… sigh.

So I went through my parses from last night’s raid and was just randomly looking at something and then got it in my head to examine the pallies in more depth than I have in a while. The holy paladins, that is.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I look and see what they’re doing wrong? Because I’m a moron, that’s why.

Anonymous report link:

http://wowwebstats.com/tpqaqvbd2ukbc?ab=54153

See that? I’m Virgo. (Which is funny, ’cause I’m really a Taurus and Taurus is our prot pally, but anyways.) The other two listed there are the other holy paladins.

Granted, Leo was only there for Mimiron and Vezax, I believe, whereas Gemini was there for the whole raid, but do you see what I see? Like, do you see the abysmal uptime for them both for Judgements of the Pure?

I … … don’t have words. 15% haste is… what, a BAD thing? Are they ALLERGIC to haste? Granted I don’t keep it up all the time on Vezax when mana is a sacred, treasured resource and judging costs 197 mana, but I still use it SOMETIMES. And it’s still useful on, you know, THORIM and FREYA and MIMIRON and ARCHAVON and EMALON.

Honestly.

The other really, really, REALLY sad thing? No one freaking uses Sacred Shield.

Sadly, the “this person cast Sacred Shield” stats aren’t available in WWS, but my World Of Logs parse says:

Virgo (me) – 235 casts

Taurus (prot pally) – 191 casts

Leo (holy) – 12 casts

Gemini (holy) – 25 casts

Aries (ret) – 22 casts

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!

So… yeah. I don’t know why I look at the parses. I really don’t. I’m not perfect, 235 casts on 4 hours is kind of poor, but HOLY CRAP, man. 12?! 25?! 25 casts over FOUR HOURS?! I hate people.

Random thoughts…

There are far too many kinds of raiders.

1) Those who don’t want to do any work and get dragged through content for phat lewtz.

2) Those who don’t even care about loot and only want to get through content for the sake of having gone through it.

3) Those who like farm nights because it means they can be gracious and give their spot up to someone while they sit on standby.

4) Those who hate farm nights because they get bored easily and it’s hard to maintain concentration and yet they have to go because the guild is low on their spec/class/etc.

5) Those who like progression nights because it means working on something NEW!

6) Those who like progression nights because it means the possibility of NEW LOOT!

7) Those who hate progression nights because they’re cheap morons who can’t figure out how to make gold in this game.

8) Those who hate progression nights because they think they’ll put in all this effort and then won’t be on for the kill which will, of course, not be tonight.

All of this is rattling around inside my head.

Is it a GOOD thing that I’m rarely on standby? Sure, because I like content, I’m getting emblems of conquest, chances on loot, DKP…

But it’s also a bad thing, because raid time is split between the other pallies, it’s a bad thing because I’d LIKE to get a night off, now and again…

Tonight, well, last night was Tuesday and we had like, 34 people online. Wednesday, we won’t have that many. Thursday, we’ll have less. It confuses me. Then again, I never did understand loot whores or people who didn’t *want* to progress.

Anyways.

A-posting we will go…

Haven’t written much here about raiding of late. Or much of anything barring the 3.2 holy paladin changes that will KILL ME. But this isn’t a post about 3.2. It’s a post about recent achievements, recent happenings and the fact that I miss being remotely knowledgeable about hunters.

The big thing… Yogg died on June 18th.

heroic-secrets

Continue reading “A-posting we will go…”

A question.

Which is cooler?

ToonName, Hand of A’dal

or

Twilight Vanquisher ToonName

I think that, given the fact that Hand of A’dal was removed when 3.0 came out and that Twilight Vanquisher is now for the previous tier of content versus the previous expansion… Hand of A’dal is cooler.

I’m both, on my pally. But I earned Hand of A’dal by leading the raids that led to that title. I did it with friends of mine. Twilight Vanquisher was the most challenging fight I’d ever done as a healer, though, and I felt like I earned it, and it was snazzy, but it didn’t mean the same as Hand of A’dal.

So I’m still reppin’ Apotheosis with the Hand of A’dal title.

BTW, our Illidan kill is up at warcraftmovies:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=115477

Think I’m gonna try to level the shammy a bit. I can’t believe I moved her back to Eldre’Thalas for like, 3 hours of playtime with my brother. Sigh.

Another new build…

Given that Yogg-Saron is still up, I have retooled my second holy spec.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sxA0gM0sVuctgdxMZVcb

I decided to keep Sacred Cleansing because it procced something like 138 times out of the 507 times I cleansed something or someone, which is about 27% of the time. That’s not bad at all. It’s not GREAT, but it’s not terrible. That’s 27% more resistance to various debuffs.

And I kept Guardian’s Favor, too, so that I could easily BOP (I’m sorry, I KNOW it’s Hand of Protection, but I can’t bring myself to say HOP!) someone in a constrictor if I need to.

Well, that’s the plan. Raid invites in 30 and it’s pouring rain here, with some thunder and threat of hail and stuff. GOOD TIMES.

One messed up spec…

So I’m currently, are you ready for this…

54/12/5

So disturbing.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sxA0gM0sVuctgdxMuoZV

I’m trying it out with regards to Yogg for the Sacred Cleansing, Divine Sacrifice and Guardian’s Favor. Not sure if there’s a difference yet due to the Cleansing, but I’ve used BOP, er, hand of protection, a lot more than previously. Haven’t used Divine Sacrifice yet, though.

Currently at the 2h6m mark of our “mega-raid”.

Still not out of Phase 2 on Yogg and Razorscale is down, but it was oogly.

And so it begins.

Prior to leaving my dear Apotheosis, I wondered if I could do the cog-in-the-machine/minion thing. After being GM for over a year and being one of the primary raid leaders for the entire time Apotheosis was a guild (and then before that, in Fated Heroes), I had to reasonably ask myself the following question.

Can I really be just another pawn in a raid leader’s arsenal?

I thought the answer was yes. I know for a fact that I do not want to lead raids. I know for a fact that, given raid leaders who know what they’re doing and raiders who do what they’re told, I would be quite happy.

The problems arise in two situations.

1) Raiders don’t do as they’re told. I’ve mentioned this before, but our interrupters are terrible. Horrible! I don’t even understand how someone can fail so much, so often, much less a WHOLE GROUP OF THEM. So when people are obviously failing, I get cranky and I try to figure out where the issue is. I’m okay with this. I write detailed explanations of our areas of weakness and point them out to the officers and, honestly, I like it. It makes me feel like I’m doing something to help the guild.

2) The raid leader isn’t succeeding in his or her role. This is what I have a problem with. If I’m being led “properly”, that’s cool. I’m more than happy to sit back, relax and chill out, doing what I’m told to do. If I’m not being led “properly” or efficiently or whatever, that’s when MY inner raid leader starts twitching.

I’m willing to give anyone who’s leading me a fair amount of free reign. If someone is in the position of raid leader, I usually assume they’re there for a reason. I assume that they know their shit, that they have control over the raid group and that the raid group has at least a modicum of respect for the leader.

The relationship between a raid leader and a raid group is a very interesting one, in my not-remotely-humble opinion.

On the one hand, the raid leader has to trust that his or her group will be doing what is asked of them. So, as a raid leader, you want a group of people who will follow your instructions, even if they don’t quite understand what it’s for. But you also want people who will think a little bit independently, who will decurse without being told to, who will interrupt various casts without instructions to do so.

For a raid group, though, you want Superman to be your raid leader. No joke, no kidding. If your raid leader is a solo raid leader who doesn’t rely extensively on his or her support group of officers/role leaders, you want Superman. The best raid leader is one who SEEMS to be on top of everything on every aspect of the fight. I honestly don’t know if that’s possible.

I know that when I was a raid leader, there were certain fights where I micro-managed EVERYTHING. Every single aspect of the fight. Like Vashj. I knew everything about that encounter and assigned people to their tasks and by golly, I KNEW exactly how and where and why people would fuck up and I would retool the strategy if it was consistent. But I disgress. That kind of encounter, where ALL of it was on my shoulders, was rare.

Take Kael, for example.

I knew the fight very well. But I didn’t micro-manage it. Instead, I let my DPS officers figure out a good order for the weapons. I chimed in that the mace and staff needed to go down quickly, but it wasn’t me who decided that just the hunters would work on the bow or that the shield would be tanked over there or any of that. It wasn’t me who decided which tank was on which add or weapon. We had our fury warrior (also an officer — really, this was a great fight for him to lead) DPS-tanking the mace to get it down quicker.

Sure, I’m the one who then assigned healing, and I helped our warlock tank out in tanking Capernian — and I healed the living crap out of her, too — but the distribution of weapons wasn’t up to me.

But to the raid, it seemed like we were a well-oiled machine. If someone asked a question, the person who was in charge of organizing that would answer. If someone was unsure about healing, I jumped in. It was a really great team effort.

And because of that, that’s basically how we did things from then on. We’d actually started doing that in Hyjal, to be honest, because I was NOT good at sitting down and figuring out how to deal with each wave. Our fury warrior officer was amazing and quick on his feet, and he knew exactly how to deal with each wave as it happened. So he handled that. Our prot pally officer dealt with tank/raid positioning most of the time. I handled Archimonde positioning, but really, I was very hands-off for Hyjal, except for healing. Same thing for BT, with the exception of Naj’entus. I always organized groups so people would have a frost aura/totem and a healer in the groups and we were all spread out.

I’m rambling and nostalgic, but my point here is that I didn’t even pretend to do it all on my own for most of our raids after, you know, Magtheridon. I was usually the person who had the long-winded explanations, but honestly, it was a team effort.

All of this is being written because I’m seriously questioning my current raid leader’s wisdom in various decisions. All’s well and good when we’re progressing, but the Hyjal thing had me lose confidence in him. We have a “mega-raid” scheduled for tonight, from 6-12:30 and I’m dreading it, but I’ll show up, because I’m a dedicated member of the guild. Honestly not sure if the raid will even happen, because our healers are mostly unavailable. But I imagine we’ll give it a shot even if they’re missing.

Sigh.

I’m speechless.

We just wasted an hour of raid time by doing Mount Hyjal because the RL had the genius idea to do Archimonde to teach us all a lesson about Yogg-Saron clouds.

I nearly /gquit.

General, Yogg and nostalgia…

Been raiding, but I haven’t been playing much. Other stuff is more interesting these days. I think that stems from the fact that my *friends* who play WoW are scattered around various servers.

Anyways, another reset come and gone and another reset without killing Yogg. We have some fights that keep kicking our asses — Thorim’s given us trouble, Mimiron’s pissing us off, and even General is being annoying.

My poor old guild, Apotheosis, had some failings. It did. I’ll be the first to admit it. But one thing our members could do was freaking interrupt casts. Maybe it was how we did Aran back in the day or something, but our melee was fan-fucking-tastic at interrupting things. Of course, our resident gnome DPS warrior, whom we affectionately called Football, was absolutely amazing at his role, which helped. Our enhance shammies were very good and, when we HAD a rogue in the fight, all of them could be relied upon to kick when needed.

So it stuns me when we’re standing there on General and there’s a DK tank, 1-2 DPS warriors, 1 enhance shammy, 2 rogues and a DPS DK standing there and Searing Flames gets off. I mean, really. We even have to have our mage as a backup. Where is the difficulty in watching the cast bar and not using a global immediately before the cast so you CAN interrupt it? It’s a two second cast. It’s not like it’s instant, it’s not like it’s half a second.

Yogg attempts are… interesting. We’ve only had a few ventures into Phase 2, but we’re still getting used to it, I guess. Worst thing ever is people standing in green clouds. This is the part of Ulduar where I’m mostly glad I’m not leading my old guild through it, because we would spawn a zillion extra adds and I AM NOT JOKING. Weird that I’d pay money to have my old guild with me on Vezax and yet I know that we’d spawn too many adds on Yogg to ever reliably get out of phase 1.

And speaking of Apotheosis, it was formed on June 1st, 2007, just over two years ago. Our first Vashj kill was on June 2nd, 2008. I need to finish up the retrospective (of this past year) when I have a chance. Some amazing moments in the eight months we raided/played together before things went to hell.

At the same time, I MUST not be overly nostalgic, because then I’ll start thinking about getting the old crew back together and that MUST NOT HAPPEN because I’ll just be way too stressed out again and it will not be as awesome as I thought it would be, but they’re my friends and I’ll feel obliged to suffer through not being able to kill Thaddius again. Or something.

But it’s still nice to remember the good times.

Off to go figure out where our epic failure on Mimiron was last night. 14 wipes. Eesh.

Woot. (Ulduar Reset 6, Night 2)

Went in, did Hodir (1-shot), Thorim (3-shot — with a new tanking tunnel situation) and Freya (1-shot) and then worked on General Vezax.

Got him DOWN.

Most hilarious part of the raid: someone asked if I’d gotten a GM to hack my account and add more mana to my mana pool. Why? I had 30989 mana while raid buffed with:

Flask of Distilled Wisdom, Blessing of Kings, Improved Mark of the Wild and Arcane Intellect.

Then I switched my gear around: T8 chest, 4-pc T7.5, Greaves of the Rockmender, plus my Figurine – Sapphire Owl (with 2×16 int) and… the pièce de resistance… the Pendant of the Violet Eye. That’s right. From my very first Aran kill. Of course, I’m also a JC, so I have 3×27 int gems in various spots in my gear and I’m an alchemist so instead of 65 int from the flask, I get about 98 intellect, with help from Mixology AND Divine Intellect.

Hawt.

So that’s two new bosses in two nights. Things are going well, progression-wise. Yogg-Saron next. It’ll be nice to get Sara to shut the hell up. She’s more annoying than Jaina was.

In other news, some old friends from Apotheosis have made alts on my new server and so I’m transferring my shammy over before she’s hit 77. She’s, uh, still 70. /sigh

But she brings with her a ton of Northern Spices, some gems, a frozen orb, some odds and ends, and 1400g. Not that my pally really needs more money, but it’ll go towards getting the shammy epic flying and cold-weather flying at 77.