Healer DPS

Hello, my name is Mak, and I like healing! Why do I bring this up and point out the obvious? Because of a weird trend I noticed in all of the Cataclysm talent preview information. In fact it is particularly noticeable in the druid and priest talent changes. That horrible specter DPS has shown up on healing talents!

For example:

[Improved Tree of Life – Reduces the cooldown of your Tree of Life by 90 sec., and increases your damage done while in  Tree of Life by 15%.]

[Evangelism – When you cast Smite, you gain Evangelism increasing the damage done by your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova and Penance spells by 4% and reduces the mana cost of those spells by 6% for 15 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.]

Wuh?! If I wanted to kill things I would play a dps character! Is Blizzard seriously catering to the bored, over-geared healer whining by requiring healers to produce damage output? Does this mean that boss fights are now going to require healers to dps on top of trying to keep 9/24 other people alive? I hope that the cataclysm testers actually try to use this so that the designers realize how bad of an idea it is. On top of losing tree form now I’ll be required to tell the tank sorry you died I was dpsing to get a healing proc.

I’m really flabbergasted with these talent changes…

P.S. This was instigated by the post over on Shy at WoW.

Healing Raiding

One of the things that have been on my plate lately is the lack of interest in raiding, especially since there are folks still interested in making progress in ICC. So this is a little rant and a little opinion with some actual math thrown in.

Now the casual guild that I’m in has an unwritten policy that if a guildie can walk in the door we take them. Unfortunately, in the case of ICC it really does have a gear/skill requirement. In principle I have nothing against this practice, but for a casual guild containing members interested in raiding it poses a problem. Let me describe the problem for you in a little more detail.

Festergut unfortunately is really the first boss that you see this “skill check” in action so I’m going to use him in my example. Now I’m going to use a little math here so you can see where my frustration is stemming.

Two points:

• Festergut has 9,412,000 health in 10-man normal.
• He has an enrage timer of 5 minutes.

So, with some math, you have 9,412,000/5 ≈ 1,882,400 health that you have to damage per minute and 31374 health per second. If you divide that up by the number of players that are actually damaging the boss in a 10-man raid (assuming 6 dps, 2 tanks, 2 healers for a total of 8 damage dealers), you need to have roughly 3923 damage per second occurring to just barely meet the enrage timer.

But wait, now we have to take into account that this fight requires some movement (Gas Spores) and that the tanks aren’t going to be doing high dps due to the very nature of tanking, we lose “uptime” and total dps. This means that at a very generous 97% uptime and the assumption that you will lose roughly 20% from the optimum damage per minute from the tanks (that’s tanks doing about 2500 damage per second), the damage per second you need is at minimum 4043 and on average closer to 4620 damage per second from the 6 damage dealers and roughly 2500 from the 2 tanks.

So why have I done all of this math… To demonstrate why a casual guild’s reality can be a hinderance for the people that really put the effort into their toons and want to see more progress in a raid such as ICC. Now go back to my comment about taking any guildies that can walk in the door. If we are short 1-2 for our raid, we will literally take any guildy that has an 80 toon, even if they just got their first toon to 80 yesterday. When that happens week after week, with different new folks getting pulled in; not only do we have the time constraint of trying to reach the Plague Wing of ICC within our 2-3 hour once a week window while teaching new folks the fights, but we also have “skill checks” that we just aren’t going to meet. Anyone that has played the game for any length of time is going to realize that a new player that recently hit 80 just is not going to meet the damage requirements for this boss.

Finally, I bring you this post because it’s my opinion that it’s great that Blizzard has provided methods such as a buff to allow casual players see more (if not all) of the content they have designed. This scenario is exactly why they provide these features. Otherwise my guild would not get a chance to see anything past the first wing (btw last night we downed Valithria for the first time after an hour of wiping).

Also, before anyone reading this starts to wonder why we don’t just refuse to bring these new toons, pug in more experienced players to those spots, or raid more nights a week, I want to note that those will never be high likelihood options for this guild and I wouldn’t change my guild for all the gold in Azeroth.

Ahh a Meme!

Ok. I love meme’s they always end up giving me all kinds of later post ideas so here is one I found randomly sorting my feed reader links (thanks Sorry Caps). Edit: Missed a question.

1. Raider, farmer, PvPer, or altoholic?
Yes, I’m a raider, farmer, PvPer and an altoholic. Of course, that’s assuming the toon I’m raiding, farming, PvPing, or leveling is a healing class of some kind.

2. Favorite raid or dungeon?
My favorite raid is Naxx (10 man) probably because it has some of the best memories for me with my guildies. Oh the memories! Although, I have to say, I do enjoy ToC10 because it was a real defining point in my raiding experiences. My favorite dungeon is Halls of Lightning because I love the design of the dungeon and the boss encounters actually feel different in this dungeon compared to many of the others.

3. Number one choice for a new playable race?
We were actually discussing this one evening, listing all of the potential playable races. I voted for Murlocs!

4. Class you suck the most at?
Melee DPS. I’ve got some experience at ranged dps and tanking, both of which I don’t fail at too much, but Melee DPS (my dk for example) will never be a serious or leveled class for me.

5. Original UI or modded UI?
I have a lot of Addons, mostly because I have alts to keep track of. Also, healing without an Addon is not doing anything except making you feel better about yourself. The Situation Awareness and Usability improvements Mods provide are just too much of an factor for me.

6. Profession you’ve never leveled past 200?
The only reason I don’t have enchanting, inscription, blacksmithing, or jewelcrafting are because my brother and I tried to complement our professions on our leveling “pairs” and he got those. Profession leveling is never an obstacle for me, I even have cooking leveled to 450 on three of my 80s and fishing at 450 and 250 on 2 of them.

7. Favorite flying mount?
Ok, I’ll admit I kind of like the profession specific flying mounts, my carpet and roflcopter are fun!

8. Nozdormu — friend or foe, you figure?
I’m horrible with the lore stuff, although there is at least a quest chain “Test of Lore” that requires you to know some basic info about the dragon flights or I wouldn’t even know who Nozdormu is. I figure Nozdormu as friend in general.

9. Useless item you have in your bank that you’ll never get rid of?
Another one that has been a source of conversation/amusement amongst my guildies as we are all pretty horrible pack rats. We once had a linking competition in gchat of the most obscure/random/weirdest bits we still had on our toons (our co-GM won of course). I have the Invitation to the Blood Elf party on three of my toons that I just keep holding onto for some reason.

10. Most expensive thing you’ve ever bought?
Uhm. In game I uhm don’t buy things per se so I can’t really say I’ve bought anything expensive, but I was bought/handed a Darkmoon Card:Beserker for PvP early on, which was hawt for a disc priest just starting arenas.

11. Favorite starting area?
Ooh. Horde – I like Tauren 1-10 and Ghostlands for 10-20. Alliance – I like the the Dranei starting zone the best so far.

12. Inane goal you worked hardest to achieve?
It’s a long strange trip achievement. I’ve got it on my druid and I’m one holiday away from it on my priest. School of Hard Knocks is teh suck even for an experienced dabbler in pvp.

13. Darion Mograine VS Tirion Fordring, gloves off — winner is?
Confirmed hordie who doesn’t know lore unless I have to for a quest…they are alliance right?

14. Game music or your own playlist?
Some of the game music is worth hearing and the voices/quotes from NPCs are awesome. However, I have limits on the loudness of my sound due to co-location of my roommates computer so mostly I put headphones on and listen to my own playlist off of another system.

15. Particular option or setting that you always toggle on a new alt/server?
Hehe. Besides setting up the right profiles in my Addons, I always make sure Auto Loot is toggled on.

16. Highest amount of levels gained in one play session?
Refer-a-friend and a higher level running repeated trips through Scarlet Monastery once netted us what we call the “Day of Seven Levels”.

17. Thing you’d most like to experience or see in-game?
Gosh there is so much to the game that I’ve not experienced or seen that I think it would be neat to see/experience. I would have to say at this stage, the thing I’d most like to see is a conquered Lich King fight.

18. Worst PuG moment?
Oh dear. I think I’ve hinted at some of my horrible PuG experiences on my blog before, but the worst is probably that CoT:CoS in “It came from the PuG”.

19. Best dungeon/raid moment?
Oh gosh there are plenty of great memories with my guildies, however, one we still talk about nearly a year later is a Naxx10 Kel fight that was about to wipe. Our very new holy pally learned a lot about raiding and her class that had the whole guild cheering her on as well as special mention in the Guild Message of the Day. We have plenty of stories that really only mean anything to us, but that still give us a chuckle and will for many years down the road.

20. Worst quest ever that you totally hate doing?
There are very few quests that I totally hate doing, but I’m definitely not fond of the beginning quests in Zul’Drak.

21. First thing you do when you hit 80?
Train my new skills then pull all of the level 80 gear out of the bank and put it on. If guildies are online this is usually immediately followed by 2-5 heroics in a row.

22. Character (of yours) you would RP as if you had to?
All of my toons have a personality, but my druid is usually the one that I tend to RP in very minor ways.

23. Keyboard, mouse, or both for using abilities?
I’ve actually done a post on the pros and cons of keyboard and mouse use. I personally use both depending on the situation and the role (e.g., mouse binding with my Addon for healing spells and keyboard bindings for everything else).

24. Thottbot or WoWhead?
I actually prefer the comment structure of Thottbot to Wowhead, but for finding items for linking and reference I tend to use wowhead.

25. Acronym you’ve seen in chat but don’t understand?
At this point with all of my blog and forum reading there are very few acronyms that I don’t understand. In fact I can’t even think of one at the moment.

26. Plot point you’d like to see resolved someday?
Huh? Again, not very good with the lore, try as I might. If someone could draw me a timeline and overall family tree of wow NPCs and events I might be able to tell ya.

27. Biggest thing you’re looking forward to in Cataclysm?
The biggest thing I’m looking forward to in Cata is the guild perks. My guild has a very wide range of activities and interests so we are all looking forward to seeing how far and how quickly we develop as a guild.

28. Guild event you’d like to see?
I’m not sure what kind of guild event I’d like to see. I’ve met almost all of my guildies in person and we raid, pvp, and level together all of the time. The only kind of event we haven’t really done is a structured social kind of thing like a scavenger hunt or something.

29. Level range you hate being in?
I hate the level 34-45 range, it seems the questing gets very spread out and sparse at this range. Once I hit 45 it seems like a breeze to get to 80.

30. Favorite map to quest in?
Map I’ve quested in on almost every character in old world is Tirisfal Glades, Outlands is Zangarmarsh and NR is Borean Tundra. Of these, Zangarmarsh is probably my favorite.

Going Forward and the Vault of Woes

In case you were wondering where I’ve been… why I’ve been gearing out my new Level 80 Paladin. Although, I did start out ahead with several crafted pieces and lots of honor from pvping during those early levels.

A month later and I have healed the first wing of ICC 10 twice on my pally, have mostly ilvl 232 gear and some ICC pieces. I’ve also dual specc’d into tanking….which has been a new experience.

In fact several weeks ago when Udluar was the weekly raid I ended up off-tanking Ignis, Razorscale, and XT-002, netting me the Seige of Ulduar achievement.  It was one of those, oh hey lets go do XT-002 while we are here, oh wait, who’s off-tank? Then, they realize that their usual healer is on her toon with the dual tank spec. It’s moments like these that I always carry around all of my off-spec gear, so that my guild can pull crazy stuff off that they wouldn’t normally be able to do.

The interesting phenomenon that induced me to actually write a post after nearly 2-months of silence were a couple of posts by regular bloggers (BBB and the Gnome) talking about Wintergrasp. They have noticed the wierd unbalance that has occured on most realms themselves, probably not in so many words, but there nonetheless. My HORDE toons on my normal realm have really felt the pinch. Let me give you a graph (from Time Until Wintergrasp) to describe this unbalance:

Yes, you’re reading that right. That is what I have to deal with on a monthly basis for the opportunity to get easy epics from this mythical place called Vault of Archavon.  (Btw, how many folks actually remember the Archavon fight anymore? Noticed that lack in your pugs lately?) Sadly, the horde manage to win regularly on Monday evenings (don’t ask me why but it’s been true for the last 3 weeks) between 12am and 1am my time and 9-10pm server time (I’m EST the server is PDT). So if I’m not half asleep at my keyboard we can manage a guild run into Vault. Yay! Since I can’t pug even when the Horde has WG due to runs that fall apart after the first wipe on the frost boss, this is an exciting opportunity for me.

The truely sad part is that I love to battleground pvp on my priest and it’s like this even in the actual battlegrounds. So all the alliance out there belly-achin’ because the horde always win in your battlegroup, guess what, you’re in the wrong battlegroup! I’m so looking forward to Cataclysm so that at least the AB, AV, and WSG fights will hopefully be thinned out with horde that can actually win a BG!

Knocking on the Door

I have the Violet Proto Drake on my resto druid yay! School of Hard Knocks was the last one I needed too. Now, while it is fortunate that I pvp regularly (even arena), I still dreaded the experience of competeing with thousands of other people for 2-6 opportunities for an objective. My persistence paid off though and I’m now working on getting the achievement for future possible meta’s on my resto shaman, disc priest, and holy pally, but I’m  going the more leisurely route with them.

Anyways I thought I would share some info with folks that are nervous about this holiday:

First, I recommend reading Cynwise’s Guide to School of Hard Knocks. He explains the basics very well and gives really good tips on getting the objectives. His tips helped me get some of them on my other toons when I got into groups that were not “cooperative” groups.

Second, cross your fingers that you get some helpful Alliance/Horde players in Warsong Gulch because otherwise that is going to be the hardest to get due to timing and the need for more actual pvp on your part.

Third, I’ve noticed that Eye of the Storm seems to be the one least likely to have cooperative groups (Anyone with any ideas on why this one versus the others?). So, you may need to take the initiative to request cooperation from your fellow faction members.

Good luck and your persistence will pay off!

Illidan’s Dead

Yes, that’s my guild’s raid last week. We went into Black Temple to take down Illidan. It was a run we did purely for fun; something that seems to be missing from the game right now for some people.  In the wait until Cataclysm is released many folks have lost interest and/or are playing less often. For a casual guild that only schedules  one day a week for raiding for 2-3 hours (east and west coast players) getting 10 players online can sometimes be difficult. So what do you do? You visit content that can be done by 7-8 players. By the end of the run we did have 10, but that was through text messaging folks that particularly wanted the achievement and late loggers.

It was particularly fun trying to accomplish this with 1-2 tanks and 1-2 healers. We had one of the tanks and one of the healers switching to dps whenever we could get away with it. I can say that aside from the Reliquary of Souls, Illidari Council, and Illidan most of the fights could easily be single healed and single tanked. We did all of the fights but those three without reading any kind of boss strategy. The Reliquary and Illidan were the only ones that resulted in a wipe, simply because we needed to see and experience the strategy once to understand what we were doing. The laughter and comraderie that we expereinced was just fantastic.

Earth Day: One of Each

Happy Earth Day folks! In the spirit of this day I’m recycling a post, but don’t worry I’m including edits to update it.

Yes, you would be right in that I’ve been leveling my paladin a lot lately, in fact as of this posting I’ve reached level 66 74! I really want to get one of each healing class to level 80 so that I can get a feel for myself on how they are different rather than just reading about it (in the case of the paladin). In fact I’ve made great progress.

For the interested reader, no I’m not leveling strictly holy, I’ve dual spec’d so that I can heal battlegrounds and dungeons, but quest as a retribution paladin. I quested as a holy paladin for the first 40 levels, it’s possible but takes longer due to reduced damage abilities and not necessary after that point with dual specs available. Also, I have BoA pieces for both a holy paladin and a ret paladin (granted the pieces for my holy set are mail leftovers from my shaman) so I’m sufficiently geared in either spec to achieve the goals of that spec.

Anyways, when I made it to Outlands Northrend I did some questing and ran into some folks doing group quests that then invited me to do a random dungeon with them. So my first experience healing on a paladin in Northrend was Utgard Keep. Fortunately I’ve read and  heard that the key to a beginning paladin is to mind your ABCs (Always Be Casting). It turned out to be a bit of a trial as I felt I was always out of mana, unfortunately the group was so inexperienced that it ended up falling apart after the first boss. I ended up talking my brother into tanking an all guild run (yes, we had enough folks around level 70-73) and had no problems, but I’m still nervous to try to heal in Northrend because folks try to run the instances like they are level 80 and my gear is just not up to it. Have you actually looked at the plate itemization in Northrend quests lately? It’s kinda geared toward death knights, so most of my holy gear is “of the gorilla” and “of the eagle”.  Fortunately, just recently I managed to snag a group with some level 80s running through Karazahn (yes, the raid) and picked up a couple of nice pieces there to update some of my holy stuff. So there you have my first experiences of the paladin healing in Northrend.

On another experimental track, I spent a couple weeks with dual spec on my priest to pvp disc and pve holy. The lessons learned are probably enough to fill a whole post themselves so I’ll leave you with my take-away: “Don’t try something drastically new unless you are certain that you will have the time and opportunity to learn it gradually.” Interestingly, my co-healer for our guild runs has decided to switch her shadow spec to disc to try it out too which experiment is currently in progress so I’ll keep you posted. Furthermore, one of the guilds’ hunters is in the process of leveling a priest discipline through dungeons and battlegrounds and claims to be absolutely having a blast… For so long I was the only guildie with a disc priest, now two of them are trying it out!

As a third experimental activity, I’ve decided to create an alt in Single Abstract Noun – US. I went with a druid because, well I always create druids when I start an alt on a new realm, I just like my tree. I’m horrible about logging into another realm other than where my 80s are because I always have something else I can do with them, so we’ll see how often I manage it. (Turns out, almost never.) However, I also have some friends in an alliance guild on another server completely that I’ve been on a little more, and I have my druid there up to level 27, so maybe someday I’ll get around to it.

Happy Earth Day folks!

Sound of Silence

I know I’ve been silent for a while and anyone that was following me has probably stopped, but life takes over sometimes until suddenly you realize that you left something fun behind. So after reading several blogs discussing the class change previews about druids I had to chime in with my thoughts on the topic. More after the cut.

Coffee Break: One of Each

Yes, you would be right in that I’ve been leveling my paladin a lot lately, in fact as of this posting I’ve reached level 66. I really want to get one of each healing class to level 80 so that I can get a feel for myself on how they are different rather than just reading about it (in the case of the paladin). In fact I’ve made great progress in the last month considering a week long business trip and a week long vacation with family.

For the interested reader, no I’m not leveling strictly holy, I’ve dual spec’d so that I can heal battlegrounds and dungeons, but quest as a retribution paladin. I quested as a holy paladin for the first 40 levels, it’s possible but takes longer due to reduced damage abilities and not necessary after that point with dual specs available. Also, I have BoA pieces for both a holy paladin and a ret paladin (granted the pieces for my holy set are mail leftovers from my shaman) so I’m sufficiently geared in either spec to achieve the goals of that spec.

Anyways, when I made it to Outlands I did some questing and ran into some folks doing group quests that then invited me to do a random dungeon with them. So my first experience healing on a paladin outside of a battleground was Blood Furnace. Fortunately I’ve read and  heard that the key to a beginning paladin is to mind your ABCs (Always Be Casting). It turned out to be a bit of a trial as I felt I was always out of mana, but the ABC mantra helped me stay on track in keeping a Pugged group alive. The very next day two guildies with toons at the same level inquired if I would like to join them in doing a random dungeon, which I did as well. So there you have my first experiences of the paladin healing outside of battlegrounds.

On another experimental track, I spent a couple weeks with dual spec on my priest to pvp disc and holy. It was okay working to learn by fire in five mans, but my guild had just enough folks online the other night to do a Trial of the Crusader run, and I went in on my priest. Boy did that change my mind, the whole raid was flipping out when we wiped because myself and our best paladin healer were both in the run, so they expected it to be a quick farm run with regard to healing. Hah! I immediately switched over to my pvp disc spec, because I figured at least a slightly gimped style that I can do in my sleep would be better than struggling to learn by fire my holy spec in a raid. Sadly, it scared me so much to let my guildies down that way that I went right back to a disc pve spec in place of the holy spec (so I’m now disc pvp and disc pve). The lessons learned are probably enough to fill a whole post themselves so I’ll leave you with my take-away: “Don’t try something drastically new unless you are certain that you will have the time and opportunity to learn it gradually.”

As a third experimental activity, I’ve decided to create an alt in Single Abstract Noun – US. I went with a druid because, well I always create druids when I start an alt on a new realm, I just like my tree. I’m horrible about logging into another realm other than where my 80s are because I always have something else I can do with them, so we’ll see how often I manage it.

It Came from the PUG

Yes, it’s been a while since I posted, you wouldn’t believe how much piles up after a week out of town due to work, especially right before a holiday. Also, due to my time away, I’m going to abuse the title creativity of BBB, because it so accurately fits this post and my blog writing creativity isn’t flowing yet. So let me tell you a short story about a pug run I was in recently and then explain how it highlights a common problem…

I queue for a random heroic on my main, a 10-man strict raid geared druid; so decently geared and itemized, but clearly not a progression raider. I pop into Culling of Strat. with a paladin (the tank), a warrior, and 2 death knights, all from the same server, but only the pally and the warrior from the same guild. While we are standing around waiting for the lore to finish I inspect the “tank’s” gear to get an idea of what kind of tank style the pally is gearing for (I’m leveling a pally and like to get a feel for how others gear and talent theirs). First thing I notice just before we start the first fight is that the tank is not defense capped, all kinds of pretty dps ilevel 232 and 245 gear, but only 2 pieces with defense on them. If I’d had any idea how this was going to play out, I would have dropped group then, instead I spoke up…

Me: Uhm. mr tank you’re not defense capped?
Tank: lol. that’s what I just said to Warrior
Warrior: he’s really good I’ve ran with him before

So many things ran through my head at that moment; I should have gone ahead then and dropped group, but no, I wanted my frost badges and this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found myself in a bad pug. But here is my first mistake, and while overly blunt, is probably something close to what most healers would at least think upon encountering this situation:

Me: Isn’t that kind of rude to assume that your healer is going to outgear the heroic instance enough to keep a tank up that isn’t defense capped? I imagine you have a higher number of wipes and healers drop group.

This is where the whole feeling of the run changes, with the tank calling me all kinds of names for “calling him rude” and his warrior guildie repeatedly going “but I’ve ran with him before and he’s really good”. Meanwhile, one of the dks starts whispering me that they are idiots and not to worry about it. The point that really stands out for me though, is this comment (which sadly I did not screencap)…

Tank: gs<<skill

At this point hopefully you too are doing a /faceplam and recognize the same logical fallacies that I did. To finish the “story”, we got through the run without any wipes, got the extra boss, and the whispering dk thanked me for sticking it through as he was just trying to get emblems for his undergeared alt. I do also want to thank that whispering dk, who while his comments probably weren’t in the best taste, kept my spirits up enough that I didn’t beat my head against the keyboard in frustration.

So let me start with the first logical fallacy of this pug, in case you missed it: this tank was equating gearscore (gs) with defense cap.  Gearscore is not the same thing as the stat defense cap! I would have been perfectly fine if his gearscore was < ilevel200 as long as he had the recommended 535 defense for heroics, because there is no healing I can do to prevent a boss from dealing a crushing blow that kills the tank.

The second problem with this pug that I wanted to highlight and discuss was the fact that both the tank and the dps warrior were defending the tank’s gearscore. It’s one of the inherent problems with the current system of gearing in Wrath of the Lich King that players can get the top 10-man tier level of  gear just from running a rapid sequence of heroics for the emblems. So a common response by raiders is to request an achievement link or check gearscores. This results in any mention of gear to be a contentious subject in pugs. As an ironic note, I don’t even have a method of checking a person’s gearscore without looking them up on wow-heroes.com or pugchecker.com.

My lesson learned: I will be using a macro that calculates defense cap for all future pugged tanks and if they aren’t within 15 points (e.g., 520) of defense cap for the content we are in, I will be dropping  group.