Author: Kurn

So much to say, so little time to write it all down.

Kurn / / apotheosis, guild, healing, raiding, ramblings

As I write this, at 8am on Tuesday, June 21st, 2011, I have 18 drafts in my blog draft section.

Seriously.

I always start to write stuff down and then get interrupted or fall asleep (this has happened three times, no joke!) or something.

I’d like to get to those blog posts at some point, but before that, there’s other stuff to discuss, including a 4.2 loot list. (I hate loot lists, but I know they’re very popular.)

I also want to talk about the recent blue post about holy paladin healing.

But right now, I want to talk about something completely unrelated to any of that.

I want to talk about the legendary caster weapon, Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest.

Ultimately, hammering out HOW to select any recipients of the staff was more difficult than actually selecting the person.

And yes, that does mean that we have a very good idea as to the first two recipients, as well as a potential third and fourth. (Guildies, you’ll find out after the raid tonight.)

We did not do the big, long, drawn-out process that I had suggested weeks ago. We used a trimmed-down version of it where four officers were put on the “selection team” and we ranked all 8 candidates from 1-8, where 1 was your first choice and 8 was your last choice.

A first-place candidate got 7 points, a second-place got 6, a third-place got 5, all the way down to 8, which got 0.

So four officers shared their thoughts and ideas in a separate area of the forums, neatly sequestered away, then the other three sent me their ranked list in a private message, which I then ignored until everyone’s PM was in AND I’d made my own selections.

Then I tallied up everyone’s results and posted them to the selection team along with the original selections, so they could see I wasn’t fixing the numbers.

It wasn’t a bad process at all. We looked at candidates based on performance (because a legendary will enhance what’s already there), attendance (gotta BE there in order to build it!), participation (teamwork and such!) and attitude (don’t be a douchecanoe!).

Honestly, it only took a few days of deliberations and such and we’re just about ready to make our announcement as to the top choices.

So that’s a huge responsibility taken care of. I call not it on the next legendary selection team. :P

While that’s been going on, I’ve still been doing a near-weekly podcast! Last week, Majik and I talked to Beruthiel of Falling Leaves and Wings during Episode 23 of Blessing of Frost and this week, we talked to Fog again with regards to the Midsummer Fire Festival.

In terms of raiding, Apotheosis is 6/13 with Heroic Halfus, Chimaeron, Maloriak, Magmaw, Atramedes and Conclave of Wind down and we’re working on H V&T for 7/13 before 4.2 drops, with any luck. So that’s always, well, entertaining? ;) I do love raiding with my guild and I do love doing all this stuff together. I do get tired of the leadershippy stuff on occasion, though. Still, it needs to be done.

Thankfully, Toga is going to be taking over the bank. Fog is stepping down, so I took the bank as an interim holder and now Toga’s going to take that from me, hooray! :)

Speaking of leadership stuff, I was curious as to how people felt we handled things during T11 content, so I decided to use my sociology background and I made up a survey.

The questions asked people to rate the officers in their primary roles on a scale of 1-10, where 1 was really bad and 10 was excellent, and I got a second question about my performance as GM, in particular. I asked people what they felt we’d not handled well and what we HAD handled well, which officer they might want to replace and with whom, how satisfied they are with our progression, if they like how loot/food/flasks/etc is done…

Out of about 33ish active raiders, we had 20 responses, which is great. I need to go through the results, but I’m going to learn a lot. I am kind of thinking about installing SPSS on my desktop and inputting the data so I can run stats equations on it… but that miiiiiight be taking things a bit far. ;)

The survey was anonymous (ostensibly, anyways. I’m fairly sure that if I allowed myself to make the connections, I could link about five respondents to those raiders) and I think that really helped the raiders to know that this was something I was taking seriously, at least. I made it clear on our forums that I would be the only one reading the responses, but that I would summarize the results and make sure the officers saw them. I think they liked the idea of me as a filter — so they could talk to me, without fear of retribution or whatever, through the survey and know that no one else will see what they said, but the overall idea will be conveyed to the other officers.

Overall, the survey seems to have been a success. :) I strongly recommend any guild go through the same thing. Google Docs does a great job for you. Look into it.

Yet other news: EPGP is normalizing values! So if a regular-mode pair of shoulders costs 750 GP in T11, a regular-mode pair of shoulders will cost that much in T12, while the T11 one will drop in price. This almost certainly means we don’t have to change how we do EP or GP! Yaaaaaay!

In still more news: Raiding on the baby pally is fun. I get to just heal. Heal through encounters I know the basics of. It’s lovely not to have to assign or organize people. It’s great to just be told where to stand on Al’Akir and NOT spend 45-60 minutes just planning out that one fight.

On Monday, I got: neck off Halfus, mace and tier shoulders off Cho’gall, legs off Al’Akir (fuck you mastery! Where was “of the Undertow” when I needed it?!) and then picked up a cloak from Valor Points. Still not up to the spirit, intellect and haste my “real” paladin has, but that’s a lot of gear and should help me hit harder. I’m also going to be JP capped so that I can … well, I can’t do a lot, really. My last blues are my helm (Ascendant Council or Nef), my bracers (Cho’gall) and my gloves (Maloriak or, if I’m feeling desperate, tier — but that’s a crapton of mastery!).

So, I’ve been busy.

This Friday is a holiday in Quebec — La Fête de la Saint-Jean Baptiste. While I am a die-hard Canadian and have not a drop of separatist blood in me, it’s always nice to have two long weekends back to back. St-Jean Baptiste has always been a holiday for me, which marked the very last possible day of the school year, back in high school, and while a lot of separatists have sort of adopted it as a “national” holiday, it’s a day where I can usually be proud to be Québécoise without feeling terribly guilty about it. ;) While growing up, my parents would always take me up north to the cottage for the long weekend, both St-Jean and the following week’s Canada Day. So, despite the fact that we will be right ahead of a patch, I’m going up north on Friday with my dad. If it rains, so help me God, Mother Nature is going to get an earful from me. I want to go up north, relax, read a book or two, go swimming in the lake, go canoeing on the lake, get some sun and the like. Maybe play some chess against my dad, play some cards, eat some barbecue… Man. It could be very awesome.

I will, therefore, endeavour to put WoW out of my mind for Friday through to Sunday. With any luck, it will be gloriously sunny and just warm enough to coax me to go swimming to cool off.

If it’s pouring rain, I’m gonna be cranky. :P

But yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to, that’s what I’m going to do this weekend.

This week:

– reaction post to blue post about paladin healing
– T12 loot list
– hopefully downing H V&T for 7/13
– do research on Firelands bosses >.>
– answer comments!

Whew.

On that note, time to grab a few winks. I have got to remember that editing the podcast EARLIER is better than LATER!

Keys: Keepsakes from Another Era

Kurn / / achievements, classic instances, general, patch 4.2, raiding, ramblings

When I started playing World of Warcraft, I had no idea what I was doing. I strongly suspect that a lot of people were, or even are, in the same boat. Over time, I educated myself about the game and what I, personally, needed to do in order to advance myself in the game. As I started playing in Vanilla, that meant getting attuned to Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair and Blackwing Lair.

Along the way, I picked up a bunch of keys. The quests involved in forging the Scholomance key were great experience and fun, if a bit lengthy and, at the time, pricey. Back in those days, keys actually took up precious bag space and it was not at all uncommon for people to not actually own the key to an instance like Scholomance or the undead entrance for Stratholme. Even more common was the single person in the group (a group you had probably painstakingly assembled over the course of over an hour) who had the key had almost certainly left the key in their bank.

The keyring was excellent. No longer would we forget keys in the bank!

I always liked my keys. I even had the key to Searing Gorge on more than one character! The one key that eluded me was Gnomeregan and I picked that up shortly after 3.0 dropped so that I would get the Keymaster achievement when I got the key to Violet Hold in Wrath. I was so, so sad when they removed a bunch of the keys for Cataclysm, like the Scarlet Key and the Key to the City.

It must seem foolish to speak so fondly of an old, antiquated system, to many readers who are newer to the game or who remember all the keys we needed to do heroics in Burning Crusade. But key quests and attunements were bonding experiences.

I can hear the scoffing from newer players. I suspect the older players either think I’m certifiably insane or they’re nodding their heads in agreement.

One of the all-time longest attunements that people regularly did (no disrespect to AQ gong ringers!) was the Onyxia attunement in the original WoW. I’m not sure how bad it was for the Horde, mind you, but for the Alliance, it consisted of something like 16 quests. And we’re not talking easy quests, either. A lot of them had to do with group content and instances.

In particular, the sticking point for a LOT of people was this one quest called “Jailbreak!”. In it, we are tasked to go to Blackrock Depths and free Marshal Reginald Windsor from the prison there. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. Not only did you have to form a group of people willing to help you out with this task, but you had to be at the right part of the quest chain to benefit from the pain that was freeing Marshal Windsor. You also needed to have the prison key from the boss in that section of the instance. (Possibly a rogue would also work, but as I was a hunter at the time, I needed the key.)

Then, you had to be really good or really lucky to free Windsor without pre-clearing all the trash along the route Marshal Windsor wants to take, once he’s freed. And guess what? He wanted to exact revenge on several people in the prison (and free someone else) before he would save his own skin.

Not only that, but he would trudge so slowly through the instance that you just wanted to kick him in the ass to speed things up. At one point in time, although this might have been fixed, later on, if you went too far ahead of Windsor, he’d despawn.

So we had to:

– form a group of like-minded individuals (either willing to do Jailbreak! or on it themselves)
– get to the instance
– know what you needed to do once you were there and likely clear both rings in the prison section — possibly killing the prison boss as well
– then free Windsor and wait for him to catch up to you every few seconds

Finally, at long last, Marshal Windsor would run for the entrance of Blackrock Depths.

But were you done?

Hell no.

THEN, you had to go back to Stormwind and WAIT for Windsor to show up. (Sometime AFTER I’d done the attunement, they brought in “Squire Rowe”, who stands by the gates of Stormwind. You talk to him and that essentially triggers Windsor’s arrival.) Then you walk with him through Stormwind (again, he used to despawn if you went too quickly) where he would confront Lady Katrana Prestor and accuse her of being Onyxia and then Bolvar Fordragon (SOB, I miss that guy!) would open a can of whup ass on the guards — who were all disguised dragonkin in service of Lady Katrana Prestor.

That was a cool part actually, but then we return right to more suck. We then had to go to Upper Blackrock Spire (never you mind that this required a whole other epic quest chain itself AND ten people!) and kill General Drakkisath for the Blood of the Black Dragon Champion. They eventually changed it so it was lootable by anyone with the quest, but for YEARS, it was a green item that only one or two people could loot (more than one could drop). That meant multiple UBRS runs.

Once you got that taken care of, you would receive the Drakefire Amulet — a fire resistance necklace that you needed in your bags in order to enter Onyxia’s Lair.

Epic-sounding, right? No doubt this is why they started out with such things. It quickly loses its appeal, however, when you’re on your third or fourth toon who you decide to attune.

Speaking as someone who was an officer in a Vanilla guild, attuning people was a pain in my ass.

Hell, attuning people to Black Temple in Burning Crusade (even after the attunement was lifted, just so that we could get the Medallion of Karabor for the shadow resistance!) was a pain in the ass.

As much as it was all a pain in the ass, though, it was what you had to do to get into 40-man raid content back then. So people did it. There was a never-ending swarm of people who applied to guilds and needed their attunements done. I can’t tell you how many times I ran Jailbreak or ran people through BRD to get attuned to Molten Core.

But there was something about that shared suffering that bonded people together. No, I’m serious!

To this day, I will always remember getting attuned to Molten Core. I was in BRD for six hours that night. We had a paladin (!) tanking, a paladin (!) healing, another hunter and a mage. It was me and the healing paladin who were there from Fated Heroes. The tank and the other hunter (who was survival! That was SO rare then!) were from another guild and we picked up a mage to help because we were doing what was called an “emp run” — that’s to say we were going to clear the last boss.

That night, I got attuned to the core, got my Shadowforged Key, did an Emp run (which is where the T0 paladin gloves used to drop until they moved them to an easier-to-kill boss), knocked out a ton of quests… it was epic. The only thing we didn’t do was Jailbreak, because no one had gotten to that point in their quests.

And it was FANTASTIC. It was great!

I don’t remember the name of the puggers, but I do remember we were, collectively, awesome.

To this day, I will always remember running with Majik to get his Jailbreak done. We had to do it TWICE. We went in, did it (it took about 45m-1h back then) and then realized that since Majik had died during a pull, he had failed the quest. So we had to reset the instance AND DO IT AGAIN.

To this day, I will always remember getting Toga and a couple of his cousins attuned to Molten Core. We pugged a healer who then joined the guild. (Granted, he guild-hopped on us TWICE in as many expansions, but it was still a great attunement run.)

My own Jailbreak run had my brother on his druid, a dwarf (!) priest from our guild, another hunter from our guild and … someone else. We didn’t know to pre-clear first. We had to blow my brother’s half-hour cooldown Rebirth (battle rez) on the priest at some point and my brother even blew Tranquility at some point. Totally epic!

I will always remember that I essentially soloed a 5-man portion of the Black Temple attunement. I killed a bunch of adds and was well on my way to killing some elite quest mob all by myself, because my guild (love them!) essentially all said they were “too busy” to help me out. So I did this part of Shadowmoon Valley all on my own until some wonderful shaman from another guild whispered me with “invite!” and I invited him and he HEALED ME and we both got credit for that mob.

Going through steps of attunements was a GREAT bonding experience.

Keys were a way that you could show people you cared about your character and its progression — particularly the more difficult keys. Attunements were a way that you could show people you cared about your character AND that you could get through the difficult challenges most of these involved. It also usually proved that you could work as a member of a team and what is raiding if not working together as a team?

So as we anxiously await Firelands and 4.2, let’s take a moment to remember the countless hours spent on getting keys. Let’s take a moment to remember that, once upon a time, we couldn’t just stroll into a raid instance without being attuned, having an amulet, doing a huge number of quests or even paying gold.

Attunements are already a thing of the past, but I’ve held on to my keys all of these years. I’ve been proud of having them, all of them, and so, as I download 4.2, I will take a moment to think about all these entry barriers I successfully navigated and the crazy shenanigans that usually went along with those runs.

Goodbye, my dear keys. I don’t regret a single moment I spent getting any of you.

(Pictured, from left to right, top to bottom:
Prison Cell Key – BRD, Key to Searing Gorge – Quest, Relic Coffer Key – needed for a portion of BRD, Jump-a-Tron 4000 key – Nagrand quest, Boulderfirst Key – Nagrand quest, Coilskar Chest Key – Shadowmoon Valley quest, The Violet Hold Key – Quest, Zuluhed’s Key – Shadowmoon Valley quest, Flamewrought Key – Heroic Honor Hold key, Key of Time – Heroic Caverns of Time key, The Master’s Key – Karazhan key, Reservoir Key – Heroic Coilfang Reservoir key, Auchenai key – Heroic Auchindoun key, Warpforged Key – Heroic Tempest Keep instances key, Gordok Shackle Key – Nagrand quest, Rusty Prison key – fished up in Dalaran.)

Holy Paladin Mastery: Still Underwhelming

Kurn / / paladins, patch 4.2

The News

People have been mentioning a change lately on the PTRs regarding the holy paladin mastery, but it was only today that Blizzard mentioned it in their updated patch notes:

Illuminated Healing (Mastery) has been adjusted slightly so that if a paladin refreshes an existing copy of his or her own Illuminated Healing on a target, the new absorption amount will be added into the old absorption amount and the duration will be reset. The total absorption created can never exceed 1/3 of the casting paladin’s health.

… huh.

That is a lot of information for two sentences.

1) The paladin must refesh their OWN copy of Illuminated Healing on a target. That only makes sense, but they clearly wanted to be sure that two paladins couldn’t stack the same Illuminated Healing shield on someone, either to build it up doubly quick or get double the effect.

2) The shield rolls! That’s to say that if you put up a 2k shield and heal enough for another 2k shield, that becomes a 4k shield (without accounting for damage done to it, of course).

3) The shield rolls up to one-third (33.3333~%) of the casting paladin’s health. Right now, unbuffed, I have 121,761 health. 33.3333~% of that is: 40,586.9594. Let’s just call it 40,587 or about 40k. I’m in all 359s plus 5 372 pieces. The “baby” paladin is at 113,123 health, unbuffed, and is mostly in 346s with some 359s and a couple 353s, so her cap, unbuffed, is 37,707.629 — or about 37-38k.

These are not insignificant potential shields values they’re talking about, here.

4) Mastery rating will not increase the shield’s maximum size; it will simply allow more of our healing done to become a shield.

The Math Section

Now, having said all that, there are still things we need to look at. Bear with me, there is a LOT of math coming up and I am not a math wizard. These numbers could be completely wrong, but I’m reasonably confident they’re okay.

a) A 40k shield will take a LOT of healing to build up. Why? I have 8.92 Mastery on my gear on Madrana. That gives me 12% + 1.38% (13.38%) of each heal turned into a shield. If my average, raid-buffed, non-crit Divine Light hits for ~30k, let’s see how many times I’ll have to hit Divine Light on that one target to get to a 40k shield.

30k x 0.1338 = 4014

40k / 4014 = 9.965

I would have to throw 10 Divine Lights at that one target in order to max out the shield and that’s IF the target wasn’t already taking any damage (and assuming no crits).

While I could certainly scrounge up some mastery gear, most of my gear doesn’t have any mastery on it at all. I have it on my Heroic Burden of Mortality shoulders and my Maldo’s Sword Cane.

If I restored these pieces that I currently have reforged AWAY from Mastery, I would have 14.3% of my heals turned into shields.

30k x 0.143 = 4290

40k / 4004 = 9.324

So I’d still have to cast ten Divine Lights to hit the shield cap, assuming no crits.

b) Not all of our heals generate Illuminated Healing effects. Of particular note, Holy Radiance, Protector of the Innocent, the Guardian of the Ancient Kings and Beacon of Light heals do NOT proc our mastery. That’s an awful lot of healing that doesn’t cause mastery shields.

Right now, without having tested things out, without having looked too closely at Firelands loot, I’m not sure that Illuminated Healing’s change does a lot for us. Certainly it’s not as good as it sounds at first, not when you realize just how much healing you have to do to cap out on the shields. Of course, as we get more gear and we get more stamina, that shield cap will grow.

So what would happen if we walked into 4.2 stacked with mastery on heroic raid gear? Would even that make much of a difference?

Let’s find out!

The first thing I did was go through the Wowhead database to find all heroic-level items that a holy paladin can reasonably equip. That means all plate gear with intellect, although it also includes a cloak and a neck and a ring with no spirit.

Here’s the list:

Neck – Valiona’s Medallion – 143 mastery rating
Shoulders – Burden of Mortality – 171 mastery rating
Cloak – Shadow of Dread – 143 mastery rating
Chest – T10 – Reinforced Sapphirium Breastplate – 217 mastery rating
Gloves – T10 – Reinforced Sapphirium Gloves – 171 mastery rating
Boots – Life Force Chargers – 171 mastery
Ring – Signet of the Fifth Circle – 143 mastery rating
Weapon – Andoros, Fist of the Dragon King – 110 mastery rating

All of that mastery adds up to 1269 mastery rating.

Now, one MASTERY (1.5% absorption) is equal to 179.28 mastery rating (source: Wowpedia). So we can take the following equation:

1269/179.28 = x/1.5%

Thus, 1269 mastery rating is equal to 10.6174% absorption, since 1269/179.28 = 7.0783

7.0783 = x/1.5%

So 7.0783 x 1.5 = 10.6174.

Now, our base mastery is 8, which is 12% absorption.

12% + 10.6% = 22.6%

Let’s go back up to our example of my average heals.

Average Divine Light non-crit: 30k

Absorption = 22.6%

30000 x 0.226 = 6780

40k / 6780 = 5.899

So even with all the best-quality pieces with mastery rating on them, I would STILL have to cast 6 average Divine Lights (not including crits or absorbed damage between the casts) to cap out the possible shield size.

But Kurn, you ask, what if we reforged everything else to mastery? And gemmed for it? And enchanted for it?

Crap. You had to ask that, didn’t you?

<deep sigh> Okay, here we go.

I’ve created a profile at chardev that is in full 372s, all reforged for and gemmed for mastery. I feel vaguely dirty.

We start with a base 8 Mastery, which is 12% absorption.

2136 Mastery rating gives us 11.91 Mastery, which we add to that 8. 8+11.91 = 19.91 Mastery.

19.91 Mastery x 1.5% = 29.865%

30000 x 0.298 = 8940

40000 / 8940 = 4.47 Divine Lights (not including crits or absorbed damage between the casts) to cap out the possible shield size.

Now, this isn’t exactly 100% accurate, because the size of the average Divine Light will change by virtue of the fact that we lose a lot of intellect (and therefore spellpower) by gemming straight-up mastery. In fact, that profile has only 6533 spellpower as compared to my current 7282 spellpower. But hey! Do you know who has 6560 spellpower? The baby pally! That’s a pretty good comparison, right?

My average Divine Light heals for 26k on the baby paladin.

26000 x 0.298 = 7748

40000 / 7748 = 5.1626

So in order to cap out with full 372 gear reforged, gemmed and enchanted for mastery, one would still need to cast 6 average Divine Lights (not including crits or absorbed damage between the casts) to cap out the possible shield size.

BUT WAIT! Due to all the stamina gained by being in 372 gear, the cap rises!

126,857 health x 0.333333 = 42,285.6244

So now let’s say the new cap is 42k instead of 40k.

42000 / 7748 = 5.420

Okay, still 6 average-sized Divine Lights, not including crits or absorbed damage between the casts, are still needed to cap out.

Whew. (Don’t you complain. I warned you it was math-intensive!)

Conclusions

– We will not be able to prepare for Firelands by equipping all mastery gear and gemming and enchanting for mastery in the hopes of being able to get a capped out shield on a target in a couple of casts.

– While mastery will be changed for our shields to roll, this may not be as effective for healing as critical strike rating may become. With the change to crit going from 150% of a regular heal to 200% of a regular heal, which benefits just about all of our heals (ticks of Holy Radiance can crit, all our casted heals can crit, Protector of the Innocent heals can crit). Especially in view of the fact that Holy Light’s transfer through to our Beacon of Light target will be 100%, crit might move up the ranks a bit more than mastery will.

So, there you have it. Mastery is still not going to be particularly good or impressive, although the way it works will certainly improve with the patch. However, given the changes to healing crits, and the fact that crit affects most all of our abilities, mastery may well still be dead last in our stat priority come Firelands and the 4.2 patch.

ETA: My apologies, I got caught up in the math that I forgot to mention the reason WHY I focused on maxing out our shiny new rolling shields.

If we cannot reasonably attain the shield’s cap in a small number of casts, then what use is the stacking and rolling functionality?

Even if we stack a LOT of mastery, even over intellect, we’ll still need at least 6 DL non-crit casts to cap our shield. With almost 8k of absorption per non-crit Divine Light, we could conceivably stack 20k worth of absorption in 2-3 casts, but that can easily be eaten up quickly, in a single blow.

The point is that in order for the shields to really matter, we need to be able to achieve a substantial shield in a short period of time/low amount of casts.

Right now, my shields are about 4k. Even with the change to our critical heals, I cannot hope to get more than 8-10k absorption on my tank between melee swings. While that’s still better than the 4k I’m getting now, it’s not substantially better. The shield still vanishes too quickly for us to really care. And even at high levels of mastery, that doesn’t change.

Thus, I expect high absorption from our mastery in 4.2, but this is not, in my opinion, a huge game-changer.

The Raiding Adventures of the "Baby" Paladin

Kurn / / apotheosis, baby paladin adventures, bastion of twilight, blackwing descent, guild, healing, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

Wednesday night was my first night raiding with Choice of Skywall again. The last time had been in late October, just before I brought Madrana home to Eldre’Thalas.

Well, Madrana II (or Saerani III, as a certain Football would put it), is back on Skywall and raided on Wednesday night.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my guild, Apotheosis. I really, really do. But at the same time, it’s SO NICE to be led by someone instead of leading people! Letting someone else organize the raid roster for the night rather than be the one to do it.

We blew through regular Bastion of Twilight in about an hour. My fellow holy paladin applicant got tons of loot (no Cho’gall bracers dropped… what a surprise…) and I’ll have to wait to be eligible until the next raid I attend, so I’m glad for him and glad for me.

It’s always interesting to acclimate to a new raiding environment. On the one hand, it’s a bit scary and nerve-wracking because you desperately do not want to screw up. And they do things differently than you’re used to, most of the time. I mean, sure, I know to hug people when I get Twilight Meteorite on Valiona and Theralion, but am I normally hugging people in melee anyways? In Apotheosis, yes, in Choice, no.

So Halfus was pretty simple and V&T went okay and Council was fine. Cho’gall was a little rough for me. I glyphed Cleansing for that fight and got 20 dispels, more than anyone — even the priest who was in the raid. /flex. But I was totally oom at the end of the fight. And I’d even taken a Potion of Concentration, too. Eesh.

Then, it was off to Blackwing Descent! And to Magmaw and Omnotron.

Magmaw was… entertaining. They were attempting to practice heroic positioning by virtue of having everyone clump up in melee and have a tank kite. The tank was… a prot warrior. I had never heard of a prot warrior tanking Magmaw parasites before, but by golly, it happened (albeit on normal, so there was no fire to dodge) and though there were some tank issues (mangle deaths — they happen everywhere, it seems!), Magmaw was still a one-shot.

On Omnotron, we had the person about to be fried to a crisp *not* moving in preparation for heroic mode, where they cannot move. A few people got nicked by the Flamethrower, but very nice positioning for the most part.

I was thinking maybe we’d poke around at heroic Chimaeron or something and I wondered if my gear could handle that or not, when all of a sudden we’re told to go to Uldum.

Okay. This was not something I had anticipated. The prospect of doing Throne of the Four Winds twice in a week with two different guilds is not cool. I don’t know WHY I hadn’t recognized this as a very real possibility, but apparently I am dumb. ;) No, seriously, it’s okay. I just dislike that instance intensely. And guess what Apotheosis is working on during Thursday’s raid? That’s right. Heroic Conclave.

So there I am on Conclave and I get to heal with Fugara, the GM. We had an easy job, staying on Anshal’s platform the whole time, so it was pretty chill and relaxed. Conclave was a one-shot. Beauty.

And then… Al’Akir.

Let it be known that I have killed that jackass just twice on Madrana (er, the original one) so it’s not like I’m a pro or anything. And they put me in a different spot than I’m usually in. On the bright side, I didn’t have to do the positions for Al’Akir!!!! Many commiserations to Zarethorn, Choice’s raid leader. He had planned that all out ahead of time.

So we wiped on him twice and called it a night. Having said that, I did NOT get blasted off the platform, I did NOT eat Squall Line and I totally used my CDs appropriately. All this from a brand-new (to me) spot, just one section to the right of the tank. (Normally, I’m at the tank’s spot but have also been two to the right.) I had one moment of panic as I saw the oncoming Squall Line and Wind Burst was casting. The moment of panic was not “how do I navigate this awful combination of elements” but rather “shitshitshitshit where is my bubble OH THANK GOD.”

(Madrana II has a different UI than Madrana I. It’s much less cluttered and yet I STILL had to search for my bubble.)

It was really fun to be back in that raid group. A lot of people have come and gone, but there were some familiar faces: Fugara, Ygg, Aidan, Zare, Acid, Baatezus, Banorind, Beezle, Cyber, Daemyn, Sane, Sham, Thorn. It was great to be back there with a lot of the same people.

A lot of people are worried I’m going to burn myself out with this crazy scheme of mine. I admit, that’s a possibility. But I feel energized by my night with Choice. I feel like going in to Throne tomorrow and handing Heroic Conclave their asses. I feel fired up and ready to kick ass with Apotheosis and then to go kick some more ass with Choice on Monday.

Also, I totally fixed my borked Raeli’s Spell Announcer on Madrana II. It refused to work at all throughout the raid, but I fixed it up afterwards. And then I realized I had enough Valor Points to buy an honest-to-goodness healing ring, so I did that, too.

All in all, a really productive night. A fun night.

Trolls and Gear and Paladins, Oh My!

Kurn / / gear, guide, healing, paladins, patch 4.1

On Friday, one of the tanks in my guild hinted rather strongly that he would like for my “baby paladin” (that is, the newly-dinged 85) to heal him and his friend through a Zul’Aman.

My first reaction was not only “no”, but “hell no”.

Then I realized I might as well. Apart from anything, there are epic bracers in that there jungle!

After completing the instance, I knew I had to write about the loot in the troll dungeons for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of Fetish Greaves. Let’s look at Zul’Aman, then Zul’Gurub.

Zul’Aman Holy Paladin Gear (4.1)

Before we look at the drops, there are two notable quest rewards. The first is a reward from Warlord of the Amani and it’s a pair of shoulders that are actually pretty sweet: Pauldrons of Ambition have spirit and crit and a red socket (10 crit bonus). The crit can be reforged to 59 haste.

The other quest reward is the Fetish Greaves, a reward from The Hex Lord’s Fetish, which requires you to kill Malacrass in Zul’Aman.

I hate these pants.

Yes, they are 353. Yes, they have two sockets. Yes, they have more intellect than any 346 legs.

They are still terrible.

Why, precisely, are they so terrible?

They have no spirit and no haste. As if that weren’t bad enough, they have a stupid amount of crit and mastery.

The person who created this item needs to be flogged. Its very existence insults me.

My top choice consists of the Greaves of the Misguided from Lord Godfrey in Heroic Shadowfang Keep. Spirit! Haste! Two sockets!

The Fetish Greaves have 21 intellect more than the Greaves of the Misguided, 209 crit, 171 mastery, 30 stamina and 60 more armor.

The Greaves of the Misguided, on the other hand, have 202 haste and 162 spirit.

But Kurn, you say, we can just reforge that nasty, nasty mastery off the Fetish Greaves, right?

Wrong. Assuming you want to reforge to spirit, you want as much of it as you can when you reforge. So because reforging is 40% of the stat, you want to reforge the larger stat to get more bang for your reforging buck.

40% of 171 mastery is 68.4, which the game will round down to 68.

40% of 209 crit is 83.6, which the game will round up to 84.

Thus, to optimize the pants by reforging towards a better secondary stat, like spirit, you would want to reforge the crit instead of the mastery, giving you an extra 16 spirit (or haste).

That leaves you with a massive 171 mastery. It makes me feel dirty not to reforge mastery, but reforging the crit here is the right call.

It’s also why those pants are complete garbage when compared with the Greaves of the Misguided. I would even choose the very lackluster Legguards of the Gentle from Justice Points over the Fetish Greaves. Like the Fetish Greaves and the Greaves of the Misguided, the Legguards of the Gentle have two sockets. Unlike the Fetish Greaves, they have 192 spirit and 172 mastery. That mastery can be safely reforged to haste, because we like spirit, so we don’t want to touch the 192 spirit at all. The mastery will end up being about 69 haste, which is still better than the Fetish Greaves, both in terms of spirit and haste.

So avoid the Fetish Greaves unless you are absolutely desperate and then keep running Heroic SFK anyways!

Okay, on to the drops!

Jan’alai drops Boots of Bad Mojo. Surprisingly, these are an outstanding option, what with the spirit, the haste and the gem socket. If you’re poor or don’t have the Valor Points (soon to be Justice Points in 4.2) to afford the Eternal Pathfinders, these are great. Even if you CAN afford the Eternal Pathfinders, these are still great boots.

I personally prefer the Eternal Pathfinders. It’s just a bit more intellect and you won’t find a better pair of boots in regular-mode Tier 11 raid content. Unlike the Eternal Pathfinders, the Fetish Greaves, which have more intellect than the Greaves of the Misguided, will be replaced in T11 raid content. The Eternal Pathfinders will not be, not until you get Heroic Omnotron Defense System down and you feel dirty and guilty for taking the heroic Life Force Chargers.

The spirit that exists on the Boots of Bad Mojo  is lovely, but after reforging the crit on the Valor Point boots, the ~92 spirit should not be terribly missed when using the Eternal Pathfinders, particularly once you’re gearing up in a raid.

The Boots of Bad Mojo are definitely a great piece, but only if you don’t have access to the Eternal Pathfinders or spirit is a serious issue for you.

Up next… Bracers of Hidden Purpose drop from Akil’zon. While gearing up Madrana, I had terrible luck in Grim Batol (both regular and heroic) and the Deadmines when trying to find bracers. Erudax was a stingy bastard for me on Madrana and I only ever saw the Gearbreaker bracers once. As if that weren’t bad enough, it took me nine kills to get the Shackles of the End of Days from Cho’gall. Surprisingly, also a stingy bastard.

Thus, I went from 316 bracers to 359 bracers on Madrana. No joke. (The baby pally was fortunate enough to get the bracers from Erudax on her first heroic Grim Batol after having run it on regular once.) That means that these would be GREAT, even if they sucked. Which they don’t, by the way. Bracers of Hidden Purpose can (and should) get the crit reforged to 48 spirit.

So definitely pick up the Bracers of Hidden Purpose until Cho’gall releases his grip on some sweet bracers for you.

How about rings? Do you need a ring? The Soul Drain Signet is perfect! It drops from Hex Lord Malacrass and is a fantastic ring to take with you into raid content.

Finally, what about a weapon? Daakara drops the Amani Scepter of Rites. A solid piece, despite the mastery. Grab it unless you have something of a higher ilvl.

And that’s about it of interest for us in Zul’Aman.

Zul’Gurub Holy Paladin Gear (4.1)

Ah, Zul’Gurub. My first raid instance outside of Upper Blackrock Spire! How I miss those bijous and coins and hilariously bad loot tables…

Ahem. Sorry. Right, on to holy paladin stuff in ZG!

While it’s not ideal, the Signet of Venoxis is a decent choice. The mastery can, and should be, reforged to  48 spirit. Rings are all over the place, to be honest — there are a lot of choices. This is a fairly cheap one in terms of in-game gold or Justice/Valor Points spent, so if it drops, from Venoxis, of course, snag it.

How about a shield? The Zulian Ward from Jin’do is okay, but it’s strictly okay. Why? No spirit. No gem socket. The Elementium Stormshield blows it away. If there’s no way you can get an Elementium Stormshield, this is a good runner up, but aim for the crafted shield.

Zanzil will drop a helm. The Plumed Medicine Helm is … well, it’s full of mastery is what it is. Sad panda. It’s still not awful, mostly due to the spirit and the fact that it has a meta socket. It’s only one of three pre-raid helms that have a meta socket. I still prefer Crown of the Blazing Sun from the Justice Point vendor, but if you’re short on points or this drops, grab it if you don’t have a 346 or higher helm with a meta socket.

If someone in your run has at least 225 Archaeology, you can summon an Edge of Madness boss. If you get Wushoolay, you have a chance at Troll Skull Chestplate. Given the plethora of choices at the 346 level, plus the fact that the Breastplate of Avenging Flame drops off of Magmaw in Blackwing Descent, the Troll Skull Chestplate is strictly “if you really can’t get lucky on a drop and can’t get to Revered with Earthen Ring” material.

Lastly, if you do ZG, you may come across the Spiritcaller Cloak as a trash drop. This is BOE (Bind on Equip) so even if you’re not in there as your healer, you can try to win it. No haste, but it’s a nice spirit option. Bear in mind that when 4.2 drops and you “need” a BOE, it will become soulbound to you, so watch out for that!

Don’t forget to read up on my pre-T11 loot list and my T11 loot list as well! (Bear in mind both are slightly out of date.) If you want to see what Madrana’s sporting these days, check it out here: http://www.chardev.org/?profile=5305

New computer, baby pally update and such.

Kurn / / archaeology, baby paladin adventures, bastion of twilight, blackwing descent, dungeons, facepalm, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

Well, one thing Archaeology has going for it is that I get time to write stuff (blog posts, forum posts, responses to people’s PMs and emails) while flying back and forth across Kalimdor in search of Tol’Vir sites for the Ring of the Boy Emperor.

At any rate, I ordered a new computer in early April. It arrived on May 25th. It’s an Alienware from Dell and I will, at this time, ask you to refrain from criticizing my decision to get a pre-made (albeit custom-built) machine and for choosing to get it from Dell. (I know all of the above can be polarizing topics.)

I adore it.

I have two 23″ screens, 9 GB of RAM, dual 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 (SLI enabled), a regular 1TB HD and a 300GB 10k RPM HD (Dayden – I was obviously wrong and was looking at one of the 17 different builds I’d assembled before placing the order.).

It’s awesome.

Let’s be clear, here. I have been playing WoW on a laptop with an integrated video card for pretty much the entirety of the last five and a half years. Exceptions have included stints of housesitting for my parents and two short periods of time where I raided from an internet cafe because my laptop(s) had to go to the shop for various reasons.

Playing with spell details up is insane. Water is GORGEOUS in this game and I never knew! How smooth things are, when I can experience them at 60 FPS or higher as opposed to my traditional 7-12 FPS! And SHADOWS.

So, as you can imagine, I am super excited about my purchase and even MORE excited to raid on this thing!

So far, I’ve done Magmaw, ODS, Chim, Maloriak  on official raid nights on the pally (all but ODS on heroic) and Halfus, V&T and Council (with many Cho’gall attempts) on Monday night on the hunter. (Hilarious! I am not completely huntarded!)

The changes are amazing. Dark Sludge is really easily visible. Blaze and shadow crash are easy to avoid. I cannot WAIT to do Atramedes and Nefarian on my new computer. CANNOT WAIT.

And in the meantime, I’ve hit 85 on my baby paladin. I basically did Uldum for the Ramkahen rep and have ignored any other quests (except the various quests to open the portal to Twilight Highlands, plus Crucible of Carnage) and have randomed my way to 85 by way of healing.

A lot of groups are filled with fail. Fail failfailfailfailfafwftgtwfgishf.

Ahem.

People who can’t do Corla’s beams, people whose pets are on aggressive, people who don’t understand how the pyramid packs (damn you, Majik) work in Vortex Pinnacle…

However, there are the occasional groups who are AWESOME. Tanks who ask about my mana and ask if I need CC, skilled DPS who can zerg the last guy in Blackrock Caverns while pulling the adds off JUST long enough for me to heal the tank…

Some very pro groups and some very fail groups.

The baby pally, who still needs a self-deprecating nickname, is gearing up nicely and has 7 346/359 pieces already.

Erudax, in Grim Batol, has already denied me his bracers (333 on normal) once. We’ll see if this gets to be a trend…

So that’s going nicely. I’ve even livestreamed a few times: http://www.livestream.com/kurnmogh

In other news, Apotheosis had a rough week last week, failing to repeat on heroic Magmaw or heroic Atramedes. The former due to a lot of mistakes, the latter because we ran out of time.

This week, we walked in and one-shot heroic Magmaw.

I’ll take it. >.>

And speaking of Apotheosis, June 1st is a fourth anniversary! Granted, we weren’t really a guild, per se, during most of Wrath, but we’ve been a guild since October or November of 2010 and we were certainly kicking back in Burning Crusade. So it’s time to celebrate what we’ve accomplished together and remember the laughter we’ve had during the last several months. I’m planning a retrospective that includes videos (!) and the like. I just need to get videos to render properly and finish going through some screenshots. Should be fun and hopefully done this weekend at the latest.

Having responded to most of my outstanding PMs and emails and having done about as much archaeology as I can stomach for now, I’m going to head to bed, but that’s what’s up with me, lately.

Upcoming blog post topics include: keys/attunement, ZA/ZG gear and T12 gear. Probably not in that order.

4.2 PTR Update – Word of Glory Buffed

Kurn / / healing, paladins, patch 4.2

While I have my own personal thoughts about how 4.2 will make T11 content easier by modifying a ton of encounters and the like, the major thing for holy paladins in this latest update from Blizzard is a single sentence long:

Walk in the Light now improves Word of Glory healing by 30% in addition to its current effects.

Walk in the Light is one of the passives we get for choosing the holy specialization, so all holy paladins will have this.

My first thought upon reading the update was “well, there goes LoD/Beacon healing!”

But then, I decided to do the math.

Of course, I ran into a snafu with the math, as is what usually happens to me when I attempt to do “math stuff”.

I wanted to go back in the logs and pull the numbers for a 3HP Light of Dawn cast on six targets and being redirected to the Beacon and add that up, then look at a 3HP Word of Glory heal and then look at what a 3HP Word of Glory heal + 30% would look like. (Bear in mind that the LoD is cast while glyphed, as is the WoG.)

Only, when I went to look at the logs, the numbers didn’t add up. There’s all kinds of math that is not making sense, primarily because of Divinity and Field Dressing. So bear in mind that although the transfer heals are NOT exactly 50% of the LoD heal, this is due to the tank’s talents and the amounts are correct, although I’m not sure why certain heals are double-dipping and certain heals are not.

[23:41:34.945] Madrana Protector of the Innocent Madrana +3992
[23:41:35.218] Madrana Light of Dawn Enhancement Shaman +6506
[23:41:35.218] Madrana Light of Dawn Feral Druid +7943
[23:41:35.218] Madrana Light of Dawn Resto Shaman +6670
[23:41:35.218] Madrana Light of Dawn Disc Priest +6608
[23:41:35.218] Madrana Light of Dawn Frost DK +*9951*
[23:41:35.218] Madrana Light of Dawn Frost DK +6506
[23:41:35.452] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 1996)
[23:41:35.890] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 3448)
[23:41:35.890] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 3508)
[23:41:35.890] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 3535)
[23:41:35.890] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 3503)
[23:41:35.890] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 5274)
[23:41:35.890] Madrana Beacon of Light Prot Warrior +0 (O: 3448)

So on that one Light of Dawn, the following healing went to the raid: 44,184

The following healing went to the tank, including Protector of the Innocent’s transfer: 24,712

Now a look at a 3HP Word of Glory on a target that also has a 6% buff to healing received:

[23:39:33.759] Madrana Word of Glory Prot Paladin +20306

So a 6-target, 3HP Light of Dawn heal will hit the beacon target for more than a single 3HP Word of Glory. This much, we already knew, and many people, including my buddy and fellow holy paladin, Walks, do this very well.

If, however, we add a flat 30% extra healing to Word of Glory (and this could be the way it’s calculated — but it may not be!) we get:

20306 x 0.3 = 6091.8

6091.8 + 20306 = 26397.8 = 26398 healing to the Word of Glory target.

This dwarfs that 24712 heal via Beacon transfer, even with the Protector of the Innocent thrown in. This is 26398 without factoring in another 2k (1996) from Protector of the Innocent.

For healing on your beacon target, assuming this change stays in the game through the PTR period into live, and assuming I’ve done my math right, Word of Glory will become the best way to get the most healing done to your Beacon target.

Word of Glory will not be the best way to get the most overall healing done, as you’ll still do a good amount of healing to your beacon target AND heal the raid, using Light of Dawn. If the raid is taking damage, that is.

So, a Word of Glory buff is almost certainly going to be viewed as a “nerf” to the LoD/Beacon style of healing. Leave it to paladins to see a buff as a nerf, eh? ;)

Hitting Our Stride?

Kurn / / apotheosis, blackwing descent, raiding, ramblings

So, on May 12th, we killed Heroic Maloriak for the first time.

On May 17th, we killed Heroic Magmaw for the first time. Took us 12 pulls. It was surprisingly easy fight, probably because we used a DK-kiting method. Honestly, I hate that method, but we’ve already gotten Parasite Evening several times without a “stack on melee, kite adds” method, so I feel marginally less lame for doing heroic the way most people seem to do it.

And then, last night, on May 22nd, we killed Heroic Atramedes for the first time.

Three progression bosses in 10 days?

Not to sound ungrateful or anything of the kind, but what the hell is that all about?

We’re making progress AND we’re doing it relatively easily, despite some issues.

What kind of issues? Well, on Tuesday, we knocked out regular ODS, Heroic Magmaw and tried Heroic Chimaeron for a couple of attempts, but he didn’t die. So we walked in there on Thursday knowing that Chimaeron and Maloriak were both up, along with heroic Atramedes and (for now) regular Nefarian.

However, Dayden, our tank lead, had plans on Thursday, so organizing the tanks was largely going to be on my brother’s shoulders.

So there we are, merrily attempting Heroic Chimaeron with one of our OS tanks as a “real” tank for double attack/feud soaking.

It was reading Rhidach’s post about the very same fight, the next day, that I finally managed to put to words the problem we appeared to be having:

We managed to down the fight after six attempts — though, admittedly, we probably could have done it a little sooner if not for my constant confusion of who was tanking what when and why. It was like “who’s on first”, but without the timeless humor.

Midway through our H Chim attempts, my lights flickered, but I stayed online. And then my brother, who does not live all that far from me, promptly went offline. He tweeted me from his phone:

@kurnmogh just lost power.

Well, THAT wasn’t good news.

So we got our other OS tank to swap to tank gear/spec and we had a couple of pulls like that.

And then Fog got back online! Yaaaaaay!

Two more pulls and Chimaeron was dead, with everything having gone right with taunts and swaps and healing. Whew.

On to Maloriak, to attempt to repeat our kill from the week before!

Before the first pull, my lights flickered again. And again, Fog goes offline.

So rather than get both OS tanks going on Maloriak and pull in yet another melee DPS, we went to look at Heroic Atramedes.

8 pulls and lots and lots of people eating discs, bombs and the like, and yes, I am one of the worst offenders. My computer is crap (although I have a new one arriving this week or next!) and so even though I KNOW I’m supposed to move, even though I’m hitting my strafe key as though my actual life depends on it, my toon decides to just stand there. Like a champ.

So we did 8 pulls and tweaked a few things and called it a night, without Fog regaining power.

Sunday: Maloriak time! I was a little nervous about this one. Repeat kills are never a stress-free experience for me. I want to always prove that the first kill was not a fluke.

Four pulls is all it took to repeat our Maloriak kill. Insert me slumping with relief HERE.

And from there, it only took us four pulls to kill Heroic Atramedes. Granted, it was messy as hell and I was certainly dead on the floor, but we did it! I got a battle rez on the first attempt, at Dayden’s request, and after that attempt, I was like “you know, not that I don’t appreciate it or anything, but for right now, I am likely THE WORST POSSIBLE choice for a battle rez.”

So 12 pulls each for Heroic Magmaw and Heroic Atramedes.

I’ll take it!

I know that ODS is going to be more difficult. I know that Valiona & Theralion will be more difficult. I know that Conclave will be more difficult.

But right now, my guild’s killed 3 progression bosses in 10 days and I will take that, thank you very kindly. :D

80! Again.

Kurn / / achievements, archaeology, baby paladin adventures, facepalm, healing, lfg, ramblings

Ding! My baby paladin is now 80. (Actually, 81, but anyways…)

Regardless of whether or not I end up transferring my baby paladin to Skywall, to help out the fine people of Choice, I’m really glad I started a new paladin.

I know, you think I have a screw loose, but it’s given me some FANTASTIC perspective.

I tanked my way from 68-80, which was alternately amazing and failtastic. Getting Oculus about 9 times in two days, completing it only three times and having my drake bug out on me no less than seven times was pretty bad. By “bug out”, I mean that, at different times, I could not dismount or, shockingly, I could not use my abilities on the drake AND I couldn’t dismount.

The only thing that worked — and even then, it wasn’t guaranteed — was logging off and logging back in.

Only I would log back in and I wouldn’t be in The Oculus. Nope. Nor would I be in the location I was in when I accepted the LFG queue. No, all of that would make sense!

I would end up in the Sentinel Hill graveyard in Westfall. Alive.

Each and every time this happened, that’s where I would end up.

I maintain that Sentinel Hill is the black hole of Azeroth.

At any rate…

So I hit 80 in The Oculus, wherein my drake bugged out TWICE, and then finished up the group. I wasn’t going to abandon these poor people without a tank in Oculus. That’s just mean.

After the run, I race-changed from dwarf (as adorable as male dwarves are) and went human female, as I usually prefer to be, regardless of the class. There are a few reasons for it — Diplomacy, The Human Spirit, Every Man for Himself — but also because I don’t think I could get used to being that short as a dwarf in a raid situation…

Anyhow! Then I started scrambling for gear so that I could queue up as a healer for Cataclysm instances.

Problem 1) Heirlooms listed 1-80 do not work at 80 any longer. They might have, once upon a time, but that no longer works.

Problem 2) I had essentially nothing in a few spots and spent some cash here and there. My shoulders, sadly, are now the Ornate Saronite Pauldrons.

The ilvl requirement for Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides is 226. I laughed. That’s 25-man Ulduar-level stuff! It’s kind of neat to see how much gear has changed so much. I did Ulduar two years ago and 226 ilvl stuff is now what your average should be in order to get into the entry level dungeons for Cataclysm.

I suppose it’s because it was just so easy to gear up to T10 at the end of Wrath but they also wanted to let those who maybe hadn’t done anything since Ulduar come in and get right into things.

I managed to get that ilvl up to 230 and finally, I could queue up. That was ALSO very strange to me. That I had to try to gear up for these starter dungeons? I walked straight into BRC, TotT, Stonecore and Vortex Pinnacle on Madrana without being challenged by the LFG tool. I guess being in mostly 277 gear will do that. Even Kurn, who was in mostly 251 gear, had zero issues queueing.

Things are blurring together for me. I dinged 80 and picked up the Patina-Coated Breastplate and the Bands of Fading Light. It seemed very weird to pick up those items to head towards Blackrock Caverns or Throne of the Tides instead of Naxxramas, let me tell you. I feel as though I’m skipping current content by skipping out on the WotLK raids, although I know I’m not. It just seems so strange to not raid those instances at 80. The disconnect between my “normal” pally and my “baby” pally is messing with my head.

I finally was ready to queue up for the entry-level Cataclysm dungeons and I looked, in horror, at my mana bar.

I had about 30,000 mana.

Do you know the last time I saw the number “30,000” next to my mana bar on Madrana? I was raid-buffed in Ulduar as we worked on Vezax. My raid thought that I had bribed a GM to give me extra mana.

So I queued up and was teleported to BRC and realized I was pulled in to a group that had lost their healer.

I took the portal that was up and found myself at the forge area.

The mage, who was the group leader, was an offensive jackass, whose first words are not “Hi, guys” or anything, but rather “dk i hope you know this fight cuz the last 3 tanks didnt.”

“I know all the fights,” he responds.

