Friday Screencap 1: Representing You

Welcome to my Friday Screencaps wherein I’ll be presenting my take on the Through Your Interface – 15 Days of Screen Shots WoW Blogging Challenge. My little twist on this “Meme” was to make a “story” out of the combination of each day’s screenshots, extend the experience to 20 ‘days’, and to work on a writing topic that is “not entirely healery”. You’ll notice that I’ll be using and re-interpreting some of the topics from the 20 Days of… WoW Blogging Challenge meme as well.

This Friday I present “Representing You”: Show us an image that represents who you are in Azeroth and/or in real life.

Since I’m an altaholic healer, that loves to collect companion pets, I present my 2 Druids:

Druid U (on the left) is my main healer that gets all of the achievements and rare companion pets. Here she is with my favorite companion pet the Hyacinth Macaw (a guildie actually gave me that pet instead of putting it on the AH). Druid I (on the right) is my second druid healer (2 accounts) and is currently leveling her way through Outlands with Deathy. While posing my toons for this screenshot I noticed two things: 1) I’ve got a lot of “rp” pieces on U so I’ll be ready to transmogrify my gear in Patch 4.3 and 2) my second druid didn’t have very many companion pets.

Another part of my wow experience is that I enjoy all aspects of the game from questing to raiding to PvP, so here I present my Priest A in all of her PvP glory.

Ironically, I got the Baradin Fox on my priest and not my Druid U, so I’m always running around battlegrounds with my Fox following. I always imagine the sight this might bring to the Alliance players: bouncy priest healer runs in with a fox following, priest proceeds to heal her teammates while the fox dances on the corpses.

You’ll notice in both of the screencaps that while I show only female toons, the hair is not the same color or style across my toons, and I don’t really play a particular race. Each of my toons is unique and has a unique ‘personality’ even though I don’t play on an RP server. So representing my love of exploring new experiences with just a single character and screencap would be difficult to do. Fortunately, World of Warcraft provides an amazing variety of experiences for everyone.

Happy Healing!

Zul’Aman Healing 101

I’ve finally decided to produce a new set of Healing Cataclysm Installments for the ‘Troll Heroics’. I’ll be starting with Zul’Aman because I like that one the best of the two; Jin’do likes to troll me. I’ll continue with the boss by boss rundown with any notable trash that you’ve come to expect. Again these instances represent content that is only relevant on heroic so the gear linked will be the heroic versions.

Akil’Zon (Eagle)
On the left side of the instance the first boss you’ll encounter has roughly two parts, a basic tank/dps/heal part and a “everyone stand in place X” part that cycles until the boss is killed. During the basic fight part, the boss does Static Disruption, which is an AoE ability that’ll hit anything within 12 yards of Akil’zon and leave a debuff increasing nature damage taken by 25%, so spread out and if you can, paladins and shaman, use your nature resist. Dispel the debuff Call Lightning from the tank. During the second part, stand UNDER whoever has become the targeted player for the Electric Storm. He’s an umbrella that will save you from the deadly lightning. Finally, new to the encounter are Eagles called Amani Kidnappers that will pick players up and fly them around (don’t worry you can still heal if you’re picked up) doing increasing damage until they are killed. There are also a ton of non-elite brown birds that you’ll need to heal through the minor damage from (mostly just annoying).

Gear
Bracers of Hidden Purpose – Paladin’s rejoice if you see them!
Feathers of Akil’Zon – Druid shoulders with +Haste
Leggings of Ancient Magics – Alternative Pants upgrade if you’re a priest suffering from bad drop luck

Notable Trash
The bear riders guarding the alter of the next boss, especially in combination with the additional mobs, will wipe a group pretty quickly. A well timed Hex can certainly save you a headache.

