You’re going to RDF heal with righteous fury up?
If you’re asking because of the talents, I needed it for Improved Devotion Aura. I don’t necessarily need to have RF going, which is probably wise with inexperienced or crappy tanks. But from what I understand, it’s a viable tactic. Healing does not produce much threat at all, so the increase from RF is not enough to present a problem for aggro, and if an enemy is going to peel off the tank and go for a caster, it’s not a bad idea to have it go for the caster wearing mostly-plate armor (who’s also taking 6% less damage because of the talent).
With my pally, I was planning on going 51/5/15, picking up Divinity in the prot tree first and then taking Benediction in Ret and going down to Conviction for the extra crit.
That really is weird. If you want to tank, tank for god’s sake (and it’s not like you can’t gear a tank up super-fast what with the insta-queues for heroics).
Current wisdom is that crit is less useful than haste if you’re going for a Holy Light firehose build. Last night after my respec, I tested and was getting 10k Holy Lights. Crit is not a concern at that point. 
It is useful if you want to maximize Flash of Light, though.
It’s probably unwise of me to focus on Holy Light, since the research I’ve been doing assumes active raiding gear and 40-45k mana. But despite all my trouble and lack of readiness with Oc, I never did actually run out of mana, and during my tests last night it took an awful lot of HL spam to get me down to 50% mana from full.
Cheers man! Very awesome.
Good luck on Sindragosa. For us, it took a while to eliminate the idiotic mistakes (when Frost Bombs 1-shot you, I would imagine you would learn how to LOS quickly, but…), but when it was at the point of just getting to P3 regularly the biggest issue was maintaining heals on everyone. The tank takes insane amounts of damage (and Sindragosa is, of course, one of two bosses that are parry-hasted in ICC), and the raid needs to drop Mystic Buffet every other block at the very LEAST. DPS wasn’t an issue for us, so we made sure that ranged were dropping every block. The largest cause of wipes early on was ranged/healers not paying attention to the Icy Grip timer and exploding the raid with their Instability Backlash, so make sure everyone is paying attention to it (the timer is for the cooldown, not the actual ability use). Good luck on that, and cheers on Shadow’s Edge. It takes a super long time to get all the Shadowfrost Shards, but man, we completed ours a week ago and that thing hits like a truck. You’re a tank, so the insane amounts of aggro is a good thing, but our ret paladin that got it had to macro HoSalvation into his wings macro so he doesn’t get insta-gibbed on trash. His “first death with Shadowmourne” was pretty hilarious in its ignominy.
As far as AVR goes, I AM SO GLAD IT’S GONE! SO GLAD! Really, the hand-holding was too much, and allows bad players to look somewhat decent while just getting in the way for players that already know what’s going on. The ONLY thing that it was somewhat useful for was to help provide visual aids while explaining fights. That functionality was nice, but going back to marking the person speaking on Vent and hopping around like an idiot for a bit was fine in the first place. I’m uninstalling it today, and will be so happy never to use it again.
Sure, but I’m not giving up haste for the crit; I’m giving up Divine Sacrifice/Guardian for crit.
And so far, my healing style has been FoL focused – but that’s because I’m only level 64 so I don’t have a lot of haste yet. I expect my style will evolve as I level and my gear improves.
**Bosstone **is being a bit modest–even when he was healing in half-gear and the wrong spec, he still kept me alive. Which IMO is decently impressive, even if I do ridiculously overgear the content.
IMO, if you can kill PP, BPC should be a cakewalk. How do you do BPC? I find that having one ranged-DPS-tank (Lock or Hunter) take the orb boss while a tank-tank takes the other two and keeps them at the edge of the platform by the stairs works just fine.
I love/hate that I’ll never get stuck with that job, since I’m a Prot War.
Some people are just impatient. IMO, if they won’t fall in line, let them sink or swim on their own. That’s what I did with the Hunter **BT **mentioned upthread. 
(He was a guildie and he’d already stated that he was going to be pulling stuff, so I just let him do it–if he pulled more than he could handle, that was his own problem.)
Oh, don’t get me wrong; I know I’m a damn good healer, thank you. I don’t think there’s many people who could have kept the group alive half-geared, mis-specced, first time healing with that class, with a suicidal and possibly slightly insane tank. It was just a hell of an adventure on my end.
Oh, and thanks for not mentioning that I just *barely *missed charging off the Oc again. :smack:
Yeah, the backlash is what’s currently killing us. When we killed her in 10 man HM, anybody who had the debuff just didn’t cast, and the healers communicated with each other to make sure healing was being covered. Not sure if we’ll have the luxury of doing that in 25 or not, but it would sure help.
I hate that fight, honestly. It’s so frustrating not to be able to cast for a good portion of the fight. I swear, I was getting the debuff three times in a row. It’s nice to be able to cast and then Ice Block, but that trick only works once and then it’s back to wanding like an idiot.
I’m sure it will take me quite awhile to get it–our alt raid is just now dipping its toes into hard modes, so it’s going to take forever for 50 shards to drop–and that’s after I get all the souls, do the three Infusion quests, and hopefully end up as the only person in the raid who actually has a legitimate claim to the shards (there’s one other guy in the group who’s working on it, but he doesn’t show up every day and his main spec is Holy, so I think I’ve got a good shot at it).
I’m of mixed mind on it. On the one hand, I really like the circles it puts down to show ranges. Yeah, range finders are good, but the visual cue is quite nice. On the other hand, it does make things kind of EZ mode and I’d rather learn to do things the right way. Still, I’m not going to complain that we got our PP kill before it went away, nor will I complain if we get Sindragosa down before it does. 
Well, I did say suicidal.
I’m a bit mixed, though mostly indifferent, about AVR being broken. Indifferent because I’d never heard of it until the day before Blizz announced they were breaking it, glad because it really does cross the EZ Mode line in a way that DBM and Omen and everything else don’t, and sad because, well, I love augmented reality. The general concept is so freaking cool and I can’t help but like technology in that area.
You know what really bugs me about Sindragosa? I feel like I should be constantly jumping. I think it’s the people getting frozen into iceblocks that’s tripping some Hodir connection in my head.
Also fun is when I’ve been running Fury for a while, then I go back to Prot, and I’m trying to scroll up to Cleave. (In Fury, downscroll is HS, upscroll is Cleave; in Prot, upscroll is always Spell Reflect, while I swap out downscroll as HS or Cleave based on what I’m fighting.)
Putricide wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for us, we wiped on him for about an hour and a half before getting him down. There were only three of us alive at the end, myself, the main tank, and a warlock. Seeing as how we may have to teach some new people the fight I’m sure it’ll be just as painful this week.
We don’t really have a strategy for doing BPC since last week was our first time seeing them as a group. A few others in the group have done the 25 man version, but most of us had no clue. How we do it this week just depends on who we have show up and what we can grab for the empty slots. Probably have the warlock tank Keleseth, I’ll grab one of the other dudes and have the offtank grab the third guy. Or, who knows, we may have a spare tank show up and they toss me into a healer role again.
My tank is a Prot War and I have been stuck with it in past weeks. Once I got past the learning curve it really wasn’t that bad. I sort of like having to do something other that “Stand here. Hit boss. Grab loot.”
IMO, you’ll probably be better off having both the non-orb guys on one tank, unless that tank’s gear is terrible or your healers really suck. It’s definitely helpful for your DPS not to have to move around as much. (Otherwise you have to spread them far enough apart to avoid getting the other tank hit by empowered Shock Vortex.)
Really! How do you stay ahead of healing aggro? The only method I’m familiar with involved blowing a CD and tanking the big ooze for a few seconds when it first spawns, hoping that you build up enough threat to keep it on you. The one time I tried tanking it with just Heroic Throw and Taunt, it ended up going taunt-immune and instagibbing healers. ETA: Of course, that was also before SoW, so I guess the 15% HP/damage buff might be helping there.
Oh maaaaaaaaaaan! You want to hear something insanely aggravating? I’ll tell you anyway.
I ran Oculus on my paladin last night. After killing Eregos, I flew my drake over to the chest, and somehow completely failed to notice that I had aggroed 3 whelps … until I dismounted next to the chest. So of course that left me trying to fight off these whelps (a hopeless endeavor) single-handedly. You see, the rest of the group had, for some unknown reason, dismounted on one of the other floating rock things that look like the one with the chest but don’t actually have the chest. And because I was in combat, so were they, and so they couldn’t re-mount to come to my aid.
So I went ahead and just let the whelps kill me so that the rest of the group could get out of combat and I wouldn’t be holding them up. Released my spirit and ran back from the graveyard, obtained a new drake, and flew back up to the chest, where the healer was waiting for me (the only other party member who hadn’t already left the group). The healer started healing me, while I clicked on the chest to loot my Ley Guardian’s Cache … and that’s when the server hiccuped and DC’d me (DC’d several of the people on my Friends list, too, which is how I knew it was the server, not me).
When I reconnected and logged back in I was still in the instance (to my surprise), but was not able to loot the chest 
But wait! My “new mail” icon was up, and a quick mouseover showed I had mail from The Postmaster! So I checked my mail as soon as I got back to a mailbox. Alas, all The Postmaster had for me was a Triumph badge and four Stone Keeper’s Shards. No bag of gems for me
On the positive side, I spent more time questing in Kalimdor, and I’m now only 6 quests shy of 3000, and 20 quests shy of Loremaster of Kalimdor
I’ve also decided to go for Exalted with the Timbermaw. That opens up some special quests with a fun ending. I also finally located that Wintersaber Trainer in Winterspring and I’ve started farming the rep for the mount he’ll sell me. That’s that ghosty-looking cat mount, right?
You can put in a GM ticket for that. I had something similar happen to me, and the GM was able to restore my bag of gems.
No, the Spectral Tiger is a TCG code mount. You’re probably looking at hundreds of dollars on eBay, minimum, or tens of thousands of in-game gold (if not 100k+) if you find someone selling one on your server.
The Wintersaber is a white (with light gray stripes?) and has the saddle of a regular mount, while moving at the speed of an epic one (no gemmed armor like most 60% speed sabers).
Thanks, I’ll try that 
Darn!
Hey, I just found this bit of complete Epic Win:
One of the best WoW music videos I’ve ever seen.
I just checked out of curiosity, and yeah, all of the Spectral Tiger cards currently on eBay are running >$600. I can’t get there from work (while, oddly enough, I can get to eBay), but WoW TCG Loot is a good site for tracking prices on loot cards.