Matticus

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

You Screwed Up

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You let the tank die.

You missed the interrupt.

You didn’t line up your cooldowns properly.

You died to the fire.

You dispelled the frost bomb in the wrong place.

You got hit by the ball.

You hit a healing cooldown on a purple ooze.

You faced the boss and it cleared the whole raid.

You didn’t hit the Heroic Will button.

You want to quit the raid in shame and disgust at yourself for failing so hard.

No way. No how. Not a chance.

You learned something that cost the guild bank hundreds, possibly thousands of gold.

Make that gold count.

Look, I get it. You screwed up.

You can punish yourself, if you want to.

You can deposit money in the guild bank, if you’ll feel better.

You can apologize profusely to the raid, if you think it will help.

Everyone deals with personal failure in their own way.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you learn from it.

Preparing for the 8 second Dispel

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If you haven’t been keeping up with the little beta changes and updates that have been going on, there’s something you should know.

Don’t worry, it isn’t as game breaking as Spirit Shell having it’s mechanics reworked or anything.

Our Purify (formerly known as Dispel) now has a a rather large 8 second cooldown attached to it. I get the need to cut down on Dispel’s usage. PvP needs to be made a little more exciting and what not.

The PvE ramifications are just as important.

In a party

Shado-pan Monastary is one of the new instances that opened up with a minimum requirement of level 87. Inside the instance, there was a fair number of mobs that had some sort of magic debuff that would afflict members of my party. On the boss encounters, I noticed any debuffs were applied one or two at a time. I dispelled one quickly and responded with steady, mana neutral Heal to maintain that player’s health. If the party started taking AoE damage, I targeted the debuff affected player and casted Prayer of Healing and would switch between single target and Prayer of Healing as necessary.

I could use Mass Dispel. Technically between Mass Dispel and Dispel, I can rely on them to remove debuffs if they’re applied one after the other. Doing that is going to be costly to your mana. Depending on the debuff duration, it might be better off to dispel one person and then heal the other until their debuffs expire.

Haven’t tried a raid environment yet. All I know is if current boss mechanics were coupled with Mists Dispel mechanics, we’re all in deep trouble. There’d be no way we could blanket  remove negative magic in time without resorting to Mass Dispel.

Blizzard developers would need to scale back and be a little more critical when it comes to any debuff inducing bosses. Ultimately, we just need to play smart with our dispels. The option of not dispelling a player in favor of healing them may well be a necessary strategy to adopt depending on what new raid bosses are like.

Solutions

Let’s classify magic debuffs into two major categories. When responding against debuffs, you need to get a little creative and look at ways to bail out your players. Ideal solution? Simple dispel. But assuming your dispel is now on cooldown, what’s your next choice?

Impairment

This refers to any ability to hinders your character from doing anything. This means any slow, any stun, a freeze, or control loss.

With your allies stuck, they need to get out of a bad situation pronto. Let’s say Jeremy is frozen in place after a Frost Nova. They can’t move and they have no way of breaking themselves out. You, being the smart player that you are, dispelled yourself first. There happens to be a giant shadow underneath Jeremy which indicates a large meteor is about to squish him in half. Mentally, you know that meteor is going to crush him before your Dispel is available for use.

You can use Leap of Faith to extract him. If that’s not available, drop a Pain Suppression and pray that’s enough to ward that meteor.

Find a way to move the player, if possible.

If you can’t give them a movement boost, look for a way to ensure that they survive through it.

Damage

Any debuff that inflicts damage. This could be any DoT, a delayed nuke, etc.

Your allies are about to experience some large dents in their health pool. You can’t get that debuff off of them. Your only option is to brute force heal the players through it until the debuff expires on it’s own. If you don’t think your rate of healing can level off or offset the rate of damage, then resort to a cooldown. Guardian Spirit is a perfect insurance spell.

Speaking of bugs, I’m not sure if this is intended or not. The 8 second cooldown on Purify only triggers if a negative debuff is removed. I can spam Purify on myself without any debuffs without tripping the 8 second cooldown.

Or is that intended? I can’t remember.

Dear Blizzard: A Modest Healing UI Request

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The default healing UI in WoW has come a long way since Vanilla. One of my favourite additions is the bar they have that shows the impact of your healing done. If you look up, you can see that little green strip that shows how much health is going to be restored with your heal.

Let’s look at Discipline shields for a moment. With Spirit Shell turning into the 1 minute ability turning your heals into absorbs, it becomes even more important to show how much your Flash Heal or Greater Heal is going to absorb for.

Here’s the problem.

no-absorb-indicator

You can clearly see that I have Power Word: Shield on myself. It’s going to wear off in a few seconds. Naturally, I have full health but have no way of knowing how strong my shield is without breaking open my combat log. Then I’d have to look at the absorb value and mentally calculate that as a percentage of my overall health which then causes my head to hurt.

Bro, I am healing. There is no time for me to do that. I just want to know how much firepower my shield can fend off.

Here’s the potential solution.

absorb-indicator

Same screenshot as above. The only difference is that I darkened the right side of my health bar slightly. I didn’t put a colour to it or anything. Originally, that image had a yellow stripe going down but then I realized Rogue health bars and class colours were yellow. A colour that’s bright and stands out would be ideal.

White? Nope, that’s for Priests.

