Mooonfire!

Mad Cow Chronicles: Heroes of Underbog from Llanion on Vimeo.

It has been a month since I posted; the aforesaid post needs fixing to match reality.

I’ve been too busy to post- the dreaded R-type Life keeping me occupied. Later today- it being 3:47 AM as I type this- I may expand upon, elaborate, or even post entirely new posts. My gear lists, both recieved and desired, are out of date and need fixing.

All of this, however, pales beside the reason I am posting now. The reason glimmers in my brain.

I just Panzered Underbog. We had a member lag out right after the first boss’ guardian trash, so we four-manned that boss and most of the way to the next one before a 69 Paladin guildmate came in to help. We wiped three times in all- once on the aforementioned guardian trash, once to an insect three-pull and once to carelessness (our mage, marking things up, got a Bog Lord by mistake). I, as the tank, managed to die three additional times- once on the second boss and once on each Bog Lord- bringing them down in the process (in the case of BOTH Bog Lords, we wobbled and fell forward at the same time).

Now we’re doing all this in a mix of quest blues, crafted epics, a little Kara gear and, in my case, PVP reward gear (one piece of Vindicator’s, and one piece of Veteran’s; a Merciless Gladiator’s and quite a lot of the blue Outland reputation PVP gear).

So why, if we have such rocking gear, did we wipe three times?

Well, be fair.

It was a Heroic.

Today’s entry is the first in what will (hopefully) be a series called “Mechanics With a Rubber Wrench”. The theme is to break down, into simple concepts and ideas, the not-so-horribly-simple and occasionally viciously-complex mechanics of World of Warcraft.

In this way, you can learn to be a better [player|raider|PVPer|Artisan Chef] without having to do the math. This is helpful if you’re not mathematically inclined, if the whole idea of ‘defense rating’ is confusing, or if you’re just lazy.

Today’s topic: The Hit Table.

If you, or someone you know, has abnormally low DPS in fights, don’t despair! You may not be an utter noob! It’s not necessarily that your weapon sucks, that your skill rotations are terrible or that your pet spent half the instance trying to do unspeakable things with the tank’s leg!

It could just come down to Hit Rating!

Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have an example of The Hit Table. Now here’s how attacks work in game, as far as anyone’s been able to piece together from research and Blizzardian tidbits.

When you swing your weapon or fire your bow, a /roll 10000 takes place on the server. Your attack is placed somewhere on this table based on what you rolled. Let’s assume 0 is at the top of the table and 10000 is at the bottom (though it doesn’t really matter- we just need an arbitrary method of placing a roll on the table).

Clearly, you want your htis to land on Critical Strike or Hit, and definitely do NOT want them landing on Block, Glancing Blow, Parry, Dodge or, heaven forfend, Miss. But how to ensure that this happens?

Well, imagine that there’s an endless supply of Hit ‘below’ the chart, constantly welling upwards- that is to say, any empty space on the chart will be immediately filled, because all the fields move up to fill the empty space, and the Hit segment expands as needed to make sure there’s no gaps left.

I won’t go into the math here, but the various sizes of the segments of the chart are based on many things:

• Your Level
• The mob’s level
• Your weapon skill
• Whether you are fighting from range
• Whether you are in front of or behind the mob
• Whether you are single or dual-wielding
• Your gear’s statistics (expertise, critical hit rating, agility, and hit rating)
• Whether or not the Balance-talented spell “Improved Faerie Fire” is present on the mob
• Whether you’ve eaten Spicy Hot Talbuk recently
• Probably more that I’ve missed…

Assumptions I’m going to be making include:

You are level 70; The mob is a raid boss (level 73, which the game shows as a skull); You are NOT dual-wielding; you have your weapon skill at 350; you are either fighting at range (guns, bows, crossbows or thrown) or are standing in the mob’s rear arc.

With those assumptions made, I can tell you, definitively, the following things:

1: Without some boost to your abilities, you are going to miss 9% of your attacks. Sucks to be you.

