Be nice with your healers.

A short post today, I'm swamped by work and don't have enough time to finish my big post about healing in Cataclysm. It will have to wait a little bit more.

Until then I wanted to say one thing to all the tanks and dpsers around here (that I sometimes am on some of my chars).

Be nice with your healers.

Seriously people, healing in cataclysm isn't the piece of cake that it was before, now you can really say that The cake is a lie! (ok bad pun)
Mana quickly becomes a serious issue for all healers (with level 83 very often you feel the bite even with ICC gear). But more than only mana, sometimes we just don't have the time to get everyone up, esp. when some people stay in poisonous pools or other fiery areas ...

I once had a player complain I let him die while he was standing in a green poisonous ground that a mob put under him ... I healed him ... he stayed ... after 10s he died. I could have saved him, spending all my mana and 50% of my gcds, that should have been used on the tank.

Please everyone, don't be silly, be nice to your healers and help them. Just ...

Don't stand in the fire.

Until later, Peace, and have fun :)

Healing 5-Man after patch 4.0.1.

I have already commented enough of my views about Holy in raids since patch, but I've not said much about 5-Man. And as it seems some are struggling with them, I'll try to give a few hints about how to handle a rushing instance group. And trust me, my guildies are not stopping for more than bosses ... and most of our dpsers seem to be completely suicidal to me lately, so healing 5-Man can be intense :P

First, you should have the right spec. I advise you to read my earlier posts:
Patch 4.0.1 is going live. You are not prepared!
First impressions on 4.0.1
You should have a 31/2/3 spec with an emphasis on Holy Shock and Word of Glory. The reason for that is that they will be your main tools for any 5-Man.

The ToR style is perfect for instances, it is very rare that your tank will need more than the Beacon influx added to the occasional direct heal used to get Holy Power. Perhaps more will be need if your tank is slightly low geared or if you're into heroic HoR, but on a regular basis you'll be perfectly fine with a regular ToR build.

That means that you will be doing that, with that rough priority order:
1. Beacon of Light on your tank;
2. Use Word of Glory when you have 3 Holy Power stacks (and only 3 !), repeat if you get an Eternal Glory proc;
3. Use Holy Shock on cooldown, if only your tank is hurt, use it on him, if anyone in the group is hit, and unless your tank is in critical, heal the group member (+1 Holy Power);
4. Direct heal your tank with a Holy Light if you're not in a hurry, with a Flash of Light if you're in a hurry, with a Divine Light if he's very badly hurt (+1 Holy Power);
5. Direct heal one of the group members if your HS is on cooldown and you don't have 3 stacks of Holy Power and it's urgent.

Now if you have enough crit/haste your HS/WoG + Beacon will handle 75% of your healing. I don't think you should have any mana issues with this "rotation" as WoG is free, can sometimes be used like 3 times in a row thx to Eternal Glory, and because HS is our most efficient heal per mana skill.
If your mana is going down, use Divine Plea while running between pulls, but that should really not be an issue. Don't forget to judge for speed and a bit of mana too.

If you are still not at ease, I suggest that you test this "rotation" on yourself for a little while, it's easy to maintain once you get used to it, as any dps "rotation" (yes several paladins are saying we are now pew pew dpsers ;p).

Have fun and if you ever encounter issues, don't hesitate to comment here :)

Cataclysm Videos on Cynical Brit

The title says everything. If you want to see numerous videos of the late Alpha / early Beta of Cataclysm, head over to The Cynical Brit. Total Biscuit has put a lot of different videos for our enjoyment on his blog. You can see there long videos of the new starting zones, the two first instances and other fun.
What I will say is that the starting zones seem good, definitely better than what they were in vanilla or BC. If you have not started a character recently, try it, you'll discover that Blizzard has also included a lot of help for beginners explaining most functions of the game while you gain access to them (battleground pvp at lvl 10, dungeon grouping at 15 ...etc).
My last comment will be about the instances. They are fun and relatively difficult. I do really think that (with the addition of a way too easy and nerfed first raid) was missing in WotLK. Most new players never got any training before coming to raids and when they have to learn the most basic things (like not stand in the fire) and also have to cope with the performance pressure that raiding is, they most of the time do very bad in one way or the other. So yes to harder instances that really teach something, and I hope Blizzard won't back up on that.

See you soon for the sequel of the Healing Through series in ICC.

WTB more instance servers.

Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later.

Ok, we all know this by now, or if you don't see what it is, you're really only playing solo, and never put a foot into instances for months.
Since a few patches Blizzard decided to put a limit on the number of instances up at the same time on their instance server. If the goal is reached, which is to prevent horrible lag during raids, that we experienced during the early months of Lich King and were driving us crazy on boss fights like Thaddius. The side effect is that a lot of us can't enter instances, or have to wait sometimes half an hour, mindlessly trying to enter an instance to be able to play into it.

Instances limit & patch 3.2
Some will say I'm qqing, and that Blizzard has already said they are aware of that problem and are trying to solve it. But still, I can only see it as a very bad commercial/design choice to release patch 3.2 that is obviously sending back everyone into instances, before they fixed that problem.
Nowadays I don't even try to play when I'm back from work, between 7pm and 9pm it's just too tedious to try going into an instance and I'm not really fond of going back and forth (or strafing left/right for the fast paced ones) for 15-20mn before being allowed to play.

Several computer for several game servers, but not as you could expect.
Each game server is separated onto several physical machines, Azeroth, Outland, Northrend and instances/raids are on 4 different computers, that group these world parts for several game servers (it's not clear if, for example, all the northrend parts of a whole battlegroup are on the same computer but it's the idea).
That will explain, if you didn't know it, why sometimes your world server (Northrend) is down while some of your guildies, or some of your alts can still play (in let say Azeroth).
That will also explain why it's not that easy to just "add some muscle" to the computer in charge of the instances to solve the problem. That's why Blizzard is saying it's complex and they need time.

Instance servers have a memory cap.
The problem seem obvious if you're a little into computer science. The instance server has a limit of hardware memory, when that limit is reached it has to "swap" his memory with virtual memory which is emulated on the hard-drive of the computer. The problem is that when it does that, the access time is about 100 to 1000 times slower on this "swapped memory", which is then producing server lags for the players in the affected instance. So, especially as Blizzard does not own the servers on which the game is played, the only solution they found is to limit the number of instances to avoid the memory swap problem.
They also installed a priority onto entering instances it's mostly LK raids > LK heorics > LK instances > older raids & instances. If you've tried to do a raid or vanilla instance during peak hours ... you're probably still trying :P

A temporary solution, instance queues.
What I'd like to see, as probably many people, is a queue. When you try entering an instance, you get into a queue and you're ported into your instance when it's your turn. Mostly what they did for Wintergrasp in the last patch.
This won't fix the problem, and they have to develop new code to be able to dynamically share several computer for the same "instance server" when needed. This is an obvious choice and necessity because all game servers don't have the same size, and the number of instances required by the players isn't at all the same during a day. But this type of coding is way more complex than the static allocation they are using right now, and it requires a lot more testing, what they are, I hope, doing right now.
Nevertheless, instance queues are a relatively simple to code patch that would make most of us much happier than the current situation. At least you can queue for your instance, and then go do your dailies for example instead or completely wasting your time trying to repeatedly enter the instance (because you have to do it if you ever want to play it ... which is what is driving me crazy).

You're all welcome to comment with your views and ideas on the instance cap. Not that Blizzard will ever read this blog, but I'll be curious to see if this problem is common to the US and the EU for example (as I think it is reading blogs & forums on both sides).