We’re recruiting!

It seems like everyone’s recruiting these days.

And so are we!

I’ve lamented many a time about the poor sod of a server that is Shattered Halls but I have yet to leave, as many of those before me have, because this is my guild. I’ve worked really hard in the last 2.5 years to keep it alive and keep it thriving.

I think the fact that it almost died once but came back stronger is one major reason why I’ve yet to give it up. Where other Alliance guilds have failed, we’ve succeeded. We’re the oldest guild on the server, the only one of the true original guilds that are still standing.

And now we need your help!

For those who are looking for a new home or thinking of looking for a new home (or know someone in this situation), Catalyst on Shattered Halls is recruiting! We’re looking for:

• 1 holy paladin (high)
• 1 mage (high)
• 1 enhancement shaman (medium)
• 1 uber-dps boomkin (optional)

Our website is http://www.catalyst-sh.com and our application forum is http://www.catalyst-sh.com/forums/18 – I’m also available for questions, etc. via email, comments, or PM via the guild website.

Happy belated Halloween!

No faction transfer, nothin!

Give me my Arcane Torrent.

I got to raid as a blood elf in the middle of an alliance raid for all of about 15 minutes before our first wipe on ToGC25. Dying restored my Night Elf self. Boo.

Forward this email to 10 other people . . .

Looks like I’ve been tagged. I’ll get you back one day, Paolo, one day. /doom

I also have to tag someone else and keep this going. Who heals with a different class… I only read priest blogs and have only just recently started reading shammy blogs with the same level of dedication. Let’s get Llyra over at Healing Way. Let’s cross our fingers that Llyra’s into Internet memes!

Post this questionnaire, with your answers, on your blog. Pick the healing class you know most about (or is the focus of your blog) for the questionnaire, and then send it over to another healing blogger you know and love who heals with a DIFFERENT class. Include a link to the blogger who sent you the questionnaire, as well as a link to the blogger to whom you are sending it.

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?

Raesa, 53/18 GHeal-spamming Disc priest.

• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)

Mostly 25-man raids and heroic 10-m raids. I pursue PvP via playing 3s with a 60/11/0 Disc spec.

• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?

Penance. Nothing else for a priest is quite as shiny or flashy.

• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?

Lolwell. I haven’t been holy since I raided Serpentshrine Cavern during a time when CoH and Lightwell were both avoided (pre-3.0 which was before CoH became OP). I’ve never used Lightwell. Ever. I’ve never specced into it. Also because I was the IDS bitch and talent points were hard to come by.

• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?

I love the fact that priests are the only healer class to have two different talent trees to fulfill 2 different healing roles. I feel special! Other classes have talents in the same tree that benefit either tank healing or AOE healing but no one else has a whole other tree and a whole other play-style.

• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?

We wear cloth.We are the only healer class that has to compete with 2 other DPS classes for gear, as well as amongst each other. All that cloth with haste/crit? It’s delicious! For everyone!Resto druids only compete with moonkins.

Resto shamans compete with each other, maybe pallies if loot policy allows for that (but rarely).
And holy pallies get all the spell plate they want.

And btw, we’re really squishy.

• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?

Specifically for me, I feel I’m best utilized as a primary tank healer, although I will say I provide awesome support for a holy pally. I’ve been a tank healer since I started healing – that’s what I like doing best. I’ve tried raid healing as holy before but I don’t enjoy it as much as I do on my shaman.

• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?

I most enjoy healing with a resto shaman. I think it’s the fact that they add another mana regen cooldown to my toolbox, as well as providing 2 caster buffs via totems – especially Wrath of Air for someone who takes crit over haste (by a small margin right now as my crit is kind of low).

• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?

I have to agree with Paolo here and also say pallies. Being a single-target healer myself, I would feel more secure with someone who can complement my weaknesses rather than someone who shares it.

• What is your worst habit as a healer?

Ha! I have to say my worst habit is also straying from my assignment moreso than is healthy. Sometimes you want to save that dying mage with a bubble but in the process, your tank takes a 40k Impale tick and it’s game over, man, game over!

• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?

Healers with a superstar/prima donna complex. I run my healing team tighter than the entire raid is run in general and when someone thinks s/he is the bomb-diggity at what he does and doesn’t think he needs to acknowledge and follow directions, it drives me up the wall.

Unresponsive in the healer channel?
Doesn’t confirm assignments?
Go find a new guild.

• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?

Yep. I don’t feel the priest class is ever especially underpowered nor overpowered. I mean, there could be a few tweaks here and there to optimize a few things but priests are always on par in terms of class balance after every patch…

• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?

I never use Recount. I use World of Logs to check up on spells used, buff uptimes (e.g. Renewed Hope), stuff like that but otherwise, I go with real-time intuition. That and I keep an eye on my scrolling combat text and adjust accordingly. Post-wipes, I use the Recount death log to see what went wrong that might have caused tank deaths or healer deaths.The other day, I was really mad at myself for letting my tank die in ToGC25 on Gormok but when I checked Recount, I saw:

7.57 (100%) Gormok the Impaler’s Impale hits Gaar for 39854 damage.
7.67 Gormok the Impaler melee hits Gaar for 17653 damage.
BAM! Dead.

What. He went from 100-0% in 0.1 seconds. That’s when I knew to hate the boss, not myself.

• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?

To be honest, I haven’t really run into people with misconceptions about my class other than the usual, “Oh, priest? Heal the raid,” because everyone assumes every priest is holy and disc is only for PvP. Either way though, my server seems pretty educated about disc vs. holy priests (well, except this guy).

• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?

That would have to be learning to use the right glyphs and the right spells. I’ve picked up a few disc priests while recruiting before and I have to say, it seems really difficult to understand that if you’re investing full points into Imp. PW:S, Soul Warding, and glyphing for PW:S, you should probably use it. Cuz, like, you know, it’s not, like, Renewed Hope benefits people with, like, the Weakened Soul debuff or anything.

• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?

They’d probably see a lot of bubbles floating around in the raid, a lot of recasts of PoM even though the stacks aren’t used up (better than letting it expire when no one but tanks are taking damage, I say).Come to think of it, I’m probably one of those healers who would drive me nuts. I stray from my assignment, take risks that might not pay off in the end, and I sometimes don’t follow the really simple rules we put in place for the less situationally aware because I know I am [situationally aware]. Yeah, I would hate myself…

• Haste or Crit and why?

Yar, both. One over the other at different levels when one is lacking. What am I even trying to say? This questionnaire is too long.

• What healing class do you feel you understand least?

I’m going to say… resto druid. I have a resto shaman and have healed all the content in 3.2 with her (minus ToGC). I’ve leveled a holy pally that I’m going to get to 80 one day but my one and only druid only made it to level 12. Now, I’m waiting for Worgen druids so… I’ll just have to read up on druid healing until then.

• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?

Let’s see – for purely healing, Grid (and extensions), Clique, PoM Tracker, and that’s about it. All of heals bound in Clique are macros that pop trinkets and other cooldowns while in combat. I also use Power Auras Classic for prompts of when certain abilities can be used.

• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?

I definitely strive for balance with an emphasis on spell power. A lot of disc priests lament their lack of throughput compared to other healing classes and I’ve noticed it myself – my resto shammy only has about ~2k bonus healing (or whatever they want to call it) and her LHW hits for 4-5k non-crit while my priest’s FHeal hits for 4-5k with 2.5k bonus healing. Healing Wave hits for ~11k while GHeal hits for 9-10k. WTF?The trade-off is in the bubbles, the mitigation, which is not quite as obvious. And spell power will boost both direct heals and shields so that’s a no-brainer.

 

“We deserve it!”

Shortly after our 10-man group got our rusted proto-drakes, an officer from another guild had a conversation with one of ours regarding Alliance firsts on the server. Once I got wind of the conversation, I have to admit, I couldn’t control my laughter.

She wasn’t congratulating us. She was essentially QQing and demanding that Catalyst would not attempt Trial of the Grand Crusader (10) until her guild downed it first. Her reasoning?

“We deserve an Alliance first!!!”

My dear, pray tell, on what grounds does anyone “deserve” a faction first?

Is it because progression is linear and just because we manage to down something first while both guilds are working on it at the same time, it somehow justifies your claim to entitlement? Or because we’re sitting at Alliance first that we should sit on our hands until some other guild gets a chance at it?

So I laughed while the conversation was divulged to me as it went on. Normally, I’d laugh and move on but Eristhan.com popped up in my reader with her latest post today and reminded me of this particular conversation.

The same officer from the other guild who QQ’d said that some of her guildies were going to “give her crap” for wanting to do ToGC (10) instead of going back into Ulduar (10) to get their rusties first. She later went on to bitch and moan that no one in her guild respected/listened to her (other officers included) even though she felt she “did the most work.” When asked why she thought that was the case, she said it was because she’s “a girl.”

Just to give a little bit of a background on my exposure to a male-driven society – I work in proprietary trading. Prop is essentially the division of a bank (e.g. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, etc.) that invests the company’s own capital into the market vs. managing other people’s money. (Okay, before anyone decides to direct hate at me for the whole financial collapse, shut it. I was still in college when the recession was in diapers getting ready to poop itself into the big poop machine it is today.)

Prop (and much of the finance field, really) is predominately male. The typical WoW raid and guild environment is pretty much what I would see in everyday life. In fact, I probably see more aggression in general on a good day at work than I would in a raid wiping on trash.

Back to the subject at hand.

Posts that depict male players as sexist, and then explaining the reason for why that may be so by giving examples of female stereotypes that feed the issues, are not helping in leveling the playing field for both genders. It spreads awareness that this problem exists, yes, but it only reinforces the fact that these stereotypes exist and that there’s a reason for them to exist, which is the fact that they might be true. Remember Lodur’s post and Sydera’s response? What a shitstorm that was.

The physical world where we might interact with hundreds, maybe thousands, of different people on a daily basis – it’s too large for all of us to realistically consider changing it. We can only control what we do on an individual basis. Our universe in-game is much smaller and we are granted the ability to change that universe with ease, to control the experience we gain from it.

I believe that, yes, it is completely possible to find a handful of bad apples together in one guild who think nothing of the female players that coexist with them in the game. What I don’t believe is that in the case of 20+ people is that everyone discriminates against one officer because she’s “a girl.” I do believe that she’s lacking something critical that would help her be a more effective leader. I believe everyone, at some point or another, is lacking something critical that would make him/herself more effective at whatever it is that s/he does.

Instead of just experiencing the issues mentioned above, I would implore everyone to try to control what they get from the experience. In any given situation, 25% of the way people react is based on the actual message and 75% is based on how the message is presented. I think if each of us stopped for a second and thought how we could best express our opinion towards someone who said something to provoke us without being confrontational, we’d probably realize that there are actually quite a few reasonable and rational people out there.

No one deserves to be treated badly but that doesn’t mean we all deserve to be treated well for no reason either.

HOLY COW, BATMAN!

Tom Chilton is funny. Kinda. Upon unveiling of the Tauren Paladin:

Let me be the first to say… HOLY COW!

So I disappeared last week to head to Anaheim:

I attended last year also but with press badges so this year was a little… different… as a general attendee. Same great content! Don’t get me wrong! Just no perks. :( I got in around 1pm on Thursday. We were staying at the Hilton next door to the convention center this time around because we learned driving 15 minutes and then looking for parking took at least half an hour. That’s no good when you don’t have press badges!

Views on Cataclysm

Anyway, the big news is Cataclysm if you’ve been living under a rock. I have to say, I was sad when I heard the news at the opening ceremony. But I wasn’t sad because of what the expansion entailed. I was saddened by the fact that everything that was leaked the few days prior was true. For me, it took away from all the allure of BlizzCon.

I go to BlizzCon to see the huge announcements they’re going to make. I felt like that was taken from me when most of everything was leaked beforehand. Yeah, I know, no one forced me to read it but seriously – was anyone really able to cruise the WoW internet the few days before BlizzCon without seeing anything about the expansion rumors? You got a good gist of what’s going on from just the title and any keywords you pick up by trying to scroll past the post in your RSS reader!

I look forward to Cataclysm. I’m excited. I know there’s a big group of people who are part of the camp that vanilla WoW was the best and with Cataclysm, it won’t even be the same game but of course it won’t be the same game! Wouldn’t you get tired of playing the same game 5 years into its life? I think it’s for the better. C’mon, gnome priests. ‘Nuff said.

I also appreciate how the core stats will finally affect your output stats. It never made sense to me how not one core stat provided effective spell power for casters (talents don’t count) while strength and agility always provided attack power for melee.

Views on Legendary Weapons

The dev hunter loot joke gets someone every time.

http://www.blizzard.com/blizzcon/recaps/class_items_prof-panel.xml

I was standing on line on the morning of Day 2 and some guys were talking about Shadowmourne featured in the Class, Items, and Professions panel from the day before.

The slide contained a screenshot of a Tauren death knight holding a 2H axe with a blue glow. The caption at the bottom read,

(Hunter weapon, obviously!)

The guys behind me in line were talking about the next legendary weapon. One of them said, “Yeah I think it’s a hunter weapon.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, that’s what it said on the slide anyway. I hope it is. That’ll be great for me.”

When compounded with all the recent misconceptions and QQ on the general forums, all I can do is /facepalm.

And for everyone else who is QQing about the lack of a DPS caster legendary weapon, you’re getting one. In fact, the caster legendary is the next to come.

I don’t know what it’s going to be but it’ll be the first one out of the gate. We’ll work it in somehow.

- Item Designer, Travis Day

To be honest, I think I look forward to Diablo 3 the most. ;)

The Spec I Hated

WoW.com’s Matt Rossi (formerly WoWInsider.com!) had a breakfast topic yesterday about playing the “spec you hate.” The part I found most relevant was:

For that matter, I know lots of players who play a spec and role they hate just because that’s the spec/role their guild needed or asked them for. So now I ask you: have you ever had to play with a spec you hated?

I read through the comments and found a few prevailing viewpoints:

1. I hate this spec but it’s the best current DPS output.
2. I hate healing/tanking but it’s what my guild needs.
3. This is a game. I play the way I want to. Screw any guild who says otherwise.

Everyone in a raiding guild who wants to stay with their guild has gone through 1 and 2 as Blizz continually tries to balance the classes. I’ve definitely experienced #2. Number 1 doesn’t apply to me since priests really only have 1 DPS spec.

I rolled shadow all through Karazhan. I leveled as shadow. As the guild grew and Gruul’s Lair loomed over us as the next step of progression, the guild needed more healers. I was asked to play the spec (role) I hated, and rolled holy (c’mon healing in TBC consisted of cancel-casting Greater Heal! ick). This isn’t anything new, as hybrids are asked to respec all the time, especially now with dual spec.

We started raiding Karazhan in August of 2007. We got our first High King Maulgar kill in December of 2007. I spent 5 months as shadow and proceeded to spend the next 11 months as holy. I hated being holy but I was good at it. The guild needed it. I sucked it up and did it.

Well, people who are of viewpoint #3 would ask, “Why?“

Because this is a game and I will play the way I want to. WoW is a huge game. Playing the spec/role that I like the best isn’t the end all and be all of the fun I get out of this game.

Zerbe said,

I wouldnt put myself in a position where I had to play something I didnt want to. Thats turning a game thats fun into something else, thats not why I play, I would just gquit, its not that important.

That seems a little too cut-and-dry for me. For me, the guild is a bigger factor in why I play the game than what my spec is. I’m not saying it’s wrong to /gquit and find another home if you feel that strongly about it but I feel like there might be some underlying issues with the guild already that would lead someone to /gquit over respeccing to another talent build. But hey, to each his own.

I believe everyone should be open-minded about things like switching specs and/or roles. You might find yourself enjoying multiple aspects of your class. If anything, what you learn from playing with different abilities will only help further your understanding of your class. You might even find yourself enjoying something that you thought you hated in the beginning. ;)

BlizzCon 2009

I have to say, the ticket queue system this year worked so much better than last year. I will be going with the BF and one of our friends this year. I also booked a room at the Hilton right next door to the convention center so no driving from hotel either.

Is anyone else going?

It’ll be a good time. :)

Oh yeah, I also passed my test. It’s been a good weekend.

/afk

I’ve been out of the game pretty much the entire week due to my impending doom come tomorrow IRL so I haven’t encountered much in the game in terms of raiding or otherwise. I’ve stayed at work until about 10:30PM every day so far this week to study for this exam on Friday. The only exposure I’ve had to WoW this week so far is me getting home around 11PM, logging on to do the fishing and cooking dailies, stepping into Naxx-25 to help with Raz (ended up clearing Military, Sapph, and KT instead …), and websites!

I haven’t even had time to think about WoW, much less play it. Hope Ulduar goes well for everyone in there this week.

/sigh

Dealing with the Summer Churn

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere far from the Equator, a very familiar season is coming upon us. It’s the time of vacations and outdoor activities, full of sun and fresh air!

Or, as some of us know it to be, the death of many raiding guilds and/or just raiding in general.

For those of us in the US, May is the season for college graduations. Memorial Day, coming up in 2 weekends, marks the unofficial beginning of summer, where it’s okay to wear white again and trips to the beach are a weekly occurrence.

Catalyst is 2 years old in a few days. We’ve experienced the summer churn once before. It was the death of our raiding and progression. Within the first few weeks of May, half of our raiding team disappeared. Some people had transferred off previously so we were already hurting. But by May of ‘08, people dropped off the planet without so much as a warning and they never came back. We made some changes this year to prevent repeating history.

1. We changed the raiding schedule.

We’ve traditionally put farm raids on the weekdays and progression raids on the weekends so that people have the flexibility to go late into the night if necessary. However, the weekends are the most active times for RL activities in the summer. So? We will be moving our 25-man Ulduar runs to the weekdays instead. Pre-3.1 content will be on the weekend for those who can make it and feel like doing it. No pressure. The new schedule begins next Tuesday.

2. We started actively recruiting.

People will seem to be away from the computer more often in the summer. If we’re lucky, we won’t have half the guild disappear and instead, we’ll just have the handful of people who take off on certain nights. Maybe they won’t because the economy is in the dumpster and it’s more economical to stay home and play WoW. However, it’s probably better to err on the safe side. We’re probably going to take on a couple more healers and some more DPS. Considering we’ve also lost a hunter to another transfer guild (I’m telling you, bimonthly occurrence, they always talk a lot of shit, and piss all over resident guilds’ recruiting threads but that’s another story), it wouldn’t hurt to bring in another DPS (although not a hunter because we have at least 5 raiding hunters).

3. Find out what your guildies are doing!

We didn’t really talk to anyone about this last year. It was our first year as a raiding guild, didn’t really know what was coming. It’s a good idea to open up lines of communication to see if anyone foresees not being around much during the summer or if some people are going on vacation, it’s probably a good idea to get the dates. It’s also a good way to figure out which classes you should be out there trying to recruit.

The summer churn is a very real issue. If you’re in a hardcore raiding guild where the members never AFK, bring all their own consumables, and expect to spend the next three hours wiping at least all in the name of progression, then you’ve probably got nothing to worry about.

The more casual raiding guilds with a foundation built on being social like ours where the philosophy is RL > WoW, you’re probably going to see some sort of member attrition. With all of that said:

/shameless plug

Catalyst is recruiting!

We are currently looking for:

• Holy and/or Disc Priest (more emphasis on Holy)
• Holy Paladin
• Prot Paladin

We are looking for awesome healers in general but the ones listed above are of high priority.

Our website: http://catalyst-sh.wowstead.com
To app: http://catalyst-sh.wowstead.com/forums/18

We are 7/13 25-man Ulduar (working on Hodir) and 10/13 10-man Ulduar (working on Mimiron). We focus on 25-man raids and indulge in 10-mans when there is interest and/or time.

As of May 19th, our raiding schedule will be:

Mon-Thurs from 5:30 PM – 9:00 PM Pacific (server time): 25-man Ulduar

The weekends are reserved for 10-man Ulduar and pre-3.1 raiding content.

We are the most progressed Alliance guild according to WoWProgress.com (#4 on the server behind 3 Horde guilds), albeit on a backwater server (trust me, I know how bad the server is and I know how unappealing it sounds when no guild on the server has cleared Yogg on 25-man yet).

What I can offer is a great atmosphere. We have some real funny people. We have a good time. And we do take raiding seriously. We don’t troll trade or the realm forums, don’t participate in bashing (but I’ll admit the guild gets frustrated by other people doing it), we don’t brag – we’re a respectful group of people who have toughed it out on a bad server and will welcome people of the same mindset.

News at 11: New Posting Schedule

It’s actually 11am for me as I’m putting this post together.

Real life is demanding more of my time now (if you know what the Series 7 is – that is what I will be doing for the next 3 weeks, followed by the 63 and the 55) so I’m going to cut posting days and shift to a Tues/Thurs schedule instead of what has been the MWF schedule.

More entertainment for patch day?

All right, add-on feature incoming tomorrow.

/scurries away to work so she can make time for studying