I See what you did there!

Cooldowns: WTF Are Those?

Tue, 24 May 2011 18:34:40 -0400

The term cooldown is defined as a period of wait time before a spell, ability, or item power can be used after a prior spell, ability, or item power. Sometimes referred to by the pseudo-acronym “CD”.(1)

——-

There are several different types of cooldowns available in World of Warcraft including Shared Cooldowns, Global Cooldowns, Item Cooldowns, Internal Cooldowns and Tradeskill Cooldowns.

Shared Cooldowns

Shared Cooldowns happen when one spell, item or ability prevents the usage of others while it is cooling down. For instance using a Crystal Charged Focus will place a Cooldown on your Healthstone. Or using a DPS pot will put a Cooldown on your Mana or Healing potions. Hunter traps also fit under this category.

Global Cooldowns

A global or universal cooldown, frequently shortened to “GCD”, is the cooldown which starts every time you start to cast a spell, and it affects all of your class spells. (2)

There are spells which are the exception to this rule. And I’ve taken the liberty of listing them below.

Death Knight

Anti-Magic Shell
Blood Tap
Dark Command
Death Grip
Empower Rune Weapon
Hysteria
Icebound Fortitude
Lichborne
Mind Freeze
Rune Tap
Vampiric Blood

Druid

Maul
Nature’s Swiftness (druid ability)
Barkskin
Frenzied Regeneration
Survival Instincts
Nature’s Grasp

Hunter

Deterrence
Kill Command
Silencing Shot

Mage

Counterspell
Cold Snap
Combustion
Icy Veins

Paladin

Divine Favor
Hand of Reckoning
Divine Sacrifice

Priest

Inner Focus
Guardian Spirit

Rogue

Cold Blood
Preparation
Evasion
Sprint
Vanish
Kick

Shaman

Nature’s Swiftness (shaman ability)
Elemental Mastery
Wind Shear

Warlock

Fel Domination

Warrior

Bloodrage
Charge
Cleave
Heroic Strike
Intercept
Pummel
Shield Bash
Shield Block
Sweeping Strikes

There are abilities that are affected by the Global cooldown, but they don’t trigger them. Those include:

Hammer of Wrath
Avenging Wrath
Gift of the Naaru
Shadowfury

When to burn a CD?

1.5 sec - GCD - Spammable at will

10 sec - very short - Used as part of a rotation

90 sec - common - usable often

3 min - common - Usable each battle, sometimes several times during a boss fight. (ie. Power Infusion)

10 min - mildly long - usable on most tough miniboss fights. Some of these are used at the request of the raid leader (for example: Heroism/Bloodlust)

30 min - long - usable at calculated times and emergencies. These are also used at the request of the raid leader (for example: Battle Resurrection, Soulstone).

Cooldown Mods

For some of us a Cooldown mod is an important part of our UI. It gives us a heads up notification of when something comes off Cooldown (for instance Battle Resurrection). Below I’ve listed several popular Cooldown monitoring addons.

(1) Source: http://www.wowwiki.com/cooldown

(2) Source: http://www.wowwiki.com/cooldown#Global_cooldown

World of Logs from Kitty's Perspective

Sat, 21 May 2011 01:13:00 -0400

World of Logs: It’s a wonderful raid diagnostic tool. I’ve been using it for both my own personal use and guild/raid use for the last 3 years. I swear by it over Recount and Skada except for on the fly things like Interrupts/Counterspells/Dispells. It’s saved my ass a few times, and it’s gotten the heat off me when a tank complained about not getting any heals. (….he got 342 heals from 4 different healers in the space for 8 seconds and still got roflpwned…but that’s for a different thread.)

I won’t say that World of Logs is a perfect science in of itself. As a discipline priest, I don’t get credit for Power Word: Barrier, and most of my absorbs from Divine Aegis and other absorbing spells don’t translate properly. But when you’re looking at things like who’s hitting what, who’s healing what, How the hell did Vandelay die? and other things it gives a bigger picture of what is going on.

The image above is of our entire evening. Where we were most active, where we were idle, and if you’ve gone into world of logs you can see where Myros casts Time Warp, where Revbem or Ris cast Rebirth on stuff, where our Shamans Ankh etc. Hillariously enough, it even tells you whether or not Myros had a star on his head when he cast Timewarp.

Who Did Damage to What?
I don’t remember ever really harping on this much, I used to more when I was a DPS and not a healer. Looking at it now, it gives you an idea of who stuck to their assigned target, who is switching to adds and doing it well (I could see this being a huge boon back in ICC on heroic Marrowgar). One of the articles I read on this topic over at Runeforge Gossip (http://runeforgegossip.wordpress.com) mentions Yogg-Saron’s Brain Room or even Freya’s Eonar’s Gift.

Who healed what?

Showtek does a rather awesome job of doing healing assignments, it’s pretty easy to tell that it works as long as all healers are on board and are focused on their tasks, and raid leaders aren’t panicking about someone’s target getting low (eyes Jedivh).

Using this as a diagnostic tool is handy to see who is sticking to their assigned target. For instance, if someone was healing Sandor and he died for some stupid reason, we’d look and show that either his assigned healer was off healing the raid instead of his target, or that his assigned healer was focusing on him, but the damage was too much, and know that we would need to assign an additional healer to that tank.

DPS, Damage Done, and Active Time!

On the far right of the Damage Chart is three numbers. 1) DPS 2) number of seconds active and 3) percentage of time active.

1) DPS

- This number is how much damage you’ve done, this doesn’t mean that you’re better than anyone else, it can mean that you got a particularily lucky stretch of crits during a heroism portion your DPS will go up for that portion. The DPS shown for the above screenshot is averaged out over the whole fight, so if you did really solid damage throught the fight, your DPS may potentially be lower than others but your damage done could easily be higher.

2) Active Time

Active time counts the seconds that you are doing damage to the boss/or healing a target. This statistic can be misleading as take for instances classes such as mages who are frequently spending time casting spells will have a lower active time than a melee who is standing next to the boss.

It’s a shitty thing to look at for healers, since it would only count if you were casting heals and that may not necessarily be the most appropriate thing. On some fights if you have a lower active time as a healer it usually means you’re being more conservative with your mana, overhealing less, though as it stands on Heroic: Halfus we all should have at least 100% uptime due to the fact that there is so much damage going out, and people are not being entirely topped off, and we’re still dying to random stuff.

Take for instance Chimaeron. The first portion of the fight we should have fairly high uptime, but at the last 20-ish % we should be either DPSing or not doing anything, since healing has 0 effect at that portion (we’d see higher out of priests as bubbles help immensely on that phase).

Interrupts and You

The downfall to World of Logs and many combat log tools is that they only record successful interrupts. To give an example: Say we’ve got Myros, Donniemode and Showtek interrupting on a target. They’re hitting the interrupt every time they need to, we’ll say Myros is a 1/2 second quicker, it’ll look like Donniemode and Showtek aren’t bothering to interrupt at all, when actually they are trying, and Myros is just beating them to it.

Though, there is instances where some people don’t bother to interrupt at all. The meters do tell when you’re at least trying because you can occasionally get one in before everyone else, and it’ll record that you did interrupt. As long as you’re trying, that is the key, if you’re not trying because you think that Myros will just take care of it for you, then you’re sorely mistaken and need to return to raiding 101.

There’s instances where the officers do ask that only one person do the interrupts (i.e. Aberrations). That’s the point where you don’t have to try to interrupt, because it’s something that requires precision (unleashing a certain number of adds) it’s sometimes better if we just have the one person do it.

That’s just a few things that I’ve mumbled about, if anyone has any other questions about WoL you can always hit me up in game, or post on this thread and I’ll try to answer them as needed.

Been away for a while.

Mon, 16 May 2011 15:14:00 -0400

Going to start posting again here shortly. Been away catching up on playing some other games including Minecraft, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, The Sims Medieval, Torchlight and a few others :)

Therefore I have not been eaten by a Grue, and you cannot have my gear. I am still planning on writing a Grid tutorial for raiding, and doing a gear itemization checklist for Discipline Priests amongst other things.

Legendary Drama

Mon, 16 May 2011 15:13:23 -0400

Legendary Drama

Darkfire and Cho'Gall: A Raid Analysis.

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:11:00 -0400

So poking around at raidbots.com I did a slight analysis of last night’s raid. Sadly, the numbers were not pretty.

1) Standing in Poopy that is bad.

Corrupting crash was stood in a max total of 15 times by one person alone. Everyone stood in it at least once. Now I do realize that on occasion people do get stunned in it with a worship, and I’m sure that World of Logs and the Comparebot doesn’t take that into consideration. Programs are pretty unforgiving. Though those that were caught standing in it in excess of 2 or 3 times may want to look at some resources that may help them get out of it faster. (Since sometimes it is hard to see when everyone is piled on Cho’gall’s ass).

If you don’t have DBM. Get it.

One of the features that DBM has is the Yell feature, if you’ve got that and your chat bubbles enabled you’ll be able to see who has Corrupting Crash and where it is.

Power Auras is the second option.

Version:4.16; buffname:Corrupting Crash; bufftype:2; texture:119

Import this into Power Auras Classic, if it doesn’t work, let me know and I”ll re-code it.

Blaze (you know those tiny fire puddles that Cho’gall puts on the ground).

There were folks that were standing it it a total of 64 times. The hero of the evening who NEVER stood in blaze once is Vandelay, we should all aspire to be more like him.

You only want to run through Blaze if it’s your only option. At all costs, GO AROUND IT. I can’t stress this enough, as the fight is hell on healers to begin with, dicking around by standing in Poopy that is bad will piss off your friendly neighborhood healer, result in our awesome tanks dying way too many times because our attention is pulled from healing them, and healing you.

Thirdly, if you are NOT a damn tank, don’t yell for heals in vent, that makes us not want to heal you, we heal mainly based on a priority system (not like DKP prio). Tanks, healers then DPS. If tanks are dead, we all are dead, and the same goes for healers.

2) Stuff you can use to help kill things and stay alive.

a) Healthstones:
-We’re all pretty good at using them. No complauints here, though there are a few that could be using them a little more diligently.

b) Random pots of pottyness (Health Pots, Mana Pots etc).
- We could totally see more use of these, It’s nice seeing some folks actually using these to optimize their DPS giving them a slight edge above the rest. Out of 25-26 people I see less than half actually making use of temporary buff pots. Congrats to those that do use them, you’re making our raids a better place. Those that don’t, need to get on that.

c) Das Lightwell
- Doc doesn’t put that thing down in the middle of our raids for shits and giggles. We need to make use of this more. It has a HUGE radius and you can almost click it from anywhere in the room, and it doesn’t cost you a GCD. Rev’s got two squirrels and bottle of tequila with your name on it, I recommend you use the Lightwell, or I’m not sure what will happen, but it involves the above mention animals and substances, and I’m gonna guess….some ducttape. When it comes to the light well, Sandor is the hero of the evening, using it a total of 9 times. WTG Sandor!

There are the mechanical things that need to be done as well as trying to increase our usage of the above, but it takes all of us working as a team to get back on the top of the game.

**the breakdown and source can be found by clicking on this link here.

WoW Limericks

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:42:23 -0500

There once was a man from Nantucket.

He was fearless with his account and said fuck it.

His account soon got hacked.

His toons all got sacked.

And the gold farmer told him to “suck it”.

Transitioning from a Restoration Shaman to a Discipline Priest

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 04:35:50 -0500

Those that know me, know that I was originally a discipline priest until very late in the Wrath expansion when I transitioned to my Restoration Shaman. It was something I was not very happy about, but I dealt with it, and enjoyed my temporary stay at the top of the healing meters.

About a week and a half ago my Guild Leader whispered me and offered me the chance to go back to my priest. I took it. In an amazing mad-dash through approximately 5 days of non-stop back to back dungeons my priest made it to level 85 and 340 item level.

At first I was completely amazed with how different entry level healing was on my priest in comparison to my shaman. I remember running with some guild mates and being able to heal with ease through a triple pack trash pull in regular Stonecore. I healed a few runs through Blackrock Caverns half asleep using only bubble and renew.

I think the hardest part of transitioning was the constant searching for my totems, I was used to dropping them at the start of every pull, and occasionally going *derp* and forgetting to pick them up, inadvertently pulling a boss after a wipe.

Relearning my personal healing style on my priest didn’t take me long to do. Even with the nerf Blizzard threw our way. I’ve never really seemed to have any issues adjusting to the curve balls that the developers have thrown my way in the last three years, though I found the Restoration Shaman healing changes almost impossible to adjust to.

I suppose the issue with the Restoration shaman is really that they’re not currently competitive in comparison to Restoration Druids, Holy Paladins and Priests. They do provide some effective healing tools, but when competing against folks that have a tendency to spam meters, it can get incredibly discouraging. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, as I am just as guilty. Though I’ve taken to spamming the breakdown of what I do and laughing when my top heal is still Power Word: Shield, or when I do completely retarded things like killing myself with a 200k Power Word: Death while doing the Ragnaros event in Mount Hyjal.

