Healing Valithria Dreamwalker

When I first heard about this fight before ICC came out, I was super excited. OMG, a fight where you have to heal the boss to full instead?! Cool!!!

I felt like this is something that is really fun and new for healers. Now that VDW is out and available for those that clear Lower Spire, I have to say it is an interesting experience.

I had a lot of fun doing it the first time around but after a while, it actually got a little un-fun (yes, I know that is not a real word).

Why?

I know that there are always healers that care a little too much about where they are on the charts but this is actually the one fight where healers need to care about their numbers. Plus, you have limited resources (aka clouds) that healers can jostle over in order to make their green numbers bigger. This is a completely different mind set than I am used to for healing.

When I raid, I am not concerned about my pretty green numbers to the point where I have all my healing combat text turned off. That is because I have a really good idea of how much my FoL, HS and HL will heal for in general.

I also tend to only worry about CDs in the context of mana management.

That is all completely changed in the VDW fight.

Despite how they tried to disguise it, VDW is still at heart a DPS race. Instead of DPS though, it is HPS we have to worry about and there is no real enrage timer though the raid may get overwhelmed by adds over time.

For healers that are to heal VDW and go in to the portal, their main concern is to grab clouds that will stack the Emerald Vigor buff. The problem is that it is very possible to "steal" clouds from other healers if they happen to be going for the same cloud and they were a little slower.

Even worse is that it could potentially have screwed over their stack timing and thus lowered their HPS. Unless of course you are going to have all the healers get stacks together but you are still jockeying for portal spawns, which are subject to RNG that can be frustrating.

In short, it is hard for team work to take place when everyone is fighting over limited resources.

Even so, I have some tips for healing this fight as a holy paladin that may make HPS output a bit easier. Hope it helps! (I still don't have Portal Jockey! I don't get it, I've been trying to make sure I go into every portal!! WTH!)

Healing 5 mans as a Holy Paladin

I think that playing a holy paladin for as long as I have, I take for granted how new holy paladins have to deal with 5 man dungeons. If I think back on it, when I was first leveling to 80 and trying to heal dungeons with 16k mana and 1500 SP, it was difficult to say the least.

For a freshly dinged 80 paladin, it's even harder to heal heroics especially since you are more vulnerable to any fail/noob players in the group. Yet, what can you do? With patch 3.3, heroics are a necessity to grind for Emblem of Triumph so you can buy the gear you need to be able to get a start on raiding.

I'm assuming that your glyphs/spec are right for the task at hand. With that in mind, here are some tips for healing 5 man heroics.

How to be a Tank Loved by Healers

Many of us interact with tanks on a daily basis in WoW. Either they are tanking for you in raids or heroics. They are either pugged or guildies or friends. Yet all of them need the back up of very special people in order for them to bask in the glory of being a tank - healers.

As healers, tanks can abuse us until we call it quits but if you want to be a tank loved by healers, there are some very simple guidelines to follow.

1. Don't be squishy - Are you at the defense cap? That's a start. Get some dodge, parry or whatever the hell mitigation stat you need so you don't blow up when you get hit. Oom healer = stressed healer = pissed off healer.
2. Give us some leeway - You can have all the mitigation in the world but it won't matter to us if your HP is 20k. We need some breathing room in case you take a big hit and we're not busy praying our heal lands in time before you take another big hit and hit the floor.
3. Do your job - You can have the best HP and mitigation but that doesn't mean anything if you can't hold threat. If healers get heal aggro doing their jobs and die, it's your fault and good luck finding healers willing to heal you. If you're not going to do your job right, then healers don't need to do their jobs for you.
4. Don't make us carry you - Many times, bosses have predictable abilities that do a lot of damage. If it involves causing the tank a crap ton of damage, don't just expect us to heal through it, blow some tanking CDs to help us a bit because most likely the entire party or raid will be taking damage too that we need to heal up.
5. Position yourself right - Don't LoS us! Don't OOR us! Don't tank with your back facing the mob! Don't stand in crap! Etc, etc.
6. Give us our due - Sure, you are a good tank but remember tanks have a symbiotic relationship with healers, so don't forget to give us a nod or some type of acknowledgment. Our job is thankless enough already.
7. Suck up to us - If you really want brownie points, flattery works best. Bribing too =) This way you get your own pocket healer whenever you need one. Hey, works out to the benefit of both parties, right?

