If a player leaves your guild, would you give them a second chance? Now clearly this one of those case by case type questions. I know for me personally, I’ll tell them they can always try again with us later if things in their future guild doesn’t work out. Yet deep down inside, I think to myself, “Probably not going to happen. You left us, buddy.” Of course, if the reason is something like a raid times issue, it is completely understandable. I can’t expect someone with a desire to raid to be in a guild when they can’t commit to those times.
Anyway, under what circumstances would you give players that left a second chance at life with your guild?
Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I’ve been a huge fan of the spell Spirit Link since it first made an appearance back in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. The spell allowed restoration shaman to link players together, distributing damage among them. The spell was eventually removed due to balancing issues, and I only got to play with it for a few, fleeting moments.
When Cataclysm was announced, the developers made a note that they were going to try to work Spirit Link back into the game. It was a spell a lot of players were excited about and wanted to have in their arsenal. It was a promise to give us something we didn’t have, a defensive cooldown. Shaman throughout the community came up with various ideas on how to balance it and let it come back to the game. I was included among that number. Alas, it was not meant to be, and Spirit Link has drifted off without much of a word about it from the developers.
After lamenting the loss of the spell, I came to a realization. I’ve been healing through the beta both in dungeons and raids and not once did I ever say to myself “I wish I had Spirit Link right now!”. That exact phrase I muttered to myself at least a dozen times in Wrath. But looking at the way Cataclysm is designed, it is now impossible for Spirit Link to be incorporated into the game. Looking at the damage model for the new expansion it is quite easy to see this. Let me explain a bit here for clarification sake. When I say damage model, I quite literally mean damage model. Everyone is taking damage in Cata. There is rarely instances in a raid where someone is not taking some damage. This is very unlike Wrath, where there were a few fights that had massive amounts of raid damage. Let’s use the new Nefarian encounter as an example. The new fight has you engaging the reanimated corpse of both Onyxia and Nefarian. Onyxia has some fun new abilities including shadow flame (doing her dad proud) and a new electrical charge. Needless to say, she does a ton of raid wide damage. Combine this with Nefarian flying around and summoning adds, throwing his own shadow bolts and you have yourself a recipe for pain.
At no point in this fight would it have been safe to link multiple players together. Simply put, any additional damage on the non tanks would have killed them. Now, almost every fight in Cata is like this. Heroic dungeons feel like raid bosses (at least until we outgear them but still), and raids feel much more difficult. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just an evolution of the game. Players are more accountable for their own health totals than every before, and healers have a whole new set of concerns. With this new model, Spirit Link just doesn’t fit anymore. Players simply would die if linked together. Now you could argue that a defensive cooldown could be extremely useful here, but Blizzard has done us one better.
Instead of a defensive cooldown, we get an offensive healing cooldown. I’m not talking about Nature’s Swiftness here, but our new level 85 spell, Spiritwalker’s Grace. Traditionally the role of a healer is to indemnify. That’s my nickle word for the day. It means to secure against hurt, loss or damage. By this I mean we wait for people to get hurt, or hurt enough and react by healing them in an attempt to bring their health back to 100%. Most of the new healing abilities for the other healers are more preventative. They stop damage from happening. Shaman without the ability to keep damage from happening are forced to be more aggressive healers. This fits really well with the tools we are given.
So let’s take a look at our new cooldown. Spiritwalker’s grace lets us cast any heal while moving. Let me state that again for dramatic effect here, it lets us cast any heal while moving. This means in those fights (read: all of them) that require us to move, we can pop this cooldown and run-and-gun casting our big heals, like Chain Heal, without having to stop. Mull that over for a second. Pretty awesome right? This gives us not only some added versatility, but the ability to manage that versatility. We choose when to use it, which adds that level of healing skill everyone has been talking about wanting for a while now. Sure, we can’t power word: shield someone, but you bet your ass we can drop a nuke heal while on the move! While other healers can throw shields and HoTs while running, we can cast full blown spells. The cooldown lasts 10 seconds, and only has a 2 minute cooldown. It fits really well with our healing style as well. Shaman are not the healers that sit in the back and chant. We are the healers that charge into the thick of battle to drop our totems and throw fire at the enemy while making our own troops whole again.
Honestly I think this new ability hasn’t gotten nearly enough media attention, as players remain too focused on what could have been. It really is quite awesome, and with it I’m no longer pining for Spirint Link. While I will always remember it with fondness in my heart, I’ve come to accept that its departure was for the best and to move on. So goodbye Spirit link, it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when wrath set in. And I would have liked to have known you but I was just level 70, your candle burned out long before, but your legend never will.
