Quoth GC:
Ancestral Swiftness was not removed. Sorry for any confusion. It is still in the second tier of Enhancement, available to all.
Arse. Sure, it's available to all... and it's mandatory for all, as well. Here's hoping they finally get rid of this irritating talent. I want to be able to subspec into resto as ele, or ele as resto, rather than being absolutely forced to dump points into enhancement so that GW is useful.
Thursday 22 July 2010
Wednesday 21 July 2010
Medley of Things
Cataclysm Talents
With the latest patch we've seen two iterations of the 31-point talent trees (the latest is here, as of publishing). Thus far, resto shaman look to be in a decent place. After picking up every talent that seems 'mandatory' plus Telluric Currents (because it looks amazing), I'm left with four points to spread around between Concussion/Convection for better ROI on Telluric Currents, Elemental Weapons for the rather dull spellpower boost, finishing Nature's Blessing for better tank healing, or a few other peripheral talents in the resto tree such as cheaper totems or the bizarre shocks-interact-with-heals-now talent.
I'm guessing that at the start of the expansion, I'll pick up Elemental Weapons and max out Nature's Blessing. Further in, and depending how much tank healing I end up doing, I can easily see moving those points around. Pulling Ancestral Swiftness (and presumably making Ghost Wolf instant cast baseline at long last, oh frabulous day!) and rejigging the low-tier elemental and enhancement talents has opened up the options considerably.
I still think the trees need to be a little fatter, mind. There were very few choices that weren't painfully obvious to me when investing the initial 31 points, the only real debate being whether 3/3 Nature's Blessing beats 1/3 NB + 2/2 T. Currents. It'd be nice to be in more situations where I want utility talent X and utility talent Y, but only have sufficient points to get one before unlocking even better talents deeper in the tree.
For my PvP shaman the situation is better. I don't have anything like enough talent points to grab everything, and there are some fairly tricky decisions. I think I want Elemental Warding, which means I can also grab up to two points in the hit and spirit-to-hit-rating talent. Being hitcapped for PvP without actually wearing any hit would be nice, depending how much spirit I end up with.
Healer DPS - Telluric Currents
This seems likely to be a choice dictated by play-style and content, but certainly when levelling it's a no-brainer to get mana-positive lightning bolts. I'll be pushing for this to work as a huge improvement to my quality of life while healing, although some healers have entirely valid points about not picking a healing spec in order to do sub-par DPS. That the resto shaman tree admits both viewpoints within the 31 point requirement, and for me at least the trade-off is acceptable, is a great start. It gives me hope that Archangel/Evangelism, Fury of Stormrage and whatever madness they come up with for paladins will also be both fun and optional. Really can't stress the latter enough; the amount of rage sloshing around in the hearts of some healers at being 'forced' to deal damage is considerable. It has to be a choice in order for this to feel like anything other than a punishment for those players.
Whoa, Enough About Resto Shaman Already
Fine, fine. My other characters and specs are a mixed bunch.
Elemental shaman still have to spend points in 'more mana' or 'more mana' on the first tier. Currently, this is somewhat a risible idea as elemental has no issue with mana in any sensible situation. In Cataclysm, DPS are expected to not run OoM despite having no spirit-based regen, so I'm of the opinion that infinite mana will still obtain. Not sure what can be done about this, but I'd rather have some options here - a talent to make fire-Bob less stupid would be nice.
Enhancement shaman appear to be doing fine. There's not a huge array of choice, and much like Elemental they have to spend some points in saving mana before getting to some tasty things on the second tier of their default subspec tree.
Mages saw very few changes apart from a lot of spells randomly altered in respect to level learned. There are some annoying aspects to their talent trees - Torment the Weak still exists, Frostbite still exists, fire still lacks tools for small-scale PvP, and so on. Combustion is really awkward, and I'm not sure how much I like the fact that Fire is now all about managing DoTs. Arcane as it exists on live is incredibly dull, and I don't like the proposed mastery for 'em. I hate pet management, so frost isn't that attractive, and I will outright hate it if I have to actually babysit my squirtle-Bob. All told, I'm just not convinced my mages will be as much fun after the expansion and that makes me a little sad. Still plenty of time for this to change, though.
Druids in their present state confuse me. Resto cannot even get past tier two without flinging some points into taking less spell damage or the literally useless Furor. Whilst I don't mind taking less damage, it'd be nice to have a choice between a couple of utility talents there. There's more choice later in the tree, and I was able to pick up the DPS talent at a fairly small cost elsewhere. Building a tanking spec was a bit more fun. Balance is a foreign land to me, a place of strange customs and glyphs that reduce spell pushback. Wut?
(Prot) Warriors have a talent called Blood and Thunder, for which they shall receive my eternal adoration. I quite like Rend, and I hope this will be worth the investment and live up to the name.
Priests and rogues - eh, I don't know enough to comment usefully. I hope they get the Smite stuff sorted for priests.
A Word on Paladins
I don't yet have a paladin, but they're undergoing a fairly massive overhaul and I wanted to whiffle about my misguided healer brethren (They wear plate! Pfft. Mail is where it's at). The addition of Holy Power came out of nowhere as far as I can tell. Loads of spells and abilities have been added or changed, and the talent trees went 'wibble' with such magnitude that nations trembled. All bets are off, essentially. The resident guild uber-paladin is somewhat depressed by the state of the class so far, which given Blizzard's track record is perhaps a reasonable stance. My concern for my future holy cow is largely in the new healing tools being added - Healing Hands is interesting, but rather encourages standing in the melee camp. All other things being equal, ranged tend to spread out - either due to fight mechanics or an inherent respect for personal space - and would be hard to cover with this spell. Light of Dawn is a conic AoE heal, the first of its kind. Having dealt with cone AoE as a DPS and tank, err, they're fiddly and really annoying at times. I wouldn't - don't - want to heal with one. Ever. If they insist on going ahead with this, I hope they at least address the issue of visual feedback. The VFX used for cone spells so far tends strongly towards being attached to the character, such that any movement gives a completely false impression of where the damage/healing actually went.
I hate to use the phrase, but so far paladin healing looks a tad... gimmicky. I'd be the last person to praise the current state of paladin healing, but it is at least solid and dependable. Gargantuan throughput on two targets (unt only two targets!), forever. The new AoE spells are strongly dependant on the position of the paladin, and running around constantly to get decent coverage for Healing Hands and Light of Dawn (mostly exclusive, as one wants to be in the middle of a pack whilst the other wants to be some distance away) does not sound very fun. At least there are more options for healing on the hoof, and Speed of Light provides a nice little mini-sprint tied to Healing Hands. Ideal for getting out of the fire whilst healing everyone who was stood in it like numpties. Bacon is back being a general-purpose appropriation of healing, but has had its throughput cut by half.
So far and with much hand-waving, it looks like paladins will be standing in melee range healing one tank and providing off-heals on a second via bacon. When the raid takes damage, Hands and Dawn will stabilise/top off the melee. If bacon also redirects all the healing done by AoE spells, these could also provide fairly massive spike heals or HoT effects. Holy Power provided by shocks and the odd heal on the bacon target will be used for free throughput with Word of Glory, exact proportion depending on how chunky the heal is and how tight mana gets. Shocks will see a bit more use, as they provide Holy Power and haste on the healbombs, but until numbers emerge who knows if this will be worth the GCD on cooldown or only as a last-ditch resort while moving.
A raid-healing paladin is doing almost exactly the same thing, but I guess making more use of shocks and flashes. If the ranged can be persuaded to cluster up a bit, some running around with Healing Hands and cone heals may also be standard.
I don't know, but neither of these seem compelling so far. Additional uses for Holy Power remain to be seen. But hey, no matter what - paladins will have more heals! It's a start.
With the latest patch we've seen two iterations of the 31-point talent trees (the latest is here, as of publishing). Thus far, resto shaman look to be in a decent place. After picking up every talent that seems 'mandatory' plus Telluric Currents (because it looks amazing), I'm left with four points to spread around between Concussion/Convection for better ROI on Telluric Currents, Elemental Weapons for the rather dull spellpower boost, finishing Nature's Blessing for better tank healing, or a few other peripheral talents in the resto tree such as cheaper totems or the bizarre shocks-interact-with-heals-now talent.
I'm guessing that at the start of the expansion, I'll pick up Elemental Weapons and max out Nature's Blessing. Further in, and depending how much tank healing I end up doing, I can easily see moving those points around. Pulling Ancestral Swiftness (and presumably making Ghost Wolf instant cast baseline at long last, oh frabulous day!) and rejigging the low-tier elemental and enhancement talents has opened up the options considerably.
I still think the trees need to be a little fatter, mind. There were very few choices that weren't painfully obvious to me when investing the initial 31 points, the only real debate being whether 3/3 Nature's Blessing beats 1/3 NB + 2/2 T. Currents. It'd be nice to be in more situations where I want utility talent X and utility talent Y, but only have sufficient points to get one before unlocking even better talents deeper in the tree.
For my PvP shaman the situation is better. I don't have anything like enough talent points to grab everything, and there are some fairly tricky decisions. I think I want Elemental Warding, which means I can also grab up to two points in the hit and spirit-to-hit-rating talent. Being hitcapped for PvP without actually wearing any hit would be nice, depending how much spirit I end up with.
Healer DPS - Telluric Currents
This seems likely to be a choice dictated by play-style and content, but certainly when levelling it's a no-brainer to get mana-positive lightning bolts. I'll be pushing for this to work as a huge improvement to my quality of life while healing, although some healers have entirely valid points about not picking a healing spec in order to do sub-par DPS. That the resto shaman tree admits both viewpoints within the 31 point requirement, and for me at least the trade-off is acceptable, is a great start. It gives me hope that Archangel/Evangelism, Fury of Stormrage and whatever madness they come up with for paladins will also be both fun and optional. Really can't stress the latter enough; the amount of rage sloshing around in the hearts of some healers at being 'forced' to deal damage is considerable. It has to be a choice in order for this to feel like anything other than a punishment for those players.
Whoa, Enough About Resto Shaman Already
Fine, fine. My other characters and specs are a mixed bunch.
Elemental shaman still have to spend points in 'more mana' or 'more mana' on the first tier. Currently, this is somewhat a risible idea as elemental has no issue with mana in any sensible situation. In Cataclysm, DPS are expected to not run OoM despite having no spirit-based regen, so I'm of the opinion that infinite mana will still obtain. Not sure what can be done about this, but I'd rather have some options here - a talent to make fire-Bob less stupid would be nice.
Enhancement shaman appear to be doing fine. There's not a huge array of choice, and much like Elemental they have to spend some points in saving mana before getting to some tasty things on the second tier of their default subspec tree.
Mages saw very few changes apart from a lot of spells randomly altered in respect to level learned. There are some annoying aspects to their talent trees - Torment the Weak still exists, Frostbite still exists, fire still lacks tools for small-scale PvP, and so on. Combustion is really awkward, and I'm not sure how much I like the fact that Fire is now all about managing DoTs. Arcane as it exists on live is incredibly dull, and I don't like the proposed mastery for 'em. I hate pet management, so frost isn't that attractive, and I will outright hate it if I have to actually babysit my squirtle-Bob. All told, I'm just not convinced my mages will be as much fun after the expansion and that makes me a little sad. Still plenty of time for this to change, though.
Druids in their present state confuse me. Resto cannot even get past tier two without flinging some points into taking less spell damage or the literally useless Furor. Whilst I don't mind taking less damage, it'd be nice to have a choice between a couple of utility talents there. There's more choice later in the tree, and I was able to pick up the DPS talent at a fairly small cost elsewhere. Building a tanking spec was a bit more fun. Balance is a foreign land to me, a place of strange customs and glyphs that reduce spell pushback. Wut?
(Prot) Warriors have a talent called Blood and Thunder, for which they shall receive my eternal adoration. I quite like Rend, and I hope this will be worth the investment and live up to the name.
Priests and rogues - eh, I don't know enough to comment usefully. I hope they get the Smite stuff sorted for priests.
A Word on Paladins
I don't yet have a paladin, but they're undergoing a fairly massive overhaul and I wanted to whiffle about my misguided healer brethren (They wear plate! Pfft. Mail is where it's at). The addition of Holy Power came out of nowhere as far as I can tell. Loads of spells and abilities have been added or changed, and the talent trees went 'wibble' with such magnitude that nations trembled. All bets are off, essentially. The resident guild uber-paladin is somewhat depressed by the state of the class so far, which given Blizzard's track record is perhaps a reasonable stance. My concern for my future holy cow is largely in the new healing tools being added - Healing Hands is interesting, but rather encourages standing in the melee camp. All other things being equal, ranged tend to spread out - either due to fight mechanics or an inherent respect for personal space - and would be hard to cover with this spell. Light of Dawn is a conic AoE heal, the first of its kind. Having dealt with cone AoE as a DPS and tank, err, they're fiddly and really annoying at times. I wouldn't - don't - want to heal with one. Ever. If they insist on going ahead with this, I hope they at least address the issue of visual feedback. The VFX used for cone spells so far tends strongly towards being attached to the character, such that any movement gives a completely false impression of where the damage/healing actually went.
I hate to use the phrase, but so far paladin healing looks a tad... gimmicky. I'd be the last person to praise the current state of paladin healing, but it is at least solid and dependable. Gargantuan throughput on two targets (unt only two targets!), forever. The new AoE spells are strongly dependant on the position of the paladin, and running around constantly to get decent coverage for Healing Hands and Light of Dawn (mostly exclusive, as one wants to be in the middle of a pack whilst the other wants to be some distance away) does not sound very fun. At least there are more options for healing on the hoof, and Speed of Light provides a nice little mini-sprint tied to Healing Hands. Ideal for getting out of the fire whilst healing everyone who was stood in it like numpties. Bacon is back being a general-purpose appropriation of healing, but has had its throughput cut by half.
So far and with much hand-waving, it looks like paladins will be standing in melee range healing one tank and providing off-heals on a second via bacon. When the raid takes damage, Hands and Dawn will stabilise/top off the melee. If bacon also redirects all the healing done by AoE spells, these could also provide fairly massive spike heals or HoT effects. Holy Power provided by shocks and the odd heal on the bacon target will be used for free throughput with Word of Glory, exact proportion depending on how chunky the heal is and how tight mana gets. Shocks will see a bit more use, as they provide Holy Power and haste on the healbombs, but until numbers emerge who knows if this will be worth the GCD on cooldown or only as a last-ditch resort while moving.
A raid-healing paladin is doing almost exactly the same thing, but I guess making more use of shocks and flashes. If the ranged can be persuaded to cluster up a bit, some running around with Healing Hands and cone heals may also be standard.
I don't know, but neither of these seem compelling so far. Additional uses for Holy Power remain to be seen. But hey, no matter what - paladins will have more heals! It's a start.
Friday 18 June 2010
Hunter Pets Are Unnecessary
Alright, alright. I admit it. I rolled a huntard. A cute wittle orc, in fact, struggling gamely 'neath the weight of her many heirlooms.
I hit level 20 the other night, levelling as Marksman because it looks to have the best toys. And really... why do I want a pet? I have approximately ninety-seven billion ways to control what I'm fighting, Disengage, infinite mana and obscene damage.
Sure, my li'l scorpid can sorta tank something if I want to eat a sandwich instead of playing the game. And he's cute enough. But really he's just an ambulatory DoT that wants feeding constantly (Why do pets get unhappy? Why do I care?).
