Cataclysm, Stats, blah, blah, blah.

Kurn / / cataclysm, ramblings

Serious question, here.

What the hell is the big deal about consolidating the amount of junk found on armor these days? People seem to be freaking the hell out over all the stat changes that Cataclysm will bring us.

It’s one thing to freak out about LOSING YOUR MANA BAR (I’m a hunter at heart; this totally freaks me out) but it’s quite another to freak out about attack power being derived entirely from agility or strength and spellpower from intellect.

Things aren’t really changing all that much, people. Hell, for hunters (apart from the mana bar to focus bar change), things are going back to how they were in Vanilla! 2AP for 1 AGI? YES, PLEASE. (I am still freaked out by the focus bar and even this 2AP per 1 AGI thing isn’t un-freaking me out.)

I don’t know about you, but this “armor penetration” thing always confused the crap out of me. I knew it was good and I knew that if you hit a certain level of it without procs that Marksmanship was totally overpowered, but since I don’t raid primarily as a hunter, I haven’t paid much attention to it. I gem agility and I’m survival, end of story.

I do hope, however, that hunter mail will not have Expertise on it. It would be like, I don’t know, being a death knight tank who has a piece of gear with shield block on it, you know? ;D

Speaking of tanking, I’m not freaking out about it, but I’m not sure I like the complete removal of Defense Rating. Has it always been a serious pain to become crit immune for various tanking classes? Yes. But that was part of the challenge! I remember getting gear lists from my two main tanks in BC as we headed into Serpentshrine Cavern and I sat there for two hours doing the math to gear them/gem them/enchant them properly to ensure they were crit immune AND resist capped for Frost or Nature, depending on which phase of Hydross they were tanking. And I did the same for them when they tanked the flames on the Illidan fight.

It was freaking HARD, but not impossible, to get to 490 defense plus 295 resistance. It took juggling of gear, gems and enchants. I always told my tanks to never, ever throw anything away from their previous tiers of gear so that they could be used in a resist set. Blizzard always has a couple of resistance fights, so it never makes sense to throw away something that can be retooled into a resistance item.

But then, have we really seen a resistance fight in Wrath of the Lich King? Nothing in Naxx except that Sapphiron became a bit easier with a piece or two of Frost Resistance gear. Didn’t need any for Obsidian Sanctum or Eye of Eternity. Again, only Hodir’s fight really benefitted at all from any kind of resistance in Ulduar, but it was easily doable without. TOC required no kind of resistance gear at all. And thus far, the only fight in ICC that I’ve seen that could really benefit from say, one piece of Frost Resistance gear is Sapphiron. But, uh, no gimmicky fights, really.

I also see some issues. The devs have said:

“Defense – Defense is being removed from the game entirely. Tanking classes should expect to become uncrittable versus creatures just by shifting into Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form, or by using Righteous Fury.”

So… just by turning on Righteous Fury, I’m going to be crit-immune from bosses? Even while casting? (Which currently opens you up to being crit, even if you have 540 defense, because you cannot parry or block while casting — which means, idiot paladin tanks, you do not ever cast Exorcism while in melee range of the mob. At least for now. :P)

The only way I could see that this could be “properly” done is if you have two kinds of Defensive Stance, Frost Presence, Bear Form and Righteous Fury. One kind would be untalented; these are the base abilities that come with the class. Defensive Stance would reduce your damage taken, damage done and increase your threat. Frost Presence would improve your armor and your stamina and your threat, Bear Form would retain all its goodies and Righteous Fury would still cause additional holy threat.

But if you then added talents deep into the protection trees of warriors and paladins, the feral druid tree and… I guess all three of the DK trees… then you could do this:

Improved Defensive Stance: Adds 10% bonus stamina and reduces the chance to be critically hit by melee attacks by 6%.

Improved Righteous Fury: Adds 10% bonus stamina and reduces the chance to be critically hit by melee attacks by 6%.

Survival of the Fittest: unchanged, basically.

Improved Presence: While in Frost Presence, you receive 10% bonus stamina and your chance to be critically hit by melee attacks is reduced by 6%.

Or something. I just find something wrong with the idea that I could just turn on RF and be able to tank something (albeit poorly) in my holy gear without being crit. I find that it is a disservice to all the people who have ever tanked before, who have struggled to find that last piece that will pop them over the required defense numbers so that they’d be immune to crits by heroic or raid bosses.