I think other restoration shaman will start to feel the same as time spent with the new spells comes.
So what do you think? Still miss Spirit Link? Do you like Spiritwalker’s Grace?
I never thought I would see the day. You know, when I first started this journey on my character, I’ve always envisioned myself as that of a career healer. It was my purpose. I was to heal, to sustain, and to cure players. Restore them back to full health. I have tried the dark arts before but it was beyond my skills and comprehension. And yet, with the guild expanding to a include PvP, I noted we had a fair number of healers already. And so, I activated a dormant side of Matticus that I thought I had suppressed forever. I vowed never to use that side ever again unless I had a significant reason to do so. But the time had come.
I went Shadow.
It was amusing at first. I already had a full set of 264 healing gear and a full set of 264 shadow gear. Within the span of minutes, I turned myself into a potent weapon. For those moments, I was no longer the shield of the guild. I was now the sword. The transferable gaming knowledge I picked up over the past 10 years came flowing back. The art of chain stunning and disabling from playing hundreds of hours of DoTA. The stacking, force firing and position playing from Guild Wars. The willingness to attract the ire of 6 opposing horde players and keeping them busy for that one second at the blue gate graveyard in Strands of the Ancients so that my team mate could capture that graveyard. Everything came rushing back. I was a whirlwind of death. Targets were identified and crushed with ruthless efficiency (unless they were resto druids, then it was just plain ruthlessness).
And you know what I discovered? I can’t get enough of it. Double tapping players with Shadow Word: Death is too much… fun.
Do not worry. You won’t be seeing shadow related posts here anytime soon. I am not quite qualified in that regard just yet. For me, the time has come to learn the dark arts. By doing so, I allow myself to play both roles in our raid as necessary and won’t be quite as restricted when it comes to roster flexibility. I have much to learn.
I will strive to learn everything I can and be the best at it. Yet, I know that it is truly impossible to master something. Here’s the thing I’ve noticed when it comes to trying to master a class. I mean, if I were to graph learning the skills to master a class, I would draw an asymptote. After all, although one can always get closer and closer to mastery, one will never reach it.
Have to admit, it is a welcome pace from healing. Except I have a disgusting 24% hit from all the spirit stuff I’m packing.
This post is what I like to call a mind dump. There is too much stuff on my mind, so I figured I’d dump it all here so I can make sense of it later. it will appear jagged, out of the ordinary and it might not even make sense.
– PvP division is coming along nicely. Growth’s a little lower than expected, but it’s getting there. Managed to a dominating number of the battlegrounds we have entered so far. However, Conquest is 0-2 in Isle of Conquest. That statistic will continue to irritate me for sometime. Perhaps a 25 player preform of guild members and pickup players might not have enough muscle to swing victory. But being shut out of our island?! This transgression must be avenged.
– On the one hand, I would love to try my hand and leading some preforms. On the other hand, I don’t know if I have the ability or time to with all the other stuff I need to do.
– Thinking ahead to the opening weeks of the expansion. Who is leveling what professions and what recipes are we going to need to progress into raids? Obviously the main enchanting and jewelcrafting recipes will be a priority. There is also the crafted stuff to consider. Under our loot council system, whoever acquires a crafted epic won’t be rolling on the normal raid gear for that slot until everyone that can use it already has it. So if I make a Belt of the Depths for myself, I’ll end up passing on all cloth belts out of the raids in favor of other clothwearers who still need a belt. We need to think big picture on the gear route to minimize any wasting of gear.
– Speaking of professions, I’m not sure how many gatherers we have. That’s going to put a dent in the ol’ Conquest credit card especially if I need to make purchases of stuff.
– The Movember stache is coming along nicely. Sadly, no SS means it didn’t happen.
– Read a nice piece on playing to win versus playing not to lose. Good subject to explore later on. It compares taking risks for big gains versus staying steady and making safe decisions. Do you push DPS to phase Lich King early so you don’t have to deal with Defiles or Valks (and consequently risk getting them at the same time?) Or do you wait for them to spawn, then deal with them, and then push into the next phase? At what point do you slam the table and push or stay conservative and wait? It’s like playing a an Eye of the Storm. Does your preformm go for the 4 capture or play in a map controlling manner with 2 points and continual flag running?
– Also in the middle of reading a book about being clutch and how people perform in high pressure situations and why other people choke in those types of situations.
– Helped someone move over the weekend. I’m buying a 1 floor place or a place with an elevator. 3 floors is not fun.
– Guild rank restructuring has been complete. We’re pushing 10 slots as it is. Makes me wonder if another one is going to be added in the future. Anyway, here’s a quick breakdown.
