d be getting to 80 as quickly as I possibly could!

I have to admit  that my last two pugging experiences did leave me a little cold. I usually do pretty well at just rolling with whatever slings and arrows a pug tosses my way, but first thing:

Gnomeregan. Oh, Gnomeregan. You are the only dungeon squarely in Vid’s level bracket, and I’m so very tired of you. Once was enough to experience you in all of your ooze-y green and filled with angry gnomes and robotics splendor.

You see, I have this dirty secret that isn’t such a big secret to people who know me or have ever waited for me. It’s the reason I’m really not that great at FPS games. I get lost, so completely and utterly. Even with a map. Even with a map that shows a dot to represent me, or a dot to represent my fellows. I do better now with the 80 instances, since they have maps. But the old ones don’t have those kinds of maps. I’m spatially challenged when it comes to a virtual environment. Or maybe even real ones; I once directed my mother down a one-way street in Vancouver. Confronted with no less than six lanes of honking vehicles, she managed to turn onto another street while I cried triumphantly, “Oh! So that’s what that arrow means!”

Needless to say, when  you put me in a place with a map that represents multiple levels of elevation but no way to discern which is which, it gets ugly. I was lost in Gnomer playing a level 80 for at least an hour. All I wanted was for you to love me, small gnomes! I’m pretty sure I ended up never doing those quests, teleporting out of the instance in frustration, and just turning in a ton of runecloth instead.

So my attitude going into the place was bleak – no, resigned. I’d gathered the pre-quests. I knew that my chances of going there were very high, and my chances of getting out again – quite slim.

On some levels, the first pug was good. We had a rogue doing good DPS, a hunter, a bear tank. They knew generally where they were going. So that was excellent, because I could follow them. I was doing a few quests – gathering mechanical junk from mobs, and also the one where you have to gather the sort of mail-box looking things. I want to say Essential Artificials, but all I know is they look like mailboxes.

Anyway, I realized fairly early on – that all the DPS were charging on ahead to loot these things. (I’d like to know, incidentally, just how one stuffs a mailbox into a backpack. Probably the same way you fit Onyxia’s head in there.) So I was starting to feel a bit indignant. Just because I was hanging around the tank, making sure he didn’t… you know, die – these jackasses were going to take them all until they had completed it, instead of sharing them around. I started to hedge my bets a little. I’d see a mailbox, heal the tank, sort of creep towards it…and at one point I just ran full out. “He won’t die before I get back,” I thought. “I can get this mailbox.”

The rogue sprinted to get there before I did. He beat me to it, and looted the damned thing. For the first time since I began this experiment, I had pug rage.

“Did you seriously just sprint to get to that before I could?” I typed out indignantly in party.

“lol yeah it was epic” was his reply.

“I’d advise you not to take very much damage in this instance,” I told him grimly, seething to myself. I know that these ARE pugs so my expectations shouldn’t be too high, but I still have some naive  notion that a group of people who’ve come together to accomplish a common goal may actually pretend to work together. Just for a little while. Or have some courtesy at all.

In an act I’m not exactly proud of, I was vindictive enough to actually barely heal him the rest of the instance. I say “barely” for a few reasons. One, I’ve always had a hard time letting a health bar drop when I know I could redeem it. I wouldn’t play a healer if I didn’t have an instinct to heal. So I may have healed him just a little bit. But he never got close to dying anyhow. I don’t remember much of the rest of the pug, except that at the end we ended up killing trash so the rest of the party could finish their robot guts quest. And there were about 50 extra mailboxes so there would’ve been enough for us all regardless – but it’s the principle of the thing!

The next night found me back in Gnomeregan. This time… fewer people knew what they were doing, or where they were going. It did include the experience of seeing someone standing next to an active explosive (the trogg caves) and not moving. In other news, fire is still hot! I wondered if it would outright kill her… it did. (In case you think I’m a complete jerk, I’d just had time to move myself, it’s not that I stood there watching and let her die in cold blood without warning or anything. Unless you don’t count an NPC yelling something like, “Get away from there, it’s going to blow!” as warning. In which case, she had no warning.)

This pug suffered from the opposite problem the other one did. Its players didn’t know where they were going, had only a vague idea what they were doing (and I include myself here) but they were so nice. I couldn’t desert them.

We were in there 2.5 hours. At first it was a little joke in guild. “Hey, anybody want to run some random heroics? Oh, you’re in Gnomer, nevermind, we’ll see you in three hours.” As each hour ticked by, it became less amusing. We occupied ourselves by jumping from great heights, fighting interminable trash packs, and talking in party chat about things like why the mage wasn’t doing any DPS.

“You should try casting fireball instead of frostbolt,” our sage tank advised. Of course, my main is a mage, so I have to check this out. I just assumed the mage was frost – for leveling. The mage… had spent four talent points in frost. The other 17? Unspent.

“You have 17 unspent talent points!” I twitched, “You should spend those!”

“I haven’t decided what kind of mage I want to be,” he said.

(One of my guildies suggested, “How about one that does damage?”)

I tried to talk him into spending his points in Frost on the spot (You could spend them right now! You, too, could actually be damaging things in this instance and keep us from spending 2.5 hours here!) but he would not be rushed. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

I’ll think about it too, every time I remember running in circles in that underground hell. But I set myself a goal; leveling, pugging, randomly. I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen the last of Gnomer.

Yes, I will murder those men in cold blood to avenge your son. For great justice.

I keep learning all of these utility things and I feel like such a paladin padawan. Like I learned Hand of Salvation. I know a ret pally will use this on themselves to make sure they don’t pull threat and then go splat. Is it typical for a pally healer to use it in a similar fashion to put on a DPS? Should I save it for myself in case I have a terrible tank and am pulling healing threat (not an unheard of situation, believe me).

Anyway, I keep logging on with Vid determined to look into these things beforehand, and end up saying, “Meh, I’ll figure it out” and just diving in. Today I managed to squeeze in three full instances; leveling handily from 23 some odd to 26. Incidentally – I’m referring to people by their classes instead of their names here to preserve at least some anonymity, not because I actually call people “Tank” or “Hey you person that smacks things.”

Stormwind Stockades – “Shaman didn’t pull shit!”
First up on the random menu, home to Stormwind’s nastiest criminals. No really, these guys are level twenty. One of them even has a BoP blue, they mean business.

I’m learning a few pug cues I never really paid attention to before. One: when your tank walks into Stocks and says “Which way?” you’re probably not in for a great run. Those of you who’ve never had the dubious ‘pleasure’ of enjoying this instance may not know what I mean… it’s a corridor, in essence. You start at the centre. You can go left, and then after you’ve cleared left, you’ll be going right. Or you can go right, and then you’ll be clearing left in due time.

It took us so long to go through this instance that by the time we were going right, we had re-spawns. I didn’t even know Stocks could HAVE respawns. The warrior tank didn’t exactly know what he was doing, but we muddled through regardless. Poor DPS at these levels is giving me ample opportunity to judge Wisdom and then flail ineffectually at things with my healing mace to try and get some mana back. I think it’s working somewhat.

At one point we had a group member drop, just as we were coming to the room with the ogre boss. Now, I’m a little vague on the details of what happened here. I’m pretty sure I saw the hunter’s wolf run into the room on the right. I’m tempted to say I saw the warrior tank sprint merrily into the room on the left. And I know for a fact that I followed the shaman into another room. The tank exclaimed gleefully while we were running back to our bodies, “I think I counted ten at one point!”

Did you know the graveyard you appear at when you die in Stocks is in Elwynn? Neither did I! On the long run back I coached my group members on the finer points of not aggroing half the damn instance. “Do you think we need a fifth?” the tank asks. “Nope, we’ll be fine if we don’t pull all three rooms. The hunter pulled a room, you pulled another, and the shaman ran into a third.” The shaman insisted he was only following the feared warrior tank (this is possible) with an emphatic, “Shaman didn’t pull shit!” I had to give him credit for his conviction, but being that I stood in the doorway of a room full of mobs into which he cast a lightning bolt… I remain dubious.

