talkin to myself (my level 1 self!)

Hi Level 1-Enlynn!

Your name isn't Enlynn yet. It won't be for a long time, but don't be afraid. You've done MMO's before, you know what you're getting into in terms of time invested, commitment, and what-have-you. Don't worry that you aren't really a shaman; you're not. You'll come into your bad healadin self after about 200 levels of other things. And that's alright.

Just about everyone out there says "Don't level as holy/disc/resto!" and they ARE SO RIGHT. But you're going to do it anyways, because you are too stubborn.

But really. If you're not having fun doing something, then don't do it. It's a game, for cryin' out loud, and you don't have to do do every single thing out there just because it's out there. That goes for every abandoned character on all those random servers. You had fun, it wasn't a waste of time.

And for the love of Elune, stop killing shit you don't need for a quest. No such thing as posterity's sake in a video game. l2train!

If you ever gripe that gold is hard to come by, I swear I'll come back in a gnomish time machine and slap you silly.

You'll think you're awesome when you're level 45. And you will be SO WRONG. It's okay, I'll be here when you figure it out. Someday you'll be in a real raiding guild and have a neat mount and all that stuff. No hurry, my dear. No hurry.

(Inspired by Rants of a Priest, Muradinn's Musings, and Dwarven Battle Medic. Join in, this is fun!)

week 2 of 4.0

Well, we survived the first week of patch 4.0.1, congratulations!

Last week I didn't get much raiding done because Tuesday was canceled, Wednesday we called early (too many people DCing every time they zoned), so we maybe got 3 good hours of raiding. Holy Paladin is... interesting. I jumped into it knowing I had a lot to learn, trying my darnedest to ramp up holy power and get as many Word of Glorys as humanly (spacegoatly?) possible.

It's hard, though, because even busting my ass I feel like I'm just not as useful as those priests and druids. Granted, druids didn't get drastic changes, but I giggle every time I proc replenishment. Hots are neat! Yesterday, I went into a 25 man run with my priest and I HAD SUCH A BLAST WITH CHAKRA. You mean they have a spell that changes depending on what chakra state you go into?! HOLY WORD CHASTISE IS AMAZING OMFG.

Muradin muses about holy paladins in 4.0 in her post "4.0 Healing is a Joke and Paladins are the Punchline." She pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about paladins right now.

Ghostcrawler talks about the present and future of holy paladins here. The long and short of it is, paladins are balanced at 85, not 80, and the spell we get in a couple of levels will make it all better (oh and the MS on Divine Plea is staying. Dfrnt classes r dfrnt!). I don't agree. I have a hard time swallowing that one spell will make the difference. Not when priests and druids have an entire arsenal of cool things. I'm not wishing for nerfs on either of them (I still play them after all), but you could take away one single spell from either of them and it wouldn't change the playstyle too much. Sure, it would suck to not have Prayer of Mending, but I don't think it would "break" priests. Right now, I feel like pallies are broken. The addition of one spell can not--and should not--fix that.

I don't mean for this to be QQ. I can envision the future, where mana is constrained. My paladin does have a lot more mana efficiency than my priest- I ran dangerously close to OOM yesterday on my priest several times, but on my pally I was able to heal heroic Saurfang using all Flash of Light and still couldn't put a dent on my mana pool. I'm not saying mana won't be a consideration for holy paladins, but having two cheap heals and a second resource could end up being more powerful than it is now. Currently, WoG is nice but not necessary. If it becomes necessary (and I think it will), that does change things.

But I just can't compare the fun I had playing my priest to the awkwardness I felt on my paladin. AND SERIOUSLY WHY IN THE HELL DOES DIVINE PLEA STILL HALVE MY HEALING?!?!?!?!

Sorry, I'm done now.

In the next few weeks, I may not be posting very often. Every year I do an excessive amount of cookie baking, and there's about 8 weeks left until Christmas, which means I'm already behind compared to last year. Yeeps. With Cata coming out in about 6 weeks, I'll need to have most of my baking done to start leveling. So, I'll be playing less, and at this point in the expansion I can't think of too many (pressing) blog topics anyways. Things may be quiet around here, but I'll be back to talk about my experiences in Cataclysm. And of course, I'll be passing along links from my favorite paladin bloggers!

Logs! Shamanigans!

I found a neat website earlier today I wanted to share with you:

www.wowraidaudit.com

If you upload your WoL parses, it will, by fight, show you how many cooldowns a player could have used, and it will also show you handy uptime. There are a couple of things that are wonky, especially for healing. I've really been looking for a handy DPS analysis tool - I'm fairly comfortable using WoL to analyze healing, but for DPS I just don't even know what I'm looking at.

Here's my audit for our Putricide kill last week, with a few discrepancies and thoughts below:

Buffs/Debuffs has been the most valuable, however, it does take some encounter knowledge to understand whether all those 0's meant I failed or whether the cooldown just didn't apply. For instance, and if I am mistaken (please, for the love of Elune, let me know so I can improve) leave me a comment, Aura Mastery doesn't help much because the damage type is nature. Ok, so I didn't use Divine Favor at all. Thats kinda lame. However, I did maintain 99% uptime on JotP (I do love to judge), but I didn't use either of my self-only bubbles.

It also doesn't list sacred shield for me, however, according to the actual WoL parse this is built from, I had 47% uptime on Sacred Shield (turns out another paladin was overwriting mine, which while annoying, at least the tank was fully shielded).

I don't understand how it's suggesting I only should have used DP twice, when on a seven minute fight I could have used it seven times. Five uses isn't bad, considering two of those were at phase changes whether I needed it or not.

The Malleable Goo thing is interesting, considering I know that I myself never actually got hit by it, and that was splash damage (other players took 45-66k damage in Malleable Goo, but I digress!).

I found this far more handy for DPS, for a couple of reasons. A players active DPS time usually reflects their standing on the charts. Players with consistently above 90% are the same ones in the top five. Meanwhile, I saw DPS with active times as low as 60%. I won't link any examples because I don't feel comfortable publicly shaming anyone but myself, but if you want to see it for yourself, upload your guilds parses and see how it works for you.

Also, while I'm talking about logs, Ophelie did an awesome write-up about how to make WoL show you uptime for healing buffs. I had a couple of healers looking for distinct feedback for improvement and I couldn't think of anything to say until I saw this. You can plot uptime for buffs you ideally want up 100%, but it can also show you when in the fight a player is managing cooldowns. Handy indeed!

Shamanigans

It's no secret that I've wanted all four healers. Oddly enough, shaman was my first healing character I created, but I fizzled out leveling her when I researched a bit more and realized that priest was more my style (so then I made a paladin. Go figure!). I still had a level 49 shaman on a server I don't play on anymore, but I made another shaman, horde side, on Malfurion. It's been a blast, and I plan on leveling has as resto. I'm not in a hurry, and ideally thats why I want her eventually at max level, to understand the resto raiding shaman.

It's been a lot of fun to be back in Mulgore (I started playing horde, then switched to Ally upon insistence of a friend, who of course is long gone from the game now), although it hasn't been without its foibles. I went into a WSG with Mayhem's rogue and had some major disorientation. I also thought we were winning because the alliance had two flags. Oops!

Edit: I found this website on skeletonjack.com about DPS and WoL and while it's not technical, it's a good read. Enjoy!

Mistakes I Will Not Be Making in Cataclysm

#1. Too many dungeons. (Or, I declared a main three times this expansion which is also a terrible idea). Over WotLK, gathered most of my emblems through heroics. Each tier, I jumped back into five mans to farm those daily new emblems and dozens of old emblems I didn't need any more on my main, while my alts jumped into those heroics to farm the old emblems to get themselves caught up. For too much of the expansion, I was doing the same daily three different times. Never again.

At the start of the expansion, Mayhem and I did a lot of heroics. A lot. We put together groups to get specific drops. We had best-in-slot gear from heroics. I think the one mistake we made in all of this was that we spent way too much time "preparing to raid", without realizing that the best thing we could have done was just jumped into Naxx10 when we had badge and crafted.

69 Cyanigosas? That's too many dungeons!

That's not to say that doing heroics of some form won't be necessary or helpful; however, I will not be grinding like I did. I ended up each tier with unneeded badges on my main, because I pushed too hard at the beginning to get all that badge and crafted gear ASAP (and then I pass on raiding drops. I may have the highest PR in the guild, but nothing to spend it on). I will be more patient with gear in Cataclysm.

A part of this mistake is how much time I spent gearing up my alts to raid and then not raiding with them. My druid is all but retired now, after grinding her gear up to raidability she went into ICC10 and 25 a mere handful of times, totally disproportionate to the time I spent getting her ready for it. That is my fault, I won't make the mistake again.

That's not to say I won't be keeping up three characters in Cataclysm (I still ponder working on my shaman so I have all the healers, and I have a young mage I'm obsessed with). But I didn't play my mains in Wrath as well as I could have, and I'll spend more time playing and less time grinding to play. Since LFD has become a major part of the five-man experience, what heroics we do will be spent doing the instance instead of waiting around in town looking in trade for more dps. And when I'm done with a heroic, I'll be done. Find someone else to heal; 69 Violet Holds is too many.