Analyzing Healadins

One of my raiders has friends in another guild, I'm talking RL friends or whatever. He has alts in that guild and raids with them on one of the alts. Guild leader of said guild is an ex-raider and friend of a Holy Paladin in some hardcore guild on another server. Said Holy Paladin believes that flash of light spec is superior and that all Paladins should use it. Of course, this idea is instilled upon GL of my raider's alts guild.

So we go into VOA25 and this guild leader and a Healadin from that guild are in the raid with me. I start to get tells after the first boss about how our healing core sucks and that I should be topping the meters (after the heavy aoe of some of the boss fights) because of my gear. This other Healadin, whose gear is not nearly as good as mine did more healing with his 'beacon the tank, heal the raid with flash of light) strategy.

During these attempts fights, I found myself struggling to keep both tanks up. The beacon had fallen off of my focus target so I didn't have my beloved redundancy safety net. In actuality, the paladin beaconed my beacon target and flashed the raid. So, I was healing his tank and mine and he was healing his tank and the raid and sniping heals from our group healers.

It pissed me off to be told that I suck because my meter numbers weren't as high, despite the fact that I was probably carrying more weight than this other paladin.

I'd use my computer being old and having low FPS as an excuse, but it's not a valid excuse. I'm usually one of the top healers and several of my top DPS top out in 25 man raids at 5fps or less.

So what was it? This other healadin was judging light, which is usually what our tankadin does. (Tankadin informed me that tanks no longer get the threat boost from light so they're judging wisdom and I should judge light.)

Judging Light = Padding the Meters.

Who was actually pulling their weight? Really.

A closer look:

Well last night the paladin (Dar) got invited to our run. He had been tanking for us the previous week but we had already had a tank on our first night so he wound up heals. Luckily I was running a World of Logs parse, which informed me that despite his gear, he beat me in healing done (and did a few percent less overhealing).

I know that I'm going to hear, through my one raider, the trash talking of Dar's guild leader who will continue to say I suck, as the numbers say so and clearly the numbers are everything.

Here's the healing done for all boss fights:

Slow is a top notch resto shaman. Tri is a resto druid with ADHD who can kick ass when push comes to shove, but will tend to slack on farm content and pick up the slack when shit gets real. Chi is a disc priest. Bacon is a lesser geared resto shaman alt who probably needs some guidance, but he isn't far behind everyone else. Most of us are shouldering equal burden. If you're wondering where the rest of the healing is? We had four shadow priests (one is a top notch holy priest who went shadow for moar deeps), some non-resto shaman, a ret, two protadins, and some blood DKs that did small amounts of healing.

But let's take a closer look at the Paladin healing:

We see two things:

First, I need to remember to Divine Sacrifice (the green outline... I should also keep sacred shield up better). That is poor performance on my part and I realize I need to stop being bad and utilize my tools. I mean, I thought to hit it but I felt that if I skipped a GCD to pop it, the tanks (or raid) would die. (My Flashes of Light and Holy Shocks were mostly on the raid not the tanks.)

More importantly: A whole 26% of this other Paladin's heals were Judgement of Light.

Compare healing done via Holy Light--I healed a million more than he did (of course we both overhealed like mad, but still.

What happens if we remove the JoL padding?

Dar: 4633901 - 1241990: 3391911

Zan: 4523016 - 19732: 4503284

What happens if we shave off the Glyph of Holy Light padding?

Dar: 3391911 - 1003275: 2388636

Zan: 4503284 - 1100705: 3402579

The real numbers show two things:

• I shouldered more weight than Dar did... at least where it really counts--on our tanks.
• We're both pretty close to dead last, Dar is even behind the freshmen resto shaman alt.

We're focusing a majority of our heals on one/two/three targets.

We should be dead last.

What conclusions can be drawn from this information?

• A lot of Holy Paladin's throughput is, in the words of Pen Jillette, "bullshit!" It's not nearly as high as it looks once you actually break it down.
• Dar's GL, should he start up with his dissing, should be succinctly informed of the facts and instructed to eat a dick.

