"It works for me!"

37 Replies to “"It works for me!"”

1. Necessary or not, once you are confident that you know all the tips and tricks on how to maximize your class/spec it’s nearly impossible to watch others wandering around wasting their potential.

   It’s about potential. It’s not elitist. I don’t really understand the itemisation of my alts, perhaps this pally is an alt? or at least, not a full time raider (with the PVP item and AP boots). Or new to Holy?

2. So true what Cassandri said.

   I am having some issues currently with a Holydin in my guild (it’s his MS, it’s my OS), he’s generally receptive to my suggestions, fortunately. Although another guildmate (who used to play Holydin around the beginning of WotLK but no longer actively plays one/keeps up on knowledge) tends to really get on my case when I try to help said Holydin out.

   Example, last night after running an ICC10 with the MS Holydin guildmate, I commented on how my (buffed) mana pool was 40k where the other pally’s was 36k. The response I got was that a mana pool over 35k was unnecessary. :/

3. Cassandri – oh my God, yes, it is SO HARD to see people walking around, oblivious to all the things that I look at FIRST. Such sad pandas.

   I think you’ve got a good point — it IS about potential. Am I weird, then, for wanting to achieve my potential? I don’t get why others don’t seem to care.

   It looks like she got Lockjaw on their Putricide kill, so I can’t imagine it’s gone to her for offspec. It’s possible it’s an alt, but I have no real way of knowing. I really wish I could find out! :)

   Aloix – WHAT?

   No. No. No. No. No.

   More mana = godly. The more mana you have, the more you regen via Divine Plea and Replenishment and Mana Tide Totem. The more mana you have, the longer you can cast without using DP. The more mana you have, the more crit and bonus healing you get. It is NEVER okay to stop stacking Intellect!

   /cry

4. Third attempt at writing this. The hot weather in here really isn’t doing my laptop any good.

   I’ve had issues with people who “do it wrong” but don’t bother to do anything about it nevertheless. Almost every single Holy paladin I’ve raided with on my server is “doing it wrong” because “they’re casual raiders”. For some of them, I fully agree that what’s working for them is just fine, even though it makes me want to cry. Some of them really have no intention whatsoever to spend an evening wiping on a single boss for some progress. They’re perfectly fine with being stuck at some point or another.

   But to be honest. I still just can’t take any raiding Holy paladin serious who isn’t at least aware of the basics. Kurn, you’ve pretty much mentioned those basics over and over. That’s what I’m talking about. Holy paladins, stacking intellect and spamming FoL on progression fights. With a Retribution subspec and ilvl 264 libram. With Glyph of Seal of Wisdom. Usually far below 300 haste. Usually obsessed with GearScore. Ugh.

   There’s a whole world of difference between a Holy paladin who’s actually putting effort into maximizing potential and a Holy paladin who’s just winging it. I’ve seen them. I’ve raided with them. AND I DON’T WANT TO ANYMORE!!! /nerdrage

   WTB raiding guild with competent Holy paladins…

5. I think there’s a fine line between judging out of an elitist mindset, and judging because you think someone can genuinely do better. If you’re one of those players who will inspect someone, and point out in an unsolicited whisper what they did wrong, you fall into the first set of people.

   But then, there are people who know what works best, and what can be improved because they actually have to do it. If you’re progressing in ICC-25-H, you’re naturally going to be looking for what is the absolute best. You NEED the best if you’re going to down the bosses with any sort of regularity (well, zone buff aside, you could probably slack a /little/ bit on gear once it hits the cap). It’s therefore in your nature to see people and think “oh, if they did X, then Y would work better.”

   Is it necessary for everyone? No, not at all. I still match sockets with every piece of gear I get, because I’m too lazy to learn the “rules” to it. But I do fine. The bosses die, the group gets loot, and we move on. For now, that’s all I need, and I’m content to be somewhere-above-average-but-below-spectacular.

6. Y’mean this kind of horribly-choiced player isn’t common on your server? Lucky you. On my server, EVERY FUCKING PALADIN (apart from myself) has Purified Lunar Dust. I tell them they’re wrong, and they say “well hurr i bought it with frosts hurr must be better hurr too much intllect is bad hurr” and on the topic of my Tears of the Vanquished (which is still excellent imo)? “HURR ILVL 200 HURR 84 INT? WHY WOULD YOU EVER WANT THAT, DURR”

   /facepalm

7. Xmolder – But doing things like matching socket bonuses isn’t just a loss of potential for you, but for your entire raid. If gemming correctly could make boss kills cleaner for your group, isn’t it worth it to do so? It’s not like it takes any true effort to do so, you just buy different gems. And taking the time to do so may cost a tiny bit of time/effort pre-raid, but will save time/effort during the raid. It’s like being part of a choir for fun and knowing that you’re mispronouncing the Latin, but just not caring. It completely boggles my mind.

8. Codi – No, it’s not. Because the only bosses we clear with any sense of purpose are Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship, and Saurfang. The last time we wiped was when a tank lost aggro on a mob on LDW due to a disconnect, and it decided to stomp the healer. I am a super-casual player at this point in time, as is the general composition of my guild. To us, it just doesn’t matter if we min-max.

   Does that mean we don’t know /how/ to improve? No, it doesn’t. If we had the raider base to progress further than Lower Spire, we could easily pull it off. /But we don’t care to./

9. Follow-up comment: I went ahead and did the math. Assuming the guide I found is correct, optimal gemming suggests I should NOT match the socket bonus if, and only if, the bonus is less than +7 spell power. That is to say, I need a blue gem to activate the socket bonus, and it provides +9 spell power. 12sp/10spi (Purified) with the +9 spell power comes to 24 spell power (counting bonus from spirit through Fel Armor). If the socket bonus is +5 spell power, for example, the total would be 20 spell power and 10 spirit (or 17 spell power and 10 haste, if yellow (Reckless Ametrine)).

   If I followed the gemming rule, on my gear, I would gain a massive 9 spell power. I would lose 10 haste. Is that REALLY why we don’t down Festergut/Rotface?

10. Hm… see, my one lv. 80 would probably make anyone even REMOTELY versed in endgame gearing just WEEP. I’ve got my full T10 armour, but only half of it’s gemmed, NONE of it’s enchanted. I have no glyphs, no idea what my caps/goals are (I’m DPS blood DK on my 80), and basically just hit my buttons in the order I’ve been told is the best.

    To be honest, though, part of the reason she’s so abysmally…. well, crap is because I know I’m never gonna raid on her. She’s fun enough to play, especially when I just want brainless facerolling in random heroics, but she’s not who I play most of the time anymore, and she definitely wouldn’t be who I raid on if I ever manage to get myself raid-ready.

    The thing is, even on my Paladin (almost lv 40, levelling just through healing randoms), I really have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to gear/etc. I’ll take +int over +sp, because mana is my god, I’m speccing based on a cookie-cutter build, and I mostly just point and click. I don’t really grasp the nuanced angles of this game, and honestly I’m not sure I ever will – I keep reading things and trying to learn them, but while I’ve gathered that int gives you mana, stam gives you health, and basic stuff like that… I really can’t seem to get my head around things. :/ I can do fight mechanics, and once I can play around with new spells a bit, I’m okay with my trained abilities, but if I had to completely build my own spec and gearset from scratch, I would probably be horror-movie fodder for people who know better.

    I have to admit, it’s very frustrating, because I WANT to grasp it. I just… can’t seem to manage it.

11. @Starm: Heh, sounds pretty much like my server. Another Holy paladin favorite on my server is Althor’s Abacus. Sigh.

    No but seriously. I’ve recently re-done my gems, glyphs and talent spec and swapped out some gear. Now I really feel like I’m a much better Holy paladin.

    For shits n giggles, here’s a link to my Armory:
    http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Eonar&cn=Kaboomski

    Notice the gem in the headpiece. That one isn’t replaced because I wanted to save 100g since I’m getting the T10 headpiece soon. The gloves will be replaced as well (with Fallen Lord’s Handguards) when I get the new headpiece.

    You can’t possibly make me believe it’s hard to get your shit in order. I did the gems and glyphs almost in a single night. I spent no more than 300g to get this far. This is why I hate it when I have to raid with Holy paladin failures. Because we can’t get Sindragosa (normal, 10 man) down. Because our second Holy paladin comes in last on total healing done. Because he decided to gem int and spam FoL. Sigh. Did I mention he has Purified Lunar dust *and* Althor’s Abacus? At least last time I checked.. I made a comment regarding his trinkets so he might’ve swapped something since then. I don’t even want to check how much haste he has. I know it’s less then me, and I’m already very low on haste!

12. In my opinion there’s a quick way to figure out if you’re an elitist or not. Picture the following: you come across someone who is quite obviously “doing it wrong”. Upon confrontation, the person replies “I know. But I find my way more fun.” What is your reaction?

    If you refuse to accept that argument, then you’re probably an elitist. Why? Because we’re playing a game, and having fun is the entire purpose of the game. If someone derives more fun from “doing in wrong” than from “doing it right”, then they are succeeding at the point of the game, even if they’re not succeeding in the manner that you might deem most fit.

    If your response is “well then, more power to ya!” and moving on your way, then you’re not an elitist. Even if you refuse to group with that person in the future, you’re not an elitist — you’re simply someone who wishes to play a game with people of the same or similar mindset. However, calling them fail behind their back does make you a big fat doo-doo head. =P

13. @ Gryphonheart

    That is a great question, and personally I do my best to stick with asking myself ‘am I (regularly) raiding with this person’ as a guide for my answer.
    Sure I may have to bite my tongue and such, but truly for me it doesn’t matter unless it’s part of that 9/24 thing.
    The only big exception to that for me really is that I use RankWatch (set to tell myself only) and sometimes in a heroic/weekly/voa/pugger in a raid I may whisper that spell rank(s) need to be checked.

14. xmolder – We’re not talking about have one non-optimal gem choice, though. If I saw a healadin have one orange gem just hanging out in his/her gear, I’d probably shrug, mention it in passing sometime and forget about it. There is a grave difference between your situation and the one we’re discussing. Is your single gem the reason your group can’t progress? Probably not. Is the paladin mentioned in the original post? There is a distinct chance of it. It also is different for healers, as when a healer isn’t performing well, it can be difficult to convince him/her what the problem is. For DPS, there is a solid metric to judge each individual. (ie. DoT uptime, damage done, average DPS) As healers we run into this “if no one died, then I did my job because numbers don’t matter” mentality that causes an uneven workload. So this paladin in question might never know that they’re causing the other healers to pick up tons of their slack, unless they are told what they are doing wrong.

    Gryphonheart – If we were discussing how every druid should heal or something of that, I’d agree with you. You should never be forced to tank if it isn’t fun for you. But is gemming badly really an intrical part of how you have fun? The paladin in question is healing raids already, we’re not asking that they do something they don’t want to do. How is using the trinket that you -already have- when you Plea making it somehow less fun?

    If this were an MMO that didn’t involve group content, I’d probably just shrug at the people making the illogical choices and walk away. However, I -care- about the state of healing in the game and on my server. I write on my blog to help decrease the average ignorance level of healing in the game and to increase the average skill level. It’s the same reason why I make sure to help any healers on my server who send me tells. I am not just helping those individuals, but also -every person they group with.- People who knowingly play in a sub-optimal way are saying “screw the rest of my group, me and my fun are the only things that matter.”

15. Kaboomski – I just don’t get how people can have so little haste. That’s the one that drives me nuts.

    I’ve had fun in the last almost-three weeks with my new guild, educating the fail pally apps. My guildies are getting a kick out of it. :)

    X – I am definitely an elitist asshole. Except that I’ll bitch on Twitter or on here about the fail I see. If it’s just something small, MAYBE I’ll mention it to someone. But otherwise, unless they’re applying to my guild, I keep my mouth shut.

