1) I’m behind on comments. I am bad. I will respond soon. :) Er, that might be Soon ™. Actually, probably tomorrow.
2) I have the makings of a post in my head about healers and tanks and obligations to guilds. More of an observatory post, looking back on the changing roles of healers and tanks within a guild over the years. I hope to post this sometime this week.
3) Getting to be around time for another Holy How-To post. I still find myself reluctant to do anything about healing meters and parses and stuff. Anything anyone is particularly curious about? Wondering about? Need to know about? Would LIKE to know about?
4) My new guild has done a few pulls on heroic Sindragosa 25 (before I showed up) and plans on playing with her tonight, so I’ve tossed in probably a dime’s worth of information in on the discussion. Tips and tricks for helping me NOT sound like a know-it-all tool would be welcome. ;) I seem to have three settings:
a) No comment. I just literally don’t say anything. I have trouble with this.
b) “If you have any questions, let me know!” which I say a lot in general (see #3 above!) but then that means not saying anything. With which I have trouble, as noted.
c) “UR DOIN IT WRONG”. (See basically every post I’ve ever written.)
Tips and tricks for helping me steer clear of “C” would be lovely. Not that I think they’re doing anything wrong or whatever, but I AM prone to opening my big mouth and would like to pre-emptively shut it, just in case.
5) Oh, yeah, PATCH DAY TOMORROW, in all likelihood, as per MMO-Champion. Dammit, I better get used to Sindragosa without AVR, pronto.
6) The guild got another holy pally app today who doesn’t totally suck on paper but lacks a shoulder enchant and a bracer enchant. He uses the 245 holy libram, not the Libram of Renewal. He’s glyphed for Seal of Light (yet gemmed straight intellect with one exception) and picked up 4/5 Toughness instead of 3/3 Imp Righteous Fury (right, armor’s going to be useful at all, there, buddy) while building down to Divine Guardian. He’s not quite off the mark enough to be “UR DOIN IT WRONG” but enough off the mark to concern me, so I wrote a quick review for my GM who was then basically like “<3” and asked him questions about his choices in his app thread. I can’t WAIT to see how he justifies ANYTHING!
7) Blog maintenance. At some point this week, I’m going to upgrade to v3.0 of WordPress. No IDEA how this will affect some of my plugins, if at all, so maybe Thursday is when I’ll tackle that. Pray for an easy upgrade.
And with that, back to working on my RL friend the resto druid’s website. Yes, folks, my life is really that thrilling.
I mentioned it before, but there IS another option to AVRE out there:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/hudmap.aspx
HudMap doesn’t paint on the world, instead it simply gives you a, well, a Hud Map. It shows where everyone is, it gives range finders for specific encounters, etc etc. I don’t know how it works on Sindragosa (haven’t seen her yet…), but it is great for other fights.
As for the URDOINITWRONG! urge, why not PM/whisper the raid leader? They seem to be fairly cool, and you get along with them, so just go “Hey, here are my experiences with X Fight, I think we should make use of them, however I don’t want to step on toes, how would you like me to present them?”
thansal – I should look into that a little more but basically, the range isn’t a major issue, at least for me. For me, it was stupidly helpful to have the raid target icons “painted” on the ground. 95% of the time, I don’t need to know where anyone else is, but I do need to know where I need to run to. It’s a matter of memorizing where they want the marks or, at worst, drawing the configuration on a piece of paper which isn’t bad or anything, just annoying after doing it “EZ MODE”. ;) I’m just whining, basically. But I really should look at hudmap for other encounters where it could be useful.
With regards to the difficulties I have in keeping my big mouth shut, I PMed the main raid leader on the forum today with some information from my kills – how we dealt with Unchained Magic/Instability, stuff like that, letting her know that she should feel free to make use of it or ignore it or whatever and that I know that not all strats work equally for all raid groups. Just to know that my brain was available for picking as they try to find the things that work best for our raid group. I figured it was probably best to say something while they’re still planning out the raid rather than during the raid itself. I can SEE myself potentially being That Jackass and I really don’t want to be, so maybe pre-emptively writing the RL will help.
And shoot, I forgot that I should really read up on their LK strat before tonight…!
I have a few ideas about a holy how-to… sort of.
Background: my paladin is my ‘main’ alt, she’s main spec prot and off spec holy, and I pretty much suck at both. My healing ‘technique’ is standing still (hard to do when I’m coming from a tree main), trying to FoL the whole raid, then remembering that I’m not a raid healer anymore and frantically HLing the tank. Even when I remember my assignment, I have no idea when to use my cooldowns… some tips and tricks about those would be amazing. All I know is use Divine Plea+Wings to make sure my healing output doesn’t drop horribly and make me lose the tank. Any useful macros? I’ll never be an amazing holy pally, but I might as well not suck… especially since I found I dislike tanking.
Also, I apparently fail already, since I am stacking int and glyphed for Holy Light. I copied someone else’s spec and glyphs and she might have got them wrong… If you’re curious, this is my pally: http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Alonsus&cn=Shinyhooves&group=2 (in tank gear, sorry; my holy gear is on the sucky side with low haste, but I am using the illvl 200 libram)
[And I have now realized that if you respec both your specs, you need to change the glyphs around too… I’m facepalming big time now. So yeah, look at the prot spec for my holy glyphs and the other way around ><]
With regards to HUDMap, the most useful encounter I’ve seen it on is for tracking the plague in Putricide HM. It’s absolutely brilliant for that.
As for post requests…healing Heroic Sindragosa is next on our list. :)
http://xkcd.com/698/
Aww man, the ‘big mouth’. I feel your pain, mine’s been getting me in trouble a bit lately. I’m definitely a ‘C’ by nature, kinda always have been (Ms Know It All.. and that’s not the most liked persona!). I actually had a bit of a blow-out tonight with a RL. I’m not in your situation as a total newbie, but I am still newer in my guild and kind of went to a top raiding spot/etc, and I definitely often feel like I need to worry about stepping on toes.
In my case we’ve concluded that I’m going to funnel more stuff to GL/RL, and I’m directing some energy to the guild website, which is in abysmal shape, hoping to drive guild traffic there/make it a useful resource.
Disregard the thing above about the wrong glyph… I can’t read.
Jen – your description of how you heal is hilarious! “then remembering that I’m not a raid healer anymore, then frantically HLing the tank” ahahaha!
A closer look at cooldowns may very well be in order, thanks for the suggestion!
As to macros, please do check out my previous post on Addons, Macros and Keybinds:
http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/?p=700
ecclesiastical: Oh, awesome! That’s what I was really going to miss AVRE for. I’ll be sure to snag that tonight, thanks!
Healing Sindragosa could definitely be worked into something somewhere, although not for my next Holy How-To, since that’s all holy pally stuff all the time. :)
http://xkcd.com/590/
Aloix – Yep. Having a big mouth and being naturally long-winded is not a good combo, either, haha. I’m trying not to overwhelm the GM, RL or healing lead with ZOMG IMPORTANT INFOZ so I’ve been posting the website a bit with general information people will hopefully read and use. :)
Jen – actually, looking at the armory, you DO have your glyphs linked to the wrong spec. :)
Hehe. What I meant was I was glyphed correctly (I confused Seal of Light with Holy Light – whoever named pally spells had zero inspiration)… my glyphs would’ve been in the right specs too, because I set out to do it last night, except I had a very blonde moment and, after I redid my holy spec, I plopped a tanking glyph on top of it, *without* changing spec first. We were already raiding and I had already been told several times that changing spec order was dumb, so I just gave up. Whenever I have to play my paladin I get stressed out and start messing up, I wonder why…
I’ll check out the how to for macros, thanks!