Status update!

My monk finally blew past my paladin and she's lvl 90 now. So that ended the long, painful grind of leveling and begun the long, painful grind for gear and rep.

While there were definitely some good gear out there to be gotten from completing quest chains, that's not me. I'm all about instances, so I slammed those and finally, this past week, got every piece of gear at ilvl 450 and above. The only one that's not above is my alchemist trinket.

That's good enough to get back into some raiding, so this week with the guild, I jumped into some LFR and got 4 new pieces of gear out of it. It was pretty nice to raid again, even if LFR has serious nerfs and most of the mechanics can be safely ignored. Either way, our raid lead explained many of the mechanics as we went along and some of them were pretty interesting. So I look forward to encountering them in a real raid.

In the meantime, I've been helping guildies get leveled and geared. One of my real life friends is still struggling to 90, so I spent several hours blowing her through instances. Another one was trying to get sufficient gear to make it into that LFR group, so we spent the better part of two days doing nothing but heroics and I picked me up a pretty decent set of healing gear along the way. The two of us switched off between tanking and healing (both monks), and I realized something embarrassing: I'd leveled all the way to 90, spent several weeks at that level and had never once realized that I had a ranged AOE threat building ability. It completely slipped by me that I had Dizzying Haze. I'd always charged in and used Keg Smash and Spinning Crane Kick. Never had a problem.

After hitting 90, I also went ahead and leveled my Alchemy/Herbalism. I've gotten my cooking up, and still haven't really started Archaeology, First Aid, or Fishing.

The transmogrification feature is also new since I quit. I hadn't really looked at it too much, but most of the helmets for monks are UGLY to put it nicely. So I finally did get a nice looking Samurai style helmet I like. I need to sit down and really explore some other options.

I did go back last night and start playing my original character, the priest. I have a few friends that play alliance, so it would be nice to be able to play with them, so I think I'll finish up that character at some point.

Random fact: I still have a level 5 rogue that was the first character ever created on my account. I didn't create it. My ex-girlfriend did when she was getting addons configured for me. I've never deleted it. She long since quit playing, but when I popped on my priest, she was online. We chatted for a bit. Can't believe that was 5 years ago. Can't believe I still have the little rogue.

Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms - Thoughts

Looks like Blizzard has announced another new feature for the 4.1 patch. It's the Call To Arms for the dungeon finder which offers bonus rewards for people that queue as the least represented role (tank/healer/dps) to help reduce wait times.

Cool idea but I don't actually see this being a good move. I think it's simply going to increase problems I've already seen, namely, people queuing for rolls for which they're not properly geared, spec'd, or proficient.

A few weeks ago, I was healing an instance in which the tank was simply taking ridiculous amounts of damage. Crits were landing for half his total health left and right. Additionally, he couldn't hold any aggro. I inspected him to see that he dropped all his points in the prot tree, and was wearing about half pvp gear, some healing gear, and only one actual tanking piece. He'd never tanked before and only queued because he "wanted fast queues".

Unfortunately, the timer prevented us from kicking his ass out of the group so we agreed in whispers to let him pull, not heal him or get engaged in combat, and let him break all his gear and hopefully rageface enough he to drop group. It eventually worked.

While this was a pretty extreme example, I've seen it several times. People think that PVP gear = tanking gear because it has tons of stam and that tank threat = dps. It doesn't.

And it's not just tanks. When not healing, I'm very curious to see how priest healers break down their healing. Using Recount, I can see just how much of their healing is made up by what spells and I think most priests are doing it dead wrong. There's a ton out there that are still using Flash Heal as their primary heal and burning through their mana in 30 seconds. Bzzt. Wrong. Sure, you'll probably keep the tank up pretty well in that time, but you're wasting your party's time having to stop to drink after every pull. Additionally, those healers are lucky to have enough mana for longer, boss fights in which they're blowing every cooldown and requiring tanks to do the same. Big cooldowns (Lay on Hands, Last Stand, etc...) are generally considered "oh shit!" buttons. Not "my healer sucks" buttons.

Players that really don't know how to play a particular role can't be stopped from doing it, but this new system looks like it will encourage them.

In some ways, I don't mind this: Hopefully they'll learn quickly, or go read up on how to play, or someone in the group will give them some friendly tips. However, I also know from my experience both in game and out, that telling people they need to improve at something or what they're doing is wrong is something they don't take kindly too.

For example: Shadow priests have had the ability to cast Mind Sear on friendly party members since the last major patch. But I frequently see them casting it on enemies, which reduces the number of targets it will hit for an already underpowered spell. I generally remind them they should channel it off the tank if they're going to bother casting it at all (they can do more dps single targeting currently). The last time I tried this, I was met with a curt, "STFU! I kno how 2 play".

Obviously not.

Again, getting people to try out new things is awesome. It gives the game variety that will hopefully help to keep players entertained and keep playing.

So by all means, Blizzard should give the carrot of rewards gold, gear, and pet bonuses that the Call to Arms feature promises. But as with other things, there should also be a stick.

What I'd really like to see is Blizzard put in a ranking system where players were given a brief "thumbs up/thumbs down" for each member of their party after a random instance. Players that suck and get voted down repeatedly would be punished by getting pushed further down on the queue next time.

The problem with this would be that some players just have a hard time because they're not sufficiently geared. For example, a tank that is absolutely awesome, when first transitioning to heroics would likely suddenly find his rating dropping as people blame him for wipes that were simply caused by not having sufficient skill. Thus, there should be another factor: Some sort of algorithm that included the gear level appropriateness for the particular instance (and perhaps the gear type as well which could knock people for thinking that they're a PVP tank).

So while I think the idea is an OK one, I worry about the side effects. It may fix queue times, but I think it's also going to bring a lot of stupid players out of the wings and into the spotlight.

Holy Heroics

I changed my healing spec to Holy this past week on the advice of a guildie. Keeping a tank up as Discipline was still pretty easy, but Disc lacked any ability to heal DPS without having the tank lose a huge chunk of HP or have to use mana inefficient spells.

With the changes made to Holy, introducing Chakra states, it's become more viable as a tank healing spec for heroics but still is strong with party healing. For those not familiar with the Chakra system the idea of it is that you cast your Chakra, then the next healing spell you cast puts you in one of two Chakra states for the next 30 seconds.

If it's a direct healing spell, you get 10% additional healing from all direct healing and the basic heal refreshes your renew. If it's an AOE heal, then it reduces the CD of our instant cast heal by 2 seconds (out of 8 so 25%) as well as improving our renew's overall healing. So one state is meant for tank healing and one is meant for AOE. And since you can switch between these every 30 seconds, it's made Holy a very flexible spec that's a lot of fun to play.

There's a few other procs that we get too. From our talent tree, we get Serendipity which turns our Greater Heal into a pretty fast cast. Generally, Greater Heal is not great for mana efficiency (Flash = 2.4, Greater = 3.3, Heal = 3.8), but since Serendipity also decreases mana cost, it becomes the most mana efficient non-CD spell we have! This is pretty awesome and since I tend to take an extra second to react to standing in things since I'm staring at health bar, I tend to use Binding Heal a lot, so it's up pretty often.

Surge of Light is another nifty proc that helps a lot. Instant cast, free, big heal? Yes please! Oh, and it procs Serendipity. Cute little chain reaction there.

The last pretty sweet new thing Holy Priests have gotten is our Power Words. The normal mode for this is a strong instant cast DPS spell on worthlessly long CD. But depending on our Chakra state, it can change one of two ways. The first is into Holy Word: Serenity. It changes into this when entering the Chakra state corresponding to the direct heals. This is a pretty large (~10k) heal that's also super cheap, and instant cast! Moderately long CD, but factored into the longer run of keeping a tank up, this is a pretty good boost.

In the Chakra state that goes with AOE heals, it becomes Holy Word: Sanctuary which is a ground targeted spell that drops a healing zone. The zone apparently spreads past the visible boundary but falls off quickly beyond there. I can see this helping a pretty good deal on Assad in Vortex Pinnacle. A lot of players don't like to move too much after the grounding field so chain lightning takes its toll. Popping some AOE heals while everyone's in the next field tops them off well and this well help greatly.

Another bit of coolness we get: Body and Soul. Shield someone and they move 60% faster for 4 seconds. One of the absolute hardest fights in heroic right now seems to be Ozruk from Stonecore. Just after doing his AOE stun he does his shatter. The tank barely has sufficient time to get far enough away to get out of range before, generally being one shot. The timing on this has been pretty glitchy and seems to depend very heavily on the lucky coincidence of the DOT they apply to themselves to break the stun happening just after the stun goes off, giving the maximum time to run. If you're unlucky, you can lose nearly a full second of run time and the tank is doomed. If a healer with Body & Soul can break themselves quickly and toss the shield on the tank, the extra move speed will help them make up for lost time.

Lastly, we now get Inspiration. With a good deal of crit (I'm currently sitting at 9.34%), this can be pretty much kept up continuously. While it's only physical damage, it's still a pretty huge chunk. Since it's a percentage, that means it scales with damage, not your gear! And since a lot of what a tank takes is physical, this is pretty amazing for us.

Overall, the whole field of Holy healing has changed. There's a lot more buttons we have to press and a lot more to think about, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's given us some great adaptability and the result is a fun and flexible build.

I still want to stay shadow as my primary raid spec, but I'm not entirely against the guild needing me for healing now.

Meanwhile, heroics have started to become tolerable again. I'm still dropping about 25% of them within the first 10 minutes when tanks think that AOE pulling and not watching CC's is a good idea, or when some scrub in full PVP gear waltzes in and expects to get carried when they're only doing 3k dps but we can't kick him due to the vagaries of the whole voting to kick system.

I'm managed everything except Deadmines on heroic now. Ripsnarl kills us every time, mostly due to poor DPS. I haven't tried it yet as Holy, but I'm suspecting I'll be able to keep people up much better and make up for their mistakes than as Disc. Time will tell.