Gitr Knows WoW

OK, so you’ve just killed Sneed, now for the Foundry. The spiral ramp isn’t a problem for you as a healer until you get to the bottom. Stay to the outside wall. If you get too close to the inside rail, you will pull a goblin or two or three from below the ramp or on the center platform. With all the healing going on all the way down the ramp, you are going to be high enough on the threat meter to warrant an attack, then you will die, then everyone else will die, and everyone will be pissed at you for being a noob. Don’t do that. As long as you can use good pulling techniques and clear the room, the boss, Gilnid, is easy. He drops a nice ring and crappy pants.

Clearing the mine to the next set of doors is easy as pie, and just mana/heal up before you blast the doors down with the cannon. As you go through the doors, make sure you clear out the goblins to the right if you have anyone pretty low level in the party, because they will come running after a 14 or 16. Clearing your way to Mr. Smite is smooth sailing. Have the tank go after Mr. Smite and generate a lot of aggro before anyone else hits him. Besides, everyone else needs to go after the guards. Put Renew on the tank and take care of the rest of your party. Smite will stun everyone twice as he goes for new weapons, but as long as the tank has aggro, everything will be fine.

My preference when I am group leader is to go left at the ramp and go after Cookie. He has the best wand for many, many levels to come, and the group is doing a good thing to make sure their healer gets some goodies. Otherwise, he drops his mace, which is so-so, but not great by any means.

Go back to the ramp and head around the other way. This is just killing mobs that are obviously more resilient than the ones at the entrance, but nothing special. When going up the final ramp, make sure any lowbies stay close to the edge away from the ship if the patrol is walking by. You don’t want to fight them and trash mobs when partially prepared. If you successfully clear the ramps and get onto the ship, mana up and heal for pulling the patrol, which includes Captain Greenskin. He drops a great staff, but the quest reward for Van Cleef is a better staff for priests. Regardless, either staff will be replaced by the Illusionary Rod in SM in your 30s. The patrol is pretty basic. Just heal. If you have a good tank, you’ll be fine.

Now for the moment everyone in the group has been waiting for: Van Cleef. You all want his head. Why else would you be in Deadmines? If you have a high enough rogue or stealthable player, have them stun VC and start in on his guards with the other 3 members. When the stun breaks, the tank needs to take him fast. When he gets to 50%, he will spawn new guards; ignore them. Take VC down fast so you can concentrate your healing on the tank for that part, and then spread it out for taking out the new guards. Loot the body, turn in the head, and you are done. Congratulations.

Next guide: The Stockades.

What would a Priest guide to Deadmines be without some good old stories about grouping as a 20s healer? Enjoy.

Heel me

March 19th, 2006 by Gitr

OK, people, there are obviously a few things you need to know about grouping. I know this is preaching to the choir for most of you, but good grief, save everyone in the group trouble and don’t accept an invite if you’re going to do stupid stuff.

Last night I tried for 15 minutes to get into PuGs for Stockades to get going on the Defias questline after killing Van Cleef. I had to talk a hunter into letting me in. He was level 24 and had a level 25 rogue with him. I got one good mage I’d grouped with before into it at level 25, and we sent an invite for a 31 priest who was on her way.

There are standards to 5-man groups:

• If you are a n00b, at least let the leader know, if not the whole group. Then they can advise you on what happens in that instance. In most cases, the rest can even adjust and be ready for your n00bishness.
• If you might have to leave, say that up front. Nothing is worse than spending an hour going in and not being able to finish everyone’s quest because of one person. If there’s a real-life issue or emergency, those are understandable and the group will just be disappointed, not pissed.
• If you see a green drop, hit Greed unless you want to wear it then or within a level or so. In the case of equipping, select Need and let others know the first time to feel out the group. 99% of groups will tell you that’s fine and keep the extra info to yourself.
• No looting for friends or alts unless you ask the whole group before making your selection.
• Use people’s names or shortened versions of them. Don’t keep calling people warrior or healer.
• Don’t pull without people being at full mana!!
• Don’t pull too many mobs or be stupid with your positioning so you do a body pull from pats in the middle of the fight.
• Pull mobs off the squishies ASAP. Don’t make them cry for help.
• Don’t keep asking the healer for healing. Over and over again. Here is an example:

My leaving came after telling them 3 times that they don’t need to ask for heals. I told them that I’d either heal them or I was out of mana. All they have to do is look, not type an idiotic request for healing when that is impossible. In this case, Lorenna is the other priest, more than capable of fading, bubbling, or killing the 2 mobs she had on her, but the others were too busy working on one mob than come help her. This also came after my repeated requests to not pull until I was at full mana. Brenie could confirm I asked about 10 times in the course of 15 minutes. The last response I had in this hallway was, “priest, we ARE FINE.” Fine. Die then. Idiot. Hearth. /ignore.

It took 8 rooms for us to wipe. Now was that becuase we were fine, or they were just dang lucky they had someone to heal their numbskulls? I’m not saying I’m the best priest out there for my level, but no one dies when it’s even a moderately bad situation. All hell has to break loose before any group I’ve been in wipes. In 10 DM runs, I’ve been in 3 wipes and all were because of bad pulls. In those runs, how many have died? 16. All of us 3 times and a level 11 pet that had 2 mobs on it. I have the Lavishly Jeweled Ring, Cookie’s Stirring Rod, Corsair’s Overshirt, and the Emberstone Staff from Deadmines. That’s all the blue drops from all the bosses in DM. And someone thinks they need to tell me they need healing? Get out of my group. Oh, it’s not my group? C’ya.

I have run Deadmines over 30 times as a like-level priest, so I’m guessing that finally gives me the right to write a guide to healing. I will be assuming a few things about your character, skills, and interface, so read this over carefully, or your group may end up dead.

• You have ‘invested’ in at least some +healing gear.
• You are specced at least some Holy for threat reduction.
• You are not the lowest level member, or are at least level 24 if you are all like-level.
• I would highly recommend ClickHeal for easy healing and buffing of party members.

Now for the basics. The instance starts out with a bunch of squishies wandering around and miners at the walls. The casters are elites and start throwing fireballs at the biggest threat around. If you overheal, that is you. If you are too low level, that is you. Your group should be able to get through this entire area using Renews and an occassional bubble on your squishies when they start nuking.

The first boss is Rhahk’Zor and is stupid-easy. Let me make this abundantly clear right now. If your group wipes or anyone dies fighting him, you are in trouble. Kick anyone who dies or find an excuse to leave the group, because they suck. It’s possible that you do, too, for not healing them enough, but there are players out there bad enough to get killed in this fight before you have a chance to do anything. The technique on him is simple, wait until he walks closest to your door, pull him through into the mineshaft where you all are, and then take out the guys that were with him. Mana up now! There will be patrols coming along behind, with the time depending on how efficient you were at killing Rhahk’Zor.

Now it is time to start paying a little bit of attention. You will be doing a bit more Flash Heals and putting Renews on more party members. Proceed to the next doors. There are a bunch of goblins inside. Mana up and open the doors. Have a hunter (preferred) or tank with their ranged weapon pull NO MORE THAN TWO goblins at a time. You will make easy work by getting one at a time, but three at a time will likely wear you down and possibly result in a death or two. You need to be careful to stay away from accidently pulling additional goblins, but also keeping people in your line of sight (LOS) for healing. I suggest going through the doors once the pulling has moved in there and going to the right and standing in that corner with a good view of the room.

The shredder and Sneed are the next boss. The shredder has a lot of HP, but if everyone has been healed and drank up, I’ve never seen a group have a problem. Groups that make it that far know what they are doing enough to kill the shredder. A word of caution: wait until the shredder has gone up the hill and pull the other goblins before engaging the shredder. After the shredder goes down, the driver, Sneed, is pissed that you broke his machine and he is no wimp. Sometimes he is still buried in the machine, but the tank should be able to pull him out to see for the others to target if they haven’t already. Sneed will really pack a wallop, but nothing a good group can’t handle. Bubble the tank after he gets good aggro. Mana up and wait for the patrols, or at least be aware that they will be coming behind you as you proceed through the doors.

Insist from this point on that the tank gains aggro before others engage. It saves a lot of mana by only healing one or two party members. Put a Renew on the tank before engagement and leave them alone until it wears off.

The next room is a pain in the tookus, and I will continue at my next break at work.

I broke the stinking theme AGAIN!! After all that work, too. I’m getting a parse error for an extra ‘$’ on a line that doesn’t have an ‘$’ and it’s really ticking me off. So I’m switching to this theme. It’s really cool, except for the issue that it is supposed to be 3-columns. So, it will be up and down and colors all funky, but should get better all day long. When the blogroll splits into my categories and slides over from underneath the other column, you know I’m learning something.

My car is running on 3 cylinders today after a spark plug gasket blew yesterday, so it’s time to replace the whole kit. I’ll be leaving after lunch, so we’ll see how much blogging I get done.

Edit: I discovered at my parents’ house when the rain got too bad to work on the car that the site displays just fine with Firefox. The text link ad is supposed to display in the far right (3rd) column and there should be a wrapping shadow to the right of the articles. If that is the case, please leave a comment about which browser you are using. – Thanks.

Here is some of what I’ve found:

• Frostbolt posted an incredible Matrox display that should have WoW users around the globe drooling.
• Inner Fire did a site re-design that is very nice and found some guides to professions.
• Aeigelus has a personal guide for raiding as a hunter that is quite informative from his experiences through BWL and Naxx.
• I signed up for Text Link Ads today to attempt to generate enough money to pay for hosting with GoDaddy.com’s plans. This domain expires next month, and I’d like to renew and switch hosts at the same time.
• Shalkis has an interesting post in a role-playing style.

I have a lot of work today and want to incorporate some cool things I’ve seen in other templates and some additional plug-ins to try.

I had some fun now! Starting on Friday, I did an Alexa search to see where this blog ranks, because Problogger.net was mentioning its importance for gaining credibility. So, how credible is Gitr’s WoW Blog?

#3? With the first two having nothing to do with World of Warcraft? I had no idea something like Alexa would rank it that high. I’m not exactly sure what Alexa is for or who they are, but seeing that sure made my day!

Friday, I wanted to ding 35 when I got home, so that’s what I did. I went and started slaughtering centaurs again. The Gelkis clan really doesn’t like me right now. I went and did a couple of Magram Alliance quests to boot. When the profile updates, if they ever get around to clearing out the queue, you’ll see just how much they don’t tolerate my presence.

I was very pleased to find Rexxar and Misha walk right past me as I was fighing. It took a while to dawn on me that they are on my “team” now. I saw him several times this weekend, and finally decided to wave at him as he passed.

I killed Khan Dez’hepah and turned in his head and finished grinding for Centaur Ears to ding 35.

I’m starting to get a little annoyed at my gear now. I can only kill level 38s. That is just plain unnacceptable. I could get attacked by some Alliance jerk at any time. Why, just this morning I was on my way to Ghost Walker Outpost and got ganked by a 38 gnome warlock. “Hey, I thought you said you could kill 38s,” you might be thinking. Yes, NPC 38s, but not resourceful people, especially those that carry their own tanks around. This problem led me to the AH this morning to replace my current gear. Now I’m very uncontent.

Now that I’ve seen a Staff of Jordan on the server and know that it is level 35, I will not be satisfied with my dps until I have one. Now, at that price, I’d better unload the Deadly Poisons XI book I bought that still hasn’t sold. I really get antsy when I do big purchases according to Auctioneer scans, and that book is one that may end up biting me. I think I spent 40-50G for it and it was supposed to go for 145G. It lists for a 6G fee and I’ve tried 3 times. It’s down to 80G now, and still haven’t seen it on the AH since.

At 285G, the Staff of Jordan seems a bit out of reach, so I may have to settle for a Hypnotic Blade and something else for +INT or +Shadow/Spell Damage to go in my off-hand. That would make me sad… 🙁