Dealing With Personal Weaknesses

Everyone has weaknesses in the way they play. I have a myriad of them, but after many years of raiding, I’ve learned how to best counter myself.

I am a creature of habit. Reflexes are my way of forming mental filters and handling complex fights. Once I figure out the rhythm of a fight, I can devote my full attention to doing my best. It’s not unlike learning to drive–at first it’s all OMG THERE’S SO MANY THINGS TO REMEMBER but it becomes second nature before long. I must master the individual layers before I can excel at the whole.

This means that when things change too much I’m the derpiest of derps.  I’m used to working like this, and it’s one reason why I seldom pugged raids  even when I had the time. The constants of a guild raid week in and week out were better for me. I’m self-aware enough to not court failure more than I must. I struggled massively with my guild’s Rags attempts because I only raid every other week, and with two different raid leaders, the strat would literally be different every single time I went. I’ve never felt so unsure of myself as when I was failing left and right on Rags. Thankfully that’s not a situation that comes up much, and after I’ve done a fight the same way a few times, I’m okay. I just need my crutches in place.

There’s a reason I was only in a “top 5 on the server” guild in Vanilla. In 40 mans, who really notices 1 of 7 holy paladins dying? NO ONE.

Suffer from left/right confusion? I know of many people who rely on post-it notes to not only remind them which way is which, but of other assignments as well. I sketch things out on paper on my desk sometimes (ex: THIS SON, dumbface) as a visual reminder.

I couldn’t get through life as a responsible adult without post-it notes.

What are your personal weaknesses, and how do you cope?  Are you a perpetual keyboard turner that remains extra aware of stuff on the floor? Did you used to be a paladin tank who had to install an ad-on to yell when you didn’t have RF up?

Share your failures!

BWD: The Elevator Boss

Don’t mock me for writing this strat.  The Elevator Boss has claimed many lives, including several members of SiB.  It may have even claimed some of them more than once.

Tips and Tricks:

As I discovered personally, the engineer’s habit of reaching for his parachute in times of crisis will not serve you well here.  While it’s true you will not splatter on the ground, you will slowly…casually…glide right into the lava.  Where you will die.  And you will not be able to be rezzed by a snickering guildie and you will have to run your arse right back into the instance to brave the elevator again.  I can only imagine that levitate or slowfall will have the same result without perfect timing.

Trying to heroic leap off the elevator early to show off how awesome you are will, more often than not, result in you making an awesome blood smear.  Right Pix?

For the highest chance of not dying, stop on the edge of the elevator platform and wait patiently.  Do not tab out–this is not a dawdling elevator.  By the time you belatedly look over from your 2nd monitor and 4chan to realize that it’s there, you will wander off the edge only to find that it has already left.  Wait and run onto the platform as soon as you see it, especially if you’re laggy.

Levitating someone else to make them float into the lava pit/splatter is cruel.  Hilarious, but cruel.  Lifegrip can also be abused in amusing ways, proving that priests are OP and need to be nerfed.

Someone else with more forethought than I was kind enough to provide images for this tough boss encounter!  You can find them here.  Or here, here, and here if the WoW forums are blocked but you can see imageshack.

Remember, avoiding higher repair bills can be as good as loot!

Amber’s Opinions on Paladin Tanking

After running a few heroics to get a hang of that whole “hunter focus” thing, I went ahead and threw Ambrosine together for prot and had a go at tanking.

….LOL.

What the fuck is this holy power shit?  It’s “like combo points”?  You realize I don’t play a rogue because I HATE COMBO POINTS, right?  Yes I know I played a cat, but NOTICE THE PAST TENSE. 

Okay, so, um, I’ll throw down a consecrate and–HEY.

HEY GUYS ALLOW ME TO HIT HE THINGS WITH MORE THAN SHINY ON THE FLOOR BEFORE YOU ATTACK, KTHX.

Okay, so…969?  Right?  Wait, 3?  939?  I…amg  /flails at buttans

HAY HUNTERS.  WTF.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN’T GET MISDIRECT TO WORK?  FOR FUCKS SAKE.  WELL LEARN TO ASSIST THE TANK THEN NUBS.

Shiny!

Shiny!

…oh there go mobs again.  Hm.  RF is up, right?  RF is up.

Shiny!

Shiny!

…oh there go…I swear to god, HUNTERS.  I AM LETTING YOU TANK THAT.

Shiny!

Shiny!

…heeeeey, I haven’t gone OOM!  Sweet.

Karma’s a Bitch

One time we were doing ToC25, and my little sister was killed by Icehowl’s charge.  I openly mocked her, as was my sisterly duty.  The very next time Icehowl charged, I died to it.

Did I learn from this karmic retribution? 

Aww HELL no.

Last night we were clearing our way to Rotface, and we pulled one of the puppies.  The puppies are always a bitch for reasosn unknown…no wait, I do know.  We’re the guild that wipes on Gunship while one shotting everything else in Lower Spire-of COURSE the mini bosses are hard.  Anyway.  I see a tell-tale fail angel and teasingly tell the priest in question, Oasic, to Desperate Prayer more.

You see where this is going, right?  Of course you do.

AS MY PTT BUTTON IS STILL DOWN, AND I AM STILL TALKING SMACK, I died.

\o/

Mad skills.  I have them.

In Need of Mental Help

Normally, Monday is Throw Screenshots At The Blog Day, but I didn’t get around to properly editing the screenies, so today…you get the Adventures of the Fail Tree.

My baby druid only has 4 buttons.  A  HoT, a smallish heal thingy with another HoT, Swiftmend, and Healing Touch.  HT has quickly become equated with Greater Heal in my mind-it’s a thing that I try not to cast too often, because it’s slow as fuck.  Big, but slow.   The adjustment part comes from not having a little heal to spam in its place-it became a game of wiggling around and wondering if Swiftmend would come off CD in time.   Sometimes the mage died.  Sorry, mage.  AoE less?

I feel comfortable enough healing 5 mans by now, but I have discovered a massive problem with playing a tree.  See, I throw my HoTs on the tank and then I…wait.  During those long seconds of waiting I get distracted-by my cat, my party chat, or by guild chat discussing whether or not spit is a good enough lube for anal sex.

No really, we had that discussion.  I screen shotted it and everything!

Anyway.

So I get distracted, and I start typing, right?  Standing there…typing…not following the group.  And then the tank runs ahead and pulls another 2-3 packs of mobs, and I go OH SHIT, and I don’t have penance to make up for my lollygagging anymore so…SPLAT goes the tank.

Because I was typing.

Ahem.

I think that maybe I need a Swiftmend maco of Amber Wasn’t Paying Attention, because this is going to be a long haul to 80…

/hots

/sees something shiny

/wanders off

(To explain the title, aside from the obvious: my poor little druid was dubbed Psychiatree.  Because I need some, see, after having that many healers…)

In Which I Fully Embrace the Light

I have, for the time being, decided to hang up my shadow hat.

“Why would you do that, Amber?  You LOVE mind sear!”

That I do, that I do.  But quite frankly, I suck at shadow.  I didn’t always, of course-in Ulduar I used to be, if not uber, at least not fail.  If we 2 healed something I did acceptable DPS.  If we did heroics, I beat the damn tank in damage.

I…can’t even do that anymore.  I somehow got shucked into a random heroic as DPS last night (wut?!) and I…was…below the tank.  Not DPS wise, no (aoe lol), but in damage done, yes.  I didn’t even break 3k.  What the hell.  When we tried to 2 heal Saurfang, I went shadow because previously I had the strongest dual-spec of the present healers and…

…no.  Just, no.  Again, in a RAID, not breaking 3k.  I swapped in my hunter and could at least do 3.5k.  My lesser geared BM hunter can beat my priest.

Yes.

So.

Until I can find some way to fix things (not enough haste? Too much else lost in trying to gain haste?  Too much cross over gear from disc?  I just suck at playing?) I’ve officially unchecked the DPS box.

And I’m a sad panda.

:(

Mind seeeeaaaar.

In GOOD news, the sort that makes me warm and fuzzy inside, my guildies shoved gear at me in ToC despite fail!rolls.  I have the nifty offhand (a nice upgrade from my Ulduar 10 piece), and two trophys I now need to…farm badges for.  XD  Maybe some day I don’t be the worst geared priest (main) in the guild.  \o/

O Hai, Pre-Patch Lull

Ah, it’s that time again.  Raid attendence drops,  people stop paying attention, and all of a sudden we’re wiping on farm content.

Freya defeated us again last night, which has me wanting to cry in both sadness and anger.  It’s Freya, for fuck’s sake.  In Ulduar.  She’s a keeper that we used to be able to down regularly.   I don’t know where everyone’s head was, but if the trash wipes didn’t clue me in, a Freya pull by someone distracted by the TV should have.  I want to kill Yoggy, people.  :(

It’s a struggle for me, internally.  I’m telling myself that it’s just a natural lull, the kind that BoO has survived over and over.   Then there’s the part of my brain that is screaming YOU ARE THE MOST TERRIBLE GM EVER, and I hate that part.  I’m flailing at my support network on a regular basis (I love you guys).

I GM’d once before, in BC.  We had a cozy little group of friends, barely enough to scrape together a Kara.  Then one day my co-GM and one of our precious healers transferred off server without warning, and I’m afraid I was rather gutted after that and the guild slowly dwindled away.  Gwuh.  Will not repeat.

I’ve got an officer who is perpetually MIA…no, actually, two officers who are perpeutally MIA, though one of them at least occassionaly shows up and leads an off night raid.   Cranky Tank is on that wavering age of burn out and /game quit…again.  Of the other three officers, one is the former GM and lord knows where his mind is…and the other two are also sort of wavering uncertainly in burn out/bored land.  In other words, I’m really afraid to lean on anybody, and the number of people I feel I can count on is smaller than our number of officers.

Of course this just means that I’ll actually be leaning on the people who currently keep me raiding, officer or not.  Myss.  Oasic.  Celaeno.  Pyxy.  Kyr.  Rivyn.  Atropus.  Frost.  All of you who joke around and generally make my nights amusing.  

I have a couple of angry rants saved up, but I’m almost afraid to voice them.  Perhaps tomorrow will be Pull Your Head Out Of Your Asses Lecture Day, where I talk about things like continuing to stare at the TV and not the computer when your GM on vent is going “EVERYONE BACK UP BACK UP BACK OH GOD THE BOSS PULLED” is pretty damn fail.

To cap the fail, I missed taming Loque by like…a minute.  Then I hopped on my warrior and found Skoll’s corpse.  Bwuh.  Sad BM hunter is sad. /pokemons

Suprise patch = surprise buttsechs.

So I’m already wound up enough, what with the first 25 man with me as guild leader, and then we have to have issues all night.  It started with the Beasts pull and our OT DCing…and being unable to log back on for awhile.  That was pretty much the theme of the night.

Pyxy, tank.  Ghostfacee, melee DPS.  Erdkrieg, healer.  Iknowyou, ranged DPS.  Mikata, healer.  Myself, healer, though I thankfully didn’t have patch issues.   It was a rotating cluserfuck of 24 manning nearly every gods be damned thing because we were always missing someone. 

Healing felt light and I don’t know if it was due it group comp, silly inattentive people, the particular tanks we’d chosen (Pyx is still catching up in gear to the other thanks and Mega just doesn’t have Zoja’s avoidances), server fail, or all of those.  I know I was lolfailing at one point, to my bafflement-I lolfail at many things, but to be hit by Icehowl?  ICEHOWL?!  On my screen, it looked like he was facing me, so I ran to one side, to you know…get out of the way.  Instead, I ran into him.  WTF?  GAH.  I think I’ll stick with “all of those” as my answer and cross my fingers for better luck next week.

On my Current Things To Do As GM List is “find my spine”.  I should get right on that.

ETA: Kestrel mentioned my name and the phrase “mad comic genius” together.  I feel better now.

Raid from Hell

It was one of those nights.  Cranky Tank is recovering from the flu and Fearless Leader is coming down with it.  Some raiders seemed to have left their brains at home and stupid wipes were had.  The loot gods were not kind.  RL stress frayed tempers.  I, ever the emotion sponge, soaked it all up and expoloded it right back at everyone (my response to one tank’s “heal me!” was “TPS the boss!”).

Normally, I try to keep spirits up with Amber’s Patended Random Silly, but even that was shot down.  Steve has been refusing to give me assist, which means I can’t /rw spam.  Aside from making me a very sad panda, this also puts a crimp on my role as healing lead.  Vent can get chaotic, and even my healers with perfect hearing can’t always catch what I need them to, nevermind the one without.  Whisper and raid chat can be lost, too.  Let’s face it, /rw makes a noise and splashes red text on your screen for a reason.  There’s some logic behind my request beyond my desire to be a dork, like telling Tank Healer #3 to cover Tank #2 because Tank Healer #1 decided to stand in front of a worm (I’m fucking brilliant some days, let me tell you). 

I have my other gripes, as well.  I disagree with having seven healers for ToC.  How about we make our people learn to not hug opposite color orbs, and other such lazy dumbfuckery?  What about dispells?  Can you learn to do those?  We have some damned fine healers and it doesn’t take much for boredem to set in.  We did fine with 6 healers before when I decided to be a bitch and ignore Steve, and we’ll do fine with 6 again.  The most fun I’ve had in ToC was one ToC 10 with one of our more undergeared healers.  My mana bar was screaming!  It was work!  Holy shit!  I LOVED IT.  …you want us to have HOW MANY HEALERS in a 25 man?

One of our tanks also has aquired the Grate On Amber’s Nerves debuff.   This is…not cool.  It applies stacks, and after so many stacks I just want to scream.  In fact, he gets a post all on his own!…again.

Monday Recap

I did a lot of raiding this week-far more than normal.  I don’t have a single 80 not saved to one or more raid instances, and I didn’t even touch Ony or VoA.  Jamethera went to Ulduar 10 and Naxx25, Ambrosyne went to Ulduar 10, and Lyrandre made her second foray into ToC 10. 

The ToC 10 was a guild run (sans one replacement for our DCing DPS warrior), albeit it an unofficial experiment before we head into it “for reals” later.  We’d done one off night attempt there before but gotten stuck on Beasts.  It resulted in lovely gems such as this one from one of our tanks:

We seemed likely to get stuck on it again, but after we replaced the aforementioned DCing Guy, we did alright.  In fact, we cleared all the way up to the Twins. And you know what?  Seeing the infamous Faction Champions for the first time, and post nerf at that I…I kind of enjoyed them.

Faction Champions: As Experienced by Lyrandre

/heal heal
/get aggro from the hunter pet
/fear
/heal heal
/get aggro from the hunter pet
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/get aggro from the hunter pet and the DK
/panic and say GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/get aggro from the hunter pet and the warrior
/panic and say GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/wonder where the hunter pet is
/heal heal, dispel
/giggle and run into the middle of mobs and fearbomb

And that is how you Faction Champion as a disc priest.  Since the sight of me running laps around the room with a cat following me was highly amusing, it was therefore an awesome fight.  I admit to having an advantage, however: my tank is in the room with me to hear “GETITOFFGETITOFF” when vent is rather, ah, busy.

Come twins in ToC, however, we ran into issues.  The tank kept dying.  As the tank healer, this makes me QQ hard core.  The only reason I can think of for this tank to die on my watch was the fact that I had to move around a lot.  Let’s face it, I’m not an awesome mobile tank healer when my big spell is channeled and I’m primarily a crit/SP whore.  Haste wut?

We were trying the one-tank, everyone-the-same-color strat.  Which works in some respects, but without anyone of the other color around to sop up those orbs, I was doing a lot of orb dancing.  Steve said that he would occasionally eat one for the sake of healing, which is fantastic, but two orbs will kill me.  I don’t want to risk “eating” one orb only to have a second one sneak up on me before I’m healed.  I think I need to drive home the “STEVE I CAN’T MOVE THAT MUCH AND TANK HEAL” aspect with a bat, because he’s got a wicked case of “If I don’t have a problem there is no problem” disease. 

Guild hobbies: Picking on Huntres, calling Phaseroll a loot whore, healers plotting DPS deaths, picking on Lyrandre

Of course it doesn’t help that I make it easy to pick on me.  Last week in Ulduar I just walked straight into a pack of mobs, for example.

My second trip into Ulduar with Ambrosyne as a tank was…not bad.  I didn’t start to suck until Thorim, where I did Arena for the first time.  Lots of DPS died in there.  Mmhmm.  I guess I wasn’t moving around to pick up mobs enough-a fact that Steve didn’t share with me until after.  Thanks, Steve.  You’re supposed to point out my dumb sooner so I can fix it if it isn’t clicking in my brain, mmkay?  :P  Since I spent so much time in the gauntlet (or staring at green bars) I admit I hadn’t actually watched tank behavior in the Arena before.  Now I know! 

She’s not a half bad alt tank if I do say so myself.  She’s got some gear that needs replacing (just bought a badge belt!) but it’s a toss up between gearing her and the hunter.  A lot of who runs what will of course depend on what’s needed, though I did also finally dual-spec Ambrosyne ret.  She is wearing this lovely mix of epics and…greens, where I didn’t have DPS gear already. 

I didn’t have much in the way of threat issues outside of the Arena, so no complaints there.

Dear Pugs:
I don’t want to see that sort of nonsense, okay?  Okay.

And that’s that for my Monday Recap.  I’ll leave you with this little gem, explaining why my ill-fated, dead-every-ten-seconds level 80 wolf is named HarryOtter.