I'm not going to drop the pet for now, just because... well, sometimes I want to eat sandwiches, you know? But it really seems excessive to have a pet in addition to all these other tools, and if I could trade him in for a personal DPS boost of some kind I'd do it without a second thought.
Maybe I'm a terrible person. Certainly I suspect I'm not a hunter at heart.
I hit level 20 the other night, levelling as Marksman because it looks to have the best toys. And really... why do I want a pet? I have approximately ninety-seven billion ways to control what I'm fighting, Disengage, infinite mana and obscene damage.
Sure, my li'l scorpid can sorta tank something if I want to eat a sandwich instead of playing the game. And he's cute enough. But really he's just an ambulatory DoT that wants feeding constantly (Why do pets get unhappy? Why do I care?).
I'm not going to drop the pet for now, just because... well, sometimes I want to eat sandwiches, you know? But it really seems excessive to have a pet in addition to all these other tools, and if I could trade him in for a personal DPS boost of some kind I'd do it without a second thought.
Maybe I'm a terrible person. Certainly I suspect I'm not a hunter at heart.
Tuesday 15 June 2010
Stuff Happened
Welp, Arthas is dead. Sure, it took a 20% buff and a couple of weeks of flailing at him, but the important thing is that we smacked him about 'til he fell over. The wuss.
He dropped a very nice kitty staff, and a terribly itemised mace that I almost rolled on because it looked gorgeous despite the icky crit/mp5. Really, Blizzard? I know you're honour-bound to drop gear that makes me wince in ten man raids, but the final boss is allowed to have non-sucky stuff. Honest.
The fight is quite fun, although I've yet to heal it all the way through. I quite enjoy elemental, and we have an absurd excess of great healers, so I should probably be working on my offset gear with more zeal. Meh, back to the sanity tap for frost badgers I suppose. I will rise about DPS mediocrity eventually!
After that we went and roflstomped TotGC and just barely scraped a Tribute to Mad Skill. I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with doing these older raids with my main, though. I don't feel we particularly deserved the victory (three healers? What?), and the rewards are pointless - excepting those who still like to keep T9 set bonuses, they were genuinely happy to pick up some trophies. I value achievements and titles very little, so all that remains is the challenge (greatly diminished by lolgear) and the fun of doing stuff with a great raid group (unchanged, but equally available doing other content). I feel I should start bringing alts to these things, who may get upgrades (I like gear) and will be approaching the fights from a different class perspective. The problem then is simply ensuring I'm not the under-performing warm body making everyone else's life a little more miserable.
Next week: ICC hard modes! That will be fun.
He dropped a very nice kitty staff, and a terribly itemised mace that I almost rolled on because it looked gorgeous despite the icky crit/mp5. Really, Blizzard? I know you're honour-bound to drop gear that makes me wince in ten man raids, but the final boss is allowed to have non-sucky stuff. Honest.
The fight is quite fun, although I've yet to heal it all the way through. I quite enjoy elemental, and we have an absurd excess of great healers, so I should probably be working on my offset gear with more zeal. Meh, back to the sanity tap for frost badgers I suppose. I will rise about DPS mediocrity eventually!
After that we went and roflstomped TotGC and just barely scraped a Tribute to Mad Skill. I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with doing these older raids with my main, though. I don't feel we particularly deserved the victory (three healers? What?), and the rewards are pointless - excepting those who still like to keep T9 set bonuses, they were genuinely happy to pick up some trophies. I value achievements and titles very little, so all that remains is the challenge (greatly diminished by lolgear) and the fun of doing stuff with a great raid group (unchanged, but equally available doing other content). I feel I should start bringing alts to these things, who may get upgrades (I like gear) and will be approaching the fights from a different class perspective. The problem then is simply ensuring I'm not the under-performing warm body making everyone else's life a little more miserable.
Next week: ICC hard modes! That will be fun.
Tuesday 27 April 2010
Raiding in Cataclysm
Was feeling a little burned out and meh about WoW recently. A long weekend away from the game and some silly fun in ICC did a lot to cure that...
And then Blizzard insist on giving me the warm fuzzies. /blush You guys.
So what have we got so far?
So this looks like a barrel of robot pirate monkeys, at least to me. My esteemed colleague doesn't agree, and raises an important point or three. Mainly, what will there be to do after downing the raid boss d'tier each week? Currently, some people very much enjoy being able to raid as much as they like per week - being able to do both ten and twenty-five man runs on the same character doubles the number of raids available to such people.
On the other hand, running both raid sizes doubles your income. More emblems, more loot. The superior drops from the larger raid cheapen the smaller raid (devaluation of drops, and a slightly lower challenge due to better gear), and you halve the time before the emblem vendors have nothing to offer you.
In addition, removing the loot differences has many positive aspects. One of these is that it reduces the development cost of a new raid tier. Whilst I wouldn't bet on item creation being the bottleneck in this process, every man-hour saved can be put to use improving the quantity or quality of other content. This is assuming the loot tables remain roughly the same size as the current model, which seems reasonable if they wish to avoid the VoA lottery experience.
I don't think this is a zero sum situation, but neither do I think it's a clear-cut halving of content. It depends on the amount of stuff we get to play with, and rate of delivery. I do hope there's enough content to satisfy people who really enjoy investing time, but equally I think these are really positive steps overall. And there are always alts.
That said, I'm hugely biased. I don't like big raids, I don't like seeing anomalously nice drops unique to one size (primarily this has taken the form of me lusting after 25-man trinkets, but I'm sure there have been occasions when a larger guild has run smaller raids for the odd well-itemised piece). I don't like the reputation of ten mans being 'easy', and right now I don't care if that has ever been justified (it hasn't, so nyer). Blizzard are making a stand, saying that the only extra challenge in the larger raids will be logistical and we're to be rewarded accordingly.
They're removing the subtle, insistent pressure to do both raid sizes each week. For the drops; for extra emblems; for achievements; because it's the 'real' raid size... all these stupid little niggling voices are rendered null and void.
The PvP changes are nice too. Being able to fully equip a character with PvP gear will be delicious. Bye-bye ratings! Yes, yes, I suck and can't even get to 1800. I don't think I'll be threatening anyone's titles just because I can now get a resi weapon, but it will be a nice little carrot. Two-way exchange between the lower tier PvE and PvP points is a good escape valve, to prevent a repeat of BC (when people abandoned raiding in droves to get 'better' PvP gear in an 'easier' fashion). Being able to minimally gear up for either portion of the game in a manner you enjoy is good.
So, is there anything I don't like in this latest set of announcements?
Of course. I don't like the fact that they're sticking with the Hard Mode = Higher iLevel model. I would greatly prefer that hard modes have unique loot tables, shared between 10 and 25 of course. But this would eat into the time we just saved by having 10 and 25 share the normal loot tables, and could lead to raids doing a boss on normal because his normal loot is more useful, even if they'd rather be working on the hard mode. Maybe an Ulduar-like system where the hard modes drop additional unique loot would fix that, but doesn't help much with the item design task.
I don't like the fact that they only admitted the possibility that raiding enough during the week could free you from the odious duty of the daily random heroic. But then, keeping the player base running heroics has had a few positive effects (starting with there actually being people in the damn things, for a start...). So maybe I'm just bitter. I would be happy to have this go from a daily chore to a few-times-a-week thing, which the throttling may well accomplish for my actively raiding characters.
And... um... yeah, that's it. Overwhelmingly positive about the whole affair. The class previews had me excited, and this makes me think that raiding and PvP will be a whole lot more enjoyable in Cataclysm. More rewarding, less divisive, with extra ponies.
My pony will have tentacles.
And then Blizzard insist on giving me the warm fuzzies. /blush You guys.
So what have we got so far?
- Ten and twenty-five man raids share a lockout
- Ten and twenty-five man raids share loot
- Two tiers of points to replace the current badge system in PvE
- Two tiers of points to replace the current honour/arena point system in PvP
- Acquisition of top tier points in both cases are throttled on a weekly basis
- Lower tier of both can be exchanged at a loss. Buying last season's PvP gear with emblems is old news, but now you can buy the previous raid tier with honour!
- Twenty-five man raids will drop more loot per capita and may have other nebulous rewards
- Arena ratings are dead!
So this looks like a barrel of robot pirate monkeys, at least to me. My esteemed colleague doesn't agree, and raises an important point or three. Mainly, what will there be to do after downing the raid boss d'tier each week? Currently, some people very much enjoy being able to raid as much as they like per week - being able to do both ten and twenty-five man runs on the same character doubles the number of raids available to such people.
On the other hand, running both raid sizes doubles your income. More emblems, more loot. The superior drops from the larger raid cheapen the smaller raid (devaluation of drops, and a slightly lower challenge due to better gear), and you halve the time before the emblem vendors have nothing to offer you.
In addition, removing the loot differences has many positive aspects. One of these is that it reduces the development cost of a new raid tier. Whilst I wouldn't bet on item creation being the bottleneck in this process, every man-hour saved can be put to use improving the quantity or quality of other content. This is assuming the loot tables remain roughly the same size as the current model, which seems reasonable if they wish to avoid the VoA lottery experience.
I don't think this is a zero sum situation, but neither do I think it's a clear-cut halving of content. It depends on the amount of stuff we get to play with, and rate of delivery. I do hope there's enough content to satisfy people who really enjoy investing time, but equally I think these are really positive steps overall. And there are always alts.
That said, I'm hugely biased. I don't like big raids, I don't like seeing anomalously nice drops unique to one size (primarily this has taken the form of me lusting after 25-man trinkets, but I'm sure there have been occasions when a larger guild has run smaller raids for the odd well-itemised piece). I don't like the reputation of ten mans being 'easy', and right now I don't care if that has ever been justified (it hasn't, so nyer). Blizzard are making a stand, saying that the only extra challenge in the larger raids will be logistical and we're to be rewarded accordingly.
They're removing the subtle, insistent pressure to do both raid sizes each week. For the drops; for extra emblems; for achievements; because it's the 'real' raid size... all these stupid little niggling voices are rendered null and void.
The PvP changes are nice too. Being able to fully equip a character with PvP gear will be delicious. Bye-bye ratings! Yes, yes, I suck and can't even get to 1800. I don't think I'll be threatening anyone's titles just because I can now get a resi weapon, but it will be a nice little carrot. Two-way exchange between the lower tier PvE and PvP points is a good escape valve, to prevent a repeat of BC (when people abandoned raiding in droves to get 'better' PvP gear in an 'easier' fashion). Being able to minimally gear up for either portion of the game in a manner you enjoy is good.
So, is there anything I don't like in this latest set of announcements?
Of course. I don't like the fact that they're sticking with the Hard Mode = Higher iLevel model. I would greatly prefer that hard modes have unique loot tables, shared between 10 and 25 of course. But this would eat into the time we just saved by having 10 and 25 share the normal loot tables, and could lead to raids doing a boss on normal because his normal loot is more useful, even if they'd rather be working on the hard mode. Maybe an Ulduar-like system where the hard modes drop additional unique loot would fix that, but doesn't help much with the item design task.
I don't like the fact that they only admitted the possibility that raiding enough during the week could free you from the odious duty of the daily random heroic. But then, keeping the player base running heroics has had a few positive effects (starting with there actually being people in the damn things, for a start...). So maybe I'm just bitter. I would be happy to have this go from a daily chore to a few-times-a-week thing, which the throttling may well accomplish for my actively raiding characters.
And... um... yeah, that's it. Overwhelmingly positive about the whole affair. The class previews had me excited, and this makes me think that raiding and PvP will be a whole lot more enjoyable in Cataclysm. More rewarding, less divisive, with extra ponies.
My pony will have tentacles.
Tuesday 13 April 2010
Cataclysm Preview Thunks
Figured it would be reasonable to jot down a smattering of Things which strike me as interesting from the Cata previews, mostly pertaining to the classes and specs which I play with some regularity.
Shaman, Elemental
Earthquake - hell yes! I don't play Elemental well enough (or spec correctly ) to capitalise on the scary AoE Magma Totem + Fire Nova can potentially bring, and besides, I'm usually providing ToW for other, better casters. A cast or channelled ground-targeted AoE will make me extremely happy and it has delicious flavour and history. If it comes with some sort of snare or other useful debuff, double hooray!
Totem changes - adding a scaling version of the ToW/DP effect to all fire totems is lovely, especially combined with the proposed change to allow Searing (and potentially Magma!) Totem to operate or be dropped from a sensible range.
Mastery - Lightning Overload is great fun, and few things are as satisfying as firing off 'lusted Lightning Bolts like some kind of storm-powered magical Gatling, or hitting a clustered pack of mobs with a double-whammy of Chain Lightning. Adding the same kind of effect to Lava Burst and maybe shocks? Delicious!
Mage, Fire/Frost/Frostfire
Flame Orb/Wall of Fog - these make me really, really happy. And the reason is really, really absurdly geeky: they sound like D&D spells. They actually do something fun, in addition to their obvious making-things-hurt function. They let magi exert some control over the field of battle, especially in PvP, and I think that is incredibly good. Wall of Fog in particular strikes me as a fantastic way to cleanly bisect a group of melee, and I can imagine rolling Flame Orbs down tunnels in WSG. Frankly I don't care if these have a useful DPET on single target fights, they're flavourful and seem to reward inventive usage in a way few other Mage spells do.
Burnout - "AHAHAHA I'm burning myself alive but I'll take you with me! Everything must buuurn!" ::cough:: I may empathise with the crazy self-destructive fire mage a little too much sometimes.
Arcane Missiles, Deathfrost Mastery - Adding procs to low-level mage play? Hooray! Encouraging spells other than Frost Bolt? Hooray!
Time Warp - 'lust for another class is good, and it has a pleasantly mage-y 'time is my bitch' feel about it. Interesting to see how the personal movement speed boost turns out.
Druid, Restoration/Burr
Thrash - yay, a button that Is Not Swipe. With on-next-attacks buggering off, I'll be interested to see how these things go for burr tanking 'rotations'.
Stampeding Roar - odd, but fun. Chained with Dash and maybe Engineering boots (so tempted...) I'll be interested to see just how far a kitty can go whilst at Warp Factor Cat.
Restoration in general - HoTs scaling with more stats and health deficit, sounds great. Using Tranquility and Healing Touch, also great. Tree of Life as a cooldown, fantastic! I hate being in tree form - Roots, Cyclone and a bit of random DPS are fun things to do in many situations, and I want full usage of the druid spells to be the norm. Gimme an interrupt in caster form other than Cowstomp and healing Heroics could be (almost) as much fun as it is on my shaman.
Wild Mushroom - in relation to the above, I look forward to playing with this as resto-but-not-tree. It's abit lot weird, but fun. Assuming it lasts for a good while after going invisible (absent instant detonation) this should make for some excellent PvP situations. In heroics, I guess plopping one of these down and then chain Hurricane on mob packs will be the norm when we get overgeared.
Misc Stuff I'm Even Less Qualified To Opine On, But Will Anyway
Warrior - from my point of view, possibly the most 'Meh' preview of all my active characters. Maybe, just maybe, Heroic Leap will be sufficiently fun to overrule this anyway.
Priest - Leap of Faith is lovely. Yes, griefing will happen. Yes, it will be funny sometimes and annoying at others. Yes, HoP/DI rotations on the tank, TotT/MD on a healer or a DPS taunting or a pet growling or people being daft already provide ample opportunity for griefing. I see this as no reason to ban interesting spells.
Hunters - focus looks really interesting, and fits the flavour of the class far more than mana in my opinion. Much joy on (a) having lots of pets and having them be viable and (b) being able to fill missing buff/debuff slots with a pet, albeit at reduced potency. This alone makes hunters an excellent addition to a ten man raiding guild. Yay.