Nalorakk (Bear)
Your first boss on the right side of the instance, Nalorakk, shapeshifts between caster and bear. In caster form, Nalorakk charges the furthest player standing away, inflicting a +500% damage taken debuff on the target. Rotate with other group members in being the furthest person away, usually the 3 dps will rotate as soakers. If you are assigned as a soaker, focus target the dps right before your turn and when you see the Surge debuff appear move out away from the boss, then move back in when you receive the debuff. When he switches to bear form there is heavy damage on the tank from Lacerating Slash so it’s a good time to use cooldowns. Also he does an AoE silence during this time, so make sure the tank is at full health right before he changes form.

Gear
Armbands of the Bear Spirit – Druid bracers with +Crit
Boots of the Ursine – Alternative Boots upgrade with +Mastery/Crit

Halazzi (Lynx)
Halazzi is one of the few bosses in this instance, that as a healer you mostly just need to keep the green bars filled. Stand in the green healing circle from Halazzi’s Water Totem as it grants mana. At 66% and 33%, Halazzi will summon Spirit of the Lynx and heal to 100%. The DPS should be focusing on killing the Spirit (which likes to randomly rush players), but does massive damage that healers will need to stay on top of. As a side note: if your group has decided not to destroy the Corrupted Lightning Totem, expect massive amounts of AoE damage.

Gear
Shadowmender Wristguards – Alternative Druid Bracers with +Haste/Mastery
Wristwraps of Departed Spirits – Priest Bracers with +Mastery

Notable Trash
The trash packs leading up to the next boss, will include Amani’shi Scouts. They run to a nearby drum and summon 2-3 Amani’shi Reinforcements, so if your dps aren’t ready to take these guys out you have similar wipe experiences as you do in the hallway leading up to Ozruk in Stonecore. Tailors can use an Embersilk Net to hold them in place until the dps can down them if they start running for the drums.

Jan’Alai (Dragonhawk)
Jan’Alai is mostly a mana conservation fight for healers. There isn’t a lot of damage if the group stays out of Flame Breath (straight line fire attack), but the Flame Buffet (which you should be cleansing off the tank) from the hatched eggs will suck your mana quickly. Watch for the Fire Bombs and make sure you don ‘t stand near them. Once Jan’Alai reaches 35% health, he will hatch all of the remaining eggs. If the dps have managed the hatchers appropriately, the number of dragonhawks should be managable even on the last legs of your mana. Once these dragonhawks are down, it’s simply a dps and mana race to the finish.

Gear
Boots of Bad Mojo – Paladin Boots with +Haste
Hawkscale Waistguard – Alternative Shaman Waist with +Haste/Mastery

Hexlord Malacrass
The two adds on the dias with hexlord Malacrass can each be one of eight different mobs. These can be crowd controlled and interrupted, so hopefully your group has the right combination of CC or interrupts to take care of that. Druids should remember they can Hibernate the Dragonkin if it’s one of the adds. Malacrass will assume the powers at random of the different classes in your group due to his power drain. Holy Paladins, your group will invariably take a lot of damage from the consecration power he’ll use. Moonfire from druids, mind blast from priests, and chain lightning from shaman can be painful to heal through too. Cleansing some of these abilities will be a quick drain on your mana so keep an eye on it.

Gear
Soul Drain Signet – A great ring with +Haste
Miniature Voodoo Mask – A fun trinket

Daakara
Daakara has three phases in which he will switch between two animal forms and a caster form every 33%. The two animal forms can be either
Bear and Eagle or Lynx and Dragonhawk.
Lynx: Daakara spawns two adds that can quickly destroy a player if they are not killed quickly, between Lynx Rush and Claw Rage. The tank should taunt during Claw Rage to split the damage taken. Claw Rage will hit one person repeatedly, and said person needs to be healed. It hurts a lot. Hopefully the tank is taunting during Claw Rage to split the damage taken.
Dragonhawk: Daakara creates Column of Fire that will spring up underneath you. Move out of them. He also will periodically cast Flame Whirl and “Flame Breath. Move out of them too.
Bear: Daakara casts Creeping Paralysis which can be cleansed. In this form just follow the same strategy as you did for Nalorakk.
Eagle: Daakara casts Summon Cyclone that spawns 5 cyclones for players to dodge. Players that run into cyclones will be hit by Zap. Be sure to kill the Lightning Totem to prevent additional damage from going out. As part of Energy Storm all spells cast will deal damage to the caster so be smart about deciding when to heal. It’s similar to Sindragosa’s Unchained Magic in ICC.