And that's that.

/post

The Good and Bad of Lowbie Randoms

I guess this (and this other post, the one that I got the idea for) could kinda-sorta be considered part of the Blog Azeroth shared topic of sharing some positive dungeon stories.

Now that the Altoholic has settled into her new apartment it's time to write some more.

This weekend I decided to try out the random dungeon tool on my lower level characters. I have two priest/warlock teams and they've fallen out of sync with the level 30 warlock quests, so I'm pushing them all to 35 using the random dungeon tool.

They're not all horror stories. Here's a few good positive stories.

Helping the Lowbie Warrior Tank

In SM Graveyard, I found myself grouped with a Warrior tank who was having a terrible time holding agro on multiple mobs.

He mentioned he was having trouble so I politely suggested he try using 'jumpystomp' and shouts to at least get the attention of things with his initial pulls. This worked out very well and the results were immediately visible. He confidently pulled a good half dozen mobs at once and held them all.

Helping the terribly confused Priest

In RFD, I had the misfortune of being grouped with a shadow priest who's healing. I mean, I heal as shadow on my little lowbies with no issue but this poor guy doesn't have a clue. He struggles to do his job and the result is wipes. He's having trouble peeling off Debuffs that would have turned the tide in some of the battles--such as the silencing disease on my warlock and the Mage.

I suggested, half frustrated, that he get decursive. As the instance pressed on, he wound up asking myself and the other person whose main is a healer for advice on how to heal, about addons and other tools that would help him do his job better.

When the instance was over he said he'd go get those addons right away so he could do better next time. *thumbs up*

The Focus on Meters

I've noticed a huge focus on meters in lowbie (level 30ish) instances on the US Ruin (Battlegroup 3). I know very little about warlocks, but I do know that even at top levels, affliction warlocks tend to not do very highly on trash (in heroics), nor do they manage to get their rotation off on mobs that die too fast. As such, I don't expect to top the meters, I simply throw up my dots, rain of fire, and throw my instant shadowbolts when shadow trance procs.

At this point, I'm not sure how classes damage lines up at the low levels and where I should be preformance-wise. I don't really care that much. I'm there to push buttons, get experience, get my loot, and leave.

I'm stuck in a state of disbelief... People actually care about the total damage done on trash in the SM Graveyard and feel it's a way to measure skill?

I keep getting told that I suck because of my damage done numbers. Apparently while I'm sitting there hitting searing pain on a ranged mob that's nuking the healer so I may have it nuke me instead to prevent a wipe, I'm less skilled of a player than the mage spamming arcane explosion on just one mob because they have higher deeps.

It really makes me want to not instance as a DPS because of the meter pressure. Particularly, that the pressure to do well on the meter is pressure for me to foresake playing well (waiting for agro, preventing wipes, getting out of the stupid) for the sake of big numbers. The reason I forbid meter linking (and to a lesser extent discussion) in my raids is because I'd rather have people worry about doing what they need to do to get the job done instead of having them get reckless for the sake of competition.

This stupidity just hurts my head.

The Reluctant Warrior Tank

I've been traumatized by bad DPS when it comes to tanking using the random dungeon system. The first few times I tanked on my warrior I found the entire thing to be hell. Jerks DPSing before I could get agro on mobs with my tiny DKs didn't help either.

I took my warrior (level 70 currently dps fury in crap outlands pvp blues and boa pieces (dw arcanite reapers, ho!)) into randoms with my Tank's holy priest alt healing. I'm afraid of tanking so I go Fury. We get UK with a paladin tank and a DPS DK.

The tank makes the first pull and almost immediately starts taking huge spikes of damage. My tank is going "OMG" on vent at the spikes. The second pull, the DK autoruns into the two pulls + patrol, getting a good 8 or 9 mobs. My tank goes "OMG" again as the little Tankadin facetanks the floor faster than a heal could be cast.

At this point, the paladin starts playing the blamegame at the healer, my tank. He says, "WTF healer? Why did I die?" My tank told him, "You got two pulls." I said, "You took more damage than you had health." He asked why he didn't get enough heals. We repeated.

I walk over and inspect him and get this sinking feeling, "..." I ask him what his defense is. No answer. I ask him again, he readychecks, I say no, he pulls anyhow. So I go armory him, my tank's still complaining over vent on how squishy this guy is. Bingo!

Our tank has something like 380 defense. I announce it in vent. I "..." he "..."s.

He also has a ret spec, so I throw on my tank gear (Mostly T4ish stuff), switch to my prot spec, and started tanking. I told him he needed somewhere around 490 defense. He didn't put on his DPS gear, instead he left the instance, demanding to know my defense.

I handled things much better with my charging, jumpystomping, and defense capped gear.

I'm still reluctant to tank... though I think I'll wind up being one of those people who offers to do it if I wind up with someone who's not ready.

Shared Topic - Like a boss!

This is a shared topic from Ye Olde Blog Azeroth.

If I were a boss, what would I be? What would my encounter be like?

I should just say "Faction Champions" and endpost right there, but Faction Champions isn't really my style of encounter despite the fact that I play just about everything. I don't find it fun at all.

For this, I'll merge a few of my character designs with my own personality and design an encounter.

Basic Idea Concepts:

As I recently blogged in an offtopic post that my very first Myers Briggs personality result was INTJ and that the Keirsey Temperment was "Mastermind". The idea of making a 'boss' that is a manical 'mastermind' amuses me a lot.

My Paladin was created with a mini-theme when I picked his professions--(Goblin) Engineering and Jewelcrafting. The theme? "All the coolest toys." My paladin is a wacky inventor with cool devices that do occasionally backfire, backfiring is something very WOW engineering, unfortunately I couldn't really figure out ways for things to backfire. =(

You can't be an evil mastermind without henchmen or minions!

My hunter is also an Engineer (Gnomish). He's something of an assistant to my paladin so it's logical that he'd be the minion. As a hunter, he'd likely have a pet, or several pets, at his side assisting him. As an engineering themed encounter, and taking some ideas from the mechanical pet by a stable master in a iron dwarf camp near Ulduar and from all the little critter pets of old (mechanical whelplings anyone), the hunter would likely have mechanical pets.

My hunter is a bow hunter, personality-wise, he wouldn't be using a gun, which is counter to the idea of an engineering encounter. Hunters already have shots that do cool things, why not take it one step further? As a nod to the DC character Green Arrow, a gnomish engineer hunter could very possibly have a bunch of cool trick arrows he's invented.

The Setup

Why would my characters somehow become raid bosses?

They're working on an invention that's either caused chaos or that will cause great chaos. Perhaps the Bronze Dragonflight feels may interfere with the time stream and that the invention must be destroyed before things get screwy. A time machine would be a good reason for the Bronze Dragonflight to go pwn some screwy elf inventors. You know if there was a time machine I'd have to make a bad Dr. Who / TARDIS reference.

The Heroes have been sent to trash my lab before I make a mess.

Mechanics: It's kinda like...

Nefarian - BWL (Class calls. Omg I'm blasting you and you can't hit me, lolol. Oh, and minions!)

Mimiron - Ulduar ( Lots of cool devices, stupid to avoid)

Mr. Smite - Deadmines (I'll have to improvise!)

Teron Gorefiend - Black Temple (Individuals having to do gimmicks, requiring everyone to do what they're supposed to at random.)

High Priest Thekal - Zul'Gurub (Having to kill 2 or more targets at the same time or they'll revive, defeat minions to piss off the boss and make him engage.)

Thaddius - Naxxramis (Do gimmicks to increase dps or hard enrage will eat your face)

Halazzi - Zul'Aman (Saber Lash)

Leo the Blind - Serpent Shrine Caverns (One portion of the fight tanked by ranged class, others in range will eat damage.)

Auriaya - Ulduar (Kitties!)

Illadari Council - Interrupts and moving out of the lolconsecrate.

