Category: ramblings

Ow, My Face

Kurn / / facepalm, firelands, raiding, ramblings

Quick post today.

Went to Firelands last night.

Spent a LOT of time on trash. Figured out that you basically have to kill one of each type of mob to spawn Shannox (although it might not be all mobs, we certainly did kill one of each mob before he spawned).

Felt ridiculously unprepared because Shannox and Riplimb are untauntable when we expected them to be tauntable. Stupid PTR!

It was a slow night and a lot of our enthusiasm was sapped by a combination of three things:

1) Changes to the boss meant changes in figuring out WTF to do about Jagged Tear.

2) Shannox’s patrol IS STUPIDLY LONG and takes FOREVER. You do a ready check and everyone’s ready and then like, 3 minutes later, THAT’S when Shannox patrols around.

3) Respawning trash, while understandable, meant that most of our good attempts were before our break and we didn’t even have a chance to really work out what we now believe is a winning strat.

On the bright side, I’m friendly with Avengers of Hyjal and bought the cloak.

On the not-so-bright side, Shannox is alive.

On another bright side, the other major 25-man guild on Eldre’Thalas ALSO failed to kill Shannox and wiped 17 times to our 12.

On the not-so-bright side, I think they also raid Wednesdays, so unless they fail hideously, we’ll probably only get the 2nd 25-man Shannox kill. >< Still, we caught up to them at the end of T11 with both of us at 7/13. Not bad since we raid something like 7 hours a week less than they do. (4 nights, 4 hours vs. our 3 nights, 3 hours.)

At any rate, I have RL stuff to do which will keep me from doing stuff in-game I should do. Tonight I raid with Choice and we’ll see if I get in for the fight or if I’m on standby. While my baby pally’s gear is much improved, it’s still not phenomenal, but Firelands normals are really made for people in 359 gear. Mine’s 356, so maybe with just a couple of JP purchases (?) I could hit that. Or just get some dailies done to get going towards some 365 gear. Rep would be great just to get the 378 cloak!

Okay, that’s my Firelands update. Anyone else have Firelands stories to share?

Legendary Fallout

Kurn / / apotheosis, guild, patch 4.2, ramblings

Well, the nightmares I’ve had about a chain reaction of /gquits upon the announcement of who is getting the legendary staff did not actually materialize, which is a bonus.

Having said that, I’m sure some people are unhappy.

Awarding a legendary is, in my opinion, often a lose-lose situation. There are always people who will be disappointed, always people who will feel slighted. I’m still annoyed that I didn’t get Val’anyr in Ulduar. I was very new to the guild, yes, but when I look at who ended up getting the mace, it still makes me want to cry and/or smash things.

The process they went through to determine Val’anyr in that particular guild was, well, shrouded in secrecy and subject to a lot of drama because quite a few people left the guild before the announcement had been made, for some reason. (I was new, I was keeping my mouth shut so I didn’t ask why, but the guild lost at least 2 healers who would have been awarded the mace before the priest who got it.)

Obviously, I felt I deserved the mace, but I knew I hadn’t been there long enough to show them that I was actually more deserving of the mace than the priest who got it. Essentially, that was the difference. The priest who got it had been there for, well, I believe it’s years.

That didn’t sit right with me. I mean, don’t get me wrong — I value loyalty, myself, but when the person you’re giving the legendary to is clearly someone who does NOT understand their class… well, you’re doing yourself and your guild a disservice. The priest in question may have been an officer (strictly in an advisory position, not a role lead) but he didn’t have Spirit of Redemption back when it was GOOD and gave you 5% extra spirit. What priest wouldn’t want 5% extra spirit back in Wrath of the Lich King when it added to your regen AND to your spellpower? I mean, to me, from my perspective, the recipient of Val’anyr was in no way worthy of the mace.

What I did in setting up the legendary distribution for Apotheosis was open a thread for people to express their interest. We had 8 casters who did so. 3 mages, 3 warlocks, 1 shadow priest and 1 elemental shaman.

After several days, I closed the thread, so everyone had plenty of time to throw their name in the hat, so to speak. I was sure to inform all new casters joining the guild (a shadow priest, a moonkin) that they wouldn’t be considered for the legendary at this time as the candidates had already been decided upon. I felt it was important to let them know that before they joined. (The number of people I saw apply to guilds hoping to get Val’anyr crafted/finished was hilarious.)

We were fairly transparent in the way we did things. As I said yesterday, the officers on the selection team ranked all 8 of the casters.

We ended up with a tie. Two of our mages ended up with 25 points apiece, followed by a shadow priest, followed by an elemental shaman.

So while instance servers were borked last night, we had the mages roll off.

Now, being a sociologist, a simple /roll would not, to me, be sufficient in awarding the staff. You can’t just have it be one roll. So the selection team had okayed a series of 5 rolls each. We’d take the high roll for each and throw it out, take the low roll for each and throw it out and then add the three numbers that remained, then divided that number by 3 to get the average (mean) and that would be “the number”. The highest number would win.

Here’s what happened, because this alone is freaking legendary.

Can you believe that? They both rolled a 60, Mabriam rolled a 74, Majik rolled a 73 and they both rolled an 81 at the same time. My stats background wants more rolls between these two guys, to be honest…

I feel as though we handled the tie well and I don’t think either Majik or Mabriam are upset with the results of the roll-off. That was as fair as it could be and it was honestly down to the wire. The difference in their final numbers was 0.67.

Of course, given our expectations of crafting at least one staff, probably two, the reactions of Majik and Mabriam are not the ones to worry about.

It’s everyone else, ranked #3 to #8, plus the guild as a whole.

One of the issues I am anticipating fielding is why one of our top performers is not in the top two. Night in and night out, our shadow priest is pretty much right up there on the meters.

If it were based strictly on damage output, the shadow priest in question would have been the #1 selection for the entire selection team. In fact, if it was based on pure damage, there wouldn’t have been a need for a selection team at all. As it was, the shadow priest was in everyone’s top four, but even if he had been in everyone’s top three, he still wouldn’t have been in the top two, based on the points per ranking.

