March 23, 2010
Traumatic Twins
After downing Twins, I thought I was in bizzaro-land checking the parse:
I never suspected FoL could ever out heal my CH HoT…
Anyways, after the party-only to raid buff, Trauma has been putting out pretty decent numbers on the fights that matter :).
March 19, 2010
Healing the Boss
In the bad way.
Turns out your healers can and will heal the boss (and pop CDs) on heroic Deathwhisper10 when MCed :(.
March 17, 2010
Resto Shaman Talents
Seems to have been some hubbub about Shaman talents and stuff (a couple months ago), and I’m just going to throw in my own 2 cents. The “debate” seems to center around three specific three-point talents: Elemental Weapons, Healing Focus, and Healing Way.
Let’s start with the one that bugs me the most: Healing Focus.
I’ve heard Shamans say, “Oh, I’ve done just fine in ICC without it” and then make some vague statement of checking EJ. While it’s entirely true that there are more fights where there isn’t any spell pushback, the times when it does happen can be critical (the second transition phase on LK is a good example). When you are being effected by pushback, that usually means there’s some weird raid damage going out or something went wrong — hence you want to be able to get those heals out as fast as possible to try to keep everyone alive. I used to not care if a Shaman did not have this talent but the further I progress the more I feel this talent is a requirement. On a slight tangent, anyone know if combat logs track pushback? Having a more comprehensive (and verifiable) list of pushback in ICC fights would be quite useful.
Now let’s talk about Elemental Weapons versus Healing Way.
This part is dependent on your own style of healing, the healing roster, and the other healers’ styles — but if you’re the type to find yourself assisting tank heals (often the case for me in 10 man, and on specific fights in 25 as well), Healing Way is quite attractive. As we get progressively more int from gear upgrades, one can use HW more liberally as the Riptide -> HW combo gives some great burst healing. Finally, as I never gem SP, I can’t really see myself getting SP talents which are equivalent to only 2 SP gems either — Healing Way is a great alternative for the final 3 talent points in my spec.
February 28, 2010
Addendum to Tier 10 4set bonus
I don’t know why I didn’t correct myself earlier because it quickly became apparent that there was a problem with how recount was registering the HoT, but … it’s wrong! As far as I can tell, the overall numbers are correct, however it fails to properly divide what was the direct heal component of Chain Heal and what was from the HoT.
World of Logs seems to do it fine as seen above (Blood-Queen 25 btw).
Getting a “free” 10% healing out of the set bonus is pretty damn amazing no matter how I look at it.
In an unrelated tangent, I’m still struggling with whether or not I want to bother investing in the 264 totem. The only time I find myself casting Riptide on CD is for farmed content — on progression fights I just feel I get much more out of CH spam.
February 7, 2010
Shaman Tier 10 – 4 Set Bonus
Been testing it out for the past couple of days, and it seems that the HoT does stack (and refreshes the timer)! I actually wasn’t expecting this and really does make the 4 set bonus amazing. I don’t have logs available but I do have a screenshot showing Recount results (taken during Blood-Queen 10).
The chance of stacking CH crits it pretty tricky and changes greatly between 10 and 25 man content as well as fight mechanics. One thing I find particularly interesting is the fact that once you get past 60% crit, CH spamming on 3 grouped up tanks in 25 man should have a relatively high % of building up a large number of stacks. Of course RNG makes this a bad idea in the end, but still fun to think about. I’m actually expecting the CH ticks to account for much less in 25 man as the chance of stacking a HoT on a person is just that much lower, but we’ll see.
Either way, now that I’m close to haste cap and I almost have enough mp5, crit has become desirable enough that I can’t see myself getting SP over it.
February 4, 2010
Professor Putricide25 down!
Last week we managed to (mostly,) [sorta,] {sometimes,} consistently push the Prof into phase 3, but a combination of huge cesspits of toxic ooze and bouncing goos (oh and not having a third MS Tank) put an end to our endeavors even when we were so close… Ah, those desperate cries of “400K! more dps!” still resounded in my ears. Until yesterday that is.
When we downed him!
Hahahhaahahahahahahahaa. Read the rest of this entry »
February 3, 2010
Tier 10 and Trauma
With our resident Druid managing to pull 4-5% on Trauma, I really want to try it again once I get Tier 10 – 4set (2 more days!) and build enough haste to soft-cap even without any stats on my weapon (my TOGC10 dagger affords me 70-80 haste depending on gem which is a pretty big loss).
Continuing on about the 4set bonus, it definitely encourages crit. As I shuffle my gear around trying to take advantage of the bonus, due to the clunky nature of stats, I find myself dangerously close to becoming that healer who needs innervates on every CD. Luckily crit does translate into mana, but how well? Quick napkin math based on my WoL spell casts and actual crit %s showed 1% of crit should roughly give me … 3.5mp5. Hardly impressive. Strangely, WoL also shows me getting much, much more mana back from Water Shield than my calculations would imply. Weird. I didn’t OOM during our recent ICC25 run, but that was running with another resto sham AND with a total of 6 healers, so it wasn’t even challenging.
Anyways, depending on my luck with the ICC weeklies, I can look forward to getting the badge 264 cape in just 8 days which hopefully can give me the boost in mp5 that I can comfortably use all my crit gear.
February 1, 2010
Blood-Queen10 Down
Blood-Queen Lana’thel is initially quite challenging but with some careful planning, it can be entirely trivialized. The two most important things to plan out: bite order and positioning. Healer perspective at the end. Read the rest of this entry »
January 31, 2010
Instance Prophecies
By way of Righteous Orbs (lovely writers, them) I came upon this blog post poking fun at instance nerfs… Amazingly when the patch notes for 3.3.2 were leaked, turns out some of them are actually coming true.
While some of the changes are indeed for “quality of life”, I kind of miss when I didn’t have the urge to go elemental and just let my Healing Stream Totem do all the healing for me. (This actually works for the pre-3.2 instances if you have a decent retardin or spriest too.)
From an overall, game-as-a-whole perspective I think people’s suggestions of punishing people who drop much more severely (like 1 hour debuffs) acts as a stronger incentive than making bosses easier (they’re already super easy), but as things stand I can’t bring myself to care any more.
World of Failcraft 