Learning in Kara =O

First off, I just want to say, this post is dedicated to Rhoe! Thanks Rhoe, for all the hard work you’ve done! You’ll be proudly placed on my blog roll minutes after I’m done with this post.

ANYWAYS, I’m going to write a little bit about maximizing healing as a holy paladin in Kara with gear that destroys the place and a druid who manages to keep almost everyone in the raid topped 90% of the time.

So I was in Kara last night. First time with the new guild, and it was a very….enlightening….run. The group got up to Opera (fell short of their normal stopping point at Curator due to new people and starting late). A good deal of the raid was new to raiding or had never raided with the guild before. At least, that’s what I gathered during the run.

While I definitely won’t argue guild policies (especially being a new member and that being my first run) I will point out that the group had more potential than we used. Yes, we had 2 wipes. One of them was due to someone not knowing that Maiden has a very large aggro range and we were positioning for her. The other, a missed kick on Julianne (or whatever her name is o_o). These weren’t really skill issues though. The healers were all amazing (I’ll try to get the screen cap of the healing meters I took, I wish I had run recount, but I decided not to because it was my first run with the guild and I didn’t to be focused on something so trivial).

But all in all it was a good run, and I learned something I hadn’t ever really noticed before. See, I was a good deal, the best geared healer. Does that make me the best? Not by a long shot. I’ve out-healed plenty of people with better gear, but that has more to do with timing than with judgment. But EVERY other run I’ve been on to Kara I’ve been the low man on the totem pole of healing gear (except that time when we got replacements…but I refuse to call that a run :)). So I’ve always had to be fast on my heals, or else I’d be useless. I do mean useless, because I can barely recall any fight short of that PUG I went on that my heals were really *needed* and so I was more of a safety than anything else.

And I was maybe just a safety in this run too, but I was actually given a tank to heal, and I recall a few times where it was good I could toss a FoL over to the main tank, because he might not have needed it, but I’m sure both he and his healer wanted it. On that note, my FoLs matter because we had light on the tanks, and a tree in their group. My FoL crits were HUGE.

So my job was to heal the off tank and secondly to be a spot healer for the raid. Cool enough, I normally end up as a spot healer anyways. But man oh man is it different to know that you’re the back up to the druid and the main healer for the tank, instead of back up for the main healers and more in charge of dealing with the raid.

Judgment is much more important than timing now. As a spot healer, you have to just pick and spam. It’s not that hard, and it more requires cognizance of AoE damage, who is most likely to be hit, and who is already lacking a bit of health. Not difficult.

Tank healing has a different spin on it. You KNOW your tank is going to be damaged. You also know that the druid in the group is likely going to have a HoT on him, and he’s not going to be taking as much of a beating from the mobs as someone who wasn’t a tank would. So now judgment comes into play. You can focus solely on your tank, and only try to toss out a heal if someone looks like they are in an emergency. With a low mana pool, this might make more sense. But it makes for a bad healer.

Ok, ok, it’s probably not a case that the healer is BAD. However, you’re not contributing as much as you could. And that’s what limits potentially great raids. So what do you do? You use judgment.

Every single healer should have some form of UI interface that shows them everybody’s health bars. I use XPerl. I’m sure there are others. I think Blizzards basic interface even has a clunky version. JUST MAKE SURE YOU CAN SEE EVERYONE’S HEALTH.

Next, make sure you know the power of your heals. This is more important to what I like to call the comfort zone. I don’t like anyone falling below 80%. Anyone. And that is my comfort zone. If everyone has greater than 80%, I’m fine and dandy and skippy. When people start to fall below, I start to get more serious. I then start to pick my heals very carefully, because if they’re consistently falling that much, then I know I need to be watching more health bars more carefully. Maybe I should be starting to toss heals out more judiciously.

Let me give you an example. Maiden last night had 3 melee (2 rogues and a warrior tank), 4 healers (the main tank was a paladin and he stepped back to help heal), and 3 ranged DPS (2 warlocks and a hunter). I was assigned at the beginning of the raid to the warrior tanking Maiden. With 2 more free healers though (main tank to healer meant that his healer would be freed up) I was certain that I could more carefully watch my tanks bars and not be so worried with everyone else.

Not so. Not at all. I don’t really know what happened, but I think the main tank was taking a lot more damage than I thought he would, and the 2 “free” healers were mainly focused on him. That or everyone in the raid was taking a lot more, so the additional heals were needed to keep everyone up. Again, I’m not sure, but EVERYONE was taking some major heat from her. And only one person died (It was a warlock, and I think he got holy fired twice in a row, and we didn’t heal him fast enough between them). But I had to carefully watch much more than just the tanks. “My” melee to BoS was a rogue, and he was my second priority after the tank. Then I had to prioritize the rest. This is what I came up with.

Tank => “My” Rogue => Myself => Holy Paladin 2 => Tree => Prot Paladin => Rogue 2 => Warlock 1 + Warlock 2

Notice there is only 9 people on that list, the hunter was left out because of her position adjacent to me, and therefore, LoS’d due to a pillar.

And so I watched everyone’s health, and judged according to that list and their health to see who gets my current FoL.

I really liked how it worked out. I think I noticed a slight improvement on my mana efficiency (and considering that the tanks were getting for more, this was impressive) and I noticed lots of less overhealing, because I was letting the druid pick up those who needed a heal less.

So, great run, learned some stuff, got some badges (I think I’ll pick up the badge shield next, unless I get the Kara shield this run through, because quite frankly, I need that shield way more than I need any of the other very tempting pieces :)).

Here’s to Friday being just as great a run!

Kara o_o

I'm back in Kara for the night. Interesting group (and a PUG). More detailed report after we're done, we have a "pee/beer" break, so I figured post this up to force myself into writing something more detailed

Edit:
So. Kara. Yea.

Did I ever mention that Kara is beautiful? It is beautiful. If I could get by and see all the mobs without them attacking me, I would live in Kara.

The place is gorgeous.

The group for the first half (up to Curator) was over powered. Seriously, the worst geared members were the tanks, and a 1 hunter >.>, and they had a scattering of token epics, a bit of Kara epics, and some blues. They weren’t bad off, but due to them being paladins, Nightbane seemed more risky then continuing up the tower and hitting on Prince.

If you want to know why, don’t ask me, I have no idea. :D I’ve only ever done Nightbane once, and Prince never.

Clearing to Attumen worried me. I didn’t need to heal anyone besides the t5 1200 spell damage shadow priest who was (like any good shadow priest) casting power word: death with any frequency. Attumen, even without the group bunching up on his butt, went down without me breaking a sweat. I didn’t pop consumables until right before Moroes, because I didn’t want to risk Mr. “Make everyone bleed and die if they aren’t healed enough because the only Paladin with the wits to bubble someone besides themselves can only do it once every 3 minutes”. And it turns out its good I did.

See, there is a reason why I said I was the only one with the wits to bubble anyone besides myself. BOTH tanks said “lol it’s good off tank tanks adds we kill them main tank tanks Moroes no worries no worries”. Now, it didn’t occur to me which fight we were on. I’d only ever done Moroes twice before (in fact, the only bosses in Kara I’ve done twice before this run are Attumen, Moroes, Maiden). But when he gouged the tank the first time, I saw what was happening, and remembered why no one ever tanks the adds on Moroes. For those of you who don’t know, Moroes does a gouge which incapacitates the tank, and then he goes and picks the person next highest on his aggro list. Of course, the group heals priest was 2nd, followed by all the DPS except the hunter, then the 2nd priest, who was really only focusing on the main tank, and then me, who was whistling away the time while spamming FoL on anyone below 80%. And oh did my finger get its exercise.

But, with 2 DPS left, the main tank, the off tank, and the main tank’s personal priest, they managed to down him. I was the last person to die, and that was due to the excessive amount of holy light crits I was pumping into the tank after he fell so low from…well…I’m not really sure, I just know he got to below 40% and didn’t want to come back up that well. I mean, when I have to cast 3 6k heals on you to get you to the comfort zone of 80% and up, I get disturbed.

So we rezzed up, and we moved on, and the healing all got called incredibly op due to saving the group from ridiculous amounts of damage from pulling 2-3 of those non-elite mob packs in the area around Moroes, and we got to Maiden, and took her down.

Now, if you’re following, we had 2 paladins as tanks. And Maiden silences. So you’re thinking “wow, that must have been a tough fight!”

Easiest. Fight. Ever.

I don’t even know why, but she went down REALLY fast with NO problems. I don’t even think the DPS had to let up on their damage that much.

So we went on to the Opera, and it’s the Crone. Now, I’ve never done ANY of the opera events (even though I wish I could. I want the trinket and the book :D.) and I had no clue what to expect.

Let me sum it up in one word; Chaos.

We didn’t have a mage to rust the tin man, and for whatever reason, I don’t think we tried to have the hunter rust him with frost traps. Does that even work? I really have no clue; I just heard that frost spells rust him. We had the chain fears at least, and searing pain on the scarecrow. Dorothy dropped fast both times, and while on the first try we did have 3 deaths, it didn’t seem all that bad. And yes, we did have 2 tries. He reset in the middle of the first attempt. Why? Don’t ask me, I have NO idea. I just stood at the edge of the mage and spammed heals again XP.

Then we wanted to go out and come back in through the back door for Curator. The main tank and DPS warrior didn’t hear this. I followed them, not really knowing where to go. Well, it ended up that the rest of the group had left the instance (duh, they wanted to reenter from the top) and the main tank wasn’t paying attention. Silly me had no clue where to go.

Then the main tank aggroed three mobs. Two elites and one non-elite I think. All I know is that they died. And that I healed and healed and healed and healed and healed. We then got the point; this was not where we needed to be. Went back down through the stage and BAM I got too close to the side, here comes a mob. Tank picks him up; the mob is doing massive damage, only got the DPS warrior DPSing, and only me on heals, but we can’t just let ourselves die. POW WAM BLAMO (I holy shocked at the end XP) the mob was dead. And I had next to no mana. So while I was manaing up (because if that happened again, we needed me to have mana) the tank kneeled before me and called me a god of a healer. Yes, yes, /flex-my-epeen.

At that point everyone was tired of waiting for us. Summoned us up, we were on our way again. Few minutes later, the Curator looms ahead of us. I’ve never done this fight, and about 2-3 others had either. That’s almost half the raid, and no one bothered to explain it. Let me just say, the healers broke the healing meters on that fight. We kept everyone up for about 5 minutes, and this was with chain lightning hitting rampantly, you know, cause people don’t have DBM and don’t realize they are too close to other people. Finally, one priest died, and the other one OOMed (I think, he sort of stopped healing at least o_o), and I was only able to sustain about another 30 seconds or so of keeping everyone else up.

Oh well, we got the point, stay away from each other, and beat on Curator when he’s evocating. And just a few minutes after everyone was back, Curator dropped me some fancy badges.

The whole night was a warlock night by the way. They seemed to be winning everything, and when their glove token dropped, no one was surprised one of the warlocks won it. But he needed it, so gratz were quickly spread.

At that point, the tank had to leave. Now, no one else was in DIRE need to leave, but the tank was leaving, and they didn’t want to wait around.

Within 2 minutes the raid was 4 out of 10. Well, those of us still there wanted to do more. So we did. Took us another half an hour to find more people, got 2 mages this time, a tree, a resto shaman, only one tank (I was told that’s all you need after Curator) and an enhancement shaman. Now, I was getting a bit tired, and figured, they’re PUGing it, they probably have gear as good as mine :D.

Oh. My. Goshles.

The tank was better geared than his predecessors. He was also a paladin. But he was a bit snarky, and I’d have rather have the two who left over him any day. But no matter, nothing I could do about that. We pushed on. Got up to shade with little hassle. As I said earlier, the healing meter was broken, so I didn’t bother to check up on the other two new healers, although I did find I was using a lot more mana (10%-15% for trash fights up to 20%-30%). I, however, chocked that up to more difficult fights, or at least more damaging fights. It didn’t occur to me I was the only one putting out sufficient amounts of healing power.

We get to Shade, not too many problems; we’re all buffed up, psyched and ready to go, because Shade is easysauce. And we wipe.

Not only did we wipe, but we got destroyed. The first thing Shade did was Flame wreath. One of the new shamans (I think the enhance one) wasn’t up next to Shade when this happened. And he wanted to be. So he wiped half the raid. I only survived due to my bubble. The resto shaman also managed to stay alive for a second (the druid died if someone sneezed wrong, seriously, 6k health in Kara? Thank you, please don’t come again.) Note how I said a second. He didn’t realize that those weird falling icicles from the sky kill you! Who would have guessed! Regardless, I kept myself, the tank, and I think a warlock, alive for long enough for Aran to drop down to about 70%. He then proceeded to pull us in to AE us, and the warlock didn’t move out. Oh well, a tank and a healer weren’t bringing him down, and I was told to run towards the door to get a DI. Of course, without my healing, the tank died before I could make the run across the room while avoiding the blizzard.

So much for that =\.

So the stupid shaman who ran during flame wreath got yelled at. Then he told us he needed to repair. /sigh took his time too. Took so long, two people dc’d; the tank and the DPS warrior. /sigh again. So I checked out some people’s armories, the healers specifically, because I wasn’t going to just give up, damn it I want to see Prince! Well, turns out both of the other healers had below +1000 +heal.

/boggle

I can barely remember when mine was that low. I was still running SV for the hat, and a few other places. I ended up getting enough AH pieces, a few mail and cloth pieces, and enchants to bump me up to about +1100 +heal. I THEN decided I could TRY Kara. And I did alright, on the first few bosses, and they bumped my healing up greatly. I since have done heroics, gotten a few things here and there, and now I feel ready for end of Kara, maybe some ZA, Gruul’s, possibly Maggy. I have a nice +heal of 1620 (unbuffed).

I don’t know, maybe my expectations are too high. But still, if you’re going to do a PUG of a raid instance, come in with better gear than you’d need to run it with a guild.

Anyways, I just sort of got disheartened after that. And the group was looking like it was going to die anyways, so I /hearthed

A bad end to a good night, even with some real life issues going on in the background; still I hope I can spend a bit more time in Kara, or ZA, or any of the raids, cause I had some mad fun. :D

4 pages (on MS word) later and I’m done! I need to learn how to condense some XP.