Thursday 19 June 2008

Crazy shoulders from the Old Hillsbrad Foothills

I was in Nagrand making progress on the Greatmother Chain when a guild run to Old Hillsbrad Foothills started to form. I keenly signed up because one has to complete OHF before one can get into Black Morass so it is indirectly on the Karazhan keying chain. Our intrepid group consisted of a Druid tank, holy priest, shadow priest, mage and resto shaman (me). So again I got some healing practise but I've not yet been allowed sole responsibility for a group.


Mostly the run went well; I've coded those /stopcasting macros onto my heals now so I don't need to twitch around. This makes it a little easier to keep a heal in flight then cancel it at the last moment. I can also switch who I'm healing by selecting them and casting the heal I want, the one in flight is now cancelled and the new heal starts.


So some tips from my experience:


  • The guards down in the internment camp AOE fear, so a Tremor Totem is good to have down.
  • The archers in Tarren Mill (or something) does a lot of poisons. After trying to manually remove poison a few times I stuck a Poison Cleansing Totem down.
  • When you follow the big green guy Mr Thrall, he can and should be healed. Unfortunately he does not come up in the party or in Grid, so I set Thrall as my focus using the in-game "set focus" key binding, which I have set to Alt-F. I run the FocusFrame mod which shows your focus as another target frame, exactly like a targetted mob, so I could see when Thrall was taking damage. Clicking on the focus frame then targeted Thrall so I could easily heal him while healing the group. Boy does he have a lot of health - a max rank Healing Wave was restoring a sliver of his health.


The highlight of the run was when I got the Ravenwing Pauldrons from Lieutenant Drake in the internment camp. Now although not strictly Shaman items, they were better than my previous green shoulders so I nabbed them. Plus they look really quite silly, with giant feathers almost half my height sticking out of my shoulders. Unfortunately I later handed in a quest on the Greatmother chain, received 250 Sha'tar rep, dinged honoured and bought the Seer's Ringmail Shoulderpads which beats the Ravenwing Pauldrons in all but appearance.


Now I am honoured with Sha'tar, only Lower City and Keeper of Time are left. The OHF run got me to half way through friendly with KoT, so once Black Morass is complete I should be honoured and can get the Seer's Ringmail Headpiece.

2 comments:

Merlot said...

Ok, here's a question for you: is the seer's head piece really better than the headband of simm'onz? That's a lot of mp5 to loose, even if you can partly make it up in gems. I'm in two minds...

Rakhman said...

Hmm I'm also not entirely sure. The raw stats say the Seer's loose 24 healing and 12 mp5. However this thread http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t24796-shaman_restoration/#Meta_Gems seems to be saying that if I put an Insightful Earthstorm Diamond in a meta socket I get the equivalent of 19.3 mp5 worst case. Unfortunately I'd need at least 2 red, 2 yellow and 2 blue gems but I have mainly reds.

The +12 int of the IED is worth +3.6 healing due to the Shaman Nature's Blessing talent. The +21 int of the Seer's is worth +6.3 healing. With a Teardrop Living Ruby in the red slot thats another 18 healing. So a total of 71.9 healing.

So *if* I could meet the gem requirements of the IED the Seer's Ringmail Head could be worth a gain of 3.9, probably 3 with rounding, healing and effective 7.3 mp5 over the Simmons. But then what would I loose regemming from reds to other gems to meet the requirements for IED?

In summary I would say they are probably equivalent unless I had a load of gold to spend on good gems, an IED, etc. Really a better headpiece would justify an IED I think.

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