Month: January 2010

More PUG failure! Hooray!

Kurn / / apotheosis, lfg, mages, ramblings

I may just take a break from using the random dungeon tool for a few days. The stupid makes my head hurt.

Today, my hunter got Drak’Tharon Keep. And the name of my warrior tank was hilarious.

Apotheosis. My old guild’s name. Awesome, right? Wrong. Our healer is a druid and had just switched to his (or her) resto spec and had no mana… and also had other gear on. What does Mr. Slandering My Guild’s Name do? He chain pulls the whole hallway and half of the first room. The ENTIRE TIME, in party chat, the druid is going “WAIT” and “NEED TO SWAP GEAR” and stuff.

That Drak’Tharon Keep run ended for me when we wiped TWICE on King Dred. Well, I only died once because FD was on cooldown, but after the second time, AND Mr. Needs A Name Change didn’t run back for his healer, I left. Screw that nonsense. And then, despite the fact it truly saddened me, I put Apotheosis on ignore.

You bastard. Using my guild’s name and being a dickweed? That is NOT the Apotheosis way. :P I left the group, requeued, and… wound up back in DTK. No problems. Got a couple people their Better off Dred achievement, too.

Madrana’s Azjol-Nerub run went fine, thankfully. I didn’t feel like tanking so I queued as just a healer. It’s nice to not have to tank.

The shammy was less fortunate than my paladin. I got Trial of the Champion. Which, you know, should be fine, right? Again, we would be wrong.

While standing in front of the Horde champions, I realize that the paladin tank has buffed us.

That’s right. Buffed us. All of us. With SANCTUARY. The group makeup is pally tank, DPS DK, mage, hunter and me on my shammy, healing.

So naturally, I ask for kings.

(The tank also had Crusader Aura up ’till I asked for a change in aura.) But basically, I was agog. The tank actually believed that Sanctuary was the same thing as kings, but you got less damage taken.

Strictly speaking, he’s wrong. But for a tank, a paladin tank at that, he’s more or less correct. You lose 10% agility as opposed to Kings when you use Sanc, but you gain an obscene amount of mana from the blocks, dodges and parries, plus you get your 10% stam for your health pool and you get 10% strength for your threat.

Does not mean that a resto shaman has any use for any of that. How many attacks will I block, dodge and parry, if I even get attacked at all?

The one who did cry was the hunter. I should have spat out “you don’t get 10% agility when you have Sanc, buddy”, but the paladin relented and gave me kings. Doesn’t mean the MAGE and the HUNTER didn’t still have Sanc, but whatever. And for that cry comment, I will admit, I let the hunter die on the Black Knight. And almost didn’t rez him before leaving the group. I also elected to use Wrath of Air totem just to spite the pally tank, even though it was just me and the mage who would benefit.

Oh, and more proof that the pally tank was fail:

STOP USING SEAL OF WISDOM, YOU MORONS. Seals of Wisdom and Light are basically for the holy paladins of the world. Seal of Command is primarily ret, occasionally prot. Seal of Vengeance is prot. STOP BEING NIMRODS and using Seal of Wisdom even when your mana bar is FULL.

Finally, I spent a mana bar’s worth of casts at the heroic target dummy in IF to determine what the hell I should use as an Arcane mage — Flamestrike or Blizzard. My Rotation was: Flamestrike 9, Flamestrike 8, Blizzard. I did this five times, emptying my mana bar almost entirely. This is, of course, an extremely small sample size, but I think that under the controlled conditions, it’s a relatively accurate comparison.

56,054 damage from Blizzard versus 48,057 damage from Flamestrike and its dot. This leads me to believe that Ignite and the various fire-related crit talents are a HUGE component of Flamestrike damage, since I have no Frost talents to improve Blizzard at all. So I do believe that the resto shammy believed me to be a FFB (Frostfire Bolt) specced mage when, neener neener, I am Arcane or Frost, depending on which of my two specs is active. So THERE.

Random Dungeon Storytime!

