Okay, after some serious technical issues tonight, I believe I’ve finally managed to produce an actual video. It’s not perfect, it’s ugly in some spots… But here ya go.

I don’t know if it was my group or if the instance was really just that different from, say, Blackrock Caverns, Throne of the Tides or Stonecore… but Grim Batol was easy to heal.

It could also have been my gear. I swapped out some ICC pieces for some greens, reforged a lot of spirit and some crit both to Mastery to give me a significant amount of mastery (400-some instead of like, 40-some) and so my heals were creating shields that were 11% of the heal, not 8%.

There are these drakes you’re supposed to mount up on that will allow you to supposedly blow up groups of trash, but they’re bugged, apparently, so we did things the old-fashioned way — with crowd control. We used a lot of hex and banish (haha, many elementals were immune to the shammy’s Bind Elemental, but not the warlock’s Banish) and a lot of Freezing Traps.

My tank was a level 85 death knight who had over 100k health once buffed.

Two of the DPS were also 85 and were around 70kish health. The other DPS was 84 and was around 60k health. I think I had the least at around 50-55k.

If this Grim Batol run is an example of what healing is supposed to be like in Cataclysm, then *maybe* things aren’t quite so bleak. I still don’t feel too much like a paladin, mind you, but let me tell you about the instance run.

Over the course of the run, there was 10,149,585 damage done. There was 10,098,252 healing done. We had one wipe on a bad pull, but that was it. 26.7% overhealing done.

There are four bosses. The first and last are not in the video, unfortunately.

The first is General Umbriss. He’s a dragon who is hilariously bugged. His Bleeding Wound is not ticking for 5-6k extra damage. Oh, no.

[23:05:44.390] General Umbriss casts Bleeding Wound on Shiramune
[23:05:44.390] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 11408 (O: -1)
[23:05:44.390] Shiramune afflicted by Bleeding Wound from General Umbriss
[23:05:46.430] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 13299 (O: -1)
[23:05:48.402] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 13299 (O: -1)
[23:05:50.412] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 11831 (O: -1, A: 1468)
[23:05:52.407] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 13299 (O: -1)
[23:05:54.394] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 9210 (O: -1, A: 765)
[23:05:56.414] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune Absorb (9974)
[23:05:57.662] Shiramune’s Bleeding Wound fades

It only faded because I threw Hand of Protection on my tank once I saw how low he was getting. We knew it was bugged going in and the plan was to sort of kite/ping-pong him around a bit. So when I noticed the tank actually running away and getting really low on health, I tossed him a BOP, then waited a second, then a Hand of Freedom to wipe off the BOP. I cannot emphasize how important that combination has been in various instances and raids since Trial of the Crusader. Stupid Gormok was actually good for something!

And no, I’m not sure what the hell that absorb is. That’s way too much absorption for my piddling little mastery and it doesn’t show that I used Lay on Hands or anything (although I know I used it now and again).

Anyways, the tank grabbed the boss shortly after I healed him to full (hello, Divine Light, how ARE you?) and got the bleed again:

[23:06:21.759] General Umbriss casts Bleeding Wound on Shiramune
[23:06:21.764] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 9916 (O: -1)
[23:06:21.764] Shiramune afflicted by Bleeding Wound from General Umbriss
[23:06:23.772] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 26153 (O: -1)
[23:06:25.696] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 25161 (O: -1, A: 991)
[23:06:27.742] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 26152 (O: -1)
[23:06:29.721] General Umbriss Bleeding Wound Shiramune 19614 (O: -1)
[23:06:31.715] Shiramune’s Bleeding Wound fades

Let me just say that that tank’s Death Strike was healing him for upwards of 17k.

After the boss, which should be a lot easier when the bleed is fixed, you move through the instance a bit and get some trash packs with two casters and a Gronn. The casters, Twilight Beguilers, cast Chained Mind, which stuns you for five seconds. 1.5 second cast. I’m not sure if it’s interruptable, but make sure you CC one of these guys, because the tank AND the healer getting stunned is bad.

