Giving Thanks

Posted on November 24, 2011

Hi everyone. Long time no see, I know. I’ve had a hard year this year. Things in my personal life and my circumstances have been in pretty much constant turmoil through the whole 12 months. But things are alright just now, and I have a lot to be thankful for. So, in honor of the day, I wanted to take just a moment to acknowledge some people that I met through the WoW community and through blogging in particular who have made this year just a little bit easier for me.

First there’s Alas and her husband Ataraxaven – Not only is she a great GM and he a crack guild forum admin who thinks nothing of changing the vent server setup so my crappy rural internet connection can access it, they’re also hosting my site temporarily because I had a fight with both my wallet and my webhost at an inopportune moment. Not every guild leader will step up and help you move your blog onto their hosting, and even though it’s continued to be fairly dead around here, I’m very thankful for that opportunity. *raises glass*

Next there’s Zelmaru and ArcaneTinkerTank – Zel’s the driving force behind, er, pretty much everything she touches, including but not limited to the great team spirit of TEAM HEAL, Murloc Parliament, and the newly christened Hawtpants of the Old Republic. She’s also been kind of a rock for me in a very low place. Despite being somewhat famous among bloggers as a privacy and security fanatic, it’s great to know that your friends will give you their cell number just in case you have a crisis. Zel and ATT also sent me a month’s sub as a surprise when the wallet war was at its most grim. *raises glass*

Then there’s my guildie Laralsong who, while he apparently can’t be convinced to open his own blog, is definitely one of the best discipline priests I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing in action and one of the bulwarks of ETI’s raid team. Laral’s also been around just about any time of any day I’ve needed anything, and I have more than once found surprises in my email from him in the form of a month’s sub and a minipet. It’s amazing to have friends like that, when you haven’t even met them in person. *raises glass*

The next two I’m lumping together, despite their not being linked IRL… Apple and Rades. Both of whom seem to be always available, day or night. Rades to keep me company at 4am when I’m sleepless and terrified that there’s some stranger outside my window and to listen to the hilarity on vent when I discover it’s just my upstairs neighbors talking dirty! And Apple has been always there to listen when life is more than I can take in general. I don’t know that I’d have gotten through the last year with my sanity intact without both of them. Thank you. *raises glass*

So cheers to everyone on Thanksgiving! If sentimentality isn’t your thing like it generally isn’t mine, I apologize, this post is not for you. I suspect starting tomorrow I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled overwhelmed silence. In the meantime, shall we toast the blogging community?

To real friends in cyberspace and meatspace. To people far away who are closer than people next door. To community and comeradeship. Cheers!

Also, Team Heal owns you.

 

Posted in Blog Stuff, IRL | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Work in Progress!

Posted on October 21, 2011

Hi guys, sorry about the long and unannounced hiatus! The details of my personal life, I’m sure bore you silly so I’ll keep it brief and just say real life threw me some curve balls and I just couldn’t keep up with the blog! I’ve also made a hosting change and decided it was time for many other long overdue updates…

So hang in there, the site is a little scattered at the moment, you’ll notice I have no blogroll at present! It’s a work in progress, but comments (and compliments *fish fish*) are greatly appreciated in the meantime! Let me know what you think about the new theme.

Posted in Blog Stuff | 9 Comments

Learning to Resto

Posted on August 5, 2011

No, not resto shaman, I already know how to do that. This past month or so I’ve been learning to resto druid. Don’t worry, shaman community, I’m not leaving you. But I’ve really enjoyed the experience of gearing and leveling my druid and I’m going to share a few tips for those of you out there who might also want to level a healing alt, or specifically a resto druid alt.

Here you can see my resto druid, Haeli, in all her half-geared glory. I’m sure not all of my gearing choices are100% optimal. I’m doing druid on a rush order and I’m sure there’s lots I haven’t learned yet. But she’s functional and I’m always learning more!

Druids are good at healing. They're also good, I've discovered, at dramatic poses.

Leveling a Healing Alt

My first recommendation for leveling any healing alt is to start healing early! Don’t wait till you have all your basic healing spells trained. Don’t wait till you’re past Blackrock Depths in the dungeon finder (*guilty look*). Don’t wait till Outland, or Northrend, or level 85. Start at the beginning and you’ll be able to master the spells organically as you obtain them. It really reduces the overload of having to start with a complete toolkit and no idea how to use it.

In the same vein, set up your basic healing UI at the very beginning and let that grow organically with your needs as well. I’m using VuhDo (of course, I’m a fangirl) and weak auras for my druid specifically. You might find you want a separate hot timer addon, or a rebirth timer, or a different plugin for your Grid frames, or a dispel addon like Decursive. One thing I have learned from playing so many healers is that your addon needs change from class to class and from level to level.

Finally, my last basic tip for leveling healing is to heal as much as you can. Heal instances, heal battlegrounds, heal random people walking past you in the street. Heal wounded NPCs in the RP fights in contested zones. Heal your escort quest target as you walk them at a painfully slow pace across whatever zone you’re in. If it moves and is friendly, heal it. If you’re healing targets in different and strange settings, you’ll learn to adapt to those wonky fight mechanics where suddenly you need to heal Brann Bronzebeard in the Halls of Stone but he doesn’t appear on your VuhDo frames. If you’ve been healing every possible target since you got your first heal, chances are, you’ll have a plan for that. If not… well, you might just wipe your group.

More dramatic poses. Moonwells are apparently for camouflage.

Druid-Specific Leveling Tips

Leveling druids is a totally new experience for me. I’ve leveled all the other healing classes (Paladin, Shaman, Shaman, sadly-neglected-Priest) but having experience with direct healing classes doesn’t really prepare you for hot healing. Fortunately for me anyway, druids’ new mastery moves them toward a model where they balance their hots with direct heals which makes them feel much more familiarly like Shamans.

Druids don’t really have the three basic heals that every other healing class has. They sort of do, but it’s not as easy to pick out and classify as a priests would be (heal, flash heal, greater heal) or a shamans (healing wave, healing surge, greater healing wave). For druids you have Nourish (slow casting-middle sized-fairly efficient), Regrowth (fast casting-small direct heal + HOT-very expensive), and Healing Touch (slow casting-large-expensive). This is pretty much your triumvirate. In the early levels when you don’t HAVE all those spells, it’s easy to get confused and misidentify your spammable efficient heal! Sprinkling Regrowths over your SFK group will result in wipes from oom! Not that I did that or anything. *whistles*

While leveling, your emergency button should be Swiftmend. Before Northrend a rejuv+swiftmend combo will be enough to bring anyone from the brink of death to comfortably safe, so be strategic in using that. Once you get to the higher levels though, throw that advice out the window! Saving swiftmend for an emergency moment in higher level content will result in you not doing as much healing as you should be (because Efflorescence will be a major part of your group healing) and also will result in dead people because when the health pools really start to swell in level 75+ content, rejuv+swiftmend will suddenly be just a drop in the very large bucket.

As soon as you get Lifebloom start keeping it rolling on your tank. Keeping Lifebloom up is a big chore when you first get it. It’s annoyingly difficult to time and annoyingly easy to let drop while doing… pretty much anything else. I’d HIGHLY encourage any newbie druid to get a big obvious timer that shows when Lifebloom is about to expire. The more you practice it the better you’ll get at it until soon it’s second nature and you won’t need your timer any more (although you’ll keep it because by then it’ll be as necessary to your sense of personal wellbeing as Linus’s blanket). And you’ll be glad, because when you hit Cataclysm content keeping Lifebloom rolling will get a lot more important because you’ll NEED the replenishment it provides!

Right around the time you start feeling comfortable with Lifebloom uptime, you’ll hit level 80 and get access to mastery and suddenly you’ll have another 10 second uptime buff to juggle. Get another power aura because keeping up Harmony is important! Don’t worry though, it’s even easier to keep rolling than Lifebloom because all the spells that refresh Lifebloom (except Lifebloom itself) also refresh Harmony and they don’t have to be on a specific target, so refreshing Harmony should happen almost by itself much of the time.

At the end of this post I’m providing a link to the weak auras strings I’m using to track my lifebloom and my harmony uptimes. They’re extremely basic, but they work for me, so perhaps it’ll give you an idea of how to set up similar reminders for your own alting project!

The rhythm of resto druid AOE healing is not actually unlike the rhythm of resto shaman AOE healing. Resto shamans often cast one instant (riptide) to proc the tidal waves buff and then follow it up with 2-3 cast time spells to use the charges. Druid AOE healing works very similar. You’ll be hitting Wild Growth on cooldown and then following it up with several targeted heals, whether that’s rejuv+swiftmend on the melee or refreshing Lifebloom (and Harmony) with a nourish on the tank, you’ll often be following that same Waltz-like rhythm that shamans get used to. ONE-two-three ONE-two-three. When you get settled in it will start to feel very familiar and comfortable if you’ve healed with a shaman.

But here’s my last and most important tip for learning a new class, any new class, healing or otherwise, is to find a resource and learn what you need to know from them! My sourcebook for all things resto druid from gearing to spell choice has been Keeva’s excellent site restodruid.info. The site is immensely helpful and simplified for those of us who aren’t math pros (or druid pros) and I would recommend it to anybody just starting out with the class. I know it took me from druid dunce to reasonably confident in short order. But whatever your source, be it Elitist Jerks, your guildies, or a blogger you respect, find some guidance and figure out from someone more experienced how to make the most of your abilities.

It’s been really fun learning how to heal as a druid, picking out the similarities to other healing classes as well as learning to roll with what’s different. It’s added a nice completeness to my understanding of healers and their capabilities, and I think it’ll make me a better healer on my main class as I work what I’ve learned about maintaining buff uptimes into my shaman healing rotation (Riptide uptime goal, here I come) as well as figuring out how to synergize better with druid co-healers. I’d recommend it to anyone who has the time and interest in broadening their healing knowledge.

And as promised, here is the link to my druid weak auras strings, such as they are. More will be added when I get really rolling with the alt raid healing on Haeli next week!

Posted in Alts, Druid, Guide, Healing | Tagged , , , , , | 13 Comments

Moving!

Posted on August 1, 2011

Hi all. Moving to a new site host, gonna be down for a bit while everything is imported.

Please stand by!

