The death of Level 80 Heroics.

Every once in a while something just walks up behind me that I should have noticed, and smacks me upside the head with a 2x4.

Reading Keeva's blog earlier today just such an event happened.  Keeva had a great little compilation of short topics that got all put together into one post, Quickies for Maintenance Day.  An off comment while talking about mount/pet changes hit me, which I've paraphrased such that no one will be trying to do level 80 heroics anymore.  I felt like this needed a little more discussion.

Level 80 Heroics have been around for a source of daily runs in order to produce a source of Frost emblems, now changed to Justice Points.  Since the change to 4.0.1 they actually produce more in the way of rewards as all of the runs give Justice Points when earlier only the first run of the day produced Frosts.  Now there's a mad rush to do chain heroics, in order to get your toon's banks of Justice Points topped off so that you can buy higher level'd gear as soon as it's available from Cataclysm.  

Wowwiki has a great rundown on the topic of Justice Points.  Per wowwiki, "outgrowing content by out-leveling it will result in the listed objectives no longer rewarding Justice Points."

Whoa!  You can only do level 80 heroics (for Justice point rewards) at, duh, level 80!  Once you hit level 81, you can do the heroics, but you will not get Justice point rewards for them.  There will no longer be lines of people queued up waiting for a level 80 Heroic.  Of course we'll have Cata's dungeons to do, but you know what I mean.  Aside from the short time you're a level 80 toon, you'll have very little incentive to even deal with the level 80 heroics.

Soon there will be ONLY ONE REASON to do these heroics: to get the Achieves associated with their completion.  In the near future, if you have a toon you've got leveled up finally to 80 and above you'll be looking to your guildies.  Guilds will have "fun days", where they do the level 80 heroics in chain fashion. Doing so over a period of time in order to get the achieves for all their leveling alts.  As monotonous as some of them were, a small part of me will miss them.

VuhDo review.

Several weeks ago a fellow guild-mate wanted me to show how I'd set up my Grid for my healing needs.  It just happened that I ran across VuhDo a few days later and have been sold on it ever since.

First, my old Grid layout looked something like this.  It was clean and well thought out.  I had my HoT's in different corners, and they'd give a yellow then red warning when they were getting ready to expire.  I prefer dark backgrounds with health that is shown decreasing, from the right (an inverse color setup).  So health is essentially a dark bar that shrinks from the right.  The reason I like this is that I can focus more easily on who needs heals.  More color showing means it moves up in my priority list.  In the grid example to the right, the bottom frame shows someone at approx 75% health.  The green number "4.4" on my tank, Irinbells, shows me I have three stacks of LifeBlooms (hence green) which will bloom in 4.4 secs.  One problem I had with grid was my need to be the instance leader, or for the tank to be the instance leader.  Grid automatically places me at the top, and then places the instance lead as the second frame down.  Although if I have lead, it automatically places the tank in the second slot, which is where I want him.  Nothing irked me more than having the tank stuck in the third or forth slot, and having to mouse carefully back and forth between us as I went along.  This left me constantly asking at beginning of instances to have the lead changed over to the tank so that my grid layout would be easier to use.  This request was generally heeded about 90% of the time.  Dispells were done with Clique, which I had setup to fire on left and right mouse buttons if I held down the shift key as 'Remove Curse' and 'Abolish Poison', respectively.

Next are a set of pics from my VuhDo setup.  These are taken actually very close in time to each other but show a few different things taking place.  

