Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

In Which I Attempt to Bring Order to Chaos

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Lich King attempts. Recruiting. Thick skin. Compromising principles. It’s been a while since I last wrote about my guild and I don’t know where to begin.

The Lich King

We’re getting better. With every attempt, we last seconds longer. Phase 1 and 2 have been all but mastered. I play Discipline during the encounters and focus on Infest prevention. At the moment, we’re struggling with breaking through the Defile and Valk phases. Some of these defiles have been absolutely spectacular. It’s difficult for us to set our stuns and slows around the valks though since we just don’t seem to know who is available and who isn’t. Both 10 man groups have also reached Arthas and are working on him as well. One of them managed to reach the second transition phase. If we can just carry that experience and that momentum into 25s, then I expect we’ll see him down soon enough.

In order to do that though, we need to hit that consistent roster. Unfortunately, we don’t have that. I’ve gone on a fairly massive recruiting spree lately. Some of them stick around, others join and then disappear after a week. When our A team roster is here, then we should be able to hit it. Sadly, this is the time of year where real life just manages to slap everyone and the face and show them who is the boss. I got some players that are moving. I got some players who on the injured reserve. Others can’t seem to show up because of a variety of reasons. I suppose I should be glad that we’ve been able to field raids at all.

Compromising Principles

You may wish to check out the Bossy Pally’s musings about a recent recruit before coming back here. Not exactly one of our star hires, but recruiting is extremely tough right now at this time of the year. From what I’ve seen, most players are either looking for hard mode guilds or are just starting to work their way into ICC. This is exactly the same thing we saw during the tail end of Burning Crusade as most guilds were either hard at work on Black Temple, Hyjal, and Sunwell or were just getting their feet into Karazhan, Gruul’s and Magtheridon. Guilds that were in Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep kept folding simply because there just weren’t enough raiders within that raiding bracket. As it stands right now, it doesn’t seem as if there’s any players interested in the late ICC 25 normal raiding bracket.

Ideally, when it comes to players, you want them to possess these three following qualities:

  • Skills
  • Gear
  • Respect

In most cases, players only come with 2 of them.

Skills: The thing about skills is that players will either get better or show zero signs of improvement. You can give them all the theorycrafting, have them watch all the videos, and read all the material. This doesn’t guarantee any improvement at all whatsoever. I call them dead-end players because there’s nothing more that can be done for them. If you want to push on and succeed in later raids, they need to be cut in favor of someone else who is better.

Gear: A lack of gear problem can be easily fixed. It requires players to take an active role and do what they can in farming for badges or getting their gear crafted. When they do come into raids, any holes in their gear can be plugged in appropriately. The problem? You can’t take an undergeared player into Lich King and expect super positive results. It takes time to reduce that gear gap to an acceptable level. These players I take in and have them brought on early bosses of ICC before swapping them out accordingly.

Respect: Sigh. I’m guilty of turning a blind eye to stuff that goes on in guild chat. I don’t like it and it’s not particularly something I’m proud of. But it doesn’t mean I won’t step in if it gets too far. I’ve got principles of my own. And yet, there are times where I have to temporarily shelve them for the sake of getting a raid going. Does that make me an inherently evil person? I don’t know. But my number 1 priority and mandate has always been to get a successful raid going. Sometimes I’ll play with the nicest people and they’re awesome personalities to boot. But they just can’t hit the benchmarks or performance targets I set. So what can I do? I don’t want to hold back 24 other people no matter how nice and courteous some player is. At the end of the day, we’re all about killing bosses.

Don’t misinterpret that as an unwillingness to take action. I’m quite capable of ejecting players when things get out of hand or go too far. What’s different is that my level of tolerance is arguably far greater than most players.

Thick skin

Players need more of this. I see some of the stuff that’s said in different chat channels and it’s like “Really? Of all things, that sets you off?”. I don’t know. Another possibility is that I could be an extremely insensitive jerk. But as a GM, I’ve got to know where and when to pick my battles accordingly. I don’t like having to deal with players who come complaining to me over every little thing. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened. In most cases, players are strong and able to stand up to themselves. No GM wants to deal with baby sitting problems and resolving conflicts in raids. Those are bad problems to have. Good problems to have are issues like deciding who gets to go in raids, which boss to take out, which tactics to use and so forth.

Human resource problems between players? Arguably the worse thing to deal with in the world.

What’s worse is that when there are issues between two players that get escalated by both sides. I attribute that mostly to an ego problem. No party is willing to stand down or lose face. If ego was taken out of the equation, I’d guarantee like 95% of problems would stop before they reached a breaking point. I took a course on policing years ago and one of the chapters was on crisis management. Police officers routinely deal with all sorts of people on a daily basis. There were some important lessons I learned in that class which I’ve managed to carry over into the whole GM thing.

We’ve been bleeding players right now and we’ve hit another rebuilding phase. Some have left due to work or lack of interest. The guild’s at a crossroads right now. My plans for the future have been to carry on into Cataclysm. I face a lot of internal pressure right now, mostly from myself. I want Arthas dead as soon as possible. There are days where I start doubting myself and my own capabilities. Everyone keeps telling me the same thing about having faith and things will get better. It doesn’t always work that way. I can’t just sit back and expect things to get better. I have to work hard for it and attract the right players. Sometimes a little luck helps.

Now I just have to find me some DPS players and healers. It ain’t just for the short term. Players in Icecrown will be auditioning for Cataclysm as well. I’ve got to go look for the long term players who buy into the system and are willing to commit.

I wish Syd was around. She’d always know what to do or what to say. I imagine she’d say something along the lines of “Just listen to yourself” and “You already know the answers and what to do”.

I am so Ashamed

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matts-pony

Ghostcrawler did promise us a pony.

Man, I hate myself so much right now. I have no willpower at all. Thankfully this thing is account wide so it means I don’t have to spend any in game gold on mounts ever again. Just have to buy the training for it.

But still.

I feel so dirty.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m not addicted to drugs or alcohol yet. Probably because I’d rather spend the money on shiny, transparent things like mounts. Tried speccing Shadow to see if it’d look any cooler. I was hoping it’d be a little darker or more transparent-y, but alas.

Are Healing Classes Losing Individual Identity?

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In my recent Priest changes announcement post, Kivassha posed some excellent questions that I wanted to share.

Comment edited for length

Hi Matticus

In my mind disc priests are topping up absorbing the damage on Tanks, almost like druid heals are for raid, helping with spike damage until the big chain heals (shammy) and POH (holy priest) lands.

My concern?

I wonder if getting Disc priests to focus on MT will make it boring. I like how classes compliments each other and the unity that forms when everyone gets to know each other’s play stile and can on the fly make the right decision and heal where it is needed. It feels like the synergy will be lost between classes.

With the holy priest changes a priest will be able to heal a little bit more like a druid does with all the hot changes. Again how will the synergy between classes work? How would druids feels about this?

How boring will it be if everyone can do what every other healer class can do? Holy can main tank heal, can do big raid heals and will now be able to do really good HOT’s. Even Shammies will now have a HOT. So I wonder if Druids will get big long casting spells like POH, Chain heal?

To me it looks like they are giving each healer class similar capabilities to make them more like all round healers. Will this take away from each class the niche they have?
Yes the email sound negative, but I am curious and excited to work out how things will work in future.

[…]

I can’t say whether or not Discipline healing will be boring. Different healers I talk to just love healing. If you love what you do, you’re never going to find it boring. As for class synergy, there’s no reason for it to go away. Don’t forget that this is just a class preview of what they intend to do. There is still a long wait before Cataclysm is installed on our computers. If you look at the different things that healers can excel at, Discipline Priests are optimized best for tank healing. Does that mean it’s the only thing they can do? Nah, far from it. That’s what I’ve always liked about the game is that I can mix and match healers and not have to worry too much at all about it.

Druids should have nothing to worry about at all. We still heal in fairly different styles. While some of the mechanics might blend together, the numbers still need to be tuned and adjusted accordingly. I suspect that will help narrow the gap a bit between Priest and Druid healing.

Going back to healing styles again, I don’t think it’s going to be boring for healers. Each healing class can do something similar to each other. That’s good though. While you want to encourage a variety of healers in your raids, it doesn’t mean that you have to always have a Shaman or have to always have a Paladin. Each healing class has their own strengths and weaknesses. At the very minimum, each class can fire off some AoE heals. Each class has a large heal, a fast heal, and an efficient heal. It just so happens that their extra healing spells are done in a different way. Priests have group based healing in Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing. Shamans have that new Healing Rain which hits everyone in a certain area. Paladins come out at the end of the week so we’re not sure what they get yet.

As far as the healing niche goes though, you are right that each class will have similar capabilities. How much would it suck if a Druid healer who loves to play a Druid has to re-roll to a Priest to heal a particularly difficult encounter because the Priest can heal a certain encounter way better than a Druid can? During Sunwell, I heard many top end guilds had to bench Paladins and some Druids for the Twins encounter. They ended up bringing in Shaman alts and Holy Priest alts for Circle of Healing and Chain Heal. The philosophy of Blizzard has always been to bring the player and not the class. A Druid should be able to heal an encounter just as well as a Priest, Shaman, or Paladin and I agree with that.

The identities of each healing class won’t be lost though. Just because each class can keep players up doesn’t mean they’ll lost their own unique style or method of doing it.

Let’s not forget what Ghostcrawler said:

We’d rather make healing fun for the players who like to heal rather than make healing easy for the players who hate to heal but do it anyway.

And I’m sure they’ll find ways to make it entertaining.

Priest Changes Announced! Your Thoughts?

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300-shield-wall

Some of the announcements were those I had expected. But there were a few surprising ones too! Check out the official blue post!

Expected

Heal: Yep, I figured they’d bring this back. Flash Heal is a 1.5 second cast, Greater Heal is a 2.5 second cast (untalented) which means that Heal will lie somewhere in between. I remember using this spell quite a bit during my downranking days in Burning Crusade and Vanilla. But yes, that’s another direct heal for us to use. Flash Heal will be on the side in favor of Heal.

Prayer of Spirit is gone: I expected this would go too. Last month, I asked in a post whether or not Spirit would be removed. My logic was that since Spirit would become a mandatory stat for all the healing classes, there wouldn’t be much of a point in having a buff around that did that. They removed it from raid buffs like Kings and Gift of the Wild. It didn’t make sense for Divine Spirit to stick around either. Guess that answers that question.

Radiance: Wow, that seems a little overpowered. It’s like converting Glyph of Prayer of Healing into Glyph of Everything Healing. Every direct heal now has an additional heal-over-time at the end of it. I think several weapons in the game had an effect like this as well.

Power Word: Barrier: Totally called it. Although knowing my luck, it might not make it past the beta phase :(. Almost two years ago, Kestrel interviewed me and served me a helping of my own 20 questions (I haven’t done them in a long time actually and I kinda feel like bringing it back. Any ideas on who I should interview?). One of the questions he asked was what the Wrath of the Lich King 51 point talent would be like. I said:

Matt’s version – 12 seconds, channeling, 2650 mana: Draws on the spirits and ancestors of all party members of the Priest to create a large bubble, capable of absorbing 22945 total damage to players within a 5 yard radius. While the barrier is in place, spellcasting will not be interrupted by damage. Players in the party within the Barrier can not be affected by fear or silence effects. 5 minute cooldown.

Blizzard version – Who knows?

Ridiculous and overpowered? Yes. Thank goodness I’m not a game designer. But I’ve always secretly wanted some sort of group shield. Later on during the development cycle for Wrath, I remember reading a post saying that the devs wanted to introduce it, but ran out of time or something. Now it’s being pushed back to Cataclysm.

Anyway, so it looks like it’s just going to be a big shield that hits an entire group. I don’t think it’s going to be a smart spell in the way Circle of Healing was. I suspect it’ll hit every player within a single group which offers a fair degree of predictability like Prayer of Healing does. Nope, GC just clarified it. It’s going to be similar to the Death Knight Anti-Magic Zone. So it’s going to create a bubble somewhere on the ground and players that stand in it will have any incoming damage absorbed (and not just spell damage like AMZ since it’ll absorb all). Already in my mind, I can picture of myself casting Barrier on one group and then casting Prayer of Healing on a different group. Think of how many lives you’d be able to save even further on something as simple as Stinky! As for shield strength? Possibly on par with or stronger than an individual shield.

Internet? Can I get an internet fist bump?

Deep down inside, there’s a little me that’s screaming “Yay! Blizzard liked my idea!” but I know better. It’s probably a spell that someone deep in the dev team already coined and it just happened to be a coincidence. I’m glad to at least see that there are plans to introduce it.

Unexpected

Leap of Faith (I’m calling it Life Grip though): Oh my goodness, a defensive Death Grip that Priests can use to pull compromised players out of fires! I can see a ton of intriguing abuse for this especially in PvP. Need to get the flag to safety? Have them run below the graveyard and Life Grip them up. But yes, I can certainly see the application in raid environments. It’s got a 45 second cooldown so it can’t be too abused. Note how it says that it’s expected to help rescue players who have pulled threat. I wonder if it functions as a minor threat lowering ability. The problem now is that I foresee other players complaining and saying “Well why didn’t you life grip me out?!” and opening yet another can of raid worms.

Inner Will: It’s various Mage armors for Priests. Sort of. This one increases movement speed and reduces the cast of instant-cast spells. It’s either Inner Will or Inner Fire. I suspect in most cases, we will use Inner Fire. During phases where we need to hustle, we’ll switch over to Inner Will. I wonder if it’ll stack with Body and Soul or the 85 equivalent of Tuskarr’s Vitality.

Holy Form (sort of): There’s a new talent that tips Holy Priests into a super-saiyan form when they chain cast Prayer of Healing, Heal, or Renew three times in a row. The effect will vary based on which spells have been cast. Perhaps a stronger AoE heal, a stronger single target heal, or harder hitting ticks from the Renew? Nice to see them add some more interesting effects for the Holy Priests. [Edit]: GC also stepped in and elaborated further saying that the talent (called Chakra) allows the Priest to temporarily specialize in something like tank healing, group healing or even Smiting.

Lesser Power Word: Shield: It hasn’t been confirmed as being in the plans for Cataclysm yet, but it’s something that has been discussed. A second (and slightly less potent) Power Word: Shield that’s exclusive to Discipline only. The aim is for it to be used on multiple targets. I suspect it’s been inspired by the massive shield casting style of raid healing Discipline Priests and this does make sense. At the moment, Discipline has limited tools in handling AoE or raid wide damage. We had to rely on establishing massive shields before the attack hit and follow it up with a Prayer of Healing or something. Since Mana management is going to play a more important role, shield spamming wouldn’t be a viable option anymore unless a smaller Shield was introduced. Interesting idea!

Actually, if you look at the Mastery Passive bonuses, you’ll see Absorption is listed under Discipline. Conclusion? Increased emphasis on Power Word: Shield (and the lesser one if it’s in the game), Power Word: Barrier, and the various Divine Aegis bubbles.

Our Shadowy brothers got an interesting mechanic change with the introduction of Shadow Orbs. Reminds me of the little floating things that Troll Priests used to have back in the day. Anyone remember those?

Okay, time for bed. Tomorrow’s Raid Rx on WoW.com will have a full analysis of the dispel changes, and what the Shaman and Priest proposed changes will look like in future Cataclysm raids (at least, in theory).

Shaman Changes and Priest Preview Thoughts

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I am still shell shocked over some of these amazing Shaman changes. I have an Elemental Shaman myself which I like to play on. Terrible at it, but it’s fun all the same. As I’m big into healing, I’m keeping a really close eye on the different healing adjustments and features being added. There’s this thing I have about thinking in the future and visualizing what things will be like.

If you haven’t looked at Zorash’s analysis on Healing Council or Lodur’s assessment on WoW.com, do check them out as well.

Healing rain: At first glance, it looks like an extremely spiffy AoE healing spell. Click the spell, select an area, and watch it rain. The amount healed diminishes based on the number of targets within the area. It doesn’t appear to be a channeled spell. It’s more a heal over time effect. Does that mean it’s a fire-and-forget type spell? You get 2 seconds to cast it in any area within 30 yards. It last 10 seconds but it can be brought up again after. I suppose this means melee can afford to get drilled by Cleave or Whirlwind again. It’d also be pretty cool to have multiple Shamans in the raid casting Healing Rain in the same area. Makes me wonder if the effect is additive if the same place is targeted.

Spiritwalker’s Grace: On the fence on this one. I know caster Shamans are like turrets: They stay still in order to blast targets (hostile or friendly). 10 seconds where Shamans can move and cast without any interrupt penalties is a good thing. 2 minutes as a cooldown seems like a long time. I’d say maybe somewhere in the 60 second to 90 second range but I suppose that’s a question easily answered when we have an idea of what encounters will be like. The talent is supposed to allow Shamans a bit more leeway during movement heavy fights, not make it super easy, right?

The Priest changes are coming soon. I don’t think I’ll be around in the hour when they go up though.I hope they bring in Power Word: Barrier. I remember the devs saying they wanted to include something like that in the game but they couldn’t pull it off at the time. I was envisioning it as something similar to the Death Knight Anti Magic Zone (the bubble on the ground) but for all types of damage or something. I can see it being a talent in Discipline (since they’re removing all the stat increasing type talents anyway) or it being a max level spell.

With the announced Dispel changes, I’m also curious as to whether or not Mass Dispel will stay in the game. I can see them making the case to remove it to make the whole dispel mechanic mean something. On the other hand, it means we can’t strip Ice Blocks or Divine Shield.

Anyway, changes should be up in a few hours. For now, I have to go downtown. Maybe I’ll bring my Macbook and just chill in the library and wi-fi it up.