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Guest Post: Circle of Tanking

Posted on July 19, 2011

So I was able to prevail upon my significant other — who has previously been immune to pleas for guest posts — to fill out the Circle of Tanks survey from D/E the Tank. Corridon (who I may have referred to as Naelian in his druid days) is a Blood Elf Prot Pally from Azgalor-US, running with Resurrection, a casual raiding guild who went 12/12 in normal t11 and plans to do the same in t12.

He’s not a blogger so he’s neither been tagged, nor is he tagging anyone else. He also may not be available to field questions, and I certainly am not able to! With that caveat covered, on to the show.

1. What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?

Corridon, blood elf protection paladin, 0/34/7

He logged out in his PvP gear. I can only work with what I'm given. *exasperated*

2. What is your primary group tanking environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

Mostly Resurrection’s 10 man guild runs as well as guild 5 man heroics.

3. What is your favorite cooldown for your class and why?

Guardian of Ancient Kings: its a long duration cooldown that can be used to mitigate heavy periods of damage, especially near the end of a boss fight when the healers are low on or trying to regenerate mana.

4. What tanking CD do you use least for your class and why?

Ardent Defender. While it was probably a broken mechanic to have it proc on 0 health, I almost never use this cooldown any more because of trying to save it for when I am about to die.

5. What do you feel is the biggest strength of your tanking class and why?

Our toolbox. With the number of cooldowns, that we have at our disposal, both to save ourselves and to help save raid members, paladins tanks can be an asset to any raid team.

6. What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your class and why?

No gap closer. Even though with bosses death knights are almost in the same situation, they at least have death grip to pull non-boss mobs to them, and with warriors having charge, and bears having charge and skull bash which is a charging interrupt, Pursuit of Justice seems to be woefully lacking as a gap closer compared to other tanks.

7. In a raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best tanking assignment for you?

Starting even as far back as WotlK the distinction between a main tank and an off tank started to disappear and became more of a distinction of tanks who were good with aoe and tanks that were single target. With aoe for bears and warriors being improved in cataclysm and single target threat being buffed for paladins, there is no defined role for any tank class any more, we are all suitable single target and aoe tanks.

8. What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with most and why?

Bears, not sure why really, but I have always been more comfortable tanking with a bear as my partner.

9. What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with least and why?

Death Knights. Although I love all things tank, and have a high level tank of every class able to fill the role, death knight mastery combined with the death strike mechanics are very counter intuitive at the moment, making them a very difficult tank class to play effectively.

10. What is your worst habit as a tank?

I tend to not be as good as I should be with popping my cooldowns, probably a habit developed when tanking as a paladin in WotLK and having Ardent Defender as a proc to save me.

11. What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?

Tanks who run bad specs and can’t hold threat because of it. Its a very simple thing to learn you class and adapt to the changes that have been made to your abilities, rather than continuing to try and play in the style of vanilla WoW.

12. Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with others tanks for tanking?

I think that tanking is fairly well balanced at the moment across 3 out of the 4 tanking classes. Death knights are unfortunately getting the short end of the stick at the moment with their counter intuitive mastery and careful need to balance avoidance and mastery.

13. What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?

Omen and tidy plates are my main gauges of the threat that I have on a single mob. I also use VuhDo to make sure threat isn’t ending up somewhere in the raid that it doesn’t belong, and to make targeting Righteous Defense an easier task.

14. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your tanking class?

That Paladins are “easy” to play. The faceroll Paladins of WotLK are a thing of the past, our class now requires timing and attention that makes it more challenging and more fun to play than it has been in a long time.

15. What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new tanks of your class to learn?

When to use your cooldowns. Plain and simple, Paladins have a ton of them, and knowing which ones to use for what situation is imperative for being an effective Paladin tank.

16. So, how about that whole vengeance mechanic, eh?

Its a good ability, it has eliminated the need for enchants like armsman to increase your threat, and allows for some talent points that would have been put in to a threat generator to be put in to a survival talent.

17. Stamina, Combat Table Coverage, or total Damage Reduction?

Generally I think I follow Combat Table Coverage, the stat combination that I find to be most effective at the moment is around 15% dodge, 15% parry and 50% block. Generally my actual numbers are lower than these, but they are what I shoot for and it seems to be working fine for me.

18. What tanking class do you feel you understand least?

Because I have high level tanks of each of the tanking classes I feel like I understand them all decently well, with Paladin being the class that I know the best. On my alt tanks, I am competent and 10 man raid capable and feel that I understand them all equally well.

19. What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in tanking?

First off with the change to Holy Shield, I now have the ability macroed in to Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous, I also have a cast sequence macro for bubble to cast it and then immediately remove it so that I can purge debuff stacks off of my character once a fight without them having to drop off. I use Omen and Threat Plates to see where I am on my target, and VuhDo gives an excellent picture of where threat is in the raid over all and allows for easy targeting of Righteous Defense and other raid member saving cooldowns.

20. Do you strive primarily for balance between your tanking stats (stam, mastery, avoidance), or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

Mastery, mastery, mastery. That’s how I gem at the moment, most of my gems are straight mastery or mastery hybrids. The other avoidance stats can be reforged on to gear in my opinion.

Posted in Blog Stuff, Classes, Guest Post, Paladin, Raiding | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off

Spirit Link Totem Strategies

Posted on July 16, 2011

So the other day I was in an alt run raid on my alt shaman, Zimzi, and there was another shaman healer in the group with me who runs with that group regularly. On Magmaw, some damage got kind of spiky on the DPS group, and I dropped Spirit Link to keep everyone at a sustainable health level and reduce some of that incoming damage until we could get it all healed up. And everyone in the group said “AHH WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?” and ran out of it. I looked, confused, at the other resto shaman who told me he didn’t spec into Slink because he heard you could kill people with it. True story.

Since then I’ve been talking with a handful of other resto shamans lately in game, people who don’t have a lot of contact with the Twitter/blogging communities. And it seems like some of them are concerned about the best way to use  Spirit Link Totem, or even whether to use it at all. And I’m guessing if they’re a little confused, maybe some other blog readers are confused too. Fortunately, I’ve now been using our Slinky totem for long enough that I am pretty much able to use it in all kinds of situations without killing anybody, so I hereby present my general strategies for doing so.

Note: This post contains no math. I was a philosophy major people, and only required to take a single math elective. After I failed basic statistics in a gruesome manner, I CLEP-ed out of general algebra. Expecting math on my posts at any time is asking to be horribly horribly misled. With that out of the way, on to the guide!

Shiny!

General Hints for using SLink

DO spec into Spirit Link! With a little practice you will not kill anyone at all. But you can still sometime try to kill people on purpose for funzies! (I would never do that…)

DO use Spirit Link for both of its component parts, its sharing of damage between effected targets and its damage reduction potential. Either one or both is a great way to use this cooldown.

DO use Spirit Link on shielded targets (Power Word: Barrier, Power Word: Shield, Divine Aegis, paladin mastery absorbs) because the damage done by Slink will hit the shield first and be absorbed resulting in a net gain in healing for your raid.

DO use Spirit Link in conjunction with other damage reducing abilities (pain suppression, divine protection, stoneform, divine guardian, icebound fortitude) because the effects will stack. The damage mitigation won’t apply to the damage done by Spirit Link in evening out your raid’s health (that’s unmitigatable except by absorbs) but it WILL combine the damage reducer with Spirit Link’s innate damage reduction on any damage that comes in during the totem’s uptime.

DO use Spirit Link as part of a cooldown rotation with other healers or tanks to survive heavy damage phases.

DO use Spirit Link early and often! As a three minute cooldown it can be used more than once during most fights!

DON’T drop Spirit Link while you’re running. Due to the unique positioning requirements of totems, this will give you really odd results sometimes, and usually wastes the cooldown.

DON’T drop Spirit Link in a place where there aren’t other people around (unless you really just want to reduce damage on yourself for a few seconds, I guess it could happen) and expect others to run into it. This is the first rule of healing, most people in your raid are too busy (dumb) to save themselves, you must do it for them.

CONSIDER speccing into Totemic Reach in the Enhancement tree. This will widen the radius of Spirit Link by three yards, and gives it a much larger effective area. This is strictly optional, not necessarily optimal, and YMMV based on your healing style and the needs of your raid. For me? I love it, and if it becomes less feasible to spec into in future patches, my raid will have to pry it out of my cold dead hands.

SLinking your Raid

Spirit Link is an amazing way to prevent deaths when raid healing. It’s a lot like a blanket of hots for a druid or bubblespam for a disc priest (RIP bubblespam) in that it provides a buffer that gives you an opportunity to pump out the heals on a wounded target before they die. It’s very unlikely that people inside your slinky’s radius will die before the effect ends so use that time to your advantage. It also has great synergy with our mastery! People who WERE higher health, are going to start to drop a bit, powering up your heals on them even more. People who were low health will be saved from death, but not immediately shot up to full, so your mastery continues to effect them as well.

Using Spirit Link Preemptively – You can use Spirit Link at times when you KNOW heavy damage to the raid is incoming, things like Nefarian’s electrocute ability or Shannox’s Magma Rupture which come at predictable times and do a ton of raid damage are great times to use Spirit Link. This is probably best done in a rotation with other tank/healer cooldowns, but you can do it on your own if your raid isn’t big on planning ahead too. Remember that Spirit Link’s duration is pretty short (6 sec, slightly longer if talented into Totemic Focus) so you’ll want to drop it not more than 1 second before the start of the ability or it’ll wear off without mitigating anything. A good boss mod is critical here — may I recommend Big Wigs?

Using Spirit Link in a Clinch – Any time the raid is more or less stacked up and looking like having a crisis, drop your Slink. This CAN prevent wipes. Some of the most common places I’ve done this are actually on trash pulls gone horribly horribly wrong. Tank DCs in the Ascendant Council room? Spirit Link can get you through the pull long enough for them to log back in. Angerforge and co. running amok? Spirit Link can save the overeager DPS. It’s also great on bosses with sustained raid damage and stacking phases (Cho’gall, phase 2 comes to mind).

Remember – it’s a 3 min cooldown. Use it early, use it often. Use it on trash. It’ll be back up when you need it.

Oh Cowtank, I hardly knew ye!

Slinking your Tank.

Spirit Link’s a little trickier as a tank cooldown because it’s MUCH easier to kill a tank with it than it is to kill a DPS with it. I don’t tank heal as often as I raid heal, but here’s the observations I’ve found in one tier worth of loving Spirit Link.

Spirit Link as a damage reducer – Use it this way when nobody much is close to the tank, or when the people closest have high health. Use it just like you would on the raid when you expect high tank damage, but remember a few things:

1) Positioning – generally resto shamans are not standing in melee range while tank healing. If you want to use Spirit Link Preemptively, get into position first, because you won’t have time to run in and place it properly if you wait. Remember the totem drops behind and to the left of you in the air totem slot.

2) Be aware of the raid’s health. If you use this to mitigate spike damage on the tank and your warlock wanders into its radius after lifetapping himself into a stupor, you’ve probably just killed your tank.

Spirit Link as an Emergency Heal – on the flip side of the above, you can use Spirit Link to pump out a gigantic amount of healing on a low health tank in a pinch. Use this when you’ve got a melee cluster that are at relatively high health and your tank’s just eaten something that should kill them. Like a meteor to the face, an immolation trap, or a paladin proccing Ardent Defender. You won’t always know these moments are coming, so you may have to drop into ghost wolf and rush in to drop the totem. It’s a gutsy move because of the potential that you may place it wrong and fail to save your tank, or you may get too many damaged people caught in the effect and inadvertently kill the tank, but when it works it’s spectactular to watch the heals pour in as the tank goes from 15% to 50% or higher in a second flat!

TL;DR

Spirit Link is great. It can save your tank. It can save your raid. Do spec into it. Learn it, love it, use it. Kill people with it only sparingly. And your raid will love you!

Posted in Guide, Healing, Raiding, Shaman | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Meme is spelled ME! ME!

Posted on July 10, 2011

So I’ve been tagged in the Circle of Healers Reboot by two delightful bloggers: Windsoar from Jaded Alt and Glorwynn from Heavy Wool Bandage. And because I love talking about myself, I’m going to have lots of fun filling it out.

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Rhee, dwarf restoration shaman. For more restoey goodness, I also have Zimzi, troll restoration shaman.

Because I am a healing fanatic, I also have Siaadna, draenei holy paladin; Haeli, night elf restoration druid; and Emmi, undead discipline priest at various stages of completion. Although I’ll spare you and restrict my answers to my primary healing class as instructed! :P

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
10s raiding

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Riptide, definitely. Riptide does just about everything. It’s instant, on a short cooldown, and it provides a respectable sized initial heal combined with a HoT. I can roll it on three targets at once (glyphed) if my rhythm is on. It triggers tidal waves, the most important buff to our single target healing, and if I bounce chain heal of the recipient of my riptide it gets a boost. What’s not to love?

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Probably healing surge. I actually LIKE the spell, I think it’s important to have the short fast-casting expensive spell in your repertoire, and I like the style of bouncing small fast heals on various targets. I should, I was a Flash of Light spamming holy paladin in Wrath! But the opportunities for that style of heal are pretty limited right now. Either something in your pull has gone very very wrong indeed, or using Nature’s Swiftness + GHW is a better choice. In a widespread emergency, Spirit Link or NS + Healing Rain is a better choice… so yes. Good heal, fun premise… too situational.

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
I think that resto shamans are the least specialized healers currently in the game. Want me to raid heal? Cool. Main tank heal? Sure. Heal the offtank? Dispel? Interrupt? Swing triage heal? Got it. And easily too. I feel like for the most part there’s no major role in a raid that a healer could be asked to fill that I couldn’t do well. Which is a pretty big strength, I think.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
Range. Everything shamans do is limited by range. Our buffs don’t move with us, our cooldown’s area is pretty small. Healing rain is nice and big for a ground heal, but it’s not nearly as wide as the range on a priest’s Circle of Healing or Prayer of Healing or a druid’s Wild Growth. And don’t even get me started on Chain Heal. I use Chain Heal a LOT. I think it’s entirely workable in 10s. But I’m not sure I don’t still think it could stand to be brought in line with the times a bit more. There’s no other healing class that is quite so crippled by spreading out as a resto shaman.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I don’t raid 25s anymore. Rhee’s never even set foot in one. >> I think this survey could use a bit of re-writing to acknowledge that 25s are no longer the gold-standard of raiding.

Anyway, to answer the SPIRIT of the question rather than its questionable wording: I think my favorite healing assignment in a raid environment is one where I can swing from role to role and plug holes. I am especially well suited to keeping an eye on a tank that’s taking low damage while strategically spreading around raid heals as needed. In our current raiding setup we often have healing assignments that sound something like this: Disc Priest is main tank healing, Holy Priest (Zel) is primarily raid healing, I am healing the offtank and backing up either the disc or holy priest based on whether we expect high raid damage or high tank damage on any given fight. I really like that flexible swing role. But as I said above, I can fill whatever role you want to give me and I like the variety of knowing I won’t always be doing the same thing on every fight.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
I really like healing with priests (of both specs) which is fortunate because two of my most frequent Team Heal companions are priests. I feel like their vast array of cooldowns and mitigation abilities complement shamans in one of our weaker areas. Pairing a spirit link totem with a power word: barrier is just a glorious feeling too!

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
I don’t love healing with druids. No offense to any particular druids out there, but I think shamans and druids have similar healing styles, in that we’re both primarily throughput based, where paladins and priests use a more (or less in the case of disc priests) balanced combination of throughput and mitigation abilities. So I always feel like I’m in direct competition with druids. And their throughput numbers are SO HIGH, I never fail to come away feeling like I’m doing it wrong when I look at their healing output. Even if during the fight I felt like I was healing to my utmost, a druid always makes me look like I’m wearing Osh-Kosh and playing with crayons while they’re in a power suit carrying a briefcase.

What is your worst habit as a healer?
Anything that I have to track uptime on is hard for me. Water shield has gotten particularly bad since they changed the internal cooldown and now it falls off every 15 sec or so. I really feel like our regen shouldn’t depend on something we have to spend 30 GCDs refreshing on every fight… but it currently does, so I had better damn well remember to refresh it.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
This will probably rub some of my guildies the wrong way, but I hate (HATE) calling a wipe when only one person is dead. It feels like someone just slapped my face and told me that nobody gets to continue until the healers are flawless. On an actual kill attempt, sure sometimes there are key players that must be alive in order for things to be successful — but there’s a lot of battle rezzes available these days. And on learning fights, what’s the harm in going a little further and, I don’t know, learning?

Do you feel that your class/spec is well-balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
For the most part yes. We’ve come a long long way since the beginning of the expansion when I felt like my heals were worse than embersilk bandages! I think there are a few things that need some tweaking with my class (the range issue is the big one, and the notion of having to trade buffs for cooldowns that I’ve talked about before) but I don’t think that’s exclusive to shamans, I suspect all four healers need a bit of a nudge in one area or other.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
I like World of Logs for evaluating it after the fact. For in combat information I rely on Skada (with the heal/absorbs module installed) and Fatality for information on who died and why, who dispelled, who interrupted, and who healed who for how much. That sort of thing helps me make corrections during the raid. Also, feedback from fellow healers and from the tanks if I’m healing is also super helpful.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
That shaman AOE healing is useless in a 10s environment. We’re stronger in 25s purely due to player density in the room in those fights. But there is NO MECHANICAL REASON that players in 10s can’t stand just as close together as players in 25s. Our low density problem is the result of other players not thinking clearly about it. As my guildie Grimmtooth put it: “We are not a gas, we do not expand to fill the room.”

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
Learning to manage totems. Totems are clumsy. But in order to get good consistent buff coverage you have to learn which totems buff what stat, which other classes can cover it, which pets can cover it, and what other shamans are buffing. It’s a lot to remember and when we first went into Cata I was literally taking a totem checklist in with me every single time. I’ve since become an encyclopedia on the subject, but it was a longish process and I suspect many new shamans don’t bother, and just drop a standard totem set everywhere they go, which is a bad habit and I scold them heartily.

On another, totem related note, we have a lot of short term, cooldown style totems from Tremor to Mana Tide. Remembering to A) use these and B) put your normal buffing totem back up when they expire, is another thing I struggled to master. But it’s very VERY important if you’re covering your raid’s elemental resistances with your glyphed healing stream totem to have that totem up as much as possible.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
I tend to have moderate output and low overheal, but that combination produces pretty high effective healing numbers. I like to make sure my heals are almost all effective healing whenever possible. You’ll also see high use of Riptide, Chain Heal, Healing Rain and GHW. Low use of Healing Wave, Healing Surge, and Unleash Elements (because I forget I have it far too often).

Haste or Crit and why?
Or mastery! Oh my! *cough* My secondary stat priority is Mastery > Crit > Haste (after 12%). After loving haste in Wrath it’s weird to not really care about it, but the plain fact is, the majority of my spells are slow. I pick up enough to hit my threshold to get those hots to heal an extra tick, and after that I reforge it off. Mastery makes my heals more effective in a crunch, and crit is getting more valuable for my regen all the time. No matter how high I stack haste, I’m never going to beat a holy shock or a penance to the punch.

What healing class do you feel you understand least? Holy priests. I haven’t played one since before 4.0, whereas I’ve dabbled in all three of the other non-shaman specs in Cata. Chakra and its many implementations is confusing to me, and Holy priests just have SUCH a huge toolbox I can’t keep up with it all. I’ll leave it to Zel, thanks.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
I’m a VuhDo fangirl. I pair it with Bartender 4 and my Razer Naga to have every healing keybind you could ever hope for. I also use Weak Auras and Mik Scrolling Battle Text. Sheep Monitor for CCs and Shadowed Unit Frames for Player/Target/Focus etc. frames (everything but raid and party).

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
I weight Int highest, of course, and gem/enchant for it as much as possible. Otherwise, I like to have as much spirit as reasonably practical – this is largely psychological – I go into panic mana conservation mode when I feel pressed and heal less than I should. I like to have a small cushion and not be totally on fumes at the end of a fight. That said, I do not want to go back to unlimited mana spell spamming… I just prefer to be a little more mana-comfortable than some other healers I know. After that, as I said earlier I go for Mastery > Crit > Haste in that order. And I don’t care if they’re balanced or not.

And now for tagging people!

We’re almost out of people to tag, but I’m gonna do it anyway. First a tag for Analogue at Looking for More. A bonus “hey you do this survey” tag for Apple at Azeroth Apple. And a final gratuitous tag for — if I can convince him to fill it out — my guildie Roderick  (aka Laralsong) who has been known to do a guest post here and there, and whose SMITESMITEWANGS is an inspiration to all the Effers.

