The difficulty

The step up in difficulty the one we sought for so much – although it’s hard to say if Wrath raiding was really any easy, strict 10M hardmode raiding was challenging for the most part and well, PUGing ICC with the big bad buff can’t be really taken seriously. Although it’s exactly this big bad buff raiding that got stuck in most raiders minds as far too easy content and the public cry for more difficult raiding was around here. And the difficulty came and it took most folks by surprise.

The mistake, from how I see it, is that even normal modes in entry gear were far too punishing. Instead of having fights with more clever or simply more mechanics, we got bosses with more deadly mechanics. Nothing wrong about that in essence, stuff just hit harder and had to be healed back. However, while touching the subject of healing, it was very hard transition on most raiding teams due to the new and improved healing system. That alone raised the difficulty some more, pushing it into impossible for many and many guilds. But still, that’s not the problem.

I do think that the true problem lies within the fact that you simply cannot make mistakes to complete encounter (talking raiders with average skill here). One person goes down and it’s a wipe. Moreso, it’s often not even a “okay, let’s see how far we can go before we go again” try, you simply won’t have enough power to get the boss down. I think that having this much difficulty on normal modes, pretty much killed the “casual” and “low progression” raiding (no offence meant nor implied) and in turn effectively killed player market.

Anyways, that’s just random thought to introduce the wide frame this post is trying to fill. A post about second guessing myself.

The evolution of  my Cataclysm raiding

We started Cataclysm with broad smiles on our faces, looking forward to the bright future and expecting things good and better. Then we dipped into the raiding and although the difficulty surprised us at first – that it indeed was as difficult as promised we had a go at it and we were, more or less successful. I would say, we were fairly successful since from the Day 1 of our raiding endeavours, we had so high turnover that we effectively replaced ten to fifteen people, maybe more.

Now, I am not going to complain about that. It’s most likely our fault anyways when it comes to the true essence of the problem, since we were the ones responsible for the recruitment and judging people. We haven’t left more than two or three people to more progressed guilds, all our war casualties simply ceased playing over burning out (or rerolled a new alt without telling). We had to kick two people because they just weren’t good fit. But we rangered on, anyways, trying to do the best with the guild and provide the people with us, those relying on us to guide them through the content and provide them with nice and steady raiding atmosphere. And I take great pride in the fact that since 1st February this year, with all the trouble our roster went through, we cancelled one, ONE raid in total and that was on day when five raiders just had to take break due to various real life stuff.

The core of the force

Even with this huge turnover, we were blessed with collecting great core of players. We have great tank, we had 2 awesome healers (now we have 3) and we had awesome band of dpsers who always strive to do better and improve. I have raiders who put much time into tactics research – our Magmaw heroic tactics thread inflated from 2 pages to 6 since Thursday raid till Sunday evening with people discussing various tweaks, posting tips and whatnot. A true raid leader’s dream. I didn’t even dare to intervene into the discussion, I was just sitting quietly at the back, taking notes and thinking about what they suggested, trying to fit it somehow to the people I raid with and in the end, all it took was a short post by me consolidating the suggested changes and outlining the tactics for Monday. And, there was noticeable improvement on Monday. No, we haven’t get him down since we didn’t really go with the best possible setup, but we got to P2 and practiced the transition few times so well that I have no doubts the worm is going down next reset when our third healer comes back from his exam period.

I have nothing but deep appreciation for the core people we raid with (this is sort of apology to the newbies – I promise I will like you in few months as much, it’s just that we haven’t been together for too long, yet) and the way they handle fights. From people willing to respec for encounters on the fly or willing to respec on encounter progress just to try a different approach, to people who do things I’d want them to do without me saying so – be it popping cooldowns, moving to spots I’d like them to move. I have people that I can rely 100% to do interrupts, gonging and any other ungrateful tasks, all the black work that never gets you the spotlight, but is needed to down bosses as much as high dps, hps or tps. I have people who are very skilled on executing encounters and as I said, I am proud to raid with these people, even though they can drive me up the wall sometimes. For the most part it was great and enjoyable ride, yet…

Second guessing yourself

I’ll say it out loud. We had not-so-good night yesterday. We started on Magmaw again to test some hardmode findings and it worked well, we have done some progress and then people (certain person) started dying to stuff they really shouldn’t be. I took a note, tried to talk to them and point out to them what is wrong, yet the improvement was not entirely coming. Anyways, we called Magmaw halfway through the raid, executed the worm on normal and decided to move on.

Chimaeron was fun moment, since we had no one to be the dps break tank so we had to resort to normal killing – trust me nothing beats raid leader asking over Mumble: “Okay guys, how many tanks we need for normal again? I have absolutely no idea how the normal works anymore.”; he went down easily, not loosing a person because the first tank lasted eternity in P2. Then we moved to Atramedes, switched to hard and happily started executing. We spent hour on him, we had 10 tries on him and we just weren’t able to down him. Atramedes. The easiest hard mode as far as I can say execution wise – or well maybe second easiest after Halfus.

Seriously, all you have to do on the encounter to execute it is to remember that we move to the back on the discs and to the door with the breath. Yet exactly this side distribution tended to be the greatest problem for many people. I had no idea what was going on – we were loosing people to full sound before first airphase, after first airphase, we were loosing people left and right. DPS figures on the meters checked out, I’d say they even exceeded our past kills, tanking was alright (except for few “rotate with us” for a new tank on the encounter). Healing was feeling a little sloppy since I don’t think we were all fully focused – but nothing so severe it would cause the wipefest we had.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it – the awesome people who can execute and dodge shit were making the basic mistakes like kiting the fire through raid, moving like headless chickens, not stacking properly as they should be – even after few prompts to do so. After 10 tries I was past furious, I was simply broken.

I tried asking people to improve and do better, I tried calling stuff out more, nothing seemed to be working. It’s moment like these that make me think I am too old for this game. It’s moments like these that make me reconsider my raiding future and make me always think whether it’s not time to quit. There is nothing worse for a raid leader than feeling helpless. You keep asking yourself – what more can I do? These are people who can do the encounter. These are people who definitely know way better than this. So where is the problem? Is it me? Am I so bad at motivating them they just don’t care? Or is it simply bad night tonight and should I let it go? Is it my problem that I take such thing so seriously, should I just take it easy?

You inevitably start to second guess yourself, your capabilities and your skills. No matter how many kills you lead before, no matter how many bosses you stomped over and thrusted your banner in, you start to second guess.

Anyways – it was probably just bad night, such things happen. I could’ve say some folks had their minds elsewhere, some just weren’t giving a damn at all as it seemed and in the end, I had an headache. I’ll leave it at that.

Meh, re-reading the post, I am not entirely sure what I wanted to say and I definitely didn’t want to sound all whiny and sorry-ass but hey, it’s out and it’s gonna get posted.

Let me ask you few questions to close with – how do you deal with bad raids? How much these raids get to you? And how much they affect your raid leader?

Real ID grouping

Okay. The event that started the whole fireworks was this short post from the blues:

With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.