2: You will not ever get parried or dodged; those two things require a frontal-arc melee attack.

Okay, so missing 9% of your attacks… well, that’s bad! But wait a minute- let’s assume for a second that my chance to land a critical hit can be boosted insanely high- to 100%- then you’ll never miss and always crit, right?

Wrong. Critical Strike is second from the bottom and can’t expand upwards until other things “get out of the way”. (It can, however, expand downwards, meaning that you no longer land normal hits but instead all criticals. This is referred to as ‘pushing off the table’, as in ‘My crit rating is so high I’ve pushed normal hits off the table.’)

So… how to get these other things out of the way?

Eliminating Dodge and Parry:

Stand away from the mob and fight at range; or; attack from behind. Attacks from behind cannot be dodged nor parried. Similarly, ranged attacks cannot be dodged or parried. Those two chances will be reduced to 0; those entries can be entirely taken out of the table (not pushed off, but actually removed completely). The second way of doing this is with Expertise Rating, which I am not going to go into in-depth today; Let it suffice to say that with sufficient Expertise Rating, you can attack from in front and still allow zero chance to be parried or dodged.

Eliminating Glancing Blows:

Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t do this, and though I hate to agree with conventional wisdom I’ve yet to see a scrap of proof that says there’s a way to reduce the chance of these things happening. Sorry.

Eliminating Blocks:

See above, ‘Glancing Blows’.

Eliminating Missed Attacks:

Here we come to the meat of the subject. It is not only possible but actually simple to reduce the chance that you will miss to zero.

Attain a hit rating of at least 142 points.

Hit ‘rating’ and hit ‘chance’ are not, of course, the same thing. And again, there’s lots of complex math but, take it from me, the 9% miss chance vs. a level-Skull mob is removed with 142 hit rating. This is referred to as ‘the hit cap’ for hunters and melee classes that single-wield (anyone using the classic ’sword-and-board’ combo, anyone using a two-handed weapon and, of course, feral druids). At this level of hit rating, you will never actually miss.

There are of course ways to lower that number- various classes have talents that increase chance to hit (generally by 3%, reducing their hit cap by 47); a draenei Paladin, Warrior or Hunter’s racial aura reduces the hit cap of their party by 15.77 by their mere presence (1% chance to hit) and, of course, a druid tagging the mob with a three-point Improved Faerie Fire allows another 3% (47-point) reduction for anyone attacking that mob physically.

But How?

As noted above- be Draenei of the appropriate class, talent for it, beg a Balance druid to come along. There’s also hit rating on gear; ranged users (almost always hunters) can pick up ranged-only hit rating via the [Biznick’s] (but good luck finding an engineer who has the schematic, these days). Finally there are gems, a [glyph], the Surefooted enchant and even [food] that can be used to top yourself out. (Hunters can also get an improving leg or head armor kit via Zul’Gurub, but that place is rarely run these days).

Now you know how the hit table (theoretically, anyway) works! This should allow you (and your raidmates, feel free to point them here) to up their DPS much faster than simply stacking crit chance or attack power. It also makes for more predictable damage, which makes your tanks very, very happy.

Go forth and conquer! (and, seriously, if your raidmates keep complaining about their miss numbers, send them here…)

When I first zoned into Quel’Danas, I thought it was a great idea. And the atmosphere, the lovely, somewhat chaotic, help-help-we-are-under-attack atmosphere, was, to my way of thinking, lovely. Compelling even. But

Magister’s Terrace. I DON’T like it. There’s only so much “You must be perfect” that I can handle, and that instance not only tops me off but overflows me, in that regard.

Then there’s the dailies. Oh, the dailies. I pretty much have to do them every day to stay abreast of my expenses (more on this in a minute) but… There’s only so many times I can do the same things over and over and over and over and over again until I start to hate them. I tell you what, Blizzard- let me do the Distraction at the Dead Scar, I.E. My Favorite, once for each of the daily quests otherwise available? Please?

I am enjoying the fishing dailies, though, and to some extent the cooking ones (though since I’ve finally tracked down both of the blue recipes from there, those, a little less).

So what does this mean?

Simple-

The new content added in 2.4 is already stale for me.

New badge rewards? That’s… nice I guess? The problem is that my guild isn’t stymied through lack of gear (for the most part). We’re geared fine. We just don’t have the manpower to make the jump out of Karazhan.

Gee, I guess that means that Sunwell Plateau isn’t going to hold my interest very much, is it?

The new dailies? As I’ve heard it said- “Twelve bear asses, go!”

And again.
And again.
And again.
And again until you want to scream.

So, apropos of screaming, what am I doing in game these days?

1: Arenas.
I’m not going in expecting to be the top the best near the best good poor acceptable at this game, but I am having fun with my young lady and a friend of ours who is an almost-identical troll hunterette to match Maliata. This means that I have to rely on my raid frames to tell who’s taking damage, since all I can tell in the field is “The hunter’s getting attack!”

And they both have scorpid pets. Identical scorpid pets.

Arenas leads well into the second thing, which is

2: Panzerkin (AKA The Mad Cow Chronicles)
I tanked my first (as a caster) five-man last week and I’m going to continue burbling about it until I get the video posted, which could take quite a while. Durnholde may be a 66-68 instance but I did it in blues/scattered badge rewards/bg rewards for the most part, which I figure means I didn’t outgear it too harshly. The challenge will be to pull the same trick with, oh, Steamvaults or Arcatraz or something.

I’m finding this fun, but the only real upgrades are via arenas, and there’s a static limit on how fast I can gain arena points.

3: Prismspec work
This is one of my other ideas. I want one, single, solitary spec that is adequate, if not brilliant, for my druiding needs. I think what I’m using now is just about it, though I’m still debating between Furor (for the rare times I AM in a feral form) and Imp Mark (normally useless except when you really NEED that extra bonus, heh).

4: Soloing Older Content
I can do up to (but not including) Baron Rivendare on Undead Strat. By myself. As a non-feral. I can do up to (but not including) the final boss on the Scarlet Side as well, though that’s harder (bloody healer caster four-pulls melee interrupting rassin’ frassin’…).

To be fair, I’ve wiped (twice) on Rivendare, and never actually tried the final Scarlet boss. I also skipped the Cannon-master- bad druid!

My best time so far is engaging Rammstein with 20 seconds to go on the ultimatum timer- though, to be fair, I managed to accidentally kill myself earlier in the instance. Remove that little timer foible (and figure out a way to handle the 5x Elite pull that comes after Rammstein) and I may be able to actually attempt Rivendare with some time left on the clock.

For those who are curious, my problems with him were based on not being able to do AoE damage four times per minute to take his skeleton assistants down, but I’m fairly sure I’ve come up with a way to handle that. I’ll let you know.

This entire activity is exempt from “Must Be Perfect” syndrome because, if I wipe, I have not wasted anyone else’s time.

5: Old-School Tuesdays.

I tried to start this when I was in my last guild, but the chronic lack-of-interest problem stopped me. I tried it again in KMM, and was immediately taken up by three people, with the same number again going “That’s cool, but I can’t usually make Tuesday nights. :(”

We’ve spent the last months or so working on our Onyxia attunements (SUCH a pain for Horde players- contrast one instance run and three raid runs plus four elite world bosses to kill starting at level 55 vs something like two instance runs, one world boss and three fed-ex quests starting at level 48 for Alliance). Tonight, we get a third player his Onyxia key (half a dozen of us also picked up Blackwing Lair attunement).

Tonight, we hope, we’re going to go in and see what she’s got that’s so exciting. We hope.

If we win, that’s 50g each and an eighteen-slot bag for one of us, so…

6: Enchanting

I dropped mining and have been levelling enchanting. It’s been pleasant.

7: Old Content (Rep and attunements)
I’m actually in higher standing with the Argent Dawn at the moment than I am with the Shattered Sun. Go figure. The Strat runs are providing me with extreme amounts of reputation. I’m going to be running Blackrock Depths next to get enchanting mats, and that should help me level my AD rep further via the Dark Iron turnins.

