Category: raiding

Kurn's Q&A #8

Kurn / / dungeons, general, healers, paladins, priests, q&a, raiding, ramblings

All righty, let’s take a look at some of the search terms that brought people here that I know I haven’t adequately answered, shall we?

1) argent dawn howto 999

I’m going to guess you want to become 999/1000 exalted with the Argent Dawn? The best way to do this is to run Scholomance, Strat Live and Strat UD over and over again. And equip your Argent Dawn Commission or your Seal of the Dawn or your Rune of the Dawn. Scourgestone turn-ins are huge. Also take advantage of the quests at Light’s Hope Chapel. Here’s a great list of ways to gain rep with the Argent Dawn over at WoWWiki.

2) divinity seal of light

I would imagine, although I haven’t verified this, that yes, the 5% extra healing from Seal of Light stacks with the 5% extra healing due to Divinity. I’m pretty sure it works, but I haven’t re-glyphed/respecced to figure out if that’s working.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, I was wrong!

I normally run with Seal of Wisdom on along with Glyph of Seal of Wisdom, so I don’t usually have the opportunity to see what my extra healing is like with Glyph of Seal of Light — except on Dreamwalker. But, uh, that fight is hilarious when it comes to comparing numbers. My Lay on Hands crit for 131k at one point, so that’s not the best time to make comparisons.

3) does 10 man onyxia give frost badges

Nope. The only instances to drop frost badges (technically Emblems of Frost) are ICC25 (2 badges per boss, 1 badge for the miniboss), ICC10 (same as ICC25) and VOA 10/25 where ONLY Toravon drops 2 Frost Badges each. Onyxia, in both raid sizes, will only drop two Emblems of Triumph.

4) does shadowmeld clear debuff on sindragosa

Okay, let’s talk about what debuffs you mean. If it’s Chilled to the Bone or Instability, the very act of not doing anything for a little while will clear the debuff. If you’re talking Mystic Buffet, then no — the only thing that will clear that debuff is getting out of Sindragosa’s line of sight. I would imagine, though my paladin is a human so I can’t test it out, that if you’re not out of line of sight of her, you’ll still take a stack when she casts it.

5) how do i dps in dungeons assist warrior

These days, lots of tanks just go into a dungeon, pull the whole group and use their AOE abilities to hold aggro. Hell, I do this. I rarely switch targets when tanking on both my paladin and my druid and this, my friends, makes me a fail tank. I SHOULD be switching targets and trying to get more aggro on each target individually. But I don’t because, nine times out of ten, it’s just not needed.

Because so many tanks do this, it’s generally safe to target your tank and assist them (the F key, by default) and focus on THAT target for DPS. Please always do watch your threat meter, though. Pulling aggro is your fault, even if your tank sucks. Moderating your damage output is entirely within your control, even if that means you just plain stop attacking or you wait five seconds for your tank to secure aggro.

6) holy paladin requirements for icecrown citadel

Ooh, good question! I guess it depends on if you’re doing 10 or 25-man, but here’s what I would recommend.

– 4pc T9 (ilvl 232, minimum)

– 232 weapon/shield at minimum

– 245 or better helm/belt/bracers/boots (Onyxia, crafting, BOEs)

– 226/232/245 + rings/neck

In terms of stats, for a Holy Light paladin, I would strongly recommend somewhere around 2350-2500 spellpower, 28k mana unbuffed and at least 650 haste.

Key trinket pickups before you go: Talisman of Resurgence from Triumph badges, either Pandora’s Plea from Mimiron in Ulduar or Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 int) or the Tears of the Vanquished from regular 5-man TOC.

7) how to make grid beacon of light 60 yard range

I’m presuming here that you want to have Grid show someone within Beacon of Light range, right? I’ve been trying to play with range fading on my Grid (pro tip: doing so RIGHT BEFORE your guild pulls Sindragosa is NOT the right time to do so!). I’ll post here when I’ve played with it adequately. Ideally, I’d like to have those in 40yd range of me to appear with full opacity, those at 60yd range to be about 75% opacity and those any further to be about 50% opacity. Or something along those lines.

8) is there a macro addon which accounts for global cooldown

If you mean, is there a way I can do something so that I can have two abilities on the GCD in the same macro and just hit that macro once…. no. There is the “/in” function but it doesn’t work for something on the GCD. I’ve always used it for announces.

9) wow icc disc vs holy

There are several fights that will use both disc priests and holy priests very well throughout ICC. It really depends on the rest of your group makeup. If you have a holy paladin or two, you’ll want to be holy. If you have no holy pallies, you’ll want to be disc and focus on single-target healing and raid-wide mitigation. The instance has several fights that play to the strengths of both types of priests. :)

10) wow paladin how to behave in dungeons

Lesson the first: BUFF PEOPLE. A general guide to who wants what buff:

– might: rogues, DPS death knights, ret paladins, feral (kitty) druids

– kings: everyone else

Why? Because might, even unimproved might, is 550 AP. In order for kings to give that much attack power, DKs and ret pallies need to have over 2250 strength in order for the 10% bonus on that to be 225 extra agi/strength, which is 550 AP for them. Rogues and kitty druids only get 1AP per agi, so they’d need 5500 agility in order for kings to be better than even unimproved might.

What about hunters and enhancement shammies? Both gain additional attack power from intellect, through Careful Aim and Mental Quickness. Plus, the extra agility will give them both more crit as well. Survival hunters also gain an extra 10% of their stamina as attack power. On my hunter, unbuffed, I have:

2183 agility

605 intellect

1352 stamina

So kings will afford me 413 more attack power. But also another 2.6% crit just from the extra agility. And because, as survival, my crits proc Replenishment and various other abilities, crits are good. :)

DPS warriors can put up Battle Shout (equivalent to might) so kings them and they can buff with Battle Shout. You should also kings prot warriors, obviously.

What else? As a paladin, be aware of who can cleanse what. If you’re in, say, Old Kingdom, as any role, and your healer is a tree, guess what? You need to cleanse diseases and magic effects. If you’re somewhere with a priest? You get to cleanse poisons. A shammy? You need to cleanse magic. If you’re not doing that stuff, you fail as a paladin. When I tank as a pally, I cleanse. When I heal as a pally, I cleanse. You need to get Decursive or something to help you be aware of what to cleanse and when.

Also, auras. If you’re on Garfrost? Use Frost Aura. If you’re fighting Koralon? Fire Aura.

And judge! Judgement of Light takes priority over Judgement of Wisdom, because everyone in your party has health, but not everyone will have mana.

Man, that last one could have been a whole post on its own, eh? Heh. :)

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.

Uh, wow.

Kurn / / paladins, raiding, ramblings

So the other holy paladin didn’t show up tonight. Didn’t post or anything.

My RL friend/healing lead pointed out a bit later that he’s no longer in the guild. With no gquit notation in the guild log, it looks like he ninja transferred.

Not that I’ll miss HIM particularly much… but I need a pally buddy. :(

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

Kurn's Q&A #7

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, lfg, q&a, raiding, ramblings

Okay, another week’s worth of search terms to comb through! Some interesting variety this week, although Valithria Dreamwalker, Toravon the Ice Watcher and Rotface and Mutated Infection/Cleansing still top most of the results.

1) “emerald vigor” power word: shield

I do believe that yes, you should cast PW:S (if you’re disc and are the designated priest to cast it on the dragon) while you have stacks of Emerald Vigor on you.

Emerald Vigor, as you can see, increases healing done by 10%. Then, to keep up Renewed Hope and Borrowed Time, you should cast a shield. While the shield won’t be absorbed by damage on the dragon (pretty sure she doesn’t take damage) While the damage Dreamwalker takes throughout the encounter is minimal compared to what you’ll have to heal (173k in a 25m parse that I saw), your crit is increased by virtue of the Weakened Soul debuff on her. So for no other reason than that, you should cast PW:S. If you have a second as you’re running around to find another portal, cast PW:S on your tanks and some of the DPS if there’s no other disc priest doing so. I would imagine that the absorption would be huge with a bunch of stacks of Emerald Vigor, but since EV doesn’t HAVE a combat log entry, I’m not sure. If you’re a holy priest, avoid using PW:S if there’s a disc priest around, particularly if the disc priest is going into portals.

2) can you use di and divine protection

I actually tried something like this about four years ago. I tried bubbling and then casting Divine Intervention on another paladin. I died, despite Divine Shield. So no, DI will kill you, no matter what.

… although, I am now curious to see if a pally with Guardian Spirit on them would live through a DI. I am doubtful.

3) combine meta gems

Nope, can’t do it. Meta sockets are only found in your helm. So unless you grow another head (and helm spot on your character sheet), you cannot combine two (or more) meta gems. Sorry!

4) configure grid toravon frostbite

Easy as pie.

Right click on your Grid icon. Status. Auras. Add New Debuff. Type in Frostbite and hit Enter. Colour doesn’t matter, priority of 90 is okay. Make sure Frostbite has a tick next to Enable.

Then right click on your Grid icon again. Frame. Center Icon. Debuff: Frostbite should have a tick next to it. Then you’ll see Frostbite in the center of your Grid square on any targets who have it, and you’ll see a number if there’s 2 or more stacks, as well.

More on configuring Grid can be found over this way, which was a little site I set up for my healers in the guild I was in on Bronzebeard.

5) does hand of protection remove mark of the champion

Nothing, not even death, will remove Mark of the Champion. Hand of Protection will, however, stop all incoming Mark of the Champion damage on the target for 10 seconds. But then it’ll start up again. It’s handy if you need to hit Divine Plea and don’t have an offset available.

6) does leader of the pack stack with abominable might

Yes. Leader of the Pack adds 5% chance to crit for melee and ranged. Abominable Might gives 10% attack power. Thus, they stack. The things that don’t stack are the buffs that give the same type of buff.

So LotP does not stack with Rampage, because both give the same 5% crit.

Similarly, Abominable Might, Unleashed Rage and Trueshot Aura do not stack with each other, because all three are giving 10% attack power.

A great way to see what does/doesn’t stack is at MMO-Champion’s Raid Composition Tool. I’m not altogether sure if that’s up to date, but when all the buffs were being changed to stack/not stack/etc, that was a really valuable tool for me.

7) emerald vigor combat log

Drives me crazy, too, that there’s no combat log entry. Go post on the official forums about it!

8) how come i cant hold aggro on a job as a druid tank?

Having done some tanking this week at 80 on the druid, I often felt like I do on my paladin when I tank and forget to turn on Righteous Fury. Everyone was pulling off of me, including my snot-nosed brother. ;)

I realized that the reason why is because my Swipe‘s threat is increased by attack power. And my attack power was, quite simply, crap, since I had just dinged 80. There’s no way my little swipe could out-threat a warrior’s whirlwind if he’s in ICC 25 gear. Or even TOC gear, haha. So I was patient and got a bunch of badges, upgraded some gear and now I can hold aggro better. But it’s still not perfect, because I’m still undergeared.

Something that helps, too, is Glyph of Maul, so on smaller groups, I’ll try to weave in some Mauls in between the swipes.

9) what coloured gems go into a yellow socket

First of all, 10 points of awesomeness to you, anonymous visitor, for spelling coloured with a U. :) I hail you, my fellow member of the Commonwealth.

Secondly, gems work just like the colour wheel does.

Blue gems + Red gems = Purple gems, meaning Purple can fit in both red and blue sockets and work towards activating the socket bonus, AND counts as both a red AND a blue for meta gem requirements.

Blue gems + Yellow gems = Green gems, meaning Green can fit in both yellow and blue sockets and work towards activating the socket bonus, AND counts as both a yellow AND a blue for meta gem requirements.

Yellow gems + Red gems = Orange gems, meaning Orange can fit in both red and yellow sockets and work towards activating the socket bonus, AND counts as both a red AND a yellow for meta gem requirements.

So, what will fit into a yellow socket and work towards the socket bonus? Yellow gems, orange gems and green gems. :)

10) valithria dreamwalker with grid

Sorry, she doesn’t show up on Grid. :( Here’s what I tend to do.

Special bonus #11: wyvern sting halls of reflection

Okay, a) I love you for wanting to crowd control. b) I love you more for wanting to crowd control in Halls of Reflection.

Sadly, I do believe that undead mobs are immune to Wyvern Sting. :( That said, undead can be frozen with Freezing Arrow or Freezing Trap. Go forth, my fellow hunter, and CC! :)

Some thoughts on leadership and raiding.

Kurn / / general, raiding, ramblings

I haven’t been a raid leader since February.

I haven’t been a guild leader since March.

I haven’t been a healing lead (or an officer) since September.

Since March or so of 2006, I’ve always been a raid leader. Since May of 2007, I’ve always been a healing lead. I was the GM of Apotheosis from January of 2008 until March of 2009. (Actually, I’m still GM, but the guild is in a social phase at the moment and I basically never log in.)

Since I started trying to raid, which brings us back to 2006, the frustrations have often, on many, many nights, outweighed the rewards. By and large, the problem has always been the same: attendence. Not enough people. Not enough bodies. Not enough DPS. Not enough healers. Not enough tanks.

I’ve always taken my position as a leader, any kind of leader, seriously. I feel that a leader has to be not only good at their own job (healing, tanking, DPSing) but also able to tend to the administrative issues that arise.

Example: You have nine healers online. That’s probably 3 healers more than you need for the content you’re currently doing. How do you decide who sits? Is it fair to the others if you never sit out? Does your raid group need *you* specifically to heal the content you’re doing or do they just need you to do healing assignments? What kind of gear do people need? How strong are the healers available?

When I was healing lead of the guild I was in on Bronzebeard, we had the above-mentioned problem a lot. Most guilds do NOT have too many healers online and not enough DPS online, more often than not. Kind of ridiculous, no? I could chalk it up to the fact that I treated my healers with respect and dignity and joked around with them and gave them healing jobs that they could do, rather than impossible tasks. I liked to instill a sense of success in them, I liked to push them. I did call them out on things when needed, too, of course, which wasn’t fun.

But I offered gold to people to beat a certain shammy on dispells on Yogg-Saron. I offered them gold if a lack of healing was directly responsible for the death of our gnomish raid leader — on Archavon only. I think I balanced it out nicely and I think I earned their respect by virtue of knowing how their classes worked (I did SO much reading for that!!) and being good at my own job. I mean, if I popped Divine Plea on Thorim after the tunnel, the tanks DIED, back when we were getting it on farm. I was the go-to healer for the tanks. If I was dead or if I was oom, well, the tanks would die. And I don’t say that to give myself props or anything, I’m just actually stating the fact. It’s sort of like now, in my current guild, if my RL friend the resto druid dies, we are SCREWED.

Wednesday night, in my current guild, we didn’t have some key players online. The main tank/primary raid leader didn’t show up for some reason. The other holy pally couldn’t make it. I was late due to RL plans with a friend. The list went on. We still had 27 people online and we still cleared through Saurfang and then went and did XT for the weekly, but we called the raid early because we just didn’t have the raid comp/experience for the more challenging content.

Thursday night, most everyone was there. I think we had 28 people online, maybe 29. All of our tanks were there. So we clear over to Festergut.

And here is why I’m thinking about leadership… The MT/RL linked to us the Flu Shot Shortage (25) achievement. But it was abundantly clear that he didn’t know how to do it. Why?

The instructions were that if you got the spore on you, to run to the back wall, wait for it to go off, then rejoin the raid group.

What does this do? It means that no one in the actual raid gets any stacks of Inoculated. Which means that when Pungent Blight goes off… well, let’s look at the combat log for that, shall we?

[23:25:29.906] Festergut Pungent Blight Madrana 27549 (O: 1417, A: 7057)
[23:25:30.390] Madrana dies

So let’s see, that’s 27.5k health I have, with 7k worth of absorbs (I love you, disc priests) and 1.5k of overkill. 36k shadow damage.

It killed 19 people. Instantly. One-shotted.

I don’t have a problem with raid leaders trying out new things. God knows that I’ve killed my entire raid group a ton of times, including our early attempts at Maulgar. But at least I had an IDEA of how to do things and we worked around that idea to customize it for our raid group. Or, in the case of those early Maulgar attempts, we decided to push 25-man raiding back a bit until we had more people who were geared out of Kara.

They quickly refined things last night so that the first three people with the spores would run to the back wall, and that they’d run out for the second (or third) spore as well, so as not to get three stacks of Inoculated. Someone had actually read the strat and communicated it to their role leader, who had then communicated it to the MT/RL.

First set of spores, three people run out. Second set of spores, people are hanging out. Third set of spores, people who had previously had spores run out. Pungent Blight hits. A couple people die. It’s all good.

Fourth set of spores, I get a spore. I hesitate, because they hadn’t mentioned what to do with the second rotation of spores. Don’t we normally get him down before the second Pungent Blight? I don’t have a freaking clue.

So I ran to the back of the room, treating it as though it was like the first rotation. At the very worst, I reasoned, I had moved unnecessarily. I had my mouse hovering over LOH if needed, so my tank would be covered. The spore pops, I get an Inoculated buff, run my ass back to the group.

Second spores pop up. People stand around, which is fine.

Third spore pops and I can’t believe Festergut isn’t dead yet, so I haul my ass back to the back of the room to ENSURE I don’t get a third stack of Inoculated.

The spore pops, I run back in, Pungent Blight hits, most people live through it and Festergut drops shortly thereafter.

No achievement.

Instantly, I panicked that I was the one who had screwed it up. I didn’t have the firmest of the firm grasps on the mechanics of the encounter. But I did make sure I didn’t have 3 stacks at any point in time, so even though I’d been unsure about things, it couldn’t have been me, right?

I checked the logs after the raid. A ret pally had stayed in and gotten 3 stacks at the end. Way to go.

But is it really the ret paladin’s fault? I wondered. There had been no indication from the MT/RL that we were going to do this achievement until about a minute before we pulled Festergut. Nothing on the forums, no mention during previous raids to read up on the achievement.

Isn’t part of being a leader preparing your charges for out-of-the-ordinary things? Back in BC, when we prepared for the Mother Shahraz fight, I completely broke myself trying to make sure everyone had their BT necks and 290 Shadow Resist gear in order to reach the 365 SR (level 70) cap with Prayer of Shadow Protection up. By “I broke myself”, I mean to say that I posted regularly to our forums to ensure that people knew when we were doing Al’ar and Rage Winterchill kills for the quest. I ensured that we always had just enough Hearts of Darkness for the crafting of gear. I bought Primal Shadows from guildies to encourage them to sell them to the guild bank so we could provide some to the guildies who didn’t have time to farm for their resist gear.

As we stood there, in front of Mother, furiously crafting last minute gear, a fail rogue tells me she doesn’t have her BT neck because she hasn’t done the heroics necessary for it. (She was thinking Champion of the Naaru. I know. I don’t even have words.) She then insisted it was fine, just give her an extra Heart of Darkness for the bracers (which we weren’t crafting).

Trouble is, we had no extras. If we went ahead and crafted her guild-sanctioned gear (cloak, boots, belt, legs) then we wouldn’t have enough for her bracers, so it would be a waste of 7 Hearts of Darkness. I ordered her back to Shattrath and out of the raid for the Mother fight. :P

But that… that was being a leader. Following up on people, checking on people, then throwing someone out of the instance because she hadn’t done what she was supposed to do. Preparing the group, to the best of my abilities, though? That was being a leader.

Time and again, since Apotheosis quit raiding, I have been ASTOUNDED at the lack of preparation and leadership through progressive content in Ulduar, TOC, TOGC and ICC. Astounded. Could I do better? HELL YES.  With my eyes closed, in some cases.

But I don’t want to.

I have no desire to drag 24 other people, kicking and screaming, through progression content. Not 24 other people in my Bronzebeard guild and DEFINITELY not 24 other people in my current guild.

For my Apotheosis folks? For them, I would do it. For them, I likely WILL do it in Cataclysm. So long as my support group is there. Who’s that? My BC officers, for the most part. My buddy Majik. Our favourite huntard. Our Football. Our best tank, a pally, who joined us midway through SSC. Each of them were key in our most difficult times of progression.

I don’t have any delusions. Server AND faction transfers have only made it easier for people to jump ship and leave guilds, to the point where it basically doesn’t mean anything anymore to be in a guild. Hopefully, the guild reforms will make it more beneficial for people to stay in-guild in Cataclysm and guild achievements will make people WANT to join guilds.

I don’t envy any guild leaders or raid leaders these days. It has been a crappy expansion in terms of loyalty and attendence. I couldn’t even keep my own guild going at the start of Wrath. But the difference is that I TRIED to do what was right for my people. Too many “leaders” these days just don’t even understand what’s really needed to succeed. And maybe I’m overestimating it, maybe I hold people’s hands for too long and baby them a little too much and maybe that ISN’T necessary. But it’s what works for me and my style of leadership and it worked, mostly, for the people in my guild.

Some days, you couldn’t pay me to lead anything, not for a Battered Hilt or a mountain of gold or even real money.

And then some days, I think back fondly to Apotheosis. I remember the exultation of downing Gruul. I remember the joy at downing Magtheridon. I remember the pure elation from downing Vashj, the cries of happiness at downing Kael as we became Hands of A’dal. I remember the determination and dedication required for downing Archimonde. I remember the enhancement shammy slapping on a shield, popping Shamanistic Rage and TANKING the priest on the Illidari Council after the tank on that mob had gone down. I remember our tanking paladin HEALING and our DPS warrior TANKING on Illidan and how we nailed that fight.

Those are the days I miss. Those are the encounters I remember. Those are the raids I looked forward to and enjoyed being part of. Hand of A’dal means more to me than Twilight Vanquisher, more than Astral Walker. It was a title I got with people I considered my friends.

Kurn's Q&A #6

Kurn / / q&a, raiding, ramblings

Woo, I’m a veritable posting machine today, aren’t I? Here we go, with another Q&A post based on search results that led people to my site. I take ten of them that I KNOW my site doesn’t adequately answer (or that I find really serious enough to answer) and post the search terms and my responses here.

I am absolutely not going to delve into Toravon stuff, because I’ve already answered a lot of that.

1) death knight tank stack all strength gems

Uh. No. Please don’t do this. Please stack stamina (traditionally) or things like parry and dodge if your avoidance is particularly low, or defense, if you’re not at 540 yet. Strength gems, particularly the +20 epic strength gems, are DPS only. Got it? Good.

2) grid dreamwalker

I know, right?! Seriously, make a focus macro and put it on a really easy to mash keybind and hit it whenever you zone out of the portals. I spent Dreamwalker healing my focus frame, meaning I could still target other mobs and judge them as well as spam cast Holy Light at the dragon.

3) lvl 74 druid tank gear 3.3

I’m probably not the best person to ask for this, but honestly, I felt that the BOA leather stuff worked really nicely for me as I tanked through the lower 70s. That’s the Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders and Stained Shadowcraft Tunic. Good stam, good agility (which are really your primary stats for health, dodge and armor). For everything else, I went for anything that had dodge on it, followed by stamina and agility. No joke, I tanked with Writhing Longstaff (with 35 agi on it) forever. ETA: Read the comment below by “gnome of zurich”, who really has a great breakdown of what bears should go for!

4) rhok delar bow without black dragon sinew pre tbc

Not sure what you’re trying to say here, but regardless, you cannot make Rhok’delar without the Mature Black Dragon Sinew. You can’t. That’s the string of your bow. But never fear, if you’re on the quest after getting the Ancient Petrified Leaf you can farm Burning Steppes black dragons for the sinew.

5) slime spray tremor totem

No reason to drop Tremor Totem at all on Rotface. There’s no fear or charm attached to his Slime Spray.

6) valithria dreamwalker gaining buff

I’ll presume you mean you gaining Emerald Vigor. I basically suck at getting and keeping the buff, but here’s what you should theoretically do. Zone in to the portal as soon as you can. Hit jump to fly directly up. You should have some green orb thingies right above you. Hang out in them for a bit, they’ll eventually burst as you move across them. Keep moving into the orbs and watch your timer for the end of the portals. Do your very best to hit an orb with like, 2-3 seconds left. That should afford you enough time to keep the debuff (it’s a debuff, not a buff, go figure) stacking between portal phases.

Pain in my ass. :P

7) valithria dreamwalker vigilance

Okay, I don’t have proof for this, but I would imagine this would be silly. First, she’s not generating any threat. Secondly, she’s not taking any damage. The suppressors channel to make her take less healing, but I’m pretty sure she’s not being damaged at all.

Buffs that DO work and are useful include, but are not limited to: Guardian Spirit, Sacred Shield, Power Word: Shield (for disc priest buffing purposes)

Good thinking outside the box, though. I’d recommend dropping Vigilance on any healer who stays outside of the portals.

8) glyph of holy wrath citadel

I don’t think that Glyph of Holy Wrath is ever better than any other major glyph you can use, as a paladin. Certainly not for a holy paladin. But ultimately, there are WAY too many boss fights that don’t have any undead adds to justify that glyph for a DPS rotation or as part of a tanking rotation, IMHO.

9) name of gem purple +ap/mp5 cut

You’re looking for an Infused Dreadstone or Twilight Opal. Having said that, if you’re a hunter or an enhancement shaman with mana issues… there may be bigger issues than you looking for mp5 on your gear.

10) sindragosa los in corner

I haven’t done Sindragosa yet, but this sounds suspiciously like a sort of an exploit. Exploiting is bad. Don’t do it.

I got lots of Rotface search terms too, but I’ve already addressed most of those. I should really get going on that ICC raid guide, one of these days.