“we’ll see,” says the mage.

I’m like “wtf did I just walk into here?”

The DK pulls the boss, since the trash is done, and he, himself, stands on the grated outer ring. And the boss is, you know, nowhere near the center flame area.

After about 10 seconds of this, the mage says “lol might as well give up he will never die”

And I got pissed, because all of this could have been prevented if only the mage had said “please don’t forget to move the boss in and out of the fire in the middle so he gets the debuff.”

But he didn’t. Instead, he was like “I hope you know the fight” and the poor tank is then forced to be on the defensive.

So, while healing, I manage to type out “(tank’s name), please move him in and out of the central fire to debuff him.”

Instantly, the DK drags the boss into the central fire.

And proceeds to stand there.

And wipe us.

So I release and run and NO ONE ELSE IS. “Run back, please,” I say.

Two people (the tank and a DPS) release, one person goes offline and the obnoxious mage says “no i’m waiting for the tank to drop group because i’m not fucking running with him”

I tried to vote-kick the mage, but couldn’t initiate any more party kicks (I guess that means they vote-kicked people out before?). And when he still wouldn’t release after the rest of us got back to the instance, I dropped group.

LFG tool: 1, Kurn: 0.

My next queue took me to a partly-finished Throne of the Tides where the group was at Erunak. The paladin tank was all KINDS of vile, spouting profanity (which I don’t generally have an issue with) and teaming it up with perjorative terms against a variety of minorities, gay people in particular.

He pulled the boss and then, partway through the fight, dropped group. >.>

Not that I was upset to be rid of him or anything, but wow. What a champ.

The mage then remarked, “what a fuckin homo”.

I was about halfway through typing something along the lines of how equating “gay” and the like with “stupid” is not cool, but the rogue in the group beat me to it.

“Homophobic much?”

“yea,” responded the mage.

“Did you know that over 800 species on the planet can be gay, but only one can be homophobic?”

I LAUGHED. “Well-said. I’m with you, man.”

That effectively shut up the mage and the rogue and I chatted a bit in whispers about why homophobes are annoying mouth-breathers. Good times.

Finally, we get a new tank, a druid. And the group is suddenly awesome.

We had zero issues with Erunak or the last dude and then requeued for BRC specifically. Easy full clear, then randomed up again and got BRC again, whereupon I got a tanking shield and a healing shield. Then another requeue and we ran a full TotT run.

The fifth member of the group changed a bit — it was a DK, then it was a DPS warrior, then it was an enhancement shaman — but the druid, the rogue, myself and even that mage made a pretty good team, despite the earlier ugliness.

I went on one more BRC run later on, whereupon the tank pulled one of the fire elementals around Karsh and accidentally pulled Karsh, too. I was like “greaaaaaat, that’s going to be a wipe,” BUT NO.

The tank was superb. Not only did he make sure to get the boss debuffed, but he picked up the other add when it approached us and marked it with a skull. He used Divine Guardian, used all of his own cooldowns. I used Aura Mastery and HoSac (OH GOD, I have missed that spell!) and everything was fine. HORRIBLE pull. FANTASTIC execution.

The one major complaint I have about my experiences getting to 81 through the dungeon finder tool is this:

No one seems to know how the hell to interrupt.

Every conceivable BAD spell that could be cast DID get cast, without interruption, almost without exception.

I was that exception and Rebuke has a 10s cooldown.

Shadow Strikes on the Evolved Twilight guys in BRC? All me. Never could reach Corla to interrupt that Dark Command and, as a result, got feared and my worshipper evolved at one point, but anyways.

And that’s even asking them to do so. Like, “Hey guys, it’d be really useful if you could interrupt that Healing Wave on that mob, or Bore on this mob or Shadow Strike…”

Nothing.

Alas.

Still. Level 81. Getting there!

My ilvl is now 270, which is HILARIOUS, considering it’s all greens and some blues and my beautiful Vibrant Alchemist Stone. I keep looking at the ilvl and going “so that’s midway between ICC25 and ICC H25…” and wondering if I could heal heroic Dreamwalker. ;)

I’ve also been digging like a fool on Kurn (for the baby pally, for the Ring of the Boy Emperor and potentially Tyrande’s Favorite Doll. I’ll reforge the mastery to spirit on the ring and the doll will be useful while I wait to make/turn in a Tsunami deck.) and I am sad to report I got the More Skills to Pay the Bills achievement the other day. 525 in all four secondaries. I kind of hate myself.

There are guild updates, too. I need to boast about our heroic Magmaw kill and such, but we’ll see if we can nail heroic Atramedes tonight, too and then I’ll put it all in a single post.

4.2 – Build 14133

Kurn / / paladins, patch 4.2

Thanks to Boubouille at MMO-Champion, we have a list of forthcoming changes to holy paladins for the 4.2 patch.

Holy

Well, now. Isn’t that interesting?

Let’s look at them one-by-one.

The Beacon of Light Change

My preferred method of healing is to beacon the tank I am healing for Tower of Radiance procs when I inevitably use Divine Light or, occasionally, Flash of Light, to heal my target. During “down times”, I can easily toss Holy Shocks or Holy Lights on the raid and I do that frequently on normal-mode fights and even on heroic Chimaeron (since I’m not tank-healing that fight and my beacon is on the “DPS” tank).

The change to Beacon means that we can put our Beacon on a tank and not look at them too often, particularly if we’re healing other targets (including another tank, perhaps) a lot with Holy Light. This still isn’t enough for us to solo-heal two targets, the way we did in Wrath of the Lich King (heroic Saurfang was a great spot for this) but it’s a welcome change. During periods of low tank damage, I can spread the love around the raid with Holy Light and know that my tank is still getting 100% of those heals.

My Holy Light hits for a modest 11k or thereabouts, critting for close to 16k. But in 4.2, with 100% crits, that Holy Light that will transfer from a raid member to my tank will hit for ~22k if it crits.

Suddenly, the Beacon of Light change looks a LOT better and so does healing “off-target”, so to speak.

Holy Shock

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I guess it got posted because the change has actually made it into the PTR build. While Holy Light, Divine Light and Flash of Light will all get bumped in cost, Holy Shock will drop in cost, if only slightly. And it means that, with our 2pc T12 bonus procced, Holy Shock will only cost us 1% of base mana (234 mana), which isn’t too bad.

Infusion of Light

Man, I remember when this made Holy Light instant-cast in the Wrath beta… Anyways, this is most likely a PVP-related change. That said, this could be clutch for getting your target an extra 20k or so, on a non-crit. And, again, with 100% healing crits in 4.2, that’s potentially an instant 40k when Infusion of Light procs.

Tweeting about this the other night was amusing.

I said:

WHOAH. HOLD THE PHONE. “Infusion of Light now also affects Flash of Light.” Instant FoLs again????

Chase Christian, of WoW Insider, responded:

@kurnmogh Instantly drains your manas!

Although I laughed at that, he’s not wrong. In 4.2, assuming the mana cost remains 31% of base mana for Flash of Light, that’s 7261 mana for each cast of that spell. I mean, sometimes you might need to haul it out, especially if it’s instant, but Flash of Light is REALLY still just an emergency heal.

Other Stuff

That post at MMO-Champion also links some new data-mined items, including intellect plate items. The off-set helm is very similar to the tier helm, but instead of haste, has mastery. Definitely worth checking out to see what we can expect to drop in Firelands.