Of course, the past week or so I've been slacking on posting. Going along with that, of course it's my luck that they released the Beta for Mists last night and there's been a huge influx of info coming out that have been answering questions as well as just creating more by the minute. As of this writing, I'm currently waiting for my beta key (I'm subscribed to the annual pass, it's just a matter of time as to when I'll get my invite). As such, since I can't comment much beyond the vague tidbits here and there popping up, I'm going to hold off on first impressions. The beta is in it's first round of invites, therefore things are a little buggy and I'd like to personally wait slightly longer before offering my musings on what's in store for us.
In the meantime, I'll take some time for STORY TIME! In one of my first postings, I mentioned how the current guild I'm in took a hit when 8 people from our ranks left to form their own 10 man and our struggles with recruiting. We were having quite a few issues recruiting for a couple of reasons. Reason A: We were 1/8H. This was probably one of the biggest struggles, if not the only to be honest, that was causing us to have bad luck. 1/8H isn't by any means a really good state of progression, and obviously it gets tougher when you can't continue to work on progression because people left for...progression. Vicious circle, eh? We were getting quite a bit of bad players apping, and I salute my GM's patience recruiting. We got people applying that were decked in a lot of Raid Finder gear, missing gems, enchants, etc. It was horrible, but at the time, we were pretty much trying to contain the damage and get people back in our ranks. Our officers decided we'd sort out the low-performing players later, but we needed people at this point.
So we were still continuing to get a bunch of bad players, and we decided after a week of not raiding that we were going to pick a group of 10 from our core raiders and go in and clear as far as we could on heroic. At this point, we were getting desperate because of lack of people coming in, and by at least making the best of our situation we'd still get some progress in on 10Man. So, we went in and did our thing - and after the week we came out 5/8H - clearing Zon'ozz, Yorsahj, Hagara and Ultraxion. This was a huge morale boost for not only myself (on the one fight I was there for), but also for our 10 people we chose as well as the guild in general. This helped prove that we had the potential to do these fights, and that it was a matter of execution and finesse on fights like Zon'ozz and Yorsahj that would get us to down them on 25.
On a side note, I do want to mention how incredibly easy these fights were on 10Man. Not only is it easier to coordinate 10 people, I feel like it was also easier because the tuning is lower. This is probably to compensate for lack of all raid buffs being present, or melee- or caster-heavy groups, or what have you. Anyways, we continued our recruitment, and lo-and-behold, now that we were 5/8, we were able to recruit and get our raiding team back up to 34 players! Of course, being in a 25Man, there's always something with someone, and we're still in a constant state of recruitment in someway. We found a group of 6 players who came as a group from a different server. During the transfer, one of those players decided to quit WoW due to a job promotion, and I think the Resto druid that was with them is MIA as well. We just lost our only (and fantastic) Resto Shaman, found another one to replace him. The new Shaman was passable, made it for one night, and then stopped showing up. We just recently (as in, last night) got a new one.
One thing's for sure - it's super stressful going through this constant revolving door of people coming and going. It's hard to get consistency when your roster is anything but consistent, but we've been making do. With the bad comes the good. Despite our recruiting woes, this week we were able to clear 5/8H on the first night, which left us with last night and still leaves us tonight to work on Heroic Gunship. I'm pretty pumped about that (it's the first time we've done that as 25Man). Either way, I'm looking forward to more heroic kills, and hopefully our roster will steady itself. Plus, Mists of Pandaria is on its way, and I'm super excited about getting into the beta for it to try out new shaman stuff and see what I'll be doing come Pandaland.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
UI
Last night, one of my guildies was asking a bunch of us about our UI's to see what was out there that he liked, which prompted about 10 of us uploading screenshots of our UI to show off our own package. I figured I'd talk about my UI and why it works for my setup.
Heads up: I lack Photoshop experience, so I'm using MS Paint to highlight elements and reference specifically.
Light Blue: Buffs/Debuffs
First, the Light Blue. The addons of importance here are Elkano's Buff Bars (top right), and ForteXorcist. I personally like EBB because, well, for one I've been using it for so long. I hated the default buff frame because to me it just wasn't intuitive and I like seeing the names of buffs and debuffs as opposed to an icon for them. You anchor them where you'd like, how you'd like them to 'grow'...and done. It's always worked for me. Apparently you can't click off buffs in-combat with EBB, but that's something I've never had to do (yet). ForteXorcist is something I started using specifically for cooldown timers back in Wrath. This was also before I made my macro with Elemental Mastery macro'd into Lava Burst so it'd use it whenever it was off CD. I liked ForteXorcist because it's simple...and it's a moving bar and I wanted to track when EM was off CD to use it asap. The DOT timers slightly above it are also part of it as well, and might be something that at some point I'll disable because I never use them or care to look at them.
Pink: Bars
Easy enough - this is Bartender. I hated the default bar style without being able to customize the layout, rows/columns, etc. I'm sure Dominos or some other bar addon will do the job for others, I'm just familiar with Bartender at this point. The left-most bars are the things I use the most - the 2x6 row is my keybinds for 1 through =. To the right, I have my volcanic potions for pre-potting on a nice big button I can't miss by accident. The bar directly below them is a bunch of other frequently used things as well. Note this was taken during 4.2 at some point, which is why you'll see Fire Nova up there. Aside from that, I've got Healthstone, Earthbind, Stoneclaw, Rocket Jump, Wind Shear (keybound to Q), Tremor, Searing Totem (bound to the ` button). The middle set of pink bars is my Fire Ele, Earth Ele, SWG macro, and totem bars. On the right side you'll find my professions, rez, milling/prospecting macro, Farsight, Water Walking, and other random odds and ends that I need but aren't terribly useful in combat and as such are dimmed out unless cursor'd over. To their right - SexyMap. I needed something simple with no bells and whistles that I could move out of the top right corner to make room for Elkano's. SexyMap has quite a few different themes for its maps, as well as scaling options to make it bigger or smaller.
Red: Power Auras/SCT
In the red area is Power Auras and Scrolling Combat Text, or SCT. I came across Power Auras when I was having some difficulty managing my Lightning Shield stacks and Lava Burst CD. While Power Auras can be daunting to set up at first, once you get slightly familiar with what you need done and their menus, it's rather simple to get set up. I currently use Power Auras to alert me when LS is at 7+ stacks (which is the blue/green thing, accompanied by Navi from Zelda saying "Watch Out!"); Lava Burst is off CD (which will be the same icon as LS, only red, and mirrored to the left, and I make it play a cat meow sound); a squeaky toy sound whenever I'm in combat without a fire totem. I also just recently set up a Flame Shock timer to show the time left on my current target. This was important to me and I didn't know I could do it within Power Auras until last night, but having a visual number of how much time is left is immensely helpful when managing Flame Shock with Fulmination. SCT was more useful to me when I healed more often, I liked seeing how much I healed for and how much heals I had incoming to myself. I also like it for incoming damage as well that gets color coded by spell type/ability type, crits are larger, etc. It's also got sound alerts for when my mana and health are below a certain threshold. I found, especially for PvP, these alerts as well as seeing the incoming damage were extremely useful to know when I was getting pounded and if I had a healer that was starting to heal me.
Green: Chat
This one's simple. For chat, I use Prat. A lot of its features were built into WoW. I liked the class colors in chat channels, and I also like being able to copy links from chat to pull up outside of WoW. Also, the black background behind my bars and chat window is KGPanels. I used this to kind of accentuate the bars/chat for a little pizazz as well as help with the contrast for abilities and chat. For some reason, Blizz likes its bright colors which tend to contrast horribly with green guild chat. I'm also a creature of habit, so the default chat colors I haven't changed much and can't stand changing them, so the opaque grey backdrops helps make my screen a little easier on the eyes.
Blue: Default UI
The medium-ish blue areas are my default UI areas. Unit frames are probably the thing I need the most help with finding a solution for. I liked the old default raid frames because you could move groups individually, so I was able to set them up into a good position/layout that didn't interfere with the center of the screen or obscure anything important. The new ones also serve their purpose for me. I wouldn't necessarily be OPPOSED to using something else, but when the target, player, focus, frames get messed around with, it kinda screws with me too. I was never a huge fan of Grid because, to me, it requires too much configuration to get going out of the box. Xperl I've never been a fan of either, but that was also because on my old computer it tanked my resources during raids. I could probably stand to change them at this point, especially now that I don't heal as often. My biggest gripe, and this is solely because of how my UI is set up now, is that anything beyond a 25 person raid causes the groups to overlap on the right side of my bar frames. Luckily, this is usually only when I'm in an AV or IoC, and most times a lot of people are out of range and their frames are faded.
Yellow: Other Stuff
My raiding addon of choice is DBM. My DBM timers will display near/in the smaller, upper yellow square. When the timers are ending, they move between my character's feet and ForteXorcist. This way, the critical alerts coming up are in the center of my screen, which is usually where my focus is. The lower, right-most yellow square is where WoW Instant Messenger, or WIM, shows out of combat. I like WIM because it gives an IM-tabbed-conversation feature to whispers and removes them from the chat frame. It works for me because it's easy to keep track of conversations with individual people. During combat, the frame disappears and whispers return to the chatframe as normal. I use BagNon for my bag addon, which gives me one giant grid for my bags. This is easier for me to organize things in then separate bags. I also like that it incorporates inventory/items on other characters. If I cursor over an item in my bag, it will tell me below the tooltip if an alt has it and how many - which is invaluable when I know I had an enchanting mat, or a gem, or something, on an alt but couldn't remember which.
What do you guys think? Anyone have any input, or suggestions for unit frames that aren't terribly complicated?
Heads up: I lack Photoshop experience, so I'm using MS Paint to highlight elements and reference specifically.
First, the Light Blue. The addons of importance here are Elkano's Buff Bars (top right), and ForteXorcist. I personally like EBB because, well, for one I've been using it for so long. I hated the default buff frame because to me it just wasn't intuitive and I like seeing the names of buffs and debuffs as opposed to an icon for them. You anchor them where you'd like, how you'd like them to 'grow'...and done. It's always worked for me. Apparently you can't click off buffs in-combat with EBB, but that's something I've never had to do (yet). ForteXorcist is something I started using specifically for cooldown timers back in Wrath. This was also before I made my macro with Elemental Mastery macro'd into Lava Burst so it'd use it whenever it was off CD. I liked ForteXorcist because it's simple...and it's a moving bar and I wanted to track when EM was off CD to use it asap. The DOT timers slightly above it are also part of it as well, and might be something that at some point I'll disable because I never use them or care to look at them.
Pink: Bars
Easy enough - this is Bartender. I hated the default bar style without being able to customize the layout, rows/columns, etc. I'm sure Dominos or some other bar addon will do the job for others, I'm just familiar with Bartender at this point. The left-most bars are the things I use the most - the 2x6 row is my keybinds for 1 through =. To the right, I have my volcanic potions for pre-potting on a nice big button I can't miss by accident. The bar directly below them is a bunch of other frequently used things as well. Note this was taken during 4.2 at some point, which is why you'll see Fire Nova up there. Aside from that, I've got Healthstone, Earthbind, Stoneclaw, Rocket Jump, Wind Shear (keybound to Q), Tremor, Searing Totem (bound to the ` button). The middle set of pink bars is my Fire Ele, Earth Ele, SWG macro, and totem bars. On the right side you'll find my professions, rez, milling/prospecting macro, Farsight, Water Walking, and other random odds and ends that I need but aren't terribly useful in combat and as such are dimmed out unless cursor'd over. To their right - SexyMap. I needed something simple with no bells and whistles that I could move out of the top right corner to make room for Elkano's. SexyMap has quite a few different themes for its maps, as well as scaling options to make it bigger or smaller.
Red: Power Auras/SCT
In the red area is Power Auras and Scrolling Combat Text, or SCT. I came across Power Auras when I was having some difficulty managing my Lightning Shield stacks and Lava Burst CD. While Power Auras can be daunting to set up at first, once you get slightly familiar with what you need done and their menus, it's rather simple to get set up. I currently use Power Auras to alert me when LS is at 7+ stacks (which is the blue/green thing, accompanied by Navi from Zelda saying "Watch Out!"); Lava Burst is off CD (which will be the same icon as LS, only red, and mirrored to the left, and I make it play a cat meow sound); a squeaky toy sound whenever I'm in combat without a fire totem. I also just recently set up a Flame Shock timer to show the time left on my current target. This was important to me and I didn't know I could do it within Power Auras until last night, but having a visual number of how much time is left is immensely helpful when managing Flame Shock with Fulmination. SCT was more useful to me when I healed more often, I liked seeing how much I healed for and how much heals I had incoming to myself. I also like it for incoming damage as well that gets color coded by spell type/ability type, crits are larger, etc. It's also got sound alerts for when my mana and health are below a certain threshold. I found, especially for PvP, these alerts as well as seeing the incoming damage were extremely useful to know when I was getting pounded and if I had a healer that was starting to heal me.
Green: Chat
This one's simple. For chat, I use Prat. A lot of its features were built into WoW. I liked the class colors in chat channels, and I also like being able to copy links from chat to pull up outside of WoW. Also, the black background behind my bars and chat window is KGPanels. I used this to kind of accentuate the bars/chat for a little pizazz as well as help with the contrast for abilities and chat. For some reason, Blizz likes its bright colors which tend to contrast horribly with green guild chat. I'm also a creature of habit, so the default chat colors I haven't changed much and can't stand changing them, so the opaque grey backdrops helps make my screen a little easier on the eyes.
Blue: Default UI
The medium-ish blue areas are my default UI areas. Unit frames are probably the thing I need the most help with finding a solution for. I liked the old default raid frames because you could move groups individually, so I was able to set them up into a good position/layout that didn't interfere with the center of the screen or obscure anything important. The new ones also serve their purpose for me. I wouldn't necessarily be OPPOSED to using something else, but when the target, player, focus, frames get messed around with, it kinda screws with me too. I was never a huge fan of Grid because, to me, it requires too much configuration to get going out of the box. Xperl I've never been a fan of either, but that was also because on my old computer it tanked my resources during raids. I could probably stand to change them at this point, especially now that I don't heal as often. My biggest gripe, and this is solely because of how my UI is set up now, is that anything beyond a 25 person raid causes the groups to overlap on the right side of my bar frames. Luckily, this is usually only when I'm in an AV or IoC, and most times a lot of people are out of range and their frames are faded.
Yellow: Other Stuff
My raiding addon of choice is DBM. My DBM timers will display near/in the smaller, upper yellow square. When the timers are ending, they move between my character's feet and ForteXorcist. This way, the critical alerts coming up are in the center of my screen, which is usually where my focus is. The lower, right-most yellow square is where WoW Instant Messenger, or WIM, shows out of combat. I like WIM because it gives an IM-tabbed-conversation feature to whispers and removes them from the chat frame. It works for me because it's easy to keep track of conversations with individual people. During combat, the frame disappears and whispers return to the chatframe as normal. I use BagNon for my bag addon, which gives me one giant grid for my bags. This is easier for me to organize things in then separate bags. I also like that it incorporates inventory/items on other characters. If I cursor over an item in my bag, it will tell me below the tooltip if an alt has it and how many - which is invaluable when I know I had an enchanting mat, or a gem, or something, on an alt but couldn't remember which.
What do you guys think? Anyone have any input, or suggestions for unit frames that aren't terribly complicated?
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Mists of Pandaria Elemental Preview
By now, mostly everyone's had the chance to forage through the new talent calculators and spell lists to get a first look at what to expect in MoP.
[Talents]
As everyone knows, the talent trees as we know them are pretty much going out the window and in their place each class is getting 6 tiers of talents, 1 choice per tier. For the most part, each tier of the trees seems to be focused on a certain aspect - ie a "healing" tier. I'm sure all the math geniuses are going to be hard at work (if they're not already), figuring out which talent in each tier will provide the most DPS possible if applicable. It's also important to note that Blizz seems to be aiming a lot of these talents towards utility, and all the fluff talents that boost up our spells and abilities are being rolled into the spells themselves.
[Talents]
As everyone knows, the talent trees as we know them are pretty much going out the window and in their place each class is getting 6 tiers of talents, 1 choice per tier. For the most part, each tier of the trees seems to be focused on a certain aspect - ie a "healing" tier. I'm sure all the math geniuses are going to be hard at work (if they're not already), figuring out which talent in each tier will provide the most DPS possible if applicable. It's also important to note that Blizz seems to be aiming a lot of these talents towards utility, and all the fluff talents that boost up our spells and abilities are being rolled into the spells themselves.
Nature's Guardian seems mostly in tact from the Resto tree as it is today. Stone Bulwark looks like it's a suped up version of Stoneclaw, and our Astral Shift we saw through Wrath has made a return, with a slightly different change. For my tastes, Nature's Guardian seems largely useless in both PvE and PvP. Stone Bulwark, depending on how it's absorption will scale at max level will likely be my choice in PvE. It also looks (at least right now) that Stoneclaw is gone, and this will be the supplement we can choose for the Glyph of Stoneclaw effect. Lastly, Astral Shift is our long-sought defensive cooldown, reducing all damage taken by 50% at the cost of 30% less damage/healing dealt for 6sec. I can see uses for both of these in current content. I'm more frustrated at the damage/healing reduction component of Astral Shift, though, seeing as classes like Druids and Paladins (and Warriors?) get cooldowns (Barkskin, Divine Protection, Shield Wall?) that give damage reduction without the damage reduction. For myself, I'll likely be going with Stone Bulwark for PvE and Astral Shift for PvP. There's been plenty of times where I've been trained and the damage reduction would have saved me. I'm curious if it'll be usable while stunned/silenced/etc and off the GCD or not.
In Tier 2, we see that the focus of these is movement/control. Frozen Power exists as the root it is now from Enhance, Earthgrab will be a suped up Earthbind replacement and Windwalk is a raid-wide Blessing of Freedom. In my experience, Frost Shock remains one of the spells I rarely, if ever, case (unless I need to slow a runner in PvP). The Earthgrab is similar to Earth's Grasp we currently have access to. The cool thing is that it isn't just the one root like we have now - let's say you've rooted a rogue, and a DK comes in to beat on you, it's next pulse will root the DK and continue to slow any other targets it's already rooted. Lastly, Windwalk totem. A raidwide Blessing of Freedom can have its uses - ie during Heroic Hagara on the ice phase to help with the snowflake snare. This one is up in the air for which I'll pick. In PvP, my issue I have is getting away from melee more than anything, and both of these will help accomplish that, albeit in different ways. Fights that require adds to be kited (like on Gluth, in Naxx) will benefit from Earthgrab, and Windwalk would be useful in fights like Heroic Hagara.
Tier 3 brings us some interesting changes for our totems. We have a Preparation-esque cooldown for our totems; a cooldown reduction on our totems when they're destroyed prematurely; and lastly a totem "launcher"-esque ability to summon our totems to a specific location. For myself, the clear winner for me is Call of the Elements. This can let me make sure I have a Fire Elemental for every attempt on a boss. I've never yearned to place my totems in a specific location other than where I am, nor do my totems typically get replaced or destroyed before they expire naturally. Call of the Elements will be a huge boon to me, seeing as currently I don't glyph it and it's frustrating when I can use my Fire Ele on one every 2-3 wipes on say, Heroic Ultraxion.
Tier 4 brings us a slew of toys. We see Elemental Mastery being changed into a personal bloodlust on a 2min cooldown. Ancestral Swiftness is a passive 5% haste with an on-use to make your next nature spell instant cast (ala Nature's Swiftness). Thirdly, Echo of the Elements appears to be a DTR/Elemental Overload effect - causing your direct damage and healing spells to have a chance to be duplicated. This is the tough one, and honestly, I'm waiting for the jury of the theorycrafters to work on this one. Haste has typically been a strong stat for us (being our #1 secondary stat through all of T11 and T12 this expansion). The choice between the first two options comes down to the choice between a personal BL/Hero versus a passive 5% haste with an instant Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning once per minute. Echo of the Elements seems like it could prove useful - depending on the proc rate. Will it be a PPM mechanic? Or similar to DTR where it's approx 13% proc chance? Can it proc off of Elemental Overload procs? A lot of questions on this last choice here. For PvP I may stick with Echo of the Elements. Many of my favorite moments in PvP are when I get DTR procs on top of Mastery procs and just seeing someone drops. PvE is a different game, and if one turns out better than the other I'll obviously go with that. However, I like the current haste bonus of Elemental Mastery and am used to that, so I may stick with that out of personal preference.
Tier 5 ties into our healing abilities. We get the choice between Healing Tide - a raidwide ability similar to Tranquility; Ancestral Guidance gives us an activated ability that will make our heals/damage do healing equal to 40% to a nearby injured ally; and Fortifying Waters, offering us a 10% magic reduction for those standing in our Healing Rain. I have yet to cast Healing Rain in a raid or a serious PvP setting, so Fortifying Waters is out the window from the start. Healing Tide and Ancestral Guidance in my opinion have the potential to be powerful raid cooldowns. I'm curious if Ancestral Guidance will be a smart heal and heal the party member in most need within its range (ala Atonement). I wouldn't see the need for it otherwise if it wasn't, so assuming it's smart helps its cause. Healing Tide could be useful for fights like Ultraxion/Heroic Ultraxion where there's a lot of AOE healing and people need heals NOW. This can also be useful for Spine, Madness, Zan'ozz. I think Ancestral Guidance might find more use in PvP where I need it to simultaneously heal me as I'm trying to burn someone down.
Our sixth tier of talents is, at current, "Coming Soon!" and I'm curious, anxious and excited to see the last set of talents we get to choose from.
[Spells and Other Changes]
Blizz recently announced that in MoP all spells will deal 200% crit damage baseline. This was a breath of relief when looking through our spell list that we only gained a 50% crit damage boost. This is interesting to me seeing as currently we gain somewhere along the lines of 137% crit damage on our Lava Bursts (talents and chaotic meta accounted for), so we'll be seeing even larger LvB crits. Also, we'll see higher crits in general, and I'm curious if this will shuffle our secondary stat priorities a little.
We seem to have lost a lot of our buff totems - such as Wrath of Air, Windfury, resistance totems, Stoneskin, Strength of Earth. It looks like we'll be losing a lot of our stat sticks (Hooray!) and gaining utility totems via talents and some class-wide (Tremor and Earthbind still currently exist). Our Totemic Wrath is turning into a passive ability no longer tied to our fire totems, and we'll be gaining a new raid buff that grants 5 Mastery to all raid/party members.
Our Fire and Earth Elementals have had their duration and cooldowns slashed by 50% - bringing them to 1min durations with 5min CD's, meaning we should have one for every boss attempt, plus with the Call of the Elements talent, lets us drop potentially 2 on every fight. Reincarnation currently has no cooldown listed on the spell list, and I'm wondering if I should be rejoicing or not. I genuinely wish the cooldown would get reduced as is, even if it was 10 minutes to have a similar cooldown to battle rezzes. I personally feel like Reincarnate is weaker than a brez - you rez with low health and mana, where you died, not to the area the warlock/druid/DK could have rezzed you. All brez's have a 10min CD while Reincarnate remains stuck at 30min.
Finally, our new class spell for MoP is Ascendance. This 3min CD will turn us into a Flame Ascendant (think Elemental Council in Bastion of Twilight) for 15sec, removing the CD on LvB and turning Chain Lightning into Lava Beam. Lava Beam is still undetermined as to its details as of yet, but most are speculating, and I agree, that it will be similar in nature to Chain Lightning ala cleaving to nearby enemies. I'm hoping for one of these 2:
Lava Beam: Hurls a stream of lava at the enemy, dealing X damage and jumping to additional nearby enemies. Each jump reduces damage done by 30%, affecting 3 total targets. Lava Beam will always critically strike if Flame Shock is present on the target, and applies Flame Shock to every target affected by Lava Beam. 1.5sec cast
Lava Beam: Hurls a stream of lava at the enemy, dealing X damage and jumping to additional nearby enemies. Each jump reduces damage done by 30%, affecting 3 total targets. Lava Beam will always critically strike all targets hit if Flame Shock is present on the primary target.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Freedom of Dual Spec
For the longest time, my dual spec has been Resto. For the better part of Wrath (at least from TOC and through ICC), I was used as our OS healer in case someone didn't show, or an encounter needed an additional healer, or what have you. I didn't mind too much because in actuality it was very scarce I'd need to go over heals (or if I was feeling lazy, I'd heal and let our normal resto sham go Enhance for the night). I'm not the best healer in the world, but I know how to play resto well - which has been both a blessing and a curse at the same time.
The guild I was in for the second half of Wrath and through T11 in Cata fell apart shortly before T12 launched. We were a 10M guild, and our Pally tank and 2 of our healers (arguably the stronger 2 of the 3 we had) decided to up and leave because we had hit a wall progression-wise due to attendance and being unable to recruit more people to stabilize the roster. They left overnight, leaving us down 3 people, which in turn caused our GM to pretty much ransack the guild bank and go to a different guild. I'm usually one of those people that stays til a guild's dying breath. I like the comradery and I bond with people and hate leaving with no advanced notice because it's (in my eyes) disrespectful. I hate when people leave the guilds I've been in like that, so I try not to be one of those people. Anyways. After those 3 left, I decided to pack up and leave. I knew that there was no hope for recovering from the loss of those 3, so I decided that instead of waiting for the inevitable, I'd just part ways.
So I applied and was accepted into a different guild on a different server, made it through my trials, etcetc. They had asked me to go resto a couple of times when healers were MIA (like I said, blessing and a curse). They were really pleased with how well I healed, considering they had a streak of getting rather awful healers in who just couldn't pump out enough heals for heroic T11. I was kinda eh about it, and I was still the new kid on the block, and I was bribed to go full-time Resto for a nice little chunk of DKP. I agreed, and continued to do my Resto thing. Week by week, I realized how much I hated healing full-time. I never minded doing it once every couple weeks, or doing it when I wanted to, but having to log in to raid and spend the time regearing some slots over to resto from elemental, as well as the progression wipes, really wore me out on healing. I ended up talking to my GM and RL and asking them to find a healer to replace me so I could go back as DPS, even offering the DKP back I had received for going MS heals.
T12 came, I was #4 in our guild to get my DTR, but I was still required to heal on some fights because we were still being plagued by bad healers coming in. In retrospec, it had to have been really embarassing for these healers we were recruiting to be destroyed by me in my OS. I had even ranked #3 for healing Rag (normal) one time! Still, I constantly was gently pushing and reminding them to find a solid healer so I wouldn't have to heal as often. It was as frequent as 1 - 2 nights each week I was healing for something. I did it for the good of the group, but ultimately was hoping for a godsend for some sort of competent healers. T13 came, and we experienced a fallout of about 8 people who decided to leave and form their own 10M guild. This 8 consisted of 3 of our legendaries, 6 DPS total and 2 of our healers.
Adding insult to injury, they proceeded to take everything of value from our guild bank to use as their own mats in their new guild, as well as trolling and slinging mud at us on the recruitment forums, trade chat, and any other public means of communication they could. This was a HUGE blow to us. We had been stalled on progression for weeks, hitting our heads against a wall, and this of course was also due to a handful of those 8 purposely sabotaging the raids. Blowing Bloodlust in the first 30sec, letting Zano'zz's orbs hit the walls and not going to them, etc. Literally, there were times we spent 2 evenings of 90+% wipes on bosses because of their lack of teamwork and just working against the rest of the raid. They left - 2 Mages with DTR and our 1st rogue with FotF- and took our mats, formed their own guild, and continued to prod and poke at us even though we left them alone. Our recruitment took a WHILE to get good players in our roster and I was still tasked with healing, especially now that we'd lost 2 solid healers.
Finally, 2 (almost 3) weeks later, we got enough people back in who could tell their ass from their elbow and who weren't just absolutely horrible. And, lo-and-behold, after all this time, we somehow managed to recruit "too many" healers. By "too many", I mean that we had 2 of our healers switching to DPS offspecs. Now, I have the option of my dual-spec being free from the cold, cold hands of healing! I'm almost unsure what to do with myself. I've kept my healing OS for so long that I feel weird getting rid of it. I'll still be required to heal if our only resto sham doesn't show up, or if we're short on heals, but now that we're in surplus of healers, I can finally get rid of resto and do something else with it.
I can finally make my PVP build (so I have things like Earthbind Root, which I sorely miss). I can make my Fire Ele spec for H Ultrax, or I can go enhance and play around with that in RF or HoT heroics. It's so liberating to finally have my choice - it's been at least 2 years I've kept resto as a backup. I'm just nervous to get rid of it. I feel like it's Murphy's Law - as soon as I get rid of my resto spec we'll randomly lose 2 healers and I'll be on healing duty occasionally again. Maybe I'll just wait through the end of next week before I decide what to do with it.
The guild I was in for the second half of Wrath and through T11 in Cata fell apart shortly before T12 launched. We were a 10M guild, and our Pally tank and 2 of our healers (arguably the stronger 2 of the 3 we had) decided to up and leave because we had hit a wall progression-wise due to attendance and being unable to recruit more people to stabilize the roster. They left overnight, leaving us down 3 people, which in turn caused our GM to pretty much ransack the guild bank and go to a different guild. I'm usually one of those people that stays til a guild's dying breath. I like the comradery and I bond with people and hate leaving with no advanced notice because it's (in my eyes) disrespectful. I hate when people leave the guilds I've been in like that, so I try not to be one of those people. Anyways. After those 3 left, I decided to pack up and leave. I knew that there was no hope for recovering from the loss of those 3, so I decided that instead of waiting for the inevitable, I'd just part ways.
So I applied and was accepted into a different guild on a different server, made it through my trials, etcetc. They had asked me to go resto a couple of times when healers were MIA (like I said, blessing and a curse). They were really pleased with how well I healed, considering they had a streak of getting rather awful healers in who just couldn't pump out enough heals for heroic T11. I was kinda eh about it, and I was still the new kid on the block, and I was bribed to go full-time Resto for a nice little chunk of DKP. I agreed, and continued to do my Resto thing. Week by week, I realized how much I hated healing full-time. I never minded doing it once every couple weeks, or doing it when I wanted to, but having to log in to raid and spend the time regearing some slots over to resto from elemental, as well as the progression wipes, really wore me out on healing. I ended up talking to my GM and RL and asking them to find a healer to replace me so I could go back as DPS, even offering the DKP back I had received for going MS heals.
T12 came, I was #4 in our guild to get my DTR, but I was still required to heal on some fights because we were still being plagued by bad healers coming in. In retrospec, it had to have been really embarassing for these healers we were recruiting to be destroyed by me in my OS. I had even ranked #3 for healing Rag (normal) one time! Still, I constantly was gently pushing and reminding them to find a solid healer so I wouldn't have to heal as often. It was as frequent as 1 - 2 nights each week I was healing for something. I did it for the good of the group, but ultimately was hoping for a godsend for some sort of competent healers. T13 came, and we experienced a fallout of about 8 people who decided to leave and form their own 10M guild. This 8 consisted of 3 of our legendaries, 6 DPS total and 2 of our healers.
Adding insult to injury, they proceeded to take everything of value from our guild bank to use as their own mats in their new guild, as well as trolling and slinging mud at us on the recruitment forums, trade chat, and any other public means of communication they could. This was a HUGE blow to us. We had been stalled on progression for weeks, hitting our heads against a wall, and this of course was also due to a handful of those 8 purposely sabotaging the raids. Blowing Bloodlust in the first 30sec, letting Zano'zz's orbs hit the walls and not going to them, etc. Literally, there were times we spent 2 evenings of 90+% wipes on bosses because of their lack of teamwork and just working against the rest of the raid. They left - 2 Mages with DTR and our 1st rogue with FotF- and took our mats, formed their own guild, and continued to prod and poke at us even though we left them alone. Our recruitment took a WHILE to get good players in our roster and I was still tasked with healing, especially now that we'd lost 2 solid healers.
Finally, 2 (almost 3) weeks later, we got enough people back in who could tell their ass from their elbow and who weren't just absolutely horrible. And, lo-and-behold, after all this time, we somehow managed to recruit "too many" healers. By "too many", I mean that we had 2 of our healers switching to DPS offspecs. Now, I have the option of my dual-spec being free from the cold, cold hands of healing! I'm almost unsure what to do with myself. I've kept my healing OS for so long that I feel weird getting rid of it. I'll still be required to heal if our only resto sham doesn't show up, or if we're short on heals, but now that we're in surplus of healers, I can finally get rid of resto and do something else with it.
I can finally make my PVP build (so I have things like Earthbind Root, which I sorely miss). I can make my Fire Ele spec for H Ultrax, or I can go enhance and play around with that in RF or HoT heroics. It's so liberating to finally have my choice - it's been at least 2 years I've kept resto as a backup. I'm just nervous to get rid of it. I feel like it's Murphy's Law - as soon as I get rid of my resto spec we'll randomly lose 2 healers and I'll be on healing duty occasionally again. Maybe I'll just wait through the end of next week before I decide what to do with it.
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