Aoifen's Journey

Blizzard have certainly had their share of complaints about the changes made to the levelling game for Cataclysm - a fair number of people seem to have voted with their feet and decided the game is no longer for them, and that's fine if they're not enjoying it. I have to say though that lately, I have been enjoying the game more than ever.

My baby Druid on Azuremyst, Aoifen, has just made it to level 58. Sadly this marks the end of her journey through the Shattered World for now, but what a journey it has been.

Aoifen hasn't taken part in that many dungeons yet, as I can't really commit large chunks of time at the moment, but each of the revamped zones she has quested in have been amazing. Sure, the "fetch me 10 rats" quests are still there, but they are usually part of a much larger zone-wide storyline that keeps you wanting to play the whole way through the zone. Many of the quests have made me laugh out loud with their jokes or whimsy, while others are very serious so that you feel like you're really helping to save lives or progress world events. The linear progression through zones didn't bother me as much as I thought it would, but I do wonder if my casual playstyle is now exactly the kind of demographic the Shattered Azeroth was designed for. In any case, I enjoyed myself and that's what counts, right?

Now, if only they would do something to ease the monotony of Outlands...

Here is a collection of some of my favourite bits of Aoifen's journey to the Dark Portal. Click to make bigger!

First things first - Aoifen meets Deathwing for the first time.

Helped the Effers to a feast,

Listened to tall tales around a campfire in the Badlands (and punched that Dragon in the face),

Hitched a ride with Fiona and her Paladins in the Eastern Plaguelands,

and wondered about Keeshan's state of mind in the Burning Steppes.

Onwards...

The Future of the Rockpool

If you've explored the new Blasted Lands you might have seen them already - the Rockpool tribe, driven out of their homes by the ruthless Bloodwash naga, forced to fight as gladiators in the pits for the enjoyment of gamblers.

It's a sad tale, unless of course, you are a murloc hater.

Angelya, like most characters, did her fair share of dying to murlocs in her early journeys, but even the hardest non-beating forsaken heart couldn't resist the pitiful cries coming from the abandoned baby murlocs.

They looked dry and thirsty so Angelya dragged the crate down to the water, fighting off the Bloodwash as they attacked.

As the crate reached the water, it started to float. The strong currents offshore quickly dragged the ropes out of Angelya's grasp and the crate drifted away from her, further out to sea. Hopefully, those little murlocs would find a better home, away from the oppression they faced on the Red Reaches.

As she watched though, Angelya was struck by a mounting horror that she had just set three tiny murloc tadpoles adrift into the open sea.  What's out there, really?  The Forbidding Sea is vast and uncharted - they could drift for weeks without ever sighting land!

I've discussed this before in a post about Geography - do the Forbidding Sea and the Veiled Sea meet up on the other side? Is there some unexplored continent in between? Interestingly, just up the coast a little there are the ghosts of shipwrecked Gilneans - considering Gilneas is on the other side of the Eastern Kingdoms continents, at the very least that indicates that the currents in these seas must be deadly, unless some magical shenanigans has taken place.

Angelya will just have to hope that the little murlocs are carried north and around to Swamp of Sorrows to join their brethren along the coast there, but not so far north that they end up dodging dragons in Twilight Highlands.

The quest is [The Future of the Rockpool] and you can pick it up at (61.1,63.7).

But now...

Resto in the Seventies

No, this post isn't about bad hair and bell-bottoms (although Druids are pretty good at flower-power).

The new Cataclysm Beta build today brought with it the new 31-point talent trees, and they've already been posted up on MMO-Champion *Caution - Spoilers*. Since I'm not involved in Beta testing, I'm going to leave it to the experts like Lissanna at Restokin - check out her comprehensive coverage of the Beta changes, if you like spoilers.

But back to the live game.  There are likely to be at least two months before Cataclysm is released - probably more. In that time, there will be new or long-neglected alts being played, including Druids.

I know this because I recently received an email from a Druid called Avawynn:

I am now a level 71 Night Elf Druid with duel spec, Feral/Restro. I haven't played in a few months and now that I am back I feel lost?? I want to get back into the mode of healer, but I can't remember what is efficient and how I should go about healing again in dungeons. I have my tree of life form and I have my restoration spec filled out with all the necessary talents. Please help me :) I need my confidence restored. 

I have already replied to Avawynn (I love getting emails!) but I figure that during this lull before Cataclysm, there are some new Druid healers coming up through the seventies who might find a primer useful. So here we go.

Talents
Let's start with the basics. I'll assume that you either have Restoration as your main spec, or you have dual specs of which one is Resto, like Avawynn.

Your talent tree at level 70 might look something like this: 10/0/51 or it might look slightly different - either way I'll assume you have enough points in Restoration to take Tree of Life and Wild Growth or are very close to it.

Another option is if you are using the Glyph of Healing Touch to give yourself a fast heal before you learn Nourish at level 80. You could re-distribute the points to boost Healing Touch like this: 10/0/51.

Glyphs
At level 70 we have two major glyph slots available. The most useful glyphs for Resto at this stage are most likely [Glyph of Swiftmend] and [Glyph of Regrowth], unless you are boosting Healing Touch as mentioned above - then the Regrowth glyph can be replaced with [Glyph of Healing Touch].

Spells
In the early 70s healing can be difficult. You may get tanks who don't have all their tanking abilities yet, and who are possibly new to tanking. This means you are more likely to get damage all around the party as dps pull aggro or extra mobs that the tank isn't ready for.

Generally speaking:

• Keep Rejuvenation on the tank at all times. Don't clip the last tick.
• Top up with Regrowth when required
• Swiftmend if you need a big boost on a HoT-ed target
• Wild Growth if the whole party is taking damage. Wild Growth can be tricky if your party is spread out a lot - see if you can work out who to cast it on so that it hits as many people as it can in its radius of 15 yards. 
• Remember to heal yourself too!

At level 80, you will learn Nourish, which is our "flash-heal" spell. As I mentioned already, before level 80 you could try using Healing Touch with the Glyph of Healing Touch, which drops the cast speed and mana cost. This makes it a faster heal than Regrowth, but you don't get the HoT component. At level 80 the Glyph would be replaced by something else and you would start using Nourish as your "flash heal" type spell instead.

I personally don't use Lifebloom at all these days, except in very situational encounters - I think Rejuvenation is a more mana-efficient HoT to be using, even with the mana return.  Other druids may disagree, so make sure you experiment with different things to see what works best for you.

I think the best advice I could give is: Don't Panic!  Tranquility makes a great panic button, but it will eat your mana so use it sparingly.

Don't forget to Innervate yourself before you actually run out of mana if you can.

Gear
As you quest and dungeon your way to level 80, try to pick up Spellpower/Haste gear rather than Spellpower/Crit gear if you can. Generally the more haste you have, the more heals you can get out there. There's nothing to stop you wearing cloth gear in your healing set :)

I'm planning another post containing a guide to some of the dungeon and quest gear that's available along the way.

Addons
Healing in stressful situations is so much easier if you have raidframes + clickbind addons. Some suggestions are:

• Healbot Continued
• VuhDo
• Injector + Clique
• Grid + Clique (not recommended for addon beginners)

In Conclusion
If you're reading blogs then there's a good chance you're most of the way towards being a great healer :) Just relax, keep the tank and yourself alive and you've done your job. Practice makes perfect so keep healing! You can give yourself a branchy pat on the back of your trunk now :)

Further Reading

• My Resto Cheat Sheet is a quick reference to the information you need at level 80
• Resto Guide at Tree Bark Jacket
• Healing Guide Levels 40 - 80 at Restokin
• Injector - An Overview on Jaded Alt
• Setting up Grid on Tree Bark Jacket
• Setting up Grid for numerous purposes - Murloc Parliament - search for grid!

Progress Post: Level 80!!

It has been a weekend of distractions, but finally, Leesah has dinged 80.  I found myself just a few thousand short of the end after doing a quest, so went flying to make it an exploration ding :)

So um, what do I do now?

From level 70, I tried to do a random dungeon every day, so the first thing after dinging was head back to Dalaran to work out what to spend my 36 [Emblem of Triumph] on!  I settled on the Runetotem's Handguards of Conquest, the Tier 9 gloves, because the gloves I had were possibly the worst thing I was wearing.  So I got a shiny purple!!!

I went and made sure to train level 80 spells in both specs.  I also bought a few BoE pieces from the Auction House - I already had a Ymirjar Physician's Robe in the bank waiting, so in all, there were a few instant upgrades.  Unfortunately once I went back into a dungeon to try out Forge of Souls, which by the way is much harder to heal than the other normals so far, one of the paladins needed on the Spiteful Signet and dropped group immediately.  Not happy.  One thing I was suprised to see in FoS normal was that you get [Emblem of Triumph] for killing bosses in there. I might try running that one a few times to get more emblems before I try healing a heroic!  Also doing the questline in there scores you a few [Emblem of Frost] so that's a nice kick-start.

So, the plan continues - run normal 80 dungeons until I get a few upgrades and run daily randoms to get emblems.  I have no idea when to try a heroic but I'll have to at some point, because I won't be able to upgrade any other way.  Can anyone suggest which heroic might be the easiest to heal?

A quick re-introduction
I might just quickly re-introduce myself since it's nearly been two months since I started this here blog and I have a few more readers now (hello new readers!).

My husband and I started playing WoW back around Christmas 2006 on a European server, since we lived in the UK at the time.  My first level 70 was my Human Shadow Priest, and I raided with her from around May 2008 (up to Black Temple in TBC) up until March 2009.  I also had an alt 80 tree druid who I loved to play.  At that time, we were farming Naxx like everyone else, then just a few weeks before Ulduar was released we left the UK and traveled for 5 months to get home to Australia (but that's another story). 

The addiction runs deep and I couldn't shake it off in that short time, so I started playing again as soon as we had internet.  The latency to European servers is pretty bad from here, and the timezones meant that we never got to play or raid with our old guild, so we made the decision to start all over on an Oceanic realm.  Just before Christmas 2009, my druid Leesah was begun and leveled up to 60 in just a few days /played using refer-a-friend.  The rest of the leveling has taken a while but I'm there now.  I am really missing being in a guild - that will be one of the next challenges:  finding a guild who is as awesome as my guild on the EU realm was ;)

Anyway enough of that.  Hang around because tomorrow (or later tonight for this side of the world), my lovely secret admirer will be revealed, and you'll get to hear who I've been stalking admiring these last few days!

 

(Click the image to big-ify)

Fresh 80 Resto Gear Plan - Part 1 - Head to Waist

The Resto Druid Gear Plan has moved to a new page:


http://reviveandrejuvenate.blogspot.com/p/restoration-druid-fresh-80-gear-plan.html


Please update your bookmark :)

Progress Post: Level 75

Leesah has be valiantly serving the Horde in Northrend, most recently taking part in a huge battle at the Wrathgate and the following siege of the Undercity.

She battles on, a little scarred but determined to reach the gates of Icecrown Citadel to join the rest of the Horde and Alliance armies.  At the moment she is having bit of recouperation time in Grizzly Hills, although she has heard that there is work to be done in Zul'Drak also.

In financial news, I managed to save up enough to purchase a Resto spec for Leesah so the healing practice begins.  Doing a random dungeon each day is earning Leesah a boatload of [Emblem of Triumph], so it will be shopping time as soon as she gets to 80!

Over the next week or so I will be posting information about Resto and Balance druids that I have been collecting, in a series aimed at new level 80 druids, and helping to make this site a bit more of a resource than it currently is.  Stay tuned :)

State of my UI: pre-80

I've written a few posts about addons that I'm using but I realised I haven't posted about how I've set up my UI.  It's unlikely, but I might be using an addon that you've not tried before, so in the spirit of sharing, here's what it looks like out of combat:

Visible in the out-of-combat image are:

• Bartender 4 action bars.  2 bars, the bag bar and the stance bar.  Oh, and the menu bar.
  
• QBar - contains quest items for easy access.
  
• Pitbull 4 unit frames - in this case just me.
  
• Chinchilla minimap - moves the map, makes it square and puts a nice border on.
  
• Prat 3.0 - chat window - adds timestamp, makes sticky channels, colours by class and other useful stuff.  My chat window is on the left and my combat log on the right.
  
• Quartz cast bar - shows red latency in the castbar and also buff/debuff timers.
  
• Decursive - the tiny box to the left of my unit frame is decursive.  Allows for easy removal of poisons, curses, diseases and magical debuffs, if you have the spells to remove them.
  
• Elkano's Buff Bars - top right corner.  I find it easier to recognise buffs by their names.
  
• FuBar - at the top of the screen, including MoneyFu, PerformanceFu, DurabilityFu, ProfessionsFu, GarbageFu, ExperienceFu, FriendsFu (I have no friends yet /cry), GuildFu (no guild either :( ), BagFu and ClockFu.  Phew!

 Next, the combat view:

Extra addons visible in the combat view:

• Omen - threat meter - still useful, especially in pre-80 instances when you may have a tank of lower level than you.
• Mik Scrolling Battle Text - shows the big damage and healing numbers.  Well, biggish. 
• Power Auras Classic - the circle around my character is the power aura telling me Eclipse is up and I should be casting Starfire.  More on PowA in this post.

You can see Pitbull in action with the additional unit frames for my Target and the Party members.  The Target's target shows in a small box above the Target frame.

Addons you can't see in the images:

• Clique - binds spells to click+ctrl/alt/shift combos
• Cartographer 3 - Google-looking-maps for Azeroth
• Auctioneer - for money making goodness
• Skillet - trade skill window that makes crafting soooo much easier.
• LilSparky's Workshop - combines with Skillet and Auctioneer to show you how much items cost to craft and what they are worth to sell
• Ratingbuster - Is that item an upgrade for me?  Ratingbuster gives info in the tooltip to help you decide.
• Tourguide + Tomtom - you can actually see the tourguide box in the images - if you are leveling, this combination is better than Questhelper in every way.
• Bagnon - shows all bags as one bag, and all bags in the bank as one back also.
• Cowtip + Tipsy - customisable placement and appearance of tooltips.
• Atlas + AtlasLoot Enhanced - maps for instances and a database of loot.  This also includes crafted and badge items.

Oh my goodness, that's a lot.   Once I reach level 80 and start healing, my setup will most likely change.  I still haven't decided what setup to use for healing.  At the moment I'm just using Clique and mousing over my Pitbull frames but I've heard good things about Vudho so I might try it out.  I've used Healbot in the past and it was also good so I may go back to it.

If you have any suggestions for improvements, healing setups or questions, please feel free to comment :)

Progress Post: Level 70

Finally, Leesah has hit the big Seven-Oh.

The levels from 60 passed quickly, burning through Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, Nagrand and Blades Edge Mountains.  I even managed to hold off going to Northrend until Leesah dinged 69, just to get a bit of a head start.

Do you remember the first time you traveled to Northrend?  On the night that WotLK was released, we lined up at midnight like good little geeks and picked up our copies of the game.  Back at home, the installation seemed to take forever, but eventually we headed out to the new Stormwind Harbour and boarded the ship to Howling Fjord.

The sense of awe as you sail into the Fjord is amazing - the music is dramatic and the scenery is so much more detailed than any other zone so far.

I have just been able to experience that feeling again, this time from the Horde side.  The zeppelin from Undercity lands pretty much right on top of Vengeance Landing so you don't get quite the same feeling of amazement at the Fjord, but the difference to the old world is still there and still makes Howling Fjord awesome.  I'm really looking forward to leveling up and seeing the rest of Northrend through Horde eyes!

Leesah's had a few nice upgrades already, especially after doing the daily random in Utgarde Keep, where the group shared the quests.  The quests there are really worth doing - the rewards are great.  They are [A Score to Settle], [Disarmament] and [Ingvar Must Die!].

The other awesome thing I didn't realise about the daily random dungeon, is that after level 70, you no longer get a [Satchel of Spoils], but two [Emblem of Triumph] instead!  I'm definitely going to try to do a random dungeon every day now!  I went in as DPS by the way - I chickened out of healing as Balance ;)

The next few days will be quiet around here - it's Australia Day and a public holiday on the 26th and since it's a Tuesday this year, we're taking advantage and having an extra-long weekend to go camping.  It's about time we went outside after all this WoW I suppose.  Have a great weekend and I'll see you back here next week ;)

Leveling 70-80: Balance or Resto?

So, the Crimson Halls open today, after a much shorter wait than for the previous gate.  It sounds like most guilds are still working on Professor Putricide so I guess this will motivate people to get a move on with him.

All this does for me is to make me want to get back into raiding faster... I love new content and the challenges it brings.  I need to get cracking.

My current action plan as it stands is thus:

1. Get Leesah to 80.  She's currently at 69, and until we get Aefa and Mengfu to level 60 I don't see myself getting a chance to play her.  Mengfu is going to be my husband's main so I'm happy to help him get up there, I don't mind, honestly... just impatient to play Leesah a bit.
   
   
2. Chain random heroics until I have all the Triumph gear I can eat, and pick up some Frost emblems along the way.  I do actually have a gear list for this - I'll share once I get to 80.
   
   
3. Find a guild who will take me to Icecrown.
   
   
4. ???
   
   
5. Beat up Lich King.

So, first things first:  Leveling.

Experienced Druids, I need some advice.  Should I stay Balance until I have enough gear to be able to heal heroics reliably, or should I respec Resto after dinging 70 and level up as much as I can in dungeons?  Has anyone done the 70-80 grind in Resto?  Is it as much of a pain as it sounds? I'm enjoying being a Boomkin but I'd like to get some healing practice while it's still fairly easy stuff. 

Suggestions are welcome! The obvious answer is to dual-spec, but at the moment I'm not in a financial position to afford it.  I'm working on it though :)

PS. Image at the top is from http://omgrpg.blogfaction.com/article/106560/wow-wake-up-the-skies-of-icecrown/.  What a brooding sky!

Leveling Herbalism - Where should I pick flowers?

PLEASE NOTE:  This Guide was for pre-Shattering Azeroth - before Deathwing came and changed the way the flowers grow.

The new Cataclysm version of the charts can be found here: http://reviveandrejuvenate.blogspot.com/p/leveling-herbalism-cataclysm-edition.html

~o~

Just about everyone will level Herbalism at some time in their playing career.  Back before leveling was speeded up, it was fairly easy to keep up your herb-picking skill with the level of herbs in the area you were questing in at the time, as long as you ventured off the beaten track a bit.

Nowadays with heirloom items, refer-a-friend and just speedier leveling in general, it is such a pain to keep your herbalism up to speed as you level that it is pretty much easier to just leave it until you're high level and go back to pick flowers later.  If you're taking herbalism on your Death Knight, it's the only option you have.

There are a lot of herbalism guides out there - googling for "herbalism guide" turns up a load of them.  The ones at thenoobschool.com and almostgaming.com even have maps with routes for you to take for each zone.  Most of the others just contain text-based lists informing where to go next.

When leveling Leesah's herbalism I was following one of these guides, doing laps of Swamp of Sorrows, when I realised it would be useful to have a chart of which herbs were available in which zones, with the levels those herbs were available.  Such a chart would be a handy reference to work out the optimal location for my current level of herbalism.

So, I made one.  Two charts, in fact.  This is the chart for 1-300 herbalism.  The 300-450 part is further down in the post.  Click the image to make it bigger.

How to use the chart
The number in each box is the number of nodes the herb spawns in in each zone, based on data from wowhead.com and wowwiki.com's herb pages.

I have put an asterisk in the starter area boxes because there are a LOT of nodes in each of these zones. It should be pretty easy to get your herbalism to 50 so that you can start picking Mageroyal in the next zone you go to.

Look at the herbs that you are able to pick at your current level of herbalism.  Where do those herbs spawn the most?

For example, Aefa's herbalism (yes I am leveling two toons with herbalism) is currently at 170.  At this level, herbs like Stranglekelp, Bruiseweed and Wild Steelbloom are still green.  I am picking and still expecting to level from Kingsblood, Liferoot and Grave Moss (if I find any) and lately have started being able to pick Fadeleaf and Goldthorn.

Based on the chart, the ideal areas for Aefa to level up herbing are Stranglethorn Vale or Arathi Highlands.  This comes as no surprise - STV is like a great big herb garden. With the most herb nodes of any zone this side of Outlands it is an ideal zone to get up to about 230 herbalism, until you reach the Sungrass phase and herbs like Kingsblood start going gray.

After 230, the next areas that have good levels of nodes include Ferelas, Hinterlands, Swamp of Sorrows and Azshara.  Hinterlands is far easier to get around than the mountainous Ferelas and Azshara, so it gets my vote for sprinklings of Sungrass and huge ruins complexes full of trolls and Purple Lotus, and Swamp of Sorrows has enough Blindweed to make anyone blind.


Another interesting thing came out after analysing this data: You don't need to have 300 herbalism before you go to Outlands.  Hellfire Peninsula has plenty of Golden Sansam and Dreamfoil to get you up there, so you can safely go to the GOGG at about 260-280 herbalism.

Speaking of Outlands, here's the Outlands and Northrend chart:

Some of the herbs have question marks in the level field as the information was not available in the sources I was working with.  If anyone has this information please let me know and I'll update the chart.

Once you get to Outlands, there are herbs all over the place and Felweed stays green until 400, so getting up to at least 350 herbalism to start your Northrend gathering is easily done.

Leveling Alchemy or Inscription?  If you are an alcho or a scribe, you can use the charts to locate the herbs you need for the current potions or inks, if the prices of such items or of the herbs themselves are too high on your server.

Any Goblins in the house?  Find out which herbs sell for the most per stack on your server, consult the chart to locate them and go on a herbing spree.  Time is money, friend!  Of course, if you were a real Goblin you'd just work out which herbs were underpriced, buy them and sell at a profit.  But where's the fun in that?!

There is one last thing that I can't help you with, and that's that you must remember to train the next level of Herbalism before levels 75, 150, 225 and 300!  

Happy Herbing :)

Clique - Inspecting the Ranks Again

After writing the other day about discovering that spell ranks used by addons such as Clique and Healbot are not updated when you train new ranks of the spells, I thought I might write a bit of a guide on using Clique and share a discovery I made regarding the rank problem.

What is Clique?

Clique is an addon used to assign mouse clicks to spells.  It is most often used by healers, in combination with some sort of unit frame addon such as Grid, X-Perl, ag_UnitFrames... the list goes on.  I am using it in conjuction with Pitbull 4.0 (I'll write up a review of Pitbull another time).  You can also use it with the default unit frames if you wish.

After installing Clique, an extra tab will appear in your spellbook.  Clicking on the new tab will open a window listing your current Clique bindings.  While this window is active, you can click on any spell in your spellbook with a combination of Ctrl, Alt, Shift or none of them to assign a binding to it.  For example, in the image below I have assigned Healing Touch to a click combination of Ctrl+RightButton by holding Ctrl and right-clicking on the Healing Touch spell in the spellbook.  Now, if I mouse over a unit frame and hold down Ctrl while I right-click on it, I cast Healing Touch.  If I need to change the binding, I click on the binding in the list and click "Delete", then click the spell again with the new binding combination. 

The trick then is to remember what combination you are supposed to be using for each spell.  It takes a while to get used to it, but I find it easier to bind similar types of spell to the same click-combo on each of my characters that have healing spells.

For example, I'll use the middle mouse button (in my case clicking the scroll-wheel thingy) for the HoTs: Rejuvenation on my druid, and on my priest I assign it to Renew.  Small heal (Flash heal, Nourish) to left button, big heal (Regrowth/Healing Touch, Greater Heal) to right button, and so on.  You could also write down the combos on a post-it and stick them near your monitor. 

The power of Clique is that you no longer need to target anyone to heal them, as long as there is a unit frame for them on your screen that you can mouse over easily.  This saves a lot of time during stressful situations when you might need to click a million times to target people then locate the spell you want to cast on them.  When doing escort quests or if I need to be healing someone not in my party or raid, I usually target them and type /focus to bring up a focus unit frame so that I can heal them while targeting baddies.

Clique and Spell Ranks
In my previous post about spell ranks, I discovered that when I trained new ranks of spells, they weren't updated in my Clique binding list.  The reason this happens is that when I first set up Clique, I had the "Show all spell ranks" box ticked in my spellbook.  This meant that Clique was assigning the bindings to the specific rank of the chosen spell.

You can see in the image above that the "Show all spell ranks" option is ticked, and the Healing Touch spell has been assigned to "Healing Touch (Rank 12)".

If I untick the option to turn off spell ranks, and re-assign the Healing Touch spell to Ctrl+RightButton, you can see below that it has now changed to just "Healing Touch" with no rank specified.  This means that it will always cast the highest rank available, and I won't inadvertently use down-ranked spells.

This technique should also work with dragging spells from your spellbook to your secondary spec toolbar.  If you have the spell ranks option turned off, and you drag the spell from the spellbook to the toolbar, the toolbar should from then on always carry the highest rank.  Note: This needs to be tested and confirmed - if someone can tell me whether this is correct I'd appreciate it :)

It also means that Healbot Continued users shouldn't have the downranking issue, as in the process of setting up Healbot bindings you actually type the name of the spell into the config window, unless you intentionally want to use a downranked spell for some reason.
 
Other stuff that Clique can do
Clique can assign mouse bindings to any spell in your spellbook, including harmful ones.  For example, if you wanted to cast Purge or Dispel Magic on an enemy, assign a click bind to that spell and mouse over the enemy's target frame. You could go the whole hog and assign click binds to your whole dps spell rotation, but I'm sticking with keybinds for now.

There's plenty of other cool stuff that can customise Clique further - visit their pages on Curse.com or wowinterface.com for more resources.

In other general news, Leesah is up to level 67 now and is desperate to get to the Frozen North.  I'm going to try to hold her back in Outlands for a little longer until 69 or 70, just because it makes those starting areas in Northrend so much easier.  Let's see how we get on after this weekend ;)

Inspecting the Ranks

Are you healing as you level up?  You might like to check your spells after a bug was flagged in a recent post by Merlot over at the spriest blog Misery. It may be less of a bug and more of a... "feature".

When you train new ranks of spells, the spells on your toolbar are automatically updated to the new rank.  They are not, however, updated in any other place.  In Merlot's case, the secondary spec toolbar used for healing, which is set up differently to the primary toolbar, was not updated with new ranks and Merlot was unintentionally using downranked spells for healing.

After reading the post about it, I went home and checked the spells I had set up with Clique, which I am using to mouse-click-bind my healing spells.  I'll go into how Clique works another time, but I discovered I have been healing dungeons using Healing Touch and Rejuvenation rank 9 when I had rank 12 available, and Regrowth rank 8 when I had rank 10 available... /blush.

I haven't tested it with any other addons, but I would recommend checking not only your secondary spec bars, but also your stance bars (eg. the bar that appears after you change into a tree), your settings for Healbot if you're using it, and any other addons that are assigned spells.

I also have not tested this, but I am 99% sure that macros are not affected by the rank bug.  Spells in macros, unless you specify a rank to use, will just use the highest rank available.

Now I just need to write a note to myself to re-do bindings at level 80 before I try to heal anything heroic!

The Mushroom Trip

Click the image for a 1600 by 900px wallpaper image.

I think Zangarmarsh is my favourite outland zone, coming a close second to Nagrand.  Firstly because Nagrand has all those Nesingwary "kill 50 of this."  "Okay, now kill 50 of that" quests that really get up my goat*, and secondly, because flying through giant blue mushrooms is just made of awesome.

I'm blocking from my memory the fact that the last three random dungeons Leesah has healed have all been Underbog.  /twitch.

Want to see more pretty pictures? Visit R&R's Gallery Page.

* Not mixed metaphors - Kath & Kim. 

Progress Post: Level 60

45 hours /played and we have reached level 60.  First stop: [Into the Wild Blue Yonder].

The refer-a-friend process worked really well for us - two players returning to the game wanting to level up as quickly as possible.  I'm just not sure it would work so well for other people.  Multiboxers aside, the only other people the RaF was designed for is for new players leveling up with an existing player.  The main problem I see with that is that it's just too fast - the first experience most players have of the game is the leveling process, and you miss most of that with RaF.

For instance, we never set foot in such places as Azshara, Winterspring, Ungoro Crater, Felwood (okay no loss there), Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge, plus barely set foot in the Plaguelands - that's a lot of game a potential new player is missing. It's a beautiful game, and soon these areas will be quite different.

For sheer speed, however, RaF is the bomb.  Pair with TourGuide (with RaF data) and you're on fire.

Now, to replace all this shirty low-level gear.

PS, I am perfectly okay with missing Silithus. /shudder

The Dark Portal: Time for the GOGG

The levels through the 50s flew past in a few hours and Leesah and Melof dinged level 58, immediately abandoned all existing quests, emptied our bags and headed for the Blasted Lands and the Dark Portal.

Going through the Dark Portal is always such an event for me - as a BC baby, the first time I took a character through there meant that I was really getting somewhere in the game, that I was playing with the big kids, and that we really needed to get a second computer so that we could both feed our addictions.  I had no idea what I was doing, but by that stage I was in my first guild and had plenty of people around to help with tricky quests and a group of friends to instance with.

Nowadays, you blast through the Portal and head straight for the Great Outlands Gear Giveaway (GOGG), where all the gear you had previously looks like a pile of kodo droppings in comparison.  You do all the group quests on your own and the levels up to 70 go by so fast people barely set foot in Netherstorm or Shadowmoon Valley anymore.  For me, the Outland zones will always be fondly remembered as places where I spent many an hour farming Primals for my Frozen Shadoweave set or heading out for another run through Botanica to try to get that staff for my druid friend...

This time will hold an interesting perspective change for me since I have never been to Outlands as a member of the Horde.  Heading out of the portal, there was instant confusion as we couldn't take the quest from the flightpoint, before realising that was the Alliance one (/blush).

