No, and I don’t mean that vaguely disturbing Mandy Moore movie from a few years back, either.
I had yet another eye-opening experience last night, my first night of running so-called “Tier 5″ PvE dungeons as a 40 healer. I managed to login in the early evening and join a guildie hitting up Sigmar’s Crypts with our alliance, then tagged along with another alliance run through the Warpblade and Skaven Tunnels under Altdorf.
Bugged bosses
The Crypts went off without a hitch — until the very last pair of bosses, the twin Arch Lectors, who drop the Sentinel chest piece. As I understand it, normally when you complete the final Crypts encounter, the last boss standing will sacrifice one of your party members when the encounter ends. Generally this shouldn’t be a problem, as your party will need to have at least 2 rezzers handy, so even if one is killed, the other can rez him up without any trouble.
Problem is, the last boss standing for our group bugged out and killed all but one of our party members, including both of our healers. Doh.
Why the last Ironbreaker was spared is beyond me, but even worse, when we all rezzed and ran back, we got the dreaded “Encounter in progress” message since the loot from the boss was still sitting on the ground. We weren’t able to get back in, and 2 Sentinel chest pieces went to waste (both of which could have been used by members of our party, of course.) I didn’t get anything of value from that run aside from the experience, but it was relatively painless and I enjoyed it (well, up until the end.) Now I’m locked out for three days, so I can ponder my next run in another attempt to pick up a Sentinel Cassock in the meantime. It could have been worse, I guess; it could have dropped and I’d have been unable to loot it. Whew, that was close. :o
Running with the rats
Subsequently, I ran the Tunnels with a group of guys in our alliance. This was totally new to me as well, and I had no clue what I was getting into. I had just secondary-healed (behind a well-geared Archmage) the Crypts as a Grace/Wrath-specced Warrior Priest with 2 lesser wards from the Annihilator set, so I figured I could handle it. Our Tunnels group was mostly different players, though, and our main healer (who was the one who invited me) was a Salvation-specced Warrior Priest; a good AoE healer, and very well-geared, but not able to single-target heal as well as an Archmage or Rune Priest. So my heals were definitely counted on a lot more in this case. This was to be a learning experience.
We made it through the bulk of Warpblade without incident, with me healing my ass off, spamming Touch of the Divine pretty regularly and rarely getting the chance to even get into range for a melee heal. With only a pair of Lesser Wards at my disposal, I was taking quite a bit of damage as well. Not the ultimate setup, but the rest of the party members were geared well enough that it didn’t really matter all that much. They joked on Vent that it would have been a lot tougher had they not already run the tunnels repeatedly, so I was pretty comfortable with my healing to this point.
Then came Grey Seer Quol’tik, the Sentinel helm boss. This wasn’t quite so smooth. After wiping about three times, with either our tanks or healers getting one-shotted by her diseased ground spam (between high latency and people having slower machines with not-so-great graphics, we had a several instances where we didn’t even see the effect until it was too late), we finally gave in and switched over to the Skaven tunnels. Rezzing on dungeon bosses isn’t possible without using the rank 4 morale rez, so if you lose a main tank early in the fight when you’re still low on morale, you’re dead in the water, something I learned previously when running Bastion Stair.
We did manage to run the Skaven tunnels successfully, and I snagged a set of Sentinel boots from Warlock Peenk, giving me a grand total of one Greater Ward between my two Sentinel set pieces (I have the bind-on-equip belt, too, which I had bought off the auction house previously.) At least I get the 2-piece set bonus now, though, which gives me a bunch of additional corporeal resistance, always useful for RvR/scenarios.
Having successfully cleared the Skaven side, we took another run at the Warpblade boss, hoping for better luck this time. Things seemed to be moving along nicely. Of course, at the halfway point, a clump of diseased ground spawned directly beneath me and hit me for 5k+ damage. I moved as fast as I could out of the way, thinking I’d seen it in time, but it managed to hit me with another tick of damage when I was visually off the area of effect. Argh, dead. Then to top it off, I was typing in chat right after having died, and I hit enter right as the respawn dialog came up. This, of course, booted me out of the instance and back to the healer in Altdorf, seconds before our other healer was about to drop his morale rez on me and get me back in the fight. Cue a chorus of groans from my party-mates on Vent. No way I could come back mid-encounter, and our remaining Warrior Priest couldn’t handle the Seer’s spike damage.
Another wipe. Frustration. The guys on Vent mention that it usually takes a few tries on this boss, and not to get discouraged. Our other Warrior Priest suggests I try respeccing to Salvation and see if that helps. He swears by Pious Restoration and Divine Light, in combination with our group heal being buffed up by having Salvation fully specced. I do as suggested and respec, we go back in and beat the helm boss without any trouble. Interesting. No helm drops that any of us could use, though.
A quick rant & respec thoughts
To go off on a tangent for a moment — why does class-specific loot drop from bosses that no one in the party can use, anyhow? Having to destroy bind-on-pickup loot is so disheartening. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and after running a difficult instance, frustrates players to boot. We know it’s entirely possible to make sure stuff drops that you can use — loot bags and all — so this just seems like a way to artificially make you keep running the same dungeon repeatedly. I hate that kind of drudgery. I’d rather get my gear now, and go out and RvR or run scenarios instead. Bleh.
Anyhow, I don’t think my respeccing really changed much — we just lucked out and managed to avoid getting one-shotted for once. I did appreciate having something else to cast in between group heals, and the combination of group shield and group HoT really does help your healing output. I didn’t get to try out Martyr’s Blessing, one of the main abilities in the Salvation mastery tree, since Touch of the Divine is significantly more useful in a single party that’s spread out all over the place in a single room. Martyr’s Blessing’s AoE heal seems to be more suited to choke points like keep lord ramps and bridges, and if you can keep a good bunch of people clumped together in a scenario. Throw in the Cleansing Power tactic and you should be able to outheal and de-curse during a Magus pull pretty nicely, too. Or so conventional thinking goes, at least.
Reaching enlightenment
All in all, an enlightening experience. On top of that, they invited me back for another run on Thursday night, which should be fun now that I’ll be properly prepared. I’m sorely tempted to try Salvation out in scenarios now, too, just to see what I can do. I was already healing pretty well as Grace, but the array of tasty options in Salvation have me salivating at the prospect of getting myself a purple book and going to town. Since I don’t need to solo PvE anymore now that I’ve hit 40, I don’t have to worry about purposefully nerfing my own damage output as much, so this gives me a little freedom to experiment. <rubs hands together in glee>
I’d be giving up a good chunk of survivability and melee healing power in the Grace tree (arguably made up for by the increased healing power from speccing Salvation, increased armor from a fully-specced Prayer of Absolution, instant heal potential from Martyr’s Blessing, and increased healing from Divine Assault) and the loss of damage from losing my half-spec in Wrath (currently up to Fanaticism.)
That’s really one of the great selling points of the Warrior Priest class, though; your spec defines your playstyle, and switching from full-on back-line healing, to melee healing with a touch of debuffing and survivability, to DPS is as simple as a 5 gold mastery respec, switching tactics, and having a couple of different sets of gear in your backpack. That’s very cool, and barring a couple of funky tactics and useless abilities, the Warrior Priest’s mastery trees are pretty solid across the board. If that’s not a perfect example of good class design, I don’t know what is.