Kurn / / facepalm, hunters, lfg, mages, paladins, ramblings, shamans

So last night, after my raid (in which I did awesomely in terms of numbers since I was the only holy paladin in the raid), I did the random heroic on 3.5 toons.

On the paladin, I got Utgarde Pinnacle. Nothing seriously good or bad happened except that an enhancement shammy got flattened by Skadi or whatever his name is and, *while* I’m casting the rez, he’s all “rez plz”.

So I’m like “I was, you know, casting the rez.”

“ty”

And the tank, a gnome DK, was like “U MAD? LOL”

The tank, who was subpar to begin with, got put on ignore after the run. :P

Then poor Kurn got Oculus. >< Not only did I get Oculus, which I desperately was not in the mood for, but the holy paladin healer was a dumbass who clearly does not know how to read chat.

As I do in every random run where there’s one paladin, I hit my Drums of Forgotten Kings macro.

I don’t know. Maybe I should figure out how to actually link the item in the macro. Why? Because after waiting about 15-20 seconds for an acknowledgement or the pally to actually start buffing, neither of which happened, I buffed kings.

The pally, IMMEDIATELY thereafter, started buffing everyone… with 10m kings.

My buffs. Granted, it’s Oculus. And we spend half our time on stupid dragons. But really? Overwriting my 8% kings that has a 30m duration with a 10% kings with 10m? Instead of giving me and the DK and the two feral druids might? Instead of giving him or herself wisdom? And you’ll note there’s Crusader Aura, too. Guess what aura was up THE ENTIRE RUN? That’s right. Crusader Aura.

The paladin met my ignore list right after the run.

Then the shammy healed… Utgarde Pinnacle. Yet again, my tank was a gnome death knight. Apart from no one initially picking up the harpoons, and the mage AND warlock pets pulling unwanted mobs on TWO separate occasions (I let the mage die because of it), it went fairly smoothly.

At this point, I was exhausted and wanted, desperately, to go to bed. But just one more random on my mage for the Emblems of Frost, right? Couldn’t be too bad, right?

Wrong.

I get Halls of Lightning. Eh, better than Halls of Stone, I reason. So I buff everyone, put down a table, put Focus Magic on the resto shammy and we’re off.

We do the first pull and the tank runs down to the second pull and I start casting Blizzard.

“don’t forget to flamestrike and then downrank flamestrike” the resto shammy whispers to me.

“I don’t really use Flamestrike,” I reply.

“you should” he says.

Now hold the phone, here. I’m 57/3/11. That’s an Arcane build. Near as I can figure, along with WoWWiki, talents which improve Flamestrike’s damage are:

Ignite, which I don’t have

Critical Mass, which I don’t have

Fire Power, which I don’t have

Pyromaniac, which I don’t have

So is there any reason for me to cast not one, but two ranks of Flamestrike with 0 fire talents benefitting it when I can just cast Blizzard? Blizzard has, near as I can figure, three talents in the Frost tree that directly benefit it, and only two of them benefit its damage. Improved Blizzard doesn’t increase damage, but adds a chill to it. Piercing Ice would give me 6% more damage to Blizzard and Arctic Winds (which I can’t seem to link to from the talent name, for some reason, but is at http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=31678 ) would give me 5% more damage to Blizzard.

Ignite gives me 40% more damage if I crit, I’d get 6% more chance to crit from Critical Mass, I’d do 10% more damage from Fire Power and 3% more chance to crit from Pyromaniac. So shouldn’t I just cast Blizzard? I miss out on 11% damage from Frost talents vs. 10% damage from Fire talents, but I miss out on Ignite and the extra crit chance to help proc Ignite if I cast Flamestrike.

Basically, is it just me, or did the resto shammy think I was a FFB mage?

Since I hadn’t (and still haven’t fully) done my research, I just stopped responding, but he kept it up. I told him that I was just playing to have fun, get my badges. “but thats why your last” he said. I checked my recount. I was, indeed, doing less damage than the rest of the DPS. But really, this is my 4th 80, who has been 80 for less than a month. Do I really care?

