First dance with the Lich King!

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!

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

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