Almost a year ago I posted a screenie of us wiping on Sarth-3D and talked about the various elements of my UI. It seemed to me that an update was in order, so for a change here is a screenie of us wiping to Heroic Anub!

The style is pretty strongly inspired by the Parasol Edition of Tapestry UI, but the fundamental elements haven’t changed over the last year. I have a middle stack of buttons, Grid, and user frames, and a big black text box in the corner. There are a few changes under the hood, however.

Out: Pitbull, In: Stuf
Pitbull was always a huge memory hog, so I was happy to find a suitable replacement in Stuf. One thing both mods suffer from is too many options — given infinite time and patience, you could make your user frames look like almost anything. Pitbull addressed that somewhat with the in-game template features, while with Stuf you just overwrite the LUA file. It can be tough to source attractive frame files, though, and it’s a little intimidating for someone with limited mod experience. Once you get it set up, it looks good and has very low overhead.

Out: Buffalo, In: Satrina Buff Frames
I enjoyed my cute tiny buff/debuff icons for years, but at some point during a couple tiers of LK raiding I got tired of having to squint to see how long I had left on Thaddius’ polarity and such. I could have just set up Buffalo to do that, but I figured I may as well take the opportunity to finally update to a more current add-on. SBF does everything you would expect, with low overhead, and a few extras. (I like being able to turn off things like Heroic Presence, for example.)

Out: BigWigs, In: Deadly Boss Mods
Huge upgrade. DBM has, in my experience, more complex timer available and gives more information to the player than BigWigs. Additionally, DBM works in some 5-man situations (it will time Make It Count for example) and by default has timers for important events in Battlegrounds like graveyard captures. No contest, DBM wins.

Best in Show: Power Auras
Oh, Power Auras. Tough to set up, but once you do you will possibly never find a mod that is so useful to every class in so many ways. “All” Power Auras does is put the symbol of your choice (including size and color) on the screen at a pre-set time or condition. For example, see that little green symbol to the left of my body in the screenie? That means I have three stacks of Serendipity up. It’s just a simple graphic that goes red, yellow, or green appropriately, but it makes a huge difference as to the next spell I cast. The flexibility to add even more clear, concise symbols to my game play in the future, in any way I need, makes this a pretty powerful add-on.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Hmm, one tiny change in my philosophy of add-ons I guess: I just noticed that I’m not running a DPS meter in the 2009 raid screenie, whereas it has a place of prominence in my UI now. How odd. Did I turn it off for the shot in an attempt to be modest? Or was I actually not running one? Perhaps I’ve gotten more numbers-focused in the last year.

Look, let’s just put this in big bold letters up front so everyone knows where I stand: DO NOT NERF PLAGUE WORKS FOR A LONG TIME. Thank you.

I should hasten to add that we haven’t killed any of the three new bosses yet, so I am hardly speaking from a position of uber superiority. In fact, we wiped to Festergut 11 times on Tuesday, getting him as low as 3% once. And when we kill him tonight, as I suspect we will if everyone is on the ball, it will feel really good.

Everyone who has ever raided knows how good a first boss kill can feel. That rush is proportionate to how much work you put in to killing him. I remember after five weeks of slogging away on Kael, I literally teared up when he finally died. That feeling when the boss you’ve been banging your head against falls down and Vent erupts in cheers — that’s the rush of raiding. I like to improve my character and hang with my friends, but that boss kill is the real kernel of raid satisfaction.

That satisfaction has been sorely missed by “average” raid guilds such as mine.

Oh sure, there are Heroic modes, and we do a fair number of them. Some are unique fights in their own right, like Sarth-3D, and very challenging. But most are just the same old boss you have already fought three different ways, only with everything scaled up. I killed Gormok in normal 10s, heroic 10s, normal 25s, and now I can kill him while he hits the tank for 40k? Awesome. I mean, I’ll do it, but it’s not very interesting.

Meanwhile, normal modes in ToC-25 were so easy that we were clearing the place in an hour by our third run. I remember when we would be all excited to get a screenie of us standing around the corpse of a new boss, but with ToC it was hard to feel like we’d actually done something until we just finished the place. Even the first wing of ICC was a little underwhelming, at the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong, the boss mechanics are interesting, the setting is neat, and I get to shackle things, but none of the kills gave that sense of accomplishment.

Then along came the Plague Works. It was incredibly fun: fresh new content, and a boss that at our level requires solid concentration, effort, and teamwork from everyone involved. Our team has been buzzing since Tuesday, too. People are analyzing the raid logs, posting on the strategy threads, and shoring up any holes in their gear. There are places to go and things to kill.

Back in TBC we were very happy to have a new boss down every two weeks. Fourteen days! And we liked it! I understand that Blizzard wants to get away from elaborate fights like our five week effort to kill Kael’Thas, and I’m not entirely opposed to that. But give us some challenge. Give us a reason to be good (and get better) at what we do. Give us the occasional morsel of fresh content that we can’t just brute force into the ground, and I suspect that you, my dear Blizz, will find many satisfied customers. For the moment, I am one of them.

As discussed previously, I am really picky about who I invite to the guild, and my methods are possibly equally mysterious. For me, gut instinct has the greatest weight in recruitment decisions, even more so than previous experience or gear or even application personality. If I think something is off, then 99% of the time that person is completely sunk for an invite. And if my gut is telling me that they’d be right

So given my fairly arbitrary recruitment standards (“Do they make Liore happy?”), it might be surprising that there are a few things someone can do to not even be considered as an applicant.

1. You have a stupid name.
“Stupid” is defined as borderline offensive, horribly misspelled, or with an excessive number of umlauts. Yes, this probably isn’t fair, but there you go. I am a big English Major elitist bastard, and I would be really sad to see “XxDeathNightxX” running around with my guild tag. It should be noted that really awesome people can overcome this barrier to entry. In fact, a long time ago I reluctantly invited a fellow who was amazingly nice but.. oh.. that name. He’s been a guild officer for at least a couple of years now, so I think it worked out in the long run. /grin

2. You ask me what our website URL is, or something that is obviously on the site.
All guild leaders like to think that their guild is a unique and special snowflake. It doesn’t matter if it’s a raiding guild or a leveling guild or a PVP guild or whatever, we all think ours is the best around (or we wouldn’t be running it, right?). I certainly don’t want or ask for obsequiousness from apps, but I do like to see a basic acknowledgment that you want to join MY guild in particular. This means you shouldn’t ask me what our website URL is, or any information that is plainly listed on the front page of said site. You want to know our web address? Go type “Machiavellis Cat” or even just “Liore” into Google. You do know the name of our guild, right?

3. Don’t immediately launch into an angry story about how you were mistreated in your old guild.
I like to assume that most guild leaders are reasonable sorts who mean well. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but there you go. If you introduce yourself to me with a tirade about how you were never invited on raids because of the stupid core clique, or how you left when you didn’t get a drop that you deserved, or whatever, I am probably going to wonder how much of it was your fault. Also, weird questions like, “Do you have attention-seeking girls in your guild? I hate those,” while possibly genuine, will likely induce concern on my part. (If you have been burned by guilds in the past and want to avoid that, try asking positive questions instead of ranting. “What is your raid roster policy?” or “Are initiates eligible for loot?”.)

4. I don’t care about your GearScore.
I really, really don’t. I’ve never installed the mod, and I never will install the mod. I even have no idea what the GearScores are for Liore or Lunedi. So when you start your app with, “Recruit me, I’m a 5100 DK,” it means absolutely nothing. Your collective item level doesn’t really tell me whether you can choose your gear intelligently, what previous raid experience you have, or what kind of person you are. It does tell me that you’re possibly one of THOSE guys who is absurdly fixated on numbers and inclined to be a jerk about it.

5. “App? I don’t like filling out apps. Can’t you just invite me?”
No.

Most of this stuff is common sense, and I’m sure some of it is more important to me than to other guild leaders. Be polite, be genuine, and remember that guild leaders are human and just as prone to snap first impressions as everyone else.

So yesterday I wrote a little mini-manifesto to the guild, although I don’t think it was very shocking. It was just basically reminding people that 3.3 is here, and it was time to buckle down and knock this last raid instance out of the park.

The raiding in 3.2 was so terrible that I felt bad marching people through achievements and hard modes. I stood in that room three nights a week at least (25s and 10s), and even my infamously unlimited resources of guild cheerleadering were being taxed. It was pretty easy to just wipe out ToC, Ony, and VoA in 90 minutes and then tell everyone to go do something fun. Plus, some people don’t really dig achievements, and get a little shirty when they wipe for an hour to get some flashing lights and a noise that they don’t care about anyway. (Side note, but to those people I say, “Suck it up, buttercup.” You don’t like it, go talk to Blizz and tell them their new raiding paradigm is stupid.  Bosses don’t matter any more, per se. It’s all about achievements and hard modes. Personally, I like it.)

Anyway, previously the time requirement was a huge block to our competitive progress as a guild. As it stands now though the time demands of raiding are greatly diminished. After the holidays we will be raiding 9 hours a week (three nights at three hours) which should handily cover farming, progressing, and achievements. And no, server ranking isn’t everything, but it’s somewhat satisfying to see your guild name in lights, and it DOES help a lot with recruiting.

Without that time limitation, competitive progression relies upon player skill, teamwork, gear, and proper motivation from the gal upstairs… oh crap! That’s me! Hence the manifesto. So we started off our new achivement-happy stance by picking off “On A Boat” and “I’ve Gone and Made a Mess” on our second clear of ICC. The latter took a little strategy and a few wipes, and the former was chaos and madness and chanting “shootit shootit shootit shootit” at the cannoneers. The result of our little adventures?

Which, you know, doesn’t actually MEAN that much, except that we are a guild of determined spazzes with a rocket pack fixation. As a pally said, “WTF are other guilds doing right now? Underwater basketweaving?” All it took was a little motivation and 45 minutes of patience from the team, and we saw results unlike those we’ve ever seen before.

So to all you other ‘casualcore’ guilds out there: You don’t need time to be recognized as badass! This is kind of the dawn of our era. Knock that 3.2 lethargy out of your head, go forth, and achieve. As Newton — or was it Ghostcrawler? — said, a guild in motion tends to stay in motion.

Right before 3.3 hit, I knew it was going to be an exciting patch. There was a whole new raid instance! And new recipes, a new legendary, new crafting orbs, three new heroics, and a new faction. Oh, and some change to the Looking For Group interface, but whatever, pug runs are stupid.

So here we are, a week after launch, and I have to admit that my 3.3 fangirling was right on the mark. Everything is fun and exciting! What I didn’t expect was becoming such a Looking For Dungeon addict.

I cannot say enough about this new system on a few different levels. As a guild leader, I love seeing lots of people on being active, and now in between raids you can look at the guild list and see people running everything, all over the place. Two or three guildies wanna group up? No problem. There’s no more “Oh, sorry, I ran that already,” and alts are suddenly really popular. I’ve even had a few people return to playing simply because they love being able to run a heroic any time their heart desires.

On a personal, player level, I have really enjoyed all my groups. Some of them were with excellent players, like the time I cleared Halls of Lightning in a fraction of the usual time (props to you mad chainpulling tanks!). Some of them were with barely adequate players. One of them was a heroic Nexus where I was not only the healer but also second highest DPS, and it was a BLAST. Granted, it was with a really good pug tank who didn’t need much looking after, but being a battle priest was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in Nexus, if not in recent heroic memory.

I even had the stereotypical dumb DK in one group, who announced halfway through that he was leveling his unarmed skill. I replied that I was going to start leveling my “unhealed” skill. The rest of the group chuckled.

Each LFG heroic is an adventure. Where are we going? What kind of tank will I have? Will the DPS be any good? Will people talk or be silent? Will they have silly names that I can ask about? (Favorite so far: a DK named Schmarthas.)

Before 3.3 my resistance to pugs was pretty well known by the guild. And I was happy that way! But suddenly I have become a Liore of the People, with badges and gold and titles and adorable puppies and alt gear and good stories.

So bravo, Blizz. I would never have asked for this feature, but now that it’s here I cannot get enough of it.

So before you read this I should probably mention that I haven’t truly “theorycrafted” any of this. I’ve barely even done any independent research on it (although really there doesn’t seem to be a lot out there). Instead this is all just based on my observations and own sense of logic. If you see a flaw in my logic, feel free to correct me in the comments.

So you have a Val’anyr! First, let’s look at the proc for a holy priest:

1. It can come from any direct heal, as long as the target has less than 100% health.
2. It technically is supposed to proc off of each Prayer of Mending bounce, but I’ve only personally observed it going off the first one.
3. It does NOT proc off of Empowered Renew, much less regular Renew.

Okay, so far, so good! Now, how effective are some popular heals? For this, I’m just going to use my stats, which are pretty much, I think, your average “farm regular TotC” gear levels, averaged out with crits.

• Circle of Healing: heals for 2500, shield for 375 (2250 total if glyphed)
• Flash Heal: heals for 3400, shield for 510
• Prayer of Healing: heals for 3400, shield for 510 (2550 total, glyph agnostic)
• Prayer of Mending: heals for 5700, shield for 855 – 4275 (inc. 2pc T9 bonus)
• Greater Heal: heals for 6400, shield for 960

There it is, the closest I possibly have ever come to mathcrafting. There was division and everything! Anyway, okay, now we have our information mostly in line, what can I figure out from this?

First, if you are in a fight with regular raid damage, Circle of Healing with the bubble is badass. For 21% of base mana, assuming you have the CoH glyph, you have 2250 in shield damage thrown around on the average CoH. That’s the equivalent to having an entire extra person included in your CoH! Note that the shield is not large at about 375, but that’s not the point. 375hp will probably not save an individual, but 2250 damage absorbed by the bubble is 2250 damage that did not have to be healed, and that saves mana, time, and GCDs for all of your healers.

Depending on how well you keep track of your bounces, PoM is also potentially a really efficient way to use your Val’anyr proc. Even with just one bounce, an 855 hp shield is not insignificant, and it gets ludicrously good the more bounces you have. I admit, I am fairly bad at keeping track of my PoM, so I probably only 3 bounces off each one, for a predicted shield total of ~2500. This is probably less important during a fight with very occasional raid damage, and totally amazing during something like Heroic Twins with constant raid-wide damage.

As a holy priest we aren’t often called upon to heal the Main Tank, but he or she should not be ignored when it comes to bubbles. Suddenly our mana-inefficent large heals become better when served with a large bubble. I always try and hit the MT with a Serendipityx3 Greater Heal when Val’anyr procs. If there is a lot of damage on the tank, follow that up with a Flash Heal and a fresh PoM — you just threw a 2300 hp bubble on them, too! I deeply enjoy this on a fight like Gormok, when the incoming tank damage is crazy.

Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and hasted Greater Heals are three really good ways to use your Val’anyr procs. Adapt to the specific fight and the kind of damage you’re combating, and enjoy the bubbles!

So 3.2 is here, probably a little earlier than we anticipated, and it is still making me cranky. (Cranky enough to not blog, but not cranky enough to stop playing!) Allow me to summarize:

GOOD

• Oracle pet!
• Adorable raptor pets with giant heads!
• New dailies!
• Raid timer extensions!

BAD

• Too many raid settings. Four different versions of Wyrms is not actually four different bosses.
• Three different types of T9. Some need badges. Some need general tokens. Some need class specific tokens. Some need tokens AND badges. I need a flowchart.
• The armor is still ugly. If you’re going to make all clothies wear the same style of gear, at least give us a rad menacing warlock design!

I kind of know what Blizz was doing, at least in part, and I appreciate that new recruits will be able to gear up faster now on their own and get to T8/T9 readiness without us having to run them through Naxx. Still, as one of my guildies said on patch day, the fact that you get three Conquest tokens from three bosses in the new 5-man really devalues the badges we’ve gotten so far in 25-man Ulduar (25 man regular, not 25 man Heroic hahahahahah oh man where am I).

Oh, and the bugs have been outstanding, although that’s to be expected with a patch and doesn’t really bother me. Our server was dead for most of patch day, and last night in Ulduar we had the awesome quintuple bots bug on XT. I’m not sure if everyone found them so amusing, but the sight of an ocean of bots swarming towards us — and the associated cries of panic on Vent — kept me giggling for the next hour. Never have I wished so badly to be DPS and on Mind Sear duty.

Anyway, on the guild front we have been toying with P3 of Yogg, and with the raid timer extension I feel pretty confident that we’ll get him down by next weekend. Then I think we’ll focus on hardmodes and dabble a bit in the new Colosseum. I admit my 21 shards and I selfishly hope the guild spirit is still up to learning Three Lights in the Darkness.

I suppose I can’t really complain too much. Summer doldrums are over, there’s some new content to be had, and I have bets with friends over which one of us will be asked to leave Blizzcon first. And, hey, at least T9 won’t make me look like a paladin.