Koralon the Flame Watcher, or loot Pinata part deux.

Last night I had one full hour of uninterrupted WoW time. Yes folk one FULL hour!

I tried to make the best of it. As I logged on I see scroll through guild chat, "Anybody want to heal H ToC? We have a full group sans heals, and ready to summon." I can't believe the luck. within 2 seconds of logging on, I have a full group G2G. We smash up H ToC in less than 30 minutes. As I land back in Dalaran to sell off the crap that dropped that no one could use I see another message in guild chat. "Starting 10 VOA, anybody free?" Again I say yes, I have at least 30 minutes ow WoW time before the wife starts nagging.

I let everyone know I had not had a chance do do the new boss yet. No big deal they say. Watch the raid after fire breath AOE, and don't stand in the fire.

I think, what do you guys think I am a moron? I have been raiding for a number of years. I know from not standing in fire.

Raid starts, flame breath, heal raid up...WTF I am dead! pst...raid leader> Skraps, you stood in the fire! I call shenanigans. There was no fire.

Recover from the wipe, flame breath, heal raid up...WTF I am dead! pst...raid leader> Skraps, you stood in the fire! I call shenanigans. There was no fire.

Do this one more time, and I still say there was no fire. I just couldnt see it for some reason. I am told to go update DBM, I do. Now Raid starts, flame breath, heal raid up DBM flashes warning on screen "Hey moron! You are standing in the fire!" I move, continue healing and we clear the place out.

Now other than the invisible (at least on my computer, other people tell me they see it no problem) Koralon is a very easy encounter. I really expected/hoped that the loot pinata raid would get a little harder after Emalon, who when he was new was quite difficult. There was raid coordination required that was tough, especially if you were in a PuG. But Koralon, cream puff.

Just don't stand in the fire!

Are you ready to heal Heroics and Raids?

Part 1: Gearing Up

When you first ding 80 the first thing people want to do is jump into LFG, or guild chat and shout I'm 80 now! Lets do a heroic! Sometime it is raid night, and you get an invite. Does that mean you are ready? Not really. I would like to preface this post with a disclaimer I do not believe healing is any harder or easier than DPS'ing or Tanking. It is different from the other roles in it's own ways.

When you are a tank it is pretty easy to know if you are ready for a Heroic or Raid (not accounting for skill). There are two pretty easy metrics to measure against. Are you Def capped? and do i have enough health? There is a few other things like mitigation, expertise, block etc. But those two are pretty much what you need for Heroics, Raids are another story, and I haven't been a tank in a long time.

When you DPS it is even easier to know when you are ready, and you can even be carried by party members that out gear the encounter. Basically all you have to worry about is do I have enough health to survive whatever AOE the boss spouts out. If you are not being helped by a guild that is willing to carry you until your gear is up to par you also have to worry about can I do X DPS?

When you first ding 80, before you get your first Heroic group you will want to look at a few things.

1. Is my bonus healing high enough? (Spell power) When looking at this do not forget your Earthliving on your weapon, and drop your totems. I would shoot for 1200-1400 spell power for your entry Heroics. (CoT: Strat, VH, UK) 1600+ for your advanced Heroics. (everything not in that first list)

2. Do I have enough mana? (Intellect) Intellect is an awesome stat for Shaman not only do we get (I think) 15 mana per point for every point of Intellect we have we get a bit more crit. The more Intellect the better. To start heroics you are going to want 13k-15k mana.

3. Can I regen enough mana to make it through a boss fight? (MP5) Just throwing out a number, I think I started heroics with around 150 MP5. This was acceptable, but got a little scary on some of the more mana intensive bosses. This in conjunction with Water Shield, a mana pot and a well timed ManaTide should get you through any heroic boss. (Maybe not HToC, Black Knight is a pretty long fight, with LOTS of burst damage at the end)

While the skill > gear > skill debate will rage on forever. There is no denying that even the most skilled healers will never clear Ulduar in greens. You NEED certain stats to survive an encounter, to have enough mana to continue casting your spells, and frankly to keep people from laughing at you.

Later this week I will discuss how to heal, in my scathing two part expose on Shaman Healing.

WoW Lovin' over the weekend

I finally had some quality time with my favorite MMO over the weekend, but didn't really do any thing. I am kind of on a mission to finally get my rep with the tournament up to exalted or what ever you have to do to spend the Champions Seals. I realized this weekend that I have almost 75 Seals, and a crap ton of non-combat pets I want to buy. I ran HToC every day this weekend on my main and my hunter alt, but alas no loot was to be had for the hunter. As a mater of fact, all loot that dropped was sharded. We got cloth when we had no one to wear it, we got leather with no rogues or ferals, we got plate with the bear tank. All in all I think the instance has a grudge against me.

