Category: gear

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. :)

Yet another fail "tank".

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, general, lfg, paladins, ramblings, tanks

My brother and I queued for the heroic random together, today. I was on my paladin. He was on his hunter. I was healing. He was DPSing.

We get a group, zone into Halls of Stone and I see the tank is a paladin who immediately starts buffing kings. Okay, I buff wisdom and might, even though I have crap might. The tank gives us Sanctuary. I give us kings. It’s all good.

’till the second pull.

The tank takes a crapton of damage.

Like, a CRAPTON.

I’m actually having to use Holy Light.

In general, I’m okay with this. He “only” has 36k health, buffed. That’s fine. He’s using the badge shield. That’s fine. I figure that he’s undergeared and I didn’t feel like taking the deserter debuff. He was prot, at least, using Sanctuary, had Righteous Fury up. It appeared like he was putting in the effort.

My brother says to me, over vent, after a couple more pulls “MAN, this tank sucks! How can he suck so bad?”

“Well, he’s got to be a new tank. Look at his health.”

“He’s got a 5400 gear score.”

“What? Not possible.” I don’t have the GS mod enabled on my paladin (too much lag with it on) so I figured my brother was looking at the DK.

“I’m telling you, 5400 GS.”

“On the TANK? The paladin? The paladin who’s not me?”

“Yes. The tank. The paladin.”

“Not poss…i…ble. Hang on.”

I inspect him.

Sure enough, he’s got good gear. Great gear. But it’s ret gear and arena gear. He has precisely two pieces of gear on him with defense/parry/dodge/block and those are his weapons; the tanking axe out of H HoR and the badge tanking shield.

“Why are you wearing ret gear and arena gear?” I ask in party, as I spam the paladin with Holy Light against one of the big guys.

“Who me?” asks the DK.

“No. The tank.”

“Oh,” says the DK.

“its all i have rite now” says the paladin.

“Then you shouldn’t queue up as a tank,” I reply. Then my brother and I left the group in the middle of the pull.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done it, but I have HAD it with idiots who don’t even make the slightest effort to be a decent tank. Had it! I am DONE with it. This guy, upon examining his armory, was specced thusly: 0/71/0. I wasn’t even aware that there WERE that many points you could spend in the prot paladin tree. His glyphs were crap. His spec is obviously crap (although he got all the good prot talents, he got nothing from ret to help with avoidance, like Parry, nor did he get Seal of Command to help with threat) and his gear was almost entirely DPS gear.

I shouldn’t have left. He was immune to critical strikes by virtue of resilience alone. And I had figured that would probably be the case. And I still left.

Why did I leave? I could have kept him up. Could have been a quick run.

I left because I don’t want to encourage people who don’t put any effort into their roles. I am exceedingly careful to NOT be a drag on any group I’m in, regardless of the role. Kurn was hit-capped before setting foot into a raid. Madrana upgraded her gear ASAP and was still holding on to some Tier 6/BT/Hyjal stuff until better stuff dropped. Lotana’s hit-capped. Katarah can heal just fine with her 4.8k GS and can even pull average DPS when she needs to as enhancement. Cayllan tanks and heals just fine, though it took a little practice and some extra gear at first (when I could NOT keep aggro from a geared, whirlwinding warrior or divine storming ret pally).

To top all that off, I use consumables to bump up my contribution to the group. Tanking on either Madrana or Cayllan? Yeah, I’ll be using Mighty Fortitude and Guru’s Elixirs, plus appropriate buff food (40 agi for the bear, 40 hit for the paladin whose hit rating is somewhat lacking). DPSing on Kurn? Agi/Guru and Mighty Thoughts Elixirs, plus agi food. DPSing on Lotana? Spellpower and Mighty Thoughts Elixirs, plus spellpower food. Healing on Cayllan? Spirit and spellpower elixirs, plus spellpower food. Healing on Madrana? At least a Guru’s Elixir or my Flask of the North, even for random dungeons.

Basically, I work at making sure I’m doing my best, regardless of the group into which I’m placed.

Other people just don’t do that.

And yet, I’m forced to play with them if I want to jump through the hoops Blizzard has so carefully designed for us. I run my daily on Madrana every day. I’ve missed THREE days, total, since the Dungeon Finder came out and we started getting Emblems of Frost for doing the first random dungeon of the day. That is a LOT of pugging.

I don’t expect people to do as much work on their toons as I do. I don’t expect others to be as considerate of the group as I usually tend to be. But I do expect others to make a half-decent effort. 0/71/0 is not a good tanking spec. Two pieces of gear with defense on it is not good tanking gear. That isn’t even putting in the effort to look up a halfway decent spec, you know?

What I expect of people is this:

– appropriate gear for the instance level. That means a tank who is crit immune via 535+ defense or Survival of the Fittest, NOT via 100% resilience.

– appropriate spec(s) for the role(s) they have selected. That means one that, even if slightly unorthodox, helps you do your job to the best of your ability. And it means that you tank in your tank spec, heal in your heal spec and DPS in your DPS spec. Tanking in a DPS spec, healing in a DPS spec and DPSing in a tank or healing spec will make me want to throttle you.

Even on my priest, who is now 50, I have not signed up as “damage” for any dungeon thus far because I am not shadow! I do not have a dual spec on that toon and am 41 points into disc. Thus, I do not queue as shadow!

Similarly, neither of my druid’s specs are damage specs, thus I never queue up as DPS.

Hell, same for Madrana, she NEVER queues as DPS because she doesn’t have the appropriate spec OR gear.

Is it really too difficult to ask people to put in the base amount of effort? Am I really expecting too much from people who play this game? I’m not asking for tanks with 60k health to heal through my random dungeons every day. I’m asking for a tank who knows the basics of tanking.

It makes me want to get on the druid and tank the living crap out of a bunch of heroics tonight just so that people don’t lose hope in the myth of “good tanks”.

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.

Of raiding, healing and gear.

Kurn / / gear, general, healers, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

So my RL friend, the resto druid who’s the healing lead in the guild, is going out of town for a couple of days. She’s actually leaving her house in 45 minutes to head out, so rather than get 2 hours of sleep after our raid, she skipped tonight’s raid and slept.

She asked me if I could do the healing assignments for tonight and Monday night.

We were on Lich King. Seemed pretty simple — I was going to assign healing for the same fight and adjust as needed, right? Right.

I show up to the raid early, have organized myself with NOTES about LK healing… and then I’m told we’re resetting ICC.

I think my private reaction was “What the hell are they ON?! They can’t reset the instance in the middle of the week!”

Apparently, however, they can. I have no idea how this was accomplished. On Monday, we worked on Arthas. On Wednesday, when we returned, there was no prompt to save us to ICC — and I know I didn’t extend my own ID — and yet, there was no trash. The Lich King was up.

So Wednesday and Thursday, we worked on LK.

Tonight, our RL announces we’re ending the lockout extension and then we all get a fresh ICC.

The ONLY thing I can figure is that because we didn’t kill anything new (ie: Arthas) we didn’t get saved to the new ID, so we were able to drop the extension and zone in to a new ICC instance. Because the people in the raid were the same — it’s not like the RL was like “okay, go in without me” or anything.

So that confused me.

Then he announced that we were going to kill 10 bosses tonight and that we’d do Sindragosa and LK Monday. So focus.

Now, I had previously prepared for LICH KING HEALING. We have new healers in the guild, with whom I’m not familiar, and I’m not even up to date on all the existing fights. (I have zero idea as to what happens on Blood Prince Council, for example. I just heal.)

I did healing through all 10 bosses, though, with just one miscommunication on Dreamwalker (leading to a wipe) and a wipe on Blood Queen due to three disconnects.

Lord, I don’t miss it. But the healers did pretty well, even the new pally app (whose spec when he apped gave me reason to be afraid, but he seems okay on the surface).

So yeah, we blew through 10 bosses with 2 wipes in 3 hours.

And because apparently no other paladins, priests or warlocks at the Member level wanted their Marks of Sanctification… I wound up getting two. At the very least, I can use them for a +spellpower set on Dreamwalker until we get heroic tokens, and it might even get me to use some of my 329 Emblems of Frost. I’m reluctant to say goodbye to some of my 258 TOGC gear, but maybe I’ll have to. We’ll see. I’m currently elbow-deep in stats and Rawr and have a headache. :P

Hilariously enough, our “favourite” rogueadin spent Emblems of Frost to examine how crappy our four-piece bonus is. And, shocker, I don’t disagree with him; it sucks. I do think that the 277 pieces will outstrip some of my gear, though, so I’ll want to ensure I’ve got SOME pieces that will be upgradable. Probably, anyways. Even if it’s just as an intermediary step between clearing regular ICC and then moving forward to get the ACTUAL heroic gear I want.

I’m also working on my fourth Holy How-To post, talking about healing meters and HPS and how much I hate numbers and, more importantly, WHY I hate numbers. That should be up this week sometime. And there are GRAPHICS!!!! I’m excited. Are you excited?! Haha! :)

Attention "tanks" of the Bloodlust Battlegroup

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, lfg, ramblings, tanks

To all warriors, death knights and paladins of the Bloodlust battlegroup… please, do not opt to “tank” in a random heroic if you do not have at least 535 defense rating.

To all druids of the Bloodlust battlegroup… please, do not opt to “tank” in a random heroic if you do not have 3/3 Survival of the Fittest.

I know that I’m not a particularly strong healer on my druid. I just dinged 80. I’m not trying to do Halls of Reflection or anything. But I do know that I can bloody well keep up tanks on trash in heroic Old Kingdom. Tanks who ARE immune to critical strikes by mobs.

So if you don’t have 535 defense, or Survival of the Fittest, GET THE HELL OUT OF MY RANDOM GROUPS, dumbasses.

I had it coming.

Kurn / / dungeons, gear, ramblings

It’s been a weird few days of heroics and randoms and such, but after a couple randoms/regular dungeons today, I hit 80 on my druid and my brother hit 78.

After I hit 80, I trained (GOOD GOD, 19g a spell?!) and organized some of my gear, bought some new relics to replace the pieces of crap I had. The 2 Emblems of Triumph per daily random is really very nice. I had 50 badges to spend and spent 40 of them on my new relics.

So then, I thought I should probably run something, get some quick badges to help get my gear up to par. Naturally, I would be laughed out of the instance if I tried to tank with my awesome 23k health or whatever, so I figured I’d heal. After all, as long as I was in tree form and no one died, they wouldn’t really think to inspect me, right? Right.

But which instance? I looked at the ones that were already unlocked for me and when I saw Halls of Lightning, I elected to not choose a random instance.

So I picked The Nexus. I needed a new mace anyways, plus it’s five badges, so hey, what could go wrong?

14 minutes after zoning in, I’d lost just one person (a DPS warrior who was standing next to the first mini-boss on a whirlwind) and we were on Keri.

And she dropped it. That’s right. On my very first trip to The Nexus, she dropped the War Mace of Unrequited Love. This is unheard of. Madrana ran The Nexus about 9 times before it dropped — easily. Katarah ran it a bunch, too. So for it to drop for me on the very first run?

I totally had it coming. Keristrasza OWED me that much.

Now, if only all of my druid’s drops would be that easy…

How I Got 19 Emblems of Triumph in One Night

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, healing, ramblings, tanks

Due to the fact that I’ve been tanking so much lately, I’ve been working on my prot gear. Up ’till now, I’ve been using my Conqueror’s Aegis Breastplate. I’ve managed to upgrade my neck, my bracers and my legs for free out of Trial of the Crusader (25m regular) because ilvl 245 loot no longer costs us DKP and we’ve cleared it so often that most people don’t want any more tank gear. (WTB Satrina’s Impeding Scarab, but that’s a whole other story.)

So tonight, we do heroic Faction Champs and heroic Twins and I manage to win the roll on the Trophy of the Crusade off one of them. I was all excited that I’d finally get to upgrade my chestpiece (which is out of Ulduar… ugh.) to another ilvl 245 piece.

And then I realized I only had 56 Emblems of Triumph vs. the 75 I needed to turn in with my trophy for Turalyon’s Breastplate of Triumph. Since we finished the raid early, I decided I’d go for it. 19 badges isn’t that hard to get, not these days. Each random heroic you do (after the first, which I’d already done) gives you two extra badges. So if the average dungeon had 3 bosses, I’d only need to do 4 or so to ensure I’d get all 19 that I needed.

To try to make sure it was a relatively easy night, I decided not to queue as a tank. I just wanted to heal, get my chestpiece and go to bed.

First up, Utgarde Pinnacle. Great run. Fail of a hunter, though, name of Glyhm. Let us not only be in awe of his fail gear that is poorly gemmed and usually not enchanted, which includes Icy Scale Chestguard (!), nor should we only be in awe of his slightly strange spec and choice of professions (and the fact that one is nowhere near max level), but we should just sort of sit there in disbelief at this little exchange:

huntard1

I probably should have gone to bed after this run, because it was definitely an indication of how things were going to go. No one said anything in party chat after that, that’s how agog we all were.

Anyways, after that… no, wait, I’m sorry. I have to address the huntard.

Aspect of the Viper definitely drops your DPS low. It’s a short-term thing you use for about 20-25 seconds at a time to fill up your mana bar when it’s low. To allow you to regen mana without dropping your DPS would make you OP. Mages have Evocation, which reduces their DPS to 0 while they channel it. Warlocks lifetap, during which they only inflict damage on themselves, not the target. And rogues don’t have mana, so there you go, the 3 mana-using pure DPS classes all have ways of regaining mana that affects their DPS.

Funny how balanced that is, isn’t it? :P

Anyways, despite the fail hunter (who makes me glad I don’t run recount on Madrana, because I think I would have cried if I’d looked at the DPS meters), we finished Utgarde Pinnacle in 22 minutes. Six badges down, 13 to go, right?

On to Forge of Souls! I basically don’t have any issues with this group. It was probably the best group of the night and I’d essentially forgotten about it entirely because nothing bad happened. Another 4 badges down, 9 to go.

And then it was time for Ahn Kahet: The Old Kingdom.

Problem #1: The mage was a cheap bastard. No table, no Arcane Brilliance (just Arcane Intellect). Given that most runs go less than a half hour and are usually quick, I can forgive them this. But it still annoyed me.

Problem #2: The mage either had no idea how to decurse or had no idea where their decurse button was. They claimed to be on someone else’s computer, so maybe the latter is the reason that I NEVER GOT CURSE OF TONGUES REMOVED FROM ME, which led to my death and the death of the warlock shortly after the second boss.

Problem #3: The warlock never bothered to soulstone me (or anyone) or put down a soulwell.

Problem #4: It appeared that the rogue had never before done the instance. Which… is fine. Honestly, I’m okay with that. The problem I have is when people don’t ask. Never been to OK before? Fine. Tell me. Then I can tell you how not to die when the last dude casts insanity, so that you’re not going “omg wtf how come u were all mced?!?!”

Despite a near-wipe on the last guy (who bugged out and reset, so we got a second chance — and the rogue died AGAIN), we got through the instance. We didn’t do the heroic-only boss, so only 4 bosses and 2 extra emblems. Six emblems down, two more to go!

Whew.

So I queue up again, as a healer.

And then I see the Halls of Reflection loading screen. I sigh, wondering if I should just drop group and go to bed, but… I’m just two. freaking. emblems. from my shiny new chest. So I cross my fingers and brace myself for doing the dumbass LoS strat (I find that as the tank, you have much more pull in the decision-making process than as a healer. :P) and probably wiping a few times.

I zone in and I look around for the tank. Warrior has 27k health. Okay, not him. There’s a hunter, so that’s not the tank. A mage, nope, not the tank. The DK has 29k health. And I know I didn’t queue up as a tank. So yeah, the DK is going to try to tank Heroic HoR with 29k health — which includes kings.

We gave it two tries and then basically asked him to leave. Which he did. And he’d been unsure in the beginning anyways. I told him to keep tanking and working on his gear and thanks for trying, hoping against hope that good karma would bring me a good tank.

After a few minutes of waiting for a new tank in the queue, I was like, well, fuck. I can tank it if I need to.

So I take us out of the queue, sign up as tank and healer, then requeue.

30 seconds later, we have a priest healer. Sweet, let’s do eeeeet.

So I tank in the middle, tell them to run to me if they have aggro, if we can get the hunter to freeze something and, if the priest has a second, to shack something, that would be amazing, but not to worry if not.

We coast through the first waves. It was beautiful. I was totally in the tanking zone, I was holding aggro, things were shackled and trapped, it was AWESOME! We kill the first boss and get all the way up to the second to last wave and then it falls apart. We lose the hunter.

That’s okay, one more wave.

We lose the mage.

That’s okay, we have what, two mobs up and the boss is coming, but we can TOTALLY do this. I have 43k health and a ton of cooldowns!

The warrior dies as the Spectral Footman who came into the boss fight with us dies. That leaves the Tortured Rifleman. I get the priest to shackle and we embark upon a long, arduous fight that ends up with her death and my continuing to wear the boss down for another 80 seconds or so. I was judging light, I was using my sacred shield, Divine Plea was active and at about 12k health, I used Lay on Hands. Still going! From 43k all the way down to about 6k, whereupon Ardent Defender finally freaking procs. And then once that was done, I still had a healthstone (leftover from my raid, not from the fail warlock who was in OK with me), so I used that… and then I died.

Way impressive, no? I figured we’d be just fine. But no, the priest drops group. SIGH.

So we go for another healer, and a druid shows up. The druid immediately starts asking why we’re not doing the LOS strat. >< And then, despite not having aggro (hi, I have Grid, don’t you lie to me, you leafy bastard), proceeds not to heal me as much as he probably should have been healing me, doesn’t remove even ONE poison and then I die and we wipe.

We run back. Again. And now the mage has decided she’s had enough. So we get a warlock. Who, of course, doesn’t SS the healer or provide a soulwell.

Once again, the idiot druid fails. I’m sorry, when I’ve taunted off of you and you no longer have aggro on any of the mobs AND I’ve BOPped you just to make absolutely certain half the mobs who are up aren’t going to touch you, you cannot blame your death FROM THE POISONS THE ROGUE STACKED ON YOU, on me. Sorry. Especially when you can cleanse poison off yourself. Seriously.

So the druid does just that, blames me for his death, then says this strat doesn’t work, and leaves the group.

So I left, too. I got up, got ready for bed, then sat back down and queued myself up just as a healer for another random heroic, because really, I was just one emblem short of my damn chest.

And there’s the bloody Halls of Reflection loading screen again. I could have screamed.

The group looks more competant than the others. There’s a DK, a ret pally, a warlock and a warrior tank who has 39k with kings. Cool.

LoS strat? Sigh, yes, LoS strat.

Two wipes, due to the LoS strat, since the tank (and others) kept creeping around the corner out of MY line of sight, but anyways. We finally got Falric down and wiped on the waves after him. I could have left. I had my stupid badge. But the four of them were all from a guild on Caelestrasz and seemed at least somewhat competant, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.

After another wipe on the trash pre-Marwyn, I said that this was my last attempt and that we should make it a good one. The warlock has no shards, so no SS, no HS. /facepalm.

We start in on the trash and even though I have to use Holy Wrath on cooldown to stun things and use Divine Shield/Divine Sacrifice to keep us alive, we made it through to the boss. The warlock even ninja soulstoned me as soon as he had the shards, in the middle of waves. Of course, he then took 4 ticks from every Well of Corruption that spawned on him, but he lived and we lived, and hey, let’s go escape the Lich King!

We wiped on the second-to-last wall because they were killing things randomly and there was still a witch doctor up that the Lich King caught up to and they couldn’t kill before he was on us, because he was a caster. ><

So I advise them to focus the witch doctors and to pop cooldowns on the second wave of the last wall. We escape the third wall easily and are nearly overrun at the last wall, but we all pop cooldowns and escaped. True, we lost the warlock, but he pulled aggro on an abom who cleaved him, so there wasn’t a lot we could do.

Whew.

So all that said and done, I went and got my chestpiece, got +10 stats to it, put in a Solid Dragon’s Eye for 51 stam and a Regal Dreadstone for 10 dodge/15 stam (and to activate my meta). With an elixir of mighty fortitude, a guru’s elixir and a 40 stam food buff and Blessing of Sanctuary, I now hit 40k health, self-buffed.

I was also told, by various groups, that I was an excellent healer (the OK group and the last HoR group, in particular) and that I was a great tank (the HoR group that saw me solo Marwyn for over a minute).  I don’t really believe the great tank business, since I think pally tanks are very overpowered at the moment and it’s all about knowing when to hit your cooldowns, but it’s nice to hear praise about my healing. I take pride in healing and really do consider it my main job in this game. If I wasn’t at least somewhat good at it, I don’t think I’d be doing it at all. Hell, if I weren’t good at healing, I might still be DPSing. Which I’m no longer as good at as I used to be — which is one reason I keep healing.

Anyways, I’m certainly not going to be tanking a lot more than heroics for the foreseeable future, but I think I’m going to keep tanking a bunch of those (at least one a day) to help me get accustomed to it. I still don’t love it or anything, but I do enjoy learning about various aspects of the game and pally tanking is so easy compared to what I imagine warrior or DK tanking is, that I’m just going to enjoy this brief period of time where I’m not loathing tanking.

It’s so hard to imagine that, once upon a time, back in Apotheosis, I OTed Hydross’ adds and Tidewalker’s murlocs… Thank God we got a real OT for those fights after just a week or so of my standing in for them. :P

10-mans = Failure

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

I really do recognize that Blizzard wants to make WoW raids more accessible. That’s why we’ve seen raids go from 40-man to 25-man and 20-man to 10-man.

But I still think that 10-mans are the biggest headache to manage for guild leaders. When I was a GM, I was like, “You know what? Fuck 10-mans. Run them, don’t run them, I don’t care.”

They’re filled with drama. You organize them in-guild, officially, and people invariably end up getting saved to the wrong run because some people didn’t show. (See: Karazhan.) You let people run them freely and people invariably get hurt feelings because they don’t get to go “with the cool kids”. (See: Zul’Aman.) You encourage them to run on their own with pugs and people invariably don’t go because they don’t feel like pugging raid content and wiping.

I honestly believe that the introduction of 10-man raid content, starting with Karazhan, but becoming more pronounced with Zul’Aman and developing into the headache we now have with Wrath content, has thrown a wrench into the works of any decent raiding guild.

My personal stance on 10s is “fuck that shit”. I view 10s to be inferior in terms of time + energy = reward than 25-mans. Obviously, I’m right in the sense that right now, ilvl 251 stuff drops out of ICC10 and ilvl 264 stuff drops out of ICC25. Stuff that I have that isn’t tier is basically 258 at this point. Almost everything I have is 245 or 258. ICC10 is a marginal upgrade for me from TOC 25 and is probably a downgrade if the piece is from TOGC 25.

But the problem right now is that you have to do 10s for two reasons. One is rep and the other is Emblems of Frost.

Blizzard has come up with this insane scheme to force you to get 400+ Emblems of Frost in order to get your tier gear. You MUST buy the Emblem of Frost version of your gear (ilvl 251) in order to use the tokens that drop in ICC25, to upgrade your tier to ilvl 264.

Thus, because I do want to get the exalted Ashen Verdict ring and because I do want to wear my tier gear, I need to do the following every week:

– ICC10 (not organized formally by my guild)

– ICC25 (regular raid)

– Random Heroic Daily x7

– Random Weekly Raid x1

That gives me 35 Emblems of Frost a week. I currently have 72 and I should have 76 (I missed 2 days of dailies).

This week, my guild is attempting to set up 10s on the forums. So far as I can see, utter failure. I signed up before the other regular holy paladin did and I am, thus far, not on the invite list. Healer 1: resto druid, Healer 2: shadow priest, Healer 3: other holy pally.

WTF is that all about? If you’re going to post and ask for people for your run, you should take those who post first. If you want to set up a super-secret, ultra-uber group, then use the guild calendar or something else so that you can be assured of the people you need.

I don’t care about going with the cool kids or not and I really hate 10-man content with a fiery passion. So I’ll make my own arrangements or whatever and if I miss out on 8 badges and a chunk of rep this week, so be it. But this is indicative of a serious problem in WoW, I think. Any time you split up a raid group that is generally larger (25 in this case) and force them to do the same content on a slightly less difficult scale, you’re going to end up with people who either miss out due to scheduling issues, have hurt feelings because they’re not as good as those organizing the run or, like me, figure that it’s just not worth the headaches to get 8 emblems a week.

This is the first time I’ve aggressively pursued 10-man content because I recognize I need the badges and rep. And into the third reset of ICC, I’m already disillusioned and am counting down the days ’till I can reform my old guild. :P

Note: Should this nonsense continue into Cataclysm, where we need badges for tier, etc, I am definitely organizing groups for the guild as a whole.

Short form of above: Fuck 10-mans.

Thoughts about healing in TOGC25 & gear stuff.

Kurn / / gear, healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

So, I have 5/5 T9 and I have the heroic Breastplate of the Frozen Lake and the heroic Legplates of Failing Light. Breaking my 4pc T9 set bonus to equip both of these pieces kind of makes me sad. I’m a tank healer — I usually heal the MT or OT and beacon the other. Sacred Shield is usually up on both, as I usually heal with another holy paladin. So when we have a situation where I can spare the second or so to refresh Flash of Light on my non-primary target, I do so. Having a Flash of Light hot ticking for over 1000, every second, for 12 seconds, on big-damage fights like Heroic Twins is amazingly effective. This “heal over time” business is actually freaking awesome. And to have the hot going on 2 targets at once? Sweet deal.

But the heroic chest and pants are still better items than their 245 ilvl tier counterparts. And I get up to 710 haste (a bit overkill, but am I really complaining? No.), more intellect (due to the itemization and one extra gem socket on each item, meaning +40 intellect from gems alone)…

So while, logically, I know that the non-set pieces are *better*, I miss my ultra-uber hots.

I decided to try out which benefits me (and the raid) more on Heroic Anub’arak attempts.

For about 7-8 attempts, I wore 3/5 T9 and for the last 7-8 attempts of that night, I wore 4/5 T9.

Altogether, the results are basically the same: people need to stop sniping my goddamn heals. ;)

I think that in certain situations, such as the way we do Twins, it would be more beneficial to the raid if I bomb Holy Light as much as possible and ignore the FoL hot on the second tank, because the Glyph of Holy Light really helps out with healing the entire raid.

But I think that, until our one Anub OT gets to the point of being unhittable, taking the time to hot him up will be more beneficial in keeping him up than helping out on the raid with HL bombs. The guy is taking insane damage because he’s just not geared properly:

[01:01:40.338] Nerubian Burrower hits Warrior Dodge
[01:01:40.338] Nerubian Burrower hits Warrior 11696
[01:01:40.338] Nerubian Burrower hits Warrior 11776
[01:01:40.550] Nerubian Burrower hits Warrior Dodge
[01:01:40.550] Nerubian Burrower hits Warrior Miss
[01:01:40.550] Nerubian Burrower hits Warrior 1962 (B: 4019)

Yeah, 24,000 or so damage in .212 seconds.

Tonight, we start TOC fresh again. And maybe THIS will be the week the warrior gets the bracers off Maexxna and the belt off of Razorscale to help him with his avoidance set. ><