Not being able to sleep sucks, so here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a few days. You are free to snag this particular image, so long as it is NOT modified, and post it to your guild forums or whatever. I’d prefer it if you uploaded it to photobucket or something as well, instead of using up my bandwidth by hotlinking it. If that proves to be an issue, I’ll disable that. Obviously, click on the image for a larger version.
Obviously, some classes (mages, paladins, shadow priests) are able to work around Unchained Magic at least once, perhaps twice throughout the encounter. This should be viewed as a general, beginner’s guide to Sindragosa’s Unchained Magic on heroic, where the Backlash caused by dropping your stacks of Instability will hit people within 20 yards of you once you drop your stacks.
I have a lot to do in WoW in the next couple of days and I have a huge amount of stuff to write. No joke, I have five drafts to finish up, spanning subjects like Zul’Gurub and its removal from the game to Sindragosa and how I hate that fight and I hate how much I know about it to beta stuff.
I did very little on beta this weekend, but live has had me pretty busy.
Just a quick update here about live raiding. My guild finally got heroic Professor Putricide down on 25-man.
It was a guild first and I am so very proud of them and pleased that I could help at all. We beat our heads against this guy for a long time, but we finally did it.
I haven’t killed Putricide on heroic since May.
It felt really good to be part of a guild’s first, even though it was my… fifth? Sixth?
So we turn from Putricide to heroic Sindragosa as our progression boss.
I know damn near everything there is to know about heroic Sindragosa. I am a champ at that fight. I know how to play through it from any perspective, even though I’ve only ever healed it. This is the fight in ICC that is *mine*.
It’s a killer fight, though. Even with the buff, there is SO much coordination that makes Sindragosa more difficult than Putricide in many ways. Putricide is more “okay, pop quiz, hotshot!” and Sindragosa is more “and everyone in perfect sync, go left! Go right! Run around like a tool!”.
It’s like Putricide is so random with the plague and the ooze target and the gas target that you really just have to be able to react instantly. More to the point, you need to know what to do given some very specific circumstances. Example:
Someone next to you has had the plague for 8 seconds. You already have the plague debuff. No one else is in range. The plague has at least another 20 seconds of duration on it.
What do you do? Do you let your raid mate die? Do you grab the plague and ferry it to someone else? Do you grab it and die yourself?
I vote for ferrying, but that’s something I would only do in very specific circumstances. (It’s on a healer, it’s on a tank, we don’t have SSes or BRs left.)
Sindragosa is a very deliberate dance with a bit of randomness inserted, but no more randomness than your regularly scheduled encounter. In fact, because you KNOW that 3 healers and 3 casters will get Unchained Magic, it’s less random. If it were to be six healers at once, that would be unworkable, if hilarious. So they made sure that only 3 healers and only 3 casters get it at once. That’s a good portion of randomness gone. So you deal with 3 of your heals with it and you can count on that. You deal with six ice tombs in air phases and you all line up according to a pattern you’ve pre-determined.
You know when her Icy Grip is off cooldown, so you can be ready.
It’s really not a fight about dealing with the random elements. It’s a fight about being coordinated enough as a group to deal with the mechanics.
Putricide was super easy for my last guild. A couple of nights of attempts and then a kill. Sindragosa is who gave us trouble.
It’d be nice for my guild to get through Sindragosa. I really like that I’ve been able to help them out and help their strats and stuff. Just my presence helped get Dreamwalker saved for the first time on heroic. I helped out with heroic LDW strats. I’ve had a LOT to say about Putricide. And I’ve already written an essay’s worth of words on Sindragosa in various posts on our forums.
In related news, I’m actually on standby for the first time ever tomorrow night. I’m actually excited about this, but I’m not sure how I’m going to spend three hours on standby. Fishing? haha.
Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the ninth of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.
Today’s post will focus primarily on the use of Righteous Fury. True, Righteous Fury is most often left to the domain of the protection paladin, who needs the extra holy threat on their abilities to gain and then maintain aggro.
