Things to do before the Cataclysm

I tend to be a bit of an overachiever.  I'm more concerned with the standard achievements rather than the feats of strength, but feats can be nice too.  For example, Magincia recently obtained Hero of the Zandalar Tribe (which will be a feat soon) and also has The Fifth Element,which is no longer available.  But the former came from a desire to see all her rep bars turn blue on the armory rep page; and the latter was from a desire to try to complete every quest in the game.  Okay, I admit.  Now I'm beginning to sound a bit crazy.  But I already decided that I will not be Insane in the Membrane (though I may come close).

Fairly soon, a good number of these achievements will become unobtainable and many more quests will be gone for good once Deathwing reshapes the world.  So, I've been compiling a list of goals I wanted to achieve before the Cataclysm hits.

Healbot Healing Assignments

When patch 4.0.1 first came out I couldn't get Healbot to work properly, so on the advice of a guildie I tried VuhDo.  Honestly I wasn't really too fond of it.  It's not that the mod wasn't capable at all.  It seemed to have all the features that Healbot has, but it's appearance and setup was not what I was used to.  Perhaps if I had trialed it on a day when all my spells hadn't changed also I might have had a better impression.  But for now I'm glad that Healbot had an alpha version available.

This may sound odd, but one of the challenges with all these new healing spells is figuring out just how to bind them all to mouse clicks.  It may not sound like much, but I feel it's a UI usability issue.  When you've worked with certain keypresses or clicks representing certain functions for so long, you get quite used to using them that way and it's difficult to reshape your instinct to think otherwise.

Initial Pally Healing thoughts in 4.0.1

I initially expected to get a lot done Tuesday night, but boy was I ever wrong!  With the release of patch 4.0.1, we saw the introduction of the new Cataclysm skill & talent system.  Upon logging in, not only did I need to respec Magincia's healing tree, purchase overpriced glyphs on the auction house, re-gem to re-activate the meta gem (all my yellows turned red), and sort out which add-ons were working and which were not, I also had a host of new healing spells to learn.  It took me a few hours of work, but I finally got up and running then braved a heroic or two with guildies.  The healing experience was definitely very different from what I was used to.

First post!

Welcome to my new World of Warcraft blog.  Here I'll talk about various WoW-related thoughts that may cross my mind from time-to-time, including lore, raiding, theory-crafting, questing, achievements, and so on.  Especially with Cataclysm hitting soon (4.0.1 is already out!), I'm sure I'll have a lot to discuss.  My main is a human holy paladin (Magincia on Argent Dawn) and quite a lot has changed with the new pally healing model.  I've also been leveling a blood elf mage (Syrennity on Kirin Tor), hoping to get a hordie to 80 before the expansion.  Still have a little bit to go - she's level 70 at present.

Why "Shattered Sun"?  Well, beside it being a unique and unused subdomain of blogspot it also represents my affinity for Warcraft lore, particularly the Burning Crusade.  I did not want this to be exclusively about pally healing or frost magery, alliance or horde, raiding or questing.  There are plenty of other blogs which study these much more in-depth than I expect to, so I felt a more neutral name would fit the site.  Having said that, I expect to delve into all of those topics rather frequently.

So, see ya around, ... and first post!