I also ran it about 20 times on normal with my hunter looking for any upgrade. What I learned, I really suck at hunter DPS now. Even in my mix of Nax gear I out DPS my shaman, but I still barley hit 3k DPS. My Shaman hits about 2.8k DPS in my Elemental set, but that still is mostly healing gear, with my +hit coming from rings, trinkets etc.

I have gotten to the point with emblems of conquest that there are no upgrades I can purchase for my main spec. I have enough right now to buy the tier head and chest for my elemental set, I think I might have enough to buy a ring or neck too. So hopefully in the next week or two I will have gear to DPS at Ulduar level as well as heal.

Oh, and I am embarrassed to say, but I FINALLY picked up this Achievement. I know, I know, that is something I should have had a long time ago, but I have horrible luck with ring and trinket drops. I picked up this ring Friday night and finally had all slots over 213.

Yesterday was a no WoW day for me, as I spend the day digging 12"x12"x32" holes all around my back yard trying to find where the water lined on my pool have broken. You would think it would be as easy as digging a hole where the yard is wet. It isn't. I think at some point I might hire one of those guys with a camera to find the hole so I can just dig there. The one good thing about digging holes, the dogs were in heaven! They love to play in the mud.

Hope everyone had a great 3 day weekend, and I will talk to you later this week.

Why I have not played WoW this week

Well I am feeling lazy today, and haven't played WoW this week, here is a list of excuses, er reasons.

1. Soccer season is in its third week, and I am spending a lot of time driving too and from soccer practice and kicking balls at the boys head in the yard in the evenings. Last year the boy was a full back/defender. This year he is a striker. He scored four goals Saturday. I have discovered that the 14 year old testosterone driven soccer player is not the timid kid he was last year.

2. Boy Scouts. Sure they say come volunteer to help out, it is only about an hour a week. They are all damn liars! I thought Boy Scouts were supposed to be noble and honest and all that crap?

3. Trying to keep the girl out of jail. So my 20 year old daughter is not wining any awards in the smarts department right now. She got a ticket for a broken tail light, driving with expired registration, no insurance and she left her license at a friends house. This all led to a $700+ fine. After many hours of arguing with the wife about how many more time we can bail the girl out we (the wife) decided we would buy her one month of insurance and pay to register her car. But the girl was required to go to court yesterday and talk to the judge about lowering her fine, request service hours to pay the fine, and get a job. Guess how many of those things were done? Yep none. She got to the court house, was told by the clerk it would be at least two hours to see the judge, and she had plans to hang out with friends, so she asked for 30 days to pay and left. Did I mention she does not have a job and no way to raise the $700? Yeah it has been happy times on the home front.

4. The job. Now don't get me wrong as far as jobs go, this one isn't too bad. My actual title is Information Technology Specialist III. It doesn't really say what I do. I work for the local county library system. I am a systems security administrator, Cisco network admin and light unix admin. It is a job. Mostly I wait for things to break. This can be days, or weeks with no "real" work, just busy work and projects. This week I have been working my ass off. I just complained to my wife last night I had to work ALL day yesterday! Tuesday I came into work at 8:00 am, and got home at 8:15 pm.

5. The wife. The lovely wife, is a teacher. She teaches High school. She is a very lucky teacher in that she gets to teach her very favorite things in the world. She teaches Drama, Dramatic Productions, and Dance. So the kids she teaches actually want to be in her class. She is THAT teacher you may have had in high school, that not only treated you as a person, but had an amazing impact on the rest of your life. I started playing WoW, because the wife would on average be at school until between 8:00 and 9:30 every night when she was producing a show, and she produced a play, a musical, at least 2 dance shows, a student directed show, and a talent show almost every year. This left me with two options, go hang out at high school, or get a hobby. I chose WoW. Well now that the boy goes to school with mom every day she has vowed to never be home later than 6:00, and to her credit she has been sticking to that target. But this cuts into my WoW time. This isn't a complaint because all things considered, I'd rather spend time with her than a dumb video game. But it has hurt my progression with the guild.

So enough whining from me? I hope so, and since it is Thursday, one of my guarenteed WoW nights, I hope to have something WoWish to post tomorrow. Who knows maybe I will finally get into a ToC Raid?

Healing Heroic ToC, a guide.

I'm sure this guide is a little late, since most everyone has gotten their fill of ToC by now but here goes anyway.

Phase one: Dumb. Hate it. The only redeeming quality is it is pretty quick. Don't bother buffing before you mount up as it doesn't matter anyway, and most groups run out of the instance to reset it before engaging the 3 bosses. The biggest advice I have for you here is make sure someone is on trample duty, and running down the dismounted bosses before the remount. If you do not do this you will have to knock the bosses off their mounts until you have them all down at the same time. Also make sure you pick a target and kill it as a group. Makes things much faster.

