Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

WoW Struggles: The Undergeared

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Picture this.

You’re sitting in Ironforge with a half filled raid that’s pumped to do Zul’Aman after pulling consecutive 3 hour clears of Karazhan.

You spam your Guild looking for that extra DPS or extra healer.

“I’ll come!”

It’s that new Paladin your Guild recruited. His status says ‘Trial Member’ in the Guild window.

You fill out the rest of the raid with power DPS and dependable tanks and then you’re on your way to Zul’Aman. You clear up to the Bear boss no problem because your Pally tank is so damn awesome that mages beg YOU to come because their sheeps aren’t needed. You, the Priest, start nodding off because the trash pulls were so lax and simple. The bear boss looms before you. A quick glance upward at the clock shows 8 minutes left before hostages are executed. Raid mana and raid health are both at 100% and you give the ready signal. Your raid’s been brought up to speed on what needs to be accomplished.
“Tanks, on your go!”

The tanks rush in and engage. There is not a single problem on the initial transitions. You and the other healers are doing an excellent job.

Until you look at your healing meters and see this:

Recount Healing Done

You blink wondering why the Paladin’s heals are low. Then you inspect him. Your jaws drop. He’s got barely +1300 healing.

Congratulations! You just invited an undergeared Paladin to a place where he has absolutely NO business being in!

And he’s a new trial member in your Guild!

I vow to never take an undergeared person into ZA ever again. My standards? Having at most 1 blue. You must need nothing else out of Karazhan if you want to go on a ZA run. I’m sick and tired of players who think that just because they ran Karazhan on their alt, they’re able to do ZA on their alt. It’s two different levels of play! I can’t believe how many “oh &#$%” spells and cooldowns I had to blow just to keep the MT alive ON TRASH.

When I was in the LFG channels and in Ironforge looking for players to fill out raids, my Pally tank said he got tells from people who wanted to come. A quick inspection showed that their equipment wasn’t quite up to snuff. He explained that to them. You know the answer he got?

We’re in this AWESOME Guild that’s doing Hyjal and BT. We’re so good we want to bring our alts in. No, you’re not! I don’t care if you’re a Death & Taxes Paladin alt with 1200+ healing! Your guild tag does not determine your suckiness. Skill can only carry you so far. It was a miracle we even got to and downed the Lynx boss.

People decked in dungeons blues and a sprinkling of epics have no purpose in Zul’Aman!

I’m going to do some quick research and survey my friends, guildmates, and even some of my blogging colleagues on their opinion.

You know your class. What would you deem are the minimum requirements go even go into Zul’Aman? If you’re a healer, I want to know what you think your health, mana pool, mana regen, and healing should be at. For tanks and DPS, I’m asking you for the relevant stats that are needed. Take a look at my Karazhan minimum requirements for an idea.

Healing Tips for 25-Man Raiding: WoW Insidered, Matt Reviewed

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I woke up this morning and decided to check my grades to see how I did this semester. Turns out I got an F in Cognitive Science. Now I’m really depressed about it, but I’m working on a plan to address it next year.

Anyway, aside from that I was catching up on a little bit of light reading on WoW Insider. One of the columns featured is that on 25-man raid healing by Marcie Knox. The article essentially summarizes the tips and tricks that healers can pull off in order to succeed in end game content. Let’s see if WoW Insider experts and I agree:

You need at least one of each healing class. Yes, even a holy priest and the rare resto druid. No matter what you’ve heard, running with all paladins really won’t get you very far, nor make the journey pleasant.

Disagreed. Ideally it would be nice to have all four healing classes, but sometimes it simply isn’t possible. Can you do some 25-man content with all Paladins? Yes. Is it recommended? No. But you do not NEED a Resto Druid, Shaman, Holy Priest and Paladin. If you set it as your goal to recruit one of each healer before trying your hand at raiding, you’ll be stuck for a long time. Carnage is incredibly stacked on Paladins and Priests. We have one Resto Shaman and no Druids (WE COULD USE ONE THOUGH SERIOUSLY). We went from Karazhan to Kael since we started back in June.

You have 6-8 raid slots for healers to work with. Start with 7 and make adjustments as you go.

Agreed. Typically, I would start with 7 and work my way up or down depending on the following:

  • The encounter
  • The gear of healers
  • The skill of healers

You’ll only need to do this the first few times when you’re working on a boss. After a while, when bosses can be done with no effort, you can remove healers as necessary to speed up the fight.

All healers must have the following information instantly available at all times:
a) Raid Health Monitor
b) Range Indicator

Kinda. I do keep the raid health monitor window open but I never make use of it. I’m not sure if Knox refers to the health of the entire raid as a percentage or the health of each individual raid member. Regardless,everyone’s health bar should be on the screen. Don’t just have your party window open in a raid.

As for the Range Indicator, it’s a good idea to have one. I’ve grown accustomed to my Priest that I can visually tell whether or not I’m in range of my tank. If I’m able to, I do a quick range check before a boss by lighting up a Prayer of Mending to ensure line of sight is not an issue. It’s a good tip for Alar when you’re not sure if the ledge the tank is standing on is going to interfere with your LOS heals. If your tank isn’t, a quick bark over vent should move them an inch or so over.

Have at least 2 people willing and able to handle the healing assignments.

Agreed. When I run my pickup Magtheridon, I make a deal with my partner. He runs the strats and I take care of the healing. He tells me whose tanking what, and then I pick out the healers who’re going to cover each tank.

In Carnage, our healers take it one step further. The raid leader puts up icons and calls out which tank is on which trash mob. Our healers take a more active approach and type in our healer channel which tank we’ll cover. Here’s an example for Hydross:

  • Resto Shaman: Raid
  • Holy Paladin 1: Water Tombs
  • Holy Paladin 2: Active Tank
  • Me: Active Tank
  • Holy Priest 2: Melee DPS
  • Holy Paladin 3: Elemental Tanks
  • Holy Paladin 4: Elemental Tanks

Active tanks refers to the one who is currently tanking the boss. Remember Hydross needs to be alternated between two tanks. This way, our healers are much more alert and everyone is accounted for. We have clearly defined our roles to ourselves and to each other.

You’ll need a way to do healing assignments. Here’s some common methods:
Macros – Easy, in-game, and nothing to download; this is what I use
Text File – WoW crash-proof, alt+tab then copy/paste into chat; Notepad, etc. (Watch for the multi-line limit)
Text Addons – Like a text file but in-game, good if you have 1k macros already; Notes (Is it still around? Can’t find it.), etc.
Assignment Addons – Fill out a form

Agreed. Typing it by hand sucks. Typing it again because someone was AFK sucks more. Personally, I use macros. Example:

/rw HEALING ASSIGNMENTS:
/rw —
/rw Tank 1: Healer A, Healer B
/rw Tank 2: Healer C
/rw Tank 3: Healer D
/rw Tank 4: Healer E
/rw Raid: Healer F and G

I mainly use this one for my own pickup raids on Mag and it spits out nice lines and alerts everyone.

Set up a healing channel to broadcast the assignments or use the Guild Info window if you’re an officer

Agreed. A typical channel name is GuildHeal or something. Just type /join GuildHeal and type / followed by the channel number. Usually it’s something like /5.

I like to change the color of all the text in the healer channel to something bright so that it stands out. To do this, right click on the tab above your chat window (General). Mouse over to Channels, then there should be a red square next to the name GuildHeal. Click the square and a color wheel should pop up. Drag the circle to any color you like.

Get set up to record your combat log and parse it via WWS.

Agreed. Post raid analysis is always important when you can’t seem to do a boss properly. You need to troubleshoot and diagnose the problems in order to fix it. For in game, I suggest an addon called Recount. I’m going to post an indepth guide to it later on in the week when I start accumulating some screenshots.

Well for the most part, it looks like we do agree and emphasize the same things (except for the first point). Knox’s healer is in Mount Hyjal. My Guild’s working on Kael. Who knows? Maybe I’ll radically change my views once I get into Hyjal.

One Shotting Heroics: The Secret

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The Dark Knight BatmanThis post isn’t really a response to Brendan’s guest post a few days back. It’s my perspective on the Heroic at Honored issue that was continued by Amava.

As long as you have the desire to progress and to succeed, then I am confident that you’ll do fine in Heroics. Veteran players like myself who levelled to 70 within 2 weeks of TBC’s release ended up learning every encounter the hard way. The first time I did Shadow Labyrinth, it took two hours and trash reclears just to kill Murmer for our one frag. I didn’t even want to think about Heroics at the time.

The Heroics of now are much more manageable than they were before. I’m not going to say easier, because players still need to have a level of intelligence and gear required.

For example, in Heroic Sethekk Halls, the opening pull involving the two ghostly mobs? Both were immune to shackle, traps, and any kind of CC. I remember they would randomly drop aggro and charge our members. It was a nightmare just to be in that instance several months ago. Your tank had to be geared enough to withstand the massive amounts of damage, and skilled enough to hold aggro on two mobs simultaneously. Your healer had to be fast to sustain your tank. Having a Hunter was almost a requirement for Misdirect.

Trash in Karazhan have been nerfed enormously. What once took two nights can now almost be done within three hours. I remember a pack of trash that was outside of Maiden’s hallway leading towards the Opera Event. Those necro’s could not be shackled nor pally feared. You had to have two tanks on at all time getting aggro on both of them simultaneously so that when one tank got frozen, the mob wouldn’t run and charge a random player in the group.

I thought that was the hardest encounter I had ever faced at the time

It’s a habit of mine that I continually forget that heroic instances of post 2.3 are much more different than they were in pre 2.3.

Why Blizzard dropped the reputation level

1: Replay Value

They lowered it because it was difficult for players to find groups for Heroics. Only a fraction of all WoW players are raiding any kind of 25 man content. The 70’s who aren’t are typically in casual Guilds who do not have the kind of dedication or personnel to go the route of raiding but want to have fun doing challenging content. If they’re not interested and don’t have the time to PvP, what’s there left to do? 5 man instances are the only option left in order to acquire gear.

2: Patch Nerfs

There’s been four main patches since TBC was released. In every patch, there’s been nerf after nerf on various heroic instances. Each gradual reduction in difficult increases the margin of error that players have. That means more time to recover in case something bad goes wrong. It means the ability to take in players who have the brains but not necessarily the gear. Grinding to revered would have increased the chance that you would get the necessary dungeon gear to replace your preexisting greens and lower level blues.

3: Player Pool Increase

Even on a server as populated as Ner’Zuhl, it took me a long time to not only find tanks and DPSers, but to find players that had to have the key to go in. Now there are more people running heroics because they don’t have to spend the time necessary to grind the rep to get in. In my opinion, players that were kara geared or higher had no need to run heroics (other then badges for nether’s, etc). What was the point? Having T5 gear is better then badge gear. They could not justify the cost of badge runs with that of raids. Players that were far below that could not keep up with whatever their job was. This resulted in a small selection of players who had the NEED to go in and WERE sufficiently geared to go in.

Now heroics are such a piece of cake. I can breeze through them

What’s my secret?

I run with a Pally tank and a Mage. It makes it so easy for me to blog and read while I play WoW at the same time.

Carnage is LFM SSC and TK

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I’m happy to announce that I’ve been asked to help recruit people into Carnage. The past few days have been very rough for us which got to a point where we had to cancel a raid due to key personnel having to cancel at the last minute. We’ve seen a lack of attendance on our sunday raids in the past few weeks.

During my time in Aurora, I was tasked as a headhunter to help look for players to supplement our Guild. Now I’ve been asked to do same thing. I will have to apply my awesome Fantasy Hockey Pool skills to WoW and somehow find some pieces that will help build us into a playoff contender consistent raiding guild.

My current standings in my hockey pools

Here’s what we’re looking for in terms of raiding:

1 Rogue
1 Elemental Shaman
1 Enhancement Shaman
1 Warlock
1 Holy Paladin
1 Resto Druid

Please, no comments on what we “should” get or what we “shouldn’t” get. We like to keep our options open.

Ideal candidates will have:

* A “can do” attitude
* A willingness to wipe to learn new content
* Ventrilo 3.0 (and the willingness to speak up)
* Deadly Boss Mods (latest version)
* CTRA or ORA2 (for raid querying only, you can use whatever raid interface you like)
* Omen Threat Meter
* Minimum Karazhan gear (that is, you don’t need any loot from there)

About Carnage:

Carnage is a high end-game raiding and PvP guild on Ner’zhul. Founded more than two years ago, we are an established guild with very stable membership. Before the expansion, we cleared MC, BWL, and had made significant progress in AQ40 and Naxx. Karazhan is phased out of our raiding schedule, although we still do an alt/main run for fun and some gear. We have all bosses of SSC and 3/4 TK on farm and are working to progress into Hyial and BT. Several of our members also PvP in arena, AB, WSG, and AV on a regular basis.

We utilize a 2 round zero-sum bidding system.

Raiding Schedule (All times in PST):

Tuesdays, Thursday: 5:30 PM – 9:00 PM
Sundays: 3:30 PM – 9:00 PM

Note: We’re very sharp about our raid times. We have several members in the guild that play from the east coast, therefore we do enforce the 9:00 PM end time. Those raid times posted are for 25 mans. There are some optional 10 mans that may happen on the fly.

Example of a bad application for a WoW Guild

Interested?

If you think you can contribute to what we’re looking for, head on over to the Carnage forum and put it an application. Make sure you read the Announcement thread on top in the Applications forum and follow the instructions.

Why Raiding With PvP Gear Is a Bad Idea

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Matticus,
First off, I want to commend you on the very nice extensive blog you run, a lot of great resources and discussion. I have an issue and am seeking some general advice and maybe to stir up some discussion. I am currently in Iraq right now BUT i get about 3-4 hours of playtime with acceptable latency. I have a 70 Druid that I just recently (1.5 weeks) re-specced to healing due to feral frustration and a noticable lack of heals on my server. Right off the bat I hooked up with some friends (2 mages+1 hunter) and have been doing BG’s to get honor and marks in order to attain some of the PvP epics.

I’ve been doing some research via blogs to find out some easily attainable gear to help my healing and survivabilty in PVP and eventually to start up some daily instancing. I thoroughly enjoy healing and I’m going to stick with it but I can’t make the decision to PVP or PVE as my main concentration.

Right now, i am trying to do a little of both and i dont see it going anywhere fast. What im looking for is to be able to PVP/Arena grind and get myself in good shape to be a full time raid healer once i get back to the U.S. where i will have ample time to dedicate to raiding. My overall question is: Am I wrong to assume that PVP gear (since it’s mostly a solo endeavor aside from arenas), is probably the best route to achieving pre-Kara quality gear? And are there any other resources out there that might be able to lend some guidance to an undecided healer? I know my question is most likely un-answerable and is mostly self chosen, but I’m just looking for suggestions, thoughts, or guidance.

Thank you,
Jordon

P.S. Whats up with all of the ?‘s instead of “‘s

Wow, I had no idea my blog was being read overseas. I salute you, sir, even though I’m from Canada. Thank you for the kind word =)!

Now, let’s get to business.

I know there are a lot of players who recommend supplementing raiding gear with some PvP Gear to help increase their survivability. Either that, or they’re unable get access to any kind of raiding gear because the population on a server is ridiculously low.

I definitely think DPS classes benefit with a mix of several PvP pieces. As a Priest, I have even added the [item]Veteran Mooncloth Bracers[/item] to my Priest raiding gear list as suggested by you readers (You know who you are).

As a healer, would I recommend going all out for arena gear just to be able to start raiding in Karazhan?

No, I would not.

Remember that PvE gear is tailored differently than PvP gear. Even though the healing or spelldamage increase may seem similar, the difference lies entirely in stat distribution.

PvP gear has a ton of stamina allowing you to withstand and deal serious firepower within a limited amount of time.

PvE gear has added longevity and endurance so you can deal firepower over a longer amount.

It’s like comparing an A-10 to a Spectre gunship. The A-10 comes in, drops its payload, and speeds off. The Spectre just flies circles above an area protecting it’s assignments.

It’s all about endurance.

If you want to raid, stat collecting raiding gear. PvP gear isn’t going to help you much at all because it lacks important stats like mana regeneration. Five minutes into a boss fight and you’ll be OOM (after innervates and potions).

What I can recommend is this: Start arenaing and get a few points under your belt. Keep doing this for several weeks. Meanwhile, if you don’t have a good set of bracers, hook yourself up with a Vindicator’s Kodohide Bracers.When you feel ready for Kara, start running the lower level of it a few times to help gradually build up your pieces. If you’re having trouble getting Maiden’s Shard of the Virtuous, put the Arena Points to good use and grab the [item]Merciless Gladiiator’s Salvation[/item] (S2 heaing mace). That should take you anywhere between 4 – 8 weeks.

How will you know if you’re good enough? Refer to my Minimum Kara Requirements for classes. Alternately, I’m sure Phaelia, Karthis, and Big Bear Butt can help you get in the right direction as they’re both Druids and far more familiar with what you’ll need. Well, the latter two are feral. But I like to randomly link to bloggers anyway.

P.S. The ?’s occur due to a CSS oversight on my part. Will be fixed when my new layout goes live. Hopefully it will be up before Christmas. Basically, what happens is WordPress interprets my apostrophes and quotes in a weird fashion.

And godspeed, Jordon.