Feels Like Fall

The air is getting chill and we should have new wood to stack soon. With the painting project still underway, we'll need to be careful to stack it out farther from the building.
I've managed to be unusually productive this week, cleaning up the bathroom and much of the kitchen (I may do more of the latter tomorrow). That's something to feel good about, at least.


Fallout in Heaven!
Sidereals (premably Bronze faction) attempted to block the circle from seeing Lytek while others assaulted Xian's manse in some way. Of course, traveling with the Maiden of Serenity is a bonus, and she effectively removed those barring their way and offered Lytek safe haven. Xian has also stated he is going to return to his project to repair the Mask - one of the constellations, the damaging of which causes Sidereals to be easily forgettable and hard to pin blame on. He wants accountability. Ah, politics.
This leaves the circle to return to Creation and work on taking Thorns from the Mask of Winter. Getting back to Gem easily, however, means going through Xian's manse, so there is to be some manner of "breaking in" involved.
A sketchy plan exists for taking on the MoW:
- Infiltrate Juggernaut to cleanse him/it of the necrotic beings within. Cured/released, Juggernaut is a potential ally and major distraction.
- Catch the Mask of Winter by surprise! ... Umm... I have no idea how we're supposed to pull that part off, but Winter's Crown needs to be put on him to have its effect and we're also supposed to get one of Lytek's impliments from him (either by sneaky theft or off his remains should work).
- Beat him down. Presumably, the crown is not going to defeat him, only weaken him/make him defeatable. That means it'll still probably come down to a fight, and odds are good the circle will have to go through others to get to him, so I don't expect that to be easy in any way.
Then it's just a matter of cleaning up stragglers, curing the shadowland, and convincing a city they haven't traded one horrid dictator for another. Yeah. Simple.



The Echoes of Doom pre-Wrath of the Lich King patch has gone live on WoW. Added content? Not a whole lot. There's a capital city harbor, hair stylists, a few new spells/talents, and the inscription profession. That last one's the biggie as far as raw content goes. Scribe trainers are surrounded by people leveling the profession, and the auction house price of herbs has skyrocketed.
But this patch is a lot bigger than that. A lot bigger than that. Some stats have been consolidated. Spell damage and healing have become spell power. Hit and critical bonuses now apply to both spells and physical attacks instead of being separate. This may seem trivial until you consider that it necessitated changes to the database covering some thousands (I really have no idea how many) items that had these traits.
Similarly, some of the basic mechanics inherent in the classes have changed. Druids don't get as much of an armor bonus in bear form and the 'extra' armor in their leather armor has been shifted to other stats (this has our druid tank sweating things). Paladin bonuses have shifted radically and the seal/judgement system has changed (this has me sweating things). And... lots of other things that I'm less familiar with have changed.
And so, there are some bugs. With anything this major, that's a given and if anyone was actually expecting 12 hours of downtime and then everything running smoothly, they were delusional. I've seen login issues, servers have been down longer than scheduled, I've seen graphics issues... and in the strangest bug ever (for my money), I've walked one of my characters into a room to see another of my characters (who had been there, teleported elsewhere, and logged out) still standing there. Seeing two characters from the same account in the game at once should be impossible. I almost expected some paradoxical system crash. I'm just glad I got a screenshot 'cause that's not likely to ever happen again.

So...
Sashayla: I'm going to need to relearn how/what to juggle as a protection paladin. All the careful research of other people's careful research as to what stats are most important is out the window. I need to once again get a feel for how many of the spells work and how best to use them. I don't think armor and health took a big hit, but if I memory serves, I had about 50% more mana before the patch. I'm hoping the new mana regeneration mechanics make up for that, but it's hard to tell. There's going to be a period of getting used to this class again, though test realm information has assured me the class is overall improved in ability.
Reyalyn: I don't feel so strange having a shadow priest in healer gear anymore, because there are no real healing-specific gear stats anymore. I'm not too terribly worried here. With the little testing I've managed to do, I perceive an increase in DPS with a decrease in mana regeneration/efficiency. I won't be able to really test playing healer 'til we get a group together.
Salaev: I've not tested or compared warlock class capabilities seriously. I'm told affliction is a little better now for some applications. But then, I haven't played Salaev in a group, really, so I'm not unlearning anything. He's my chosen scribe, so I've worked on getting his inscription up. I hit 124 (one short of learning the next rank) before running out of third-tier herbs to convert into pigments (to then convert into inks). With prices as they are, hitting the auction house isn't entirely viable, and I don't have a high-level herbalist of my own to support him. I was (and am) planning to make my deathknight an herbalist, but that class still isn't available (though some of the code is in) until WotLK is out. So, I imagine leveling inscription will be slow from this point, but it's still better than not having a scribe.

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