Posted in Blog Stuff, Healing, Raiding, Shaman | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Did Somebody Say Legendary?

Posted on July 3, 2011

So the other night in guild chat, somebody finally said “Legendary.” And not as in  ”it’s going to be legen– wait for it– DARY!” but as in legendary staff. I think there was a significant population in the guild who were all just kind of holding our breaths hoping nobody would ever mention it and thus we would never have to make that decision. I know I was one of them.

But alas, it was not to be.

So having acknowledged in public the actual existence of the thing (pesky stick) we then had to decide who we would give one to on the off chance that we actually constructed one. I think it’s pretty darn unlikely that we’re going to make one, honestly. We made great progression in t11, especially for a guild that started as late in the tier as we did, but I don’t really think it was building-legendaries level progression. But who’s to say really, it’s possible that we’ll be in that position, so we needed to be prepared for it.

So here’s how we’re deciding. Anyone at raider rank and “above” (I say this in quotes because above raider rank consists of Alas as GM and a handful of bank organizers, we don’t have an officer rank) gets a vote. The people who are elligible are mainspec dps casters at raider rank or above, no alts allowed. The votes are being collected by two raiders who have no possible dps caster spec and no personal relationship with anyone who does. In this case, it’s two of our hunters including the esteemed Grimmtooth. Once all the raiders have whispered their votes to both Grimm and Yngwe, the two of them will compare lists to make sure they are the same, and then tally up the votes. The greater raiding population will never know exactly who voted for whom, but the two vote takers will each have a list in the case of a dispute.

I think it’s a pretty good system. I like that the votes will be effectively blind to anyone who has reason to hold a grudge. I like that our hunter pollsters have very little self-interest in who gets an +Intellect stick, and in a guild as couple filled as Eff the Ineffable, I’m glad we decided to make sure that our vote collectors were not the significant others of our candidates. Sorry At and Orv, not elligible! At one point Yngwe asked me to be the second vote collector before we had quite nailed down the backup voting idea, and I declined because I do have a dps caster offspec and I didn’t want to be in a position where any perceived self-interest could cause a problem. So I think our voting method and collectors are avoiding all the major drama pitfalls I can think of. I hope (fervently) that we won’t be the kind of guild that shatters just by knowing who a legendary weapon would go to, but stranger things have happened.

At this time, our votes are still trickling in, so we don’t know yet who the nominee is. Honestly, I’m glad it’s not something I could possibly be in the running for, because I would be pretty disappointed if I was chosen to get something like that but then we never actually built it. Again, that’s another drama pitfall I hope we can avoid. It feels overblown in a way, to choose a recipient for a weapon we might (read: probably won’t) be making. I hope this doesn’t put undue pressure on the guild to perform beyond our capacity or willingness. And yes, I just hope we can maintain our current drama-free zone.

** It’s been pointed out to me that the elements for making the staff are available without going into heroic modes. To which I say, “Huh.” It does, however, make the thing a bit more in reach, and thus the selection process both more and less important. More important because it seems we will be making one… and less important because it seems we might not be limited to making JUST one. Interesting.

Posted in Cataclysm, Guild, Raiding | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Accountability — Update

Posted on June 29, 2011

Wow, guys… When I posted my rant on Monday I didn’t expect more of a response than most of my usual rants garner. But I have gotten so many messages of encouragement and support after this, I could hardly believe it.

So yes, Azuremyst? Not a complete hive of scum and villainy. Not only did the Effers rally around me as I expected they would, I also got whispers from several people around the server that I’ve never talked to before letting me know they read and enjoy my blog and that there are quality guilds on Azuremyst, they’re just a bit less visible than the douchecanoes.

The first player who whispered me also asked that if I see any of his guildies behaving badly in LFG that I let him know. Which I will certainly do, but I don’t expect it at all! He also let me know that they knew the guild that I was talking about and their members have also had trouble with them, so it isn’t just me.

The second player is from one of the older guilds on Azuremyst (which is a BC server, as the name implies) and he wanted to tell me that every summer they see what he called “mushroom guilds” spring up, annoy the server population, and then fade away in the fall. He knows Alas and At from their previous guild and assures me that there is a good community on Azuremyst, it’s just lying low during the summer months.

And then there’s the fact that our friend Valvyx has been lying very low lately. We speculate that perhaps he got the WoW-vacation he so richly deserved. Add to that some of the most positive pugging experiences I’ve had in a very long time these last few days, with people from my own server and from other servers, and I’m back in a good place.

So thank you! Thank you to the two readers who whispered me to say hello, thank you to the awesome holy pally I pugged BoT with on Monday. Thank you to the warlock from my LFG group who turned out to be from Azuremyst. And thank you to the blog commenters, tweeters, and IMers.

My hope for accountability returning is very much improved!

Posted in 5 Mans, Alts, Druid, Rants | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Accountability?

Posted on June 27, 2011

So there’s been a recent move to pair you with players from your own server as much as possible in Dungeon Finder Pugs. Apparently it’s supposed to foster some sort of accountability on the player base. What it seems to be accomplishing is getting me stuck in some of the very worst pugging experiences of my long and distinguished pugging career. Sometimes I feel like I run with the absolute lowest common denominator from Azuremyst. My server is turning into some kind of wretched hive of scum and villainy, but without the nostalgia or grungy charm of Mos Eisley.

So here’s an actual horror story for you guys. And I’m not usually a name and shamer, but these guys are SO BAD that I suggest you all put them on your ignore lists right now.

The Scene is Sunken Temple. The tank, Hawkar, and his buddy Valvyx, the hunter are from Azuremyst, from a guild called the Sacred Plague.  Hawkar, zones in and immediately goes AFK. After several minutes, he returns and pulls without warning or hesitation. Apparently while he’s AFK I’m supposed to maintain a state of hypervigilance and be ready to respond immediately when he comes back and pulls. Anyway, I scramble to catch up and all is well, barring my minor twinge of annoyance. A couple of pulls in, I stopped to loot my sparklies, and as the sparkling mobs were dragons I skinned them too. I’m not skinning every dragon in the whole room or anything, just the ones I personally looted, so it’s pretty quick. But by the time I look up, Hawkar had pulled around the corner and died.

/sigh He emotes, so many fail healers.

Dude, I said, I stopped to loot. A chorus of lols rings out from the rest of the group. Apparently if the tank doesn’t think looting is worth bothering with, I’m not allowed to either. I told them I planned to loot and that wasn’t unreasonable, and if he wanted to pull and die while I did it that wasn’t my problem. And I continued to loot as we went along. The real problems began when we died to Jammal’an the Prophet’s mind control with the tank screaming DISPEL ME DISPEL ME RETARD!

Now, this is the first time I’ve been in Sunken Temple in Cataclysm. Theoretically, I’m told it’s possible to dispel that mind control, but it requires actually having dispel on your bars, not just keybound to a healing addon because the addon won’t click cast heals on a hostile target. So yeah, I could have done that better, but I didn’t even know it was dispellable because it can’t be done with VuhDo. Pre-Cata my groups have always either burned him so fast it didn’t matter or simply CC’d the mind controlled target and waited for it to break. Which is presumably acceptable, because some healing classes can’t remove curses anyway. But no, this guy had to rant and rave and be a dick about it.

Anyway, a spate of verbal abuse later and we’re on Avatar of Hakkar who (since the Cata redesign) does Curse of Tongues. Which I dispelled, since believe it or not I am an experienced healer capable of removing standard dispellable debuffs. The tank snarked at me after that fight that he knows I can decurse since he saw me doing it. Thanks, I needed the reminder.

THEN he insisted that I could dispel the sleep mechanic on Eranikus, which is non-dispellable, confirmed by Wowhead, my preCata experience, and my repeated attempts to dispel it (in case it had changed since Cata).

Anyway, the instance ended, and Hawkar and his hunter pal Valvyx decided to follow me around while I finished up the skinning and turned in my quests. When I say “followed” I mean, ran around me in circles calling me offensive names, spamming the role checker, and filling chat with line after line of “lols” until I put them on ignore. But even then they kept following me and spamming the role checker.

This is what grouping with people from my server gets me.

I reported, ignored, and thought about sending a message to their GM to tell them how very very poorly they are being represented in the dungeon finder. But a quick search through the armory made me suspect that Valvyx might actually be the alt of the GM anyway, and is certainly an officer’s alt, which isn’t very encouraging. Hooray for guilds with GMs who are worse than the average troll.

I have rarely, if ever felt so demoralized and frustrated in my entire WoW-playing history. I am a good healer. I am a nice and pleasant person if you don’t start our acquaintance with an insult. I’ve leveled not one, but three main-spec healers through the dungeon finder, and the druid I was pugging on will be the fourth. When I get paired with anonymous jerks from other servers, I normally console myself with the thought that I’ll never see them again. That’s why this new trend of jerks from my own server is so depressing. I CAN see them again. I HAVE seen them again, and I probably WILL continue to see them again. And who knows, I might be pugging Baradin Hold with their guildies and alts. I’m stuck with these guys on my home server, and I still don’t feel like I have a prayer of ever influencing their reputation enough to make a difference in their behavior when every other player I meet from Azuremyst is just like them. Probably it’ll wind up influencing my reputation instead.

And standing up for yourself in instances isn’t really done. I’ve been trying to do it lately, and half the time all it does is end up escalating out of control, because assholes will go to any extreme to get their way and nice people normally just leave. If you try to not let them win, all you do is make it so everyone loses. But just leaving teaches the asshats that if they’re bad enough they can force everybody to either leave or comply.

Some accountability, huh?

And if that grim PuG story wasn’t enough, the next day Valvyx (as confirmed by my guildies and the other poor saps in trade) announced to trade that I was giving away free gold to anyone who would whisper me.

You did not just...

I have had no contact with him (because I’m ignoring him) since our fail Sunken Temple, except the harassment report I filed. After his trade chat stunt I couldn’t take two steps without being whispered by some beggar wanting free gold for the rest of the evening. That’s just pure malicious trolling and so now I’ve filed another harassment report because I can’t even believe what a jerk this guy is. So for your sanity and the sake of accountability, avoid Valvyx, Hawkar, and the members of the Sacred Plague.

Posted in 5 Mans, Alts, Druid, Healing, PuG, Rants | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments