A Revelation

Kurn / / cataclysm, guild, raiding, ramblings

I saw my RL friend the resto druid today. And over the five hours we talked (yes, I am, in fact, long-winded in person as well as in text) we spent precisely one hour talking about WoW.

And in that one hour, dear readers, she pointed out something to me that has completely changed my perspective on a few things.

It’s times like these that I’m really glad I’ve blogged all this stuff, because you can see in my blogs how I have become increasingly unhappy and more distressed at guild crap.

I really started getting CRANKY right about mid-April. It’s then that I was in the middle of my temporary position of healing lead, plus dealing with Priest Who Thinks So Far Outside The Box He Can’t Even See It Anymore, plus raiding too much and too late for my tastes.

My RL friend the resto druid has been concerned about me and my attitude about raiding, both as a friend and as a healing lead. So when we met up today, we had a discussion that completely opened my eyes about a few things.

1) Prior to, say, December/January, I didn’t have a real problem with how people were treated in our raids. I was personally called out a number of times for standing in fire or poison (I do raid at like, 9fps and adjust to those things fairly quickly, but it takes some dying first) and insulted directly. Like “are you retarded?” and such like. I think I was actually asked, by the MT, if I was blind, at one point.

The way it goes in the guild is: you take it. You shut the hell up, bite your tongue and you take it. It’s just business. Don’t take it personally.

This does not excuse or forgive the MT’s behaviour. But you just take it. Period.

And yet, I didn’t have the same recoil and reaction as I did the other week when the MT basically insulted all the healers by lumping us all together with the Failadin. (I’ve since learned that two other people have complained to my RL friend the resto druid about that comment, so it really wasn’t just me.)

The question is, why did I not react as severely to personal insults in September/October as I did to something that could have meant this particular Failadin instead of all healers?

2) I spent two months as healing lead, raiding in a guild I had only joined in order to raid with my RL friend the resto druid… without my RL friend the resto druid. Without her there, raiding became a real obligation and duty to me. Every night I went to a raid, I told myself that I had to go for her, so that she could focus on her RL issues and not let the guild stuff distract her.

It was that important to me that she not need to worry about the guild and the healers. I continued raiding and doing healing despite not wanting to, because I felt bound by loyalty to my friend.

So the answer to the question in the first point up there is this:

The guild has changed. We have had some WICKED turnover. We have lost a ret paladin, a holy paladin, a disc priest, a resto druid, a kitty druid, two hunters, a resto shaman, two mages, a DK tank, an enhancement shaman, two different moonkin, a DPS warrior and a rogue, I think. That’s just the people I can think of off the top of my head. They were all core raiders and all of them have quit the guild or the game.

We pulled in a core bunch of raiders from a failing guild to shore up our numbers and suddenly, raids weren’t cancelled anymore. Sweet deal.

At about this point in time, we had a change. The MT gave up raid leading duties to the current raid leader (a shadow priest), promoting him and the hunter (now DPS lead) to officer.

The new RL is, in my mind, a jackass. But he’s an excellent player. Still, he spends too much time theorycrafting versus seeing what’s actually executable with our raiders. This makes him inflexible and makes me want to beat him in the face with a hockey stick.

But I digress.

The new RL also brought Vent into raids.

Given the new social dynamic brought by the core raiders from that other guild, added to the fact we have now spent time on Vent together listening to each other’s voices… the guild has gotten more social.

Add to that the fact that I was in a position of authority, which was EXACTLY like the position of authority I’ve ALWAYS had in all my other guilds, which were ALL much more social and friendly and such…

And you have the makings of Kurn going batshit insane without realizing what the hell is going on.

Without my realizing it, the guild changed, became more social, became much more like my old guilds. And with me slipping into my old role of healing lead, I began to treat my healers… well, not better, but as if they were MY healers in MY guild, not just my FELLOW healers and guildmates. That’s to say, I took care of them. Not that my RL friend the resto druid doesn’t take care of us, but I slipped into the job and did what I’d always done — reviews of the healers, detailed examinations of the logs, personal attention to the healers…

I was forging relationships (even if they’re just working relationships) with the healers. And trying to forge them with the raid leader, the DPS lead (hunter) and… even the big, bad MT.

And I didn’t even realize what I was doing. It’s just who I am. It’s just what I do.

So talking to my RL friend the resto druid today brought all of this up.

She pointed out that I am taking everything as a personal affront to me these days. Everything. In a raid, out of a raid, in trade chat, in an instance. And she’s right. I am SUPER CRANKY KURN these days.

Why?

Because the guild is getting to me. Nine months ago, I treated it like a job. Log in. Raid. Log out.

Ever since my stint as healing lead, I have been forging relationships with some people and taking shit personally. It’s not that job anymore. Now, it’s this horrible situation I’m in where I am literally betwixt and between. All my instincts are telling me to be personable, to continue building these bonds with people but every time I do, I get crankier.

The reason is that the guild is in a state of transition from a very business-oriented guild to a guild like most others, that is somewhat social, but the guild master (the MT) is a complete dick to people in raids.

He’s ALWAYS been a dick to people in raids.

But I take it personally now because I’ve adjusted to the new, more social reality of the guild. Hell, I probably helped contribute to the new, more social reality of the guild by bonding with the healers.

The GM/MT has not. He will not. He never will. He will ALWAYS be The Bad Cop, which was his role four years ago, two years ago, nine months ago and two weeks ago. And will be his role tomorrow and Monday when we pull heroic LK on 25 for the first time.

This realization has completely shifted my perspective.

I realize that one of two things has to happen.

1) I have to go back to thinking of it as a job. Log in. Raid. Log out. Done.

2) I have to leave for a guild that’s more social and friendly and respectful.

I’m going to spend the next three or four days deciding whether or not I can do option 1. I have a feeling that I can’t.

But if I can’t, if I do have to leave… at least I really understand WHY that is. This is a different guild than it was nine months ago. It will never get to the social level I need if it’s going to be a social guild, and it may never return to the very business-like atmosphere it once had. But it may be possible for me to readjust my thinking and go back to how I used to treat my membership in the guild.

My mind is still kind of blown by all of this.

My RL friend the resto druid pretty much rocks, everyone. Because when I realized I had to make one of those two choices, she reminded me that if I have to leave the guild to be happy, that that’s what I have to do. She reminded me that it’s not like I’m leaving her in the lurch, that I shouldn’t feel bound to the guild because of her and that I’ve done so much for her already that she really doesn’t want me to stay if I’m not enjoying myself. She also said it would suck to have to look for another paladin, based on Failadin’s very short trial, but that I really do have her blessing if I’m gonna go.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’ve been friends with her since we were six.

More stuff tomorrow here on the blog, including responses to my judgement post comments (must do math and research!), an update on potential guilds to go to and a nugget or two of information about Cataclysm, without spoiling too much. But I got to play Alpha for a little while at my friend’s place today. Woot!

Who Judges What?

Kurn / / paladins, raiding

Edit: My initial hypothesis is under review. In the meantime, please feel free to discuss how your guild handles judgements in the comments and why you value JoW or JoL uptime in your raids.  –Kurn (June 13)

All right. I’m taking deep breaths. Honest, I am. However, I have recently had occasion to go through various parses belonging to other guilds and I have noticed something that drives me a wee bit nuts:

Given two paladins (1 ret or prot and 1 holy), the holy paladin is judging light.

Don’t see why this is wrong? Think “oh, holy paladins heal, let’s have them judge light!”? Okay, then. Let’s examine what, exactly, the judgements do, shall we?

Paladins can put up three different debuffs on any hostile target:

Judgement of Light: “attacks made against the judged enemy a chance of healing the attacker for 2% of their maximum health”

Judgement of Wisdom: “giving each attack a chance to restore 2% of the attacker’s base mana.”

Judgement of Justice: “preventing them from fleeing and limiting their movement speed.”

We can basically throw out Judgement of Justice. It’s almost exclusively used in the domain of PVP. Since I’m addressing PVE encounters here, particularly 25-man raids, we will pretend Judgement of Justice doesn’t exist. (And druids and shammies who arena rejoice at the concept of a world without JoJ.)

Obviously, JoL and JoW are both important debuffs to place on the boss and even the adds at times. I think everyone can agree that 2% of your maximum health or 2% of your base mana is pretty sweet to proc, right? That’s a lot of healing and a lot of mana regen.

Now, let’s bear in mind that Divinity does not work the way you think it might when it comes to judging. That means that anyone’s JoL is basically equal to anyone else’s, at least when considering the raid group as a whole.

Let’s now look at a typical 25-man raid group.

3 tanks (say 1 warrior, 1 DK, 1 paladin)

6 healers (say 1 paladin, 2 priests, 2 druids, 1 shammy)

6 melee DPS (say 1 warrior, 1 DK, 2 rogues, 1 enhance shammy, 1 kitty)

10 ranged DPS (say 2 hunters, 2 shadow priests, 2 mages, 2 warlocks, 1 ele shammy, 1 moonkin)

That’s 25 people. All 25 of them have health bars. 7 of them do not have mana bars and 6 of them (the healers) are not going to be attacking the boss with any kind of regularity. That means that even though 6 of them aren’t really going to attack the boss, there’s still 19 people who are going to benefit from Judgement of Light versus 12 people who will benefit from Judgement of Wisdom.

Even if that wasn’t as large a difference in terms of pure numbers, let’s look at this logically:

If you run out of mana, you’re probably not going to die, you’re just going to have to stop casting spells or special attacks until you get mana back.

If you run out of health, you’re dead.

Hm. Now, which Judgement should have priority on a mob?

The answer is, of course, Judgement of Light.

Now, let’s examine why paladins judge at all. Surely there’s a reason, right? Apart from debuffing the mob in a helpful manner?

Yes, all three specs of paladin have a reason to judge the mob.

1) Retribution Paladins: Judgements of the Wise. So not only are they proccing the Replenishment effect whenever they judge, which Blizzard themselves have admitted they expect all raid groups to have, but judging is a damaging ability. ICC-geared ret pallies in my guild are judging for 7k, critting for 14k. It is an integral part of the ret pally DPS rotation. They are specced for Improved Judgements so they are judging on cooldown, every 8 seconds. That leads to really, really, really high uptime on whatever debuff they’re judging.

2) Protection Paladins: Judgements of the Just. Hey, look! It’s the prot pally version of Improved Thunder Clap! That’s to say, both those abilities reduce the mobs’ attack speed by 20%. Which is, you know, awesome. Plus, because tanks do have damage-dealing abilities to help cause threat, judging is also an integral part of the prot pally 96969 rotation. So they’re also judging on cooldown, every 8-10 seconds, depending on talents, even if the judgement debuff (and attack speed debuff) lasts 20 seconds. This also leads to a really, really, really high uptime on whatever debuff they’re judging.

3) Holy Paladins: Judgements of the Pure. 15% spell haste. Gorgeous. This talent is what allows us to reach a 1s GCD with 676 haste and is just generally awesome for getting more casts in during the same time frame. (The result being that your cast times drop pretty drastically.) However, unlike our melee-friendly brethren, our Judgements of the Pure buff lasts a full minute. We do NOT have a built-in reason to judge any more than once a minute, if we are playing as selfishly as possible and we have no mana problems. The prots and rets, however, even in the most selfish scenario, are judging on cooldown. In that scenario, we are judging once a minute.

To summarize:

– Protection and Retribution paladins judge on cooldown, Holy paladins judge at least once a minute but do not necessarily need to judge more than that for optimum self-performance. (Exception: Judging can proc Seal of Wisdom, which most holy paladins should be using if their style is Holy Light. Still, meleeing or judging strictly for mana return is not always possible, so I won’t really address that, preferring to stick solely to judgements and their uptimes.)

– Judgement of Light should be the priority debuff placed on any mob, followed by Judgement of Wisdom and Judgement of Justice should be ignored entirely.

Everyone following me? Good.

Now, then, it is a logical continuation of these thoughts that leads to ret and prot pallies judging light and leaving wisdom to the holy pallies, isn’t it?

You know that if the prot or ret pally is alive, they will be judging. This leads to near 100% uptime on their chosen debuff.

But what of the holy paladins, who are busy healing like crazy, dealing with insane tank damage, making sure to refresh Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield and trying to judge when there’s a bit of a healing slump? Sure, you can usually find an extra GCD to throw a judgement at the boss to maintain a better uptime than 20 seconds on every minute. But not always. Judge the boss more than once a minute on, say, Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang when you’re solo-healing two Marks of the Fallen Champion? Not going to happen or you’re probably going to lose your marks, unless you time it exceedingly carefully.

Not only that, but even with Enlightened Judgements, which every single holy paladin should have, you can still actually miss your Judgement. You need 8% hit to hit a raid boss with a Judgement without missing. Since Judgements are considered ranged physical attacks (like a hunter’s auto shots), they are not affected by a moonkin’s Improved Faerie Fire or a shadow priest’s Misery. Even with a Draenei in your party, for Heroic Presence, that’s still only 5% chance to hit. So you can miss, which means both your debuff of choice and your Judgements of the Pure will not be applied or refreshed. And if you then are swamped by healing, it might be a while yet before you can try to judge again.

What does that all mean?

It means that the uptime on a Judgement debuff by a holy paladin will almost always suck compared to the uptime on one by a ret or a prot paladin.

It means that the following setup is probably the best way to maintain high uptimes on the debuffs most important to the group.

1 paladin (any spec): Judgement of Light, preferably judged at least every 20 seconds.

2 paladins (ret/ret or ret/prot or prot/prot or holy/holy): Split them up, one judgement each, judge at least every 20 seconds if possible.

2 paladins (holy/ret or holy/prot): The ret or the prot gets Light, the holy gets Wisdom.

3 paladins (holy/ret/prot or holy/ret/ret or holy/prot/prot): The melee paladins split the judgements and the holy picks one and only judges more than once a minute if they feel they can — or for Seal of Wisdom procs, as mentioned above.

3 paladins (holy/holy/holy): Put two holies on Light and one on Wisdom to achieve a higher uptime on Light. The logic here is that all the holy paladins will judge at least once a minute, probably at different times, so while there will be some overlap, it leads to more uptime than just one of them judging it.

3 paladins (holy/holy/ret or holy/holy prot): The ret or the prot takes Light and the holy paladins both take Wisdom. The logic here is the same as above for Light, only applied to Wisdom.

4 paladins (holy/holy/ret/ret or holy/holy/ret/prot or holy/holy/prot/prot): Melee paladins split judgements between them, holy paladins split judgements between them, so you have the melee pallies really responsible for the uptimes and the holies are free to judge whenever, but are still judging something valuable in case one of the melee pallies dies.

Any other situation I didn’t cover: You can figure this out yourself, just make sure any melee paladins are judging Light first, then Wisdom and assign holies to be backups, basically.

Questions? Comments? Got a better method for splitting up the Judgement of Light/Wisdom debuffs? Do tell! :)

Guilds & Loyalty & Obligation, Oh My!

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

(or, Yes, Kurn is Still Bitching About Her Guild And Stuff… You Got A Problem With That?)

So, as previously mentioned, I didn’t raid last Thursday. Or last Sunday. And I didn’t raid on Monday, either. Insert 24h downtime and then I figured I’d go raid tonight. Apart from anything else, I was definitely getting twitchy. I hadn’t healed on the paladin for, oh, a week. I actually tried to toss a renew up on a tank at one point by clicking my mouse wheel and got the error message that there’s nothing to dispel. (It’s bound to Cleanse on my pally.)

Anyways, it didn’t start off terribly. I don’t raid for loot, but it was definitely very nice to get the heroic version of the Bulwark of Smouldering Steel. We’ve had five shields drop since our first week in ICC and this is only the second heroic one. I’m too tired to do the math, but that is a LOT of weeks without a shield dropping.

Apart from that, the raid pretty much sucked. Here are some “highlights”.

Heroic Lady Deathwhisper:

Number of Resto Shaman in the raid: 2

Number of Resto Druids in the raid: 1

Number of decurses by Resto Shammies on one attempt: 3 and 1 = 4

Number of decurses by Resto Druids on same attempt: 12

Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang:

Wipes: 2

Number of times people beaned in the face by Blood Beasts over all three attempts: 13

Number of times the raid leader got beaned in the face by Blood Beasts and subsequently died: 4

Heroic Blood Prince Council:

Number of wipes: 1 (which is 1 more than usual)

Number of times the stupid DPS forced ME to move, while healing the MT, despite Shadow Prison: 3

Number of times the stupid DPS killed me because they refused to move and I could not move lest the MT die: 1

Number of times veteran ret paladin died to Shadow Prison: 2

Number of dispels of Glittering Sparks by anyone over 2 attempts: 6 (me), 2 (RL/shadow priest), 2 (holy priest)

Number of dispels of Glittering Sparks by virtue of Mass Dispel by ANY priest over 2 attempts: 0 (I think that the healing lead asked the holy priest to go disc and he doesn’t seem to have done so)

Blood Queen Lana’thel:

Number of healers asked to heal tanks: 3 (1 holy paladin, 2 resto shaman)

Number of non-Chain Heals cast by shammies: 33 + 43 = 76

Number of Earth Shield heals on MT: 8 (never refreshed)

Number of Earth Shields heals on OT: 1 (placed on the OT at the end of the fight)

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “Not at All” and 10 being “Extremely”, the level of fear Kurn has of looking through the rest of the log to see Earth Shield failure: 14

If I was looking to last night’s raid to convince me that I should stick around despite the fact I’m currently not speaking to the raid leader, well, that definitely wasn’t convincing at all.

Everything was pissing me off. The stupid holy/disc priest who is the one who thinks outside the box before thinking inside it was all “yaaaaaaay, we have healers tonight!!!! I’ve missed you guys!!!” and it made me want to punch him in the face. Which, you know, is silly. He was genuinely happy to have so many members of the healing team online. But I still wanted to punch him in the face. I didn’t feel like it was a big ol’ happy reunion or anything. I was actually dreading the raid, exactly as I have been for the past couple of months and everything about it had the effect of stressing me out or frustrating me.

And so, perhaps it’s finally gotten to that point where a decision will have to be made. Do I put the good of my guild ahead of me and my desires? Or do I run screaming from this atmosphere and find a new home?

Let me be clear: I am not a guild hopper. I spent a year in Fated Heroes — my first real guild. I was there from the day I dinged 50 until the day it disbanded. I spent a couple of months in Skull, until such time that they ceased raiding pretty much entirely and my old FH crew and I started up Apotheosis. I was in Apotheosis for over a year and a half, until we stopped raiding officially in March of 2009.

From March of 2009 until September, I was in a raiding guild on Bronzebeard and only left due to two reasons:

1) The raid leader had ragequit and, though I was an officer, I didn’t have the energy to help them pick up the pieces of the guild. I tried, but I really couldn’t help keep it together.

2) My RL friend’s guild was in need of holy paladins; after nearly two years of talking about raiding together “someday”, “someday” was finally here.

And so I’ve been in my RL friend’s guild since October, with my trial having started in September. That’s nine long months of TOC, TOGC, ICC and the odd Ulduar run. I’ve been there for their Algalon kill and the crafting of my friend’s Val’anyr. I was acting healing lead for more than two months while my RL friend dealt with RL stuff. I was responsible for the healing for Sindragosa and LK regular kills and all the hard mode kills except Putricide and some of Sindragosa (I did some basic strat stuff, but it got further refined by my RL friend and the raid leader, which then led to a kill).

My point in this is not to toot my own horn, but merely to show that I am someone who values loyalty, who IS loyal, who always puts the needs of her guild/raid group/healing team ahead of her. The exception, of course, being when I took the crappy boots off Dreamwalker from Failadin. ;D

Leaving a guild is never an easy decision for someone like me, who believes that there has to be more to the guild than showing up with 24 others and downing content, or attempting to. I’m not saying I want to be best friends with everyone in my raid group, but I’d kind of like to respect the majority of the raiders. I’d like to push myself to keep up the tank because I don’t want to let the tank down, not just because I’m scared they’ll swap me out for a poor performance.

I want to be patted on the head every so often and told that I did a good job. I want to do my job quietly, but I want people to recognize that even if I didn’t top the healing meters, I DID do my job. (Don’t get me wrong, I CAN top healing meters if I really want to, and I will do so on certain fights, without even aiming for that goal, but that shouldn’t be the measure of success on a fight. :P)

I want to be surrounded with people who can play their classes adequately, if not extremely well. I want people who KNOW how to play, who can rely on others in the group to do what they’re supposed to do on each attempt.

Like, for instance, resto shammies who know they’re supposed to get rid of the damn Curse of Torpor and NOT let it run full duration on a freaking tank healer. Have you ever seen every healing ability you have on cooldown for fifteen seconds? It’s not a pretty sight, but it was necessary because if I didn’t throw my tank SOMETHING, he was gonna die.

So my raid on Wednesday was lacking in so many ways and was not at all what I had hoped it might be. I hoped that with a few nights off, I’d be ready to go back to ICC and kick some ass. And I, personally, totally kicked some ass. I have no idea how, but I hit 7k HPS on Saurfang, and I didn’t even have Marks 1/3 to heal, I was given 2/4. I never died to something that was my fault (see: DPS killing me on Blood Prince Council) and when the tanks died, it was either a wipe or they weren’t my target for that fight. (Like Saurfang, and for some reason, we lost a tank on our Council kill, but it wasn’t my target, nor was it my beacon. I didn’t even notice.)

As a former guild master, I automatically hated people who left my guild. Period. You leave my guild, you are dead to me. As a raider, I’m similarly pissed when a core person leaves a guild. And so this is where responsibility and loyalty and obligations come into play. As a member of any guild, I have a responsibility to show up for raids, ready to raid and prepared for the fights. I have a feeling of loyalty and belonging when I’m in a good guild, where we can learn from mistakes or laugh about near misses and all be collectively inspired to kick some ass after a 2% wipe. I have an obligation to do my best, to not let down the people around me, to do what I can for the team.

This is why, more often than not, I open my stupid mouth and try to help if I see things being done “wrong” or not being done at all. I’m the one who tells the paladins what to judge. I’m the one who sets up pally power for the optimal buffing setup. I’m the one who does all of this stupid stuff because other people either don’t do it or, in my experience, they do it WRONG. Er, “wrong”. As in, sub-optimally.

I’m not someone who, by nature, min/maxes completely out the wazoo. If I were, I’d run 10s, I’d have crafted the shammy spellpower legs for Madrana already and replaced the 258 Legplates of Failing Light.

But when something is done sloppily in a raid, I tend to be a little cranky. So I step up. Same with healing and healing assignments. That’s how I got to be healing lead in my Bronzebeard guild; I wouldn’t shut up about how X, Y and Z would be better than A, B and C. I feel like if things are done sloppily, we’re all just wasting each other’s time.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I devote myself to the guilds/raid groups I become part of — I want the team to succeed.

So when the time comes to leave a guild, I am, of course, drowned in waves of guilt. My natural inclination is to help the team, not myself. Leaving a guild is the ultimate in selfishness; you’ve gotten loot, experience, strategies from raiding with these people and then you leave and take your loot and experience and another idea of how to do things to another raid group.

But, as anyone who’s been reading can tell, I’m clearly getting to this point with my current guild.

So I’m exploring my options and plan to talk to my RL friend about this stuff tomorrow. There’s already a guild that’s caught my eye, but I figure hey, if your guild is looking for a holy paladin, let me know, either here or via email at kurn [at] apotheosis-now [dot] com. Why not, right?

Some notes:

– I will not go Horde.

– I would prefer raid times between 8:30pm ET and 1am ET (not for 4.5 hours, but a 3-3.5 hour chunk in there). (Obviously, I am on North American servers and cannot transfer to any other versions, blah, blah, blah.)

– I prefer PVE servers and have no interest in going to a PVP server. RP is potentially negotiable, but not my preference.

– Server economy must be strong; I don’t care if things are pricey so long as they’re available.

– Prefer Alliance to dominate Wintergrasp so VOA pugs are easy to form.

– I have 0 interest in 10-mans. I am only interested in 25-man ICC (and eventually Ruby Sanctum) and my preference is at least 9/12 HM already down. (Perhaps 8/12, but I have no desire to relearn/teach people how to do fights I already spent hours wiping on.)

– Must have a competant healing lead who is very aware of all five healing specs and how they work together. Healing leads who bitch people out for not topping meters are not competant. :P

– Similarly, must have a competant healing team. Preferably, a competant raid group in general.

– Must have a respectful atmosphere. I don’t want to see racist, sexist, homophobic crap, no religious or national intolerance either. If your raid group consists of people who call each other “gay” or “fag” or use “rape” casually to indicate domination of something in the game, I would probably rather stay with my current guild and all the abuse the GM lays on us.

– I’d really only stay until 4.0/Cataclysm. This is just a short-term stay to help finish ICC heroic and Ruby Sanctum.

So, yeah. Let’s see if there are any options out there, eh?

ETA: Here’s a CharDev profile of my gear and talents:

http://www.chardev.org/?profile=420109

Kurn's Q&A 20

Kurn / / addons, mages, paladins, q&a, tanks, ulduar

Apologies, my brother suckered me into rolling a low-level (Horde!) toon. But I insisted the server be The Venture Co. because xmolder is over there and it’s RPPVP so the joke’s on my brother. ;) So this post is later than I intended, but it should be followed up quickly with my Strat Live post.

Anyways, time for Kurn’s Q&A! Going through my website stats from last week, the vast majority of people showed up here looking for help with heroic Putricide. I hope my guide helped!

So, barring Putricide (and freaking Toravon) searches, here are ten search terms that amused me or intrigued me.

1) dont want avr broken

You and several thousand others, I’m afraid. It’s still going to break and that means that you and I will both have to keep our eyes out for Unbound Plague without it. We’ll have to run to our Sindragosa spots and either memorize what symbol goes where or refer to a cheat sheet. You know, one that’s been written out on paper. With a pen or pencil. Or something. Shocking, I know.

2) holy paladin wearing mail

Uh, yes. Do it. There’s nothing wrong with it. Resto shaman mail is better itemized than holy paladin plate is, most of the time. Cloth and leather are even okay… as long as there’s no spirit on it.

3) can u reset the keepers in ulduar

To my knowledge, no. Then again, it’s been a long time since I was last in Ulduar. That said, though, I’m pretty sure that once you talk to a Keeper in Ulduar (after rescuing them), you can’t tell them to take a hike. I think they might be, you know, mortally offended.

4) fol spec holy pally for hardmodes?

You know, I’m kind of torn. There’s no question that my personal preference is for Holy Light. I am, and always have been, a Holy Light paladin. It’s hard for me to judge whether or not my response to this question is coloured by my obvious bias towards HL. I will say this: You need a HL paladin, period. There is just so much insane damage that you need someone spamming those huge heals. Now, should there be another paladin in there… you know, maybe. There could be room for it. I guess a lot depends on your raid makeup. Would I rather bring ANY kind of paladin if we have to rely on ghetto kings (Drums of Forgotten Kings)? YES. Would I rather bring a FoL style holy paladin in over a second HL style paladin? Probably not. But, as I said, I’m biased.

5) i am a fail tank

Just by googling that, you are not, because it implies you’re willing to learn. Key points: Don’t be crittable; hold aggro; have a real tanking spec. Thank you!

6) is divinity or healing light better for ret pally

I’d make sure to get Guardian’s Favor and then drop any points you have left into Divinity.

7) mage role toravon ice watcher

DPS Toravon. Kill Frozen Orbs. Rinse, repeat. Don’t forget to put up Frost Ward to help mitigate damage and, in the case of Arcane mages, proc Incanter’s Absorption.

8) shieldwall against soulreaper

In general, a tank should not need to hit Shield Wall when Soul Reaper comes along, because, ideally, the OT has taunted the Lich King off of the MT once Soul Reaper is going to hit the MT. If you ever find yourself still tanking the Lich King AND Soul Reaper is going to go off, hit Shield Wall and Last Stand, both. :P

9) what to do with extra emblems of triumph

There are a lot of things you can do with extra Emblems of Triumph.

a) Trade them in for Emblems of Heroism and buy epic gems for 20 (red, blue, yellow) or 10 (orange, green pirple) emblems each.
b) Trade them in for Emblems of Heroism and buy Frozen Orbs, which you can then trade for things like Frost Lotuses or various Eternals.
c) Trade them in for various Emblems of whatever to get things like Crusader Orbs, Runed Orbs and the like.

10) how the fuck do you get into halls of reflection when you die

Heh. Fly towards Icecrown Citadel. See the battering ram? Go over to the wall on the right. Fly up. See the Argent Crusade banner? Follow the rampart to the entryway on the left and you’ll see a summoning stone and three doors. Halls of Reflection is the middle one, the left one is Forge of Souls and the right one is Pit of Saron.

Healing Classes and History

Kurn / / classes, druids, general, healers, healing, paladins, priests, ramblings, shamans

(or, Why the Hell do I Have All Four Healing Classes??!?!)

Yep. It’s true. I finally have all four healing classes at max level. I’m still not sure why, exactly, but I do. As such, I feel the need to discuss some of the differences and such between them. This isn’t going to be a direct comparison between all the four classes and five specs, but more my own history and views on each. I feel that I’ve spent a lot of time recently giving out information, which I love to do, but haven’t spent a ton of time on me/my classes/my history, despite the whole “I hate my guild” post last week. So this is a fair amount of rambling about my history with my healers in the game. You’ve been warned. ;)

Continue reading “Healing Classes and History”

24 Hour Downtime

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

In all seriousness, a 24-hour break from this game is something I need to do more frequently. That doesn’t mean that the fact it’s not on MY timetable doesn’t bother the crap out of me.

Anyways, Tuesday, June 8th, will be a busy day here on ye olde blogge. I’d start my posting frenzy now, but I am le tired. As such, I am not attending my raid AND I am going to bed early. So THERE!

That said, I thought I’d let you all know what is coming up tomorrow.

1) Healing: Paladins vs. Shammies vs. Druids vs. Priests. Just a look at the four classes and their healing roles from my perspective and (in some cases) limited experience.

2) Kurn’s Q&A 20, where we look at such search terms as:

“holy paladin wearing mail”

“can u reset the keepers in ulduar”

and, my favourite:

“how the fuck do you get into halls of reflection when you die”

Then, depending on Real Life stuff, I may also write up:

3) Holy How-to #7: How NOT to be a Holy Paladin. This will be a detailed examination of many of the mistakes Failadin ™ made while applying to my present guild. Specifically, mistakes made in the Lower Spire. I plan to include a link to a WoL parse where I’ll have changed all the names, to preserve anonymity.

And finally, if time permits:

4) Kurn’s Guide to Stratholme (Live side), assuming I can get the narration done properly and upload the darn thing.

No World of Warcraft for 24 hours means there’s no game to distract me from the blog, mwahahaha. ;)

Of Money and Alts

Kurn / / priests, professions, ramblings

So I set out on Friday to make 5000g and to level my priest alt from 78-and-a-half to 80.

I was halfway successful.

My priest is languishing at about 79 and a half, mostly because my brother and a friend of ours both dinged 80 over the weekend. This meant that my brother, resplendent in his awful tanking gear (though still immune to crits, thank you very much) insisted I “heal [him] plz” through some heroics. Seriously, he hit 80 and says to me on Vent “heal meh plz!!!”. So I hopped on my druid and went to town. Over the weekend, we went to Azjol-Nerub, The Nexus, Culling of Stratholme and Halls of Stone, all on heroic, and tried TOC regular for the tanking trinket, too.

He’s not easy to heal, but he’s not inflicting himself on another healer, so I’m okay with that.

What’s more than a little surprising is that he’s not having a horrible time holding aggro. When I went out there on my druid in bear form, probably better geared than my brother, I kept running into people with ICC gear who would whirlwind or Consecrate or Death and Decay and BAM, they would own the mobs.

My brother? No problem. And he’s using Grid to show him who has aggro so he can cast Righteous Defense or BOP or something easily. (Yes, that was my influence.)

Conclusion: Paladin tanks are OP. ;)

As to the money side of things, I ended up with 5,400g more than I had on Friday afternoon. There are still things up on the AH and still things that expired in my bags, but really, that wasn’t bad at all.

How did I do it?

1) Flasks. Flasks sell like hotcakes between 7pm-8pm server time. I sold Flasks of the Frost Wyrm exclusively, in stacks of 5, for just over 100g per stack. I have no idea how many flasks I made, but it was a LOT. It seemed like I always had at least a stack up on the AH or a stack that had just sold.

How did I get the mats? Well, Icethorn is plentiful out there. So is Lichbloom, really, but it’s expensive on the AH. So I took Rilgon’s advice and grabbed GatherMate/GatherMate data (Gatherer has never worked properly for me, for some reason) and went farming in both Wintergrasp and Icecrown on my shaman. My shammy is both a miner and an herbalist, so I used GatherMate’s displays to show me when I should be tracking what, which worked out very well.

The Wintergrasp farming was particularly productive since you can not only harvest Frost Lotuses from any herb you pick, but you can also pick Frost Lotuses from their rare spawns. (I think the only other place in the game you can pick an actual Frost Lotus spawn is in Freya’s room in Ulduar, but I could be wrong.)

While farming herbs for flasks, I also gathered a ton of ore (I actually hit something like 10 titanium nodes in two loops of Icecrown and Wintergrasp!) and did the following:

– prospected the raw Titanium Ore: sold some Titanium Powder, cut and sold any epic gems from the ore, stored the rare and uncommon gems for the future.

– smelted the raw Saronite into Bars: sent them to my transmute specced alchemist and transmuted them to Titanium Bars. The proc rate was abysmal, but I did see a couple. I sold stacks of five bars for 75-80g per stack.

– kept all the crystallized elements for the future, including future Cardinal Ruby transmutes

2) Gems. I had a bit of a stockpile of Cardinal Rubies in my bank (5-6 I think) and so cut those into Fractured, Delicate, Bold and Runed. I transmuted four more Cardinal Rubies on Saturday and Sunday (no procs) and cut and sold those as well. I got a couple epic gems from my Titanium Ore prospecting, so I cut a Solid Majestic Zircon and a couple of Ametrines (Reckless — they sell, but cheaply! — and Glinting, which doesn’t sell well at all on my server). The trouble here is that most of the cash I got from gems is not repeatable because I emptied my stock of Cardinal Rubies and the cut gems are going for like, one or two gold over the raw gems on my server. If I made about 1100g from gems, probably only 500g of it was not due to my prior stock.

3) Food. I spent some time on Kurn fishing and got a ton of Imperial Manta Ray, which I cooked into Imperial Manta Steak. This is my preferred buff food in raids on Madrana, so at worst, I was stocking up for myself. But when I realized I had something like over 200 fish, I decided to sell half of what I had. 80-100g a stack for haste food at raid time on the weekend. Very nice.

I also had enough fish to make a couple of Fish Feasts, which I sold for about 120g per stack of 20.

I also bought some cheap Rhino Meat and made some Hearty Rhino. I made 40, so 2 stacks sold for about 90g apiece, I think it was.

4) Enchants. I sold some raw materials. I had Dream Shards coming out my ears, so I sold a bunch of those (about 40) and a lot of leftover enchanting mats from the 50-60 range, like Large Brilliant Shards, Greater Eternal Essences and the like. Sold all that, probably to the tune of about 500g. I also had leftover mats for the Fiery enchant, so I made some scrolls and while I’ve only sold one of them for 35g, I still have 3 to sell. This was really just me selling crap I already had.

5) Dailies. The only dailies I did were the fishing and cooking dailies on Kurn and the daily random dungeon. I also did the weekly quest on Kurn. I got lucky a couple of times and got the Waterlogged Recipe (5 extra cooking tokens) and the Poison Vial thingy (extra gold). I could have done a lot more in terms of dailies and money, but the thing is, I absolutely loathe the Argent Tournament dailies in particular, and I hate relying on people for Threat from Above and the Commanders.

6) Glyphs. My druid is my scribe and I have a very poor selection of recipes. I essentially did Inscription for the Darkmoon Cards and the shoulder enchant, because as I was levelling my druid, I decided there was no way in hell I was going to do Hodir again. And then when I hit, oh, 70-something, they patched in that the Hodir enchants were BOA. /headdesk. Still, I had a bunch of glyphs leftover that had never sold, so I managed to sell about 200g worth of glyphs. Glyph of Polymorph, Glyph of Chain Heal, Glyph of Rejuvenation all sold out.

Other Things I Could Have Tried: With some patience, I could have done various Leatherworking leg armors, Tailoring spellthreads, done more Earthsiege/Skyflare Diamond transmutes/cuts. The main issue here was a lack of cheap eternals and Frozen Orbs to do this effectively. I already have most of the mats for these, but not so much with the eternals and definitely not with the Frozen Orbs. (Most of the orbs I was getting — and yes, I bought some — were for the sole purpose of making them into Frost Lotuses.)

So. With a 24h downtime coming to ALL MY SERVERS as of 3am, I need to get going on my priest. Stupid priest. Why did I roll a priest? A fourth healer? Really? Someone punch me in the face if I ever decide to level another healer to 80 again. I’ve GOT one of each, that should now be sufficient FOREVER.

All "Good" Things… ?

Kurn / / raiding, ramblings

Well, I snapped. At least a little bit.

I sent a fairly, how shall I put it, biting PM to my raid leader (CCing my RL friend the resto druid/healing lead) on Thursday afternoon. In it, I addressed three things:

1) Screw this noise, I am not your healing lead, even when the healing lead isn’t there. The expectation to automatically do healing if my RL friend is late or absent, without so much as a “hey, do you think you could…?” was perhaps understandable, but not doable for me. I made it very clear that my time as healing lead was temporary and that I was happy to help my friend during a time of RL trouble, but that I was done with it.

2) The MT/GM has got to stop being so freaking abusive. I’ve talked to my RL friend about this point a lot and she’s insistent that he’s not saying it to deliberately insult us but that he’s just a bad leader and that’s how he’s seen the previous leaders in this guild get results. My stance is that I just don’t give a crap what his intentions are, because any normal person is going to take offense to “HEALERS YOU FUCKING SUCK” and such. The chances of changing any part of the MT/GM’s behaviour are slim to none.

However, I did realize something. He has always been this crude, abrasive and obnoxious. It’s not a new thing. But prior to my RL friend’s break from the game, he at least was telling her in /o or whatever that we sucked and trusted her to bring the message to us. Which, we both realized in discussing this, he doesn’t do anymore. He just lets us have it in raid chat. She had been acting as a filter for him for pretty much the entire time I’ve been in the guild, but without her, he had no one he trusted to tell us we suck and fix things. Because he didn’t know or trust me. (Compared to my RL friend, who’s been in the guild for four years.) So my RL friend is going to work on getting him to use her as a filter again. Which is only changing what chat channel he says his stuff in, rather than changing what he says.

So. I guess we’ll see.

3) The late nights are killing me. The raid leader has pushed us past 2am a few times in the last couple of weeks and obviously, I stay, like a moron, because I know they can’t get X or Y down without a holy paladin or without a sixth healer or whatever. So I told the RL in my PM that I was done, that 2am is my hard limit and that any attempts that begin after 2am, unless it’s an exceptional circumstance, will have to be done without me.

Those were the basic points. Of course, I was a lot less brief about it all and I was angry, to boot.

The response I received involved the RL being pissy at me and included the phrases:

“If you’re really that unhappy raiding here though, you should probably
just stop raiding. […] If you have more suggestions about what we can do, then I’m all ears, but I’m kind of doubtful we’ll be able to fix all the issues.”

So I didn’t raid on Thursday. I’m about to post and say that I won’t raid tonight. Did I mention that they didn’t raid on Thursday, either? Not enough people in general, but only five healers as well. 0, that is zero, paladins of any spec.

I’m not one to cause issues, really. But I’m not above withdrawing my services from the guild for a little while to illustrate various points: a) We need 3 holy paladins, period, b) I have worked my ass off for you people and if you think that you can just tell me to not raid because we’re not going to solve the issues, well, good luck raiding without me, c) An unhappy raid environment leads to unhappy raiders who then don’t want to raid or do whatever’s necessary to push through, such as staying ’till 2:30am when end time is 2am.

That cancelled raids give my RL friend a better night’s sleep doesn’t hurt, either. ;)

Anyways, I don’t know what this means for me or for my guild at the moment. It may mean I’m in the market for a new guild. As angry as I am with the RL, he has a point: if I’m not happy, I shouldn’t raid, which is what so many people have said to me over the last week. His pissiness towards me (not really included in this post) has helped ease the guilt of not showing up. I have lost respect for him and, as such, I don’t feel motivated to do my best. Or, you know, anything at all.

Having spoken candidly with my RL friend really helped and I’m feeling less stressed and less worried about the impact my absence has on the guild and raids. I suspect taking a few nights off is also helping substantially.

I’m undecided on tomorrow’s raid, but it’ll probably depend on what they do, if anything, tonight.

In the meantime, priest is 79 and I’ve made almost 4000g since Friday afternoon. So there’s that. ;)