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I still remember when I discovered mouseover macros on Krikket. It was like an entirely new universe in healing opened up to me. Since then, I’ve had several healing characters, who used mouseover macros with different levels of effectiveness, and finally now, on Norrah, I’ve found the macro that does just about everything you could possibly ask for.
If you’ve been healing a long time, I’m probably not going to tell you anything you don’t already know (or haven’t already tried), but for the casual offspec healer, someone who’s completely new to healing, or someone who’s always wanted to try mouseover healing, but is afraid they’ll kill someone while they’re still getting used to it, read on:
I managed to get her leveled into The Land of the Bad Pigs, and she dinged 61 before I needed to stop for a bit – and in the interim, my boyfriend totally quested & instanced into Northrend on his warrior, thus taking away the one thing that made playing her kind of fun.
“Oh, that mob there, the one you’re about to charge?”
DEATHGRIP
“Yeah, he’s over here now. Sorry!”
I think my biggest hurdle (although not the only one) with playing a death knight is this – you get three levels to learn how to play your class before you’re dumped into the cold unfeeling world of Hellfire Peninsula with a whole bunch of buttons that you really don’t get how they work yet. When you level a character from 1, you get one, maybe two, abilities at a time. You play with those for a couple of levels, and then you get another one. Sometimes, you go 6 or 8 levels without getting something new that you actually ever use. You have time to get a feel for it before you have more abilities than you have convenient keybinds, y’know?
So, other than Death Grip (which admittedly, has its lulzy uses), I have a whole bunch of buttons that I mash in no particular order, and most of the time stuff falls over, but mostly? I’m bombarded with a cute little zombie-gnome voice telling me “That ability isn’t ready yet!”.
I don’t want to instance on her because I do not want to subject others to my complete an utter fail at playing a class widely thought of as “faceroll” and overpowered.
And I don’t really want to solo quest on her because I am wearing a giant bullseye visable to every bored Horde level 80 character on four continents. Oh PvP servers. How I do not love you.
I cannot find my DK-groove, I guess. I thought maybe I’d want to tank with her, but dear god. Two handed weapons are SO SLOW, and getting two ridiculously slow one-handed weapons to tank with doesn’t sound like it’d be more fun (and like it would be far more hassle). Also, see above with the “not wanting to subject others to my humiliation”. Blood DPS (which is – kind of – how I’m specced) is meh. It works. Things die, and I usually don’t – at least not to mobs. But it just isn’t that fun because I don’t get it.
As a result, I’m back to having more things in WoW I feel like I should do, and almost nothing that’s exciting and fun and that I actually want to do. The WoW-apathy is coming back and it’s coming back hard. I’m looking for excuses all over the place to not do things in game. Raiding has even lost its allure for the moment – yet again, I feel like I’ve put myself in a place where my alt is going to get to see and do more than my main, and I get sad if I think about it too much.
That little gnome up there? She’s making me reconsider all over again why I play WoW.
When you are particularly satisfied with yourself & the way you handled a challenging interpersonal encounter, to the point where you find yourself actively preaching things like “Know your audience” and “Think before you speak/type” …
… be very aware that it’s only a matter of time before you too will be dining on foot.
I am currently the lucky owner of one Battered Hilt. I know I should be super-excited about this, but I’m just flummoxed over what to actually do with the thing.
Krikket current is using Abracadver as her weapon. As much as I whine about the injustice of being a staff-shaman, it really is a decent weapon for an elemental shaman. It makes staying hitcapped simple. If I were to dump it so I could use the Battered Hilt quest reward weapon, I would need to go back to my Ulduar shield (since I don’t see myself getting either a Bastion of Purity or a Bulwark of Smouldering Steel anytime soon), and I would likely have to either downgrade some armor pieces, or regem pretty much everything I own for hit. Which makes it – at this point – not so much an upgrade.
Norrah, on the other hand? Well, she could use her Quel’Delar now. It would be quite the sexy upgrade for her, actually. It is a pretty excellent holy paladin weapon, and the best I’m likely to get my hands on for a very long time. Someday she might get a Lich King weapon, but I just don’t see that happening anytime soon either.
But I feel guilty as hell using something this shiny on an alt, you know? I know it’s irrational, but there it is. I feel like Norrah isn’t important enough to deserve this weapon, despite the fact that, at this moment in time and for the forseeable future, it’s far far better for her than for my main.
Help convince me it’s ok to let her have it.
Here’s how I look at it. Being in a guild is sort of like working in an office environment. It’s great when you have people you like at work – people you enjoy having lunch or taking a coffee break with. It’s even better when you have friends at work – people you want to go out for drinks with on Friday afternoon, or invite to your Sunday afternoon cookout.
Neither of these things is actually required for you to be successful at work though. They’re merely perks.
On the flipside, I think we’ve all had that person we worked with that just rubbed us the wrong way. For whatever reason, someone who just bugged us. Not someone who was blatantly inappropriate (such in cases of sexual harassment or complete and utter incompetence), but someone you just would choose not to spend your time with if you weren’t both employed in the same place.
Sometimes? There are people you just cannot get along with. You can make yourself crazy trying, sure, but ideally, you just minimize your exposure to the people that drive you nuts. This has served me well in my professional life (back when I had one), and has – mostly – served me well now that I’m in a large guild in WoW.
My boyfriend, however, tends to have very very different ideas.
From Nethaera’s blue post on the World of Warcraft forums:
The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.
We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.
For me, at least, this is an interesting day to get this news. A few months ago, we finally took the plunge and joined a 25 man raiding guild after resisting it for a very very long time. Yesterday, some things happened inside of my guild which have led me to the decision of no longer doing 10 man raids on my main on a regular basis. It left me feeling a little lost, to be completely honest.
Do I still prefer 10 mans? Overwhelmingly yes. And because of this, I’m thrilled that 10 and 25 man raids will be sharing a loot table. I feel like now 10 man raiders and 25 man raiders will finally be on equal footing.
Will this change the way I choose to raid in Cataclysm? That I don’t know yet.
Expacs tend to shake up even the strongest guilds, and I don’t expect Cataclysm will be any exception. However, I’ve made a commitment to my guild and my guild mates, and if BoO stays a 25-man focused guild? I will continue to raid 25s on my main.
That said, this will encourage me to make sure I have at least one alt ready to raid the latest tier of content throughout all of Cataclysm because I want the opportunity to be part of a cohesive 10s team again. That is still where the majority of my raiding enjoyment comes from. As the release date gets closer, I’ll likely be looking for people to commit to that cohesive team, and try to figure out what role will be most needed so I put my effort into the right character as early as possible.
I expect a lot of people are going to be upset about this planned change. Not me. I’m completely relieved. I’m looking forward to getting to do more with my alts, and have less chance of burnout on my main. I’ve been complaining about the disparity between 10 & 25 man loot practically since the day Wrath came out, so that is honestly the change that makes me happiest.
I understand that the queue time for tanks for randoms is much much shorter than the queue times for DPS.
I understand that gearing up a new character means running a lot of heroics, and the less time you spend in queue the more you get to spend actually running those heroics.
I understand that you might not want to roll need against a tank for tanking gear, so you prefer to be the tank while looking for upgrades.*
But for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE do not queue as a tank for a random heroic unless you have a set of gear, in your bags, that will give you at least 535 defense. More is ok. Less is not.
No love,
The healer (with tanking offspec) waiting out a 30 minute deserter debuff since the tank in her H-ToC had 25k health and 512 defense.
*Honestly? I think it’s the queue times. I don’t think people who are all “lolwut do you mean defense-cap?” would think twice about rolling on tanking upgrades against the actual tank in a 5 man.
File this under “Things that Piss Me Off”:
Krikket’s main spec is elemental. Yes, once upon a time, I was a resto shaman, but that was long before I transferred to my current server. I may be a healing-capable DPS class, but I play DPS.
The fact that I have healing spells does not mean I want to heal for your raid. This especially does not mean I want to heal for your raid that I wasn’t particularly interested in going to as DPS.
Being told that since I have a blue bar, I am a healer? Does not endear me to you, nor does it make me all of sudden swell with an overwhelming desire to be a healer.
It does make me wonder how the mages, warlocks and hunters feel about your admonishment that “Blue bar = Heals”.
Do a lot of people run into this prejudice that just because your class is capable of healing, that you should be totally thrilled with the proposition of healing whenever it’s convenient for someone else? Do death knights, warriors, paladins & druids get the same kind of crap about tanking?
I do enjoy the utility of being able to heal, even if I normally would prefer to blow things up. However, nothing makes me dig my heels in harder and proclaim that I’m not a healer than being told I should be.
You have a new character that’s about to hit 80, and you know that the gear grind is coming. Maybe you’re thinking about switching raiding mains. Maybe you just want an alt that can fill in when needed. Maybe you just want to have another decently geared character who can jump in a PuG now and then.
Sure, you can search for “BiS pre-raid gear for <insert class and spec>” and maybe find a few hits that are actually current. But I think it’s so much more interesting to do it yourself. The tool I use for gear-planning is Wowhead’s Profiler.
I’m currently leveling 2 characters in conjunction with my boyfriend – we have a druidbear & druidtree pair, and we have a prot pally (his) & holy priest (mine) which we’re LFD leveling with another couple.
However, I like to always have a character I’m poking at that I play by myself so no one else is waiting for me (and alternately, I’m not waiting for anyone else). This is where you help me decide my next solo project:
