So in the absence of raiding I have been playing my alts. I’ve gotten my druid pretty much ready for 10 ICC(even got him into a 10 ICC run where I nabbed a Heroic Midnight Sun and some DPS gear), and I’m definitely having trouble deciding if I want to off spec him as Feral Tank or Balance for DPS. Not sure. Might bounce between the two.

My warrior has been pretty much left alone. I can’t get him in to tank a 10 ICC, and really 25 ToC is the only available place for upgrades to him. So I only use him when the guild needs a tank for a random raid or heroic.

I’ve been leveling a Shaman and Priest, depending on my mood at the time. My Shaman has risen to 48, and I’m making the trek to 80 slowly but surely. I’m hoping to get him there before Cataclysm hits, as if the class stays as fun as it is now, I might swap him in as my main. There’s just something about Jesus Beams that makes me giggle inside, and that’s something I’ve been missing from this game for a long time. This has also led to long discussions with our healing lead, who happens to be a Resto Shaman. He is well aware of my dislike right now of the Paladin class, so maybe I’ll have someone in my corner if I do make the switch. My Priest I’ve been trying to level as Disc(randoms only mind you), but it doesn’t seem to be working too well. Something about the Priest class just isn’t making it into my train of thought. I’m doing something wrong. Bubble on the tank? Right. Flash Heal and Penance, got it. Oops, out of mana 75% into the fight. Seriously that’s pretty much how it goes. So for now I’m Shadow, and I’ve done a little question while waiting for DPS queues. I’ve also got a Mage around the 46 range that I’m having some fun with, though queue times are making leveling her a bit slow.

And as usual, my Death Knight sits in the corner by himself. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the burnout I had with him. I use him to tank weeklys. Only when every other character is saved. Thats it. Or when someone needs something crafted with his Blacksmithing. I can’t bring myself to put any more time into him. Oh well.

Anyways, that’s what has been going on with me. Hope all is well out there in your neck of the woods.

Keep fighting the good fight,
-Sady

If I was given the chance to start over in WoW, I definitely would start off at 80, or at least 60. I absolutely hate the 1-60 grind. Quests done in Vanilla just aren’t put together as well as they are in BC and beyond. That’s beside the point. Anyways, I’d start off at 80, and I’d have to switch out my DK for a Shaman, most definitely. I got burned out on the DK class, and one of my most vivid memories in this game was in BC seeing a Tauren Shaman roll into the Aldor bank, all kinds of swagger, just screaming “I’m an ELITE BADASS!” He had two of the biggest axes I had seen at that point, and single handedly destroy every inhabitant in there.

So here’s to you, Enhancement Tauren Shaman on Malfurion, you’ve created a dream in this guy to one day be a big axe wielding Shaman, and to beat on things with said axes. However, just recently on the PTR I had a Shaman, and I fell in love with Resto(and unfortunately, Elemental was easier to pick up on than Enhance). So were I to have a Shaman, he would definitely have to be Resto main and Enhance off spec.

As for my other  80s, I absolutely love them. However, I’d save myself the gold and the hassle and just not spec Prot on my Paladin. To put all kinds of work into it, just to realize I don’t like it, and to hardly ever use it, is just a waste. Then I wouldn’t be fighting to get enough gear to do decent DPS in ICC this late in the game.

So, I would definitely have a Draenei Shaman, Dwarf(I hate my NE self) Warrior, and a Draenei Paladin. That’s Alliance by the way. If I could have my way, I’d have a Tauren Shaman, Tauren Warrior, and Draenei Paladin. I’m sorry, Horde just looks a lot more bad ass in most cases. I’ve always wanted an 80 Tauren, but unforunately my current guild and raiding situation only allows me to be Alliance. Although, I’ve got a buddy who’s just started back into playing, so I might transfer one character over back to my Horde server and play with him a bit. Not sure.

Speaking of which, one thing that really does bug me is that Horde and Alliance can’t play together. Yeah yeah I know it goes against lore and all that other crap. But seriously, who cares? Why can’t we have a couple servers that allow this? I’m not really fond of being stuck somewhere because the only guild I’ve found that works with my times happens to be Alliance. I mean, I like my Pally being Draenei, I love it. I absolutely hated being a Blood Elf. Some part of my manhood drained away everytime I logged on when I was Horde and I saw his hip sticking out like that. I cried a little everytime I saw it. I think, when Cataclysm comes out I might go back to being Horde, because frankly, Tauren Paladin is like a dream come true to me. Lore be damned, I’m gonna be a Holy Cow someday!

