Oh, lookee!

Blogs you should check out this week: Blessing of Kings covers a Paladin tanking spec, and I give it my approval. I still prefer Divinity in my prot tree, and see Pursuit of Justice as laughingly silly, so never get it. But that's just me. Seal of Command is GOOD. I loves it. Especially on big pulls. :) UK, UP, CoS. Yum.

Falling Leaves and Wings covers Quartz Procs, a module for my favorite addon (after grid). Delicious!

Bossypally covered low level ret tanking, too! YAY!

There's a ton more. But this blog is full of links so you can easily find the great ones. Or follow me on google reader to see what I thought should be shared with the world.

Amazingly, this week's weekly raid assignment was in the Halls of Ulduar instead of Jaraxxus for the billionth time. Oh the fun I've had so far, slogging through Loot Reaver (or whatever his name is in this expansion). The fun began on my holy paladin. There are 2 ways to start Flame Leviathan, kids, and one is the fast easy way and one is the NOT FAST OR EASY way. It became painfully obvious when the big mechano-thing busted through his doors to kick us out of the Halls of Ulduar that someone had spoken to the Lore Keeper of Norgannon, because pillars of light, adds of flowers, fire and brimstone started spawning, and we all died. Enter the facepalm!

So, we then had to go back and kill all the other junk that normally we could have skipped if our raid members had simply spoken to Brann Bronzebeard instead.

Lesson: NEVER SPEAK TO LOREKEEPER unless told to do so.

If you are raiding ICC10, your gear should make achievements in Ulduar silly easy. Especially the Flame Leviathan ones. (Or I could just think nothing compares to the complexity of dancing around Rotface or trying to kill Putricide, but that shows what I'm focused on right now.)



This is an easy achievement. Motorcycles get the oil down in front of him. This means have a basic idea of where people are going to kite (we used to try to kite diagonally across the room). And, this means you do NOT throw people on top of him to kill his towers, instead the people in the mid-sized vehicles throw pyrite on him and never stop, refilling as well. Super duper easy.

Moving on, I also realized that since all I pretty much do on the paladin is tank heroics on a daily basis for her frosts, she is now my source for primordial saronite. My tailoring priest is positively drooling at getting her hands on them.

This week my priest's 10man raiding guild Annihilation finally killed Rotface. We three healed it with a disc&holy priest combo, and a holy paly. (Does that count as 4 healers, with that awesome beacon spell? I think it does.) Now we start working on Putricide and hope we can get Rotface dead again next week. We had 4 hunters in the raid and one ret paladin. So... yeah. But it worked!

Stacking the Deck

What do you do to stack your group/raid's deck? I guess this could mean classes, but really I'm wondering what you do when you put the groups together.

Me, I don't start invites until I have the tanks and heals covered, minimum. There's no point in getting people's hopes up without those key roles, and the impatience factor can seriously hurt anything happening without them!

For tens, I keep tanks and heals in the same group if there is a healing priest present. If there's no priest, but there is a healing shaman, and I build the tank/shaman group around those that will be in range of the totem. Onyxia this is pretty classic. Tanks, melee and shaman is told to always be in range of that tank with their totems.

On to the dps. DPS is so hit dependent, I build my groups around Heroic Presence. It is so good to be playing in the Alliance faction with that handy little feature! After duking it out with a past raid-leading-team that tried to put my draenai healer into a group that made little sense with her totem applications, whenever possible I put melee draenai with melee dps, and ranged draenai with ranged dps. This is because totems and heroic presence are range dependent. Sticking like ranged toons together, based on the necessities of the fight, is the optimal way to group them up.

I've been lucky that in my 25man raiding career we usually had a plethora of shamans. 2 enhancement and 2 resto, most nights. This means we had 2 resto split between the healer group and caster group (yay mana tide totem usage, not to mention the other buffs being shared) and the enhancements were put into the tank group1 and a melee group. This left a tad bit of quibble room on the last group, but the benefits for the rest with added healing, hit coverage, fear protection, extra dps, all seemed worth it.

It doesn't always work out that way tho. Sometimes groups have to be built on their assignments. Onyxia is another great example because half the raid at least is focusing on running about and killing the big dragon, while others are killing adds. Grouping those teams together where possible makes good usage, too! Let's face it, it's not on every fight that we can all be grouped up together and hope everyone gets coverage with everything. Group-limited effects really spoil that, too.

What I've never really wrapped my mind around before is raids that have both sanctuary and kings up... /boggle

What do you do to build groups/raids? What did I forget?

