Type "H" For Heals

The Sixth Meme

Malevica — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:56:44 +0000

The “Sixth Meme”, started by Gnomeaggedon and picked up today by WoW Insider, challenges bloggers to:

Go into your image folder
Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
Challenge six new bloggers.
Link to them.

Well, as far as I know I’ve not been tagged yet, but since most of my blogroll has already joined in I’m going to do it anyway. Sticking it to the system, yeah!

Feel free to tag me retroactively so I don’t appear quite as sad though!

My WoW Life in Pictures

Unfortunately I only actually have five sub-folders in my WoW image directory, which is something of a problem given the meme. So instead I’ll give you the sixth image from each of my sub-folders. Once again, screwing the system. Such a rebel!

Cataclysm Beta

The new Cataclysm Beta water, with my (at the time new) Frostbrood Vanquisher on display

I took this image early in the beta, simply because the new water texture was absolutely breathtaking compared to what was available in the live game at the time. It was jawdropping.

Plus, I wanted to show off my new mount, even if it was only the 10-man version, we were really proud to get them.
General Screenshots

Myself and my favourite tank as dancing Night Elves in Darnassus, dressing in just our guild tabards

Back in 2007 myself and my favourite tank were in the Royal Guardians guild on Perenolde-US. One day, for reasons which are lost to the mists of time, we decided to roll level 1 Night Elves, slip on a guild tabard, and entertain the denizens of Darnassus. As I recall, there were games involved too, in particular a sort of tag game with Heavy Leather Balls.

A nice bunch of people for my first experience in WoW
Strategy

Oh, the horror of trying to explain this to 25 people...

This brings back some memories. If you don’t get it, let me explain.

On the Lich King encounter, there were these Val’kyr who would grab three of your party and fly with them to the edge of the platform and then drop them off. It helped to kill them if you kept them going all the same way so you could AoE stun them and cleave them. The direction they flew was a straight line from the middle of the room to the edge, so where you stood when you were picked up determined precisely where they went.

This diagram shows why, for a given tightness of group (the white circles), it was better to have that stack point further out than right in the middle. If you stand in the more central stack point but off to the sides of the white circle, the val’kyr’s path could be the edge of the red zone. Whereas if you stand on the edges of the white circle that’s further out, the range of paths is much narrower.

My contention was that narrowing the possible routes and getting more reliable cleaving and stunning would outweigh the disadvantage of the val’kyrs starting a little closer to the edge of the platform.

Not visible in this screenshot: AVR scrawls all over the place, showing in no uncertain terms exactly where to run when Defile hit.
Other People’s Screenshots

Levitated Kitties oscillate between sinister and scared

This is Malevica, apparently in Shadowfang Keep for the Love Is In The Air holiday, being stalked by my favourite tank, this time in Druid form.

I’d levitated her, and apparently she’d decided to get revenge while my back was turned. Sneaky!
Miscellaneous

An applicant who holds the key to rejuvenation. And not a Resto Druid

Oh, saving the best for last!

I can’t claim credit for this post or the detective work that went into it, but it’s a masterpiece indeed.

The assumption we made was that the applicant had not in fact discovered the secret to eternal youth, but was just a teenager lying about his or her age to get past a 18+ rule that’s as much there for new members as it is for existing ones.

Kids, if you’re going to do this, at least make it convincing and just add 5 years to your actual age. That way you’ll be consistent even when you tick over a year, and 5 is a nice round number that’s easy to remember.

Passing The Torch

Here’s the challenge, finding people in my Google Reader who don’t appear to have joined in yet. So I hereby tag the few people below, and anyone else who reads this can consider themselves tagged as well.

With a Heavy Leather Ball.

In no particular order:
Evlyxx of Evangelism
Gina of Healbot.net
and Therya of Shaman Nebula

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Love Is In The Air

Malevica — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:08:24 +0000

Last week my favourite tank and I got married! She’s an amazing person and I’m extremely honoured to be able to call myself her husband (still getting used to the sound of that…)

As if that wasn’t enough, when we got back home we found ourselves invited to an in-game party organised by the guild, complete with excessive quantities of alcohol, drinking games to go with it, and of course awesome wedding presents! We’re now the proud owners of his and hers Mekgineer’s Choppers, amongst other things.

Seriously, is such a great bunch of people. Thanks a lot to all of you for giving us such a fun night!

Tell and Koryll's In-Game Wedding

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Heroic Ultraxion

Malevica — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:53:12 +0000

NB: This guide will assume you’ve already read my normal Ultraxion strategy, or otherwise know the details of the fight on normal mode.

Fight Summary

The Ultraxion fight on heroic is pretty much the same as the normal, the difference are fairly small.

The main change you’ll notice as a healer is that the AoE damage is a lot higher, as befits a heroic encounter. The timing intervals remain the same but the hits are higher: 400,000 Shadow damage on 10-heroic vs 300,000 Shadow damage on 10-normal. What’s more, you’ll be going with 2 healers in order to make the enrage timer, so it’s a lot more work than normal mode is.

The second change is that Fading Light is cast on two raid members plus his current tank, as opposed to tank plus one on normal mode. This makes the healing a bit more tricky because the damage will be spikier as more people use Heroic Will and don’t split the damage. Fading Light also leaves a debuff on the tank; unlike on normal, where the debuff leaves the tank unable to generate threat for a few seconds, the heroic debuff increases physical damage taken for 10 seconds. This is a very good way of forcing you to take two proper tanks, but shouldn’t impact on the healing as long as the tanks swap immediately when the debuffs go out.

The final changes are to Hour of Twilight. The small change is that the cast is shorter, 3 seconds instead of 5 seconds. That sounds small, but it matters if you’re used to squeezing an extra round of heals in and you’ll need to carefully adjust your timing.
The big change is that you need two people to soak each Hour instead of just one, and your tanks will not have major cooldowns available often enough for them both to take every single one. You need other people, DPS and healers, to pick up the difference.

I’ll focus on the Hour of Twilight changes, and on handling the increased damage, particularly towards the end of the fight.

Hour of Twilight

As I’ve said, the important change is that you now need two soakers per Hour instead of one. Hour of Twilight happens every 45 seconds, and once you’ve soaked an Hour you get a debuff which prevents you from taking another for 2 minutes. If you try, you die instantly. So you need 6 people to soak the Hour of Twilight, working in three pairs.