Anyway, a lot of this is common knowledge but I'll be damned if I don't come across tanks (especially pugged ones) that flout these guidelines regularly.

Share some of your tanking horror or glory stories in the comments! Till next time!

Dueling Etiquette

I remember my first duel. I was leveling in STV near Grom'gol and I came up against another player, who was ~2 levels higher than me. I don't remember their class. There was no greeting or emote, just a duel window popping up suddenly while I was questing.

I was curious to see how duels worked so I nervously clicked the "accept" button. I really wanted to win my first duel but to my chagrin, I was losing. At this point, I already knew that even with my HP low, being oom was a bigger concern. I used my mana pot to try to regain some precious mana but too late, I was dead before I could heal myself up to full.

Later on, I told my boyfriend what had happened earlier and he told me that I did wrong by using a consumable. This was my first hint of the existence of a loosely followed dueling etiquette.

Female PVPers

So if you can't tell from my little teaser photo that I posted at the end of my previous post, I've started PVPing or more specifically, doing arenas. I arena with my boyfriend just like I raid with him. We do 3s with a very good friend of ours that has been with us for a long time in WoW (he transferred with us, twice!).

Repost of my sneak peek =P

Anyway, to prepare for my foray into arena, I started reading up Arena junkies and I found blogs focused on PVP and arena. More specifically, I started reading World of Ming.

In time, reading current entries and archived entries, I realized that World of Ming originally had a female blogger named Anna but eventually quit blogging due to the unbelievable trolling in the comments. She had some type of personal drama dug up and posted in her face, meant to mortify her. And it did. As a result, she quit WoM.

That One Person

So despite my last post, I still do not have I Love The Smell of Saronite in the Morning. It was due to one person in our raid.

Two particular ranged DPS we had in our raid kept reacting too slow. One of them has a crappy computer and is laggy. He reacted a bit slow but still managed to perform tolerably.

The other one, I don't know what his excuse was but he was the worse of the 2 by far. He would call out shadow crashes and wind up being the only one eating it. I would be thinking, "dude, why you watching out for other people when you can't even watch out for yourself?"

Every time he got the life leech, he would always cause other people around him to eat more ticks by not reacting fast enough. He would also do stupid stuff like run with the life leech people instead of compensating and running the other way so the life leech person wouldn't have to run back the other way into more people.

Why We Raid & Loot Drama

I've obliquely revealed that I quit my 25 man guild and started a 10 man guild with my boyfriend and other friends.

As a 10 man guild, I think we have been fairly successful. We've only been established 3 weeks and in those 3 weeks, we have cleared Yogg Saron and gotten more hard modes than the ones we got while we were still in the 25 man guild (Heartbreaker).

I am probably one of the most enthusiastic in the guild pushing for hard modes. This is because most of us have 25 man gear and farming 10 mans for loot will rapidly cause disinterest in the game. Every WoW player needs goals and challenges to look forward to or there is no point in being a WoW raider.

Sure, it can be frustrating and demoralizing when you are in for a night of wipes when learning a fight but it makes all the more sweeter when you get that elusive first down. That feeling of everything coming together in a cohesive, well-oiled running machine during raid is so very satisfying and every time it happens, you remember why you raid.

Loot is just your reward, your gravy on top of your mashed potatoes. That said, loot can also cause a lot of drama, especially if you feel loot is being distributed unfairly or unevenly.

So if people raid just to raid, why does loot matter?  