I feel I’ve made the transition smoothly, though even as a priest, I still can’t heal stupid. Keep up the CC kids, don’t stand in fire, and happy raiding!

fuckyeaworldofwarcraft: DAMN ROGUES!

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:05:26 -0500

fuckyeaworldofwarcraft:

DAMN ROGUES!

Priest/Shaman 101: Dispels and You!

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 02:20:00 -0500

(or how I learned to stop worrying and love utility…..)

Currently as a priest we are one of the best AOE dispellers in the game, in some situations it’s what we do and only what we do. (think back to having priest assigned to dispelling back in TOC).

Below is a list of who can dispel and what they can dispell.

Death Knight: None
Druid: Abolish Poison, Cure Poison, Remove Corruption (removes poisons and curses) (will remove magic if resto and talented)
Hunter: None
Mage: Remove Curse
Paladin: Cleanse (diseases and poisons) (cleanses magic if Holy talented)
Priest: Cure Disease, Dispel Magic, Mass Dispel
Rogue: None
Shaman: Cleanse Spirit (Curses) (magic only cured if resto and talented)
Warlock: Felhunter (offensive magic), Imp (defensive magic)
Warrior: None

Knowing what classes can do what helps greatly in chaotic fights like Argaloth, but importantly if you are assigned to a specific side of a room and there is a large scale curse/disease etc that can be cleared by mass dispell, do so because the single target dispellers aren’t going to be able to keep up with you.

Though I suppose before that point, it’s nice to see who has what disease and where. I recommend that you use a dispelling mod like Decursive, it will show you who you can dispell when they have a curse or disease on them.

If you’re like me, you don’t use Decursive, and instead have grid set up to show curses/diseases/poisons etc with a simple icon. From there you’d use a mouseover macro to dispell a single target or have mass dispel keybound.

*Edited: Correction to who dispells what as per Zecht of Darkfire on Draenor-US*

patman023: The Daily Blink - Ah, So That’s How It Works

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 02:50:19 -0500

patman023:

The Daily Blink - Ah, So That’s How It Works

Photo

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 04:12:19 -0500

clairelouise2: Honestly, I’m nervous to start healing cata...

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:20:23 -0500

clairelouise2:

Honestly, I’m nervous to start healing cata dungeons. Should bite the bullet really.

Dude I’ve totally seen this happen.

Healing

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 04:15:15 -0500

I’ve now been healing since the release of Cataclysm. I’ve done my homework, designed my gear, gotten help from knowledgeable people, thrown temper tantrums because the game mechanics were working against me, nearly deleted my Shaman and yet. With a few pieces of gear I’m not so distressed by healing any more.

While doing my research for not only my Shaman, but my Druid, Paladin and Priest, I’ve come across many forum posts like the following.

Just hit the ilevel for heroics today. First heroic was Thrones of the Tides. Not too bad, I thought, should be pretty easy. But boy was I wrong.

When I read about all the healer complains in the forum, I thought maybe they exaggerated things a bit. Now that I had healed my own heroics, I realized that almost everything the healers complained about in the forum are true. It’s simply horrible and too discouraging.

Anyways, this healer is done. My healing gears are packed and stored in bank. Back to the 45 mins instance queue as dps…even that doesn’t feel as bad as the agony of healing through a Cata heroic. I’ll take the 45 min queue any day.

Posts like these are discouraging, horribly discouraging. It makes me ask if there are really any remaining old school healers left in Warcraft. Healing isn’t a joke anymore, you can’t just sit there and spam Prayer of Mending and /dance because you’re omfg bored out of your tree.

The game design is around teamwork. Everyone doing their job and working together like a well oiled machine. If one part fails, the rest will. That means that the DPS have to pay attention, make sure that you’re not standing in unnecessary crap, make sure that you’re watching your threat, and if you can bandage, gift of the Naaru or other such damage mitigators. Warlocks have this easier, the lower the health of the mob, the more healing their drain life ticks for.

Crowd Control is of the utmost importance. You can’t zerg the trash mobs anymore. They actually do things other than hit the tank. There are marks or a reason, use them. You have things like sheeps, banishes, frogs, traps, sleeps, roots etc for a reason, use them. It won’t hurt you.

Lastly. Mr. Tank. Do you see those things in your spell book. “Shield Wall”, “Raid Wall”, “Pet Sacrifice”, “Survival Instincts”, “Frenzied Regeneration” they’re damage mitigation tools. They help your healer, use them.

I love watching my cooldown monitor pop up when things like Shield Wall is blown. Seeing these things light up on my screen makes me happy as a healer.

329 item level is just a guide line, it’s the bare minimum that is required for you to just walk in the door. You now need to bring your problem solving skills, your ability to work as a team, and your ability to help each other out when the going gets tough.

There’s a hunter in my guild on Draenor that will protect the healer, he does it regardless of the healer. He is my last pillar of hope for the community, and for healers everywhere that things aren’t really as bad as they seem to be on the forums.

clairelouise2: tsurockets: Whoah, whoa, whoa. Who came up with...

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:46:21 -0500

clairelouise2:

tsurockets:

Whoah, whoa, whoa. Who came up with those raid markers.

Moon is for mages, hunter trap is square. Diamond is for warlock, unless in Symphony cause our warlock would be like “wait what am I doing? fear the skull? oh fear, not howl of terror everything all over? oh okay sorry. is anyone else getting weird lag when we pull?” In that case, diamond is for mind control.

Makes it sound horribly complicated!

Lost City of the Tol'Vir: High Prophet Barim

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 21:21:01 -0500

High Prophet Barim, you are one miserable bastard. Up until two days ago I was able to comfortably heal through your diseases, groups that wanted to zerg the shadow phoenix down without killing the shards.

Having next to no problem with the fight was pretty cool all in itself. Pugs and Guild runs alike we weren’t having any problem, then we zone in to Lost City yesterday and the first two bosses go by swimmingly.

Phase one of Barim starts and we’re doing well, guild DPS is always welcome since I can assure myself that they’re not going to do anything ultimately retarded like standing in fire. Normally I don’t need to pop any mana regen toys until the beginning of third phase, I look down and I’m completely and utterly bone dry on mana. I’m seriously starting to panic at this point. I double check my gear to make sure I wasn’t wearing anything dumb, double check my totems, and my weapon imbue all seem to be intact. I drop mana tide, and pray that it was just a hiccough on my part. The tank disappears out of range, I pop Spiritwalker’s Grace and chase after him. We wipe.

I’ve NEVER wiped on this fight, at least not since I got my gear into what looks like a semblance of solid blues from heroics and Justice Points.

I’ve now seen three healers struggle with this boss. A restoration druid, a holy paladin and myself (resto shaman). I’m starting to think something is stinky about the fight.

I went back in twice today with two different gear configurations, (haste/crit/spirit) and (crit/mastery). Same results on this boss. Tol’vir is now added to the list of dungeons that I will try to avoid like the plague.

In the last few weeks that I’ve been healing heroics. We...

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:56:17 -0500

In the last few weeks that I’ve been healing heroics. We still have problems with CC.

Magmaw

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:11:20 -0500

Attempted Magmaw 25 last night. Not a bad fight overall, unless you’re suffering from severe sleep deprivation. I think I slept through 2/3 of the fight, and was still 4th on the healing meter.

The Plural of Shaman

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:27:34 -0500

Shamans!

You can look it up in a dictionary or an encyclopedia. It’s not shamen, or shaman (like the singular - kind of like moose is both singular and plural), or shamens.

Why?

The word “Shaman” is a native word from a Siberian language. It got brought in whole to English, and thus gets just an “s” on the end to make it plural like any other normal noun. Because it’s not an English compound created from two other English words, it’s not “shamen” (like man - men).

According to WoWwiki, Blizzard uses both the form “shamans” and the form “shaman” for the plural (so technically both would be OK for this forum), but to truly be correct, it’s shamans.

So stand proud, shamans, and accept no misspellings!

(AND NOW YOU KNOW!)

A Rant

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 12:09:49 -0500

School holidays are probably one of the most aggravating times of the year for me, not only as a raider but as a farmer.

Right now not only is it next to impossible to farm mats for gear and flasks, but adding insult to injury you’re fighting a mob ontop of a node you’re going to mine, when another player of the SAME faction swoops in and takes that node, leaving you with no node, and an angry mob beating your brains in.

/sigh Only a couple of weeks until they go back.

Welcome to Cataclysm!

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:38:03 -0500

Hope you’re all enjoying Cataclysm sofar! I’ll be back posting tomorrow with a quick guide on Cataclysm dailies.

*Image courtesy of Bloodwynde of Draenor-US