Cataclysmic Observation

Fly like an eagle... into the fuuuuture...

I know I'm getting pretty lazy about updating my blog. It's only because I probably spend too much time playing the game right now. A number of the bigger issues that have come along recently are mostly glitchy glitches that are being (slowly) taken care of. But slowly and surely, some new articles are under development. I promise. But for now...

1. Why is there suddenly so much Outland fauna in Azeroth?
This question struck me in Deepholm. On the Crimson Expanse, one Rock Lord or another was giving me crap about how "your world is polluting ours" and pointed to the wandering fungal giants as proof of it. But, wait a second...fungal giants don't come from Azeroth; they are from Zangermarsh...in Outland. Of course, I had also just done battle with a bunch of rockflayers, last seen in Hellfire Peninsula. The Twilight Hammer have themselves a nether drake in Blackrock Caverns, and then, meeting some enslaved Gronn in Grim Batol today sealed it: there's an invasion going on here. The movements of the Twilight Hammer are difficult to trace, but Deathwing has been to Outland. Did he bring back some pets?


2. Bestest Quest
"The Twilight Flight" near the end of the long series in Deepholm. The quest is to kill this guy...he's a troll, yada yada yada. No big deal, right? You've been bonking TH leaders on the head for a while now. Except, when you take 50% of his life, he runs and jumps on a drake and tries to escape, and a stone drake scoops you up and flys off in hot pursuit. What follows is a true arial chase with mounted combat. The dragon you are on is smart enough to do the flying and keep up, leaving you free to use your full set of powers and abilities to knock that troll out of the air. No special combat bar, no vehicle interface...in my case it was just Merinna, streaming lightning from her hands, and looking so positively cool i just can't say it strongly enough.

3. What can you do-y with your UI?
This is mostly offered as an apology to anyone I'm dungeoning with at the moment. I'm not sure what other healers are experiencing, but being 85 means I need more buttons than my traditional UI has room for. Which means it's time for change. And, haha, it also means more death than usual while I grope for keys that previously my fingers remembered the location of better than my actual brain. My pumped-up, super-strong insta-cast heal has always been on the "8" button and now it's wandering around the board and is never to be found when I really need it anymore. Similarly, I keep having things come up like I forgot to put Heroism back on the board after a reorganization.

So, to all my dungeon partners: Sorry! I swear it's just about there.

The real problem here is that there is really no way for a healer to practice without a live group in a live dungeon. There are no healing dummies. One can pick a random player in a town and run through some spells, but that doesn't begin to approximate the complexities of a dumb mage who won't get out of a rockslide or to set up the conditions that make Chain Heal a better choice than a single heal.

4. The Squishiness of Tanks
I don't have a huge observation here except to worry what happened to the Death Knights. I know blood tanking has a heavy component of self-healing, and everything is all different from before, but it sure doesn't seem to be working out. It's quickly getting to where a DK tank shows up and it just makes my stomach feel uncomfortable. The dungeon cam get done with a death knight tank, it's just that I'm going to have 50% more heart attacks.