First thing you'll notice is that my tank is set off to the left from the main group, VuhDo can be set up to do this automatically.   The red surrounding the toon's frame shows he has aggro.  You can see in the second pic that 'Star' has just picked up aggro as well, which lets me know to consider throwing a Rejuv their way in case they take some damage.  The top left of the frame shows the character's "Rejuv" status. The number within the purple colored square counts down the last 9 seconds of the Rejuv in case I need to watch for who'll need to get replenished.  The red circle next to the Rejuv square shows that these toons are capable of receiving a Swiftmend if needed.  Once used, the circle will disappear on all frames but will return once Swiftmend's cooldown is up.  WildGrowth is the green square in the bottom left corner of each frame and also shows a countdown till it's done.  Mana bars are set in the bottom of each frame.  Once again, I mimicked my health preference with an inverse colored bar, filling from the right.  More color means more attention.  "Thab" in the first pic has his health bar with a darkened part.  VuhDo is showing me that it expects him to have received that much heal from the current Rejuv by the time it expires.  In the second pic a poison has dropped onto me with 5 secs left until it expires.  VuhDo contains it's own built-in version of Clique, which I have set up to operate exactly like I did with Grid.  Not shown here is that I have it set to show a small version of a marker icon right over the player's name.

A bonus feature I found with VuhDo (in Louisiana we call these a "Lagniappe", meaning a little something extra) is that I can have other frames within my UI hidden.  I've decided what works best for me is to hide the "party members" so they don't take up the visual space on the left side of my screen.  I've left my toon and my target's toon.  The reason I left these two is to make it easier to access the menues WoW gives you when you click on these frames.  i.e. Leave Group, or to mark with an Icon.  Below is a typical, though small, version of my basic UI in action.  As you can see, I have VuhDo taking up a very small area of my screen, yet it is my area of greatest focus.  The size frames I am using lend themselves very well to 10 and 25 man raids as well.  On 25 mans, I'll unlock the frame and move it over to the left just a little before locking it back down.

 

What I did not do is try to show you the exact steps to set this up.  There is copious information linked from VuhDo's creator as to how to go about setting it up to your liking.  The major thing to do is dive in and play till you start seeing what you have in mind for your needs.  There is a certain point at which a lightbulb goes off in your head and the setup process makes sense.

Five finished where none of us had started.

Jumped on to do a quick random for my two frosts last night after work.  What transpired ended up being somewhat amusing so I thought I'd recount some of it.

I queued up for my random as my usual healer self and got dumped into Halls of Stone.  Only, it wasn't at the entrance.  We were right at the entrance to Krystallus.  Several were finishing their run back to the spot, they were in a post-wipe phase and had somehow lost their healer.  After appropriate buffs were passed around and before running in, I said "ok, please remember to stay away from each other after his blowback."  On the very first blowback, the mage near me got thrown further away (my back was to a nearby wall) and ran right past me as we turned to stone.  Boom, I'm dead, great.  I thanked him for my 6 gold repair bill and released to run back.  I got back just as the DK tank had finished kiting Krystallus back out of his room.  All the DPS had died in the process.  A few touchup heals and Krystallus fell over dead.  Before I could rez anyone, all three DPS released and left the instance.  I guess from their point of view they'd taken two wipes and were calling it quits.

I let the tank know I'd stick it out (hah, a tree pun) and we re-queued.  As you'd imagine we had three fresh new DPS in short order and off we went.  Maiden of Grief was easy as always.  Duh, don't stand in black stuff.  Just as Brann started his thing in the Tribunal of Ages the tank says he's gotta go.  He'd stay around till this sequence with Brann was finished, but his guild was starting ICC and he had to head out quick.  Tank gone.  We cleared the one last group of roving mobs that's always left over outside the last boss and right on the spot a new tank showed up.  He was ecstatic that we only had the last boss to go.  Two minutes later we had opened the door, charged in, and downed the boss.  The usual thanks for group got passed around, and it hit me.  No one that finished this instance were present when it had started.  I've never before been a part of a complete group swap-out.

On a side note.  VuhDo rocks.  I'm now one week into using it for all of my healing needs.  Next week I'll get some screenshots ready and start working on a quick demo of how I've got mine set up.

Tunin(n).

Life happens...

Nope, I've not disappeared off the face of the earth.  Life happens.  For us it's the summertime scramble.  We had two kids in AllStars, vacation to the beach right after that, then work work work to pay da bills.

Since my last post I've had time to do quite a bit.  RebirthII is doing some casual raiding with it's upper levels now.  Tunin's gear is getting good enough that I can finally be helpful for many of the raids our guild can pull off.  I seem to keep missing the times for the raids as they like to go a little early for me so I have been PUG'ing several of the weeklies.  Football season is upon us so my Tuesday nights on my non-work weeks are now taken up to go see the kids play.

I'd been asked by one of my guild mates to put something up about my Grid setup.  I'd actually collected up quite a few screeenshots of my Grid during an ICC rep run and was ready to write some in depth verbiage about them but...  Last night I discovered VuhDo.  It got me excited enough that I got up early this morning to install it.  I wanted to get started setting it up to my liking before the 7am maintenance took us offline.  I therefore will be withholding my Grid setup details pending my VuhDo experience.  Hopefully it won't take me as long to post about it as it's been since my last blog post in here.

As always, Happy Hunting!
Tunin(n)

They're a little weird ... but they're good at what they do.

I think it's funny sometimes how things come in waves.  I had an experience a couple nights ago that I was going to write about.  I then just happened over to Keredria's blog Tree of Life and noticed she'd just blogged recently on a similar topic with this article.

Our guild, RebirthII, decided to have an Ulduar 10 man day.  As I showed up it became apparent I'd missed out on the weekly raid quest, which was to kill XT-002 Deconstructor.  Nearly everyone else had done it in the guild group.  Not being much of a raider due to time constraints I'd missed out.  One of our main tanks, Irinbells, hadn't done it either, but knew a group that was getting ready to run.  I had him check, and they were up for some druid heals to go with the group they had together already.  So off I went.  Irin had one cautionary point to make though, "they're a little weird, and kinda young, but they're good at what they do."

As I joined, their leader Iceshaman sent the usual Vent settings over. "Is anyone here a lesbian?" is the first thing I hear as I join, spoken by some anonymous toon on their chat.  Irin whispers "see what I mean?"  The second thing I noticed is that the average age, gauged by sound of their voices, was about 15.  And I think that's because Irin and I significantly averaged their age upwards by being present.  Their leader Ice ran a tight ship otherwise though.  Once he found out I was new to the instance, he said I was with him.  Prior to every fight Ice gave a very to the point and clear message to each person what he expected them to be working on.  These were probably some of the best pre-fight summaries I've heard.  For the fight with XT-002 we ran like clockwork.  We were lined up one one column of the floor, and if you got a 'light bomb' dropped on you you were to run four squares to the right before it detonated, then come back to the middle.  If you got the 'gravity bomb' you were to go left.  I really didn't even need DBM as he called out instructions anyway as we went along.  "Tunin, light, head right", and so-forth.  

Yep, they were a little weird.  They were definitely young.  But like Irinbells had meantioned, they were good at what they did.  It was refreshing to run with a different group and have fun.   In retrospect, it was the natural born leadership of Iceshaman that made it a good time.

How about a ready check?

Just when I thought I was running out of little things that bug me...

I'm busy saving up my Frosts as there's some gear I've got my eye on.  Being as I don't raid much my main source is the first random daily heroic giving me a whopping two Frosts/day (wheee!).  So I que'd up Friday evening when things had settled down at the house and ended up with a Trial of Champions run.  We mounted up and took off.  Man, this first phase while mounted was taking forever.  We spent at least two to three times longer doing this than it should have.  At the end it became clear why.  It seems our tank's toon disconnected at some point, and with all the commotion of mounts running around I'd not noticed one of us standing in one place doing nothing.  I hate re-que'ing for a tank as you never know how long it'll take.  But after asking the other guys, they wanted the first tank dropped and then wanted us re-que'd.

As soon as I hit the que button, I typed "hey guys, that took forever and we don't know long this tank'll take... gonna take a two minute break and get my drink refreshed".   I came back in less time than that, to find everyone at less than 10% health, fighting on the other side of the ToC hall.  The tank's dyeing words were "dude, are you going to heal?".  My reply as all four of my teammates ghosted, and the remaining mobs charge across the hall at me, was "uhh, I'd said I was gonna be AFK".  His reply was that no one told him.  Great, a needless wipe, where I look bad.