Enhancement Shaman - I don't really care for all the crying over the third mastery bonus. I think it's a brave and interesting attempt to have the various spec bonuses different, which means they can't all be proc-y gimmicks that sound awesome. It's a boring bonus as written, but has the potential to allow for more valid ways of gearing, and for your Mastery rating stat to directly affect the way you play and spec your shaman. It may not work, but I'm glad it exists.
Rogue - me wants to bring Smoke Bomb to help bear tanks on tricky caster pulls. Also the self-HoT makes me want to level a subtlety rogue. Yes, I am easily influenced. I agree that the tanking cooldown is a bit daft for a class which already has plenty of exceptionally strong (if short) survival cooldowns, and significant problems with sustained metabolic viability outside those.
Shaman, Elemental
Earthquake - hell yes! I don't play Elemental well enough (or spec correctly ) to capitalise on the scary AoE Magma Totem + Fire Nova can potentially bring, and besides, I'm usually providing ToW for other, better casters. A cast or channelled ground-targeted AoE will make me extremely happy and it has delicious flavour and history. If it comes with some sort of snare or other useful debuff, double hooray!
Totem changes - adding a scaling version of the ToW/DP effect to all fire totems is lovely, especially combined with the proposed change to allow Searing (and potentially Magma!) Totem to operate or be dropped from a sensible range.
Mastery - Lightning Overload is great fun, and few things are as satisfying as firing off 'lusted Lightning Bolts like some kind of storm-powered magical Gatling, or hitting a clustered pack of mobs with a double-whammy of Chain Lightning. Adding the same kind of effect to Lava Burst and maybe shocks? Delicious!
Mage, Fire/Frost/Frostfire
Flame Orb/Wall of Fog - these make me really, really happy. And the reason is really, really absurdly geeky: they sound like D&D spells. They actually do something fun, in addition to their obvious making-things-hurt function. They let magi exert some control over the field of battle, especially in PvP, and I think that is incredibly good. Wall of Fog in particular strikes me as a fantastic way to cleanly bisect a group of melee, and I can imagine rolling Flame Orbs down tunnels in WSG. Frankly I don't care if these have a useful DPET on single target fights, they're flavourful and seem to reward inventive usage in a way few other Mage spells do.
Burnout - "AHAHAHA I'm burning myself alive but I'll take you with me! Everything must buuurn!" ::cough:: I may empathise with the crazy self-destructive fire mage a little too much sometimes.
Arcane Missiles, Deathfrost Mastery - Adding procs to low-level mage play? Hooray! Encouraging spells other than Frost Bolt? Hooray!
Time Warp - 'lust for another class is good, and it has a pleasantly mage-y 'time is my bitch' feel about it. Interesting to see how the personal movement speed boost turns out.
Druid, Restoration/Burr
Thrash - yay, a button that Is Not Swipe. With on-next-attacks buggering off, I'll be interested to see how these things go for burr tanking 'rotations'.
Stampeding Roar - odd, but fun. Chained with Dash and maybe Engineering boots (so tempted...) I'll be interested to see just how far a kitty can go whilst at Warp Factor Cat.
Restoration in general - HoTs scaling with more stats and health deficit, sounds great. Using Tranquility and Healing Touch, also great. Tree of Life as a cooldown, fantastic! I hate being in tree form - Roots, Cyclone and a bit of random DPS are fun things to do in many situations, and I want full usage of the druid spells to be the norm. Gimme an interrupt in caster form other than Cowstomp and healing Heroics could be (almost) as much fun as it is on my shaman.
Wild Mushroom - in relation to the above, I look forward to playing with this as resto-but-not-tree. It's a
Misc Stuff I'm Even Less Qualified To Opine On, But Will Anyway
Warrior - from my point of view, possibly the most 'Meh' preview of all my active characters. Maybe, just maybe, Heroic Leap will be sufficiently fun to overrule this anyway.
Priest - Leap of Faith is lovely. Yes, griefing will happen. Yes, it will be funny sometimes and annoying at others. Yes, HoP/DI rotations on the tank, TotT/MD on a healer or a DPS taunting or a pet growling or people being daft already provide ample opportunity for griefing. I see this as no reason to ban interesting spells.
Hunters - focus looks really interesting, and fits the flavour of the class far more than mana in my opinion. Much joy on (a) having lots of pets and having them be viable and (b) being able to fill missing buff/debuff slots with a pet, albeit at reduced potency. This alone makes hunters an excellent addition to a ten man raiding guild. Yay.
Enhancement Shaman - I don't really care for all the crying over the third mastery bonus. I think it's a brave and interesting attempt to have the various spec bonuses different, which means they can't all be proc-y gimmicks that sound awesome. It's a boring bonus as written, but has the potential to allow for more valid ways of gearing, and for your Mastery rating stat to directly affect the way you play and spec your shaman. It may not work, but I'm glad it exists.
Rogue - me wants to bring Smoke Bomb to help bear tanks on tricky caster pulls. Also the self-HoT makes me want to level a subtlety rogue. Yes, I am easily influenced. I agree that the tanking cooldown is a bit daft for a class which already has plenty of exceptionally strong (if short) survival cooldowns, and significant problems with sustained metabolic viability outside those.
Monday 12 April 2010
Deep Healing
Right. So! The meat of the shaman Cataclysm preview has been discussed extensively and with much insight elsewhere. I'm (cautiously) excited; Spiritwalker's Grace, Healing Rain and Unleash Weapon have me all tingly, and Spirit Link making a potential comeback is... nom. Tank assisting cooldown for shaman, maybe?
But on topic, here's our third mastery:
And after a bit of digging on WoWWiki, here's Eyonix on the mastery stuff in general:
The important thing here is that shaman will always have some Mastery Rating from wearing mail (assuming you're wearing at least some and not pinching priest/tree gear exclusively, you naughty shaman), but that otherwise we should have some flexibility with regards to how much we acquire. Assembling a Mastery Rating-less gear set will probably be tricky or impossible (especially for ten-man raiders, assuming the current second-class citizen status obtains in Cataclysm), but with luck there will be adequate wiggle room that we can exchange most of our MR for additional haste, crit or spirit.
I really quite like the concept of Deep Healing. In a world where people don't have near-binary health, it plays into healing in ways I enjoy. 'Saving the day' with a massive heal on low-health targets is a nice feeling, and with Healing Rain and a bit of Chain Heal spam I can see our throughput being potentially monstrous after heavy raid damage. It'll help on tank healing, too, assuming tanks will not spend much time at 100% health.
One key thing is that it makes recovering from a bad health situation something shaman are intrinsically good at. I like this. I pick up Healing Focus today not because it helps when things go smoothly (it's generally useless then) but because it sometimes assists in turning around a raid when things go pear-shaped, and the mastery bonus seems to speak to the same philosophy.
It also discourages topping off of people who are not in danger. This is a good thing, to my mind. Let the HoTs and random smart heals do that, and not only will you save mana (I hear it matters in this crazy world, or something) but your heals will land for more when you do decide to heal someone. Bumping someone up from 95% will feel less satisfying than a beefier heal on someone who needs it more, and this kind of psychological feedback may be significant in mitigating the culture shock of returning to triage and mana management as constant parts of the healing play style.
All this said, who knows if Mastery Rating will be 'worth it'. Deep Healing is optimising for the worst case, which is not a place most theorycraft is done. Picking up additional crit or haste provides extra throughput all the time, and these ratings are supposedly going to be much harder to cap for all specs. Mana regen in general is going to be savaged; most or all spirit-boosting buffs are going away, including the current MP5 counterparts. Replenishment is being nerfed. The five second rule is going to be dead, replaced with in-combat and out-of-combat regen rates according to rumour... maybe stacking spirit and intellect will be vital. Can we even gem for Mastery Rating?
I'd like to hope it'll be an interesting choice. I love my current haste > all setup because it feels more responsive and fun to play. Bigger heals on nearly-dead folk doesn't appeal as much on a moment-to-moment level, compared to crazyfast casting. With other healers and the intrinsic randomness of raid damage, it's a factor beyond our control much like critical heals are, but it's also a reliable throughput increase when needed which crits are most certainly not, individually.
Like everyone else, I await details and numbers with bated breath. But so far, I'm voting 'maybe' to our Mastery.
But on topic, here's our third mastery:
"Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target's health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points."
And after a bit of digging on WoWWiki, here's Eyonix on the mastery stuff in general:
"The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree -- meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear."
The important thing here is that shaman will always have some Mastery Rating from wearing mail (assuming you're wearing at least some and not pinching priest/tree gear exclusively, you naughty shaman), but that otherwise we should have some flexibility with regards to how much we acquire. Assembling a Mastery Rating-less gear set will probably be tricky or impossible (especially for ten-man raiders, assuming the current second-class citizen status obtains in Cataclysm), but with luck there will be adequate wiggle room that we can exchange most of our MR for additional haste, crit or spirit.
I really quite like the concept of Deep Healing. In a world where people don't have near-binary health, it plays into healing in ways I enjoy. 'Saving the day' with a massive heal on low-health targets is a nice feeling, and with Healing Rain and a bit of Chain Heal spam I can see our throughput being potentially monstrous after heavy raid damage. It'll help on tank healing, too, assuming tanks will not spend much time at 100% health.
One key thing is that it makes recovering from a bad health situation something shaman are intrinsically good at. I like this. I pick up Healing Focus today not because it helps when things go smoothly (it's generally useless then) but because it sometimes assists in turning around a raid when things go pear-shaped, and the mastery bonus seems to speak to the same philosophy.
It also discourages topping off of people who are not in danger. This is a good thing, to my mind. Let the HoTs and random smart heals do that, and not only will you save mana (I hear it matters in this crazy world, or something) but your heals will land for more when you do decide to heal someone. Bumping someone up from 95% will feel less satisfying than a beefier heal on someone who needs it more, and this kind of psychological feedback may be significant in mitigating the culture shock of returning to triage and mana management as constant parts of the healing play style.
All this said, who knows if Mastery Rating will be 'worth it'. Deep Healing is optimising for the worst case, which is not a place most theorycraft is done. Picking up additional crit or haste provides extra throughput all the time, and these ratings are supposedly going to be much harder to cap for all specs. Mana regen in general is going to be savaged; most or all spirit-boosting buffs are going away, including the current MP5 counterparts. Replenishment is being nerfed. The five second rule is going to be dead, replaced with in-combat and out-of-combat regen rates according to rumour... maybe stacking spirit and intellect will be vital. Can we even gem for Mastery Rating?
I'd like to hope it'll be an interesting choice. I love my current haste > all setup because it feels more responsive and fun to play. Bigger heals on nearly-dead folk doesn't appeal as much on a moment-to-moment level, compared to crazyfast casting. With other healers and the intrinsic randomness of raid damage, it's a factor beyond our control much like critical heals are, but it's also a reliable throughput increase when needed which crits are most certainly not, individually.
Like everyone else, I await details and numbers with bated breath. But so far, I'm voting 'maybe' to our Mastery.
Thursday 1 April 2010
Back To Ulduar!
For fun and gear, a loose bunch of people decided to start running through Ulduar again. There's a plan to progress to Onyxia and ToC and then start flailing around in ICC. I think we're all alts or people new to this raiding malarky, and this is a fun way to take those characters for a spin.
So, drood gets to play with trains! (She even managed to avoid falling off this time).
Ulduar went pretty well, considering. We're rather stupidly overgeared from triumph badge gear of course, but there were equally plenty of people who'd never seen the fights or in some cases, raided at all. This made it fun, and I'd forgotten just how interesting Ulduar is to raid. We got to Yogg within one lockout and after bouncing off P2 for a bit decided progress had been sufficiently good. I'm looking forward to trying out Ony. My druid even offtanked her in a pug a week or two ago, which is a testament to just how easily she falls over, and she gave me a supershiny tanking ring.
My main still hasn't killed Yogg. What can I say, scrub shaman.
I've started PvPing a bit more on the tree spec. It's kinda fun, and I made a bit of a commitment by respeccing into more PvP talents. I think this is reasonable, though, as it allowed me to pick up Living Seed and nab a few other handy-in-PvE bits (now an 11/0/60 build). I'll miss the 3% haste, but I think the added versatility makes for a viable trade in the context of 10-man raids.
What else...
Baby disc priest got to go to Gnomeregan. Ugh. There were some awful DPS that kept pulling for the tank, pulling off the tank (who was quietly competent, but there's only so many tools in the paladin toolbox at level 28), standing in what little fire they could find and generally making everyone's life needlessly painful.
Hmm.
My primary healing spells at this level (PW:S, renew, flash heal) cost very roughly 100 mana each. Resurrect only costs 300, and I can drink before casting that.
Some new, draconian policies were put in place: you pull for the tank, you don't get heals at all. You get one bubble for self-inflicted hurt such as pulling off the tank or standing in bad; the next heal you get will be Resurrect. Randomly targeted or accidental, unavoidable damage (categorised thus by mine discerning and increasingly hateful eye) I heal through to the best of my ability as long as the tank is safe.
This made for a happy, contented healer and tank, and some deeply unhappy DPS who were apparently unable to comprehend why pulling the next group with a Blizzard whilst the tank is drinking might be silly. Eventually they dropped group, we found replacements and proceeded to finish the dungeon with a far nicer lot of damage dealers.
So, yes. The old adage 'It costs less to resurrect you than heal through your stupid' applies when levelling, too. More so, in fact, because I have less mana to waste making up for the mistakes of others.
So, drood gets to play with trains! (She even managed to avoid falling off this time).
Ulduar went pretty well, considering. We're rather stupidly overgeared from triumph badge gear of course, but there were equally plenty of people who'd never seen the fights or in some cases, raided at all. This made it fun, and I'd forgotten just how interesting Ulduar is to raid. We got to Yogg within one lockout and after bouncing off P2 for a bit decided progress had been sufficiently good. I'm looking forward to trying out Ony. My druid even offtanked her in a pug a week or two ago, which is a testament to just how easily she falls over, and she gave me a supershiny tanking ring.
My main still hasn't killed Yogg. What can I say, scrub shaman.
I've started PvPing a bit more on the tree spec. It's kinda fun, and I made a bit of a commitment by respeccing into more PvP talents. I think this is reasonable, though, as it allowed me to pick up Living Seed and nab a few other handy-in-PvE bits (now an 11/0/60 build). I'll miss the 3% haste, but I think the added versatility makes for a viable trade in the context of 10-man raids.
What else...
Baby disc priest got to go to Gnomeregan. Ugh. There were some awful DPS that kept pulling for the tank, pulling off the tank (who was quietly competent, but there's only so many tools in the paladin toolbox at level 28), standing in what little fire they could find and generally making everyone's life needlessly painful.
Hmm.
My primary healing spells at this level (PW:S, renew, flash heal) cost very roughly 100 mana each. Resurrect only costs 300, and I can drink before casting that.
Some new, draconian policies were put in place: you pull for the tank, you don't get heals at all. You get one bubble for self-inflicted hurt such as pulling off the tank or standing in bad; the next heal you get will be Resurrect. Randomly targeted or accidental, unavoidable damage (categorised thus by mine discerning and increasingly hateful eye) I heal through to the best of my ability as long as the tank is safe.
This made for a happy, contented healer and tank, and some deeply unhappy DPS who were apparently unable to comprehend why pulling the next group with a Blizzard whilst the tank is drinking might be silly. Eventually they dropped group, we found replacements and proceeded to finish the dungeon with a far nicer lot of damage dealers.
