Guide to Healing, Leading, and Progressing in WoW Raids
Every story, article, column, piece, and so forth on World of Matticus ever published.
I’ll be on the WoW.com show in about 15 minutes. I’m not quite sure what I’ll be talking about. If you’ve ever wanted to listen to a Dwarf Priest do improv, this is your chance! Not sure if this embed works, if not here’s the direct link to the Ustream page!
Update: Show’s over! Thanks for listening! Will post MP3 up later!
So, recently I’ve been talking more and more about the story and lore of gaming. The games that create a rich background and intricate story for you to be a part of. As such I’ve been talking with a lot of RPers lately. I’ve been reading very interesting RP posts, and fan fiction stories, and have even begun writing my own for Lodur’s background. It can be a lot of fun to think about where your character has been and where they are going and how they might interact with their fellow raiders. This side of the game does appeal to me as I’m an old school D&D Role playing geek. It is however something I haven’t fully explored in game yet.
Blizzard has set aside entire servers for people to Role Play with each other, and no I’m not talking about the seedy dirty stuff, but honest interaction between players acting out their characters. There are a few different types of Role Playing you’ll come across in the game.
Spontaneous RP
This is a spontaneous act between two or more players who play out a short scenario on the spot. These players typically do not have background stories that cross paths and have a low likelihood of interacting again in a role-playing context. This is coming across someone randomly while questing or bump into in one of the major cities. These RP sessions can sometimes lead to further contact later on and might develop into character friendships later one.
Deliberate / Planned RP
Some role players will set aside specific times to be online to interact with others. This can be in a raid, a group that quests together as a party or simply a meeting in the local inn to throw back a pint or twelve. Many interesting interactions happen here. Friendships are made and lost, sometimes characters pair off in the way of couples, and sometimes they break up and throw bottles at each other. I have a group of friends I talk to on a regular basis that do set aside specific time to role play during the week, and I always enjoy hearing about what happened afterward.
Out of Game RP
Probably one of the more important things to mention here. Out of game RP happens in emails, forums and blog posts. This exists between spontaneous and deliberate RP events and honestly has no true end point. These can serve to flesh out backgrounds for your character, can help turn spontaneous RP encounters into full on character relationships and can really give some creative license to tell a very intricate story. I’ve seen posts that filled in the gaps of a raid, and some rather humorous explanations for why the group wiped on a particular boss fight. The forum posts I’ve run across or have been linked to are often the result of people working together in emails to get the story together before it’s posted. People have even created twitter accounts for their toons so they can RP with other characters through that media as well. The results are almost always a very very fun story to read. It’s like being an actor in a movie and really getting into your role, or playing out a scene in your favorite books. You get to be a part of a story of your making.
The community surrounding MMO’s has always interested me, it’s one of the most important reasons I got into MMOs in the first place. We make friends as we play the game (or enemies) and we get to share our triumphs and defeats. There’s something very gratifying about working with 24 friends and downing a big nasty boss. The community that has sprung up from the Role Playing elements of Warcraft is very strong as well. The people that RP have most definitely set up a community for themselves (and their characters) within the game. You can sit on twitter and see just how deep the interactions go. To them there is more to the game then the grinding of levels or the end game content. Now it’s not to say that all they do is interact in character, many times the OOC (Out Of Character) chat channels are hillarious with the Real Life interactions. It’s refreshing sometimes to take a step back and look at the other side of the fence.
Does this mean you’ll see posts here about role playing in game? Possibly, depends on how deep down the rabbit hole I go. (or how far @justanna from toomanyannas.com can drag me =P)
So, what about you? Have you tried RPing? Have you ever written a fan fiction about your character? Have you thought about it? What would your characters background be?
That’s it for now, I’ll have more for you later this week. Until then, Happy healing!
Image courtesy of madbrewlabs.com
This is a guest post by jeffo, a Paladin blogger from Looking For More.
Before there is Cataclysm there was a cataclysm – a massive overhaul to WoW that patch 3.0.2 brought to the game. From this Holy Paladin’s perspective, these changes were more than welcome and, once I got used to 40-yard judgments, a spell that would let me heal two(!) targets at once and a greatly streamlined judgment system, I was in good shape. The road to level 80 also brought us a shield and a new mechanism for regenerating a lot of mana over a short period of time. The revisions to all three Paladin trees made many Holy Paladins rethink where their non-Holy points should be invested.
Prior to 3.0.2 most Holydins would go into Protection tree, primarily with the aim of picking up Blessing of Kings. With Wrath out most Holy Paladins decided to dig instead into the Retribution tree, picking up talents that increased spell crit by 8%. Although Kings remained in the same location in the Protection tree, the shuffling of talents around it made this build pale in comparison to a Holy/Ret spec. The crit talents took advantage of one of our key talents, Illumination, and enabled Holydins to stack Intellect, load up on crit gear, and Holy Light-spam our way through Naxxramas into Ulduar. Even as we watched a shameful moment in paladin history (Arthas disbanding the Silver Hand and sending Uther home in disgrace in Old Stratholme), healing Paladins seemed to be entering into a Golden Age, topping meters and putting out prodigious amounts of healing while our fellow healers were running dry.
Storm clouds appeared on the horizon in May when Ghostcrawler dropped the first hint that Blizzard was looking at nerfing Illumination. This touched off a vigorous debate on Plusheal.com (as opposed to the O-Boards, where it spawned much QQ from Paladins, and much ‘lol, nerf pallies, QQ moar’ from everyone else) about what this would mean if the change went through, though many seemed to believe that it wouldn’t.
It did.
On June 18, the news was announced, and it was even worse than we had imagined: Not only did the mana return from Illumination get cut in half, one of our key talents, Divine Intellect, was also getting cut by 5% at max level. Combined with an across-the-board nerf to Replenishment, it appeared that Holy Paladins were getting nerfed ‘to the ground, baby’ (sorry, can’t resist borrowing that quote from our favorite crab). Anguish and anger ruled the day on the O-Boards. We were going to be crippled, we were going to be benched. Never mind the huge buff to Beacon of Light (and it is huge), never mind the Flash of Light over Time effect on Sacred Shielded targets: Rerolls were incoming, subscriptions were being canceled. The Golden Age of the Paladin was over.
Or was it?
April’s Patch 3.1 introduced some new wrinkles that may well have been designed to lure healers out of the Ret tree: Divinity and Divine Sacrifice. With the nerfs incoming in patch 3.2, a number of Paladins began eyeballing and experimenting with Holy/Protection as an alternative. Siha at Banana Shoulders predicted on July 21st that a Holy/Prot spec would become the favored spec while other Paladin deeper in Ulduar than I were looking at this spec as a way to mitigate some of the high raid-wide damage seen in fights like Mimiron. Sadly, despite the theorycrafting that was going on, few people who were actually IN the PTR were posting their experiences with any real numbers. Instead, we got a mix of ‘it’s not too bad’ and ‘it sucks, I’m re-rolling’, so we were left to wait, wonder and speculate. Much of the speculation focused on whether or not the sky would fall when the patch went live.
Just before the patch hit I dropped my 1000 gold on dual-spec training and created…a second healing spec. I went with a 51/20/0 ‘Bubble spec’, figuring there was no getting around the nerfs and that I was going to have to get used to it. A funny thing happened to me: I’ve been using the bubble spec almost exclusively ever since. A one-minute Sacred Shield is nice, and Divine Sacrifice is a very strong talent (provided I don’t inadvertently kill myself with it). I do miss not seeing quite as many BIG, GREEN NUMBERS as I used to, but with raid buffs I’m still typically critting well over thirty percent of the time, and have hit 40+% on some fights.
But what about the mana? Prior to 3.2 in my Crit spec, I was getting around 40% of my total mana regeneration from Illumination; Replenishment was a distant second at ~30%. Both were getting cut drastically in the patch, and switching to a Bubble spec would make my crit drop by another 8% or so – would I be able to heal, or would I find myself starved for mana?
