So, finally I’m getting down to write something worthwhile again.

With the recent announcement made that icecrown citadel will feature a zone-wide debuff called Chill of the Throne, that reduces all player’s dodge chance by 20% (after DR), players left and right have made exclaims how bad, unimaginative and whatnot it is.

I don’t agree with this a single bit. And luckily many folks over at TankSpot or ElitistJerks do neither.

I, for one, have always been someone to value EH far more than avoidance. I don’t think that avoidance is unimportant, but as a tank you first priority is to be as healable as possible. Damage spikes just don’t take a ride on that boat in my book.

Another thing that bugs me is that many seem to believe that this debuff will hurt druids and, to some extent, death knights more than warriors or paladins. In fact, we are more or less on equal footing here.

Let’s face the fact that no tank that is ready for Icecrown Citadel will sport less than 20% dodge after DR. So every tank will lose exactly 20% avoidance.

Let’s assume we have a boss that will attempt to hit you 100 times during the encounter. Each hit will maim you for 10k damage ignoring any means of mitigation.

Now, we have 2 tanks, me as a feral druid, having 40% dodge and a protection warrior having 30% dodge and 30% parry.

Without Chill of the Throne:

• Feral druid
  100 attacks * 40% avoidance = 60 hits
  60 hits * 10k damage = 600k damage total
• Protection warrior
  100 attacks * 60% avoidance = 40 hits
  40 hits * 10k damage = 400k damage total

With Chill of the Throne

• Feral Druid
  100 attacks * 20% avoidance = 80 hits
  80 hits * 10k damage = 800k damage total
• Protection Warrior
  100 attacks * 40% avoidance = 60 hits
  60 hits * 10k damage = 600k damage total

After digging through this heap of deeply scientific mathematics, you can clearly see that Chill of the Throne increases the incoming damage by an equal amount for both tanks.

If you factor in mitigation, you will notice that there will be slight differences, but those have always been there and are not tied to Chill of the Throne.

I firmly believe the development team behind World of Warcraft is doing a good, even great, job to make this game fun, entertaining and challenging for as many players as possible.

If the manage to make encounters less spike-heavy and random this will go a long way to make the life of healers more fun and less spammy.

I’m looking forward to tank in Icecrown Citadel.

This seems to be a growing into hot topic currently, and since this is also on my mind rather frequently, I’m going to rant a bit about it.

Gevlon stated in his post Good enough that it’s rather pointless (from his perspective) to strive for additional performance once you are able to carry your own weight during whatever content is your current focus.

This is a loaded topic of course. Some may even view this to be the breaking point of their own definitions of hardcore and casual. As futile as that other topic might be.

In the end, as with all things, it’s a matter of your own and your guild’s/raid’s focus. If you just want to get through the content to get the loot. I suppose they won’t have any issues with you as long as you are able to pull your own weight.

My take on things is rather relaxed. Time-wise, I’m currently raiding very casually. I suppose 1 day per week is as casual as you can get. ;-P

However I really like to optimize my own performance. I do research on tactics. Try to think of different ways to do things. I really enjoy being the best player I can be.

Please notice that emphasis.

Since I have only experienced the healing and the tanking role in raids during roughly 4 years of playing World of Warcraft, I suppose I have lived a rather sheltered life.

• As a healer I nearly completely ignore healing meters to evaluate performance. If the raid survives, it worked. If we wipe, we have to evaluate. If someone dies, I have to evaluate. It’s rather simple.
• As a tank, it’s even simpler. Try to maximize your survivability and learn the encounter. Know what happens, when it happens, and what you can do about it. If something goes wrong, try to safe the day. Then evaluate.

As a raid leader, I have to admit, I am content to fill my raids with people that able to carry their own weight. I don’t expect much more. I am very happy if someone is showing the same mentality that I use to bring to raids, but I don’t expect it from my raiders.

Our raiding goal is not to push towards the bleeding edge. We try to be good, get through the content without any stupid mistakes and have a good time.

Other raiding guilds sport different philosophies. Ours will welcome players that are good enough. Others may not. Such is life.

Whatever you do, try to have fun!

*sigh of relief*

Virtually no Arakkoa were injured during the process of acquiring this item.

With the Reins of the Raven Lord finally in my possession, I can now turn my attention towards more pleasant things. Like blogging…

I have been too quiet for a long time. As usual I have plans to change that in the coming weeks and months. Let’s see if I can keep it up.

But first, some obligatory Anzu-Posing-Screens^TM:

Just no time left for writing…

I’m a terrible blogger, you don’t have to tell me!

You could say that I’m a blogtard, I suppose.

Expect some more from me once Anzu drops his *bleep*ing Reins of the Raven Lord. *grumbles*

What?

What do you mean… "No posts for almost seven Weeks!"… This can’t be. I wrote an awful lot of posts about the expansion release, the leveling, the oh-so-crowded starting zones, my new death knight, my druid becoming my main (again)…

The Database must have crashed! This is an outrageous setback! A slap in the face! I will have to contact my hosting service immediately!

No… really… it’s not my fault! I did really wrote all that stuff… or… rather… wanted to… kind of…

*cough*

*nervous-grin*

Aaaaanyway… Let’s move on, shall we?!

The road ahead. It will no longer be the path of a healer, but that of a tank. I really enjoy healing, I always did, but playing Rhil as a big furry meatshield has opened my eyes to the tanking perspective once and for all. And I really love it!

The upcoming posts will be focusing on my way from a freshly dinged level 80 Feral Druid in quest items of blue and green quality towards being the maintank of Naxxramas raiding guild.

Mash and me just recently abandoned the idea of creating out own little 10-person raiding guild and joined a larger, but not too large, guild on our server. We have our eyes set on the raiding content. Non-heroic at first, maybe more later. We shall see…

What? Why yes, I’m still playing World of Warcraft, of course.

No, this blog is not dead. Let’s just say it was hibernating.

But let us not wander astray too far, hmkay? Today our focus shall be the last content patch of the Burning Crusade era.

This patch is a bridge patch. These patches are designed to smooth out the transition between expansions. As such they almost always contain some pretty wacky stuff. The last bridge patch had been 2.0.1 - Before The Storm.

While 2.0.1 has been big and it stirred up quite a lot of dust, 3.0.2 - Echoes of Doom will most likely surpass this. Not only will there be sweeping changes to all the classes, there is also an entirely new profession being added and a lot of mechanics are being streamlines/removed/adapted.

Nothing will be as it has been. Hooray!

Let’s have a closer look at all the funky little details, shall we?

I won’t re-iterate patch notes here, you can find a very good patch notes write up on wowhead. Just go there and take if look if you haven’t already. I’ll wait right here.

I did not dig very deep yesterday. We come home rather late and a lot of people from Europe suffered some severe difficulties when trying to log in.

At first there we had problems to get to our character lists at all.

Then we managed to get past this. But logging in seemed to take 10 minutes and always ended back on your character selection screen.

We continued to try while talking to a friend on Teamspeak who was already online and had no problems at all.

Suddenly Mash’s login was successful. However, Stormwind was very empty. She ran around a bit, visited the Barbershop, but quickly noticed that the town was vacant and she could not cast *any* spell. Lag ahoy!

We decided to log off and watch some DVD while everything settled itself, hopefully.

An hour later or so, I did some quick scouting and found that I was able to log on Rhil. However into a very empty Stormwind. Having Lag. Still.

I tried to get my hair done, but the confirmation did nothing, so I ran around a bit and scouted out the all-new Stormwind harbour. Then suddenly I was finding myself warped back into the barbershop with my hair-change accepted and paid. Seemed like a 10 minute lag.

I logged of and on again only to find Stormwind bustling with activity and all the lag gone.

/cheer

Spend the next hour whipping up a talent spec, learning all my pets and buying a few additional ones. I’m now sitting at 27 minipets if I recall correctly.

This evening, I think I will log onto my hunter and tame "Fluffy", just like I did on the PTR. *evilgrin*

Have fun out there!

In a Nutshell

Netherspite is a mostly tactical fight. As long as everyone knows their roles, pays attention and stays alive, it’s a walk in the park. If something goes wrong, you better adapt quickly or things will start to look rather grim quite fast. The fight involves precise player positioning and rotating those players in over the course of the phases.

Rundown

Netherspite will alternate between two phases based on a timer. Those phases are the portal phase and the banish phase.

Regardless of phase, there will be two abilities that you will have to deal with throughout the whole fight.

• Netherburn is active during the whole encounter, putting quite some basic stress on the healers. Shadow resistance helps, so make sure to hand some Prayer of Shadow Protection to everyone.
• Occasionally Void Zones will appear beneath someone’s feet. They last a few seconds, dealing around 600 damage per tick, Just move out of them as soon as possible.

Portal phase

This phase will last 60 seconds and it will be marked by the spawning of three portals in Netherspite’s room. 10 seconds in the phase, each portal will start to emit a beam towards the dragon. Each beam can (and should) be interrupted before hitting the dragon. This is done by a player standing between the portal and the dragon, interrupting the beam. The beams will generate different effects depending on their colour and whether they hit a player or Netherspite.

Since the Boss Focus columns are about healing I will focus on the only beam that may play a role for you as a healer, the green beam.

Standing in the green beam (named "Serenity") will apply a stacking debuff each second. This debuff will increase your healing done by 5%, reduce the mana cost of your spells by 1% and reduce your maximum mana pool by 200 per stack. As you can see this is quite massive and helps a lot if your mana pool can handle it.

Leaving a beam (and letting the stacks tick out after 8 seconds) will apply another debuff, called Nether Exhaustion. As you can see, this will make you unable to intercept the beam during the next portal phase.

However, it’s perfectly doable, and maybe even recommended, to omit your healers from beam duty completely. Any non-mana user will be able to interrupt the green beam without suffering from any ill effects. We always used our two tanks to switch between green and red, thus simplifying the whole thing significantly.

Banish Phase

During this phase Netherspite will kind of banish himself and remain mostly stationary. This phase will last roughly 30 seconds. He will melee anyone within range according to aggro and cast Netherbreath on seemingly random targets. Netherbreath will hit everyone in a cone towards the target, deal moderate damage and knock everyone affected backwards. Spread out to avoid this splash damage.

Watch out for

The player who will intercept the blue beam will receive a stacking debuff that will increase his vulnerability to magical damage. Keep a close eye on this player, he will need a lot of healing while "tanking" the beam.

Tanks that are on red beam duty are able to do beam-hopping. This means, they will enter the beam for a few seconds, leave it and re-enter before the debuff runs out. This will enable them to take the read beam for the whole portal phase without taking a too big hit to their maximum hp. As a side note, entering the red beam will heal the tank to full health. If your tank is well geared, he will hardly need any healing if he is stepping in and out of the red beam.

At the start of any portal phase, during the 10 seconds before portals spawn, there is an aggro wipe. So be careful during that time frame. Wait for the current tank to grab aggro before you start healing. Either that, or have a Fade ready.

Also, note that, at the start of each portal phase, while the placement of the portals if fixed, the colours may change on each portal phase after the first.

Healing Roles

There aren’t any hard healing roles for this encounter. As long as your tank is stepping in and out of the red beam, he will need no dedicated healer, only some attention.

However, be aware of who is tanking the blue beam. The person will need more healing than anyone else.

With this said, just heal through the Netherburn and don’t forget to watch your own health.

Rewards

If you don’t stand in other people’s beams, watch the blue beam tank and don’t forget to heal everyone else, you may be able to acquire the Shining Chain of the Afterworld or the Pantaloons of Repentance.

Good Luck.

What is Healing? How does it work? What makes a good healer, and what pitfalls should you avoid?

These are very generic questions that have been answered many times across the blogs and sites that inhabit the world wide web.

I don’t want to re-iterate any of those articles. Each and everyone of them has it’s points and I’m likely to pick them up here.

To sum it up, I think there are major 4 points to the whole healing game stuff:

1. Know yourself

   How big are your heals?
   How long will your mana pool last you?
   How fast can you react?
   How much is your latency affecting your gameplay?

   All these question are aiming at evaluating yourself and your performance. Be true. Don’t over- or under-estimate yourself. Going astray in either direction will likely cause people to die.

2. Know your tank

   How much damage can she stand?
   How much damage can she mitigate?
   How much threat can she produce?
   Is she able to generate threat on difficult mobs? (ranged, for example)
   Is she likely to break crowd controlled mobs?
   Does her class feature any emergency abilities and will she use them?

   All this will help you to evaluate the amount of healing that is needed to keep the tank alive. It’s important to know your tank well. Depending on gear and skill-usage the feeling of running with different tanks will vastly differ. Even if they are of the same class. Use the first pulls to get a good picture of your tank’s abilities, it will help you a lot.

3. Know your damage dealers

   Do they watch their threat?
   Will they crowd control mobs and have aggro from them once the control wears of?
   Are their crowd control abilities reliable?
   How much damage do they deal? (a.k.a.: How long will the fight last?)

   These questions will help you to estimate the duration of the fight and the damage on the tank, depending on the crowd control. Additionally, if you know some player will frequently over-aggro the tank (or is assigned to AoE some mobs down), you can adjust your healing priorities accordingly. Don’t forget your tank, however!

