Just so long as I’m not missing a trick! Ty for the info. About 8% to go to 73. One random should top me off nicely tonight.
There were folks from a guild wanting to run ToC 10 man the other morning but they were short of healers and needed one tank. When I answered them in trade chat I was invited into the raid and shortly thereafter we were all at ToC and ready to go. Except that one of their guild mates logged in and they decided they wanted him to be off tank instead and asked me to leave. Keep in mind that I wasn’t under geared nor had we started so it wasn’t as if I was doing a bad job. I went ahead left because I didn’t want to stay where I wasn’t wanted. I was polite and whispered to the person who wanted me to leave that I thought revoking my invitation so close to the start of the raid was extremely rude. He explained that he didn’t mean to be rude and offered a few reasons why the wanted the other guy to run though ToC 10 as if they were valid reasons for asking me to leave. I explained that it was still rude to ask me to leave and then I wished them luck and good drops in the raid.
I wasn’t overly peeved at this and both he and I remained civil during our conversation. While I think his behavior, and, by extension, the behavior of his guild was rude it was pretty clear that he didn’t think he did anything in the least bit wrong. Am I the one out of touch here?
Odesio
Especially since it’ll probably take a good long time to put a PUG together. A friend of mine who’s been running BC dungeons as a tank sat in the heroics queue for 5 whole minutes before leaving the queue. 
Nope. I think you’re in the right - certainly a guild ought to try to run with guildies and should have a preference for guild members, but once they’ve picked up a pug they should stick with him unless there are performance issues.
By the way, what is an off tank and what do they do? I have only done 5 man dungeons, I have absolutely no clue about the dynamics of 10 and even worse 25 man raiding. Do the basic proportions remain? ie in a 25 man are there 5 tanks, 5 healers and 15 DPS? Does everyone do the same boss at once, or do you split into 3 groups, each with a different objective?
An off-tank is basically a backup/secondary tank - sometimes, especially in boss fights, there might be two things that need to be tanked at once.
10-man raids tend to have 2 tanks (one might have a secondary spec to change into if a second tank is not needed in a particular encounter), 3 healers (often involving two to heal the tanks and one to heal the raid), and 5 DPS.
I don’t have much experience with 25-man raids, but I assume the number of tanks doesn’t go up much if at all. Probably another healer or two to heal the raid, and the rest DPS. 25-man raid groups would stick together and work on the same boss; the raid difficulty is increased through various changes (like a boss’s abilities) but it’s also nice that if you lose one person to a death, it’s not as potentially awful as when you lose 10% of your raiding power to a death in a 10-man.
I’m not so sure about macro-ing them to be honest it seems that sometimes they would go to waste on trash. I use Divine Illumination for most boss fights and at the moment there is a big enough gap between bosses that it’s off cooldown and available. Is Infusion of Light really worth a gcd when you could be casting Holy Light? I can’t see it myself but then I am still a Holy Pally noob, could well be wrong.
I have the Holy Light, Seal of Wisdom and Beacon glyphs which are about the best for mana I think.
Grats to all.
And I won Onyxia’s head in the roll for it. I felt like one of the Voltron robots while picking it up – the phrase “And I’ll loot … the head!” kept running thru my brain. 
Yep, generally in 25 man raids you have 2-3 tanks, with 2 being the norm. For ICC, for example, we use 2 tanks for all encounters except Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Blood Princes, and Putricide. The exact number of healers depends on the encounter, but 6 is a good number for hard modes, with some fights requiring less due to dps constraints and some fights requiring more.
Generally on 25 man there’s more of everything and everything hits harder. Another source of increased difficulty is that you are fighting in the same sized room in 10 man or 25, so for encounters where you need to spread out for specific mechanisms, like the shock vortex in Blood Princes, or the air phase in Lanathel, your raid needs better awareness and coordination due to the increased number of people.
You always have the option of going up to a mob and hitting them to regain mana from Seal of Wisdom. It procs often, and 4% of your total mana per proc means you can fill up your mana bar very quickly. You can judge wisdom as well for even more mana return, though that will be minor compared to what the seal will generate. Once you get Divine Plea at level 71 that will be your main mana return ability, so don’t worry about it too much for now.
