Wrath Encounter Design for Healers – Has Blizzard “Succeeded”?

And now for my next article, something a little different. I had hoped that Icecrown would hit the servers last Wednesday and I’d be able to jump in so I could give you another “first impressions” blog entry, but it would appear (quite fairly) that Blizzard aren’t fans of releasing major patches immediately before big holiday weekends, so that will have to wait. Instead of talking about strategy or UI or how to play a Discipline Priest, today I’m going to discuss Blizzard’s encounter design for healers over the months since Wrath’s release. How have they tackled the big problems that faced them and the complaints that were being made by healers? Have they been “successful”?

Now let me clarify “encounter design”. What I’m not going to be talking about here is the introduction of hardmodes and whether it was a good idea, or the limited attempts system from Trial of the Grand Crusader that will also be being implemented in Icecrown Citadel. Yes, I have my opinions on these matters, but you’re not going to find out what they are! There’s no point alienating half my readerbase straight off the bat by saying what I think of this stuff either way – I think the discussion surrounding these systems is a bit too “polarising” (people get very opinionated about it) for my liking and so I’ll keep my neutrality in tact.

Without further ado, let’s start looking at the problems that Blizzard have faced!

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The Great Shaman-Stacking Problem

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What Was The Problem?

When Blizzard released patch 2.4 and the Sunwell Plateau raid instance became available to play, it was designed to challenge the best of the best. Blizzard’s modus operandi was to create a raid instance that would keep guilds like Nihilum and SK Gaming (the merger of which became Ensidia) busy until the release of Wrath of the Lich King, or at least mean they would spend several weeks on it. The fights were tuned aggressively beyond belief and required near-perfection to kill. Many hardcore guilds had their entire memberbase reroll Leatherworking for the chain Drums buffs during M’uru, such was the damage output required.

But as we know, where there is a challenge and where a hardcore PvE guild comes across it, they will look in every nook and cranny of the game mechanics to find a way past it. A great example of this is Ensidia downing Hodir in under 2 minutes by spellstealing the Flower Power buff from some other trash; something which many players question the legitimacy of to this day (although, personally, I think it is an ingenious method of beating what was considered a mathematically impossible encounter). For Sunwell, the norm became the stacking of Shamen – mostly Restoration, but any Shamen were good.

Why? There were two main reasons;

1. Bloodlust/Heroism: In Wrath, the Sated/Exhausted debuff prevents anyone from being affected by Bloodlust or Heroism for 10 minutes after it’s used. The debuff is removed on death. The intended purpose of this is to allow a shorter cooldown on the skill so that it can be used again quickly if a guild wipes. In Burning Crusade, however, Bloodlust had no limitations, which is what made it so appealing – a massive, chainable DPS boost? Thank you very much!

2. Chain Heal: Of course, Blizzard had to make the healing just as difficult as the DPS requirements and it wasn’t uncommon to see gigantic amounts of raid damage being put out several times per minute, in one notable case (M’uru Phase 2) damage that wasn’t intended to be healed through forever. With skills like Wild Growth just a distant speck on the horizon, Shamen were the primary AoE-healing class and this made them an excellent choice for Sunwell.

So the fact that there was one class which excelled at AoE healing whilst adding tremendously to the damage output of the raid made them an excellent choice for any raid that was seriously attempting Sunwell.

How Has It Been Fixed?

“Bring the player, not the class”. This, I think it is safe to say, has been Blizzard’s primary motto through Wrath. They saw what happened with Sunwell Shaman-stacking and they didn’t particularly like it – whether a guild was hardcore or not, they shouldn’t be required to reroll an entire character and gear through several instances just to beat a few more encounters (an exception can be made for the world-first guilds who will do anything to win!).

So, class healing has been somewhat equalized. For AoE healing, Resto Druids received Wild Growth and Chain Heal was toned down. In return, Shamen had their tank-healing capabilities bumped up a little (although they are still behind Paladins and Discipline Priests here) and became a “jack-of-all-trades” healing class, something that many of the elite didn’t like. More casual guilds and even more hardcore guilds are able to fit their raid composition around the players available to them for almost every encounter. Yes, there are still some fights (inevitably difficult ones, like Anub’arak hardmode) that require certain healing classes; but by and large, this has been a big success on Blizzard’s part.

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The Whack-a-Mole Issue

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What Was The Problem?

The nature of healing is that we react to damage or (in the case of good healers) incoming damage. Somebody gets catapulted into a world of pain by some boss and it’s our job to try and stop them from dying. Healers since the dawn of time in WoW have always complained that healing is quite a monotonous affair. We put our raidframes in the bottom portion of the screen, somebody takes damage, we click their little nameplate and press a button; hence the “whack-a-mole effect”.

This, combined with many more casual healers feeling shut out by raid leaders blaming them for the fire-lovers dying, served to create a fairly disillusioned group of players who felt they did a difficult and boring job for not much credit.

How Has It Been Fixed?

The key to ridding WoW of the whack-a-mole effect is to create boss encounters that challenge healers in ways they don’t expect. DPS generally get their enjoyment of the game from seeing the boss die faster and the numbers on their Recount get gradually larger. Healers, on the other hand, don’t have this luxury. Numbers are generally meaningless to us, so the design team satiate our lust for fun by making us think about how we heal. It’s the basis of several great encounters and is most recently present in Anub’arak; see my last article for more on that. Fights like Val’kyr heroic and Beasts heroic are great gear checks but the healing is often frustrating (particularly Gormok, with his tank-gibbing tendencies) and almost feel like a rotation with no thought put into it.

Icecrown would appear to have more of the same interesting new encounters, with fights like Valithria and Sindragosa (will Penance cause three stacks of Unchained Magic?) having healers drooling over their keyboards already. Verdict? A partial success. I’ll admit you can’t always have great encounters for healers, but there are definitely more of them these days.

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Instagibbed – Damage Output on Tanks

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What Was The Problem?

For those of us who have been unlucky enough to try Beasts hardmode (our guild wiped on it over 250 times before killing it) you’ll know what I’m talking about. The problem is that as gear quality increases, healing throughput does so as well. Your heals get faster, stronger and… crittier? I love that word. Anywho, because of the way Wrath raiding has panned out; with hardmodes offering one or more different tiers of gear for every patch, in effect giving us 7 tiers already, healing started to become a spamfest. My Flash Heals can crit for almost 11k these days, and because of the higher levels of avoidance on tanks, healing becomes exponentially more easy. The tanks take less hits; and when they do, our heals heal them faster.

What was Blizzard’s response to this? They made the bosses hit harder. MUCH harder. Gormok was an extreme case of this, and I may cause some controversy by saying that I think it’s the biggest failure of Blizzard’s design team so far this expansion. When the tank took a full hit from a boss, his health would drop 25k. Combined with Gormok’s damage-increase and unlucky Impale ticks, (and especially given that before the first nerf Gormok was affected by parry-haste,) we lost about 50 attempts to tanks getting what we in the business call “gibbed” or “instagibbed” – killed before the healers could possibly react.

How Has It Been Fixed?

It hasn’t. Not yet, at least, because it’s still 3.2. For tank healers, Icecrown Citadel will be a pivotal point in the analysis of Blizzard’s balance team; they’re hanging their balance on Chill of the Throne, a zone-wide effect in the Icecrown raid that reduces tank avoidance by 20%, similar to Sunwell Radiance. The theory behind this is that allowing tanks to take more hits means that the strength of those attacks can be toned down, and tanks will take more of a “steady stream” of damage rather than 40k-40k-bang-you’re-dead. Will that be a success? We’ll see! Keep your eyes peeled.

So, is encounter design a “success”? The reason I have success in quote-marks is because the word success is polarised. It’s a yes or no question, really. In reality, Blizzard make a great game that keeps me glued to my screen when I have the time to spare for it! There are definitely places for improvement and we’ll see how Chill of the Throne works out when 3.3 goes live, but for the most part Blizzard’s encounter design has been very good this expansion; something that I think is overlooked by a lot of people.

Next article, first impressions of 3.3!

Anub’arak Heroic for Healers and Raid Leaders

I won’t lie. Right now, Anub’arak heroic is my favourite fight in the game. I can see Valithria hardmode being a lot of fun (spoilers!) once Patch 3.3 arrives, but for now, this encounter trumps Vezax hardmode as what I feel is the most challenging and enjoyable fight for myself and other healers in the game. It’s got to the point where almost every guild is working on some form of the encounter, whether it’s 10-man (Tribute runs or otherwise) for more casual guilds or 25-man for the progress guilds (including my current guild). Today I’m going to be going over the fight itself, as well as how Discipline fits into the healing side of things and providing some tips for both raid leaders and DPS.

The fight varies vastly depending on which version of the fight you are working on (ie. 10 or 25) and there are several different strategies and methods of dealing with Penetrating Cold/Leeching Swarm depending on your raid composition. I’m not going to cover them all, but I will talk at length about the most common solutions. You might want to watch TankSpot’s excellent video-guide of the encounter before reading on, as I will take some elements from that. Firstly, let’s look at the fight itself!

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Anub’arak Heroic – The Fight

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Part One: The Gimmick

Every fight has a gimmick, but the gimmick on Anub’arak is more than just something to be aware of – to understand how to heal the fight, you actually have to understand how it works and that it affects everything from how you divide up your healers to the raid’s DPS. Blizzard have created a fight where the healers have at least partial control over how fast the boss dies. How cool is that?

Let’s skip straight to Phase 3. Anub’arak uses an ability called Leeching Swarm, which drains 30% of the raid’s current health per second (20% on 10-man heroic) and heals Anub’arak. What does this mean? When you heal someone, you’re effectively healing the boss. For this reason, the raid needs to be kept as low as is realistically possible without dying. But don’t worry – the minimum tick for Leeching Swarm is 250 damage per second, so if someone is kept at 1000 health then they’re still 4 seconds away from dying! This can present a big problem for inexperienced raid leaders, which I’ll talk about later.

Leeching Swarm also presents two other big problems; tank healing and dealing with Penetrating Cold – a debuff applied by Anub’arak to several members of the raid which ticks for 6000 damage (3500 on 10-man) every 3 seconds. I’ll talk about these in the next sections.

Part Two: Raid Composition

Whilst Blizzard have always aimed at having a “Bring the player, not the class” system, Anub’arak heroic is one fight that benefits greatly from having a comparatively precise raid setup; but thankfully not back to the days of Sunwell Shamen-stacking or requiring X Priests for Razuvious. Two Holy Paladins are virtually essential for tank healing, and Paladins of other specs are invaluable for both tanking and phase 2 kiting. Other DPS classes with good passive group-wide heals (eg. Shadow Priests and Elemental Shamen) excel here as well, and shield tanks are pretty much required for the blocks on boss/add hits.

So while there’s no hard-and-fast ruleset, you’d do well to think about what you’re missing when you’re putting your raid together.

As for the number of healers, there are a lot of different combinations. I’ve heard of many 10-man guilds that have successfully done the heroic mode using 3 healers; my guild generally uses 2 healers and 6 dps (thus only going through one submerge phase). As for the 25-man, the number of healers can vary anywhere between 5 and 8 (!) but the normal group of 6 healers, provided it’s well-structured, won’t really let you down.

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How Does Discipline Fit Into The Fight?

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Discipline has historically been about damage mitigation, which means that in a fight where the damage is predictable we normally excel. Anub’arak heroic is no exception; and we can go further by saying that, indeed, this is one of the only fights where we can actually raid heal!

Part One: What’s Our Role?

In this fight, you can take on a variety of roles depending on whether you’re doing 10 or 25. I’ll cover these two separately.

10-man healing can take one of four forms, depending on whether you’re running with a Holy Paladin or not (you should be, really) and whether you’re using 2 healers or 3. Assuming you’re running with a Holy Paladin, you’ll be either asked to respec Shadow to make way for another raid healer or given a free role. You’ll generally be shielding the tanks and concentrating most of your healing on the raid in phase 3 (all of it if you’re running 2 healers). If you’re not running with a Holy Paladin, 2 healers becomes almost impossible to pull off as keeping the tanks alive all the time is tres difficile without plenty of luck and cooldowns coming out of your ears.

25-man healing invariably takes the same form. You’ll be helping out on both tanks and raid members in phase 1/2, dealing with Penetrating Cold and throwing shields around when you can. In phase 3, your attention will switch to the raid and your designated Penetrating Cold target. More on this later.

Part Two: How Can We Raid Heal?

Discipline hasn’t been very good at raid healing encounters in the past. While we can throw out a metric ton of shields and almost trivialise several bosses’ AoE attacks, when it comes to huge amounts of unavoidable damage that needs healing up quickly in a 25-man raid, we just don’t cut it. So how is Anub’arak different? Well, while the damage output in phase 3 is gigantic for the first 6 or 7 seconds, it doesn’t need healing up. We don’t have to get everyone back to full health; we just need to keep them alive, which is where small but precise heals like Holy Nova (your key tool in phase 3) come into their own. Because the actual healing required is restricted largely to Penetrating Cold targets, it might look like you need a Holy Priest or Resto Druid but really the job gets done just as well by a DPriest.

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So How Do We Kill Him?

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So, down to the nitty gritty.

Phases One and Two

The healing in these phases are pretty simple and shouldn’t take much more exertion than normal. The tanks will be hit slightly harder and the stacking debuff from the Swarm Scarabs gets annoying; but ultimately, the most important thing in these two phases is to kite correctly and this is something that the TankSpot video covers much better than I could.

What you’ll spend most of your time doing in these phases is conserving mana. Because the damage output is pretty low by comparison and because the mana requirements in phase 3 are so heavy, you’ll be wanting to keep your mana in as tip-top a condition as possible. Holy Nova may be extremely useful in phase 3 but it’s mana-intensive to use and the final phase continues for much longer than you might think compared to normal mode. Don’t underestimate the importance of a healthy mana bar in phase 3, and err on the side of caution.

Phase Three

In General: The trick to healing phase 3 is to keep everybody without the Penetrating Cold debuff (and the tanks) as close as possible to ~2000 health. This gives you plenty of time to react to the Leeching Swarm debuff (between ~4 and 6 seconds) and means that Anub’arak doesn’t heal too fast. Tanks and Penetrating Cold targets should be kept at ideally 50% health or higher; perma-blocked hits from tanks give them much more survivability when you do this. Get the raid stacked as close together as possible so your Holy Novas won’t miss targets (and may actually damage the boss and adds, however small the output is) and make sure for the first time on progress that everybody has Frost Protection potions at the ready. Nope, I’m afraid you won’t be getting a mana potion on this fight.

As for DPriests, the only really general rule is not to use Prayer of Mending! It can crit for upwards of 9k on any random target and that’s really what you don’t want in a fight where precision reigns supreme.

10-man: Healing this phase in 10-man depends heavily on your raid composition. With two healers, you’ll probably be raid healing and will thus want to keep a hasted Prayer of Healing in your bag of tricks for the other group of the raid (ie. the one you can’t Holy Nova). There are several little chain-cast tricks that come in useful here: one example would be immediately after Penetrating Cold is applied, a Shield –> Flash Heal –> Shield –> Penance –> Holy Nova –> PoH with the first four casts on the PC targets. Try and weave casts like that to get the maximum haste possible from Borrowed Time. It’s really important here!

You’ll be using PoH and Holy Nova to keep the raid from dying to Leeching Swarm, so your mana will drop extremely quickly. Ask a Druid if he can save an Innervate for you or, failing that, a Hymn of Hope from a Shadow Priest; this will help a great deal. Save your shields and Penance/Flash Heals for the PC targets as they’ll need extremely quick healing (you have to deal with two within a matter of seconds).

With three healers, the load on the raid is decreased considerably. You’ll probably be raid healing; divide the groups between the two of you, assign yourself one PC target each (raid icons help here) and keep your assigned group/PC target alive. Throw a shield off on the tanks when you can!

25-man: Many of the concepts here carry over from 10-man. Normally, each group will be assigned one healer who will keep them up through the entirety of phase 3, with the two Paladins on the tanks. Try and co-ordinate the healers so that if you’re short one raid healer, one of you heals the two groups which already have passive effects like Vampiric Embrace. Each healer will also be assigned one Penetrating Cold target, designated by a raid icon that’s automatically applied by DBM. Make a macro to target that icon, because Grid won’t tell you which of the targets with PC is yours!

Your key tools will once again be shields, Penance on your PC target and Holy Nova, but this time without PoH as you don’t have to deal with another group. Don’t forget to pop your Shadowfiend!

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Some Notes for Raid Leaders: Common Mistakes

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Having been in a good 50 failed attempts on Anub myself, I’ve heard quite a lot from raid leaders on “where we’re going wrong”. I figured I’d add this section as an appendix of sorts, so that disillusioned healers (or helpful healers) can link their RLs here and make the process a lot nicer for everybody!

Problem One: Asking DPS to offheal

Some raidframes, like XPerl, flash red when someone is on low health. If a raid leader uses a set of raidframes like this, I can guarantee you they’ll have a heart attack when phase 3 arrives. You’re sat there with your precise heals and your calculated casts but all the raid leader sees is “people are dying”. This has led to an RL asking an Elemental Shaman or Shadow Priest to offheal in the middle of phase 3 several times.

It might seem like an inconvenience for healers and you might get a little pissed when someone does it, but just remember; your raid leader may not know the kind of specifics that you do! They’re just trying to keep everyone alive and in check – it’s their job. When we were progressing on heroic 10-man, (sadly we didn’t down it before I went to university,) my RL certainly didn’t know how the healing worked on the first few tries, and neither did the rest of the DPS. Every fight on that first evening you’d see an overeager Mage Ice Block because he was at 3k health, or a Shadow Priest jump out of Shadowform and pop Divine Hymn.

So, how do you know if your healers have the situation under control? Simple! If half the raid is dead, they don’t. If less than about 10% of your raid is dead, unless it’s a tank, don’t worry. People do die here and there on Anub’arak and it’s unfortunate when it happens, but most of the time your healers are still dealing with it. If you start losing healers and it creates a snowball effect, you’ll wipe. But that doesn’t mean that you should divert DPS to offhealing just because the healers are on low health!

Think of it this way: it’s not like a fight such as Kologarn or Ignis, where you can see how your raid healers react to raid-wide damage and analyse it. Raidframes just don’t tell you that on Anub’arak. In this fight, there’s simply a line that separates someone being alive and someone being dead and you just have to place your faith in the healers. If someone’s health is at ~500, nothing has gone wrong yet. If someone’s dead, it has.

Problem Two: “Keep the raid at X%”

I’ve heard just about everything from raid leaders! Do I keep the raid at 20%, 50%, 5% or just spamheal my socks off? The generally accepted “correct” figure – which gives a balance between survivability and lack of healing on Anub’arak – is roughly 2000 health. If you want a percentage, this will work out at between 10% and 6-7% of someone’s health. Tanks and Penetrating Cold targets should be kept as high as is realistically possible, but 50% is a good health count to aim for on them. One of the big communication issues in this fight is different raid leaders hearing different things and nobody knowing who’s right.

Problem Three: Defensive Cooldowns on DPS

A great example of this is Ice Block. Something that reduces someone’s DPS for a gain in survivability. Well I’ve got news for you, buddy! Us healers don’t want you to pop Ice Block (unless perhaps you’re using it to get rid of PC); we want you to kill the boss faster. I remember someone once telling me that “DPS is the best mp5″ – well in this fight, it certainly is. You kill the boss faster and let us worry about keeping you alive.

Of course, you should take this with a pinch of salt. What’s a good figure to start worrying about defensive cooldowns and Ice Block and the like? Maybe if you’re one or two ticks of Swarm away from dying – that’d be about 250 to 500 health left.

Anyway, hope this helps. I always have a blast on this boss and it’s a great fight for Discipline. Good luck!

– Roble

The Roble UI and Essential Addons for Healers

Well hello again readers, and sorry for my inexplicable absence! I’ve been beavering away at my Maths degree for the last three weeks and I’m afraid to say I’ve barely even raided, let alone had time to write up a blog entry. But here I am! I’ve got some free time on an afternoon in between more work and going out this evening and I’m using it to make you happy.

I said before that I was going to upload my UI to offer to you guys, and I didn’t lie; without further ado, here it is – the Roble UI (v1.0)! I’ve included a readme in the .rar file so that I don’t have to deal with all the instructions in this post, but what I will say is that it’s very important you follow those instructions and create a backup so that just incase my UI screws up your keybinds or macros or whatever then you can bring back your old UI. It’s a big thing switching between interfaces and not something you should do lightly! Also, note that this UI is for 1920×1080 resolution screens. Those of you with different monitors may have to jiggle/scale the addons around a bit. Finally, the UI was physically created before I came to uni and so some addons may need updating. You’ll find that my setup is probably completely different to yours and it’ll take a while to get used to it. Want to see what the UI looks like? Take a look! (This screenshot is pretty much perfect and illustrates all the major features of the UI.)

So, addons for healers. There’s an overwhelming selection out there and while one person might recommend PitBull for unitframes, someone else might swear by X-Perl. Which do you pick? It’s a tough choice and I can’t speak for experience for all of these addons as I have only ever used a select few. What I’m going to do is explain which parts of the default Blizzard UI you’ll really be wanting to replace and then tell you which one I use, along with a few other suggestions!

But before we start, what’s the first rule of making a healer UI? Maximise space. As a DPS, all you usually need to know is your rotation, some Deadly Boss Mods (DBM) timers and where the mob you’re killing is. Okay, that’s maybe a little unfair! But so long as you don’t have LUA errors coming up interfering with your view of the bosses’ behinds, there’s not a lot that can go wrong. Being a healer is all about information. I do my best to not just watch Grid, I look around the screen as well. Adds coming into play on Anub’arak? I see that happening long before the tank’s health bar starts dropping on Grid. Grid can tell you that somebody’s out of range, but it can’t tell you where they are. What you need is as clear a screen as possible so that you can look around and see what’s happening. The only exception to this rule is Grid, because without Grid you won’t heal much!

Step One: RaidFrames

Roble's RaidFrames

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Roble Uses: Grid

Other Options: Healbot, VuhDo

Raid frames are the first and most important thing you need as a healer. My raidframes, at a very basic level, give me information on people’s health counts in my raid (with a blue outline when they drop to low mana). But in reality, Grid does so much more than that for me. It has info on who has aggro, (useful on fights like Razorscale for fireball targeting,) who’s got PoM or Renew on them, who’s got Shields, who’s got Weakened Soul, who’s got low mana, who’s out of range and important debuffs are shown on their individual frame. At a glance, I can tell exactly what’s happening in a raid, who needs healing now (and who’s receiving it from someone else) and who’ll need it soon, as well as which heal I should be using on them. As for position, you’ll want it somewhere near your character (I have mine at the bottom of the screen) so that you can quickly glance between Grid and what’s happening to your character.

Grid is near-infinitely customisable and you won’t know how you kept a raid alive without it.

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Step Two: UnitFrames

Roble's UnitFrames

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Roble Uses: Pitbull

Other Options: X-Perl

Pitbull and X-Perl are by far and away the best-known UnitFrames. These replace the Blizzard UI section that shows your health and mana/rage/energy/RP and that of your target (and the target’s target). The Blizzard stuff, while fairly functional, is a bit ugly. I use Pitbull, which is very customisable and displays information much more clearly. The Blizzard UI has very small health and mana bars in which it tries to display a fair amount of numbers/information, which just doesn’t really work. It also displays target buffs a lot more clearly – sometimes I’ll be wanting to do a quick glance to see if X target has, for example, Beacon of Light and the Pitbull frames make this much easier.

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Step Three: Action Bars

Roble's Action Bars

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Roble Uses: Bartender

Other Options: Dominos (issues with v1.13 beta afaik) and ButtonFacade

Let’s be honest. The Blizzard action bars aren’t good at “maximising space”. They take up about a quarter of the screen if you have the sidebars/topbars enabled; so from a space point of view, getting rid of those action bars is about the best thing you can do! You can see from my UI screenshot that what I’ve done is minimise my action bars to one key set of cooldowns that I can glance at, tucked away in a corner somewhere. This kind of hide-the-bars-away stuff relies on you knowing your keybinds inside out. I use 1-9, (on two bars, with the mouse wheel to switch between them,) V, Q, E, Z, R, G, C, X, H, the two side-buttons on my mouse, (and the shift- for all of these,) along with CTRL 1-3/side-buttons and F1 through F10. I know what each and every one does! If you can’t commit these kind of things to memory, I’d recommend enabling the action bars and having them as small as your eyesight will allow you to reliably, quickly read them.

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Step Four: Boss Mods

Roble's DBM

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Roble Uses: Deadly Boss Mods

Other Options: BigWigs

Boss Mods tell you what’s happening in a fight and what’s going to be happening. They’re absolutely invaluable to any guild that’s not at the cutting edge of progress (as for obvious reasons, this info is generally unavailable to guilds going for world firsts).  DBM is a very lightweight addon that tells you important stuff. Need to know when to switch Essence on Val’kyr? DBM’s got it covered. Need reminding there’s an Icehowl charge near you? DBM will tell you. Anub’arak pursue message not attention-grabbing enough? Don’t worry, DBM won’t let you miss it.

Essentially, Boss Mods are a tool that either allow healers to concentrate on Grid and other stuff, only stopping to do stuff when DBM tells them to, or it can be used to – for example – pre-shield raid members ahead of a raid-wide AoE on a timer. There’s a lot more you can get out of it than just “it tells you what to do”!

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Step Five: Combat Text

Roble's Combat Text

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Roble Uses: Mik Scrolling Battle Text (MSBT)

Other Options: Scrolling Combat Text (SCT)

The Blizzard combat text tells you how much healing you did and how much damage you took. Really, that can be improved on! MSBT contains a plethora of features that will allow you to accurately tell what that debuff on you is doing in damage per tick, or how much your Penance is hitting for. It also tells you when things come off cooldown and has an option (which I run with disabled outside of arena) that tells you things like when you get a new buff or when you go in/out of combat. It also makes overhealing much clearer. Yes, technically you could just modify the existing Blizzard combat text and not find out any of this stuff, but the cooldown support (and trigger support to tell you when something procs) swings it for me. This is the functionality of two or three addons in one nice, small, highly customisable package.

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Appendix: Other Raid-Relevant Addons

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Roble Uses: Recount, Elkano’s Buffbars, Quartz, Sexymap

And why do I run with these? All these addons make the most of the space they take up. They’re all scaleable to make them as small or as large (but realistically, as small) as you want or can be hidden. Let’s do a quick once-over of what these things do and how essential they are.

Recount: Recount, at a basic level, tells you who did the most damage or healing. But really it’s so much more than that! I normally have this turned off during fights and use it afterwards to look at things like “did I always have PoM on cooldown?” or “which tank took more damage?”. If there’s a question you’ve got about damage done/taken or healing done/taken during a fight, Recount can answer it. Who’s slacking on dispels? Check Recount! One important thing to remember is that Recount does not tell the whole story for Healing Done! I never, ever use Recount as an indication of performance and you shouldn’t either. I use it purely to find out information about a given fight.

Verdict? Hideable during fights and very useful if your computer can support the extra memory taken (remember to reset it regularly!). Definitely worth it.

Elkano’s: Elkano’s is the thing in the top left of my UI screenshot and I use it to manage my buffs. It’s the only aspect of my UI that I actually want to change, and frankly I think it can be downsized; I just haven’t found a better addon for the job yet. Takes up a fair chunk of space but any buff addon is useful.

Quartz: Pitbull includes a castbar for the player as far as I know, but ultimately you’ll want to get something better. Quartz is a moveable cast bar that has the important feature of calculating lag. What do I mean by this? It displays a little red bar on your castbar and when your cast reaches that red section, (or the end if you have it set so the red bit is at the start,) you can be reasonably sure that your next cast will go off when you press the key, even though your gcd may not appear to have finished! This is a lifesaver and can save you a lot of casting time if you’re on a bad connection. Well worth it.

Sexymap: A scaleable map that turns all your minimap icons hidden until you mouseover the map! Great for saving space and making your screen look a little less cluttered/more pretty.

Anyway, hopefully I’ve covered everything here. Sorry for the delay, and next time I believe I’ll be covering Anub’arak 10-man heroic from a healer’s point of view. Ever heard your raid leader ask a DPS to help out healing because their raid frames go crazy? Yep, I’ve been there too. And I’ll be writing a little something you can link your raid leaders to.

How Has 3.2 Changed Discipline Gemming?

Wow, it’s been a whole two weeks since my last article. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind recently and I’ve been slacking on my blog – it’s one of those things that takes a backseat when other stuff gets crazy! My guild disbanded and reformed under new leadership after the officers got sick of the GM and I’m getting ready to go back to uni in a week’s time, so I need to start remembering all that stuff I did last year…

Anywho, there’s been a bit of a ruckus on the Ensidia forums over the last few days. Two threads about Priest gemming, one for Discipline and one for Holy, started off with the usual advice and suddenly descended into a debate (to say the least) about the value of Spirit compared to Intellect for Priests of different specs. These threads made me realise that much of the information in the gemming section of my Discipline guide is a little out of date! While it was more than valid for Ulduar, 3.2 has changed the game when it comes to gemming and I’ll be writing about what I’m doing differently, as well as what Blizzard is doing differently.

Perhaps at this point it would be prudent to go and look through my old advice for DPriests. I wrote a paragraph or two on how to gem your Priest for best possible results and I basically summed it up by saying “screw socket bonuses, gem for spellpower”. This still holds true… to an extent. It’s just not chapter and verse anymore.

How To Do It!

Allow me to explain.

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Back in the mists of time at the release of Wrath, classes and specs were still working out what stats were best for them. Socket bonuses on gear varied vastly between useful (spellpower) and relatively pointless (spirit, crit). The question you had to ask yourself was “would I rather have X spellpower, or Y crit/spirit and Z intellect/mp5/whatever?” where Y and Z were much inferior to X. The answer was almost always X spellpower, because rule number one for Discipline Priests is that spellpower reigns supreme.

Then 3.2 came along. Blizzard realised that pretty much every caster class was gemming for straight spellpower, because that’s what was most useful for them. If the socket bonus wasn’t spellpower, we just stacked more spellpower. Gear in top-end guilds was getting to the point where it wasn’t customisable, (as the socketing design is supposed to make it,) because everyone did the same thing and gemmed for straight spellpower. DPriests were no exception. Something had to be done.

Suddenly Blizzard’s policy on socket bonuses changed. Notice the overwhelming majority of 3.2 set pieces and item drops have spellpower bonuses? We’re being forced to make much more difficult decisions, because there’s finally some carrot attached to that socket-bonus-string.

Say we have a piece with a red socket and a yellow socket which has a +7 spellpower bonus. Here we have a choice. Do we socket it with two +23 SP gems and get +46 SP, or do we go one 23 SP and one 12 SP/10 INT – which gives us the socket bonus? It’s a tough choice. Whichever option we go for, we’ll get at least 42 spellpower. Beyond that, we have to choose between 4 extra spellpower and 10 intellect. And that’s difficult… is there even a cut-and-dry “better” decision? What about 12 SP/10 Crit? Gear becomes less about what’s best for your class and more about what’s best for your current situation.

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So, we need a new set of rules. Obviously knowing what stat is good for what will help, so let’s do another quick runthrough of that;

• Spellpower: Your bread-and-butter throughput stat. You get more of it from better gear, and it pretty much trumps everything – but we don’t want to sacrifice 10 Intellect or 10 Crit for 1 Spellpower. Priest stats are about achieving a balance, remember?

• Intellect: Your bread-and-butter regen stat. Intellect gives more than double the mp5 per point than Spirit as well as giving extra Crit. We’re never out of the 5 second rule because we’re pretty much spam casting. If we’re not healing the tank, we’re shielding the raid!

• Crit: Nice for throughput, helps to stack Divine Aegis on the tank. Thanks to the change to Divine Aegis (stacks up to 10k on any Level 80 target) there is no longer a realistic soft-cap for crit. Divine Aegis is now capped by spellpower. Once your triple-crit Penance heals for ~30k (with the t9 4-set bonus) you will start to see small reductions in Divine Aegis throughput. The upshot of all this mumbo-jumbo? Crit is good.

• Mana Per 5 (mp5): Better for straight-up regen than Intellect, which gives about 0.8 mp5 per point. The tradeoff is that there’s less mp5 on gear/gems and it doesn’t give us any crit. Decent for regen.

• Spirit: 11 Spirit is roughly equal to 4 mp5 for regen. What does this mean? Well, you’ll find Spirit on gear but DPriests would rather have Intellect and mp5. Don’t pass up gear just because it has Spirit, but don’t gem for it!

• Haste: Useful up until the soft-cap of just under 5%. You’ll get this just about exclusively from gear.

So, what are our rules going to be? Well, here’s what I’ve started doing.

How Not To Do It!

Rule One: Spellpower Socket Bonuses Are Awesome

In most situations, you’ll want to fulfil your Spellpower socket bonuses. I could see an argument for going straight Spellpower if it was a double socket item with no reds (where gemming for the socket bonus if it was, say, +7 Spellpower would still lose you 15 Spellpower) but a combination of gut instinct and wanting to get the most usefulness possible out of my gear tells me that if an item has an insane socket bonus, I’m going to get it. After all, I can choose what non-SP gems I put into my gear but I can’t choose my socket bonuses.

Rule Two: Don’t Be Afraid of Intellect – Just Don’t Stack It

Intellect is where we get the majority of our regen from. The fact that there’s double the Intellect on gems than there is mp5 makes gemming for Intellect better for regen purposes. The trick is achieving a balance. I can fully understand if you want to gem Intellect to get some more regen, just don’t get too much of it. It seriously pains me to see the kind of thing in the above picture, where someone sacrifices a Spellpower socket bonus for more Intellect. If you’re finishing ToC/Ulduar hardmodes on 10k mana then something is badly wrong – or you outgear that encounter, but you probably already know that if it’s the case. You’re either not casting enough spells or you’re sacrificing throughput, and it’s probably the latter.

Examples. I’m at 27k-28k mana raid buffed depending on what elixirs/flasks I use. I finished Vezax hardmode last night on zero mana. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. But more importantly, I reached that point between 2 and 5 seconds before the boss died. That’s about perfect. If trials in our guild would stop failing on Icehowl charges, I’d be finishing Beasts hardmode on ~3-4k mana. Also perfect, not too much left but still enough to be comfortably healing at the end. I don’t need more Intellect on gear, so I’ll stop gemming for it!

I met a DPriest from a pretty good Kazzak guild today who had a nice chat with me about our respective gearsets. I told him he had a little too much Intellect and he told me he cycled gear for different fights. That’s cool, and especially easy to do with trinkets. My point? Get as much Intellect as you need for the given fight you’re doing, then STOP.

Rule Three: Make Sure to Keep Your Metagem Active

Should go without saying really, but if you run out of blue or yellow sockets on gear then just gem the prismatic in your belt for whatever you need. There’s no excuse to not have your metagem working! Oh, and DON’T get the 2% Intellect metagem. It’s pretty worthless, the mana restore metagem (Insightful Earthsiege Diamond) is much better and gives such an insane amount of regen that you can gem for much more Spellpower. And that is good.

Rule Four: Gem Straight Spellpower in Prismatic Sockets and non-Spellpower Bonus Items

Unless in the situation mentioned above, prismatic sockets are just free Spellpower! As for non-Spellpower bonus items, they’re small enough to be pretty much negligible. Say we have a yellow item with a +4 Intellect bonus like the one in the first picture. Option one, we gem for SP/Int for the socket bonus – option two, we gem for straight Spellpower. The choice is between 14 Intellect from option one and 11 Spellpower from option two. That’s almost 1:1, and I’d rather take the Spellpower in that situation.

THE GOLDEN RULE

Prioritise Spellpower, then get whatever else you NEED.

There’s a simple way to sum all this up into a general rule of thumb. The 3.2 changes to socket bonuses on set pieces and other items allow us to gem for what we need on the majority of our gear rather than just gemming for Spellpower and relying on other sources for our regen. You need regen? No problem sir, find a Spellpower socket bonus and stick an mp5 or Intellect gem in there. Got enough regen but lacking much in the way of Crit? Never fear, just find another Spellpower socket bonus and put some Crit in a socket!

Thanks to Blizzard, there is no longer a “best way” of gemming your gear in many situations. You can realistically gem for whatever you need while still sticking to the framework I outlined above.

Next time – addons! I’m finalising my UI and I’ll be talking about how to create space on your screen as well as what addons are essential for DPriests! I’ve made some sweet changes since Friday’s raid, but click here for a preview! (And low resolution screen users be warned, it’s a bigun.)

Five Top Tips on Making It in a Raiding Guild

While I’ve written a lot about raiding recently, I haven’t talked about the means to do it. Sure you can go with pick-up groups, but for by far the best and most consistent results, you’ll need to join a raiding guild. Between all the drama-laden horror stories about loot and YouTube videos of screaming raid leaders, the guild environment can seem quite intimidating. In reality, it’s the greatest asset of the game! Finding a guild that fits your lifestyle generally allows you to see content with a group of friends at your own pace, and is a much more reliable way to experience the game than PuGs.

Having watched a good 15 to 20 trials in my most recent guild, as well as having been a trial in two guilds myself, I’ve identified some problem areas which prevent people from fitting in and meshing with the rest of the guild. So, without further ado;

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Step One: Find The Right Guild!

The first step on your road to happiness and purples is to find a guild whose goals and methods fit your own. Do your research! Anyone can find a guild in /Trade, but the best matches are the ones where the interested party has read up on guild policies, (things like loot policy and raiding atmosphere,) asked guildies questions and generally made sure that it’ll be fun for everyone involved before they join.

Finding guilds themselves can be a tricky process and where you go to find them will largely depend on things like how many times per week you wish to raid. The more hardcore guilds can be found on progression websites (I used GuildOx to find my current guild) or occasionally in General/Trade chat. More casual guilds will generally advertise in in-game channels, but you can generally distinguish between the two by how they word their ads.

Once you’ve found a guild, chances are if it’s decent (read: if it’s worth joining) that you’ll have to go through some sort of screening process. What does this entail? Normally, it’s either an in-game chat about anything from your raiding experience and gear to where you’re from, or an application on the guild’s forums. But applying to a guild which is completely at odds with the way you play the game is a recipe for disaster!

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Step Two: Impress!

Making a great first impression is key to getting an invite to your chosen guild. Some guilds will say that they’re full on all classes (or your class) if you choose to apply on their forums, but that shouldn’t stop you persevering – I know from experience that excellent applications for any class are always considered by the management. The three main keys to a successful application are;

• Be informative, but concise in an application – and use common sense! If the application template seems a little small then the guild probably expects you to buff it out a bit with your answers – if there’s several sections on everything from raiding to whether you prefer your eggs hard-boiled or soft-boiled, they probably want shorter answers. If there’s no template at all, consider everything that you’d want to know about a prospective applicant if you were in charge of a guild. Past raiding experience, explanation of glyphs/gear/talents that might be different from other class members and motivation for playing the game are all great things to include.

• Keep your spelling and grammar tight. You wouldn’t litter a CV with typos and bad grammar, so why do it on any other application? An excess of spelling mistakes, shortened text (“i gt 2 imprv my gear a lil”) and other basic errors will put any sensible raid leader right off you from the word go!

• Be honest. In this post-Wrath world, there’s more methods than ever to check what someone has and hasn’t done. If you can’t be bothered to grind your Sons of Hodir reputation, (a huge indicator of in-game effort,) don’t make up some half-boiled excuse about not having the time. Raid leaders can see right through that and it won’t stand well with them. Either set about correcting holes in your profile or be honest about just not wanting to do them.

If you’re just going through an in-game chat, the last two of these points still apply. Don’t spin fairytales about your raiding experience and try to come across as someone who takes pride in what they write, even if you normally cut corners with your text chat!

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Step Three: Be There, and Whatever You Do… Don’t Die.

Congratulations! You got invited to the guild. Here’s where the real work starts. Firstly, make sure you turn up to raids. Do it on time, and inform the guild in advance if you’ll be late or not there. I made 10 of my 12 trial raids and 3 optional 10-mans, with good reasons for the other 2 which were given in advance. Follow this example and you’ll quickly gain a reputation as a reliable guy who wants to help the guild progress – the “attending optional raids” thing is great for when you miss a progress raid.

Once you get into the raid, stay focused and concentrate on one thing. Do. Not. Die. These are the three most important words any trial can hear.

Why? We generally get an influx of trials at the rate of about one or two per week. That means that in this situation, you’ve usually got one or two raids to make an impression before the next trial comes along and we’re watching them instead. As a healer, I’ve always found that the new guy’s tendency to stand in the fire tells me a great deal more than their DPS or their healing done on the meters. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that after activity, (a trial got kicked today for joining and then promptly missing his first raid – the same evening – without a reason,) competency at basic execution is what makes or breaks 90% of our trials. We can live with an average DPS or a healer who misses a dispel here and there so long as he doesn’t repeatedly fail. A tank death is generally a much more acceptable way for a raid to wipe than someone screwing up!

Think about it – it’s what separates the average guilds from the bad ones. The bad guilds will wipe over and over when they get to Twin Valkyrs because people won’t pay attention to orb colours. The average guilds (“good” here referring to the likes of Ensidia) will learn within 2 or 3 wipes that orbs of the opposite colour are bad, and should not be picked up. They then have 25 people who execute correctly, and they down the boss. Guilds can down Yogg-Saron in blues because teamwork and survival is more important than numbers on your profile. Your gear isn’t what impresses me in a raid – it’s how often I see DEAD where your name should be on Grid.

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Step Four: Get the Basics Right

You’d be surprised how many people in our raids still miss important things when they’re starting. As an Alchemist, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve got “hey mate, need some Wild Magic pots” whispers just after the start of a raid! It’s the kind of thing that people are often embarrassed about, but never learn from.

• Flask up! Flasks cost next to nothing nowadays and even one round of SoH dailies normally covers the cost of an entire raid’s flasks for a non-Alchemist. You should have that lovely free +125 spellpower buff from start to finish. Last progress try on a boss for the night and your flask has just run out? Don’t go slacking! That kind of dedication – paying 25 gold for 10 minutes’ raiding – gets noticed.

• Bring plenty of potions! I normally have at least one stack of Crazy Alchemist’s Potions with me for every raid – the Alchemist’s equivalent of a Runic Mana Potion (plus a bit!). If you’re not an Alchemist, bring plenty of mana potions and use them – that’s what they’re there for, and you never know when that mana pot might turn into a Shadowfiend off-cooldown and a boss kill!

• Take a stack of food incase you miss the Fish Feast, and stock up on candles/reagents for instances where you don’t have easy access to a reagent vendor. Paladins never seeming to have DI reagents (despite it saving them a repair bill) is a good example of this.

• Keep buffs up! A tank without Fortitude will not pull, and that slows down the raid. Buff early and often – there are several addons that will track who in your raid doesn’t have a given buff when you mouse over it.

To conclude – prepare for raids, don’t just show up first and ask questions later.

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Step Five: Don’t Whine

I cannot stress this enough. By all means express your opinion. Talk to your GM or raid leaders about the raid setup, the way the guild is run or your concerns on any other matter. My current guild actively encourages debate as it almost always improves the guild environment (the last major change being a switch from DKP to Loot Council). But there’s a difference between airing your opinion and whining.

You probably know the guy I’m talking about, and as Mock The Week so brilliantly put it: “if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you”. Maybe it’s about loot, maybe it’s about being told to do something differently, but whatever it is, his response is never “okay” or a sensible argument of his case. His response is to moan, complain with no good reason and generally be the Guild Diva. As a trial, not doing this is especially important.

Let’s start with loot! If a piece of loot drops and you need it, you roll. If you don’t win it (for whatever reason, be it member prio or a losing roll) then say “gz” and get on with your life. It is, after all, just pixels on a screen. If you get told to do something differently then either do it to the best of your ability or formulate a sensible argument as to how a) you can’t or b) you’d have to stop doing something else. Present it in a measured and calm manner. But don’t whine.

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Hope all this helps, and best of luck with getting into the guild of your dreams!

– Roble

More on 3.2 – Flash Heal, Raiding and The Truth About the Penance Nerf

It took me quite a while to decide what to write about next, but having settled into raiding with my new guild and downed all the Crusader bosses I figured this would be a good time to take a look at what has changed since 3.2 and my impressions of the new raid so far, in much the same vein as my last post on 3.2. Yes, Cataclysm has been announced, but all I’d really be writing about if I covered that would be stuff you’ve probably already read about! Suffice to say I’m really looking forward to the expansion and excited to see how stuff like guild levelling and the Mastery system plays out.

So, without further ado;

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Flash Heal

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But why?

Why? Good question.

About a week after 3.2 hit, the Glyph of Flash Heal made its glorious return to my talent pane. I’ve replaced Glyph of PoH with something that I once told you “just wasn’t worth it”. This means that something must have drastically changed – because let’s face it, the PoH glyph was pretty insane back in the day.

The key in this glyph puzzle is the 3.2 nerf to Penance. Back in 3.1 with Penance on a ~6 second cooldown, (6.4 if you’re a pedant like me,) tank healing wasn’t really much of a problem. We could throw a Penance on the tank every 5 or 6 GCDs, and provided we kept Shield/Renew/PoM up whenever possible, keeping that tank alive was an absolute breeze. In 10-mans, we could solo tank-heal no problem. In 25-mans, we could support the other tank healer and have plenty of time to shield the raid, safe in the knowledge that a tank death in-between Penance cooldowns was very unlikely.

But then Blizzard increased the cooldown by one precious GCD. Suddenly tank deaths in-between Penances became a possibility – especially considering Coliseum bosses are hitting harder. What fills the gap between Penances if the tank is in danger of dying? Yep, you guessed it. Flash Heal.

Flash Heal has suddenly rocketed up my healing charts and thanks to the Replenishment nerf, it was increasingly correlating with me running on fumes at the end of hardmodes. Fights like XT and Steelbreaker became battles to do as little overhealing as possible in an attempt to conserve mana. Despite hitting ~26k mana raid buffed with the +int elixir and getting in two Shadowfiends per fight, (along with the odd lucky Alchemist’s Potion double-mana proc,) I was really struggling at the end of those fights. Enter Glyph of Flash Heal, and now I’m just that bit more comfortable.

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Trial of the Crusader – Impressions So Far

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He's the new Heigan!

First things first – yes, I hate the artificial gate system too. Maybe “hate” is too strong of a word, but it seems counterintuitive to release one boss per week when the ones you put in are so, so easy. Many guilds are already getting the normal-mode achievements (things like Upper Back Pain and Three-Sixty Pain Spike) just because they “feel like having a go” and proceed to one-shot them. It remains to be seen how difficult the hard-mode bosses are, but I’d imagine they’ll just be the same mechanics with slightly increased damage. Doubtless having said that, Blizzard will prove me wrong – but given the current difficulty and the time we’ve had to practice on them, I still imagine it will be a race for server firsts rather than “the best guilds” getting them.

Anyway, as for what the raid is actually like – it’s really fun! I’m enjoying it, despite the system of progress. Many of the encounters – things like Jaraxxus, Faction Champs and the Val’kyr – strike me as the sort of fights that simply require good organisation rather than good gear to beat. Faction Champions is just about my favourite of the four fights so far, and take note here DPriests, it’s a fight that we absolutely destroy. Blizzard have to tune the fight so that the AI will set up spikes on players, but it can’t be crazy enough to give the healers no time to react. This means that you’ll see when people start to die, all you have to do is shield them – which essentially lowers the reaction time required by the other healers. With the lack of cooldown on shields and the lack of an aggro table for the fight, they’re super-spammable and make the encounter a lot easier.

Jaraxxus comes a close second in that there’s a lot of movement required and I always have to react to something – the style of the fight led me to describe it to someone as “Shade of Aran with adds”. That might not seem too accurate at first glance, but just cast your mind back to Zelda games (if you’ve ever played any). The boss did some kind of special attack, you reacted in a set way. It’s very black-and-white gameplay, as opposed to fights like the Faction Champs or the Jormungar where your strategy needs to be fluent, for want of a better word (we found that Ventrilo was a massive help for those fights). With Jaraxxus;

a) Someone gets a debuff, they run to the wall.

b) Someone gets a different debuff, healers heal them.

c) He casts a fireball, someone interrupts.

etc.

See what I’m getting at? There’s no room for different reactions, it’s just cut-and-dry. I almost enjoy it more that way.

Then there’s the Beasts encounter. This is relatively fun (and kindly asking your tanks to swap at 3 debuffs instead of 5 makes it a hell of a lot easier) and strikes me as “the new Heigan” – see picture. Icehowl is the third phase of the encounter, after you’ve downed the Magnataur and the two Jormungar. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m saying this… let’s face it, Heigan is a unique fight! Two things make me say this – the first is that Icehowl can, up to a point, be killed with as many or as few people alive as possible. The first week of 3.2, my old guild’s first Icehowl kill was with 5 people alive at the start and 4 at the end.

The second point is that in theory, Icehowl’s big gimmick is just as avoidable as the eruptions in Heigan’s dance phase… but people still die to it. Provided you’ve got a Hunter in your group and the tank positions himself correctly, someone dying shouldn’t be a problem. I’m not going to lie, I’ve died to it once! But that was lag on the stun debuff wearing off, so it doesn’t count.

Finally, the Twin Val’kyr. An interesting concept for a fight, but sadly far, far too easy provided your raid has the DPS to break their heal shields and people are quick to react to the floating orbs. I hadn’t popped a single mana cooldown and I was still at half mana when the fight finished! We almost got the 10-man achievement, but a couple of our DPS were offspec and not pushing as much as the guys in our guild’s other raid group, who got the 3-minute kill without a problem on their first attempt. Frankly, I think that if there was no shared health pool, they had to die within X seconds of each other then the fight and there was a strict 3-minute enrage (on hardmode) then it would become much more interesting, but still fairly easy.

EDIT: This was written before the Val’kyr were fixed. The healing in this fight is now what I’d call “stressful”.

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The Truth About the Penance Nerf

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Something struck me the other day when I was thinking about this post and how I was using Flash Heal more. I imagined myself sat in the Blizzard design offices, balancing Penance. Why would I nerf it? Sure, it was pretty overpowered, but it was the only way we could heal tanks effectively. And that’s just the thing, folks. They nerfed Penance to make sure we were staying in the role they designed us for – a mix of healing on the tank and raid support. Think of that extra GCD as a choice – if the tank needs healing, we can use it to heal him. If he doesn’t, we can throw out another shield.

But gone are the days when we can just main-tank heal in 25-mans. I was put on our Steelbreaker tank the other day and let me tell you, it’s no longer easy to solo tank-heal or be the main MT healer. I got switched to our OT and could suddenly shield the raid a whole lot more – and we instantly made it to phase 3 as opposed to wiping on phase 2. Let’s look at Penance and FH;

Penance: Heals an MT faster than they take damage (net increase on their health)

Flash Heal: Heals an MT slightly slower than they take damage (net decrease on their health)

Imagine, for the purposes of this exercise, the MT is taking a constant stream of damage instead of 20k chunks. We pop Penance, the tank goes back to full health. As the main MT healer, we have a choice here. We can either pause to shield the raid and then have to spam-heal the MT to keep him alive, (thereby completely killing our mana bar and risking a tank death,) or keep Flash Healing the tank to make it much smoother for the MT and not shield the raid. We can only do one or the other now. Remember 3.1, when we could use Penance on every cooldown and be able to throw out some shields on the raid? We weren’t a good raid healer, and now we’re just a slightly worse Holy Paladin as a tank healer.

So there it is, the truth about the Penance nerf. It may have been to make DPriests a little less scary in PvP, but in PvE it was to reinforce where we should be in raids. Ladies and gents, the day I get told by my RL “just do whatever you want” I will be a happy man.

– Roble

Double Trouble – Why Discipline Priests Don’t Stack Well

Last night, I took part in a curious raid.

It was the first experience of raiding with my shiny new guild Absolute on Kazzak, and I’ll start by saying that it was a blast. Very relaxed atmosphere and largely sensible raiding added up to a fun evening’s 10-mannage of Ulduar. We jogged through a few hardmodes, but had nowhere near an optimal setup for… well, for anything! We didn’t even have Replenishment. This made it both fun and kind of frustrating at the same time – it added a completely unnecessary challenge, (which is great fun if you know it’s coming,) but on the other hand I was going out of mana three quarters of the way through many fights. You don’t realise how important something is until it’s gone, right?

Anyway, I digress. Not having Replenishment on three-healer fights (one Priest respecced Shadow for Hodir) was a big issue, but what hindered us more early on was that we had two Discipline Priests. Our setup for XT and IC was two DPriests and one drunk, Scottish-sounding Holy Paladin. It reminded me of how I had said I was going to do a post on this, so I promptly got my ideas together and started writing!

So, Big Question – why don’t Discipline Priests “stack” well in a raid? Let’s take a quick look at all our buffs, and what impact a second DPriest has on them.

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Renewed Hope: 3% damage reduction on the entire raid when we shield (so that’s basically all the time). A second stack of this would be lovely, right? Unfortunately they don’t overlap – a second DPriest shielding won’t give you an extra 3% reduction, it’ll just restart the buff’s duration. Because we’re throwing shields out for raid support, there’s almost no downtime on this – I even preshield most tanks now, so there’s not even any downtime on the pull. Benefit of bringing another DPriest? None whatsoever.

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Shields: The defining spell of the Discipline tree, every one of us will be rolling these on raid members, left right and centre. Bringing another DPriest means more shield coverage on the raid, right? The answer is “yes, up to a point”. The key here is the Weakened Soul debuff, which pays no regard whatsoever to which Priest shielded the player it’s applied to! If you shield a guy, he gets the debuff and nobody else can shield him until it wears off.

The obvious problem this presents is on tanks. We shield them every 15 seconds anyway, because that’s what we do – so there’s going to be some overlap on the tank shielding. For 25-mans, raid shielding is a little more flexible because different DPriests can take different sections of the raid, leading to really incredible absorption capability. That only works for predictable AoE damage, though – single target stuff like Light Bombs, Gravity Bombs and Razorscale Fireballs don’t benefit at all from having a second DPriest around, because only one of you gets to shield that guy!

As for 10-mans, the advantage is even less. In many AoE damage situations, I’m shielding a large portion of the raid so long as I can stay off the tanks for a while, and there won’t be much left for the other guy to chew on.

So, benefit of taking a second DPriest? Negligible.

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Rapture: See above. With the lack of a second shield, Rapture also has similarly diminished effects on both tanks and raid members. There’s no additional rage or RP generation on the tanks, but it’s worth mentioning that you can “aim” the Rapture proc on two low mana raid members instead of one.

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Grace: As far as I know, Grace stacks independently for each Priest, which means that two stacks of Grace can be active on one target. You won’t benefit from the other Priest’s stack, but it will allow both Priests to put Grace on the tank. But wait – isn’t this exactly what would happen normally? There’s no extra benefit from bringing the second DPriest, Grace is just an innate talent that increases our throughput. So while Grace isn’t harmed by bringing the second DPriest, it doesn’t benefit.

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Divine Aegis: Not affected by the second DPriest. If the DA procs were to add to each other’s “stack”, then you might in some exceptional situations hit the 10k single-target stack cap, but each Priest’s aegis stacks separately so I don’t believe it makes any difference. As this is effectively just a straight throughput increase, having another DPriest doesn’t really get any benefit from this.

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Just look down that list – many Discipline buffs and quirks have their effects reduced or negated by a second DPriest in the raid! This is why Discipline is often seen as a “niche” role, and you’ll find that the majority of upper-level raid leaders are very reluctant to take two of us to the same raid. Frankly, I don’t blame them.

But on the off chance that your guild has more than one of our kind, in what kind of situations would taking more than one be good? Where can you wangle your way into a raid with a fellow DPriest? Basically, any 25-man fight where there’s a lot of predictable AoE damage going around – when the healing isn’t required on the tanks, the overlapping shields aren’t as much of an issue and you can coordinate which groups to shield with your fellow Discipline club member.

First Impressions of 3.2 – Priest Changes, Mana Regen and Trial of the Champion

WARNING: There are many numbers in this post!

You may have noticed that I didn’t make a 3.2 “preview” thread, for the simple reason that I knew whatever I said would probably be wrong. It’s easy to look at changes on a piece of paper and say “that’s a nerf” but it’s often tough to know how it plays out until you get some playtime with the finished product. Having never transferred a character to the PTR before, I decided not to change that this time around and just waited until the patch went live before giving my initial impressions. I’ll be covering three topics today – the direct changes to Priests that affect Discipline players, the mana regen changes and the new 5-man dungeon. I’m not going to be covering the new raid yet, as I haven’t had a chance to try it! So, without further ado;

Priest Changes

The changes that affected Discipline in 3.2 were few and far between. While other classes like Death Knights got a veritable myriad of tweaks, Priests only really got two big changes. Our Shield Glyph causing Divine Aegis is nice, but ultimately that’s just a fairly small throughput increase. Nice, but not game-changing. The two really big changes were the addition of 2 seconds to our Penance cooldown and the reduction of our Prayer of Healing “spell coefficient”. I’d put both of these into the Small Nerf category – but how much do they affect gameplay?

Penance Cooldown: Cooldown increased from 10 to 12 seconds. Thanks to talents and glyphs, this a 1.6 second increase (percentages and stuff always screw things over) which effectively gives us an extra general-cooldown in between Penances. In reality? It’s not that big a change. I ran Ulduar 10 last night and got through a few hardmodes – keeping the tank up was never a problem. If he needed some more healing, I’d throw in an extra Flash Heal. If he didn’t, I’d throw out an extra Shield. It might take a little while to get used to, but it’s not a horrendous nerf!

Prayer of Healing Coefficient: “Coefficient” often conjures up nightmarish images of algebra lessons back at school. So I’ll break it down for you.

The “spellpower coefficient” of a healing or damage spell is the percentage of your spellpower that spell gains in damage/healing done. For example, say there’s a spell that does 500 base healing and has a 50% spellpower coefficient. With 2000 spellpower, that spell heals for 1500 (500 base + 50% of 2000) – with 3000, it heals for 2000. Now the change to Prayer of Healing reduced the spellpower coefficient from roughly 80% to roughly 50% (exact numbers 80.7 to 52.6) per target.

In 3.1, every time you used PoH, it would do the base healing + 80.7% of your spellpower in healing on each target, which made it quite overpowered – especially when hasted by Borrowed Time or Serendipity. In 3.2, it does base healing + 52.6%. So for a 2k spellpower geared Priest specced the same as me, you’ll see a reduction on each target of about 560 healing per target. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s pretty damn big. Considering that it also affects our PoH glyph, it’s even worse. The one saving grace is that as Discipline Priests, this isn’t quite as big a change as it is for our Holy counterparts, who I imagine are sobbing into their Sunny Ds.

So how does this affect our playstyle? Not a whole lot, I’ll be honest. It just places more importance on shielding properly. All in all, while the changes are clearly an overall nerf, it’s nothing we can’t deal with.

Mana Regen

A curious thing happened to mp5 in this patch. You may have noticed that all your pieces of gear on them with mp5 have had that stat buffed by roughly a quarter. Not Spirit. Oh no, that would be imbalanced because Holy priests would get an extra X spellpower which would completely negate the PoH nerf. This completely solidifies Spirit’s place as the worst regen stat. It’s now absolutely “incredibad”, as the Lonely Island would say. But with the nerf to replenishment, has mp5 become the better regen stat?

Let’s take a look at a 20k mana Blood Elf DPriest, which is what I’m running (and is by far the best PvE healing Priest race, by the way!).

One Intellect: Gives 16.5 mana (Blessing of Kings included) – 0.04125 mp5 from Arcane Torrent, 0.165 mp5 from Replenishment, 0.0345 mp5 from Hymn of Hope (including the mana increase and extra Replenishment gains during it,)  and 0.1375 mp5 from Shadowfiend, 0.066 mp5 if you’re in a group with a Resto Shaman and a marginal increase from spirit-based regen. This totals roughly 0.44 mp5 = 1 point of intellect. In reality? We can add slightly more to this, as this assumes you pop every cooldown as soon as it comes off cooldown, whereas we actually get an “extra” usage due to the fact that they’re off cooldown at the start of the fight. We’re probably looking at one point of mp5 is equal to something like 1.5 points of intellect.

EDIT: Thanks to Niefe for pointing out there’s a +15% intellect from talents, boosting it to roughly 0.5 mp5 for one point of Intellect. I also forgot Rapture and several other small pieces of the puzzle. If you’d like a much more accurate analysis, Zusterke does some excellent number-crunching in the comments section.

So it’s a toss up, but more importantly the +intellect bonus on gems is, I believe, still superior to +mp5 for DPriests. It’s pretty close, but I’d wager intellect is still better.

As for how mana regen actually works out during fights? I’ve hardly noticed a difference. For all Blizzard’s attempts to nerf regen on healers, I’m now sitting at 500 mp5 base before we even consider intellect/cooldown regen. I can breeze through hardmodes with 24-25k mana raid-buffed (so much so that I’ve forgone +int potions for now to go pure SP flask). If you’re going out of mana, you’re really just undergeared for the instance you’re in!

The New 5-Man: Impressions

It's a bit dull...

Don’t get me wrong from that picture – if you haven’t gone and done the new 5-man, try it! It’s a boatload of fun, especially the joust bit at the start. The thing is, it’s just not Ulduar. The scenery’s pretty dull, which is a stark contrast to the luxurious decor of the big 3.1 addition. All in all, it kind of feels like this is a filler patch for 3.3, that Blizzard are concentrating most of their efforts on a big Black-Temple-style finale (although the speed at which these patches are coming out suggests to me that there’ll be a 3.4 as well).

The difficulty of the 5-man is pretty comparable to most other heroics. It’s certainly not a Magister’s Terrace equivalent, and stuff like kiting the Ghouls around in the last fight is really optional provided you’ve got a decent geared healer who stays on his toes. I just advance shielded everyone, threw out PoM/PoH and didn’t experience any problems at all with wipes and the like on bosses (although we did wipe once in the heroic version when we experienced some problems with the trash MCing our tank). Fun, worth it and some good iLvl gear if you have a couple of pieces that need replacing – but not one of Blizzard’s best instances.

Next on the drawing board are articles on UI and why two DPriests in one guild causes problems – let me know if you’ve got any preferences!

– Roble

“Man, that fire looks cosy” – Five Top Tips for Positioning as a Healer

Positioning can influence everything... including the pull.

