At some point the weekend before last, I got a bee in my bonnet to level another character on the live server. For whatever reason, rather than leveling my priest which was my original intent (some how I have five healers at 85, and the priest just can’t seem to make it into the line to level), I opted to dust off my mage who hasn’t been played outside of leveling JC early in the expansion. Now, I must say that rather enjoyed putzing around with her again, and leveled/quested/dungeoned as frost. She has pretty much always been frost, aside for a short period of time where she was arcane at the tail end of WotLK.

Anyhow, I came home Monday night jet lagged and exhausted from my trip home, and needing something completely mindless to keep me awake so that I didn’t go to bed at four in the afternoon. Being the stellar pocket tank that he is, Brade carried me through all of the level 84/85 instances and before I crashed for the evening I managed to hit 85 (hoory!). So I did what every freshly minted 85 would do and hit the AH to fill my bags with PvP gear, and my sexy goblin body with any gear available that I could wear.

Let’s get a little personal today.  I’m going to talk to you a little bit about work. It’s something I don’t really do because I try to bifurcate my personal life and my professional life so that they don’t intersect with each other outside of the office.  But I think there are some similarities with recent events that have occurred in both that I think are illustrative of a challenge that I’ve been handed since the nerfs with regards to raiding.

There has been a bit of a stir up in the community lately regarding the concept of  Heal Sniping and how it’s viewed by different healers.  I’ve already offered my thoughts on it in several different comments as I worked my way through each post, and I’m not going to rehash them here.  However, all of this discussion did get me thinking about a tangentially related topic.  Competition.

Competition is not a four letter word.

Something that regularly confuses me a little bit is why people tend to classify healing competition as a bad thing.  I mean, we ask all of our DPS to compete with each other regularly.  We even go so far as to look at who is on the top and who is on the bottom – and to an extent insinuate that those on the bottom should strive to be on the top.  Granted, there are encounters where DPS are given special assignments that will hinder their DPS for the good of the raid, but generally DPS is a rat race to see who can contribute the most for any given encounter.

We expect this of them and consider it good play.

What?  You aren’t up on your Harry Potter?!  That’s ok, let me educate you a bit so that my title makes a bit more sense.  You see in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the students are given an assignment that forces them to face their worst fears.  Ron Weasley’s turns out to be spiders.  Of course, later in the book Ron is met with (you guessed it) giant spiders!  How does this play into my musings?  Well, see if you can guess how I spent most of my time yesterday! 😉

On Raiding

We are currently working on our third Hard Mode encounter of this tier – Beth’tilac.  Last night was our second night of work on the giant widow, and our first full night of attempts.  After a few strategy changes from Thursday night, we managed to work her down to 22%, and are very close to a kill.

Of the hard modes that we’ve done so far, this is the one that I’ve found the healing to be the most intensive.  I am assigned to heal one of the cave/broodling/spiderling DPS and it can definitely be a bit tricky, especially when Beth is spewing all over the raid.  In addition to that, the raid damage in phase 3 is brutal.  I find that my mana bar is plummeting and I am still working out how to manage it a bit more so that I have the resources to push through until the very end of phase 3.  I have a few ideas, but won’t get to exercise them until we get back in there for some more attempts.

Five Days. That is the amount of time I have until the mover arrives to cart all of my worldly belongings from point A to point B – leaving me to desperately stare at the boxes he leaves in his wake and hope beyond all hope that they will somehow magically unpack themselves.  Why am I telling you this? Because I want to explain why I will be somewhat sparse over the next week or so!

The craziness starts tomorrow.

Much to Brade’s chagrin, I have decided that the plain cream walls of the new apartment are insufficient for my needs, and I am going to be adding a few accent walls.  Which means painting.  Which is great – because it’s the kind of DIY (do it yourself) project that Brade’s parents love, and we get to couple some expert help with visiting with his parents.  It’s pretty much win/win.  I’m going to be adding a deep red wall to our living area and a gold wall to our spare room – and perhaps to our bedroom (shhhhh, don’t tell Brade about that third wall – he can’t do anything but groan once the paint is up!).

While the ladies are playing with paint, the gents have their own tasks…invovling power tools (hah hah hah – that is my Tim Allen grunt, by the way).  They are going to be bringing the television over and mounting it above the fireplace, as well as connecting all of the appropriate cords for our peripherals.  I have even purchased a lovely cord hider thingy from The Container Store so that the cords aren’t a huge mess all over our walls!

Once they’ve finished that project, they will be jaunting over to Home Depot to pick up our new Grill.  I enjoy grilling – and hopefully this one is small enough to satisfy Brade (Mr. “why do we need a grill that big”), and large enough that I can easily cook on it.  This, my friends, is supposedly how that whole “compromise” thing works.

You see, I absolutely love to grill.  And you know what we will be having for dinner while we unpack on Sunday?  Probably McDonald’s.  But Monday or Tuesday, I’m going to light that sucker up and make some steak, potatoes and corn on the cob.  It will be delicious.  Trust me on that one.  This particular meal is one of my specialties 🙂

(I’m still trying to convince Brade that I need that cute little 3 piece patio set I saw at Home Depot while I was looking at grills.  I mean, a girl’s gotta have someone to rest her feet with a glass of lemonade while slaving away on dinner, right? RIGHT?!?!).

In addition Wednesday’s activities, we’ve still got to finish packing and get our mail changed (I swear, I meant to do this already).  I did, however, take my own advice and schedule our internet set up to occur before the move – which means that Saturday post 4 pm is going to be a night out for dinner and movies (assuming we’ve finished packing…).

Between tonight at 4:00 pm when I pick up the keys (ok…more like 9:00 pm after we finish our raid) and Sunday at 9:00 am when the mover arrives, we will no doubt be ferrying anything we’d prefer to move ourselves to the new apartment (Computers, China, USRD (useless shit requiring dusting – aka knick knacks).  Oh and buying more bubble wrap – you can never have too much bubble wrap.  Seriously.

So if you see less of me than you might expect this week, that is why!

In other, non-moving type (and more WoW related) news, Brade and I secured tickets to Blizzcon again this year and will be in attendance.  I’m looking forward to it, and I’m sure that I will blather on more about it as it gets closer to the date – and I’m not in the process of moving!

A while back Ghostcrawler wrote a post regarding the relative difficulty of dungeons and their heroic counterparts.  He said a lot of things in that post that made me really respect him a lot more than I already did, but for the purposes of this story I want to highlight a bit of the post that has to do with group coordination – and more specifically crowd control.

Tanks, you can’t pull and AE every group in a Heroic (again, until you overgear the content). It’s a good idea to crowd control at least one target — and sometimes two. As long as you have someone with a long-duration and/or renewable crowd control and someone else with a short crowd control such as a stun or even a snare, you should be fine.

Before I get to exactly why I’m highlighting this, I want to look again to commentary that Ghostcrawler made.

This time I’d like to point you towards a post he made regarding tank threat, more specifically he talked about how sometimes when pulls go bad, it’s not always the tanks fault.  In fact, sometimes other players in the group are equally, if not more, responsible for supposed “poor” tanking.

We do want players to pay attention. We don’t think it’s too much to ask for DPS and healers to wait a couple of GCDs for the tank to get the enemy under control — we’re not asking for five stacks of Sunder Armor these days

Ok, ok!  I know that by now you are probably wondering where I am going with this!  Well, I’d like to tell you the story of the little orc that could (also known as Kitai).

Last night’s raid was fantastic, and I am still super stoked about it!  We managed to get not only Heroic: Obituary but Heroic: Heartbreaker completed as well.  Now…I’m not so sure that I’m qualified to comment on Obituary because we struggled with it, and like in our 10 man made it by on the skin of our teeth with only 2 vehicles standing at the end (it’s not a Monolith kill if we don’t have a 1-2% wipe first, and if it’s not nail bitingly close at the end!).

However, even though our XT kill was close, and of course, by close I mean “every one spread and and nuke as hard as you can” as the enrage timer was going off, it was a relatively smooth kill and I feel a very repeatable strategy.  We had spent about 3 hours over two raid resets on it previously, so had the basic strategy down, but we were still struggling with people dying during tantrums and being quite aways out from the enrage timer when we were hitting it.  Yesterday we made a few tweaks to our strategy that worked fantastically (and frankly made me feel like a nubcake for not realizing our errors sooner) and got him down on our second pull, first successful heart phase, last night.  So, I thought I’d share my thoughts on how we got it done.

Last night’s Hodir kill: 3 minutes, 5 seconds.  Literally seconds away from success, realizing failure too late to catch the wipe before the kill occurred.  It was borderline devastating, and it was some of the best performances I’ve seen from some of my guildmates.  They really dug in and gave it all they had to give.  But we still fell short.

As we moved on to Vezax, I couldn’t help but ponder the question:  Are hard modes “fun”?

I figured that my colleagues have already sufficiently covered the upcoming changesthat we will be seeing with the next content patch (3.2), so there was really no need for me to touch on the topic.  Of course…other than to say the following to my dear paladins: no, the world is not ending; yes, you will still be able to heal; no, you will not always be OOM.  Wait for the PTR results before jumping off that cliff, dear friend.

OK!  Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. . .I thought I’d rant a bit about something releated, but different.

Does anyone else think that patch 3.2 is coming way to fast?  I mean, I know that we’ve got 2-3 months of PTR testing ahead of us still, but I honestly feel like I just stepped into Ulduar yesterday.  I’ve barely had time to stop and breath and enjoy the instance…and we are just 2 weeks into focusing hard modes.  I feel like we are just starting to really sink our teeth into the meat of the instance, and it’s going to be a flash in the pan before we have a chance to get through it all.