    I’ll talk a bit more about socket bonuses later. :)

    Starm – Oh no. It’s common everywhere I’ve seen. Any paladin with Purified Lunar Dust is a moron. SIGH.

    Tears of the Vanquished is a lovely thing. Honestly, here’s how I rate trinkets:

    1) Meteorite Crystal (10m Algalon)
    2) Solace of the Defeated (heroic, 25m TOGC)
    3) Talisman of Resurgence (Emblems of Triumph)
    4) Solace of the Defeated (regular, 25m TOC)
    5) Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 int)
    6) Tears of the Vanquished

    10 points to you, btw, for the imitation of the noobs you run into with the “hurr”s and “durr”s. I cracked up. :D

    Codi and X – The thing is, you’re probably well-specced, X. You probably have decent enchants. This pally didn’t have an enchant on her mace. Had an *AP* gem in her boots. This kind of stuff isn’t the same as your difference of nine spellpower.

    I think that if you multiply the “small issues” like your 9 spellpower across the 10 or 25 people, you’ll find that unless people are strongly encouraged (and then forced, if that doesn’t work) to change things up to be more efficient, the average amount of “small issues” is not a difference of 9 spellpower. In the instance of this paladin, the issue is the lack of a raid-saving cooldown, a loss of 155 intellect and a lack of thought with regards to Divine Plea and the offsets she has available to her.

    If you multiply THAT amount of (what IMHO is) fail by 10 or 25 people, I’m surprised anyone can down anything. But clearly, her raid group is downing Putricide.

    My question out of this exchange between you two is this:

    X – are you SURE it’s that your raid group doesn’t know how to be most efficient? Are you SURE that all the right buffs and debuffs are in place? Are you SURE that every player has a reasonable spec, gems and enchants and are using the right spells?

    Codi – I’m definitely with you on the mispronouncing the Latin/boggled mind bit. Having said that, I’m (slowly) learning that people play for different reasons and even if they’re raiding the exact same content as me, their motivations are probably different. I guess I just don’t understand trying to down something and not doing everything I can in order to do so. I’m glad I’m not alone, though. :)

    Apple – I’m sure a lot of people would have trouble building a spec and gear set from scratch. Let me tell you how many hours I’ve spent trying to come up with a gear set that I know I want to wear, which is BASED on other people’s suggestions: probably a good 20-25 hours since ICC was released. That’s like, a full day of my LIFE spent pouring over stats, available gear and the probability of my getting these items. So don’t feel badly about that. ;)

    As to your DK, I’m afraid I’d have to shudder if I ever ran into her. :( I understand the concept of her being mostly retired, but is there any particular reason besides “never gonna raid on her” that she’s only partly gemmed, not enchanted and has no glyphs? I’m honestly curious, because you definitely approach the game very differently from how I do and I would love any kind of insight into a different opinion. :)

    As to the paladin, what sort of nuances do you think you’re missing out on? At the lower levels, it’s pretty simply — someone takes damage, you heal them. :) The complexities come beyond 60, with things like Beacon, Divine Plea, Sacred Shield, etc.

    Kaboomski – OH MY GOD, if it’s the paladin who is specced 3/3 Blessed Life and 0/5 Judgements of the Pure and 0/2 Enlightened Judgements that I just saw in your guild, OH MY GOD I AM SO SORRY FOR THE FAIL YOU ENCOUNTER CONSTANTLY.

    Oh my GOD, that is just… wow.

    Failure of the Week, right there.

    Gryphonheart – However, calling them fail behind their back does make you a big fat doo-doo head. =P

    I’m a big, fat, doo-doo head. I am. I freely admit it.

    If someone is “doing it wrong” and won’t listen to how to “do it right” because they find their way “more fun”, I don’t want to play with them.

    The trouble is that, on a daily basis, I end up playing with them anyways because of the in-game methods of encouragement Blizzard has given us. Emblems of Frost? Yes, please. For the last week or so, I’ve done a LOT of randoming on ALL my toons, both Ahune and random heroics. I’ve encountered so much fail that I try really hard not to think about it, lest I weep.

    As long as, due to game mechanics, I have a good chance of being paired up with people who are completely oblivious to the basics of their class — not just paladins, but any class — then I feel that I have a right to at least complain about Blizzard’s utter lack of training. Or the utter lack of talent in players hitting 80 these days. Or the utter lack of common sense being shown by a lot of people. All of these are to the detriment of the group. The group that I’m in.

    If some warrior who calls themselves a “tank” queues up for a daily random dungeon at the same time that I do and we get heroic Halls of Reflection and I get eaten by four adds because he’s concentrating all his aggro on the one mob he managed to grab… then his failure becomes my problem. And it IS his failure, because he’s not managing to do his job.

    I feel strongly that the grey area is between “being able to do your job while not min/maxed or playing efficiently” and “failing to do your job entirely”. I’m generally OKAY with people who aren’t playing efficiently as long as they’re not hunters or paladins and I don’t inspect them, so long as they’re doing their jobs. :P But as soon as that DPS proves to me that they can’t do more damage than I can, as a healer, or the healer can’t keep us up despite amazing tanking, or the tank can’t hold aggro, despite appropriate level healers and DPS around him, that’s when I’m like “no. No. Just… no.”

    Aloix – exactly, if I’m not raiding with them, I usually don’t open my mouth. But I have been using RankWatch for months and usually have it on, at least for me.

    Codi – If this were an MMO that didn’t involve group content, I’d probably just shrug at the people making the illogical choices and walk away. However, I -care- about the state of healing in the game and on my server. I write on my blog to help decrease the average ignorance level of healing in the game and to increase the average skill level. It’s the same reason why I make sure to help any healers on my server who send me tells. I am not just helping those individuals, but also -every person they group with.- People who knowingly play in a sub-optimal way are saying “screw the rest of my group, me and my fun are the only things that matter.”

    So, tell me, are you married and if not, wanna get hitched? I think I <3 you with all my <3.

16. In my situation? Yes. I AM sure. I’ve taken a look at everyone in our core group, and everyone of them has what they need. Everyone is gemmed right, and the enchants are more than acceptable. They have the necessary talents. Hell, our resto druid single-healed LDW until the shield went down and tank cooldowns were up before he could spare a GCD to cast Rebirth on the holy pally. In my situation, we don’t need to min-max. And at the end of your post, that’s what you were asking. WE don’t need to do that, but your guild, who has to push with everything they have, does.

17. X – I was actually using you as an example of raid groups in general in casual guilds. I had no idea what “hit rating” was pre-BC except that I needed it for my Tranq shot rotation on Magmadar.

    How do you define needing to min/max, though? Why *can’t* you down Plague? Is it a matter of not understanding the mechanics or is it something else? If you can’t down content you want to down, tweaks in efficiency are in order, no?

    Example: My guild, Apotheosis, was wiping on Gruul. 16%, 13%, 6%, 4%. And even then, we were getting INSANE grows, like 18-19 grows.

    I didn’t get it. People weren’t even really dying until the grows got immense.

    I then looked at the parses. Everyone was missing. NO ONE was hit-capped.

    So I wrote a post that I made everyone read that gave them hit caps for their classes, basically.

    We went back in to Gruul and ruined him. And that’s how Apotheosis started to be a guild that wanted to be better and down the next boss and the next, etc, all the way to Illidan.

    So if your (now former, as I understand it?) guild is trying to do Y, but they’re not doing Z which might help in their efforts, why bother trying to do Y at all, I guess?

18. Kurn – LOL I’m not married yet, no, although the SO might have issues with me moving up to Canada to get hitched to you. XD ‘Course, then we’d be in Canada. Hrm, it’s very tempting!

    Psst! Just so you know, regular Solace is worth more regen than Talisman, so you might want to switch those on the list. XD Solace = 128 MP5, Talisman = ~95 MP5 ;D

19. Is it possible to judge someone’s ability by looking at there stats? Do you say someone is fail because they aren’t a Kingslayer? I have sat here and read the post and the comments and even though you say:

    Should it really make a difference in a pug? Should I care that the pally is specced abysmally? Should I care that she’s having to waste globals to refresh SS and BoL? Not if she’s keeping people up.

    I am not in a raiding guild, I don’t raid with a constant group, am I bad healadin because I am only 5/12? My spec, gear, gems, etc. are probably not elitest, but they allow me to work with a VAST composition of groups because that is how I play, I pug and take what I can get.

    Does it fall on me because I may not have enough haste when all the dps are cut in half by purple lasers of pew pew? Or when the tanks don’t do their job and 15+ stacks of increased damaged on a boss kills them? A raid group is a team, interconnected and while you should put your best foot forward, if every single person was chomped out of a cookie cutter, it wouldn’t be worth anything. It wouldn’t MEAN anything to put yourself behind your character and say I DID IT, it would just be, well all my stuff is the best, there is no reason not to do it.

    Is there a right way and a wrong way…yes…I fully admit that paladins with or wanting spirit is a heaping pile of fail. However, just because a stat (int/sp for example) isn’t min/max doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. You said yourself she outhealed you on some fights, log based.

    Just because they don’t use your glyphs, doesn’t mean they aren’t using their choices wisely. I fought long and hard to understand my mana conservation, regeneration, usage, etc. and I don’t use SoW, and I rarely (haven’t in a VERY LONG TIME in fact) end a fight in mana problems. I am down the ret tree and use SoL…I prefer to hit and hit hard.

    In the end, doing your job is all that matters.

    PS. I tried to say this as organized as possible >.<

20. darn it….

    correction: even though you say: (long quote here) all you are doing is judging and saying she is probably a leading factor in a lack of progression.

21. Nah, I left a different guild, my lock is still considered a raider with the guild in question.

    It’s hard for me to define min-maxing, because I’m shit with words (a fact I’m sure you understand quite well by now). But I suppose I could try to sum it up as “a lot of little things to push your (D/T/H)PS just that much higher.” Not necessarily figuring out how much spirit a piece would need to make up for, say, a loss of haste on your current piece (which is just a simple thing to understand for any class, as I don’t know a single raid that will wait for you to sim something if it drops, and even I don’t plan for specific drops if I bother to run something). Putting epic gems in every slot is not min-maxing, but making sure you gain that extra 9 spell power (to draw upon the comment I made earlier) and whether or not it’s more vital than the 10 haste you lost is.

    As for why we don’t down Plague quarter? We just don’t care to. Most of us have arena teams, or are working on a PvP set. Some of us are alt-whores (myself included, obviously) and would rather work on them. Our current MT healer is pregnant, and is due pretty soon (if I recall correctly). We clear the Lower Spire, and realize that we’ve spent enough time there, and don’t want to keep going. For whatever reasons we have, we are content knowing that we have made it as far as we have, with a ragtag group that generally doesn’t get along (the short-term raid leader was convinced that you can’t hide under Marrowgar to avoid the coldflames, and had us spread out for six attempts before his prompt demotion).

    Maybe my guild isn’t the best example for the point you’re trying to make, but I think that’s a fine answer to your question. Maybe there’s more to the player base that doesn’t need to min-max simply because they’re not shooting for 12/12 ICC.

22. Codi – And Canada isn’t even all that cold! It feels like 96 Fahrenheit right now! ;) Just think it over. No pressure. ;D

    I have no doubt that regular Solace is worth more regen than Talisman, but I value Talisman more as an offset for Divine Plea along with the regen/intellect it gives. I suspect I make up for a bit of the regen by using Heroic Holiday’s Grace, for example, whereas you might prefer the choker off of BQL.

    Tarinae –

    Is it possible to judge someone’s ability by looking at there stats? Do you say someone is fail because they aren’t a Kingslayer?

    It is not possible to judge someone’s *ability* by looking at their stats. It *is*, however, possible to gauge someone’s knowledge about how best their class works by looking at their stats, as well as the potential of their performance.

    I have no idea what your stats are, but if you’re primarily casting Holy Light using Glyph of Seal of Light, I can almost certainly say that you’re not experiencing mana problems for one or two of the following reasons:

    a) You don’t have enough haste, so you’re not casting enough to keep your regen methods from catching up.

    b) You’re loaded up with a bunch of regen gear (mp5 vs. the haste, for example, or outrageous amounts of crit, or some combination).

    c) The content you’re doing may be something you now outgear, considering the ICC buff.

    As well, no one is fail for not being a Kingslayer. Being a Kingslayer depends a lot more on luck if you’re not in a solid, regular, raiding environment than it depends on anything else.

    You are not a bad healadin because you’re 5/12. Again, this is largely a game where the reliable groups within guilds get more things accomplished than a group that doesn’t raid together on a regular basis. Hell, my hunter is only 4/12 because I don’t raid in a guild on my hunter and, when I do raid, it’s a very occasional thing.

    Does it fall on me because I may not have enough haste when all the dps are cut in half by purple lasers of pew pew? Or when the tanks don’t do their job and 15+ stacks of increased damaged on a boss kills them?

    Everyone needs to take personal responsibility. One of the things I’m generally good at is looking at logs to figure out the reason behind a wipe. Was the tank eaten? Why? Were healers incapacitated? Did we enrage? Why did the tank die and what were the contributing factors behind it? If it’s that six DPS were too dumb to move out of Twilight Cutters, that’s their fault and no amount of haste is going to make up for that.

    A raid group is a team, interconnected and while you should put your best foot forward, if every single person was chomped out of a cookie cutter, it wouldn’t be worth anything. It wouldn’t MEAN anything to put yourself behind your character and say I DID IT, it would just be, well all my stuff is the best, there is no reason not to do it.

    I know that I come across as harsh in many of my posts. There is some flexibility in an “optimal” holy paladin build and playstyle does have something to do with it, but, for example, 5/5 Judgements of the Pure is not optional. 2/2 Enlightened Judgements is not optional. Both of those talents are absolutely key to the way the class works. However, Imp Blessing of Wisdom, Imp Conc Aura, Imp LoH and a variety of other talents ARE optional, because, while they’re very helpful (say the shammy dies and you can’t get Mana Spring totem anymore), they’re not necessarily mandatory. (I would argue for Imp LoH, but I don’t use it every single fight, myself.)

    There’s a lot more to the game than how you’re specced or how your character is geared or enchanted. Part of being able to say “YES, I DID IT!” is about knowing when to clump up for Val’kyrs and when to run away for Defiles on Lich King. It’s about knowing how to kite your slime to the kite tank on Rotface or who to heal when a mark goes out on Saurfang. It’s about making the proper decisions at the moment they need to be made that makes or breaks a fight. You can have someone totally decked out in 277 gear who doesn’t have a clue who to heal or how, and that person is definitely going to wipe your raid if they don’t know what they’re doing.

    Is there a right way and a wrong way…yes…I fully admit that paladins with or wanting spirit is a heaping pile of fail. However, just because a stat (int/sp for example) isn’t min/max doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. You said yourself she outhealed you on some fights, log based.

    Well, she outhealed me while I was on my shaman, who is in 4/5 T9 (2 232 and 2 245) who was rockin’ the badge shield until yesterday, so pretty much anyone in any 245+ gear could outheal me if they are actually steadily healing someone who’s taking damage. I do think that she did well *in spite* of her strange spec and gemming (seriously, an ATTACK POWER gem?) and playstyle. I think the major issue my 10m pug experienced was the fact that our OT on Tuesday was a moron and that the mage who was in the group refused to ever move when getting Fiery Combustion or Soul Consumption. No amount of healing can fix people who don’t taunt adds or don’t move when they’re required to.

    Just because they don’t use your glyphs, doesn’t mean they aren’t using their choices wisely. I fought long and hard to understand my mana conservation, regeneration, usage, etc. and I don’t use SoW, and I rarely (haven’t in a VERY LONG TIME in fact) end a fight in mana problems. I am down the ret tree and use SoL…I prefer to hit and hit hard.

    My question to you here would be — how’s your overheal? I don’t generally take overheal very seriously, since I do it enough as it is and it’s just a fact of life. But my Holy Lights are critting for 25k in ICC these days. I generally don’t need that to hit for more unless I’m healing Dreamwalker. I DO, however, need it to hit faster, hence my prioritizing haste over anything except intellect. Intellect (and Glyph of SoW/Libram of Renewal) allows me to cast a spell that costs me 1102 mana almost every 1.3 seconds for minutes on end, combined with Divine Plea and my various offsets for it (Divine Illumination, Avenging Wrath, Talisman of Resurgence) while keeping my target up. Plus, the mana proc from Seal of Wisdom when I judge and the mana restore from my meta gem all go a long way towards allowing me to continue to cast Holy Light at the rate at which it is needed.

    I’d accept Glyph of Holy Shock over Glyph of Beacon of Light, to be honest. I might think it’s a little foolish, but I’d accept that, so long as I saw that they were actually using Holy Shock often enough to justify it and were keeping BoL up without the extra thirty seconds. But I don’t see that Glyph of Holy Light is remotely optional. Obviously, you know that I prefer different styles for Glyph of SoW/SoL, so there’s some flexibility there, even when optimizing your gear/spec.

    In the end, doing your job is all that matters.

    Ultimately, keeping your targets up and downing the boss is what matters, yes. But what if you think you’re doing your job and you’re not, because someone’s covering for you? This happened rampantly in my guild in Burning Crusade; the healers were always sniping other healers’ heals and not staying on target which meant that no one trusted each other and they paid more attention to other people’s targets than their own. It was only on Bloodboil in Black Temple that we discovered this and had to stamp it out. When we did that, we realized that some healers had been overly compensating for other healers and so had to reorganize how we did healing.

    Sometimes, and it’s happened to me, it’s easy to think you’re pulling your weight and helping the raid get the job done, when in actuality, it’s not you who’s doing your job, but all the other healers in the raid. I can only imagine this sort of thing is more common in a pug than it is in a guild raid, too, since the average person tends to care more about meters than their job in keeping specific targets up; if, indeed, there even ARE any healing assignments in a pug.

    And finally:

    all you are doing is judging and saying she is probably a leading factor in a lack of progression.

    I would disagree with this.

    I would say that I am evaluating her, both on paper and in practice. On paper, I am truly aghast at some of the choices she has made. In practice, she was not directly responsible for any of our 10m wipes.

    I will further say that lack of Divine Guardian probably hurt us, although her use of Divine Sacrifice probably helped.

    I will say that the loss of her healing due to Divine Plea and not using offsets more than a couple of times put undue strain on myself and the other shaman healer.

    I will say that the fact she didn’t keep up Judgements of the Pure even 70% of the time resulted in slower casts and a longer GCD, given her current amounts of haste (656), not to mention the lack of the judgement on the boss, be it wisdom or light.

    So even though she didn’t directly wipe us, she didn’t make it any easier for the team. Granted, it was a pug, so the team was more or less transient. I will probably never play with her again, just due to randomness factors. The “team”, such as it was, will likely never play together again, so what do we owe these people?

    I cannot judge whether or not she’s a drag on her regular raid group, since I don’t raid with her regularly, but I can say this — she was not playing a holy paladin as efficiently as she could have in the pug we were in and, if that is any indication of her playstyle in a regular raiding group, it is POSSIBLE that her inefficiency/playstyle is negatively affecting her group’s progression and forcing others to pick up her slack.

    But for all I know, she’s the best geared, gemmed, enchanted, environmentally aware, knowledgeable person in her 10-man group. I can’t make that kind of call without knowing the other 9 players.

    This is the ultimate question — how efficient, how optimized, how min/maxed do you have to be these days to successfully do, say, 5/12 in Icecrown Citadel and down Halion in Ruby Sanctum? She’s 7/12 in 10-man ICC and is horribly inefficient and not well optimized. So does it matter that she’s inefficient if she’s getting content down? At what point does someone become that drag on their group who is unable to do the job asked of them? It’s certainly not at the point where you have one gem that should be swapped, like xmolder was saying, but is it at the point where your haste is too low for your casts to hit quickly enough? Is it at the point where your playstyle is hindering the team? This is what I’m exploring in this post and the subsequent comments:

    How much optimization is “enough” these days and where is that line drawn and why is it drawn there?

    Finally, I feel compelled to mention that if you feel personally insulted or angered by what I’ve always termed my opinions (it being “Kurn’s Corner” and my “guides” to being a holy paladin) or conventional paladin wisdom or best-practices, then I apologize, but I am someone who always strives to do her best in group content and it makes me angry when I perceive that others are not doing so. A large reason of why I started writing about paladin stuff on this blog was so that I could help inform the masses of what I believe to be proper paladin theorycrafting, healing methods and such like. Anyone is free to take it and learn from it or turn their noses up at it and call me a noob, whether that’s you or Codi or xmolder or my current guild leader.

    X – ah, righto, I forget that you have 17 billion characters. ;) I would agree with your definition of min/maxing, too. The game allows us to play a mini-game within it that’s all about balance. It’s what makes me favour Holiday’s Grace over the Blood Queen’s Choker, while Codi prefers the latter over the former. I like that — no one should be identically geared, since there ARE personal choices (and RNG) that come into consideration.

    Are you trying to do Plague? If not, then why did you say “Is that REALLY why we don’t down Festergut/Rotface?” My impression from that comment was that you WERE trying to do the Plague Quarter and were not being successful at it.

    Maybe there’s more to the player base that doesn’t need to min-max simply because they’re not shooting for 12/12 ICC.

    And this is where I kind of sit there and scratch my head. I guess that I feel that if you’re raiding with a guild and it’s something you enjoy, why don’t you want to go 12/12? I think this is probably the biggest issue I have in understanding other people in this game. If I do something, I want to do it well. If you think any of my toons are ever under hit-cap at max-level, you’re wrong. If you think I’ll go tank something without being crit-immune, you’re wrong. But SO many people don’t do any of that optimization of their characters and SO many people are satisfied with that.

    And that’s what I don’t get. I LOVE optimizing everything. Figuring out how much more defense rating I need is FUN to me. Trying to balance my spec and hit and such is FUN. Trying to hit 1000 haste, unbuffed, on my paladin, while still maintaining some semblance of mana regen, is FUN to me. The added bonus here is that I’m rarely, if ever, doing something so very wrong that I’m screwing over the 4, 9 or 24 other people I’m grouped with. That’s probably why I have trouble understanding crittable tanks in dungeons and the like. Drives me nuts because the mentality required for it is 100% opposite to my own mentality of “DON’T EVER BE A DRAG ON YOUR GROUP”.

23. Wow. I’m surprised that one fit. haha!

24. The reason why we don’t care if we hit 12/12 is situational more than anything, I think. Were we together earlier in the expansion, we would have had time to do Naxx, or Ulduar, or TOC, and really felt the progression as a group. But now, we go into ICC, after so many people have done it before us, and with such a massive buff that people are literally doing 12/12 GDKP runs (including hard modes like Marrowgar, Gunship, Saurfang, BQL, Valithria…) (though on Sargeras, not VeCo, apparently Sargeras is a PUGing beast). It sort of feels like going back to, say, Black Temple or Sunwell. There was no sense of guild achievement when we got I’ve Gone And Made A Mess, because we forgot the achievement existed. We could turn the buff off, but that doesn’t really make it any better. For us, at least.

    But come Cataclysm, I’ll finally be able to get into ground-floor raiding and feel like what I’m doing might actually be worth it.

    Come to think of it, I think the fact that you could PUG raids in WotLK is one of the reasons I don’t feel like clearing everything now matters that much. I genuinely want to feel like a hero, and that’s not something I can get out of standing in a city and being like “Hey, this guy, the guy who created the Plaguelands, scourge of life as we know it, has shown his face again. I need 24 other willing men and women to come with me and slay the wretched thing,” when the replies I get are “5500gs rogeu dps” and “lol naxx.” But, then, that’s the roleplayer in me, I guess.

25. I always enjoy reading your blog posts. They’re especially insightful, and often clearly explain mechanics or mathematics involved that would otherwise confuse or intimidate a newer player, or even a more experienced once. There is nothing wrong with being good at what you do, and wanting to share that to help others in the community is great!

    But occasionally, there are comments like this that make me go :(

    4) Cloak: Why any holy paladin wastes Emblems of Frost on this piece of crap, I don’t know.

    You seem to have forgotten that when 3.3 came out, the only cloak upgrades available to ANYONE after Ulduar were if you completed ToC10/25 _hardmodes_. Possibly even with the stupid no-wipes requirements, I forget what the tribute chest rewards required off the top of my head.

    In any event, the cloaks for ToC were pretty much out of reach for a vast majority, either due to not having a raiding guild and having to pug it, being in a casual raiding guild who didn’t have the skill or perhaps even enough players around regularly to attempt those hardmodes, or just plain crap luck. You might not ever see the regular ToC cloak off Anub’arak if you had crappy droprate luck or, you know. Only run 10man content. I was stuck with Drape of the Spellweaver for a very long time.

    The Drape of the Violet Tower was the first massive upgrade for most people, especially Holy Paladins, once 3.3 came out. It was an upgrade in all regards, it mostly had stats we liked, even if it wasn’t perfect due to lack of haste, and was not difficult to obtain with frost emblems. It is still a good starter piece to help you with Icecrown Citadel.

    I am currently still using it because I can’t freakin’ get anything better right now. In all the times we’ve cleared blood princes, I’ve never seen them drop the Heartsick Mender’s Cape. None of the healers in my team have it. And the likelihood of a 25man pug getting to Dreamwalker, succeeding at Dreamwalker, and having the Frostbinder’s Shredded Cape drop and then beating out the DPS and other healers for it?

    Yeah…..yeah.

    A lot of us take what we can get, and this cloak is decent enough to fill the gap adequately till we can get an improvement with better stats.

    Acting as though it’s the worst possible decision we could ever make in regards to upgrades is a little unfair to the rest of the community who may aspire to the heights you’ve reached, but may not be ready or able to get there yet.

    (And wow that was a long comment defending a singular item choice! *rofl!!*)

26. But woo! I did at least finally get my shield of Sindragosa, which made my last week. No more Pulsing Spellshield for me! o/

27. Alfimi – The cloak off of Onyxia (either 10-man or 25-man) is ever so much better than the Frost badge one.

    http://www.wowhead.com/item=49491 <– 25 man
    http://www.wowhead.com/item=49307 <– 10 man

    Blizzard put those in for the exact reason that you're discussing. Both are miles better than the Frost badge cloak. And Onyxia is very easily pugged at this point! :D So, I have to agree with Kurn on this one.

28. X – The pugging this expansion is killing me. I love it for Kurn, hate it for everything else. You should NOT be able to go kill LK in a pug, IMHO, because it should be a meaningful kill. Not a meaningful kill necessarily because “OMG IT’S ARTHAS OMG OMG OMGOMGOMG!!!!” but more because it’s an encounter that is not trivial and takes a lot of practice and time to learn the mechanics like the Val’kyrs, the Defiles, the Infests. Even though I didn’t like who I was raiding with when I killed him for the first time, it MATTERED to me. I had finally killed The Lich King, who I’d seen in all kinds of previous instances. It also helped that it was my healing strat that did the job. :D

    Fair enough about the lack of meaning, though. I understand a lot better now. Hope to give you a better raiding experience in Cataclysm, though. ;)

    Alfimi – I’m glad you truly like my blog posts! I really do aim to try to help the community. My tone with regard to the Drape of the Violet Tower was a direct reflection on how many freaking paladins are wearing that thing that I’m exposed to on a given day. It’s a lot.

    As Codi said, the Onyxia cloaks, believe it or not, are better. Haste over MP5. Similar crit and spellpower values. The one area where the Ony cloaks fail in comparison to the Drape is that, properly gemmed, that’s 35 more intellect than the 245 and

    So we weigh 35 intellect versus 35 haste 41 intellect versus 30 haste.

    I know that intellect is king, but haste is pretty much riiiiiight behind it and, in certain circumstances, should outweigh intellect, such as if you’re below the 676 minimum to achieve a 1s GCD.

    Even if you’re NOT below the 676 minimum, the Ony cloaks are both a nice place to add a total of 53/58 haste (depending on which cloak you get + 23 haste enchant).

    Considering the items we can get for Emblems of Frost that are costly, I really do view the 50 most people spend on this cloak to be a waste. We need:

    – 95: helm
    – 60: shoulders
    – 60: If we’re poor or unlucky in drops, we should pick up Lich Killer’s Lanyard for a belt.
    – 60: Gauntlets of Overexposure are great while waiting for Unclean Surgical Gloves to drop.

    I’m using the 245 Onyxia cloak. No joke. I have 190 Emblems of Frost that I’ll probably use for T10 prot gear at this point. I have seen the Dreamwalker cloak drop three times, twice on heroic, and haven’t gotten it yet, but that (or a new one from Halion) is my next gear goal. Well, that or a main-hand that doesn’t have freaking hit rating on it. Or a heroic token. But my point is, the Emblems of Frost people have spent on the badge cloak, which is pretty poorly itemized for a holy paladin at this point in time, probably could have (should have?) been spent elsewhere.

    I admit your comment made me go back and rethink my math. 35 intellect versus 35 haste is not a bad trade. But then, I have 976 haste and with my 40 haste food, I hit 1016 haste. I like my FoL to be .9 seconds and my HLs to be 1.2s in cast time, so I’ll stick with my haste over the intellect for right now.

    Codi – seriously. The whole marriage thing. It’s legal up here in Canada, you know. Think it over. ;D

29. Kurn – XD I’m actually just a lake away from Canada, so it’s not like it’s all that -far.- ;D

30. This is why I loved your blog, you do all the scary math and make it easy to understand. :)

    I admit, I 100% forgot that Onyxia’s cloaks existed, possibly because outside of seeing the cloak drop once on 25man, it’s never resurfaced since. Admittedly, I haven’t done her fight in a long time, but pugs for her on my server are extremely few and far between nowadays :( That said, my guild’s taking a few weeks off to counter burn-out, I’ll have to poke around and see who’d be up for a few runs against Onyxia!

    I quite like haste myself, even if it feels pretty hard to get sometimes. I’m happy to make do with my current cape for the moment – it was the third or fourth purchase I ever made, since I’d completely forgotten about the gloves, and the ones I had at the time were decent enough to not need replacing at the time. *suitably wrist slapped*

    I can understand a bit better where you’re coming from now, tho. :)

31. Codi – <waggles eyebrows> ;)

    Alfimi – Man, I laugh whenever someone tells ME that I do the scary math, hahahaha. Honestly, the most math I’ve done in years has to do with making sure my Illidan flame tanks were at 365 Fire Resistance and 490 defense back in BC, or at 365 Nature or Frost Resistance and 490 defense for Hydross. ;)

    It’s not the worst cloak in the world, it’s true. It’s just that given how rare Emblems of Frost can be for those not regularly clearing an ICC 10 or 25 in a given week, there are (IMHO) other priorities. Ony runs ARE a lot fewer these days, too, so I can see where you’re coming from. Ahune was dropping one that I actually considered using, 51 int, 45 haste, something like that. I actually have it in my bags just in case I want to try it out, even though I lose more intellect.

    Haste is such a good stat, though, and if you feel it’s hard to get, by all means, take a look at my Holy How-To #6: http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/?p=940 and go poking through the various options available at the various sites I link to. :)

    And by the way, grats on the shield! Totally forgot to mention it in my last comment. :)

32. A bit late, yeah, but..

    Kurn – yes, that is the kind of crap I’m healing with. And to be blunt about it.. most holy paladins I’ve encountered are like that. It’s not just the spec, some have a somewhat decent spec. But the majority fails in understanding how holy paladins work in general. As I said, spamming FoL while gemmed full Intellect and visibly having trouble keeping the tanks up is not okay in my book. Not using Sacred Shield at all either. Failing to keep targets beaconed… yeah..

    Oh and btw, I’m now considering my options

33. Shit.. I hate pressing wrong buttons..

    I meant, I’m now considering my options to move to Canada. Don’t think the Mrs. will like it though ;-)

34. Which of us is the Mrs. here?! XD I’ve a feeling the relationship would go something like…

    Kurn: Honey, I’m working on a very in-depth and wordy post about the changes to Illumination over time. Could you whip me up the old equations for mana return?
    Codi: Of course, sweetheart! Anything for you (and so I don’t have to write the post myself)! *calculates stuff like whoa*
    Kurn and Codi: *skip off to the magical land of Holy Pally Awesomeness, hand in hand*

    …at least we’d have a viable way to split the work?

35. Kaboomski – I think the end-of-expansion frustration is upon us. It’s been over a year and a half. You would think that some basic things would be understood by the community by now. Not talking about the cloak in particular, but the other stuff I was talking about in this post. It’s frustrating to still see so many misconceptions running rampant.

    Well, hey, stick around in The Netherlands where RealID might not be able to touch you. Maybe I’ll move to Italy (parlo l’italiano!) and join the EU community. ;D

    Codi – Wow. So first of all, that sounds absolutely BRILLIANT (and actually sounds like a post we SHOULD collaborate on!!). And secondly, it’s my understanding that we’d both be “the Mrs.”. As a bonus, I give good foot and back rubs and will clean out the refrigerator when it gets icky if you do the laundry.

    Yeah, let me know when you wanna come on up, I’ll get started on procuring the marriage license. ;D

36. @Codi – Actually, I was talking about my wife, so that’d be *my* Mrs. She would heal the crap out of me if I cheated ;-) … or just let me die, of course.

    @Kurn – I suppose. It’s a bit weird for me though, since I’ve only started playing somewhere around the end of last October according to some of my earliest achievements. Before that, I’ve only played on a trial account back in classic and I’ve played on (and developed for) my own private server for years. It’s not the same though, not even comparable. I’m never going back to private servers.

    Oh and you should so move to Europe! We could cry over terrible failures together while we let them die in fires :P
    … and I’m not bad at giving massages myself, either. Just saying.

37. Yaay, this is the post I was looking for (I know it’s an older one, but eh I’m commenting anyway).
    This whole conversation is very real to me right now. I’m a ‘technical’ player, not a t-crafter but certainly min/max-y. And, pretty resourceful, and I like to be helpful and share what I know with others.
    Unfortunately, my ‘outspokenness’ has left me guildless. There was a mass exodus from my former guild (including myself), and I was not opted into their new guild, since I couldn’t hold my tongue well enough. Hmm.
    Anyway, sorry for the necro/rant. There is some good food for thought here.
    Thank you.

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