How I’m healing in MoP – Holy Pally 4eva: The UI

You have your gear (note that the gear post is somewhat outdated) and reforging in mind and you’ve picked out the Talents and Glyphs you want to start with. You’re ready to start pressing buttons!

Almost.

Before getting to the pressing buttons part, I want to make sure your UI (User Interface) needs are met. To heal effectively you want a proper interface. One that tells you what you need to know yet cuts down on useless, overwhelming information.

A good healer knows exactly what’s happening to each person in the raid at all times as well as what their own character is doing, while following the fight.

The key to that, friends, is a proper UI.

What to Add to the Addon Shopping List?

Here’s a screen shot of my UI (click on it on few times to make it bigger). This is obviously just an example and you are free (in fact, I encourage you!) to use your imagination to build your own interface.

1- Raid Frames

You want to see what’s going on in your raid. The more popular frames for healing are VuhDo, Healbot, Grid and Grid2. Shown in the above picture is Grid2.

Grid and Grid2 require an extra addon if you want to use the mouse to interact with the frames (Clique is the only one I’m aware of). The original Grid may require extra addons to track certain buffs and debuffs as well. For an elaborate breakdown of the major frame addons, check out Grimmtooth (the series may be a little outdated but the general gist is there).

Having tried all of the popular healing frames, I found them equally good, so go with whichever you find prettiest or whichever your friends use (so it’s easier to get answers if you have questions).

As a Holy Paladin, you want to track:

- Your Beacon of Light as well as the Beacons of other Holy Pallies in the raid (indicated separately)
- Eternal Flame
- Sacred Shield (If you are using the spell, otherwise it is optional)
- Your Illuminated Healing (Optional – nice to have but may be overwhelming)
- Range (Fade out at 40 yards)
- Aggro (Optional but helpful)
- Rezzed but not yet taken the rez (Called Resurrection on Grid2. Most players don’t track this, but I find it super helpful.)
- Fight specific buffs and debuffs (Such as Pungency on Garalon)
- Magic, Poison and Disease debuffs (Curse debuffs can be shown separately if desired)

As a side note, in the screenshot you can see the tanks on the default WoW frames. I do this in LFR to keep track of who the tanks are. I would hide the default frames in a guild raid.

2- Bar Organizer

The popular addons are Bartender 4 (shown in screenshot) and Dominos.

A good bar organizer will keep your game from vomiting buttons all over your screen. If you look closely, you can see my keybound abilities on the bottom (I rebound my movement keys to ESDF and use the surrounding keys to tap abilities) and my cooldowns (mostly) on the top. My mounts, professions and others are faded out to the right of my main bars, my seals are to the left, and my system buttons (Raid Finder, Raid Journal, Character, etc) are to the top left (hidden behind the WoW frames on the screenshot).

(The screenshot was taken during a time of winter cleaning so the layout isn’t ideal – there are a couple of suboptimal buttons and even an empty space. I am still working on perfecting my bars, so please don’t copy the screenshot.)

Ideally, I would have my cooldowns larger and more in the middle of my screen, but there are so many cooldowns and so little room on the screen. I’ve just gotten in the habit of glancing at my CDs as part of my regular screen visual sweep.

3- Personal Frames (Heads Up)

While you can keep track of yourself using your raid frames, many of us find it easier to track ourselves separately. I use mine for mana and Holy Power (it shows health too, but out of habit I tend to look at my raid frames for my health).

Shown in the picture above is IceHUD, but there are a lot of options to choose from. Once again, the awesome Grimmtooth has reviewed and cataloged the main ones (again, may be a little outdated but still relevent, see Grimmtooth’s comment on this post for some updates).

I have the bars set to fade out of combat so they are hard to see, but in the left circle is my mana bar, my health bar and my pet bar (not shown). On the right side, if I had a target, you’d be able to see my target’s health and mana.

In the bottom circle is my Holy Power bar. I love the location – right on my character, above my healing frames. I always know how much Holy Power I have!

Even if you choose not to use frames for yourself, you will have to track Holy Power near the center of your screen somehow. The tiny bar at the top left of the screen is too out of the way. You’ll waste a lot of time if you extend your visual sweep all the way up there just to look at your Holy Power.

4- Scrolling Battle Text

Some players will say this is optional, but I can’t play without battle text. On the rare occasion that my addon crashes, the difference in my healing output is noticeable.

I use MikScrollingBattleText (you can’t see it in the shot since I wasn’t doing anything at the time) and I have used Parrot in the past as well.

There are a lot of cool things you can do with your battle text, such as sounds for when your cooldowns come up, or when you have 3 Holy Power. You can also use it (mostly) out of the box, to keep an eye on your numbers or to notice when Beacon isn’t transferring heals.

5- Pally Power

Pally Power is truly optional, but I find it helpful for rebuffing after a rez or swapping a Seal. And it’s so small and cute that it doesn’t cause me any problems.

6- Combat Log

Not an addon, but a valuable part of an interface.

I love my Combat Log so much that I moved it to the right side of my screenkeep, separating it from my chat box. You can customize your Combat Log, but Blizzard has done a really good job fixing it up so that the default “What happened to me?” is all you really need.

It’s fantastic for diagnosing deaths (nothing sets me off more than people who don’t know what killed them…the Combat Log SPELLS IT OUT TO YOU DUMBASSES /fume), verifying damage type (physical/shadow/nature/etc) and seeing if the raid healers are slacking.

A Note on the Addon-Free School of Thought

Occasionally you’ll come across healers who refuse to use addons, for a variety of reasons. What they might not tell you, though, is that, if they are successfully healing in a competitive raid environment, they’re using other aids, like macros and optimized keybindings. If you choose to use macros instead of addons (addons are essentially, after all, pretty and precoded macros), you can heal well, however I won’t be able help you.

If you’re hesitant about adding to your game, think of it this way: designing an interface that’s both pleasant on the eyes (you’ll be staring at it a lot, it needs to be sexy) and informative is a skill in itself.

Building a super efficient UI does not take away from your talent as a player. Rather it highlights your ability by reflecting your understanding of the game and of your personal playstyle. A bad player who doesn’t know where or what to look for won’t be able to build a proper UI.

So stop worrying and start addon shopping.

Wrapping up Cataclysm

Not long now!

I’ve procrastinated tons and now I’m stuck with a long long to-do list:

- Collect 24 dailies to turn in
- Tune up my ret gear to make leveling faster
- Pre-order MoP
- Install MoP on my desktop and laptop
- Fix my laptop’s WoW UI

I think the only thing I’ve done so far is prepare enough food for me to not have to cook at all next week. (Why am I not surprised that food was my top priority?)

How do you measure an expansion?

In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, a year in the life?
-”Seasons of Love” Rent

So many bloggers do their expansion recaps and it’s interesting to see who uses what as their expansion milestones. Some measure their expansions in class changes, some in game changes, some in tiers.

Me, when I think back on Cataclysm, the first thing that comes to mind is my guild chronology. I suppose then, that I follow the song and measure my expansion in love. Erm.

The Beginning of Cataclysm

Shortly before Cataclysm, the GM of my guild at the time asked me: “What are your plans? Are you staying with us? Will you still be playing your pally?”

I told him his questions were silly. I’d been happy in that guild for over a year. There’s no way I expected my feelings to turn very sour, very fast.

But they did, for a list of reasons too long for me to write out. So long, in fact, that I’m pretty sure I don’t even know all the whys to my change of heart.

I left, was devastated, held my ground, tried not to make an ass of myself (I slipped a few times), licked my wounds, checked out different raiding styles, got to know my inner-raider better, moved on, became a more grown up person.

More or less in that order.

I made up a lot of excuses for my not throwing much of a hissy fit. Mostly noble bullshit like how “I’m not like that” and “I’m going to be the bigger person” and “I learned my lesson last time”.

Yeah, that’s right! Bullshit!

The main reason I restricted my hard feelings to private conversations and comments on other blogs was because I didn’t want to burn my bridges.

Yep. Just in case I could be “just friends” with my ex guildies later on. It’s been a good plan so far. Since leaving the guild I’ve had good times with them at Blizzcon, in PuGs and occasional real life meetups. I’m proud to say I have the best ex-guildies in the world. So yeah, my advice to anyone grieving after a /gquit: never ruin the potential for perfectly good friendships down the road.

Those friendships might be a worth a lot more than your passing frustrations.

What else happened the beginning?

I remember there being a lot of bosses in three (four?) different dungeons. I liked that. On the progression race, having a lot of bosses clearly favoured guilds who raid more hours, but on the “I get bored of the same thing real fast” race, it was very satisfying. We didn’t have to start with the same boss every raid, or even the same dungeon. I like variety and I was served.

I remember the heroic 5s instances being a bit more challenging than we were used to. I liked that too. I didn’t find them particularly hard, even in PuGs, (maybe us holy pallies were just OP at the time), but they did force me to use all my spells, my teamwork skills and my favorite muscle, my brain.

Speaking of pallies and spells, the beginning of Cataclysm brought us Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance. Stirred us up a bit, after single-target healing for so long. I found we were still the most ideal single-target healers, but at least the addition of multi-target heals gave us the opportunity to take single-target healing vacations and try something new.

Then the middle of Cataclysm

I gave casual raiding a whirl. At the same time, I gave 10s raiding a try. Not that 10s are necessarily casual (apparently you get things thrown at your face, even through the computer screen, when you say offensive, sizist things like 10s = casual), this just happened to be a more laid back group who also did smaller sized raids.

My teammates were tons of fun (I do mean to crash their Mumble parties sometime in the near future!) but I learned pretty quickly that casual raiding is not for me. When I do something, I do it all the way. And while my pathological attachments to guilds may lead to believe otherwise, I’m not really a social person. Raid time is for raiding. Not telling stories, not waiting for people to log on, not reforging gear (unless there’s a strat change) and certainly not for going to the bathroom. I raided with them for about a year, but after some soul searching and a few entertaining (for everyone else) yelling matches between me and the main tank, I decided to be “just friends” with that guild too and move on to a more compatible team.

This is a good place to plug thoughts on 10s and 25s

Opinions on 10s vs 25s and on “the death of 25s raiding” never cease to be shared.

To me, it’s a personal thing. I’m a 25s raider. I like the occasional 10s as a side-raid to get to know my guildies (and more importantly, to get to know what my guildies are like when they’re drunk), but my little raider heart needs the beat of 24 teammates. I gave 10s a fair shot with Team Sport, but I missed having a large healing team, I missed being a single link in the chain, I missed the complex strategizing, I missed the large-scale wack-a-mole of 25s healing.

It’s not about what’s “harder” (I’ve found difficulty to depend more on who my teammates are rather than on my number of teammates), though I did wish 10s and 25s were treated like separate entities within the game. After all, the style of raiding is so different.

