3.2 Patch and New Content

Well I did not waste any time getting into a 5 Man group for the new content. I was pleasantly suprised at the difficulty level for a "normal" mode 5 man instance. It is short enough to make you want to run the instance every day. The gear that dropped was excellent for a begining feral druid build or rogue, but for me not so much. After the 5 Man run, we turned it onto Heroic Trial of the Champion and gave it another

whirl. Again, pleasantly suprised at the healing difficulty. Make sure you have either a co-ordinated team or a good AOE tank, missing either and you will die some; however, We easily defeated most of the bosses once every one got the hang of fighting on horses, then group up, then spread out. I was in a team with two (2) hunters that kept taking agro from the tank and stood too far apart to effectivly use Wild Growth.

I got a trinket that chance restores 500 mana, and first in my mind is, "I wonder if this will work on Vezax and Yogg." So something new to try.

AS FOR BADGES, I am happy and saddened by the dropping of just Conquest badges for Heroics, 10 mans, and 25 Mans. Everyone has no excuse to have poor gear now. Run some heroics that become overly easy at this point. As for me, I know that Gear Score alone doesnt account for ability.

I think I have found a way to measure effective healing vs. efficent healing so here is the first graph of Total Healing / (Hits + Dots). I have left off the Heal / Mana over TotalCoE.

Hoting and You

Well its back to the swing of things and the joyous return of myself to raiding. I was happy to be getting back on Fenrous healing. Apparently they were also happy to see me return, they saved me a healing spot on the Ulduar 10 runs. So we downed some bosses on Hard Mode, followed by wiping all of the Keepers out of the Raid lockout this period. So, as I was enjoying two nights in a row of steller performance rocking healing, I got to see a whole bunch of content that previously was unexplorered. A whole lot of it was stand here, move there, heal while running, yadda yadda yadda, then last night we hit GENERAL VEZAX.

So, now I am trying to figure out a healing strategy that will work for my play style that doesnt involve me going insane from the lack of mana regen.

So, my brainstorms include going OLD SCHOOL on the raid and saving mana by reducing the healing spells down to just Nourish and Rejuvenation, and breaking out the bandages for the ranged DPS, just like we use to down in Zul Grub as scrubs. So I am reviewing videos and thinking that having 80+ bandages that I still carry around with me is going to be an interesting report since I NEVER use them on my Druid. Sure on my Mage, my Rogue, hell even occasionally my Priest. I have been unfortunate enough not to be able to pick up a second Tier 8 piece for the two (2) peice bonus; however, I do have enough hit to be hit capped on my Moonkin Spec gear now. WOOT, and I also crossed over 4400 achievement points putting my Horde Mage below Fenrous in achievements now.

So come on Sunday so we can down Vezax and Yogg, time for me to go watch some YouTube videos of people killing these bosses.

Watching

Well, I have been raiding and watching my progress very closely. I have found that I am very statisfied with my healing and progression. Sometimes not to happy with the groups I end up in but never the less, pretty satisfied.

I have been updating my healing spreadsheet and crossed over the average Item level of 223. With all this gear, its time to go play some more. I am one shard away from my Black War Mammoth and about 16 Emblems away from my Ice Mammoth.

As I approach my Achievements points on my mage, I can't help but feel loss for the time spent playing away from Fenrous.

Status Updates

Well, it seems that over this past holiday weekend, I got a lot accomplished. I ran Heroics till I dropped. Some good groups, some bad groups, one group resulting in a resounding harrassment across several characters.

So, I have two thoughts today: First, does your healing change from Raid 10 to Raid 25 mans? and Secondly, what do you do for cases of cross-toon harrassment?

On the first point, I know my healing strategies do not change from Raid 10 to Raid 25 or Heroic / Dungeons. It just seems that I do MORE raid / party healing as the the numbers decrease. I know I am WAY over geared for Heroics. My heal rate is hovering around 1500 HTPS, simply because the tanks rarely take more than 5% damage. I even going so far to go into all melee Heroic groups. Here is the sample from a recent Uldar 10. Nourish is most used, we were taking heavy tank damage, followed by the expected distribution of spells.

On the second point, I am truely disappointed by bad sportsmanship. Like people telling me to STFU when we are trying to get Heroic Achievements and they cant be bothered to read the achievement text. Of course, I hearthed out before the boss fight amongst an assailment of "your dps sucks" comments, which landed that idiot on my ignore / report as spam rotation. Then as if that isnt enough, he logs onto another Toon to continue the verbal assault, because apparently everyone else dropped out of the group once the HEALER left. Yes, I can be a prick, but I dont have to play with you. SO ENFERISM / ENFER, enjoy explaining yourself and your 72 hour harrassment ban, you earned it buddy. So I am wondering how other people deal with foul mouthed insulting pea brain idiots in World fo Warcraft?

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.

ULDAR 25

August Knights ran their first Uldar 25 run last night. The WWS report is linked. Overall, for my first time in there I was pretty pleased with what we were able to get accomplished, including Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs. I made healer 5 out of 7 overall, but just main tank healing is pretty good. So now I am off to research a better healing spec than regrowth spam that I am using. Nourish with T7/8 is going to be a requirement, which I am looking forward to it.

