This is just a test post, no need to read/click/care what these words say.

On that note, this editor, “Blog Entry Poster” (on Ubuntu) is nothing to write home about. Me thinks it’s time to find a new one.

So due the greatness that is dual-speccing, I’m a new holy pally with better than average new holy pally gear. I have only one piece of blue gear (my shoulders) and no green gear at all. In the LFG channel, I nervously click the “I are healer” checkbox since it’s sort of a misnomer when it comes to my mad healing skillz.

When I do get picked up by a group, I ask “am I healing or hurting?”. When they tell me that I’m healing, I tell them that I’m a noob healer. Then I notice that everybody usually targets me. My assumption is that it’s to inspect me.

Some dude said “LOL, liar, nice gear noob”. That’s when I have to tell them “my healing gear is epic, my healing skill is not”  – I’m going to macro that cuz I’m tired of typing it. I let them know that I’ve never solo healed before and that I’ve only healed 10 and 25man raids where I always have someone to somewhat cover my ass.

Now, having said all of that, HEALING IS FUN SHIT, despite what some people think!

Perhaps it’s because I’m new to healing and am only used to tanking or dps’ing, but it is very fun to me! In the first heroic VH I did, there were only two deaths (sorry random mage, I blew my Holy Shock since I momentarily forgot which mouse button it was keyed to; here, have a Sacred Sheild – woops, I’ll rez/buff you in a few seconds) and no wipes. I healed another VH later (after the reset an hour later). Then I healed heroic UK, despite my not-knowing how long I couldn’t heal after the last boss does his silencing thing. In case you’re wondering, I got silenced, so I didn’t wait long enough.

In other news, I finally got my ring enchants, 2×19sp for my holy gear and 2×32ap for my ret gear! My enchanting is at 405 now. I don’t plan on advancing it further than that, but it might happen eventually. My unbuffed spell power is over 2k in my holy gear. My self-buffed ap is just under 4200 in my ret gear.

My glyph selection is very weak at the moment, for both of my specs. The scribes must be making a TON of money right now – good for them. It’s amazing that some people will buy a glyph for 300-400gold.

I (re-)started fishing too! I’m up to about 200 so far. The new fishing dailys are pretty cool. I really like that I can start to level my cooking with the new fish that I’m getting. Being able to fish from outside of VH is very cool stuff. I find that if I can fish while I’m in LFG, I don’t get so bothered at how long it takes to get a group for <insert random heroic name here>.

Patch 3.1 is finally live. The servers were down all day and most of the night (for me, on the east coast). I guessed the servers would come up around 10pm EST and from what I saw, I was mostly right. I checked at 9 and my server was down. I checked again at 11:30ish and it was up.

I logged in just for a few minutes, mostly to buy my 2nd spec, spend the points and to glyph up both specs.

My account still stands as canceled but I am definitely more intrigued than I have been recently. I believe my boredom with the game stemmed from doing the same thing for too long. I’d log in, do my JC daily, heal some battlegrounds (as ret, in PvP holy gear), look for a group for a heroic and very little else.

Since I canceled my account, I changed my habits a bit. I finally dropped mining and picked up enchanting, like I said I would many months ago. I needed to keep a minimum of 1k gold so I could get the dual spec talent so I didn’t want to spend a LOT of gold leveling it. As a result, I spent a lot of time in Sholazar Basin and did all of the quests there, mostly for the green quest rewards. I made a lot of gold in the process.

I manage to get enchanting up to 380. I was able to DE most of the epics that I no longer use. Another 20 points, and I’ll have access to the ring enchants that enchanters can use.

As for which specs I chose, my primary is ret and my secondary is holy. I’d link to my builds, but my armory appears to be borked!

Regarding the ret major glyphs that I will be using, I’m going with Josh’s choices: Glyph of Judgement, Glyph of Consecration, and Glyph of Exorcism. If I find I need more mana, I’ll be using Glyph of Seal of  Blood in lieu of the consecration glyph.

As for my holy major glyphs, I’m going to be using the Glyph of Holy Light, Glyph of Holy Shock and one other, that I haven’t determined yet.

I haven’t purchased the glyphs yet because they are crazy expensive at the moment. The judement glyph was selling for 75g last night and the exorcism glyph was selling for 86g! It serves me right though, I should have been more diligent about buying them before 3.1 came out.

I currently have 25 JC tokens stock-piled. I assumed the new JC resilience patterns would require JC tokens to purchase, but I was wrong so it looks like I’ll be buying dragon’s eyes and selling them so that I can fund my enchanting.

I just cancelled my account. Since I’m paying 3months at a time, I still have game time until May 25th.

