Category: healing

Hard modes? More like Not Facerollingly Easy Anymore Modes.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

So we went into ICC tonight and attempted five different hard mode fights.

1) Lord Marrowgar. Coldflame lasts longer, bone spikes during bonestorm… I got impaled by a spike during a bonestorm AND Marrowgar came whirling my way and I died. So did another healer. And another healer had already died.

But then Marrowgar died, so all was well!

Heroic modes Attempted/Succeeded: 1/1

2) Gunship Battle. Rockets knock you back 7 yards and hit for more damage. Mages have more health. The Horde ship (or Alliance, if you’re Horde) has more health.

Okay, this was still facerollingly easy.

Heroic modes Attempted/Succeeded: 2/2

3) Deathbringer Saurfang. Has more health, likely to get more Marks of the Fallen Champion. Adds are super fast and annoying and debuff the whole raid to 20% movement speed. Will one-shot anything but a tank.

Ow, my face. We tried three times and got up to 5 Marks of the Fallen Champion and were completely unprepared for the amount of raid damage taken and the amount of blood power he generates.

Then we switched it back to normal and killed his ass.

Heroic modes Attempted/Succeeded: 2/3

4) Rotface. The addition of Vile Gas complicates things, requiring some people to remain at range. The ooze on the ground now slows/roots you. The infection now reduces healing done by 75%, not 50%.

It actually seemed to go by faster than normal mode.

Heroic modes Attempted/Succeeded: 3/4

5) Festergut. Okay, moving all the healers at once to avoid Malleable Goo is dumb and leads to tank death. Speaking of tank death, HOLY TANK DAMAGE, BATMAN.

In 1.5 seconds:

[22:24:49.497] Festergut hits MT 27196  (A: 2353)
[22:24:49.733] Madrana Holy Light MT +0 (O: 15383) (clearly this is lag on my part)
[22:24:50.476] Festergut Gastric Bloat MT 11250 (R: 1523)
[22:24:50.598] Festergut hits MT 27334
[22:24:51.039] Festergut Gaseous Blight MT 1391 (R: 251)
[22:24:51.269] MT dies

So that’s 27k + 11k + 27k  = 65k damage in 1 second. Plus another 1k damage half a second later. Yikes.

He’s still up, so we’ll go back tonight and maybe try again.

Heroic modes Attempted/Succeeded: 3/4.5 ;)

My poll over there on the right (on the main blog page) asks you what you think about heroic modes. Vote (or not) and comment here (or not), but I think it would be neat to get a discussion going about heroic modes/dungeons/raids.

Kurn's Q&A #12

Kurn / / dungeons, healing, paladins, q&a, ramblings, shamans, tanks

I really relish my Tuesdays off. I get to watch Lost and the newly-returned V and get to do WoW stuff that *I* want to do. Which includes writing on the ol’ blog. :)

1) best way to heal heroic falric with a shammy

Well, I don’t know if it’s the best way, but this is how I do it.

The real problem with Falric is the Defiling Horror for two reasons. The first is because it’s a horror effect, so Tremor Totem does nothing. The second is because everyone takes 16k damage. So what I do is endeavour to keep everyone topped up as close to max as possible before he casts the horror.

To recover from it, I cast Riptide on the tank and, using my hasted Healing Waves from Tidal Waves, I heal myself and a caster. Then I’ll Chain Heal off the Riptided tank, which will hopefully hit the tank and 2 melee. Then I’ll RT/HW anyone else who still needs health. Total time, with my crappy haste (400 haste + Wrath of Air) is about 8-9 seconds. I usually have enough time to get everyone to full, or close to it.

Apart from that, try to stay close together and bunched up for Chain Heal to get the maximum use possible from it.

2) choker of filthy diamonds or soulcleave pendant

Choker of Filthy Diamonds has more haste and mp5. Soulcleave Pendant has more crit. I definitely prefer the Choker for a holy paladin or possibly a resto shammy and likely a resto druid, since the nerf to Gift of the Earthmother, leaving the crit to priests. Maybe? I’m not sure how crit is for a holy priest these days, but I know crit is still awesome for a disc priest.

