Weekend (29 Aug) - It's The Weekend!

Weekend - It's The Weekend!

Saturday morning Wild was getting some crafting done and got a whisper from his old shaman friend, Bf. "icc25?" Short and to the point as usual. Wild said "sure" and Bf responded that he would pass my name along to the raid leader. Bf is still in the FS guild, although two of his alts are now in MM. I was curious about the raid - ie, was it an FS raid, a PUG? You never know with Bf.

Wild waited around and didn't get an invite. No problem, I'd said yes on a whim and because it was Bf asking. But Bf whispered back asking if I'd gotten a whisper from the raid leader. When I replied "nope, but np if they don't need me" Bf gave me the raid leader's name to contact him directly. The name gave me a moment of pause. I see his name in /trade chat all the time and he belongs to a guild with a high epeen - ie, they fancy themselves as elite raiders but still raid with PUGs, and the guild membership seems to turn over constantly and rapidly. My interest in the raid dimmed quite a bit. I did not contact the raid leader, but in the interest of fairness I waited a few more minutes to see if they were going to get back to me. Nothing, so I whispered Bf a "thanks for asking, but no invite, and I'm gonna log, good luck in there!"

He sent back a "thanks, sry" and I noted that their raid had already started and they were at Lord Marrowgar, the first boss (this info is sent back automatically when whispering someone in an active raid). Wild coudlalso tell that they were running with 24 raiders, since the info also included "24/24 alive." Lots of reasons for holding that one spot open - perhaps they had someone coming, etc. Wild didn't care, but I'm glad I didn't end up in that raid.

Melasahnd and Rakta did some neutral AH work in Booty Bay over the weekend, not only for Lost but also to pad the guild bank vault with gold the DER family had come up with. We are looking pretty good. One of Sis's extended family, a level 80 on another server, might also be joining us, which would be a great boon to our guild. Funny thing about Booty Bay, though. It's a neutral town, so both alliance and horde can come there. The town is run by goblins (goblins run all of the neutral towns, I believe) and the average level of the goblin npcs is around 77. For some reason I have yet to figure out, players are always attacking the neutral npcs in Booty Bay. Most of the time they don't get down to where the less known about neutral AH npc is, so it doesn't affect our transactions, but I still don't know why it goes on all the time.

Mery has a couple of pics of a new set of gear she is working on. Now, a certain degree of color blindness might hinder Mery's efforts to have a perfectly matched ensemble, but she's pretty happy with her first shot at it. Mery will accept "constructive" criticism and suggestions on color coordination and other gear choices that might work better. Obviously, her new outfit is tailored to match her pair of butterfly pets and is intended to show off her charms rather than her killer instinct.



Wild did two random Heroics on Friday to get from 20 to 30 triumph badges. The first was CoS (Culling of Stratholme) which is very long but easy to do. Wild then joined a Nexus run in progress. They were about a third of the way in and said they'd had a terrible healer and an afk warlock - apparently both were kicked from the group. Often the healer gets blamed for problems that aren't his fault, but Nexus is also an easy run so Wild stayed to see how it worked out. Well, a mage went offline soon after we started and we four manned it almost to the final boss, when she finally logged back in saying she'd had computer problems. No matter, we could have finished with just four, as fortunately the tank was decent. Wild had time for one more, and the queue's were short since wild was signing up as a healer. But random Heroics are just sooooo boring ... Wild had had enough after the two runs. Wild still needs two more runs to get the forty triumph emblems he needs for his heirloom leather chest piece.

Oh Noes! I just read that the current heirlooms will not work past level 80, so Wild cannot use heirlooms for leveling to 85. Ok, I guess that makes a kind of sense, so that some players don't get a leveling advantage over others, but ... Sigh. The good news is that now Wild won't have to do those two extra random heroics! There will be new heirlooms to be acquired once the first player gets to 85: a cloak and a helm. Once Wild gets those, total xp increases for under level 80 toons is 45% xp boost (with 4 heirlooms) vs the 20% we have now. Wow. I've also heard that the new heirlooms will come from Guild awards, which may or may not suck depending on how that works, which is still unclear.

I've drifted into news about the Cataclysm expansion, or "Cata" as the shorthand that seems to be popular. Here's some more.

There's a Cata change to Dungeon Finder I find amusing - As it works today players sign up on dungeon finder, and when a group is full everyone is instantly teleported just inside the instance. Things will still work this way in Cata. However, one of the frustrations of a group (and subject to some hilarity) is that when a player dies or the group wipes, players might not have any idea where the entrance is to the dungeon they were in or how to get there from the graveyard where they were deposited. They never needed to know since they were instantly teleported directly inside from wherever they were. In Cata, players will be required to have already found and visited the entrance to a dungeon before dungeon finder will allow them to sign up for that dungeon.

Some more Cata tidbits about capital cities. In vanilla WoW there was a capital city for horde (Orgrimmar) and one for alliance (Stormwind). There was no neutral city that both horde and alliance called home (ie, set their hearth to more or less permanently). When Outland was released, the neutral city of Shattrath become the primary hearth point for both factions. Sure, Org and SW were still important, but Shattrath was the primary home. Then came Northrend and Dalaran became the neutral city home to both factions.

Cata will not have any new capital cities. None. The new zones are spread across the World and there is no central gathering place for this expansion such as Shattrath and Dalaran were in previous expansions. Neither of those cities are anywhere near where the action is going to be in Cata. The expectation is that in Cata the horde will return to Org and the alliance to SW. The as yet unknown piece of this is whether the two faction cities will get a portal hub like exist in Shattrath and Dalaran. If it doesn't, travel across the realm may still be centralized at Dalaran.

Level Professions Now or Wait?

What is the best strategy for leveling professions: get professions to 450 skill before Cataclysm or wait until after release?

Typically, the mats for leveling professions quickly becomes more expensive when an expansion comes out and older content is no longer farmed. There would also be no ramp up to 450 after Cat to start skilling up to the new level. So getting to 450 now might be the best choice. However, with all the changes to professions (such as random stats, eliminating specializations, reductions in mat requirements, etc) would it be better to wait and take advantage of them after release?

Ruby Sanctum - Dead and Buried Already?
[A post I made on the WoWhead forums]

From what I've seen on my realm and read on the forums it seems like few PUGs or guilds are bothering with Ruby Sanctum. PUGs seem to find it too hard to build a raid that can coordinate well, which RS requires, and so there are virtually no /trade requests for RS. Comments from raiding guilds are that it's "too hard" or "too trivial" depending on whether the guild has killed Halion or not. Either way, I don't see many guilds bothering to go to RS anymore.

A third reason, and perhaps the most telling, is why bother? The gear is nice, but it's a major effort to get it (ICC25 is easier), plus it will all be obsolete in a few weeks when Cataclysm arrives.

So, is Ruby Sanctum going to become the quickest raid ever to go from new to forget about it?

Most replies were yawns. Ruby Sanctum is a boring instance, several said. It's too difficult for PUGs, seemed to be a consensus opinion, which would explain why it's rare to see RS PUG runs advertised on /trade. The loot is very good, including some Bis (best in slot) gear in the hard mode versions. But gear upgrades to ilevel 288 (the best gear in the game currently) is going to be replaced almost immediately when Cata arrives. The gear currently available in the Beta starts around ilevel 300. Yes, I said "starts" at i300. Quest greens in Cata will be better than a lot of top end gear we have now. I've seen a few posts saying that by level 83 most players will have replaced almost all of their WotLK "epic" raiding gear with Cata quest gear. So why bust our heads getting gear out of RS?

But there are other opinions as well, and the discussion is still ongoing.

Oh, and now might be the time to let it slip that Naithipe has some news about her whereabouts the last several days. This could be interesting, but it will have to wait until the next post, assuming JB can get the full story out of her.

Thursday (26 Aug) - Shorin' Up the Ship

Thursday (26 Aug) - Shorin' Up the Ship

I thought I might have to title this post "Start Bailing" but the G2 ICC10 ship hasn't started sinking quite yet.

It was an inauspicious start to our second night of ICC10, though. We wiped on the first set of trash mobs, which left us wondering if we had completely lost our way. There were reasons (or excuses) for the wipe. That first group of mobs spawns adds that are mirrors of our own players, and we got a rogue duplicate that duplicated three times and all three healers found themselves being stunned by these rogues. The fact that the tanks couldn't pull them off and the DPS didn't kill them quickly ... well, that we couldn't explain. On our second try we goofed again and pulled two sets of mobs instead of just the one, but that time we easily killed them all. Go figure.

We'd only downed five bosses on Wednesday night, so the first target of the evening was Rotface. We have the strategy down for this fight, but Rotface can still challenge us. We were very happy to kill him on our first try.

When Wild first joined G2, Wild was clearly the best geared of the three healers. Cr was a close second, with Pl needing the most gear upgrades. By now Cr and Wild are pretty much in a dead heat gear-wise (Cr is actually slightly in the lead) and there is very little in ICC10 that we can use as healers (we both still want DPS gear, but as an offspec that gear is almost always going to main spec DPSers). That opened a lot of gear up for Pl, and she is now almost at Wild and Cr's level of gear. Evidence that we are all nearly equal showed in the numbers from the Rotface fight:

#1: Wild, 3582 hps/35.8% healing
#2: Pl, 3665/30.3%
#3: Cr, 4064/30.2%

We then worked our way to Valithria Dreamwalker, wiping on trash on the way. My opinion is that we are just getting extremely careless on trash mobs, plunging right into them without any preparation or thought to who is ready or not. Sometimes ... sometimes I think it would be worth it to open the mike and really get them to pay attention to what we're doing ... sometimes.

As you know, Dreamwalker is an interesting encounter in that the goal is to heal the dragon to 100%, not kill her. Wild and Cr are the dragon healers. Pl is the raid healer. While Wild and Cr go in and out of a portal, stacking up a healing buff to give us super healing powers, Pl and the rest of the raid have to stay outside and survive wave after wave of deadly and clever mobs. Those waves won't stop until Dreamwalker reaches 100% health, so the whole raid is dependant on Wild and Cr to make that happen as quickly as possible. The longer the fight goes, the more likely bad things will start to happen.

Last week Wild and Cr had a long discussion about holy priest healing on this fight and came up with a spell rotation approved by expert priest healers that we anticipated would push up Cr's healing on this fight. Wild, for his part, had shuffled some gear to get my +haste stat past the soft cap (something I should have done before now, but could never get the right set of gear). That would speed up Wild's heals even further and should also bring up my numbers on this fight.

On attempt #1 we had the usual settling in of the raid and the dragon healing was cut a bit short when we wiped. Wild was over 13k healing, and pretty pleased with that considering the early wipe. Cr was under 6k, less than half of what Wild was making. The numbers didn't change that much on our second attempt, another wipe. This was getting to be a concern for both of us, particularly since she was using the new rotation. It had also caught the attention of at least one raider, Gv, a hunter who is either married to or a couple with Pl. He and Pl were looking at the numbers and wondering why Cr was so much lower than Wild. Wild and Gv had a whispered conversation about that, with Wild getting him caught up on the past two weeks and what we'd been working on. I still didn't know what was wrong.

Gv decided to ask the raid leader, Lady Hunter, to switch roles between Pl and Cr to see if that would help the fight. Lady Hunter leaves all healing issues to the healers, but Wild okayed the switch as I was willing to try anything at this point. Cr was extremely unhappy with that decision, and I could understand why she would feel that her competence was being questioned. All I knew was that all my research about holy priest healing on Dreamwalker said that they should do much better than what we were getting.

Well, on our third attempt we wiped again, although we did last longer into the fight, getting Dreamwalker to 85% health. Part of that, I'm sure, was Cr's raid healing since she is still a bit better geared than Pl. However, we were all disappointed with the dragon healing once again. Pl delivered 5460 hps, which was in the same range as Cr. Wild got his hps up over 15k on that attempt.

Baffled and a little unnerved I think by the unchanging results, Pl asked to go back to raid healing and Cr definitely wanted her role back as well. I wanted the girls happy so we switched them back to their original roles.

Attempt #4: Wild kept up the 15k hps pace, and Cr got her numbers up over 7.5k, which got us even closer to bringing down Dreamwalker.

Attempt #5 failed because Wild missed a portal and I lost my stack of buffs. Cr got close to 9k and Wild dropped to around 12k. There might be a glimmer of a reason here, though. Remember that Cr asked Wild to divide up the portal area so that we weren't stealing orbs from each other - each orb increases our stack of buffs by one, so we try to get as many as we can. With Wild missing an entire portal, Cr had the field to herself during that particular portal. Cr (and even Pl, who did the portal just the one time and so wasn't very practiced at it) may just not be getting enough buffs. Wild can get over 20 buffs going after 3-4 portals; Cr says she is getting those numbers, too ... but I wonder. Either that or she's dropping her stack. I don't know what else it could be.

We saved Dreamwalker on our 6th attempt. Wild broke over 19k healing (19702 hps to be exact) with Cr getting just under 7k. Gv whispered Wild, "we owe this win to your craziness, you know" referring to Wild's crazy healing. "You are just stomping on everyone in there." Wild appreciated the pat on the back ... but I still don't know for sure why our priests are having trouble.

I am tempted to suggest another strategy the next time we face Dreamwalker. Let Wild go into the portals alone. We were able to save Dreamwalker with 26k total healing between both Wild and Cr. By himself, Wild might be able to reach 30 stacks and reach the same amount of healing as both healers did. That is a strategy used by successfully several guilds. The extra benefit is that two healers would then be available to help heal the raid; or, one of the healers could go shadow spec and we'd have an extra DPSer. I'd at least like to give it a try.

We moved on and made two "sort of" attempts on Putricide. It was supposed to be practice, but we didn't last long enough on either try to really call it productive. I guess Dreamwalker had worn us out.

After the raid we had a quick discussion about next week's raid. Lady Hunter offered to lock the raid so that we would not have to clear all the same bosses again. Everyone agreed. What that means is that next week we will start where we left off - facing Putricide. Next week will be our first real test on whether we are ready or not to face the tougher half of Icecrown Citadel - a measure of whether we have any chance at all at the Lich King.

Wednesday (25 Aug) - Slip Slidin' Away

Wednesday (25 Aug) - Slip Slidin' Away

It was another step backward for the G2 ICC10 group on Wednesday night. First, we had two new guild DPSers who were making their first run in ICC, requiring additional instruction and the inevitable mistakes while learning the fights. Second, our DPS was erratic, sometimes hot and at other times we just kept going until the enrage timer wiped us. Third, we just didn't play all that well.

Time-wise we started well, with nine raiders in game and at ICC by 6:35pm. The tenth raider was a healer, and she wasn't able to get in game until 15 minutes later. Once we got started, we moved quickly. We cleared trash and took down Lord Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and the Gunship and it was still just 7:30pm.

The night then became a tale of wipes.

Saurfang should be on farm by now, but we wiped at the enrage timer with Saurfang at 7% on our first attempt. Too many people were getting attacked by the beasts, but what was worse was that raiders were not spreading out properly. Standing too close to each other spreads a debuff that heals Saurfang, so even while we were trying to kill him we were also healing him. It didn't help that Cr, one of our healers, was Marked early in the fight and she needed extra healing over the course of the fight. We did get Saurfang on our second attempt.

After that we came completely unglued.

We wiped on a set of trash mobs when the tank weighed into them while there were no healers in range and raiders were still coming back from an ad hoc break. We sorted that out and set our sights on Festergut, another boss that we have on farm status. The new guildies were having trouble understanding how to manage the spores, and we wiped a couple of times while they figured that out. The raid instructions were sketchy and our impatience showed so the new folks might not have wanted to ask questions. Then we all seemed to forget how to do this fight. We wiped five times on a boss we should be able to kill in five minutes. We did finally kill Festergut, and mercifully ended the raid at 9:35pm.

The G2 downed only five bosses on our first night, where we had gotten to the point of being capable of taking down seven. We'll be facing Rotface to start with on Thursday, a boss that certainly still gives us trouble, and then hopefully a quick Dreamwalker victory. Then it's back to Putricide. If we play like we did tonight against that boss we'll be at him all night.

Wild had posted some suggestions on the guild website to help smooth the flow of the raid. That was six days ago, and three days after Wild had sent an in game mail to the raid leader letting her know it was there. Last night she admitted she hadn't seen it yet and promised to take a look. We are supposed to have a meeting with the raid Thursday night before we start. I'm hoping we decide to really push to complete ICC10. If not, then I'll probably just bring Philly to the raid, if all we're going to do is kill time and gear up alts - gear which will be obsolete the second that Cataclysm hits. Cr, who doesn't need anything from ICC10 any more than Wild does at this point, whispered Wild that she planned to bring her alt, a pally, next week.

The G1 group also had troubles. The raid leader, Bd, was unable to come and they weren't able to get a full group together. G1 won't run at all this week.

But hey, there was good news from our alliance cousins. Auction House entrepreneur Lost made her first thousand gold! She'll spend most of that on mats to resell, but the new business is flourishing.

Monday (23 Aug) - Me and my Macros

Monday (23 Aug) - Me and my Macros

Just a few this's and that's before getting into the main discussion of macros (so, you can tell not much went on yesterday).

First of all, Wild had a sudden insight. He and Philly and JB have been diligently working on getting heirloom gear for all the various classes so that our baby alts can grow up fast. The Wild family has amassed a large pile of shoulder and chest heirloom gear for both accounts that should serve all of the existing low level toons on both the horde and alliance side (assuming the gear is shared and no one gets greedy). Happy was doing an accounting of the gear and noted that there was no leather gear. There was cloth gear that leather wearers could use, and plenty of mail and plate gear as well, but no leather. Happy just shrugged. After all, the only leather wearing classes were druids and rogues, and there weren't any leveling Wild family toons in those classes. Even the new toons planned in Cataclysm - a goblin mage and a warrior worgen - don't use leather. All was well - WAIT! There is one toon who uses leather - WILDSHARD! And come Cataclysm Wild will be leveling from level 80 to 85. Wild suddenly realized that HE NEEDED his own heirloom gear!

By a juxtaposition of the stars (and just blind luck) Wild came to this realization just as a call for Wintergrasp went out. Heirloom shoulder gear can be purchased using WG shards. Wild checked his currency and he had 160 WG shards. Too hundred shards would buy Wild the shoulders. Wild headed for WG, collected four weekly quests (that give 10 shards each), and belted on his dismal set of pvp gear. His resilience (a pvper's best protection against other players) totaled only 173, where 800-1000 was considered good. Oh well. As a tree druid in pvp Wild would be heavily targeted and probably spend most of the battle running back from the graveyard. The horde was defending, and for 15 minutes everything went very smoothly. We got complacent, however, and the alliance attacked from the east, breaking through the walls and entering a very lightly defended interior. The rest of the horde were chasing alliance outside for kills. Wild launched himself into one of the Keep's heavy guns and blasted the invading alliance siege engines. Wild had two guns shot out from under him on the outside walls, and a third blown apart under me on an interior gun. But Wild did considerable damage to the allie assault, destroying most of their engines and killing many of them. They were inside, though, and allie soldiers poured in.

Wild died several times as a small horde defense tried to stem the larger allie assault. We did our job, keeping the allies from taking down that final door while the rest of the horde hustled back to the Keep. The Horde successfully defended the Keep, and Wild got the forty shards he needed to buy his heirloom shoulders. Wild still needs to get a leather chestpiece, which he can buy for 40 triumph badges. Those won't be hard to get.

In other important news, the DER family is back! Yep, we should start seeing more action in our Monday night pvp fests in the next week, when all three of our intrepid team can finally get together as one. Even now there is considerably more activity going on between the horde and alliance cousins, positioning gear and gold where it can do the most good. Lost is making slow but steady progress on the Alliance auction house as well, working on building that nest egg for the Tea Green alliance guild.

Ok, now on to Macros! Come on, show some enthusiasm!

Every now and then I review my macros to determine if I should make any changes. Macros are basically short bits of code that players can save and use to perform functions. Macros help players by altering game play in ways that better suit individual player styles. Yes, WoW has a standard User Interface (UI) and some players are happy with the default setup. For those who want more flexibility, or prefer a play style that the default UI doesn't easily support, well, macros can help with that.

There are two main camps regarding play styles: clickers and keybinders. Clickers use the mouse keys and on screen buttons to cast spells and use abilities. Keybinders use keyboard keys for the same purpose. Militant keybinders believe that clickers suck and can't possibly play as well as the worst keybinder. Clickers say that's crap and that clickers can play just as well as any keybinder. Mostly this battle revolves around character movement, which I'm not going to bother talking about because it's a stupid (and endless) argument and a matter of individual preference.

When talking about casting spells and abilities, however, keybinders and clickers go about that in very different ways.

True keybinders do not use the mouse to click on anything. The primary function of the mouse is for movement. Clicking would be used sparingly, and only in situations where speed/combat don't come into play (opening a bag, for example). Every spell/ability that a player intends to use in combat (and many not used in combat) are "bound" to a key. Keybinders have to remember what key each spell is bound to, and then train themselves to be able to hit the right key for the desired spell without resorting to looking at the keyboard. If you play a class/spec that uses a lot of spells and abilities, that can be a lot of things to remember. Forgetting where that "save me" spell is bound on the keyboard could be fatal.

The true clicker places all his spells/abilities on his rows of buttons visible in his screen, using the mouse keys to click on the button to cast spells. The advantage is that the player doesn't have to remember what key does what spell; he can see his spells right there on his buttons. Moving the mouse and clicking on buttons takes longer than tapping a key, all else being equal. In addition, it can also interfere with movement if you are also using the mouse to move with.

Then there are macros, which are used by both keybinders and clickers. Keybinders make macros and bind them to keys. In that sense Wild belongs in the keybinder class because I typically create macros and then bind them to keys for easy use. However, I'm not militant about it. The only keys I bind things to are the number pad keys. For example, all of Wild's healing spells are contained in macros bound to the number pad keys. That's only nine keys to remember and my right hand already has the muscle memory to hit the key for the spell I need without me really thinking about it or looking at the pad. That said, I cheat, just in case my aging brain takes a vacation during a critical moment. I have a 3x3 grid of buttons with all the same macros assigned to the buttons that match the number pad. Should I forget, I can still click the button to cast. Wild has a lot of other spells besides his healing ones, and I still place all of those on buttons for click casting as needed. It works for me.

Today Wild updated his healing macros, thanks to Valithria Dreamwalker. Wild has a spell called Innervate, which is a powerful mana regen spell. Wild doesn't need the spell for himself much anymore, so I usually cast in on other mana users if I see they're having mana problems or ask for it. In the Dreamwalker fight the priest that is outside the portal healing the raid burns a lot of mana very fast. So Wild checks her mana each time I exit the portal, and if she's dropped below 50% mana I cast Innervate on her. I wanted to update my simple Innervate macro to send her a whisper letting her know she'd just received an Innervate. It's a three minute cooldown spell so that would let her know how long before the next one would be available.

After getting that done and testing it - ALWAYS test your macros! Get a letter or a space wrong and the thing won't work. Don't find that out in the middle of a raid - Wild took a look at his other macros and decided to update them to be more flexible. Here's the macro Wild put together for "friendly spells" - spells that would be cast on a friendly player only.

/cast [@mouseover,nodead,help][nodead,help][@player] Regrowth

Regrowth is a healing spell. That part is easy. But what does the rest of that gobble-de-goop mean? The commands inside the [brackets] are targeting commands.

[@mouseover,nodead,help] says that if my mouse if hovering over a target (@mouseover), and that target is not dead (nodead) and it's friendly (help) then cast Regrowth on that mouseover target. If those conditions don't apply, then go to

[nodead,help] which says if you have directly targeted something (implied) and that target is not dead and is friendly, cast Regrowth on that target. If neither of the above conditions apply, then go to

[@player] which says cast Regrowth on yourself. Note that [help] is assumed since you are obviously friendly to yourself, and [nodead] doesn't apply since if you're dead you won't be casting any spells.

How does this help Wild? Wild normally is a "mouseover healer." I have a raid frame setup that shows me the health of every raider, and to heal them I hover my mouse over their frame and hit the numberpad key for the spell I want. When Wild is tank healing I usually have the tank assigned as Focus. That way I don't have to use the mouse to hover over his frame. I click on his focus frame and hit the key I want to send the heal directly to him while still being able to mouseover heal at need. To heal himself Wild would have to un-target the tank and then hit the appropriate key, or, horrors!, I'd become a momentary clicker and right click the spell button for self healing. If I wanted, I could insert another targeting command like

[@focus,nodead,help]

and I'm actually thinking about trying that.

Philly also has her DPS spells macroed and placed on the number pad keys. "Save me" spells, such as Fade and Shield, are also keybound to the numberpad. This is most useful to me so that I can use the mouse for targeting and movement. For DPS Philly doesn't use mouseover at all. Hostiles are better targeted directly.

End lesson. ;-)

Weekend (22 Aug) - Philly's ICC25 Debut

Weekend (22 Aug) - Philly's ICC25 Debut

Philly played hooky on Saturday afternoon. I was supposed to be outside with the Mrs, our recovering cat, and the dog on a picture postcard Southern California day. But as Philly was wrapping up her dailies and preparing to log off, she got a whisper from a guildie. "You dps or heals?"

Uh, why are you asking? was my first thought. Then I realized that it was 3pm and that Philly had signed up as "tentative" for a 3pm ICC 25 run. The run had been canceled for the past two Saturdays due to lack of participation, and the week before that (which Wild had been part of) had started two hours late. Well, it was still early, Philly reasoned, and most likely the run would be called off anyway, so . . . Philly whispered back, "my main is shadow spec but offspec is disc, prefer dps but ok with healing."

A few minutes later Philly was invited into the raid as a ranged dps. The first thing Philly did once she was in the raid was to fly to Icecrown Citadel and enter the instance. I was still under the impression that Philly had to complete the three ICC5 dungeons to be able to enter ICC 10/25 (which she still hasn't done). I figured that if she couldn't get in then I would bring Wild instead. Philly entered ICC with no problem. Woot!

We managed to get 17 guildies to join the raid, and then filled in with a few non-guildie friends and even a couple of PUGs. Even so, it was 3:55pm before we got started, and we went with 23 instead of 25 raiders. Philly was not the worst geared, but she was far from being among the better geared. This would be a great opportunity for her. Cr, Wild's healing partner in ICC10, was also in the raid. We chatted a bit and Cr got a bit a confused at my "she" and "her" references (to Philly, who is a female toon). Finally she whispered Philly and said "I thought you were a guy!" After teasing her a bit (how could I resist?) and getting her more confused - "You know," she whispered, "I don't think I've ever heard your voice in vent" - I relented and told her "I'm a guy. I also never speak in vent." I let that sink in and then told her, "So if you want to pull someone else's chain you can start a rumor by wondering about that."

Cr played her own tricks on me, demanding that I switch to healing (and claiming she'd passed that on to the raid leader) and telling me she was going to out roll Philly on all priest loot. Cr is a lot of fun to fool around with. I learned that she is in the central time zone and lives in a small town two hours from "civilization" in her words. As I've mentioned before she has a strong accent that I took for British, but I'm probably wrong about that. Will have to ask her about that sometime.

Anyway, there was a raid in there somewhere, an important one for Philly, who was seeing ICC for the very first time.

Shadow priests use a set of spells that is part rotation and part priorities. It starts with a rotation of five spells: Vampiric Touch (VT), Mind Blast (MB), Mind Flay (MF), Shadow Word: Pain (SWP), and Devouring Plague (DP). That set of spells, in that order, triggers two things - shadoweaving, a damage bonus that must be maintained to do the highest level of damage, and an automatic refreshment of SWP. VT, SWP, and DP are all DoTs that MUST be kept ticking at all times. DoTs are where a shadow priest gets most of her damage. So after the initial rotation, Philly's first priority is to refresh VT and DP whenever their timer expires. Her second priority is to cast MB whenever it is not on cooldown. And her third priority is to spam MF when she has met her other two priorities. Taking all that into account while having to move around, taking damage, switching targets, etc, is still new and challenging to Philly.

Finally, we were ready to start on the trash mobs of ICC25. The tank pulled the first group of mobs. The first thing Philly saw was the Tank List covering the center of the screen. Ack! I can't see! Never mind that, just target the mob that the tank is targeting and start shooting! You can tell that Philly doesn't raid much, and her raid addons (which included the tank list) needed adjusting. No time for that now. For trash mobs Philly doesn't strictly follow the spell rotation/priorities described above. Mostly Philly used her three DoTs and when the two tanks had good aggro she would spam Mind Sear, which is a channeled AoE spell that hits multiple targets.

We had our first real test of the raid when two traps were triggered, bringing some big nasties into the fight. We adjusted quickly, the tanks picked up the mobs and the DPS laid into them. Philly took some hits, and that reminded her to keep up her own Shield to reduce the damage and spare healer mana. Cr had teased Philly that she wasn't going to heal Philly, but from the recount logs it was clear she was looking after me.

I was a little surprised that we had so little problem with the trash mobs and Philly quickly found herself standing in front of Lord Marrowgar. Wild had told her all about this boss, but seeing the multi-limbed and multi-headed beast was still an exciting sight. Philly was going to be tackling her first ICC boss! We began.

Philly rushed in along with the rest of the raid as the tanks wrestled Marrowgar to the door, positioning the boss with it's back to us. Philly crowded in close to avoid the lines of white flame that would quickly kill her. Then she loaded up her spells and let fly. Raiders started getting hit with Bone Spike. As a healer, Wild would immediately toss some heals on the Spiked raider; as a DPS, Philly was supposed to drop some DPS on the Spike in order to get it off the raider. Hunters handled most of that, but other ranged DPS were asked to help out. Philly wasn't very good at that, though. She could tell from the raid frame who had been Spiked and could easily target the raider, but she constantly found herself facing the wrong way. Healers can heal even if their back is to their target. DPSers have to be facing their target or their attack will fail.

During Bone Storm (when Marrowgar runs around the chamber attacking everything near him) Wild could just stand and cast heals, moving only to avoid the lines of fire. Philly had to modify that because she still had to attack Marrowgar, and so had to follow him to stay in range as well as avoid those lines of fire. Philly handled that pretty well. We killed Marrowgar!

Your target is Dead

The "Boned 25" banner is an achievement where every Spike was destroyed in 8 seconds of less.

Philly didn't win any loot. We had 16 DPSers in the raid. Against Lord Marrowgar Philly finished 11th in dealing damage at 5672 DPS and 4.7% of the damage. Philly didn't suck. She'd survived an ICC boss. What more could she ask for?

Lady Deathwhisper gave Philly a new challenge in her DPS role. The mobs which spawn several times during the fight are peculiar in that the melee mobs are immune to ranged attacks and the ranged mobs are immune to melee attacks. Philly had to know which mobs were melee, because those were the only mobs she would be able to hit. To make that a little easier, groupings were set up and specific tanks assigned for melee and ranged mobs. As a ranged DPSer, Philly was assigned to that group along with a tank who would only be tanking melee mobs. Philly was worried about her targeting, but it wasn't as hard as she thought it would be. Philly was able to target the right mobs (most of the time - once in awhile she'd get an IMMUNE warning and that tipped her off to change targets). Philly kept all her DoTs on Deathwhisper as well and DPSed her hard whenever there were no mobs to deal with. Philly got mind controlled once and lashed out at the raid with several of Philly's nastier spells, but Philly was soon subdued and the mind control released. Philly negotiated the death knight pools of death and the un-killable ghosts while keeping her feet and her health, even as other raiders started to die. Deathwhisper went down. Philly had her second boss kill.

Lady Deathwhisper dropped [Nibelung]. This is a DPS caster two-handed staff that has a unique feature. Doing damage with it can sometimes cause a Val'kyr (flying mob) to be summoned and fight alongside it's owner. There were six rolls for the staff. Philly rolled a 93 out of 100. She TIED for the top roll with another raider not in the guild. The two of us rolled again. Philly's 82 on the second roll won her Nibelung. Philly's current staff, Perdition, is ilevel 232. Nibelung is i264, a massive upgrade for Philly. By the way, she finished 11th again with 4939 DPS and 4.9% damage. A second by the way - Wild was also a Nibelung winner some time ago and for awhile it was his main weapon in moonkin form.

After Deathwhisper we completed the weekly ICC quest as well, so Philly picked up an extra 5 frost badges, and then we defeated the Gunship encounter. In ICC25 generally only melee DPS is sent over to the enemy ship, so Philly got to stay on our ship and just kill mobs that swarmed over to our side. A very easy fight.

The raid was holding together well, and despite a couple of delays we had been pushing steadily forward. Now we faced Saurfang, a level of difficulty higher than the prior bosses. On this fight ranged DPS is responsible for stopping the beasts that spawn at certain points in the fight. Philly held a whispered conversation with Cr to find out how priests do that. But even though Cr has a shadow offspec, she had never done this fight in that spec. We decided that spamming Mind Flay, which slows down it's target, was the best spell to use on the beasts, and it worked well.

The Saurfang fight turned out to be the most fun for Philly. She'd pound away with her spells on the boss and then switch to the beasts when they spawned. Her attack often pulled the beasts toward her, and she'd strafe away a few feet and then launch another attack. Philly was often able to get damage on as many as three targets on each round. A bit past the halfway point Philly got Marked. Given Philly's low position on the damage meter, I figured the healers would just let Philly die, but instead Philly got some crazy healing and stayed in the fight until near the end, when one of the tanks got Marked and huge heals had to be directed his way. Philly sent her pet in to get in that last bit of damage, but forgot to hit Dispersion, which would have kept her alive a bit longer. She died, but seconds later Saurfang fell. Not only had Philly finished off a fourth ICC boss, she'd cleared the entire first wing!

By now it was just after 6pm and the raid broke up. It was an absolute blast for Philly and one she's going to want to get in on every week if she can.

Philly was generally very pleased with her performance in the raid. I discovered that Philly's Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) addon had not been active for the raid. While obviously not needed in the first wing, the raid warnings DBM provides would have been critically important against bosses like Festergut and Rotface. I made sure DBM would be turned on for the next time. Overall, Philly was 13th out of 16 DPS raiders in total damage. Comparing herself only to caster DPSers, she finished 5th out of six. The #1 caster DPSer, a mage, had 6235 DPS and 3.9% damage. Philly's overall numbers were 4915/4.0%. This included boss and trash fights.

Cr led in healing among the five healers with 4179 hps/18.4% healing. The top four healers were all over 4k hps. Only Wild's shaman friend, who was playing his rusty resto druid alt, finished out of the money with 2506 hps/10.8% healing. Philly surprised me with over 1500 hps as well, very high considering she was DPSing the whole fight. Philly has an ability called Vampiric Embrace which imparts healing buffs across the raid. But that was still a very high number. Then I remembered that Philly had been Marked in the Saurfang fight, which does crazy things with healing numbers. Sure enough, almost half of that healing came from the Mark (and it heals Saurfang, not the raid).

Oh, and I did get outside for some real life fun afterward.

Thursday (19 Aug) - ICC 5/10

Thursday (19 Aug) - ICC 5/10

Philly's attempts to get the ICC 5 man triplet of dungeons done is becoming comical. Philly has completed the first dungeon - heroic Forge of Souls (FoS). She signed up on the dungeon finder to do the second heroic dungeon, Pit of Saron. Instead, after a 15 minute wait, she wound up in FoS. Not wanting to waste the 15 minute wait, Philly stayed and completed it. However, she was unable to complete the Pit of Saron quest that was part of chain of quests Philly has to complete. Philly was able to talk to the quest giver outside PoS, but she just babbled about the Lich King and was otherwise unhelpful. Wild vaguely remembered some kind of bug that he had to get around to complete the quest. Going to have to research that. Not getting the quest done is probably why Philly was pushed into FoS instead of PoS.

Later ... Philly checked on how to get around the bug and then went back to Icecrown Citadel and entered PoS. Lady Sylvanus "should" be waiting inside, but because of the bug she was was noticeably absent. So Philly wandered around inside, being careful not to aggro the large dragon (Tyrannus) that hovered a few feet away. After a couple of minutes a small army of friendly npcs appeared along with the Lady. She had Philly's quest and completed it. Now, I hope, Philly is finally ready to get into PoS.

Philly would have to wait on that PoS run, however, giving way to Wild and the second night of ICC10.

It was another somewhat frustrating night of delays and waiting around, but more and more the group is starting to realize that we need to step things up if we are indeed want to see the Lich King. The raid leader, Lady Hunter, opted to start with Valithria Dreamwalker. That was a good choice, even when a raider started a trash mob gauntlet before the raid was ready. Half the raid died when the gates closed, separating those inside the gauntlet and those out. Wild knew not to enter, and did what I could to heal those inside.

Wild and Cr (our main holy priest) chat via whispers pretty frequently during our raids. There's a lot of talk about healing and strategies, of course, but we also talk about other things. She has a distinct accent and I believe she is from England. She may actually be playing from England, although I did not get around to asking that. If so, her time zone is 8 hours later than Wild's, putting the starting time for her at 3:30am. Whoa.

We struggled a bit with Dreamwalker, with Wild and Cr only managing to get up to 12k+ on healing the dragon. We seemed to be stealing each other's orbs inside the portal, and Cr suggested that we divide up the area. Wild agreed, admitting that Wild was something of a hog about grabbing the orbs. "Yea, hog," whispered Cr, "give me a chance at some of those orbs." Wild laughed.

We saved Dreamwalker on our 4th attempt, but it was a close thing with most of the raid dead when Wild emerged from the portal for the final time. But Dreamwalker hit 100% health, and when that happens she leaps into the air and kills the remaining bad guys. Wild set a new high for healing per second, getting 19543 hps. Cr was well behind at 10035 hps, enough to give us the victory, but we've got to find a way for her to increase that number. Wild did some research, and passed along some suggestion to her for next week.

After Dreamwalker, we headed back to get Rotface, which we had failed to kill on Wednesday. It took us two tries, but we got him. Cr got the better of Wild on healing on Rotface:

Cr: 3633 hps/33.5% heaing
Wild: 2811/32.2%
Pl: 3016/29.6%

We were now back to our record of seven boss kills out of twelve. It was time to take on the talkative Professor Putricide again.

We've been struggling with our strategy for this fight. We've tried several things but haven't really settled on one approach. After four attempts on Putricide on this night, I think we are set on what strategy to use. Now all we need is practice. We did show promise, getting him to phase 2 on three of our attempts. Of course, there are three phases, so we aren't there yet, but we were improving and I wished we'd had more time. On Friday morning Wild posted some suggestions on the guild forums that I feel would improve the flow of the raid and gain back considerable lost time. The guild website is not used much, but Wild intends to let the raid leader know it's been posted and to pass that along to the rest of the raid. I think many will agree; the crux of the matter will be whether everyone will abide by them and whether it would be enforced.

In other guild news, the raid leader for FS posted on the FS website (which Wild is still a member of) a sizable discussion about leveling and raiding once Cataclysm arrives. As expected, it was a very organized and precise assessment of who and how fast guildies would get to level 85, and how that would affect establishing first five man dungeon teams and then raid groups. It's hard to tell how many raiders are left in FS (with so many alts), but it is definitely less than the 20-25 raiders available for the two ICC10 groups that were running before the other FS raid leader left (with perhaps a half dozen others) to form their own guild. It's pretty certain, though, that they'll have one high performing, near hardcore ten man ready to go not too long after Cataclysm arrives.

The future of 25 man raiding in Cat is somewhat fuzzy because of the change in raiding loot. Currently there is different loot in 10 and 25 man raids, with the 25 man offering better loot. In Cat, the loot in the 10/25 man raids will be the same, the only difference being that more of that loot will drop in 25 man. In may happen that the 10 mans will be used to learn the fights and gear up the core raiders, and that the 25 man will be used to farm loot. Heroic/hard modes of the raids will still offer the best loot.

Wednesday (18 Aug) - Rakta my World

Wednesday (18 Aug) - Rakta my World

After what seemed like an endless time out for the Wild family, Wild at least found some action with the G2 ICC10 raid group on Wednesday night. The group had two straight weeks of steadily growing progress and we were starting to murmur about the possibilities of our group. Could the G2 overtake the G1 group? After a slow start, G2's successes in the past two weeks put G2 just one boss behind the more experienced G1. We were even starting to see a glimmer of hope at reaching the final boss, the Lich King.

Wednesday night was a bit of a setback, however. We had an intact regular group, the same group we'd had the last two weeks. But, where last week we always seemed to get past trouble, riding the positive edge of success, on this night we slipped back, unable to deliver that extra effort. It's not that we did badly. We downed five boss encounters. We failed to kill our target for the sixth boss, Rotface, who we had beaten two weeks in a row, but Rotface is not on farm yet. But we are setting higher standards for ourselves now, and this did not live up to those new expectations.

So, what went wrong?

The first two battles, against Marrowgar and Deathwhisper, went mostly according to plan. In fact, we were encouraged in the DW fight when we overcame some trouble with the weekly quest involving DW and not only beat her but got the quest done as well. We didn't have a true third tank to kite the mob involved in the quest, but one of our DPS specced death knights did an excellent job of handling that role. We rode the edge of success to victory - this time.

We then badly bungled the easiest fight in ICC - the Gunship. We wiped on our first attempt, which was very embarrassing. It's hard to figure out how we managed to do that, but lack of DPS on the enemy ship forced the tank to stay onboard way too long, costing him his life despite Wild's best effort to keep him standing. The tank's job on the enemy ship is to tank the Commander of the enemy ship. The Commander can't be killed, and deals ferocious damage. The longer that fight goes, the more likely the tank will be overwhelmed. We then made a bad decision not to send our #2 tank to the enemy ship; instead, we pressed our death knight into that role. Wild knew mere seconds into that battle that our DK could not withstand barrage of attacks from the enemy Commander. After a few seconds of combat with Wild pouring on all the healing I could muster, the enemy Commander hammered the DK with back to back crits and our DK went down. So now it was two tanks dead, and our other tank had more than enough trouble on our own ship that he could not be sent over to the enemy ship. It was a stalemate we would lose. We did beat the encounter on our second attempt, but some of the wind had been taken out of our sails.

Festergut also took two tries to kill, a boss we should not have any trouble with by now. DPS was down from last week, so the battles were running longer, but we didn't know why.

In addition to the time taken because of the extra attempts, we again had trouble getting raiders ready and there were delays and delays and delays. It is getting more and more worrisome, particularly since Wild's healing partners seem to be the most put out by it. Both of the priest healers in the raid have started openly questioning the lack of organization. In a way the growing unrest is a result of our success. When we started, we had no idea how far we would get, and we were happy with whatever we were able to accomplish. I don't think anyone was seriously thinking about downing the Lich King. But now that goal is at least on the horizon, and we know that we have a chance to get there. The problem is that I don't think it will get better. There are things we can't change, such as this group has raiders with real life issues that will affect us during raids. They're good people and we make allowances for those times. But there are also raiders who can't or won't adjust to additional rigor in the raid. During early trash pulls, for example, the raid leader and the tank asked a raider repeatedly to stand behind a wall so that the tank could "line of sight" (or LOS) a group of mobs to avoid having the mobs plow into the rest of the raid. The raider simply refused to comply. The tank pulled anyway, and of course the disobedient raider was targeted and attacked. It was stupid and unnecessary, but little was done about it. Via unspoken agreement among the healers, he got no heals and died. There were jokes made about that, trying to tease him into listening, but that behavior won't likely change.

The one thing that I think we must change, is just to get raiders to get in position and ready for the next battle quickly. Even if they then have to go afk for a moment, at least we are all in one place. I think that would save at least thirty minutes of wasted time, enough to get in 2-3 extra battles. We only had time for three tries against Rotface, and got him to 6% on our third try. We might have killed him had there been time for one more attempt. I'm going to talk to Lady Hunter about that for tonight's (Thursday) run.

Little Rakta had her own embarrassing moment on Wednesday. Rakta is a level 11 hunter that lives in Booty Bay. She is a go between the horde and alliance in transferring stuff through the neutral auction house. She happened to be on when a group cleared ZG (Zul'Gurub), a 20 player raid for level 60s. The victory imparted a buff to all players in the area, greatly increasing player stats for the next two hours. Booty Bay is in the same zone as ZG and Rakta got the buff. She was excited and eager to get out of Booty Bay for a bit to take advantage of the buff. As a level 11 she needed to get where she could both get experience and survive the encounter. She chose to catch the boat at Booty Bay to Ratchet, a neutral town in the Barrens. There is a stretch of land bordering a river that divides the Barrens from Durotar that is well stocked with level 13-16 mobs.

Rakta wasn't sure how she and her combat owl pet, Dargh, would do against mobs 2-5 levels higher than they were, but with the buff those mobs died relatively quickly. Rakta was a skinner, but the mobs were too high level for her level of skinning. As she worked northward, she got an idea. She would kill mobs she couldn't skin until she reached level 12. Then she would take the bridge across the river to Durotar, where lower level mobs could be slaughtered to raise her skinning level. She could then work her way to the main city of Orgrimmar to see the trainer there.

There was just one tiny detail Rakta forgot. Rakta made level 12 as she came into sight of the bridge. She was happy to be out of Booty Bay for awhile and was having a great time with Dargh. Rakta approached the bridge - and was suddenly surrounded by yelling orcs who rushed in and attacked her. What was going on? Rakta thought as she made a panicked attempt to escape. Dargh picked off a couple of the attackers, but they were all at least ten levels higher and no buff was going to save her or Dargh. As a level 12 she had very few "save me" spells. Rakta died.

Really, it wasn't Rakta's fault. The "tiny detail"? The Barrens and Durotar are Horde territory. The bridge is manned by Horde troops. Rakta is Alliance, mortal enemy of the Horde. I'd totally forgotten that Rakta was Alliance, and I'd gotten her killed.

The death also removed Rakta's buff, so her two hours of freedom was curtailed and after rezzing she had to make her way back to Booty Bay and her day job. Rakta wished she'd gotten more time, but was philosophical about it, and still happy for the time she did get.

Monday (15 Aug) - My New Digs

Monday (15 Aug) - My New Digs

The Mrs went on a painting spree this weekend, which included starting on my "man dungeon." I had to take apart all of my wall shelving and electronic components as well as doing a desk swap with the Mrs that would put her computer out of action as well.

We started Thursday night, and my all of the household computers were offline on Friday. The Mrs painted all of the wall shelving, which we had originally installed unfinished. Then the wall that the shelving hung from was painted. My room was a total shambles, with parts of computers, modems, routers, monitors, printers, and innumerable other various peripherals scattered about, and all of it covered over in cabling of all colors a foot thick.

I got the desks swapped out, which was something of a major undertaking all by itself, and then was under orders to get the Mrs computer back up and operating, which I got done Saturday.

The Mrs' computer was easy compared to the mess in my room. I like the new arrangement and the swapped desk fits into the room better than the other one. However, some of the cabling came up too short - monitor cables, mouse cables, keyboard cables, speaker cables - they just wouldn't stretch far enough.

Got all that taken care of, connected everything together, and started turning things on. My biggest worry went smoothly - getting all of the network and internet connections back where they were supposed to be worked fine. But most everything else had to be reworked one way or another.

It was today (Monday) before I got everything working. I'm also trying out a new keyboard. Keyboards are like new clothes, they don't usually feel right the first time I wear them, and they take some breaking in before they feel comfortable. So right now this keyboard feels stiff and I have to hit the keys harder than on my old one. The keys are just slightly larger, too, which is one reason I got it, but that also means my fingers don't quite hit the keys right - at least until I get used to the new spacing. I'll give it a try all this week, though, before deciding whether to keep using it.

I can't say whether I'll be on tonight (Monday) or not, as there are still some tweaking to do and our cat is also headed back to the vet tomorrow. Not expecting any problems but the Mrs gets pretty stressed about it.

Hope you enjoyed the little vacation, the Wild family should be back in action soon!

Thursday (12 Aug) - Watching the Clock

Thursday (12 Aug) - Watching the Clock

Our ICC10 G2 fell back on old habits on Thursday night. We didn't get moving until almost 7pm, and took forever to reassemble each time there was break in the action. Smoke breaks, "I just need to run get a gem" breaks, "oh wait I need some potions" breaks, bio breaks, dinner breaks, etc, consumed the night. Every time a raider "needed just a sec" by the time he came back someone else had left. On top of those were some real issues, such as Lady Hunter's laptop crashing and a failed mouse by the off tank, both of which took considerable (and understandable) time to rectify. But even this very laid back group started to ask why things were taking so long.

In between all that we did get in a little raiding.

Following last week's plan, we decided to go after Dreamwalker to start the night. We'd saved her last week, and we were sure we could do it this week as well. As we did last week, Wild and Cr would be the two healers going into the portal, with Pl staying outside healing the rest of the raid.

"Please keep the quishy alive," Pl teased the group and also as a reminder that if she died they all died.

Our first attempt was a bit ragged, and we wiped, but we were just getting settled in. The key to this encounter is how much and how fast healing can be delivered to Dreamwalker. Wild felt he was struggling a bit inside the portal in getting his stacks of buffs. You know how Wild is about flying around trying to catch things (or in this case, just fly through the pulsing orbs in the air around Dreamwalker). Well, he kept flying over and under the orbs, taking longer than usual to get their buffs. I would also discover after that attempt that Wild had forgotten to drink his spell power enhancing flask, losing even more healing power.

Considering all that, Wild's healing per second (hps) wasn't as bad as I thought it would be:

Wild: 13907 hps
Cr: 9430 hps
Pl: 3486 hps (Pl doesn't get the buffs, so her healing is only for comparison purposed with the other attempts)

Over 9k for Cr was a good start and Wild hoped she would raise that number as we continued to practice.

On our second attempt we got Dreamwalker up to 84% health, but toward the end we unraveled. Coming out of the portal, Wild appeared right in front of a zombie (Wild can't see what is going on outside the portal until I leave it). Wild kited the zombie for a bit, but help couldn't get to me and Wild died.

Wild: 14461 hps
Cr: 7686 hps
Pl: 3432 hps

Wild kicked himself for again forgetting his flask. There was a long delay in between attempts and I don't like drinking a flask until right before the fight starts. Flasks are expensive and I don't like to see their timer ticking (they last one hour) while sitting around doing nothing. Wild went ahead and drank his flask and waited for the next attempt.

We beat her on our third attempt. Wild had smoothed out the wrinkles in flying into those orbs and got his stack of buffs up over 20, which is the number I shoot for. I think a stack of 23 buffs has been my best so far. Expert raiders have gotten up to thirty I've heard.

Wild: 17725 hps, 54.5% of the healing
Cr: 8902 hps, 29.4%
Pl: 3549 hps, 10.5% (but almost 100% of the raid healing)

Wild needs to work with Cr on her technique and make sure she is not healing the raid when she should be healing the dragon. If she can get her hps up around where Wild is this fight will be quick and easy. I even thought Cr might be low on +haste and so taking longer to cast, but she's at 642 haste, which is decent, so that isn't it. I'll also look at what spell rotation a holy priest should use for dragon healing, and whether holy priests are a good class for it.

After we won the Dreamwalker encounter everyone wanted to troop over to the elevator and take on Sindragosa. However, assuming that ICC works like other raid dungeons, we have to defeat all of the boss encounters in ICC before the final boss, the Lich King, can be engaged. We've still neither defeated or even attempted three bosses that come before Sindragosa: Professor Putricide (2nd wing), and both bosses in Crimson Hall (the third wing) - Blood Prince Council and Blood-Queen Lana'thel.

Clearer heads prevailed eventually, and we headed for Putricide.

I've said before that Professor Putricide is one of the toughest encounters in ICC. It requires very tight coordination and teamwork, good positioning, and every raider doing his/her assigned roles.

Our first mistake was that no one, not even the raid leader, could explain this fight, which 7 of our 10 raiders were seeing for the first time. Again, this is an issue with the raid that we've always had as far back as Naxxramas when our resident raid strategist stopped raiding. Raid strategy is just not Lady Hunter's forte, and no fault to her for that. Wild can't do it that well, either. But we really need someone in the raid who can.

So, most of the raid was monumentally confused when we made our first attempt. And probably the worst thing possible happened. We did surprisingly well. We got Putricide down to 58% health before wiping. We didn't do much right and we really didn't learn much about the fight other than "hey, this fight isn't so bad!" Wild knew better.

There was a delay between the first and second attempts so Lady Hunter could get her laptop fixed. We then lined up again for the second attempt - and got slaughtered. What happened? everyone wanted to know. We did so well the first time!

The delay between the second and third attempts was even longer (more than thirty minutes) as raiders came and went and our off tank tried to fix his mouse. When we finally made that third attempt, we wiped in less than a minute.

In between the third and fourth attempts, Lady Hunter asked Bd to join us on vent and explain the fight. It was an excellent discussion (a "Bd epix explanation" someone said) even though it was a lot of information for the raid to absorb. Bd sprinkled his explanation with terms loved by all "adolescents at heart" and which raiders happily repeated on guild chat so the rest of the guild could share in it. Bd's favorite line was "So when Tn, who is disguised as Putricide's son, starts spooging up the slime, oh wait, spooging is from the other end, I meant slurping up the slime, he then pukes it up on the oozes . . . " What makes that so hilarious is that this is exactly what one raider has to do in this fight!

Our fourth attempt wasn't bad, even though we didn't last very long. Raiders were trying to follow the strategy laid out by Bd, and mistakes were made, but now it was possible for further practice to correct those mistakes.

It had taken up a lot of time to get in those four attempts, though, and we were 15 minutes away from our usual stop time. With G2 the stop time is a rather vague line, since most raiders can go longer. Trash mobs had also respawned and we debated whether everyone could stay to both clear trash and get in another attempt. We went for it.

We made a pretty good effort on our fifth attempt, getting Putricide to 60% health before again wiping. Beating Putricide requires more practice than most other fights. If we can get in enough attempts next week, we have a chance to get him. As frustrating as this night was for the time we lost, I think G2 is closing in on having a serious chance at reaching the Lich King. I think we would ALL treasure getting the Lich King down and be wearing the title of Kingslayer before Cataclysm makes that a trivial accomplishment.

Wednesday (11 Aug) - Group Two on the Rise

Wednesday (11 Aug) - Group Two on the Rise

Last week the G2 ICC 10 group, with Bd (our premiere tank) leading the way under the raid leadership of Lady Hunter, downed six boss encounters on our first night. On our second night we faced Valithria Dreamwalker. It took ten tries but we saved the dragon, winning the encounter. It was our first time downing seven bosses in the same week.

This Wednesday night we were without Bd, who ran with G1 on his resto druid. Our tanks were Tn, one of our regulars, and Fn, a paladin who also runs with us pretty regularly. For healing there was Wild, of course. Pl, a holy priest, was back again, and it looks like she could become a regular with G2. Instead of Ch (who ran with G1 this week) we had Cr back, who is pretty much a regular and also a holy priest.

[Just as an aside, Philly has been thinking that she would have to be a healer if she were to replace Wild in one of the ICC runs; however, with two priests already in the raid, it might work to Philly's advantage to stay shadow priest and let Cr and Pl step it up. I know they are capable of two healing the first wing.]

The DPSers in the raid were all regulars or semi-regulars, and with many getting upgrades each week they are starting to deliver some pretty nice damage. Many of them are still lacking the i264 gear from ICC25, but with 30 raiders in game Wednesday night it looks like the guild has plenty of raiders for the weekly Saturday ICC25 run. Wild can't really make that run very often, but it's a great source of gear to help with the ICC10.

ICC - The Lower Spire (ie, the first wing)

Wild died on the first assault on the trash mobs. Yes, the raid tripped three of the traps and we were deluged with angry mobs, and yes, Wild was the only one healing at the time so the new mobs made a direct beeline to me, but Wild was also careless and let them catch me. Wild was the only one who died as the other healers arrived in time to take over.

Marrowgar and Deathwhisper died without any fanfare, and then Wild killed himself for the second week in a row by rocketing off the Gunship before the battle even started. It makes for a lot of laughter, but Wild really does need to be more careful. And it is stupidly simple to use that rocket.

The Gunship was an easy victory, and Wild's misadventure with the rocket pack was forgotten when one of the DPS raiders forgot to jump back from the enemy ship at the end of the fight. The enemy ship broke away from us and the raider died. I'm not sure if he was killed on the ship or if he went down in flames when the enemy ship went down.

Even Saurfang seemed off his game tonight and went down without ever Marking a raider, which I think was a first for us. No Marks meant that we handled the spawning adds perfectly, never allowing the beasts to buff Saurfang up enough to cast that spell.

ICC - The Plagueworks (ie, the second wing)

Festergut gave us a bit of trouble on our first attempt and we wiped. When we have trouble, it is always because of the spores. Wild had begun to enjoy this fight because recently Wild has been given the job of anchoring the ranged raiders - Wild for healing, plus two hunters. The rest of the raid stands in melee range of Festergut. Two spores spawn regularly on raiders throughout the fight and it's critical that every raider stand near one of the Spored raiders while they are up. Most of the time there'll be a spore in the melee and one out with the ranged, but since it's random both spores could spawn in the same area. Wild's job is to do nothing. If Wild gets the spore, the other two ranged raiders run over and stand next to me. If a spore spawns on the ranged raiders, Wild still stands where he is and the ranged raider with the spore brings it to me. Wild can just stand there and heal heal heal! except when Wild gets vomiting fits (and starts spamming his macro "WILD is PUKING his guts out!!") which I just love to do.

The problem with the spores happens almost always when two spores form in the melee. One of those raiders with a spore have to run out to Wild so that the ranged will have a spore to get next to. Confusion over which raider stays and which runs got us killed. Wild's not with the melee, so I don't have to worry about that. In ICC25 Wild was usually in with the melee, and that was scary.

Wild was minding his own business, doing some buffs, eating some fish food, grabbing a bite of pizza the Mrs thoughtfully brought up to my dungeon, when I heard Lady Hunter and Cr talking about the spore problems. Cr was having a hard time understanding who should run out of the melee. Perhaps it would be easier to see how that works, suggested Lady Hunter to Cr, if you stood with the ranged on the next attempt and Wild can go in with the melee.

NOOO! Wild wanted to throw a tantrum. Me no want to worry about spores, and moving, and . . . ok, so Wild was being a crybaby. He kept it to himself, though. Maybe I won't get a spore, was Wild's fondest wish.


We went after Festergut again, and on the second round of spores, Wild got one, and so did another raider in the melee group. Ruh ro. Here is the priority for determining who stays and who goes: the tank NEVER runs out (if he did, Festergut would follow him, as would the melee, and we wouldn't exactly be getting anywhere, would we?). The healer should never run out, unless the other spore is on a tank. The DPS should always run out, unless both spores are on DPS raiders, in which case - um, Wild wasn't sure about that other than knowing it wouldn't affect him.

Wild looked for the second spore and saw that it was on a tank. Ok, that means, uh, think now . . . RUN, Wild!

Wild made it out to Cr among the ranged in time (he even ran in the right direction, which was likely blind luck). Wild's stress level was elevated as he kept up the healing but was always on edge waiting for the next spore spawn. Wild got a spore one more time, but the other spawned on Cr so Wild stayed put. Festergut went down.

With Festergut down we decided to give the weekly ICC quest a try. It was one of the more unusual ones that Wild has done only once before. To complete the quest, raiders have to get a red and a green debuff (one from Festergut, one from Rotface). When the quest was designed, I suspect the intent was for raids to have to kill Festergut and Rotface both within thirty minutes, which is how long the debuff lasts. Of course, clever raiders have figured ways to get around that.

When Wild did it the first time, we had a small group engage Festergut while the rest of us hid outside the chamber. The raiders inside died. Many raiders outside were also killed, which was a surprise, but some of us survived and had the debuff. We then did the same thing with Rotface, although he very nearly killed us all when he aggroed on those outside his chamber and chased us halfway to the beginning of the of the instance before he reset and went home. We got the quest done, though.

On this night we tried a different strategy. First, we would kill Festergut, making sure that at least a couple of raiders had the debuff when Festergut died. We moved over to Rotface. Only two raiders would engage Rotface, a tank and a healer. The rest of the raid would stand just outside the chamber, and as soon as the fight started (and the gate closed) the outside raiders would crowd up as close together as possible right outside the gate.

Our paladin tank, Fn, volunteered to stay inside as he was a little more survivable than the other tank, a warrior. The best tank healer should also stay inside. Ahem. That's YOU, Wild. Get in there!

Wild stepped up next to Fn. Wild started loading up Fn with all his HoTs - regrowth, rejuv, and a three stack of lifebloom for good measure. Fn was saying in raid chat that he would need healing buffs, then interrupted himself with, "but Wild is already doing that. We ready?" Of course, the priests had Shielded us both and set a Prayer of Mending (POM) on the tank for even more healing help. They would not be able to heal from outside the room.

"Ready," Wild squeaked, his trigger finger on his high velocity Nourish spell, which he planned to spam like his life depended on it. We both expected to die, of course, but we needed to stay alive long enough for the strategy to work.

Fn engaged Rotface, drawing him to the gate where Wild waited and was already throwing heal after heal at Fn. We had to stay alive long enough for Rotface to throw up all over the raid (vomit which would splash through the gate and hit those outside), which is how we got the debuff.

Rotface vomited. We got our debuff. The raiders outside began running away, in case Rotface came after them now that he was aware of them out there. Fn and Wild were still alive inside that gate with Rotface, but we couldn't possibly last long.

A strange thing happened. A hunter outside the gate attracted Rotface's attention. We're not sure why or how the hunter could possibly have pulled aggro off the tank. But Rotface opened the gate and killed that hunter. Wild and Fn were stunned. Wild hadn't stopped healing, and Fn hadn't stopped tanking, but ... well, Rotface de-spawned and reset to his original position in his chamber. Wild and Fn had lived through a two raider assault on Rotface. And yes, we were all able to complete the quest.

Of course we then went back and killed Rotface, and on our first try to boot. Six bosses down in one night, for the second week in a row. The G1 raid only managed five bosses on their first night this week.

ICC - The Frostwing Halls (ie, wing four)

We weren't done, though. We cleared the way to Valithria Dreamwalker and gave her two shots. We got her up to 80% health on our first try, proving that our victory with her last week was no fluke. Wild was healing the dragon along with Cr. Wild had 13,827 hps, which was right in line with Wild's best from last week. Cr, who had not done this fight with us before, but said she had done the dragon healing with her previous guild, did not do so well, getting 5,959 hps. Wild whispered her, asking if she had any questions, and she said no. We went over the basics anyway, making sure we both agreed to: (1) max heal the dragon at the beginning of the fight, (2) enter the portal every time it was up (missing a portal cut healing in half because the stacks expire), (3) get as many of the stacking healing buffs we can while inside the portal, and (4) when coming out of the portal be in position to start healing immediately.

Wild had other duties, too. When Wild comes out of a portal and back into the chaos of the battle outside, I've pre-positioned Wild so that he is where he's supposed to be. Wild can immediately start healing the dragon, dropping an instant rejuv and then spamming Nourish. While spamming Wild checks the raid. If Pl needs a heal, Wild interrupts his spam long enough to drop a rejuv on her. If she dies we wipe. With Wild's healing buffed up by the stacks, one rejuv will heal her to full health. Wild also checks the tank and will drop a heal on him, too, but only if he's in real trouble. Remember, Wild's main role is to heal that dragon. If Pl is below 50% mana Wild will also toss his innervate to her to regen her mana.

I was hoping to get a better idea on our second attempt why Cr's healing was so low, but something went wrong outside the portal, and when Wild came out, ready to heal the dragon, there were hostile mobs running amok and both Pl and the main tank were dead. It was a quick wipe and we were out of time for the evening.

It's possible that Cr missed a portal on the first attempt and didn't realize it. I forget to check my stacks sometime, assuming that they hadn't expired, so Cr might not have known she missed a portal and lost her stacks. It also might be that she's been trying to heal the raid when outside the portal instead of leaving that to Pl. It's better that only Wild help with raid healing because my heals are instant and hers take time to cast. I will have to ask that question next time. Oh, and it might also be that she just needs practice. Last week Wild got progressively better with each attempt.

By the way, Wild picked up two pieces of gear over the course of the night. No one else wanted them and both had +haste on them. Wild is considering using them to speed up his casting for fights like Dreamwalker where speedy casting is one of the most important aspects of the fight. Wild would have to give up some other stats to do it, as both pieces of gear are i251 and would be replacing i264 gear. But that might be worth it. I have to run some numbers.

Tuesday (9 Aug) - Risking Big

Tuesday (9 Aug) - Risking Big

Sorry to be talking shop again, but Happy couldn't contain himself. Frost lotus prices leaped to better than 30g apiece on the horde AH. Frost lotus prices on the Alliance AH was 14g each. Happy talked Lost into burning her entire stake on ten frost lotus, costing her 140g. Happy agreed to pay 17g each if the frost lotus could make it's way through the neutral AH. Through the intermediaries at Booty Bay the deal was struck, with the neutral AH taking 2g 55s for each frost lotus. The end result was that Happy paid 170g for ten frost lotus that he would normally be willing to pay up to 200g for, saving Happy 30g. Lost, who paid 140g for the frost lotus, is receiving 174g back, a 34g profit on the transaction. For the Wild family as a whole, the deal was worth 64g in profits and saved costs. Not too bad. At last check Tuesday night, though, frost lotus prices on the alliance AH were up to 20g each. This might have been a one shot deal, but Lost will certainly stay on the lookout.

Lost has the AH bug bad, now. She was still waiting to get that 174g when she found a great bargain on greater eternal essence. Normal price was 6g each, but she found them on the AH for 3g each. She had no money to buy them, and she had no access to the alliance guild bank (but that's another story). Lost, not wanting to let that deal get away, got hold of Java. Java went to the bank and took out most of the gold (it's temporary, I promise!) and bought up the bargain priced eternals. He sent them to Lost with a dire warning that she had to return the money taken from the bank as soon as she cashed in on the sales.

Lost needs bank access to return that gold. Only the guild master can give her (and Rakta) that access. The guild master, Daethbot, has been on sabbatical but may make a brief return to grant the access (considering there is 60g at stake).

The Mrs's toon, Chaitee, went for a surprise stroll as well. She has been hanging out in Stormwind, although I've forgotten why. Chaitee heard that there is a cat lady just like her not far from the city. Her name is Donnie Anthania, but everyone just calls her the Crazy Cat Lady. Chaitee and her combat pet, Stretch, left the city and headed south to the small town of Goldshire, where she then turned north up a winding path through pleasant woods until she found the lady's charming little house.


Inside Chaitee met with Donnie and admired her many cats.


Chaitee does have a cat of her own, a Siamese cat, but she couldn't resist adding to her little family. Perhaps she got a little carried away, but she loves cats, and just couldn't turn any of them down. In addition to her Siamese, she came away with four cat carriers, each with it's own occupant: a Bombay cat, a Cornish Rex, an Orange tabby, and a Silver tabby. The Mrs doesn't yet know about Chaitee's little trip, and hope's it will be a nice surprise to open up those cat carriers and claim her new pets.

Tuesday (9 Aug) - More About Nothing

Tuesday (9 Aug) - More About Nothing

The light action of the past few days will hopefully start to ramp back up again. Our cat is doing very well and we are starting to feel like we can relax a little.

Wild is signed up for the Wed/Thurs ICC10 and Philly is standing by to get her ICC 5 mans completed, the pre-requisite to getting into ICC herself. It was frustrating to see all of the ICC 10 PUGs that formed almost constantly over the weekend to get the frost weekly done, and not having the time or the ICC5 completions to get in on one of them.

Wild bought a new heirloom for Java, a level 18 alliance paladin. He has the [Strengthened Stockade Pauldrons] with it's 10% experience bonus, and now has [Polished Breastplate of Valor] for another 10% bonus. Wild let him try on the new gear and then let him run free for an hour. Java returned home to Exodar as a level 20 and riding his new ground mount.

Java on his new Mount

For an unprecedented third straight week, it looked like there was no maintenance on Tuesday. The usual login message announcing the maintenance period was not there. However, when logging in I was disconnected twice before getting in game and then got a pop up screen stating that the server was offline. Another attempt to login resulted in a brief message stating that the world server was down. Five minutes later, though, I was able to login. My guess is that they did rolling restarts this morning without the usual heads up messages. Or possibly something crashed. Blizzard isn't saying.

The stranglehold on the AH loosened a bit Tuesday morning. Usually a quiet day for trading as it's too close to all the action of the past weekend and not close enough to the coming weekend. It appears that some sellers, frustrated with the poor state of the AH over the weekend, did a little dumping and Happy made off with some very good bargains that should help his profits this week. Happy's best buy was three stacks of Greater Planar Essence, in very short supply and worth twice their average price, at one-third the price Happy would have paid for them. Half of them have already sold at nearly double the price Happy paid for them. Things are still tight, but Happy will be able to pay his bills.

Happy and Lost also decided to experiment. Small Radiant Shards list at under 2g each on the horde AH. They used to be a good source of steady income for Happy, but that market is near dead with only small spurts of action. Those same shards sell for 6g each on the alliance AH, and that price has held steady since Lost first started her own AH business. As a means to increase the coffers of Tea Green, the alliance side guild that Lost, Java, and others are part of, Happy agreed to make a sweet transaction of the cheap radiant shards. Happy bought a stack of twenty shards for about 18g. Happy passed them to the horde agent at Booty Bay, and that agent sold the stack for 20 silver (one-tenth it's purchase price) to the alliance agent also at Booty Bay. From there the stack of shards worked their way to Lost. If the 6g price holds (and if there are actually interested buyers on the alliance side) then Lost could see about a 100g profit from the sales. Even at lower prices Lost should still make some pretty good change.

On the flip side, Happy hasn't yet figured out how to make money off of frost lotus exchanges between the AH's. JB needs a lot of frost lotus to make the flasks that anchor Happy's profits. Happy buys in bulk when the price gets to 20g or less. Unfortunately, frost lotus prices are stubbornly staying at around 22-25g, and Happy really, really, really hates paying a premium when he knows he should get it for less. Happy is running out of flasks to sell, though, and JB needs more frost lotus to restock him. On the alliance AH frost lotus is selling for 15-16g each and that galls Happy to no end. Lost simply doesn't have the gold to buy them and isn't sure if this is a temporary drop or if that is the normal price. The cost to move the frost lotus from the alliance to the horde side, even at the lower cost, is probably not worth it. The large chunk that the neutral AH takes out of transactions is minor when the item is sold at a nominal price like the one silver for a small radiant shard. But Lost can't buy frost lotus for 15g each and then sell them to Happy for one silver - she'd go broke in a hurry. But the price Happy would have to pay to cover both the cost of the frost lotus and the take from the neutral AH might not be worth doing. And yet . . . Happy is still thinking about it.

Finally, with the Cataclysm expansion motoring toward us ever faster, there will be two new members of the Wild family coming. The expansion includes two new races: Goblins become a playable race for the Horde, and Worgen (think werewolves) for the Alliance. On the alliance side I had wanted the worgen toon to be a paladin, but that is not one of the classes allowed. Java was relieved to hear that. Since the heirlooms available to Wild's account are all mail/plate armor types, I've decided (for now, anyway) that the worgen will be a warrior, instead. On the horde side there is a pair of cloth heirlooms mostly gathering dust since Philly made level 80. Those heirlooms will go to the goblin, who for the moment is probably going to be a mage. There is no mage in the Wild family. All of this is subject to change and the whims of the moment. But of course. :-)

Weekend (9 Aug) - Auction House Woes

Weekend (9 Aug) - Auction House Woes

About the only activity over the weekend has been at the Auction House and the Veterinary Hospital. Our 11 year old cat had surgery on Thursday and we got him home Saturday night. That has pretty much absorbed our time for the past few days.

Last week Wild got in his two nights of ICC but did not get to run the scheduled Ruby Sanctum raid on Friday night. Wild learned later that the run was called off when the raid leader was called in to work and couldn't make the raid. Wild has yet to set foot in the game's newest dungeon. Wild wasn't able to make the ICC25 on Saturday afternoon, either. Philly fidgets, unable to get time for the ICC 5 man runs she wants to get done.

Meanwhile, Happy and Lost struggle through ever shrinking profits. The "walking the dog" syndrome has thoroughly infected both horde and alliance now. Happy has four full bags of different items that he deals with every day, and rarely has more than half a dozen items "not for sale." Right now more than a quarter of his items are off the market. And many of his posted items just sit there at the lowest price, with no buyers. Even Happy's best item, frost wyrm flasks, went upside down this weekend, with prices on the key ingredient (frost lotus) becoming increasingly pricey while a bidding war drove down the price of the flasks so far that Happy stopped selling them. Ironically, frost lotus is selling at bargain prices on the alliance side, but high priced items like that are not good choices to try to buy or sell through the neutral auction house, and they cost too much for Lost anyway. This weekend will be a complete loss for Happy. Very little cash coming in, and very little worth buying to restock his shelves. Lost is still making a profit, but her stock is very small and the AH is not offering her any bargains to rebuild.

Naithipe was around, flitting here and there in Kalimdor, disturbing the Timbermaw tribe in Felwood and using their tunnels, but said nary a word about what she was up to.

EZ plans to make the Monday pvp night, and is looking forward to trying out her Stormstrike enhanced dual blades - unless the cat decides to change our plans.

General (7 Aug) - Did You Know?

General (7 Aug) - Did You Know?

The next expansion pack for Warcraft, Cataclysm, is officially set to arrive on 1 Nov 2010. Did you know that this is less than three months away? That's about a dozen romps in Icecrown Citadel. That's practically JUST AROUND THE CORNER."

Yea, but did you know that neither of the prior two expansion packs were released on the initial release date? Did you know that the beta test server is not even up yet? But did you also know that once we hit November nobody will be able think about anything but Cataclysm?

Cataclysm could also be labeled "Back to the Future" for healers. There is a great couple of you-tube videos about the history of healing and what is expected to happen with Cataclysm.

In the days of Vanilla WoW healers had to pay a lot of attention to mana regen and "over healing" (which was essentially healing wasted on someone who did not need the heal). Wasted healing used up mana, and using too much mana meant you'd run out before the fight was over, and the raid would wipe. These were REAL concerns in Vanilla WoW. Two techniques to combat running out of mana were popular in those days - "interrupt" healing and "down ranking." Down ranking meant using, say, rank 5 of a spell instead of it's full power of rank 9. Down ranked spells cost less mana. A lot of effort was expended determining what rank of a spell was the right rank to keep the raid alive while not running out of mana. Interrupt healing was used with long cast, high powered healing spells. The healer would start casting the spell, and if the target took a big hit he'd let the cast finish and the target would get the heal. But if the target did not need a big heal, the healer would interrupt the cast, aborting the heal so he wouldn't waste the mana.

When Burning Crusade came out, healing changes made down ranking less important, and large increases in mana regen gave healers a major boost. Tanks got some help, as well, making them more survivable and requiring less healing. Boss damage increased to compensate, but not enough. Healing still required good mana management, but over healing became less of an issue, and interupt healing became less necessary.

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion eliminated down ranking all together and took the BC changes a step further. Mana regen was insane and healing changed completely to accommodate. Well geared healers could constantly spam a healing rotation that ignored over healing. Healing became a brute force process with almost no worry that the flow of mana would ever dry up over the course of a fight. WotLK attempted to address that by making bosses more and more powerful. Bosses like the Lich King, Sindragosa, Halion (in Ruby Sanctum) could two shot a tank unless that tank was receiving a virtually endless, massive infusion of constant healing. AoE damage across an entire raid also rose and so AoE heal spams became common on almost every boss encounter. All that extra damage was added to soak up the massive healing that our mana regen could deliver. How well a healer managed his mana and selected his spells took a back seat to how fast those heals could be delivered.

In Cataclysm, the idea is to go back to the days of Vanilla Wow healing. Mana regen is getting a massive nerf. The main mana regen statistic, MP5, has been DELETED from the game in Cataclysm. Yep, it's gone completely. All mana regen will come from Spirit. Spirit will only be available on healing gear, although there will be arguments over loot distribution from elemental shaman and balance druids who must use mana for their DPS. Spell power is also being restructered. It will appear on "caster weapons", but all other spell power will be combined into Intellect. So, for healers, it seems that intellect and spirit are the two major stats in Cataclysm. Having a spell power caster weapon appears to be a must as well. Haste still has a secondary role. I'm not quite sure where crits come in; it's still there, but it does not appear on the list of stats that will be on gear. The hit stat is also still around, but again not much information about the changes to it.

Well, that took me a bit off topic. Back to healing in Cataclysm. Mana regen will be greatly reduced, while the cost in mana to cast spells is going get higher. Healers are going to have to pay close attention to how much mana they have and keep their over healing numbers down if they are going to last an entire encounter. The damage being dealt to the raid is also going to get higher, but the thinking is that the very high spike damage abilities are going away. Tanks should be able to survive those big hits better, allowing healers to plan their spell casting more carefully. That's the strategy, anyway.

For you melee types out there, your most favorite (or hated) stat, attack power, has also been deleted. All attack power will come from either agility or strength, depending on which is appropriate for that class. There are lots of other stats having to do with tanking and melee, but those just make me want to take a nap, so I'll . . . . snnnooooooorrrzzzz . . .

There is a mountain of other stat changes that will make the number crunchers go numb with excitement. More to come.