Busy Week

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted.  Real life takes over every now and then.

We have hit the wall in Kara…  we just don’t have enough DPS for Shade.  I think we’re going to have to trade out the second tank for another DPS, but we have a hard enough time getting 5 DPS on a regular basis, I’m not sure about 6.  We’ll just have to see.  We did get Illhoof down though.  It was painful and sloppy, but he went down.  We got healing plate and a caster cloak that went to the druid I think.

We’re implementing DKP next week so we’ll have to see how that goes.  The GM is still nailing down particulars about the system and how he wants to work the bidding.  We also need to decide on a cap for the DKP since some of us already have 5x the DKP others have.  We were throwing around 4-5k but haven’t really decided.

Anywhoo, I’m rambling now so I’m going to go to bed.  I promise a post for Monday or Tuesday depending on how busy I am at work.

Leveling Your Priest – The Lighter Side

Since Kirk stole my idea… just kidding, he wrote an article about talents for the leveling priest, up to level 40. I had a similar article half written, waiting for some polish when I read his this morning. This will be more of a companion piece. I’m going to give a possible talent build for the leveling Holy Priest. What I would suggest is to use Kirk’s recommendations (or whatever floats your boat over in the Shadow tree) until you reach a point where one of a few things happens;

1. You find yourself healing in a group more than soloing.
2. You like to run instances or group and play the healer, but don’t feel like you can handle the load with the Shadow build.
3. You realize that you just want to be a BAMF healer no matter how hard soloing is (this happened for me at about 60)

I’m going to follow Kirk’s lead here and give a possible build up to level 40. You can jump in at any time you decide to respec. I’m also going to include some talents in the Disc tree, I will give the Holy talents first, then Disc because I think that’s how you should do it, but you could take some of the Disc talents part way through if that’s what works for you.

Here goes:

Start with 3/3 in Improved Renew, then 2/2 Healing Focus.  I’m not a huge fan of Holy Specalization, I don’t like to rely on crits, they never come when you really need them.  Holy Specalization is a good back filler, throw points there when you are just trying to get to the next tier.  Moving on, I’m not a big fan of Spell Warding either, seems like weak sauce…  I don’t have any hard facts but I think I take a lot more melee damage than spell damage.  I can see it being a good PvP talent though, so you can consider it if you do PvP.  5/5 in Divine Fury, .5 secs won’t seem like a lot, but add it up and it’ll be substantial.  Next Tier: 1/1 Holy Nova, just because it’s fun!  Seriously, every little bit can help in AOE pulls, espcially if you only have one AOE class in your group.  It’s also the only group heal you get before Prayer of Healing at level 30.  Plus, no threat = good in my book.  3/3 Blessed Recovery.  This doesn’t seem like much, but I’ll take every little bit when soloing as a Holy Priest.  You could also go 3/3 in Inspiration, but at these low levels I don’t think it’s worth it.  Since it’s a percentage boost, your tank probably isn’t stacking enough armor yet to make the boost terribly useful. The last point for this Tier, put wherever you want, Holy Specalization, Spell Warding, or Inspiration.  This one is just back fill, take what you like.  Next take 2/2 in Searing Light.  Even though you are going Holy because you want to heal, you will be soloing at least some of the time, why not make it a little easier.  I’m going to recomend you stop here and move over to the Disc Tree to get some mana efficency.  5/5 in wand specialization.  Even though you don’t have Spirit Tap, it’s still a good idea to finish with a wand to get a little time OFSR for mana regen.  Next 3/3 Imp PW:S and 2/2 Martyrdom.  This one is nice, since like I said earlier, you will be soloing at least a little and the immunity to interruption is nice.  Next is 1/1 Inner Focus.  Know it, Love it, Use it every time the cooldown is up!  3/3 Meditation… need say more?

That my dear friends brings us to level 40!  Like I said earlier, you could go get the Disc Talents earlier than I recomend, but I think they’re most beneficial where I’ve put them.  Now that you are 40, should you so desire, you could go respec 0/31/0 and get Lightwell, but I think that one is best reserved for later levels.  I would go a little farther in Disc, get Imp PW:F and DS if you want to go that far then go back to Holy.

These are all my opinions, feel free to disagree with me… as Kirk said in his article “take this with the appropriately sized salt shaker for your taste, and go play.”

