twenty-five boxes

Coming out as a Paladin

2010-12-30T12:54:00.003-05:00

Well the burn in period is over, and I've leveled both my priest and paladin to 85, and having done a few dungeons and heroics on each, I see a world of difference.

My priest is mana constrained, I struggle with throughput, and I have a heart attack every time a pull doesn't go perfectly.

My paladin finishes most pulls with 80% of his mana, I have no trouble keeping the whole group topped off, and I have a lot of tools to smooth out bad pulls, like divine protection, salv, etc. It's really so much better right now as a holy paladin then as a holy or disc priest, at least for me.

This is all 5-man, of course, I could see how holy priests could tear up raids, but right now I just can't even bring myself to log onto the priest right now. So I think I'm a paladin, for now.

Heroics is hard, mkay?

2010-12-20T11:05:00.002-05:00

I hit 85 about a week ago, and I've run about 3 heroics successfully. Most of it is definitely a lack of gear on my part, which becomes somewhat of a circular problem. I have very few upgrades in normal dungeons, and I don't feel super comfortable running pugs for heroics. I could farm rep, but again, most of that happens in dungeons. Going back to zones for odd quests I've missed for extra rep is a possibility, but with 2 healing specs, soloing quests is a pain in the ass.

I did pick up a disc spec, and have noticed way better mana management techniques for healing 5-mans over holy. In fact, I always thought holy had more tools available, but really I find disc to be more versatile right now in a 5-mans, at least at my gear level. I actually am thinking of switching my holy spec to be my pvp spec. I'm all over the place right now.

So yeah, until some more tanks level to 85 in my guild (ahem, hopefully including a tank reading this right now), I think I'm going to avoid heroics, level my pally and maybe tank some crap, and just farm pvp points and tol barad rep. I'm not in a huge rush to get into raiding content, and for the first time in a few years, I'm not even sure I'd want to do it in a healing role right now. I got the prot pally to 83, and it's been pretty fun so far...

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

2010-12-14T10:52:00.006-05:00

Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Pick up on one and leave the other one behind
It's not often easy, and not often kind
Did you ever have to make up your mind?

Haven't been posting yet, because I've been busy leveling, duh!

Cata Impressions

So I am really enjoying cataclysm so far! The new zones are all really fresh- the phasing is a little awkward when group questing, but it does give the zones a more narrative feel than in past expansions. Love love love the Harrison Jones questchain in Uldum.
The dungeons themselves... so far I've been a little on the fence about them. When I do them with guild groups, they go great, but I've gotten into some sketchy PUGs with entitled tanks who seem to think that mana is some sort of healer myth. Actually in general I'm finding healing to be a little crazy right now.

Class selection at 85

So I was kind of on the fence about which of my toons I was going to level first. I ended up leveling the priest first because I was having a lot of fun playing holy at 80 and thought it would be pretty fun to level shadow too.
The unexpected thing for me at least, is that the leveling grind from 80 to 85 was really quick! On top of that, I have an incentive to level my alts, because the questing will contribute to guild xp. So, I think my plan now is to continue leveling my alts and then decide on my main. So here are my general thoughts on the classes so far.

Priest

I leveled shadow for the last two levels, but I did a fair bit of questing in my holy spec, mostly if I was waiting in the dungeon queue and didn't want to bother switching out. Most mobs were pretty squishy, and any spec where I was glyphed for Spirit Tap was pretty easy to level with. I ended up ditching my disc spec after the first dungeon- I had some bad luck with Atonement- I don't think it's practical for a 5-man. It might be good in a raiding environment, but overall I found the holy spec to be really fun and versatile.
At 85 though, I've only run 2 heroics, and I've had severe mana problems. I have to drink after every pull and I and up oom on several bossfights, even when I feel like I'm being pretty conservative with my spell selection. I'm not that enamored with the priest after all. I might try a non-smite disc build to see if the mana efficiency is a little better...

Shaman

So originally when I was picking a toon to level, I was comparing priest and shaman, and looking at all the shiny new toys priests were getting, while shaman seemed a little boring. Now at 85, as my priest, I find myself pretty much healing like I would on a shaman. Sure, I have all these other fancy buttons, but if I actually use any of them (looking at you, Holy Word: Sanctuary), I'll go oom in about 30 seconds and just sit there watching my party members die.
So I'm going to start leveling the shaman in parallel. It's pretty easy to level to 85, and it is all contributing to guild xp, so it's gravy.

Paladin

The dark horse in this race is my paladin- I had this tank alt on another server, and cause my guild there folded I decided to transfer him to BT and start leveling him just to get some mining/ore for jewelcrafting. I am actually still leveling prot, and I really like it! I also am going to look at a holy spec for him as well, but tanks are so in demand I doubt I'll get much use out of it.

I have time to choose, cause my guild isn't really going to start raiding for at least another two weeks.
And then you bet you'd better finally decide...

So, anyone have any initial impressions of healing in cataclysm?

Postponed

2010-09-27T10:37:00.003-04:00

Supposedly the rumors are that cata will now be delayed until early December. I'm a little disappointed cause I was getting pretty excited to start up again in mid-october and get ready for a November release.

So it's pretty frustrating to even look at talent calculators or patch notes since everything will probably be wildly different in two months... Already from my last post, one of the talents I mentioned (Trinity) has already been removed.

I'm probably going to move into a more read-only mode until November or so.

See y'all then!

First, Do Some Harm

2010-09-21T11:16:00.011-04:00

Gone are the days of the pacifist healer sitting in the back row patching up the dpsers doing the dirty work. Come Cataclysm, with the new mechanics, abilities, and talents showing up in beta, it's prety clear that Blizzard wants us healers to get down off our high horses and get our hands a little bloody. So healers? Let's get ready to rumble.

Pre-Cata

Prior to cataclysm, most healers really only did damage when they were super bored. A healer spending mana on a dps ability would be pretty much unthinkable on a progression encounter, much less talent points, with only a few exceptions.

Holy Paladins in Wrath got Judgements of the Pure, which, combined with Enlightened Judgements, allowed holydins to judge from a distance, and in fact, were encouraged to do so at least once every minute to optimize their healing.
Holy Priests have frequently found themselves using their Shadow Word: Death backlash to force a stuck Prayer of Mending to bounce to another raid member.
Holy Priests have Surge of Light, which prior to WOTLK could only proc a free smite, instead of a Flash Heal like it does today. This was generally regarded as a poor talent prior to being changed.

Other than those, most healers had no real incentive or reason to dps while filling a healing role. Even dead time was better spent regenning mana out of combat.

New Talents/Skills for Healing Classes in Cataclysm

In cataclysm, across the board, we're seeing dps talents showing up in previously healing exclusive trees.

Shaman
Resto shaman playing with a cataclysm talent calculator will find that it's nearly impossible to build a pve restoration build without being forced to take one of the new "hybrid" talents that encourage resto shaman to dps during periods of light healing.
- Focused Insight allows you to get a cheaper and more effective heal after any shock spell (this does not include Wind Shear).
- Telluric Currents gives you a portion of your mana back from casting Lightning Bolt relative to the amount of damage done. Interestingly enough, on beta, many shaman were able to get to spellpower levels that would actually cause lightning bolt to be a net gain in mana, although Blizz has since clarified that this is not the intended purpose and presumably the talent will be rebalanced as needed.
I'm not crazy about either of these mechanics. For Focused Insight, I feel that Shaman have many other ways to "charge up" their next heal, including Tidal Waves and the new Unleash Life ability. Telluric Currents confuses me, because we're constantly being told by Blizzard developers that we've had it too easy in the past and they want mana conservation to be an issue going forward. Even if they're cheap, I can't see how encouraging Resto Shaman to waste mana on lightning bolts is part of this overall strategy.
Priest
Disc priests have always had the schizophrenic Penance which contextually heals or damages based on who the spell's target is. Now Holy is getting a somewhat similar spell called Holy Word: Chastise that is an instant damage ability by default, but can convert into either Aspire, Serenity, or Sanctuary, based on the Chakra state that you are in. The mechanic sounds confusing, and potentially a nightmare for keybindings/macros, but the abilities themselves look really cool, so it's definitely something I'm looking forward to playing with. Beyond that, priests of both healing trees are getting a lot of talents that encourage smiting.
- In the second tier of the Disc tree, priests get a talent Evangelism which looks like a pure dps talent until you see it's dependent Archangel which restores mana and gives you a short healing boost. This definitely fits in with the "dps during dead time" model nicely, and gives you another nice mana regen and healing boost cooldown.
- The disc-only talent Atonement is probably one of my favorites of the new hybrid talents; you heal low health allies near you when you smite. Simple and kind of fun. Dovetails nicely with Evangelism.
- I'm not as excited about the Holy tree's Trinity because it is useless unless you have enough downtime to smite three times in a row, and your haste boost is only good for the next 12 seconds. You really need to time this effect right to make it useful, whereas Archangel is much more adaptive. Still, this talent is a prereq for the new Surge of Light, which most people will probably want.
Paladin
The aforementioned long range of Enlightened Judgements is now actually becoming baseline for all Paladins, which is kind of a nice treat. In addition, they get some new and somewhat confusing new dps/healing hybrid talents.
- Denounce looks basically like the old pre-wotlk Surge of Light. At 2 points it reduces the cost of exorcism by 75% at its base, and gives your holy shock the ability to proc fee exorcisms. Additionally, the free Exorcisms can crit, allowing you to proc other talents like Conviction for free.
- As I said before, the old Enlightened Judgements range became baseline, and the new one causes your judgements to heal yourself. Healing yourself is pretty boring, but it's not a bad filler talent, given that you have to judge at least once a minute.
I gotta be honest, a lot of these changes confuse me, because I've never really raid healed on my holy paladin. I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut.
Druid
Druids, most dramatically, actually could only cast restoration spells in tree form in the past. Now not only can they cast all their Balance spells in tree form, but they even get a bonus to Wrath while in Tree form. Additionally, there is a new talent that encourages dps.
- Fury of Stormrage makes Wrath FREE and allows Wrath to proc instant Starfires. While this seems like a strange mechanic for healing, any free spells are awesome. Not only does your mana regen continue as in out of combat, but I would assume that these free spells can still proc talents and abilities like Omen of Clarity. Anyway, this talent is a prereq for Malfurion's Gift, so I think all Resto druids will be picking this up anyways. Enjoy it you guys.

So as a whole, I'm intrigued by the hybrid aspect of these talents, and there are some of them that I think work really well without interfering in the primary role that healers signed up for. Obviously these will all be tweaked and edited and modified before cata goes live, but it's definitely something I'm keeping an eye on.

The Road to Cataclysm

2010-09-13T12:12:00.005-04:00

Mage on a shelf

I got my mage to 73 when my account lapsed, and I figured that was for the best. I have a lot of real life events that have kept me busy, and haven't had time for anything more than one daily dungeon a day, which wasn't really satisfying. I do really like the mage, and I hope to finish leveling her maybe sometime after cataclysm drops.

Waiting game

So just this morning, Boubouille from mmo-champion predicted that the cataclysm release date will be Nov 2. He's been pretty spot on about expansion and release dates in the past, so I'm going with this for now.

I figure that I'll probably start my sub up in late October, after the last of my trips, so I have maybe a week to mess around with talent specs on all my toons, and maybe do some of the pre-expansion content.

Planning

I still don't know who my main is going to be post-expansion. I've been loving the shaman, but the priest mechanics coming up in Cata look really fun. This is probably what I'll use that week pre-expansion to decide.

It's only really going to be a factor for the first month. I do plan to eventually level all my 80 toons (shaman, priest, pally, warlock, and maybe mage) to 85.

In the meantime

I've been pretty occupied with Starcraft II, which is a fun game too. A lot of my WoW friends are playing that now, mostly. I don't think I'm ever going to be that great at it though, so I've been pretty casual.

I've also been playing a ton of iPhone games, because I've been traveling so much, but again, nothing serious.

Reading

Vixsin from Life in Group 5 mentioned a new shaman blog resource called TotemSpot which seems like it will be the go-to source for shaman questions starting in Cata. Definitely looking forward to that.

Reincarnation (not improved)

2010-06-17T11:14:00.005-04:00

My life as a noob mage

So my cousin has been leveling on a different server, so I packed up some of my heirloom items on a middling toon and transfered over to try rolling a new mage.

I'm level 42 now, I've pretty much exclusively been leveling with the Dungeon Finder, and just some filler quests and profession stuff while I'm waiting for queues to pop. It's not as efficient as questing, but I just can't bring myself to kill coyotes in the badlands again.

I've found the mage super fun for the most part. I'm not sure either of my leveling specs are that efficient. I started with frost, and focused on aoe talents, thinking that I would be solo aoe farming more, but since I really haven't had long queue times in the LFD finder (Blackrock is crazy overpopulated, so I never wait more than like 5 mins), I haven't even been doing that much.

I basically Cone of Cold whenever its off cooldown no matter how many targets there are, and if there is only one target I frostbolt it, and if there is more than one target I Blizzard. If I pull aggro (which is likely with my half enchanted heirloom items), I frost nova the mobs, blink away, and pray my tank can pick up the slack. Ice barrier has saved me a few times.

When I hit 40 I had my transfer money so I bought my dual spec and got a fire build, but I don't know if I've found my groove with that spec yet. Most instances are just chain pulls of aoe, especially with pally tanks. I am hoping when I get dragon's breath I'll be able to aoe as much as my frost build, but right now I find that in between flamestrikes, I am just single targeting. I know I probably should be blizzarding there, but it seems strange, with my fire spec.

Can anyone recommend a good mage blog, particularly one with leveling theorycraft?

Cata talent preview

I also browsed the talent previews on mmo-champion. I thought the resto shaman ones were super boring, and I was a little perplexed by the priest "smite" talents showing up. For a second, I thought it would make holy leveling more fun, but someone on EJ pointed out that without the damage bonus of the masteries (that you only get in shadow spec), holy leveling will still be painfully inferior. So i guess it's for bored healers in instances to dish out a little damage when their tanks overgear the instance? Sounds kinda lame to me.

The only spec that interested me so far is the ele shaman tree. I do like that they're getting what looks like a flamestrike aoe, and there are some new mechanics coming there way that seem cool.

Zigi out.

Moving right along

2010-04-22T10:55:00.003-04:00

Last night our guild had a sit down and we decided it was time to stop raiding. Some people are going to move on to larger 25 man raiding guilds, but I think for the most part, I feel that our guild had reached a logical conclusion to the progression we started about a year ago.

I just haven't felt the drive to log on lately, and I know I wasn't the only one. Getting on for raids was feeling more and more like a chore; in the past few weeks, when other guild members had other engagements and raids were getting cancelled, I felt relieved, not irritated.

I do regret not downing the Lich King, but I am pretty proud of what our little scrappy guild was able to accomplish during its run.

So I'm paid out through July and I may still log on for pvp and such, but for the most part, I think I'm pretty much on an official WoW break until Cataclysm. Looking forward to it!

Cataclysm Class Preview: Shaman

2010-04-07T13:47:00.004-04:00

Saw these notes on MMO Champ today. Just going to break down the resto changes:

Healing Wave will be split into two direct heals, a larger nuke heal called "Greater Healing Wave", and a medium heal with the current name.
Not sure how I feel about this. I really am skeptical that they'll be able to make 3 levels of heals individually viable, but we'll see. With the larger health pools they've promised in Cataclysm, I can see how finer granularity could potentially be necessary
Unleash Weapon Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects (see below). A dual-wielding Enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both of their weapon enchants. Instant cast. 30-yard range. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable. Earthliving Weapon – Heals the target slightly and buffs the shaman's next healing spell by 20%.
Umm, cool ability on a short cooldown, gives us another instant heal
Healing Rain An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell that calls down rain in a selected area, healing all players within it. There is no limit to the number of players who can potentially be affected; however, there are diminishing returns when healing a large number of targets, much like the diminishing returns associated with AoE damage spells. This should give Restoration shaman another healing tool that improves their group-healing and heal-over-time capabilities. 2-second cast time. 30-yard range. 10-second duration. 10-second cooldown.
VERY NICE. Kind of like a wild growth/tranquility spell. As the only heal with no limit of targets Could be crazy OP in 25 man situations. Gotta wait on numbers to see this one
Spiritwalker's Grace When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.
A really nice buff that will give us some great mobility on a cooldown.
Dispeling Shaman will be able to remove magic defensively and offensively, and remove curses. Cleansing totem will be removed from the game.
I'm a little disappointed with the dispel changes, but they are so closely tied to encounter mechanics, we'll have to see how those look
Spirit Link The idea is that you will be able to link targets together so they share damage. When we had previously tried to implement Spirit Link, it was hard to balance and a little confusing. However, we really liked the concept -- and so did players -- so we are trying to bring it back.
This could be very interesting, but I do remember when they tried it at 70 and couldn't get it to balance right
Mastery Our passive talent tree bonuses are Healing, Meditation, and Deep Healing (increased healing to players at low health).
No surprises here- I think these are going to be the boilerplate masteries for all healers

Looks like some really exciting changes coming up for Shaman. It looks like devs are addressing our issues with mobility and group healing, and have some good ideas for new mechanics to make cataclysm interesting. Can't wait to hear more!

First dance with the Lich King!

2010-03-31T08:46:00.005-04:00

So, just yesterday I was fretting on another shaman blog that I feared we had hit a wall with Sindragosa. I don't know if it was the new 10% ICC buff, or just improved raid coordination, but we got her down in just 3 tries last night!

We got to take a peek at the Lich King encounter, which incorporates some unique encounter mechanics, feels dynamic and fun, and has an epic feel to it. I like that his fight seems to incorporate little elements of other WOTLK fights: his Necrotic Plague ability is kind of similar to Rotface's Mutated Infection; healing up a raid after an Infest is similar to healing a target of Lord Jaraxxus's Incinerate Flesh (In fact, I'm thinking of trying to fix up my broken GridStatusRaidDebuff so I can actually make sure the raid is getting Infest taken off).

We got in about 10 attempts last night, and were comfortably getting him into phase 2. Though we're not going to have any more raids this week due to the Easter break, I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get a hang of those Defiles down, and I'm hoping to see Phase 3 next time I'm in there.

From a resto shaman perspective, I found the healing intense. It's not constant AOE like BQL or Sindragosa, but instead it's sudden bursts of intense raid healing. Maybe it's because it was my first night on the encounter, and maybe I was a little paranoid, and overhealing a bit, but I found myself burning through mana like crazy. I am gonna try to set up my shaman_hep parse for my log to just look at the LK encounter, but as it's such an intense fight, and so much longer than the other ICC encounters, I am thinking I'm going to have to rethink my stat weights and trinket choices for that fight, and I may go back to the mana restore meta gem.

So excited to finally get a crack at this guy!

Patch 3.3.3 for the tunnel-visioned Shaman

2010-03-22T10:40:00.003-04:00

By all accounts, patch 3.3.3 drops tomorrow. As a shaman, what do you need to know about? Not much!

Quote from Zarhym

PTR Patch 3.3.3 Notes - 03.15.10
Shaman

Flame Shock: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes and is affected by spell haste.
Elemental Oath: This ability is now always on as a passive aura.
Unleashed Rage: This ability is now always on as a passive aura.
Shaman Tier-10 4-Piece Elemental set Bonus: This bonus has been slightly adjusted to account for the fact that haste now modifies Flame Shock's periodic damage ticks. The bonus now makes the shaman's Lava Burst cause Flame Shock to tick at least two additional times before expiring.

(Source)

Really nothing much going on for resto shaman, but some interesting changes for ele. The flame shock buff is nice, and considering that when I play ele I have a ton of extra haste from the resto pieces I can't replace, I'll get a ton of use out of it I'm sure. I'm still not crazy about the ele t10 set, and considering it's my second spec, I'll probably never see it anyway.

Other interesting notes? Daily battlegrounds being revamped, a hidden mechanic in wintergrasp that will handicap factions that win wintergrasp more than 3 times in a row. But as a resto shaman, the note that probably I found the most interesting?

Quote from Zarhym

Dungeons and Raids

Blood-Queen Lana'thel: Pact of the Darkfallen now applies damage twice as often, but for half the damage. This change will make the removal of the spell a bit more responsive.

(Source)

NOM NOM NOM, MOAR MANA FROM WATER SHIELD!

Is mp5 irrelevant on progression fights?

2010-03-19T11:16:00.005-04:00

I've run into some very strange gearing issues lately. The main problem for me is that the value of mp5 fluctuates wildly from fight to fight. The main reason is that for most of the progression fights, there is either so much raid damage that our Water Shield makes gearing for mp5 on these fights completely inefficient (Putricide, Blood Queen, Sindragosa), or there are mechanics that make mp5 irrelevant (Valithria).

To give you an idea, Water Shield procs every 2 seconds on Blood Queen, which combined with Improved Water Shield gave me about 540 mp5. On Sindragosa, Frost Aura causes Water Shield to proc every 3 seconds, and combined with the forced throttling of Unchained Magic, I never need my mana tide on either of these fights unless I die unexpectedly. Some shaman will carry multiple sets for different fights, and for these fights would opt out of mp5 entirely; I'm too lazy to gem and balance multiple sets myself, but I have to figure that if I'm going to min-max for any fight, it should be the hard progression fights, right?

In my combat log parse last night, my Insightful Earthsiege Diamond got a distressingly low HEP value of about 40 HEP. While most shaman agree that The Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond is the best choice when you have double solace, I'm thinking of switching to this even though I don't even have those. In addition to gaining the crit heal effect, I will be gaining a little haste by replacing the one mp5 gem I have to meet my blue gem requirement with a yellow haste gem.

So I think I'm going to start moving away from mp5 entirely, starting with my meta gem, and then replacing my boot enchant with Tuskarr's Vitality (which I should have done a long time ago). I'm hoping it's not going to be super painful when my guild gets to heroic modes, for fights that won't have these contstant damage mechanics, but I guess we'll see.

The Broken Vote to Kick system

2010-03-09T11:07:00.005-05:00

The Dungeon Finder system introduced in 3.3.0 was in many ways a revitalization of the casual dungeon system, and allowed players with only half an hour to play each day an effective way to get a measurable amount of progress toward new loot every day.

However, one aspect of it that is deeply flawed is the Vote to Kick system. I was really excited when I read a blue post a few weeks ago saying:

Quote from Zarhym

It's not mentioned in the notes, but the Vote Kick option no longer has a 15-minute cooldown. Enjoy. :) (Source)

However, last night we got into Occulus, and 2 pulls into the dungeon, our rogue happily announces that he has to go afk to eat dinner. We immediately attempt to kick him and get the frustrating message "You cannot kick this player for another 14 minutes". I don't know if the change got reverted, or if this was a bug, but we had to go through the already annoying trash and early bosses of the Occulus with only 4 players, and then when the timer was about to run out, our rogue returns and says "Ok ready!". Naturally, because we're not idiots, we still just waited for the timer to run out and then kicked him anyway, but it still was an irritating reminder that there are still people in this game who know that it is possible to get something for doing nothing.

I have had so many conflicting experiences with the Vote to Kick system that I really don't know what to expect from it at any given time. At present though, it is not a reliable way to keep lazy players from leeching effort from regular players just trying to have fun and playing the game as it is intended. In that regards, it is very similar to the well-intentioned, but ultimately useless "report player AFK" option in battlegrounds. I have to say that I've never seen this deter any afkers from happily going about

The largely unnecessary strategy guide for the Rotting Frost Giant!

2010-02-25T13:15:00.009-05:00

I was jealous of Kae's amazing illustrated strategy guides and wanted to post something of my own, but I forgot that:

I have no artistic talent and
All raiding content that I have seen has been covered to death by other, better blogs and strategy forums

With those 2 limitations in mind, I present to you my entirely unnecessary strategy guide for the optional weekly boss in ICC, the Rotting Frost Giant!

Background

There are 4 randomly generated weekly raids for Icecrown Citadel. Somewhere in the instance, you will find one of these questgivers. In my opinion, the easiest one is the quest "Securing the Ramparts", which asks you to slay an optional boss in the area before the Gunship battle.

Fight Mechanics and positioning

The Rotting Frost Giant has 3 abilities you need to know about.

The first is a Stomp ability that hits everyone for about 12k damage, and throws you up in the air. This will interrupt casting and generally just sucks. Not anything you can do to avoid this damage so keep everyone topped off.

The second is a randomly targeted Arctic Breath ability which will stun and damage all targets in a cone, exactly like Icehowl from TOC. To avoid this, the raid should be grouped in a circle around the boss. This will do about 15k dmg over 5 seconds. This is why it's important to keep everyone topped off, as a combination stomp, breath will nearly kill clothies. It is also important to distribute healers so that no more than one healer gets stunned at a time.

Here is what our positioning looked like for a 10 man raid.

The last, and most complicated ability, is the Death Plague. This will affect a randomly targeted raid member. It lasts for 15 seconds and does a minimal amount of damage and cannot be dispelled. After 15 seconds, it will explode, doing 8k damage to you and all other raid members within 8 yards. All members hit will become infected with new copies of the Death Plague, and the person who just had it receives a debuff called "Recently Infected" which prevents them from receiving the Death Plague for another 30 seconds.

To combat this mechanic, we used a "Hot Potato" strategy. First, dps the boss as normal until someone becomes infected:

The infected person would find someone next to them that does not have the recently infected debuff and hug them until the disease expires. Make sure you are only infecting one other person (this is why you spread out 8 yards apart initially).

After passing the disease, go back to your original positioning, and keep passing the disease every 15 seconds to new people.

That disease is then passed onto a third person, with the original infectee's immunity about to wear off:

Keep passing it around the circle among your range and healers in this fashion. Eventually there will be 2 copies of the disease going around, and this should be managed in the same fashion. It may be a little tricky distributing the buffs accordingly, but you eventually want the passing circle to look like this:

You should not need to manage more than 2 copies of the disease in 10 man mode.

Rewards

The Rotting Frost Giant drops no loot, but he does reward 250 rep with the Ashen Verdict, and turning in the weekly quest will get you a Sack of Frosty Treasures which has 5 Emblems of Frost, some gold, and a chance at a 264 BOE epic.

Alternate Strategies

After I made these slides, I read online that there is a simpler, although probably unintended strategy. You can pair up, and when someone gets infected, they will pass it to their partner after 15 seconds, and then if you stay up, supposedly the partner will pass it back to the original infectee, and the debuff will simply go away (the aoe damage will still occur). I have not tried this strategy, but if it is true, it is much simpler, and trivializes this encounter. Maybe I'll try it next week...

First night with T10-4

2010-02-24T10:54:00.004-05:00

I spent my first night with T10's 4 piece set bonus last night, and I think it was a little bit of a disappointment. The hot accounted for about 3% of my effective healing for the night, which is way less than in some of the parses I'd seen. I think that it's possible that the fights I happened to be healing for last night were generally not chain heal friendly, and I was also mostly tank healing as the other healer was a druid.

I will be more excited to see my stats from tomorrow, when we will be doing Blood Queen, the fight that was built expressly for Chain Heal spam.

Still, I think I probably will be building 2 sets, one for Chain Heal centric fights, and one for Tank healing fights. I have generally resisted building multiple healing sets in the past, due to bag space, and general laziness, but I think the set bonuses and relic effects have become so specific these days that it may still be necessary.

Back to the Chain of Healing Bloggers

2010-02-08T17:13:00.003-05:00

Jessabelle is revisiting the meme that riveted the healing blog world, and asking past participants to revisit their answers with a few questions, to see how our opinions of our class have changed, both with experience, and with the content that has been released since then.

My original answers are here, for reference.

1. Reread your original answers to the questions. With the benefit of hindsight, score your own work in terms of its cringeworthiness.

Hmm, I think when I look back on past-Zigi, I think "geez, you and Chain Heal should get a room already". Sure it's a great spell still, and probably still class-defining, but it was also made nearly unusable in many of the fights of the first wing of ICC. Spreading out on fights like Saurfang meant that your CH would often hit only one target, making it useless. In general, you're going to be spread out on other fights like Blood Princes, Failboat, and Marrowgar too. It's useless on Valithria of course, who isn't in your raid so won't get hit by it. It's still amazing on fights like Festergut and Blood Queen, but it certainly has struck out on a lot of ICC fights for me. This is especially painful as my totem and glyph are just wasted on these fights by association, but I'm too cheap to replace them for just those fights.

2. Has your class's healing improved in the area you identified as its weakest?
I identified mana usage as the biggest weakness, and when we were just beginning TOC I was living on my mana tide and potions. My gear has gotten a lot better since then, and there is a lot more raid damage (HELLOOO Blood Queen) giving me nearly limitless mana from my water shield.

What I would identify as our biggest weakness now is our lack of mobile healing. We have one spell to cast while moving (and don't get me wrong, I want to have Riptide's babies\), so when Riptide is on cooldown and you need to run off a nasty debuff, then you're kinda not doing anything for 6 seconds, eh?

3. Have you changed your "least favoured class to heal with"?
I selfishly said holy priests, because they don't offer any buffs for me personally that a disc priest doesn't provide. I like holy priests a lot more since a lot of them now take the Glyph of Guardian Spirit, which is an amazing talent. I have set foot in a few more 25 man raids, and I do realize now that it is a headache to have more than one disc priest, as they're constantly weakened-soul-blocking each other, without careful coordination.

4. Did you read the entries from others in the webring, especially your class?
I thought they were really informative. I didn't know a lot about druid healers, to be honest, and the thoughtfulness and complexitiy of their decision making processes for raid healing go into way more depth than resto shamans do.

As for my class, Resto Shammies had the lowest participation out of all the healing classes :(, which is unsurprising as resto shammies are the lowest represented healing class on the armory. I like the perspective of the other resto shammies, although most of them are 25 man healers, for which I'm not there. My favorite was probably Chayah, who if you're a shammy you're probably already familiar with from their amazing ZAP! spreadsheet.

5. If Yes to #4, did you learn anything that made you a better healer?
Like I mentioned, Chayah has an interesting perspective. Maybe it's cause of his dps background, but I liked his idea that mana at the end of a fight is useless. I don't really switch up my gear from fight to fight, but recently I have considered building different sets for different fights.

6. What tools/resources or information do you think you would need to improve as a healer and how could that help the community at large?
I'm going to echo Miss, and mention the lack of resto shammy healing blogs. I'd like to give a shout out to Rul, who I've recently added to my blogroll, who not only has great shaman healing ideas, but ALSO is in a 10-man strict guild, adding a little extra flavor.

7. What did you identify as your worst habit as a healer? Have you improved in this area?
I complained that I probably refreshed Riptide too early, but now with my Tier 10 2-piece set bonus, that's a FEATURE, not a BUG!

8. What did you list as your favorite healing spell and your least used healing spell for your class? Are these answers still true? If they have changed, what caused the change (i.e. patch fix, different healing environment, etc)?
Hmm, I did say Chain Heal back then, but like I said earlier, that has become much more situational in ICC. I gotta say with the new nummy set bonus, it's Riptide hands down. I've never been a fan of 6 second cooldowns; in fact I think I really stopped playing my Holy Priest over one, but with Riptide, it makes sense to me, somehow. Just a juicy spell with all sorts of awesome things that happen after you cast it.

To 4-piece or not to 4-piece?

2010-02-02T10:16:00.007-05:00

It's decision time again, peoples. Back when I made my initial pull list, We were working on Saurfang, and I was considering the first 4 ICC bosses and thinking how underused Chain Heal was. At the time, I couldn't see the value in saving up 160 emblems on top of my 2 piece set bonus to complete the 4 piece set bonus, when I didn't feel like I was even casting Chain Heal that much.

Times have changed. 2 Wings later, we've seen fights like Festergut, Putricide, Blood Princes, and Blood Queen, which featured massive raid damage and pushed aoe healing demands to the limit. Also, early reports for HEP values for the 4 piece set bonus are showing up, and they are quite positive. One report puts it as high as 800 HEP!

I also finally had a full night just healing, so I had a log I felt comfortable passing through my shaman_hep for updated calculations. The summary is here, but the main takeaway is that I have HEP estimations for my trinkets now. My Ephemeral Snowflake clocked in at around 143 HEP for the night and the Sliver of Pure Ice clocked in at around 211 HEP. Their theoretical maximum HEP values are around 276 and 242, respectively, which may mean that I'm just not using the "Use:" effect on the Snowflake very wisely, and I'm using the Sliver's Use effect fairly well.

In either case I've decided to weigh the 4 piece set bonus at something like 400 HEP, until I hear some more concrete numbers. This still offsets the stat bonus of the non-set emblem purchases, so it definitely shifts up my pull list a lot. I won't actually be purchasing anything until I have enough emblems for both the chest and gloves, so I can go directly from tier 9.2 to tier 10.4, so if I find out soon that the numbers are not quite as good, I can change my plan accordingly. Here goes:

>

Updated Emblem of Frost Pull List
Best Upgrade	HEP	Cost	HEP Upgrade per Badge	Current	HEP

Frost Witch's Handguards	541.4	60	3.332	Thrall's Handguards of Triumph	341.4
Frost Witch's Tunic	785.7	95	2.98	Thrall's Tunic of Conquest	502
Waistband of Despair	491.8	60	2.89	Darkspear Ritual Binding	318
Earthsoul Boots	512.1	115	1.818	Sabatons of Tortured Space	302.9
Drape of the Violet Tower	289.7	50	1.791	Shawl of the Caretaker	200.2
Purified Lunar Dust	215.2	60	1.95	Ephemeral Snowflake	143.5
Lightning-Infused Leggings	679.3	184	.0922	Leggings of Concealed Hatred	509.5
Totem of Surging Seas	255	30	.7	Totem of Calming Tides	234

The bolded item costs means that I am factoring in part of a set bonus upgrade. The italicized item cost mean that they are primordial saronite costs, and can be bought with alts or money.

Happy hunting, Shaman.

I CAN HAZ DATAZ?

2010-01-27T11:58:00.005-05:00

So I was going through my blog feeds, and I was sad to see that Olokoth's old blog that dealt with data mined from the armory was dead. I did some googling and found a new blog, that does the same thing, and quite well. I'm kind of totally obsessed.

Their methodology is basically that they have a script that goes through all level 80 characters on the armory, and looks at their spec, and then counts them. The data is then broken down, and you can get all sorts of neat view on the data, broken down by class, race, spec, etc.

They acknowledge that their methodology is somewhat flawed in that:

They only look at active spec.
They don't distinguish between 2 different types of the same spec (feral kitty is counted the same as feral bear).
There's no filter for completely inactive level 80 toons.
There's no attempt to separate PvP data from PvE

Still, it's a pretty fun look at the data. Shaman are one of the lowest represented class, although Resto is by far the most popular spec. Elemental is more popular than Enhancement, which surprises me for some reason.

I especially like some of the Shaman specific data. I always wondered how many people were taking things like Improved Reincarnation. I guess now we know: 13%.

Updating Solarian Macros on Deathwhisper for the Lazy Shaman?

2010-01-20T16:40:00.004-05:00

So back in my day when we had to walk up the hills in outlands both ways to get to school or something there was a boss in Tempest Keep called High Astromancer Solarian. During one of her phases, the only unavoidable damage came from a randomly targeted arcane missles. Healers that were assigned to that damage would target her and use a macro like

/cast [help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead] Lesser Healing Wave

Now, Lady Deathwhisper is not a hard healing fight, and the majority of damage probably comes from the empowered adds and the Death and Decay. Still, I think tonight when my guild does her, I'm going to try using a macro like the Solarian macro to heal the random damage (when there's no other major death and decay or add damage to heal). I think I'm going to try:

/castsequence [help,nodead][target=targettarget,help,nodead] Riptide, Lesser Healing Wave, Lesser Healing Wave

So I don't think it's that big a deal actually (and I'll probably have to insert some filler heals to get over the riptide cooldown), but that fight is so boring to heal in the first phase I feel like tweaking my macro mid fight may give me something to do tonight ;). I'll let you know how it works out.

Sticking to the plan?

2010-01-19T14:51:00.003-05:00

So I've been pretty much going along with the planned pull list I laid out about a month ago. I got my shoulders first, which were a solid upgrade, are nearly best in slot for the content I do, and look awesome. The next piece according to my plan was the helm. The thing is, 95 emblems is a lot. A lot a lot. I've been on vacation so I haven't gotten my weekly and dailies in as much as I'd like. So I'm only at like 70 emblems now, and last night, and the Ice-Reinforced Vrykul Helm drops! Clear upgrade, and great itemization, but it leaves me in a bit of a quandary...

I really was hoping to get the helm, so I could run with 2 pieces of tier 9 and 2 pieces of tier 10. The T9-2 and T10-2 set bonuses have great synergy, and the helm and gloves are the best pieces, stat-wise, if you're only going to pick 2 pieces; the legs and gloves have horrible stats for a resto shaman, and the chest is nice, but the cloth non-tier emblem chest is MUCH better.

So do I:

Stick with the plan?
I'll just keep this helm as an intermediate until I get 25 more emblems or so?

Change up the plan?
The only other tier piece I could get is the chest really, which would break my t9 set bonus. This is something I'd have to do eventually I guess, although a lot of shaman on EJ are really hanging onto that set bonus.

Wait?
Do I just hold off on acquiring 2 pieces of tier, and use my frost emblems in other slots that are sure-things? This would be the belt, and cloak.

Still haven't decided, but I gotta make a decision this week I guess... I guess I shouldn't complain- upgrades are always a good thing ;)

Zigi's Law #2

2010-01-05T13:44:00.001-05:00

Still on vacation, so I haven't been playing much, but I did get on a little to show my ex-WoW player cousins the new dungeons and gear, and I came up with this axiom.

The shaman T10 deer shoulder will never have the visual proc when someone is watching your screen and you're talking about how cool they are. As soon as they look away, the shoulders will proc like crazy.

So yeah my cousins think I'm mental now. Thanks blizz.

Is this melee trinket Best-In-Slot for my resto shaman?

2009-12-23T13:39:00.006-05:00

Two posts on ElitistJerks recently about the Herkuml War Token made me do a doubletake. Because of the 153 passive haste rating on the trinket (despite the completely wasted attack power proc), this trinket is still a really good throughput trinket for a resto shaman-- due to our voracious hunger for haste. In fact, a quick glance at my lootrank would actually indicate that for the content I am doing (non-25 man), this trinket is actually Best-in-slot for my HEP calculations! (Note that lootrank will show Muradin's Spyglass higher because it can't distinguish between healing and dmg procs). Is this correct? Should I really be spending Emblems of Frost on a melee trinket instead of a healing one? Perhaps.

Up until patch 3.1, melee and casting haste ratings were completely different. When they merged them at first, it seemed like a nice way to simplify stats. However, .2 patches later, I think we are seeing that this stat is scaling so differently for melee and casters that we are seeing odd phenomena like this trinket. Consider that for a melee cast (combat rogue) for example, haste is maybe 4th or 5th in their stat priorities. For a caster, including both my resto and elemental specs, haste is far and away the best stat I can stack, and only reaches diminishing returns for a resto shaman at ludicrously high numbers.

It's still very early into Icecrown Citadel- so far, the devs have not made mana regen a priority stat for healers like they had claimed to. Perhaps later wings will prove more challenging, mana management wise. For now though, mana regen trinkets like the Purified Lunar Dust are just going to pale in comparison to throughput trinkets for cutting-edge content.

So which troll shaman has two thumbs and may be sporting a melee trinket in a few weeks? This guy.

From 70 to Icecrown in 2 weeks!

2009-12-22T11:08:00.000-05:00

Since I knew I'd have some time on my hands during the Christmas holiday, I decided to pull out my old 70 priest and level her, since she hadn't seen any action since Black Temple. I was also really interested on how the gearing up process would go with all the changes in 3.3.

Fortunately, between the new LFG system, changes to questing, and the newly available gear, I found I was able to get my priest ready to heal Icecrown Citadel in just 2 weeks!

Leveling through the new LFG system

I leveled with a Shadow spec (for soloing) and a Disc off spec to heal some dungeons, and my initial thoughts on the new LFG system were very positive. From 70-80 I ran each dungeon once, with VH 2-3 times. During this time I was only in 1 pug that didn't finish the instance and probably only had a total of about 4 wipes.

I also found that the new quest/map system was really amazing in zones that I didn't know very well, such as Sholozar Basin. It replaced the need for extra mods like TourGuide or Carbonite.

Overall, leveling from 70 to 80 took about a week.

Gearing up a fresh 80

Once I hit 80, I decided to concentrate completely on Disc (I queued as both but, unsurprisingly, have never been selected for dps). After 3 days and about 40 heroics later, I had amassed full iLvl 200 gear with a few 245 pieces from triumphs: the Talisman of Resurgence and the Band of the Invoker.

Hitting the new 3.3 content

Once I had at least 200s in every slot, I felt comfortable running the regular version of the Icecrown 5-mans.

After running them all once, I'd picked up a few pieces of 219 gear. Since I still didn't feel completely ready to dive into the heroic versions, I just kept queuing for these 3 and continuing to pick up the free 219s, and noticed that after another day or two of this I was finding it hard to OOM. The only way I could do it was spamming Holy Nova even on packs of 1-2 mobs. When healing regularly, I never even had to drink between my Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend cooldowns, so I decided it was finally time to start into the heroic versions. Besides 1 failed PoS run, I've found them to be pretty smooth.

Ready to raid!

Overall it's been a really good experience, the new emblem system mixed with the new LFG system makes it very easy to get into full 232/245 gear and ready for Icecrown Citadel in a matter of a few weeks. Compared to the BC days where hitting 70 during Black Temple meant you were about 9 Karazhan runs away from doing anything higher than SSC/TK, I have to congratulate Blizzard on catering to the alts of people who love the game and know how to play but don't have time to raid off nights to gear up.

Updated Emblem of Frost Pull List

2009-12-18T12:06:00.009-05:00

So yesterday I explained why I'm only going for 2 pieces of T10 at this time, and that I generally value the bonus around 150 HEP.

Looking at the actual itemization, I'm going to go for the shoulders and the head. Basically, the handguards and the legguards, having 0 haste on them, are actually overall downgrades for me from my current gear. The chest is a nice upgrade, but not nearly as nice as the cloth chestpiece purchasable from Emblem of Frost as well.

So I'm going to plug in the 2 pieces of tier that I want to buy, plus the craftable leatherworking patterns (Frozen Saronite can be bought for 23 Emblems of Frost each), and update the pull list I made about a week ago. In the meantime I've run new HEP numbers based on a night of ICC healing. You can see the new rankings here.
The tier pieces are augmented by half of the projected HEP bonus from the set, so 62 each. In addition, because the trinket and the totem are so hard to model, and I'm not really that excited about either, I'm probably going to hold off on even attempting to acquire them until I see some real numbers on them. I've also left on the non Emblem gear that is available in Lower Spire before the next content expansion (which is only in like 3 weeks, so it's not really that long).

>

Updated Emblem of Frost Pull List
Best Upgrade	HEP	Acquired by?	Cost	HEP per Badge	Current	HEP

Frost Witch's Spaulders	123.3	Emblem of Frost	60	1.067666667	Pauldrons of the Spirit Walker	59.24
Frost Witch's Headpiece	142.18	Emblem of Frost	95	0.758315789	Helm of the Spirit Shock	70.14
Waistband of Despair	70.31	Emblem of Frost	60	0.391166667	Darkspear Ritual Binding	46.84
Drape of the Violet Tower	42.42	Emblem of Frost	50	0.2622	Shawl of the Caretaker	29.31
Meteor Chaser's Raiment	96.12	Emblem of Frost	95	0.259052632	Thrall's Tunic of Conquest	71.51
Earthsoul Boots	72.99	Leatherworking	115	0.250956522	Sabatons of Tortured Space	44.13
Blizzard Keeper's Mitts	70.01	Emblem of Frost	60	0.242833333	Thrall's Handguards of Triumph	55.44
Lightning-Infused Leggings	96.64	Leatherworking	184	0.121467391	Leggings of Concealed Hatred	74.29
Purified Lunar Dust		Emblem of Frost	60	N/A
Totem of Surging Seas		Emblem of Frost	30	N/A	Totem of Calming Tides
Hammer of Purified Flame	127.23	ICC5 Drop/Quest
Ashen Band of Endless Wisdom	51.21	Rep			Ashen Band of Wisdom	41.13
Pride of the Kor'kron	48.09	TOGC10			Pulsing Spellshield	43.01
Soulcleave Pendant	45.68	10N Drop			Arcane Loops of Anger	36.31
Coldwraith Bracers	44.22	Marrowgar-10N Drop			Cuffs of the Shadow Ascendant	29.29
Signet of Putrefaction	41.13	Marrowgar-10N Drop			Band of the Invoker	34.7
Sliver of Pure Ice		Marrowgar-10N Drop

So that's why I'm getting the pretty deer shoulders first. MATHS MADE ME!

[Update: Thanks, Gritz! Yeah I meant T10, and I messed up on my spreadsheet and used an old HEP value I had from older haste valuations, of 125 for the HEP bonus.]

How good are the T10 Shaman Boni?

2009-12-17T08:52:00.008-05:00

Uhh, it's a word, right? Anyway.

2-piece set bonus

According to my log parser, Riptide accounts for 23% of my in-combat casts. This makes sense because my normal rotation is something like RT-LHW-LHW-CH, and with the Glyph I try to keep Riptide rolling on 3 separate targets if the fight mechanics allow it. The Shaman T10 2 piece set bonus grants 20% haste on your next spell cast immediately after a riptide. At level 80 1% of haste is 32.79 haste rating so 20% haste is about 655.8 haste rating.

Unfortunately, as I'm already sitting on 995 passive haste rating, that haste boost would actually push me over the GCD/LHW haste cap of 1639.5. It's not a total waste, but in my normal rotation it would lower the value of this set bonus to 644.5, and this value will get worse and worse as my gear gets better. So I'll stick with the value of 655.8, and assume that I'm going to be switching to something like RT-HW-LHW-CH. Assuming I can keep a pretty steady rotation of this, the rough theorycraft would be that this haste bonus affects a quarter of my spells, but loses a little utility because it's not really controllable, and due to the riptide cooldown, I may not have the haste proc up during a burst when I really need it.

For the purpose of future loot rankings, I'm going to say the T10 2 piece set bonus is worth about the equivalent of 100 haste to me, which probably stacks up to about 150 HEP.

4-piece set bonus

The Shaman T10 4 piece set bonus, as it is basically an uncontrollable hot, which we already have one of, and looking at the 251 T10 items there are much better upgrades from other sources for a few of the slots. I can't really think of an effective way to model it, but I am hoping it is something stassart will model and get HEP calculations on. I suspect it will account for a lot of overhealing.

Until then, I'm pretty much going to ignore it for the purpose of loot ranking, as 2 of the 251 t10 items are downgrades for me right now. I'll probably revisit it when the next iLvl of T10 items become available, or when some number crunchers on EJ find out that it's actually awesome or something.

Results

Anyway, I'm up to I think 35 Emblems of Frost on my shaman now, so I'm probably going to revisit my planned pull list with some updated HEP stats based on these calculations, and the availability of other gear. Stay tuned!

Patch 3.3 after 1 week

2009-12-15T10:24:00.010-05:00

Here's a big bag of my impressions of patch 3.3 after the first week.

Shaman changes

Not many changes for Resto, but the hot sexiness for Elemental came in the form of Fire Nova. Even when I'm healing instances, I find myself watching this cooldown and hitting it on big trash packs if no one is really in need of a heal. LOTS of fun. It's like when I spam Holy Nova for easy 5 mans on my priest. I can see it being a headache to keep up on big aoe raid pulls, as you actually have to get right into the cleave zone and drop a fire totem to get to use it, but so far I find it to be a really nice addition to the shaman arsenal. I haven't had time to tweak my elemental gear/spec (and I should, because I end up 5-manning as dps a lot), but I think my new spec may include the talent and glyph for fire nova, just because it's fun.

LFM/Random

So I think everyone is probably in agreement that the darling of patch 3.3 is not actually Icecrown Citadel, but the entirely revamped cross-realm LFG system. It is really refreshing to be able to sit down at your computer, and within 5 minutes of logging in and checking auctions, you're suddenly good to go for exactly the instance you need, or the random heroic, with pretty much no hassle.

Nobody talks! You just zone in and start thwacking bosses and it's all good. Once or twice on the new instances I've stopped the tank and made sure that they knew a boss strat before charging in all crazy-like, but for the most part, silence is golden. And that's actually fine.

People are surprisingly nice! I hope this lasts. The other nice our tank accidentally hit need on a boe green, and then fell over himself apologizing and made me take it.

The one or two bad apples don't ruin it. I've had the odd unenchanted, ungemmed ret pally pulling 400 dps and generally being a noob, but the Luck of the Draw buff goes a ways in letting the other people compensate for it. When you're well geared guildie warlock is raking down 6k dps on trash packs, you can ignore the non-dpsing pally noob.

Versatility is key! After the first day of waiting around for a while for a LFM random, a guildie switched his fury warrior to fury/prot so he could get in pugs faster, and discovered that he LOVED tanking. Similarly, I was surprised to find that I'm getting into a surprising number of groups as dps when i select heal/dps on my shaman, and given the recent ele changes, I'm having a blast!

New Instances

The new 5-mans are really well done! They are visually striking, as is all of icecrown citadel. They're actually kind of challenging; you can't just faceroll and expect to collect loot. Like I said last time, I still find that first boss of Halls of Reflection to be a little too punishing as a healer who can't dispel magic, but it's nice to have a challenging 5-man for a change!

Loot

A new instance always brings new casually and hardcorely acquireable loot and this was no exception.

4 of my guildies already have Quel'Delar, or some derivative of it. I'll get there eventually...

I was surprised to see people are already selling Primordial Saronite, some for as low as 3500 gold!

So some people on my server farmed trash in ICC for the Ashen Verdict Rings and supposedly some of them already have the improved versions. It's pretty easy to acquire; Marrowgar's trash can be AOE'd down really easily. Maybe if I get some free time... we'll see.

Raiding

Only got one real night of progression raiding in, though I did get to go back and kill Maly on both my shaman and priest for emblems. On the one night we did in ICC, we got Marrowgar down after a little struggling on positioning issues and dps. Though our raid probably slightly undergeared for ICC, I think we'll be fine. We got in about 2 attempts on Deathwhisper, but then we had to cancel our other raiding night due to holiday party complications.

Blue reactions?

One of the most interesting meta-games that wow-enthusiasts like to play is reading too much into blue hotfixes and posts immediately following the patch. The ones that made me think a bit were:

Quote from Crygil

Recent In-Game Fixes - Decmeber 2009 - 12

The chance for epic items to drop off trash mobs in the Frozen Halls 5 player dungeons has been reduced.

The Ephemeral Snowflake trinket now has a very short cooldown to prevent it from restoring inappropriately large amounts of mana.

(Source)

I suppose this explains why I saw 3 Battered Hilts drop in the first 5-man I ran, and then I have only seen one since then. Le sigh.

The "inappropriately large amounts of mana" is what I had refered to a few posts back. Some druids were theorycrafting the mp5 value of this trinket to be over 400 mp5. Hehe, good stuff.

Quote from Bornakk

Recent In-Game Fixes - Decmeber 2009 - 12/14
Lord Marrowgar will now do significantly less melee damage in both the 10 player normal and 10 player heroic difficulty. (Source)

Given that we ended up going in with mostly iLvl 232 loot and we downed him after one serious night, and other bloggers were posting that they facerolled him, I was a little surprised to see this nerf so quickly. This certainly will make farming him easier, but I actually thought he was pretty decently tuned, and it was cool to have a tiny bit of a challenge on the first boss there.

Who gets your innervates?

2009-12-11T10:18:00.007-05:00

Back when Innervate was spirit-based, you had basically 2 choices. You could give your innervate to a holy priest and let them go nutty with circle of healing (pre-nerf), or you could give it to an arcane mage and let them rack up the deeps. Now that innervate is based on the casting druid's base mana pool, any mana user (probably a healer) will benefit from it.

We got our first boss down in ICC10 last night, and I found myself getting all the innervates (from a resto and feral tank druid). Now, the funny thing is, I actually think my mana regen is pretty great right now compared to a while back. I got a usable mana regen trinket, and the new 3.3 gear has been mostly itemized for haste/mp5, so I've been able to pick up mp5 along with my delicious delicious haste.

Compared to the other healers, though, shaman have the fewest mana regen tricks. Other than mana tide totem (which affects all healers really), we live and die by our own mp5 and the mana we get back from critting a Improved Water Shield bubble. Pallies have Divine Plea/Divine Illumination, Priests have Shadowfiend/Hymn of Hope/Inner Focus, Druids just don't seem to have that bad mana usage, and our resto druid is glyphed so that her innervate gives her mana back too. Right now our mage is trying out a frost spec to see how the 3.3 changes affected him, so that's not really a valid option either.

So this shaman is sitting on mountains of mana, chain healing his ass off. Woo!

My Emblem of Frost Pull List

2009-12-09T13:32:00.003-05:00

So lootrank isn't showing emblems of frost items yet, so I've plugged my latest HEP stat weights into a wowhead filter to plan what items I should save badges for. I've gone over my HEP-based loot selection methodology, and I generally try to get the highest HEP per Badge item, unless there are oustanding considerations.

Keep in mind that I'm in a group that does 10 man casual raids, so I'm not really expecting to have access to 10 man heroic loot that early, or 25 man loot.

Emblem of Frost Upgrades
Item	Upgrade from	Cost	HEP gain	HEP per badge	Easy Alternatives

Drape of the Violet Tower (49.09)	Shawl of the Caretaker (35.79)	50	13.3	0.266	Flowing Sapphiron Drape (45.35)
I've had really bad luck with cloak upgrades in Ony and ToC. This would be a big upgrade for me, but if there's a chance I'll be running some legacy raids, There are intermediate upgrades that would make this slot less of a priority for me.
Meteor Chaser's Raiment (120.05)	Thrall's Tunic of Conquest (86.78)	95	33.27	0.350	Frost Witch's Tunic (101.04)
I'm still unclear on exactly what the purchasing method for tier 10 with emblems of frost will be. Regardless, the Meteor Chaser chest piece is a huge ugprade over the base level tier 10 chest. It is MUCH better than the mail piece, which has no haste on it.
Gloves of False Gestures (86.65)	Looming Shadow Wraps (62.64)	60	24.01	0.400
The cloth gloves are a touch better than the mail ones, due to the increased haste and the usable socket bonus. No real easy alternative glove upgrades without going into 25 man raids.
Waistband of Despair (85.58)	Icehowl Binding (56.76)	60	38.82	0.647	Cord of the Patronizing Practitioner (69.53)
The belt is a huge upgrade from what I already had. There is a potential upgrade from 10 man Marrowgar, BUT it is cloth and it has spirit on it, so it would probably be a while until I was allowed to roll on it.
Totem of Surging Seas (255)	Totem of Calming Tides (234)	30	21	0.700
The totem upgrade is basically a flat 21 spellpower upgrade. Not that sexy, but easily the cheapest and most effective badge purchase.
Purified Lunar Dust (216.232)	Eye of the Broodmother (195.296)	60	20.936	0.349
The trinket proc was modeled to be 76 mp5. While it would be a fair upgrade, trinkets are very situational, and I would be swapping this one out for fights that I'm not mana constrained on. Not a high priority for me yet.

I still don't understand how the iLevel 251 tier 10 gear is purchased with emblems of frost, and this data doesn't seem to be on wowhead or mmo-champion right now. If someone knows, please give me a heads up. Obviously those numbers would change all my badge priorities going forward, but until I figure that out, my upgrade priorities based on these numbers are probably:

Totem, Waist, Gloves, Cloak. The Trinket is a situational sidegrade, and the chest is nice, but blocks a possible tier bonus which I'm hoping to get at least 2 pieces of as soon as possible.

Playing with the new 5-man Healer Trinket!

2009-12-09T11:54:00.004-05:00

When I finally got on to Borean Tundra last night, some guildies and I blew through the 3 new heroic 5-mans, and I got 3 upgrades! Also, 3 Battered Hilts dropped, but I didn't roll on them because I had already gotten some phat loots, and since they were dropping so readily I figure I'll get mine soon enough.

One very interesting upgrade I got was the new trinket, the Ephemeral Snowflake. In addition to a kickass on-use haste proc, it also gives you back 11 mana every time one of your healing spells heals someone. This is incredibly interesting to me. What I've found from half an instance of testing is:

It procs off heals from hots and directly applied spells. For shaman, this is Lesser Healing Wave, Healing Wave, Riptide (including its hots), Chain Heal (including jumps)

It does not proc from passive heals, like Healing Stream Totem, Earth Shield, Ancestral Awakening, or Earthliving Weapon.

The proc is maximized for multi-target spells and hots. Riptide can return up to 66 mana (88 if glyphed). Chain Heal can return 44 if glyphed.

The proc does NOT happen on overhealing, so it will only shine in heavy raid damage situations where hots are not overhealing and your AOE heals are actively healing all of their targets.

On Elitist Jerks, they've modeled it to be about 147 mp5 in ideal Chain Heal spam situations, assuming 2 riptides rolling. Obviously this would only be sustained by constant damage to be healed, and assumes perfect Chain Heal jumps and Riptide target selection. It's still not as good as either of the Solace of the Fallen trinkets from TOTGC, but it is very easy to acquire, and a lot of fun. And I just love weird trinkets.

I am dying to get it on my priest, to see if it procs on every target of CoH, every target of PoH, AND the PoH glyph hot? I can't imagine it does for that last one because that would be insane, but it's not like I really have mana probs on my priest anyway?

Speaking of which, the new 5-mans were really fun, but also REALLY healing intensive. Even with a pure guild run, we had some wipes on some bosses in there. The hardest one for me was the first boss in the Halls of Reflection, Falric. He has a really nasty AOE horrify that will do 10,000 shadow damage to all party members, and can be amplified by various debuffs he puts on you; he also has a magic debuff that can stun you if not removed in time. Like Violet Hold, if you wipe on this boss, you have to reclear the waves of trash up to him, which is non-trivial. The packs spawn all around the room and have a lot of caster mobs that have to be LoS'd to stick to your tank.

Anyway, despite some server trouble, yesterday night was great fun. I didn't get to play with the random heroic tool yet, but my guildies all said it was pleasant and easy to use. So far, 3.3 wins!

3.3 patch excitement!

2009-12-08T10:21:00.006-05:00

Yigi's original predictions were correct! While we're all waiting for the servers to come up, what are you planning to do when you get on first?

As a rule, I don't like to raid on patch days- there are too many possible headaches, and it's been a while since I've been in a guild that was really competitive for server rank. I think I am definitely going to try to hit up the daily random heroic on both my shaman and my priest, and if I have time, I probably want to run the regular and heroic 5 man as many times as possible for new loots and triumphs. And remember, the MOST important patch note if you plan on going for perky pug?

Quote from Zarhym

Fall of the Lich King: Patch 3.3.0 Notes

A Player will not be placed in a group with people on his or her Ignore list.

(Source)

Learn it, live it, love it.

I also want to get some battleground dailies in, now that they grant arena points. But there's also the Kalu'ak fishing daily...

And of course, just staring at my new totems...

PATCH IS HERE!

A truly terrible plan

2009-11-28T09:47:00.003-05:00

I don't know how I thought this was a good idea. Somehow I'm on my warlock alt, waiting for Level 1 Dwarf rogues to spawn in Coldridge Valley so I can blast them and finally get my Turkey Lurkey achievement.

UPDATE: GOT IT! Thanks guildies!

3.3 Release predictions

2009-11-24T13:33:00.011-05:00

With the coming of Thanksgiving, I can't help but wonder when 3.3 will be released. The gating system and (almost) completion of testing on the PTR realms leads me to believe that it will be very soon. However, a WoW Dev DID hint a few days ago that:

Quote from Daath

Re: is there a mirror for 3.3.0?
We only provide mirror links for full client patches. Background downloads do not count. You have around 1+ month to download this file so we're not really worried about your speed. :) (Source)

Does this mean that 3.3 is still a month away?
If 3.3 dropped exactly 1 month after that announcement, it would make the release date December 22 (23rd on EU realms), which is the week of Christmas. I have a very hard time believing that Blizzard would release a major content patch, even if it isn't the full instance, that close to Christmas.

My best guess is a few weeks earlier; either next week (December 1) or the following (December 8). This will give us December to work through the first 4 bosses and adjust to any buffs/nerfs and also give Blizzard enough time to finish off the Arena season. I would think that wing two of Icecrown would then drop right after New Year's, with Arthas FINALLY coming near the end of January.

Although I cannot WAIT for 3.3 and to finally face Arthas, I have to say that in this case anticipation is half the fun.

I will leave you with my guesses:
Patch 3.3 launch: December 8th
2nd wing unlocked: January 5th
3rd wing unlocked: January 26th
Arthas unlocked: February 16th

Return to KZ

2009-11-23T16:31:00.004-05:00

Back from my vacation!

5 bored guildies completed all the easy achievements for Pilgrim last night, and with nothing else pressing we decided to go clear Karazhan (3 of them had never seen it). It was pretty fun, mostly because the two of us that had done it before we're trying to remember all the fight mechanics on the fly, and because we could easily pull all of those big middle-of-the-room trash pulls that you had to strive so valiantly to avoid back at 70.

The hardest fight for 4 level 80s and a 1 level 74? CHESS. Sometimes the best old jokes are the ones with a ring of truth to them.

-zigi

Icecrown Gate System Info Released

2009-11-18T14:32:00.006-05:00

Blizzard has just announced the exact gate system they will be using for Icecrown Citadel:

Quote from Daelo

Icecrown Citadel Raid Access Progression
As we're now getting closer to the release of 3.3.0, we wanted to talk about our plans for access progression within Icecrown Citadel. Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. At this point we can't give precise dates for these release dates as they are determined by when patch 3.3.0 goes live. Once dates are known with more certainty, I'll update the community so they can plan appropriately. (Source)

Basically, this means that we'll get the Icecrown wings at 4 different times. When Patch 3.3 first drops, we will get The Lower Spire:
Lord Marrowgar
Icecrown Gunship Battle
Deathbringer Saurfang
Lady Deathwhisper

And we'll only get a chance to kill these bosses on normal mode. This will last "several weeks" until The Plagueworks is released:
Festergut
Rotface
Professor Putricide

Also of note, we will only be allowed 5 attempts per week on Professor Putricide before we are locked out.
After several more weeks, The Crimson Hall will be released:
Blood Princes
Blood Queen Lana'Thel

At this time, we'll have a total of 10 attempts for Putricide and Lana'Thel, and our attempts on Blood Princes will not be limited.
Finally, after several more weeks, we'll get The Frostwing Halls:
Valithria Dreamwalker
Sindragosa
The Lich King

And we'll get a total of 15 attempts to kill Putricide, Lana'Thal, Sindragosa, and The Lich King.
After Arthas is killed on normal mode, heroic modes will be unlocked.
The FINAL catch is that in order to get to the Lich King (heroic) on ANY given week, we will have to kill Putricide, Lana'Thel, and Sindragosa ALL on heroic. Remember that our attempts will still be limited to 15 total for the 4 bosses. Over time, the number of attempts will be increased.

This will be good for prolonging the time until The Lich King heroic is finally killed, but in what I feel is a VERY superficial way. It will be at least 6-8 weeks until the Lich King is even unlocked, and then the following week we'll finally get a chance to try hard modes. After that we will have 15 attempts a week to kill Putricide heroic and continue on to Lana'Thel, Sindragosa, and finally, Arthas.

Personally, I dislike this system, even though I don't think my guild will personally be held up too much by the gates. Whether or not I am personally affected, I feel this will kill the race for world first Arthas heroic by just making it take too long until it is released.

I will reserve my final judgment until I see how difficult each of these encounters are, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope.

Vacation!

2009-11-13T10:03:00.001-05:00

Going out of town for a wedding!

Really hope the patch doesn't drop while I'm gone, heh.

Probably won't be posting much, but Yigi will still be posting about druid and PTR stuff.

-Zigi

Hit & Run: New Emblem Gear

2009-11-11T15:51:00.007-05:00

Not a lot of new stuff, but I thought I'd weigh in on some of the new gear.

New Emblem gear has been announced on the PTR. I always wonder how in-touch the devers are with the actual player community, but it is very nice to see that the itemization for the mail gear, for the most part, is very much in line with Resto and Ele prioritization. Other than that mp5 on the chestpiece, it is all very well itemized for the current Shaman HEP weights that are being thrown around at EJ.

REALLY like the new healer trinket too. It's a lot more interesting than the current badge one.

Shaman T10: GHOST DEER?

2009-11-09T13:17:00.005-05:00

OK, I know shammies have been bitching about having to wait to see our tier 10, but it was TOTALLY WORTH THE WAIT:

Druids may be wearing yogg-saron as a scarf, but I have DEER COMING OUT OF MY NECK. Shaman Win.

-zigi

Zigi's Choice

2009-11-05T11:31:00.003-05:00

The Pandaren Monk?

or Lil' K.T.?

Let's be honest- Lil' K.T. looks AWESOME... but 5 bucks of the Pandaren Monk purchase goes to an awesome charity- the Make a Wish foundation. Walking around with a Lil' K.T. is a big skeletal middle finger to sick kids and their dreams!

Eh, who am I kidding? I'm getting both.

-zigi

Circle of Tanks

2009-11-04T14:03:00.006-05:00

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?
Yigi, Druid, 0/58/13

What is your primary tanking environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Mostly 10 mans, some 25s

What is your favorite tankng spell for your class and why?
Swipe. I love it's spammability and it's high threat. I would LOVE to say Maul because it just does so much threat and dmg, but I hate the way it works.

What tanking spell do you use least for your class and why?
Druids don't have a very large arsenal of tanking spells, so I tend to use all of them in a normal 10 man setting. In 5 mans i rarely use Lacerate, since it takes 5 GCDs to really make it worth it.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your tanking class and why?
I hate to use the standard "swiss army knife" cliche that druids get, but it really is true. Our burst threat, sustained threat, and survivability are not the BEST, but they are all really good. So I would say, we are very well rounded. A huge strength we also have (while it's not necessarily tanking), is the ability to switch to a very solid healing spec.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your tanking class and why?
Snap threat is our biggest weakness that I can see. The only way we can REALLY frontload a lot of threat is through berserk, which only works if you have 1-3 targets and really gimps your sustained threat in a single mob encounter.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best tanking assignment for you?
Bosses that hit for big numbers, whether it's a spell or physical attack. Our high health pool and good defensive cooldowns really make us perform great during a Plasma Blast, for example.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with most and why?
I tank with a DW Frost DK every day, and I love it. Their AoE threat is amazing, so it really counters our lack of burst AoE threat during fights like Mimiron P3 or Jaraxxus adds.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with least and why?
I haven't tanked much with paladins in Wrath, although they seem ok. I haven't met any GOOD pally tanks on this server, so I think my view of them is skewed.

What is your worst habit as a tank?
Probably hectic fights where I tend to watch how my raid is performing rather than concentrating on tanking.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?
DPS who try to run the show. I love suggestions, but when DPS feel like a certain strategy is better because it involves less DPS movement, it irks me.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other tanks?
I feel like we are pretty well balanced. DKs have gotten the shaft a lot recently, but since they started so high during 3.0 and 3.1 they are about on par, if not a SLIGHT bit behind.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?
Mostly just seeing how well the fight is controlled. In most fights, the tanks control the fight. If the tanks are doing their job, there is minimal movement, minimal add rampages, and an overall cleaner encounter. I do look at Omen to see my TPS on occasion, but for the most part if I am holding aggro and know I'm using the right rotation, it's all about the same.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your class?
The fact that we are "mana sponges." Uneducated people feel like the druid class is just supposed to be a high health sponge that soaks up the hits, while they fail to realize that our high dodge and armor make us take a lot less damage than they may think.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new tanks of your class to learn?
How to properly gear. Since druids don't have a "def cap" to worry about, a new druid doesn't have any stats to "aim" for. It's all about knowing the proper balance, and how to gem/enchant properly. The only thing that seperates leather feral tanking gear from feral/rogue dps gear is the gems and enchants.

Effective Health or Avoidance and why?
I raid with a Disc Priest, Resto Shaman, and Resto Druid healer, so I feel like in a lot of cases avoidance really ourperforms EH. If I raided regularly with a holy paladin, or raided 25 mans, EH would be much more important to me.

What tanking class do you feel you understand least?
DKs, although I understand the basics, the ins and outs are foreign to me.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in tanking?
I don't use any tanking specific addons, but I use omen, grid, and spellreminder to keep track of my threat, raid, and cooldowns respectively.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
At this point I mostly stack Agility. To an extent I DO balance it with stamina, but mostly only in blue slots (using agi/stam gems) and in certain enchants where stam is just better than agi.

-yigi

Showing WoW achievements in Blogger

2009-11-03T15:10:00.006-05:00

The first thing I noticed when I started this blog was that all the wordpress dudes had awesome achievement feeds on their blog, and generally the blogger implementations were a little hack-y. Given that the armory is XML and the achievements are all accessible through that, I figured that it wouldn't be that hard to put together a Yahoo! Pipe that shredded the data and made it a nice little RSS feed. You're welcome to copy or use the Yahoo Pipe that I put together however you like, and here are a few suggestions on how to display it on your blogger blog.

Go to Yahoo Pipes!
You can roll your own if you're comfortable with XML and Pipes, or you can just use the one I set up here. Feel free to copy it if you want to make minor changes.

Enter your data
Server name, character name, like so:

Select a display format
You have 3 choices for displaying the format. The first and second are both Yahoo! Pipes embedded badge; which you can choose either the image format or the list format.

For an example of a blogger blog that's using an image badge from this pipe, check out druidmain.

If you want something without images, like what we have here in our sidebar, just pick the "RSS" output from the Yahoo Pipe, and copy that URL into the standard Google RSS badge.

Enjoy!

-Zigi

The fight where HPS is DPS

2009-11-02T11:39:00.008-05:00

Hehe... Right after I soft-whined that healing becomes less fun as the raid gets more gear, I read about this new fight that just got tested on the PTR: Valithria Dreamwalker. This fight is backwards, in that you find an NPC that is at 50%, and your raid's healers have to heal that NPC before adds can take her down. They do a lot of nasty healing mortal-strike stacking debuffs too, so the adds have to be managed carefully.

Basically, they turn the tables- in normal fights, the dpsers do the measurable work while healers support them by keeping damage off them and healing them through the unavoidable damage. In this fight it's now up to the healers to get an NPC from 50% to 100% health, while the dpsers take on a support role, and manage the adds to let you do your job.

And the achievement for killing her quickly? Healbot.

I love blizz sometimes. Cannot WAIT to see this fight on live! I think I'll make a macro "/ra cna some1 link healing meterz plz?". Yep, I'm gonna be THAT GUY.

-Zigi

Healing is most fun when everyone around you is dying

2009-10-30T11:10:00.008-04:00

OK, this is going to start off a little unfocused, but I kind of want to make a big generalization based on some somewhat unrelated items I've been thinking about lately

One thing I love about the healing blogs is there is a real sense of dialogue and community between them; Jessabelle's questionaire being a recent example (and not a meme). The topic of "making healing fun" has come up a lot recently, and I've said in general that I enjoy healing and would probably be bored dpsing in endgame.

That being said, the raids I'm in are currently on a "farm" state of the instances we can comfortably clear, while we gear up for the achievements and heroics that are slightly out of our grasp.
Blizzard recently announced that the new patch will introduce a debuff in Icecrown Citadel that will reduce your tank's dodge chance. It is basically Sunwell Radiance 2.0.

Quote from Blizzard staff

Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!
For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Why are we doing this?

The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.

We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again. (Source)

I think in general people are pissed about this because it was considered a hack back in BC, and it's a hack now; Blizzard planned gear itemization wrong, and now tanks overgear content. That being said; I agree that at current levels of tank avoidance, they would basically have to make the mobs deal so much damage that they would 2-shot a tank if it lands, or else the tanking and healing would be super boring.

So where I'm going with this is; when you first encounter new content, tanking and healing is very dynamic and exciting. However, once everyone in the fight knows the encounter really well, is avoiding the predictable damage and interrupting the spells and moving out of fire, healing becomes really easy. Similarly, tanking becomes boring when you have enough stam and avoidance to survive the bosses super power move without needing to use cooldowns.

Better gear for dps means bigger numbers and more procs; better gear for tanks means less need to manage cooldowns efficiently; better gear for healers means more overhealing and standing around. As my raid members have gotten better at avoiding stray damage and my tanks have gotten better at mitigating the boss's damage; I find more and more that I am spending fight time dpsing and arranging my bags.

This is just an observation, I don't really know what the game designers could do to make it so healing and tanking stays interesting as you gear up and have the encounters memorized. Any ideas?

-Zigi

Heal Naked: Healing with the Stock UI?

2009-10-28T20:24:00.002-04:00

In a previous post I mentioned casually that NO raiding healer uses the stock UI, and of course that was a complete overstatement, because I'm sure there are plenty that do, and do it well. I even got smacked down in a comment for it.

So I have been playing around a bit on the PTR, and was asked to come try healing some 10 man ICC PTR bosses, and as I was going through the dreaded initial UI set up for my Shaman, I thought I'd itemize what I consider to be the barebones essential healing mods for me, and considered what the alternatives are if you want to just use the stock UI.

SmartBuff

Description: SmartBuff provides a little icon and a text warning if you are missing any buffs, or if people in your party are missing buffs that you can provide. This is highly configurable, and has different configurations based on your talent spec, and whether or not you are soloing, instancing, pvping, or raiding. When you are out of combat, you can automatically apply these buffs by clicking a button, or even have it set to when you scroll in and out.
Use: This was much more of a necessity when I played a level 70 disc/holy priest and was responsible for applying different buffs to 5 different parties every time we wiped. Now as a shaman, I just use it to make sure my Water Shield is up and my weapon imbue is applied before going into any fight.
Necessity Level: Low
Other Mods: I don't really know of other mods that duplicate this functionality.
Stock UI Alternative: This one isn't so bad for a shaman to do without addons. I can easily monitor my own buffs via the default buff tracking UI. It's much more of a headache for priests, though.
Grid

Description: Grid is a compact raid unit frames mod that optimizes space by filtering down to only buffs and status indicators that you care about.
Use: On my shaman, I have it optimized for notifying me about health and debuffs that I can dispel.
Necessity Level: High. The default raid frames are not as I claimed "impossible" to fit onto your screen, but in a 25-man raid, it's pretty much going to be a mess.
Other Mods: Vuhdo, Healbot.
Stock UI Alternative: Pull your raid frames out from your raid tab onto your screen. In order to fit a lot of these in a 25 man situation, you should scale them down a lot. As for the debuff filtering... it's not pretty.
Clique

Description: Clique allows you to bind spell casts to chorded mouse-clicks on a unit frame, rather than pressing a keystroke.
Use: This allows me to fit a number of healing and dispelling spells into mouse click combos. For example, I can bind Cure Toxins to shift-left click.
Necessity Level: Medium/High.
Other Mods: Vuhdo, Healbot mentioned earlier have the same functionality, bundled in.
Stock UI Alternative: Kae from Dreambound swears by "mouseover macros" as an alternative to Clique, which provide the same level of reactiveness, without needing to diverge from the stock UI. So as an alternative to the clique binding I mentioned above, you could make a macro:
/cast [target=mouseover] Cure Toxins
And bind that to a key, like "2". Then instead of shift clicking a unit frame, you can mouseover the unit frame and hit your "2" key to have the same effect. I think this is a very reasonable alternative, but it does take up macro and keybinding space.
ForteXorcist

Description: ForteXorcist a buff/debuff/cooldown timer mod. This was actually originally a warlock mod (as they have all these DoTs to track), but they've expanded it to be customizable and to work for all buffs and debuffs; I find it to be perfect for my shaman.
Use: I use this for tracking the duration of my Riptide HoT on multiple targets, as well as my Earth Shield buff's charges on a tank.
Necessity Level: Medium. Without this mod I would probably be wasting a lot of mana refreshing Riptide unnecessarily, or letting it fall off.
Other Mods: SpellReminder is what I used for a long time on my priest, and I liked that as well.
Stock UI Alternative: The default UI is really bad for tracking buff times on multiple targets.
Power Auras

Description: Power Auras provides a visual indicator based on highly configurable conditions, such as gaining a certain number of stacks of a debuff, or losing an important buff.
Use: For my shaman, I use this to ensure I have 100% uptime on my Water Shield. In a heated battle where I'm taking damage, it's very easy to let that fall off, and if I don't pay attention, I'll suddenly be out of mana. I have Power Auras to have a giant red bubble pop up when my Water Shield is down to 1 charge or fewer. You can set up even more Power Auras based on other conditions, like missing your weapon imbue, or having full stacks of Tidal Waves. On my priest, I have this pop up when I get to max stacks of Serendipity, for example.
Necessity Level: Low
Other Mods: The shaman Mod Shields Up does exactly the case I mention in the Use Case, but it is not as configurable as Power Auras.
Stock UI Alternative: Uhh, you gotta just watch the buff/debuff indicators in your upper right hand corner like a hawk, I guess.

So these are the mods I wouldn't raid without. I'm sure you can do it with the Stock UI, but one of the amazing things about WoW is the UI's expandability, and it's awesome to have such amazing and talented addon developers cranking out these awesome mods with healers in mind.

RE: Jessabelle's Healing Questionnaire

2009-10-27T08:07:00.011-04:00

Jessabelle at Miss Medicina posted a Questionnaire with the intent of spreading knowledge between healing classes, and among the healing bloggers. The idea is you answer all the questions, and then "tag" another healing blogger that plays a different class.

In typical priest ethnocentrism, she calls it a "Circle of Healing Bloggers", when I'm pretty sure any impartial observer would agree that "Chain of Healing Bloggers" or "Totem of Healing Blogs" would be a far superior name... but I suppose the damage has been done ;)

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Zigi, Resto Shaman.

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
At the moment, I am primarily healing in 10-man raids.

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Chain Heal, because it's spammable, looks cool, and is a good example of a spell that Blizzard has made useful ever since level 60, and is still a staple of shaman healing today

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Hmm, Shaman really only have 5 healing spells in our arsenal (6 if you count the totem), so there are no spells that I never use, but based on my meters since 3.2, I rarely cast Lesser Healing Wave. With the changes to Tidal Waves and a high level of haste, a Healing Wave cast is usually only 2/10ths of a second slower than a Lesser Healing Wave. The only benefit of that spell is mana efficiency (from the improved crit), which has not been a problem for me recently. I still use it situationally to top off raid members when CH is totally inappropriate, but it is not the go-to spell it was before 3.2.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Our strength is very high throughput in both aoe and tank healing roles.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
Our weakness is mana management, and scaling to 25 man raids.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I haven't done a ton of 25-mans, but having read some of the big-boy shaman blogs, and from my experiences in PUGs, I do feel that resto shaman are better suited to tank healing roles, with backup AOE. If a holy priest is not available, then a resto shaman is pretty good at the dedicated aoe role too.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
I'm gonna second Jess here, and go with Disc priests. Their damage prevention buffs, passive talents, and spells, all make healing noticeably easier on everyone.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
I'm going to answer this in an extremely selfish way and say Holy Priests. Keep in mind, that this is JUST in the context of this question. Obviously I love holy priests because I played one for 2 years, and they do amazing throughput healing, but in terms of buffing other people in the raid, holy priests actually provide no raid buffs that a disc priest can't provide as well. Sorry Jess :(

What is your worst habit as a healer?
Probably refreshing my HoT, Riptide when I don't have to, or even worse, Riptiding the tank and instantly Chain Healing it off instead of letting it tick a little bit. I definitely have to consciously think about it to get the full value of my Riptide, considering I have the set bonus and the glyph for it!

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
I have mentioned this in comments on Jess's blog in the past, but it's gotta be linking/asking for/bragging about healing meters. This is not to say I don't look at healing meters, or feel an irrational swell of pride if I top them, but I am also completely conscious of the fact that healing meters are misleading, incorrect, and can lead to bad healing habits. For one thing, disc priests are horribly represented on healing meters, as Blizz has provided no official way to track absorbs. If this caused all guilds to avoid disc priests, it would be a disaster!

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
At my niche yes; in 10 man raids, shaman shine. I do feel like we don't scale as well as any of the other healers into 25 man content, just because our AOE heal hits less than everyone else's; I know a lot of shaman feel like they get shoehorned into tank healing or sidelined, but right now I'm definitely enjoying my niche.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
I think the most important metric for a healer is the ability to follow an assignment and keep those people you're assigned to alive. If there are no assignments, then my success criteria is no one dying.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
I think that people who played WoW prior to WOTLK know shaman as AOE raid healers, and honestly, prior to playing one myself, that's all I thought they were good for too. However I was surprised at 80 to find that we're probably comparatively better at tank healing than raid healing.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
I think mana management can be tough- especially coming from other classes. We only have one "trick" to get back mana, our totem, as opposed to Priests (Shadowfiend, Hymn of Hope, Inner Focus). Keeping up 100% uptime on Water Shield is ESSENTIAL. Get a mod for that.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
My overheal is between 20 and 30% usually depending on the spell, which I think is probably a little high, but not the worst I've seen. I'm pretty happy with my healing output. If anything the criticism would be what I mentioned before- I probably use Healing Wave on some occasions that Lesser Healing Wave would be the right spell.

Haste or Crit and why?
HASTE! All shaman now live and die for haste; chain heal spam is AGONIZINGLY SLOW if you don't have enough of it. NOM NOM HASTE.

What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Well the only class that I have not healed at 80 on is a resto druid, so definitely that. They just have so many spells that seem very similar in function: Lifebloom and Rejuv; Nourish and Healing Touch and Regrowth.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
I use Clique/Grid for healing, ForteExorcist for tracking my hots and buffs, and Power Auras to let me know when my shield or weapon imbue has fallen off.

I use a TON of macros, but mostly just things like binding my two big cooldowns: Nature's Swiftness and Tidal Force into one giant OSHIT button.

The other one I like, and this is just to save space on my bar, is I have a macro that casts Stoneclaw Totem if I'm in combat, or my Resurrection spell if I'm out of combat. The idea is I can't cast Res out of combat, and I'd never need Stoneclaw out of it.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
Right now Shaman are stacking haste to the sky, and I'm not different. I do feel that when newer content comes out in 3.3 I may move back toward a more balanced approach with mana regen, if the fights are long.

So for choosing new bloggers to add to this questionaire, I would normally pick
BobTurkey or Healing Way, but I think Bob is on vacation, and Llyre is a Shaman so I can't pick that, so I'm going to go with a blog that I just discovered recently because of their awesome illustrated boss guides: Kae from Dreambound!

-Zigi

Yogg Saron Down

2009-10-26T20:44:00.004-04:00

Yay, we killed Yogg!
I might do some editing on this video, but here it is for now:

-yigi

RE: Healing and fun

2009-10-24T11:48:00.004-04:00

Llyra from the Healing Way blog is starting a series of posts on Healing and fun from the perspective of WoW development. I thought there were a lot of interesting points which I wanted to give my perspective on.

Can healer's enjoy solo-ing? With dual-spec, does this even matter anymore?
So from 70-80 I actually ended up preferring a holy/disc leveling spec for my Priest rather than Shadow. This is mostly because my spirit levels were so high from my raiding 70 gear, that any build with Spirit Tap would have zero downtime, and my spellpower was high enough that mobs would never live long enough for the very long dots to tick to their full extent. In contrast, holy has a spammable damage-up-front spell, and can spec to actually make this damage totally fine for solo content.

With the advent of dual-specs, Llyra discards the idea that this will make hardcore raiders pick a dps spec as a second spec, as they can now min/max even further. While this is totally true for Priests, and I actually do have 2 healing specs on my priest even though I am not a hardcore raider; I don't think this is very true for the other healing classes. I'm not even sure what talent points I would want that I'm not already getting on my Shaman. Maaybe Healing Focus. I've already told you why I don't like Improved Reincarnation. Other than Priests, who have two very different healing trees, the other healing classes are viable in their cookie cutter specs.

How can Blizzard make healing more fun?
Obviously I don't know if this applies to me- I played a DPS class (Rogue) for about a year and got pretty bored, after which I leveled my Priest and that became my main for the next 2 years. I really don't think I'd ever consider playing as my main any class that doesn't at least have the capacity to heal on it. While I do really enjoy the occasions that I get to DPS in my ele spec for a 5-man or for a specific boss where we scale down our healers, it's more of a vacation than anything else; I don't think I'd be happy dpsing every day. DPSing just doesn't seem dynamic enough for me, while healing forces you to constantly be reacting.

That being said, I think the biggest barrier to entry for healers, is that it really is almost unimaginable to be a raid healer without mods. The default user interface just doesn't cut it. It doesn't normally bother me, but I was trying to make a character on the PTR, and I didn't want to migrate all my mods. I found that I had no problems dpsing things there, but I just didn't want to deal with the default UI when it came to healing. I'm sure I could approximate the functions of Grid/Clique (or Vuhdo or Healbot) with the default unit frames and mouseover macros, but it wouldn't be elegant, and it would be pretty miserable overall.

Blizzard has got to be aware that their default unit frames aren't adequate. This would be fantastic if they addressed it some way. In general, I'm having fun as it is though ;)

-Zigi

Making Gear Choices on a Resto Shaman

2009-10-23T10:31:00.007-04:00

Depending on if you're shooting for 10 or 25 man content, or if you are intending to maximize your raid healing or tank healing potential, your spell selection will change, and consequently, your stat priorities should change as well. This can make forum or blog discussion on optimal shaman gearing very difficult, as two different resto shaman could have wildly different stat priorities, and neither would be necessarily incorrect.

Fortunately, the resto shaman community has some amazing tools at their disposal to evaluate and optimize your gear, glyphs, and totems. I'm going to go over how I would use these tools to evaluate a potential gear upgrade. In this case, I am deciding whether or not I should break my Tier 9 set bonus for a shoulder piece that has better stats.

Get a combat log
I suggest the mod LoggerHead, which you can set to automatically toggle logging based on your location.

Then, pick a fight or set of fights you think represents your regular healing rotation pretty well. Obviously I'd avoid General Vezax, or any fight where you change your role. If you DPS on Hodir, for example, turn off logging for that fight.

In this case, I logged our guild's first attempts on Heroic 10-man Northrend Beasts this past Wednesday.

Download, configure, and run shaman_hep
shaman_hep is a tool developed by an awesome guy named stassart. He's a frequent poster on ElitistJerks, and keeps up with the latest theorycrafting for resto shaman (you can PM him or give feedback in a dedicated EJ thread here). He developed this tool that parses your combat log, and based on your configuration, it spits out some important information and analysis that you can use to improve your glyph selection, talents, and gear, based on your actual playstyle. In short, it's awesomesauce.

Unlike other WoW tools, it doesn't run as a mod in game, but it's a perl script that you run offline on your combat log. The configuration is fairly straightforward. If you have the cookie cutter resto shaman spec, you can assume that it pretty much works out of the box, you just have to put your name in the configuration (this is important because you could have several shaman in the raid, which would mess up the stat collection). You should also look through the configuration and make sure that the buffs and glyphs match your set up. If you're curious, I've uploaded the config I used here.

After you've done that, you can run it at the command line. It will work on Windows, Mac, or even Linux.

Interpreting the output
So the output can be kind of overwhelming- I've posted the output from my Wednesday parse here- but all you care about is the stuff at the end really, so scroll down to the bottom.

What shaman_hep does is it has taken into account every talent, glyph, certain totems, and stats and normalized them in terms of spellpower.

So since I am evaluating a shoulder upgrade relative to a set bonus, the two important parts to me are:

Set Bonus Report:

Tier 9 2-piece:
Effective: 74738 (2.81%), Total: 141278 (3.52%)
Combat Effective: 74343 (2.84%), Total: 127720 (3.28%)
Combat EHPS: 104.9594
HEP: 167.8772
Tier 9 4-piece:
Chain Heal:
Non-crit Effective: 346244, Count: 85
Crit Effective: 423183, Count: 82
Number of crits from T9 4-piece: 8
Increased average effective per crit: 1087
T9 4-piece Combat Effective: 9079
Combat EHPS: 12.8179
HPS HEP: 20.5016
Combat extra mana: 78
Combat MP5: 0.5538, Mana HEP: 0.6510
HEP: 21.1526

and

Stat relationships:

Shaman Healing Equivalency Points:
1 SP = 1
1 mp5 = 1.1755 (calculated)
1 mana = 0.0330
1 Haste rating = 2.2574
1 Crit rating = 1.0384
1 INT = 1.2802 (actual)
1 INT = 1.1421 (max theoretical)

To break down these, what it is saying is that 1 point of crit is worth 1.0384 spellpower based on my playstyle. You will notice that the haste value is very high. While this is probably inflated because of the fight I chose, in general it is in line with how most shaman are gearing these days (I believe most shaman are using 1.8 as a benchmark for haste).

In comparison, the tier 9 4-piece set bonus is worth about 21.2 healing. So, if I can find a shoulder that gives me that much healing, or equivalent stats, I should break my set bonus.

Plug these stats into lootrank
shaman_hep even gives you a nice pre-made lootrank URL you can use!

