Amusing LFG.

Too funny imo:

On my warrior alt, doing LFG while leveling (I have so far refused to tank for the sheer ability to not have to do anything but kill stuff) and I ping up Dire Maul for the 27th time (no, really. the 56-60 range it's all that queue's up, which isn't horrible because everyone seems to get to know it pretty well) and we get this pally tank. Yay, I have more HP than him... AND HE USES A POLEARM TO TANK.

2 trash pulls in, he face pulls too much... Dead. NOT ME THOUGH. EFF THAT YOU BIG TREE/LOTR-ENT-THINGY. /equip sword/board /defensive stance. TCLAP TCLAP TCLAP SUNDER SUNDER SUNDER

Ok, everything is attacking me, now I look at my bars and realize I have no idea where I put my CDs or other abilities... SHIT.

Meh, healer is competant, Everything dies, tank says good job. I say, buddy, shields help. He goes "Oh yeah."

Later on an epic BoE trinket that restores Hp5 (Yes, health...) falls, we all need.... Hunter wins. tank complains... I begin explaining in 2 sentences that "CLEARLY you haven't played this much... as ALL loot is HUNTER loot. DUH." Noobs don't get it.

1 boss later- The pally starts waiting in place for a pat to move away while were headed to the final boss. Someone comments that were all here for xp and why are we avoiding trash. Tank starts berating him for not knowing he is there for gear, not xp. DUH.

Lowbie LFD is fun.

Hard Thoughts About Hard Modes

What I do love, are hard modes. They have become my new passion. I had been of the opinion that I am not leet enough, not hardcore enough, too casual, didn’t play in Vanilla or raid seriously in TBC. I enjoyed the nerfs. I play a paladin. I try to think realistically.



A few months ago I decided I didn’t like that a smattering of my friends were dispersed into different guilds and that we were not able to raid together, logical next step? I formed up a once a week Uld10 (best instance in WoTLK so far imo, and this was before we had ToGC down) for 3 hours and we went in with the idea of first, we will kill yoggy, as we had yet to even spend some quality time on him without pugging in horribad fail, then we’ll take it from there. We go in and clear the entire instance (Alg not included) with a person in full blues all in under 4 hours. At that point we knew that we were going to be able to make a dent in hard modes and we set forward from that week on to work on them! 3 weeks later we began working on Alg. I must say, putting the time limit on Alg did make that fight very fun, and very challenging. Adding to the fact that Alg was quite buggy and would sometimes just despawn, or kill people during big bang for no reason if they were cutting it close with their hopping into holes. This lead us to working around it and being more methodical and diligent in our movements, helping us work as a well oiled machine better. The more challenging the fights, I found out simply required more teamwork. (This being said that we overgeared the encounters, and they were still difficult to us. And yes I know, months behind.) I became very proud with our progress, but after the high that was Alg, we didn’t see much else as a challenge. We had cleared out ToGC with over 45 attempts remaining, and even that was more of a crapshoot in that bad RNG could hose you, and it felt more like the undying runs in naxx that I personally never enjoyed. I understand putting fun limitations on a fight (like the 1 hour on Alg) but no wipes is a little too far past what I enjoy. Like I said, I feel that I am pretty casual.

Of the many things I felt I got out of doing the different hardmodes, I value those experiences that made me a better player. After doing FireFighter, which is essentially the same exact fight as reg but with fire going all over the place, I felt like my awareness for watching multiple timers, healing a raid, and positioning not just myself, but my range tank, mobile tank, heals, and dps as we moved around the room. Working together with the whole raid to take down targets only when we needed them(emergency fire bots), and to unload on the boss at all other times was quite the experience.

The sad part is though, after all of that, the regular ICC modes frustrate me when the only reason we are wiping is because not our whole raid has the experience I had learning more challenging, demanding content. At the end of the day, we are all sitting in front of a keyboard with mouse and monitor and pushing buttons at the right time. It’s not exactly like were pro athletes. But I feel that I gained the ability to basically multitask in the way that the game wants me to, and that is what determines if the raid will win. Can each person in each role of the raid execute their specific duty?