A major reason for my cancelling my account can best be summed up by Kadomi’s post. Being a casual player, I don’t have a big chance to improve my primary character beyond where she is.

I still have almost 2 months of game time left, so perhaps I’ll begin to like the game again before then.

Daily savings time rolled through this past Saturday. I set (most) of my clocks one hour ahead. My computers did this automagically.

My WoW server, did not apparently.

I’m a jewelcrafter. I’m a casual player. If I don’t get to play a lot (more than 30m) on a given day, I do like to do one thing at least and that is my JC daily.

I’m normally able to wake up, get showered, shaved, dressed and eat some breakfast and then I’m able to squeeze in my JC daily, all before I have to leave for work. I wake up around 5:30 or 6am EST. The JC daily usually takes less than 5 minutes to complete.

I woke up this morning, logged in to WoW and went directly to Timothy Jones (the JC daily quest giver) and … nothing. There was no blue exclamation point proclaiming “Hey! I have a quest for you to do today!”.

The dailys reset at 6am EST on the server that I play on. It was 6:42 am when I strolled up to him to accept my quest. My guess is that at 7am, he will offer me a quest that I won’t be able to accept unless I log in tonight.

QQ

I don’t have a lot of time to comment on these changes at the moment, but here they are, from mmo-champion.

All paladins auras had their range extended from 30 yards to 40 yards.
Holy

• Sacred Shield now cannot be on more than one target at any one time.
• Infusion of Light no longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.

Protection

• Hand of Sacrifice now lasts 12 sec or until the caster has transfered 100% of their maximum health.
• Targets affected by Divine Shield, Hand of Protection or Divine Protection can no longer be affected by any of these spell for 2 minutes. (Down from 3 minutes)
• Divine Sacrifice *New Talent* (Tier 3) – 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin’s health). Instant, 2 min cooldown.

Edit: There is a badass new tanking enchant coming down the pike as well -

Enchanting

• Enchant Weapon – Blade Ward *New Enchant* – Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

I just saw this on mmo-champion tonight:

Protection

• Divine Protection: Cooldown reduced to 3 min.

The current CD is 5 minutes! This can be talented down to (2 points in Sacred Duty) 4 minutes but down to 3 and I’m assuming talented, it will be down to two minutes? That’s a HUGE change and very welcome!

In response to general user uproar (at the removal of ghetto-hearthing), Blizzard has decided to reduce the cooldown on hearthstones to 30 minutes (down from 1 hour).

The forum thread that this announcement was rather amusing to me, the way Eyonix basically just tells people to get over it and how it’s been like this for 4 years and then…cave.

The end result: 30 minute cooldown on hearthstones. Yay. Now I don’t have to worry about managing my in-game time any more than I’m used to.

Ghetto hearthing has been removed from the game, at least in the current PTR build of patch 3.1 (source).

Ghetto hearthing can best be described as temporarily grouping with someone, going into an instance and then leaving the group. The effect of leaving the group is that you are hearthed (to where your hearthstone is set) after one minute of not leaving the instance. Players used this technique if they went to a city, needed to get back to another zone (like Shattrath or Dalaran) and their hearthstone was on cooldown.

This was basically a free hearth, granted you could find an instance to make it usable. Orgrimmar is a great example since RFC is located there.

For example, if your hearthstone was set to Dalaran and is currently on CD. You are in Dalaran but need to buy something from the auction house. You could take a portal from Dalaran to Orgrimmar and do what you need to do from there. Now your somewhat “stuck” in Orgrimmar since your hearth is on CD. In order to “ghetto-hearth” and get back to Dalaran, you would need to group with someone (random person, guildy, friend, whatever), run into RFC (which is located in Org) and then leave group. The effect of this is that you would get a message box that pops up that basically tells you to GTFO or be ported to Dalaran.

The new change on the PTR will still port you out of the instance you are in but instead of sending you to the location where your hearthstone is set, you will be ported to the nearest graveyard – leaving you stuck in the zone you didn’t want to be in.

I just caught a great dual spec Q&A type discussion on mm0-champion’s blue tracker (source).

Dual specs are now available at level 40!

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Q u o t e:
Using an expensive reagent only scribes can make. Let’s be honest here.

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This requirement has been removed.

You no longer need to buy a reagent that can only be created by a Scribe (inscriptionist — whatever).

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Q u o t e:
So scribes will no longer need to my a lexicon(sp?) of power to swap specs anymore? What is the requirement then, it just happens?

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You literally just click a button, and after a 5 second cast, your specializations, glyphs, and action bars swap. You must be out of combat, and it still cannot be used in battlegrounds or arenas. There is currently no cooldown on the ability to swap specializations though.

This is awesome stuff! I do expect that there will be a cooldown introduced though.