Category Archives: PVE

Healer design retrospective

Back in BC, Holy paladins were stuck into casting 2 different single target heals for every needs, including when they needed to heal many different targets. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice and added diversity to the paladin healing rotation : they now use a variety of single and multi target spells, and are encouraged to alternate between holy power generating spells and holy power consuming spells.

Back in WotLK, Disc Priest tended to use a single single-target spell to blanket the whole raid with shields. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice and improved the disc priest toolbox. They now have many efficient multi-targets spells, each with different goals, being effectively healing the raid or creating preventive shields on many characters.

Back in WotlK, Resto Druids spammed a single-target hot to heal the whole raid. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice, so they forced the druids using a variety of spells to benefit from their mastery, while providing them new spells to deal with different damage patterns.

Back in BC, Resto Shamans used 2 to 3 different ranks of the same spell (needing different buttons on their action bars) to heal different damage patterns on the tank or stacked people. Shaman were also the only class capable of efficiently healing aoe damage, and thus surpassed all other classes for this purpose. Blizzard decided it wasn’t a great design choice and made Chain Heal less efficient to bring Shaman in the other healers range. They also gave shaman new tools to respond to their single target and stacked healing needs. Today, shaman are stuck using an inefficient single target spell (Healing Surge, mostly) to heal raid wide damage when the raid isn’t stacked (that is, at least one on two fights).

Note : This post is based from my current knowledge and remembrance of other healing classes. I didn’t make research just for it. So it may not be exactly accurate. However, its aim is to be an overview of the situation. Also, I didn’t talk about Holy priests because back in Vanilla/BC they were the most versatile healer, even if they’re not in as a good shape today (again, compared to other healers).

The morale of the story

Overall, Blizzard did a great job at designing healers over time. I remember a day when if you wanted to do timed Shattered Halls (needed for Tempest Keep raid attunement) as a resto shaman, your best chance was to go there with a paladin tank. Now you can do about any content with any spec.

But I’m pretty sure everyone out there is afraid of shaman becoming OP again as they were in Sunwell, and are afraid of making them better than other healers, even in their niche : stacked aoe healing. Since then, shaman were more in range of the other healers, occasionally dipping way below when the fights required a lot of spreading (mainly Ulduar, Firelands and Throne of Thunder).

In MoP, up until today, our emblematic spell, Chain Heal, was our worse spell. It healed for just as much as Greater Healing Wave, for about the same mana cost, had a longer cast time (as CH doesn’t benefit from Tidal Waves), and ran a high risk of only hitting a single target, reducing healing done by the spell by 60% (a lot of bosses hit boxes are so big that a Chain Heal doesn’t jump from the tank to the melees)

Today shamans’ main aoe healing spells were improved. This improvement may make shamans extremely good at healing a stacked raid (the 20% Healing Rain buff is pretty huge on an already strong spell, it may all be Sunwell again : shaman very powerfull in their niche but stuck in there). I understand why these improvements were chosen right now instead of more complex changes. But these don’t solve the true problem : shamans doesn’t have any suited spell for spread raid healing. They are forced burning their mana using an inefficient single target spell (Healing Surge) to aoe heal, or helplessly watching the other healers do the job. This isn’t fun. Healing should be about using the right spell for the right job. For a shaman healing a spread raid, our only right spell is a 3 minutes CD talent (Healing Tide Totem). We need something to fill this hole, be it via a new spell, a glyph or a revamped talent (Elemental Blast, I’m looking at you !). I just hope it comes in 5.3…

Is Wrathion questline Legendary enough ?

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Tzufit recently wrote a post about the Wrathion legendary questline. In this post he complained that Legendaries have become too easy to acquire thanks to the Black Prince, making them no longer legendary. This seems like a valid concern. As he said, when everyone’s Legendary, no one will be!

