Opinionated

I am the type of person that nearly always has an opinion. Once I've formed one, I usually feel pretty strongly about it. That doesn't mean I'm locked in my viewpoint - reason does have an effect on me - but if I think I'm right, I can be stubborn.

I was reading Banana Shoulders' post this morning about the new pally patch stuff and pretty much commented all over the place. I guess my stance on Bacon is you're kinda dumb not to take it. Does this mean it's awesome for every single fight ever created in the history of WoW? I doubt it. But any fight where there's an OT or second tank, the benefit in healing and mana usage is awesome compared to even Flash. A few posts ago I put up numbers backing this up on the KJ fight.

I also have witnessed first hand the result if you don't take the judgment range extending talent. Do you plan on running up to the boss, dodging a cleave, and judging every 20 sec? Or is the plan to just ignore judging altogether? It boggles my mind that you wouldn't want 10% haste. This is an amount I can visually see the difference of. This is the same as 157 haste rating or picking up 5 item level +141 haste items. FIVE! This is awesome for me with T6, imagine how great this is for other tiers that don't have access to the quality haste items. What is the issue here?

Instead there's all this "Imp Lay on Hands is so awesome" crap. Really? A 50% armor bonus on a tank every 18 min for 15 sec is better? First, if you've already beaten a boss, it's obvious that you don't actually need the armor buff to win. Secondly, if you're working on progression, is your guild going to wait for your CD to be up for the next attempt? The key to your victory is this talent? I think not.

The other issue with LoH is how much Holy Shock has improved. If I need an emergency heal, am I going to use a spell that I don't have in a normal rotation or will I go with the one I'm using every minute or so? Your target doesn't need to be at 100% hp. They just need to live, and that means using you can cast the fastest.

What LoH REALLY has become is an emergency mana battery. You grab the 2 LoH glyphs and now you have 1080 mana** you didn't before. The irony here is if you're using LoH on a non-prot tank, you're throwing the mana granting portion in the trash.

** There are a couple of nebulous things about the whole LoH/glyph situation I'll probably need to play test. For one, back in the day you could cast LoH on yourself and end up with the bonus mana. If this is still true, then you'd get 2.1k mana back if you cast it on yourself. Also, the Divinity glyph says "Use: Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target." If you cast it on a warrior, do you still get mana returned to you? I believe so, but I can't recall for sure.

Better Late Than Never!

Whelp, we did it. Burning Crusade is beaten. The world is a safer place (until respawns on Wednesday). Yes, we defeated Kil'jaeden. Yes, it was after a major nerf. Yes, it still felt awesome. :D

Here are some fun pictures for you to enjoy...








Click the last one for a wide-screenie.

We Can Has Practice

We spent all of last night learning the Kil'jaeden fight. Our best attempt got him to below 25% and into the last phase. We'll be in there again tonight, seeing if we can manage a win. It's a tough fight, but doable.

What this has really done, though, is give me a chance to iron out my spell selection. Also, WWS is working again! Yay!

Right now I'm sporting the following rotation:
1) Seal of Wisdom/Judge (while I'm running to get into position)
2) Beacon of Light on the OT
3) Flash (bulk of my heals)
4) Occasional Shock
5) Reapply Judge (20 sec)/Bacon (60 sec)

I'm keep the OT as my target and use quartz to watch his bacon time. I make the boss my focus and use Pitbull's filtered buffs to show my Judgment time. I've keybound Bacon (2), Seal of Wis (3), /cast [target=focus] Judgment of Light (4), and /targetlasttarget (5). Flash, Shock, and Light are mouse button bound.

My job on Kil'jaeden is raid healing + OT healing. I have picked Flash as my primary heal because it lets me hop around the raid quickly. I'm keeping people from dying until a a bigger heal lands. This very speedy healing also means I tend to get higher effective healing, which results in more hp directed at the OT. Also, due to our locked-in positioning, Bacon means I can heal the OT even when he's not within 40 yds of me.

On our best attempt, Z and I topped the healing meters. To be fair, though, this isn't a good chain heal fight. In fact, I think due to our spread-out-ness, Shammies can't use it at all. And if you have to resort to direct heals, it's hard to beat a pally.

Since WWS has recovered, I wanted to do some before/after spell comparisons. The following values are average amount healed per cast/mana cost. The larger the number, the better.

Flash - Before: 2180hp/180mana = 12.1 hp/mana (with old LotLB)
After: 2573hp/206mana = 12.5 hp/mana (with new LoSR)

Light - Before: 3879hp/546mana = 7.1 hp/mana (both with LoAbsTruth)
After: 6390hp/822mana = 7.8 hp/mana

Bacon - 229330 total eff healing/(13 cast*971 mana)= 18.2 hp/mana

Bacon, it's what's for raiding. :D

Speaking of this spell, WWS (and most likely the combat log) treats it a bit weird. Placing Beacon of Light on someone isn't attributed to a particular healer. Instead, the person just miraculously gains it. The healing, on the other hand, is attributed to the correct healer. So how did I know I cast it 13 times? Well, for one, I knew that for a particular attempt, I only ever cast it on Fozec. Fozec gained the buff 13 times that go-around. But to be sure the other two pallies weren't also buffing him, I had to check the log.

The easiest way to do this is as follows:
1) Pick the attempt
2) Under Browse select Browse Log File
3) For the filter, put in spell="beacon of light" and unit="otherpally'sname" where "otherpally'sname" is the name of another healadin in your raid that could be slapping Bacon on your target

What you're looking for is whether any healing via Bacon is being attributed to your target. If so, you're going to have to figure out how many times. Use the 60 sec duration as a guide. Do this for every paladin and subtract the number from the total times your target got the buff.

If you're sticking it on multiple targets, you should be able to get a history of whom got what by filtering yourself and seeing what healing is attributed to you.

All in all I'm pretty happy with things. Last night it felt as if Judging was something to work in between heals but I didn't feel stressed out like "Omg, do I heal them or do I blow a GCD???" Once my addons were set up so I could see all my timers, things were good.

Thrift Store Gear (Or How to Steal from the DPS)

So I want to talk about healadin gear. The other night an OH dropped that was originally a dps caster item. I checked its stats out of habit and saw that it had more +spell power than my shield. o.O So I figured I'd take a look and see if there are "new" upgrades for me in Sunwell that I didn't know about.

Tip: When looking up spell power-only items in WoWHead, you need to use the "Spell Damage Item (damage=healing)" filter. The old "Healing Item ("healing>damage)" no longer works because damage = healing = spell power. Here is an example of the filters I use, spell powered items. Also, when I'm linking comparisons below, I'll be comparing what I already have to other items.

I suspect that actual plate pieces won't change much since spell power doesn't have much to do with ret pallies or dps warriors. Doing a quick sample of chests and boots shows I'm most likely right. I imagine resto druids have the same situation. If you're reading this as resto shammy or holy priest, though, I'd recommend checking out your counterpart specs' main gear just to be sure.

This leaves me with the following potential gems in the rough: neck, cloak, rings, trinkets, weapons, and off-hands. I'm only considering PvE versions since there's zero chance of me picking up a PvP item, but they may be available to you.

For necks, an interesting situation has cropped up. I call it The Battle of the JC Necks! The healer JC neck is still quite good, providing haste, healing, and mp5. The formerly dps neck has become very viable with crit, haste, and healing. The question becomes "Do I want 25 crit or 10 mp5?" Also, with the extremely low drop rate of these patterns (we've had 1 Ammy of Flowing Life evah), this new pattern may open up other chances to get a neck upgrade.

Next up are cloaks. The Tattered Cape of Antonidas, a formerly dps item off Kil'jaeden is looking mighty pretty. It has the potential of +18 spell power over my current back warmer.

It doesn't look like rings have changed much since the last thing healers want to do is sacrifice +healing for hit. I currently have Band of Lucent Beams and Blessed Band of Karabor.

Here's kind of a weird mix of off-hands and shields. In theory I don't have to lug around a car door, you know. So... First off, if I switch to my dps shield, I'll gain +8 spell power and loose -7 crit. That's like +14 healing pre patch. Sold! If I wanted to go for mp5 over crit, then I should get the shield off M'uru. If I want to swap haste for crit, then I need to get the Heart of the Pit off Brutallus. It has +10 haste, +2 spell power, and -9 mp5 compared to the dagger book off Twins now. I guess I'm glad I passed that sucker to Z. >:)

Comparing weapons is kind of tricky because Crystal Spire of Karabor has this whole "if your target has less than 50% health, you'll heal an extra 200" component. Also, I included the uber spell power dagger even though pallies are the only healers that can't use them, yet we're the only ones that could use the crit. /headdesk I think ultimately, though, the Hammer of Sanctification is still more viable because of its blue gem slot. Honestly, between you and me, I'd only upgrade to the one off Kil'jaeden if I was just bored with the look of my current one. There, now you know how I really pick out lewts. lol

So I hope I've inspired you to check out your friendly-until-they-find-out-you're-gonna-take-their-stuff neighbors and see if anything new has popped up on the gear scene!

Bonus Post

I wasn't expecting to get to post about M'uru. Rather than make you read a giant wall of text, I've separated out some new patch stuff I wanted to cover.

First off there's the new spellpower/healing spells situation. With full raid buffs, I sport +1550 healing, down from the previously +2700. These are just points of reference, as we all know, but interesting none the less. I've also gone from about 12k mana to over 13k and gained 1k hp from somewhere to clear the 11k mark. I approve these changes.

I was hoping for some WWS lovings this morning but I'm not seeing a link. I'll just have to go over the individual spell changes later when I can has math.

I picked up the two Lay on Hands glyphs last night, plus the BoWis one. I haven't been able to find a 3rd minor glyph I consider worthwhile. What this does is sets up Lay on Hands as another way for me to mana regen. I plan to add it to my mana regen macro.

In general I don't have a good feel for my mana usage yet. This whole no downranking thing is throwing me off. Normally I use 3 spells, Flash and 2 ranks of Light. What this does is covers the normal chunks of damage I see: 2k, 3k, and +4k. My 3k button has been converted to Holy Shock on a 6 sec CD. So if my HS is on CD, that leaves me to decide between Flash or max Light. This isn't something my brain can process automatically yet. I kept finding myself stuck while I decided. lol

Also, one thing to keep in mind is I believe bacon is currently bugged. It's only working on people in the same 5-man group, rather than raid wide. I'm also pretty sure that the 100yds is operating more like 10yds-20yds. This means for now we're piling all of our tanks into one group. Unfortunately I can't seem to find a blue post saying this is indeed a bug, but I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to operate like this.

Grid, Pitbull, some of DBM, Prat3, Click2Cast, Quartz, and Bartender4 were the only addons I could get to work properly for last night's raid. Those are the essentials, though, so I did ok. Paladins need a bacon monitor, kind of like what Priests have with PoM. I don't want to have to stay targeted on someone forever just so I can tell how much time is left on it.

I also tried to set up some focus macros for Seal of Wis and Judgement. The idea was I could set up the boss as my focus and refresh seals whenever. Unfortunately it kept making my focus my target, thus messing up my bacon monitoring. Here's what I've been trying to use:

Macro 1
/cast [target=focus] Seal of Wisdom

Macro 2
/cast [target=focus] Judgment of Light

As soon as I cast Macro 1, my focus is now my target. I guess I should add in /targetlasttarget. I can set up Quartz to show me the duration of the judgment on the mob.

Edit: P.S. Like a few of you have told me, my issue with my macro is that seal is cast on me, not on a mob. Such noobishness will be corrected before this evenings raid. Thanks!

We (Almost) Won The Game!

Last night we were full of patch goodness. The server crashed once before the raid started but was solid from then on out. We didn't have what you'd call an ideal raid comp (10 healers, 7 shamans, 1 Warlock) but we figured why not have fun testing out our new found powers.

Holy crap has 3.0.2 changed Sunwell. The first thing we noticed was the mob packs have lost their umph. What used to be a 40% chance of wipe unless we had tons of CC has now become an AoE-fest. Slap some tanks on them and burn em to the ground. Hunters were volly-gasiming all over the place, pulling in 2k crits per mob. Tanks' threat was through the roof. Millions of healers meant it was hard to even get one in.

Long story short, we cleared the first 4 bosses in 1.5 hrs when it used to take ~6hrs. On Kalecogs we had some problems with too much dps on the dragon. Brutallus was a joke and died in about 2 minutes - with 10 healers in the raid (normally can only take 7 or you don't have enough dps). Felmyst took three tries due to some air phase breath calling rustiness. Fozec totally picked up the Shield of Cathedral Windows!! Twins took 2 attempts because of a "My dad was talking to me, sorry." wipe. lol The dagger book of awesomeness dropped. I passed it to Z, another healadin. I'm holding out for the shoulders/chest first.

We cleared us some trash and said hello to M'uru. We had some solid whacks at him with a few phase 2 wipes. On the last attempt of the evening (due to time constraints) we downed both the cosmic windchime and his bluberry counterpart. Woot! We can has your lewts! We're the first Horde guild on SC to down them. You can see a group-shot screenie here.

We went and took a peek at Kil'jaeden. He is scary. I do have to share a quick picture for you guys. This is me and one of our mages looking down over the edge of Kil'jaeden's room, looking at the girl in the bubble.

Patchiness with a Chance of "Oh, Crap"

Last night was an exercise in "Wtf Win Vista? Srsly? Really? You HAVE to move my entire WoW folder system before you'll aknowledge the patch?"

Answer: "Yes."

I thought I'd be saving a ton of time downloading the patch ahead of time from a mirror site but in the end it took an hour or so for Vista to be happy with where exactly my WoW stuff resides. Apparently it MUST be public or the world will get sucked into a black hole.

I spent the file moving time updating my addons. I have a few that have been around since the age of the dinosaurs, but the rest needed some newer versions. What I soon found out was I wasted my time. None of the shiny "3.0.2 Ready!" onces worked except Prat 3.0.

When I finally logged in around 8pm EST, I was slammed with JC requests. Apparently every shaman has to redo all of their orange gems. For our enhancement, that meant 11 of those bebes. Resto just needed 4.

I respected to this, taking imp conc aura , BoWis, and BoKings. Our ret has imp might so we're good to go in that department. We're just lacking a prot for imp devo. Zhain also took kings so we're covered. Once Wrath hits Brysan will take over that duty, freeing us up for moar crit!

Zhain's alt is now a 375 Inscriber, too. She mailed out a ton of glyphs for everyone. I can has Glyph of Holy Light!

We also attempted a Heroic Magister's Terrace. I had 0 healing addons and threw together some mouse-over macros just so I'd have something. I assigned Flash, Light, Holy Shock, and Cleanse to keybinds. I slapped Bacon and Rez on my quickbars. I also had my mana regen macro in there somewhere. Short spell rotation is short.

On the first boss, there was a miscommunication. One person thought we were starting the fight and the rest of us didn't. Would you believe me if I told you we beat that boss with 4 of us standing outside of the room? Whelp, that's exactly what we did. The key was the one inside was a retadin and was able to self-heal. I covered everyone in the hall. It was good times. lol

We had made it as far as the mana worms when the world server bit the dust. By the time it came back up it was my bedtime.

My +healing with 0 talents was 1190. I didn't check again after I got my points in order (and used the right libram). I'll have to get back to you what I look like with full raid buffs, etc.

My plan, assuming the servers have calmed down, is to compare my WWS from tonight's raid to a previous one and give you guys the details on what's changed healing spell-wise.

In other news, I've been thinking about Bacon Hand of Sacrifice, imp Righteous Fury, and Imp Devo Aura. My idea is to use HoSac on a tank during a particularily bad part of spike damage, like stomps on Brutallus. I'd stick Bacon on myself, plus imp RF, to help heal through it. If I'm already going that deep in Prot, I might as well get imp devo aura and increase healing on the tanks by +3%. Granted, I won't have enough points for all this until level 80.

My concern here, though, is the fairly high chance I wouldn't survive the damage. On our last Brutallus kill Fozec took 5 stomps and Tahra ate 6. For the first 12 sec of a stomp, Fozec took 54,473 dmg, excluding the AoE breath stuff. He also dodged/parried 4 sets of attacks (MH/OH). HoSac + Imp RF would transfer about 13k damage to me. Bacon + Flash would heal me for about 17,600 in that time, so it would be close.

What I'll probably do is try a light version of the idea out sometime in a 5-man or something. I'd just BoSac the tank, Bacon myself, and see how it goes. I'll have bubble/Lay on Hands ready just in case.