We go back in to try again, unfortunately we somehow lost Dextren Ward in the fray, and he won’t respawn, so we can’t chop his hand off. It’s during this confused trash clearing that I realize something. Every single green that drops, the Hunter is rolling Need on it. When he rolls need on Bright Mantle, I call foul.

Me: Hunter, why are you needing on everything?
Hunter: cuz I can use it and make my armor better
Hunter: do you know how hard it is not to die from melee as a hunter?
Shaman: You should play a lock priest or mage they wear cloth
Hunter: I need the best possible protection
Me: I hope Bright Mantle helps, lol
Hunter: I can use Cloth, Leather and when I hit 40 Mail.
Shaman: Cloth is for a damn caster type… you should only roll need on Leather
Me: I am sure he does, LMAO
Hunter: O chit I gotta go, sorry
Hunter: but cloth shoulders were the best 4 now
Me: Good luck with your melee problem!

I liked the Tourette’s shaman, he tried to get the hunter to give me the shoulders but I demurred. I left the group secure in the knowledge, at least, that the next time the tank should know which way to go (left or right), and the hunter… bless him, I’ll bet he never runs out of mana, he has such high spirit!

Blackfathom Deeps – Please light one candle at a time, guys
I actually made sure to collect the easily available quests for this instance in case I happened to get popped in line for it – and it pays off! I gained at least half a level from these instance quests; they were all red and orange to me. My second instance is everyone’s favourite murloc-ridden, Twilight Cultist dwelling cavern. I have a fond place in my heart for this instance, because it was the first one I stumbled through as a completely noob priest with no idea what I was doing, a year and a half ago. I hope I acquit myself better as a healer this time around and I can make up for past wrongs. I remember it because being my first character at the time, the other party members actually pointed out how bad my gear was – “lol you need better gear!” and I shamed them by saying that it was my first character and I couldn’t afford the AH prices to buy anything.

Vidyala, on the other hand, practically glows when she walks she’s so laden with antiques, so nobody tells her she needs better gear. I join the instance in progress, they’ve already downed the turtle boss, and a mage joins at the same time as I do. We head down the tunnels as the mage begins attacking neutral crabs or something. I tell him we don’t need to kill those, we’re trying to get to the group. As it turns out, the group comes to us, as we reach the first true boss: platform jumping.

I can only assume that the current generation of young WoW players missed out on Mario or something, because we spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for this poor mage to manage three jumps in a row to make it across the water. I remember there’s a cheat you can run along the wall and skip it, but instead I watch as the shaman coaches the mage by showing him where to jump. Amid “lol wut r u guys doing,” everyone comes back to find us. “I’m helping this mage!” The funniest thing is, this is probably the hardest part of the whole dungeon.

Eventually he gets it and we move on – I have to tell the party “to please stop attacking random crustaceans,” and they manage to restrain themselves for the most part. We had a hard time keeping this party together and at one point I thought we wouldn’t finish it – the mage dropped early on, the shaman not long after. Eventually they’re replaced by a hunter and another rogue. It dawns on me, as we’re moving through the Twilight Cultist section and the hunter’s pet tanks a mob off in the corner and dies – my healing UI is not set up to display warlock or hunter pets. I must remember to fix that before I run another instance.

I really haven’t met many tanks I particularly like or trust doing this. I wonder if that will change or improve as I reach higher levels? They’ve been mostly bumbling and blissfully unaware of the fact that the healer can’t heal them if they run on ahead out of range, or if the healer is completely out of mana since they pulled an entire room of murlocs with their face.

By some miracle though we get this one done, too. I even get a piece of loot at the end! Moss Cinch is better than what I’ve been wearing and we only have cloth-wearing casters, so I need roll on it. Cuz I need it to make my armour better. Do you know how hard it is to avoid being killed in melee as a holy paladin? At 40 I can wear plate and I’ll roll Need on that, too!

Razorfen Kraul – Would anyone actually eat the meat that drops from these mobs?
I need to start taking into account that these classic instances…they’re often LONG. These aren’t “I can knock out a quick instance in 20 minutes” kinds of places. They’re more like “Let’s venture into a tangle of thorns and pigs and see how many times we can get lost, mmkay?”