As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We’ll have more details to share with you as development progresses — in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.

I have to admit, the reactions to this post completely surprised me. I was waiting for this feature from the day Real ID was first announced and implemented, I was looking for this update in every patchnotes since. Now it’s coming and I love it. Do I mind it’s a premium feature? Bloody hell, not at all. Why would I? After all, it’s additional service.

The great things about it

There are many, many great things about this new feature. To name a few – you can group with your old friends that are scattered all over the serversphere. You know, these guys that you raided with in your old vanilla guild, who you keep in touch through various internet messengers or even RealID. You can have those people in your party very soon, kicking ass and taking names and catch up with their stories so far. But it’s not only that.

Imagine the possibilities for guild recruitment – you can group with the prospects before they even pay for server transfer (provided they are same faction), and you can run Zul’Aman or Zul’Gurub with them and rest of your guild. Test them under pre-set stress conditions, see what kind of person they really are. Waste of time you say? I’d say it saves you time deciding on person and making sure you are getting perfect match and gives your guild an edge in recruitment – shows that you actually do care about applicants, their time and their real life money, accepting them and making them transfer with more feedback on who are you getting.

All this sounds absolutely awesome, and it is absolutely awesome. It wouldn’t be the spoiled community of World of Warcraft if no one took very strong opposition to this idea; and not this idea per say, but the whole concept of it being “premium”. Why would they feel the entitlement to have this feature for free is beyond me, but let’s elaborate on that.

Subscription, game price and premium services

Apologies beforehand because in this section the train of thought will jump back and forth. Most voiced opinions and reasons why this feature should not be premium were said over and over at all forums possible and anyone without crybaby syndrome must consider them invalid at the first sight. So let’s sum them up:

1. OMG BLIZZ! I pay high monthly fee and now you are charging me to play with my friends – wrong. You pay your monthly fee to get access to certain service, a basic package if you will. This package is way bigger than in any other MMO and I’d bet my left hand that still offers best price/service ratio on the business. For your monthly fee, you are getting access to any server in your region you like. Freedom to roll any number of characters across these servers and you get this huge world to explore and then some exploration to be done beyond. You get board access, you get in and out of game support, you are getting game updates (and like it or not, Blizzard is actually working on the game continuously). That’s what you get for your money, same package as everyone else. You can play with your friends any day you like without the premium feature.
2. OMG BLIZZ! Why you charge for everything??? They do not. All of this stuff is optional. You don’t need sparkling mount, you don’t need remote guild chat and you definitely don’t need the RealID grouping to stay competitive in this game and vice versa – having those does not give anyone upper hand over you when it comes to the gameplay balance and equality. Once again, you don’t need to do this. Any and all optional or “premium” features are there to make you enjoy yourself more – be it changing your looks and sex or race when you get tired of your current one, offering you new interesting and fun pets and mounts, allowing you to stay in touch with your e-friends through remote chat – all this is just quality of life stuff, nothing game changing.
3. OMG BLIZZ! You said you’ll never provide game advantage for real money!!! And they, except for one service, haven’t. And even that service is discutable. And no, it’s not the RealID grouping. The feature I am talking about is Remote AH. Being able to control the AH game any minute of the day, from anywhere in my humble opinion gives extreme advantage over someone who can’t. But looking at it from the other side – even to utilize the remote AH to it’s fullest, you need to either spend on it huge chunks of time (which you probably could’ve spent from your PC anyways) or any access to game in order to earn small fortune on JC green gems for dailies. And more importantly – if you are not skilled/gifted enough to play the AH, not even RemoteAH will help you; the same way, if you indeed are skilled at playing the AH, you will make enough money just by logging into game as usual and earning the gold the old fashioned way.
4. OMG BLIZZ! WOW is expensive as it is!!! Well, it’s not. I don’t know where you’re living at, but the whole monthly fee for playing World of Wacraft is, to put it in understandable way, 8-10 beers and a tip in our small country pub we visit on weekends. That’s like 2 beers and 2 shots for a couple. So if  I skip out once, I can pay for monthly evening fun. Please don’t jump on me for this one, it’s really simple display of how much the game is worth and in the end it comes down to your own prefference. Would you rather get wasted one more night, or pay your subscription? Would you rather have those two extra beers on one Friday night, or pay for premium?
5. OMG BLIZZ! It’s like you’re selling gold!!! Probably the most stupid comment I read somewhere. The person was afraid that trade chat will be full of people offering RealID runs for in game money. Not like tanks are selling short queves or anything already. Besides, I’d not feel personally all too comfy about trusting my RealID (and real name) to some total stranger my buddy from server XY just spotted on trade. Not mentioning the logistics of relaying all the information and stuff to set up the RealID connection.

Self entitlement in the community

For some reason, the self entitlement reaction from the community shocked me. Why on earth would anyone object against this service being “premium”. It’s not like it was there to begin with and as much as we can argue till we are blue in the face that Blizzard does not need our money and we should get it for free, offering it for a fee is perfectly legitimate move from Blizzard and I’d understand a raised eyebrow about why it’s paid and not free, but not this huge shitstorm that it turned into. I’d like to quote Matticus’ post on this one, as I think the same way about it:

The point I’m trying to get to here is would you rather pay a higher monthly cost for included services or have a lower monthly cost along with optional services?

I like the opportunity to pick and choose what additional premium features I want access to. If it costs extra, that’s okay because then I can see what I’m willing to pay. Otherwise, the other alternative option is a higher price with no say in customizable features.

And that is all there is to it. Blizzard is offering us optional / additional features for long time by now and while half of them go unnoticed, some can cause some serious arguments and get out the worst of some people. Blizzard is company and companies in general pursue one goal – to make money. Good companies use some of this money to reinvest back in their product and keep developing to keep their customers happy. Most companies offer “premium” features with their products – would you buy a notebook and insist you must get complete and full life-time warranty and the option to get it replaced every time it as much as seems it’s not working properly just because said company offers this warranty as “premium” for extra money? No, you wouldn’t. It’s this sick and flawed perception of World of Warcraft as something we own and is ours and not something that isn’t ours and we just pay for the privilege to access it (yes, privilege) and we always see Blizzard as the arc-devil and mastermind with no other goal but to ruin our lives. That perception is completely wrong and while Blizzard might be doing some bad moves or some non-popular changes, it’s in their own interest to keep the playerbase happy and hooked to the game.

Do I think this was good move by Blizzard? Yes, I do. Although I believe wording the service/package as “optional” instead of “premium” would be better. Will I buy the premium feature the second it comes out? Hell yes. Do I think it might’ve been for free? Yes, I do. Do I think it should be for free? Yes, I do. Not for the money, I can really afford to fork that much every month, but mostly because it brings the community together and might be far better for new players to get into the game.

Will you buy the premium feature?

RNG WHAAAAAAT?

