Say hello to my new favorite progression enchant, Blood Draining!
How it works is that as you attack the target you gain up to five stacks of a buff called Blood Reserve, which combined can heal you for up to 2,200. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot but then again the amount healed isn’t really the best part of the enchant. The best part is that the enchant fires off automatically when you are reduced to under 35% of your total health pool. That means that it works much like the old Commendation of Kael’thas but instead of giving you dodge raiting it fires off a little extra heal for you. Does the 2,200 number not excite you? Well let’s look at some numbers:
- Runic Healing Potion: 2,700 to 4,500 health.
- Super Healing Potion: 1,500 to 2,500 health.
The effect of a full five stack of Blood Reserve going off and healing you is equivalent to drinking a nearly maximized Super Healing Potion! “That’s not amazing, it’s just a Super Healing Potion,” I hear some of you saying and while it’s true you might be forgetting two things:
- It’s automatic. You never have to think about using it, it just fires off the instant you fall below 35% health.
- Potion Sickness. The days of being able to chain-chug pots as an oh-shit button are gone. We know this and we aren’t happy about it but we’ve adapted. I just recently looked at a WWS report from our Auriaya kill this week and I noticed that a healthstone I used gave me 4,337 health but, again, I could only use it once and I had to trigger it. I regained a total of 8,828 health from Blood Draining over the course of the same fight, that’s the same amount of healing as if I had used an additional two healthstones!
Bear in mind, however, that while Blood Draining is fantastic for progression fights where your raid might be a little under geared or new to the content that you’re attempting, it will be very much wasted if you are doing farm content since it will rarely, if ever, proc. If you are looking at farm content, look at other enchants.
Popularity: 70% [?]
Last night my guild was making progress on Auriaya in 25-man Ulduar and we got a string of unlucky breaks in terms of situational damage. Instead of boring you with details I’ll just say that I ended up taking a ridiculous amount of damage in a very short period of time. Directly after this huge damage spike four things happend; I blew Shield Wall, the discipline priest used Pain Suppression, I got Lay on Hands from on of our Paladins and to top it all off I got Guardian Spirit from one of our holy priests.
The only way to describe that is with a single word and that word is “overkill”. All in all it wasn’t exactly a stellar use of cooldowns but I lived so who cares, right? Well you can bet your ass that the entire raid did about a minute or so later when I took another huge string of damage and died because everyone was out of OH SHIT buttons to use on me.
Normally communication between our healers and tanks is very good but this is one of those times when it broke down and the entire raid suffered for it. It is hugely important that the tanks build a good rapport with the healers. Communication needs to be instantaneous whether it’s through raid warnings, class channels or over Vent. If someone uses a cooldown I need to know about it and so does everyone else so that situations like what I described above are as limited as possible.
Be good to yourself, be good to your raid and above all, be good to your healers. You’ll thank me later.
Polgera says: I’d like to just say the best thing you can do for your healer is to communicate well. My personal pet peeve is when a tank goes down and the tank who then picks it up doesn’t call it out. Sometimes a taunt war ensues and healers are left in the dark as to who is actually going to be tanking the boss. Please call it out on vent it prevents wipes and I guarnetee it will lower your healer’s blood pressure.
Popularity: 69% [?]
Pro-Tip: Be sure to let one of your off-tanks know what you want him to do before you yell at him over Vent to taunt Kologarn while he’s tanking adds. Surprisingly, the melee do not like being blown up by your bad decisions.
Popularity: 49% [?]