I’m going to be frank here and admit that I recall very little of this actual instance. The tank was pretty decent, except for the expected oblivious understanding of my mana restrictions as he chain pulled while I gasped along behind. Mana, btw, is lasting a goodly long while now. Flash of Light is helping me a great deal to not just spam massive heals; if we have many melee I can cast Holy Light on the tank and see if the little heal from the glyph will top them all off, and spot heal FoL where necessary. A few pulls in here got pretty hairy, and actually the last boss (some big pig lady?) was interesting, she was casting a chain of lightning sort of effect the whole time. I’m not sure what the range on the jump for it was, since she was tanked in a little hut at the top of the stairs.

Anyway, at that point I realized how intense pally healing can get at this level, when you have a lot of AoE damage going out. If you aren’t constantly casting, you’re doing it wrong. This place had a lot of annoying debuffs I couldn’t dispell just yet. Magic effects, curses. No poisons of course, because those I could dispel.

At some point the tank, hunter and I got hopelessly, uselessly lost on the other side of the instance from the druid.

Tank: “Crap guys, I really have no idea where we are.”
Hunter (as we pull a pair of quilboar) “Why don’t you ask these guys for directions?”
Me: “He won’t, guys never do.”

(You know it’s true). At the end of the instance time is getting really tight for me since I haven’t eaten and we’re raiding in about an hour. Once we finally manage to find the rest of the group I tell them I’ve got five minutes, tops, so let’s get this done. A few minutes later they’re still messing around and I say, “Less talk, more killing!” I mention this only because it prompts the warrior to say, “I’m the one doing all the killing here!” and I tell him, “Well, I’m keeping you alive while you do it, so we’ll call it even.” The feral druid is mightily offended by this, and he interjects, “I disagree! Everyone knows it is us who are doing the damaging, you tank things but we will damage them.”

I glance over at the damage meter. Of course he’s right…kinda. In practice, the feral druid has done less than half the damage the tank has, and none of the DPS are even close to the tank. I point out that he put me on follow and went AFK to eat supper for half the instance, although his theory is sound. The tank links the damage meter. I’m actually a little ashamed to be running a damage meter in an instance at this level. So far the hottest DPS I’ve come across is doing a whopping 50 damage per second! Quilboar don’t have that much HP, y’know.

You don’t want to know where they are wearing those bandanas.

Stormwind Stockades
There’s no question that this is a slow method of leveling, but it’s convenient. I just have to login, make sure I have water to drink and bagspace, hop in the queue and away I go. So I would call it both incredibly slow and incredibly fast. Today I was randomly queued for Stocks, which impressed itself upon me as the singularly most boring instance in the game. (Somebody remind me if I bitch about the wolves again). But, at least it is fast and easy, but there’s really not much return for time investment. BoP blues? Just one. Greens? Only a few. It’s like someone took all the trashiest trash and just crammed it in a few hallways with the same repetitive rooms lined up one side and down the other. That said, the instance was fast and easy owing to some other good group members.

I encountered my first issue with the Looking for Dungeon system, though. Well, maybe “idiosyncrasy” would be more accurate. Anyway, the group was nice, we all got along well, so the leader said, “Who’s up for another?” Everyone was. The only problem was that the extreme outliers (myself, at level 22, and another pally at level 26) were basically making it impossible to queue for something appropriate to all of us. The other group members were 24-25. It kept giving the error, “One of more of your group members do not meet the requirements for this dungeon.” So it would try to queue us for Gnomer (shudder) and then say we couldn’t go because I was too low level. Then I can only assume it would try to queue us for something like Deadmines and encounter the same error with our level 26 friend.

I suggested we queue for something specifically – I can do RFK at this level, or BFD, or whatever, but the two hunters immediately dropped group. I speculate they want the “Satchel of Helpful Goods” granted from doing a random, every time. Which is a shame because it was a good group. Now I only hope I can avoid being queued for Gnomer during the course of my leveling, which inevitably means I will run it five times, minimum.

