Second Magister’s Terrace run

Ran it for the sec­ond time with my guild, again on my heal­ing priest. This time I bet­ter appre­ci­ated its virtues, I think. It’s a fun, inter­est­ing, and relax­ing instance, per­fect in length. It runs like a greatest-hits ver­sion of Burn­ing Cru­sade boss-fight design.

Of course, both times I’ve healed it have been with a very tal­ented pro­tec­tion pal­adin doing the tank­ing. Pro­tec­tion pally tank­ing every­thing is easy-mode for every­thing but boss fights. I haven’t had to heal the group with a pro­tec­tion war­rior yet, which I’m guess­ing would be (cough) a bit harder due to the aoe encoun­ters. The sad state of war­rior tank­ing is well known. We had a mage, rogue, and hunter, which gave us ample crowd con­trol. The hunter was one of those lovely peo­ple who like to put an ice trap in front of me instead of him. Just a nice run from start to fin­ish, and the rea­son I like the game. Group up with guildies, laugh through an enjoy­able instance together, where effec­tive team­work mat­ters.

I for­got that some­one gets a zomgepic just for com­plet­ing nor­mal mode. Last night that some­one was me, when I lucked into [Kharmaa’s Ring of Fate] off Kael’thas Sun­strider. The socket (on a ring, whee!) goes per­fectly with the quest reward gem ([Teardrop Crim­son Spinel]). I’m not sold on priest heal­ing with spell haste yet because priest heal­ing is a mix of instant/non-instant spells, but I’ll exper­i­ment to see if it’s bet­ter than my [Band of Halos]. Not that you can actu­ally tell most of the time. More on that later.

An inter­est­ing heal­ing note is that in both wins on the Kael’thas, two dps’ers died. It actu­ally got much eas­ier after that, when you have only three peo­ple to keep alive instead of five. Most of the time when some­one dies, that means that the full dam­age of that part of the encounter then turns to some­one else. This event has con­stant global dam­age, so the group takes 100% dam­age with five peo­ple, 80% dam­age with four, and an easy-to-heal-through 60% with three. I’ll shoot for four team­mates alive at the end of the next run.

This is a very fun instance. I’m look­ing for­ward to try­ing this on heroic.

More Words!

• Take the Group Role
• Poly­toons can be Bad
• Raid­ing does not mean Skilled
• There is no heal­ing spreadsheet
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid