A while into patch 4.2 and Firelands

While being on a vacation in Norway (Did I just go on vacation during new and exciting content? – Yes), I’ve pretty much been without an internet connection for four days (Yes, it was tough and I am making up for it as  you read this) 

So my guild and I “finally” killed Shannox as somewhat mediocre 300ish or something, which I must admit was a bit disappointing since I did think that we had to skills to at very least be able to hit the kill within the first day, and then steady approach a rank 120-150, however, that didn’t happen, but then again let us blame that US guilds did have a day more (A lousy excuse, but hey stupid Americanos !) 

We practiced a bit on Lord Rhyolit, which didn’t real reveal anything beside we didn’t understand a lot of the abilities and how to counter them, however, to make matters worse the melee DPS (Who is quite good at calling out do x or y, and whom got the assignment to DPS the legs was after 5 wipes continuingly being asked by an officer “Why didn’t you do X when you did Y” and he summed it up with a fucking retarded comment “You have to think 20 seconds ahead, but you cannot miss the volcano which just pops up and you got  ½ second to counter” and it is cute to give “Thumbs up” or help, but that was just down right useless comments which made me want to mute VT and made the DPS, whom I sits and rambles on with during raids, being close to what he was dealing with. an Erupting Volcano. So I said in the most grown up and neutral voice “Why don’t you then call it?” which gave the reply “Is it now everyone against me?” which is just fucking sad that people look at it that way. You give criticism and it is not even constructive, and when you are asked to do it instead because you are obviously pointing out what the other person is doing wrong to all the 23 others and you simply goes into “defensive stance”… I mean seriously, if you cannot yourself handle criticism then do not fucking give it… 

However, I have heard rumors of that the next couple of wipes were disastrous due to the volcanoes (And by that I mean the damage on the legs) were handled and called poorly with mr. “I KNOW WHAT YOU DO WRONG NOW LISTEN TO ME FOR 5 MINUTES EVERY WIPE DESPITE IT ISN’T ALWAYS VULCANOES BUT MORE PEOPLE ARE BEING FATTER THAN THE BOSS”

While saying this I did suddenly remember that over the last couple of months people seems to have been unable to move or avoid damage, which they vividly could see coming and pretty much just being a fat ass “DWARMAGE DERP DERP”.

When talking DERP it is not possible not to look at the various topics and posts on mmo-champion – Oh boy …

First I read through about 4 pages with people pretty much stating “Restoration shamans is broken and the worst healing class, and we got a useless CD”. Okay, this is almost every day B#LL S#IT, however, hardly anyone seemed to look at the fact that whenever gathered there is NO ONE, who can touch a resto shaman, and from my point of view “Spirit Link Totem” is possible the best CD due to the fact that it transfers HP around, which means that the possibility that you lose a player is being a lot lower, and it is a 10% dmg Reduction, and it pretty much also boosts the other healers HPs by reducing “Overhealing” to almost nil. No, go and tell me that it is crap cooldown you ignorant idiots …

A person argued with the fact that the guild “Inner Sanctum” (Who I got nothing but respect for) well, they used 2 paladins and two disc priests to down Baleroc, and no shamans and thereby the logic would be that shamans sucked. Ehm, wut ? Disc priests is AMAZING for tank healing currently due to the fact that a lot of bosses has a 100k+ hitting ability which is not avoidable, but during this they can hit with their melee attack and pretty much bringing 200.000 damage to a tank within 1½ second, and in that scenario the disc priest shines.  PW:S is a 30-40.000 absorb and with GH spam they should have another shield of 20-30k more on them while the disc priest is able to push out just as much healing as any other class which solely focus on tank healing. And they got the best single target cooldown ingame – Pain Suppression! 

Well, back to the post, but then the poster ignores the fact that there were no restoration druids either or holy priests ? Are they underpowered as well ? Furthermore, you make the assumption based on the log, and now what they were doing. Would it possible also have been to having 2 x Power Infusions to boost raiders damage? Is their restoration shamans and druids at the same skill level as the others ? There is made an assumption, while not looking at the greater picture, but hey it is MMO-champion so what can you expect. 

Another post I stumbled upon was the “Telluic Current” thread, where I read that the majority of posters hardly see anymore than ZG / ZA and they were not having mana problems so they saw TC as a useless talent. Another poster even typed something along the lines “ I am a healing so I only use healing spells even in spite of it being utterly and fully wasted”,. Honestly ? Idiot, throw a LB instead of useless overhealing who gives a shit if you specced into TC ? It is your attitude which is completely crap. When that is being said I will agree on, beside TC is an amazing regn. tool if you know your fellow healers, it is quite different from fight to fight if you got time to throw a few LBs, however, I still maintain the view that you should pretty much keep Flame Shock on the target, and throw in a few Lava Bursts and possible keep up your Searing Totem (Or putting down Fire Elemtental) to help during progression, but hey that is just my Point of view, and I do play with several people who rather push out overhealing that use their damage abilities, and that is just plain stupid because it is = wasted mana and wasted time.

Firelands ! New Content ! Horray !

25 eager raiders looking forward to new content as well as shiney shinies, and we decide to go for Beth'tilac which we take down in our second attempt, and it would have been the first if our tank had remembered a very, very important thing “Is my healers with me or did I just leap and charge forward ?” Yes, a typical “ME TONK, ME TAKE BOSS – TONK TONK !!”. But Beth'tilac went down and I must admit it is not really that much of an interesting fight, however, this is normal’s and let us see what hard modes will bring.

The second boss which we attempted was Shannox who went down in the third attempt with one of our attempts being a ninja pull. And from Shannow we moved on to Lord Rhyolith, who died in the 5th pull and two of those were ninja pulls because people simply were too eager.

These three bosses were relatively easy, but I am also aware that due to the fact that the majority of our gear is +ilvl 372 it does make it quite a lot easier and more forgiving in regards to mistakes, however, this next boss is not forgiving and is a step up the difficulty ladder. We went for Alysrazor, and after 10 wipes we called the raid due to the time had reached 23.15.

We went back the day after and started out with Alysrazor, and after 5 wipes the bird stopped flying, and it was a decent kill which took us  10.30 to pull off. However, it did show the poor, disastrous and seemingly none excising thing called “Move without taking damage” people got hit by tornadoes like if it increased their DPS and they were aiming for it, and healers were no better infact our druids seemed to have rooted, however, it went down but it did again demonstrate the sheer incapability for people to avoid damage. And furthermore it revealed a major theme in our healers idea of playing, which was that it would be better to throw out overhealing than throwing a dot or two or even direct damage towards the boss, and a common excuse was “It is so little what does it even matter?” . Sure, it might not seem like a lot from 1 person, but do you have 4-6 people doing it then it will become a decent chunk of damage, and how many times can you recall that you wiped on 300k or less thinking a few more crits and would have killed it *hint* healers do fucking damage when you got time and mana for it*.

We turned towards Baleroc, and despite us just healing randomly we got him down in the 5^th attempt, and it is a boss which I will look forward to on heroic.

Majordomo Staghelm was a boss which we thought to be another step up, but after 5 pulls he died and we were then 6/7 with only Ragnaros left. But again we stopped due to the clock had reached 23.15. ´

At Sunday we visited Ragnaros, which went great for a starter. Our guildleader had birthday so he wasn’t attending, however, it didn’t occur to our officers that it might happen or that any of them should read up on the tactics. And that meant that we stood literally for 45minuttes doing nothing while one of the attempted to find something out, and may I point out that we had tactics and videos posted on our forums, however, I am not to judged (Reading is hard YO?). After this unexpected afk time the officer who took over started to assign things, and when I say things I do mean things. Names on abilities were none existing, abilities were incorrectly understood and I was about to explode due to the level of incompetence. After a few wipes and more wrong information, and a bunch of people coming up with “ideas”, I say ideas when I should say stupid fucking suggestions, on stuff that they “found out” and suggested we changed or how to deal with it? I am not saying that we got a full tactic on the forum and all the abilities explained on forum and in the Journal, which Blizzard have implemented. So basically I was in a bad mood because of people’s lack of preparation while expecting an easy kill. However, we didn’t kill Ragnaros we wiped miserably many times, and may I add “HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET HITTED BY LAVA WALL CONSTANTLY?”. This was a problem, but so was handling adds and I do mean all adds, and then to add we got tanks dying due to our druids which we had assigned to tank healing pretty much went back to WOLTK style – hot hot hot, a damn a 70k hit on the tank nevermind the hots will be sufficient… Learn to fucking play your classes it isn’t rocket science.

We went in the day after and took Ragnaros after 21 wipes, but I am pretty disappointed with the way people handle new boss encounters and neglect the use of defensive cooldowns, health stone and doesn’t care to read the least on an encounter or just watch a video on youtube. But hey – I am not to judge, I know raiding is hard – Sometimes you have to do stuff. 

