3 hours, 16 wipes. Ow, my face.

Well, we extended our ICC lockout this week so we could work on the Lich King.

3 hours. 16 wipes. Gloriously, none of them appear to be my fault. :D

Sadly, the fact remains the Shambling Horrors and their enrages suck, Soul Shriek sucks and, oh yeah, standing on the outer edge of the platform AS IT CRUMBLES AWAY sucks.

So I’m going to complain a bit.

Soul Shriek silences people for five seconds.

It is supposed to be cast in a frontal cone, meaning the tanks will be silenced.

Tanks should not be silenced so that they may taunt.

When you have one holy paladin who is LARGELY responsible for healing BOTH tanks (thank you, Beacon), who can rarely spare a moment to refresh her Judgements of the Pure, you need other people in the raid to dispell that silence.

Dispells on the raid tonight, including the Necrotic Plague dispells:

Holy priest (in charge of NP dispells): 111

Myself: 21

Shadow Priest: 9

Rogue (for the enrage on the Shambling Horrors?): 5

Ret Paladin: 1

Nothing from the discipline priest. Just the one from the ret pally. Failure. I honestly cannot stop spamming the instant that comes up on a reliable basis, because, hi, that’s like, 30k damage from the ability, right when they’re silenced. I NEED to be healing that damage.

Seriously. Look at this.

[00:09:16.809] Raging Spirit Soul Shriek  MT 19774  (A: 2207, R: 2976)
[00:09:16.809] MT afflicted by Soul Shriek  from Raging Spirit
[00:09:18.244] Madranah Beacon of Light MT +11420 (O: 3589)
[00:09:19.444] Madranah Beacon of Light MT +0 (O: 22235)
[00:09:20.099] Madrana casts Cleanse on MT

That’s nearly four seconds into the silence. But it was STILL ON THE main tank, so after I healed up the nearly 20k damage he took (through Beacon, while healing the OT as well), I cleansed it.

/facepalm

/headdesk

The disc priest had been asked to help out with it at about attempt #6. The ret pally at about attempt #10.

0 in 10 attempts by the disc priest. 1 in 6 by the ret pally.

And it’s not like they even only get Soul Shriek ONCE. They get it several times a fight!

Plus, we were on Vent again tonight. Totally annoying and absurd. At one point, a mage says:

“Salv on [his name].”

And I’m thinking to myself, “You tool. If you think I have even HALF A SECOND to spare to toss you Hand of Salvation, when I’m keeping up BOTH TANKS here, you are freaking crazy.”

The ret pally apparently cast it on him, but if he had been like “I SAID SALV ON [NAME]”, I would have been like “Sorry, would you like me to let the tanks die while I cast a spell on you that is wholly unneeded if you would, I don’t know, Invis? Or WATCH YOUR THREAT in the first damn place?!”

Seriously. I don’t need to hear these people. Their voices, their ambient background noise, their idiotic requests that they don’t make through the proper channels (raid chat, for instance).

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t ever raid with Vent again, but I think my preference is to not at this point. I’d do it for Apotheosis, because I know and love those people and because it’s like spending three hours with friends when I raided with them. But I don’t need to listen to 20-some mouth-breathers who stroke their epeens while using perjorative terms for various social minorities in Vent and raid and guild chat.

Ugh. I feel like I should shower after that raid night.

Kurn's Q&A #8

All righty, let’s take a look at some of the search terms that brought people here that I know I haven’t adequately answered, shall we?

1) argent dawn howto 999

I’m going to guess you want to become 999/1000 exalted with the Argent Dawn? The best way to do this is to run Scholomance, Strat Live and Strat UD over and over again. And equip your Argent Dawn Commission or your Seal of the Dawn or your Rune of the Dawn. Scourgestone turn-ins are huge. Also take advantage of the quests at Light’s Hope Chapel. Here’s a great list of ways to gain rep with the Argent Dawn over at WoWWiki.

2) divinity seal of light

I would imagine, although I haven’t verified this, that yes, the 5% extra healing from Seal of Light stacks with the 5% extra healing due to Divinity. I’m pretty sure it works, but I haven’t re-glyphed/respecced to figure out if that’s working.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, I was wrong!

I normally run with Seal of Wisdom on along with Glyph of Seal of Wisdom, so I don’t usually have the opportunity to see what my extra healing is like with Glyph of Seal of Light — except on Dreamwalker. But, uh, that fight is hilarious when it comes to comparing numbers. My Lay on Hands crit for 131k at one point, so that’s not the best time to make comparisons.

3) does 10 man onyxia give frost badges

Nope. The only instances to drop frost badges (technically Emblems of Frost) are ICC25 (2 badges per boss, 1 badge for the miniboss), ICC10 (same as ICC25) and VOA 10/25 where ONLY Toravon drops 2 Frost Badges each. Onyxia, in both raid sizes, will only drop two Emblems of Triumph.

4) does shadowmeld clear debuff on sindragosa

Okay, let’s talk about what debuffs you mean. If it’s Chilled to the Bone or Instability, the very act of not doing anything for a little while will clear the debuff. If you’re talking Mystic Buffet, then no — the only thing that will clear that debuff is getting out of Sindragosa’s line of sight. I would imagine, though my paladin is a human so I can’t test it out, that if you’re not out of line of sight of her, you’ll still take a stack when she casts it.

5) how do i dps in dungeons assist warrior

These days, lots of tanks just go into a dungeon, pull the whole group and use their AOE abilities to hold aggro. Hell, I do this. I rarely switch targets when tanking on both my paladin and my druid and this, my friends, makes me a fail tank. I SHOULD be switching targets and trying to get more aggro on each target individually. But I don’t because, nine times out of ten, it’s just not needed.

Because so many tanks do this, it’s generally safe to target your tank and assist them (the F key, by default) and focus on THAT target for DPS. Please always do watch your threat meter, though. Pulling aggro is your fault, even if your tank sucks. Moderating your damage output is entirely within your control, even if that means you just plain stop attacking or you wait five seconds for your tank to secure aggro.

6) holy paladin requirements for icecrown citadel

Ooh, good question! I guess it depends on if you’re doing 10 or 25-man, but here’s what I would recommend.

– 4pc T9 (ilvl 232, minimum)

– 232 weapon/shield at minimum

– 245 or better helm/belt/bracers/boots (Onyxia, crafting, BOEs)

– 226/232/245 + rings/neck

In terms of stats, for a Holy Light paladin, I would strongly recommend somewhere around 2350-2500 spellpower, 28k mana unbuffed and at least 650 haste.

Key trinket pickups before you go: Talisman of Resurgence from Triumph badges, either Pandora’s Plea from Mimiron in Ulduar or Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 int) or the Tears of the Vanquished from regular 5-man TOC.

7) how to make grid beacon of light 60 yard range

I’m presuming here that you want to have Grid show someone within Beacon of Light range, right? I’ve been trying to play with range fading on my Grid (pro tip: doing so RIGHT BEFORE your guild pulls Sindragosa is NOT the right time to do so!). I’ll post here when I’ve played with it adequately. Ideally, I’d like to have those in 40yd range of me to appear with full opacity, those at 60yd range to be about 75% opacity and those any further to be about 50% opacity. Or something along those lines.

8) is there a macro addon which accounts for global cooldown

If you mean, is there a way I can do something so that I can have two abilities on the GCD in the same macro and just hit that macro once…. no. There is the “/in” function but it doesn’t work for something on the GCD. I’ve always used it for announces.

9) wow icc disc vs holy

There are several fights that will use both disc priests and holy priests very well throughout ICC. It really depends on the rest of your group makeup. If you have a holy paladin or two, you’ll want to be holy. If you have no holy pallies, you’ll want to be disc and focus on single-target healing and raid-wide mitigation. The instance has several fights that play to the strengths of both types of priests. :)

10) wow paladin how to behave in dungeons

Lesson the first: BUFF PEOPLE. A general guide to who wants what buff:

– might: rogues, DPS death knights, ret paladins, feral (kitty) druids

– kings: everyone else

Why? Because might, even unimproved might, is 550 AP. In order for kings to give that much attack power, DKs and ret pallies need to have over 2250 strength in order for the 10% bonus on that to be 225 extra agi/strength, which is 550 AP for them. Rogues and kitty druids only get 1AP per agi, so they’d need 5500 agility in order for kings to be better than even unimproved might.

What about hunters and enhancement shammies? Both gain additional attack power from intellect, through Careful Aim and Mental Quickness. Plus, the extra agility will give them both more crit as well. Survival hunters also gain an extra 10% of their stamina as attack power. On my hunter, unbuffed, I have:

2183 agility

605 intellect

1352 stamina

So kings will afford me 413 more attack power. But also another 2.6% crit just from the extra agility. And because, as survival, my crits proc Replenishment and various other abilities, crits are good. :)

DPS warriors can put up Battle Shout (equivalent to might) so kings them and they can buff with Battle Shout. You should also kings prot warriors, obviously.

What else? As a paladin, be aware of who can cleanse what. If you’re in, say, Old Kingdom, as any role, and your healer is a tree, guess what? You need to cleanse diseases and magic effects. If you’re somewhere with a priest? You get to cleanse poisons. A shammy? You need to cleanse magic. If you’re not doing that stuff, you fail as a paladin. When I tank as a pally, I cleanse. When I heal as a pally, I cleanse. You need to get Decursive or something to help you be aware of what to cleanse and when.

Also, auras. If you’re on Garfrost? Use Frost Aura. If you’re fighting Koralon? Fire Aura.

And judge! Judgement of Light takes priority over Judgement of Wisdom, because everyone in your party has health, but not everyone will have mana.

Man, that last one could have been a whole post on its own, eh? Heh. :)

Kind of an epic night.

Last night, we were again without our healing lead, my RL friend the resto druid. Last night, we were again working on Sindragosa.

For the first time in the six months that I’ve been in the guild… they asked us to get on Vent.

My guild doesn’t use Vent for raid instructions. At all. Ever. My RL friend can count on one hand the number of times she’s been on Vent for guild-related purposes, including officer meetings.

So last night, before we started working on Sindragosa again, they had us get on Vent so that the caster lead could call out Ice Tombs and the direction of Ice Tombs in Sindragosa’s final phase, which is what we were REALLY having problems with.

Not only that, but the tanks indicated, over Vent, when they were taunting.

I’ve raided for six months without Vent and I really didn’t miss it. But having the tanks calling out taunts on Vent was GREAT. I would swap my beacon, keep healing the tank and/or raid members, etc. I don’t think I missed a single transition, as opposed to missing a bunch in previous nights of attempts.

Anyways, we got Sindragosa down in three tries last night and then went on to clear out the Plagueworks, which we’d skipped this reset so we could get good work in on Blood Queen (we wanted, and got, a repeat kill) and get some real good time in on Sindragosa.

Of course, the healing officer, as I said, wasn’t online. So the caster officer, who’d been giving healing instructions for Sindragosa, asks me to do healing for the Plagueworks.

… oh crap.

I loaded up my trusty healing assignment mod, HealOrganizer, for the first time since, oh, SEPTEMBER, and then, through trash, struggled to remember everything my RL friend had ever said about the upcoming three fights. It wasn’t made easier by the fact that we had a new holy priest and a new resto druid in the raid, who I hadn’t really analyzed in the last couple of raids (hi, I’m not actually an officer, you know), so I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle things.

First up, we went to Rotface.

I put myself on the MT and infections (so I beaconed the MT) and healed those with infections. I put the disc priest on the MT. I put the resto druid on the OT (kiting slimes) due to his mobility, along with helping out on infections and the raid. I put the two resto shammies on the raid and had the holy priest on the raid.

While we had a cleansing totem dropped in error (sigh!) we still one-shot it. I would have liked the resto druid to help me out a little more with infections towards the end, because we lost a couple of people that way, but overall, it worked out and we one-shot Rotface. Whew.

Then I had to figure out Festergut. I put me and the disc priest on the tanks. I put the two shammies, the druid and the holy priest on the raid and strongly encouraged the shammies to chain through the active tank after the second spore and through Pungent Blight.  Had we not attempted (twice) to do the achievement (in which BOY did people screw up!), we would have one-shotted. As it was, it took three attempts, but he died.

On to Professor.

I put myself and the disc priest on the MT, put the shammies on people with Volatile Ooze, gave free reign to the holy priest and the resto druid, reminded people to stand on the left when we were on that side of the room, reminded them to watch out for Malleable Goo, not to stand in green slime or near orange viles, told the priests to use GS and PS at their discretion and to stack up on the Volatile Ooze people if at all possible.

First wipe happened because the tank who was the abom got way behind on slime pools.

Second attempt was a great kill, with just one person dying at the end, and it was to Malleable Goo (and it wasn’t a healer, so I didn’t care so much). I popped DS/DS, I did a lot more casting of Holy Light than I normally do on that fight (as per my own analysis from 2 weeks ago) and we got him down easily.

Whew.

And then, it was about 1am. One hour left in the raid.

Every boss in the instance was dead. Except for the Lich King.

So up we went to The Frozen Throne.

Epic.

Our best attempt lasted less than three minutes. Hilarious.

We’re extending our lockout this week. I need to farm up a crapton of mats, I think. This is going to be huge.

Judging, Divinity and an Experiment

I won’t link to it, because I think it’s a crappy article, but the WoW.com holy paladin writer, Chase Christian, is claiming that Divinity affects the healing done by a paladin’s Judgement of Light. My first thought was “that’s BS” followed quickly by “… right?”.

I just spent 95g, respeccing my prot spec to holy and then back to prot to examine this situation.

At first, I thought I could try it out with the same holy gear and just switch from holy to prot and judge light on a training dummy and see what happened.

What happened made no sense whatsoever. One of the specs I was in got 3.4% more healing from JoL. That didn’t make any sense to me, so I went and respecced. I mean, I should be getting 10% more, not something weird like 3.4%, right?

With identical 54/17/0 builds, except getting Divine Strength instead of Divinity, I ended up with:

Divinity: 454 per JoL

No Divinity: 412 per JoL

What does that mean? That means that Divinity is granting me 5% extra healing because the judgement is mine and it’s granting me 5% extra healing because I’m receiving the healing. I have 20,564 health unbuffed, so 2% of that health is about 412. Another 10% of that 412 is about 454.

So that works and means that Mr. Christian’s claim that paladins with Divinity ought to judge light exclusively makes sense, right?

Wrong.

My brother’s hunter has 21,404 health unbuffed.

I had the hunter shoot up a training dummy in IF and I judged light in the spec without Divinity in it.

My brother was getting 428 health back. That’s 2% of his health. That seems to work fine.

With Divinity, my JoL should, then, heal my brother’s hunter for an additional 21.40 (5% extra), or about 450 health per proc.

And still, my brother’s hunter was getting 428 health back per proc.

It appears to me that Divinity and Judgement of Light give the JUDGING paladin 10% extra healing, but it honestly doesn’t affect anyone else, except possibly other paladins with Divinity.

I know! I know! It doesn’t make sense! Why would you be awarded the 10% bonus with Divinity and not have that extra 5% affect others? Before you ask, no, it’s not my glyphs. While I had my prot glyphs in on the secondary non-Divinity spec, none of my glyphs affect my JoL or extra healing in any way. I wasn’t using Glyph of Seal of Light or anything.

But no matter what I did, 428 was what my brother’s procs of JoL were hitting for. So I must conclude that my initial “that’s BS!” call stands. Of course, if anyone out there has screenshots or a combat log parse to show otherwise, I’m happy to revise my assessment. :)

If there’s another paladin in my raid group, by the way, I almost always judge wisdom. Why? Because warriors, rogues and death knights have no use for mana and ret pallies, hunters and enhancement shammies have little need for the regen and the healers generally will not benefit from it, as they’re not attacking the boss. That means that if I don’t refresh my judgement three times a minute, it’s not a big deal. It means that only elemental shammies, mages, warlocks, moonkins and shadow priests will really be adversely affected if I can’t find a global to judge. Whereas any other kind of paladin, a retribution or protection paladin, will be judging on cooldown, which is WAY more than I am, which leads to WAY more uptime on their judgement.

The judgement that should, IMHO, have priority, is Light, because EVERYONE attacking the boss has a health bar and could potentially benefit from it.

So basically, Kurn, you’re saying that you fail at judging.

:P I’m saying that, as a healer, keeping our judgement up is not going to be our first priority and sometimes it’ll fall off. Sorry, but if my tank is taking 30k melee attacks, it’s not always easy to find a place to judge often enough to keep up Judgements of the Pure, much less my judgement debuff.

As an added note, I’m finding that the best time to judge on Sindragosa is when I get Instability and again when I want to drop my 4-5 stacks of it.