So long and thanks for all the fish

It has been almost a year since I last posted. Months since I last played. It is probably time to shut this site down. Thanks for the community and the laughs.

What Heal To Use And When?

Cataclysm has been out for a month and a week now. Natural Order has finally started our raiding schedule and it is time to start farming raid mats, and leveling alts.

With the time put into the expansion I would like to take a look at the Shaman healing toolkit and talk about when to use what heal.

Riptide: Our only non-proc HOT (not counting healing stream). Glyphed Riptide lasts 21 seconds, if you are at the haste soft cap you will get an additional tic out of your riptide. You should cast it every 6 seconds on cool down to any member of your raid taking damage. Do not cast over a currently ticking Riptide, that is just a wast of mana. This is our second cheapest heal, and is REALLY efficient to top off raid damage, or to give you a couple seconds of breathing room to land that big heal.

Healing Wave: Our baby heal. Cheap. Very small heal. Use it to top off only. I actually don't even have this on my regular cast bars. It is setup with a cast modifier and isn't used much.

Healing Surge/Greater Healing Wave: Big heals. Until 4.0.6 don't even bother with Greater Healing wave, as it is more expensive, slower and its heal is barley bigger than Healing Surge. We will revisit this after 4.0.6 when it is supposed to get bigger (20% bigger) but it's mana cost will also getting a 10% boost. Healing Surge is big, fast and sexy. Use it on the tank, or to bring a DPS from almost dead to near full health.

Healing Rain: Heal over time, AOE. The sexy. Heals anybody standing in it for a pretty good chunk, throw a chain heal or two during a healing rain and you have healed five or six people to almost full, but you have also just burned through 20% of your total mana. Situational for massive raid damage, try to overlap with other AOE heals to create a ven diagram of healing on the ground during raids to bring the raid back to full health.

Chain Heal: Used to be the iconic heal of the Resto Shaman. It has become slightly underpowered, and fairly inefficient. That should change some in 4.0.6, but we will have to wait and see. Still works great if you are on raid heals, procs up to 4 earthliving weapon HoT's. Use it anytime you have extra mana and raid wide damage to top off. Again works great with Healing Rain.

Totems

Water: Mana Spring, probably wont be used in a raid if there is 1 or 2 pallys. Use Healing Stream. It is a decent HoT, in current Heroic/entry Raid gear it heals for about 400 every 2 seconds. It isn't going to save anybody but essentially lowers incoming damage by 1% or so.

Earth: Again you will probably have a Pally or DK providing Earth's buffs, so drop Stoneskin Totem. Increases tank mitigation and lowers incoming damage. Earth has a few utility totems you may have call to use, on add heavy fights you may want to drop Earthbind to slow adds, or Grounding Totem to eat a spell every time it's CD is up. It just may save a tank on a magic heavy encounter.

Air: You are probably always going to use Wrath of Air . Unless someone specifically asks for windfury. I have never been asked to do this.

Fire: Fire totems are kind of problematic for the Resto Shaman. There really is nothing usefull for us here. There is usually a Elemental (at least in my raids) providing the superior Totemic Wrath on their fire totems. I usually either drop Searing Totem to contribute a tiny bit of DPS, or no fire totem at all.

Finally I am going to give Mana Tide it's own section as it really is too important to place with the other totems. This is our big mana regen ability. Use it every time you are below 75% mana and then every time it is off cool down the rest of the fight. Don't try to save it until later in the fight. If you are below 50% mana, it is too late and you will be oom before the fight is over. Pop it early, pop it often as it is on a 3 minute cool down. You may be able to pop it 3 times on a longer boss fight. In 4.0.6 it becomes raid wide, so it will really help your healing team.

I must really love my wife.

Last night, after dinner I queued for a random, got Halls of Origination. (I have learned in the past any dungeon with "Halls" in the title is going to suck) First time I have been there and I must say, it is excellent dungeon design! It is by far the most fun I have had in a Cata dungeon! I mean come on! CAMELS! A boss that you fight while riding camels! What could be more fun? I had a great run. It was a dungeon finder PuG, and everyone seemed to know the place and their roles. Tank was great, explained his strats and marked targets. DPS didn't stand in the fire and went pew pew.

By the end of the run I was 1/10th of a bubble to level 85, some 100k experience. One quest, a few random mobs, and I would be 85. (I know I'm a slacker, 2 weeks in and still not 85) But instead of finishing the last little bit to 85 I sat down on the couch with the wife to watch this...
Is that love? Oh I think it is.

Level 85 Resto and Elemental Specs

*Disclaimer: These specs are not raid tested, not theory-crafted. These are just the specs I will be starting level 85 heroic grind with. Specs may change with raiding and after testing.

Restoration: I think the resto spec is pretty self explanatory. I did not take any of the PvP talents, and I also took none of the damage to increase mana/healing talents. I just do not see having the free GCD or mana to risk a lightning bolt or shock early in the expansion.

Other than the above mentioned talents I took pretty much everything in the resto tree. I took the talents in enhancement that allows for more efficient shields, and better weapon enhancements. (15% additional mana from water shield and 40% better earthliving) I also took ans am really excited for the reworked Ancestral Swiftness. I loved this talent in wrath, but could never find the free points to take it, and in Cata it is even better as it is an instant cast Ghost Wolf, but an overall 15% movement speed increase. Which should help in the promised "more movement" fights coming up. Other than that I took Acuity from Elemental, because 3% crit si 3% crit.


Elemental: Elemental is a little more difficult to come up with what I think of as an "optimal spec" as there are a few more discretionary points here. Basically I took the same 3 talents from the Enhancement tree to give me a little more oompf and the instant cast Ghost Wolf, plus all the standard DPS increasing talents from Elemental. There are 2 extra points at the end that you can move around. If you find yourself running out of mana drop the two points into Convection, otherwise I put them into Earth's Grasp. Rooting your targets isn't always what you want to do, but it is pretty helpful wen soloing, or kiting. Plus it is pretty nice if you find you have pulled agro and need to run to the tank before getting squashed.

Healing Blackrock Caverns

Here is a quick guide to healing Blackrock Caverns, with a little bit of boss strategy thrown in. This is based on personal experience, so your mileage may vary.

Rom'ogg Bonecrusher: You need to clear the pat and packs close to the boss first. If you do not he will call for help and probably kill your group. Once you engage the boss, stay at max range and heal. The boss has a few abilities you need to worry about. First is Quake. Quake is a fairly quick cast, targeted/AOE. Near as I can tell it targets 3 ranged targets and does a fairly significant amount of damage over time. When you see it targeted run away. Second ability you need to worry about is Chains of Woe. Chains pull you to the boss, and roots you into place. Chains need to be AOE'd down fast. Twenty seconds after casting chains he will use The Skullcracker, 360degree cleave in a 10 yard radius that deals 100k damage. If you do not get out of it, you will die. I recommend running straight through the boss and away soon as your chains are broken. Use any cool downs you have, make sure Earth Shield and Riptide are up on the tank and kill the boss.

Once you kill the boss, a large NPC is released from a cage, when ever you see a pull that looks impossible, wait a few seconds the NPS pops out, and kills the mobs for you.

Corla, Herald of Twilight: Only allow one zealot to evolve at a time or you will wipe. You need to swap DPS in the evolution beam, or one of the players will evolve and become mind controlled and you will wipe. We found we had the DPS to kill the cultists before they evolved, but then the boss dropped no loot. I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature. Once a zealot evolves he will cast Shadow Strike you should interrupt it. We found it best to burn the boss till the first zealot evolves, kill the evolved Zealot then back to the boss till the second evolution. Once the second zealot is evolved you should have the boss pretty much dead.

Corla casts Dark Command, but tremor totem and chain heal should take care of it. She also Death Grips a random player to her through the encounter. Watch the Zealots melee abilities while you are running back out. The zealots are the real boss of this encounter, once the zealots are down, it is pretty much tank-n-spank. Don't be afraid to use chain heal and riptide.

Karsh Steelbender: From a healers perspective this is a tank-n-spank fight. Watch for the cleave, and don't die. Tanking is a little more difficult. He has Quicksilver Armor making him basically undamageable. The tank needs to drag him through the fire in the center of the room, giving him Superheated Quicksilver Armor. Every stack increases damage against him by 5% +1000 per melee attack. But every melee attack causes an AOE splash to the group for 1000 damage over 12 seconds. Anything over 6-7 stacks becomes unhealable and the group wipes. So you have to let the stacks of superheated fall off, then drag him back through the flames.

Beauty: Optional boss, Tank-n-spank. Boss has a fear, drop tremor totem. The only other things to look out for is the knock back ability Flamebreak and a random charge ability Beserker Charge. There is a lot of group damage, so chain heal liberally. One final ability is a living bomb like ability called Magma Spit. If you cleanse it, and the target is close to other members it will blow them up. Run from the group before cleansing, or just let the timer tick down.

Ascendant Lord Obsidius: The final boss of the first Cataclysm dungeon. He has two Shadow of Obsidius who should be off tanked or CC'ed away from the boss. These adds are pretty much immune to damage so ignore them. Obsidius will randomly swap into one of his shadows, so there is a target switch with an aggro reset.

Obsidius really doesnt have any abilities of note. A pretty basic melee ability Stone Blow, an identical ability to Warriors, Thunderclap and a shadow damage spell Twilight Corruption. This fight is by far the easiest in the instance, assuming you can target switch mid-fight.

Depending on how real life runs today I will try to discover Throne of Tides, or Vortex Pinnacle and let you know how those are.

P.S.

See this post from a week or so ago. Cataclysm was Blizzards smoothest expansion launch to date. Servers were up at midnight, there was no regular Tuesday maintenance and near as I can tell there was no server outages all day yesterday. Good job Blizzard, I hope this sets a precedent for the future.

Of course it was brilliant planing on Blizzards side to put all the game-breaking data in a patch two weeks before the launch of the expansion, so returning players see nothing but a smooth running remade world.

Cataclysn: Day 1

I went to my local GameStop Monday night at midnight, with many protests from Mrs. Skraps. I got there a little late, almost 11 and paid for my copy and went to get in line to pick it up at 12:00. As I was walking out of the store I ran into a friend who was 5th in line who said as I was walking out "John! here we are come get in line!".

There were about 100 people in line, so unexpectedly being able to jump to the front of the line was nice, I was out of the store at 12:08 and on my way home to install. I promised Mrs. Skraps I wouldn't play Monday night/Tuesday morning, so soon as the install was complete I logged on grabbed my Lil'Deathwing and signed off to go to bed.

Yesterday, despite having the day off from work I didn't get to play much. I had to go do a bit of a side job, clean house, do laundry and go pick up my new lap top that conveniently was delivered to work on my day off.

I then powered on my new laptop, and they hard drive failed. I spent an hour on the phone with Dell before I could convince them to just send me a hard disk.

Well after all that, I spent some time in Vashj'ir, it is a beautiful zone, with some fun quests and you get the awesome seahorse mount. I then decided to head over to Hyjal. This zone is awesome. There are scenic views, awesome monsters, great quests and some surprises. (1980's Joust arcade game style mini-game with vulture non-combat pet as a reward)

I got to level 82 last night, 3 pieces of my T10 gear are still left, but 3 epics have been replaced with greens and 1 epic has been replaced with a dungeon blue. I have enshrined my T10 set in my bank, to marvel over forever. I will only replace the T10 shoulders when something more awesome than a elk pops out of the replacement.

I AM KINGSLAYER!

Last night while struggling against great adversity the Natural Order alt run finally downed Arthas. The great adversity consisted of my wife wanting me to, in her words "QUIT PLAYING THAT STUPID GAME, COME HAVE DINNER AND DECORATE THE CHRISTMAS TREE!"

Our raid started right on time, 6:15 pacific. We started the first attempt at about 6:20. I am confident we would have 1-shot Arthas if it were not for something I did. We mastered phase 1 and 2 in the last few weeks, the phase transition into 3 was giving us trouble last week, this week we walked right through it.

Arthas was at 18% health, all 10 of us were up and it was looking like a 1-shot kill. I quickly yelled through the house to my son "Aristotle! We are killing the Lich King!", as soon as the words were out of my mouth, our tank somehow was one-shot. (We think whoever was sucked into frostmourne missed and Arthas enraged) DPS started dying to infest and it pretty much fell apart.

I jinxed us.

We went it for attempt two, Natural Orders alt team looked like pro sponsored raiders and killed the Lich King, without loosing a single DPS, stepping in a defile, loosing to an infest. It was basically a text book kill...

and I forgot to start FRAPS.

One consolation is this wicked-awesome screen shot.


So finally after almost two years I have seen the defeat of the Lich King and I can move on to Cataclysm tonight with a light heart and a massive sense of accomplishment.

I'll be heading to Gamestop tonight about 10:30 to grab my collectors edition and I am off tomorrow. I'll be posting screen shots and impressions as I start to level tonight.

Damn you Arthas!

So this is the third week on Arthas and he still lives. To be fair the first week we only had a couple of attempts before the raid time was over and we all went to bed. Last week we worked on him for a good hour, hour and a half. Last week we were struggling with phase 2, and getting the Val'kyr's down. This week we have mastered phase 2, killing the val'kyrs with no problem, staying out of defile, but it would fall apart at the phase 3 transition.

I am not sure how I managed to do this, but every single time just before we pushed into transition, defile would drop, and the raid would run one way, I always ran the other. I would get out of range and could never recover from the infest. We would loose 2-3 dps, and push into phase 3 with 2 tanks, 3 heals and 2 dps. I guess you could probably finish him off with those numbers but I'm skeptical.

We have decided to push one more week on Arthas, and do our regular Sunday night raid on the 5th , as well as raid into the night on Monday the 6th. I figure we have to midnight my time Monday if we do not get him down Sunday.

Then I heads out to game stop, pick up my Cata collectors edition, and take Tuesday off, and hopefully the servers cooperate and I get some "me" time with Cata before the wife and kid get home from school.

On the launch day front: Am I being overly optimistic? I really think this will be the smoothest expansion launch to date. I figure, almost all of the expansion data is running on live right now, the shattering has occurred and and everything is running smooth. All that is left is flip the switch to activate the Worgen/Goblin starting zones and the new 80-85 zones.

Right?

Right?

Lich King 10 Still not down.

Well Sunday night came and went and Natural Order's alt run still has not defeated The Lich King. We have now mastered phase one, the phase transition and managed to get almost to the second phase transition. We were killed by a lot of bad luck late in the evening with defiles and early in the evening with Varyklys. We have just about 2 weeks to finish him off before Cataclysm. If we can get the DPS coordinated I think we should be able to get him down this week.

Things I learned on Lich King.

1.) When DBM tells you you have Necrotic Plague, RUN and RUN now. don't finish casting, tont stare at your screen and watch the pretty timer tick. Get over to the ghouls and get cleansed.

2.) Watch your threat. A mage can tank Arthas, for about 1/2 a swing. It isn't pretty. When Omen flashes "High Threat" you can not cast "just one more arcane blast". Because that Arcan Blast will crit for 60k damage and Arthas will eat you.

3.) A mage with a lucky string of crits on a full stack of Arcane Blast can do some SERIOUS DPS in phase one, when it is pretty much stand and fire. Sunday night I was averaging 16k dps during phase one, and settling down to a more reasonable 8.5k DPS for the rest of the fight.

With Cataclysm so near I spend a lot of time reflecting on what I have managed to attain over the last two years in Wrath. At the end of the Burning Crusade I was in Ex Obscurum. We were a close guild, and had some major accomplishments. We were ranked number 3 on our server, the number 1 horde guild. I had successfully killed Illidan and the whole guild was excited for Wrath, and the future of raiding. The only problem was we raided 4-5 nights per week. I was a casual hardcore raider, and after almost 2 years of raiding 4-5 nights per week it was taking a toll on my home life. The wife and I were growing apart (she was working late most every night as well), the boy needed more dad time it just wasn't working.

Wrath launches, I cut back my WoW hours, and I was late to the level 80 party. I missed early raids, in fact I didn't even step into Naxx before Ulduar was released. I finally started raiding 10 mans with pugs and guild alts, and slowly got back into raiding with Ex Obscurum near the end of Ulduar/early ToC. But I was raiding only Thursday/Saturday. Late last winter, Ex Obscurum decided to server transfer and for the first time in my WoW lofe I had no guild for my toons. I spent a few months guildless leveling alts. I got both my Pally and Mage to 80, and found a new home in natural Order.

NO is a much better fit for my play-style/life needs. They have a number of runs every week from Hard Mode progression to alt runs, and it is a "come as you are" atmosphere. You do not have to dedicate your life to every single run every week. Show up when you can and if they have a spot you raid. We run so many raids, both 10's and 25's that if you want to raid on a given night there is usually a place for you. If you miss a raid there isn't 9 or 24 people missing you.

So Wrath is closing, I am so close to an Arthas kill I can taste it and level 85 is looming with a whole new sait of heroics, dungeons and raids.

Here is to the future, and the past. I toast Arthas, Anub'arak, Mimron, Illidan, lady Vash, C'thun and any other boss that myself and a group of myself and 9-39 friends worked those long nights to defeat.

Quick and Dirty Video Cataclysm Changes

This is a quick video sped up 2x flying from Bilgewater Harbor to Gadgetzan.

Sunday night Natural Orders alt run did something amazing. After only 2 weeks we cleared ICC to the foot of the Frozen Throne. The previous week we cleared through Plagueworks, and Dreamwalker. This week we started on Sindragosa as we felt she was the hardest boss we had left. We spent close to an hour on Sindi, and thought we would be lucky to get the rest of the bosses before Arthas down.

A personal aside, FU Sindragosa. I went in on my Mage for the alt run, to save my lockout in case I can actually make the 25's on Skraps, and this is an ALT run. Probably shouldn't take my main on an alt run. I was targeted for EVERY SINGLE Unchained Magic, but with the patch 4.01 health pool improvement I was able to survive stacks getting as high as 10 without putting any strain on the healers.

The rest of the bosses were a cake walk, and we decided since we actually made it though to Arthas a bit early we would make a few attempts on the Lich Kink himself. We ended up calling the raid at just shy of 1:00 am eastern time, a full 2 hours after raids normally end. Lucky for me and my marriage that put us off just before 10:00 pm my time, and a good 15 minutes before wife agro one-shot me.

The alt run will extend our raid lockout for another week, or two or three if needed. Basically we have committed to getting as many people the Kingslayer title before December 7th as possible. It is looking good for both Skraps and Tharadra to get their kingslayers before Deathwing leaves poor Arthas alone atop his ivory tower wondering where all the visitors have gone. I hear Prince Malchezaar has a weekly poker night Arthas may be able to join.

As much as I am looking forward to the release of Cataclysm and the new leveling experience for my alts, I am really excited about downing Arthas before that happens. This will be the completion of two years of work, and completing a goal I have had since the Fall of the Lich King was pushed last December.

No matter how silly the goal, it always feels good to be this close to completing it.

Serious Case of Pre-Expansion Blues...

In the last 2 weeks or so I have been having a really hard time motivating myself to even log in unless it is a raid night, even then I only want to raid about 50% of the time. I have pretty much given up my spot in our 25 man, and only really run the Sunday night alt ICC 10. I guess I would like to maybe try tanking ICC on either my warrior or my Pally a bit, but not really sure.

Over the weekend I picked up the StarCraft 2 Collectors Edition at a local Fry's Electronics. The sticker on the box said $59.99. It was the only one on the shelf with that price, the Sticker said right on it StarCraft 2 CE. When I got to the register, I had to fight with both the checker and the manager to get the price as they said it was supposed to read $89.99. Well after about 5 minutes of fighting that I should have to pay what the box says I walked out the door with a CE for the price of the regular. Yay me?!

Any way, I have been mixing it up pretty heavily between the single player campaign, and the online multi-player matches. I am really enjoying the single player game, multi-player...not so much. I have been playing the "training" league for those of us who never played RTS before, even though I have been playing RTS's since Warcraft. I have had my ass handed to me a number of times. Some of the matches I am killed so early in the game I only have a few marines to protect myself with, and they are rolling over me with whatever the Protoss and Zerg versions of a tank are. How do they do it?

Last night for the first time I was matched with someone who played on my level. It was tedious. We spent hours gathering materials, and sending squads of units to their slow painful death. I would attack his base, take out forward defenses damage a few units, and get all my guys killed. I would then frantically return to my base, pump out units and wait for his attack, where I would barley get enough units together to defend.

We would then move to another resource and gather for a while and start the attack cycle over again. While it was long, and tedious I had a really good time. Finally when all the maps resources were depleted, and there was no way to recover from the loss of units, I was able to get into his base and win.

A far cry from watching the SC2 finals at Blizzcon.

Just for fun

If you ever wanted to write a blog post on faction rewards, check out Flameshock.

Also last night was Natural Orders ICC 10 alt run. There was much discussion as to weather they needed a healer, or not. I volunteered to heal on Skraps, even though there is nothing in ICC 10 I could really use this side of the LK kill. After much waiting, a guildie with a semi-geared healer came on, joined the raid and off we went.

Now don't get me wrong I fully understand that damage meters are a pretty lame measure of ones performance, and a DPS that puts out the least DPS could be the most valuable raid member if they are kiting, cleansing or some other vital job that prevents them from standing still and going pew pew.

But last night, for the first time ever I broke 10k DPS. I actually hit 10077 dps on Festergut, and topped the meter for that one fight. I normally hover around number 3 for 10 man, 5 or 6 for 25. I am not the best geared mage in the group, or frankly the best DPS, I am normally a healer remember.

But I was pretty damned proud of myself when I topped the meter for that one fight.

And I Ran...I Ran So Far Away!

I shouted all over Durotar that the end was near, not one damned person cared. Although thes two little ladies were pretty impressed, you could tell by their looks of total indifference.

Blizzcon 2010 Photo Slideshow

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Get your own

This is not the greatest shirt in the world.

It is merely a tribute!


My favorite blizzcon shirt. More pics to come soon.

Blizzcon news...

I was struck near dead by some Blizzcon Super Virus this week. Today is the first day I managed to crawl into work. I'll get pics and info from my point of view posted this weekend after the Halloween party.

I would like to have a word with AT&t

That word would be a big F.U. Ok that's technically two words, but you get the idea. I can not post anything from blizzcon. The network is so super saturated that nothing is going up. So I will just do a massive dump of information and pictures Sunday or Monday.

Opening ceremony.

I think the 10:30 start time on the wall is erroneous!