Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘raid’

Yesterday after a fast ICC and TOC we went to Sartharions Lair deep under the Wyrmrest Temple to get yet another Twilight Drake for a guildie.

It was not the first Sarth 3D kill I’ve been in on – I got the Twilight Vanquisher title on one of my very first raids with Adrenaline 3 months ago – but it was still a special one because this was the first time I would be allowed to roll on the mount. Because it is such a rare mount and a result of a group effort you need to have been present at at least 2/3 raids during the last three months to be eligible to roll for it, and my three month anniversary with Adrenaline had rolled by just a few days ago.

This time the RL’s decided we were going to zerg it, so four of us healers swapped to our pewpew specs and outfits, leaving only two healers to deal with keeping people alive.

After a few tests we went for it and poor Sartharion went down like a snowman in hell. He did manage to splatter the tank and a few of us around him at the end, but he was so low on hp that the remaining raiders finished him off without even breaking a sweat.

And when it was time to roll for the mount I rolled highest of all eligible members and won it!

Larúe got herself a beautiful twilight dragon!

The twilight dragons are not part of any of the usual Dragonflights - Malygos’ blue ones, Alexstrasza’s red ones, Ysera’s green ones, Nozdormu’s bronze ones or Deathwing’s black ones – but seems to be the result of a breeding program by Deathwing’s consort Sinestra in Grim Batol.

With the discovery of the twilight egg nests withing the Obsidian Sanctum, guarded by Deathwing’s henchman Sartharion, it is now suspected that Sinestra did not act alone but that Deathwing himself was involved in this breeding of twilight dragons, and that he has far-reaching plans of plunging Azeroth into a new Cataclysmic twilight…

You know one surefire way to make me start to tremble and feel icy clammy slithers of dread down my spine?

It is when someone I know comes up to me and says “we need to talk”. Guess I am one of those that see the glass as half empty because that “we need to talk” opener, however worded, always fills me with apprehension of the bad kind.

So when one of the officers in my new guild whispers me just before raid start and ask if I have a minute to spare because she wants to talk to me you can imagine what happened. Did someone suddenly turn down the temperature in the room?

I know I haven’t been slacking too much in this last month I have raided with my shammy. I have made some a few a lot of mistakes, but I like to think I have learned from them and did not do them twice, and also think that I managed to do a few many some things right from the start.

So this talk a month after I got invited to the guild when I happen to know after having read somewhere that a new members’ trial period is a month should not be something to be afraid of, right? If I sucked badly they would have told me something before, right? Right? Right?

Still, I shiver a little as she asks me how I like it in the guild.

I reply truthfully – I like it a lot! The people are fun and friendly and nice and helpful, the raid leaders are calm and cool and I have a lot of fun raiding there.

And then she replies to me, saying not the words I dreaded but those I hoped to hear – they are happy with me and would like to offer me a full membership!

Yes! Yes, please! Thank you!

I still tremble but as I get promoted from Trialist to Raider in Adrenaline those clammy shivers are now replaced by a broad smile and tears welling up in my eyes and I jump up and down in excitement.

I R Raider!

My computer, my beloved laptop, although getting on in years (it’s soon three years old!) and although it has been to the shop twice, has never had any problems dealing with the graphic settings of WoW.

When the special shadow effects were introduced some time ago I got seasick from them and turned them down to the barest minimum where you could still see shaped shadows and not just formless blobs.

I’ve ran all of 25-man Naxxramas (AoE heaven, remember?) without any problems at all, and although I mostly raided 10-mans after that up till just a few weeks ago I never ever had any problems with lag or disconnects during raids apart from the very rare power cut or similar total loss of net access. Never!

Now, enter patch 3.2.2.

The release of this patch coincided with me moving my shaman to another server and starting running 25-mans with her.

On these 25-man raids with her I have been disconnected from the game once or twice per raid night.

It may not sound much but it is one time (or two!) too many, especially since it seems to happen in every fekking raid!

If I am “lucky”, it happens during the startup phase, only making me miss portals to Theramore for Onyxia or the generously provided Fish Feast.

If I am not so lucky, it happens during an encounter. And in case you haven’t noticed or maybe it has slipped your mind, the encounters nowadays are pretty damn unforgiving of people standing still.

Standing still, you know, like someone who has just lost all her control over her toon by disconnecting but said toon is still in the game, still in the raid, and she is NOT MOVING when Kologarn looks at her nastily, and she is NOT MOVING when the blue sparkly roaches start trailing to Thorim and she is NOT MOVING when the lava around Sartharion and his three hench drakes starts churning.

And if the disconnect didn’t do enough damage, either collateral by me and my uncontrolled toon drawing hurt to my fellow raiders, or incidental by me not throwing my heals where I was supposed to, when I do manage to log back in the dc always, always, ALWAYS screws with my healing addons.

I lose all the raid frames, and even if I manage to do a /reload ui while back online, the reloading screen takes forever and ever to load through and all that time I am NOT MOVING.

And even if I do get through that prolonged hell of waiting and having to listen on Vent to what is happening and I actually do get the raid frames back, sometimes they are not sorted, sometimes they are not clickable, and sometimes the amount of health they show are frozen and unchanging!

The clickability comes back once either I or the boss is dead, but the randomness of the sorting linger on.

(Incidentally, this is why I had a brief session of  Earth Shielding the druid tree instead of the druid bear last night, because my main tank setting was lost and the spot in my raid frames grid where the bear used to be was now taken by the tree – same orange color and their names are similar enough for me not to react immediately (hey! It’s not like I read all the names on the raid frames!))

Turning down all graphic settings to the absolute minimum does not seem to help at all, I was playing with that last night and I still got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is server-related – I find Dalaran on Stormrage way more laggy than I find Dalaran on Aerie Peak – but maybe that is just a matter of me being in Stormrage Dalaran during peak hours more often than on Aerie Peak where I am mostly out in the bush or the old world.

Sometimes I wonder if it is raid-related – I raid 25-mans on Stormrage and 10-mans on Aerie Peak, but then again I have done the odd 25-mans on Aerie Peak too after the patch and although my fps was very low at times I never got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is computer-related – my computer is not the most modern and fastest one, and is generally slow when tabbing in and out of WoW, but why have I not encountered these horrbible dc’s before patch 3.2.2 then? I seem to have had more dc’s after 3.2.2 than in my entire WoW history before that.

No, I firmly believe patch 3.2.2 is the root of all this evil – it is the patch from hell!

Well I’m sitting by my game rig
But the frame rate’s way too low
And it lags with every spell cast that I try out

And I’m standing still while running
In the raiding fireworks
Scared beyond belief to get the login screen

And this perverted fear of dc’s
Chokes the smile on my face
And common sense is ringing out the bells

This is a technological breakdown
Oh yes, this is the patch from hell

And all my addons got resetted
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s all just bits of pixels not controlled by me

Oh look out world, take a good look what comes down here
I must learn this lesson fast and learn it well

This ain’t no fresh exciting new content
Oh no, this is the patch
Said this is the patch
This is the patch from hell!

(And fear not, I am not going to sing out. Well, not loudly at least. Well, maybe loudly but in the shower only where no one can hear me.)

I was debating whether I should title this post the more catchy “How To Get Four Achievements On A Single Raid Boss”, but I settled for a slightly down-toned variety.

The well known quote of “Standing on the shoulders of giants” refers to how you can make intellectual progress by using the understanding gained by notable thinkers who have gone before you, to how much farther you can actually see from a slightly elevated position.

In WoW, most of us are standing on the shoulders of someone, perhaps not giants but gnomes, dwarves or maybe orcs. Very very few of us set out into the world intent on discovering it all ourselves (at least not after the first toon levelled to 80 :P).

We seek out information about where Mankrik’s wife can be found (yes, even I have done that quest on a lowbie Horde alt) instead of scouring the Barrens on our own and we happily use knowledge gathered by others to further our own understanding of the world and our abilities.

There is not that many of us that run into a new dungeon totally oblivious to what may come. Instead, we prefer to study videos made by those who really did go in not knowing what to expect and we read up on encounters and what information has leaked from various sources before we even enter the big ugly mofo’s lair.

When we see the big dragon lying asleep, curled up on the floor of her cave, we know that she has a nasty breath and a tail that will swipe if we come too close, we know she will fly up after a while and breathe lethal fire down upon us and we know her eggs had better be left untouched or we may regret it.

We have an inkling of what to expect and we work out a way to get what we want, sometimes by slavishly following someone else’s tactics, sometimes by tweaking those tacticts to suit our own group and abilities.

We are standing on the shoulders of gnomes, elves and orcs. We use the knowledge and information and tactics and understandings gained by the people who have gone before us.

Nothing wrong with this of course.

I don’t need to prove the Pythagorean Theorem myself before I use it – I can see the proof and understand it and gladly use it.

If I am going kayaking a weekend I want to know beforehand how to get up again in case the kayak does a flip and I get submerged, I don’t want to work it out on my own hanging upside down in the water.

If I am going to be part of an attempt to do the Assembly of Iron the hard mode way, ie killing Steelbreaker last, I want to know what I should look out for and how I should try to react to the various bad things coming my way.

(Now, those of you who know me know that I’ve usually been very keen on wanting to experience new dungeon and raid content fresh, of not knowing what to expect when I entered, of finding out myself why doing certain things are good and some are bad.

I have been very stubborn about this, but lately I have somwhat reluctantly acknowledged the fact that information does not always diminish the joy of the play.

Because while there are thrills and joys to be found in exploring and discovering things, there are also thrills and joys to be found in the execution of things, of having a theoretical if not yet practical knowledge of the steps of the dance and how to follow in your partner’s lead.

And, of course, the fact that most people I run with would already have a good knowledge of the fights and me refusing to listen did only leave me the noob might have had something to do with my changing my views on this as well :P)

This possibility to stand on other people’s shoulders is also why a generally bewildered and somewhat bedraggled raider like me can snag four achievements in a single boss kill. I was standing on the shoulders of both the people I’ve raided with before and the people I was raiding with that night as I went from doing 10mans the normal way to 25mans hard modes without going through any intermittent stages.

It makes me feel grateful and indebted and humble – regardless if you’re doing the social variety or the more hardcore one raiding really is a team effort and I hope that I can pay it back and that someday someone else will be standing on my shoulders.

One sure way to rub your nose in how many addons you rely on in your daily WoW is to transfer to another server.

Because, you know, all your addons and user interface and macros and even Blizzards’s own in-game options will reset their settings when you transfer and you will end up with a blank slate of helpful addons and options not being helpful at all.

And somehow they are all inter-related. I could not customise my HealBot until I had fixed my macros I use therein, I could not dress my shaman in her various ItemRacked gear outfits until I had  set all stats displayed in RatingBuster. And I had totally forgot how to tweak the displays of the plethora of BigWigs warnings so I ended up with them all in the middle of my screen obscuring important things going on.

Thanks to a pro reminder of a fellow transferee (you know who you are – thanks!) I had been clever and screenshotted all my macros and settings for some of my addons, so it was not such an ardous task to fix it all as it might have been. But still, it took a good many hours to pimp ‘em all to my satisfaction.

Got some aha-experiences as well when I worked my way through the addons. HealBot, for example, comes not blank but with a pre-set suggestion of shaman heals and spells. Did you know shamans have a spell called Cure Toxins? I didn’t. Can’t remember ever using that spell, especially since Cleanse Spirit does the same thing for the same cost and with the added benefit of removing a curse as well.

And even though you test and tweak and check them you still need to do a live SAT to weed out all the little bugs and things that ar not quite right.

For example, I thank the gods of Providence that my very first run with the raid guild I’ve applied to (and been accepted into!) was 25 man Vault of Archavon and not 25 man Iron Council on hardmode. I know the VoA fight a little – enough to be really really determined NOT to die in a fire (thus proving that I am a noob instead of just suspecting it) and with my instant self-heal spells handily macroed in to save my be-tailed behind in case of an emergency.

I did manage to not die in a fire, I managed to not die at all actually, and after having calmed down a bit from the initial panic (what? now? no, I am not reeeeeeeady!) I slowly woke up to the fact that my Chain Heals did not, in fact, splatter their pretty whitish-green lazor beams all over my fellow raiders.

And I rapidly found out that this was because I had, in fact, not bound the Chain Heal to its usual left mouse button hot-key. Residing there was now the eminent Healing Wave, a spell that is not bad at all but perhaps not the best choice for raid healing :P

Anyways, I got it worked out eventually and got a whole bunch of new ideas for how to Improve Stuff as well! I see many hours of macro playing looming ahead! :-)

I have recently been contemplating a switch from social 10-man raiding to a more hardcore 25-man raiding.

The difference (for me) between social and hardcore is a difference of focus. It is not a difference of skill, of time, of knowledge, I see it simply as a difference of focus.

A social raid focus on bringing the humans behind the toons, and may end up with for example two warriors tanking, two paladins healing, three mages dps’ing but no priest and no shaman.

A hardcore raid focus on bringing the toons, on the on-line world, and making sure that the raid is balanced class-wise to get as many possible abilities and buffs at hand to maximise the chances of being able to handle all kinds of situations, to maximise the chances of success.

A social raid chooses the players first, and the toons they play tag along. The goal is of course to see content, to down bosses and perhaps even to do achievements and hard modes, but their focus is on having a good night out with friends, and if the raid halter a bit because one or more of the players are not exactly up to speed, the raid works around that somehow.

A hardcore raid chooses the encounters first and the toons they need to beat these encounters, and the players who control them tag along. Their goal is the same as the social raids, and this goal is also their focus. Content, bosses, achievements and hard modes, and if a player is not up to speed she must learn to be so or she will not raid again.

One way is not more right than the other, it is simply two different ways of playing the game. One is bringing a bunch of friends and see how far you get, the other is deciding how far you want to go and seeing which friends you need to bring to get there.

However, as I was doing this contemplating, I’ve come to realise that the difference is larger than I initially though. It is not just a difference in which players or classes you bring, which goals you set up or how you deal with players who can’t meet the requirements of the encounters.

It is also a difference in how you treat your own toon.

I’ve come to realise that I will have to look over my gear and possibly probably certainly need to do some regemming and re-enchanting and even altering my selection criteria for what I pick to wear.

In a social raid, you are never quite sure what kinds of buffs and abilities you will get. Even though many buffs overlap nowadays, you can never be 100% certain you will have Replenishment, Blessing of Wisdom or Mana Spring totem, Spirit or Intellect buffs, just to name a few healery-related buffs. Or if you dps you can never be 100% certain you will run with a draenei in the group for that nice 1% extra hit chance.

Most likely you will have these buffs available, but you can never be certain and this uncertainty makes you gear your toon to be self-sufficient.

You don’t want to end up out of mana half way through the bossfight because all your replenishing friends were out of town that night. You don’t want to see your heavy hitting spells miss the boss because without that pretty draenei shaman in your group you are not hit-capped.

But it is different in a hardcore setting, and especially so in a 25-man setting. You know you will have Replenishment, you know you will have Intellect and Spirit and mana regenerating buffs. You know you will run with a draenei.

It frees you up to increase your spellpower, haste and crit and lower your mp5. It frees you up to replace those hit rating gems and enchants with something else.

If I ever get the opportunity to go down the way to the 25mans hardcore raiding I will have to stop being so damned self-sufficient and start relying on other people to be there.

It is kind of scary actually, like standing on a top of a high bridge with a bungee cord tied around your feet, contemplating the jump, knowing it will be a wonderful thrilling exhilarating experience, but still dreadfully afraid that you just will go splat at the bottom instead of bouncing back up.

I love riddles.

I can spend serious amounts of time solving logic problems, puzzles, crosswords, any such things.  And I am especially fond of riddles like this famous Zebra puzzle:

Facts:

There are five houses in five different colours in a row.

In each house lives a person of a different nationality.

These five owners drink a certain beverage, smoke a certain brand of
cigarette and keep a certain pet.

No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of smoke or drink
the same drink.

Clues:

The Englishman lives in the red house.

The Spaniard owns the dog.

Coffee is drunk in the green house.

The Ukrainian drinks tea.

The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.

The Old Gold smoker owns snails.

Kools are smoked in the yellow house.

Milk is drunk in the middle house.

The Norwegian lives in the first house.

The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.

Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.

The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.

The Japanese smokes Parliaments.

The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Question: Who owns the zebra and who drinks water?

(If you are too lazy to figure this out yourself the solution can be found here.)

Now, some months ago when I was a brand new officer in AT I offered to help out with raid preparations and sorting the groups out, also known as raid slotting. At first, I was really clueless and unsure about how to do this and the raid leaders had to give me a lot of pointers and switch people around to get viable raid groups.

But I got the hang of it eventually, and these days I most often manage to sort our two 10-man raid groups on my own and our raid leaders seem to think they are ok (at least they don’t object too much ;P).

And I’ve come to realise why I really like doing this raid slotting. It is a puzzle, a logic problem!

And it is even more complex than the one above because I have another dimension to keep in mind: time. I need to keep track of past and future attendance, to get a fair and even slotting for the raid groups I am currently sorting. Complex, many-sided puzzle… me likes!

So, check this example out:

Facts:

AT guild raids are held on Wednesdays and Mondays.

These raids’ primary venue is Ulduar.

There are two raids with 10 players in each raid.

In each raid there will be two tanks, three healers and five dps’ers.

Raid Core (RC) players will have priority on going to Ulduar and on raid spots overall these nights, with the option of offering their spot to a guildie or alt if the raid goes to Naxx instead.

Players not in the RC will be rotated in as fairly as possible, considering gear levels and number of past raids attended.

Rotating RC players out of Uludar runs will also be done as fairly as possible, considering past raid venues attended.

Raiders saved from the Wednesday will have priority on the Monday run.

If all raiders do not meet requirements for Ulduar, the group will go to Naxx or other 10-man raid venue. 

All classes should be represented in each group to ensure maximum buffage.

Clues:

Sign-up/sign-off post for Wednesday. (RC signing off due to RL issues, not-RC guildies signing up if they want to come)

Sign-up/sign-off post for Monday next. (See above)

Excel spreadsheet on past raid attendance and raid venues, including RC, not-RC, benched people and replacements.

Question: Which players shall go where tonight?

Solution:

*cogwheels start to spin*

Our raid force consists of 17 people in the Raid Core (people who have committed to raid two days a week) and about 5-10 more who sign up for individual runs with very varying frequences.

So, contrary to the Zebra puzzle, the raid slotting may have several solutions, and there are a lot of “If A Now Then B Next Time” situations as I work it out.

“If I bring my warlock to group A tonight, resto druid X can come heal and next Monday when X can’t make it I’ll bring my resto shaman instead and mage Y whom will be able to come then will pick up the empty spot left by my warlock.”

“Paladin tank Z will be coming on Monday, so if feral druid NN tanks tonight he can go kitty on Monday and I will slot in that new DK tonight.”

“XX, YY and ZZ has been in Ulduar every time they’ve signed up, so since we had to settle for one U group tonight, they will go Naxx instead.”

The cogwheels keep spinning as the raid groups form, as I work throught the clues and check them against the facts.

And then I present the solution, two groups with the right amount of tanks, of healers, of dps, replenished, heroic, buffed to the teeth with every possible buff you can think of, the group outlines for the continued raids already formed in my head.

It is satisfying, and it is beautiful.

And like every other thing of beauty, it is ephemeral and next week I will do it all over again.

I have a lvl 80 resto shaman and a lvl 80 warlock.

Both of them have done their time in Naxx10 and Naxx25, and are now working their way through Ulduar10.

I also have a lvl 80 druid, bear to the bone and just occassionally a kitty. (Well, I say occassionally but I mean a lot, she’s been mostly questing and she usually do that in kitty-cat form. Miaow!)

Anyways, some weeks ago as she was about a half bar of xp from dinging the big 80, one of my fellow guildies announced in gchat he was starting up a Naxx10 run, and wanted volunteers.

So I volunteered. “Sure, I’m in, give me 20 minutes to finish this quest.”

And they did, and I did, and I hs’d to Dalaran, got my Trollwoven Girdle and Chain-Gang Legguards from the bank and flew off to Naxxramas. (I might be just recently dinged but I had planned ahead a little and picked those things up from the AH for a bargain some time previous to my ding. Had even gotten a Jormungar Leg Armor for those new legguards.)

The rest of my gear was mostly lvl 70 left-overs from my Gruul and Kara raiding days, complete with an Earthwarden and the Merciless Gladiator’s Dragonhide Spaulders and Helm.

You might (correctly) assume that some of my fellow raiders were dubious to say the least about me coming to tank for them in Naxx10. Just dinged 80, dressed in old lvl 70 raid rags, and really rusty tank-wise since I hadn’t tanked a single thing since said lvl 70 raids, and those had not even been at the edge of end-game raids, just Karazhan and Gruul’s.

Anyways, thanks to my fellow raiders the raid went excellent and we got three wings down and finished the entire place off the following evening.

I had a blast. It reminded me of my first time ever tanking in a raid and I loved it. Sadly, I have not had much time to go raiding with my roaring bear, my Ulduar raids taking precedence, but by now she has a few Naxx runs under her thick hide.

And I have gotten a healthy reminder of the difficulties a tank face.

Playing a dps, especially ranged dps, does not necessarily teach you anything about how to behave in groups or raids. You are free to just go pewpewpewheywhere’dmymanagoandwhyamIdeadonthecoldfloorhere because you trust the healer to keep you alive and the tank to keep the mobs from beating on you?

Playing a healer makes you aware of the benefits of putting health pots and stones easily accessible on your action bars, and to actually use them. It makes you remember to run out of void zones. It makes you time your Lifetaps to when you hear that watery splash or get engulfed in that green swirl and you never ever Lifetap-zerg if you play a healer on the side.

Now, playing a tank makes you aware of a lot of other things that you don’t really think about otherwise.

Now you understand why the dps should wait a little while before unleashing their full power, because you are still manouvering the boss into position and haven’t started working up your threat seriously yet and those (un)lucky crits from some impatient dps will make the boss run away from you, and although you usually can taunt it back it will make you lose time. While it may seem easy to get the boss where you want it, it is really rather tricky to make it obey your sit-command when your camera swings around like a weathervane in a gale and the fireworks are going off left and right.

You understand why it is crucial that the tank runs in first, because if the boss targets someone else before you he may evade your attacks as you engage him and you won’t get him back before he has wiped half the raid.

You understand why it is difficult for melee to position themselves at correct range and also avoid any nastinesses the boss spawns around him because you are in the middle of the fray yourself and can see (or not see) the insane amounts of fireworks going off around you, white and red and yellow and green numbers floating up, boss mod warnings beeping and thundering, blurring most things around you, increasing the probability for that shimmering red glow around you to work its evil effects on you unheeded until it will be too late.

You get a crash course in situational awareness as you keep an eye out for every headless-chicken-style fellow raider of yours, who wanders off into a new pack of mobs as they are fighting down your current ones, and you get to really appreciate the ranged threat-makers of yours, like Faerie Fire and Growl, so you don’t have to run across the entire room, dragging a pack of mobs with you, out of the aoe beating them down to pick up those other mobs beating on your wayward compadre.

And you really really understand why anyone who has a mob beating on them generally should run TO the tank and not try to run away from the mob.

You know these things already, of course you do, but sometimes it is good with a hands-on reminder like this.

A reminder that you do not really know what it is to be in someone else’s shoes until you have walked a mile in them.

A reminder that every thing is easy to do and every choice is an easy one if you look at it from the outside, but when you find yourself in the middle of it, looking at it from a different perspective, it is not always so easy and clearcut as it may have seemed.

To quote one of my all-time favourite songs:

But before you come to any conclusions
Try walking in my shoes
Try walking in my shoes

You’ll stumble in my footsteps
Keep the same appointments I kept
If you try walking in my shoes
If you try walking in my shoes

So, even if you are not suffering from the severe alt-itis to the extent that I do, I have a tip for you:

When the shit hits the fan, when the shoot-out at O.K Corral goes down and the bullets start zinging by, when you think you are safe on the straight and narrow and looking down on the one struggling in the mire below, do try to keep in mind that maybe you do not see the whole picture, maybe you have too narrow a perspective.

Maybe if you get down there you would stumble too and fall on your face in the dirt.

And maybe I would be there then to help you get up.

Imagine this.

You are a druid, one of those shapeshifting ones, you know.

You have played every single level in this game as feral. You have tanked every instance from the Dead Mines to Maraudon to Scholomance to Shadow Labyrinth to Utgarde Pinnacle and beyond as a bear and you have loved every minute of it.

You missed raiding in Vanilla WoW but maybe that’s for the best because the only druids raiding back then were the healing ones. You more than made up for that by raiding in the Burning Crusade, you know every nook and cranny of Karazhan, of Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep, and you can find your way around Mount Hyjal too in a pinch.

And now you are in Northrend, raiding with your guild, with your friends, and having a great time tanking all the big and not-so-big ugly mofo’s with your face. Roar! Bring it on!

In the course of these fun raids with your friends you have actually picked a piece or two of leather healing gear, you know, those drops that would have gone for DE otherwise, you can wear it and might be handy someday to have a little healing set. And this healing set grows as you keep raiding, and soon you have a rather good one.

You lug around this healing set in your bags, always prepared, never using it, cause frankly, who would ask an imba bear tank to don some spell power gear and shoot of the few heals she can before she runs out of mana? The very few times you are out of bear form when raiding you are in kitty form, clawing and raking the mobs from behind. Miaow!

Now, enter dual specs.

You have too much gold lying around from excessive questing or smart AH day trading, so you visit your trainer and learn the ability to dual spec. And you choose a healing spec. Why not, you have all that healing gear that noone else wanted lying around, now maybe you can get some use out of it.

And then one day you lack a healer for your raid but you have plenty of tanks, so you offer to put on your brand new, never used spell power gear and help heal this run. You know, just to make it happen.

The gear chafes, the spells do not come naturally to you, your entire raid frame setup is for tanking and not healing, and your reflexes betray you in tricky situations. Maybe you do not exactly wipe the raid every time, but you sure make the other healers jump around a lot to cover your laggy healing.

And you know what? You discover that you don’t like healing. You have no wish whatsoever to keep healing but you hang in there, doing your best to keep people alive.

After the run you breathe out, stashing your healing gear in a dark dusty corner in your bank where you will soon forget about it and get back into your gory, bloody and beloved tank leathers. Ah, the bliss!

And then somehow your raid group changes, one healer after the other cut down on their playtime due to real life issues, a whole bloody epidemic of real life comes crashing down on everyone of a healing inclination,  and it seems every new raider joining your little friendly guild is another tank or possibly a melee dps. So when the next raid time rolls along you are asked to heal again.

You don’t like it, you know you suck at it, but you also know that if you persist in wanting to tank this run you won’t be going raiding tonight. In fact, none of you are going raiding tonight if you don’t get that stashed-away almost-forgotten hated gear back out of its dusty corner. And you want to raid, you want to have fun with your friends, so you go get it.

You wistfully think that maybe you’ll grow to like it, maybe this sudden influx of new tanks whose only healing spec is the Bandage one will subside and the usual healers will come back. Maybe pigs will fly and maybe there will be a snowball fight in hell.

And you go in there with a heavy heart, listening to the happy banter of your friends, cursing the day you bought that dual spec, cursing the possibility even to get it, cursing those pure classes like mages and rogues who whine about that nobody will ever want them anymore when hybrid classes get to dual spec.

You don’t want a dual spec! You want to tank, not heal!

And you wonder for how long the wish to raid will be stronger than the wish to play the way you like.

Remember how I talked about the painfulness of being at the low end of the dps meter?

I modified Paynne’s spec a bit to a variety of the Felguard/Emberstorm spec, put Incinerate on that easy-to-reach key where I used to have Shadow Bolt, and dove head first into the world of raiding again. And it payed off!

Paynne is at the top of the DPS chart!!

Admittedly, this is on one fight only, and one that is very good if you are an aoe’ing dps class, but look at the stats from the last time Paynne was there:

In these 2 weeks since that first Gluth fight she has almost doubled her total dps output and went from a measly 2300 dps to more than 3900.

Granted, she has had a few gear upgrades, but mostly her boosted dps is a result of me sitting down and actually looking around for a spec that would suit me for both raiding and solo play. This spec is allegedly not putting out as much hurt as an affliction one, but it is also allegedly a lot easier to play since you don’t have to keep track of a lot of different dots ticking down.

This is how I play it:

Trash packs

Dot a mob up with Curse of Agony and Corruption and send the Felguard in with his Cleave enabled, empowering him whenever it comes off cooldown. The shadow damage ticks from the dots will proc Molten Core, and you rain fire down on the mobs’ heads. See all the pretty yellow numbers pop up on your screen!

Bosses or single-target trash mobs

Dot dot dot (no, I am not referring to Mamma Mia) the big ugly mofo with Curse of Agony,  Corruption and Immolate and start spamming him with Incinerate. Send the Felguard and empower him as often as you can. Like before, the dots will trigger Molten Core, and take care to always keep a fresh Immolate up for the damage increase to Incinerate.

See, not very difficult! :-)

So, the raiding is going ok with this spec, but how about the solo play and questing?

Well, since this spec leaves Paynne with only rank 1 in Mana Feed and completely devoid of the Fel Synergy and the Demonic Resilience, her Felguard is a bit more fragile when he is taking on the mobs as a tank instead of a dps, and she needs to Life Tap and  feed him up a lot more often than before. It’s not a huge difference in questing speed, and the increased raid damage makes her more than willing to live with it :-)