What’s that? Screenshots or it didn’t happen?

Either way though, I’m thrilled to have her at 80.  And very very glad that I had epic and winter flying before I transferred her (and kinda wishing I’d stocked her up with level 80 BoE items).  I did buy a few things, mostly to replace the awful level 70 stuff I am so tired of looking at, and crafted a few other things.  Tailoring is going to take me forever, but at least I can make mooncloth and such now!

I’ve not respecced yet, because I want to see how good/bad healing is with this hybrid smite build.  Mostly because I don’t have the cash to dual spec just yet, and that means more soloing.  Eventually she’ll be full Discipline.

Because Disc is Bullshit, amirite?

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Screenshots and Second Chances

When I started digging around for Troll ideas, though, I hit the jackpot.  So here she is!

Her name is Anzefi (she doesn’t have a last name), and she’s a Darkspear Troll (duh).  Relatively slight… ok slight for a Troll… she’s somewhat unassuming looking (aside from the huge teal mohawk), but has a particular love of really bright colored clothing.  She’s spent some time studying with the priests of the Zandalari, and as such is a firm believer in the Loa and has some skill in voodoo.  She works particularly with water and ocean Loa  – who, according to superstition – are both creative and judgmental, granters of wishes and second chances, but with a fickle temper (much like any ocean spirit would be, really).

Walking the fine line between healing and hexing, she’s not afraid to look into the future – and she’s not so bad at interpreting omens either (though she’s had a few … uh… miscalls in that area in the past).  If you asked her to tell your future, she’d do so with a set of shells, or by scrying into a bowl of water.

She’s also quite terrified of bugs.

I’m super excited and spent most of last night exploring around places I’d not yet been in game (namely Northrend Horde towns!).  She also brought with her a set of Heirloom leather XP shoulders for Anaje, which should help HER out as well.  Hooray!

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Meet Anzefi!

Her name is Anaelle Fischer, and she’s got bats in her belfry.

And I’ve had a lot of trouble leveling her, plus have had interest in a high level Horde character for awhile.  Rirri is awesome, but Rirri has one major flag against her.  She’s a DK.  DKs do two things – they tank, and they do melee DPS.  And I really suck at those two things, and I’m not overly fond of leveling them.  Admittedly, she does level quickly when I put the burn behind her, but with two OTHER characters in the 55-65 bracket, she doesn’t see a lot of time.

Anaelle is 75.  She’s got the heirloom shoulders and robe.  And she has no active RP to tie her to the Alliance /at all/ – I’ve spent some time working out a story for her, but it’s never worked out to where I felt comfortable bringing her to the Pig for RP night.  Especially not in favor of leaving Aely, Angoleth, and Annie Mae back in the character selection screen.

So then I get left with my choices:

Anaelle Fischer – Forsaken Priest

• Has the advantage of no name change.  In fact, her name works beautifully for a forsaken.  If I were to change it – which I might, depending on how the faction change thing works – she’d become Aleydis Schaerbeck (who also has bats in her belfry).
• Added advantage of Lordaeron lore, something I’ve put a lot of work into.
• I already have a Forsaken character.
• Cult of the Forgotten Shadow, which rocks, and which would make “Remember – Patience, Discipline” quite applicable, as she’s rather firmly a discipline priest.

A Troll Priest Who Is Yet Unnamed

• Trolls are awesome.
• Would require a name change. (Possibly Ananda? Annala? Anzefi? Lots of options, Trolls have fun names)
• Trolls wear shoes funny, blech.
• Would allow me to do Troll Lore research – and having tiny lore nerd binging sessions is fun. Would also require learning and figuring out an accent, something else I rather enjoy.
• I don’t currently have any Troll characters.  And Voodoo is also awesome.

So there are obviously good and bad sides to either option.  No desire to play a Blood Elf (or a Goblin, or a Tauren priest), so it’s really just these two.

Or stick as a Human priest and not worry about it.  I’ve not really officially made up my mind yet.  But the ability to transfer over some of the account bound items, to have a “ready made” character that could see Northrend from a Horde perspective without getting slogged down in Hellfire and Zangarmarsh (the way Rirri is right now), etc. is pretty appealing.  She’s also got epic flying/Northrend flying already, and an epic mount.

About the only thing I’d be sad to lose is that Anaelle is an enchanter, and she DE’s all my greens?  But I could just as easily send those to my husband’s enchanter – who is already 80, and who does almost all of my enchants for me anyway.  It’d put me back at waiting for enchants and paying for them again though.  (booo!)

So what do you guys think?  Is this worth it?  Am I just, yet again, trying to breathe life into a dead character?  Am I deluding myself thinking she’ll get more than an evening of play a week (if that), depending on how much time I end up not spending on my three, already invested Alliance characters?  (I’d rather not end up overcommitting myself!)

I seek your wise council, oh commenters!

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Faction Changes – Or where I jump on the Hordewagon

Unfortunately, I’m also strongly against purchasing characters and paying for power leveling (it’s against the TOS, it’s unsafe, don’t do it).

Which means I either need to get over it… or  I need to level.  In Northrend. But!  I want an 80 priest, and now’s the time to do it, since with the Midsummer Fire Festival going, I can get a 10% XP buff that stacks with the 10% XP shoulders (woo!) plus all of the experience from the various fire quests.

