Valithiria Dreamwalker impressions
I have some tips on Valithiria Dreamwalker – spec, glyphs, gear changes, UI, rotations etc – I’ll post those a little later as a mini tips post (and later, I’ll integrate it into the Frostwing Halls tip post). For now, I just wanted to reflect on our first encounter.
- make a target macro so I don’t keep losing her as my target. Yes, she’s a whopping great dragon in the middle of the room, but I still managed to click on other people by accident. Seconds count, and fumbling on your target is bad.
- tweak Dotimer to get my HoT rotation as tight as possible (done – I’ll show you guys later)
- DON’T FAIL AT CLOUDS
- Mark healers so we don’t all run for the same portal
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Yes please! Looking forward to your setup and your impressions, I am gimped without Grid… and honestly have no idea about maximing my HPS. I just keep people alive, I don’t look at meters!
Jen´s last blog ..A holy paladin walks into Icecrown…
If it makes you feel better we had 2 druids and a pally going in, and by the end the other druid was absolutely kicking ass…. He did 39% of the healing to the boss and me and the pally were still at about did about 19% each.
I’ll be interested in seeing how you specced and glyphed. I went for rapid rejuv and nourish which i think worked pretty well, wish I had respecced and taken a build with empowered touch – maybe next time!
Lath´s last blog ..But I Can’t Use a Sword?
I tried going with Valithria as a focus target myself, but every time I zoned through the portals I lost my focus target and lost precious healing seconds re-acquiring her. If I had done more than one attempt on her as healing her (10 man), I would’ve gone with this macro:
/focus Valithria
/cast [@focus] Rejuvenation
…and bound that over my usual set-focus macro. I use Pitbull and have my focus target health bar right next to my grid frames, with self-applied hots and buffs ticking off to the side. It’s not Grid, but it worked better than having a further-away target frame with an overload of buffs that aren’t mine to visually sift through.
/target Valithria
/cast Rejuvenation
…would probably work too, for those that want to use the target frame instead.
We just did her on 25man tonight. 2 pallies and a shaman were going down mostly.
It is an interesting fight, certainly different from all the other encounters!
I was stuck on raid healing but I still managed to do over 10% of the healing just from hots and nourish spam when the rest of the raid wasn’t taking damage.
I did chew through my mana fairly fast doing that, so ducked through a portal mid way through the fight to get some mana regen.
I set the dragon as my focus to conveniently see where my hots where, but with mouse over macros for my casting it wasn’t a problem when I lost the focus going through the portal.
Beru actually topped all of our healers fairly consistently over several of our runs.(2 Pallies, 2 Disc Priests, 2 Shaman, 2 Druids and 1 Holy Priest).
On our actual “kill” Beru was 1st and I was 2nd on total healing done. So Druids are definitely effective. Our pallies seemed to struggle a little with the portals and clouds they can probably do better on future runs.
One thing about my spec on this fight. Normally, I’m kind of bleh on Nature’s Grace, but it is godly in this fight. Make sure that you have it!
Virile´s last blog ..Where’s the Haste?
Also, I noticed that Lath used the Rapid Rejuvenation glyph. I thought about doing this, but decided against it. Primarily because I wanted Rejuv up for as long as possible to keep Nourish buffed.
Personally I used Nourish, Swiftmend, and WG glyphs. I kept WG because I was still responsible for helping the raid.
What is everyone’s thoughts on RR for this fight?
Virile´s last blog ..Where’s the Haste?
I put stuff like that in /focus. There I have another target frame for the focused target. (I don’t know if it’s default UI or an add-on.) That makes it easy to target the thing again.
Hi, I’m a mage!
As far as DPS (err… HPS?) strategy on this fight, basically think of yourselves as affliction warlocks in a general sense.
Your goal is to maximize healing done in a given time. Since you only have a certain number of seconds available before the boss dies (err… is healed?), if you want to maximize HPS, it stands to reason that on any given one of those seconds, you want to be using whichever ability you have at your disposal that will cause the highest amount of damage (err… healing?) to the boss. It’s not about the HPS of a spell per se, it’s about the HPET (Healing Per Execute Time) – so even though a Rejuv lasts 15 seconds (unmodified), it only costs 1.5s (unmodified) to cast. Its HPS may not be as large as nourish, but its HPET is enormous.
