I noticed after posting that this week’s Blog Azeroth Shared Topic is “Initial Thoughts on Cataclysm” (suggested by Jaedia of Jaedia’s Menagerie. So if you’re looking for a range of opinions and views from across the blogosphere, you could do a lot worse than to look there.

First, in case you’ve not noticed, and in case you’re interested, I’ve got very rough strategies for most of the new raids hammered out now (I don’t have Blackwing Descent finished, or a Sinestra strat yet).
You can find them in the menu above, or they have their own index page. I’ll update them, but I’d appreciate feedback from anyone who experiences the content on Live before me. Leave a comment on the strategy page!

First impressions

My early experience of Cataclysm is a good one. I played through each of the zones on the beta but bugs prevented me from really experiencing the flow of the new zones, so it’s been really nice to see how well the quests link up to tell you a story as you progress through a zone. The variable respawn rate on quest mobs seems to have been refined pretty well, so there’s not many bottlenecks to overcome either.

People, though, are a constant source of frustration. I’m absolutely not a competitive person by nature, so spamming a target/SW:P macro to try and be the first to tag a slowly respawning mob isn’t fun for me; but I can only be so patient before I start getting annoyed at the people who don’t seem to understand that if someone’s at a spawn point before you you should a) try and group with them, and b) let them go first. Special mention goes out to the people who try and ninja a quest mob spawned using a quest item you get given…

Levelling

The pace of levelling seems about right to me. I logged in briefly at Tuesday lunchtime to find that we already had a handful of level 85 players and a Realm First tailor who had started at midnight and not slept, but since I’ll be levelling in the evenings only it’ll probably take me until the weekend to ding 85. I made 83 last night in Deepholm after about 9 hours of play time.

I’m levelling as Discipline, which is working out quite nicely. The healing from Atonement means I have to try really hard to get killed, and the DPS isn’t too bad either. I’ve always levelled as a healing spec, and I just accept that it’ll take a bit longer to kill things. Since I intend to use my second spec for Holy once I’m 85, I really don’t want to reconfigure all my bars for Shadow only to have to put them all back again in a few days’ time.

Instances

I haven’t run many instances yet on Live, partly because of a shortage of tanks and surplus of healers in my guild, and partly because I just prefer to level solo, always have.

But my guild will be running guild 5-mans on our regular raid nights for the next couple of weeks, so that’s what I’ll be doing this evening, and of course I’ll share my thoughts.

Early priorities

Well clearly I’m aiming to get to 85. Preferably on Saturday so I can spend some time at 85 on Sunday and maybe run a few heroics.

I’m also keen to get my Guardians of Hyjal and Therazane reps up fairly quickly so I can get access to the Arcanum of Hyjal and Greater Inscription of Charged Lodestone head and shoulder enchants.

Then comes the rest of the gearing for starting to raid. I’ve been glancing at gear lists on other blogs, so my priority after getting my Guardians of Hyjal rep to Exalted for the Cord of Raven Queen will be the Earthen Ring, to fill in a few more gear slots.

I’m not levelling my professions especially aggressively yet though. I’m not selling off my mats for obscene amounts of gold, but I’m also not buying materials either. I doubt I’ll have Alchemy maxed for a while, since I’m one of the huge number of double-crafters lulled into a false sense of security by the low material prices of WotLK. I’ll get there when I break out my alts.

I’m doing the cooking and fishing dailies religiously though, and making a nice stash of cooking mats in my bank for when I have enough tokens for the new recipes.

What I am slightly obsessed with is Archaeology. I’m having to fight the urge to run around the world digging up artefacts rather than questing. Getting XP for every find I make means it’s not actually too bad, but it’s not getting me gear, and at this stage of the expansion my focus is on getting into those first raids.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclys-meme
• State of the Cataclysm
• The First Cataclysm Raid

Everblue recently posted a retrospective on Wrath of the Lich King from one tank’s perspective. I liked the format, and I’m feeling nostalgic, so here’s my version.

Favourite instance

I have to agree with popular opinion here, and go for Ulduar. The grand scale of the instance, as well as the tremendous variety of the bosses kept it exciting and interesting right the way through. I also loved the way the hard modes were implemented, generally adding mechanics rather than just bumping bosses’ HP and damage output.

This was also the phase of the game where I also felt at my most flexible as a Disc Priest, being able to keep up with tank heals or switch to raid healing depending on the requirements of the fight. And since most of my hardmode experience of Ulduar was on 10-man, I really used that flexibility.

Most difficult encounter

With the exception of heroic Lich King which we’ve not attempted on either format yet, the hardest boss for me personally and for my guild has to have been heroic Anub’arak.

You had to position the adds relative to the boss extremely precisely or you didn’t have the DPS to keep up with the fight, not to mention the many, many “kersplat” moments we had when an add got behind their tank, and for healers the reaction time needed in Phase 3 was not much fun either, especially combined with the lack of anything much to do in the rest of the fight.

Least fun encounter

If not for the fact that there’s so much else going on to keep the fight interesting, I’d pick the Lich King. Spending 10+ hours a week in 10-minute bursts of bubble-spam is definitely not on my list of fun experiences.

However I’d probably pick Faction Champions, just for the sheer helplessness of it from a healer’s perspective. Random people being nuked before you can react, aggro lighting up everywhere, the inability to properly strategise (we’re not much for PvP in my guild, so we didn’t have people accustomed to calling targets or responding to key deaths); it all combined to make for a very frustrating experience.

Most fun encounter

Firefighter, without question. Mimiron is one of the best bosses I’ve ever come across in WoW in just about every way. From the enticingly cartoonish Big Red Button to the well-written dialog the designers outdid themselves, and the mechanics were tuned very neatly to stretch you without introducing too much RNG; just about every mechanic could be mitigated or controlled through the raid’s actions.

A distant second would be either of the Mind Control encounters: Instructor Razuvious or the Who Needs Bloodlust? achievement. It’s nice to be central to an encounter, and to use a trick that usually doesn’t get much of an outing.

Most rewarding boss to heal

Another tie here.

Heroic Anub’arak-10 felt really, really good when we finally got it down. It demanded a lot from two healers, with tanks being absolutely pounded at the same time as the raid needed complete focus because Penetrating cold could take people out pretty quickly. Those two healers needed to work together to get everything covered.

As my other choice, I’m going to nominate early Mimiron once again. You can’t beat a fight where the focus shifts from spot healing to raid-wide healing (and on to total chaos), and needs coordination and defensive cooldowns to make it work.
Especially one which takes a lot of learning time to defeat, the rejoicing on Vent was amazing.

Proudest moment

Yet another Ulduar memory: getting my hands on the Rusted Proto-Drake. This was pretty much the golden period in Wrath for me, working through the achievements with a really tight-knit group of people. Even though it took a long time to get Firefighter down, spirits always stayed high and we kept plugging away until we got it, and then kept going back for a few weeks afterwards to make sure everyone who’d work for it got their drake too.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Reflections on Heroic Healing
• The First Cataclysm Raid
• Dragon Soul Nerfs

There’s recently been a bit of a debate over the use or not of addons for healing. I don’t want to throw more fuel on the fire, but some of the posts and commentary have been quite throught-provoking, and since I’m about to head into the Beta and my usual UI will go out the window, I thought I’ve been giving my own addon usage even more thought.

My story

I use addons to heal and pretty much always have. I remember my first healing experience in Wailing Caverns in my 20s, way back in mid-2007, clicking on party frames to target people and then clicking on the healing spells on my bars. This being early in TBC and not my first character I was well aware that there existed a wide variety of addons to help classes do their job, so it was a natural next step for me to go a-Googling and I quickly found Healbot. Thus was a click-healer made.

Although I’ve never seriously used the default raid interface to heal, I have had occasion to quickly drag out the default raidframes and heal with keybinds (not mouseover macros, just target & press number keys) in a pinch when I’ve been disconnected mid-fight. I’m far from brilliant with it, but I can be non-useless in such a situation.

Pros and Cons

For me, healing effectively means mastering two stages: decision-making, i.e. picking the right person to heal and the right spell to use, or deciding whether to dispel that thing or to leave it; and then acting on that decision, i.e. reacting in time and hitting the right person.

Addons can help in both areas, but I mostly value assistance with the first part. Addons, if you spend the time to set them up properly, can provide you with as much information as you need to make your decisions, with (hopefully) no excess clutter, although of course in reality no addon can provide perfect configurability.

The problem that was brought up recently was that near-ubiquitous use of addons for showing spell cooldowns and boss abilities or for changing health bar colours when a decurse is needed means that people are losing, or failing to acquire, a sense of timing or even a depth of knowledge of boss mechanics. This can lead to a dependence on the addons, to the point where people become (or at least feel) unable to heal without them.

The trouble is that this is predicated on the idea that the addon(s) may stop working one day and expose that dependency. As long as the addon is active and functioning, there’s no problem. As a commenter observed, you’re judged on results, not methods.

Of course if your addons do break on patch day someone who has a more “visceral” understanding will probably outperform you, as will someone who is more accustomed to using the Blizzard interface to heal. When you don’t have an addon using a special this-one-really-matters colour, someone who can recognise an Unbound Plague icon from a Plague Sickness one will be at an advantage.
That is, until the player adapts to a new addon or the old addon is updated.

Here’s a different perspective: the default UI can be thought of as simply a set of ‘addons’ designed by Blizzard and included with the game, rather than something special or sacred. The only difference is that Blizzard make sure that their ‘addons’ are working before each patch release. From that perspective, it becomes much more like a choice between Vuhdo, Blizzard, Grid and Healbot.
You simply pick your comfort point in the trade-off between reliability in extreme conditions and everyday convenience, configurability and performance.

As a fun thought experiment, consider Blizzard announcing that due to the large number of excellent addons in the community, they are removing the default UI completely, leaving it purely in API form.

Short Version?

The most important thing addons provide is the ability to provide only the information you want to make your decisions, no more and no less. This (in theory) should lead to the most optimal decisions being made in any given situation. If providing more information than the default UI is helpful, then suitably-configured addons should improve your healing.

If those addons break, you may find yourself worse off than someone using the default UI (which is unlikely to break, at least on Live) until you can readapt, adopt a new set of addons, or the old addon is fixed. For the vast majority of us this isn’t a problem, although I can see how world-first guilds might find it helpful to be able to raid and heal regardless of the situation on the day new content is released.

I’ll be shortly spending some time on the Beta realm, where my normal UI is unlikely to work, so this will be an interesting test of my “dependency” on addons.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Getting Started As A Healer
• [MoP Beta] Snapshot of the Disc Priest
• Reflections on Heroic Healing

… Or: How I learned to love Power Word: Shield.

This post is a little overdue since we got our Lich King kills on 10 and 25 a few weeks ago, but better late than never, eh?

First there’s a bit of personal stuff about the kill itself, then I’ll talk phase by phase about how I approached healing this fight as a Discipline Priest.

The kill

Our 25-man kill came after around 100-120 tries. (I have WoL parses for 102, but I missed one night so some aren’t recorded.)

The feeling was incredible: we’d recently wiped at 11%, during which several people on Vent sounded like they were going to have heart attacks, so the tension as we saw ourselves getting closer and closer to 10% with most of the raid alive was palpable; the shouts over Vent when the RP started were deafening, and the whole experience was marred only by the tendency of my PC to crash WoW as soon as any video cutscene auto-loads (the same thing happened at the Wrathgate and after the build-up that got in /g I was miffed, to say the least). For those who care about the statistics, we were the 7th guild on the server to beat him on 25-normal.
We killed him on 10-man a couple of months ago, which helped us to understand some of the mechanics and feed that back to the 25-man, although I’ll say we had to be a lot tighter on the strategy and execution in 25-man.

Healing the fight as a Disc

Phase 1

Bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble, ProM, bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble… Ah, you get the idea.

Pretty much the best thing a Disc Priest can do here is control Infest, by keeping bubbles on the raid as much as humanly possible. The rest of the damage going out is focused on the three tanks, and Disc tank healing is quite time-intensive so it’s much better left to the other healers to cover it.

Infest deals around 8k damage to the whole raid and keeps ticking for 6k (initially, it rises over time) until the player’s health is over 90%, at which point the debuff is removed. A full PW:S can absorb this damage entirely, preventing the player’s health from dropping at all, so Infest will not be a problem for this player at all.

The refinement to this technique for a Disc Priest is maximising the mana returns through Rapture. Now I was under the impression that the Rapture trick had been “fixed” a couple of patches ago so that you were no longer able to gain multiple mana returns from multiple shields being removed simultaneously, but it seems this has been “unfixed” again.
I can manage the fight adequately without much Rapture optimisation simply by using my mana cooldowns judiciously and taking it easy in the first transition phase, so if you don’t nail it don’t panic. But if you can get it then so much the better.

So, how to maximise Rapture returns? There are two things to remember:

1. You can only trigger Rapture every 12 seconds. This means that if you bubble a tank and the shield is removed you get one Rapture return and then nothing for 12 seconds, probably missing out on the next Infest cycle. So avoid bubbling tanks, or anyone else who is frequently taking damage (like that Whirlwinding warrior who grabs every round of adds).
2. Rapture also only returns mana when ” your Power Word: Shield is completely absorbed or dispelled”. Even before the buff to PW:S absorbs, the vast majority of bubbles fully absorb the Infest and don’t return any mana.
   One option is to not reapply a partially-consumed shield, which would let it be removed the next time around, assuming it lasts long enough. The trouble is that this negate the point of bubbling in the first place, absorbing only a small portion of the Infest hit.
   The other option is to downrank. Usually downranking is counter-productive, since the lower ranks cost more than the top rank, but in this case getting Rapture gains more reliably outweighs the increased cost. I’ve not been in a LK raid since reading about this on PlusHeal so I’ve not got round to testing this out in detail, but the suggestion on PH is to drop to Rank 11 or 12.

Besides the mad bubble-spam, the other thing that’s very useful is to keep Prayer of Mending on cooldown. I tend to bounce it off one of the tanks and let it sit where it ends up.

Prayer of Mending is great for helping heal the tank(s), especially if you get it to bounce between the two add tanks, but it also helps a lot on Infest by helping to heal up a few people who missed out on bubbles or had low health for other reasons.

Phase 1.5

To be honest this phase isn’t ideal for a Disc priest, so I tend to use this as a bit of a mana break. I’ll throw heals at the tank if they need it, but I don’t get too involved with the raid healing because the Druids and Shaman are much better suited to it. Bubble-blanketing here is very mana-inefficient and you’ll need that mana going into Phase 2, so I’d stick to keeping a ProM bouncing and helping tank healers.

Also remember that Priests are among the higher DPS healers, so help out on the Frost Spheres if any are getting close. A well-timed Penance or Holy Fire could save the day here.

The other thing a Priest can do here is to Dispel the Soul Shriek off the tanks. A silenced tank is a less effective tank, and the raid needs all the threat lead they can get to kill off the Raging Spirits as quickly as possible.

There will be an Infest very early in Phase 2, but unfortunately Pain and Suffering renders pre-bubbling a bit useless. As soon as the Lich King starts casting Earthquake though you should be starting your bubble cycle, maybe avoiding people with high stacks of P&S.

Phase 2

Back to the bubbling, to keep Infest under control. You won’t be able to reach every player all of the time to keep them bubbled, so it will be a bit more hectic, but your default activity should be basically the same as Phase 1. There are other tricks you can employ though.

First, keep your eyes peeled for the person who will get Defile on them. Defile only grows when it damages someone, so if you can bubble them as they run out you might save one tick of expansion. It is worth talking to any Holy Priests in the raid though, in case they’re using Body and Soul instead to help the person run away more quickly.

Secondly, watch for the MT getting Soul Reaper on them. Since this hits for around 40k, boosting the tank’s effective health by 10k can easily be the difference between life and death if they have a health deficit at the time. Assuming you have a second tank taunting, wait until the taunt happens to prevent a mêlée swing from just removing the bubble again.

Thirdly, watch out for any of the MT healers being picked up by Val’kyr and be ready to switch to fill the gap immediately. Penance, a quick PW:S, a ProM or even a Pain Suppression can all be used to prop up a tank and support your fellow healers.

Phase 2.5

Another transition. As with Phase 1.5 I tend to slow down here and regenerate some mana.

Phase 3 – No more Infest!

The order of the day in Phase 3 is triage and reaction, with quite a strict priority.

The ultimate, top priority for this phase is Harvest Soul victims. One person will take 12-15k ticks every second, six in total (as shown in the log section below) and this person needs quick, focused healing, and failure on the part of the raid to keep this person alive could mean a wipe unless the tanks are very quick to notice and react to the resulting Enrage.
I usually default to PW:S first, then Penance as a follow-up, then take it from there.

The second priority for this phase is dealing with the risk of deaths from Vile Spirits exploding (Spirit Burst). The key here is to keep as many players as possible above 20k health at all times to keep them out of one-shot territory. At this stage of the expansion with Hellscream’s Warsong (or the Alliance equivalent) at 15%, most people will be approaching or above 30k HP, so you should be aiming to keep people above 70%.

Third priority is tanks again. Soul Reaper is still active in this phase, so watch out for tanks and use your PW:S to boost their EH as much as possible.

If you’re not engaged with any of the above, then I’d suggest falling back on keeping bubbles on the raid. People will get hit by exploding Vile Spirits and bubbles will help to prevent them getting into the insta-gib region in the first place.

A final note on what to do if you get Harvest Soul. The key is to heal Terenas Menethil as quickly as possible, since his DPS is in proportion to his current HP. First step is to get a PW:S on him to stabilise things, and then fall back on your high-throughput rotation. I might be out of date, but I tend to rely on PW:S > Penance > Greater Heal > FH until Penance is off cooldown again.
The other thing is to deal with the Soul Rip ability. This is the primary damaging ability the Spirit Warden will use on Terenas Menethis. Since Priests lack an interrupt, we should instead dispel the debuff off Terenas immediately to prevent this damage.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Priest
• Atonement, or Not Atonement?
• 4.3 Quick Guide for Discipline Priests

In common with what seems like a large proportion of the WoW population, I took to the battlegrounds this past weekend to complete the final steps of the Long, Strange Trip meta-achievement, abandoned in disgust last year after failing to click the damn flag in WSG for the umpteenth time. This year was a refreshing change. Why? This time I had backup.

Before I get too far in, I need to say a huge thanks to my bodyguard in these battlegrounds. As last year proved, these achievements are a nightmare to attempt solo, so she helped so, so much.

My experience

When I tried this last year on my Priest, solo, I struggled. My problem is that I insist on healing in battlegrounds.
Normally this isn’t a problem: I don’t get the caps or killing blows but I do get to keep our flag carrier alive while he races up the tunnel, or hide behind the broken-down Fel Reaver and help our apparently-lone defender hold a flag. As long as someone does get the caps and kills then all’s well.

The trouble with the School of Hard Knocks achievement is that it requires me to take point:

• Warsong Gulch – Return a flag. This requires me to be the quickest person to click on a dropped flag in order to get credit for returning it. As a healer I don’t stand much of a chance of actually killing a flag carrier, and I don’t get too excited about standing in melee range either, so I’m relying on other people killing the flag carrier and then me rushing in and spam-clicking to get credit. Last year I tried and failed at this for several battlegrounds in a row before this being the straw that broke the camel’s back. This time around I brought my friendly neighbourhood Feral Druid along and camped our flag with her. She did the killing and I did the clicking, and we got the achievement on our first battleground. We then continued our defence of the flag while our team capped a couple more times and we won the match. I even got Warsong Perfection as a tidy bonus.
• Eye of the Storm – Capture a flag. This one requires that the enemy be killed or chased off from the flag spawn in the centre, me to be the fastest person to click the newly-spawned flag, and then me to survive carrying the flag all the way to one of our towers. Actually this turned out to be the easiest one, since a DPS + healer combination is very effective at holding the centre, and I was allowed to pick up the flag. Doing this as a healer last year was pretty tough, since I couldn’t clear off the flag on my own and no one on my team seemed especially keen to capture the flag. Once I’d got my achievement, we helped out and went on to win the battleground. 2/2 so far.
• Arathi Basin – Assault a base. Note that defending a base doesn’t count, it has to be already enemy-controlled when you attack it. This is another one which does not favour a healer: if there’s any sort of defence of the flag I don’t stand much of a chance of clearing it out, and since the healer is often (should be always, but people aren’t as logical as they should be) taken out first my chances of being able to assault the base ahead of any others who are assisting me are slim. Once again, a DPS + healer combo was plenty to clear out the 1 or 2-person defence left at a node so I could go in and assault it. Oh, and we went on to win that battleground too. 3/3
• Alterac Valley – Assault a tower. Same as Arathi Basin really. If there’s any sort of defence I will have great difficulty clearing it out in order to assault the base, and my inconvenient lack of Crusader Aura makes it tricky for me to win the race to the towers. Not a problem, bring a pocket DPS along who can do my killing for me, and it’s easy. We then went on to tank Vanndar and three adds and won that battleground as well. 4/4

Now I’m not saying that I couldn’t do these achievements solo, but I would require a lot of cooperation or an even larger quantity of good fortune. Warsong Gulch would require me to follow the enemy flag carrier like a terrier until I got lucky enough to be the one to click the flag. Alterac Valley and Arathi Basin would require me to find an undefended node to assault. Eye of the Storm would require the flag to be undefended or me to be the fastest clicker and no one to attack me while I channelled the flag pickup.

Playing DPS makes this a lot more possible. I doubt I could take down two or three defenders but I have a much better chance of killing that lone rogue hiding around the back of the Gold Mine as a DPS than as a healer. That said, having a pocket healer probably makes life a lot easier for a DPS player too, guaranteeing the win for them rather than making it 50-50 based on who gets the jump on whom.

It should be borne in mind that I suck at PvP and have functionally zero resilience. I even use the no-resilience version of the PvP trinket from Wintergrasp, which I picked up for some fight or other in T7 or T8, lost in the mists of time. But I share this with a large proportion of the WoW community, and I’d like to think I have a better grasp of my character than most.

Harmful to PvP?

Well, my non-scientific, anecdotal, totally unreliable evidence would say “absolutely not”. Seriously, my BG stats are somewhere below 20% wins, but this time I managed to score 4 wins from 4 games. However, a hasty generalisation is not proof, and I’m quite sure there were Alliance with Orphans out who would tell the opposite story.

But most of these objectives are, at least so it seems to a PvP newbie like me, helpful actions. OK, deliberately allowing the enemy to kill you or dropping the flag so they can return it is not a helpful action, but guarding the flag? Capturing enemy towers or nodes? These are (or should be) the point of the game. Let’s not get into the fact that people don’t even wait for towers before attacking Vanndar Stormpike these days, they just push an ICC-geared tank into the fray and heal the living daylights out of them. If we wipe, we lose. C’est la vie.
I’ll agree that the Eye of the Storm achievement might be a little counter-productive if attempted unintelligently (like I did last year). There’s not much point capturing the flag when we only hold one tower because our focus should be elsewhere, but if we have the towers under control then a cap speeds things up and buys us a headstart.

The reason this causes such problems for PvPers in battlegrounds is in two parts: people are generally doing this solo, and everyone is doing this at the same time.

PvP in general, as with everything else in this massively multiplayer game is much more productive and successful if we cooperate and work as a team. Having people in your battleground with a specific goal who may ignore even the rudimentary coordination of a random battleground is not exactly a recipe for success.

But, as my experience showed, these goals can be beneficial to the battleground as long as only a small number of people are doing them. 8 people camped in our flag room would suck, but two or three people highly motivated to defend the flag are a good thing. Likewise a few people dedicated to recapturing nodes is beneficial in AV or AB. The problems come when too many people want to do this at the same time, like Children’s Week. Now you have a minority of people floating around the zone, doing the jobs necessary to win, and a majority of people racing to cap nodes or kill the enemy flag carrier.

You can see the thought process behind creating an achievement like this: encourage PvE players to participate in PvP, and reward them for completing the objectives of the battleground. This is fine if you’re bringing a small number of players in at a time, but doesn’t work when the numbers get too high. You need a range of roles and flexible people in a battleground to be successful.

Improvements

I don’t have any problem with being required to take part in all aspects of the game in order to get an achievement like this which rewards long-term commitment and wide participation. I don’t even mind that some of the achievements are a little difficult to obtain. I mean, I didn’t get a mount for Loremaster or World Explorer, so this one should require a little more from me.

But can we address the problems of the massive influx of players that cause such problems for the battlegrounds every year?

There’s a temptation to suggest making the holiday last two week rather than one to spread things out, but I’m not sure this would help. Think back to Noblegarden: the eggs are massively overcamped for the first day or two, then it seems there’s no one around at all. People just seem to want to do them as early as possible, and since a lot of people have work or school there will be a concentration of people at the weekend. Beginning holidays midweek rather than at the weekend might spread the load a bit though.

It’s difficult to introduce an artificial limit to the rate at which you can complete the achievements without punishing those who have limited playtime. For example, you could give the Orphan Whistle a 1hr cooldown, but then you’re limiting people to very few attempts.

You could change the achievement to a sort of “assist” system, where healing the person who returned the flag, or damaging the enemy flag carrier, generally assisting in the returning of the flag was enough to give credit, this would speed up the gaining of the achievement and at least get the surge through the system more quickly. Or you could give credit simply for winning the battleground.

Advice

If you’re a healer having trouble with this achievement, or dreading taking it on, the best advice from me would be to find someone to work with. If you can get yourself into a guild or other premade group that would be ideal, but even finding a partner willing to support you will make all the difference.

I would also encourage people to stick with the battleground once you get your achievement done. There’s no reason to screw over your fellow players by bailing the second you get your credit, and even one player swapping over make a big difference, especially in the smaller battlegrounds.

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