Last Post

This will probably be my last post on this blog, it's got more or less a little successful at one point, I was up to a few hundred hits a week, most of which were most certainly NOT unique, but it was a start. Then I kinda dropped off, lost my ambition, and try as I may I really can't bring myself to start again. I was just going to leave this blog be as it is, but after reading a blog today I thought I should atleast do my part to pass it on.

For those of you who aren't aware of the blog, The Gold Queen, has been a favourite of those of us that like to have enough gold to do whatever we want, whenever we want (in game). However it was never one that I got into. Having said that, I popped on there today to take a peek while I was a little bored at work and was very sad by the article I read. Apparently a few months ago the writer was gang raped a bunch of men, and is currently recovering. Due to the huge amount of fans she has, and the horribleness of this incident, there has been an overwhelming amount of support. A few people have now organized a "white ribbon compaign." Now don't feel bad if you don't know what that is. I didn't until a few minutes ago (although i kinda picked up on it from the post on her site). The White Ribbon is the symbol of the "campaign against violence against women."

As my final post I'm hoping that a few of you that are still following me (if any of you are) will spread the message about this story, and if you have a few spare bucks sitting around go to one of the below websites and donate.

Once again thanks to those of you that read my blog, pop onto Mug'thol and say hi from time to time.

http://whiteribbon.ca/
http://whiteribbon.ca/international/

Nerfs: Our love/hate relationship

This week we were able to clear the first three heroic bosses in the first night. While this may not sound like a feat, we are still between permanent tanks, and so spent a few wipes trying out new apps, and letting a few newer, somewhat undergeared players give it some attempts. We also killed Beth for the second time, and this time was a huge amount cleaner, really demonstrating that last time wasn’t a fluke (despite how close of a kill it was). We then went on to work on HC Alysrazor. We only had a few attempts on Tuesday, and went back in on Wednesday ready to spend some time wiping. And we did. But we made progress pretty quickly, with our first entrance into phase two we had her down to below 70%. That showed us how easy that fight would be once we got the mechanics settled into automatic mode. By around 11pm about 2 hours into attempts we downed her. We then went on to take on Baleroc, but only on normal mode. We one shotted him (thankfully, it’s embarrassing when we go from downing a HC mode boss in a single night of attempts to wiping on normal modes!), and moved on to HC Majordomo. On our second attempt of this fight we had him below 20%. Now this fight is more or less a DPS race, with some minor mechanics thrown in, including the one which allows the DPS to make the enrage timer. Of course with DPS races, its rarely the first few percent that a guild wipes on. The next night (Thursday) we went back in and spent less than 5 attempts on this boss, before killing him. Bringing our total count to 5/7 HC, with two those kills in one week.

While I am quite excited about seeing the content this far (I’m sure we will get Baleroc this next week), I am a little concerned about the speed that we, and most other guilds, seem to be progressing after the nerfs, it makes me think that Blizzard has gone overboard on their across the board nerf. Now as I said I am quite happy about our progress, however I wonder how much of our progress is now us just powering through the mechanics, now that we are over-gearing the content by so much. I’m quite happy that we will be hitting the new content close to as well geared as any guild out there as a result of this rapid progression, but I do wish that I could have seen how far we could get without the nerfs.

How to Gauge Performance

All raiders that are at least a little serious about their own personal (read character’s) progression, or their guild’s progression should be constantly checking on their performance. Whether it’s as compared to someone, or to a potential, it’s important to have some sort of understanding of how you are doing. With the proliferation of addons such as recount or skada, people have put a huge emphasis on “the metres” and sometimes this is helpful, but other times a step back is needed to understand why someone isn’t topping the charts.

1. Class or spec. This is one that is often the go to favourite of people. While there will always be a little bit of a spread between the top spec and the bottom spec, blizzard does a pretty good job of balancing them out, at least with in reason. There will always be some specs better on some types of fights than others. For example demo locks are better on heavy aoe fights then affliction, but on single target affliction locks tend to out show demo locks. This is one reason why you should really look past the numbers to see the reasons. While this is a very cut and dry example of why people should learn to play all their class’s specs (so they can swap depending on need), other times it’s a little less obvious.
2. Utility vs. Numbers. Some specs or classes are currently a little underpowered on throughput, but they bring important utility. Shaman for example have, in the past (and still somewhat) been known as more of a support class. At first in vanilla they were buffers, they provided the raid with buffs that made them better, in Cataclysm resto shaman were brought normally for their mana tide and not for their total through put, and enhancement/elemental were brought for their amazing interrupt (wind shear).
3. Gaming the numbers. While until now I’ve talked about why some people may seem low, there is also times when you have to think about why that person is always on top. Ghostcrawler has talked a bit about this in the past, with for example resto druids always being a little higher on the healing charts because of their amazing cooldown of tranquility, when they are actually supposed to be no better than any other healers the rest of the time. But there are also times when people intentionally game the numbers. For example I was watching a live streamed raid the other day by one of the top guilds, and on Alysrazor their rogue popped on bladeflurry during the time when Alysrazor was grounded, during this time their tanks had silenced and brought in the two adds. These adds don’t need to be killed, and he had intentionally nerfed his single target damage to artificially inflate his numbers. I know this same guild has a shadow priest that on Shannox will triple dot, even though the dogs should be ignored by the dps.
4. Role. While you rarely hear of people talking about how low the tanks’ DPS is, I’m talking about something a little less obvious, such as people who are handling a particular mechanic. Shannox for example, generally guilds will run one or two people who have the job of controlling rageface, and breaking his “facerage” ability. These dps generally have substantially lower numbers than those who get to focus on only killing Shannox.

So how can you really tell where you are when all these variables make add-ons very poor gauges? Dig a little deeper, spend some time looking at more than one screen, go to worldoflogs (if your raid uses them), or just reason it out (or even talk to them). For example: Why does that healer keep having his tank die? (Death logs: oh the tank stood in bad stuff and took unnecessary damage) Why is that healer always ahead of me? (Spell breakdown on WorldofLogs: Oh 10% of his healing came from a tranquility). Why is that DPS ahead of me? (Damage done by target: oh 50% of his damage was to unnecessary targets). Or even better, compare yourself to your potential rather than others. Hit a target dummy and see how much damage you do, and extrapolate from that with raid buffs how much you SHOULD be doing, or look online for how much you SHOULD be doing, and try to reach that target (without gaming the system!). Or if you are a healer, focus more on why someone died, and how you could have prevented it (if you could have), or if no one died, then look at things like how many judgements you got off, and how many you could have (pallies), or if you could have cast more mana efficient heals, or maybe even dps’d a little? And if you were on a fight like Shannox in charge of breaking face rages, look at the amount of damage you did to Rageface, and see if you were perhaps focusing TOO much on him and could have put some more dps into Shannox, or how much damage he did by facerage, maybe you should have been quicker to break those.

There are always ways to gauge your performance, and by taking a bit of time before or after raid, or maybe on a down night, to dig into your performance you can see what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and how you can improve the next time around.

Healer Test Fights

Last night one of our top healers mentioned how he hated Baleroc. Now this isn’t a guy QQ’ing about the fight because he’s not good at it, he’s currently ranked on it (in normal mode as we don’t have this boss down on heroic). He then followed it up with a comment about how he wished Blizzard would stop making healer fights. Given that I am overly opinionated, and USED to be a healer, I thought I would weigh in on this!

I should start with an explanation of what we mean by healer fights. Healer fights are fights that put the majority of the mechanics on the shoulders of the healers. No matter how good the rest of your raid is, there is NO way to make up for their mistakes. This is the equivalent of a dps check fight (with a tight berserk timer), or a tank check fight, with lots of adds to pick up or boss movement, such as Shannox, (although in these types of fights usually intense healing or dps can give at least some wiggle room). The three fights that are most recently thought of as healer fights are Baleroc (Firelands), Chimaeron (Black Wing Descent), and Dreamwalker (Ice Crown Citadel).

Blizzard tends to make this type of fight, in my opinion, because while dps and tanks sometimes get to deal with interesting mechanics (or at least testing mechanics), such as interrupts, “vehicles”, etc. healers are generally assigned the same role of keeping green bars full, and handling the normal high damage phase that seems to accompany pretty much every fight. As someone who used to play a healer I have to say that while you get very good at this type occurrence, it can get quite tedious and boring over the long run, “what do I do on this fight? Oh yeah stay out of bad stuff and keep green bars full…again…” Much as they make fights like Alysrazor where dps gets to try out something new such as flying, they like to let healers experiment with some new things too, even if “new” still means keeping an eye on green bars.

There are two major issues with these types of fights, as I see it. The first is that the mechanics tend to be, at first anyways, quite buggy usually, or don’t work as well as they should. Chimaeron for example was well designed (if annoying) however because of latency and the very short window to heal someone, it wasn’t that uncommon to see a green bar go over where it needed to be, only to see that person die, because while your computer registered the heal, the server didn’t. The second, and more important issue that I see is that while Blizzard’s intent is good, healers already tend to carry a ton of weight on their shoulders, 90% of the fights tend to be mostly relaxing for DPS, where they can stand there, hit their rotation, and move occasionally, normally with some sort of heavy “avoid this” phase or “burn” phase. Healers on the other hand tend to be constantly reacting to what is happening, and picking up the slack for people that don’t move or make a mistake. This is especially an issue on fights that have a soft enrage, where they tend to be able to extend the time that dps have to finish a boss by “brute healing force”. By creating healer fights, blizzard doesn’t tend to really change the fight for them, just make things more stressful, as a mistake on healer fights tends to mean at least one death, if not a wipe.

