Category: coliseum

Trial of the Idiotic Crusader

Kurn / / apotheosis, cataclysm, coliseum, facepalm, healing, patch 4.0.1, raiding, ramblings

There are three things anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time knows about me:

1) I hate 10-man raids.

2) I’m a pretty decent holy paladin who is very familiar with the changes to the class, given time on beta and such.

3) I’m pretty damn well-geared. (Bear in mind that chardev isn’t all the way up to date, but at least the gear I’m wearing there is what I’m wearing on live.)

Tonight, a certain priest was asking in guild if anyone was up for TOGC10. I didn’t say anything. I purposely didn’t say anything. Until like, the third time she asked and I was like, well, crap.

So I sighed and let her know that if she desperately needed me, I’d heal. But I had a few things to do first — update a website, take a phone call… it would be 15 minutes at least, probably closer to 20. Ended up being about 30, but anyways.

It was mostly a guild group. 2 tanks (both paladins), two healers (me and O), then a hunter, an ele shammy, a warlock and an enhancement shaman all from our guild, with a ret paladin and a DPS warrior as pugs, rounding out the group.

I don’t know what anyone else was assuming about it, but I assumed the following:

People aren’t going to know what to do and this is going to be painful.

By and large, I was right. I wasn’t horribly frustrated by that. I expected it. I did not expect 7 wipes on heroic beasts. Nor did I expect a Jaraxxus one-shot.

This isn’t a blog post about how my guildies and I (well, mostly my guildies) got Tribute to Skill or got the TOGC 10 achievement. (I’d never done it all the way before.) It’s not even a blog post about how I still hate the warlock and felhound on Faction Champs or the pain that Light Vortex can bring. Nor is it about how we didn’t even actually get a burrow on our first Anub attempt.

It’s about my experience healing.

Fuck that place.

It dawned on me, perhaps on our fourth wipe on heroic beasts, that we are at that stupid time of the expansion where:

a) we are not tuned in our abilities,

b) the environment has not changed so that our abilities have even a SEMBLANCE of being tuned.

You can get away with this in ICC with 30% more health, more damage, more healing and more absorption.

It is very much a different story when attempting to do content that is a little more challenging than your average dungeon without a buff.

O and I are good healers and both very experienced in TOGC. We’re both 4/5 TOGC 25 (stupid Anub…) and, between us, we have 33 kills of heroic beasts on 25-man. Granted, she had those kills on her druid instead of her priest, but hey. Experience, you know? It matters.

So while I anticipated some problems, I was, in no way, prepared for the amount of problems we had.

First of all, I kept losing my tank on Northrend Beasts.

I didn’t know why. I STILL don’t know why, except for two attempts.

Seriously, I’m looking at the logs right now.

Barring attempts where I got Paralytic Toxin on the worms… and barring the attempt where someone got trampled and so Icehowl enraged (and no tranq shot was cast!)…

So attempt 1: Paralytic Toxin, which means running, which means not casting.

Attempt 2, Trample/enrage.

Attempt 3, not sure why, but my tank (as opposed to my brother, who was also tanking) ended up with both Molten Spew AND Acid Spit. Ow.

Attempt 4, ah yes, there I was standing around, casting, minding my own goddamn business and someone runs past me with a Snobold on their head. No, they didn’t run past me. They ran right next to me. So that the Snobold was actually IN RANGE of me.

[22:04:52.365] Madrana begins to cast Divine Light
[22:04:52.365] Snobold Vassal casts Batter on Madrana
[22:04:52.365] Snobold Vassal’s Batter interrupts Madrana’s Divine Light
[22:04:52.469] Snobold Vassal Batter Madrana 992 (O: -1)
[22:04:52.771] Madrana Retribution Aura Snobold Vassal 284 (O: -1)
[22:04:53.971] Gormok the Impaler Impale PallyTank 7046 (O: -1)
[22:04:54.377] Gormok the Impaler hits PallyTank 7474 (O: 7941)
[22:04:54.785] PallyTank dies

Dead tank.

Attempt 5, Paralytic Toxin.

Attempt 6, I tried to squeeze a heal out to a DPS who had stood in the fire just a touch too long and then got caught with the long cast time on Divine Light. Even with over 1000 haste, it’s just SUCH a long cast. My instincts definitely betrayed me here. Divine Light may be the spell the most similar to the old Holy Light and it may even have the same Clique bind as my old faithful HL… but the cast time ALONE needs to set it far, far apart from Holy Light. 2.5 second talented base cast time. That’s crap is what it is. In this world of content where your tank can and WILL die within 1-2 GCDs, that’s a death sentence.

