Guild drama
Big blow up last two days in my guild over our achievements. Of course once you start to be successful at anything people who aren’t successful will take any excuse to bring you down. In all honesty I feel like its the same people who fail and fuck up our 25s who simply refuse to admit that the primary reason they can’t do any good is that (1) they don’t try at all and (2) they aren’t half as good as they think they are.
I think if my hardmode team breaks up I will be looking for a new guild. Any Australian guilds want a 4k+ HPS holy paladin who knows every raid fight in Wrath and has killed a bunch of hard modes. Seriously, good healer looking for a home? Anyone??
How long is too long?
Apologies for the sparse posts lately. A lot going on (both in WoW and out) – closing in on the Algalon chain (just Firefighter left now) and the Proto-drake. Not to mention 14 hour work days, weekend work and public holidays and a cheeky VR program at the edges.
I’ve got a grand unifying theory post (probably in several parts) that I am working on, which I hope will be a meaningful insight into the state of Holy Pallies (as I see it).
In the meantime I want to talk about how many attempts you give a boss before you move on. If you are stuck at a particular boss (or hard mode) you need to go further how many times do you bash your head into the wall before you stop? Perhaps more importantly, how many times should you do this?
Take our raid night before last – we mashed our head into a certain hard mode more than 25 times. Over and Over again and we only made the last phase once. By the end of the night the things I’d thought we’d mastered we had regressed from. It was a surreal experience. Come our latest raid night and we nearly one shot the thing and got it in 3 attempts.
So the question is this. Did we
- imprint the actions and movements so clearly in our brains from all those attempts that we just “knew” what to do?
- finally get the lucky combination of spawns and dice that got us there?
- waste a heap of time the first night because we got tired and sloppy?
See I think it was mostly 1 (but unquestionably with some 2). The single best way I know to learn something like the complicated group movement required for hard modes is to do them and keep doing them until you “get” it. Its the trouble with some of the earlier Ulduar hard modes – you have so many other bosses and other loot that spending time learning how to do easier bosses in harder ways hardly seems justified. No-one wants to learn til you get it.
Which is why, having fought for basically an entire expansion for this chance, I am so grateful that I finally have a team of people (that I am allowed to build a team of people) who are keen to learn the fights and try things until they get it. Algalon + the drake – its a goal that we really want. Something as tangible as you can get in an intangible world that shows what you can do when you put your mind to it and work as a team. Its a lesson that everyone who plays this game (hell just everyone) should learn really.
Was that a boss?
Just finished wiping out FL +4 all night – well not all night. I spent 25 minutes in the new instance clearing it. 1 shot beasts, 1 shot Jaraxxus. No deaths. No problems.
And I was mightly disappointed. I thought that beasts was undertuned. It wasn’t hard at all once you figured out that if you got the debuff you have to move to whatever worm is being kited. That’s not exactly rocket surgery, but given it was the first boss I wasn’t too upset.
Lord Jar Jar Binks – wow, we had pretty much no idea what to do (and still don’t really) and still destroyed him. Pick up and kill adds, move out of the fire, interrupt something, collect loot. It was a bit of a joke. I don’t want to faceroll to loot. No-one is going to find this challenging, especially not if you are at the gear level needed for the fight. Maybe in 6 weeks when the hard modes get here things might be different but all the same I raid because I enjoy a challenge. There is no challenge here. None.
I just don’t know. I feel like it could have been so much better…
Do heroics – make a sandwich
The new glut of badges from dailies brings me out of heroic retirement and into the daily most days. Outside the new instance (which is brutal on healers and mostly fine on everyone else) healing is… a little different now I am in t8/8.5. Especially when my tank is in full t8.5
This was my heroic violet hold run…
Portal 1 – apply sacred shield, beacon and hot – wait for damage… add dead, new portal
…
Portal 3 – reapply sacred shield and beacon (screw the hot) – dps the portal guardian
…
Portal 4 – apply sacred shield, beacon and hot – go and make toast
…
(toast pops halfway done – reapply toasting)
…
Portal 6 – completely missed the last portal and am now slightly out of position. Come back and apply hot etc thinking boss will be harder
Boss fight starts – 36 seconds later – boss dead
…
(toast pops again – liberally apply reheated leftovers)
…
Portal 7 – apply buffs and eat, forget completely about fighting for a minute
…
Portal 10 – have pulled my taunt button out onto my bar and am annoying the tank with it.
…
Portal 11 – pull one mob from the trash pack out of los from tank and laugh. DPS pulls agro on this mob – heal DPS (warlock) while they tank
…
Portal 15 – wonder if I should eat pies for afternoon tea, ignore healing
…
Portal 18 – run around the dragon healing naked (not really), type /sleep and get pulled to the boss lying down (actually happened)
…
Well you gotta get your badges on right?
3.2 – first live impressions
Last night my 10 man team cleared the new raid content added in patch 3.2 (all one boss of it) and I got my first look at the new changes in action. We again ran our 2 tank, 2 healer strat (4 ranged dps and 2 melee).
Flash of light hot
I didn’t even notice it. I spent a while configuring power auras to show me when it was up and when it wasn’t (unsuccessfully I fear – certainly didn’t seem to show it correctly). Generally I target the boss anyway (so I can get those sweet mana replenishing melee swings in) so I could kind of look at it from there. I spent a while trying to keep it up 100% of the time.
By the end of the night I was only putting it up when I had a spare GCD or two with no really heavy healing required. Sure it does some healing but 2 things strongly mitigate its use. First, it doesn’t give any benefit to the beaconed target (as an aside I think in any fight where there is 2 tanks taking roughly equal damage it will be much more beneficial to split beacon and sacred shield onto 2 targets). This means that, in circumstances where a target other than the tank and the tank both need a small heal (ie pretty much all the time) you would need the hot to completely tick out to do the same amount of healing as just a single flash on the non-beacon target.
Secondly, FoL simply doesn’t make a dent in the damage taken most of the time. Every time I used FoL, unless it was a rare period of minor damage (start of Gormok, after the ram headbutts the wall etc), we got behind in healing damage taken and I had to spam HL to keep up. Once I lost a tank because I hit him with a flash instead of a HL (at about half health at the start of the cast, died before the second heal hit him).
Verdict: much stronger in pvp (where FoL DOES keep up with the damage done) than in pve. A nice addition, but 100% uptime isn’t a necessity.
Beacon changes
I have said all along that beacon won’t make it live in the form that it is in now. Clearly I was mistaken. I still firmly believe that beacon will not stay in the form that it is in now for long. The sad thing is that it’s not even overpowered in its current form. There is no question that, in a normal fight, the buff to beacon increases throughput.
Last night beacon was about 25% of my total healing (unfortunately I only ran recount last night so there may be a reduction for SS). Pulling up a log from last week’s hard mode encounters beacon sat at about 10-15% so I think we can safely assume that there is a buff of sorts. Of course given that it’s a 2 tank encounter with fairly consistent damage at times, its likely skewed towards beacon anyway. My total overhealing actually went down by about half too. There was a fair bit of damage flying around.
Something that has changed for the better, I would often use holy shock to guarantee a quick beacon heal before HL’ing another target (so it wouldn’t matter that much if some of the HL got sniped because the HS would have landed). This is no longer necessary, which is good cause I aint got the mana for low HPM heals.
However, the extreme range and the complete overhealing transfer are going to be problems for pvp (which is why this was pulled on beta). It has to be. The maximum transfer range for a heal is nearly 100 yards (60 yards on the beacon and 35yds on the heal).
Of bigger concern (given my disinterest generally in pvp) is the lag between the original heal landing and the beacon heal (there must be a better way to do this – I raid from Australia and there is a noticeable gap between the two, presumably because the server has to send info back to my client and then return it).
Verdict: fight bias aside, its clear this is a buff in most situations. It doesn’t synergise well with the FoL hot and is likely to be hot fixed but at the moment you can pump out some healing.
Mana
Another holy pally in my guild commented last night “mana was something I used to worry about, you know back when I had any”. Yeah 😦
One of the first things I did when I logged on last night was to set up a power aura’s reminder of divine plea again (I used to have it but I stopped using divine plea as much so I turned it off). The first time we took Gormok (just before the instances shut down) wasn’t terrible mana wise, mostly cause everyone died pretty quick. The second time we went a bit longer, I used divine plea once and then again and then… I went OOM. At most we were 2 and a half minutes into phase 1.
People have been posting things on various fora (plural of forum?), ridiculous comments about how the nerfs are fine based on a single 10 man Naxx run. This was the first fight in CC, the raid damage is not THAT high and it was rough on mana. I think if:
- you have all relevant mana buffs (replenishment, mages, druids etc);
- you can melee the boss or a mob periodically (or all the time);
- you watch your mana like a hawk;
- you have pretty well geared tanks; and
- your raid doesn’t take a lot of unnecessary damage,
then you’ll be ok (and I don’t mean good, I mean ok). If you’re missing some of those things, its going to be brutal.
My impression was (this was in a 51/20/0 fyi – yet to try the 51/2/18) you need to be constantly aware of your mana and I mean CONSTANTLY. I spent most, if not all, of the night under 10k mana. I hit 25k when I melee’d the stunned ram and I almost cheered. The thing you can’t do is focus too much on healing the incoming damage. You’ve gotta be pretty ruthless about what is healable immediately and what isn’t.
I don’t find this constant attention to mana fun. Its not nearly as fun as immersing yourself in the mechanics and pitching your healing against the bosses damage. That said, aside from those damn snobolds, I thought the new encounter was fairly cool. Not horribly tuned, its not anything like as hard as Yogg or Mimiron (especially pre-nerf) but its not as easy as say Kologarn or Razorscale. I’m looking forward to the rest of them 🙂
Smashing it
My latest 10 man shows both why preserving with holding the DPS accountable is both good and bad.
We have had a few raids in a row that were just fantastic, at a level above what we had been doing prior to this. Our 25 man went in and one shot all the bosses we’d been struggling with, then we had a day of a drama all over our forums. At the end of the day I am feeling pretty down about it all, I mean I like these guys and I don’t enjoy pissing them off. I don’t think its that unreasonable and, quite frankly, the people who are getting pissed off about this stuff are the exact same people whose DPS is so inexplicably low.
Raid time rolls around and I am late logging on – I jump on, grab an invite and get lead dumped to me (as you do) there is 1 tank, 1 healer (2 with me) and 15 DPS. Sort out a 10 man huh? fantastic… So I start shuffling groups, pushing people off on to their alts. Pretty soon we’ve got 2 10 mans ready. More drama. People are unhappy with the groups (surprise), amazingly choosing to complain bitterly about the most even aspect of the groups (the DPS). I zone in and am already feeling tired of this run… and then we just tear it up!
We 1 shot FL+3, then 2 shot heartbreaker (neither of which were progression kills but its rare to get them this right (it was only the 2nd time we’d done heartbreaker). Then things just started to get silly. We kill Kologarn in 2 minutes and head off to Iron Council to try the hard mode. I’ve wiped on that hard mode for at least 3 full raid nights and that was with 3 healers. Tonight we only have 2 and we wipe once on the first phase cause the middle guy has a burst shield in a blue circle and noms on our OT (who, while a quite skilled tank, is a DPS in tanks clothing).
Then we came back and smashed it to pieces. An easy, clean kill, no worries at all. Walk off to Auraiya, 1 shot. Head to Hodir, by this stage I got this feeling that we are on a roll. I obliquely suggest to our Druid healer that he dust off his moonkin spec and maybe we’ll see if we can 1 heal it for the achievement. 3 attempts later and I have the first sigil. What ought we do as an encore? I don’t know, how about 2 shot Thorim hard mode??
1 night, 5 hard modes, 3 progression kills, 2 sigils and maybe, just maybe, proof that accountability and performance standards on the DPS isn’t the worst thing in the world.
How to use healbot
So B3 posted recently about his healing exploits and that there really isn’t a how-to type guide around for Healbot. Since I use healbot like a fiend I figured I could whack some poorly arranged screenshots (in paint naturally) and explain how I got it set up.
Ok so here is a basic screenshot of my UI
You will see 2 poorly painted numbers. These show the basic interactivity of Healbot with other addons (in this case ORA and Bartender)
1 This is a basic mouseover macro. I have a 5 button mouse with a wheel. Healbot likes the buttons (well it recognises them) but not so much with the mousewheel. I have therefore added 4 macros to the mousewheel (you’ll see some macros below). Healbot fully incorporates other keybound macros (I have used the key binding function in bartender so that I can shuffle macros in and out). At the moment I have cleanse and beacon (my two most cast in combat buffs) bound to mousewheel up and down respectively and hand of salvation and sacred shield bound to ctrl mousewheel up and down.
2 Using the tank assign buttons in ORA will autosort your Healbot to move the tanks to the top (this is good for tank healers particularly because you can position all tanks together to minimise mouse movement and increase reaction speed.
3 The most important thing about Healbot (the one which perhaps isn’t that well known) is that you can use macros in your spell slots. Use the exact name of the macro and your golden
4 Clicking smartcast out of combat will do things like rez, buff, heal etc with 1 click when not in combat. Pretty useful, fairly standard
5 Make sure that pets are checked and that tanks are too. This will be important if you care about hunters (which I don’t but I do care about being seen to be a godlike healer (for fun I used to rez pets after combat before their hunters could – this impresses them enormously, but then so do the blinking lights on the microwave)
As discussed above, here is a basic healbot macro. In the days pre-wrath healbot used to use the tag [target=hbtarget] but now seems to support only [target=mouseover]. The text of the macro is
#showtooltip Holy Light
/cast Divine Favor
/use 13
/use 14
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast [target=mouseover] Holy Light
6 Here is a shot of the bars in action. The thin red line is the person with agro (useful if you want to impress people by healing the warlock “tank” for a while) or allowing you to blast off a quick BoP (or bubble hearth if you are pugging). Usefully it classifies people – green is good running through orange bad and black dead.
7 One last thing to note is how the bars you are out of range of are greyed out.
Not sure how useful this is – if anyone has any questions though I can try to answer them.
Performance standards
Yeah, my guild doesn’t really have them. The majority of my guild came from a guild that was aggressive about its “casual” status. Not only did people expect completely equal invite rights (basically regardless of how poorly geared they were) but people expected the groups to be structured so that the geared, skilled raiders killed the same bosses as those undergeared, unprepared people. People got pissed off if the “geared group” (which meant of course any group they weren’t in) got a guild first.
Vestiges of this attitude still remain in my new guild. I am not sure how many other guilds have this problem, but we have too many healers and so we tend to farm our less good healers out to DPS. Our tanks are held accountable somewhat (yeah I am a tank healer – I know when the tanks are fucking up). Healers, well to be honest the further into Ulduar we go, the clearer the difference between the good healers and those guys who are just geared becomes. The DPS though, outside of the top 6 or 7, is (was) awful.
In the last six weeks (because our 25 man progression was actually negative) I’ve started to try and make the DPS accountable. It has been terrible, people are outright pissed at the mere suggestion that a measure of damage done / DPS should determine their raid spots.
I am definitely not anything like as demanding of the other people in my guild as I am of myself. All the same though, I was increasing frustrated by the sloppy, lazy crap performances that some of the healers and a depressing number of the DPS have been putting out in Ulduar.
It has worked, to a degree though. Both last night and the week before our 25 man DPS was sufficient to get the quick shave achievement on Razorscale. People still die to stupid shit (failbot – coming to a raid near you) but its getting better.
I, of course, get to feel like a prick because I am holding DPS to the first actual performance test most of them have faced since they started the game. You know what? Every heroic you did as an 80 healer (before getting raid gear) was a performance test. That 25k health DK tank, he was your performance test. DPS can get away with their 2.5k DPS cause the lock next to them is averaging 6k.
Is it worth the drama though? Well I am not that sure…
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