The  moral of the story is:

• do what makes you happy, choose your talent points to accentuate the areas you like most about your character.

Tune in next week for:

•  Maybe Guild Management, or maybe some more about Leveling Your Priest…  must ponder…

*** For 10 SuperCoolPoints  “If DaVinci were alive today, he’d be eating microwave sushi, naked, in the backseat of a Cadillac with the both of us.”  Name that Movie!

Happy Birthday To Me!!

Yesterday was my birthday!!  I had a great birthday, my husband I have season tickets to University of Texas football.  Yesterday was cake, but the game was fun.  The Rice band showed up at least!  Anywhoo, my birthday present from my hubby was a new computer.  I am the proud new owner of an iMac.  He got me the big one, 24′ widescreen.  It’s a thing of beauty!!  The only downside is that I now have to reload all my addons and macros.  It’s probably a good thing, I’ll make sure that I have the newest versions of my addons and clean a few things up.  Hope all of you out there in cyberland had a good weekend too!

Soloing as a HealPriest

A little background for those who don’t know.  I’ve been a Holy Priest since about level 60.  I run a lot of instnaces with my friends and I decided that I wanted to make it easier since we did so much of it.  Made questing and soloing a lot harder, but I did most of my leveling in instances anyway.  I’ve been raid specced (see article here about my spec) for a couple of weeks now… it got even harder to kill things on my own.  The obvious answer to the problem of soling as a Holy Priest (or Holy Pally, or Prot Pally, or Prot Warrior, or Resto Druid… you get the idea, we all have a tough time of it) is don’t do it.  Buddy up with a Warlock, he Life-Taps, you heal him and you dont’ really have to stop.  If you don’t have a pet Warlock in your pocket, have another 70 to do your farming for you (*snort* those of us that only have one 70 will get right on that!) but that only works for farming… can’t have someone else quest for you.  Here’s some tricks that I use for farming and questing as a Holy Priest.

Most important is to have a DPS set of gear.  Since I have tailoring (even if you don’t have tailoring, these pieces are BOE so you can have them made for you)  I use the Imbued NW and a few pieces from the NW set.  I don’t think it’s all that important what the pieces are, just not your healing gear.  All the good healing gear is +heal only.  Most of the damage gear has both.  My +dmg is about 83 in my healing gear (and I think that’s from DS anyway).

Edit: As of Patch 2.3 this won’t be the case.  Supposedly all healing gear will now have aprox 1/3 of their healing in damage.  You’ll have to do some math and figure out if that 1/3 of your healing will be more than what your DPS gear has.  I have about 1400 +Heal from gear alone (remember you can’t count enchants, gems or buffs for this) and that gives me about 460 spell damage.  My Damage gear has about 650 spell damage.  For me it won’t be viable to use my healing gear for a DPS set until my + heal is at about 1950, presuming that I don’t pick up anything new for my DPS set.  The other thing to note is that healing gear that good is going to have really high repair bills.  You might want to use a different set of gear just to make repair bills cheaper.

Questing

First is a simple thing.  Pull with your longest cast spell.  If you can get those long casts of with out the mob hitting you it makes life easier.  My typical spell rotation is Holy Fire, SW:P, Shield, Starshards, then finish as appripoate (for high level mobs, I need a Mind Blast then SW:D, for lower level mobs I can SW:D after Starshards.  As a side note, I’m not very careful about my SW:D timing.  Without the +Dmg of a SPriest it doesn’t hit for all that much, but it is instant.  If the mob is still alive after SW:D I just wand until it’s dead.  It really doesn’t hurt all that much if it doesn’t kill the mob.)  I used my SWStats  and did some expirementing and found that my most mana efficent spells are Holy Fire and Starshards, so I try to utilize those the most. 

Next are some common sense things, but worth saying.  Pull carefully.  Without Mind Flay, fear juggling is dificult so taking down 2 or 3 mobs at the same time is mostly out of the question.  Watch for pats, and try to pull one at a time.  Don’t be afraid to run, but do it inteligently.  If you have to run, be sure your not running into another set of mobs, you thought the first one was going to kill you so 3 more definatley will.  Put up a shield and a Renew while your running so hopefully you can make it until he leaves you alone.  Fear carefully.  Make sure you have an open area to fear into, and if you don’t be aware that you’ll probably have more bearing down on you shortly.  Lastly, make sure the quest is worth your time.  Is there a reward you want?  Is the cash good?  Do you need the rep?  Take all of these things into consideration before you spend a long time on a pain-in-the-butt quest that doesn’t give much in the way of rewards. 

Farming

Most of the things I said about questing apply here too.  Pull carefully, don’t be afraid to run, fear carefully, and make sure it’s worth your time.  This last one has a different meaning for farming though.  Make sure it’s worth your time.  If you have a hard time farming for motes of fire (like I do, for example) you might try to find something else easier to farm and sell it.  Turn the cash around and buy the stuff that’s really hard to farm.  A rogue friend of mine does this all the time.  Cobra Scales are fairly easy for him to get, but Primal Air is hard since they are immune to poisins (I may have those wrong, but you get the idea).  He farms one and buys the other.  The last tip I have for farming is this: try to find a lower level mob that drops the same stuff.  Most of the things you farm for will have a lower level mob that drops it at a lower rate.  If it takes you forever to kill the higher level mob your item/hour rate will drop and it’ll probably net you more to kill the easier mob with the lower drop rate. 

The moral of the story is:

• When you’re gimpy and squishy you have to use your abilities wisley
• Do a little research to make things easier for you

Tune in next week for:

• Not sure yet… I’ll have to see what moves me in the next few days 🙂

One more try…  this one should be easy espcially if you have kids  “I shall call him squishy, and he shall be mine, and he shall be my squishy.”  10 SuperCoolPoints

Priesty’s Little Helpers

Today, my friends, I’d like to introduce you to some of the addons that are near and dear to my heart. There are some people out there who dislike the use of addons and think it makes the game too easy… I am not one of those people! I’ll take anything that has a clean interface, lots of options to suit my ever changing moods and doesn’t clutter up my screen too badly. I’m not actually going to link these addons, there are several sites that will provide the download and I don’t want to advocate one over the other and I know that some work for me and others don’t… go Google the name and you’ll find it. Here we go:

• VisualHeal – This one is one of my favorites. It adds a movable bar that shows up whenever you cast a heal. This bar shows your current target’s health and the expected value of the heal (and it seems fairly accurate). The extra bit that is your heal will change color (red>orange>yellow>green) based how much overhealing you will be doing by completing the cast. It will also show the expected value of a fellow’s heal (provided you both have the addon) in a dark green so you can judge if both of you need to complete your casts.
  • Pros: Very simple and clean, only takes up a small amount of screen space and goes away when your not casting a heal, if your groups other healers don’t want to use it, the bar can be turned off so they can’t see it, but it will still show their casts on your screen.
  • Cons: Is always going to be an estimation as there is no predicting a crit, doesn’t work for HOT’s.
• SmartBuff – This one tracks the timers on buffs for yourself and everyone on your party/raid. When the timer reaches a predetermined threshold it will make a noise and/or splash a message on the screen. You can then scroll the mouse wheel, or a click on a movable button to cast the buff. There are MANY settings you can play with to suit your situations as well the ability to save and automatically switch settings on joining a raid/group.
  • Pros: Makes keeping a group/raid buffed easy, keeps buffs with annoyingly short timers (like Inner Fire) up all the time, it will cast group buffs when there are enough players missing the buff or singles if there aren’t enough, tracks reagents remaining in your bags, takes up no screen space unless you decide to use the button instead of mouse wheel.
  • Cons: has LOTS of settings so you have to be careful and make sure it’s doing things the way you want, it does not actually track buffs on other players it remembers the last time you cast them so if you cast manually it will think you need to re-cast before you actually do (you can fix this by leaving it disabled for about 5 mins and re-enabling it so it’ll loose it’s memory)
• Perl – This one is a custom UI.  I could write an entire post about Perl but I’m just going to say I like it.  It replaces the normal party frames with sleek black boxes.  It has some nice options for cast bars, color coding for health bars, etc.  I think this is one of those things you just have to try out.  I’ll put in a screen shot when I get home tonight so you can get an idea of what it looks like.  I didn’t think I was going to like it, but my husband made me try it out and now I love it.

Those are the biggies.  I use a couple of small addons that aren’t really worth mentioning.  Most of those functionalities are available through the big packages (Titan or Cosmos) but those seemed like more trouble than they were worth to get set up.  Another I’ll mention is CTRaidAssist.  I installed it this week to try out with raiding.  The standard raid interface doesn’t show buffs and the debffs are really small and hard to see.  I liked the fact that CTRA showed buffs and debuffs clearly but I found it really hard to use.  When in a raid I do a lot of selecting with my mouse.  I was finding that I had to click in just the right place on the frame to select the target I wanted… that just doesn’t work for me.  And Sun night I couldn’t select the hunter at all, no matter where I clicked.  I’m open for sugestions for raid UI’s since I will be getting rid of CTRA.  What I really want in raid is to be able to see at least my buffs clearly, and have my curable debuffs show up clearly (maybe change the color of the frame so it jumps out at me).  CTRA does both of those things, but sadly I won’t be using it any more.

The moral of the story is:

• Find the things out there to make your gameplay more enjoyable.

Tune in next week for:

• Some thoughts on soloing as a healpriest.

Even though no one got last post’s movie quote, I’m going to give you another… “You don’t understand how serious this is, they killed my dog!”  As always, 10 SuperCoolPoints.

Blah, Blah, Blah

I’m tired of thinking of titles for entries…. hence the not so creative one you see above.  I’ve got a post half finished that I’ll be putting up sometime today. 

We did make it into Kara again last night before the reset.  Got all the way to the Chess Event (for those of you who don’t know, it’s LOT of trash that’s not trivial to get to the Chess Event).  We decided that it wasn’t worth it to go for the Chess Event alone any more, we’ll just do it if we’re in the area.  We did make a try at Shade but only got one shot at him before the respawns.  Nothing interesting came out of the Chess Event so I don’t really remember.  We had 2 pugs last night and had a little snafu over loot.  We didn’t explain our policy and the only DE’er was one of the pugs.  He assumed that we would roll on the Void Crystals… Our policy is for everything green quality and up to go into the guild bank for enchanting mats.  He didn’t make a big deal out of it but I got the impression that he was a little peeved over the issue.  Oh well… live and learn.  We know to make our loot rules clear from the begining next time.  We invited him to apply after the run and he said he’d consider it and sounded like he meant it, so it couldn’t have been too bad in his mind (let me just say, I want that guy… rolling with a Shammy rocks!)

Update

As I said in my last post, my friends and I left our guild and started a new one.  There were 6 of us who left to form the new guild.  We mainly had some issues with how raiding was handled.  We feel that the best players should go and the rest wait until their gear is better, their playstlye is better, or we’re doing good enough in there that we can cary some dead weight.  We also wanted to impliment some kind of DKP system (the previous guild created a loot system based on priority, then when we got in there we just rolled… that’s how I wound up with the T4 Gloves off of Curator before the tank got them)  There were a couple of other issues but suffice it to say that asking the GM to change all these things would have meant asking him to let us take over his guild…  so the logical solution seemed to be to make our own guild.  Needless to say, the GM was not happy about us leaving.  We effectivley ended raiding for them for at least a little while, but I sincerely hope they’re back up and running as soon as possible. 

We got a good start to our little endeavor.  We got a few friends to transfer servers and a few recruits and we went into Kara last night.  We one shotted Attumen, Moroes, Maiden, Curator and downed the Big Bad Wolf in 2 tries.  I got Bands of Indwelling off of Maiden, which was fabulous since to quote Ego, I should have been wraping Fruit-By-The-Foot around my wrists so I could at least have a snack.  It was so smooth in there.  We did great for our first try playing together.  If we’re all available I think we’re going to go try the Chess Event, and maybe Shade or Illhoof tonight before the reset.

I promise to have a real post up today or tomorow.  As you can tell I’ve been very busy.  Here’s a link to our website if anyone is curious.  We threw it together in about 24 hours so it’s not real high quality stuff, but it does the job.

Min Stats for Kara

There is a long story, but I’m going to give the short version here: my friends and I left our guild and started a new one. I’ll give the whole story in another post, but for now I need to pick your collective brains. We’re working on some minimum stats for going into Kara and I’d like to get some input from you guys on stuff we’re not sure about. What we need are

• Druids (all specs)
• Shadow Priests
• Shamans (all specs)
• Pallys (Holy and Prot)
• Rogues

Any thoughts would be appreciated. We’d like ideal and minimum stats where possible (for example, I’d take a priest with 1k healing, but wouldn’t be happy about it, I’d like 1.2k).

