Tidewalker Defeated!

That's right folks, we killed him! After a couple hours of getting strategies down, it just sort of clicked after a couple tries. We ended up using a variation on the positioning depicted to the left, but more of an angle. So the MT was where he is indicated in the picture, however the ranged DPS, healers, melee DPS and Paladin Tanks were angled more towards the pillar on the left side of the picture.

The fight was interesting, you could tell that people were 'getting' it around 50%: on our first few tries quite a few died on the murlocs, but by our second last and last attempt it was nice to see the raid get in to a rhythm and the entire raid still up give or take a person. I think the key was to have two paladins consecrating to get aggro on the murlocs away from the healers. Our first loot was:

[Ring of Sundered Souls]
[Warboots of Obliteration]
[Pendant of the Lost Ages]
[Pattern: Hurricane Boots]

Not too bad for our second night of working on him in earnest, first night dedicated solely towards getting him down. Here's the victory shot:

Tidewalker Take Two

So the guild is in SSC again tonight to take another shot at Tidewalker. We've discussed lessons learned from last time we were in there and I think we have a few strategies to try out. I've read up on the encounter and have decided that we need more healers than the amount we had in there last time.

We'll see how it goes.

SSC

So, we were in SSC last night. For all intensive purposes, we one-shot Hydross and one-shot Lurker. I say 'for all intensive purposes' because our first Hydross pull was botched. Not because of lack of healing, or some gung-ho dpser, but because the nature tank put the wrong equipment on (i.e. he had his frost gear on instead of his nature gear). So we ate the wipe and came back to a picture perfect Hydross kill. I think he enraged 5 seconds before we killed him. Ok, maybe a little slower than we'd like, but it still worked.

I was asked to handle healing assignments, which was fine with me. I had assigned a healer to each of the tanks/offtanks for the trash and told them to stick with their tanks for the adds phase of the encounter. I also doubled up healers on the MT of each phase, so MT healers were healing first the frost tank then the nature tank depending on the phase. The raid healers (who should be shaman, I wish we had more healing shaman) were told to keep an eye on the lucky nubs who got entombed. All went as planned.

We moved on to Lurker and one shot him as well. Healers were told to heal their groups, in addition to three strong healers put on the MT. We had one healer assigned to mind the melee dps and during the add phase, healers assigned to heal the off tanks. Again, I'd like to have more resto shaman as they are very adept at group healing and are perfectly suited to healing the melee dps. Yours truly actually got her first piece of SSC loot, even if it is off spec.

Velvet Boots of the Guardian Binds when picked up Feet Cloth 148 Armor +21 Stamina +21 Intellect +15 Spirit Durability 50 / 50 Requires Level 70 Equip: Improves spell critical strike rating by 24 . Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 49.

We then took a couple shots at Tidewalker. This is the first time I'm seeing this encounter and to be honest, I haven't really done much research in to the boss itself. While we were setting up for our first attempt, I quickly logged over to bosskillers and read up (read: looked at the layout pictures) on the encounter. Seems simple enough, especially that the watery graves aren't working as intended (i.e. you don't take damage while inside one, only when you're catapulted up in to the air do you take the damage). So positioning of the healers was pretty simple, the space in front of where he loads. Tidewalker is to be tanked in the doorway and the melee dps should be separating the boss from the ranged dps/healers. I assigned a small group to MT heal, another couple healers to the paladin that was tanking the murloc adds and one person to heal the watery grave victims. Anyone else was on general raid healing. As we only had about 30 mins to play with, we got in two or three good attempts, enough to make me want to read up more on it and see if I can distribute healing more effectively for the encounter. I think we're back in on him on Monday, which would be some good quality learning time. I'll do some research.

Off for the weekend, so no raiding till Monday night, possibly some Arena/PVP this weekend. That'll be fun!

2.4 PTR Notes

So the PTR notes are up. Here's the meat and potatoes of things affecting Priests:

Priests

• Chastise no longer disorients the target, but now is instant cast and roots the target for 2 seconds.
• Fear Ward is now usable while in Shadow form.
• Focused Will now reduces damage by 2/3/4%, down from 1/3/5%.
• Inner Focus: Chastise now benefits from Inner Focus. In addition, Starshards no longer consumes Inner Focus.
• Power Infusion: Infuses the target with power, increasing their spell haste by 20% for 15 seconds.
• Power Word: Shield: Using low ranks of this spell will now be penalized the same way healing spells are penalized.
• Prayer of Mending: This spell will now fade from players who leave or enter an instance, change continents, or exit the game.
• Reflective Shield: The reactive damage from this talent no longer breaks crowd control affects which break on taking damage.
• Shadowguard: No longer consumes the charge of Inner Focus when triggered.
• Silent Resolve:This talent now affects Surge of Light, Power Infusion, Inspiration, Spirit Tap, Blackout, Levitate, Shackle Undead, Touch of Weakness, Hex of Weakness, and Symbol of Hope.
• Touch of Weakness: No longer consumes the charge of Inner Focus when triggered.It will also function properly even when the Priest with Touch of Weakness on is silenced or stunned.
• Vampiric Touch: Casting lower ranks of this spell is now properly penalized like other healing and damage effects.

Having said that, there was at least one thing I noticed that was mentioned by a Blue on the forums that wasn't included in the PTR notes:

This is an intentional change to how drinking works. The amount of mana regenerated now ramps up, so you will see little or no mana regen the first few seconds and then it will increase as the duration continues.

So much for sitting and drinking for a tick during those times you're out of combat for a tick or two during an Arena.

Here's another change being made to Warlocks that may have an impact on us:

Turn Undead(Rank 3):This spell has been reworked and has been renamed to “Turn Evil”. It will now work on Demons in addition to Undead. Turn Evil is subject to diminishing returns, and lasts 10 seconds in PvP.

This, my friends, simply means that if you're on an arena team with a paladin, the warlocks you are up against are all that more likely to sic their felpuppy on you. Yes, and we still have little to no offenses against these things. Charming.

I'm not keen on many of these changes, specifically the change to Power Infusion. I like it the way it is now. This thing for spell haste that Blizzard has can DIAF.

21 Easy Steps to Blow Away a Rating

Ok, so I used to have a 1740 rated 3v3 arena team on my Disc Priest. The team was good, I was getting nice points, then the guys got invited to another team and since I was an outsider, they left me the team. Well, in an attempt to get some points - any points really - I added people to the team and played.

So after going 2-21, the team is now under 1500. It breaks my heart to see that.

Metamorphasis

Well folks, my warlock friend and I managed to finish Season 2 in the mid 1600 range, a little lackluster if you know what I mean. So far Season 3 has been less than sensational. We decided to join a casual raiding guild and since joining them, I have geared up my Disc/holy priest but yet managed to keep her PvP spec. We've been doing pretty good, we managed to kill Hydross, Void Reaver and Solarian as guild firsts since I joined, of which Solarian and Hydross I was organizing healing. Not bad for a noob hm?

I have decided to make this more of a Priest blog than a PvP blog since I've become somewhat apathetic towards arena lately.

3v3 Pwnage

So we decided to try some 3v3 action last night. The team makeup was myself, a Warlock and a Paladin. We did amazingly well. We started off with a 1410 rating and I think we ended up around 1511. Not too bad for a bunch of noobs. After an hour and a half of 0 wait times, we ended up with a 8 and 2 record.

There were a few teams we just didn't get organized for, and of course they just wiped the floor with us. I seem to remember they had a disc/holy priest on their team and for whatever reason we didn't put enough pressure on the Priest. I think in that case I should have whipped out the Mana Burn button and just leeched everything I could. Good to keep in mind in the future.

There also was another situation where each team had 4 dead, me being alive at 30% health vs a Rogue who was at 100% health. I popped my healthstone, feared him, DoTted him up and started to melt his face. He pulled the Cloak of Shadows trick, which I just re-DoTted him up and feared him again. I don't know if it was just luck or something on his behalf, but he had just hit sprint when I feared him so he managed to run out of range. He then proceeded to try to run around a pillar to cause me line of sight issues and you should have heard me on vent. By that time I was back to full health (gotta love Vampiric Embrace) but without having LoS on him, I couldn't get to face melting him. Eventually my DoTs caught up to him and we won but boy, that sure was frustrating, trying to chase that moron around the pillar.