Once the bosses are all dismounted run out of the arena so the bosses reset and you can control aggro from the start. Makes things so much easier. You need to establish a kill order and stick to it. These bosses hit pretty hard, have some nasty AOE and if you don't focus fire and follow the tanks lead you will not make it.

You will get a random mix of any of the three classes Warrior, Mage, Shaman, Hunter or Rogue. Basically here if you get the Shaman, kill him first, or he heals everyone else then Warrior. The other three classes are a piece of cake, and kill order doesn't really matter. Then there is the ever important "DON'T STAND IN THE POOLS OF DEATH". Other than that this encounter is a piece of cake.

The second boss is very much a loot pinata. You will get one of two bosses Eadric the Pure Argent Confessor Paleteress. Eadric is basically tank-n-spank. If you are healing turn your back on the boss or you will get stunned. The magic of being a healer is you do not have to be looking at your target to heal, so there is no reason to ever get caught in the stun. Paleteress, is a little harder (it is all relative) when she hits 25% she will summon a previous boss you have fought. But they are all the same. They have an AOE fear, tremor totem FTW! When the add is dead, engage Paleteress again, kill her.

The Instance is done.


But wait! It is the Black Knight come to crash the party, you are not done yet!

The Black Knight has three phases. Phase one, basic tank-n-spank with one ghoul add, the former arena announcer. As the healer I often kill the add while the rest of the DPS is working on the Black knight. He doesn't hit very hard on this phase and Earth Shield and Riptide should be enough to keep the rest of the party alive while you deal with the ghoul.

Phase two, he is dead, and pissed. He pope Army of the Dead at the start of this phase, and uses Corpse Explosion on all the ghouls you kill. This phase can be tricks. Make sure you stack on the tank so he can get aggro on all the adds, then move out and kill the adds one at a time and move before they explode. Also try to keep out of the Death and Decay. Once all the adds are down, the Black Knight should be almost dead.

Phase three, he is really dead now, and really pissed. To be honest I do not really know what he does here. I have always spent phase three running around like a three year old kid amped up on redbull and vodka casting Chain Heal, Riptide and generally trying not to die.

After that you have spent about 30 minutes, collected three emblems of conquest and hopefully five pieces of epic loot that won't be sharded!

Should I be offended?

Over the weekend I hopped on early Sunday morning while the house was quiet, the wife and kid were sleeping and I could get some uninterrupted WoW quality time. I did a few of the daily's that I still do, like the fishing, cooking and a few tournament ones. Then hopped in the LFG channel while in Dalaran.

I was chatting whit some friends and futzing around when I see LF Healer H ToC then GtG, and others. I think "I'm a healer, I haven't done ToC or others. They are looking for me!

I send a tell, stating as much.

He responds I'm at the north bank, come here I want to inspect you before we invite you.

I want to preface this next paragraph with a bit of a disclamer...I am not a ginormous epeen, nor do I have a giant ego. I run a lot of PuGs. I think running PuGs is one of the best way to learn your class, because there are not that many "oh Shit!" moments in guild runs and raids, as if you are raiding you probably know what you are doing.

I was kind of taken aback! I understand that on a server you can't possibly know every level 80. But I like to think I have kind made a name for myself as an extremely competent healer. Nine times out of ten when joining a PuG I know at least 1 other member. I run A LOT of PuGs I love them. I run them whenever I do not have something going on in guild. But i was kind of offended when he wanted to inspect me just to join his PuG.

I responded "I am geared to heal (or DPS for that matter) any encounter we could possibly see today up to and including Ulduar. I am not going to waste my time or your time for a parade of my gear. If you need a healer I am available otherwise I will go back to my daily's.

I guess he had a discussion with his group and a few minutes later I got an invite. We went on to one shot ToC, HoL and even Occulus (which I hate btw). The group was fun we cleared 3 heroics in just over an hour and a half. With only the occasional death and no wipes.

So the question is I guess. Should I be offended, or am I the ass hole for not cooperating and showing off my gear before the run?

Impossible Achievements

Hello everybody, my name is Skraps and I'm an Achievement Whore. There I have said it. it is the first step in the road to recovery. Even thought I love the achievements and i love seeing them flash on my screen there are plenty of other people with more than me. My problem lies in the fact that when one achievement pops up, I have the compulsive need to complete all other related achievements until I get the title, reward, tabard, or pet associated with it.

As I was perusing the achievement list this morning I came across one that I think must be the most difficult achievement in the game. Incredibly difficult in 25 man, and I'm pretty sure impossible in 10 man.

Earth, Wind & Fire.

How in the hell can that achievement be done?