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!
Tuesday 19 January 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)