Life As A Healer: Week Four

You know, life is a lot easier with a little expert knowledge.

Thanks to some advice from readers, I’ve adjusted my spec and cast priority, and as a result I think I’m a better healer for it.  I’m also now officially back on Raider status (I was promoted as I was writing this, thank you healing officer!), so I can start working on my gear without having to rely upon heroic 10-man ToC.

Speaking of heroic 10-man, I participated in it again this week, and it looks like I’m not going to get the last two bosses any time soon (if at all).  There’s only spaces for two healers, and it looks like a disc priest won’t be able to put out enough healing to get through it – they managed to get Anub’arak down, but there was only one player still alive at the end (end it was a shaman who self-ressed).  The fact my off-spec gear is still at Ulduar-level (in combination with my own underperformance as shadow) means I’m not capable of putting out enough dps to be hard-mode-ready.  (They ended up going with a holy pally and resto druid, and I think that’s going to be the pair they take in future)

That’s the problem with 10-man hard modes; in order to take the best group you can (that is, when you don’t grossly out-gear the hard-mode encounters, as we currently do 10-man Ulduar, and are starting to do with 25-man Ulduar), the “Take The Player Not The Class” idea only works where the classes are relatively interchangeable and players equally skilled.  It’d be nice to try heal or dps the final encounters, but I just don’t perform at a high enough level to justify the raidleader taking me instead of a healer or dps who have more reliable (or just more overall) output.

Well, at least I can say I’m increasingly confident of my ability to heal, and I’m beginning to be able to make suggestions of how best I can be utilised in specific encounters (such as with General Vezax: instead of being one of the sequential tank-healers, which I can do quite well, I let the other tank healers do their thing and I just cast PW:S on the tank whenever i can for extra mitigation).

With luck we’ll be seeing 3.3 on the PTR soon; I’m really hoping that’s the case, as the guild is stuck on the gulf between “Farming normal-mode 25-man ToC” and “Wiping on heroic 25-man ToC.”  We gave heroic-25 a try this week, and we were quite comprehensively (to use the vernacular) OMGWTFPWNED.  We were almost able to keep the tanks up long enough, but our dps just wasn’t enough to get to the second part of the Beasts encounter in any controlled manner.  I suspect it’s a combination of undergeared and underperforming raiders, growing dissatisfaction with ToC, and just a growing sense of ennui with WoW itself.

Speaking of dissatisfaction with WoW, I’ve found another game to dabble in while I wait to see what 3.3 is bringing to the raiding table.  The Chronicles of Spellborn is an comparatively young MMO based on the Unreal engine, set in a unique world with a novel combat mechanic that’s starting to grow on me.  While the game is being re-developed as a free-to-play game supported by micro-transactions, the current game has been made completely free-to-play, and it’s proving more appealing to me than the array of speed-bumps that D&D Online becomes after leaving the starting zone.

I doubt I’ll be playing it all that seriously, but as a diversion it’s pretty engrossing.  It does have some nice ideas, such as making gear purely cosmetic (as opposed to being the measure of your progression as in WoW) and the novel combat system (which I don’t quite have time to go into right now – maybe in another post, if anyone’s curious).

I’m kind of semi-impoverished while I’ve put most of my gold into cards for Darkmoon Faire from which I’m hoping to make some small profit; I’d like to get back to my 70k from the end of last faire, but I’ve spent so much on bits and pieces (such as the two ToC tailoring recipes for the chests and 12 Crusader Orbs to make chest and wrist pieces for Mingle) that it might be something of an uphill battle.

Well, it’s getting towards server-goes-down time, so I should make some use of the time remaining.

/wave

Life As A Healer: Week One

Well, I’ve a week of raid-tank-healing on Mingle under my belt, and I think I’m off to a good start.  (Translated: when the tank died, it wasn’t my fault)

I suspect the situation would be different for someone in a guild that isn’t one of the better-known progression guilds on their server, but it’s fun being able to enjoy fights that left me gritting my teeth as shadow.

