[Paladin] The Lament of Flash of Light

Flash of Light used to be my bread and butter spell. This blog is Flash of Moonfire because Flash of Light was such a key part of my repetoire as a holy paladin ever since I first hit 70 and started healing Karazhan.

But when Cataclysm hit I had trouble figuring out where I'd put it on my bars. The tilda, numbers 1-6, and F1-F6 are the keys I bind things to, with occasional Ctrl or Shift combinations. Flash of Light used to be number 2 since I hit it so often. Then it moved to F2 to be a little more out of the way since I didn't use it that often. Now...

Well, it's still on my bars, but it's not bound to anything. That's probably bad, but its usefulness has become so far out of sight and out of mind that I have trouble thinking of moments where someone died because I didn't use it.

The thing is... it doesn't heal that much for the mana cost (making it an expensive proposition for what you get out of it) and it still has a cast time unless there's an Infusion of Light proc (making it's usefulness while moving limited).

I've been doing arena the majority of Season 9 and since the start of Season 10. I've seen other holy paladins run themselves dry casting Flash of Light too many times while I'm still at 90% or more mana. Whereas when I need an emergency heal and Holy Shock and Word of Glory are on cooldown, I hit Divine Favor for that 20% haste and crit and chug out a speedy Divine Light or two (perhaps combined with Aura Mastery to ensure no interruption). I figure if I'm going to spend the mana I'm going to get the most health I can for it.

I'm sure there's room for a Flash of Light in there. Again, it'd be instant with an Infusion of Light proc, but as a cast time spell I just wouldn't use it. An IoL-enhanced Divine Light goes by so fast that 90% of the time it's too fast for my opponents to interrupt (gladiator level I am not, so YMMV).

Then this week I did some Firelands raiding with the second 10-man team in my guild as a fill-in healer. I know these fights on my druid, but for those I've always been dps or a tank. I had little to no experience healing them, so I was surprised by how much faith the raid leader had in me, suggesting we two-heal several fights, considering that my paladin had only the Firelands cape and a bizarre mix of BWD, troll dungeon, and PvP gear.

I thought that perhaps as I was doing PvE raiding I would find a use for Flash of Light, a reason to keybind it again, but I didn't.

It's not that there were no wipes that were my fault, being rather scrubbish for the duties I was assigned, but they weren't because I didn't get a quick heal off. I'm quick with my Lay on Hands and I'm not afraid to use it if I think a tank's gonna die.

Wipes were more due to missing the Smouldering Devastation cue on Beth'talic (I'm not usually on the web, let alone as a healer), being in the wrong place on Alysrazor (until recently I always tanked that fight so I had no concept of where the caster adds spawned and lost a dps and a tank because of range issues), and there was the occasional, for some reason or other I didn't think the tank's health was going to drop that fast so I wasn't ready with a heal.

But we cleared 6/7 and I two-healed Alysrazor and Rhyolith so at the very least I know I'm not bad. I was just on a bit of a learning curve, and I was the only healer who didn't let someone die to Torment on Baelroc so I was rather happy about that.

Getting back to Flash of Light though... I still didn't see when to use it. I thought maybe Baelroc would be the boss.

Torment's a nice stacking debuff that eventually chews through dps the higher it goes. But it ended up that I would Holy Shock, Word of Glory, and then roll almost immediately into Divine Lights to make sure no one dropped.

My mana was hurting almost every Firelands boss (inexperience healing the fights combined with not as geared as the rest of the raid), so if I needed a "save" I wanted it to be Lay on Hands because at least that would give me some mana back.

I guess I don't use Flash of Light because I try very hard not to be in the position where Flash of Light would be appealing to me; namely where someone's going to die and that little sliver of health would make it worth the cost of using it.

In PvP I use Holy Shock and Word of Glory as much as possible. If I use cast time spells I'm either using them under an IoL proc (making them very fast and hard to interrupt), I Aura Mastery to make them uninterruptable, or I prepare to cancel the cast if the possibility of getting interrupted exists and then cast again after the interrupt is wasted. It's rare I do unprotected casts in arena, and if I do it's because my partner is probably going to die in the next couple of seconds if I don't and all my cooldowns have been burned.

In PvE there are multiple healers and the the damage intake doesn't seem to warrant it. Tanks get hit too hard for Flash of Light to make much of a difference. And if they're dps or another healer, there is typically enough time between damage bursts to allow HoTs or a Holy Light to save them.

Is there really a need to raid more than twice a week?

I occasionally read recruitment threads of other guilds, partially out of curiosity, and partially to see if there's a nice recruitment layout I might want to use at a later date. Sometimes I'm surprised by what I find by what people offer or what they expect.

Particularly, I notice quite a few guilds still raid 3-4 nights a week, a pace I gave up as too demanding.

For most purposes, I don't understand raiding more than two nights a week anymore. It used to be a near necessary, especially with resets every week and no way to extend a lockout, but even then it seemed an awful lot of time to spend each week in a game. Just because I might spend 20 hours in a week playing a single video game, doesn't mean that I want to spend 20 hours a week every week playing a single video game (because you can't forget the time spent doing heroics, leveling alts, and playing the AH on top of raiding). Personally, I burn out.

At my raiding peak I'd run 25-mans three days a week and 10-mans two days a week, and that was just too much. I like WoW, but there are a lot of other forms of entertainment I enjoy besides WoW, such as other video/ computer games (played the new Dragon Age II DLC, woo!), D&D, anime, books, etc. When I'm playing WoW, I'm not doing any of those, and there's only so much time in the world.

At the time I started my two night a week 10-man raid guild, 10-man raiding was still the poor cousin of 25-man raiding and how the hell could anyone get anything done before reset with only two nights a week?

But we managed. We did wonderful things like clearing 11/12 Heroic ICC in a single three hour night so we could spend all of our second day on Heroic Lich King. (We rarely extended the lockout because people didn't like the idea of doing nothing but the Lich King all week.) We prided ourselves on efficiency. We still do.

We like that we've cleared the majority of Firelands bosses within our first three attempts. We like that we never spent more than three hours downing any of our six heroic T11 kills. We like that raids start on time and people come back on time from our scheduled breaks (if you're 2 minutes late it means you're last, people are doing /poke at you, and chances are everyone else was back on time).

Even though we like raiding, we like that we have good progression for minimal time investment. We lost a couple raid nights after 4.2 landed due to real life issues, but we're still 6/7 in Firelands, and hoping to down Rag in the near future.

One of our raiders, who really likes raiding, also raids on an alt in another two night a week group to get more of her raiding fix. When I mentioned that I was surprised she wasn't with a three or four night a week raid guild instead of us, she said that raiding more nights a week doesn't mean the guild's going to do more with the time that they have.

Skywall is not the most progressed server out there, so when I say we're in the running for server third kill of Rag it may not mean much depending on what your own server is like, but the thing is... the patch hasn't been out all that long! I don't know when Patch 4.3 is going to land, but if you figure it's at least three months betwen major patches there's still two months or more to work on Firelands.

It's not necessary to raid more than two nights a week anymore if you just want to see the content, not unless there's a drive to be the first at something, to brute force a boss kill, or you just really like raiding (and even then, you could do that on an alt like my guildie does). Two nights a week has even allowed us a fair amount of time for heroic kills. So if I was a prospective applicant looking for a new raid guild, where would I go?

Would I want to be in a guild that's 6/7 raiding two nights a week or 1/7 raiding four nights a week? (I've seen the recruitment ad for the latter. It's out there.)

We're not best in the world or best on the server, but we're doing all right and because of this I know that it's possible to do a lot with just two nights a week.

Yet when I look at other guilds advertising their raid nights, I'm quite shocked that a lot of them still raid 3-4 nights a week. And these aren't necessarily heroic guilds either. What does a 4 nights a week raid guild that has only downed Shannox do on its other nights? Are they raiding T11 still? Maybe some of those raid nights are retro raids?

I admit I don't understand and their ads don't help me to do so.

If a guild's struggling with content, adding more nights to the raid schedule probably isn't going to help them see it faster. More raid resets will, because that will give them more gear to compensate for any lack of skill. A guild that takes 50 attempts to kill a boss that takes another guild 5 isn't a better guild because they killed it first, and they may be burning out their members by doing so.

Times I'm Thankful For My Guild

My guild looks like it will be ending its Tier 11 raids with the progression of 6/13 Heroic, which isn't too shabby at all. We've had our ups and downs, and chewed through a frightful number of healers at one point, but stabilized over the past month or two and downed multiple heroic bosses for the first time.

One thing I've liked is that people are serious about showing up. People post ahead of time whether or not they're going to be absent. We run a team of 12 and only very, very rarely have we had to cancel a raid even under the worst of circumstances.

I was not always in a guild like this.

Back in TBC, when I was in my first raiding guild, they were very lax with their team setup. People knew the raid times, but on the rare occasion they would actually raid earlier than scheduled (I was admittedly quite upset to have rushed home to raid only to discover they're started without me) and then they wanted to be fair about giving everyone an opportunity to raid. The problem was, they had trouble stopping recruiting and when you have two tanks, three healers, and twenty dps for Kara... well... you don't get to go very often.