On those epeen sites, you can see the decline of number of 25s guilds. On recruitment forums, you can, however, see that there are plenty of 25s guilds. More guilds, in fact, then actual raiders. 25s raiding is not dead. Yet. Maybe one day Blizzard will decide that having a 25s tuning isn’t cost effective. I’ll totally understand and not be angry. However, I suspect that I’ll also stop playing WoW on that day.

What else happened in the Middle?

Heroic Ragnaros was a badass and gave lots of players nervous breakdowns. But not me. I was in a normal mode guild when the content was relevant. And when it stopped being relevant, I couldn’t really find the motivation to do extra hours when I could be doing so much fun stuff IRL.

There was a lot of questioning as to why Heroic Ragnaros was so much harder than final boss Heroic Madness. I question this questioning. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Heroic Madness is accessible to any somewhat disciplined raid team. Thus, for the first time, many, many players were able to end their expansion with a satisfying “I killed the last boss! On Heroic!”. And customer satisfaction is an important goal for a business, no?

I think it was a smart strategy to make the bragging rights boss (HRaggy) different than the satisfaction boss (HMaddy).

Also in Firelands, there was a lot of anger (and in my case, annoyance) when Blizzard decided to nerf Fireland by 20% in one go. I didn’t understand that one. The nerfs were supposed to accomodate guilds like the one I was in: normal mode with a slow and steady progression. Thing was, we were progressing just fine. We weren’t sick of the instance yet, we had to work for our kills but we weren’t discouraged either. Then Blizzard came in, yanked out the carpet, took away the discipline requirements for the bosses. We didn’t progress much faster after the nerfs, really. Once you take away the discipline requirements for a normal mode guild, you take away the discipline. Instead of killing bosses faster, we just goofed off more.

In the End of Cataclysm

When I left Team Sport, I went guild shopping which was scary and hard work. (I do have a post about it, but I never got around to finishing it. Post writing is also hard work.)

I did, in the end, find myself a home. I love my raidmates, I love the leadership, I love the raiding, I love my healing team, I love my fellow holy pally. They do tend to raid a tad early (I spend the beginning of my raids changing out of my work pants, stuffing my mouth full of food and trying to not to autorun into mobs), but otherwise I’m very happy.

I hope MoP does not have the same effect Cataclysm did.

ps. Important! If you are guild shopping and suspect your raiding interests to be similar to mine, I encourage you to check us out at http://www.occasional-excellence.com/ We still have a couple of open spots for MoP!

What else is at the End of Cataclysm?

Dragon Soul brought us LFR. I liked LFR. Early on, spending an extra night running it was tough, but I did like having it available if I missed a raid. It also made gearing up for my guild change much easier.

While, yes, the fights were stupidly easy and your LFRmates stupidly…stupid, I really didn’t mind LFR and I was glad to have that opportunity.

Dragon Soul wasn’t a well loved instance, and I do agree it lacked the epicness of Karahzhan, Ulduar and even Icecrown Citadel or the creativity of Zul’Aman (the original) and Black Temple. I didn’t hate it, though. I don’t think it would be my first pick for a final dungeon, but it had a few good moments. Notably the gamergasms Ultraxion’s Blue Crystal gave me time and time again, until Ultraxion started dying before the crystal came out (damn Ultraxion that minute-man!).

Of Blogging and Podcasting

I do miss blogging. I miss the excitement of watching my stat page, the amusement from reading search engine terms, the delight of discovering new comments and the satisfaction of publishing a Bossy Pally-approved post. And, most of all, I miss the friendships.

But at the same time, I don’t expect a sudden increase in post count. I’ve been having a lot of fun in the offline world – now that I’m no longer a student I’m finally living the life I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid. Between living it up and working a demanding job, I’m just too tired to be coherent. It’s a good thing, mostly, it just means that the blog will most likely keep its current posting rate and its current reader count of approximately 3.

I feel like I’ve grown away from the community too. I still subscribe to a lot of blogs, but it seems that everything I read triggers one of 3 reactions:

1) I’m not interested
2) I’m interested and I’m thinking about it, but I don’t have the energy to write a response
3) I want to throttle the writer and scream at them: “OMG HAVE YOU EVER EVEN LEFT YOUR HOUSE BEFORE!?!?”

I suppose that’s how life goes. You grow closer to some groups and away from others. I do plan to keep the blog somewhat alive, I’m not deleting the personal blog either (it may even get some extra attention in a couple of months when my big big big project/dream comes closer to fruition) and I’ve told Oestrus that I’m not against recording the odd episode of the Double O Podcast.

I think a post-MoP grind episode might be a good follow up to our pre-MoP episode. And who knows, maybe a reader/listener will suggest a topic they’d like to us discuss and we’ll be overcome with inspiration… It could happen!

Guest Post: A Christmas Story

W00t! As part of the Furtive Father Winter event at Blog Azeroth (hosted by Akabeko, who has done a fantastic job this year), I received a surprise guest post!

My Secret Santa was no other than Saif from Raiding after Dark. Saif’s a fantastic writer (WITH CREDENTIALS!) and he certainly delivered again this time. I got all goosebumpy and teary after reading his lovely story.

* * * * * * * *

I don’t know crap about Holy.

That was my first thought when I sat down to write this. Fear enveloped me. I hadn’t been writing about and theory-crafting Paladin healing for ages. What could I possibly have to say on one of the most popular and successful blogs in Azeroth?

Then I realized I didn’t know much about Christmas, let alone Winter’s Veil.

The real panic set in.

I thought back to the last few Winter’s Veil celebrations and the holiday has come and gone eliciting only the occasional “Bah-humbug” from me as my guild-mates ran about gathering their achievements, carefully wrapping gifts and sending them to one another. I was the Grinch in the guild, muttering darkly about commercialism and errant
dates and stolen culture. All those Winter’s Veils blended together into a gray blur of kill-joy.

But last year’s Winter’s Veil shines clearly in my memory. Last year was different.

Cataclysm was young and new, we were still struggling with Heroics, trying to gear up to take on Nefarian and I was having a terrible Christmas Eve. My car was broken into, a severe snow-storm was on its way, and near midnight, I finally got home from leaving my car at the garage, cold and tired. My family was all asleep yet I was jittery, so
I logged into WoW, and queued for a dungeon.

Before I could click “Enter”, I heard my son stir in his sleep. He was only 2 months old at the time, and as one does with their first child I suppose, every noise he made compelled me to check in on him. I saw he was awake, but content, blinking in the dim light of the monitor trying to make things out, and so I tried to pat him back to sleep but he was having none of it.

He squirmed and I picked him up, brought him back to my desk with me and he focused his eyes on the only part of the room that was illuminated – the screen. We sat down together, and he continued to stare, mesmerized by the colors.

With one arm occupied by the baby, I was left to wander Stormwind, trying to think of something I could do. As the clocks in Stormwind struck midnight, in the midst of drowsy exhaustion, I thought, “It’s Christmas.” Despite the fact that I don’t celebrate the holiday, nor do I have any childhood associations with it, at that moment, I wanted
to celebrate it with my son.

Running to my bank, I saw the plethora of enchants and cut gems that I had stored up from having leveled up my professions quickly. I took everything I had, stood on the bank steps in the Dwarven District and typed, “/join trade.”

The usual mixture of erratic, chaotic white-text flooded my screen but I began to link the cut gems and enchants, with a “Free! ” after them. People stopped by, some skeptically, others offering to buy them off of me, but I gave something to everyone who spoke to me.

I didn’t just want to do dailies or quest on an alt with my son watching. If I was in game at Christmas, I wanted him to see me do something even a tiny, little bit meaningful. That’s what sets Warcraft apart from all other games for me – I have the opportunity to engage with other people, and perhaps improve their experience in a tangible way. It lets you affect positive change, if you are of a mind to do it. And I wanted my son to see me smiling and trading with
people, not blinding clicking Accept Quest/Complete Quest on auto-pilot having no interaction with the people around me.

And for the next half hour or so, I emptied out my bag, and when I was done, I looked back to see my son was asleep.

I carefully walked him over to his crib, laid him down, and went back to run that dungeon after all.

This Winter’s Veil, I finished my Merrymaker title.

Happy Holidays!

* * * * *

Such a sweet story, I love it!

As for myself, if you were looking for a guest post from me on the participating blogs (right, I’m really THAT delusional ;D ) and couldn’t find one, well, someone did gift an anonymous guest post to Beruthiel. I WONDER WHO WOULD DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT, HMMMM?

A Little Chatting Over Coffee

I don’t feel like writing a coherent, thought out, potentially useful post today. So I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to sit here with some coffee (ok, I’m lying, I haven’t taken the coffee machine out of the moving boxes yet – I’m actually drinking beer) and ramble. I’d apologize but I’m not sorry and I know you don’t mind anyway.

I didn’t answer comments

I didn’t answer any comments from the last post. Don’t worry, I read them all and I love that so many of you took the time to share your own drinking-during-heroics strategies. I edited in a reply to one of the points that came up a few times (you can’t miss it: italics at the end!) but otherwise I thought it best to leave the comments section alone. I had already explained the logic behind my strategy and the comments were everyone else’s turn to share their own strategies.

I’ll say this, though: I like my heroics fast. Like really fast. Like once I even got annoyed at some dps who were eating instead of letting me heal them.

I think most healers underestimate themselves. Ok, I don’t know most healers. Let me rephrase that. I think most vocal-in-the-blogosphere healers underestimate themselves. You guys kick ass, you really do. You can squeeze way more out of yourselves than you believe. And it’s fun to be challenged at times.

Of course, just because you’re awesome doesn’t mean that its ok for your pug-teammates to be rude. And yes, standing in shit, hitting random mobs instead of the tanks’ target, breaking CC, ignoring the healer, etc. is rude. Just making sure I’m not misunderstood here!

Strength in Numbers

I’ve been getting all my Marks of the World Tree and capping my Valor Points for the past few weeks. There was a lot of chatting about To Cap or Not To Cap awhile back. Me, I stick with my Social Contract theory. If your team as a whole tends to cap VP, then you’ll want to cap VP. You don’t want to hold them back. If no one caps their VP and you do, though, it’s a different story. You need to be uber motivated or else you’ll get very frustrated very fast.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been capping my VP. And to my utter and deepest delight, so have most of my teammates.

Just not at the same time as me.

When you’re only killing one, maybe two raid bosses a week, running the same two instances 5-6 times every week is tedious. That’s when I discovered Real ID.

Real ID + Twitter = Weapon of mass dungeon obliteration!

Whenever I needed a friend, I shouted out it on Twitter. I’ve been teaming up with Entropia, Anslym and Jed over the past few weeks and it’s been wonderful. (I share my real name with a celebrity so if anyone googles me, they’ll think I’m a rather attractive gaming company CEO. I don’t mind being mistaken for her.) I’ve been getting to know them better, hanging out on vent with them and laughing with them about nothings. And after a few hours of good times with friends, I end up with all these Valor Points.

Lodur even joined Entropia, Jed and I one night, finally earning me the ZA bear run achievement. I’d been wanting to do it since forever, but I haven’t gotten lucky with pugs. (I also teamed up with Lodur for dailies- we’re on the same server- and OMG they’re so much smoother when you do them with a friend!)

Oh, and one night my raid leader fished in his Real ID list and pulled out WoW Insider’s Fox Van Allen! I got so giddy fangirly, you’d never believe it! I don’t think I was able to type in a single thing all run.

So I gotta say, going out of my way to VP cap every week has been frustrating at times, but it’s also has some really awesome moments. As proud as I am of my associalness, I have to admit I’ve been converted to Real ID.

Gossip Corner

If I were reading this post, my eyes would be instantly drawn to the gossip section.

So, the decision everyone (well, not everyone, but everyone who has to put up with me on a regular basis) has been waiting to hear! I decided to stay with my guild for now. The general sentiment has been one of wanting to get more serious about raiding. And my sentiment has been that I’ve been looking for a project. Also, if you remember my post on the kind of leaders I want to follow, you’ll be interested to hear that the post was inspired by the common traits of a few of the WoW leaders I’ve met in my life. Including my current raid leader. (He doesn’t read my blog, so I can flatter him all he wants without worrying that he’ll get embarrassed.) While I do miss 25 mans and more progressive raiding, I think that, at the moment, I’m pretty spoiled.

Oh and there is also certain, um, possibly good news IRL. Which has nothing to do with my guild. Or WoW even. But its very exciting and fun. And that’s about as much as I can say on the blog. For now…

The Key to Drinking on Borrowed Time

Clearly I’m talking about drinking for mana here. I don’t know what else you guys could be thinking…

And by “borrowed time“, I’m picturing 5-man heroic with one of those tanks who plays with his eyes closed and his finger on the forward button. And I’m picturing you, with your mana bar empty, cursing and swearing, trying to keep up.

I don’t get to look at other healers often. In 5 mans, I’m usually the healer. In raids, I’m too self centered to spy on my co-healer’s drinking habits. But I do like to talk to other healers, especially healers who are in guilds similar to mine, where we’re used to chilling a bit between pulls. And on the rare occasion where I’m not the healer in a 5 man, I’m watching my healer’s every move.

So, healers condemned to running 5-mans, tell me, which scenario is more like you?

Scenario 1:

1- Mob pack dies
2- Drink
3- Catch up to group
4- Heal next pull

Scenario 2:

1- Mob pack dies
2-Catch up to group
3- Drink
4- Heal next pull

Scenario 1 is the careful healers. The “when I make a mess I clean it up right away” folk. These people are probably very successful and organized in their offline life.

They probably really hate 5 mans though.

Scenario 2 seems riskier (what if the tank pulls and I’m not ready?), but you have to get over appearances. Consider the following:

1- You can’t sit down to drink while you’re in combat, but if you’re already drinking when someone pulls, you’ll keep drinking.

2- If you mana bar has boiled dry, you want to drink as long as possible, but still be able to get up and back to business if you need to.

And which scenario allows you to drink into combat and get up when your team needs some heals?

Right.

Scenario 2.

Plus, if you’re a paladin (I swear, holy paladins were designed with 5 mans in mind!), Scenario 2 allows you to regen some mana via Divine Plea so that when you do sit down to drink, your mana bar is already partially filled up.

So the key to dealing with hasty tank without running out of mana?

If you need to drink, drink before the pulls, not after.

EDIT: I’ve had a lot of people mention that a tank might pull if you’re nearby but would wait if you’re out of range. I’m not sure that a tank who can’t see you sitting down and drinking is going to notice you’re out of range. And unless I’m totally drained, I also don’t want a tank to stop pulling. I’ll drink for a few seconds into the pull, then stand up when I need to start healing. If I need more time, I’ll ask for it.

You Can Always Tell When I’ve Been Pugging A Lot

The tank left, as many tanks do, after Zul’Garub’s raptor boss. A vote-to-kick popped up to kick our warrior. “Shitty fucking DPS” was the reason.

I glanced at Skada. The warrior was doing a bit above 8k. Not amazing, but stuff was dying fast enough and he wasn’t doing anything stupid. Besides, the other two dps were doing 9k and 11k respectively. If the warrior ranked as “shitty fucking“, then they ranked as just “shitty“.

Our three wipes so far has been due to:

Wipe 1: Tank failing on boulders
Wipe 2: Tank pulling more than he could hold aggro on
Wipe 3: Dps who initiated the vote-to-kick being outside the ring when raptor boss was pulled.

The warrior hadn’t caused any problems yet.

Since there were only 4 of us in the group, the final decision as to whether to kick the warrior or not was left to me.

Times I’ll Use Vote-to-Kick

I rarely kick players for being bad. Mainly because I know I struggle to reach 6k dps myself when playing ret. If I pop all my cooldowns, I might be able to reach 7k for a fraction of a second. If I’m lucky. So unless our weakest link is getting in the way of killing a boss (Grim Batol comes to mind), I don’t care about dps much.

Not actual DPS meters

However, when someone’s pulling 4k while the rest of the group, including the tank, is sitting at 14k, I’ll usually agree if a vote-to-kick is initiated.

I don’t know where the DPS benchmarks should be for heroics, but I do think that if someone’s doing under 5-6k, they’re not quite ready for the leap yet and shouldn’t queuing for them. There is a difference between normal 85s and heroics for a reason. But while it can justify a kick, I don’t think it justifies abuse.

I hate when players abuse each other. I know it’s not a big deal to most of the guys I play with, but if I were abused in a pug, and I wasn’t so confident about my healing ability, I’d be really shaken. (I have encountered, um, strange reactions in pugs, but they always started before the first pull and were so very weird that I suspect those players were stoned. Very stoned.) I’d rather see someone removed than witness verbal abuse. When the target of the abuse is sub-performing, especially if they haven’t gemmed or enchanted their gear, there’s not a whole lot I can do to defend them besides kick them and spare them misery.

Initiating vote-to-kicks, though, is something I will do if a player is being a douchebag and annoying me. I don’t mind carrying players, but I have no tolerance for annoying behaviour. Besides, if a person has no regard for the feelings of others, then I really have no regard for their feelings.

An Anatomy of Douchebaggery

The word “elitism” is tossed around a lot. But in my experience, the players who are the biggest douchebags in pugs aren’t particularly good players themselves. It almost feels like they’re people who’ve been picked on in the past for being bad and jump at the opportunity when they’re in a position to do it to others.

Or they’re people who don’t really understand the game or meters, and are looking to attack before they get attacked. (I actually met a healer who spammed healing meters from 5 mans. Yes, you are going to be on top when you’re the only healer. And a high hps just meant people were taking a lot of damage. No damage, no high hps.)

And wannabes. The wannabes. Players from upper-but-not-top guilds who just don’t have the skill, the focus or the discipline to be excellent. Or players from more casual guilds who assume they’re amazing because they’ve always topped the meters in their raids. These guys are quite possibly the worst culprits in heroics. They play badly, are mouthy and are quick to pry on anyone else.

Penny Arcade’s Internet Fuckwad Theory is often referred to explain douchebag behaviour. Which works if you have a Lord of the Flies view of people. But I have trouble believing the person spewing out bullshit and feeling real’ proud of himself for being such a badass is a “normal person”. Oh, maybe he acts like a normal person when there are consequences to his actions, but, really, if someone over the age of 12 gets pleasure from shitting on others or saying “naughty words”, I quite suspect there being something wrong with them to begin with.

Now, I understand anger and raging. I have quite the temper myself, although I’m more likely to get angry about time-wasting or arrogance than about wipes and mistakes. I’m also a lot more likely to get sarcastic and accusatory than swear or name call. But I understand tempers getting heated. Games are like that. You get involved in them, you use them as a safe outlet for stress and, well, I suspect (but have no proof) that the chemical effect games have on the brain trigger short term aggression or crankiness anyway. I’ll never hold outbursts in raids, pvp or even nasty heroics against people.

But gratuitous abuse? Or “OMG LOOK AT ME I SAID A NAUGHTY WORD IM SUCH A BADASS LOLOLOL!!!111one”? Give me a break.

No it doesn’t offend me. It doesn’t hurt my feelings. It does, however, hurt my eye rolling muscles.

Hindsight Wears Rose-Coloured Glasses

I don’t want comments blaming LFD and saying “things were so much better before LFD“.

Sometimes I wonder if the LFD haters ever tried to pug 5 mans before the system got put in. I pugged alone in Vanilla and in pre-LFD BC. I pugged alone a lot.

Back then, pugging a 5 man alone was an all day event. If your instance wasn’t overly popular at that moment, finding a full group took a few hours. By the time you had your group together, someone would have to leave. Before max level, you didn’t always have the luxury of a tank-healer-3dps so you made do with what you had. You’d wipe a lot. People would often have to leave halfway through and you’d spend up to an hour waiting for a replacement while trying to 4 man the instance. I don’t think I ever finished an instance with the same 4 people I started it with.

Where people nicer and did they talk more?

I vaguely remember that they were and that they did. But when you’re stuck with these people for hours and when replacing them was a disgusting task, you either had to be patient or you didn’t pug.

So I suspect the shitty behaviour in pugs is due more to pugging being available to those who wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in the old system. Plus, with the all the incentives from instances nowadays, more players in general are pugging.

And really, I’d rather put up with the occasional douchebag than go back to struggling for hours every time I wanted to do an instance.

ZG, ZA and Wouldn’t it be Cool if there were 5 Mans that Felt like Raids

WoW is buzzing with folk talking about the two revamped instances, Zul’Garub and Zul’Aman.

“Too recycled!”
“Too long!”
“Too hard!”

And, of course, the occasional show off: “Too easy!”

Lissanna did a good post on the topic, rounding up some thoughts and getting some substantial discussion going.

I’ve done ZG. I haven’t gotten around to ZA yet.

I loved ZG. It was awesome. I know the recycled material offends purists who are too good for “lazy content”, but not me. I really enjoy the theme of Cataclysm, where I can go back to all those places near and dear to (or strongly despised by) my heart and see what they look like a couple of years after my services.

ZG was no exception. I didn’t have time to read up on the story, but I was very interested to know that more evil trolls invoking spirits have moved in since I cleared the place in hopes of achievements and tiger mounts.

I’m told ZA is a copy-paste of the original, which is a little disappointing (dudes…dudes! I killed you people years ago! What are you doing back here?), but at the same time, ZA was a brilliant instance. I loved the complexity and creativity of the fights. Especially the fire egg boss that took me so long to figure out and that made me so proud when I finally understood. I’m sort of glad I’ll get to re-experience those fights.

Now let’s look at the complaints surrounding the instances:

Too Long

It took my group a little over 2 hours to complete ZG, and we had a patient, kick-ass tank in heroics gear talking us through. We had a group simultaneously do ZA, without an experienced guide, and it took them barely a few minutes more than us.

Contrarily to what Lissanna says, ZG has very little trash. Much less than the other Cataclysm 5 mans. I also don’t recall doing much in terms of CC. The instance has a feel of a modern raid, with just enough trash to avoid falling back into the Trial of the Crusader trap.

What took up our 2 hours, were the wipes as we struggled to grasp the novel mechanics of the fights. Without wiping, I think we could have easily gotten through the instance in 45 minutes, which is pretty much the same time as the other Cataclysm heroics.

I can’t speak for ZA.

How do these line up with the other heroics from Cataclysm? Well. I remember pugging them during the week of their release. Once the hardcore, now-Sinestra killers were finished with them (I loved those runs!), Cataclysm heroics took well over 3 hours to pug with an average group. As the instances became better known, the players got better geared and the fights themselves were nerfed, the average pug run was shortened to about 45 minutes, with Deadmines still taking the better part of an hour.

Too Hard

I recall a tweet saying: “Don’t bring your alt to the new 5 mans!”.

I’d like to make a correction: “Don’t bring your alt to the new 5 mans yet!”

The fights are actually perfect for gearing alts…once you know them on your main. These fights aren’t gear checks. They’re all mechanics. Do the right thing at the right time and they’re a breeze. Trust me. Our DK soloed the better part of the first ZG fight.

But prepare to die a lot learning the fights. The mechanics are more complex (and interesting) than “pick up adds and don’t stand in the fire”. Think Stonecore, but less shitty.

Once you’ve mastered being at the right place at the right time, though? This is the perfect place to gear your alt.

5 mans should be accessible to anyone!

While I don’t necessarily agree with this statement (I think regulars should be accessible to anyone, heroics should involve a minimal effort), I’d like to point out that my guild had two teams complete the instances Thursday night. And we are your casual, chilling, social raiding guild. At 6/12, with anywhere from 0 to 2 raids a week, we’re not Sinestra killers.

And we did ZG and ZA. We wiped, we ran back, we adjusted our tactics, but at no point did we feel like we were banging our heads against a wall.

Which is actually better than Stonecore and Grim Batol the week those instances were released.

Could an average Pug do the instance? Probably not. Not yet. The instances take too much communication and, as social bloggers everywhere constantly moan, communication is difficult in PuGs. But once people run the instances with their guilds a few time and learn the fights, I think ZG and ZA will totally be puggable, and will be comparable to the other Cataclysm heroics in length.

Conclusion: I’d sort of like a raid-style 5 man

I like fights that make me think. I like having a really small team to think with. So I like hard 5 mans.

I thoroughly enjoyed running ZG with the fantastic people in my Thursday group (I was even very tempted to ask our DK out on a date. He was HAWT.). It felt like a raid, except there were only 5 of us and the fights took slightly less wipes than a raid to learn.

The whole time I was thinking, what if there was an epic 5 man designed like a raid? One instance you don’t do often, that you save for an afternoon where you have 5 hours to yourself. A huge instances with twists and turns, Original Stratholme or Blackrock Depths style. A fight were you really need to think before engaging the bosses.

And really, sure, I think 5 man heroics should be accessible to anyone. Anyone with a brain, instead of only a face for rolling.

Shared Topic: Do Your Alts Know Each Other?

I’ve been running a writing about WoW drought lately. I think that may have something remotely to do with the fact that when I’m not logging in to raid, I’m only logging in for an hour or so in hopes of finally digging up that trinket. Want to know what’s ruining WoW for me? Tyrande’s Favorite Doll, that’s what.

Besides, if you look at my scale of Important Things in Life, you’ll see faded, used ol’WoW on one side. On the other, you’ll see getting a podcast up and running, planning a backpacking trip in Cuba, finishing up clerkship, studying for pharmacy legal/licence exams and preparing to move to Alberta. WHICH SIDE OF THE SCALE DO YOU THINK IS HEAVIER?

Very good.

For Confused People who've never seen an old fashioned Scale

But anyway, this week’s Shared Topic is perfect for the person who can’t really remember a whole lot about WoW. Because if there’s one thing I remember, it’s how I feel about my characters. Kamalia from Kamalia et alia came up with a Topic I fell in love with: Do your alts know about each other?

Me and RP: A Background

We’ll get this out of the way: I’m not an RPer. In fact, if I tried to do any sort of RP on my blog, RPers all over the world would be horribly insulted and hate me forever.

RP and I just don’t click. Not in real life (the big cardboard box in my closet at my parents’ house that’s says “Roleplay Costumes” on its side is dusty for a reason) and not in games. The few times I tried, I felt silly, followed by embarrassed, followed by bored.

I don’t even like reading other people’s RP. I haven’t gotten though a piece of fanfiction since the last Digimon lemon I read when I was about 16 (hey Mat and Tai were HAWT ok! In my imagination they were older than 11). I’d blame my distaste for fanfiction and RP on bad writing and the overuse of clichés like the word “trembled”, like female characters with hippy names and physical traits like “sky blue eyes”. I’d blame it on that, but I don’t even like the good fanfiction.

But…the Small RPer Within

I think we’ve established that there’s no converting me to RPing. But…sometimes….it feels like my brain tricks me. It tricks me into thinking that Rykga, my paladin, grew up in Stormwind. It tricks me into thinking she was a merchant’s daughter. It tricks me into thinking that she was sort of innocent, but adventurous and resilient.

It even tricks me into thinking she’s got a sense a humour, that she secretly loves to blow up faces but can’t take herself seriously long enough to put a +Strength weapon to good use.

I think somewhere, hidden, I might have an RPer-within. One that will never be completely revealed to the world- if I start writing bad fanfiction and the word “trembled” with any type of seriousness here, I swear I will burn my blog to the ground. But one that graces me with a glimpse of her (decidedly my RPer-within is female) presence once in awhile.

As for the Alts

The alts…my mage, the squeaky Eloise, the cynical death knight Snowfia, the stuck-up but lonely paladin Ophelie… they all trembled- Just kidding! They all seem to have their own little personalities. And my low low lowbies, I feel like they have personalities too, but I haven’t discovered them yet.

Elo's Encounter with the World

But there’s one thing that never crossed my mind – have my characters ever met each other?

No, they haven’t met

There. It’s official. None of my characters has ever met, or will ever meet one another. They’re far too different, or far too obscure, to cross paths.

As for whether they know about each other, Elo and Snow have heard of Rykga. After, she DID kill Arthas, badass that she is. They come across some old stuff she’s left lying around. Snow’s even done some business with her, operating the Auction House and the Bank for her.

Ophelie’s Horde, though, and, even though she’s ready for Northrend, she’s still too unlearned about the world to have a firm grasp of who Rykga is. Other than having heard the name once or twice in Taverns or Inns, she’s got her head up her arse and doesn’t pay much attention to the world.

Doesn’t that just weird you out?

I’m no RPer. Not now, not ever. Yet I know all this stuff about these characters (and their sky blue eyes…). That just weirds me out.

And you know what? I kind of miss hanging out with my toons. Once the real world gets boring again, I’ll probably be back watching my girls grow up.

Want to join in on a Shared Topic? Head over to the forum at Blog Azeroth for all the upcoming Topics. Blog about that week’s Topic and leave a link back to it in the appropriating thread.

My Take on the 10/25 Thing

It’s fitting that Naithin guest posted about 10s vs 25s on Thursday. After all, I’m a die hard 25 man raider. A die hard 25 man raider who just joined a 10 man guild.

Bit of background, differences of opinion with (some of) the leadership (understatement) and inconvenient raid times brought me to leave my 25 man guild. Instead of craving a rebound guild, my gquit actually triggered cravings to spend time around people I can get touchy-feeling with. But I didn’t want to lose my skills, or fall too far behind on gear, or to become too out of the loop for paladin blogging (contrarily to popular belief, you don’t have to play at Paragon’s level to read and translate EJ into plain English, but it does helps to step into a raid once in awhile).

That’s when my old healing lead, Vik, put me in touch with Thespius. Remember what Naithin said about backup players being hard to find for 10 man guilds? Well, it was a perfect match. Team Sport gained a backup healer and I got 6 hours a week of scheduled WoW time, which occasionally included raiding.

Guest Post: Raid Size ~ Two Months On

Editor’s note: Naithin from Fun in Games was kind enough to write a guest post for me, and on a very current topic at that! (Someone’s got to write about current topics ‘cos the light knows I sure don’t.) It’s a fantastic post and he sets the bar high for when I finish my post for him. Enjoy!

How do you feel about Blizzard’s decision to, for all intents and purposes, merge 10 and 25 man raids? Is it different to how you thought you’d feel about it when you first heard?

When I first heard of the plans to make 10 and 25m share a lockout my response was immediate dismay. I liked doing both. I did 25-man ‘serious’ raiding with Surreality, and 10-man ‘funsies’ raiding with a bunch of friends scattered across a few guilds on the server.

It was our way to relax and unwind and how dare blizzard take it away!

I read further, and found out they also intended to give equal loot to 10 and 25 man raids. I didn’t particularly have any problem with this; it was about time so far as I was concerned. I mean, I only got into 25m raiding in the first place because you couldn’t finish gearing in 10s alone and I was tired of fail pugging 25s . . . Oh.

Oh.

Sure, I can write this as one continuous thought now but to think it actually occurred to me with such clarity would be to assume a degree of cleverness and self-awareness that, in reality, I didn’t possess. I’d done a pretty good job of tricking myself into believing 25-man raiding was what I wanted and the most fun and that it was the ‘real’ version of raiding.

Where that idea comes from I really don’t know. I’d seen first hand that in many cases the 10m content was legitimately more difficult and less forgiving of error than 25m, but nonetheless, it was how I and many others felt.

In actual fact, reaching the epiphany at the end of that thought process took me at least a month as I alternated between being pleased with how they’d handled the loot distribution between the raid sizes and mad at the loss of choice of doing both 10 and 25m if I wanted to.

The provided reasoning was sound, I could admit, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. The provided reasoning for multi-variable calculus problems are also often sound, and I certainly don’t like those.

In any case, eventually I did come to the end of that thought process, and realised that for me, 10m content was where it was at. This is pretty much in direct contrast with both Ophelie of- well; here, and Larisa over at The Pink Pigtail Inn, who strongly believe it is 25m or go home.