Raiding requires two functional arms?!

Oh yeah, been a while since I wrote anything here. Mostly due to completely destroying my shoulder, going through a painful operation and an even more painful recovery training. But I’m getting there! My right arm is now almost fully functional again, and I can almost cope with the pain as well. But safe to say, that last few months I’ve been spending more time at the gym than in wow. See that’s something very unlikely for me…

But I’m back to raiding ‘full-time’ again as well. Admittedly, mostly been doing 10-man raiding lately. And since there’s a shortage of tanks in my guild, I have actually been tanking more than healing while progressing in ICC 10 heroic. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I love healing, and it’s my main spec. But with all the tanking, I’ve realised how I feel tanking is just ‘easier’ than healing (no offence to all the tanks out there!). Now take Blood Queen, for example. When healing that fight, basically I’m working my wodden arse off. It’s a busy fight! When tanking it, I basically run in, grab aggro, then I can go pick up some coffee, and return in time to position myself again after fear. I’m sorry to say, that Blood Queen really isn’t a fight that requires a whole lot when you’re MT. Same goes for Festergut (normal and especially hc). Healing can feel kinda crazy-busy. If you miss moving from mallable goo, you’re generally screwing the raid over. But tanking… meh… stand here, grab aggro, watch your stacks. Oh, use a cd to avoid being blown up. Mallable goo… guess I can move from that if I really have to.

This post isn’t meant to be a rant, or complaining that tanking is too easy and healing is too hard. I love healing, I love being busy, throwing heals around everywhere. But there’s definitely some fights where you’re kept busy as a tank as well. And having been tank all through The Burning Crusade, I know tanking ain’t all cake & beers. But I kinda feel, that tanking has meant some easier strains on my poor arm since I started raiding again, compared to having to heal. But going feral tank as main spec is defintely not part of my plans… even if I feel outlooks for Cataclysm is kinda grim for my poor tree (or non-tree to be *cry*). But that rant is not for this post, I’ll make a separate one for Cataclysm-whining. Meanwhile, I’m levelling a paladin. She’s lvl 63 now, and she’s ofcourse gonna be a healer. So when Cataclysm comes out, I’ll see how I feel about resto druid then. I can’t imagine playing anything but my druid as my main – but I can’t imagine loosing my tree-form either. So if I don’t like it, hopefully I’ll have a choice to change main character (either picking my resto shammy or my holy paladin).

Now… I was benched for tonights 25-man raid. So back to levelling my paladin. I’ll be in touch!

The druid trainer is a fake!

Don’t let the druid trainer in Stormwind lure you closer. It’s a trap. He’s got quicksand. You *will* die

Hehe, found this screenie when I was cleaning up my pictures. It’s from back when I was level 30-something, but I’ve held on to it, just because I find silly things like this amusing

No… Seriously?!

“We are looking into the usage of levitate during the Gormok encounter. We advice you to not use this tactic (anymore), because it could be seen as exploitation of game mechanics and could have the consequences of our guidelines”.

Guess this means I’ll have to learn how to move
Seriously, we’re not particularly bad movers in my guild, but we’ve gotten used to the levitate trick. If you’ve read my post on how we finally downed Northrend Beasts in 25 hc the other night, you’ll see that this plays a part. This might set us back, no longer being able to use levitate, now having to move. Not the end of the world… but still *cry*

Source (original blue post in german, so I found the english translation): Gormok+Levitate is considered an exploit

Kitty dps – bring it on!

I don’t really have a dps spec. My main spec is resto, my off-spec is feral tank. I got good gear for both. I used to be moonkin, but I didn’t like it so much. My dps was too dependent on RNG, and I felt that even if I played really well, it didn’t always look like that because I had no luck with eclipse. So no more moonkin for me. So far, I’ve gotten by just fine doing dailies in kitty wearing my tank gear. It works for me.

But my raid leader has a wish, that I get myself some proper dps gear. Why? Well, on some boss encounters you need 7 healers, on others you need 5 or 6 healers. So we usually bring 7 healers, and then rotate the healers on going dps on some encounters. So far, I’ve not been part of the rotation due to my lacking dps gear. That’s a bit unfair I guess, so I’ve been gathering dps gear and now I have a decent set, so I’m about ready to try doing some dps in raids as well, if needed.

So last night I decided to spend some time on a training dummy in Ironforge. I have no idea what rotation to use, and feral dps kitties have all sorts of fancy useful abilities these days, apparently. I never really use any of it, since I only use my kitty for solo questing. When solo playing, my rotation is usually *mangle, mangle* and things are dead. But I figured I would need a different rotation for raid bosses I went to the dummy, placed myself behind it and started the stopwatch (I know from my moonkin days, that I need to test for at least 3 minutes, and have about 5-10 attempts to get a decent picture of my dps output).

I did 3 minutes of dps on the dummy, I check recount; 1341 dps. WTF?! Okay, maybe I should read the tooltip for these abilities. Tiger’s fury seems useful enough, maybe I should put it in my action bar. Savage roar… not bad, I’m gonna try that too. I test again; 3 minutes full dps, recount says 1577 dps. Okay… This just isn’t working. Time to visit google. “feral dps rotation”… yay, lots of matches. A thread on wow forums, I’ll check that. Kitty rotation for bosses? It goes something like:

Mangle -> Rake -> Shred (till 5cp) -> Savage Roar -> Tigers Fury -> BERSERK! -> Mangle -> Shred (till 5cp) -> Rip -> Rake -> Shred (tll 5 cp) -> Ferocious Bite /Repeat with no berserk

…say what….?

I was tempted to delete all my epic dps gear, and just tell raid leader, that if he wants healers with dps spec, he can bench me I mean, I might be able to get this rotation sorted on a target dummy, where I can stand still for 10 straight minutes. But on a raid boss? No wai! If I have to dps, they’ll have to accept a melee tree spanking big bad bosses with the tree branches that look like arms!

I did go on testing on the training dummy, and after a while, I got a consistent 25-2800 dps on each attempt. But still… That’s not particularly impressive, so I’m gonna stick with my melee tree! My branches hit hard, and with just two arms, it’s an easy rotation!

The Beasts are no more!

Finally!

My guild has been struggling with Northrend Beasts hc 25. We’ve been trying for a few weeks, never really having any succesful attempts, and constantly messing up in p2 on the two worms. But this wednesday, we finally managed to down the Beasts. First off, for once we had 33 sign-ups, so the officer group had the opportunity to finally choose a really good group for this encounter.
We’re a small guild, often struggling a bit with sign-ups, so it was really nice to see, that for once we had plenty to choose from.

We went with 3 tanks and 6 healers, one priest healer being on the dedicated duty of levitating the ranged in p1. We already knew, that we could do a decent p1, getting Gormok down before the wyrms enter the arena, so p1 really wasn’t our main concern. p2, on the other hand, we just haven’t been able to get right so far. But wednesday night we really had some good attempts in p2, getting a lot more organised and having people moving the way they should be. We had one good attempt where we got both worms down just before Icehowl came in, but for some reason the healer group messed up, and we lost two tanks straight away – and then it was too late to save the situation, since Icehowl started one-shotting our dps. Bummer. What went wrong? well, it was just bad luck and some range issues – we could do better.

But 2½ hours into our raid night (8.30-midnight server time) we were still wiping, even though we were so close to getting it right. Unlucky, one of our healers announces that he has to leave, even though it’s only 23 server time. At that point, it was so late, that we really didn’t have a lot of replacements to choose from, so we take in the only guy available, who’s not a healer, but a good dps warlock. I’m a bit worried about this. Even though I’ve read several guides suggesting only bringing 5 healers to this encounter, I feel like we’ve been struggling with 6 healers, often losing people in p2, due to lack of healing. So I prepare for hard, hard work.

And it was hard, hard work…. But first attempt with 5 healers, and Northrend Beasts go down! Wild cheers, everyone’s so exited. Finally! Apparently the extra dps made the difference, or so it would seem. We go on to have three wipes on Lord Jaraxxus before raid comes to an end. He seems less complicated, so I’m positive we’ll get him soon enough

Anub, the confidence killer

For some reason Anub’Arak – last boss in TotC – always ends up killing my confidence as a healer. Last night was no exception. I was running 10-man TotGC with my guild, and it was my second time trying the heroic version. A while ago I tried it, managing to kill everything but Anub. Last night, we were determined he would go down.

We had a few wipes on Beasts. No surprise, since Beasts isn’t exactly the easiest encounter. P1 is a faceroll for a healer, but p2 is often a struggle. We got the beasts, though – and the next three encounters without problems as well. Then we were facing Anub. Last time I tried him on heroic 10 man I was healing alongside a priest. We were both strong group healers, but neither of us could manage to keep the tanks up in p3. This time, I was paired with a holy paladin. A dream scenario for me really. In p3, I just had to heal the group, while the paladin would take care of the tanks. Yay!

Problem turned out to be, that we rarely made it into p3. We kept wiping, and a few of those were due to me messing up during Anub’s burrow phase. 3 times Anub managed to spike me to death, because I failed the running. Really, how tough can it be? I mean, I got kitty + dash, so it really shouldn’t be much of a problem for me, but it was. I’m used to doing this encounter in 10/25 normal, with lots of ice lying around, so I don’t really need to worry about kiting that much. On heroic, kiting obviously is very important, and I learned that I really suck at it… who would have thought I was a tank in BC, when I can’t kite?!

After around 10 attempts, we finally get him into p3. Woohoo! this shouldn’t be tough. I was well prepared for it, I’d reglyphed so I had Glyph of Rejuvenation instead of the nourish one. I start throwing some rejuvs on the people with Penetrating Cold and a few Lifeblooms on the people going down quickly as well. Then I’m dead. Why? oh, because this silly three had made the classic healer mistake of healing everyone but herself

Luckily, we have a really good enhancement shammy, who managed to keep the group up for the rest of the fight, and then Anub was dead. People were cheering (first time he went down for a few of us). Everyone was happy. And I was sitting there thinking, that my job had been done by an enhancement shaman.

Today I’m gonna go heal some heroics to get my confidence back! Maybe Violet Hold, where I will never go below 90% mana during the entire instance. That should make me feel good about myself again.

But yay for finally clearing TotGC 10. Now time to work on TotGC 25. Still wiping on beasts, so a long way to go…

My first post!

Yearh!

So, why this? Well, mostly for myself, really – but if you want to read my ramblings, feel free to do so. The reason I’m trying out this blog thing, is because I realised, that I have been playing WoW for almost 3 years now. That’s a long time. Much longer than I’ve ever spent on any other game. WoW never ends…

But, realising this, I also realised, that there’s so much I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten what it was like to level my first character (Charna, my lovely tree), what it was like to ding 70 (yeah, I only started playing a month before Burning Crusade was released), and suddenly realise, that I didn’t know what the fuck to do***, or what it was like to spend 5 hours trying to do Heroic Arcatraz with a pug (okay, I remember that, but I’ve forgotten how horrible it was).

So for my own sake, I’m now trying a blog. To keep track of things relating to my gaming, so I don’t forget how much fun WoW really is. Or how annoying it really is.

***”If you get aggro, it means you’re going to lose 50dkp, because you didn’t know what the fuck to do”!