Transplanted!!

The Grove is back… kind of.

It’s being resurrected, but under a new name, The Niquisition. It was a blog I made for a different game, but I no longer play it and I’m playing WoW again so I decided to blog again and since I’ve already put money into The Niquisition, I figured I could just use it. All it needs is a fresh coat of paint and some febreeze and it’ll be just like this “old” site….but newer.

So go check it out theniquisition.com

A nifty little idea.

So the other night, I was sitting in raid thinking “Hmm, how could healing be more interesting?”

Healing Challenges!

It sounds a little strange, but I think people will really enjoy them. Here’s just a few:

Minimal Healing Challenge (Chimaeron): Whoever does the least amount of healing wins x amount of gold. Now, this one may need a bit of tweaking because of tank healers and sic priests, but the concept is there. Done this one twice with 2 different winners.

Inefficient Challenge (For any/all bosses): Not one I’d use for your hard/progression content, but great for farm bosses. In this challenge, you are not allowed to use your small,efficient heal. This is one is more suited to be going on the entire night because it’s much easier to check logs afterwards and see who qualified. It has multiple winners and each receive x amount of gold if they didn’t use their efficient heal.

Unquenchable Challenge: There are two versions of this challenge. 1) Players who use no/the least amount of mana potions for all bosses OR 2) Players who use no/the least amount of mana potions for a specific boss. There can be multiple winners for this one or there could be one.

Of course there are ways to make these better/more challenging and I encourage you to try some out or make ones of your own. I just think it adds a bit of fun to the monotony of farm content.

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I have also changed my UI (again) and will be posting it soon/now depending on how much time I have this morning. Addons are the same, just a different layout. I generally try to mix up my UI every 3 months if I can, just to keep things fresh and interesting. I also get a lot of unwanted opinions ideas when my butthole guildies friends get a hold of my UI and start bashing talking about it. Meh.

 

What do you think of the healer challenges? Will you implement your own? Tell me aboot it!

Disc-oration

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time on my Priest(ess). Yes, Niq has made his not-so-butch priest Junius into a lady elf named… Niqqi. Anywhoodle, it’s been so much fun playing on a different character, especially one I thought I would never play seriously again. Having the freedom to swap between Holy and Discipline, which changes the whole experience, is a nice change of pace from the HoTness of a druid.

When Cataclysm was coming up and the subject of “main alts” was brought up, Cosmopolitan was my automatic first choice. He had been my Healer-gone-Tank-back-to-Heals-for-the-weekend-runs alt and RP character for quite a while. Longer than I’d ever had a serious raiding alt. But the Cataclysm really changed it for me. Not to say that I QQ’d because paladin tanking/healing was hard ( I actually have a good friend who lets me pick her brain about Prot) but the healing part was just a little overwhelming. New resource, new spells, new stat priorities. At least with the druid, I knew all the spells already and the function was pretty similar.

Cosmo was still the first alt leveled to 85 after Niq, but my interest really fizzled after about a week of play. So then I just left him and my other alts be…. until a month or so ago.

One day, I worked up the nerve to log onto my priest and try to rekindle the spark that died 2 years ago. At first it was difficult, I knew nothing of the class other than what I read in patch notes briefly. i tried first leveling as disc with the “smite spam” method, but it felt too slow so I did what I couldn’t do the first 2 times on this and my previous priest. I went Shadow to level. Oh em god, so fast! Long and boring story short, the Priest(ess) is now level 85 and I’ve begun raiding on my off-nights with a smaller, more casual guild. Happy time!

Someday I may pick the paladin back up, but for now he’s strictly RP. The patrons of the Wyvern’s Tail seem to enjoy him too much for his attention to go elsewhere. I’ll have to tell the story of how he got his nickname “Bad hair Day”, but that’s for another time.

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Late druid news:

Efflorescence and Tranquility changes…

• Efflorescence has been redesigned. It creates a healing zone at the feet of a Swiftmend target, but this healing zone now restores health equal to 4/8/12% of the amount healed by Swiftmend to the three most injured targets within 8 yards, every 1 second for 7 seconds. This periodic effect now also benefits from spell haste, but the individual ticks cannot be critical effects. In addition, Living Seed is no longer a prerequisite talent for Efflorescence.

• Druids now innately have 100% pushback protection from damage while channeling Tranquility.

• Malfurion’s Gift now reduces the cooldown of Tranquility by 2.5/5 minutes.

Something for the Trolls:

• The troll druid models for Flight Form and Swift Flight Form has slimmed down to be more in scale with other druid flight forms.

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The changes to efflo looked kind of scary at a glance. Only going to heal 3 targets at a time!? But haste will contribute to tics and it’s no longer “gimped” for +6 players in the area-of-effect. Inability to crit is a sacrifice I’m sure many of us are willing to take. Also, the fact that we are no longer tied to Living Seed is fantastic. Depending on your current spec, you could divide those 3 talents from LS to Blessing of the Grove/Nature’s Bounty/Nature’s Swiftness (if you’re one of “those” druids who didn’t take it already). 3 Points of freedom, yum. Who knows, maybe people will leave those points in LS, but I plan on moving them around.

