Category: paladins

Maybe ignorance IS bliss / Divine Plea offsets

Kurn / / druids, dungeons, healing, icecrown citadel, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I admit it. I remain almost entirely ignorant when it comes to the Blood Prince Council fight. And yet…

Basically, I heal the living crap out of my target while having a beacon on another tanking person and stay away from anything I see that is obviously bad.

And I get an achievement for my ignorance and I beat out the other holy pally on the meters, even though he used Judgement of Light, haha!

Speaking of numbers, I really have to remind myself, frequently, that meters suck. It’s kind of hard not to put faith in them, though, when you’re doing well. ;D Honestly, it just means that people weren’t healing my target and sniping my heals. I know that. But it looks so pretty! I mean, look at this from an attempt on Blood Queen Lana’thel!

Truthfully, I have to say that the two-piece Tier 10 bonus for holy paladins has changed my entire playstyle.

It is this:

While your Divine Illumination talent is active, your heals are 35% stronger.

I have a keybound macro to take advantage of that. Shift-S pops Divine Illumination and then Divine Plea. So I’m at 85% of my ability instead of 50%. This almost certainly means a tank will not die when I pop Divine Plea. Not only that, but everything is super cheap to cast! AND I’m regenerating mana?! Hi, two-piece, I love you. Marry me.

I generally pop it when I realize my mana is at about 60-65%, will probably refresh Beacon and Sacred Shield and continue spamming merrily along. Then when Divine Plea is up again, I’m usually down to about 35-40% of my mana. So I pop Divine Plea with the Talisman of Resurgence to offset it. So instead of healing for 12-13k, I’m healing for around 10k. Totally worth it.

Then, next time Divine Plea comes up, I still have Avenging Wrath if I really can’t wait another minute for Divine Illumination to be up again. Instead of 12-13k, I’m healing for about 8k. Less worth it, but it’s better than not having any mana, particularly in a situation where I can’t melee to regen or can’t even spare the globals to judge in the hopes of a Seal of Wisdom proc.

Thinking about it, I should probably pop DivIll/Divine Plea around 70% mana to ensure that I CAN wait a little between DP coming off cooldown and using my trinket and then waiting for Divine Illumination to come back up after DP comes back up after using the trinket with it.

Anyways. Healing meters are bad and I feel like a bad player for not really caring enough to know the details of the Blood Prince Council fight and I should adjust my Divine Plea usage just a wee bit.

Oh, and in brief other news, Maj, my brother and I pretty much ruin Old Kingdom, Drak’Tharon and Violet Hold. No kidding, my brother does leet hunter DPS after a quick respec. And Maj got a couple of upgrades today to render him uncrittable by a boss 3 levels higher than him. And my tree got nothing except experience, which is fine. I’m level 76 now. And totally out of rested! WOE IS ME, people. WOE.

… I need to stop posting stuff at 6-7am.

Haha?

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

Okay, I clearly need to look at the logs in depth, but, uh, this amused the living crap out of me.

Basically, those graphs show me doing over 8k effective HPS, over 12k raw HPS over the course of a 1m 23s attempt on Queen Lana’thel. The first graph shows me, then the resto druid and a resto shammy. The table shows me, the druid, the shammy, the RET pally (JoL), the other resto druid, the SHADOW priest (VE) and the other holy paladin.

Sure, it doesn’t matter because we all died real fast. But damn me, how hilarious is that? :D

Edit:

Bwahaha, look at these numbers! I got seriously lucky with my timing. Look at the utter lack of overheal in this 8 second snippet. I was healing the bear tank with my beacon on the warrior tank.

[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1414
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +0 (O: 1333)
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1413
[23:40:55.005] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +12698
[23:40:55.832] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +11768
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1235
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +450 (O: 786)
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1236
[23:40:56.541] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +11768
[23:40:57.455] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +11551
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ebon Gargoyle +0 (O: 1213)
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +1213
[23:40:58.158] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +11551
[23:40:58.687] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +*6481*
[23:40:59.389] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +6481
[23:40:59.612] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +5236
[23:41:00.325] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:01.183] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +*20051*
[23:41:01.183] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +458
[23:41:01.542] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 2 +2106
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light DPS Warrior +2105
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Ret Pally +2106
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Rogue 1 +2105
[23:41:01.713] Madranah Glyph of Holy Light Warrior Tank +2106
[23:41:01.729] Madranah Beacon of Light Warrior Tank +16267 (O: 3784)
[23:41:02.353] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +458
[23:41:02.541] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567
[23:41:02.993] Madranah Holy Light Bear Tank +13362
[23:41:03.257] Madranah Flash of Light Warrior Tank +459
[23:41:03.585] Madranah Flash of Light Bear Tank +567

