Matticus

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

Hard Decisions

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I’ve always thought about forming my own raiding guild. I’ve always talked the talk. But can I walk the walk? It’s still something I’m mulling over. The expansion is nearly here. It’s time for players to re-evaluate their guild, their goals, and their environment. Are you happy where you are? Are you going to achieve your goal where you are? If you answer no, then it just might be time to do some soul searching.

That’s what I’m doing right now. Raiding with Carnage has been a major blast and one of the best WoW experiences I’ve had. I had my own reasons for joining Carnage because my goals coincided with their goals. Now my goals have changed.

I’m still mulling things over. But I’m more or less committed at this point. Talks with friends have helped me orient myself and I’ve come to realize that the only way I can be satisfied playing this game is to do it in a way where I’m doing what I want. Along the way, I’m going to have to find 24 other players that want to do the same thing as I do. It’s going to be a tough sell. Will they buy into the Matticus system and philosophy? Who knows? But I have the support of around 12 players on the same server and off the server.

Who else out there is changing guilds or is thinking about leaving? What’s holding you back? What’s making you consider pulling the trigger?

Wish I had the title of General Manager Matticus. Anyone in the market for a raiding progression guild?

*Over* Matticus on the WoW Insider Show

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I should’ve wrote this sooner. I fail. This is a cool edition of the show as it’s one of the rare ones that’s going to boast an all healer crew of myself, Mike Schramm (Resto Shaman), Elizabeth Harper (Holy Paladin), and Phaelia (Resto Druid). I’ll post the link up to the show later on. It’ll be around noon-ish (or 1230) PST. Expect a bunch of healer talk, some raid talk, and me loudly proclaiming the superiority of the Priest class (or at least, try to ^^).

It’ll be live on uStream. Here’s the link to the channel.

(worldofmatticus is my name)

PS, Phae my last name has no e :(.

In case that above embed doesn’t work, use the direct link to the channel.

2:00 PM: Shows over! Thanks for listening!

Circle of Healing Redux

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As you may or may not have heard, Blizzard is revisiting the idea of bringing in the CoH cooldown. I’m not sure where to start on this or how to begin.

Something that I feel has been overlooked is that there seems to be a feeling that raid instances right now at 70 (post nerf) are representative of what raid instances are like at level 80. A lot of players, right now, are a little overgeared for the content that they’re doing (again, due to the nerf).

Path of least resistance (or effort)

I was first exposed to this idea in my first year of psychology. The general premise here is that people, animals, or even machines will choose the path of least resistance or effort in order to get to their goal. Applying this to healing, we’ll see one person taking a shot for 2000 damage for whatever reason. I myself have been known to tap CoH once or twice to bring that one person’s health back up. Is that a loss of mana efficiency? You bet it is. But efficiency goes out the door if your mana regeneration is able to offset the mana loss within seconds.

Could I have used a Flash Heal? Yeah but it takes casting time.
How about a Renew? Yeah but it takes about 15 seconds for the full duration to kick in
Circle of Healing heals that minor damage extremely quickly and leaves me open for spell options without causing me to wait for the spell to go off or eat a channel or something.

This is partly the case because of current nerfed raid content and the way our spells work. It’s a smart heal, it’s the fastest heal, and it’s brain dead easy. I’m sure we can all agree on that.

With the complete gear reset at 80, I strongly doubt we’re going to be able to get away with non-stop CoH casting. I know I couldn’t. I was extremely limited with my mana regen and my overall mana pool. I confess I did start with PvP gear and I encountered some difficulty then. Yet, after daily Naxx and OS runs on 10s and 25s, I amassed a decent collection of PvE healing gear. I still found it difficult and strenuous. As this was largely a pickup group, maybe I was overcompensating in some areas.

The benefit of Circle of Healing is that it can heal a lot of players really fast.
The cost of Circle of Healing should be the fact that it taxes your mana pool.

I’m not quite sure if that’s possible. I can see why they want to include the 6s cooldown because there are a staggering number of players using it (at 70 and at 80 when I played). Maybe if they included a scaling cost with the spell it would be acceptable. The ability to heal a lot of raid damage really fast is an excellent tool to have. But it should come with a severe price or penalty. I don’t think time, a wonderful resource that it is, should be the case. Perhaps base cost + a percentage of healing done in that one cast? I don’t know. I’m not a game developer.

Regardless of what they do, Priests will easily remain the most diverse class. I’ll continue to play mine well into Wrath. Even if they do bring in the CoH cooldown, we still have Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing. Zusterke, on Plusheal, started some preliminary work on Holy Nova and it’s effectiveness.

By adding the glyph of holy nova, the spell has become quite a powerful healing spell. It is able to output more healing than circle of healing, up to a point where it rivals prayer of healing. The recent mana cost reduction boosted this spell even further where it has become a mana efficient spell, in comparison to the priest’s other AoE spells.

He might shoot me if he feels it’s a little outdated. But not much has changed yet so I think he’s definitely in the ballpark (or ice rink).

Plusheal has more great discussion about this.

Random Plug: Traits of WoW Officers

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Kreeoni wrote a list post disguised as a non-list post about the traits of WoW Officers. Those of you unfamiliar with him and his work, he’s another blogging Guild leader. I randomly stumbled across him one day on Twitter. I was intrigued and started following him.

Now if it were me, I would’ve titled it something like “7 Universal Traits of WoW Officers”. Number + Catchy line = Eyebrow raising interest.

A good post by a good blogger! We could use more GM blogs around.

Priest CoH Cooldown Returns?

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Matticus has no comment at this time. But, I felt that the readers should be aware of this thread. It was tried before in the summer but they removed the cooldown. They’re thinking about bringing it back again (note the dates).

We’ve tried to keep up with all of the several threads that spawned as a result of my last comments. People have made some really good points.
Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

We’re less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it’s not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.

At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you’d also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons. 🙂

This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications — one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don’t want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.

And

Yeah, we did. We thought it would feel like a big nerf and changed our minds. But seeing the state of healing at 80 makes us think it might be the right call again. When AE healing is so prominent, it also makes specs without great AE heals (Holy paladins and Disc priests) feel useless.

Assume that we would lower Wild Growth by the same proportion as Circle of Healing. The exact numbers aren’t as important to this discussion as the concept that you can’t hit the button whenever you want.

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