Matticus

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

Circle of Healers

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For some reason, I hardly seem to get tagged for these anymore. My friends tell me it’s because I’m supposedly all big and popular.

Hogwash I say. I’m not sure how many of you remember when I was but a young blogger still struggling to make a mark in the WoW community. I was once a small time blogger too, you know. Even though my time has diminished, my interest has not. I’ll do my best to respond to them if I feel they’re fun to do (or if I’m dodging a really important paper that’s due on Tuesday).

  • What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Mallet, Discipline Priest. I’m ambi-spec-trous and will go Holy if the situation calls for it.
  • What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) Primarily raiding environments.
  • What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Power Word: Shield. Sometimes I think Protego to myself when I cast it. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than a field of bubbles.
  • What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Renew. That’s only when I’m Discipline though. I usually have better spells to respond with. If I’m idling, then I’ll use a Renew. But I’m rarely idle.
  • What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? The ability to protect and to extend the health buffer of a player is the difference between life and death.
  • What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Weak raid healing. All we have is Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova. But then again, that’s not supposed to be our jurisdiction. We can raid heal, just not very well.
  • In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Anything that enables me to watch playoffs. Generally, I prefer covering the raid. I’m a twitch healer.
  • What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Priest. It’s the oldest healer I have and I have a diverse array of spells to use.
  • What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Paladins. I once nodded off in the middle of a 5-man. It was a truly boring experience.
  • What is your worst habit as a healer? Not staying on target. I’ll sometimes cheat and heal a different player than my assigned target if I feel I can get away with it. About 1 in 25 of those situations will result in the death of my assigned target. It’s like base stealing. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it bites you in the rear.
  • What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? Dying to avoidable deaths. Healing is not a cure for stupidity. There’s only so many chances we will offer.
  • Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes I do. Discipline has come a long way.
  • What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? I rely heavily on Recount, Obituary, and World of Logs or WoW Meter Online. I mainly look at the cause of death the most to determine whether or not it was something that I could have prevented.
  • What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? That Disc sucks for healing in raids (not raid healing, I mean having the spec in raids).
  • What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? How to do things in addition to healing. Many new healers are caught staring at their bars when a fire lights up on their character. Try moving your head back a few inches to get a larger perspective on the entire screen. Move your camera back too. Awareness of bad stuff will get you far in this game.
  • If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? Lack of healing because they don’t have the Recount Absorbs addon installed.
  • Haste or Crit and why? Haste. Speed is life. The faster the spells, the faster you can cycle to different targets and cast them again.
  • What healing class do you feel you understand least? Druids.
  • What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? I rely on Vuhdo for all my healing needs.
  • Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? On my Priest, I’ll stack a ton of intellect via gems and break socket bonuses if necessary. It’s not uncommon for me to reach over 35000 mana with full raid buffs. This adds to Replenishment, Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope. The more mana I have, the more options I’ll have at my disposal. That and spellpower are stats that are universal to Disc and Holy Priests. There’s no sense in grabbing Spirit as it’s not going to do much for my Disc side anyway.

Thanks to Sushicookie for reaching out and tagging me (as well as sending me a direct tweet about it since I usually miss these things). Of course, this was the brain child of Miss Medicina. You can find the rest of the responses from other bloggers here too.

Handling Icewell Radiance

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Props to this guy for coining the term.

Daelo announced earlier in the day the implementation of raid wide buff called Chill of the Throne. What does it do?

The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid’s main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

Similar in concept to Sunwell Radiance, the reason it was implemented was to lessen the overall spikiness of incoming tank damage. Spikiness refers to something like a tank taking constant streams of 15k damage here, 14k damage there, and then suddenly plummet after a 44k hit of some sort. Sometimes it was predictable and in other cases it was not. It’s a large and often unpredictable hit that is capable of flooring a player.

I call it the Chuck Norris effect.

For present healers, the current way to deal with this is to use defensive cooldowns in tandem with tanking cooldowns. If tank avoidance isn’t high enough or if cooldowns aren’t used, they can easily get 2 shot in a manner of seconds.

With luck, this will be the last time we’ll ever see a buff like this in the game. Going forward into Cataclysm, the idea is to raise the health pool of tanks. Right now our overall approach to healing is to spam really fast heals, really large heals, or AoE heals depending on the situation.

While tank health pools go up, healing spells will scale up but not as sharply. The ratio of healing done on a tank vs tank health won’t appear to be the same as it is now. Let’s say a Greater Heal can cover 60% of a tank’s health right now. When Cataclysm hits, Greater Heal might only heal for 35% or something. The approach is to make overhealing a real risk to the point where healing spells can’t be spammed just to get through the boss fight.

That’s going to present an interesting change. It feels as if it’s going to be a hybrid between Vanilla-esque healing and TBC-era healing. I daresay those were the two extremes. In Vanilla, you had to rotate out with other healers and regen for a minute before tagging back in. In Burning Crusade, you could get away with Circle of Healing spam. It looks like in Cataclysm, they just might make overhealing mean something again since we can’t spam heals nor can we switch out with other healers to come in for us.

PTR Live: Gunship Battle

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You can read my full impressions of the encounter over at WoW.com.

Hope this works.

16:54 – Clearing trash right now. Reminds me of faction champs.
17:20 – Two attempts on the boat.
17:23 – Going to zerg Saurfang
17:25 – Nevermind, Saurfang gains more health back than we can DPS.
17:27 – Yeah, encounter’s over. There’s no way we can finish it. The cannons are bugged. Don’t seem to be damaging the other boat.

Video clips at Ustream

A Val’anyr Story

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matt-mace

Several weeks ago, the leaders of two guilds met together. Both had a serious problem. Both guilds had 2 players that had 30 fragments for Val’anyr but did not have the drive nor the personnel at the time to pull it off. An agreement was made to launch an operation into Ulduar to finish off and complete the weapons of mass prevention.

A plan was hatched to take the best from both guilds and launch repeated assaults on Yogg-Saron. The instance ID was already cleared having been saved and unused for the past 9 weeks.

The first such attempts were designed to gauge how this hybrid raid group would function together. DPS checks were made followed by threat and healing checks. It certainly seemed as if the group had the DPS to do it. It was felt at times that 6 healers was one too many but it wasn’t a significant issue as the players outgeared the boss. Even then, people were dying left and right for unfortunate (and in most cases preventable) reasons.

After 2 and a half hours though, the raid managed to buckle down. On the last attempt, I fell not once but twice against Yogg’s early minions. Both battle res’s were burned and we were fresh out of pick me ups. A guardian was burned too early but there was nothing we could do but grab another. Phase kicked in. Yogg reared his ugly head and tentacles began sprouting. Portal teams were finally in sync and hitting the right portals. They were getting there early ahead of time (to make sure no one was jacking their portals).

It was frantic non-stop action. The amount of running and tentacle dodging might have rivaled a really cheesy hentai movie. Surprisingly this Dwarf’s agility managed to survive and escape the clutches of Yogg (although losing part of the beard in the process). Soon, we advanced to the final phase.

Guardians began swarming all around us as the brain team emerged from Yogg. We held fast to our positions as the rest of the strike force rallied to our position. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Ret Pally thrust his spear into one guardian before another guardian came up and struck him from behind. He crumpled to the ground from the unexpected blow. I muttered a curse and inched back towards the entrance of the room while motioning to the other healers to do the same. No sense in getting caught off guard ourselves.

When I wasn’t too busy firing off heals and shields, I would steal occasional glances at Yogg to determine how much longer we had to hold the fort down for. The reserves of the healers were all but expended. A sudden warmth and glow filled the raid. Heroism had been activated for the last minute. The raid fought back with renewed vigor. It felt like an eternity.

But it was done.

Without Hodir.

Who needs him anyway?

Case study: The Player Who Wanted More and the GM Who Couldn’t Care Less

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Have you heard of the grass is greener concept? It’s a basic premise that there is something better elsewhere or on the other side of the fence.

When it comes to Warcraft, there are all sorts of guilds with different aims. You’re going to play alongside players with different goals. These goals aren’t static. People’s ambitions change. Sometimes life deals a curveball and the game has to take a back seat. The end result is the departure of a player.

One case I wanted to discuss is the departure of the player who wants more. I’m not going to delve too deeply on other reasons and there’s no hard feelings between myself and the player who left. I’m very liberal when it comes to stuff like that and I’ve learned long ago to not let people leaving bother me too much.

What it boils down to was that the player was ambitious. He wanted to do more and see what it was like in an a higher echelon guild. The environment in an extremely hardcore guild is obviously different compared to a simple raiding guild. He’s never been in a situation like that before and he told me he wanted to try it out.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I encourage everyone to try apping with or raiding with a top server guild at least once just to see what it’s like in that sort of setting. I believe everyone should experience it at least once.

What’s unfortunate is the way he did it:

  • Left in the middle of the raiding week – As a GM, given the choice between having a player take off midweek or depart at the end of the week after multiple attempts on hard mode, I’d rather they leave at the end of the week. It’s advantageous for both parties. That player still remains an asset to the guild until such time that another player can fill in and they don’t waste their lockout until the time is up.
  • Took an item – I suppose I shouldn’t be too upset about this one. I might have done the same thing if I were in their position. It’s incredibly bad form to take an item knowing that you’re planning on leaving if there’s another person in the guild who can also use it. But, we did award it to him because it was felt he deserved it after an increase in performance.
  • No advance notice – My only desire is he spoke to me first before leaving. Instead he opted to leave before consulting with any of the leadership about his attentions. I would’ve been happy for him to go and get the experience. In my view, there’s two things that can happen: Player leaves and raids with a higher end guild, discovers he enjoys the pressure and is able to sustain the high level of performance required or comes back after having his confidence shattered and realizing that high level of guild isn’t what he’s looking for.

How should a GM react in this case?

So this is where a bit of introspection comes into play.

Reactions are going to vary based on situation and individual. Why wasn’t I as upset as my officers? They were rightly pissed. I felt indifferent. He expressed interest in some gear which we awarded to him and took off with virtually no warning. I should have been super angry. Chairs should have been thrown against the wall. Headsets should have been smashed. Don’t get me wrong, I care about my players. I’m just not sure if any player warrants begging or groveling to return. Other GMs on my server would have pitched an absolute fit if a player deserted their ranks. I suppose I am just as mortal as others for not recognizing the signs and the symptoms.

I didn’t feel any shock nor did I feel anger.

But why?

The guild still has a some amount of depth. It may not be the most ideal, since I had to ask a Resto Druid to come in as Balance instead. It’s funny because on previous attempts on Heroic Icehowl, we were only 1 for 4 on dodging his tramples. It was disappointing. The other night we didn’t have any Hunters for de-enrage duty and we were able to pull off a 100% success rate on dodging the oversized Yeti Icehowl when he was trying to take us out. He was killed with 1 tank, 4 DPS and 3 healers down. Thankfully he enraged right after he crashed into a wall allowing everyone to pour a large amount of damage resulting in a kill.

As a sidenote, we were able to wax Heroic Jaraxxus after 9 or so attempts as well. Faction Champions was down after another grinder of 6+ wipes and reached Heroic twins.

I suspect my lack of emotion could be attributed to my inherent belief that everyone is expendable and replaceable (which is true to an extent). I do care about my players, but as a GM I also keep many people at arms length. Again, I wish I could explain why. It just feels like another day.

“Hey Matt, this player left today.”
“Alright, put the word out for that class. I’ll be in my ready room reviewing logs.”

On a side note, I’m looking for some additional ranged DPS and backup healers for our raids if there’s any free agents out there looking.

Two fantastic posts by new team additions Mimetir and Thespius earlier today. I’m putting the final touches on a post that addresses the idea and problem that Wrath is too easy and follow it up with a solution. Look for it as early as tomorrow.

Have a good weekend