Gear
Amani Scepter of Rites – 1-Handed Healing Mace with +Mastery
Amani Headdress – Druid Helm with +Mastery
Hexing Robes – Priest Chest with +Mastery
Mask of Restless Spirits – Shaman Helm with +Crit

Tiny Patch

Patch Notes
Two items came down the pipe from Blizzard™ that certainly improve game experience.

Targeting
Now the holy paladins and discipline priests that use damage abilities to regenerate mana don’t have to worry about the weird targeting issues they have been experiencing.

Using an instant cast spell right after a target dies should no longer re-target the dead target’s body.
Using an ability immediately after switching targets should no longer affect the previous target.

 
Color-coding
With the number of heirloom items I collected during WotLK, keeping track of them when they blend in whith all of the white items in my bags has required multiple sticky notes. Here’s the solution!

The tooltip color for heirloom items has been returned to gold.

Source

Snippets Week 32: Catching Up

I lost track of which day it was and forgot to post on Tuesday, I must have had a run-in with a Jedi… So today’s post is going to be a “Snippets” post.

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Updates to Healing 101 Guides

I’ve periodically gone back and updated my Cataclysm dungeon guides with additional strategies and information as I notice the popularity of a guide. For example, I’ve recently updated Shadowfang Keep since that seems to be a really popular dungeon according to my site search terms. Additionally, I’ve added a Dungeon Guides page with links to my guides to keep them more accessible. I would like to eventually add to these guides with “guides” to the troll dungeons as well as ones for the dungeons while leveling. The troll dungeons have not been done because I haven’t run a lot of them this summer due to RL stuff. The latter is a rather significant undertaking and I’m still not sure how useful folks would find healing 101 guides for lowbies.

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Feral is Epic Too

Blog guides provide a easy to understand “cliff notes” version the theorycrafting information folks want to know but can’t always wade through the math to understand. Therefore, Resto is Epic’s Feral Bear Quick Guide is a great example of how useful those can be at anytime during an expansion. I know I don’t include a section in my Druid page on feral, but I chose not to because they don’t use mana during regular play, and a limited mana pool reduces the usefullness of their emergency heals. That doesn’t mean that Healing Druids don’t dual spec as feral dps, so here’s an alternative source for those folks.

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Learning Thru PvP

The best way to learn a new class is to put yourself in situations in which you need to use all of your spells and abilities to survive. What aspect of WoW comes the closest to this concept? Player versus Player: the video game version of “survival of the fittest”. Learning, relearning, or just getting comfortable with all of my spells on every new toon I roll motivates me to queue for a couple of battlegrounds while I level. It’s a great no pressure way to learn to get comfortable with your cooldowns, utility spells, and UI. On top of that you might just find you enjoy PvP enough to be serious about rated battlegrounds and/or arena. That’s why I want to provide a link to Cynwise’s latest post on choosing your PvP gear. Cynwise provides an easy to use spreadsheet that can be adapted for any class to prioritize your PvP gearing.

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More on Spreadsheets

I’ve been playing around with a variety of healing class spreadsheets for various activites (including PvP as seen above) and an interesting characteristic kept cropping up. I found that they all tend to emphasize HPS (health/heal per second) as the gearing and math goal. Unfortunately, that can make it somewhat difficult for a new healer to properly balance their gear for healing throughput versus mana regen. One alternative is to derive a kind of balanced metric as The Inconspicuous Bear did in their Resto spreadsheet. Considering how daunting the math can be for a new player that just wants to be geared correctly so they don’t get laughted out of a heroic pug; having simple tools to use in gearing that can be explored as they get more comfortable with the concepts is critical. I suspect I will be exploring the spreadsheet end of theorycrafting in more detail than just my “plug-n-chug” casual affair with it I’ve had since I started WoW.