Personally I think that if done right healer fights can be a ton of fun for all involved, however the only one that I think of in recent times as “done right” has been Dreamwalker, and it’s pretty hard to extend that mechanic to new fights, without making it feel stale.

The Attendance Boss

The Attendance Boss.

Oh how I hate thee. Of all the bosses I’ve fought in WoW this seems to be the one that never gets nerfed and seems to scale with gear. In my current guild this seems to be the major issue preventing us from being a top 10 guild on our server.

When we first began raiding in Firelands on Mug’Thol, we had some recruiting to do, that was something we knew ahead of time and had been trying out best to do so. We weren’t real picky, it was a new patch so no knowledge of the fight was expected, and valor gear and tier 11 was so easy to come by that we really didn’t have concerns about gear level. Our first raid we downed three bosses with less than 25 people because we just could not fill the spots. It got better the following week, we filled, if just barely, and the following week we were up to around 30 people. Finally we could start to select based on performance, and we did. We of course had people quit over the fact that they were replaced do to poor performance, but we had a pretty good first month overall.

Then it happened. There was a sharp and sudden drop off in attendance. First we noticed it on Thursdays, we were having trouble filling raid. And suddenly it was every week. Normally we are able to fill our raid, although we have 24 manned a few bosses and done a few Baradin Holds with substantially less than that, however it’s WHEN we fill it that is the issue. Our designated raiding times are 830-12 Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; this is something that is clear to everyone that apps and so everyone in the guild should be aware of this. Does life sometimes get in the way and it is not possible to show up for every single raid on time? Absolutely. Working late, family gatherings, bad traffic, whatever the reason, there are always good excuses. However when we are consistently having issues making that first boss pull before 930, an entire hour after we are supposed to be buffing and pulling trash, that’s an issue.

I have found this week especially hard to put up. There’s a huge nerf to Heroic modes in Firelands that has taken place; 15% reductions of damage and health right across the board. This is the week that we should be able to really push past some bosses, using this nerf to give us a bit of room to make some mistakes, and yet this week seems to have presented our worst attendance so far. It’s Thursday today, last night we raided and again didn’t pull until 930. Around 850 in my frustration I said in guild chat something to the effect of “Is everyone that showed up late aware that we raid at 830?” The response I received from one person was “It’s just a game,” and from another “there’s no point getting mad about it, that doesn’t solve anything”. I hate both of those responses. I get that it’s just a game, but if you had plans with a friend to meet them for drinks, and you showed up 30mins-1hour late, how happy would your friend be? Sitting there waiting, and waiting, and waiting until finally you show up, no apology, and just sit down. That’s exactly what making the rest of your guild wait is like. How do we fix an attendance issue? Recruit. We recruit and start to sit people who don’t show up. Will we maybe not progress as quickly by not running our top players because they don’t show up? Probably. But it’s not as though they can really go anywhere else. Most guilds that are substantially into heroics require something in the area of 90% attendance from raiders, it’s something they can afford to say because they have a lot of applicants when they’re sitting at 6/7, us not so much, but considering we don’t progress very quickly by wasting half our week waiting around, I think I would rather raid with people that want to be there, and try hard (even if they aren’t the best) then people that show up whenever they feel like it, without the regard for others to be on time, or let us know that they will be late.

Any other suggestions?

Where in the Firelands have you been?!

(See what I did there? firelands....fire and stuff...you know...bah!)
So wow it has been around 5 months since my last post on here, and while I have from time to time had the urge to write a post I just haven't made myself make the time. A lot has happened and I figured I would update this blog, and maybe try to get back into a regular posting schedule.

Goodbye Healing!
Well this post was tied quite a bit around my adventures while healing, whether I was stubbornly holding onto Disc or playing as my eventual favorite spec of holy, I tried to approach this blog from the perspective that only a healer could, after all, we do tend to keep a really good eye on health bars and environmental hazards.
However, as I had wrote I was originally in a guild called Jubilance. During Cata release we swapped from a 25man to a 10man guild, that then had it's ups and downs, and eventually the raiding core decided to move over to another guild on the server ShadowRaven, which was a 25man raiding guild, a bit further progressed then we were. After a few months of raiding there we all started to realize that this wasn't what we were looking for, a few decided to take a break, but the rest of us decided to server transfer with many of the people from another guild on the server. I am now on Mug'Thol, under the name "Moriturri" (some silly lvl 62 DK had my name and Blizz said they couldn't just delete him or something...). Currently I am raiding with the guild: One Last Stand (the guild we transferred to be a part of). This server is quite a nice change at times, pugs regularly clear content on normal, and attempt heroics, and of course everyone's favorite Holy Priest Aliena is on the server with the guild from Tankspot Void.
I suppose that the bigger news for some of you out there may be my conversion to the dark side, or rather Shadowy Side! I am now playing Mainspec Shadow DPS. I actually have only healed in raid once, and that was only for a planned wipe to allow someone to do a quest for the legendary. In fact, I have probably only healed a handful of times since transferring. While I seem to be doing pretty good dps (rarely outside of the top 3 or 4 by the end of a fight) I have noticed that I spend a lot less time paying attention to the raid frames than I used to, in fact probably less than I should, there have been times when I am dps'ing away only to realize that most of the raid is dead and I hadn't even noticed. It's a much different play style!
Having said that: I am loving it! (sorry McDonald's, please don't sue me!).

So if anyone out there is still following me: Feel free to check out our guild! One Last Stand on Mug'Thol (currently as of writing we are 2/7HC, however with those pretty 15% nerfs to heroic we will likely gain a few more kills this week). We are always looking for talented players (especially tanks at this point!). If interested in joining, or even just discussing this blog or playing a priest or anything else feel free to send me a tell!

Good luck in Firelands all, and I hope to be writing a lot more of these!

Chimaeron Update

As I am fond of doing, I am going to do a bit of an update to a past post. I noticed just today I received several hits to my post on Healing Chimaeron, so I thought I would update it with my thoughts on the fight now, and how I heal, now  that I am in a 25man guild that is farming Heroic Chimaeron.

So far my assignment has been to the Double Strike tank. We have a soaker tank, which is actually either a DPS DK in Blood Presence, or a Ret Pally with Righteous Fury on. Regardless of who is taking the majority of the hits, they will always be jumping back and forth between 10k+ and 1hp, so no point in wasting potential dps on bringing a third tank. We have 2 tanks who alternate taking the double strikes, the only time they are actually tanking is during the stack up phases, otherwise they taunt for the double strike, then the soaker takes him back. The purpose of that is to avoid getting stacks of break. So back to me: I heal the double strike tank, along with one other healer (usually a holy pally, as they can beacon the soaker tank, which along with hots, is all the healing they need). Priority is to get that tank topped off to 100% quickly, although there is actually a fairly big window to get him topped off before the next double strike, but any time spent healing him up with slow casts is time you could be spending helping up healing Caustic Slime Targets. My "secret weapon" to keeping the double strike tank topped off, including during the stack phase, when he quite often has stacks of break, is Prayer of Mending. This spell is great because as long as they survive the first hit, they're getting a ton of healing instantly, between hits. When the Bile-o-tron is online, this spell will guarantee that the tank survives the double strike, no matter how much damage each hit inflicts.

Every second Caustic Slime I am able to cast a Circle of Healing. This spell is another of the Priest's secret weapons on this fight. Normally I either target one of the tanks, or someone near the stack location, regardless of whether they are at full HP or not; This is because I have it glyphed, so it hits 5 targets in addition to my main target. And how many targets does Caustic Slime hit? That's right, 5. This spell alone is enough to handle all five caustic slime targets. It's sometimes a little scary, because my initial heal from it isn't enough, but one second of Echoes of Light (my mastery) pushes them over the Low Health warning and into the safe zone. If my circle of healing is on CD, I will always look for a group that has more than one low health member, and throw a flash heal on them.

Before the first Stack phase, I stay in my single target healing Chakra (the holy word is great for a quick top-off on a low health party member), but as soon as we stack up I switch to the raid healing, drop my circle on the ground, hit circle of healing, and then look for my tank's HP. Because I have a Holy Pally healing with me, I know they will quick to make up for any little hits the tank takes, and we have a Lay on Hands rotation that ensures my tank will be topped off before he starts taking damage. If my tank is full on health I start throwing Circle of Healings, or Prayer of Healings on the raid. I have Chimaeron Focused so I can see when he gets the double strike debuff. As soon as he does I cast Guardian Spirit on him (first and third stack) and then a Prayer of Mending (see above!). Then I will start throwing serendipity bombs to ensure I get him topped off right away. At this point I stay in the Raid Healing Chakra, because I don't have time to swap to single target, then back to raid healing before the next stack phase, and my circle of healing becomes that much more powerful!

Phase 2 is another area where Priests shine (especially Disc, but eww). As soon as phase 2 hits we should look at the DPS count, and start bubbling our top 5 dps. Constantly keep them bubbled, this will ensure that your top DPS are taking minimal damage, and will survive the longest. If Guardian Spirit is off cooldown wait until your first or second tank is low and throw it one him, it will allow him to survive a little longer, making Chimaeron leave your high Threat DPS alone for a while longer.

This is my guide in a nutshell. Please comment or ask questions, this was wrote pretty quickly so I may have left out things you have specific questions about!

4.1 Changes

Well this is pretty behind but I've been busy, okay? (I also notice a lot of traffic from the search terms "4.1 priest" which means people seem to be hungry for this information).
If you are looking for a full synopsis of the changes I suggest the Wowhead patch notes, as that is where I get most of my information, however I am going to do a run down of some of the changes that you should know as a healing priest. This will by no means be an exhaustive list of all the changes, but will outline things I think are important.
General

• Inner Fire and Inner Will last until canceled. While this is not the largest change it is one that makes sense. How often have you been running around in a dungeon and not realize that it has fallen off (especially now that it's hidden in that little buff box). It never made sense to me for this spell to have a limited duration (or limited charges as pre cata!) a big Thumbs Up from me.
• Dispel Magic now dispels two magical effects at once for healing priests. Its about time we got this back, while it is more of a PVP ability (I think) it's nice to have this back, it has bugged me since they took this away that all the other healing classes have one button to click for dispels and we have 2 (3 if you count mass dispel), so this is a nice little handout to make us feel a little less forgotten.
• 100% pushback protection while Channelling our Hymns . Quite happy about this, although it was pretty rare to deal with this in PVE it was a pain when it DID happen.

Holy

•  Chakra States now last until canceled. Wow is this awesome, I love not worrying about falling out of my Chakra state because I haven't been paying enough attention to my timer. Combine this with the four piece set and it actually comes off a little overpowered, but hey, Priests ARE Blizzard's favorite class right?
• Holy Word: Sanctuary has had it's healing buffed, and has a much cooler spell effect (even if it IS harder to see where the edges of the actual effect are :S). This is now a spell I am actually quite happy to use, while in the past it almost wasn't worth the GCD to me.

Discipline

•  Atonement now triggers from Holy Fire. Not only does it trigger from the direct portion, but I have noticed that the DoT portion seems to work as well (smart HoT ftw?). Combine this spell (faster than smite, and deals more damage) with the proper glyph and this change is huge for those atonement fights (especially Halfus!)
• Power Word: Barrier. Oh yes, the spell that Blizzard likes, but is never sure they like the way it works. It started off as a set damage absorption (like an area wide Power Word: Shield), then was changed to a damage reduction, and now they've decided it was over powered (now don't get me started on the Shaman Raid Wide Pain Suppression...). But alas they have decreed that this spell should have it's cooldown buffed by 50%, so now it has a 3 minute cooldown, up from 2 minute. Disappointing. Relearn those CD Rotations Raid Leaders!
• Power Word: Shield has had it's duration halved. Not a huge deal for PVE to be completely honest. No one is bubble spamming anyways (except Phase 2 Heroic Chimaeron), so bubbles were popping way before that 30second duration they used to have anyways.
• Divine Aegis has had it's duration increased (12s to 15s). This is a very nice change, as many of those Prayer of Healing bubbles were being wasted, and now...well they'll likely still be wasted, but hopefully less!

That summarizes most of the Priest Changes. I really encourage any good raider to go take a look at all the changes to the other classes as well (especially your fellow healers, and the priest changes I may have skipped), the more you know about other classes and how they work, the more prepared you are to adapt to changes in the middle of a fight, or change your strategy between attempts.

4.1

Just a reminder: Update those add-ons and read up on your class changes PRERAID!
If I get a chance I am going to discuss a few changes that are going to be important to us Healing Priests!

Nefarian down and more wipes Incoming.

Well my last post introduced everyone to the fact that I was applying to another guild. Well I had been planning to raid with Jubilance on the Wednesday, however that did NOT happen. Jubilance did NOT raid on Wednesday, and so I was asked to raid with the guild I applied to. I went in with them, downed some bosses (all farm content, not any of their newer kills or their progression attempts), and had a pretty good time. I was invited to the guild shortly after raid and Morituri is now a member of ShadowRaven-US|Muradin. I wasn't able to raid on the Thursday (I informed them on Wednesday I wouldn't make it, otherwise that would be a really bad introduction to me!)

Moving on.

I have officially applied with a different guild. To be honest I have a LOT of mixed feelings about it. I really loved pretty much everything about Jubilance, as I hope you have all seen through my posts. When we originally decided to go from a 25man guild to a 10man guild, I was reluctant, but definitely did not put up any sort of fight on the issue, and was quite happy to accommodate the group with my "Mad Healin' Skillz".

Fun with Alts

I have been musing the last few days about what my next post should be. Normally I try to not think about it, and let my subconscious decided when I need to write, and what to write about. However due to the latest shout I got from Fannon, I have been watching my stats go up quite a bit faster than usual. In fact with only one post this month so far, I have already hit about 1/4 of my normal monthly views. So I thought I owed it to all you new readers out there (I hope there are some of you anyways...) to be a little more proactive in my writing. I have really struggled with nailing down something to type, I normally like to pick larger topics, things that have been "in vogue" in the blogging community for instance, however today it hit me that what I have been doing to kill time while thinking is the best thing to write about currently: Alts!

Not so Homogeneous

There has been a lot of talk now for the last - well since 4.0 dropped - about class homogenization. For those of you who don't read dictionaries for fun, that means how Blizzard is making all the classes similar, taking away their "uniqueness". Blizzard started with buffs, removing some, and changing others, to make people "bring the raider, not the class". However, people are complaining that the classes are all losing their appeal, the things that people liked about their class are being removed or changed. Although I'm wondering if this is as big of an issue as people are saying it is, are there really too few differences between classes now?

How important is a Leader?

The group I raid with is full of very knowledgeable, intelligent, great players. When we first started raiding we started with the opinion that we really didn't need a raid leader. It was only a ten man, and over half of our group had done raid leading for the guild before, so we just kind of thought that we would all be okay with watching our own timers, and I guess just assumed someone would make the decision whether to, for example, release that fifth drake on Halfus. We were kind-of right. For the most part our progression hasn't been hindered by our trust in each other to take care of their own things, however we have been very lucky in the fact that we seem to have all fallen into our own roles on what specifically we each do for each fight. I have to some extent been working on the strategies before the fights. I really like watching boss kill videos, and trying to pick out all the little things guilds are doing to succeed and where they could improve. Bazain has been great with calling out timers a head of time, and yelling at people to get their heads out of their...respective places.... when we've been goofing off too much. Green is just an overall loudmouth that fills in where someone is needed. Pixelated has a very strong personality in that he will call ideas out in the middle of the raid, or yell that something isnt' going to work, he's great at adjusting on the fly and communicating that to us. And of course everyone helps out between wipes on helping to adjust our strategy, explain what went wrong from each other's perspectives, and step up when we need an extra set of eyes or one of our usual people has to tunnel something so hard they can't pay attention to a specific mechanic. Having said all that, the focus of this post wasn't really on OUR situation, but on where I see a break down.

Holy...Pally?!

Just a quick post here. I have pretty much always had my Paladin as a tank. I haven't found it to be overly difficult to play, and the practice that I was getting leading our alt runs during ICC was helping me to get - I dare say - pretty good at it. With Cataclysm brought changes, but I'm happy to say that I have started raiding with him and I am getting pretty confident with him again, including using my CDs effectively and learning when to use my holy power for what. I've always been pretty if-y on using my Hands (Salv, Freedom, etc.) but I think I am getting a bit better with them too! Unfortunately, the masachist that I am, I have been slowly building him a holy set...

A Look Back, and Updates!

I looked back at some previous posts over the last few days, specifically at I Don't Heal; I stand there and Regen!. This post was very...down i think is the right word. I know that I mentioned that I wasn't QQ'ing or anything of the sort just presenting my situation, however it still came off a little...I like the word down - so I thought I would update a bit on what I have experienced.

10/25 Difficulty Split

When Blizzard announced in Wrath that they were going to have 10 and 25mans dropping the same iLVL of loot, there was a LOT of noise about it. In response Blizzard made a ridiculous number of posts trying to assure people of their intent to make the two raid sizes more of a preference to the guild, rather than any sort of strategic choice. In theory this means that they were intending to make both 10 and 25mans of equal difficulty in terms of the fight itself, and excluding the logistics of running a larger raid. Originally Blizzard intended to reward people for their logistical effort of having 2.5 times more people in a group by awarding more loot PER PERSON. There was again a lot of noise about this, and eventually Blizzard backed off of this idea, going back to making the raids identical in nature, with absolutely no difference between one and the other, besides the number of people you bring (of course anyone that knows much about probability understands that having more pieces in total drop means a higher chance of seeing those elusive 5% drop rate items, knew I would get called out on that if I didn't mention that now!). So how did Blizzard do as a whole on making the raids balanced?

Response to my response...

Okay so it's a little conceited to respond to your own post but honest the last post I did "Problems with Linear Progression" started a bit of discussion in the comments. I did think up a few points related to this topic while reading Rillfane's post that I also wanted to touch on, so here it goes:
Thank you to everyone that responded, I had a very strongly opinionated response to the contrary of my post, and I'm quite happy to see those as well!

One interesting thing that Blizzard did with ToC and ICC was they made the heroic gear from ToC better than the normal gear in ICC (iLVL 258 vs 251). This is something that they seem to have turned their back on in Cataclysm (Firelands gear from the list I have seen is higher iLVL than heroic Bot and BWD), however I think it's very important for a few reasons. (OMG not another list...)

1. Blizzard has stated that the heroic modes are designed for progression "high-end" guilds, which means that they don't expect your average PVE player to clear hardmodes, and in fact hardly even see most of them, as they should only be clearing endgame normal mode bosses slightly before the release of the next tier. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view point), they have gated heroics by requiring all normal mode bosses to die first (at least in that raid). This means that guilds like Paragon, Method, etc. still must spend a week clearing normal modes, which for them isn't that huge of a deal, but for guilds not QUITE as hardcore they may spend multiple lockouts getting there. I see the style of iLVL done with ToC and ICC as being a good way to allow those progressed guilds to get into their preferred level of raid a little faster, give them a gear boost so that if they were in heroics to start with, they can get there quickly again.
2. I see this as a bit of a hybrid between the linear raid style and the "gear reset" (as it was called in one of the response comments), while it doesn't mean you have to climb from the very bottom rung of raids all the way step by step to the top, it does mean that there should always be two tiers of raids that stay quite important all the way through (again, think about all the Solace of the Defeated, etc. that were farmed once ICC was already out).
3. It allows those guilds that worked really hard to get the handful of heroic bosses down to feel like they had more of an achievement by giving them an advantage over those guilds that up and decided to start raiding at the end of the last tier/beginning of the current tier.

Is my view skewed? Absolutely, it's my blog, not a newspaper article (which are SUPPOSED to be impartial, even though they rarely are), however I really see that the fully "on-rails" raiding scheme does more to punish new players that want to raid, by leaving them with the "entitlement-sloths" than it does to reward hardworking progression guilds.

I really do appreciate all comments, even if I do pick on some respondents :P As a final response to the response to my response (lost yet?) I really want to ask: How do you expect a new player to learn to raid if they are stuck in "Naxx" with all the "entitlement-sloths" that don't know how to/aren't capable raiders?

Problems with "Linear Progression"

I started to respond to a post one of the bloggers I follow made, and then realized my response was going to end up as long as her post...So this seems like a better alternative: Asilwen this post is for you!

For those of you who don't want to read the post, basically what I got out of it (so this may not be the intended message), Asilwen states that she liked the BC style of raiding involving keys, attunement and the basic need to do the raids in order, even near the end, in order to go on to harder raids. I see many problems with this, and while I think they have been presented by a number of different authors (Weekly Marmot by Tankspot, Blizz Blueposters, and probably a ridiculous number of others) I decided I would post what my perspective is.

Boss Strategies

Well with 4.1 coming out in the next few months seems like a perfectly terrible time to start releasing Jubilance's strategies for each boss, I'll be working on these when I have a spare bit of time, which may mean I won't get very many done before 4.1. Don't forget either when reading these over that "no plan survives contact with the enemy" (-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder), so while we may say these are our strategies, it seems likely they change within the first minute after the pull, although they should last longer the more practiced we get with them.

How Important Is Your Community?

I had an unusual weekend. Normally my schedule dictates that I not be online much over the weekends (and given the proximity of exams, 2 yesterday, and 3 over the rest of the week, I probably shouldn't have been...), but this weekend I found myself online quite a bit. The most striking thing for me? My guild seemed to be deserted! Now don't get me wrong, we had our usual Alt-aholics, and the few people that don't ever seem to log off (that's right Mr. My-Boss-Lets-Me-Play-From-Work, I'm talking about you!), but there were very few others on.

I HAZ MAIL!

Anyone that hasn't checked out our Cho'gall kill video should, make special note of the fact that apparently Reflektions (the PoV of the video) is waiting on an important mail message that just couldn't wait till after raid!

Applications

Jubilance tends to go through periods of no applicants, followed by huge numbers of them for a very short period of time. I haven't really noticed that the increase occurs around guild achievements (boss kills, etc.), it just seems to be completely random. We just went through a bit of one of these phases, very welcomed to say the least, as our second ten man is still trying to get off the ground, and the one I am in has been looking for a back-up or two.

Success in WoW and Life

The other night my friend, named in game as Sail (and soon Qail, as he switches mains from a warrior to a rogue), were sitting around talking, playing some Call of Duty and drinking a few Heinekin (okay, he was playing, I was drinking...) and we got talking about some of the people we knew in game. We both tend to be in fairly social guilds, and as such know quite a bit about the real world personas of our fellow raiders and ingame friends. One of the things that we quickly got caught up in is that so many of the people we know seem to be extremely successful in Real Life. In fact, we seemed to notice a correlation between successful raiders being successful in their vocations.

Random Thought for the Day

After taking bread out to make sandwiches: Do NOT wait 30 minutes for the servers to come down before completing them and putting them in a nice airlocked container...The bread becomes quite dry and crusty :(

Update: They were still delicious!

Site Updates

I will be probably taking a bit of a break from actual posts as I try to get the blog set up a bit better than it has been. This will include:

• Video Page
• About Me Page
• About Jubilance Page
• Guide to Encounters Page

I will be adding to the list as neccessary and crossing things out as I am done them, so that should give people an idea of how far along I am!

Really?!

Okay this is getting a little ridiculous...three posts in one day?! what's up with me?!
Well this post is going to be very ranty and I warn you now, if your not into that sort of thing stop reading now. (I know, who really stops reading when someone puts that disclaimer up right?)

FINALLY!

Well after weeks upon weeks of grinding, countless hours or tedium, and a number of other ways that make this sound a lot worse than it was:

Bazain contibuted probably the most to this achieve, he was constantly out there fishing, but everyone in the guild put a bit of work into this I think. We capped it off with a 6 hour grind for the last 2 000 this afternoon, and we had 5-6 people out there the whole time, hopefully this will help out a bit for the people that don't have the time to farm for their own needs. Honestly I'm a little unsure of whether it's really worth the time for the ten mans, the 25 raids it is deffinately better, the only advantage is that only four fish need to be caught out of non-pools, in contrast to the eight that we were needing to catch prior to the feast (two mages, one boomkin, three healers all catching sagefish, and the two tanks catching lavascale catfish). Also on the bright side Bazain and I caught around 500 of each guppies and eels so all we need is 500 catfish and we will have 125 feasts! (hopefully that will do us for a few wipes!)

This achievement was a long time in coming for us, but I think it is deffinately one of those neat achieves Blizzard put in to make guilds more important. Honestly I love being part of a guild that can pull together for even something as silly as this.

Healing Chimaeron

Well I don't really post a whole lot of "do this to heal" type posts, but this one may get a little into that sort of situation. I'm going to write a bit about the Chimaeron fight in Black Wing Descent.

New Guildy in the Blog-o-sphere

My GuildMaster has just branched out from his blogging on our forums (a whole what 4 times in 2 years? :P) to his very own blogspot blog spot. Check it out! (also a link in the sidebar -->)

My Avatar Is Pixelated

Conversation with my Level 1 Self (well...Avatar)

Inspired by Janyaa's Conversation with My Level 1 Self, which was in turn inspired by Fannon's

"An Intimate Conversation with my Level 1 self."

So, if I were able to send an ingame mail back in time, or some other rediculously science fiction like event, here are a few of the things I would want to include.

-If you level as Holy I swear to god I will kick your ass, it is SUCH a waste of time, wait until northrend and slowly pick up healing gear from quest rewards and dungeons instead. (ok, maybe some of it was good experience...)

-Switch to Discipline pretty much as soon as you hit level 80. It's a MUCH better spec!

-Elitestjerks may look intimidating but it's really not too bad once you get used to it.

-Don't be afraid to ask questions of others, yes a very high percentage of them will be jerks and "lawl nub!" at you, but it will be worth it when you find those few nice people that actually know what they are talking about.

-Add-ons are good, don't hesistate to use them, just make sure you aren't going overboard, know what the purpose of each add-on is, learn it's capabilities and limits.

-This game will take up a LOT more time than you expected, prepare for that now, and set limits on it (no playing until you are done that paper, chapter, etc.)

-Get you're friends involved, they will be even more addicted than you and if anyone complains about your play time, you can just point at them and say "o yeah? well "Sail" plays atleast twice as much as I do!"

-Fill that friends list, and don't hesistate to get to know the real people behind the Avatar. You will make a ton of GREAT friends this way (even if they do live a REALLY long way from you)

-Most of all: Don't forget it's a game, you should be having fun, but also remember it's a social experience, you will make a ton of great memories of doing stuff with your friends (even if it IS slaying imaginary dragons)

I really think that this is a good way of looking back on your time spent playing WoW. Not only the "virtual" mistakes that you may have made a long the way, but also points like my last few, with real life implications. Honestly I would tell anyone that can't list atleast one real life benefit to playing this game that they should reevaluate their priorities, because I love this game, but I often think I have spent way too much time playing, and if it weren't for the friends that I have made along the way, it would be a very depressing day that I type in /played.

This was a great post idea, and any of you readers with blogs should jump on the bandwagon, lets hear about your virtual regrets and real-life-achieves associated with playing this game.

 

Cataclysmic Depression

Well as promised here is my follow up to the post I bumped by Screaming Monkeys. (If you haven't read the post, I will make reference to it, and the comments, so maybe go take a quick look here). The title selection maybe isn't the best, as I am not talking specifically about true Depression, just this feeling that so many WoW players are having with respect to Cataclysm: they love the expansion but there is just something that they can't put their finger on that they hate, and makes them less interested in playing.
Well I kind of agree that there is something. I am feeling it myself, but I do NOT share the opinion that it is due to Blizzard mapping out the path a little more than maybe they have in the past. Nor do I believe it is neccessarily anything to do with the dungeon difficulty, although in a way it is. I see two major culprits, which I will touch on individually: The LFG system, and Changes.

Interesting Opinions

I would imagine most of you that are reading this have already seen this, but just in case you haven't I wanted to bump this Blog post. I don't really have the time to comment on it now, however I think my next entry will be related to this topic, as it has REALLY got me thinking. When you are done reading it, take a look at the comments, the entry was interesting but I think the back and forth in the comments is a great read.

http://screammonkey.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/the-cataclysmic-wow-disease/

Changes, Updates, and the End to a Long Wait!

Well.....December 21. For those of you wondering that was my last post. A lot has changed since that post, and I am hoping to get back into a little more regular posting.
First, the big news. I have always prided myself as being an above average Disc Priest, but for the first time since my first raids, way back in the days of ToC, I am once again raiding as *gulp* HOLY!