In some cases it might be. It’s a good idea to try to keep the FoL hot on your sacred shield target, so if you have a spare gcd that’s a good thing to do. Also, remember that Infusion of Light increases the crit rate on HL as well, so it’s never going to be wasted. It doesn’t mean you should cast Holy Shock on cooldown, but don’t be shy about using it when you are moving or when someone needs to be healed right this instant.
While I’m following the school of Holy Light Uber Alles WRT gearing and gemming, I refuse to adhere to it in practice and I’ll use whatever I think is best for a situation.
While Holy Light is pretty much the staple heal right now, there’s another factor to consider: Time Until Healed. It’s mainly used in Holy Pally discussions to justify stacking haste for Holy Light, but it has other applications too. I’ve died several times because I didn’t pay attention to TUH and stubbornly tried to finish a Holy Light cast, but the TUH was too long and I took lethal damage before it finished. When you need healing done right now, Holy Light simply won’t cut it, and an instant 3k Holy Shock, GCD, instant 3.5-5k Flash of Light (or even just a non-procced FoL) can buy you just enough time to cast that 10-15k Holy Light.
Maybe not at 80, when you can spam Holy Light. Since I don’t yet have the mana pool or the +haste to do that, The main benefit for me is a Holy Shock / Flash of Light combo: two instant (or nearly instant) heals including at least one crit.
I’m pretty sure you’re right; but since I don’t cast a whole lot of Holy Lights, and I only have two major glyph spots, I went with Wisdom and Beacon. Again it’s just a matter of not being 80 yet and having a more limited toolbox.
I do this when I’m low on mana and/or when I know the mob does not have an aoe stun/fear to worry about.
One time in a lower level dungeon (BRD, maybe) I ran up to a mob and started whacking on it with my mace for the mana regen. One of the DPSers, apparently unfamiliar with healadins, said in chat “Is the healer doing melee? That’s badass!”
Heroics and raids are designed for max-level characters at the time they were introduced. So, there are level 60 raids, level 70 Heroics and raids, and level 80 Heroics and raids. You will not be able to queue for (or even enter) Northrend Heroic dungeons until you’re level 80.
In Wrath, you are automatically keyed for all Heroics as soon as you ding. Back in TBC, however, you had to actually purchase the Heroic key for each instance; and each group of instances required you to be at least Honored with a different faction. That’s why, as someone else mentioned, the queues for them take so long. Most players these days blow through Outland so quickly, they don’t bother to get the rep they’d need to run the TBC dungeons on the Heroic setting.
When you’re coming into a guild run, it’s pretty standard that they’ll swap a guildie in for you if they can. Since the run hadn’t started yet, I’d say he wasn’t hugely rude to swap you out, since you’re an unknown factor, and any gear you’d get would be gear that wasn’t benefitting the guild.
However, this is only because you hadn’t killed anything yet. As soon as you get a PUG saved to your raid ID, that’s when you’re obligated to keep them unless they’re having performance issues that are affecting the raid.
Five-man dynamics don’t scale perfectly to 10s and 25s, and nowhere is this more evident than with tanks. In a 10-man raid, almost all fights (excluding hardmodes) will require one to two tanks. In 25s, most fights will be one or two tanks, and a few might be three. This is part of the reason that there’s such a dearth of tanks in the game, compared to the dungeon demand: there just aren’t enough raiding slots for us.
The entire raid will focus on a single encounter at a time. A given encounter might involve more than one boss, or one boss with adds, or just the single boss. But all of these will be located in the same general area. An exception to this is the Thorim fight in Ulduar, where you have to split your raid and send part of the group down a side gauntlet to bring Thorim down into the arena–but the raid starts together and fights Thorim together at the end.
Traditionally, the tanks in a raid are referred to as the “main tank” and the “off tank(s).” However, these days I generally like to say “boss tank” and “add tank,” since there are many fights where the “off” tank is doing a harder or more important job than the “main” one. There are also a lot of encounters, especially in ICC, where the tanks have to take turns tanking the boss.
As an example, consider the regular version of the Deathwhisper fight in ICC25. You’ll usually do this with two tanks. At the beginning of the fight, DW sits up on the platform surrounded by a bubble. At this stage of the encounter, she is not tanked, but adds will spawn alternating on the left and right sides, and may spawn in the rear as well. So for ph1, you’ll generally have one tank assigned to the left, one assigned to the right, and one assigned to the back. In between add spawns, the tanks may run up to the platform to help DPS the boss. When DW’s mana has been drained, her bubble drops and she needs to be immediately picked up. She then begins applying a stacking debuff to the person she’s attacking that lowers their threat. So when the stacks get too high, a new tank needs to taunt her, and she’ll get passed from tank to tank in this manner for the duration of ph2, until she’s dead.
Another example: Jaraxxus in TOC. One tank holds him in the center of the room, where he’ll pretty much stay unless there’s an AOE to move out of. During the fight, Jaxx will periodically spawn two types of adds. The other one or two tanks are responsible for picking these up when they spawn and bringing them to the boss, where they can be DPSed in such a way that splash AOE will also hit the boss.
Yep, I’d agree with Tom. Once you’ve picked up a pug, it’s incumbent on you to stick with him even if another guildie logs in a minute later.
Some things have shifted around on our raiding side, and we’ll be able to have a badass priest/DK combo come more often. Yay! This makes me a lot less frantic to get my priest to 80. T__T
With them last night, we took Rot down in a couple of tries. After the first try, it was pointed out that people were having trouble with the ooze explosions, so the next go around we had someone call out when the explosion was coming. People moved much faster with that change which made the encounter go very nicely. It actually felt kind of anticlimactic when he went down - we’d spent enough time that it felt like it should have had a ding. Our tree is actually building a very nice feral set from the leather that’s dropped so far, by the way.
Then we went on to Professor Putricide. We’re still learning to react to the green oozes and stack like crazy. As you can probably tell, I was the first one to get oneshot on the first go around because, well. I’m so used to standing at extreme range. We made some pretty good progress (83% on the last try – we’re all still learning the mechanics) and I’m reasonably sure I’m not the only one who’s looking forward to next week now.
At least he told you why he kicked you, some people just kick you without a word and put you on ignore when you ask why. This happened to me when I joined a ToC25 pug last week, luckily I got kicked before we started so it wasn’t a great loss.
In my book when you’re inviting people from outside of your guild then it ceases to be a guild run. If anyone is that concerned about having people in the raid that they know then they have no business issuing an open invitation. I wasn’t the only person in the raid that wasn’t a member of their guild they also picked up at least one healer and maybe a DPS or two as well. Raids can sometimes take a long time to get started, I’ve been in a raid group for up to 30 minutes or so before we ever really got started, though, in this case, it didn’t take that long. This was unusually short in that it only took about five minutes of my time. Still, that was 5 minutes of my time that could have been put towards completing dailies, waiting for random heroics, etc. What they’re essentially telling me is that my time is not valuable and that I do not matter.
I disagree for reasons listed above. Then again I’m one of those people who won’t abandon a PUG just because my guild wants me to do something. I actually try to treat the other players with the same respect I’d like in return.
Certainly, I would take this as a sign to never agree to fill a slot in this guild’s runs again. But I, personally, don’t think they did anything particularly egregious. Stupid, certainly, since if they make a habit of kicking PUGs for late guildies, they’ll eventually find themselves mighty short on people willing to step up. But not rude in the same way that getting you saved and *then *kicking you would have been.
Grats to the 9! I was thinking of you guys as I was at my LAST Monday meeting; fetching chairs, making coffee, creating copies, and rubbing elbows with State Attorneys :eek: (thank God they’re on our side) and other duties as assigned. I should be there for next Monday, barring any other misaligning stars that require some random skill set they I have or may have to learn on the fly.
How long does it usually take to get a GM response to a “missing loot” problem? Sunday evening, my mage won a Need roll on the Wand of Ahn’kahet, but the wand failed to appear in my bags. I submitted a GM ticket as soon as I discovered the problem, around 7:55PM Sunday night, and as of 2:00PM Tuesday, I still have the “We are experiencing a high volume of petitions” thing sitting there on my screen, and no GM response.
I have discovered the biggest problem running heroics with a 12-year-old tank: when 12-year-old tank’s mom says it’s time for dinner, 12-year-old tank has to go eat dinner, regardless of where the group is in the dungeon 
Just out of curiosity, is anybody watching and enjoying the WoW machinima links I post now and then? Nobody ever says anything, so I don’t know if I’m wasting bandwidth posting them.