I Just OPed Myself

It may seem like I am boasting in this post. I am not. I am a competent Warcraft player, but nothing more. In fact, that’s my point.

Nerf holy paladins:

I’m not normally one to comment on or care much about class balance. I’m especially not one to complain about a spec being over-powered when I play that spec, but I’m sorry, holy paladins need a nerf. I know holy radiance got its cost increased in yesterday’s patch, but I don’t think that will be enough.

Let me set the stage. I zone into a Shadowfang Keep PUG. This is probably the hardest non-Zandalari dungeon to heal in Cataclysm. It nearly broke me in my early days of healing. And the group is awful. I mean spectacularly bad. “You can’t make this stuff up” bad.

How bad, you ask? Other than myself, only one person in the party was wearing the right kind of gear: a very under-geared elemental shaman. The rogue was stacking strength, the mage was stacking spirit, and the DK tank was rocking intellect gear like a boss. The group’s total combined DPS was something like 20,000, and the tank got one-shot by trash on at least one occasion.

We get to the first boss, and no one is interrupting anything. The fight takes as long as some Raid Finder bosses. And the rest of the run is just as much of a gong show. The tank’s threat is so bad we might as well have not had a tank. The mobs were beating everyone to a bloody pulp. Fights took forever because our DPS was so low.

And we facerolled it, just because I could heal them through all their stupid. I think we wiped two or three times, and at least one of those was just because I was too busy laughing my ass off at the group’s Three Stooges antics to heal.

I had no right to successfully heal a group that bad. By all logic, that group should have never made it past the first boss. But I got through it without breaking a sweat. We even did Commander Springvale, who I’ve seen crush many a PUG, with no trouble. I never even had to pause to drink.

I’m really not that good. I don’t even use healing addons. I still click for some of my spells. Holy spec is just really, really OP right now, and I happen to have very good gear. Personally, I think our mana regen is the problem. I can use all my most expensive heals non-stop and never go OOM. They should make us have to judge on cooldown again; that’d set things right.

As an aside, while that DK was terrible as a tank, he was also very laid-back and polite, and I enjoyed grouping with him much than some of the indestructible but arrogant raiders I’ve suffered through PUGs with.

So, anyway, now I’m thinking of intentionally weakening my gear just to make healing interesting again. Maybe I’ll start doing runs in those nice Lunar Festival outfits.

Ah, the regret of the flavour of the month roller.

And I also has teh leet deeps:

But I’m not just facerolling my way across Azeroth as a healer. I didn’t want to have to trek back to the transmogrifier every time I got a new piece of gear for my warlock, so before I headed to Northrend, I got all the best epics honor could buy and gemmed and enchanted them six ways from Sunday so I wouldn’t have to replace them for a while. And now I can kill pretty much every quest mob in the Borean Tundra in one or two hits.

Killing WoW quest mobs in less than five seconds really isn’t all that special, but it is rather bizarre for a DoT class, especially considering I’m not even using my pets.

And that brings us to my rogue and her welfare daggers of ultimate stabbiness. In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Granted, this is Zon’ozz, so my DPS has been artificially inflated by quite a bit, but still…

Again, I’m not boasting here. I’m really not that good. It’s just funny how much difference good gear and the occasional over-powered class can make.

Sometimes, gear really does trump skill.

BH Woes, a Different Kind of Rep, and More Graphics

Baradin Hold Woes:

As you may have noticed from my last post, I’ve been having a great deal of luck in Baradin Hold lately–all of it bad. The sad thing is that the new boss, Occu’thar, really isn’t that hard. I enjoy the fight with a group that knows what they’re doing. Unfortunately, he is a big step up in difficulty from Argaloth, the most ridiculous faceroll of a fight since Patchwerk. Argaloth has made people overconfident.

Bad demon dog, bad!

Take my group from yesterday. It was proof that some people just should never lead raids–and for the record, I’m on that list, but at least I’m smart enough not to try. Yesterday’s raid leader initially invited everyone who whisped her without even checking their class. A lot of people bailed right then and there because they realized the group was entirely DPS except for me (I was playing my holy paladin at the time).

Eventually, she managed to put together a group with the right balance of roles, but her choices were still, shall we say, less than ideal. Case in point: the “tank” in blues and PvP gear with DPS gems who suicided himself into a pack of trash before everyone had even zoned into the instance.

It was an agonizing half hour with several people bailing before we even got to the boss, and things didn’t improve from there. I have to blame the raid leader, because organization was awful, and almost no one in the group seemed to have any clue what they were doing. I admit, I turned into one of those pissy, snide healers just a little bit–something I try desperately to avoid normally. I try to be as patient with groups as I possibly can, but this one wasn’t even close to doing it right. I don’t think we ever got him down to 60%, even.

I gave up after three wipes.

I almost wonder if Blizzard erred by making such a huge gulf in difficulty between the two BH bosses.

A Different Kind of Rep:

On a more positive note, yesterday marked the second time someone whispered me completely out of the blue asking to join their raid group (in this case, a Firelands trash run). I refused because I had just joined the ill-fated BH group and because I’m already honored with the Avengers of Hyjal, but it was nice to be asked.

I do have to wonder where these whispers are coming from, though. Can it be that I am developing some sort of reputation on my server? I think I can say without undue pride that I am above average as far as healers go (though I’m sure there are many people out there better than me), but I’m still not sure where such a reputation would come from, as I hardly ever raid–because my guild is small and because there are never any PUGs when I’m online, not by choice.

More graphics:

I’ve been continuing my experiments with Gimp, as you can see from the blog’s new banner. I continue to be impressed by how easy and fun it is. If I’d known image editing was this simple, I would have started years ago.

Continuing my idea of pairing my toons with their home cities, behold the glory that is my mage.

This one didn’t turn out as well I’d hoped, but I think it gets the point across. It’s surprisingly hard to find decent images of Ner’zhul–very sad considering what a crucial figure he is in WoW lore.

Pick up the games discussed in this post on my Amazon Affiliate.