My concerns about the 10-man / 25-man duplicate system are starting to appear elsewhere in the guild. The ‘early adopters’ – those in the first wave to 80 and with the desire to run everything everywhere – are already getting tired of the Naxx bosses, and we haven’t even completed three wings of it on heroic mode yet. There is a fair group of people who have run Naxx-10 on every timer for the past 4-5 weeks, and the general consensus for this week is that we were kind of bored with it.

The unfortunate side effect of this Naxx lethargy is that these people, many of whom are our best players and have the best gear, are now also kind of bored with Naxx-25 already. This was our first week of Naxx raids, and we’ve cleared the Spider and Plague wings, and everything in the Abom wing short of Thaddius (I will leave that rant for another day!). Tonight is the Military wing. None of these are new encounters, even though they are new to us in 25-man form.

These early adopter people are also generally the folks who crave new adventures and challenges. Is Gothik-25 a new challenge? Not really. In fact, Thaddius aside most of the bosses seem easier in heroic form. Unchallenged core raiders become bored core raiders, and experience has shown that bored core raiders become cranky prima donas. This has happened eventually in the past, and part of my job is to handle it, but it became an issue a lot quicker with this new format.

I know why Blizz made the choice to have identical 10 and 25 man raids, and to be honest I have had an outstanding time on the 10-mans thus far. I wish they had the time and resources to develop totally different raids, though, because the current system just throws a lot more issues at the guild management.

We ended up with a bit of a “Dream Team” in Naxx-10 this week and took advantage of the opportunity to load up on achievements. I will give it to Blizz – achievements provide a great deal of fun for naturally overachieving players, and it gives a sense of satisfaction that some of the easier raid bosses are lacking.

The Safety Dance
You can dance if you want to! And apparently we could. This achievement is pretty straight forward, but I was thrilled to have my dancing skills proven for the official record.

Momma Said Knock You Out
I got this achievement, but it certainly wasn’t my doing. One tank just holds all four adds for the whole fight, and the other tanks Faerlina through all her enrages. This was made possible thanks to my partner in healing crime, a stellar paladin. Bacon between the two tanks, and it’s actually easier than doing the fight the normal way. Which is good because we also wanted…

Arachnophobia
From the death of Anub to the death of Maexxna in 20 minutes. We had a group with some pretty badass AoE (a mage, warlock, and boomkin) and a tank who is infamous for pulling like crazy. We worked out tanking assignments for Faerlina and Maexxna ahead of time, and just didn’t stop moving until it was all over (ignore the loot for later, too). At the end we still had six minutes on the clock – plenty of time!

The Hundred Club
This one is easy to get in theory – just don’t have any frost resist gear, totems, or auras. It does make it a lot more difficult to heal, though. Sapph is still the big barrier that I can see to us getting The Undying. I don’t think we’ve ever one-shot him, and he definitely will take one or two of us with him.

Just Can’t Get Enough
Kel’Thuzad has some extraneous abominations spawn in Phase One of his fight, and if you go out of your way to kill 18 of them in total you get this achievement. There was some debate amongst our casters whether they’d have the mana to try this one, but we nailed it on the second attempt. (The first one was marred by a lack of communication and both the DK and the insane pally pulling abom alcoves. Oopsie.) Melee focused on the aboms, which usually came in groups of three, and ranged stayed on top of the skellies and banshees. The one tricky part was when our two tanks were occupied with a group of three aboms and a solo one came ambling over from the other side to eat clothies, but a quick yelp on Vent helped solve that problem. Fun priest tip: If you didn’t already notice, Shadow Word: Death can one shot a skellie, and it’s fun to boot.

We were 17 seconds too long on the 3 minute Patchwerk achievement. Soon!

Often in WoW I will do little projects that take a day or two, but I usually stay away from the really big, mammoth tasks. I’m frequently too busy with guild management stuff to concentrate on anything for an extended period of time, and to be honest I’m just not that patient. After 24 hours or so I demand gratification!

However, with the promise of being snowed in this Christmas holidays I decided to take on my biggest character quest ever: Liore, Ambassador of the Alliance. My Exodar rep was about halfway through honored, and I was just over into revered with Ironforge, Stormwind, Darnassus, and the Gnomes. I had a lot of work to do.

The first step was the easiest: doing the starter quests for gnomes and dwarves. I’ve done them so many times on abandoned alts that it took no time at all, particularly seeing as I could just holy nova entire caves. Then it was off to Bloodmyst Isle for Draenei quests! I’ve done these starter zones twice before on alts, but there are sooooo many quests that it still took a full day or two to finish them. The rep was outstanding, though, so I didn’t mind. Finally off to.. ugh.. Goldshire and Westfall! I have run so many alts through these zones that the memories are all squished together. I think I could do Westfall quests while blindfolded, so imagine my surprise to discover that I’ve never killed Hogger or made Westfall Stew on Liore. That was some easy rep, and I enjoyed slaughtering endless numbers of boars by just looking at them.

Okay, what next.. ew, Gnomeregan. There are three quests for there that you pick up in Ironforge and Stormwind, and they are cheap and easy rep. I didn’t run any other instances in the name of becoming Ambassador, although there appeared to be some good quests for Scarlet Monastery in particular. I did a few quests in Loch Modan and the outside of Uldaman. If you leveled up a long time ago, don’t forget the new quest hubs of Forest Song in Ashenvale (Exodar and Darnassus rep) and the little Draenei camp in Swamp of Sorrows (Exodar, natch).

If you’re not sure, take the time to check the faction before you start on an epic quest, hub, or instance. I almost hit up Maraudon before remembering that it’s almost entirely Cenarion Circle rep!

It was about this time that I hit Exalted with Stormwind. One down! It was time to go back and farm AV. Every time I think I’m done with AV, POW – they pull me back in. This time my goal was different. Instead of collecting AV rep or honor points or kills, I needed turn-ins. Five crystals is 20 rep for each Alliance faction. Each 20 armor pieces is 3 rep across the board, as is each of the three Wingman turn-ins. The key, I found, is to ride up to Stonehearth, hang around for the first wave of graveyard defense, then boot it back to Stormpike. Defend the graveyard as long as possible, going to drop off turn-ins every five bodies or so. They don’t last outside of that AV, and once the Horde have pushed over the bridge your turn-in NPCs are going to die pretty quickly.

Anyway, after a day or so of AV I was Exalted with Darnassus and IF, about 500 away on the gnomes, and 3000 away with Exodar. (I must have missed some Exodar quests somewhere, although nothing really stood out when I checked on Wowhead.) I was tired of grinding, tired of AV, and it was time to spend some money. I think all told I ended up spending around 500 gold on runecloth, but it was worth every penny.

Tada! Liore, Ambassador of the Alliance. As well as the title, I also hit the 20 exalted factions achievement, the food and drink ones (from visiting all the different cities and towns), picked up some mounts towards the 50 mount total, loved a lot of critters, and made significant progress towards hitting 3000 quests complete. All told, it was a pretty worthy adventure.

I am soooo anxious about this patch on Tuesday. I hear other people talk about some of the goodies it will bring, and I just want to stick my fingers in my ear. On Tuesday, I become a lot less useful.

Circle of Healing is currently overpowered. Not by a lot, in my opinion, but okay. However, putting it on a cooldown is the least interesting and respectful way Blizzard could have implemented a nerf. Make it cost double or triple mana so we really have to think about using it. Give it diminishing returns. Hell, take away the stupid smart heal aspect, which is what made it overpowered in the first place. Or hey, maybe tone down the constant spray of aoe damage in dungeons and raids that make me want to hit that CoH button anyway.

The joy of playing is priest is that we have so many different spells in our arsenal, but it doesn’t matter if those spells SUCK. After Tuesday there is absolutely no reason to bring a healing priest on a 25-man raid. All the other classes can do an element of what we can, only better. We have no stacking buffs. We aren’t the best single target healers, or the best raid healers, or the best at hots. We are master of none.

I liked playing a raid healer, and I’m going to miss that greatly. I’ve been leveling up my shaman to try raiding as a resto, but to be honest I’m so attached to Liore that I don’t know if I could ever successfully switch. Perhaps I’m overreacting, and everything will work out okay. I’m nervous, though.

Yesterday we completed this achievement with myself, a prot warrior, affliction lock, mage, and boomkin. I’ve tried — and failed — before, so it was pretty satisfying. This one is more about gear than execution, but I won’t complain.

The tank pulled Dred to the entrance to his pen, facing him out. He and I stayed there while the three DPSers ran around killing little raptors. They didn’t need an offtank, although there were some close moments. If one of the DPS needed a heal, they ran in range of me.

When Dred “raises his claws menacingly”, shield and PoM the tank, and encourage him or her to blow their cooldowns. Dred will hit the tank very quickly and very hard three times. He also has a stacking debuff that will make your life difficult as the fight goes on. At our gear level (lots of 10-man and heroic items) I just kept up a steady stream of GHeals and it was always under control… right up until the end.

I used Fear Ward on our warrior about halfway through the fight, but then.. oooops. At 3% on the boss we had a badly timed combination of fear (on me) plus talons plus the stacking debuff that knocked poor Kinch dead. The remaining DPSers managed to kill Dred before anyone else died. I’m sure my awesome smites helped to save the day.

Heroic Achievement #21 complete!

My bad luck with Sartharion + drake attempts continued as a very good guild group got their butts handed to them by Tenebron. We wanted to try Tenebron because we figured his increased shadow damage debuff would be easier than Shadron’s fire damage aura, but we underestimated the effect that many whelps can have on a small raid. (Yes, I did yell at people on vent to “HANDLE IT!”) We gave it our all, but I just don’t think we had the right group for the whelp drake. I stomped my feet a bit and made some disappointed faces, but at the end of the day we killed Sarth the old fashioned way. I’ll be back, stupid drakes!

On the bright side, the guild had three Naxx-10 runs last week that resulted in three Sapphiron kills and two Kel’Thuzad kills, a first for us! I was really pleased to see so many people eager to get into Naxx, and that our teams were so evenly balanced. Organizing 10-mans in a 25-man guild is always a bit of a balancing act, and it can be pretty fractious. Two of the groups were organized through a public signup, one was put together privately, and all three kicked ass.

After killing Kel’Thuzad, our group swanned triumphantly over to Malygos (or, as he’s known in the Cats, Malligoose), who promptly ate our lunch. Many times. Finally, a really tough fight! This one will take a while to get…

So clearly there was a pretty major change to the caster gear system with the introduction of Spell Power in patch 3.0. I didn’t worry about it too much at the time — with a month to go in TBC, gearing up was not a great concern, and I already had my +healing gear wishlist set.

Of course everything changed once we entered Northrend. Where once I felt pretty sure about my gearing decisions (if it has healing and spirit, it’s probably good!), suddenly the nuances made me nervous. Haste vs. crit. Int vs. spirit. And what separates mage gear from warlock gear from priest gear?

I like optimizing my gear and technique, but when people start pulling out math with elaborate Greek symbols and graphs my eyes start to cross. Fortunately there are people out there much smarter than I am who can help work this stuff out, in this case namely the clever person at A Dwarf Priest. I took their stat weights, and put them into the mod Pawn. Now when I look at the tooltip for gear there is a little number at the bottom labeled “Holy” with a figure based on my weighting system. It’s easy for me to see on the fly if something is an upgrade or not, and I don’t have to keep a raid waiting while I ponder haste vs. crit.

I’m still a little unsure about the spell power change, and I miss having my holy priest gear niche. Plus I just don’t feel I have a true handle on the current gear and stats. I’m willing to learn, though, with the help of a mod or two.