Then again, while playing on Argent Dawn last night, I realized that the Defias over in Northshire are neutral and don’t aggro you. Humans who are levelling now for the first time have NO IDEA how painful it was to gather Milly’s Harvest or even CLEAR to Garrick Padfoot, when all those mobs were aggressive.

This, more than basic stat changes, is what truly concerns me about the direction of the game. Are they opening it up to more people, making things more accessible to others? Yes.

But in so doing, they seem to be disrespecting the hours and hours of effort, of blood, sweat and tears, that their old playerbase put in.

It’s not to say I haven’t benefitted from the dumbing-down of WoW, because I have. My hunter didn’t have to wait 6 hours between demon spawns for the Rhok’delar quests. My druid levelled uber-fast, getting a mount at 20, getting an epic mount at 40 and got the Tome of Cold Weather Flying at 68. I’ve had dual spec on my druid and shammy since they were both level 40.

But, I am a sucker for memories. I remember attuning practically all of my old, old guild to Molten Core. I ran Jailbreak for Ony attunements more times than I can possibly count (and still hate Reginald Windsor TO THIS VERY DAY.). I remember succeeding in the 45m Strat Undead run with seconds to spare — and then it bugging out (Baron died, Ysida Harmon lived, but had a grey question mark over her head instead of yellow. Turns out that my pet or our warlock’s pet got the killing blow, causing it to bug.).

Those were all amazing memories. Even the bugged-out Baron kill. Even the 502 times it feels like I ran BRD.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in WoW has compared to the fun I had pre-BC. Sure, some things came close (downing Vashj, Kael, Archimonde, Illidan, becoming a Hand of A’dal), but while I felt accomplished during most of BC, it never quite felt as epic as my first Lucifron kill or my epic bow quest or, for that matter, dinging Kurn 60.

So to hear that they’re messing with stuff that’s been in the game since I started playing, to hear that NOW, five years plus after releasing the game, NOW they decide to give hunters a non-mana resource system, NOW they decide to remove defense, NOW they decide to stop with the gimmicky resist fights… It disrespects the hours I’ve put into this game. It rewrites history. “Do you remember the epic battles between Tarren Mill and Southshore” will become “Hah, do you remember that thing called an ‘attunement’?!” or “What do you mean, hunters used to DRINK?” or “What the hell are you talking about, defense?”

And honestly, this all makes me sad. I guess it’s inevitable that things will be changing on a grand scale, because they’re basically redoing all of Azeroth… but some things, even some annoying things, shouldn’t change.

… having said all of that, I still don’t have a problem with most of the changes dealing with armor stats. :P

Single Abstract Noun!

Kurn / / general, ramblings

So I was reading Tam’s post and was a little sad that Single Abstract Noun was only on a European server.

And then I read Miss Medicina’s post and was all “oooh…”.

I do not need another alt. I really don’t.

But I made a baby priest (named Kurnmogh — who looks exactly like Madrana) on Argent Dawn US (Alliance) and joined Single Abstract Noun.

I’m level five. ><

I probably won’t spend a ton of time there, but maybe now and again. At any rate, it looks to be a fun group of people. Who are healers! Or mostly healers. :D

3 hours, 16 wipes. Ow, my face.

Kurn / / icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

Well, we extended our ICC lockout this week so we could work on the Lich King.

3 hours. 16 wipes. Gloriously, none of them appear to be my fault. :D

Sadly, the fact remains the Shambling Horrors and their enrages suck, Soul Shriek sucks and, oh yeah, standing on the outer edge of the platform AS IT CRUMBLES AWAY sucks.

So I’m going to complain a bit.

Soul Shriek silences people for five seconds.

It is supposed to be cast in a frontal cone, meaning the tanks will be silenced.

Tanks should not be silenced so that they may taunt.

When you have one holy paladin who is LARGELY responsible for healing BOTH tanks (thank you, Beacon), who can rarely spare a moment to refresh her Judgements of the Pure, you need other people in the raid to dispell that silence.

Dispells on the raid tonight, including the Necrotic Plague dispells:

Holy priest (in charge of NP dispells): 111

Myself: 21

Shadow Priest: 9

Rogue (for the enrage on the Shambling Horrors?): 5

Ret Paladin: 1

Nothing from the discipline priest. Just the one from the ret pally. Failure. I honestly cannot stop spamming the instant that comes up on a reliable basis, because, hi, that’s like, 30k damage from the ability, right when they’re silenced. I NEED to be healing that damage.

Seriously. Look at this.

[00:09:16.809] Raging Spirit Soul Shriek  MT 19774  (A: 2207, R: 2976)
[00:09:16.809] MT afflicted by Soul Shriek  from Raging Spirit
[00:09:18.244] Madranah Beacon of Light MT +11420 (O: 3589)
[00:09:19.444] Madranah Beacon of Light MT +0 (O: 22235)
[00:09:20.099] Madrana casts Cleanse on MT

That’s nearly four seconds into the silence. But it was STILL ON THE main tank, so after I healed up the nearly 20k damage he took (through Beacon, while healing the OT as well), I cleansed it.

/facepalm

/headdesk

The disc priest had been asked to help out with it at about attempt #6. The ret pally at about attempt #10.

0 in 10 attempts by the disc priest. 1 in 6 by the ret pally.

And it’s not like they even only get Soul Shriek ONCE. They get it several times a fight!

Plus, we were on Vent again tonight. Totally annoying and absurd. At one point, a mage says:

“Salv on [his name].”

And I’m thinking to myself, “You tool. If you think I have even HALF A SECOND to spare to toss you Hand of Salvation, when I’m keeping up BOTH TANKS here, you are freaking crazy.”

The ret pally apparently cast it on him, but if he had been like “I SAID SALV ON [NAME]”, I would have been like “Sorry, would you like me to let the tanks die while I cast a spell on you that is wholly unneeded if you would, I don’t know, Invis? Or WATCH YOUR THREAT in the first damn place?!”

Seriously. I don’t need to hear these people. Their voices, their ambient background noise, their idiotic requests that they don’t make through the proper channels (raid chat, for instance).

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t ever raid with Vent again, but I think my preference is to not at this point. I’d do it for Apotheosis, because I know and love those people and because it’s like spending three hours with friends when I raided with them. But I don’t need to listen to 20-some mouth-breathers who stroke their epeens while using perjorative terms for various social minorities in Vent and raid and guild chat.

Ugh. I feel like I should shower after that raid night.

Kurn's Q&A #8

Kurn / / dungeons, general, healers, paladins, priests, q&a, raiding, ramblings

All righty, let’s take a look at some of the search terms that brought people here that I know I haven’t adequately answered, shall we?

1) argent dawn howto 999

I’m going to guess you want to become 999/1000 exalted with the Argent Dawn? The best way to do this is to run Scholomance, Strat Live and Strat UD over and over again. And equip your Argent Dawn Commission or your Seal of the Dawn or your Rune of the Dawn. Scourgestone turn-ins are huge. Also take advantage of the quests at Light’s Hope Chapel. Here’s a great list of ways to gain rep with the Argent Dawn over at WoWWiki.

2) divinity seal of light

I would imagine, although I haven’t verified this, that yes, the 5% extra healing from Seal of Light stacks with the 5% extra healing due to Divinity. I’m pretty sure it works, but I haven’t re-glyphed/respecced to figure out if that’s working.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, I was wrong!

I normally run with Seal of Wisdom on along with Glyph of Seal of Wisdom, so I don’t usually have the opportunity to see what my extra healing is like with Glyph of Seal of Light — except on Dreamwalker. But, uh, that fight is hilarious when it comes to comparing numbers. My Lay on Hands crit for 131k at one point, so that’s not the best time to make comparisons.

3) does 10 man onyxia give frost badges

Nope. The only instances to drop frost badges (technically Emblems of Frost) are ICC25 (2 badges per boss, 1 badge for the miniboss), ICC10 (same as ICC25) and VOA 10/25 where ONLY Toravon drops 2 Frost Badges each. Onyxia, in both raid sizes, will only drop two Emblems of Triumph.

4) does shadowmeld clear debuff on sindragosa

Okay, let’s talk about what debuffs you mean. If it’s Chilled to the Bone or Instability, the very act of not doing anything for a little while will clear the debuff. If you’re talking Mystic Buffet, then no — the only thing that will clear that debuff is getting out of Sindragosa’s line of sight. I would imagine, though my paladin is a human so I can’t test it out, that if you’re not out of line of sight of her, you’ll still take a stack when she casts it.

