The Cranky Old Gnome

So far, I like this feature. It’s informative enough to help you get where you are going, but lightweight enough that it doesn’t get in the way. You can turn it on/off with a simple mouse click, and I really like the new tracking and map feature. Blizzard has poached another addon, and is doing it well. It’s not very customizable (i.e. no level/zone/group filtering, etc), but if all you want is to know where your quests are, this is a way to do it without having to download and maintain an addon.

I also want to say that I love love the new map.  The fact that I can make it so it’s not full screen (meaning I can move my character and interact with things with the map up) was the main reason I went with a map addon in the first place.  So while there’s still not the same level of customization, I will definitely use it if I need to conserve memory.

The new LFG feature?  Well I’m going to have to wait till it goes live to address some of my concerns about it.  However, I do like the interface.  It’s easy to use and understand.  I hoped in and with a few seconds was whisked away to a random heroic (Halls of Stone to be exact).  But I realized I didn’t want to be in a random one.  I wanted to try Forge of Souls.  So, I bailed.  But the pulls hadn’t started yet and I was just dps-ing so I imagine a new replacement was found fast.  I got two debuffs from it.  One started from the time I entered the instance.  The other started from when I left.  Both lasted 15 minutes and did the exact same thing: made it so I had to wait to queue up for something else.

After you queue, you get a little eyeball icon attached to your minimap.  If you hover over it you will see 5 slots (tank, heals, 3 dps).  When those slots are filled up, the icon lights up.  It also tells you what you are queued as.  If you right click on the eyeball LFG icon you can select “leave queue.”

The one really annoying thing is that once your group is all together, if one person doesn’t click accept in however long, you get dumped back into the queue.

I’ll let you know what I think of the Forge of Souls…if I ever get in it.  This is the first time ever I’ve waited for a dps.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

Dear players on the World of Warcraft Public Test Realm Broxigar,

I think there has been a bit of a miss-communication.  Either you forgot (despite having to click on ‘public test’ every time you log in), or no-one told you (maybe they installed the PTR on your computer without telling you?) but you seem to have missed the fact that this is the public realm.  For testing.

I’m going to repeat that, for emphasis.

Public.

Realm.

For testing.

Private Teapot Roller-coaster?

Ok, I know I shouldn’t be that surprised.  I mean, the whole idea behind a pre-made character is so that you can jump right into the end game raiding world.  But holy freaking crap man.  It’s just a little jarring to log into a character that automatically has 5k gold, maxed enchanting/jewel crafting, 3 full sets of epic gear, enchanting and jewelcrafting supplies out the yin-yang and dual spec ready to go.  My own character isn’t even close to being this decked out and he’s been around for years.  So…it was a little weird.

And apparently there’s someone in trade who doesn’t quite understand the purpose of pre-mades.

So, how’s everyone enjoying the free epics that I had to work my ass off for in live?

Um…really?  Clearly you missed the point.  This comment (or something similar) was made probably once every 10 minutes.

In addition to all the gear and supplies, all my weapon skills are maxed out as well as riding and first aid (no cooking? sad). I’m also Exalted with all Horde Factions, the Horde Expedition, the Warsong offensive, and the Northrend factions you can champion.  I’m also revered with the entire Steamwheedle Cartel.  This of course gave me a number of achievements so I’m rockin’ the “Ambassador” title.  I’ve also apparently been everywhere already, have all flight paths and have the explorers achievement/tabbard (which I’m wearing).  It’s very interesting.

One of the things I’m looking forward to is seeing if I can get myself properly gemmed/enchanted/talented on my one without looking up any theory crafting sites.  Should be interesting.

*Edit: It’s a little weird though that I get all this premade stuff, but no glyphs.  Not that I’m complaining, I just think it’s interesting.

So, because I’m sure there are plenty of you out there who haven’t ever tried the Public Test Realms, and haven’t made an insta-80, I’ve decided to include a full list of what was included after the break. Because I find it interesting, so I imagine at least one of you does too:

« Read the rest of this entry »

Last week my shaman’s guild finally downed Hodir.  I wasn’t in the raid, but I was listening on vent.  I was just as excited for them to take him down as the people that were actually in the raid were.  Mostly because he’d given us such a hard time for such a long time.  So this time around when we went back into Ulduar I was very much looking forward to taking down…or rather freeing, Hodir.  It was a hard fight.  We kept wiping and couldn’t figure it out.  It was difficult not to feel like I was primarily responsibly as they had all been there the previous week.  As it turns out…I did share a brunt of the blame.

The reason?

Overhealing.

I’ve mentioned previously that I one of my biggest issues as a healer is overhealing–specifically when grouped with druids.  It’s because I can’t see there HoTs.  The druid in our group was assigned to the main tank.  Well because I couldn’t see his HoTs it looked like the main tank was going down and I needed to help heal him.  As it turns out all the HoTs were doing just fine, i just couldn’t see them.

I did two things wrong here.  First, I didn’t have enough faith in my raid party member to get the job done.  Second, I was overhealing the crap out of the main tank, taking away heals from the rest of the raid.

Now I could spend an entire post on trusting the abilities of your raid members, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

So, overhealing.  You’ve heard it was bad, and know you shouldn’t do it, but do you know why?  Well, I’ll tell you why.

The most obvious reason is that overhealing wastes mana.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize if you are casting healing spells on people that don’t need them, then your just wasting mana.  That’s one of the reasons I miss downranking so much.  Back in the day, our lower level spells did less healing, but also cost less mana.  Now they do less healing but cost the same mana as the highest rank.  (Although the word on the street is they are returning to down ranking.)

Not only does it waste your mana, but it wastes the mana of other healers.  If a druid puts a healing over time spell on a target and then a shaman casts a healing wave on the same target, sure the target is at full health, but the druids’ HoT that is still ticking after the shaman’s spell hits is effectively wasted, so is the mana the druid used to cast those HoTs.

The other thing overhealing wastes is time.  Here’s a complicated example.

Tank has 20,000 health. Boss hits for x health every 2 seconds.  Healer has a spell with a 2.2 second cast time that heals for y health.

Time elapesd: 0 seconds. Tank has full health. Healer begins spell cast.

Time elapsed: 2 seconds. Boss hits Tank for 5,000 health. Tanks health is now 15,000 health.

Time elapsed: 2.2 seconds.  Healers spell heals Tank for 5,000 health. Tanks health is now 20,000. Healer begins next spell.

Time elapsed: 4 seconds. Boss hits Tank for 6,000 health. Tank parries full amount of the attack.  Tank still at full health.

Time elapsed: 4.4 seconds. Healers spell overheals Tank for 5,000.  Healer begins next spell.

Time elapsed: 5 seconds. Boss parries Tanks attack, speeding up their attack speed. Hits Tank for 7,000 health.  Tank now at 13,00 health.

Time elapsed: 6.5 seconds. Boss uses special ability to hit Tank for 10,000 health.  Tank now at 3,000 health.

Time elapsed: 6.6 seconds. Healers spell hits tank for for 2,000.  Tank now at 5,000 health.

Time elapsed: 7 seconds. Boss hits tank for 6,000 health.  Tank is now dead.

Complicated enough? Well, lets break it down.  The healer in this example can only get off a spell every 2.2 seconds, so when the tank is hit at 4 seconds in, but doesn’t take any damage, the healer should have canceled the spell and started over.  This would have allowed the healer to land a spell at 6.2 seconds in, just in time to bring the tanks health up enough to last through the bosses next attack at 7 seconds in.

Now I know some of you are probably screaming inside about how that’s not really how the game mechanics work.  Well I know that.  This is just an example to illustrate a point.  Because the healer let their spell play all the way out and over heal at one point, they were unable to time their subsequent spells correctly.  This resulted in a dead tank.

So if you are healing someone, expecting them to take lots of damage, if they don’t take that damage DON’T heal them.  Instead, cancel that heal, and start a new one.  This same idea goes if you are casting a heal on a target with less than full health, and another healer gets them before you do then for heavens sake stop healing them.  Move on to the mage that is about to die.

And finally, over healing takes heals away from others who need it.  In my Hodir example, we kept wiping because I was busy overhealing the main tank rather than focusing on the raid.  Once I realized the problem was because I spent to much time trying to heal the tank (trust the HoTs…trust the HoTs…trust the HoTs…) I was able to save my time and mana for the raid.  Because I wasn’t in the middle of casting on the tank, I was able to do a Chain Heal in anticipation of his Frozen Blows ability (which is what was killing most of us).

So, what did we learn in today’s lesson boys and girls?

Overhealing is bad.

Add this to this list of Thistlefizz’s life lessons for better playing.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

Well now that I have the space on my hard drive I’ve decided to download the PTR.  I’ve been super bored in game lately.  Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard, it’s been kinda on the down-low, I’ve also been pretty lonely and aimless.  So I thought the PTR might be a nice way to add a little spice to my life.  I’m going to take advantage of the feature that lets you create a pre-made level 80 and try out the two classes I’ve never played before (hunter and priest).  Also, I’ve always wanted to try having a horde warrior and an alliance shaman.  So this is a nice way to do that without having to commit to a paid faction change.

And don’t worry, as I try things out and see what’s new, I’ll let you fine folks know what I’ve discovered.

My first impressions? It takes a long time to download.  It’s been 4 hours so far, and I’m still patching.  Granted, I’m also playing WoW in the background so my bandwidth isn’t exactly unrestricted.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz