The End

And there it is, the end of the Burning Crusade.

I am so fortunate to have come so far. When I came to Moon Guard a year and a half ago, I never thought I would raid, let alone "beat the game." It's such an odd thing, thinking back on all that has happened. That the cranky old shaman and teacher of The Earthwalkers should find herself standing before the Sunwell after defeating Kil'jaeden... I'm sure Salanthe herself is as shocked as I am!

I joined Ascension because I had something to prove to myself and to others. And for one other very important reason - they promised to give me a chance. They certainly did. I owe them a lot.

Quick Update

There is a lot to write about, obviously. I haven't made a post since The Patch went live. It is very late (or early) however, and I'm not coherent enough to talk about all my impressions of shaman healing post-3.0. I am coherent enough to make a brief update!

Salanthe's guild ventured into Sunwell Plateau for the first time since 3.0 last night. It was an eventful night. We've attempted Kalecgos several times previously and always been stymied. Last night, it took us four attempts to down him. Yours truly got the Protector token and is now the happy owner of Skyshatter Bands. Yes, I got the elemental tier 6 bracers. Post-patch, I decided to use my T6 elemental legs (for more crit), so the bracers give me the elemental two-piece set bonus and the restoration four-set bonus. Overpowered restoration shaman, much?

We didn't stop at Kalecgos though. We had close to an hour and a half of raid left after downing the big blue dragon, so we headed on to Brutallus. Yes, I brought 24 of my friends back to meet him. And we one-shot him. Yes, you read that correctly. We one-shot Brutallus. After that stunning victory, we set up for Felmyst and attempted him twice before running out of raid time.

All in all, it was an amazingly successful night, although I feel like we cheated. It doesn't seem right to one-shot a boss we've never seen before. A testament to the shadow priest that set up our strategy for us and explained the fight! Well, and the nerf.

As far as my knee-jerk impressions of shaman healing post-3.0, let me just sketch them for you.

• 5-man healing is very fun. Lots of tools to use and it's very easy at Salanthe's gear level.

• Riptide is over-powered, but don't tell Blizzard game developers that, please.

• Mana efficiency, as I predicted, is utter crap. Shaman just cannot keep up with the other healers, priests in particular. I am willing to make such a broad statement because the other resto shaman in my guild are having just as much trouble with mana as I am.

I'll hopefully have more to say at a later date and time when I'm more coherent and have some hard data to back up my impressions. Or maybe change my mind about them, who knows!

Progression

Yes, you are looking at a screenshot of my guild after downing the Illidari Council. I'm in the middle near the top, looking all large and shamany.

It's an odd thing, progression. What seems like something you will never get suddenly can come together and the next instant your guild is standing before Illidan the Betrayer.
We one-shotted Reliquary of Souls tonight, steamrolled past Mother Shahraz, and kicked the Illidari Council in the teeth. It was shocking really, considering that so many of the new folks hadn't been past Anetheron in Mount Hyjal. We spent so much time outfitting new people in shadow resist gear before taking down Mother... Well, you wouldn't have expected us to actually down the Illidari Council tonight.

It started as one of our many other attempts. I didn't expect us to last long at all, just like the other attempts. But fate and skill seemed to come together in one shining moment and suddenly they were dead! It was amazing. That is why I raid - to experience that feeling of downing a new boss. Sure, we weren't server first this time, but it doesn't matter. We were Horde first and in all honesty, the only things I care about are 1) that my guild trusts me enough to include me on progression fights and 2) that it was a first for me!

See, I have a funny story when it comes to raiding. Once upon a time, I was dating a guy who also plays WoW on Moon Guard. We were in the same guild and in some aspects, he was the one that first helped me learn to heal well. In other words, I respected him a great deal, in addition to our romantic feelings. Well, we broke up and I took about a two week break from WoW. When I came back, I had to start from scratch with this guild we were both members of. Meaning, I had to prove that I was a good healer all over again. Which was stupid, but when you're trying to prove something you don't really complain that much.

Well, to make a long story short, I wasn't included on raids. So I asked my ex-boyfriend (we were supposed to still be friends) why I wasn't being invited and he told me it was because I wasn't good enough to handle the fights they did. You can only imagine how angry I was because despite my occasional bouts of inferiority complex, I know I am a good healer. Maybe even a very good healer. I realized that he was doing whatever he could to get me out of "his" guild. (Funny sidenote: I was the one that wanted to join it when we started looking around.)