“But Kurn,” you might say, “I thought this was a HOLY how-to?”
Indeed it is. We’re going to look at the use of Improved Righteous Fury while healing as a holy paladin through T10 (ICC/Ruby Sanctum) content.
Okay, so obviously, my brain wasn’t working when I wrote my Being a Woman who Raids post, because I forgot about some truly excellent bloggers who are women who are fairly progressed. So, ladies, let’s all work together and try to come up with a fairly definitive list of progressed female raiders who blog, shall we? Please leave a comment with your blog URL if you’d like to be listed (or someone else’s blog URL if you know they’re a progressed female raider) assuming you meet the requirements below. If the blog does not have the woman’s most-progressed raiding character’s armory profile listed on it, please include the armory link as well. (You can email me the armory link if you prefer: kurn [at] apotheosis-now [dot] com.)
I’ve populated the list with a few names and blogs already, but haven’t been able to verify progression in some other cases.
Requirements (may be subject to change, but we’ll start out with this):
1) The blogger must be at least 9/12 ICC HM (that’s 10 or 25, although if you’re doing 10, you shouldn’t be decked out in all 277 gear). This can mean that the blogger has reached that stage with her current guild or a previous guild. Please let me know what the progression is in the comment itself. (Note that I’ll take your 25m progression over 10m if you’re wearing lots of 277 gear.)
2) The blogger must be a woman. This means that the blogger should say somewhere (either a blog post or in the About section) that they are a woman. Gender of the character does not matter. ;) (I will also include self-identified MTF transgender individuals as female bloggers, should any exist, mostly because I’m inclusive in general, but also because my previous post was spawned in part by my annoyance with the male-dominated heteronormative narrative that exists in WoW.)
3) The blog should primarily be about WoW stuff. If your blog is mostly you talking about what movie you saw before you went off and spent a couple of hours in ICC, you won’t get listed. I’d really like for this to be a solid list of women who are progressed in this game and who really talk about the game on their blogs.
A proper submission:
Kurn of Kurn’s Corner (http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com), is 11/12 ICC 25 HM and here is her armory: (link)
Please note that this is not any kind of effort to be elitist or to snub women who may be less-progressed! This is really a sort of experiment to see how many women out there are progression raiders who blog about WoW to help me see if my initial theory was right or wrong. (I believed that the reason there weren’t, from what I could tell, a lot of progression-minded female raiders who blogged was because there weren’t that many progression-minded female raiders at all.)
Also, the 9/12 HM requirement is arbitrary, I know. I put it there because I feel that most raiding guilds can eventually get Lady Deathwhisper down on heroic (typically the 9th boss on heroic you’ll do) but that, for whatever reason, a raiding guild may struggle once they start banging their heads against the walls that Putricide and Sindragosa represent, even to the point of giving up and no longer raiding.
I have a feeling that this post may be updated fairly regularly. ;)
25-man Progressed Female Raiders who Blog
(Please note that progression listed below is for Icecrown Citadel 25-man hard modes.)
So, on heroic, Professor Putricide casts Unbound Plague twice in a row, a minute or so apart, whenever he casts it. So you have to play hot potato with the plague for two minutes without getting people with Plague Sickness to grab it.
Tonight:
[19:44:21.389] Professor Putricide casts Unbound Plague
This is the second plague of a set.
[19:44:21.399] Moonkin’s Unbound Plague fades
This is the first plague the moonkin has passed to a warlock.
[19:44:21.399] Moonkin afflicted by Plague Sickness from Moonkin
This is the moonkin getting Plague Sickness at the same instant he has passed the plague off.
You may notice that this is 0.01 seconds after Professor Putricide has cast the second Unbound Plague.
[19:44:21.413] Moonkin afflicted by Unbound Plague from Professor Putricide
This is the moonkin getting the NEW plague almost immediately after passing the old one off to the warlock. He does NOT have Plague Sickness at the second that Putricide casts Unbound Plague. .01 seconds before he gets Plague Sickness, Putricide cast the new plague. The rule has always seemed to be that if you have Plague Sickness, you cannot get a new plague.
Due to a discussion I am having elsewhere, I would like to know what you all think is appropriate use of a paladin’s utility spells, regardless of spec, over the course of a 4 hour raid night which is in Ruby Sanctum (25m regular) and ICC 25 (mostly heroic, some regular modes).
Please answer the following questions.
1) Should all paladins use Lay on Hands at some point in that 4-hour block?
2) Should all paladins know how to Cleanse? Should every paladin be expected to Cleanse? What encounters should they/shouldn’t they be expected to Cleanse on? What spec do you expect paladins who Cleanse to be?
3) Should all paladins use Hand of Salvation at some point in that 4-hour block? On whom? What spec should these casting paladins be? In what situations should it be cast?
4) Should all paladins use Hand of Sacrifice at some point in that 4-hour raid? On whom? What spec should they be? What situations?
5) Should all paladins use BOP (Hand of Protection) at some point in that raid? On whom? What spec should they be? In what situations would it be useful?
I await your answers and then will tell you on Tuesday why I’m asking. :)
Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the eighth of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.
Holy paladins have, thus far in the expansion, changed considerably. Arguably, the biggest change that we have encountered is the change to Beacon of Light, which now takes overhealing into account when mirroring heals.
This one change has completely modified the way in which holy paladins heal. We’ve had to adapt to this change and it’s been for the better, in my opinion.
What this one change has allowed us to do is to be absolute superstars on two encounters in particular: Deathbringer Saurfang and Valithria Dreamwalker. There are other fights where we can shine, but these two encounters are basically designed for us to be awesome. So, this Holy How-to will focus on exactly how to be awesome on Saurfang and Dreamwalker. Continue reading “Holy How-To #8, Awesome on DBS and VDW”
Hello, lovely people. It is Tuesday once again and, once again, I have had a ridiculously low number of search terms I haven’t covered, so, once again, the Q&A post will be put off. Can’t wait for people’s Internet use to go up again…
Anyways, I thought I’d update the ol’ blog with some, well, updates.
Beta:
You may have noticed I haven’t talked much about Beta in the last few days, not since I hit 83 and got Healing Hands.
Why haven’t I been talking about the Beta? Well, I’m kind of stuck.
Madrana’s 83, which is the level cap, so I don’t want to quest on her, since I’m not gaining any more experience. I would love to do instances like crazy, but the Random Dungeon Finder isn’t working unless you’re already in a group, apparently.
So I could go quest on Kurn, right? I’m only level 81 and 3/4. But the thing is, Kurn’s stuck on a bugged quest in Vashj’ir (Still Precious, if you’re curious — no naga currently drop the pearls!). I’d rather not skip the content in this sub-zone and move on, because I’m enjoying the feeling of completing the subzones and continuing this storyline. Again, can’t really do instances… I could go do Hyjal on Kurn, but I figure I’ll be doing Hyjal and Vashj’ir enough times on live when Cataclysm drops, so I’m just sort of waiting for Blizzard to fix a few things in a new build.
God, I hope they drop a new build soon. Like, today. Tomorrow. Yesterday…
Leadership:
I went to a private, all-girls’ school for eleven years, from Grade 1 through to Grade 11 (which is our last year of high school in Quebec). Somewhere along the way, somehow, I obtained these things called “leadership skills”. I was never, ever a leader back in school. I shied away from positions of authority, I never liked being the one people looked to for decisions or depended upon to make decisions.
But in every circumstance since my high school days, I have found myself gravitating to leadership positions whenever it’s clear that whoever is currently leading is not doing it well.
And you know, I’m not terribly bad at being a leader. I’m good at allocating resources, scheduling things, thinking inside the box and then outside when it’s required… Sadly, I’m one of the better leaders I’ve encountered out here in the real world. It kind of sucks, because I really don’t like being a leader.
What I prefer is to be led by a competent leader.
If the leader is not competent or if I am not being led appropriately (not being used to my full extent, not being given clear instructions, etc) then that’s when my leadership skills step in and want to usurp the leader’s position and just DO IT BETTER.
Why am I talking about this? Because it’s basically describing my leadership experiences in WoW.
How did I get to be a raid leader/officer back in my old, old guild? I asked questions, I educated myself and then I educated others on why, precisely, they wanted to do Zul’Gurub and Molten Core.
How did I get to be an officer/raid leader/healing lead back in Apotheosis? It’s because I took initiative to help form the guild, it’s because I knew Karazhan and I researched my ass off for Gruul and Mag and everything else. I had learned to allocate healing from my short stint in another guild and applied it to Apotheosis and that basically meant that I was just doing healing, period. And I was okay with that, because there just wasn’t anyone else I trusted at the start to do healing, except for our awesome priest officer, who was, unfortunately, MIA more often than not.
How did I get to be healing officer in my Bronzebeard guild? The healing lead (and GM) stepped down from raiding/playing altogether for a long while and I was the noisiest healer of the bunch, so they were like “HEY YOU! Here! Do healing!”. I wasn’t being led properly, so I became the leader.
How did I get to do healing for a period of like, 3 months through Sindragosa (reg), LK (reg) and 8/12 ICC25 HMs? My friend had basically deputized me before she took time off, but I still had to earn my “position” in that I was CONSTANTLY talking to the raid leader about healing and such. Why did I do it if it made me miserable? Because no one else was going to be able to do it, barring the RL, and having been a RL and healing lead at the same time, I basically don’t wish that upon anyone.
So it’s nice to be in a guild now where the leaders work hard. I might not always get a precise healing assignment, but I know I’m on the tanks. My healing lead listens to my feedback (and the feedback of others, I would imagine) and sometimes strats and assignments are tweaked. Sometimes they’re not. But at least I have an idea that he’s listening.
My GM is awesome, as you guys already know. I don’t envy her the position, nor the work and time and energy she puts into the guild. I’m sort of dreading being in that position with Apotheosis in a few months. I think I’ve learned a lot about the workings of guilds in the last year and a half, though. I always go into a guild with the attitude that I will be there forever (or at least until the end of the expansion) and, barring seriously bad conditions (continuously cancelled raids, abusive environment, etc), I WILL be there. While I’m in any guild, though, I find that I’m soaking up all the little things to do or not to do if (when) I find myself back in the position of GM.
Raiding:
Re-learning some of these fights with a new guild isn’t easy. My current guild is struggling on Putricide and I don’t really know why. I got caught by the Gas Cloud last night on one attempt and I was like “WHAT THE HELL?” because I NEVER get caught by that thing. I realized that it hadn’t been slowed. Sure, I wasn’t in an ideal position for the possibility of being targetted by it, but, by golly, I had a head start on the sucker!
So I mention to my GM that I’d been caught because it wasn’t slowed. She countered that I didn’t move fast enough/was in a bad place.
Of course, I looked up the logs.
[22:22:53.499] Gas Cloud’s Regurgitated Ooze fades
[19:22:55.251] Gas Cloud Gaseous Bloat Madrana 17373
[19:22:56.582] Gas Cloud hits Madrana Absorb (574)
Okay, so it only took it two seconds to catch up to me, but I was right; it wasn’t being slowed. My GM later mentioned that she was aware of the slowing issues but honestly thought I was right next to the Gas Cloud and that’s why I was hit. I maintain I’d have been able to get away since I was the second target and the thing should have been almost dead, but anyways. The point is that — the Gas Cloud was not being slowed.
Why?
The Abomination has a lack of energy.
Why?
Druids aren’t keeping Rejuv up for Revitalize procs, disc priest isn’t keeping PW:S up for Rapture procs.
But on the bright side, we’re doing less dying to Plague?
I don’t know, it was a tough reset, I guess. It feels like there are too many little mistakes being made by too many people, which includes me. I’ve eaten some Malleable Goo, I got hit by the Gas Cloud, I’ve died to Unbound Plague because I didn’t pass it off when I should have.
I’m learning that heroic Putricide is actually a lot harder than it was when I first learned it. It was an easy fight to learn for my last guild, but, for whatever reason, it’s a lot more challenging for this guild. I’m okay with that, and getting to P3 and getting him to 7% or thereabouts this reset was great. I just want that momentum to continue.
Anyways, that’s about all for my deep thoughts right now. Hopefully we’ll get something going on the Beta soon so I can post more.
And who knows, maybe a new Holy How-To soon, eh? It’s been over a month since my last one!
I’ve been in my current guild now for seven weeks. Throughout that entire time, I have basically been the only holy paladin. More to the point, all the holy paladin apps have pretty much made me want to cry.
We’re talking people specced into Retribution for support even though they clearly have all intellect gems, we’re talking people with under 500 haste, we’re talking the Drape of the Violet Tower… There has been all KINDS of failure. It’s so varied, but the end result is the same — sucktastic is a generous word for most of the pally apps.
Coming from a more progressed guild with what is more or less a set roster (you are expected to make every single raid for its full duration unless you give notice and even then, it’s frowned upon to take too many nights off) to a guild who hadn’t gotten Dreamwalker healed on heroic yet, with a very large roster, in comparison, has been an interesting experience.
I knew that I could help them with Dreamwalker. I knew that I could help them repeat heroic Saurfang. I knew that I could help them with Lady Deathwhisper. God knows I’ve wiped enough to Putricide and Sindragosa that I can certainly offer my experience and brain to the raid leaders.
On the first reset, bam, Dreamwalker healed to full. We’ve done her on heroic every week since except for when we got them Portal Jockey, I think. (I say “them” not to set myself apart from the rest of my raid group but rather because I already had it, as well as all the other required achievements for my 25-man drake.) That’s satisfying.
I’ve also been a key part for heroic Saurfang kills, taking on the first two ranged marks, for the most part.
I helped them to retool the Deathwhisper strat to one that worked twice before people seemed to stop caring about adds and Vengeful Shades. (Which is roundabout the time we lost the one decent healing priest we had, who wasn’t all that decent, but hey, Renewed Hope and Mass Dispel are nothing to sneeze at.)
It’s been a really good experience for me, learning how to integrate myself into this team that hasn’t had a single decent holy paladin for months. I cannot imagine how they did half of what they did without a holy paladin, much less two.
It’s been pretty clear to the leadership, I think, that we need a second holy paladin. Certainly my GM has been recruiting like crazy and levelling her pally alt with the intention to switch over if we can’t find someone. I mean hell, I’m good, but I’m not a miracle worker. I can’t imagine really working well on heroic Sindragosa without a second holy paladin.
We’ve done a LOT of heroic Sindragosa attempts to try to get us used to the mechanics, if nothing else. We’ve had a lot of practice on things like Frost Bombs and Ice Tombs and Unchained Magic (I think I may be the person currently in the guild who has spent the most amount of time in her life with her pathetic magic betraying her.). This is good stuff, I’m GLAD we usually take a few whacks at her on heroic to make sure people understand the mechanics. You never know when you’ll get lucky on an attempt, either.
Still, we were definitely lacking a holy paladin and really, a decent discipline priest. We don’t even have a holy priest right now and just pulled a disc priest app in this week (who is doing AWESOMELY and we’ve only raided with him once!).
Last week, we brought in a holy paladin app, who learned of my guild’s need for a holy paladin through this very blog.
I was totally excited… until I realized his internet was lame, meaning that he couldn’t stay connected through Marrowgar. He got disconnected and couldn’t return and we didn’t see him again until the weekend and he explained his internet issues. Thankfully, the internet issues turned out to be something that was more or less temporary and not even his fault. We raided together on Monday for a little bit on heroic Putricide until the battlegroup died on us and it wasn’t enough for me to really make any kind of judgement on how this guy was doing.
I have to say now, after raiding with him for just over three hours on Wednesday night (we called it early after getting Halion down), this guy is the real deal.
We got heroic Lady Deathwhisper down for the first time in a month. The pally app ate one Vengeful Shade at the end of our first (of two) attempts and that’s it. He cleansed at least adequately, used cooldowns appropriately and healed like mad, which is what you need to do on LDW.
And then, after way too long, I got to heal Saurfang with another holy paladin. I asked the healing lead if he would mind if the two pallies took care of the first four marks and so when he gave out assignments, he told the other pally that I’d explain to him what it was we would do. It was spectacular. The first attempt was hilarious, actually. The first mark got killed by a blood beast and then our healing lead rezzed him. Whoops.
Our mulligan out of the way, we got ourselves organized and blasted through Saurfang in just over four minutes, with only five marks, which is a first for us, I believe. I think we usually get six.
It was awesome; the pallies took care of the marks, there was great uptime on beacon and judgements of the pure… We both used BOP on casters pre-first mark, he even found time to hit DS/DS at the Frenzy and also bopped one of his marks again. Win all around.
To Blood Wing, where I may throttle most of my fellow raiders if I get thrown across the room on Council again. Seriously. The guild’s major flaw (every guild has one, IMHO) is that they are very bad at range issues. That means that we get people hurled across the room due to Empowered Shock Vortex, we occasionally get people chaining Ice Tombs on Sindragosa, people dying to Bloodbolt Splash on BQL. You know. That kind of stuff.
Still, craziness ensued and we WON. What happened?
The Keleseth tank died. He didn’t have enough shadow orbs on him and had literally 98 stacks of Shadow Prison on him, plus Keleseth was basically wailing on him… so the Valanar tank picked him up — and was one-shotted by an empowered shadow lance or something. This is bad. That was my tank who picked him up and then died. I hate losing my tanks. So I did what any good paladin did, I swapped to the last tank and healed as best I could. I was low on mana, Divine Plea was always on cooldown… But the pally app, whose tank it was, had no issues and basically was the person responsible (well, along with the tank) for bringing the Council down.
Way impressive.
Off to BQL where the app unfortunately got penned in by some DPS and died to a Bloodbolt Splash (see? That was totally foreshadowing up there!) but got a battle rez and still managed to get his DS/DS and Aura Mastery off for the second fear.
Add to that the fact that he LISTENS with regards to beacon/shield/judgement/aura/blessing assignments… Uses his cooldowns…
<3
As if I didn’t love raiding with this group before, I now get to raid with them plus someone who obviously has a similar mindset to me when it comes to holy paladin healing. It’s pretty glorious and, assuming his internet issues are more or less resolved, it’s going to be a huge benefit to the guild to have him available.
Also, I didn’t mention this last week, but I FINALLY picked up Heroic Marrowgar’s Frigid Eye. Here’s my chardev link which is also linked in the top-right box here on my website and that’s updated as soon as I get a new piece of gear. Check the updated date to see if I’ve gotten any new loot lately. :)
I should get back to beta and try to get through to level 83. Talents are seriously busted this build, though. I can’t learn Art of War in my ret spec no matter what I try. I mean, if I have the talent preview on, I can click three times on it and pick up my other spells, but because it won’t learn Art of War, I cannot get more than 19 talent points in ret that way. I had to go learn Pursuit of Justice and 1/2 Eye for an Eye or something in order for my talents to “stick”. If I had to guess, I’d say things are more broken today than they were yesterday. Alas, such are the highs and the lows of beta. :)
