Cataclysm PTR Build 13033

Kurn / / beta, cataclysm, ptr

Just to be clear, I haven’t screwed around at all on the PTRs. I’ve really kept all my activity to the beta realms and even that activity has dwindled since I hit 85. However, MMO-Champion is reporting a new PTR build that significantly affects the paladin talent trees, particularly the holy tree.

Holy changes:

* Enlightened Judgements now also Increases the range of your Judgement by 5/10 yards.
* Divinity is gone, moved to Protection
* Protector of the Innocent is now a Tier 1 Holy Talent and has been revamped – Casting a targeted heal on any target, including yourself, also heals you for 1240.83 to 1427.62. (Multi ranks, but currently all with the same value)

Well, at first, I thought we were going to get 40-yard judgements again. Wrong. The ret talent has been changed to 10/20 yards from 15/30. So this is a big change and we basically need to grab Enlightened Judgements now, just to maintain a 30y range. I don’t care about the self-healing component at all. Like Walks was saying to me tonight, they seem to be in love with the idea of us passively healing ourselves. Screw that, I just want my range back.

Divinity being gone from the holy tree is, in my opinion, a bad move. With the change to Arbiter of the Light several builds ago, removing the critical chance for Holy Light, we now only really actively want Judgements of the Pure on our first tier. We don’t want to play with Arbiter of the Light. That left us with Divinity. Except now Divinity is gone, swapped with Protector of the Innocent, which has been changed.

Again with the passive healing. What is this, some sort of perma-mini-beacon on us? I don’t want this. Give me back the ability to increase healing done to and by me, which is infinitely more useful than this, which is PVP-only at best and completely useless except in the most dire circumstances at worst.

Prot changes (that affect us):

* Divinity is now a Tier 1 Protection talent.
* Protector of the Innocent is gone, moved to Holy.

So if we want Divinity, we now need to spec 3 points into prot, along with the 2 we already put there for Eternal Glory. But that leaves us unable to access Rule of Law!

Okay, don’t get me wrong. I was very happy to see that we can maintain our judgement range, which adds to the 20 yards from the talents in ret. They nerfed ret’s range and gave us the chance to pick up those 10 yards. But now we’re all kinds of screwed up in terms of trees.

Here’s the build I came up with for PVE healing:

31/5/5

Let’s walk through it.

Holy

Tier 1

0/2 Arbiter of the Light. We gain nothing from improved crit on our judgements and we have no way of accessing Templar’s Verdict.

2/3 Protector of the Innocent. Well, it doesn’t add to our overall healing, but it will heal us a wee bit and is, therefore, slightly more useful than Arbiter of the Light. I’ve decided to take the minimum points possible here to go up to the next tier, which is 2 points.

3/3 Judgements of the Pure. Even if it’s 9% rather than the 15% on live, haste is haste is haste.

Tier 2

3/3 Clarity of Purpose. Reduced cast time is reduced cast time. Snag this.

2/2 Last Word. It was a talent that was lacking, but in recent builds there’s really been nothing else to get us down to the next tier. This is fine, particularly since people will be staying at low health longer in Cataclysm. But I wish we didn’t need it to get to the next tier.

0/2 Blazing Light. Damage by Holy Shock and Exorcism. Pass.

Tier 3

0/2 Denounce. With the change to Enlightened Judgements, we REALLY have no room for this in a PVE healing spec. The only way I would consider dropping points in here is if it gave us mana back.

1/1 Divine Favor. Spell haste and spell crit by 20% for 20 seconds every three minutes? Yes, please.

2/2 Infusion of Light. Still a great talent even if it doesn’t cause instant Flashes of Light anymore. It still reduces the cast time on Holy Light. Really, using Holy Lights after IoL procs is the best use of Holy Light, from what I can tell. I’d take this even if it wasn’t linked to Speed of Light.

2/2 Daybreak.  I would be tempted to drop this, although it’s a very nice little talent. I would have considered dropping it for other talents elsewhere, except that we still need two points to get to Tier 4 and to have our 31 points in holy. It’s not a bad talent, but it’s another talent that I feel I am cornered into taking in order to get to the next tier. I feel that way about three talents so far, because they are simply better for PVE healing than the alternatives. That’s kind of tragic. But yes, take Daybreak.

Tier 4

All of it!

2/2 Enlightened Judgements. Pretty sure the tooltip on the talent calculator is wrong. This is almost certainly 5/10 yards, not 50/100 yards, which brings us to 30 yards with the 2 points in Improved Judgement in ret. Oh, and also, it’s more passive healing! I’m tired of seeing passive healing *to myself* in my tree.

1/1 Beacon of Light. Do it. Everyone likes bacon.

