Raiding on Live, Updates

I’ve been in my current guild now for seven weeks. Throughout that entire time, I have basically been the only holy paladin. More to the point, all the holy paladin apps have pretty much made me want to cry.

We’re talking people specced into Retribution for support even though they clearly have all intellect gems, we’re talking people with under 500 haste, we’re talking the Drape of the Violet Tower… There has been all KINDS of failure. It’s so varied, but the end result is the same — sucktastic is a generous word for most of the pally apps.

Coming from a more progressed guild with what is more or less a set roster (you are expected to make every single raid for its full duration unless you give notice and even then, it’s frowned upon to take too many nights off) to a guild who hadn’t gotten Dreamwalker healed on heroic yet, with a very large roster, in comparison, has been an interesting experience.

I knew that I could help them with Dreamwalker. I knew that I could help them repeat heroic Saurfang. I knew that I could help them with Lady Deathwhisper. God knows I’ve wiped enough to Putricide and Sindragosa that I can certainly offer my experience and brain to the raid leaders.

On the first reset, bam, Dreamwalker healed to full. We’ve done her on heroic every week since except for when we got them Portal Jockey, I think. (I say “them” not to set myself apart from the rest of my raid group but rather because I already had it, as well as all the other required achievements for my 25-man drake.) That’s satisfying.

I’ve also been a key part for heroic Saurfang kills, taking on the first two ranged marks, for the most part.

I helped them to retool the Deathwhisper strat to one that worked twice before people seemed to stop caring about adds and Vengeful Shades. (Which is roundabout the time we lost the one decent healing priest we had, who wasn’t all that decent, but hey, Renewed Hope and Mass Dispel are nothing to sneeze at.)

It’s been a really good experience for me, learning how to integrate myself into this team that hasn’t had a single decent holy paladin for months. I cannot imagine how they did half of what they did without a holy paladin, much less two.

It’s been pretty clear to the leadership, I think, that we need a second holy paladin. Certainly my GM has been recruiting like crazy and levelling her pally alt with the intention to switch over if we can’t find someone. I mean hell, I’m good, but I’m not a miracle worker. I can’t imagine really working well on heroic Sindragosa without a second holy paladin.

We’ve done a LOT of heroic Sindragosa attempts to try to get us used to the mechanics, if nothing else. We’ve had a lot of practice on things like Frost Bombs and Ice Tombs and Unchained Magic (I think I may be the person currently in the guild who has spent the most amount of time in her life with her pathetic magic betraying her.). This is good stuff, I’m GLAD we usually take a few whacks at her on heroic to make sure people understand the mechanics. You never know when you’ll get lucky on an attempt, either.

Still, we were definitely lacking a holy paladin and really, a decent discipline priest. We don’t even have a holy priest right now and just pulled a disc priest app in this week (who is doing AWESOMELY and we’ve only raided with him once!).

Last week, we brought in a holy paladin app, who learned of my guild’s need for a holy paladin through this very blog.

I was totally excited… until I realized his internet was lame, meaning that he couldn’t stay connected through Marrowgar. He got disconnected and couldn’t return and we didn’t see him again until the weekend and he explained his internet issues. Thankfully, the internet issues turned out to be something that was more or less temporary and not even his fault. We raided together on Monday for a little bit on heroic Putricide until the battlegroup died on us and it wasn’t enough for me to really make any kind of judgement on how this guy was doing.

I have to say now, after raiding with him for just over three hours on Wednesday night (we called it early after getting Halion down), this guy is the real deal.

We got heroic Lady Deathwhisper down for the first time in a month. The pally app ate one Vengeful Shade at the end of our first (of two) attempts and that’s it. He cleansed at least adequately, used cooldowns appropriately and healed like mad, which is what you need to do on LDW.

And then, after way too long, I got to heal Saurfang with another holy paladin. I asked the healing lead if he would mind if the two pallies took care of the first four marks and so when he gave out assignments, he told the other pally that I’d explain to him what it was we would do. It was spectacular. The first attempt was hilarious, actually. The first mark got killed by a blood beast and then our healing lead rezzed him. Whoops.

Our mulligan out of the way, we got ourselves organized and blasted through Saurfang in just over four minutes, with only five marks, which is a first for us, I believe. I think we usually get six.

It was awesome; the pallies took care of the marks, there was great uptime on beacon and judgements of the pure… We both used BOP on casters pre-first mark, he even found time to hit DS/DS at the Frenzy and also bopped one of his marks again. Win all around.

To Blood Wing, where I may throttle most of my fellow raiders if I get thrown across the room on Council again. Seriously. The guild’s major flaw (every guild has one, IMHO) is that they are very bad at range issues. That means that we get people hurled across the room due to Empowered Shock Vortex, we occasionally get people chaining Ice Tombs on Sindragosa, people dying to Bloodbolt Splash on BQL. You know. That kind of stuff.

Still, craziness ensued and we WON. What happened?

The Keleseth tank died. He didn’t have enough shadow orbs on him and had literally 98 stacks of Shadow Prison on him, plus Keleseth was basically wailing on him… so the Valanar tank picked him up — and was one-shotted by an empowered shadow lance or something. This is bad. That was my tank who picked him up and then died. I hate losing my tanks. So I did what any good paladin did, I swapped to the last tank and healed as best I could. I was low on mana, Divine Plea was always on cooldown… But the pally app, whose tank it was, had no issues and basically was the person responsible (well, along with the tank) for bringing the Council down.

Way impressive.

Off to BQL where the app unfortunately got penned in by some DPS and died to a Bloodbolt Splash (see? That was totally foreshadowing up there!) but got a battle rez and still managed to get his DS/DS and Aura Mastery off for the second fear.

Add to that the fact that he LISTENS with regards to beacon/shield/judgement/aura/blessing assignments… Uses his cooldowns…

<3

As if I didn’t love raiding with this group before, I now get to raid with them plus someone who obviously has a similar mindset to me when it comes to holy paladin healing. It’s pretty glorious and, assuming his internet issues are more or less resolved, it’s going to be a huge benefit to the guild to have him available.

Also, I didn’t mention this last week, but I FINALLY picked up Heroic Marrowgar’s Frigid Eye. Here’s my chardev link which is also linked in the top-right box here on my website and that’s updated as soon as I get a new piece of gear. Check the updated date to see if I’ve gotten any new loot lately. :)

I should get back to beta and try to get through to level 83. Talents are seriously busted this build, though. I can’t learn Art of War in my ret spec no matter what I try. I mean, if I have the talent preview on, I can click three times on it and pick up my other spells, but because it won’t learn Art of War, I cannot get more than 19 talent points in ret that way. I had to go learn Pursuit of Justice and 1/2 Eye for an Eye or something in order for my talents to “stick”. If I had to guess, I’d say things are more broken today than they were yesterday. Alas, such are the highs and the lows of beta. :)