Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘Jools’

Now I have run through the normal version of Magister’s Terrace 2,5 times. Once as a bear tank and 1,5 times as a holy priest healer (a half time when our tank dc’d just before the 3d boss and we couldn’t find a replacement, be it tank, healer or dps).

Some reflections on the runs:

Party
I have played with most of the people I ran with many times before and all of us were Kara-or-better geared, so we were sort-of confident that we would pull it off with ease. Well, we downed all the bosses along the way but there were some unneccessary deaths and wipes that we will hopefully learn to avoid in coming runs :-)

The group set-ups varied a little:

Run 1
Warrior tank
Holy priest healer (me)
Demo warlock
Mage
Hunter

Run 2
Bear tank (me)
Resto shaman healer
Mage
Shadow priest
Enhancement shaman

Run 3
Fury warrior tank
Holy priest healer (me)
Shadow priest
Hunter
Enhancement shaman

As you can see we had at least 2 cc’s with us at all times, which we utilised as best as we could. Sheep, banish, frost trap, mind control, seduce and enslave, all of it used as often as we could.

Dungeon
The dungeon itself is pretty nice, all made up in the style of Silvermoon with the light airy beautifully foliaged gardens and tastefully (?) decorated halls and hallways.

Most of the pulls along the way are group pulls, 4-6 elite mobs, many of them casters, and sometimes an imp along just to spice things up. There are multiple groups in every location, placed pretty near each other, and some 1-2 mob patrols between them. This makes it all too easy to accidentally pull a second group or patrol while you are fighting the first one, so pull back a bit to keep it safe. I will say this again: Pull back so you only have to fight one group at a time.

In all 2,5 runs we managed to pull multiple groups on several occassions. Sometimes we managed to kill all mobs in both groups with none or just a few deaths on our side (and with ensuing joyful shouts of our imbaness!), but other times (most of the times) we were caught between the rock and the hard place and smashed to little dead pools of red goo (at least those of us not lucky enough to be able to run out).

Since many of the mobs are casters the tank needs to pull and then go hide around a corner to make the casters come running to her. (Do I make this sound easy? It’s not! Trust me on this!)

And if you see a lone non-elite imp on some path in the garden or hallways, DON’T kill it! Learned the hard way that the imp is linked to a 4-mob group that will come running from far away if you kill the little twitchy bugger.

Healing
It is rather easy most of the times to find good spots to heal from, where you have LoS to everyone and still be a bit away from the fray.

Some notable abilities of the mobs (from a healing priest’s perspective) are:

Mage Guards drop some sort of magic field (looks almost like an arcane explosion frozen in time) that lowers spell damage and healing considerably – stay out of it! These nasty buggers also throw their glaives around, creating a hard-hitting AOE stun effect. The stun lasts for a few seconds only but it feels like a long time! Be ready with Renew and Circle of Healing to get all back to health . If you have a shaman healer, stay bunched up so the Chain Heal may come to full use.

The Physicians use a nasty poison on their weapons (notable for me since I can’t remove poisons).

Tanking
Tanking in here is a mess. Period.

(I haven’t tanked in months and I said from the start I was a bit rusty, but my friends seemed to have confidence in me and treated me like I had done nothing but tank for ages… ie sheep-pull, dish out a shitload of dps and completely ignore my properly marked kill-order, making me run around like a desperate sheep dog to keep the nasty blood elves hitting on me and not my over-dpsing, triggerhappy friends ;P. I am sure they do this on purpose! We wiped on occasion, but we did manage to survive most of the times, not in any way thanks to my tanking skills but rather luck and the skills of my friends.)

The casters make the pulls rather difficult, they seem to find a LoS to you where they shouldn’t, so they are not bunched up sweetly and easily for you to take down. Oh noes, they are spread around and somewhere in between them is a sheep that you don’t want to break.

The stun of the Glaive throw affects tanks as well, so suddenly you find that the melee mobs that you do have bunched up around you are going for some of your clothies instead and you just stand still looking confused, unable to move for those seconds-that-last-forever!

And then suddenly one of the cc breaks and you have another mad mob running for another of your friends and not you…

It was sweaty, what more can I say… (or maybe I just was a bit rusty in my tanking reflexes…)

Bosses
The first boss, Selin Fireheart, is on a platform with some crystals on it. Make sure everyone is in the room before you engage him, because the sudden appearance of a crystal door will bar everyone outside from coming in.

Its a simple tank and spank fight, he draws energy from the crystals at intervals and then you have to destroy the crystals asap.

The second boss, Vexallus, is like the Curator fight. He spawns adds that needs to be taken down asap, otherwise its a pretty simple fight-

Third boss, Priestess Delrissa, has 4 random thugs accompanying her. The Priestess heals her friends a lot and needs to be taken down fast.

The shaman thug, Apoko, purges the beneficial spells that your party have, so be aware and reapply if you really need them.

The warlock thug, Ellrys Duskshallow, and the naga warrior, Warlord Salaris, fears and if you haven’t cleared the room you will probably draw another pack if this happens. On my second run here, when I tanked, we had 2 shamans who both put down Tremor Totems to remove the fears, but if you don’t have that its advisable to clear all first, since the fight is pretty chaotic and you may have to run around a little.

All the mini-bosses are immune to taunt.

The fourth boss, Kael’thas Sunstrider himself, summons a phoenix that does AoE damage and needs to be kited away from the party. When the phoenix dies the egg that he lays must be destroyed or a new phoenix will be born.

He then makes you all come afloat in the air, tethered to him by some umbilical cord-lookalike, and sends purple orbs of arcane damage flying around you. Stay away from the orbs but if it’s clear around the boss swim down and hurt him. Be careful, if you touch the ground you bounce right back up and might hit and orb. Otherwise ranged dps is very good here.

After a while he tires of keeping you all afloat and needs to rest a little, but then its up in the air again. This continues till he is dead.

And this is the only boss that drops an epic item in normal mode! On my first run he dropped Gloves of Arcane Acuity for our warlock and on the second Hauberk of the War Bringer for our enhancement shaman. Gratz, guys!

News Flash: Jools is insanely happy! After having killed about 200 ogre geomancers and about three times that amount of skirmishers in Blade’s Edge over a period of two months or so, it finally dropped! The recipe for [Enchant Bracer: Spellpower]!

Only thing not so fun was the mats required for the enchant…6 large prismatic shards, 6 primal fires and 6 primal waters…with those mats you would have expected the enchant to give 150 spellpower instead of 15…ah well, I got the recipe and gotta start looking for somethinhg else to farm for when I have a moment to spare :-)

Back to the usual stuff:

As you probably know already, I respecced Jools to holy recently and immediately ran into trouble gear-wise. What is she supposed to wear? How can she improve her healing bonus to the max?

Every holy priest dress list mentions the Primal Moonclothe set as the absolutely best for a holy priest. Well, I am not gonna drop my 375 enchanting or my 375 jewelcrafting to pick up tailoring, so what else is there?

Not much actually. Well, now I tell a lie again, there is pretty much, but not much that is achievable for me, casual player with too many girls to take care of (damned be that alt-itis of mine!). Drops from Kara, heroics, ZA, pvp vendors or BoE stuff from the Trade Channel or the AH is what I have to dress Jools in.

Btw, and this I didn’t realise until recently, have you noticed how aptly named Jools is for a 375 JC? Hihi…

There is a chest that drops from Nalorakk in ZA, and there is a chest that drops from Julianne in Kara. Both are pretty nice and both are pretty hard to get.

There is the hallowed set ofc, which requires a lot of instance going and good luck in drops (= really not an option for me then, which all of you avid readers probably know by know….

…optional reading regarding my luck in drops:
The day I specced Jools holy I went for a Kara run. Huntsman, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, Curator, Chess and Aran went down that night. These bosses dropped in total
- 0 (zero) healing gear that Jools could wear.
- many (a lot!) of other stuff
(Well I am not complaining that bad, I got 4 new shinies that night for my spell damage gear, including the one and only Staff of Infinite Mysteries that Paynne have been longing for so long =( well it aint that bad for a priest either)

It seems that the times I roll goood rolls, like more than 80 or so, are the times when noone else is interested in rolling so I will get the bling-bling whatever I roll, and it feels Fate is just teasing me with this, cause next time when I roll against someone its that customary 10 or lower….oh cruel fate!

…optional reading off)

So I decided to do like everyone else these days, I will go get some honor and buy some sweet shiny epix for my priests healing gear – yeye I know I said I didn’t want to do a lot of bg’s but hey! A girl can change her mind can’t she?

So I go AV for the honor (which goes fast and is fun) and I go AB for the marks (which is slow and pretty painful and have to be spread out through the day to avoid death by acute irritation at your fellow alliance (a guildie of mine called alliance in AB for headless chickens, and I see his point. Very clearly. Too clearly, in fact. Ah well, no pain, no gain…I try to look at it as en exercise in patience and keeping your calm no matter what the world throws at you…))

Anyways, as I went to Alterac Valley I noticed that there usually is enough healing going around on the boss fights, Galv and Drek, so I switched and started nuking instead. This made me curious – is it possible for a holy priest to actually put out some serious spell damage? I am not talking about topping the raid charts, but maybe just a chance to survive out there in the hostile world? And how is the survivability of the holy priest when she goes offensive?

Let’s try to examine this a little.

Jools has about 860 + spell damage unbuffed and a crit chance of 15 % for her Holy spells and about 10 % crit chance for other spells.

How many offensive spells does a Holy NE priest have? Two Holy spells with a cast time, three shadow spells, one dot, one cast spell and one instacast, and one arcane dot.

I am not counting spells like Drain Mana or Holy Nova because they are very situational to use, and I don’t think I have ever used Shadow Word: Death, not even back in the old shady days.

Smite
Now here is a spell with a cool name, smite, smite, smite…mmm just taste the name, not just any other everyday blast-things-away spell but very Old Testament-like, smelling strongly of the crusadery killing of unbelieving infidels, smite-the-mobs-with-the furious wrath-of my-pure-and righteous-faith-kinda spell.

Smite has a 2 sec cast time and does about 1300 Holy damage in her current gear. It crits for about 2000 but not as often as you’d wish (guess 15% is about right).

Holy Fire
Dunno what’s so holy about this one but it looks cool, probably one of the coolest spell animations in the game, with that pillar of white fire blasting the target away…it has a 3 sec cast and hits for about 1100 and with another 450 damage over 10 sec. Isn’t that the most pathetic dot-part ever?

Good thing though about the two holy spells is that they have no cd, so u can keep casting them on and on and on…

Mind Blast
As a Holy priest, MB has a 1,5 sec cast time, an 8 sec cd and does about 1100 Shadow damage.

Shadow Word: Pain
A staple for any priest, regardless of spec. Insta-cast, 2200 Shadow damage ticking over 18 seconds.

Starshards
A Night Elf racial priest skill, an arcane dot that with a 30 sec cd that costs no mana and ticks for abot 1650 over 15 seconds.

So off she went to Shadowmoon to finish those Scryer quests and get a little closer to the coveted shoulder enchant…

And to my surprise and delight it went real well! The mobs went down like snowmen in June and even the occasional add or two was really no problem to handle. Tried it on the warriors, shamans and elekk handlers of Baari and the slayers and chosen of the orc stronghold with the same result.

Usual spell rotation was Shield, Holy Fire, SW:Pain, Starshards and as the mob came running a Smite or two and then wand to death. Reapply Shield if needed.

Psychic Scream and Elune’s Grace helped in the could-be tricky situations of additional mobs turning up, and she took a beating or two, but all in all she did real well and only died a couple of times (and one of those times was when she swam into a group of hordes while doing a quest).

It was a happy holy priest who almost reached revered with the Scryers that day :-)

My shadow priest Jools has been slacking a little lately, not been getting around much. On a whim, I decided to go holy!

Jools has actually been shadow only for a short time, from about half of 67 to 70. Before that she was heavily into the discipline tree – luuuv that reflective shield! When doing the very rare boost for some low lvl friend I used to put on the shield and then just run through the mobs – they killed themselves getting their own damage reflected back at them ;P

Also the mana regen in a heavy disc spec was pretty amazing, hardly ever needed to sit down for a drink (this was very nifty since Jools been a little of my grind-bot, grinding rep for those sweet enchanting and jewelcrafting recipes, timbermaws anyone?)

Had a very brief stunt rearranging my talent points in the mid-60’s, getting that angel talent for the spirit buff, which buffed the mana regen even more. It was about this time that I agreed to come heal in Auchenai for some pug.

I told them I was disc and not very used to healing and it was ok with them. Maybe not the most efficient group, a few of them got killed some times in the pulls in the first room, and then I got killed too. Woosh, the angel shape hovers above the rest of the valiant fighters and I watch them die.

When running back, one of them kindly asked me “You do know that you can heal in angel form, don’t you?” Eeh right, had totally forgotten about that *blush*.

Anyways, we kept going but after I while it was painfully obvious that I was way too unexperienced for taking on healing in a pretty chaotic group. Changing healing targets, getting the right heals off, it was just too much for me to keep up so I told them I was sorry but they were probably better off with another healer. They agreed.

(On a side note, maybe I wasn’t that bad because one of the party members have asked me to come heal some more times, but I have respectfully declined. Or maybe he was just desperate :-)

So now I respecced to full holy with a small dabble in discipline. Holy Nova (this spell I have actually had in shadow spec too – hihihi when aoeing those ballroom packs in Kara), the Lightwell and the Circle of Light – instant (instant!) spell that heal the target and his party members for about 450. Not that mana heavy either, and it scales with bonus healing.

Equipped my healing gear and blushed. Blushed for 2 reasons – why does some gear look like its designed for table dancing or other dubious activities? The dev’s at Blizz definitely need to go out and get some fresh air occasionally. 2nd reason – about 1100 healing bonus, half of my gear greens of the prophet or of the physician. (Actually have a pair of sweet epic healing gloves, the [Gloves of Saintly Blessings] that my guildies forced upon me on an earlier Kara run when all of the present healers had better.)

Jools in her K-mart healing gear. Note the fishnet sleeves, the daring deep v-cut top, the pants that somehow lack the parts between the knees and the hips and the huge turqoise musceteer boots.

So the raid time came and we all went off to Karazhan to start decimating the number of its denizens. Three healers, me, a resto shaman and one of our shadow priests healing as well.

The rest of the nights raid were pretty well geared, having been there many times and I suddenly understood why some of our healers are complaining when I am tanking with my pretty bear – I had nothing to do! The damn tanks hardly got damaged!

(On a related side note, some of our healers are known to go pull more mobs when this happens just to avoid falling to sleep due to inactivity. I was thinking about doing this but decided against it, I’ll pull when I am in bear gear but not when I am in my fragile glass outfit ;P)

Wohoo, 100 hp’s lost, let me give you a renew!

Someone in the melee getting damaged – ooo let me try my instant group heal!

Hmm maybe I should throw the tank a frisbee, just on the off chance he gets damaged.

Prayer of healing, now this is a nice one, maybe I should use it pre-emptively just in case some unforeseen aoe damage happens!

The night ended after 4 hours of raiding, Huntsman, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, Aran and the Chess Event all cleared without a wipe, 4 new shinies for Jools shadow outfit but none for her healing.

So why is this not a good way to start your healing career you ask? Well, how am I to learn how to handle aggro management, chaotic multiple pulls and such like when we raid like a well-oiled machine?

Hmm I guess I am never happy unless I have something to whine about ;P