Magmaw–What a beast!

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1 year ago
by george in

So tonight Revenge took on Magmaw, the first boss in the Blackwing Decent raid encounter. I have to admit, I saw the video for this fight and thought to myself, right, there are only really a few mechanics here. What I wasn’t counting on was just how much damage was going around on this fight and how those mechanics were to play out in-real life with our raiders.

First observation, the worms that spawn from the Pillars of Fire, they can’t hit anyone. Our first several attempts, raiders were getting hit by the worms and cumulatively took somewhere in the order of 2million HP worth of damage. So we adjusted and got better at handling the worms so that the damage from the parasite debuff was down to under 50k (still really not that good).

Second observation, Ignition is pretty brutal. Yes if you stand in the steam it won’t immediately do damage to you. But you’ve got to move your self out of the steam before Massive Crush hits you, in almost every encounter, this was the reason for at least one DPS death.

Third observation, the main tank needs to use cool downs and maintain their abilities. We had a paladin as our main tank and quite frankly there were some errors. First off, tanks need to use defensive cooldowns to decrease the amount of damage taken during the Mangle ability. Also while your being chewed on, tanks need to self-heal–bottom line, with all the other damage going on, this is just needed at this point with this gear. Second, just like DPS need to keep their DoT’s up 100% of the time, abilities like Holy Shield you have to make sure NEVER drops. This is a straight increase to your damage mitigation and will help to flatten the burst damage. So do your healers a favor and keep your abilities refreshed in order to minimize the amount of damage you will take.

Fourth observation, AoE damage is pretty massive. When Magmaw does his Magma Spit, the damage that raiders will take is pretty substantial. We had a druid and priest raid healing, and quite frankly we didn’t have the HPS to handle the incoming damage. Looking back through WoL, it looks like my throughput is pretty much where it possibly could be for my gear, but still this wasn’t enough to keep everyone alive. I’m hoping though that abilities coming down in 4.0.6 patch will help especially in these encounters, such as decreasing the mana costs for rejuv, decreasing the cast time for Nourish, increasing the healing done by Wild Growth–all of these I can see major benefits in our ability as druids to heal through the encounter.

Final thoughts, we didn’t get a progression kill in tonight’s attempt. Tomorrow brings a new day and new attempts and we will all go back to the drawing board to digest the encounter, think of new ways of approaching our difficulties and continue to adjust and tweak until he goes down.

Fixing the Retribution Paladin

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1 year ago
by george in

By and large, most of my posts have been focused on the druid, in particular Restoration. There’s a reason for that–since Revenge will be starting up formal raid schedule most likely next week, there is a need to get the druid (be it still gimped) geared, rotation/priority list, and comfort with the changes post-Cataclysm before hand.

But as the days tick on, healing on the druid can become quite tiresome. So to fill in the spaces, I’ve been working a bit on my retribution paladin gathering up gear, both for retribution as well as protection.

So this is where the QQ begins.

Problem/Situation/Dire-straits

Retributions post-Cataclysm have been broken. Well maybe not completely broken [source], but certainly significant changes have been made to the class to make it as desirable as an STD. Some of the complaints that I have are:

  1. We have no rotation. When I compare my DPS rotation/priority list to my Boomkin, I cry. I’ll QQ about this next.
  2. We are proc-o-matics.
  3. I only have 5 fingers

Most of the above can be described in the following. First off, we have no real rotation/priority list. This is partly or by and large (whichever way you want to look at it) because our priority can be interrupted by something proc’ing, such as Art of War or Hand of Light. Additionally we have 4 DPS boosters that have to be managed–Zealotry, Inquisition, Guardian of the Ancient Kings, and Avenging Wrath. Since there is our base priority list, then a priority list when something procs, then a DPS booster, hence my reason for only 5 fingers (I don’t use anything that I can’t reach with my left hand on the keyboard). So for example, my rotation looks something like this:

Crusader Strike > Templars Verdict > Judgement > Exo (only when AoW procs) > Holy Wrath (assuming that there is nothing CC’ed) > Consecration

Repeat the above until you get to 3 Holy Power (HP), then hit Inquisition. Now that you get a 30% boost to your DPS, hit Avenging Wrath. Since Avenging Wrath allows you to cast Hammer of Wrath regardless of whether or not the target is < 20% health, your priority list looks like:

Hammer of Wrath > Crusader Strike > Judgement > Holy Wrath > Consecration

When you get to your next 3 HP, you hit Zealotry. You immediately hit Crusader Strike to get to 3 HP and then refresh Inquisition. At this point, pop Guardian of the Ancient Kings for another DPS boost. Since Crusader Strike will immediately get you 3 HP, your rotation looks like:

Crusader Strike > Templars Verdict > Judgement > Crusader Strike > Templars Verdict > Exo

Phew, so to sum it up, the above is worse than anything I’ve ever seen. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that if Art of War (AoW) procs, you hit Exorcism before anything else–why, because at the moment it hits like a TRUCK!

My initial claims are confirmed–we don’t have enough fingers to hit the keys, our rotation is completely based around a backwards priority list, and our damage increases are more than any other class.

Changes to Come

In patch 4.0.6, some changes occur that make us much more viable.

  1. Crusader Strike damage has been increased from 115% (of weapon damage) to 135%.
  2. Any single target attack will refresh the stacks (or increase) of Seal of Truth
  3. Divine Storm damage has been increased from 80% to 100%.
  4. Divine Purpose has been changed to act like the current Hand of Light. So instead of certain abilities gaining 1 HP, when it proc’s, the next applicable ability will consume no HP and act like you have 3 HP.
  5. Hand of Light is now changed to provide a straight DPS increase to Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm of 2.1% increase per point of mastery (not mastery rating).

What does that mean to Retribution paladins? Basically we learn to play our class again. The changes to mastery push it right up there in stat priority as this is a flat damage increase vs one that increases our punchyness cause something is going to proc as the mastery goes up. I’m thinking that Divine Purpose will proc in order to notify the player that their next ability will consume no HP, but I can image the proc similar to Clearcasting state on the druid, so during the duration of Divine Purpose one of those 3 abilities will consume Divine Purpose and not take any HP in the process. This will be HUGE as it will mean that we can pick and choose when to take that freebie and if we are in the middle of our rotation we can appropriately prioritize that.

But even with that, I’m still at a bit of a stand still in terms of the long term benefits of these changes. First off, I think Zealotry and Inquisition are both broken talents. In most other classes you get one or two abilities like this. For the mapping I can see something like:

Starfall = Avenging Wrath

But I can’t imagine that you could compare Starsurge with say Zealotry or Inquisition. I’d be more comfortable to comparing Starsurge with a 3 HP charged Templars Verdict.

