Step 1: Sabotage !

After reading Cynwise post about Disposable Heroes, I levelled a few characters up to 10 and geared them with a full enchanted heirloom and Hand-Me-Down set. This was a lot of fun. You find yourself in a battleground with people having 2 to 4 times less hp than you, and you happen to kill about anyone within 2 GCDs, even as a healer !

As Cynwise predicted, this is a great way to begin PVP. It allows for a lot of error and you can actually progress, something that’s hardly possible if you’re the one dying in 2 GCDs.

Step 2: Twinking is easy…  and fun

After trying shaman, mage, rogue and priest, I decided to level the priest up to 19 and try non-xp battleground. It was fun too. It feels like rated battleground: most of the group is on vent, and there is an actual strategy. Except that if you have heirlooms and enough gold (I used between 500-1000 gold to buy lqe gear, enchant/tailoring mats and enough ore to level mining up to 225) it is really fast to have a close to optimized gear. The only difficulty is the Arena Grand Master trinket, but being on a PVE realm there wasn’t so much competition for it, and I often was the only one in the Gurubashi Arena (it has of course more chances to happen at 9 a.m on a weekday than 9 p.m during weekend!).

Playing Warsong games in this organized way was a lot of fun, up until the night were I was shout at 3 games in a row by some excessively exited 12 year old (based on his high pitched voice), because I was the only healer and he wasn’t being healed. THAT was not fun. I PVP because I find that relaxing (really, more on that later), and because you know what ?  It’s the only way to get better at it (and at my general awareness in the same time), not because I liked to be shouted at. I may go back to my priest later, but I needed a small break. So I began a new project.

Putting a foot in the twink community, I learned there was level 70 guilds out there. Guilds doing BC raids, Battlegrounds and arena. I really begin playing at the beginning of BC (my first character was level 60 just before BC launch), and this is a time I loved a lot. Returning to these raids at the appropriate level appealed to me. Plus, a bit like level 19 twinks, it’s really easy to get more than decent gear. You can have a full S4 gear (including weapons and off-set items) for about 2k honor, something you can have with about 20 battlegrounds, depending on the level you do these. So I began leveling a new resto shaman on a new server where there was level 70 guilds. Unfortunately, she’s stuck at 54 for now, as I’m not in the mood of leveling her while I don’t know if I’ll still be playing (and how much) in a few weeks.

Step 3: Where I finally find out that I can actually appreciate PVP

So, while I’m wondering about my WoW future, I created a new baby rogue (If you didn’t understand why I choose this blog title until now, I hope you do know!). This rogue is on the same server than my baby shaman, so no heirloom or overpowered enchants for her. I entered Warsong as soon as I had a few green items. If you wish to do that, you need to be prepared : you’re going to die A LOT, and it may not be a lot of fun. Most people will have twice as much health as you do, and do much more damage (with standard non enchanted heirloom gear). You’d better choose your class with a lot of attention (I suggest rogue or hunter). As a rogue, I can at least choose to not commits suicide with my partners and instead remains stealthed when needed to focus on more interesting challenges. If you’re (very) well geared in a low level battleground, you can play to win the game and almost bring victory to your faction alone. If you only have what you can get from quests, you’d better not always try to play for the victory, or you may become frustrated within a few minutes. I you just try to focus on what achievable, you can have fun too. Like, I once managed to kill the flag carrier and his geared healer on my own. You can learn to make inventive use of your limited toolbox too. As a blood elf rogue, I learned that if I want to kill a mage, I need to use Arcane Torrent just after Ambush so that they can’t use their nova. I was surprised after my first Warsong to find out I actually appreciated the challenge. I may block her xp at level 20 for a time, as this seems to be an active bracket with F2P accounts, and it should allow me to grind a base gear with quests and dungeons. Unfortunately the leveling curve is so fast now that even without heirloom you don’t have the time for quests AND dungeons AND battlegrounds!

Step 4: Enjoy !

Anyway, PVP used to be a very stressful experience for me. I don’t know if I just changed or if it’s the fact I now entered battlegrounds the easy way (instead of going there with PVE gear, hoping to get appropriate PVP gear in the end), but it’s not the case anymore. I don’t shout about everything anymore while doing battlegrounds. (I only shout about my stupid totems bindings once in a while, because if you want to bind all your stupid totems, you have to use stupid bindings, and you have to remember these too!). I don’t rage because my team partner are obviously not wishing to win the game. If I loose a few games in a row and I’m not in a mood for that ? Ok, maybe I should just log out and try again later, it’s not a big deal after all, I’m not here to grind these stupid honor points but to enjoy myself.

With all this renewed interest for PVP, I did a few BG with Zahia too. It was interesting to notice all the differences between a level 10-14 Warsong where I completely overgear the content, a level 19 twink Warsong and a level 85 Warsong. I learned interesting stuff while researching about it. Did you know that if you have glyph of Stoneclaw totem, the shield is a personal buff, so that you keep it even if you replace another earth totem asap ? I also learned to use Healing Surge, and I now use this spell much more appropriately in raids.

If you’re interested in PVP but find it stressful or are easily frustrated, you should give it a try the easy way. You can learn a lot about your character and improve your gameplay. And it’s a nice change if you’re looking for new WoW projects !

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

But yesterday Oestrius wrote an interesting post about the recent subscriber loss and how these people are real people that we met in game. First I wanted to comment, but then I felt like this deserved a whole blog post.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re losing people.  Let me stress that.  We are losing people.  We’re losing loved ones.  We’re saying goodbye to friendships and memories and ties that we have formed with one another.  It’s more than just lost revenue and subscription numbers.

Oestrius is right, but I find that a bit excessive.

While playing WoW, I met and became friend with a lot of people, and many left the game. Each time a friend leave the game, it makes me sad, because I know there’s a good chance I’ll never see him again. People leaving are real people. But you know what ? People leave your real life too. Remember your best friend from when you where 7 year old. Do you still know her ? Do you still write letters to your foreign correspondent from secondary school, or to your friends from your holiday camps ? How long since you last spoke to your friends from university, or from the last place you lived ?

Making friends and then “losing” them is part of life. Be it in an MMO or in real life. But you don’t loose them. There aren’t part of your life anymore, but their life is still going on. And, from the WoW friend I lost, most of them left because they had an happy busy real life other wise.

Loosing WoW friend is always sad, but it has nothing to do with Blizzard subscribers numbers for me. What Blizzard subscribers loss say to me is that WoW will no last forever. Some day, Stormwind streets won’t be crowded anymore. It’ll be hard to find groups on low population realms, until some day when these realm will be merged together or with some bigger realms. Content patch and extensions wil come less and less often. Blizzard saw this too, the signs are obvious. I didn’t remember it, but Oestrius said that the Dungeon Finder tool went out just after the first subscribers loss was announced. Recently Blizzard encountered a new loss, and a cross realm Raid Finder tool is planned for the next patch. This is the simplest way for Blizzard to keep activities on realms even if the population get lower and lower. There are also clues that makes me think we’ll have a new expansion in less than a year. Extensions make people come back to the game, and keep current players interested in the game.

WoW is on his dying slope. I get that, WoW has to die some day anyway. But thinking about it is still strange. Will WoW stop existing altogether ? Or will it continue with a few irresistible players ? How is it going to impact me ? Will I still be playing at this time ? That’s what Blizzard subscribers number means to me. It means that some day, my favorite game, and almost the only game I really played, will no longer exist. Maybe I’ll even be part of the next subscribers number, as many of my WoW friends plan to play Star War, the Old Republic when it’s going out, and I might very well follow them.

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

Want to /suicide each time I look at Skada…

First, there is this thing about resto shaman feeling useless while healing with a resto druid. That isn’t just me, many shaman feel that way. When you do your best at using all your skill in the best possible way, reforge all your spirit away to have BIGGER HEALS, and still can’t manage to do more than 70%-80% of your fellow holy paladin and resto druid on a normal fight, you don’t feel very well. OK, when your raid is doing it wrong and damage is crazy, resto shaman healing is great… until the raid inevitably wipes. But what’s the purpose of being able to heal a lot when you know it’s going to be a wipe anyway ? (like, when the upper team is dead on Beth’tilac…). At least, you know you CAN do it. And you try to persuade yourself than you’re here when the raids needs you, with your mastery @save-the-raid-from-certain-death, but knowing the raid don’t really needs you most of the time is still sad.

Then there was that random crap on Rhyolith

Last time, we tried Rhyolite (or Riz au Lait, as we like to call him) for the second night, and it was a complete disaster. First, we felt like melees managed the driving better: no more lava drinking. But then, we felt like we couldn’t beat bad RNG. We had volcano spawn at inconvenience places, Riz au Lait activating volcanoes he just passed.

Like one time, just on the beginning of the fight, Riz au Lait spawn 2 volcanoes in front of him, one just on the right, and one just on the left. As Riz au Lait came closer and closer to the lava, we decided to make him turn right. Of course, the second he passed the left volcano, he decided to activate it.

Or these time, where volcanoes where all on one another, and Riz au Lait had 10 stacks of Molten Armor…

Ok, that’s just Murphy’s law, I suppose we could handle it if we just get better handling the whole fight.

But then, there was that completely random move from Riz au Lait. He turned 50° in one step, stopped for his stamping, and turned 50° again on the next step. And the gauge wasn’t even full or even near to full!

That seemed so omg volcanoes are random, Riz au Lait driving is random. Why the hell are we just trying to kill a boss where everything is complete random crap?

Plus there are all these urban legends on this boss. Maybe you can avoid the bumping thing if you jump at the right time. Maybe you should avoid dots on the feets. Maybe you should dot both feets. Maybe Riz au Lait’s direction depends on damage done to each feet. Or maybe Riz au Lait’s direction depends on number on hits on each feet. It seems like none really knows. Well, maybe hard core guilds know how it works, but it seems like they either don’t want to talk about their finding before they kill him on heroic mode or don’t have the time to talk about it before they kill Heroic Ragnaros.

Well, I like this boss, because the mechanisms is new and different. But it seems buggy, no one really knows how it works, and while the encounter journal is comprehensive on other bosses, it’s widely lacking for Riz au Lait. Molten Armor isn’t even mentionned in there!

/bored about doing 25-man fights in a 10-man raid

All these add boss where you have to divide dps on 2 or more different tasks seems so much better tuned for 25 man, and much more complicated in 10-man. In 10-man, 1 dps is 1/6 to 1/5 of your total damage. In 25-man, one dps is 1/16 to 1/18 or your total damage. You can easily fine-tune the dps assignment so that everything is dpssed down at the rate it should. Plus if you want to do one boss with one more tank, you only loose a small part of you your raid damage.

In a 10-man raid, fine-tuning dps assignment is much harder. Lets take an obvious example. On Beth’tilac, 4 things must be dpssed down at the same time: Beth’tilac, the drone, the spinners, and the small spiders. If you put one dps on each task, you have one free agent left. But one dps on each task is not enough sometimes. In a 25-man raid, you can have 4 dps on each task, and you can fine-tune it by moving one dps here and there.

So, the random 10-man dps has to handle multiple tasks at the same time, whereas the random 25-man dps can focus on one single task. He needs more awareness, more reactivity, more autonomy than a random 25-man dps.

10-man are harder on the raid leader, because decisions are harder to make and choices are limited. 10-man are harder on each member because they need to handle many tasks at the same time, whereas in a 25-man raid you can assign a single task to each dps (or, at least to the people who can’t handle multiple tasks).

Final ranting: I’m doing it wrong too!

There was a bit on ranting on the blogosphere lately about the need to do things you don’t like, bet it farming dailies or heroics to cap your weekly valor points. As Windsoar, I’m doing it wrong. I don’t do heroics anymore because I hate that. I already spend 30 to 50 minutes each day doing Molten Front dailies and not leveling my toon of the moment, I’m not going to spend another hour doing something I already did 15+ times. Farming valor points in T11 was ok : the instances were still fairly new and they still could be a bit of a challenge (at least if you did the Zandalari random in 4.1). But now, I did these instances a lot, and there isn’t any difficulty left.Plus, my play time available to do instances is limited, be it with Zahia or with an alt.

I wish Blizzard could be inventive for that, and find a new way to obtain valor points for raiding toons, without having to run the same old instance again, and again, and again. Like, there could be a chance to get valor points from Fireland trashes. Or Molten Front daily quests could award a chest, were you would have a chance to find valor points. Or they could have added the Zandalari instances and Fireland at the same time, so that all the useless valor points I got while doing the new troll instances would have served buying my T12 set, instead of some crap for my offspec.

But I don’t think Blizzard will do that ever. For the Looking for Dungeon tool to be successful, there needs to be enough people queuing for these instances, otherwise it takes too long to find a group. So, they must be pretty happy with how valor points currently work, because it allow the LFD to work well, and casual players can do dungeons, get new gear at each new patch, and they still wish to play the game and pay their subscription.

But still, for casual raiding guilds, with casual raiders, this system is complete crap. I don’t even want to know in how many weeks I am going to get my T12 valor pieces while killing 2 bosses each week (that is, Shannox and Baratin Hold)

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

Roles and Positionning:

• Spread out when Electron is active, else you better stay close from each other to help healers.
• Don’t let any boss (generally it’ll spawn under Arcanotron) stand in the pink puddle

Fight!

• Stop all damage on current boss (switch to the next one) when energy bar drops to 50% and for 10 seconds after that.
• Interrupt Arcanotron Arcane Annihilator
• Lighting Rod target stand away from anyone else
• Kite, slow down and kill the slimes (named Poison Bomb) that spawn at Toxitron feets
• The target of Magmatron red ray should position herself so that there is nobody on the line going from Magmatron to her.

Additionnal tip:

• As usual, don’t stand in the bad! That includes the green cloud. But you can stand in the pink puddle, and should stand in it whenever possible (that is, don’t stack in it when Electron is active)

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

Reforging for haste or for mastery like we did in 4.1 is the easy way. We won’t talk about it here. But what if I want to take advantage of the buffs to crit ? Let’s take an example and see what happens.

Let’s imagine a shaman with about 2500 spirit and 6000 intel, 950 haste rating, 16 mastery (~1450 mastery rating) and 23% crit (~730 crit rating) raid buffed. This shaman feel good mana wise, based on her spell usage.

How many Spirit can I spare ?

I explain in a precedent post than 1 spirit give you about 2 to 4 times as much mana than 1 crit rating. Well, lets go further. Let’s imagine the worse case, where this shaman cast Healing Rain on CD, and else mainly use Chain Heal (hitting 4 people, because this shaman is very wise!), Greater Healing Wave and Riptide. This shaman spend 2 seconds every 12 seconds casting a spell not giving any mana thanks to crit. Else, he’s casting spells giving on average 45 mp5 per 1% crit. That’s 37.5 mp5, let’s round that to 40mp5, because really, who cast Healing Rain on cd for the whole fight ? That’s exactly 1/3 of what you’d get by reforging all this crit into spirit.

Or, better said: Each time you gain 3 crit rating on your gear, you can safely reforge 1 spirit away.

What if I reforge for crit above anything else ?

Now, this shaman is very smart and always ask Mr.Robot when she has some complex reforging to do. (That is, more complex than reforge everything to haste).

If I want to make Mr.Robot reforge for crit, I can choose these stats weights :

• Spirit : 90 until 2500 (enter your own amount of spirit, taking into account your average procs and on use effects like Darkmoon Card: Tsunami)
• Haste : 60 until 12.5%, 20 after
• Crit : 55
• Mastery : 20

Optimize, and look at your stats. While doing this I gain a bit of intellect (because I have suboptimal enchants, booh!), and gain 885 crit rating, or 5.06%, at the expense of 5.42 mastery.

Ok, now I have almost 300 spirit I can safely remove out of my gear!

Let’s do the optimize thing again with spirit cap at 2200.

Mr.Robot managed to remove 280 spirit from my gear. Instead, I get 40 intel, 0.80 mastery, and 0.40% crit. For free! Because you didn’t need the spirit anymore.

Isn’t that beautiful ?

And if I want to keep some mastery ?

This time we’ll use the same stat weight, 55, for both crit and mastery. Such Mr.Robot will try to give you as much crit rating than mastery rating. If I’m not mistaken, this should reduced the diminishing returns as much as possible.

Optimizing, we get these new stats :

This time, we get 2.03% crit at the expense of 2.42 mastery. That’s 341 crit rating, and 110 spirit I can reforge away.

With spirit cap at 2390, I reforged away 95 spirit to gain 0.5 mastery and 0.3% crit. Again, for free.

And what about Mana Tide?

Well, I lied. The 95 and 280 spirit I loose could have been useful with Mana Tide. How much mana is that ? If I drop my Mana Tide while my 4T11 is up, 95 more spirit would grant 125 mp5, or 425 mana over the duration of the totem, and 280 spirit would grant 380 mp5, or 1292 mana (again, with 6000 intel raid buffed). See if the other healers in your raid miss the mana, but you shouldn’t notice the difference with your own blue bar.

How is that useful ?

Well this fiddling with Mr.Robot to reforge away unused spirit is useful each time you feel fine with your mana and the crit rating on your gear increases. Be it because you get a new piece, or because you want to reforge some haste or mastery to crit.

I’m a partisan of having only the mana that I really need, and that all the mana I have at the end of the fight is wasted spirit. Some will say that by having more spirit, you can use more expensive heals, and thus spirit is always useful. I personnally think than less spirit and more throughput stats will always make for a more fun an interesting gameplay, and for a better result most of the time, more spirit being only useful when something goes (really) wrong.

I’m also of the opinion that feeling how much spirit you need is like choosing clothes. If you try the bigger size first, you may think it fits and buy it asap, without knowing the smaller size would have look better. If you instead try the smaller size first, you really know if you need the bigger size. For spirit it works the same way : you’ll know if you don’t have enough mana, but you never really know if you have to much.

So, for 4.2, I reforged crit and mastery at the same level, reforged the excess spirit away, and I’ll see how it works.

PS : Beware, Water Shield uptime seems hard to manage as it stand right now, making resurgence unreliable. You may still need the excess spirit until somethings is done to fix Water Shield.

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

With the 4.2 nerf bat, we may see a lot more pug raids going into the tier 11 raids, and you, me, anybody could be in one of these raids and have to explain the fights (may it because you’re the lead or because the raid leader has no clue about what a raid leader is supposed to do). In these pick up raids, it’s especially important to be concise while explaining the strategy. Plus you may not be on vent and have to use raid chat.

That’s why I start this series of short strategy posts. I’ll aim at explaining each T11 fight with the less possible words and phrases, focusing on what is important only. These short posts should suit me as I don’t have the commitment to write long posts with screenshots and all that at the moments, but still am sad to completely give up with this blog.

Let’s start with Magmaw :

Roles and positionning :

• Only one tank.
• Every body stand in melee range except one ranged dps standing at max range. (let’s call him the kiter)
• 2 dps jump on Magmaw’s head when available and use the chain on the peak before Magmaw

You're lucky this time, you've got a map too !

Fight !

• Kiter dodge the fire pillar (and eventually kite the worms that’ll spawn on the pillar location)
• All range dps kill the worms when they spawn on the kiter position and slow them
• Whole raid dodge the smokes when needed (go to the tank position)

Additional tip :

• Tank  use cooldowns while eaten (not needed if your tank and healers are good enough, but you never know in a pug raid…)

That’s all. 6 simple steps to kill Magmaw. Let’s see if I can do better for the other bosses…

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

While Water Shield is active, you recover mana when your direct healing spells have a critical effect.  You regain 2293 mana from a Healing Wave or Greater Healing Wave critical, 1376 mana from a Healing Surge, Riptide, or Unleash Life critical, and 764 mana from a Chain Heal critical.

(Spell description from the PTR thanks to Alacranmex from Stand in a Blue Circle)

But, how much mana is that?

I did a bit of math about that, and I found interesting facts :

• 1% Crit will always save you the same amount of mana for each spell, no matter how much crit you already have.
• The mana saved by crit will change drastically depending on your spell usage. 1% crit will save you about 1.37% mana on Healing Wave, and only 0.17% mana on Healing Surge.
• Casting Healing Surge with Tidal Waves up reduces the average cost of the spell by 300 mana, or approximately 5%.

So I made a chart of the average mana saved per spell cast for 1% crit, and I added the mp5 value of 1% crit for each spell (at about 1100 haste rating):

As a comparaison, at 2300 spirit and 6000 intel, 180 spirit will grant you about 120 mp5, 2 to 4 times as much as 1% crit or 180 crit rating. If you want spirit equivalent for your own values of intellect and spirit, you can look at this regen calculator from Zusterke.

So, you won’t reforge spirit to crit yet if you’re looking for mana regen only. As to know if crit will become a better throughput stat than haste or mastery, that’s another story…

Want to know more about Resurgence? Continue with How to get the most out of Resurgence?

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us

What are the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?

Zahia, resto Shaman

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

10M raids, and of course 5 mans, as everyone have to run 5 mans nowadays.

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?

Healing Rain ! It has a nice animation, and coupled with a few Chain Heal it makes a wonder in filling these health bars.

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?

Healing Surge. With Tidal Waves, I don’t really feel the need for a fast spell. In case of emergency, I often prefer a 1.6 second cast Greater Healing Rain that’ll crit for 60k than Healing Surge. Of course, sometimes in the emergency I don’t notice that Tidal Waves just dropped, and in the middle of my looong Greater Healing Wave cast I just think “Oh crap, that was a good time for Healing Surge. To late now, let’s just pray my big heal will land in time!”

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?

Utility. In my healing environnement (5-mans and 10-mans), being able to bring 4 out of my 6 raid-wide buffs via totems, bloodlust, utility totems, an offensive dispel and the shortest cooldown interrupt of the game is very useful.

Of course, these tools are not healing tools, but they can change the issue of the fight in small groups.

Healing wise, I’d say we’re  very versatile, but’s it’s true for about every class now. From my own experience, I think we have 2 main strenghs :

• Being able to produce strong and steady AOE heals
• Resto shaman can have about infinite mana, provided they can throw a lighting bolt on something. That’s pretty much unique above all healers.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?

Not defensive CD ! Of course, we now have our new Spirit Link Totem. But for now I think this spell would better suits an goblin engineer toolbox than a shaman spell book, as it  has a lot of chances to fail.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?

Hard to answer this one, as I only played with an holy priest a few times (plus he was a complete newbie), and I never played with a disc priest since Cataclysm launch. I’m raiding with Holy Pala and Resto druid most of the time. It went very well for now, even with the lack of defensive CD from druid and shaman. I’m finding than druid and shaman works very well together for raid healing, as our hots supplement each other to generate massive amounts of healing when needed, along with my Chain Heal for “spot” healing.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?

As said above, I didn’t healed with priests enough to answer this question.

What is your worst habit as a healer?

As a healer, I don’t know. As a resto shaman, I always forget to use Unleash Elements on CD in the heat of the battle. That’s not a big deal most of the time, as it’s more a mana saver than a throughput spell.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?

That hunter that don’t stand in the blue circle !! I don’t know why but it’s (almost) always an hunter.

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?

I think so. Again, I always heal with the same (great, by the way) healers, so I don’t have a lot of experience concerning healers balance.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?

I’m raiding very casually, so “the boss is dead” is a good evaulation already. Sometimes, someone in the raid will upload a raid night on World of Log, and I’ll take a look at it. But making an in-depth analyse take way too much time! The best used I made of it recently helped me choosing my talent spec, as I could check the contribution of some talents to my overall healing.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?

We’re Chain Heal spammerz ? I don’t know people continue to see shaman like this, but they should know that we’re drop-Healing-Stream-Totem-Earth-Shield-and- Healing-Rain-and-afk type of healer now !

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?

Back in TBC days, I would have said “learn how work your totems and what totem is the best in each situation, and know what rank of Chain Heal to use in each situation”

In Wrath, I’d have said “learn when you should use Chain Heal, and when you should use all your other spells instead”.

Now, shaman are faced to the most complicated spell ever: Spirit Link Totem. Learning how to use it effectively will take a while, be it for new or long time playing resto shaman.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?

Well, it depends a lot on the fight. On Chiameron, they’ll see high hps and low overhealing, but effectively a big part of this healing was wasted, healing people above 10k hp. On Omnitron, I’ll just sit at the low end of the healing meter, generally having a lot of mana left at the end of the fight (except if the dps  is so low that it takes 13 minutes to kill them)

What healing class do you feel you understand least?

I suppose druid. I didn’t play a resto druid at max level since Karazhan, so it’s been a while. Plus, paladin, and priest roles in a raid seem obvious to me : paladin =  strong tank healing, disc = bubble love + good tank healing, holy priest = strong raid healing. But druids remains a bit mysterious for me, even if I raid with a resto druid most often. Generally he is on support role (tank or offtank + raid), so it doesn’t help to know what he’s best at. Plus, he’s a very good player, it looks more like he’s very good at every thing!

Haste or Crit or  Mastery and why?

For now, haste. I may try reforging to mastery soon as it got a huge buff since 4.1, but I’m not sure it’ll work very well. As I’m alchemist and jewelcrafter, it’s very easy for me to get to the 2nd haste threshold (2005) with alchemist stone and +67 haste gems. So a while ago, as I noticed than players where not often below 50% hp in my 10-man normal raid, I tried reforging for haste. For now, it’s working very well. I love the short cast time, and instead of just spending more mana by casting more, it allows for more regen via Telluric Current too. And as I’m often on raid healing duty, haste do wonders with Healing Rain. It doesn’t heal for more, but it heals faster, thus you don’t feel the need to cast so much Chain Heals while Healing Rain is doing his job.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?

I’m currently using vuhdo + mouseover macros. I was a long-time grid user, but finally I made the switch. I used to run with a lot of grid plugin, and became bored of having half of the plugins broken at each patch. Plus, in my guild we want to completely discover the bosses, so we don’t  read strats or boss abilities before trying. I have to say vuhdo is way superior than grid for that. Vudho allow you to see all debuffs at a time, and most importantly to see debuffs tooltip easily. This helps a lot to see what’s happening, but isn’t available in grid.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

At the moment I stack haste much higher than other stats, because it’s the only possibility to get to the 2nd haste threshold. I generally don’t think too much stacking is good for a healer. But with our current gear level, you don’t have much choice, you need to choose your main stat and stack it. As a resto shaman, I have 3 gearing possibilities. Either I get to the 2nd haste cap, and have to reforge most of my secondary stats except spirit to haste. Either I gear for high mastery or for a mix of haste and mastery, crit being a very poor stat at the moment. Ratings being what they are, you don’t gain anything while gearing for mix of haste and mastery: you won’t gain additional hot ticks, and your cast won’t even be 0.1 second shorter. So your best bet is stacking mastery, or stacking haste up to the 2nd threshold.

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us

If you missed it, flowchart for fire totem is here. Stay tuned for the air and water totems (in less than a month this time, I hope)…

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us

© Zahia for One more alt, 2011. | Permalink | Make a comment ! | Add to del.icio.us