The Enslaved Gronn Brute does hit hard. I forgot to mention this in the video, but he can cast Crunch Armor on his target. It’s very possible to deal with one Beguiler and the Gronn at once, then deal with the CCed mob.

Forgemaster Throngus is the second boss, who is fairly well detailed in the video.

You can see that he starts out hitting hard, but relatively slowly:

[23:11:31.754] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune  14776 (O: -1, A: 1408)
[23:11:35.160] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 2261 (O: -1, A: 12101)
[23:11:37.021] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 12388 (O: -1)

Then he gains his sword thing (Dual Blades) and starts to hit more frequently, although it seems it’s for a little less, particularly from the off-hand. (4-5k hits, as opposed to 10-12k hits.)

[23:11:45.186] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune  Absorb (11344)
[23:11:46.084] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 2117 (O: -1, A: 2204)
[23:11:46.196] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune Dodge
[23:11:46.196] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 7743 (O: -1, A: 2204)
[23:11:47.130] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 10726 (O: -1)
[23:11:48.225] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 4206 (O: -1, A: 741)
[23:11:49.306] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 11928 (O: -1)
[23:11:49.417] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 12730 (O: -1)
[23:11:49.417] Forgemaster Throngus hits Shiramune 10612 (O: -1)

Key points here: That is not a Consecration! Don’t stand in it! It’s a visual cue to get you to move out of the Cave In. ;)

The third boss is Drahga Shadowburner, a caster, who summons elementals and a dragon. The dragon will eventually run away and you can finish off Shadowburner at that point. Really, not a challenging fight. It reminds me a little of the Rend fight in UBRS, but that was a lot more difficult than this seemed to be.

The last boss is Erudax. He looks like General Vezax and there are some Forgotten One type mobs in the trash in his room.

Near as I can understand it, you want to be spread out for this boss to avoid sharing the Binding Shadows, but you need to group up for Shadow Gale. Other than that, not a tough encounter, although I did see an add. Whether the add was part of the fight or we didn’t clear all of the trash, I’m not sure.

Anyways, I hope that look at Grim Batol is useful! Here’s the parse, which doesn’t break things up all nicely yet, but at least you can take a look at things.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/ypf184h036rec74m/

I just wanted to take this opportunity to point out some truly awesome posts by Lara over at Root and Branch.

A Threat Primer for Beginning Tanks

An Intermediate Guide to Threat

Threat Quirks

Great little series about threat that’s useful to read regardless of the class you play, in my opinion.

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the eighth of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Holy paladins have, thus far in the expansion, changed considerably. Arguably, the biggest change that we have encountered is the change to Beacon of Light, which now takes overhealing into account when mirroring heals.

This one change has completely modified the way in which holy paladins heal. We’ve had to adapt to this change and it’s been for the better, in my opinion.

What this one change has allowed us to do is to be absolute superstars on two encounters in particular: Deathbringer Saurfang and Valithria Dreamwalker. There are other fights where we can shine, but these two encounters are basically designed for us to be awesome. So, this Holy How-to will focus on exactly how to be awesome on Saurfang and Dreamwalker.
Read the rest of this entry »

Believe it or not, a post about fun stuff that’s happened recently on the live servers!

First up, the other night, we were doing Sindragosa and people were crowding me while I was about to be encased in ice. The result?

To their credit, they kept me up when I got out. I definitely bubbled as soon as I could, too, but I honestly laughed my ass off when I saw that. 459 health. Woo.

The other thing I wanted to talk about happened on Wednesday evening.

I was walking home from Real-Life stuff and called up my brother, asking him if he wanted to do the weekly raid quest with our buddy Majik later on. The weekly was Sartharion. He was like “sure, what toon?”

And then it hit me. We could try a 10-man zerg.

Majik could tank it, I reasoned, but wait. My brother wanted to go on his paladin, not his hunter. So my brother could tank it, right?

And Majik only has a tank and a healer, so that left him to be the healer. It was decided I’d bring my hunter.

All without us letting Majik know “hey, you’re solo-healing a Sarth10 3d zerg on your still-relatively-new-to-80 priest”, it was completely decided. ;)

After I got home and Majik logged on and such, we informed him that he would be healing a zerg.

I don’t know what prospect made me laugh harder; my brother’s nub tank solo-tanking or Majik’s nub priest solo-healing it. I laughed a LOT, though.

Did I mention that my brother hadn’t ever actually DONE the Sartharion fight? At all? On any toon whatsoever? No? Well, he hadn’t. And I don’t know when the last time Majik did it, although he did do it a few times back in Apotheosis’ early Wrath days. Pretty sure he never healed it, though. And the last time I DPSed it was certainly months ago.

So after discussing this on Vent, we all logged in and I went about setting up the party. Bear in mind that I had never successfully done a zerg before. I had been in ONE zerg run where I was the freaking healer (on my PALADIN), and it didn’t work out.

So I call for 7m DPS for a Sarth10 3d zerg. I said we’d do five zerg attempts and if that wasn’t enough, whatever, we’d kill the drakes and just do the weekly normally. I added that the drake would be an open roll, but if you were DPS and didn’t do at LEAST 5k DPS on Sarth during the kill, you wouldn’t get a roll.

Everyone who whispered me ASSURED me they could do more than 5k DPS. I was like, okay, great. I didn’t check any gear score crap, I didn’t ask for achievements. I made sure I had drums and fish feasts and stuff for others, flasks for Majik and myself and special food for myself (yum 40 agi!). We all got summoned there, courtesy of Majik and my brother.

Our composition was okay. Two death knights, two moonkins, two marks hunters (myself included), a shadow priest, an elemental shaman, a holy priest (Majik) and a prot pally (my brother). I would have liked a feral druid or fury warrior for the crit, but it seemed to work out okay.

We passed the first test: we didn’t accidentally pull any of the drakes while clearing trash. YAY!

I assigned the other hunter to do the initial misdirect on my brother while I’d save mine for Tenebron.

I dropped a feast. I instructed everyone to eat.

I asked for heroism to be hit at about five seconds in, just to make sure my brother had aggro.

We went for it.

One of the moonkin died to the first flame wall.

My brother died to a Flame Breath, Shadow Breath and melee hit from Tenebron.

A wipe ensued.

Hilarity!

After the first attempt, someone whispers me asking if one of the DKs is a friend of mine. I’m like, no…

“We’re carrying him, you know.”

I look at Recount.

3k DPS. Less total damage done than my brother, the tank.

So I call him out on it. “Any reason you did less damage than the tank? Have you ever been here before?”

“got hit by fire” was his response (or something along those lines), which obviously answered my “have you ever been here before” question.

I dropped a fish and assured the whispering person that if the DK screwed up that badly again, I’d kick him.

The DK hadn’t eaten the fish.

“Eat the fish,” I told him.

Nothing.

“EAT THE FISH.”

10 seconds later, right as I was about to tell him to eat the damn fish or he’d be replaced, he runs over and eats the fish.

Hero’s ready, they tell my brother to mount up and run in. I was like “yeah, sure”.

Bet you $10 you don’t know what I forgot to make sure the other hunter knew.

Give up?

I forgot to make sure the other hunter knew you couldn’t misdirect a target who is mounted.

Try 2 begins with the hunter pulling aggro, since he didn’t see that his MD failed, and Sartharion hitting the ENTIRE RAID with flame breath. Which we mostly survived, except a moonkin.

Hilarity!

Try 3: No mounting! Body & Soul shield instead. :) It was actually going really well until Tenebron hit my brother for 25k, which was a 14k overkill.

Still, that was a cooldown issue. My brother was just reaching for Divine Protection when, WHAMMO. Dead.

Okay. No big. Even the fail DK is doing almost 4k DPS.

Did I mention that we wiped with 24,000 health left on Sarth? No? Well, we did. We could actually DO this!

Try 4: It was going AWESOME until, I kid you not, my brother takes a 30k Shadow Breath followed by a 26k melee hit. Way to not use Guardian Spirit, Majmaj!

Try 5: I announced it was our last attempt at a zerg and if we didn’t get it, we’d just do it normally for the weekly. After all, it was around 8:20 and I had a raid at 9.

It went beautifully. Sure, my brother and Majik both died, but so did Sartharion!

The fail DK did not break 4k DPS, so he didn’t get to roll on the drake. I ended up giving it to the non-fail moonkin (the one who had not died to the flame wall earlier) who actually did the second-most DPS on the kill. I was pretty pleased to see her get the drake. I was even more pleased that the thought of ninjaing the drake didn’t even occur to me until much later. I hate raid leaders who ninja loot.

What really amuses me, though, is that my hunter now has a raid title that my paladin does not. Sure, Madrana’s a Twilight Vanquisher from back before Ulduar opened, but she never did get of the Nightfall. I mean, it’s a 10-man title. Of course Madrana doesn’t have it! It seems fitting that Kurn’s got at least one title that Madrana “should” have gotten and didn’t. :)

Probably the best part is that it’ll be a lasting memory of this one day I decided to haul my brother and our friend, undergeared though they may be for this sort of thing, to Sarth, to do a crazy, crazy zerg. We probably shouldn’t have been able to do it, but we totally did. And I will forever remember that I did it with two people with whom I have a TON of fun while playing this game.

Even if they threaten to bankrupt me weekly and are jackasses. They are now Jackasses of the Nightfall!

So this is what I did on my Tuesday night. I logged on to beta. Found someone who was LFG for a random dungeon. Grouped with them. Queued for a random. Got Throne of the Tides. And made a video.

I also have a written guide to Throne of the Tides!

Hello, lovely people. It is Tuesday once again and, once again, I have had a ridiculously low number of search terms I haven’t covered, so, once again, the Q&A post will be put off. Can’t wait for people’s Internet use to go up again…

Anyways, I thought I’d update the ol’ blog with some, well, updates.

Beta:

You may have noticed I haven’t talked much about Beta in the last few days, not since I hit 83 and got Healing Hands.

Why haven’t I been talking about the Beta? Well, I’m kind of stuck.

Madrana’s 83, which is the level cap, so I don’t want to quest on her, since I’m not gaining any more experience. I would love to do instances like crazy, but the Random Dungeon Finder isn’t working unless you’re already in a group, apparently.

So I could go quest on Kurn, right? I’m only level 81 and 3/4. But the thing is, Kurn’s stuck on a bugged quest in Vashj’ir (Still Precious, if you’re curious — no naga currently drop the pearls!). I’d rather not skip the content in this sub-zone and move on, because I’m enjoying the feeling of completing the subzones and continuing this storyline. Again, can’t really do instances… I could go do Hyjal on Kurn, but I figure I’ll be doing Hyjal and Vashj’ir enough times on live when Cataclysm drops, so I’m just sort of waiting for Blizzard to fix a few things in a new build.

God, I hope they drop a new build soon. Like, today. Tomorrow. Yesterday…

Leadership:

I went to a private, all-girls’ school for eleven years, from Grade 1 through to Grade 11 (which is our last year of high school in Quebec). Somewhere along the way, somehow, I obtained these things called “leadership skills”. I was never, ever a leader back in school. I shied away from positions of authority, I never liked being the one people looked to for decisions or depended upon to make decisions.

But in every circumstance since my high school days, I have found myself gravitating to leadership positions whenever it’s clear that whoever is currently leading is not doing it well.

And you know, I’m not terribly bad at being a leader. I’m good at allocating resources, scheduling things, thinking inside the box and then outside when it’s required… Sadly, I’m one of the better leaders I’ve encountered out here in the real world. It kind of sucks, because I really don’t like being a leader.

What I prefer is to be led by a competent leader.

If the leader is not competent or if I am not being led appropriately (not being used to my full extent, not being given clear instructions, etc) then that’s when my leadership skills step in and want to usurp the leader’s position and just DO IT BETTER.

Why am I talking about this? Because it’s basically describing my leadership experiences in WoW.

How did I get to be a raid leader/officer back in my old, old guild? I asked questions, I educated myself and then I educated others on why, precisely, they wanted to do Zul’Gurub and Molten Core.

How did I get to be an officer/raid leader/healing lead back in Apotheosis? It’s because I took initiative to help form the guild, it’s because I knew Karazhan and I researched my ass off for Gruul and Mag and everything else. I had learned to allocate healing from my short stint in another guild and applied it to Apotheosis and that basically meant that I was just doing healing, period. And I was okay with that, because there just wasn’t anyone else I trusted at the start to do healing, except for our awesome priest officer, who was, unfortunately, MIA more often than not.

How did I get to be healing officer in my Bronzebeard guild? The healing lead (and GM) stepped down from raiding/playing altogether for a long while and I was the noisiest healer of the bunch, so they were like “HEY YOU! Here! Do healing!”. I wasn’t being led properly, so I became the leader.

How did I get to do healing for a period of like, 3 months through Sindragosa (reg), LK (reg) and 8/12 ICC25 HMs? My friend had basically deputized me before she took time off, but I still had to earn my “position” in that I was CONSTANTLY talking to the raid leader about healing and such. Why did I do it if it made me miserable? Because no one else was going to be able to do it, barring the RL, and having been a RL and healing lead at the same time, I basically don’t wish that upon anyone.

So it’s nice to be in a guild now where the leaders work hard. I might not always get a precise healing assignment, but I know I’m on the tanks. My healing lead listens to my feedback (and the feedback of others, I would imagine) and sometimes strats and assignments are tweaked. Sometimes they’re not. But at least I have an idea that he’s listening.

My GM is awesome, as you guys already know. I don’t envy her the position, nor the work and time and energy she puts into the guild. I’m sort of dreading being in that position with Apotheosis in a few months. I think I’ve learned a lot about the workings of guilds in the last year and a half, though. I always go into a guild with the attitude that I will be there forever (or at least until the end of the expansion) and, barring seriously bad conditions (continuously cancelled raids, abusive environment, etc), I WILL be there. While I’m in any guild, though, I find that I’m soaking up all the little things to do or not to do if (when) I find myself back in the position of GM.

Raiding:

Re-learning some of these fights with a new guild isn’t easy. My current guild is struggling on Putricide and I don’t really know why. I got caught by the Gas Cloud last night on one attempt and I was like “WHAT THE HELL?” because I NEVER get caught by that thing. I realized that it hadn’t been slowed. Sure, I wasn’t in an ideal position for the possibility of being targetted by it, but, by golly, I had a head start on the sucker!

So I mention to my GM that I’d been caught because it wasn’t slowed. She countered that I didn’t move fast enough/was in a bad place.

Of course, I looked up the logs.

[22:22:53.499] Gas Cloud’s Regurgitated Ooze fades
[19:22:55.251] Gas Cloud Gaseous Bloat  Madrana 17373
[19:22:56.582] Gas Cloud hits Madrana Absorb (574)

Okay, so it only took it two seconds to catch up to me, but I was right; it wasn’t being slowed. My GM later mentioned that she was aware of the slowing issues but honestly thought I was right next to the Gas Cloud and that’s why I was hit. I maintain I’d have been able to get away since I was the second target and the thing should have been almost dead, but anyways. The point is that — the Gas Cloud was not being slowed.

Why?

The Abomination has a lack of energy.

Why?

Druids aren’t keeping Rejuv up for Revitalize procs, disc priest isn’t keeping PW:S up for Rapture procs.

But on the bright side, we’re doing less dying to Plague?

I don’t know, it was a tough reset, I guess. It feels like there are too many little mistakes being made by too many people, which includes me. I’ve eaten some Malleable Goo, I got hit by the Gas Cloud, I’ve died to Unbound Plague because I didn’t pass it off when I should have.

I’m learning that heroic Putricide is actually a lot harder than it was when I first learned it. It was an easy fight to learn for my last guild, but, for whatever reason, it’s a lot more challenging for this guild. I’m okay with that, and getting to P3 and getting him to 7% or thereabouts this reset was great. I just want that momentum to continue.

