Suicidal Tendencies

Spirit of Redemption is a strange talent, I'm not aware of any other talent in any tree of any other class which is similar. It gives you 15 seconds of unlimited healing upon your death (21 glyphed). Why would anyone in their right mind spend a precious point on a talent which is only useable when you're dead? Well I did! And here's why:





In my view there are two reasons why you would spec SoR

1. You're general awareness is pants
   
2. You're general awareness is excellent
   

Now the more mathematically inclined amongst you (possibly statisticians, I don't know) may point out to me that my two reasons encompass all players, not so. The middle ground of not being pants, but not realising quite how SoR could be employed exists, here's a nifty little diagram to summarise my thoughts.

It's not so cut-and-dry, I suppose what I'm saying is all pants players will need it lots, because they've done something silly which has killed them, generally this will result in a wipe, but sometimes it'll be just enough healing to let the group kill whatever needs to be killed. Average players, where most of us sit, will drop the ball occasionally and do silly things too; the more you progress towards the middle ground the less you die, the less you need it? True. And the same has happened to me over the past few weeks, I've considered dropping SoR, but then a funny thing happened to me, we were Fighting Lord Walden in SFK, and I was completely out of mana, all my cooldowns were gone and I'd even popped my mana pot (can you tell the fight was going well?). Four of five of the party were alive and Walden was sub 5 % health, as were most of the party, when the green Toxic Coagulant debuff pops up. Veterans of SFK will know this means move around quickly or die (in fact I quite expect to get several comments of purely qqqqqqqeeeeeeeqqqqqqq just from the natural reaction to strafe at the mention of the green nastiness). Instead of my natural reaction to move immediately, my hand froze; I'm not sure this was intentional at this point or just an admission of defeat, moments later I was in SoR form and healing away again the part were back up to fullish health and Walden was as dead as a manic depressive Warlock with a haste buff. The logic is quite simple, commit Hari-Kari, incur a repair bill and have a chance of killing the boss, or don't do it, definitely incur a repair bill and wipe the party. If I haven't upset those statisticians too much to have left by now, they'll point out that this is simple game theory, which can be explained by a two by two matrix (the MBA graduates weapon of choice)

	Best Case	Worst Case
Suicide	Death & repair bill + loot	Death + Infinite repair bills (more subsequent wipes)
Don't Suicide	Death & repair bill + loot (kill it next time)	Death + Infinite repair bills (more subsequent wipes)

Admittedly you might wipe, reform, and kill the boss next time, but chances are you'll have at least a couple of attempts before succeeding, or calling it a night. Worst case scenario is no worse than not trying it. So in my view, it's worth a shot. I've employed this tactic on two or three occasions since to good success, there's a time and a place for it and it won't always work, but what have you got to lose? That's right, nothing. There are plenty of bosses in Cata which give you the opportunity to do this, so bare it in mind as a last resort. Don't expect to get thanks for doing it, people will just assume you died, so make sure to brag about being better than them if it comes off, or alternatively just keep quiet and sit back with a smug smile on your face knowing that you rock.