Thus I have server-transferred yet again! This time to the pacific time realm of Wyrmrest Accord—currently the youngest RP realm in the game. My new guild is Instinct, and I’m currently of recruit status since I just started this past week. Progression is at 8/12 in Heroic Icecrown Citadel and the guild holds the server-first torch for pretty much everything.

I’m excited to really get back into raiding, though I am admittedly a bit rusty after 3 full months of not raiding at all. I’m not worried though—with a bit of practice I’ll be back in full swing.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Lilith and I have been pretty busy with a lot of things lately, both in and out of the game.  Lilith started an exciting new job and moved out of state with her boyfriend (sorry to break your hearts, guys) and is planning on staying away from the game until Cataclysm.  I have been working a lot, as well and have been focusing more on 10 mans and 10 man hard modes lately, with a close group of friends in my guild.  I have also taken up the mantle of a recruitment assistant and bringing in some fresh, strong talent to our ranks to hopefully down some more content before the expansion hits.

With everything happening, I felt like I wanted to take a stab at my own blog and try to bring in some more readership for myself, while Divine Aegis is sort of on hiatus.  At the end of the day, this is Lilith’s blog and I’m thrilled to be on the guest list to the party.  But it would feel weird being here and posting and having her not join me in that endeavor.  I wanted to be here, because we would be posting together.  If she isn’t here, it doesn’t feel right for me to kind of take over her space.  I know she doesn’t feel that way, but I would.  I came here to write with her, to have our entries kind of build off each other.  And that’s clearly not happening, lately.   

I decided to create my own blog at http://thestoriesofo.wordpress.com, with the full support of Lilith.  My plan is to build my own little following and then when the expansion comes, we can reform our ranks (hopefully with a new holy paladin advisor and possibly even a shaman) and really charge out of the gate strong.  There has been talk of Lilith even forming her own 10 man guild and I would love to be a part of that with her.  I think that could provide a neat perspective on the articles, if we’re in the same runs and just writing about it from different angles.  This blog has already proven to be a great resource and I think it can be an even better one, once we’re in the right place to make that happen and the stars can align.

Please stop by and say hello and hopefully we will be seeing you all very soon, in some form. 

Thanks for reading and have a great night!

I started playing WoW on this day two years ago because my boyfriend at the time convinced me it would be a good thing to do together since we were in a long distance relationship. Previously I had been very steadfast in refusing to try this game, fearing that I’d get too into it and play constantly at the expense of other things. (This was at a time when I was in the middle of college and also had a part time job, with little sense of time management.) However, I decided it couldn’t hurt trying. I was already talking to the boy every night for hours, it might as well be while playing a game too, yes? So I downloaded the trial. And I spent something like 4-5 hours playing a Night Elf Priest—GASP! Alliance!… Just don’t tell anyone—on some random server it assigned me. I didn’t realize that 4 hours had gone by until my boyfriend called me and pointed out that it was 4 am. WTF!

A few days later I bought the BattleChest (with both Vanilla + BC in it) at GameStop and installed it. I rolled a Blood Elf Priest on a friend’s server, and my boyfriend joined me as an Undead Warrior. We leveled 1-70 on Thorium Brotherhood and took our sweet time doing it. It took a few months, if I recall correctly. I reached level 70 in June 2008, and that’s about when the boy quit playing WoW. (Then in September we broke up, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Because I enjoyed WoW so much, I decided to join a raiding guild. Since then I’ve been in… 4 raiding guilds. I stayed in my first one for all of BC raiding, and then joined a new one at the start of Wrath. When that one fell apart, I transferred to Scarlet Crusade and joined Axiom. I remained there for 6 months, but then my schedule changed and I couldn’t raid with them anymore. Now I’m back on Thorium Brotherhood, with the server-first guild there and ready to kick some Arthas ass. Who’s with me?

(For a higher quality version of the UI screenshot shown, click here. For a more recent screenshot of my UI in action, click here.)

Big thanks to Matticus from World of Matticus for interviewing me for the article and scanning it. You can check out all the articles he wrote on his blog. Sadly, he is not credited in the piece(s). :(

And, they have me listed as a Holy Priest. How blasphemous!

EDIT: For those wondering, I have not uploaded this UI, LilUI2, to WoW Interface yet. It’s still a work in progress, I’m not completely happy with it yet! I’m actually just working on the art/textures for it right now.

Phase 1 for resto druids in the Heroic Anub’arak encounter is pretty cut and dry.  Keep a Regrowth and a Rejuvenation on the main tank and the add tank at all times.  Anub’arak will choose 5 targets for a DoT called Penetrating Cold.  Your raid frames or user interface should have a way of marking those targets and DBM calls it out, too.  Place a Regrowth on all 5 of the targets and possibly even a Rejuvenation on them, depending on how much you see them taking.  Regrowth should have a high enough crit chance, where you will eventually proc Nature’s Grace – so casting it on 5 targets shouldn’t take too long. 

The reason why I find Regrowth to be better for the PC is because of how long the DoT lasts.  You can put the HoT on the 5 targets and refresh your HoTs that you initially put on the tanks and keep it all going. 

Once Anub’arak burrows, then comes the scarab phase.  Regrowth is also going to be a big help here.  Players who are killing the adds are bound to get hit by a scarab and they leave a DoT on targets that also hits very hard.  Unlike PT, this DoT can stack and even a short stack can be rough to heal through.  If you see a target with the debuff, place a Regrowth on them, both for the initial heal and the lasting HoT.  Keep an eye out for people that may have missed their spike duties and keep a few HoTs on yourself, just in case you end up being that person.  You can possibly survive one hit from a spike, with a HoT or two on and a Swiftmend to burn.  Obviously, it’s not something you want to try and test out, but I have seen it done.

Rinse and repeat the above until Phase 3 happens and Anub’arak begins his Leeching Swarm effect.  The rest of the fight is going to take you drastically outside of your comfort zone.  It’s going to be up to Healing Stream totems, Judgement of Light and other passive forms of heals to keep the raid alive.  You will be doing very little direct healing and if you do, it’s going to be with one spell:  Healing Touch.  Dig deep in your spellbook, dust off the tooltip and put it back on your action bars – if you don’t have it there already.  Healing Touch will work best if glyphed and you will most likely have to perform a slight re-spec to get the most out of this, making sure you have  points in Empowered Touch and Naturalist.

The reason why this spell is best is because you are going to be assigned to heal the Penetrating Cold targets and the damage from that plus the Leeching Swarm ability is going to be too much for any other heal you have to cover it.  Even with a good amount of haste, Nourish still won’t be fast enough to keep up.  You have to do enough healing to keep the targets up, but not so much that Anub’arak is getting too much health back from the debuff.  Talented and glyphed, Healing Touch is the perfect solution to this.

In my experience, guilds usually assign one healer to cover each PT target and sometimes they get assigned two.  This is your focus – nothing else.  No tank healing, no self healing, just your target or targets.  Using only Healing Touch.  Pop Barkskin when it’s on cooldown to mitigate some of the Leeching Swarm damage or to help out if you end up being a PT cold target 

Do this until Anub’arak is dead and then celebrate your victory!

“Let’s bring the Paladin in. We could use another set of blessings.”

“But what about that Priest? She’s done these fights before and her experience will be invaluable.”

These are one of the many internal conversations that raid leaders have with themselves mentally or their officers. Deciding which healer gets to come to raid and which healer gets to sit isn’t an attractive activity for most people. No one likes being the guy that has to tell a person that they’re taking the night off.

But first, you need to get to that point.

I’ve handled healing assignments for various different guilds and I can tell you that there is a system that is used. There are certain criteria that make different healers desirable over others. In this post, I’ll walk you through what goes on during my head when I’m selecting my healing roster.

Before we do that, let’s look at the activities of the night as it will play an impact on what healers we bring in.

Are we:
• Going back to farm older raids?
• Doing 10 or 25s?
• Pushing the progression content stuff?

Heading back into older raids means I have much more flexibility with my roster. I can give veteran healers the night off if they so choose. I won’t have to worry about specific buffs as much. Pushing into progression content or hard modes means I have to be increasingly picky with who I want to bring in.

The Factors

Availability

My guild employs a strict signout policy. All raiders are expected to be present and ready to jump in any time. But there are occasions where players have things happen in life and I understand that. If they know in advance that they can’t show up (exams, important dinners, family functions, and so forth), they’ll post in the forums. Even though I have a large stock of healers to select from, they might not be there that day.

Raid composition

• Do we have Priest buffs?
• Do we have enough blessings to go around or the totems to cover it?
• Do we even have a Heroism?

I try to make sure that we have all the healing buffs necessary for what we’re working on. I don’t want to stack it too far in one class direction either. That doesn’t mean I won’t do it if I have to (like the time I ran 4 Priests and 2 Paladins). It just sort of kills me if a piece of healing plate drops and there’s no Paladin on hand to grab it.

Experience

This is the not-so-tangible aspect of players that I look at. Stuff like tenure and raid experience plays an impact on which person I bring in. I’m not going to take in a fairly “green” healer who just joined the guild into a progression raid. The players invited tend to be the ones who have healed together long enough that they know what other players will do. They’re comfortable in their surroundings and they’re relaxed with the other healers around them. If they’re new, I might simply swap them in at the last notice on a difficult raid to see how they hold up and how they perform.

Gear Needs

Are there any significant upgrades for a player that drop in this instance? That’s another question I will look to answer. If one of the varsity healers don’t need anything but one of the newer players do, I’ll ask them if they’re willing to sit. If they’re reasonable, they’ll understand and gently sidestep out. After farming Trial of the Crusader 25 for multiple months, some players jump when I ask for volunteers to take the night off.

Those are just some of the significant factors that are looked at when selecting the healers for a raid. Other officers might handle things based on merit (IE, this healer did a great job the night before filling in and I want to see if they can repeat that effort). It’s never easy to choose a healing roster with a large number of players to select from. Sometimes, things take a turn for the worst and there are not enough healers on at all. You’re hard pressed and have to consider things like off specs or alts.

The ultimate concern for me is to ensure that the raid be stabilized as much as possible using whatever healers necessary.

I just wanted to post a quick update about my hiatus in posting on here and to thank everyone who has still been adding us as readers and who have been following along and eagerly awaiting new posts from us.

Personally, I had taken a month off from the game and rolled an elemental shaman, just to relax and get psyched up for Icecrown Citadel.  Throw in a generous helping of holidays, a new position at work and redecorating my loft and it’s been nothing short of hectic, lately.

I’m getting back into the scene, with a great new guild and I’m learning as much about 3.3 as I can (from Heroics, glyphs and everything in between), so I can keep my fellow druids updated with the best advice and opinions that I can.  I’m still deciding what I want to cover first, but it will be very soon, I promise.

I do frequently keep in touch with the other bloggers and I know we have some great things in mind for our readers in the coming weeks and the start of the new year.  There has been talk of another new section on the blog, that is more reader oriented and even rumors of a very special guest blogger in the near future.  You won’t be disappointed!

Again, thank you all for sticking with us and you will be seeing more of us very soon.

This is just a note to let you all know that we’re still around, just busy with real-life stuff. I’ve been both sick, working my ass off on some freelance projects, and preparing for the upcoming holidays. Oestrus has been really busy with work and holiday stuff, too. I’m sure you all know how that is.

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have that next L2Disc post in the works—I’m just asking you be patient with me and our other writers since other things have priority at the moment.

Wit that said, take care, all! And if you don’t hear from us by Thanksgiving, have a good one! May the food make your bellies happy and full.

Let me be the first to welcome you to Divine Aegis, a new healer-centric blog focused on tank healing maintained by yours truly, Lilitharien, and my fellow guildie and tank healer, Lyriel (who I’m sure will post his own intro later). We’re a Discipline-Priest-and-Holy-Paladin combination, and we’ve been working together to keep the tanks in our guild(s) alive for over 6 months.

Lyriel finally got the idea to make his own blog and made a Blogspot account, and I was lamenting that I’d love to start my own healing blog too but it wasn’t really that much fun doing it by yourself. In fact, it’s a lot of work to maintain a blog! One needs motivation, time, and all that jazz. It’s much easier with two or more people doing it together. So, Lyriel goes “Well, we’re both tank healers. Why don’t you blog with me?”

And thus—Divine Aegis is born!

Expect to find informative, but (we hope!) fun-to-read posts about healing, raiding, gear, talent specs, spell use, rotations, healycrafting, macros, addons, and a whole lot more. We’re excited to start this new venture and share our talents, experience, not-so-humble opinions with you!