Matticus, Author at World of Matticus

Back from Laguna Seca

July 27, 2010 by Matticus

What an exhausting and fun trip. Will have a full write-up later on this week. I’m not publishing it until I select my pictures and upload them accordingly.

Highlights

85 SPF sunscreen isn’t enough for me. I still got cooked pretty good. I’m red, and it ain’t from the alcohol.
Speaking of alcohol, 1.75 L of Bacardi for 18 bucks. What the hell? (I will need some help finishing it)
Chatting with bike enthusiasts. I’m terrible at sales but apparently good at raising awareness, talking with potential customers and directing them to the right staff. This must be what the world was like before Twitter.
I was amazed at how fast overcast gets cut through. In the morning, its all foggy and slightly chilly, but I’m standing there in shorts and a T shirt. Reminded me of typical Canadian weather.
No merging lanes. What is up with the lack of merging lanes on US roads?
I mentioned U Turn lanes before, but they deserve another nod.
Rush hour traffic in Portland or Seattle sucks. I will never complain about rush hour traffic in Vancouver again.
Monterey (did I spell that right?) seems like a cool city. I wish I could have explored the place more. Downtown was surreal with all the bikers and their bikes lined up. I’m not talking about Hell’s Angels or Harleys or anything. I wish I had pictures of it to demonstrate.
Chili’s. I ordered their ribs. Felt it was a bit dry though.
Do not chain pot Monster, Red Bull, or the 5 hour energy drink upon consumption. Chain potting Starbucks double shots seem to be okay with no noticeable ill side effects (at least, for me).
It takes 20 hours to drive from Monterey back to Vancouver. We stopped once for a 5 hour nap. I’m going to bed.

Show Your Holy Priests Love With a Glowing Twilight Scale

September 24, 2012July 20, 2010 by Matticus

Not happy with your trinkets?

Feeling disappointed about your lack of throughput?

Getting teased by other healers in the raid?

Then get yourself a Glowing Twilight Scale today!

In all due seriousness, this is one of the best trinkets you can get. If you can snag one of these, you’re virtually set for the rest of the expansion. Let’s ignore the spellpower bonus for now and look at the proc alone. Every time you use it, your direct heals will cause the target of your heal to heal both themselves and friends within 10 yards.

Not quite sure which spells will activate it?

Prayer of Mending bounces
Prayer of Healing
Circle of Healing
Power Word: Shield glyph

That’s not including your direct healing nukes. But yeah, it will trigger off each target hit by your AoE spells. In theory, you can overlap your raid with these HoTs within seconds. It’s called Twilight Renewal.

It will also activate Trauma’s proc.

I’t’s something like 356 HP per second for 6 seconds. Multiply it by 25 players in the raid, and you have a large number.

At least, in theory. And you don’t have to be a theorycrafter to understand that you’re providing a lot of painkillers and Asprins to your entire raid during those 15 seconds that the trinket is activated.

What it won’t work with:

It doesn’t seem to work with Glyph of Holy Light for Paladins (needs confirmation)
Riptide (Sorry Shamans)

The HoT effect is amplified by the ICC zone wide healing buff. It doesn’t seem to gain any benefits from your character’s spell power.

Here’s a comparison from the logs of select volunteers on Plus Heal.

A Discipline Priest on heroic Sindragosa 25 (Time elapsed: 6:30)

A Holy Paladin on heroic Sindragosa 25 (Time elapsed: 7:24)

A Holy Priest on normal Sindragosa 25 (Time elapsed: 7:06)

It’s difficult to create lab conditions, but this is the best I can do. Two of the encounters were on heroic and one was on normal for Sindragosa. Just a few things to note though:

When the trinket is activated, you gain Eyes of Twilight (which is when your heals get amplified and start spreading around). In this example?

Discipline Priest – 3 activations
Holy Paladin – 2 activations
Holy Priest – 4 activations

The heal gains for Holy paladins aren’t as bad as it’s made out to seem here. I think if they all used it the same number of times (like 3), we’d see fairly close margins. Maybe within 2-3%? I’m still going to bet money that a Holy Priest has the slide edge in terms of proc maximization (and purely proc maximization).

So who does it go to?

Give it to your best healer.

If they’re all equally deserving of it, and you want to approach it from a raid min maxing perspective:

Holy Priest
Resto Shaman
Disc Priest
Resto Druid
Holy Paladin

At least, that’s my personal take on it. You’re free to assign it however you like and you’ll want to look at any number of combinations such as who needs it, attendance, looks, etc.

Anyway, don’t be like me and give it to a Holy Pally who quit the guild within the next week because he wanted to devote his time to PvP instead and joined a straight PvP guild.

Any Holy Pallies or Mages out there? We’re looking for some really excellent ones. Bonus points if you can do the invisible thing on Putricide.

Preparing for Absences

August 6, 2012July 19, 2010 by Matticus

Things get a little frantic on my end during events where I’m cut off from both my guild and my blog. Everything needs to be planned out to make sure there’s enough stuff to do.

Tomorrow, I’ll be driving down to Laguna Seca in California for work and to check out these motorcycle races.

Remind me to bring ear protectors as we’ll be next to the track. I’m also going to need stuff to do on the way down. Anyone have any suggestions? I’m bringing a few books and I’ll have my Macbook with me. I’m not going to get much in the way of internet. I suppose I could collect some Sudoku or crossword puzzles from newspapers.

From the guild side of things

Knowing when you’re leaving and how long you’ll be gone for is a big plus. It’s good to take stock of the roster during the 6-8 weeks before leaving to see what sort of gaps need to be filled. Knowing that my guild will be down a healer, it’s smart to have an idea of who can step in to fill that position temporarily. I recruited a couple of extra players (who can play multiple roles adequately) so that the raids will continue unaffected.

For my raiding guild, the bottom line for me has always been that the raid must go on.

The next thing to do is to delegate any extra responsibilities you have to other people who both can do it and want to do it.

I usually direct the healers. Someone will need to liaise between the healers and the officers. I picked one of my Priests to do that as he’s done the job before.

Lastly, you also need someone that can cover your position and roles in raids. When the opportunity presents itself, I’ll try to rotate and shuffle healers around. I might put a Resto Druid on Infest healing or a Shaman on tank healing. I’ve placed my number 2 Disc Priest on Infests while I went Holy and raid healed. The goal of the exercise is to give everyone one or two shots doing something that they otherwise normally wouldn’t be doing so that in the event they have to, they won’t be confused.

Always build redundancies.

I think the greatest fear of every guild leader when they need to step away for a while is that they return to a smoking ruin with a pillaged bank and the guild in complete disarray with half the roster size.

And for crying out loud, designate a de facto number 2. Make sure you have witnesses. Tell them something like “This guy’s in charge while I’m gone. Treat the words coming out of his mouth as if they were mine. He’s got my full support and I trust him to do the right things for the group.”

Guildmasters, what’s on your to do list when you know you’ll be gone from the guild for a while?

From the blog side of things

I’ve pre-written a bunch of stuff. I think I’ve written more in the past few days then I’ve had in the past month or so. With more beta information released, there’s been more ideas and stuff to discuss.

I also updated our About page (finally) to include the new guys to the team as well as add some interesting facts and tidbits about ourselves. You might actually find it interesting!

If you’re interested in being a part of the team (whether permanently or just want to contribute a guest post), check out my guidelines, and then contact me. I love guest posts. And I’d certainly love to feature some over the next week and a half.

Understanding New Talents and Thoughts on Priests

July 13, 2010 by Matticus

Last week, it was announced that talent trees would get sliced. Reason being that there was too much unnecessary crap and not enough fun talents. Most of us sort of got the idea of what they wanted to do. Include more talents that do something tangible, that we can feel or use.

Potentially free Lightning Bolt after casting a Lightning Bolt? Cool.

Gradually increasing healing by some random percentage of which you can’t really see? Not quite as exciting.