Flight form change for bats, YAY!

Now to Tranquility. Beruthiel of Falling Leaves and Wings said it best in my opinion so I’m going to let this link do the talking because I am in 100% agreement with her on this change. LINK!

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Brief note about my personal life, work is in full swing and time is short, but I will do my best to keep The Grove alive. There’s going to be a lot to share with the new patch coming up and I hope to not be so late next time.

It was a rough weekend, I was not able to sleep in past 10:30 on Saturday or Sunday morning so booo sunshine! I did get to change my bedding back to my summer sheets. I got yellow sheets (the actual sheet part I don’t even use) so go with the light blue comforter/pillow to remind me of living in Florida, when the beach was only 30 minutes away. D:

Toad LeFrog seems to be enjoying the change of scenery. No pillow for me tonight I guess.

 

How do you feel about the changes to Efflorescence? Tranquility? Have any alts surprised you lately with how fun and interesting they are? Leave a comment and let me know.

Cindy make Niq her avatar of work

So i finally caved and got an ipod touch. Loving it!!

I got it for two main reasons.
One- I really needed an mp3 player to motivate me to start jogging around the lake again.
Two- With this new toy, I can do some woek things while not at my desk (aka: update inventory in real time)

It’s really nice. I know it’s been a long while but with work being as crazy as it’s about to be, I cant post as often as I would like.

BUT in case you live under a rock, here is some druid news.
Tranquility will have its CD reduced by 2.5/5 minutes via Malfurion’s Gift. It will also feature a 100% pushback immunity mechanic. YAY!!!

New ZA and ZG are coming out soon. I hope I’m not the only person not prepared. Loot tables look less than stellar. Lots of Spi/Crit on the caster leather pieces.

In unrelated news, I got to have some fun in TK. We killed Kael too quickly in p3 so he bugged on my friend Riz. I made a recording of this strange side-effect.

The video is entitled Riz flies a Kite’thas. Link below:

Riz flies a Kite’thas

Anyway, time to sleep so I can enjoy my one-day weekend.

How do you balance work/wow/personal life/sleep and find time to eat? Do you have any odd/fun experiences with boss bugs? Leave a comment and let me know.

The busiest bee that you ever did see

It has been a time-consuming 2 weeks.

My job has started back and is in full swing and boy have there been some complications.

In druid news, patch 4.0.6 hit on Tuesday and my spec didn’t change one bit. I did, however, make a second spec to toy around with bu as far as main spec, no changes were made. Worgen and Trolls got their new flight form skins. This was kind of a hit/miss with people. I like the bat form, but there seem to be just a few issues with it which I’m sure will get fixed. Namely, the size, bat form could be a mount for goodness sake. /2 WTB druid saddle. Another small issue is the positioning, the form appears a bit above where it normally should (the shapeshift smoke effect happens way below the form) so this just makes it aesthetically confusing.

In alt news, Comsopolitan, my RP paladin, has reached 85 this week. Such procrastination! I am currently waiting to make Raider/Member in my current guild to bring my ppriest in as my main alt. Cosmo had his run in LK, time to dust off my BC main. Holy looks like so much fun to play and I’m really looking forward to having a fun alt again. Not that Cosmo isn’t fun, he’s just lost some luster and I’d rather him be an RP focused character now.

I know it’s not a lot and it’s been so long, but I have really been burnt-out this week. Between raid schedule and working (home and at my job >.<) there hasn’t been much time to really get a post together. I will post my Theralion & Valiona kill video. It’s not as good as Halfus, but mind you it was like my second time seeing the fight. There’s also like a 12 second blackout after the intro, nto sure why (Sony Vegas hates me) bu after that it’s all fine and dandy.

New flight forms; Good/bad/ugly? Share you opinions below.

Whataweek

This past week was “fun”? I got whisked away to my brother’s for the week to help him finish some work. The internet connection was less than steller so no raiding/blogging for me. I took it surprisingly well  think. I did get a little bored and played through Portal….again…and again. I now have Still Alive stuck in my head.

I made a little financial investment, that should have been made months ago. I finally bought some speakers. They were just some cheapy, 20 dollar HP speakers from Wal-Mart. I like them, they’re black so everything matches AND the power light is green to match the router/modem lights.

I’m kind of glad to have them because I’ll have to keep my ears as not-covered-by-my-headset as possible for the next few weeks because I got my ears pierced. Yay! I actually had one ear done a long time ago, but I never kept the stud in long enough to let the hole develop. I’m super cheap so I had my brother do them and hopefully they don’t look like crap or get infected. *crosses fingers* My sister in-law has some ear care stuff for me so that’s good. ❤ Her!

In other news, I put up a background last week. It’s just an Ent in Crystalsong Forest  (You remember Northrend don’t ya?) I fooled around with some others, but this one felt the most balanced. I might change it up if it gets a negative response. Let me know what you think in a comment/e-mail, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’ll be doing some toying around this week with pages and stuff, so if you’re browsing the site while this is happening, don’t panic, the Cataclysm already happened.

Do you have any piercings? What are your thoughts on the new look, Like/Dislike? Leave a comment and let me know.