Attempt 7, at least it wasn’t my tank who died. O got a Head Crack from a Snobold and couldn’t adequately cast, so Fog went down.

It’s not all bad RNG, but it looks like a lot of it was. If only I hadn’t been silenced. If only O hadn’t been silenced. If only Icehowl hadn’t trampled someone. If only…

We one-shotted Jaraxxus, though, mostly because hi, it’s a healing fight and O and I could probably both heal our way through that fight in our sleep, having a combined 29 kills on 25-man heroic Jaraxxus.

We wiped twice on Faction Champs before O had to go (she hadn’t anticipated taking so long with the issues we’d had on the beasts) and we pulled in my favourite BC-era priest, E.

Faction Champs down on the first try. At least this fight hasn’t changed much. I still hate Unstable Affliction.

Also, the Horde (or, I guess, Alliance, if you’re Horde) druid is still in perma-tree form. FYI.

On to Twin Valks!

This was the suck. Mostly because it felt like I couldn’t do anything EXCEPT spam Divine Light in order to keep up the tank. We’d gone with a one tank setup wherein the DPS all get dark aura and burn the crap out of the white Valk, leaving the tank to just use passive AOE and such to hold aggro on the black Valk. It was fine… unless I wanted to judge or something. So I judged on the pull on the third attempt and spammed Divine Light, so that it was more than half my healing done and I had pathetic use of the other spells in my arsenal.

Now, while this is somewhat an unorthodox method of doing it (I would have been much more comfortable with Fog and the pally tank on one mob each) it’s still ridiculous that due to the insanely high cast time (at least, relatively speaking), I can’t even afford to judge once a minute on that fight and have to use my other instants very sparingly.

Holy paladins are very broken here and I would submit that Holy Light should have a medium cast time. When they talked about a three-heal system, here’s what I thought:

FoL: Short cast, very expensive, average throughput

HL: Medium cast, medium cost, average throughput

DL: Long cast, expensive cost (not very, but higher than medium), huge throughput

Instead, we have:

FoL: Short cast, very expensive, average throughput

HL: Long cast, very cheap cost, less than average throughput

DL: Long cast, expensive cost, huge throughput

There HAS to be a step between FoL and HL/DL. That’s what we’re really missing. A two-second (talented) cast time on a casted spell. Like the old HL with Light’s Grace up.

Anyways. Anub’arak went smoothly, surprisingly, despite poor positioning. We had one wipe but we learned that, with hero, we could push him into P2 without a burrow.

Naturally, we pulled him a second time without first checking to make sure hero was up. Whoops.

We kited him around in the burrow phase without issue and then burned him down. Props to E for being a kick-ass healer, as per usual.

So that was most of my evening. I hate that instance. I never, ever, EVER want to do it again, not on normal 10 or 25 and certainly not on heroic 10 or 25. It’s just not meant to work with our current abilities and talents.

After getting down to a 1.3s Holy Light, having Sacred Shield and things like Divine Sacrifice/Divine Guardian and running TOC/TOGC with those tools and that speedy cast, I could do anything. Running it tonight (well, technically last night) was a painful reminder that I am gimped far beyond what I recognize and that I am nowhere near as good a healer as I was three weeks ago.

What sucks is that it’s not that I’m not a good healer. It’s that my mechanics make me a worse healer than I was. I could reliably do my job, three weeks ago. This raid picked away at some of my confidence.

See, I KNEW that I could do what was required of me in there. Or I thought I could. Now, I’m not so sure. And I’m not so sure it’s even that I’m not making the right decisions, because I think I AM making the right decisions, just about all of the time.

The mechanics, especially when matched against that particular instance on that particular difficulty, are just flat-out going to lose against TOGC10. Did we get the achievement and finish the instance? Yes. But would it have gone about 10 times more smoothly back in the world of 3.3.x? Hell yes. I wouldn’t have had any problems. None. I know my capabilities.

And what I saw in TOGC10 really hit me hard.

We have an ICC 25 coming up on Tuesday and perhaps one on Thursday. Guild runs, predominently. I was feeling pretty good about maybe flipping the switch to heroic Marrowgar and maybe BQL and maybe even Dreamwalker.

After the TOGC run? Not so much.

I’ll post more pally stuff soon, btw. I’ve been lax, I know. Guild stuff is always beckoning!

(By the way, still recruiting for Cataclysm!)

Kurn's Q&A #16

Kurn / / coliseum, gear, general, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, q&a, raiding, tanks

Ah, Tuesdays. Relaxing day with no raid. It feels sooooo good to chill.

And I kind of deserve the day off, even if it’s nothing special and we always have Tuesdays off. We downed heroic 25-man Sindragosa on Monday, bringing us to 11/12 HM in ICC 25. Gah. I’m so worn out. Of course, our second holy paladin is apparently going to be MIA for a MONTH starting after Thursday, so I am not going to get a lot of recovery time. I told the raid leader that we needed not just one more paladin, but two, because I NEED a night off sometimes without the potential guilt that a raid can’t happen. Neither of us were there last Thursday, since we, strangely enough, both had our birthday on Friday, so in three hours they only got heroic Rotface, heroic Festergut and a few attempts at heroic Putricide before downing him on regular.

Anyways, guilt and obligation are not a factor tonight, so I ordered pizza and will be watching some TV shortly. While I wait, it’s time for Search Terms I Wish To Expound On!

1) unbound plague melee

Probably the most important thing you need to do if you, as melee, get Unbound Plague is to run the hell out of melee until you and people in melee no longer have it. The worst case scenario is that everyone, including your tank, keeps passing Unbound Plague around, increasing your debuff stacks and then you all die.

Check with your raid leader, but that thing spreads FAST, so my advice is to get out ASAP.

2) “divine sacrifice” putricide hm

Dear sweet God, if you have it as a holy or ret pally, bubble and hit Divine Sacrifice in P3. Right about when the third stack of Mutated Plague starts hitting the tanks is a REAL good time for the whole raid to take 20% less damage, assuming you have Divine Guardian, or a good time for your group to take 30% less damage. (Do not hit Divine Shield and Divine Sacrifice if you are a protection paladin who has stacks of Mutated Plague, because you will heal Putricide.)

3) 2 beacons on 1 tank

Yep, no problems here. They do stack. Bear in mind that there is lag between the casted heal on a person and the person with beacon, so watch your tank anyways.

4) anti magic zone viable for sindragosa hardmode?

This is a great question. I don’t actually know. I will state, with confidence, that nothing but LOS is wiping off stacks of Mystic Buffet. But AMZ may be useful for P3 on heroic Sindragosa, perhaps allowing people to drop Instability stacks in the raid for a short time.

5) can fury of frostmourne be bubbled through?

Excellent question. I’ll try that this reset. I think one of our shammies Reincarnated on Monday’s LK kill after FoF, so…

6) do you have to interupt npc in frost tomb lich king

I love that I’m answering this without actually ever getting sucked into Frostmourne.

– If you’re a DPS, you need to kill the bad NPC and that includes interrupting his cast.
– If you’re a healer, you need to heal the good NPC and that includes dispelling the magic effect on him.
– If you’re a healer who cannot dispel magic, you must heal your good NPC and then interrupt the bad NPC’s cast. Shammies would, in this case, use Wind Shear. Druids will need to bear form and bash.

So unless you’re a priest or a paladin, you need to interrupt the bad NPC’s cast. If you’re a priest or a paladin, you just need to dispel magic or cleanse the debuff on your good NPC.

7) haste pally 3.3.3 holy

If you’re someone stacking spellpower and mostly casting Flash of Light, get to 676 haste and then stop worrying about it, given Wrath of Air Totem, Improved Moonkin Aura/Swift Retribution Aura and Judgements of the Pure.

If you’re a holy paladin who stacks intellect and mostly casts Holy Light, don’t stop stacking haste! Ever! :) Stat priority goes:

Intellect > Haste > MP5 > Crit > Spellpower

8) nagrand level range

I believe 64 is when you can start picking up quests in Nagrand and you can easily spend four levels there if you do ALL of the quests, including some group quests like Durn the Hungerer, the forge camps, etc. And Corki. But I prefer leaving him to die. I hate that bastard.

9) prot pally why not divinity

This is an interesting question. After all, Divinity improves the healing you take by up to 5%, right?

The issue here is one of what is a better allocation of those five talents.

A semi-typical spec for a raiding prot paladin would look something like this:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZVhxA0uMusIufdxfbzbc

With a spec that’s 0/53/18, could you take five points out of ret and sneak them into Divinity? Sure. But you’d be losing out on more damage done out of something like Crusade and Seal of Command or utility out of Pursuit of Justice. It’s not really worth it when you have Improved Devotion Aura which you should usually have on if only for the armor bonus, which also adds 6% extra healing. If you are suffering so much that you feel you really need the 5% extra healing from Divinity, your healers are slacking.

As a tank, you have two main jobs.

a) Hold threat. You hold threat by doing damage and using high-threat abilities.
b) Stay alive. You stay alive by virtue of the gear you’re wearing and various cooldowns like Divine Protection, Ardent Defender and other forms of avoidance (dodge/parry) and mitigation (block).

Your first responsibility is to pull everything on to you and hold them there. Your survivability, while most certainly something that should concern you, is not your most pressing concern. If you’re specced and geared properly for the content you’re attempting, your healer(s) should be able to keep you up. Blow cooldowns if you have to, but you should not need the extra 5% healing. Consider those to be points incenting holy paladins to start dropping points in Protection.

10) toc toc different lockouts?

Yep. There are FOUR lockouts for Trial of the Crusader.

a) Trial of the Crusader, 10 man (regular)
b) Trial of the Grand Crusader, 10 man (heroic)
c) Trial of the Crusader, 25 man (regular)
d) Trial of the Grand Crusader, 25 man (heroic)

Thankfully, Blizzard recognized that that is WAY too much time spent on the same bosses in what is the same blasted instance and changed hard modes for ICC back to being something you can trigger or select within the same instance of the raid.

Wrapping up the Week that Was

Kurn / / coliseum, dps, gear, general, healing, hunters, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings, weekly raids

I actually have a lot of stuff to talk about that I find interesting, fascinating, what-have-you. Let’s break it down into guild raiding and making money/pugging, shall we? We shall!

Guild Raiding

This week was awesome for raiding because of one simple reason. My RL friend the resto druid came back on Wednesday. We agreed I’d do healing for this reset so she could get her healing legs back under her and learn how we do stuff on heroic and what the changes are for heroic modes.

Then, armed with the 15% buff, we proceeded to ruin Lower Spire (we still have a lot of trouble on Deathwhisper on heroic, but to be fair, a lot of people were still learning that fight). The most notable moment was that, while mind controlled on Deathwhisper, I chucked a Hammer of Wrath at my RL friend and killed her and proceeded to get teased about it for the rest of the night.

Reactions:

RL friend: “omg mad you killed me! :(”

Priest: “rofl! judas!”

Holy Paladin: “omf maf!” (yes, we were still in combat, can you tell?)

RL friend to other RL friends: “[my real name] just killed me! totally smacked me down!”

After the fight:

Holy Paladin: “mad nice hammer of wrath on [RL friend] there earlier btw!”

OT: “nice welcome back to your friend!”

It was amusing.

Anyways! We got Saurfang down in 5 Marks of the Fallen Champion which was SO nice. Way to go, DPS boost! Looking at the WoL for that fight, only one DPS was under 10k DPS (sitting at 9k) and everyone else is between 10k and 14k. Comparing this with my own DPS in ICC with the 15% buff, which hit 8k on Festergut, it’s kind of mind-blowing how much of a difference the gear really does make. I don’t really notice a lot of difference in my healing as I go through ICC every week, even when I get an upgrade. It must be nice to see the DPS increase as a DPS class, though.

Anyways, Wednesday was heroic Lower Spire and heroic Dreamwalker. Boy, did we mess that up. Previously, we’d waited for heroism until about 82%, but we recognized that was WAY too late, last week. In that we hit heroism and like, 10 seconds later, the boss was healed to full. So, last week, we decided we’d stop taking portals and call for hero at 75%.

WAY too early. We were healing for nearly two minutes after hero expired.

We’re thinking one more round of portals after 75% ought to be a nice inbetween.

It would also be useful if I had noticed that I’d been put into combat while swapping my Glyph of Seal of Wisdom for a Glyph of Seal of Light. But I didn’t notice, since I was also doing healing assignments at the time. I went in with my spellpower set and Seal of Light up and didn’t realize until after the raid, when I went to switch the glyphs back, that I’d never made the switch in the first place. /facepalm

Thursday saw us without our regular resto shammy and without our regular disc priest, so we were a little light on healing and that meant no heroic Sindragosa attempts. Shucks. :P (I really loathe that fight with everything I am.) We got Blood Prince Council (almost got it on normal before we realized it wasn’t on heroic!) and BQL pretty easily. Actually, both kills, while one-shots, were messy as hell. I feel like my RL friend the resto druid might have reason to think the healers suck. :P Shadow Prison killed a LOT of people. I think part of the issue there was that I kept the regular holy priest as holy to help with raid healing rather than as disc to help with raid mitigation. Lessons for next week, I guess.

Rotface was messy, too. Hell, all of Thursday was messy. One wipe and a kill on Rotface. 3 wipes and a kill on Festergut. Must remember to assign SIDES to the healers because after 2 wipes, I realized both resto druids (assigned to healing the raid, primarily the ranged) were both on the same side. /facepalm

Then, because we lacked the healing for Sindragosa, we played with heroic Putricide. We got him to 40% after a handful of attempts and were getting the hang of the Unbound Plague, too. Still, we’re planning to hit him up after Sindragosa, I think. We just have a lot more time poured into Sindragosa and, with the buff, ought to be able to get deeper into P3.

Speaking of Sindragosa… AVR is basically cheating. Look at this.

That’s our layout. So when you get a mark on your head and you’re going to get the frost tomb on you, you run to the corresponding mark and stand on the little orange circle in the center of it. Pretty simple. The big circles (which, my guildies hastened to mention, look like parts of the female anatomy. :P) are for frost tomb positioning in P3.

Another look at the mark positions, from above.

So yeah, that’s hax. And I’m not really sure how I feel about it. I mean, being able to paint on the game world is really nice and isn’t it really just something we’ve done with in-game tools thus far? Warlock teleporters? Flares? Elune Stones? What’s the difference between this and those?

The difference, in my mind, is that this is not something that comes with the game. This is an addon that someone developed with this purpose in mind. It’s not something the developers of the game foresaw (I don’t think). I would NOT be surprised if AVR is blocked somehow.

Boss mods work with the game. It makes emotes more noticeable. It times abilities for you so you’re not sitting there with a stopwatch the way you did for Core Hound respawns in Molten Core. All the information boss mods give you are available through the game itself. But this doohickey works separately from the game. It allows players to start dictating information to other players that are strategy-based, not encounter-mechanic-based. Does that make sense?

It’s the difference between telling someone to run left and telling someone to run to that particular spot on the ground that is NOT visible in-game without use of the mod.

I think that’s where I have problems with it as a raider. As a raid leader, GOOD LORD, where was this two years ago!? haha. :) Seriously, though, I like to think that I have a fairly firm grasp on what the developers of the game want us to do. I don’t think they want us to skip three of the four trash packs on the way up towards the tunnel in the Pit of Saron. They definitely don’t want us to try to do the Lich King encounter in Heroic Halls of Reflection from behind. I’m kind of hoping they don’t want us to ignore Light Vortex entirely and heal through it by stacking in the doorway of heroic Twin Valks.

I don’t think this mod is in the spirit of the game that the developers had in mind. That said, I’ll use it ’till it gets banned or my guild no longer requires it. But I’ll feel dirty about it! ;)

Tonight, we’re looking at Sindragosa and I guess maybe Putricide if we get Sindragosa down or if we have unexpected healing absences.

Making Money/Pugging

I’ve been bad. I’ve spent so much money in the last couple of weeks and a lot of it is due to just plain laziness on my part. On Saturday, I was at 4800g on my bank toon, with probably another 800g spread out on different toons.

Considering I had 15k a couple weeks ago, this was unacceptable. I decided to spend yesterday making money.

First up, I took 6 Cardinal Rubies and cut them for the AH. I made a ton of Runescrolls of Fortitude. I hauled out some of the BOE Christmas pets that I hadn’t used and had been waiting to sell. Then I did some dailies at the Argent Tournament on Kurn. Finally became a Champion of Stormwind (I stopped doing anything AT-related with just one more day left for the Champion of Stormwind achievement!), did a bunch of the dailies and got The Bread Winner which totally got me by surprise!

I bought a Teldrassil Sproutling since I realized I had more than 40 Champion’s Seals and there were no others on the AH, so I bought that and put THAT on the AH for 300g.

I traded in some Triumphs for more gems and cut those, too. I also did my random heroic on all but one toon. (On my druid, I got Oculus, to which I said no thanks. Later, I got to try to heal a fail H HoR run, which fell apart… then I got tapped to tank it on my third attempt at the random heroic — which went well!) I did my cooking daily on both Madrana and Kurn, fishing daily on them both as well. I also got my weekly (Marrowgar) done on Kurn because I pugged an ICC 25 and we went through Lower Spire (couldn’t down Festergut because people were dumb) and, as you may have seen by now, I got my bow!

Once just about everything had sold, I had 6600g or thereabouts. Not too bad! From 4800-6600? Excellent.

And then I saw someone in trade talking about a GDKP TOC25 run that would be happening in the next 20 minutes or so.

What is a GDKP run?

I’d heard of these, but never participated before. Basically, every item is up for bids, with a minimum. Bids are made publicly in raid chat. At the end of the run, the proceeds are split among the raiders who lasted ’till the end.

Kurn may be kickin’ it in some sweet 264 gear, including the new bow, but a lot of the gear is still sub-par. Like trinkets. Like my melee weapon. Plus, I didn’t actually HAVE the TOC 25 achievement, which makes me look like a moron when trying to get into pugs. (I’d previously gone as far as Anub and then there was total raid failure.)

So. I indicated my interest to the person organizing it. I got a whisper back saying to ask for an invite at 12:15am (my time). So I repaired my stuff, sent myself 5000g of that 6600g, just in case something AWESOME dropped, and headed to TOC.

I decided that there were three items I was actually interested in, plus maybe I would try to snag a Trophy of the Crusade so I could get another piece of 245 T9. (Already had 245 gloves from Koralon.)

The items were:

Lupine Longstaff – compared to the Orca-Hunter’s Harpoon, it had more agi, more armor penetration, less crit (ugh, for haste!) and less hit, which is nice, because I’ve got a stupid amount of hit. Drops off Twins.

Archon Glaive – clearly better than the Lupine Longstaff; no haste but crit, still more armor pen. Drops off Anub’arak.

Obviously, I was in the market for a new melee weapon.

The other item I was looking at bidding on was, no surprise here, Death’s Verdict. I decided that, if it dropped, I’d go as high as 2000g on it. It drops off the Twins as well, so it was going to be exciting to see the loot off those bosses.

At 12:15, I whispered the guy in charge, got my invite and after about 20 minutes of fiddling with the groups and everything, we were finally ready to go.

I was not prepared for the amount of money that was spent on even the first boss. 500g was the minimum but the Trophy went for 1500g. I resigned myself to not buying a trophy. :P

Satrina’s Impeding Scarab dropped off the Faction Champs. I have that trinket on Madrana for her tanking set. I got it for 2 DKP with my guild. Someone in the run paid 3000g for it.

I was suddenly sure that 2000g would not be enough for Death’s Verdict, if it dropped.

The Twins died easily (I deterrenced Light Vortex! Go me for remembering how to play my class!) and though there was no Death’s Verdict, there was the Lupine Longstaff.

I figured I’d bid 500g, since it had dropped and there was no guarantee that the glaive would drop off Anub.

No one bid against me. Grats me! It’s not often I get to upgrade a bow AND a staff in the same day.

Anub’arak died and the Reign of the Unliving dropped, which set someone back 3400g. No glaive, so I was very satisfied with my purchase of the Lupine Longstaff.

Throughout the run, there were updates posted in raid of how much had been spent on each boss and the last update included the 1500g spent for the “goodie bag”, which consisted of the skins, the patterns, the Crusader Orbs and the Abyss Crystals (4) from the run. The updates added up the total pot and the breakdown per person. Here’s the final breakdown.

So, I paid 500g and got 1196g for a total of 696g in profit, not to mention the gold from the bosses.

All told, I finished the day with 7700g in my bank, with a few hundred spread out over various toons. I got a new bow, I got a new staff, Frost Emblems, Ashen Verdict rep, a bunch of new achievements and had a lot of fun.

It’s never a bad day when you make about 3000g and get new gear. :)

A night off? HAH.

Kurn / / coliseum, gear, healing, raiding, ramblings

So, given that, you know, everything in ICC was dead, we headed to Trial of the Grand Crusader 25 tonight. We had yet to down Anub’arak on heroic 25m and so we decided to go in there tonight. With 2 new healer apps and two of the other healers had never been to TOC/TOGC with us before.

Tonight involved a LOT of typing to healers. Yikes.

Northrend Beasts – ugly. At least two people died to TRAMPLE. Seriously. New people, two apps (not the healers) so I don’t know if they were expecting a speed buff or something.

Lord Jaraxxus – peachy keen, healers did great, no one got silenced by the kiss, no one blew up the raid because incinerate flesh hadn’t been healed. And, ta-DAH! Solace of the Defeated! Kind of insane that I got it, really. I guess most other healing classes have latched on to spellpower ones out of ICC or from the badge vendor. Geez. I still have my Pandora’s Plea, though. I wiped to Mimiron for WAY too long to just throw that crap away, not to mention the something like 9 or 10 or 15 weeks or HOWEVER long it was that it took me to get the drop.

Faction Champs – OUCH, they still burst people down FAST. But we won.

Twin Val’kyrs – got them down in 3 phases. Dark Vortex and both shields. No Light Vortex stupidity for us, YAY!

And so we faced Anub’arak with 50 attempts left.

13 attempts later, we called the raid and we are going back to our long kiting method.

Still, I got to try out a new holy pally app, a new holy priest app and got to get our regular holy priest to go disc and try that out for a bit. I think he secretly likes being disc but he likes his numbers a lot as holy. But he’s always eager to go disc. I really do like that particular healer a lot. He’s very solid.

—

In other news, I got a comment today from Chase Christian asking if I wore a 4pc T10 gear set to my LK kill.

The answer is no, I wore 2pc T10 (helm and shoulders), Holiday’s Grace, the 245 healer/caster cloak off Onyxia (for real), Rot-Resistant Breastplate, Crypt Keeper’s Bracers, Unclean Surgical Gloves, Lich Killer’s Lanyard, Legplates of Failing Light, Earthsoul Boots, Ashen Band of Endless Wisdom, Marrowgar’s Frigid Eye, Pandora’s Plea, Talisman of Resurgence, Misery’s End, Bulwark of Smouldering Steel and the Libram of Renewal.

I have my tier chest, gloves and now legs so that I can have a bit of wiggle room when it comes to upgrading my gear to 277 level. Right now, I use my T10 chest and gloves as part of my spellpower set, which I only really use for Dreamwalker healing at this point. But I do have the 264s of all those pieces and am ready to upgrade them at any time. ;)

—

Tomorrow, though, IS a day off. I’m really looking forward to it, too. Whew.

Wow. Just… wow.

Kurn / / coliseum, general, healing, raiding, ramblings

Heroic Twin Val’kyrs down. Using the DUMBEST STRATEGY I have ever encountered in my ENTIRE LIFE.

The whole basis of the fight is that there are auras that you should switch to based on what’s happening right then in the fight, and the aura portals are in four spots (two for each) of the room.

But does my guild do this?

No.

On the kill, 3 of us got the light aura, 21 of us got the dark aura. (Did I mention we 24-manned it? No? We did.)

Those 3 were two hunters and a warlock in BT Shadow Resist gear, basically collecting white orbs and dodging as many black orbs as they could.

As I understand it, here are four abilities the twins use.

Light Vortex – surge of light, 16k fire damage to anyone not with light aura every second for 5 seconds.

Dark Vortex – surge of dark, 16k shadow damage to anyone not with dark aura every second for 5 seconds.

Twin’s Pact (Light) – light-coloured shield that people with dark aura should have no issues killing, then interrupting the cast (which is a heal)

Twin’s Pact (Dark) – dark-coloured shield that people with light aura should have no issues killing, then interrupting the cast (which is a heal)

So, just by describing that, one would think that half the raid is light, half is dark, everyone switches on vortex, right? WRONG.

We healed through Light Vortex.

2 resto shammies, 2 holy priests, 2 holy paladins, 1 resto druid.

It meant popping two Divine Sacrifices that overlapped (even if they don’t stack) AND all four druids in the raid popping tranquility for their groups.

But, by golly, we healed through it.

And the shammy blew heroism at the right time. And they swapped DPS targets on time. And we won!

But it was pure luck.

The order of those four abilities (which happen once a minute, I believe?) is random. But they won’t repeat until the fifth time an ability comes up. And THAT is also random, I believe. So we only got one Light Vortex. Had we gotten two, we would have been SCREWED. I was ready to Divine Protection/Divine Sacrifice (which would have killed me) if I had to, but we got through without a second Light Vortex.

Some stats:

Effective raid DPS: 121,717

Effective raid DT(taken)PS: 50,469

Effective raid HPS: 50,966

RAW raid HPS: 91,732

And only 44.4% overhealing.

My RL friend, the resto druid? 9133 effective health per second. To my 4064.7.

Whew.

Rounding up the last little while.

Kurn / / apotheosis, coliseum, facepalm, general, raiding, ramblings, ulduar

First thing… I tried Algalon for the first time tonight, ever. It was 25m. It’s a seriously fun fight. We only got through one Big Bang at most, though. The guild I’m apping to hasn’t killed him on 25m yet and only killed him on 10m for the first time tonight (after the 25m attempts were done). Still, I didn’t fuck up hardcore, so I’m pleased. Still, look at this damage.

[00:00:25.621] Algalon the Observer hits Tank1 4639 (A: 7176)
[00:00:25.621] Madranah Flash of Light Tank1 +*0* (O: 6637)
[00:00:25.621] RestoDruid Lifebloom Tank1 +525
[00:00:25.854] Algalon the Observer hits Tank1 24051
[00:00:25.854] Tank1 Necrosis Algalon the Observer 74
[00:00:25.868] Tank1 Retribution Aura Algalon the Observer 209
[00:00:26.028] Tank1 Frost Fever Algalon the Observer 353 (R: 88)
[00:00:26.164] Tank1 Retribution Aura Algalon the Observer 233
[00:00:26.343] Algalon the Observer hits Tank1 7441 (A: 4659)
[00:00:26.343] HolyPally1 Flash of Light Tank1 +443
[00:00:26.714] Tank1 Plague Strike Algalon the Observer 1131
[00:00:26.726] RestoDruid Lifebloom Tank1 +1066
[00:00:26.897] Algalon the Observer hits Tank1 21430 (O: 2249)

And just like that, dead like dinner. My holy light was in the middle of casting and I just needed another half second to make sure it would land… Anyways. I didn’t make a fool of myself, which is nice.

As to the previous guild’s drama…

Continue reading “Rounding up the last little while.”

Hah.

Kurn / / coliseum, raiding

Okay, guild drama aside for a moment… the guild I’m apping to on Proudmoore got 25-man heroic Northrend Beasts on Monday (and again on Tuesday) and we got Jaraxxus tonight (after doing some Ulduar due to poor attendence — which got me a mace and a new chestpiece!) and then worked on 25-man heroic Faction Champions.

Two words: Epic. Fail.

Hilarious, though. It’s nice to always be one of the last ones to be alive. It’s like, hey look! I’m NOT a noob! :)

Bed now. These hours are killing me.

Eesh.

Kurn / / coliseum, gear, general, healing, raiding, shamans

Got the shammy to 80 at long, long last, so now I have:

Kurnmogh (80 hunter on Proudmoore)

Madrana (80 paladin on Bronzebeard)

Katarrah (80 shaman on Bronzebeard)

Plus I still have my 74 mage on Proudmoore.

In the less-than-24 hours that Katarrah has been 80, she’s healed (!) Vault of Archavon 25 and 10, DPSed Azjol-Nerub and ToC (both heroic)… I’ve gotten a TON of nice gear, stuff I made on Kurn that I sent over with Katarrah when she transferred to BB. I also got a couple nice drops here and there and, overall, am kind of excited I have another 80 on the server.

In other news, server first Northrend Beasts, faction server first (server second) on Lord Jaraxxus and server/faction second on Faction Champions.

Woot.

3.2 – Sob.

Kurn / / coliseum, facepalm, healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I’m probably making too much of it, but I’m still very sad about the nerfs to Divine Intellect and Illumination. Bastards.

Anyways. Got an achievement the other day that, frankly, shocked the living crap out of me. So surprised was I, I forget to screenshot it as it happened.

lightning1

I had no idea what the hell that was.

lightning2

… I’m still dumbfounded that the raid I was in, my guild raid, got that. Week after week, people get ruined by that dumb lightning… and yet, we get THAT achievement? It’s not like it’s difficult to avoid or anything, but it’s kind of surprising. Sort of like The Safety Dance.

Anyways, I’m still unsure how the hell I’m going to be healing in 3.2.

I guess something along these lines:

1) Cast Sacred Shield on the tank I’m healing.

2) Beacon the tank I’m not.

3) FoL the tank every 12ish seconds to keep my hot up (must configure Grid to show hots AND my own one…)

4) … FoL the other tank if they have SS on them?

5) Continue to spam Holy Light and pray to God I don’t run OOM.

Ugh. I guess we’ll see how things go in the Coliseum (anyone else think that should be spelled Colosseum?!) tonight. Assuming the servers and such get all sorted out okay.