I’m also a key-and-attunement fanatic. Thus far in the list of ‘keys not often picked up’-

Blackwing Lair attuned
Onyxia Key
UBRS key
Anzu Key
Key to Stratholme
Master Key to the City of Stratholme

I’m working on my Molten Core and naturally my Naxxramas attunements.

So, I’m keeping busy and regard the new daily quests as a boring, but necessary evil to keep me financially solvent through all of this (ever tried to gem, enchant and keep in good repair five sets of gear? It ain’t pretty).

In other words, I’ve been occupying my time with fighting the Scourge threat and hunting dragons- What are you doing to keep yourself interested in the game?

I figure it’s important to put something up here so you know I’m not dead (beyond “I’ll do a real post later, I promise”).

So here you are.

And that’s why I haven’t been writing! I’ve been working on the stuff referred to in the video, either in-game or out.

I have a nice long panzerkin post for you later. For now, I would merely like to note that I was actually on Quel’danas when Arathor took the Armory. It was disappointing- there was no fanfare, no epic battle to take the building. It was just a zone-wide yell of “The armory is ours!” or words to that effect, and the NPCs spawned in (and were mobbed by players).

Sort of anticlimatic.

This one runs long. If you get bored or are shocked and dismayed at any point, roll it on down to the bottom of the post where you get a TL;DR explanation.

So the time has come to announce it.

I did, of course, briefly dabble in a Balance-weighted healer build, before switching out due to mana inefficiency. In a spec-tacular blunder (I’m sorry, the puns are worth it) I managed to completely lose sight of the fact that I’d just swapped specs right before 2.4 and an insane boost to my mana efficiency via more MP5 and cheaper Regrowths. The point, however, is that the druid community has a nickname for this sort of build- we call it a ‘Restokin’.

We have names for our other builds too, of course. A build with at least 31 points in Balance, assuming the Moonkin Form talent is taken, is referred to as a ‘Boomkin’, or sometimes a ‘Doomkin’ or, if you really feel like having a feathery fist embedded in your teeth, an ‘oomkin’.

A druid with at least 41 points in Restoration (again, assuming Tree of Life is taken) is usually known simply as a tree druid.

A druid with a 31/30 or 30/31 Feral/Restoration split is known as a lunatic. Sorry, sorry, bad joke, but I can’t find a way that build can be viable. I’ve run it. It’s not so good for me. The opinions of Mooonfire are not those of Blizzard Entertainment and we do not necessarily in any way represent the pure mathematical truth of the matter. If you can make a 30/31 or 31/30 split work for you, by all means go ahead with my blessing. Druids are meant for exploring the mechanics of the game and for pulling crazy ideas out of nowhere.

But there’s one more spec that has acquired a nickname. It’s a monster whispered about in dark corners. Respectable druids don’t even think about them. Even the ‘edgier’ druids who might try speccing Restokin, the druidic equivalent of the guy with all the facial piercings, don’t dare use this spec. Even the guy with “DIAF Staghelm” tattooed on his forehead turned white and muttered about having an appointment to skin some furbolgs when this spec was brought up in conversation.

The reaction of the WoW community at large is to scream about what idiots these folks are. Of course, given that that’s the reaction the WoW Forums will give you if you say you like raspberry jam more than peach jelly, that’s nothing new.

But even other druids shy away from this spec. “I wouldn’t do that,” is the most common response (though this becomes the second-place finisher if you count “You’re joking, right?” as a formal response). Others are harsher. “No. Just no.” “It can’t be done.” “You off your meds?”

Druids comprise only about 10% of the game’s active players.  Within that, a disproportionately large number are Arena Resto druids and presumably will fall out of favor once Arena Resto stops being the flavor of the month.

It falls to a very few players- perhaps less than a couple hundred in the ten million players of this game, perhaps as many as a couple thousand, to take this nightmare spec.