The encounter would be pretty easy, annoyingly long, gimmicky as hell, placing stress not on tanks and healers so much as everyone doing the right thing at the right time. There would be a hard enrage that would wipe the raid if the encounter is not completed in time.

The Encounter: Boys and their Toys:

The heroes enter the scene.

The Paladin and Hunter are going about their business, tinkering with things, occasionally working on a metal box, tall enough for someone to stand in, with a door.

Moving forward into the room prompts a lolRP skit. The two walk over and admire the box.

Paladin (imagine Cam Clarke (male belf) voice): It's just about done but... *sigh* gray just isn't a good color for it. I think we should paint it!

Hunter: ...

Hunter turns around and looks at the heroes.

Paladin: I know, we'll paint it blue!

Hunter taps Paladin on shoulder then points at the heroes.

Paladin turns around: Who are you? What are you doing in my lab?

Paladin says to hunter: You, remove these fools immediately.

Paladin goes back to tinkering.

Hunter summons a mechanical lion pet and engages.

Phase 1:

Mecha-Cat - Abilities:

• Saber Lash - Requires two tanks. Managable damage, but could eat the face of a non-tank who happens to get in the way.
• Headbutt - Occasionally charges a random member of the group, stunning them for 3 seconds before returning to the tanks. Will not headbutt the person tanking Hunter.
• Note on Agro - Mecha-Cat won't return to the tanks if it runs into the ranged and one of them has greater threat than the tank. This means that players may have to watch their threat, the ability to go to 30% above the tank's threat is not acceptable.
• Mecha-cat has 40% more health than Hunter.

Hunter - Abilities:

• Disengage - Entering melee will cause the hunter to disengage, he cannot be killed or tanked by melee.
• Rocket Arrow - Occasionally launches a rocket at his range tank, reducing their health to 30% and applying a dot that ticks for a few thousand fire damage per tick, will also apply to anyone within 10 yards of the tank. Target must be healed to full or the dot will remain. This means that DPS must stay beneath the range tank on threat, or there's a chance the entire raid may get hit by the rocket. It's manageable to heal the ranged tank through this, but it can be quickly out of control if others are eating it too.
• Flame Trap Arrow - Occasionally launches a trap which creates fire on the ground at a random raid member (can throw at tanks). Deals a mild but annoying amount of damage. Applies a stacking debuff that cannot be removed which reduces damage done by 1%, can stack up to 100 times. Let's punish DPS instead of healers for DPS standing in the stupid for once.
• Serpent Sting - Applies a dot that ticks for a few hundred per tick. Can be removed.

Every 30 seconds the hunter uses a gimmicky trick arrow of some sort, stuff to avoid:

• Ice Trap Arrow - Occasionally launches an ice trap at a random raid member. The ice block can be dispelled (magic effect) - or DPSed down.
• Wyvern Sting - Puts a random raid member to sleep.
• Poultry Arrow - Polymorphs someone into a turkey. You were the turkey all along!
• Adhesive Arrow - Puts a pool of glue on the ground which freezes someone in place for 30 seconds or until cleansed.

Defeating Phase 1:

Both Hunter and Mecha-Cat must be 'killed' within 10 seconds of each other or one will revive the other with 50% health. The cat can be destroyed, the hunter will kneel down, injured.

Paladin will cast a protective bubble around the Hunter when he has 100 health remaining then engage the raid... kinda. More LOLRP

Paladin throws a bomb at the raid which stuns everyone for X seconds (for lolRP purposes) and deals 1000 damage.

Paladin: How dare you hurt my assistant! Who do you think you are?

Phase 2:

Paladin is bubbled and cannot be attacked. He activates assorted machinery and randomly starts one of somenumber of events.

Paladin's Abilities for Phase 2:

• Spanner of Justice - Paladin throws an arclight spanner at a random raid member, stunning them. It's hammer of justice, but ranged with an engineering twist. Can be dispelled.
• Alteration Ray - Paladin will use a device on a random raid member, turning their abilities against them. Consecrate will heal enemies, threat building abilities of tank classes will act as threat reducing abilities. Heals will do damage, damage will heal. If a class is hit with the ray, players will find they can attack allies (to heal them) and heal enemies (to damage them) or do threat building abilities on others (to boost their threat) or threat reduction abilities (hand of salvation, cower, feint) to boost their targets threat.

The Mini Gimmicks:

The Paladin will activate three weaves of Mini Gimmicks via a handy remote control. Gimmicks can only occur once per attempt.

(Special thanks to Tombstone for making a few suggestions to get my wheels turning again. I wanted to do more than three and have them be random choices but coming up with more miniboss gimmick fights is harder than I thought.)

Option 1: Lasers and Clockwork Robots:

Paladin summons a mechanical device that creates clockwork robots.

• The robots come at a near constant rate.
• One type of robots will pick a random raid member and walk towards them. If they reach their target they will explode and banish that player from combat for 10 seconds.
• Another type hit very hard and must be tanked and do an annoying pulse ability that deals damage to the entire raid from time to time.
• The device has a laser mounted on top of it and a barrier that prevents the device from being targeted directly with hostile attacks.
• Laser will target a random player in the raid and follow them wherever they go.
• The bots do not fade immediately when they die.

To defeat the miniboss one must kill the adds then have the player who's focused with the laser kite it so that the beam hits the dead trash. When it does, it reflects back at the source, taking away 5% of the machine's health. When the laser has been kited into shooting its-self to death the device will explode and conveniently stun the raid to buy time for the next gimmick or Phase 3 to start.

Option 2: Whelps! Left side!

Paladin summons a mechanical dragon, it flies down from the upper level of the lab.

• Mechanical Dragon does all typical dragon things: Tail swipe. Breath. Cleave. Fear (any one within 30 yards).
• Mechanical dragon creates electrified spots on the ground that gives a debuff that increases damage done by targets standing in it by 10% and but reduces healing/threat by the same amount. Stacks. The debuff lasts 15 seconds. Also deals an increasing amount of damage which quickly goes out of control if folks stand in it for too long.
• Summons mechanical whelps from around the room. If whelps reach the raid they will explode and deal massive damage to folks nearby and likely cause a wipe and must be gunned down by range.

Obligatory destruction stun occurs when the device is destroyed.

Option 3: The Hatebunnies and Doomkittens:

Paladin summons a creature spawning device.

• The device has its power core on top. There's a cone that prevents it from being in line of sight of range. The device is destroyed when the power core is destroyed.
• The device summons bunnies. Cute little pastel bunnies.
• These bunnies explode when they reach a target.
• The damage they do is mild but increases by the number of people in range when they explode.
• When the bunnies explode they put a temporary gravity reduction aura on their targets. These people can jump into the air and pew pew the power core.
• When the aura fades, if they're within melee range of the power core, it'll knock them back off of the device.
• The device also summons little mechanical kittens of doom. They come in assorted feline colors.
• Like the bunnies, they explode but their damage works opposite of the bunnies, the more people in range (3 yards) the less damage they do. They'll hit someone for 100% of their health, hit two people for 50%, 3 for 33%, etc.
• The mechanical kittens give players an aura that doubles the damage they do.
• The device pulses an aura which increases over time. The sooner the power core dies, the sooner the fight is over.

Obligatory destruction stun occurs when the device is destroyed.

Phase 3:

After defeating four of the Paladin's inventions, the Hunter has been healed to full and is ready to go again. This time the two have a shared health pool and it's not very big.

The Hunter has all the same abilities from Phase 1 but lacks his pet.

The Paladin continues his abilities from Phase 2, though uses his alteration ray less often.

New Paladin Abilities:

• Consecrate - increases the threat of people standing in it and reduces damage done by them by 20%.
• Holy Light - Paladin heals himself (and the hunter too). This can and should be interrupted. He only has one spell school so it's possible to keep him locked out.
• Hammer of Justice - Paladin hits the person that has threat on him. He switches to whoever is second in threat. Stun lasts 20 seconds and can't be removed.

Once the Paladin / Hunter have been reduced to 100 health the Paladin bubbles the duo.