Well, this depends of what are your expectations concerning Legendaries. If your main definition of Legendary is rare, then effectively, the Wrathion quest is hardly legendary as anyone can complete it.

Although, if you look at the quest reward, these become scarcer. Of course, it’s easy to get your Sha-touched gem. But then ? Not really useful if you don’t have the associated weapon. So yeah, I suppose a lot of players have actually equipped the gem in the most advanced guilds, but if you’re hoping to get your Sha-touched weapon in LFR, it suddenly gets a legendary touch !

But Legendary isn’t just “rare” for me. It’s also epic, fabulous. And what would you call a gigantic questline that’ll keep you involved during a whole expansion ? In this quest you’ll have to do raids (all of them, as it seems), daily quests, battlegrounds, and maybe heroics, challenge modes or scenarios to get your 6000 valor points.

Of course, this can’t replace the legendary items for top-notch guilds (and I hope Blizzard will continue to introduce legendary weapon in future patches). But for the others ? For all the players out there who know in advance that they won’t be able to get the new legendary weapon because they aren’t part of a hardcore raiding guild ? Well, for all these players, the Wrathion questline really have a legendary fell in my opinion.

Fireland is great. Or is it really ?

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Be warned, this is going to be a rant post. Small thinks that bugs me in Firelands and 4.2, things that don’t allow me to enjoy the new content as much as I’d like. Anyway, feel free to leave if you really love Firelands and wouldn’t like to have your pleasure ruined by someone who noticed boring flaws.

Want to /suicide each time I look at Skada…

First, there is this thing about resto shaman feeling useless while healing with a resto druid. That isn’t just me, many shaman feel that way. When you do your best at using all your skill in the best possible way, reforge all your spirit away to have BIGGER HEALS, and still can’t manage to do more than 70%-80% of your fellow holy paladin and resto druid on a normal fight, you don’t feel very well. OK, when your raid is doing it wrong and damage is crazy, resto shaman healing is great… until the raid inevitably wipes. But what’s the purpose of being able to heal a lot when you know it’s going to be a wipe anyway ? (like, when the upper team is dead on Beth’tilac…). At least, you know you CAN do it. And you try to persuade yourself than you’re here when the raids needs you, with your mastery @save-the-raid-from-certain-death, but knowing the raid don’t really needs you most of the time is still sad.

Then there was that random crap on Rhyolith

Last time, we tried Rhyolite (or Riz au Lait, as we like to call him) for the second night, and it was a complete disaster. First, we felt like melees managed the driving better: no more lava drinking. But then, we felt like we couldn’t beat bad RNG. We had volcano spawn at inconvenience places, Riz au Lait activating volcanoes he just passed.

Like one time, just on the beginning of the fight, Riz au Lait spawn 2 volcanoes in front of him, one just on the right, and one just on the left. As Riz au Lait came closer and closer to the lava, we decided to make him turn right. Of course, the second he passed the left volcano, he decided to activate it.

Or these time, where volcanoes where all on one another, and Riz au Lait had 10 stacks of Molten Armor…

Ok, that’s just Murphy’s law, I suppose we could handle it if we just get better handling the whole fight.

But then, there was that completely random move from Riz au Lait. He turned 50° in one step, stopped for his stamping, and turned 50° again on the next step. And the gauge wasn’t even full or even near to full!

That seemed so omg volcanoes are random, Riz au Lait driving is random. Why the hell are we just trying to kill a boss where everything is complete random crap?

Plus there are all these urban legends on this boss. Maybe you can avoid the bumping thing if you jump at the right time. Maybe you should avoid dots on the feets. Maybe you should dot both feets. Maybe Riz au Lait’s direction depends on damage done to each feet. Or maybe Riz au Lait’s direction depends on number on hits on each feet. It seems like none really knows. Well, maybe hard core guilds know how it works, but it seems like they either don’t want to talk about their finding before they kill him on heroic mode or don’t have the time to talk about it before they kill Heroic Ragnaros.

