A lot has changed since I last posted.  Kraklenheit Industries saw a rather large slump in its raiding, due to summer vacation mostly.  I chose this time to move on to a more progression oriented guild.  I would like to say a few things related to this: understand that I hold no ill will towards anyone in KI, nor was my decision to leave based on anything other than a need for more progression.  I play this game to experience the things that Blizzard works so hard to put into it, including hard modes and the like.  Algalon just wasn’t within KI’s sights, and I moved to a group of people that are working towards him.  That being said, Malevolent is a great group of guys.  They get shit done efficiently while maintaining great attitudes and a fun loving nature.   They’ve, for the most part, completely accepted me into their little group.  It’s been a great experience thus far, and it’s one I hope continues for a long time.

I’d like to point out a few individuals that really stand out to me in the guild.

• Teddymonster is the guild leader.  I don’t know how the guy maintains his positive attitude throughout some of the most challenging content released thus far.  I’ve not played with a more phenomenal tank.
• Legit is one of the guild’s mages.  He was really one of the first people in the guild I started talking to after joining, and he’s hysterical.  Not to mention, the guy puts out monster DPS all the time.
• Scroogedu is literally the best healer I’ve ever met.  The guy’s a machine.  I’ll have to post some WWS the next time I remember to, just to show you.  We couldn’t do the things we do without him.

Before I move on to more stuff, I’d like to ask that anyone that has any questions about healing specific fights, gearing, theorycrafting, or what not… please, comment on any post or send me a message.  I’d like to start a column answering reader questions here very soon.

In my next post, I’ll be giving some more recent impressions of Ulduar, specifically certain hard modes and later bosses.  For now though, I’d like to touch on Iron Council hard mode.

Iron Council is the “first” fight in the Antechamber of Ulduar.  It’s technically three bosses, with the normal kill order being Steelbreaker -> Molgeim -> Brundir.  Medium mode has you killing Molgeim last, and hard mode is Steelbreaker.

I won’t go into an in depth strategy on the fight.  I’m really only here to talk about healing it.  That’s how we get down here.  You should know that by now!

In any case, ICHM is one of the most healer intensive fights in Ulduar.  The only ‘forgiving’ part of the fight is that we constantly take damage, so Water Shield procs are many and frequent.  I would not recommend attempting this fight unless your raid is exceptionally well geared from normal mode Ulduar.  Especially your tanks, as they’re going to be getting hit about as hard as they ever will.  Raid damage is high, tank damage is higher, and nothing seems to go your way this fight.

Here recently, I’ve been glyphed, gemmed, and specced for RT -> LHW LHW rotation.  The rotation lends itself well to this fight, where specific people are taking a ton of damage and you’ve got to move quite a bit.  But at the same time, you pretty much have to pull out all the stops on this one.  The way I usually end up healing it looks pretty similar to this: RT tank, LHW tank, LHW raid member, CH melee, LHW tank, LHW raid member, etc.  I recommend dropping Mana Tide early on in this fight… you’re going to need to be at or close to full mana at the start of phase 3.  For phase 3, spam the tanks with everything you’ve got.  RT -> LHW LHW is perfect here.  Keep your Earth Shield up on whichever tank is up, and make sure they stay alive until it’s their time to blow up.

At the end of the fight, you might be rewarded with some pretty phenomenal loot.  Unfortunately, none of the hard mode loot is meant for Resto Shaman.  You’re out of luck, buddy!  Pick up some of the sick off-set loot that drops, and move along.

Until next time!

Auf Wiedersehen!

But on the upside, the Freya video is now up at Warcraft Movies!  While I’m taking this short hiatus, please go watch it and let me know what you think.

I highly recommend downloading it, as it’s much higher quality… but the stream is decent enough.

Warcraftmovies.com

Well, it’s official.  The video I took of our guild taking out Freya in Ulduar 10 is now being uploaded to Warcraft Movies!  If all goes well, within 24 hours, the video will be published and ready to go.

Make sure to comment on what you think about it!

Remember that whole ordeal with the new hard drive? Well, it was worth it. FRAPS now records at a much more manageable FPS. What does this mean for you?

I’m going to be recording our Ulduar boss attempts this coming week so I can edit and post them as a preview of the bosses!

But I need your help! I’d like to find out what you’d like to see in a video – d’you want a full instructional video, or a regular old ‘here’s the boss’ video? Post your comments to vote!

Suck it, BSOD.

Some of you may have wondered why I was late on my posting.  Some of you probably don’t care.  An even larger number of you don’t read this blog, and thus are oblivious to my tardiness.  Be that as it may, I feel I should weave a tale of woe for you.  I’ve been lusting after a new hard drive for about a year now.  It’s been like that burning itch that just won’t stop, no matter how hard you scratch it.

So I got one.  As I gleefully unwrapped it, opened up my case, and put it in, I couldn’t help but think, “Rob.  Something’s going to go wrong with this.”  You have to understand – while I LOVE working on my computer, I always seem to screw something up during the process.  And it’s always some easily correctable mistake that I gloss over twenty or thirty times.  This is when I start headbutting things until they start working, and that’s just not a good place to be.  Eek, back to the story.

See, here’s the thing.  Everything in my computer is magnificently up to date… except the hard drives.  So up until today, I’ve been using two old eIDE drives.  I know, shoot me.  They were decent capacity!  One was even a 7200 RPM drive!  It was definitely time to upgrade to the SATA drive I have in here now.  But the problem was – I have a raid tonight!  I didn’t want to have to take the time to do a fresh Windows install, plus WoW, plus patches, plus UI, etc.  So the logical solution?

Drive cloning!

So I spend $50.00 on a piece of software that’s supposed to help me with this process.  I’ve cloned quite a few drives – it’s a fairly simple process.  Tell the program which drive you want cloned, which drive to clone it to, and click the big pretty go button.  Everything’s going just like you could hope – until 79%.  Windows BSOD‘s on me.

Corrupting both of my old drives with it.

Why?

I spent about an hour trying to pull an old image I had of my drive when I first installed Vista on it.  This, unfortunately, didn’t work either.  So I’m back to step one – installing a fresh copy of Windows.  So I go to find my copy of Vista Ultimate 64, only to find that the CD has a hairline crack in it, and will not read.  What the hell?

Luckily, I do still have a copy of Windows XP Pro 64 laying around, so I installed that, and am currently downloading patches and the game itself.  I just hope that tonight’s raid proves to be more successful than the rest of my day.  I might make another post after the raid with some more screenshots, possibly a video.  Until then!

Should be adding some more soon.  Thanks for reading!

We three kings…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending a decent amount of time playing the game with some friends that just started.  One of them has managed to make his way up to Northrend (he’s 68 right now), the other is still in his 40′s, but they’re both learning the game pretty quickly.  I’m proud!

But the whole point behind this post is this: as I’ve been helping them, I’ve noticed something very important.  We, as veteran players, tend to skim over a lot of things that new players find amazing or difficult.  We also tend to go after our end goal much more aggressively, skipping out on some of the fun of leveling.  Clearing out entire areas really isn’t my thing – I have a route of quests that I go through, efficiently clearing out those quests that will give me the most experience, so I can move on.  Pilosus takes his time and clears out almost every quest in an area before moving on.  I think that’s awesome!  Hanhwa, on the other hand, likes to solo difficult mobs simply for the sake of soloing difficult mobs.  At 66, he utterly destroyed a 67 elite by himself.  For someone that’s just starting the game, I gotta say… I’m severely impressed.

Beyond that, it’s given me a good excuse to play the role of tour guide, running them through some of my favorite dungeons, trying to recreate some of the original feel of places like Upper Blackrock Spire and Blackrock Depths.  I try to form a full group of at-level characters, but it can be somewhat difficult.  Instead, they get the one-man tour-de-force of Tantric and his big axe.  Still, it’s fun, and they get what the places are all about.  On the Beast, I had him run in and get punted, then we killed him together.  All in all, it was very fun.

So the entire experience has really made me take a step back and realize that it’s okay to stop and smell the roses sometimes.  Rather than a mad dash to get consumables ready for Ulduar, I’m currently leveling my fishing leisurely in Dalaran.  I highly recommend all of you take a break from the daily grind to go do something you’ve wanted to do, but just haven’t taken the time to.  Get to it!

P.S. – Sorry for the rather late posting, raid started a bit earlier than I expected tonight.  I’ll make up for it tomorrow!  I’ll be posting my first (of many) product review, and possibly a second post as well.  We’ll see!

Flame Leviathan

With 10 of our best, we walked into Ulduar and made our way through the opening trash.  We’ve all grown rather accustomed to the vehicle combat system used during the Flame Leviathan encounter.  My first impressions of the encounter were of a better designed Wintergrasp, in which we were to lay siege to some dwarves.  Who’s not down for killing dwarves?  Flame Leviathan went down easily, we earned the Shutout achievement, and picked up our loot.

XT-002 Deconstructor

Then there was this guy.  While a pushover, I really like the mechanics of the fight and the audible signals that go along with it.  Having a skyscraper-esque robot screaming “NO! NO! NO! NO!” and throwing a temper tantrum is probably the greatest thing Blizzard’s ever done.  We grabbed the Nerf Gravity Bombs achievement and moved on to the Antechamber, one of the most visually stunning portions of the game I’ve seen thus far.

I will note here that we did skip Ignis the Furnace Master simply so we could continue work on a few other bosses in the Antechamber.  We have not yet downed him (not for lack of trying), but we plan on doing him in 25-man this week.  With the recent nerfs to his abilities, I think we stand a pretty good shot at it.

Kologarn is a really cool fight – not necessarily for the mechanics, but because it reminds me a lot of Kil’jaeden.  He’s so massive, you only get to see his torso, arms, and head.  Just HUGE.  I took some screenshots last night, but they didn’t come out quite like I wanted them, so I’ll post some others later.  Other than the visuals, Kologarn is a rather easy fight that requires a small amount of coordination between tanks and healers, and some movement from everyone.

Then comes the Assembly of Iron.  Similar to some other fight’s Blizz has added in the past, but different enough to make it fun and challenging.  I recommend bringing your best healers along with you, this fight requires a lot of healing.  And make sure to bring someone who can dispel magic.  You’ll need that, too.  We made a few attempts on these guys, but hit our hard cut-off time of 12:00pm, and stopped.  We should be dropping them on Friday, when our 10-man group heads back.

I will more than likely be posting an in-depth guide to each boss of Ulduar as time permits, and as it becomes prudent.  If you’re interested in seeing these fights from the P.O.V. of a resto shaman, please comment and let me know!

Welcome!

I’d like to open this post by giving my heartfelt welcome to any who stumble across this blog.  Without readers, there wouldn’t be a reason to even create a blog, let alone maintain it.  I hope to provide you all with some informative, possibly entertaining, sometimes inspired posts to peruse.  I would like to thank Klinderas over at Slow Wolf for his inspiration in my creation of another blog.  And so it begins! 

Today really should’ve started off as any other normal day.  Wake up, stumble out of bed to foggy eyes and leftover dream haze.  Work my way haphazardly through the hallway, downstairs, and into the garage for morning cigarette and coffee.  Instead, I awoke to a blaring alarm on my computer.  Apparently, I had set an alarm to wake up and write this first post before work.

That, obviously, did not happen.  So I sit here today after what must be the longest day of work in the history of man.  I had grandiose plans for this post.  I really did!  Instead, you’ll have to settle for mediocre today.  Today, I’d like to talk about speccing and glyphing resto for Ulduar, and what I’ve found works well for me and what doesn’t.  I’ll also touch on some rotations for healing.  For starters, I’ll point you to my current spec: here.

I’d like to take a moment and explain why I picked up a few key talents.

Ancestral Healing : I love this talent, simply because it allows for the tank to mitigate more damage.  I tend to spend a lot of time on melee and tank healing, so this is important for me.  It even helps some on melee healing, since Ulduar has a LOT of mobs that do AoE physical damage.  Take for instance the Sentinels during the Razorscale fight, whirlwind to the max.

Tidal Mastery & Thundering Strikes : Whereas Naxx could be shoved through with brute force healing, Ulduar takes a little bit more finesse.  I like to have my crit up as high as possible and stack haste at the same time.  These two talents allow me to stack crit without sacrificing my beloved haste.

Tidal Force : I’ve seen a lot of builds here recently sacrificing this talent, and it’s slightly disconcerting.  This talent allows you to somewhat accurately know when you’re going to crit when you need it.  I use it in conjunction with Nature’s Swiftness and Healing Wave in a macro as an emergency “OH SH~~” button.  It works wonders.

Those of you who’ve been in Ulduar will understand what I’m about to go into all too well.  For those of you who haven’t, I hope I can give you something that will make it easier on you. 

With the recent nerfs to mana regeneration (most of which didn’t hit shaman too hard, besides the Mana Spring Totem nerf), we’re at a constant need for mana.  I wouldn’t say that I’m mana starved – I’ve been able to get through most fights without going completely empty more than once.  I have, however, had a lot more trouble staying above a comfortable level of mana than in any other raid previous.  Ulduar requires a certain amount of finesse from your healers, and a lot of coordination between your healers.  I highly encourage all of you to create a channel for your guild healers, and communicate assignments as well as other key points during the encounter (deaths, need for switch healing, etc). 

As I’m typing this, I’m about to start the night’s Ulduar raid.  Before I finish the post up, I’d like to talk for a brief second about rotations.  I’ll expand upon this in a future post.  A word on Riptide: it’s your best friend.  Love it like you would your children.  I’ve been in Ulduar a bit this past week, and I’ve found that a Riptide and a Lesser Healing Wave is far more useful than the brute force Chain Heal techniques of Naxx and most BC content.  I know this may seem like second nature to some, but I’ve found a lot of shaman do not use Riptide to it’s potential.  I try to scan the WWS parses from every raid, and I’ve noticed a significant improvement in throughput since I started keeping Riptide on cooldown.

But for now, it’s time to go into Ulduar and get some bosses down!  Ciao!