PVP and Hallows Eve

Last night was fun! 

1. Maxed out my conquest points for the week. 'de rezz' now has a 729 arena rating, which isn't great, but is improving (last week score was 95). Followed quickly by a grand-slam 5:0 win in Arathi Basin for 25 more conquest. By end of next week, I hope to have my season 10 conquest chest piece replacing my raiding Tier-11 chest. 
2. Ran through 3 Headless Horseman dungeons (after 1AM local), this awarded 2 hallow's eve achieves (horseman and mask) plus picked up the caster ring for epic and cataclysmic epic. Plan to keep running the dungeon until I pickup the healer ring, plus the squashling for the achieves. At least now, if I don't see it by the end, I'll just buy it. 

Off to trick or treat tonight. Need to finish Outlands for the achievements. After Outlands, I should have enough GNERDS for the PVP achievements and then enough Tricky Treats to spill them out. 

Which Brewfest Trinket for Disc?

Pickled Egg proc glows

Brewfest is over and it's time to start clearing out the bags of all the trinkets from Coren. Over the two dozen runs through this mini-dungeons, I picked up all three of the 'caster' friendly trinkets.

Now, right off, the easy selection seems to be the Petrified Pickled Egg. It has high INT and procs Haste. Both seem great. Unfortunately it procs off healing spells and playing an Atonement Disc Priest, my key spell is not a heal, but smite, a DPS spell.

By Grifters (206 – 3) 16 days ago (Patch 4.2.2)Sadly Atonement do not proc it. :(

So, now do I run the strict STAM trinket, or do I run the CRIT trinket? I know the Balebrew charm is definitely going into my PVP set. Nothing better in PVP than having more life for the opposing team to take away. Unfortunately, according to those nifty stat weights on AskMrRobot, Crit is the least useful stat for disc, followed close by haste.

I guess the answer is none of them. Before next raid night, going to spend some JP and pick up the Core of Ripeness.

Stepping into the Arena

Last night my guild was on the last boss of BOT. Yeah, we're a little behind, but very, very casual. They were short a healer, so I got to step in for our typical druid healer. After a few attempts, we had Cho'gall down and I picked up a wonder new weapon, replacing my 316 Biting Wind.

With that, we called the night and I went back to battlegrounds. With the win last night in Eye, I had enough Honor points (>7250) to qualify for the Season 9 weapons, namely a new wand and the related cheese. Whew average i359 gear score!

not us.

OK, so I had been bugging an avid PVP player in guild about running a few arenas. He was interested. He stated that priests look to be top contenders in the arenas right now, it would be a good match. I wanted to do it, so I could pick up a big handful of conquest points. Running Battlegrounds for 25 points a day, is DREADFULLY slow.

Step 1. Form an Arena team. Go to the PVP menu (H), click on the Arena tab on bottom and then click on the 2v2 banner. Up comes the team banner interface, (color, icon and name). Populate the info, invite my 'tank' and save it.

Step 2. Fight! Now we're a team, invite him to join this little party and fire off the arena finder. Queue, accept, apply buffs and everything during the 45 seconds, then die once the gates open.

Step 3. Buy shiny new gear!. Unfortunately after a dreadful 1:7 run last night, I didn't rake in the conquest points that I envisioned. I got just around 100 last night for both the fight and the random battleground. At the moment I have about 1000 resilience. My team member suggests that I stack around the magic "3500" resilience.

Next steps. Going forward, I need to pick up more PVP gear. ATM, I have 5 pieces (shoulders, gloves, neck, trinket 1 and wand). The shoulders have the PVE enchant, not PVP. The gems are all PVE raiding, as well. With 4.3 coming soon (November I hear), buying up Vicious gear might be pointless. I need the gear, or else it will continue to be 10 seconds to death for me. Can't leave my druid fending off everyone all the time...

Healers Have to Live!

Check out this post by Cynwise about a feature in Healers Have to Die that highlights the friendly healers. It makes wonderful sense to highlight that your friendly healer is being hurt in a BG, but one commenter mentioned he uses the addon in raiding, as well, to pinpoint when they have healer aggro.

Bounty of Drops

During the raid last Wednesday, not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 upgrades dropped during our run through BoT. OK, one of the drops, the pants, are an off-spec, DPS set upgrade, but still a nice change.

1. Bracers of the Dark Pool - replacing the PVP  Bloodthirsty Firewave Bracers
2. Wyrmbreaker's Amulet - replacing the PVP Vicious Gladiator's Pendant of Meditation. Of course, after the raid, I then completed the 40-ish quests to open the Fireland's dailies and picked up the i365 neck from there. 
3. Flame Pillar Leggings - didn't end up using, because I already had the crafted Flame-Ascended Pantaloons
4. Power Generator Hood - replacing Mercury-Coated Hood.

Finally, the Jar of Ancient Remedies also dropped off Maloriak, but I passed rolling on it, due to my other 4 wins. It WOULD have been a nice upgrade for my non-heroic Witching Hourglass. Of course, my raid leaders don't have an iPhone, otherwise the new changes to the AskMrRobot applet might have alerted them to the discrepancy. :)

Raiding Priorities

I've been told tonight, I'll get to heal for the raid group! They are going to reset all of the raids and run one of the starting environments. For most of the group, this will be old content. Seen and killed Magmaw a few times already. Hopefully this means that all the wonderful caster gear will be MINE!

To get prepared, I've been researching on AskMrRobot and LootRank. To be exact, I am taking the stat scale provided by MrRobot and using it on the LootRank website. The reason being, that LootRank has one option that I love, te All-in-One view. This helps me see what upgrades would be my biggest and best upgrades. Considering, I have 4 items that are iLevel 300 - 316, I think I know which to watch for, but still like the view.

LR Priority:

1. Weapon - Crafted, Nefarion then Magmaw
2. Trinkets - Crafted, Cho'gall then JP Vendor
3. Wand - VP Vendor or Chimaeron

Personal Priorities (low, or replacing PVP gear)

1. Helm - Magmaw
2. Shoulder - Altramedes
3. Neck - VP Vendor or Halfus
4. Bracers - VP Vendor, or Altramedes

I'll let you know if anything drops tonight. Or if I get kicked and replaced with a DPS toon.

PVP Bug? Or healing NPCs?

I just finished a BG, Alterac Valley, where we won. I was just overwhelmingly surprised, when I saw this warrior did so much healing!

Today I reached a 348 iLevel by equipping a PVP trinket. This replaced the mediocre (i316) Rainsong. I also picked bought off the AH a Mercury-coated Hood ro replace my Aurelian Mitre.

With these two replacements, I ran a totally pugged Lost City. First boss, all but the rogue died. Nice because he actually res'd us all. No drops that I could use, but very frantic fights. Got the heart racing, for sure.