Damage Taken - Ranting

We are now a little more than three months into the newest expansion to World of Warcraft and much has changed since Vanilla, The Burning Crusade and most recently and most dramatically since Wrath of the Lich King. Good or bad - It is hard to say, but as some would say "Change is bad" and when you take your daily heroic or attempt to pug a few bosses in "Blackwing Descent" or "Bastion of Twillight" it does become quite clear that quite a bit amount of players still believe that everything is like WOLTK where a healer could, if he was decent, was able to outheal most damage. This is no longer the case and you can be a brilliant healer and you will not be able to "outplay" mistakes because Cataclysm is much less forgiving if you have a hard time to avoid fire, which does make you wonder - How do some people survive traffic?

I thought that this "problem" was mostly encountered in pugs and with randoms, but after 3 days of wipes on Nefarian HC I can only conclude that it is sadly also the case in my guild. Nefarian on heroic has not changed that much I am quite surprised that it is relative "easy" compared to most BoT heroics, but as almost every heroic - If one person fucks up the remaining 24 people will get punished. 

This leads me back to the point I am trying to make and the issue I want to address which I firmly believe that a big majority of healers thinks the same of (Yes, I said it healer - I have abandoned the way of "I WIN RECOUNT, LOLOLOL") and that is "DAMAGE TAKEN". Due to the changes to healing and the way encounters have been changed, a thing which hardly was any concerns than the tanks, has become 25 peoples problem. If you raid with a guild you will most likely have noticed one or two people dying a lot more than other people and why is that ? That is mostly because they focus on Recount or Skada instead of doing their job which is - To stay alive and do as much damage as possible. These people are stuck in the mentality "I STAND IN FIRE, OUTHEAL FIRE" instead of thinking "Uhm, This fire hurts perhaps I should move the 5 yards to the left in order to avoid it, or I could use my defensive cooldown (Anti-magic shell, Mage Ward, Nether Ward, Divine Protection, Divine Shield, Barkskin, Feint and the list goes on), it might lower my DPS by 50, but I will survive and thereby do 1.mio more damage. What to pick this is a hard choice".

There is no other way around this than to either /w to the people that they need to avoid damage and use their defensive cooldowns and if that doesn't work you can either yell it on Ventrilo or Teamspeak, but if nothing changes you are left with only a few possibilities a) Tell the raidleader / Guild Master that this person needs to step it up, b) IF you are the raidleader - Replace him, he might do 20k DPS, but what good is that if he almost requires a dedicated healer and a Combat Resurrection every time? This might also serve as a "warning" to people ignoring the importance of (not being Earnest), but reduce the damage taken by as much as possible. c) Tell your fellow healers to let him die until he gets the point.

And back to my personal experience on Nefarian HC. 

Phase1:  There should hardly be anyone dying in that phase, however, for three days we have used at least one CR in this phase due to two things. 1) People being morons in regards to their AoE spells and the timing with Mind Controls (E.g mages with 150 stacks using Flame Orb a second before Nefarian casts Dominate Mind - That is just retarded) and 2) People being so focused on getting the magic 150 stacks that they a) Forget to look at their HP bar as to counter if another person fucks up, however, I am aware that it is unavoidable to remove all damage on those, but a lot is avoidable just by people playing smart by not using their AoE spells while people are MCed. And b) People who have been MCed either releases infront of Nefarian and thereby getting cleaved or taking a breath and the winner is - People who are MCed removes the MC 1-2 seconds before Electorcute and that is just mind-blowingly stupid.

In phase two I have learned one thing - Interrupting is apparently incredible difficult and complex and that people tend not to use their defensive CDs despite them being at 10% HP and in the lava with Explosive Cinders. And with phase 3 quite a like phase1 you just run out of CRs before Nefarian is on 50% HP.

Now why don't we just not heal harder? 1) Mana is a limited resource and on heroics you DO need it for the tanks as they take very big hits. 2) To put it in perspective - Let us look at a warlocks Nether Ward. It is a 30 sec CD which absorbs +10.000 damage. With the current healing model 10.000 healing is for a holy paladin a Holy Light with a cast time of 3 seconds which when you hit hardmodes will be around 2 seconds give or take. And it costs roughly 2k mana - Now with 25 people taking damage and requires healing why wouldn't you use it to help the healers ? On Electrocute why wouldn't you use Barkskin, Divine Protection in order to reduce the damage you take? What is quite interesting is that everyone says "Paragon is the worlds best!!!!!111!! I am a fanboi!1!!1!", but if you e.g. look on World of Logs you rarely see a person from Paragon dominate rankings, but why is this? This is because they prioritize survivability over damage (E-peeeeen) which people forget and sadly many people think - "I am #1 on recount" or "I made a top3 WoL record" I must be one of the worlds best !1111
Gratz, however making a WoL record is a team effort and GJ on doing a lot of damage, but if you look on damage taken and find the person being 3rd only surpassed by the two tanks - Is he still then a good player? No, a good player will be able to sustain high DPS while keeping his damage taken at a minimum

To take another fights as an example - Valiona & Theralion in BoT on heroic. It is a very, very intense fight as a healer and it requires people to do their best in order to avoid damage and there is an attack which you can avoid a large part of the time "Twillight Blast", however looking at the log from our latest kill I can see that there is 300k damage difference on the melee who has taken the most damage to it and the melee who has taken the least. If we look at ranged / healers we see that there is 250k damage difference between them. I know not all damage is avoidable and since we use heroism in phase one it is stupid to move from it during heroism since it is easily outhealed in that phase. However, that does not explain that major difference and the only thing that explains it is that people are too focused on doing DiPis to notice anything else.

To look at the log from another POV - It is an 8minute fight and Nether Ward is a 30 second CD and we used 3 warlocks - 9 Nether Wards were used. I am not saying that it should be used on CD, but when gathering on Blackout and you are running anyway or in phase two with fires in the room - Just fucking use it. Divine Protection is even worse - 4 paladins only two used it.

Do you expect the tank to use cooldowns ? Why ? Because he takes damage ! Do you yourself use your cooldowns ? Why not ? 

And at that I will end my rant.

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Long time and less cake.

Cake, phawt lewt and holy paladins after patch 4.0.6.

I rolled to holy paladin after taking our first HM boss, Halfus, however this had nothing to do with the state of restoration shamans. What made me reroll is that I am playing in a 100% Danish guild and therefore the amount of applications is quite limited and the amount of decent application with people who seem to have potential is even smaller. So when my guild who at that time had two holy paladins and three restoration shamans received a restoration shaman application from what seemed to be a decent player I offered to reroll to the holy paladin I just leveled out of boredom a few weeks earlier. Because four restoration shamans isn’t exactly a great cocktail and holy paladins was just plain OP at that current stage along with Aura Mastery, Hand of Sacrifice and shit loads of “I DO MOAR HEALING” stuff. 

I did Halfus on HC with my shaman and had soon rerolled and was fooling around as OP holy paladin. My guild is currently 7/13 HC and I have been presented on every kill and I must admit that I do feel that I more useful as a paladin instead of a shaman, not that shamans was/is in a bad state, in my opinion the only class I feel is redundant is restoration druids on HCs since the burst damage isn’t “HoT” friendly and you usually have to get people above 95% Hp and the druids hots cannot cope with that amount of healing required leaving their hots to heal the last 5% which would be topped off by shadow priests VEB or Healing Stream totems . Shamans do have a massive “on demand” burst with HR + CH spam where it is only surpassed by holy priests.

Though, back to holy paladin who I played a little back in Naxx, Ulduar, ToTC and ICC where it was beacon and HL spam. One may argue that it haven’t changed a lot, but it sure have Holy Power is an amazing tool – Beacon is still very, very strong and at the beginning of the content mana wasn’t an issue as it was for a lot of other healers, but over all I am quite pleased with holy paladins at their current state (yes, even after patch 4.0.6 and the nerf bat). Despite “Protector of the Innocent” being nerfed by roughly 50% it is still a very strong talent and the only difference is that I cannot “ignore” all incoming damage, but I now have to move from some things, but that is hardly an issue. The 10% increased mana isn’t really an issue either since I found myself hardly ever stop casting a DL despite the tank was topped of, but I do monitor that more closely now and I perhaps throw a little less Divine Lights and use Holy Light instead. Here I might add that after this “change” I do believe that the tier11 2-setbonus has become decent and I will be trying to get it, however, this is only shoulder (which is BiS at ilvl 372 anyway) and head. 

Why am I so pleased with the holy paladin currently?

Aura Mastery is an incredible tool and before HC Omnitron nerf it was almost required to use an Aura Mastery at Magmatrons flameshit and on Shadow Conductor. Maloriak Hc – Dark phase, Red phase. Chimaron HC below 25%. Atramedes searing flame. Magmaw Lave spew and this is just a few encounters it is an incredible tool, use it !

Hand of Sacrifice is also a quite useful tool and again on HC Omnitron where a person gets Aquiring Target – Hand of Sacrifice on the person in order to prevent him from dying, however, I did get raped when Magmatron and Toxitron was up and one was pulled into the Poison Cloud by Nefarion, but that could have been counterd if I had pressed my win button:
Divine Shield – Amazing, ignore everything e.g. on Halfus while pumping healing out below 50% while the rest of the raid is being stunned and after patch .4.0.6 if you do have problems with the interrupt after you can acuallty make a difference by moving your sexy paladin arsh in to him while bubbled and take the first interrupt with Rebuke.

Divine Favor / Avenging Wrath / Guarding – amazing “Oh shit, massive incoming damage” pew pew “I healz moar”.
Divine Protection is an underrated talent 20% reduced damage or 40% glyphed for one GCD – I cannot see why you wouldn’t want to use it on almost every encounter. The less healing you will require = more healing on the raid = people get topped faster and thereby reducing the chance that someone will die.

Holy Power – Win, hardly anything to say about it WoG or LoD depending on the situation – more win.
Beacon: How can one not love healing a person while healing yourself and the person with beacon – win win win !

Blessing of Freedom may not seem to have much usage in a raid environment, however, Conclave Hc – Freedom on people who stand in frost path = moving faster, less damage and thereby more mana since you have to heal less (I usually save this for the tanks since they can spike quite a lot and the damage you can make him avoid is quite nifty)

Lay on Hands – 100.000 healing at least and glyphed 10% mana back – amazing tool especially when you reach the last “25%” where you are close to OOM and the tanks is dying – BAM topped of and mana back and there goes DL spam !

So  how is it to play a holy paladin? Great fun, a lot of utilities and despite we aren’t guaranteed to top the healing meter anymore (hello mr. disc priest) we are still putting out quite decent healing and the healing we can throw in two tanks is unchallengeable which is why you want to bring holy paladins.

On a small note I do have a few pages of text which I haven’t completed and some of it is outdated due to the recent patch and this is the reason for my low amount of post, zwarry.

Restoration shaman - Starting out in Cataclysm

World of warcraft Cataclysm so far has been quite entertaining leveling wise, I do admit that I never really enjoyed question, but I think some of the quests was quite enjoyable.
Heroics is quite good fun IF you tag along with friends or guildies who you know will know what to do or just thinks "Hey, crowd control might be useful " instead of the WOLTK minded people who go "AOE GO GO " that is doable when you've gather a bit of gear and got a decent tank and healer, but I still prefer as a healer to do some crowd control since I barely have to use any mana then compared to Greater Healing Wave spam when the tank takes on +4 mobs.

But so far I am quite happy with the current state of restoration shamans, and despite we are the "all rounder" I still think that tank healing and raid healing is both places where a restoration shaman is in the very top in both niches.

Since the expansion is quite new and there is +thousand theories on how to play and value stats - sadly quite a lot of those people is people who never will step into a raiding environment  before they are standing in "welfare" epics. I am not saying that my way of doing it is the correct one, but it is working for me, and quite well I must admit.
So stats on gear we have three options mastery, haste and crit and if you can get an item with haste on - then get it haste is your "primary secondary" stat if that makes sense to put it that way. After haste go for crit since crits is always nice, but due to the talents we also gain mana when critting with spells, but it isn't nearly as good as haste. Mastery isn't a bad stat, but your targets will have to be at less than 60% hp in order to start benefitting "enough" from it therefore unless you want to top meters on Chimaeron, but else you will gain more from haste and crit.

Primary stats is intellect and spirit which is on most gear and currently I have a rule of thumb - "Does the item has spirit? If not, reforge it by taking the stats in this order mastery > crit > haste" Spirit will become "less" valuable when you reach a certain level of it due to mana regn becomes less and less of an issue, I am currently on 2400 spirit unbuffed and the only way I go out of mana (oom) is if I use my spells foolishly or having to spam Greater Healing Wave (GWH), but spirit is a very, very good stat only surpassed in my opinion by intellect. This is due to several reasons 1st: higher mana pool which also grants more mana returned from replenishment, 2nd: your spells hits harder, 3rdly you gain some crit.

For gemming it is quite similar: red slots = +40 intellect unless you are a JC and then it is 67 intellect, yellow = 20 haste / 20 intellect not much to say boosts two of the best stats + you gain a socket bonus and it is almost always worth it. Blue = 20 spirit / 20 intellect unless you are freshly dinged you might want to put +40 spirit in, but I would suggest 20 spirit /20 intellect.
Concerning meta gems is there really only one option and that is +54 intellect +2% mana, if people start arguing +54 spirit +3% critical heal just ignore them your critical rating is currently so low that it extra healing on the crit is useless and when it becomes more efficient you will have such an amount of regn that the spirit becomes less valuable than 54 intellect. Again, if this is my opinion everyone is entitled to their own, but just because you read something on a forum does not mean that it is correct.

That will be all for now, I will post how restoration shaman has been so far raiding wise later on.

Small update

I guess an update is appropriate  so here comes.
Here is a picture taken about an hour before the launch:

(Sorry for the bad quality, but it was taken with my mobile phone)















And bam the time was 00.01 and the you were asked to logout in order to get into Cataclysm, but as a massive amount of players were spamming their "Login" myself and I along with thousands had problems logging in a range from 10mins to almost 1½ hour, I got in like 30mins or so after release so I was in the what I would call in the better part of people. since the amount of mobs / items and the respawn timer was horrible and what I was asked to tag along for a dungeon I lost the "advantage" I had while being in "the front". That slowed down my leveling quite a lot and I dinged 18 hours after the release and having played none stop.

So busy, busy quest, kill / collect, turn in rinse and repeat until you look like a madman and bam you are 85. The fastest person in my guild was 12 hours, I was a bit slower, but leveling as elemental was piece of cake.

So ding, ding, ding 85 and the next step was obviously to start gearing myself for heroics and I quickly found a group. in the guild, and we farmed dungeons until we were bored and decided to check out "Vortex Pinnacle" on HC. This was a quite fun instance the first boss was fairly easy and the second boss is just pure fun the first comment when we pulled him was "lol, this is awesome" and we eventually managed to kill the last boss. After this HC I've pretty much farmed HCs and they aren't really that hard except perhaps for Grim Batol we did spend quite some time in there, but eventually we pulled our asses together and cleared it.

The last two days I've been farming HCs getting hc gear along with Justice Point gear, and it is coming along nicely.
Currently I am valuing stats like this: spirit > haste > crit > mastery on items and gemming: red = 40 int, 30 spirit (no one got the "big one yet") yellow = 20 int / 20 haste and it works okayish.

For glyphs I've thrown away Earth Living since it is the least HPs increase from Riptide (which I've found after doing quite some HCs is always my 2nd or even 1st healing spell).

That will be all for now,  too many HCs to farm and stuff to experience.

Getting Cataclysmic !

Cataclysm is so damn close now that it is almost unbearable, but I guess we will have to wait the remaining 30ish hours.
So are YOU ready for Cataclysm? Have you stocked up on flasks, food and pots in order to make the leveling go smoother? Have you capped yourself with Justice Points and Honor points in order to grab some fast upgrades? I have - on two characters and there is a good reason for that, and that is not me being a brainless farmbot, but my guild is currently a bit low on healers, well a bit is an understatement we got 6 healers and one trial , and while we most likely will be progressing with 7 it seems that there quite easily could arise some annoying problems. The problems could be one of the healers being abnormally slow with leveling, another could be one person being unable to raid one day and thus we would not be able to make a proper raid. You might argue that there ought to be some people with a healing off spec, and yes there is people who play hybrid classes, but there is a huge difference between being able to spec healer and then actually play healer to a degree which is satisfying.

So I offered to play my resto shaman in the beginning of this expansion until we had gotten a few more decent healers to bolster our ranks, so I've decided that I will try to cover the beginning of the expansion from a resto PoV as well as mage.

So here goes resto PoV:
I've decided that this properly is the spec that I will be using in the beginning http://wowtal.com/#k=mvVjJ27r.a8t.shaman.Rc6inp some may argue that leaving out Improved Cleansing Spirit is stupid, but unless there is a heavy dispelling fight I would prefer to have 5% more Damage Reduction while casting. A talents which I am quite thrilled about is Focused Insight. You get an "on demand" burst which from what I've seen from videos and read will become quite handy and it is another reason to try to squeeze in Shocks, not only does it help downing the boss faster (And yes I am aware that the damage output is quite small, but a little damage there and a little damage there and suddenly you can notice a little change). A debated talents is Telluric Currents and despite the fact that I like the idea of being able to throw in a few LBs there isn't any talent from my point of view which can be changed in order to be putted in there.

Glyps: It is a matter of personal preference that I've taken Riptide over Earth shield, but also due to we will be running with atleast two resto shamans, possible three, and yes Earth Shield is nice, but it can only be placed on one target where Riptide can be used on every 25man along with the pets, and with the extensive amount of damage the raid will take I would prefer that over Earth Shield. Water Shield and Earthliving is a must have as well as the major glyphs.

Stats will look different that they do today and I doubt that you will find people stacking one stat as a madman since you will have to balance your int, spirit, crit, haste and mastery (which I doubt will be worth going for except you are healing tanks or a heavy AoE fight where the raid is below 60% hp for the most of the time). And you will want to go for socket bonuses the most of the time since it just is better than stacking one stat. Personally I will gem more or less like this: Red = int, yellow = int / haste, blue = int / spirit, but that is just my personal opinion and it might be altered throughout raiding and certain fights.

Another point of view.

Beside my mage I have more or less decided that I will level my shaman as my second character, and due to the healing situation in my guild I have been thinking about getting it leveled rather fast.

As you might have guessed I want to play restoration and this is due to several reasons:
1^st Shamans is in my humble opinion the “best overall” healing class and perhaps the one who have been changed the least for the release of Cataclysm.
Chainheals initial healing has been nerfed, but I do actually thing that it is a good change since it will force you to use a larger part of your healing arsenal instead of just spamming Chainheal because it was such a strong heal both for AoE, which it still is, and for single target healing where it would crit for 14-18k and leave a massive hot on your target.

One of the major changes to most of the healing classes is that they now have the opportunity or they must do damage now in order to keep a buff up on themselves. There is those who think that as a healer the only thing you should be able to do is – Heal, and then there is those who adjust and see the opportunities in the changes as for an example I will take restoration shamans since it is the class which I am most familiar with. The talent “Focused Insight” – “After casting any Shock spell, your next heal’s mana cost is reduced by 75% of the cost of the Shock spell, and its healing effectiveness is increased by 30%”. This is a massive “on demand” burst healing one can launch while not feeling guilty of doing damage to the boss with a few GCDs add this 30% effectiveness with our mastery Deep Healing I think that Shamans will have the opportunity to specialize more in either raid healing or tank healing.

In addition restoration shamans gets a new heal “Healing Rain” which in its current state isn’t that healing impressive (from what I’ve read) it heals for close to 2k pr. Tick if there is 5 or less people in the area and then heals for less as more and more people is in the area, but since it is capable of proccing Earth Living on the target it is in my opinion a decent AoE heal. One has to remember that the amount of “burst” both on the tanks and the raid is being reduced and the tank dying within somewhat near of 1 second shouldn’t be that much of an issue anymore.  

Another new talent is “Telluric Currents” which will allow you to cast Lightning Bolts and essentially will allow you to do damage instead of just ideling / throwing a heal which you know will be 70/80% overhealing aswell as the druids hots would heal the target up without your help. And again it is the idea – Healers can do if they please do damage, and this is not a new thing you could take a look at almost every single video released by Paragon or Ensidia; If the healer got mana and a free GCD he or her usually throws a DoT on the target and when you search through some of the wipes you have had on 1-2% imagine if your healers would have had a DoT running almost constantly.
Another aspect is in my opinion that since most guilds most likely will run with 7 healers until they get the hang of the fight, enrage is first a problem when you actually manage to stay alive for that long, you will not be as penalized if the healers can do some damage. I am well aware that they won’t top damage meters or do billions of gazillions of damage, but every single bit of damage counts for a first kill! – Why else would we do theory crafting, respec for encounters and use pots and flasks.