I tried to click the "need" button. I tried again. I tried again, and nothing happened. I had to roll "greed", but of course others had rolled "disenchant". Sorry, Ovi -- now that nice new trinket is a dream shard.

Uh, okay, I thought. I went on to Halls of Stone. This time we lost our healer midway through, and (cover your eyes, RP folks) I went disc in order to get us through the rest of the instance (it was not hard to find another DPS). Well, a Forge Ember dropped. Okay, not the most exciting healing trinket, but not not a healing trinket, right? Everyone else in the group was melee anyway.

I tried to click "need" again. Nothing. Another shard; another disappointed dwarf.

Valinar pointed out, today, this post:

The "need" option is only available for both armor and weapons that are designed for your class. Caster classes and hybrid caster classes can roll "need" on items with intellect and/or spell power while melee classes cannot. Melee classes and hybrid melee classes can roll "need" on the items without intellect and/or spell power.

What do you notice about Forge Ember and Pendulum of Telluric Currents? Forge Ember's base stat is crit. Pendulum's is haste.

Not Int. Not spellpower. Crit and haste.

Hot damn, guys, those are melee trinkets. Or at least the Need-Before-Greed system sure thinks they are.

Until this is fixed -- and I hope it gets fixed soon; the GM ticket I submitted got a response that said "we know it's an issue and we're working on it" -- please, for Muradin's beard's sake, pass on caster trinkets that don't have int or spellpower. You may get shafted once or twice on this; you may lose out rolling on a shard. Greediboi-NotYourServer the nelf rogue may walk away with a shard unopposed (except by the desperate druid rolling "greed" instead of "disenchant").

But right now, rolling greed on trinkets is the only thing those of us with shitty caster trinkets can do. And we're doing it. Give us a hand, if you can.

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.

Ovistine Lighthammer in full 8/8 Virtuous, wielding Benediction.

I had a definite "WHOA" moment on seeing that. I'm so glad I kept that armor and that weapon! Talk about your blast from the past...

Yesterday, though, I found something even more appalling.

Imagine you're a male dwarf with a particular beard graphic (short and tidy!), and then you get a Female Dwarf Mask.  You might try it on.

You might look like this:

Yes, folks, that's a female dwarven mask with a Fu Manchu mustache.  (I suppose it helps to have the same hair color, roughly, as the mask.)

More seriously, here are the three caster shields in 10-man and 25-man Ulduar put together. (*sigh* Same three shields as there were in Naxx, except the haste/mp5 one has been moved from 25-man to hard-mode 10-man, and we get a socket on the 25-man hard-mode one.)

10-man: Pulsing Spellshield. Deconstructor. Comments are saying that as of 3.1.2, the spellpower has been fixed (73 instead of 37). 46 haste/36 crit/73 spellpower. NOM.

10-man hard mode: Ice Layered Barrier. Hodir. 46 haste/74 spellpower/15 mp5. I wouldn't kick that out of bed for eating crackers. (Er. Actually, if my shield were in bed with me and eating crackers, maybe I WOULD kick it out of bed. Wait, I don't sleep with my shields in the first place! Although if I had this next one...)

25-man hard mode: Wisdom's Hold. Thorim. 40 crit/47 haste/75 spellpower, blue socket with +5 spellpower bonus.

Dear Thorim: Your days are numbered. Fear the wrath of paladins and shamans who have been totally freaking shafted by the RNG over and over; WE WILL PREVAIL. I'm putting in a Costco-sized order for chickens to sacrifice to the RNG gods; TRI paladins, you wanna get in on the action? After the chickens are sacrificed, CHICKEN SANDWICH RATIONS FOR ALL!

3.1 brought about a host of nasty mana regeneration nerfs. Most notably for me, Mana Spring Totem got changed to a replenishment-esque x mana every 2 seconds buff to a Blessing of Wisdom clone -- perhaps even the anti-Blessing of Wisdom, since Mana Spring totem now removes Blessing of Wisdom if I drop it. (Eeeuuurgh.)

I hit on a metaphor for why I don't like the mana regeneration nerf the other day, and if this is too pretentious, forgive me, but here's the deal:

Healing is an art, not just a series of spellcasts. Working with a really good healing team is utterly fantastic, because between knowledge of each other's personalities, tendencies, strengths, and instincts, you have a pretty good idea of whose healing is going where when stuff starts happening to the raid. Ulduar has given us a bunch of nasty raid-wide damage to deal with, and yet because of our healsquad leetness, we've adjusted pretty darn fast and have come up with a lot of reasons to use utility talents and abilities that didn't come up very often in Naxx/Maly/Sarth. The healer channel is full of intelligent strategy and ways of keeping people alive, and that? That's fun.

I will grant you that perhaps the complete and utter lack of worry about mana regeneration is not what Blizzard had in mind for healsquads. Given that Mana Tide totem is a 31-point talent -- once the crowning glory of the Resto tree -- you can understand that they want us to need that sucker. But it's frustrating to have synergistic abilities (Mana Spring totem/Blessing of Wisdom) turn into competing abilities -- since Mana Spring removes BoW, if we're going to use BoW at all I can't have Mana Spring up at all, lest it remove the buff from someone who's going to go out of range later. It's frustrating to know that I can help with mana regeneration, but to have one of my key utility abilities (+1% hit) party-only, so my raid has to pick between stacking me with the healers for mana regen or stacking me with melee -- and usually the tanks -- for hit, tremor totem, and disease/poison cleansing totem.

Worrying about mana regeneration is like having to worry about how much your paint costs. Okay, yeah -- paint costs do go up, especially with the economy in the shape it's in now. But at this stage, our healsquad has a team that's been winning blue ribbons at art shows for the last six months, and now we're being told "your art is too nice -- we're increasing the cost of your paint so your paintings will look crappier."

Sigh.

I like working out new ways of working with the healsquad to improve our efficiency, help each other out if we've got issues, and stack our buffs in the most synergistic way possible. I'm sure in another month or two, we'll have worked around this. But it's a pain in the tail having to rework my spec over and over again because the artwork the healsquad turned out was too damn good.

I'm really enjoying having a chance to solo instead of dual-boxing; while I can't deny it's useful, and I'll probably dual-box Teu and Ovinia [mage and druid], it's a pain.

I love the Outlands. Oh, sure, it's the same old zone I've done with Ovistine, Teuthida, Agnes the First (up to L69), Lyja, Nancie, Trisia (up to L63), and now I've got three more characters to level through there, but consider: I am cheap when it comes to gearing up alts, and even the crafted gear pre-BC is pretty awful. In my first session in the Outlands, I replaced:

Cookie's Stirring Rod with Desolation Rod
Earth Warder's Vest with Goldweave Tunic
Cassandra's Grace with Shadowbrim Travel Hat
Swashbuckler Sash with Foreman's Sash
Chestnut Mare with Swift Brown Steed

Beginning of session: L58, 2644 health, 3831 mana, 156 spellpower
End of session: L60, 3559 health, 4558 mana, 226 spellpower, 9.3% crit

I'll keep posting my replacements as I go. I think it's hilarious, and am only moderately embarrassed at the crap poor Agness has been saddled with for the last... um... in some cases, 60 levels.