Druid of the Moon

This Thursday our 10 man raid is finally getting back to LK 10 Hero attempts. It’s only going to be about 2 hours worth but hopefully it will be all we need.

We look forward to our 10 man raiding for more than just achievements and downing difficult content but because of the fun we have playing together.

Hopefully we can shake the rust off quickly but we have not done anything as our complete 10 man since sometime in early June… Woof.

So I am sure a lot of you are wondering, when will I be switching out my 264 or 277 Wrath gear for Cata greens?

Let me start by saying all your ArP gems will convert to Crit gems, so one might want to stock up on agility gems before the xpac… however, I plan on just leveling in the Crit gems with the knowledge that greens and blues before or by level 83 will be replacing my Wrath gear.

Let me tell you why you will be replacing gear rather early.

1. Mastery – Old Wrath gear has none, most of the quest rewards has lots. Look below for the Mastery tooltip in the character screen for an idea of what this means to DPS.
2. Stamina – All the new gear has a lot of added stamina. If you plan on tanking new 5 man content early in the xpac you will be harder to heal with your old gear.
3. Agility – The new gear rewards come level 83 content starts surpassing old gear stats on more than just stamina and mastery.
4. Leveling not Raiding – For leveling, pure stats not set bonus or procs tend to be more beneficial. Fights are short and usually trinket procs are wasted as you run between mobs.

This being said I am at level 83 and I still have not seen a weapon worth switching out my Heroic Wrath weapon for (though I hear a blue polearm at the end of deepholm questing fits the bill). I think there was a weapon or 2 with tons of mastery but I wasn’t sold on the stats over my current staff.

Note also that Idol’s are becoming uninteresting in the xpac and are expected to no longer be limited to certain classes. For example I was surprised when I headed to the bank hoping my old idol would be better for leveling….

Note the new gems sockets. Notice the lack of interesting procs. Meh.

So, level 83 and here is my new look…

Sexy huh?

I geared myself in greens and blues to max stats like Hit and Mastery… see below…

Notice you can now get a quick answer to your hit chances in your current gear, this is the new Hit Tooltip.

With all old Wrath Epic gear Mastery was at a base of 20%.

Here are my melee stats in old Wrath Epics. It doesn’t tell the whole story as you don’t readily see procs but as I said, leveling wastes them more than not and the lack of stamina will hurt when running instances especially as bear.

I wish I could do some test dummy parses but with no recount and the chance that some things are not working (not sure Mastery is functioning) I can’t do much. Notice I lose about 7% Crit. Not sure yet if that loss is worth the added damage from higher AP or the mastery bonus, but as I start leveling again I will report back on my findings.

I am in a holding pattern atm in beta since I am at the level cap, as soon as they break that open I will start leveling Jacemora again. My plans are to start leveling my hunter in beta… I need to find the new foxes.

I am currently leveling in Deepholm and I about 75% to 83.

I saw this blue quote on MMO Champ…

In terms of gameplay, our goal was to take advantage of the changes to the environment and use them to help address previous issues with quest flow. It was an opportunity to streamline progression within Darkshore so that the overall experience for players would be much smoother and require less running back and forth.

Leveling in Cataclysm will go faster as they are changing the questing design quite a bit and limiting the need to fly back and forth from quest giver and quest area. Some quest givers now actually allow you to complete quests at that location through a spiritual link instead of flying back.

How many night elves can look at that blue quote and remember all the running back and forth in Darkshore to level… it was horrible and really drug out questing in the zone. Low and High level characters alike will most likely benefit from the new questing linearity of moving through zones and it should speed up leveling. My guess is leveling in Outland will be the worst it will be as Northrend was a lot better than BC or Pre BC.

Ok, so I went back into my 7 hour trial of SC2 and did the single player campaign… it’s fun. I am not an RTS type of gamer but the cut scenes and story line makes it rewarding.

So not only do I have no clue what I am doing but I can’t imagine if I did I would be having any less fun.

Downloading the new beta, failing at RTS game with pretty graphics.