Well, I like this boss, because the mechanisms is new and different. But it seems buggy, no one really knows how it works, and while the encounter journal is comprehensive on other bosses, it’s widely lacking for Riz au Lait. Molten Armor isn’t even mentionned in there!

/bored about doing 25-man fights in a 10-man raid

All these add boss where you have to divide dps on 2 or more different tasks seems so much better tuned for 25 man, and much more complicated in 10-man. In 10-man, 1 dps is 1/6 to 1/5 of your total damage. In 25-man, one dps is 1/16 to 1/18 or your total damage. You can easily fine-tune the dps assignment so that everything is dpssed down at the rate it should. Plus if you want to do one boss with one more tank, you only loose a small part of you your raid damage.

In a 10-man raid, fine-tuning dps assignment is much harder. Lets take an obvious example. On Beth’tilac, 4 things must be dpssed down at the same time: Beth’tilac, the drone, the spinners, and the small spiders. If you put one dps on each task, you have one free agent left. But one dps on each task is not enough sometimes. In a 25-man raid, you can have 4 dps on each task, and you can fine-tune it by moving one dps here and there.

So, the random 10-man dps has to handle multiple tasks at the same time, whereas the random 25-man dps can focus on one single task. He needs more awareness, more reactivity, more autonomy than a random 25-man dps.

10-man are harder on the raid leader, because decisions are harder to make and choices are limited. 10-man are harder on each member because they need to handle many tasks at the same time, whereas in a 25-man raid you can assign a single task to each dps (or, at least to the people who can’t handle multiple tasks).

Final ranting: I’m doing it wrong too!

There was a bit on ranting on the blogosphere lately about the need to do things you don’t like, bet it farming dailies or heroics to cap your weekly valor points. As Windsoar, I’m doing it wrong. I don’t do heroics anymore because I hate that. I already spend 30 to 50 minutes each day doing Molten Front dailies and not leveling my toon of the moment, I’m not going to spend another hour doing something I already did 15+ times. Farming valor points in T11 was ok : the instances were still fairly new and they still could be a bit of a challenge (at least if you did the Zandalari random in 4.1). But now, I did these instances a lot, and there isn’t any difficulty left.Plus, my play time available to do instances is limited, be it with Zahia or with an alt.

I wish Blizzard could be inventive for that, and find a new way to obtain valor points for raiding toons, without having to run the same old instance again, and again, and again. Like, there could be a chance to get valor points from Fireland trashes. Or Molten Front daily quests could award a chest, were you would have a chance to find valor points. Or they could have added the Zandalari instances and Fireland at the same time, so that all the useless valor points I got while doing the new troll instances would have served buying my T12 set, instead of some crap for my offspec.

But I don’t think Blizzard will do that ever. For the Looking for Dungeon tool to be successful, there needs to be enough people queuing for these instances, otherwise it takes too long to find a group. So, they must be pretty happy with how valor points currently work, because it allow the LFD to work well, and casual players can do dungeons, get new gear at each new patch, and they still wish to play the game and pay their subscription.

But still, for casual raiding guilds, with casual raiders, this system is complete crap. I don’t even want to know in how many weeks I am going to get my T12 valor pieces while killing 2 bosses each week (that is, Shannox and Baratin Hold)

Short Strategy: 7 steps to Omnotron

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These short strategy posts aim at explaining each T11 fight with the less possible words and phrases, focusing on what is important only. These should be especially useful for someone wanting to explain a fight in a pick up raid.

Roles and Positionning:

Spread out when Electron is active, else you better stay close from each other to help healers.
Don’t let any boss (generally it’ll spawn under Arcanotron) stand in the pink puddle

Fight!

Stop all damage on current boss (switch to the next one) when energy bar drops to 50% and for 10 seconds after that.
Interrupt Arcanotron Arcane Annihilator
Lighting Rod target stand away from anyone else
Kite, slow down and kill the slimes (named Poison Bomb) that spawn at Toxitron feets
The target of Magmatron red ray should position herself so that there is nobody on the line going from Magmatron to her.

Additionnal tip:

As usual, don’t stand in the bad! That includes the green cloud. But you can stand in the pink puddle, and should stand in it whenever possible (that is, don’t stack in it when Electron is active)

Short strategy: 6 steps to Magmaw

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When explaining a fight strategy to a raid, you need to be as short as possible. Otherwise, you’ll loose the attention from people already knowing the fight, and people who don’t know it won’t remember whats really important about the boss after a 5 minutes explanation.

With the 4.2 nerf bat, we may see a lot more pug raids going into the tier 11 raids, and you, me, anybody could be in one of these raids and have to explain the fights (may it because you’re the lead or because the raid leader has no clue about what a raid leader is supposed to do). In these pick up raids, it’s especially important to be concise while explaining the strategy. Plus you may not be on vent and have to use raid chat.

That’s why I start this series of short strategy posts. I’ll aim at explaining each T11 fight with the less possible words and phrases, focusing on what is important only. These short posts should suit me as I don’t have the commitment to write long posts with screenshots and all that at the moments, but still am sad to completely give up with this blog.

Let’s start with Magmaw :

Roles and positionning :

Only one tank.
Every body stand in melee range except one ranged dps standing at max range. (let’s call him the kiter)
2 dps jump on Magmaw’s head when available and use the chain on the peak before Magmaw

You're lucky this time, you've got a map too !

Fight !

Kiter dodge the fire pillar (and eventually kite the worms that’ll spawn on the pillar location)
All range dps kill the worms when they spawn on the kiter position and slow them
Whole raid dodge the smokes when needed (go to the tank position)

Additional tip :

Tank use cooldowns while eaten (not needed if your tank and healers are good enough, but you never know in a pug raid…)

That’s all. 6 simple steps to kill Magmaw. Let’s see if I can do better for the other bosses…

One Toehold into Cataclysm raiding

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Pick up Addicts killed Magmaw

I thought I wouldn’t post about my guild’s raid kills, but finally I’m quite proud of having killed Magmaw last night and I want to share!

This kill really feels like we’ve achieved something. I know, this boss isn’t hard and most of you must already have kill him. But for us, it’s not that easy.

Pick up Addicts was our alt guild on Vol’jin, and we turned it into a casual raiding guild for Cataclysm. Our first raid was 3 weeks ago. We’re a guild of RL friends and vanilla players coming back after a 4 year break, and we’re raiding once a week. Without spoilers. Some of us are pretty new players and their first raid was our first raid. We don’t have a full roster yet and run with 1-2 PUGs recruted on trade each night¹. And yet, after one and a half night on Magmaw, we managed to figure out a strat by ourself and kill him.

By the way, if you’re interested by raiding with a casual guild on a french server, we’re looking for a few players. You can visit our forum or contact me here, on twitter or via the contact form ↩

Fail Hard Mode ICC

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I was hanging in Dalaran on my resto Shaman a few weeks ago when I saw an announce for an ICC HM and Wyrm achievements. It was made by a DK named Spärtiate. I should have been more more careful seeing a name like that. But I already have most ICC normal mode achievements and I’d like very much doing a few HM, so I whisper him with my Glory of the Icecrown raider. I got an invite asap. He didn’t asked for my gearscore. I found that a bit suspicious, being on a server where you’re asked for a minimal gearscore for Naxx or Vault of Archavon. But as I’m not a gearscore fan myself and don’t have the addon I didn’t care.

When entering Icecrown a few minutes later, I saw the raid had already killed 5 bosses. Again, I didn’t care. I was just happy for not having to do these 4 first bosses again. I should have realize that a raid which have only killed 5 bosses on his first night was obviously not ready for killing more bosses on HM.

We began killing trash, and after 3 minutes we already have 2 death. The 2 other healers aggroed the skelettals on Precious and didn’t manage to keep themselves alive. The first dying was the disc priest. Fade, Pain Suppression, anyone ? I said to my hubby “Great, the 2 others healers just died on Precious, it’s off to a bad start.”

We finally manage our way to Rotface. Our only disease dispeller was the disc priest.

“I must dispell ? Omg I never did that! How should I do ? When do I have to dispel ?”

In my opinion the best answer would have been “asap”, as I prefer taking a bit of damage from the little ooze than having to heal people through the healing debuff of the disease. And dispelling people when they get to the ooze kiter is not easy if the dispeller never did this before. (Has he ever killed Rotface?? Again, another clue : this priest didn’t obviously have his place in a HM ICC)

But the raid leader didn’t answer “asap” :

Raid Leader : “Dispel when the guy get near the tank kiting the big ooze.”

Priest : “How do I know when the guy get near the tank ?”

Raid Leader : “Tank kitting the big ooze will announce when you can dispel.”

Tank kiting the big ooze : “My microphone don’t work.”

Raid leader : “Make a macro to announce “decurse” in raid. (the RL kept saying decurse, and people corrected me in chat when I spoke about dispelling instead…)”

Tank kiting the big ooze : “How do I make a macro ?”

/facepalm

That’s what I should have done. And leave the raid too, my Saturday night was not completely ruined yet. But I didn’t. I was full of hope and thought we still could beat HM Rotface.

After the raid leader made a step by step explanation about how to make a macro, we pulled. Everything went ok. Until I got the disease. And died. No shield. I Riptied myself. I was at about 2% hp when I was finally dispelled. I stopped and tried to heal myself, but the big ooze just walked on me before my heal could land. The raid wiped a few seconds later.

Someone said on Vent : “There are out of range issue, healers need to be dispatched in the room in order to heal everyone”. WTF? Healers were supposed to stand on Rotface in the center on the room. People would have to hug the wall in order to be out of range (and still, I’m not sure if they’d go out of range this way). When I died, I sure wasn’t out of range of the other healers.

Second try. The raid leader kept shouting “more threat more threat” on Vent. The tank kiting the big ooze probably thought this was for him because he stopped kiting to strike the big ooze in melee. And died. Wipe again.

Third try. I got diseased first. I went to the kiting tank while casting Riptide on myself. Again, no shield, late dispel. The Rejuv + Lifebloom (Lifebloom not on tank ? WTF?) from the druid weren’t enough to keep me alive. Admittedly Rotface was vomiting on me at the same time, but still. There isn’t anything to heal at this time of the fight.

I explained on /raid that the priest had to cast shield on diseased people, otherwise they just die. And I say that he should better dispel asap than wait for kiter’s macro. Biiiig mistake. I didn’t know it yet but the priest was friend with the raid leader (possibly even his girl friend). At this point, the raid leader started to hate me. And if we wiped, if was because I didn’t talk on vent¹ and instead wrote on /raid. Gni ? Did the priest wait for people to ask for shields on Vent in order to heal?

Thus, the raid leader switched to normal mode, and we tried the Rotface achievement instead. The raid leader took 5 minutes to place people around the room, because of healing range issue. Again ? My heals are 40 yards range, not yours ? And when people get into place in the room, I finally understood these range issues. People where effectively hugging the walls. And stayed in the green goo. And with such high range between people, we still managed to have a big ooze. Guess why ? The priest came in melee range when he had the disease…

We still manage the achievement, and went to Putricide. The raid leader was realistic and stayed in normal mode. None of the tank had ever done the abomination thing, but one of them was eager to try. The raid leader explained to him the only thing he had to do was to eat the green goo, and we began.

Nobody announced the Unstable Experiment. Ranged dps were only a few yards away from the green ooze when it popped. And apparently the dps weren’t really fast to switch target. After 2 explosions the ooze was still at 20% hp.

On the second experiment a warlock was targeted. Instead of kitting the Cloud Gas, he dpsed, ran a few seconds then stopped to dps again. He was hit twice by the Gas Cloud.

But that wasn’t our biggest problem. Before the 3rd experiment, the room looked like this :

Hurrah green pool!

The abomination tank was just eating once or twice on each slime puddle. Then switched to a new one, even if the first was still there.

The slime problem was resolved, and we managed to kill him on second try, even if the experiment management was still disastrous. We head over to the blood princes to do the achievement where you must not be hit by more than 23K damage at once.

The Raid Leader tactic was brilliant for this one : Shields on everyone. Apparently he thought damage absorbed was not considered as damage. But I couldn’t verify this theory as even with shields people took huge amounts of damage.

First, his healing assignment, were great : one healer heals both tanks. And the healer was me, the less mobile of all healers. I said that it wasn’t very sensible because of range reasons. But he replied to me than if I did know how to play, this weren’t a problem. So, on Rotface the healers can’t heal people 20 yards away but on Princes Council it’s not a problem to heal 2 tanks 100 yards away from each other… And I guess you absolutely need 2 healers to keep the raid alive because you know, we’re not supposed to take a lot of damage.

And effectively, range wasn’t a huge problem. I could stand in the middle most of the time and Keleseth tank stayed in range. This could explain why he only had 2 Nuclei on him at best (at one time in the middle of the fight he even hadn’t any!), and got almost one-shot.

But this wasn’t the only strange thing. I always did Blood Prince with melee and range people getting near the ball of flames to discharge its energy so that the target isn’t hit by too much. This night I was the only one trying to do that.

The hunter kept relying on his pet to keep Kinetic Bombs up, and his pet kept diyng, resulting in many Kinetic Bomb explosions.

And people didn’t seem to understand how Empowered Vortex worked. I was standing far rein anyone else at most time, and I kept seeing people coming and hugging me when the vortex was casted…

We killed the council, but as you can guess the achievement was a long forgotten dream. We head over to the Blood Queen. And guess what ? The raid leader switched to heroic mode again…

This was a carnage. The raid leader kept shouting “more threat” on vent, and died after taking aggro for the umpteenth time. The raid leader didn’t make any healing assignment, and I didn’t asked because I was really bored of being answered “you’re bad, I know your class better than you do” each time I said something. This result at melee being constantly topped, and me having to use single target heals on ranged people (very effective way to use a shaman, whereas disc priest and druid main healing spells are single target heals, but who cares?). People lifes kept droping and there was no way to make these going up again. Of course, the druid didn’t use Tranquility. She seems to only use this spell to top off people after rezzing the raid. Yes I’m speaking about out of combat rez after a wipe.

I died near the beginning of the fight. I ankhed, used all of my regen tools, and even casted lighting bolts on the boss to regen via Telluric Currents ². We were approaching the enrage timer when I was the target of Pact of the Darkfallen with the same warlock who didn’t care about kiting Gas Cloud. This time, he was too focus on dpsing the boss (omg 30 sec left to kill the last 10% !!) to move even a toe. And the 2 other healers were too oom to heal me. WTF ? I died during the fight, used my least efficient spells because someone else was doing the duty I was good at, and still I manage to have more mana than the other 2 at the end ?

The queen was at 3% when the raid wiped.

At this time, I was offered a place in another raid, so I quit. I suppose I’m on the BL of the full raid by now, but I suppose I’d prefer not to group with them again anyway. I don’t generally quit raids like that, but this was just a pitiful raid, and they were being mean to me ever since my comment on the disc priest on Rotface.

I’m completely clueless when it comes to configuring my microphone, resulting in nobody being able to heal me when I speak ↩
It’s the first time I used Telluric Currents in case of emergency and it’s very effective, especially during bloodlust as it’s easier to manage free GCD to dps ↩