Four Frivolous Things Before Breakfast
Normal service is resumed! This post contains nothing about Dragon Age, loot or, err, any Anglo Saxon I’m afraid. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to all those for whom it is important, as opposed to faintly bewildered. Here is some WoW-related silliness.
1) Open Letters
Dear Spammers,
I know I wrote a post while back called ‘failing by inches’ but I assure you I am perfectly happy with the size of my genitalia.
Kind regards,
Tam
Dear Spammers,
Thank you for your generous offer of free twink sex but I assure you I am perfectly happy to have sex with people regardless of their gear-level.
Kind regards,
Tam
Dear Spammers,
This must be in “it is healthy!” It read with the pleasure. Thanks for the answers to all questions:) It in reality learned much new. Here only to the end so it was not dismantled that also from where. Greatly it was pleased, even it did not expect.
How do you like them apples?
Kind regards,
Tam
Dear Spammers,
Yes, I’d like some valium. Please stop spamming and send immediately.
Kind regards,
Tam
2) There’s Something Subtly Wrong Here
I went off with a guild-led, semi-PUG to kill Ony with 24 other chaps the other day. It was pretty efficient, we all assembled, started buffing up, ate non Gordon Ramsay approved fish, and so and so forth, I gave myself the usual once over (do I have buffs: check, am I well-fed: check, am I flasked: check, I have got inner fire up and why can I never remember that: check) and we dashed forward to pull the first group of trash. Even something as simple as trash can be pretty chaotic with 25 folks flinging spells about, so I started off with a quick healing appetiser of prayer of mending and a circle of heal … except … wait … no … something was wrong.
They weren’t working. Eeek! Was it the key bindings? Was my mouse malfunctioning? Had my shift button fallen off the keyboard again (happens fairly regularly, that shift key takes a lot of abuse)? Was it Vuhdo? Surely not! No my beloved Vuhdo. No. None of those things. Shit. Shit! What was it then? What could it be?
Panic!
Alarm!
Flail!
Oh.
Wait.
Surely not.
Oh surely not.
Please don’t say you’ve done that, Tam, please don’t….
Right.
So, yeah, what’s with that little purple swirly icon?
You’re in shadow, aren’t you?
I managed to heal my way through the trash with a mixture of PW:S, renew and flash heal (woot) but it wasn’t exactly comfortable. The worst of it was that there wasn’t enough of a break between trash pulls to stop, change specs, and have a sneaky glass of kungaloosh so I was petrified that we’d go charging into Ony and I’d be stuck in shadow. I mean, yes, I could have contributed my DPS – all 1.5k of it – but 1.5k DPS was not what was promised, if you know what I mean. It’s kind of the equivalent of turning up to a party with a bottle of hairspray instead of a bottle of wine.
And I really didn’t want to have to shout out over raid: “Wait! Stop! Stop! Everybody stop! I’m an idiot and I’m still in shadow!” Not in front of 24 people anyway. I would have done it if I’d had to (personal embarrassment is not sufficient reason to mess up a raid) but, as it turned out, I did just have time to change spec, gulp down some mana juice and get myself into the fight before we pulled Ony. But it was way too close for comfort.
I think Tam is still shaken. I imagine it’s the priestly equivalent of exam anxiety dreams. Do you other people get those? Despite having put quite a few years between myself and my undergraduate degree, I still occasionally jerk awake in the middle of the night, trembling and perspiring, and convinced I have my Medieval literature final in the morning and I still haven’t got round to revising Pearl, and my gown is at the dry cleaners and a passing moose ate my white bowtie. I suspect Tam has something similar – he’s haunted by nightmares in which he turns up to heal a 25-man raid, only to discover he’s entirely naked and still in his shadow spec… Still, at least then he’d have dispersion which sadly is something you don’t get for your exams. But, dammit, you should.
3) Gaze into the void. It is the perpetuity in which they dwell
The other night, we did TotC-10 and decided to follow it up with a speed run of OK (which was the daily). It has literally been weeks since I’ve healed a heroic and, you know, I’ve totally forgotten how to do it. I think it was probably because we’d gone straight from raid to heroic that my fingers got themselves in a tangle but I kept catching myself doing really really rubbish things. Like trying to cast PoH. There’s very rarely time for that in a 5-man, even with three stacks of serendipity, unless it’s one of those special occasion fights like Loken or The Black Knight: Phase III. Or I’d be doing the sort of healing you do in order to augment druid HoTs … except, of course, there was no druid, and no HoTs, only me and a big pile of dead DPS around me. Gah!
I always used to scoff a bit when people gave me the “raiding is completely different, and beyond the capacity of your tiny, noobish mind” speech but, actually, it turns that they might have been telling the truth. Healing is raids is completely different to healing 5-mans. Whodathunk it. Actually, I’m being a bit facetious here. I’ve never doubted that healing 5-mans is different to healing raids but I dislike, on principle, the mystification of raiding. But that’s a post for another time.
Anyway, the personal highlight of this particular run came when we hit the Herald. Y’see, when I raid, I reduce screen clutter to an absolute minimum – I want all my focus to be on the fluctuating bars in front of me, and also on the floor, in case I’m standing in fire. To be an absolute healing nerd about it, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit this in public, but I actually I have different setups for bosses that demand particular strategies. The faction champs, for example, have their own mass-dispel / survival focused set up.
So the Herald induced madness in us, my party members came charging towards me with evil looks on their faces while Tam presumably drooled and gibbered, the DK death-gripped me because doesn’t the fucker always, I threw up PW:S and I reached for … ah. Oh dear. There was nothing there. All my offensive spells had been neatly filed away. I had nothing except mass dispel and healing cooldowns I wanted to be able to track. And a shadow fiend. Go forth, Nigel, go forth and chomp! (No, I don’t know why my shadow fiend is called Nigel, he just is, deal with it)
I did manage to cast a couple of offensive spells (typing it all out is painful, though, especially when you’re being wailed on from all sides, and your Nigel is dead) but then I did what any holy priest worth his salt would do.
Yes. I sat under PW:S, casting desperate prayer on myself and crying until the rest of my party came to rescue me.
It was not my finest hour.
But at least I didn’t die, which is my other main “strategy” for dealing with the madness phase.
4) Lag Takes a Deep Breath
We tried to do Ony-25 last night but lag stopped play. It was kind of hilarious and impossible, and we gave up. But here’s the best thing. Before we took her on, several people were standing around in the mouth of her lair with their 5th anniversary whelplings out in solidarity or maybe to sap her morale, I don’t know. I guess it would be kind of depressing to see some of your kids had fallen in with a bad crowd. A bad crowd who were coming to kill you. Anyway. One of the little guys took a deep breath…
…and it trigged DBM!
BIG BLUE DEEP BREATH WARNING TEXT!
I nearly had a heart attack. So ingrained and intuitive is my response to that blue warning text that I ran Tam face-first into the wall of the corridor in sheer, adrenaline-fuelled panic.
If you ever needed proof that Ony deserved her A, that was it.
Hehe, yes.. we have banned Ony whelplings from the raid instance too after a similar moment of panic where we assumed someone had run in and pulled while we were all still buffing
Hehe, it’s the best bug ever, apart from all the heart attacks, of course. I guess we’re just lucky it happened *before* we were all running around in there, avoiding real deep breaths.
This post was hilarious, esp. parts two and four
Thank you kindly
Shame on you for not updating DBM (at least I heard from my other raiders that’s what the latest patch does ^^).
I have the same problems in heroics after a long night of raiding — riptide, chain heal does not cover the bases like it does in a raid
So, uh, I guess I should update DBM, right? Shame on me. But it was so amusing, I’m kind of glad I didn’t. Although I suspect running away screamining from dinky whelplings is not good for Tam’s dignity.
I’m probably not going to go straight from raid to heroics again quite so speedishly again – it was late anyway but it exploded my brain.
I found it particularly funny, as a priest myself, but of shadow variety, that you would be caught in shadow spec instead of holy. Why? Because my second spec is discipline, mostly for pvp, and I myself have also been caught, unaware of my impending crappy dps, in discipline spec for a raid. You are not alone! My guildmaster, a tree/bear, is often caught tanking heroics in tree spec and bear gear, flailing to keep aggro.
Also funny, my shadowfiend is named Nigel as well.
Thanks for the great post! It’s also motivated me to update DBM as i didn’t know about the whelp Deep Breath glitch.
Everyone knows Nigel is the most common name for a Shadowfiend.
Really? I thought it was George.
Yes, performing in the wrong spec is quite common I’m understand but it’s the first time I’ve ever done it. What really threw me was how long it took me to realise, despite the big purple shadowy buttons all over the screen. I even replaced the batteries in my mouse! *shame* I guess with so many things to check you somtimes can’t see, well, the wood for trees. Which is especially true if you have a high-druid raid comp =P
Well, shadowfiends just look a bit like Nigels, don’t they, as they skulk along the floor, looking like they’ve going to complain about your over-use of post-it notes or not leaving the stationary cupboard in an appropriate state of cleanliness.
I kind of love the DBM glitch … but I guess I should update, huh?
We had that too, but it was during the fight in phase one.
None of us had updated, so there was a brief moment of mass panic and “HOLY CRAP DEEP BREATH IN PHASE ONE AMAGAH WHAAA” before we realized it was the whelp and chided ourselves for being silly.
We kill her too fast anyways, she doesn’t even get a chance to deep breath in phase two before she lands again.
I’d always been under the assumption the healers just healed themselves through Herald, maybe throw out devouring plague or a CC, and waited for rescue.
DPS can gib those things pretty damn fast, you don’t have to wait long.
Hehehe, it’s such a cute glitch. I havn’t updated my DBM yet, I suppose I probably should, huh?
I’ve usually managed to save myself during the Herald madness phase – which is slightly better than playing damsel in distress under PW:S. But then I haven’t done OK for a very long time, not since I stopped running heroics regularly to be honest, and so I’m not sure I’ve done it with Xtreme DPS.
Mini welp triggering DBM is hilarious!
Gobble gobble.
I know, and so cute
So there is yet another reason for you to go disc instead of holy!
You can pew pew just as well, and when you show up in the wrong specc again (and you will, sorry but you will again, this isn’t one of those “learned my lesson, this will never happen again” sort of things -it never is), you will still be able to heal better than ever!
Also.. I didn’t get that 3rd ‘dear spammer’ joke
Oh snap! wait, it was one of those machine-translated ones.. ahhh it had bugged me for a while now
I didn’t realise that disc came with pew-pew? All the more reason to give in to temptation…
“I always used to scoff a bit when people gave me the “raiding is completely different, and beyond the capacity of your tiny, noobish mind” speech [...] but that’s a post for another time.”
Now that is an interesting post right there. cannot wait to read that (now it seems like im trashing other posts for not being interesting… well ehh :p)
Because it is very very different, especially when healing. I think I have found out that I like healing in 5 manned groups a lot more than i do raids. Can’t wit to read your take on it and take it from there
I suppose it depends heavily on class, spec and gear. With my pally my healing is not very different, maybe I use Holy Light more, but I don’t see a big difference in my way of healing. Same with the resto druid, I stack hots wherever are needed or when I know some splash damage is coming up. Since I haven’t healed with the disc priest and resto shammy in raids I can’t tell if there’s any difference with them. I suppose that depends also on healing assignment (tanks or raid).
Really? I heal massively differently with my holy priest in raids than I do in five mans. But then, obviously, I’m usually on raid healing rather than tank healing which is, in itself, a difference. I should really write this post, it’s clearly something intriguing…
Hehehe, I should probably write that post then – I’m not quite sure which I prefer to be honest. I used to feel pretty confident about 5-mans until I started raiding and forgot how they worked. Although I got hammered and healed through Nexus the other day so I can’t have lost it that badly…
I think there’s more to do as an individual in 5-mans. But raids have a bigger pay-off. Perhaps…Hmmm *ponder* *muse*
Not with the priest, but several times I’ve carried my pally tank into the fray without Righteous Fury on. Since I’m usually on holy spec, when I’m asked to tank I switch spec and have to double-check RF is on. If I forget this I start pulling and then when I see somebody pulls aggro off me I start wondering what kind of overgeared monster do we have in the party that’s able to snap aggro off me so easily. Then I see RF is not on and I curse myself. Luckily until now nobody has died (I just get into aggro-generating frenzy until I have a momento to cast RF and get all scattered mobs on me again)
M’Pocket Tank once tanked without RF up, we’ve never let her live it down =P It’s stupidly easy to do if you’ve just changed specs though.
My Shadowfiend’s name is Wilfred.
Have you ever seen the movie Death at a funeral? That is what Thanksgiving is like. We’re all forced to spend a far too massive amount of time with our families. By the end of the day, there are often death threats, lots of tears, and lots of “YOU RUINED MY CHILDHOOD”s.
And I heard about this DBM bug right after the whelplings came out. Which is, of course, why I refuse to update DBM until i get a chance to see it for myself.
Wilfred is a good name for a shadowfiend. I take it, he doesn’t get Willie for short?
I haven’t seen that movie, and God, Thanksgiving sounds terrifying. All the disadvantages of Xmas with none of the advantages. Actually, an American friend of ours did insist we did “thanksgiving” one year because he couldn’t go home to his family. He cooked us an enormous amount of thoroughly excellent food, and we consumed a rather excessive quantity of alcohol and none us had ruined each other’s childhoods, so all was well
The giving thanks part was a little awkward though – he was quite, err, American and forthcoming and enthusiastic and sincere and we were all very English, sitting there, looking sheepish and saying things like “We, err, we give thanks for these rather splendid carrots.”
oh and regarding the “raiding is completely different and will blow your mind”, it IS totally different… and that’s why whenever I talk about stuff regarding healing on my blog, I’m always differentiating between 5 mans and raiding… because you need to spec, gear, AND cast differently! it’s crazy.
It is, indeed, totally different – I think the problem is that, while you’re levelling, endgame seems impossibly oblique and, sometimes, I think people over-mystify it in order to feed the raider versus everyone else upper / lower class distinction.
Wouldnt it have been easier to pull up your spell book and cast from that as opposed to typing them out 0_0
I tried that initially but in a state of blind panic I couldn’t find the spells I wanted and I was just back and forthing through the pages helplessly.
I raided almost an entire evening in my chef’s hat before I figured out what was going on. The whole night I was like “wtf, I’m am CONSTANTLY out of mana”. Yea, but I could cook like a short order cook on the fry line!
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