Doing appropriate DPS is incredibly important for nearly all encounters. You need to end the encounter by timer X, kill adds before they use X ridiculous spell or beat your healer to death. The new heroics are a perfect example. Poor DPS will lose you many, many fights. Heals can't just spam forever anymore, if the fight lasts too long everyone will just die to mana attrition. Often DPS will have to use control utility (proper stun timings on HLK in WotLK, infinite numbers of important interrupts on bosses, etc.) or the raid will wipe. Every member of the raid contributes. Certain things may be simpler for a lot of people to manage, but that's neither here nor there. Poor play prevents, or at least significantly hampers, progress. Whether it's from tanks, DPS or healers.
Ugh, I just finished some attempts at the Tol'Barad raid, whatever the hell it's called. The trash mobs had some kind of insane move that was one shotting the tanks (I was healing.) The warrior tank tries to tell me he just needs to be topped off before that move because it only hit for 130k. I look at his HP... 132k. Hmm...
So on the next one, I'm not sure what happened, if he turned him a bit or what, but instead of the tank dying, a ret pally died and the tank took half his HP in the hit... he starts gloating and saying, "See? It doesn't one shot me." The mob did it again, while he had Last Stand up and had like 185K hp, and he got one shot. Raid had a laugh at that.
Anyway, we never understood it, but given the boss' meteor slash being divided by who gets hit by it, I'm guessing maybe it was that? Needed to divide it up with more targets?
We did about 5 attempts on the boss, first one I kind of panicked trying to keep everyone's HP up and ran out of mana waaay too fast. After that I didn't worry about that as much and did better... however I didn't realize that we were 3 healing it, and on the... 3rd attempt I think we hit the enrage timer. Swapped/dropped some people, went down to just two healers and tried it again... only people didn't pay attention to the fact that they were in different groups now and they left one side with too few people, meteor slash ended up wiping out some people and we wiped.
We straightened that up for the last attempt I was there for... don't remember how far we got, I know it wasn't even to 33%, but that was it for me, I had dinner getting cold so I wished them luck and headed out.
I also healed a regular Lost City of Tol'vir before that where the group was trying to treat it like a Wrath dungeon. For the first few pulls, I was basically spending all of my mana every pull, and then the tank wasn't letting me heal the party or get mana back before the next one. Not only that, but he pulled the first boss while I was still trying to get the party healed and I was only at half mana. Somehow we survived but I got him to slow the fuck down after that. We started using a bit of CC and then I got them starting to mark targets... we did better then.
We wiped on the second to last boss due to not understanding mechanics... we got him the second time, though the tank kept pulling the party out of my healing rain (even though I said at the start that I'd be throwing it down to deal with AoE damage), because he thought it was bad. Ugh.
Last boss was utterly insane and ran me completely out of mana by the end. So much damage going around.
It's a bit stressful trying to heal these dungeons when no one's paying attention right now. I still haven't set foot in Halls of Origination or Grim Batol... thinking of just queuing as elemental for those so I can get my bearings in them.
Oh yeah, and my Shaman is *just* now able to start queuing for heroics, 331 average item level after I upgraded my bracers from the Tol'vir quest and hit Honored with Therazane and bought a new ring. I've got a couple 318s I need to replace but they drop in Origination and Grim Batol, so... guess I better get queuing.
Grim Batol isn't so bad, actually. First boss - CC the infected Trogg, don't stand where the boss faces. Third and fourth boss are pretty much "slow and kill the add/s" and don't do stupid shit like standing out of vortex.
Lockmaw kicked my pug group's ASS yesterday, I'm not sure what it was, but it just seemed like a TON of damage for everyone around. Wasn't even standing in whirlwind, either. We just got slowly whittled down.
I was Elemental for Grim Batol and it was pretty fun (the 20 minute wait time to get to it wasn't.) I was pretty much destroying the DPS, a mage was the only one even remotely keeping up.
I didn't end up doing much CCing, and the mage was also much better at controlling the adds than I was. On the fourth boss the two of us were the only ones on the big adds, barely killed them in time. But we had no wipes, it all went well. Priest was healing it. I got some boots from a boss and some shoulders from one of the quests.
Now I just need to run Halls of Origination and I will have been through at least all the new instances once.
Oddly enough we didn't have *that* much trouble with Lockmaw when I was in LCoT... I needed DPS to kill the crocs because even when someone else had the arrow, they'd have healer aggro on me, which I didn't understand. So I spent what time I could running while trying to heal... still got it in one try though.
I really love shaman healing. It's not really much different from Wrath, but for some reason the new emphasis on mana management just clicks with me.
And shaman healing feels like the complete package to me. Earth shield for autopilot tank healing, healing stream (with glyph!) for autopilot group healing, riptiding all the time for tidal waves, shocking and unleashing weapon to empower my heals a little bit. Chain heal and healing rain for when shit gets serious.
Unfortunately Earth Shield got nerfed to hell, at 6k healing power mine is critting for about 7.8k maximum. I believe I remember it critting for about that back at 80 at much lower healing power.
Well I tried two random heroics last night, at 40 minute DPS queues... first was Grim Batol. We wiped at the first boss twice and the group bailed (sissies). Was rather discouraged at that but decided to wait again... got Lost City and the first boss was already down. We wiped on Lockmaw twice and everyone left but the boomkin, we requeued, got another group fairly quickly and proceeded to beat the rest of the instance with only one more wipe I believe.
For the heck of it I decided to try the healer queue... 10 seconds.
Then I ran a random regular with some 84 friends of mine (all it could choose was Stonecore and Vortex Pinnacle though), we got Stonecore which I healed without incident.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and try healing some heroics I guess, because 40 minute DPS queues are just insane. I just feel fairly underpowered at the moment and with groups doing stupid things, it makes it *really* tough to keep up.
Dranyth on
0
Options
Madpandasuburbs west of chicagoRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Resto - What kind of numbers are people aiming for with heroics? I'm at about 80k mana unbuffed. Trying to figure out if i should focus on haste/mp5 now.
I have been reforging mastery into haste and enchanting/gemming for int/spi when possible, haste when its not (mainly on the enchant side).
Heroics completed - Deadmines (god this was fun), BRC, Stonecore, Vortex pinnacle.
I am having a problem healing the other ones that I've tried
Lost City - got the gator boss down, its a pain but if people with marks run to the tanks and adds are burned its doable, you can mana up once the gator is down and the second phase is pretty easy.
The prophet (2nd to last boss) though on heroic, I haven't been able to heal though. In the spirit phase, everyone is just taking too much damage, chain heal does not do enough hps it seems and people are running away from adds so healing rain doesn't do much either. They are focusing on the small adds first as per wowhead. I can't tell if this is a gear issue or just a mechanic being missed.
SFK - first boss, i feel that if even one of his heals doesn't get interrupted, i can't heal through this to the end. Our best attempt was getting him to 5%, then the pugs ragelogged.
Throne of tides, mind control boss - same thing as sfk, if lava burst doesn't get interrupted, people move out of rocks in time, or LoS the mindflay, i can't keep us up.
I actually like healing normals, but heroics I can't tell if its an issue with my gear/play, or just people not doing what they are supposed to. It feels like I cannot fix many mistakes with healing when they happen.
Resto - What kind of numbers are people aiming for with heroics? I'm at about 80k mana unbuffed. Trying to figure out if i should focus on haste/mp5 now.
I have been reforging mastery into haste and enchanting/gemming for int/spi when possible, haste when its not (mainly on the enchant side).
Heroics completed - Deadmines (god this was fun), BRC, Stonecore, Vortex pinnacle.
I am having a problem healing the other ones that I've tried
Lost City - got the gator boss down, its a pain but if people with marks run to the tanks and adds are burned its doable, you can mana up once the gator is down and the second phase is pretty easy.
The prophet (2nd to last boss) though on heroic, I haven't been able to heal though. In the spirit phase, everyone is just taking too much damage, chain heal does not do enough hps it seems and people are running away from adds so healing rain doesn't do much either. They are focusing on the small adds first as per wowhead. I can't tell if this is a gear issue or just a mechanic being missed.
SFK - first boss, i feel that if even one of his heals doesn't get interrupted, i can't heal through this to the end. Our best attempt was getting him to 5%, then the pugs ragelogged.
Throne of tides, mind control boss - same thing as sfk, if lava burst doesn't get interrupted, people move out of rocks in time, or LoS the mindflay, i can't keep us up.
I actually like healing normals, but heroics I can't tell if its an issue with my gear/play, or just people not doing what they are supposed to. It feels like I cannot fix many mistakes with healing when they happen.
I finishes heroic deadmines, never wiped more than once on any given boss. The place is very fun... but jesus christ its long. I'm totally in favor of the harder difficulty and use of CC, I remember being great at it in vanilla wow with my hunter. However, the amount of time for some of these heroics and the rewards... it just doesnt even out.
I dont wanna go back to facerolling a dungeon in 15 mins. But some of these feel like a quick raid type commitment, which I only care to do anymore on the weekend.
SFK... yes the first boss took me four tries. But the first one was due to never trying it, then the next two were due to healers dissconnecting. I was elemental shaman, and wind shear was enough interrupt really, long as I didnt miss one of course, which really just required paying attention. The casted cure is the bitch, cause its 25% of his life... the channeled one you wanna let tick a few times after the attack that puts everyone at 1 HP, but it should be interupped always other than that.
We got to silvermane in SFK with that pug... tank kept trying to pick up the adds by moving and the aoe cone attack from the boss was to much when hitting the group.
Did 2 bosses in H halls of origination as elemental. I need the mana cost reduction talent apparently. I was out of mana at the end of both, when we won. Wiped a bunch of times on the first one.
Oddly enough we didn't have *that* much trouble with Lockmaw when I was in LCoT... I needed DPS to kill the crocs because even when someone else had the arrow, they'd have healer aggro on me, which I didn't understand. So I spent what time I could running while trying to heal... still got it in one try though.
I'm still pretty inexperienced with the Cata dungeons and haven't done any reading about the encounters, but I think the arrow just marks who that elite goon chases down. I think the little crocs just follow normal threat mechanics.
I'm at around 96k hp and 84k mana at the moment and I'm thinking I should start healing heroics... though I think I'd much prefer to run with 3 of my friends when we can once they get to 85 and can queue. At least I can yell at them in Vent, easier to coordinate and such.
And yeah, when I read about Lockmaw I believe the description talked about the arrow being like the panther boss in ZG and I thought that meant they attacked the arrowed target. Probably just meant that Augh goes after that person... ah well.
It's annoying how bad Earthquake is, though. On a similarly geared shadow priest, Mind Sear not only hits for more damage per tick, but costs HALF the mana.
Such a bad 31-point talent.
As Elemental, I find myself having pretty serious mana issues, but I imagine they'll go away once I'm in epics and rolling thunder restores more of my mana.
I really wish I could have some of the cool utility major glyphs, but Lightning Shield, Chain Lightning, and Thunder are all way too necessary. A longer thunderstorm cooldown and I'd blow my mana too fast, Chain Lightning on 5 targets builds lightning shield charges and makes chain lightning pay for itself, and GOD is the lightning shield glyph an amazing quality of life boost.
SenshiBALLING OUT OF CONTROLWavefrontRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
I don't quite understand why you're using Glyph of Lightning Shield. I was under the impression Earth Shock only burned off a maximum of six Lightning Shield charges. Thunder is a given, and I guess Chain Lightning is largely preferential, but I'd rather use Hex and Ghost Wolf.
Are people speccing into Convection? Also, with the new/changed totems, are we using Searing and Tranquil Mind as base now?
I use glyph of lightning shield because plenty of boss moves will eat charges, and not having to worry about refreshing it is really nice. It's also really nice for questing. Fulmination does indeed only burn you back down to 3 charges. Chain lightning with mastery on groups of 5 with the glyph can yield like 6 shield charges
I don't have convection, but honestly I could afford to as I have earthen grasp. Still, the mana I'd save just isn't enough to me to justify the talent points. I'm having mana issues, but 10% isn't going to fix them.
SenshiBALLING OUT OF CONTROLWavefrontRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Yeah, or PvP. Again, not sure why you would take it if you're PvE. Fulmination won't bring you below three charges, ever, and you add more to it just by casting shit, so even if you get hit, you'll be generating more charges. You shouldn't be getting hit to begin with, to be honest.
Is anyone else experiencing shitty Earthquake damage? I seem to recall one of my older posts re: earthquake.
Well, there are plenty of add fights in the new heroics, and I have saved my guild's cloth healers a few times by thunderstorming adds away. Dropping it is something I'm considering, though, because the glyph of healing stream totem is amaaaazing.
You don't really use a base water totem, at least I don't. I change it based on what's in my group. For soloing, definitely tranquil mind, but with healer mana mattering, mana spring is really good, and glyphed healing stream is really good as well, if you have the mana regen buff. Searing is indeed your fire totem. Its short, sucky duration means you'll want it hotkeyed to refresh during boss fights. For weak enemy AoE, I tend to not drop a full set of totems and just drop a magma totem and use fire nova and chain lightning, rather than earthquake. Earthquake's mana cost is just too much right now. Maybe when i have like 120k mana it won't be an issue.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Oddly enough we didn't have *that* much trouble with Lockmaw when I was in LCoT... I needed DPS to kill the crocs because even when someone else had the arrow, they'd have healer aggro on me, which I didn't understand. So I spent what time I could running while trying to heal... still got it in one try though.
I'm still pretty inexperienced with the Cata dungeons and haven't done any reading about the encounters, but I think the arrow just marks who that elite goon chases down. I think the little crocs just follow normal threat mechanics.
Nope nope nope.
There is a debuff that makes the crocs become suddenly infatuated with you.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
So I ran each of the 85 regulars with two friends of mine again tonight with me healing. They felt *much* less stressful than the first time I ran them (though only one of those was as a healer.) I'm feeling better about healing again. Very few wipes and the only major problems came from DPS (or the tank) not moving out of certain things, or just not using their interrupts on major trash moves. I could only Wind Shear so many things, and with no +hit, I would miss sometimes.
Still, starting to think I'd be alright in Heroics again perhaps.
So I ran each of the 85 regulars with two friends of mine again tonight with me healing. They felt *much* less stressful than the first time I ran them (though only one of those was as a healer.) I'm feeling better about healing again. Very few wipes and the only major problems came from DPS (or the tank) not moving out of certain things, or just not using their interrupts on major trash moves. I could only Wind Shear so many things, and with no +hit, I would miss sometimes.
Still, starting to think I'd be alright in Heroics again perhaps.
I thing something needs to be done with regards to the lack of +hit a resto shaman has (obviously this should apply to other healing classes' cc).
You're never going to have the required amount, and considering you now get punished quite severly if you don't interupt or CC correctly, I think it's a pain that it's a bit up in the air as to whether you can be relied upon.
A bit like how back in the day, you had improved sap only working 90% of the time (it always failed for me in "that" room before the beast in BWL).
Just have something deep in the resto / healing tree, that somehow gives you enough hit to deal with heroic mobs at least.
Redcoat-13 on
PSN Fleety2009
0
Options
GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
edited December 2010
They could just make it a major glyph only applying to Hex/Bind Elemental/Wind Shear. That way you could take it for a cc-light group and even switch it out for something else if you don't need it.
Or tack it on to Telluric Currents, that talent would also need the hit anyway.
On the other hand, I don't really see a downside to just making those three abilities always hit. Hit would still be important for the dps specs and it wouldn't change much for PvP (basically giving healers some extra stats that they now have to use for hit). Obviously this should then apply to all CC/interrupt in the game. I think they did the same for Taunt etc.
Grobian on
0
Options
SenshiBALLING OUT OF CONTROLWavefrontRegistered Userregular
Well, there are plenty of add fights in the new heroics, and I have saved my guild's cloth healers a few times by thunderstorming adds away. Dropping it is something I'm considering, though, because the glyph of healing stream totem is amaaaazing.
You don't really use a base water totem, at least I don't. I change it based on what's in my group. For soloing, definitely tranquil mind, but with healer mana mattering, mana spring is really good, and glyphed healing stream is really good as well, if you have the mana regen buff. Searing is indeed your fire totem. Its short, sucky duration means you'll want it hotkeyed to refresh during boss fights. For weak enemy AoE, I tend to not drop a full set of totems and just drop a magma totem and use fire nova and chain lightning, rather than earthquake. Earthquake's mana cost is just too much right now. Maybe when i have like 120k mana it won't be an issue.
Don't drop Thunder, it's great.
Do drop Lightning Shield, though. Like I said, I prefer Thunder, Hex and Ghost Wolf, but Thunder is the only one that's even remotely close to mandatory. Healing Stream is pretty boss because of the resistances, it seems like a must-have, at least for Resto.
As elemental, I have no mana issues in PVE.
PVP though... its pretty harsh, and my pvp ele spec is different than my pve ele spec. Casting all the survivability type totems is just a huge drain. Its not like you get free time to spam lightning bolts and fill your mana back up.
About 80k mana, and I can sustain pve DPS all day... but in pvp, the non-mana dps seems to have a major edge right now. Because they can use their CC and dps to its fullest... but if I wanna keep use stoneclaw alot along with tremor and grounding, I then run out so fast.
I dunno.. when I have mana, I do great. But pvp is still just all over the place. From what I can tell, warlocks are really good again, I use tremor totem, but they seems to have some pretty hardcore new fear stuff with the PVE CC thats needed now for everyone.
I think the biggest drain on my mana in PvE is that I don't have that much haste, so my rotation is disproportionately lava burst, not to mention a set of totems costing 8k mana.
I also tend to use chain lightning quite a bit on 4+ pulls, because it has a high chance of paying for itself, and it builds a lot of lightning shield charges.
For replacing my lightning shield glyph, I think I'd have to go with ghost wolf or healing stream. I mostly use mana spring in instances, for healer mana, but resistances would be really nice to have. Still, with how much I use ghost wolf to avoid things, more movement speed from it would be great.
I wish they hadn't introduced prime glyphs, because they're all boring. It's the major glyphs where you get interesting choices.
GrobianWhat's on sale?Pliers!Registered Userregular
edited December 2010
I have no idea about Elemental, but for both Resto and Enh, I have options for Prime glyphs, it's not like there are only 3 possible glyphs.
Resto has Earth Shield, Earthliving, Riptide as the 3 main healing glyphs and then Water Shield and Fire Elemental as the options. Sure, the first three are the best for most situations, but while gearing up or for specific fights, I might prefer Water Shield. And Fire ele might shine, too, in certain situations.
As glyphs are easy to change, I'm fine with a set of go-to glyphs and then some you can switch to if the need arises.
Other classes have it way worse, like bears literally having 3 prime glyphs that do anything for them.
Prime glyphs basically depend on whether you're pvping or pveing. Even then they're mostly the same, but there are some differences.
I use the Lightning Shield glyph as elemental (along with thunder and chain lightning), just because I hate seeing charges get lost to incidental damage. To be honest I don't really see the point of the GW glyph. I just don't use it that often.
I should probably swap out CL for hex, since I doubt CL will be as useful in heroics.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Incidentally I think the elemental mastery glyph is probably underrated in the current environment. There's lots of situations even in heroics where it'd be super handy to have a little caster shield wall in your back pocket.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Incidentally I think the elemental mastery glyph is probably underrated in the current environment. There's lots of situations even in heroics where it'd be super handy to have a little caster shield wall in your back pocket.
Does it share the same slot as the Stoneclaw glyph though? The stoneclaw glyph I think absorbs something like 16k (I'm not sure on this figure), and it's something you can spam with more regularity than you can with EM.
I honestly don't see how the EM glyph can compare as it only stops 20% of incoming damage to you (if the stoneclaw is 16k, then you'd have to be taking 80k's worth of damage to match stoneclaw, and if that's the case, I think you're standing in the wrong place).
Redcoat-13 on
PSN Fleety2009
0
Options
SenshiBALLING OUT OF CONTROLWavefrontRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
You should be using Elemental Mastery on cooldown anyway
turning it into a defensive cooldown in addition to an already formidable offensive cooldown is very, very pvp-esque
I kept my former level 80 pvp glyphs as ele - stoneclaw, mastery, Lit Shield (which imo saves a bunch of GCDs). I can solo-kite 2-3 melee instance elites. If I can afford to, I'd like to go back into ancestral resolve too (for both ele and resto)...at least until my gear is raid capable.
I was really feeling bad about my mana pool as healer in my first lost city pug. Going oom on trash is kinda embarrassing. Then I looked at the meters. All but one DD were averaging well under 5K dps, even on bosses, nobody was interrupting _anything_ (except for me as the healer), and the DPS DK took more damage than the tank from standing in crap. It's really nice to see that all group members really need to pull their weight for groups to go well, but damn is it tough sometimes.
Shaman CC and wind shear should have a huge accuracy bonus, at least as resto. In many groups, I'm CCing 2 mobs at a time along with interruprts and healing. I shouldn't have to worry about those skills missing (except for my LB missing when I want to get some mana back, I'm ok with this).
Well, I have a guild, so no pugging heroics until like raid tier 3 when people have so much gear that the content is more reasonable.
Also, need to level that guild, so guild groups are double better.
I don't like the elemental mastery glyph, though, because you really should be using it on cooldown, so you're not just losing cooldown reduction via Feedback.
That stoneclaw glyph, though, sounds like a pretty awesome idea, since the str/agi buff is given by SO MANY other classes, it's rare that I'm not using stoneskin, and stoneskin is really mediocre.
Well, I have a guild, so no pugging heroics until like raid tier 3 when people have so much gear that the content is more reasonable.
Also, need to level that guild, so guild groups are double better.
I don't like the elemental mastery glyph, though, because you really should be using it on cooldown, so you're not just losing cooldown reduction via Feedback.
That stoneclaw glyph, though, sounds like a pretty awesome idea, since the str/agi buff is given by SO MANY other classes, it's rare that I'm not using stoneskin, and stoneskin is really mediocre.
Well to get the stoneclaw shield from the glyph, all you have to do, is put down the totem; you don't have to keep it down to keep the shield on you, so you can immediately just switch back to stoneskin anyway.
Posts
Plaz come resto for my ten man, we'll be ready in a week or so.
Ok, thanks, see you soon!
So on the next one, I'm not sure what happened, if he turned him a bit or what, but instead of the tank dying, a ret pally died and the tank took half his HP in the hit... he starts gloating and saying, "See? It doesn't one shot me." The mob did it again, while he had Last Stand up and had like 185K hp, and he got one shot. Raid had a laugh at that.
Anyway, we never understood it, but given the boss' meteor slash being divided by who gets hit by it, I'm guessing maybe it was that? Needed to divide it up with more targets?
We did about 5 attempts on the boss, first one I kind of panicked trying to keep everyone's HP up and ran out of mana waaay too fast. After that I didn't worry about that as much and did better... however I didn't realize that we were 3 healing it, and on the... 3rd attempt I think we hit the enrage timer. Swapped/dropped some people, went down to just two healers and tried it again... only people didn't pay attention to the fact that they were in different groups now and they left one side with too few people, meteor slash ended up wiping out some people and we wiped.
We straightened that up for the last attempt I was there for... don't remember how far we got, I know it wasn't even to 33%, but that was it for me, I had dinner getting cold so I wished them luck and headed out.
I also healed a regular Lost City of Tol'vir before that where the group was trying to treat it like a Wrath dungeon. For the first few pulls, I was basically spending all of my mana every pull, and then the tank wasn't letting me heal the party or get mana back before the next one. Not only that, but he pulled the first boss while I was still trying to get the party healed and I was only at half mana. Somehow we survived but I got him to slow the fuck down after that. We started using a bit of CC and then I got them starting to mark targets... we did better then.
We wiped on the second to last boss due to not understanding mechanics... we got him the second time, though the tank kept pulling the party out of my healing rain (even though I said at the start that I'd be throwing it down to deal with AoE damage), because he thought it was bad. Ugh.
Last boss was utterly insane and ran me completely out of mana by the end. So much damage going around.
It's a bit stressful trying to heal these dungeons when no one's paying attention right now. I still haven't set foot in Halls of Origination or Grim Batol... thinking of just queuing as elemental for those so I can get my bearings in them.
Oh yeah, and my Shaman is *just* now able to start queuing for heroics, 331 average item level after I upgraded my bracers from the Tol'vir quest and hit Honored with Therazane and bought a new ring. I've got a couple 318s I need to replace but they drop in Origination and Grim Batol, so... guess I better get queuing.
Lockmaw kicked my pug group's ASS yesterday, I'm not sure what it was, but it just seemed like a TON of damage for everyone around. Wasn't even standing in whirlwind, either. We just got slowly whittled down.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
I didn't end up doing much CCing, and the mage was also much better at controlling the adds than I was. On the fourth boss the two of us were the only ones on the big adds, barely killed them in time. But we had no wipes, it all went well. Priest was healing it. I got some boots from a boss and some shoulders from one of the quests.
Now I just need to run Halls of Origination and I will have been through at least all the new instances once.
Oddly enough we didn't have *that* much trouble with Lockmaw when I was in LCoT... I needed DPS to kill the crocs because even when someone else had the arrow, they'd have healer aggro on me, which I didn't understand. So I spent what time I could running while trying to heal... still got it in one try though.
And shaman healing feels like the complete package to me. Earth shield for autopilot tank healing, healing stream (with glyph!) for autopilot group healing, riptiding all the time for tidal waves, shocking and unleashing weapon to empower my heals a little bit. Chain heal and healing rain for when shit gets serious.
Well I tried two random heroics last night, at 40 minute DPS queues... first was Grim Batol. We wiped at the first boss twice and the group bailed (sissies). Was rather discouraged at that but decided to wait again... got Lost City and the first boss was already down. We wiped on Lockmaw twice and everyone left but the boomkin, we requeued, got another group fairly quickly and proceeded to beat the rest of the instance with only one more wipe I believe.
For the heck of it I decided to try the healer queue... 10 seconds.
Then I ran a random regular with some 84 friends of mine (all it could choose was Stonecore and Vortex Pinnacle though), we got Stonecore which I healed without incident.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and try healing some heroics I guess, because 40 minute DPS queues are just insane. I just feel fairly underpowered at the moment and with groups doing stupid things, it makes it *really* tough to keep up.
I have been reforging mastery into haste and enchanting/gemming for int/spi when possible, haste when its not (mainly on the enchant side).
Heroics completed - Deadmines (god this was fun), BRC, Stonecore, Vortex pinnacle.
I am having a problem healing the other ones that I've tried
Lost City - got the gator boss down, its a pain but if people with marks run to the tanks and adds are burned its doable, you can mana up once the gator is down and the second phase is pretty easy.
The prophet (2nd to last boss) though on heroic, I haven't been able to heal though. In the spirit phase, everyone is just taking too much damage, chain heal does not do enough hps it seems and people are running away from adds so healing rain doesn't do much either. They are focusing on the small adds first as per wowhead. I can't tell if this is a gear issue or just a mechanic being missed.
SFK - first boss, i feel that if even one of his heals doesn't get interrupted, i can't heal through this to the end. Our best attempt was getting him to 5%, then the pugs ragelogged.
Throne of tides, mind control boss - same thing as sfk, if lava burst doesn't get interrupted, people move out of rocks in time, or LoS the mindflay, i can't keep us up.
I actually like healing normals, but heroics I can't tell if its an issue with my gear/play, or just people not doing what they are supposed to. It feels like I cannot fix many mistakes with healing when they happen.
Steam/PSN/XBL/Minecraft / LoL / - Benevicious | WoW - Duckwood - Rajhek
So...where do we get totems now, just dungeons? Mine blow.
Sorry do you mean relics?
The ones I've seen, have typically been from quest rewards; I think I've seen one drop in Stonecore from a boss, I'm not sure.
There are also boe relics that can be made from Inscription.
I finishes heroic deadmines, never wiped more than once on any given boss. The place is very fun... but jesus christ its long. I'm totally in favor of the harder difficulty and use of CC, I remember being great at it in vanilla wow with my hunter. However, the amount of time for some of these heroics and the rewards... it just doesnt even out.
I dont wanna go back to facerolling a dungeon in 15 mins. But some of these feel like a quick raid type commitment, which I only care to do anymore on the weekend.
SFK... yes the first boss took me four tries. But the first one was due to never trying it, then the next two were due to healers dissconnecting. I was elemental shaman, and wind shear was enough interrupt really, long as I didnt miss one of course, which really just required paying attention. The casted cure is the bitch, cause its 25% of his life... the channeled one you wanna let tick a few times after the attack that puts everyone at 1 HP, but it should be interupped always other than that.
We got to silvermane in SFK with that pug... tank kept trying to pick up the adds by moving and the aoe cone attack from the boss was to much when hitting the group.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And yeah, when I read about Lockmaw I believe the description talked about the arrow being like the panther boss in ZG and I thought that meant they attacked the arrowed target. Probably just meant that Augh goes after that person... ah well.
It's annoying how bad Earthquake is, though. On a similarly geared shadow priest, Mind Sear not only hits for more damage per tick, but costs HALF the mana.
Such a bad 31-point talent.
As Elemental, I find myself having pretty serious mana issues, but I imagine they'll go away once I'm in epics and rolling thunder restores more of my mana.
I really wish I could have some of the cool utility major glyphs, but Lightning Shield, Chain Lightning, and Thunder are all way too necessary. A longer thunderstorm cooldown and I'd blow my mana too fast, Chain Lightning on 5 targets builds lightning shield charges and makes chain lightning pay for itself, and GOD is the lightning shield glyph an amazing quality of life boost.
Are people speccing into Convection? Also, with the new/changed totems, are we using Searing and Tranquil Mind as base now?
I don't have convection, but honestly I could afford to as I have earthen grasp. Still, the mana I'd save just isn't enough to me to justify the talent points. I'm having mana issues, but 10% isn't going to fix them.
Is anyone else experiencing shitty Earthquake damage? I seem to recall one of my older posts re: earthquake.
You don't really use a base water totem, at least I don't. I change it based on what's in my group. For soloing, definitely tranquil mind, but with healer mana mattering, mana spring is really good, and glyphed healing stream is really good as well, if you have the mana regen buff. Searing is indeed your fire totem. Its short, sucky duration means you'll want it hotkeyed to refresh during boss fights. For weak enemy AoE, I tend to not drop a full set of totems and just drop a magma totem and use fire nova and chain lightning, rather than earthquake. Earthquake's mana cost is just too much right now. Maybe when i have like 120k mana it won't be an issue.
Nope nope nope.
There is a debuff that makes the crocs become suddenly infatuated with you.
Still, starting to think I'd be alright in Heroics again perhaps.
I thing something needs to be done with regards to the lack of +hit a resto shaman has (obviously this should apply to other healing classes' cc).
You're never going to have the required amount, and considering you now get punished quite severly if you don't interupt or CC correctly, I think it's a pain that it's a bit up in the air as to whether you can be relied upon.
A bit like how back in the day, you had improved sap only working 90% of the time (it always failed for me in "that" room before the beast in BWL).
Just have something deep in the resto / healing tree, that somehow gives you enough hit to deal with heroic mobs at least.
Or tack it on to Telluric Currents, that talent would also need the hit anyway.
On the other hand, I don't really see a downside to just making those three abilities always hit. Hit would still be important for the dps specs and it wouldn't change much for PvP (basically giving healers some extra stats that they now have to use for hit). Obviously this should then apply to all CC/interrupt in the game. I think they did the same for Taunt etc.
Do drop Lightning Shield, though. Like I said, I prefer Thunder, Hex and Ghost Wolf, but Thunder is the only one that's even remotely close to mandatory. Healing Stream is pretty boss because of the resistances, it seems like a must-have, at least for Resto.
PVP though... its pretty harsh, and my pvp ele spec is different than my pve ele spec. Casting all the survivability type totems is just a huge drain. Its not like you get free time to spam lightning bolts and fill your mana back up.
About 80k mana, and I can sustain pve DPS all day... but in pvp, the non-mana dps seems to have a major edge right now. Because they can use their CC and dps to its fullest... but if I wanna keep use stoneclaw alot along with tremor and grounding, I then run out so fast.
I dunno.. when I have mana, I do great. But pvp is still just all over the place. From what I can tell, warlocks are really good again, I use tremor totem, but they seems to have some pretty hardcore new fear stuff with the PVE CC thats needed now for everyone.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also tend to use chain lightning quite a bit on 4+ pulls, because it has a high chance of paying for itself, and it builds a lot of lightning shield charges.
For replacing my lightning shield glyph, I think I'd have to go with ghost wolf or healing stream. I mostly use mana spring in instances, for healer mana, but resistances would be really nice to have. Still, with how much I use ghost wolf to avoid things, more movement speed from it would be great.
I wish they hadn't introduced prime glyphs, because they're all boring. It's the major glyphs where you get interesting choices.
They should be baked into each spec, but that would be boring from a player perspective.
Resto has Earth Shield, Earthliving, Riptide as the 3 main healing glyphs and then Water Shield and Fire Elemental as the options. Sure, the first three are the best for most situations, but while gearing up or for specific fights, I might prefer Water Shield. And Fire ele might shine, too, in certain situations.
As glyphs are easy to change, I'm fine with a set of go-to glyphs and then some you can switch to if the need arises.
Other classes have it way worse, like bears literally having 3 prime glyphs that do anything for them.
I use the Lightning Shield glyph as elemental (along with thunder and chain lightning), just because I hate seeing charges get lost to incidental damage. To be honest I don't really see the point of the GW glyph. I just don't use it that often.
I should probably swap out CL for hex, since I doubt CL will be as useful in heroics.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Does it share the same slot as the Stoneclaw glyph though? The stoneclaw glyph I think absorbs something like 16k (I'm not sure on this figure), and it's something you can spam with more regularity than you can with EM.
I honestly don't see how the EM glyph can compare as it only stops 20% of incoming damage to you (if the stoneclaw is 16k, then you'd have to be taking 80k's worth of damage to match stoneclaw, and if that's the case, I think you're standing in the wrong place).
turning it into a defensive cooldown in addition to an already formidable offensive cooldown is very, very pvp-esque
not really pve
I was really feeling bad about my mana pool as healer in my first lost city pug. Going oom on trash is kinda embarrassing. Then I looked at the meters. All but one DD were averaging well under 5K dps, even on bosses, nobody was interrupting _anything_ (except for me as the healer), and the DPS DK took more damage than the tank from standing in crap. It's really nice to see that all group members really need to pull their weight for groups to go well, but damn is it tough sometimes.
Shaman CC and wind shear should have a huge accuracy bonus, at least as resto. In many groups, I'm CCing 2 mobs at a time along with interruprts and healing. I shouldn't have to worry about those skills missing (except for my LB missing when I want to get some mana back, I'm ok with this).
Also, need to level that guild, so guild groups are double better.
I don't like the elemental mastery glyph, though, because you really should be using it on cooldown, so you're not just losing cooldown reduction via Feedback.
That stoneclaw glyph, though, sounds like a pretty awesome idea, since the str/agi buff is given by SO MANY other classes, it's rare that I'm not using stoneskin, and stoneskin is really mediocre.
Well to get the stoneclaw shield from the glyph, all you have to do, is put down the totem; you don't have to keep it down to keep the shield on you, so you can immediately just switch back to stoneskin anyway.