Telluric Currents and healers doing damage - wut ?

In one of my first posts I talked a bit about "healers doing damage" and how I could see some interesting uses for Telluric Currents, and that was back in the beginning of Cataclysm, but since I changed to a holy paladin just around the time my guild started to progress on hard modes I didn't really get to examine the usages of this spell. However, I am now back playing restoration shaman full-time now and while my guild is slowly progressing through Firelands, I want to give my point of view on Telluric Currents for what encounters it will be useful, and not downright dumb to take the talents. 

This is from my experience with the Hard Mode encounters.

Shannox: Hardly any use and because I am healing the person who is getting raped by Rageface I have very little "free time". 

Lord Rhyolith: At first glance it would be a stupid idea to spec into TC for this encounter because of the damage reduction, and when the damage reduction is reduced you end in a DPS / Healing race. However, you can get quite a lot of the talent if you can communicate with your fellow healers, and here is why: The Spark of Rhyolith (I cannot recall if this is the same on normal, however on HM this does apply) stacks a buff on themselves called "Infernal Rage" and it increases their damage dealt and taken by 10%, and if you can allow yourself to throw in a few Lightning Bolts at +6 stacks you will get quite a lot of mana back. However, I would only suggest this if you got very good communication between the healers. 

Beth'tilac: I am usually upstairs so it is not because I have a lot of time not casting GHW on the tank or CH on the melee crew we got up there, I might add that Riptide is golden there and it just gets better when you get 2-set bonus. However, when we approach phase 2 and she gets down on the ground, perhaps I should add that we run with either 2 or 3 shamans on this fight and it is mainly due to players at our disposal, and we pretty much just keep Riptide in the tank and Healing Rain on CD and then we push as much damage as we can with Fire Elemental and Lightning Bolts / Flame Shock / Lava Burst in order to make the fight as short as possible and thereby less likely for us to wipe. Our first kill was with the three shamans doing between 700.000 to 950.000 damage each which might not seem like a lot, but that is 1500-2000 DPs that we each were able to dish out, and whenever you are progressing on a boss you want to keep your DPs as high as possible, and a shaman in capable of doing so with very little effort and will gain something from it (If you spec into Telluric Currents). 

Alysrazor: Telluric Currents isn't really mandatory because of the "regeneration phase" in which you will be topped off after a few casts, and mana is not really an issue unless your melee plays "HOW MANY BRUSHFIRES CAN I HIT" or "INTERUPT - WUT IS DAT ?". Nonetheless, because of the many targets Hatchling, Meteor and Druids I will strongly recommend to at least try to keep Flame Shock up in the Hatchling and possible Alysrazor whenever she flies by if you got mana for it. 

Baleroc: We are currently progressing and after a 12% wipe the first night I do think that we should be able to kill him with in a raid night, however, it is brutal. Almost constantly spamming GHW to keep people with Tormented up and the tank taking just as much damage (I love whenever our tank dodges / parries the majority of Baleroc's Decimating Blade). This might be after his nerf, however, I will say this - Two restoration shamans is NOT optimal for this encounter, and I cannot say that I have found a use for Telluric Currents here simply because the damage input is so damn high that you cannot just say "All righty guys - I am going to regn." at least not without taking a rather big risk, and penalizing your fellow healers because you had to be a little to aggressive with Healing Surge to get a few more stacks. 

Majordomo Staghelm: I have only had a few wipes on this boss, and haven't really been pass the 70% marker, but with the damage and healing debuff TC might come out quite nifty, but I will make a repost when I know what I am talking about.

Ragnaros: 2-3 Months and you will have an answer ;)

However, to summarize - I do think it is immensely important for healers to squeeze out a little damage if they got mana, and furthermore if it does not jeopardize the tank / themselves or a raid member (DIEEE DKS DIEEEEE), and if you expect a damage dealer to use defensive cool downs / spec into damage reduction talents and optimize spec / gear and gems in order to squeeze out a few more DPs - Then should they not expect you to throw up a Flame Shock, Moonfire, Insect Swarm, Devouring Plague to gain 100 DPs or more ? (Yeah, I know I "forgot" paladins, but they get raped whenever they attempt to do damage with Exorcism)

3/7 Bosses down on HC.

Hard boss is hard, but communication is apparently harder.

So we are slowly progressing through Firelands, and with Lord Rhyolith down within a jiffy of 110+ wipes and a 5 healer tactic, which was because of the fact that we do not have good damage. In fact our kill (When I say our I do mean the guilds since I wasn't present at the kill) with 5 healers was just as long as the majority of guilds who take 6 healers - Now I wonder if that is a DPS problem and what obstackles we will hit in the furture (With this DPS I assume we would only use 2 healers for Baleroc). 

So the next natural step in this fast line of progression would be Beth'tilac HC, which so far around 300 guilds have killed and that mean - We are currently around 100 ranks lower than when this expansion started, and when the goal is to jump 100 ranks up we are now looking at a jump of 200 ranks, but I guess is is beyond our reach currently. 

However, Beth ze fun spider which is a cake walk - Oh wait, it isn't when logic is a city in Mother Russia and speed is a french word. Our Beth tank did in the beginning have massive problems with getting "fast" up to Beth, and we need to him to do that because of two reasons 1) The raid is taking shit loads of damage and that stops when she is meleeing and 2) We need as much DPS on her as possible, however, to illustrate the speed of our tank: I stood next to a "line" and waited 4 seconds before I pressed it believeing that "Hey - The tank should be up now ? Oh wait I am dead due to melee ... FML (At that time the tank still hadn't been able to get up). When the tank got "the hang of it" or at least were able to get up faster the next problem arose in that region.
Our resto druid were mindblowingly slow to get up, and didn't really understand the need for her to get up ASAP after the tank (One man healing 4 melee, the tank and yourself is easy peasy ? Yesh ?).  After 25 wipes she is still the slowest and that is despite the DPS who jumps up are waiting longer and longer, but I guess that the "I MUST HEAL HERP DERP" factor is engaged. This was "just" our problems upstairs. 

Downstairs the RL had assigned three rogues to taking care of the Cinderweb Spiderlings inspite inspite of the wast majority of logs on Worldoflogs is either a) Hunters, b) Hunters + Boomkins, c)Hunters+ Frost DK or a few with d) hunters+frost dk and  rogue. Now, I am not saying that it will work for us, however, there is quite a few problems with using rogues. One is the damage which is lower than hunters, and secondly they have to stand far far out, which will require them to be single healed by one healer, who again will have to stand outside the raid (And thereby the raidhealing) during Beth's Venom Rain - Is that good ? 

Now, we do have a few people frankly "Talking out of their arshes" with ideas, and it is very cute and adorable, but it is also a bloody pain in the rectum, so when a person asked "Why aren't we using the frost DK and the hunter on the adds" Well, he wasn't exactly getting a "positive" respons  - On the contrary infact the response was pretty rough and not at all constructive.

In the end Beth'tilac got bashed to the ground, and it is perhaps the "best" fight for a restoration shaman since our mastery really shines in p2.

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.