MotW

"We aren't using the Zeed word!"

This is a classic by all means of the word. When this came out in 2004 many people that are hardcore Zombie fans were put off but now years later they see the brillance in this bit of film.

An excellent movie to just loop in the background as it has enough laughs and enough action to keep you motivated.

I promised the last part of the Balance Tree but I've got some kind of stomach bug and not up to writing. Sorry to everyone who's been reading that latest examination.

Learning your Roots: Balance Druid Part 2

Bosque is about three bubbles away from 63, I’ve split time between doing PVP and leveling, hence the slower climb to 70. Still enjoying it though and I managed to hit 375 Herbalism and sitting pretty at 315 Alchemy. I’ve already got some of the high level plans for Alchemy that should garner me some money, hopefully enough for swift flight form.

Alright let’s get down to it. When last we spoke, I began to talk to you about the Balance Tree, today I aim to continue that conversation.

Brambles is the first talent that you’re going to see in the third row. This talent will affect the damage done to a target by both Thorns and Entangling Roots. Thorns is a self cast spell that gives out damage to anyone attacking you. I have Thorns on me all the time, its second nature to have the damage ticking off of a mob. While Nature’s Grasp is a totally wasted talent, this is one that serves two good purposes and shouldn’t go without some love.

Insect Swarm is a spell exclusive to Balance and one that is actually an instant cast spell and incredibly useful. While Farie Fire is great when you’re a melee beast or when you’re working with a group, Insect Swarm is the best when you’re soloing. Two reasons, first it does give a small chance that the target may miss when aiming for you but more importantly, it does some damage over time. So in theory, when you get this talent, you could do Entangling Roots, Moonfire, Insect Swarm and then Wrath. This would give the first spells time to work on the health of the mob while you spam Wrath.

Nature’s Reach is a gimme, you HAVE to have this talent. It increases the reach of your Balance spells. So any casting spell will basically have a longer reach. This is great for those range pulls. It gives you more time to take down a mob before it even reaches your front door. A great way to make sure that your caster loving self has enough time to bring that mob down to a manageable size before they make you caster worms.

Vengeance is the talent that you have access to if you put points into Focused Starlight (which you should have done). It’s a five point talent that increases the critical strike damage bonus of your three bread and butter spells as a caster. You drop the five points and it’s a 100% increase, which is absurdly wonderful for the Moonkin in all of us. I’ll tell you why it’s all sorts of goodness further down the tree.

Celestial Focus has two uses. The first it gives up to a 15% chance to stun a target when hit by Starfire. I know that’s not much but it’s the second thing that it does that you want to put points in here for; you can have up to a 70% chance to resist spell interruption when casting Wrath. So if you’re running around and a mob is hitting you, you can still get Wrath off and cause serious hurt to the target causing you grief.

Lunar Guidance is great. For three points you can increase your spell damage and healing by 25% of your total Intellect. As a caster you’re going to be looking for any type of gear that’s going to have intellect on it to begin with. So this is a nice bonus to reward you for making sure you have enough intellect to get a high mana pool.

Nature’s Grace. This is a one pointer that’s going to be feeding off your critical strikes as a caster. Your point will gain you an ability that will produce with each critical strike you achieve. It reduces the cast time of ANY spell by .5 seconds. That, that’s a GREAT little trick. As a Moonkin you’re going to have an aura that gives a 5% chance to crit. Your gear will be set up to give you a better chance to crit as well. Case in point Bosque currently sits just over 16% crit chance. I’ve already gotten 2k crit hits, I’m only level 62.

Moonglow is a mana reducer. It reduces the cost of just about all your spells by up to 9%. As a Balance Druid you’re ALREADY going to have issues making sure your mana pool doesn’t go dry after every fight, getting this will help making sure the pool stays somewhat steady.

::WHEW!:: Okay, I think that’s it for today. I wanted to try and crunch it all down to just two entries but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow for me to finish this bad boy out. I will say this though, aside from maybe one or two talents on this tree, I feel that all the talents on here are not only viable but essential for a Moonkin to be good at what he/she does.

So, there you go.

Zangarmarsh

One of the few zones that I'm beginning to get a new joy for. When I hit 61 with Bosque I stopped leveling for a couple of hours to get my herbalism up. I was sitting pretty at 277 and after a couple of hours of circling the Blasted Lands I ended up hitting 305, that made just about everything in Hellfire an herbing joy. While that's fun, what's better is begin able to herb those stupid Bug Lords and Giants.