Anyways, that’s about all for my deep thoughts right now. Hopefully we’ll get something going on the Beta soon so I can post more.

And who knows, maybe a new Holy How-To soon, eh? It’s been over a month since my last one!

So I hit 83 last night after questing my ass off in Deepholm (screenshots of all that to come).

Just a quick note on Healing Hands as it currently stands on beta:

- 10 second duration, 30 second cooldown (with 3/3 Speed of Light)

-4 second 30% movement speed buff (with 3/3 Speed of Light)

- Heals people for ~764/tick as long as they’re within 10 yards of you (with about 3600ish spellpower and 3/3 Divinity). Unsure if this can crit, although I assume so. Edit: Yes, it can crit.

- Heals you for about 810/tick (with 3/3 Divinity – since you are receiving 6% more healing through the talent). This can definitely crit.

- Edit: It looks like this gives eleven ticks, not ten.

- Will not maintain the heal on someone if you move away from them. You cannot, for example, stand in melee, hit this and then run back out to range with the heal continuing to heal melee. It will hit whoever is surrounding you at the present time.

I’ll have a video demonstrating this later today, but my initial thoughts are “Uh… Okay?” I keep thinking this would have been amazing using the stupid door strat on 25-man heroic Twin Valks… But I haven’t had an opportunity to heal with it yet on beta, because the stupid random dungeon finder tool is broken. Alas.

Also, you don’t get experience beyond 83, so you can’t work towards 84 and just be capped at the end of 83. I don’t expect I’ll do a lot on Madrana (apart from instances) until they raise the level cap.

Anyways, that pesky “real life” thing beckons. I’ll finish up (and post) that video later. :)

Edit: Here’s the video!

I’ve been in my current guild now for seven weeks. Throughout that entire time, I have basically been the only holy paladin. More to the point, all the holy paladin apps have pretty much made me want to cry.

We’re talking people specced into Retribution for support even though they clearly have all intellect gems, we’re talking people with under 500 haste, we’re talking the Drape of the Violet Tower… There has been all KINDS of failure. It’s so varied, but the end result is the same — sucktastic is a generous word for most of the pally apps.

Coming from a more progressed guild with what is more or less a set roster (you are expected to make every single raid for its full duration unless you give notice and even then, it’s frowned upon to take too many nights off) to a guild who hadn’t gotten Dreamwalker healed on heroic yet, with a very large roster, in comparison, has been an interesting experience.

I knew that I could help them with Dreamwalker. I knew that I could help them repeat heroic Saurfang. I knew that I could help them with Lady Deathwhisper. God knows I’ve wiped enough to Putricide and Sindragosa that I can certainly offer my experience and brain to the raid leaders.

On the first reset, bam, Dreamwalker healed to full. We’ve done her on heroic every week since except for when we got them Portal Jockey, I think. (I say “them” not to set myself apart from the rest of my raid group but rather because I already had it, as well as all the other required achievements for my 25-man drake.) That’s satisfying.

I’ve also been a key part for heroic Saurfang kills, taking on the first two ranged marks, for the most part.

I helped them to retool the Deathwhisper strat to one that worked twice before people seemed to stop caring about adds and Vengeful Shades. (Which is roundabout the time we lost the one decent healing priest we had, who wasn’t all that decent, but hey, Renewed Hope and Mass Dispel are nothing to sneeze at.)

It’s been a really good experience for me, learning how to integrate myself into this team that hasn’t had a single decent holy paladin for months. I cannot imagine how they did half of what they did without a holy paladin, much less two.

It’s been pretty clear to the leadership, I think, that we need a second holy paladin. Certainly my GM has been recruiting like crazy and levelling her pally alt with the intention to switch over if we can’t find someone. I mean hell, I’m good, but I’m not a miracle worker. I can’t imagine really working well on heroic Sindragosa without a second holy paladin.