I’ll be using Pookie’s guide to hitting the various fires (Alliance guide, Horde Players can find an excellent rundown on WoWwiki), if only because at level 73, I get around 12K experience for each Alliance fire, and nearly 25K for each Horde fire.  Which is quite a lot, especially considering how slowly Northrend feels like it’s going, and how rested experience buffs are going to be at a premium for a bit.

So wish me luck, and we’ll see how long this goes.  Maybe with a bit of momentum, this’ll go along better.

Oh also – I need a bit of advice.  I’m leveling with a combination of group stuff (with my husband’s rogue) and on my own.  Leveling with the rogue and priest, when I’m specced shadow, is a pain in the butt, since I’m dropping in and out of shadowform. But on my own, shadow was much better than discipline, at least in terms of speed, the last time I was working on it.  What spec do you folks suggest?

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Buckling Down

Hi Anna,

I’m a cat herder (healing lead) and I am concerned that I may not know enough to properly evaluate if our healers are doing their job appropriately.  How do you evaluate the performance of the healers in your raid and at what point do you pull them aside for ‘a talk?’

I read your Diagnosing Healer trouble, but I’m not even sure if are ‘having’ healer trouble, and it’s not a factor of other raid elements getting in the way.

Thanks for any help in advance!

That’s a hard question (I love you guys, but you never email me easy questions!) – but I’m happy to take a stab at it.  In some ways it’s easier to work on once you figure out exactly what the problem is than it is to decide who/what is the problem.  Anyway!

1.  Are people dying?

If yes, and if it’s the cause of the majority of your wipes, look at why/how they’re dying.  If they stood in instagib shadow pancakes of doom… not a healer problem.  If they got hit by a periodic AOE and just didn’t get heals – more likely a healer problem.  If your tank is dying repeatedly, check in WWS for the actual combat log right around his death.  If he gets hit and doesn’t get any heals within 3 seconds?  Healer problem.  If he gets /oneshot/ – well, there could be a number of issues, including lack of gear, improper gearing, or running past an enrage timer and getting pwnt for 340K damage in one shot.

Also keep in mind how many healers were alive at this point – if you only have two healers that are capable of not standing in shadow pancakes of doom, that’s a healer problem, but not related to healing!

2. How are your healers feeling? How is their general attitude and morale?

Are they seriously stressed out?  Do they say things like “man I know there’s 6 of us, but it really feels like 5″?  Are they butting up against problems with the rest of the raid (melee standing in stuff, not using damage prevention abilities) or is there a serious shortage when you should have the people you need to cover your bases.  I’m in a team of 7 in Ulduar, and that’s a little thin sometimes for a group with 7-8 melee DPS every week, especially if the DPS have a tunnel vision week and forget to use things like feint and cloak of shadows and divine protection (etc).

3. What does the WWS say?

Do you have a disc priest that never casts power word shield?  A resto druid that’s raid healing but doesn’t use wild growth?  There are some big red flags that you’ll see if you start to look at individual WWS parses.  The other thing to look at, from the individual player’s stats page, is the breakdowns tab.  If your tank-healing paladin doesn’t have the VAST MAJORITY of his/her healing on the tanks, and then themself, and then smaller amounts for the raid (primarily melee that get HL Glyph splash) – he’s doing it wrong.  If your raid healing holy priest is almost exclusively healing the tank, then she’s doing it wrong.  You’ll have to have a pretty good handle on who usually does what kind of assignments, but keeping an eye on where your healers individual foci are will tell you a lot.

It’ll also tell you if you’ve got a healer with a god complex making up for a slacker.  Rankings are less important overall, but seeing something like a holy paladin who is a tank healer outhealing a holy priest who is a raid healer is cause to at least look into what was going on.

4. Double check their spec:

Elitist Jerks and PlusHeal both have good posts and suggestions about sample specs – particularly the first posts in the EJ “[Spec Class] in 3.1″ and/or Theorycrafting Thinktank posts.  If you’ve got a shaman who isn’t taking Riptide… she’s doing it wrong.  This isn’t about minutae, but about someone skipping things that are crucial to their efficiency as a healer.  It’s also something to broach to the healing team as a whole – we recently had a long discussion about whether I might try out a Holy/Prot hybrid build (to take Divine Guardian), as a way to promote some tank healing synergy.  The final discussion was maybe to pick it up later as a dual spec, but to get more used to Ulduar now.

5. Double check the gear – esp. enchants and gems:

Are they stacking crit as a resto shaman?  Spirit as a paladin?  Those kinds of things.  Also – do they have their gear enchanted.  I generally “allow” a little grace period, but stuff needs gems and enchants by the next week’s raid at the VERY least, especially for major upgrades.  If there’s a cash or time problem, that’s something to talk about and work out between yourself and the healer in question.  Sometimes weirdnesses are actually experiments, and (like SO many things I talk about with regard to healers) communication is key.

Both “double checks” can be made easier through wowarmory checks of other people of that class that you know are on top of their game.

As I’m sure you’re noticing, figuring out just what exactly is the problem can be a pretty difficult task, especially for the raid leadership.  Of course, all of this takes TIME, particularly since it involves a lot of knowledge and research on your part – so take it one step at a time.  Obviously the first bit is the most important – if people aren’t dying, you’re both more likely to be OK and under less of a crunch to figure out the problem.

I hope that helps, both for your particular raid, and for raids in general that are banging their heads against any particular progression wall and are wondering if the problem is the healers or not (no matter WHAT people say, the adage “it’s always the healer’s fault” is … uh… horsefeathers).

So good luck, happy healing, and as always – May the Loot-Fu be with you!

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Are your problems healer caused?