Guess What We Did Last Weekend

22 February 2009: Naxxramas is repossessed after Kel'Thuzad defaults on his mortgage.



22 March 2009: The Bank of NiHao help Alexstraza collect from her deadbeat brother Malygos.



29 March 2009: The Bank of NiHao Foreclosure Team shows up at the Obsidian Sanctum. Sartharion and Tenebron snicker at the "flammable little insects."



29 March 2009: Sartharion and Tenebron learn to say I'm sorry.



Congrats to the Bank of NiHao for finally getting Sarth+1D down. To quote Malago, "You guys make me hard."

Big Red Kitty closes up shop

I occasionally wonder how I'll end this blog - whether or not walk away from both game and blog in one tempestuous, emotionally-charged post, or quietly let the blog die, leaving its six or seven readers* bewildered as to the lack of updates.

Big Red Kitty shuttered its doors today for reasons I can relate to. Although it was primarily a hunter blog, I always enjoyed BRK's posts. BRK made it clear that there was a critical difference between hunters and huntards. His sheer love of the game and the great enthusiasm he brought to his craft made me appreciate my time in Azeroth more.

My hat's off to you, BRK. Thanks for everything.

* I should be so lucky.

Malygos DOWN!

This should be a rather emo blog entry whining about how folks aren't punctual or don't update me on what their availabilities are; really, that's how this post played out in my head. But the truth is that we had a brilliant weekend raiding and while we definitely need to address concerns regarding punctuality and maybe even commitment, I need to talk about the great things that happened so I don't forget it months down the road when these achievements will have been eclipsed by newer ones.

On Saturday afternoon we began our Naxxramas run at 12:30 and proceeded to demolish every wing in the raid. We cleared the entire instance in 5 hours - still long compared to more hardcore raiders, but a vast improvement over our usual 9 to 11 hour raid time. We one-shotted every boss but Grobbulus and Kel'Thuzad. Grobb, a technically difficult fight, really caused us a lot of headaches. We were quite unlucky with our DPS positioning in some cases, which led to too many slimes spawned. Kel'Thuzad, on the other hand, was harder for us due to void zones spawning under the adds, where the tanks couldn't see them.

Azmuth paid for a new Ventrilo server for us, which we'll be trying out over the next few months. For the first time I really feel pressured to talk over Vent - it's different now that we don't have that many players around. I'd really like to maximize the use of the Vent server while we have it. The Vent server was quite useful for some of the harder fights, but as usual, we avoided using it.

We also tried out a new strategy for the 4 Horsemen, which led to a one-shot instead of our usual 5-6 attempts. The DPS start the fight right behind Lady Blameaux's position, while the tanks wait near the front of the room where Baron Rivendare and Thane Kor'thazz will start the fight. Once the fight starts, they then pick up the melee horsemen and kite them back to the ranged horsemen. On three marks, everyone swaps sides, and the tanks need to taunt off each other to ensure that the melee horsemen stick to their sides. While we had a few deaths, this strategy really worked for us, and we'll be using this in the future.

Sunday was a rough raiding day for us; even though we had a posted raid time of 12:30, we started at 2 pm due to lack of raiders. We finally downed Malygos after 21 attempts - 21! While hardly a flawless victory, it was a victory nonetheless, and we'll be coming back next week with high expectations for ourselves.

Killing Malygos unlocked an Achievement, of course, and I'm proud to note that Avierra is now a Champion of the Frozen Wastes, along with Azmuth, Silverwisp, Elauris, Damo, Brutusk and Calimdan.

Well done, everyone. Well done.

A Quick Post Before The Weekend

One day more till Malygos.

Over the past week, we've seen fewer and fewer log-ins: for most of us, work is starting to pick up. Rizal's been sidelined thanks to major deadlines for one of his accounts, and I know that Calimdan's been dealing with midterms. I'm happy to see that some of us are still running heroics during the week, though.

This weekend we'll be taking on Malygos, in an effort to down him before the Ulduar patch arrives. We've all spent a considerable amount of time and effort preparing for this fight; let's hope it pays off.

So GoV...

I've been tempted to post something in response to Cath's post on the forums.

But I'm quite good at resisting temptation, so all I have to say is, the best of luck to GoV, and thanks very much for everything.

New Paladin Tools in WOTLK

There are two new tricks Paladins have in Wrath of the Lich King I'm relying on more and more.

Hand of Reckoning

I have only rarely needed to use the badly-named Hand of Reckoning a few times in protection spec, preferring instead to stick to my tried-and-true Righteous Defense. I don't use it to initiate combat - once the taunt buff wears off, the mob usually heads straight for any healer within range, forcing me to burn Righteous Defense anyway. That said, I've learned to appreciate it while farming solo, especially when I'm competing with others for mobs.

I use it extensively on Gluth. We don't rely on hunters to kite zombie chow, as our huntards are terribad at kiting. Instead I slap on my tanking gear for extra dodge and run around, picking up spawning zombies with HoR and cementing my hold on them through the occasional Consecration. I also use it on 4 Horsemen to ensure that the Horseman I'm tanking doesn't ignore me completely.

I understand that it's brilliant in PVP - a taunt that actually does damage, preventing rogues from stealthing - and I'm keen to test the report that it breaks through Divine Shield, preventing bubble hearths. Now if only it interrupted casting...

Beacon of Light

Four major changes to paladin healing have challenged me this expansion:

1) The need to judge,
2) The newfound viability of Holy Shock as a healing spell,
3) Sacred Shield, and
4) Beacon of Light.

Of these changes, Beacon of Light has forced me to rethink how I heal the most. Beacon of Light effectively forks your heal onto a second target, healing it for up to however much your first heal landed for. So if you had your Beacon of Light on Target B while you healed Target A, Target B would receive heals up to however much Target A was healed for.

Say, for example, that my main tank, Azmuth, was standing in front of a boss mob. Az has 29,000 hit points and the boss hits for around 6,000 on plate. Behind the boss is one of my melee DPS, Malago, who has 18,000 hit points. Unfortunately, this boss casts a spell which does 10,000 damage to a melee player in range. So Az gets hit for 6,000, bringing him down to 23,000, while Mal gets hit for 10,000, bringing him down to 8,000 hit points.

Let's say I had my Beacon of Light on Malago. If I threw a heal on Azmuth for 10,000, that would heal him back to full - wasting 4,000 hit points (overheal). Malago would not be healed to full, as he only receives 6,000 hit points back. So now I have a healing deficit; I need to throw another heal on Malago to make up the gap. This would be remedied by putting Beacon of Light on Az and healing Malago instead.

This is why Beacon of Light messes me up so badly. In order to know how to maximize my healing output, I need to be deeply aware of the fight mechanics. I need to know who will be taking damage - and how much - so I don't waste my Beacon on someone who won't be getting hurt anyway. If I shift my healing target, I waste one GCD on transferring the Beacon to someone else. More often than not I find myself forgetting to refresh Beacon.

That said, Beacon is insanely powerful, although I often wish they'd made it a 2 or 3 minute buff instead (it's currently a 1 minute buff). I like having it in my arsenal. Maybe I just need to learn to use it better.

Where We Are

Raiding last weekend was very productive - six or seven attempts at Malygos in Eye of Eternity (none of which took us beyond Phase 2 due to the enrage timer), then an eleven hour run in Naxxramas which spread across two days. Avierra walked away with three new epics (four if you count the one I bought with Emblems of Heroism). It looks very much like I'll be healing for the foreseeable future; it took a failed Culling of Stratholme run to show me that while I'd gotten much better as a tank, I'd let my healing skills deteriorate over the past few months.

Naxxramas is far from being on farm, although we're making real progress in cutting down the amount of time we're spending in there. My goal this weekend is to cut down our Naxx time to 9 hours - 4 hours for the first three wings, 5 for the last two. Already we're starting to DE gear that no one wants to loot, a clear sign of content on farm. Given our gear, though, we're underperforming - Be Imba says we should be farming Malygos right now, and looking at our Armory profiles, we definitely should be doing harder content.

I'm skipping instances this week in favor of farming - this past weekend cost me nearly all my gold after I bought enchants for nearly all my gear. I'm not done yet, though - my War Mace of Unrequited Love is still unenchanted. I spent most of last night farming gold, and I'm finally back to 500g; I expect to be at 1.4k by the end of the week - a comfortable number, given that dual specs will cost 1k when they're finally patched in.

The Ulduar info I've been reading online is a bit daunting - we're not a hardcore raiding Guild, and I really don't know if we'll have the time to master Ulduar before the next tier of raid comes out. I'd really hate to miss Icecrown Citadel when it comes out, though, so it looks like we'll be spending more time in Ulduar than we are in Naxxramas. I may even have to remove Naxx from our raid schedules once we're more or less geared for Ulduar.