[Local Time] 2-7-11

Woohoo! It's been an amazing two weeks for my raiding guild! Last week we downed both Maloriak and the Twilight Ascendant Council for the first time, then this week we took both out on the first try! In addition, we also killed Atramedes and Chimaeron with relative ease, go us! Chimaeron went down on the second attempt, even! Then we got a full night of attempts on Cho'gall and got him to 8%.

This is my guild and Loot Pinata Chimaeron!

It seems like things have just clicked on the raid front. We aren't struggling with low DPS on encounters anymore and the mechanics don't seem to be tripping people up the way they were just a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure if it's just getting back into the raiding groove or if the little gear upgrades just make a huge combined difference. Either way, it's a great feeling!

My little lock made it to 82 fairly easily, yay! She replaced her winged helm with something more drab: a whitish hood that, when combined with her new white robe, makes her look a bit like a priest. A convenient lure for the wary souls, perhaps? Mwahahahahaha!

I've been leveling her destruction because affliction has changed so much since I played her last in BC. Now I'm starting to look at it again. I don't yet know if I want to try to make her a PvP toon (or even engage in PvP on any toon), but if I do I'm sure it'll be afflic. I used to love the affliction playstyle, but it seems like the dot-and-forget thing is pretty well dead. I might run with it in a few dungeons (with dual spec costing only 10g, there was no reason not to buy it) and see how I like it. In the meantime, I'm happy playing with fire.

My tsunami deck is complete and the Darkmoon Faire is this week! Only I don't know if I want it anymore :P. With the patch coming out tomorrow that includes an alchemist stone for healers, I'm not sure if I'm better off selling the deck I made and just sticking with the cheap-to-make stone that's a throughput buff. I was lucky and picked up the Jar of Ancient Remedies off Maloriak the other day, so it's not like I don't already have a nice regen trinket. Most likely I'll heal Tuesday with the alchemist stone and see if my mana regen is a problem. If it is, I'll pick up the Darkmoon card. If it's not, then I'll sell it. Or maybe I'll keep the card anyway so I can have a regen set and a throughput set. I'm still undecided!

I'm wondering if I should drop Efflorescence. A lot of druid blogs are advocating it, and have some very convincing math to back it up, but I'm just not sure it's the best course of action for my 10man. We run druid, holy priest, shaman, so we do have lots of AoE healing. I'm usually a tank healer, so my AoE heals are sort of afterthoughts, but it's nice to have two of them. After the Tuesday throughput vs. regen experiment I may change my spec Wednesday and take out Efflorescence, see how that goes. Ah, the wonders of new mechanics!