Now to convince the bosses to drop some caster mail…

P.S. Blizzard, please fix the bug where the AOE damage that the Blood Queen does triggers shaman water shield orbs. Having to refresh my water shield every 15 seconds is a poor use of GCD.

We use World of Logs to study how we’re doing and compare our progress across weeks. I recently took a look at our healers and came up with some notes about what I consider when healing.

Here’s the log from Lady Deathwhisperer from last night (of course I chose this fight because I was the top healer, mwhaha).

1) Keep Earth Shield up!
Keep ES up all the time! Unless it’s a single tank fight and Myr is hogging all the ES glory (I’m Myr, and in your case I mean another resto shaman since I’m probably not secretly raiding with you), make sure you have ES on a tank. LDW is a good example where there are tanks on both sides. Make sure to be refreshing ES in downtimes, if it’s at 1 or 2 orbs left I tend to refresh it if I’m not doing anything else.

2) Keep Water Shield up!
If you are running low on mana you should spend a GCD refreshing your water shield if it’s down (or about to go down). In a hectic fight this might seem dangerous but having no mana is worse!

3) Riptide is awesome and should be used whenever it’s off cooldown
Even without the t10 set bonus (which gives you spell haste after riptide), Riptide procs Tidal Waves which makes your Lesser Healing Wave crit chance increase and your reg Healing Wave cast time decrease. Plus it’s an instant heal with a hot. If you’re tank healing you should be doing Riptide->LHW->LHW or HW if you have the time. On Festergut at 3 stacks I’m doing Riptide->HW->LHW and repeat on the main tank.

4) Chain Heal is pretty awesome
For a while it sucked. But they buffed how much each bounce hits for and how far it’ll jump. If it’s a stacked tank fight then I’m pretty much always chain healing the tanks (Marrowgar is a great example of this). On Saurfang I’m chain healing the tanks as well since they end up switching off and tend to both be taking dmg. When choosing between CH and LHW on the tanks I choose LHW if time is of the essence and they are really low, otherwise I usually CH if I think it’ll hop to at least one other player. Same with healing non-tanks. I always riptide the lowest raid member and will LHW if someone is really critically low, otherwise it’s usually chain heal.

5) Don’t forget your cooldowns
Nature’s Swiftness is now on a 2 min cooldown. I use it early and often in boss fights and trash. Insta-cast HW on the tank in a pinch or for a CH if the raid is taking crazy damage.
Tidal Force can be a savior too! It makes you crit which not only saves whoever you are healing but procs Ancestral Awakening and heals the lowest member of the raid too. If NS is on CD and we’re in an Oh Shit raid damage moment I hit Tidal Force.

Shaman don’t have nearly as many healing spells to figure out as priests (I know, I have one of those too). The crux of being a great shaman healer is figuring out when to use each tool and in what order since we’re so much about procs. Spamming anything mindlessly is rarely the best thing to do, for each fight we should evaluate what kind of damage players will be taking and choose the best tools to fit that situation! If anyone has questions on a particular fight, I’m happy to share my healing strats for it. Enjoy!

Writing really gets easier with practice
At the start of the month it was really hard to write my daily quota. Sitting down without a clear idea what to write was scary and intimidating. The page was blank and the thought that I could fill it with something was just immensely difficult. But by the second and third week I knew I’d get some words down, regardless of if they were amazing or not. Even when I didn’t feel like writing, I’d manage to make progress.

Writing without being self critical is essential
I’m usually an excessively meticulous fiction writer. Every word and turn of phrase is examined and studied from every angle to determine if there’s a better word choice or way to communicate the sentiment at hand. This is funny since when I write blog posts I just ramble at will and it probably comes out better than when I fret about every single detail. When you’re trying to write thousands of words a day, you can’t be worrying about each individual word. As much as it made me wring my hands, I didn’t let myself turn back and edit anything. If I used the same word five times in a single paragraph then too bad! I could break out the thesaurus on the rewrite phase, if I ever got to it.

Setting a daily goal the requires writing every day is not realistic
If you write everyday, you need to write 1667 words per day to reach the NaNoWriMo winner’s circle. I gave myself the smallest possible margin, setting my daily goal at 1700 words. Then I had a few weekends where fun social plans kept me from writing and I fell so far behind. I think setting my daily goal at 2000 or even higher would have been better, allowing me to miss more days and not requiring catchup days with such high word goals. Looking at the remaining week and realizing I need to write almost 4000 words every day just deflated me.

Pre-plotting is good!
I did some basic world building before I started writing, getting a sketch of the characters and setting of my story. I had a loose idea of a character arc but I didn’t really have a plot, and ultimately it made it hard to progress. I had a lot of fun with unexpected new characters popping up and turning the story in different directions but if I’d had a firm central plot to pull things back to I might have made it through. As it was, my story delved into chaos and I wasn’t quite sure how to get out. My main character ended up in a dark place and the central arc of my story get left by the wayside. I think even having a one paragraph plot outline would have made things better.

Bottom line, it was great. I wrote and wrote and realized that I can write. Maybe not well, and maybe I’m not going to ever let anyone read anything in this first attempt at a novel, but I’m going to do it again. And I’m going to “win.”

NaNoWriMo is a pledge to write a 50,000 word novel (or novella really) in the month of November. You can’t start writing ahead of time and it’s pencils down by the end of the month. The novel doesn’t need to be edited or polished, the point is just to get yourself to write.

How many people have “write a novel” on their to-do list? I know I do. It’s something I’ve always thought about for later. I love reading and used to be very creative. Growing up I would write stories all the time. Somewhere along the way everything got a little too serious and I haven’t made the time for it anymore. So quite probably my book will not be any good, but that’s not really the point. I want to reconnect to my creativity and do something that is far-fetched and a dream. So here goes, wish me luck.

YouTube video of Anub kill shot! No music or titles this time, I’m tired

Our group makeup was paladin main tank on Anub, warrior off tank on the adds, rogue, hunter, ele shaman, shadow priest, death knight, arms warrior, resto shaman and resto druid. We two healed the fight and had the shadow priest off spec heal in phase 3 so we could do a quick burn and only get one submerge phase.

When we first ran in the hunter shot down one and only one patch of frost. This was to make it easier to position the adds as they spawned. We found that having multiple patches up slowed them and made it hard to get them to the boss. We wanted to tank them on the boss because we used incidental AOE to get them down.

The prot warrior and the rogue were on add interrupt duty to keep them from Shadow Striking – each took and marked one to keep their attention on.

1) Shoot down one permafrost
2) Tank Anub on the frost
3) Adds spawn and offtank pulls them to Anub where they get downed by whirlwind, chain lightning, heart strike, etc
4) Second set of adds spawned and is pulled to the ice, DPS switches to the adds to burn them down before submerge
5) Hunter shoots down all remaining permafrost
6) Anub is pulled as far from the adds as the tank can get him to give us more time to position for spikes

During the submerge phase we marked our two healers and told each group to try to stick with their healer so we wouldn’t have people running around getting too many scarabs on them alone. Whenever Anub started chasing someone everyone else ran in the opposite direction to maximize the time between him hitting and destroying permafrost patches. Since we were burning with only one submerge phase we only needed to have one permafrost patch remaining at the end which is very feasible without too much attention.

Whenever Anub ended up following the hunter he’d pull super far away, then feign death until Anub went far in the other direction, then pop back up and Anub would head back to him. Similarly, the rogue could use sprint to get some extra kiting time.

Once Anub popped back up we pulled him to the last permafrost patch. The goal was to burn two sets of adds and the boss down to 30% before the next submerge. This way we’d have the most time without adds. Again, we tanked them on the boss but focused on burning the adds and the incidental AOE dmg hit the boss this time.

Once we got to 30% it was pretty hectic since 2 healers have a hard time with the frost debuff on top of the damage to everyone. Our shadow priest through around prayer of mending and healing as possible and we just burned burned burned – let any new adds burrow to take them out of the picture, bloodlust and just hope you can pull it off!

You’ll notice in the video that it was actually the submerged adds coming back and shadow striking that took out a lot of the raid. Not sure if it was because we didn’t have enough dps to burn fast enough or how to manage that better.

Stay tuned for a video of our killshot! Will update tomorrow!

P.S. I made out like a bandit with loot and according to wow-heroes.com I’m now the 16th best geared player on the entire server.

Why does anyone need three characters? I’m not really sure! Well, there are pretty much 4 roles in WoW. You can be a DPS class, of which there are ranged and melee varieties. You can heal. Or you can tank, which means you’re a living meat shield, there to soak up all the damage.

My two 80s fill the healer, melee DPS and ranged DPS roles (both actually heal too much of the time). But tanking was something I’d never tried and wanted to see what it was about. So there you go, welcome to the endgame Myrela, let’s see what happens. First up, getting yet another alt geared up. Dropped a bunch of gold and I’m on my way, but it looks like lots of runs of Halls of Lightning hoping that this tanking trinket drops are in my future.

For the third year I’ll be taking part in the San Francisco AIDS Walk on July 19. If you’re local to the San Francisco area, I’d love for you to join my team and walk with me! There’s no minimum fundraising requirement and it’s a really fun opportunity to get out and walk around Golden Gate Park with a few thousand other motivated people.

For more information on the AIDS Walk, stop by the official site:

http://aidswalk.net/sanfran/index.html

If you’d like to join my team, just drop me an email or click here to register online

Join My Team

If you can sponsor me and make a contribution, stop on by my page. No donation is too small.

My Personal Page

For information on where your donation goes and who your money helps, visit http://aidswalk.net/sanfran/about/beneficiary.html

Thanks for your consideration!