Pink? Paladins.

What about an overlay or a shadow over top of the health frames instead? The right side of my Priest health frames is darker which would show how much my shields would take. The absorb bar would go from right to left. There’s addons right now where absorb amounts extend past the frame to the side. That’s a solution but I don’t consider that elegant.

The problem with that is in a raid setting, if you put out large absorb numbers, then the absorb bar would go past the frame and it might visually impede you from healing the person in the next group over in your UI.

Drop a big absorb on Jeanine in group 1 and watch as you can’t target Nathaniel in group 2 because that absorb bar is covering up part of their health frame.

I haven’t thought of what the UI would look like if my health wasn’t at full. That paladin that’s above me is at around 50% health. If I put a shield on them, should that green healing strip be used? Or a different color? Won’t be able to use a transparent or darkening solution because then it becomes black bar on a black background.

Lightening up the background might work though. A brighter background stripe could serve to highlight the absorb amount.

Whatever the case, I’m just hoping they consider looking at quality of life visuals for any kind of shields or mitigation.

Four Links for the New Guys

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Someone on Twitter pointed this out to me the other day.

The same guy who’s selling me gems in Diablo 3 is the same guy who makes really awesome noodles and is the father of the Dragon Warrior!

Mind. Blown.

Progression wise in Diablo 3, my Wizard’s level 38 or so and is halfway through Act 2. Also, those sand wasps in act 2? You know, the ones that crap out 4 mini wasps that then proceed to take a dump and two shot my character?

Those bastards can die a horrible, fiery death.

Oh, and it’s a Saturday. The theme this week is tips for those who are new at something.

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Tips for the Middle Lane and Essentials: Last Hitting

I wrote two posts on how you can become a better player in the middle lane. Winning the center lane is a huge boost to your team because it’s the quickest access route between both bases. Also allows the middle player to roam to the top or bottom lanes and provide fire support. The second post on last hitting is a universal skill for almost any champion in any lane (supports being the exception). Excellent pointers for new players to League of Legends.

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Hey, Newbie! Stop writing!

Beej has a great piece for new, aspiring bloggers everywhere – Don’t be a writer. Writing shorter and simpler is the second longest skill for me to pick up since I had just left the academic world. There, you’re at the mercy of deadlines, word count minimums, and page limits. Your blog has the luxury of being limitless. The most common argument I see against writing shorter and simpler goes like this:

“But why are we trying to make our audience dumber? Why not sound smarter and help educate people?”

How do you plan on helping people get better if they don’t understand what you’re trying to say? If you can’t get your point across in a few sentences, then it’s time to find a new point. The job of the blogger is to get the message across. Using complex vocabulary and 6000 words you pulled from the thesaurus may look impressive to your English teacher but the cold reality is not many people will make it that far.

Why make your message harder to understand?

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Anxiety, the Scariest Raid Boss

I am not afraid of anxiety. I dominated public speaking throughout my years in school. Wasn’t afraid of standing in front of my peers. Raiding’s a little different. You’re playing with a group of players  and you don’t want to screw up. Some players get a little anxious when thrown into a guild tackling progression content. Being nervous about your first raid’s more common than you might think.

My biggest public speaking fear? Being thrown into a room with an amazingly hot woman and just screwing up talking. I’m at the point where I feel if I utter “Hi there” I get responded with “YOU MISOGYNST PIG” or something. Not that it’s ever happened, but well.  Give me the auditorium full of listeners instead.

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Four Reasons to Like Diablo 3

If you’re still on the fence about D3, check out Liore’s post on why she’s a fan of the game. She and I share the same feelings about bugs too, it seems.

What the Mists Talent System Could Have Been

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Diablo 3’s skill system essentially represents what the Mists talent tree is going to be like. I remember the former Diablo skill system was overhauled completely not too long ago. But it feels like they got it right with the current one. You have a limited selection of spells that your character can use. However, you can customize your selected spells in a variety of ways to help you out with a specific purpose. That spell customization with the Runes is what I imagine the Warcraft designers wanted with the glyph system.

Look at the Wizard’s Magic Missile. Want additional multi-target DPS? Rune it up with Split. Want to use it as a charger for your Arcane Power? Grab Attunement. Same basic spell but it now has additional flexibility with it.

Think about the possibilities with WoW. Lightwell recently received a glyph that it into a smart, raid heal for players under 50%. There’s another glyph that gives it some additional charges. How about a glyph that says anyone near it who receives a heal gets an additional 25% healing on top? Or a glyph giving it unlimited charges for 5 seconds?

You can’t really pull off a large number of spell customizations with WoW though since there’s so many classes and so many spells with a huge variety of combinations. It would be cool to modify each spell to have some cool effect, I reckon most of us would be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices.

A friend of mind made a comment that he felt as if he had zero choices when it came to D3’s systems. I laughed when he elaborated further by saying it was because he didn’t know what to pick for his ability slots and it was more dependent on the bosses and area he was fighting as opposed to something that was “best” for the class.

“Dude, you just nailed it right there.”

I’m hoping Diablo 3’s skill system, now that more people are exposed to it, will help open some eyes and encourage understanding to those who were vehemently opposed to Mists talent system. Even though the earlier talent system in D3 that Mists was based on was scrapped, you can tell that the spirit of what they were trying to do is still there.