Suggestions

To be open and fair, I propose the following changes to Blizzard that are more inline with other classes and would streamline the Retribution Paladin. First off, with a druid, the whole solar/lunar eclipse state means that we are constantly changing our rotation and focusing on certain abilities, but changing that depending on the state. You should always be focusing on pushing that bar from one side to the other and back again. For the retribution paladin however, the whole idea is once you get 3HP you should use it–either with a Templars Verdict, or Zealotry, or Inquisition.

So the first recommendation is that you decouple Zealotry from Holy Power. Zealotry should just use mana and have the same cool down. This would alleviate the lack of front loaded burst DPS by saying that on the pull we could pop Zealotry using mana, and then our first Crusader Strike would be able to generate 3HP right off the bat and we can go straight into a 3HP charged Templars Verdict. Boom! Problem solved. We have front loaded DPS again. Additionally with the cool down being 2 minutes, it would be viable to prevent this from becoming overly powerful and fall more inline with other classes in terms of burst and sustained DPS.

Second recommendation I would have would be around Inquisition. This is clunky and fugly and also needs to be changed. The duration of 30 seconds with 3HP is really steep for just 30% increase in damage. If you are going to cost us 3HP, again going back to the front loaded DPS, I would say that the duration should be increased to 45 seconds AND/OR the damage scale by the amount of Holy Power vs the duration. So for example, right now 1 HP will give you 10 seconds of Inquisition, 2 HP will give you 20 seconds, and 3 HP will give you 30 seconds. But if you changed this from duration to power, then it gives more of an incentive to get the 3 HP stacks, so something like 1 HP = 15% damage increase, 2 HP = 25%, and 3 HP = 35%. This way you could adjust your rotation to push more damage out, say on the initial pull, but then flatten out your damage by only say getting 2 HP for the refresh than 3 HP.

Another option would be to change the mechanic of Inquisition all together and make this a passive ability like Vengence for Protection paladins. So for example, if you made it proc off a 3 HP charged Templars Verdict, then it would have a duration of say 9 seconds, and fall off unless refreshed by another 3 HP charged Templars Verdict. Doing it this way would achieve 2 goals. The first would be that the importance and priority of Templars Verdict goes up–way up! The second is that if you don’t use Templar’s Verdict you don’t need to worry about another DPS increase ability and your DPS will flatten out. By removing Inquisition from our rotation we can focus more on the priority and less on checking to see if our stack of Inquisition fell off AND if we have 3 HP. My preference would be more towards this route as it makes it more similar to Seal of Truth in that way than something that you hit.

Conclusion

I’m not saying that currently Retribution Paladins are completely worthless to play. They are good DPS’ers. Your damage scales with gear–period. For example, a run through Shadowfang Keep tonight yielded that on single target fights, I could push the retribution paladin’s DPS past the 10k mark. This is the first time tonight that I’ve been able to do this (use the rotation/priority list above–it will work assuming you have gear).

But they are not fun to play. So after 4.0.6 I’ll make another post with comments on the changes, but for now we play, we grind our teeth in frustration we win (kinda). Make sure to wipe the blood off your walls after sessions of banging your head up against the wall in frustration.

Rebuilding Haiti – Why hasn’t this happened yet?

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1 year ago
by george in

Back on January 12th, 2010, an earthquake that measured a jawbreaking 7.0 hit Haiti and thrust this nation into the global spotlight [source].

Now over a year later, a report come out regarding the current status of things in Haiti. Now this is a familiar story, as I can find countless other stories relating to Hurricane Katrina and how years after the event the cleanup and recovery is still underway.

But the question I pose is why hasn’t Haiti progressed further than we would expect? With the billions of dollars in humanitarian aid that has gone to Haiti, why aren’t the Haitian people back to a state closer to livable life and returning to normal?

From a CBS report:

More than 665,700 plastic tarps and 97,000 tents were handed out, but  most are now falling apart. Officials planned to put up 125,000  transitional shelters - not nearly enough for everyone. Only 3,722 have  been built. Nearly four times as many still await assembly, shelter  officials say.

Now I am not unconcerned about the need for people in need to have access to basic necessities of life–yes this does require the support of items like tents, food, clean water, ammenities; however, it would seem that this is where our effort is singularly focused. The major efforts of clearing the debris which is a prerequisite to everything else has only progressed by 5%. This means by all accounts that seem to suggest that the condition of Haiti now is similar to just after the earthquake is fairly accurate.

The question remains why isn’t relief being prioritized? Yes it is a priority to get people livable aid; however, it should be balanced by the necessity to progress forward efforts to clear the rubble and allow for reconstruction to occur. Get people back to work, back into their homes, and the real relief can begin. When do we get the people of Haiti to feel like they are part of the solution instead of charity cases that need our help? And when does just helping the basic needs actual not help the long term solution of getting Haitians back on their feet?

I think for Haiti to regain some of it’s dignity and humanity, we need to stop focusing on the basic needs and start thinking about the big picture. To think that after a year these people, these families are still living in hobbled together tents and canvas-covered communities is deplorable. And as Americans in support of such relief and recovery efforts, we need to hold those organizations–who claim to be taking those charitable contributions and provide relief–more accountable to actually taking those contributed monies and produce meaningful goals. The first goal should be to clear the debris. How can you aim to build that monumental hospital or school if there isn’t ground to build it on? How can families start providing for themselves if they cannot rebuild the houses that were destroyed because that land is still occupied by the remains of their one standing home? How can Haitians go back to work to their jobs and occupations if there is literally a metric ton of rubble between them and their jobs? So clearly clearing this debris away is priority number 1.

I compare this to the efforts of the world trade center rubble. It would ludicrous to think that you could figure out what to do at the ground zero site if the debris from both trade centers were still there. Obviously we would say, the debris has to be cleared and then we can start the process of recovery and rebuilding. The same must be prioritized for the Haitians. The debris must be cleared to allow for major infrastructure projects, such as water sanitation, irrigation, hospitals, and roads and recovery of minor projects such as homes, businesses, and schools.

Only then will the Haitians be allowed to take an active road to their own recovery and to get them back to work and back into their homes and allowed to return back to a life that was previously theres. This is what help means, not  to make American’s feel good a thousand miles away by giving money with the idea that it must be going to a good cause. We need to know that these friends and neighbors in Haiti will be allowed to take those monies and to make something of it.

Preparing for Restoration changes with Patch 4.0.6

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1 year ago
by george in

In preparation for the changes to the restoration druid spec in patch 4.0.6, I’ve been toying around with a few builds. The one that I seem to like the most is this one. The benefits that I see here is the utility of your heals. Overall this would be a balanced healer both for raid and tank and functional for instances. I decided to keep Efflorescence as I do see that this does make up a about 5% of your heals. This may not sound like much, but as a way to deal with raid wide damage, this coupled with Wild Growth could be quite powerful. Also the fact that even with the changes, Wild Growth’s cool down is being reduced by 2 seconds (from 10 seconds to 8) and the overall power has been increased by 30%. You could argue though that with the increase in power of Wild Growth, that the benefits of Efflorescence aren’t worth the 5-6 talent points.

I’ve left in Nature’s Cure as I believe that even though Druids previously couldn’t heal magic, that with all the dispellable debuffs that we will see in raids, this is going to be essential that any healer who can, should dispell corruption, magic, and poisons. This may change, but for example in last night’s fight I did 8 dispells. Doesn’t sound like much, but that means that someone else didn’t have to waste 8 GCD’s.

I was debating, or still debating on decreasing the talent points in Moonglow from 3 to 2, which would effectively reduce my base mana costs of each spell from 9% to 6%. We’re talking about 3%, but if we look at say Rejuvenation which has a new base cost of 16% (down from 26%), this means that with 3 talent points, that cost goes down to 7% base mana cost per rejuv vs 10%. Since I am envisioning that rejuv is going to be used a lot then it seems better to leave the points there for mana conservation vs moving that point into Gift of the Earthmother or Efflorescence. Even though GotEM would put a frontloaded punch to the rejuvs by increasing the upfront healing done by an additional 5%. This one I’ll need to see better as the decrease to rejuv is huge, and if mana isn’t a problem, getting more frontloaded heals may be better in raiding situations where massive incoming damage would call for a more frontload healing approach than one that can afford to recover off of HoT’s.

With the changes to ToL, I am actually in a situation where I wish we could go without that talent. I’m finding more and more reasons to not use ToL and the benefits now that it won’t allow rolling Lifeblooms means that in a raid situation the only real benefit is the instant case benefits on Regrowth. But regrowth is still a metric ton of mana; however, I’ll be watching it closely in 4.0.6 especially with the changes to talents and buffs that regrowth will get.

Efflorescence

Healing Heroic PuG’s and How I Loath Thee

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1 year ago
by george in

5-man heroic dungeons are now a requirement as we march forward in our quest through Cataclysm and the precious raids contained within.

There are a few reasons to run 5-man heroic dungeons using the Looking for Dungeon (LFG) tool:

  1. First heroic dungeon yields valor points
  2. Bosses drop a nice chunk of justice points
  3. Heroic Loot (ilevel 346)
  4. Achievements
  5. Just because you can say you’ve been there done that

At the moment, ilevel 359 gear is the gear to have. Many pieces you can get via reputation rewards, crafting or through Archeology; however, the Tier gear that you can get with Valor points is very epic. This above all else should be the reason why you run at least one heroic dungeon every day to ensure you get your daily quotient of valor points.

The rest of the stuff is just icing on the cake and ordered in what I consider to be the order of importance.

But now that we’re a month into Cataclysm, I’ve started to notice the quality and patience drop again in PuG heroic dungeon runs. For awhile everyone was patient because they were learning the fights, people were undergeared, and generally trying to get comfortable with all the crowd controlling (CC) that was now required. World of Matticus has a similar post of his observations.

I’ll use an example that came from last night. After we one-shotted Argaloth, we got a guild group together and got heroic blackrock caverns. Now this has been the ban of my heroic existence as I have yet to get this instance cleared because Karsh and Beauty kept beating up all the PuG groups I’ve been in. But with clear coordination and everyone doing their jobs, we were able to get through the entire instance with only one wipe on Karsh (his armor caught fire and he exploded).

Now feeling good coming out of that run and since we only could have 5 guildies go, I decided to bring another guildy along on another heroic run–this time we got Vortex Pinnacle. This is an interesting instance as many consider this to be the easier/easiest of all the new 5-man instances. Personally I think this is deceptively easy because with a group who knows what to do, no doubt this will not be a problem, but that really could be said about any instance! The first run through, as I was buffing myself with buff food and flasks, the paladin tank saw my mana was at full and just did a Leeroy into the the first pack of adds. No healer, no dps, just the tank. There was a shock and awe moment as we all ran up the stairs to see the tank just getting pummeled–it was a wipe. The tanks excuse was “why do you need to get buffed? Buffing takes 2 seconds and healers mana was at full”. Clearly this is an instance where patience is running thin. When we started to defend the position that the group as a whole needs to be ready before the pull and god forbid that the tank even considers CC (we had a warlock and mage, plenty of CC to go around), the tank bails.

The next tank we get was a death knight who talked the talk so we all went along. He seemed to know what he was doing, at least he was using crowd control on the adds, but I couldn’t help but notice that it took an aweful lot of healing to keep his butt up! We get to the first young drake and I went OOM pouring healing into him. I used everything in my toolkit to keep his butt alive, but I couldn’t. Unless you’ve played a healer (seriously played), a player dying on your watch makes you feel like crap. A complete failure and you begin to second guess yourself as to why that player died. In this instance, I knew something was wrong, so I shot out a question in party chat as to why the tank was taking so much damage. Silence. I resurrect the tank and he leaves group along with one of the DPS without saying a word. As we were analyzing what was going on, my other guidy noticed that half his gear was DPS gear as it had no dodge/parry on it. Clearly this was a situation where yes the tank knew the instance, but had fooled the LFG by altering his gear to meet the minimum ilevel requirements. Doesn’t matter how much stamina a piece of gear has, if you aren’t balanced, i.e. hit and expertise capped and minimally block capped, you will have your health bounce all over the place. I might as well heal a rock as it’s being driven over by a steam roller for all the good it’s going to do.

The final tank we got was a paladin tank along with a guildy warlock. At least the paladin was geared properly and generally knew how each pull was suppose to go–or so I thought. We got to Altairus and this boss is generally easy. How I approach this boss is:

  1. Tank positions the boss in the middle
  2. DPS/Healers stand upwind and spread out (Chilling Breath is a pain to heal if affecting more than a few party members)
  3. Stay out of tornado’s

For the first 2 pulls the tank decides to tank him right at the rail. Problem is, this leaves very little room to stand upwind of Altairus, especially if the windows are coming off of the railing. Finally I spoke up politely and asked the tank to move the boss in the middle. We one shot the boss after this change. The rest of the instance went by and large smoothly (we had another wipe due to a careless pull and lack of CC), but all in all we finished. 2 and a half hours later.