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Happy Healing!

The Power of Power Auras

In the process of avoiding tackling the finishing touches on my post on unit frames as a means of healing, I ran across some posts on the use of a certain addon for tracking the up-time of the new Mastery for druids.

Symbiosis (Mastery) has been removed and replaced with Harmony. Harmony increases direct healing by an additional 10%, and casting direct healing spells grants an additional 10% bonus to periodic healing for 10 seconds. Each point of mastery increases each bonus by an additional 1.25%.

If you are a raiding druid, this change may be making you reach for your buff tracking addon of choice to track an additional “proc”. My go-to addon of choice is Power Auras, although I used to use TellMeWhen before I recognized the need for more configuration options. There are a myriad of alternatives such as Satrina’s Buff Frames, Auracle and many more. I’m going to talk about the power of Power Auras and how I utilize this amazing tool.

What is Power Auras?
Power Auras is a notification addon that will alert you to the buffs and debuffs on yourself, a groupmate/raidmate, target/focus, or an enemy. The biggest advantage of Power Auaras over many of the other buff/defuff watchers and notification addons is the customizability of the graphics and timers. Now while this is the biggest advantage of this addon, it is also like Grid it’s biggest disadvantage because it can take a lot of practice to configure your notifications in just the right way to get it to show up at the right time and in the right place. Therefore, I present you with three sources to get you started on what is power auras and the basics of creating a notification:

• Wow Insider’s Addon Spotlight article
• Tankspot tutorial
• Guide by Righteous Fury Blogger – Labeled pictures are very useful
• Power Auras Wiki

Healing 101: Making the Most of Macros

Introduction: What are Macros?
Macros allow you to trigger a combination of in-game actions so that you can play more efficiently (similar to the benefits of key bindings). These include: equip items, use items, cast spells and abilities, store targets as your focus, and execute commands such as summoning a non-combat companion pet. You cannot use a macro to create a single click to perform a sequence of spells or wait for a GCD to expire for a spell to activate. To create a new macro, either type /macro, or click on the speech bubble next to the chat box and select macro. You can then give a macro a name, an icon and type in a few lines of slash commands. The macro is created in the form of a button that you can drag onto your actionbar for easy access and keybinding.

Over at WoW Insider you can find an archived multi-part introductory set of guides to macros that will provide a good bit of info for anyone just getting started with macros. Check them out starting with:
Macro Anatomy: Primer
Macro Anatomy: Crawl phase
Macro Anatomy: Walk phase
Macro Anatomy: Run phase and beyond!

Introduction: Why Macros?
So now that you know what macros are, how to make a macro, the basic rules, and some examples…why am I providing this information in a healing blog? Well, as a follow on to my Healing Addons post, an alternative to using one of those addons is to use the blizzard default unit frames along with specialized targeting macros (called mouseover macros) to facilitate efficient healing.

Healing Macros
Since mouseover macros are such a frequent alternative to using healing addons, Matticus has a post – A Guide to Mouseover Macros – covering what mouseover macros are, how to create them, and some examples. Aside from the mouseover macros, there are several general, “every healer” should have these types of macros that I’ve gathered together here. There are plenty of other macros that I use that don’t have a direct application to healing that I’ve tried to refrain from mixing in my list. The next lists are some macros that are somewhat unique to the healing classes due to spell interaction and use. Note: Some of these macros have not been used by me in Cataclysm but they were pulled from my character macros so were useful at one time.

Healing Survey 4.0

So the healing survey started by Miss Medicina is circling the healer blog community again. I didn’t get tagged myself, probably because I’m not on twitter with the rest of the healers, but since I joined in the last time I figured I’d get back into the swing of things again with my updated response. Since it is an update I’ve followed the same format as my old post, while here I actually cover all of the healing classes.

PvP Product Line

In my weekly blog reading, I came across an amazing analogy produced by one of the advanced pvp blog writers I recommended last week.

I like Product A, and have liked it for a while. But now, in order to enjoy Product A, I have to also buy Product RBG, which is more expensive, is more of a hassle to assemble, and takes longer to deal with. I can get Product A on its own, but I get less than I used to without Product RBG.

And this change is because sales of Product RBG are low. It’s a quirk of the product that if more people had Product RBG, it would probably be easier to use, which is arguably a good thing for the vendor.
— Cynwise’s Battlefield Manual

I wanted to post this because it represents one of the constant trade-offs that occur for the casual player. Before the “great raid restructuring” that occurred with Cataclysm, this argument could be used by a casual PvE player as follows:

I like Product 10, and have liked it for a while. But in order to enjoy Product 10, I have to also buy Product 25, which is more expensive, is more of a hassle to assemble, and takes longer to deal with. I can get Product 10 on its own, but I get less than I would without Product 25.

And this change is because the combined sales of Product 25 and Product 10 are low. It’s a quirk of the product that if more people had Product 25, it would probably be easier to use Product 10, which is arguably a good thing for the vendor.

Except in the PvP case, instead of everyone being able to use Product A/Product 10, they are requiring everyone to use Product RBG/Product 25. What if they balanced raiding such that the Valor Points awarded for 25 man raids so overshadowed the 10 man raids that in order to get your Valor Point cap for the week you were required to do 25 man raids in the current lockout structure? Um, yeah. This line of thinking is going to take me down a rabbit hole I don’t want to see the inside of… I leave it there and make your brain hurt instead.

Happy Healing!

The 7 ‘P’s of PvP

Since I brought it up in the last post and it seems to be a popular topic right now, I thought I’d provide a healing 101 post on PvP. According to one of my favorite military adages: “Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. So lets prepare for PvP…

For an absolute beginner at PvP head on over to Wow Insider’s PvP Introduction and Beginner’s Guides to Battlegrounds. These will introduce you to the basics of what is PvP and battlegrounds. Arenas are an advanced form of PvP and is usually played by experienced PvPers and I will touch on arena toward the end of the discussion, but for most of this post I’ll talk about battlegrounds. So now that you know what PvP is, you might be wondering how does a healer fit into this?

While Battleground roles are not as simple as PvE raid roles, they are replaced by situational roles for each battleground. Healers still play a defensive role in that they are serving in the situational battlefield roles such as flag carrier support and enemy flag carrier offensive group support. However, a new healer jumping into a battleground for the first time in Cataclysm will encounter a lot of factors that make it particularly confusing. Not only is the new player dumped into a new environment completely different from questing or dungeons, but also within your typical random battleground group you have potential social factors such as are somewhat encountered in dungeons, but to a more extreme. PvP and battlegrounds are a chaotic, messy experience, but there is a certain rush to keeping a teammate alive long enough to win a ‘node’ or ‘cap a flag’.

So you’ve queued for your first battleground (whether at level 10 or level 85) and now you are hooked. What’s next? Planning and Preparation! Planning involves understanding the basic strategies and terminology of the battlegrounds you are playing. For simple battleground strategies (and the terminology you will see to convey this) I won’t rehash what Cynwise has done a good job of providing in Simple Battleground Strategies and his amazing post on alternative maps for the battlegrounds. These are older posts and don’t cover the Cataclysm battlegrounds Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks, however he has a later strategy discussion for Battle for Gilneas and the strategies for Twin Peaks somewhat resemble Warsong Gulch.

