Through the Dark Portal

The little warrior rode her trusted Mechanostrider across the barren red wastes of the Blasted Lands, taking good care to skirt the roaming helboars and felguards. She followed the old and worn path through the crater rim and came to a halt at the inner edge of the crater.


The Dark Portal was ahead of her, green-glowing, carved in stone, leading to that other world, the Outland. Many had gone before her, many would come after, but this time, this one time, it was her turn to pass through the void, spanning the dimensions between the worlds.

She approached the other-wordly thing with trepidation, her heart beating fast and her senses all on maximum alert, thrilled and terrified at the same time.

The thing was huge, it loomed above her and she had never felt so small and insignificant in her entire life. The gateway itself swirled in greenish colours before her, almost hypnotically. She felt as if it was trying to lure her in, beckon her to come enter the glowing enticing mists of the portal, and suddenly she was not at all sure she wanted to go through.


What was on the other side? Was there really another world?

For a fleeting moment she considered turning back, riding back to her old world, never going through the portal. But then she took a deep breath, and without really making a conscious decision about it, her body leading and her mind tagging along, she stepped through the gateway.

The green mists felt oddly cold to the touch, the passage through them felt like it took forever, she was floating in space, time elongating and then snapping back in an instant as she stepped through on the other side.

The portal was high up on a stairway and the view of the new world was breathtaking. It was all different. The sky was red, streaked with nebulae and stars and planets never seen in Azeroth. It was beautiful beyond words and the little warrior was just standing there at the top of the stairs, looking in awe and delight and wonder at the new world unfolding beneath her.


All fear and worries and second-thoughts were gone, she was thrilled and excited about exploring this new world like she had the old one, one adventure after the other, and she ran down the stairs, giddily, happily, joyfully, ready to go find friends and quests and fame in this new strange place...

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Beware of terrorists!

It has a flashy title, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with a .gov adress so it must be official, and it has spent a lot of RL gold (I guess) to produce a 15-page summary report on data mining.

The report outlines a few up-and-coming projects, but what I think will catch most gamers' eyes are the Reynard Project, "a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games".

The data mining is defined as "a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases" in order to " discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomaly indicative of terrorist and criminal activity..."

Terrorists in WoW?

Of course there are, let me introduce to you mr Ganker and his friend mr Scammer. But I guess you have already encountered them several times, in various guises.

You know any other place where it is totally legit to harass and grief other people? Didn't think so. Yeye, QQ more nuub, or whatever that kind of people say.

The relative anonymity and the lack of any real consequences really bring out the worst in so many people it seems, patterns of suspicious criminal and terrorist behaviour must be emerging all over the place.

I think the Reynard project would have had an easier time tracking decent, friendly and unselfish behavior in online games. Although it do exists, there really are a lot nice and kind people out there too, and I am really glad every time I meet one :-)

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Blogging in Azeroth

A lot of people play WoW, more than 10 million according to Blizz. The WoW-blogger crowd is not quite that big but there are quite a few of us and we are a prolific bunch.

Seems that every time you see something funny, or interesting, or get a good idea for a blog post, someone else has already been there, done that, and posted an article in their blog about it. Well written, interesting, and a good read, in most cases.

Ah well, there is a lot of stuff going around in the WoW-universe and many things bears repeating and maybe you find a different angle to approach something. Or maybe you just enjoy writing, blogging is quite fun =)

Go visit Blog Azeroth and see for yourself! Maybe you'll find a new favourite blog among the more than 200 introduced there.

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Are You Imba?

Stupid question, eh? Of corse you are! I know I am...

Imba = online slang for game imbalance according to Wikipedia.

In daily speek, it usually means that something or someone is very good, as good as it gets, so to speak.

If you want to know if your WoW-character really is imba, or at least if she's considered imba by the gear she's wearing, head over to Be Imba!, an online Character Auditor that pulls your character from the Armory and suggests "PVE tuning hints and tips for every level 70 World of Warcraft character".

When I audit my sweet rogue Tessy it tells me "This character may be improved".

Well, I should think so, I haven't played her very much and she hasn't got any fancy outfits.

The Auditor tells me she has 1 unenchanted item - Stealther's Helmet of Second Sight - and also suggests a suitable enchant (click on the three dots ... after the item to see the suggested enchants), the Glyph of Ferocity, which I actually was planning to get once I get her revered with CE.

It also tells me she has 5 misenchanted items and proceeds to suggest better enchants for these items. For example, it doesn't really approve of the Nethercleft Leg Armor she has on her X-52 Pilot's Leggings and would seem to be more satisifed if she put a Cobrahide or Nethercobra on her pants instead.

Well, that piece of Leg Armor was a gift from a very sweet friend and I don't think I'll replace it anytime soon.

The Auditor proceeds to tell me how many and what kind of low quality gems she has and also what low levels items she has - all of them almost =(

It the gives an assessment of what she is most suited for - grinding, it seems, and suggests some appropriate raids and instances where she can upgrade her gear - heroics and Karazhan.

All in all a pretty cool tool for checking out your chars and see if you can get any new ideas or tips on how you may upgrade them gearwise, so go check your imba-ness asap! =)

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A Feral Druid's Illustrated Primer - healing

***This article is outdated***

Feral (Healing)

Ok, as a feral druid you probably know a lot of what to wear and how to behave when in your cuddly kitty form or your even cuddlier bear form. How about when you are in your cuddly elf form? Or your very cuddly (?) tauren form?

Well, there are actually a lot we can do while not quadrupedal, we can heal, we can nuke 'em down with our pretty sparkly spells, we can use our weapons to bash some mob's head in, we can do our famous NE dance, and we can discuss the pros and cons of different detergents when it comes to their ability to remove bloodstains from leather. Among many, many, many, many,...,many other things...

So your group does not need a furry tank or sneaky cat? What do you do? Say "well, thx a lot for the invite, guess I am out of here then..."?

BEEEP! Wrong answer.

You say "Ok, I heal then", pull out your prepared heal bag and impress everyone by keeping them alive and well through the massive onslaught of nasty mobs of all sizes and flavors.

Easy? No. Possible? Yes.

Btw, I warn you already, I just know this will be a long post, so grab a cup of tea and some cookies, cuddle into your favourite comfy chair and enjoy!

Your talents

Even if you are feral to the bone and can't even remember how you look like in caster shape, chances are you have taken a few points in the Resto tree. If not, consider if you shouldn't make some small alterations in your spec.

First out is Omen of Clarity. This is actually one of the best spells ever for a feral. Since it procs (and it procs often!) on melee damage and nothing else it actually seems tailored for a cat or bear. How often do you melee while healing anyways?

However, Omen of Clarity requires at least 10 more points in the Resto tree. So what else to take in there?

Well, for starters, you have to pick at least 5 points in Improved Mark of the Wild or Furor. 5 points in total in those two opens up the next tier, which contains Naturalist, another spell with a very nice effect for a feral.

In the next tier there is Intensity, which, besides the very nice instant Enrage-rage it gives, also is very good for the healing druid since it allows some of your Spirit-based mana regeneration to continue even while casting.

Actually, I like all five of these talents very much in my feral specc, guess that is why I have taken them all and have a total of 19 points in the Resto tree. Not bad for a feral druid, eh?

To balance things off a little, there is the Nurturing Instinct talent deep in the feral tree, but this is more of a pvp spell since you will rarely try to heal in dungeons or raids dressed in your tank or dps gear. And I guess your healing gear is rather devoid of Strength?

Talking of which...

Your healing gear (stats)

As a feral, you probably haven't had first tjing on any of the healing drops you've encountered in your dungeon runs, but maybe you have gotten lucky and run with some healers that didn't need the stuff that dropped. Or maybe you have bought yourself some rep items, or have collected some quest rewards on the healing side.

I will not dwell on where to get healing gear, but I will spend a little time discussing the stats you want to be looking for on the gear.

When you are healing, regardless of class or specc, you have two goals:
1. heal as much as needed
2. heal as long as needed

You start the fight with a full mana pool. Well, maybe since you are feral and thus dressed in the Real Healers’ hand-me-downs and probably very untalented in the mana-increasing department, it may be more appropriate to call it a mana bathtub.

Anyways, as you start healing you pull the plug on your bathtub, and the sweet blue mana starts going down the drain. When the tub is empty you are out of mana but hopefully your friends will have killed the mobs by then.

In longer fights, however, you might face the shiny bottom of your tub glaring back at you when the mob is only half-dead, and if that happens all your friends will most likely be very dead pretty soon.

Luckily there are some ways of getting more heals out of that tub of yours, and those ways are:

1. Increase the size of your tub
2. Increase your mana regeneration
3. Increase your healing bonus
4. Downrank your healing spells (actually it’s dubious if this qualifies here, but I will leave it and comment on it)

Tub size
The amount of mana you have at your disposal is dependent on how much Intellect you have. Now, while a large tub is pretty neat to have it will run dry eventually if you keep using the mana in it. So, while tub size is important, it is more important to make the mana in it last longer and/or heal for more.


Mana regeneration
What if someone didn’t turn off that bathtub tap, but instead left it dripping? As we all know in this era of energy saving awareness, a water tap left dripping can fill a whole bathtub in a surprisingly short time. Same goes for your mana regen, only in your case, you want that tap to be dripping as much as possible.

There are two stats that will help you pry that tap open, and that is mana/5 and Spirit. Mana/5 will give you the stated mana regeneration at all times, regardless if you are casting or not. Spirit will give you mana back only when you are NOT casting, and after a cast you will have to wait 5 seconds until the Spirit-based mana regen kicks in.



You can get 30% of that Spirit-based mana regen going even when casting if you choose the talent Intensity in the Resto tree. Besides the mana regen bonus it has a nice effect for a Feral too, so it’s not a total waste even if you rarely heal.

A Resto druid will have a whole bunch of other nifty Spirit-based talents and thus a reason to stack the Spirit high, but a Feral won’t, so if you have to choose between mana/5 and Spirit go for the mana/5.

There is one occasion when a lot of Spirit is useful for a Feral as well, and that is when you use your Innervate on yourself. However, since it’s possible to switch weapons in mid-fight you can create a macro that will swap your regular healing weapon for one with more spirit on it for the duration of the Innervate, to maximize the mana regen.

#show Innervate
/equip Serpentcrest Life-Staff
/cast [target=Yourname] Innervate
/equip Shard of the Virtuous

Click the macro once to swap to your Spirit-weapon and to cast Innervate on yourself (or whomever you have named as target), click it twice to swap back to your regular healing weapon. (Now isn't that a nice oxymoron... a healing weapon...)

For more in-depth info on mana management for druids please head over to Resto4life and read Phaelia's excellent article there.

Healing bonus
By choosing gear, gems and enchants that add +healing you will get more healing done for every mana you spend. More healing will keep your friends alive for a little longer, and will ease the strain on you.



The amount of extra healing each spell will get depends on its cast time, its duration, and whether is direct or over time. For example, your Rejuvenation will get 20 % of your heal bonus per tick, each application of your Lifebloom will get about 7 % of your heal bonus per tick and with about 40 % of your heal bonus applied to the final heal, your Healing Touch will get 100 % of your heal bonus.

Downranking
This means to not use the top rank of whichever spell it is you are casting. Lower ranks cost lower mana and thus you have more mana left after the cast. Of course, lower ranks heal for less but this can be offset by stacking a lot of +healing.

The sweet combination of downranking and stacking +healing was utilised by ingenious players back in the old misty pre-TBC days, and it led to them being able to heal almost indefinitely without running out of mana. This was not the way things were supposed to be in Blizz’s opinion, thus nowadays downranking a spell is penalized so that the healing per mana remains about the same regardless of which rank you use.

Downranking can still be useful on occasion though, if for example a rank 9 Healing Touch will be overhealing too much, you might perhaps wanna consider using a rank 6 or 7 instead and save some mana. I am not that big a fan of downranking, since when healing as a Feral without the handy Resto talents, you will probably need your heals as big as you can get them anyways.

Your threat

Your party have pulled a group of mobs and the fighters are busy taking them down. You are busy keeping your friends alive, staying at the back, trying to be inconspicous.

However, when you are healing your buddies the mobs start to dislike you. All of them start to dislike you. More and more. Suddenly one of them decides he's had enough and comes running towards you, intent on smashing your face in.


What do you do? Well, you are a druid, you can always drop into bear to get a little more thick-hided to live through the beating until the tank can come taunt the mob away from you.

But while you are in bear form none of the others in your party will get healed. They may not need to be healed, but then again, they might.

Luckily, there are some cool ways of lowering the amount of threat your heals create.

Make friends with an enchanter in good standing with Honor Hold and persuade her to enchant Subtlety on your back.

Carry around some trinkets that you may switch to if you have problems with your threat generation. Be aware that you can't swap trinkets while in combat, so you must have them equipped at the start of the fight.

Good trinkets for this is Hypnotist's Watch, a quest item from a Hellfire Peninsula quest, or Jewel of Charismatic Mystique, a drop from the 3d boss in Shadow Labyrinths. They are on a 5 minute cooldown so you better not have to use them too often.

While you are on your friends-making tour, find an Alchemist to make you some Shrouding Potions as well. Keep in mind though that these nifty pots share the cooldown with mana and other potions, so using one potion will keep you from using another until the 2 minute cooldown is up.

Your threat (Plan B)

But what if lowering your threat isn't enough? Well, you can always throw up the Barkskin which lowers the damage you take and let's you keep healing uninterrupted even when being beaten on.

And a Herbalist might be good to know as well, since if you are nice to her she might give you some Fel Blossoms, that will shield you, like a priest's shield, for a little while.

These moves might buy the tank enough time to come pick up those nasty mobs again, but if all else fails, do drop into bear and let the others fend for themselves for a while, at least until the mobs stop hitting you. A dead healer is good to no one, and in bear you can take a beting better and heal yourself at the same time if you can kick in your Frenzied Regeneration.

Your picnicbasket

Even if you are a casual druid mostly intent on tanking or dps-ing you may wanna keep a little picnic bag at the bank for those extra special occasions when you dabble in the healing way.

Remember that nice and friendly Alchemist? Now is the time to be even nicer to her.

Mana potions is a staple for any healer, you never know when it may save your lives. Keep a stack or two in your bag.

Elixir of Draenic Wisdom is a Guardian Elixir that will increase your mana pool and (if you have the talent Intensity) your mana regen too.

Bring along some Elixir of Healing Power as well, since it's a Battle Elixir you can use this and the Draenic Wisdom at the same time.

Fishermen and -women skilled in the art of cooking are also a good addition to your friends list, since they might give you some Blackened Sporefish or Golden Fishsticks. Or you can always buy them from the AH.

If you have the talent Intensity (it's the third time I've mentioned this talent in this article, it must be a good one!) the Fishsticks will give you about 7 mana/5 compared to the 8 mana/5 from the Sporefish. So the choice is basically between 44 healing and 20 stamina.

Gems and enchants

Lastly, a thought about enchanting and gemming your healing gear when you are Feral:

Your healing gear will most likely be blues with maybe a few BG or heroic shinies thrown in. Is it justifiable to put expensive enchants and rare gems in blue gear?

In this case, I’d say it is. As Feral, you are not going to be first in line when the sweet epic healing gear drops. You will probably be stuck with your healing gear for a long time until all the dedicated healers have geared up, and if you want to make a significant contribution when needed, you better make the most of the gear you have.

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Me me f**ing n00b!

So as I was playing my druid Joaquime today, and was on a flow in AV in the special AV weekend, on my sixth or so consecutive win, I was rushing down to Frostwolf Keep with some others to get and defend the grave yard and towers while the most of the crew were beating down on Galv. I came to a halt at the Frostwolf Graveyard where some horde was chasing down a gnome warrior. The warrior seemed to be on top of things and I threw him some heals to keep him alive long enough to get the job done.

Now this is me, in my catsuit, in my feral spec, healing because I can and because it seemed better to heal the warrior than go cat and dps at the time, when I suddenly get a whisper that just stops me in my tracks.


This is not something I usually encounter while bg'ing. For some reason this player has taken his time to target me, whisper me, taking care to spell noob the correct way, showing how good he is at communicating with people, and to include a profanity.

But he also forgets to include what he wants (a heal) and then he takes his time to whisper me again, adding this wish to be healed to his earlier statement.

For some reason he thinks its more important that I heal him than the warrior the two hordes are beating on.

I am at a loss of what to do, I see no other than the warrior in sight, and even if I could have seen the whisperer, his chances of getting a heal from me now is slim, to say the least. Non-existant, would be more truthful, even. Not-gonna-happen, is another way of putting it.

Anyways, the horde have reinforcements coming, the gnome warrior die, I die, and I have no idea if the unseen whisperer is dead too, and frankly I couldn't care less.

However, as I am at our grave yard, waiting to be ressed, I get another whisper from the sweet talker.


So I assume that he did die too.

He may have whispered me with more but I by this time I had welcomed him to my ignore list and was blissfully uninterrupted by hostile whispers out of the blue for the duration of that AV. We lost, by the way.

Now losses in AV do happen, but I can't help to wonder if maybe they are more frequent with players like this in them, players who actually spend time and efforts whining about things, rather than getting them done.

While in the AV, I checked him out in the bg tab, and he was listed as a shaman. So after the AV I was actually curious enough to check out this guy, and he was listed in the Armory in four different guilds (none of which had any other members than himself) and he was shown to be an elemental/resto specced shaman.

Now, last time I checked, a shaman can heal themselves pretty well, and this guy had about 750 +healing bonus. Me, in my cat gear, I have +0 healing bonus. It would have been better if he had whispered himself to get a heal. But maybe he was out of mana, in which case healing him up would be pretty useless anyways since it would mean I would have to stop healing the warrior.

This guy had netted about 3500 honorable kills in his days of playing. Me, on my druid, I have about 2300. I have not played very much BG's with her, I joined the general honor craze before TBC was released and have played a little since the Arena S1 gear became available for honor points, but that's about it. So, I am no BG expert, but I usually help get the job done without being a sad little moron like this new addition to my ignore list.

And think about the time and effort this guy spends on whispering people calling them things. Well, maybe he had never whispered anyone else and this was the first time, but somehow I get a feeling this was not the first time he did something like this.

What if he could make something useful out of that time instead? As most of us know, if you type something while fighting at the same time, both things get a little unfocused...

Ah, well, this is not really anything I wish to dwell further on. Morons and jackasses are sadly all too frequent in the WoW-universe, but at least this place has an Ignore-list.

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A Feral Druid's Illustrated Primer - cat stats

***This article is outdated***

Feral(Cat)

And what are the preferred stats for the kitty-cat? You didn't think it would be the same as for the cuddly bear, now would you? Well, there is one stat both the cat and bear want - Agility, but generally if you are dressing for cat you take your bear gear and shove it down your bags.

A druid in cat form is a lean mean killing machine, a sleek and furry bullet aimed straight at the enemy and your goal is to make sure they don't know what hit them before they are dead.

The key to hit the mobs hard is to stack up on Attack Power (AP). The more AP you have, the more pain you deal to the mobs.

Attack Power is a stat of its own and many items sports something like "Equip: Increases attack power by "some number here".


A druid in cat form also gets AP from Agility and Strength. One point of Agility gives one AP but one point of Strength gives two AP. Would seem that Strength is better then? Well, that is a tricky question, because it so happens that one point of Agility also increases the Crit chance, and thus the total dps of your cat.




So Strength or Agility? Well, for a lvl 70 cat druid there seems to be an equilibrium point at around 225 dps accordning to wowwiki.com if you have the talents Heart of the Wild and the Predatory Instincts.Check you character's melee tab and the Damage info to see how much your dps is.



Until you reach that number it is more beneficial to your AP to stack up on Strength, after that the increased Crit chance from the Agility will give more total dps.



Another nice talent for the cat to have is the Naturalist talent from the second tier in the Resto tree - not unattainable for a feral druid, especially since you most likely want the Omen of Clarity, which requires at least 10 Resto points.

However, what is the use of having a paw like a sledgehammer if you miss your target and drives that sledge deep down into the flag stones instead? Ouch, that would be painful for you, not the mob! Let's make sure you hit that mob next time, ok?

A single-wield (or maybe I should say single-paw) white damage attack or special attack (your Mangle, Claw and all those others energy-costing attacks you do) has a base chance to miss a lvl 73 mob of 9 % (yes, we are talking raid bosses again). You can decrease this by increasing your Hit rating and when you have 142 Hit rating you will have done all that is in your powers to do to eliminate the chance that you may miss the mob.



A new stat introduced in patch 2.3 is Expertise, and it affects the chance that your target will dodge or parry your attacks. As a true feral sneaky cat, however, you are not really planning on attacking something up front are you? Attacks from behind can't be dodged or parried, so this is not a stat you have to worry that much about ;P



So to conclude this short stats speech, a kitty-cat brimming with AP, Strength, Agility and Hit rating is a kitty-cat you don't wanna mess with.



Stay tuned, next episode of this Feral Druid's Illustrated Primer will deal with Feral(Healer).

Until then!

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A Feral Druid's Illustrated Primer - bear stats

***This article is outdated***

One of my favourite books is Neal Stephenson’s “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”, and one day as I was browsing forums, wikis and wow-related blogs I got thinking maybe I should do a small compilation of these druid things I have read about and the things I think I know and have learned from my own experinces, written from a feral perspective and - BAM! – the name “A Feral Druid’s Illustrated Primer” was etched in my head.

My druid Joaquime is feral at heart, even though she occasionally ventures into the balance tree to fight like a laser chicken. However, feral does not equal “incapable of doing all the other things a druid can do”, and I have picked up a grain or two of druidic wisdom (mostly from other people) during my WoW-years that I figured I could share.

Note: This will not be a guide on how to tank, nor will it be a guide on how to heal, it will be more of a “so you are 70 and you are a feral druid, here are some things that you might find interesting to know and consider”-sort of thing.

Primer = A book that covers the basic elements of a subject.

Enjoy!

Feral(Bear)

What stats should you aim for and how much?

A feral druid’s first concern should be to make herself uncrittable, and since you are a lvl 70 druid you want to be uncrittable by all the top mobs that may come running to you, intent on smashing your face in, ie raid bosses. The chance for a raid boss to score a critical hit on you is 5,6 % (for some reason raid bosses are considered to be lvl 73, even though they are shown as skulls, which should indicate they are at least 10 lvls above you...)

So, uncrittability is achieved by
1) taking 3/3 of the feral talent Survival of the Fittest, which gives you a 3 % reduction to the chance of an enemy scoring a critical hit on you, AND
2) stacking Defense or Resilience until they add another 2,6 % chance that you will avoid a critical hit. Defense is usually preferred since, unlike Resilience, it increases Dodge chance as well, but any of the two will do the job. You will have reached your coveted goal at 415 Defense or 220 Resilience. If you have a little of both, check the tooltips for each stat and add up the numbers.




Please pay attention to the difference between Defense rating, which is not the same as Defense. For some reason Blizz has a plethora of different ways to confuse us all, and this is just one of them. You stack Defense Rating to get Defense, and you stack Resilience (not rating!) to get Resilience.

In my opinion, hoarding up on Defense after you have reached crit immunity is rather useless. You get a slight increase to Dodge, but you have no use for the Defense-induced Block or Parry. Better to increase other stats then.

The second thing you want to start amassing is Armor. Your thick furry hide is the one thing that protects your fragile innards and warm heart from the cold cruel world out there. Love it! Get a lot of it! Maximize the talent Thick Hide and keep an eye out for items with their armor value in green - that means that they are extra good for that sweet protection.



Armor is also increased by one of the druid's other favourite stat - Agility. It also increases Dodge and Crit, and you want a lot of the two first at least for starters. Dodge to avoid as many of the mob’s hits as possible, Armor to reduce the hurt of the hits you can’t avoid, and Crit is a nice bonus to giving that nasty bucket of smelly old carp that’s trying to take you and your friends down a little extra painful taste of his own medicine. Get as much Agility as you can – there is no such thing as too much Agility.



For some reason the impact of Agility on the Dodge is not shown in the tooltip, but it's there, rest assured of that.

Dodge rating is another stat that the just-turned 70-druid might wanna check out, since you have no other means of avoiding a hit, you have no shield to block with and no weapon to parry with. (Yeye I know you do have weapon equipped, but Blizzard in their mysterious ways have not yet seen fit to tell us all how, exactly, a bear utilises the pretty blunt weapon she somehow carries with her underneath that furry exterior.)

Aim for about 30 % Dodge unbuffed to start with. The talent Feral Swiftness adds 4 % to your Dodge, take it! In my experience, it is usually not necessary to gem or enchant for Dodge, a lot of the gear you will be interested in has Dodge rating on it, and anyways I prefer stacking pure Agility over Dodge rating for the extra benefits of that stat.

A slight note though, on some bosses it seems too much Dodge may interfere with your rage generation, but generally it’s the more Dodge, the merrier.

Same thing here as for Defense btw, you stack up Dodge Rating to increase your Dodge.



Stamina is the last of the really must-have’s, a good feral druid needs a large health pool to soak all those un-dodged hits that gets through your thick bear fur. Once your gear covers the basic uncrittability you can start stacking Solid Star of Elune’s or other gems with stamina in your gear. Don't worry too much if you miss out on the socket bonus, or if it's a real nice one, try to find suitably colored gems with stamina and some other nice stat on them, like the Jagged Talasite or Shifting Nightseye. Also, don't forget to take the talent Heart of the Wild, which will give you a sweet flat 20 % Stamina increase in Bear form.



Other stats that are interesting are Crit and Hit, but for a starter druid they take secondary place to the holy quintuplet(is that even a word?) mentioned above. Hit rating makes you hit your target more, Crit rating makes you more likely to get a critical hit when you do, and as you know, the more you damage that mob, the more threat you generate, the more your dps’ers and healers can unleash on the mob and you respectively without having to worry about taking aggro. Crit is also crucial if you have the talent Primal Fury, which you do have, right? Free rage for every crit? Gief!




So now that you know which stats to aim for, check out this sweet tool from Rawr to see how you can make your own druid dress up in different outfits and how it will affect your overall stats.



Stay tuned for the next part - Feral(Cat)


Type rest of the post here

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Yet another alt

Ok, now I have done it...now I officially have an alt of every class there is.

Well, I actually have two mages for some odd reason, so this means I have ten chars that I more or less actively play on.

The last one is my dwarf hunter Szorcha. She started life as Szorcha, the dwarf paladin, got to about lvl 17 but she was dreadfully boring to play. Now the paladin is deleted and reborn as Szorcha, the hunter.

And what is the defining characteristic of a hunter? That's right, they have pets.

My husband has a blood elf hunter on Outland, and he got himself one of the bats of Eversong Woods as his first pet, and he named him Kalle. Now Kalle is a cool pet and everytime we visit our BE alts Kalle grows bigger and bigger.

So when the time came for Szorcha to get her first pet of course she wanted a bat. Only problem was, the bats that are tameable for a lvl 10 reside in the Horde territory far north in the Eastern Kingdoms...the very same woods where my husband's BE tamed his pet.

And those woods are very far away from the safe (well, comparatively safe) environs of Dun Morogh where Szorcha has been hunting up til now.

But shame thee of the weak heart - difficulties are there to be overcome and so she did. She ran all the way up through the high lvl areas, dying quite a few times from nasty mobs and even nastier gankers who couldn't let a little lowbie hunter run around happily unbothered.

During the final stretches, through Eastern and Western Plaguelands and into the Eversong Woods my husband escorted her on his lvl 70 warrior to keep her alive, and then she got herself a pretty bat as her first real pet of her own.

<3 Kalle!


Very nice it was that the Zul'Aman sported both a flight point and repair vendor, so in 60 lvls when she will go for her first raid there with her Kalle-bat, she will already have the fp ;P


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/gquit

So I left my guild yesterday.

Again, I might say. I gquit some months ago after having had doubts about my place in the guild and what I wanted from the guild, but soon realised I had made a mistake and came back. This time its no mistake.

We were a small guild with a pretty loose management. We had struggled with recruitings for raid and frequent dropouts by many of the new recruits when they realised that a guild just starting on Karazhan was no fast way to pretty shinies. We had worked out some agreements on how to do things to be fair and treat everyone equally and things seemed to be working.

Lately one of my fellow officers have been rushing ahead, deciding things, changing things without caring about our agreements. I don’t mind that for urgent matters, things that needs to be dealt with swiftly and when there’s no time to ask the advice of others – hell no, I welcome the ability to make fast decisions under difficult circumstances and have never questioned any of them. Committee solutions are not for every situation.

However, things like changes to the loot system and promotions are not urgent and does not need to be done on the spur of the moment. When I have asked him to please stick with our agreed upon ways of doing things, or if he thinks they need a change lets discuss it – we have wrangled those ways many times for many reasons and everyone has made concessions and compromises to get a fair and effective working system but hey, why not go over them again? – I get called rude things, I get told I am being offended to easily, I get told I critisize too much, I get told I take things too seriously and that I need to loosen up, I am ruining the fun of the game because he was too tired or too bored or too whatever to wait and do it our way because in his opinion he was following the spirit of it and not the letter.

Well I think that following the spirit of our guild is to try to do things the way we have agreed upon, it is not difficult or complicated or anything like that, it's a matter of courtesy to the rest of the officers who put in time and effort to get the guild running smoothly and fairly, both for us and for our members.

Who is right? Who is wrong? I don’t know and now I don’t care anymore. He’s right about one thing, it's a game and it is supposed to be fun. When it starts to feel more like work than play its time to seriously consider if you want to go on.

I am not really mad at him or anyone else, he has his opinion and I have mine. Its not always bad, but lately the bad parts have been dwarfing the fun too much for me to really enjoy playing, and it seems pointless to even try to make things work.

So, I considered and I decided and I told my guildies that I wasn’t happy in the guild, hadn’t been happy for some time, I wasn’t mad at any of them or anything but it felt more like work than play and that I felt thin like Bilbo, butter spread over to much bread, and I gquit.

I was crying as I did it, but then again, I cry for a lot of things so it is not really that big a deal.

So how do I feel now?

Relieved, actually. It feels like I can breathe again, like a huge burden is off my shoulders.

And I realise it was not just the constant arguing that wore me down, there were other little officer things as well that was tearing away at me, like the attempts to keep a semblance of raids going while our usual raid leaders were away.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a lovely guild with a lot of sweet and fun and friendly people I left, and I will miss all of them a lot. I just don’t want to stay there, and if I ever join another guild I will stay very far away from the guild managing business. I get enough of project leading shit at work, never again will I try to do that in my free time as well!

So what am I going to do now?

I don’t plan on quit playing, I am playing a lot with my husband and I like the game.

I was pretty fed up with the raiding and its been a few weeks since I last saw the inside of Karazhan so I have no intention of looking for a new guild now.

I hope to stay in touch with a few friends from my old guild, but I think I will enjoy playing solo or pugging for the time being, and besides, you never know what awaits you out there in the great wild unguilded opens…=)

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