Matticus, Author at World of Matticus

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.

The Aftermath of Real ID

September 13, 2012July 12, 2010 by Matticus

It’s not going away as it’s already been integrated into the game. At least we won’t get our real identities attached to the forums. Personally, I don’t post on the forums that often. When I do post on forums, it’s usually to advertise that my guild is recruiting players (an absolute, shameless plug I might add).

I can’t pretend to know what the full storyline was behind the closed doors of Blizzard. I am a little worried about the direction that this network is going. I don’t have an issue with the idea of Real ID. I think the ability to communicate across platforms and servers is a great idea. But greater control over who can and cannot be on a friend’s list is needed.

Now as for the forums, that idea has been shelved (at least temporarily). That’s not to say that one day it isn’t possible for that to thrive. In order for that to happen though, we need to exist in some super utopian society where stalking and harassment simply cannot occur at all. That day is a long time away. We probably won’t ever live to see it.

A compromise

I do think Blizzard might’ve been on to something though when they set off on implementing a united ID of sorts for players. I might have different characters on my World of Warcraft account, a Starcraft 2 account and potentially a Diablo 3 account. Perhaps I don’t want to go through the hassle of logging in and out everytime I want to switch game forums. Having the forums display first and last name is (obviously) a very bad idea.

But what about a handle that’s universal? That would work. For example, I could apply Matticus as my universal handle and whenever I’d post something, it could attach my chosen character name (like Matticus [Mallet] or something). Haven’t quite thought of all the negatives yet and there’s bound to be some, but I know it won’t generate such an uproar across the entire ~~forums blogosphere community~~ internet.

But most importantly…

(High five to anyone who reads this blog who is also a Reddit reader)

Posting employee info was wrong though

One thing I did not agree with at all was when certain individuals took it upon themselves to just publically post information about their names, their jobs, their addresses, pictures of their family and so forth. Personally, I felt that action crossed some line. I don’t know, maybe it’s my idea of ethics and my time in school which taught me better. Actual implementation (if it happened) wouldn’t have been for a couple of weeks. Many arguments across the internet already raised the privacy issues. I just don’t think it was the right thing to do. I mean these guys are developers and people who work on the game in some aspect of it too. They’re the architects of the world we love. Do we really want to threaten them and run them out of a job (or possibly worse than that)?

Like, I don’t need to see a nuke go off to know it’ll level a city.

I do know that a number of players voted with immediately cancelling their subscriptions (and some closed their accounts). That’s probably the better way to go especially if it’s something that affects you on such a personal level like this.

Did anyone really like the change? I mean really?

Those are most likely not the official numbers, but I generated them purely based off of Twitter, blogs, opinion pieces and people I spoke with. For sure, a solid majority of the community was strongly against it. There were some individuals who felt indifferent or gave off the “doesn’t bother me, I don’t care vibe”. But, I was hard pressed to really find anyone who was seriously gung ho and all for it.

Or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.

Anyway, my point does sort of stand. You were either against it or felt indifferent. Not many (if any) truly embraced it.

Why the UFM policy doesn’t work

“I don’t like that you’re clogging up my twitter timeline with your junk”

“I don’t want to get spoiled by <some upcoming expansion>”

“You don’t talk enough about warriors” <- (Yeah, I know. I actually had someone tell me this.)

UFM basically means Unfollow Me. I have a twitter policy in place simply because I’ve had former followers who disapproved or disliked aspects of my tweets or personality. Following is a volunteer action. If you don’t like someone on twitter, you do not have to follow them.

And this was the logic provided by players who weren’t really affected by the ramifications of Real ID.

“If you don’t want your name shown on the forums, then don’t post”

For the most part, that was the exact solution I was going to use.

Ultimately though, the carpet bombing solution would lock out a lot of productive individuals who contribute guides, advice, or other beneficial things to the forums. The cost-benefit ratio is greatly skewed where it becomes way too costly. The rewards did not even come close to exceeding the risk. Players who troll are going to troll anyway.

For the vast majority of us, I like to think that we’re all level headed, reasonable individuals. Looking someone up, tracing their location or phone number, and making menacing phone calls or threats? Hey, you just crossed over to criminal territory. Yeah that guy you’re calling up may be the biggest douche bag on the forums, but right now, you’d be the one that’d face jail time or fines or some other form of punishment.

It’s something I learned (and somehow still remember) from my criminology courses. Someone who is going to shoplift a product is probably going to do it anyway regardless of the consequences. The main reason that stores have cameras, store personnel, bars on windows and so forth is to act as a form of deterrence for the rest of us normal, civilized people.

In any case, it’s all over with. It’s done.

At least for now.