Silly

Ask Lodur!

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It’s been a while since we’ve had enough questions for me to do this but today happens to be one of the days I DO have enough! For those of you who don’t know about this I take questions over Twitter you can find me at the LodurZJ user name or you can use the hash tag #asklodur. Ask lodur is where I take the serious and the silly questions from our readers and give them an answer. Think of it as a Dear Abbey WoM style 😉  So without further ado, here’s today’s Ask Lodur!

Dear Lodur,

Will the new pet store cause the fall of WoW civilization as several WoW-“experts” have suggested?

Sincerely

The Zet

Dear Zet,

I can honestly say I don’t think so. Not unless they decide to let you buy say…Onyxia as a pet that you can unleash in PvP! Honestly though the addition of a pet store is nothing more then cutting out the middle man in the quest for more shinny non combat items for us in game. I hardly think that this break the game, and it is a FAR cry from being the Micro transaction model that other games such as Dungeons and Dragons Online and various other MMO’s have employed. This is no different then buying the cards for the collectible card game and getting an in came code.

Dear Lodur

Do you condone breaking and entering? Would you be ok someone broke into Blilz HQ for the supersecret t10 Shaman gear?

Kirby

Dear Kirby,

Well I personally don’t condone breaking and entering, I feel that the fact that Blizzard has not released the Shaman tier 10 to be as good a reason as any to look the other way >.> While I myself wouldn’t do it… if it happened to find it’s way across my desk I wouldn’t ask where it came from ….
Dear Lodur,

In the absence of trustworthy feedback, how do you evaluate your healing performance? Especially as a rsham?

Sincerely,

Herselftherogue

Dear The Rogue

An honest judgement of how you evaluate your healing performance can be done a few ways for a Resto Shaman. The first thing to look as is… Did the raid wipe? If the answer is no, then you’re pretty good to go. If the answer is yes then you need to look a little bit deeper. Was the cause of the wipe the target you were assigned to heal? Was it caused by a “stupid” death that you couldn’t heal through? Honestly it’s very hard to judge your performance individually. Basically if no one died or it isn’t a wipe, count it as a win 😉


Dear Lodur,

boxers, briefs, none or “other”?

Sincerely,

Shamanfan

Dear Shamanfan,

um… I don’t really know how to answer that one. Honestly though, it depends on the gear. If I’m in a kilt, there’s no reason not to go full dress! If I’m in actual chain maille pants well… that’s another story.

Dear Lodur

I have this thing were I feel the need to only cast PW:S on everyone. Do I have a problem?

Sincerely,

BubbleBoi


Dear BubbleBoi,

YES! seek help immediately! There is more to life then bubbles alone! If you continue down this path you will develop Bubbleitis! This is a very serious problem that results in tunnel vision, blurry awareness and can escalate as far as deadraidsyndrome! Get help before it’s too late!

That’s it for todays Ask Lodur, be sure to use the contact form on this site, or pop on twitter and ask away!

Until next time, Stay Classy Azeroth

Sig

Exclusive Shaman Tier 10 Preview!!!!!!!!

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So I’m sure many of you are on the edge of your seats, wondering with baited breath what our armor is going to look like. Well I have exciting news for you!! Here at WoM we have the exclusive on the new armor graphics for the tier 10 shaman set

Are you ready?

Truly?

Honestly?

Are you sure?

It’s pretty epic!

Here it comes!

386195602_fvZ4J-M

CARDBOARD SAMURAI!!!!!

Made you look!

Honestly there still is no news on the tier 10 armor set models for Shaman and it’s a little disheartening. We’ve seen the sets for everyone else (good or bad) but not for ours.

What could be taking so long? Maybe they are really trying to figure out what it should look like. Maybe they have something in mind but want to spring it on us like a nice holiday surprise. Maybe they are just embarrassed by what they slapped together and are scrapping it to start over. I wasn’t very impressed with the Tier 9 Alliance set, it looked decent on the male models and it looked good on Dwarves but on Female Elves and Draenei it just looked misshapen. It also didn’t seem very shamanistic to me, especially since Hunters got the same armor graphic. I need something with at least a little bit in the way of elements to make me happy. Hell I’ll settle for a dead bird hat Druid style at this point. Here’s hoping we’ll get to see their model for it soon, but until then I have a challenge to lay at your feet.

If you want to try your hand at making a mock up of what you want Shaman tier 10 to look like or what you think would look cool, post it here! Break out the photoshop and MS Paint and let’s see what you got!

Sig

Image courtesy of http://www.rosepolenzani.com

Circle of Healers

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For some reason, I hardly seem to get tagged for these anymore. My friends tell me it’s because I’m supposedly all big and popular.

Hogwash I say. I’m not sure how many of you remember when I was but a young blogger still struggling to make a mark in the WoW community. I was once a small time blogger too, you know. Even though my time has diminished, my interest has not. I’ll do my best to respond to them if I feel they’re fun to do (or if I’m dodging a really important paper that’s due on Tuesday).

  • What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Mallet, Discipline Priest. I’m ambi-spec-trous and will go Holy if the situation calls for it.
  • What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) Primarily raiding environments.
  • What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Power Word: Shield. Sometimes I think Protego to myself when I cast it. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than a field of bubbles.
  • What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Renew. That’s only when I’m Discipline though. I usually have better spells to respond with. If I’m idling, then I’ll use a Renew. But I’m rarely idle.
  • What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? The ability to protect and to extend the health buffer of a player is the difference between life and death.
  • What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Weak raid healing. All we have is Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova. But then again, that’s not supposed to be our jurisdiction. We can raid heal, just not very well.
  • In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Anything that enables me to watch playoffs. Generally, I prefer covering the raid. I’m a twitch healer.
  • What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Priest. It’s the oldest healer I have and I have a diverse array of spells to use.
  • What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Paladins. I once nodded off in the middle of a 5-man. It was a truly boring experience.
  • What is your worst habit as a healer? Not staying on target. I’ll sometimes cheat and heal a different player than my assigned target if I feel I can get away with it. About 1 in 25 of those situations will result in the death of my assigned target. It’s like base stealing. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it bites you in the rear.
  • What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? Dying to avoidable deaths. Healing is not a cure for stupidity. There’s only so many chances we will offer.
  • Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes I do. Discipline has come a long way.
  • What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? I rely heavily on Recount, Obituary, and World of Logs or WoW Meter Online. I mainly look at the cause of death the most to determine whether or not it was something that I could have prevented.
  • What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? That Disc sucks for healing in raids (not raid healing, I mean having the spec in raids).
  • What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? How to do things in addition to healing. Many new healers are caught staring at their bars when a fire lights up on their character. Try moving your head back a few inches to get a larger perspective on the entire screen. Move your camera back too. Awareness of bad stuff will get you far in this game.
  • If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? Lack of healing because they don’t have the Recount Absorbs addon installed.
  • Haste or Crit and why? Haste. Speed is life. The faster the spells, the faster you can cycle to different targets and cast them again.
  • What healing class do you feel you understand least? Druids.
  • What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? I rely on Vuhdo for all my healing needs.
  • Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? On my Priest, I’ll stack a ton of intellect via gems and break socket bonuses if necessary. It’s not uncommon for me to reach over 35000 mana with full raid buffs. This adds to Replenishment, Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope. The more mana I have, the more options I’ll have at my disposal. That and spellpower are stats that are universal to Disc and Holy Priests. There’s no sense in grabbing Spirit as it’s not going to do much for my Disc side anyway.

Thanks to Sushicookie for reaching out and tagging me (as well as sending me a direct tweet about it since I usually miss these things). Of course, this was the brain child of Miss Medicina. You can find the rest of the responses from other bloggers here too.

It Came From the PUG: A Resto Shaman Story

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dazed2

For those of you who are new to here as readers or are just tunning in, I have an addiction to PUGs. I think they are a fun and amazing animal to play with. It came from the PUG is my column where when something interesting happens when pugging, I can share it with you.

With the Tier 9 content requiring  badges for all gear, I find myself trying to do the heroic daily every day. My normal Modus operandi is to log back into the game around 2 am EST and hit trade chat / LFG and find a group that needs a healer. I’ve been doing this for weeks no problem. Log in, pop in LFG usually no more then 4 minutes go by before I’m scooped up and on my way to the instance of the day.

Thursday though something odd happened. Something that hasn’t happened to me in a long long time. I’m talking beginning of BC long time. I log in, 1:45 am EST. I pop into LFG add a comment about being Tier 9 geared. The daily is Heroic Culling. Easy mode for me, I never have to stop to drink I can roll Riptide and Lesser Healing Wave pretty much the entire time and then go home with some badges. After about 15 minutes I notice no one’s sent any invites out and that I haven’t recieved tells. I just think that maybe there’s a ton more healers on tonight pugging then normal. So I hop into trade chat.

“T9 Resto Shaman LFG Heroic CoS pst”

I don’t spam trade but I make sure it’s seen. After another 10 minutes of no response I see someone asking in trade chat for a healer for CoS. I wait to see if a second request goes out and after a few minutes don’t see any so I figure someone got scooped up quickly. So I toss into trade again

“T9 Resto Shaman LFG Heroic CoS pst”

No more than 2 minutes go by before I see the same person send out a request in trade for healers for CoS. I think to myself well this is silly I’ll just send them a tell and we’ll be off in no time. Still plenty of time before the reset at this point.

“Hey, I’ll come heal for you guys.”

I get no response. After a few minutes I send them

“If you found another healer it’s cool. “

Then I see in trade chat again the same person asking for healers for CoS. WTF!? Does this person have me on ignore? Maybe the tells are just getting lost in the sea of trade chat spam? I don’t know so I send him another tell.

“Hey, I see you keep posting in trade you’re looking for a healer for the daily. I’m willing and ready to go. Are you not receiving my tells?”

This time I get a response;

“no, I’m getting them. Just don’t want you healing.”

I scratch my head at this one a bit. What the hell did I do to this guy?

“I’m sorry that’s a rather ominous satement. Did I do something to offend you or something?”

At this point I’m not mad, I’m just ridiculously curious why.

“you’re a Shaman, you can’t heal a heroic.”

The reply was very matter of fact and that’s all I got.

“You can’t be serious. Really it’s because I’m a Shaman?”

“yeap, sorry.”

So, complete B.S. reason right? Maybe. Maybe this person had a really bad run in with an enhancement shaman who said “OH HI I’LL HEAL YOU” but didn’t actually spec into Resto or use any spell gear. Either way I had a good chuckle about it and I responded with the only thing I think I could at the time.

“Dude, I’m so blogging about this! Make sure you stop by and see it! www.worldofmatticus.com, Good luck and have a good night =D”.

At this point the daily was changing over, so I decided to call it a night without getting my two badges. Just goes to show you, sometimes you don’t even have to get it IN the group before something interesting happens.

So, how about you guys? Anything fun to report from any PUGs?

Until next time, Happy Healing.

Sig

The One That Got Away

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The other day I had the good fortune of talking with our friends over at Wow relief and our conversation got me thinking about something.
Some of us have been around for a long long time in this game. We’ve lived through PTRs and Betas and now two expansion with a third on the way. We’ve seen many things change and many things come and go, and things that were promised to us never come to be. I got to thinking what I would love to see added to the game for my class. The answer actually comes from the Wrath of The Lich King beta.

Back in Beta, restoration shaman had a rather interesting 51 point tallent to play around with. It was unique and new and fresh and odd and I loved it.

Spell_Shaman_SpiritLinkSpirit Link (Rank 1): You link the friendly target with two nearby targets, causing 50% of the damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. After 2200 damage, the link will sever.

This little baby was awesome in my eyes. The concept behind it and the possible strategic uses of it, especially considering the health pools of both Druid tanks and Death Knights  intrigued me. It wasn’t your normal everyday spell. As a healer we’re used to playing healing triage as well as Cast X spell get Y result + / – a little. This you know the values but you can effectively use this to shift some raid damage around. Alas this was not meant to be and it was replaced by Riptide, which is a very good spell, but doesn’t lend itself to the same sort of mysterious awe that Spirit Link gave me. With cataclysm coming back I’d love to see this come back as a mastery spell or some such. It was a fantastic concept that I’m sad to say got left on the cutting room floor.

So, with that I turn it over to you our readers. Anything you want to see desperately added to the game? Why? Did you find something in a Beta or PTR that you wish would have made it to the live servers?

That’s all for today, until next time Happy Healing!

Sig