Cataclysmic log p6

Professions
Wow, I have picked a lot of herbs. @.@

My warlock was made primarily to try out the class and have someone to do inscription. Amusingly, after grinding his skill up to high-end Wrath levels, we had another player int he guild become active with their scribe - this story gets better later. I also took tailoring with him, because it didn't require specific gathering support and in the Burning Crusade era, bind-on-pickup tailored items were the way to go.

So I've been leveling his inscription again, though the glyphs taper off. Cataclysm inscription seems to be more about making relics (which are more universal than they used to be) and off-hand items. I decided to drop his tailoring as it's not nearly so important or useful when I have another character that does it. Instead, I took up alchemy and leveled that up from zero. I was actually able to cap it before inscription, go figure, but both are maxxed out now.

And the same player that became an active scribe before transfered over their druid who is... an alchemist.

This gives me access to that accursed truegold transmute myself - not that I'm quite to the point of being able to do anything with that yet. And in the process, my death knight has reached level 83 just gathering and doing the initial zone quests.

Heroics are Hard Again
"Let's do a dungeon!" carries a lot more weight to it these days. Especially when sight are set on heroics. I've done Vortex Pinnacle, Stonecore, and Grim Batol all on normal. I've now made a couple attempts at Deadmines on heroic difficulty and it's hard.

The first boss teleports around a few times. This wouldn't be a big deal, except he wipes his aggro table when he does so. And usually at his transition, he kills about two people in our group. The second boss isn't too complex, but often leads to fatalities too. The third is a wipe-fest. I can't help but wonder if using the golem to deal with adds at the bottom while fighting the boss up top isn't actually making things harder than they need to be.

The fourth boss, Ripsnarl, does some serious damage. Our healer was frequently running out of mana about the time we got him to 50% health, though we managed to finally squeak by only to be wiped repeatedly by Cookie and his spoiled food tossing.

It's now possible to spend hours in a heroic dungeon and still not get through it. Oof. Mana goes fast for healers - and this is even with me running Seal of Insight (rather than the more damaging Truth) and using Word of Glory as my holy power dump to heal myself some. I'm burning through most, if not all, of my survival cooldowns. It's pretty intense.

Part of this is simply the fact that we aren't geared as highly in comparison as we're "accustomed" to. Early in Wrath, we did not delve into heroics as quickly and we gave up a lot faster. The minimum item level requirements to use the dungeon finder are a minimum, and I don't think people are realizing that. Until we get well above that threshold, it's very likely to be a difficult ride.

In some ways, I welcome that, but I think everyone's expectations are a bit skewed. They aren't used to failure being an option, as it is for now. We'll see how long that lasts. I mean, the expansion has been out less than three weeks. I don't expect to be blowing through it all.