At this point, the device the Bronze Dragonflight sent you to destroy becomes attackable. When it's burnt down to 75% (then 50, 25) the duo are back on their feet again and you start again.

After the device is destroyed and you've burnt the duo down they bubble-hearth out.

Chromie appears, breathes fire all over the paperwork in the lab, destroying blueprints and other information required to recreate the device, presents a chest-o-phat-loot, and you win.

Costumes!

Of course, I can't dream this up without thrashing around with what my characters would wear if they were bosses. I already had tinkerer costumes for them, however, I thought it might be fun to add some extra armor for them. This is what I came up with:

In closing:

To Blizzard's encounter designers. I salute you, what you do isn't easy.

Please keep coming up with cool, fun, and awesome encounters for us to explore.

Cheers.

-Z

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

I'll take a moment to feed my lurkers, entertain the rest of the readers, and perhaps share some media that a majority of you are probably not familiar with.

It's been a rough but relieving week over here at the AA guild. The folks that I felt would become upset and leave if I tried to flush Ms. Lag really stepped in it Tuesday. The side of me that doesn't assume malice sees it as a miscommunication getting blown up to the extreme, but other evidence supports that this has been a long time coming. The end result was some folks leaving.

Some of the folks had been people I had considered making officers before their bad behavior started. Some of them had become pretty unreliable, passive aggressive, or petty. One of them was the person I was going to have get the primordial saronite for Shadowmourne. Some of them were recipients of our TotC25 patterns, one was given our first battered hilt. Oh well. It's only pixels.

Others were new, who I really haven't had a chance to work with. They weren't really raiding with us much. Some were on friends and family invites and weren't really briefed on issues like how we handle loot. One or two were folks whom I felt were assets and actually liked having around. They seemed pretty upset and a little hesitant about leaving (as if they were being bullied into it).

Ms. Lag left on her own accord. I booted her friend Wants to Raid and took the opportunity to reorder ranks. And with the departures, a majority of the drama has gone away. A huge weight of tiptoeing around people's feelings has been lifted from my shoulders and we can go back to being awesome again.

The old crew that founded AA, our friends that we brought in, some of the been around awhile folks whom I didn't integrate into the other team, and some of the newest members who've been watching from the sidelines in a fairly objective manner, still remain. In fact, in the middle of it all we gained a new member who'd come over to our faction to escape drama... when I'd warned him about the drama. He was still happy to be with us.

Some of the former members seemed to be lingering on the forums. I nipped that at the bud and did some maintenance, they'll get bored and move along soon enough. I've told my folks to not partake in drama, troll, or anything silly like that.

I wish them well in whatever they're doing. I'm not going to pay them any mind or any further attention. I'm too busy working, blogging, and having fun with my guild to care.

In the end, this is merely a setback, a minor one, and change for the better. In the end I haven't invested eight months of my time to give up so easily. The dust is settling and we're still standing.

My next entry is a Blog Azeroth shared topic about being a raid boss.

I wound up designing an actual boss fight, complete with reasons to support why my characters would be a raid boss as well as game-twisting mechanics and silly roleplay skits.

Stay tuned.

Revisiting the Circle of Healers

Miss Medicina asks some additional questions related to the original Circle of Healers non-meme.

These were my original answers, I answered only from a holy paladin perspective, though I do have a druid, shaman, and a leveling (73) priest. In the recent months I've begun playing the shaman and the druid more, healing a Malygos run on my druid in mostly iLevel200 gear as well as TotC10 in some 219s.

1. Reread your original answers to the questions. With the benefit of hindsight, score your own work in terms of its cringeworthiness.

Looking back in hindsight, very little has changed from my original post, except for now I'm running two holy specs and using them situationally. One is a 53/0/18 and one is a 51/20/0 build.

2. Has your class's healing improved in the area you identified as its weakest?

Holy Paladins still don't have a group heal aside from judging light (which our protadins do) and the glyphed holy light splash.

3. Have you changed your "least favoured class to heal with"?

My dislike of playing with other holy paladins has faded some, having two in a 25 man is very helpful, especially when the other paladin is capable of preforming at the same level as I do. The number of deaths our tanks have in 25 man content is super low because we just don't let them die.

I now greatly detest healing with most Discipline priests. I absolutely abhor it.

While I understand the benefits of the disc build there are some major flaws and issues with every single priest succumbing to the nauseating discmania that the priest blogger community and who knows who else has been making noise about for months now. It's starting to feel like priests are going to disc just because they want to be radical and different, a rebel. ... Yet everyone is doing it.

I guess a bad holy priest still carries their weight better than a bad discipline priest and it's pretty rare for me to find a discipline priest that actually carries their own weight on my server despite the discipline spec being at epidemic levels. The disc priests are the "omg I own't heal anyone but the tank" types. (My priest was a disc tank healer before it was cool, way back before Horde had Paladins. Y'dern young disc whippersnappers, it's my lawn, get off of it!)

At this point, I refuse to recruit any more discipline priests for raiding. It may be the player's 15 dollars a month, but it's the raid's 360 and we have a priority of getting things done over how 'fun' penance is. For new recruits it's go holy or go home. One disc priest is enough (or even too much when we have all three holy paladins present in raid).

4. Did you read the entries from others in the webring, especially your class?

Yes I did. I read a lot of the entries for all the healing classes. As a healing lead and a person who has all four classes covered it's very relevant to my interests.

5. If Yes to #4, did you learn anything that made you a better healer?

Honestly, I don't really remember at this point. *nervous laugh*

6. What tools/resources or information do you think you would need to improve as a healer and how could that help the community at large?

The resource right now that would improve me as a healer would be a computer that runs at higher than 8FPS in raids.

I'd love the ability to broadcast settings and information to other healers in a fast, useful way. I'd love to broadcast my grid status indicators to other healers while in game--I can say, "Hey, send this setting" and give the rest of my healers bits of my setup without having to sit down and instruct them (or remind them) how to configure their grids.

This would make more of my healing core respond quickly to debuffs that require quick healing responses from players and may alleviate stress from me trying to heal two tanks plus the bone-spiked people on Marrowgar.

7. What did you identify as your worst habit as a healer? Have you improved in this area?

I identified my worst habit as a healer to be being too lazy to do a jump stop-cast to curb overhealing. As my haste has continued to skyrocket, I've actually gotten worse, not better, at this. At this point it's virtually impossible for me to do a stopcast in the tiny window where I can. I flip between being methodical and waiting for damage before dropping bombs and just spamhealing proactively. I'd rather overheal than lose a tank in a sudden damage spike.

8. What did you list as your favorite healing spell and your least used healing spell for your class? Are these answers still true?

My favorite spell is still holy shock and it's only going to get better when I approach my 4 piece T10 bonus that will give me back my super fast holy lights (possibly near instant) when holy shock crits.

/nod

Must... cast... faster!

As a Paladin healer, I find myself with an urge to stack haste. Must. Cast. Faster.

Raid buffed, my itty bitty healadin sits at:

38.5k mana

2700 spellpower

53% haste (895ish from my gear and food buff (33%), 15% from judging, 5% from wrath of air totem)

The only way I can increase my mana is more gear or changing my weapon enchant from spellpower over to the wowclassic int to weapon (and I'm tempted to).

My problem is that when I'm playing, it feels like my heals just aren't fast enough. But my holy lights are coming so fast that I can't even jump and stop cast, because they'll go anyways. So I'm casting fast enough, it just doesn't feel like it.

When I'm in a boss fight, the type that are fast and furious, my heals feel like they take forever. When Naxx was the only raid content out there, I recall fighting Patchwerk and having such a sensation. I've had similar sensations on Hodir, Mimiron, Yogg, Festergut, Rotface, etc. Some of these fights feel like they take forever. Festergut has a very unforgiving enrage timer, but it feels like the fight takes forever. I keep thinking, "Is it dead yet? Oh man kill it quick." I've had similar feelings when playing toons, including non-healers, as far back as Molten Core. I recall having such feelings on the salamander bosses (where I played decurse bitch on my mage) as well as on Rags, Vael, Broodlord, Hakkar, Jindo, Mandokir, Arlokk, and Thekal.

I've figured out what it is that happens that makes me feel like everything is 'too slow'. When I'm really really focused I seem to go into a heightened state of awareness or something. It's like time slows down to a crawl and I'm thinking critically and casting each heal methodically. It's like that scene in The Matrix where Neo slows down time and dodges a bunch of bullets, but with gaming. (Humorously enough, I drive a Matrix.) A few months ago I decided to call the phenomenon my 'healer trance'. I can't really control when it happens, when I do go into it, stuff gets done something fierce.

Dear readers, do you ever experience similar states of mind when playing or does the Altoholic need to step into a sanity well?

A Title Well Earned

I usually don't use my "The Patient" title on my characters. It feels like superscrubville.

Last night, right before bed, I hit up a random dungeon on my resto druid.

There was a warlock, a rogue, a mage, myself, and a dk tank in heroic Nexus.

The warlock pulled agro and died. To my glee, he was running rankwatch and notified me that my res wasn't the right rank. (I had hit 80 in my other spec and wow didn't update my spells on the resto spec, so I'd been using downranked spells. I had fixed all of them but the res.)

The rogue died to agro and/or stupid.

The warlock repeatedly pulled agro and began to complain.

After the first boss, the tank got iceblocked and the locke got instagibbed and nerdraged more. He went on to say he had multiple tanks and how the guy should l2tank and hold agro better. I noted I had several tanks as well and suggested waiting for the tank to get threat.

The mage left group, probably sick of the raging. I queued up and we got a ret paladin.

Meanwhile, the tank ragequit and the rogue went linkdead shortly after, leaving me alone with the raging warlock and the newly added ret. I couldn't add a new tank because of the offline person preventing it.

I initiated a vote kick but it failed. The warlock cursed the tank, saying they were bad. The ret reached us. I got out of treeform and sat my healery cow ass down and told the warlock point blank that he was doin' it wrong. I told him he would have made a better impact in the other player's gameplay if he had been constructive and polite with his feedback instead of attacking. The locke continued to be a jerk, not liking that I told him he was wrong.

I initiated another vote kick to remove the warlock and this time the ret, having seen the warlock be an ass, quickly agreed and we punted him. We then punted the offline person and queued up.

The ret said to me that he agreed with the idea of giving positive constructive useful information and said that he himself had bad dps and he didn't know why, that he was on his first 80 and needed help.

I told him some spec tweaks he could do (with the ret only seal that acts as a cleave now for trash and the other seal for bosses). I told him to get some more hit (8%) and to get rid of his agi gems (why he had agi gems I don't know) in favor of strength gems and strength/hit gems (until at 8%) and then str/crit gems. I told him to stay in group after the instance was done and I'd help him more.

In the middle of my talking we got new people and went back to playing to finish the instance. There was an elemental shaman in group who had made note of me explaining ret stuff to the new ret paladin and started asking me questions too. The elemental shaman was also a new 80 and wanted to go resto but didn't feel geared enough yet. They asked me where I got this item and that item. I happily answered their questions, gave them some gemming tips, and tips about healy addons.

After the instance I scrambled to an AH while the ret was still in the group. From there I suggested (linked) which enchants to get for his gear (+hit to gloves, icewalker to boots), told him about sons of hodir and what to search the webs for to find out how to open the ebon blade faction. Suggested a meta and what gem to use to activate it. Linked him those gems along with the str/strcrit/strhit gems.

Finally, I told him about Elitist Jerks forum for gem/rotation/spec reading and sites like wowpopular to look at specs at. He thanked me and logged off for the night.

I hearthed back to Dalaran and looked at my character paperdoll, noted I had no title selected, and clicked my title dropdown. Sure enough the "The Patient" title was there, it's been there for a while, I remember turning it off. I selected it and turned it on because it felt like I actually earned the title.