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They say that the three most important things about buying a house are location, location and location. Positioning is pretty similar, in that a healer’s movements and position can influence everything from extra work for raid healers to the amount of DPS being thrown out. It really is the most important thing to master in a raid, so I’ve decided to bridge the gap between my last article and the updates on the guide (I promise, that Naxxramas Bosses section looks sweet) by talking a little about how you can avoid screwing everything over for your raid!

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Step One: Know The Fights

Each and every fight requires different positioning – sometimes it’s general, like “spread out 8 yards” and sometimes it’s very specific, like standing underneath the boss on Vezax or stacking on the tank for Auriaya. However, you can’t execute this positioning correctly if you don’t know what it is. Generally speaking, unless you’re in a very casual guild, “not having read up on the fight” isn’t an excuse. Hell, I knew the tactics for Mimiron two months before I actually did it, just because I was interested.

If you haven’t read up on the fight, raids go slower. The encounter has to be explained before every boss, and then you need to spend two or three wipes getting to grips with it having only been given a sketchy description (and I quote: “there’s some lightning and stuff” on Thorim). Sometimes, even people who have read up on the fight miss things – while not exactly positioning-related, Hardened Bark on Freya for my current guild springs to mind. If you’ve read the fight, you’ve got advance warning of all this stuff, and you’ll have a much better chance of not screwing up.

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Step Two: Consistency

Whatever the positioning required is, you need to execute it for the whole fight. People move around, people get feared or mind-controlled or rooted and so on – stuff changes during a fight. So unfortunately, we can’t just stand in one spot for the whole fight. Instead, you need to check (ideally every few seconds) to see if you’re still fulfilling the requirements. Range-checkers and the like from DBM definitely help here, and are pretty much essential for fights like Kel’thuzad 25, where there’s a lot of people in quite a small space, and the 10-yard spacing between players is non-negotiable.

Getting stuff right at the start is important. Getting stuff right the whole way through is key. More on this later.

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Step Three: Stay in the Middle

More a general rule of thumb than chapter and verse for healers, step three says that you should always be in as range of as many people as possible, and so the reflex reaction is to stand in the middle.  Staying in the middle of the raid means that you’ve got 40 yards of space on either side in which you can heal – whereas if you’re standing at the edge, you’ll only have access to roughly half the raid. Top tip for working out where to stand is to enable Frame Alpha on your grid settings for anyone who’s more than 40 yards away from you. This will “fade out” their raid frame when they’re far enough away, so you can see at a glance how much of the raid you’ve got covered.

As a Discipline Priest, this is especially important. A Holy Paladin might only want to heal the tank, but we want to throw out shields on the raid – and because I do my shields by group, (complementing Prayer of Healing,) I need to be in range of everyone at all times.

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Step Four: Don’t Be a Rabbit

I used to be a Rabbit. I was the kind of guy who would move around while he was healing, because standing still just felt boring. I’d jump or move slightly to the side while I was shielding. In reality, this is completely and utterly pointless! I didn’t need to move, and I was just doing it because it felt like standing still made me more open to Bad Things happening.

If you’re standing still in a good position, nothing can go wrong. You don’t need to move. But the second something changes, and suddenly you know that position will be bad in a few seconds’ time, then you start moving. Move to where you need to be, and stop. Don’t jump around and make your other guildies adjust their spacing/position unless you need to avoid damage. Don’t be a Rabbit!

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Step Five: Think Ahead and Pay Attention

Step five ties in with Consistency, from earlier. The trick to avoiding unnecessary damage is to know what’s coming, when it’s coming, and what you have to do to react. Think of it like an old Zelda boss from the N64 – he charged up some attack, it was really obvious, and you moved to avoid it. So why would WoW be any different? We get big, flashing neon signs from DBM when stuff like Lightning Nova on Emalon happens, or Sarth throws us a Flame Wall. There’s a massive targeting circle on the floor when Mimiron fires a rocket. We get customised timers to tell us when bosses’ abilities are off cooldown.

So in theory, we should never take unavoidable damage! The main reason that healers take damage like this is because we’re all too busy looking at other people’s healthbars. I’ll be honest, I suffer from Grid Syndrome on occasions too -  we all get it from time to time. Just try to tear your eyes away from it for a split second every few moments, look at the screen, be aware of what’s happening and what you need to do, and I guarantee that your time spent alive will increase dramatically.

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I’m roughly halfway through Naxx bosses (doing each boss’ portrait in Paint seemed like a good idea, but it takes forever!) and I’ll do my best to speed up. Hope this all helped – as always, feel free to leave comments.

– Roble

Lessons Learnt from Ulduar 25

So, the long awaited first Ulduar 25 raid is here! And probably my last, for a while. I’ll keep it short, but the guild and I had some disagreements and we decided (mutually) that I wouldn’t continue with them. We were both at fault in different ways, so I won’t drag them through the mud. But what I will say is that this raid was responsible for me taking a week’s break from raiding – on the gaming front, I levelled an alt, tried out some arena and bought a new game (Prototype, first impressions of which are “it’s quite good”) and hence the delay.

Instead, I’m going to concentrate on what matters to you, and that’s what I learnt from the experience! I certainly had a lot of fun on the encounters themselves, and got to see some sweet new content – we downed everything except Yogg-Saron, so by my standards it was a pretty successful raid for me, and I was more than happy with how I performed.

First off, for the stat junkies, here’s my stats from that raid;

Healing Done for Ulduar 25

The first thing I noticed is that no, I don’t use Binding Heal. I need to get that sorted out, it’s right there on the R keybind and I should really use it a lot more. But hey, I’m not perfect! Also, where’s Greater Heal? That’s right, just like I said, Flash Heal figures a lot more prominently here, and probably far too much of that was on raid members (it’s a reflex reaction, honest!).

Point One: Pre-emptive Healing

I always used to think pre-emptive healing was for pansies. I figured that as Penance is on a cooldown, it should be used reactively, so that you get the maximum healing done from each cooldown. Turns out that pre-emptive tank healing is pretty much essential for many 25-man Ulduar encounters, the best example being Phase 3 of Yogg-Saron, on which the tanks take so much damage so quickly that they can drop to 20% in a flash… and then you’re just going to panic, and the tank will die. I very quickly learnt that casting Penance on every cooldown isn’t actually as bad a thing as I thought. Certainly in 10-mans it’s acceptable to leave it until it’s required, but in 25-mans it’s much better to use it a lot, regardless of the situation. Quite often I found myself trying to sync the first tick of Penance with the boss hitting the tank to get the speediest healing possible.

Point Two: Intellect Gems are NOT necessary!

I’ve got 20k mana unbuffed and used a +45 intellect potion as one of my pair for the majority of the fights. Including raid buffs, this brought me to roughly 24k mana. I didn’t go out of mana once, not one single time, and I used a total of one mana potion. And no, I hadn’t cut down my shield usage! I was still getting through a minimum of 1 group/maximum of 2 before raid damage on most fights, whilst keeping the tank up and throwing out PoHs. This made me realise that between good cooldown usage and some sensible gear, intellect gems and the like really aren’t necessary. While they can help if your gear is severely lacking for the instance you’re going into, they’re by no means essential to any gear setup. Concentrate on how you use your cooldowns, and you might find you’ll be able to spend those gem slots on something a whole lot more useful!

Point Three: Staying Alive

This is a very important lesson, which wasn’t quite as essential through Naxxramas (although it did hold some serious weight in OS +3d). A dead Priest is a useless Priest. Ulduar, especially the Mimiron and Yogg-Saron encounters, made me realise that it’s very important to concentrate on staying alive, and monitoring encounter-specific stuff like Sanity. When somebody dies, it has a bigger impact than you might think – and if somebody gets mind-controlled on the YS encounter, it will normally spell a wipe. While your job is obviously to stop people dying, remember also that the less avoidable damage being dished out on the raid, the better. And that includes you, sunshine!

Point Four: If in doubt, Shield

An example of this is Yogg-Saron. I ran through the fight in my head while we were rebuffing outside the door, and there wasn’t much obvious raid damage that immediately came to mind.

Wrong!

This is Ulduar, and in Ulduar, people will invariably take damage. It surprised me on Yogg-Saron how quickly other raid members than the tanks could take a large chunk of damage, and on the second try I was immediately pumping out shields onto raid members when phase 2 hit us. The reason it initially seemed so counterproductive is that the raid damage was very unpredictable – I like stuff like Flame Jets and Shockwave, because I can look at my DBM timers and think “I should probably start advance-shielding now”, and unpredictable damage means that shields could be wasted. But then I thought again. “Wait,” I thought, “I’m not having any mana problems. Also, each shield lasts 30 seconds, and chances are that Bobby Shaman or Dave Hunter will take at least some damage during that time.”

In short, shielding in a fight where there’s raid damage – even if it’s unpredictable – is never a bad thing, provided you’ve got the mana for it. If in doubt, throw some shields out!

Hope this helps you guys tune your 25-man game a bit, and I’ll be working on a write-up of Naxx/Ulduar bosses next, so keep an eye out for that.

– Roble