It also meant that if a healer was absent we probably wouldn't go, and if a tank was absent we definitely did not go. There was no penalty for being absent. There was no reward to being present (other than you might get to go). There were no attendance rules at all really, so the dedicated raider would often be sat for someone who rarely showed up in the interests of giving everyone a chance to raid.

Those who are dedicated raiders can see the problem in this.

But for a casual raid guild, maybe it's not that bad a thing to trade off progression and a regular raid spot for the freedom of just showing up once in a while and still getting to go (maybe), but it's something I knew going forward that I've wanted to avoid.

And I've done a decent job. My second TBC guild valued me highly and I never sat, whether it was 10-man or 25. My first WotLK guild never benched me either, though occasionally I volunteered to sit. Both of those guilds were good about making raids happen until eventually their leaders couldn't take it anymore and quit.

My second WotLK guild and current Cata guild are the same, and it is my guild. I run it, and I do all I can to avoid the burnout of my predecessors while accomodating the schedule and raid style I want. We raid just two nights a week (then unprecedented on our server and quite rare in general when we started in ToC), just 10-mans, and with an eye on heroics.

I've seen more content in my little guild than in any of my previous ones, and I know it's due to the skill and dedication of my raiders.

This feeling of pride isn't something triggered by the upcoming patch 4.2, as one might think. Rather, something else happened recently.

In these final days of Tier 11 I volunteered to fill in for a casual raid guild's healing team on my paladin. I don't know this guild well, but their members have always been nice folks, so I was sure that running with them would be more pleasant than pugging. I was warned by their GM that they didn't have as many of their regular raiders anymore, and things might be kind of rough, but I said I was fine with that. I'm not someone who's going to nerd-rage because we wiped.

The guild ended up taking three non-guildies, including me, to fill the holes in their roster. We killed three bosses in two hours and called it a night. For a casual guild deprived of a full in-guild raid team it was acceptable, especially considering that they had to explain the fights from scratch for a couple people.

Knowing they were short-handed (and wanting to raid a bit more on my alt), I offered to fill in for them again, and their guild master extended invites to me via the in-game calendar for the next three raids.

I accepted, and now two of those three dates have passed. They didn't raid on either of them because not enough people have showed up.

If I was one of their guildies and that was my only opportunity to raid, I would be quite annoyed, but since I'm just filling in for fun on my alt, hearing that the raid has been canceled 20 minutes after start time didn't bother me, especially since I would have been online anyway.

Now, attendance is not mandatory in their guild, and it's one of their selling points in their recruitement ads, so it's not surprising that when content is stale not enough people show up. Personally, I could not live with that on my main. But I know people at my day job who play WoW and think it's ridiculous to set aside a set time every week to raid. They don't mind raiding itself, they don't mind going once in a while, but they don't like the commitment. For them, that kind of guild isn't a bad idea. Go if there are enough on, don't if there aren't.

The biggest thing to be thankful for in a guild is being with people who share the same commitment to raiding, leveling, PvP, whatever that focus might be. It doesn't matter if it's a high amount or a low amount as long as the commitment is the same. My guild is ranked #2 for 10-man progression on our server, but #72 on guild levels since we're still level 20. We might not be achievement hunters or fishers or crafters or activity maniacs, but we know what we like and we do it.

[Paladin] Gut Feeling About Healing in a Post-4.0 World

Cavaet: I have not raid healed since the patch. I have only done heroics. However, I did spend an fair amount of discussion with my guild's holy paladin over his performance in our heroic ICC 10 raid last Saturday, so I think I have a decent handle on what the fuss is about.

And fuss there is. Ghostcrawler wrote a humongous post on the subject yesterday.

After our first post-4.0.1 raid in ICC, our holy paladin posted on our guild forums about his issues with healing that night, most particularly in regards to Heroic Lich King. He was concerned that due to the change in how paladins work, that he might not be able to perform at the level he used to pre-patch. Typically he would beacon one tank, heal the other, and possibly help the raid if GCDs allowed or the situation demanded (disc priest grabbed by valkyr).

Now he's no longer sure that's possible, and he thinks we may have to three-heal H LK. With the improved dps post-patch, we might still be all right.

So, I did some thinking about paladin healing; after healing heroics on Gillien, listening to my guildie's woes and analyzing World of Logs with him, and reading Ghostcrawler's mega-post.

My feeling is that paladins are heading in the right direction. It may be bumpy now, but I like having more spells, more decision making. I was never a big fan of the firehose approach to paladin healing. My crowning moment was solo-healing half the Moroes fight in Karazhan after our priest died, and that was back in TBC. It was a big mess of triage and figuring who could live for a few seconds more and who needed a heal now.

There wasn't really that kind of decision-making in WotLK. Beacon tank. Heal someone else. Make sure the heals keep flowing in even if no one else needs it. It was a little wonky at first, when the beacon didn't transfer overheals at the start of WotLK, but after overheals counted there was even less thought involved.

Running through heroics after 4.0.1 I found I had to change my keybindings. Flash of Light and Holy Shock swapped places, since Holy Shock would be my go-to heal and FoL my emergency quick heal. Holy Shock was now stronger and cheaper than Holy Light, with the bonus of being instant! Building up Holy Power for Word of Glory wasn't a problem, and Word of Glory was another instant heal more or less on par with Holy Shock. If I couldn't use either, then I would consider a Holy Light; Divine Light if the tank needed it. My biggest problem is that I need to set up a good Power Auras for Holy Power so I can better keep track of it.

Divine Light felt a little sluggish, but for heroics it usually wasn't necessary. Flash of Light I barely used and mana troubles were non-existent. After a few heroics I felt confident that I should be able to play my paladin in a normal ICC just fine. The only thing I was not certain about was longevity, since nothing in a heroic lasted long enough to test me, so I wasn't sure how much spirit I would need on my gear.

However, I haven't raided progression content on Gillien in months, and my guild's holy paladin had quite the maddening experience in heroic ICC.

The problem arises from what was expected of him, what he was previously capable of, and what he can do now.

The 4.0.1 paladin is no longer a firehose.

• Divine Light is more or less the same as the old Holy Light in terms of output, but it's slower.


• Beacon of Light only transfers half the heal.


• Holy Light has a low mana cost, but does a low amount of healing, and takes about a second longer to cast.


• Flash of Light, while quicker, does about 80% the healing of Divine Light at the same cost (still not quite the old Holy Light)

Due to the 50% reduction in Beacon of Light, it's no longer possible to beacon one tank, heal the other, and expect them both to stay up. He actually has to heal both tanks. While that doesn't sound horrific on paper, it is costing him GCDs he didn't have to worry about before, and in our raid he's also the person who cleanses the Necrotic Plague. (We used to have a dps do it, but we found our transitions worked better if he could concentrate on dps-ing so the shambling horrors are up a shorter period of time.)

Our paladin's job is harder, and I don't mean to trivialize his concerns, but I don't think holy paladins are necessarily in as bad a spot as he thinks, or that the people on the forums think.

It might just be a need to rethink strategies.

For instance, on Saturday he ran with a spec without Enlightened Judgements and he was having trouble maintaining his 9% haste buff with the limited range, so when we go back tonight, he's going back to that so he can judge from afar.

He can't heal like he used to, constantly powering through heals that will hit both tanks, but he isn't supposed to heal like that anymore. It might be a case of relearning how to heal, redividing the duties between him and our disc priest, or maybe bringing a third healer. With the post-patch boost in dps we probably can spare that now.

When I looked at our World of Logs report, only one of the four H LK wipes we had on Saturday was due to premature tank death. None were due to the plague not getting dispelled in time. It might have been hard, but considering he was still learning his new spec, he did fine. The plague was getting dispelled, and with one exception it wasn't tank death that caused the undoing of the raid. He was performing just about the same as he was pre-patch.

Naturally, this is just a top level view of our attempts. It doesn't encompass how he's needed to change his play style and how his percentage of heals vs. the other healers on World of Logs has actually gone down. But on the surface he can still perform the job he was assigned to do. It's just harder/different.

Paladins might not be what they were, but that doesn't mean they're broken. I like where we're going. I like the idea of not being a spammer. I like triage. Holy Power's a little quirky, but I'll figure it out.

I'm not going to miss the pug raids where holy paladins fight over who gets to heal the tanks. I'm not going to miss being told that when they were looking for a healer they really meant a priest/druid/shaman who can raid heal. I'm not going to miss the VoAs where I was told to raid heal because they already had three other holy paladins and someone had to do it (which I didn't mind much, though I still beaconed one of the tanks because it was only prudent to do so).

I'm sure there will be people who quit their holy paladins for another class/spec. It's not going where they want it to go. And that's fine. But maybe it won't be that bad either.

A coworker who's also a casual raider, thought about dumping his holy paladin after he heard about the patch 4.0.1 changes. He thought about switching to his level 70-something priest. But he tried the paladin changes and ultimately decided they weren't as bad as he thought. He'd keep him.

Maybe I have too much faith in Blizzard, but I think we just need a little more time for the dust to settle and get used to things. Of course it will be hard for those working on the toughest content, those who will feel every little change and are fighting bosses with razor precision and precious little margin for error. Paladins are different now.

