News and Opinion

General news and opinion about WoW.

An Event Every Guild Leader Goes Through Once in Their Career

by

fate

At present, my healing corps consists of the following: 2 Priests, 4 Druids, 2 Paladins, and 2 Shamans. Note that both 1 Druid and 1 Shaman are on a part time rotation. I figure that’s more than enough to handle any sort of outages or benches that need to occur.

But a few nights ago, I received an in game mail from one of my Paladins. Let’s call him Wayne.

“Hey Matt, I’ve decided to take a break from WoW until Ulduar comes out. I’ve gotten what I need to prepare myself for it and I don’t want to burn myself too early. Thanks for understanding.”

The feeling I experienced after reading his in game mail could only be described as “disappointment”. Here was a player that had showed up to all of the raids we asked him to do before the holiday break. He was one of the earliest healers we had in the guild. For a time, he was the only Holy Paladin we had in our raids as our other one wasn’t ready to go yet.

Perhaps in this aspect, Loot Council may have failed as we awarded him nearly all the spell power plate gear until our second Paladin was able to join us.

The alternative would have been to shard upgrades to keep him coming for more. My guild and my friends would know that I would never consider that as an option.

Skepticism

Hmm… – I shouldn’t have to question the motives of my raiders. My experience in the game has taught me that there are some legitimate excuses for going on a hiatus and some that make you raise your eyebrow and go “really?”. This is one of those times. I would’ve been more than happy to accept a temporary leave of absence if a player was going out of town. Life does happen and there’s nothing I can do to change that (nor would I).

Conquest is now able to effectively clear out all heroic level content in the game.

Actually, we took down Sarth with 2 drakes up tonight.

And we’re able to do this within 6 hours. I intentionally split this into 2 days of 3 hour raid nights to avoid wear and tear on my troops.

Short term effects

Newsflash – This reduced our number of active healers down to 6 but I plan to rotate the other 2 healers I have on standby as needed. Both myself and my other Priest were both deep Holy. After some consultations and careful consideration, I decided to join Vonya and respec Discipline myself. This means I have to toss out the 16 Spirit gems in my blues and replace them with some Intellect heavy gems (Dazzling Forest Emerald although I probably should’ve used Seer’s Forest Emerald instead, but alas the AH doesn’t always have what you need).

Feel free to check out my character’s armory.

The impact this has on our healer corps is the fact that we are back up to having 2 solid tank healers who are myself and a Holy Paladin. We still have a strong supplement of Resto Druids, Shamans, and another CoH Priest to maintain raid wide heals.

Long term effects

We are down to 1 Holy Paladin. That’s 1 less set of blessings and auras among other things. I know for the time being I am willing to stand pat on my corps. But I would not be against the idea of recruiting another Holy Paladin for part time purposes. I’ve spoken with several around the server, but they’re all interested in a full time raiding and starting position. That’s not something I can promise. I don’t want to say one thing only for them to switch over and find out that I failed to deliver. I try to maintain a record of meaning what I say.

As for Wayne, I’m not going to think about any actions for the present. Those are his choices to make and I have to react accordingly. I can’t help but feel anything else but disappointment right now.

To me, it’s just another day behind the desk.

PS – If you’re a Holy Paladin looking for for a home and not expecting a lot of raiding hours, get in touch with me.

Image courtesy of TouTouke

Keeping your Healers Happy: a Death Knight Tank’s Perspective

by

deathknight

This is a guest post by Scourge of his self titled Death Knight blog, The Scourge!

First of all, I’d like to thank Matticus, Wynthea, and Sydera for allowing me to guest post. I have been reading this blog for a long time and followed SYTYCB intently. I didn’t participate at the time for two reasons. One, I don’t heal and two, I didn’t have a niche to discuss. Wrath changed one of those drawbacks.

I originally planned on continuing to tank on my Feral Druid but I rolled a Death Knight for fun. Next thing I know I’m the 3rd level 80 in my guild as an Unholy Death Knight and I specced to tank.

Now let’s talk about keeping your healers happy. Some of this advice will apply to all tanks and some to Unholy Death Knights only.

I love healers.

I love the two healers in my small guild
I love all the healers that are on my friends lists from guilds past
I love all the healers that I pug with.

I pug a lot.

My first goal in every Heroic or raid is to complete the run. The second is to make my healers so happy that they want to heal me again. As I write this, patch 3.08 is still on the PTR and keeping healers happy as a DK isn’t always easy. It seems the damage we take can be inconsistent. For some reason healers like consistency, I figure Matticus and crew can tell you why.

Overall basics to keep your healer happy

  • First: Make sure you are geared for the content you are running. That means defense capped, plenty of health, armor and avoidance, proper gems, chants, and glyphs and a kitchen sink. You never know when you’ll need the kitchen sink.
  • Second: you better be specced properly for the job. When Ghostcrawler says all DK specs can tank he doesn’t mean spend 71 talent points willy-nilly however you want and you’re golden. There are clear mitigation talents in every tree and you need to have them if you want to tank.
  • Third: come prepared. Food, pots, flasks, repaired, all standard stuff. But if you want to get on a healers friends list, which makes pugging a heroic real easy, you need to be prepared.
  • Fourth: Healers get mad when other players take unnecessary damage because they have aggro. Now Ron White says you can’t fix stupid and any DPS who focus fires secondary targets get what’s coming to them, but you should provide enough AOE or set up enough CC so you are the only one taking non AOE damage.

Death Knights take inconsistent damage because we try to avoid it altogether. Let’s face it we stack parry and dodge to avoid incoming damage and reasonably geared have around 50% avoidance. That’s a coin flip. Every time the boss swings we either get hit or we don’t. Right from the start we are inconsistent in the damage we take.

Death Knights also have a number of talents, spells, and abilities that either increase our avoidance or pump up our mitigation for a short period of time. These also lend themselves to taking inconsistent damage.

To start us out, let’s look at the two abilities all DKs have.

Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude

Both of these are on a one-minute cooldown and provide great mitigation. For 5 seconds, Anti-Magic Shell will mitigate 75% of the magic damage a DK is taking, while Icebound Fortitude will reduce all damage by 50% currently for 12 seconds. Fantastic mitigation while in use, if we use these whenever the cooldown is up that creates sudden drops in the damage we take which may lead to greater over healing. Whoops. Healers don’t like wasting their mana.

That leaves talented mitigation abilities. Any DK tank worth their salt will have at least 3 of these, some may have four. We’ll break these down into avoidance, mitigation, and healing efficiency.

Avoidance talents

The avoidance talents are Blade Barrier and Lichborne. Blade Barrier procs off of using both your blood runes and increases your parry by 10%. A good tank will have this up just about the entire fight, which contributes to the coin flip. Lichborne, on the other hand, adds a flat 25% chance to be missed and has a cooldown. Needless to say, when your healer is charging up a big one and the tank pops this and the boss misses a couple in a row the healer may have wasted their time and mana.

Mitigation talents

For mitigation DK tanks will have either Bone Shield, Unbreakable Armor, or even Anti-Magic Zone. Once again, all three have a cooldown and provide excellent mitigation when active. BS can by glyphed and kept up around half the time in most boss fights. UA increases the armor damage reduction even further, while AMZ drops a stationary bubble everyone can get into to avoid all the magic damage flying around.

Healing efficiency

Blood tanks (yeah I know lolbloodtank, for now) have a couple talents that help with the healing load. Mark of blood will give back 4% of damage dealt by the boss for 20 seconds out of every three minutes and Vampiric Blood will increase healing efficiency by 50% when its in use. Want to see a big fat heal, crit a blood tank when Vampiric Blood is up.

The trick to keeping your healers happy with all these talents at our disposal is to use them judiciously. Pop them when you know there is an incoming damage spike, whether an enrage, adds, or whatever. The other time to use them is when your healers are low on mana; just let them know you will be giving them a break. Nothing says healer love like telling them the next 16,000 in damage won’t need to be healed and they can score some non-casting MP5.

I’d like to close this guest post with a shameless plug. My blog titled The Scourge has several posts dealing with achieving and maintaining the defense cap, talent discussions, and tanking strategies.

Warning: Bad Targeting can Lead to Raid Deaths

by

targeting

"Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment."

– Baltasar Gracian, The Oracle

I bet this is something not many healers even think about. I’m not here to talk about your raid frames or your raid UIs. They all represent the same thing (health bars).

But a good healer knows better then to simply rely on clicking health bars to heal or to target their fellow raiders.

Targeting methods

There’s two different ways to target your allies.

  • Raid frames: This is the method that just about every healer is familiar with. Simply put, you click on the player’s frame, and you hit the heal button.
  • Heads up: This method involves you directly clicking on the target on your screen. As in selecting their character model. It can take some practice to do. The reason why it’s called heads up is that you have to keep your head “up” on to the screen instead of glued to the frames.

Why should I care about the heads up method?

A fair question to ask. I can easily heal players at will by clicking on their frames, you might say to yourself. But if you keep your head up on the action, you can make an estimated guess as to who the next person to get hit will be. Or give the impression of having really fast reflexes!

It’s like being psychic and being able to to tell the future!

And in the end, being able to predict where the damage is about to go to can only make you a better player. Don’t pigeon hole yourself into using one method or the other. Learn when to use each one.

Allow me to illustrate.

Kel'Thuzad's room, phase 2 with a player ice blocked

This is Kel’Thuzad’s room. Specifically, we’re witnessing yours truly in action during phase 2. See that Ice Block? That is not a friendly one. Any player trapped within loses 104% of their health in 4 seconds. Note that it’s a percent not an absolute.

You have 4 seconds to react. Or else they die.

What’s faster?

Looking for the raid warning, running towards the player, targeting them in raid frames and then healing them? Or targetting the big chunk of ice in the middle of the screen and dumping spell after spell in a desperate attempt to keep them alive?

Your brain takes time to function. Sure we all make split second decisions and react accordingly. But in a situation like this, you take more time waiting for the cue and finding the player in your raid frames as opposed to just clicking the big blue block.

Why is that?

Because the less tasks that are involved in a goal, the faster the goal is achieved. The brain is an interesting part of our physiology and it takes time to “shift” between tasks.

But that’s an extreme example!

Okay, that’s fair enough. I did talk about trying to predict who would take damage and Kel’Thuzad is a bad example of that since it’s nearly impossible to predict ice blocks.

Let’s take a look at Sartharion’s fire walls.

His basic attack is that he sweeps that area from right to left and vice versa with a giant wall of fire that has gaps where your raid can hide.

If you have an absent minded raider or just a really slow person, you can reduce the damage they take. A quick Shield and a Prayer of Mending helps to ensure they live through the worse parts of it. Raid frames can’t exactly tell you that your absent minded raider is about to get slammed with a fire wall. But at least they’ll live through one this time due to your diligence.

Practice, practice, practice!

For some players, targeting heads up can be difficult. Perhaps their mouse sensitivity isn’t high enough or its too low. Maybe their screen resolution doesn’t allow for enough room. Maybe you just don’t have enough real estate or open room to click on stuff.

But trust me when I say that it is an awesome skill to learn to be able to run and gun heal your party. Practice healing while moving. Practice it from different zoom settings. Try it with the zoom as far away as possible and click on the little dots that is your party. Learn to work the mouse to angle around large player models or objects. PvP battlegrounds is a great place to practice heads up healing since you can tell who’s about to engage players within your area.

Try to activate health bars by pressing Shift V. This allows you see the health of your party as the bar is located above their characters in game.

Be diverse as much as possible in your targeting methods and you will go a long way toward being the best you can be.

Image courtesy of theRIAA

Recommended Requirements for Naxxramas (Normal and Heroic)

by

Your requests have been heard and I am here to deliver. I’ve received repeated emails for minimum Naxx requirements for both 10s and 25s. Unlike the Kara or ZA guides I wrote, this one will be much more brief. I won’t be able to give precise numbers for stats or anything like before due to radical buff changes in raiding. I spent a lot of time writing, re-writing and scrapping this post repeatedly because it’s extremely difficult to pen this. Here’s what you should shoot for.

Before you even read the numbers, you should consult Anna’s blog: Am I Ready to Heal Naxx?

Note: These numbers are good for both Naxx 10 and 25.

Note 2: Your mileage may very. Experiment with different raid combinations to find out what works best.

Tanks

Health: 25000 unbuffed
Defense: 540 (Crit immunity)

Note: Druids will have a higher health pool. 30000 health is a good number to aim for.

Melee DPS

Hit: 9%
DPS output on average: 2000 DPS

Obviously the more the merrier.

Caster DPS

Hit: 17%
DPS output on average: 2000 DPS

Note: Both percentages assume you are completely naked and lacking in hit-increasing buffs. You can find your hit percentage by mousing over the hit rating on your character screen.

Healers

Spellpower: 1550
Mana regeneration: 700 (is what I was able to get away with)

Paladins mana regeneration: around 200 with 25% crit is a good start

Shamans may have slightly lower mana regen.

Treat these as guidelines! Use your discretion. If you can handle a few heroics under your belt, then you’re ready to give Naxx a shot! Don’t expect to be killing Kel’Thuzad or anything right away. Know your limits.

Resolutions

by

1125709_13771957

On New Year’s Eve, I was at a friend’s house celebrating and having a good time in general. I played a clutch game of Taboo of guys vs girls. Heh, one of the memorable ones went something like this:

Aimed shot!
HUNTER!
YES!

All the guys cracked up and all the girlfriends had confused looks on their faces. It was glorious.

Once 12 AM hit, we did the usual toasting and cheering and we went around the room listing off resolutions we’d all do this year. This was done to the sound of a modern day Mo-Town type group on the TV (I resolve to sing on-key in Rock Band). Some of the ones I heard were realistic (I resolve to maintain a 3.0 GPA), to the downright impossible (I will never drink again). Then there were the usual ones that people say every year that never goes through (I resolve to lose 30 pounds).

Of course, the last one was made by me. Then a friend spoke up and said something like this:

”Matt, you shouldn’t do that. Don’t set a goal as a resolution. Set a process. Resolve to walk around for at least 30 minutes a day. There’s a Starbucks nearby you, I know that much. Or even go to the public library. Spring and summer are a few months away. Come out and play soccer with us sometime.

And I thought about it and I realized he’s right. You can’t have a goal without a way of attaining it.

Blog

Goal 3000 subscribers

Process: Continued discipline in blogging, raising awareness of posts, more use of Twitter. This blog is in it for the long haul as is the editorial team. Double or nothing.

Goal Increased content (to at least 1.5 posts per day)

Process: Further expansion into the healing arena. More partnerships with player/bloggers. Looking to team up with a Resto Shaman, Holy Paladin and a Disc Priest on the blog to provide more.

Game

Goal Top 10 server

Process: Ner’Zhul is one of the most competitive servers to play on in terms of raiding. Around 20 guilds have taken down Malygos and done Sartharion with 1 drake alive. To do this, loot council will have to continue making smart choices. I need to remain diligent about upcoming raid content and experience it first hand myself via the PTRs if it’s possible.

Goal Avoiding burnout

Process: For the sake of myself and the blog, I cannot risk overdoing it. Healing is both fun and stressful. I can’t do it all the time or else I risk losing interest or not playing my best. To do this, I may level an alt like my Paladin or have some more fun on my Shaman (who is now 2/5 T7.5).

Goal Raid achievements

Process: Going to start looking at these in more detail and determine what we can do and what’s out of our reach. I’m going to start publishing achievement strategies (or at least, my proposed approach).

Personal

Goal Let things go

Process: There are people out there who intentionally go out of their way to try to irritate me for no reason (in life, in game, etc). Yeah it’s annoying and it’s incredibly dumb for them to do that. I’m just going to ignore them until they have something intelligent to say.

Goal GPA to 2.5

Process: The last semester saw my GPA climb to a 2.25. That’s enough for me to get into my program. I got momentum going into the exam. Found me study buddies, converted all my notes, and (the key) applied real life examples to all the concepts I learned. I realized late that the best way to understand a concept is to apply it.

This will be an intriguing 2009. More guest posts are coming (thanks to all the submitters)! A lot of ideas are on the to-write list.

But I think I’m going to go for a walk first.

Check out some other New Year resolutions from the WoW bloggerati:

What are your resolutions? Feel free to add it to the comments below or write on your blog with a linkback here (it shows up under trackbacks).

Image courtesy of sofijab