Since I’m not a druid, and also not active in wow anymore (so no parses from my guild to draw from), I’m going to pull the first set of HPET numbers I see off EJ, and sort largest to smallest. They may not exactly match your numbers, but they’re probably roughly proportional (poster did not state which glyphs were in use.)
Rejuv – 19603
Regrowth – 15756
Lifebloom – slow 3 stack w/bloom – 15067 (*)
Lifebloom – rolling – Once it is rolling, 1 cast is worth 7 ticks of 1893 or 13251.
Nourish(w/glyph 3 hot) – 12169
Nourish(w/glyph 2 hot) – 11640
Lifebloom – fast 3 stack w/bloom – 10649
Nourish(at least 1 hot) – 10582
* Not being a druid, I admit I don’t know the logistical difference between a slowstack+bloom lifebloom and a rolling lifebloom, so I’m trusting that these numbers are accurate.
And then you simply base your next spell on this priority list. Rejuv is at the top for HPET, so that’s going to always be your obvious first choice – spending a second casting rejuv is always going to give you more raw healing than spending a second casting nourish (no matter how many hots are buffing it). Rejuv, Regrowth, slowstack lifebloom, and use Nourish as a filler when there are no higher-value spells to cast.
Now, as for the rapid rejuv glyph causing you to need to recast rejuv more often? That’s a good thing. Because rejuv is your #1 top HPET spell – the more often you cast it, the more often you’re taking a second or so of time that would otherwise be spent on low-value Nourish filler and using high-value rejuv instead.
Thanks for the analysis. I feel pwnt!
Virile´s last blog ..Where’s the Haste? 
Ian: even with a mouseover macro (which I use primarily for healing, myself), having a unit frame to mouseover is preferable to relying on mousing over the dragon in the environment, plus allowing for hot timers to be visible. If I have to spend a click to target her for those timers and to ensure I have a unit frame to heal over rather than risk some raider running under my mouse, then I want that click to be useful and actually cast a heal.
A couple of suggestions/observations from a DPS who has 3 healing alts (including a resto druid, but have not done this fight as a healer yet)…
I use grid+clique for healing, and have my Clique settings to where I can use my click-casts on the focus frame, target of target, etc. When I did this fight as DPS, I made Valithria my focus target so I could toss HOTs on her between trash waves on my side of the room… of course, after a few wipes because the DPS was getting overrun on the other side of the room, I gave up trying to help heal and instead helped clear the other side when my side was dead. I never got to go through the portals so I didn’t experience losing her as a focus target, but I have a keybind for my /focus so it’d be relatively simple to re-acquire her.
I don’t have my target frame set to use the click-casting options because I have used Clique to bind right-click to my most commonly used heal on all my healers, and I wanted to be able to target someone and still use the right click menu to promote them to party leader, invite, inspect, boot them from party, etc. – setting Valithria as the focus meant I could heal with click casts that way.
Second suggestion – since my main went DPS, I’ve used Quartz as a cast bar… one of the things I have it set up to do is put my buffs, debuffs, HOTs and DOTs on a small timer bar above my target and focus frames – if I’m DPSing a target I can use that to tell if my DOTs are on it, or Faerie Fire. I’ve since started using Power Auras to make that even more obvious without having to look at the tiny little timer bars… but on Valithria the first few times when I was actually attempting to heal, I could see my HOT durations over the focus frame because of this Quartz option.
Since you normally use your Grid frame for HOT durations, you may want to do something similar instead of having a whole separate mod to show you HOT timers – Quartz is very useful for caster DPS to make sure you’re accounting for your latency in being able to chain cast without constantly spamming buttons and giving yourself carpal tunnel.
Grr, something is up with my comments :/
Keeva´s last blog ..Valithiria Dreamwalker impressions
Jen: I’ll post it soon
Lath: I know I can be competitive, I just really suck at clouds – and didn’t get much time to practice. Last night on 10s I was mostly out on the raid. I won’t be happy until I’ve mastered the art of stacking to 20+.
Kae: I’ll definitely incorporate Rejuv into a target macro, thanks – didn’t think of that. Might as well squeeze in a heal if you’re pressing a button anyway, right? I like it.
Virile: RR increases your Rejuv HPS by quite a bit, so it is definitely worth using. You will need to recast more, obviously, but it’s still better. Cogfizzle’s numbers are basically what I am going to explain in my next post.
Kring: Unfortunately you lose her as your focus when you go into the portal, which is a royal pain. I have a focus window.. but you have to keep acquiring her as your focus. That’s where a target/focus macro comes in.
Cogfizzle: You smell funny.
Kiliani: Definitely making good use of a focus frame. Just wish she didn’t drop off when you take portals. I’ve used Quartz timers before, not much of a fan unfortunately. I said I went with Dotimer but that was a lie (got mixed up – I tried a few!), I used Classtimer and I’m really happy with what I’ve done with it. I’ll show it in my next post. I’ve also done a few things with Power Auras to help me out – I’ll explain those too
Keeva´s last blog ..Valithiria Dreamwalker impressions 
Actually druids are good for healing her, but you will only get 5-6 stacks at the most, on a good portal you might get 7. The reason why is because we will always have a harder time breaking the clouds. It requires an aoe to break them such as Holy Nova. I was pulling about 11k hps on that fight too with 2-3 stacks. Imagine how much more we could be doing if we were able to get the stack higher. Priests are a easier choice for healing, not just because of their output, but because they can stack that buff nearly to 20 without any issues at all. They have a much easier time breaking the clouds than any other healing class.
Clouds break by simply swimming through them – I think you may have had to kill them on the PTR, but now you just swim around in them.
I just need better depth perception and less lag, I think. If you swim through them too fast, they don’t pop. You seem to have to pause for a second.
In future I am going to focus on simply getting 2-3 per portal, rather than rushing around trying to build up huge stacks – that just makes me lag through the clouds and miss them entirely. Slow and steady, focusing on refreshing the stack (even if it’s just one or two more each time) is the way to go, I think.
Keeva´s last blog ..Valithiria Dreamwalker impressions
Hey Keeva!
I agree Druids own on this fight! I actually did a post today with my suggestions on it, and I did a *big* section on how to handle the clouds as our first handful of pulls I was also really struggling with them. I was able to consistently get 30+ stacks by the end of the night, and at one point last night got up to 42! Hopefully there is something over there that you find helpful and can use to help maximize your buffs next week
I also glyphed RR and Noursih for this fight, but did not grab empowered touch, although I probably will drop my moonkin spec for it next week.
I can’t wait to see the rest of your thoughts on the fight!!!
Beruthiel´s last blog ..Getting GRID Ready for ICC’s Frostwing Halls
I saw that, thanks! I’m so bad at it. But as I mentioned, I think I was rushing through the clouds too much instead of very deliberately picking each one up. More haste, less speed. I’ll try harder next time.
I’ll be linking back to your tips because they go into more detail on that aspect.
Keeva´s last blog ..Valithiria Dreamwalker impressions 
Yea, definately slower is better down there. It’s so hard because you want the buffs so badly, but I think I did worse rushing than when I just went slow and steady
I also can’t imagine them with the oceanic lag (ugh!).
Beruthiel´s last blog ..Getting GRID Ready for ICC’s Frostwing Halls
Very nice comment cogfizzle. But I have one question.
What’s the diffirence between dps (or hps) and dpet (hpet)
In other words. When is something “effective time” and when is something just seconds?
Execution time, not effective time.
Take a look at Curse of Doom. The warlock curse explodes 60 seconds after it was applied to the boss and does about 20′000 damage.
That means the curse dotes 20′000 / 60 = 333 dps.
A shadow bolt does about 5000 dmg and takes 2 second to cast.
That results in 5000 / 2 = 2500 dps.
Shadow Bolt has a higher dps then Curse of Doom.
But a dps does not care about dps of single spells. He only tries to maximise the amount of damage he can put out during a fight. During a boss fight you have a finite amount of time until the boss is dead (or enrages). Therefore, you try to use these time most effectife.
And that’s where DPET comes into play. DPET (Damage per execute time) is the amount of damage a spell does divided by the cast time.
Curse of Doom is an instant and does 20′000 damage 60 seconds after it is applied.
That means Curse of Doom has 20′000 / 1.5 = 13′333 DPET.
Shadow Bolt still has 5000 / 2 = 2500 DPET.
The limiting resource of a DD is time, therefore you try to use the spells that do most damage for your cast time. If that damage happens instantanious or over some time does not matter.
Yeah we were approaching it wrong that night. The clouds are still slightly awkward. I did RR/Nourish glyph as well.