Never Give up, Never Surrender

So I get to level 80 knowing that the battle has just begun. I'm all decked out in my spiffy blue quest gear and haphazardly spec'd to my pleasure. And even though I have this feeling in the back of my head that I should be more aware but I'm all GO WITH THE FLOW.

So we do our first heroic run on Monday. We choose Violet Hold (first mistake) because it's the daily heroic. We go with a pally tank, arcane mage (aka OOM mage), world pvp spec'd rogue, a resto shammy spec'd for healing wave, and a feral druid who normally tanks.

This combination equaled WAKE UP CALL!

That heroic dungeon chewed me up and spit me out like an Alabama sunflower seed! pateeweee! spat! Sad, our pally tank, was taking BOAT TONS of damage and I was spamming max Healing Wave to keep him up. This of course cost me all of my mana.

To top it off, Felix had to keep coming out of feral dps to support heal and crowd control so his dps was like 600 at avg. Flipmax was spec'd arcane and he was running OOM like crazy so his dps was only hitting 1100 avg. And our rogue wasn't spec'd pve so he was only hitting up 1300 max.

And even better, we hadn't experienced some of the boss fight before because the first two boss mobs you get in Violet Hold can be random. So we were learning as we were going.

We ended up getting the first two down after trial and error but the tank just dropped on the final boss.

So we were like "WTF man, let's just go do an easy one like Utgarde Keep!"

Yeah, that instance kicked our ass too! Again, dps was shotty and tank kept dropping like a rock and I was OOM after seconds (even with a 16k mana pool). We were able to finish it but it took several wipes.

SOOOO, FRUSTRATED as all hell, I started looking up tanking and healing changes for WoTLK.

L to the f*cking O to the f*cking L!

First, PROT pallies had some major overhauls. They no longer need to stack spell power as they have a talent that gives them bonus spell power from their stamina attributes so they can start stacking Stam gear. SECOND AND MOST IMPORTANT, at level 80, defense requirement is 540 for 25 mans and 535 for heroics. Sad was only at 512 defense thinking the old 490 defense cap applied. Basically, I was healing a crittable tank. OUCH OUCH OUCH.

Significant changes to druids to note as well is they have a built in talent that makes them basically uncrittable (Survival of the Fittest 6%crit reduc. All you need is 5.6% to be uncrittable for druids) so they can forgo stacking defense and resilience and instead grab agility when they can.

As for me, I learned the hard way that spamming Healing Wave was detrimental to the raid because it ran me out of mana so fast. My old spec was more conducive to Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave spam. (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0x0hZtseuqeoxkrIRt (0,8,63).

After reading Elitis Jerks forums on Resto Shamans more, I learned that even for main tank healing, I'm better of spamming chain when I can because it's my most efficient HPM spell. Then I just stack crit to help boost the healing effect of Chain Heal.

I also repecc'd to boost my mana shield and got rid of Healing Way in order to put points into Thundering Strikes and Elemental Weapons which help boost my crit and healing.

(new spec: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=hZ0xxGZxfezVxoxkrIRt(0/15/56))
I'm still playing around with it though but I did see vast improvements.

The next day we went back and everyone had regeared and respec'd (a whole sep. post about frost mages later) and we pwd the Heroic Dungeon. I was never OOM and the tank never got crit :) and DPS was at a low end avg of 1500. Made a huge difference.

"Never Give up! Never Surrender!" -Commander Peter Quincy Taggart