One Boss DOWN!

Brief post to brag...

That's the voa boss of Cat, and I healed him. Undergeared me! Oh, and a awesome holy pally too, but yay I raid-healed and I didn't go oom (though I did have to pop 2 of my 3 mana cooldowns) and no one died. Plus, we two-shot it! Yup, I have awesome guildies.  We split into two groups, stacked on the two tanks, and ran around like chickens with their heads cut off during the lots of fire phase.

Raiding officially starts Thursday, and my gs seems stuck at 338. I'm hoping the purple gloves from Earthen Ring bring it up enough, and maybe a few more heroic drops? Every item I have is 333 or above, so I'm not in bad shape, just not as good as I'd like to be.

So here's hoping that this BIG STORM that's supposed to hit Sunday night brings loads of snow and no power outages, so I can run heroics all day for rep and shinies. Mostly rep.

My redone UI (thus far)

I spent a hour or so on this tonight, and so far Lyllea's, Anput's, and Eiunn's UIs are doneish. Here we have a few before and after shots...

Eiunn, the shaman. Before....

Eiunn's after. I still need to fiddle with Sexymap to make it match better

Lyllea's, in shadow, before

Lyllea's, also in shadow, after. Vuhdo's not completely set-up, I do not want it in the middle of my screen as shadow, but that's tomorrow's fix.

I've gone from 70+ addons to 40ish, which I think is good, and I like the switch to the lighter grey color-scheme. Also, that spell timer isn't visible all the time, I just hadn't locked it when I took the cap.

My Current To-Do List

Okay, this is mostly because I'm getting myself confused, and needed to write this down somewhere.

First Goal: Get Lyllea raid-ready. To do this I need to/should probably...
a)unlock Hyjal and start that rep grind. Ideally I'd be at exalted when I start raiding. While I'm at it, I should probably start running Wildhammer dailies and figure out if Ramwhatever has dailies and unlock those.
b)get therazane and earthen ring to exalted
c)either level Monera's inscription to get This great holy offhand or get the mats and get a guildie to do it. I already have 4 of the inks needed, and all of the volatiles. 4 more inks would be 800 gold, or I can keep herbing and buying up cheap herbs when I see them.
d)get enchanted. I've been slacking on this, partly because I have to level the DK to get mats and I don't really wanna level more in Northrend. Been there, done that way too many times.
e) actually run heroics and normals. I've been avoiding doing this, but with the first raid in a couple of weeks, I REALLY can't put it off any more.
f) Building two gear sets, one for holy and one for shadow. This isn't horribly urgent, since I know I'll be healing in raids to start with, but it'd be nice to at least have a hit-capped gear set.
g) Redoing my shadow spec to pick up silence.
h) Get rawr working and have a gear upgrades list ready to go.

Second Goal: rebuild my professions web. There's some overlap here with getting Lyllea ready. For this I need to...
a) level Monera's inscription and herbalism, since she's the current leveling alt. While I'm at it, I'll be attempting to get her heroic-ready.
b) level Garetia's alchemy for access to metagem and truegold transmutes. This may or may not involve actually leveling her. I'm not sure if Alchemy has some recipes locked in Twilight Highlands or not.
c) look into the other professions (enchanting, leatherworking, blacksmithing, tailoring, ect.) and see what I feel I'm going to need. Tailoring, enchanting, and leatherworking are all on toons that have to be leveled to be useful at this point, so they're probably on the back-burner.
d) Actually remember to do the cooking daily on Lyllea, Monera, Garetia, and possibly Eiunn. Also need to remember to do the fishing daily on Lyllea and Garetia (Lyllea for the skill points and Garetia for the pet).
e) Get Lyllea all the gem cuts she and Monera will need. Then pick up gem cuts for other alts as I level them. This means hitting EJ and looking at what fashionable priests and druids are socketing this season.

Third Goal: get my UI cleaned up. This is probably going to involve a complete rebuild, starting by backing up all my addons and settings, then reinstalling what I think I can't live without. I know I'd like to find an addon that can replace mfclip and hotcandy, as well as show me feral dots. I might try a new bar mod, and I'm certainly going to find a new buff mod, or just not use one at all. This'll probably end up being a blog post or two. It's really high past time I rebuilt my UI from first principles, and a new raiding season's as good a time as any to do it.

Fourth Goal: look at pvp. Seriously, I haven't even set foot in Tol Barad or a bg since Cat hit (except for a very brief Strands match).

Fifth Goal: Don't panic, remember it's a game, and have fun!

Sixth Goal: Get Lyllea a special mount. I don't care which one, I just want a nifty flying mount. Skyguards, Netherwing, and raid drakes are all possibilities. I may even get lucky and win a roll on one in a guild fun run. And I'd like to push Garetia to 50 mounts and 100 pets. She's been at 46 and 92 for a long time, and it'd be nice to hit that.

Obviously this is a ton of things to do, and I don't think I'm going to have all this done any time soon. But hopefully getting it all written out will stop me from logging on, running some dailies, and then going "crap, what am I supposed to be doing?"

It's been a crazy, crazy week

In RL, not in WoW. In WoW, well....there was an awesome fun run and I got some nifty achieves. Personally I'm the most fond of More Dots, since I was shadow at the time.

I'm starting to come to terms with holy. Most of my frustration is, well, mana. My current philosophy is "tank near full, dps gets a renew if I have extra mana, otherwise they fend for themselves unless they're under half health and the tank is good". I may need to rethink that keeping the tank near full, and just go for tank above half.

As far as gear goes, my list goes...
int>spirit>haste>mastery>crit> to hit.  I'm reforging to add spirit whenever possible, and while I know this gear priority isn't ideal for shadow (shadow likes crit more than mastery), I figure it'll work for the moment.

Rep wise, I'm doing the dailies for Therazane (aka Hodir for Cat), and wearing the Earthen Ring tabard so I can get those sexy purple cloth gloves. I'm revered with both, and I'm hoping to get exalted soon. I'll likely keep checking on the Therazane dailies even after I'm exalted though, since I want the baby earth elemental pet. Oh, and if you're having problems with that quest, hug the right wall. Trust me, it works.

Then I need to make some decisions. Wildhammer has a nice neck, Hyjal has my head enchants and a purple waist, but I need to unlock them and do the zone, and Ramkahen has purple shoes and a camel. Probably I'll be doing Hyjal (since ooh spirit on the waist), and running dailies for Wildhammer. Meanwhile, the druid's leveling slowly, and sending all her herbs to Garetia for leveling alchemy.  I want access to that truegold transmute, darn it!

So, that's where I stand atm. Hope everyone had a happy new year, and here's hoping 2011's a bit brighter than 2010!

Are Cataclysm Heroics Too Hard?

Are Cataclysm heroics too hard?

Are they harder than heroics at the end of Wraith? Heck yes. We don't over-gear them.
Are they harder than heroics at the beginning of Wraith? Yes, I believe so. I don't remember group makeup being important (besides the obvious healer/tank/3 dps thing), and I don't remember CCing.
Are they harder than BC heroics? Not sure, since I never ran them at level.

But there's several other things going on here that make difficulty harder to judge.
First, we've all been revamped. This hit some classes and specs harder than others, and we didn't have much time to get used to the new status quo before Cat.
Second, Blizz has decided to change the way we heal with Cat.
Third, we have far less control about who we end up grouped with (if pugging) and far less knowledge about them.
Fourth, CC/interrupts/stuns/kiting hasn't been needed for pretty much all of Wraith (unless you PVP), so most people are anywhere from a little rusty to completely unfamiliar with them.

Honestly, if we were coming into Wraith heroics this way, I suspect we'd find them pretty difficult as well.

But I think the better question to ask is "Are Cataclysm heroics fun?" Well, not for me thus far. Running with my guild makes them more entertaining, but I still haven't enjoyed one yet. I do them because I need gear to raid, not because I want to.

The unforgiving group makeup problem is really the deal breaker for me. A suboptimal group makeup, even if everyone in the group is a great player, makes for lots of wipes and frustration. Don't have enough stuns or cc? Then certain trash pulls are nightmares, nightmares that reoccur over and over again.  Call me a wimp, but I really don't enjoy that sort of thing. Most of the boss fights I've gotten to see I thought were great (except for the tornado boss since that's a little too RNG dependent), but the trash, ugh.

So for me, I think the answer is that, yeah, they are. They're too difficult for me to have fun in them, and I have to wonder why, with Blizz introducing the random dungeon finder to make it easier to run stuff, that they went to such a difficulty level. Seems counterproductive to have this tool to make finding dungeon runs easier, and then bring out a bunch of heroics that discourage pugging due to group makeup and difficulty level.

It's been a busy week here, and I went holy

First there was...

Then there was... and yes it took me long enough.

Then my guild leader had a request. That I go holy. Since I kinda need to relearn how to heal anyway, I figured why not try it. So far, well, I've managed to heal one boss. While I picked up some power auras from Tales of a Priest (which is a great resource, btw), I'm not sure what they mean yet. Plus, I keep forgetting I have this nifty group heals. Guess I spent too long playing whack-a-mole with flash heal and pw:s. But I'll get it, eventually.

But while figuring this out, there was also...

And yup, in that last one I'm healing as holy. It was the second try at the boss, who has a fairly brutal aoe (it might not be so brutal if I knew wtf was going on, but since I didn't...), and I got shiny shoes. You can see the power auras, and I know one is circle of healing's available, and maybe the other one's something to do with Chakra? While I understand the chakra thing in principle, in practice I'm a bit too busy trying to figure out which spells I need to be using to keep people alive without going oom. Quite frankly, right now the entire chakra thing is another layer of complexity, one I really don't need.

 As a disc healer in Wraith, I used pw:s, flash heal, penance, and prayer of mending almost exclusively. In Cat, disc throws in Archangel and smiting when possible, plus using heal and possibly renew. The challenge there is figuring out when you can dps, when you need archangel, and trying to make the two mesh somewhat.  Or at least that was my (very) limited experience healing while leveling.

As holy in Cat, so far I have Renew (which I like), Heal, Greater Heal, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, that other group heal spell that I can't remember the name of, and the occasional free Flash Heal. And I have three chakra states, each which makes that Holy Word thing do something different. Of course, that assumes I remember I have chakra states and that holy word thing and am not just fairly frantically figuring out how to keep the tank up as far as possible while keeping the dps above 50% and not running oom every pull. Okay, so I'd be worrying about the last bit as disc as well, but holy just seems to have this added layer of complexity that it really doesn't need.

I can't help wondering if that's one of the reasons holy was buffed so much. The OPness of it right now induces people to try it that otherwise would look at the complexity and go "nope, not for me".  I suspect part of my own problem comes from being a mostly single-target healer for so long. That, combined with new tools, old tools I actually need to use now, and a resource I need to pay attention to,  makes holy quite a challenge for me.  Good thing I can always queue as shadow and go quest for a while for a break, right? Or hit an alt.

Click-casting and you: A primer

Given that many people are trying new things in Cat, I figured I'd write a guide or two on various things. This one is on click-casting, keybinds, and how to figure out what to bind to what.

First off, what is click-casting? It's the ability, primarily used by healing classes, to mouseover a target either in raid frames or party frames, and heal them with a click.  It's faster than selecting the target, then hitting a heal.

Second, how do I do this? Well, you have several options. Me, I use the addon Vuhdo, which is a raid frames and click casting addon. Other people use Grid (a raid frames addon) and Clique (a clickcasting addon) together, or simply use mouseover macros and the default frames.
Here's the vuhdo wiki.
Here's a couple blog posts about how to setup Grid and Clique.
Here's some info on mouseover macros.

Third, what do I bind to what?
Okay, this you want to think about carefully and have an overall strategy for. I'll walk you through my disc priest setup for Wraith to give you an idea.
       First I figured out what buttons I can use easily. Since I play on a laptop and use a trackpad, I really only have left and right mouse buttons.  But vuhdo allows me to use ctrl, shift, and alt, as well as combinations thereof, to modify my clicks. The combinations aren't really workable for me, so I'm left with 8 click-casting options.
      Left click and right click: these two are the easiest and fastest for me to hit. So, I bound my two most-used spells to them, Power Word: Shield, and Flash Heal. I changed Flash Heal to Heal when Cat hit, but the sentiment of "most used" is still there.
     Ctrl+left click and Ctrl+right click: big heals. I bound my two biggest single-target heal spells, Penance and Greater Heal, to these two buttons. Having my two big heals use the same modifier button helped me remember the bindings when I was learning them.
     Alt+left click and Alt+right click: select target and levitate. Alt+left click is actually the easiest for me to hit, so it made sense to me to bind something I use a lot there, plus I needed some way to select people from raid frames. And as for levitate, well, I like having it keybound, and when I had a heal bound there, I kept forgetting about it. So it made more sense to just bind non-healing functions to alt.
     Shift+left click and Shift+right click: I never used these in Wraith. I believe they were bound to Renew and possibly Prayer of Mending, but I'm not sure.

Since I'm limited in my click options, I tend to be picky about what I bind and don't bind. If I generally only use a spell on one target (renew, prayer of mending, earth shield), or the spell has a cooldown (pain suppression), or does not need a target (circle of healing, holy nova, power word: barrier), I don't bind them to mouseclicks. All those spells are bound to my number keys, and that's how they get cast.

So when considering what to clickcast, and where to bind it, consider:
like functions (aka big heals all using the same modifier button)
ease of clicking (aka bind most used to left and right click)
how spell is used

It's important not to overload your brain. Start small, maybe just with left and right click bound, and gradually increase. If you're moving to click-casting on more than one toon, try to keep the philosophy consistent. For example, my leveling resto shaman has her fast heal and her to go heal bound to right and left click. For my druid, it's regrowth and rejuvenation. For my pally, it was holy light and flash of light (but I haven't looked into pally healing since 4.0).

Hopefully this will help make the wonderful world of click casting less scary. It's my preferred way to heal and I think once you convert, you'll never go back.