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Every story, article, column, piece, and so forth on World of Matticus ever published.

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.

Breaking in The Newbie

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Screen shot 2009-10-31 at 3.07.09 AM

So you’ve just recruited a new healer and need to integrate them into your healing line up. The question a lot of people have is how do you do this effectively? Well, it will obviously be different a little bit for every guild but I’d like to offer up some tips

As a Leader

Communication

Probably the most important thing you can do is talk with the new person. Make sure they understand the rules of the raid if there are any. If they don’t know the specific rules of a raid it’s too easy to trample on them. Communicate healing assignments to them and see how they react. Seeing if they can follow an assignment is a great indicator of their raid mentality. If you have a veteran healer of their class in your raids that performs well, ask them to talk to the newbie and gauge their performance. Most importantly socialize with them a little bit. Getting to know someone a little bit can make a big difference in how they perform and react. Also being able to judge if the person can communicate effectively, as well as if they mesh with the other personalities of the raid is a good thing to do.

Performance

This is something you think wouldn’t be an issue, but it is. You have to be able to put the player in a situation where you can accurately gauge skill and knowledge of the role. If you bring them to a raid that you out gear, with your team of best healers, chances are the new guy wont show up quite as well against the others. It’s easier if the person is equally geared but chances are just as likely that they are below your current gear content. Give them a place to shine, take them on 10 man runs with alt healers, take them on heroic runs, chain pull and see how they react. Give them a chance to show you their moxie without the saturation of other over geared healers.

Evaluation

When it comes time to look at what they’ve done, take the time to include them in the analysis. They may have done things that you don’t quite understand, but they might have a perfectly logical reason for doing them. Talk to them about the runs you’ve done, things you like, things that might be concerns, you’d be surprised how many people respond very well to just being talked to about what’s going on.

As an Applicant

Be Vocal

Don’t just be the silent kid who follows along behind the pack. Be vocal, say hi, converse with the your fellow healers and guildies let them see your personality. Don’t overrun ventrilo or take over the conversation, but try to be sociable. It goes a long way when people can see your personality shine a bit. Don’t be afraid to offer to go on heroic runs and such.

Ask Questions

I encourage my raiders to ask questions if they are ever unsure about anything. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask for clarification or anything really. I’ve had raiders ask why we do things a certain way compared to another, and it’s OK with me, I have zero problem explaining why we’re doing it one way if someone cares to know.

Don’t Be Afraid

Probably the most important thing I can say is don’t be afraid to be yourself. Don’t try to be someone or something you’re not. There’s nothing worse then trying to shoe horn yourself into a little category or check box. Just be you!

Have fun!

It is a game after all! If you’re not having fun with the people you’re around, then what’s the point? We want to have fun too and if you can have fun with us, well that’s just a ton of points in your favor.

Practical Application

I’m going to share with you a story of one of my healing team members, you might know him. He’s a little bald Dwarf named Thespius. You might have seen him around Here and There. He came to me as a transfer applicant, he transferred servers just for the chance to raid with me and mine. We had talked over twitter and on AIM and email, and eventually he decide it was worth while to hop servers and spend time with us. I talked to him outside of the game so I had a decent understanding of his personality and I made it clear what I was looking for in a healer and a raider. We were both on the same page. And then after he was transferred on server we got him into one of our ToC (25) raids.

Keep in mind he is a Disc Priest for the next part. I started switching him back and forth between tanking heals and raid healing, purposely overlapping him and my other Disc Priest multiple times. I wanted to see how he would react and if it would interrupt his rolling if he got to a target that already had the weakened soul debuff. He didn’t make one complaint, nor did he break stride. He performed very well, never questioning orders. He had one suggestion that night and sent me a tell about it right away, and I encourage this in all my raiders as we either succeed or fail as a guild. I had also sent a tell out to the healers to give it all they got and not go easy so I can see if he can keep up (we out geared him a little bit ). At the end of the night I uploaded numbers to World of Logs. Thespius had performed more then admirably, he did downright fantastic! My healers had given their all and he kept right up with us despite the gear discrepancy.

I talked to him the next day and let him know what a fantastic job he did and that I was happy to have him on my healing team.

We talked, he listened to assignments and he wasn’t afraid to be himself. Since then he has contributed to strategy as the guild was working on three lights in the darkness. Communication between us was clear and he always responded when I gave assignments letting me know he knew what to do. He performed well, and was very personable with everyone in the guild, going along with heroics and raids and just having a blast. Honestly was one of the best applicants I’ve had in a long time.

Being the newbie isn’t always the most fun thing, but just remember to be yourself and have fun!

So how about you out there. How do you try to integrate the new recruits? What about when you first joined your guild? Any tips you want to Share?

