Friday, January 25, 2008

Fear me! For I R Leafy!

Maybe...

I'm levelling a Druid to be Resto, mainly to get my main (Taurack) out of Resto spec and back into the face-smashy goodness that is Enhancement.

Now, Pochani (said Druid) just hit level 64 this past weekend. I vowed to go Resto once I hit 64 and got Lifebloom, giving me at least some time to experience healing as a Druid before I made a fool of myself trying to heal in a raid. Now since my Shaman is currently Resto and has gone on and off as such more than once when we've suffered shortages of healers, it's not like I'm a noob to the healing game, but the distinct HoT oriented style of Druid healing is completely new, since Shaman's have 0 HoT's.

Pochani has been Feral his whole career so far and has been quite successful, so the switch will come with a learning curve.

Now that he's 64, I ported to Moonglade, got my new spells, hit the unlearn talent buttons and applied all 55 points in a distinctly Healy way. The problem I'm having is trying to find that balance between getting a respectable amount of experience healing, not only as a Druid, but as a Tree... yet not stunting my levelling ability to a crawl. I did it as a Prot Warrior and really dont want to go down that painfully slow path again, which the spec I had chosen was reflecting very soon after I got back into quest mode.

I've done a lot of research on Resto4Life (Phaelia roxxors my soxxors) so I like to think I have the theory down well enough. So in trying to find this balance, I applied a recent post of hers regarding speccing Balance/Resto. While this spec is great and saw my DPS increase by about 100, I find the distinct lack of Treeform not to my taste. While I certainly agree that her spec is probably more favourable to the grinding/questing that still needs to be done, I find it not to my tastes.

The reasoning behind it all is that I want to learn to adapt to the more HoT based healing that Druids lean towards. I agree whole heartedly with her theories about Dreamstate builds and others that simulate Tree of Life in all forms and the sometimes rather heavy reliance on Healing Touch as opposed to HoT's, so it is in no way that I'm trying to discredit her... I'm just more masochistic I guess. I want to learn early on how to deal with the downfalls of our Leafy form so that it's not as much of a burden come Raiding time.

I did however learn a few good things while specced as Phaelia's Balance/Resto spec, one of which is that Starlight Wrath is your friend. I think I'll be using a hybrid spec of hers and mine once I log back onto him and shell out another 30g to try it out.

I'll update this post with my specs over the weekend (hopefully).

Monday, January 21, 2008

/snap

A little history on my guild may help to put things into perspective. We're a casual-raiding guild (I can hear the groans already) that has Karazhan on farm and has for some time now. We've just recently downed all of the animal bosses in ZA and have set foot into Gruul's only once, with the help of about 10 others from another guild.

We regularly have around 15 people on a night (70's mind you) and have enough people (barely and it may just be my opinion), gear and skill to be doing 25-mans at least enough to own Gruul's face, but we can never get in.

We have the numbers, we have the gear, and we have the skill. We don't have the attendance.

I happen to be one of the 5 officers in the guild (including the GL) and we all hear the same thing. Apparently people want to do 25 mans and apparently 25% of those that say it are damn well lying.

You see, we schedule our raids and have people sign up. Every time a 25 man one goes up, we'll get ~15 people sign up and no other takers. What kills me, is then everyone has the nerve to complain that we're not doing 25 mans. "Oh, we didn’t know” is a common defence. Meanwhile, it had been posted on the forums and in the guild message for a month and people talk about it occasionally in guild chat...

Right...

Now, as I said, we have the numbers and for the most part the roles, if people would stay healing... We have more than enough DPS (of course), enough tanks and are currently scraping by with healers geared for ZA. We don’t enforce people to spec certain ways, part of being 'casual' I suppose is shooting yourself in the foot progression wise. But damn it, I'm Resto right now (on my Shaman) because we need healers and don’t really want to be.

Problem is, if I don’t do it, we don’t do ZA... or we rely on less favourable options to take my place.

I'm not trying to sound like a Martyr here, if I really didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it... my point is I am doing it, for the sake of progression, why the hell cant others do it (or stay doing it).

Yet they complain. /sigh

What kills me more is the number of people that repeatedly ask in guild chat if "anything is going on tonight?". Check the frickin' forums, it's all there, usually well in advance. I'm not your GD secretary and no one else in the guild is either.

No, you can’t go to ZA tonight... the list is full with people that can manage to check said forums and confirm they can go.

No, you can’t get on the ZA roster because you don’t meet minimum stats... you're a liability. Everyone (well, most) else gets it.

R34D T3H FR1CK1N' F0RUMZ (maybe you can understand that)

It hurts to know that the officers spend a hefty amount of time establishing loose, fair rules that are easy to understand, readily available and have the best interest of the guild in mind. Then the mouth breathers start asking the same questions, over, and over, and over....

No, I'm not 'elitist', but is it so much to ask for people to do their own damn leg work and leave me the hell alone answering questions they can answer themselves?

And stop whining about progression, it's likely your own damn fault as well.

Friday, January 11, 2008

CC or not to CC, that is the question...

At least it seems to be the entire rave on the Tankspot forums these days. I, personally, don’t get what the issue is. The way I see it there are 3 groups of people:

Group one:

Tanks against CC

This is the group of people who are tanks and for whatever reasons are against using CC. These people are typically your 'leet' tanks who just can’t fathom not having every mob possible wailing on their face; I call this "Rocky" syndrome. The tank glorifies his position by flexing his ePeen and proving that he can take a hit, while the rest of the group doesn’t really give a hoot… it’s your bloody job. You make the healers job more difficult, can’t focus threat on one mob ergo making everyone watch their threat more and in general increase the chances of wiping your group or raid.

Now, to be fair there are some excellent times when tanks actually want or need more mobs wailing on them. For the Warriors and the Druid tanks out there, this is more rage. While this is a distinctly more pronounced problem for warrior tanks, which generate very little rage from attacking, it can still feasibly affect our more fuzzy counterparts. This will usually occur when the tank in question is well over geared for the instance and isn’t getting hit enough or hard enough to build a reasonable amount of rage to maintain good threat rotations. This problem can be rectified in three ways: gear swapping, rotation change or having more mobs tickle the tank.

Most good tanks have a couple sets of gear, a DPS set (for soloing mainly) amongst them. Whether they have that gear on them at the time is another question, but that’s beside the point. The point is, DPS gear doesn’t have tanking stats (save for Stamina, which is fine) and will let you take more hits, take more damage and deal more damage, all of which generate more rage.

But before that a tank should be mindful about what abilities their using. Our job is to survive, to take a hit and not die and to hold agro in the process. As such, most tanks are diligently hitting Shield Block, Thunderclap and Demoralizing Shout to lower the amount of incoming damage. Stop (why?). You’ll take more damage and gain more rage without having to swap out gear or…

Let more mobs tickle the tank. This should be a last option IMO. CC is there for a reason, it lessons the chaos by eliminating mobs until the party is ready to deal with them. The theory however is sound if the tank needs more rage. If they don’t have gear to swap out and have already changed up their rotation to allow for more damage to be incoming, then by all means. The tank needs rage to do their job, no rage = no threat = dead party members, nuff said.

Paladin Tanks want to get wailed on for a different reason however. Much of their threat and damage comes from being hit not to mention that the Bread-and-Butter Consecration spell is AoE, which is a little more dangerous around CC’d mobs. Now while that shouldn’t be an excuse for the Pally Tank in question to be lazy, it can be a valid concern. Pally Tanks don’t use rage, so the above reasons are moot for one. Basically if a Pally Tanks wants to get hit more, let him… as long as he can actually take the beating and doesn’t have a case of the Rocky syndrome.

CCers against CC

This is short a sweet. Its people with the ability to CC (Mages, Hunters, etc…) that openly tell the tank they should ‘L2Tank’ or the like, requesting that the tank take on more mobs and allowing them to not CC.

Don’t be lazy… you have a CC ability for a reason. No one cares about ‘how much more DPS’ you could do if you didn’t have to Sheep. Chances are you got the spot in the group because you’ve got the ability to CC, so don’t complain when you’re asked to use it. If things are going smooth with the CC… why should you change it anyway?

Suck it up buttercup, its part of your job.

Everyone else

These are the rest of the people that already understand the above and are thinking, much like I do, “WTF is the problem here?”

The point is that there are actually people out there that don’t like to, or don’t want to use CC when it’s a perfectly viable option, for whatever reason. 99% of the time it’s tanks with a Rocky complex, or its DPSers trying to flex their ePeen, in both cases it’s time for them to wake up and realize that no one cares about it, they care about a quick and easy run with no wipes.

If you have CC and there’s no reason not to use it, then use it. If there is a valid reason not to use it then don’t. Evidently some people just don’t get it…

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Incoming!

Sorry for the delay to anyone who may have been here already, but I'll have some posts up soon. Been busy with the holidays and new year. Thanks for waiting!