Why does the Murloc mock me?

So my wife and I were talking about what we wanted to do for a big vacation this year. Last year we went to the Rose Bowl to cheer on Illinois and spent a few days in Vegas as well. When my wife mentioned the possiblility of heading back to the west coast for a trip, I immediatly thought of Blizzcon. After stepping up like a man and putting my foot down (crying like a girl), I finally talked her into letting our vacation give me my Blizzcon fix! Yes, I will draw the jealous stares of my guildies as I ride my polar bear! At least....that is the plan.

However, a Murloc stands in my way, like a cold, fishy, roadblock. When I went to buy my tickets this morning I was greeted with an error page showing the murloc in all of his glory. He gave me the very detailed and helpful, "An error has occured." I surfed on over to the Blizzcon forums and witnessed a full-on fanboy meltdown in progress. As it turns out, noone can buy their tickets yet, as Blizzard's servers are apaprently AFK for the time being. I truely hope this situation gets sorted out and I manage to get my hands on some tickets, or I will not be a happy camper.

Punishing your raiders?

On the verge of getting down Archimonde now. We had one magical attempt where everything seemed to come together until the very end. We had a warlock get seperated at around 18% or so and get feared into a fire to die. While it was a frustrating way to wipe, I am hoping it got us over the mental hump.

So what was different last night? For the first time, we started to hold people accountable for their actions. We put in a -10 DKP penalty for failing to use their tear and cratering. We also put in a policy where if you were the first to die twice, you got benched. We only had a couple people crater, and they never did it twice. It definatly seemed to get everyone focused and in the mindset of survival rather than owning the DPS meters. I am never a fan of punishing people, but sometimes you need to do something to shake them up and make them really pay attention.

WotLK - The state of the resto shaman

First of all, take a peek at the talent calculator at the official site. Here is a link for you.

Shaman Talents

Alrighty, now that we have a look at the talent trees let's review some of the new features.

Improved Water Shield: The first major addition is in Tier 3 of the resto tree. For 3 points, each time you crit with HW or LHW you will proc one of your water shield orbs. Not a bad talent, and will shine in 5-mans. The exact role of resto shamans in raiding has gotten much less clear with the changes. As raiding stands today, this seems like a waste of 3 points, since our role in raids is 95% Chain Heal and that does not work with this talent.

Cleanse Spirit: 1 point talent that cleanses poison, disease, and curses. Woot! All in-one cleanse including curses? Yes please! Very nice to have.

Blessing of the Eternals: 2 points for 4% crit and +10% healing from Earthliving Weapon. Not a bad talent, but I have never been the hugest fan of crit builds for healing since alot of healing crits are going to overheal. It seems Blizz is trying to push us in that direction.

Ancestral Awakening: When you critically hit with LHW or HW, it jumps to a raid member within 40 yards for 60% of the healing done. It is sort of like a big chain heal for tank healing, but it is uncontrollable.

Improved Earth Shield: Gives you 2 additional orbs and increases healing by 10%. An ok talent, but nothing that wows me.

Tidal Waves: 100% chance after casting chain heal to reduce the cast time on your next 2 LHW and HW by 50%, and your HW and LHW spells gain an additional 25% healing. I am a little confused if the extra 25% is only after a proc of this, or is an overall buff. This talent can be used in one of 2 ways. You can cycle between CH and 2 HW when healing, or you can be spamming CH on the raid and have the 2 HWs "loaded" and ready for quick help on the tank or someone that is very low. This should be useful regardless of the style in which it is used.

Spirit Link: Links the target with 2 nearby friendly targets, causing 50% of damage taken to be distributed to linked targets. Targets that take a hit equal to 30% of their total health will be removed fromt he link. Well, this thing is interesting. Let's do some quick overview using current values. A tank at 20k health is linked up with 2 other melee with 10k each. The tank gets smacked for 7k from a boss, so that gets split into 3.5k to the tank, and 1.725k to each of our melee. The is a HUGE difference in incoming damage. Just mop up the damage with Chain Heal. This talent as it reads is almost game breaking, so I am not sure how it will play out.

Other areas of interest include Elemental Focus now working to reduce mana off of heals too. The way it reads now it only procs of damage spells, but I have heard it does proc off heal crits as well. Also, Ancestral Knowledge is now +int, and Improved Shields ups both Water and Earth Shield by a small amount.