PVE Projections for Holy Paladins in 3.2

Blizzard seems to have made it their policy in WotLK to design fights around stressing healers to the limits of their abilities. As such, mana regeneration is a vital standard to tweak. Mana regen for healers was deemed too high by Blizzard and spirit based regen was famously nerfed.

Now in 3.2, Replenishment will be nerfed. On top of that, holy paladins in specific will be targeted as Illumination and Divine Intellect is nerfed. Holy paladins are therefore facing a 3 pronged attack to their mana regen mechanics.

Currently, holy paladins favor stats like intellect, crit, haste and spell power. Mp5 is a stat that is mostly ignored for reasons I have detailed in previous posts explaining how mana regen works for a holy paladin.

So with the nerfs to Replenishment and our talent buffing our own intellect along with "buffs" to itemization allocation of mp5 on gear, will things change much for holy paladins?

This is my own opinion formed through my experience on the PTR, my current healing experience and my knowledge of my class. So feel free to disagree with me (respectfully if you so please).

The Unspoken Rules of DI

Most raiders know of Divine Intervention, the paladin only spell that kills the user and places a bubble of immunity on the target. The target is immune to all damage but cannot move or cast anything until the buff wears off after 3 min or until they click it off themselves.

I actually leveled all the way to level 70 in TBC and as a fresh 70, I was talking to a fellow holy paladin about DI and how useless a spell it seemed to be. I remarked that what was the point of a spell that killed yourself and thought it was a very quirky spell.

I later discovered I was a noob.

My mistake in my first experience using DI was that I had targeted no one and therefore, I only killed myself with no discernible advantage. The whole point of DI is that it is a wipe saving mechanism. With that said, there is actually a whole art to using the spell.

PTR 3.2 - Initial Impression for Holy Paladins

I've never been on the PTR before but with the severe mana regen nerfs incoming to holy paladins, I knew that I wanted to experience for myself how bad the nerfs really were before passing judgement.

I wasn't able to copy over my main in time but a premade paladin character was successfully copied over. The paladin got a lot of sweet gear for all 3 specs for PVE with full sets of T8.5 and complete Deadly gear for PVP, pretty nice hook ups.

I wasn't completely happy with how the holy set for the premade paladin turned out but I got to see the Mimiron 25 trinket, score! With that said, the enchants for all the gear was pretty funny such as PVP res enchants for shoulders/head for PVE gear and really weird enchants for the tank set.

The Dilemma of Holy Paladins

So some of you may be wondering what crawled into my pants and died from my previous post.

Well, basically Ghostcrawler got this bright idea that paladins should want mp5 and actively try to stack it as their mana regen. In short, he wants to mess around with the foundations of what makes a holy paladin tick JUST so we won't bitch and complain about the poorly itemized gear (mp5 heavy) in Ulduar (the T8 bonus is still shat, no matter what, compared to T7).

Why am I so mad that Ghostcrawler is mucking around with paladins? There are a couple reasons.

One has to do with the spells that paladins must use to heal and that we are the ONLY healer class STUCK as single target healers. Another reason is to do with the large contrast between our 2 main spells in terms of effectiveness (HPS) and efficiency (mana cost). Another important reason is how our mana regen works despite the claims of Ghostcrawler to the contrary. Lastly, mp5 is an archaic stat that has lousy lousy scaling but is being foisted on us. I will elaborate further on each of these points and then you'll know why I think Ghostcrawler is a f*cking ignoramus.

WARNING LONG WORDY POST AHEAD!

I. How Paladins Heal

Paladins only have ONE way of healing, single target direct heals. We have no AOE heals, no HOTs or smart heals. Anytime we land a heal is usually a result of a conscious decision on our parts to target and cast a spell.

We have 3 spells in our arsenal, which are Flash of Light (FoL), Holy Shock (HS) and Holy Light (HL). HS is on a 6 second CD (or 5 if you glyph for it) and is instant cast but is very mana inefficient as well as unreliable since it is on a CD. That leaves FoL and HL.

