Should I stay or should I solo?

So there has been a lack of WoW related stories on the blog lately, so I guess it’s time to recap the past week. I buckled down, and stayed off of my newly created pally for the past week, which is somewhat of a success. Bremere is now at 34, and fairly close to hitting 35. I finally went back into Scarlet Monastery, to try the armory, and I found it to be a very good test of my abilities. For the most part, my groups generally consist of 3 hunters/rogues, myself, and usually a druid tank. So whenever a fellow squishie is looking for a group, it is a pleasant surprise. So our group was a rogue, lock, mage, druid, and myself. I was pleasantly surprised with the new group dynamic. I ran into one problem, mainly that I know nothing about locks. I’ve never played one about level 5, nor do I plan on it. While it’s helpful since that’s one less alt I need to worry about, I also know nothing about their play style. What a fun time I had with this life-tap-obsessed, pet-less lock. I had no idea how he kept pulling aggro onto himself, omen had him below the tank almost all the time. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized he was sacrificing his health, and then everything made sense. Unfortunately, there isn’t really any specific priest loot in the armory, maybe some trash drops, so I didn’t come out of there with new loot.

Last thursday, I joined my final gnomer run, yes! The acidic walkers dropped, and I could get out of the boots I had been wearing for over 15 levels. It was frustrating, I had two huntards in my group. One of which, sadly, was from my guild. He chose to melee the entire time, his pet was never healed by him, and he was wearing quite an assortment of gear. I plan on helping him in the future, but I could barely keep my mouth shut while I watched him melee for the entire instance. I find that since I have played a lot of the classes to level 20 or so, it helps me understand their abilities, and it makes me more aware of when I need to pay attention to them.

So I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into groups lately, there isn’t as much interest in SM or RFD like there was for VC, SFK, BFD, and Gnomer. Does it get better or worse for lfg as you level up? If it’s going to be like this until I get to 70, I think I’m going to respec shadow, and solo my way there.

-Bremere

Also, I was messing around on my human mage last night, got him from 5 to 7, and used up all his rested xp, I didn’t find the class to be that much fun, aside from making my own food. It seems like once the mob gets to melee range, I have no tricks left if my health gets low, I guess on I can freeze or blink it will get better.

Roleplaying

So I’ve decided I want to try and add some flavor to this blog, by adding in some roleplaying elements. Unfortunately I am very new to the idea of RP-characters, and I was wondering if you guys could give me some advice. Any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks,

-Bremere

Top 10 Memories

Ok, there will be a real post coming later, but I’ve got some downtime at work, and figured I’d do my top 10 memories, I saw another blog doing it for WoW exclusively, but that might be boring read coming from a lowly noob. Haha. So I will be doing my top-10 MMO moments.

10. Getting my mount on my warrior. I had struggled to level 40, level 39 probably took 3 days, I was ganked repeatedly in STV on my last day before a 3-day vacation. It was getting late, and I’m staring at my XP bar, trying to figure out if it’s even moved. After two separate corpse camping events, I finish killing enough trolls for some quest, get killed on my way back to Booty Bay, and log for the night. I was so frustrated, I didn’t even go get my mount until the following monday. But after I pooled all my money together, and bought the mount, and trained the skill, it was definitely worth it. I think I purposefully stayed out of water and buildings for an hour or so just so I could ride everywhere.

9. Beating the Guild Wars: Prophecies campaign. The final mission was definitely a challenge, but the group made up of solely my guild persevered with barely any deaths, and completed the mission. I had been playing for almost a year, but had just never bothered with the campaign too much. It was a great feeling to have finally see all the major storyline in the original game.

8. This happened during my brief stint of WoW, between FFXI and Star Wars Galaxies. I was playing Horde on a PvE server, Kargath I believe, and I was on my tauren drood. There was still some fun world PvP going on then, and the Crossroads was constantly under attack. One day I accidentally healed a 60 and became flagged. I was killed shortly thereafter, but it was exhilarating. I then hung around in the back throwing up HoTs and a moonfire here and there, I didn’t get any honor, but I felt like I was contributing somehow. Now my druid was only 24, so there is a bit of a level gap, but I saw a warrior who just finished killing one of my allies, but he only had 2% health. So I threw a moonfire at him, and followed with wrath spamming, and he died on his way to kill me. I was proud of myself, until he respawned and killed me haha.

7. My next best memory was also on this tauren druid, it was my first time shapeshifting, it was awesome. It was my first time leaving the general area of the barrens/mulgore/durotar. Eventually the buzz wore off, but the first time I will never forget.

6. This one was from FFXI, classes work differently, in that you can be any class you want, and change classes at your in-game house. When you hit level 18, you are able to do a quest to unlock the subjob ability, being able to play another class at the same time. So if your character is level 18 white mage, you could sub black mage, get some extra mana, plus any of the other benefits(ie spells) of being a black mage. Your subjob can only be half of your mainjob’s level however. Anyway, two of the three drops you need to get are fairly easy, but the last involves killing mobs that are almost impossible to kill by yourself at that level. I got a friend to help, I got the drop, and finally I had taken my first step to leaving the world of Noob-dom. Only having one job is usually a sign of lack of game experience. Anyway, it was great.

5. This memory is also from FFXI, it was my first experience going after a BCNM, burning circle notorious monster. Basically mobs will occasionally drop various coins, which are used to enter these BCNM fights. It was such a different experience going into this fight from the standard grinding. The cutscenes were epic, and I was immersed into the story by the time I began the fight, one of my fondest memories of FFXI.

4. Guild Wars PvP is somehow involved in 3 of my top 4 MMO memories. #4 isn’t one specific memory, it’s basically me reminiscing about flawless streaks. There are a variety of arenas in guild wars, one of which is RA, the random arena. You get paired with 3 other people, randomly, and it’s a 4v4 match. It is very challenging due to the lack of communication, I have been paired with a friend, once, and that was due to a lack of participation at the time we were playing. Most of the time your team will fail without a healer, it’s possible to win, but tough. If you can string 10 victories together, you advance to the Team Arenas, where all your opponents have been able to choose their teammates beforehand. Rarely do RA teams defeat more than 1 or 2 TA teams. Flawless streaks are exactly what you would expect, not having anyone die on your team. It’s a great feeling as a healer to know you are doing your job to the best of your ability.

3. Getting my battleship in Eve Online. I will eventually write a post about Eve Online, but basically it’s all about space combat, but it requires huge amounts of time and micromanaging. The sheer amount of time it takes to be able to use a Bship, let alone have the secondary skills to use it effectively, took at least a few months to accomplish. In the end, it was totally worth it.

2. Getting the elite skill Restore Condition. This is a monk elite skill in Guild Wars, and is usually a staple in my PvP builds. It clears all conditions, while healing for a sick amount. Only downside, is that you can’t use on yourself. To get elite skills, you have to find a boss who has it, kill the boss, and capture the skill. The only boss with RC is in the end game area, has 3 possible spawn points spread out across the map, and shares these points with many other bosses. I spent a long time entering the zone with npcs, either failing to get to the boss, or not having him spawn. Then one guild night, I mentioned I had been trying for awhile, and we got a group together, capped the skill, and I was ecstatic. I think I thanked everyone for way too much time afterwards. And promised everyone in the group power levels whenever they wanted them.

1. My top memory happened last summer. My guild in GW is fairly casual, we always have some people on, even though we are a rather small. I had been pushing for trying to do some GvG battles, and we were sure if it would be possible for us or not. We doubted our ability to compete at such a level. Other guilds in our alliance participated but I never was invited to join them. Finally, we set a night up to practice and then try out once or twice. Guild Vs Guild battles are 8v8, and most maps are pretty similar. Both teams have some npcs at their base guarding their Guild Lord, when your Guild Lord dies, your team loses. Their is usually a flag stand in between the bases, and it provides a buff to your HP and Energy when controlled for a certain amount of time. It was electrifying the first time we did an actual GvG battle. I was incredibly nervous, and we all made mistakes, and lost. I overhealed way too often, forgot that one person was going to extend, and wasn’t prepared, etc. We all had tons of fun, and a variety of jokes followed. It was awesome, and while we rarely have done GvG since, I still am glad I got a chance to try it out.

What are some good memories you guys have from WoW, or any MMO?

**I started playing Guild Wars again this weekend, so there isn’t anything new to report on WoW-wise, aside from spending some quality time levelling my fishing, which is now at 150. I also found the skill book to teach the find-fish ability. Now I just need to level up my cooking enough to cook the fish.

-Bremere

White Mage LFG

Well my adventuring in Azeroth wasn’t anything spectacular, did a few quests, and decided to, finally, roll a pally. He’s a lowly level 7 dwarf pally named Logar. So instead of regalling you with his exploration of Kharanos or IF, I want to talk about a different game altogether.

FFXI, that’s the final fantasy MMO, was the gateway MMO for me. My cousin got me hooked, and I began my life-altering path of playing MMO’s. Don’t get me wrong, my time in FFXI was TERRIBLE most of the time, long LFG spans, not to mention some of the harder grinding areas.

I don’t know if any of you have ever played FFXI, but if you have, you can skip this paragraph. Ok, for starters, in order to level past 10, you are almost required to group. Any mob who will give you xp is usually going to be either too tough for you to solo, or not worth your time (ie gives you 25 xp). Also, there are basically only 2 or 3 zones where you can handle the mobs for any given level range, somewhat like WoW. Mobs will chase you all across a map, unless you move into another region. It makes the whole situation much more stressful. Also, when you die, not only is XP lost, but unless your healer has a revive spell(not until level 25), you have to respawn where your homepoint is set, and rarely is it close.

So I played White Mage for the majority of my time in FFXI. I enjoyed paladin, as well as Dark Knight, similar to the Death Knight I believe. This was where my healing tendencies were created, and haven’t changed much, with one exception. The white mage has one HoT, one direct heal, two party heal, as well as a variety of buffs. There is no “flash heal” with the exception of one of the party heals, which was on a 2 hour cooldown, and generated a ridiculous amount of threat, rarely does the mob get pulled off of you before you die. The white mage covers most of the “cleansing of debuffs”, and can debuff enemies as well, you rarely have mana to spare however. Most groups will set up camp somewhere slightly safer then average, and you will have a designated puller, who will go find the appropriate level mob and kite him back to the group, where the tank will provoke the mob from him…dps will dps…you get the picture. That was one of the harder habits for me to break after leaving FFXI. Most other MMO groups, including WoW, have a search and destroy mentality. So I had to learn when to ask the group to wait, and when I could regen on the fly.

Anyway, while there is some nostalgia for FFXI, and whenever I see someone playing, part of me wants to reactivate my account, I usually can resist.  That’s about it for FFXI, I’m just curious, have any of you ever played FFXI?

Next time I don’t have an idea on what to write about, I’ll move onto Star Wars Galaxies. Eventually I will talk about GW, but that’s going to be a very long piece, a multi-post piece.

-Bremere

Scarlet Monastery FTL

Ok, maybe I’m being too hasty, I only tried the graveyard portion of SM. But I did not like it at all. I’ve heard everyone saying how great of an instance it is for gear and what not. Maybe it was because I had no tank, or a trigger-happy-loot-stealing mage in my group. I found SM to be barely worth my time, and that isn’t including the effort of getting there.

So I’m questing along in Duskwood, and I get a tell saying, SM Yard, so I assume he is asking me to heal for this instance. I say yes, and the leader quickly gathers a party. Our “tank” is a ret pally, which should have thrown off some red flags, but I assumed he knew what he was doing – big mistake. So the leader and the pally both announce that neither of them are going to help summon. So I offer to, and a mage comes along. We finally approach the stone after a lengthy ride from SS. Surprise surprise, plenty of horde here, and our summoning party was crashed. I guess I took the summoning stone for granted, we spent almost 25 minutes waiting for it to be left alone, eventually it was just a 29 Belf pally, and he chose not to turn his flag on. We managed to sprint into the instance, with only one of party being killed by the horde outside.

Now the fun begins, as my heals are almost equally distributed to everyone but myself. I also noticed the main curse being applied to everyone reduces healing effects by 75%, and I’m not exactly ok with that. So we wipe once, before entering the mausoleum part. The one good part, I got some leg armor, Blighted Leggings, which dropped off of a rare spawn. So now we enter the mausoleum, work through the first pull. Then the pally goes down a flight of steps, as a pat comes around to greet me. We wipe, the tank blames me, and hearths out. Luckily we replaced him with a rogue, who happened to be nearby. The mage mentions that he can decurse, I didn’t want to tell him how to play his class, and offered to help with the 75% reduced healing. He only would decurse himself, which was slightly helpful I guess. We manage to work our way to the boss, the shammy goes down, then the mage, then me, and the two rogues manage to finish the boss off, loot drops, but I can’t use. Ok, thanks for the group guys, I’m outta here.

So I will do this instance again, if not just to see the rest, but I think I’m going to take a day or two off and just quest a few levels out. Are most SM runs this bad? Or was it just a bad group?

Get to the Choppah!

That scene from Predator is the best way I can sum up my weekend of WoW. I no longer remember how many times Mor’Ladim aggroed me while I was questing at Raven Hill, and all I was able to do was sprint for the gate, hoping that power word: shield would hold. I ran through gnomer two more times, once through the back door, the other everything fell apart after the fallout room. I also did a stocks run, mainly there was nothing better to do at the time, which went well. I now have greatly improved both of my rings, and have hit 31. I’m sporting a gray elekk, and a significantly smaller gold supply. I began using Recount this weekend, and I’ve been fascinated by it. What is an acceptable amount of overhealing for a PUG instance group? I’ve kept it under 3% so far, but I’m curious what the average is. I trained my first AoE heal, and not a level too soon, since the group which quit out of gnomer had two large problems, one was a lack of common sense, the other was a lack of proper tanking. The “tank” was receiving about 35% of my heals, dps were getting 15% each, their pets under 5%, and I was the rest. Two of the dps were killed my the avalanche of rock caused during the quasi trogg invasion. Also, their bodies were out of my LoS, so they had to walk back, serves them right…

I respecced to a pure holy talent spec, so my solo-ing is slightly handicapped, but my heals are 15% less mana, which is worth the trade-off. Lately I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of hunters and rogues lfg, I’ve been with shamans and mages, two classes that intrigue me, but I need to force myself to stick with one character.

So I’m looking to get a new banner for this blog, but I’m trying to find a nice location in Azeroth to take a screenshot. Does anyone have any suggestions? Actually, I might not be looking for a screenshot. It seems like a lot of WoW bloggers have a WoW-ish like background, with their character superimposed on it. Any info would be very helpful. I recently discovered that Holy Specialization increases crit chance for heals as well as the other holy spells, I never knew heals were included. My heals are visually critically more, and Inspiration is, as a result, being applied much more often, which leads to less healing.

I’m curious, when does the first tough instance come around? One that will have be banging my keyboard against the desk. Where after we wipe not because of a stupid mistake, but because we were organized enough. I think I need to experience something along the lines of an epic fail, in order to appreciate the clearings of these instances. I hope I don’t have to wait until level 50 or 60 to enter into an instance like that.

Gnomer

I had never run gnomer before this week, either from lack of interest in instances, i really dislike PUGs when I’m not healing or tanking. Seems like most people can DPS mediocre-ly however tanking and healing generally require a higher quality of effort and focus, which for some reason, PUG members generally fail to posess. Healers who are throwing out moonfires, shadow words, or other various spells bother me so much. If you feel the need to dps while healing, use your wands or staff. Unless someone in the group asks you to cast spells other then heals, try not to. Obviously, if a mob with low health breaks free and attacks you, and no one cares, throwing a few spells is ok. But consistently nuking while healing is not ok for a healer.

On an unrelated note, during one of my Shadowfang Keep runs, I had a party member telling me to stop wasting mana on CC-ing the undead mobs. My opinion is if you have a CC, and enough mana to spare, CC the extra mob. Any thoughts on this? Should healers purely save mana for heals? My CC probably saves the tank and/or dps from some damage, until they can FF on it. Granted, for a drood healer, throwing roots to CC a target which could be sapped or sheeped is a different issue.

Back to my topic. I have now completed my second gnomer run, and have yet to receive any drops I can use. I’ve seen 4 rare cloth armors, 1 uncommon wand, and 2 uncommon cloth armors drop over these runs. Any of those 7 items would be an improvement, but I couldn’t seem to win a loot roll to save my life. Whenever it was an uncommon battle axe or mail leggings, I rolled 85+. The other clothy in my party last night received the Spidertank Oilrag , the Acidic Walkers, the uncommon wand, and an uncommon cloth bracer. Amazing how he/she was that lucky, to steal all my loot. It must have been because he was a shadow priest… So I understand it takes time to get the drops I want (I ran SFK probably 8 times to get the Feline Mantle and when I get into the raiding scene, it will be even worse, but I think it’s ironic how some people get very lucky with their item rolls. Don’t get me wrong, when I finally got that mantle, the previous runs were totally worth it. I just need some sort of mantra to say when that rogue needs my cloth leg armor, and says oops wrong button. I’d like to hear about some item you spent a significant amount of time running instances to get, and whether or not it was worth it in the end to you.

Lesser Heal 3 vs Heal 1 vs Heal 2

Maybe in the future I will use the website databases for my numbers, but I’m generally stubborn when it comes to those things. So I ran some tests just now, 3 trials for each test with my current mana pool, 1730. I did a chain cast, so my spirit wasn’t a variable.

Lesser Heal 3:

Avg. Total Possible Healing: 3819HP

HP Healed/Point of Mana : 2.214HP/MP

It takes around 57.5 seconds to cast 23 Lesser Heals, so approximately 66.4 HP/Sec healed.

Heal 1:

Avg. Total Possible Healing: 3883HP

HP Healed/Point of Mana : 2.277HP/MP

It takes around 27.5 seconds to cast 11 Heal 1s, so approximately 141.2 HP/Sec healed.

Heal 2:

Avg. Total Possible Healing: 4058HP

HP Healed/Point of Mana : 2.474HP/MP

It takes around 20 seconds to cast 8 Heal 2s, so approximately 202.9 HP/Sec healed.

So basically Heal 2 is my most efficient, but rarely do I like to wait to cast the heals, but this calc might have swayed me into using Heal 1 as my main heal now. Well that’s all for tonight!

-Bremere

Lesser Spamming

For my first real post, I want to talk about the healing strategy which carried me through the Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep, and most of Blackfathom Depths. However, I will first give you a brief history of how I ended up with my Priest, Bremere. I originally started playing WoW in 2005, played for a summer as a Horde on some PvE server, I can’t remember the name currently, but long story short, my cousin had started playing Star Wars Galaxies, and I followed him to there, and quit WoW. Towards the end of my spring semester this year I became very bored with my gaming selection. My 360 was broken, my RTS games were becoming boring, and I got tired of PvP in Guild Wars. I decided, cue the dramatic music, to get back into WoW. I began playing as Isundir, the NElf Priest. I initially was having fun being back in Azeroth, but by level 8, I became frustrated with the solo abilities that this class had to offer. I then embarked, trying every single class in the game, taking some further than others, notably my 41 warrior, 33 druid, 21 hunter. These three I will eventually take to 70, once I finish with priest hopefully. Then 3 weeks ago, while experiencing the entire spectrum of PUG healing, I realized I wanted to get back into being the dedicated healer. I quickly took Bremere throughout the Draenei starting location. Why did you go Draenei, you might ask? I saw Symbol of Hope in action, that’s why. So while I am specced for healing, not DPS, I did put 5 points into spirit tap to speed up my solo time.

Basically, as you can see from the title, it involves spamming lesser heals whenever necessary. I generally through my highest rank of renew on the tank, and the next two highest ranks for everyone else. While it is challenging to not have to revive anyone in a standard PUG, I managed to pull this feat off a few times. The deaths which occurred were almost entirely due to me being OOM. Either a patrol came by, the pull was done before I had full mana, and there was one or two resulting from me becoming overzealous with my renew’s on non-tanks. I consider myself an above average healer, but obviously we all make mistakes. My largest one to date was due to my reluctance to use flash heal.

For whatever reason, I hate flash heal. End of story. I know I will eventually have to learn to use it, but it bothers me so much to use an inefficient heal. Sometime during levels 20-25, I began to throw in an occasional Heal, it was now a much more viable option, a) my group members had more health, and b) i was beginning to invest in Divine Fury . I’m not sure how effective my technique actually was, I’m going to experiment tonight with max rank lesser heal and rank 1 heal, to see how much I heal for on average, and then take into account the mana regen I would get from the pausing between rank 1 heals. So, either later tonight or tomorrow I will update you on how poor of a tactic the lesser heal spam is, so until then…happy healing!

If anyone has any good stories about low level healing, please comment them, or email them to me and I’ll post them later. I’m always curious to read about unbelievable healing events, or even healing gone wrong, whatever it may be.

-Bremere

The First of Many

So this is my first post on Healing Anonymous, which is also my first blog. I guess I’ll start with some info about me, and outline what I plan to do with this blog.

My name’s Brian, I’m currently in college, and began playing wow this summer. I have a variety of characters because I alt-oholic, not sure if that’s defined or not, but basically I constantly create new characters. My highest is a 41 warrior, but my favorite is my draenei priest, which I plan on sticking with, I play on the Dark Iron PvP server. While I’m relatively new to WoW, I have been playing, and mostly healing, in MMORPG’s for the past 4 years. I started with FFXI, getting to 57 on my white mage before quitting, a brief stint of WoW ensued, followed by Star Wars Galaxies, Guild Wars, and Eve Online (no healing in this one haha). So I do have a lot of healing experience which I can bring to the table, just not much from WoW. Anyway, that’s enough about me, hopefully I haven’t bored you away.

I have a few thoughts about what to do with this blog, mainly it is to discuss healing tactics at the different stages of the game. I want to comment on the differences between healing in Warcraft and other MMO’s, but that won’t be a common subject. I plan to gather information about different efficiencies at the different levels, as well as some of my own tactics (which maybe not be unique) for the different instances. While I will be focusing on healing as a priest, I have leveled druid to 33, and eventually plan on leveling a shaman too. Hopefully in a few months, I can give my own opinions between the healing classes. I’m aware others have already done this, but I rarely share opinions with the main websites I visit. I’m open to suggestions if people want me to talk about a specific topic as well, however, my knowledge is not as broad as I might like, while I do spend a lot of time researching WoW, I have other interests too, which brings me to my next point. I’m fairly obsessed with WoW currently, so there should be a plentiful amount of posts.

That’s enough of a rant for now, if you have a WoW related blog, post a link for me, I’m using interested on people’s opinions of various topics, so any additional reading for me is a plus!

- Bremere

If any of you happen to be an Alliance member on Dark Iron, feel free to shoot me a message, group invite, anything