In the week past I’ve healed 10-man and 25-man Ulduar, along with 10-man normal, 10-man hard-mode and 25-man normal ToC.  Admittedly the 10-man Ulduar only consisted of doing Razorscale, XT, Kologarn and Auriaya while the main raid did the first three bosses in 25-man ToC (and I was the raidleader for it – talk about stressful).  And on 25-man Ulduar I sat out for Yogg-Saron+3, but I’m proud to have successfully tank-healed up to and including General Vezax.

The way we tank-heal on General, we rotate through three healers who each heal the tank until they’re down to 50% mana, at which the next in the series takes over and continues until they reach half mana.  When the third person in the sequence starts healing, the previous two go stand in a saronite pool to regain their mana and get ready for the first person to take over from #3.  Anyway, I was #3 in the sequence, and was quite surprised when the boss died just after I hit 50%, and before I got to engage the saronite-boss.  Bear in mind that I’m still pretty inexperienced; enough so that I don’t know how much of the time I spent healing (which felt like I was in there for ages) was due to very-well-geared and skilled DPS, how much is due to well-geared and skilled healers, and how much is me not screwing up.

While I was only in for the last 25-man ToC boss, Anub’arak, I was in for the full 10-man normal clear, and the first two 10-man heroic bosses that were downed.  No pretty loot for Mingle, but some other new raiders got some upgrades and one of our priests finished making Val’anyr.  (Why yes, I am just a little jealous)

The Heroic Beasts encounter was pretty full-on to heal; the tweaks between normal and heroic change the substance of the fights quite a bit, especially that change to Icehowl that changed the fight the most, namely removing the speed-buff you gain after everyone is stunned and knocked back to the wall, right before he charges someone.  (The tank wiped us twice by not running out quite fast enough; she’ll probably be very happy to hear that they’ve added an extra half-second before he charges)

The Faction Champions are even harder on heroic than I expected, and they’re such a hard fight on normal that it’s already (sometimes) remarkably difficult – it’s probably the most unpredictably difficult encounter I’ve come across, with the difficulty of the fight being almost completely reliant on their group makeup.

Still, I’ve managed to pick up one piece of nice badge loot (the non-tier badge shoulders, not to be confused with the horde equivalent), and I’ll probably be looking for the badge ring next.

It’s the start of Week #2 though, so hopefully it’s more of the same, but better this time.

Oh, and I’ve managed to reach another personal milestone.

Ding 50k.

/wave

Raid v3.2, or The Trial Of Wake Me When It’s Over

I think it’s kind of telling that I opted to sit out from our first 25-man kill of Lord Jaraxxus, the boss in the Trial of the Crusader who was unlocked this week, in favour of leveling skinning on an alt (yay for guides).

I was underwhelmed by the first encounter (the Northrend Beasts), and the second encounter left me equally unenthused after completing the 10-man version this afternoon.  It might just be me, but it feels like I’m being served the raiding equivalent of baked beans on toast when you really wanted a three-course meal.

Perhaps it’s the single-room thing (and it’s the same room we do the 5-man in, so we’re seeing way too often), or the difficulty (I think the more advanced raiders are expected to still be expending most of our time and effort completing Ulduar hard modes until we get access to the Trial hard modes), or maybe I’m just tired of doing the same old thing (Shadow DPS isn’t exactly rocket science, which may be why I’m beginning to lose interest).

I spent a bit of time today on Kringle with a view to replacing his Herbalism with Skinning, the one gathering profession I don’t have on a character at the moment.  He’s currently sitting in Feralas with around 230 skinning – he picked up a new pet, the rare wolf Snarler, while he was working his way around the east of Camp Mojache, out of curiousity about wolves and their hunter-buff.  (It’s pretty nifty so far – I can see the appeal for non-BM hunters)

It looks like one of my glyph competitors (the one who posted everything for 3g) has dropped out of the race, and prices have taken a leap upwards as a result.  The downside is my remaining competitors live in the AH, and undercut me pretty quickly.  But what I’m losing in sales I’m making up for with a higher mark-up, so I’m not too worried at this stage.

