Hybrid Love

Starting Over - a Blog Azeroth shared topic!

2010-03-31T15:15:00.001-07:00

I'm hoping to start posting the BA shared topics on a regular basis -- gives me something to be accountable to!

Caze was my first character.. I learned a great deal leveling, some slower than others. On her way to 70 I also dabbled in warlock and priest leveilng, though neither made it to 20.. I got frustrated and gave up. I imagine the same would have occurred with Caze if I hadn't leveled with my boyfriend's hunter.

Typically, when I start over, I do so with a goal in mind. I started my first priest with the intent to twink her and PvP with my boyfriend's warlock. This didn't actually go very well, and my (lack of) motivation probably didn't help. I knew priests should be good at PVP - but I wasn't, and I didn't have the patience at the time to understand why. I pushed her to 80 (with my boyfriend's DK from 55-and-up) with the intent of having a viable healer so I could go boomkin, and having a competent shadowpriest for Razuvious. I really, really, really hated standing around for ages in Trade trying to find a shadowpriest that knew how to mind control. It couldn't possibly be as difficult as people were making it look. (It wasn't, and I don't think Caze got in on a Razuvious kill for quite some time after I got enough hit on Amh.)

I started Blue to avoid server-transferring Amh. Not much more to say there!

By sheer luck, Amh picked up a halfway decent PvP set. I've dabbled in Battlegrounds with her.. and I'm quite enjoying it.

To start something new? I'm struggling with that. Going blindly in to a class doesn't appeal to me. My paladin and my shaman both lost their purposes; warlock was one of the ones I'd always wanted to try, so that's my SAN character.

If I had to start entirely fresh, losing everything I had? Druid, priest, and then likely either shaman or warlock in that order. I like what I have, I understand how to play the two that I have, and I love doing it.

Although.. I wouldn't be averse to a bloodelf priest/undead warlock, because I think they are awesome.

Sometimes it's the little things: Thank you.

2010-03-29T18:17:00.000-07:00

I've become unaccustomed to seeing tanks mark and pop their cooldowns when they see a difficult pull coming in a random heroic. Scarlah of Windrunner - thank you for surprising me by doing both.

I wish I'd noted down the names of the two ret paladins, on two separate occasions on my priests' heroic runs one day, who were willing and able to throw cooldowns, bubbles, party-bubbles, repentances, stuns, and even heals when things went bad in the random Pit of Saron heroic. Absolutely made my day.

Ttwodollars of Frostmane - thank you for sitting there at Draenai Ruins in EOTS today, fighting the two-three Horde for several minutes.. as no help came from the rest of the team managing to get us four-capped quite quickly. You thanked me -- but solo, Blue absolutely does not have the resilience to hold up against one solid pvp player of pretty much any class.

To the rogue who hung out with me at GM for most of that AB game.. you were awesome at keeping both of us alive. You got kinda creepy when you asked about playing together. Still! Nice rogue-pvp skills, you have them, at least as far as I can tell.

What - or who - are you grateful for today?

Warlocks are.. kind of fun.

2010-03-13T20:05:00.000-08:00

When I first started playing, I contemplated both priests and warlocks without a great deal of success. (Translated: Neither made it past 20. I think I tried at least one of the two twice.)

Warlock is now level 14, Cazenovia since my normal lock-name was taken. Boo! Happily in the Blog-guild over on Argent Dawn and absolutely delighted with the conversations therein.

Updates may therefore be split between the hybrids and the new lock-child. Be forewarned!

My priests & gear plans

2010-03-05T16:00:00.001-08:00

Quick writeup of my current priest gearing plans - both are disc-focused still, as Amh's needed (primarily) as a healer and I'm counting on skill/cross-spec gear to carry me over when I have to go shadow, and Blue's likely to end up healing 10s for guild. Whole 'nother rant there, but that's how it stands right now from what I can see. Amh is a tank-healer, Blue's role isn't particularly set in stone at all.

2pc T10 -- I'm not currently picky about which pieces. Amh bought legs & gloves and recently picked up the Sanctified leggings (<3 vault). Vault drops would be awesome, but I'll be evaluating what my first choices are otherwise. Planning to buy two pieces at once if Vault doesn't come through.

Tentatively.. looking at shadow shoulders for both specs and both priests, possibly shadow chest as well.

Trinket -- Purified Lunar Dust, 60 emblems. Amh just picked this up, I'm expecting to pick it up on Blue unless I can miraculously manage to make out with Solace from a guild alt run. Both priests are running with the TOC5 intel trinket as their 2nd, though Amh's got a selection to pick from, and it'll do for the moment.

Cloak -- Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky. Amh will be getting this next. Blue's in a Deadly cloak and probably getting this after the above 3 items.

