Eesh.

Got the shammy to 80 at long, long last, so now I have:

Kurnmogh (80 hunter on Proudmoore)

Madrana (80 paladin on Bronzebeard)

Katarrah (80 shaman on Bronzebeard)

Plus I still have my 74 mage on Proudmoore.

In the less-than-24 hours that Katarrah has been 80, she’s healed (!) Vault of Archavon 25 and 10, DPSed Azjol-Nerub and ToC (both heroic)… I’ve gotten a TON of nice gear, stuff I made on Kurn that I sent over with Katarrah when she transferred to BB. I also got a couple nice drops here and there and, overall, am kind of excited I have another 80 on the server.

In other news, server first Northrend Beasts, faction server first (server second) on Lord Jaraxxus and server/faction second on Faction Champions.

Woot.

3.2 – Sob.

I’m probably making too much of it, but I’m still very sad about the nerfs to Divine Intellect and Illumination. Bastards.

Anyways. Got an achievement the other day that, frankly, shocked the living crap out of me. So surprised was I, I forget to screenshot it as it happened.

lightning1

I had no idea what the hell that was.

lightning2

… I’m still dumbfounded that the raid I was in, my guild raid, got that. Week after week, people get ruined by that dumb lightning… and yet, we get THAT achievement? It’s not like it’s difficult to avoid or anything, but it’s kind of surprising. Sort of like The Safety Dance.

Anyways, I’m still unsure how the hell I’m going to be healing in 3.2.

I guess something along these lines:

1) Cast Sacred Shield on the tank I’m healing.

2) Beacon the tank I’m not.

3) FoL the tank every 12ish seconds to keep my hot up (must configure Grid to show hots AND my own one…)

4) … FoL the other tank if they have SS on them?

5) Continue to spam Holy Light and pray to God I don’t run OOM.

Ugh. I guess we’ll see how things go in the Coliseum (anyone else think that should be spelled Colosseum?!) tonight. Assuming the servers and such get all sorted out okay.

Sigh.

2-piece HOLY T9 bonus is extending the duration of our judgements by 10 seconds, to last 30 seconds.

Blizzard hates us.

Not only that, but I’m trying to figure out what to do with regards to the Illumination nerf. 30% of mana back on a crit instead of 60% (and all that is instead of the original 100%!!!).

Do I stack spellpower so my FoL/Sacred Shield hot is huge? Do I keep stacking int so that I can cast close to forever? Do I stack even more crit so that even if I’m only getting 30% of mana back on a crit, at least 50-60% of my heals ARE crits? Do I respec back into ret for the +crit?

I should probably go read up on this stuff at EJ, PlusHeal and other places, but part of the problem is that I’m just so SAD about our bonuses and our nerfs. And I’m sorry, I don’t particularly like the idea of beaconing the tank and healing the raid so that the heal can transfer .5 seconds later, even if it’s now going to count overhealing. I’ll probably still beacon the other tank and spam heal the current tank. The only places in current content where I can see beaconing the tank and raid healing as viable are:

– Freya +any elders (’cause the tank doesn’t take a lot of damage, but good LORD, does the raid)

– Head tank on Mimiron, MAYBE?

– Thorim in the arena, I guess? I still foresee a squished tank.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I LOATHE Beacon of Light with all my heart. I use it so sparingly. I use it on a second tank, I use it on my tank on Mimiron’s Plasma Blasts and use Hand of Sacrifice and then heal the crap out of myself, I use it on myself on Kologarn and Iron Council and Hodir… and that may be it.

I want the new expansion to come out and I want a decent 61 point talent, please. Sigh.

Updatey things.

You may have noticed by the fishing-related achievements in the sidebar that I am levelling fishing. Sadly, it’s true. I am. On a second toon. Sigh. Up to just over 300 fishing. At least I’m fishing up my own buff food, now, which gives me the possibility of fishing up the Sea Turtle. Plus, I’m making Fish Feasts, which are selling quite well.

Apart from that, we wiped 24 times to get a new achievement last Wednesday:

heroic-knock

We did it with Elder Stonebark up, so we had to deal with Ground Tremors. Bad. Bad, bad. Ground Tremor damage was huge, and it’s physical damage, so… Ow. I’m kind of pleased with how healing went on that, though.

We had 3 holy priests, 1 holy paladin, 1 disc priest, 1 resto shaman and 1 resto druid in the raid, so I had this going on:

– Resto Druid topping off group 1 (with tanks) and 5

– Holy Priest 1 – POHing Group 2 (5 of 7 healers)

– Holy Priest 2 – POHing Group 3

– Holy Priest 3 – POHing Group 4

All holy priests to COH groups 1/5 after their POH.

Resto druid watching for Nature’s Fury (although he didn’t do a great job).

Me and the disc priest spamming the tank(s) and the resto shammy doing what he could to top people off.

Overall, it worked okay. But I have a lot of refinements for Freya + Elders, mostly to do with positioning.

Anyways, still conscious, thereby confirming that my sleep habits are completely screwed up. I’m thinking I’ll get back to my healer evaluations.

Done so far: disc priest app, two holy paladins.

To do: disc priest (regular), holy priest (irregular), both holy priests (regular), holy priest (app), both resto shammies (regular), all three resto druids (all somewhat irregular).

At least the regular disc priest and one of the shammies are fine and I have nothing bad to say to either of them. Gonna be fun times with everyone else, though! HOORAY. ;)

Should probably get started on at least the easy ones…

Improved Judgements… Why?

When speaking of PVE content, one of the typical holy paladin specs is 51/5/15. Another is 51/0/20. And another is 53/0/18.

All three of these specs bring you deep into the Retribution tree to pick up Conviction (15 points) and then perhaps Sanctity of Battle (3 points).

What cheeses me off is the idiot holy paladins who pick 2/2 Improved Judgements over 2/2 Improved Blessing of Might as they spec down into the Ret tree.

Why? Honestly, why on earth would you ever pick something that lowers your Judgement cooldown?

There’s one reason I could possibly see for PVE content: do more DPS.

What the hell? You’re a holy paladin. You heal people. Your DPS is poor at best. Judgements of the Pure lasts a minute, not 8 seconds. Your global cooldowns should not be used in order to judge more often than is necessary to either:

a) Keep your judgement up (which is ~20 seconds)

b) Keep Judgements of the Pure up (which is 1 minute)

I’m lucky in that I’m rarely a paladin who must judge. We have a prot paladin and a ret paladin, both of whom are regular raiders, and I’m not always the only holy paladin in a raid, so JoL and JoW are both generally up and I don’t absolutely need to judge, most of the time, unless I want to keep Judgements of the Pure up.

You may not be as fortunate as I am, but there’s still very little excuse to lower that Judgement cooldown for any PVE reason whatsoever.

But, you may argue, what if we always have a ret paladin with improved might?

So what if you do? What if he or she is out of town for a week? Do you think your melee or raid leaders will be okay with crappy might? Is your raid really going to rely on Battle Shout? Hah!

So Improved Might wins over Improved Judgements and don’t get me started on Heart of the Crusader. That’s win, too, even if you have an elemental shaman. They can die, you know, and there goes 3% crit, unless you keep up Heart of the Crusader when you judge.  Or maybe they’re out of range, like on Thorim. I judge Light in the tunnel on every mob for the additional healing (which won’t interfere with anyone else’s judgements, as I’m the only paladin in there) and for the crit buff, and I’m especially careful to do it when we don’t have an elemental shaman in the tunnel with us. It helps us get through the tunnel faster and who knows when that ten seconds we shaved off will be the time we need to get to Thorim before Sif leaves?

So, TL;DR version:

– Improved Judgements for PVE holy paladins = bad

– Improved Might for PVE holy paladins = good if you’re going for Conviction or anything else deep into the ret tree

– Heart of the Crusader for PVE holy paladins = good, just like Improved Might

Hunter stuff.

So I went to Proudmoore after my raid tonight (smoothest Thorim kill in forever with a WEIRD raid comp!) and did my cooking and fishing dailies and somehow wound up in a Naxx 25 pug.

Thus far, I have my T7.5 legs and proof positive that survival is HAX. I should not be doing 4.9k DPS on Thaddius. Even if it IS Thaddius. My gear is just that bad. Then again, I’m hit-capped and not a moron, so…

But explosive shot is disgusting. In the face. For real.

Win?

The first person up for the legendary mace asked to sit because of connection issues.

Fragment #2 is mine.

Yay? haha.

ETA: Make that Fragments #2 and #3.

Oh, for the love of Pete…

Problem 1: I am awake at 7:17am and have not gone to bed yet.

Solution 1: In lieu of sleep, since I can’t sleep, I should be productive.

Problem 2: Being productive means trying to organize the healers in my guild a little more. The group is working okay, but some individuals need a nudge in the right direction, so I need to communicate this to them.

Solution 2: Write notes to the healers who need a nudge.

Problem 3: How to nudge/shove people without sounding like an overbearing, condescending bitch? Hm.

And that’s where I am right now. A disc priest app has two WRONG, just plain WRONG, glyphs and some odd talent choices and is casting Greater Heal a lot more than Flash Heal.

Problem 4: How to keep from tearing my hair out at some of the issues some of the healers are experiencing…

Yep, stumped on this one, too.

Siiiiiiiigh.

Updates and Ramblings, as per usual…

So, first of all the Armory is sucking. It hasn’t updated my pally since July 1st.

As such, I have pictures to share.

mad-flamewarden

This is probably the only title/world event achievement Madrana will get, just because she was so close to getting it after last year. I’d gone through and honored/desecrated all the flames on … probably all three of my characters (hunter, paladin, mage) last year, and killed Ahune at least once on each. Hell, I tanked Ahune on Madrana, which was hilarious.

I honored/desecrated just about all the flames on three characters this year, too, only I didn’t do anything with the mage and did all the flames with my shammy. Got a full bar of experience, too!

mad-bfd

Some people from my old guild, Apotheosis, have come by Bronzebeard and are transferring toons or rolling alts. Alts need run-throughs, of course. And so Madrana got her BFD achievement.

mad-master

While killing things for a friend who was questing in Ashenvale, I took the opportunity to finish out my Unarmed skill, which also got me Master of Arms. Shweet.

Not so shweet: getting tricked into going to an Ulduar 10. Someone in my guild, who has been pestering me to go for WEEKS if not MONTHS at this point, asked me to go “for fun”. So, considering it was pouring rain outside, I went. Turns out it wasn’t “for fun”. It was “for hard modes”. If I weren’t a decent human being, I would have left the group RIGHT THEN AND THERE. But then they couldn’t have done the instance. So I stuck around, at least until my RL plans were going to settle themselves, and got a few achievements.

Flame Leviathan with 4 towers up:

mad-fl-hard

XT-002 after breaking his heart:

mad-xt-hard

Just a note — getting something like four bombs IN A ROW is FTMFL. I got Light Bomb, then Gravity Bomb, then Light Bomb AGAIN, then Gravity Bomb AGAIN. Of course, if I hadn’t spent 30 seconds running around like a moron, I would have been completely out of mana, so I guess it wasn’t too tragic. And we got the kill anyways.

Another friend transferred his druid over and got it in his head that he wanted to get the Guardian of Cenarius title, by getting exalted with the Cenarian Circle and Cenarian Expedition. He ground rep for three days to get exalted with CC and has been steadily working at CE. Of course, after a certain point, one of the best ways to get CE rep is…

mad-heroic-sv

Which Madrana’s done at least a dozen times, but definitely not since 3.0 dropped.

The druid in question is levelling resto (no joke!) and knows that the Idol of the Emerald Queen is basically the best resto idol until Wrath. So we did a quick Shadow Labyrinth boss kill (it dropped) and then cleared a bit of trash so that I could get rep and…

mad-exalted-lc

So that was kind of sweet.

In other news, Yogg down for the third time and still no trinket from Mimiron. I’m beginning to think that Pandora’s Plea doesn’t even exist…