It has been a little while since I last left any scrawl on this wall (hmm that line makes me think of becoming a poet - nah). I've had a week off of work, so amongst many other IRL things that I managed to achieve - I'd managed to fit in a great deal of gaming. So what have I been up to I hear your cry!

Actually I don't hear you cry that at all - without much digression I am noticing a fairly regular increase in hits to this website, and a lot of which are return visits. No comments are left. Allow me to take a moment to invite questions and comments in all their forms.

Right back to what I was going on about. PvP-wise I've been fairly active. On both weekends I'd started my Arena career. I started a 2v2 team with a friend of mine in the guild. He's just recently hit level 70 also, and like myself has a splattering of Season 1 items earned through standard PvP. He's a Resto-Shaman of the Tauren variety known to most as "Nock" but his toon is "Dontfoget". We quickly ran through 5 games and then another 5 the next day of our first week. We had a 3:7 win-to-loss ratio - but learned a great deal I think. We were seriously undergeared, with no more than 250 reslience between the two of us. Our main discovery (which came as no real surprise really) was that he was the main dps target for the other team. Often times I was crowd controlled somehow which (or simply ignored) while they focussed entirely on him. This led me to two decisions about my gear. Firstly I seriously needed to purchase the 2 minute Medallian of the Horde to try and get out of that Crowd Controlling at timely moments. Secondly - as I was not really the focus of DPS until my healer was dead to the world, I thought that stacking Stamina enchantments and gems was a waste of my time. I need more DPS. I'm leaving my Season 1 gear as it is though - and going to focus on DPS bonus' for any new gear and use my Season 1 for extra survivability for flag running etc when I get the chance.

The following week was another learning experience for us. Again we faced another 3:7 win-to-loss ratio and our rating has now dropped to 1370 from the starting 1500 for the new team. I had a long chat with Nock afterwards about what happened. Crowd Control was less of an issue this week - as I managed to earn the trinket during the week (despite that I was seriously tied down by one or two druids). But he was basically unable to be allowed to heal at all. We theorised that his 52 points in the restoration tree were probably not as well spent as some kind of hybrid build could have been. His main issue would be Rogues and Warriors keeping him "slowed" while interupting his casting and being able to DPS him at the same time. After some long discussion he has now featured Toughness (an enhancement talent I believe) into his build. This increases the armour bonus' from his gear - as well as reduces the duration of slow effects on him. This should help him keep a distance from those pesky melee and be able to drop heals on himself (and maybe me should I ever be the victim of DPS).

It is early days for us, and I definately think we have the ability to get a nice rating one day. At the moment we are both still learning and undergeared - but we've earned an amount of respect from some of the 2100+ rated 5v5 chaps in our guild for not going for a "boost" in arena.

In other news we've had a worrying amount of discussion of PvE raiding content within the guild. I say worrying simply because we're a bunch of casual PvP lovers. Some of us have some raiding background (mostly pre-TBC however). We certainly have the skills to clear PvE content quickly - though not enough numbers to do more than 10 man content. After discussion we decided that our most limiting factor is a lack of tanks. I'm completely out of the loop for tanking these days, and certainly unlikely to respec at all. But the least I could do is start gathering some tanking gear and getting some tanking practise back in. So last night I headed on over to TankingTips.com's Guide to new-to-70 tanking gear. I aim to get geared up and getting into some 5 man content with people from the guild who might be interested.

Tank, DPS or PvP. Warrior I am.