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2 hours ago
You know how this blog was really supposed to focus on priests and pallies?
Well, see, the way that actually works is that I try to give helpful advice about priests, and present to you my stories of utter fail with my pally. And so, today I would like to showcase a tale of holy pally craptacular goodness.
It was VoA. Voa is a cake walk, I run it every week. Actually, that was part of the problem - because I run it every week on my priest via PuGs, I was saved, and after our little Sunday night 10 man group finished up Naxx, we thought we'd give VoA a try, since we had plenty of time left on Wintergrasp. So, in utter trepidation, I hopped onto my Paladin, with the intent to DPS.
We started with the easiest boss first, and Archavon went down without a hitch. Then we moved towards Emalon.
Our gear and experience on our alts wasn't enough to quite cut it on Emalon, and as I felt somewhat useless flailing about wildly with my giant mace and usually just facing the wrong way anyway (OH HAI WALL), I offered to switch over to heals so we would have three healers.
What followed was a successful takedown of Emalon, sure, but there was a lot of yelling going on in the basement of my home. The druid healer in the raid was my fiance. And he gave the healing assignment, which I did not like (helloooo? that's MY JOB mister. BACK OFF), because when he's leading he just barks out orders and takes control of everything (control freak!) so he put the disc priest, Abigora, on the add tank (aka Ful!), the druid on the MT, and me on the add tank with Abigora. He said he would handle raid heals as well. lolwut. Fine, fine. You look cute in black, so I'll shut up and let you have your way. As a side note, I wonder if there was as much yelling going on over at the Fuus' place as there was at ours? Hmm.
And then the real yelling began. "If you're going to have two MT healers on one tank honey then STOP PUTTING YOUR HOTS ON MY TARGET" to which he yelled that he wasn't paying attention to names, just health. Every time I saw a HoT, I yelled at him, and then he'd yell back insisting it wasn't him, and I remembered that Disc Priests DO have Renew. Whoops.
Not much later, he's yelling "Who the hell is healing the main tank with me? His health keeps jumping up!!!" me-> "LAWL PWNED BY BEACON OF LIGHT BITCH"
And so on, and so forth. No one expects a Beacon of Light heal. nomnomnom.
So yeah, yeah, that all sounds well and good, but then we get to fire dude. No, I don't remember his name. This time I glared angrily at my tree fiance and insisted I do the healing assignments. He rolled his eyes and agreed, so I told Abigora to focus on the MT and OT with me, and let the druid take care of the raid.
First, we didn't have much time, and my Treedude was having problems with Healbot, which he was sure could be fixed by running in and out of the instance... repeatedly. He glared at me when I suggested he simply type /reloadui, and then proceeded to run in and out even more.
Finally we get started, and proceeded to wipe three tmes. Each time was more fabulous than the last, let me assure you.
The thing is, if you've never played a holy pally before, you may have the following misconceptions:
So, so, so wrong.
Granted, maybe a pally that doesn't suck as badly as me doesn't run out of mana, but I am all badness. Also, I am awful at keeping track of my cooldowns. Sacredshieldwut? LOLJUDGE. I can't tell you how many times I would finally remember to judge, and then be like "Ooooo this is nice and speedy. I should really do that more often..." I probably cast Beacon of Light every 30 seconds, even though I also have the glyph. Oh and Sacred Shield every 2 minutes. Sigh.
My mana would get low and I'd just hit every magic proc buff button I have - Divine Favor, Divine Plea, Mana Pot, Avenging Wrath... you name it, I would just hit it. I have no idea what I'm doing here.
And let's not even get me started on hands. What? Hand of what? HOW CAN I POSSIBLY HAVE THAT MANY APPENDAGES?!?!?! Should I tie all these thingies to hotkeys or something? My current strategy is just to completely ignore that row of buttons and pretend they don't exist. Lalalala I can't seeeeeeeee you! Again, I have no idea what I'm doing here.
I mean, I probably could try to learn but... what would I post about then? FailPally is way more fun and entertaining, don't you think?
... Anyone?
Well, see, the way that actually works is that I try to give helpful advice about priests, and present to you my stories of utter fail with my pally. And so, today I would like to showcase a tale of holy pally craptacular goodness.
It was VoA. Voa is a cake walk, I run it every week. Actually, that was part of the problem - because I run it every week on my priest via PuGs, I was saved, and after our little Sunday night 10 man group finished up Naxx, we thought we'd give VoA a try, since we had plenty of time left on Wintergrasp. So, in utter trepidation, I hopped onto my Paladin, with the intent to DPS.
We started with the easiest boss first, and Archavon went down without a hitch. Then we moved towards Emalon.
Our gear and experience on our alts wasn't enough to quite cut it on Emalon, and as I felt somewhat useless flailing about wildly with my giant mace and usually just facing the wrong way anyway (OH HAI WALL), I offered to switch over to heals so we would have three healers.
What followed was a successful takedown of Emalon, sure, but there was a lot of yelling going on in the basement of my home. The druid healer in the raid was my fiance. And he gave the healing assignment, which I did not like (helloooo? that's MY JOB mister. BACK OFF), because when he's leading he just barks out orders and takes control of everything (control freak!) so he put the disc priest, Abigora, on the add tank (aka Ful!), the druid on the MT, and me on the add tank with Abigora. He said he would handle raid heals as well. lolwut. Fine, fine. You look cute in black, so I'll shut up and let you have your way. As a side note, I wonder if there was as much yelling going on over at the Fuus' place as there was at ours? Hmm.
And then the real yelling began. "If you're going to have two MT healers on one tank honey then STOP PUTTING YOUR HOTS ON MY TARGET" to which he yelled that he wasn't paying attention to names, just health. Every time I saw a HoT, I yelled at him, and then he'd yell back insisting it wasn't him, and I remembered that Disc Priests DO have Renew. Whoops.
Not much later, he's yelling "Who the hell is healing the main tank with me? His health keeps jumping up!!!" me-> "LAWL PWNED BY BEACON OF LIGHT BITCH"
And so on, and so forth. No one expects a Beacon of Light heal. nomnomnom.
So yeah, yeah, that all sounds well and good, but then we get to fire dude. No, I don't remember his name. This time I glared angrily at my tree fiance and insisted I do the healing assignments. He rolled his eyes and agreed, so I told Abigora to focus on the MT and OT with me, and let the druid take care of the raid.
First, we didn't have much time, and my Treedude was having problems with Healbot, which he was sure could be fixed by running in and out of the instance... repeatedly. He glared at me when I suggested he simply type /reloadui, and then proceeded to run in and out even more.
Finally we get started, and proceeded to wipe three tmes. Each time was more fabulous than the last, let me assure you.
The thing is, if you've never played a holy pally before, you may have the following misconceptions:
- That pallies don't run out of mana and
- that they only have three spells.
So, so, so wrong.
Granted, maybe a pally that doesn't suck as badly as me doesn't run out of mana, but I am all badness. Also, I am awful at keeping track of my cooldowns. Sacredshieldwut? LOLJUDGE. I can't tell you how many times I would finally remember to judge, and then be like "Ooooo this is nice and speedy. I should really do that more often..." I probably cast Beacon of Light every 30 seconds, even though I also have the glyph. Oh and Sacred Shield every 2 minutes. Sigh.
My mana would get low and I'd just hit every magic proc buff button I have - Divine Favor, Divine Plea, Mana Pot, Avenging Wrath... you name it, I would just hit it. I have no idea what I'm doing here.
And let's not even get me started on hands. What? Hand of what? HOW CAN I POSSIBLY HAVE THAT MANY APPENDAGES?!?!?! Should I tie all these thingies to hotkeys or something? My current strategy is just to completely ignore that row of buttons and pretend they don't exist. Lalalala I can't seeeeeeeee you! Again, I have no idea what I'm doing here.
I mean, I probably could try to learn but... what would I post about then? FailPally is way more fun and entertaining, don't you think?
... Anyone?
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that's funny that you were yelling at Boingo for the hots :P
Lat night was actually fun for me since I haven't really healing anything challenging yet. Or maybe I'm so much fail that others are picking up my slack & I'm just excited that things aren't dying lol. Healing Decedereful for his first "offical" ass whoopin was very exciting. We actually had wonderful communication regarding his cooldowns & my own. No yelling on our end (until I started pvping with Ful's open mic)
*blush*
Anywho... I think you should start bringing your failpaladin to more of our raids. So much more exciting that way :D
Ohhhhhh dear. I am both frightened and amused.
When you're running low on mana, the best idea is to hit three cooldowns:
Divine Favor, Avenging Wrath and Divine Illumination
Divine Favor returns mana, but it generally cuts down on healing power, which is why you use Avenging Wrath to boost it back up to normal. Popping Divine Illumination will allow for you to regen more mana without cutting back on healing, since your spells are only costing half their normal mana amount.
It's often better to assign the holy paladin to both tanks; you beacon one and heal the other. Then you get assistance from your other healers, like HoTs on the tank.
And on Koralon you can time your Holy Lights with meteor fist pretty well, as beacon is king!
:D
. . . and that's why I heal on my priest and kill stuff with my pally.
I grinned at your description of running OOM as a pally... I think that I play pretty decently on my holy paladin, but I do tend to forget about my mana too.
The thing is that coming from playing a priest, I'm used to having a *big* cooldown for mana return (shadow fiend) that I often pop too early still, so some of it gets wasted. So when I play a paladin I automatically tend to wait until I'm low too (plus I generally also still have this misconception that holy paladins never run out of mana anyway), and then I suddenly go "CRAP!" and hit all my cooldowns at once without it having too much of an effect.
Yeah, I think the yelling goes hand in hand with the RL. I'm glad I gave that to Darf last night. We were pretty calm with me calling out when I'd pop my cooldowns to give her some room to get me back to full. I think she's starting to trust that I'm not totally a newb tank anymore :-).
I loved your post :)
I do play a holy paladin(holy/prot) as well and my husband plays a druid (feral/resto). After a few years... y, years of playing together and yelling at each other because i think THIS is better and he knows THAT is better we end up playing on different servers so we stop with the anger and we actually play together only alts on one server...
As for your holy paladin, i am sure you will learn (mine was main at some point) and you will actually enjoy it. I love healing with mine... and tanking:P
and... don't try to do arena if is so:P
Wait, pallies have more than 3 spells? Flash of light, Holy shock. . . um I'm stuck. .
maybe this is why my pally is prot/ret. . .
Go get this addon http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/clcbpt.aspx - it is a tracker for Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, and JotP. It will also track your HoT from FoL. You get seperate little bars that let you know how much time is remaining for each, plus you can have it show all the Sacred Shields and Beacons in the raid - so you're not cross beaconing or sacred shielding the same target. It's pretty awesome.
Also http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/clcret.aspx is a First Come First Serve addon for Ret - basically shows you what button to hit next. It's kind of like training wheels until you get the muscle memory down.
Mmm - Pally Healing!
They did remind you the 'fire guy' was Koralon, right? *checks*
Hmm, nope.
Well, The Pigtail Ladies have commented on the 'boss in a box' phenomenon, but hey, KORALON has a name! :P
Also, I like your category 'inevitable divorce,' although I hope it's not really an accurate prediction!
-hey, my ADHD made me think of my first realy lvl 80 weapon - the Inevitable Defeat! omnom. :)
Oh man, can I sympathize with you on the yelling! Back in BC, my boyfriend (the raid leader) originally raided on his rogue until we needed another healer and he switched to his resto shaman. I was the heal lead up until then, and he used to be so nitpicky about healing assignments (which, when he was playing a rogue, he completely entrusted to me), thinking his were ALWAYS better. All I can say is Wrath made our home a more peaceful place to live now that his main is a tanking DK =)
@Fuu
I know, there's no excuse for me being so possessive about my healing targets, I was just pouting because the healing assignment was silly. Hmph.
I actually do want to bring my pally more so I can get more practice healing, but I know you and Boingo want to heal as well. For some stuff three healers is good, but I need to get more regular practice on my poor pally.
@Bell
When you say Divine Favor, do you actually mean Divine Plea? I thought Divine Favor was the one that guaranteed your next spell would crit. Too much Divine stuff. But, I was trying to couple Avenging Wrath with Divine Plea (or whichever one increases your mana regen but reduces your healing) so yay for me picking up on one thing properly at least!
@BeatricCaldwell
Amen sister. Amen. Although, I'm not very good at killing stuff with my pally either. Come to think of it, I'm only really good at standing around looking pretty, methinks.
@Shintar
Yes - I think this goes well with the overall rotationness of a holy pally, as opposed to that of a holy priest! I still need to get my cooldown rotation set properly in my head.
@Ful
I don't think you really *gave* it to Darf, dear. I think he pretty much just took it.
@Bati
hhahahaha... that's funny! That's how we used to play, on different servers. I am glad we play and raid together now though - most of the time it's great fun.
And no. If there's anything I do worse than Pallying, it's PvPing. So I suspect that combination would be terribad.
@Fish
No no, it's Flash of Heal, Holy Circle, and Greater Light. Or something like that. I think.
@Adgamorix
zomg pally addons! Okay, I will have to check these out when I get home. Thank you so much for the recommendations! I had some back in the day but they were really annoying, and now the only real Pally add-on I have is PallyPower.
@Hinenuitepo
I always forget his stupid name because I confuse it with Koragon. No wait, Korgalon. No... oh screw it. Fire dude works too! Ha, glad you liked the new category XD I love making stupid tags. I have decided that if we can make it through Icecrown healing together, we might just be able to make it through the wedding ;)
@Edainne
We were doing just fine when he was tanking on his DK! It's kinda my fault though, I encouraged him to roll a healer. I'm actually glad he did, because we're learning more about druids together. I'm hoping I can convince him to let me play around on his druid a bit too... mmmm more healers!
Oh my... healers fighting over who's healing. The end of the world is nigh, for sure. And it's not going to wait for 2012 :P
Holy pally is not difficult to play (but it's not easy to master). What will help you a ton, not only with it but with any char is a plugin like ZOMGbuffs. Works like PallyPower but tracks any cooldown you can cast (demo shout for warriors, arcane intellect for mages, water shield for shammies...), so it will remember you when to cast Sacred Shield, assigned blessings, Divine Plea. Yeah, Divine Plea. Holy pallies DO run out of mana, specially when having to deal with lots of damage, not only on assigned targets (I also heal raid when possible) and Holy Light is the only button you're pushing because it also gives some minor aoe healing (if glyphed) and can restore players in the brink of death to a safe status. Then better pray for a damage spike not to appear (fusion punch, etc) because your healing while plea is up is really crappy.
But you have to remember your other spells, since pallies have a good array of "oh shit!" spells that can save the day: bubble, Lay of Hands, Holy Shock (combined with an instant Flash of Light if glyphed does wonders), Divine Sacrifice (this is a double-edged weapon)... and if everything goes down the drain you can always pop Divine Intervention and sacrifice your life to keep a healer safe for the resses.
So keep up working on that pally, you'll see it can do wonders.
same as Beatrice said, I dps on my rogue, i tank on my dk, and i heal on my priest lolx
I just have grid track Beacon and SS. I can't remember which frames you use, but I think they can all track it.
As for healing assignments in VoA...ever since a disturbing PuG where I ended up having to solo heal Emalon, I've been a total snob. Healing assignments? That would imply there are other healers. What are these other healers you speak of?
That was hilarious :) Thanks for the laugh :)
My partner (feral druid) and I (holy pally) have banned ourselves from pvping together because we yell too much :) But I love healing him in raids because we can coordinate cooldowns and movements so much easier (and then I only have to yell at him when he moves out of my range and I don't notice :P)
I do, as a paladin, help with healing the group because I have fairly fast reaction times. I'm usually the one to ht people with a fast holy shock + heal combo. I help raid heal with the tank beaconed on fights like KT, Mimiron, and Hodir. It's not uncommon for me to be about equal or right on the heels of the resto druid in terms of healing done.
I have 34k mana raid buffed. I still rum OOM, though it may be that I heal something other than just the tanks. :( I let the raid know when I'm taking a "mana break" so they may cover me for the 15 seconds it takes for me to regen. It feels like playing a priest in the MC days. (The other healers usually do things like innervate me and use their hymns.)
I use macros, grid, and Power Auras to keep track of things. I can see beacons on Grid, I also see it with power auras if it's not up (beacon focus for sure), I can see where sacred shields are, etc.
If you want to rip your hair out, try raid healing as a Paladin. I was in a pug Uld10 one time with a resto Shaman. We were on Razorscale and the raid leader's like: Shaman heal the tanks. Paladin, heal the raid. I did it as best I could and was very much like, "... I hate you all."