Lootrank:
Overall:
http://www.lootrank.com/wr.asp?Cla=64&Art=2&Max=20&Gem=4&mh=2.2574&mp5=1.1755&mcr=1.0384&spd=1&Int=1.2802&Sta=0.1000&Arm=0.0100&Sckm=86.6325&Ver=6

Once in lootrank, I can enter my own name and server, and then I scroll down to the shoulders section to see if the shoulders I'm looking at (the non-heroic Pauldrons of the Spirit Walker) are worth more than the set bonus.

At +16.06 points, the shoulders are not quite good enough to break my set bonus yet. Still, I'll hold on to them, and if I get maybe a leg upgrade, I will swap out my set for those.

Whew, that was a lot of text.

-Zigi

Things I love: Illustrated Boss Strats

2009-10-22T14:09:00.002-04:00

I dunno if it brings up awesome memories of watching Onyxia Wipe on Youtube, but I'm always tickled by illustrated boss strats. I remember in particular a series that helped my old guild get through T5/T6 content, like this one on Leotheras the Blind in SSC.

Anyway, trolling through my blogroll this morning, I came across a link to this illustrated guide to Yogg-Saron, which just so happens to be the fight that our guild is going to be working on on Monday. Something about seeing cartoon stick figures yelling at each other, rather than hearing my own guildies do it on vent, makes it suddenly more fun.

-Zigi

A year ago, I idolized him. Now I'm stealing his clothes.

2009-10-22T09:39:00.007-04:00

Maybe it was my nostalgia post from Tuesday, but I found myself going through my old fraps'd videos on my computer, and I came across this capture I took during the WOTLK opening events. As you can see I'm in my level 70, T6 holy priest at the time; as I've annotated the video though, it was certainly Thrall's awesome moves that planted the seed that made me switch to shamanism (even I call false advertising!).

[BTW, I tried to upload the video with "The Boy is Mine" as the soundtrack and YouTube din't like. :(]

Anyway, maybe it's because he's my Shaman Idol, but I'm pretty psyched that I completed my 4-piece set bonus for Conqueror's Thrall's Garb. Woo!

For those of you who are interested, after obtaining my 4-piece set bonus, I ran shaman_hep on my logs for a Heroic NRB fight, and I got the following HEP values for my Tier 9 2-piece and 4-piece set bonus. I'll probably make a post about how shaman HEP weights work, but for posterity, here's my config and output.

Set Bonus Report:

Tier 9 2-piece:
Effective: 74738 (2.81%), Total: 141278 (3.52%)
Combat Effective: 74343 (2.84%), Total: 127720 (3.28%)
Combat EHPS: 104.9594
HEP: 167.8772

Tier 9 4-piece:
Chain Heal:
Non-crit Effective: 346244, Count: 85
Crit Effective: 423183, Count: 82
Number of crits from T9 4-piece: 8
Increased average effective per crit: 1087
T9 4-piece Combat Effective: 9079
Combat EHPS: 12.8179
HPS HEP: 20.5016
Combat extra mana: 78
Combat MP5: 0.5538, Mana HEP: 0.6510
HEP: 21.1526

As you can see, for me, the Tier 9 2-piece set bonus is amazing; the 4-piece bonus is only alright.

-Zigi

Healing Vezax makes me nostalgic

2009-10-20T17:32:00.003-04:00

So yeah, our guild is backwards and we did TOC before Ulduar. What of it?

Anyway, last night I healed General Vezax for the first time, and even though it was so frustrating I wanted to die, it actually gave me super flashbacks. Not to any other fight in particular, but rather to back when I was an undergeared priest stepping into Karazhan in level 65 blues.

I'm so used to pre-emptively overhealing tanks and not really having mana problems with all my nifty procs and meta gems and totems and potions. Even though Vezax is clunkily designed in terms of how it makes most healers' itemization completely wrong, it does make you think really carefully about what spells you can afford to cast, in a way I haven't thought in a long time, since those days when I was jump-casting downranked greater heals on Curator.

We didn't get Yogg down last night, but it felt so good to be able to heal people frivoulously at that point that I just didn't care.

Our Fault, Your Fault: Tier 9 Edition

2009-10-19T11:14:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite blog posts from a longstanding member of the healing blog community, Matticus, is his run down of fights in Ulduar. Basically he breaks down analyzing the deaths in each fight, and assigning blame to either the healers or the guy who died. Now, this is a little simplistic and fingerpointy, but it gets the point across well, so I thought I'd do my take on it for the newer round of content, ToC and Onyxia's Lair.

Northrend Beasts
If you died to:

Gormok's Fire Bomb - Your fault. Move out of fires, noob.
Gormok's Snobold – Raid dps's fault. They're supposed to get this off you, and it should be their highest priority.
Gormok's Staggering Stomp - If you're melee, probably our fault; Stomp isn't that much damage and it's not tough to keep the melee topped up on this fight.
Acidmaw's Paralytic Toxin – Your fault, you're supposed to get to the raid member with burning bile (I know some raids do this backwards, but it is not hard to get to the burning bile target if you act as soon as you get the debuff).
Acidic Spew and Dreadscale's Molten Spew– Again, your fault- this damage is avoidable if you're not the tank
Acidmaw's and Dreadscale's Slime Pool – Probably your fault, this is like standing in fires.
Acidmaw's and Dreadscale's Sweep– These two are generally unavoidable, so if you die to these it's our fault.
Dreadscale's Burning Bile – If you are the one debuffed by Burning Bile and you die to this, it's our fault, because you can't avoid this damage. If you die from the aoe effect from other people, it's probably your fault. Don't group up!
Icehowl's Arctic Breath and Whirl- Our fault. It's healers' main job on this fight to stay spread out around him so we don't all get iced at the same time.
Icehowl's Trample – Your fault.

Lord Jaraxxus

If you died to:

Fel Fireball – Our fault. While someone should be interrupting this, it's not that much damage, and one of the healers should be able to dispel the DoT
Fel Lightning – Our fault, this damage is unavoidable
Incinerate Flesh and Burning Inferno – Our fault in a big, big way. Sorry about that.
Legion Flame – Your fault, so move!
Infernal Eruption, Nether Portal – Our fault. This damage is unavoidable.
Fel Inferno – Your fault. Get out of there!
Spinning Pain Spike – Our fault.

Faction Champions

Uhhh, probably our fault. Let's skip this one.

Twin Val'kyr

There's very little healing required on this fight if everyone is on their game. Only two real things a non-tank could be dying from on this fight and that would be:

Light/Dark Surge – Our fault
Light/Dark Vortex – Your fault

Anub'arak

If you died to:

Penetrating Cold – That's our bad
Pursuing Spikes – That's your fault
Leeching Swarm – Our fault again.

Onyxia

I'm gonna make this simple and say:

Deep Breath, Whelp Aggro, Tail Sweep or either frontal cone ability – Your fault
Anything else – Our fault.

And a special holiday edition:

Headless Horseman
Just kidding. If you are a dpser dying on HH or a healer letting people die on HH this is probably not the post for you.

-Zigi

Someone set up us the blog

2009-10-16T19:32:00.000-04:00

Another meta post about actually setting up the blog. I was trying to find a way to get one of those pretty "achievement" feeds that I see on other people's blogs. It looks like most of them are using hosted wordpress blogs with that add-on installed. I'm trying to get something together for blogger, and I feel like I'm close. As you can see on the sidebar right now I do have a shredded RSS feed from the armory that can be used however. Unfortunately it does not preserve the actual date and timestamp, so it is not really what I want. I also would eventually like to include the appropriate artwork or tooltip.

I've also found a few other bloggers on BlogAzeroth that are looking into solving the same problem, most notably Razorbax from Three Druid Noob.

Man, setting this blog up is almost as fun as actually playing WoW. Geez, I am more geeky than ever right now.

-Zigi

Knee-jerk blue reaction: Improved Reincarnation

2009-10-16T12:15:00.013-04:00

A recent blue post on the forums revealed that they are thinking of lowering the overall cooldown on Reincarnation to 30 minutes, which means that with the talent it will go down to 15.

Quote from Blizzard staff

Reincarnation cooldown
We might drop Reincarnation to 30 base, talented to 15. That's a slight nerf to the talent, but at the same time taking the cooldown that low might make an unattractive talent more attractive. (Source)

They hope that this will make the unattractive Improved Reincarnation talent suddenly popular. Now I'm not normally one to look a gift buff in the mouth, and if they give me a 30 min CD on base Reincarnation, I'll take it and be happy, but I still don't think this makes the Improved Reincarnation a good talent, or an attractive one to Shamans. To see why, you need only look as far as the iconic healing class and my former main, the holy priest.

Prior to patch 2.0.1, holy priests would rarely spec for the Spirit of Redemption talent. Back then it merely provided the pop-up temp healer effect, and had no passive bonus other than that. Even though that pop-up healer is extremely useful and can often make the difference between a progression boss kill and a wipe, it was referred to as "Improved Death" and was avoided except for very specific gimmicky progression fights. Finally after years of being an ignored talent, Blizzard buffed the talent in 2.0.1 and gave it an awesome passive spirit bonus. The talent became a spec-defining talent in the holy tree.

The main reason no one wants to take Improved Reincarnation or pre-2.0.1 Spirit of Redemption talents is that we're healers. Healing aggro is basically a thing of the past; the only way these talents could have any use is if we die, and more often than not, that would be our own fault. Rather than spec to improve when I fail, I'd rather spend points in throughput or mana efficiency talents, to help me NOT DIE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Still, I feel like Shaman are very strong healers right now, and I'm not going anywhere. But I will be leaving that box 0/2 until they can find a way to design that talent so it doesn't just improve your fail. Cause Zigi don't fail. Zigi win.

-Zigi

PTR Testing Notes: Lord Marrowgar

2009-10-16T09:05:00.013-04:00

Last night, the US PTR saw it's first Icecrown Citadel boss:
Lord Marrowgar.
I wanted to try him out personally, but by the time I was able to get on and get a raid together, he was bugged out and untestable. This is the information I have gleaned from MMO-Champion and videos and such:

There are 3 trash pulls up to the boss. They are all very easy and nothing that could really ever kill anyone unless a DPS pulls aggro.

The boss has 18M health on normal 25 man, which means he should have ~5M on 10 man. This is a REALLY low amount considering Ignis has 5.6M on normal.

He only has 4 abilities, and none of them look like anything too hard to handle.
1. He has a cleave called Saber Lash which will hit the tank and an off tank for 300% weapon dmg (not 100% sure what he even hits for, so this isn't much information). As a result of this, the tanks should stack. This ability seems like what Halazzi or Koralon does.
2. He will emote (not sure what the emote is as of yet), and begin to Whirlwind around the room for ~15 seconds, dealing damage and leaving a DoT on anyone he comes in contact with. This is just like what Leotheras the Blind from SSC did, and is pretty easy to avoid if everyone spreads out and melee runs out after the emote. He also drops aggro after the WW and must be taunted.
3. He will target a random raid member and impale them and anyone within ~5 yards of them with an ability called Bone Spike Graveyard. This will become an attackable target (much like a Flash Freeze on Hodir) and must be killed by the ranged ASAP, as it will incapacitate whoever is impaled as well as deal 10% of total health every second.
4. The last ability is Coldflame, a fire that will start at Marrowgar and head towards a random raid member, much like a Doomfire on Archimonde or Legion Flame on Lord Jaraxxas. The fire does 7000 damage every second for 3 seconds (not sure if this is a DoT it leaves, or if this only continues while standing in the fire). Also, it should be noted that 7000 dmg/sec is the 25 man number, and the 10 man will likely be lower. Basically, the targeted raid member and anyone else in the fires path should turn and run in a straight line so as to not bend the flames.

This boss looks pretty simple and doesn't seem like he'll be much of a road block. I look forward to seeing more ICC bosses and hopefully even testing them myself.
~Yigi

Welcome to the suck

2009-10-15T13:00:00.000-04:00

Hi, I'm Zigi, and I'm a WoW player. I spend all my time talking about WoW with Yigi anyway, so I figured we'd start putting it down in a blog for posterity!

Here are some ideas I have to start the blog off, mostly lifted from other blogs that I like.

Topics
This is just a list of the kind of topics I normally chat about with Yigi, either in-game or offline. I figure we'll probably cover topics like:

Raiding
Economy
Class balance
Roles
PVP
Theorycrafting
PTR experiences
Alts
Guild building
Interface

Organization and Layout
To make it easier to navigate, I hope to keep tagging posts with useful labels, like the class that they pertain to, or the game version if it's a theorycrafting or PTR post. For example, this post will be tagged with "introduction" cause it's a rough introduction, and "blog" because it's about the blog itself.

Features
Features that I liked from other blogs that we should have are:

Wowhead mouseover links. Does this work? [Update: IT DOES WORK! SWEET. All Credit goes to Arcane Blaster]

Not Yet Implemented
Things I want to put in eventually:

Achievement feeds for our mains
Sigs for our mains and our alts in the sidebar

Well, that's about it. Next stop, content!