Month: January 2013

Better Late Than Never

Kurn / / healing, paladins, podcast

Ladies and gentlemen of the holy paladin community… hello.

You are probably all caught up on this stuff, but since it was a lingering issue throughout the Pandaria beta and well into live, I thought I’d actually update here. Thanks to Ophelie’s post that reminded me I hadn’t updated the situation!

Shortly after 5.1 came out, I sent a note to Jacii, a holy paladin in Apotheosis. I was like, “dude, can you please do me a favour and see if they actually fixed Holy Avenger like GC promised they would?”

He happily obliged, for which I thanked him profusely. Then I got caught up in holidays and family and junk.

So here, now, are the results of Jacii’s testing:

Holy Avenger will now grant 30% extra healing to Flash of Light and Divine Light on the Beacon of Light target while active.

Additionally, they will continue to give you three Holy Power when benefiting from Tower of Radiance, when Holy Avenger is active.

Here are the averages of about 10 casts WITHOUT Holy Avenger active:

Holy Shock – 34,755
Holy Radiance – 25,674
Flash of Light – 46,791
Divine Light – 62,204

And here they are WITH Holy Avenger active:

Holy Shock  – 45,147
Holy Radiance – 33,421
Flash of Light – 60,999
Divine Light – 80,516

Jacii kindly also included the percentage differences, which means I don’t have to do math. Yay!

Holy Shock – 29.90%
Holy Radiance – 30.17%
Flash of Light – 30.36%
Divine Light – 29.44%

Obviously, the offsets here and there are due to heals healing for a RANGE of healing and not always, say, 35k, 25k, 47k and 62k. It seems as though Holy Avenger now properly grants 30% extra healing to all heals that grant Holy Power, as the tooltip indicates! Yay!

If you want to see the screenshots from Jacii, they’re all available here: http://imgur.com/a/pD0qr

Anyhow, my apologies to being late on this, but that pesky “real life” thing tends to get in the way an awful lot. :) Thanks again to Jacii from Apotheosis for getting me the info (like, six weeks ago) and thanks again to Ophelie for reminding me, however unintentionally. ;)

Lastly, Majik and I are still plotting planning our grand finale episode of Blessing of Frost. We’re looking for YOUR comments on what you liked best about Episodes 43-74! Recording will likely occur in early February, so get your comments in now! Tweet us @kurnmogh and @majjity or email us at podcast [at] blessingoffrost [dot] com. :)

 

Old Habits and Updates

Kurn / / general, ramblings

One of the things I loved about WoW is that I could play it at any time of day or night. I could always find something to do in World of Warcraft that would be beneficial for one (or all) of my characters, even at, oh, 4am. For a long time, it was a habit to play WoW until I was just so exhausted that I would have to go pass out.

This was especially the case when I had a headache.

You can make all the jokes you like about a raid leader/guild master/etc having game-induced headaches (God knows I did get some headaches due to other people in that fashion), but since the age of 18-19, I’ve had some seriously bad sinus headaches on a fairly regular basis due to something called vasomotor rhinitis. I was on a steroid nasal inhaler for this for quite some time, but for the last several years, they haven’t made that particular inhaler any longer and other prescriptions don’t work quite as well to the point where there’s no real point to taking any regular prescription for the condition at all.

What works best for me, during some of my most severe headaches, is taking an over the counter decongestant, along with some Tylenol, waiting for it to kick in and then taking a nap or going to bed when the pain is bearable enough to ensure lying down. (Lying down always makes it worse for me, and sleeping while sitting up sucks.)

WoW was a great habit to have when I had headaches. I would be sitting up (good for my head), I would be entertained (thus distracting me from the pain) and it wasn’t something that required a ton of attention when I was obviously not feeling 100%. But it required SOME attention and that was really, really awesome.

It’s been over two months since I last played WoW. I haven’t uninstalled the game yet, but my account is inactive and I have no plans to reactivate it. I haven’t really missed it all that much. Part of it is that I threw myself into National Novel Writing Month (and “won”, by writing 50,000 words in the 30 days of November), so when my account was disabled on November 10th, I didn’t really have a chance to miss it ’till December. And I didn’t really have a chance to miss it in December what with the holidays and family and all kinds of stuff.

I find I don’t really miss WoW very much now, either. I sometimes miss the idea of raiding and I certainly miss the idea of being really good at something (tank healing!), but other things are taking the place of most things I used to do in-game.

Except farming when I’m up late with a headache, like I am right now. There’s still not a good option. Television is loud and is also too passive, mostly. Reading is too difficult with the headache. Other games aren’t as interesting. At least when I’d farm in WoW when I was up with a headache, I felt like I was doing something useful with my time. I do miss that aspect of the game.

But, having said that, I guess I’ll go try to watch some TV or a movie on Netflix and hope that’s enough to distract me until the Tylenol and decongestant kick in.

Hope you’re all doing okay out there. Aside from this killer headache, I’m doing pretty well. :)

PS: The last episode of Blessing of Frost is being recorded Soon(tm). Let Majik and I know what your favourite bits were — episodes 43-74 only, please! :)