Fear and Loathing

Fear: Deciding to let go of T7 in favor of other gear choices, and tweaking a talent spec in order to optimize other raiders.

I decided to drop t7 all together. OK, maybe I kept the shoulders because my spirit was a little too low for my taste, but otherwise I am sporting my new Ulduar upgrades. Much to my pleasure, I got Phaelia's Vestments of the Sprouting Seed last night, which when the blogsphere said Phaelia was getting a peice of gear named in her honor I knew I was going to have it. It's not optimally the best thing I should be wearing at this point, not to mention it was BoE and easily gone in the guild bank... but hell I took it for sentimental reasons.

Again, rawr says my choices lately blow, which reiterates my idea that these gear calculators are guides really. Sometimes, I have to just go with my gut on some things. Having nearly as many hps as our melee dps makes me feel good on those fights that having me taking extra damage (which in Ulduar seems like every fight). I will say that I spent a good several minutes going over my gear and regemming or tweaking until my stats were at a comfortable level. In order to keep my haste and spirit at those levels, I had to take a gem I never thought I'd use- 8 spirit, 8 haste. As much as it pains me to drop some int gems, I needed to make sure my global cooldown could keep up with my personal reaction time. In addition, we have discovered that between me and our other druid, I am better suited for raid healing and therefore need have speed to make sure all my targets have the hots flowing.

Currently, based on gear item levels, I am the third top druid on the server. The other two are sporting 3 peices of t8.5 and I can accept that their guild is a bit more progressed than I am. Competitive? Sure I am, but at the same time I also don't want to sacrifice too much of my own personal goals.

So what did I tweak? I took Revitalize over the weekend in order to test it on our next progression run. It was actually a friend of mine sending me a tell before my next DM Rep Run saying something along the lines of "Hey I could be getting 200 more dps if you specd this." OK, it wasn't quite like that, but he did challenge my perceptions on the talent. The good folks at Dreambound had a nice write up on the math taking Wild Growth into account. After doing some reading, talking with my friend (who also crunches numbers and in general trolls info sites) I decided to give this talent a shot. See, I had it before but thought it sucked hard, regardless of the amount of rejuv I was tossing. Lately, though, with my new full time role as raid healer I had to bite the bullet and say that perhaps there was some value to tweaking my talents. Add in my recent addition of the Wild Growth glyph, and I started seeing some possibilities. It still is pretty marginal as a mana regen talent. However, we run with more DKs and Hunters than any other class. Without rehashing the math already done before, I will say our Deathknights got a nice boost last night. Hodir, especially, was fun as I got lucky and was given our two top DKs as my heal targets. Maybe I should tell my friend to give me the 35 gold for the respec cost, since it pushed him to nearly 9k dps on Hodir with a 560 runic power gain. mmm...

Loathing: Um, the prospect of tackling Thorim and Mimiron in the comming weeks. Shudder.


Have a safe Memorial Day. My brother will be BBQing while I tell him how I obliterated one of his healers in VoA. (What's the point of being a big sister if I can't call bragging rights?)