Wrists -- Amh has 245 bracers.. I cannot remember which ones, but they're not awful. I'll be getting the Bejeweled Wizard's Bracers for Blue this week, I think.. currently have 245 wrists, but I believe the crafted are better and she's got my tailor to supply.

Boots -- Amh has +hit boots off Saurfang-10. I think. I'm pretty sure that Blue has the same ones. (Writing this sans internet, woops.) Once I run out of upgrades for Caze to buy (in the next week or two), I'll be getting Blue the Sandals of Consecration crafted. Again, she's got my tailor to support her, Amh's going to do just fine with some extra hit for now.

Waist -- Amh's got one from Saurfang-10 (I think?) [ETA: Cord of Dark Suffering from Gunship-10, I was close!] and it may have hit [don't think so!], but it beat what I had and I'm not in a huge rush to upgrade. Blue has a Wrathful piece - Vault is kind to my priests. Not great, but again not terrible and I'm patient.

Neck -- Blue has the Choker of Filthy Diamonds from Rotface-10, Amh has Wail of the Val'kyr. Just fine for now.

Rings - taking what I can get. Rep ring for one, currently either the Ony ring (crit) or the Triumph emblem ring (haste) as a 2nd.

Offhand -- both are wielding the +hit offhand from Lady Deathwhisper-10. It'll do just fine for now.

Weapon -- I don't really want to talk about it. I'll take anything that drops that I can win a roll on. Not really kidding at all. TOC-10 upwards.. anything with spellpower is an upgrade. Much as I wanted that Razorscale-mace eight months ago.. I'm ready to move on.. really. I may end up settling for the Maghari staff if I can walk off with that one.

Multiple alts, same class!

2010-03-04T07:35:00.000-08:00

I'm in the interesting predicament of having two priest alts, specced almost exactly the same. One was leveled in conjunction with a DK from 55 up, primarily as holy, before the advent of dual-specs. The other leveled primarily shadow with a feral druid, and picked up discipline as a second spec somewhere in the 50s or 60s. The first started her raiding career as a MC-priest for Razuvious; the second dived headfirst into the raiding scene at.. TOC-10, I think.

I'm a decent priest healer as discipline. I'm a terribly holy priest for a lot of the same reasons I'm a terrible resto druid (even ignoring the lack of practice!). I'm.. well, shadow and I are still talking. I don't understand shadow as well as I should, I don't theorycraft it. I rarely have the opportunity to raid seriously as shadow, but when it comes up, I know what I'm doing and I have the gear for it (at least sort of).

Where am I going with this, my priesty ramblings, you may ask?

I play my priests very similarly. I'll occasionally forget which priest I'm on - I know that Amh is stronger, has better regen, has the 2pc bonus. My head knows that; my fingers don't. I'll look for my flash heal hot and realize belatedly it's not there. I'll go to switch to a better regen trinket and discover that I haven't gotten one yet. One keybind is different between my priests - holy nova - and especially when going from one to another, my fingers will instinctively hit the key for the other priest's nova.

Question of the week!
If you have multiple characters of the same class/spec, how do you get your fingers and mind to come to terms with the differences - or are there any? What's your solution?

Now, I know disc priests are awesome..

2009-12-25T19:18:00.001-08:00

Sure, I'm on disc priest #2 now. Yes, I know that TOC25 is old content.

I got into a TOC25 Trade-PUG on Amharach today, and noticed there were a lot of priests. They were desperate for healers, though, so I guess they weren't being too picky. I've gotten into the habit, in pugs, of checking what specs the healers are - out of 7 priests to start with, one was shadow. Two were holy. Four (yes, four!) were discipline. Once on vent, while figuring out who we had, one of the priests mentioned that they'd like to switch to their warlock if we needed dps (we did). Hope against hope, could that be one of the disc priests? Oh no. That was one of the two holy priests.

We had one druid, one shaman, two paladins, and SIX priests by the time we started. Both paladins were holy, the shaman was elemental, and the druid was a boomkin. The latter two were absolutely awesome. I have no idea how to judge the poor lot of us priests and paladins.. I mean, we tried. We really did. We got through the first two with only minor mishaps if you ignore the fact that I think at least half of us were either oom or close to it midway through both bosses.

The icing on the cake was someone posting healing meters when we lost one of the paladins, and the RL (the other paladin) commenting that we definitely needed another healer since the leaving-paladin had been 3rd on the meters. Er.. no shit. You're running 4 disc priests, man, what do you expect?

I did manage to pick up Cord of the Tenebrous Mist off Icehowl, though - pretty big upgrade, even ungemmed, from the Uld-10 belt I've had for months.

---

On a slightly brighter note, Blueknots is 80 now and in nearly full epics. I've successfully healed all the heroics on both priests now, including the new ones! Every once in a while I forget that I'm not as geared on blue and still need to keep an eye on my mana from time to time, or that I can't just switch to T8 for bubble-heavy gear. I'm getting up there in gear though - being able to chain-run heroics is quite the blessing.

My pet tank, however, has apparently managed to do more pugs than my priest.. late last night he was startled to discover the Perky Pug reward. I /facepalmed.. that's half the reason I'm being so diligent about pugging!

A year ago, Wrath had only recently hit, I switched Caze from tree to chicken due to internet problems (which I fixed over break, woohoo!!), Amharach was probably not even 70 yet. A lot of things have changed; some I regret, some I really don't. Overall, I'm fairly pleased with how things have been going.. and I'm really looking fowards to that pug pet!

3.3: PuG tales and Mac woes

2009-12-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

Patch hit a week ago; plenty of time to poke around and see just what we have here.

My guild went into ICC-25 last Tuesday night. It took a bit, but we did successfully down the first boss. In the process, I discovered that I was having bizarre lag, autorun was getting stuck on somehow (and randomly at that), and trying to turn my view would lock me up pretty significantly. Disabled addons, enabled addons, tried a few other things.. and finally checked the Mac Tech Support forums Thursday afternoon before I gave up and benched myself from raids. I only wish I'd done it sooner. It's not all entirely fixed now, but there's a temporary fix in place that makes things playable, and I can live with that. (I also discovered that I seem to be one of two Mac-raiders in my guild, and my boyfriend missed out on these problems completely. No one else was having troubles - that's why!)

With finals over, the past few days have been spent on the druid/priest pairing. They went from 73 or so to 78 as of tonight, largely thanks to the new LFG tool. Running as a healer/tank pair, groups came quickly and frequently! We've had some really lovely groups, and some not-quite-so-lovely groups, but I've been generally pleased with how it's worked.

I've also been doing the random daily heroic on both Caze and Amh, and had some drastically different experiences. I don't heal on Caze - I actually dropped my resto spec for a modified moonkin spec a few weeks ago - so I'm often faced with longer queue times (~10 minutes). Makes sense, absolutely. I'm also faced with the challenge of PUG tanks while being a very high-threat DPS. I've been pleasantly surprised! Some have struggled a little more than others, but I have not had to really scale back my DPS much at all. (Do I watch it and try not to pull? Sure. Have I pulled much unintentionally? Not really!)

Amharach.. oh, my poor priest. Good and bad both with her, usually queueing as a healer.

Heroic Halls of Lightning. Dualboxed BM hunters, rogue, warrior tank, and myself. I think the warrior topped the meters at around 1500dps. The hunters pulled roughly 600-700 each (yes, counting pets). The rogue was somewhere between the two. It took a little over an hour, a handful of wipes, and a fair amount of hair-pulling on my part, but every boss died. I swear at least one of the pets must have been on aggressive at one point or something, because we got all sorts of bizarre pulls going on and the tank wasn't quite aware enough to cover it.

Heroic Halls of Reflection. I got into a group for this after I'd already cleared it with a guild group on Caze, so I knew it would be a challenge. I hadn't realized quite how much of a challenge. Our tank had probably 40k health all buffed, but he was in decent gear; the DPS were in very solid gear, and while my gear isn't BIS by any means it's not awful either. For the first time in ages, I really wished I knew how to play holy. We downed the first boss; we then proceeded to wipe at varying stages before the next boss. We got to wave 9 several times and I just couldn't keep everyone up. Not enough heals, not enough GCDs, too much aoe damage. We called it after awhile; we just couldn't get anything to work for us. But we tried! The other four were all from the same server, two from the same guild. I'm not sure if they were all on vent or chatting separately or if they just happened to all be in there.. but I was incredibly impressed. No one complained when we wiped; we were all frustrated, but we did some troubleshooting, ran through numerous ideas to make it easier, and called it with no pointing of fingers except at ourselves (both the tank and I felt it was our fault it wasn't working - my gut feeling is that it was a combination of the two, but without much either of us could do to fix it). It was a pleasure to run with them, and I wish I'd written down their names.

There will always be good groups and bad groups, patient and impatient people both; the key is to look on the brighter side. Another day, another PUG, another chance to see how awesome people from other realms can be!

Disc healing in.. Northrend?

2009-11-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I've been a little bit behind on updates lately.

Caze is regularly running TOGC-10 through Faction Champs/Twins with guild.
Amharach is very happily pugging everything minus TOGCs and filling in from week to week with a friend's guild if they need a 10th. Discipline one week, shadow the next! I'm not really happy with my shadow performance, but my runs on Caze probably have me overoptimistic for my Kargath-priest's potential.

Blueknots. Oh, Blueknots. She's now level 73, two quests short of finishing the Dragonblight-quest achievement, and nearly 350 cooking. The holiday cooking stuff has really been a blessing - follow a few quests around, use the spices & food provided by the vendors, go train again, go train in Dalaran to get past 300.. wow.

I've been in Nexus as a healer I think three times now on Blue. The first time was kind of stressful - I didn't actually have all my macros set up right. =O Woops. If there's no replenishment, I'm typically drinking every other pull - but my guess is that's not a spec issue, that's a function of not overgearing the instance. I have yet to have any real wipes on a boss, though, even in there as a level 69 or 70 healing it.

We went back last night to help get me to 73 (my boy's druid has JC dailies that've been pushing him up there right quick and leaving me behind a bit) and it was pretty significantly easier. No use of pain suppression, no use of power infusion (bad priest!). My guess at this point is that my initial flailing and panic in Nexus probably had more to do with some less-than-ideal pulls and the level difference rather than anything else.

It's still weird though - I don't know how much things heal for anymore! I'm so used to Amharach and knowing exactly when to cast each spell, and suddenly that's all turned over and morphed on me. I'll get there with practice.

Disc healing in Outlands, first impressions.

2009-11-06T16:28:00.000-08:00

Those of you who caught that my main healer is a disc priest may be moderately puzzled by the post title. Or maybe not. Either way, a quick background may be in order, so I'll toss it out there.

I leveled Amharach holy through Outlands, because shadow-healing was painful with 4 DKs + me even if I did know one of them, and having a pet tank I could afford to stay heals and smite-spam things to death when said pet tank did not need heals. I went disc after a heroic Old Kingdom run on her at 80 where I pretty much sat there despairing that my healing ability on my priest was terrible and either I was not going to play her, she was going to go shadow, or.. something. We wiped several times before the first boss when I kept going oom. My boyfriend was kind enough to finish healing the run for me.. stuck him on my priest. They quit wiping. Clearly, the problem was not my priest, was not the group: it was me. And hell, I had one option left. I think within a couple days of that I was Discipline and enjoying it quite a bit more.

So.. Blue's at level 60 or 61 or something now. I healed a DK (who had tanking experience on his main) through Blood Furnace, and it felt like Violet Hold on an 80 tabbing in and out and generally not needing to do very much. I healed my boy's druid through Ramps immediately afterwards and it was an improvement only in that he pretty much chain-pulled the entire instance. VH would get more interesting if there wasn't so much downtime.

I didn't have mana problems. I remembered having mana issues on Caze on some of these bosses, and.. nothing. I stopped to drink 1-2 times between the two instances. I'll be fair though; we had replenishment, from a hunter once and a ret paladin in the other group. But it was EASY. In one-two spots where a pull went bad and got us twice the amount we'd planned for, my boy's druid shifted out and healed in BF. One death between the two.

(Ignoring the DK we pulled in for Ramps when we specifically asked for DPS and he came in, in Frost Presence, and started pulling. When I was tabbed out, and had told my boy on vent to let me know when he was starting, as one group member was AFK. I picked up on the pull fast enough to keep the DK healed.. the first time. We asked him to please not do that again, please don't be in Frost Presence/pull stuff. He pulled the second group without responding. He was promptly kicked from the group and died as he tried to run out. I would've felt bad letting him die the first time - I didn't feel terribly bad at all letting him die the second time when we specifically informed him that he was Not The Tank.)

I'm still dualspecced shadow for quests - there's no sense in gimping myself when kitty-druid don't need much healing, and I can shift out to toss a few heals if he's BearPulling the nearest ten mobs. I only wish I'd had that luxury on Amharach!

PuGs are tough.

2009-11-05T23:52:00.000-08:00

For a random group to be successful, there's a baseline amount of skill required. Especially in a raid, there's also some degree of requirement that people be around the same level either in gear or in skill.

I had the opportunity to heal Naxx-10 on Caze within a week or so of hitting 80. I'd healed a Heroic Nexus group through the achieve that requires you to kite Anomalus and not kill his orbs or some such, and they were evidently impressed enough to ask me to come with.. in what was probably half blues. It absolutely made my week. We did alright; I don't think we finished clearing, but again, this was back in November or December when most of us had not set foot in Naxx before! None of us were really being carried, we were all close to the same gear & skill level.

Nowadays, I'm very wary of pugging a Naxx-10 on Caze - indeed, of pugging many raids on Caze. I'm in high-level epics and I don't have a particularly effective threat drop. If the tank is a fresh 80 in half blues, half epics, they can probably tank Naxx and do alright. However, they probably cannot hold threat against me. I'm slightly less wary of heroics simply because things die faster and don't hit as hard.. if I do pull threat, I can usually either kill it before it kills me, or trust the healer to keep me alive through a few hits.

In a time where GearScores are often used for judging pugs - are those new standards just hurting people more than not? Bringing in one highly-geared healer is fine. A highly-geared tank is fine. A highly-geared dps, when the rest of the raid is in lower gear, may not be so fine. Sometimes it seems as if it would be better to have people in Naxx-10 gear run with others in similar gear, etc etc etc.