Pictures from last night to follow, while I relax tonight. I also made Exhalted with Cenarion Circle finally and made my Mace of Unending Life which completed my set of Symbols of Unending Life.

Blasting from the Past

Well, I have been kind of busy, but I did manage to get a few dozen runs in.  I am a little miffed at the fact that I do not have healing or blasting information form numerous Heroic runs, because unbeknownst to me, the CombatLog is turned off every time you rez.  I did however get a few dozen runs in, HEY ME.  

So this is the combat log from Uldar 10 run on Wednesday night.  I got to fill in for Rjuna whom was out. After this run, I got a confirmed healer spot for this week.  

Our "August Knights" Naxx 25 run on Thursday night, we had a lot of missing people including a main tank and the main raid leader.  

Heroic Runs on Friday morning, which we went form one Heroic to the next included, Utgarde Keep, Nexus, Azjol-Nerub, and Violet Hold.  More Heroic Runs on Friday afternoon, Culling of Stratholme, 2 attempts at Eye of Eternity followed by a Heroic Halls of Stone which bugged out on us. 

Try at getting some stats in on AQ 20 Sunday, but doesnt look like I got much from our run. 

My partial Heroic Utgarde Pinacle run stats from Monday morning. Unfortunately, I don't have the rest of the runs from Monday nor do I have the Heroic Halls of Lightning I got to run as a Moonkin.  But I did get a few Heroic Achievements for the runs.

So all in all a busy, yet prosperous 4 day weekend of World of Warcraft and Heroic Runs.  I also managed to complete my Feralheart Set quests as well. I know it is about useless, but hey it was fun to solo now and quite a remarkable accomplishment.  I also finished up my Ironforge Champion and now working on my Exodar Valiant for Argent Tournament.  And completed all of the Storm Peaks quests, which lead me to Honored with Sons of Hodir faction. And as if to say I was slacking, I also made Exhalted with the Kalu'ak faction and Darnassus. Whew, what a busy 4 days.  I raked in almost 140 achievement points over this past weekend.  So, with Uldar 10 Red tonight, I am ready to heal some butt.

Eye of Eternity

Had my first go at raid healing for EoE 10 tonight. We didn't down Maly, but I am feeling better about raid healing now. First attempt there was some pressure on my mana pool / regen, but on the subsequent attempts, was much better. Class Timers is a MUST, and playing on my laptop isn't as much fun as my screamer machine at home. So we ate some blockage tonight, but all in all I lived to heal at the end on 2 of the attempts, so it is getting better.

Also, www.end-result.org is selling runs through Heroic instances of Naxx and OS. Might be something to look into on their method of doing it.

Naxx 25 Heroic Mode

Well, I have just completed my first tour of duty last night as a healer for Naxxaramas 25.  I got several complements on my healing capabilities having arrived at 4th overall and only 300 points behind the average at 1300.  I personally am interested in reworking some of my talents or settling down with what appears to be a suitable healing objective.

Raid healing now is completely different than what I have done on Fenrous before.  The original raid strategies were pretty simple, keep rejuvenation and supplement with healing touches according to how much damage the tank had missing.  It prevent a large amount of overheals and worked pretty good for keeping the tank alive.  Well that is of course all preBC.  Before, I would rarely toss a rejuv on anyone other than the tanks, and between casts would bandage the ranged dps that was hurt standing around me.  I am wondering now what would be said i if I did similar on one of our Naxx runs.

Anyway, here is my struggle, having only recently dinged 80, there is a good chunk of my gear that just isnt performing as well as I need it to.  Twice last night, while main tank healing, I would be watching my rotating stacks, keeping wild growth, lifebloom, rejuvenation, and regrowth up on the main tank, applying refreshes as needed to keep them rolling and the tank would be 1 shoted right out from underneath me at nearly max health.  I tried to make it a point to keep the tanks above 80% across the raid, which proved to be outside of my capabilities; however, just wasnt able to keep up with the damage coming in.  I wasnt really running out of mana nor was I having to use my Innervate excessively.  It was always up when I felt I needed more mana; however, just the amount of healing that was coming out seemed a little low to me.

So, I am working on identifying if it is simply a Druid Talent build issue or if I just do not have enough spell power that I am looking for in my healing output. So, I am left wondering about my talent builds and playing around with Rawr to answer my question about output.  I have also just recently learned how to output for WWS so my raid sessions are going to be looking up now.

I picked up 4 new pieces last night Valorous Dreamwalker Robes, Desecrated Past, Gloves of Peaceful Death, Siezed Beauty

For my first Naxx 25 man run on Fenrous, we did really well, full clear in a little less than 5 hours, all wings and all bosses.  We did not complete any heroic achievements, but having only laid down in 2 raid wipes and doing the Haegan dance, I am feeling pretty confident on future runs and being an asset and not a liability on the run.

Updated / Enchanted WoW-Heroes Score 1877