This is in honor of my guildmate Vosk ( The World of Warcraft Armory - Vosk @ Mal'Ganis - Achievements ), who recently completed the achievement A Mask for All Occasions, becoming one of a handful of people worldwide to complete all of the achievements in WoW. The luck involved in this achievement prompts a lot of discussion, particularly in Vosk's case, since he would have been the first player in the world to complete all achievements if he'd been luckier with masks last year. It's not too difficult...

• Hamlet

The value of Glyph of Starsurge is a common topic of discussion among Druids lately. Since its DPS contribution is nontrivial to estimate, I'll give a quick walkthrough of the basic calculation. For actual results and final DPS comparison, as always, look at my spreadsheet, but this post explains the way the spreadsheet models Glyph of Starsurge, and contains some general mathematical points that are useful for theorycrafting.

First, we need to know the frequency of Starsurge casts....

• Hamlet

Hopefully this be polished up soon, but here's how it looks for now:

http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t107636-...p/#post1777982

• Hamlet

With 9 others from my guild, I went and killed 5 bosses that were open for beta testing over the past two days. I did them all as Resto. I will try to get longer comments out at some point, but, here's a video of one of the more fun fights:
YouTube - Cataclysm Raid Test: Bastion of Twilight, Twin Dragons

Very briefly:
--Still healing almost entirely with HoT's and instants.
--But mana is a factor. You can see me pacing myself through the fight.
--There's...

• Hamlet

I haven't seen anyone else comment on this, but it seems level-based partial resists have gone away in 4.0. Previously, all spells lost 6% damage on average against a target 3 levels higher. But, examining the log of the night I raided as Moonkin this week revealed no evidence of partial resists, and I didn't observe any shooting at a level 83 target dummy for a few minutes.

Best I can tell, that mechanic is gone.

• Hamlet