I love long weekends. Seriously love them. They give me time to play WoW and also do other things I love (cook elaborate turkey-based feasts, work on NaNoWriMo, watch the toddler tease the kittens, check out the Playstation Move Gladiator Combat game [ow, stiff arms today!]). Mostly play WoW though.
This was definitely a healer-centric weekend for me. From least advanced healer to most:
My Gnome Priest, Elucidate, dinged 80 yesterday. That makes four pairs of 80s for Reversion and me. Three pairs of tank/heals, including one pair that’s tank/heals/heals/tank. Huzzah! We got them enough gear to get into regular TOC and the ICC 5 mans (did anyone else notice they raised the gear requirements on heroics and such?) by raiding the guild vault, buying a piece or two, and crafting a couple ilvl 200 pieces. Then we ran TOC and FOS/POS on regular a few times for some gear. Yeah, it’ll be obsolete but hey, a few pieces will make leveling to 85 easier. And my trinkets were really really bad.
The best bit was, I’d been queueing all day as dps/heals. Halfway through our third TOC I was thinking how easy it was to heal this time. Then I saw a Living Seed on myself. Then I noticed the druid wasn’t showing up on Recount. Ooops. I’d forgotten to check what my role was, and I was supposed to be dpsing! I switched to Shadow, apologized, and dotted the Black Knight to death. Ahem. Ooops.
So she’s disc/shadow. I’m not sure I’m good at disc yet, at least not beyond “bubblebubblebubbleSMITE” but I can keep the party alive most of the time. And PW:Barrier is cool. Too short, but cool. Even if people always run out of it. Sigh.
Divergent, my Holy Pally: this is backwards chronologically but I want to whine about druid heals at the end so, Saturday we did an alts run on ICC and I brought Divergent. I like paladin healing right now. Charging up Holy Power and using either Word of Glory or Light of Dawn feels amazing. With Beacon and my self-healing, I can keep myself and one tank alive with basically no effort. It’s very nice. We went 9/12 with a couple heroics but the group wasn’t our normal one, we had alts and some guildies who don’t really run with us and while it was fun I didn’t feel like we made as much progress as we usually do. Still, I like having the pally heals available.
Analogue the Druid. Oh, my. Friday night’s ICC we extended a lockout that had just Sindy and LK. Try as I might I could only get 9 guildies in (turkey casualties were high this weekend) so we ended up bringing in a friend of one raider as a third healer. So our heals setup was druid, paladin, disc priest. I thought we were in trouble when the other healer observed that the disc priest wasn’t gemmed and enchanted. Oh well; the two of us were well set up.
It took a couple tries to get Sindy down but it always seems to. I don’t know if that fight ever feels really clean. Well, I’m sure it does if you’re really good raiders but ours always feel chaotic.
Then we went up to Arthas. Reversion explained the fight, we got into position, I prepared for the usual slowly progressing wipes. I was confident in our ability to get him down though. I mean, we had most of our normal raid, the dps looked fine, the heals were fine…
It was a nightmare.
Infests were killing us. I’m not going to assign blame there: all three of us could have done better. The disc priest could have pre-bubbled us, but he wasn’t running any raid frame addons (sigh. And insisted he didn’t need to. Sigh.) Multi could have timed his Light of Dawns to have three holy power and go off at just the right second. I could have timed Wild Growth and Swiftmend perfectly. As it was, we were wasting cycles healing Infest victims back up (and, as the disc priest couldn’t freakin’ see the debuffs, since he WASN’T USING RAID FRAMES, he wasn’t helping at all there. Can you see I’m ticked about this one?)
Then we started getting into the transition and I realize that I popped Innervate already and I’m at 17% mana. In transition 1. What the heck? Well, it’s a wipe anyway. I’ll pay more attention.
Next attempt I watch and notice that I can see my mana pool go down every time I cast anything. This should not be. I have a mana pool that makes paladins cry. I end the LK fight with 70% mana. I haven’t worried about mana in a year. What is wrong?
I’d noticed a mana problem on Sindy, and asked the arcane mage to switch to frost so we’d have replenishment. Had she switched back? Nope, there’s replenishment right there. I ask Multi and he’s hurting too.
Wipe after wipe, we’re struggling to handle infests and running out of mana. We’re not even getting into phase 2. I’m starting to tear out my hair: I can heal the infests back up, but if I do, I won’t have any mana for later in the fight. As we’re buffing up from a wipe, we discuss strategies. Multi pulls out some flasks of pure mojo. I take one, and then look at my stats.
Oh. There’s the problem. I’m regenerating 600 mana per 5 in combat. Rejuv costs 900 mana. If I can cost 3 rejuv in 5 seconds, that means I’m using three times as much mana as I’m regenerating. Innervate is basically worthless, I get one potion – and they freaking nerfed replenishment; it returns half the mana it used to. Wow. No wonder.
Ok. I understand this is the Cataclysm healing philosophy. And I know the 4.0.3a changes to druids hurt and they may have to change us back. But I realized as I stood there, staring at my stats, that we had probably seen our last LK kill until we were 80. The math just doesn’t work any more.
My mana pool, all buffed up, – I forget what the numbers were this week; I think they were lower than usual. Let’s say 40k. That’s 45 casts of Rejuv. With replenishment and Revitalize, let’s pretend I’m regenning 700 MP. That means if I do my usual Rejuv spam, I’ll be OOM in…. let’s see. Math. If I cast 3 Rejuv in 5 seconds, not counting mana gains I would go OOM in 75 seconds. However in that time I’ve regenned 10,500 mana. That’s another 12 Rejuvs. So there’s another 20 seconds. Say I popped innervate and a mana pot in there, and be generous and say that buys me another 45 seconds.
Total: 140 seconds. 2 minutes 20 seconds. Or, Transition 1 of LK.
(Math not intended to be theorycrafting, just envelope calculations like I did in my head standing there on the platform)
So don’t rejuv spam. But how am I supposed to get everyone over 90% health every time Infest ticks?
That is what makes me angry. Not what I might or might not be able to do at 85. That’s weeks away. I care about today, about those last chances to down the Lich King,the Kingslayer title for some of my friends, the fun I can salvage at the end of an expansion. I have faith that if the numbers are really bad, Blizzard will fix them not long into Cataclysm. But right now, I feel like they cut my legs out from under me. They gave me the new healing model while I’m still trying to play encounters designed for the old model, and it just doesn’t work any more. Spout your lines about wanting us to use all the tools in our toolbox, Blizzard, but sometimes that nail really is a nail, and darn it, I want my hammer.
Anyway. I’m not really angry. I obviously had a lot of fun this weekend. I just wish I thought this next Friday, which hopefully will be our last ten man night before Cataclysm, will go better than my last attempt to raid on my druid. I think we’ll just work on the Lich King and see if we can kill him one last time. I’ll adapt my strategies, we’ll work even more closely as a team and we’ll see what happens.
Even without some raid frames (Elgar just uses default) he should have had at least DBM and decursive or something. I wouldn’t attempt LK without being able to one-click off disease.
We had multi doing that. We brought the guy because there was just no one else who could come. He wasn’t the reason we failed, but still. I don’t care what you use – default frames are fine – but you need to be able to see things like Infest. He did have DBM, at least, and it only took two tries for him to learn the ice blocks on sindy so…
I’m not exactly sure on the Infest mechanic since I’ve never healed it. Is it a raid wide thing or is it targeted on people? Preventative bubbles were suggested by the video I watched.
Everyone in the raid, every X (30?) seconds, gets it. It’s a dot and it goes away when the person is healed above 90% of his max health. Preventative bubbles work great, as I explained to the priest. He said “ok” but I’m not sure he did it. It ticks harder the longer it’s there so basically you need to instantly heal it off or you start losing people. It’s why raid frames with debuff icons or whatever are essential; you need to KNOW who still needs to be healed. It happens in all of phase 1 and 2.
A 2 minute phase 1? Does your raid DPS the shamblers? My group always ignores them and DPSes the LK to the transition ASAP without blowing CDs, leaving time for only 1 or 2 shamblers. The disease takes them out easily, and if for some reason we’re unlucky and the disease expires before the last one is dead, we just prioritize him for DPS in the transition. Shortening phase 1 could help to conserve your mana.
We last did LK about 3 weeks ago in 4.0.1 (have been working on hardmodes for Frostwyrms! so close, and yet so far!) with a disc priest, holy priest and druid. I’m talking to one of our priests (both of our priests are holy/disc; this one was holy on our last kill, but has done the fight in both specs) right now and he says he didn’t notice any mana problems until near the end of phase 2, and that it was almost certainly your disc priest’s fail, not the new mana restore mechanics, that made it difficult for you. Given how overpowered bubbling is on Infest, I can definitely see how the difference between an idiotic disco and a good disco could be the difference between mana and lack thereof.
In the future if you’re running with a fail disc you could ask the raid to stack up on the King whenever you’re not actively spreading out for defile, and spam a couple AoE heals in short succession, laying down a ground heal too. I think that might work? Don’t ask me, I’ve not healed past Dreamwalker. Healing is scary. >>
We were having a lot of trouble. We were dpsing the horrors sometimes – I wasn’t watching those details, too busy not dying. Thanks for the tips. I don’t want to blame someone who came in as a favor to a friend but…. un-enchanted gear and no raid frames, never seen the fight… yeah, I’m sure that didn’t help. Hopefully we’ll have a reliable healer next week.
Also, thank your priest-y friends; hearing that they have learned to handle their mana woes gives me a great deal of hope as I understand they went through what I’m dealing with several weeks ago.
I wouldn’t say I’ve handled them YET. It’s more that I enjoy the pain, and I enjoy making workarounds.
A night with a calculator, some spirit/int gems and rum. My mana pool isn’t perfect. While holy certainly is more of a draining battery full of dead cells (with Disc not too far behind now), I’ve given up on crit. I gave up on raw power. Essentially, I’ve given up on ego of the light.
My calculations go towards mana regen, a bit into the mana pool’s depth, and then to haste. With these results, if I go out of mana I can reasonably tell the tanks to USE THE BOOST TO GET THROUGH in any cases of mana depletion. A few heals and regen cooldowns will surely be returned.
I also stretch out my procs in light of today’s mana issues. As soon as around 20% (not exactly, just “a good chunk” of my mana is used, Shadowfiend is out in the fields picking my mana cotton. Procs from http://www.wowhead.com/item=50358/purified-lunar-dust allow me to go Maverick while Shadowpuppy is nomming away.
As soon as “another good chunk” is gone, I light off Arcane torrent (as I am a Belf) and my http://www.wowhead.com/item=50339/sliver-of-pure-ice
By the time I need mana again in a reasonable fight, my cooldowns will have returned. If no, Hymn of Hope. If I blow all of these, we need to wipe and start over with less people raiding while on Farmville.
Oh also I forgot, since the patch my rdruid friend swears by the Ephemeral Snowflake. http://dontdropform.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/the-mighty-snowflake/ . If you’re having mana issues, might be worth checking out?
Thanks, I was meaning to try swapping trinkets around on some of my tries – I keep about 8 different ones in my bags for that but I always forget. I’ll check out that link.
Old post about the snowflake (from Holy Pally PoV):
http://www.zabery.com/blog/2010/02/28/a-holy-paladin-and-his-ephemeral-snowflake/
Definitely more useful on some fights than others.
We’ve downed the LK how many times now? Let’s see, it’s been four times for me. I know we had a disc priest once but … we haven’t had one for any of the other 3 kills. This one might not have been good, but I sincerely don’t think that the mana issues could be blamed on him.
The druid in our Uldy run last night was having all kinds of mana problems as well. And that was just Uldy … we did a couple of minor achievements but that’s it, no real hard modes.
On the flip side, I noticed absolutely no problems on my paladin, other than the fact that holy shock now heals like I’m a ret pally. Fortunately for Blizz, the new Light of Dawn is full of so much awesomesauce that I don’t care. :p
Yeah, but we have had three good healers each of the three times I’ve downed him. If we had one weak healer, and two healers who had mana issues… yeah.
I’m gonna reforge for spirit, drink mojo, and generally be in a regen mode come Friday.
Situations like this make me wish that there was some kind of…Live Server character copy, or a cheap character rental. An ungemmed, unenchanted healer shouldn’t have the audacity to deny needing raid frames.
The person needs more than that. I’d suggest a whallop in the babymaker. Know that my Priest years to fly to your world and help if I could.
Button’s restodruid friend here. Yeah, if I’m ever worried about regen in a fight, the Ephemeral Snowflake is my best friend; according to my calculations, at 30% haste it’s worth about 70 mp5 from Lifebloom, 22 mp5 for every Rejuv you have ticking, and 50 mp5 if you keep Wild Growth on cooldown. It’s flat-out OP for druid healers.
Anyway, I never had any mana problems on the one LK fight I’ve healed since 4.0.1, and chalk me up with the people who blame in on the disc priest – more than the Snowflake, I suspect that a lot of the reason I did fine on mana was because I have good healer friends who handled Infest nearly all the time. How did you deal with it? With Rejuvenation? Nourish? Regrowth?
I agree that Rejuvenation is expensive now if you want to keep it rolling on everyone. On many fights now I actually feel I do better healing reactively with it – heresy I know, but with haste and Gift of the Earthmother it’s much, much better at it than it used to be, and it’s significantly more efficient when used that way.
I used WG, Swiftmend on the melee to proc Efflorescence, and Rejuv on anyone who didn’t get fixed from that. We usually seemed to have 3-4 people who needed Rejuvs each Infest, so even playing reactively I was using a lot of Rejuv spamming.
Those numbers sound awesome. I’ll definitely have to switch it.
Mana hurts on resto druid at the moment, unfortunately blizzard doesn’t care because it doesn’t effect ‘end game’ lvl 85 play (oh hai there — moonglow — second tier balance talent that can reduce our heal cost by 9%).
Previous to the lastest rejuv nerf I was handing over all my innervates to our holy priest on 25m heroic modes. This week? I was using them on myself, plus mana pots I haven’t touched in months…. on normal 25m modes (last hurrah for folks missing achievements). Half way through the night I even bagged my 277 trinkets and reverted to double solaces.
On a beta t-11 pre-made, most heroic fights (and a couple normal modes) had me ooming — granted it was LFD pugs — but this latest change has me a bit worried about how it will play out at 85.
Any one else notice the mouse over tooltip for spirit based regen not matching the displayed regen? Mine is off by like 500 while casting, and more while not casting.
~Kara
Can you give me more details on that regen tooltip bug? I’m not entirely sure I understand what you are saying but now I’m suspicious. Thanks for letting me know I’m not the only druid struggling to get on – seriously this is a blow to my ego, I thought of myself as a really good healer and now I can’t even manage my mana pool.
If I mouse over spirit on the stat list on the character tab it states spirit increases my regen ~1200. Standing in Dal twidlling my thumbs my actual regen is ~800. How can something be increased by ~1200, yet be less than that number?
Is the spirit increasing your in-combat or OOC regen by 1200?
Blizzard math can be really funny sometimes… especially percentages, but regen things can be worded badly too.
Meant to comment on the LK fight itself but got distracted (evil w word). Prevention is priceless on infests.
An undergeared disc priest was likely not helping your case… but not necessarily for the reasons you think (and certainly not the ones he or she was). An on-par (245ish or higher) geared disc priest’s bubbles won’t break a sweat … nor will they ‘pop’ due to infest.. meaning the disc priest doesn’t gain rapture through full absorbs on his or her shields… which over the length of the fight will oom the priest if they try and bubble everyone all the time. Previously, they could down rank PW:S to adjust there spell power / shield absorb level… now all they can do is remove gear / buffs. Because intel is both mana pool and spell power it becomes a very fine line to walk if they choose to play that balancing game. Dropping the inner fire buff is still viable if they are not spec’d into the reduced spell damage. Alternatively, they can prioritize ranged players (dps and heals) so that they are only bubbling 5 of 10 players — shields still don’t break but their mana should hold out.
A skilled and adequately geared disc priest (232-251 ilvl gear) should be able to handle the infest damage on the raid without too much assistance. The number of folks the priest can bubble is effected by his or her haste as well (although should be less of an issue on 10m), but primarily influenced by his or her mana management given the lack of rapture. Shields on tanks should be avoided unless the tank is idle to conserve mana. Prayer of mending can and should be used on a melee target just prior to infest hitting (causing it to bounce it’s healy goodness around as infest does it’s thing). Prayer of healing can be timed to hit the melee exactly as, or immediately after, infest hits. Holy Nova can also be used to proc mini DA shields on ranged to further reduce the infest damage.
From a resto druid perspective try placing a ‘pre-rejuv’ on a melee (preferably not the PoM target). When infest hits — swiftmend to start green puddle of healing, followed by a WG… these ‘hots’ should stabilize the melee long enough for you to cast direct heals on anyone that is not at 90%+ health. Trying to heal infest on multiple targets by spamming rejuv is like trying to put out a fire with spray bottle — not very effective. In 25s, rejuv is more viable as you can play the triage role and get the hots out until the other healers can catch up.
Other things that could be making infests more difficult:
– Melee (or ranged) getting aggro on ghouls, these eat disc bubbles like candy and hinder getting infest healed up. Your OT should be gathering ghouls as much as possible between shambler spawns (they need at ~5 + 2-3 disease drop offs to kill the shamblers without external dps).
– P2 the valks drain life (after they drop their victim) from players, this also eats bubbles like candy. Again OT should be taunting the valks to the tanks to keep random damage off the raid.
– The valks found your disc priest tasty… save defensive / raid cooldowns for this (and the infest that follows). A good time for Tranq, bubble wall, aura mastery shadow, Divine Hymn etc.
– Missing Shadow Protection / resist aura/totem.
– and of course the good old standing in defile / pulling aggro etc.
Big wigs and DVE both have ‘audible’ count down alerts that can be configured for any of the big raid wiper abilities. As disc I had this enabled for infests, as dps/non disc heals I had this enabled for defiles, and as tank I had it enabled for soul reaper.