This Week's Fun . . . My RNG Karma is Strong!

1. ICC 25 -- Ran as Enhancement until the PlagueWerks, then respecced Resto. The Shield of Much Awesomeness, aka The Biggest Resto Upgrade For Me, dropped, but a guildie won it. Gratz Maddie! We went "bounce" off the Plaguewerks, again. No upgrades this run.

2. ICC 10 -- Last night's run netted me a couple of big Enhancement upgrades: One was a weapon off the Gunship in the Lower Spire, the other was my first piece of Tier 10 for my Enhancement set. Of course, the piece broke the 4 piece T9 bonus . . . but the increase in damage was worth it. If the T10 Enhancement gloves or pants should ever drop off Emalon in VoA . . . I got to heal on Marrowgar, Lady D and the Loot (Gun) ship, and did damned well, according to WoL parses. I went Enhancement on Saurfang after winning an axe (see below) and I am not so disappointed in my damage output anymore.

3. Two RNG (Random Number Generator) wins this week: One, in VoA-10, was a new mount: the Grand Black War Mammoth. Rare drop, rare mount, and it is one of three mounts in the entire game that carry more than one person. I've been playing Taxi for Jameece's characters hauling them around and assisting them when I'm not raiding or running Narty. The other win was in a random daily dungeon . . . a "Battered Hilt" dropped and I won it. That Hilt starts a 15 step 3 dungeon quest chain to reforge an ancient sword that results in a weapon as good as any that drop from ICC-10 (Item Level 251). Until then I had no iLevel 251 weapons on my character's Enhancement set, so this was a big win for me.

Combining these two RNG wins with the win of the rare drake last week, I have to say that my Loot Karma has been quite strong. What goes around, really does come around.

I also added a neat new item to my Enhancement set: the Shammy helm that is dropped by Onyxia. I've had that damned thing forever but I was afraid to break a set bonus by using it. Now with the Tier 10 piece breaking the 4 piece set bonus, no reason not to add the helm. It's T9.5 (iLevel 245) -- an uprated T2 helm with improved stats. As a result, my Ghetto-Sim DPS (Ghetto-Sim is what I call a five-minute attack run on a Heroic training dummy with all cooldowns popped in the first second (Heroism, Feral Spirits, Fire Elemental Totem, trinkets popped, etc) but no raid buffs. It went from just over 4k to 5k after all changes. I've also tweaked the combat priority queue a bit as well in preparation for 2 pc T10. Finally, on Saurfang, last week I was pulling just over 4k with my old gear and combat priority queue and fully raid-buffed. This week, with full buffs and the two new weapons (the axe minus its enchant) but no T10 or Ony helm, I was just over 5k on the same boss. I expect 6k on Saurfang next week.

4. Operation: Healbot -- Nartyros is on the verge of heading to Outland (level 57) -- heirloom gear rules. I'm really enjoying the Balance play style as much as I do Resto. Ph33r teh B00mCh1kkin!!