Not a Cata post

Spend two minutes on the blogroll today and you’re likely to find 87 posts talking about the announced Cataclsym changes. I’m not going to repost them here for three big reasons.

1) You can find them somewhere else in about 30 seconds.

2) We have no clue if/when they will go live with Cata.

3) They don’t do anything for me today.

I’m not alone

It seems like I’m not the only one who thinks that the new Holy Paladin columnist at WoW.com was the wrong bloke for the gig. Kurn, over at Kurn’s Corner, has some pretty substantial rants about Mr. Christian – you should check them out for yourself. I had considered applying for the part, but since I was tanking full time I thought better of it. Having read some of his latest posts though, I really wish I had. I’m fairly certain that the only useful thing I took away from his posts was the mouseover macro.

You don’t need to be at 100%

Most raid/heroic damage is fairly predictable, especially if you’re using a boss mod and have any kind of situational awareness. There are also few bosses where the environmental/raid damage is so high that you don’t have any kind of breathing room whatsoever. Your average raider already sports 20k+ HP, so as long as they are topped off BEFORE the big nasty hits – they should be able to live long enough for a quick heal to get them safe.

That’s right – get them safe.

Let’s take Sindragosa for example. Throughout the fight raiders take assorted damage from debuffs – which conveniently show up on Grid (or your UF of choice I assume) so you can see who’s going to be taking a big spike when they fall off. You also probably have that one person who just can’t quite get far enough away from Sin during her pull in/AOE fun times. So what do you do?

Personally I use those moments for the following actions.

· Re-apply my judgement and get a free melee swing in for mana regen purposes.

· Refresh BoL and SS on the tank.

· Holy Shock anyone who is low, if I get a crit I’ll use my instant FoL on the tank to get a HoT rolling (if it’s falling off).

· Hold my mouse over our newest raider, just in case she’s a little slow on the run out.

During Phase 3, I don’t try and top off raiders. JoL and CH will take care of that. My only goal is to get them to the 60% range or so – generally one FoL. I use my raid frames to triage, and look for someone who has a significant number of Arcane Buffet stacks, because they could be in trouble.

So yeah – I don’t have a lot of different healing spells per-se, but my eyes are never still.

This is doubly true in heroics. Don’t pitch a fit because you’re at 80% health and you’re a DPS. I guarantee I’m more aware of your health status than you are. Oh, and warlocks who life tap? Make sure you attack my JoL target.

On Blogging the Guild Business

Tam got himself in trouble recently for airing his guild’s dirty laundry, and as a result found himself in a position where he felt the need to server xfer, change his name, and go back to being anonymous. I admire his desire to keep blogging, but I wouldn’t have gone that route. There are three bloggers in our guild of 11 people, and everyone knows about it. I’m not afraid to call someone out in a raid, and I’m not afraid to mention that someone is an idiot on my blog.

Just in case you were curious, I’m Amathalanea of on Bladefist (US). Come get some.

I will kill you if you flag

Another bit of drama, which I found particularly funny, was theerivs from A High Latency Life getting some guild agro for admitting he(she?) ganks people.

I agree with his statement “Red equals dead”, especially on our PvE server. I figure if you’re flagged, you’ve done so semi-volountarily. Either you accepted a PvP quest, ran through a PvP zone, or (as in the case of some poor Paladin I found outside Stonard) you accidently stumbled into it. Either way, you made a choice to flag up. Like those crybabies in WG who get up set that we fly in from high above to crash the party – “Nut up or shut up” (from Woody in Zombieland, but I also swiped this from theerivs post).

Now it’s a little tougher for me to do recently, since I was spec’d Holy/Holy – but I went out and got myself a PvP ret spec over the weekend and had some therapeutic face smashing in AB/WSG. I may suck at PvP, but damn if I don’t have a good time doing it. There’s something truly refreshing about getting a kill shot with a wrist rocket as a mage blinks away.

My point here is that you’ve either chosen to play on a PvP realm, chosen to PvP, or chosen to at least flag yourself. Don’t cry just because someone came and punched your face in.

Roll Need if you want it

I suppose this is just a reflex action, but I’ve been bitten enough times that I’ve considered making a macro for it. When the 3.3.3 notes were announced revealing that Frozo was going to swap your Frozen Orbs for something useful, the number of ninja-needers seemed to skyrocket. That’s fine, we can all roll need. I suppose that if I hit greed on something I was just asking to be taken advantage of. Of course I will also roll need on everything if the run meets any of the following conditions.

· If after declining to help out with any achievements, someone still tries to sneak one in there. Yes, I am that guy who will hop on a green drake in Occ the moment someone says “Everyone just get bronze”.

· Someone drops agro onto me (or the healer) after pulling it. Although if someone pulls agro off me while I’m tanking, I’ll usually toss them a mental salute.

· If I’m forced to put up with jerkwadiness. Yeah, I made that up.

Maybe I need to not run heroics for 6 hours while chain drinking pots of coffee. You tell me.

WTH is with Paladins and their buffs

So I get this whisper in a random heroic I’m healing (the tank is a fellow Paladin). “Wisdom please”. WTF? Wisdom? I look him over and sure enough, he’s not running Sanct on himself – but rather is running Kings. I politely remind him that Sanct gives him everything he needs from Kings (except that tiny bit of Agi) and that running that plus using Divine Plea will cover him – and of course he’d take less damage as well. His response? “I don’t want to use Divine Plea, it reduces the amount of healing I get from my JoL”.

/headdesk

Really? What do you think I’m here for, to hold your cloak?

Final note on guild drama

So Bladefist saw quite a bit of guild drama over the last few weeks. Our raiding alliance died, and they lost some of their top members to us and an Alliance guild. The top Horde 25 man guild fell apart, and the #1/#2 Alliance guild transferred to Proudmore. We upgraded to another guild (Seriously Everkill, killing the relationship was a blessing to us) for our “PUG” 25s – and smoked through 7/12 ICC in about 3 hours. Not bad for a bunch of scrubs (us, not them – those guys were pretty danged awesome).

It may be time to evaluate forming a 25man again to push for the server first 25m Arthas kill. We’ll have to see if my blood-pressure and liver can take it.

Tomorrow – HL vs FoL and INT vs SP