Yet another Theme

I’ll decide on something eventually…  I promise.  Nothing is making me, to quote Ego, a happy panda.

Raid healing vs 5-Man healing

With 2 weeks of Kara under my belt, I thought I’d share some of my expirences and observations about the differences of raid and 5-man healing strageties. In our few forays into Kara I’ve been in all 3 of the healing roles we use (I’ll get to that in a minute). We have a very casual guild and we take whoever can go on any given night. We have 4 healers: me and another priest, a resto druid, and a holy pally. I must say that I like the combination of the priest/druid/pally better than 2 priest/other healer set-up. There’s a lot more flexibility with all 3 classes, but any combination can be made to work.

Ok, the 3 roles I mentioned earlier… these are very flexibile and very fluid. Basically heal whoever needs healing, but it’d be chaos if you didn’t have pre-determined targets. The Main Healer is responsible for the Main Tank, Off Healer is responsible for the Off-Tank and Group Healer is responsible for the rest of the group. Like I said, these are fluid roles. If either tank needs some extra heals, the GH adds a couple. There won’t always be a need for an OT, in that case the OH and GH would take a group and focus their efforts on their group. If the group is taking a lot of damage but the MT is topped off, the MH can throw around some HOT’s. I don’t mean these assingments to create tunnel vision, but there has to be some planing.

To me, MH is the most like 5-Man healing.  All heals on one target and throwing HOT’s or PoH when time and mana permit.  It’s fairly straight forward and since there’s 2 other healers you don’t have to think about the rest of the group as much as you do in a 5-Man.  Most fights that I’ve expirenced in Kara (with exceptions like Attumen and the larger trash pulls) don’t require an OT, because of that the OH, in practice, will spend most of his time split between the MT and the group, and I’d like to see them doing their best to conserve mana in case the MH runs out.  GH is the hardest in my opinion, espcially if you don’t have CoH.  While filling that role I usually spend a lot of time wishing that I had it, but alas, I don’t really want to give up Imp DS.  In this role I don’t usually worry about the tanks except to try and keep HOT’s on them (yes, Renew does stack with another priest) and throw the occasional Frisbee to help out with threat generation.  Each of you focuses on your role but you have to keep an eye out in case a fellow healer gets overwhelmed.  There’s a fine line there too, you have to develop trust that your partners will be able to do their job and they have to trust you will do yours.  Like I said earlier, these roles are fluid and flexibile but you have to be organized.

Ok, all that said, I’m going to mention a few generalizations.  The damage comes a lot harder and faster in Kara.  I can say that until I’m blue in the face, and I read it a lot before I went in there… but you can’t understand it until you see it.  You have to be on your game.  You have to be paying attention.  You have to anticipate what’s going to happen next.  You have to know your assignment and what everyone else’s is so you can fill in when they die.  It’s HARD!  The flip side: there is no better feeling in the game when you down a raid boss for the first time.  There’s just nothing else quite like it.  Heroics give you a feeling for what it will be like, the incomming DPS is comparable, and most of the Heroic bosses have quirks like the Kara bosses do (there aren’t really any tank-n-spank fights in Kara, they all do wierd stuff) but Kara fights are longer.  Management of your mana and dancing the 5 second waltz become more important so you can keep going to up to 10 mins. 

As I said before, I can say all this stuff but it’s mostly meaningless until you get in there.  Be prepared with 2-3 times the consumables you would take on a normal instnace run (see my article on pots for instancing, also I take a stack of Golden Fishsticks, and at least 10 mana pots, a stack of Mana Oil, 60 Sacred Candles if I’m the only priest, 40 if there’s another, and make sure you have cash for repair, my record is 14g but I’m sure it can get even higher than that), be ready to get kicked in the head a few times while you get used to the speed of Kara, and be sure to have fun.

The moral of the story is:

1. Stay organized, know your healing assignemnts but be ready to fill in gaps.
2. Know the fights so you can heal extra when needed and lay off to regen when possible
3. Be prepared, it’s even more important in Raids than 5-Mans

Tune in next week for:

• Probably some thoughts on Guild management, but we’ll have to see what’s on my mind later on this week.

***  “I’m disgusted and repulsed… and I can’t look away”  name that movie for 10 SuperCoolPoints  ***