Consequently, I quit the guild citing difficulties with my ex as the reason (without going into details - no one cares about that). With a new-found sense of determination, I set out to prove to everyone that I was a good healer. I applied to the most progressed guild on the server and set a list of goals; foremost among those goals was the desire to prove to the guild that I was a good enough healer to be included on progression fights.

I worked really, really hard to improve Salanthe. If you go to her Armory page, you'll see that I have almost everything maxed out. All her professions are maxed out (I hadn't even trained fishing prior to being accepted to the new guild), all her weapons skills are maxed out, she's exalted with a ton of factions... Almost all of that I did after joining this new guild. I showed up to every raid and waited outside, hoping for a chance to come in.

My new guild gave me the one thing I asked, a chance to prove myself. I did everything I could to prove to them that I was worth a raid spot and now I'm invited when I log on. It's a good feeling. And I love my guild for giving me a chance.

Since joining my guild, I've been there for four of their first kills, three of those were server firsts. It is such an honor to be there and I feel incredibly lucky every time I get an invitation for a raid. Corny yes, but entirely true.

With the bosses down tonight, Salanthe got Nadina's Pendant of Purity, a guild first drop. I had been saving my SK spot for a long time, hoping the Blessed Band of Karabor would drop. Well, the necklace was too good to pass up. Sure, I could have saved my spot for Illidan and hoped that the Memento of Tyrande or the Crystal Spire of Karabor would drop, but there are a couple of very minor upgrades I need still and it's not worth wasting an SK spot on Howling Wind Bracers or even the Bastion of Light. So I decided to blow my SK spot on the necklace and hope that those bracers drop while I'm still low on the list, so I can climb up the list again in time for Illidan. Additionally, I passed on the T6 leg token that dropped because my current pants are really a side-grade to T6 and I would rather have the T6 chest from Illidan. Definitely saving my SK spot for the chest.

The other small thing of note from yesterday's raid is a small encounter I had with the new restoration shaman. It started off innocently enough. He asked me about loot rules, so I explained how it worked. I should have done it earlier, but I forgot. Not to mention that he has other friends in the guild that could have told him as well. So I told him about SK and that if he wants to bid on something, he just whispers the master looter. This prompted an odd comment from him. He told me that he wasn't upset that I got the necklace. (Did I even have a reason to think he was? *confused*) Then he said that he didn't care about the loot; he only cared about doing well on the meters.

Yes, you read that correctly. He only cares about doing well on the meters and he thinks that the only way to do that is by getting better gear. He apparently doesn't care about actually keeping people alive... Just, wow. I had no idea how to reply to him, so I decided to take the tactful route and reassure him that he was doing very well on the meters and had no reason to worry.

Honestly, his attitude really irritates me. Yes, I out-gear him. You know what? It doesn't matter. As a healer, you should only be worried about keeping your raid alive, not about topping the charts. If you are doing everything in your power to do your job well and your raid is surviving, then you are doing well. Yes, it is cool to see your name at the top of the meters. It's an extra confirmation that you're doing your job well. But ultimately it doesn't matter.

Edited to add: Something just occurred to me. The new shaman already knew how loot rules worked because he got something the night before and I had explained it to him already. I knew there was something odd about him asking me for clarification. I wonder what he meant by all that.

Progression Competition

I'm kind of ashamed of myself for doing it, but I have a bookmark for our primary raiding competition so I can keep tabs on their progress. And I just learned that they downed Mother Shahraz last night. This makes me sad because it means that they are at the same place progression-wise that we are at. They raid more days per week than we do and for a longer duration of time. With the trouble we've been having getting people to show up to raids, I think this may be the end of our server first reign. Which does make me sad, even though it's silly.

The one claim we can make that they cannot is that 1) we reached Black Temple and Mount Hyjal before 2.4 and 2) we earned our shadow resist gear for Mother. They came to BT/MH after the patch and after attunements were lifted. They also purchased -all- their Hearts of Darkness and primal shadows and lifes from off server.

For what little that is worth.