3841

LOOK AT MY HUGE PAULDRONS!

3842

Do you have to be 80 to do Vash thingy? I am 79 and don’t have any !'s on the Orgrimmar job board, which from what I read is the way to unlock that zone…

3843

Yep, you need to be 80 to get into the Cataclysm zones. You’ll get a notice at the call board.

3844

Yes, both Vashj’ir and Hyjal are for level 80+.

3845

Yeah, I don’t expect it to be zero-sum - it’s a trade-off and it should remain that way.

As an Elemental Shaman, I basically can’t; my big heal lands for less than 10% of a tank’s health and costs a tenth of my entire mana pool, which I can’t spare. Healing Rain costs even more than that!

Bit of a bummer. As an enhancement shaman I have the chance quite regularly of helping out with a decent heal that costs me a lightning bolt, which isn’t so bad.

It’s “Intended Gameplay” a la the Retadin’s healing powers, and frankly I think it’s a wonderful direction for the hybrids to go in.

3846

As an Elemental Shaman, I basically can’t; my big heal lands for less than 10% of a tank’s health and costs a tenth of my entire mana pool, which I can’t spare. Healing Rain costs even more than that!

you need to enhance your big heal with unleash the element.

3847

He’s likely to have Flametongue on there - Unleash Elements doesn’t do shit for heals with Flametongue, it does fire damage and buffs the next fire spell.

3848

I run Flametongue Weapon, of course, because it gives me 1047 spellpower.

The GCD cost of switching to Earthliving would be prohibitive (switch, Unleash, heal, switch back).

However, I don’t need to; our problem in the 10man we were running wasn’t damage or healing, but attention and execution.

3849

that’s your problem, flametongue adds spell damage, not SPELL POWER, as a resto, spell damage does nothing.

L2Play :P.

P.S.

Joke aside, even if flametongue add SP instead Spell damage, it’s not worth it simply because unleash element with earthliving is an instant cheap heal that heal around 4k+ can crit as well, not mentioning it increase your next direct heal by 30%!!! which is way more than 300 more sp will do for you.

3850

idrisz.

I’m an Elemental Shaman.

Hence why I’m talking about offhealing / throwing spot heals as an Elemental Shaman.

:)

3851

I should go l2read, but I refuse too, damn quote on quote get me confused, and stop offhealing in elemental, you give healer a bad rep.

3852

:)

It’ll be an issue when we move to 2healer 10man runs, I think. If both of the healers get targeted by the poison adds from Toxitron, or if one does and the other is busy being flamethrowered by Magmatron, etc… makes me wish my GHW didn’t hit for a measely 10k.

3853

Yes, its unrealistic. Doable, sure. Top guilds? So what? The current healing system is baloney, bar none. How can I heal a tank and a group taking damage and not run out of mana? 2.2s nourish heals for 7k HP (11k crit) aint cutting it and thats the only mana efficient spell I have now. Spell costs are out of wack for what you get. Don’t care to argue it anymore. Start healing and tell me if you think its fun or a challenge.

CC helps and is necessary in many fights. I don’t have a problem with that. Pugs will as I said earlier. You might be lucky in your groups but for most its a crapshoot.

3854

So I did Tolvir on normal twice tonight, once with a group that took it’s time and used 3 forms of CC, the other with a tank who just chain pulled and tanked everything.

With the cced fights, I was at or close to full mana at the end, only needing my cooldowns on boss fights. The second run, I was having to pop my cooldowns every pull.

I much prefer when people use CC.

The holy nerf isn’t as bad as I anticipated, but I’m also getting some gear. A few more runs, and some replacing of my last greens, and once I’m at least in all blues I will feel prepared for heroics.

3855

Ranulf, for what it’s worth, our Resto Druid is important enough to our raiding capabilities that we’re at the moment scheduling raids around him, despite having two Resto Shaman, a couple of healing Priests, and a Holy Paladin available.

His hp/s was more than double the other two healers’ on our kill, and anytime he went down, we wiped within a few tens of seconds; without one of the other two healers, we could go a minute or more.

3856

So, I finished the complete quest chain for the game on the Vash->Deepholm->Twilight Highlands path tonight. Overall TH was decent, but felt a lot more like “traditional WoW”, where first I did quests for A, then for B, then for C. I far preferred the singular overarching quest in Vash’Jir (rescue the sailors from the tentacled beast, with the side-trip being the very coherent Battle Maiden flashback stuff) and DeepHolm (don’t really recall -any- side quests particularly here. Just figure out what happened to the world pillar and get the pieces back.) The whole Alliance/Horde leads to Wildhammer/Dragonmaw leads to Dragons thing felt too reminiscent of dragonblight for me. I was also a little disappointed that the end quest (as near as I can tell) in Twilight had me defeating Cho’Galls right-hand Gronn then just dropping back to town to turn it in. No story wrap-up/sense of closure as in the other zones. (That may be because the full sense of closure comes in the dungeons and/or raid questlines, though; on the other hand I felt as if I’d “finished” in Deepholm.)

Next up is taking my shaman through Hyjal/Uldum/Twilight… (Twilight is going to get old fast I predict…)

Level 84 seemed to really drag (being, as it was, almost twice as much experience as level 83). Compared to WotLK and TBC, the fact that doing the stories here just -barely- lasts long enough to level is significantly different than previous expansions. (Yes, I could have done both 81-83 zones, then both 82-84 zones, but I’ve never really had to do more than half the zones in previous expansions to hit max level, usually well before the ultimate outdoor adventuring zone to boot.)

Still, I think I enjoyed this process more than any of the other expansions. I really felt like I was working my way through a single player RPG. That will probably wear out by the third alt or so, but it’s a nice change to not really ever feel the grindy bits hit me on the first go through this time; usually at some point I feel like I’m just going through the motions to see the exp bar move.

3857

Thats nice to hear Aaron. I’m sure it will get better when folks gear up and know the fights more but the new system is flawed. I don’t know how anyone can’t see that. It is NOT just gear here. Its fights and mana usage/spell cost. I just got my ass handed to me in H Grim batol tonight on the first boss. I’m healing mostly due to not wanting to feral tank given bear aoe threat fail and guild goups need healers more than tanks atm. H SFK wasn’t much better but at least doable.

I’m getting better with the new system. Lifebloom on tank, pray it blooms when I need it to, rejuv on tank 90% of the time. Hit WG for dps/myself and a rejuv/RG if can afford it. That goes to hell when any aoe damage starts going. Swiftmend if tank needs it, that helps heal melee. CC makes trash easy if you do it. Its the boss fights. We walked through normal GB with our pally tank at 149k HP. CC a few times but usually not needed. Maybe 3 fights I was under 30% mana at the end. Boss fights a bit tougher but not bad. Heroic difficulty seems way insane given the gear to get in and with the healing system, its just not fun or easy. I don’t want a cake walk but I have no, absolutely no tolerance for heroics even brand new ones to be 1-2 hours wipe fests of frustration. I want that in my cutting edge raids or that one tough 5 man no one really likes.

3858

Our resto druid made some changes to his spec after checking out the latest thoughts on EJ and has reported fewer mana problems. He’s certainly not finding it a cakewalk but he doesn’t consider it to be bullshit either.

3859

Yeah, I take back what I said about not noticing the issues with healing. Last night I tried to run Halls of Origination on normal at 84 in mostly greens and wound up wiping 4 times with 4 different tanks who all just ragequit before I finally gave up.

Tanks couldn’t hold aggro, dps weren’t cc’ing, so it was basically an all-round clusterfuck, but I could tell that my heals just weren’t cutting it. I need better gear before I do that dungeon again. Let alone Heroics.

I feel like Mastery, while cool, is still not as important as haste for healadins. Or spellpower.

3860

I did the same. There’s a few talents that I didn’t prioritize enough for Cata. After reading EJ a bit, I tried out a new talent spec, swapped out a glyph and I’m having much better success with mana conservation.

I am still not a very good raid healer any more, which makes me sad, but post EJ research I’m far more effective.

~C~