Friday, March 9, 2012

Healer stat priority and the importance of alacrity

As you advance and gets better gear, a good healer will find himself asking "which secondary stat should I invest in"? There are 4 secondary stats that benefit healers, crit, surge, alacrity and power. But how do I decide which one is best for me? Which one should I prioritize to maximize my performance?

One thing I saw in many of the healing guides is that alacrity is the worse one, considering it lets you spend more resources, but doesn't increase your regeneration rate. As a result you will ran out of resources faster, making this stat the worse one to have. I completely disagree. In a theoretical testing scenario, if you had a static amount of resources and needed to calculate how much healing you can do, than it's true that alacrity wouldn't increase the healing done, only the time it takes you to cast it. This however, has nothing to do with the real world (I mean, game world) of actually healing a FP or Op. If it was, you would only be spamming your most efficient heal and only care about HPF (Heals Per Force) replace force with energy\heat\ammo depending on your favorite healer class. This is obviously not the case in any real healing scenario.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Eternity Vault HM Experience

After clearing EV and KP on normal mode, it was time to move on to the next challenge, Hard Mode Operations. We started working on EV HM. The first night my guild went there I couldn't participate. They managed to get to the last boss and I joined the following night to keep working on him. The second time I was there from the start and we got to the 4th boss. So I got to experience all the fights.

HM is basically a very similar experience with the bosses getting some type of advantage over normal. It can be more health, more damage, shorter enrage timer or a slightly different or buffed mechanic. Nothing too exciting to have to describe the fights again. Another change I didn't really like is that they use the old WOW master looter option, which is actually working with the latest patch 1.5 (previously the master looter option was bugged and caused fewer drops). This can potentially cause drama, mistakes and disagreement which I think is unnecessary, not to mention the time to /roll (another addition to 1.5) or whatever loot system your group is using and the time to distribute the loot. You also get Rataka level loot, the highest you can currently get. So you basically get a bigger challenge and better loot, nothing surprising there.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Karagga's palace first run

We ran Karagga's palace for the first time. Cleared the operation in 4 hours and change. It was a really fun and well designed operation, just like Eternity Vault. I would say it's more challenging than EV, we were slightly more geared, since we had additional time for gearing up between the operations, yet it still took us longer with more wipes. One thing that disappointed me a bit is that this operation has many more trash groups and much harder ones. Feels a bit like an artificial way to make the op longer.

Also the difficulty design seems a bit strange, it's not an increasing difficulty ladder like EV, with the last boss being the toughest one, the forth boss, "G4-BC Heavy Fabricator" seemed much tougher than Karagga himself, which is the last boss.