The main reason?

Motes of Life! After completing most of my quests in the Mire Bog, I had 2 Primal Lifes in pocket and on my way to a third! In my server those go for about 8g a piece in AH since all of the Cloth professionals need them for some nice purples later on.

I've been playing the AH a little more with the drops that I get an normally make a good bit of money. Case in point, I bought my Epic mount which ran me about 560. I was down to 40g after that, and I didn't transfer any money from another toon. Just on his drops and the pots he can make I'm close to 300g again. Life, life is good.

Tomorrow I'll pick up the Balance tree for you again.

Learning your Roots: Balance Druid Part 1

Blog Azeroth is a new tool for bloggers, someone requested that I do more of the tree breakdowns for classes. Since I’m currently working on my Druid and that build is FRESH in my head, I’ll work with that for now.

Learning your Roots: Balance Druid

A Balance Druid is a fun build. A friend once called it, “A Mage with Plate Armor” and that’s exactly what it is. Consider this, if you build a Druid when you get bear form you get a 400% armor boost. This enables the bear to tank for a 5, 10 or 25 group as well as solo. At level 40 a Druid that has run the Balance tree gets Moonkin Form. Moonkin is a highly armored form that allows you to cast nature spells. So you have high armor and severely high spell damage. I’ll explain more as I break this down for you.

Let me disclaimer something to you right now. When I built my Druid I leveled as Feral for the first 40 levels. The reason being is that while you do have good spells as a druid, doing it as a straight caster the entire time puts you at a disadvantage. First because you don’t get Moonkin until level 40, this means that you’re not better than a Mage or a Warlock in the sense that it’s two swipes and you’re down. The other part of it is that you will have a harder time leveling because you can’t take out two mobs at once. So remember that if you are going to Balance from level 1, you will more than likely have a lot of graveyard runs in your future, you’ve been warned.

Starlight Wrath is going to be one of your main attacks as a Balance Druid and will also be a main attack when you’re a lowbie. It’s great high damage but it takes a while to get it cast on the mob that you’re trying to take down. Putting five points into this talent brings down the cast time of this attack, something you really want since it’s basically the start of any attack you’re going to do.

Nature’s Grasp is the second talent at the start of the tree. “While active, any time an enemy strikes the caster they have a 35% chance to become afflicted by Entangling Roots. Only useable outdoors, 1 charge. Lasts 45 sec.” This is a waste of a point to me for several reasons. First, you have to be STRUCK before it’s activated, so you have to suffer damage before it becomes active. Problem with this is if you’re struck and get dazed, your time to runaway is cut down severely and you don’t do much with it. The second is that it can only happen once a battle. So there’s no promise that it will happen at the beginning of the fight, it may very well happen as you drop your killing blow, highly annoying. The most important thing to me though, that makes it useless, is that it’s only outdoors. I don’t know if you noticed but you have to run INTO a lot of places, caves, hovels, houses, crypts and instances (Which are considered INDOORS) so if you begin to rely on this talent, it’s going to be useless to you in most situations.

The last talent at the top is Improved Nature’s Grasp which gives a higher probability of your target getting entangled but doesn’t give you more charges and doesn’t allow you to use this talent indoors, so to me this is a wash.

So firs five go into Starlight and that opens up the next three which are basically must haves.

Control of Nature is the first one that it’s the second segment. It begins by giving you a 40% chance of avoiding interruption by damage when you’re casting Roots or Cyclone and maxes out at 100%. So no matter how strong the attack being sent against you, you’ll still get your cast off. Cyclone you don’t get until level 70 but if you go to the forums you will see other classes are always highly upset that you can do it with no cool down. Might be something fun if you’re into PVP.

Focused Starlight. As a Moonkin you will depend HIGHLY on the ability to get a critical attack on a mob because it allows some of the other abilities available to you to activate. You put two points into this talent and it increases the possibilities to get a critical strike from Starfire and Wrath by 4%, these are going to be two spells you will use regularly and I can’t begin to tell you how important it is that you have them up as high as possible. This talent also leads to another one further down the tree that I’ll talk about later.

Improved Moonfire. Again this is a talent that you want to spend points on because it elevates the critical strike opportunity for one of your bread and butter spells. It gives a 10% chance for your Moonfire attacks to be a critical strike. Very tasty if you’re a caster.

I’m going to stop here for today. I don’t want to overwhelm you right away. I’m going to attach an image, hope it comes out...

Depression

So Bosque is in Outlands now, happily killing things at level 61. While the speed in which I got there is nice, I have to tell you that I have had a hard time with my guild in the past couple of weeks. That’s not to say that it had ANYTHING to do with raiding and more to do with the overall attitude of the guild itself. Sometimes when working with people for so long you get used to the way other people do things. Then there are times that no matter what happen you let it just slid off your back and it’s not a big deal. Usually that’s who I am.

This past weekend that wasn’t there for me. Instead I was confronted with a part of my personality that I don’t really enjoy. I’ll be honest here and let you know that I’m bi-polar. Not many people will admit to something like that but I will. I’ve know for over five years that I had that imbalance going. It slipped through the cracks of my teenage years because I was living with a high school teacher and didn’t have any insurance at the time. I learned about it because I’m an emotional guy. Ask anybody who runs with me or who knows me well and they’ll tell you that I wear my emotions on my sleeve like most heart sick puppies wear their hearts. There isn’t anything that doesn’t give me SOME kind of emotion and any guy that sits there and says, oh well I don’t have any feelings toward x, y or z and I will tell you that they are lying to you and you should kick them in the shin.

One of the first times that I remember realizing that something wasn’t right in my brain was with an ex-girlfriend. We had been dating for over a year and we were talking about marriage but I wasn’t quite sure of that future. She and I had some kind of silly argument about where to eat and I just went ballistic. I mean just balls to the wall about it and I began speeding through town in the little car that we had. We were in the car when the argument happened and I drove with anger in my mind. I drove like the world was against me and I came to a screeching halt in front of her house and told her to take a hike. Funny thing is that this all happened as we were supposed to go to church. I sat behind the wheel of that car, engine idling and wondered, what the hell was my problem? The issue was that even though I understood something was WRONG I couldn’t get into the mindset to figure out that the something was me. I was just out there but I couldn’t reel myself back in.

A couple of years later I began taking medication to help with this issue. It’s a good medication. I can see clearer, mentally, with this medication on board than I did before. The life around me is crisper and I’m taking things in stride. That’s great but I have to remember to take my medication and sometimes, well that just doesn’t happen. I get up early in the morning but I’m not really awake until I’m in my car headed for work. So between the times I get up and the time I leave for work I’m supposed to be getting my crap in order for the day, medications usually slip my mind.

I forgot like five days straight last week. So by Sunday it was out of my system and the dumbest things started getting on my nerves. The Hooved Missus is starting to feel A LOT better and when she does she likes to be helpful around the house and with various other things. So Sunday I’m sitting in front of my computer suffering through WSG, cause that’s what it is when you’re Alliance suffering, and my wife asked me about something that I had asked HER to do earlier in the week and had never gotten around to doing it. Now she was doing it while I was playing and it IRKED me. I mean it REALLY just bent me out of shape. Coupled with WSG and I was livid. Then my GM made some off the cuff remark that normally I would just retort back to and I’m getting ready to be in a RAGE.

One of the guys I run with normally also made some jab at me in fun and I just stared at the screen for a moment and waited to hear moans of pain and agony as the others there would begin to type about the pain my mental powers put them in and have them apologize to me or they would pay even more dearly for what they had done to me.

I shut down and went to the kitchen, took all my meds and took a shower to give them time to work before I joined the general populace of my house again. Yes I was bent out of shape but as you can tell as you read this, I didn’t even really have a clue about what it was I was bent out of shape about; I just knew that I wasn’t happy. Happiness comes from what you do but when you’re bi-polar and clinically depressed, it doesn’t matter WHAT you do, you’re always depressed.

I think that playing WOW, while time consuming; it has really given me a barometer for when there’s something wrong with me. I enjoy playing a great deal; anyone that knows me will tell you that. When I get to the point where I don’t give a rip and I’m willing to blow up at my family, my medicine isn’t on board.

When I originally started to write this post I was going to bitch about my guild but the more I look at my mindset the last couple of days, the more I realize that the problem isn’t with them and it wasn’t with them, it was within myself and the crap that I was pulling on my own. Man, I’m glad I blog.