PUG is the Time-Killer

The Daily Blink: "The Loot Must Flow"

If you don’t read The Daily Blink you’re missing out on some amazing “tongue-in-cheek” humor, which is where most of my humor stands… I saw this the other day and considering what I’ve been doing lately in between researching for my next Healing 101 post, it really had me laughing. My posts have been slower lately because I’ve been busy with RL stuff that has left me just enough time most days to get a pug LFD run done on 1-2 of my characters, especially my lowbie alts. Now while I hate to add to the pugging woes posts, new players (especially healers) might find something useful from this post, just as most healers say they pug to get better at healing.

Most of my alts are in the 60-80 level range so I get to run a lot of Outlands or Northrend dungeons and I’ve especially been leveling a holy paladin, a frost mage, a demo warlock, and a resto druid through these dungeon runs. While all of these dungeon runs for the most part are smooth, quick runs in BoA gear it does require teamwork to get through the run without a wipe and I’ve found that the teamwork tends to breakdown in one of the three following ways:

1. A dps decides that the tank is not doing their job in some way, so starts pulling extra groups, expecting the tank to pull the groups off of them.
2. The healer decides that they are not going to heal for whatever reason and/or starts pulling extra group for the tank to pull off of them.
3. A tank decides to start pulling extra groups expecting that they will be able to hold aggro on all of them and off the AoE of the dps.

I have weird and humorous dungeon experiences for each of these teamwork breakdowns and I shall relate one of the more memorable ones to you since I love telling stories and all names have been forgotten anyways so the innocent and guilty alike shall remain anonymous.

Story: I zone into a new Underbog run on my Warlock, the tank (Protadin) pulls the first and what appears to be the second group, he and the mage die almost right away. The healer (Priestly), a dk and I are still fighting the mobs. My response is to soulburn and summon my Voidwalker to tank a set of the mobs while the dk and I each concentrate on a single mob to burn it down, while Priestly heals the two of us. This seems to work and we manage to survive and resurrect Protadin and the mage. Protadin runs to the next set of mobs while Priestly just stands off to the side. We manage to get the next group down and Protadin proceeds to run to the next set of mobs, Priestly meanwhile has moved over near another set of mobs that are patrolling in from the right. This results in an extra large pull, all the while Priestly is just standing there. The rest of the group notices Priestly’s lack of action and poor choice of standing location and requests that he heal the group. No response  to the questions in party chat posed to Priestly and we proceed to the next group of mobs. Protadin pulls the group, Priestly moves over and pulls another group, doesn’t heal and just stands there while the mobs die and the party’s health drops. The group waits a few minutes while Priestly still stands there doing nothing, but Protadin runs on to the next group of mobs which proceed to wipe the entire party. At this point one of the other party members realizes the teamwork breakdown in progress and initiates a vote to kick Priestly (which passes). The rest of the run is very smooth and not very memorable, although the beginning was definitely one of the more bizarre dungeon experiences in a list of bizarre dungeon experiences.

I see a distressing commonality in all of my dungeon situations and that is of players purposefully reducing the controlled flow of the dungeon. The intrinsic problem here is that Blizzard designed the spacing and numbers of each group of mobs with the intention that they are pulled in a controlled manner, one set of mobs at a time (usually with crowd control). When you start messing with that controlled flow of the dungeon, you are messing with the balanced design of the dungeon. Considering the cries on the forums about balance in the game, why do players decide to purposefully unbalance their dungeon runs?

P.S. My scientific mind has in fascination started counting how many of my runs contain each of the three categories and #2 has a distressingly high frequency. I apparently need more Healing 101 posts for lowbie dungeons…

Happy Healing!

Choosing Your Healing Addons

While the Blizzard UI has improved tremendously, healers for the most part still find healing addons useful for the variety of options available to improve their experience. When talking about healing addons, the big four healing addons that you always see mentioned are: Grid, Healbot, Healium, and Vuhdo. However, to a new healer, understanding the difference between them and actually configuring them to meet Cataclysm healing needs are a monumental task. As you can see below I’ve taken the time to download and perform a minimal configuration with a level 10 druid character to provide a visual point of reference for the rest of my discussion.

The Lifeblood of Professions

I’m a sucker for memes and I’ve mentioned before that I tried to avoid Blog Azeroth for as long as I could before finally succumbing. This week a Blog Azeroth Shared Topic was proposed that actually pertains to healing so I’ve managed to squeeze a little time into my schedule to write a post on my “favorite profession”.