3/3 Speed of Light. Fantastic spell for haste to FoL, HL and DL, plus the shortened Holy Radiance cooldown (30s from 60) and the speed boost during the first four seconds of Holy Radiance. These are the best three points you’ll spend in all of Holy.

1/1 Sacred Cleansing. Magic debuffs suck. Pick this up.

Tier 5

3/3 Conviction. 9% extra healing, even if it’s based on procs and not 100% uptime, is still 9% extra healing.

1/1 Aura Mastery. This has saved my ass a ton this expansion. It is unchanged. Pick it up.

1/2 Spiritual Focus. In order to maintain only 31 points in Holy (the minimum before we can spec into other trees), I went with 1/2 Spiritual Focus, meaning half of my spirit is converted into hit rating. Let’s face it. We’re holy. We’re not expected to hit all that frequently. Judgements are basically all we want to hit, if we’re indeed “supposed” to be standing at range. (And believe me, I am a staunch supporter of standing way the hell in the back.) So we can skimp here, but I do like this talent very much.

Tier 6

3/3 Tower of Radiance. Anything that adds to Holy Power is good.

0/2 Blessed Life. Except this. We’re not supposed to be hit in PVE content, so if we’re being hit, chances are, things are going downhill anyways. This talent had about five seconds worth of being a PVE talent in beta, but it’s still firmly in the realm of PVP.

Tier 7

1/1 Light of Dawn. The no-brainer. We’re all supposed to love and hug our 31-point talents.

Protection

Tier 1

3/3 Divinity. We almost have to take this. It’s 6% extra healing and really still belongs in Holy. If we could swap this out with Arbiter of the Light, I’d drop Spiritual Focus altogether to pick up all three of these points and spec out of Protector of the Innocent.

0/3 Seals of the Pure. There’s no reason to take this, no healing is involved.

2/2 Eternal Glory. Yaaaaaay for Holy Power! Snag it.

Nothing else affects healing in the prot tree.

Retribution

Tier 1

0/2 Eye for an Eye. Worthless for a holy paladin.

3/3 Crusade. 30% extra healing to Holy Shock is certainly worth 3 talent points. It’s one of our most-used spells and we should be using it on cooldown. (I know, that still just feels very strange to say.)

2/2 Improved Judgement. Previous builds had this at 15/30 yards, but this has been tuned down to 10/20 yards. This makes snagging Enlightened Judgements in Holy even more important.

And… we’re out of points.

Losing out on the chance to get Guardian’s Favor and Rule of Law in Tier 2 of Retribution, not to mention Pursuit of Justice, kind of sucks. But Eternal Glory is just SO GOOD that we need to take it. And Divinity boosts my healing by 6%, which is extremely hard to say no to.

Other builds I would consider:

“Utility” Build: 31/3/7: Divinity and Guardian’s Favor, no Eternal Glory.

“Weak” Build: 31/2/8: No Divinity, but Eternal Glory and Rule of Law. I say “weak” because although you gain extra crit from Rule of Law, which is extremely awesome, you lose the 6% extra healing done from Divinity.

Honestly, you can swap points between Enlightened Judgements and Spiritual Focus too, but there’s nothing else you want or, more importantly, need to take in the holy tree for PVE healing.

That’s a pretty sad state of the holy tree. To not actively want more than one talent in your first tier? I really do need to get my feedback posts up on the beta forums. This is worse than the over-bloated Holy Priest tree back in BC, only it’s the opposite. Instead of having a hundred talents you WANT, I have trouble finding places to spend all 31 I absolutely must drop into holy.

Solutions to Common Problems on Heroic Sindragosa (25)

Kurn / / guide, icecrown citadel, raiding

I have now learned Heroic Sindragosa 25 with two separate guilds. I have killed her twice, both times with my previous guild. I have wiped to her a significant amount of times. Probably more times than I dare to consider. Definitely more times than I have wiped to heroic Putricide or heroic Deathwhisper, most with my previous guild.

When I left my previous guild and joined my current guild, I was aware that I would have to relearn how to do some encounters and would have to learn along with the guild how the guild was going to do the heroic versions of Dreamwalker, Lady Deathwhisper, Professor Putricide, Sindragosa and, perhaps, the Lich King as well.

Dreamwalker was rescued in the first reset I had with the new guild. Deathwhisper was two weeks later. It took much longer for Putricide to go down, but he finally did. So now our attention turns to Sindragosa.

I have noticed several issues in our attempts on her and what’s interesting to me, at least, is that the issues are the same, exact ones my previous guild dealt with. I’m not just talking about screwing up some of the mechanics, either, although that’s part of it and part of learning.

Sindragosa is a challenging encounter because of the amount of coordination it requires. Putricide on heroic is hard because everything is random — Unbound Plague targets, ooze targets, gas targets, who gets which buff in transitions. Sindragosa is not challenging for that reason. Most of the things that happen on Sindragosa are constants. There will always be three healers and three casters with Unchained Magic. Ice Tomb targets are random, but you can plan where each person goes. P3 Ice Tombs are placed with regularity on one side or the other.

The issue is coordination — you need to stop, start, move, run, start again, stop again, watch the ground, watch your debuffs, and you need to be able to rely on your fellow raiders to be doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing as well.

So today… Solutions to Common Problems on Heroic Sindragosa (25).

1) Parries. Sindragosa parry hastes. What does this mean?

From WoWWiki:

Swing timer

After a successful parry, the defender’s “swing timer” is reduced by 40% of your weapon speed (or even reset), unless this would result in a reduction to less than 20% of your swing time remaining. This results in an average of .24 extra swings per parry; thus parry favors slower, higher damage weapons.[1] Note that with a slow weapon and fast incoming attacks, it is possible to gain multiple speed reductions. While tanks like to profit from this effect, melee damage dealers should attack from behind whenever possible, both to increase their own damage and to avoid causing unneeded damage to the tank through the enemy’s parries.

Your swing timer is always running any time you are able to parry (you can’t parry during spellcasting, stun, etc.), and since it resets on a predictable basis, there are several addons that can display it. Using such a timer and monitoring incoming events, you will note that parry affects only your current swing, and only the time remaining when the parry occurs. In order to display parry events accurately, you must know the correct swing speed (including haste effects) and the elapsed swing time.

Note: When a mob parries an attack, its swing timer also advances in the same manner. This does not apply to certain raid bosses for which parry-haste functionality has been explicitly turned off by the game designers, e.g. Brutallus.

The vast majority of ICC bosses have parry haste turned off, like Brutallus in Sunwell Plateau. The following bosses are those in T10+ content in Wrath of the Lich King who have parry haste turned ON:

Lady Deathwhisper, Sindragosa, Halion.

So three things here:

a) Tanks need to make sure they have a fair bit of expertise, even if they’re wearing frost resist gear. Maybe some Rhinolicious Wyrmsteak? For tanks, you’re almost certainly not going to be able to eliminate the parries, so your goal is to minimize them.

b) Melee need to eliminate parries, period. This is achieved by making sure you’re at the expertise soft-cap of 6.5% AND making sure you’re standing in the right place! Do not stand near the dragon’s front shoulders. Stand right near the back legs, just a bit towards her midsection. You obviously don’t want to stand in the back o f the dragon because of her tail swipe, but standing near the hindquarters should allow the game to believe you’re hitting her from an angle where you’re technically behind her.

c) If you’re a caster or a healer, don’t stand next to the dragon and auto-attack. We have pretty much no expertise and can easily cause a parry. This can happen particularly when a paladin judges from afar and then runs in close without turning off the auto-attack. While this doesn’t matter much on a Blistering Cold cast, since she’s not actively hitting the tank, be careful that you’re not beating on her with your dagger or staff or mace or even your sword.

Pro-tip: If you parse your attempts with World of Logs, you can tell who’s being parried by selecting the attempts you’d like and then going to the Expression Editor. Use this string:

(fulltype=SWING_MISSED) and targetname=”Sindragosa” and missType=MISS_PARRY

To see if this causing an issue, look at individual fights and examine your tank’s deaths. If it was due to melee attacks around 0.9-1.2 seconds apart, this is likely a parry haste.

2) Icy Grip & Blistering Cold. So many people die to Blistering Cold and it just plain isn’t necessary!

When you see by your boss mod timer that there is 5 seconds left on the Icy Grip cooldown, prepare yourself. Move very close to the dragon (making sure your auto-attack is off!) and continue casting/hitting, etc.

When she casts Icy Grip, she’ll pull you to her. Since you’re so close to her, you’re barely moving. Just turn (using your mouse) and run or strafe out 25 yards from her. The single biggest issue I see with Blistering Cold is people being way the hell away from her when she casts Icy Grip, so they spend a couple of seconds being pulled TO her and don’t have enough time to run out.

Pro tip: Tuskarr’s Vitality (or Cat’s Swiftness) is seriously the best boot enchant you can get if you don’t have a talent that increases your speed, like Pursuit of Justice. You would be shocked at how often it saves you on this fight and so many others throughout this expansion.

3) Frost Bombs. On regular, they weren’t too much of a problem. You ducked behind an Ice Tomb and if you got hit, so what? No big deal. On heroic, they one-shot you, unless you’re a bear and you pop Barkskin and Survival Instincts. ;)

The proper way to deal with the Frost Bombs is thusly:

a) Hide behind an Ice Tomb.

b) Look at the platform for the projected texture that shows you where the Frost Bomb will land. It’s a small, blue circle. This is a terrible quality screenshot, but here:

If you cannot see that little rune thing, check to make sure you have Projected Textures turned ON. If you do and you still have trouble seeing it, turn down your Particle Density. The above screenshot is with Projected Textures on and Particle Density at the lowest setting.

c) Move to make sure the Ice Tomb is blocking you ENTIRELY from the frost bomb. As my brother said the other night on regular Sindragosa 10m (his first time there), “man, you really gotta tuck in there, don’t you?” The answer to that is yes. Cling to the tomb.

d) Make sure you move to properly line up the Ice Tombs between you and the bombs for ALL FOUR BOMBS.

e) Make sure that no tombs are broken until after the last bomb drops. You then have several seconds for the tank and healers to run out to meet Sindragosa during which you can finish off the Ice Tombs. It is ideal for all Ice Tombs to be below 15% or so health by the time the last Frost Bomb hits and then finished off before anyone is asphyxiated.

4) Frost Damage. There are three main ways to help combat the persistent frost aura (which only gets worse with stacks of Mystic Buffet up). I like to use all of them.

a) bring extra healers. Like, 8.

b) Wear 1-2 pieces of frost resistance gear. I personally wear the belt. Tanks should probably wear 2 pieces (belt/boots) and should pop either version of Sindragosa’s Flawless Fang on Blistering Cold (and ONLY on Blistering Cold!) if they’re planning on eating them in order to keep Sindragosa standing still.

c) Have BOTH Frost Resistance Totem and Frost Resistance Aura up. Drop the totem near the tank, in melee range, so that when the raid runs away from the tank during Blistering Cold, the tank still has 130 Frost Resistance added, thanks to the totem.

5) Unchained Magic, Instability & Backlash. Run away from the raid. Let Instability drop when you’re 20 yards away from others. Don’t get gripped into Sindragosa with any stacks — if you do, keep casting instants every 3 seconds so that you don’t blow up the whole raid. More on dealing with Unchained Magic on heroic here. I strongly recommend not casting at ALL in P3 with Unchained Magic.

As well, the whole of the ranged contingent of the raid (casters, hunters, healers) should be clumped up together very tightly.

6) Unchained Magic, Instability, Backlash and Iceblock, Divine Shield & Dispersion. Mages, paladins and shadow priests can avoid dealing with Unchained Magic once or twice or so per attempt on Sindragosa by using their immunity effects (Iceblock and Divine Shield) or by using Dispersion. However, for mages and paladins, if you’re going to IB or bubble it off, you MUST NOT have any stacks of Instability on you when you do! If you do, this will cause your Instability to fall off immediately and hit all people within 20 yards of you. IF you have a stack or more, run out, cast to your heart’s desire, THEN bubble/IB. Otherwise, bubble or iceblock FIRST, then continue casting as normal.

Shadow Priests can stack Instability to truly ludicrous amounts if Dispersion is up, but again, just because you’re taking almost no damage doesn’t mean you should blow up the raid around you. Run. Out. Of. The. Raid.

7) Ice Tombs. Ice Tombs cause damage AND they can chain to other people. Ice Tombs cause about 10k damage and if you’re within 10y of other people getting tombed, you’ll cause 10k damage to each other. So stay 10y away from others, even if you’re given a particular location to go. Do not stand on top of others, do not stand too close to others. This can be a problem in P3 where people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

It’s also really important to get a shield or a hot or two up on the people who are about to get Ice Tombed, so that they’re absolutely topped off by the time Asphyxiation kicks in, if that’s an issue. Hell, I even toss a Sacred Shield and FoL on someone if I can. Make sure Frost Beacon is on your raid frames, healers, that’ll show you who’s going to get tombed.

8) Phase 3. Keep it simple. If you have Unchained Magic, don’t cast. If you get a Frost Beacon on you, telling you you’re going to be a Frost Tomb, run to the appropriate side. Drop Mystic Buffet stacks every other tomb. Give tanks a chance to reset their stacks. Run out from Blistering Cold.

Above all, keep calm. The big problem I see in P3 (or P2, if you don’t count air phase as P2) is people panicking. Quit panicking!

9) Communication. While this is not imperative during the entire fight, it’s particularly important between healers in the final phase.

My previous guild, which did not use Vent or any voice communications, came up with the idea of using macros between healers to indicate who had Unchained (and was, therefore, not healing). The macro looks like this:

/6 *** UNCHAINED MAGIC *** on Madrana!

/in 29 /6 *** Unchained Magic *** is done on Madrana!

/6 is the healer channel we used so replace that with your own channel number. What you do with this is hit it when you get Unchained Magic. UM lasts 30 seconds, so this is an approximate macro that will count 29 seconds before telling your fellow healers that you’re able to cast again. Depending on when you hit the macro after getting UM, it might be a little late in announcing you’re ready to cast, but it’s better than nothing, particularly if you don’t use voice communication or officers are calling out things like where to drop the next Ice Tomb or whatever.

I think that’s all the advice I have for Sindragosa on heroic. Just keep it simple and think through the consequences to your actions. Good luck!

Heroic Sindragosa: A Flowchart for Unchained Magic

Kurn / / guide, healers, icecrown citadel, raiding

Not being able to sleep sucks, so here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a few days. You are free to snag this particular image, so long as it is NOT modified, and post it to your guild forums or whatever. I’d prefer it if you uploaded it to photobucket or something as well, instead of using up my bandwidth by hotlinking it. If that proves to be an issue, I’ll disable that. Obviously, click on the image for a larger version.

Flowchart for Unchained Magic on Heroic Sindragosa

Obviously, some classes (mages, paladins, shadow priests) are able to work around Unchained Magic at least once, perhaps twice throughout the encounter. This should be viewed as a general, beginner’s guide to Sindragosa’s Unchained Magic on heroic, where the Backlash caused by dropping your stacks of Instability will hit people within 20 yards of you once you drop your stacks.

Still, enjoy. Please. Spread the word.

Pretty please.

So much to post, so little time.

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

I have a lot to do in WoW in the next couple of days and I have a huge amount of stuff to write. No joke, I have five drafts to finish up, spanning subjects like Zul’Gurub and its removal from the game to Sindragosa and how I hate that fight and I hate how much I know about it to beta stuff.

I did very little on beta this weekend, but live has had me pretty busy.

Continue reading “So much to post, so little time.”

Cataclysm Beta Build 12984

Kurn / / beta, cataclysm, paladins

MMO-Champion is reporting new beta build changes, indicating that a new build is around the corner.

Holy changes are being reported as follows:

* Holy Light base healing has been reduced by 25%. Mana costs changed to 9% of base mana, up from 6% of base mana.

Wait, so you’re taking the one heal that’s got a cast time that we can use a lot, even though we don’t usually, because it’s so weak, and you’re making it weaker? AND more expensive?

* Light of Dawn base healing has been increased by 10%. Can no longer consume Holy Power to increase healing.

I’ll have to see what these numbers are like without charges of Holy Power. I’m thinking instead of around 4-4.5k for 3 charges, we’ll be lucky to see 3.5-4k.

* Improved Concentration Aura is gone.

That’s okay. They’re making all spell pushback base 70% resist. Regular Concentration Aura is fine.

* Daybreak now has a 10/20% chance to make your next Holy Shock not trigger a cooldown if used within 12 sec. (Old – 15/30% chance to reset Holy Shock’s cooldown)

I liked the first iteration of Daybreak, but this allows for two Holy Shocks in a row. We’ll be even more dependant on Holy Shock with a weaker Holy Light.

* Spiritual Focus (Tier 5) *New* – Grants hit rating equal to 50/100% of any Spirit gained from items or effects.

Well, that’s good. Yay for our judgements hitting.

Then in prot tree news, this:

* Guardian’s Favor is now a Tier 2 Retribution talent.

That makes it easily accessible to holy paladins for a reduced CD on Hand of Protection. I’ve always loved my shorter BOP cooldown, so this may fight for points.

However, it should be noted that Eternal Glory will be gone from ret and dropped into Tier 1 of the prot tree.

This means we’re looking at 31/2/8 as our ideal build for PVE healing, where we make a choice between Rule of Law (extra 5/10/15% crit to Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, Word of Glory) and Guardian’s Favor.

Note that this hasn’t been released on the beta yet and this is just what I’ve gleaned from reading MMO-Champion, but… Well, I’ll keep you posted on how healing is once this has launched.

This is probably a kneejerk reaction, but basically, I just want to say “So really, what do you want me to heal with going forward?” because that’s kind of how I feel right now. They have just augmented our absolute dependency on Holy Shock by weakening Holy Light and by changing Daybreak, which will allow two Holy Shocks in a row.

It feels very much like I have two spells:

1) Holy Shock: Instant-cast heal with a cooldown. Creates charges of Holy Power.

2) Word of Glory: Instant-cast heal with no cooldown, but dependent on charges of Holy Power.

And that’s it. That’s how it *feels*. I haven’t played much yet in instances and not at all with this build. But I’ll keep you posted.

Please feel free to ask me questions and I’ll do my best to respond.

Good News, Everybody!

Kurn / / achievements, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

Just a quick update here about live raiding. My guild finally got heroic Professor Putricide down on 25-man.

It was a guild first and I am so very proud of them and pleased that I could help at all. We beat our heads against this guy for a long time, but we finally did it.

I haven’t killed Putricide on heroic since May.

It felt really good to be part of a guild’s first, even though it was my… fifth? Sixth?

So we turn from Putricide to heroic Sindragosa as our progression boss.

I know damn near everything there is to know about heroic Sindragosa. I am a champ at that fight. I know how to play through it from any perspective, even though I’ve only ever healed it. This is the fight in ICC that is *mine*.

It’s a killer fight, though. Even with the buff, there is SO much coordination that makes Sindragosa more difficult than Putricide in many ways. Putricide is more “okay, pop quiz, hotshot!” and Sindragosa is more “and everyone in perfect sync, go left! Go right! Run around like a tool!”.

It’s like Putricide is so random with the plague and the ooze target and the gas target that you really just have to be able to react instantly. More to the point, you need to know what to do given some very specific circumstances. Example:

Someone next to you has had the plague for 8 seconds. You already have the plague debuff. No one else is in range. The plague has at least another 20 seconds of duration on it.

What do you do? Do you let your raid mate die? Do you grab the plague and ferry it to someone else? Do you grab it and die yourself?

I vote for ferrying, but that’s something I would only do in very specific circumstances. (It’s on a healer, it’s on a tank, we don’t have SSes or BRs left.)

Sindragosa is a very deliberate dance with a bit of randomness inserted, but no more randomness than your regularly scheduled encounter. In fact, because you KNOW that 3 healers and 3 casters will get Unchained Magic, it’s less random. If it were to be six healers at once, that would be unworkable, if hilarious. So they made sure that only 3 healers and only 3 casters get it at once. That’s a good portion of randomness gone. So you deal with 3 of your heals with it and you can count on that. You deal with six ice tombs in air phases and you all line up according to a pattern you’ve pre-determined.

You know when her Icy Grip is off cooldown, so you can be ready.

It’s really not a fight about dealing with the random elements. It’s a fight about being coordinated enough as a group to deal with the mechanics.

Putricide was super easy for my last guild. A couple of nights of attempts and then a kill. Sindragosa is who gave us trouble.

It’d be nice for my guild to get through Sindragosa. I really like that I’ve been able to help them out and help their strats and stuff. Just my presence helped get Dreamwalker saved for the first time on heroic. I helped out with heroic LDW strats. I’ve had a LOT to say about Putricide. And I’ve already written an essay’s worth of words on Sindragosa in various posts on our forums.

In related news, I’m actually on standby for the first time ever tomorrow night. I’m actually excited about this, but I’m not sure how I’m going to spend three hours on standby. Fishing? haha.

Ding, 85.

Kurn / / beta, cataclysm, healers, paladins

After 22 hours spent at 84 (much of that running around, testing things, not getting XP in instances and the like), I finally hit 85 on the beta.

Suffering through zones and quests that weren’t itemized, meaning I get beat on within an inch of my life was probably not the best choice, but I wanted to get to 85 and get my guardian dude thing and then focus on instances and not questing (as ret, no less).

Some quick numbers.

At 85, the following spells cost…

Flash of Light: 6323 mana

Holy Light: 1405 mana

Divine Light: 7026 mana

Cleanse: 3279 mana

Holy Shock: 1873 mana

Beacon of Light: 1405 mana

Light of Dawn: 4918 mana

Holy Radiance: 9368 mana

Yeah, I want to cry, too. I have about 60k mana, I think it is.

At 85, I also got Guardian of Ancient Kings. He looks like a moron. (Click for a larger image.)

He’s wearing some kind of bastardized Lawbringer armor, it looks like, is carrying a Val’anyr and is wearing a mask reminiscent of Batman.

Not only that, but he’s on a 5-minute cooldown. He lasts 30 seconds or 5 heals, whichever comes first. Here’s the effect.

I haven’t run an instance with him or anything, but… ugh.

And he … cries out in what sounds like pain. Or anger, according to Walks.

I want to heal on beta later today and report back on some of the instances. At the very least, I’ll comment on this post MMO-Champion put up. It’s by our friendly neighbourhood Lead Systems Designer, Ghostcrawler:

Right now on the Beta videos a lot of the healers seem to be spamming the weak “Heal” for 90% of the time. So spamming is ok and we are expected to spam for most of the fight as long as what we’re spamming is a weak spell? is this truly what is intended for Cata healers?

No, that’s not the intent. We made those heals very cheap so that healers wouldn’t be in constant terror of running out of mana. We also are making the normal modes easier than the heroic modes. You’ll have to pair the right heal for the right situation to a greater degree in heroic modes. I think part of what you’re seeing is that healers are using the base heal because they can get away with it. It’s also possible that in our effort to distinguish them from the more expensive heals that we made the base heals too cheap or efficient. (Source)

I have so many things to say in reply to this and I just don’t even know where to start.

Anyways, more later as the day goes on. Gotta love Tuesdays!

Something A Little Different

Kurn / / apotheosis, raiding, ramblings

While on beta, chatting with Matticus about paladin healing, he accused me of being depressing on my blog sometimes. ;) While this is absolutely true, since I’m usually spurred to write in my blog because of something that makes me facepalm or want to cry, I thought I’d try something a little different today.

Over the last several months, I’ve heard from a lot of people about a variety of topics (and I have more to say about the hunter stuff, including responses to people, but that’s another blog entry) but one comment that always surprises me is the one that has to do with my being a progression raider and still being “nice” enough to talk to those who aren’t big-name bloggers or raiding what I’m raiding.

On Sunday night, I had the opportunity to invite a player to Apotheosis, my Burning Crusade-era guild that I’m reforming for Cataclysm. Apple has the intention of healing as a holy paladin in the next expansion and she’d like to do it with Apotheosis. So I promoted her to the internal rank of Member. The ranks will be redone and most everyone will be demoted to Initiate to begin with, but I know that Apple will work hard to get this toon to 80 and I know she’s been reading my blog voraciously to learn what to do now and how to do it differently later on when Cataclysm is released. To me, it was a no-brainer to promote her to Member in anticipation of her working to earn her raid spot.

It was a huge deal to her.

I read the blog entry I linked above and my smile nearly broke my face.

I think a lot of people who don’t raid the highest levels of progression are really intimidated by those of us who do. There are those who are jealous, those who are intimidated, those who are bitter, those who don’t care and those who are sort of awestruck and probably more types of people as well.

But I think there are people who are intimidated by higher-end raiders and the proof is in Apple’s blog post or Will’s tweets to me telling me that I’m down-to-earth and how he’s surprised.

So I’ll tell you a secret. I’m down-to-earth about my progression (although admittedly unforgiving on basics of raiding/classes/etc) because it wasn’t long ago that I was that casual raider who didn’t know WTF she was doing.

I started playing this game in October of 2005. That’s like, five years ago.

I stumbled into a social levelling guild, courtesy of my brother.

My brother promptly LEFT the guild to go do this mysterious thing called “raiding” with another guild. He described the Rag fight to me and I discovered Ragnaros had OVER A MILLION HEALTH. And instantly, I knew that I wanted to do these encounters.

So I set out to get my guild to raid. The desire was there, but there was no organization, no one tried to do anything and so the 60s who hit 60 in the guild just up and left, looking for a guild that raided.

The guild I was in was called Fated Heroes. We eventually gathered enough in-house people and recruits to do ZG, AQ20 and set foot in Molten Core. We ran our first ZG on April 1st, 2006 and spent three hours trying to kill Venoxis, which we finally did do.

By the time we stopped raiding in November of 2006, we had cleared ZG, including Jin’do, several times. We’d gotten to 3/6 AQ20. We’d spawned Majordomo twice, although never attempted him. We’d gotten Onyxia into phase 3, but had never downed her with just us (although many of us got her down together when another guild on the server was putting together a pug).

Throughout this time, we farmed the 5-mans and Blackrock Spire. We did the 0.5 quest chains. We worked hard to get our upgrades, we worked hard to bring in recruits who would help out and we were the ones standing there, slack-jawed in Ironforge when the main tank of Eternal Force, Thack, walked around with his fancy Scarab Lord title on his Black Qiraji mount. I was all proud of having my Zandalar shoulders because it required getting to Revered with the Zandalar Tribe… and there’s Thack, the main tank of EF, in his 9/9 Tier 3, just standing there in Ironforge.

Was it intimidating? Yes. To see people walking around in Judgement Armor or sporting Thunderfury or Quel’Serrar was intimidating. It was infuriating. It seemed to us that the only way to get into a raiding guild was to have raid gear, which meant having to raid, but how do you raid if you’re not in a raiding guild?

So a few of us pulled together and basically dragged Fated Heroes through ZG, some of AQ and 8/10 Molten Core.

By golly, we wanted to raid, so we were GOING to raid.

The guild imploded for a variety of reasons, but we sort of reconvened in May of 2007 and reformed as Apotheosis on June 1, 2007 with the shared goal of clearing BC content.

This is where we learned how to play. We learned about hit rating, crit immunity, how to avoid crushing blows, when crowd control was necessary (oh God, Tempest Keep trash when you’re undergeared is terrible) and when it wasn’t (CAN DAYDEN TANK IT?!).

We learned about cleaves and how standing in front of a boss who cleaves is bad. We learned about how standing in fire can be detrimental to your health and your raid leader’s blood pressure. We learned how to execute things together as a team.

And still, we were behind in progression. Of course we were. Everyone had a huge head start on us. We only killed Maulgar on September 2nd, 2007 and Gruul on September 11th, 2007. When Burning Crusade ended, Apotheosis was the only guild that had cleared Black Temple (all of three times, thank you very much) without downing anything in Sunwell. We finished 9th on the server, 6th on Alliance.

We were still looking up at other raiders, like those in Epic Again and Tempest, two guilds that had continued into BC from Vanilla. We were lucky to have even one, MAYBE two pieces of our Tier 6 sets and looked at those who had all four pieces from Sunwell for the set bonuses and the other non-set pieces that blew the Hyjal/BT pieces out of the water. We’d made a lot of progress, but the truth of the matter is, some of us felt like we were still those Fated Heroes; sitting in our Zandalar set while looking at Thack in 9/9 T3.

We made some costly mistakes at the start of Wrath and so on March 1, 2009, we stopped 25-man raiding. I’ve been bouncing around other servers since. I’ve gotten a couple of server firsts since I last raided with Apotheosis. I’ve gotten my Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher for Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25). I’ve been killed by the Lich King on heroic. I’ve been the last healer standing on heroic Putricide and seen him die.

I’ve been around the block this expansion — I’ve done a lot, seen a lot, written a crapton about my experiences.

When I went 11/12 in ICC 25 hard modes, I looked over at Eldre’Thalas’ progression. There was Epic Again… at 9/12. And it dawned on me that even if there’s no one left in Epic Again who was there in pre-BC, that guild is still one of the guilds we all looked up to and envied. They had gotten into Naxx, pre-BC, and done well! They’d cleared all but Kil’jaeden in BC. But there they were, two progression bosses behind me.

Do you know how that felt?

Wrong. It felt wrong.

It felt wrong that I, a Fated Hero at heart, was ahead of Epic Again in progression.

It felt wrong that I, a Fated Hero at heart, was ahead of Epic Again in progression on another server with another group of people.

In that moment, I wanted to be on Eldre’Thalas, surrounded by my Apotheosis crew, the core of whom are Fated Heroes, too.

The Fated Heroes among us are scrappy. We’re hungry for progression. We want to see content. We want to progress along with the other big guilds on the server. It’s a feeling of inadequacy we’re trying to alleviate and we’ve had that feeling for over four years in many cases.

It was that attitude that kept us holding on through Burning Crusade, even when things looked bleak. We pushed, dammit. We wanted it. We got it. We killed Illidan! The freaking Fated Heroes killed ILLIDAN. We were Hands of A’dal. Killing the bosses 6 months or a year after others didn’t matter too much. Just doing it at all, and together, meant something to us. It’s not about epeen or reputation or status, not really. It’s knowing that we had seen what the big guilds had seen and we proved that we could hold our own against the same measuring stick. In my heart, I’m still a Fated Hero. I’m not “nice”, I’m not “down-to-earth”. This is just who I am and who I’ve always been in this game. Progression is progression, whether you’re competing for server firsts or you’re just determined to get your crew through that encounter. You do it for the challenge, not necessarily the loot or the bragging rights. You do it so you can say you did it with your friends, your companions, your brothers and sisters in arms. Despite my personal success this expansion, I’ve experienced a huge loss — I couldn’t progress with my guild, I couldn’t lead us to this point. I made mistakes that cost us. So even though I have my drake and various titles from “Twilight Vanquisher” (when it was still current content) “Astral Walker” (when it wasn’t really current), I’m still one of those people who envies the gear someone might have. I admit, that happens less often these days, but I’m still someone who wants to do this kind of progression with my old crew, on my old server.

I’ve learned an incredible amount of stuff about this game, about raiding, about people over the last five years and I think that maybe I’m ready to help lead Apotheosis to success in Cataclysm. I think that maybe this is our expansion to finish in the top five of the server. I think that I’ve learned from my mistakes and failures. I think that I’ve learned from my successes. I think that I’m ready to listen to my officers and what they’ve learned in the last year and a half since we all raided together. Three of my six 80s are back at home on Eldre’Thalas and are ready for the next step.

Whatever happens as Cataclysm launches, I know that I will face it with the same attitude I’ve had since the very first time I heard about Ragnaros; if you want it, get your stuff together and do it yourself. No one’s going to hand it to you. You have to work for it. You may succeed. You may fail. But you took your future in your own hands and did what you thought was best.

It’s what we underdogs do. And sometimes, the result can be very surprising. :)