Level 90, Heroic Dungeon and Raid testing here I come!

I managed to crawl my way to finishing off level 89 the other night (okay, so it really wasn't that bad ^.^)! Found out where to obtain free PvP gear so I would be wearing something a bit closer to what I would look for, but the dilemma I had was gold. It's always about money isn't it!? Created a bunch of premade 85s and mailed their gold to my shaman just so I could pick up gems to outfit my new gear; these were not cheap! The gear's pretty snazzy though :).

Besides the money hiccup I'm pretty much prepped as well as I'm going to be (not bothering with enchants at this time as I don't have a maxxed enchanter for Mists content). Did one Heroic Dungeon so far, Siege of Niuzao Temple. Fairly interesting fight mechanics involved in the dungeon, most I haven't seen applied in the fashion Blizzard decided to put them in. Overall I was impressed with what I encountered, healing it wasn't easy even with my gear being put at an iLvl estimated to handle the dungeon (lower then the PvP gear I had equipped) and the dungeon was challenging and interesting all at once!

 Attempted some LFR Mosu'ghan Vaults and didn't make it past the second boss, but again some interesting mechanics put in place by Blizzard. The second boss is actually difficult and requires quite a bit of coordination from the whole group, something I wouldn't expect to see in a PuG situation. I found myself facing alot of mana problems, couldn't keep any amount of it for the life of me; that's something I desperately need to work on. Hopefully with the hotfixes they recently put into place buffing Healing Rain while decreasing mana cost that I'll feel a little more comfortable; how do you AoE heal without Healing Rain and only being able to use Chain Heal every 6 seconds or so? You don't! Going to take some time hopefully later tonight to attempt some LFR again and see if these hotfixes are worth me not pretending to be a druid in Wrath spamming Rejuvination (equivalent to my Riptide glyphed) on the entire raid. Crossing my fingers for something a little more interesting! Otherwise I'll be switching out some glyphs each fight, which is supposedly what Blizzard intended so I guess I'll learn to do it one way or another ;).

In non-related news I did complete Heroic Dragon Soul with my group this week, yay! Took the week off this week so I could spend time with the boyfriend and son, but hoping to get back in there this week.

A break from WoW; what?!

Been so busy lately that I haven't had much of a chance on here, but I'll take the time to make a few bulletpoints anyways.

• Took a break from WoW about a month ago to get my life straightened out, WoW became such an addiction that it took priority over the more important things in my life, like my family and doing what I'm supposed to be doing while I'm staying at home; cleaning the house.
• Got everything straightened out and am now attending my first week back to raiding on my resto shaman; without the heavy burden of being guild CDO on my plate and feeling like I need to do everything for the guild things seem a bit better between my home life and WoW life.
• Testing MoP beta for the past while so I can get a head start when the live version comes out in September.
• Guild has in the meantime completed Heroic Dragon Soul (you rock guys and gals!). Sucks that I wasn't there but oh well, life comes first.
• Pretty much gave up on Diablo 3 after getting my "main" to Inferno Act 3, way too much time repeating for my like to get any further in the game.

And that's about it, going to make a point to boot my ass into gear so I can blog more often in my free time!

The Road to level 90: A Mists of Pandaria beta adventure!

Since I am an annual pass holder, I received a beta invite a few months ago to go with my other gifts included in the deal I signed up for (whether the whole year contract was worth it or not that is still being debated on); but I never did much of anything with my beta access. Logged on a few times to play around with some glyphs and imagine my shaman as a Pandaren, but that's about it! A few weeks ago I decided it was time for me to get around playing it, free access to boss strats from dungeons and raids prior to the live content comes out will help my guild out I hope. At the beginning of the Cataclysm expansion I wrote a guide to Heroic dungeon bosses for my previous guild since I was the first to be able to do them and they really appreciated it.

 Mists of Pandaria has such gorgeous scenery, I love it. If a game I'm playing has nice scenery and a captivating storyline I'll usually be too busy just looking at the environment my virtual avatar is exploring, or reading the questlines to understand the full story behind what I'm doing instead of going for the all out "balls to the wall" type questing that most people do in the effort to reach max level first.

 My shaman is currently level 89, the first level was given to me since the Jade Forest was closed for repairs so that was one less level I needed to grind out :). For the following levels it wasn't near as terrible to get the experience needed as I was expecting, I ended up with enough rested experience to almost get me to 90; just finishing it off today with about 2/3 of my last level to go. The changes to resto shamans are pretty neat, glyph so my Riptide doesn't have a cooldown but doesn't do the initial and another glyph to change the looks of my chain heals make everything seem like something new, feeling more like a druid/kind of paladin hybrid again. Considering that's why I fell in love with shaman healing in the first place that just fine with me :).

 Don't get me started on Ascendence, http://mop.wowhead.com/spell=114049/ascendance! This ability is beyond awesome as a resto shaman, if you're familiar with Ultraxion from Dragon Soul it's like the green buff you can obtain on crack! Really handy spell, just wish it would last me a little bit longer. With the additions it seems like I have more cooldowns then I know what to do with at times, probably why they removed buff totems out of the equation...

Hoping to get myself to 90 soon (probably within the next week) and get to work on scenarios and raids so I can really be on top of things when this hits Live!