5) how do i dps in dungeons assist warrior

These days, lots of tanks just go into a dungeon, pull the whole group and use their AOE abilities to hold aggro. Hell, I do this. I rarely switch targets when tanking on both my paladin and my druid and this, my friends, makes me a fail tank. I SHOULD be switching targets and trying to get more aggro on each target individually. But I don’t because, nine times out of ten, it’s just not needed.

Because so many tanks do this, it’s generally safe to target your tank and assist them (the F key, by default) and focus on THAT target for DPS. Please always do watch your threat meter, though. Pulling aggro is your fault, even if your tank sucks. Moderating your damage output is entirely within your control, even if that means you just plain stop attacking or you wait five seconds for your tank to secure aggro.

6) holy paladin requirements for icecrown citadel

Ooh, good question! I guess it depends on if you’re doing 10 or 25-man, but here’s what I would recommend.

– 4pc T9 (ilvl 232, minimum)

– 232 weapon/shield at minimum

– 245 or better helm/belt/bracers/boots (Onyxia, crafting, BOEs)

– 226/232/245 + rings/neck

In terms of stats, for a Holy Light paladin, I would strongly recommend somewhere around 2350-2500 spellpower, 28k mana unbuffed and at least 650 haste.

Key trinket pickups before you go: Talisman of Resurgence from Triumph badges, either Pandora’s Plea from Mimiron in Ulduar or Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 int) or the Tears of the Vanquished from regular 5-man TOC.

7) how to make grid beacon of light 60 yard range

I’m presuming here that you want to have Grid show someone within Beacon of Light range, right? I’ve been trying to play with range fading on my Grid (pro tip: doing so RIGHT BEFORE your guild pulls Sindragosa is NOT the right time to do so!). I’ll post here when I’ve played with it adequately. Ideally, I’d like to have those in 40yd range of me to appear with full opacity, those at 60yd range to be about 75% opacity and those any further to be about 50% opacity. Or something along those lines.

8) is there a macro addon which accounts for global cooldown

If you mean, is there a way I can do something so that I can have two abilities on the GCD in the same macro and just hit that macro once…. no. There is the “/in” function but it doesn’t work for something on the GCD. I’ve always used it for announces.

9) wow icc disc vs holy

There are several fights that will use both disc priests and holy priests very well throughout ICC. It really depends on the rest of your group makeup. If you have a holy paladin or two, you’ll want to be holy. If you have no holy pallies, you’ll want to be disc and focus on single-target healing and raid-wide mitigation. The instance has several fights that play to the strengths of both types of priests. :)

10) wow paladin how to behave in dungeons

Lesson the first: BUFF PEOPLE. A general guide to who wants what buff:

– might: rogues, DPS death knights, ret paladins, feral (kitty) druids

– kings: everyone else

Why? Because might, even unimproved might, is 550 AP. In order for kings to give that much attack power, DKs and ret pallies need to have over 2250 strength in order for the 10% bonus on that to be 225 extra agi/strength, which is 550 AP for them. Rogues and kitty druids only get 1AP per agi, so they’d need 5500 agility in order for kings to be better than even unimproved might.

What about hunters and enhancement shammies? Both gain additional attack power from intellect, through Careful Aim and Mental Quickness. Plus, the extra agility will give them both more crit as well. Survival hunters also gain an extra 10% of their stamina as attack power. On my hunter, unbuffed, I have:

2183 agility

605 intellect

1352 stamina

So kings will afford me 413 more attack power. But also another 2.6% crit just from the extra agility. And because, as survival, my crits proc Replenishment and various other abilities, crits are good. :)

DPS warriors can put up Battle Shout (equivalent to might) so kings them and they can buff with Battle Shout. You should also kings prot warriors, obviously.

What else? As a paladin, be aware of who can cleanse what. If you’re in, say, Old Kingdom, as any role, and your healer is a tree, guess what? You need to cleanse diseases and magic effects. If you’re somewhere with a priest? You get to cleanse poisons. A shammy? You need to cleanse magic. If you’re not doing that stuff, you fail as a paladin. When I tank as a pally, I cleanse. When I heal as a pally, I cleanse. You need to get Decursive or something to help you be aware of what to cleanse and when.

Also, auras. If you’re on Garfrost? Use Frost Aura. If you’re fighting Koralon? Fire Aura.

And judge! Judgement of Light takes priority over Judgement of Wisdom, because everyone in your party has health, but not everyone will have mana.

Man, that last one could have been a whole post on its own, eh? Heh. :)

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.