The epic weekend
Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.
Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.
And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.
All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)
It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.
Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.
More Uld10 hardmodes
Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.
We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.
Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.
For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.
At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.
Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.
After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.
We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.
No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.
And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).
I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.
Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!
After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.
Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.
Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.
It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!
Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.
Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.
I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.
Armory Feed
Ewwww… Healing.
Anyways, good work on the hard modes. A 310% mount with crusader aura is the only way to travel.
The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..The Nature of Raiding in Wrath: Gear Resets
You are a braver man than I am. I spent the gold to respec, gem, and enchant my holy set and then never had the guts to use it. Sad part is it’s a really good set. 30k mana with kings and setup to be a Holy Light spammage build.
Grats on going for the Drake. Firefighter was our biggest headache, more so than Yogg +1. I would light a fire under those that want the drake though. Blizz has said that they would give 30 days notice before the drake was removed, but they also said that the RPD and IBPD would go away when the next 310 raid mount was available. Well, with hardmodes in ICC now open I fear that is right around the corner, and no notice will be given.
Tijeras’s last blog ..Protadin: One thing I have always wanted to know, how do you forget your network password in 2 days? You knew it Friday I have to reset it Monday…
@Rhidach
22 February 2010 at 3:09 pm #
@TRM: It’s not that bad! And thanks, I’m pumped to finally get this over with.
@Tijeras: I think our biggest obstacle right now is time, getting people interested in the drakes to show up. Time is definitely a factor and that’s finally lighting some fires under some asses. Also, healing really isn’t that bad. The trick is to bring two friends along so you can’t get vote kicked, haha.
I suggest you extend it anyways. This way you have the choice to either continue, or wipe the extension and start from scratch.
Apparently even after you extend the raid ID, it doesn’t “Lock” you until after you zone in and head to an area a boss should be. At that point it then “Locks” you into the extended raid ID. Any time before that point though, you can just cancel the extension and you won’t really lose anything. This way your group when you gather next week can decide.
We did this with Ulduar 10 for a while when playing with the various hard modes ditching the lock out when an Ulduar boss showed up as the weekly so that we wouldn’t lose out on the freebie badges.
All we need left is Yogg + 1. So we just normal cleared everything on alts and now using that ID to do yogg. Hope to have our drakes tonight!
@Rhidach
22 February 2010 at 3:45 pm #
@Taynka: Good luck!
@Selyndia: I think I’d do that, thanks for the idea.
Healing heroics as a paladin is supposed to be one of the more challenging parts of the game. It is, as you’d expect, tougher to do when you are geared appropriately to the instance. Lucky for you, you outgear most of them. Unluckily for you, you’re gear-appropriate to the hardest ones. It will never be easy as long as people (dps) expect you to heal through avoidable damage.
In my case, this makes learning how to tank fun when you’re running around in 219 to 251 ilvl gear… until it drops you into HoS. “Oh, no problem for a pally tank,” they say!
There are recurring posts in paladin healing forums bemoaning our problems solo healing 5 man content. Learning your Hands, DSac, bubbles, etc can be the difference between wipefests/kicks/keyboard-tossing and a fun-but-challenging encounter. Blizz doesn’t make this impossible though you will read plenty who think they do. Just be glad you never got to heal Magister’s Terrace without Beacon of Light. Whiners these days don’t know how good they’ve got it…
@Anafielle
22 February 2010 at 6:21 pm #
You are a brave, brave man. I too have a holy set in my bank which I set up and then never, ever used.
But I have to keep my ret set up these days because I am the tank who goes DPS for those increasingly rare one tank fights, so I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go holy. :) My ret spec is part of my raiding toolbox.
I laughed so hard at your tales of drunken raiding that I a) almost spit dr pepper all over my keyboard and b) had all the girls at work looking at me like I was crazy.
One of the reasons why I am raiding so much these days (3 10 mans on top of 3 25 mans, you saw me whine on twitter) is because my 10 man has been finishing off Ulduar drakes for everyone. We’ve been doing 1 night of ICC10, a second night of ICC10 if we just have to go back, and then an Ulduar Drake Farm night.
We finally got Yogg 1 the other week. Unfortunately a 10 man raid is made up of more than 10 people, and my MT/RL was determined to get the drakes for everyone who helped us along the way. So we had to spend a few more week in Ulduar, killing Firefighter again (luckily, just 1 night of work) and Yogg 1 again (another night of work).
Man, Yogg 1 still isn’t easy even with lolgear. I was ret for that fight, and it was frustrating. Decursive and I became best of friends, and I actually installed Healbot and learned how to use it specifically so I could heal with ease in the brain room (in ret).
We killed his ass again last night, finishing the drakes for everyone who contributed. Maybe my raiding schedule will slow down now…
Anyways, I wish we were pro enough to go to U10 drunk :) As usual, your guild sounds like lots of fun, and I wish you the best recruiting!
haha… welcome to the healing brigade :)
and that sounds like a lot of intense raiding on the weekend..
sadly my togc10 groups either fail on gormok, or champs or just wipe on anub one attempt after another :*(
@hazmacewillraid
23 February 2010 at 10:27 am #
I need to get going on those Uld achieves too. Sadly, other than Vezax and Steelbreaker, the only hard mode I have is Firefighter. Go figure.
Oh, and I’m 99% sure speccing Holy gives you malaria. And no, Cleanse doesn’t work.
@ antigen
sadly :*(
Well we did it after 3 pulls, finally got my 310% mount. Now to get our 10man back into ICC.
@Rhidach
23 February 2010 at 1:59 pm #
Grats man!
Sounds like a blast! Maybe I’ll start enjoying raid nights more if accompanied by a bottle of scotch! :-)
wishing my guild was having more success in icc.
Anyway, wanted to say thanks for this site, I love reading stuff from a prot pally perspective.