Archive for the 'PVE' Category

Baer

August 29, 2008
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Oh em gee.

Our guild has a bear mount! (I lost the roll, but whatever! I know I’ll get one eventually.)

The fun part is that we’re such a small guild that we’ve only ever done 10-man raids. I know we’re not the first guild to pull that off, but it does make us somewhat unique on our server. I’m pretty certain that all of the other bear owners around here are in BT/MH/SWP raiding guilds.

I would like to dedicate this victory to G’eras and Smith Hauthaa. We love you guys.

PS: my dear guildies and friends, I understand you have found my blog, so; welcome! Feel free to leave a comment or two. You know I’d appreciate that a lot more than your offhand remarks in raid chat :>

Old news!

June 17, 2008
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An unfortunate side-effect of being strapped down in bed with a very bad flu, besides of course an unhygienic amount of snot and sneezing, is that one tends to miss out on stuff. Well, I got one such Very Bad Flu last weekend, and, as I would find out - I missed quite a scoop.

I’m still going to write about it, but blogging about news that is a couple of days old is the internet equivalent of wishing your colleagues a Happy New Year in the middle of June; some people might appreciate the gesture but most will probably just look at you funny.

You may now proceed to look at me funny.

So. What is the news? The news is that the new shaman talents and abilities have leaked out from the WotLK Alpha. And yeah, that’s pretty big. It’s quite a list, too, so grab yourself something to drink.

Also - disclaimer alert! - remember that all of the information that has leaked out so far is still speculative and very much subject to change; Blizzard don’t call it Alpha for nothing.

Continue reading ‘Old news!’

The troll genocide continues

June 9, 2008
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Jan’alai and Halazzi down!

/dance

My better half has written a very entertaining report on yesterday’s events. And I am one lazy troll. Go read!

Magister’s Terrace

April 4, 2008
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It took a bit longer than planned, but I have finally beaten Magister’s Terrace. Uhm, yes, on normal difficulty.

I even managed to steal the spotlight in the end, which is pretty rare for my humble restoration self. (Normally, as a healer, it’s a good thing when people don’t notice you - because that means you’re doing your job!) But when Kael’thas sent our group flying, everyone but me died within seconds. At that point I suppose my group mates were getting ready for a corpse run and a retry, but… that didn’t happen.

Can I brag a little? Well, of course I can brag, this is my own blog :P

Somehow I managed to dodge the spheres, heal through the DoTs, and toss lightning bolts and flame shocks at Kael whenever I had the chance. It took a while, but I did it! Witch Doctor 1, Kael’thas 0. And I didn’t even have to use any mana potions.

Unfortunately I was too flustered to remember to take any screenshots, but here’s a funny one that Mr Witch Doctor took. (Yeah, that’s me, all the way up in the ceiling!) Speaking of whom…

That’s right, even while being dead for 80% of the fight, he still manages to deal more damage than me. Grrrr.

—

Hammertime!

Priestess Delrissa, the third boss in Magister’s Terrace, saw it fit to drop a [Battle-mace of the High Priestess]. I very quickly glanced over its stats, decided I didn’t want it, and then hit greed. (There was no enchanter with us on this run, so everyone was greeding on the BoPs that they didn’t want.) I won the roll and the mace landed in one of my bags.

After the run I took another look at it. Sure, it’s an ugly thing, and it doesn’t come close to my own trusty hammer, [Gavel of Pure Light].

But still. It’s ridiculously well itemized for a blue quality weapon, it has a red socket, it even has spell haste rating on it! If I was just starting out as a fresh level 70 healer, I think I would have loved this thing. This is the case with the rest of the loot table for this instance as well, all of the drops seem to be just a notch better than those in other instances.

I’m really looking foward to trying this gorgeous instance on heroic difficulty. There’s no epic Battle-mace as far as I can tell, in fact none of the heroic loot is particularly interesting for me. But wouldn’t it be awesome to solo beat heroic Kael’thas?

Maybe a few more tries on normal first though, to gain a better understanding of boss tactics and such. And to see if the others have learned anything from watching my aerial sphere-dodging.

Temporarily dual wielding

February 26, 2008
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You know this Be Imba! site that has been floating around recently? Well, of course you do, we’re all on the internet after all.

It amuses me that it tells me I’m ready for Zul’Aman and early 25-man content. Me, who has never been past Curator? Wow.

Even more amusing, however: I respecced to enhancement just yesterday to get some farming and questing done. I haven’t been enhancement in a very long time, so I don’t have an enormous, nicely matched enhancement wardrobe; instead I’ve equipped myself with some various bits and pieces of heroic instance gear that I snagged when nobody else wanted them. So I got curious. What does Be Imba! have to say about my mismatched outfit, crappy gems and complete absence of enchants?

Yeah… I wishKarazhan.

Honestly… if I showed up at the Karazhan meeting stone like this? I don’t think I would let myself in.

So yes, it’s a funny and helpful tool, but please use it with the proverbial grain of salt.

Karazhan

February 11, 2008
3 Comments

Another “game first” has been added to my list! Yesterday Mr witch Doctor and myself went into Karazhan for the first time.

Not with just the two of us, of course. Some long time friends of ours had asked us to come along with their guild. Coincidentally, none of them had ever been to any raid either. Hmm, Karazhan with ten raiding virgins… I’ll admit I was slightly apprehensive.

Group one consisted of two protection Warriors, a Warlock, a holy Priest and a holy Paladin. Group two consisted of a fire Mage, an arcane Mage, a Boomkin, my Hunter boyfriend with his trusty pet, and yours truly.

We cheered as we cleared the first trash pull.

We cheered as we downed Attumen. Everybody seemed to have done their homework and the fight was a piece of cake. Mr Witch Doctor got himself a nice pair of bracers, and the Paladin a pair of gloves.

Moroes next. There was some confusion as to what was to happen to the adds, so when one of them wasn’t tanked I quickly pulled healing aggro and died. Luckily I’m a Shaman. :) So when one of the tanks finally picked up the add, I reincarnated and happily continued healing. Moroes went down without too much trouble after that. The Warlock got a belt and one of the Warriors a nice trinket.

We were feeling lucky so we pushed on to Maiden of Virtue. At this point we were happy to have Mr Witch Doctor with us, since he was the only one who had been reading up on boss fights up to this point! After listening to his strategy, we spread out around the room, and the tanks started the fight. I’m not too certain what went wrong after that, but the Warlock, the Mages and the Boomkin died one after the other. I spammed Grounding Totem whenever the cooldown was up, which probably saved me from getting Holy Fire’d, but I think that maybe we were spread out too far because the others in my group didn’t seem to benefit from it. Miraculously, both of the tanks, all three of the healers, and the Hunter and his pet survived. His mana depleted rapidly so at a certain point he could do nothing but stand there and auto-shoot. With him being the only damage dealer the fight seemed to take forever, but… we did it.

WWS report on MaidenMy anonymized WWS report on the Maiden Fight. “Try 1″?

That’s right, we one-shotted Attumen, Moroes and Maiden. :) Nobody (except Mr Witch Doctor I suppose) expected that we would do so well, but we were happy that we did!

And the fact that Maiden decided to drop Totem of Healing Rains for me was of course just the icing on the cake.

Maiden down!

Some interesting observations:

  • Boomkins are awesome. All buffed up and with his moonkin aura my spell crit was as high as 24%!
  • With a Blessing of Wisdom, a flask of mighty restoration, and my own mana spring totem and water shield, I had more than enough MP/5 to outlast all of the boss fights. I think I only chugged one mana potion all evening. And I didn’t even use any mana oil.
  • Normally, when I’m main healing 5-man instances, I cast Healing Wave approximately 90% of the time, followed by 5% Chain Heal and 5% Lesser Healing Wave. As expected the numbers looked quite different yesterday: 60% Chain Heal, 35% Healing Wave and 5% Lesser Healing Wave.
  • The healing meters showed that all three of us healers really put in our weight. I’m especially impressed with the Paladin, who was slightly undergeared compared to the Priest and myself. I think we did an awesome job together.

All in all it was certainly a good evening. Next time I will be better prepared, and read up on strategies for all of these bosses. And on all three possible Opera events. And on all the other Karazhan bosses. And on Zul’Aman. Just in case…

Hard like Heroic

December 7, 2007
2 Comments

Hard like heroicBoring. That’s probably not what the level 70 instances were intended to be, but that’s exactly how I started to feel about them. The first few times you run an instance everything is new and exciting, but after a while the boredom kicks in, as well as the autopilot.

But wait. Did I become such a fabulous healer? Did I pick up a lot of incredible new gear to make the healing easier? Did I learn new tricks and techniques to become more efficient? Far from it. As this - completely scientific - graph shows, there was in fact something else going on:

Healing curve in normal instances

The difficulty curve of normal instances are tuned in such a way that at a certain point, healers are mostly there for compensation. This means that when something goes wrong I have a lot of work to do. But usually, the average pull in an average guild run is a perfectly timed and beautifully executed ballet of tanking, DPS’ing and Crowd Control. Our uncrittable tank takes only minimal amounts of damage, and the others don’t take any at all. So what’s left for me to do? I toss my totems and turn my attention back to the television. Or I sling some lightning bolts in a pathetic attempt of getting my name on the damage meters.

Sure, it’s nice to not have to corpse-run all the time. But do I really contribute to that?

Needless to say, I needed a new challenge. And patch 2.3 was the little push that we needed, as the addition of the daily heroic quests drew our attention to the easier of the heroic dungeons.

We tried Ramparts first. I was nervous, but we did surprisingly well. Then we did Underbog, and Slave Pens, and Underbog, and one more Underbog, and Slave Pens again.

It’s a completely different experience. We’re wiping again. What’s worse, we wipe on trash, on bad pulls, on resisted freeze traps, on totem aggro (oops), and on a whole lot more silly situations. I regularly run out of mana again. I have to be on my toes the whole time; if I slack for a second, the tank is dead.

So if it’s really that much more trouble, is it really worth it? The short and simple answer: absolutely. And this is why:

Healing curve in heroic instances

(the sharp incline at the left indicates how you won’t need any skills if the group doesn’t have them either: you’re better off disbanding and doing something more productive)

Maybe we wipe more than we used to, but so far we’ve always made it to the end. And as we all hearthstone out with our new badges (and maybe a primal nether), I’m proud in knowing that a large chunk of the effort involved was mine. It’s strangely flattering to learn that I am not, in fact, a dead weight to my group, but that I’m indeed capable of healing heroics – or at least the easy ones.

The odd talent

October 12, 2007
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Reverberation. A third-level talent in the elemental tree that reduces the cooldown of your shock spells from six seconds to five. Most shamans agree it’s a weak talent and best avoided unless you plan to PvP. So why did a pure PvE shaman such as myself bother maxing it out? Why not Elemental Focus and Eye of the Storm?

To start with the last question, that’s simple. My spell crit chance is only 9%, which I think is not enough to merit the point in Elemental Focus. Eye of the Storm seems only useful for casting lightning bolts at melee range, and even then only after being the victim of a critical strike. Maybe as an all-out elemental shaman I’d be more into the lightning bolt slinging business, but as it stands this talent is just too specific to be useful for me.

So, what makes Reverberation such a good choice then? Very simple: interruption. That’s admittedly not something I do a lot when healing a group, but it’s a necessity when I’m solo and fighting caster enemies. (I’m Scryers, so I have to fight blood elf warlocks all the time.)

The shaman tool of the trade for interruption is Earth Shock. To understand just how awesome Earth Shock is, you must first understand what it does:

  • Firstly, it’s an instant cast nature spell that deals damage. Quite a lot of it too, if you’re using the max rank (which is what I tend to do when I’m solo’ing)
  • Secondly, it interrupts spellcasts. I strongly recommend enabling enemy casting bars in your interface menu, so you see exactly when to interrupt.
  • Thirdly, it locks out the school of magic of the spell that the enemy was casting before you interrupted it. This lockout lasts for two seconds.

Now let’s assume that the average caster enemy’s offensive spell has three seconds casting time. Let’s also assume that most enemies are one-trick ponies; they have one offensive spell and they will attempt to cast that spell over and over. I don’t have any solid evidence for these two assumptions, but from experience I can say that they generally ring true.

How do these numbers add up in practice? After you interrupt an enemy spell, it will prevent him from casting the same spell for two seconds. After those two seconds, it will probably immediately start casting it again. This spell would have hit you three seconds later… if it wasn’t for the Reverberation talent, that reduced your Earth Shock cooldown from six to five seconds.

In theory, you could continue to simply keep interrupting every five seconds, but in practice you’d probably want to alternate every two shocks with one Grounding Totem. This still enables you to intercept the enemy spell, but now you also have some extra time to cast a shield on yourself, or drop a Searing Totem, or whatever best suits your fighting style. The bottom line is that Reverberation makes it entirely possible for a shaman to fight caster enemies without ever getting hit by their spells.

A word of warning for applying the above routine in a PvP setting: most players are smarter than letting their spells repeatedly get interrupted or grounded. Although your mileage may vary ;)