Monthly Archives: April 2008

Playstyle

I have zero buyer’s remorse.

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I picked up an epic flying mount for my main perhaps six months ago now, and zooming around at Ludicrous Speed with Crusader Aura on has been fun, but trying to farm for herbs and ore on my alt has been a horrible sluggish 60%-speed pain.

So I bought her an epic flying mount as well.

I’d been agonising about it for a few weeks; 5,000 gold on an alt? But I’ve been farming on her for a few days now, and I don’t regret it at all – farming is fast, easy and rewarding now, and that makes it actually fun. I can’t remember the last time farming for anything was fun.

(Also, sorry it’s been so quiet around these parts. RL stuff + big posts still in draft phase + social calendar = temporarily-quiet blog.)

Humour

“Too much WoW”? What’s that?

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You know you’ve been playing WoW too long when you’re thinking about what to cook for dinner and you decide on a recipe, and then think “Oh wait, do I have the mats for that?”

In other news, Sailan – my main, my much-loved and comfortable pally – has just hit 200 days of /played time. Yes, I can stop any time I want to, honest.

Playstyle

The “Oh Shit” Button

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Having picked up the [Vial of the Sunwell], which doesn’t activate the global cooldown, I thought it might not be a bad idea to make up an emergency panicbutton for healing use, for those times when Lay on Hands is just overkill (or you’re going to need mana before your potion cooldown is up).

/use Vial of the Sunwell
/cast Divine Favor
/cast Holy Shock

All three items are on various cooldowns, so you may wish to add the following line to the end of the macro:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

which will suppress “Spell is not ready yet.” error messages.

Provided nothing’s on cooldown, this will deliver a crit Holy Shock and trigger the Vial of the Sunwell heal, for a total of 4200-5600 healing in one instant cast (range dependent on +heal, and whether the Vial crits). Extremely useful for spike damage situations!

(If you’re beyond 20 yards, the Holy Shock won’t proc, but the Vial still works out to 40 yards.)

Playstyle

Farming for Shattered Sun Rep

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If your server is anything like mine, finding groups for Magister’s Terrace can be … challenging, to say the least, since apparently every single tank has gone on holidays this month and the only ones left are kinda Donald-y. But you want your Shattered Sun faction, don’t you, for those tasty recipes and epics? And the dailies just don’t roll your faction rewards in fast enough…

Lo, paladin, find yourself a friendly mage, preferably one who’s as eager for SSO rep as you are so they don’t bitch and moan about how tedious this is going to be.

Then hie thee to Magister’s Terrace, and kill the first four mobs. Over and over again.

  1. Set it to normal mode. Do not try this on Heroic unless you are uber.
  2. Zone in, pally in tanking gear (with tanking buffs, ie Righteous Fury *ahem*), salv the mage.
  3. Take the first pair, making sure the patrol isn’t pathing anywhere nearby.
    • This pair will be 2x Mage Guards. They’re basically melee mobs, although they have an annoying ranged damage/stun attack called Glaive Throw.
    • Sheep one, tank the other. Tank and spank, and the pally should have little risk of dying unless things go pear-shaped.
    • Of note: when they throw their magic dampening field thingy, pull them out of it and tank them a decent way away from it. The field dampens all spell attacks against them, which makes them slow as hell for your mage to kill, and your threat generation drops to almost nothing.
    • Before breaking the sheep, bandage yourself back up to reasonable health. Then kill the second one.
  4. Eat and drink back to full health. Don’t bother trying to heal yourself up; your mana pool is tiny and your heals won’t do jack. It’s quicker to just eat as well as drinking.
  5. Check out the patrol. There are a number of mobs that can be in the patrol:
    • Warlock: very high dps caster, fire based, with an imp pet. The pet should always be the first thing to die.
    • Magister: frost-based caster, fairly high DPS but manageable.
    • Physician: a melee mob, despite the name, with a poisoned melee attack. Fairly trivial.
    • Mage Guard: same type of mobs as in the first stationary pull. (I think these are potentially in this patrol, although I can’t remember.)
    • Blood Knight: pain in the neck. A paladin mob with a self-heal (or cross-heal if you have another mob up as well) and an aura/dot that does a surprising amount of damage.
  6. Tips for dealing with the patrol:
    • Physician + Magister: the easy pair. Sheep the magister, kill the physician, then kill the magister.
    • Some other combo: relatively easy. If the patrol has the blood knight or the warlock, sheep that mob first. If it has both, then read on.
    • Warlock + Blood Knight: the difficult pair. Sheep the warlock, tank the blood knight, kill the imp, then kill the blood knight. The pally should be ready to interrupt the blood knight’s heal with a stun; the mage should be ready to spellsteal the blood knight’s buff as soon as it appears. Once the blood knight is down, bandage and regen some mana – drink a potion if you’ve got some cheap ones (eg Major Combat Mana Potions) on hand. You don’t want to tackle the warlock when you’re already half-dead and low on mana.
    • The reason I suggest this order is: if the warlock breaks sheep early while you’re killing the blood knight, the warlock will get a spell off and do a bit of damage before being resheeped, no big deal. If the blood knight breaks sheep early while you’re killing the warlock, the knight will get a heal off and you’ll have to kill the warlock all over again, which – given how much damage they do – could well be fatal.
  7. Zone out. Eat, drink, reset the instance.
  8. Perform above steps four more times.

This will net you 240 rep (264 for humans) in about 20-30 minutes, and will use up your five instance resets for the hour. Go make some lunch, do some chores, come back in half an hour, and repeat steps 1-8 again.

I used this to push me over the line to Revered so I could make my healing trinket in time for our first night in Mount Hyjal, since the daily quests were going to reset in the middle of the raid. I used this again today to push me over the line to Exalted so I didn’t have to wait til tonight for a fresh daily reset to get more rep.

Obviously, this is not an awesome way to get to Revered or Exalted SSO by itself. However, a few iterations of this – if it’s in company with a partner you enjoy playing with – can be a fun way to polish some skills and get just that bit of extra rep to reach a particular milestone when you choose, instead of being dependent on being able to get proper Magister’s Terrace groups.

Game Info

Vial of the Sunwell

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As I just mentioned, I picked up the [Vial of the Sunwell] last night in Heroic Magister’s Terrace, and I’ve been trying to assess its value.

A brief attack of theorycrafting (hello, Excel spreadsheets) later, and here’s what we’ve got:

Assumptions

  • Healer is a paladin
  • Healer uses approximately 75% Flash of Lights and 25% Holy Lights
  • Healer is chain-casting
  • Trinket is used every time the cooldown is up

Results

  • On raw numbers, given the assumptions above, Vial of the Sunwell is worth 15 mp5 and approximately 55 +heal.
  • Apart from raw numbers, this trinket has some particular strengths:
    • Triggering the “Use:” effect doesn’t activate the global cooldown, meaning it stacks nicely on top of your regular healing rotation, and can either be macroed into your regular healing macro, or be used when you need burst healing to supplement your heals without eating a GCD.
    • Unlike many trinket effects you can ‘charge it up’ ahead of time; the Holy Energy buff (which represents the collected energy, and stacks to 20) has no duration. This means that you can charge it up with 20 rank 1 heals before a fight starts.
    • Edit: As Matticus just pointed out to me in chat, the effect of the trinket isn’t suppressed by silences, so it’s great for use on fights with silence effects and big damage, like Gruul and Nalorakk.
    • Note that the effect can crit, for 3000 healing.

Variations

  • The figures aren’t wildly different for paladins with different casting rotations. Chaincasting 100% Holy Light lands somewhere around 47 +heal; chaincasting 100% Flash of Light equates to around 58 +heal.
  • Keeping the same casting rotation, and instead assuming you’re only casting 75% of the time instead of chain-casting, the value of the trinket rises to an equivalent of around 72 +heal.
  • It is important to note that this trinket doesn’t magically do more for you just because you’re casting less often. These numbers are equivalents to give you an idea of the end effect of the trinket, compared with other alternatives you might equip.
Playstyle

An embarrassment of trinkety riches.

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Thanks to Magister’s Terrace and the new Shattered Sun faction rewards, I’ve picked up the following in the last week:

Very shiny, very epic. Given that they’re leaps and bounds better than my existing trinkets (which hadn’t been upgraded for a looooong time), I’m pretty much replacing everything at once – which means I have to work out a whole new set of mental guidelines about what I use when.

The [Vial of the Sunwell] is the one I’m really thinking about. The 15 mp5 equip bonus is very nice; I’m trying to work out how useful the rest of its abilities are. Theorycrafting post due shortly.