Kind of an epic night.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, raiding

Last night, we were again without our healing lead, my RL friend the resto druid. Last night, we were again working on Sindragosa.

For the first time in the six months that I’ve been in the guild… they asked us to get on Vent.

My guild doesn’t use Vent for raid instructions. At all. Ever. My RL friend can count on one hand the number of times she’s been on Vent for guild-related purposes, including officer meetings.

So last night, before we started working on Sindragosa again, they had us get on Vent so that the caster lead could call out Ice Tombs and the direction of Ice Tombs in Sindragosa’s final phase, which is what we were REALLY having problems with.

Not only that, but the tanks indicated, over Vent, when they were taunting.

I’ve raided for six months without Vent and I really didn’t miss it. But having the tanks calling out taunts on Vent was GREAT. I would swap my beacon, keep healing the tank and/or raid members, etc. I don’t think I missed a single transition, as opposed to missing a bunch in previous nights of attempts.

Anyways, we got Sindragosa down in three tries last night and then went on to clear out the Plagueworks, which we’d skipped this reset so we could get good work in on Blood Queen (we wanted, and got, a repeat kill) and get some real good time in on Sindragosa.

Of course, the healing officer, as I said, wasn’t online. So the caster officer, who’d been giving healing instructions for Sindragosa, asks me to do healing for the Plagueworks.

… oh crap.

I loaded up my trusty healing assignment mod, HealOrganizer, for the first time since, oh, SEPTEMBER, and then, through trash, struggled to remember everything my RL friend had ever said about the upcoming three fights. It wasn’t made easier by the fact that we had a new holy priest and a new resto druid in the raid, who I hadn’t really analyzed in the last couple of raids (hi, I’m not actually an officer, you know), so I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle things.

First up, we went to Rotface.

I put myself on the MT and infections (so I beaconed the MT) and healed those with infections. I put the disc priest on the MT. I put the resto druid on the OT (kiting slimes) due to his mobility, along with helping out on infections and the raid. I put the two resto shammies on the raid and had the holy priest on the raid.

While we had a cleansing totem dropped in error (sigh!) we still one-shot it. I would have liked the resto druid to help me out a little more with infections towards the end, because we lost a couple of people that way, but overall, it worked out and we one-shot Rotface. Whew.

Then I had to figure out Festergut. I put me and the disc priest on the tanks. I put the two shammies, the druid and the holy priest on the raid and strongly encouraged the shammies to chain through the active tank after the second spore and through Pungent Blight.  Had we not attempted (twice) to do the achievement (in which BOY did people screw up!), we would have one-shotted. As it was, it took three attempts, but he died.

On to Professor.

I put myself and the disc priest on the MT, put the shammies on people with Volatile Ooze, gave free reign to the holy priest and the resto druid, reminded people to stand on the left when we were on that side of the room, reminded them to watch out for Malleable Goo, not to stand in green slime or near orange viles, told the priests to use GS and PS at their discretion and to stack up on the Volatile Ooze people if at all possible.

First wipe happened because the tank who was the abom got way behind on slime pools.

Second attempt was a great kill, with just one person dying at the end, and it was to Malleable Goo (and it wasn’t a healer, so I didn’t care so much). I popped DS/DS, I did a lot more casting of Holy Light than I normally do on that fight (as per my own analysis from 2 weeks ago) and we got him down easily.

Whew.

And then, it was about 1am. One hour left in the raid.

Every boss in the instance was dead. Except for the Lich King.

So up we went to The Frozen Throne.

Epic.

Our best attempt lasted less than three minutes. Hilarious.

We’re extending our lockout this week. I need to farm up a crapton of mats, I think. This is going to be huge.

Judging, Divinity and an Experiment

Kurn / / general, guide, healing, paladins, raiding, ramblings

I won’t link to it, because I think it’s a crappy article, but the WoW.com holy paladin writer, Chase Christian, is claiming that Divinity affects the healing done by a paladin’s Judgement of Light. My first thought was “that’s BS” followed quickly by “… right?”.

I just spent 95g, respeccing my prot spec to holy and then back to prot to examine this situation.

At first, I thought I could try it out with the same holy gear and just switch from holy to prot and judge light on a training dummy and see what happened.

What happened made no sense whatsoever. One of the specs I was in got 3.4% more healing from JoL. That didn’t make any sense to me, so I went and respecced. I mean, I should be getting 10% more, not something weird like 3.4%, right?