-Sady

DISCLAIMER: If you do not wish to read something regarding some LFD Horror Stories, please continue on your way.

People who cannot take 10 minutes to research their class/spec piss me the hell of.

In a bad way. Seriously. Lets set the scene here. It’s last night, my wife is in bed, I’m surrounded by silence, and I decide to farm up some emblems to continue working on my Ret set. I set a goal of 85 emblems(I’m at 48 I believe), and I’m going to hit it. Enter bad players gallore.  I had one good group last night. ONE. With a 45k health tank…..wait….

Let me digress. YES. I judge books, movies, and CD’s by their covers. If you’re a tank rocking 25k health buffed, I’m assuming this is your first time, or an alt, and I’m prepared to play Whack-A-Mole with your health bar.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a tank rocking full iLvl 251+ gear with 45-50k unbuffed health, I’m going to assume you’ve stepped for inside a raid and you’ve tanked said raid. I’m going to assume you know just what the hell you’re doing, and are quite confident in your abilities, and i’m prepared for Borefest 99′(I know it’s 2010, but Borefest 10′ just doesn’t have the same ring to it, so bite it!).

Same thing with DPS. I look at health. If you’re a warrior with sub 20k health, I know your gear is not great, and I do not expect great things out of you. But if you’re rocking 25-30k health as a DPS, I’m fully expecting over 3k DPS, minimum. At all times.

There, I said it. Guilty as charged. I assume, I judge, and I criticize. I use health as a judging tool for how your gear is(only sometimes thrown off by idiot DPS who stack stamina, yes I have seen it). Does this make me a bad person?

Hell. No.

Why? Because I don’t let any of that judgement show. I keep it to my god damned self. My reason? If I step into a group where the tank has 50k health and all DPS has good gear and I make the comment “Awesome, this is gonna be a good group!”, Murphy and his fucking law are going to kick in and next thing I know we’re going to have one person pulling above 1500 DPS(the tank). It’s inevitable. Again, lets visit the other end of the spectrum. Step in, tank has less than 30k buffed, DPS looks all kinds of shoddy, if I make a comment(would probably be along the lines of “Jesus Christ, this group is gonna blow hard isn’t it?”), the tank is going to pull like there’s no tomorrow, and DPS is going to be excellent. Yeah that’s a good outcome, but then I’m an asshole, for no reason. I don’t like that.

So I keep my mouth shut. The ONLY time I’ll speak up in a random is after someone does something stupid. Like last night in H AN. DPS who looks like they’ve just hit 80, and a tank who somehow managed to accidentally pull two groups in front of the first boss. We’ve got a Mage and Boomkin with about 15-16k health each both drop in 2 hits, not a whole lot I can do about it. The rest of the group holds out for a while, and the mage decides to release and run back and continue to contribute. We get the boss down just fine when the Druid makes a comment about how that was full of fail. Well, lets just say that this doesn’t sit well with me, so I pipe up about how the only fail there was them not releasing and running back like the mage did. Queue the slowest run of AN I’ve been through in a while.

I don’t think a single person there broke 2k DPS. Anub took over 6 minutes to down. It was a real test in patience.

Or how about the next group where the druid tank only used Dodge/Stam gems. Seriously. That was IT. He couldn’t generate threat whatsoever.  Or the one after that where somehow our 900 DPS Lock pulled aggro off the tank.

Seriously folks, my point is, this game is not HARD. It might be a little difficult to be EXCELLENT, but to be proficient and pull your own weight is not difficult. You’re online, you have access to resources, and I’m pretty sure you can spare 10 minutes to read something(yes, I’m ASSUMING you can read too), so why do so many people perform horribly? Don’t tell me gear, because I’m about to bring this whole thing full circle.

You ready for this?

My ret gear is the most thrown together mis-matched pile of shit I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s all epics, yes I have access to enchants and gems and all that jazz. I have green quality gems, I have sub-par enchants on my gear. How much DPS do you think I do in Heroics? I pull anywhere from 4k-6k

“But Sady, you’ve been playing a Paladin for a bit now, some people are new!”

QUIET VOICE IN MY HEAD!

Here’s where research comes in. It took me all of 5 minutes to find out Ret Paladins run off a priority system(instead of a set rotation that I”m used to, remember, my last DPS was a DK), and what exactly that priority system was. Yeah, I have a head start, I know where to look for this stuff. A new person would not. But they can ASK, or take the time to SEARCH for their research. The information is out there people, it’s ripe for the plucking. Your mind is a sponge, it can absorb this information. There is almost no reason you cannot perform decently at this game. I saw almost because Arthur Hawking might have a bit of a problem.

The one thing that consistently gets on my god damned nerves is when people can’t seem to put 10 minutes into researching their class to perform at a level so as not to waste the other 4 peoples time.

I’m almost tempted to take a page from Gevlon and start nabbing blue pieces of gear, equipping them with green quality gems, sub-par enchants and see what happens. Not out of some elitist standpoint to say “Hey look at me I’m awesome I can out DPS peopl ein blues!”, but to just PROVE to people that you don’t need good gear to be good at this game. Everyone as soon as they hit 80 has access to farmable gear that will put them into the most current progression content, meaning Heroics should be a joke. We shouldn’t be seeing people doing under 2k DPS(Kitty Druids aside, I’ve tried your rotation, how on Gods Green Earth you pull that off is entirely beyond my want or need to comprehend, hence why I will only play a Bear, Tree, or Boomkin) anywhere near a heroic.

DISCLAIMER: This is all strictly my opinion. I’m not lobbying to have gear limits set on heroics(the gear limits on the three new ones is retarded in my eyes), and I fully believe you should play the game the way you want. It’s your 15 bucks. But please, for the love of all that is right in Azeroth, do not waste the time of 4 people coming together to enjoy this game.

-Sady

So here we are, second attempt. I’m nervous, excited, all kinds of pumped and ready to go. I’m beaconing our tank and healing the Dreamwalker(though what I read was to simply stick to beaconing Valithra and healing myself, leave everything else alone, our guild had a different strategy, so I stuck with that to see how it’d work), I blow all my cooldowns right off the bat, I’m throwing out Holy Lights like it’s going out of style. Enter first Dream phase, nabbing 6 orbs, 6 stacks of the debuff, but shit, I’m behind her while the rest of the raid is in front of her, gotta run. Next Dream phase it’s the same thing. I’m getting pissed cause I’m not paying attention to where I’m gonna come out at, and I know it’s hurting my output. Every dream phase after that I managed to drop out between her and the raid, less time running is more time healing. Her health is going up like there’s no fricken tomorrow. Within what seems like 2 minutes she’s at 80%, we’ve already made progression. Then it happens….

I missed a dream phase. I completely spaced out spamming my heal button, watching my 94k-97k Holy Light crits, and I was completley oblivious to the fact that more portals had spawned. Every last one of my stacks dropped off. I’m cussing myself and blowing more cooldowns to try to keep my output up. Guild Leader calls for Heroism. Oh HELL no. “You blow Heroism and I’m cutting your balls off! Give me two Dream Phases, I’ll let you know when I’m out.”

Two portals later we blow Heroism, I’ve pop my trinket(only thing off CD), and I’m back in business. As Hero is coming to an end I notice portals back up, and I for some reason made the split second decision that this fight was ending now, cause I stayed out and healed. I don’t even remember looking at Dreamwalkers health to determine if I COULD make it off the stacks I had up, but I must have because about 10 seconds after Hero the fight is over. We two shot her.

The healing for that fight was insane.

That may be par for the course, but still, that’s rather insane. Talking to the other healers, we’ve determined that the next time we get into that fight, we’re going to 2 heal it, with one healer supporting the raid while I focus solely on Dreamwalker and see how that works.

All in all though, this is by far my favorite fight out of everything I’ve ever done in Warcraft. It takes the cake. Wins by a mile. Think of any saying that signifies a complete blowout, and you still can’t come close to how much I loved this fight compared to everything else I’ve done in this game. I can’t wait to get into this fight on 25 man(though we’re a ways off).

In other news, I’m getting ready to overhaul this Blog. I’m definitely not a Human anymore, and I feel like I haven’t even finished putting this thing together. There are a ton of things I want to do with this Blog, but I don’t know if I have the time or resources to do it. I’d like a section dedicated to videos of raids from a Holy Paladins perspective, and I’d even like to get my OWN videos up(though I’d have to learn how to create them, edit them, upload them, all that stuff). Is this how having a Blog is going to be, a list of things I’d LIKE to do, but it never really happening? Oh well, at least tonight I’ll get some new pictures up, maybe a revamp of how this place looks. Also, I’d kind of like some advice on how to get this Blog out to more people. I’m really ecstatic that I get 2-5 hits a day, sometimes going up from there, but I feel like maybe I’m just not putting it out there enough. How do you guys get your blogs out to the masses?

Keep up the good fight,
-Sady

Phase 1:
Begins with 1 tank grabbing Putricide and taking him to the left side of the room(as you’re facing into it), while the second tank runs to the table, clicks on it and becomes the Abom. The Abom’s purpose is to pick up the pools of slime that spawn, and to snare the oozes that spawn. Putricide is tanked on the left side until a green ooze spawns, and is then kited to the right side of the room. The green ooze will target a random player and root them in place, but still allow them to heal and DPS(if in range). Once the ooze spawns the raid has to switch DPS to the ooze to bring it down before it reaches it’s target. If it reaches the target it does damage split between the number of people that were on top of the target, and knocks everyone back.

Once the green ooze is down, DPS lays back into Putricide until a red ooze spawns. The red ooze will target a random player and put a stacked debuff on them doing significant damage over time. This debuff decreases its stacks over time and cannot be cleansed off. Should the red ooze catch up to it’s target while the debuff remains it explodes causing raid wide damage, so once it spawns, it’s important for the DPS to get this thing down as quickly as possible. Once again, after the ooze spawns Putricide is kited over to the opposite side of the room.

That’s Phase 1 in a nutshell, DPS the oozes, stay out of slime pools, get Putricide down as you can. It’s all about getting those adds down quickly so you can get time in on the boss.

Phase 2:

At 80% Putricide stuns the raid, runs to his table and starts taking shots of potions, grows two new arms, and adds a little more chaos into the mix of the fight. Phase 2 is the same as Phase 1 with the addition of Malleable Goo, in which Putricide will launch a blue blob of goo at someone, which should be dodged(get out of its way, it moves slow so it’s pretty easy). If it hits it does damage and reduces casting/attack speed by 200% for 15 seconds, so it’s bad juju. Putricide will also begin dropping Choking Gas Bombs, which are two flasks placed on the ground around him that create an orange cloud and explode after 20 seconds, killing ANYONE in a 10 yard radius. So Putricide MUST be kited away from these as soon as they drop. This on top of the Green/Red Oozes that are still spawning. Enjoy this, you’ll be doing it until 35%.

Phase 3:

Once he hits 35%, add stop spawning(though any adds still alive will remain, so it’s important to make sure not to push him into P3 with any adds up), and the Abom disappears. P3 is a complete and utter DPS race. Slimes are still going to spawn on the ground, and they will grow. Putricide still drops his Choking Gas Bombs, and shoots Malleable Goo. He now also stacks a debuff on the tank called Mutated Plague, that does raid-wide damage. Should someone die or the debuff fall off of someone(minute long timer), Putricide gets healed and you better believe it’s probably a wipe. General consensus is to let one tank get the debuff up to 2 stacks, have the other tank taunt, get his debuff up to 2 stacks, then they switch off at a single stack(tank 1 gets up to 3 stacks, tank 2 taunts and gets his 3rd stack, etc). Meanwhile he’s being kited, around Bombs and all the slime on the ground. Oh, did I mention he stacks a buff on himself called Mutated Strength that increases his damage done over time? Yeah. Phase 3 is insane.

As a Paladin healer, this isn’t the most friendly fight you’ve ever seen. He doesn’t hit terribly hard, but the challenge is having to heal on the run. Not SO bad in Phase 1 and 2, but damned if the damage in P3 doesn’t add up over time. On top of the fact that you have to KEEP moving, it’s just not fun. I’m really not looking forward to attempting him on 25 man, because I know our guild does not have the DPS to get him down. Especially since we’re having big trouble with Festergut.

In other news, I’ve successfully completed building a Ret set. It is a conglomorate of whatever plate DPS gear I can get my hands on, with various emblem gear and stuff I’ve picked up to keep it from getting sharded. I filled it with green quality strength gems, and enchanted it with the lowest enchants I could find, and took it into a heroic. I pulled anywhere from 4-6k DPS with it. That right there folks explains to me why we have so many Ret Paladins in our guild, because they are so easy to play. Easy to do well with, perhaps hard to be exceptional with. At this point I now need to farm more emblems and start nabbing T9 and other various emblem gear so that I can compete somewhat with the DPS in our guild.  We’re getting to the point that everyone and their mother has the axe off of 25 Marrowgar, so I’m hoping that I can nab one soon enough. Oh, and I also have to farm up honor for epic quality gems so I can replace these green quality ones I have right now.

Are there any tips for a new Ret Pally? I’ve done my reading, I know the priority systems, but when do I pop Avenging Wrath? I usually do it on bosses, but I’ve seen other Retadins pop it all the time. Also, to Consecrate or not? I’m having mana issues usually(yes I’m using Divine Plea, not on every cooldown, but when I need it. What can I say, Holy Paladin habits are hard to break!), so dropping a Consecration is gonna hurt me mana wise.

On an off Warcraft topic, does anyone know how to use WordPress to get a link for people to use to have the new email address where everyone can see it?

That’s it for now, keep up the good fight!
-Sady

(EDIT) – I’ve got an email account set up for this blog, but I don’t have time to figure out how to integrate it into WordPress right now, so here it is. FlashOfSadysm@gmail.com, please feel free to email questions, concerns, comments, suggestions, anything. Think I’m a big fat poo poo head, send it over. I promise to read every single email, and respond to those that I can, which with the number of subscribtions shouldn’t be hard to do.

-Sady

I wish I was talking about Putricide, or Blood Princes, or even Blood Queen. Hell in a dream world I’d be talking about Lich King. No, friends, I’m talking about Festergut.

We went in with full intentions on mopping the floor with him. Right now we’re RIGHT on that bubble, the point where we’ve finally got the gear to pull off the DPS required to bring him down, all we need to do is bring our A Team, our A Game, and make him puke his purples.

Last night was most definitely not that night. First, we were down every single Ret Pally in our guild(and that’s a lot, we’ve got more Ret Pallys than we do anything else I believe). So we’re down 2 or 3 of our good DPS. To add on to it, we’re experiencing server lag, random DCs, it was horrible. Oh, and did I mention one of our Main Tanks had an emergency and we had to sub in our new Druid Tank? Who’s really undergeared for this part of ICC? Yeah. It wasn’t working last night.

On the upside(always have to look at the positive right?!), it was a very humbling experience has a healer. Not only was I given a sub-geared tank and told to keep him up, I had a DPS give me a tip on how to heal, and it was something I’d NEVER heard of before, and looking at it, I should be doing this all the damned time. Oh, and did I mention that this tanks wife is our new Pally Healer, who made me look like a fool on the meters? Yeah. Humbling experience indeed.

Anyways, I was introduced to Hand of Sacrifice last night. Hell, JUST last night I was complaining to myself that Pally’s don’t have any good CD’s to cast on a tank to reduce his incoming damage, like Pain Suppression for example. That’s when our resident DK informed me of Hand of Sacrifice. So I read up on it, made a macro, and used it. I could instantly tell that it was making a difference. I’ve also noticed that it’s really not required to pop Divine Shield when you use it either. Yeah it’s nice, but even with Fester hitting with his 3 stacks of Inhaled Blight, I wasn’t taking a whole lot of damage(though keep in mind this works with our group, we’ve got GREAT Raid heals, it’s always considered polite to let your healers know you’re going to be taking a little extra damage!).

On the flipside, I informed our Mages and Shadow Priest that they could live through his Pungent Blight without being Innoculated by means of Ice Block and Dispersion, which would leave them open to not having to move to get spores. So I guess it all worked out.

Except for the fact that we couldn’t down him. Little things going wrong added up to a boss still alive. Another week through 10 mans and more gear going out and we should have him. Our best attempts had him down to 7% when he enraged, which was about 3.7 million if I remember correctly.

In other news, I’ve been severely neglecting my alts. I don’t believe I’ve run a daily in over a week on my warrior, and forget about my DK, I haven’t even logged him on to do anything except check his Blacksmithing to see what I could make. I’ve toyed about on my Druid a bit in the past couple days, but that’s it. Oh well, they’re alts right? No matter how much I want my Warrior to be ICC ready for DPS, I don’t think it’ll happen. For some reason I can pull 4-6k in a Heroic, but get me into a raid and I’m down to 2-3k. It’ s absurd, Arms defintely isn’t that hard, but for some reason I just don’t have it down in a raid setting. I’ll just have to get more practice in on him, get him into some more ToC runs, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to put him into an ICC 10 man. I can only hope.

I’m 1 Primordial Saronite away from getting the Protectors of Life crafted. I’m hoping to save up some money over the next few days to just buy it, since I don’t see me saving another 23 Frost Emblems until next week. I’m impatient like that. My boots are the only piece of gear besides my Cloak that I can get some Haste on. I’m up to 820 with my Exalted Ashen Verdict ring, and I know that’s overkill, but I love it. Now that I’m here, I can start building up my other stats, mostly my crit, which is hovering around the 30% mark.

Anyways, that’s it for now. Keep fighting the good fight!

-Sady

After the raid I whisper his uncle and apologize for calling him out like that, but that his nephew needed to work on his healing a bit, that he was standing around quite a bit, and was found being below a ret pally for most of the fight. I was nice, I apologized, I was trying to be mature about it. What did I get in return? “I stand around too, spamming heals doesn’t work.” As well as a link to the Overhealing Done meters, of which our druid healer and myself are on top. “Overheals are bad, if people don’t need heals I’m not casting heals.” This from the Priest, not the one I have a problem with. I calmly explained that Paladin’s are PROACTIVE healers, that if I try to heal reactively then I have no control over a situation and people generally die. Mind you, this is all through whispers. So what does he do? He gets onto Vent, and begins talking to someone else about an article he read saying that in Cataclysm, spamming heals will cause healers to go OOM, that the way to heal in Cataclysm is to choose the right heal at the right time, and anyone NOT doing that right now is “is setting themselves up for failure and is fucking stupid”.

Really? You really want to take our private conversation out onto Vent? Roger the fuck out of that. My response? “When you’re quite fucking done, this is Wrath, NOT Cataclysm. When Cataclysm comes out, I’ll fucking handle it and adjust appropiately, until then, I heal the way I’m fucking supposed to, and I do just fucking fine!”

This followed by a long guild chat message that if I bring a problem to your attention in whispers, it’s quite fucking rude to bring it into Vent or some other public channel. From now on, if I have a problem with someone or something, I’ll be bringing it out for everyone to see and hear, in raid and vent. To fuck with etiquete and keeping the boat from rocking.

Vent pretty much shut down. Our assistant GM started whispering me asking me whats up, and after a few minutes I’m calmed back down, situation is explained. I’m told to bring it up to the healing lead, and if that doesn’t resolve it take it up with the guild leader. I apologize to her for causing a scene, but I absolutely do not stand being told that I’m healing inappropriately when I know damn well I’m a good healer(not trying to toot my own horn, but dammit I know what I’m doing, I know my limits!).

A bit later, I talk to our healing lead about it. I tell him I know this Pally is doing good on the meters, and we’re not wiping because of him, but dammit he’s standing around most of the time, and it’s BS. I inform him of the confrontation with his Uncle(I feel the leaders should know of strife between people in the guild), and that from now on, I’m not being quiet about this stuff, next time I’m calling people out in raid. He acknowledged my concerns, told me he sees it, and that this Pally is just coming back from a hiatus and to give him a bit to get back into his groove. He also threw some flowery stuff in there, telling me I’m a great healer and other shit like that, trying to divert me from this problem, and I know he was doing it. This is the thing that got me though, “I know, and the rest of the leadership knows that you’re a damned good healer, the guild got lucky when we got you, you know you’re class and you know what you’re doing, you’re fully capable of picking up the slack.”

…….

What. The. Fuck. I KNOW this Pally can heal, I’ve seen him do it, he’s quite capable. I have no problem picking up slack from undergeared or people who simply don’t KNOW what to do, but picking up the slack when people simply aren’t giving their full effort, I have a problem with. In the essence of having a cohesive healing team, I told him that I’d hold off on speaking to the Guild Leader, and give this guy another week or two, but if his shit doesn’t start coming together, it’s over. When I hear people complaining that they’re not getting invited to raids, and this ass hat is here, but not putting forth a full effort, I have a problem, and if I was a Guild Leader or Raid Leader, I’d want to know.

So, I’ll give him another couple weeks. Maybe I’ll actually try talking TO him, see if that’ll do some good. But somehow I doubt it. If he doesn’t improve, I’m lobbying to have him out of the raid group.

In other news, I joined this guild with 3 iLvl 232 pieces, and I’ve replaced two of them. I got Lockjaw off of 10 man Rotface, and I nabbed Bulwark of Smoldering Steel(I think that’s right?) off 25 man Marrowgar. I snagged the Frost Emblem healing belt(replacing my 264 belt from Gunship, due to it not having haste), as well as the Rot-Resistant Breastplate from Rotface last night.  All in all I’m upgrading quite nicely, bringing me to 33k unbuffed mana, 2921 Spell Power, and 809 haste. All unbuffed. I felt like a machine gun last night with my 700 something haste, 1.02 second Flash of Lights were quite fun. All I can do now is save up for the Frost Emblem gloves, and get 3 more Primordial Saronites to have the craftable boots made and I’ll be mostly set. Except for my neck piece. I’m still rocking the 232 neck piece from Forge of Souls. I DID win the neck piece from 10 man Gunship, but then in the same run I had to trade it to get Lockjaw(from another Pally Healer who won it, but I make all 25 man raids while he does not, so he willingly made the trade for the benefit of the guild). So I finally got rid of that damned DPS weapon.

I know this means nothing, but it’s a nice number that I like looking at, but my Gearscore has risen to 3059, bringing me to the 9th ranked person in my guild, and the 29th Holy Paladin on the Alliance side of the server.  Like I said, I don’t swear by this number, and I don’t judge by it, but it’s nice to see where I stand against the other Paladins on my server and in my guild. It also helps me judge on when to pass on loot and who to pass it to.

Anyways, sorry for the lack of posts lately, between work and raiding, I’ve had to fix my motorcycle, and my computer, so I’ve been a little preoccupied. I feel bad to the one person I have subscribed to me. I get a few hits a day, some days I get none, but still, if people are going to read it, I feel I should be putting stuff out there, stuff you guys want to read. So please, if you feel like there’s something here you’d like to see, let me know. Anything, seriously, it doesn’t have to be about the Paladin class, or healing, or even about raiding or WoW. This is a place for me to vent and to talk, but it’s about you guys too. So help me make this better for you, what would you like to see?

-Sady

He’s not healing. Not just not healing well, at all.

At. Fricken. All. Seriously, on Marrowgar, he had just over 300,000 healing done. That means if he had beacon up, he did 150,000 of actual healing to someone. That’s NOTHING. We’ve got DPS doing more healing then that.

But, I had to ask him. I don’t want to just be the guy who assumes. So I asked him what he was doing to heal. His response was almost as shocking as seeing him on the meters. “Oh, nothing really.” Why? I’m still waiting on a response. I asked our assistant GM later that night about him. It’s a family oriented guild, with most of the core having been together for a while, so I had to check. I asked if this healer was a family member, whether the leadership knew that he was absolutely being carried, or what. Her response was that he’s the nephew of one of our healers, and he doesn’t really like healing. I had to take a step back at this point, and look at where I was at.
1. He doesn’t like to heal.
2. He isn’t healing.
3. He’s making raids, taking up a spot from someone who actually WANTS to be there.

I’m having a hard time with this. I’ve got 3 choices, as I see them.
1. Talk to him, try to help him out. Or at least talk him into healing a little more.
2. Talk to the leadership, try to get them to see that he’s simply being carried, and that we can fill his spot with someone who WANTS to be there, be they healer or DPS(I vote DPS since we’ve been fine without his heals so far).
3. Ignore it, don’t rock the boat, let a sleeping dog lie, don’t cause trouble.

My first instinct is to go with #1, I’m constantly trying to help people out. But, this healer isn’t the most mature, and I have a short temper when it comes to people just acting immature. The problem with that is I don’t want to alienate myself from his uncle, due to his uncle being one of the longest standing members of the guild. His word carries weight. I don’t think the guild would boot me cause he said so(or anything along those lines), but really, who wants to be the guy who causes trouble like that?
If I go with #3, then what happens when that rare piece of Pally Loot drops, and he rolls on it? I’m a firm believer in you get what you earn. And if he’s not doing anything, but still being given the chance to roll against me on something, then I have a serious problem with that. Not because I’m losing out on purple pixels, but because the guild as a whole is losing out on an upgrade. It’s going to someone who’s not doing anything, who’s being carried. It hurts the guild no matter which way you look at it.
With #2 I run into the same problem as #1, they could go to his Uncle, and again, I don’t want to rock the boat.

Seriously, this is a problem for me. The entire situation is. I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. What would you guys do in this situation? I have a feeling I know what I’m going to do, but I’d like to see your ideas on how to handle this. More than likely you’ll think of something I haven’t.

-Sady