So, yes. The old adage 'It costs less to resurrect you than heal through your stupid' applies when levelling, too. More so, in fact, because I have less mana to waste making up for the mistakes of others.
Thursday 11 March 2010
BURR! Or, Why I'm giving druid tanking another go.
M'partner wondered this aloud. I spent 76 levels as a bear, and found it miserable. The toolset was tiny, the gear confusing, and the bear model still eats up way too much screen area. I respec'ed tree, and didn't look back... for several weeks.
Then I took some carefully hoarded pennies and my long-unused flight form*, walked up to the annoying elf with a dragonhawk who loiters on Krasus' Landing spamming emotes... then ended up in Thunder Bluff, in front of a druid trainer, considerably lighter of pocket and spending a second set of talent points in a disturbingly bearlike fashion.
Why?
Mostly, I think it was this superb look at the 'feel' of druid tanking. After playing a warrior, the way a bear's tools fall short felt absolutely stifling. But the above post kind of turned that on its head - bears don't feel like prot warriors (despite having mostly reskinned prot skills), and that is entirely OK. They have a simple priority system for single-target threat, a couple of debuffs and a DoT to track, wear a lot of kitty-gear... they really do feel more like a DPS that wants aggro.
Bears, on single targets and rage allowing, keep Faerie Fire and Mangle on cooldown, keep Lacerate up, keep Maulin' every attack ('tis on my mousewheel down, sharing a bind with Heroic Strike, and drives my partner nuts with the incessant whirring) and... um, fill in with Swipe. With a glyphed Maul, this also covers two targets. On three or more, I try to Lacerate/FF/Mangle the first kill target just in case the planets align and the DPS elect to follow the kill order, and then just Swipe+Maul my way to the bank. It's all very simple, although as with DPS classes getting used to the timing so you don't over-refresh Lacerate or let it fall off takes practise. I'm guilty of both, as well as not applying Demo. Roar most of the time - but hey, I do that on the warrior as well. At least I consistently fail at AP-debuffs**.
It's so very simple. No procs to worry about, Infected Wounds is self-applying, and with Mangle/FF sharing a cooldown duration (I don't spec Imp. Mangle at the moment) it practically falls into a rotation. Combined with the crazy crit rates bears get (40% odd, unbuffed, with terrible gear!), it really does feel like DPS. Once I'd reconciled this with the fact that it was still tanking, I've felt a lot more friendly towards the bear's smaller toolbox.
* I did hoard some more pennies and get cold weather flying shortly afterwards, so the poor thing can - at last - flap slowly around Northrend.
** I think the general reason for this is I'm really, really paranoid about getting a solid aggro lead - especially on AoE pulls - that I feel I can't afford the GCD to slip it in at the start of a fight. By the time I actually feel secure in the threat tables, trash is nearly dead anyway. This behaviour reinforces itself, and Demo. Roar/Shout slowly falls down my internal priority list until I forget about it. Bad Bear!
Then I took some carefully hoarded pennies and my long-unused flight form*, walked up to the annoying elf with a dragonhawk who loiters on Krasus' Landing spamming emotes... then ended up in Thunder Bluff, in front of a druid trainer, considerably lighter of pocket and spending a second set of talent points in a disturbingly bearlike fashion.
Why?
Mostly, I think it was this superb look at the 'feel' of druid tanking. After playing a warrior, the way a bear's tools fall short felt absolutely stifling. But the above post kind of turned that on its head - bears don't feel like prot warriors (despite having mostly reskinned prot skills), and that is entirely OK. They have a simple priority system for single-target threat, a couple of debuffs and a DoT to track, wear a lot of kitty-gear... they really do feel more like a DPS that wants aggro.
Bears, on single targets and rage allowing, keep Faerie Fire and Mangle on cooldown, keep Lacerate up, keep Maulin' every attack ('tis on my mousewheel down, sharing a bind with Heroic Strike, and drives my partner nuts with the incessant whirring) and... um, fill in with Swipe. With a glyphed Maul, this also covers two targets. On three or more, I try to Lacerate/FF/Mangle the first kill target just in case the planets align and the DPS elect to follow the kill order, and then just Swipe+Maul my way to the bank. It's all very simple, although as with DPS classes getting used to the timing so you don't over-refresh Lacerate or let it fall off takes practise. I'm guilty of both, as well as not applying Demo. Roar most of the time - but hey, I do that on the warrior as well. At least I consistently fail at AP-debuffs**.
It's so very simple. No procs to worry about, Infected Wounds is self-applying, and with Mangle/FF sharing a cooldown duration (I don't spec Imp. Mangle at the moment) it practically falls into a rotation. Combined with the crazy crit rates bears get (40% odd, unbuffed, with terrible gear!), it really does feel like DPS. Once I'd reconciled this with the fact that it was still tanking, I've felt a lot more friendly towards the bear's smaller toolbox.
* I did hoard some more pennies and get cold weather flying shortly afterwards, so the poor thing can - at last - flap slowly around Northrend.
** I think the general reason for this is I'm really, really paranoid about getting a solid aggro lead - especially on AoE pulls - that I feel I can't afford the GCD to slip it in at the start of a fight. By the time I actually feel secure in the threat tables, trash is nearly dead anyway. This behaviour reinforces itself, and Demo. Roar/Shout slowly falls down my internal priority list until I forget about it. Bad Bear!
Tankin' HoR - It's Hard
My poor little undergeared bear has been thrown into Halls of Reflection twice, now. I suspect this is the fault of my (considerably nicer) healing gear, but I've made a stab at it.
First time went without a hitch. The priest healer kept one of the ranged spirits shackled at all times, and the DPS paid attention to Omen (I make a point of mentioning my new-ness and generally low threat output on joining an instance, but people listening is still a rarity).
Second time, we had no priest, and no other useful CC either. The DPS had better gear, and were veritable aggromonkeys. We wiped twice on the last wave of spirits before the very first boss, before deciding it wasn't happening. I couldn't control all the mobs without the help of some CC, and I was too squishy to let the healer focus on keeping DPS alive when they did pull aggro. It ended politely, but still. Bit of a sad ending to an otherwise productive night of bearing.
From the perspective of a noob-bear, the instance is a real pain. I had to use growl and FFF on cooldown to try to keep the riflemen and magi focused on me, and swipe-spam in the alcove to keep the melee mobs semi-controlled. If any of them got loose, it was painful to reacquire threat given that growl was generally on cooldown. Charging one of the ranged mobs after getting concrete threat on the melee did help, but was risky. And if I hate that alcove for giving me viewing problems on my shaman, it's ten times worse with a giant bear arse obscuring the screen!
I'm not sure what to do about that place, except get a better weapon and try to sharpen my focus. The emphasis is there because my druid still hasn't seen the polearm from HoR. Nor the one from ToC. Nor even the staff from VH - she's stuck with the drudgery of the tournament dailies to pick up the Staff of Feral Furies at some point in the distant future, because precious little else is dropping for her. /grump
Speaking of focus, I managed to fail utterly and repeatedly in Old Kingdom. Never tank whilst tired and using a new UI mod that wrecks your frame rate - the combination is not shiny. I guess I had become blasé about tanking the 'normal' heroics to even consider this, and ate a mounded helping of humble pie as a result.
Tanking takes concentration and sensible reflexes to do well. Who'd have thought?
First time went without a hitch. The priest healer kept one of the ranged spirits shackled at all times, and the DPS paid attention to Omen (I make a point of mentioning my new-ness and generally low threat output on joining an instance, but people listening is still a rarity).
Second time, we had no priest, and no other useful CC either. The DPS had better gear, and were veritable aggromonkeys. We wiped twice on the last wave of spirits before the very first boss, before deciding it wasn't happening. I couldn't control all the mobs without the help of some CC, and I was too squishy to let the healer focus on keeping DPS alive when they did pull aggro. It ended politely, but still. Bit of a sad ending to an otherwise productive night of bearing.
From the perspective of a noob-bear, the instance is a real pain. I had to use growl and FFF on cooldown to try to keep the riflemen and magi focused on me, and swipe-spam in the alcove to keep the melee mobs semi-controlled. If any of them got loose, it was painful to reacquire threat given that growl was generally on cooldown. Charging one of the ranged mobs after getting concrete threat on the melee did help, but was risky. And if I hate that alcove for giving me viewing problems on my shaman, it's ten times worse with a giant bear arse obscuring the screen!
I'm not sure what to do about that place, except get a better weapon and try to sharpen my focus. The emphasis is there because my druid still hasn't seen the polearm from HoR. Nor the one from ToC. Nor even the staff from VH - she's stuck with the drudgery of the tournament dailies to pick up the Staff of Feral Furies at some point in the distant future, because precious little else is dropping for her. /grump
Speaking of focus, I managed to fail utterly and repeatedly in Old Kingdom. Never tank whilst tired and using a new UI mod that wrecks your frame rate - the combination is not shiny. I guess I had become blasé about tanking the 'normal' heroics to even consider this, and ate a mounded helping of humble pie as a result.
Tanking takes concentration and sensible reflexes to do well. Who'd have thought?
Thursday 4 March 2010
Slowly It Grows
Whee! This is going to be a scatterbrained post, even more so than usual.
Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.
Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!
I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.
So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.
Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.
So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.
I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.
For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.
Darkmoon Faire is still a slightly odd place to me, but I took the plunge and transferred a load of alts over. All my significantly levelled characters are now on one realm again, which is nice.
Now I just have to decide what to do with the bleedin' things. I sorta-decided to farm Frost emblems on as many as I could be bothered, and focus on gearing up one at a time. As the mage and enhancement shaman are adequately geared in their main specs, the druid seemed a logical place to put some effort in!
I'm really enjoying my tree, but in a moment of complete insanity I decided to buy dual spec and cobble together a tanking build. Argh! I really didn't enjoy bear-tanking up to level 75, so who knows what possessed me. I'm hoping that it will provide a valuable contrast to the warrior, who is currently hoarding Rested XP in the Thrallmar inn, and that the rage-management experience from there will help me enjoy the big bear butt a little more. It'll be a while before I'm willing to actually tank, though - she currently only hits 28k health in bear form. More than enough to tank your average heroic, but pugs these days positively sneer at any tank who's not rocking up to the plate with at least 35k. I suppose there's no reason not to, as that's easily achieved with emblem gear.
So, tree is running out of things to spend emblems on now and can start collecting bear gear. Hopefully I can snag some tasty bits of offset gear from ToC and the ICC dungeons on the way, too.
Some notes on druid specs: There seems to be a lot of wibble going on about how useful Living Spirit is to raiding trees compared to spending points in Empowered Touch, and how it might be more useful to an undergeared druid. I'm honestly confused by this. It's a percentage increase to spirit. It scales near-perfectly with gear (things like Solace aside, MP5 isn't common in tree gearing), and that cuts both ways. A newly dinged tree might indeed want extra regen with a small lump of throughput, but they'll also have a low amount of spirit. Per talent point, 5% of a small number is a smaller number.
So basically, if you're on the low end of the gear scale LS might be tempting, but it's also a relatively low absolute boost to regen and spellpower. Granted, points spent in Empowered Touch are also weaker because it affects only the spellpower portion of the healing done by those spells, and with lower spellpower the base amount unaffected by the talent will be a larger chunk of the total.
I don't think it's a bad talent by any stretch, but I don't really see the logic in saying it's significantly better for those with lesser gear.
For reference, I've been running with 1/3 LS, 2/2 ET basically since dinging 80 in blues and greens. I wish I had talent points to pick up Living Seed as well, but hey ho.
Monday 1 February 2010
Changes
Sooo, my guild fell apart a bit. There was a lot of drama and silliness, raiding wasn't happening, and my partner again reminded me that she had many characters on a different realm.
With a surprising amount of trepidation, I moved my main to Darkmoon Faire and joined a smallish guild. I know a few members from university, and the flavour of the guild reflects that kind of gathering. Guild chat is frequently home to discussion of theorycrafting, people are very willing to debate and don't hesitate to call out spurious statements. It's not unpleasant, but it's certainly different.
I think I've only managed two guild-normative faux pas. I severely understated the value of the more interactive Arcane playstyle (too long as fire, clearly), and performed a semi-wowcock move when HPS discussions arose about Festergut.
I've managed to do a couple of ICC10 bosses with the new guild as a stand-in DPS. Blowing the dust off of my PvE elemental gear was a bit strange (2T8! Eek!), but I think I performed adequately and we got Saurfang down on the third attempt. I've since farmed up another couple of bits of T9 and I'm working on the cloth headpiece now, so hopefully I'll be able to contribute a bit more should I need to DPS again. Of course, I'm gently prodding towards a healing spot but the new guild has a plethora of tanks, melee and healers and a distinct lack of ranged DPS. Bleh.
DMF is an RP realm, but so far it's been light and mostly confined to Silvermoon. All to the good, I don't have much desire to RP and none whatsoever on my main. We'll see what happens if I fling tinyTank across, though. If all goes well I'll move at least a few alts over to join the main - mostly, if I'm being honest, because they have handy professions and it's convenient to have such things available.
With a surprising amount of trepidation, I moved my main to Darkmoon Faire and joined a smallish guild. I know a few members from university, and the flavour of the guild reflects that kind of gathering. Guild chat is frequently home to discussion of theorycrafting, people are very willing to debate and don't hesitate to call out spurious statements. It's not unpleasant, but it's certainly different.
I think I've only managed two guild-normative faux pas. I severely understated the value of the more interactive Arcane playstyle (too long as fire, clearly), and performed a semi-wowcock move when HPS discussions arose about Festergut.
I've managed to do a couple of ICC10 bosses with the new guild as a stand-in DPS. Blowing the dust off of my PvE elemental gear was a bit strange (2T8! Eek!), but I think I performed adequately and we got Saurfang down on the third attempt. I've since farmed up another couple of bits of T9 and I'm working on the cloth headpiece now, so hopefully I'll be able to contribute a bit more should I need to DPS again. Of course, I'm gently prodding towards a healing spot but the new guild has a plethora of tanks, melee and healers and a distinct lack of ranged DPS. Bleh.
DMF is an RP realm, but so far it's been light and mostly confined to Silvermoon. All to the good, I don't have much desire to RP and none whatsoever on my main. We'll see what happens if I fling tinyTank across, though. If all goes well I'll move at least a few alts over to join the main - mostly, if I'm being honest, because they have handy professions and it's convenient to have such things available.
Tuesday 19 January 2010
The Community That Cried Nerf
So, fresh furore over this rather minor comment from a blue.
The thread rapidly derailed into discussing the relative merits of and issues with some heroic boss abilities, based on this li'l snippet:
"With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn'Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters."
And there was some angry blogging about it in various places, too.
My take on the whole afair, this apparent nerf to boss abilities? Good.
When first stepping into heroics, in my mixture of blues and greens, some of these abilities were challenging. They were interesting. They broke up the fight into palatable chunks, and did indeed help train me for some basic aspects of raiding such as target switching, not standing in fire, interrupts, and tank damage spikes. The problem is twofold. The abilities concerned are tied to the boss health bar - so the higher your party's damage output, the more frequently they occur. They also render the boss immune to damage for at least some time, often long enough for a little speech plus the time taken to target and dispose of the add, so their 'interrupt the battle' abilities scale relatively less with increased player damage than their health bar does.
So, essentially, a fight which was designed to be a fun and interesting mix of phases and adds and abilities boils down to 10% time spent tearing through the boss at a crazy rate, 88% watching boss emote whilst invulnerable, and perhaps 2% blowing up a hapless add. This is not fun. I don't care how long the boss takes, within sensible limits, as bosses aren't the bottleneck for heroic runs anyway. The pacing and feel of the encounter have been broken by our gear spiralling ever-higher in item level, replaced with pointless vexation.
Some other examples off the top of my head...
Anub'arak in AN. He barely pops up to say hello before burrowing again.
Svala Sorrowgrave in UP. With even a single geared and competant ranged DPS, the melee are basically sitting on their thumbs as she yoyos. Killing the adds for almost the entire boss fight. Yawn.
Ymiron, again in UP. His stun/fear went from a critical part of the fight (getting stunned in those AoE damage effects was troublesome, I recall), to merely a very annoying but increasingly large portion of the encounter.
Others spring to mind, but the basic point is that this kind of fight doesn't scale appropriately with gear, and thanks to frequent badge upgrades and easier access to high-level gear (both things I agree with entirely) everyone is getting gear these days and exposing the weaknesses. These abilities do not make the boss fights harder, just more irritating. They do make the fights a little longer, but really not by much compared to their sheer annoyance factor.
It could be argued that the designers should have forseen these problems with heroic bosses 'scaling' in the wrong way. Abilities on a timer, or a combination health/timer (will perform X ability every Y% health, but at most every Z seconds) are less likely to break with higher DPS. I think it is entirely reasonable that heroics become trivially easy over time, especially if there's a steady trickle of new five-man instances appropriate to the current level of gear, as long as they don't become annoying.
Yeah, the proposed fix for OK (and probably other dungeons as well, in time) is also a nerf. But really, no-one experiencing the issues with the boss spending more time floating in the air than being smacked in the face should be concerned with that. Hey, if they want to later give those same bosses more health or mitigation to artifically inflate the length of the fight to pre-fix levels, I wonder if anyone would complain?
Oculus, as an aside
I hate Oculus. It's a mess. A halting, on-again off-again mess of an instance. There is no opportunity to play here. The dungeon will not let you engage with it outside the stifling parameters expressed by disconnected platforms and your pitifully equipped drakes.
It is not fun. For a little while, it was interesting at least, but it has no depth and the space circumscribed by its mechanics does not allow for any. As a guild we decided to spice up the Nexus by kiting Anomalus and Omorok to the mage boss, and it seems to be the new standard to drag the Infinite Corrupter to Mal'ganis in CoS for the jokingly titled 'hard mode'. These instances do admit play, so if we feel like making a simple daily run more interesting you can. Oculus does not and cannot, due to simple layout issues and the horrible, horrible drakes.
My resolve weakened enough for me to run it with guildies when it popped as the daily, and lo I was rewarded with a blue drake, a rare gem and some extra badges. Great. Now I can go back to instantly dropping group every time it loads, as even the miniscule bonus of a mount I'll never use is a non-issue. Badges and gems? Pfft. Have to do a lot better than that to convince me I can't find a better way to spend fifteen minutes!
The thread rapidly derailed into discussing the relative merits of and issues with some heroic boss abilities, based on this li'l snippet:
"With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn'Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters."
And there was some angry blogging about it in various places, too.
My take on the whole afair, this apparent nerf to boss abilities? Good.
When first stepping into heroics, in my mixture of blues and greens, some of these abilities were challenging. They were interesting. They broke up the fight into palatable chunks, and did indeed help train me for some basic aspects of raiding such as target switching, not standing in fire, interrupts, and tank damage spikes. The problem is twofold. The abilities concerned are tied to the boss health bar - so the higher your party's damage output, the more frequently they occur. They also render the boss immune to damage for at least some time, often long enough for a little speech plus the time taken to target and dispose of the add, so their 'interrupt the battle' abilities scale relatively less with increased player damage than their health bar does.
So, essentially, a fight which was designed to be a fun and interesting mix of phases and adds and abilities boils down to 10% time spent tearing through the boss at a crazy rate, 88% watching boss emote whilst invulnerable, and perhaps 2% blowing up a hapless add. This is not fun. I don't care how long the boss takes, within sensible limits, as bosses aren't the bottleneck for heroic runs anyway. The pacing and feel of the encounter have been broken by our gear spiralling ever-higher in item level, replaced with pointless vexation.
Some other examples off the top of my head...
Anub'arak in AN. He barely pops up to say hello before burrowing again.
Svala Sorrowgrave in UP. With even a single geared and competant ranged DPS, the melee are basically sitting on their thumbs as she yoyos. Killing the adds for almost the entire boss fight. Yawn.
Ymiron, again in UP. His stun/fear went from a critical part of the fight (getting stunned in those AoE damage effects was troublesome, I recall), to merely a very annoying but increasingly large portion of the encounter.
Others spring to mind, but the basic point is that this kind of fight doesn't scale appropriately with gear, and thanks to frequent badge upgrades and easier access to high-level gear (both things I agree with entirely) everyone is getting gear these days and exposing the weaknesses. These abilities do not make the boss fights harder, just more irritating. They do make the fights a little longer, but really not by much compared to their sheer annoyance factor.
It could be argued that the designers should have forseen these problems with heroic bosses 'scaling' in the wrong way. Abilities on a timer, or a combination health/timer (will perform X ability every Y% health, but at most every Z seconds) are less likely to break with higher DPS. I think it is entirely reasonable that heroics become trivially easy over time, especially if there's a steady trickle of new five-man instances appropriate to the current level of gear, as long as they don't become annoying.
Yeah, the proposed fix for OK (and probably other dungeons as well, in time) is also a nerf. But really, no-one experiencing the issues with the boss spending more time floating in the air than being smacked in the face should be concerned with that. Hey, if they want to later give those same bosses more health or mitigation to artifically inflate the length of the fight to pre-fix levels, I wonder if anyone would complain?
Oculus, as an aside
I hate Oculus. It's a mess. A halting, on-again off-again mess of an instance. There is no opportunity to play here. The dungeon will not let you engage with it outside the stifling parameters expressed by disconnected platforms and your pitifully equipped drakes.
It is not fun. For a little while, it was interesting at least, but it has no depth and the space circumscribed by its mechanics does not allow for any. As a guild we decided to spice up the Nexus by kiting Anomalus and Omorok to the mage boss, and it seems to be the new standard to drag the Infinite Corrupter to Mal'ganis in CoS for the jokingly titled 'hard mode'. These instances do admit play, so if we feel like making a simple daily run more interesting you can. Oculus does not and cannot, due to simple layout issues and the horrible, horrible drakes.
My resolve weakened enough for me to run it with guildies when it popped as the daily, and lo I was rewarded with a blue drake, a rare gem and some extra badges. Great. Now I can go back to instantly dropping group every time it loads, as even the miniscule bonus of a mount I'll never use is a non-issue. Badges and gems? Pfft. Have to do a lot better than that to convince me I can't find a better way to spend fifteen minutes!
Monday 18 January 2010
Hodgepodge
Icecrown
Eight attempts remaining on Putricide. I'm hoping that enough people log to use those attempts up before the reset. I want that kilt, damnit!
On the subject of loot, there's an aweful lot of haste/MP5 mail in there. As in, far too much. The haste is nice, and as a Solace still eludes me the MP5 isn't worthless, but I'd really rather have some haste/crit options. I'm not really assembling a personal BiS list just yet, but trying to look ahead and pick out where I want offset gear and how I should prioritise tier acquisition. I'm thinking that I'll pick up the two-piece bonus with the chest, a direct upgrade from T9.232. That will break my T9 set bonus, making it a little less painful to pick up the horribly itemised T10 gloves (cheap!) and then the headpiece, which is a slight upgrade from the Gunship helm, to complete the four-piece. If the Rippling Flesh Kilt still eludes me by then, the crafted mail legs are very nice and the boots aren't half-bad either. The emblem trinket is a nice upgrade from Sif's Remembrance, and the mail/cloth emblem gloves will be good for fights where 4T10 isn't useful.
Yep, I do think that given our usual raiding lineup and healing assignments, 4T10 will be worth wearing the crappy gloves. Three pieces are nicely itemised anyway, so it won't be that much of a hardship.
And to whinge a little: why are none of the items with fun procs available in the ten man version? I really appreciate that with the addition of hard modes I can pick up 264 gear from my preferred raiding environment, and I really like that the ten man trinkets are not completely awful this time (TotC, I'm looking at you). But I'd quite like an Althor's Abacus, or a Trauma, and I'm unlikely to ever get them due to the weird ongoing 10/25 loot dichotomy. It seems like it'd be interesting to allow the normal twenty-five man versions (item level 264) to drop in ten-man heroic fights, at least for the stuff that isn't represented in ten-man normal (funky trinkets and weapons with procs, at this point). Or, y'know, make some ten-man items with the same kind of fun principles. Larger guilds end up roflstomping the smaller raids anyway for emblems, achievements and the odd bit of well-itemised gear, so I can't see much of a flaw in spreading the goodies a bit.
Tanking
Levelling with the LFG tool is proving very interesting. Close to level 55 now, with only a few spates of questing/profession training interspersing dungeon runs. So far, it's not gone too badly. Had an... interesting experience with the Sunken Temple, where we did the lower area first (ever tried communicating the order of statues to click on to an almost silent pug? The ret just kept following me, everyone else stood where asked but seemed incapable of clicking the statues... sigh. Thankfully the healer was (a) from my realm and (b) entirely competant, so we just did the lighting up ourselves). By the time we'd done all this, killed the ugly troll dude, run back upstairs, killed the six guys keeping the barrier up and cleared the dragonkin from the central chamber it was getting a bit late, sowe I rushed a bit when we got to the Prophet. Pulled one group of the trash, killed, waited for ghosts to dissipate. Emboldened by several large pulls earlier in the instance, I grabbed two groups this time... but didn't move them very much, in a tragic error of judgement. Melee DPS charge in, start their face-beating, and promptly get feared.
Crap. I'd forgotten about that. Crapcrapcrap.
Both make fear-inspired beelines to two separate trash groups, who I rush forward to collect in full panic-mode. I'm now tanking an ungodly number of the things in the middle of the room, the healer is in full manic heal-spam, everyone's desperately using every cooldown they have...
Then the DPS get feared again, and one runs straight to the boss. By this time the entire room is aggro'd, a large number not on me, and the bosses joining in just hasten the inevitable. Not my finest tanking moment, although everyone (who spoke at all) had the good grace to gently poke fun rather than get nasty. On the way back trash started to respawn literally as I was running through it so we called the run without killing the Prophet or Eranikus. Eh, well.
Point. I had a point here, what was it... aha! Yes, I remember now.
The classic instances are in many cases brutal. At best they can just deal harshly with those that do not approach with caution (see above, or Princess in Maraudon...), but at worst they're downright evil. Zul'Farrak with the mobs who polymorph the tank, for example, with subsequent complete chaos as they drop threat. Horrible. Eranikus with his absurd sleep ability. And I'd almost forgotten the joys of ubiquitous mobs that flee on low health, leading to hilarious results in BRD. Silences, stuns and disarms feel common and awfully long in duration for their frequency.
Of course, an awful lot of this can be negated by choice of tank (hello druids!) or with snappy dispels from an appropriate class, and smart DPS is always a plus. But when you're pugging your way up the levels those are the exception rather than the rule, and watching your party get nommed by things while you, as tank, are CC'd is... unpleasant.
Thing is, it's often a lot of fun. It encourages good play when people work together, and at least strongly impresses the limits of your own class when they don't. All good stuff, for a levelling tank. I seem to recall TBC dungeons continuing to be somewhat evil (MgT anyone?), but throughout WotLK there are far fewer situations where a tank gets CCd. In fact, I'm so used to seeing lines such as "... and the boss will never use this ability on his current aggro target" that I was starting to think of the alternative as unfair.
For shame.
Eight attempts remaining on Putricide. I'm hoping that enough people log to use those attempts up before the reset. I want that kilt, damnit!
On the subject of loot, there's an aweful lot of haste/MP5 mail in there. As in, far too much. The haste is nice, and as a Solace still eludes me the MP5 isn't worthless, but I'd really rather have some haste/crit options. I'm not really assembling a personal BiS list just yet, but trying to look ahead and pick out where I want offset gear and how I should prioritise tier acquisition. I'm thinking that I'll pick up the two-piece bonus with the chest, a direct upgrade from T9.232. That will break my T9 set bonus, making it a little less painful to pick up the horribly itemised T10 gloves (cheap!) and then the headpiece, which is a slight upgrade from the Gunship helm, to complete the four-piece. If the Rippling Flesh Kilt still eludes me by then, the crafted mail legs are very nice and the boots aren't half-bad either. The emblem trinket is a nice upgrade from Sif's Remembrance, and the mail/cloth emblem gloves will be good for fights where 4T10 isn't useful.
Yep, I do think that given our usual raiding lineup and healing assignments, 4T10 will be worth wearing the crappy gloves. Three pieces are nicely itemised anyway, so it won't be that much of a hardship.
And to whinge a little: why are none of the items with fun procs available in the ten man version? I really appreciate that with the addition of hard modes I can pick up 264 gear from my preferred raiding environment, and I really like that the ten man trinkets are not completely awful this time (TotC, I'm looking at you). But I'd quite like an Althor's Abacus, or a Trauma, and I'm unlikely to ever get them due to the weird ongoing 10/25 loot dichotomy. It seems like it'd be interesting to allow the normal twenty-five man versions (item level 264) to drop in ten-man heroic fights, at least for the stuff that isn't represented in ten-man normal (funky trinkets and weapons with procs, at this point). Or, y'know, make some ten-man items with the same kind of fun principles. Larger guilds end up roflstomping the smaller raids anyway for emblems, achievements and the odd bit of well-itemised gear, so I can't see much of a flaw in spreading the goodies a bit.
Tanking
Levelling with the LFG tool is proving very interesting. Close to level 55 now, with only a few spates of questing/profession training interspersing dungeon runs. So far, it's not gone too badly. Had an... interesting experience with the Sunken Temple, where we did the lower area first (ever tried communicating the order of statues to click on to an almost silent pug? The ret just kept following me, everyone else stood where asked but seemed incapable of clicking the statues... sigh. Thankfully the healer was (a) from my realm and (b) entirely competant, so we just did the lighting up ourselves). By the time we'd done all this, killed the ugly troll dude, run back upstairs, killed the six guys keeping the barrier up and cleared the dragonkin from the central chamber it was getting a bit late, so
Crap. I'd forgotten about that. Crapcrapcrap.
Both make fear-inspired beelines to two separate trash groups, who I rush forward to collect in full panic-mode. I'm now tanking an ungodly number of the things in the middle of the room, the healer is in full manic heal-spam, everyone's desperately using every cooldown they have...
Then the DPS get feared again, and one runs straight to the boss. By this time the entire room is aggro'd, a large number not on me, and the bosses joining in just hasten the inevitable. Not my finest tanking moment, although everyone (who spoke at all) had the good grace to gently poke fun rather than get nasty. On the way back trash started to respawn literally as I was running through it so we called the run without killing the Prophet or Eranikus. Eh, well.
Point. I had a point here, what was it... aha! Yes, I remember now.
The classic instances are in many cases brutal. At best they can just deal harshly with those that do not approach with caution (see above, or Princess in Maraudon...), but at worst they're downright evil. Zul'Farrak with the mobs who polymorph the tank, for example, with subsequent complete chaos as they drop threat. Horrible. Eranikus with his absurd sleep ability. And I'd almost forgotten the joys of ubiquitous mobs that flee on low health, leading to hilarious results in BRD. Silences, stuns and disarms feel common and awfully long in duration for their frequency.
