Category: paladins

Quick update.

Kurn / / druids, facepalm, general, healing, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

First of all, I AM working on my third Holy How-To post. It’s long. There are many screenshots and links. But I am definitely working on it!

Secondly, I’ve seen some serious fail lately. The latest morons:

– An 80 fury warrior, specced with Titan’s Grip… using one 2H weapon. And nothing else in his other hand. Sadly, I’ve forgotten his name.

– Holymeatbag, an 80 holy paladin, specced 68/3/0 and STILL managed to miss out maxing out Holy Power (3/5) and Holy Guidance (1/5). I may be a little squishy yet, but dude wasn’t keeping Beacon on anyone or shielding me or anything of the sort in Heroic TOC. As such, I died on Paletress. And if I hadn’t used my abundance of cooldowns (my trinket for extra dodge, a healthstone, a healing potion, Survival Instincts, Lifeblood, Frenzied Regeneration and Barkskin!), I would have died again after the wipe. I got H TOC again as a random later in the evening and was healed just fine by the resto shammy. Highly recommend you all ignore this guy.

In positive news, for once, my guild got 25-man Blood Queen Lana’thel on Monday night. HIGHLY recommend that the RL get and use the following mod:

BloodQueen at WoWInterface

We also one-shotted Valithria and, although I dropped my stacks once, it was only once! I got a lot better at making sure I got a stack just before the portal phase ended.

In news with my druid/my brother’s hunter/our friend’s DK…

My druid has 2/5 T9 resto but still has better feral gear, haha. My brother’s hunter is practically as well-geared as Kurn is, which depresses me to no end. He’s got 4/5 T9 (232), the Crusader’s Dragonscale Breastplate and Bracers (thanks to me), the True-aim Rifle out of H TOC, the staff from regular FoS, a Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 agi, obviously) that I made for him, the 245 ilvl badge ring… Seriously. It makes me sad. Especially because tomorrow, he’ll be giving me a primordial saronite and I’ll craft him Rock-Steady Treads. :(

Our DK buddy has 1/5 T9 (shoulders!) and a 245 sigil, which he was very happy to get, haha. His gear is still pretty low, but he’s at 540 defense and 22k health unbuffed. With some consumables and the random dungeon buff, he gets about 30-31k buffed. His dodge and parry are still pretty low, but I imagine that’ll improve as he gets his other tier pieces.

I’m getting a lot of practice on the druid, both healing and tanking. My Swipe is actually holding aggro and my mana pool and regen are sustaining me fairly well, to the point where I rarely need to drink and can even keep innervating my brother’s hunter.

I was thinking about why I like my druid, earlier tonight. I mean, it’s a tree and it’s a bear. I fit the two most sought-after roles in the game and I’m not horrible at them. I think the utility is really what I enjoy about the toon. I can tank and heal on Madrana too, of course, but I think I really enjoy bear tanking as compared to pally tanking. I think I prefer pally healing to druid healing, but there’s a certain elegance to druid healing that’s lacking on the paladin. I can brute force heal darn near anything on my pally. But I actually have to make decisions on my druid while healing that will have repercussions over the next few seconds, as the health builds up slowly.

That’s completely opposed to pally healing, where I strive to keep everyone topped off at all times, rather than letting Wild Growth heal most people up, because I don’t have much in the way of “set-it-and-forget-it” heals on the pally. I guess that druid healing challenges me a bit more than paladin healing in terms of healing intelligently. Pally healing is characterized for me by long periods of casting the same spell, followed by frantic button mashing to get buffs up, then more of the same.

Anyways. I do still have lots to say about pally stuff, so stay tuned for Holy How-To number 3. :)

… and one day, ICC raid strats. :P

The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 2

Kurn / / facepalm, healing, paladins, ramblings

Welcome to Part 2 of my issues with the current holy edition of The Light and How to Swing It, a column written by Chase Christian at WoW.com. This post will focus primarily on the three articles written thus far by Mr. Christian as well as expound on the reasons why I believe his lack of experience as a holy paladin will be detrimental to the holy paladin community as a whole. If you’d like to read the post I wrote detailing his lack of experience and the apparent false justification Mr. Adam Holisky offered to me regarding Mr. Christian’s appointment to the column, you can do so here.

Continue reading “The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 2”

The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 1

Kurn / / facepalm, healing, paladins, ramblings

Okay. I am not *generally* a bitch. But, sometimes, when properly motivated, I can be very, very good at being a bitch.

In this post, I will discuss the fact that Mr. Chase Christian, better known as the  rogue columnist at WoW.com, got the position of the Holy Paladin columnist as well. Further, I will explain how I feel that the justification used to placate me when I was intially outraged appears to be false.

Continue reading “The Light and How to Swing It — Kurn's Issues, Part 1”

Thinking about spellpower.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I am pretty much a die-hard Holy Light spammer. As such, I stack intellect. I’m happy with my 42k mana pool in raids.

But it means virtually nothing  on the Dreamwalker fight.

So, I’m thinking of pulling out some old gear (and getting the 251 versions of my pants and gloves, which I don’t have yet) and gemming/enchanting entirely for spellpower.

Raid-buffed, I would go from 2883 spellpower to 3205, assuming chardev.org is right. That’s a difference of 322 spellpower. I’d also drop 8000 mana… but regen is not an issue on that fight. And since the “debuff”, Emerald Vigor, means 10% more healing for each stack on you, wouldn’t that mean that every point of spellpower makes a HUGE difference? I’d keep eating haste food, lest I drop below the 1s GCD with JotP up, but I’d flask for spellpower, gem and enchant for spellpower, even using the Ember Skyflare meta for 25 spellpower and 2% intellect, instead of old faithful, the Insightful Earthsiege Diamod (21 int, 600 mana back proc).

Really, it would only require spending badges I should probably spend anyways (to get 4 of my 5 T10 pieces, if only so I can upgrade them to the 264/277 versions later) and some cash to get a bunch of Cardinal Rubies.

I’d need 10 Rubies, 3 Dragon’s Eyes, 1 new meta gem, 1 new helm enchant (+crit instead of +mp5), 1 new shoulder enchant (+crit instead of +mp5), 1 30 spellpower enchant to wrists, 1 28 spellpower enchant to gloves, 1 new spellthread for my pants… ooh, and maybe Purified Lunar Dust, too, which would bump me to 3358 spellpower. Of course, I don’t have the badges for new pants AND new gloves AND a crappy trinket I will never use except on Dreamwalker.

Hm. Maybe I’ll go do a VOA 10 on Madrana and pray T10 holy pants drop, eh? ;D

I’m not sure I’m going to do this, but at least I know I CAN do it and at least I know what it would take in order to do it.

Anyone have thoughts?

Kurn's Tale of the Level 75 Fail Paladin

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, paladins, ramblings

As you may or may not be aware, I’ve been levelling my druid with my brother (and his hunter) and my buddy Majik (and his DK). I’m a bear/tree depending on my spec, but because Majik’s been tanking damn near everything, I’m usually healing (and using my innervate on my brother, haha!).

Last week, before I got seriously sick with the plague, Majik and I ran a Drak’Tharon Keep.

In the group: the two of us plus a mage, a shadow priest and a retribution paladin.

I don’t normally do this, because it’s just plain mean, but the fail is on-going even a week later, so I’m going to name the paladin who is the failest pally in all the world.

His name is Furtor. I’ll link his armory in a sec. But first, I took some screenshots of Furtor’s gear and such.

He was, at the time, level 75.

Way to not place your talents, buddy. That he has 59 points in ret is probably the least bad thing about him. How is that possible? Check out some of his gear.

“Wait, Kurn!” you say. “Those aren’t terrible bracers. Those are actually okay.”

Yes. You’re right. Too bad he REPLACED THEM with the Darkweb Bindings he won on the run.

And, for the grand finale…

Just inspecting him made me want to cry. And then I armoried him. 1 each in Mining and JC. 2 major glyphs that suck and 0 minor glyphs. The dude was pulling 700 DPS at most at any point in time, compared to the mage and the shadow priest, who were around his level, pulling 1200-1400 DPS. Not that numbers are everything, but in this case? They were a GREAT indication of the level of nubness going on with Furtor. He is, in all respects, an amazing example of how NOT to be a paladin… particularly because his armory now shows him in much the same gear but he’s exchanged his crappy 2H of Intellect for a 1H melee sword and a spellpower shield.

Anyways, I hope to have another Holy How-To post coming up this weekend or Monday and I definitely have another tale of what I consider to be paladin failure, which I’ll share Saturday or Sunday.

Valithria Dreamwalker

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

Well, I’m back to raiding. I took Sunday night and Monday night off, then showed up on Wednesday and was feeling okay, if a little worn out. I was feeling much better on Thursday when the raid began, though. We raided for 3 full hours, killing the blood princes and then cleared to Dreamwalker (killing a sort of a miniboss in there? I got an extra Emblem of Frost from some damn mob).

I was both totally prepared and not remotely prepared for the Valithria Dreamwalker fight.

Under the Totally Prepared umbrella, we have:

– Glyph of Seal of Light (instead of my typical Glyph of Seal of Wisdom – although I brought an extra one of those, too, obviously, to reglyph back to my regularly scheduled awesomeness)

– Libram of Tolerance (instead of my typical Libram of Renewal, although I’m thinking of picking up the ilvl 226 Libram of the Resolute)

Under the Totally NOT Prepared umbrella, we have:

– no spellpower flasks or elixirs

– bad flying coordination inside the portals to stack the buff effectively

– bad timing inside the portals to ensure the buff wouldn’t fall off between portals

– had no idea how freaking often the damn portals SPAWN

– had no idea what the best way to TARGET the stupid dragon was

I realized on my first attempt (the guild has already done Dreamwalker on both 10/25, but I missed out on the 25 due to being sick and the 10 by virtue of being sick and hating 10s) that targetting the dragon was going to be a problem.

“… target the dragon with your mouse, Kurn, then spam Holy Light. WTF.”

I know. I did that for my first attempt. It was very poor. I was trying to judge mobs to keep Judgements of the Pure up (ahahahaha, forget THAT nonsense in the freaking chaos) and all the time I lost in switching targets and also in switching targets back to Dreamwalker meant I was getting frustrated as crap.

“So… use a focus, Kurn. Geez, this isn’t rocket science.”

Well, that’s exactly what I did on my second attempt. (We had 9 wipes before getting her down… up?? on the 10th.) Except that HEY, focus targets that you’re focused on in one phased area VANISH if they’re not targettable in another phase!

So not only is Dreamwalker not sitting there on my Grid, but the focus mechanic is basically useless to me, right?

Third attempt, I made a macro.

/focus Valithria Dreamwalker

Then I edited my Clique frames to include my ShadowedUF Focus frame (I use ShadowedUF) as well as my Grid frames. So all my happy Clique bindings now worked on my focus frame. I dropped my macro someplace useful on my bars and would hit that as soon as I came out of every portal phase and went back to my regular Holy Light bombing.

At that point, having gotten the mechanics of healing the great damn dragon in front of me down properly, I turned my attention to not sucking at getting green orbs.

The most stacks I had at any point was about 16, and that was twice in all of our attempts. In other words, I FAIL REAL GUD. I was getting better at getting a quick rebuff once I was back inside the portals, but if I didn’t have at LEAST 3 seconds left on the buff before zoning back into the portal, I was screwed.

And, on our final (successful) attempt of the night (yes, Apotheosis, the Infamous Last Attempt is not just a phenomenon that happens to us!), some dick ninjaed my portal from me at one point, leaving me to deal with this thing called “regular mana regen” for a full portal phase. Ugh!

I’m seriously considering buying the 251 level versions of two more pieces of tier and gemming/enchanting them with spellpower, along with chunks of T9 and other old gear, so that I basically have a spellpower set specifically for Dreamwalker. I’m going to have to sit down with my gear in my bank and figure out if that’s at all possible, but I’m thinking that it can’t be a bad thing to try to boost my spellpower for that fight.

Oh, the best part about the Dreamwalker fight? 9% overhealing.

I don’t remember the last time I saw that number. Ever.

Circle of Healers #2 – The Follow-up

Kurn / / healers, healing, paladins, ramblings

Totally forgot that Saunder posted a follow-up to Miss Medicina’s original surveyish post and her recent post in response to Saunder reminded me it was something I needed to post, too! :) I snagged all six of Saunder’s questions and the two additional ones from MM.

1. Reread your original answers to the questions. With the benefit of hindsight, score your own work in terms of its cringeworthyness.

Eh, I’m not horrified by my previous responses. I don’t use Lay on Hands enough, though — and I hadn’t mentioned it at ALL in my previous post. I think I probably forgot it existed for a few minutes when writing the original answer for “least used” healing spell.

2. Has your healing improved in the area you identified as your weakest?

Not a whole lot, really, but there’s not a lot I CAN do about my lack of heals on the move and my lack of group heals. But I have pulled some huge numbers on Blood Queen attempts that just remind me that I’m usually at my best with a persistent damage aura going. It means that the tank and OT both benefit from my direct heals (well, one of them with Beacon) and the melee benefit from my Glyph of Holy Light splashes. It’s always fun to see huge numbers.

3. Have you changed your ‘least favoured class to heal with’?

Nope. Still don’t like healing on my shaman. I don’t feel any more powerful than I do on my paladin, even though I can chain heal four people at once versus dropping a 20k heal on a single person.

But apparently, this was meant to be “what other class do you not enjoy healing alongside you on your healer?”

Four months or so ago, I would have probably said a disc priest. Not that I don’t like them, but because I had my doubts that, in a 10-man, a disc priest and a holy paladin would have been able to get through Saurfang together. But then I did that in December or early January and it wasn’t just “fine”, it was “great”. So I guess maybe a second holy paladin would be my answer now. ALL FOUR other classes/specs that heal regularly have better raid-healing capabilities than I do as a holy paladin.

4. Did you read the entries from others in the webring, especially your class?

I did indeed! And still traipse through other entries if I’m bored. :)

5. If Yes to #4, did you learn anything that made you a better healer?

Not with regards to pally stuff, I don’t think (it’s been a while!) but I think I remember a priest writing about using Holy Nova to heal while on the run, which I thought was freaking brilliant and have used that when moving on my little 72 disc priest.

6. What tools/resources or information do you think you would need to improve as a healer and how could that help the community at large?

Maybe the ability for the combat log to record locations of people, movement and stoppage in movement. I love WorldOfLogs and love that they can show us the breakdown over time, show us combat log snippets… but it really doesn’t show us where we are in relation to others. That’s the one thing that I’ve really, REALLY wanted to see and it’s not a failing of WoL’s, because the combat log just doesn’t record that information at the moment. I think it would be GREAT for the community, though, if only to see where people are standing during fights, when they move as a group, singly, etc.

7. What did you identify as your worst habit as a healer? Have you improved in this area?

I said it was my cross-healing. To be honest, it’s not that I’ve necessarily improved in this area, but I am EASILY the healer in my guild who cross-heals the least. So I look good because other people are worse than I’ve ever been.

8. What did you list as your favorite healing spell and your least used healing spell for your class? Are these answers still true? If they have changed, what caused the change (i.e. patch fix, different healing environment, etc)?

Still a sucker for Holy Shock, but I’m using it less often now. I swapped to the Glyph of Beacon of Light from the Glyph of Holy Shock, but I’m debating getting the new libram and going BACK to Glyph of Holy Shock. The least-used (well, we’ll imagine I said Lay on Hands for that)… still don’t use it nearly enough, but I’ve used it on at least two Putricide kills, so even if I never use it again, I used it when it counted, at least twice. :)

Seriously.

Kurn / / paladins, raiding, ramblings

I have like, six posts I want to write, including one about the utter fail of a certain holy paladin, now that I’ve seen his armory and LACK of any pre-BC or BC-related rep. (Plus some questionable spec and glyph-related issues.)

But I’m still sick. I’m actually not even going to raid tonight, that’s how worn out I am. And I think the guild is doing the Dreamwalker fight. :(

Holy How-To #2 – Spells and Abilities

Kurn / / guide, holy how-to (wrath), paladins

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the second 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, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Today’s post or, more accurately, today’s novel, is about what our role is in PVE content as holy paladins and how to fulfill it. That’s to say, it’s about keeping the people around you alive long enough so that your group or raid can survive the incoming damage long enough to down the boss.

“But Kurn,” you say, “I already know how to heal! I use Flash of Light for small heals, Holy Light for big heals and Holy Shock when I move!”

And that’s a start, young padawan. But it’s quite a bit more than just that.
Continue reading “Holy How-To #2 – Spells and Abilities”

Stuff to say!

Kurn / / paladins, ramblings

I have a bunch of stuff to say and it’s going to take me a heck of a long time to say most of it, but I hope to have an epic-length post with regards to paladin stuff by the morning. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I have taught approximately 6 tanks in the last three days how to deal with Pound or Dark Smash. /sigh. What makes me curious is how on earth none of them realize that being stunned or taking insane amounts of damage isn’t a BAD thing. I mean, I asked this tank to run through Anub’arak today after he was stunned after the first pound and he’s like “kk” and he did. I don’t think he understood why, though. How is this game so very difficult for people to understand? :( There are some basic concepts about people’s roles in the game that just don’t seem to be getting through to people.

Sigh.

Anyways, more holy pally-specific stuff to come. And I do think there is a need for some holy pally-specific stuff out there, based on some stuff I’ve seen recently.

Off to go play in TOC/TOGC 25. Hooray?