Now for the Preparation piece! At this point you are ready for gearing, talents, and playstyle. Gearing in PvP is similar to raiding but with a slight twist, you want slightly different gear. PvP gear has to keep you alive so you can do your job, therefore you lose potential healing output as a tradeoff for survival. Resilience is the first stat on PvP gear that is different. It reduces the incoming damage you take, this means fewer heals you have to cast. Ideal is around 32-40% resilience to be able to keep yourself up against any dps 1v1 using only your non-casted heals and timing your cds. The next two stats that are a little different compared to PvE are hit cap and spell penetration, which are basically: 6% hit and 195 spell penetration (for most situations). Some healing classes have talents and glyphs that change these numbers, but those are a standard metric, and for more information I recommend more advanced reading. Finally, the other stat we need is our basic stat: intellect. Talent specs are somewhat based on personal playstyle so I recommend trying a couple of options and find what works best for you. This brings me to playstyle…

Playstyle is the type and level of PvP that you engage in, whether it’s a casual battleground or a ranked 3v3 arena team. THE source of all things PvP for serious PvPers is Arena Junkies, and arena is a whole new level of battle. Now while I have stepped foot into all forms of PvP (including rated battlegrounds and arena), I am certainly not ranked, nor do I pretend to know even the tip of the PvP iceberg. But I bring you this battle plan so that you may find enjoyment in a different aspect of WoW.

Other advanced reading I recommend:
Oombulance(A Druid PvP Guide)
Cynwise’s Battlefield Manual
WoW Insider: Art of Warcraft

Happy Healing

Twixt Night and Morn

I recently had a guildy whisper me with the news that his interest in the game was renewed after he recently geared out his 3rd pvp toon, a holy paladin. I was excited that he’d reconnected with the game as I knew he was getting burnt out with it. In the process of the conversation I mentioned that I had yet to get around to gearing my druid for pvp as there was too much for me to see and do with my limited play time right now. The conversation led to an agreement that he’d have to invite me to run a bunch of battlegrounds with my druid and not my geared out priest so that I would finally gear my druid. Note that he’s mostly into pvp not pve and we do regular bgs and arena together so this conversation was not unusual between the two of us.

I mention this little story because of a recent post by one of my favorite bloggers BBB with his posts When you wish upon a star and One inch deep and a million miles wide. Both the titles and the content motivated me to blog about the concepts of burn-out and finding a new interest in the game. In fact, any readers left on my blog may assume that I left the blogging scene, which happens all too frequently. For those readers wondering, I’ve moved to a different state and gotten a new job in the past two months so limited time to play or blog. I’m not burnt-out on the game, I’m in fact finding so much to do that I don’t have time to do everything I want to. One of my previous posts mention my dual boxing efforts and demonstrate that I’m a terribly avid altaholic with two accounts just so that I could level another set of healers.

I’m seeing a lot of comments right now on the forums and blogsphere from active folks hoping that patch 4.2 will prevent the decline in players logging in and the general concerns about burnout within the player base. As manaobscura pointed out there are three contributors to burnout: variety, frustration, and re-playability. Those players that are not running heroics or doing PvP, leveling alts, or even role playing are the ones that are limiting their ability to find variety and re-playability within the game. To a certain extent Blizzard is responsible for limiting the lack of re-playability of the game, but the factors of variety and frustration are primarily player centered. Additionally, with the higher priority blizzard placed on guilds with the Cataclysm expansion, the social aspect of the game is a stronger factor than anything else keeping players active and motivated. Therefore, if a player limits themselves to a single toon and a single activity within the game (i.e., raiding) they are just speeding themselves down the path of lack of variety and increased frustration.

BBB found variety in leveling an alt, my guildy found re-playability by gearing out another alt for pvp, and I’ve found both in the fact that I enjoy both pve and pvp. For me, it helps that I’m part of an amazing guild that is very alt friendly and will support each other both in and out of the game. I’ve found continued interest in the game and hope many others will continue to hold strong to a game that “hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.”

Quote by Lord Byron