OK I ate too much

Christmas has come and gone and with with it being New Years Eve tomorrow I have run out of excuses not to post. I've no real excuse, just distracted by the game, life and recooperating some energy for the madness January will bring at work

Cataclysm has bought good things and bad things for me. I've spent the week doing a variety of things, not just gold related
Healing

I almost threw in the towel last week when I tried healing my first heroic on my priest. Three hours of wiping without dropping a single boss, and I was ready to call it a day.

Discipline priests (a week ago at least) were struggling. Most priests I know have switched to Holy, but being the stubborn so and so that I am (plus the fact that I don't enjoy holy) I was determined to remain discipline. My thoughts were that if Blizzard have broken a spec that much, then that's their problem, not mine. And surely they can't have screwed up that much could they?

We wandered off to Stone Core. Trash was CCed, the first boss was reached without much incident.

15 wipes later we thought that we'd try another instance. Shadowfang Keep was picked. Again we got to the first boss without much incident, again I just couldnt heal the first boss.

What made things worse was that we decided to change a few roles around. The tank (paladin) went heals. The DPS DK went tank. The priest switched to Shadow. And guess what? We one shot the boss.

I was seriously <----> this close to deleting the damn toon.

The issue was two-fold - mana and throughput. Now I knew that mana was always going to be an issue, I've done my reading. I'd taken Flash Heal out of my usual healing toolbox, and hidden it away on healbot only for emergencies. The trouble was that the entirity of each boss fight seemed to be an emergency. There was nothing that I could do to throw enough heals out to heal the tank. Nothing.

Shields were gone at the pull. They were next to useless. It was practically pointless to shield anyone. Heal and GH were taking too long to cast (even hasted by shield), and as you are aware once you get behind in your heals you either lose the tank or have to use your mana intensive spells, which puts you OOM so you lose the tank anyway.

Disc was broken - and I actually considered the darkside of Holy as a healing spec.

I took a couple of days away (threw myself at the AH etc), did some reading, respecced. I've dropped the smite/archangel spec for a pure Disc spec. Yesterday I got back no the horse and healed a couple of normals, and thing were better. "Boss fights cleared with 70% mana remaining" better.

I personally think there was an undocumented 'fix' in the last mini patch. Shields now last a number of seconds giving time for a GH to hit. I'll head back into a heroic later today and try again.

Losing Disc as a viable healing spec would be a great loss IMHO. Its the only pure mitigation healing spec in the game, and always brought something different to the game for me. I'd hate for it to be truely broken. But we'll see.

Hunting

Puraa hit 85. I'm happy. She's still MM (even though SV is deemed the spec of choice) and still kicks ass when it comes to DPS. She CCs, she pew pews, she tops DPS charts. And she isn't even able to enter heroics yet because of her gear. I love hunters :)


Gold

Sitting at 420k. I'm in a consolidation phase. Its not as though the money isnt coming in, its just I am making investments elsewhere which means the bottom line isnt moving much. With incomings and outgoings in the 15-20k region each day I could just accumulate, but I'm working to a plan and that doesnt involve resting on my laurels.

Glyphs are selling, but the way I have things set up mans I spend around 30 minutes every two days posting, then just walk away. 48 hours later I repeat this, but have 3k+ more in my coffers.

Disenchanting is still a good money earner, although the falling price of hypnotic dust is starting to make things less viable. With the ongoing Auctioneer scanning issues I'm having to do a lot of manual scans of cata gear (generally twice for lvl77+ armour and weapons) and have been using fixed values for the mats themselves to drive the DE search itself.

Its funny how factions change, dust on alliance is less than 14g, whilst on horde its still a healthy 19g. However the essences are reversed, still being 65g+ for a GCE on alliance but only 45g on horde. Havent got a scooby why, but sometimes it not worth worrying about.

The power leveling of professions has started to ease. The bargains that once were are not as frequently found on the AH. But I have big stockpiles of a variety of items, which can now be drip fed back into the economy. Forward thinking was always the key, as well as being able to gauge where certain mats were going to plateau. I always tend to take a conservative approach to guestimating these, so I'm feeling comfortable with where I've made my purchases. Sure I may have missed a bargain or two, but I cant have all the gold in the game can I?

And finally

Breevok has left the AH, been deleted and recreated as a worgen. Still a druid, but one who will smell the fresh air and not be tied runnin from mailbox to AH and back again :)