84 to 364 in just over 24 hours of /played

Just over a week ago now I was faced with a difficult quandary - stop playing, find a new home for my Paladin, or find someone to take a chance on my Warlock.  Of course, this was me taking a chance as well.  I mean, I've spent the last few years healing, and the years before that tanking, with only some side jaunts into the realm of ICC ranged DPS (after the 30% nerf) or as a fury/slam warrior.  Could I do it?  Could I find that guild to take a chance?  Would it really be all that I hoped for?

It was certainly time to find out.

So after an application and an interview, I transferred servers and started getting raid ready.  Let me set the stage and timeline for you here.  First, I was installing new floors (finishing them actually, and damn do they look good) and so tensions were high in the house.  Then I'm juggling qutting or taking a lock spot.  Fortunately my wife is awesome, and while I'm sure she'd like it if I played WoW (or other games) less, she knows it's better than me joining a bowling league.  

So there I am on Friday night (the 15th), taking a quick hour to push my lock to 85.  As soon as I hit, I get him some VP bracers, JP boots, and some relatively inexpensive BoEs off the AH.  I grab the tabards I needed, and started hitting the heroics.  I thought about hitting the Firelands quest areas, but I'm not keen on suicide.  I was a fresh 85 lock on a PvP server.  Nothing screams "I taste delicious" like someone wearing magic-toilet paper (thanks for that phrase Cyn!) that isn't even heroic level, but just some greens.

Instead, I take stock of what pieces I need first, and what I can get my hands on in a hurry.  The first thing I noticed was that in my original leveling (since I stopped him at like 83 to go back to the Paladin - raid needs come first) I completely skipped Deepholm.  Now, I don't mean I did part of Deepholm and stopped just short of the Therazane folks.  I mean I somehow skipped the entire zone. I think I was just a little tired of it by the time I was leveling the lock, and did I mention I was on a PvP server?  So I started the zone while queueing for heroics.  I'd slapped on the Dragonmaw/Wildhammer tabard, figuring the neck would be a good holdover (I didn't know about the neck from Firelands questing), and off I went.

24 hours of /played later

I'd server transferred, faction changed (human was the only race I could stomach as a lock), hit exalted with Therazane, capped my VP twice, nabbed two epics from Firelands T12 raids (MH BoE dagger and OH), and am now sitting at a 364 iLvl.  While it took a fairly intensive week to do it, I'm so far ahead of where I was, it's not even funny.  I certainly wouldn't want to do it again any time soon (that was a LOT of PuG Zulroics), but I will admit that it took a lot less time than I'd anticipated.  Of course a lot of it I owe to the guild that I'm trialing with.  They took me into T12 content when I was pretty undergeared, hooked me up with a BoE dagger, and have been pretty awesome all around.  

I don't think I'll get to raid tonight, but that's ok.  I'm on standby while they go for a repeat on Domo and try to get Rag for the first time, and I can use the time to work on my PvP gear.  I don't know if I like PvPing as DPS as much as I did on my pally - it's a lot different.  I think in a random, where I don't have my wingman Wombcrusher looking out for me, the Lock is better.  I've noticed that healers in PvP that don't have a good peeler with them just get crushed.  Because I know this however, I can keep a good eye out on any healers in my area and save my fears/deathcoil for helping them.  

Wrap-up

I've thoroughly enjoyed the last 10 days of warlockery.  It's pretty impressive to watch my DPS get better every day, and not just because I'm adding epics.  I know my rotations are getting tighter, and I'm building that internal timer that I need to keep my DoTs rolling.  I had the same timer with my Paladin, where I could just feel when things were coming up.  I used to joke that my healing was done on a metronome in Wrath, you just knew that a heal was landing every second (hello haste cap).  Now I'm working on that for the lock.

The hardest part I'm having is, is it worth hard casting a 2nd Shadowbolt to get the 3rd stack of Shadow Embrace up (DoTs tick 5% harder), or is it better to get the DoTs up and ticking, and let the 3rd stack land when it can.  

I guess the other issue is what to do with that last little bit of time between the 2nd and 3rd Haunt.  With an 8sec CD and a 12 sec buff, there's a little wiggle room, but not much.  I'm guesing add in another SB, and maybe a lifetap.  I've certainly discovered that tapping early and often is better, since I don't have Mana Feed in my Affliction build.

CoE, SB, Haunt, UA, Cor, BoD, SB, SB, Haunt, UA, SB, SB, SB - I'll get my metronome set yet.

Traveling to the dark side

The Shattering is upon us, and Cataclysm looms around the corner, and the band is getting back together again. Currently we've named ourselves , because when we hopped servers a bunch of us went with Punchout style names. Pistonhondo was my name, but Piston hasn't seen much love lately.



While I know that things are still changing, and that the game isn't tuned for 80 but for 85, I have to confess that I have found the changes to the Paladin healing game to be fairly disappointing. While I think that they have done some good things for the class, and it's certainly changed from the FoL/HL spam we had, it just doesn't feel right. Our heals are still powerful, and our soloing DPS is better, but it's just not the same class.



I'm not alone in this, as our resident priest and my healing partner has also found his Priest class changes to be a bit too much for him, and he doesn't really like the way the class plays now. While a lot of this may be a "Who moved my cheese" type reaction, this is certainly a more radical change than we've ever seen in the past.



Grabbing a new insturment



So with the band getting back for Cata, it was time to evaluate the members. Our core group is still the same, and we may even be getting a Priest from way back (like, Vanilla days) to help fill it out. With this, our entire healing core is changing, and Monger and I are heading down the road of DPS. Monger is changing to his tried and trusted Ele-Shaman, but I went to something wildly differet.



A Warlock.



Let me know when you've closed your mouth and refocused.

***Edit***

Apparantly I fail at remembering how to Blog, as I lost the second half of this post. So here's the short version.

I'm playing a lock now.

Tanking and Healing aren't falling off the radar, so I'll be keeping up to speed on those.

Skelroon is my retarded Felgaurd, more on him later.

The loss of portals is awesome