Jan’Alai
We were doing ok on this boss for a bit. See if you can spot what goes wrong ;)
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Netherspite: Fun with the green beam
Netherspite’s green beam provides a buff to +healing spells at the rate of 5% per tick (ticks are 1 second). There is also a cost reduction of spells / abilities at the rate of 1% per tick, and a debuff that reduces total mana by 200 per tick. Don’t worry, though, all of the (adjusted) mana pool is refilled at each tick. Effectively, this means you can take mana pool size and divide by 200 to get the max number of seconds you can stay in the beam before reaching 0 mana, and losing the ability to retain the beam. Somebody else (e.g. a tank) should be ready to take over the green beam, or else netherspite gets leet heals.
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While in the green beam, spam heals, focusing on spells with low cast time. Pretty soon, the healing buff from the beam will make even cheap spells heal for quite a bit. There is essentially no mana cost here, so go as hard as possible, taking as much load as possible off of other healers.
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Just before running out of mana, drop a healing stream totem. In my case, this will tick for around 450 for the next 2 minutes, pretty much taking care of portal phase damage for my group.
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Let’s have a look at a graph of a netherspite encounter where I used this strategy.
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 With my current gear, my healing throughput normally tops out around 1400 HPS or so when I pull out all the stops and have enough targets to soak it all up (little or no overhealing). I find it fairly interesting that this amount is very close to the amount of actual healing I was able to provide in this encounter *while in the green beam*. In effect, the bonus is almost completely wasted on overhealing.  One problem with the green beam that might not be obvious is that once you stop receiving the buff, you have a smaller mana pool combined with normal mana regeneration. If you let the green beam tick all the way down to 0, you are now completely oom. Hope you saved mana tide and your pot cooldown :)  Taking all these factors into account, I prefer not to own the green beam for the majority of any portal phase. I will step into it for a few seconds to get some regen, though, making sure that the primary owner of the beam isn’t out long enough to get exhaustion.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Azuregos
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He was pretty easy. Between the tank’s damage mitigation and my +healing bonus, and the fact that it’s an old-world boss… it’s pretty much infinitely sustainable just between the tank and I, so then it’s just a matter of getting some dps. We were cruising along fine with just three of us, but after about 15 minutes we decided to invite more to speed the process along :) He drops so much stuff! None of which is useful to me now, though he could have dropped a rare alchemy recipe, [item]Recipe: Elixir of Dream Vision[/item] that might be fun…