Overall I like most of the changes, but I dislike the overall direction of the class. In current WoW, all healers have a role the shine in. Shamans are the best raids healers, pallies for tank healing, druids for HoTs, and priests are the jack-of-all trades. In WotLK they seem to be muddying the waters and making everyone do everything. All of the new shaman talents are based on improving our single target healing.

While I like being able to single target heal better, I expected us to get something to benefit our raid healing. Almost none of the new synergy in the talent trees does anything for our raid healing. Not seeing the design of WotLK raids yet, it is difficult to judge our role. CoH got a nerf with the cooldown, and now they are pushing us to single target talents. Is Blizzard trying to move away from huge AOE damage on the raid? I guess time will tell. I personally like having a more defined role to shine in, and not making everyone a jack-of-all trades.

Impact of the WotLK beta notes

The big news in WoWland today is the Wrath of the Lich King beta is starting and the first official patch notes are now floating around. You can check out the entire list here. Let's start by looking at the shaman changes.

Shaman

• All totems are now considered on the "Physical" school, and no longer magical spells.
• Ancestral Knowledge (Enhancement): Now increases your Intellect by 2/4/6%, instead of increasing your total Mana by 2/4/6/8/10%.
• Call of Flame (Elemental): Now also increases the damage of your Lava Burst spell by 2/4/6%.
• Call of Thunder (Elemental) now also increases the critical strike chance of your Thunder spell.
• Concussion (Elemental) now increases the damage of your Thunder and Lava Burst spells.
• Convection (Elemental) is now a 3-point talent, down from a 5-point talent. Now lowers the mana cost of Thunder and Lava Burst.
• Earth's Grasp (Elemental) is now a tier-1 talent, up from tier-2.
• Elemental Detestation (Elemental) is now a tier-2 talent, up from tier-4.
• Elemental Focus (Restoration): Now also can proc off Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Wave, and can be used on all healing spells.
• Elemental Fury (Elemental) now requires Elemental Focus as a pre-requisite
• Elemental Precision (Elemental): Chance to hit reduced to 1/2/3% from 2/4/6%, but threat reduction increased to 10/20/30% up from 4/7/10%.
• Enhancing (Enhancement) Totems is now a Tier 1 talent, up from Tier-2.
• Flametongue Totem is now a flat spell damage totem. All ranks have been modified.
• Frostbrand's snare effect has been increased to 50%, up from 25%.
• Ghost Wolf's mana cost is now 13% base.
• Grace of Air Totem has been removed. (Agility has been rolled over into Strength of Earth Totem)
• Improved Fire Totems (Elemental) is now (again) Improved Fire Nova Totem. It now has a 50/100% chance to stun all targets for 2 sec.
• Improved Lightning Shield (Enhancement) is now Elemental Shields, and is in Tier-1.
• New ranks have been added of Water Shield, starting at level 20. (Level 20, 27, 34, 41, 48, 55, 62, 69)
• New Spell: Earthliving Weapon - Imbue the Shaman's weapon with earthen life. Increases healing done by x and each heal has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additionaly over 12 sec. Lasts 30 minutes.
• New Talent: Cleanse Spirit (Restoration) - Cleanse the spirit of a friendly target, removing 1 poison effect, 1 disease effect, and 1 curse effect.
• New Talent: Elemental Shields (Enhancement): Increases the damage done by your Lightning Shield orbs by 5/10/15%, increases the amount of mana gained from your Mana Shield orbs by 5/10/15% and increases the amount of healing done by your Earth Shield orbs by 5/10/15%.
• New Talent: Mental Dexterity (Enhancement) - Increases your Attack Power by 33/66/100% of your Intellect.
• Rockbiter ranks 5 through 9 have been removed. Windfury Weapon is intended to replace Rockbiter at level 30.
• Shapeshifting will no longer cancel Water Walking.
• Shield Specialization (Enhancement) - Now a 2-point talent, and increases the chance to block with attacks by 10/20%, and increases the amount blocked by 5/10%
• Stoneskin Totem now increases armor instead of reducing physical damage.
• Storm Reach (Elemental): Now also increases the radius of your Thunder spell by 10/20%.
• Strength of Earth Totem now also increases agility.
• Tranquil Air Totem has been removed. (Threat is being addressed by modifications to the base threat of players and/or "baked" into tanking abilities.)
• Unleashed Rage is now raid wide.
• Windfury Totem is now a flat 20% melee haste totem. All ranks have been modified.
• Windwall Totem has been removed.
• Wrath of Air is now a flat 10% spell haste totem.

Ok, so that is a lot of stuff to look at. I will go through and point out the changes that have a bigger effect on Resto Shamans.

All totems being physical now is nice. It is more of a PVP change, but in some PVE encounters you can use time you may be silenced to refresh your totems.

Ancestral Knowledge is now +int instead of +mana. I imagine that will make it scale better and may make it worth taking. I would have to hunt down some theorycraft to see how much of an upgrade it is.

Elemental Focus in the elemental tree now procs off lesser healing wave and healing wave. Increases efficiency for tank healing.

Flametongue totem now adds spell damage! With the change to Wrath of Air, this makes us able to add spell haste and damage with our totems. Very nice.

Grace of Air removed and rolled into Strength of Earth. With totems now being raid-wide, we now have reasons to keep all 4 down at once.

Earthliving Weapon finally gives us a weapon buff for healing.

Cleanse Spirit puts all of our cleanse abilities on one button and even adds decursing! Yay!

Tranquil Air has been removed. All of the threat reduction spells seem to be changes significantly. Pallies salvation for example is changed dramatically. They seem to be pushing for tanks to be able to push more threat so you do not need these anymore.

Windfury is a flat 20% melee haste buff. I am assuming that is a buff, and it certainly is a buff for druids, since now it works for them.

Wrath of Air is a 10% spell haste buff. Since Flametongue does spell damage now, combining the 2 is amazing!

Overall these are mostly positive changes. I will follow-up this post with a discussion on the general direction of the shaman in WotLK so far. If you have not seen the changes in general, go check them out here.

I'm surrounded by retards!

Ok, not really, but sometimes raiding can make you feel that way. Archimonde is the ultimate personal responsibility fight, or as some like to call him, the retard check. He is pretty simple to understand, but is unforgiving of any mistakes. Here is a quick rundown.

Tanking: He hits for 6-7k on plate. Nothing too bad that 3 good healers cannot handle. He does not crushing blow, so a druid tank may actually be a better choice assuming you have enough Fear Wards for him.

AOE Fears: He does a AOE fear that lasts about 8 seconds, which is a long time to be feared. The tank must be fear warded or stance dance this, and you need to make sure you have a couple healers out of it to heal. Due to the fears, everyone in the raid needs to have a 2 minute PVP trinket. You then can rotate out pairs of healers that will trinket during each fear. If a DPS finds themselves running towards a doomfire, that is when they need to trinket out. Also, tremor totems are incredibly useful for the fears.

Grip of the Legion: A curse DoT that does 2500 damage every 3 seconds. Must be immediatly removed.

Air Burst: He will target a person and send them and everyone within 13 yards flying up into the air and away from him. Before the fight begins, you need to aquire the tears of the goddess from Tyrnade Whisperwind at the nightelf camp. The tears will slow your fall for 1 second. So the way to use them is to wait until you are about 2/3rds of the way down and then hit the tears. You need to have the tears on your bar and hotkeyed. It is always better to be safe and use it a little bit early instead of crater and die, thus wiping the raid.

Doomfire: By far the most dangerous ability, he will send trails of fire that actively chase people. As with almost every raid in WoW, do not stand in the fire!! If you get caught by it, you will also get a DoT on yourself that cannot be removed. Too many DoTed people will strain the healing.

Soul Charges: Here is why the fight is a retard check. If anyone dies, Archimonde gets a Soul Charge. This ability does really nasty things to the raids depending on the class that died, and is almost always a wipe. It usually results in one person dying, thus causing another soul charge, and setting off a quick chain reaction wipe. The goal of the entire fight is not to allow anyone to die!

This fight is frustrating, because it demands perfection. You can be doing great and are steadily bringing him down, but then one person misses their tear on an airburst and you are wiped. It makes players that do not make many mistakes very annoyed when the same people keep having problems over and over in dealing with air bursts and not standing in fire. We got him to 52% on our first night of attempts, which was very good for a learning night. I hope to get him down in the next few weeks so I can blow all of my DKP on my T6 helm. :)

Tier 6 for me!

Grabbed my first piece of Tier 6 with the gloves off Azgalor last night. Seems like we have the fight pretty well down now, but we did get sloppy right at the end and almost wiped when the tank went down at about 5%. We were able to finish him off before he killed Thrall. The gloves are only a small upgrade over Worldstorm Gauntlets from Solarian that I have been wearing. However, once I get another piece for the set-bonus then T6 becomes the clear winner.

I also am starting to slowly move towards building up some spell haste rating. After I got the gloves last night I switched a couple of Luminous Pyrestone I had in yellow sockets over to Quick Lionseye. Spell Haste gives more raw throughput once you have plenty of healing, you just have to be sure to keep a balance and not go too far with it and gimp healing or regen. I think it scales exceptionally well for a resto shammy spamming Chain Heal on the raid.

On Sunday we are starting or first real efforts on Archimonde. We ran in a couple times last night just to practice air bursts and get a feel for dodging doomfires. We did not even bother setting up heal assignments or trinket rotations, so I do not even consider those real attempts. We did manage to take him to 80% without even trying, so I am not too sure how hard he is going to be. It is a complete retard check, so hopefully we are low on retards. I think if T6 helm drops I will be blowing a lot of DKP to get the set bonus. 10% off each cast of Chain Heal is uber! When spam casting it is equivalent to over 80-115ish mp/5 depending on which rank I am using.

Teron Gorefiend down!

Symbiosis is progressing very nicely. We managed to kill Teron Gorefiend on our 5th attempt ever. We started in Hyjal and 1 shotted Azgalor and then headed over to BT to take a look at Gorefiend. Our fearless guild leader inspired us by saying we would not kill him tonight, but it would be good to start learning. Shows what he knows! :) Our first attempt we had him at 25%, so I could already see he was going down that night.

If your guild is getting ready to attempt him for the first time I recommend you hit up the Teron Gorefiend Simulator for practice at controlling your constructs. It was a great help in getting everyone used to the idea.

The fight is basically a tank and spank and is a race against raid attrition. As more and more people go down to the debuff you are slowly going to lose more and more DPS. His damage also slowly grows as the fight goes on.

Here is the healing setup we used that worked well:
4 healers assigned to the MT at all times.
3 raid healers, with 1 raid healer assigned to float to cleansing or MT duty depending on if a healer gets shadow of death.
1 full time cleanser for the incinerate. We had our prot pally on this.

Every wipe on the fight was due to contructs getting into the raid. If everyone handles their constructs well then he is not too difficult at all. Funny how random events work. I practiced the flash game a ton to be ready, and not once in 5 fights did I ever get the debuff. My only concern with it is the buttons with my Bongos mod, but aside from UI issues I am confident I can handle the constructs without an issue. I was hoping to get the debuff once to see how my UI reacts, and I created a couple macros on my sidebar just in case I had button problems.

Badge loot ftw?

As most people know, when the Sunwell patch came out Blizzard added a metric ton of new badge loot that is crazy good. As soon as I saw what was coming, I immediately started running all the heroics and Karas I could to stock up. After my purchases, let's take a look at my gear now, shall we?

Head: Mojo-Mender's Mask
Neck: Shattered Sun pendant of Restoration
Shoulders: Cataclysm Shoulderguards
Back: Lifegiving Cloak
Chest: Wave of Life Chestguard
Bracers: Howling Wind Bracers
Gauntlets: Worldstorm Gauntlets
Belt: Girdle of Fallen Stars
Legs: Runed Scales of Antiquity
Feet: Treads of the Life Path
Ring: Pheonix-Ring of Rebirth
Ring: Anveena's Touch
Trinket: Fel Reaver's Piston
Trinket: Redeemer's Alchemist Stone
Weapon: Gavel of Naaru Blessings
Shield: Triptych Shield of the Ancients
Totem: Totem of Living Water

Ok, so I am sitting pretty good for BT/Hyjal thanks to all the badge loot. I am over 2200 healing with plenty of mp/5. I can spam chain heal 4 all day if I chain drink super mana pots. But the side effect of all of this great badge gear is all the good gear the I would have snatched up in the past just rots. Most of my upgrades will not be until T6 or Sunwell. The only coming big upgrades for my gear will be a new cloak and a new shield. The cloak is from BT trash, and the shield will either be off Dragonhawk or Anetheron, both of which refuse to drop for me. I will also take the helm off warlord, but it is only a small upgrade, and the ring off BT trash. Things like the resto boots, legs, and chest off the first 3 Hyjal bosses all are just going to an offspec or to DE since the badge gear is just as good or better, which is a little sad. I think it is a double-edged sword, as it lets people like myself get quickly caught-up and into T6 guilds, but it also sort of makes the T5 instance gear pretty obsolete and seems to encourage skipping those instances.

Drama, and a new guild

After months of not posting I decided to try and pick this blog back up again. There have been many changes to my WoW life. The first is with great sadness I was forced to leave Critical Mass. Unfortunately, being the raid leader I knocked over the dominoes that managed to bring down the whole guild. I think in the end it turned out to be a good thing.

Over the years with CM, I made a lot of great friends. But everyone has their own goals in this game and you really need to belong to a guild that shares those goals. The core problem that existed in CM was that the guild was split between really casual people and casual/hardcore raiders. The group that wanted to raid and make progress was constantly having to try and carry the load and it just does not work after awhile. Having people show up sporadically, and when they do show up not bringing consumables or even able to do their job well caused mounting frustrations within the guild. Slowly some of the more hardcore raiders would hit their breaking point and leave for greener pastures.

We had several officers meetings to discuss how to fix the situation, but we could never come to a complete agreement. Being the raid leader, I felt like my hands were tied to fix the situation, as at least one other officer actively opposed me trying to institute any policies that would even give priority invites to the core raiders. At that point all the Void Reaver mods were broken in a patch making him no longer free T-5 shoulders. It seems our more casual group was incapable of looking for the orbs without the mods as a crutch. After several weeks of futility in TK, our priest officer left in frustration. That was the breaking point for me, and I moved on as well. As the core raiders that made a real effort saw what was happening, they all began to abandon ship as well, causing the GM to declare CM was now an alt only guild and kick everyone out that he did not consider a friend. In the end, all of the people that were important to me kept an alt in CM for old times sake, and we now have a custom chat channel to talk in game. Also, most of the core group followed myself and the priest officer to our new guild, Symbiosis. In any one Symbiosis raid there could be 6 or 7 ex-CMers.

On the positive side, I am now far more happy with my raiding time. I have now declared my resto shaman as my main, thus the change in this blog. Symbiosis seems like the perfect guild for me. They don't put up for long with an under performing player, but they also maintain a more casual 3-day raid schedule. We are now 4/5 in Hyjal and 3/9 in Black Temple.

The first couple weeks I felt I was a bit shaky, but mostly due to a bit of bad luck on some fights and getting used to the new mechanics. I ended up dying a bunch during Vashj, which was more on the tanks, but I did die several times in Hyjal due to noobishness. So I was either sitting the bench or flat on my face for the first 2 weeks, which was embarrassing to me as I always strive to be the best at what I do. But now I have settled into the guild and believe I have proven myself as a good raider. I am the only consistent resto shaman we have, so it pretty much gives me a nice guaranteed raid spot and the pick of any healing mail for minimum DKP. I have also started handling healing assignments recently, so me being just a raider did not last long. Haha. I am looking forward to staying with this guild long term and am excited about downing new bosses together. I am especially excited when WotLK finally arrives to be with a guild that is focused on getting started with the new lvl 80 raids and progressing from the start!

Soloarian dies as well

We got down High Astromancer Solarian twice since my last post. She really is an updated version of the Baron Gheddon fight from MC. If you can run away when you are the bomb, you will win. If you have someone that is not paying attention, the whole raid will go boom. Her bomb hurts a lot more than the Gheddon bomb did, and is almost an automatic death if the raid eats one. Her other abilities are a weak AOE to the raid, which I just chain heal on the shaman. She also constantly throws arcane missles at a random target similar to Shade of Aran on steroids. This is countered by 3 fast healing classes using an assist macro to always get heals on her target. About every minute she vanishes and a bunch of non-elite AOE mobs charge in. Just have a pally pick them up and AOE them down. She then respawns with 2 priests, so kill the priests and have someone on each interrupting the heals before you resume DPS on her. Repeat until 20%, when she turns into a ginat Voidwalker. At that point you have won. She starts hitting like a wuss on a tank and just does an AOE fear which you can stop with fear ward.

Gruul is now dying every week, but tends to bog us down and most of the loot gets passed on. I think we will make that night dedicated to starting in SSC and Gruul will be moved to an off-night quick run. That is the approach I prefer to take anyways, as I feel people are not as motivated once we switch to the second instance. I want us all to be in the SSC mindset going in, and be prepared to learn the fights. We took a few Hydross attempts this week and got him to 60%. It is all in the transistions and as soon as we get that down we will be fine. Seems like his adds are by far the most dangerous part of the fight.

Woot, VR goes down!

Critical Mass went into TK last night and put Void Reaver on his ass. Took 2 learning attempts, and we came up just short of the enrage timer on the 2nd try. So I went and got my Warlock since healing was not super stressful and that put us over the top with the DPS. We actually killed him right as he enraged and started going around 1 shotting people. There was a lot of screaming on Vent as one of our pallies ended up getting him with his hamer with about 5 people standing. I was holding my breath watching my DoTs tick since I had already died. We got a set of mage shoulders, some pally shoulders for our prot pally, and a DPS cloth head for a shadow priest. Hopefully next week we will get him down first shot and can start looking to another boss. I also think we will start in on some Mag attempts this week depending on how fast we clear Gruuls. Last week it only took us 30 minutes, so if we go in there like that again I definatly plan on us heading to another boss. It's a great feeling to make some progress with a casual and friendly raiding guild!

WoW, a blog from me!

Hello to the 3 people that are probably reading this. I've decided to have a go at entering the exciting world of typing random crap for the Internet to read. This blog is going to be primarily focused on World of Warcraft, with the occasional posts dedicated to whatever I feel like talking about.

I am currently an Officer and Raid leader for the guild Critical Mass on the Stormreaver realm. My main is a lvl 70 Warlock named Ryanoth. These days, I seem to raid more on my lvl 70 Resto Shaman named Syrinth. I am also gearing up a lvl 70 Prot Warrior named Mysrinth, and slowly working on a rogue name Mysra who is in her 40s. I have no idea why I like to name all my characters with a "y" as the second letter, but now it is a theme! :)

Critical Mass is mostly a casual raiding guild. We are working on 25-mans 2 nights a week, and run Kara and ZA groups on off days. We have Kara and Gruul on farm, and are just stepping into SSC/TK to start learning the place. Last week was our first attempt on Void Reaver. I think it will just take a few tries to train people to run from the damn orbs.

I love my guild in general. There are some great people in it and I consider many of them friends. The officer core has been basically stable for a few years now. Several people even have started having RL get togethers with other guildies. There is one this weekend I wanted to attend, but unfortunatly I will be in St Louis.

The downfall of being in a casual raiding guild is the mix of playstyles can conflict. In a hard-core raiding guild, you can enforce strict requirements and attendance. That just doesn't work in a laid back guild. So we have a mix of hard-core raiders, PVP people, and people that are just doing whatever they feel like. I and most of the officers lean more towards being hard-core raiders. So it is frustrating when you work in your spare time to gear up by running heroics, crafting items, and farming up consumables, only to have someone in the raid only doing 300 DPS because they don't work on their toon at all outside of raids or is not PVE specced at all. While I could always go join a hard-core guild, I don't have the time to dedicate 5 nights a week to raiding, and I have far too many friends in CM. So for now, it is an adventure with trying to balance being open and friendly, but expecting people to bring their A-game to the raids.

My WoW experience in general is that I have been playing since beta. I rolled my first Warlock back when they had no talents and were laughed at. I was a free kill to any horde that wasn't mildly retarded. I specifically rolled a gnome Warlock just because it was the least played combination in the game at the time. I remember grouping for instance runs with people having never had a Warlock in their group before. I ended up becoming very interested in all the game mechanics, and am kind of a theorycraft nerd. At the time, there were no good Warlock guides out there, so I wrote one that is posted on Gamefaqs. It is horribly out of date now, but I guess was decent for it's time as I got a lot of email about it and even several offers to write for some web sites.

In future posts, I will discuss many aspects of day-to-day life in WoW. I will probably go into depth on each of the classes I play and give my opinions. Hope someone finds it informative.