The first quest we did outside of Thrallmar resulted in this upgrade.  This is a fair indication of the state of Leesah's gear before the GOGG.  Yes, that says 'level 14' on it.  The weapon damage enchant on it was part of my enchanting leveling, before anyone asks ;)

A few quests later and Leesah is already suffering from Outlands Clown Syndrome (insert homage to Ratshag here), but she is rocking an awesome hat!

As soon as we hit 60 and refer-a-friend bonuses end, I'll head back to Azeroth and try to get Leesah's herbalism and enchanting to some kind of respectable level before having a proper crack at Outlands.

Progress Post: Level 50

Yes, we fast-fowarded through level 40 and went straight to level 50!

Well, what actually happened was that it was a hard week of being out and about with family things and the occasional crippling hangover (cocktail parties = pain), but Melof and Leesah have managed to fit in some more power-leveling and on Saturday night reached the big Four-Oh.

Then, we played all day on Sunday, and dinged level 50. Our /played is now about 30 hours.  That includes mucking about in cities and extra herbing time (we keep getting behind zones in our herbalism).

The twenty levels from 30-50 were mainly split between Thousand Needles, Stranglethorn Vale, Arathi Highlands and Tanaris.  I've always enjoyed leveling in Thousand Needles since it's such a stunning area, but while STV is visually beautiful, I've done those same quests too many times to call it an enjoyable place. In Tanaris, you get to do the pirate quests.  'Nuff said.  The fast part came after level 40 when we spent all our money on fast kodos!  I had no idea they had lowered journeyman riding to level 40 - it makes areas like Tanaris seem ridiculously easy to get around.

Achievement-whores
We spent a lot of time in these levels waiting around for things to respawn.  It seems that so many high level players are doing the Loremaster achievements, the lower level areas are full of people trying to kill the same named mobs.  Booty Bay was a disaster area with loads of people killing quest npcs on their way to the Bloodsail Admiral title.

At least the flowers were pretty while we waited.

Shadowfang Keep
On our way running from Undercity to Tarren Mill we decided to stop in at Shadowfang Keep, just to remind ourselves what it looks like before the new heroic version supposed to be coming in Cataclysm.  The place is a bit of a maze, with bosses tucked all over the keep, so if they keep the current bosses and layout it will be different to most other heroics currently in the game.  There's also a lot of trash and many of the mobs are linked, so it's easy to accidentally pull a whole room of guards (similar to Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral).  Should be an interesting one on heroic!

The final boss is the Archmage Arugal, and after we killed him we nicked his dress. Any level 20-ish magic user would love it - it's just a shame Leesah was about level 38 at the time! Still, she hasn't seen any better and doesn't expect to until Outlands.

Talents and Moonkins and Kitties, oh my!
Leesah's talents went into Balance up to level 40 to get Moonkin form (hooray for Owl-Bears!), then the next 10 went into Restoration so I can work my way up to Omen of Clarity.  I've mainly been aiming for mana-efficiency talents that help me have minimal downtime between fights, but after level 40 when we both got Innervate, Leesah rarely struggles for mana anymore.  Her gear is still rubbish but with Outlands looming soon that won't last too long.  Healing on occasion is going well but to be honest everything is dying so quickly at the moment we rarely need healing!  I am using the healy glyphs of [Glyph of Healing Touch] and [Glyph of Rejuvenation], as I don't feel the balance glyphs are really worth it for duo-leveling.

Click the image to embiggen-ify.

Melof's talents have all gone into feral - he is the kitty powerhouse and occasional bear-tank.  Low-level quest rewards all seem to be agility-leather so he is happy.  Leesah has to be content with wearing mostly cloth!

Progress Post: Level 30

It's time for another update on progress!  This time we've reached Level 30 after about 19 hours /played.  Most of that time was spent running in circles around Ashenvale and Southern Barrens looking for rare mobs - gief SilverDragon!  It's not worth just skipping those ones because they give really good xp and sometimes also nice rewards.

It's really quiet out there in the world... I miss not being part of a guild at the moment.  I notice this especially when we go into one of the cities and the trade channel suddendly springs to life - Oh, there ARE people out there.

I'm finding I have mana troubles again at times, especially when I need to heal when there are a few mobs or an elite on us.  It's not really a problem, I just need to drink a bit more often. My problem is that [Regrowth] (161 mana, 2 sec cast, 318-360 + hot) doesn't seem very mana efficient and [Healing Touch] (183 mana, 3 sec cast, 502-606) takes juuust too long to cast. I'm considering using [Glyph of Healing Touch] which reduces cast time to 1.5 sec but only heals for 250-300 then, and would cost just short of 140 mana. It's a shame we don't get Nourish until level 80 though.

Does anyone have suggestions for healy spells at low level?  Apart from respeccing resto for levelling that is :)

Anyway the levelling goes on!

Useful Addons for Levelling

The User Interface is arguably the most important tool you have as a player.

While the default UI worked for me for the first few months I played, when I first found out that I could make my WoW user interface look however I wanted, I was so excited.  That was shortly followed by a lot of frustration, mucking around with different mods and creating a constantly changing style.  I know what I like now, but it takes a while to get it right.

Addons used for levelling are pretty different from those used for end-game content, so I have just installed those that I am using during levelling for now, and listed a few of those I find most useful here.  I hope you find something useful in this list too! I've added links to curse.com but you can also download them from a variety of other sources such as wowinterface.com.

1. FuBar 3.6
Fubar puts a thin bar across the top and/or bottom of your screen.  A huge variety of plug-ins allow fubar to display useful information.  The ones I'm currently using include MoneyFu, PerformanceFu, ProfessionsFu, DurabilityFu, GarbageFu, ClockFu and BagFu.  They're fairly self-explanatory, and you can find plenty more by searching for 'fubar_'  A lot of people recommend using databroker addons as a successor to FuBar but I've never managed to get broker addons working properly so I'm sticking with FuBar for now.

2. Tourguide + Tomtom
Tourguide is a questing addon designed to provide a streamlined series of quests to do in the most efficient order.  Combine this with Tomtom, which produces an arrow to tell you which direction to run in, and levelling is a snap.  Equally as useful is the version of Tourguide for Refer-a-Friend we have been using that was linked from dual-boxing.com.  The files to use are hosted here. I'd also recommend using the addon SilverDragon if you're doing the RaF version - we spent ages trying to find rare mobs and SilverDragon can help you to locate them.

3. Bagnon 
Puts all your bags into one window. There are quite a few different mods that will do the same thing, but what I especially like about Bagnon is that it has a search function - you can search by name for items in your bags.  Of course, Leesah still only has two small bags so it's not super-useful yet but it will be, ohh it will be.

4. Cartographer
Awesome for showing areas on the map where you haven't been and dungeon maps.  I also pair this with Gatherer, which records where you find herbs, mining nodes etc for future gathering trips. Note:  There is another version called Cartographer 3.0, which is an "experimental" version looking a lot like Google Maps.  It completely replaces the Blizzard map, it doesn't work with the Blizzard quest indicators and it doesn't green-out areas you haven't explored.  Looks nice though.

5. Prat 3
Prat is a great addon for your chat window.  It colours channels, colours people's names according to their class, allows scrolling with the mouse wheel, makes channels sticky so you don't have to keep typing /g all the time... and that's just for starters!  There are a bunch of different addons altering the chat window but this one is the first one I found that does all the things I'd like it to.  (Bit of a retro screenie here)

6. QBar
The last addon I'd like to mention is QBar.  All it does is add an extra action bar that contains quest items if you have any, so that you don't have to go searching through your bag for them.  Really, really useful.

If you download the addon manually, you need to locate where on your hard drive your World of Warcraft folder is.  In that folder should be an Interface\AddOns folder.  Open the zip file you downloaded for the addon, and unzip into that AddOns directory.  You don't need to create any new folders.  Voila, start up your game and the addon should load!  You can also download clients such as the curse client, that will help you to locate and install addons, and also update them when new versions are available.

Are there any addons that you can't level without?  Leave a comment and let me know :)

Progress Post: Level 20

'Tis the season to visit each branch of the family tree and generally stuff yourself silly. We've done plenty of that this week, but also, some levelling.

We are using the version of the addon Tourguide specially designed for refer-a-friend, so we followed instructions and hopped from Mulgore, via Orgrimmar (making sure to visit Grandfater Winter on route) and Undercity to Silvermoon City, then south to Ghostlands.  It's a bit of a journey but the quests in Ghostlands are laid out really well and the rewards are pretty good for the level bracket.

As there were two of us we also managed to do the group quests, and so ended up with a nice bit of kit, the [Staff of the Sun]. Most awesome looking low-level staff...

So after about 8.5 hours /played we were at level 20:

Back to Thunder Bluff we went to have a bit of a moan about how easy the game has become these days but not much because really, letting us have mounts at level 20 is just made of awesome.

I'm heading more or less up the balance tree so I decided my first five talent points would go to [Starlight Wrath]. I was struggling with mana and had a bit of a drinking problem so the next three went into [Moonglow], then the last two into [Nature's Majesty].

Money-making ventures are going moderately well.  We're herbing everything that grows and selling on the auction house, plus any greenies that drop, even ones that we might think of wearing.  We'll be outgrowing them pretty soon so we might as well try to get a few gold for them.  I also discovered that people are willing to pay 10g to have their guild charter signed so I've had a bit of income that way!

Until next time, enjoy the holidays ;)

Progress Post: Level 10

First 10 levels are down in record time, thanks to refer a friend...

After setting up our accounts, including mucking about with refer a friend, we only managed to play for about 1.5 hours last night. The battle.net site is a bit flaky so it took awhile to get organised. Imagine if we were new people to the game - we would have given up early on after the 10th failure to log into the site. Bad one Blizzard. /facepalm

So it began - Leesah and Melof set out to relieve the wildlife of Mulgore of their paws, feathers and claws.

Our night involved quite a rapid series of these:

and eventually led to:


Much to my delight, since I have had a battle.net account for a little while and also an authenticator, I had not only the gorgeous [Core Hound Pup], but also an [Unhatched Mr. Chilly] waiting in Leesah's mailbox!

The only trouble with the refer a friend so far is that we can't afford to train. Better get started on that auction house!