Last depressing raids before patch 4.2

Last raid before patc h 4.2 and Firelands, and a new main character.

Yes, Firelands will be here tomorrow and I since I just jumped back to my restoration shaman (On which my gear is brilliant – or not) and was in the raid with 2/5 in BoT cleared and BWD cleared, so 5 bosses that should be a piece of cake with two raid days left and everyone geared to up over their ears ? Meh, think again. 

Again I had to kite adds on Conclave, and for some reason I still cannot figure out (Okay, I was perhaps a bit hung over) I had immense problems with pickup up the adds the usual way, and if that wasn’t enough they spawned like crap almost every time – Yey. We finally managed to take it down and I reclogged to my restoration shaman for Al’Akir. I should perhaps add that we the last couple of weeks more or less has one or two shotted Al’Akir, however, for some apparent reason it would seem that a majority of our raiders felt like they would miss tornadoes, lightning and the general fun of the encounter – So they decided to play like a bunch of retards on meth and when we finally managed to kill Al’akir, well then we had spend almost 3 hours on two bosses which we usually spend a maximum of one on. So we called the raid and decided that the last three could wait a day, and hopefully people would have found their focus, glasses and runned out of drugs. 

So, did they find their focus ?

There is your answer:

 It was one of the worst raids I have experienced in this expansion, and we started on Council. Let me give you brief explanation – Phase one wasn’t really a big problem, except we had a few tank deaths due to we putted our resto druid on the tank (Rej spam on the raid is just gr8888 only 50% OH), however, if the druid threw any HTs it wasn’t during Ignacious’ Flamebreath and pretty much everyone else had to try to emergency heal the tank. Okay, we ended in phase two  which is pretty simple: grab tornado, grab vortex rinse and repeat and run away with Lightning Rod and kite the Frost Orb into the fire. It isn’t complicated and we even have our raidleader announcing what debuff to take, however, it is seemingly an impossible task for a bunch of our raids, sadly. We ended up taking it on normal – Hard boss is hard, sometimes you have to do something else than tunnel. 

We took Cho’gall after a few wipes due to people forgetting (Because it is only the 100^th time?) that they have to interrupt and kill the fucking Fire Elemental, horray ! He went down and we “only” had the retard check aka. Sinestra left.

Sinestra – I just love dispelling just as much as kiting adds, however, someone has to do it and atleast dispelling Wreck wasn’t the issue. The issue was people pulling agro on Sinestra in phase one, pulling agro on whelps (When they shouldn’t be on them) and tanks dying to Cutters with +50 stacks of Twillight Spit on them. A fucking brilliant run turned better, oh wait – It didn’t ! And this has made me wonder, how hard is the game currently ? Or phrased another way, How big of a bunch of retards am I raiding with? Only Firelands will show, but if this continues I foresee a grim, grim future.

Closing in on patch 4.2

With the upcomming patch 4.2 and the new and interesting content known as Firelands will be flung in our heads ,ready or not, on the 29^th of June (Yes, Europe !!). Most people tend to focus on what new flashy loot will be available for them and their class along with the changes in their classes, which can be for the better or the worse.
I did the same in regards to holy paladins, and lets take a brief  look at the changes to holy paladins.

·         Our mastery gets “reworked” and can now stack, but in spite of this it is still a situational stat at best, and since it only affects our direct heals it isn’t that great since, and I can only speak for myself and the paladins in my guild, but we tend to balance our healing around beacon and beacon swapping. It can now stack, but unless you play like a retard, OR there is some insane attack that we would be able to mitigate by stacking a shield like idiots – Unless that is the case I hardly see any change to our mastery.

·         Holy Radience gets it CD lowered which always is nice – This, makes us more viable for raidhealing, which apparently is quite important to some holy paladins, and I must admit I do welcome it because I usually want to spam it more than I can currently.

·         WoG becomes more potent, however, It is still sub par compared to LoD when we talk 25man content, but I guess it will be a nice boost to 10man paladins.

·         Divine Protection will now grant the same speed buff as HR, and I guess a lot will argue “this is only for PVP”, and sure it Is possible done to make paladins more viable in PVP, but it is sure a very, very and I stretch this – VERY nice feature, which if used wisely will grant you the ability to avoid some damage. And as a bonus you will look like you do care about surviving and using your defensive cooldown , which is a thing I still think people tend to ignore the importance of.

And in regards to gear I had gathered close to BiS (Stupid Fing trinkets – this is the 2^nd expansion where my trinkets just seems to have vanished from the game), however, at the brink of new content and while being prepared for it am I going to reroll, again. Or I guess it is more of a “back roll” to the character I changed to in order to help out the guild in the beginning of Cataclysm – my shaman.

It wasn’t an easy call, however, there is several reasons:

·         When playing in a Danish guild (And I am fairly sure it is the same thing in every guild where you only got one nationality) the amount of people isn’t that big, and this affects the numbers of “useful” classes which will apply to your guild. Our case was that an old paladin, who have played with us for a few years and then took a break due to IRL stuff, decided to reapply to the guild. So what do you do? Four paladins will undoubtedly be one too many, and you aren’t really in a position to throw away good applications and especially when you know a person is a quite good player, I mean , that is just stupid. So one way to resolve this was to say: nay – you quitted on us before, however, since the manner of his leaving was presented in advance giving us time to replace him, and since he wishes to play with us again (yeah, it must because of the awesome jokes I crack on VT and all that other stuff) it does also show a great deal of loyalty. Loyalty is a thing which is too rarely seen, and I do think that when you got loyal players who come back that they should be given a chance. So I suggested that I “rererolled” to my shaman, however, this being a week before Firelands and my shaman at the same gear level that I left him when I rolled pwaladin, and the paladin in somewhat half heroic gear it isn’t the start of the content I had hoped for. However, as it is said numerous times and therefore must be correct: Skills > gear.
Furthermore, this movement of persons will also ensure that we are “full” on healers, and should thereby be standing better due to not being forced to run suboptimal setups as we did before with 4 holy paladins. It worked, but it did require some coordination and I must admit we did have some quite good paladins.

·         I just realized that I forgot to hit the damn “Enter” and thereby pretty much throwing everything in to one single paragraph.

·         BUT, we will now look at Firelands with two restoration druids, three paladins, two priests and three shamans which I think is a quite decent  setup.

·         Furthermore, I did talk about the difference in gear level, but then again I doubt that people want to change their ilvl 372 just to get a few +points over a person who runs around with ilvl 359. And I guess it will be healthy for me to try to be in the lower end of the healing meter (Yes, aren’t we all some small horny bitches who wants to be able to point at the meters and say “Look, Look at my healing done I must be the best healer in the WOOOOORLD, or a massive cock who snipe heals, but I choose option number #1)

However, the more I think about it the more I am looking forward to playing my shaman again at a higher level than our occasional alt run whenever I am bored.
And one thing that I do think is quite unique for a shaman is the ability to throw a HR and then spam Lightning Bolts in order to maximize the damage whenever being close to a first kill, and as I have stated in a few posts – A few of our first kills would simply not have been possible if our healers hadn’t thrown out between 3-5 million damage. Furthermore, I get around a thing which I have been thinking on and that is the inadequate Judgement, and the none excisting scaling with the mana return, and it is a thing which will rape paladins in the butt at one point if the issue does not get addressed. It is a great tool and depending on the fight I did regn. between 100.000 – 150.000 pr. Fight due to Judgement, but it is a decent amount now, but when we get further into the expansion it will be harder to justify the usage of a GCD to regain that amount of mana if you are running around with 200k mana (It will take a while, but I hope you understand what I am trying to say), and furthermore you are not capable of using your Judgement as you wish during progression and when being slightly undergeared – whereas a druid uses one GCD with innervate and priests one with Shadow Fiend, but yes shamans is in the same business as us and has to spec into Telluic Currents and with a cast of everything between 1,2 and 2 sec casttime, depending on your haste level, they do seem to be worse off than paladins, but since that their mana “gain” scales with the damage it will therefore scale with gear which makes it more and more precious as you get better and better gear.

Oh well, I guess that was enough whine – but I do think it is an issue that needs to be addressed and I believe it was a paladin from Method (Yes, those something who were worse than the Finnish) who addressed it on the official forums under Healing, but I seem to be unable to find the thread, but if I will I will edit it in because he did say some quite interesting things.

Here is the link, and the post is written by Shakaroz from Method Link to post

That will be all for now, and I guess with a new class and new content I will making a few posts which will deal with me whining about the content is too hard or my class is underpowered or any other excuse I can find to explain my miserable playing.

While add it I will take the liberty to give a little advertisement, in case you play a shaman please read on and if not do it anyway you might want to do so, for a guy who plays a restoration shaman and I must admit that when I played my own shaman back when normals were hard I did agree with the majority of what he had to say, and I think he has some very nice observations, however, here is the link: www.lifeingroup5.com