GM (That’s me)
Officers (My awesome team)
Loot council (Decider of loot)
Raider (Raiders on the starting lineup)
Red shirts (Trials and players working on cracking the starting lineup)
PvP Commander (Preform leaders)
PvP Troopers (Rated BGers on the starting lineup)
PvP New Guys (Awaiting evaluation to see if they’re in the top 15)
Civilians (Socials, alts, friends, no obligation to raid or PvP, just a place to hang out
Normal (One of the few ranks that doesn’t require a radiation suit)
– Eyelids are getting real heavy now.
– Comparing 10 man vs 25 man healing. Not sure if you read my post on WoW Insider yet (you should), but if you’re not into reading, at the very least check out this legen …(wait for it)… dary video. Conclusion? If you’re not great with periphreal vision and standing out of stuff, 10 man raids are the way to go for you. There is more healing that needs to be done and you are triaging (tree-aging) more often. Be comfortable with players not at 100% health. On 25 though, it is much more chaotic. I didn’t know as much raid damage going on because the city was getting cleaned up right quick. But if you can manage those, the kidnapper will be blindfolded again.
The last couple of weeks have seen the blogosphere gently swaying from side to side during the wait for Cataclysm, like a drunken llama on a narrow fence. A couple of weeks ago the blogosphere leaned more towards the healing type topics. Last week it loosely double-focused on healing and guild organisation. And now this week… well, this week we’re wobbling decidedly towards the guild organisation side of things and away from healing, although not entirely, because if we do that we might loose our balance.
Why, you ask?
It’s likely because as Cataclysm draws close we’re looking at restructuring our groups of seasoned (and I’m sure not inebriated) warriors so that we can meet Cataclysm’s challenges. And at the same time there’s not much new to say about healing now that the patch has been and gone, until Cataclysm itself hits and we wake up to find our healers at the top of the DPS charts.
…Oh! You meant why the llama analogy? I don’t know. Someone gave me caffeine. And it’s Saturday. But I bet you kept reading. Anyway, without further ado here’s this week’s MMO Melting Pot-sque roundup ‘specially for WoM readers of the healing, leading and guild related posts from around the blogosphere. Albeit with a distinct shimmy towards the latter.
Falling Leaves And Wings: Are 25 Mans Going To Be Worth The Effort In Cata? – Beruthiel is looking ahead to Cataclysm and wondering whether it’ll be worth running 25 mans in the new raid setup, even for a guild that specialises in 25 mans. Her worries are that raids won’t be properly balanced and 10 mans will still be easier for the same gear, added to the possibility that 25 mans won’t drop enough quantities of gear to make them progress at a relative speed to 10 mans. An interesting read for any raider, 10 or 25 man’er.
Organizing a 10 man team – Aunna’s got a brief if really quite detailed post on 10 mans. Not just on organizing them, though that does make up the latter chunk of her post. She’s also covering the benefits and disadvantages of raiding as a 10 man group, which is well written, refreshing to read and very grounded. Hear hear!
What It Takes To Be a Great Raid Leader – This is a great 5-point list for raid leaders by Saga over at Girls Don’t Play WoW. She says that it’s aimed primarily at newer raid leaders but as an experienced raid leader myself I found her post a very interesting read. Her points might seem obvious but they are all core principles of raid leading, some of which are easy to make mistakes with sometimes. Great post, and well timed for when people are organising for Cata.
Daily Thoughts: Raid healing – a short post by Sharden over at 15 Minutes of WoW musing on his recent forray into, yep, you got it – raid healing. He’s used to healing as a paladin and not doing the raid healing so much, so trying out the new role on his shaman sounds like it was a fresh experience. A nice read which I bet a lot of us can relate to or remember similar experiences!
Syl and Theanorak: Preparing For Healing Changes As DPS – This one’s not directly aimed at healers, but is from a healer trying to help their guild’s DPSers. Syl from Raging Monkeys has written a guide to her DPS guildies prepare for healing mechanic changes in Cataclysm, so they can brush up on their knowledge of what to stand in and what healing to expect. She invites you to use or adapt it for your own guildies, if you think they might benefit from it too.
Rules for Raiding – Analogue from Looking For More has posted her guild’s prospective raid rules and is looking for your thoughts on them. They’re covering things like attendence, strategy, tasks – and how raid members should behave in regards to these things. She’s asking us readers if we think they’re reasonable or whether we’d raid under them; an interesting question…
That’s it for this week. In a moment I’ve got to be heading off to do some organisation work for my own 10 man guild, but just before I go – what do you think, this week? Do you have a bee in your bonnet about any of these topics or are you hoping for more posts on a different subject?