However, the Choker is off Rotface and the Pendant is off Saurfang. Really depends how far you’re getting into 10-man ICC, I think.

3) divine plea timer

Okay, I’m assuming you want a timer to tell you when Divine Plea is back up. For this, and any other cooldowns, I use OmniCC. It was my first-ever addon, as I recall. And it’s the one addon I cannot play without.

If you were looking for a timer to tell you how much of the 15 seconds your Divine Plea is still up for and such, I recommend Power Auras Classic to monitor if the buff is active on you or not.

4) hos divine shield holy macro wow

I haven’t actually tested this out, but this ought to work:

/cast Divine Shield
/cast [@target] Hand of Sacrifice
/raid Hand of Sacrifice is up!
/in 10 /raid Hand of Sacrifice is done!

That’s four lines and should work with two button clicks or presses. I highly recommend that your shield come FIRST in the macro, lest you be ruined in the face by whatever insane damage is hitting your target. Also, your @target could be @focus as well or even this:

[@mouseover,help,nodead]

5) paladin group buffs how to

Oof. Okay. The first thing to know here is what buffs other classes give that are equivalent.

Warriors: Battle Shout is equivalent to unimproved Blessing of Might. Improved Blessing of Might (2/2) requires the warrior to have 5/5 Commanding Presence to be equivalent. That’s in the third tier of the Fury tree. This is not part of a typical warrior build, as I understand it.

Shamans: Mana Spring Totem is equivalent to unimproved Blessing of Wisdom. Improved Blessing of Wisdom (2/2) requires the shaman to have 3/3 Restorative Totems which is the fourth tier of the Restoration tree. However, it leads to Mana Tide Totem which virtually all restoration shammies take.

This is the general order that I, personally, recommend for pally buffs:

Death Knights (DPS): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings
Death Knights (tank): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might
Druids (bear): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might
Druids (kitty): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings
Druids (moonkin): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Druids (trees): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Hunters (survival/marks): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Wisdom
Hunters (BM): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Mages: Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Paladins (prot): Blessing of Sanctuary, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Wisdom
Paladins (ret): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Paladins (holy): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Priests: Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Rogues: Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings
Shaman (enhancement): Blessing of Might, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Shaman (elemental/resto): Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Warlocks: Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Wisdom
Warriors: Blessings of Kings, Blessing of Might

Of course, if you have a warrior in the group, it’s likely more beneficial to have them pop Battle Shout and you do kings than it is for no kings and your might, even if it’s improved. Same deal for wisdom and mana spring.

Alternately, you can buff everyone with Drums of Forgotten Kings and then give physical DPS might and healers and casters wisdom.

6) dk tanking halls of reflection

Note: I am not a death knight, nor am I a great tank. However, if you’re going to do the LOS method on Falric and Marwyn, just drop Death and Decay and hide around the corner. For any casters or the riflemen, Death Grip is great. For the chase scene, D&D is still awesome to use and you’ll want to Death Grip or Strangulate the Witch Doctors to bring them close if they’re a little far out. Blow your cooldowns when you can, saving Army of the Nub Dead for the second spawn of adds at the fourth wall on the chase scene.

7) list of cuts a purple gem can be cut to

Here’s a list of epic, level 80 purple gems. And here’s the list of rare-quality ones.

8) melee dps toravon guide

Hit boss. Don’t touch Frozen Orbs unless there are basically no ranged. Collect loot.

9) shammy tanking gear 3.3

Okay. You can equip a shield. This does not make you a tank. There is no mail gear out there at level 80 that has any kind of defense on it and very little leather, due to the druid changes. You would basically have to stack resilience. The major problem with shaman tanking, apart from the fact that you’re squishy as all get-out, is that a key to tanking is avoidance, like dodging, blocking and parrying. Your parry talent, Spirit Weapons, also reduces threat. Bad combo.

I don’t advise shaman tanking unless you’re doing it for fun with friends OR your tank on Lady Malande on the Illidari Council in Black Temple DROPS and your resident enhancement shaman thinks quickly, throws on a shield, pops Shamanistic Rage causing your raid leader to shout out over vent “ALL HEALS TO DUPER, ALL HEALS TO DUPER!”, which never had been heard before and never would be heard again. Ever. ;)

10) soul shriek aggro reset

Nope, there’s no aggro reset associated with Soul Shriek, as far as I can tell. It IS, however, a silence. Make sure someone is assigned to cleanse this magic effect off your 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.

Kurn's Q&A #10

Kurn / / cataclysm, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, priests, q&a, raiding, ramblings, tanks

Strangely enough, I get a kick out of random search terms that lead here, so here’s the 10th post where I take a look at who’s been searching for stuff and my attempt to better answer the questions these people probably had.

1) paladin divinity jol

Yeah, basically, it doesn’t work the way you think it works. For whatever reason, it works on the judging paladin (and perhaps anyone else who has Divinity) but not on, say, a hunter. I know, weird, eh? Still, here are the results of the experiment I did.

2) “stained shadowcraft tunic” “enhancement shaman”

No, no, go get the Champion’s Deathdealer Breastplate. I know it’s mail, but even before 40, you’ll be able to equip it. It’ll be leather, effectively, ’till you ding 40 and then it’ll become mail. Same deal for your shoulders, get the Prized Beastmaster’s Mantle. Apart from anything else, intellect is a good stat to have — not only will it extend your mana pool, but also if you’re properly specced in the 50s or thereabouts, you’ll be getting Mental Quickness, adding to your attack power from your intellect.

3) anyway to keep focus frame through valithria

Not that I’ve seen. >< I use a macro to focus her:

/focus Valithria Dreamwalker

4) blood prince council+holy priest+bad

Nah, not bad. What we’ll typically do is 1-2 holy paladins, 1 disc priest, 1 resto druid, 1-2 resto shammies and a holy priest. The holy priest does very well in topping people off, saving people from their own idiocy. We have the shammies helping on tanks if we’ve just got the one holy pally, so the priest gets his Circle of Hax on and his Empowered Renew blasting through the raid. Works pretty well.

Of course, if you’re thinking their numbers suck, look at their assignments. Are they assigned to the raid with 3 resto druids? Then yes, they will appear “bad”. But unless you’re losing a bunch of people due to lack of heals (and not their own stupidity), your holy priest is probably doing fine.

5) can you remove mutated plague with divine protection

Okay, first of all, Divine Protection is the paladin equivalent of Shield Wall. So no, Divine Protection is not going to wipe Mutated Plague off the tank.

Mutated Plague is the debuff that Professor Putricide stacks on the tanks in Phase 3 of his encounter. Typically, on 25-man, we have Tank 1 take 2 stacks, then Tank 2 takes 2, then Tank 3 takes 2, then T1 takes 1, T2 takes 1, T3 takes 1, and so on until the good Professor is dead.

What WOULD drop Mutated Plague off is Divine Shield. But you DO NOT want to do this (and I suspect that’s why you asked if DP would wipe it off) because if MP drops off any target for any reason, it’ll heal the boss for a certain amount per stack that was on the tank. That includes tank death, that includes bubbling.

So please do feel free to use Divine Protection in P3 of Professor Putricide. :)

6) cataclysm “level 85″+”experience needed”

Okay, there’s like no information out for Cataclysm yet. I don’t think the Friends and Family Closed Alpha is even out yet. However, considering the level cap is moving up only five levels, I would have to presume that those are going to be some pretty epic levels and that you’ll have to get an obscene amount of experience to get to 85. That doesn’t mean that SOME crazy space goats won’t ding in like, four days, though, RIGHT OSEPHALA? ;)

7) divine illumination cooldown add on

I cannot pimp this enough: OmniCC is the best cooldown timer ever. It displays cooldowns by minute and then, at 60 seconds it displays by second until it’s up. This is one of the addons I cannot live without.

8) divine intervention macro

From my Holy How-To #3:

Here’s my “hey, I cast Divine Intervention on someone” macro. Note that you must be targetting the person you want to DI.

/cast Divine Intervention

/script SendChatMessage(“DI: The generous pally’s version of Bubble/Hearth.”, “WHISPER”, nil, UnitName(“target”));

/6 Divine Intervention cast on %t.

What that does is cast DI, then sends a whisper to your target saying: DI: The generous pally’s version of Bubble/Hearth. This can obviously be changed, that’s just my sense of humour. ;)

Then it announces to the healing channel (#6) that I cast DI on my target.

9) divine shield mystic buffet

Nope. It goes riiiiiiiight through Divine Shield. :(

10) grid show random dungeon tank

Ah, you’re using Grid and you want it to show you the roles of the people in your party, right? To my knowledge, there’s no way to show that in Grid as of yet. Your standard Blizzard UI party frames will show you the roles, though. Or, you can do what I do and that’s click on every possible person in your party who’s a pally, druid, death knight or warrior and pray that the one with the highest health is your tank…

Bonus question: how to tank as a paladin at lvl 20

20 is when it becomes easy. Make sure you have Righteous Fury on (which I believe still goes away after you die, so don’t forget to put it back on!) and judge your single targets. If you have more than 2-3 mobs, drop Consecration. Congratulations. You are now a leet threat machine!

Of egos, numbers and priorities.

Kurn / / facepalm, healers, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

This totally ties in to my upcoming Holy How-To #4: Healing Meters, but I didn’t want to complicate what will be an informative post with my own personal stuff.

My question is this: how can a guild that is practically five years old be run by people who rely on healing meters to determine who the “best healer” is?

My RL friend the resto druid is taking a break from the game due to various RL issues that have cropped up. Which sucks. I mean, obviously I support her decision and I think it’s the best decision for her, given her RL circumstances and all. Apart from anything else, not having to raid from 11pm-2am four nights a week will benefit her in that she’ll get a decent amount of sleep.

The trouble here is that she’s the healing lead. And we’re 11/12, working on getting Sindragosa on farm (most emphatically not on farm!) and getting Lich King down on 25-man, so we can unlock hard modes, etc.

When she went away on business for a couple of days, she posted on the forums that I’d do healing assignments while she was away. (She and I had talked about this, so it wasn’t a surprise, it was fine.)

So naturally, while she’s away from the game, I figured that the whole healing lead thing would fall to me. Just about everyone else who has seniority is gone or not raiding anymore; the other holy paladin ninja-transferred, the disc priest who is awesome stopped raiding a couple of months ago… Honestly, there’s two healers who have been in the guild longer than I have been at this point, and one’s attendence sucks and the other is happier to be on standby.

So I’m thinking to myself that I should write to the officers that I get along with and let them know that I’m happy to help out in the short-term while they find a new healing lead until my RL friend comes back to the game. But that it’s strictly for the short-term, I don’t want any kind of promotion, I don’t want the job, etc.

So I do. I talk a bit about how I’m willing to help for the betterment of the raid and because the resto druid is my RL friend and I want to do what I can to lessen her stress/guilt for not raiding, etc. This is all on Thursday night.

Later on Friday, the caster officer PMs me back on the boards and is like “can we talk in-game about something real quick?”

So I log on and we chat and he’s like “I apologize in advance, but do you remember me asking you if [resto druid] was going to log on, Wednesday?”

“Yeah, you asked right before she did log on.”

“Yeah, well the reason I asked was because [MT/de-facto GM] had actually asked me to do healing if she wasn’t around.”

Relief totally flooded my body. Honest to God, I was like “haha, that’s fine!” and I was all relieved and fine. I’ve been in the guild for seven months, which is a drop in the bucket compared to most people, including the caster officer (who used to heal in pre-BC and BC).

But then he said that apparently, some people actually complained that I was doing healing assignments. Complained? What the hell? It’s not like I was doing a bad job or anything. With little to no communication from Mr. MT/officers, I did healing assignments for 10/12, with only 2 wipes. One WAS my bad, but the other was due to disconnections on BQL. I’m sitting there, scratching my head as to why on earth people would complain; I was polite in my requests, I was encouraging of the healers, I allocated resources pretty darn well considering I don’t know the capability of half of these people (there are five healers who have been there less than 5-6 weeks)…

So it blew my mind when the caster officer said why they complained.

“apparently some ppl complained about you doing them because they feel like you’re not the best healer or something”

And it dawns on me. The MT felt that these complaints were justified because I don’t top healing meters.

It’s got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I can’t manage the healers, nothing to do with the fact that I can’t allocate resources, nothing to do with the fact that I’m polite and courteous. It’s not even that I suck at healing; it’s because I stick to my assignments and do what’s best for the raid, rather than inflate my numbers.

Our last holy paladin, the one who had arrived when the guild was working on Sunwell, was a numbers whore. That’s all he cared about, that and caring about looking as if he was awesome because he knew the details of the game and mechanics — even though he didn’t. (Seriously, he tried to tell me that if MY beacon was up on a tank, that HIS heals would also be mirrored to MY beacon. Which is absolutely false and untrue.)

As a result of his priorities (his numbers instead of the raid), he would often heal off assignment, judge light (instead of wisdom, when there was always a ret pally in the raid, who could more reliably keep a judgement up) and was directly responsible for several wipes in recent memory. Basically, my RL friend was RELIEVED he ninja-transferred so that she didn’t have to deal with his stupid ass for never listening to her. You know how hard it is to type, in healing chat, while running around and healing, the words “[holy pally name] put your beacon on your assigned beacon target and heal your tank please”. She did that frequently and also whispered him a ton to get him to do it.

If I WANTED to, I could give myself the assignments that have me ridiculously high on the meters and I could judge light. But what’s the point in topping meters if people are DYING? What’s the point in wiping the raid all night in order to show off?

I’m sorry, but if we’re on Sindragosa, with a harsh frost aura ticking constantly, there is no WAY I’m going to beat a raid healer AND keep the MT alive. Not a chance. So what’s the more important thing? Healing the MT and keeping him alive so Sindragosa doesn’t turn and one-shot the rest of the raid.

This conversation has been bugging me since Friday and I just realized why. It’s not even that the MT is ignorant enough about healing that he relies on healing meters (haha, does that mean he thinks disc priests are completely worthless?), but it’s that the healers are the ones who complained. My fellow healers, the ones who are supposed to have a deeper understanding of the game and mechanics and healing assignments and the roles of various healers… THEY are the ones who complained to the MT.

So not only is the MT, who is also acting guild leader, ignorant of how healing works in this game, but so are at least some of the healers in the guild.

I could understand it if I weren’t one of the more senior healers in the guild at the moment, if I were this new recruit who, via nepotism, got the healing assignment job just because my RL friend knows me IRL.

I could understand it if I were actually terrible at allocating healer resources.

I could understand it if, instead of going 10/12 the other night, we had gone 6/12 because healing for Putricide had gone to hell or something.

But… I’m not “new”. I’ve been there longer than most anyone else. And I’m not bad at assigning healing. And my assignments proved to be done properly and well as we ruined 10 bosses in 3 hours the other night.

And yet, I don’t top healing, thus I suck?

I am agog at the ignorance that is clearly rampant in my guild. Truly, I am. I don’t understand how any healer who prioritizes the betterment of the raid could give a rat’s ass about the meters.

I’ve been wondering if I’ll leave the guild if my RL friend doesn’t come back soon. If she doesn’t, I think I just plain have to leave. It’s not that I’m hurt by the idea of the complaints, but I’m pissed off that people who should know better just don’t. After this realization that at least SOME of the healers are dumber than I thought they were, I find that I don’t care anymore. This guild is in trouble if it’s recruiting ignorant players and listening to them.

You want to point out where I suck? That’s great. Pull out logs, show me standing in fire or eating Blistering Cold or getting beaned by Malleable Goo. Guess what? I don’t eat BC. I don’t get beaned by MG. Fire and I have an uneasy relationship, this is true, but I have better environmental awareness than most of the healers. Which is SAD.

It’s like, all of a sudden, the small healer community that I THOUGHT was getting better in quality, that I THOUGHT was worth my respect and courtesy, doesn’t matter to me at all, because it’s been infected by Stupid™ and that Stupid™ is also present in the ranks of the officers.

In short, without my RL friend there, it’s clear that there’s nothing left for me. I’m going to kill LK, see how my RL friend is doing and then make my decision as to what to do.

I strongly suspect that I’ll be heading back to good old Eldre’Thalas earlier than expected.

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! :)

Kind of an epic night.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, raiding

Last night, we were again without our healing lead, my RL friend the resto druid. Last night, we were again working on Sindragosa.

For the first time in the six months that I’ve been in the guild… they asked us to get on Vent.

My guild doesn’t use Vent for raid instructions. At all. Ever. My RL friend can count on one hand the number of times she’s been on Vent for guild-related purposes, including officer meetings.

So last night, before we started working on Sindragosa again, they had us get on Vent so that the caster lead could call out Ice Tombs and the direction of Ice Tombs in Sindragosa’s final phase, which is what we were REALLY having problems with.

Not only that, but the tanks indicated, over Vent, when they were taunting.

I’ve raided for six months without Vent and I really didn’t miss it. But having the tanks calling out taunts on Vent was GREAT. I would swap my beacon, keep healing the tank and/or raid members, etc. I don’t think I missed a single transition, as opposed to missing a bunch in previous nights of attempts.

Anyways, we got Sindragosa down in three tries last night and then went on to clear out the Plagueworks, which we’d skipped this reset so we could get good work in on Blood Queen (we wanted, and got, a repeat kill) and get some real good time in on Sindragosa.

Of course, the healing officer, as I said, wasn’t online. So the caster officer, who’d been giving healing instructions for Sindragosa, asks me to do healing for the Plagueworks.

… oh crap.

I loaded up my trusty healing assignment mod, HealOrganizer, for the first time since, oh, SEPTEMBER, and then, through trash, struggled to remember everything my RL friend had ever said about the upcoming three fights. It wasn’t made easier by the fact that we had a new holy priest and a new resto druid in the raid, who I hadn’t really analyzed in the last couple of raids (hi, I’m not actually an officer, you know), so I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle things.

First up, we went to Rotface.

I put myself on the MT and infections (so I beaconed the MT) and healed those with infections. I put the disc priest on the MT. I put the resto druid on the OT (kiting slimes) due to his mobility, along with helping out on infections and the raid. I put the two resto shammies on the raid and had the holy priest on the raid.

While we had a cleansing totem dropped in error (sigh!) we still one-shot it. I would have liked the resto druid to help me out a little more with infections towards the end, because we lost a couple of people that way, but overall, it worked out and we one-shot Rotface. Whew.

Then I had to figure out Festergut. I put me and the disc priest on the tanks. I put the two shammies, the druid and the holy priest on the raid and strongly encouraged the shammies to chain through the active tank after the second spore and through Pungent Blight.  Had we not attempted (twice) to do the achievement (in which BOY did people screw up!), we would have one-shotted. As it was, it took three attempts, but he died.

On to Professor.

I put myself and the disc priest on the MT, put the shammies on people with Volatile Ooze, gave free reign to the holy priest and the resto druid, reminded people to stand on the left when we were on that side of the room, reminded them to watch out for Malleable Goo, not to stand in green slime or near orange viles, told the priests to use GS and PS at their discretion and to stack up on the Volatile Ooze people if at all possible.

First wipe happened because the tank who was the abom got way behind on slime pools.

Second attempt was a great kill, with just one person dying at the end, and it was to Malleable Goo (and it wasn’t a healer, so I didn’t care so much). I popped DS/DS, I did a lot more casting of Holy Light than I normally do on that fight (as per my own analysis from 2 weeks ago) and we got him down easily.

Whew.

And then, it was about 1am. One hour left in the raid.

Every boss in the instance was dead. Except for the Lich King.

So up we went to The Frozen Throne.

Epic.

Our best attempt lasted less than three minutes. Hilarious.

We’re extending our lockout this week. I need to farm up a crapton of mats, I think. This is going to be huge.

Judging, Divinity and an Experiment

Kurn / / general, guide, healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I won’t link to it, because I think it’s a crappy article, but the WoW.com holy paladin writer, Chase Christian, is claiming that Divinity affects the healing done by a paladin’s Judgement of Light. My first thought was “that’s BS” followed quickly by “… right?”.

I just spent 95g, respeccing my prot spec to holy and then back to prot to examine this situation.

At first, I thought I could try it out with the same holy gear and just switch from holy to prot and judge light on a training dummy and see what happened.

What happened made no sense whatsoever. One of the specs I was in got 3.4% more healing from JoL. That didn’t make any sense to me, so I went and respecced. I mean, I should be getting 10% more, not something weird like 3.4%, right?

With identical 54/17/0 builds, except getting Divine Strength instead of Divinity, I ended up with:

Divinity: 454 per JoL

No Divinity: 412 per JoL

What does that mean? That means that Divinity is granting me 5% extra healing because the judgement is mine and it’s granting me 5% extra healing because I’m receiving the healing. I have 20,564 health unbuffed, so 2% of that health is about 412. Another 10% of that 412 is about 454.

So that works and means that Mr. Christian’s claim that paladins with Divinity ought to judge light exclusively makes sense, right?

Wrong.

My brother’s hunter has 21,404 health unbuffed.

I had the hunter shoot up a training dummy in IF and I judged light in the spec without Divinity in it.

My brother was getting 428 health back. That’s 2% of his health. That seems to work fine.

With Divinity, my JoL should, then, heal my brother’s hunter for an additional 21.40 (5% extra), or about 450 health per proc.

And still, my brother’s hunter was getting 428 health back per proc.

It appears to me that Divinity and Judgement of Light give the JUDGING paladin 10% extra healing, but it honestly doesn’t affect anyone else, except possibly other paladins with Divinity.

I know! I know! It doesn’t make sense! Why would you be awarded the 10% bonus with Divinity and not have that extra 5% affect others? Before you ask, no, it’s not my glyphs. While I had my prot glyphs in on the secondary non-Divinity spec, none of my glyphs affect my JoL or extra healing in any way. I wasn’t using Glyph of Seal of Light or anything.

But no matter what I did, 428 was what my brother’s procs of JoL were hitting for. So I must conclude that my initial “that’s BS!” call stands. Of course, if anyone out there has screenshots or a combat log parse to show otherwise, I’m happy to revise my assessment. :)

If there’s another paladin in my raid group, by the way, I almost always judge wisdom. Why? Because warriors, rogues and death knights have no use for mana and ret pallies, hunters and enhancement shammies have little need for the regen and the healers generally will not benefit from it, as they’re not attacking the boss. That means that if I don’t refresh my judgement three times a minute, it’s not a big deal. It means that only elemental shammies, mages, warlocks, moonkins and shadow priests will really be adversely affected if I can’t find a global to judge. Whereas any other kind of paladin, a retribution or protection paladin, will be judging on cooldown, which is WAY more than I am, which leads to WAY more uptime on their judgement.

The judgement that should, IMHO, have priority, is Light, because EVERYONE attacking the boss has a health bar and could potentially benefit from it.

So basically, Kurn, you’re saying that you fail at judging.

:P I’m saying that, as a healer, keeping our judgement up is not going to be our first priority and sometimes it’ll fall off. Sorry, but if my tank is taking 30k melee attacks, it’s not always easy to find a place to judge often enough to keep up Judgements of the Pure, much less my judgement debuff.

As an added note, I’m finding that the best time to judge on Sindragosa is when I get Instability and again when I want to drop my 4-5 stacks of it.

Something amusing.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

So last night was not a good night for me healing on Sindragosa. First of all, the healing lead and my RL friend the resto druid, was unable to make the raid due to RL issues. She and I were actually on the phone for the first 45-60 minutes of Sindragosa attempts — on my first night on the fight, ever.

But even after I got off the phone with her, I was a little rattled. It really wasn’t going to be a good raid for me and I knew it, but since we had people offspec healing as it was, I figured the experience would be good for me, etc.

Today, the sort of “senior” paladin in the guild, a ret pally, PMs me on the guild forums with his concerns about my healing last night. He, unlike the MT/raid leader, the range leader and the guy who was doing healing last night, was unaware of the situation regarding the resto druid. So not only is he unaware that I basically wasn’t paying attention for the first hour, but he’s like “why aren’t you using divine plea? Why aren’t you casting holy light?”

I laughed my ass off. Why am I not using Divine Plea? How about “because I have full mana”? And he was like “On try 6, over a 7 minute fight, you only used Holy Light 14 times!”

… no, actually, I cast 33 Holy Lights. 19 of them crit. 14 of them didn’t.

I don’t really mind being called out on my performance, especially because I know I sucked it up last night, but if you’re going to call me out based on the PARSE, you had better know how to read the damn parse properly.

Admittedly, it was probably one of my weakest nights in terms of raiding in a long while. I had never done the fight before, despite reading strats and watching videos, and it’s just a BAD pally-healing fight, period. All that running around does not a good numbers fight make. At least the people in charge of the raid knew what was going on with my RL friend and knew that I’d been in contact with her.

Anyways, I’m just amused that the ret pally focused on two of the stupidest things to focus on in a parse, and was wrong about the stats he gave me on one of them. Ah, people. :)

Tank healing vs. Single-target healing

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding

So, you all remember my rant about how the new WoW.com holy paladin columnist insists that paladins are tank healers, right? Where I was saying that no, we’re single-target healers and that tank healing is a subset of single-target healing?

Great post here at Divine Plea that tells us that we’re single-target healers.

Last night, my guild worked on Sindragosa. It was a challenging fight for a variety of reasons (my RL friend couldn’t make it due to RL issues, so we were without the healing lead and our best healer) and it was specifically challenging for me because I got beaned by Blistering Cold a few times, but having prepared myself for the fight, I had already decided to Beacon whichever tank was tanking so I could help out on the raid if needed. Why? Because although I don’t enjoy raid healing very much, it’s the best use of my beacon in the situation. Everyone is taking constant AOE frost damage, people are randomly taking melee or caster debuff damage, so there’s a LOT of raid damage going on. And, due to the placement of the tank vs. the melee, there’s not a lot of opportunity for Glyph of Holy Light to see much action.

So I did a fair amount of raid healing with my beacon on the tank. I really do much prefer to beacon the OT and heal the MT, or vice-versa, just because that way, it leaves me able to really focus on my one target, and I LIKE that. I don’t think paladin healing is boring like that. Some people do and really relish the idea of beaconing their tank and raid healing the way I did on Sindragosa last night and that’s cool. There are certainly a lot of fights where my preferred use of Beacon is how we do it in my guild and there are a few fights where we switch it up a bit.

Another example is Rotface. What we had done for our first few kills (and then refined it a bit, but now that I’m the only holy paladin in the guild, we may revert) is have me beacon the MT and heal the crap out of the people with the infection. I HAVE to drop huge heals on them because of the healing debuff on them, and those all get transferred to the tank, so it works nicely. Of course, there will be another healer on the MT specifically, but it works out okay.

Anyways, I just wanted to point out that post at Divine Plea, which I stumbled across due to Miss Medicina’s post.