Of course, an awful lot of this can be negated by choice of tank (hello druids!) or with snappy dispels from an appropriate class, and smart DPS is always a plus. But when you're pugging your way up the levels those are the exception rather than the rule, and watching your party get nommed by things while you, as tank, are CC'd is... unpleasant.
Thing is, it's often a lot of fun. It encourages good play when people work together, and at least strongly impresses the limits of your own class when they don't. All good stuff, for a levelling tank. I seem to recall TBC dungeons continuing to be somewhat evil (MgT anyone?), but throughout WotLK there are far fewer situations where a tank gets CCd. In fact, I'm so used to seeing lines such as "... and the boss will never use this ability on his current aggro target" that I was starting to think of the alternative as unfair.
For shame.
Monday 11 January 2010
Assorted Stuffs
So, we cleared the trash (Princess and Stinky were the highpoints) and spent a while wiping on Rotface, and then slightly less time wiping on Festergut.
The former fight I think we can resolve by dropping to two healers, as we were repeatedly wiping at the 15-20% mark with five DPS. At this point, he was dropping infections too quickly to easily handle, so it dissolved into a chaotic mess and failure.
The latter I'm not even going to contemplate fewer than three healers, but swapping the tanks around so the better geared gets the first three-stack period and slightly improved cooldown usage should sort it. It's a very simple fight in comparison to Rotface, but quite frustrating to heal with no mitigation cooldowns. I guess our tanks and non-shaman healers need to have a discussion on this.
As an aside, something which I find a bit weird... Rotface's infection debuff really messes with my healing intuitions. I don't know why, but whilst I can generally happily heal through a Mortal Strike-like debuff just fine, in this case I was constantly overestimating incoming healing on infected targets despite Grid helpfully informing me of the reduced estimates. Hmm. Not sure about that, but it's messy. The kiting tank also spent altogether too long outside of healing range. Things that experience will help with, both.
So, that's enough about the new bosses - we've not downed them yet, despite two nights of wiping. Overall I'd consider that a good thing, it's nice to be challenged a bit.
Babytank has been fun. She's had some good pugs, and some baddish ones, but no true failpugs for a while. Learning to tank as a warrior is interesting, to say the least. I don't really thing my brain is wired for red bars, but I certainly can't complain that I lack tools.
My druid, when tanking, basically has spammable-AoE, spammable-on-next-attack-high-threat attack, a taunt, free-aggro-thingy-on-cooldown... and Lacerate, which is some kind of mutant nonscaling failthing.
My warrior, despite lacking 30 levels on the druid, has far more tools, and they're more fun. More are on cooldowns, there are Revenge procs, Shield Block generates mitigation and rage and Shield Slam awesomeness, and Cleave is fun. I understand a bit more already about why it can sometimes seem easy to pull things off a warrior tank if you follow the tank's target - chances are they're just tabbing through things dropping high-threat attacks until something properly AoE comes off cooldown - and also why DPS entering a fight late might all start to attack different targets based on the tank's current target. It explains a few things I've seen while healing, should I be feeling generous enough not to invoke the standard 'the DPS are drivelling idiots' line.
Warriors are definitely different to the other tanks when it comes to AoE threat. They generate it in a spiky manner, and have to work like mad to keep aggro on everything between those AoE cooldowns. It can get quite manic. They are a lot more fun than druids at this stage though. I still don't recommend having a boomkin pull enormous packs of trolls in Zul'Farrak by using Hurricane, but outside of that rampant e-peening it mostly felt like something that can be handled with experience.
Even so: not having aggro on some quantity of mobs, and having no rage to deal with this, is a horrible feeling. I may have to make an enormous stack of rage potions.
Also: Shouts suck. They're the most annoying buff system I've seen since shaman weapon imbues had a five minute duration.
And I really need an addon to track Vigilance. I spent the talent point, damnit, I should use my only sensible buff more often.
The former fight I think we can resolve by dropping to two healers, as we were repeatedly wiping at the 15-20% mark with five DPS. At this point, he was dropping infections too quickly to easily handle, so it dissolved into a chaotic mess and failure.
The latter I'm not even going to contemplate fewer than three healers, but swapping the tanks around so the better geared gets the first three-stack period and slightly improved cooldown usage should sort it. It's a very simple fight in comparison to Rotface, but quite frustrating to heal with no mitigation cooldowns. I guess our tanks and non-shaman healers need to have a discussion on this.
As an aside, something which I find a bit weird... Rotface's infection debuff really messes with my healing intuitions. I don't know why, but whilst I can generally happily heal through a Mortal Strike-like debuff just fine, in this case I was constantly overestimating incoming healing on infected targets despite Grid helpfully informing me of the reduced estimates. Hmm. Not sure about that, but it's messy. The kiting tank also spent altogether too long outside of healing range. Things that experience will help with, both.
So, that's enough about the new bosses - we've not downed them yet, despite two nights of wiping. Overall I'd consider that a good thing, it's nice to be challenged a bit.
Babytank has been fun. She's had some good pugs, and some baddish ones, but no true failpugs for a while. Learning to tank as a warrior is interesting, to say the least. I don't really thing my brain is wired for red bars, but I certainly can't complain that I lack tools.
My druid, when tanking, basically has spammable-AoE, spammable-on-next-attack-high-threat attack, a taunt, free-aggro-thingy-on-cooldown... and Lacerate, which is some kind of mutant nonscaling failthing.
My warrior, despite lacking 30 levels on the druid, has far more tools, and they're more fun. More are on cooldowns, there are Revenge procs, Shield Block generates mitigation and rage and Shield Slam awesomeness, and Cleave is fun. I understand a bit more already about why it can sometimes seem easy to pull things off a warrior tank if you follow the tank's target - chances are they're just tabbing through things dropping high-threat attacks until something properly AoE comes off cooldown - and also why DPS entering a fight late might all start to attack different targets based on the tank's current target. It explains a few things I've seen while healing, should I be feeling generous enough not to invoke the standard 'the DPS are drivelling idiots' line.
Warriors are definitely different to the other tanks when it comes to AoE threat. They generate it in a spiky manner, and have to work like mad to keep aggro on everything between those AoE cooldowns. It can get quite manic. They are a lot more fun than druids at this stage though. I still don't recommend having a boomkin pull enormous packs of trolls in Zul'Farrak by using Hurricane, but outside of that rampant e-peening it mostly felt like something that can be handled with experience.
Even so: not having aggro on some quantity of mobs, and having no rage to deal with this, is a horrible feeling. I may have to make an enormous stack of rage potions.
Also: Shouts suck. They're the most annoying buff system I've seen since shaman weapon imbues had a five minute duration.
And I really need an addon to track Vigilance. I spent the talent point, damnit, I should use my only sensible buff more often.
Friday 8 January 2010
The Birth of a Tiny Tank
I have a tank!
(full disclosure: I also have a level 76 tank-spec'd feral druid, but she doesn't even get brought out for JC dailies any more. The poor thing is... abandoned.)
Two things led to this rather bizarre situation. I was doing some random dungeons on my tiny little cow-warrior, part of my new year not-resolution to better my understanding of parts of the game at which I fail and suck. Hanging around waiting for an AFK healer in the Armoury, I was picking through my bags looking at some of the loot I'd acquired when being boosted by kindly guildies. I noticed the Aegis of the Scarlet commander, Gauntlets of Divinity, plus a couple of bits of the Scarlet set. Ctrl-clicking, I further noticed my little warrior looked pretty damn awesome, in a red kind of way. Healer returns, and off we trundle through the instance. Herod falls over in due course, and (although he does thoughtlessly neglect to drop the shoulder piece) no less than two of the tabards drop off the swarming trash afterwards! One of which I won! Exciting stuff, I'd never gotten one on any other character. Picked up a quest reward sword at some point, and all of a sudden my Proto-Scarlet set was looking all kinds of awesome.
So cute. I'm not one for RP, nor do I play on an RP realm, but that's just nifty looking... aside from the shoulders, anyway. "Hmm," thunk my brain "Almost wish I wore a shield and sword like that full time..."
The second event was rather less positive. A little later, I was trotting through Uldaman with one of those highly fail paladin tanks. He had decent threat generation and DPS, but kept LoSing the healer (he was merrily engaging the poor resto shaman in a mangled parody of conversation whilst running ahead. When she stopped to reply in a considered and less failspeak manner, he... didn't), ignored adds that didn't stray onto his Consecrate, and eventually proceeded to pull an entire room of adds and the General boss. I sighed and hit the by now rather familiar defensive stance + weapon/shield macro and Challenging Shouted at the lot after the tank fell over, but by then it was a lost cause. This kind of stupid wipe is annoying, but hardly unusual. Everyone starts the corpse run, and he (needlessly) pipes up "every1 run, only sham can rez" or some such piffle.
"Not really, you can as well" quoth I.
In response: "no lol"
"Yeah, you really can. Check your spellbook for Redemption"
"i didnt lrn it"
A small argument ensues, as I mistakenly thought you didn't need to do the quest any more and just got the skill at the trainer. It seems you do need the quest.
"OK I'm wrong, but why didn't you do the quest? It's one of your critical abilities as a paladin!"
"i cba its a chain and takes 2 long"
By this point, I was standing open-mouthed just inside the instance. I think he was already pulling stuff deep within, but I'd been afflicted by Stunning Stupidity(rank 14). The quest, from my obviously hazy recollection, involves walking around Silvermoon for perhaps five minutes.
I apologised to the rest and dropped group. It was just too damn stupid. How can anyone do that? I'm sure we could have easily done the instance, and hardly kid myself that a replacement DPS was hard to find, but the cost to what remains of my sanity would be too high to continue. And frankly I refuse to help that kind of person in even the smallest of ways.
As a healer, the idea of someone not learning to resurrect when they're capable is abhorrent. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
So, through a combination of my little cow looking awesome with her sword 'n board and that one person's towering idiocy: I dinged 40, dual spec'd prot, grabbed a load of cheap plate off the AH and prepared to tick the other little warrior role-box for the next random dungeon!
(full disclosure: I also have a level 76 tank-spec'd feral druid, but she doesn't even get brought out for JC dailies any more. The poor thing is... abandoned.)
Two things led to this rather bizarre situation. I was doing some random dungeons on my tiny little cow-warrior, part of my new year not-resolution to better my understanding of parts of the game at which I fail and suck. Hanging around waiting for an AFK healer in the Armoury, I was picking through my bags looking at some of the loot I'd acquired when being boosted by kindly guildies. I noticed the Aegis of the Scarlet commander, Gauntlets of Divinity, plus a couple of bits of the Scarlet set. Ctrl-clicking, I further noticed my little warrior looked pretty damn awesome, in a red kind of way. Healer returns, and off we trundle through the instance. Herod falls over in due course, and (although he does thoughtlessly neglect to drop the shoulder piece) no less than two of the tabards drop off the swarming trash afterwards! One of which I won! Exciting stuff, I'd never gotten one on any other character. Picked up a quest reward sword at some point, and all of a sudden my Proto-Scarlet set was looking all kinds of awesome.
So cute. I'm not one for RP, nor do I play on an RP realm, but that's just nifty looking... aside from the shoulders, anyway. "Hmm," thunk my brain "Almost wish I wore a shield and sword like that full time..."
The second event was rather less positive. A little later, I was trotting through Uldaman with one of those highly fail paladin tanks. He had decent threat generation and DPS, but kept LoSing the healer (he was merrily engaging the poor resto shaman in a mangled parody of conversation whilst running ahead. When she stopped to reply in a considered and less failspeak manner, he... didn't), ignored adds that didn't stray onto his Consecrate, and eventually proceeded to pull an entire room of adds and the General boss. I sighed and hit the by now rather familiar defensive stance + weapon/shield macro and Challenging Shouted at the lot after the tank fell over, but by then it was a lost cause. This kind of stupid wipe is annoying, but hardly unusual. Everyone starts the corpse run, and he (needlessly) pipes up "every1 run, only sham can rez" or some such piffle.
"Not really, you can as well" quoth I.
In response: "no lol"
"Yeah, you really can. Check your spellbook for Redemption"
"i didnt lrn it"
A small argument ensues, as I mistakenly thought you didn't need to do the quest any more and just got the skill at the trainer. It seems you do need the quest.
"OK I'm wrong, but why didn't you do the quest? It's one of your critical abilities as a paladin!"
"i cba its a chain and takes 2 long"
By this point, I was standing open-mouthed just inside the instance. I think he was already pulling stuff deep within, but I'd been afflicted by Stunning Stupidity(rank 14). The quest, from my obviously hazy recollection, involves walking around Silvermoon for perhaps five minutes.
I apologised to the rest and dropped group. It was just too damn stupid. How can anyone do that? I'm sure we could have easily done the instance, and hardly kid myself that a replacement DPS was hard to find, but the cost to what remains of my sanity would be too high to continue. And frankly I refuse to help that kind of person in even the smallest of ways.
As a healer, the idea of someone not learning to resurrect when they're capable is abhorrent. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
So, through a combination of my little cow looking awesome with her sword 'n board and that one person's towering idiocy: I dinged 40, dual spec'd prot, grabbed a load of cheap plate off the AH and prepared to tick the other little warrior role-box for the next random dungeon!
Wednesday 6 January 2010
Only Several Months Late
I kind of got sucked into reading far too many healing blogs recently (I stumbled upon Tamarind being awesome somewhere on the internet and it spiralled out of control), and whilst reading backlogs found this questionnaire dealy. From October last year, making it least thirty seven years old in internet terms. Not one to be deterred by mere complete irrelevance, and more importantly finding both the questions and several sets of answers rather intriguing, I'm going to fill it out now. I will avoid impertinently tapping any other bloggers with this necro-not-a-meme.
What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Oomjin, shaman, restoration.
What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Ten-man raids, normal and occasionally hard modes. Elemental for PvP, pew-pew!
What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
This was actually really hard to answer because I honestly have a lot of love for every healing spell, but equally they all have downsides. Except one, of course, and when I realised this it took me by surprise.
Earth Shield.
Sure, it may look like a tiny malignant flying dung-golem orbiting the tank, it's not at the top of my healing breakdown, it's not flashy in any way. It's just there, easy to keep up, buffering the hits, being amazingly time- and mana-efficient for me. I heart poopshield.
What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Hmm. Tricky. I probably mis-time Mana Tide a lot more than I should, that's an area I'm trying to improve on. But recently I don't think I've been giving the practically-synonymous-with-shaman Chain Heal enough of an outing. It just feels slow right now, but it is amazing when used correctly.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Given my predilection for smaller raids, it has to be the versatility. I can raid heal, or keep a tank up, or share those duties. I can fling out fast, efficient heals to scattered damage across the raid, bomb a single target with (relatively) high throughput big heals, or keep a cluster of people alive with my bouncing love-beams. I can deal with a few nasty debuffs either directly or via totems. I can also help offensively dispel, ground or interrupt, albeit unreliably. This last can be very helpful, especially on trash/5-mans or when the assigned interrupt monkey elects to take a dirt nap. On fire.
What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
Two things frequently bite me. The first is movement. In common with paladins, we don't have many options on the hoof - Riptide and maybe a Nature's Swiftness, and perhaps hoping Earth Shield will crit. On the whole, though annoying, it's not a huge deal on most fights.
More generally, the lack of an external mitigation cooldown for tanks (or DPS that do reaaaally silly things occasionally). Shaman provide many things, but our mitigation is very low key and entirely passive - Stoneskin Totem and the 10% physical damage reduction from Ancestral Healing. I'm far from unhappy with the tools we have, but I couldn't help but sigh wistfully when reading OS+3 strategies from the mists of prehistory and seeing constant mention of Guardian Spirit, Pain Suppression, Divine Sacrifice (avec bubble, naturally). Being able to do something about damage before it even arrives is a powerful tool, so hug a disc priest for their mastery.
In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I dislike 25 man raiding in the extreme. My laptop is slow and creaky, everything takes longer, the sense of personal responsibility and investment feels lower to me, and (because any 25 mans I do invariably involve a lot of pugging) there's a far greater chance of running into rampant douchebags.
I also dislike healing assignments. I like healing people I know, with other healers I know, where we just Do What Needs Doing. Being told to babysit a given person/group doesn't sit well with me, and those (thankfully rare) healers that absolve responsibility for anything other than their assignment and let wipes happen whilst overhealing their targets mindlessly... well. Less said the better.
That said, I'm a loot whore. I've pugged a fair number of TotC-25 groups in the recent past (Solace never even dropped, let alone had the basic decency to fall into my grubby troll-paws). I'm happiest when stuck on the raid, and end up just healing whoever needs it.
What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
Until Icecrown rolled around, our healing team was essentially me and a holy priest. Seems to work well, and I can't wait to get back to two-healing everything once the fights are familiar enough to do so (three healers is cheating, somehow). That's probably more to do with healing styles and habits though. My most successful TotGC attempt was with pug, where my healing partner was an awesome disc priest. Some of our Ulduar hard modes were with a tree.
Mechanically, the answer has to be restoration druids. They complement my relatively immobile healing perfectly, have enormous healing output, and all the health bars sloooow riiiight doooown. Perfect for dumping those big ol' chain heals where they're needed without the painful internal process of "that person is very low on health, they may die before chain heal lands and waste the entire cast, but there's too much of an overall health deficit to waste a GCD on riptide argh argh argh I'll target someone else and hope it bounces argh argh they're dead and I'm terrible"
But really, it's more about the player than the class. Healing is healing, the colour of the name in Grid is largely irrelevant if your healing styles are complementary.
What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
Resto shaman. Some I know well and are awesome, but in pugs I always seem to end up with people overwriting my poopshields (you said you'd shield the other tank, argh!), dropping a talented Mana Spring even though I spent ages begging for a Blessing of Wisdom off the retadin so we can drop the cleansing/healing/resistance totems preferable to the fight mechanics, dropping non-stacking redundant totems despite carefully arranging against this before the pull... I just don't think most shaman spend long enough working with other shaman, especially of the same spec. Maybe I'm unlucky. We don't stack particularly brilliantly, although at least we don't have Weakened Soul to contend with. /comfort the bubblers.
What is your worst habit as a healer?
I have many bad healing habits. Needlessly overwriting Riptide HoTs, or bouncing Chain Heals through fresh riptides when there are equally viable targets nearby, is something I'm trying to improve on currently.
But my worst habit is flinging a sad, non-bouncy Chain Heal out to some lonely soul on the fringe of the raid. It happens a lot when I'm not thinking. Having it fail to bounce because all the nearby damage was mopped up by other healers whilst casting is acceptable (still makes me wince) but my heal-beams grounding on a mage I knew was miles away from anyone else is dumb, dumb, dumb.
What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
"FFS I NED HEELZ!" Is, thankfully, becoming rarer even in pugs these days. My current largest complain would probably have to be... people not helping dispel. Some healers need to learn to do more than just heal. /grump
Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yup. Although I'm sloooowly levelling healers of the other classes, I love my shammies.
What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
World of Logs is very good for in-depth analysis, especially over multi-phase or particularly heterogeneous fights where an overall average HPS figure isn't as useful. I do use recount to compare my performance over time (eHPS and overhealing, basically) especially after picking up significant upgrades or changing my gearing strategy, or on repeated wipes to see if I'm dishing out more healing or getting relatively worse as the night wears on. At the end of the day the various different assignments, gear, talents and strategy tend to render comparisons between healers a bit meaningless.
I also take deaths - any deaths - as a sign I'm doing something wrong. Even if it was a DPS doing something really stupid involving fire or cleaving mobs, if it wasn't a one-shot I could have done something. Often stupid to think so, but whatever. No wipes, no deaths is my primary success metric. If that's the case, I work on reducing the number of times my 'ohshit' macro comes out during a fight. And once that's been minimised... the place is probably on farm and uninteresting.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
Probably the "faceroll brain heal" thing. Chain Heal is very good indeed, but if that's all you use you're doin it rong. A shaman's various heals are all lovely, use them.
What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
Totems, totems, totems. As resto, there's less to track and a lower chance of the dreaded Totem Pull than an enhancement shammy, but you still have to deal with the things. Making sure the appropriate ones are down and covering enough of the raid, pre-emptively placing tremor and cleansing if needed, avoiding excess redundancy with other shaman/similar buffs.
If you're already used to managing our buffsticks, the only other complication might be managing the Tidal Waves effect. It's absolutely key to a lot of fun shaman healing.
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)?
Of course it varies by fight, but generally a fairly hefty raw output and mid-to-large overhealing. I don't worry too much about the latter unless I'm actively trying to improve my time-to-OoM.
Haste or Crit and why?
Haste all the way! Shaman get a fair whack of base crit from talents, a crit-increasing cooldown, and extra crit on Lesser Healing Wave from the Tidal Waves buff. But until I get under the GCD cap, I can never have enough haste. In particular the enormous cast time on Chain Heal means it benefits wonderfully from haste stacking, but quite weakly from crit.
What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Priests, of either spec. I swear there're just too many options there. PoM, PW:S, Renew, CoH, PoH, the Hymns, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Holy Nova, Penance... I've probably missed a load. Anyway, they confuse me deeply with all those heals. I've no idea where most of them come from, how they interact, or when you'd use them.
What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Grid (with the HoT and raid debuff addons) and Clique are my main standbys. I have a macro for activating Nature's Swiftness and Tidal Force together with any on-use trinkets (but no healing spell inside the macro - I do that bit manually afterwards. Sometimes an instant Chain Heal is just what the raid-doctor ordered).
Oh, and of course a macro for "/y I have a snobold on mah face!". It doesn't actually work in ToC pugs, but I feel better for using it.
Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
Haste all the way! Drawing close to 1k now, so just a few hundred more to find from somewhere and I'll be the happiest healspammer there ever was. Although I do tend to pick up socket bonuses (more often than I should) with Haste/SP and Haste/MP5 gems, the first question I ask of a potential upgrade is "How much haste do I gain? /dribble".
I value crit and MP5 about equally and try to acquire options with both as additional stats (after HasteHasteHasteHaste) for all sensible gear slots so I can tweak throughput and longevity for more tricky fights (such as when the raid includes no replenishment /sadface). The haste/crit gear has the advantage that it'll also be more useful if I ever change my dual spec back to PvE Elemental.
Haste is delicious. Have I mentioned haste yet?
Spellpower seems to convert almost directly to overhealing at this gear level so I don't feel the need to gem for it, likewise crits are often overheal (although talents provide some nice benefits from a crit regardless). But I have yet to complain about a heal landing earlier or being able to spam faster when things go wrong. Sensible use of Mana Tide, potions, and maybe a whinge for an Innervate from one of our friendly laser chickens are generally enough to avoid going OoM on a given fight with my current haste-to-excess gearing, but it is getting closer in Icecrown. Maybe I'll start picking up some intellect gems after I get my Lesser Healing Waves down to the mystical one second.
What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Oomjin, shaman, restoration.
What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
Ten-man raids, normal and occasionally hard modes. Elemental for PvP, pew-pew!
What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
This was actually really hard to answer because I honestly have a lot of love for every healing spell, but equally they all have downsides. Except one, of course, and when I realised this it took me by surprise.
Earth Shield.
Sure, it may look like a tiny malignant flying dung-golem orbiting the tank, it's not at the top of my healing breakdown, it's not flashy in any way. It's just there, easy to keep up, buffering the hits, being amazingly time- and mana-efficient for me. I heart poopshield.
What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Hmm. Tricky. I probably mis-time Mana Tide a lot more than I should, that's an area I'm trying to improve on. But recently I don't think I've been giving the practically-synonymous-with-shaman Chain Heal enough of an outing. It just feels slow right now, but it is amazing when used correctly.
What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Given my predilection for smaller raids, it has to be the versatility. I can raid heal, or keep a tank up, or share those duties. I can fling out fast, efficient heals to scattered damage across the raid, bomb a single target with (relatively) high throughput big heals, or keep a cluster of people alive with my bouncing love-beams. I can deal with a few nasty debuffs either directly or via totems. I can also help offensively dispel, ground or interrupt, albeit unreliably. This last can be very helpful, especially on trash/5-mans or when the assigned interrupt monkey elects to take a dirt nap. On fire.
What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
Two things frequently bite me. The first is movement. In common with paladins, we don't have many options on the hoof - Riptide and maybe a Nature's Swiftness, and perhaps hoping Earth Shield will crit. On the whole, though annoying, it's not a huge deal on most fights.
More generally, the lack of an external mitigation cooldown for tanks (or DPS that do reaaaally silly things occasionally). Shaman provide many things, but our mitigation is very low key and entirely passive - Stoneskin Totem and the 10% physical damage reduction from Ancestral Healing. I'm far from unhappy with the tools we have, but I couldn't help but sigh wistfully when reading OS+3 strategies from the mists of prehistory and seeing constant mention of Guardian Spirit, Pain Suppression, Divine Sacrifice (avec bubble, naturally). Being able to do something about damage before it even arrives is a powerful tool, so hug a disc priest for their mastery.
In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I dislike 25 man raiding in the extreme. My laptop is slow and creaky, everything takes longer, the sense of personal responsibility and investment feels lower to me, and (because any 25 mans I do invariably involve a lot of pugging) there's a far greater chance of running into rampant douchebags.
I also dislike healing assignments. I like healing people I know, with other healers I know, where we just Do What Needs Doing. Being told to babysit a given person/group doesn't sit well with me, and those (thankfully rare) healers that absolve responsibility for anything other than their assignment and let wipes happen whilst overhealing their targets mindlessly... well. Less said the better.
That said, I'm a loot whore. I've pugged a fair number of TotC-25 groups in the recent past (Solace never even dropped, let alone had the basic decency to fall into my grubby troll-paws). I'm happiest when stuck on the raid, and end up just healing whoever needs it.
What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
Until Icecrown rolled around, our healing team was essentially me and a holy priest. Seems to work well, and I can't wait to get back to two-healing everything once the fights are familiar enough to do so (three healers is cheating, somehow). That's probably more to do with healing styles and habits though. My most successful TotGC attempt was with pug, where my healing partner was an awesome disc priest. Some of our Ulduar hard modes were with a tree.
Mechanically, the answer has to be restoration druids. They complement my relatively immobile healing perfectly, have enormous healing output, and all the health bars sloooow riiiight doooown. Perfect for dumping those big ol' chain heals where they're needed without the painful internal process of "that person is very low on health, they may die before chain heal lands and waste the entire cast, but there's too much of an overall health deficit to waste a GCD on riptide argh argh argh I'll target someone else and hope it bounces argh argh they're dead and I'm terrible"
But really, it's more about the player than the class. Healing is healing, the colour of the name in Grid is largely irrelevant if your healing styles are complementary.
What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
Resto shaman. Some I know well and are awesome, but in pugs I always seem to end up with people overwriting my poopshields (you said you'd shield the other tank, argh!), dropping a talented Mana Spring even though I spent ages begging for a Blessing of Wisdom off the retadin so we can drop the cleansing/healing/resistance totems preferable to the fight mechanics, dropping non-stacking redundant totems despite carefully arranging against this before the pull... I just don't think most shaman spend long enough working with other shaman, especially of the same spec. Maybe I'm unlucky. We don't stack particularly brilliantly, although at least we don't have Weakened Soul to contend with. /comfort the bubblers.
What is your worst habit as a healer?
I have many bad healing habits. Needlessly overwriting Riptide HoTs, or bouncing Chain Heals through fresh riptides when there are equally viable targets nearby, is something I'm trying to improve on currently.
But my worst habit is flinging a sad, non-bouncy Chain Heal out to some lonely soul on the fringe of the raid. It happens a lot when I'm not thinking. Having it fail to bounce because all the nearby damage was mopped up by other healers whilst casting is acceptable (still makes me wince) but my heal-beams grounding on a mage I knew was miles away from anyone else is dumb, dumb, dumb.
What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
"FFS I NED HEELZ!" Is, thankfully, becoming rarer even in pugs these days. My current largest complain would probably have to be... people not helping dispel. Some healers need to learn to do more than just heal. /grump
Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yup. Although I'm sloooowly levelling healers of the other classes, I love my shammies.
What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
World of Logs is very good for in-depth analysis, especially over multi-phase or particularly heterogeneous fights where an overall average HPS figure isn't as useful. I do use recount to compare my performance over time (eHPS and overhealing, basically) especially after picking up significant upgrades or changing my gearing strategy, or on repeated wipes to see if I'm dishing out more healing or getting relatively worse as the night wears on. At the end of the day the various different assignments, gear, talents and strategy tend to render comparisons between healers a bit meaningless.
I also take deaths - any deaths - as a sign I'm doing something wrong. Even if it was a DPS doing something really stupid involving fire or cleaving mobs, if it wasn't a one-shot I could have done something. Often stupid to think so, but whatever. No wipes, no deaths is my primary success metric. If that's the case, I work on reducing the number of times my 'ohshit' macro comes out during a fight. And once that's been minimised... the place is probably on farm and uninteresting.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
Probably the "faceroll brain heal" thing. Chain Heal is very good indeed, but if that's all you use you're doin it rong. A shaman's various heals are all lovely, use them.
What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
Totems, totems, totems. As resto, there's less to track and a lower chance of the dreaded Totem Pull than an enhancement shammy, but you still have to deal with the things. Making sure the appropriate ones are down and covering enough of the raid, pre-emptively placing tremor and cleansing if needed, avoiding excess redundancy with other shaman/similar buffs.
If you're already used to managing our buffsticks, the only other complication might be managing the Tidal Waves effect. It's absolutely key to a lot of fun shaman healing.
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)?
Of course it varies by fight, but generally a fairly hefty raw output and mid-to-large overhealing. I don't worry too much about the latter unless I'm actively trying to improve my time-to-OoM.
Haste or Crit and why?
Haste all the way! Shaman get a fair whack of base crit from talents, a crit-increasing cooldown, and extra crit on Lesser Healing Wave from the Tidal Waves buff. But until I get under the GCD cap, I can never have enough haste. In particular the enormous cast time on Chain Heal means it benefits wonderfully from haste stacking, but quite weakly from crit.
What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Priests, of either spec. I swear there're just too many options there. PoM, PW:S, Renew, CoH, PoH, the Hymns, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Holy Nova, Penance... I've probably missed a load. Anyway, they confuse me deeply with all those heals. I've no idea where most of them come from, how they interact, or when you'd use them.
What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
Grid (with the HoT and raid debuff addons) and Clique are my main standbys. I have a macro for activating Nature's Swiftness and Tidal Force together with any on-use trinkets (but no healing spell inside the macro - I do that bit manually afterwards. Sometimes an instant Chain Heal is just what the raid-doctor ordered).
