(( I've been down with the swine flu for over a week; it's not uncommon for me to inflict illness on my characters when I'm sick. And what happens when a priestess of the Light gets sick and can't just Abolish Disease on herself, anyway? ))
Things I discovered about the Faction Champions fight last night, speaking as someone who hasn't taken her shaman to PvP EVER and hasn't seriously PvPed since vanilla:
What I learned, above and beyond everything else:
PvP on Teu could actually be fun. o_O That was… an interesting revelation. I will grant you — I would rather (by a factor of eleventy billion) be healing friends and people I actually know than healing random n00bs. And if I'm ever in a battleground with someone who, after taking four times his entire health pool worth of healing and still getting his face eaten because he was unable to kill someone who did not have a healer, tells me, "Don't just stand there, do something", I will, in fact, say "I was healing you, assclown" rather than letting it sour me on the whole PvP experience.
But if I were gonna PvP on Teu, I'd need gear. And practice. And I have no idea how much I'd really like it. And, honestly, it's not really very in-character for her, which is unfortunate. (Nancie, on the other hand…) But hey, it's a thought.
(Dwarf shamans NOW PLZ. Ovi-shaman in battlegrounds? 
!!)
Anna mentioned today that she's not interested in speculation, partly because she's so busy with game stuff that's going on right now, and that made me think about things I'm excited about in game that's live, not coming up in a future patch. I've been playing a lot of WoW lately — or I was before my gaming rig blew up (possible hard drive failure), and here's what I've been up to:
* 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…
(( Pet-sitting for your warlock friends is not without an element of danger. Especially if you're a shadow priest who's been more shadow than priest for quite some time now. ))
When I got started healing, I was almost always following Valinar around. Made sense to me at the time! I could throw an Earth shield on him, drop Strength of Earth and Windfury down, and trail behind him skinning things.
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:
| Pre 3.2 | ||
| Chain Heal | 4267491 | 63.60% |
| Water Shield | 97942 | mana gained |
| Post 3.2 | ||
| Chain Heal | 6041972 | 72.00% |
| Water Shield | 232815 | mana gained |
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.
(To be updated as I figure more stuff out…)
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.
(( Anna asked about personal NPCs. Clunk was one that a few different people I hung out with talked about and wrote about, and once in a while he makes an appearance in offhand chatter. If you hear Ovistine talking about some godawful brew that shouldn't really exist, like blindweed-and-spinach lager, you can rest assured that it comes from Clunk Brewery… ))
A Dwarf Named Clunk
(( The original Agness was a shadow priest–but with my main (or primary alt, if you insist) being a priest who'd also been shadow for a while, Agness-priest seemed a little redundant. I decided to reroll her as a warlock, and IC, I thought that might be a change that happened very gradually, over time, so slowly that even she didn't quite realize what was happening to her. And it all started with… ))
The Shadoweave Knitting Circle
Getting this shirt made me think about my characters, and which of them are morning people. (If you can't guess by the fact that I own the shirt, the girl at the keys? Definitely a morning person.)
Teuthida is less a morning squid than an all-the-time squid. She remains happy and cheerful and bright from the minute her eyes open to the time she falls asleep. Luckily, her companion Valyrie doesn't seem to mind too much.
Ovistine is definitely not a morning dwarf. She's not exactly a late-night dwarf, either (not by her standards), but she has to have a good strong coffee in the morning or she's really not awake.
Nancie is used to this early morning business by now, but she does have an alarm clock. (It's from the Ultrasafe corporation, and almost always goes off at the right time, plus or minus an hour. Geoffar keeps saying he'll get to it eventually…)
Lyja is not a morning person, but can do a reasonable facsimile if she has an alarm clock available. For really important events, she gets a buzzbox wake-up call.
Agness doesn't get out of bed before noon if she can possibly avoid it, and tends to sabotage Vaelen's attempts to get up early, too.