Healing with new toons

Yesterday after running my daily random heroic on my horde paladin, I was killing time doing stuff and saw a group desperate for one more healer for ICC10. It sort of killed me. When does healing experience and raiding experience makes up for a lack of actual hands-on-practice? I'm sure this is a quandary many altitis sufferers deal with.

She'd have been third healer, but a tank healer. She's undergeared and still has blue boots. (Guess I have to get the ulduar pattern crafted). She only had 2200 bonus healing and 31% crit (totally unbuffed). I felt weak, basically, and weak + unsure at my healing skills = not a good place to be healing for a pug you'd like to make a good impression with. Since she's my only horde 80 I don't want to ruin my server reputation should anyone figure out who my Alliance mains are.

My goal is to heal on this paladin. That was why I made her, to flesh out with the 4th healing class my stable of healers, and learn the mechanics well enough that I felt confident giving directions to other holy paladins. I have 99% confidence in my ability to lead priests (even holy, which I have never played), druids, and shamans. But near to zero with paladins.

Sadly, since hitting 80 and the mad rush to gear up and get my rep and my emblems, I've tanked 99% of all things. Healing only happens when a guild tank offers or is seeking a guild heroic binge. That's it. I've healed exactly one daily random, and every single day I queue up as tank/heals. Sadness. So really I have no clue what I could do given an unknown tank factor, let alone unknown co-heals factors.

This lack irritates me, but given real life situation, my wow time may be put on hiatus depending on how strong the internet wireless junk is at my new place. So I guess we'll see what happens this coming week and weekend!

Healing ICC thoughts

I've managed to heal through ten man ICC up through Saurfang on my discipline priest, my resto druid and my resto shaman. I also heal 25 man ICC on the druid. It's been... interesting. And a school of hard knocks. Here's what has been going through my mind when facing this huge payload of damage I have to help heal.

My main is the druid, and I've done far more 25s with her than 10s, I've also simply been in there more with her. I have affiliations with other guilds on the server and have pugged the priest and shaman into their tens when they were short healers or doing alt runs. But the most pain has been felt on my druid.

Why?

Because with a good raid, the trash is EASY sauce heal-wise. At least with my co-healers. Most nights we run 2 holy palys, 1 disc priest, 1 or 2 resto shamans, and me. Yeah that's a lot of friggin heals. And they're all awesome at their job. So me and my measly little hots are brushed aside pretty easily. And, I try to hurricane or Faerie Fire or roots but with heavy melee and aoe damage, basically I stand there and look pretty. (Good thing my druid is damn fine!)

Last night I was talking in our guild healing chat channel. And I said "honestly, at this point, I pretty much view my job as putting up healing buffers to keep people alive until the palys or the shamans or even the priest let loose a heal bomb. I know the heal bombs are there and I know it's going to come. I just gotta keep people alive til then." A very forgettable job. :( My heal numbers look like crap. My overheal is insane. The numbers don't bother me since I know and accept my role. But I know my RaidLeaders don't really get it. How'd I go from uber heals in TOC to nada in ICC? Well we went from 5 to 7 healers. And 1 shaman to 2 most nights. My hots are overwritten so fast, it's only on fights that are freaking crazy to heal (Marrowgar and Deathwhisper) that I might actually put up a good show numbers wise. I mean, I'm still doing my job. I'm healing to my best. But it's hard to show that until everyone in the raid is nearly dead and my hots helped keep them alive. Luckily, one of the uber paladins that heals our raids saw my chatting and loosely agreed with me, then later on in our 2healed 10 man he complimented me because we healed that to death and rocked it. The best compliment is when he says "I like not having to stress about the healing situation." Yay?!

In TOC I loved my crit, even at a lowly 22%. I didn't even have the (4) T9 that let Rejuv crit, but in TOC it was WG that went a little crazy. My healing strategy was Rejuv and Nourish heavy with WG every time it was on cooldown. But now that I'm in ICC with more healers that heal like mack trucks, I've switched to Rejuv and Regrowth, and pulled Swiftmend out of the cobwebs. I mean, it was on my bar, but I barely had to use it. In ICC despite the Chill of the Throne damage is intense and fast heals are king, I think. Well fast heals and bubbles! And my heals... are not fast, unless I nourish spam, which makes me just another healer like the rest in my healing crew. I want to heal my best, but I want to really bring something useful to the raid, and I think my methodology now is good, given the other awesome healers I raid with.