You might be able to guess based on the picture to the left and the post title that my favorite profession is Herbalism. I have herbalism on both of my current max level characters (my tauren druid and blood elf priest) and I’ve picked it up on a couple of alts along the way. Of course, there is a little story behind having the same gathering skill on both of my first two characters. If you take the way back machine to my first posts I explain that my druid and priest were both leveled using refer-a-friend (RaF). The tripled experience gained during this period made it difficult to keep your professions leveled with your character level. In an effort to have at least one profession leveled I picked up herbalism, especially since my “friend” had mining covered.

Since that initial leveling experience Herbalism has undergone many changes and has led to some amazing experiences for me. WotLK brought us Lifeblood, which in Cataclysm changed slightly to use your skill in Herbalism to absorb energy and nutrients from the earth, instantly healing minor wounds and granting 120 haste rating for 20 sec. Cataclysm also brought us the fun Lifegiving Seed, which you can use to Disguise yourself as an herb. We also now gain experience from picking flowers! This was a particularly interesting change from Cataclysm, because I took the advice of an amazing blog (linked below) and managed a fun achievement on my Tauren Druid (yes, I know it’s overpowered with 310% flight form and the herbalism racial). I’ve also found it immensely relaxing to gather herbs while waiting for the battleground queues, questing, or watching a TV show.

Regardless of which profession you select while leveling or if you wait until the level cap before starting your leveling process, I recommend using a profession leveling guide such as those found at Caliope’s Crafter’s Tome or WoW-Professions.com. Both of these two sites have amazing information on the cheapest and most efficient path to leveling everything from Alchemy to Tailoring.

Happy Healing!

Bears to the Rescue

I’m still here! However, real life has caught up with me, so my posts for this month may be more sparse than usual.

Happy Healing!

Five Healing Questions

In watching the various forums and blogs for healer questions, especially the priests, it seems certain questions keep popping up. So here are the questions I’ve been noticing and a short discussion on them…

1. I keep running out of mana. What amount of regen do I need?

This is the most common question I’ve been getting, and the issue is usually not about regen but healing style. Yes, Ghostcrawler has indicated that they expect healers to have about 1750-1800 Spirit when they enter heroics. However, it can be accomplished with less than that, if you are using your heals wisely and your group knows the mechanics of the fights. So most of the time it’s the case of a new healer not using their heals wisely.
A Druid needs to keep Lifebloom rolling on the main target (e.g., tank) and use Nourish as their most efficient heal, a Priest should be using Heal as their most efficient heal (flash heal is not your first choice here) and use their Chakra and Penance spells wisely, a Paladin needs to make sure they are using Judgement all of the time and Holy Light as their most efficient heal, and Shaman need to keep Earth Shield on the main target and use Healing Wave as their most efficient heal.

2. Is Mastery a good stat for me, and how much should I be aiming for?

This is a tough question because the problem with mastery for many healing classes is not that it’s a bad stat by itself, but the fact that many of our healing spells work so much better with crit or haste. In general, for most healers, Mastery is not a gearing priority over Haste or Crit. Which brings me to my next discussion…

3. Should I use the crit piece or the haste piece of gear?

Each healing class has a slightly different gearing priority in terms of haste and crit as follows:
Druids: With multiple Haste ‘breakpoints’ due to the different HoTs in our arsenal, the stat priority looks something like: Intellect > Spirit > Haste (till a breakpoint) > Mastery > Haste (at a breakpoint) > Crit
Priests: Depending on the spec, you’ll want for discipline: Intellect > Spirit > Haste =  Crit = Mastery; and for holy: Intellect > Spirit > Haste (to 12.5%) > Mastery > Crit
Paladins: Paladins have a soft cap on haste that they want to reach (1019 haste) immediately then collect gear with the following priority system: Intellect > Spirit > Haste > Crit > Mastery
Shaman: After reaching 915 haste: Intellect > Spirit > Crit > Mastery > Haste

4. Where can I find more info about “skill x”?

It seems like many of the blogs that healers have used in the past have disappeared or slowly died out in recent months. However, for each class I have a go-to blog/site that I recommend to my guildies which include:
Druids: The best Druid healing site I’ve found is Keeva’s Treebark Jacket blog and her Resto Guide.
Priests: There is a deceptively high number of sites pertaining to priest healing, but World of Matticus and Tales of a Priest are the two most comprehensive ones available.
Paladins: The best theoretical information for Paladins used to be Holy Paladin net, which has stopped posting, but a nice, more conversational site is The Bossy Pally.
Shaman: Vixsin has a great Resto Guide on his blog Life in Group 5

5. Which reputation has my helm enchant?

Yes, I’ve actually gotten this question myself. I just thought I’d throw it in at the end to remind players that Mount Hyjal needs to be visited for your helm enchant.