4. Know the fight

   How many mobs are there?
   How much damage will they deal?
   How spiky will that damage be?
   How quickly will the mobs go down?
   Will there be any debuffs going round that you should remove or know of?
   Do some mobs have secondary target attacks that need to be healed?
   Are there any mobs that may reset their threat?

   Everything in this category will help you to estimate the course of the fight. It will tell you how much healing will be required, what people will need it and what else you should pay attention to.

So, with all this written down, it seems like an awful lot to pay attention to. Actually, you can’t really play at a good pace and watch all of these points actively.

The trick is: Group often, heal often, let it sink become a part of your intuition. You will soon recognize that you will adjust to different situations without any consideration. That’s the beauty of this role imho. Once you get a hang of it, it really becomes kind of addictive.

/cheer to all you healers out there!

Today I want to highlight Mark of Divinity and the joy that comes with it.

First, let’s have a look at this little marvel:

 
Mark of Divinity (Rank 1)
65% of base mana, 30 yd range
Instant cast
Marks the target with Divinity, causing 30% of all of your healing to also heal the target.

Casting this spell places a 30 minute buff on the target that will do exactly this. I suppose the spell will only allow you to place one Mark of Divinity on only one player at the same time, much like Prayer of Mending works.

To put it simply:

Strengths

The effectiveness of this spell is currently unparalleled and could prove far too powerful. Granted, it’s not really effective to re-cast it while combat is still running, but outside of combat, the immense mana cost hardly hurts.

Mathematically, this spell increases your healing output by 30%. Very powerful. But you have to chose the target in advance. If the challenges ahead don’t involve too much unpredictable chaos, it’s a very good idea to mark your tank with this spell. Even if no one else takes damage, you will see your hps on your tank increase by a very sizeable margin.

If you are raid healing, this spell will make you shine. Just mark your tank with divinity and heal away. Your main tank healers will love it, big time. Just trust me on this one. ;-P

If your current encounter does not feature a predictable aggro handling, or just involves serious amount of unpreventable raid-wide damage, it may be best to mark yourself with this spell. That should take care of some silly oops-I-didn’t-notice-that-I-was-getting-my-face-smashed-in deaths. (Feel free to use that term, just remember, you heard it here first)

Weakness

Well, there is not much of a downside to the spell. If you cast it on the wrong target, the additional healing will be lost. Epic fail?! Hardly.

One other thing you should watch while this is active is your threat. If you use this spell’s potential to it’s fullest, you will generate 30% more threat. So be careful, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Synergy

Spells that heal more than one target (read: Spells with a large hps ratio) will perform very nice in conjunction with Mark of Divinity.

For example, using Binding Heal on a marked tank may start to produce some very nice hps and hpm numbers, since 30% of both heals will land on the tank in addition to the regular healing part of the spell.

Don’t even get me started on Prayer of Healing.

What do you think?

So, lets start with Lhoyra, my hunter, shall we? She dinged 70 just yesterday evening and I went to the Isle immediately to earn some of the money back I spent on the riding skill. I haven’t used Snake Trap or Misdirection yet, but Steady Shot, Aspect of the Viper and Kill Command are steady companions since I acquired them.

Aylah, my druid, has moved back to the Gilneas realm. We started to miss some of our old friends there, so we decided to take some steps to get more in touch with each other again. Sadly the name “Aylah” has already been taken on Gilneas since my departure, so I renamed Aylah to “Rhil”.

We (Mashaya and Rhil) have started doing Pick Up Karazhan Runs mixed with friends and random people from the LFG. Our first run featured only 1 other healer besides Mashaya and because the other healer was not very good (he usually plays a mage, so this is understandable), Mash was burnt out by the time we downed Aran, calling it quits early. I did pick up the Forest Wind Shopulderpads (now sitting in my Resto-Gear bank slot) and Mash was able to fetch herself a Ribbon of Sacrifice.

On the other hand, I have turned into an avid collector of every tiny scrap of WotLK Beta information that I can get my hand on. I’m really enjoying all the new skills, talents, features and what-not’s.

The revamp of hunter pet is a much welcome addition to the upcoming changes. I’m very anxious to tame a few exotic pets and mess with the talent trees in general. Additionally, I really want to try out some real tanking pets once the expansion is live.

I could go on forever, but I think I will wait how this all develops before going into too much detail.