If a tank can't hold aggro, whose fault is it - the lesser-geared tank or the more-geared DPS? Replace the tank or the DPS?
If a healer can't keep the tank up - whose fault is it? Undergeared tank, undergeared healer? How do you draw that line?

Would love some input, I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with some pug groups.

Alt-leveling: brief observations

2009-11-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

My shadowpriest, my boyfriend's feral druid. Both 59 as of late last night.

1. Experience bonuses are ridiculous. These were the first characters we'd leveled that had both 10% exp, shoulders & chest. Rested experience bonuses are even more ridiculous.

2. When duoing with experience bonuses, you fly through zones. Absolutely fly.

3. I think my boyfriend's personal record for running my priest through Ramparts from 55-58 (approximately 7 runs) was 9 minutes. Elemental shaman with a priest's power infusion. I can't do it on my boomkin in less than 12 with both my innervates + his druid's innervates on me on cooldown constantly. I'm not sure what this says for anything, but it's an interesting observation.

4. Getting 3-4 levels in one day was typical, and probably assisted by the fact that red quests weren't usually too difficult for us. Feral cat/bear, shadowpriest who can heal if things go bad. We didn't die very much.

5. I think our current expectation is 2-3 zones before we hit 68 and Northrend.

6. Things that aren't at least orange die very, veeeeery quickly.

Healery responses!

2009-11-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

Well. I wasn't actually tagged, but I saw this and.. well, why not?
(Previously seen on Miss Medicina and Righteous Orbs)

The healing meme-that-is-not-a-meme:

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Amharach, Disc Priest. (Formerly Cazenovia, resto druid)
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) At this point, mainly 10/25-man raids. I don't do a lot of heroics on her simply because I'm lazy and don't really need the emblems anymore.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. If you've never really looked at a priest casting it, do so. It looks awesome, and its looks are not deceiving.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? It's a tossup between Divine Hymn and Greater Heal. Divine Hymn is for the moments where I either sit there panicking thinking we're going to wipe because there's crazy damage and people at low health, or for when I just got rezzed mid-fight and realize people need lots of heals and I don't have a lot of mana. (That's also the only time I ever remember to use Inner Focus, eep.) Greater Heal.. it's a slow cast and feels like a mana sink. I use it on Jaraxxus where people have Incinerate Flesh and I can spare the time.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Mitigation. I do love my bubbles! If I know there's a lot of incoming damage, I like the challenge of being able to time it so the bubble eats most of that damage (think Ony's Flame Breath) and saves other healers from needing to help pull the tank back up from half-health or less.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Lack of multi-target AOE heals. If I'm put on raid healing, I'll be oom incredibly fast trying to flash heal, bubble, and penance people up to full health. There's probably a fair amount of overhealing at that point, and not an awful lot of mana regen going on.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Tank healing, hands down. Partly I feel that disc priests are stronger on the tank than the raid in most cases, and partly I know that my raid-health-awareness is terrible. I, personally, am a much better healer when I have 2-3 people/tanks to focus on. Having 25 health bars to watch is intimidating and leads to a lot of overhealing on my part.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Probably Shamans. They're very strong aoe healers, and they have the raw healing output that I don't.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Ehhh.. it's tough to judge given that I'm primarily pugging on Amharach. In a PuG, probably holy priests and paladins. It's hit and miss as to whether the priests will let me bubble, and if there's a paladin in a PuG I'm typically assigned to raid healing because I'm *not* a paladin. Assuming all skills are equal, I'd probably say I have the most challenges with druids.. but it's been a long time since I've had the chance to two-heal anything with a druid. I'm afraid I'd not recognize the hots and try to get people up to full health in my free GCDs.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? Not trusting other healers. Again, I imagine this comes from not running with many consistent groups on her. If people get low, I try to get them back up rather than trusting that someone else will take care of it.
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? 'Heal me!' on vent. Unless you're a tank who just got rezzed or a rogue stealthed because he's low on health, chances are I probably know you need heals. I duo-healed TOC-10 with a paladin a few weeks ago; we lost a few people in a few fights bcause there are only so many GCDs to go around. If the tank needs heals, the tank is going to get healing priority over all you DPS. Sometimes you should've avoided the damage, and sometimes I just don't have time to heal you right now.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes. I can MT heal and hold my own, my raid healing isn't amazing but it's made up for in the tools that I have (bubbles, divine aegis mitigation).
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? Is everyone standing at the end of the fight? Failing that, are the tanks standing? Why did people die - is it something I reasonably could have prevented? (Much as I'd like to, I can't heal through stupid, and I won't do so at the detriment of the tank.) I'll look at Recount as well, and if my healing done + guessed absorbs leaves me close to the other healers, I'm usually pretty pleased.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? Most annoying: Disc priests can't heal well. Possibly biggest: Disc priests can AOE heal as well as holy priests, so dpriest/paladin is perfectly fine when we know there's going to be aoe damage! In the raid I mentioned earlier, yeah, we did fine.. but the pressure was definitely on for both of us and I credit the paladin's past experience healing with dpriests for how well it went. I've honestly been pretty spoiled with my priest, a lot of people know either that I'm a good healer or know how a disc priest works, so I don't end up facing very many misconceptions in raid.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Bubble. Bubble bubble bubble. A lot of dpriest healers I see don't keep a shield on the tank; they don't shield themselves when they're getting low; they may or may not be penancing/flash healing whenever possible. I know holy priests don't use PW:S as much, and it's just kind of a mindset shift, I think.
• 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)? That really depends on whether they know what they're looking at! Disc priests are typically fairly low on raw healing done.. when I'm topping the meters by a fair amount I start to get worried. However, if you combine guessed absorbs + healing done, I'm typically on par with one of the top few healers. Meters won't show a lot of overhealing.. if anything, I probably over-bubble, but I'm still figuring out how to judge that.
• Haste or Crit and why? Right now, I think the sweet spot for me is about 400 haste, and crit from there on out. I wouldn't mind getting it a bit higher, but I'm not feeling like my spells are taking too long to cast and gimping my healing. Around 300 haste, I felt like if I could get my heals slightly faster I'd be a lot more effective, but your results may vary!
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Resto shamans / holy priests. I've got a basic understanding of both, but I really don't know their strengths at all. I played a resto druid for awhile, and I've got a good grip on paladins.. but I was a terrible holy priest, and just don't understand shamans the way I'd like to yet.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Mouseover macros and Grid. The only corner indicators I have are for PW:S and the corresponding debuff.. I really need to get a POM tracker either integrated into Grid or separate from it. My feeling is that by recasting it once it's off CD, I'm wasting some of the useful charges.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? It's a weird balance. I'm gemming primarily Intellect, gearing for spellpower and crit, and looking to keep my haste at about 400. More intellect = better regen/crit.

I'm tempted to respond as Caze, but I think I put enough resto druid-y stuff in there to keep my druid side happy, especially since my druid knowledge is.. well.. lacking nowadays.

Oh RNG, how I hate thee.

2009-10-30T18:23:00.001-07:00

I'm kind of bizarre in that I like some of the mindless grinding. I like fishing in game. It's calming, a break from the sometimes high-stress atmosphere of raiding, heroics, the constant grind for badges that in large part my characters may not need right now.

My current pet project is to get Caze up to 75 pets. I'm at 59 or so right now, I believe. All the Alliance tourney pets, 3/4 crocs, a handful of the rep-buyable pets [Sporeggar and Kalu'ak so far]. I originally worked on this on my priest, my achievement-child who has a similar number. A few differences have bothered me, though.
- The Squashling. Caze had it; Amh didn't. Finally got it on her this year.
- The proto-drake hatchling. I did the rep grind on Amh and have all the pets on her (no green proto yet though). I still need to *start* the quest chain on Caze. I've bought all of them except the proto-drake - 75g for a pet I can rep grind to get? Seems silly. I'll probably give in one of these days, though.
- All the Winter Veil pets. All of them. I've got to create more alts on my new server to go for them this year. I think I'm missing one on Amh; I passed all of them to her last year.
- Phoenix pet out of MgT. I've told my boyfriend we should run that sometime. No really. Soon pretty please? [My priest has it and has seen the mount drop enough times to get everyone EXCEPT her the mount. Every other person I've run it with has it. Seriously.]
- And.. most key.. the Emerald Whelpling.
- Fishing pets. I have one croc on my priest. I have three on my druid. Guess which one I'm missing? The one my priest has. Boo.
- It gets better though; my priest has Mr Pinchy. I'm farming that on my druid shortly. My priest also has the Sewer Rat. It's not liking the look of chicken. >_< And the fishing daily reward pet? Dropped on my druid.. once I'd given up ever seeing it drop.

I decided at one point that I wanted the Whelpling collection. I half-heartedly farmed it on some character awhile back in hopes of getting it for my priest. It didn't last terribly long, and I didn't get the whelp. Big surprise, eh?
I was leveling a shaman a bit later who happened to be running through Swamp of Sorrows for some reason or another. Why not - she's here, I'll kill a few and then move on.

Three kills later, I had the whelpling in my bags and had sent off a few whispers to my ever-tolerant boyfriend to the effect of 'OMG OMG LOOK LOOK LOOK'.

Oh, how I wish the story ended there. I decided I wanted it on Caze, and I might as well level up my weapon skills while I'm at it. I spent three hours in Swamp of Sorrows stabbing whelps with a dagger. I figured I'd just keep going 'til I maxed out all my weapons skills. My daggers got up to 399, and the pet dropped. WOOOO!

Two addendums to my whelpling-tale:

I went to go farm the Azure Whelpling right after Emerald. I went from 399->400 daggers, from 399-400 staves, from 399-400 unarmed, and realized I didn't have more weapons on me and the pet hadn't dropped yet.. 20 minutes or so in. They respawn fast enough I don't mind killing them with wrath, though, so I stayed around for a bit. Heading back this weekend.

I told a friend of mine on my old server about the whelps and spent several minutes directing her to the correct place for the Emerald whelpling to drop. Three kills later.. yep. She's got one now.

Status updates.. server transfers and raiding

2009-10-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

Back in June the little 10-man guild we'd been running fell apart. People got bored with the game, people left for other guilds (and to this day I don't know why some of them left, but that's past now), people didn't want to raid. All right, we said. Let's look elsewhere.

To make a long story short, we transferred from an EST server to a PST server, apped to a few guilds, switched guilds a few times in the four or five months since then. Both my boyfriend and I are stubborn about making the most of our classes, spells, rotations, and gear; we kept looking for somewhere that had that as well. The guild we transferred for was full of really lovely people, but it wasn't a good fit for us. The next guild worth mention ended along similar lines: we came in with expectations that 25s would be happening soon, but their progression in 25s didn't meet those expectations. There were some other misconceptions on both sides here, I think, as well, and while we stayed for a while it eventually became clear that we weren't going to be happy with the way things were going.

Within a week we were guilded again, and I am very pleased with our current guild for a number of reasons..

- We're running 10s and 25s weekly, pushing our TOGC-10 to Anub this past week and looking to start TOGC-25 shortly. I like progression.

- We have the numbers necessary for 25s. We're often sitting people for our 25-man night, not fighting to make the raid with barely 20.

- The guild leaders have standards for people. If someone's performance isn't up to par, they will get called on it and asked to fix it. It's not mean, but if someone's holding the rest of the group back, it's important that this get fixed and not perpetually overlooked.

- They're not actively recruiting, per se. I'm not sure how we pick up new people, but it does happen nonetheless. We chatted with the RL/main tank of the guild as we looked into them.. they weren't looking to recruit lots of people. Somehow, the two of us and our resto druid friend that transferred to join us were solid enough on paper that they were willing to take a chance with us. (Incidentally, I think we were put in some of the early 25s that we did with them to challenge the more establish DPS. In our slightly sub-par gear, we were matching them on DPS.)

- I'm not a healer. My boyfriend transferred his shaman (ele/resto) and has no problems with being whichever spec is needed, he's comfortable and effective playing both. I transferred Caze.. I want to stay as a boomkin in raids. I'm neither comfortable nor happy raiding as a tree in 25s. Can I do it? Sure. Is it what I want to do? No.
This actually led to a fair amount of tension in our first guild, where they were hurting for heals. I was asked to switch to healing for the first 25 we did with them. I don't have a problem with healing occasionally, but it left a bad feeling that I was asked to heal right off. It was stressful and left me with the most tension raiding that I've had in months! (I think it rubbed all the more because when we interviewed with the guild, they reassured me that they had plenty of healers and we were needed as DPS.)
In our current guild, I'm seen as a boomkin. I'm not even sure most of them realize I have a raid-viable healing offspec. I healed Faction Champs once, but the rest of the time? Boomkin.

This leads to my next point.. priesting vs druiding is tough for me. On weekends I raid on my disc priest back on our EST server, pugs and such. I'm a decent disc healer, I know what I'm doing, I have the gear and the skill to heal both 10s and 25s. I can run shadow, too - I'm not as good at it, but I have solid gear and I'm not terrible. I'm not being carried either way.

No, I didn't transfer my priest. Healers are in high demand; I wanted to raid primarily on my druid. I felt - and to some extent still feel - that transferring my priest opens up the possibility that I'll be asked to raid on a character when I'd strongly prefer to raid on the other.

Up until a year ago, my druid was full-time resto. I was a decent healer, theorycrafter, I knew fights as a tree and I knew them well. I never really saw the fights, I stared at health bars, and I got by. Possibly because I haven't healed much since then, I've lost my druid-healing-touch. I'm not a raid healer anymore. I don't have the awareness that I need to watch all 25 health bars. I can deal with 10; I can tank-heal in 25s, but my raid healing? Terrible. I heal like a discipline priest, and I know it.

It used to be that I was boxed into a healing role because I was good at it. My boyfriend's shaman is currently boxed into a dps role because he's good at it. It's easily ignored that he's also a damn good healer.. and that if we're hurting for heals, he's very comfortable switching on the fly. ` Interesting how things get switched around..

New and revised UI coming up..

2009-03-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

Especially after looking at all the other shiny functional designs people seem to have, my lack thereof has gotten to me. Decent screenshots coming as soon as I'm at least somewhat happy with it. >.>

Healing Assignments.. how to? (And what do you look for in a raid?)

2009-03-02T13:59:00.000-08:00

Matt's post got me thinking. I'm the self-assigned heal lead for the raid groups and pugs my guild sets up. Our 10-mans are mainly in-guild and friends, our 25s are about half and half most days, though it varies. So.. various questions! I'm curious, and I'll probably head over to the PlusHeal forums to get more insight there next.

1. Do groups matter for all healing classes? I know Priests have Prayer of Healing, which is group-wide. I know Trees have Tranquility, again group-wide. Shammies have their water totems [disease/poison/mana/healing] which are group-wide. Paladins.. nothing, right? Do your raid groups spread out their healers amongst the groups, or leave most of them in, say, group 5?

2. When dealing with unfamiliar healers, how do you give them assignments? Based on class? Asking them?

I've been lucky in that I've healed naxx-10 on my Tree and in part on my Disc Priest. I have a very solid understanding of what those two classes need to do, what they're best at, etc. I'm also incredibly lucky in that while I'm not typically one of our healers, I know the majority of the healers I run with for raids. I know their strengths and their weaknesses..

I see it as similar to tank-assignments. We have a paladin tank who is far better at single-target tanking than large groups. He can do both, but his strength is in single-targets. The fact that he's a paladin doesn't change that. We happily run two paladin tanks in Naxx-10, knowing that one is an amazing group tank and one is an amazing boss tank. Sure, the single-target paladin can tank groups. He's just better at tanking single-mobs and generating huge amounts of aggro on that one mob.

We also have a resto druid with what seems like infinite mana, amazing situational awareness, and infinite patience, sort of. (Incidentally, he's also a clicker.. and that doesn't change him being one of the best healers I know.) He heals anything and everything in the raid. I can happily asign him to healing the raid and drop spare hots on the main-tank, and I don't worry about either of them. He's intelligent and uses good judgment. If he's going off his assignment, there's typically a good reason for that.. or else he's just really bored. He heals the hunter kiting in the back in Gluth, and then heals the tanks in his free time. Pure tank-healing is typically going to leave him very bored.. so I don't do it. I think the most fun he had was solo-healing Thaddius when the shammy healer died early on in a polarity shift.

The resto shammy we ran OS with once wasn't specced into decursing. I didn't think to check. Little things like that.. how do you deal with them? How do your healers deal with them to better help the raid? What's the best way of setting up this commmunication?

Who am I again? ./introduction

2009-03-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

Greetings to whoever happens to find this!

I'm Cazenovia - a crit-chicken and former tree on Kargath-US. I've been contemplating a blog for awhile - however, Phaelia's closing of Resto4Life finally kicked this into gear. I've been WoW-ing for a little over a year now, and I go to others for most of my theorycrafting.. but commentary and thoughts? I can do that.

Quick introduction to the characters I primarily play, all on Kargath, alliance-side.

Cazenovia, my main, the aforementioned Boomkin. She's my first character, and for whatever reason, I leveled.. as a moonkin. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it, but it worked for me! I knew I wanted to heal, and actually healed quite a bit in my moonkin-spec while leveling. Somewhere in the late 60s in BC I swapped to a Tree build, and oh my goodness what a difference. <3 Trees! As I came in late to BC, I managed to get into Kara and ZA, but really not much else. Leveling in Wrath I went back to a moonkin build to be able to kill things, and discovered I loved it, and loved that it finally felt viable to raid with the critchicken build. The offset I'd been building in Wrath Heroics rapidly became my main-set, with my healing gear coming second. I did feel kind of guilty for not being a healer anymore, though..

So I decided to level my priest, who was all of level 30 when Wrath hit. Amharach is my lovely healy-priest, leveled from 55-80 with my boyfriend's DK tank. I started out as a holy priest, but the World of Matticus commentary on discipline made me keep that in the back of my mind.. and I discovered, around level 80 heroics, that I'm not a very good holy priest. It's just not my playstyle. My boyfriend could heal just fine on my priest, and I'd be quite frustrated. So I respecced to disc, fell in love, and haven't looked back.

Somewhere in there I guess I leveled my paladin, too. Figure isn't that important anymore.. prot paladin, tanked a little bit, leveled ret, beat stuff up. Tanking is.. stressful. Melee? Is actually also kinda stressful for me. I'm way happier as a caster, from what I've found. So she sits at level 73 very contentedly, and I'm sure I'll get her to 80.. someday.

Most recently? I started leveling my baby shammy, who sat in her teens for ages and hit 37 yesterday night. Hooray!

More museful blog-posts to come.. I've had various subjects going in my head that are beating up my muse and demanding an outlet.