“Dude,” I responded, “this is my 4th 80. I really, REALLY don’t care.”

Shortly thereafter, we had a death in the group. One of the DPS died on a pack pre-first boss. Well, we then accidentally (?) pulled the CHARGED boss. So we had a pack of trash, PLUS the boss and his adds.

Other DPS dies.

I start focusing the adds, being that I’m the only DPS still alive. The resto shammy is typing, all in caps “RUN BACK RUN BACK” and the DPS are basically just lying there. “after the boss dies” they said. Apparently, they didn’t understand that it was POSSIBLE that the boss WOULD NOT DIE if they didn’t run back.

So it takes something like five minutes. And the resto shammy wants us to WIPE so that the dead DPS don’t “get a free badge”. So he actually RUNS AWAY from me and the tank and doesn’t heal the tank for the last 40-some seconds of the fight. Well, over the course of the five minutes, I used 2 mana gems, an evocation and a mana potion and we finally got the boss down, no thanks to the resto shammy.

So he’s all like “i’m not rezzing you” to the dead people and I just snapped at him.

“Dude, you’re just a dick,” I said.

“says the fail mage,” he replies.

“Fuck you, buddy,” I said, then left the group, putting him on ignore. I don’t normally give people the opportunity to report me for even something as minor as profanity, but my patience was at an end.

In all fairness, perhaps I am a fail mage. Perhaps I SHOULD be using two ranks of Flamestrike or whatever on AOE. I honestly don’t know. But that guy was my definition of a jackass. Everything he said set me on edge, his suggestion to WIPE on the first boss was ridiculous and clearly he’s a nimrod if he wants to NOT heal his tank so that he can better facilitate his stupid wipe idea. I also think he’s a bad healer for letting two of his DPS die, but hey, if the DPS dies, it’s their own damn fault, usually.

So I left the group, ignored him and logged off and went to bed. :P

And now I’m doing research to figure out what my AOE spell should be. Clearly, Arcane Explosion is a deathwish, since I wear cloth. :P

And this post from Critical QQ says I should use Blizzard. Granted, the post is 9 months old.  Eh, I’ll figure it out.

So those were yesterday’s randoms. I hope today’s will be less interesting.

Huntard Sighting

Kurn / / facepalm, hunters, lfg, ramblings

I ran my daily random heroic on my shammy today and was greeted with Old Kingdom. They’d already done the first two bosses (although I don’t believe the dungeon finder told me it was already in progress) and were going down to the fungus boss, with Jedoga and the last guy both still up.

Honestly, every time I see a huntard, a tiny part of me dies.

We got to Jedoga after the fungus guy. To refresh your memories, Jedoga Shadowseeker is the one who summons volunteers to make their way towards her and we have to kill them, lest she get a buff from them that can, in many circumstances, kill a tank. So I remind them, as the healer, to not stand in Thundershock and to kill the volunteers when they become active.

We have no problems downing the volunteers and the boss, so we go on and finish up the instance.

But then, out of curiousity, I checked my recount’s damage and facepalmed. Here’s the damage from the Jedoga fight.

Top DK was DPS. The pally was DPS. The second DK was the tank. And right there, above me (thankfully) is the huntard.

Just low DPS isn’t my problem. Nope. I don’t care about low DPS. We killed the boss with no issue. My problem is this:

So hang on a second here. He did 3013 damage to THE THREE VOLUNTEERS? His PET did more damage to volunteers than he did? As if that wasn’t bad enough… he used Volley. I’m sorry. VOLLEY. On a single-target fight? VOLLEY?

Here’s his breakdown. On the whole fight. 11 autos, 4 hits of Volley (so one cast, it looks like), 3 steady shots and FIVE, count ’em, FIVE concussive shots. Conc shot is on a 12 second cooldown. So… I’m sorry, did he nail all three of the volunteers with it (I’m not sure that even works, to be honest) and then hit the boss with it? Twice? Even though bosses are immune? What the hell was he doing, just standing there?

It makes me want to cry.

Problems with all this:

1) Not enough focus damage to volunteers. Although we can give him the benefit of the doubt and maybe, MAYBE Concussive Shot works on them and MAYBE he was focused on slowing them down. But that’s your first global. Don’t just stand there like an idiot. Hit Arcane Shot, Multishot. ANYTHING to up the damage on the volunteer. DROP A TRAP, for crying out loud! (He’s BM, so he has no Chimera Shot, no Explosive Shot and also isn’t specced for Aimed Shot.)

2) Don’t use Volley for single-targets. Had it not been his SECOND kill of Jedoga, according to his armory, I wouldn’t fault him for using Volley once. But of all the abilities to use on this fight, Volley is the stupidest one. In the first place, there is no point in the fight where you fight more than one mob. Period. In the second place, if you’re using it on a volunteer, yay, EXCEPT the volunteer moves OUT of your Volley circle.

3) Even BM hunters have a shot rotation. According to the Warcraft Hunter’s Union (written by Frostheim, who now does Scattered Shots at wow.com), it is this:

  1. Put Hunter’s Mark on target (usually before combat begins, or as part of a macro)
  2. Send pet in to attack
  3. Put up Serpent Sting (reapply to boss when it goes down)
  4. Arcane Shot
  5. Hit Steady Shot or Multi-Shot/Aimed Shot until Arcane is off cooldown

Didn’t notice HM either way, but he did use his pet. But there’s no Serpent Sting damage, there’s no Arcane Shot use, there’s just auto, steady, conc and volley. Don’t even look at his armory. It’s even more painful than his poor play. IT HURTS, PEOPLE. IT HURTS. :(

Granted, he just dinged 80 on January 12th, according to the armory. So, okay, yeah, he’s still learning. But WHY is it so difficult for people to do even the slightest amount of research on HOW TO DO SOMETHING before they wind up in my groups? In your groups? In anyone’s groups? (I also had a fail bear tank in my UK run today on my hunter and a fail pally tank in my DTK run on my mage today. Sigh.) Take an hour. Read up on your talent spec, your glyphs (huntard is missing a major glyph), your gems, your enchants, your gear and YOUR CLASS ABILITIES and how to effectively merge them all together to become one kick-ass killing/tanking/healing machine.

Please.

Kurn's Q&A Time #2

Kurn / / q&a, ramblings

So I went poking through my site stats again. Let’s look at a few interesting search terms, shall we?

1) holy paladin improved judgements

Please, please, God, please have shown holy paladins to go to this entry:

http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/?p=317

2) “halls of reflection” heroic howto

Head over to Kurn’s Guide on How to do Heroic Halls of Reflection Without Being Lame and Cheap. Note that I don’t mention the cliff “strat”. That’s because it is, in my mind, an exploit, similar to standing on the ledge in Mandokir’s room in ZG. In other words, just plain ridiculous.

3) addon healer is drinking

Well, now, this could be interesting. I don’t actually know of an addon that lets you see if your healer is drinking, like that pops up with “ZOMG DON’T PULL HEALER IS DRINKING” or something. If one exists, please post in the comments!

Otherwise, keep an eye on your healer’s mana bar. Basically, if they’re above half, you’re good to go on trash. You can also, you know, look at the party portrait of your healer and see if they’ve got the eating/drinking buffs on them, or just watch your healer to see if they’re eating or drinking. But thank you for being considerate of your healer’s mana!

4) can dps use death and decay in instance

The quick answer is yes. The longer answer is, let your tank pick up all the adds, first. While Death and Decay is good damage, it’s also high-threat. You’re going to pull off the tank if you drop it ASAP unless your tank is totally on the ball.

5) does flask of frost wyrm proc with elixir master

Why yes, yes it does. So do all flasks, from Flask of Distilled Wisdom to Flask of Stoneblood. Flasks count as elixirs for some unknown reason. And that’s why very few people were potion masters in BC and now that you can use one potion per fight, even fewer alchemists are potion-specced. I was potions for a long time, given that I use to live on mana potions in a raid, but even I gave that up and went elixir.

6) could a balanced nightseye gem count as two sockets

Yes! It astounds me how few people realize this.

Purple gems (like nightseye, twilight opal, dreadstone) are a mix of red and blue stats. Red and blue make purple. So a purple gem counts for both 1 red and 1 blue.

Orange gems (monarch topaz, ametrine) are a mix of red and yellow stats. Red and yellow make orange. So an orange gem counts for both 1 red and 1 yellow.

Green gems (forest emerald, eye of zul) are a mix of blue and yellow stats. Blue and yellow make green. So a green gem counts for both 1 blue and 1 yellow.

A Nightmare Tear matches any socket AND counts as all three of the gems and so is known as a “prismatic” gem. So if you’re a holy paladin with an Insightful Earthsiege Diamond as your meta (and it should be!), having one Nightmare Tear in your gear somewhere will be enough to activate your meta all on its own.

Also, a note about the Eternal Belt Buckle. This adds an extra socket to your belt. It is a “prismatic” socket, because it can hold any colour gem. You are NOT required to use a prismatic gem (such as the Nightmare Tear) in this socket! I still see WAY too many people walking around with a Nightmare Tear in their belts for no reason other than the fact that they think they can’t have another gem in there.

7) hunter kiting dk icc boss

Ah, on Saurfang, are we? Your job, hunters, is likely to wail on the blood beasts he calls out. Watch your boss mod timers, drop a frost trap near the spawn points and use Distracting Shot to get them to walk over it towards you. Hope your range knows how to focus fire! :)

8) getting a mage geared for icecrown citadel

I’m still a pretty craptastic mage, but for anyone aiming to gear up for ICC, here’s what I recommend:

– 4/5 Tier 9 (232 is okay, but 245 is better and 258 would be amazing)

– All the badge items you can get that are ilvl 245 that actually, you know, help your toon out

– A couple 264 badge items

– Friendly or Honored Ashen Verdict ring

That’s assuming you’re trying to app to an ICC guild. That’s probably what I’d be looking for in terms of gear from just about anyone. Pugging it will probably require full T9 and a handful of ilvl 245 items. On my server, you get laughed at if your “gear score” is under 5000. (I do not like the concept of “gear score”, but it’s become a fairly sad reality on Proudmoore.)

9) pugs having problems with second wing in ice crown

No freaking kidding. Rotface and Festergut and Professor Putricide aren’t a walk in the park like the Airship or anything. There’s a lot of coordination that needs to take place on all of these fights. I haven’t even killed Putricide yet (although I came close on 10-man last night). Hopefully we’ll down him tonight before the new content opens up tomorrow.

10) why are so many dps idiots

Haha, okay, my final search term for the day. Honestly, I wish I knew. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the DPS has one job — kill stuff. They don’t really need to worry about dispelling stuff (except mages! You should always decurse!!!). They really have very little in terms of responsibility. You lose a DPS on a fight, eh, big deal. You can still down a boss with the remaining DPS. They’re expendable. I think that because they focus on that one job so much, they ignore everything else except their own damage meters. So they don’t care if they pull aggro, they blame the tank. Guess what, buddy? If you pull aggro off your tank, YOU ARE WRONG. If you don’t save the healer’s ass by sacrificing yourself or your pet or something, YOU ARE WRONG. So what if the boss enrages? Gotta be the healers’ fault for letting DPS die, right? WRONG.

DPS has to stay out of crap on the floor, has to down adds, has to beat enrage timers. And sadly, 75%+ of the DPS out there are total morons who wouldn’t know what Naxx looks like because they’re spending all their time in the instance staring at their meters.

Pro tip: Pay attention to your surroundings and your Omen window instead of Recount.

The Decline of Random Group Quality

Kurn / / dungeons, facepalm, general, lfg, ramblings

I’m getting increasingly worried by what I perceive to be a trend. That trend is the lack of quality in random groups.

I pug a lot. I have the pet pug on all four of my 80s. When the new 5-mans came out, I pugged them constantly. I’m now down to pugging four times a day on my 80s (plus the weekly raid, but that’s a whole other story), once on each of the four for two Emblems of Frost each.

Increasingly, people suck.

In the last 24 hours, I have four stories of failure. Not necessarily to mean that the group didn’t finish the instance, but failure nonetheless.

Continue reading “The Decline of Random Group Quality”

Whew.

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, raiding, ramblings, weekly raids

All my 80s have done the weekly raid quest, which was for XT in Ulduar this week. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to get a group, particularly on my mage, because I had no achievements for her in Ulduar. She didn’t even have the flight point. ><

But I got the pally and hunter done early this week (on Tuesday?) and then got the mage and shaman tonight.

I was on the mage and in a siege engine as the passenger (my preferred vehicle spot in the awful fail that is Flame Leviathan) and my driver took a detour to Hodir’s tower and basically wailed on it until it died.

The raid leader was saying stuff like “who started the event? Do we need to down towers?”

No response from anyone. But I had a bad feeling about it. Brann had kept pointing out each tower and its abilities as we passed them by. Was this normal or was this hard mode?

Well, we engage FL and, wouldn’t you know it, Orbital Countermeasures are online.

Some jackass, most likely the idiot huntard I was in the siege engine with, had started the event on hard mode by talking to the mage instead of Brann.

“lol you guys didnt destroy the towers?” my huntard asks.

“If some idiot hadn’t started hard mode, we wouldn’t have needed to,” the raid leader responded. Or something along those lines.

So we wipe, obviously, then go back and destroy the three remaining towers, then kill FL and then XT. I was just glad to have gotten in on my mage. And I didn’t suck, either!

The grind for Emblems of Frost continues! I’ve missed one random daily on the mage, 3 dailies on the paladin and one week of 10-man ICC on the paladin. Eh. That’s a lot of Emblems lost when I think about it like that. But I honestly don’t know how much longer I can keep doing 4 randoms a day and ICC both 25 and 10 every week on my paladin. Blah. At least I have my 2-piece set bonus on the pally and she’s wearing her new boots that I was able to craft for her on Kurn, without spending any of her own emblems.

Confession Time

Kurn / / addons, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I have a confession to make.

The guild my paladin is in requires BigWigs as a boss mod. I mean, they require Omen, oRA and BigWigs, and Grid/Clique if you’re a healer. That’s it. Not terribly stringent requirements, since I already had Omen, oRA and Grid/Clique.

I had never downloaded BigWigs, continuing to rely on my old favourite, Deadly Boss Mods. I resisted BW for a very long time because… well, they do the same damn thing. I still prefer DBM, to be honest, but I have to say that BigWigs definitely has useful tools to ensure you see that you’re standing in fire, poison, etc, that you’re standing too close to others on a fight where range matters…

But I downloaded BigWigs because, at some point last week, half the guild was like “crap, my BW is out of date”. And I thought, well, I should probably install it and run it simultaneously with DBM so I can get used to the BW sounds/warnings while not screwing up because I know how to react to my DBM warnings.

So, there we were, about to pull Saurfang on Wednesday, when I heard this noise and wondered what on EARTH this infernal pinging was. It had to be BigWigs, I reasoned, because it certainly wasn’t part of the fight. It sounded like I was on a submarine and we had sonar going and we were tracking other ships or torpedoes or something.

And then I saw it. A little square box had cropped up and had as its contents the list of people in my raid that I was 9 yards or less away from.

I stepped back two paces.

Silence. And a little smiley face in the range box.

Okay, I admitted to myself, an audio tool for range can really come in handy in a number of places.

Some of the warnings are a little too harsh — the screen shaking, the audio AND flashing colours, combined with raid warnings and such can make it a little confusing. But all of that is customizable.

I love my DBM. I really do. I think it’s a fine piece of craftsmanship. But I’m going to be running  both from now on, because BW just has that something extra. Plus, it was invaluable to me and my guild back in Hyjal because it would announce the types of mobs in the upcoming waves, and good ol’ Football (melee DPS officer) would call out assignments on the fly. “Shack 2, spell reflect casters, pally tank pick ’em up, warriors pull one each off him for kill targets.”

Apart from anything else, BW saved my ass twice on Thursday alone. Once, I was the person Rotface spewed his slime at — and it told me when I was targetted and not when he was done casting. And the second time was because I was TOTALLY healing my ass off and I almost got blown up by a slime. I would have been killed if I hadn’t run away, like a little girl, when my screen turned blue and shook violently, thanks to BW.

Having said that, I genuinely hope that the majority of the players in the raids DO NOT have BW installed. Why? Because they miss even the obvious things like range issues. If they actually did have BW installed, would they not NOTICE the big slime is going to explode? Would they not NOTICE that their computer is beeping at them because they’re in range of 8 other people? If they do have it installed and are still missing most of these warnings… I just don’t even have words.

By the way, you should definitely download DeadlyBossMods or BigWigs if you don’t run a boss mod addon.

Briefly, in other news, I’ve managed to outheal the other holy pally. Finally. He has this stupid tendency to judge light, CONSTANTLY. I mean, all the time. Even with ret pallies in the raid. But tonight, he didn’t judge light (no idea why) AND I got the following Rotface assignment:

– Beacon the MT, heal infected players

I even outhealed my RL friend, the resto druid/healing lead. The only person I didn’t outheal was the disc priest, and half of his effective “healing” was casting PW:Shield on people. I don’t normally get caught up in the numbers, but DAMN, did it feel good to finally not have all my heals totally sniped! I usually just focus on keeping my target up, which is usually the MT or OT, and keeping my beacon up on the other of them, but I’ve noticed that the other holy pally will tend to beacon his target and raid heal, unless he’s specifically told to place his beacon on someone else. (And then he’ll usually judge light.)

So now I know that I don’t totally suck and confirms my suspicions that the only reason I’m “so low” on the meters (which suck anyways) is because of assignment. My RL friend knows I won’t deviate from my assignment except for quick spot heals, so she gives me the job of primarily keeping the tanks up by virtue of direct heals and beacon.  And I do enjoy it, except that all the healers are also tossing heals on the tanks — the other holy pally (via beacon if not direct heals), my RL friend rolling hots, the priests dropping POM, Renew, using Penance and shields, the shammies with ES and Riptide and chaining off the tanks and melee… So, it’s very rare that I have high effective healing or show up huge on the numbers. Which is fine. It’s just nice to see for myself that a small change in assignments can bring out those numbers and I AM capable of doing them, when asked to do so.

Rotface and Cleansing Totem

Kurn / / guide, icecrown citadel, q&a, raiding, shamans

I haven’t really spoken about strats for ICC25 as of yet, mostly because I’m not a raid leader or even a healing lead at this point in time, which suits me just fine.

But I found this in my search stats, and thought I should address this immediately:

“rotface cleansing totem”

No! Don’t do it! I know I am a HUGE proponent of Cleansing Totem. I have said, repeatedly, that shammies should drop it all the time because it’s the best totem ever.

But dropping it on Rotface is BAD. As soon as the person with mutated infection gets cleansed, they drop an ooze. Dropping an ooze in the group is similarly BAD.

What we do, and your mileage may vary, is have everyone stack up on Rotface and beat on him at close range, sidestepping Slime Spray and running out when the big oozes explode.

If someone gets the mutated injection, we have them run to the OT who is on the outer edges of the room, dodging slime pools and trying not to run headfirst into the slime that fills up quadrants of the room.

We do not currently cleanse any of the people with mutated infection. This is similar to most people’s strategies on Grobbulus in Naxxramas. Just let it fall off naturally. The reasoning is that it appears that cleansing someone will reset his timer on casting it and will eventually lead to more casts of mutated infection, leading to more slimes, leading to more explosions, leading to less DPS just by virtue of people running away, not even taking into consideration the number of people who may die due to more infections, slimes and explosions.

So, long story short: NO CLEANSING TOTEM ON ROTFACE. Your raid will thank you for not cleansing, I promise. And if they don’t, point them here. :P