But the LFG tool actually got me pretty excited about this whole pugging idea. It's not just the title (although I think "Ovistine the Patient" and "Teuthida the Patient" will eventually be pretty rad), and it's certainly not the pet (I'm not overly fond of pugs), but the ability to get a group pretty much any time I want, for any character I want, run a quick heroic, and get scads of rewards? It's shiny.

So I have made great use of the LFG tool on Ovistine, and in three days I've upgraded her from the godawful Spaulders of the Runeseeker she started with (I took away her heirloom shoulders; other alts needed them more, and I'm too lazy to swap them to her every single time I wanted to play her) to a quest reward from the Nexus (Ovi hadn't stepped foot in the Nexus, ever, so she had four quests to do there) to, finally, her first piece of Lich King tier gear. My only regret is buying her the Sons of Hodir shoulder enchant for every one of those. But hey — I didn't know she was going to get her upgrade so fast!

My evaluation of the LFG tool: It's actually pretty decent. I have been extremely lucky so far; of the 30+ random people I've grouped with, 99% of them have been perfectly reasonable folks to group with. No better than a battleground, perhaps, but certainly no worse. There's been no blaming the healer or tank, and most of the groups substantially outgear the instances and are basically just there for badges — almost all loot gets disenchanted. (Although I am still cranky about the fact that there seems to be a bug at present that prevents hybrid casters from rolling need on caster trinkets. Maybe it's just priests. I dunno. I submitted a ticket, but you can bet they'll just tell me to disable all my addons.)

It is substantially faster to get a group if you're willing to heal. When Val and I queued up with Val willing to tank or DPS and Teu willing to heal or DPS, we got a group literally as soon as he clicked the "Join as Group" button — with him tanking and me healing, of course.

I'm always willing to heal with Teu, and probably will always end up doing so; I'd rather not heal with Ovi, since it's OOC and I'd like more practice at shadow, but in less-than-ideal situations, it's nice to have the other spec. (I did successfully heal a Heroic Halls of Stone run today. I thought I was crazy for trying it, since I haven't healed an instance with Ovi since, uh, Burning Crusade, but it turned out to be relatively easy on me. That said, it's a good thing there's a lot of overlap on shadow and healing gear, because oof. I may have a healing spec, but I don't have separate healing gear. Also, per my raid, Disc is bullshit — in the best possible way.)

I am really grateful, though, that I haven't had to stop instancing with my friends altogether! Yesterday we took a whirlwind trip through the new Icecrown instances, and it was an absolute blast. Heroic Halls of Reflection was a challenge, but a really fun one. And lo, there is a five-man that has a caster shield! Pit of Saron, normal. I have better — but Val's paladin sure doesn't.

Yesterday I was afraid that if I let myself, I'd just go to random heroics with Ovi nonstop until I forgot things like eating and sleeping. Today I've done only two on Ovi and one on Teu, so I think the shiny might give way to other stuff soon. Still, I like that the option's there. It'll be interesting to see how it works out in the long run. And… really, only five or so random heroics for another piece of non-crappy gear? I might be back online sooner than I think.

Dwarf shamans.

DWARF shamans.

Dwarf SHAMANS.

DWARF SHAMANS!!!!!!

Well, I know what I'll be doing in Cataclysm. (And to think I just registered sandwichrations.com because, after all this time, I thought Teu was my permanent main. Why didn't I grab up invincibledwarf.com or twirlybraids.com?)

* Agness has been leveling up her fishing and cooking, using the awesome Level Your Cooking While You Fish! guide from El's Extreme Anglin'. She's just reached Northrend, and I've been doing a little RP writing to get her caught up to where she'll be in game in a few weeks (computer permitting). She's about halfway through L69–not quite the same level as her husband Vaelen, but really close; in a level or two, she'll be caught up, and Val will be switching to Vaelen, since he's the alt Val most wants at L80.

I am really excited about the RP, even if my RP tendencies are very writing-oriented and not so much on-the-fly in-person. (I freeze up at major RP events and have trouble following fast-paced multi-character real-time conversations.) Being able to have Agness chatter at Vaelen in-game will be a lot of fun. It's been a long time since they adventured together — pretty much since they hit 60 and we both changed mains (me to Ovistine, Val to Valinar). Then I re-rolled Agness, so when Vaelen went from 60-71, he was mostly playing with Nancie — who doesn't have any RP with him to speak of. Dual paladining is fun, but there wasn't much RP involved. I can't wait!

* Nancie hasn't been very active — primarily because I can't decide what to do about emblems for her. I'm trying to decide if I want to get her some heirlooms. I also want to get her PvPing again. And I need to get her leveled up. Now that you can gain XP in battlegrounds, I'll be really tempted to do that! It depends on whether it's faster to quest or grind it out in battlegrounds. I also need to decide whether to move Nancie to a different account, so she and Ovistine can actually take on Wrathgate together.

* Ovistine has been on hold, too — and she may be more thoroughly on hold in the upcoming days. One thing that's going on with her has to do with future changes, so I'll save that for the future section of this post; otherwise, I desperately want to move her and Nancie through the events of Wrathgate, because it's going to have some major implications, some of them right away.

* Teuthida has gotten to go out and adventure and see the new instance, which has been fun. Kinda buggy, but fun. I need to find someone who can cut her a Reckless Ametrine for her new chestpiece.

All right, so that's what I'm doing now. And in the future…

There are a lot of things we're hearing about — some confirmed, some not. The retuned Onyxia makes me whoop with glee (really! there was whooping!), and I'm looking forward to the Coliseum opening up further.

But one of the big things people are talking about is opening up class choices to different races, and let me tell you, I am wildly excited about that — I'm just waiting to find out if it's true.

Most notably, it's the idea of dwarf shamans that has me excited. The dwarves I know have been clamoring for it since the introduction of Alliance shamans — after all, with the Wildhammers, it just plain makes sense!

But on a personal front, the idea of being able to keep the class I love best at endgame (shammies forever!) but, potentially, tie it together with my all-time favorite RP main (Ovistine forever!), is — needless to say — incredibly exciting. I love being a shaman, no question, but between the fact that Ovistine has more history with everyone — especially including Valinar — and the fact that I just plain like playing a dwarf better than I've ever liked playing a Draenei (there's a reason I have two separate dwarves and only one Draenei character!), I'm very interested in the notion of rerolling shaman. And, er, possibly going enhancement as an off-spec! Maybe! (YOU NEVER KNOW. I COULD EVEN LIKE IT.)

I even have an RP storyline figured out for this; it has to do with Wrathgate. But in the meantime, I'm also kind of tempted to roll Ovistine as a hunter. (Really!) Mostly because, darn it, I like the hunter class, and I don't have one Alliance-side. She'd be a hunter-gatherer (*groan*), with two of the three gathering professions — undecided about which ones. The only problem is that until Wrathgate, Ovistine's a Priesty Priest Of Priestiness And Nothing Will Ever Change That (She Thinks). So playing Ovistine-the-hunter would mean making sure everyone understands that, in-character, she's not a hunter, she's a priest.

And what about just plain re-rolling, as in with a character recustomization option? I've been asked, if I were able to reroll Teu-Shaman as a dwarf and recustomize her, would I just dwarfify her and have a ready-made Ovistine? What if you could simply reclass? I don't know if either of these will actually happen in game, and I'm not holding my breath. And I'm also kind of relieved that it's not a question at this point, because a.) Ovistine-priest becoming Ovistine-shaman would require a hell of a lot of new gear AAGH, but then b.) Teu-shaman becoming Ovistine-shaman just seems unfair to Teu. Even if I have Emergency Backup Teu (the mage), I can't say I really want to have Teu-shaman just… gone. It doesn't seem right.

There's also the fact that Teu, as a draenei, does bring along that 1% hit aura. >_< I'm pretty sure my raid is cool enough that they'd be willing to deal with one fewer squid in the raid when the next expansion hits — after all, when a new expansion comes out, there's always a scramble to see who changes mains and what opens up for people. (Overall, in our raid, we had, I think, three people change mains with Lich King, plus a bevy of alts coming around and several new faces.) Losing your only regular resto shaman might be less than ideal (I do pine for more resto shammies!), but I don't want to not be a shaman. I just want to be a dwarf shaman — if I can. (And let me tell you, the desire to figure out what Horde race would transform to Dwarf, and roll a shaman with that race, and start playing them up right now so I don't have 80 levels to make up when the expansion hits, is very great.)

ETA:

Q. Will I be able to choose the race on the opposite faction that I want to change to?
A. Yes, but you will only be able to switch to a race that has your class type available to it. So if you play a human paladin, you’d only be able to change to a blood elf paladin.

So, uh, I had been thinking about rolling up a Horde shaman anyway…

Frankly, there are too many things going on in my head to make any good decisions just yet. Until we have real information, I'm going to stick with what's already clear and established — namely, Agness's leveling, Nancie and Ovistine's need to at least go through Wrathgate, even if I don't know what's going on with Ovistine afterwards, and Nancie's return to PvP.

And I need my *&#% computer back. Hopefully sometime this weekend we'll have a chance to figure out WTF is wrong with it. *whimpers* (Let me tell you how much I am not looking forward to having to reinstall everything I own — though, on the bright side, quite some time ago I added my gaming rig's WTF and Interface directories to my Live Mesh, which means they're backed up and some of my pain may be alleviated. Live Mesh = FTW FTW FTW. If you are not backing up your important files already, I strongly recommend doing so, and there are many free remote storage services available!)

When we started getting into instances, I was still basically glued to Valinar, and we seemed to know more people who wanted to stay Tanks than who wanted to offspec and play DPS. So Val continued to be the Furious Whirlwind of Night Elf Rage, Yet Politely. Synergy being what it was, and what with everyone we knew leveling up at the same time, we were frequently spoiled for choice on things. We often took along other melee folks (rogues, c'mon down! you're the next contestant on the heals are for you!).

Then when I started raiding, I pretty much didn't see any reason not to keep doing that. We had lovely paladin healers to handle the tanks, and priests who could cover the tanks as well as raid heal if they liked, and druids who could make the whole raid HoT, and then… there was me. I like to raid heal. I really, really, really like to raid heal. I like the fact that my abilities make me a natural fit for raid healing. I like saving group 2 from themselves, and being part of the reason warriors can stand in shit they really shouldn't ("but it's RAGE!"). Mostly I like the fact that my careful watching of a situation includes the knowledge that my addons can't really predict who's going to soak up the chain heal, so I have to know whether someone's out by his lonesome somewhere, or whether he's surrounded by people who also need a heal. Generally, when we all take damage at once, I slam heals on all the dudes packed up by the boss's feets — the tank and melee, not necessarily in that order.

So what I don't know is what other shamans were doing, because apparently that wasn't it. Now, I've been in raids before where for some reason the actual assignment someone gets is this big status thing — "I'm the MT healer! I'd like to thank my family, friends, and Bolvar Fordragon for his inpsiration", but I'm happy to say that TRI is not like that. We do try to give everyone jobs suited to them, but I don't think any of us perceive it as a status thing. And yeah, if I reglyph and respec a little, I can make a perfectly tolerable tank healer…

…and maybe that's what other shamans were doing. Why? I don't know. It's a more straightforward job, sure, but to me it seemed kinda boring (I have one… big… very slow… heal, and Earth Shield, which I have on the tank most of the time anyway. Sure, I could occasionally throw a Lesser Healing Wave or a Riptide, but mostly… it's that one… big… sloooooooow… heal.), and very heavy on mana. If I'm going to be covering a single tank, I really like that he's often in the midst of a bunch of people, who I can hit with incidental chain heals, or when he's fighting something that has a spell that needs interrupting, which I can do with a timely Wind Shock, thus decreasing my threat on that mob, anyway. (When you have no other aggro dump, you get grateful for the ones you have, even if you wear mail and carry a shield.)

At any rate, apparently enough of the other shamans were Doing It Wrong (at least according to Blizzard) that… Chain Heal got buffed through the roof. What's more, my mana regeneration via chain heal got buffed through the roof. Take a look at this:

That's an average night's chain heal and water shield output before and after the patch. Hitting more people and doing more healing and replenishing more mana = happy happy happy shammy!

As for the totem bar, I am… undecided. It's useful and nice, but it's not very useful in the heat of combat, except to drop sets you've already established. There are no options on it; you can't make it fly up with mouseover. If you want to drop a new totem out of the bar, you have to click a teeny tiny
button, then click a very small picture of the totem you want, then click the teeny tiny button again. If you click wrong, you end up with NO totem in the bar, or some godawful totem you really do not want (magma totem + cc'd mobs = NOOOOO).

It's great to be able to drop more than one totem at a time, I'll give them that. Repositioning fights where I used to lose four GCDs are much easier to handle; never was I so grateful for it as I was during the gauntlet half of Thorim. (Though the Auriaya repositinings were nice, too.) However, on those times when I just want one totem, it falls short. I don't always have 1700 mana to spend on the entire totem spread; sometimes I need to drop Mana Tide, for instance. Or maybe I'm down to my last few hundred mana, but if I don't drop a Tremor Totem, things are going to go badly.

This is where the mod I've been using forever, Totem Timers, has always shined through. I have it set up so my (non-Blizz) totem bar is in the center of my screen (more or less), and when I mouse over each column by element, the totem choices spring up. At that point, they're keybound to 1-6 (or however many totems are in that column), and you can reposition them so the numbers make sense for you (in my case, for water, say, 1 is Mana Spring, 2 is Healing Stream, 3 is Cleansing Totem and 4 is Mana Tide). All I have to do is hover and hit "4" if I'm desperate for mana. With the new system, I'd probably be better off moving Mana Tide to a whole new key binding.

Which is problematic. I'd need a new key binding for the three totem sets, and then a new key binding for every totem I might want to drop without dropping all the other totems. (Mana Tide, Cleansing, Tremor, Earthbind, Grounding, and Magma, just to name a few.)

So while I like the eventual results from the totem bar — I'm not complaining about being able to drop all four at once; there have been times when not losing four global cooldowns has been fantastic — I'm not really sure they know what they're doing with the concept yet. And I'm definitely not giving up TotemTimers anytime soon.

General
+ New quest log: IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME.
+ Sell value: Ibid.
+ iLvl and info on the tooltip: Ibid ibid!
+ Class colors in /say, /channel, /etc.: Woohoo!
+ Heirloom chestpiece: Okay, so I didn't really want my druid to run around in Dreadmist, but for 10% bonus XP, she'll do it. (My other toons that still need a-levelin' are a priest, a warlock, and a mage.)

Teuthida
+ Totem bar sets are kind of nice…
- but they don't eliminate the need for a totem mod. I still need a visible timer for totems with a cooldown (mana tide, etc.), and sometimes I don't have the fifteen hundred mana it would take to switch to my set-with-tremor-totem, etc.
+ Fortunately, TotemTimers still works.
- Unfortunately, the totem bar isn't actually built into Bartender4 yet (I'm not sure I'm ready for an alpha version), so I have resorted to building a bar and putting it up between my character bar and my TotemTimers.

Ovinia
+ Epic riding for 45g!
+ Flight form for 3g60!
+ No, really, FLIGHT FORM AT L60 OMG OMG.