BUBBLICIOUS ANNOUNCEMENT

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already familiar with I Like Bubbles, Amber’s blog. Amber is Brotherhood of Oblivion’s GM, and her blog is pretty much the reason that I’m still playing WoW these days. I had always thought that her guild sounded hilarious and fun, but they were Alliance and I had no interest in leveling all the way up to 80 on a new faction. I had completely quit raiding for a while, and when faction transfers opened, I didn’t hesitate at all to go draenei and transfer over to Azgalor to join BoO. So you could definitely say that Amber’s had a hugely positive impact on me when it comes to WoW.

ANYWAY. She decided that, since her paladin is retired, her blog was lacking in paladin flavor, and asked me to talk about holy paladining over there. So I’ll be making regular bubble loving posts on her blog. :D I AM EXCITE.

Wait, does this mean … FRIDAY FLOWCHART POSTS? WITH PALADIN FLAVORING?

A basic Holy Paladin primer post.

Since Rivs is leveling up a holy paladin and asked about tips, I thought I’d make a post about the basics. This is just how I play, and things that have made me successful at healing.

A holy paladin is good at many things, but the first and foremost is single target healing. Compared to the other healing classes, we don’t have many spells in our repertoire, but what we do have enables us to excel as tank healers, and we’re certainly able to break out of that mold as needed. Paladins also tend to have very large mana pools at later gear levels, and are able to last a long time without running dry. This is a catch 22 – because you’re a holy paladin, your tank will almost never stop and let you drink because he has never heard of a paladin dipping below 50% mana, but at the same time that’s okay, because being a holy paladin means that you probably won’t need to.

The basic foundation of the holy paladin is two spells: Flash of Light and Holy Light. Flash of Light is the smaller of the two heals, with a quicker cast time, and Holy Light is a longer casting, more mana-expensive heal that has roughly five times the base healing output of Flash of Light. Flash is the quick filler spell that you use to top off dps who stand in The Bad Things or tanks who aren’t taking much damage, and Holy Light is a bomb of … well, holy light, that’s best to drop on someone who is taking very large hits that Flash just can’t keep up with, like a tank who might have rounded up a few extra adds and the boss. It’s really a matter of preference as to which one is used more often – some of us are devoted Flash of Light spammers, while others have embraced the strength of Holy Light’s powerful heals (how else would I ever hit 6k hps?).

When it comes to 5 mans and leveling as a healer, you’re going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage compared to other healers, because a lot of the things that make paladins good aren’t available until later levels, like Divine Plea at 71. As soon as it’s possible to get Beacon of Light (earliest is level 60), your job will be a lot easier. I recommend always keeping Beacon (along with Sacred Shield) on your tank, and sprinkling around FoL on the dps as they take damage. Don’t be afraid to use Holy Shock – it eats up mana and it’s not all that strong, but it’s very much necessary when there is heavy AoE damage, and can proc an instant FoL for you, which will be a real life saver. Always stay on the ball with casting your Judgement, because the haste buff that you get is crucial. The most important thing in 5 mans is that you will have to be on the ball and react quickly, because you are constrained by your cast times. An example is Argent Confessor Paletress: in that fight you have to be able to heal up five people in between fears, and that means taking advantage of all the time that you have. Become intimately acquainted with your cast times so that you are able to chain cast without pauses – a cast bar addon, like Quartz, can help a lot with this. Don’t forget that you also have Divine Illumination and Divine Favor at your disposal – the 50% mana cost reduction and 100% crit chance of those two will definitely come in handy.

When it comes to speccing, I prefer to go into the protection tree for my other 20 talent points, rather than retribution. That’s just a personal preference that fits my play style – I think crit is no longer the amazing stat that it used to be for paladins, while having the extra mitigation of an improved Sacred Shield, improved Devotion Aura, and Divine Sacrifice available for times when you just can’t keep everyone up are absolute life savers. I would imagine that if you don’t have a retribution paladin or balance druid in your raid group, then a holy build that makes Heart of the Crusader available would be nice to benefit the raid as a whole, but I’ve had the most success with 51/20/0.

I joke about it, but my rule for successful paladin healing really is ABC. Unless you’re geared to the teeth and running heroics for fun, your tank/party will be taking damage, and you will need to always be casting to top it off. Usually spamming FoL is sufficient outside of raids. Learn to love your FoL button, you two will be seeing a lot of each other.

Screenshot Tuesday – raiding and a dose of fail tree.

The first thing that you should know about the members of BoO is that we’re all very mature and we never joke about sexual things.

Just kidding. We call it Boner Spike and giggle. Also, if you don’t think “ass cherry” sounds funny, just say it out loud – preferably in the voice of a sweet 12 year old girl.

I hate the name iPad; what was Apple thinking? But it was good joke fodder for the first 24 hours.

This is why Kotakh calls me a beast. I throw out Holy Light like it’s my job … because it is.

Our strategy for Festergut includes rainbows, ponies, cupcakes, and hugs for me.

Let me just say that I find tree healing very unsettling sometimes. I think that it’s because I primarily play a paladin healer, and our motto is ABC – Always Be Closing. I mean, Casting. Unless we’re vastly overgeared and my tank just isn’t taking damage, my fingers are always pressing Flash of Light at the very least, so it feels weird to me to put two HoTs on a tank, press Wild Growth, then do NOTHING for 15 seconds. So a few nights ago I tried to see how I could multitask and still heal effectively.

Things you can do while tree healing: put on makeup, run to the kitchen to get a drink, grab all the quest items in Utgarde Pinnacle while everyone else fights, herb, go answer the door, and probably a million other things I’ve forgotten. Things you can’t do while tree healing: sharpen pencils during the Tribunal of Ages in HoS.

Edit: OH, Amber’s screenshot post du jour reminded me of something about ICC. The Valkyr pulls spawn a shade of some of your players, and I think I’ve been the one who gets spawned a few times. That leads to me making stupid jokes about how I’ve always wanted to hit on myself, but I also end up rooting for my evil self just a little. Congrats for being so tough to kill, evil Ori!

The guild who blogs together.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to hear that I’m a social gamer. Despite being very shy, one of the main reasons that I play WoW is to interact with other people. Who knows, it may subconsciously have been the reason behind my switch to tanking, then healing – I felt very under appreciated when I played my warlock and was just dps (though my guild master at the time promoted some newer members who didn’t help out as much as I did, to an officer rank, so that was definitely the other reason). Social issues have had unfortunate impacts on my guild membership in the past, and that part of the atmosphere is generally why I will take a hike, rather than anything to do with raiding.

BoO seems to be the exception, and I think it’s because we’re a guild of bloggers. Sure, not everyone has a blog, but I feel closer to and more understanding of the ones who do. I know that the reason for that is simply communication. People love to use vent to talk during raids and during offtimes, and in the past I’ve felt very isolated at times because of it. When everyone’s talking somewhere that I can’t pick up on everything, guild chat tends to be really quiet, and there’s nothing that I can do to include myself. In one of my last guilds, I chatted a lot with the only other (coincidentally also holy!) paladin in our paladin channel, and he was always encouraging me to get onto vent and talk to people during the day, but didn’t understand that I wasn’t comfortable with that. At the time I only used vent when my friend Ashley, who knew me IRL and knows just how much I can’t hear, was on and could relay anything directed at me, or tell me to speak up if I was way too soft.

Vent does still get used a lot in BoO, but the thing I’m grateful for is that there is a lot of text chatter as well. I do log onto vent for our raids and sometimes join into conversations when I can, and I’ve been trying to make a habit of talking more often. I kind of have this crippling fear of talking over someone or saying the wrong thing because I don’t follow the conversation. But I feel that despite this, I know and understand my healing team well because we all chatter in the healer channel during raids, and because most of us who play healers also blog. It makes me so happy to play in a guild where I have this, because it definitely makes those few bad raids with lots of wipes much easier to bear.

This kind of turned into a ramble, but the gist is YAY COMMUNICATION. \o/ It’s why I like saying things in my dungeon groups and handing out compliments, or occasionally saying something silly in trade chat that starts a conversation. It’s undoubtedly why I have a blog, and why I need to do a better job of updating it, even if it means silly personal posts like this, because it’s my blog and I do what I want.

Also, this is why I NEVER make fun of Amber, other than because I luff her.

When I do, she exacts great vengeance!

A few things.

First of all, thank you to everyone who commented with some ret paladin tips. I haven’t had a chance to ret it up and test things out yet, because most of the time I just want to pull up my healer britches and take the easy way through some heroics. Seriously, I don’t know what I would do if I had to wait in those dps queue times all the time!

What I have been doing is playing my hunter alt. Lysippae’s a wee level 40, and the result of 30 granted levels through RAF, so I’ve really only played her for 10 levels. I think I’m doing a decent job of learning, though, and she and her crab, Soggleby, are zooming along just fine when I bother to log in and level. A couple of days ago I played her for the first time since the new dungeon system debuted. Before the new LFG I did enjoy leveling through dungeons, but it was always hard to find a group and I mostly only did it on characters that I could heal with. Now with the cross-server groups, I find that the queue pops quickly and there’s generally no confusion about who is filling what role.

But something about getting into the instance at that level generates all sorts of other confusion! I had an SM Cathedral group where everyone seemed to be doing their own thing. We had a rogue who insisted on sapping, yet always seemed to break out of stealth and come running back to the tank with at least two packs of mobs. Our healer seemed to sometimes suffer from OOOH SHINY OBJECT syndrome and would wander off. Since I’m usually a healer but can’t do much beyond mend pet and bandaging on the hunter, I was freaking out and trying to save our tank while he slowly dipped lower and lower in health. Eventually we made it into the Cathedral building and the tank goes one way, the healer and rogue go the other way, and the entire group implodes when half of the Cathedral is beating us to death and the tank and healer are yelling at each other. My other two groups have both been Uldaman, an instance where I’m not particularly comfortable because I’ve always skipped over it in the past and am not familiar with the layout. In both cases we suffered from a lack of communication, and members of the group wandering in different directions. I usually tried to stick with the tank, but sometimes we found ourselves healerless, or even the only two out of five to have stuck together.

I think that might have killed my interest in leveling my hunter through dungeons, at least, but I would love to give it a shot if I ever level a shaman. I think I’m just too attached to healing to pick another role. Or maybe I’ll even go with a warrior – after all, I leveled Orithea as prot and tanked instances all the way up to 80.

Ret experiment.

So how goes my attempt to make a viable dps spec for my paladin?

In a word: FAIL.

I have four pieces of T9 armor and have cobbled together items for every other slot that are mostly 213 ilevel and above. I’m hitcapped, expertise capped with glyph, socket strength pretty much everywhere else, and follow the Elitist Jerks’ suggested priority rotation. Based on that I was hoping to at least get 2k dps on a target dummy/in a heroic group, and was hoping for even more. But so far my personal best has been about 1.5k.

My failures at retribution pretty much sum up why I will always respect a good dpser who can do the job well, because I sure can’t just swap some gear and suddenly hit those numbers!

Does anyone who might be reading this have some ideas for a healer who apparently just doesn’t get the nuances of melee dps? I do just fine as a caster – my heroic geared warlock does better than my paladin in T9. Something about retribution just isn’t clicking for me.

To top it all off, ret seems to be dangerous for my tail.

How to make a healer happy?

Tell them that you appreciate what they do! There seems to be a general attitude that tanks and healers are demanding divas who want to think they’re more important than dps players. I don’t think that’s really the case – everyone recognizes that without dps, tanks and healers wouldn’t be able to down bosses, just like dps know they couldn’t do the same without us. The difference is that people applaud dps a lot more frequently; almost everyone has been in a group where the dps meters are posted, or someone says “great job!” when DBM announces a new record time. Compare it to the number of times that you’ve seen/heard, “amazing tps!” or “wow, great heals!”, and you can see that it’s just not as common for those two roles to be applauded. On the other hand, tanks and healers receive much more blame when something goes wrong.

I’m trying to make an effort to tell tanks that I appreciate them more often as I work my way through random dungeon finder groups. When a tank goes out of the way to do little things, like positioning in a way that makes the group take less damage and my job easier, I let them know that I recognize that they did it, and it makes them a good player. Occasionally when I’ve pulled off some fantastic healing maneuvers (… usually caused by my accidental pulling – the boss is right here, whyyyyy did my Judgement hit that trash pack across the room?) people pipe up with “great heals” and it makes me feel GOOD. I like to be told that I’m performing well, because there is rarely feedback for healing, beyond “is everyone alive? Okay!”.

Oh, and if you want to flatter your paladin healer, this is what you should say:

I’m proud of that ever-filled mana bar. /flex

I take my disenchanting duties very seriously.

Sometimes when gear drops that no one wants, it’s looted to me and Amberbubbles tells me to blow it up. To assume that I pay attention to this process is pure folly, so I didn’t think much of it when a dps weapon dropped last night, two people rolled on it but it was looted to me, then Amber says “I need you to DE something”. Citadel Enforcer’s Claymore went the way of the Abyss Crystal.

And suddenly there was a lot of laughter and “I hope that was something else in your bags!” Because people forget that even if I am in vent, I don’t hear about …. 90% of what is said there. So I had no idea that it was a joke being played on Mach (though I did wonder why he was opening trade with me).

This is what happens when you don’t realize that I take disenchanting duties very seriously! I think it might be one of those “you had to be there” things, but we were laughing about it for the rest of the night. Congrats, Evis, I’ve replaced your balls as the new guild joke. FOR NOW.

And that’s how we won the Gunship Battle.

Screenshot … Thursday: I Love My Guild

Maybe next week I’ll be back on track with actual Tuesday posts, but today I just want to take the time to share why I love Brotherhood of Oblivion.

First, there’s the guild pastime of picking on our fearless leader:

A universal appreciation of draenei chests in slut plate:

The fact that dirty jokes and pop culture references will always be welcome:

(I can’t be the only person who starts singing Tears for Fears when disrupting shout is announced as “shout … shout” on vent!)

And the fact that anything you mistell can and will be held against you forever. First you need to check out this post that features the original MT about testicular health in gchat.

I’ve also been up to some non-guild shenanigans, including the most amazing save I’ve ever had in a heroic:

And these days I’m getting mah VROOM on.

BEEP BEEP

Important Post of Complete Seriousness

If you participate in the Ice Cream Citadel gunship battle without listening to Elton John sing “Rocket Man”, you are Doing It Wrong.

Sorry guys, I have no idea if you just told me it’s time to cross over to the other ship, because I think it’s gonna be a long, long time …