Wednesday 25 June 2008

To haste or not to haste?

That is indeed the question. Now that I'm getting into the position where I am comfortable with Aedos + healing and my own technical abilities to heal, I've started asking myself whether I should start focusing on gathering haste gear. Soldiers of Azeroth are now progressing nicely through Black Temple, and have killed every boss in Hyjal except Archimonde. With the amount of tanks we usually have in the trash in these instances, I'm sure an extra lifebloom stack would help immensely.

With the amount I'm raiding at the moment I'm gathering up a fair bit of DKP, and not spending it as all who know me would testify, my luck with drops is horrendous! I'm now trying to decide whether to actively seek out spell haste items in various places. I'm fairly comfortable with my mana pool even though my mp5 at the moment isn't as high as other resto druids, it's very rare I actually have to Innervate or take pots, so to lose some mp5 on items wouldn't be that much of a big deal to me.

The two other main questions I ask myself are this: Would the raid team benefit from my lowered global cooldown, my ability to stack more lifeblooms and also to pop a swiftmend if the situation arose? Now I think the answer to this is a resounding yes.



The next question is do I have the time and resources to actively seek out +haste pieces, to acquire enough of them to get my haste rating to at least 180 to be of any use, then enchant etc? Well I am a leatherworker, not a very good one, I've never seemed to be able to grind enough to get past the 350 mark. I chose Leatherworking for Aedos when she was levelling as Feral, and though I knew there wasn't much in the way of healing gear I could make when I did respecc, I kept leatherworking as my profession anyway. So the guild bank currently has three of these recipes: Shoulderpads of Renewed Life sitting gathering dust, and if I was at 375 LW, for a mere 10 dkp these would be a steal! The big problems, no I'm not 375, and no there are no spare Hearts of Darkness in the guild bank to use. So a big sad face here =( However in the raids I'm doing there are a few items that may drop, so I can wait for these or spend some more badges



One nice haste badge item:

Cloak of Swift Reprieve for 60 Heroic Badges

An item I already have that provides haste is my Kharma's Ring of Fate from normal MgT. However this really wouldn't add up to much for now, so it would take some time for me to be fully haste geared up! Now next week will be Aedos' first Zul'Aman run as it had been taken off our raiding roster when I began raiding with her, and now our resident Paladin tank Woody has started some GEM runs up. I know of a few haste items that drop there, cant remember the names but I might edit them in if i do! I just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope my luck with drops improves.

So I think I've decided that I will try to gather as much +haste items as I can, also trying to level Leatherworking at a steady state so that maybe some day I can get that pattern, hopefully this will all be before Wotlk and before we all start replacing our epics with Northrend greens!

2 comments:

Jive said...

Hi there! I followed the link over from Phaelia's site. Always nice to find another tree. :)

I kind of had the same thoughts on haste. I mean, it sounds great. More LB's! I eventually decided against it because with more LB's comes even more micromanagement of HoT's, and BT and MH like to have those high mobility fights where you could lose a stack or two running around. That mixed with an unlucky latency spike and I thought I might be too frustrated to keep it up. If you do end up going the haste route I'd love to hear about it, though. :)

I think there's a haste healing cloak in ZA, and not much else. There's also some haste leather gloves from Teron. I think. It's been a while.

Aedos said...

hehe, welcome! Well it's been playing through my mind a bit, there are currently only two trees in our guild, and the other is much better geared and has some haste items, during trash and the like he always seems to be stacking his Lb's a lot easier than me!

So where it would be helpful while I'm not moving, I know what you mean about the Hyjal fights, those little tree legs do a lot of running!

ButI guess I'll see what good gear drops for me in the next few runs and if I do get my haste to useful level I'll definitely report =)