With identical 54/17/0 builds, except getting Divine Strength instead of Divinity, I ended up with:

Divinity: 454 per JoL

No Divinity: 412 per JoL

What does that mean? That means that Divinity is granting me 5% extra healing because the judgement is mine and it’s granting me 5% extra healing because I’m receiving the healing. I have 20,564 health unbuffed, so 2% of that health is about 412. Another 10% of that 412 is about 454.

So that works and means that Mr. Christian’s claim that paladins with Divinity ought to judge light exclusively makes sense, right?

Wrong.

My brother’s hunter has 21,404 health unbuffed.

I had the hunter shoot up a training dummy in IF and I judged light in the spec without Divinity in it.

My brother was getting 428 health back. That’s 2% of his health. That seems to work fine.

With Divinity, my JoL should, then, heal my brother’s hunter for an additional 21.40 (5% extra), or about 450 health per proc.

And still, my brother’s hunter was getting 428 health back per proc.

It appears to me that Divinity and Judgement of Light give the JUDGING paladin 10% extra healing, but it honestly doesn’t affect anyone else, except possibly other paladins with Divinity.

I know! I know! It doesn’t make sense! Why would you be awarded the 10% bonus with Divinity and not have that extra 5% affect others? Before you ask, no, it’s not my glyphs. While I had my prot glyphs in on the secondary non-Divinity spec, none of my glyphs affect my JoL or extra healing in any way. I wasn’t using Glyph of Seal of Light or anything.

But no matter what I did, 428 was what my brother’s procs of JoL were hitting for. So I must conclude that my initial “that’s BS!” call stands. Of course, if anyone out there has screenshots or a combat log parse to show otherwise, I’m happy to revise my assessment. :)

If there’s another paladin in my raid group, by the way, I almost always judge wisdom. Why? Because warriors, rogues and death knights have no use for mana and ret pallies, hunters and enhancement shammies have little need for the regen and the healers generally will not benefit from it, as they’re not attacking the boss. That means that if I don’t refresh my judgement three times a minute, it’s not a big deal. It means that only elemental shammies, mages, warlocks, moonkins and shadow priests will really be adversely affected if I can’t find a global to judge. Whereas any other kind of paladin, a retribution or protection paladin, will be judging on cooldown, which is WAY more than I am, which leads to WAY more uptime on their judgement.

The judgement that should, IMHO, have priority, is Light, because EVERYONE attacking the boss has a health bar and could potentially benefit from it.

So basically, Kurn, you’re saying that you fail at judging.

:P I’m saying that, as a healer, keeping our judgement up is not going to be our first priority and sometimes it’ll fall off. Sorry, but if my tank is taking 30k melee attacks, it’s not always easy to find a place to judge often enough to keep up Judgements of the Pure, much less my judgement debuff.

As an added note, I’m finding that the best time to judge on Sindragosa is when I get Instability and again when I want to drop my 4-5 stacks of it.

Holy How-To #3 – Addons and Macros and Keybinds, Oh My!

Kurn / / guide, holy how-to (wrath), paladins

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the third of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Today’s post/novel is about the various addons, macros and keybinds that will aid you in your quest to become an uber-leet holy PVE paladin. They’re not, of course, strictly necessary in order to heal. You can heal just fine using the Blizzard default UI. However, and let’s be fair here, sometimes the default UI doesn’t show us what we need to see or maybe sometimes it’s sort of clunky. So today, I’ll discuss not only the addons, macros and keybinds that I personally use (and have used), but will offer up some other popular and useful addons or macros. (Edited to add Power Auras Classic!)

Continue reading “Holy How-To #3 – Addons and Macros and Keybinds, Oh My!”

Something amusing.

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

So last night was not a good night for me healing on Sindragosa. First of all, the healing lead and my RL friend the resto druid, was unable to make the raid due to RL issues. She and I were actually on the phone for the first 45-60 minutes of Sindragosa attempts — on my first night on the fight, ever.

But even after I got off the phone with her, I was a little rattled. It really wasn’t going to be a good raid for me and I knew it, but since we had people offspec healing as it was, I figured the experience would be good for me, etc.

Today, the sort of “senior” paladin in the guild, a ret pally, PMs me on the guild forums with his concerns about my healing last night. He, unlike the MT/raid leader, the range leader and the guy who was doing healing last night, was unaware of the situation regarding the resto druid. So not only is he unaware that I basically wasn’t paying attention for the first hour, but he’s like “why aren’t you using divine plea? Why aren’t you casting holy light?”