Preview the new trees and see what they’ll look like

How specialization works

Okay, so the way I understand it, the moment you ding level 10, you get to start specializing your character. The moment you invest your first talent, you get access to a myriad of spells and abilities which define that particular tree.

Let’s use a Priest for example.

As Holy

I get access to:

Desperate Prayer
Holy Priest (Pushback reduction on discipline and holy spells)
Meditation

As Discipline

I get access to:

Penance
Pushback resistance
Meditation

From what I can see, no special training is required. You are well on your way to becoming that specialized priest of your choice. There won’t be any 20/21 type builds either. You need to fully invest your points down one tree before you can fork over to a different one. The rate at which you receive talents points have been roughly halved as well. Figure you get a new point every 2 or maybe 3 levels.

What do I think?

My opinion though, I’m not sure what can be done to entice players to select holy at the lower levels. I notice a few sad face Priests when they notice that Desperate Prayer is the innate spell we get. Desperate Prayer makes the most sense for balance and logistical reasons (like what’s the point of getting Circle of Healing at level 10?) At that stage of the game, you’re hardly doing much in a party anyway. At least with the prayer, you can fire off a desperate heal if you pulled one too many murlocs.

I can’t count the number of times where I could’ve easily leveled the murlocs and their huts if I had access to Desperate Prayer.

Anyway, I can certainly see the foundation of Holy taking place. I’m trying to remember what the original 41 point talent was back in vanilla (Spirit of Redemption? Lightwell?). Now if they can just somehow throw in something new in place of Renew or Empowered Healing at the first level under Holy. What would be a decent ability at that level?

Holy seems quite top heavy in the sense that any of the deeper talents could easily fulfill the role as the 31 point talent. Guardian Spirit is the current one. Circle of Healing used to be the end talent back during Burning Crusade, if memory serves. I wouldn’t mind seeing Chakra and Guardian Spirit switched. From a symbolic perspective, I think a talent like that which gives your spells nifty bonuses whenever you string them together should be an ultimate skill.

But that’s inspired from assorted limit breaks from Final Fantasy.

From a logistical and practical standpoint? It might be better off if priests get a feel for Chakra earlier in their leveling life.

The Discipline side of things looks great! Power Word: Barrier as the 31 pointer? Awesome. It appears that Discipline is destined to be the leveling spec (due to Evangelism and Archangel).

One thing I noticed is the placement of Inner Focus. At 11 points in, it will not be accessible to Holy priests. I don’t know if that’s intentional or not. Inner Focus has been one of those taken-for-granted type talents that all healing priests usually get. For it to be cut off like for those that choose the path of Holy is going to be quite the impact. Here’s hoping it gets switched with Archangel.

Anyway, I like the direction the talent condensation is going. Obviously they’re not all complete or finalized yet. Some classes still have a few placeholders or leftover talents from live that aren’t supposed to be there.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have a heck of a time figuring out which healing priest type I want to switch to. I’ll probably end up dual speccing both anyway. I might just go back to my roots and be straight up holy again in the expansion.

How are you liking the talents so far? (And it doesn’t have to be restricted to just priests either)!

Awesome WoW Moments: #1 Surviving When You Had No Business Surviving

July 13, 2010 by Matticus

Last week, the crew and I were working on some Icecrown hard modes. Specifically, we spent a few hours wiping to Sindragosa on 10 man. On one of the pull ins, my mouse stopped responding for a moment and I lost my bearings. I knew there was no way I could run out in time. So I held my breath, cast Pain Suppression on myself and watched as I survived with several thousand health points left in the tank.

I don’t advise anyone doing that.

But managing to survive through certain death is, without a doubt, one of the best highs you can experience in the game.

Other such moments include:

Receiving a Power Word: Shield with double digit health left
Guardian Spirit activating
The angry Faction Champion after you getting death gripped away when one more swing would’ve killed you

Awesome.

Yeah. I bought the book as a birthday gift for a friend. Made me think about WoW moments. I felt inspired.