FAQs and need some help!

Hello everyone,

1- I'm going to start a FAQ post every start of the month, so if you have any questions related to me/Holy Paladins/Ret Paladins/Protection Paladins that you'd like me to answer for it, please send me an e-mail at Halqato@gmail.com.
2- I'm looking for someone to help me out with this blog, Paladin preferably or any healing class, I'd consider any DPS class that has the will and the energy to keep posting in this blog.
if you are interested, please send me an e-mail, my e-mail is mentioned above.
3- I'd love to get my blog on other bloggers blog roll, If you add me to your blog roll, I'll add you to mine!.

Cheers,

I used to be, for the horde!

when I started the game, I knew I wanted to be on the Horde side. Being an avid Warcraft fan, I always enjoyed everything about the faction and was a huge Thrall fan. Going on my third year of playing the game, I found myself playing less and less till finally I stopped playing all together. Was it that I hit a plateau in my enthusiasm for the game or was it simply I’ve run my course? Probably both to be honest.
Being on a PVP server for 3 years will bring disdain towards the other faction like no other. I hated gnomes and I squirmed in BRD just hearing the dwarfs laughing in the bar. Nonetheless, I decided I was going to level a character to 80 and see things from the other side. Funny enough, as of now, its been the most enjoyable time I’ve had playing the game.

To really appreciate the game, you have to see it from both sides and to really appreciate the work Blizzard has done, experience it.

always believed that sentiment that the Horde was where the Adults played and the Alliance was simply filled with children. I always expressed that I could never join the faction due to it and at my own remission, I don’t know why I believed that.



I met up with a group of nobles, if i may say, the guild of Lux Legis, from their Guild leader/Co-leaders, to the newest recruit, they were all kind and welcoming, i've never felt any kind of a stranger that never played this faction before.


now, I'm... For the Alliance!



Now the Alliance is no change from the horde, shapes and names had changed, but nothing else, I have this feeling that i am going to reroll again...
I already started a Death knight over Arygos, which is a server a lot of my horde friends transferred into, but every day i see my paladin after the logging screen, i stop thinking of rerolling, and log into Arthas, with my pride of being Alliance, better yet, a paladin of the Alliance... duh! who wants to be a Blood Elf? =P

Your guide to healing TOTC: Anub'arak

In 10 man, this is a very easy fight when you compare it with 25 man version or any of the heroic versions.
there are simple things to avoid/do, do them right, and you will have no problems downing this boss from try one.

PS: if you are pugging this, the first 3-4 bosses will show you if you are having any nubcakes in your raid, get rid of them before this boss, or if you prefer carrying people then that's your problem :P

for this fight you need at least 1 ranged DPS, 2 tanks, 3 or 2 healers (i did it as 2 healers and got it just fine, although i was on my toes half of the time)

Phase one:
1- 1 ranged DPS to shoot permafrost orbs.
2- 1 tank for Nerubian Burrower, those adds have an expose armor debuff, the tank needs to make sure that he is tanking them on permafrost.
Don't DPS the Nerubian Burrowers at this time, and wait till phase 2, since most of your dps will have nothing to do in that phase.
Phase Two:
Anub'arak will burrow approximately every 90 seconds, starting phase 2. He will pursue a random target with spikes throughout the phase and when he reaches them he will cast Impale. The spikes will gradually speed up until they hit the target, or hit a patch of permafrost. Standing on the permafrost (or being on the other side of permafrost from the spikes) will enable you to avoid the impale, but the permafrost will despawn. After a few seconds, he will select another target.

Swarm Scarabs will spawn rapidly, scarabs have little hp, seem to ignore most threat but stack the same stacking nature damage debuff on their targets, should be range kited and killed, or killed by melee not being chased by them. It is also possible to drag them across permafrost to gain more distance. After about one minute Anub'arak will surface and begin phase one again. He keeps threat from phase one.

Phase Three: It is advisable to kill off any adds currently active before pushing Anub'arak over 30%. He will not submerge or summon any more adds at this point. Anub'arak needs to die very quickly after hitting 30% as you will not last long under the effects of leeching swarm. It is not ideal to top off raid members as they will then be taking full damage from the leeching swarm, healing Anub'arak and prolonging the phase. Instead you will want to keep people at ~5,000 HP, so that they do not get gibbed by penetrating cold while also minimizing the amount Anub'arak heals.

Anub'arak does not have any other tricks and will die upon reaching 0% HP.

congratulations, you can now lewt your pixels.

Shared Topic: Fail.

I've been wanting to post something about this for a long time now, you see, even if you are the best player that have been playing WOW ever, you will still have your fail moments.

Shared Topic: Fail




One of my fail moments when me and my guild went to Naxx 10 to get the Undying title, i was the raid leader and made sure we don't have anyone who have a connection problem/old comp/ retardness to prevent us from earning the title.

3 wings went smooth, until we got into Grobbulus room, got him to 15% before our Elemental shammy disconnected.
I've been guilded with this shammy for over 2 years now, he never disconnects, but because our luck is awesome! he did.

I was 1 man healing the instance, so i went back to Evee (the shammy) and kept healing him since he d/c ed in a poison cloud, i had to walk back and forth to heal the tank and melee and in the same time heal the shammy, until he disappeared, and then went back and healed the raid.
on vent, i was going crazy, cursing at him and asking him to get back in right now or i am going to go to his house kill his family in front of him, then kill him.
he logged back in after we killed the boss, i flamed him all the way until we reached kel'thuzad, everything was going smooth for a 1 healer 10 man group, until...




i got in a void zone and died.

All of my guildies never fail to make me remember that day, every time i try to do something and someone helping me fails, i get reminded of it.
it was fun though, so close to get it, and i failed :(

I R excited!

Hello dear readers!

I'm really excited today, although it has been a long day at work.
Why? you might ask?

1- I just read Ferrro's post about Paladin Schmaladin blog is hiring, and i apped for it.
I know that i deserve to post on such a successful blog, I've been a holy Paladin for a long time now, I've been playing a druid, a rogue, a DK, a Warlock, and a hunter. so i am familiar with most aspects of the game.
I mentioned before that i got my strategy form for the first strategies i posted from ferraro, i really liked the way it was done.
To be honest, although F is offering money for people posting for her, i am not interested at all in it, i have the will to be posting on a paladin blog, and help others, for free! and since this blog is not attracting much readers (sorry), i am a very active, i love to post alot, on my guild website, i think i am the only one posting paladin stuff in the paladin forums, also i am the only one posting raid strats or strats for officers and guild leaders.
I'm also always checking whats new with WOW, i check wowhead, mmo-champion, blog azeroth and much more helpful websites at least 4-5 times a day.
so i hope i get accepted :D

2- i just read gnomeaggedon's post about Azeroth united.
i registered and hope i can help with the community!

3- i got this achievement


25 more mounts for my 100 mounts achievement.

2 years of trying to get this mount, and finally!


4- I made a new UI, i know all of you will love it, i will be posting another topic about it tomorrow hopefully!
yay!

Your guide to healing TOTC: The Val'kyr twins

To begin with, split the raid in half (as well as you can for having 25 people) and start opposite the large entry doors. Those tanking/attacking/healing the white Val'kyr (Fjola Lightbane) should have dark auras, and those tanking/attacking/healing the black Val'kyr (Eydis Darkbane) should have light auras. At the beginning, like most fights, the only one who should need healing is the tank you are assigned to (though there are no penalties for scooting near the middle and being able to hit both tanks). Make sure each tank has their focus in between the portals of the right or left side.

The only time the fight becomes healing intensive is during the "bullet hell time" and that is only if you and your raid members are not careful to avoid balls of light/dark, as you only absorb those of your own type and those of the wrong type cause damage. As a healer, you should avoid all balls as they are much more beneficial to the DPS than you, and they will need them for the shield portion of the fight.

Otherwise, your only other job is to watch for Vortexes and change your color if it is appropriate. Blizzard has generously provided a warning for you, all you have to do is read it. If you are "dark" and light is being channeled, you need to click a light portal, and vice-versa. There is no healing through this. If someone is wrong, they are dead.

Since you're a healer, you don't have to worry about shields other than to know that once a shield is up, the DPS needs to burn it down so they can interrupt the heal. If you have the spare time and can pop up some damage on it, it wouldn't hurt. As was mentioned before, this fight is very undemanding of healers so long as everyone avoids the wrong color orbs.

Your guide to healing TOTC: the faction champions

I would kid myself if I thought this was a truly proper healing guide, but this is not a "proper" fight. There are no aggro tables, so you will, most likely, be being focused by one of your enemies at one point or another. You need to be mobile, adaptive, and have a fast reaction time. It's time to start loving PvP, because that is what this fight is; one extremely long arena fight. I personally find this to be the most enjoyable and exciting fight so far!

What I can provide are tips on what to do when facing these champions.

Communication is key.

First of all, make sure you start facing the right way. The champions do NOT enter from the double doors. They jump directly down from the stands where their faction leader is located. If you are Alliance, then you will be facing Horde Champions, and if you are Horde, then you will be facing Alliance Champions.

Communication is key.

Be prepared to break out of your intended role. When CC is needed, don't be afraid to add a couple Cyclones to the mix. Pop Nature's Grasp when someone is on you. This is a perfectly acceptable use of your role. Be careful with your Cyclone, though. Cycloning someone that your raid is about to unload on can be disastrous. So, no pressure, right?

Communication is key.

Be aware of your surroundings. You have to know what's going on. When there's a warrior near you, you have to run away. You have to know who is focusing you and who is being focused. This requires a large amount of focus for the important things. There is a lot to keep track of. If you waste your time thinking about your Recount meters or what have you, you or somebody else will die.

Communication is key.

Okay, why do I keep repeating that? Because IT IS IMPORTANT. You cannot win in this fight if you do not report that which is pertinent, and nothing else. People will get focused down and will need Rebirths. CC will break, and even if it doesn't it's on PvP lengths and will be less effective each time you chain it. You have to communicate. You just have to.

If you keep this all in mind, you should kill them. Not the first time, but soon. And if you do kill them on the first pull, I salute you.

For a list of all Champions, go to this post from MMO Champion. Note that, in the case of the Champions of the same class, the one listed first is a healing spec, and the one listed second is the DPS spec. The exception is the Druids; the first is Moonkin and the second is Resto.

Good luck!

Your guide to healing TOTC: Lord Jaraxxus

This fight may seem complicated due to the randomness of it. However, with a bit of coordination and communication, it's very controllable and doable.

To begin, my raid arranged itself in a circle around the middle, using the points of the star as markers. The areas directly in front of the instance door and directly in front of the boss entrance were left open. After that, two ranged each sat on points of a star to minimize spreading damage, like the chain lightning ability or the fire drops. Every person who became affected by Legion Flame then had an area to run straight backwards to drop their fire (Legion Flame does a DoT and causes you to drop patches of fire where you are standing that do heavy damage once every second for six seconds). We kept the spread of healers even, and monitored people for Incinerate Flesh.

Incinerate Flesh is a little bit of a weird mechanic in that your target will not noticeably be taking damage. The debuff absorbs 60k healing and decreases attack speed by 50%, and persists either until 60k healing is absorbed or fifteen seconds pass. If you don't heal enough, then the person will gain a raid-wide DoT for 3K+ every second for five seconds. And while this may not seem too bad, there is a lot of incidental damage going out, and this is so completely avoidable as to have no excuse for the person not to gain heals.

During the encounter, Jaraxxus will summon an infernal volcano. You should have one or two OT's responsible for managing these brutes. They have an AoE just for standing near them, so ranged should nuke them down and you should get out of their way. Try to recover quickly from any charges they get off and heal any people affected.

Jaraxxus will also summon Mistresses of Pain during the encounter. When he opens the Nether Portal, he'll gain Nether Power, a 20-stack buff that needs to be dispelled and purged and spell-stolen as quickly as possible, and at this time you need to watch the tank as he'll be taking more damage. The Mistresses of Pain need to be controlled as well as possible and kept away from melee. Ranged should power her down, as they can keep clear of her armor-ignoring attacks. The reason she is so hard to control, however, is the Spinning Pain Spike. This causes her to leap upon a player (kind of like the snobolds in the first part of the Beasts) and, well, hurt them. These people need to be called out quickly, as she'll pick them up and slam them into the ground for a percentage of their maximum health.

It certainly sounds like a chaotic fight, and it certainly can be. However, with a little bit of coordination, the chaotic, random side of the encounter is diminished greatly, and a win is much easier to obtain.

Good Luck!

Your guide to healing TOTC: The Beasts of Northrend

1- Gormok the Impaler



an easy fight, not even worth to say something about it, beacon the tank, heal the melee when they gt stunned, heal the person with the snobold on his head, stay away from his stun because it silence you for 8 sec, and stay away from fire.

WIN!


2- Acidmaw and Dreadscale



This fight is like a tease to all who can remove poison. There's two poison types, a burning and a paralyzing, and the only thing that can remove the paralyzing is someone running past who is afflicted with burning to "burn" it off, or they'll be stuck in place, unable to move or act and taking ticking damage for quite a while. Since you can still move some while afflicted with the paralyzing poison, my guild had everyone afflicted run into the center.
Keep relatively spread out to avoid too many people being affected by the poison at once, and the rest of the fight is a snap.
nothing special here, heal heal heal, I'm usually out of mana at the time this ends, i usually beacon the tank with acidmaw and heal the tank tanking dreadscale.

3- Icehowl



This fight is pretty unique, yet still intensely simple. This is another fight you want to stay spread out for, since his breath attack can freeze whole sections of raiders in place. You can't control the direction, it's just something that happens. It doesn't hit too hard, so you should be fine. Keep people topped off from Whirl, and when he knocks everyone to the side of the ring and stuns them, look at the boss model. See where he is facing, and when your stun wears off, run away from that area. You'll have a speed boost, so for no reason should you not be able to get out of the way. If you don't, you die, simple as that. When he charges into the wall, he becomes stunned, so use this time wisely to top everyone off. Other than that, just keep people up from incidental damage and you should win this one easy. Also, watch out for Frothing Rage, though your hunters should smash that off right quick. If not, just heal, heal, heal the main tank!


Congrats, you are now illegible for some phat lewtz

apology

I apologize for posting all those guides pretty fast, the problem is i have been lazy enough not to post any of them, and i already made the TOC guides so i needed to post those lol.

promise wont do it again!

Your Guide to Healing Ulduar: Yogg

Like Mimiron this is another “Phase” fight so I will separate it accordingly. Like Mimiron, to me this is another “Communication” fight. People have to talk on vent. They have to ask for buffs to be cleansed and they have to let you know when they are getting squeezed. If you have people that do not communicate on vent this fight will be exponentially harder.

Phase 1

For phase one you need to focus on two things:

#1 – Staying in range of the tanks and keeping Beacon and Sacred Shield up on one of them. This first phase you and the tanks will be running around like crazy WHILE having to avoid the clouds. They take spike damage when the adds blow up so you will have to really be watching. Without the MCing that used to be in this phase, the only really challening thing is to:

#2 – Avoid the clouds. We found that triggering 1-2 of them in the beginning actually helped us get through this phase. Any more and you will wipe. The first 2-3 spawn far enough apart that a few extra adds are not hard to deal with. The best way for me to heal was to run around on my own and stay in range of the tanks. The strats vary greatly for this fight.

Phase 2

#1 – Cleanse your face off. Especially if you are the only paladin in the group. There are two things that cause more frustration than anything: Apathy and Black Plague. These cause movement impairing affects and for a movement heavy fight you’ve got to be johnny on the spot with cleanses. There were a few attempts I spent 75% of the time cleansing. Your melee’s abilities at keeping the Corrupter tentacles down will help lower the number of cleanses needed.

#2 – Being squeezed. At some point you will get grabbed by a Constrictor tentacle. You can bubble out of the first one but then the next couple you will have to be DPS’d out of. The positive: You can keep healing as normal while it has you grabbed.

#3 – Sanity. Some fights, I never have to worry about my sanity. Some fights, I am at <20>

#4 – Brain link. Not a huge problem usually unless it gets thrown on one of the people going into Yogg’s brain and they come out and are like 1000 feet away from you and they are taking mega damage/losing sanity. Just run towards the person and heal them.

Phase 2 is more in the hands of the dps than yours. Just keep people alive and cleansed and you’ve done your job.

Phase 3

Get ready for the wildest boss fight that you won’t get to see (unless you are one of those people that have figured out how to turn your character and still be able to see behind him etc. i’m not that cool)

#1 – Face away from Yogg. None of your heals are LoS so just turn around and face away from the boss and pray the tanks are quick at picking up the adds. Heal your ass off. That’s really it in this part. You don’t have to move just heal and keep beacon up on the tank. Use all your cooldowns etc. This phase is NOTHING like phase 4 of mimiron. It is a stand there, FACE AWAY FROM THE BOSS and heal. The tanks do take big hits, and the adds will one shot everyone in raid except a tank when they first come out. So just heal, heal, heal with Holy light and every cooldown you have.

Do that and your done!

Your Guide to Healing Ulduar: General Vezax

I was reading around about the hard mode for Vezax this week and I stumbled across a couple of hidden posts that reccomended Holy Paladins to heal this fight in their Holy gear but spec’d prot. I did some casual Theorycrafting and realized that for this fight only 4 of my Holy tree talents really helped me heal this fight more effectively and there were about 7 Prot tree talents that improved healing for this fight. I tried this tactic last night, and for the first time at the end of this fight I actually had mana left over (even with a brand new healer).

Lets look at the specific talents that make the Prot tree worth using.

#1 – Touched by the Light . first and foremost this is the talent you are spec’ing for. You don’t really need anything beyond. Since I spend about 95% of the fight casting FoL on the MT I was amazed at how much this improved healing. I went from criting for about 6k even to hitting him for 7.5k a crit. And with Sacred Shield up my crit rating was around 85% for FoL. The additional spell power also makes it nice as several other talents in the prot tree increase stamina.

#2 – Divine Guardian – 1 minute Sacred Shields are amazing. So much so that if I felt FoL was worth using in any other fight I would totally spec into this for raid. Not just longer shields though it also will stay up a bit longer since it absorb’s a bit more damage. The combo of these two talents alone changes the dynamic of this fight. Instead of consistently needing green pools to keep my mana up I was much less dependent on them. To the point that I used them twice and only did the 6th stack method and I still had about 6k mana left when Vezax died.

The rest of the talents in my opinion don’t matter. In the prot tree just pick anything that increases healing/crit/stamina and your golden. Then you can either spec into the Holy tree (remember Illumination doesn’t work so don’t waste the talents) to increase your amount healed or you can go into the Ret tree to get some more crit. I found that my crit rating was exactly the same in prot as it is in holy.

Tried and true it made healing this fight about 60% easier. Not EZ-mode, but considerably easier. Factor this into the strategies listed below.

Another very difficult fight to heal through. Where Mimiron was all about avoiding damage and moving cleanly, Vezax is about healer communication. We read all the strats on this one and we only found one that really works well.

Abilities that effect healing -

1. Aura of Despair – No mana regen whatsover… No Divine Plea, no Blessing of Wisdom procs, no Illumination crits, mana pots, innervate etc…. for a paladin you truly will not be gaining any mana back on your own at all. Sucks to be a healer on this fight.

2. Shadow Crash – There are 3 examples of this in the trash pulls right before Vezax (the big faceless ones). A huge arcing shadow bolt starts from the boss and targets one raid member and arcs to the place where they are standing. If you don’t move it hits for around 7k and knocks you out of range. Since this fight is all about maximizing heals for mana, then you or other raid members being hit by this is not good. Just strafe left or right, or run towards the boss. Because of the nature of the arc, understand that the closer you are the faster it will get to you. DO NOT STAND IN THE BLACK MARKS LEFT BY THIS.

3. Mark of the Faceless – A life leech debuff that leaches 5k hit points from raid members within 15-20 yards. It does not do damage to the person who has it. Also, for every tick that it hits for 5k, Vezax is healed for 100k health. So 10 ticks of this debuff will heal for 1 Million health. This ability is maddenly frustrating because you will watch your least experieinced raid members heal the boss for a ton in seconds…

4. Surge of Darkness – This is where our strat differed from everything else we read. We did not have the tank kite the boss until towards the end of the fight to help us conserve mana. We had a DK stand there and rotate cooldowns and never move the boss unless to get in range of a downed saraonite vapor. When he surge’s he will be taking extra damage and will require close concentration by healers.

5. Saronite Vapors – your mana regen method. When one of these green gasses dies, it leaves a large pool on the ground that you gain 1 stack of a debuff for every second you stay in it. It is shadow damage, BUT DO NOT USE SHADOW AURA. (I will explain*) As you take damage from the debuff you will gain mana. You can take 6 stacks (wait for the stack to actually say “6″) without much in healing. But the key is to get to that 7th stack without dieing (you will need a heal at the 5th and 6th stack). Taking 7 stacks will give you plenty of mana back. There are only 8 of these so using them in a timely and orderly fashion is key. This takes a higher level of healer communication than most guilds are used to.

*Shadow aura seems to give you a greater chance of FULLY RESISTING the tick of the debuff. If you FULLY RESIST it, you will not get the mana from it. You want to make sure you get the mana.

Primary Objectives

If you have a good group of people that can avoid shadow crashes and can manage to not hit people with Mark of the Faceless, then congrats! Your job is way easier, you ONLY HAVE TO HEAL THE TANK (and maybe yourself depending on how you do the green stuff)

1. Heal the tank – if you don’t kite him, he will need extra heals during surge. If you do kite him, then pay attention to distance. We stopped kiting cause the tank would always get hit on the run and then we’d be running to catch up and heal and by the time we would start casting something BAM, he’s dead.

2. Use Sacred Shield and Flash of Light – with this combo i was criting almost 75% of the time on FoL, which fully raid buffed was hitting for almost 6.5k a heal. This along with other heals was plenty to keep him alive. I used Holy Light about 20 times in the fight during Surge’s and when I had my Divine Illumination on. I got in the habit of popping Divine Illumination, then casting my wings (Avenging Wrath) and then hitting the tank with Sacred Shield. That way the costs of those abilities were lower. I think in a 9 minute fight if I used it during the first surge I could use it 3 times.

3. Regen Mana on a Healer Rotation – with three healers we would have two healers on tank at start of fight with the third healer doing nothing. Not healing ANYBODY. When one of the two healers would get close to 60% mana, we would call out “Need green goo soon”. A dps would find an appropriately placed vapor and then tell us he was downing it. The lower mana healer would then go and refill. The off healer that was sitting doing nothing, now steps in and main heals the tank. Once a healer got full mana, then a dps would down another green goo. We frowned heavily upon casters using up our mana*, and tried to have only the minimum of 4 ranged during the fight (which is only 1 dps beyond the healers)

*The reason we don’t want more than one person in a green thing is two-fold. If a close by raid member gets Mark’d or Crash’d then the healer would have to adjust, run away or who know what totally negating their ability to regen mana. Its better to just any caster dps fend for themselves and keep your big dps in the melee.

4. Decide on 6 or 7 stacks – hotly debated by our guildies, but getting 7 stacks is the best way to regen mana. It is also though the riskiest. At the 6th stack you take 6,400 damage which at that point will be a total of 12,600 damage up to that point. Totally easy, and it won’t kill you (unless you get crash’d or someone ticks your health with a mark). Now here is where it gets tricky… the 7th stack will do 12,800 damage, so without a heal you will probably die. That will be a cumulative total of 25,400 damage if you don’t get a single heal. If you heal on the 5th, 6th and 7th stack, you will be fine. The way I started doing this with ease, was to jump into the goo and beacon the tank and then just spam FoL myself after the 5th stack. It might seem like a waste, but that 7th stack will give you 6,400 mana. It is SO worth the time saved of jumping out after 6 stacks and then repeating, but IT IS VERY RISKY.

5. Don’t save cooldowns – no really, be liberal with them here, use Aura mastery whenever its up, pop your auto-crit every time its up, pop trinkets every time they are up, bubble yourself and put hand of sacrifice on the tank during surge. Anything that potentially saves you mana, is worth using. I also got used to “queuing” heals. If you don’t have a ton of haste, it is easy to start casting a heal, and then staring at the tank to see if he gets hit, if he doesn’t, then move real quick and recast. By doing this you won’t overheal as much, but if your haste is too high, you will have a hard time stopping before the heal gets off.

6. Don’t use Judgements or Holy Shock (unless in emergency) - While I love holy shock and constantly scream at fellow pally healers when I see them spamming 75 FoL’s in ignis, during this fight it is best to not use. It is horribly mana efficent, and my FoL crits were very close in total amount healed, and you save 350 mana. I had to literally take this off my bar so I would stop twitch casting it. And the extra haste from Judgements if you read #5 and try to do that will actually hurt you more than help.

Your Guide to Healing Ulduar: Mimiron

Let me just start out by saying this so far has been the most difficult fight for me to heal. I thought Hodir was bad, but Mimiron is a whole new level of healing pain. With that said, killing him was probably the most rewarding experince thus far for me in Ulduar. The first time we downed him was after 3 days/50 wipes. Because of the complexity of this fight I am going to separate everything into phases.

>> Phase One <<

Abilities that affect healing -

1. Plasma Blast – Healing the MT through this without him using a cooldown is possible, but seems to come down to luck. Use anything and everything you have at your dispolsal. I was popping Fire Aura with Aura mastery on one of his blasts and Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Shield on another, especially if your tank is out of cooldowns. If you want to be consistently successful on Phase One, you have to be using cooldowns. (FYI – for this fight we used 2 tanks that took turns using cooldowns. So far it seems in Ulduar, “When in doubt, add another tank.”)

2. Napalm Shell – Random raid member gets shot

3, Landmines – Although avoidable, depending on the number of melee you have the odds are someone will run over a few.

Primary Objectives (Phase One)

- Keep MT up through the Plasma Blast

- Stay spread out so Napalm doesn’t hit more than one person (Mimiron is another type of “avoidance” fight, like Hodir a lot of damage can be avoided by the dps/heals)

- Keep your mana high by using Divine Plea AFTER a plasma blast, but save big cooldowns for phase

>> Phase Two <<

Abilities that effect healing -

1. Heat Wave – the hardest thing to heal through. It is raid-wide fire damage considerable to Frozen Blows on Hodir. It hurts a lot and is mana intensive to heal through and there is no way to avoid it. Bubbleing/Aura Mastery will help if you have it. Paladin OT’s or DPS with Divine Sacrifice are very nice to have here.

2. Rocket Strike and Laser Barrage – both life ending abilities. You get hit by either you die. You will not get past this boss if you have raid members that can’t see the rockets coming.

3. Rapid Burst – this is his basic attack that he will do the entire fight except during Laser Barrage. It shoots out in a cone effect so the closer to him you are and spread out around him the less damage everyone will take. Set up right there really should only be 1 person getting hit by this at a time.

Primary Objectives (Phase Two)

- Heat Wave healing – beacon yourself and Sacred Shield someone. Use your bubble during one of the waves and then Aura Mastery during another. At the first Heat Wave is when I also pop Divine Illumination (your 50% mana CD)

- Don’t go OOM – When he starts to spool up Laser Barrage pop Divine Plea once you are caught up on heals and then click it off if its not done yet when he is done. If someone gets hit by barrage you won’t be able to heal them anyway. This phase is hugely mana intensive and your group needs to kill him fast but you need to conserve mana for the next phases as well. If you keep going OOM during these phases, don’t worry you will get better. After 40 wipes our healers were reaching phase 3 with full mana.

>> Phase Three <<

Abilities that affect healing -

1. Bomb Bots. Bomb bots, bomb bots, bomb bots. Having trouble on this part of the fight? Its the bomb bots. Once we got into a good rhythm of snaring and killing them this phase is a total breeze. These drop out of the head while it is flying around and target somebody and blow up for crazy damage.

2. Plasma Ball – whoever is tanking the head (usually a ranged dps) will take about 8k damage every 2-3 seconds from this ability.

3. All other adds – the tanks will be taking mild damage from the various adds. Nothing too major.

Primary Objectives (Phase Three)

- Stay away from Bomb bots

- Keep the head tank at max health as much as you can.

- Use Divine Plea during this phase to regen as much mana as you can. With 3 healers no one should be getting terribly hard. I usually beacon the MT and then just holy shock/FoL the head tank the whole fight.

>> Phase 4 <<

So bring it all together then. Mimiron keeps several different abilities from each phase. The healing intensive ones are the Plasma ball from the head and then the main attack from phase 2 (hand pulse). Everything else is pretty avoidable and is what makes this fight so tough (land mines, missiles, laser barrage, shock blast – your raid members health is in THEIR OWN hands more than yours…) As a healer if you have made it this far than the tough part for you is over and now just pray the DPS is smart enough to stay alive…

Your Guide to Healing Ulduar: Hodir

Positioning: 7 ► Healing Intensity: 6 ► MT/OT Damage: 3 ► Raid Damage: 6

Difficulty: Medium

1. Frozen Blows – raid wide damage…like OMG damage. This is really a pain to heal through because during this, all his other abilities are still going on and do EVEN MORE damage. Put on Frost Aura and if you have it pop Aura Mastery when he starts this attack – it will up your resistance to 260. I have to believe this attack is why some guilds make everyone have “some” resist.

2. Frost Nova (Cleanse-able) – the frost novas shoot out of Hodir and then AOE an area. The nova’s don’t do huge damage, but they root people.

3. Avalanche’s – you will see it snowing in random areas. Get out of the snow. Yell at people to get out of the snow so you don’t have to heal them.

4. Flash Freeze – if someone gets caught in it they will need mild heals.

5. Biting cold – Keristraza type aura. Keep moving and jumping. During Frozen Blows you might think “I will just stand still and take the damage.” Don’t do that. The damage of Biting cold is worse when Hodir is doing Frozen Blows. (If you see a fire on the ground, stand next to it. It is another “helper” and it stops Biting Cold from happening to you.

6. Starlight – one of the “helpers” casts a spotlight in random areas. Standing in the light gives you 100% haste to casting. With all buffs up, my Holy Lights were taking .8 seconds to cast. If you can safely stand in one and heal during Frozen Blows, it helps a ton.

RECAP:

- Avoid damage: this is one of the only encounters your primary goal is to stay out of damage. The tank (in frost resist gear) never gets hit terribly hard. This fight is about keeping moving and NOT TAKING DAMAGE.

- Heal the tank

- Use Aura Mastery during Frozen Blows. BELIEVE ME IT HELPS. If you have more than one pally, have both of them put Frost Resist Aura on and alternate casts of mastery. If you have a pally off tank who is DPSing during this fight, have him bubble and use his raid wide damage decrease. Anything that can decrease raid damage here is a plus.

- Bubble during a Frozen Blow to catch up: Normally I would use Aura Mastery in the first Frozen Blows and then bubble in the second one if i needed to. While bubbled, stand in a spotlight and cast like crazy.

- Cleanse the frost nova’s: it always seemed that at least one person would be frost nova’d while in the “snow” of an upcoming avalanche. Cleansing them helped them get out of that before it kills.

- Keeping Beacon and Sacred Shield always up on the MT. Get a timer or something to help you remember to refresh these. I use Grid and a couple addons to pull this off.

Would you change factions?

A shared topic on Blog Azeroth caught my eyes, since i was a former Horde warrior, and now a paladin of the Alliance, its kinda concerns me.
Not really.



See, I am not a RP player, nor that i am very interested in WoW lore.
yes i am little interested, i won't lie, but not that much.

For me, I already gave away my horde warrior, with reputations and gear from T0.5 to T6 (including T1, T2, T3, T4, T5). so do i really want to switch again to horde? no.
do i miss my friends on the horde side? hell yes, but most of them were kind enough to make alliance characters (mostly DKs) and i invited them to the guild i am in, we talk a lot, i help them lvl faster. nothing more.

In my opinion, the whole thing will NOT work, i really doubt that the employees in blizz will be smart enough to figure out a way to change reputations, mounts, or any other aspect of the game.

I was thinking a bit of how many people will be faction changing if it DID work, some people with high population servers might, i had the chance to log on magtheradon (or whoever its spelled like) on the EU servers, the server who used to have the first guilds to clear everything in TBC (now called Ensedia).
they had like 100 horde for each alliance, my friend had a mage on that server, in wintergrasp he had like 15 of the buff increasing HP for more than 200% and damage taken by something like that too, there was like 10 people in WG raid while horde had at least 4 or 5.
without talking too much about that, i felt like he was Onyxia with all the dots he had on him, and a raid of horde were trying to kill him, he only was aoeing to wipe them all, it was fun to watch.

So yeah, people on that server might think of faction changing, and i wont blame them.

I keep thinking about it, do i really want to change factions, no.
Will i consider it if i was in a another situation? maybe, but most likely i would have stopped playing this game if i wasn't in this perfect guild with those awesome people. i actually played this paladin so i can play with them, and i am very happy, i cant say that i will be going to any other guild, although we stopped raiding, if the guild disbanded, i will be cancelling my account, the only reason that kept me going is this guild, and this server that i am in, if anything in it changed, i will automatically cancel my account.