I laughed my ass off. Why am I not using Divine Plea? How about “because I have full mana”? And he was like “On try 6, over a 7 minute fight, you only used Holy Light 14 times!”

… no, actually, I cast 33 Holy Lights. 19 of them crit. 14 of them didn’t.

I don’t really mind being called out on my performance, especially because I know I sucked it up last night, but if you’re going to call me out based on the PARSE, you had better know how to read the damn parse properly.

Admittedly, it was probably one of my weakest nights in terms of raiding in a long while. I had never done the fight before, despite reading strats and watching videos, and it’s just a BAD pally-healing fight, period. All that running around does not a good numbers fight make. At least the people in charge of the raid knew what was going on with my RL friend and knew that I’d been in contact with her.

Anyways, I’m just amused that the ret pally focused on two of the stupidest things to focus on in a parse, and was wrong about the stats he gave me on one of them. Ah, people. :)

Tank healing vs. Single-target healing

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, raiding

So, you all remember my rant about how the new WoW.com holy paladin columnist insists that paladins are tank healers, right? Where I was saying that no, we’re single-target healers and that tank healing is a subset of single-target healing?

Great post here at Divine Plea that tells us that we’re single-target healers.

Last night, my guild worked on Sindragosa. It was a challenging fight for a variety of reasons (my RL friend couldn’t make it due to RL issues, so we were without the healing lead and our best healer) and it was specifically challenging for me because I got beaned by Blistering Cold a few times, but having prepared myself for the fight, I had already decided to Beacon whichever tank was tanking so I could help out on the raid if needed. Why? Because although I don’t enjoy raid healing very much, it’s the best use of my beacon in the situation. Everyone is taking constant AOE frost damage, people are randomly taking melee or caster debuff damage, so there’s a LOT of raid damage going on. And, due to the placement of the tank vs. the melee, there’s not a lot of opportunity for Glyph of Holy Light to see much action.

So I did a fair amount of raid healing with my beacon on the tank. I really do much prefer to beacon the OT and heal the MT, or vice-versa, just because that way, it leaves me able to really focus on my one target, and I LIKE that. I don’t think paladin healing is boring like that. Some people do and really relish the idea of beaconing their tank and raid healing the way I did on Sindragosa last night and that’s cool. There are certainly a lot of fights where my preferred use of Beacon is how we do it in my guild and there are a few fights where we switch it up a bit.

Another example is Rotface. What we had done for our first few kills (and then refined it a bit, but now that I’m the only holy paladin in the guild, we may revert) is have me beacon the MT and heal the crap out of the people with the infection. I HAVE to drop huge heals on them because of the healing debuff on them, and those all get transferred to the tank, so it works nicely. Of course, there will be another healer on the MT specifically, but it works out okay.

Anyways, I just wanted to point out that post at Divine Plea, which I stumbled across due to Miss Medicina’s post.

Uh, wow.

Kurn / / paladins, raiding, ramblings

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

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

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

Various things…

Kurn / / ramblings

First of all, ZOMG MY BATTERED HILT SOLD FOR 12,195g. I am now comfortably above 15k again (18,050g in my bank toon’s guild bank at the moment) and can breathe a sigh of relief.

Second of all, I went through my google reader feeds and added a bunch of people to the blogroll, so definitely check out those reads! :)

Thank God the hilt sold. I have spent about 13k in the last month. Eesh.

Quick update.

Kurn / / druids, facepalm, general, healing, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

First of all, I AM working on my third Holy How-To post. It’s long. There are many screenshots and links. But I am definitely working on it!

Secondly, I’ve seen some serious fail lately. The latest morons:

– An 80 fury warrior, specced with Titan’s Grip… using one 2H weapon. And nothing else in his other hand. Sadly, I’ve forgotten his name.

– Holymeatbag, an 80 holy paladin, specced 68/3/0 and STILL managed to miss out maxing out Holy Power (3/5) and Holy Guidance (1/5). I may be a little squishy yet, but dude wasn’t keeping Beacon on anyone or shielding me or anything of the sort in Heroic TOC. As such, I died on Paletress. And if I hadn’t used my abundance of cooldowns (my trinket for extra dodge, a healthstone, a healing potion, Survival Instincts, Lifeblood, Frenzied Regeneration and Barkskin!), I would have died again after the wipe. I got H TOC again as a random later in the evening and was healed just fine by the resto shammy. Highly recommend you all ignore this guy.

