Every so often a healer decides they want to go DPS and a new Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman, Boomkin, or even a Ret Pally is born. Sometimes a healer has real life events that require them to hang their Benediction up. Now you’ve lost a core member of your healing force, what does this mean to your healing team? Depending on who the healer is, this can be a pretty drastic change to your healing force. Your healing team often needs to work together as a unit. Key parts of keeping that that cohesiveness going is knowing each other strengths and weaknesses, discussing “what went wrong” and “what can we change to prevent Tank X from dying?”. Lets say that this person who is leaving is a pro healer, or …

The concept for this post was thought up by a IM conversation I had with Matticus after my guild banged out a bunch of achievements in Naxx last night. Thanks for the brainstorm! You’ve cleared 25 Man Naxx and Malygos and you’re making progress (or have completed) 3 Drake Sartharion… 3.1 and Ulduar are a ways off… Now what? Achievements My guild has been focusing on these for the last couple of weeks. Up until then, we didn’t put much effort into them as we were mainly pursuing Sartharion + 3 – which we finally got last week. Some people feel the Achievement System is only a check box system- who cares? However, it allows your guild to fine tune and hone its abilities in preparation for Ulduar – then …

3.08 is launching today, and the hands-down biggest change that will affect priests is the COH nerf. I apologize for covering this over and over, however it is important to prepare. There WILL be fights that we will need to adjust, but lets see if we can address some of those. 1. Malygos – Vortex. You should be able to get 2 COHs out before the Vortex is over. Also you should be able to burn through charges of ProM. (and a couple of Surge of Light procs will be handy). Generally, if you have been farming Naxx25 you shouldn’t be in too rough of shape as your HP should be well over 20k. You take 20k damage (2k a sec, for 10 seconds) then 10% HP falling damage. Preemptively …

We did it! Took us a little longer than I think we all would have liked, but we did it. /cheer Some tips for those healers who are doing it now. 1. Don’t bring too many healers. 6 even 5 is enough. DPS needs to be strong to take the drakes down, so you don’t have to deal with the crazy empowered Flame Breaths for too long.2. Healer CD Rotations need to be proactive. Guardian Spirit and Pain Suppression last 10 and 8 seconds, respectively. If you know a breath is coming… cast it a few seconds early. It may very well save your life due to running from flame walls.3. Control Ventrilo chatter. Too much noise on a very busy fight can cause a cooldown call to be missed.4. …

Picture this: Sartharion 3 Drakes. Great DPS. Fantastic progression. Consistent steps forward. We get to 1 drake remaining. Then, I hear over vent from one of our top DPS… “My graphics card is overheating and the fan is dead, I am locking up.” What do you do? What do you do? Well this is the solution my guild-mate came up with: He lives in the Midwest, so he is enjoying -14°F weather — open the door and take the cover off the computer! Oh no… still overheating. Problem solved with frozen foods:Now that is dedication to getting the job done. Didn’t eat any void zones, or walls of fire. Award winning. Epic.

Well it has been 30 days since I did my Character Re-Customization— and now, I did it again. Derevka is back to being a short, stout, freckled dwarf again and I missed her. When I showed up to a raid as a male dwarf, I got tons of comments on Ventrilo, whispers, raid chat, and /gasp emotes. After all, I have been playing D as a female dwarf for over 4 years now. People expect me to be a certain way, visually. Showing up contrary to that surprises. I have to admit, I couldn’t get used to it. The audio cues when I was /lol, out of range, on cooldown, or even death just sounded wrong. I kept hearing the male dwarf emotes and thinking, “Who was that?!” It wasn’t …

So, do to Blogger screwing up my schedule to post… my post about my guest post at World of Matticus went out hours early. So apologies to my RSS readers who got that early, and no Matticus post existed! But, I have a guest post up at World of Matticus today. It is a post I wrote for Matt regarding Healer Evaluation. I really tried to tie in some good numerical understanding of healers, as well as some more subjective analysis. I’m honored that Matt let me write up a post for his blog, and I hope people find it interesting and a good read! You can find my post here.

Sigh, healing assignments. If you have done them like I have been doing them, it means you have been doing them for your guild for years. Perhaps you think about them on your way home from work, class, or before a raid– it makes you shudder. Fact is: very few people enjoy doing healing assignments. Everyone would typically rather show up, kill the boss and have fun. Doing administrative work is no fun, right? Doing healing assignments is just like having to do the dishes, or take out the garbage as a kid– a chore. While doing healing assignments really isn’t a lot of fun, it certainly doesn’t mean it isn’t worth while. Being tasked to do healing assignments provides the opportunity to learn a lot about your raid members. …

It is always interesting when I ask healers: Why do you heal? It is, after all, a very loaded question- and timely now that WotLK has launched. Wrath really introduced the the changes to Spellpower/Healing Power. It is now, for the most part, only a matter of +hit to transition to a Caster DPS player. Many healers can/have/are planning to make the leap from Healer to Pew-pew! Which makes asking the question even more interesting, since many of the healers are actively choosing to stay in a healing role. Further many former healers who have migrated to DPS occasionally will say “Man, I never thought I would say it… I actually miss healing.” There must be something that is driving that statement home; but what is it? The answer can …

No one likes queues to play Warcraft- duh, stating the obvious. I can prepare to deal with over 1 hour long queues by logging in and not letting myself AFK/DC while I am cooking dinner and spending some quality time with my better half, so I can be logged in and on time for sending out 8:00 invites. I’m not happy about it, but I can deal with it. But, having horrible lag for the last month in every zone and instance is not something I can personally deal with . This needs to be fixed, and soon. Patience is a virtue… but certainly not something all of us have. 5 Second server lag COH heals on a 5 Min Malygos 25 Achievement raid, is NOT happening. It isn’t client …