Bang, and the Dirt is Gone!

We lost a good player this week, he left of his own accord and he will be sorely missed. Yes that’s right ladies and gentleman, Edicia has left the building. After not having Trauma drop for the second week in a row, he suddenly has a few ‘game problems’ by which is game keeps logging him in and out unnecessarily. Course, we all have a giggle about it saying that we’re probably better with no Paladin than that Paladin, and he eventually gets online long enough for Esmi to call him out with “it’s convenient that your game decides to break down again after your loot bosses are dead, eh?” BOOM, HEADSHOT. He leaves the raid and the guild, and Gnoor happily bans him from the healer channel, and we get a couple of good BQL fights in before we call it for the night.

BQL is our new progression boss and I’m struggling a bit to get my head around healing it. There’s a main tank taking physical damage and an off tank taking what I could consider passive damage (in the sense that it doesn’t proc Earth Shield), an arse load of AoE aura-type damage, and every ninety seconds or so, a fuckdickton of raid wide damage and that’s assuming nobody screws up. The regular healing is fine, I put my Earth Shield on whoever seems to take a lot of damage (since it’s no good at all for the off tank here), and Chain Heal the melee and tanks while topping anybody up raid-wide with LHW as needed. Then comes the Blood Whirl, I just have no idea what to do. Among spreading out between 25 people with 6 yards between, and them taking 10k hits every 2 seconds for 6 seconds, I have barely enough time to get off two, maybe three Chain Heals at most. We’re getting better at it, but we always seem to lose somebody at the Whirl. On top of that, our DPS haven’t got the hang of bite timings either, so if we make it to the second Whirl then one DPS will undoubtedly get MCed because he’s too busy being Feared to go bite someone, and he doesn’t do it earlier because [insert viable mechanic here].

We’ll get it done, our attempts are slowly getting better, but it’s a long way to go. We’ve never hit the berserk timer as of yet, we usually wipe before that, but our best attempts (even with 10% Wyrnn-goes-apeshit buff) are sitting around 45-50%, we just lose vampires to stupid mistakes and even worse, my mistakes.

What with Edicia gone, we’re short of a Holy Paladin and as much as I’d like to help, I doubt I’ll be allowed to. Squiggle is now level 79, I’m going to get her to 80 tonight and then just go farm the hell out of Sholozar to buy some 226/245 epics, at least (while I wait for Veir to get to 80, anyway), then do the usual Heroic spam to get T9 and whatever else I need.

Speaking of Tier pieces, I read somewhere (I can’t find the exact post, it was on MMO-Champion somewhere in the mess they call a forum) that the mechanics for the Holy/Disc Priest’s T10 were unusual in that the Flash Heal HoT that it applied could ‘stack’ in a sense. If a HoT was applied while a HoT still existed, for the majority of skills (Renew, Rejuve, just about everything) then it would simply reset the HoT counter back to its full duration and anything remaining on the old duration would be ‘zapped’ (or lost/wasted/etc). For the Priest set, it just adds on the healing left on the old HoT to the new HoT, so the new HoT is even more powerful. Using this method, one could effectively stack up Flash Heals (especially as Disc if you’re ‘tank healing’) and get a HoT rolling for several thousand heals per tick.

I was wondering if the same thing applied to the Shaman’s 4 piece bonus on their Resto T10, and it does. Now, without raid buffs and full testing it’s going to be difficult to tell just how useful it’ll be. For various fights (here’s looking at you, Festerbutt), having a HoT that could potentially stack up is going to be incredibly useful for the first couple of phases (until you switch into tank healing, at least). The question isn’t, though, ‘how big can my pretty green numbers get’, but moreover ‘how much actual healing do my pretty green numbers do and how much is wasted?’. If the majority of the HoT is just going toward overhealing, I’d be happier with just keeping the two piece set bonus and using regular ICC drops for the rest.

Then there’s the little issue of homogenization between classes again. Now, I know Shamans are wildly different to the next healing class in a lot of ways, but I can’t help but feel that they’re pushing us towards the Holy Paladin’s regen method. Stacking crit on our Tier gear (when they know that most people look for Haste, at least according to ElitistJerks) just makes me feel like a Paladin all over again, except instead of Illumination I get Improved Water Shield. With such a move, it makes me wonder about the viability of the four piece bonus at all. Yes, you’ll have a HoT ticking and your high crit will mean it’s around even more often than usual, but if my Chain Heals aren’t landing fast enough because I’m losing a rather healthy stack of Haste to use the four piece bonus then what’s the point? Maybe I’m just fussing over .1 of a second on a cast time, and maybe it’ll work out fine, but I’m happy with my Crit level and I’m happy with my Haste level, in fact I’m happy with everything. I never run OOM when Chain Healing, so then stacking Crit for mana regen is pointless, and egh, I don’t know. Shamans are blah right now.

I’ll just keep two gearsets, the Tier10 set for AoE spam happy fights, and a dedicated healing set for fights where I’m single target healing. I can do both, and while that makes my class awesomely versatile, it also means I’m going to have to fork out a few more Emblems and gems for a gearset to match every capability.