That’s it for today, until next time, Happy Healing~

Sig

Chill of the Throne and It’s Future

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As Matticus has just reported, Daelo and the Dev Team have unveiled a new mechanic that tanks and healers are going to experience in Icecrown Citadel.

The new mechanic is a skill called “Chill of the Throne”, and it’s applied to all enemies in the zone:

The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee target.

Healers have grown accustomed to the heart-attacks caused by massive spike damage and carefully timed cooldowns.  There is a thrill accompanied with the notion of needing to stay on top of things to an extreme degree like that.  However, the reality is “Can the dps kill the boss before the healer runs out of mana spamming their biggest heals?”  We’re pigeon-holed into praying and hoping our heals land at the right time so our main tank doesn’t eat two 25k hits in a row.

Chill of the Throne allows the size of the hits to become smaller, rather than huge hits that hit every so often (via a tank’s mitigation).  If RNG fails, a tank is dead.  We, as healers, now get to heal a steady stream of damage, instead of breaking down with panic attacks.

Where does this go from here?

Devs have been talking about introducing a way to incorporate expertise in new bosses.  Although it seems that system isn’t viable for Icecrown, we may be able to see it in Cataclysm.  The  idea is for bosses to scale in skill, not just in health and damage done.  This could definitely open up more possibilities for damage management in the future.

ThespiusSig

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: Fond Friend or Venomous Vixen??

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wizardmario

The PTR.  Public.  Test.  Realm.  It’s been our best friend and our worst enemy.  People will flock to it, and then people will cry outrage or joy at its contents.  Some avoid it like the plague, while others spend more time in its embrace than in the game itself.

I have a huge innate sense of curiosity.  I love learning things.  When it comes to this game, I try to learn everything there is to know (without delving into theory-crafting and copious amounts of number-crunching).  There are different healing styles, different add-on preferences, different philosophies on gameplay.  I’ve learned to love the variety of them all.

However, the idea of the PTR has me torn between love and hate.  I don’t harbour a global hatred for it, but I have my reservations about it.  It is both a blessing and a curse.  And I’ll tell you why.

Friend

Patch Notes have become a huge cornerstone of the WoW community.  We read them every chance we get.  We get Twitter updates about them; entire blog posts are dedicated to them.  They help us get accustomed to our class.  If we need to change our playstyle, we get a heads up.  If our class is getting nerfed to oblivion, we know to spend more time on an alt.

We can see what gear we have to look forward to.  We drool over gear models, agonizing over the ever-changing nature of new tier set bonuses.  Our dreams are peppered with new craftable items, new patterns, new glyphs, new gems/enchants.  It’s like waiting for (insert related holiday with presents)!

In this, I’m a huge fan.  I love having to save up money/gems/mats for new enchants, or re-speccing to take advantage of a new spell bonus or counteracting a nerf.

Foe

I’m averted to the large exploitation of the upcoming raids on the PTR.  I don’t “hate” it, because I understand its purpose.

I get a huge adrenaline high from facing a new boss on my server with my guild, without really knowing what to expect.  I have to think on my feet.  The raid has to be ready to adjust and listen to the raid leader for directions.

Remember the climactic scene of the movie “The Wizard”?  The kid and his nemesis are the in the final battle, about to play a game that no one has ever seen before.  The curtain is lifted….SUPER MARIO 3!!  I was a kid when that movie came out, and I just about crapped my pants.  Neither the kid nor his nemesis had any experience with this game.  Both were going in totally blind.  No tricks, no strategies, just shutup and play.

It’s that mentality that I crave for the community when it comes to releasing a new raid.  The new content is released and has been tested by a representative sample of the community under a confidentiality clause.  My team goes in on patch day, bags filled with flask/food, ready to conquer.  Our gold stash resembles Scrooge McDuck’s money pit in “Duck Tales”.  Let’s learn this boss our way.  We can be as hardcore as we want to be.

The Toss-up

In spite of all my rantings, I understand that living on the cutting edge of raiding needs every advantage.  World and Server Firsts are a big deal to a lot of guilds.  They need that edge–the ability to practice something, even if it’s not in it’s final form.  Guilds can strategize what needs to happen before the boss actually hits the live servers.

My proposal, though, is to assign a smattering of raiders the ability to do a closed testing of these bosses.  Start the difficulty of the bosses high and slowly bring it down as needed, but not so much to make the boss one or two-shottable.  Keep in mind it isn’t too interesting for us to go in and down bosses in our current gear.

My random thought of the day: Would we complain as much about the ease of boss killings if we didn’t have a head start?  A marathon is a piece of cake if you only have to run a small portion of it on the actual day, right?

What do you think?  Would you rather train in the PTR, or save the workout for after a new raid goes live?  How do you feel about the ability to test and learn a boss ahead of time?

ThespiusSig