The good news through all of this is that our hard mode group of 10 will most likely begin work on the ICC ones when they come out, as opposed to being drastically overgeared making the hard, less hard. This will again force us to all play at a high level if we expect any sort of success. This excites me. To be a part of a team that works together to achieve.

ICC is...

(This was a post I wrote a while back while in a car or airport or something where I didn't have internet. Figured I'd post it before it goes out of date)

Lately with time at work being so high and full weekends of work consuming my life, I found that the crawling pace of ICC releases is actually helping me out. With the release of Ulduar, and previous to that with Naxx there was so much pressure to clear because we were able to. (I was in college barely going to class, I pretty much played whenever I wanted to) This allows you to go as far as your raid is capable of and choosing when to stop. Now that blizzard decided that they would control the flow of raiding by only releasing the easy content one step at a time, the challenge in ICC just isn’t there for me.

I really do enjoy the new scenery and the new fights, yet at the same time I find it difficult to get really enthusiastic about content that everyone *should* be downing.

After re-reading that proclamation I realize that it can come off as very elitist and in the same tones as the “Why is everyone allowed to raid and see the content I deserve to see after all my hard work” but I really don’t mean it in that sense. I love the accessibility that blizzard gave to all players into the endgame. When I first started playing I mentioned casually one time to a person that I really enjoyed Wow. He claimed that after he reached level cap there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to do except raid. At the time he was playing (vanilla) it really did take a long time to gear up to actually contribute, then you are looking at being a dpser in a 40-man? Let’s pretend for a moment they even HAD recount (they didn’t). You have no idea who is doing well, and who is afking for anything they like. The content isn’t challenging except for the fact that the raid coordination and leadership. (Think of the nightmare that was Thaddius for 40 people. Granted it was high enough up in progression that any guild that got there had enough people committed to actually paying attention… but still… It was bad enough when we were pugging it before Uld. with 25…)

Back on topic, the accessibility that blizz has given out for raiding is awesome. The logic that they design uber-awesome content (like AQ or Sunwell) that not very many people were able to experience is not really logical. It’s like James Cameron being like “Avatar is teh sex, and you can’t watch it unless you are a well known movie critic. I realize I dumped a massive amount of money into this, it’s extremely popular, received amazing reviews, but unfortunately you all have not watched all my other movies leading up to it so you do not deserve to even be in it’s very presence. You are not 1337.” That just makes no sense.

I want Icecrown to be the pinnacle of raiding, I want the Arthas fight to be just phenomenal. Anything else would be a letdown. We all played WC3 (assumption here) and no one got irate when everyone was able to beat the game!! It had amazing story and the story comes to a close here. It is 100% logical for most people to get to the Arthas fight and to see it. The self-nerfing raid instance is what will assist this as well.

Here’s to hoping it cracks up to everything we want it to be!

Healbot, and why it really is better- No matter how you feel about addons.

To begin- I first used Healbot when I was around level 40 on my paladin, my first character and used it all the way up to when I got bored with it and how it looked in ToGC and decided to finally give Grid+Clique a fair shake. I still am using Grid+Clique on my main computer, but my backup laptop still has healbot on it. So I love them both.

First off, I’ve never liked the whole “Addons make the game less pure, and I’m a purist.” I said that once to a good friend (and healing companion) and he lol’d at me so hard I couldn’t talk to him for a week. Maybe if you had an addon that took over your toon for you, or actually moved you out of the fire, and chose what spells to cast, when, and on who- Sure, that’s like using steroids in baseball (Mark McGwire, you suck!) as it just plain hurts the game. Now, if you have an addon that just makes your choices and abilities easier to use, and more streamlined in your gathering of information then it is simply like you are deciding to use a glove in center field, not just your bare hands. And you decided to use signals to your base runners, instead of them just figuring it out. Limiting yourself to not have these things does not make logical sense unless you are a masochist or you are looking for a challenge. Hardmodes do the same thing- Do this fight, but with one hand behind your back. Quite the feat, but you chose to make it harder.

Also, Blizzard supports addons now a day. If you don’t believe me look to the quest interface; I dumped my Questhelper on my alts because I more or less have the utility it provided from Blizzard now in their built in UI. They have an in game threat meter. They made arena enemy frames. These are all very useful and popular addons that they decided to make a part of the main UI. One part of the game that I really feel is lacking in the UI is simply the raidframes. To be frank, the ones in game have to be pulled out manually (I think? I haven’t used them since I was leveling in TBC on my first char) they are ugly, and don’t provide the necessary information or customizable options needed from all classes for raidframes to be effective. On top of this, Blizzard has a built in, easy to use, macro writing tool. And who doesn’t love macros??

It always amazes me that people who claim addons are useless and not needed claim their macros work just as well. Well good sir! I have only this to say to you- “Your macros work almost as, or just as effective as my addon does. But my addon’s benefits come from the fact that it is more malleable to multiple classes/uses AND better at processing information than your macros are.” In fact, macros just DO what your healbot or Grid+Clique do. The problem is that both those setups outstrip your prewritten macros when you say… Use a different character, a different spell, decide you want to respect, your targets change, your raid change, your tanks respect, the encounter messes you around, and so on. I can think of thousands of scenarios here, but instead I’ll just get into personal experience where my addons allow me freedom to do more things in a raid.

On my pally specifically, I hated having to target people before I healed them, I found it clunky and cumbersome. To be honest, I became a monster at being able to raid heal on my paladin specifically because I did NOT have to select the target for where my heals were to land. Also, having to judge (and wanting to do so as much as possible) means that a paladin must target the boss/adds from time to time. Even if you have raid frames and are clicking them then using a macro, as druids always tell me is so easy to do… you are losing fractions of a second. Fractions of a second? What’s the big deal Tur?!?!?!?!111ONE111!!??? It’s not like a fraction of a second is going to do much for you on that heal! Sure, that one heal may not matter and it could have been delayed… that one time… but let me tell you, in a 10 minute fight fractions add up into real seconds, and seconds mean GCDs, which means more raw healing output. Plain and simple, you will be more active. Secondly, if you think that fraction of a second won’t matter… well go heal ToGC25 Gormok when the worms are about to come out and have your tanks tell you their CDs are all, well… on CD. You will WISH you had fractions of a second there (especially considering you swap tanks many many times there).

On my priest, How could I swap targets with so many different spells if not for the click-casting of either addon? I couldn’t. I just heal more efficient, and the same raidframes I click on also tell me if they are in range, have debuffs, or anything else I need to know. About 70% of the druids I met did not use any sort of healing addon when I first met them. I convinced about half of them to give an addon a try. All of those who tried looked at my addon and said “Hey, it does exactly what I do already… except it just eliminates one little step in between, making me just slightly faster. Why wouldn’t I use this??”

Shaman?? Well that healing companion of mine who laughed at me in that conversation way back when, he’s been my healing shaman partner my entire raiding experience. He’s always used healbot, and he has the worst setup for his buttons. His mouse wheel click button is Chain Heal. He claims it made sense back in 5mans when he set it up, but I just lol at him now, Cause he has to hit that thing so often in raids. Anywhoo, Shaman healing is more similar to Pally I guess in that it is more stand in one spot and cast with cast times, and I just got him to try the swap to grid+clique after he’d been using HB for as long as I had.

All in all, there is literally zero downside to using one of these addons, other than resources on a slower computer. I will say though, Healbot does NOT use a lot of resources and is pretty much all you need considering if you use decursive, you may disable that as HB does that as well, and either addon can be used as a full set of raidframes as well. To me, healbot or Grid+Clique is like using PallyPower, and to not use that just does NOT make sense? Even the “I don’t have a nice computer” argument makes sense! All it says to me is “I’m really lazy and I don’t like to be efficient.” This is odd to think that people ACTIVELY MAKE THESE DECISIONS TO HURT THEMSELVES, yet they do it on a daily basis. Hell, I make those decisions when others tell me they are no-brainers I suppose. I decide to stay up 4 hours playing wow and go to work for a full 11 or 12 hour day on 2 or 3 hours rest? Sure, why not. Makes sense to me! Most of my RL friends don’t get it.

*here’s to hoping everyone sees that I am the smartest one and they should all do what I say*

The foolproof way to be awesome at holy paladin-ing:

This will also be known as my "How To: Holy" Post

Covered in this post:
• Gearing goals/choices
• Talent choices (but not the discussion on DS/DG, that is another post entirely)
• Spell choices/”rotations”

Main points:
1. You are a single (dual) target healer, don’t try to be more than that.
2. Int.
3. Holy Light.
4. Int.
5. Intellect.
6. Haste is very very nummy, and crit has gone away for the most part… kind of.
7. Int.
8. Utility is nice, and you can bring a lot of it.
9. Int.

Now, before I get into the meat and potatoes of how to get ‘er done, I just want to clarify to those who are reading to see WHY you will be gemming/gearing/chanting towards these specific goals. If you have illusions of being some monster raid healer who tops everyone off whenever they get hit with any damage, think again. Roll a holy priest, a resto drood, or a chealing shaman. They all do very well at that job in different ways. CoH is fast, hits hard among many people and a 3 stack serendipity hasted PoH will unload on more people (even more so when glyphed). The pure HPS potential of the raid healers is just inherently higher than ours in current raiding situations. That being said, they can’t even come close to single target bombing a tank (or two!) to keep them alive for as long as we do. If you do this right you will be able to fully unload on your target (or two!) for well over 2 minutes self buffed, and with raid buffs you will near 5 minutes going at full bore.

The end goals for being that monster tank healer:
Currently I aim to at these goals for healing as a pally-
-The 2500 spellpower (raid buffed) minimum.
I used to consider the minimum at 2000, but with ICC having things hit slower and more consistently, our HLs have become more effective and I have seen more times where one is landing and not topping off the target (or the beacon target) which means more spellpower could have been utilized. This being said 2500 spellpower is still quite low and I generally sit above 3k in raid buffs. If you hit the other minimums and can’t tote 2.5k spellpower you are probably doing something wrong.
-The haste softcap.
670 haste (I think it’s actually 677? I’ll math it out after I post this and edit it up). This pulls your FoL to 1 second and your GCD at 1 second (which makes you using your other abilities faster too… I.E. reapplying your SS, beacon, or hitting the magical DP button.
Just so you know, wear more haste when you don’t have full buffs in your raids, meaning you need shaman for wrath of air (5%) and a ret pally (ret aura 3%) OR boomkin (3%) to make sure you hit that cap. I have 2 sets of gear that I actually raid in consistently, one sits around 800 haste for our 10mans where I don’t get all my favorite buffs, and another that sits at 668 which is close enough to cap for me in 25mans. The one with less haste has about 1.5k more mana on my bar for it.
-Intellect, as high as that sucker can go.
After you hit your other two minimums, the rest is pretty much stacking int. There are many reasons why you do this, but the first being that above all else, it makes you able to cast longer and longer the more mana you have. More int=more mana=more mana back with DP. DP is wonderful, it scales with your MAX(ask your friendly priests to hymn sometime, its amazing) mana. Also, Int is fantastic because A. it scales with kings B. it gives you extra spellpower via talents C. it gives you extra crit from naturally being int D. its sexy

Now, those are the basics for gear and what you want on it. Honestly past that it doesn’t matter *AS MUCH*
Here is where many people scoff at me for not talking up crit and mp5. I say that they are “not great” but clearly they are good stats for us, just not even as close to as good as Int/Haste. I’d take free crit or mp5 over extra SP, sure. But, really mp5 and crit just kind of “happen” on your gear choices when you gear for Int and haste. (if you stay in mail and plate that is) Really though, my sword currently is awesome, it’s absolutely stellar, so nice… And some of our caster dps hate me for having hit on it. I don’t care about it, it’s truly a wasted stat (Hey! I judge!) but the other stats make the weapon better than most of what was available in T9 for sure.
If you didn’t get it already, the meta to use is insightful earthsiege (Int plus mana back!) and all your gems should be yellow Brilliant King’s Ambers with one Nightmare tear for the meta activation (10 int!) or a purple with spellpower and Mp5. Almost every socket bonus is not worth dropping some int for like 8 spellpower, or haste, or crit, or mp5. It just isn’t even close.

Now you know how to gear!

Let’s put those talents into place!

For the most part we will all agree that beacon is one of your best assets and maybe your most valuable talent point spent. I have seen some fun combo specs that could probably do decently well, but beacon (not-effectively) doubles your healing output for 1 GCD every 60 seconds. I suggest taking it…

So you go into the talent choices and find that for the most part it’s pretty easy to see what is for PvP and what is for PvE, you get your cookie cutter going in the tree and find you can spend 51 points easy. There are only a few real choices:

Aura mastery- I have seen a lot of people tell me this isn’t that great because holy pallys usually have Concentration aura up…. I don’t get why people think we need to only use that aura?? If a fight has no pushback on the ranged, it is useless. Literally zero use, throw up ret aura if you have nothing better to throw, or a resist if there is some form of resistible damage… which MEANS! You now have a 6 second CD to double that resistance. Last I checked it gives something like 40% resistance to your aura’s defense at level 80, which is nice being as blizz now loves to send predictable AoE onto your whole raid which has to be healed through. Truly an underrated talent. I have found so many uses for this and all smart raiders will as well.


Imp Conc aura- This is a raid buff, not for you. With conc aura up and your holy talents you cannot be pushed back, at all. Realize this. Also- if you have one paladin with this in your raid there is simply no reason two need to have talent points in it. Why would you stack conc auras? I can think of a handful of fights where you could claim that the raid breaks up into groups… but really? You will break up the paladins and NEED that extra help from pushback where you wouldn’t rock a resist aura?? You have got to be kidding me.

Spell rotation!!

Now, it’s difficult to claim that healing has a “spell rotation,” but really we can describe what using different spell rotations will net you as each and every one will change in your HPS output, the speed of your output and your mana usage.

Ideally we’d be just chain casting flash of light. Coupled with SS on a target FoL is in my opinion (at 1second cast time 1 second GCD) just a really big hot ticking for like 7k a second. This sounds powerful because it is at high gear levels. Unfortunately though, it is not always big enough. In 25man ToC and above even with much ICC gear you will still have tank deficits far greater than what your FoL can do. And let’s face it… if the raid wanted a big hot-casting machine they would put a geared resto druid in your role and have 6k hots ticking on multiple targets, not just one. BUT with an understanding that in our “downtime” or when tank damage has slowed down for a moment there really is no need to queue up monster HLs (unless you know the pain is coming down the rails and your tank is standing in the tracks) and then cancel-casting them or even worse burning mana on pure overhealing. Also with small tank defecits you can do some decent healing with FoL. During the majority of the fight though you will fall into HL spam and the length of your mana pool will be extended by squeaking FoLs between HL casts and relying on your other healers to be actively healing that target as well for those moments.

So there you have your best case scenario, FoL spam, with your most likely scenario, HL spam, but both of those require you to stand almost perfectly still to execute. Due to Blizz enjoying tossing fire at you frequently you will be on the move, a lot. How do we keep tanks up during this arduous task of NOT EVER USING YOUR S-KEY WHILE HEALING (more on that later) well they gave us the wonderful Holy Shock!! It is our most mana-consuming spell per healing which makes it BAD to use on CD if you care about not ooming. BUT it is our only spell that is instant which heals. This means people can die during cast times of FoLs and HLs, but you can use HS to keep someone up if they are on the verge of death, but that’s about it. Either moving, or your cast time is just not going to cut it.

Getting used to using all of these in their correct ways simply takes feel and practice, but once you get it down you end up being a monster. Just remember that HL is the only spell that allows you to continue to tank heal WHILE DPing. FoLs cut in half hit like wet noodles, while HLs cut in half hit like small vehicles, instead of cement trucks. Understand when you need a cement truck do NOT DP. Also try to use your wings or trinket during DP phases as it is about the only time when you can say you need a boost in oomph in your heals. If you need to boost your non-DP’d heals… then you need more gear to be in the instance anyway and should just leave. (or get better healers to heal with you.)
The most wonderful thing to ever happen to paladins- DP. With the inception of DP we became infinite mana machines until Blizz nerfd us (rightfully so) to where we are competitive with the spirit based healing classes and the shaman who has the mighty mighty water shield. I get asked more often than not about healing the most simple question- When do you use DP? My answer for this All the time. My first DP is when I get somewhere between 80-90% mana. Yes, 90% mana. I’d rather stay topped off at 100 for the first 45 seconds of a fight and have DP come back off of CD early to keep me up in mana than to chain spam HL and melt my own mana pool during a heavy tank healing phase. If I’m healing ANYTHING during DP I try to use a healing increasing item per DP to make the healing reduction slightly less. I also note before I hit it with the quick thought of “is this an awful time to plea?” If the answer is even remotely yes, do NOT hit that button, but use it at your next available moment. After that every time it comes off of CD you need to be finding a moment to use DP for as long as you can (you can always let it tick for a few seconds and cancel it so you keep your tanks alive). Currently I don’t have an addon to tell me it is off of CD, omniCC/Bartender4 aside. I’ve been in the market for one, considering PowerAuras.

Some posts are just THAT good.

So short, so sweet, so amazing. I don't even read this blog that much yet I have to share it with anyone who stumbles upon mine. Here it is.

Things seem to be getting better (or rather, I’m being optimistic again…)

I would like to tell myself that all the baddies are starting to learn how to play. I believe that we all keep getting better (I do, why isn’t everyone else?). Then again it is more likely that most of those I raid with do not actually get “better” but they learn the encounters we are working on. 4 weeks of the first 3 bosses of ICC may be boring for some… but let’s face it… most guilds didn’t even SEE yoggy (I’m not even talking about hardmodes.) I’m just talking from a “people get disinterested” point of view. A massive instance like Uld overwhelms many guilds from the standpoint that they have to keep killing the old bosses again and again, and rather with less time in Naxx I assume it would have done it as well. Granted with the new lockout extending feature you can keep your farm bosses down to save time and keep raid time on the new bosses (not to mention trash) where the tradeoff being that you don’t get the loot off of the easy bosses and trash that could have dropped had you decided to spend the 2 hours clearing them out.

We kill Saurfang last week for the first time on 25man (apparently disc priests help slow down the rate of him gaining power… it was our first week one of our 2 priests were there, and last night I went on my alt priest who I respecced to disc for the encounter) and this week it was a “clean” 1-shot. This inclines me to think that people have learned the encounters and they fail less… but then again Lady D and Marrow both saw nerfs, and Saurfang had been wiped on enough that the bulk of the raid had to learn sometime.

We get to Rotface (is that his name?) and really as the strats say, he’s basically grob on crack. Except the adds do a little different movements and we found the little adds basically untankable so the entire raid when they got little adds needed to pay attention and keep it near the OT. All in all though, I felt like people weren’t messing up as bad as they could have and seem to have gotten the hang of it fairly quickly. The mark of good raiders to me is not knowing the encounters through and through (though that definitely helps you know where damage coming from/to and how to beat an encounter) but instead should be a group of people who know their roles, their spells, how they work, why they work, and the best way to use them… then you come at a big ugly and if everyone does their “job” while remembering the basics of raiding the boss will die. That’s all the strat you technically need.

Basics of raiding: Tanks take damage, healers heal them. Bosses hit tanks, generally cleave, spit fire at the raid which the raid should avoid. Novas one-shot. Glittering areas should be stood in for buffs, but check your debuffs. If you are the only one in the raid to get a buff, you should probably move away and then check to see what it does. OTs pick up adds, they should mostly be killed by ranged as they can swap faster, but should be tanked next to the boss (unless they are AoEing) so the melee can destroy them faster too with random AoE (via sweepin strikes, cleave, heart strike, consecrate, divine storm, blade flurry, killing spree… it goes on).

Not much more to it than that, a smart raider learns the mechanics of fights they have been in before and know how to apply them to the future fights they encounter. They are the ones that never forget.

Anywhoo, a boy can dream right? I hope dearly they are all getting better because if we all keep getting better we’ll eventually get ahead of the ‘norm’ of what blizz tunes encounters to and we’ll dominate all the new reg content while taking a pass at hard modes!