Category: dungeons

Follower Dungeon Thoughts

Kurn / / dragonflight, dungeons, ramblings

Folks, I am still gobsmacked at this whole “follower dungeon” thing. Gobsmacked.

Naturally, as I haven’t been playing regularly in a while (I was last tinkering in Season of Discovery with my brother and his eldest son), I had no idea that there even were follower dungeons.

I ended up running Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr as Kurn, just to check it out and I was impressed with the NPCs. I pulled, MDing to the tank… and everything was fine. I tried pulling without MDing to the tank. And still, everything was fine. I tried pulling aggro off the tank and I couldn’t. I tried pulling multiple groups to see if either the tank or the healer would get taxed. Nope.

Mind reeling, I then decided I had to do this as a healer on Madrana.

You should watch it. It’s pretty funny. I also confuse this big shiny yellow spinny effect on the ground for something a mage does. No, no, it’s something a trinket of mine does…

Anyway, the NPC tank was fucking amazing. Like, no shit, my hand to God, amazing. Tanks of the world (or, perhaps more accurately, wannabe tanks of the world) should take a page out of Captain Garrick’s book. She is GREAT. The one nitpick I had (I healed Neltharus) was that at one point, the tank was at the top of some steps, the hunter (Austin — I hate him, but the other characters are fine) was at the bottom, and I was in the middle, having a bit of trouble with line of sight for a minute. But aside from that, this tank was great. This tank cast Lay on Hands on the shammy. I would have 100% let that shammy die while I cast LOH on the mage (which I did) because a shammy can rez.

So now, I’m like… how did the tank know to LOH the shammy? Is there a piece of code in there that says that a real human behind a paladin healer would have saved the character who couldn’t self-rez and that’s why the LOH went to the shaman?

(PS: I have a battle-rez, now? What?! I mean, it’s on my bars, so I must have known about it at some point, BUT WHAT?!?!)

So yeah, I’m really interested in understanding how the NPCs are programmed. These are not the dumbasses who were in the proving grounds. These are much more sophisticated. Slow to pull (but considerate of the healer!!!) and the DPS is somewhat weak (but they’re normals), but still. They sort of play their classes well? (Austin has pulled extra mobs on me at least once, so he’s on my shit-list.)

What comes next, I wonder? Heroics? Mythics? LFR bots to come in when there aren’t enough tanks or healers?

Part of me kept thinking about these “fun” dungeon runs some of us had together in Burning Crusade. It was like a bunch of night owls. Me on Madrana, with Tia (warlock), Fodder (DPS warrior) and Cennathas (rogue). And sometimes Fodder would actually tank if we, you know, couldn’t find a tank at 2am. And Cenn would always be the one tasked with finding a rando DPS. So we’d all be on Vent or something except for the rando and I’d be stressing about mana and Tia would get lost in the instance and the rando must have always been like “who the fuck are these people and what are they even DOING???” It was vaguely stressful for me as a healer, but it was usually a good time.

And like… that wouldn’t necessarily have happened if we had had the ability to do follower dungeons.

Hell, if the gang of us had been able to find a tank back in the day, like the Vanilla days, we may never have done a 39m Baron run without a tank. It was me on Kurn, with my cat, Whisper, tanking, Crypt healing the crap out of Whisper, and Tia, Tan and Maj doing insane caster DPS while I pulled. (This was prior to MD, btw.)

Now, obviously, doing a dungeon without a tank is, in a word, stupid. But that’s sort of what we liked about it. We liked challenging ourselves to use all the abilities at our disposal. We liked learning things. We especially liked forcing Majik to drop enchanting and pick up engineering and power-levelling it all night so he could drop repair bots and try to rez Crypt with jumper cables, when Crypt’s darkmoon card wouldn’t proc (which was, you know, often).

I wonder if we would have still had the fun adventures we did if this technology had been available to us. My gut says no, because necessity is the mother of invention. And if we hadn’t needed to find ways around not having a tank, would we have? Probably not.

So while I do love this follower dungeon thing as it is, where you can do normal-level dungeons with 3 of your friends and a bot or by yourself with 4 bots or anything in between, I hope it doesn’t go further than this.

I do think it’s sort of a band-aid to the whole lack of tanks situation.

The way to get more tanks is to open them up to more specs and to make it more rewarding to be a tank (and I’m not talking a goodie bag out of LFG) and to require more hybrid role encounters in raids. In a 25-man raid, we needed like, 2.5 tanks in Cataclysm. Usually 2. Occasionally 1. Sometimes 4. (Heroic Halfus, anyone? God, kitties who could be bears were amazing.)

So yeah, still gobsmacked. Still very curious as to the how. And now curious about the why and the how far this will go.

What are your thoughts?

Hilarity at 4am

Kurn / / addons, dragonflight, dungeons, healing

So I was hopping on and off my various alts, trying to get them all a few extra profession points courtesy of the Darkmoon Faire, and I was like… I kind of want to heal on the paladin. So I spent a good amount of time setting up Plexus and Clique and, at 4am, decided to go heal a random dungeon. This, I might add, without ever having done any of the Dragonflight dungeons before.

So how did it go?

Well, it was not my finest hour, as I outright panicked throughout it, basically. Why? Check it out for yourself.

After sleep and such, I figured out the issue was PlexusClickSets and Clique had to have been interfering with each other. I disabled Click Sets and walked into Stocks and back out and all my settings worked properly. But I tell you, this was an intense 20 minutes or so of, first, figuring out what the hell was happening, and then what buttons are bound to what keys and then, finally, how do I keep people alive??? Only a couple (3?) deaths overall, no full wipes. Just a lot of me flailing. Enjoy!

It’s All Coming Back…

Kurn / / classic, dungeons

So in December, my video card died. My beautiful, gorgeous, GTX 1080Ti died.

Naturally, this put a crimp in my WoW playing in that I basically couldn’t play anything that required hardware acceleration.

Thankfully, my 16-month old video card was still under warranty, so I got a free replacement. Unfortunately, this was all happening over the holidays so it took over a month to get my card. I had other stuff to do with some personal projects, but I’ve finally gotten back to playing WoW.

And I’m level 58! And almost a half!

I’ve run a bunch of the high-end instances for the first time in over a decade since properly doing them at level.

Dire Maul West – a couple of wipes, but ultimately I got the Backwood Helm.

UBRS – No loot but I didn’t have to kite Drak! I did get my Pyroguard Emberseer quest done (Eye of the Emberseer) for Duke Hydraxis and got attuned to BWL and got my Blood of the Black Dragon Champion for Onyxia. So with one run, I was attuned to everything except Molten Core.

LBRS – This was a weird-ass run. Four wipes (I feigned through two of them) and these people didn’t drop down to the right at Hordemar City. Why… why would you not do that? We ended up not clearing the hallway where the recipe for the Greater Fire Protection Potion drops, nor the other one on your way to Troll side. It was weird. But I got my Beaststalker’s Gloves and Beaststalker’s Mantle (thank you, Voone and Wyrmthalak!) as well as Trueaim Gauntlets.

Strat UD – No loot to speak of, but I got the holy water quest done and got the key.

Haven’t done Live or Scholo or DM North yet. Oh, and I soloed my way to attune myself to Molten Core. Plus got my Royal Seal of Eldre’Thalas all by myself. Plus assembled a video of five ways to mess up Jailbreak.

It’s a very interesting experience, to be really knowledgeable about stuff and yet unable to convince anyone to take you anywhere when pugging because you’re a hunter and no one thinks you can CC worth shit. My brother has promised to tank me through anything I need, so that’s good.

And I have more than enough needed for my epic mount. I’m pretty pleased about that.

The most interesting thing about this experience, though, is how old memories come back.

We were in that LBRS run and we’d killed the quartermaster up the hallway from Halycon and were clearing trash towards the dogs and I’m like … there’s something here. There’s a pat. I hit Track Humanoids and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a pat coming from the upper hallway just as our pally tank is going to run at the group at the far end of the corridor. I pinged the map multiple times, averting certain disaster as the tank stopped to get that pat before the group.

And while in Strat, the goddamn Eye of Naxxramas kept showing up during boss fights, but guess who killed the damn thing each time? That’s right. Me. Too many memories of being wiped by the Eye and its summoned thingies.

But the thing is, that pat in LBRS, the Eye in Strat UD, these aren’t memories I would have consciously thought about. They’re not things I would remember if I were talking about the instances to someone. But as soon as I was in those particular positions, it was like an old neural pathway just lit all the way up.

It’s been fun, relearning this stuff or, perhaps more accurately, rediscovering that I still have this knowledge.

Dungeon Healing as a Holy Paladin in Classic

Kurn / / classic, dungeons, guide, healers, healing, paladins

Folks, it’s been a long, long, long time since I healed in Vanilla. Healing has changed so much, and so often, that it’s hard for me to really remember what it was like. I didn’t get a chance to play on beta, outside of the stress tests, so please take my advice here with a grain of salt for now.

I healed dungeons from Scarlet Monastery onwards in Vanilla. Heck, I levelled holy. (Don’t do this, you will regret it when it takes you 12 minutes to kill a Kurzen Medicine Man in northern Stranglethorn Vale.)

For the lower level dungeons, it’s as you might expect – heal the tank and yourself primarily, cleanse people and try not to let them die (but not at the expense of you and the tank), don’t stand in bad.

Once you hit about level 50, it gets interesting, though. The dungeons you’ll be running are also run by level 60s, so things get a bit more challenging — your tanks get hit harder, dots tick for more damage, all that sort of thing.

This is a reasonable level 50 dungeon-healing build:

https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/paladin/05503022521351–052

This is a reasonable level 60 dungeon-healing build:

https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/paladin/05503020521351-5002-552

Both of these builds try to increase your utility by giving you improved Blessing of Might, plus Improved Devotion Aura, plus Guardian’s Favor and decreased Judgment cooldown.

Healing “Rotation”

Fun fact, there’s no healing rotation. You have three, count ’em, three healing spells. You have Flash of Light, which is fast, doesn’t cost much mana and subsequently doesn’t heal for much and you have Holy Light, which is a bit longer to cast, costs more mana but heals for more. Oh, and then every thirty seconds you have Holy Shock.

Now, this doesn’t touch on downranking, which is a more complex subject, but basically, those are your three castable heals. That’s it. No Beacon of Light, no Holy Radiance, no Light of Dawn. That. is. it.

Someone is missing a bit of health? Flash of Light.

Someone is missing a LOT of health? Holy Light.

Someone is ABOUT TO DIE and can’t wait for Flash of Light to cast? Holy Shock, then Flash of Light, then Holy Light. (Or Lay on Hands — see below.)

The Oh Shit Button

Divine Favor is a talent and it is glorious. It forces your next Flash of Light, Holy Light or Holy Shock to be a crit. And, IIRC, it’s not on the global cooldown, so you can macro it to something like:

/cast Divine Favor
/cast Holy Shock

You need a target in there somewhere, but it should instantly cast Holy Shock and force a crit. If you have any on-use trinkets that would be helpful that are also off the global cooldown, you can use them here, too, to chain a nice big instant heal.

Note that Divine Favor does NOT force Lay on Hands to crit.

Seals and Judging

Of course, you also have Seal of Light and Seal of Wisdom and you can judge them both. How does judging work? Well, you put up a seal (like Light) and then you judge, then the seal is no longer up. So you would need to recast Seal of Light in order to judge it again. Read the tooltips on the seals to know what the judged effect is. So attacking someone with Seal of Light up gives me, the paladin, 94 health when it procs. When I judge it, anyone attacking the mob who has it on them has a change to get 61 health when it procs. If you’re close enough to attack the mob yourself, your melee hits refresh the duration of the judgment. I’m definitely fuzzy on this — not sure if it’s you or anyone in your group, but I’ll come back to this. I was more someone who stood 30y back and mostly judged from there.

So Seal of Light is nice to judge on a boss because then everyone is attacking the boss and everyone is getting health back. However, Seal of Wisdom is also nice to judge if you have a bunch of mana users (and if you, yourself, are running out of mana). You can judge Wisdom, then put up Seal of Wisdom on yourself again, then attack the mob and get a crapton of mana back as both the seal and judgment will proc.

Blessings

Contrary to popular belief, Blessing of Kings is not the best buff. It’s Blessing of Salvation. That alone can allow you to live through a not great tank or allows a monstrous DPS to control their threat. Here’s how you should buff people.

Tank: Kings, if you’re specced into it, if only for the boost in stats and stam. If not (as you may not be, given my recommended builds above), give them Blessing of Might or, if they’re squishy, Blessing of Light. This only increases a paladin’s healing done to the target, so if you’re ret or prot in a dungeon and have a priest healing you, don’t buff this. (If you’re in some spec that allows you Blessing of Sanctuary, go for it on the tank.)

Yourself: As a holy paladin, you should give yourself Blessing of Wisdom. You naturally cause less threat than any other healer. If your tank is Not Good with the aggro, give yourself Salvation. However, you have a bubble. You should not need to Salv yourself.

All DPS: Give them Salvation. They may complain. Give them Salvation anyway.

Exception: Hunters! You may instead want to give hunters Blessing of Kings if you have it, or Blessing of Wisdom. Hunters can feign death every 30 seconds to completely eliminate any threat, so they can be in charge of managing their threat on their own. And no, do not give them Blessing of Might, no matter how much they think they want it. It is only good for melee attack power and hunters use ranged attack power. So if they don’t want Salv and you don’t have Kings, give them Wisdom. They do use mana, after all!

How Blessings Work

I think it’s at 60 you get all the Greater Blessings which last 15 minutes. Don’t be cheap. Use the Greater Blessings that use Symbols of Kings. Period. Do it. Not only do you not want to rebuff everyone every five minutes but no one else wants you to pause to rebuff and then drink every five minutes.

Finally, as they worked in more recent expansions, you are buffing an entire CLASS when you use a Greater Blessing. So if you have 3 warriors and one is tanking, buff them all Salv and then hit the warrior tank with the simple Blessing of Light or Blessing of Might. Got three mages in the group? Peachy, throw Greater Blessing of Salvation at them all and be done with one cast.

Utility Blessings

Okay, so, blessings are crazy in Vanilla/Classic. First, and I don’t think I’m wrong about this (but I could be), Blessing of Protection, Blessing of Freedom, etc, ALL OVERWRITE your actual Greater Blessing of whatever. One blessing per paladin per person! So if you have to cast BOP on an overzealous melee, don’t forget to hit them with Salvation again.

That said, so many of these blessings are useful. Do not hesitate to cast Blessing of Protection on someone with a bleed. If it’s a melee, once the bleed drops off, hit them with their normal blessing so they can continue attacking. If a clothie is being attacked, keep BOP on them and re-bless them after, as they don’t do physical damage and aren’t prevented from casting while BOPped.

Blessing of Freedom is great to avoid slows. Don’t hesitate to use it on your tank if they need to get to a mob casting Frostbolt at them.

Blessing of Sacrifice is not as good as it is currently, but hey, it’s some damage mitigation.

Auras

Which aura to use? You have A LOT. You have the elemental resist auras, Frost, Fire, Shadow (though no arcane!), so if you’re expecting damage of any of those schools (Baron Rivendare’s Shadow Aura, Alexei Barov’s Shadow Aura, Lord Incendius’ fire attacks), use that resist aura.

Concentration Aura: if you and/or your casters are being interrupted a lot by damage, use this to prevent you from ever being interrupted. (Pretty sure you start at base 70% chance not to be interrupted in casting when damaged?)

Retribution Aura: mostly used while soloing to inflict more damage on anything hitting you.

Devotion Aura: The go-to standard. Who doesn’t want more armor?

Cleansing

Guess what? You have an overpowered ability. Well, to be fair, you have several. However, one of the best utilities you have is your Cleanse ability. At level 8, you get Purify, allowing you to dispell a disease and a poison. At 42, you get Cleanse which adds a magic effect to that. So with one click, you can remove a poison AND a disease AND a magic effect from someone. And there’s no cooldown. This is incredibly important. The only thing you can’t get rid of is curses. (Bring a mage, bring a druid.)

Cleansing is one of the most important things to do in the game, period. Get all the bad crap off your healing target and then heal them, for the most part.

Lay on Hands

Oh, that’s right, you do have Lay on Hands… except it literally is a 40 minute cooldown (when talented for it! 60 minutes otherwise!) and it literally uses all of your mana, so make sure to have a Major Mana Potion ready and judge wisdom and put up Seal of Wisdom and go hit the boss after you use it.

Turn Undead

You’re a paladin. A champion of the light. As such, you can Turn Undead. Note that this later became Turn Evil and included demons, but this is just for undead and not the Forsaken, either! This can be an effective form of crowd control. That said, just like a warlock’s fear, your dude can go running off pretty far in 20 seconds and may come back… with friends. Still, this is super handy on, say, the two adds in Scholo on Alexei Barov.

Divine Intervention

Known as “DI”, Divine Intervention is one of my favourite spells. It kills you instantly. But you don’t take durability damage. It requires a target, so target someone who can resurrect (priest, other paladin, druid, engineer with jumper cables) and cast it if you’re about to wipe. It removes the other person from combat (so make sure they’re in a good place and won’t pull when they click it off!) when it kills you, so they don’t die and can rez the group. However, druids have a 30m cooldown on their rez and it’s an in-combat resurrection, so they should be your last choice. Always try to DI a priest. This will rarely be an opportunity for you in a dungeon, though.

TL;DR:

  • There is no healing rotation. Flash of Light for small heals, Holy Light for big heals, Holy Shock when moving as it’s your only instant, Divine Favor for forced crits, Lay on Hands once every 40 minutes.
  • Buff wisely and use Salvation for everyone except you and the tank.
  • Judge Light to heal and Judge Wisdom to regen mana. Feel free to run into melee with either of those seals up to gain health and mana yourself as well.
  • Don’t forget to cleanse.
  • You can CC for about 20 seconds with Turn Undead.
  • Use auras as needed and go Devotion Aura if none of the others are required.
  • DI a priest or paladin before a druid. Engineers with jumper cables are also valid options!

 

All righty, I’ll end things on this note, but will come back to talk about raiding. Any questions? Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments below!

Classic Countdown – Tier 0 Loot Drops

Kurn / / classic, classic instances, classic loot, dungeons

Tier 0 armour sets, also known as Dungeon Set 1, are sprinkled all around the high-level dungeons. They are not the best pre-raid loot, certainly not for healers or tanks, but will do fine as all-around sets. Additionally, they’re required to turn in for the Tier 0.5 armour sets, also known as Dungeon Set 2, when those quests come out. Here’s where everything drops, according to my memory and backed up by Wowhead.

All Chests from General Drakkisath in UBRS

All Pants from Baron Rivendare in Strat UD

All Helms from Darkmaster Gandling in Scholomance

All Belts & Bracers are BOE and zone-wide drops (in various dungeons)

All Gloves are BOE

Druid – Wildheart:

  • Shoulders: Gizrul the Slavener in LBRS
  • Gloves: The Unforgiven in Strat UD/Live
  • Boots: Mother Smolderweb in LBRS

Hunter – Beaststalker:

  • Shoulders: Wyrmthalak in LBRS
  • Gloves: Warmaster Voone in LBRS
  • Boots: Nerub’enkan in Strat UD

Mage – Magister’s:

  • Shoulders: Ras Frostwhisper in Scholo
  • Gloves: The Butcher in Scholo
  • Boots: Postmaster in Strat, eventually Hearthsinger Forresten

Paladin – Lightforge:

  • Shoulders: The Beast in UBRS
  • Gloves: Emperor in BRD (eventually changed)
  • Boots: Balnazzar in Strat Live

Priest – Devout:

  • Shoulders: Solokar Flamewreath in UBRS
  • Gloves: The Archivist in Strat Live
  • Boots: Malekki the Pallid in Strat UD

Rogue – Shadowcraft:

  • Shoulders: Cannonmaster Willey in Strat Live
  • Gloves: Shadow Hunter Vosh’gajin in LBRS
  • Boots: Rattlegore in Scholo

Warlock – Dreadmist:

  • Shoulders: Jandice Barov in Scholo
  • Gloves: Lorekeeper Polkelt in Scholo
  • Boots: Baroness Anastari in Strat UD

Warrior – Valor:

  • Shoulders: Rend in UBRS
  • Gloves: Ramstein the Gorger in Strat UD
  • Boots: Kirtonos the Herald in Scholo

I, for one, cannot wait to run through these dungeons again and have them be challenging, where the gear actually means something.

Short post today, but more coming soon. Tell me, what are you excited about for Classic?

6 Levels, 22 Hours, 1 120 Shaman

Kurn / / achievements, dungeons, facepalm, healing, shamans

For the first time ever, my second toon to max level in an expansion is not my paladin. Rather, it’s my shaman.

And, for the first time in several expansions, I actually felt pressured to get to level 120 by a certain point. That point was by June 25th, the day of Patch 8.2.

The reason for both of these is that my shaman is my herbalist and scribe, while Madrana, the paladin, is a jewelcrafter/alchemist.

For whatever reason, it didn’t dawn on me until like, Sunday evening, that I would need to be level 120 to get to Nazjatar, one of the new zones in Battle for Azeroth. And that the profession trainers are in Nazjatar. As such, I “wasted” my weekend getting Kurn through almost all the requirements for Pathfinder Part 1 (just missing some rep) because I figured that flying is The Most Important Thing.

Except it’s not.

I went to bed early (for me) on Sunday and then woke up with a bad sinus headache at like, 3:45am. So naturally, I took headache meds and then logged on to WoW, whereupon I realized that:

a) My shaman was 114

b) My mage (miner) was 113

c) My paladin was 111

I wasn’t going to be able to benefit from any new profession stuff on any toon except Kurn. And, let’s be fair, I did not make millions of gold at the launch of the expansion on Kurn, who is a skinner/leatherworker. I made millions of gold on my shaman, making Darkmoon Cards and decks.

So by 4am on what was technically Monday morning, I queued up to heal dungeons on my shaman, something I haven’t done since probably getting through the last couple of levels in Mists or maybe Warlords of Draenor. Typically, since my shammy was my dual gatherer for quite some time, I just herbed and mined my way to max level most of the time.

Wearing the heirloom helm, cloak, shoulders, chest, pants and the Dread Pirate Ring (god, I love that I once won the fishing competition), I had 50% extra XP. I was also rested. So I went for it.

I hit 116 before going back to bed around 7:30-8am. Then I napped for three hours, then worked ’till 7pm and then cracked my knuckles and was like “LET’S DO THIS”.

My brother logged on to his rogue (114ish?) and we queued up for a couple of dungeons. By and large, these went fine and I got to 117.

However. There was this one dungeon we ran that I feel I must absolutely discuss: Tol Dagor.

Let us be very clear, neither my brother, nor I, know anything about this dungeon and its mechanics. I’d run it maybe twice before, once on the shaman and once on my hunter, maybe. My brother had also seen it once.

The run was off to a not amazing start when our tank ran and pulled a ton of stuff right before the Sand Queen, the first boss. And said in chat, “lust”.

I was like “wtf is lu—-ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, bloodlust. Meaning, heroism.” Because, of course, I’m a shaman and I apparently have that ability. So I blew it and we finished this insanely large pack of mobs and then dude pulls the boss without pause. Great. Anyway, we move on and it’s on the third floor, I want to say, where we run into trouble. We’ve done three bosses so it’s some trash on our way outside to the ramparts where we wipe… and our tank leaves. The group is composed of me healing, a moonkin, and two rogues, my brother and someone else. We got a tank and then proceeded towards the ramparts, but no one knows what they’re doing re: cannons. So we wipe and the tank leaves. Something bugged out and we weren’t in the queue for a new tank. I tried to leave the queue and requeue, like I used to be able to do, but I couldn’t do that, either. It was very weird. So now we’re in a room right before the ramparts part, literally five mobs from the boss, but have no tank. Oh, and the dudes see through stealth, so my brother can’t whatever the AOE stealth thing is to get me through.

TIME TO GET CREATIVE.

I told my brother to just run for the cannon, while I’d run in and drop my Earth Elemental (Josh!) and then we’d just take down the mobs with the help of the cannon. Boom, we succeed. Then the moonkin goes BEAR and we get the last two overseers with the cannon and some great heals. ;)

And then, the last boss, Overseer Korgus.

Everyone except the tank died on this fight. First the other rogue. Then me. Then my brother. Then the moonkin REZZES ME and we kicked some ASS and finally got him down! VICTORY.

It’s these hard-won victories that remind me of Vanilla. Like, in those days, I would have wanted to invite the moonkin to my guild.

Anyway, while we were doing this, our favourite football, Daey, shows up on Discord and is like “haven’t you done island expeditions?” and I’m like “what are island expeditions?”

Insert EZ mode here. Daey takes my brother and I on like, three (?) island expeditions on his demon hunter, and I’m like, midway through 118 by the time my brother goes to bed around 11ish or so. Daey and I kept doing them and next thing you know, I’m 119. And there’s an assault up in Stormsong Valley, so heyyyyyyyyy, yes, I would like another 10% XP, THANK YOU KINDLY.

So I went and did those quests, got my buff and we got Daey done with his demon hunter and pally (almost) for the expeditions. Dude, I am not kidding, it took three island expeditions to get 18 bars of XP with my 60% XP buffs. DISGUSTING AND AMAZING ALL AT ONCE.

And for the last expedition of the night, I queued up with Daey on his pally and on Kurn, since I hadn’t done one on my hunter yet. So Daey got all his expeditions done on the pally, I got one done on Kurn (on Heroic, no less!) and my shaman is level 120 and ready to go herbing in Nazjatar.

More than that, though, my shammy is ready to learn the Inscription trinkets from Nazjatar.

And I am ready to make a crapton of gold.

Hopefully. :)

And that, my friends, is how I got from 114-120 in less than 22 hours (owing to sleep and work) primarily through sick XP boosts and island expeditions!

Give me the Energy achievement
So many expeditions!

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.

More Baby Paladin Adventures!

Kurn / / baby paladin adventures, dungeons, facepalm, gear, healers, lfg, ramblings, tanks

At this point, the “baby” paladin isn’t all that little. Well. He’s still a dwarf, so he’s little in that sense, but he’s, er, level 70.

I told you. I must have a screw loose!

Of note, at level 64, I soloed Banthar, Bach’lor and Gutripper as ret.

At 65, right after Gutripper’s quest dinged me, I soloed Tusker.

/flex

Bach’lor was actually rough due to the knockbacks, but I kited a bit, stunned a bit, used WoG, Flash of Light, Lay on Hands… Win. Tusker was a bit rough too, but I got through that in three tries rather than the SEVEN Bach’lor required.

If I ever see Mana Tombs or Auchenai Crypts again, I will cry and/or scream. I had never been so happy in my LIFE to see Sethekk Halls after a certain point. Hell, I was even HAPPY to get Escape from Durnholde. The first two times, anyways.

As soon as I hit 68, I started selecting Utgarde Keep specifically in the dungeon finder. There was no WAY I was going back to Auchindoun!

And before you knew it, I was 69.

That is where the suck began.

I had so many awesome tanks in the 60s, in BC content. (Lots of crappy ones, too, but mostly the DPS were crappy versus the tanks.) And as soon as I set foot in Utgarde Keep, I started getting idiots. I’ve run UK about 14 times now. I have had two good tanks from pugs. I’ve run it three times with the pally tank alt of a guild rogue, Tikari, which is great, but the realization slowly dawned on me: if I want a good tank, I’m going to have to do it myself.

Trouble was, my ret gear consisted largely of the heirloom Shadowcraft (leather) stuff. Farm heroics for Justice Points? Me? Hah! Why would I do that when I had a bonus 20% XP anyways and would never, ever inflict my fail retness on others?

I had the heirloom valor helm and the heirloom agi cloak, so if I was going to tank, I needed the tanking cloak ($$$), the tanking heirloom chest and tanking heirloom shoulders. I could deal with the helm, even if it’s mostly geared for DPS. At least it’s stam and strength and it’s plate.

Thus began the grind.

I can’t tell you how many heroics I’ve run in the last two days. Probably about 13 or so. I capped out Madrana’s VP via dungeons and then two more because healers had Call to Arms (3 Golemblood Potions and an Obsidian Hatchling for my troubles) and then did several on Kurn. At least four, since I got three Chaos Orbs and lost out on one.

That is more level 85 heroic dungeons in 48 hours than I’ve done since December.

And along the way, some notable groups:

– An all-guild group consisting of four people who were incredibly racist and vulgar, all of whom I reported after the run. They tried to recruit me, since I was healing on Madrana. Despite their douchebagginess, they were spectacular players and heroic SFK went quickly and smoothly.

– By contrast, a heroic SFK I got today had a “tank” who had less health than I did. Now, I know, I’m in some heroic raid gear, but I should almost never have more health than the tank. Really. After he got me to blow Lay on Hands AND Hand of Sacrifice on him IN THE SAME PULL, I looked at his gear, saw it was almost all the ret PVP gear, none of it gemmed or enchanted and he was using a spellpower sword. Vote-kicking him felt good.

Having said that, I think he might have been better than a fail DK tank I had in UK on the baby pally, though. Imagine, if you will, a level 71 worgen death knight “tank” who is:

* dual wielding
* not using Death and Decay or, apparently, spreading any diseases, meaning that any time I dropped even a HOLY SHOCK on him, the other 3-4 mobs would charge me and kill me
* using Rune of Lichbane on his two weapons and only using Death Strike and Heart Strike
* apparently unable to use Dark Command or Death Grip

Vote-kicking him felt less good than the fail pally “tank” from H SFK because this guy wasn’t even 80 ot 85 yet. 71. He clearly didn’t know his class that well, but my feeling bad for him evaporated the third time we wiped because mobs killed me and he didn’t know how to taunt.

– Oh, and there was that dipstick of a druid tank in heroic Lost City. He berated everyone (except me) in the group repeatedly for being “fucking retarded” and “total fail, epic fail!”. They weren’t that bad, they just weren’t putting out much more than 7-8k damage each.

This caused the tank to yell at the ret pally so much that when the tank DEMANDED the ret pally leave… he did. I feel bad for the ret, even if he only did 5k DPS on the first boss.

We had a trash wipe on our way to the third boss and the tank just LOST it on the DK (who had replaced the paladin) and I’d had enough at that point. I initiated a vote kick and the reason I gave? “Jackass.”

It passed in about 2 seconds.

We got a very nice (albeit less geared and less skilled) DK tank to replace the abusive druid tank and finished up the instance without any issues.

– On Kurn, there was a fail H Deadmines run that actually was finished successfully, but in the middle of the nightmares, my bow broke. That’s how bad the run was and how often I died. I actually tried to rez people with Mass Rez and it was still on cooldown. Squishy tank who didn’t know the instance very well and undergeared healer. Like, my resto shaman who is just barely qualified for heroics has about 15k more mana than the resto shaman who was healing us.

– Also on Kurn, a group where the shaman healer didn’t know he could (and should!) keep Flame Shock up on Ozruk in Stonecore. So he kept getting stunned (and I did, too, at the start). I don’t know WHY, but Serpent Sting doesn’t count as damage or whatever and it’s been that way for quite some time. Luckily, I always keep some Sulfuron Slammers on me, which breaks the paralysis.

So yeah, lots of “interesting” runs.

But mission accomplished! The heirloom Might chest and shoulders are mine!

And I’ve tanked!

I actually tanked with just the chest, the tanking heirloom cloak and the valor helm (and my ring, of course) twice and then once I got the shoulders, I couldn’t resist going again.

This is the first time I’ve tanked on a paladin since 4.0 dropped.

I’m still not great, I’ve never been a GREAT paladin tank. I’ve been at least adequate most of the time, though.

I gotta say, it’s a little horrifying to realize you don’t REALLY know what the hell buttons you’re supposed to be pushing. Apart from anything else, I FORGET to Word of Glory myself to keep Holy Shield up and I keep hitting Shield of the Righteous when I only have one charge of Holy Power. I know, I know… fail!

So the baby pally is almost 71 and is tanking ’till 80ish. At that point, time to race change to human and then we’ll see how the tanking situation is. The Wrath content tanks are awful from just about every run I’ve done and I KNOW that content as a tank (thanks to tanking on Madrana in heroics back in the day and thanks to tanking on my druid, also back in the day), so it’s just easier to adjust to the new pally tanking methods and going to town on Wrath instances.

I just hope no one looks at my trinkets. They’re level 60ish blue healing trinkets…

Why Bribery Won't Help — Much

Kurn / / dungeons, facepalm, lfg, ramblings, tanks

Today, Blizzard announced that they would essentially be bribing tanks and healers to queue up for random, heroic dungeons in the 4.1 patch, by rewarding the least-represented role with special rewards, which may include rare mounts and rare non-combat pets.

(I won’t even talk about how one of those rare mounts is the Baron’s mount out of Stratholme. That’s someone else’s QQ fodder, but I can imagine people are going to be pissed if they’ve done 500 runs over the years and not gotten one, but some random tank gets it for running heroic Vortex Pinnacle.)

Tanks and, to a lesser extent, healers, are the least-represented roles when queuing up for a random heroic dungeon at 85. You can tell because DPS has the longest queue (30+ minutes for me on my hunter, typically), healers have a much shorter queue (about 8 minutes) and tanks have a damn near instant queue.

In a dungeon group, you have 20% of the group that heals, 20% of the group that tanks and 60% of the group that’s DPS, right? 1 and 1 and 3 makes 5.

In a 10-man raid group, you generally have 30% of the group that heals, 20% of the group that tanks and 50% of the group that does damage. (This can also be 20/20/60, so your mileage may vary.)

So far, that all seems pretty logical, right? The dungeon group percentages mostly match up to the raid group percentages.

Then we have 25-man raids. In a 25-man raid group, you drop from 20% of the group being comprised of tanks to, in most situations, 2 people tanking. That’s 8%. On some occasions, you get 3 tanks, that’s 12%. It is a lot less than the 20% in your standard random groups. You also generally go up from 20% healers to around 25% healers (6 or 7, up from 5, one per group.).

My hypothesis: Tanks are in high demand in dungeon situations because there are not enough tanks needed in raid situations.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking for 5 tanks, 5 healers and 15 DPS for every encounter. Or even ANY encounter. But my theory is that there are more healers than tanks and more DPS than healers because there are more spots required of DPS and healers than there are of tanks. Yes, having death knights be able to tank since last expansion has added to the number of possible tanks. Yes, more raid groups (thanks to the legitimacy of 10-man raiding in Cataclysm) will mean more geared and skilled tanks who are available.

However, what will bribing tanks (and, to a lesser extent, healers) into solo-queuing do to the random dungeon finder system?

Fox Van Allen tweeted: “you’ll wind up seeing a lot more bad, unready tanks,” although he rather likes the idea apart from that.

I tend to agree — tanks are going to be awful. This isn’t going to convince the good/experienced/geared tanks to go out and start pugging. Since they don’t need much out of heroics (once they farm ZG and ZA with mostly guild groups, at any rate), the only added incentive is this “Call to Arms” reward. Why do your daily random (or seven weekly randoms) with not one but four puggers if you can easily do it with at least a partial guild group?

I don’t think the experienced, good tanks will do this very often.

What I think this will do more of is convince that idiot ret paladin to choose prot as his dual spec and fail miserably. Or convince the moonkin that he doesn’t need ALL feral gear to use in a bear spec; after all, who’s going to actually take the time to inspect the bear?

I did a lot of daily dungeons runs in Wrath on a lot of different toons. I did them on my pally as a tank and a healer, I did them on my druid as a tank and a healer, I did them on my mage and hunter as a DPS and I did them on my priest and shaman as a healer.

Oh, the failure I saw, the lack of knowledge I witnessed, the common sense that I realized was not remotely common at all. I KNOW I’ve blogged about these experiences on this very blog before.

Oh, look. April 9th, 2010, “Yet another fail ‘tank'”.

April 6th, 2010, “OMG.”

There are more, but I digress yet again.

I have no reason to believe that Cataclysm random heroics are any different from Wrath random heroics except that they’re longer and more difficult to begin with than the Wrath ones were. Thus, based on my WotLK dungeon finder experiences, I do not foresee a lot of experienced tanks solo-queuing to get these rewards; I see a lot of DPS posing as tanks who solo-queue for the rewards, without any kind of real understanding of how the encounters work.

That’s going to translate into more groups being formed, yes — but will they be more successful? I’m sure some will be, but I would imagine that the success rate will drop, overall, at least after the initial ZA/ZG farm fest.

I really believe that the key to alleviating the dreaded DPS queue problem is to make tanks more needed at the higher levels of content. More demand for tanks should lead to more tanks being rolled, no? That said, I don’t have a good idea as to how to make tanks more needed without requiring 5 tanks on all 25-man raid encounters. I just don’t think this is the way to go about fixing the queue problem. I am actually afraid to see those DPSers in “tank” specs who will probably spec 41 points in their tanking tree and still miss out on six crucial points…

Time will tell, I suppose!

A Tale of a Heroic PUG

Kurn / / cataclysm, dungeons, healing, lfg, paladins, ramblings

I’ve done quite a few heroics lately, as I expect most of us have. I could tell you about my healing in heroic Halls of Origination, on the Setesh fight that lasted almost 7 minutes because we pulled by mistake when still fighting trash. (Hymn of Hope + even a feral innervate + tranquility + every effing cooldown in the book = win, apparently)

I could tell you about how I “healed” (I use the term loosely, because we died an AWFUL lot) heroic Stonecore yesterday. But I won’t. What I’ll say about that run here is what I tweeted yesterday about Ozruk, which should help out holy paladins everywhere:

I don’t know if this is a hotfix or something, but I found that I got the melee bleed debuff when I’d appropriately judge when he had his Elementium Bulwark up.

When Ozruk says “Break yourselves upon my body. Feel the strength of the earth!” judge at “Feel”. This will give you the bleed debuff for four seconds and you’ll break yourself out of Paralyze.

This was while using Seal of Insight, FYI, and I was at range the whole fight. I knew I wouldn’t survive the shatters if I was in melee range, so I came prepared with Sulfuron Slammers (again, drink them at “Feel”!) which also worked. Bubble works, Every Man works and Hand of Sacrifice (you can cast it on the tank at any point during the “Break yourselves” emote, I believe). But then I noticed I had the bleed debuff and realized it was my judgement that had caused it. So go forth, paladins, and heal Ozruk knowing you can get out of Paralyze very easily with just a bit of timing. :)

Having said all that, I will not regale you with my tales of heroic SFK (two Godfrey kills, no legs yet) or heroic Deadmines (Ripsnarl isn’t really that bad, though).

What I will say is that I did most of H Deadmines in a guild run yesterday as my holy pally and then swapped out to my hunter for the last boss (allowing one of our healers to actually heal the last fight instead of OS DPS) so I could snag the Chaos Orb for the crafting of a guildie’s gear.

I probably should have just stayed in on the paladin because then I would have gotten another 100+ Justice Points. And then would have had enough for my helm, the Crown of the Blazing Sun.

I logged back on to Madrana to see… 2143. 57 points shy of my damn helm.

Crap.

ALL of my heroic runs to date have been with the guild. I don’t know if it’s because I’m the GM or because I’m a healer or because my hunter can actually CC or what, but I’ve never had an issue finding a group in-guild. This is opposed to most of my guildies who complain constantly about the fail pugs/dungeon finder groups they’re in.

So I decided I’d go try a heroic random, all by myself.

Blackrock Caverns. Which I haven’t done on heroic.

Thankfully, at least to my eyes, I get a group of four people all from the same guild on the Akama server. I figure this should be less painful than most, even if the tank hasn’t done this on heroic before.

They’re really good at pulling the trash around the first boss, there’s great use of CC (sheep and sap and repentence) and things are going great.

We pull the first boss properly, after clearing most of the trash and the first thing I realize is the boss occasionally puts on a 25% reduced healing debuff on the tank. Peachy.

Then I realize that Quake spawns adds. Peachy.

All of this is handled okay, we kill the adds easily and then get chained.

We break the chains. I pop Holy Radiance to GTFO… and three people, including the tank, die to the thing the boss casts after he chains you. Sigh.

So I’m like “gotta run out of that, guys. :)” and the tank was like “lol I usually stay in on regular guess I can’t here!” I’m fine with that, no worries.

We go back in and take down the boss properly, now that we’re all aware that there are these crazy-ass adds and that we have to run out, etc. Goes fine.

Everything goes beautifully until Corla, the second boss.

Now, on beta, she had three adds. The way we did it on beta was have people rotating in two beams to prevent those zealots from evolving and just let one of them evolve at a time. But the version I tested didn’t have Corla fearing, nor did things hit quite as hard as they were hitting on live.

The Evolved Twilight Zealots, if you were unaware, have an ability called Gravity Strike and, in conjunction with Grievous Whirl and Shadow Strike, all of this will totally destroy the tank. It was actually a bit hairy to heal them separately in the trash leading up to Corla. So my group was basically planning to ignore the beams, evolve all three adds and I’m like, “I can’t heal that.”

“I’ll interrupt the strike,” said the rogue.

“That’s not the issue,” I said and linked them Gravity Strike.

“oh wow that sucks,” one of them says.

So I tell them I’m going to handle the stacks on the right-most add, which I marked with a circle. The mage says he’ll take the left-most add. The ret pally says he’ll do the middle one.

About thirty seconds into the encounter, the mage’s target evolves.

We wipe, despite a heroic effort by yours truly. The tank also popped his CDs appropriately, using Shield Wall and Last Stand. But the damage was just overwhelming.

Mage apologizes, we give it another shot.

This time, the mage himself evolves. He didn’t watch his debuff and got stacked to 100.

Wipe.

Mage apologizes again. They now inform me that they’re all on their vent and that they’ve got it all worked out.

So we go again. This time, the ret paladin’s target evolves. Apparently, there had been some confusion and he thought the rogue was going to get that target.

Apologies once more.

At this point, I’m like… I have my Justice Points. I literally only came in with the hopes of doing one boss to get the points that I need.

Then they suggest they let the zealots evolve in a controlled fashion. Bear in mind that I’ve had ZERO issues controlling my stacks and the stacks of my zealot in these three attempts, even when things went to hell.

Based on my mana and such on the previous attempts, I reiterate that there is no way I can heal through a zealot up along with the boss at this point, but that if they want to boot me and replace me with another healer, I’d completely understand, since it’s a guild run, basically.

They were like “no, no, that’s okay,” so we tried it again. And promptly died when the mage transformed because he, again, wasn’t watching his debuff and stepped in too soon, refreshing his stacks.

So at this point, it was clear to me that we weren’t going to get the encounter down. I had wiped five times with these people. Throughout it all, I’d been patient and calm. I’d been clear about how to go about doing the encounter. I had used buff food after every wipe.

On the run back to the instance, I basically said, “I think I’m going to take off, guys. Thanks for the run and I wish you the best of luck with the rest of the instance. Take care.”

And I dropped group, grabbed my body, then ran out, got my new helm and that’s all she wrote.

I feel badly about leaving. I feel badly about not being able to heal through an evolved zealot. But I’d gotten what I wanted and I gave it a really good try, educating the group about the evolved zealot’s abilities, giving them the opportunity to replace me to try their strat and basically being very patient with them.

I still feel badly, though. Shouldn’t I be able to heal through an evolved zealot? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, the issue isn’t that I can’t heal through one for 30 seconds, but I can’t continually heal through one up during the entire encounter. 85k mana goes FAST if you’re casting Divine Light and the occasional Flash of Light all the while praying Eternal Glory procs more often. Even with my Big Angry Man out (Guardian of Ancient Kings), I can’t maintain that kind of healing. Not even with a variety of both my cooldowns and the tank’s.

My paladin was always my alt. I’d be pulled into raids if we needed healers, back in Vanilla, but my main was always Kurn. As such, since then, I’ve always been lacking a bit of confidence. “This is my alt,” I used to think, “I have no business healing Molten Core!!”

Obviously, healing through Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King has alleviated the confidence problem. I had no problems being the strongest single-target healer in WotLK ICC25HMs. I had no problems shouldering the responsibility of healing two tanks at once or being the primary reason Valithria Dreamwalker got healed to full.

When I came back to Eldre’Thalas, I knew I was one of the most geared and experienced people in Apotheosis and so I was fine with taking a lot of responsibility on myself in our little excursions to ICC.

So it’s a little humbling to sit there in a heroic 5-man and be like “Yeah, I can’t heal through that.”

Should I be able to? I mean, assuming that the fears and Shadow Strikes are interrupted properly, assuming good cooldown usage by the tank, should I be able to heal through the Corla encounter with a single evolved zealot up at all times? If so, why can’t I? Is it gear? Spell selection? Oh, God, is it really because I’m just not good enough of a healer?

One half-hour spent working on Corla and all my WotLK confidence has flown out the window.

MMOMeltingPot linked to a great post about how healers have no instant gratification from casting a heal and seeing it actually DO something. The poster says “Random dungeons are a front for blamestorms and negativity that make folks discontent, and it’s a bit worse than I expected, but that is just one element in the shitstorm.”

While I wasn’t blamed by my group (they seemed to mostly understand that Gravity Strike is a Bad Thing), I came away from my pug feeling very negative and discontent and, worse, blaming myself. Questioning myself.

So I ask you, my fellow paladins, my fellow healers, my fellow dungeon-runners…

How have YOU done the heroic Corla encounter in Blackrock Caverns? And what kind of a healer did you have?