If you spec this way, you can expect a complete and utter lack of PUGs. You may have trouble even getting guild runs. And so it is with some trepidation that I write this post. Phaelia will probably call for my druid license to be revoked. Bell might just set me on fire. Leafy will call for me to be turned into steak. Wara won’t hurt me, but that’s presumably because he’s a fellow Murlock and not because he doesn’t have a sense of the proprieties.

This nightmare spec I have been so obliquely referring to is called a Panzerkin.

Assuming my server software has not rebelled at having to display that nightmare word, I’ll continue to explain. It uses a couple dynamics of the Druid class to turn us into a leather-wearing tank.

“Uh. Llanion? Druids have a tank build. You might have heard of it. It’s called the entire Feral talent tree.”

*busily checks this off his checklist of responses expected to be seen*
Yes, the Feral tree makes for amazing tanks and vicious close-quarters DPS. I should know, I levelled that way. And it’s true, they get a tasty stamina boost.

“Llan, they get an armor boost too!”

Yup. So do Moonkins. An identical one, in fact.

“Bears get a talent to reduce the likelihood of incoming crits!”

I currently am, due to a combination of resilience and defense, uncrittable by any mob below level 72. Oh, and I figure a couple more pieces of PVP gear will put me at completely uncrittable even by raid bosses. Did I mention that the PVP Wyrmhide pieces are heavily focused on intellect and stamina, both statistics critical to Moonkins? As it turns out, of the three specs, Moonkins have the easiest time using PVP gear in PVE.

Oh, and the Wyrmhide’s high on armor, which plays in well to the armor boost in deathchicken form.

“Buh… mana pool!”

About 7k at the moment, planning to drive that up.

“That won’t hold you through any lo-”

Innervate. Melee to regenerate mana when I have a decent threat lead. The Blue Dragon if I have any spirit left, which I doubt. Sporefish, Distilled Wisdom+Dreamstate and oh, yes, Rejuvenation and Mana potions. Plus, Shadow Priests.

“You expect a non-tank to hold threat against a Shadow Priest?”

I’m just going to laugh here. Have you ever run with a deep Balance druid? Balance druids scramble for the normally-pointless 26/2 Meta and slap down a subtle cloak. Quite a few of them also have 5/5 Subtlety and they’re always happy with Salvation. Even with all four of these, a string of ‘lucky’ crits can bring the mobs away from the tank and running towards the Balance druid faster than a level 19 night elf Warsong rogue runs for Crusader/Fiery duals.

“Um… how are you going to handle a two-pull?”

With crowd control, exactly like a warrior would.

“All your crowd control’s used up and you have to tank two mobs-”

All right. We’ll designate them MT and OT, main target and off-target. We’ll even assume I’m slack enough to have a half-second of dead air between spellcasts. Time zero is when the first spell hits and the mobs start running.

0: Starfire hits OT

.5: Moonfire hits MT

2.5: Wrath hits MT

3: Moonfire hits OT

Then it’s just a juggle- Wrathspamming the main target while keeping Insect Swarm and Moonfire on the off-target to keep it off the healers.

“The off-target breaks away and”

Gets Moonfired.

“He’s still running towards the healers so-”

I cyclone him and we finish up on the MT.

“And… then… he… uh…”

Hates me even more when I time a Starfire to hit him coming away from his Cyclone.

“Your health pool is too low for this!”

That’s actually true, at the moment. However, PVP gear is heavy on stamina and I intend to enchant for yet more of the same. I’m hoping to top out to 9k at least, 10k if I’m lucky.

“So you’re mentioning this because…”

I thought it might interest some folks. Also, if you look on my sidebar below ‘/grabby hands’, I have ‘/kaboom’. ‘/kaboom’ tracks my goals (and exploits!) as a Panzerkin. There will eventually be movies, naturally.

Now, it’s off to grind for more gear!

Waiting in the queue for Arathi Basin at the moment, for my first bit of 2.4 PVP.

