[WoW] Holy Cooldowns... use them!

Holy Paladin Healing Cooldowns

Recently I've noticed that I don't make near enough use of my
cooldowns while healing. Making good use of cooldowns is very
important to performing at the top of your game. If you're not using a
cooldown that gives you +20% haste for 15 seconds every 2 minutes, why
bother worrying about that extra +10 Haste you got from upgrading
gear?

Paladins have 6 major healing related cooldowns available to us. There
are also "Hand" spells that could help with healing, or preventing
damage as well. I'll go over both and hopefully give suggestions on
when and how to use them.

Cooldowns

Avenging Wrath

This is probably the most iconic paladin ability ( next to the bubble). "Wings", this provides 20% more damage and healing done for 20 seconds. This is on a 3 minutes ( 2 mins with talents) cooldown.

This can be used pretty often. Some people ( me included) tend to "save" it until healing gets intense. Unfortunately this means it doesn't get near the amount of use it should. I personally tend to try to save it so much that I end up rarely using it. That's 20% less
healing i'm doing every 2 minutes.

People have suggested that it should be macro'd to something like Holy Radiance or even Divine Light, the justification being that if you're casting either of those spells, then you'll probably be casting more in the near future. I partially agree, at least for my usage. I really only hit Holy Radiance when 1.) I need massive tank heals, 2.) Everyone is taking damage and I need to pile on the healing. Both of these situations would do well with Avenging
Wrath.

On the other hand, my usage of Divine Light is a bit different. I mainly use it when it would cost too much mana to do multiple Holy Lights or Flash of Lights. In fact with Cata-level health pools, Holy Light does almost nothing at this point. I may or may not be in a furious healing state.

Divine Favor

According to ElitistJerks, Divine Favor is actually more useful or powerful in many situations than Avenging Wrath. This adds 20% more haste and crit for 20 seconds ( +10 with the glyph) every 3 minutes.

With such a short cooldown, I would macro this with heals as well. Holy Radiance is a good candidate, for the same reasons as above. Plus since its basically a mobile HOT, more haste means more ticks and more crit means each tick has more chance to crit. I definitely need to make more use of this cooldown.

Aura Mastery

This is more of a damage prevention talent. "It will give you 6 seconds of "enhanced" auras every 2 minutes. 4076 extra armor, double damage retribution aura, silence and interrupt immunity, 195 extra fire/frost/shadow resistance or extra mount speed" - ElitistJerks thread. Personally I'd recommend the 195 resistance. This is a major boon on fights where you know that a boss is about to hit everyone for major damage. 6 seconds is just enough time to mitigate that one big hit.

Lay on Hands

This is the BIG heal on a LONG cooldown. It will heal the target equal to the max HP of the casting paladin. It will also return 10% of the heal to the paladin as mana. Note: If cast on yourself, it will trigger forberance. Cooldown is 10 minutes ( 7 with the glyph). Very useful for when the tank is going down, and you can't keep him up. This is instant "oh-shit" button. Gives you a bit of mana to boot. The cooldown is long enough that its one use per fight, probably saved for boss fights only.

Guardian of Ancient Kings

This spawns our newest tool, a angel looking pet. It will duplicate all heals done by the paladin. The heals go to the same target the paladin healed. It will also splash heal all targets within 10 yards for 10% of the amount healed. Lasts 30 seconds or after 5 heals. Cooldown is 5 minutes, 3 with prot talents, but that doesn't apply to us.

Some people like to macro this to Avenging Wrath, to power up the heals done by the Guardian. That seems like a good idea to me. I'd be hesitant trying to macro this to other, heals though. The cooldown is just long enough that I wouldn't want to "waste" it. Plus my usual "oh-shit" button Holy Radiance, isn't duplicated by the Guardian.

I personally macro'd this up with Avenging Wrath, and left it as them as something I can press when I need that extra oomph.

Divine Plea

When mana is as much of an issue as it is in Cataclysm, any kind of mana-regen abilities will be used. This ability returns 10% ( +5% with the glyph) of total mana over 15 seconds. Penalty is that it reduces healing by 50%. Cooldown is 2 minutes. Definitely useful for times when damage isn't so intense. But be careful, if you have to do more heals to make up for the healing penalty, then the 15% mana returned will do no good. With the cooldown at 2 minutes, its possible this could be used more than once in a boss fight.

I personally like to hit this in between fights on trash, instead of drinking. I also hit it at the movement portions of some fights (such as during Firestorm in Baradin Hold).

Divine Shield

I'm including this because, while it doesn't raise healing throughput, it reduces the number of players that need healing by one, the holy pally. This helps immensely when shiet hits the fan, so you're not worrying about running around, or getting interrupted because of damage.

Hands

Hands are very short term buffs than can go a long way towards making the target's life easier.

Hand of Sacrifice

Think of this as a bubble with teeth. When cast on a friendly it transfers 30% of all damage done TO the target to the paladin, up to 100% of the Paladin's HP. This lasts 12 seconds or until total damage transfered equals 100% of the paladin's HP. Cooldown is 2 minutes.

A good hand to use on a tank when a boss enrages. With the 100% limit, plus Tower of Radiance talent, as long as the healer is still healing other targets then the healer shouldn't have to worry about dying. This coupled with Divine Shield would mitigate the entire 30% damage.

Hand of Protection

This is the poor man's bubble. You bubble a team member. All damage is prevented, but they cannot attack or use physical abilities. 5 minute cooldown, causes forberance on the target.

This is useful if a DPS, or even another healer's health is dropping way too fast to get a big heal, or taking so much damage that a Holy Shock+WoG can't keep them alive. It also helps DPS that are standing in fire.

I've also used this to calm over-active DPS. If they pull aggro, you HoP them and the boss will go to the next person in line on their aggro table (hopefully is the tank). Hand of Salvation is really designed for this, but sometimes its not enough. Plus this has the added benefit that it cannot be ignored, and their DPS takes a nose-dive. This is bad in a DPS race type fight, but handy to wake up auto-piloting DPS.

Hand of Salvation

Reduces threat of the target by 2% every second for 10 seconds. So after 10 seconds, they've lost 20% of their threat, if they stopped attacking. This is useful if the DPS out-gears the tank and the tank is having trouble staying ahead of the DPS in aggro. 2 minute cooldown.

Hand of Freedom

More of a PVP talent, removes all snares and slowing spells on the target. Useful for the tank if they're having trouble moving. Also useful for dps who might be slowed or snared during movement heavy fights.


Hopefully this little run-through of our major cooldowns has helped someone out there. I've personally macro'd quite a few of the cooldowns to my "big" heals, Flash of Light and Divine Light. Reasoning being that if I'm casting either of those mana-intensive spells then major healing is probably called for. If not, the cooldowns are short enough that they'll come up again.

Even if I do end up wasting the cooldowns half the time, thats still 50% more usage I'm getting out of it than I normally would. Now off to try it out in some dungeons.

Cheers.

Phat Lootz

So Hooff finally got off his lazy belf butt and started going back to work. I spent 2 days questing in Deepholm ( which I completely skipped on the 80-85 leveling ). It took some time but the therazine daillies are now open to him. This plus the dragonmaw daillies provide a small bit of gold, and a steady stream of reputation gains. Relying on getting upgrades purely through normal dungeon drops doesn't work fast enough. I don't run dungeons often enough to get steady upgrades, plus I've gotten almost the best gear I can from normal-85 dungeons.

Reputation rewards have quite a few nice blue, and even some epic pieces for me. A few nights ago the guild did a heroic dungeon run, and I healed. It went pretty well, we wiped once or twice, sometimes to mistakes. My throughput definitely started to wane as the dungeon progressed. We first queued up for random and got Grim Batol. At the first boss we wiped because we had no offtank for the adds. Nib( the tank) asked if anyone minded if we did a different dungeon, I was fine with it. We went and did Blackrock Caverns instead.

The dungeon went well, and I got 3 upgrades total, one for my ret set and two for my healing. I got Heroic: Raz's Pauldrons. With the rare-quality +40str gem, thats a pretty major upgrade to the green iLvl 318 shoulders I was wearing before.

For healing I got: Heroic: Crepuscular Shield. That was also a nice upgrade from the ilvl333 shield I was using before. I also got: Quicksilver Amulet. Wowhead comments say its "The best pre-raiding neck piece for healing classes" which is quite nice. My previous neck piece was a blue ilvl333 neck, so it wasn't terribly huge upgrade.

A nice addition to running that dungeon was that it finally put me over the edge and got me exalted with the Ramkahen faction. This enabled me to purchase their nice blue and epic pieces.

For Healing I got: Sun King's Girdle. An epic healing belt. I'm glad I didn't buy the Light Elementium Belt that was going cheap on the AH. A +40 Int adds even more mana/spellpower goodness. I should also probably get a belt buckle for it, for yet another gem slot. Have to check how much those are.

Ret I was able to buy a Gift of Nadun. A very welcome addition to my then-deficient ret set. I also bought Sandguard Bracers. They are obviously meant for tanking, but the stats were already much better than the ilvl 318 green piece I was wearing. Plus reforging the +dodge to +hit, makes it nice hold-over piece until I can get a proper dps bracer.

If that wasn't enough, opening up the Therazine daillies also let me talk to their quartermaster. Just by questing in Deepholm you already end up at Honored, or close to it. This enabled me to buy some of their lower level items too.

I got Diamant's Ring of Temperance, a nice healing ring. Also Gorsik's Band of Shattering, a dps ring. Both were ok upgrades, but not as dramatic as the earlier upgrades.

To round out the loot parade I also acquired Shroud of Dark Memories and Shield of the Iron Maiden for my probably never used tanking set.

All in all Tuesday night was a loot filled night. My healing set now has an ilvl average of 339, and ret is 334. With this new gear I might be confident enough to try healing a heroic PUG. Maybe, maybe not.

Update

So with my newfound free time I've been steadily leveling my triumvirate of alts. Unfortunately I haven't been leveling them evenly. I worked on Solinari for a while, got her up to Outland, got bored of that, then leveled up Nuiitari. Lunitari is languishing at level 12 merely because I can't have that many characters in the guild. I'm thinking of replacing Caaz with Lunitari, so that I can finally level her. But the guild is short on tanks right now so it may pay to keep Caaz in instead. I haven't decided.

Solinari Level 73 Priest

Soli has gotten up to Borean Tundra. Outland was uneventful, if boring. I've done the 58-68 grind so many times, I do it on auto pilot. It truely is a big letdown after the revamped quests from 1-60.

Before starting outland I had to go back to train up her herbalism. Actually, I leveled to 60 first in outland, then went back. Having a flying mount made training up the herbalism sooo much faster. I even bought her Epic 280% flying, since I was getting tired of how slow the mount was.

Mana has become less of an issue as shadow. With the combination of Shadowfiend and Dispersion, I can usually handle being chained pulled DPSing a dungeon. My DPS is actually pretty respectable, but only on boss fights. The only AOE I have access to, even at this level is Holy Nova, which I forget if it knocks me out of shadowform. Either way it uses a lot of mana for not much damage. I tend to just single target nuke everything.

For healing, mana isn't too bad. I'm trying out the new "smiting" way of healing. Which keeps you constantly casting. Its ok I guess, but I think I prefer the shield+renew way of healing. That might not be too viable once I get into the upper Wrath/Cata instances, so we'll see how that goes.

I've leveled Soli's Enchanting to about 320 or so. Arcane dust is crazy expensive now so I was hoping to bank on DE'ing greens made by Nuii leveling her Tailoring. To do that Nuii has to be at least level 50, so I started leveling her.

Nuiitari Level 50 Warlock

I leveled Nuii to 50 in order to further train her tailoring. Unfortunately the price of Netherweave Cloth is high, probably because of the inflated prices of Netherweave Bags. This makes leveling tailoring in the 300's expensive. The last time I did this on Bob, I had a huge stockpile of cloth, so that helped soften the blow of gold.

At first I was trying to level Nuii as demonlogy. It was the one spec I didn't have much experience with and it seemed to make sense. Having a felguard at such a low level was a boon. I rarely had to stop to drink, and I was plowing through mobs quickly. But as she got higher in level, having the felguard wasn't as imbalanced. Towards the 30's the send-in-the-pet-and-dot style was getting tiresome. I already have to dot the target on my shadow priest, I wanted more burst. I then switched to destruction, which gave me conflagrate. This made quite a bit of difference. Now I send in the voidwalker to tank, hit immolate, conflag and then either a shadowbolt or drain life if running low. The shadowbolt is a long cast, but some talents and procs do bring the cast time down. Its unfortunate you don't get incinerate(fast cast) or even soulfire(instant with soulburn) until much later.

Switching to destruction has really opened the class back up again. With the shoulder, chest and now cloak heirlooms ( +25% XP total), the mana regen BoA trinket, and the guild's +10% XP bonus, you can fly through the levels very quickly.

Unfortunately Lunitari is still at level 12. The main reason being that because she's not in the guild, she loses out on that 10% of xp, which is enough of a psychological reason for me to avoid leveling her.

[Server Farm] Retiring Downy

Yesterday I finally retired Downy. I copied over all the files from the 2.25TB RAID5 array onto frisket's 6TB RAID5, and then shut the machine down. With the changes needed to the den, it was good timing. I was able to move frisket somewhere less conspicuous and downy will be put into "storage" ( probably into its box and then into a closet). I'm not getting rid of downy, just putting it away until my whole situation stabilizes.

Quite a few of the fans in the computers are starting to give out. First it was the exhaust fan in Squirrel. I'm not too surprised since Squirrel, Downy and Frisket are on constantly. Guess I'll have to buy new ones for them.

[WoW]Nuiitari's first PVP kill

This is a comment I left on Miss Mediocre's blog in response to her post Hell hath no Fury

Haha nice story. I suck pretty bad at PVP but I will get into tussle if the need arises. I don’t usually nerd rage from being camped or dying in PVP. Though getting called out as a “bad healer” from a loud mouth in a dungeon will rile me up good.

My own little story:

I was on my lowbie lock, female belf level 36 or so? I was just questing feralas when I notice I was getting dotted up. I noticed a female human lock, level 38 was sending in her voidwalker on me. There was some distance between us so I ran and hid through the thicker part of the forest. Eventually I got far enough away that I was out of combat. I felt a bit betrayed that another lock would try to kill me, the whole honor among deranged, sadistic, demon wielders and all. I said so in guild chat and healed up. Got some laughs and an 85 guildie that offered to help, I said no I would do it myself. Switched out my own void walker for the fel pup ( for spell lock). Mounted up and searched for the lock. Found her questing in an area. Smart play would have been to get her while whe was fighting a mob, but I’ve never had an overabundance of brains. She was at full health and so was I. I sent in the puppy and started with dots. I am destruction spec, so the dots don’t hit as hard as an affliction lock’s. She sends in her void after me. I’m not being dotted up so I guessed the spell lock worked. I hit immolate and a quick conflag. She’s at half health. That’s when the dots start coming. Good thing her void hits like a wet noodle, but the his are interrupting my longer casts. I run in close and hit Arcane Torrent ( idea having just popped in my head a second earlier). By then the dots were widdling her health down to 25%. Conflag came off cool down and another shadow bolt seals the deal. The [An Honorable Kill] achievement pops up in guild chat and the grats start coming in. I don’t stay to revel in my victory in case she calls in friends.

And that’s the story of baby lock’s first PVP kill. My 80 lock on another server would have been so proud.

I'm not sure, maybe I'll rewrite this in character when I get some time/inspiration.

iPhone4 on Verizon

Verizon announced today that the iPhone4 is coming to its network. I'm mildly interested in it because recently I've been somewhat annoyed with ATT's business practices. The most annoying being the change from "unlimited" data to "3GB" limit, for no other reason than just because they can. While I understand that the majority of iPhone users probably don't even approach 3GB, its the fact that we were able to get unlimited before, but now we can't, simply because ATT changed their minds. Thats crap.

Another annoying thing is tethering. They want to charge extra for tethering. So basically they want me to pay an extra monthly fee so that I can use the bandwidth that I've ALREADY PAID FOR. Thats also crap.

Verizon's iPhone4 is playing up that it has mobile hotspot built in. This has been available for a long time on jailbroken iPhone's via MyWi. Not exactly a game changer but still nicer to have it built in rather than having to hack your phone. Of course there will be an extra charge.

When my contract is up I'll have two decisions to make. Whether to stay with ATT or hop to Verizon, and whether to stay on the iPhone train, or jump ship to Android.

[Personal] Lack of posts

I wanted to explain the lack of new content. Currently I'm going through a life changing event. To be honest a lit if the motivation in keeping the stories has been lost. I'd like to keep it going but I've fallen so far behind, the story didn't even mention the shattering yet. I did have a few ideas in mind about how the characters experience the changes to the world, unfortunately I feel that I don't have the skill to do it justice.

I'll keep posting and there will be new installments in the story eventually, when? I have no idea. At this point I'm just trying to emotionally and mentally survive each day. It's been hard I'll be honest.

During my childhood I wouldn't have considered myself a happy kid. I wasn't emo, or outwardly depressing, I chose to keep it in, suffer in silence as it were. The past few years I'd been happy, for the first time in my life things were coming together.

Now I'm back to where I was. I have to relearn how to be happy. It's a long road.