It’s been almost two months now since I was part of a guild regularly doing 25-man content, so I’ve been able to get away with using a bastardized catch-all Resto spec, leaving my other spec slot free for whatever tomfoolery I wished. (Lately, this has been bear tanking.) So, I’m returning to my old ways, of optimizing top-to-bottom for a given role, with regards to my talents. I’ll be using two somewhat distinct, and highly focused builds to fill either the role of raid healing or tank healing as need arises.

Tank Healing

The first, my tank-healing build, is 14/0/57. Using the Glyph of Nourish, Glyph of Innervate, and Glyph of Swiftmend, it is tailored to HoT up my chosen tank(s) and then bombard him with big-number, high-crit Nourishes. The only real allowance I’ve made for the changes in 3.2 is adding Empowered Touch to the mix, for the extra 20% of spellpower added to my Nourishes (along with the original 40% of spellpower to Healing Touch.)

I’ve sometimes comtemplated rocking out my 4-piece Tier 7.5 set in this build to nearly duplicate the effect of the Nourish Glyph: “Your Nourish heals an additional 5% for each of your heal over time effects present on the target.” (Lifebloom counts as one HoT whether it’s a single stack, double or triple.)

Raid Healing

For the purposes of raid healing, I’m using 11/0/60 with glyphed Healing Touch, Swiftmend, and Wild Growth. I can hit up to 6 targets with my AoE heal, cast sub-1.0 second Healing Touches for anywhere up to ~11K crits, and Swiftmend all those Rejuvs I’m tossing out to the raid. This build will really shine if I ever get that elusive fourth piece of tier 8, which will add an extra instant Rejuv tick to the target as soon as it’s cast, healing for upwards of 2K and then another ~12K over 15 seconds. Since 3.1 I’ve dropped Revitalize in favor of Living Seed, as my glyphed HT gets tossed around a lot and has a great crit rate.

I’m still adjusting to the new Innervate mechanics, but I so seldom need to Innervate myself anyway that it hasn’t tripped me up yet.

All that having been said, looking forward to getting back into 25-man content again!

Cross-posted via email from Shane’s Posterous

WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INC

Anywho, I’m back from a brief, voluntary hiatus, although my return wasn’t really planned, nor was my leaving announced to the general public. Back at the end of June, I was in a position to inherit leadership of the guild I’d raided with since mid-January, Celestial Being. We were raiding Ulduar-25 three nights a week, and had gotten as far as Mimiron phase 4 when the summer raiding slump earned another victim. Our attendance was slipping, tempers and egos were running high, and I had a lot of other stuff going on IRL that I won’t bore you with. But suffice to say, I called it quits, intending on not playing WoW for a healthy amount of time. This was basically the last nail in the coffin for CB, which is something I still regret somewhat.

My annoying, wonderful friends kept talking about the game, and wanting me to play again, and I still had a bunch of time left because my account renewed a few days before I made the decision to quit. I played my lowbie paladin Tharae here and there, maybe one day a week, and healed the odd Heroic on Ithato for my buddies. I played a lot of offline games in the meantime, and had a brief fling with EVE Online as a one-player-two-Podder mining team. That game…I could write pages about my forays with that game.

So now, it was a gradual process, but I’m back to playing quasi-regularly. Tharae is up to level 42 at the time of this writing. Some of my closest friends from Celestial Being and/or the real world decided to make their own guild, and I got dragged along for the ride, and somehow wound up an officer again. I don’t really have any responsibilities, aside from volunteering to host/admin our forums and a Vent server through TypeFrag.

We’re just big enough to do Ulduar-10 regularly, and I’ve learned that I highly, highly enjoy the lower stress and better, er, intimacy of 10-man raiding. There’s a lot more room for goofing off in vent and raid chat when 7 or 8 of you are seasoned veterans of Ulduar-25, and when all 10 of you seem to be highly competent. I really enjoy the whole crowd we have and it’s only going to get better as time goes on.

Due to the aforementioned kickassery, we cleared up through to General Vezax in two nights in our first lockout, and last night we cleared up to General V again in a single 2.5-hour raid, our second week in. Really looking forward to getting more attempts on him tomorrow night, because last week we almost had him. Big shout-out to some of our members, like Ampharos, Aliatris, Quintas and Khulgar/Kyliana, who all hadn’t seen Ulduar before and still listen/learn well enough to be 1-shotting bosses all night last night.

I’d never seen anything past Mimiron in 25-man nor 10-man prior to this, so it’s all very new and exciting, even though it means I need to be watching TankSpot vids and reading boss strats again.

As far as loot and gear goes, I’m still sitting pretty decent in terms of gear, although I thank the FSM every day that I can shift into Tree and not have to stare at my god-awful Soot-Covered Mantle. It clashes hard with all the rest of my gear. I currently have 3/5 T8.5, and I keep getting bad luck with token drops on Freya/Thorim for either my shoulders or gloves. I want that elusive 4-pc bonus so bad!

• Heroic: Siege of Ulduar – Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, Ignis and XT-002 defeated. Earned May 5th.
• Heroic: Orbital Bombardment – Left 1 tower up on Flame Leviathan. Earned May 6th.
• Heroic: Staying Buffed All Winter – Earn all proximity-based buffs at the same time during the Hodir encounter. Earned May 14th.
• Heroic: I Have The Coolest Friends – Defeat Hodir with all friendly NPCs surviving the encounter. Earned May 19th.
• Heroic: Shutout – Default Flame Leviathan without causing a System Shutdown by launching passengers to attack turrets. Earned May 20th.
• Heroic: Cheese the Freeze – Defeat Hodir without any raid members dying to Flash Freeze. Earned May 21st. Great job, guys!

Lately I’ve been using World of Logs alongside the venerable WowWebStats for our guild’s metrics. I really like certain aspects of both and think they compliment each other well. One feature of WoL that really made me say “Neato!” was the real-time logging available in the client. You can have it monitor your combat log file as you raid and it will periodically update the data online, allowing you to i.e. quickly and painlessly view your last pull in great detail.

Recent Loot

• Igniter Rod – circa May 13th.
• Conqueror’s Nightsong Robe – May 18th
• Rapture – May 19th

Those last two after enchants and gems have me peaking at well over 2600 +healing in raid.

Misc Stuff
Several officers in my guild, Celestial Being, have had various life issues come up and been forced to cut way back on their playing time or stop altogether. That left us down to two officers who were on for every single raid, along with lots of Veterans. Monday night, however, a former officer was re-promoted, as he was moving and would again be able to make every raid. On top of that, they promoted me! I’m now an officer as well. I hope to be able to provide good input into guild policies and raid-wide decisions and such, without being that overbearing, know-it-all new officer that everyone loves to hate.

I’ve also got a web development hobby project going, but I’ve got to keep it hush-hush for now. It is entirely WoW-related, as well as somewhat guild-centric. No, it is not another social network or profile tool. Expect more news soon as I grow more satisfied with it. As a bit of teaser info, I’m developing it on OSX, in Ruby on Rails, and using HAML/SASS, Passenger and Capistrano for deployment (for now) and hosting it on Debian Linux. The code used to be freely available on GitHub, but I’ve gotten such positive feedback from the people who’ve gotten a look-see that I changed my mind about that. That move was based on two decisions: I don’t want to leave myself open to exploitation and get my ideas stolen, and I’d like the option of being able to monetize the project should it make it that far.

So, consider this also an unofficial call for help from my fellow web developers out there in the WoW/Twitter community. I’m still polishing my CSS and Javascript (mostly jQuery) skills, so if you’re good at that stuff, or particularly if you yourself have worked with Rails, feel free to leave me a comment. I may have questions for you from time to time, and I always love getting feedback from different folks.

• Heroic: Nerf Gravity Bombs
• Heroic: Nerf Engineering – great job guys!

Last night, we finished off Iron Council again, and moved on to down Auriya for our first kill! That wraps up the Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar achievement, too.

I’m having a blast having two resto specs. Sure, it makes respeccing for the weekends just as time consuming and expensive as it was pre-patch, but I feel so versatile! One is able to put some serious single-target healing down with glyphed Nourish, Nature’s Grace and my 4-piece Tier 7 bonus. I had something like 68% crits on Nourish and 50% crits on Regrowth on one WWS log. The other is able to throw around 5-8k glyphed Healing Touches in under a second!

Lastly, my baby Paladin Tharae hit 30 on Sunday night and I’m happily riding around on a Warhorse now. I can’t wait to get him to 80, he’s so much fun!

Celestial Being - Flame Leviathan First Kill

Last night was much more productive. We went in with a few new tryout raiders, two of which were healing Priests. Congrats to Faizia and Aylani on a really solid first night! One of our Priest vets, Zelda, was also running Disc for our early attempts on Razorscale. We finally nailed down the right placement for everyone involved, got in two solid attempts, and downed Razorscale for good on our third “real” try. Great job guys!

Some of us are missing from these screenshots unfortunately:

Celestial Being - Razorscale First Kill

Celestial Being - Razorscale First Kill #2

In other news, I’ve sort of taken over acting as healing lead, unofficially, due to the unexpected retirement of our favorite (and only) Holy Paladin, Somitierra. It’s been fun, fairly stressful, and certainly educating. I also finally got everyone on board to join a healers-only channel, which we never really needed before 3.1. I’ve been using an addon called GettingThingsHealed to do our healing assignments, and I cannot recommend it enough. Expect a post over at NSUI about it sometime soon.

Finally, we’re at 2 Fragments of Val’anyr and counting. We had three candidates for the first legendary healing mace, including myself. I passed to our resident Resto Shaman, Buji. Grats Buji, can’t wait to see it in action! Hopefully I’ll be in the running for the next one, however.