DKP systems

Well, instead of talking about the upcoming changes and worrying over how the 3.2 patch is going to change my healing life, I have been thinking about DKP systems. Every guild has a different method of distributing loot to raiders. Each guild is supported by ensuring those raiders continue to recieve gear to further the progression into the raiding content. I have been in several different guilds that use dkp and some that just random everything.

I personally like the DKP system my current guild is using. It does have draw backs and is not perfect by any means; however, once you master the concepts, attaining gear becomes as easy as attending the raid. The one thing I like about Uldar content, is that there is enough variety for each type, tank, dps, healer, to keep people obtaining gear even 6 weeks later. While, we have seen the Idol of the Crying Wind enough to shard it on sight now, the fact remains that every

Druid has it now. And as time wears on building

off-spec sets is becoming easier. I see this because my overall gear score is putting me in the top 20 on the server for Druids, top 5 for

healing.

So while the debate rages about patch notes and testing changes, ole Fenrous is going to sit back and remember a time before Druids had Innervate, a time when we had to spec into Innervate, a time when it was useless, and now a time for healing.

Now with LARGER Graphs

Well, I was looking over the trending in healing again this morning, in preparation for the inevitable badge run and feeding frenzy that I am sure to participate in. When I noticed that my graphs were a little small in the last post, so I decided I would make it bigger.

After a little further thinking about it, maybe I should share with you how I got to this nice looking graph. First, it is done in MS Excel 2007.

Second, I took the raw summary report directly from WWS reports. I typically like to have two reports laid on top of each other. One report that is overall, the entire run. The second one is a report that is jsut defeated bosses. All of the trash pulls, and the deaths along the way, while they factor into the progression, really don't factor esaily into useable data. You simply can't measure how effective each 30 second slice fo the fight is easily. If you could, charting DPS ramping up and healing through put would be all USEFUL information.

Third, okay so now that I got the data from the two reports, I dump them into Excel, and then chart. I can see that my spot healing is dead on, with both Rejuvenation and Nourish at 21%. Wild Growth is a lot higher, but I am healing 5 people most of the time with it. Followed by my concentration on my tank / target healing at Regrowth 17% / Lifebloom 11%. I am a little puzzled by why Lifebloom is a good 6% below Regrowth; however when I look at my Hit/HoT counts, I am using Lifebloom significantly less. There is no doubt about it. I am also glyphed for Regrowth / Nourish / Swiftmend, so I am sure that is also inflating the healing numbers as well. Lastly, is all the stuff that I use in emergencies and "oh crap" moments. Luckily, 5 total moments, over 7 bosses, with 13 Swiftmend applications. I think those stats are right spot on target. Might consider using Swiftmend a bit more for instant healing; however, that would require letting the tank/target drop below 90% health, which is something I try to avoid.

Uldar 25 Man (First Day)

Well our Uldar 25 man run went very well last night, run report linked. We downed the First 6 bosses on the first night. This is a new record for us and we have downed all of the bosses that we normally would down in a week on the first night. I am not sure which bosses we are going to attempt on Thursday, but we should be getting into TIER pieces this week. WAY ahead of schedule if you ask me.

So now that I have settled down some, and easing into the Nourish / Rejuvenation mentality for Raid healing, I decided to put a chart together on how my healing is working out. I have moved up from a solid 5th place on the healing charts to third place overall. I am pretty satisfied with the solid performance. So here is the chart.
My thoughts are, 1) I am sticking to my healing philosophy, which is what I contribute the success to. 2) I am using Vuhdo and SmartBuff to cast all of my spells. I think that being comfortable with the configuration of these two addons is what has increased my healing output. 3) Because of my button layout and concerted effort on the philosophy, I can heal albeit slower without any addons.

As for the game plan here is what I am currently doing:
1) Rejuvenation / Nourish combination, if you get a spot heal you get both
2) Regrowth / Lifebloom combination, if your my tank/target you get both with the bloom to help cover the deficit.
3) Wild Growth, I am popping this onto my tank target as much as it is up, which 90% of the time also catches the MELEE DPSers, so it is a win - win
4) Swiftmend is reserved for my tank/target, if its up and your less than 50%, your getting it.
5) Nature's Swiftness / Healing Touch, I am only using this in an "Oh Crap moment", I am also measuring how many of those I think I had during a run and comparing the number.
6) Health stones, I am seeing more frequent use of these for myself and trying to remember to save the mana instead of healing myself if it is up. (Its a work in progress)
7) I am trying to Innervate early (~50% mana), use a Mana Injector in the middle of the fight (~25% mana), and Innervate late, if needed. So far, I haven't had the mana issues I was expecting, but I think me also setting up the healing is going to contribute to this as well.

Old School Runs

Recently our Guild did a "naked" Scarlet Monastery run. The idea was for everyone to start out naked and then only use equipment that was picked up out of the Instance. The groups were formed into 5 man teams randomly, which means a couple of groups did not have healers. Welcome to farming silk for bandages, anyway the goal was the first team to complete all 4 wings of SM won 400 gold.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend due to the timing, but it did make me a little nostalgic for my 60 days. So I dusted off the Feralheart Rainment and my Wildheart Rainment and took some pictures of me in my just barely raiding days of early 60dom. Love that Staff of Rampant Regrowth was awesome back in the day.

So now that I only collected 5 of 8 Tier 1 Cenarion Vestments, 3 out of 8 Tier 2 Stormrage Rainment, I was wondering if anyone else was also going back and collecting those old dungeon sets, including Tier 4 and Tier 5.

Flame Warden Fenrous

Well in my traditionally retentive way, I completed all of the Midsummer Festival meta-achievements last night. Flame Warden Fenrous. I am still debating on whether or not I am going to do them on Cywyn as well. It would be a shame not to, but I don't want to waste time on her either. I also got my achievement for Leading the Calvary. It seems kind of silly on Fenrous, since I am not likely to use them, but hey that is me.

The other item to share is I got to run a Vault of Archavon 10 man as a SOLO Healer. Emalon's Run report, in which there were NO deaths and Archavon, in which 1 Hunter died. I topped 4K in heals per second as well. I feel pretty confident that I could do it again.

Uldar 25 Man (Second Day)

Well we made some nice strides in our raid progression, downing two (2) new boss encounters on Heroic mode. Our Uldar 25 seems to be growing and people are starting to get excited. So the only boss that we downed that we consistently do is Auriaya. I rather like the encounter, but I also received my Phaelia's Vestments of the Sprouting Seed. It was hard to remove my Valorous Dreamwalker Robe but as I had no other Tier 7.5 Gear, the raw stats of the Vestments made it a rather easy choice.

I also seemed to be having a rather excellent healing night, having arrived at third on the healing chart. BTW, the healing and DPS charts are only reviewed after a run and not during. So either everything is clicking or it is not. Thursday night, I just seemed to be in the groove. However, I am also a lot more confident after continual reviewing of what I am doing and seeing steady improvements. My overall over-healing is also going down significantly.

Uldar 25 Man (First Day)

In our Uldar 25 man from 6/16, I wasn't the only healing tree. Sydia was also with us as well. I noticed that Sydia, whom I have not run with before, relied on regrowth spam as his primary heal with rolling Lifeblooms. Sydia also spent a lot of time lying on the ground, thus reducing his effective healing, which leaves me wondering how effective the time he spent healing was and what caused him to die so much, as the tanks never lost agro on their targets. I suppose the only explanation would be that Sydia simply didn't know the fights and insisted on standing nearly on top of his healing target. I did notice that overall, Sydia's healing did heal more per tick, regrowth (5029/4595), lifebloom (8332/7881), rejunvenation (1978/2026), and nourish (4412/5011). So judging by these numbers, he is using his heals that are bigger for him, and I am using my heals that are bigger for me. The only other thing that really stood out for me is that I used Swiftmend 13 times while he used it once. Thanks for the mana regen nerf and nerfing lifebloom Blizzard.

So, I am also hoping that I get a chance to run with Sydia again this week, so I can get another chance to compare build/healing preferences side by side again.

Druid Blogs

Well, as you can well imagine, I spend a lot of time reading other blogs. Nerf this Druid has come up with a list of Ultimate Uldar Loot List for Trees and I am smitten with her work. Very through and much appreciated. Thanks to Restokin for the link and a summary of Tree healer loot. It was a pleasant read.

But you know it was this Druid Healing 101 that I got the most information from. It is interesting to me to read how other druids are healing thier raids and then contrast it to my own tendencies and play styles. There are so few healing druids on my server, that I get tells from people all the time asking me to heal their Heroic this or their achievement attempts, because there are so few of us that are good at it. In my recent experience, I have only ever had the pleasure of playing with one (1) other healing tree and it was on a VOA 25 run, let alone ever analyze how they did it (it was before I found out about WWS). So I am finding that reading others struggles and triumphs help me figure out how I need to be progressing my healing. So go have a read.

Uldar 25

Here is our stats from our Uldar 25 run from Last night. I was looking at the statistics and notice something interesting about my own healing patterns. It looks like that once I changed one glyph from Glyph of Lifebloom to Glyph of Nourish, it completely has changed my healing. I am finding my self spot healing with rejuvenation, then healing them with Nourish, while my tank healing continues on with Regrowth, Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, Nourish for the deficits, and Wild Growth for the healing on the Melee around the tank.

While this change does not seem significant, it has allowed me to start picking up more Raid healing, while keeping the tank pretty much topped off. The only other change I have made was that I dumped Grid and picked up Vuhdo. So between SmartDebuff and VuhDo, I RARELY have to hold down any keys while click healing my raid frames. Smartdebuff handles rejuve/nourish and Vuhdu handles my lifebloom/regrowth.

I have also noticed that Lifebloom, while used less and only for tank healing, is blooming more frequently providing me a refresh pool of mana to use to keep casting. With the exception of the Kologarn fight, I have not had a problem maintaining my mana pool at 45% or better.

So now that it is Tuesday Night run we downed Flamescale, Razorscale, Deconstructor, and Kologarn, with three (3) attempts on Auriaya, means that Thursday we will be diving deep into Uldar's content.

PUGs that go Bad mmm'kay

Heroic Occulus

Fenrous (2206) recently went on a Heroic Occulus run with several of the Members of Testosterpwn. you know it starts like any other run, do we have a tank, has everyone been there before, etc. Now these guys did not sound very awe inspiring but I have been in worse groups. But then again I did not run the group through a PUG Checker either. So we begin, the Tank Howdie (1618) can't get agro from all of the mobs, bad druid. DPS is all over the place and finally, we get through the initial pulls and to the first boss after 25 minutes. Down the first boss pretty easy, but we cant seem to get to the second bosses platform and die along the way, 53gold worth of deaths for me.

So now we have swapped our DPS warrior Darradin for a Boomkin Floridaman (1219). Now it is about this time we try the first pull of the second boss Varos and wipe where Staticlight (822) starts complaining that I am only healing the tank. Well here is the WWS report. I mean if you don't know the boss fights and your melee, use your LAY OF HANDS when your not smart enough to get out of the lightning field. So I bailed on the group to go to the doctors. I had 2 hours to run this instance and they couldn't do it and wanted to blame healing. Makes me want to club baby seals.

Sorry KAOINT (1069) not grouping again with anyone from your guild without a Pug Check before hand.

P.S. As an axiom to this rant come to find out Draklite has had the same problem with this guild.
*Number in parens is WoW-Heros equipment score

Achievements

Well, I feel like Fenrous is finally coming around. The Fishing Diplomat, Skills to Pay the Bills, I Smell A Giant Rat, and Ragefire Chasm. Fenrous also made his Winds of the North achievement.

Our Thursday continuation of Uldar 25 man. More Heroics and a nice Obsidian Sanctum 10.

All in all a productive transition.