We’ve done a LOT of heroic Sindragosa attempts to try to get us used to the mechanics, if nothing else. We’ve had a lot of practice on things like Frost Bombs and Ice Tombs and Unchained Magic (I think I may be the person currently in the guild who has spent the most amount of time in her life with her pathetic magic betraying her.). This is good stuff, I’m GLAD we usually take a few whacks at her on heroic to make sure people understand the mechanics. You never know when you’ll get lucky on an attempt, either.

Still, we were definitely lacking a holy paladin and really, a decent discipline priest. We don’t even have a holy priest right now and just pulled a disc priest app in this week (who is doing AWESOMELY and we’ve only raided with him once!).

Last week, we brought in a holy paladin app, who learned of my guild’s need for a holy paladin through this very blog.

I was totally excited… until I realized his internet was lame, meaning that he couldn’t stay connected through Marrowgar. He got disconnected and couldn’t return and we didn’t see him again until the weekend and he explained his internet issues. Thankfully, the internet issues turned out to be something that was more or less temporary and not even his fault. We raided together on Monday for a little bit on heroic Putricide until the battlegroup died on us and it wasn’t enough for me to really make any kind of judgement on how this guy was doing.

I have to say now, after raiding with him for just over three hours on Wednesday night (we called it early after getting Halion down), this guy is the real deal.

We got heroic Lady Deathwhisper down for the first time in a month. The pally app ate one Vengeful Shade at the end of our first (of two) attempts and that’s it. He cleansed at least adequately, used cooldowns appropriately and healed like mad, which is what you need to do on LDW.

And then, after way too long, I got to heal Saurfang with another holy paladin. I asked the healing lead if he would mind if the two pallies took care of the first four marks and so when he gave out assignments, he told the other pally that I’d explain to him what it was we would do. It was spectacular. The first attempt was hilarious, actually. The first mark got killed by a blood beast and then our healing lead rezzed him. Whoops.

Our mulligan out of the way, we got ourselves organized and blasted through Saurfang in just over four minutes, with only five marks, which is a first for us, I believe. I think we usually get six.

It was awesome; the pallies took care of the marks, there was great uptime on beacon and judgements of the pure… We both used BOP on casters pre-first mark, he even found time to hit DS/DS at the Frenzy and also bopped one of his marks again. Win all around.

To Blood Wing, where I may throttle most of my fellow raiders if I get thrown across the room on Council again. Seriously. The guild’s major flaw (every guild has one, IMHO) is that they are very bad at range issues. That means that we get people hurled across the room due to Empowered Shock Vortex, we occasionally get people chaining Ice Tombs on Sindragosa, people dying to Bloodbolt Splash on BQL. You know. That kind of stuff.

Still, craziness ensued and we WON. What happened?

The Keleseth tank died. He didn’t have enough shadow orbs on him and had literally 98 stacks of Shadow Prison on him, plus Keleseth was basically wailing on him… so the Valanar tank picked him up — and was one-shotted by an empowered shadow lance or something. This is bad. That was my tank who picked him up and then died. I hate losing my tanks. So I did what any good paladin did, I swapped to the last tank and healed as best I could. I was low on mana, Divine Plea was always on cooldown… But the pally app, whose tank it was, had no issues and basically was the person responsible (well, along with the tank) for bringing the Council down.

Way impressive.

Off to BQL where the app unfortunately got penned in by some DPS and died to a Bloodbolt Splash (see? That was totally foreshadowing up there!) but got a battle rez and still managed to get his DS/DS and Aura Mastery off for the second fear.

Add to that the fact that he LISTENS with regards to beacon/shield/judgement/aura/blessing assignments… Uses his cooldowns…

<3

As if I didn’t love raiding with this group before, I now get to raid with them plus someone who obviously has a similar mindset to me when it comes to holy paladin healing. It’s pretty glorious and, assuming his internet issues are more or less resolved, it’s going to be a huge benefit to the guild to have him available.

Also, I didn’t mention this last week, but I FINALLY picked up Heroic Marrowgar’s Frigid Eye. Here’s my chardev link which is also linked in the top-right box here on my website and that’s updated as soon as I get a new piece of gear. Check the updated date to see if I’ve gotten any new loot lately. :)

I should get back to beta and try to get through to level 83. Talents are seriously busted this build, though. I can’t learn Art of War in my ret spec no matter what I try. I mean, if I have the talent preview on, I can click three times on it and pick up my other spells, but because it won’t learn Art of War, I cannot get more than 19 talent points in ret that way. I had to go learn Pursuit of Justice and 1/2 Eye for an Eye or something in order for my talents to “stick”. If I had to guess, I’d say things are more broken today than they were yesterday. Alas, such are the highs and the lows of beta. :)

I was excited to log in to WoW after patching (I didn’t like the streaming patch) to see if anything changed for holy paladins.

Near as I can tell, two things have changed. And also, I don’t know if something is intended or not, but good gravy, there’s an interesting mechanic to talk about.

1) Infusion of Light still reduces the cast time of Flash of Light by 1.5 seconds. But now it ALSO, as advertised, reduces the cast time on Holy Light by 1.5 seconds. So your FoL is instant, which isn’t in the tooltip (we are told the tooltips are borked), but Holy Light’s cast time reduction works, where it did not previously.

Edit: Wow, I need to play less beta and get more sleep. I was wrong. I read that I was going from a 2.3 second cast to a 1.8 second cast as a 1.5s cast time reduction. What I am actually seeing, however, is the Speed of Light haste bringing it down that 0.5s.

Sleep deprivation is bad, mkay?

2) Rule of Law in the first tier of the ret tree has been changed from a 3-point talent to a 2-point talent. The tooltip now reads:

Increases the critical chance of your Crusader Strike, Holy Shock and Word of Glory by 5/10%.

That’s 5% crit gone from Holy Shock and Word of Glory, unless they’ve changed the talent to be 7%/15%. I can’t tell; my crit rating is terribly low at 82.

And the interesting mechanic is this…

As long as you have a beacon on someone and even one charge of Holy Power, you can heal that person for free indefinitely.

Check it out.

Edit: I’m totally late to the party on this, btw. ElitistJerks was talking about this the other day.

Edit: Also, guild ranks are saving! I don’t know if all the associated rank stuff is being saved, but I was able to promote people in my guild to officer without, you know, promoting them to GM first!

Okay folks, I have almost 700 screenshots from beta up at my gallery:

http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com/cataclysm/

They’ve been reorganized:

Madrana – This gallery is my paladin questing or being in instances or screenshotting cast times/mana costs/talent trees and the like.

Kurnmogh – same as for Madrana, just on my hunter.

The other stuff is mostly random and is very little actual content, just a few profession things, a couple random screenshots taken on my shaman.

Planned for today (Wednesday, August 4th):

A look at instances, specifically those “OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL” moments that you will doubtlessly encounter in your journeys through Throne of the Tides, Blackrock Caverns and The Stonecore.

Obviously, this look at the first three dungeons available to us will be from my perspective of a holy paladin, but I hope for the post to be useful to all players. Understanding various mechanics is pretty key.

The one thing everything shares in common is what I consider to be the basic rule of World of Warcraft:

IF THE FLOOR CHANGES COLOUR, GTFO.

Just as a brief example, I was in The Stonecore on Tuesday and noticed something swirling at my feet. I stopped casting and strafed the hell out of there before a puddle of lava appeared.

You can see the gallery shot of that here.

Anyways, that’s what’s coming up.

Also, I know, I know, I’ve been lax at talking about “current content”. I will definitely get a new Holy How-To up in the next week or so, once the beta-mania has calmed down. My goal is to get Madrana to 83 ASAP (I’m already a quarter of the way through 82) so I can play with Healing Hands and report back on that.  Then I’ll feel more able to talk about Wrath content and such.

In the meantime, if you have questions concerning holy paladins or perhaps instance questions, drop a comment and I’ll try to respond to them either in the comment or in my upcoming post. :)

Welcome to everyone from World of Raids, by the way! Hope you’ll stick around. :)