Post mortem:  Everyone's seen a tank do this.  They join an instance already in progress, replacing a failed, disconnected or ejected previous tank.  They realize where they are, then charge ahead with a "lets go!".  Apparently this guy joined up within seconds of my leaving my chair.  No one in the group said "hey, the tree just afk'd" when he charged off.  That alone should have stopped the tank in his tracks.  But, whatever happened to the tried and true, simple "r?".  If you only get three replies then you investigate.

I must admit that I share some blame.  Unless you are an hour into trying to finish Occulus with a couple of people who have never run it before, you should be ready to finish a simple five man heroic at one sitting without getting up after you hit que.  I just wanted to stretch my legs real quick, freshening up my drink was my excuse to make an orbit around the kitchen.

"r?" would have prevented a wipe.

Disappeared there for a bit...

You'd think I fell off the edge of the Azeroth the way I've been gone.  The world is flat you know, Tuninn the DK has his Explorer title, he'd know.  Things have been busy.  Tunin turned 80 during a PUG at UP just over a month ago.  Tunin then started the progression towards getting his full epic gearset, and now am on a nearly full set since then.  (For the last few weeks, in real life, I've been nursing three broken ribs, and haven't felt like doing anything where I had to sit in front of a computer.)

The first things I had to do with Tunin is retune his glyphs.  Gone is Glyph of Healing Touch as I now have Nourish I can spam away if needed.  The glyph set I settled on are: Nourish, Innervate and Swiftmend.  My minors, for what they're worth, are Unburdened Rebirth, Glyph of the Wild, and Glyph of Thorns.  I tuned my spec tree a little more to one found I think at elitistjerks, and is an 18/0/53 variety.

Tunin has now healed his way through all the standard heroics.  He is currently working on the 3.3 patch heroics and has finished The Forge of Souls, and The Pit of Saron.  Tunin has been to Halls of Reflection once, and it was a bad day.  We wiped 5 or 6 times.  The main problem was that Tunin would draw aggro very early on while our group was hiding behind a corner.  Someone pointed out that I can't throw any heals until well after the tank has gained aggro as they were attacking me too soon, and he wasn't successful at pulling them off of me.  So two more times in a row, between waves, I'd stop throwing heals and yet aggro would again go straight to me.  We quit out of frustration, but I'm thankful they stuck with me for a PUG for so long.  It was afterwards, while doing some reading that I had another of my epiphanies.  HoT's generate threat during EACH TICK, not just when they're thrown.  My general practice in a 5 man is to keep the tank fully loaded with three Lifeblooms, and a Rejuv ticking on everyone.  This lets me hit a Swiftmend on anyone (remember, I don't consume mine as I'm glyphed) in a pinch, and/or hit with a Nourish as needed.  When the tank starts getting in trouble, and Lifebloom is nearly expired, actually leaving Lifebloom alone is the answer, as it'll bloom, giving the tank a massive healing burst.

Druids then, apparently have a major disadvantage in Halls of Reflection.  The majority of my heals are Hot's in nature, with occasional spot mends here and there.  I'll therefore have to change my tactics during this phase alone, and spam the crud out of Nourish ALONE.   This way, when we're between waves, I'll not draw aggro by having HoT's ticking away on every one in the group.  Since coming to this realization I have yet to actually get a random back to Halls of Reflection to try it out.

ICC Rep Runs.  Oh my these are fun.  Irinbells in my guild, Mok'Nathal's RebirthII, put one together the other night and I signed up.  It was actually my first prolonged sit-down in front of the computer in two weeks.  We had a blast.  Probably the best part was having all 10 of us chatting on Vent at the same time during the event.  I'll be watching TradeChat again to try and get in on more of these in the future.

Will sign off for now.  I'll keep track of the new tree strategie for Halls of Reflection and let you know.

Tunin(n).