Distractions and diversions

It can be a little strange having a gaming blog, especially one so narrow as a class-specific WoW blog. Things will happen in the real world, like tsunami or the death of bin Laden, and you're not sure whether you ought to comment on it. Does it seem weird that you haven't mentioned it? Or would it seem weird for a WoW hunter blog to suddenly start talking about SEAL team 6 in Pakistan?

I guess all I'll really say about that is that, while I'm glad the guy's dead, I wish it had been Army Special Forces that did him in. Just a little vestigial branch loyalty from my time in.

Now that my priestess has also made it to 85 and done a few heroics, I really must admit that I like healing a lot more than I like tanking. I've been playing her as discipline, and for me there really aren't any tanking moments comparable to popping wings with a full stack of evangelism and then casting penance into an inner-focused greater heal. It's pretty feasible to bring a nearly-dead tank back to almost full health, and just the juggling and triage in general is more satisfying for me than rounding up mobs. You do have to be willing to dive into your combat log to prove things though. I had a group wipe a couple times on Karsh in H-BRC and you could tell they were winding up into "blame the healer" territory.

I went into my combat log and found the last tick of heat wave that I'd eaten was for 28k. The damage from those climbs the more stacks of the debuff he's got on him, so if you're leaving him in the fire long enough to get 4 or 5 new stacks of the debuff, that's 20,000+ damage ticking on everyone in the party every second, in addition to melee swings on the tank. There's no way a healer with an average item level of 333 is healing through that, you know? People were falling over dead even when I popped PI on myself and spammed prayer of healing.

Some boss mechanics are a little bit better at illustrating to the DPS that they have responsibilities past "DPS the boss real hard". I haven't yet had a group clear Drahga in Grim Batol without a single wipe, because DPS are just loathe to swap targets. Having a fire elemental ram into them and blow up, insta-killing them, is a pretty good wake up, though. Well, sort of. After a couple wipes on him last night, the PvP-geared arms warrior bailed to be replaced by the most delightful rogue, who made the encounter trivially easy. She also kicked casts on later mobs! When I remarked on how many DPS don't seem to like to use their interrupts, she said "they do no damage," then had a whole little comic monologue about "y i use if no damage, i no waste golds on training it" and stuff. So that was great.

In raiding news, I feel like I'm pretty sure that we're not going to clear T11 before T12 launches, which is a shame. I guess once we out-gear it we can come back later and clear it. Maybe I'm being pessimistic? I hope so. Part of it's my fault, as I've known I need to do some recruiting for... a while now and I haven't gotten around to doing so. Recruiting is a lot of work, and especially for a small casual guild with poor progression it's tough to attract the people that will really help with that.