I suck at PVP

Or, it’s just that I don’t have the gear and I haven’t been serious about shaman PVP ever since I first played the character. I used to duel alot on my warrior and played alot of AB on my warlock, but I’ve never tried killing any player with my shaman (other than 2 really annoying warlocks while I was leveling, which died under quad WF procs).

The sad part is, Blizzard has once again introduced PVP gear that is better than PVE equivalents. The healer necklace off the honor rewards is just amazing.  It’s got good stamia, good healing, and good mp5 along with a socket to meet your meta gem needs. Off to AV it is.

I’ve also started to 2v2 and 3v3 in arena just for fun and to grab an elemental set (which is pretty much non-existent) for some dueling if I really wanted to get into that. The first night my 3v3 was horrid, we kept losing to triple DPS teams (2x warriors), and coupled with the fact that none of our players had PvP gear, we just got creamed. We do have more than 3 so we mix people up. We did get a few wins with our Shaman, Shadow Priest, Affliction Warlock Combo. But once we go against DPS heavy teams it’s hard to survive the barrage.

It’s a bit better on 2v2 though I only played 4 games with a feral druid. Both of us were PvP newbies but still managed to go 4-0, tho I must say that some opponents are just really scrubs. We fought against a Pally-rogue combo twice and that was pretty exciting, especially the first game. The second game we came up with a better strat and finished the game pretty quickly.

I’ll need more practice and AV runs to get some resilience: I can already see how Godly that stat is.

Quanitfying the Pendant of the Violet Eye

Pendant of the Violet Eye
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
+40 Intellect
Use: Each spell cast within 20 seconds will grant a stacking bonus of 21 mana regen per 5 sec. Expires after 20 seconds.  Abilities with no mana cost will not trigger this trinket.

Actually, I’ve been equipping this trinket if only for the 40 int on it since 2.1 without ever giving deeper thought into the actual numbers this trinket equates to. It’s all fine for now since I don’t really have any good trinkets to equip. But for future reference I’ve decided to run some calculations on this trinket so I can replace it with certainty in the future. Do consider I will be writing this from the perspective of a Resto shaman so if you’re another class/spec you’ll have to modify the numbers to suit your own analysis

The first thing to notice about this trinket is that its on use function is rather deceptive in that mana regeneration is not really ticked every 5 seconds but every 2 seconds. Therefore, every spell is actually giving you a stacking 8.4 mp every 2 seconds after you cast a spell.

The first thing to check about this trinket is it’s usefulness by spamming spells for the sake of stacking the buff compared to simply not casting and getting spirit regen. As a resto shaman, the only spell that I can spam meaningfully in a 400ms environment is rank 1 Healing Wave, not only does it heal for a nice 300 per cast, you keep up healing wave and may proc Ancestral Healing as well. That costs 23 mana per cast (with Tidal Focus). Assuming you have zero lag and can cast one every 1.5 sec (due to GCD), you get 13 such casts, costing you 299 mana. Now someone at Wowhead has generously given us the detailed listing of what happens when you chain 1.5 casts here and you will see that after the trinket fades you would have gained a total of 588 Mana. Which means that the net mana gained is 289.

My shaman with 0 spirit bonus has 100 mp/5s mana regen, and not casting for 20 seconds would actually net me 400 additional mana, which is much more than spamming for this trinket. Now, if you had the SSC Relic, and it worked before talent reductions (ie (25-24)*0.9 = 0.9 , or 1mp) for you to be able to spam it on the trinket would make the total mana spent 13, and net mana gained 575, which would make it marginally better than sitting out and waiting for spirit to tick. (And if you have Insightful Earthstorm, Spellsurge, and Fathom Brooch, it might actually be quite beneficial to pop the trinket and spam). 575 mana every 2 minutes is 24mp/5s and 175 (net gain over spirit) is 7mp/5s.

Now, I’ve never killed anything in SSC and therefore I do not have the luxury of testing that out, and since spamming for the lone reason of stacking the buff is not reasonable, the best use of this trinket is to anticipate when you will be chain casting spells and pop it in advance to get the most mana out of it. For a resto shaman there is no better time than the time to repop your totems; conveniently the cooldown of this trinket is also 2 minutes, same as all of our buff totems. Assuming we place 4 totems in the first 8 seconds (accounting for lag), and we cast 2 heals which were actually needed in the remaining 12 seconds.  The mana gained would be around 330, these spells would have to be casted anyways, therefore there is no opportunity cost, and we have a net gain of 330. Every two minutes this would be 13mp/5s.

40 int is 600 mana, which is 144 mana returned from Mana Tide and 12 Healing Done

Therefore, in terms of mp/5s, the trinket is as follows:

3 Minute fight : 29.8mp/5
5 Minute fight : 23.4mp/5
7 Minute fight : 22.3mp/5
11 Minute Fight : 19.2mp/5

The 13 mp/5 from the on use generally stays the same while the worth of 40 int falls as the fight gets longer. I’d say it is a pretty solid mana regeneration trinket, if you can find a way to utilize it.

On a side note, I’m seeing a drastic change of Shaman healing techniques as we progress past Gruul and Karazhan, and therefore I am planning an overhaul to the shaman notes, but not until I get experience in both SSC and TK.

Gurren Lagann

I implied that I’d write something about the series because the first episode didn’t give me a good nor deep enough impression to say about the series. In fact the first episode really isn’t anything that amazing apart from the first time seeing Yoko in her bikini suit and wielding a large rifle.

The first episode certainly doesn’t do the series justice. In fact, nor does the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. I stopped at the 6th episode for quite a while until I decided to do catch up last night up to 12th. Starting around 7th the story really picks up and you’re thrown into the fray all of a sudden and so much starts to happen. Certainly does turn the series into top-notch quality that Gainax has given us in Evangelion and FLCL.

For those of you first seeing the series, I do warn you against terrible art in several episodes in the series. The first few are OK, then suddenly you get a terrifying episode 4 (can’t remember was it this one) where people suddenly look differently and it just looks like a sloppy rushed job of an episode. It happens in latter episodes as well, but nothing as serious as that one episode.

Definitely a must-see this season, and if you know why drills are so important, this is one damn good anime.

Enhancement Weekend

More enhancement gear drops over this week’s Kara run and I’m almost fully geared in epics now. Coupled with our Kara group full-clearing the instance in one night, it meant that we weren’t raiding until the instances got reset (the other Kara group has to finish their instance so nothing else was planned).

Thats why I paid 20g and respecced to enhancement for a weekend. If you look at my armory profile, you’ll be able to see me in enhance spec and gear, though I think the respec back into resto should be anytime these two days. Basically it’s full epics with a few green and blues here and there. I do have an emerald ripper for the offhand, but found that a 70 blue offhand with 2.6 speed (Bogspine Knuckles from heroic Underbog) was actually a dps upgrade over the ripper.

Farming mobs was a breeze, basically zero downtime and using Black Grasp of the Destroyer + Zangarmarsh Mushroom Trinket + Water Shield + Shamanistic Rage meant mana wasn’t a problem. In instances, the DPS output is quite impressive, though most tanks have problem catching up to my aggro if I manage to get a mainhand windfury double crit right off the bat. Druid tanks help a ton, and for the most of the time I had to hold off dps by not shocking or helping with off-healing.

I’ve been enhance from 1-69 and I think 1 day at 70. That was pre-WF5/WF4 fix, but honestly aside from the ridiculous quad-procs, the DPS is still respectable (and a lot less streaky). On one of the Aeonus fights in Black Morass  I managed to sustain 700 dps, and that was before my gear got enchanted, not bad!

Now that daily quests give us so much gold respecing weekly is no longer a burden. Some upgrades that I want to get are T4 helm, T4 gloves (which I have sitting in my bank as a token, but I’m not sure if I want to exchange it for the heal set or melee set), Nightbane chest, Bloodlust Brooch (18 more tokens), and Darkmoon Card – Crusade.

As the guild grows lets see if more healers crop up and I get to DPS in raids for a change in pace.

The Curtains of Serpentshrine Uncurl

Yes, Gruul got slain.

I’d say this is the 2nd week of our serious tries on Gruul, along with actually assigning a second raid day to get in more tries (due to Kara clears being sped up). I’d have to say that Gruul is a really straight forward fight in that the mechanics of it are terribly easy to get and the only hard part is execution.

Typical mistakes include running into people during shatter, people forgetting to run out of cave-ins, and the Main Tank dying.  The fact that Gruul was bugged on a few nights and decided to hateful strike our 3rd highest threat holder wasn’t helpful either. The night before the kill we were still wiping horridly and could barely get him past 50%, but suddenly our DPS clicked and we had a 9% wipe after the MT died.

The ground slam part is dealt with more by experience than control. Tell mages not to blink right as they land (due to people still in the air and might still land in their area), tell people to zoom out and open friendly name bars, rogues and pallies can CoS or DS out of clusterfucks. The most important part is to remind people to start observing and planning their escape route while they are in the air, the fact being that the first 2 seconds after you land is prime time for you to cover ground, the last 2 seconds at 20% movement speed doesn’t get you anywhere. If ground slam is really troubling you, go play simon at Ogrila for the 15% movement buff.

Another common mistake for us was the MT dying. My advice was to keep 3-4 healers (depending on growths) on the MT and tell them to heal nobody except the MT. Most MT deaths are caused by these assigned MT healers unable to resist the urge to heal people after a ground slam and hence neglecting the MT. However bad the raid’s health may look after a ground slam, they aren’t taking further damage, so let the people who are assigned to spot-heal deal with it, they have a full 30 seconds to top of the raid. Just remind people to run out of cave-ins.

The most important part of the Gruul encounter I say would be DPS. If you can get him down before significant growths the fight gets exponentially easier. Trim down healers (7 max I would say), weed out weak DPS, tell people to L2P, if you’re having trouble getting him down around 12-13 growths.

Killshot