Turkey

I've been playing a fair amount over the holiday weekend, but haven't managed time to blog at all. Curiously, the holidays and my pushing for 80 set off a desire to play in my kids who have been begging for turns on the good computer and the wow accounts. So we swap around during the day and then I've been trying to concentrate on leveling at night.

Maybe that'll ease up now since I finally dinged 80 last night. I pushed hard to 79, but then repsecced prot on Thanksgiving evening and spent the night running a whole bunch of instances instead of grinding out quests.

It took a solid run to get the hang of the new tanking rotations. And I took the opportunity to move around some of my key buttons, which also meant a lot of missed keys over the last couple of days. But I'm getting used to where the buttons are now. I decided it was relatively optimal to keep my most frequent keys on '2', '3' and '9', '0', '-' and '=' with the middle ones being the less often cast. I seem to be most comfortable tanking with both hands on the kbd, although in multi-mob situations, I frequently have to reach back and forth for the mouse.

Over the last couple of days, I also started looking into the proble of the new defense cap of 540. Not only that, but it takes 4.8 pts of on-item rating to get a single point of def. It's not a trivial target. I looked up some quest & rep item blue replacements. Got a couple of pieces of the crafted tanking gear (thanks to Barantir) and started re-gemming.

While I was wrestling with the problem, I learned about the new BoP JC gems made from Dragon's Eye. These are 'prismatic' (any color slot gems) that carry a whopping 27 def or other really high stats. And you can now have 3 of them in your gear instead of 1. That pretty much solved my def problem. Or it will when I get all 3 socketed. You get them through doing the JC daily quest and you only get 1 per day.

If I've calculated correctly, I'm actually going to overshoot the 540 mark and get to undo a 'downgrade' to an old lvl 70 blue +def trinket. At first, I was annoyed that there is no new JC trinket with +def, but the Red Monarch Crab as +63 stam, 2 gem slots and a +300 dodge on use. Yeah, I'm going to go with that together with the old lvl 70 +def trinket.

So I think I'll be ready gearwise to raid very shortly. I wonder what the new consumeables will be -- flasks, best food buffs, weapon buffs (do we still get those? I remember a rumor about taking them out of the game). I was briefly tempted to try to push towards getting a quick visit Naxx run in this weekend to explore, but a few of our core raiders are going to help out OotC tonight in their first Naxx visit. So we'll give everybody a few days to gear up and prep and plan to go in loaded for success on Tues/Wed.

If I understand it properly, there are 4 wings. Two are considered eays, two harder and 2 final bosses. That sounds a lot like ZA. That makes me feel pretty optimistic.

I'll try to get in some Heroics this weekend and keep skilling up the professions. It might even be time to start fishing and cooking again.