What with taxes needing to be mailed out by tomorrow, and the current state of 2s arena play... okay so those two subjects do not meet logically on the playing field... but they are both depressing topics, so they have some relation at least in how they make me feel. In my last post, I mentioned spec'ing back and forth for arena play, this is still the case, but it gives me options to try new play-styles to see what works and what does not work. I had been the Nature's Grace build before, but I think that it might be time to go back and try the HoT build again since I have attained more resto gear. Essentially, I had picked up the regrowth build because it was the best way for an undergeared resto druid to put out any burst when Swiftmend was on cooldown. Now, however, I do not need to rely on regrowth as much, so I think that going back to the feral charge build will end up being the best strategy.

Enough druid talk... spec'ing resto is going to be boring, but hopefully it nets me some wins. We just want to keep our rating up to get some points until my brother graduates. So, I have very little room to grow my feral skills, in this regard, until we get a team with a healer. I have heard reasonably good things about ferals when there is a healer behind him and I desperately want to give this a go, but I do not know any good pvp healers who 1) are not already on a team, 2) would be willing to give this a go, or 3) good enough to play this team well.

BAH. I said enough, and yet I continue. Let us talk about my warlock. I forgot to get my spell crit trinket out of the bank when initially spec'd destro, so I grabbed it and saw that I still had my Eye of the Beast from the UBRS days (which has 28 spell crit rating on it compared to my Bladefist's Whatever which has 26 iirc), so I slapped that on as well. Then I remembered about Spellstones and how they have crit, so I busted out one of those as well. Then I went to the Hall of Legends and bought my vindicator's wrist and belt. Long-story-short, I do not have the best enchants and I am running around in a PvP scenario without a PvP trinket, but I have hit ~20% paperdoll crit (25% on destro spells, 35% on searing pain) pretty painlessly. Painlessly, in this context, means without sacrificing the 400 resilience mark to get 20% crit, although I did dip down to 885 spell damage WITH Fel Armor on... which is a little unnerving. Oh well, I suppose I could go farm the bracer spell-damage enchant for a couple weeks and get some decent spell damage from that. It doesn't really matter all that much, however, because I will be going back to felguard for arena tomorrow to get the macros I use back in place, and all that, and I will be back at the ~1100 spell damage mark, which is always good.

a brief pause

Look, WotLK has finally (and apparently out-of-the-blue) hit the internal Alpha testing phase. What does that mean? Well, quite simply it means this: all our arena trials and tribulations are for naught. Well, no, that's not true. They were indeed fun times, and we faught as hard as we could, but it means that once my brother graduates from college, we will finally have the time to do arena, but there will not exist a need to with the expansion on the horizon. It means that we can do some arena for fun, and sit back and wait for leaked WotLK info (intentionally leaked or otherwise) to get us salivating for it. We will have less drive to get that 2.2k rated team (oh yeah.... the s4 shoulders will require 2200 personal rating... wtf) and compete as true pimps, and instead look to the future. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted... hopefully we get some leaked talent trees soon.