Happy Healing!

When Good Intentions Go Bad

I missed my usual Tuesday post this week as my intention was to provide updates to my pages for each class, which are still unfinished. Only the page for Druids is even remotely up-to-date and it’s not been updated since 4.0.1!  So instead I’m posting a day late on the Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, but with a slight twist.

In a large, progression minded raiding or pvp guild, when a usually good performer starts to fumble and generally degrade in performance, the response from those guilds will tend to be an approach that progresses the goal of raiding/pvp. Talk with the member, try to fix the problem, and if it doesn’t get fixed then they loose their spot on the raid/arena team. The stated goals of these guilds are to progress in raiding (or pvp), which can’t happen with a member that is under-performing. But what if….

You are in a small friends & family guild, where the goals of the guild are not so obvious, an under-performing member may be hard to even identify, much less try to help. If the guild members come together for raiding, an under-performing member may be identified by their healing or dps output, but is it really under-performing if the guild’s objective is to have fun with friends? The members who’s goals are raiding will min/max their gear/talents/etc and work to obtain the best gear that they can for their interest. However, the members who enjoy seeking out achievements or finishing every quest in the game are not working on the same goals as those who prefer raiding. In the small friends & family guild both of these types of goals have an equal part in the “having fun with friends” objective of the guild.

In a small friends & family guild you don’t always have the luxury of 10 members that all happen to have the right role (e.g., healing) and with the goal of raiding as their preference, so you bring some of your friends. Your intention as a raider in this situation is to kill internet dragons with your friends, but in most of Cataclysm content failure to come prepared will directly impact the success of the team when it comes to raiding.

So this brings me to my own questions: Should the raiders in a small friends guild have the same expectations in performance of the achievement seekers in the guild? What kinds of expectations in performance should there be in a small friends & family guild?

Figuring out Tabards in Eight Easy Steps

So you’ve hit level 85 and you’re ready to start working on your Cataclysm reputations. You equip a tabard and start running level 85 dungeons, but which tabard should you put on first, second, etc.?

There are plenty of websites and posts listing reputation rewards, but very little that gives you a clear goal of which to start with. For example, I’ve noticed one of my guildies wearing the Therazane tabard (which has dailies) versus the Earthen Ring (which has no dailies). Due to these differences there is a clearly efficient method for obtaining your reputation reward gear. In this post I’m going to list the order that tabards would be worn, the gear obtained at which reputation levels, the dailies that you can use to grind your reputations in the meantime, and why a reputation piece might be skipped (e.g., crafting pieces are available). Note, that these recommendations are assuming that you will be doing the full 25 dailies, that when your faction does NOT have Tol Barad you are filling in those 6 dailies with others, and you are filling in the rest of your daily log with dailies from your remaining factions. Also, that I’ve done very little theorycrafting to determine if a given reputation reward is better than what you might find elsewhere because we all know that the RNG gods don’t always cooperate whereas a purchased piece is a sure bet.

Something New is in the Air

Now that everyone has gotten used to using their /run BuyMerchantItem(11) Macro, today we’ll finally be able to buy our rose petals individually if we need to. Along with that happy fix, comes the Patch 4.0.6! I know I’ll be devouring all of the changes on my healers, my druid and priest especially will be seeing a lot of nice changes.

The Official Patch Notes are available to review, and will take the uninitiated a good 10 minutes to look over. A couple of the updates that weren’t in previous hot-fix notes that caught my eye are:

• Moonkin Form now grants 15% damage reduction instead of increased armor. In addition, shapeshifting in or out of this form now breaks roots. Note this is not stated in the tooltip.
• Druid forms now have an Archaeology Survey animation.
• Druids in Moonkin Form should now correctly be able to mount.
• Pain Suppression is no longer dispellable.
• Unnecessary string errors should no longer occur when casting Power Word: Barrier.

Happy Healing!

Snippets: Week 5

I’m going to finish out my week with a look at just a few of the blogs and WoW sites I’ve been reading while composing these guides to healing the instances of cataclysm. If you’ve been following along all this time, don’t get your hopes up for raiding guides, my guild hasn’t even started raiding yet!

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Resto Druid Info

Keeva from Tree Bark Jacket has produced the long awaited Resto Druid Guide, and she more than delivered!

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VuhDo Configuration

In a quirky turn of events I just this week stumbled upon Tamarind’s series of posts on Configuring VuhDo. Starting with Part 1 all the way to Part 6, Tam walks you through what to change and what to just leave it as it is… If it ain’t broke don’t fix it! UI stuff is something close to my heart, so I may be providing a Healing 101 discussion of VuhDo here soon™.

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Bear Druid

I’ve been reading about the trials and tribulations of a wonderful Bear Tank since I started with WoW, and this week he’s posted some fun “bearwalls”, including a Big Bear Butt Contest.

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Other Guides

I try to browse the list of posts produced by the columnists at Wow.com on a daily basis, but when my RL gets hectic it will turn into a once-a-week occurrence. A good post by The Overachiever columnist takes a look at Glory of the Cataclysm Hero. Hey, I finished WotLK Hero achievement just weeks before patch 4.0. So, an early post by a familiar source is helpful since I’m always late to the punchline!

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Happy Healing!

Halls of Origination Healing 101

This will be my final Healing Cataclysm Instances Installment in which I’ll finish up with Halls of Origination. It’s been very informative and interesting writing these posts as I’ve learned a lot about my healing style which you have probably discovered in some of my descriptions of the encounters. As a final reminder, I’ll be including notable trash and all gear linked is from normal.

Temple Guardian Anhuur
Anhuur has two different phases of the fight. The majority of the fight is the “kill the boss” phase, consisting of avoiding the blue Burning Light on the ground and dispelling the Divine Reckoning, so the boss doesn’t heal. At 66% and 33% Anhuur will put up a Shield of Light and start channeling Reverberating Hymn. The Hymn will stack up to 20 times and becomes increasingly difficult to heal through. The Shield is removed by activating levers at the base of the two columns on either side below the platform. There are several strategies for handling the levers, based on group composition and party strengths. There are many line of sight issues with the healer remaining on the platform, so an easy strategy on normal mode is for the whole party to drop down, the tank picks up the snakes and the group kills them while one person handles the levers. However, this is more difficult on heroic, so many groups may use the strategy I cover under heroic mode.

Heroic Mode
In heroic mode, since everything hits harder, there are several different strategies used during the Shield phase to make sure his Hymn is interrupted and still get the levers activated. Keep in mind that the levers are now a channeled action in heroic. If your group sends a single dps down to the levers while everyone remains up on the bridge, it is important for the healer to stand on the very edges of the platform in order to reach the party member activating the levers.

Gear
Awakening Footfalls – Druid feet
Belt of Petrified Tears – Priest waist

Earthrager Ptah
This Lord Marrowgar look-alike, is a two phase fight, but with a slight twist. This fight is done on the back of a camel! The camel is awesome because you can cast while moving on the camel; a healer’s dream. During the first phase, you’ll have minimal upkeep on the party damage. The second phase, Ptah goes underground and produces adds for the tank and dps to kill. Avoid the stone spikes and dust clouds that will kill your camel.

Heroic
Avoid the dust clouds, stone spikes, and dust whirlwinds during the second phase, which is easily done if you stay moving.

Gear
Soul Releaser – Two-handed Staff
Underworld Cord – Druid belt

Notable Trash
Leading up to the next boss, the party must defeat four “Wardens” to activate mirrors in an Brann Bronzebeard event sequence. These four wardens represent four elements, air, fire, water, and earth, and can appear on the platforms in any order. The Air Warden targets a player with a vortex that needs to be avoided; lots of movement for this warden fight. The Flame Warden has a short range AoE damage that the tank and melee need to avoid and a targeted ability Raging Inferno that will need some significant spot healing. The Water Warden casts a targeted water pool that needs to be avoided. The Water Warden will also target a player, placing them in a bubble that needs to be destroyed, so call out if you get targeted. The Earth Warden casts a Rockwave that needs to be avoided.

Anraphet
Anraphet has two abilities that will require almost opposite reactions from the party, and is mostly a healing endurance fight. The first ability, Alpha Beams, targets a player and produces a void zone. Move out of the void zone when you get targeted. Meanwhile you will need to dispel Nemesis Strike from the tank. The second ability, is Omega Stance, which is a large AoE type of ability. Some healers may find having the party group up during the phase to lighten the load on the AoE healing. Eventually though, Crumbling Ruin will make it such that you won’t be able to keep the party alive through Alpha Beams and Omega Stance, so this fight becomes a dps race. An interesting strategy my guild has been using, is to line everyone up straight out from the boss so that the Alpha Beams only hit a single person and they can move to their right across the squares on the floor. It’s a strategic method for laying down the void zones similar to Azil in Stonecore.

Heroic
Nothing significantly different during heroic other than that everything hits really hard.

Gear
Anraphet’s Regalia – Priest chest
Mantle of Soft Shadows – Druid shoulders
Omega Breastplate – Paladin chest

Isiset
Isiset is another somewhat familiar boss in that she has abilities similar to WotLK bosses, but with slight differences. Isiset will start the fight with four different abilities, Astral Rain, Veil of Sky, Celestial Call, and Supernova. The familiar ability is Supernova; similar to Eadric in ToC, turn away from the boss for as much of the fight as possible. Of the other 3 abilities, the most difficult for healers to manage is Astral Rain, a party-wide AoE that you will need to heal through. Celestial Call will summon a Celestial Familiar, the number which increases during the fight. Isiset’s fourth ability Veil of Sky, creates a reflective, mana-draining shield on her that can catch the unwary party member doing some serious damage to themselves. Finally, at 66% and 33% Isiset will split up into her three Aspects – Astral Rain, Veil of Sky, and Celestial Call. The party will choose a “kill” order for the “abilities” depending on group composition, but will usually be the Astral Rain, thereby reducing the party-wide damage for the rest of the fight. Killing one of the Aspects will force Isiset to re-appear, but without the ability that was just “killed,” but strengthening the one(s) that remain.

Heroic
Nothing significantly different during heroic other than that everything hits harder.

Gear
Blood of Isiset – Trinket with equip stats
Legwraps of Astral Rain – Priest Legs

Ammunae
Healing on this boss is mostly centered around cleansing and staying out of stuff on the ground. First, dispel Wither if the dps miss an interrupt. Secondly, avoid the Spore Clouds dropped by the Spores. You can also use the cloud to kill the Bloodpetal Blossoms by kiting them through the clouds like with the adds from Azil in Stonecore.

Heroic
Nothing significantly different during heroic other than that everything hits harder.

Gear
Band of Life Energy – Healing ring
Robes of Rampant Growth – Priest chest

Setesh
This is another boss fight that is more of a dps race due to the build up of damage mechanics. Furthermore, the boss is not tankable, so the tank will be corralling the adds. Setesh will frequently summon Chaos Portals that will summon a set of four adds. One of the four types of adds does not take damage so the tank will be kiting those around from portal to portal. As the fight time increases, there will be more adds on the tank, greatly increasing the incoming damage. Setesh also has two targeted casts, one of which is Chaos Bolt, a targeted minimal damage spell. The second is a shadow projectile similar to Shadow Crash from Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom, that should be avoided, along with the shadow void zones they leave behind. Occasionally he will cast Seed of Chaos, summoning a multitude of small purple bubbles on the ground. The tank should avoid them especially in the later part of the fight, when incoming damage is particularly high.

Heroic
The adds move more quickly and with the increased health in a heroic, the tank may just tank them all.

Gear
Scepter of Power – Healing Mace
Chaotic Wrappings – Shaman Leggings

Rajh
Rajh’s abilities are based on the “Energy” he has, so there are essentially 2 phases. During the main ‘Energy’ phase, he has 2 abilities that need to be interrupted, but that can be avoided if he gets a cast off. The first is Infernal Leap, in which Rajh marks the floor with fire under a player and then leaps onto the target. The second is Summon Sun Orbs, if one spawns, run away from it. During this phase, there will also be firy tornadoes that will hit nearby players with Solar Winds, if not avoided. The second ‘Recharge’ phase occurs when Rajh reaches 0 energy. Rajh will walk center of the room and begin a recharging process, which will bring him back to 100 Energy and returning to the main phase.
During the recharging phase, use your AoE cooldowns for Blessing of the Sun, that will last the entire Recharge phase.

Heroic
Nothing significantly different during heroic other than that everything hits harder.

Gear
Blade of the Burning Sun – Potential Sword for Paladins
Solar Wind Cloak – Healing Back
Hekatic Slippers – Priest Boots
Legguards of Noon – Paladin Legs

Zone Drop
Book of Origination – Healing Off-Hand