This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!
Well, this is a bit of a list, really.
– Hunters using mana. No, really. I miss my mana bar. I’m getting used to the throttling of our damage provided by focus, but I miss my mana bar.
– Divine Plea on a 1m cooldown.
– 100% Beacon healing.
– Sacred Shield. I REALLY miss Sacred Shield. A lot.
– I miss wanting tier gear. I just picked up my T11 shoulders because they dropped and because they’re marginally better than the Chimaeron ones in terms of base stats (crit vs. mastery). That might be the only piece of tier I pick up.
– I miss the old lockout system! If you zoned in to an instance that was already partially cleared, you were saved. If you were in a fresh instance where you killed a boss, you were saved. EASY. I know, many people enjoy the flexibility, but we ran into more lockout issues tonight. Total bullshit.
– Auberdine. I spent a lot of WoW time in Auberdine while levelling Kurn. And a friend of mine from one of my stats classes was farming furbolgs for Timbermaw rep and he made his hearth the inn in Auberdine, way, way back in the day, before BC came out. I was at his place once and he showed me his toon (level 60 warlock) and showed me why Auberdine was his hearth — one flight point from Darnassus (AH/bank/etc) and one or two flight points away from Felwood, where he’d spend most of his time.
– I miss the occasional true tank-and-spank fight. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of the newer mechanics we see… but sometimes, a tank’n’spank is just what I crave. :)
– I miss Valithria Dreamwalker! Well, not her. And not flying. But I miss the fact that it was a “heal this boss to full” fight as opposed to yet another “kill this before it kills you” fight.
– Most of all, I miss the knowledge that I had accumulated over 2 or so years. I’m stuck relearning everything, all the mechanics, all the player abilities and such, so that I can do my job of leading raids better. I just wish I could know it all NOW, you know?
Yesterday: Your Desktop Background
Tomorrow: Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)
Every raid tier sofar as I can remember (WotLK baby) has had a gimicky healer fight, they just haven’t all been ‘HPS THAT BOSS TO FULL.’
Naxx – Loatheb (Healing window)
Ulduar – General Vezax (No mana regen / limited mana regen)
ToC – Anub (Keep raid below X% life)
ICC – Dreamwalker (become badass flying HPS machines)
Chimeron – Heal to 10k, heal the crap out of everyone on Feuds.
As to the evil lockout system we currently have… We’ve been bitten by this as well. If you think of it as Heroic mode is basically old lockout, it’ll be eaiser to keep yourself from getting burned.
If you kill a/some boss(s), then switch it to heroic, you will be locked to the ‘heroic lockout’ with the other bosses dead, even if you didn’t kill them on heroic. If you, say, kill magmaw and omnotron, then do some 25 heroic chim work, you’re now saved to that 2 dead ‘heroic’ lockout.
ALSO, try removing your bench from the raid group when you do the transition between normal and heroic mode. We have had people who were on the bench locked out of our instance, and the GMs refuse to do anything for anyone concerning resetting lockouts, even if it’s the fault of the stupid system in place now that two of your healers get locked out of your current run, while they were on the bench in your current raid group.
Also dumb… once you’re saved to heroic 10/25, you can’t flip flop. Even if you’re ‘save’ to heroic killing bosses on normal, swapping to 25, working on heroic, coming back the next day, trying to downconvert to 10m and try heroic there.. Sorry, you can’t do that!
I understand if you’ve downed a heroic 25 boss, but if you’ve only put in attempts?
Sorry for that crit wall of text, but I share some of your frustrations!
Cinderhaze – Oh, the raid tiers have had a lot of healing gimmick fights, but I really, really enjoyed the idea of healing the boss to full. I miss that particular gimmick! I do enjoy the Chimaeron encounter, though. A little hectic!
As to the lockouts, we didn’t have a problem last night;
– Magmaw, ODS, Maloriak, Atramedes all killed on normal
– Switch to heroic for Chimaeron
– 4 attempts on Chimaeron
– Swap back to normal, 1-shot him
– Swap out someone who was there for heroic Chim attempts for someone who wasn’t — no problem.
Maybe we would have had an issue if we’d tried heroic Nef (ahahaha, oh God, too funny!) but that flipping of switches worked out okay. Same raid leader throughout, too.
I think our problems come from having someone in the group that we havent’ subbed out yet, changing the lockout, then subbing them out for someone else. We then kill a boss in heroic mode, and then our ‘heroic’ lockout is say 3 bosses dead (two were on normal, but the lockout doesn’t seem to care) while it considers the other person locked to it left after it was changed to heroic as having 2 bosses dead in heroic (actually normal kills but swapped to heroic for attempts). When they come back in later, they’re considered in a heroic lockout with two bosses dead, while the rest of the raid is in a heroic lockout with three bosses dead.