You bring the sword, I'll bring the shield

Since the launch of 3.3, Four Lights has been pushing through new content in the form of 5 mans and 25 mans. (We tend to clear 25 then come back and worry about 10.) I must say that I think we've got some wins and some fails when it comes to the fight mechanics. A few remarks from what I've seen as a healer so far. ICC 25 post to follow.

Forge of Souls

To be honest, we tackled 5 man FoS (heroic) first to start the chain. It was a guild run with some of our best geared and talented players. I didn't really learn much from it due to the fact that we blitzed through so fast that I didn't even get a good chance to see what the bosses abilities were supposed to do. Going in blind for the initial run I used the shield and topped technique and the bosses were dead before they could do, well, whatever it was they were supposed to do. The last boss. Devourer , does have a nasty beam you need to steer clear of (think Mimron's barrage) but other than that we found it to be pretty pitiful. It's a huge dungeon with very little to do.

Pit of Saron

We tried to continue the quest line only to have the servers die on us and we called it eventually. I picked up the new PUG system to continue onward the following day. Pretty basic, don't stand in shit, stay away from anything the boss outputs. The 2nd boss in the Pit is the hardest. It also didn't help that it glitched a few times causing our PUG to wipe. Players MUST stay behind the saronite boulder the boss throws down, out of LoS, until the debuff wears off. Healing this was tough because 1) I had an all melee group, and 2) they were too eager to get back to DPSing that they jumped the gun on letting the debuff stacks not wear off. Add to this several glitches of boulders not showing up and there's your wipes. The successful try was closer than I'd like for comfort. Shields were up as often as possible and a penance CD on the tank with PoM and a renew seemed to hold him while everyone ducked for cover. The biggest problem here is LoS works both ways. Players running for cover need shielded and healed up as soon as they come back to the saronite boulder. Definitely a range friendly fight. The final boss is a pushover. Kite him around, shield your raid and collect loot. Easy sauce.

Halls of Reflection

The 3rd and final in the chain. This was surprising fun. I like when cut scenes interact with action/combat in a run. Maybe that's why I like CoS so much. The biggest worry you have here is that your tank can grab and hold AoE threat. Staying in the entrance door will give you some LoS advantages. As a healer, the waves will start coming. (Think VH only faster and more.) If there's a mage mob it will target your healer and blast away. I waited a few seconds for the tank to pick them up (to no avail) then I simply shackled them. As the later waves come, depending on your DPS, you may find CDs are necessary. I used pain suppression on our tank towards the end. Probably didn't need to. I also found that hugging a wall (right or left) would keep the mages out of LoS of you as well and helped a little. That's the hard part. The rest is a cakewalk. Just keep players topped and the occasional shield and run like a girl from the Lich King (because apparently he is incapable of "running" after you.)

Sorry about the gap in posting

Well now, where was I? Oh yes, healing my ass off through progression in 3.2. Let's see, in all that time, so much has changed. Where to begin?

Well, first things first I guess. I've been asked to take the helm of the priestly ways in my guild - aka step up and be the priest class leader. I graciously accepted and have been chugging along smoothly as class lead for a while now. I've also switched my raiding spec to Discipline from Holy. As patch 3.2 approached, I was doing a lot of research on bosses, damage, and how it all compared to our current raiding set up. At the time our only raiding Discipline priest, who also happened to be our Guild Master, wanted to change to his DK - a role that he had planned to fill prior to this but our need for healers at the launch of WotLK derailed this. As his Disc Priest stepped down from raiding, I felt that the guild needed a Disc priest to help us through 3.2 content and the damage mitigation it brings. So I made the leap to Disc. More on that later.

I managed to win the guild anniversary raffle of a Meking Engineer's Chopper and picked up my first 310% mount from the Ulduar 10 man hard mode clear.

To date, the guild has cleared all of the content of 3.2 up to 3/5 of ToGC 25. We're ranked #3 Alliance guild on the server (yes, our server is a bit behind) and #8 on the realm itself.

Raiding has been demanding. So much so that I often find myself asking if it's even fun for me anymore. Progression nights are hard - no doubt about that. But the feeling you get from downing a new boss and the distinction it brings knowing that your healing team got the job done is just what a gamer lives for.

Pay attention, there will be a quiz

I've posted a few raid kills to you tube, of which you can find the channel here. From those I've been getting a ton of emails asking about my audio notifications and how to set them up. Because of this, I've decided to do a short "how to" video series on how you go about setting up these things with MiK Scrolling Battle Text. I give you part 1 and 2:

Priest Best-In-Slot

Wismac over at /Heal has posted a B.I.S list for holy priest. Go check it out. Now.

Say what?

This is a short demo of my lvl 80 holy priest and the spoken audio alerts for cool down timers in WoW. The addon is MiK Scrolling Battle Text with multiple triggers setup for visually showing cooldown text. You can also set it to play a custom sound of your own which I generated by going to AT&T online Text to Speech creator (free http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php ) and it will generate a sound file for you. Marry the two together and this is what you get. I have this for nearly all spells - offensive and healing, as well as pvp.

It's not wack-a-mole. Think of it as "tag"

First let me just get this out of the way. In my opinion, light well is not a wasted talent IF it's used correctly. So throughout my time as healer, I've spec'd it, other builds in TBC I chose not to. Now with the improvement on it, I've picked it up again. I've found that it creates a cheap "buy yourself time" healing source - especially if one is assigned to raid healing. (I tend to drop one next to casters and ranged dps.)

My pet peeve (and point), is that people don't seem to understand that one click will buff you with a powerful HoT and that there's not really a need to click 10 times thinking that each click will heal you. I can't tell you how many times I've dropped a LW for a raid/party only to have one person use the whole thing in 2 seconds.

I would argue that the best possible use of a LW is during repositioning when a raider runs by, clicks once for the HoT and keeps on running as if to say, "tag, you're it." We must rid our raiders of the "I have to click this until the cog icon goes away" mentality.

My guild respects the LW and knows how to use it - mainly because our healers communicate with the guild via our forums, but throw one down in a PUG and it's like digital crack.

Don't even get me started on people who click on it before the fight even starts.

In the beginning

I've been thinking quite a bit about how to launch the maiden post for this new blog and have decided it best to explain why I've undertaken this effort. For nearly 5 years I've been actively playing WoW, building up an arsenal of toons along the way. I, like many of you, shake my head in disbelief when I type "/played". A small part of my real life dies each time I do that. But nonetheless, I march on, crafting my players, learning the game mechanics, adapting to each new patch/patch of bugs. You could say that my addiction to this game, (which I have to often remind myself that it IS just a game) has led my drive for progression - and strive for perfection.

My WoW-life began as a lonely rogue, leveling up with only the skin off my mob kills. Soon, I had manipulated the rogue into a deadly killing machine and found my niche in PVP. I was determined to understand how to kill each class. I wanted to know their strengths and weaknesses. How do I counter each move? What do I do if they counter mine? Thus, a monster was created. I began a toon of each class, and leveled them up, learning their skill sets and rotations, talents and not to mention professions along the way. I altered specs along the way. My druid went feral, then resto so I understood the mechanics of druid heals. The shammy was no different. Hell, I even enjoyed tanking and it made me a better player because I understood what it takes to build agro and when to use my cool downs.

But it was then that I discovered my true calling - priest healing. With a priest, I could hold the balance of an entire party in the palm of my hand. It felt good to be getting compliments from my group members. "Great heals" they'd say. I'd never heard that before on my rogue. Nobody ever says, "nice job hitting the boss". Perhaps the most gratifying feat is really coming through to save some one's ass. Sure, they screwed up and pulled agro, but they're still alive because of you - and they know it.

Of course all of these would have been extremely difficult without the support of a quality guild. Via real life friends, I've managed to find myself in one of the most supportive, mature, no-nonsense guilds on my server and that's where I flourished. As time past and expansion packs released, the call for experienced healers went out and I decided that it was time for me to see the content my old guild couldn't allow me to see. As any respectable player who has but friendships with their guild would do, I thanked everyone for the experiences I had with them and kindly parted ways for a more experienced raiding guild. It was the top server guild, but that also wasn't what I was looking for. I'll take stability, drama-less, mature, focused, and personable guilds over progression any day.

So I guess that brings us up to today. We focus on 25 man content (10 man is free for us to organize amongst ourselves) and are currently making our way through Ulduar. We've downed 9/14 and are very close to 10 having cleared all content prior to 3.1, including 3D. We work well as a team but like any progression guild we stumble once in a while. The important thing now is that we keep getting back up and that we all keep enjoying the game. In the end, life if too short to continue playing something you don't enjoy. And when that happens, I'm calling wipe.