More to the point, a post about casters in WotLK in general. You might have noticed from my live Armory portlet (on the right, just below my BanHammer portlet) that I have been getting Boomkin gear for a while now, and if you actually hit my Armory directly, you will see that I am basically decked out. Mind you, I never planned (as long-time readers will undoubtedly know) to ever spec boomkin; it just sort of happened. Now, that is not to say that Boomkin isn't a decent spec or anything, I just never really considered it... it's not my play-style, if you will.

However, when you are sitting on 9.8k Arena Points, are 5/5 Wrathful with all the off-pieces and the staff and everything else you can buy, you are left in a predicament. My initial instinct was to go Resto and get that gear and run double-healer Warrior or some other ridiculousness, but eventually Guntir talked me out of that suggesting that DHW is not the flavor of the month anymore, and in all honesty, he reminded me just how much I hated playing Resto in the 70s days (new readers probably don't know, but I ran Resto+Warrior in the 70s with Guntir's Warrior alt; he's rolling a shaman on our soon-to-be-new-server at the moment, but motivationally stuck at 30. For the record, because I think it is kind of funny, Guntir has the following level 80s: Priest, Pally, Rogue, Mage, Warrior, DK, Hunter... he will have a Shammy before too long; personally, I think he's insane).

So, my only other alternative was to buy Boomkin gear, right? So, now I am 4/5 Wrathful (with 1 remaining piece of Resto Relentless gear lawl) with the full off-set, and sporting numbers which are almost criminal. We were doing some skirms as Balance+HPally last night, and it just is not fair going against some comps. For instance, we went against this Pally+Warrior team on Ring of Valor, and I know what you're thinking (oh come on, you're a caster on RoV, how is that fair!?) but it turned out to be tougher to keep someone locked down long enough to try and nuke 'em than I thought. Eventually, we caught the Pally as a pillar was dropping with Typhoon into HoJ while I pelted Eclipsed Wraths into him and at some point just below 50%, they started critting for 10k a piece.

Now, I don't know how familiar many of you are with Boomkin. Boomkin is a spec that lives and dies around Crits; if you get crits, you cast faster, and subsequently nuke "harder". So, when your Wraths are critting for 10k a piece at 1.01sec casts (lots of haste plus more haste from crits), it only really takes 3 of these in a row to kill something. Guntir ran in (on his pally, mind you) and landed his AoE mini-silence to interrupt a FoL and the pally died before he could bubble.

Long-story-short: we are actually looking for something to run with this. Obviously, Guntir has a Shadow set that would work out well in the arenas (tons of Haste), and if we found a Resto Shammy with any amount of skill at all, we could probably faceroll Owlplay to some high ratings for fun. The trick is finding that skilled Resto shammy who hasn't already facerolled through Bloodlust to the top >_<