Ulduar Paladin Checklist, Part I

So since Ulduar is out, I wanted to do a more comprehensive analysis of the gear out there along with detailing some of the reasoning behind my spec/glyphs/gemming. I wound up writing a long post so I'm going to split it up so it is more manageable to read.

Gems

I will be listing in order of preference from highest to lowest. I don't have the new epic gems included as they are not widely available at this time.

A rant on loot

So I had a guild meeting last night because of loot issues with EPGP.

There was a problem with people getting full EP while waitlisted for a raid (25 man OS 3d) that they had no business getting invited to nor would they ever get invited to because of their gear/skill level. (greens/blues? never done naxx? or heroics? constant fail?). This of course led to problems when it came to 25 man Naxx as there are still some pieces progression raiders needed but due to the EP that casuals on the waitlist earned undeservedly, the casuals or friends/family would take key items from raiders and thus, hinder our progression.

Well the officers fixed that by making people waitlisted get 50% EP since it is really not fair to get full EP for an entire raid day while doing BGs and then coming in on farm days to take loot from raiders that said person will never use for progression raids. All in all, I'm really happy with how the guild leadership handled things. They listened to raider concerns and implemented policy to make sure things were fair pretty quickly.

However, there were some complaints.

How it all started

So around 2 years ago, I started playing WoW.

My boyfriend had already been playing and his other friends also played. When I started going out with him, he was still leveling his mage to level 70, the max level at the time. I remember always being curious as to what he was doing and he would tell me that it was so boring because no one would help him as all his friends left him high and dry since they were all max level already. He really didn't play much but I remember watching him inch up slowly level by level though he didn't play much in my presence.

I never really played an MMORPG before except maybe a free one named Knight Online for like 10 days though I used to play console RPGs (FF7 FTW!). I don't quite remember how it started but I think I asked my boyfriend how to use his character. So he lent me the controls and showed me what spells to use to kill mobs. I remember when he said "mobs" I thought, why are they mobs? I was so nub =X

Musings

To tell the truth, I've actually been feeling a little sad.

I used to be part of a very tight knit group of WoW friends but for whatever reasons, we are dwindling.

Thinking back on it though, people come and go in WoW just like in real life. Just because we play WoW not knowing how the other person looks like or what their real names are doesn't mean that the relationships we form with each other are not important.

As WoW players, we experience a sort of strange paradox. It is just a game and yet it is also not just a game.

We have to know how to have fun in WoW and not take it too seriously but at the same time, we can't take it completely easy and think that it doesn't matter what we do or say in the game because it is just a game.

So where are the boundaries? When are we too serious and when are we too carefree?

The Undying

Warning: Long rant ahead!

So my guild very recently completed a 10 man Undying run. For those of you that do not know what I am talking about, this achievement means that whoever was in 10 man Naxx did not die on any of the bosses for that raid id. For those who completed this achievement, they get the privilege to display the new title, "the Undying," behind their character name. Many guilds use this title and the Heroic Naxx equivalent, "the Immortal," as a way to display their superiority.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't see anything wrong with being proud of having such an achievement under your belt because it isn't one that depends on random luck or grinding for massive amounts of time but is indicative of your own ability along with that of your group. However, having such an achievement available means there will be drama-rama.

Remember Zul'Aman?

That was THE 10 mans to do in TBC when it first came out. By then, Kara was a joke and many people thought at first it was supposed to be the next step up from Kara since it was a 10 mans. Dead wrong. You definitely needed gear beyond Kara or uberly skilled at your class if you were undergeared to clear ZA. Most likely it was guilds that did 25 mans that did ZA, not the casual family guilds that were only doing Kara.

The thing is that ZA didn't offer great gear, maybe some pieces that were really really nice but alot of the stuff wasn't that great and it looked horrible imo! So why did people want to do ZA?

They did it all for the bear.