Ghostcrawler said:

We haven't seen too much evidence yet that paladins are much poorer tank healers than other classes, though I understand many of you feel that to be the case. (It also doens't help that the popular logging programs and websites aren't showing Holy mastery yet.) If we do decide Holy can't competitively tank heal any longer, then we will buff them.

Blizzard's watching. If it's really bad they'll fix it.

Selling Myself Short

I don't know if other people who have multiple 80s ever run into this problem, but I've been habitually regarding my feral druid's dps as "crappy."

This is the first expansion I've had more than one max level character with a main spec as dps, and being that I raid, I have a good idea of what feels like good dps and what feels... underwhelming. I know meters aren't everything, but they're a good tool for evaluating one's own performance and as a feral druid I've gotten used to feeling inferior to when I'm on my moonkin.

But then again, it's inevitable that given less gear and less time invested, that whatever my feral does should feel pretty "poor" against my main.

Then today I went on an ICC 10 pug on my feral. It was a good run, clearing out two wings before people failed on Blood Princes (between a lagging healer and an inexperienced range tank it wasn't so good). One-shotting Putricide was definitely a highlight though. After the raid was over and people were leaving, the raid leader thanked me for my "leet dps."

I was stunned.

My crappy dps alt? The one with virtually no drops from ICC until that [Whispering Fanged Skull] dropped today?

But going by Recount I had set a new personal best for dps on Saurfang. I was either #1 or #2 on almost every fight, even crappy ones for cats like Rotface. I was pleasantly surprised. I wasn't the worst geared in the raid, but not the best either. Definitely middle of the road in that pug.

On a whim I decided to take my dps and compare it to the benchmark of my own guild, using the World of Logs report for our most recent raid. As in, if I was applying for an open feral spot in my own guild, would I take me?

I stack up better than I thought I would, but I can't say my feral compares to our rogue and our ret paladin, her gear still isn't there yet (get rid of those ToC 5 leather boots!), but I think if she was full ICC 10 geared she could be competitive. I would consider her as a backup raider if someone wasn't able to make it.

So maybe I'm not so bad after all. Maybe for my gear I'm actually doing just fine.

Remembering My Roots (Not a Resto Pun)

I started playing my feral druid again and decided to try getting in on some pug raiding action. After a couple attempts to get into an ICC 10 and an ICC 25 that fell apart before I even got in the instance, I finally got a positive response. But before I got the invite, the raid leader whispered me asking if I was fine with doing just Lower Spire. Going further than that would depend on how the raid looked.

Though I would have liked to go further, I realized it was Sunday and my guild raids on Monday so the chances of me getting into a different ICC raid were looking pretty slim. Besides, I might get a drop or two that would boost my gear score on a server that's obsessed with "you must be this tall to ride." So I agreed.

After the invite I found myself in a group for ICC 10 that consisted of a group of 7 guildies and 3 puggers.

In terms of gear, the guildies were a group that would have been laughed out of any "respectable" raid. They were not undergeared though. They were just perfect for starting out ICC 10. The worst of the puggers was on par with their best, I was a little better (though still with no ICC 10 or 25 gear), and the best had quite a few pieces of ICC 10/25 gear.

We cleared Lower Spire with only a couple wipes on the optional raid weekly, Securing the Ramparts, which the pug hunter repeatedly moaned about. Only after being reminded that the reward was five Frost Emblems, worth two and a half boss kills, did he finally consent to a third attempt, which ended up being successful.

The guildies seemed to be in good spirits though. Friendly bunch. If they complained it must have been in their private guild chat or vent because they were nothing if not civil.

We wiped once along the gauntlet to Sister Svalna, but otherwise got her Frost Emblem. Then we went over to Festergut and they admitted that they'd never done him before.

Since I rather liked the group, they made good time, no extended AFKs, no complaining about wiping, I offered to explain the Festergut fight to them. Though I will have to say that I never want to type out an explanation about Festergut again. I've done Festergut as a tank, healer, melee dps, and ranged dps, and it's a fight where each group has different things they need to be aware of.

We gave Festergut a shot, and wiped not very far in. He'd only managed to get to the third inhale. I couldn't tell for certain, but I don't think the healers were equipped for two healing all the damage in Festergut. I remember having to heal my eyeballs out when my guild first got there and we had three healers, though granted we did not have a 15% ICC buff at the time.

When a second shot didn't produce better results, the hunter said no more, he was out of ammo and he was leaving. (I found it amusing that not bringing enough ammo was his reason for leaving.)

I thanked the group for the run and said that if they usually ran at this time on Sundays and needed a spare I'd be happy to go. They said they would keep me in mind and I dropped group.

The raid leader then whispered me saying that he was surprised that someone who outgeared his guild would be so patient with them. Most geared raiders won't give them the time of day.

I replied that I really wasn't that much better geared than them, so I understood their inability to get into raids of their chosing. Goodness knows I started responding to LFM ICC with the fact I've cleared the LK and five HMs on my main since my feral's own achievements aren't anything to write home about.

Apparently this guild was a group of friends that wanted to raid together, and while not mind boggling stellar players, they seemed a good, disciplined group whose primary fault was lack of gear due to their coming on the raid scene so late. Again, I was much impressed with the pace of trash clearing and the lack of AFKs.

Playing with them reminded me of my early raiding days in TBC, when everything was still exciting, and back before people got jaded and short-tempered around "scrubs" who couldn't plow through content while overgeared. Back when giving a boss a couple good shots was all that was really expected.

My current guild started ICC 10 with about the same gear score they did, so this guild, coming late to the game as they are, is perfectly well geared for the content they're doing, and they seem to realize that. They're not disappointed by not clearing farther and they're not having any mammoth screw-ups. They know the fights they've done and they're learning for the fights still to come.

I don't know that I'll get a chance to raid with them again next week, but even if they don't clear 3-4 wings in a single night, I think they're a fine bunch to run with and I could do a lot worse.

[Druid] Settling in as a Tree

I'm still working on that tree thing. After getting Grid set up properly and running a few practice heroics, I jumped into a ToC 10 pug and managed to not embarrass myself. I do, however, wish that I had a bubble like a paladin. Barkskin just doesn't cut it. Faction Champs is remarkably fun as a tree though. Didn't get silenced or interrupted once, and it was really easy to just run around and keep healing. Nerf restos!

The ToC 10 run was blessed with idiots, which in most cases would annoy me, but because I was there to learn how to heal, well, nothing prepares a person for healing bad situations like people getting into bad situations. It's not like I was there for gear.

We wiped 4 times due to various acts of stupidity, such as people not changing the aura around their feet to dark for Dark Vortex on the Twin Val'kyr, or people not getting on or behind ice patches when Anub was burrowing. We cleared everything, but it was far from the cleanest run out there, and it was only ToC 10!

What pleased me the most was that the other healer was a similarly geared resto shaman and I was mostly able to keep pace with him on overall healing. It was a good sign. I might not be a very good resto druid yet, but I may be passable.

My guild got to Lich King again last night, but due to a misjudgement about how much time we had left to clear and a couple bad wipes (so not on farm yet), we didn't actually get to kill him. On the bright side, we got the Blood Queen hard mode down and our first armor token went to our DK MT. This puts us at 3/12 for hard modes.

We'll be starting over with a fresh lockout for more hard modes next Saturday, with the goal of downing Marrowgar and Saurfang, maybe Rotface or Festergut if time allows. Our resto shaman will be there this time, which should make things easier.

I had hoped to do some practice tree healing on our farm bosses in ICC last night, but time and deciding to do the BQL hard mode didn't allow it anywhere except for the Valithria fight. It was our first time four healing it and it went ridiculously fast. I almost caught up to our shaman in pure output. Of course, neither of us got near our paladin. We left our poor priest outside again (his heal spec is disc). I don't think he's ever gone through a portal on her.

I told our paladin that healing as a druid is like using a sprinkler when I'm used to a firehose, but I think I'm getting comfortable with it. I just need some more practice so I can be a proper backup healer.

[Druid] Not the Best First Crack at Heroic ICC

I was waiting to get our first crack at heroic ICC tonight, but when we reached Marrowgar there was something different about me. You see, I was a tree.

Our resto shaman couldn't make it tonight and our paladin healing lead really did not want me to bring my paladin since the role we were missing was our shaman's awesome raid healing. I argued that I'd probably heal better on my paladin, having healed as one since TBC, but the raid agreed to wait while I respecced and regeared myself.

You see, we're a small raid guild with only 11 regular raiders, and we hate benching. When our shaman is missing, we're down to our paladin and our shadow/disc priest who does the uber swapping mania. Two healers aren't enough so I often went on my pally if we needed a third.

But we're doing hard modes now so raid comp in all likelihood matters more, and if I can learn to play resto as adeptly as holy, then it would not hurt as much for a healer to be absent.

Since we picked up a ret pally with a prot off-spec who can fulfill the backup tank role I used Hana's off-spec for, I had offered to look into making a resto set. I built out what I needed in Rawr and read over Keeva's fantastic new resto druid guide.

The only thing is... since no one had responded to my offer on my guild forums, I didn't bother assembling anything because I figured people weren't interested. I'm known for sometimes going a mile farther than necessary, so I chalked it up as more than I had to do.

Until tonight. So I ran around Dal grabbing gear and gems while our raid was clearing trash. After they summoned me our JC/enchanter cut and enchanted the lot for me, and in I went, with jack squat but theoretical knowledge of how to play a resto druid.

HoT the raid, right?

Crap... my Grid's not set up for HoTs because paladins don't need them and as a moonkin I only bothered to add poisons and curses.

Wild Growth when three or more targets can be affected.

You know... that doesn't work so well when everyone's scattered around during a Bone Storm. It requires more heads up healing than I can manage as a nub tree. We eventually got people to be better about staying roughly in the middle of the room though so might not be so bad later.

Convenient keybindings are good.

It would have helped if Nourish wasn't the 7 key, Lifebloom wasn't 0, and my Nature's Swiftness/Healing Touch macro wasn't the 3. Things that didn't matter as a sometimes heal bar for a moonkin turned out to be horrible as a tree.

In a nutshell, I sucked. I didn't even do half the healing of our holy paladin and our disc priest.

It's a very different mentality healing as a druid than a paladin. I can't help wanting to top everyone off, like immediately.

Still, we managed to get Marrowgar to 50% despite the horrible healing on my part, and in the end decided to save him for later. We were making a lot of mistakes, and I think if our shaman had been there we would have been able to handle it better.

So I went back to moonkin and we pushed on to Heroic Deathwhisperer, which we heard could be 2-healed, and she was. She was a one-shot. So was Heroic Gunship. (I would have cried if we managed to wipe on that.)

We were a little skeptical about spending much time on Saurfang, given that most 10-man guilds seems to skip him and come back later, but we gave him a shot and found out that we really weren't doing too bad. We had a heart-breaking 10% wipe as our best attempt of the night.

But because we wanted to kill the Lich King for our eleventh, who sat out last Monday, we switched back to normal and killed him so we could continue with the rest of the instance on Monday.

I'm thinking I might ask our priest to stay shadow on Monday so I can get some tree form practice in on our farm fights.

Final note as a nub tree who assembled her gear too fast: As I was writing this I just realized I still have my feral glyphs in my off-spec. Way to go!

We are Kingslayers

I know, I know. The 15% buff just went live this week, but we had gotten to phase 3 few times before last night, so I think we would have downed him regardless. Our last attempt had a flawless phase 3 and only a single hiccup in phase 2 where we lost our holy paladin and had to battle rez him.

I'm very proud of my pokey little 10-man guild for downing Lich King, for sticking with the 10-man strict format, and still beating the majority of our server's 25-man guilds to the punch. I'll admit, being adding to the GuildOx Hall of Fame as Skywall's server first 10-man strict kill is a nice pat back too.

One of my guildies pointed out that with our kill we're now ranked #80 in the US for 10-man strict. It's pretty cool, but I attribute that more to a lack of popularity with 10-man raiding than how quickly we sped through ICC. Last month was particularly brutal for our raiding schedule since 2 of our 11 raiders had night shift problems that made it difficult if not impossible for them to raid.

We ended up canceling a couple raid nights and temporarily moving a couple more to accomodate absenses.

We're back to our normal raid schedule though, and the night shifts are pretty much done, so we're hoping to rack up some hard modes now.

We also need to get our ret paladin into our next Lich King kill, for being the stand up 11th raider in a 10-man raid guild who volunteered to sit out last night. I really hate benching people, which is why we only have 11 active raiders in my guild, and for someone to offer to sit out on a night where we were all very sure of a kill is very sporting of them.

Now I need to read up on hard modes. It'll be like relearning some fights all over again, I'm sure, but it should be fun!

So Happy for 10-mans!

By now several bloggers have already commented on the news announced by Blizzard regarding the Cataclysm raid sizes and lockouts. I won't bother reposting what others already have (you can read the whole post here if you want), save the cliff notes version as it means for 10-man raiders:

• 10 and 25-man raids will drop the same loot


• 10 and 25-man raids will share the same lockout


• 10 and 25-man raids will share the same difficulty

While I'm sure there are some 25-man raiders who are no doubt concerned about this, as a 10-man raider I'm extraordinarily pleased, and overall I think this is a good thing, even for the 25-man raider.

Why?

When I was a 25-man raider, we officially raided three nights a week. We considered ourselves casual. But we liked running 10-mans too. So our casual three nights a week often turned into five nights a week. Not so casual anymore, was it?

Some people in the guild really only wanted the 25-man raids so they never went to 10-mans, but were they gimping themselves by doing so? Sometimes key trinkets only dropped in 10-mans, and to say nothing of the extra emblems that could be earned by regularly doing 10-mans once ToC and ICC became regular content! ToC was the worst for 25-man raiders who might end up doing the same instance four times a week for normal and heroic, 10 and 25-man.

Blizzard admitted that the ridiculous number of emblems for the ToC/ICC gear is because they expected top level raiders would be running both raid sizes, collecting emblems from both, and they needed to make sure they didn't get gear too fast. But the bad part about planning for the gearing of the hardcore is that raiders who only do one size raid have to scrimp for weeks to get a single piece gear that costs 60-95 emblems.

It's really not too bad for a decent group that only does one size raid. I have my four piece of T10 now, and emblems leftover, but I can see how 25-man raiders can feel compelled to run both raid sizes if they want to stay on top. The perception is there that they have to do.

I know if I was still in my 25-man guild I would be running both 10 and 25-mans on a regular basis. As an officer it would have been derelict for me to do otherwise. Sharing the same lockout is a good thing, in my opinion. It prevents player burnout.

It's primarily the same loot that I think most 25-man raiders would have an issue with. Never mind that under the new system they'll get more loot per boss drop and therefore be gearing up faster than a 10-man raider. They'll still be better geared than us; just in a different way.

Personally, I know a couple guildies who have had enough of 25-man raiders waving Shadow's Edge in their faces and our DK has expressed a disappointment that there's no similar epic quest for him as a 10-man raider.

I think this will also be good from Blizzard from a design standpoint since they'll have less item levels of gear to worry about and we might not see something like Chill of the Throne or Sunwell Radiance in our final raid of Cataclysm to accommodate unexpected gear inflation.

I'm actually not entirely sure what to make of the same difficulty for both raid sizes since I think that's something Blizzard has been striving for anyway, but it'll be good to know it's still a concern for them.

Overall, I'm really happy with this. I think it legitimizes 10-man raiding, because we won't have 25-man raiders doing "easy" 10-mans on the side. If they do them, it'll be because they're short too many people on a particular night. And as a bright side for them even if they end up short people a particular night they can still get the same ilvl loot they would have otherwise.

Even when I was in a 25-man guild I've always been happier with the 10-man raid. Everyone is more accountable for their performance. It's a more intimate environment where you're more likely to know the extended group you're playing with. I love that I know what each of my fellow raiders does for a living, that we can joke around and we don't have moments where we've just never talked to a particular person in-guild.

I'll be honest. I was thinking of retiring from WoW after beating the Lich King. It was a thought I had at the beginning of the expansion, and one that returned when my 25-man guild died at the start of ToC. I formed my 10-man guild because dammit I wanted to see Arthas and none of the 25-man guilds that I'd be interested in joining on my server ran at suitable timeframes for me.

I wasn't sure I would be taking my guild into Cataclysm. But I admit, I've gotten attached to my guildies, a few of whom even transferred to join us because they wanted the 10-man style. Listening to my guildies talk about what they're looking forward to, and now, knowing that the raid size I prefer will be supported even more, makes me more comfortable with the idea of sticking around. I'm not really thinking of retiring anymore.

Besides, in the meantime, there's still Arthas. It might not mean much, with many guilds having downed him already, but no 10-man guild has done it on my laid back server yet (not even those that moonlight 25s), and my scrubby little guild still has an eye on being the first to do so. We've had some attendance issues lately with a couple folks having late shifts at work, but those have cleared up now, and we finally got to Phase 3 the last time we fought him.

I'm pegging Arthas's demise for next Monday. Then I'm gonna want me some hard modes.

The Moment is Fast Approaching

My 10-man strict guild raids just twice a week, Saturdays and Mondays, so at times we're a little behind the curve. Everyone else hits bosses first, gets their achievements first, gets to wave their fancy gear in front of us first (okay, maybe just's a couple folks we know, and they're 25-man raiders waving around gear we'll never get).

But the thing is, we get there. We don't spend a whole lot of time raiding, and sometimes if we're missing someone we just don't raid at all, but we make progress.

A couple of our main raiders are having overtime issues at work this week, throwing their Mondays in doubt, so I decided that it might be worthwhile to make as many progression attempts on Saturday as possible, while we had the advantage of having a full guild raid. We could always pug the last spot (we have eleven raiders on our roster) for the farm content on Monday.

Since we'd gotten Sindragosa to a not-too-shabby 18% last week, I really wanted to make the most of our momentum and the bulk of the guild agreed. We cleared Lower Spire, one-shotted Dreamwalker (that 10% raid buff is insane, we healed her so fast the fight was over before we knew it), and then faced down Sindragosa, who had been making frozen pancakes out of us for the past two weeks.

We refined our strategy for the ice tomb placements and finally, with only one dps, one healer, and one tank still standing we got her down. It was pretty epic.

My only regret is that we didn't get her down before the 10% buff went into effect. I think we could have done it, since we were still making mistakes and no attempt was flawless, but I'll take it. You know why?

We're gonna see Arthas on Monday.

I know. We still have to clear Plagueworks and Crimson Halls. But those shouldn't take us more than a couple hours, if that. That means we'll still have at least an hour to work on Lich King.

Also, after raid last night, I talked with a former guildie of mine who recently came back to the game. He's has negligible ICC experience, but heals like a monster, and he's agreed to be on standby with us on Monday in case both our overtime folks can't make it.

This means we should have a full batch of ten on Monday. And Arthas is waiting...

My First GDKP Run: ICC 25

Well, I wanted to go to ICC on my feral druid... and I did.

Dark Iron is a fairly hardcore server for raiding. The top guild on Horde is one of the top 100 in the world, having downed several bosses on 25-man heroic, and three other guilds have killed the 25-man Lich King. Another five are working on Arthas. Compare this to my primary server of Skywall... where the top guild is still working on the Lich King. Our guys are good, but they aren't crazy good.

So while Skywall hosts a ToC 25 GDKP, Dark Iron hosts an ICC 25 GDKP.

GDKP is typically a special kind of pug, first popularized on the Korean servers where players run a raid and the awarding of drops are decided not by main spec/off-spec rolls, but by who bids the most gold. Hence the G in GDKP. The "pot" or the "purse" of everything paid is divided equally among all comers in the end.

It's considered to be a drama free method of pugging because all the terms are disclosed up front, bidding is public, and the concept is simple. If you're willing to pay the most for an item, you're the one who gets it. Additionally, the gold is only divided up at the end, so if someone leaves early or they're so bad they get kicked they get nothing. It's incentive to play well and to stick it to the end.

For more reading I recommend the Elitist Jerks thread on the subject.

Because my feral is an alt with gold to burn and no raid schedule, GDKP runs are theoretically perfect for her. Consider that she is primarily in heroic and emblem gear (with one ring from ToC 25) with no prior proof of having done anything in ICC before. Link achievement? Not possible.

What normal pug would take her?

Admittedly, even the GDKP run almost didn't, because her gear is on the low side, and you do need to have some geared people to make sure those bosses go down. The raid leader said he would see how the raid shaped up when it was almost full, and eventually said no, leaving me to run a random heroic and feeling a little disappointed, but understanding. Then maybe a half hour later, he whispered me again asking if I was interested in filling in. Someone had left and they were at Gunship. I said yes in a heartbeat.

Being in that ICC 25 raid was… humbling. There were a lot of genuinely well-geared people on that run. If most of these people were on their alts (remember this was ICC 25!) I shudder to think what their mains are like.

I was never in the top 5 in a VoA or ToC 25 pug as a feral, but I was respectably middle of the pack. In ICC 25 I was… next to last for overall damage. I was beating the tanks for certain, but I never got higher than #12 on the damage meters for any boss fight.

But I did pass the idiot check. And so did the majority of the raid. The raid leader ran a tight ship. Instructions were clear and concise. People listened to them. Only once was there a call out for someone doing something completely wrong. We cleared seven bosses with only three wipes; one on Festergut, one on Blood Prince trash, and one on Blood Princes themselves.

Yes, this pug cleared seven bosses and my feral got to ride along with no prior ICC experience.

Money talks?

Because I was a last minute addition the raid leader actually didn't have an opportunity to check my finances, but people were supposed to bring 3k minimum with which to buy things and he had been checking in Dal before inviting people. I had 7k, and hoped I might pick up a couple items off the early bosses. The announcement stated that we were heading for Saurfang and anything beyond that would be dependent on the composition of the group. Truthfully, since this was a pug, I didn't expect we'd go beyond Saurfang, especially as a 25-man, so the fact we did was amazing!

It was a good experience, and I'm predisposed to go again, if they'll have me. I'll have a fatter wallet this time. (I walked out with no new gear, but 10 frost emblems and 4k gold!) Only one item dropped that I wanted, a ring off Rotface. I bid 4500g for it, but lost to our bear tank at 5000. Maybe I should've bid a little higher, but at the time I really wasn't certain how good the ring was since I hadn't checked out the boss drops past Saurfang.

I think there were several elements that made this a successful pug.

1) The gold requirement

If you want to come you must have gold. It shows you're capable of bidding and paying for items and stops the tourists who have no gold but just want to earn some of the pot. You could of course have money and never bid for a single thing, but a smart raid leader will watch out for those people and stop inviting them unless they're one of the powerhouse tanks/dps/heals that make the raid happen.

2) The gear requirement

I was the worst geared person in the entire raid, but was at the point where there was absolutely nothing left for me to buy with triumph emblems. To give you an idea, according to WoW Heroes my feral is perfectly geared for ToC 25 and ICC 10. This meant that the raid's potential dps was very high.

3) Experienced raiders

People were expected to know the fights. Bosses were not explained beyond sorting out assignments. Nobody failed for not knowing the fight, and fact was, very few people got achievements that night. They already had them. Even Rotface with all the slime management was a one-shot. I think we could've done Putricide given more time.

4) Good raid leadership

The raid leader was very aware and good at calling out events, whether it was managing people with spores on Festergut or people who had to run from flame spheres in Blood Princes. That he managed to do this as a healer was even more remarkable. He also had a very matter-of-fact tone of voice. He never got mad, but just laid things out as they were. He gave orders, expected them to be followed, and they were.

5) Professional attitude

Almost everyone had it. No one was whiney or full of themselves. Vent was clear of chit-chat. It was all business, very professional. Many of us left with a polite "Thank you, sir" for the raid leader, and all properly typed out.

So now I'm 4k richer, I have 25-man achievements to flash in my attempts to get in an ICC 10 pug, and I had one heck of a smooth run. It was just about everything I could have wanted from a pug raid.

I wish some more gear had dropped that I could have used though. I felt kind of bad that I didn't spend anything since I otherwise got so much out of it and the raid leader really did take a chance on me with my gear and no proof of experience. It opened some pugging doors for me and I'd hate for the raid leader to think I just came to freeload.

I can't say whether all GDKP runs are as good as this one. I haven't been to the one on Skywall yet (work keeps conflicting), but I think it's a certain type of player that comes to those runs, so that tends to weed out the poor performers. The participants need to know and understand how GDKP works, and those who don't bother to learn how the system works don't get that far. Also, participants need a decent amount of gold, and be willing to spend it.

Players will pay thousands for a choice epic (the [Shadow Silk Spindle] from Blood Princes last night went for 13k), but for a player to do that they need to understand the value of the item to them.

In a pug that does /roll, someone might very well roll on items that are negligible upgrades, upgrades that aren't really upgrades, or even technically off-spec (healers rolling on +hit gear). Would those same people drop 5k on the item?

GDKP ensures that the person who ends up with the item is the person who really wanted it. It won't stop off-specs, but people aren't likely to drop tons of money on something unless they're sure about it, and if they do drop a ton of money on it, everyone else is happy because they got compensated.

Over 100,000 gold was "spent" on last night's run, so everyone left with a pretty good payout even if they did get any items, and several said they'd be happy to come again.

[Druid] Does this mean I'm a real raiding kitty now?

My feral druid isn't part of a raid guild. She still sits in her mostly abandoned guild started by my coworkers, so if I do any raids with her it's always as a pug, which suits me fine because I can stop playing for a week or two and nobody wonders where I went (because I'm focused on my mains on my primary server).

I tend to be a little concerned about my status as a pugger though, always striving to not be bottom dps. As an alt in a land of ICC 25 geared mains I think it's a more reasonable goal than being top dps.

Since all I have are pugs, I don't want my time wasted by being incompetent or being kicked midway through a run for being incompetent, and I've been able to do that. Though there have been times where I've been completely wasted on the meters, it's typically not fair for me to gauge myself against mages, so I look for other melee, and in particular I look for other feral druids.

One night, after having not played my feral in a while, I wanted to do the raid weekly, but I couldn't seem to get a group for Malygos (maybe people have bad memories?) so I hopped in a VoA 25 led by one of the third tier casual raid guilds. They had a cat druid in there that was decently geared, mix of ICC Lower Spire and ToC stuff. Had the Death's Choice trinket. And here I was in nothing but heroic and emblem gear.

I fully expected to get my butt whooped on the meters, but surprise surprise, I was pulling about 6.2k and the other druid was lagging behind me by a reasonably steady 600-800 dps. It was a personal best for me (having an arms warrior really helped) so I was happy with myself.

The funny thing was, the other druid noticed what was happening as well, and I got a friendly whisper asking how I was beating him when he was better geared than me.

Cat dps is incredibly complicated, so I couldn't begin to tell him exactly what I was doing because there just wasn't enough time between trash and boss pulls. I told him basically that I tried to always keep Savage Roar up, keep Rake up (since arms warrior removes need for Mangle), Shred to 5 cp, and then Rip.

What I couldn't tell him was that I was weaving Ferocious Bites into my rotation (I'm just starting to get comfortable doing that) as long as there were 8 seconds left on Rip, that I was trying to use Berserk strategically during Bloodlust or a trinket proc, that I try to use Omen of Clarity procs for Shreds no matter what, that I try to be strategic about when I use my energy and for what so I don't find myself empty when I need to refresh an important buff/debuff, and most of all that I still considered myself a novice learning a very complicated spec to play. Cat dps is so frantic that knowing the priority list is still a far cry from executing it, which is why mods like FeralByNight (which suggests the player's next move) exist.

I really didn't feel qualified to be telling a raiding druid how to play his cat, and I'm guessing that if he goes to his guild's ICC 25s he's probably playing his main. He must have logged far more hours on his cat than I have on mine, and I'm not at the point where I can look at a damage breakdown in Recount and tell him that he's letting Savage Roar drop too much, or he's bad about refreshing Rake, or he doesn't use Tiger's Fury.

But I guess the fact that he asked at all means that my cat dps was respectable and maybe I wasn't quite the newbie that I thought I was. My feral occasionally got into pugs, but we're talking like raid weekly pugs. They kill a boss and that's it. She had only finished ToC once, and no pug would take her into ICC since her gear score is considered too low and she lacks achievements besides.

He asked how I opened to get Savage Roar up and I told him that I'd Mangle if it wasn't up yet, then follow it with a Rake, and then SR. The important thing is to get SR up and a couple combo points is enough, because it can be refreshed later.

Fast forward a couple weeks, again with minimal playtime on my feral, and I logged on last night thinking to do a daily random and work the AH.

I joined a pug VoA 25 that failed so hard that people left after the first wipe. Thinking I'd do Wintergrasp, since it was up in a few minutes, I queued and ran through my AH options while I waited.

Lo and behold, a ToC 10 group was forming in Trade. I figured ToC 10 might net me some nice gear, so I joined it and we cleared it, but I had no luck on drops (barring a leather caster helm for my rarely used healing set). I did get more emblems though, which was nice because my feral doesn't have the backlog of emblems my moonkin and my pally do. She was getting dangerously low if she wanted any gems for new gear.

After the ToC 10 I queued for a random heroic as dps, thinking to get some kitty practice in, but wait! Someone was LFM for Malygos Must Die! Well, that was a hard weekly to get a group for last time. Might as well go while someone was looking. I came out #1 dps and most stacks of the flame debuff on the boss. Nice to know I haven't lost it in all the months since he was top level content.

I queued in LFD again… and while I was waiting, minding my crafting for the AH, someone was LFM for ToC 25. My lucky night for pug raiding?

And in this raid was… that same feral druid from a couple weeks ago.

He was now gemmed completely for armor pen (I can't afford to, I don't have enough native armor pen on my gear), he had his two piece T10, and the majority of his gear was now from ICC 10/25 Lower Spire.

We sized each other up, and then we were off.

The gear advantage was showing more this time, my lead on Recount much narrower. As far as straight up dps went he was beating me, but I was consistently doing more damage; I had better uptime on my dps. I knew to pay attention to Recount this time to compare our performance, to see what we were doing differently, and the breakdown of our abilities was similar. Top 3 damage was from melee attacks, following by Shred, followed by Rip. He was doing more damage per attack, but I was doing more attacks.

Maybe I do know what I'm doing. Maybe I'm a real raiding kitty now. The difference between our damage done could be attributed to greater raid awareness or use of situational abilities (like Feral Charge to get back behind a boss after having to run away), not because we don't know the priority list of which abilities to use.

I want to get into an ICC run with my feral now. That might be too much to ask on a server obsessed with gear score and achievements (seriously, some people ask for VoA achievements when making a run), but I want to try.

[Paladin] Blood Princes – Like Getting Slapped In the Face With A Dirty Sock

Last night was the third time we killed Blood Princes in our ICC 10 since the Crimson Halls opened, and one would think that after having seeing the fight (and even one shot it last week) that it would have become a no-brainer. Our tanks all know the fight, our hunter (with his pet) can keep up the disco balls almost entirely by himself.

But we had two new folks with us last night and that resulted in a lot of Empowered Shock Waves throwing healers around the room that just shouldn't have happened. Aside from that, we had a couple jaw-dropping tank deaths in the first few seconds of the fight that resulted in me calling for a wipe, and since I'd come on my paladin as a healer, that resulted in much self-berating (as well as a request for the bear to Barkskin while running into position, just to give a little breather).

When we first beat the Blood Princes I came away from the fight loving it for its franticness and coordination, but it's funny how a few weeks later it's still crazy frantic. I did this first as a moonkin dps, and twice now as a paladin healer and it's just so much OMG OMG OMG, I can't screw up or we're gonna die.

Our first few Festergut attempts were like this, where if I didn't start spamming Holy Lights we were going to lose a tank, but we've gotten Festergut to the point where we can almost do him with two healers (providing we have four ranged dps). The Blood Princes still require three healers going full bore. Our vent chat is full of healers calling out their mana regen cooldowns or shouting at someone running out of range (usually the warlock tank or the hunter on the disco balls).

When I say that Blood Princes are like getting slapped in the face with a dirty sock it's because last night was like a rude awakening, a surprise, and it stank. It was a reminder that we still have to pay attention even if we know the fight, because it's tricky enough that we can't go on autopilot, not yet. Sure, some of it could be attributed to new people in the raid, but the two early tank deaths were definitely due to unprepared healers.

I got back in the habit of spamming Holy Lights at the start of the fight whether I thought the warlock needed it or not, because I couldn't risk that he would get one-shotted, and even if he didn't, my beacon was on the bear, and I needed to make sure the bear stayed up.

As the fight wore on I could afford to mix up the HL/HS/FoLs together, but that opening while everyone was getting into position was critical. I'm not sure why our one shot last week hadn't brought that home. It had been my first time healing it. But maybe we'd gotten lucky.

One thing that helped over the duration of the fight was that I recently set up Power Auras for my paladin. While healing Festergut I'd noticed that I tended to get tunnel vision in regards to my mana bar, and sometimes I wouldn't remember to Divine Plea until I noticed I was running on fumes (<25%). Not a good thing.

Now there is a row of three possible icons that appear beneath my feet in a raid (where I can't miss them) if the cooldowns are available; one each for my Divine Plea, Avenging Wrath, and Talisman of Resurgence cooldowns. Additionally I added a blue ring around me that shows up when I have 50% mana to I make sure to use DP when it's both available and I can use the regen, and as a general reminder myself that I might have to start playing a little conservatively (or use a mana pot) if DP is on cooldown.

I like to alternate between using Avenging Wrath and the Talisman of Resurgence to offset the healing penalty when using DP, and once I have the two piece set bonus for T10 I'll probably add Divine Illumination somewhere, maybe make a little T with the icons. It's not often that I feel I need to Plea while both Avenging Wrath and the Talisman of Resurgence are on cooldown, but it happens sometimes, and the two piece T10 is stronger than either of them.

[Paladin] Taunt the Adds while Healing on Saurfang

My guild did its weekly ICC run, but still dealing with holiday absences, we ended up being short two of our three healers. I asked our one attending healer, Valiea, how he felt about two-healing it if I came on my paladin (we would have gone with three if we had to resort to out of guild folks), and ever up to a challenge, he said let's do it!

Now I know it's not uncommon to 25-man guilds to do 10-man runs with only two healers, but being that we're a 10-man I'm always a little hesitant to accept that the content is as easy as some people claim. Valiea is also a paladin, which meant that we'd be two-healing ICC without the benefits of hots, chain heals, or priest shields.

If anything, our run last night was a lesson in how to take an sub-optimal group through Lower Spire (we had four paladins in raid, wtf?), but we did it! And hell, it was a lot of fun with just the two of us healing. There were scary moments and I can't say we never died, but it was a very satisfying run.

Aside from healing Lower Spire with two paladins, the biggest adjustment we had to make was our strategy on Saurfang. Our resto shaman wasn't there, so we had no Earthbind Totem (and no Bloodlust!). I was not on my moonkin, so we had no Entangling Roots. Our hunter was still there with his frost traps, but he was already pulling the right add towards him as soon as it spawned, which meant the left add would still be free, the one that I would aggro with Wrath spam and then root if I was on my druid.

We had a mage, warlock, rogue, ret pally, hunter, and cat druid for our dps. Given that set up, we figured the mage should aggro one and Frost Nova it into place. But this turned out to be tricky, and she got herself squished the first time she tried it. The second time she couldn't pull the add off the melee. The blood counters were stacking up.

Then someone said, "One of the paladins taunt it out."

The only paladins at range were Valiea and myself, the two healers. Valiea's better geared since his paladin is his main, and we'd agreed beforehand that he would focus on the tanks and I would get the raid and the first mark. Figuring I had the bigger bandwidth, I hit the wayward add with a Hand of Reckoning and pulled it out of there. If it got out of the frost trap and into melee range of me before the ranged could kill the first add I'd stun it. By then the first add would be dead and our hunter would taunt the second one off me and pull it away.

Being that I'm still using my hybrid raid/PvP spec I also had a 40 second Hammer of Justice, so I had a stun available almost every spawn, just in case.

For a healer that really likes to make decisions, it can be quite a rush to be healing a party member taking steady ongoing damage from Mark of Blood, raid healing with single target heals the sporadic party members with Boiling Blood, and taunting and stunning adds all in the same battle.

I've always been the kind of person that relished these kinds of assignments, where if you screw up the raid's probably doomed, and to participate in add control as a healer on a fight where you just can't let your target die or it'll probably be a wipe... it's something I haven't done before.

It made healing the VoA 10 pug I did later that night incredibly boring.

[Druid] Okay, Maybe I Will Try That Typhoon

I was reading Villainus's comment on my last post, where I described my annoyance with the Tankspot Typhoon strat, and while I do disagree with some of what he says, one thing struck me in particular. If you don't have a point to spare for Typhoon, you're wasting talent points somewhere.

At first I was annoyed because anecdotally speaking, I don't know any raiding moonkin on my server who use it and if one wants a greater sample size, the most common PvE moonkin spec does not include it (link generated by WoW Popular, formerly TalentChic). One has to go down to #5 on the list to find the first spec with Typhoon, which indicates that either a lot of moonkin are "doing it wrong" or it's really not as easy or necessary to spare a point as he suggests. Elitist Jerks does not consider Typhoon a must-have either, if you look through their moonkin article in their Theorycrafting Think Tank (recently updated for patch 3.3).

But, I run an unusual moonkin spec. You won't find it on WoW Popular at all. I suppose you could say I'm one of those "doing it wrong." I decided months ago that I didn't need my mana regen talents and dropped every single one of them. I even dropped the supposedly mandatory point in Moonglow and took a point in Genesis. I wasn't running out of mana. The dps increase from Genesis is marginal at best, but marginal is better than the zero, right?

If I could, I would take the point in Genesis and toss it in Typhoon, but I can't.

Villainus says that Typhoon is 2-3% of a high end moonkin's dps for any fight with at least two targets, which doesn't sound like much, but not bad for a one talent point investment. If I was to remove a point from my current spec for Typhoon it would be from Brambles, which is another marginal talent. This would decrease the damage done by my treants by 5% and my Thorns (I always thorn our tanks) by 25%.

My treants typically do around 30-31k damage. If I remove a point from Brambles they'll do 29-30k. If it's a long fight I'll cast treants twice. If it's a really long fight I'll cast it three times. That means at most I'll lose 3000 damage from my treants if I take out a point. That's not much at all. But what about Thorns? It's passive damage, but the boss isn't going to exactly stop hitting the tank, is it?

Our first 10-man Marrowgar kill, the boss took a whopping 74k from Thorns (not too shabby for a spell cast pre-fight). Taking out a point in Brambles would reduce that to 63k. Our first Marrowgar kill took seven minutes, so obviously the numbers generated by Thorns are better the longer the fight goes on, but we can look at Thorns as being roughly 10.5k damage for each minute of the fight; down 9k damage if I take out a point.

Let's get everything into similar time units. We'll go with three minutes since that's the time for Force of Nature to come off cooldown.

With 3/3 Brambles:
Force of Nature – 30-31k damage
Thorns – 31-32k damage

With 2/3 Brambles:
Force of Nature – 29-30k damage
Thorns – 27-28k damage

The damage lost for a three minute fight would be about 5k.

So for Typhoon to be worth it, it must do at least 5k in three minutes without disrupting the moonkin cast rotation (which would require more dps to be done by Typhoon to make up for the time the moonkin would normally be casting other spells).

I'm looking at it and suddenly it doesn't sound so bad at all. It's been a long time since I've been specced into Typhoon, but surely I could fit 5k damage over the course of three minutes when I'm running/shifting positions and I already have both my dots up.

Now, I still disagree that if a moonkin doesn't have Typhoon they are wasting points elsewhere, but for those who have the room, it looks like it's viable, and a better pick than a point in Brambles. Though, this does mean said moonkin will have to remember to cast Typhoon, because I'm not in the habit of it at all. And it does mean said moonkin will have to do a better job of pointing herself at the boss so the Typhoon actually hits him.

My guild's on a bit of a hiatus with the impending Christmas before us. We won't resume our regular raid schedule until January 4th (any other raid between now and then is purely optional and might consist of fun runs rather than honest raiding), so I can't say with any certainty when I'll get to try out a boss fight with Typhoon in my spec, but I think I'm going to give it a whirl and see how my World of Logs parse comes out.

I still won't be taking it for the knockback though, which was the reason for the eye-rolling in my last post. Now that I've read up on the 25-man strat I can see why that would be desirable since there are five blood beasts on Saurfang, but it's unnecessary for 10-man which only has two, and my guild only does 10-mans.

I'll also be glyphing [Glyph of Typhoon] to improve my ability to hit a target with it (wider radius) and use it when I can't cast anything else due to movement issues or to use as a cheap AoE. If it all works out, it should be a dps increase.

Of course when I show up with Typhoon now I'm going to have to explain that I don't have a knockback for it, but yes it really is Typhoon and seriously, I didn't decide to start PvPing on my moonkin.

(And amg I actually did a post with math in it!)

[Druid] I'm Not Specced for Typhoon, Quit Asking

Thank you, Tankspot, for making so many people suddenly think that all moonkin are packing this blue knockback spell and they've just been hiding it all this time. That's what happens when an optional raiding talent gets highlighted in everyone's favorite strat video series.

The fight in question is Deathbringer Saurfang. Two blood beasts periodically spawn and have to be dps-ed down as fast as possible while not being allowed to hit anyone, because if they hit someone they make Saurfang's blood counter go up, and when his blood counter hits 100 bad things happen.

There are a number of ways to keep the blood beasts away from people. Ranged dps can ping-pong threat between them. The beasts can be stunned or slowed by Frost Traps or Earthbind.

One of the methods specifically highlighted by Tankspot was Typhoon. Why Typhoon? It's a ranged spell that has a knockback effect, so the moonkin can use it to knock a blood beast away from its chosen target before it reaches it. It has a 20 second cooldown, which should be good enough for it to be used once a spawn.

Would I use it if I had it? Sure.

Would I spec specifically for this fight to get it? No.

Maybe if this was Arthas and we knew we'd have to be top of our game to beat him, I would. I did respec for our Twilight Zone attempts after all, back when that was the pinnacle of 25-man raiding. But Deathbringer Saurfang?

Now, no one's been asking me to spec for it. But last week we got to Saurfang for the first time and went over the strat and someone said, "Yeah, moonkin can use that blue knockback thingy of theirs." I explained that we have to spec into it and it's not really considered a raiding talent. He shouldn't expect a raiding moonkin to have it.

It was our first time meeting Saurfang. Explanation given. All good.

Second time meeting Saurfang. Different person. "Moonkin can use Typhoon to knock back the blood beasts."

Oh no you didn't. I now realize that I'm in all likelihood never going to get away from this. Even when pugs begin to regularly farm Saurfang there is always going to be that one guy who's thinking "That moonkin is being such a lazy ass and not using Typhoon!"

A couple nights ago a moonkin friend joined our guild run since the holidays had depleted us of a dps and he was also baffled by the Typhoon request, because we as raiding moonkin just don't spec for it. We could make room for it, sure. Our talent trees aren't that tight. But most don't bother.

So why don't raiding moonkin take it?

Typhoon is very situational in raids. It doesn't have a place in our rotations which rely on the core four spells of Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Wrath, and Starfire. It doesn't do enough single-target damage to be used every cooldown like our Force of Nature or Starfall spells. And while an AoE of a sort, it has a knockback effect which generally annoys tanks when used on trash and doesn't work on bosses. While it can be glyphed to remove the knockback, that defeats the purpose of why you would want it on Saurfang.

There are occasions where Typhoon can be useful; zombie chow on Gluth, blood beasts on Saurfang. When you don't want adds going someplace it's not bad to use it if you have it. But the problem is that it's situational. The vast majority of boss fights it's not necessary, so the moonkin interested in maximizing his or her boss dps generally will not take Typhoon when it is possible to take something else.

Some moonkin will take Typhoon for PvP, or for flavor because they feel they have a talent point to spare, but because it's not considered a core raiding talent, it shouldn't be assumed that all moonkin have it, which is why the Tankspot video is potentially irritating. Because it's Tankspot, it's held up as the default go-to strat, and it makes it look like moonkin should have Typhoon because after all Tankspot says they should use it.

So this is what I do to control adds on Deathbringer Saurfang.

Two beasts spawn. All ranged focus fire the add on the right. I Wrath the one on the left to get its attention and pull it away from the tanks, melee, and anyone else. Then I root it at the bottom of the steps.

Add is contained (and for far longer than a Typhoon would keep it at bay) and I pew-pew the one the right until it dies. Then everyone focus fires the add on the left and it dies. Repeat.

Who needs Typhoon.

[Paladin] Finding a Brother in Heals

So I'm a guild leader these days. And we want to do ToGC. So when I recruit someone, I need to evaluate how they perform. As dps it's easy. Can they put out a minimum amount of dps while following instructions and not dying in fires. Both Recount and World of Logs tells me their output, and when and why they died early. Following instructions is a little harder to spot, except by watching them visually.

Even tanks aren't too bad. Health is one measure, but put in a simpler fashion, an undergeared tank leaves healers gasping to keep them alive. If the tank blows cooldowns and still gets pancaked either they're not geared enough or they're doing something wrong. (And of course, following instructions is good.)

Healers though… I have a harder time evaluating them. Recount/WoL is good for telling who is doing most of the healing, and between classes it might show who's slacking vs. who's not, but there are variables like what kind of damage is being thrown around. I don't know what good output for a resto druid or a disc priest, because I don't play those specs, but I know how to heal as a paladin.

There is also the matter that instructions (beyond don't stand in the fire) are more flexible for healers. If healer A is the tank healer, but dies, then healers B and C should start healing the tank even if that wasn't their original assignment. Also, for some fights tank healing is easy, and other fights raid healing is easy, so someone's performance looks skewed based on assignment or the particularities of their class (druid hots not having enough time to tick).

But for the first time since I started the guild, I've found a new healer that I have a lot of confidence in, and he's another paladin.

Last night we were short a healer for our ToGC attempts. We'd never downed heroic Northrend Beasts before, but I was pretty sure we could do it if we had a solid group. But our resto druid didn't show for some reason. So there was our disc priest, and the new paladin who just joined us this weekend.

I know some guilds can two-heal ToGC, but based on prior experience I doubted this would be possible for my guild. So I hopped on my holy pally and we brought in a mage.

The other pally and I worked out our beacons and tank assignments, and set to work. And though we wiped, and wiped, and wiped, something beautiful emerged.

Though the other paladin and I are specced differently (I went down prot for DG and he down ret for the extra crit), our spell breakdowns are almost identical; our percentage of total healing from each spell like looking into a mirror. This was a guy who played like me! And while it can be argued that I'm not the greatest paladin healer either, knowing that I now have another healer with output similar to mine and makes casting decisions similar to mine feels like an incredible relief.

I've joked about wishing I could clone myself so I could heal while dpsing. Now I feel like I have something even better (since the new pally is fully specced for PvE and my paladin is hybrid because I use his spec for both PvE and arena). I think we'll be in good shape with our new paladin, and it'll be fun to have someone to talk shop with.

I just can't get over how identical our performance was. I've raided with other holy paladins before, but never have I been matched so closely with one of them. It was a fabulous sense of synergy.

And aside from that, last night we managed our guild firsts of downing Heroic Northrend Beasts and Heroic Jaraxxus (woohoo!).

[Paladin] Would you want two holy pallies in the same 10-man raid?

As I mentioned, I'm in a 10-man guild now and we're still recruiting for a couple roles. ToC is on farm, but we want to go back and do Ulduar hard modes. Our attendance for ToC is spot-on, but we're trying for Ulduar tonight and it's looking a bit weak. Part of it is that even though this night works for most people, it doesn't work for our favorite resto druid and one of the shaman who usually runs with us has a prior commitment for this particular Saturday.

We had a very good disc priest who signed up, but he had to cancel as of last night, leaving us with our new holy paladin recruit as the only guaranteed healer for the night, and a holy paladin is actually the last of the healer classes I wanted to recruit because I already have a holy paladin that I'm happy to swap to if the raid needs it. But the thing is, I can't be on my pally and my moonkin at the same time and all else being equal the raid needs my dps more than my heals, so having a good paladin healer should still be desirable.

So tonight... We have the tanks, we have the dps, but we need a second healer. I'm the only one with a healer alt geared to perform in Ulduar, but even allowing for the loss of my dps, that would mean two holy paladins in a 10-man raid, and that just strikes me as a horribly uncomfortable way to duo-heal a hard mode.

And it occurred to me that this is probably the only double healing class setup that I would balk at. Two shamans? Sure. Two priests? Not a problem. Two druids? Sure, as long as one of them is set up for tank healing.

But paladins don't have that option. They can heal two targets at a time, max, and they can keep a HoT on one target max, and that target is probably going to be a tank since Sacred Shield has to be on the target in order to get a HoT.

Okay, in a raid of ten people two paladins could in theory be healing four targets at the same time, but in practice it's probably not going to work that way. In a two-tank fight there would probably be a beacon and SS on each tank and then the pallies would be playing whack-a-mole with the rest of the raid, but in a one-tank fight the beacon's going to see limited usage. Either both beacons will be on the tank or one beacon will be under utilized because whoever it's sitting on won't need the heals as much.

If the two paladins are very good, this could still be doable, but desirable?

I know Blizzard likes to talk about bringing the player rather than the class, but holy paladins are still the most limited healer class. We make great tank healers, but there's not really any such niche in a 10-man, especially when you only want two healers in a the raid period. The paladin has to help raid heal, and with the 3.1 version of beacon it's not going to risk the tank the way it did previously, but the thing is a paladin's ability to raid heal is still limited to one person beyond the beacon.

We have no Chain Heal, no Circle of Healing, no Wild Growth. Not even an emergency one like the druid's Tranquility.

I don't miss not having one when I'm healing a 5-man, or even when I've been healing a 10- or 25-man, but for the raids I've usually been paired with a different class of healer, or multiple different healers. Duo-healing with another paladin? I did it a couple times before, but it felt very odd, and it wasn't for progression content.

And it bugs me that I only feel about paladins this way.

The simpliest solution is to give paladins an AoE heal, but that does't sound like a Blizzard solution. It doesn't fit the paladin "kit." So what would work?

I think maybe if holy pallies could have an improved version of Judgement of Light, maybe one that stacks with other holy pallies' JoLs and is boosted by spellpower, that would help a lot. That would give the raid a lot more passive healing (since everybody except for the other healers will regularly be whacking the boss) without resorting to giving paladins an AoE heal. It would be like a HoT except that paladins won't have to cast it on each individual since the raid will keep it up on itself.

Blizzard wants us to keep pressing buttons to keep things interesting, and keeping up a judgement every 10 seconds can be trying for the healing-focused paladin, but the pay-off would be so worth it for more raid healing.

[Druid] My Raid Tanking Debut

Notice anything funny in this picture? (Besides the crappy UI.)



Hana is a bear! And I'm tanking Lord Jaraxxus!

It's not exactly what I expected for my raid tanking debut (not counting the time I bear-tanked Gluth in my moonkin spec/gear). After I made my decision to go feral for my off-spec I made some heroic attempts, figuring that I would pinch tank as an OT if one was needed, but by and large my guild wound its way through Ulduar without me needing to go bear. We had enough backup OTs that we generally got by, and besides, I'd never raid tanked before. Well, I had as Gillien in 10-man Naxx, but never as a bear. I only had a half dozen heroics under my belt; if that.

Thursday night was not a good night. We were short several people due to various circumstances that all decided to converge on one day (and a few people who professed to burnout as well) so our usual 25-man turned into a 10-man Trial of the Champion run for those people who did want to run. Problem was, both our MTs were feeling the burnout and our usual OT didn't have any interest in 10-man. Several people wanted to run though, including me, so I said, "I've never tanked this before, but I think I have the gear."

35k health unbuffed. It seemed like a healthy number. I had two piece T8.5 for my feral set, BIS bear boots from Ulduar (according to Rawr), and other leather pieces I'd picked up in 10 and 25-man Ulduar.

One of our ret pallies said he had a decent tank set, and he did. It was also T8 and Ulduar off-set pieces he'd picked up. He was geared and enchanted. 31k health. I'd never seen him tank before, ever, but evidently he took it seriously enough to put a set together.

The healers said let's give it a shot.

So we did.

With two off-spec tanks and some sloppy deaths we still got Icehowl down to 3% on our first attempt. Even then we probably would've killed him if someone hadn't died to his charge, causing him to enrage and then slay me so fast the release button came up before my brain registered what had happened. We beat him though, unlocking the next boss for us, which no one in guild had seen yet; Lord Jaxxarus.

I watched the Tankspot video for this fight a bit nervously. There had never been a boss I'd tanked that I hadn't participated in as a dps or healer first. This was brand new to me. Progression. I like tanking, but it's a high stakes job. Obviously it's easier for me if I have first-hand experience regarding what happens, even if it's from a different point of view. When my raid started discussing whether we stay in for the fire or we kite I didn't know what to say. I just said something to the effect of doing what I saw in the video, which looked like some modest kiting, presumably away from the green fire and volcanoes on the ground.

I was still feeling a bit hazy on what I had to do (even after watching the video), but decided I would just do what I knew to be most important; hold aggro on the boss, blow cooldowns if needed, and don't stand in the green stuff. Surprisingly, that strategy was enough from a MT standpoint. Our pally was the add tank because paladins have far more ways to get snap aggro on recently spawned mobs than a bear (Avenger's Shield, Hand of Reckoning, Righteous Defense…) and he did a fine job picking up adds. Most of the problem seemed to be with the heal team actually. The shaman we semi-pugged (friend of a guildie) kept dying early, leaving us short a healer for the majority of the fight.

Even so, we beat him on our second try. There were only three of us alive at that point, and I was dead after having blown every cooldown I had on top of a healthstone and health pot. If you're gonna die as a tank, that's the way to do it. We were down to a single healer in the final moments of the fight so I really can't blame him for not being able to keep me up, and in any case I held on long enough that the dps was able to finish him in the few seconds that the raid was without a tank.

It felt good.

Maybe we didn't do 25-man, but at least the people who wanted to raid had a good time and got to down a new boss. And I finally got to try out my bear tanking set and see how it held up. I'd have to say I'm relieved to know that I can tank 10-man ToC, because it probably means I'm good for pinch tanking in 25-man Ulduar. Once I was raid buffed I was breaking 45k, which is pretty nice!