Needs more wolves.

Adventures in Shadowfang Keep

Well this is new and exciting! I’m here, I’m excited! If you stand too near the door at the front, it pulls a pat. If you panic and back up – you back out of the instance and get teleported back to the Exodar. Then you say “OMG OMG OMG” while frantically trying to click on the “Teleport back to instance” button.

When you get back, act cool as if you meant to do it, nobody will know the difference.

Shadowfang Keep has, um, wow. A lot of stairs, a lot of worgen. Worgen, stairs, ghosts – wtf was that a ghost horse? worgen, stairs… Bear tank says “I have to go, guys, my dad needs the computer.”

Priest and Rogue turn to look at me.

“…Why is everyone looking at me? Well sure, I can wear plate, but I don’t… you know, that’s not really what I…”

“…”

I finish SFK as the ‘tank’ while Voss looks over my shoulder shouting, “That one got away from you! Are you turning with your keyboard? OK now taunt it. If they pull aggro it’s their own fault. Let that guy die.”

Amazingly, we finish with no wipes or deaths. I very decidedly unselect ‘tank’ from my random group options and toss myself back in.

Shadowfang Keep…again
Well sure, RNG, I guess I could run SFK again. If you insist. Crap, I aggroed that pat by the door again. Aaand, why am I getting a loading screen…? Oh right. That’s the entrance door, again. This group was a mixed bag. Our valiant pink-haired gnome warrior lead was tanking but not with any real zeal. At one point a shield dropped and I greeded assuming he’d take it – great shield, right? For tanking? He passes and says, “Nice shield, too bad I’m Fury lol.” He did not badly at holding aggro though, for a guy in battle stance with a two-hander. I guess at lower levels it doesn’t really matter too much.

I’m starting to dread running into hunters in these things. One hunter only brought out his pet about halfway through the instance. We’d pull a group, and he’d run in to start DPS – with his axe. He need rolled on [Some Cloth Thing Of The Owl]. I tried to see if I could out-DPS the pair of them but we had too many reckless pulls where I had to heal a great deal. (Glyph of Holy Light is WIN). This tank was nice about waiting for mana when I asked him, but it was always a surprise to him. He’d say, “Oh, k.” I imagine his thought process: “What? Why are we stopping? Where is my healer? You need to refill that funny blue bar? Why is that? Oh it powers your SPELLS. So it’s like rage. Only more like… peaceful? Okay, we can do that.”

Five minutes later “Mana, wait please.”
“What? Why are we stopping? What’s with you and the blue bar, can’t you just hit something and fill it up? No? Siiiigh.”

Arugal turned me into a worgen and for a moment I was inexplicably in Silverpine, and a worgen.

Shadowfang Keep – why do something else when you could do it again?

Another bear tank, this one stuck with us until the end. He said, “Just to let you guys know, I haven’t done this before.”

I told him, “You’re in luck, because this is my third time today!” I know all about the worgen. And the stairs. And the other worgen.

This group actually sort of redeemed the other ones. We had a nearly silent ret pally who asked quietly (I don’t know how she did it quietly, but somehow) if she could Need on an axe that dropped. We had a good hunter, everyone dinged at least once during the instance (including the wolf, “Buddy”) and much fun was had by all.

I can’t think of anything else noteworthy that happened. I think some wolves were killed.

Notes for next time: I’m level 22 now! My mana is lasting longer and I really don’t need to drink as much as I did. As Jorah observed, I could go to BFD to tackle some elite murlocs. You might think that with all of this pugging I’ve got quite a lot of blue gear drops – you would be wrong. I did snag a leather belt upgrade and like… some cloth gloves that had more int than the ones I had, yes they have spirit, yes I know that’s bad, but they were better! I know better than to expect spellpower mail, though – I remember what it was like with my elemental shaman. So I’ll make do with what I can as we go along, and someday a long time from now spellpower plate shall drop and I will say IN YOUR FACE because only another plate wearer can roll Need on it… And I’ll lose the roll to a DK.

Wait times to kill wolves are still under a minute. My flashy heals are much in demand!