I Heart Nyhm

New Decision

After my heroic last night (yes, I’m still healing sans mouse), I started thinking. The plan was to level up the shammy, take her resto and take Mercy shadow. But now I’m thinking about it and I’ve decided that I’ll probably be speccing Wycaan back and forth between enhance and resto until her bonus heal is at the same point as Mercy’s, and I’ll spec Mercy back and forth between holy and shadow. It’s a tentative plan, and an expensive one, but for some weird reason, I like it.

Sick and Twisted

Now I am not a Blogcast/Podcast type person, but recently there has been a lot of talk around the WoW Bloggers about Twisted Nether Blogcast. I listened to some of it yesterday and I must say, I heart Bre and Fim. They are a lot of fun to listen to and come up with some great talk topics. In fact, I’m listening to episode 4 as I type. It’s a little long for my tastes, so I kind of have to break it into pieces, but as a whole, it’s great. Go ahead and check out Breana and Fimlys at Twisted Nether Blogcast.

“Hey, Why’s the Tank Naked?”

I ran Mana Tombs on normal yesterday. We carried a couple of lowbies through, and it was easier than I expected. At first I was nervous and had the tank in full tank gear, then I had him put on half DPS gear, then full DPS gear. He was still taking to much damage, so I had him take half of his gear off. By the time we made it to the first boss, he was naked except for his Staff, Necklace, Trinkets and Rings. We ran through flawlessly enough that I’m pretty happy with my skills to start healing raids again. So now I’m off to find out when the next raid I’ll be able to make it to will be!

Time for a Change

Ooooooh Boy.  So, now that I’ve got this over heating situation on my laptop fixed, I’ve got a whole new problem…  My USB ports… They’re broken. I can handle it though.  I can still WoW it up, but I’ve got to change my whole style until I can get this fixed, which will probably be awhile.  So today will be the first day of me learning how to heal without a mouse. I’m sure there’s a raid I can experiment on, but for now, I’m off to find some 5 mans!  Wish me luck!

Raiding 101: Part Five – Adding it All Up

Part I – Consumables
Part II – Strategies
Part III – Stats
Part IV – Atmosphere

This is the last part of your crash course on raiding.  The information I gave you in the previous four chapters is nothing if not applied. Just as you are in charge of your atmosphere, you are the only person who can apply what you learn.  Good luck and happy healing. Ooh, that’s kinda cute. Haha. I’m to easily amused.

Raiding 101: Part Four – Atmosphere

Sorry for the delay. Life was a bit hectic for me last week. We now return to our regularly scheduled post.

We’ve covered everything in game to help you be prepared for raiding, now lets look at out of game. The atmosphere is a HUGE deal when it comes to raiding, especially as a healer.  Personally, the atmosphere I work best in depends on my mood.  Sometimes I like some kill music playing, sometimes I prefer something smoother and calmer, and sometimes I like it to be relatively quiet.  I can’t tell you what you’ll like, or what you’ll work best with, but I can give you some generalizations.

Music
Personally my taste in music is very eclectic and varied greatly.  I enjoy everything from rap and hip hop to ERA to Evanescence to Green Day and everything in between.  One thing I can suggest is before you decide to listen to music in a 25 man, listen to it while healing a 10 man.  And before listening to it in a 10 man, listen while healing a 5 man.  If you succeed in a 5 man, go ahead and take it up a step.

Lighting
I probably sound like your mother, but it’s bad for your eyes to watch TV in the dark and the same goes for staring at a computer screen.  Make sure that you have sufficient lighting near your computer so that you don’t have to read raid chat.  I used to raid in the dark and I’ll tell you what, I used to end the night with a huge headache every night. 

People
If you’re anything like me, raiding with a bunch of people yelling blabbing talking loudly in your ear isn’t quite what would be described as easy.  Usually while raiding I tend to prefer not to have any company, or at least WoW playing company so that they understand a small amount of concentration is required.

Self
Ever tried raiding while your stomach is empty?  Or while you watch TV?  The ultimate variable in the atmosphere you raid in is you.  With practice, you can manage to ignore everything else that’s going on around you. 

Farming for Badges

There are a few easy and quick heroics that are great for farming up when you need Badges.  Of course we all have our favorites but these are the ones I’ve found best for farming.

1. Botanica – Bot may not exactly be fast, but if you’ve got a couple of CC, it’s easier than most would realize.  If your mp5 is high enough, your tank will be able to chain pull for the most part, and you’ll be out of there in no time.  Try to grab a paladin tank as they’re great for AoE tanking, which will keep little mobs off you.  5 Badges
2. Mechanar – Definitely one of the fastest and easiest group, though the fire chick is a bit difficult to heal if you’ve got to kite around one of the flames. Again, best with a CC or 2. 4 Badges
3. Underbog – As a short instance with the last 3 bosses pretty close to each other, this instance is great for speed.  4 Badges
4. Black Morass – I hate normal BM, but on heroic, I love this instance, as it’s guaranteed to only take a certain amount of time to complete.  It was nerfed, so bosses, Rift Keepers, and adds all seem to die faster. 3 Badges
5. Slave Pens – Now this one is tricky. If you don’t have a good group, it can take forever, but if you do, you’re good to go.  A shaman makes this pretty easy, Tremor Totem is well… Hacks.  3 Badges

These 5 could probably be finished within 2.5-3.5 hours depending on your group comp.  If so, that’s an easy 19 badges you could make every day, even more if you get lucky and manage to get one of these as the heroic daily, which will give you an extra 2 badges. Good luck!

To Tired to Raid?

For some guilds, raiding is a three times a week thing. For others, it’s an every night or almost every night thing. For my guild, it’s the latter.  We are a late night raid group, we always start after 10:30PM server time, which is 7:30 PM my time. It usually gives me time to take a nap before raids, but sometimes a nap isn’t enough. 

The fact that my guild raids fairly late at night is incredibly helpful.  It gives me time for a pretty long nap, but sometimes it’s not long enough.  I try to let my guild know when I can’t make it, and I have our MT on my AIM buddy list which makes things easy.  Lately my sleep schedule has been kinda wonky, and I wouldn’t be lying if I said that I’ve fallen asleep in the middle of a boss more than once. 

Usually if I’m pretty tired and I want to raid, I’ll do one of a few things:

• Drink something sugary.
• Play some music behind vent.
• Sit up instead of laying down (my preferred position for playing WoW is on my stomach).
• Make some coffee.
• Grab a one hand compatible snack.
• Take a shot of alcohol, preferably something strong. One shot won’t get me drunk, but the harshness of it is enough to wake me up.
• Talk to The Boy while I raid.

On the off chance that none of these work, I whisper my raid leader and let them know that I’m looking for a replacement, and then on trash pulls I begin my search.  I ask guildies first, then friends, then ex-guildies. LFG is always my last option as I usually don’t know anything about the person in LFG other than their gear.  Try never to just bail on a guild run, wether it’s a raid or an instance.  It’s a bad plan, and leaves a bad impression.

My Talent Tree

This is much less of a teaching or learning post and much more of a reference post. 

I decided to post my talent tree because I get asked often when asking for advice what my spec is and why I went with Circle of Healing instead of Imp Spirit.