Right. I intended to post about this long time ago, pretty much since I read the post over at Paragon site by Lazei. While I agree with Lazei on all points almost completely, some of the reactions to his post were rather negative and in a “STFU you elitist” manner. So I thought I’ll take on the very same topic from the point of view of casual passionate raider. For those of you, not familiar with the post and not really into reading it, allow me to quote the basic thesis of the post:

I’m going to rant here a bit because every time I see someone mention bad luck (or RNG) it makes me angry. I’m pretty sure most raiders hear “bad luck, couldn’t have done anything about it” multiple times in a single raid and I just want tell you that almost every single player who blames bad luck for wiping is a fucking idiot.I hate when people blame luck and that’s the end of it. Somehow the general attitude seems to be that shit happens and there is nothing you can do about it when the players’ attitudes should be “FUCK! That’s not supposed to happen! How can we survive this? Could this have been prevented?”.

Now, I completely and totally back that statement up. As “my” raiders found out, nothing gets my blood pressure up as much as hearing “bad luck” or “RNG”. Why? I’ll explain soon.

Definition of terms

RNG isn’t actually something that causes the wipe. In fact, RNG is just part of the game. Hell, it’s even part of the D&D games you use to play with your friends – it’s simply random number generator. Nothing less, nothing more. It works the same way as a dice – it rolls a number against certain table and determines the result. While I agree that some events or roll results can make your life difficult and/or complicate boss encounter flow, it’s not lethal evil game mechanic put in place to justify a failure.  All boss fights have certain random elements in them but these elements can be pre-countered by thinking ahead and utilizing all your character and player traits.

Bad luck on the other hand can happen and it’s actually something I am okay with – as long as you did everything you could and then some to avoid said situation. Bad luck can happen simply because we are people and no matter how skilled we (think we) are there is always a line we just won’t be able to cross, way above our skill curve.

True raider?

RNG and bad luck is the thing that in my opinion tells who you are. A true raider for me isn’t someone necessarily raiding 24/7 and being in world top 100 guild (although these people definitely have the mindset I am describing, that’s what makes them succesful). Being a true raider to me means improving and always thinking out of the box, not subscribing to rng and coincidence.

Whenever I hear “It was RNG” my blood pressure goes up. You know why? Because whoever says that immediately dismisses the possibility they did something wrong or that there was something they could do extra (or someone else for that matter). Want example?

Anecdotal evidence 1 – progressing Cho’gall normal

The ooze team on 2nd/3rd ooze gets ready to unleash hell (in words of Tropic Thunder – ” I’m talking about a scorched earth, motherfucker! I will massacre you! I WILL FUCK YOU UP! “) and Worship goes off. Two out of three AoE dpsers get mind controlled and the whole raid is stacked on Cho’gall on the other side of the room. We wipe.

Was it RNG fucking us up? No. While worships are the random element of the fight,  this situation could’ve been countered and has been countered from that point on. How? Simply. I wasn’t stacking in the raid, I was hanging with the ooze group, my trigger finger ready to hammer down my Wind Shear bind the very instant I see enemy nameplate near me. And guess what. It worked. That means going the extra step, these are the moments that separate the true raiders from the rest. And I don’t mean to toot my own horn here, I see many things like these done every week by most of the people I raid with – they put in the extra effort to push the whole raid onwards, to counter even the slightest randomness or disadvantage we might face; it’s just that I recall  my moments to shine better.

True raider, second part.

Now, given the example above – if all 3 of us get Worshipped, now that’s bad luck at our level of play. We took precautions and got screwed anyways – yes, someone else might’ve been looking out to provide backup-backup interrupt but if we are to be honest here, that’s pretty much very borderline top of our skill curve, not to mention probably ineffective for 10M raid. Detaching a person who has some downtime at the start of ooze spawn is okay. Detaching another to watch out after this person is not effective; in fact, it’s more worth to take the risk of  “bad luck” wipe than overcomplicate things.

Being a true raider for me is about improving oneself. There is always lesson learned from a wipe you cause, from every death. To quote Lazei once more:

Just to emphasize: bad luck does exist. But you don’t wipe because of bad luck, you wipe because you couldn’t handle it. I realize I’m not the average raider and I raid with a pretty incredible group of players. But the point I’m trying to make is that don’t blame bad luck and just end it at that. Try to learn how to avoid getting in to situations you just were in.

No matter your level of play, no matter the time commitment you put into your raiding, no matter whether you class yourself as casual or hardcore – the bolded part above is the one single thing that will move you forward, help you improve yourself as a player. As soon as you start thinking outside the simple assignments of DPS/heal/tank X and start thinking whether there is anything (even standing 2y to the left) you can do to reduce the random elements / dangerous situation of the fight, you’ll grow as a raider. As well, it feels incredibly good knowing you’re the one who indeed saved the day, or who made it easier for their friends to get boss kill.

Fear of being a failure

As in most social groups, being singled out for making a mistake is considered “unwanted” and it takes a little change of mindset to understand that owning up for a mistake you make in raid has usually two simple results:

1. It gives everyone a chance to learn from your mistake. Isn’t it better that everyone knows “this” is not a way to do it and can avoid wiping the raid next time. In the end, it takes less time to speak up and explain what went wrong than wipe 4 more times before others learn this lesson too.
2. It earns you street cred. If you make the entry to your new raiding group as person who might fuck up, but always knows why and what went wrong, you raid leader will love you long time. Knowing you have person who can fess up to mistake and provide you with feedback to a certain boss mechanic is priceless.

Conclusion from this is simple – owning up to your mistakes is most of the time is the best thing you can do. Start noticing things related to your character and soon you’ll be able to notice the whole bigger picture of the fight and your performance will increase with every raid. You’ll know where and when to move, you will understand the flow of the fight better. Ever wondered how can your raid leader see all those things, see what went wrong? It’s this simple training. We all started as self-tunneled players and just worked on our perception.

Another important thing to note – you are raiding with friends or e-buddies, people you presumably went to hell and back with in the past while kicking ass and taking names – no one is out to get you and just because you fuck one thing up, doesn’t mean you’ll get insta kicked. We all make mistakes and we all should have the understanding when someone else makes them.

Above said applies for most cases. Of course, if you fail to taunt a boss 5 times in a row, at the very same time into the encounter and wipe the raid for the same stupid mistake – that’s where the benevolence and tolerance runs out.

So you’re saying there is no RNG or bad luck?

No. Same as Lazei, I am saying that while RNG and bad luck might occur (and does), most of the time something is considered RNG or bad luck is just steep learning curve or a thing you should’ve handled differently. The important thing here is to be able to tell the difference at your level of play. It’s okay that your players simply can’t counter immediate random change of fight pace or cover for others when something unfortunate happens. It’s really okay, as long as you don’t play in world top guild. It’s not okay to be completely oblivious to what happened to you though. In current raiding tier, being able to tell the cause of a death/wipe will help you avoid wipe in the future.

Remember, you’re in it together with 9 or 24 other people and you all share the same knowledge base and you share the think-tank to down the boss!

So, how about you? How much do you subscribe to RNG theory?

But, this patch brought a lot of Shaman changes too, so let’s take a close look on those related to restoration talent tree and what could they possibly mean or whether we should be pissed such a change went through in first place.