I’ve yet to experience the new dailies due to one little oversight on my part: you only have access to them on a character who has the Crusader title, and the only of my characters I’ve bothered to finish that particular grind with is Dingle.  Mingle is onto her third valiant faction, and I’ve forgotten which one Fingle is up to…  The problem is, the grind just isn’t fun.

Seriously, after going through it once I have zero interest in repeating it (especially now the two irritating jousting quests for commanders and their friends have lost their common elements, which combines more jousting with the added irritation of spawn-hunting to try find the commanders you need to kill).  So there is however many new dailies that I don’t have access to because I don’t want to subject myself to 25 days more jousting per character, and to be honest, I don’t really care.  I’m spending more time doing incidental things (playing the AH mostly, with the occasional heroic) than dailies, and it’s getting harder to find things to occupy myself with.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I’ve been finding excuses to not take tank Dingle back into Ulduar 10-man has been referenced by Ghostcrawler quite recently:

We aren't trying to make the fights easy necessarily, but we are trying to challenge the tanks and the raid in ways other than just pounding the tank as hard as we can such that cooldowns (from the healers even) and big heals become the only things that matter. Those are fine for some fights, just as having a tank and spank once in awhile is fine. The problem with Ulduar is that too many of the fights came down to these huge hits such that other parts of tanking (and healing) became pushed to the side. For example, nobody is as worried about being a mana sponge these days because mana isn't generally limiting and tanks can generally be destroyed in two hits.

One of the things I’ve disliked most about Ulduar has been the reliance upon healers being able to keep the bosses from 2-shotting your tank, and that doing so requires almost perfectly-timed use of cooldowns (often both on the part of tank and healers).  Sure, a good tank is required in order to get anywhere in Ulduar (thinking of encounters like the corridor trash before Thorim, or the initial trash pickup with Auriaya, or tanking the first phase of Mimiron, as opposed to the easier bosses before XT) but there’s not much wiggle-room if things fall apart: when any boss kill can turn into a wipe because of a single mis-timed cooldown, it gets a bit less '”fun” (at least, from my perspective).

If they can make Icecrown a place where you’re not reliant on cooldowns to keep the raid alive, I think it’ll be an improvement over the Ulduar model.  Admittedly it’s a fine line to draw between “the ability to recover from mishaps” and “insert faceroll here,” especially for more competent guilds, but I’d like to think Blizz can tune things a bit better in future.

I’ve also just come across the news that we’re going to get to go back to a level-adjusted version of Onyxia with patch 3.2.2 (posted here).  I think this could be quite entertaining (and it’s very much in keeping with Blizz’s apparent love of single-room boss fights of late), and it’s a pretty nifty way to celebrate WoW’s 5th anniversary.  It’ll be interesting to see what the 310% mount looks like, and the fact it’ll be a permanent upgrade to the instance is a nice touch.

Also, WoW.com apparently has insider information that confirms the rumour of Worgen and Goblins being playable races with the expansion, which makes me a happy pandaran.  It’s a pity Goblins are horde-only; my dream of a goblin bank alt will have to remain unfulfilled for now.  (sigh)

Last of all, I’ve finally gotten around to purchasing an authenticator for my account.  It’s probably a couple of weeks away from delivery, but it should add an extra layer of security to my account when it’s all set up (which will add some piece of mind, as my online assets continue to grow).

Oh, and speaking of assets, I’ve received another fan letter, I’m guessing from a competitor in the AH who fails to appreciate just how much fun I’m having.

I love the way I’m berated for farming too much (something I don’t bother with) and for making too much gold.  (It’d also have a little more gravity if I could believe he was concerning about my well-being, and wasn’t just complaining because I’m cutting into his AH sales)

Well, it’s time to get back to being too rich and wasting my life.  (Seriously, I’m so amused right now)

/wave