Healing in Blackwing Descent
My guild is finally raiding and even with some success. I am of course an active part of that success, but unfortunately not with Vrethir yet. This must be the first time ever that I’ve seen a guild that doesn’t have a problem with tanks – even more, has more tanks than you can shake a stick at. Instead we were (and still are) short on ranged DPS and healers.
Which is why I have to raid on Sheven and heal. Not that I mind much, because I either way I’m still raiding and that’s where I find fun in this game, but I would still prefer to tank. Maybe some time later, after we kill more bosses and it will be easier to recruit other people.
First two bosses of BWD weren’t much of a problem for healing. We have pretty solid healers in our group with a holy paladin, holy priest and me. We delegated the priest to heal his group while I focused on mine, and the paladin was doing what they always excelled at, being spamming the tank with the Light. This setup worked well throughout Magmaw and Omnomtron, which to be completely honest, aren’t very hard to heal, as long as everyone keeps doing their job and not standing where they don’t have to. I’ve kept my Lifeblooms on the main tank for Clearcasting procs and healed whatever was in need of healing.
Next we dealt with Maloriak. This fight required more coordination from us – announcing on vent if one of the healers was flash freezed (and slapping some DPS that were too quick to kill the ice blocks, killing frozen people by accident) helped a lot, as did saving Tree of Life for the red flask phases. On our killing try I couldn’t do that though, as there wasn’t enough time between them. With two mages and two hunters for slowing traps and Freezing Circle goodness it went pretty good.
Then we went to Chimaeron, on my request nonetheless. In retrospect, maybe Atramedes would be a better choice…
We didn’t make a lot of tries since it was getting late already, but the healing there just didn’t go well. Rejuvenation is much too slow to heal people up and they would die, HT and Nourish were too slow and they would die… You can probably imagine my frustration.
Next time we’re gonna try doing it something like that:
- Paladin heals the offtank taking Double Strikes, with beacon on the main tank to keep him above 10k health.
- Priest focuses on his group, I have never healed on a priest, so I have no idea about this one to be honest.
- I will keep Lifeblooms on the main tank for Clearcasting and healing above 10k, using glyphed Regrowths and Rejuv + Swiftmend for keeping people up.
Unfortunately rolling multiple Lifeblooms and keeping them up with Nourish will end in 4.0.6, so that tactic won’t work anymore. Too bad though, I always thought that was a neat thing. Maybe a bit too easy to do though, but if you had a fight with lots of things to pay attention to or a lot of movement, it was also quite easy to lose the extra stacks.
I suppose we will still have to get used to that fight. I just don’t like all the randomness of it – random Double Strikes, random phase 2, bleh. Well, next try either on Thursday or again over the weekend sometime.
Heroic Adventures in Healing
Sheven, my tree druid, is now 85 and this week I was running quite a lot of heroics as a healer. Also, it turns out that skipping Mount Hyjal wasn’t the best idea for a healer, because even though the head enchants are now Bind on Account, they still require revered reputation with a faction to use, making the BoA part totally pointless. At least my boomkin spec gets hit rating from all the spirit, so I can quest through there pretty fast.
I’ve also had to quest through the entire Harrison Jones questline in Uldum to get a proper helmet (unlike most other dungeons, Halls of Origination quests are not availaible at the start of the instance), which I then replaced with a drop from the first heroic run I did. Yay for spending 400 gold in gems just for one run. I also still don’t have any decent bracers – anything good for this slot is awfully painful to get in this expansion. I had the same problem on Vrethir (was running with the pvp ones for a while), and I’ve seen the same problem on a paladin as well. I’m using the pvp ones right now, because they’re better than some quest green I have otherwise.
Healing on a druid is pretty cool now – if people don’t break CC and follow the tactics, I hardly run out of mana thanks to all the Clearcasting procs. Most boss fights in heroics I finish with very low mana though, but I usually won’t get OOM unless something goes wrong and I have to spam heal people to save them. Or unless I forget that I shouldn’t spam everyone with Rejuvenation all the time.
What makes my healing adventures feel like a really heroic journey though, are the tanks. Elune save me, there are so many BAD tanks out there. I never imagined.
I’ve had one guy, a death knight. We join Stonecore as a random dungeon and the remains of the group are on Ozruk – apparently their last tank sucked, as we get a new one as well. So one of the dps asks the new tank if he knows what to do on this boss. He answers something like “first time hc tanking” and runs at the boss before any of us can say anything. And promptly gets oneshot by a Ground Slam just a few seconds later. Why am I not surprised? Okay, we run back, buff up, explain the fight for him… He manages to somehow avoid the Ground Slam this time, but dies to the Shatter afterwards. Honestly, if you don’t know the fight just say so, we will explain it to you. In fact, we were in the middle of doing so when you decided to facepull the boss…
Then I had a Lost City of the Tol’vir run. Same deal – the previous tank sucked so we get a new one with us, and they’re before the first boss. The new tank apparently has an awesome tactic for running this boss – without a word of explanation what he’s going to do he starts kiting him around the whole room, while I lose range and line of sight and I’m totally unable to heal him. Eventually I die to some mines after trying to run after the tank and he’s asking me why didn’t I release and run back to heal him. Well no thanks, you suck and kite the boss out of my range and LoS, so just don’t do that and lets kill him.
Apparently for Polish players from Burning Legion this is the proper tactic to do this boss though, because he and one other Burning Legion DPSer tell me “bad healer nub dont know tactic” and leave the group. I breathe with relief. See, that’s why I play on Deathwing, not on Burning Legion, and never admit to being Polish when in a group with someone from there. I couldn’t be bothered to deal with these kind of morons on a daily basis. I know I’m kind of unfair to some of them which are decent players, but yeah.
Unfortunately the next guy did the same thing, but only for the second half of the fight. I have no idea why. We finished that instance with him with some mistakes like pulling the extra pack on Barim or not taunting the crocs off me on Lockmaw.
Speaking of Lockmaw, I have no idea why people insist on standing on the statues. The crocs are tauntable, just run to your tank and let him take them off you while the group burns them down. It’s not hard at all, I do it all the time when I’m tanking this boss. It boggles my mind that the same community that despised Exodus for evading the mobs on Yogg+0 actually suggests exploiting a fight when they have to do it themselves. It’s nothing new, though – I remember the tactic for Prince Malchezzar in Karazhan as well, the one that avoided all the infernals by having your raid stand on some kind of rubble near the door on his platform.
I also noticed that you don’t see a lot of druid tanks in the dungeons for some reason. I suspect that might be their AoE threat (or rather the almost complete lack of it), but that’s only an observation after I could easily pull mobs with healing aggro off the two bears I encountered.
Oh, and recently I’ve had a very weird experience in Halls of Origination. We get it as a random dungeon – I think cool, there are still upgrades for me there (I even won two items in that run). Apparently the tank doesn’t think so, because the first one leaves instantly the moment the instance loads. I wasn’t even able to see what class he was. Then we get a second one, a death knight – and incidentally, this is a moment that one of our CC has to quickly go away due to a phone call. We stand there for a minute or so, and then the death knight just leaves without saying anything. So we get a third one, a warrior. He gets in, runs in a small circle a bit, sits down looking at the first trash pack… and leaves without saying anything. WHAT THE FUCK MAN.
So we get another tank, and this deserves a name and an armory link, because I doubt you’ll believe me otherwise. I present you Nogon of Sunstrider-EU. Yes, this is a tank that wants to tank heroics. With a surprising 116k health unbuffed, half the avoidance that he should have, level 80 epics, quest greens, pvp items, lack of enchants and dps items. I don’t know how he even got into a heroic in the first place.
Anyway, as I’m too annoyed and already went through 3 tanks earlier, I decide not to vote kick him until he gets splattered by some random trash mobs. He does suprisingly well as we have a lot of CC availaible, though I have to sit drink after every pack. What kills him though are the elemental adds before one of the last bosses, Isiset I think. They do a lot of damage and it’s just not possible to heal him through it. He finally leaves and again I breathe with relief.
Another moronic example from a different Halls of Origination – one tank repeatedly was running out of my range ignoring the fact that I’m drinking and even started to argue with me that it’s not his fault and not his responsibility to watch healer’s mana, as he has stuff to tank and has to protect the party and tank. Well, you don’t have to do any of these after the trash is dead, do you? I can’t sit and drink while I’m still in combat.
Needless to say, all of this crap doesn’t really make me want to run any dungeons at all.
Cataclysm class previews, part 2
More awesome news from Blizzard’s development team came out this Friday with previews of next few classes. This leaves only the poor Paladins for the next week for some reason.
Druid
Mushrooms! It’s weird though, but as I only play Resto, I don’t really mind. Getting Dispel Magic will be good – finally all of the healing classes will have it, which they should in the beginning.
The biggest change here is the changing of the Tree of Life. It will be a cooldown (similar to Metamorphosis they say, which told me nothing at all and I had to check Wowhead to see that it has 30 sec duration and 3 min cooldown) instead of a passive ability. It’s kind of disturbing, but on the other hand, I’ve been looking at my tree looking exactly the same for one and a half of expansion now. I just hope that the gear will be worth it, or I’m afraid I’ll have to pay for Sheven’s operation and his transformation into a female night elf. ;)
On a more serious note though, I don’t really mind. It’s not the tree form I like in the class (though it’s cool and all that), it’s the healing style, and that doesn’t seem to be changing that much – only for the better with bits and pieces like Regrowth leaving an AoE healing patch on the ground if it crits. I just hope that with removing of the boring talents they’ve talked earlier, they will be adding some fun ones instead.
Hunter
Some time ago I’ve tried to level up my hunter when I was bored, but the ongoing mana problems weren’t really making it any less boring, so he’s still sitting somewhere around Borean Tundra, waiting for the Cataclysm to happen. Changing mana to focus needed, but I’m a bit disappointed here about losing ammo. It will just feel weird, and I would prefer to have an infinite item in the ammo slot instead, maybe with different damage types or something.
Second thing that I like is Camouflage, which just sounds fun. The rest – stables changes, finally getting a pet from level 1, losing some melee abilities, launching all traps at range and others – are for me just icings on a cake that is focus. Awesome icings nonetheless, especially the level 1 change.
Mage
I haven’t really played a mage before, so I might not be the best person to talk about this, but as I’m planning to make one in the future, here goes.
The big one – Time Warp. Basically it’s a Bloodlust/Heroism finally given to another class. So long, Deathwing-EU Alliance shamans, finally I won’t have to put up with your crap when I can have a mage with a brain instead. It’s about time some other class got this kind of ability and from a raid leader perspective I don’t really care about all the poor shamans that are afraid of losing their raid spots. If you won’t suck, you won’t lose the spot, rather than the rest of the raid having to endure you for your unique buff we need. They should have done it much earlier, when they gave shamans to the Alliance.
Wall of Fog sounds nice as well – with the addition of rated battlegrounds this will be a nice defensive tool in some of the places, if used right of course. Would be more fun if it was a wall of ice making a new wall and breaking line of sight, though.