Random observations, brought to you by some of the “excellent” artists on my iPod

Faster Pussycat Kill Kill

Despite a slow start to the raid last night, we’re moving through Ulduar-25 substantially faster each week.  We took down Flame Leviathan, XT, Kologarn, Auriaya, Hodir, Thorim, Freya and Razorscale, with a quick trip over to Emalon before calling it a night.  I feel a Yogg kill is in the works this week.

KC & the Sunshine Band

Each time we return to Ulduar, we notice more and more nerfs.  There was less trash on the way to Freya, and she didn’t seem to spawn the green-seeds-of-Doom during her final phase.  I see from MMO-Champion that the mobs leading to Ignis will no longer cast Unquenchable Flames and that the Ice Turrets en route to Mimiron will do less damage.  And the void zones spawned when one of Auriaya’s cats dies no longer insta-gib you.  Not remotely.  I discovered this last night as I was feared through one, briefly had some weird camera-spin-mouse issue, ran back through the void zone — and barely took any damage.

Dead Milkmen

Despite the nerfs, there are people who die consistently.  I’m going to start keep score, because going back through my WWS reports, I swear there’s at least one person who’s never lived through Hodir.  Not once.  

Arrested Development

When I was nearing the level-80 mark on my druid, I knew it was important to have her raid-ready (or at the very least heroics-ready) as soon as possible.  I set my sights on gathering the necessary gear from the AH and from crafters so that “Ding 80!” could mean “Level 80 Resto Druid LF Raid.”

Now that my DK is almost 80, I’m approaching the level cap quite differently.  Khiiya won’t raid.  (Not that Khrii has really, either.  The release of Ulduar has made alt runs through Naxx non-existent.  Not that I’m in any rush to go back there.)  Unlike the gold I was willing to spend on getting the druid geared, I don’t want to invest one copper on the DK.  Instead, she will make due with gear from quests, from factions, and from the odd heroics.  She will just be my farm toon, assigned to do dailies and gather herbs.

When K- encouraged me to roll a DK, we purposefully chose the spec that is (/faceroll) least gear dependent.  Upon 80, I won’t bother to spec out of On a Pale Horse.  I won’t enchant my gear, unless it’s via enchants that help K-‘s priest level the profession.  *Gasp* I won’t min-max.  I won’t care; I won’t have to.  As an Unholy DK, I’ll still be able to (/faceroll) do just fine.

Right Said Fred

Mid-raid, my little brother whispered me.  “So…” he said.  “I need to run through Dire Maul, Scholomance, and Stratholme for my paladin mount.  Can you and K- help me?” he asked.  He’s been pestering me about a run through Scholomance and Stratholme for a few days.  And I want to be helpful and supportive, really I do.  But ewww.  Ewww.  I’d rather send him the gold to just buy the damn thing, to be honest, but he loves lore and loves questing and even though I keep saying “Go to the Outlands,” he’s determined to finish up his questing in the old world.  So in evil-big-sister mode, rather than responding, I enabled my auto-response with DBM, and figured if he asked again he’d get the “Khaeli is fighting Freya.  Leave her the hell alone” message — and he’d just pester K- instead.

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Weekend Update: Things Done and Undone

Raiding:  This weekend was my first foray into 10-man Ulduar, and I am absolutely thrilled we were able to clear the zone — our guild’s first Yogg Saron kill.  Friday night, we did Flame Leviathan (one tower up), Ignis, Razorscale, Deconstructor, Kologarn, Iron Council (medium mode), and Auriya.  Saturday afternoon, we did the rest of the zone up to Yogg Saron (including what I believe was the server-first hard-mode kill on Thorim), and regrouped Sunday morning for the clear.  Achievements aside, I was really thankful for the opportunity to experience all the encounters on 10-man, if only to give me more practice for the 25-man raids (We still haven’t killed Yogg on 25-man).  I had some new and different roles on 10-man — launched onto Flame Leviathan, healing those folks inside Yogg’s vision — and I feel like I have better insight now into the zone’s various encounters.  I don’t think any paladin / priest / warlock tokens dropped the entire weekend, and so I’m still just sitting with one piece of tier-gear, purchased with badges.  I did win a ring for Khaeli, and I accumulated enough badges of valor to buy my druid her epic wrists.

To Do: Clear Ulduar 25 on Khaeli. Run Naxx 25 on the druid so she’s in better stead if ever needed for Ulduar. Run 10-man Malygos on the druid so she can complete the quest for the neckpiece.

Leveling: The hours spent inside Ulduar meant no time for other endeavors.  The shaman did hit 60 a couple of nights ago, and thanks to my little brother via the Recruit-a-Friend program, no longer suffers from what K- calls “elephant butt.”  Go go zhevra mount.  The DK is still 78, as most of the time when I play her it’s to power-level K-‘s alt.  K- and I did manage to run Halls of Lightning with me on the DK and him on the hunter.  But it involved much dying, sadly.  And each time I released to the graveyard, I went on autopilot back towards Ulduar, rather than into HoL.

To Do:   Powerlevel K-‘s priest.  Make him spec holy.

Argent Tournament: I haven’t had any time for the Argent Tournament either.   Khaeli and Kaleyen became Champions of Darnassus last weekend, but we haven’t done the dailies since then.   My druid and my DK should really do these quests too: Khrii for the “of Darnassus title” and the Tendrassil Seedling pet, the DK for the epic weapon (the titansteel weapon is so damn ugly; I must avoid it at all costs).  I really suck at jousting, however, and if I have half an hour to quickly do dailies on alts, the last thing I’m going to opt to do is struggle to defeat those punkass valiants.

To Do:  Dailies.

Professions/Farming:  The time spent raiding has limited my time for farming.  Herbs are harvested from the auction house, for example, making those folks who are engaged in frost lotus extortion quite happy, I’m sure.  Thankfully, the druid is an alchemist and a cook and a fisherman, and so she’s able to keep Khaeli and Kaleyen fed and flasked.

To Do: Profit… or at least break even.

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How I Spent My Weekend

 

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In which our heroine goes off on a tangent before eventually returning to the main point, which is a follow-up on Ulduar debuffs and Grid

An aside:  I work in the educational technology field, and there is a bit of a war at my job right now between those with a traditional notion of marketing (the organization has the expertise and will disseminate it “top-down”) and those who wish to embrace new social media (people have the knowledge and we should help them share it among themselves).  I fall squarely in the latter camp — anti-authoritarian, blogger and twitterer that I am.  I appreciate the shift that our culture is making in knowledge creation and distribution.  The experts aren’t merely those whose voices are sanctioned by powerful institutions, but rather lots of folks have things — good, smart things — to say.

This is one of the reasons why I love the WoW blogging community:  there are lots of folks with good, smart things to say.  And by following the links from one site to another, I keep finding new blogs that are great resources and great reads.

My latest discovery:  The Munch Land. 

My main point:  Munchies has a post that links to a post (omg! see what I mean?!) on PlusHeal about Ulduar debuffs.  This information completes a post I made a while back about updating Grid for the new raid zone.

I’ll be adding the following to Grid when I get home from work tonight:

Iron Roots:  Immobilizes and inflicts 7863 to 9137 Nature damage every 2 sec. until freed.  (Freya/Elder Ironbranch)

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More Thoughts on the General

There’s nothing quite like running back from a wipe on a raid mob to find that things have been hotfixed.  Respawns on the trash to back to General Vezax’s room stopped spawning multiple Void Beasts, and there were only four, rather than three encounters in his room.

There’s also nothing quite like defeating a mob with the the main tank down and calls for the warlock to “kite it!” and the rogue to “evasion tank!”

And there’s nothing quite like a painful reminder that Blizzard wants healers to be conscientious of our mana with the mechanics of the General Vezax encounter.

Aura of Despair, as the tooltip reads, blocks nearly all mana regeneration for the duration of the fight.  And as such, every spell that a healer casts should be weighed pretty carefully.

Mana Regen in a Mana Regen-less Fight

Periodically during the encounter, saronite clouds will form.  When killed, these leave a green pool on the ground.  Standing in a pool regenerates mana, but at the expense of health. One can only stand in the pool for about 7 ticks — returning about 6500 mana but taking about 13000 damage.  Only eight of these clouds can be spawned over the course of the fight and so it is important that they’re killed and that healers get in (but don’t stand too long in!) the pools.

I had bad luck with my positioning last night for pools, and I wasn’t near many that dropped.  Looking through the combat logs of our successful attempt, I only gained ~6000 mana, while another healer gained upwards of 50,000.  Left side of the room FTL. 

While mana potions, replendishment, Shadowfiends, Innervate, Hymn of Hope and the like do not restore mana, other mechanisms seemed to.  (I am not sure if this is a bug or not.)  Our resto shaman gained mana from Water Shield.  I gained mana from Rapture (not via the 2.5% regained when PW:S is absorbed, but via the chance for a shield to restore 2% mana on the target.)  One of the resto druids gained substantial mana from Lifebloom blooms.

Healing Efficiently 101

The only person who really needs healing in the fight is the main tank.  While there is some periodic damage to others, this can be avoided and/or healed with bandages and/or healthstones.  In other words, this isn’t really a fight for AOE healing.

Yesterday I posted a link to a great blog post about the efficiency of priest spells, and as such I entered battle last night reassured in the knowledge that Penance is absolutely-the-most-kick-ass-heal-ever-rah-rah-rah-Disc-Priest-4-Life.  But where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, I found that its awesomeness actually resulted in a lot of overhealing.  

I would definitely like to see us healers coordinate this fight a little better as “oh hey, let’s all spam heal the tank” just meant “oh hey, let’s all run out of mana and push and shove everyone out of the way to get to the green pool of goodness.”  Followed closely by “oh shit, the tank just died because we were all hovering around the green pool of goodness like the addicts waiting for the methadone clinic to open.”

After a couple of attempts on Vezax, I opted to return Penance once again to its status as the premiere “oh shit” heal, and instead relied primarily on PW:S, using it every time the Weakened Soul debuff dissipated.  I did cast PoM in the hopes it’d proc Divine Aegis.  But that was it.  And as such, I was able to sustain my mana pool for a good long while in the fight.

Now on to Yogg-Saron… oh wait, it’s Tuesday.  Now back to Flame Leviathan! 

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Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo

THE GOOD

I won my first piece of Ulduar loot last night:  Rapture, a drop from the Iron Council.  

As I’ve written before, I have always opted for a 1H weapon plus an off-hand, but the new spellpower enchant for staffs has made staffs much more appealing.  With some quick calculations — and having just read Xeonio’s post earlier in the day — I decided to go ahead and bid on this.  It was a sizeable upgrade in spellpower, Intellect, and crit; I didn’t lose any haste (a stat I still really need to improve) by losing my current weapon/offhand (neither had haste); and it gave me a nice chunk of Spirit as well — great for dual-spec occasions.

And yes, “Funny, she doesn’t look druish” jokes are perfectly apt.

THE BAD

Patch 3.1.2?  Fuck.  You.  Divine Hymn — nerfed.  Soul Warding — nerfed.  But the most painful… Glyph of Penance — nerfed.  No longer will it reduce the cooldown.  Instead, it’ll add 5% crit to the spell.  As Chris writes (thank you, Chris, for doing teh math!),

At full usage – using Penance every time the cooldown is up – the previous version of the glyph (reduced cooldown by 2s) effectively provided a 33% increase in Penance’s throughput. The new glyph provides a 2.5% increase in Penance’s throughput (since healing crits heal for 150% of the normal amount). The new glyph, therefore, sacrifices 30.5% throughput for an additional 1/20 chance per tick to proc Divine Aegis.

I was really pleased with this glyph as it made using Penance a lot easier to fit into a rotation.  With my most powerful heal on a 8 second cooldown, there was often the tendency to save it for an “oh shit” moment, but those 2 seconds provided by the glyph seemed to make a big difference (and perhaps it was just in my imagination) in fully utilizing this spell.  Post 3.1, the usage of my spells has changed substantially, but now I guess it’s back to Flash Heal spam.

And while the nerfs to my spec are annoying, the rationale behind them is infuriating.  As I focus almost solely on PVE, changes to my class that are made in the name of  “balancing” PVP irk me.  As Ghostcrawler explained yesterday,  “These were mostly arena changes.”  

THE UGLY

This is the Avatar of Freya.

She’s not the only bitch I ran across yesterday. But she’s the one that I’m opting to post about.

Oh, and we killed Freya (not the avatar) in Ulduar 25man last night — an incredibly fun fight.

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More Dead Bosses, or When An Achievement Doesn’t Really Feel Like One

We managed to down Thorim last night, a boss that gave us quite a bit of grief last week.  As we were learning the fight, we seemed to always face problems in the arena (“tank down!”) or problems in the gauntlet (“tank down!”), and if we successfully made it past that phase, died to massive chain lightnings when fighting Thorim himself.  We also struggled with an undocumented ability:  Thorim’s tendency to DC one or two people on the pull. 

The thrill of downing a new boss was dimished by several things — that Kaleyen wasn’t invited to raid being the most important to me personally.  But the nerfs, omg, the nerfs.  The changes to the first few bosses in Ulduar have been discussed by several bloggers, and no surprise to any readers here I’m sure, the elitist jerk in me thinks it’s ludicrous that these have come so soon.   Honestly, I’d like to see the Disconnect, Lag, Latency, and Loading Screen bosses tweaked first.  But as we circled back around to Razorscale and Ignis last night — one shotting both while standing in the fire — I felt pretty sad that Blizzard wasn’t willing to give us time or incentive to improve.

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/grid config (for Ulduar)

Now granted, my knowledge of Ulduar is still quite limited.  I’ve only run the zone on heroic.  I’ve only experienced 7 fights.  I’ve only defeated 6 bosses.  But even so, I’ve already witnessed a couple of encounters that have caused me to reconfigure Grid.

I’ve written more in-depth instructions elsewhere, so I won’t go into too many details here.  But sufficed to say, if you are new to healing (as it’s your dual-spec, or you’re newly 80, or you’re new to raid-healing), I highly recommend you use some sort of healing add-on to help you better monitor the health, mana, HoTs, buffs, and debuffs of your raid members.  There are several add-ons you can use (Healbot, VuhDo), but I prefer Grid.

In Ulduar, several of the bosses I’ve fought thus far have abilities that target one or two raid members and that require healers respond instantly.  As with Kel’Thuzad’s Frost Blasts, players who are targeted take immense damage over a short period of time.  And while add-ons like Deadly Boss Mods can announce the victims to the raid and while people do typically holler this shit out in vent, if you’re like me — playing whack-a-mole with your unit frames — then your best bet for a quick reaction time is to have the indication show up there.

To open your Grid settings, type /grid config.

Go to the Status tab, then to Auras.  There you can Add New Debuff.

Although I doubt this is a complete list, here are the ones I’ve added so far:

Ignis the Furnace Maker
Slag Pot:  Charges a random target and incapacitates them, inflicting 5,000 (Heroic: 10,000) Fire damage every 1 second for 10 seconds. If the target survives, they will gained 100% (Heroic: 150%) haste for 10 seconds. 

XT-002 Deconstructor
Light Bomb:  Causes the target to inflict 2,750 (Heroic: 3,500) damage to other players within 10 yards every 1 second, for 9 seconds.
 

Gravity Bomb:  Causes the target to spawn a Gravity Bomb after 9 seconds, which pulls other players within 20 (Heroic: 10) yards and inflicts 17,100 to 18,900 (Heroic: 19,000 to 21,000) Shadow damage. 

Kologarn
Stone Grip:  Grabs 1-3 targets, incapacitating them and inflicting 3,700 to 4,300 (Heroic: 5,363 to 5,637) Physical damage every 1 second, until they are freed. The Arm can sustain 100,000 (Heroic: 480,000) damage before it releases its targets. 

Once you have added these debuffs to Grid, be sure to click on them and ensure they’re enabled.  You’ll also want to set their priority so that other settings don’t obscure them.  (For example, I have these “oh shit” debuffs set as a higher priority than the PW:S or DA icons).

 

Finally, you need to determine where on your unit frames you want these debuffs to appear.  For me, it’s most noticeable if they show up as center icons.

 

How and if you choose to assign healers to those who end up in Ignis’s pot or Kologarn’s grip is dependent largely on your raid composition.  But I would encourage all healers, regardless of whether or not you’re typically the one who handles this, to activate these debuffs on your unit frames. 

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Environmentalists Worry that the Northrend Fish Population Might Not Survive the Overfarming. And 2 More Ulduar Bosses Down for Delirium.

Ignis the Furnace Maker.  Dead.
Kologarn.  Dead. 

Khaeli.  Pissed Off.   Tune in tomorrow once I’ve cooled my jets~

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CONSUMER ALERT: The Loot Piñata is Broken. Sorry, No Refunds. No Exchanges.

When I uploaded the combat logs from last night’s raid to WWS and WoW Meter Online (yes, I use both), I labeled the raid “Ulduar fail.” It was a failure not because we didn’t down any bosses (although that’s a pretty fair definition of failure, I’d say), but because many of our attempts were damn shoddy.

When learning new encounters, I understand wiping. Personally, I can read all the strats I can find, and I can watch all the videos; but until I’ve actually moved my character through the fight, I don’t really “get it.” That’s just how I learn. But once I’ve seen a boss in action, even if it’s as I lay dead on the ground, I know what has to happen. I know what I have to do. I know where I have to stand. And while, yes, sometimes it takes a few tries (and sometimes a lot of tries) to perfect the execution of a fight, grasping its mechanics comes pretty quickly.

I didn’t see that last night. In six of our attempts on Ignis, people stood in the fire and/or cast during his flame jets. People didn’t seem to listen to instructions.

Ten folks had spent the weekend in Ulduar, learning the fights and developing some strategies, and I couldn’t help but think that there were several people in the 25man raid last night who just expected those ten to carry them through. After all, that’s what could happen in Naxx. As long as you had a smattering of decent folks who knew what the hell they were doing — whether healers, dps, or tanks — you could clear the zone. (You might not clear it gracefully, but you could clear it nonetheless). Ulduar doesn’t work that way. All the DPS need to be rocking it. All the healers need to be on their toes (Almost every fight I’ve done so far has a Kel’Thuzad/Frost Blast component of sorts to it — as in “oh shit, heal that person right now or they’ll die!” Plus massive AOE damage. Plus 40K hits on the tanks. Yay?). The tanks need to know what the fuck they’re doing. No one can die. No one can slack. No one can ninja AFK. No one can be a whiny little drama queen in vent. No one can come without plenty of food and flasks.  No one can be complacent.  Complacency = “Ulduar fail.”

I have several posts in the works about healing in Ulduar, about setting up Grid to show some of the new debuffs, about telling Holy Paladins to STFU with their QQ-“nerf Disc Priests”-bullshit, about the mysteries of tracking Discipline healing and mitigation via WWS and WoW Meter Online, about how much I suck at jousting in the Argent Tournament, but all those will have to come later in the week.

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