For DPS heroic instances may be just something you can roll your face over your keyboard and win on. For healers and tanks by and large heroic dungeons are terrible. If your tank doesn’t know what they are doing, you will wipe. If your healer can’t keep up with the incoming damage (reasonable damage as stupid people who do stupid things deserve to die in the instance) the group wipes. If a DPS doesn’t do the right thing, normally just they die.

The main issue I see with heroic instances at this point in time are:

  1. They take a lot of time to complete in a blended PuG group. In a group where everyone knows exactly what to do, how and when to do it, instances can go by very quickly. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
  2. It’s too easy to get upset and leave or kick other people out.
  3. The end boss rewards need to be improved–especially the Chaos orbs

Ghostcrawler made a post on some of these points the other day [source]. I’m not going to QQ about this post, but I do have some of my own suggestions on how Blizzard could address each of the above concerns to make the overall experience better.

I’ll start with the second one as this will feed into the others. The main issue with kicking people out comes as a result of the other players thinking/knowing that the player has not a good grasp of the fight mechanics and therefore painful for the group to try and coach them through this. I am a strong proponent in teaching a man how to fish; however, for heroic content, it should be assumed that the person knows the basic fight mechanics as these are generally the same from normal to heroic. At the moment the only mechanism in place to control who can get into heroics is the ilevel require (333 or higher). My suggestion to fix this would be to setup the following controls for players to get into heroic dungeons:

  1. Keep the ilevel requirement, but make it so that periodically the dungeon scans each player to ensure that during the encounter their ilevel still is sufficient. Many people will equip just higher ilevel gear to get into an instance then put on their class gear that is of lower ilevel just so they have a shot at jumping from say 312 gear to 346. Yes for that person that’s easier, but it’s at the cost of the players who took the time to farm normal dungeons to get to the 333 gear legitimately.
  2. A player should not be allowed into the heroic instance unless they have run the normal instance at least 15 times. I use 15 as an arbitrary number, but the intent is that the person has gone through a normal instance successfully at least a dozen times and should have a good understanding of the mechanics. Assuming they went in with a PuG, the normal dungeons should be the proving grounds and allow the player to work through their misunderstandings and learn the fight so the only thing they will need to adjust as they go from normal to heroic is understanding what heroic mechanics have been added on top of the normal dungeon mechanics.
  3. Each class should have a minimum set of requirements to gain access to heroic dungeons. So this takes the minimum ilevel requirement one step further. So for example, as a tank you would need to be hit capped to 87, expertise capped, have a minimum amount of armor on your gear and a minimum amount of block cap. For a healer you will need a minimum mana pool, minimum mana regeneration and spell power. For a DPS, it would depend on class, but some classes would have a minimum damage requirement in addition to being hit capped to 87. This is extremely important as it ensures that players are gearing to play and not just gearing for the best ilevel gear. Would it matter if someone has all ilevel 333 gear but the tank misses a lot of their hits and therefore has aggro issues? Or DPS coming in and not being able to push out the necessary DPS to down the boss?
  4. When the dungeon finder pops, it should warn the player on approximately how long it will take to complete the dungeon. This seems like a fairly obvious one, but I get tired of players who leave part way through the dungeon. Some stuff you can’t avoid, but these aren’t 20-30 minute dungeons people! You should be prepared to set aside 1-2 hours to complete a dungeon–period. Stop wasting everyone else’s time.

The addition of these checkpoints would ensure with at least a certain level of reason that the person is geared and aware enough to take on the heroic content. I think especially point #3 is reasonable as even in raiding you have soft gear check raids, such as Baradin Hold to ensure that the raid has the right stuff to keep going forward on harder content. Heroic dungeon’s should be no different. Why waste the people’s time who want to do the right thing with players who just want to goof around. I’m sorry but with the challenges and changes and certainly the direction that Blizzard is going in with Heroic dungeons casual players need to stay put unless they are willing to put the necessary effort to make the experience worthwhile for all parties involved.

The second set of changes I would make would be to:

  1. The groups of trash need to be marked with a simple arrow over the heads of the target or some other identifier, maybe a different level of the add or aura, but some type of indicator that will let the players know which adds are particularly nasty and should be crowd controlled. Granted some groups may still ignore this, but the general idea is that you are presenting players with information on which adds do especially nasty abilities and they can choose what to do with that information. A lot of times the pace of the instance is slowed because the tank isn’t familiar with what to mark and the CC abilities within the party, i.e. if you’ve never played a Warlock what are the limits of what you can CC? This may also be addressed through the party as a tank could know that each class has some type of CC, assign an icon to each player and leave it up to them to mark their own targets based on their own limits avoiding Skull and X.
  2. At boss encounters, players should be presented with a list of abilities that the boss will do and the phases. This will at least provide more information within the game on what each player will need to do and they can figure out what strategy they want to use to address those mechanics. Personally I think it would be awesome if someone created an addon that a player could have that would look at the party composition and announce to the group for each player what needs to be done and also taking into account any special abilities of their such as defensive cooldowns that can be used to address certain things. That would make explaining the fights a whole lot easier and faster and make the progress much smoother. Explaining the fights is generally what takes the most amount of stop time.

Another change would need to be made in order to address the issue of guild abuse and loot abuse within 5-man heroic instances. For example, if 4 guild members join and the 5th is a PuG, they have all the power. They can arbitrarily kick the 5th player because they have all the vote power. To address this I would:

  1. If the party is made up with a majority vote belonging to guild members, they would be unable to kick someone while they are at the boss, or during/after a boss encounter (for a set number of minutes). This would prevent a guild from forcing a player out just because. Or an alternative is that in those situations the vote to kick is removed and this is the risk that a guild run takes for not equipping the run with 5 guild members. Clearly this balance of power is unfair and should be addressed with drastic measures.

Lastly at the end of the encounter, Chaos orbs are awarded to anyone with a primary/secondary profession that is 525 and not a gathering profession. The problem is that these orbs are soulbound. The changes I would make here would be to make clearing the instance much more desirable:

  1. The orbs are fully tradeable.
  2. Like the frozen orbs in WoTLK, they need to only have a need option.
  3. Anyone should be able to roll for these orbs
  4. The boss should drop more epic loot, 352 gear

By and large I think the above changes would make the 5-man heroic dungeon experience a lot better and smoother for all parties involved. But since those are just pie in the sky dreams, at the moment heroic dungeons are still very hit and miss and when they miss they can be brutally brutal.

World_of_Logs_-_Real_Time_Raid_Analysis_-_Google_Chrome-2011-01-13_09.12.53

Baradin Hold – Argaloth

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1 year ago
by george in

We have not raided in Cataclysm since it’s release in December. This is a sad fact, but the reality is there is a great deal of work each raider needed to do in order to become raid ready. Running heroic instances, getting reputation rewards, and Archeology rewards were a pre-req to becoming successfully raid ready.

Through all the hard work that each raider put in, we decided the best way to determine our raid readiness was to take on Argaloth in Baradin Hold one of the new zones in Cataclysm. Very similar to Wintergrasp as Baradin Hold is only available to the faction that has won Baradin Hold. On Shandris this isn’t very hard to win as the Horde generally controls Baradin Hold.

Our raid composition was:

2 Tanks

  • Death Knight
  • Paladin

3 Healers

  • Shaman
  • Druid
  • Priest

5 DPS

  • Warrior
  • Hunter
  • Priest
  • Mage
  • Warlock

Now I’ll be the first to say that we went into this raid with a bit of caution. From everything that I read on this fight, you generally want to have 6 DPS. The reason for this is that Argaloth has 21 million health and a 5 minute hard enrage timer. This means that each DPS has to push out about 10k/dps. Since we only had 5 dps, this meant that we needed roughly 13k/dps. Not impossible, but certainly a stretch with the type of gear that everyone had.

After winning Tol Barad, we headed to the instance. Inside there are 3 adds that patrol around. The mechanics of the adds are very similar to Argaloth. We split our raid into two groups and had the tanks position themselves at 8 and 4 o’clock and all the healers and DPS stacked right on top of them. This is because they periodically do a frontal cleave that needs to be split up amongst all the targets in it’s range. This resulted in a few wipes as we didn’t quite get this at first, but after we stacked, these adds were very easy to get down.

The boss itself has some fairly straight forward mechanics. The first ability he does is a Meteor Slash. This is also a frontal attach that will deal 200,000 damage to all the targets in front of Argaloth and those targets will get a debuff that will increase the fire damage they take by 100%. The mechanics on this is just to split the raid into two groups, again at 8 and 4 o’clock, and all healers and DPS within those groups stacking on the tank. My initial thought was, HOLY CRAP, 200000k damage!. But in reality the damage that the raid takes is fairly moderate (ends up being about 40k damage/person). Two AoE heals, such as Wild Growth and Chain Heal on the group should get them up to a decent level.

The second ability that he does is periodically casing a magic debuff called Consuming Darkness. This is a despellable debuff that will affect 3 people every 45 seconds or so. It is imperative that this debuff is removed as this is avoidable damage so it’s worth the GCD to dispell this.

The last ability he does is a Fel Firestorm. This is a fairly obvious ability as he will start casting fireballs that will land where a player was standing and result in a pool of fire at the point of impact. Players need to periodically move to ensure that they don’t get hit by or stand in the fire. During this phase he doesn’t do either of the other two abilities, it is a matter of everyone watching where they are standing and moving where there is no fire. During this phase it’s imperative also that ranged DPS continues to DPS Argaloth. After this phase ends, the tanks will need to reposition themselves and the DPS/healers need to stack immediately.

This is really all that is required to be aware of in order to get through this encounter. It was surprisingly simple to do, although with our composition we were 1 second from the enrage timer. Our lowest DPS was 10107.0 and our highest was 15767.

The drops that we got were both PvP gear that nobody could use, but Argaloth will drop Tier 11 gear, so it’s worth taking him down whenever the lock is available.

Restoration Druid Perspective

From a restoration druid perspective, I used the following strategy:

  1. Whichever tank the boss had aggro on, I did a rapid stack of Lifebloom x3
  2. Added Rejuv as needed
  3. When Meteor Slash hit, I used Wild Growth on that group along with Rejuv on the target that had the least amount of health and proc’ed Swiftmend to get an Efflorescence under them.
  4. Dispell Consuming Darkness whenever it was up
  5. During the fire phase, I tried as best I could to keep Lifebloom up (since everyone was moving to avoid fire, there were times when I was out of range of the tank that had the Lifebloom stacks). Rejuv as needed for those who couldn’t move.
  6. As soon as that phase was over, I topped off whoever needed it, using a Wild Growth if necessary or Nourish.

By and large this was not that difficult of an encounter; however, I do have to take a bit of that with a grain of salt as we did have 3 healers. I will say though that my healing on the druid was something I was a bit shocked on, as looking through World of Logs:

My healing was above what I was expecting given the difficulties that I’ve been reading about from raiding restoration druids. Also making sure to keep Lifebloom on a tank at all times and using Rejuv/Wild Growth when necessary really helped to ensure that the entire raid was in good shape. Also my mana at the end of the fight was above 50% with an innervate used around 65%. Considering my mana pool during the raid was just shy of 95k this wasn’t bad at all. I would expect as the changes in 4.0.6 move from the PTR to production, the balance between Wild Growth, Rejuv and Regrowth will change a bit as I would expect Regrowth to be my goto fast heal and Rejuv to be used liberally to proc a lower cast time on Nourish. I did not have to use ToL ono this fight, and I have to say by and large, I have not been using ToL very much given it’s limited abilities and the fact that I do not use Regrowth very much except in situations where I need just a few more seconds buffer (normally in situations where I have Lifebloom x3, Rejuv and the tank is starting to drop rapidly in health. I’ll use a regrowth/swiftmend to give me some buffer time to get a Healing Touch off).

What shocked me was that our Holy Priest was on par with our Resto Shaman. Granted with all the healers in this raid, by removing one of the healers, and assuming that my healing output was the same, I would expect the bars to be somewhat leveled out.

Becoming Better at Healing

0
1 year ago
by george in

World of Matticus posted a nice and brief 11 step guide to becoming a better healer [source]. The list is:

  1. Heal.
  2. Heal normal dungeons.
  3. Heal heroic dungeons.
  4. Heal players in the world as they’re questing.
  5. Heal in battlegrounds.
  6. Heal in world PvP.
  7. Heal in arenas.
  8. Heal raids.
  9. Heal until a wipe has been called.
  10. Heal on a daily basis.
  11. Just keep healing.

By and large this list is hard to refute in any way as the basic principle here is that with practice comes perfection. The more you heal the less you will be caught off guard as you’ve committed your rotation and bindings to muscle memory so without actually having to think about it you can observe incoming damage and know exactly what buttons to press, when, and in what combination.

Without disrespecting Matticus as this is a blog I follow quite regularly, I will make some slight modifications to this list based on my own experiences:

  1. Heal normal dungeons
  2. Heal heroic dungeons
  3. Heal players in the world as they’re questing
  4. Heal in battlegrounds, pvp, areans
  5. Heal raids
  6. Heal until a wipe has been called
  7. Heal on a daily basis
  8. Learn your class and what they are capable of
  9. Keep up on your theory crafting on what will/can make you a better healer
  10. Read what others are doing, do your homework
  11. Practice, rinse/repeat

I make some modifications to the list to remove some of what I would consider to be redundancies; however, more to the fact, I believe that instead of just banging a square peg into a round hole and hoping it sticks, the better approach is to heal in various ways, but then step back and see what’s working and what’s not and figure out if there are things that you can adjust to make the outcome either less of a pain or more enjoyable for you as a healer.

Lets face it, healers and tanks have a rough job. In a previous posting I touched base on some of the roles that are to be expected of a tank [source]. But that goes the same for a healer as a disheartened healer or frustrated healer is really going to be a sub-par healer. There are certainly exceptions to this rule as sometimes there are those who successfully feed on those failures to push through that adversity and come out stronger, but most of us the more a group wipes–and wipes directly because you couldn’t heal, the more it becomes disheartening for you and you actually start to perform much more poorly than you were before the wipe.

Wipes will happen, and in WoW are necessary in order to learn the fights and mechanics and more importantly your own breaking points. But lets be clear, the intent here isn’t to actually break you. There are times when we’ve wiped so many times that I’ve thought to myself that the best course of action is just to quit the guild, quit the game, and move onto something else. It can get bad. So healers do yourself a sanity check and make sure that during your journey to becoming a better healer you keep in mind that banging your head up against a wall isn’t necessarily going to yield you favorable results and it is up to you to keep yourself in check and know your limits. When you’ve reached your limits determine if things can be adjusted, or if you’ve reached a point where your clueless and you need to ask or research in order to overcome your adversity.

We talk about GCD’s as the holy grail of WoW, but just as important as it is to reach your mythical GCD through haste, it’s equally just as important to step back and consume others experiences and knowledge to better prepare you for your next encounter. I would argue that it is a combination of the two that makes a great healer, and not just a healer who has the sheer willpower and stamina to bang that square peg into a round hole for hours on end. If the rest of the healing community is like me, it will be destructive more than constructive.

Resto Druid Healing in Cataclysm Normal Dungeons

0
1 year ago
by george in

I’ve been healing on my druid normal dungeon’s and I’ve noticed a few things that I thought I would share.

Required Mechanics

In each of the Cataclysm dungeon encounters, there are a set of mechanics that go along with that fight. Most of them revolve around a few core principles:

  1. Tank the right adds
  2. Positioning
  3. DPS the right adds
  4. Interrupt
  5. Stay out of the obvious

A lot of Pick up Groups (PUGs) will be completely clueless about these mechanics, so save yourself a wipe and frustration and just briefly go through the mechanics with the group. For example, as a healer, the Siamat encounter goes much more smoothly if the ranged DPS target and kill the Minion of Siamat whenever he spawns. The Minion of Siamat does periodic chain lightening AoE’s and he will eventually kill himself; however, if the DPS can down these minions quickly the overall party damage is substantially reduced. Will this lower someone’s overall DPS? Perhaps, but a kill is a kill right? And if the healer doesn’t have to overheal or furiously keep up with the incoming burst damage, then all the better.

Don’t stand in the OBVIOUS

This one is a bit of an obvious one to put, but for a healer this is absolutely critical that people know not to stand in the obvious. Fire, dust storms, spikes, mines, you name it it’s in the encounter. And yet people still don’t have the discipline to move out of the obvious. Somehow players have gotten it ingrained in their thought process that a healer should be able to health through whatever incoming damage is occurring. In WoTLK this was absolutely the case as you were referred to as a ‘fail healer’ (which by the way, I hate people when they say this as it is completely devoid of anything that is a helpful descriptor as to why they failed to be a good healer) if you couldn’t keep up with all the incoming damage. You would be told to just ‘heal through it’ and that was that. With full ilevel 264 gear and properly spec’ed, in WoTLK this was a joke. Any heroic encounter you could pretty much all stand in the obvious and get healed through it.

Fast forward to Cataclysm and we see a dramatic shift in mechanics. Not only are healer spells taking longer to cast, they do substantially less healing as everyone’s health pools are over 100k. Additionally healing seems to be directly linked to gear, so in the lower gear ilevels you will have substantially less Healing per Second (HPS), mana pools, and replenishment that makes it even more critical that people don’t stand in the obvious.

No longer should/can healers be expected to heal your way out of an avoidable situation so get it through your heads people that mechanics exist, they are there for a reason and take caution that your healer will/may/can let you die for standing in the obvious and it’s entirely your fault.

Druids Healing over Time (HOTs) are not so HoT

This is one I’ve been struggling with since Cataclysm came out. Previously our rotation was fairly straight forward and Regrowth and Rejuvenation were our two go to heals. One was an instant cast with fairly good returns on HoT, i.e. it was very easy to blanket Rejuv an entire 10man raid. Also regrowth was fairly powerful as a HoT and had a much lower cast time than the bigger heals like Nourish and Healing Touch. In fact in WoTLK Healing Touch was so costly and slow, I took this COMPLETELY out of my rotation.

Druids also had a nitch as being a powerful raid healer because of the abilities to HoT on the go and that we were very mana efficient.

Now looking at healing in Cataclysm, the entire mechanics have changed. No longer can you Rejuv the entire raid. Regrowth is pretty much your medium heal, Nourish and Healing Touch have the same cooldown time (not sharing the same cooldown timer obviously) with Nourish being your most of the time medium heals and Healing Touch being used in conjunction with heavy damage and during Clearcasting periods. Lifebloom which had a much higher mana cost in WoTLK is now essential to put on your tanks and keep rolling due to the HoT and the replenishment that you get.

So let’s look at a typical healing situation.

  1. At the pull, Lifebloom your tank. You can either do a slow stack meaning you apply Lifebloom once, allow it to get to say 1 or 0 seconds remaining and then refresh Lifebloom to get 2 stacks, rinse and repeat to get 3 stacks and then maintain 3 stacks. Or you can rapid stack and quickly apply 3 stacks of Lifebloom and then just maintain it. My preference is to use a rapid stack as it’s 3 seconds of your global cooldown (GCD) that you don’t need to use at the start of a fight.
  2. Rejuv your tank for small damage. Between rejuv and lifebloom HoT’s this should be enough to mitigate against small amounts of regular or constant incoming damage. Keep in mind that the mana costs for Rejuv are essentially the same as a healing touch so do not keep a rolling rejuv on your tank. Unless the encounter requires that your tank is topped off, get ready to be comfortable with their life taking dips down into the 70-80% range.
  3. For moderate damage I go with Nourish. I Nourish spam because of 2 reasons. 1) Nourish is cheap on mana. Really cheap! Use it. 2) Nourish will have a 100% chance (if speced) to refresh your Lifebloom stacks to 3. This prevents the use of a second GCD to reapply Lifebloom so 2 birds, 1 stone = win.
  4. For burst damage, I go with the following strategy. Lifebloom x3, rejuv + swiftmend (should proc also efflorescence which is another HoT), Regrowth + Nourish/Healing Touch, and Wild Growth. This is most of your toolkit boys and girls. Burst damage is a bitch to heal through (sorry about my language there, but it is). Refresh rejuv as needed to get your tank past the burst incoming damage and Noursh/Healing Touch them back to life. I usually spare the Regrowth because it has limited HoT and is really only good for the shorter cast time and moderate healing.
  5. For party wide damage, Rejuv, Wild Growth and Swifthmend/efflorescence where needed.
  6. Clearcasting, any time you are in clearcasting get a big heal off (don’t mind that you are overhealing). 1) this will top off anyone free of any mana charge and 2) if this is on a tank it will refresh their Lifebloom stacks. Take advantage of your clearcasting states as much as you can so you can conserve your mana.

The one thing that I am having trouble dealing with is massive party wide AoE damage. For example, in the Blackrock Caverns encounter, Karsh Steelbender is probably one of my least favorite fights. First off, he’s 99% immune to attack. The only way to attack him is for the tank to kite Karsh through the lava in the middle of the room so he can gain a debuff of superheated obsidium armor. The problem here is that each stack will cause Karsh to deal more fire damage to the tank as well as increase AoE damage to the party.

I have yet to clear this encounter successfully with pugs as it seems very difficult for tanks to stack the debuff to 9 and then allow it to drop before the AoE damage gets to big. But at 9 stacks, that’s 9k damage party wide that is happening. This seems to be a very hard situation as you have to tank heal the burst damage due to Karsh’s main attack doing more damage for each stack, as well as healing up the party who are also taking substantial damage due to the AoE and the stacks of the debuff.

It’s been talked about on the forums that druids are not equpped to handle that kind of front-loaded party/raid wide damage, and I have to agree. Our main two reusable talents are Wild Growth and efflorescence (assuming that the DPS stacks on it). Tranquility is also within our tool box; however with its insane cooldown this may not be viable to use through this encounter as you can only use it once.

As your gear gets better, there seems to be a direct link here to gear and being able to move more towards rejuv as a main heal for the party. This is obviously very good for us as Rejuv is an instant cast, we can cast on the move, and it does a fairly moderate amount of healing. This coupled with the fact that if you rejuv a target and then hit them with a Nourish/Healing Touch, both do additional healing since that target is already affected by a HoT (this works with Wild Growth, Lifebloom, Regrowth, etc).

Level 85 Heroic Dungeons–Heroic means something now

0
1 year ago
by george in

Before I had off to bed on what should have been a rather quite and WoW-fulling day, I find myself having to put a bit of pen to paper and write out my experiences running level 85 heroic dungeons.

I’ll start by saying that up to now I have been very hesitant to set foot into a heroic dungeon from everything I’ve heard my fellow guildies and WoW community in general say about Heroic dungeons. Blizzard, rightfully or wrongfully, have redeemed themselves after WoTLK and made it so heroic dungeons are not guaranteed to be successfully run and that it takes skill and not just gear to get through them.

Running normal dungeon’s over the last few weeks has shown me a great deal of what Blizzard was thinking about when creating Cataclysm. First off, the dungeons bring back Burning Crusade mechanics when it comes to trash mobs. Crowd Control started in Burning Crusade and was necessary because in a group of say 4-5 adds 1-2 of them were just nasty. Whether they hit like a truck or did some sort of fear ability, you wanted to get them out of the picture until the rest of the adds were down and you could focus all your attention on them to burn them down quickly and safely. WoTLK took that mechanic and threw it out the window as the trash just hit hard and you could heal through it. Most DPS’ers who still do this are what the community has come to refer to as ‘Lich Babies’ or ‘Wrath Babies’ to denote their inexperience in dealing with trash mobs in a strategic way.

Additionally, trash mobs in WoTLK could easily be grouped up and AoE’ed down quickly and efficiently. DPS’ers would grin when they saw 10k+ numbers show up in their Recounts and do a /flex emote to prove their greatness. In Cataclysm trash mobs have a metric ton more HP to them. Given AoE’s generally weak individual damaging effects and that the duration tends to not be that long and the mana costs that it takes to cast AoE’s, AoE’ing in Cataclysm is pretty much a mute topic–single target your adds to bring them down quickly.

Lastly, the boss encounters are setup more like raid encounters than dungeon encounters. For instance in WoTLK a heroic dungeon encounter may have 1 major mechanic, such as a stacking debuff that needs to be dropped by jumping when the stacks got to a certain number. Other than that it was just traditional dragon rules, don’t stand in front or behind a dragon and only stand on one of its sides. Pretty simple. The boss encounters in Cataclysm are much much harder. First off most boss encounters have multiple phases and in addition to the phases, there are a minimum of 2-3 boss mechanics that you now have to worry about. Additionally bosses will sometimes have adds as part of the encounter, so instead of 1 target you are dealing with multiple targets. Needless to say that going from WoTLK to Cataclysm using the Random dungeon finder has been somewhat of a challenge!

Tonight was no different. We completed successfully a run through Tol’Vir with me healing our OT (Prot Paladin) along with one of our main raid mages (Arcane). Blew through that instance with no issues (well I let one DPS die, but he shouldn’t have been standing where he was so often!).

Now we move to Blackrock Caverns. Let me start by saying that I’ve been trying to get past Corla on normal for the last few days, and that just wasn’t happening. Turns out that Corla was the LEAST of our concerns as on heroic the next 2 bosses were more than we could deal with. After a dozen or so wipes, 100g in repair bills and still no bosses down after Corla after 4 (YES COUNT IT 4!!!) hours in that dungeon, we called it a night.

In reflection there were several issues. We had pug tanks who each had their own styles in dealing with the boss encounter. We had DPS issues where adds weren’t being burned down properly to meet boss mechanics. We had healer issues as I couldn’t keep people up during periods of mass AoE damage. All in all, there was certainly a lot to think about and reflect, but clearly these issues need to be sorted before we start raiding again.

I’ve made some adjustments to my Healbot configuration:

Left Button: Lifebloom | Middle Button: Healing Touch | Right Button: Nourish

Shift+Left Button: Swiftmend | Shift+Middle Button: Regrowth | Shift+Right Button: Rejuvination

Ctrl+Left Button: Rebirth

Ctrl + Right Button: Wild Growth

I’m mainly making more use of the middle button as I was finding it more and more difficult during periods of panic to worry about shift vs control key. This way there really is only 1 function button that needs to be alternated to get me through my rotation. Also I need to make more use of Tree of Life (ToL) form. This is hard for me at the moment given that this is an ability instead of passive and that really the only 4 benefits of ToL that I can see at the moment are:

  1. Regrowths turn to instant cast
  2. Armor is buffed
  3. Lifebloom can be applied to more than one target
  4. Wild Growth hits 2 additional people

There’s a lot of talk about using ToL to get Lifebloom on more than one target. I think in most cases this would mainly apply in raid type situations as I can’t really see where this would be useful (both in time and pre/execution) in 5-man instances. So ToL has to be used more for the Regrowth. Regrowth in general though I’m still trying to get back into my rotation. Consider, the mana costs for Regrowth are about the same as Healing Touch! The only real difference is the cast time and the overall healing done (obviously Healing Touch is going to be much stronger). Nonetheless, I need to get Regrowth back into my rotation as hiding it under the Control key was making it much more frustrating to get off a “oh crap I need to pour some life into this person” type of situations.

Reviewing my spec, I think the talents are correctly distributed; however, as better gear is obtained, I will probably move Moonglow into Genesis to improve the overall healing done instead of conservation of mana. One thing I did find is with a proper group staying out of the obvious and alleviating the needless damage that they are taking, mana did not seem to be as big of an issue as I had previously thought it had been. Not keeping people topped off seemed to make a huge difference and selectively healing and making use of Clearcasting periods where I get free heals (and overheals) I could dump a Healing Touch or a Nourish into someone just for the sake of it.

One challenge that I have still not yet figured out is what to do in periods of major raid wide damage. For instance both bosses after Corla do massive party wide AoE damage. Druids main ability to handle this would be Wild Growth and Tranquility. Since tranquility has a super long cool down, this doesn’t become something you can actively spam during the boss encounter (more than once), so between Wild Growths and selective healings, it didn’t seem to be enough to keep everyone alive. I need to research more if this was due to improper handling of boss mechanics, individuals taking avoidable damage or purely a healer issue where I just need to figure out how to more effectively pour health into people taking burst damage.

All in all, I will conclude that heroics have finally lived up to their names. Love them, hate them, oh I loath them, but challenging. This above all else is what keeps the game interesting and forces people like me to actively research test, and theorycraft about ways of improving our encounters to make for a more successful instance.

Update 1/8/2010: Added the ctrl+right button for Wild Growth

Etiquette to Gathering in WoW

0
1 year ago
by george in

With any new expansion, the need and desire to level up is compounded by the fact that EVERYONE on the server is doing the exact same thing. Prices on items that you think to yourself should not be as high as they are–they are that high. And this is just something that people will have to live with and will adjust as time goes on and more and more people get to a maintenance mode with respect to their professions and gear.

But that doesn’t mean that the journey to get to that point is going to be one where everyone is courteous and helpful. Let’s be perfectly honest, with a limited amount of “stuff” and a mob of people trying to get at it, there are going to be misunderstandings and hurt feelings. Take for instance gathering. Turns out that gathering professions are highly sought after in Cataclysm. For one thing Blizzard has tied in professions to each other, for example there is a VERY strong link between Jewelcrafting and Mining since most of our uncommon and rare gems come out of prospecting. Since most of the recipes require a substantial number of uncommon gems, you have to prospect a TON of ore.

So what does this mean to gatherers? It means that there is a huge demand out there and the supply is very small. Actually when Cataclysm first came out, Deepholm and Twilight Highlands both were rich with gathering nodes for mining and herbing; however, as of December 8th, Blizzard decided that those area’s were too rich in ore [source]:

Mining nodes were too dense in the entrance cave to Uldaman and have been thinned out.

Needless to say ore is at a premium and there aren’t enough nodes to go around to satisfy the demand for it. Let’s go over some ground rules to the etiquette with gathering. I believe this is important because I have encountered more and more rude behavior that would suggest people just don’t understand how this all works (i.e. getting all bent out of shape when they feel that the ore that you just got was theirs).

Etiquette when Gathering

  1. The node is not yours until you get it. Let’s not be unrealistic here. Multiple people may go after a node. This is just the nature of the beast here.
  2. Who gets it first? Normal rules would usually say that the person closest to the node should get it. But what if two people get there at the same time? Whoever gathers it wins it.
  3. Don’t be a sore loser. If you and another person(s) are going for a node and you don’t get it, don’t be a sore loser about it. There is always respawn of nodes.

It’s unfortunate to say that in the world of gathering professions there can’t be more civility; however, until the WoW economy levels out and the demand is still high for the gathered items, the quest to hunt the next node is going to be as strong as ever. Keep the above in mind when you travel out into the world and first and foremost keep a good head about it. Nodes are not yours until they are in your bag and if you don’t get it this time don’t be a sour puss about it and just keep moving on. Trust me, I’ve had loads of nodes taken right before my eyes, but the reality of it is my name was nowhere on that node and the other person was just there sooner and was able to gather it that much faster than me. Think of it as a store, if there are only a limited quantity of an item there is going to be a mass rush to get them. And just because you did the right thing and stood in line and was patient doesn’t mean the person next to you isn’t going to try and get there just a second ahead of you. It’s not right, but it’s also nothing to get all pissy about either.

I remember back in the early days of WoTLK where Primordial Saronite were selling at over 3k a piece!Now they sell for 150g a piece. The economy will adjust itself, you just need to be patient and stick through it. But first and foremost don’t let it get the best of you. After all this is just a game and there isn’t anything gained by being a sore loser.

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