I can’t tell you why people ranked the candidates the way they were. I’m not those people. Nor am I going to discuss my own choices or my personal reasons for my choices, because I feel there would be a conflict of interest in sharing that. There’s a reason we were neatly sequestered away and discussed the legendary and the candidates privately. In part, it was to prevent hurt feelings among the candidates who were ranked lower and in part, it was to be able to discuss the pros and cons of each candidate honestly and bluntly. But there was no collusion or anything of the sort. We had our discussions, then I had the selection team send me, via PM, their ranked selections. I’d made my list before looking at any of theirs and then posted everyone’s selections to the private section of the forums for the selection team to see that I wasn’t cooking the books or anything. In doing so, I was transparent to the officers and they could hold me accountable by saying “Kurn, that’s not my selection!” if I’d messed with anything. But obviously, I didn’t.

What I will say is that the legendary selection process was based on performance, attendance, participation and attitude. I’ll say it wasn’t an easy decision (although anything was easier than actually coming up with a legendary selection process!) and I struggled with my own choices. As an officer, I routinely ignore friendships and personal relationships with people in the guild when looking at performance and the like in a raid setting. I feel as though I evaluated each candidate appropriately and I feel that I have an explanation for each of my personal rankings that is based on facts, logic and evidence. I would hope that the other officers on the selection team can back up their decisions as well. I believe they can.

It’s not enough to say “hey, casters, you guys are awesome anyway!” in the wake of an announcement like this, though. No matter what, no matter how defensible the decisions are, there will always be hurt feelings because a legendary is viewed as a status symbol, as recognition for going above and beyond.

So it’s only today, more than two years after the announcement came down from my then-guild that a priest would be the first recipient of Val’anyr and that I would be the second, that I really, truly understand that there’s no winning when it comes to handing out a legendary. I feel that we maximized transparency in the process, that we were as open and honest as possible with people at every step of the way and ultimately, I’m satisfied with the decision that was made from an empirical point of view.

As a guild master, I think that I have to look at the process and be satisfied with what we did. As a person, I’m happy that Majik got it, obviously, but I think that I put in checks to prevent my own bias from having too much of an effect, such as having other people making the decision with me. I was one of four voices. And then, most notably, there was the roll-off, which acted as a final check to protect anyone if they came up against Majik at the end. Clearly, the selection team as a whole was comfortable in both of those mages receiving the legendary and the roll just determined the order. The roll was clean, unbiased, and gave Mabriam a chance to get the first one.

We could have just given it to someone without all this hullaballoo. We could have just had the 8 interested people /roll a single roll. We could have just done “eeny-meeny-miney-moe”. But we didn’t. We invested a significant amount of time, effort and discussion into the process and I think that’s the best we could do.

In a way, I’m not thrilled that Majik won out, because no matter how much effort was put into the process, it still LOOKS like we just favoured him over everyone else, when that’s really not the case. But I can’t control what people think. I can’t control what people do. I can only do what I feel is best for the guild at any given time.

Matticus said this, the other night, on Twitter:

And no, I’m not getting myself worked up over a game. No sir. I’m worked up over people and situations, that is all.

How right he is. This isn’t about the game. The crux of this game, for me, is raiding. Raiding is allllll about people and situations.

With any luck, we’ll get through without any overt drama from the legendary announcement, but I’ll tell you right now that just because my nightmare of a chain of /gquits didn’t happen at the time of the announcement doesn’t mean that I’m not still sitting on the edge of my chair thinking that it might.

So much to say, so little time to write it all down.

Kurn / / apotheosis, guild, healing, raiding, ramblings

As I write this, at 8am on Tuesday, June 21st, 2011, I have 18 drafts in my blog draft section.

Seriously.

I always start to write stuff down and then get interrupted or fall asleep (this has happened three times, no joke!) or something.

I’d like to get to those blog posts at some point, but before that, there’s other stuff to discuss, including a 4.2 loot list. (I hate loot lists, but I know they’re very popular.)

I also want to talk about the recent blue post about holy paladin healing.

But right now, I want to talk about something completely unrelated to any of that.

I want to talk about the legendary caster weapon, Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa’s Rest.

Ultimately, hammering out HOW to select any recipients of the staff was more difficult than actually selecting the person.

And yes, that does mean that we have a very good idea as to the first two recipients, as well as a potential third and fourth. (Guildies, you’ll find out after the raid tonight.)

We did not do the big, long, drawn-out process that I had suggested weeks ago. We used a trimmed-down version of it where four officers were put on the “selection team” and we ranked all 8 candidates from 1-8, where 1 was your first choice and 8 was your last choice.

A first-place candidate got 7 points, a second-place got 6, a third-place got 5, all the way down to 8, which got 0.

So four officers shared their thoughts and ideas in a separate area of the forums, neatly sequestered away, then the other three sent me their ranked list in a private message, which I then ignored until everyone’s PM was in AND I’d made my own selections.

Then I tallied up everyone’s results and posted them to the selection team along with the original selections, so they could see I wasn’t fixing the numbers.

It wasn’t a bad process at all. We looked at candidates based on performance (because a legendary will enhance what’s already there), attendance (gotta BE there in order to build it!), participation (teamwork and such!) and attitude (don’t be a douchecanoe!).

Honestly, it only took a few days of deliberations and such and we’re just about ready to make our announcement as to the top choices.

So that’s a huge responsibility taken care of. I call not it on the next legendary selection team. :P

While that’s been going on, I’ve still been doing a near-weekly podcast! Last week, Majik and I talked to Beruthiel of Falling Leaves and Wings during Episode 23 of Blessing of Frost and this week, we talked to Fog again with regards to the Midsummer Fire Festival.

In terms of raiding, Apotheosis is 6/13 with Heroic Halfus, Chimaeron, Maloriak, Magmaw, Atramedes and Conclave of Wind down and we’re working on H V&T for 7/13 before 4.2 drops, with any luck. So that’s always, well, entertaining? ;) I do love raiding with my guild and I do love doing all this stuff together. I do get tired of the leadershippy stuff on occasion, though. Still, it needs to be done.

Thankfully, Toga is going to be taking over the bank. Fog is stepping down, so I took the bank as an interim holder and now Toga’s going to take that from me, hooray! :)

Speaking of leadership stuff, I was curious as to how people felt we handled things during T11 content, so I decided to use my sociology background and I made up a survey.

The questions asked people to rate the officers in their primary roles on a scale of 1-10, where 1 was really bad and 10 was excellent, and I got a second question about my performance as GM, in particular. I asked people what they felt we’d not handled well and what we HAD handled well, which officer they might want to replace and with whom, how satisfied they are with our progression, if they like how loot/food/flasks/etc is done…

Out of about 33ish active raiders, we had 20 responses, which is great. I need to go through the results, but I’m going to learn a lot. I am kind of thinking about installing SPSS on my desktop and inputting the data so I can run stats equations on it… but that miiiiiight be taking things a bit far. ;)

The survey was anonymous (ostensibly, anyways. I’m fairly sure that if I allowed myself to make the connections, I could link about five respondents to those raiders) and I think that really helped the raiders to know that this was something I was taking seriously, at least. I made it clear on our forums that I would be the only one reading the responses, but that I would summarize the results and make sure the officers saw them. I think they liked the idea of me as a filter — so they could talk to me, without fear of retribution or whatever, through the survey and know that no one else will see what they said, but the overall idea will be conveyed to the other officers.

Overall, the survey seems to have been a success. :) I strongly recommend any guild go through the same thing. Google Docs does a great job for you. Look into it.

Yet other news: EPGP is normalizing values! So if a regular-mode pair of shoulders costs 750 GP in T11, a regular-mode pair of shoulders will cost that much in T12, while the T11 one will drop in price. This almost certainly means we don’t have to change how we do EP or GP! Yaaaaaay!

In still more news: Raiding on the baby pally is fun. I get to just heal. Heal through encounters I know the basics of. It’s lovely not to have to assign or organize people. It’s great to just be told where to stand on Al’Akir and NOT spend 45-60 minutes just planning out that one fight.

On Monday, I got: neck off Halfus, mace and tier shoulders off Cho’gall, legs off Al’Akir (fuck you mastery! Where was “of the Undertow” when I needed it?!) and then picked up a cloak from Valor Points. Still not up to the spirit, intellect and haste my “real” paladin has, but that’s a lot of gear and should help me hit harder. I’m also going to be JP capped so that I can … well, I can’t do a lot, really. My last blues are my helm (Ascendant Council or Nef), my bracers (Cho’gall) and my gloves (Maloriak or, if I’m feeling desperate, tier — but that’s a crapton of mastery!).

So, I’ve been busy.

This Friday is a holiday in Quebec — La Fête de la Saint-Jean Baptiste. While I am a die-hard Canadian and have not a drop of separatist blood in me, it’s always nice to have two long weekends back to back. St-Jean Baptiste has always been a holiday for me, which marked the very last possible day of the school year, back in high school, and while a lot of separatists have sort of adopted it as a “national” holiday, it’s a day where I can usually be proud to be Québécoise without feeling terribly guilty about it. ;) While growing up, my parents would always take me up north to the cottage for the long weekend, both St-Jean and the following week’s Canada Day. So, despite the fact that we will be right ahead of a patch, I’m going up north on Friday with my dad. If it rains, so help me God, Mother Nature is going to get an earful from me. I want to go up north, relax, read a book or two, go swimming in the lake, go canoeing on the lake, get some sun and the like. Maybe play some chess against my dad, play some cards, eat some barbecue… Man. It could be very awesome.

I will, therefore, endeavour to put WoW out of my mind for Friday through to Sunday. With any luck, it will be gloriously sunny and just warm enough to coax me to go swimming to cool off.

If it’s pouring rain, I’m gonna be cranky. :P

But yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to, that’s what I’m going to do this weekend.

This week:

– reaction post to blue post about paladin healing
– T12 loot list
– hopefully downing H V&T for 7/13
– do research on Firelands bosses >.>
– answer comments!

Whew.

On that note, time to grab a few winks. I have got to remember that editing the podcast EARLIER is better than LATER!

Keys: Keepsakes from Another Era

Kurn / / achievements, classic instances, general, patch 4.2, raiding, ramblings

When I started playing World of Warcraft, I had no idea what I was doing. I strongly suspect that a lot of people were, or even are, in the same boat. Over time, I educated myself about the game and what I, personally, needed to do in order to advance myself in the game. As I started playing in Vanilla, that meant getting attuned to Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair and Blackwing Lair.

Along the way, I picked up a bunch of keys. The quests involved in forging the Scholomance key were great experience and fun, if a bit lengthy and, at the time, pricey. Back in those days, keys actually took up precious bag space and it was not at all uncommon for people to not actually own the key to an instance like Scholomance or the undead entrance for Stratholme. Even more common was the single person in the group (a group you had probably painstakingly assembled over the course of over an hour) who had the key had almost certainly left the key in their bank.

The keyring was excellent. No longer would we forget keys in the bank!

I always liked my keys. I even had the key to Searing Gorge on more than one character! The one key that eluded me was Gnomeregan and I picked that up shortly after 3.0 dropped so that I would get the Keymaster achievement when I got the key to Violet Hold in Wrath. I was so, so sad when they removed a bunch of the keys for Cataclysm, like the Scarlet Key and the Key to the City.

It must seem foolish to speak so fondly of an old, antiquated system, to many readers who are newer to the game or who remember all the keys we needed to do heroics in Burning Crusade. But key quests and attunements were bonding experiences.

I can hear the scoffing from newer players. I suspect the older players either think I’m certifiably insane or they’re nodding their heads in agreement.

One of the all-time longest attunements that people regularly did (no disrespect to AQ gong ringers!) was the Onyxia attunement in the original WoW. I’m not sure how bad it was for the Horde, mind you, but for the Alliance, it consisted of something like 16 quests. And we’re not talking easy quests, either. A lot of them had to do with group content and instances.

In particular, the sticking point for a LOT of people was this one quest called “Jailbreak!”. In it, we are tasked to go to Blackrock Depths and free Marshal Reginald Windsor from the prison there. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. Not only did you have to form a group of people willing to help you out with this task, but you had to be at the right part of the quest chain to benefit from the pain that was freeing Marshal Windsor. You also needed to have the prison key from the boss in that section of the instance. (Possibly a rogue would also work, but as I was a hunter at the time, I needed the key.)

Then, you had to be really good or really lucky to free Windsor without pre-clearing all the trash along the route Marshal Windsor wants to take, once he’s freed. And guess what? He wanted to exact revenge on several people in the prison (and free someone else) before he would save his own skin.

Not only that, but he would trudge so slowly through the instance that you just wanted to kick him in the ass to speed things up. At one point in time, although this might have been fixed, later on, if you went too far ahead of Windsor, he’d despawn.

So we had to:

– form a group of like-minded individuals (either willing to do Jailbreak! or on it themselves)
– get to the instance
– know what you needed to do once you were there and likely clear both rings in the prison section — possibly killing the prison boss as well
– then free Windsor and wait for him to catch up to you every few seconds

Finally, at long last, Marshal Windsor would run for the entrance of Blackrock Depths.

But were you done?

Hell no.

THEN, you had to go back to Stormwind and WAIT for Windsor to show up. (Sometime AFTER I’d done the attunement, they brought in “Squire Rowe”, who stands by the gates of Stormwind. You talk to him and that essentially triggers Windsor’s arrival.) Then you walk with him through Stormwind (again, he used to despawn if you went too quickly) where he would confront Lady Katrana Prestor and accuse her of being Onyxia and then Bolvar Fordragon (SOB, I miss that guy!) would open a can of whup ass on the guards — who were all disguised dragonkin in service of Lady Katrana Prestor.

That was a cool part actually, but then we return right to more suck. We then had to go to Upper Blackrock Spire (never you mind that this required a whole other epic quest chain itself AND ten people!) and kill General Drakkisath for the Blood of the Black Dragon Champion. They eventually changed it so it was lootable by anyone with the quest, but for YEARS, it was a green item that only one or two people could loot (more than one could drop). That meant multiple UBRS runs.

Once you got that taken care of, you would receive the Drakefire Amulet — a fire resistance necklace that you needed in your bags in order to enter Onyxia’s Lair.

Epic-sounding, right? No doubt this is why they started out with such things. It quickly loses its appeal, however, when you’re on your third or fourth toon who you decide to attune.

Speaking as someone who was an officer in a Vanilla guild, attuning people was a pain in my ass.

Hell, attuning people to Black Temple in Burning Crusade (even after the attunement was lifted, just so that we could get the Medallion of Karabor for the shadow resistance!) was a pain in the ass.

As much as it was all a pain in the ass, though, it was what you had to do to get into 40-man raid content back then. So people did it. There was a never-ending swarm of people who applied to guilds and needed their attunements done. I can’t tell you how many times I ran Jailbreak or ran people through BRD to get attuned to Molten Core.

But there was something about that shared suffering that bonded people together. No, I’m serious!

To this day, I will always remember getting attuned to Molten Core. I was in BRD for six hours that night. We had a paladin (!) tanking, a paladin (!) healing, another hunter and a mage. It was me and the healing paladin who were there from Fated Heroes. The tank and the other hunter (who was survival! That was SO rare then!) were from another guild and we picked up a mage to help because we were doing what was called an “emp run” — that’s to say we were going to clear the last boss.

That night, I got attuned to the core, got my Shadowforged Key, did an Emp run (which is where the T0 paladin gloves used to drop until they moved them to an easier-to-kill boss), knocked out a ton of quests… it was epic. The only thing we didn’t do was Jailbreak, because no one had gotten to that point in their quests.

And it was FANTASTIC. It was great!

I don’t remember the name of the puggers, but I do remember we were, collectively, awesome.

To this day, I will always remember running with Majik to get his Jailbreak done. We had to do it TWICE. We went in, did it (it took about 45m-1h back then) and then realized that since Majik had died during a pull, he had failed the quest. So we had to reset the instance AND DO IT AGAIN.

To this day, I will always remember getting Toga and a couple of his cousins attuned to Molten Core. We pugged a healer who then joined the guild. (Granted, he guild-hopped on us TWICE in as many expansions, but it was still a great attunement run.)

My own Jailbreak run had my brother on his druid, a dwarf (!) priest from our guild, another hunter from our guild and … someone else. We didn’t know to pre-clear first. We had to blow my brother’s half-hour cooldown Rebirth (battle rez) on the priest at some point and my brother even blew Tranquility at some point. Totally epic!

I will always remember that I essentially soloed a 5-man portion of the Black Temple attunement. I killed a bunch of adds and was well on my way to killing some elite quest mob all by myself, because my guild (love them!) essentially all said they were “too busy” to help me out. So I did this part of Shadowmoon Valley all on my own until some wonderful shaman from another guild whispered me with “invite!” and I invited him and he HEALED ME and we both got credit for that mob.

Going through steps of attunements was a GREAT bonding experience.

Keys were a way that you could show people you cared about your character and its progression — particularly the more difficult keys. Attunements were a way that you could show people you cared about your character AND that you could get through the difficult challenges most of these involved. It also usually proved that you could work as a member of a team and what is raiding if not working together as a team?

So as we anxiously await Firelands and 4.2, let’s take a moment to remember the countless hours spent on getting keys. Let’s take a moment to remember that, once upon a time, we couldn’t just stroll into a raid instance without being attuned, having an amulet, doing a huge number of quests or even paying gold.

Attunements are already a thing of the past, but I’ve held on to my keys all of these years. I’ve been proud of having them, all of them, and so, as I download 4.2, I will take a moment to think about all these entry barriers I successfully navigated and the crazy shenanigans that usually went along with those runs.

Goodbye, my dear keys. I don’t regret a single moment I spent getting any of you.

(Pictured, from left to right, top to bottom:
Prison Cell Key – BRD, Key to Searing Gorge – Quest, Relic Coffer Key – needed for a portion of BRD, Jump-a-Tron 4000 key – Nagrand quest, Boulderfirst Key – Nagrand quest, Coilskar Chest Key – Shadowmoon Valley quest, The Violet Hold Key – Quest, Zuluhed’s Key – Shadowmoon Valley quest, Flamewrought Key – Heroic Honor Hold key, Key of Time – Heroic Caverns of Time key, The Master’s Key – Karazhan key, Reservoir Key – Heroic Coilfang Reservoir key, Auchenai key – Heroic Auchindoun key, Warpforged Key – Heroic Tempest Keep instances key, Gordok Shackle Key – Nagrand quest, Rusty Prison key – fished up in Dalaran.)

The Raiding Adventures of the "Baby" Paladin

Kurn / / apotheosis, baby paladin adventures, bastion of twilight, blackwing descent, guild, healing, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

Wednesday night was my first night raiding with Choice of Skywall again. The last time had been in late October, just before I brought Madrana home to Eldre’Thalas.

Well, Madrana II (or Saerani III, as a certain Football would put it), is back on Skywall and raided on Wednesday night.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my guild, Apotheosis. I really, really do. But at the same time, it’s SO NICE to be led by someone instead of leading people! Letting someone else organize the raid roster for the night rather than be the one to do it.

We blew through regular Bastion of Twilight in about an hour. My fellow holy paladin applicant got tons of loot (no Cho’gall bracers dropped… what a surprise…) and I’ll have to wait to be eligible until the next raid I attend, so I’m glad for him and glad for me.

It’s always interesting to acclimate to a new raiding environment. On the one hand, it’s a bit scary and nerve-wracking because you desperately do not want to screw up. And they do things differently than you’re used to, most of the time. I mean, sure, I know to hug people when I get Twilight Meteorite on Valiona and Theralion, but am I normally hugging people in melee anyways? In Apotheosis, yes, in Choice, no.

So Halfus was pretty simple and V&T went okay and Council was fine. Cho’gall was a little rough for me. I glyphed Cleansing for that fight and got 20 dispels, more than anyone — even the priest who was in the raid. /flex. But I was totally oom at the end of the fight. And I’d even taken a Potion of Concentration, too. Eesh.

Then, it was off to Blackwing Descent! And to Magmaw and Omnotron.

Magmaw was… entertaining. They were attempting to practice heroic positioning by virtue of having everyone clump up in melee and have a tank kite. The tank was… a prot warrior. I had never heard of a prot warrior tanking Magmaw parasites before, but by golly, it happened (albeit on normal, so there was no fire to dodge) and though there were some tank issues (mangle deaths — they happen everywhere, it seems!), Magmaw was still a one-shot.

On Omnotron, we had the person about to be fried to a crisp *not* moving in preparation for heroic mode, where they cannot move. A few people got nicked by the Flamethrower, but very nice positioning for the most part.

I was thinking maybe we’d poke around at heroic Chimaeron or something and I wondered if my gear could handle that or not, when all of a sudden we’re told to go to Uldum.

Okay. This was not something I had anticipated. The prospect of doing Throne of the Four Winds twice in a week with two different guilds is not cool. I don’t know WHY I hadn’t recognized this as a very real possibility, but apparently I am dumb. ;) No, seriously, it’s okay. I just dislike that instance intensely. And guess what Apotheosis is working on during Thursday’s raid? That’s right. Heroic Conclave.

So there I am on Conclave and I get to heal with Fugara, the GM. We had an easy job, staying on Anshal’s platform the whole time, so it was pretty chill and relaxed. Conclave was a one-shot. Beauty.

And then… Al’Akir.

Let it be known that I have killed that jackass just twice on Madrana (er, the original one) so it’s not like I’m a pro or anything. And they put me in a different spot than I’m usually in. On the bright side, I didn’t have to do the positions for Al’Akir!!!! Many commiserations to Zarethorn, Choice’s raid leader. He had planned that all out ahead of time.

So we wiped on him twice and called it a night. Having said that, I did NOT get blasted off the platform, I did NOT eat Squall Line and I totally used my CDs appropriately. All this from a brand-new (to me) spot, just one section to the right of the tank. (Normally, I’m at the tank’s spot but have also been two to the right.) I had one moment of panic as I saw the oncoming Squall Line and Wind Burst was casting. The moment of panic was not “how do I navigate this awful combination of elements” but rather “shitshitshitshit where is my bubble OH THANK GOD.”

(Madrana II has a different UI than Madrana I. It’s much less cluttered and yet I STILL had to search for my bubble.)

It was really fun to be back in that raid group. A lot of people have come and gone, but there were some familiar faces: Fugara, Ygg, Aidan, Zare, Acid, Baatezus, Banorind, Beezle, Cyber, Daemyn, Sane, Sham, Thorn. It was great to be back there with a lot of the same people.

A lot of people are worried I’m going to burn myself out with this crazy scheme of mine. I admit, that’s a possibility. But I feel energized by my night with Choice. I feel like going in to Throne tomorrow and handing Heroic Conclave their asses. I feel fired up and ready to kick ass with Apotheosis and then to go kick some more ass with Choice on Monday.

Also, I totally fixed my borked Raeli’s Spell Announcer on Madrana II. It refused to work at all throughout the raid, but I fixed it up afterwards. And then I realized I had enough Valor Points to buy an honest-to-goodness healing ring, so I did that, too.

All in all, a really productive night. A fun night.

New computer, baby pally update and such.

Kurn / / archaeology, baby paladin adventures, bastion of twilight, blackwing descent, dungeons, facepalm, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

Well, one thing Archaeology has going for it is that I get time to write stuff (blog posts, forum posts, responses to people’s PMs and emails) while flying back and forth across Kalimdor in search of Tol’Vir sites for the Ring of the Boy Emperor.

At any rate, I ordered a new computer in early April. It arrived on May 25th. It’s an Alienware from Dell and I will, at this time, ask you to refrain from criticizing my decision to get a pre-made (albeit custom-built) machine and for choosing to get it from Dell. (I know all of the above can be polarizing topics.)

I adore it.

I have two 23″ screens, 9 GB of RAM, dual 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 (SLI enabled), a regular 1TB HD and a 300GB 10k RPM HD (Dayden – I was obviously wrong and was looking at one of the 17 different builds I’d assembled before placing the order.).

It’s awesome.

Let’s be clear, here. I have been playing WoW on a laptop with an integrated video card for pretty much the entirety of the last five and a half years. Exceptions have included stints of housesitting for my parents and two short periods of time where I raided from an internet cafe because my laptop(s) had to go to the shop for various reasons.

Playing with spell details up is insane. Water is GORGEOUS in this game and I never knew! How smooth things are, when I can experience them at 60 FPS or higher as opposed to my traditional 7-12 FPS! And SHADOWS.

So, as you can imagine, I am super excited about my purchase and even MORE excited to raid on this thing!

So far, I’ve done Magmaw, ODS, Chim, Maloriak  on official raid nights on the pally (all but ODS on heroic) and Halfus, V&T and Council (with many Cho’gall attempts) on Monday night on the hunter. (Hilarious! I am not completely huntarded!)

The changes are amazing. Dark Sludge is really easily visible. Blaze and shadow crash are easy to avoid. I cannot WAIT to do Atramedes and Nefarian on my new computer. CANNOT WAIT.

And in the meantime, I’ve hit 85 on my baby paladin. I basically did Uldum for the Ramkahen rep and have ignored any other quests (except the various quests to open the portal to Twilight Highlands, plus Crucible of Carnage) and have randomed my way to 85 by way of healing.

A lot of groups are filled with fail. Fail failfailfailfailfafwftgtwfgishf.

Ahem.

People who can’t do Corla’s beams, people whose pets are on aggressive, people who don’t understand how the pyramid packs (damn you, Majik) work in Vortex Pinnacle…

However, there are the occasional groups who are AWESOME. Tanks who ask about my mana and ask if I need CC, skilled DPS who can zerg the last guy in Blackrock Caverns while pulling the adds off JUST long enough for me to heal the tank…

Some very pro groups and some very fail groups.

The baby pally, who still needs a self-deprecating nickname, is gearing up nicely and has 7 346/359 pieces already.

Erudax, in Grim Batol, has already denied me his bracers (333 on normal) once. We’ll see if this gets to be a trend…

So that’s going nicely. I’ve even livestreamed a few times: http://www.livestream.com/kurnmogh

In other news, Apotheosis had a rough week last week, failing to repeat on heroic Magmaw or heroic Atramedes. The former due to a lot of mistakes, the latter because we ran out of time.

This week, we walked in and one-shot heroic Magmaw.

I’ll take it. >.>

And speaking of Apotheosis, June 1st is a fourth anniversary! Granted, we weren’t really a guild, per se, during most of Wrath, but we’ve been a guild since October or November of 2010 and we were certainly kicking back in Burning Crusade. So it’s time to celebrate what we’ve accomplished together and remember the laughter we’ve had during the last several months. I’m planning a retrospective that includes videos (!) and the like. I just need to get videos to render properly and finish going through some screenshots. Should be fun and hopefully done this weekend at the latest.

Having responded to most of my outstanding PMs and emails and having done about as much archaeology as I can stomach for now, I’m going to head to bed, but that’s what’s up with me, lately.

Upcoming blog post topics include: keys/attunement, ZA/ZG gear and T12 gear. Probably not in that order.

Hitting Our Stride?

Kurn / / apotheosis, blackwing descent, raiding, ramblings

So, on May 12th, we killed Heroic Maloriak for the first time.

On May 17th, we killed Heroic Magmaw for the first time. Took us 12 pulls. It was surprisingly easy fight, probably because we used a DK-kiting method. Honestly, I hate that method, but we’ve already gotten Parasite Evening several times without a “stack on melee, kite adds” method, so I feel marginally less lame for doing heroic the way most people seem to do it.

And then, last night, on May 22nd, we killed Heroic Atramedes for the first time.

Three progression bosses in 10 days?

Not to sound ungrateful or anything of the kind, but what the hell is that all about?

We’re making progress AND we’re doing it relatively easily, despite some issues.

What kind of issues? Well, on Tuesday, we knocked out regular ODS, Heroic Magmaw and tried Heroic Chimaeron for a couple of attempts, but he didn’t die. So we walked in there on Thursday knowing that Chimaeron and Maloriak were both up, along with heroic Atramedes and (for now) regular Nefarian.

However, Dayden, our tank lead, had plans on Thursday, so organizing the tanks was largely going to be on my brother’s shoulders.

So there we are, merrily attempting Heroic Chimaeron with one of our OS tanks as a “real” tank for double attack/feud soaking.

It was reading Rhidach’s post about the very same fight, the next day, that I finally managed to put to words the problem we appeared to be having:

We managed to down the fight after six attempts — though, admittedly, we probably could have done it a little sooner if not for my constant confusion of who was tanking what when and why. It was like “who’s on first”, but without the timeless humor.

Midway through our H Chim attempts, my lights flickered, but I stayed online. And then my brother, who does not live all that far from me, promptly went offline. He tweeted me from his phone:

@kurnmogh just lost power.

Well, THAT wasn’t good news.

So we got our other OS tank to swap to tank gear/spec and we had a couple of pulls like that.

And then Fog got back online! Yaaaaaay!

Two more pulls and Chimaeron was dead, with everything having gone right with taunts and swaps and healing. Whew.

On to Maloriak, to attempt to repeat our kill from the week before!

Before the first pull, my lights flickered again. And again, Fog goes offline.

So rather than get both OS tanks going on Maloriak and pull in yet another melee DPS, we went to look at Heroic Atramedes.

8 pulls and lots and lots of people eating discs, bombs and the like, and yes, I am one of the worst offenders. My computer is crap (although I have a new one arriving this week or next!) and so even though I KNOW I’m supposed to move, even though I’m hitting my strafe key as though my actual life depends on it, my toon decides to just stand there. Like a champ.

So we did 8 pulls and tweaked a few things and called it a night, without Fog regaining power.

Sunday: Maloriak time! I was a little nervous about this one. Repeat kills are never a stress-free experience for me. I want to always prove that the first kill was not a fluke.

Four pulls is all it took to repeat our Maloriak kill. Insert me slumping with relief HERE.

And from there, it only took us four pulls to kill Heroic Atramedes. Granted, it was messy as hell and I was certainly dead on the floor, but we did it! I got a battle rez on the first attempt, at Dayden’s request, and after that attempt, I was like “you know, not that I don’t appreciate it or anything, but for right now, I am likely THE WORST POSSIBLE choice for a battle rez.”

So 12 pulls each for Heroic Magmaw and Heroic Atramedes.

I’ll take it!

I know that ODS is going to be more difficult. I know that Valiona & Theralion will be more difficult. I know that Conclave will be more difficult.

But right now, my guild’s killed 3 progression bosses in 10 days and I will take that, thank you very kindly. :D

80! Again.

Kurn / / achievements, archaeology, baby paladin adventures, facepalm, healing, lfg, ramblings

Ding! My baby paladin is now 80. (Actually, 81, but anyways…)

Regardless of whether or not I end up transferring my baby paladin to Skywall, to help out the fine people of Choice, I’m really glad I started a new paladin.

I know, you think I have a screw loose, but it’s given me some FANTASTIC perspective.

I tanked my way from 68-80, which was alternately amazing and failtastic. Getting Oculus about 9 times in two days, completing it only three times and having my drake bug out on me no less than seven times was pretty bad. By “bug out”, I mean that, at different times, I could not dismount or, shockingly, I could not use my abilities on the drake AND I couldn’t dismount.

The only thing that worked — and even then, it wasn’t guaranteed — was logging off and logging back in.

Only I would log back in and I wouldn’t be in The Oculus. Nope. Nor would I be in the location I was in when I accepted the LFG queue. No, all of that would make sense!

I would end up in the Sentinel Hill graveyard in Westfall. Alive.

Each and every time this happened, that’s where I would end up.

I maintain that Sentinel Hill is the black hole of Azeroth.

At any rate…

So I hit 80 in The Oculus, wherein my drake bugged out TWICE, and then finished up the group. I wasn’t going to abandon these poor people without a tank in Oculus. That’s just mean.

After the run, I race-changed from dwarf (as adorable as male dwarves are) and went human female, as I usually prefer to be, regardless of the class. There are a few reasons for it — Diplomacy, The Human Spirit, Every Man for Himself — but also because I don’t think I could get used to being that short as a dwarf in a raid situation…

Anyhow! Then I started scrambling for gear so that I could queue up as a healer for Cataclysm instances.

Problem 1) Heirlooms listed 1-80 do not work at 80 any longer. They might have, once upon a time, but that no longer works.

Problem 2) I had essentially nothing in a few spots and spent some cash here and there. My shoulders, sadly, are now the Ornate Saronite Pauldrons.

The ilvl requirement for Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides is 226. I laughed. That’s 25-man Ulduar-level stuff! It’s kind of neat to see how much gear has changed so much. I did Ulduar two years ago and 226 ilvl stuff is now what your average should be in order to get into the entry level dungeons for Cataclysm.

I suppose it’s because it was just so easy to gear up to T10 at the end of Wrath but they also wanted to let those who maybe hadn’t done anything since Ulduar come in and get right into things.

I managed to get that ilvl up to 230 and finally, I could queue up. That was ALSO very strange to me. That I had to try to gear up for these starter dungeons? I walked straight into BRC, TotT, Stonecore and Vortex Pinnacle on Madrana without being challenged by the LFG tool. I guess being in mostly 277 gear will do that. Even Kurn, who was in mostly 251 gear, had zero issues queueing.

Things are blurring together for me. I dinged 80 and picked up the Patina-Coated Breastplate and the Bands of Fading Light. It seemed very weird to pick up those items to head towards Blackrock Caverns or Throne of the Tides instead of Naxxramas, let me tell you. I feel as though I’m skipping current content by skipping out on the WotLK raids, although I know I’m not. It just seems so strange to not raid those instances at 80. The disconnect between my “normal” pally and my “baby” pally is messing with my head.

I finally was ready to queue up for the entry-level Cataclysm dungeons and I looked, in horror, at my mana bar.

I had about 30,000 mana.

Do you know the last time I saw the number “30,000” next to my mana bar on Madrana? I was raid-buffed in Ulduar as we worked on Vezax. My raid thought that I had bribed a GM to give me extra mana.

So I queued up and was teleported to BRC and realized I was pulled in to a group that had lost their healer.

I took the portal that was up and found myself at the forge area.

The mage, who was the group leader, was an offensive jackass, whose first words are not “Hi, guys” or anything, but rather “dk i hope you know this fight cuz the last 3 tanks didnt.”

“I know all the fights,” he responds.

“we’ll see,” says the mage.

I’m like “wtf did I just walk into here?”

The DK pulls the boss, since the trash is done, and he, himself, stands on the grated outer ring. And the boss is, you know, nowhere near the center flame area.

After about 10 seconds of this, the mage says “lol might as well give up he will never die”

And I got pissed, because all of this could have been prevented if only the mage had said “please don’t forget to move the boss in and out of the fire in the middle so he gets the debuff.”

But he didn’t. Instead, he was like “I hope you know the fight” and the poor tank is then forced to be on the defensive.

So, while healing, I manage to type out “(tank’s name), please move him in and out of the central fire to debuff him.”

Instantly, the DK drags the boss into the central fire.

And proceeds to stand there.

And wipe us.

So I release and run and NO ONE ELSE IS. “Run back, please,” I say.

Two people (the tank and a DPS) release, one person goes offline and the obnoxious mage says “no i’m waiting for the tank to drop group because i’m not fucking running with him”

I tried to vote-kick the mage, but couldn’t initiate any more party kicks (I guess that means they vote-kicked people out before?). And when he still wouldn’t release after the rest of us got back to the instance, I dropped group.

LFG tool: 1, Kurn: 0.

My next queue took me to a partly-finished Throne of the Tides where the group was at Erunak. The paladin tank was all KINDS of vile, spouting profanity (which I don’t generally have an issue with) and teaming it up with perjorative terms against a variety of minorities, gay people in particular.

He pulled the boss and then, partway through the fight, dropped group. >.>

Not that I was upset to be rid of him or anything, but wow. What a champ.

The mage then remarked, “what a fuckin homo”.

I was about halfway through typing something along the lines of how equating “gay” and the like with “stupid” is not cool, but the rogue in the group beat me to it.

“Homophobic much?”

“yea,” responded the mage.

“Did you know that over 800 species on the planet can be gay, but only one can be homophobic?”

I LAUGHED. “Well-said. I’m with you, man.”

That effectively shut up the mage and the rogue and I chatted a bit in whispers about why homophobes are annoying mouth-breathers. Good times.

Finally, we get a new tank, a druid. And the group is suddenly awesome.

We had zero issues with Erunak or the last dude and then requeued for BRC specifically. Easy full clear, then randomed up again and got BRC again, whereupon I got a tanking shield and a healing shield. Then another requeue and we ran a full TotT run.

The fifth member of the group changed a bit — it was a DK, then it was a DPS warrior, then it was an enhancement shaman — but the druid, the rogue, myself and even that mage made a pretty good team, despite the earlier ugliness.

I went on one more BRC run later on, whereupon the tank pulled one of the fire elementals around Karsh and accidentally pulled Karsh, too. I was like “greaaaaaat, that’s going to be a wipe,” BUT NO.

The tank was superb. Not only did he make sure to get the boss debuffed, but he picked up the other add when it approached us and marked it with a skull. He used Divine Guardian, used all of his own cooldowns. I used Aura Mastery and HoSac (OH GOD, I have missed that spell!) and everything was fine. HORRIBLE pull. FANTASTIC execution.

The one major complaint I have about my experiences getting to 81 through the dungeon finder tool is this:

No one seems to know how the hell to interrupt.

Every conceivable BAD spell that could be cast DID get cast, without interruption, almost without exception.

I was that exception and Rebuke has a 10s cooldown.

Shadow Strikes on the Evolved Twilight guys in BRC? All me. Never could reach Corla to interrupt that Dark Command and, as a result, got feared and my worshipper evolved at one point, but anyways.

And that’s even asking them to do so. Like, “Hey guys, it’d be really useful if you could interrupt that Healing Wave on that mob, or Bore on this mob or Shadow Strike…”

Nothing.

Alas.

Still. Level 81. Getting there!

My ilvl is now 270, which is HILARIOUS, considering it’s all greens and some blues and my beautiful Vibrant Alchemist Stone. I keep looking at the ilvl and going “so that’s midway between ICC25 and ICC H25…” and wondering if I could heal heroic Dreamwalker. ;)

I’ve also been digging like a fool on Kurn (for the baby pally, for the Ring of the Boy Emperor and potentially Tyrande’s Favorite Doll. I’ll reforge the mastery to spirit on the ring and the doll will be useful while I wait to make/turn in a Tsunami deck.) and I am sad to report I got the More Skills to Pay the Bills achievement the other day. 525 in all four secondaries. I kind of hate myself.

There are guild updates, too. I need to boast about our heroic Magmaw kill and such, but we’ll see if we can nail heroic Atramedes tonight, too and then I’ll put it all in a single post.

It's Going to Be Legen-waitforit-dary!

Kurn / / apotheosis, facepalm, gear, patch 4.2, ramblings

I don’t mean for this to be me bitching (I swear), but I’ve spent time over the last week working on a fair, equitable process for determining who’s going to get the legendary staff. Note that I haven’t selected anyone, but I have recently proposed a fairly lengthy and detailed process to the officers of my guild.

I was pretty pleased with it. It promised to be long and tedious for some people (mostly the officers) but it seemed like the fairest way to do things.

There is a substantial amount of resistance from the officers thus far.

I won’t describe my process (at least not yet, but I’d like to do so at some point in the future), nor what some of my officers are countering with, but I wanted to post because if they aren’t going to accept my method, I need another suggestion. So I am now looking at backup plans. Of course, the last one took me a week to refine, so if I’m going to counter, I need to spread my net a little bit.

Please comment about legendary selections that you’ve seen in the past! Tell me about the best AND the worst selection processes for a legendary you’ve ever seen. Tell me why you liked one and why you didn’t like one. Have you ever gotten a legendary? If so, the process obviously worked out for you, but what flaws did you see in the system? Have you been passed over for a legendary? If so, the process obviously did NOT work out for you, but what did you LIKE about the process?

Finally, how is your guild dealing with the legendary staff?

Can’t wait to read your responses. :)

T12 Bonus Changes, Mana Costs

Kurn / / cataclysm, gear, healing, paladins, patch 4.2, ramblings

MMO-Champion has the new T12 set bonuses for us, as well as a post by the blues about why they’re raising our mana costs significantly.

Old set bonuses:

Paladin T12 Holy 2P Bonus: Casting Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Divine Light on your Beacon of Light target has a 40% chance to grant you 2% of your base mana.

Paladin T12 Holy 4P Bonus: Your Divine Light also heals a nearby injured target for 20% of the amount healed.

New set bonuses:

Holy Paladin 2-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Healing with Holy Shock has a 40% chance to grant you 6% of your base mana.

Holy Paladin 4-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Your Divine Light, Flash of Light, and Holy Light spells also heal an injured target within 8 yards for 10% of the amount healed.

My thoughts: (Edited May 14, 2011)

The 2pc is a lot better. 40% of the time you cast Holy Shock, you will only spend 1% 3% of your base mana instead of 9% (which is the current cost) or 7%, which is the new 4.2 cost (at least as of build  14107). Actually, you will probably need to have 7% mana (1640) in order to cast, but when this procs, you will probably get a refund of about 1406 since the real cost will be around 234 mana. Since Holy Shock is our cheapest heal that costs mana in 4.2 (Holy Light will be 12%) and is our primary method of Holy Power generation, this is a nice little bit of mana back. Remember, though, this could be on an internal cooldown, much the way Eternal Glory is!

With this bonus, it seems that they want to further emphasize the use of Holy Shock and so it is now taking Flash of Light’s place as an uber-cheap heal. In the old days, Flash of Light was stupidly cheap and even if you had pretty much no mana whatsoever, you could always afford a Flash of Light.

The 4pc is better, but not a ton, IMHO. They halved the healing of the splash heal to 10% from 20% but let us use more of our spells AND there’s no “you must heal the beacon” requirement. We still have to use a casted spell, but it can be any of the three casted spells. Even with the increase in mana to Holy Light, we’re still going to be using that quite a bit.

Mana Costs

Zarhym said:

We increased paladin mana costs because they were too efficient at healing. In raid encounters, for instance, paladins were sitting at 40% of their mana while the other healers were flat out of mana. Paladins were casting Divine Light as their main heal because they didn’t need the efficiency of Holy Light. You personally may not have been in that situation, but when looking at the overall picture, as well as running plenty of tests, this was our conclusion overall.

To which I say, “you know what? This is what you get when you design mana-free heals. You have now introduced Holy Power to the paladin class and the holy paladins now have two resources with which to heal.” But no other class has that. Blizzard now has the unenviable task of balancing holy paladins between the maximum amount of holy power one can possibly generate (through use of Holy Shock, Crusader Strike, Tower of Radiance and the Blessed Life talent), plus their mana costs and regen rates in current gear levels VERSUS everyone else’s mana costs and regen rates.

Essentially, they’ve screwed up by giving us Holy Power and we are forever going to be overpowered if they tune our mana to what other healers have, but forever underpowered if people don’t make smart use of Holy Power or, perhaps more importantly, don’t smartly generate Holy Power.

It’s still early in the expansion and I’m still trying to find what’s right for me. I like to tank heal. So I have Tower of Radiance. But on a fight like Chimaeron, where I am not tank healing, I don’t pick up Tower of Radiance. Instead, I take advantage of the crazy raid damage that fight has and I pick up two points in Blessed Life. The last time I killed Heroic Chimaeron, I picked up 12 Holy Power that way instead of the 0 Holy Power I would have generated since I am emphatically NOT healing my beacon target on that fight.

There are much better players than myself out there, much more progressed players than myself, who have probably figured out the balance as it works best for them and it’s probably also a very efficient way for them to heal, which is likely why they’re better players than I am. (Though I would challenge anyone to heal through heroic Maloriak, keeping their tank alive, at 3fps at some points, though. I would totally win.)

So my thoughts are that Blizzard has screwed up. We will never be tuned “properly” because of Holy Power, unless they specifically limit the rate at which Holy Power is generated. They’ve already taken steps to do so — Holy Light on the beaconed target no longer gives Holy Power, as it used to with Tower of Radiance. Blessed Life now has an internal cooldown and cannot occur more than once every eight seconds.

There’s already a limit on how often we can cast Holy Shock (6 seconds) and Crusader Strike (4.5 seconds) and there’s a less-tangible limit on how much Holy Power we can gain from Tower of Radiance, due to the exorbitant mana costs of Flash of Light and Divine Light — which are only going to get more expensive.

I don’t think the limits are firm enough, though, and it’s going to make balancing us a really difficult job for the next few major patches.

My two cents.