Left scratching my head…

Kurn / / paladins, ramblings

So, as some of you may be aware, I applied to WoW.com to be their new holy paladin columnist. Today, in their paladin column, The Light and How to Swing It, they announced that Chase Christian had been selected to be the new holy paladin columnist.

This gentleman appears to also be the rogue behind their Encrypted Texts column. It appears, after a little research, that Mr. Christian has levelled a holy paladin because his guild needed one.

Honestly, I don’t think someone who has spent the last X number of years raiding as a rogue is going to be able to do a good job in terms of helping the paladin community with the holy side of things. I have no idea how long he’s had a paladin, but I know that I don’t know all the subtleties of all of my alts. I don’t even know all the subtleties of a hunter. But I’m fairly confident that I know my stuff when it comes to a holy paladin. Much like Mr. Christian probably knows the insides and outs of being a rogue.

Out of curiousity, I listened to a few minutes of the WoW Insider show today after it had been broadcast, as Mr. Christian was a guest. They mentioned that he’ll be writing the new holy paladin column and asked what he thought he would bring to the column.

His reply was something along the lines of “well I don’t know how many times I can say stack intellect in every socket…”

Uh? Sure, most paladins do stack int in every socket. I’m no exception. But there are other raiding holy paladins who don’t stack int — they stack spellpower. They are the Flash of Light spammers who use Seal of Light and its associated Glyph and stack spellpower and basically use that. So you have a Holy Light bombing paladin, stacking int and being responsible for the big incoming heals, and you have the Flash of Light spammer who is responsible for keeping the 1-second FoL heals coming constantly.

Further, what about new-to-80 holy paladins? You can’t just stack intellect the instant you hit 80, or even while levelling. You need to hit about 2000 spellpower first and THEN work on your intellect, or else your heals are just not going to be strong enough to keep your targets up. What does it matter if you have 25,000 mana if your Holy Light doesn’t hit for enough to keep your tank up?

Yes, I realize that Mr. Christian’s comment on the WoW Insider show was likely a joke, but I am not at all convinced that he’s the right person for the job. Maybe I’m not either, but I’ve raided as a holy paladin for all of Burning Crusade and all of Wrath and chunks of pre-BC. I think I know how my class works.

Having said that, what on earth was the point of WoW.com calling for applications for the holy paladin column if they were going to consider an internal candidate? I’m not a business genius, but convention has it, in many businesses, that a job goes around internally first, then external applicants get their shot.

I have no idea how many people applied to the holy paladin column, but let’s imagine (and I think I’m probably low-balling it) that 150 people applied.

That’s 150 people who took the time to sit down and come up with:

– 10 sample topics

– 1 sample article of about 500 words

– 1 pretend letter to Blizzard about their class/spec of about 1000 words

That doesn’t include your background and why you think you’d do a good job.

I spent approximately 4-5 hours on my application, re-reading, re-writing, editing and trying to cut my sample article down from 920 words to 500. (I got it down to 606 and honestly couldn’t snip another word.)

Assume not everyone of those estimated 150 people spent 4-5 hours on their application. Imagine 150 people spent an average of 2 hours on their applications. I don’t think that’s too far-fetched, because you needed approximately 1500 words in terms of sample writing in order to apply.

That’s probably 300-some hours of work. That’s 12 days and 12 hours of work by what I think is an obscenely low number of potential applicants.

So you’re telling me that WoW.com basically wasted two weeks’ of people’s collective time and then decided to get the rogue writer to do the holy paladin column?

Nice.

I’ll read a couple of Mr. Christian’s paladin columns, but if I am not absolutely blown away by his work, I’m going to start going elsewhere for my World of Warcraft news.

In the meantime, look for some holy paladin-specific material to crop up right here.

Random Dungeon Storytime!

Kurn / / facepalm, hunters, lfg, mages, paladins, ramblings, shamans

So last night, after my raid (in which I did awesomely in terms of numbers since I was the only holy paladin in the raid), I did the random heroic on 3.5 toons.

On the paladin, I got Utgarde Pinnacle. Nothing seriously good or bad happened except that an enhancement shammy got flattened by Skadi or whatever his name is and, *while* I’m casting the rez, he’s all “rez plz”.

So I’m like “I was, you know, casting the rez.”

“ty”

And the tank, a gnome DK, was like “U MAD? LOL”

The tank, who was subpar to begin with, got put on ignore after the run. :P

Then poor Kurn got Oculus. >< Not only did I get Oculus, which I desperately was not in the mood for, but the holy paladin healer was a dumbass who clearly does not know how to read chat.

As I do in every random run where there’s one paladin, I hit my Drums of Forgotten Kings macro.

I don’t know. Maybe I should figure out how to actually link the item in the macro. Why? Because after waiting about 15-20 seconds for an acknowledgement or the pally to actually start buffing, neither of which happened, I buffed kings.

The pally, IMMEDIATELY thereafter, started buffing everyone… with 10m kings.

My buffs. Granted, it’s Oculus. And we spend half our time on stupid dragons. But really? Overwriting my 8% kings that has a 30m duration with a 10% kings with 10m? Instead of giving me and the DK and the two feral druids might? Instead of giving him or herself wisdom? And you’ll note there’s Crusader Aura, too. Guess what aura was up THE ENTIRE RUN? That’s right. Crusader Aura.

The paladin met my ignore list right after the run.

Then the shammy healed… Utgarde Pinnacle. Yet again, my tank was a gnome death knight. Apart from no one initially picking up the harpoons, and the mage AND warlock pets pulling unwanted mobs on TWO separate occasions (I let the mage die because of it), it went fairly smoothly.

At this point, I was exhausted and wanted, desperately, to go to bed. But just one more random on my mage for the Emblems of Frost, right? Couldn’t be too bad, right?

Wrong.

I get Halls of Lightning. Eh, better than Halls of Stone, I reason. So I buff everyone, put down a table, put Focus Magic on the resto shammy and we’re off.

We do the first pull and the tank runs down to the second pull and I start casting Blizzard.

“don’t forget to flamestrike and then downrank flamestrike” the resto shammy whispers to me.

“I don’t really use Flamestrike,” I reply.

“you should” he says.

Now hold the phone, here. I’m 57/3/11. That’s an Arcane build. Near as I can figure, along with WoWWiki, talents which improve Flamestrike’s damage are:

Ignite, which I don’t have

Critical Mass, which I don’t have

Fire Power, which I don’t have

Pyromaniac, which I don’t have

So is there any reason for me to cast not one, but two ranks of Flamestrike with 0 fire talents benefitting it when I can just cast Blizzard? Blizzard has, near as I can figure, three talents in the Frost tree that directly benefit it, and only two of them benefit its damage. Improved Blizzard doesn’t increase damage, but adds a chill to it. Piercing Ice would give me 6% more damage to Blizzard and Arctic Winds (which I can’t seem to link to from the talent name, for some reason, but is at http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=31678 ) would give me 5% more damage to Blizzard.

Ignite gives me 40% more damage if I crit, I’d get 6% more chance to crit from Critical Mass, I’d do 10% more damage from Fire Power and 3% more chance to crit from Pyromaniac. So shouldn’t I just cast Blizzard? I miss out on 11% damage from Frost talents vs. 10% damage from Fire talents, but I miss out on Ignite and the extra crit chance to help proc Ignite if I cast Flamestrike.

Basically, is it just me, or did the resto shammy think I was a FFB mage?

Since I hadn’t (and still haven’t fully) done my research, I just stopped responding, but he kept it up. I told him that I was just playing to have fun, get my badges. “but thats why your last” he said. I checked my recount. I was, indeed, doing less damage than the rest of the DPS. But really, this is my 4th 80, who has been 80 for less than a month. Do I really care?

“Dude,” I responded, “this is my 4th 80. I really, REALLY don’t care.”

Shortly thereafter, we had a death in the group. One of the DPS died on a pack pre-first boss. Well, we then accidentally (?) pulled the CHARGED boss. So we had a pack of trash, PLUS the boss and his adds.

Other DPS dies.

I start focusing the adds, being that I’m the only DPS still alive. The resto shammy is typing, all in caps “RUN BACK RUN BACK” and the DPS are basically just lying there. “after the boss dies” they said. Apparently, they didn’t understand that it was POSSIBLE that the boss WOULD NOT DIE if they didn’t run back.

So it takes something like five minutes. And the resto shammy wants us to WIPE so that the dead DPS don’t “get a free badge”. So he actually RUNS AWAY from me and the tank and doesn’t heal the tank for the last 40-some seconds of the fight. Well, over the course of the five minutes, I used 2 mana gems, an evocation and a mana potion and we finally got the boss down, no thanks to the resto shammy.

So he’s all like “i’m not rezzing you” to the dead people and I just snapped at him.

“Dude, you’re just a dick,” I said.

“says the fail mage,” he replies.

“Fuck you, buddy,” I said, then left the group, putting him on ignore. I don’t normally give people the opportunity to report me for even something as minor as profanity, but my patience was at an end.

In all fairness, perhaps I am a fail mage. Perhaps I SHOULD be using two ranks of Flamestrike or whatever on AOE. I honestly don’t know. But that guy was my definition of a jackass. Everything he said set me on edge, his suggestion to WIPE on the first boss was ridiculous and clearly he’s a nimrod if he wants to NOT heal his tank so that he can better facilitate his stupid wipe idea. I also think he’s a bad healer for letting two of his DPS die, but hey, if the DPS dies, it’s their own damn fault, usually.

So I left the group, ignored him and logged off and went to bed. :P

And now I’m doing research to figure out what my AOE spell should be. Clearly, Arcane Explosion is a deathwish, since I wear cloth. :P

And this post from Critical QQ says I should use Blizzard. Granted, the post is 9 months old.  Eh, I’ll figure it out.

So those were yesterday’s randoms. I hope today’s will be less interesting.

Confession Time

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

I have a confession to make.

The guild my paladin is in requires BigWigs as a boss mod. I mean, they require Omen, oRA and BigWigs, and Grid/Clique if you’re a healer. That’s it. Not terribly stringent requirements, since I already had Omen, oRA and Grid/Clique.

I had never downloaded BigWigs, continuing to rely on my old favourite, Deadly Boss Mods. I resisted BW for a very long time because… well, they do the same damn thing. I still prefer DBM, to be honest, but I have to say that BigWigs definitely has useful tools to ensure you see that you’re standing in fire, poison, etc, that you’re standing too close to others on a fight where range matters…

But I downloaded BigWigs because, at some point last week, half the guild was like “crap, my BW is out of date”. And I thought, well, I should probably install it and run it simultaneously with DBM so I can get used to the BW sounds/warnings while not screwing up because I know how to react to my DBM warnings.

So, there we were, about to pull Saurfang on Wednesday, when I heard this noise and wondered what on EARTH this infernal pinging was. It had to be BigWigs, I reasoned, because it certainly wasn’t part of the fight. It sounded like I was on a submarine and we had sonar going and we were tracking other ships or torpedoes or something.

And then I saw it. A little square box had cropped up and had as its contents the list of people in my raid that I was 9 yards or less away from.

I stepped back two paces.

Silence. And a little smiley face in the range box.

Okay, I admitted to myself, an audio tool for range can really come in handy in a number of places.

Some of the warnings are a little too harsh — the screen shaking, the audio AND flashing colours, combined with raid warnings and such can make it a little confusing. But all of that is customizable.

I love my DBM. I really do. I think it’s a fine piece of craftsmanship. But I’m going to be running  both from now on, because BW just has that something extra. Plus, it was invaluable to me and my guild back in Hyjal because it would announce the types of mobs in the upcoming waves, and good ol’ Football (melee DPS officer) would call out assignments on the fly. “Shack 2, spell reflect casters, pally tank pick ’em up, warriors pull one each off him for kill targets.”

Apart from anything else, BW saved my ass twice on Thursday alone. Once, I was the person Rotface spewed his slime at — and it told me when I was targetted and not when he was done casting. And the second time was because I was TOTALLY healing my ass off and I almost got blown up by a slime. I would have been killed if I hadn’t run away, like a little girl, when my screen turned blue and shook violently, thanks to BW.

Having said that, I genuinely hope that the majority of the players in the raids DO NOT have BW installed. Why? Because they miss even the obvious things like range issues. If they actually did have BW installed, would they not NOTICE the big slime is going to explode? Would they not NOTICE that their computer is beeping at them because they’re in range of 8 other people? If they do have it installed and are still missing most of these warnings… I just don’t even have words.

By the way, you should definitely download DeadlyBossMods or BigWigs if you don’t run a boss mod addon.

Briefly, in other news, I’ve managed to outheal the other holy pally. Finally. He has this stupid tendency to judge light, CONSTANTLY. I mean, all the time. Even with ret pallies in the raid. But tonight, he didn’t judge light (no idea why) AND I got the following Rotface assignment:

– Beacon the MT, heal infected players

I even outhealed my RL friend, the resto druid/healing lead. The only person I didn’t outheal was the disc priest, and half of his effective “healing” was casting PW:Shield on people. I don’t normally get caught up in the numbers, but DAMN, did it feel good to finally not have all my heals totally sniped! I usually just focus on keeping my target up, which is usually the MT or OT, and keeping my beacon up on the other of them, but I’ve noticed that the other holy pally will tend to beacon his target and raid heal, unless he’s specifically told to place his beacon on someone else. (And then he’ll usually judge light.)

So now I know that I don’t totally suck and confirms my suspicions that the only reason I’m “so low” on the meters (which suck anyways) is because of assignment. My RL friend knows I won’t deviate from my assignment except for quick spot heals, so she gives me the job of primarily keeping the tanks up by virtue of direct heals and beacon.  And I do enjoy it, except that all the healers are also tossing heals on the tanks — the other holy pally (via beacon if not direct heals), my RL friend rolling hots, the priests dropping POM, Renew, using Penance and shields, the shammies with ES and Riptide and chaining off the tanks and melee… So, it’s very rare that I have high effective healing or show up huge on the numbers. Which is fine. It’s just nice to see for myself that a small change in assignments can bring out those numbers and I AM capable of doing them, when asked to do so.

Wow.

Kurn / / dungeons, hunters, paladins, ramblings, world events

The mind boggles. I just tanked Heroic Halls of Reflection, not using the wussy LOS strat, with a total pug. My healer was a priest who still had blues.

And we didn’t wipe. No one died. Everyone worked together as a team.

Granted, we then did the wussy ledge strat for the escape bit, but considering how well they’d done on Falric and Marwyn, I didn’t complain too much. They deserved an easy run.

Good to see some people still know how to use their class abilities.

Also, I got BB King on my hunter! Coming soon, a video of the event, because I frapsed it. :)

Another 80 and some musings.

Kurn / / dungeons, general, hunters, mages, paladins, ramblings, shamans

Well, the mage is 80 and it’s led me to some thinking about my alts and how I play this game.

My first toon, forever my “main”, even if I don’t raid with it, was Kurnmogh and I love my hunter all day long. Kurn and I have been through it all together. But sometime in there, I rolled a bank alt toon, which ended up being a human female paladin, named Madrana. Levelling Madrana (as holy!), back in the day, was a welcome reprieve from farming Essence of Air out in Silithus, which is basically what I’d do on Kurn when I wasn’t raiding or couldn’t get a guild group to go to Strat UD (my favourite instance) or UBRS (for my bloody T0 chestpiece!).

Madrana got to be a pretty awesome healer, pre-BC, even if most of her heals were Flash of Light and I didn’t understand half the mechanics of a pally.

Burning Crusade launched and my brother rolled a human warrior on a PVP server, where some of his RL friends played on Horde side. His goal: to level up and kick their asses. I know, my brother is a dork. So he calls me up when he’s level six or so and is like “I NEED A HEALER COME HEAL ME!”

Having already levelled a healer to 60, there was no way I was going to do it again (haha, I was so sure back then…) so he encouraged me to roll up a DPS class. And so my mage was born. I hit 30 and then discovered the utter chaos of Southshore on a PVP server. So I left Darkspear and brought the mage “home” to Eldre’Thalas — and my brother brought his warrior over.

At some point during this time, I also rolled a shammy, who would eventually be Katarah, but she started life as Shockra. I know, horrible name, eh?

I got the hunter, pally and mage up to 70 in BC but ignored the shammy.

In Wrath, I got the hunter, pally, shammy up to 80 and then got the priest going. And I’m getting a druid up there, too. :P

I think that, for the most part, playing my alts (not necessarily levelling them, but playing them) is my break from my raiding “job”. I raid 12 hours or so a week on Madrana and I heal, so it’s work. I like to get Kurn into whatever raids I can because I like to take pride in my hunter and I like to see how I’m doing compared to people playing their toons full time.

I got the shammy up because I wanted to understand healing better, from a shammy perspective. I’m not quite sure that I do, but I definitely know that I can’t DPS worth a damn on the shammy. ;)

And then I started playing the mage, for fun. And with the advent of 3.3 and the dungeon finder, I was having a BLAST going through instances on my mage. True, there was usually a wait, but I loved learning these stupid instances again from the perspective of a pure caster. I’ve sheeped things! I’ve provided food! I’ve buffed intellect! Good times.

Now that there are the four 80s (whose recent achievements are on the right over there… the order is Madrana, Kurn, the shammy and the mage), with a fifth to level by Cataclysm (stupid druid), I have plans.

Madrana is saving her Emblems of Frost for tier gear, first and foremost. Kurn, meanwhile, is upgrading via Emblem of Frost gear from the vendor, not going for tier armor yet, because hey, I don’t have access to the marks that drop in ICC.

Kurn is also my leatherworker, so after enough rep runs and such, I should be honored with Ashen Verdict and be able to buy patterns for various boots — boots that I’ll use on Kurn, the shammy AND Madrana, probably, because the crafted plate boots just aren’t as good as the crafted caster mail boots.

So how to fund the purchase of Primordial Saronite and such? Simple. The shammy and the mage will be using their Emblems of Frost for Primordial Saronite and finish gearing themselves up with Emblems of Triumph.

Both of them should get 19 Emblems of Frost a week, assuming no ICC runs, until the new VOA boss comes out (Tuesday?) at which point they’ll get 21 a week, one would presume. It’ll be slow, but at least I won’t have to spend 3000g on a single Primordial Saronite. I don’t know how many the shammy has, atm, but I’m pretty sure I’m into the 40s, so I’ll have enough to purchase the patterns as soon as Kurn hits honored.

So that’s the plan.

Also, I’m 18/0/53 on the mage. I’ve glyphed for Frostbolt, so it no longer slows (!) but causes 5% more damage, and I have Focus Magic and Torment the Weak (which I really didn’t understand, but TOTALLY do now — everything is a damn slow! Go go TTW!!). The mage’s achievements are hilarious, because I’m a brand-new 80, so everything I do is an achievement. Got a dungeon/raid emblem, achievement. Didn’t use the defense crystals in VH, achievement. Etc, etc. It cracks me up.

Happy new year, everyone. Looks to be an exciting year in terms of WoW. :D

It's a Winter Veil Miracle!

Kurn / / paladins, ramblings

Madrana actually got to heal something today when I queued for the random heroic!

Granted, it was Halls of Lightning and the DPS warrior and the mage kept stealing aggro from the DK tank and so they kept dying, but I actually got to heal a heroic! After queuing as a tank AND a healer!

The mind boggles.

In other news, it appears that after I submitted my guides to healing, tanking, DPSing and not failing at H-HoR to TenTonHammer, there has been some feedback and it’s looking mostly positive. I probably could have written them a bit better, but most of them were written while I was in queue for randoms on a DPS class. ;) So if you’re here because you followed the links from TenTonHammer, welcome! I hope you’ll stick around. :)

In yet other news, apparently people read this blog and did so before the links from TenTonHammer appeared. Colour me shocked. :) Saunder, over at Non-Squishy Heals, apparently takes issue with my request to paladins to use Greater Blessings, in lieu of cheap 10-minute buffs.

First off, wow, someone actually read my blog who wasn’t one of my old guildies or one of my old healers. Honestly, this is the most shocking thing of all. I’ve spent the last year or so writing into the ether and never even considered that other people would really read me. I think it’s because of Miss Medicina‘s not-really-a-meme-meme that I did back in October. Anyways, I digress.

Saunder gets pissy with me for requesting greater blessings. Here’s what I wrote in his comment section:

My primary issue (and reason for essentially telling people to use greater blessings) is that not everyone is as observant as you are. Most pallies I’ve been running with have given out 10m blessings that they let fall off. Frequently. If they buff at all.

If you’re willing to maintain buffs for the 20-25 minutes most random heroics last, good for you. I’m more addressing the players who don’t know what they’re doing and who will let a kings buff vanish, never to be seen again, after 10 minutes is up.

Personally, I just like to buff the once (assuming no deaths/wipes) and be done with it, but I suppose that really boils down to personal preference. I don’t yell at people to buff me with greaters, but I will nag if they fall off or I’m not rebuffed after a death.

Here’s the thing, though… I don’t get why anyone would buff 10-minute blessings when they could be doing 30-minute Greater blessings. Of course, if you’re the pally and I’m not, it’s up to you, so long as I always get your buff. Then I won’t gripe, I won’t complain, I certainly don’t bitch.

But even when levelling, while soloing on my paladin, I give myself greater blessings.

So, if indeed there are any paladins reading this thing, what do you think? Do you give out greater blessings in pugs or are you vigilant, like Saunder, and keep refreshing the 10-minute versions? And, most importantly, what are your reasons why?

(Also, if anyone would like to mention how they found this little blog of mine, assuming I was never guilded with you in the past, I’d love to know!)

Heroic Violet Hold and… tank failure?

Kurn / / paladins, ramblings, tanks

So today, I tanked Heroic Violet Hold on my paladin for the random heroic.

No one died. There was a moment or two of concern when we were dealing with the kiting boss, whose name I can never remember, but by and large, I held aggro. And people lived. My healer was never in danger.

And yet, after Cyanigosa died, one of the members of the group (I can’t even remember the class type) told me that I had the worst threat of any pally in my gear they’d ever seen. Then they left the group before I could even go “I’m holy, 95% of the time”.

So, even though the rest of the group laughed and said I did fine, I’m sitting here wondering what, exactly, I did wrong.

It’s true, my spec isn’t maxed for threat. So I could fix that. I could also tab-target more and stack more Seal of Vengeance on various mobs, but if they’re being AOEd down faster than I can stack the debuff, does that matter?

I’m dropping Consecrate whenever I can. I’m also using Hammer of the Righteous on cooldown. Judging Light. Keeping Holy Shield up for the mitigation and the threat.

On single-targets, I’m pretty much fine. I way out-threat most people on Omen without even trying. I suppose it’s just the groups of mobs. If we were all focused on one target (my target) and assisting me for the others, there wouldn’t be a threat issue. The issue stems from people AOEing or not focusing on my target.

So as a tank, am I to spread my threat around beyond passive abilities like Consecrate, Holy Shield and even Retribution Aura? Or am I to expect that good group members will follow my target?

Or, what if I’m really just that bad? Should I then remove myself from the tanking role in the queue and focus on healing, which is what I do best anyways? I could. But would that serve the larger community, to remove a not-terrible tank from the pool of available tanks that seems to shrink every single day?

The way I see it, hybrids who don’t have at least one of their specs dedicated to tanking or healing are fail. They should have rolled a pure DPS class. Paladins can be melee DPS, tanks or healers. Shammies can be melee DPS, ranged DPS or healers. Priests can be ranged DPS, tank healers or group healers. Druids can be melee DPS, ranged DPS, tanks and healers. Warriors and DKs can be melee DPS or tanks.

All the healers CAN be DPS. All the tanks CAN be DPS. And since DPS is basically the easiest job with the least amount of responsibility and, one can argue, the most fun, a lot of hybrids choose to be DPS.

Which is fine.

What I find NOT fine is that, in this day and age of dual-specs, hybrids STILL aren’t tanking or healing. It’s not *that* hard, it’s just different from what you’re used to doing. And with the new dungeon tool, it’s easy to find a group so you can practice. Just make sure you won’t die in three hits if you’re tanking or run out of mana after one group of trash mobs if you’re a healer, and you’re good to go.

So the way I see it, by entering the queue as both a healer AND a tank, I’m doing my job as a hybrid. I’m not entering it as a DPS, which is the most common kind of player available, but as the two most sought-after roles. So… if people live and I hold aggro pretty much the whole time, even if my threat output isn’t amazing, does that mean that I shouldn’t enter as a tank at all?

That said, I clearly need to analyze my threat output and I guess try to stick to the 96969 rotation better.

Stupid perfectionistic tendencies…