In positive news, for once, my guild got 25-man Blood Queen Lana’thel on Monday night. HIGHLY recommend that the RL get and use the following mod:

BloodQueen at WoWInterface

We also one-shotted Valithria and, although I dropped my stacks once, it was only once! I got a lot better at making sure I got a stack just before the portal phase ended.

In news with my druid/my brother’s hunter/our friend’s DK…

My druid has 2/5 T9 resto but still has better feral gear, haha. My brother’s hunter is practically as well-geared as Kurn is, which depresses me to no end. He’s got 4/5 T9 (232), the Crusader’s Dragonscale Breastplate and Bracers (thanks to me), the True-aim Rifle out of H TOC, the staff from regular FoS, a Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 agi, obviously) that I made for him, the 245 ilvl badge ring… Seriously. It makes me sad. Especially because tomorrow, he’ll be giving me a primordial saronite and I’ll craft him Rock-Steady Treads. :(

Our DK buddy has 1/5 T9 (shoulders!) and a 245 sigil, which he was very happy to get, haha. His gear is still pretty low, but he’s at 540 defense and 22k health unbuffed. With some consumables and the random dungeon buff, he gets about 30-31k buffed. His dodge and parry are still pretty low, but I imagine that’ll improve as he gets his other tier pieces.

I’m getting a lot of practice on the druid, both healing and tanking. My Swipe is actually holding aggro and my mana pool and regen are sustaining me fairly well, to the point where I rarely need to drink and can even keep innervating my brother’s hunter.

I was thinking about why I like my druid, earlier tonight. I mean, it’s a tree and it’s a bear. I fit the two most sought-after roles in the game and I’m not horrible at them. I think the utility is really what I enjoy about the toon. I can tank and heal on Madrana too, of course, but I think I really enjoy bear tanking as compared to pally tanking. I think I prefer pally healing to druid healing, but there’s a certain elegance to druid healing that’s lacking on the paladin. I can brute force heal darn near anything on my pally. But I actually have to make decisions on my druid while healing that will have repercussions over the next few seconds, as the health builds up slowly.

That’s completely opposed to pally healing, where I strive to keep everyone topped off at all times, rather than letting Wild Growth heal most people up, because I don’t have much in the way of “set-it-and-forget-it” heals on the pally. I guess that druid healing challenges me a bit more than paladin healing in terms of healing intelligently. Pally healing is characterized for me by long periods of casting the same spell, followed by frantic button mashing to get buffs up, then more of the same.

Anyways. I do still have lots to say about pally stuff, so stay tuned for Holy How-To number 3. :)

… and one day, ICC raid strats. :P

Kurn's Q&A #7

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

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

1) “emerald vigor” power word: shield

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

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

2) can you use di and divine protection

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

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

3) combine meta gems

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

4) configure grid toravon frostbite

Easy as pie.

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

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

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

5) does hand of protection remove mark of the champion

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

6) does leader of the pack stack with abominable might

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

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

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

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

7) emerald vigor combat log

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

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

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

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

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

9) what coloured gems go into a yellow socket

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

Secondly, gems work just like the colour wheel does.

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

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

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

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

10) valithria dreamwalker with grid

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

Special bonus #11: wyvern sting halls of reflection

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

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

I don't know why I'm still surprised…

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, ramblings

… at the utter insanity of pugs.

I mean, I don’t even have words to express my dismay at the ridiculousness of some people.

In the last, oh, two days, the following things have happened:

– I was tanking a Heroic Violet Hold on my druid and the healer left after the first boss. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ABOUT?! Oddly, we managed to get to the second boss without a healer (holy crap, do I love being able to heal myself after combat), but then we wiped. But… SERIOUSLY. If you are a healer or a tank and you leave your group in an instance with timed portions, like Violet Hold or Halls of Reflection, YOU HAVE SIGNED A DEATH WARRANT FOR YOUR WHOLE GROUP.

– Speaking of Halls of Reflection, I was healing on my druid, with my brother on his hunter, and we queued for regular HoR, to finish off the quest chain. We did the first boss. The tank leaves. Just… leaves. No one had died, there hadn’t been a wipe, I was keeping everyone alive and it was going smoothly! And he just LEFT.

Thinking quickly, I instruct the ret paladin to cast DI on the DPS warrior, tell my brother to feign and I shadowmeld.

Does the paladin cast DI? No. Does he even know what a DI is? My guess is no. So the three of us died (because the Phantom Mage’s Flamestrike broke my shadowmeld). The warrior and paladin left the group after the wipe, leaving my brother and I agog at the stupidity.