Marrowgar and Deathwhisper are where I really love my glyph of Rejuvenation. Whatever it's proper name, it boosts heals when targets are below 50%. That thing has saved lives on Marrowgar, I know it. GCD annoys the piss out of me in ICC. Did I mention I'm not haste capped yet? Not by a long shot. And the one upgrade I've gotten to drop in ICC10 (last night) has crit on it. #%!@! I actually traded out equal ilevel bracers from TOC and lost 2 sockets just for some haste. This is making me sad. But I refuse to gem purely for haste and I love my socket bonuses. So I'm up a creek without a paddle, basically, until I can get more upgrades.

I learned on Deathwhisper that I simply HAD to change my hot keys for ICC. Which is tough as I try to make my cleanses across all my toons on the same hotkey. My aoe heals on the same hotkey. My bigger heals on the same hotkey. Because of this hot mentality I'm focusing on with the druid, I really had to shift away from that. And I have to bring in my decurse for this Witch. It's aggravating and pushing me to set up clique and get it working. And it was Marrowgar that made me reconfig my Disc Priest's buttons.

On my druid, this is where I'm at with my hot buttons.

I really feel I should probably switch Nourish and Swiftmend, but then I use Swiftmend when I intended to nourish and I get confused, mostly because of my keybind setup across all 4 of my healers. I may have to macro Swiftmend to my Rejuv or Regrowth buttons with a modifier. I don't use many macros at all so this is a big undertaking for me. But like I said, ICC is pushing me to become a better healer. Clique may be needed to transform my cleansing life on all my toons.

As for my Discipline Priest had her share of keybind shakeups to get through ICC. I've only been in ten man a few times with her, but the first was extremely rough for a number of reasons and really bushed me to get the most out of my healing there. I learned from that escapade and next time in made some changes.



After the experience in ICC, and leading to a successful 2 heal 10man clear through Saurfang with my resto tree buddy (@xparanormalityx) I used this setup instead.



I have to say, healing ICC with the priest was HELLA FUN. On my druid I feel weak and too slow, and shaman is.. awesome in an epeen sorta way. But I felt my most versatile and best on the priest. Even as a tank healer, two healing it with my druid buddy made me intensely happy to heal again. Maybe it was just that that ten man had a certain ambiance that made everything fun and good. Not sure, but it was great.

The shaman? She's OP. Walked into a 25man ICC pug and chain heal stomped holy priests that overgeared her, though I was fighting with a druid for pure numbers. The drops that druid got made me cry inside for my main, but the shaman got a suuuuuper shield so I was happy. She's not the first to get tier 10, as the druid got her gloves for some sexy haste, but she's undoubtedly the sexiest of my toons, even if the most underplayed. Life in my bank guild is quiet.

Time to cheer

A new plan

I finally took the plunge and put my druid into a progression based raiding guild. I feel guilty on multiple levels. I was first asked to tank with my druid for these guys almost six months ago, during a rough time with her first guild, the one she raided with in TBC, and I was working on my shaman and had almost totally given up on doing anything with the druid. I should have joined them then. But, I didn't. So we move on.

I'm healing with the druid, and I had what I thought was the best assignment for my first night raiding with them. Simple raid heals. It was great. But their raids are full of 2 disc priests, a holy priest, and some holy shamans. Needless to say my hots are too slow to tick! So I showed myself pretty shabby on the numbers when I wasn't dying due to unfamiliarity with the fights.

Vezax wasn't that surprising. I had done my homework. But everything I heard/read was that 3 stacks was pretty decent to have the green goo, get some mana back, etc. But nothing was happening. Then when I hit 5 stacks I hit a lag spike for some unknown reason and my jump out of the goo was slow and next thing I know I'm dead. Soooo frustrating. I'm not the type that's gonna jump in right away with my excuses. Lag spikes are random and I'm not sure what caused the problem there. It pisses me off as much as it makes me feel guilty for failing my job to stay alive. So, I feel like slime.

I think I'm really an anticipatory healer. I like to know the kind of damage that should be coming in because I'm really good at meeting those needs. But sudden spikes of unexpected damage tend to show me at a disadvantage. So with a new guild I'm struggling to learn how these tanks take damage. And their strategies are a bit different from the other guilds I've managed to run this content with on my other toons.

So, just, ugh. I need to learn more on how to maximize druid raid heals. And I really need that idol. As much as I love getting mana back from Lifebloom the GCD vs the healing it spits out seems not a good balance, and I much prefer Rejuvenation. /headdesk

Hit Bitch

Damn you, Blizzard, for creating party-only buffs!

If you don't play a shaman, or a select few other classes (maybe?), or try to compose a raid, you may not be aware that Blizzard did NOT make all buffs raid wide. But it is true.

Healing Stream totem, for a glyphed shaman, can pack a pretty heavy punch of healing when used appropriately (18-25%). So at times I have to nag my raid leaders to move me around in the raid, or at the very least remind them that my totem, which I am dropping, will only serve those in my party. If they're ranged and/or not taking much damage that may be a lot of wasted healing opportunity.

Mana Tide totem is party only, and can be extremely helpful for mana users, I especially like to keep healers in the party for that one. Sometimes they are spread out pretty far but if I am going to drop it I run to the one with the lowest mana or the inability to regen it (sorry druids with an available innervate lose out!).

Tremor totem. Ah the reason shamans are loved against the Cat Lady!

But then there is heroic presence. Oh how I loathe heroic presence (as a healer; I freaking love it as enhancement). For some reason draenai are on a shortage in my raids. And I hate asking my raid leaders to balance more_healing vs hit_capping_dps, but since my focus in a raid is healing, that's where I'm going to put my support.

I've always viewed getting hit capped as a standard part of dps raiding. On my shaman and shadowpriest (my only dps toons) I've set up my outfits to account for both situations to the best of my ability. I understand hit rating is a pain to get sometimes, and that keeping hit capped can severely limit gear choices and dps capabilities. But when healing is my goal, I'm going to fight to make sure my skills, every one of them, is used to the best it can be.

So, I don't like being dps' hit bitch. And having the same conversations over it every week in raids kinda drives me nuts.

Healing Assignment Redux

The question I pose is this: Any help on what to do with 2 pally healers and 3 tanks? And, should multiple holy pallys use the same judgement? We had 3 holy pallys, zero ret and prots. For the full story, read on.

Last night was a nasty night of wiping on Ignis. It's not a hard fight, it's just very chaotic with a LOT of things going on, and very healing intensive because of the constant raid wide damage.

Our main tank or an off tank was almost always the first to die. This is a great clue that healing assignments just weren't effective. So I've been struggling to come up with something better, but I have a massive problem. I don't understand paladin healers. I'm currently leveling a paladin but she's in her 20s and is more prot than ret at the moment. So I really have very little clue how raid healing works.

We started with 3 tanks, 7 healers. 2 bear off tanks and a DK main tank. 3 paladin healers, 2 shaman healers, 2 druid healers.

After the fifth wipe, I traded my bear out for my priest (we really had no priest buffs before then, too, no shadows) because I seriously failed grabbing those adds. 2fps is not helpful there. So one of the paladins went prot. That leaves us with a Prot paladin and a bear on the adds, and a DK main tank. 2 paladin healers, 2 shamans, 2 druids and a discipline priest.

So, the healing numbers of the paladins were really unimpressive. I am not healing lead in that guild, but often I step in and make solid recommendations (especially when healing assignments are bass ackwards). I know priest, shaman and druid healing even if I'm not a number whore about it. I try to use both class strengths and healer-player strengths to their fullest.

Any help on what to do with 2 pally healers and 3 tanks? I don't solidly understand pally skills. For some reason the RL who is a paladin healer had 2 pallys on the same assignment and then wondered why one of them had low healing numbers... *sigh* My other big issue is there is so little communication among healers. My other guild actually has a GUILDhealers channel for healer discussion. So I don't know that the pallys communicated beacon targets, that they worked together at all. Just, ugh.

And I really hate to make suggestions regarding pallys because I don't understand the spells well enough.

shaman blog discovery

Just found Lyra at Healing Way thanks to a Wow Insider article.  Was added to my google reader right away, and I found an excellent article on the mess that the Blizzard devs have made of the Blessing of Wisdom vs. Mana Spring Totem debacle.

Great read!  In fact hopefully its in the right list of shaman articles to read...

Now, I need to write a post about arranging groups, which many many MANY raids, maybe because they are led by more casual leaders, think died with 3.0 thanks to so many buffs going raid wide.  Anyone that plays a toon with *some* party only effects knows how rough it is to get the raid leader to set up the groups a certain way.  

My pet peeve is running with healers that don't use raid frames and/or prefer to heal their target in the same group.  But hey I don't mind keeping Mana Tide Totem all to myself... until we wipe because they went oom...