• Cleansing Waters now has a 6-second internal cooldown - easily spotted straightforward Arena change. To my knowledge restoration shamans are kings of Arena healing at the moment due to their utility and healing teammates at the same time as dispelling them is just… stupidly overpowered really. There isn’t any dispelling in 10M content that would be heavily hit by this change as far as I know (Argaloth? Cho’gall shadow debuff?) so… meh. And if there will be something requiring so much dispells in the future the changes are we will already be used to this new internal CD that we won’t even remember it was different, back in the day. However I would say that this changes frees 2 talent points from Cleansing Waters.

• Deep Healing now benefits all heals, not just direct heals – definitely a hardmode change. Sucks to admit it but this is change you will not really notice on normal mode fights since everyone is close to full health and our mastery just does not kick in properly. On most hardmode fights on the other hand, you are utilizing mastery more, since people are generaly lower or very low to start with, as well all the hots will be fully used.

• Earth Shield healing done by Restoration shaman has been reduced by 20% - again, clearly Arena change again. While I personally dislike it, I think in the grand scheme of things this change is really not important, especially related to Nature’s blessing change (below). However, as a 10M healer who often is on raid healing duty, ES always provided great safety net on the tanks for the times when the designated tank healer was on the move, silenced, out of position or well, whatever really. This safety net is now less firm and won’t catch everything.

• Nature’s Blessing has been improved to 6/12/18% bonus direct healing on Earth Shielded targets, up from 5/10/15% - there we go, compensating change for the ES loss, unfortnately only when tank healing (see safety net above). However, I believe this change is actually better for tank healing due to ES versus HW/GHW/HS scaling and the fact that you don’t rely on any internal ES cooldown and actually actively influence the amount healed on tank.

• Spirit Link Totem (new talent) reduces damage taken by all party and raid members within 10 yards by 10%. This lasts 6 seconds, and every second it is active the health of all affected players is redistributed among them, such that each player ends up with the same percentage of their maximum health. This counts as an Air totem and has a 3-minute cooldown -  yay for raid cooldown, yay for spirit link! Just wondering how many times will I wipe my raid / waste it on stupid thing before I get the hang of things. Oh well.

That’s it from the shaman changes, well, restoration shaman changes. Another interesting slash important note is this one – Grounding Totem cooldown has been increased to 25 seconds, up from 15. While having no direct raiding impact, it’s worth noting for all dungeon endeavours – nothing hurts more than wiping a run (or just letting people die) because you’re on autopilot and not watching your cds.

The single most important change of 4.1

Yes, that’s right. There is a change that is more worldbreaking than Spirit Link totem to me. There is a change that is more exciting and thrilling than Deep Healing benefiting all  heals possible, including HST. What is it, you ask?

All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target. This includes Pummel, Kick, Mind Freeze, Rebuke, Skull Bash, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Solar Beam, Silencing Shot, and related player pet abilities.

Yes. That. Now stop frowning and imagine the following – on Nefarian, for example, we have one pillar counting entirely on non-capped me and non-capped warrior to interrupt blast novas. That means, if we both miss at the same nova, our cooldowns won’t be back up till the whole channeling is over and the raid is dead. I can be sure that my WS on other healers will hit on Worships, that I can take care of Arcane Storm on Maloriak, Shadow Nova on Halfus, Feludius ice lanceish spell – all these easily done focus interrupt spells. Especially now when our court interrupter is taking week off.

Best 10M change this expansion, by far.

Other goodies include – Atramedes timer changes making it even easier to heal, Bile-o-tron not going into chain-offlines too often, allowing better cooldown distribution on hardmode, huge tuning down of heroic Cho’gall to be actually doable and tuning down of Shadow bolts on Nefarian both difficulties 10M removing the biggest mana drain on the encounter.

All in all – awesome patch for restoration shaman (as in we get more shiny things than those that were broken in the process) and one huge package of improvements for 10M raider.

Cherry on top – new content with higher level gear to make pugs succeed and close the gap on gear progression to help out recruitment.

Right, just a quick notes about how the blog itself is going on.

1. Banner should be in the making (<3 Padrae) and should be up in week or so. It will be hyper-mega-awesome-super-duper cool stuffs (or not if I annoy her over the limit of her kindnes and she will just beat me to death with peg leg – not hers. I think.)
2. Cataclysm instance guide (the very same walkthrough instance guides that is around for Wrath heroics) is in the making and should be posted over time. Unfortunately the instances are not hard anymore (although the amount of fail pugs I encountered is just stupid really, not getting through first trash pack because CC is overrated is driving me up the wall) so stay tuned for that one.
3. Blogroll – looking for active 10M and/or resto shaman bloggers out there to expand my Reader horizons as well as possibly share some traffic love. If you know of any good / favourite 10M blogger, be sure to leave me url in comment, I’ll have a look and update the blogroll if I like it. Thank you very much
4. RSS Feed. So I went to this fabulous site to get this thing called feedburner account just to notice I already have one for over a year. I still have no idea how to put it on the site or why it’s better than the default RSS provided by WP.com, but well – here’s the link.

Shameful promotions:

Dogwatch is recruiting! We are mature guild composed of adult players, many have families and other real life commitments. We aim to provide high-standard raiding at parent friendly times (21:00-00:00 EU server time, Wed-Thu-Mon) and we are currently 1/13. We are looking for Restoration druid as the last spot on the roster, for more guild related information please visit our guildsite.

TotemSpot shaman community hub! In case you missed this awesome hub for shamans of all specs and skill levels, if you miss place to hang around even as alt shaman or regardless of your experience, be sure to drop by. Most shaman bloggers and other helpful people are to be found at that site so be sure to check it out!

PlusHeal healer community site! I presume all your healy types know about this community hub, but just in case – it’s forum by healers for healers. Any class or spec, any trouble from raid/guild leading through boss tactics and gear checks to healer focused recruitment, you can find it all here.

BIS diapers or bust, biatch!

As the title gives away, this by all means won’t be positive post at all. Quite the contrary, it’s supposed to be the rantiest rant that you haven’t seen here for long time (which given that this blog was dead for long time is not surprising, or hard to achieve really). Anyways, back on track – “BiS” aka “Best in slot lists” are lists of maxed out gear. That’s quite simple isn’t it? Yeah, indeed it is. They truly are the best gear composition you can attend running the related content. Now, EJ diehards get your tar and feathers, let me make on this clear – I don’t hate those lists nor do I belittle the people who make them – quite the contrary putting the work into making the list, doing the math, simulating the weightings and all that stuff and the putting it all into forum post (those who ever made any gearlist understand) is hard work and sacrifice. Lists per say are fine and great thing – the perception of the lists is what is flawed and wrong.

But Rah, this is not my BiS item!

As a raider and raid leader, I heard all the varieties of this sentence way too many times and in my books it’s one of the sentences that should never come from anyone who considers themself a raider. See, the trouble with best in slot list is, that it’s not best in slot unless you have all the items. Got it? Let me repeat it.