Oh, and of course a macro for "/y I have a snobold on mah face!". It doesn't actually work in ToC pugs, but I feel better for using it.
Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
Haste all the way! Drawing close to 1k now, so just a few hundred more to find from somewhere and I'll be the happiest healspammer there ever was. Although I do tend to pick up socket bonuses (more often than I should) with Haste/SP and Haste/MP5 gems, the first question I ask of a potential upgrade is "How much haste do I gain? /dribble".
I value crit and MP5 about equally and try to acquire options with both as additional stats (after HasteHasteHasteHaste) for all sensible gear slots so I can tweak throughput and longevity for more tricky fights (such as when the raid includes no replenishment /sadface). The haste/crit gear has the advantage that it'll also be more useful if I ever change my dual spec back to PvE Elemental.
Haste is delicious. Have I mentioned haste yet?
Spellpower seems to convert almost directly to overhealing at this gear level so I don't feel the need to gem for it, likewise crits are often overheal (although talents provide some nice benefits from a crit regardless). But I have yet to complain about a heal landing earlier or being able to spam faster when things go wrong. Sensible use of Mana Tide, potions, and maybe a whinge for an Innervate from one of our friendly laser chickens are generally enough to avoid going OoM on a given fight with my current haste-to-excess gearing, but it is getting closer in Icecrown. Maybe I'll start picking up some intellect gems after I get my Lesser Healing Waves down to the mystical one second.
Tuesday 5 January 2010
Being an Aggro Monkey - And Loving It
Farming up some emblems on my mage the other day (Oculus again, /groan), I realised something which probably makes me a very bad person. I reaaaaally like stealing aggro sometimes. A quick explanation is in order, I guess.
My mage is fire-specced. She was Arcane (purple-pink-rainbow-sodamnpretty-squeeee), since 3.0 when she was a cute level level 64 gnome with pink hair rather than the troll lass with a magenta mohawk she is now, all the way up until a few weeks ago, but... it was getting boring. Once more very high DPS despite a roller coaster ride throughout Wrath; wonderful cooldowns that seemed to be ready all the time; absurdly low threat; and decent efficiency. But it basically involved counting to four. Arcane Barrage, my purplepinkrainbow-squee spell of choice since since Outlands, was no longer worth casting except on the move, and even then only if Presence of Mind was on cooldown and thus preventing a nice instant Arcane Blast. Blast four times, Missiles, repeat. Yawn.
So - fire spec now. It's a lot more tricky for me to make work, tracking Living Bomb and the Improved Scorch debuff took a while to get implanted, and Hot Streak can be flaky as hell when your crit is still a tad on the low side. But it's FUN. And the first time you get to plant Living Bomb on a whooooole buncha stuff and watch it all explode in sequence... well. I cackled. I'm not usually a cackler, but I'll make an exception for that.
But the main thing that makes it fun, right now? Omen screaming aggro warnings at me. Yeah, tanks probably know me - I'm That Mage that watches the tank charge and then instantly starts applying LB to every mob in the pull, then drops Flamestrike, and then... the first LB starts to blow up and suddenly Mr. Tank isn't so interesting, noooo, not compared to the pyromaniac troll cackling to herself at the back with only 10% threat reduction and an inexplicably spiky dress, lolaoe-ing with impunity. Most tanks don't actually have a problem, even nuking my evil heart out I may get a pulse or two of high aggro warning and then everything's dead or fascinated with the tank again. With paladins in particular, I rarely even get that (and is it wrong that it's not as satisfying if I don't?).
But back to Oculus. We had a pugged warrior tank, and, well... his threat generation wasn't the greatest. He wasn't undergeared, by a long shot, and as far as I can tell his points were all in sensible places. But eeeevery pull I got a mob... or two... or four charging towards me. I got to use Frost Nova, Ice Block, Invisibility, even a desperate Mana Shield a few times. I was having immense fun, and although I was actually chatting to the healer on Vent and she cheerfully informed me that if I died it was my own damn fault (I know that!) I managed to stay alive until all the mobs were dead. Each and every time, much to everyone's chagrin. About halfway around the ring o' constructs he informed me that I should watch my aggro. Right you are champ! Continued doing exaaactly the same thing until the end of the instance. Clearly I am a bastard.
I think that's the only time I've honestly enjoyed a good chunk of the Oculus. I did a fair amount of damage, but mostly I was just having fun using all those survivability options that rarely get a showing outside of PvP. I feel a little guilty about the poor tank. But only a little. In fact, only a leetle, which is even less. I've seen tanks in worse gear generate plenty more threat.
Besides he may have been letting the mobs go to teach me a lesson. Muhaha, I refuse to be taught lessons! /cast Ice Block
My mage is fire-specced. She was Arcane (purple-pink-rainbow-sodamnpretty-squeeee), since 3.0 when she was a cute level level 64 gnome with pink hair rather than the troll lass with a magenta mohawk she is now, all the way up until a few weeks ago, but... it was getting boring. Once more very high DPS despite a roller coaster ride throughout Wrath; wonderful cooldowns that seemed to be ready all the time; absurdly low threat; and decent efficiency. But it basically involved counting to four. Arcane Barrage, my purplepinkrainbow-squee spell of choice since since Outlands, was no longer worth casting except on the move, and even then only if Presence of Mind was on cooldown and thus preventing a nice instant Arcane Blast. Blast four times, Missiles, repeat. Yawn.
So - fire spec now. It's a lot more tricky for me to make work, tracking Living Bomb and the Improved Scorch debuff took a while to get implanted, and Hot Streak can be flaky as hell when your crit is still a tad on the low side. But it's FUN. And the first time you get to plant Living Bomb on a whooooole buncha stuff and watch it all explode in sequence... well. I cackled. I'm not usually a cackler, but I'll make an exception for that.
But the main thing that makes it fun, right now? Omen screaming aggro warnings at me. Yeah, tanks probably know me - I'm That Mage that watches the tank charge and then instantly starts applying LB to every mob in the pull, then drops Flamestrike, and then... the first LB starts to blow up and suddenly Mr. Tank isn't so interesting, noooo, not compared to the pyromaniac troll cackling to herself at the back with only 10% threat reduction and an inexplicably spiky dress, lolaoe-ing with impunity. Most tanks don't actually have a problem, even nuking my evil heart out I may get a pulse or two of high aggro warning and then everything's dead or fascinated with the tank again. With paladins in particular, I rarely even get that (and is it wrong that it's not as satisfying if I don't?).
But back to Oculus. We had a pugged warrior tank, and, well... his threat generation wasn't the greatest. He wasn't undergeared, by a long shot, and as far as I can tell his points were all in sensible places. But eeeevery pull I got a mob... or two... or four charging towards me. I got to use Frost Nova, Ice Block, Invisibility, even a desperate Mana Shield a few times. I was having immense fun, and although I was actually chatting to the healer on Vent and she cheerfully informed me that if I died it was my own damn fault (I know that!) I managed to stay alive until all the mobs were dead. Each and every time, much to everyone's chagrin. About halfway around the ring o' constructs he informed me that I should watch my aggro. Right you are champ! Continued doing exaaactly the same thing until the end of the instance. Clearly I am a bastard.
I think that's the only time I've honestly enjoyed a good chunk of the Oculus. I did a fair amount of damage, but mostly I was just having fun using all those survivability options that rarely get a showing outside of PvP. I feel a little guilty about the poor tank. But only a little. In fact, only a leetle, which is even less. I've seen tanks in worse gear generate plenty more threat.
Besides he may have been letting the mobs go to teach me a lesson. Muhaha, I refuse to be taught lessons! /cast Ice Block
Lady Deathwhisper, how I loathe thee
The other day I ended up taking my enhancement shaman into ICC10 for a little brisk exercise. A previous week's PUG had gone pretty well, her moderate gear and a great deal more playtime recently (both mostly thanks to the new Dungeon Finder tool) were enough to put her near or at the top of recount most of the time. Satisfying. We didn't get Saurfang down, but for an alt/pugged run it went well and I was more or less happy with my performance. Plus I got new bracers from the gunship and a bunch of Frost emblems. Everything is better with loot.
This week... well, Marrowgar was the big cuddly kitten as usual (once we'd gotten past the ambush by no less than three Giant Skeletal Ninja during a trash pull). Cheap bastard didn't drop the cloak, but such is life. And then... more than two hours of wiping on Deathwhisper. And I was doing appallingly badly. We didn't even get to the second phase, and my DPS rarely crested 2k (2k! That'd be absolutely terrible even in a 5-man group for this gear level, let alone with a decent complement of raid buffs).
What went wrong? Well, there were plenty of failures really. I think the worst I saw outside of my little sphere of pew-pew was the resto druid (guildy, also the only person dealing with Curse of Torpor despite a resto shaman and mage hanging around in the group) getting locked out of dispel curse. Yeah, it's happened to me when healing on my main too - you go to remove the vicious little debuff on some random person, and just as you're cliquing them to happiness it also gets applied to you. The aforementioned other people with a curse curse removal ability let him sit there, unable to cast any heals nor remove the curse himself, for what I know feels like at least three hours when healing. In actuality, probably the fifteen seconds it took for him to be able to cleanse himself. Too damn long anyway, the other healers were behind at this point and it all went south from there.
And with me, personally, it was a litany of fail. Bad luck sometimes, stupidity at others. I was of course on add duty, managing the gamut from running up to one of the adds the tank was near but hadn't aggro'd and wailing on them until they turned and blew me up, bouncing spells off a reflective shield into my own low-health face, ankhing right into an AoE spell from the empowered adds, zooming around the back of a cleaving add and starting to DPS just in time for the tank to spin it around and kite it through me to get oneshot by said cleave... unhelpful of the tank, but I could and should have moved... it was horrible. Horrible!
Also, I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or not, but the Lady's bright green Death and Decay is barely visible when she pops it on the raised areas where the adds spawn. I just ran in a straight line until my poor moocow stopped being green in such cases, probably taking the longest possible route through the stuff and without fail in completely the opposite direction to that the tank was dragging the adds.
Then there were the undead chaps. For those who haven't had the joy of playing with these, periodically the adds get, err, resurrected with a few new abilities. Most importantly, the caster adds now gain 99% physical damage reduction, whilst the cleaving, cow-killing melee adds have a similar near immunity to spells. As some may appreciate, this isn't much fun for a DPS spec that is primarily physical, but deals a very large chunk of damage in the form of spells.
I tried a few things. Swapping flame shock out of my shock rotation to avoid reflecting the DoT onto my face for some poor sap to dispel/heal through, and maybe improve my terrible DPS on those adds that got burned down before the flame shock DoT would run its course anyway. Dropping puppies early enough that shaman-sprint would be up in time to get on the boss between spawns. Shamanistic Rage whenever I get caught in Death and Decay or tanking the bloody Adherents. Leaving a fire elemental to help mop up physically immune adds whilst chasing the deformed fanatics. Ugh. There was more I could have done - or not done, in the case of bouncing lightning bolts and shocks off of the reflective shields - but muscle memory had largely taken over and was hammering my high priority abilities and frankly I was getting annoyed. Annoyed at myself, annoyed at the tank, annoyed at people not helping the poor tree decurse, annoyed at the rogue managing to die about the same time as me every single time... horrible.
So, yes. I don't actually like ICC much (the instance itself is beautiful, and some trash is fun. The boss fights alternate 'meh' and 'irritating' so far.) but this was the first time since Faction Champs where an encounter was making me reconsider my subscription. It's annoying to heal, but in comparison to that DPS experience... /shudder.
OK, enough ranting. Next time I go there as enhancement, I'll be better prepared. I will be a veritable monkey when it comes to clinging to the back of cleaving mobs, I will trawl the interwebs for any enhancement-specific strategies, tricks, or consoling sob stories, and I will damn well petition to be on Deathwhisper's mana shield throughout the misery of that first phase.
This week... well, Marrowgar was the big cuddly kitten as usual (once we'd gotten past the ambush by no less than three Giant Skeletal Ninja during a trash pull). Cheap bastard didn't drop the cloak, but such is life. And then... more than two hours of wiping on Deathwhisper. And I was doing appallingly badly. We didn't even get to the second phase, and my DPS rarely crested 2k (2k! That'd be absolutely terrible even in a 5-man group for this gear level, let alone with a decent complement of raid buffs).
What went wrong? Well, there were plenty of failures really. I think the worst I saw outside of my little sphere of pew-pew was the resto druid (guildy, also the only person dealing with Curse of Torpor despite a resto shaman and mage hanging around in the group) getting locked out of dispel curse. Yeah, it's happened to me when healing on my main too - you go to remove the vicious little debuff on some random person, and just as you're cliquing them to happiness it also gets applied to you. The aforementioned other people with a curse curse removal ability let him sit there, unable to cast any heals nor remove the curse himself, for what I know feels like at least three hours when healing. In actuality, probably the fifteen seconds it took for him to be able to cleanse himself. Too damn long anyway, the other healers were behind at this point and it all went south from there.
And with me, personally, it was a litany of fail. Bad luck sometimes, stupidity at others. I was of course on add duty, managing the gamut from running up to one of the adds the tank was near but hadn't aggro'd and wailing on them until they turned and blew me up, bouncing spells off a reflective shield into my own low-health face, ankhing right into an AoE spell from the empowered adds, zooming around the back of a cleaving add and starting to DPS just in time for the tank to spin it around and kite it through me to get oneshot by said cleave... unhelpful of the tank, but I could and should have moved... it was horrible. Horrible!
Also, I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue or not, but the Lady's bright green Death and Decay is barely visible when she pops it on the raised areas where the adds spawn. I just ran in a straight line until my poor moocow stopped being green in such cases, probably taking the longest possible route through the stuff and without fail in completely the opposite direction to that the tank was dragging the adds.
Then there were the undead chaps. For those who haven't had the joy of playing with these, periodically the adds get, err, resurrected with a few new abilities. Most importantly, the caster adds now gain 99% physical damage reduction, whilst the cleaving, cow-killing melee adds have a similar near immunity to spells. As some may appreciate, this isn't much fun for a DPS spec that is primarily physical, but deals a very large chunk of damage in the form of spells.
I tried a few things. Swapping flame shock out of my shock rotation to avoid reflecting the DoT onto my face for some poor sap to dispel/heal through, and maybe improve my terrible DPS on those adds that got burned down before the flame shock DoT would run its course anyway. Dropping puppies early enough that shaman-sprint would be up in time to get on the boss between spawns. Shamanistic Rage whenever I get caught in Death and Decay or tanking the bloody Adherents. Leaving a fire elemental to help mop up physically immune adds whilst chasing the deformed fanatics. Ugh. There was more I could have done - or not done, in the case of bouncing lightning bolts and shocks off of the reflective shields - but muscle memory had largely taken over and was hammering my high priority abilities and frankly I was getting annoyed. Annoyed at myself, annoyed at the tank, annoyed at people not helping the poor tree decurse, annoyed at the rogue managing to die about the same time as me every single time... horrible.
So, yes. I don't actually like ICC much (the instance itself is beautiful, and some trash is fun. The boss fights alternate 'meh' and 'irritating' so far.) but this was the first time since Faction Champs where an encounter was making me reconsider my subscription. It's annoying to heal, but in comparison to that DPS experience... /shudder.
OK, enough ranting. Next time I go there as enhancement, I'll be better prepared. I will be a veritable monkey when it comes to clinging to the back of cleaving mobs, I will trawl the interwebs for any enhancement-specific strategies, tricks, or consoling sob stories, and I will damn well petition to be on Deathwhisper's mana shield throughout the misery of that first phase.
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