Month: July 2009

Updatey things.

Kurn / / healers, healing, raiding, ramblings, ulduar

You may have noticed by the fishing-related achievements in the sidebar that I am levelling fishing. Sadly, it’s true. I am. On a second toon. Sigh. Up to just over 300 fishing. At least I’m fishing up my own buff food, now, which gives me the possibility of fishing up the Sea Turtle. Plus, I’m making Fish Feasts, which are selling quite well.

Apart from that, we wiped 24 times to get a new achievement last Wednesday:

heroic-knock

We did it with Elder Stonebark up, so we had to deal with Ground Tremors. Bad. Bad, bad. Ground Tremor damage was huge, and it’s physical damage, so… Ow. I’m kind of pleased with how healing went on that, though.

We had 3 holy priests, 1 holy paladin, 1 disc priest, 1 resto shaman and 1 resto druid in the raid, so I had this going on:

– Resto Druid topping off group 1 (with tanks) and 5

– Holy Priest 1 – POHing Group 2 (5 of 7 healers)

– Holy Priest 2 – POHing Group 3

– Holy Priest 3 – POHing Group 4

All holy priests to COH groups 1/5 after their POH.

Resto druid watching for Nature’s Fury (although he didn’t do a great job).

Me and the disc priest spamming the tank(s) and the resto shammy doing what he could to top people off.

Overall, it worked okay. But I have a lot of refinements for Freya + Elders, mostly to do with positioning.

Anyways, still conscious, thereby confirming that my sleep habits are completely screwed up. I’m thinking I’ll get back to my healer evaluations.

Done so far: disc priest app, two holy paladins.

To do: disc priest (regular), holy priest (irregular), both holy priests (regular), holy priest (app), both resto shammies (regular), all three resto druids (all somewhat irregular).

At least the regular disc priest and one of the shammies are fine and I have nothing bad to say to either of them. Gonna be fun times with everyone else, though! HOORAY. ;)

Should probably get started on at least the easy ones…

Improved Judgements… Why?

Kurn / / classes, facepalm, paladins, raiding, ramblings

When speaking of PVE content, one of the typical holy paladin specs is 51/5/15. Another is 51/0/20. And another is 53/0/18.

All three of these specs bring you deep into the Retribution tree to pick up Conviction (15 points) and then perhaps Sanctity of Battle (3 points).

What cheeses me off is the idiot holy paladins who pick 2/2 Improved Judgements over 2/2 Improved Blessing of Might as they spec down into the Ret tree.

Why? Honestly, why on earth would you ever pick something that lowers your Judgement cooldown?

There’s one reason I could possibly see for PVE content: do more DPS.

What the hell? You’re a holy paladin. You heal people. Your DPS is poor at best. Judgements of the Pure lasts a minute, not 8 seconds. Your global cooldowns should not be used in order to judge more often than is necessary to either:

a) Keep your judgement up (which is ~20 seconds)

b) Keep Judgements of the Pure up (which is 1 minute)

I’m lucky in that I’m rarely a paladin who must judge. We have a prot paladin and a ret paladin, both of whom are regular raiders, and I’m not always the only holy paladin in a raid, so JoL and JoW are both generally up and I don’t absolutely need to judge, most of the time, unless I want to keep Judgements of the Pure up.

You may not be as fortunate as I am, but there’s still very little excuse to lower that Judgement cooldown for any PVE reason whatsoever.

But, you may argue, what if we always have a ret paladin with improved might?

So what if you do? What if he or she is out of town for a week? Do you think your melee or raid leaders will be okay with crappy might? Is your raid really going to rely on Battle Shout? Hah!

So Improved Might wins over Improved Judgements and don’t get me started on Heart of the Crusader. That’s win, too, even if you have an elemental shaman. They can die, you know, and there goes 3% crit, unless you keep up Heart of the Crusader when you judge.  Or maybe they’re out of range, like on Thorim. I judge Light in the tunnel on every mob for the additional healing (which won’t interfere with anyone else’s judgements, as I’m the only paladin in there) and for the crit buff, and I’m especially careful to do it when we don’t have an elemental shaman in the tunnel with us. It helps us get through the tunnel faster and who knows when that ten seconds we shaved off will be the time we need to get to Thorim before Sif leaves?

So, TL;DR version:

– Improved Judgements for PVE holy paladins = bad

– Improved Might for PVE holy paladins = good if you’re going for Conviction or anything else deep into the ret tree

– Heart of the Crusader for PVE holy paladins = good, just like Improved Might

Hunter stuff.

Kurn / / hunters, raiding, ramblings

So I went to Proudmoore after my raid tonight (smoothest Thorim kill in forever with a WEIRD raid comp!) and did my cooking and fishing dailies and somehow wound up in a Naxx 25 pug.

Thus far, I have my T7.5 legs and proof positive that survival is HAX. I should not be doing 4.9k DPS on Thaddius. Even if it IS Thaddius. My gear is just that bad. Then again, I’m hit-capped and not a moron, so…

But explosive shot is disgusting. In the face. For real.

Win?

Kurn / / gear, raiding, ulduar

The first person up for the legendary mace asked to sit because of connection issues.

Fragment #2 is mine.

Yay? haha.

ETA: Make that Fragments #2 and #3.

Oh, for the love of Pete…

Kurn / / facepalm, healers, priests, ramblings

Problem 1: I am awake at 7:17am and have not gone to bed yet.

Solution 1: In lieu of sleep, since I can’t sleep, I should be productive.

Problem 2: Being productive means trying to organize the healers in my guild a little more. The group is working okay, but some individuals need a nudge in the right direction, so I need to communicate this to them.

Solution 2: Write notes to the healers who need a nudge.

Problem 3: How to nudge/shove people without sounding like an overbearing, condescending bitch? Hm.

And that’s where I am right now. A disc priest app has two WRONG, just plain WRONG, glyphs and some odd talent choices and is casting Greater Heal a lot more than Flash Heal.

Problem 4: How to keep from tearing my hair out at some of the issues some of the healers are experiencing…

Yep, stumped on this one, too.

Siiiiiiiigh.

Updates and Ramblings, as per usual…

Kurn / / general, ramblings, world events

So, first of all the Armory is sucking. It hasn’t updated my pally since July 1st.

As such, I have pictures to share.

mad-flamewarden

This is probably the only title/world event achievement Madrana will get, just because she was so close to getting it after last year. I’d gone through and honored/desecrated all the flames on … probably all three of my characters (hunter, paladin, mage) last year, and killed Ahune at least once on each. Hell, I tanked Ahune on Madrana, which was hilarious.

I honored/desecrated just about all the flames on three characters this year, too, only I didn’t do anything with the mage and did all the flames with my shammy. Got a full bar of experience, too!

mad-bfd

Some people from my old guild, Apotheosis, have come by Bronzebeard and are transferring toons or rolling alts. Alts need run-throughs, of course. And so Madrana got her BFD achievement.

mad-master

While killing things for a friend who was questing in Ashenvale, I took the opportunity to finish out my Unarmed skill, which also got me Master of Arms. Shweet.

Not so shweet: getting tricked into going to an Ulduar 10. Someone in my guild, who has been pestering me to go for WEEKS if not MONTHS at this point, asked me to go “for fun”. So, considering it was pouring rain outside, I went. Turns out it wasn’t “for fun”. It was “for hard modes”. If I weren’t a decent human being, I would have left the group RIGHT THEN AND THERE. But then they couldn’t have done the instance. So I stuck around, at least until my RL plans were going to settle themselves, and got a few achievements.

Flame Leviathan with 4 towers up:

mad-fl-hard

XT-002 after breaking his heart:

mad-xt-hard

Just a note — getting something like four bombs IN A ROW is FTMFL. I got Light Bomb, then Gravity Bomb, then Light Bomb AGAIN, then Gravity Bomb AGAIN. Of course, if I hadn’t spent 30 seconds running around like a moron, I would have been completely out of mana, so I guess it wasn’t too tragic. And we got the kill anyways.

Another friend transferred his druid over and got it in his head that he wanted to get the Guardian of Cenarius title, by getting exalted with the Cenarian Circle and Cenarian Expedition. He ground rep for three days to get exalted with CC and has been steadily working at CE. Of course, after a certain point, one of the best ways to get CE rep is…

mad-heroic-sv

Which Madrana’s done at least a dozen times, but definitely not since 3.0 dropped.

The druid in question is levelling resto (no joke!) and knows that the Idol of the Emerald Queen is basically the best resto idol until Wrath. So we did a quick Shadow Labyrinth boss kill (it dropped) and then cleared a bit of trash so that I could get rep and…

mad-exalted-lc

So that was kind of sweet.

In other news, Yogg down for the third time and still no trinket from Mimiron. I’m beginning to think that Pandora’s Plea doesn’t even exist…

… /facepalm

Kurn / / facepalm, raiding, ramblings, ulduar

I have family in town, so I missed our Tuesday raid for family time at the parents’ house and then down at the Jazz Festival. WoW popped into my head twice. The first time when I realized my mother expected me and the cousins to stay for dinner instead of eating downtown (and I thought “I can’t believe I could be raiding instead of this…”) and the second time was at the Jazz Fest and I thought “It’s a gorgeous night, I’m kind of glad I’m not raiding right now.”

Guarantee you that the raid was very unhappy with me for not being there because the tanks kept getting killed. On Razorscale, we lost a tank. On Kologarn, we lost tanks. It’s like… what the hell is wrong with the healers? I go away for a few hours and come back to see things like this:

[18:39:06.734] Unknown Shockwave ProtPallyTank 9023 (A: 1808)
[18:39:07.125] TrialDiscPriest Prayer of Mending ProtPallyTank +3615
[18:39:08.640] Kologarn hits ProtPallyTank 19916 (A: 1808, B: 1797)
[18:39:10.671] ProtPallyTank Improved Leader of the Pack ProtPallyTank +1879
[18:39:11.078] Kologarn hits ProtPallyTank 20874 (O: 94, B: 1797)
[18:39:11.484] ProtPallyTank dies

So… in a span of about 5 seconds, the prot pally takes 50k damage and gets one heal from the trial disc priest’s POM and one heal from improved leader of the pack.

No Lifebloom from the resto druid in the raid. No Holy Shock from either of the two holy paladins in the raid. No Earthshield from the one resto shammy in the raid. No Penance from the one disc priest in the raid. No shields, no heals, no nothing.

Worse, the holy paladins didn’t judge. At all. Neither of them had Judgements of the Pure in their buffs gained. I’m sorry, ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO HASTE?! What the hell!?

Filled with rage and I’m not even halfway through the logs from last night.

Sigh.

Kurn / / ramblings, shamans

I still get teary-eyed when doing the Wrathgate quests.

And despite the possibility of faction switching, I will NEVER go to the Horde just because of what some of the Forsaken did.

FOR THE ALLIANCE.

Even if Varian is a douchebag.

Whew.

Kurn / / general, shamans, world events

Finished all the fires in the old world, Outlands and Northrend on my shammy. Got easily a full level of experience and a whackload of gold. And none too soon, either, since Midsummer ends in 4 hours.

Go me.