It’s not BiS unless you have all the items.

All the items.

There, I said it. Now, let’s elaborate on this quite simple, yet overlooked topic. Best in slot lists (or any gear lists for that matter) are maxed out around all these items worn together. These items are selected, gemmed, reforged and enchanted to the highest output potential and unless you put all the pieces together, it won’t work. Hell, I’d even go as far as claim that unless you do have all these items, upgrading one by one from your lower-gear without taking any side upgrades “for the time being” actually does not help your performance or – god forbid – makes your output worse. Let’s just go with this imaginary situation – you as resto shaman are wearing two pieces of gear, heavy on haste and spirit. Now, you come across two other items for these slots, both being on BIS list, however both these pieces are haste and spirit free. So you blindly get them, pop them on and – voila – you’re shitloads of spirit and haste short. What you do? You re-reforge and re-enchant to get these stats back to where they were. Now tell me, was it overall gain, or loss (since presumably your items already were reforged to provide certain “set” of stats) – well of course it will be gain, even if marginal, since in most cases this upgrading will bring increase in ilevel and thus raw stat capacity as well. However, what if you enter raids in your blues and two items drop that are upgrade to you, but are not on BIS list? What do you do?

DKP hoarding

This is closely related to holding out for BIS items. Most guild run some sort of point system – be it plain DKP systems, be it hidden systems like KSK or “fair roll” (simple roll with the exception of you got loot last time, you pass next) – there is always some rule saying that once you get an item, you will wait/be skipped for your next upgrade (yes I know there are exceptions, I just like to generalize!). DKP hoarding refers to such acting when you pass on upgrades (even if you don’t have competition for them) just to make sure you do have the leading spot when the deeper and BIS item drops. I was well guilty of this in Black Temple, saving my DKP priority (EPGP) for Torch of the Damned (THE single BEST weapon for alliance retribution paladins at the time) that drops from Reliquary of Souls (sp?). Fortunately the only plate dps contender I had was a dps warrior and soon we came to conclusion that actually pre-dividing drops between us works fairly better – I believe the arrangement over this mace was that the first drop is mine, no matter the dkp (he passes) and he gets the first drop of plate boots (I pass) regardless of DKP. This actually needed us both to realize we are a team and that we need to work together on loot. The less interesting items were down to DKP between us. Now, ever since I came to that realization that DKP hoarding is actually just wrong, I hate it with passion.

Why it doesn’t work? Well, first reason is quite simple – you are playing in a team environment, and any upgrade to anyone in the team (including you) is an upgrade for the whole team. So passing on items till you get to the dream item (that very often drop from the last or second to last boss of instance) cripples your team progress capability. It’s simply you deciding not to pull your weight. The second reason why it won’t work is that while loot tables are rich and bountiful, drop tables are not. I’d even go as far as insist that Murphy’s law is heavily in effect when it comes down to holding out for drops.

So please, don’t hoard DKP. It’s bad form and should never be done unless you are ignorant tit.

The Elusive BIS

Best in slot lists were always taunting us. They were always there, elusive, on the other end of the rainbow. But let’s burst the bubble. First off, most of us won’t be able to reach the BiS list before new tier is released. Simple as that. I consider myself to be capable raider, so are the raiders I lead and raid with. However I have no doubt that as much as we’d probably kill Nefarian hard before 4.2 (our steady progress plus tweaks / nerfs / fixes to the encounter should make sure of that), I am very much positive that there  won’t be enough kills on our record to allow me just go “fuck it, I’ll just wait till he drops it”. And that’s why for me and many other raiders BIS lists are in the realms of fantasy. It just won’t happen and you should not be holding out for the hero in some rainbow chasing delusional trance.

The not-so-much-BIS lists

Now, let’s say that BIS list has the average ilevel of 372. Have you ever stopped to think that there are more 372 lists around? And if you did, have you actually stopped to think about how much these other lists lag behind the BIS dreamlist? Yes, it will be some – but, if you keep the same ilevel, especially now with the option to reforge stats back and forth – will the non-BIS list be behind so much to even matter for you? I know it won’t for me. I am not Vodka/Paragon type raider. I might have the hardcore mindset, but I definitely don’t have the same hardcore performance nor will to even attempt it. Where does that bring us? Little anecdotal evidence, if I may:

We do have Resto shaman and Elemental shaman on our roster. While I am in full epix (!!!), the elemental shaman was sporting blue shoulders and headpiece because “BIS is resto tier for shoulders and ele tier for head!”. So the shoulders from Conclave in BoT got passed on to me, and I just nicked the mace from Chogall (‘sup not-BIS mace). Last reset (few Nef kills later and second Halfus Wyrmbreaker hard kill later) the awesome imba mega hot helmet dropped. Mind you, our Elemental Shaman (still in the two blues) were insisting on passing the helm to me. Why on earth would he you do that? Because the BIS list says blah blah blah. So I asked how important is the 4T11 bonus for his dps, he said it’s quite significant. So I asked if it’s not actually better to take the helmet and wait for just one drop instead? Gotta say it took a while before this idea went through. And by far I don’t mean said Elemental shaman is a “noob” or “moron”. It’s actually good kid that just got too blinded by the bling-bling of BIS list. Of course you are so pro that it won’t ever happen to you. Really?

The real BIS list

So is there anything like true or real BIS list? Of course there is. Your best in slot is any gear that drops and is an upgrade. If my experience ever taught me anything about these lists or dkp hoarding is that it almost never works. By hoarding DKP you skip out on so many upgrades that in the end it damages your performance. I’ve learned that picking out the little upgrades at the cost of loosing the first drop of the BIS item proves to be long-term output increase.

It’s nice to be holding out for your 4T11 without one VP item and holding out for shoulder token (say you lucked out on helmet). But what if, after 5 months, the shoulder token just doesn’t drop? Should then your BIS be actually the VP chest you missed and those Conclave shoulders that already dropped and been sharded 2 times over? Think about it.

To conclude…

If there was any moral in this post, it’s this – take BIS lists with grain of salt and take them for what they are – BEST IN SLOT. They are best, so only the best will ever gather them. Look at your guild and your progress and think for a while whether holding out to the BIS item for the best output isn’t actually damaging your performance and what are your chances it will ever happen?

PS: I am putting breakers after first paragraph so the front page is not huge mess – can anyone reading me through RSS feed readers tell me if the posts in their readers are non-truncated? Cause I hate when people post truncated posts in their feeds. Thanks!

“What is your favourite race?”

Now, put like this, the question indeed is simple. However once you dig deeper into it, the reasons behind your race selection, the reason behind your alts race choice, it starts complicating. Just thinking about it, even my alts went through this race-changing (or prefference changing) experience from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm. Why? Fairly simple reason really – I am person willing to try about anything and well… Shamans could now be played by Dwarves. So there, I guess my most favourite race in World of Warcraft would be Dwarves.

My humble beginnings…

My very first beginnings in this game were on Dwarven Paladin on Roleplaying server. That being said, I knew nothing about Warcraft lore, last game I played properly from this series was Warcraft II, but I was (am) Warhammer junkie so Dwarven Slayer was my preffered choice and back in Vanilla warriors just weren’t as appealing to me as paladins. So there I was, grey haired, experienced Dwarven Paladin. I dipped into the lore a bit and from the very start decided that my paladin is actually a Wildhammer. Yes, I went outside the pre-set lines of game and made a Wildhammer dwarf. Sure, he believes in the Light and all that, but as well had these “shamanistic” roots and was heavily attuned to nature and life at it’s purest, raw form. Using many roleplaying addons I created a looks of tattoed face and all those Wildhammer rings braided in his beard and trucked on. He stayed like this till our Illidan kill which came after barbershops (was that 3.0, wasn’t it?) he was finalized with these looks:

The age of the Draenei

Short after Wrath came, I rerolled to Rahana, a female Draenei at that time. Shortly after, her looks and visuals became the master-pattern for all my characters. If you looked at my character selection screen at that time, you’d see five different Draenei alts, all looking the very same and I was happy about it. I loved Rahana and her looks as well as her cleavage in T10. The racials were awesome for most alts I played (Deathknight and Mage could totally utilize the +hit, so could Rahana in her offspec and my low level Hunter and Priest were benefiting from it as well, if only for leveling). The starting area of course went a little dull after doing it so many times, so basically asking guildies for port out to civilization. But hell, was I in the love of the hooved spacegoats back then? Sure was. I still am. Want a proof? Slideshow ahoy!

Non-Draenei era

Being bored, I decided to roll a new alt – a druid. As this was in Wrath, the only available race was Night Elf, so Night Elf it was. I leveled my Panzerbutt (yes, she was intended to be a tank at 80 – and she was) as Night Elf, looking forward to this -1% chance to hit as a tank. That was my last alt I rolled pre-Cataclysm I guess and was the only who had the race forced on it (except for Rahana ofc). The next character I rolled was actually another Druid on Cata beta, but that was to see the bear/kitty forms (heavily un-polished at that time) and was looking at the racials as quite benefiting, but not decisive factor.

So Rahana, how do you decide on race?

I don’t, I guess. It’s spur of a moment thing really. Sometimes I go after the visuals, sometimes I go after racials – for example Rahana went Dwarf as soon as it was possible, getting the same looks as my old Paladin (currently have 4 Dwarves on character screen, all looking the same). That definitely wasn’t a “clever” change mechanics wise – given that I will never play enhancement the hit was far more valuable than the expertise on maces only (then again my whooping 6K dps on Atramedes says I really shouldn’t  bother at all – but hey, I fired off many chain heals on that one as well as stopcasted countless rains). Arliana, my mage, was leveled Draenei the whole time just to go Worgen at level 84ish. That was both visual and racial choice as I didn’t have any other Worgen at that time and I really wanted her to be fire in the endgame so I went for the crit instead of hit. Kilriana, my level 85 Draenei deathknight has been rerolled as fresh lvl 58 Night Elf in order to provide the best tanking benefits (as I want her to be blood and level it all over again as blood just to get the practice). The only character that actually remains untouched is Angrak, Draenei warrior (tank?) who still keeps my “original” Draenei look I had. The good thing about Draenei that once you learn to love their looks, you’re good to go. You get the 1% hit for leveling and usefull stat for your dps spec at endgame. I am quite weird person when it comes to it – I will for example never wear staff or off-hand on Rahana – yes, even if I could possibly poach the Legendary coming up, I just couldn’t stand it unfortunately. Or offhand – Shaman has to have shield, simple as that. For me at least. And if you please and scroll up to remind yourself of Chmur… this is how Rahana looks now:

Do you have most favourite race? If not and you’d really have to pick one, which would it be? Do you min-max your race selection for your alts? Is your current main of min-max race for it’s purpose, or did you sacrifice the “best” for looks or personal liking?

Then 4.0 came and we got our new shiny abilities and mechanics, but in old and very, very easy content. Which didn’t mean much and everyone was excited and well, quite optimistic about the times that were supposed to come. There of course were the BETA reports of health being buffed by a lot, whilst remaining at the same per-heal numbers, meaning a lot more work. But that was far ahead, not in the present shiny days of ICC hardmodes and so much mana that we could bottle it and save for rainy days. Which we should’ve done.

Healing shift

The healing shift actually didn’t happen until heroic instances. As a T10 geared Shaman, decorated veteran of many raid encounters and whatnot, I felt invincible venturing into my first instances. As soon as I got Healing Rain, I was feeling like the king of the world. Sure I was, back then. Quite frankly, even in my old raiding gear, I was all fine and dandy up till like level 83. Till then the damage incoming and the healthpools were fairly small, except for tanks that had the outstanding 80+ thousands of hitpoints. So I healed tanks more, big deal. However the spirit benefit and combat ratings on gear were more than sufficient to pose as endless mana battery and having enough throughput to just not care. As well, since I never really bothered with Vash’ir (seriously can’t stand nagas, no matter how great the rep rewards are there – they are!) so I haven’t discovered Throne of the Tides entrance till I was actually forced to by the heroic dungeon selection (some guildie wanted to farm that stupid place for something). But hey, all the way it was just sunshine, chocolate and joyful singing.

We were young, restless and happy to run instances in and out. Not caring about anything in the world. I think I stopped healing at level 84, took a deep breath and just went for the 85 push. I was finishing off Uldum for the quest rewards (Harrison Jones belt) and doing as much of Twilight Highlands for the blue quest rewards as I could before dinging. Well it all went fine and dandy and soon enough here I was, doing the Maw of Madness questline and dinging on that one. Weee, I am big boy! Level 85 and i327, 2 points short of heroics (in fact I thought it was i330 back then so I overgeared entry hc point by 1 ilevel!).

Level 85 experience

First thing first – since I am responsible healer first and foremost, I attempted few guild runs into normal instances. I know it was something piss easy like Lost City of Tol’vir or Grim Batol. Our guild tank was very cautious of CC usage and we were happily CCing whole packs at time! Soon we decided to plunge ourselves into heroics.

“Let’s do VP, it’s easy!”, they said.

Well reflecting back on VP regular and seeing the group composition – ele shammy, resto shammy, lock – I was thinking to myself man, that’s so much CC in the group it’s not even fair. And so we went. Truth be told, with that composition, VP was a cakewalk. You can Bind/Banish almost everything, and have Hex-Hex-Fear for non-elemental packs. We wiped three times total before I got the grasp of things – the big single dragon trash actually hit like trucks on steroids (healable IF you are expecting that), and both spark groups – well maybe not the second one but there definitely weren’t many people standing. It was fairly simple boss-wise. Stack up on first, heal tank, lay down HR and CH through it when he summons the winds in, face different ways for sparks. Drake? Stack up behind dragon, keep HR down for party damage, heal tank. And Asaad? Well let’s say that once you are told you need to get under the cage and once you make sure the Chain Lightning jumps can’t be outranged, it’s very simple. We conquered the place, cashed in 70VPs and queved for another, random this time…

My first two random heroics

Deadmines. Cool is what I was thinking, neat! Well… no. Goddamnit that place was painfully hard. I was OOM every other pack, bosses were a mess and many times on bosses I felt like there was bloody nothing I could do. About halfway through the instance I just understood that people WILL die no matter what I do; and they did. MTT on permanent cooldown, 60-60 spirit food on, mana pots stacked in every empty inventory slot. Well we won, with few hiccups on the way – especially doing the mechanical nightmare like 4 times myself was extreme fun… boy I fail that part so much it’s not even possible. We killed Vanessa and queued for yet another heroic, hungry for the reputation and justice points it brings.

Grim Batol. Seriously, Grim Batol as my third heroic ever. It was pain and living through hell. I was completely oom most of the time, drinking my free espressos (espressoes? espresses? confusing!) after every other pull. First boss was one shot, even without CCing the Malignant trogg. Things looked pretty optimistic then and we trucked on. Well just around the corner and two dragonkin pack and small troggs on top of it, so let’s release and run back. Second boss was pain in the ass. God bless Healing Rain and Chain Heal on phalanx phase. He went down, 1 or 2 attempts total and once again, we bit into the painful trash. No one managed to fall down from the bridge (I actually managed that on my first alt few weeks later) and we reached third boss. This one pushed me to limit, really. I didn’t exactly know what will happen so the first shadow-breath caught me by surprise. But we killed him right off, possibly lost a person or two (or three) and had the fun with the last large trashpack down the stairs in Erudax room. Two big fellas, and boss. Avoid shadowcrashes, stack up on voidzone for phase 2, kill both adds/interrupt them. We gave up 10 tries later. We simply couldn’t do it. In hindsight I had no idea what exactly went wrong – we pushed upwards of 8K dps per dpser on the encounter, we got snares and slows and interrupts, but they just weren’t going down quick enough and we got swarmed by the small adds. Since it was quite late into the night already, we just acknowledged our failure and went to bed.

Restoration Shaman in early Cataclysm content

Despite the awful end of that evening, I was and still am thrilled by Restoration Shaman in Cataclysm. We have it all – passive raid healing, powerful pre-emptive AoE heal, AoE heal, passive tank healing and 3 direct healing spells, one direct with hot effect and one direct buffer. We had it all and we still have it. It was the time when I was the only healer in guild willing to heal heroics and I was actually enjoying it. Yes, given the vicious circle of gear dependancy (which I still think is biggest for resto shamans of all healers) I was oom pretty much all the time very often till I got some gear, but once I got it (as well as the rising dps of my guildies) instances became easy to conquer and they actually became even more fun than they were at start – yes, more fun than at start. I for one think the heroic 5-man nerfs came too many too soon

Anyways, even in those troublesome days before Purification buff and all the doom and gloom posts how Shamans are deadweight healers, I was happy healing my ass off, rolling my little dwarven hands left and right and trying to keep people alive, completely excited about the new healing model. The period of adjustment had begun.

This concludes the first post in the series which should… like in Wrath provide leisure instance guides, tips and tricks and hopefully help any stray Shamans out there being helpless about healing some encounters realize that they are not terrible and that they are not alone. We’ve all been there, we all know it.

Before I sign off on this post, let me repeat the most important points you need to learn as fresh Cataclysm 85 healer:

• Do not hesitate to ninja CC. You can Hex and Bind, which should help you great deal in instances; offering CC services at the start of run is always a good idea. If you get LOL’d back at, so be it. It’s their repair bills.
• Have thick skin. This is the reason I gave up pugging altogether as healer. I couldn’t be arsed telling the dpsers that I simply can’t heal through fire and stupid. Seeing situation on my dps alts, it has changed a bit (unless you group with me, sometimes I tend to have quite suicidal tendencies) and people understand the importance of self-preservation.
• Have Purge and Wind Shear at hand. Really do. Interrupting and purging can save you great deal of mana, casting time and stress. And don’t forget that Wind Shear is off GCD. So tap that key like you mean it!
• Always remember to have fun. Healing with low gear and the returning “zerg it” tactics can become tedious at times and it’s no shame to bail group if you are getting abused or simply not having fun. Even wiping can be done with grace and be fun. If it’s not, skip out.

And that’s all folks, for today. Before I leave this post be though – for some reason, my favourite heroic seems to be Deadmines (despite the fact I killed Vanessa for bracers so many times it was actually faster to kill Chima for them), I really loved the pace and difficulty of the instance when we were starting out. So what is your favourite heroic if you have one?

As noted elsewhere here, I was pretty excited about the intended raiding size changes for Cataclysm; 10M and 25M sharing same loot and same lockout? Yes please. No more belittling of our efforts and achievements, no more needing to prove ourselves. As well, with the gear and the format being on par between the formats, bigger pool for recruiting players for roster (which was constant struggle in 10M, as well as to remain on various “strict” rankings). This coupled with guild experience and guild perks felt like really the good and proper move towards more FnF style of raiding and actually good step forward in the PvE direction.

With T11 normal cleared and Wyrmus heroic beating the dust, I think I couldn’t be more wrong…

Personal update

At one point at the end of Wrath, I kinda decided that I do not want to be GM anymore, that I don’t have the willpower to go on anymore. was disbanded and some people fled server, and two guilds were created on Shadowsong as it’s successors. One of CP officers and the coming-back-to-game GM from before CP decided to roll on with new guild and I was offered a Raid Leader officer spot in the new order. Since I liked the way these two people work and we shared the general view on things, I was thrilled to accept and be part of something new. So came into existence. The idea behind is to provide “Adult friendly” highly focused raiding scheme as well as social hotspot to hangout and chill after work. Pretty much the same thing we did in   a guild with many interesting personalities and progress of 11/12ICC-HC. Well there we were, recruiting pre-Cataclysm, trying to trial the people in and out of outgeared and outpatched content, prepping ourselves for what was supposed to be the Golden Era of small size raiding.

Please note that for the following intents and purposes I am using our guild as the reference in my posts. By that I mean the format – we keep non-alt raiding roster of 12 people and we pride ourselves to provide enough raiding for everyone on the roster without necessary sit-outs; we do not sport 17 people roster to rotate people in-and-out to stack classes, buffs or trivialize mechanics. We unfortunately don’t have Resto druid or Lock/Mage or Rogue and didn’t have for longer period of time since Cataclysm launched, yet we worked our way around that.

Illusions shattering

The reality check was kinda harsh though. We immediately found it hard to recruit anyone – most 25M guilds split into smaller 10M teams and even those pushed off the raiding roster stayed in their old guilds to take advantage of guild perks and level as well as hoping to make the cut “later”.  Many people from “pro” 25M guild came and went on pretty much soon and I realized one thing as we progressed into content with the Wrath 25M raiders on board:

There were 2 possible shifts for 10M raiding for Cataclysm; it could either be balanced as it felt for the 25M overgeared raiders going 10M for fun and points, a faceroll lolcontent basically, or it could’ve been shifted on par with the tougher and challenging 10M strict raiding we already had experience with.

Having healed and progressed normal content from i346 to i359 gear-wise, I can say that the latter is definitely the truth. 10M raiding now is very close to what the 10M strict felt like in Wrath and those 25M raiders were actually kinda blown away by that. Imagine that, you have to work now for 10M gear. I laughed a little when a Rogue suggested healers should do Magmaw spiking because he is loosing dps time if he does it.

We talked about this in /o lately as we killed Nefarian and Halfus then on hard, that afterall it seems we know what we are doing. Yes, yes, praising myself sucks, but no one else is gonna do it. Let me elaborate though – you can see guilds splitting, quitting disbanding left and right (especially lately) and people hitting brick walls whining how hard content is as 10M (not saying that does not happen in 25M, just really don’t follow the scene) whereas us in don’t find it that much harder than it used to be. We just rangered on the same way and with the same goals and approach like in Wrath and here we are,  standing strong and looking forward to hardmodes. Not saying there weren’t any speed bumps along the way, misjudged recruits and other mishaps, just saying that even after all that shit dropping down and hitting the fan, we made it here.

The actual T11 content

I like it difficulty wise, except for few bosses I like the mechanics. There are some old bad habits that come from ICC times, some class balance habits that simply can’t be helped (because fixing them means screwing more things up), but there as well are some good things on current raiding scene.

• Same as with Discipline priests in ICC, healer composition makes wonders. This was most obvious pre 4.0.6 whenHoly Paladins trivialized most fights to the extent of making a kill or wiping. They were not necessary, but the mana effectivity and sheer throughput of their healing was something to stare at at awe (especially playing resto shaman in bluish gear). Having Holy Paladin on our squad rocketed our progress a fair bit.
• Interrupting situation is dire. For example fights like Halfus or Maloriak pre-nerf as well as Nefarian are nightmare for 10M raiding guild like ours at this moment. For example, I have one dedicated interrupter at hand and pillars on Nefarian are mostly done on the mechanic of tank and healer hitting their interrupts and praying something will work. The upcoming fix in 4.1 however is godsend and a proof that Blizzard listens.
• Majority of theorycrafting is less valid. Most of theorycrafters around are in 25M guilds and adjust to their raid compositions and buffs and healer compositions. We don’t have that luxury and we heal what we can, when we can. On the upside, it’s far easier to manage assignments of 3 people than 6-7 to avoid any overhealing and mana-wasting. However, either I am doing it wrong, or plain simple gear guides for 25M raiding don’t work all that well for me.
• Homogenization of gear – definitely a good thing. I can now plan and contrary to the doom and gloom point above use the theorycrafting breakdown of trinkets, enchants and whatnot made by 25M raiders, because nowadays I can get the same gear as them. Not only same item level (screw that to be honest) but the same type of loot.
• Loot quantity – I feel this as major setback for 10M raiding at the moment. As much as the gear is the same, bosses always drop the same. And with 2 items dropping per boss, it’s getting old pretty fast. For example we haven’t seen Shaman shoulder token off Cho’gall (4-5 kills me guess), not a single helmet from Halfus (upwards of 10 kills methinks, armory is down so can’t check), Atramedes is quite stubborn with not dropping ranged weapon. The only caster weapon (beside 2 trash swords for Holy Paladins) is my mace from Cho’gall. Didn’t see anything else. But hey, we keep sharding the same belts, bracers, robes every week. Is this the same for 25M raiders, or does your drop-table actually allow for faster gearing?

The state of art

Repeating once again – I am happy with the overall overhaul and difficulty of things as they are. The step up from LOLmode-impossible from wrath 10M to challenging content-overgearedlolcontent-challenging heroic content is nicely done and nicely follows the progression feel as it should, but…

Thinking about it, can’t say my wishes/hopes for Cataclysm 10M raiding were fulfilled or that I am completely happy with the state of things. There definitely are things I’d done differently and few things that I think should be changed in order to make the whole raiding more appealing to the masses. But that’s for another post, another time. For now, let’s stop the excursion to the life of 10M guild here and not get into details, yet.

PS: My spellchecker is not working atm for some reason, so bear with me before I fix it

So here I was some day last week, dusting off my login into WordPress after many months, thinking I should you know, actually try and stick with something and do it. I logged into it and stared at the screen, frankly I didn’t even find the courage to click on the “blog dashboard” link to get over to BBT. Back in Wrath, BBT and the community I got into while blogging meant a great distraction and a perfect addition to what was happening in game. But truth be told, I am slacker. If slacking would be olympic sport, I’d be on Gold Medal streak and possibly hold few records. So here I sat, pondering what to do next. I was actually scared to write anything new because I was affraid of failure. Not that what I want to say will not interest anyone, but my own failure to stick to something and see it through. So I closed my browser and turned World of Warcraft on.

I told this to Chayah the same day and while he seemed pretty excited that I opened WP.com again (given he was excited only till I said I shut it down right after), but Chayah is pretty excited about just anything, he always seemed like the person who will cheer at you for finishing race last, because, you know, that’s awesome result and all and you might not run fast but you run with style… Anyways, it got me thinking some more. What if – what if I can keep it up? Not only that, what if I can actually take advantage of regular, additional activity in my life and stick with it, wouldn’t it be better for me in my personal life as well?

Well, here I am. Thinking that it’s about time to do something with my life and stop being as bad person as I am, work on myself. Yes, starting a game related blog might not seem to be the best idea but… baby steps. I as well ordered new pair of hyraulic disc brakes and set of wheels for my bike in prep for the nice weather, so hopefully I will be able to stick with some regular schedule with that as well.

On this blog, content and visuals…

We will see what time brings. As in the past, if I will stick with this, there won’t be much theorycrafting or solid guides around. I play it by the ear as I see fit (and I damn rock it) and there are others, far more sophisticated blogs out there for proper restoration shaman resource – big shout out to Vixsin from Life in Group 5 for being the lead on this field, I owe you soo much.

However, I am quite torn on the name and layout of this blog. I already changed the header and theme because, you know… Rahana is not Blueberry anymore. The very first day it became possible, she turned into Dwarf. A male one. You see, my very first character was a Dwarf Paladin and that’s kinda my race. Not that I have anything against Draenei, Rahana was hot shit as Draenei and all, but I am Dwarf at heart. As well being completely useless as anything but restoration invalidates all racial arguments. O hai Archaelogy.

So the biggest task for the few upcoming weeks is to rebuild the blog graphic site wise, move around the guide content to some archive cathegory and maybe, maybe post some new guides. I as well decided to actually put some time into TotemSpot (been given Wiki editor rank right from start, haven’t written a letter yet) and as I said, basically spend way more time doing the fun stuff around this game outside the stupid grind (more on that later).

So, now just to dust off the language, put in links to leech some link love from other bloggers and we might officialy re-open. I really do hope you will enjoy your stay and wish you best of luck downing bosses. And remember, have fun!