But you have other ways to survive this:

Shadowpriests have Dispersion every 2 minutes (75 seconds with the glyph)
Fire Mages can use Cauterize once a minute to survive, as long as they get healed up quickly afterwards
All Mages can Ice Block to avoid the damage, and Paladins can Divine Shield one as well
Rogues can use Cloak of Shadows every 2 minutes, preventing all magical damage taken
Hunters can use Deterrence to deflect the spell and take no damage
Holy Priests can use Guardian Spirit to help someone survive
Discipline Priests can use Pain Suppression in combination with a minor cooldown such as Barkskin or Anti-Magic Shell. These cooldowns are good, but not good enough on their own

There may be more abilities I’ve missed, I’d be glad to add them to the list!

Healing the last 30 seconds

At 5 minutes in Ultraxion becomes more Unstable for the final time. He goes from casting every 2 seconds to every 1 second, which effectively doubles his damage done. At this point, it’s a race against time to kill him before your healers run out of cooldowns or you’ve used up all your Timeloop charges.

The trick to surviving this is to start rotating raid cooldowns and healing cooldowns from 5 minutes onwards, anyone with a spare personal cooldown should use it, and ideally you get a kill before 5:30 or 5:40. Remember that your tanks will be getting their 4-piece bonuses, which give them an extra raid cooldown to play with. (See Grav’s comment for a great tip for using a Warrior tank’s 4-piece for both Hour and general damage soaking).
Start with passive abilities like Divine Guardian and Power Word: Barrier, and end with Divine Hymn and Tranquility because these synergise better with Bloodlust.

Speaking of which, there’s a little trick with Bloodlust…

The double-lust trick

You have a dilemma: you really want to give the healers the Bloodlust or Heroism or Time Warp for the end of the fight, but the best time to use it is the very start, where you can line up BL with trinkets, pre-pots and DPS cooldowns.

But you can have your cake and eat it too! Heroic Will takes you into a different realm, so you can’t be affected by buffs or debuffs, including BL and Heroism.

So here’s how to use this to your advantage:

Have a countdown timer for pulls. (You already have this though for timing pre-pots, right?)
2 seconds before the pull, have your healers hit Heroic Will
Just as the pull is made, pop BL/Heroism/Time Warp. Your healers won’t get the buff but they don’t need it, and crucially they also won’t get the associated debuff
At the 5-minute mark, pop a second BL/Heroism/Time Warp so the healers can benefit from it

Spec and Glyphs

The glyphs of Prayer of Healing and Power Word: Barrier are essential. I tend to take the Penance glyph as well, but this is as much for DPS as anything else.

I take an Atonement build for this fight because in the early stages the damage is pretty low so I spend quite a bit of time DPSing. I can put out about 1.8million damage per attempt, which is only 2% of the raid’s damage but makes a huge difference when you’re looking at taking 5-10 valuable seconds off the length of the fight.

Consider taking an extra point in Veiled Shadows so you can get an extra Shadowfiend in, because the default cooldown of 5 minutes makes it tricky to use it twice when you really need it, before you get the Blue buff. See how you go, you may not need it.

Cooldown Usage

PW:B is best used at the start, right at the 5 minute mark, because it doesn’t depend on the Bloodlust being cast immediately. Once the Barrier runs out you should have Bloodlust and can throw Divine Hymn into the mix whenever it fits in your team’s rotation.

Pain Suppression can be used to keep a tank stable if you’re busy regenning mana, but I tend to hold it in case we need a backup for an Hour-soaking team.

Life Grip is fairly useless on this fight, sadly, unless you have an annoying person standing way out at the back and not benefiting from AoE healing.

You’ll only get to use one Hymn of Hope in the fight. The few seconds after an Hour of Twilight are fairly quiet, just warn your fellow healer so they can cover. The same applies to Concentration Potions.

Other Tips

Atonement healing is buffed by the Red buff, and will proc the Green buff as well, so don’t be afraid to use Smite and Holy Fire it if you get either of these buffs. Do look and make sure your raid is getting Atonement heals though, and move them forward or back if not.

The fight doesn’t require much special from you, so as a Discipline Priest your biggest contribution to damage reduction and to the raid comes from using your DPS.
Keep an eye on the raid’s health bars, but go nuts with Smite and Holy Fire in the early days. Just before the first buff is available the damage tends to ramp up and you’ll need to heal for a bit, then you can go back to DPSing because the buff will settle things down for a while.
Shortly before the second buff you’ll probably want to switch to healing full-time, but judge it for yourself.

If you’re not stacking Mastery PoH spam is probably the most effective approach to healing the fight as opposed to heavy PW:S usage. Given this, Discipline Priests benefit roughly equally from Red and Blue (Red doubles PoH and the resulting DA, while Blue doubles the number of PoH casts per unit time), although the Green is less effective because it doesn’t affect Divine Aegis procs. Resto Druids and Holy Priests really shine with the Red buff while Holy Paladins love the Blue buff, so take and then one which is left over and make it work for you. If you’re on Blue, get the Green first of course.

Good luck, and have fun!

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Dragon Soul Nerfs

Malevica — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:44:44 +0000

Blizzard has announced that from January 31st Dragon Soul normal and heroic will be hit with a 5% nerf across the board, which may or may not be followed by further nerfs. Reactions have been predictably strong.

What Blizzard Said

Let’s have some choice excerpts. You can read the full text on MMO-Champion and elsewhere.

Here’s a bit from the first announcement:

During the scheduled server maintenance on the week of January 31, the Dragon Soul raid will become enveloped by the “Power of the Aspects” spell, reducing the health and damage dealt of all enemies in the raid by 5%. This spell will grow progressively stronger over time to reduce the difficulty and make the encounters more accessible. The spell will affect both normal and Heroic difficulties, but it will not affect the Looking for Raid difficulty.

The spell can also be disabled by talking to Lord Afrasastrasz at the beginning of Dragon Soul, if a raid wishes to attempt the encounters without the aid of the Dragon Aspects.

So it’s a flat 5% nerf to health and damage done, no mention of removal of mechanics or mechanic changes à la Firelands. The scale is similar to the ICC progressive nerf/buff, and just like the ICC effect it can be turned off if you want to.

Later on, a follow-up post with clarification and, importantly, explanation was posted:

Believe it or not there are actually guilds and raiding groups that are attempting to progress through Normal and Heroic raids, but are hitting a wall, and have been hitting a wall. We have actually statistical date [sic.] we base our changes on, we know exactly how many people are clearing these raids each week, we know exactly how many people are able to down just a few bosses, and how many were only able to down a few bosses every week for weeks on end and then stopped raiding altogether.

The issue we’re constantly trying to combat is the one where people feel like they’re just out of options. One way this is an issue is the content is too easy, they blasted through it, have everything they could possibly want, and have nothing else to do. Ideally that’s a small subset of very hardcore players. For everyone else it’s a feeling of just being stuck with no possible way to progress. Very few players are willing to suit up, buff up, do all the necessary requirements to raid, jump in, and then do no better than they did last week for hours and hours, only to return next week and do the same.

[...]

If they don’t have to be like us, why do they have to have nerfs to get to our position in HM Raiding?
Because they want to and they pay the same amount for the game? I don’t know, man. How is it good for the game to have 1% of players parading around for months and months and a 99% sitting around with nothing to do because they’re sick and tired of wiping?

[...]
We plan to increase the spell by 5% about every month, but we’re not sure if we’ll need to. If we see a lot of people able to keep progressing and downing bosses, maybe 5% is all we need. It’s going to be watching completion numbers and seeing where that gets us. We’re not assuming we’ll need to go as far as we did with ICC. It’s not going to be automatic, our hand is on the dial.

The increase is not automatic or set in its frequency. We will be manually controlling when it increases, if at all. It will be completely based on how many people we see able to complete the raid, and our decision to increase it or not.

Needless to say, much has been made of these two announcements.

Reactions

Taking a quick, far from exhaustive look down my Google Reader and Twitter, I can see several really great points being made. Gina at Healbot.net looks at it in terms of how it affects raiding guilds, particularly when it comes to recruitment. She describes two scenarios:

Option A) Turn off the buff. Fall behind on progression because everyone and their mother is using the buff. Fall behind on server leaderboard. Does it matter that we clear it without the nerf? Not so much, leaderboards don’t show the difference unless you look at clear dates.
Option B)
Succumb to the buff, get totally demotivated (/sigh), and let it hang over your head that you cleared from 3+ on HC after the nerf and had to do it with the buff or fall farther behind.

Looked at this way it’s a real no-win situation.

Kurn made a similar point:

While yes, it can be turned off, I don’t know that many raiders will take advantage of that option. What looks better when recruiting — 2/8 HM (no buff) or 5/8 HM?

In my experience while it’s not the be all and end all, server ranking is a major determining factor in the rate of applications received by guilds, especially those not at the cutting edge; a large proportion of applicants will simply work their way down WoWProgress, and if you’re a fair way down that list it’s a lot more work to recruit without a really good selling point. Saying that you can easily turn the buff off assumes both that your entire team is of one mind on the subject (which might not be the case) and that your team is stable enough to not be affected by turnover and recruitment.
Guilds do not exist in a vacuum, and the decision about the buff is not solely determined by in-game factors.

Gina also sums her feelings up in a way I can definitely relate to:

I feel a sense of disapointment and I’m sorry for my raid team. Sorry I didn’t push us harder, faster, and get us more HC kills.

Nerfing current content reminds us that raids, at launch, are intended for a different audience than us. Once they’ve been through the content, it gets changed to be more suitable for hoi polloi. That’s not a good feeling. I want to raid the same content, albeit a bit later and with more gear, as everyone else.
What’s more it feels slightly patronising to me, as if the game is somehow taking pity on us and nerfing bosses so we don’t have to wipe too many times.

Another thought from Kurn:

I still wear my Hand of A’dal title because of what it took for us to kill Vashj and Kael and finish the Vials of Eternity quest.

Those were my favourite days of WoW; pushing hard to achieve something, even though I was months behind others, knowing that, apart from minor tweaks and slight adjustments, the encounters were basically the same as they had been when the server first guilds had done them. (Until the 3.0 nerf, anyhow.)

Raiders like us who take their in-game achievements seriously are bothered by when we kill bosses, pre- or post-nerf. A post-nerf kill, regardless of the size of the nerf, feels illegitimate, as if we’ve used a cheat code or killed the boss’s weaker sibling. Many guilds insist on tackling heroic modes because normal mode kills aren’t enough of a challenge and therefore don’t give enough of a psychological reward; as normal modes are to heroic modes, so post-nerf bosses are to pre-nerf bosses.

Juvenate of WTS Heals (@WTSHeals) on Twitter was one of several people who brought the LFR mode into the equation:

I always thought the ICC nerfs were so that people can see the content. We have raid finder now.

When LFR was announced, I was hopeful that LFR would allow people to “see content” without needing to nerf normal modes. Unfortunately, as Adam Holisky points out at WoWInsider:

The Raid Finder, while good, isn’t for everyone. Some people really hate pugging — so much so that they’d rather not play the game than have to pug. There are some people who are just interested in running content with their guild, and if their guild doesn’t want to run the Raid Finder, then it’s normal modes.

LFR might have fixed the difficulty problem, but it has its own problems relating to the format and to the social side of raiding. Perhaps if there existed a 10-man LFR difficulty mode that a casual or otherwise less-progressed 10-man guild could elect to tackle we’d have our third difficulty level, but at it stands LFR is an entirely separate animal and can’t just be considered an easier version of the raid that people can do if they can’t handle normal mode.

Note, I’m not arguing for the removal of LFR either. The match-making functionality and the ease and speed of grouping is a huge bonus for a vast number of people, and the game experience for many people has been dramatically improved by the feature. All I’m saying is that it didn’t achieve one of the things I, and others, had hoped it might.

Finally, in what I suspect might be a regrettable slip from whoever wrote that second Blue post, there was a noticeable change in the tone of the rationale this time around. In previous tiers the changes have been framed more towards “greater accessibility” and “allowing people to see the content”. While we’ve not always agreed with the decision, the intention has always appeared relatively noble. This time around though there was some extra language which very definitely pushed Kurn’s buttons, and I can certainly see why. Here are those lines again:

The issue we’re constantly trying to combat is the one where people feel like they’re just out of options. [...] For [all but a small subset of very hardcore players] it’s a feeling of just being stuck with no possible way to progress. Very few players are willing to suit up, buff up, do all the necessary requirements to raid, jump in, and then do no better than they did last week for hours and hours, only to return next week and do the same.

[...]

If they don’t have to be like us, why do they have to have nerfs to get to our position in HM Raiding?
Because they want to and they pay the same amount for the game? I don’t know, man. How is it good for the game to have 1% of players parading around for months and months and a 99% sitting around with nothing to do because they’re sick and tired of wiping?

I wouldn’t go quite as far as Kurn did in her reaction to these comments, although she’s perfectly entitled to her opinion and as I’ve said I do understand her perspective. But it is very provocative to see Blizzard effectively saying that they’re not catering for you.

The (valid) point Blizzard is trying to make here is that insurmountable roadblocks cause players to leave the game and that’s bad for everyone. Thus, they argue, if people have reached their ceiling they’ll get bored unless the difficulty is tweaked to let them progress again (until they reach another ceiling, when the number goes up to 10%, etc.). Clearly the data they have suggests to them that a large enough number of guilds have reached their ceiling to start the tweaking.

The trouble is, one size doesn’t fit all. Some of us are not at our ceiling, so we’re seeing our experience altered, our rewards diminished, our playing field made less level, for the benefit of other people. As humans, that just isn’t going to sit right with us.

And that “they pay the same money, they should be able to do whatever they want to” line was really ill-advised, and I note with interest that it’s been edited out of the forum post.

Et Moi?

As much as I’m disappointed by the nerfs to current content it’s not the first time it’s happened while I’ve been raiding and the game’s still here, I’m still raiding, and I can’t see either of those things changing in the foreseeable future. I’m happy with my current guild, and I’m enjoying the Dragon Soul encounters. Even with the 5% nerf there will still be plenty of challenge to be had.

When I look over the list of issues most of them are external, they relate to how other people will perceive me, or how I perceive my achievements in comparison with other people. So the trick is to focus on the team, focus on the encounters in front of us, and worry a little less about rankings and progression.

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Heroic Warlord Zon’ozz

Malevica — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

NB: This guide will assume you’ve already read my normal Warlord Zon’ozz strategy, or otherwise know the details of the fight on normal mode.

Fight Summary

Moving from normal to heroic mode there are three big changes. The first is that Zon’ozz has an increased health pool but a very tight 6 minute berserk timer, so you need to bounce the ball more times to stack Void Diffusion higher on the boss so you can beat it. The second big difference is that during the Black Blood of Go’rath phase 8 tentacle adds will spawn around the room, and the damage dealt by the Black Blood of Go’rath is multiplied by the number of tentacles still alive. The third is that the Disrupting Shadows debuff he casts on 3 random players in your raid will deal AoE damage and and AoE knockback when dispelled, so you have to take great care with dispelling it.

Let’s go through the more straightforward two first, then we’ll come to the tentacles.

Void Diffusion

As a reminder, every time you bounce the Void of the Unmaking it gains a stack of Void Diffusion, causing it to do 20% more damage on the next bounce. It also gives Zon’ozz a stack of Focused Anger, increasing his physical damage by 20% and his attack speed by 5%. When the Void is allowed to hit Zon’ozz, he gains Void Diffusion instead, increasing all damage he takes by 5%, and his Focused Anger stacks reset. This also triggers the Black Blood phase, which we’ll deal with later.

The Void Diffusion debuff is the key to beating his berserk timer. The debuff lasts 2 minutes, so you are able to stack it up progressively over the course of the fight every time you let the Void hit him. However, in order to beat the berserk you’ll need quite a few stacks. A typical bounce strategy is to go with 7 each time, and 5 on the fourth round. After the fourth set of bounces, you ignore the Black Blood phase adds entirely, pop Bloodlust and hope to burn him down before he reaches Berserk or your healers run out of cooldowns/mana/will to live.

If your DPS is low, you might want to push an extra pair of bounces, either on the first or last sets. 7 bounces shouldn’t require cooldowns to survive (and you’ll need them later, so try and save them) but the damage will be pretty high by the end. 9 may require special treatment, perhaps a PW:B if you have one spare, or you can use tricks like having a Mage with Cauterise or a Shadow Priest with Dispersion solo one bounce.

Disrupting Shadows

On 10-man heroic Zon’ozz will cast this on 3 random players at a time. Before resistances it deals 35,000 Shadow damage per 2s, but the real danger it poses is that when it gets dispelled it deals 60,000 Shadow damage to, and knocks back, everyone within 10 yards.

Because of the significant AoE damage the dispel causes, usually no one should be dispelled before they’ve run out of their cluster. On the other hand, you don’t want too many people running out before the Void reaches your group either or the damage won’t be split widely enough and people are liable to die. So when the Void is on its way to your group, you need to heal the debuffed people through the damage, and only when you’ve split the Void damage should they run out and be dispelled. This will stretch healing, but is manageable; Disc priests can help a lot here with absorbs acting as an extra buffer.

Getting this right is one of the biggest challenges in the encounter. You need to watch the game space as well as your healthbars so you can see where people are and when they’re 10 yards away. It’s also worth coordinating who will do the dispelling so you don’t get two dispels at the same time or waste mana. We assign one healer to the ranged and one to the melee and they dispel their own clusters only.

Black Blood of Go’rath

On normal difficulty, Black Blood of Go’rath is just a raid-wide AoE, you group up and heal through it and get back to bouncing the Void again. On Heroic the Black Blood of Go’rath deals 3,795 Shadow damage per 2 sec for every one of the freshly-spawned 8 tentacle adds (one Claw, two Flails and five Eyes) still alive. What this means is that the AoE damage at the start of the fight is pretty intense, but becomes manageable once 2-3 of the tentacles have died.

The way to deal with this is to have everyone group up at the start of the phase, throw out heavy AoE healing along with a raid cooldown, and have your DPS quickly take out the nearest three tentacles. (I’ll describe our assignments in a moment). The timing is such that you will be able to use 3-minute cooldowns every other Black Blood phase, so plan accordingly; remember that if you’re going to go for a burn after the fourth round of bounces, you’ll need to save your best cooldowns for that phase, which might affect which you choose to start with.

The tentacles spawn in predictable places, which makes planning for them easier:

Heroic Warlord Zon'ozz Positioning Diagram. Boss position is the red cross; Black Blood phase group-up spot is the blue square; the green triangle and purple diamond are the two Flail spawn positions

We split the raid into three teams at this point:

Left: 2 ranged + 1 healer
Right: 2 ranged + 1 healer
Middle: 3 melee

Here’s how we handle this phase:

Everyone groups up on the blue marker, right underneath the Claw. The claw needs to be tanked or it’ll do substantial raid-wide AoE Shadow damage and people have a bad habit of getting owned by this.
Left group takes out the nearby Flail (spawns on the green triangle marker) while the Right group takes the right-hand nearby Eye (number 4) and the Middle group kills another nearby Eye (number 3). Except for the melee everyone should be stacked up at this point to help with the healing
Once these first three tentacles are dead, the Left group heads out to deal with their two assigned Eyes (numbers 1 and 2), the Right group kills their Eye (number 5) and Flail (spawns on the purple diamond marker), and the Middle group switches to the boss, cleaving the Claw down at the same time.

After this phase ends the boss continues to be tanked on the Blue marker while the ranged position shifts to the centre of the room. This positioning then remains until the end of the fight.

Spec and Glyphs

The damage is quite high, so you don’t get the natural lulls you get elsewhere, but Smiting can be very useful for helping your team kill their tentacles in time, and you can build up Evangelism stacks during the early bounces in preparation for either the later few bounces or the beginning of the Black Blood phase.

In terms of Glyphs, it’s again all about the output. Prayer of Healing and Power Word Barrier are must-haves here, and I’d be inclined to take Penance for spot-healing; towards the end of each light phase Zon’ozz will be meleeing the tank pretty hard, and people may also be low from having Disrupting Shadoew dispelled.

Prayer of Mending is a very strong Major glyph here, because of the long periods of sustained raid damage.

Cooldown Usage

PW:B should be alternated with another raid cooldown at the start of each Black Blood phase to keep the raid alive until a couple of tentacles are down. Once everyone’s grouped up you can throw it down and it makes a big difference. I’d recommend saving Divine Hymn for the final burn phase, since you’ll only get one chance to use it and that’s when you’ll need a second cooldown up your sleeve.

Pain Suppression has two uses. First, you can use it to keep the tank alive when Zon’ozz is at >5 stacks of Focused Anger (or whenever else they need it). Especially if your assigned tank healer has to run out because they were unlucky enough to get Disrupting Shadows. The other use for it is if the ranged DPS are slow to return to the middle after killing their tentacles, you can save someone who will find themselves taking a larger share of the damage.

Life Grip can be used to get people to cluster points quickly, but shouldn’t be relied upon.

The Berserk timer on the fight is 7 minutes, so if you want a second Hymn of Hope you’ll have to use it very early in the fight, pretty much just after the pull. You could spam bubbles like crazy before the first bounce and then regen all that mana, but this might not pay off. The best time to pop this, if you’re only going once, is just after everyone’s got back in position after the Black Blood phase, but not when there’s a round of debuffs coming out. The damage is relatively low at this time.

You should be able to get a second Shadowfiend cast in though, so use it early and have it ready for near the end of the fight to allow you to spam like crazy.

Other Tips

Not too much besides what I’ve already touched on. The damage profile is more ramped than spiky, so if you can build up Evangelism before the high-damage portions you’ll be in a strong position. Clever, sparing use of PW:S as a buffer can be really helpful here too, because raid members will be taking some pretty large hits from time to time. In particular, bubbling the people with the debuff is a great way of buying time to allow them to run out and be dispelled safely.

The other thing of note is that Smite and Holy Fire are affected by Zon’ozz’s Void Diffusion buff. Especially in the nuke phase at the end you can get a lot of mileage out of Smite healing. At 45k per Smite your HPS will approximate that of PoH-spamming, plus Atonement stacks DA when it crits and is smart-targeting; not to mention you could also be pushing out 50k+ DPS at a time when, especially on early kills, you’ll be right up against the berserk timer.

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New Year, New Look!

Malevica — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:15:03 +0000

Type “H” For Heals has a shiny new look for 2012!

I started this blog back in 2009 and in those early days when I was really still only dabbling with the whole “blogging” thing I picked the Suffusion theme. It was free, it looked good, and it was pretty easily customisable. It’s served me well to this point, but as is often the way I began to feel a nagging desire for a change.

And this is the result. The apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree – I still like dark, blue themes in general – but I think this one looks a bit more textured and modern than the old one.

The layout and graphics are based on the freely-available Firecrow theme, although I’ve spent a good deal of extra time rewriting the basic theme to better suit my needs. Some of that was fixing little quirks (on a dark theme, having the hover colour for links set to black is not smart…), but there were some more significant tweaks as well:

I added a second sidebar to the right-hand side so that I can keep more things visible above the fold.
I widened the theme in general, but stuck with a fixed width. I know that a fixed width doesn’t always play too nicely with small screens, although most small-screen devices have their own tricks for rendering wide pages these days. I just object, as someone with a desktop PC and 1680 pixels to play with, to viewing the web through an 600 pixel-wide window (I’m looking at you, WoW Insider…); at the same time, really wide text blocks still look slightly odd to me. I’ll accept that this is more or less a product of my own quirks, but then it is my blog, after all!
I moved the subscribe and contact buttons out of the sidebar and into the header, so they’re more prominent and don’t push sidebar content too far down.
I added sharing buttons at the bottom of each post. Oddly I ummed and ahhed over this one for quite a while. On the one hand having people think enough of a post I’ve written to want to share it on G+, Facebook, Twitter and their ilk is undoubtedly a good thing, and it’ll certainly help bring in more readers from different places; on the other hand there’s just something about putting in those buttons, even in miniature, that makes me feel like I’m being just a little bit… needy?
Rationally though, they’re helpful to people and they don’t detract from the posts, so in the end up they went.
The new theme has a “Featured Posts” box; I’ve not had one before. Currently it’s set up simply to show the most recent 4 posts from my main on-topic categories, but I might experiment with setting specific posts to float to the top instead.
A consequence of this feature is that I’ve had to assign featured images to my posts. This is a good thing, because frankly I suck at using images in my posts, so anything that encourages me to use more of them can only be a good thing.
I removed the built-in WordPress nofollow attributes from external links on my posts. This way if you make a reasonable (non-spam) comment on a post, the link back to your blog counts for something with search engines as well as just people. As it should be.

Hope you like the new look!

P.S. Don’t be surprised to see further small changes as things settle in and I change my mind repeatedly about the little things, but also do yell if you spot something that looks a bit weird, because I might well have missed something.

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About My Heroic Guides

Malevica — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:33:32 +0000

I’m doing the heroic guides in the same format as the normal mode guides, but instead of doing them all at once I’ll be pushing them out one at a time as we gain experience with the encounters. Keep checking the front page, this post and the Raid Guides menu above for additions, or you could always subscribe to see new posts the minute they’re published.

I would really appreciate comments on these guides if people have them. I typically wait until we’ve either killed it or we’ve nailed the strategy before posting, but there may still be things I’ve overlooked that need including, and commenters are really valuable for improving the guides for everyone.

Big List of Heroic Guides

Morchok – Up!
Yorsahj the Unsleeping – Up!
Warlord Zon’ozz – Up!
Hagara the Stormbinder – Soon!
Ultraxion – Soon!
Warmaster Blackhorn – Soon!
Spine of Deathwing – Soon!
Madness of Deathwing – Soon!

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Heroic Yorsahj the Unsleeping

Malevica — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:27:58 +0000

NB: This guide will assume you’ve already read my normal Yorsahj strategy, or otherwise know the details of the fight on normal mode.

Fight Summary

The key difference between normal and heroic mode is that Yorsahj spawns four slimes instead of three, dramatically increasing the damage and meaning that you have some more difficult choices to make about which add to kill.

What this means in practice is that you’ll have to deal with the Purple debuff a lot more often, about half of the combinations will include a Purple, and your DPS will need to be much more on the ball to kill the double spawn of adds that comes from a Black/Yellow combination.

There’s also a trick to using the Blue Mana Void to your advantage, which I’ll talk about later.

First though, those combinations. There are in fact only 6 combinations that come up. I’ll list them all, along with a recommended kill target (underlined), and then talk about them all in detail.

These are listed in the order that the current version of DBM reads them out so you can use this as a quick reference if need be. I’ve left Black as white, for obvious reasons.

Purple – Red – Yellow – Black

Purple – Green – Black – Blue

Green – Red – Blue – Black

Green – Yellow – Black – Red

Blue – Black – Purple – Yellow

Blue – Purple – Green – Yellow

Combinations in detail

Purple – Red – Yellow – Black

This is just nasty. Kill the Yellow to keep the damage in check, and then go easy on the heals. You may blow one or two people up, but keep your head and plan ahead and this one is manageable.

If you have a surfeit of cooldowns, you could consider killing Purple, but you’ll need your cooldowns for a later combination so I’d recommend going with Yellow initially and learning to handle it.

The rest of the damage is pretty rough though, so blow those cooldowns and crank out the AoE heals.

Purple – Green – Black – Blue

By contrast, this is one of the easiest combinations to deal with. We kill the Black here to allow ourselves some solid distraction-free DPS time on the boss, but you could go with Green instead for a real healing chillout.

Green – Red – Blue – Black

You have to pick between Red and Green and since you want to stack to kill Black adds, pick Green to kill. There’s a fair amount of raid damage out there, but there’s no Purple to worry about so go to town with the heals and you should be fine.

Green – Yellow – Black – Red

This is another really rough one. Whichever way you slice it you’ll end up with 3 AoE damage abilities to deal with, so you’re going to need to pop some raid cooldowns and AoE heal your heart out to get through it. If there are no cooldowns available pop a Bloodlust instead, which will also help with the Black adds.

You’re pretty much forced to kill the Green so you can stand in to reduce the damage from the Red.

Blue – Black – Purple – Yellow

An easy one. You need to kill the Yellow, because if you don’t the AoE it does will overwhelm you and you can’t heal enough because of the Purple, leaving you with just the damage from the adds to handle, which is manageable.

Blue – Purple – Green – Yellow

Here you’re picking between Yellow and Green to kill, and as with the previous combination you should kill the Yellow for the same reason.

That leaves Green and Purple, which is healable.

Handling the Mana Void

The trouble with the Mana Void is that when you get your mana stolen you really need it back immediately to deal with the silly damage, and because four combinations include a Cobalt Blood you won’t have mana cooldowns available every time. You don’t have time to wait while the Mana Void is taken down from full HP, people will be dead by then.

So, when the first Mana Void spawns you should pop your raid mana cooldowns (Mana Tide, Hymn of Hope) and get by without killing the Mana Void at that time. Then either throw spare DPS on it or assign one person to it specifically while the next slimes are coming in; either way, get it down to around 10% then leave it alone.

Now, when the next Mana Void spawns and you have no mana and no cooldowns left, quickly kill off the old Mana Void for a free full mana bar. DPS the new Mana Void down to 10% again, rinse and repeat.

The advantage of this, despite being a bit more complicated, is that you’re always only a few seconds away from a replenished mana bar whenever you need it.

Deep Corruption

Here’s a full list of abilities that stack Deep Corruption.

Highlights for Discipline Priests:

Atonement – 1 stack
Binding Heal – 1 stack to the person you heal. NO STACKS for yourself.
Divine Hymn – 1 stack per tick (i.e. will wipe your raid)
Holy Fire (with Atonement) – 1 stack per tick. Do not use if you have atonement.
Penance – 1 stack for the whole channeled cast (i.e. not 1 per tick)
Power Word: Shield – 1 stack (even when glyphed)
Prayer of Healing – 1 stack
Prayer of Mending – NO STACKS
Renew – 1 stack on initial application

Binding Heal is a useful spell, because it doesn’t add stacks to you. The downside is that it doesn’t heal for as much as Greater Heal, so if the target is taking big damage and you’re not in danger GH is still favoured.

Do not try and use Atonement here, especially not with Holy Fire. Atonement in general is bad because you can’t plan where it’ll go and it’s fairly weak healing anyway, and especially not Holy Fire because every tick adds another stack.

Penance, Greater Heal and Power Word: Shield are your staples depending on what’s needed most, and because it doesn’t generate stacks, keep PoM bouncing at all times for stack-free healing.

PW:B doesn’t do anything here, so use it if you need it, although it’s better to save it for the evil combinations with 3 AoE damage abilities.

Spec and Glyphs

This fight requires really high output, and is a great example of a time when Archangel shines. You can DPS the boss or the incoming slime to stack Evangelism, then pop it for a healing boost when things get rough later on. It’s also a fantastic boost just after the Mana Void has spawned.

In terms of Glyphs, it’s again all about the output. Prayer of Healing and Power Word Barrier are must-haves here. Pick between PW:S or Penance depending on your usage. I went with PW:S, but there’s a case for both.

Because of no dispels and high raid damage, Prayer of Mending is the Major top pick here.

Cooldown Usage

PW:B and Divine Hymn should be kept for the Yellow – Black – Red combinations. You’ll need them to survive the damage.

Pain Suppression should likewise be use on the nasty AoE healing combinations to keep the tank relatively out of trouble while you focus on the raid. Anything with Yellow up will do that.

Life Grip is useful either to get people in on the Red or out to the incoming slime to get it killed in time.

I’ve touched on Hymn of Hope before, it can be used just after the Mana Void spawns to get your raid some mana back up. Remember that the buff grants a chunk of free mana while it lasts, so even if you have to break off to heal after only a couple of seconds chanelling it’s still worth it. If you’ve got your raid pre-shielded, this ought to buy you enough time to get a few ticks off.
Ideally though, you’d like a non-healing Priest to pop HoH if you have one, so you don’t need to take time out from healing.

I’d suggest saving Shadowfiend for another Mana Void phase. Although you’ll get mana back soon from the Mana Void, there may be times when you need it sooner. Because of the effect of the Mana Void, there’s no point holding more mana than you need throughout the fight, it’s better to have it in reserve.

Other Tips

As I’ve mentioned previously, Archangel from DPSing the adds or boss is very useful for AoE damage phases. Just don’t Holy Fire the boss for a Purple phase, because each tick of Atonement adds a stack of Deep Corruption. he fight on normal mode.

You can prepare for either a Blue or Purple (or both) phase by throwing as many heals and particularly PW:S around the raid as possible before the Deep Corruption buff comes up, to get some stack-free healing and protection out there. You’re going to lose your mana or be limited in your healing ability anyway, so you might as well get a head-start even at high cost.

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Heroic Morchok

Malevica — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:27:44 +0000

NB: This guide will assume you’ve already read my normal Morchok strategy, or otherwise know the details of the fight on normal mode.

Fight Summary

The key difference between normal and heroic mode is that at 90% HP Morchok splits into two clones, one named Morchok and one named Kohcrom, with a shared health pool. Both have the same abilities as on normal mode; Kohcrom does his approximately 6 seconds after Morchok does his, with the exception of the Earthen Vortex/Black Blood of the Earth, which happen simultaneously.
Morchok and Kohcrom both get Furious at 20% HP.

In addition, the Stomp applies a debuff making you take 100% increased physical damage for 10 sec, so you have to split the raid into two teams spread at least 50-60 yards apart (so that one boss’s crystal can’t spawn in the other boss’s Stomp range either) or risk players, especially tanks, being gibbed. There is no Crush Armor, at least!

This splitting of the team requires some thought: in each 5-man team you need a tank plus someone pretty tough to soak the double-hit from the Stomp, which was hitting our Ret Paladin for ~140,000 Physical damage after armour. Rogues can Feint every Stomp, making them excellent candidates, otherwise you’ll need to keep your soaker well topped-off and where possible give them a PW:S too.

On top of that, you need three players to split the damage from the Resonating Crystal. It is unclear whether this targets only ranged players or just ignores the two closest players to the boss, it was merrily targeting someone on the other side of the map rather than picking on the melee DPS soaker if we lost a ranged DPS or healer. You may need to check, and maybe switch an extra melee DPS for a ranged.

A note on composition: we ended up using 4 healers for this encounter, 2 per side. You might be able to lower this eventually but I’d strongly recommend starting with 4 and seeing how you go, even if you get an offspec healer in they’ll be valuable.

Once you have the two teams sorted out, the execution is pretty straightforward, although it is fairly challenging for healers to prioritise healing where it’ll keep people alive – the long-lost art of triage.

There’s a rhythm to the fight, but the most important thing to remember is that every crystal explosion is preceded by a Stomp, so it’s important that when a crystal spawns you wait and soak the Stomp before then running for the crystal. You have roughly 5 seconds to get there, which is easy as long as the tank isn’t miles away from the crystal.
The number one cause of early deaths was people immediately running for the crystal and not splitting the Stomp.

Before the first Black Blood:

Time	Korchom	Morchok
0		Crystal
5		Stomp
12	Stomp
15		Crystal
20		Stomp
21	Crystal
26	Stomp

Subsequently:

Time	Korchom	Morchok
0		Stomp
5	Stomp
8		Crystal
14		Stomp
19	Stomp
21		Crystal
26	Crystal
26		Stomp
31	Stomp
35		Crystal
41	Crystal
41		Stomp
46	Stomp

Note that Morchok’s side takes one additional crystal each time, so bear that in mind when planning teams. For example, if your raid has limited mana restoring cooldowns it might be worth putting more on Morchok’s team.

Remember: when a crystal spawns, wait for the next Stomp, then run out to the crystal. You have ~5 seconds to get there, which is plenty of time.

Spec and Glyphs

This fight, on heroic, really rewards damage mitigation. I’d recommend a Soul Warding spec so you can cover your entire group, or at least the three people taking the crystal. Archangel/Atonement is less useful here because Prayer of Healing, with the associated guaranteed Divine Aegis absorption, is a much more valuable tool for recovering from and preventing Stomp and Crystal damage. Given the heavy weight placed on PW:S and PoH it’s probably worth glyphing those.

Cooldown Usage

Morchok takes a little over 6 minutes. To get a second PW:B in, you need to use it between the first and second Black Blood phases, and it will be available again during the Furious stage.

Pain Suppression should be used to support your tank and your Stomp soaker during the enrage, when they’ll be taking extra damage from the stomp and may not be able to rotate cooldowns for every one. Earlier in the fight, it can be handy if one person on your team is too low before a damage spike.

Life Grip can save someone’s bacon if they’re slow to run out to get away from the Black Blood or especially if they’re too slow getting in for a crystal.

Finally, the Black Blood phase is a good time to use Hymn of Hope, since there’s no damage caused while you’re safely behind the pillars. Shadowfiend is also safe from the Black Blood because it’s AoE damage, yet Morchok himself can still take damage.

Other Tips

Discipline shines on this fight, because there’s spaced-out damage spikes.

Make sure you PW:S the Stomp soaker and use a few casts of PoH to stack Divine Aegis before the Stomp, then while running to the crystal you can get PW:S on the three people that will take the damage. Once you’re back by the boss and in the ~8 sec lull before the next Stomp, bring everyone back up with Binding Heal and PoH in preparation for the next round.

Binding Heal is a real gift on this fight too, it really helps keep you alive while healing other people and it’s a nice quick cast for triage purposes.

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Dragon Soul Difficulty

Malevica — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:45:55 +0000

The current hot topic amongst the raiding blogo- and twitterspheres is the question of the tuning of the new Dragon Soul raid instance: far too easy and not enough to keep us going for potential 8 months? Tuned about right, when you consider it as a difficulty curve and realise that Firelands was rather flat compared to a strong curve in Dragon Soul. I also commented that I thought the raid was undertuned, but I think I may have been a little hasty in that assessment.

Some Data

cleared Dragon Soul on Normal this week, taking a total of 20 pulls for the first 6 bosses and then 33 pulls on the last two together, although quite a few of those were on the Spine where we were 9-manning for practice because we had too many people LD that evening. For a better sample (albeit still small), I’ve taken the top 5 guilds on my server and averaged their pulls to kill for each boss for which data were available; it’s not very scientific, but it’s interesting:

First Week Pulls to Kill for Normal Dragon Soul 10-man - Data gathered from World of Logs for the top 5 guilds on Dath'Remar-US

Caution is due here because there may have been server issues affecting guilds on later bosses, or experimentation with tactics, or less information available from the PTR, but this does suggest that there was a pretty strong increase in the difficulty throughout the raid, for whatever reason, lining up with what Rohan observed over at Blessing of Kings.

For additional data, we turn to WoL again, tracking the kills-to-total-pulls ratios for the bosses, again on 10-man normal for comparison:

Success Percentage (Kills/Wipes) for Normal Dragon Soul 10-man - Data from World of Logs for all uploaded reports

Madness of Deathwing has no kill detection so it doesn’t appear, and Spine seemed to have dodgy kill detection earlier in the week so take that figure with a pinch of salt.

With the exception of Zon’ozz who seems to be causing raids a great deal of difficulty, once again you can see a curve there. Morchok is a pushover, but then there’s a good ramping up of difficulty between Yorsahj, Hagara and Ultraxion.

Both of these data sources point to a strongly-graded difficulty curve. Compare that to Firelands:

Success Percentage (Kills/Wipes) for Normal Firelands 10-man - Data from World of Logs for all uploaded reports

Again, a note of caution. Dragon Soul is a snapshot of week 1, whereas the Firelands graph includes the effects of nerfs which I’d expect to have flattened the curve somewhat, but again it’s suggestive of a difference.

So Is Dragon Soul Actually Too Easy?

Initially I thought it was. We’re a very strong but not elite guild and we’ve cleared 8/8 bosses in the first week. And we’re far from alone: on Dath’Remar, hardly a hotbed of hardcore raiding, 7 guilds went 8/8 in Week 1, and a further 8 are 7/8.

However, the situation we’re in is atypical. Guilds like ours, high-ranked but not the cutting edge, benefited from the Firelands nerfs to gain a gear advantage that wouldn’t have been available to us in previous tiers, so Dragon Soul normal probably should feel easy to us. It’s meant to be done in ilvl378 gear, not ~ilvl388 like many of us have, and it absolutely has to be designed that way. By the time we came to the Madness of Deathwing we were very close to the Cataclysm and Berserk timers on several occasions, so a starting position closer to ilvl378 should indeed mean a few weeks of farming would be needed to meet the checks of the later encounters.

In short, I think all is as it should be with the raid, the trouble is more a consequence of the previous tier, and perhaps premature reactions to first nights from surprised raiders like myself incorrectly assuming the whole place is at the same level.

The trouble though, with guilds like us being in this position, is that we’ve lost something important in the raid lifecycle: the “inevitable kill” phase.

Working through normal modes, for a guild like us, is supposed to be something that takes a bit of time while we learn the fight, but which we always know we’re intended to kill. It’s a good feeling, it’s reassuring, and the successes help to lift our spirits and build some momentum. Now, instead, what we have to look forward to are heroic modes which are a far from a certain prospect. We didn’t kill heroic Ragnaros; most of us didn’t make much progress in heroic Tier 11 let alone kill Sinestra; heroic Lich King (even with the 30% buff) evaded many. So every kill from now until MoP is likely to be a long, hard grind, and some kills we may not even get.

You’ll forgive me for feeling a little cheated.

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Type "H" For Heals

The Sixth Meme

My WoW Life in Pictures

Cataclysm Beta

General Screenshots

Strategy

Other People’s Screenshots

Miscellaneous

Passing The Torch

Love Is In The Air

Heroic Ultraxion

Fight Summary

Spec and Glyphs

Cooldown Usage

Other Tips

Dragon Soul Nerfs

What Blizzard Said

Reactions

Et Moi?

Heroic Warlord Zon’ozz

Fight Summary

Spec and Glyphs

Cooldown Usage

Other Tips

New Year, New Look!

About My Heroic Guides

Big List of Heroic Guides

Heroic Yorsahj the Unsleeping

Fight Summary

Spec and Glyphs

Cooldown Usage

Other Tips

Heroic Morchok

Fight Summary

Spec and Glyphs

Cooldown Usage

Other Tips

Dragon Soul Difficulty

Some Data

So Is Dragon Soul Actually Too Easy?