Achievements and fishing

A quick update on what Yas has been doing recently:

- Been steadily leveling up my tradeskills. Made my moonshroud robes, and am steadily getting gear upgrades. Most of my gear is above level 187 and my spellpower has reached 2055 self buffed. My mana regen is where I’m working on and I’ve been enchanting away.

- Rep grinding – got exalted with teh Kirin Tor, new spellthread and some nice mana-ful robes for a rainy spirit-less day.

- Finished the Elder achievements. An impressive duo-ing run through normal Nexus got me the title.

- Working again on fishing and cooking. No particular reason, I just like having things to do when I can’t instance.

C'mere my fishies...

- My healing confidence is mostly restored. I can sometimes heal and alt tab like I used to . Hooray well geared groups! I still have a handful of heroics I have yet to do. Some day.

- I invested some real life money to get Yasura a facelift. And since then, she’s become a bit addicted to the barbershop. Being pretty takes so much money! :O

Cuteness squared.

Until next time, happy lunar festival!

I still don’t get it.

So I did some instancing after my failed runs and a heroic Nexus run on Thursday night. I didn’t lag at all. I’m wondering if there’s some weird kind of lag I get during peak hours because I usually never get to play during the peak hours. If so, this is disconcerting because if it’s a chronic thing, I’ll only have to settle for late night/early afternoon pugs. On the other hand, I researched for similar issues on WoW’s technical support forums and found that there were quite a few threads about bad latency and lag in instances and Northrend in general.

Another reason that living in the Northeast United States (not on Comcast though, I’m at least somewhat lucky) is fail. On the plus, my boss told me that I’ll likely not have to close so much soon (crosses fingers) but my new slightly earlier schedule probably still won’t mesh with my guild’s times. Woe is me. I’m still job hunting. And still sick! Okay, I’ll stop complaining now. Here’s a link to tide you over for now.

Meh

Some days I really doubt whether I should be playing this game at all in a role that’s as pivotal as a priest. I just had the lag day from hell whileI was running some heroics. My first heroics even. I’m already sort of conscious about my  healing ability and the lag just amplified it more. Tons of tank deaths and deaths of mine. It was just not very prettty. Sure we actually finished both heroics, but I came out feeling like I had to apologize to everyone for wasting their time.

On the bright side, I got some upgrades and the number of items that I have that are still subpar and pre-80 is slowly diminishing. I’m still sorely in need of items with crit, int or mp5 as I feel like I go out of mana way too fast. Northrend heroics are really brutal. With inexplicable lag, it’s half throwing away almost all motivation for continuing this game. What fun is healing when you are not even sure if the heal lands and you’re constantly trying to catch up because each new lag spike makes you more and more behind in healing. BAH.

I have a bevy of alts that I like to play. They don’t hold a candle to my main though. I hope it’s just a matter of 1) I have crazy bad internet luck today (I sincerely hope my internet isn’t *that* adverse to instances now) and 2) that maybe I’ve prematurely guessed that my gear is up to par and I really need to finish getting gear upgrades so that I can keep up even if there’s lag.

Anyways, I am just feeling like the worst healer ever right now.

A merry…

Have a happy and safe holiday and enjoy your day off, folks.

Snowgal Yas tips her hat off to you.

UI tastiness.

So I haven’t mentioned this but for the duration of Yas’s healing career, I’ve gone through a few computers or so. The first was a poor laptop that was ill-equipped for handling anything graphically intense and resulted in hours of staring at a poor resolution, low fps game on dialup no less. I’m surprised I didn’t turn into a murderous psychopath but I had some support and eventually got a technically superior if somewhat used desktop. This computer served me well except for the fact that its innards were slowly deteriorating and a few months ago showed signs of its impending need for retirement. So I had this computer for a long stretch of time until finally I was afraid that it would die and I was able to get a job where I could save enough to get a brand new computer.

Now where am I going with this? Well my old computer had a really cruddy resolution. Half the time I couldn’t use anything higher than 800×600 for fear of random crashes and freezes. This, naturally, led to a really constrained UI which you can see a few posts back. And being a healer, my screen real estate was virtually nil half the time. Once I started tanking on my druid, I realized just how much of WoW I’d been missing. What do I pull? What does this boss do again? And now I went from not noticing the instances to not really being able to see anything past my large posterior.

But now, with a 19 inch widescreen monitor, I can see again! I can actually design a UI I like and not try to squeeze in everything. It’s glorious.

And now I present my current UI (a work still in progress):

Listed above (and hastily drawn in mspaint):

1) X-Perl Unit Frames – I wanted to get away from Pitbull and ended up going back to these. I’m not quite happy with it , so if anyone has any suggestion for a unit frames alternative that is not Pitbull, I’m happy to try it out.

2) Chatter – A chat mod.

3) Simple Minimap

4) Autobar – Convenience! Laziness!

5) Dominos – Like Bartender, highly customizable action bars.

6) Fortress with several LDB mods such as Statblock_coords, PicoGuild and others.

7) Elkano’s Buff Bars – There are more minimal mods out there, but I like the look and predictability of this one.

8 ) TourGuide – So I cheat and take convenient and efficient quest routes, kill me XD

9)  Omen Threat Meters – Even healers need to watch it!

10) Smart Buff – I hardly use the buff portion but the Debuff part (that I seem to have lost) is great for keeping track of who needs decursing or dispelling in a timely and easy way.

11) Recount – Healing e-peen. Or not.

Not labeled:

- EE Panels – for that nice little black background to keep your messy addons looking spiffy.

It’s a scaled down version of what I’ve had before which was way overloaded and half the time I didn’t know what I had.  But I do think I have a fair amount more space than I did before. I still need to see if I can stand to scale things down more or just try again from scratch XD But! It’s fun having a computer that can handle WoW for once.

I can’t grant any wishes…

…but if you’re nice, I’ll let you ride my carpet. Maybe.

Why yes, I do lead a lavish lifestyle.

And something visual:

I wanted to add some pictures of some of the memorable times I’ve had leveling:

Dalaran from above

Is it hot in here or just me?

We're off to see the---oh hai.

More scenery

Oh Yas, how do you get yourself into these situations?

The Nexus is soooo pretty.

I approve of the blue-y

Awesome quest XD

Yas posing with some penguin buddies.

Another awesome quest. And yes, I did every conceivable emote I could with this costume on XD

Future Me is a bit mean! XD Northrend must have been a trip. And lay off about my shoulders...

*Spoiler* The infamous Battle for Undercity. I stayed up late finishing this chain. Protip: If you're doing this part, it works like the last DK quest so WAIT for the event to restart if you don't see Thrall outside >.> We learned this the hard way...

For the Horde!

Wrath Recap

So I haven’t written here in a while. That’s totally my fault, and of course, WoW’s fault.  In the land of Yasura, I finally got to 80. With a boomkin leveling partner, we managed to mostly AOE and blaze through most of the zones. I have to say, Blizz really outdid themselves on this expansion. Every time I’d finish a quest line and say, “Oh my geez, that’s the most awesome chain ever”, I’d stumble across another chain that’d have me saying the same thing and squeal unabashedly.

Quick notes:

- A Disc/Holy build is great for leveling. I never ran out of mana and I was a decent healer.

- Holy Nova is a great way to mitigate the health losses of an AOE-hungry boomkin while still dishing out some dps.

- The Levitate glyph is very handy for leveling especially in quest zones with a lot of water to get across. Also, you get the added bonus of looking like a special diety with your own special water walk. (It’s too bad this goes away next patch, now everyone can be special. Boo! )

Speaking of the next patch, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that priests got COH nerfed and otherwise lackluster updates (in the holy department, anyhow).  I really wish they would give Holy just a slight boost in mana regeneration and a few more tricks to make Holy stand out more as a raiding build. Guardian Spirit is nice but it’s been situational for me so far. Divine Hymn is really poorly scaled and I mostly use it for my gimmicky “Change is here!” macro. I’ve heard a lot from priests regarding the COH change from praising it to bemoaning it. I’m actually a bit lukewarm, as I’ve been consciously trying to wean myself off using it as much as I used to. Prayer of Healing has had a bit more bang for my buck with scaling. I haven’t tried to raid with my spec yet so I can’t say anything regarding that, but I’m hopeful that holy priests are still pretty viable in raids.

My current project is mostly trying to finish questing in the zones I haven’t finished for the tailoring stuff I need (as well as instances). I am also attempting to finish leveling my professions. I am really awed at the people that got realm first achievements with their professions. That is some insanity.

Speaking of insanity, I’m currently also powerleveling cooking and fishing to get the Merrymaker achievement. >.> …Yea. I’m not all there, I suppose.

Oh how time flies.

So this weekend was full of nostalgia and new things. I went to do an AQ 40 run with my priest and while we weren’t able to nab a full clear, I was very happy to have seen it at all in the first place.

Pic or it didn’t happen

Later in the weekend we also did a full clear of ZA with chests and all that done. It pleases me when I don’t die several times over. It’s a running joke in my guild that it’s not a raid until Yasura dies…at least once. I’m just a klutz in-game is all. *shifty eyes* Fortunately I usually have stellar tanks and have trained myself in the art of “listening to the big kaboom Omen sound so I can fade like the trained monkey I am”. And then fading anyhow when the cooldown is up. Did I mention I really like Fade?

Anywho, Kadomi’s post recently about nooblet-Kadomi made me nostalgic and I went to dig around my screenshots folder. Alas, I lost most of my early WoW screenshots but I do have at least a few from the tail end of 2006.

My UI, then and now: (Some things will never change >.<)

Yea it made my eyes bleed too

Yea, oww.

And here is Yasura today. Her trademark Troll mohawk is on vacation but I’m sure it’ll make a re-appearance soon.

Note: She is neither rolling in the money or managing yours.

And as a bonus, nothing strokes my ego more than being needed by everyone unexpectedly:

Patches and achievements

So I’ve been busy these few weeks catching up on WoW-related goals and generally trying to not go insane from my wonky work schedule. My paladin, Delenitha, dinged 70 (alas, I forget to get a screenshot, as is tradition with my 70s) and I am really enjoying the AOE tankadin life on her.

Due to the holiday and achievements, however, my priest has seen a resurgence in playing time. Who knew that achievements could be so addictive? With the help of a friend, I got enough pets to get Stinker and I’m slowly trying to get through the achievements to get the Hallowed title. Earlier this week, I got the ubiquitous Jenkins title but then I thought, Yasura the Hallowed has a bit nicer ring to it than Yasura Jenkins. Maybe.

As for healing, I can say that despite my earlier protestations, I’m really digging the changes. I thought I would miss downranking a lot more but I’ve found the transition easy. I also did something I thought I’d never do and respecced to include “lolwell” in my healing arsenal. I’m still trying to train my party and raid people to actually *use* it but I’m hopeful it’s worth the point since my mana is a lot more valuable now than it was with mana pots freely available. As for raiding,  I can’t say much about that at the moment since my schedule has thrown advance planning out the window. I have heard raids are easy as pie now but that’s no surprise to me considering that the pre-expansion patch always shakes things up, if only for a little while.

Now if only maintenence would end soon, I have more random instances to do and places to explore for achievements. I’m not obsessed…really.

Meow!