In short, my mana is fine! Despite the fact that in bubble spec Illumination now only makes up 15-17% mana return, and Replenishment returns now seem to fall in the 25% range, I have had virtually no issues with mana to date. Even on fights where I find myself having to bomb Holy Lights, I’m not the healer that calls ‘Out of mana’ over vent – that doesn’t happen for me unless something’s gone very, very wrong in our raid. How can this be? I believe it’s due to a combination of the following:
Based on my experience, Bubbledins seem to be faring pretty well so far: we can still put out very large numbers and our mana seems to hold up well over long, healing intensive fights. I think that it actually makes us a more well-rounded healer than we were heading into the patch. But what about the holdouts? The nerfs seemed to be aimed pretty squarely at Int-stacking, Crit-bombing, Holy retadins, and there’s still a lot of them out there. For my next act (Matt willing) I will take a look at some numbers and reports from my critting cousins. A bit more research is in order, and it may mean taking the Crit spec back out of the garage and into Ulduar again – should be fun!
Can’t disclose anymore at the moment, but I’ve decided to turn to public appeal as a last resort. Here’s the scoop. I’m working on something special but I’m not going to disclose what it is.
I’m looking for two players to talk to. They have to be willing to discuss their UIs. But there’s a few things that you should know.
a) I’m not looking for a Grid/mouseover healer. Yes it’s popular. Yes it’s effective. I already have someone who has discussed their UI with me that involves Grid and macros.
b) If you’re a raid healer who does not use the above combination to heal, look me up anyway. Your interface might be sufficiently different enough.
c) Do you heal in PvP? Either arena or battlegrounds will work. I’d like to have a chat.
d) 5 mans and heroics. If you heal 5 mans extensively, I’m also looking for you.
Use comments below to illustrate interest. Make sure you leave your E-Mail. Alternatively, you can email me directly (matttz@gmail.com and yes, that’s 3 Ts. I do have GChat and I’m on practically all the time).
Those of you that do know what I’m secretly up to, don’t publicize it any further.
Submissions closed! Thanks for your help everyone!
Psssst! Want to hear a secret?
Did you know Priests can maintain a near limitless amount of mana?
It’s very possible. But it does abuse a certain in game mechanic. This post is just for educational purposes only. I’m not here to encourage you to knowingly abuse game mechanics. Wynthea has this deluded idea that Blizzard reads my blog. Personally, I’m a skeptic. If I see a hotfix or a patch update within the next several weeks that address this, I’ll believe it. But until then, I’m going to assume I fly well under their radar.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. It wasn’t until I read this post on Plus Heal that the urge to get it out there resurfaced.
Anyway, this idea revolves around Rapture.
When your Power Word: Shield is completely absorbed or dispelled you are instantly energized with 2.5% of your total mana, and you have a 100% chance to energize your shielded target with 2% total mana, 8 rage, 16 energy or 32 runic power. This effect can only occur once every 12 sec.
After you shield someone and their shield wears off because it absorbs the damage or get dispelled, you gain back 2.5% of your total mana. Your target gains some form of energy back as well. But we’re not concerned with that aspect of Rapture.
Normally, for the tank healing Discipline Priest, it’ll only work once every 12 seconds just like the tool tip says.
However, for the raid healing Discipline Priest, something else occurs.
Let’s take a fight like Kologarn. Kologarn has the Shockwave ability where his arm completely manhandles the raid and does a fair amount of damage. A shield cast on a player will be fully exhausted after one sweep.
So what happens if you shield 10 players before Shockwave connects?
My Priest has around 33000 mana fully raid buffed (Note: Newer Priests, do not do what I do and stack copious amounts of Intellect. I do it to have a bit of fun with my Priest). Rapture will give me back 837.5 mana if one shield gets absorbed or dispelled. Seeing as the Rapture debuff is not in effect because the shields have not been consumed, it’s easy to conclude that you would gain a ton of mana back if your shields were simultaneously absorbed at the same time.
In other words, I would get 837.5 x 5 = 4200 mana back. Give or take. Shield 10 players, and I would get upwards of 8000 mana as the Rapture internal cooldown kicks in.
Anyways, that’s today’s public service announcement. Don’t go around spreading this secret now. We might get nerfed again after all!