– I was tanking a Heroic Halls of Lightning, in the middle of the first boss, when I realize that the priest is almost oom. It was shortly after the first boss went down that I saw the priest was in shadowform. Not a big deal, right? Well, my group consisted of me, two rogues and a hunter. So the priest was ostensibly the healer. Now, I’m not geared. I know I’m not geared. My swipe can’t out-threat a geared DK’s D&D or a geared warrior’s Whirlwind. And I’m a little squishy, to be honest. I don’t have a crapton of health, my dodge rating is kind of low and my armor is only awesome because I bought Glyph of Indomitability. So I was like “uh. Why are you in shadowform?”

“healing is boring, ima dps and heal at the same time”

… so I left. True, he kept us up during the first boss and he COULD have been leet enough to pull it off and keep us all alive, but I really, REALLY didn’t want to find out.

– So I went and queued for a random heroic again, this time with my brother on his hunter and my RL friend on her priest. We got Heroic Violet Hold. First portal opens up.

Warie, of Kil’jaeden, I reason, is either a victim of the stupid dual spec bug, which will not update spell/ability ranks on your inactive spec when you train, or he has not trained. I usually have RankWatch active ever since someone whispered me saying that my shaman was using Chain Heal 4 instead of 6. At which point I realized I had been doing so for about two months. I was ashamed but I was seriously grateful for RankWatch’s notification. So I keep RW on, most of the time. (My 5 channel is a channel for RL friends to chat in, so my RL friend the priest and my brother and I were all in it and chatting.)

I mean, really, train. 19g per spell on a druid is not cheap, let me tell you. But if you’re not trained and using max-rank abilities (there are some exceptions, but I don’t believe DKs have any of them), then you’re being a moron. Or a dick.

So the guy just got his epic flight. Good for him. I’m not sure how he made his money, but certainly it would have been easier for him to grind mobs (if he did that at all) or instances if he was using max rank spells, no? My RL friend wisely puts him on ignore. Apart from anything else, this guy’s English hurts my eyes. “i no”. Gah.

This is what damage looked like after two portals. My brother, who dinged 80 a week ago, is right up there with a fairly geared shadow priest. And I’m almost putting out another 50% of the damage done by the idiot DK. And I’m a scrubby TANK.

So what does my RL friend do? She does exactly what I left the HHoL group for; she swaps to shadow spec to help out on DPS while still healing me, because we were going to be behind on portals. It was actually close for a couple of pulls there. But at least she was doing it because the fail DK wasn’t doing any real damage. My brother was putting out 1k DPS when he was 75. This guy is using abilities from level 67 (Obliterate 2, D&D 2).

– Then today, I got Oculus as my daily random on Madrana. As a tank. Of course. :P I had, bar none, the weirdest person in my group. Ever. His name was Xamot and he was from Sen’jin. How weird? Allow me to pull out the screenshots.

So I left. I put them both on ignore, too. It’s a shame, because I was going to talk about how I’m invested in my character, in my skills, how I’ve practiced to hone those skills and THAT is why I don’t like vehicle fights. Vehicle fights just rob you of your class abilities, they render all knowledge about your class useless, they just mean that you need to know what your vehicle can do and how you should do so most efficiently.

– Then, I saw a VOA going on. Since I’d missed my guild running it on Wednesday, I thought hey, I’ll go. They’re looking for a holy paladin, after all. Now, I do have the GearScore addon. I use it on Kurn and my other toons, but not on Madrana. Madrana raids with the guild, does one daily every day and that’s about it. I don’t care about GS in general, so I don’t care what Madrana’s GS is. So I don’t have it enabled on her.

And I get no response. Nothing. At all. I’m like… seriously? So I think a minute and decide to link the Toravon 25 achievement and then figure that my Plagueworks achievement ought to be enough.

I cannot believe that someone wouldn’t invite me to VOA on my PALADIN, who likely has a better gearscore than 90% of the server, until I linked the Toravon achievement and the Plagueworks achievement. It’s just mind-boggling to me.

– Then, the universe clearly decided to make it up to me, as my mage failed to complete Heroic Halls of Reflection yet again.

Booya.

They’re going for 12.5k on the AH on my server. So I don’t know if I should sell it or give it to Kurn or give it to Madrana or give it to my brother. My mage, shammy and druid do not need such an epic weapon. I should probably sell it, give it to Kurn or to my brother. Madrana will get a better weapon eventually. Kurn likely will not. My brother likely will not. But I could definitely use 10k+ gold to help offset the cost of outfitting my brother and I in non-sucky gear. Decisions, decisions!