I picked up 4/5 blue Faction PVP gear, so I’m toting a decent level of resilience for the first time. Picked it up in Moonkin flavor, in fact, since I’m trying to construct a Panzerkin.

In other news, I switched back to 19/42 Tree build. I didn’t have the mana longevity I wanted. Of course, that was in 2.3, much to my disgust when I realized I’d respecced early. Well, I’m breaking in a new raid healer and the aura helps, so we’ll give it a couple weeks to let the respec cost drop before I swap back and try the Boomhealer again.

Challenge accepted, Matticus, challenge accepted. Today’s topic, drawing from a headline of the Cosmopolitan issue you had featured in your blog:

“Little Mouse Moves to Make Encounters ‘HoT’ter!”

Don’t look at me like that, you started this.

---

One of the things most overlooked by players is their mouse. O humble mouse, without you how would I ping the minimap? Deprived of your company, must I resort to tab-targetting? What a debt we owe you, o Mouse, and how useful can you be? Let me count the ways…Fun Things To Do With Your Mouse:Movement. If you’re using your keyboard to turn then, I’m sorry, but you’re doing it wrong. You can use the mouse to whip around a 270 degree turn in the time it takes the ‘turn’ keys to go through 45 degrees. You have much more control. The default is that a right-click and hold, combined with left and right motions of the mouse, position your character. Don’t keyboard turn. It makes healers cry. You don’t want to make healers cry, do you? Do you?

Push My Buttons, Baby:

I find that a lot of people don’t use macros. This makes me really sad, because these same people fill their screen with eighteen frillion buttons until you cannot see the game. Here’s another idea. Let’s say you want to cast Innervate, you want to cast Mark of the Wild, and you want to cast Thorns. All three of these are fairly commonly used, and because of the ten-minute duration on it, you’re going to be casting Thorns, like… a lot.
Type ‘/m’ and press the enter key.
Create a new macro. Name it what you like, pick any button you want for it.
Into the text field, copy-and-paste the following:

/cast [button:1] Mark of the Wild; [button:2] Thorns; [button:3] Innervate;

Drag the button to your buttonbar and close the Macro window.

So… what was the point of all this? Easy- a left-click on this button casts Mark of the Wild. A right-click casts Thorns. A middle-click casts Innervate. Bam, your three most-frequently-cast buffs in one button’s-worth of real estate.

Give Your Game Some Mouseover Action

On the subject of macros, there’s a command that is really quite handy:

/cast [target=mouseover] ‘Spell Name Here’

What does this do? If you use a keybind to push this button while holding the mouse over someone’s unit frame (and possibly even their overhead health bar if you use those), you’ll cast ‘Spell Name Here’ on that target. There’s an add-on, one I highly recommend, called Clique; it lets you easily build this sort of functionality into target frames using your mouse.

What does this mean? It means I can simply click on my raid frames to heal someone. A slightly different click- shift-left-click instead of just a left-click- and a different spell is cast. As far as I can tell, this is similar to the behavior of the addon Healbot, with the tasty advantage that Clique lets me define seperate spells to use if the target is hostile, and lets me cast using my target frame, focus frame, target of target frame… the list goes on.

Whether you use a target=mouseover macro, or whether you use Clique, or Healbot, this is a tecnique that can save you a lot of time, and thereby keep your group alive. It also helps keep your interface uncluttered, something I value.

It Really Is the Size that Counts

And by ’size’, I mean ‘number of buttons’. I play WoW with a Logitech MX-310. It’s a five-button mouse. (In theory, it’s a six-button mouse, but the sixth button continues to baffle me). I could not play without it.

Click-casting gets easier if you have more buttons, and at this point the spells I have bound on Llanion are reflexive.

Single target damage! Left click on friendly to Lifebloom.
Single target LARGE damage- shift-left-click, Regrowth!
Hostile beast-type add! Hover mouse over my target frame, shift-thumbbutton, Hibernate that sucker!

Some Like It Wild — Tips For the Druids Out There

Here’s a nice macro for my fellow nature freaks:

/cast [button:4,nocombat,flyable,noswimming,nomodifier] Swift Flight Form; [button:4,noswimming]Travel Form; [button:4,swimming]Aquatic Form; [button:1]Dire Bear Form; [button:2]Cat Form; [button:5]Moonkin Form;
/cancelform [button:3];

Note that this is all two lines, one /cast and one /cancelform.
This macro gives you a one-touch shift button. Feel free to modify it as you see fit, but as displayed above it does the following:

• Left-click: Dire Bear Form.
• Right-click: Cat Form.
• Button 4 (on my mouse, under my thumb):

1. Swift Flight Form if it’s available (in Outlands, not in combat, not swimming)
2. Travel Form if that’s more appropriate (in combat, or in Azeroth, but not swimming)
3. Aquatic Form if that’s your best choice (I.E. if you’re swimming at the time)
4. If you want to override this behavior and get Travel Form (in Ogri’la, for example, where it can be dangerous to take to the air), hold down shift as you click with button 4 and it overrides Swift Flight to drop into Travel Form.

• Button 5 (on my mouse, under my ring finger): Moonkin Form.

Obviously, this macro needs changing to suit circumstances (Not all of you will have stayed up ’til 1:30 AM last night to finally claim your Swift Flight Form, for example), but it’s a very handy resource to have a one-touch shifting button.

Paladins could use this for auras, in a modified form; Hunters for aspects, warriors for Stances- the possibilities are there.

Keep Your Partner Lively- The #1 Mouse Tip For Druids Who Need a Quick (Battlerez)

Hypothetical Situation Time!

You’re three minutes into a boss-fight, paying attention to the health bars like a good little druid, maintaining your own situational awareness, when the aggro-happy rogue pulls aggro from one of the boss’ adds and dies.

You know three things:

1. He’s somewhere in the 220 degrees of room behind the area you were monitoring.
2. You have to keep healing the tanks.
3. The order just went out to drop a battle-rez on him.

Unless you’re much better-coordinated than I am, or have a naturally much more sunny disposition, this is your cue to start cursing frantically under your breath.
Rebirth, you see, has a fascinating targetting mechanic- you have to target the corpse manually, either before or after casting the spell. Those of us- myself included- who use click-casting add-ons (I use Clique & Grid, but I know others like Healbot) find that we have to disrupt our nice shiny routine, often for a full ten seconds of searching as we mutter imprecations under our breath and try to convince the rogue (who, given how he died, is probably not paying a lot of attention) to just bloody PING HIMSELF on the minimap so we can find his soggy corpse and drag it back into action.

….Yes, this situation does frustrate me.

Well. Did frustrate me.

Then I built a nice macro. Here it is below:

/target mouseover
/script local spell = UnitCastingInfo(\”player\”); if (spell == \”Rebirth\”) then SendChatMessage(’Rebirth headed out to ‘ .. UnitName(\”playertarget\”) .. ‘!’, \”SAY\”); end
/cast [help,dead] Rebirth;
/targetlasttarget

Note that this is four lines in your macro window- one starts with /target, one starts with /script, one starts with /cast and the last line in its entirety is the word ‘/targetlasttarget’.

What does it do? How do you use it?
If you click-cast, like myself, bind this macro to execute when you click a friendly userframe (or shift-click, or right-click, or alt-shift-click, or whatever. I have it bound to CTRL+leftclick).

If you don’t click-cast, put that macro on a button bound to a key. To use it, hover your mouse pointer over the stiff’s unit-frame and peg the key.

Now, whether you use click-casting or the key+hover method, you need to peg the macro twice in quick succession. What will happen is this:

First Push: Presumably you’re still targetting someone else, either a living friendly or a living hostile. The macro targets your stiff. The macro skips the line that starts with /script because you don’t meet its conditions (trust me on this). Rebirth starts casting.

Second Push: Rebirth is already casting, so the /script command goes off. It’s a touch complex, but essentially what it does is says, in /say: “Rebirth headed out to X!” where X is the name of the sap who needs to wake up and smell the ichor. It will say this if, and only if, you are actively casting Rebirth at the time. Thus the spammage. If you throw Nature’s Swiftness into the mix for really fast casting, the announcement just… won’t work. I’m still prodding at it. Regardless, you end up targetting your original target, with scarce a flicker of targetting frames to tell you that you were ever targetting somewhere else.

There You Have It!With these Little Mouse Moves, you can make all your enounters HoT ones. Have fun!

Caveat Emptor: The version of the Quick Rebirth macro presented in this article is modified from the last known working version. It SHOULD work perfectly- I haven’t tested it yet as I have no WoW access for a couple more hours.

Edited to add: I tried to get fancy and add Innervate to the QR macro to be used on living targets. Too bad that pushed it over the character limit. Oops. The version shown above is the canonical authorized version.

It behooves me (ahahaha!) to learn that I should never make predictions about upcoming posts, either in particulars regarding date, substance, category or number. It seems that saying I’m going to post, no matter in what way or how nebulous the reference, leads to my being compelled to spend at least one week not-blogging.

In theory, I have now learned this. In practice, I suspect, not so much.

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I respecced recently. I went from 17/0/44 “Angry Tree” Heal/Solo/Utility build to a 37/0/24 “Raid Support” Heal/Solo/Utility build. I am finding many things about this.

1. Dreamstate + Intensity = Mana Regen, whoa.
2. Nature’s Grace is my friend. Suddenly there’s a point to getting crits on spells.
3. I need to run a heroic to see how this changes my healing style. I do have a couple ideas involving spamming downranked spells to force crits.
4. I miss Swiftmend.
5. My raidmates love me; Improved Faerie Fire means that the hunters, rogues, enhancment shamans, tanks and fury warriors can pretty much slice 47 hit rating out of their gear without injury to their DPS. They’re all happy now about how they can put more gear, gems, and other enhancements towards straight-up damage stats. (In some cases, this means they can use buff foods they want instead of Spicy Hot Talbuk.)
6. Just the fact that Faerie Fire will be on the mobs means the damage happens faster and harder. If only Imp FF gave the same bonus to spells…
7. Insect Swarm. 2% chance to miss makes for happier healers. Just the fact that I can put this up during fights now makes for shorter fights, which also makes for happier healers.
8. Healing Touch can weasel its way back into my healing rota. In fact, I have this neat theory about a downranked Healing Touch- I can’t say too much here, lest the curse strikes again.
9. I can see my gear again. I’ll be frank, I don’t like looking like a wilted piece of broccoli, and I really don’t like the 80% movement snare. If Andriges’ skins (thanks to Phaelia for showcasing these on Resto4Life) were in the game, this would be a different matter, but they aren’t.
10. I have Moonkin form for the first time in my druiding career. It’s rather tasty, though I must admit I keep forgetting to use it. On the other hand, now that there’s no pressing reason for me to be glommed in with the tank group, I can be in the caster group, which means that there are some evil things happening on, say, trash pulls… or during Curator’s Evocates… or on Shade if he’s not hitting us hard enough…
11. I have found that I much prefer Control of Nature 3/3 to Nature’s Grasp+2 points of Impr. NG.
12. If I want to group and they already have a healer… I’m actually useful now. I don’t have to just mumble about raking my leaves and rustle off to sit in a corner. I can DPS in five-mans.
13. Spirit is now on-par, in my personal item-budgeting thoughts, with Intellect (Int takes the place of Spirit as regards the 25% bonus to +healing… though now it gives +damage as well. And even when not in tree form). This is great, because, uh, there are a lot of sources for +int. Including the [Flask of Distilled Wisdom]. An actual flask that has a point for healing now! It’s great. (Well, okay, so 16 +dmg/heal and 6.5 MP5 isn’t exactly gamebreaking. It’s more advantage than I got from that flask in my old build, and better than yet more mana regen).
14. MmmmmmmOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONFIRE!