Guide to Healing, Leading, and Progressing in WoW Raids
Every story, article, column, piece, and so forth on World of Matticus ever published.
It’s here in all of its glory! It’s been up on the Twisted Nether blog for a while, but alas, I’ve been rather slow on the uptake.
Participants copied straight from the original post:
Check back in a few hours for a heavy duty blog post.
I was reading one of Ess’s posts wondering what happened to our Shadow Priest friend. He moved. Just thought I’d share. =)
There’s a special broadcast of the Twisted Nether blogcast being done live tonight. Yours truly will be staying up past his bed time to have an awesome time in a round table discussion with other names like Kestrel from Kestrel Aeire’s, Phae from Resto4Life, Auzara from Chick GM and Anna from Too Many Annas.
It wouldn’t be much of a party either without our terrific hosts Bre and Fim!
How do you get in on this action? Here’s a brief excerpt from the post with the details:
The show is scheduled for Saturday, July 19, 2008 at 12:30 am EST (yes I know that technically makes its Sunday, July 20, just go with me on this)
To participate on the live show, you will need to go to the TNB Ustream show and use the password tnb73 (the password is caps sensitive. Only use lowercase)
This will be loads of fun and the blooper reel will be huge, I guarantee!
Image courtesy of Chancaca
Wyn’s gearing philosophy
It seems like whenever I start talking healing with a new priest-acquaintance or guild-app, the first (often only) metric they give me to describe their gear level is their +healing. Not that +healing isn’t important at all, but there are more important stats. More than that, how you balance your stats is infinitely more important than each individual stat’s level. Think about it: You can hit 2k +healing in full greens. You can definitely go way, way over 2k healing in PvP gear. Either way, it’s not a set up I’d take into a raid situation, and as a single-stat +healing tells me next-to-nothing about a given players ability to heal well and KEEP healing well through a whole fight. So in the absence of my spreadsheets, lootrank, and what-not, here’s how I think about it.
1. Because around 2k +heal is more than enough to handle any T4 or T5 content. Once you’re in T4 and T5 content, any gear you get to improve your mana-regen stats will ALSO increase your +healing, without you worrying about it. There may be occasional pieces where you’ll lose 10 healing for 20 spirit or something, but it’s always worth it. I promise.
2. You need to have a good working base of casting-regen while you continute to find heavy-spirit pieces. A lot of this Mp5 can come from spirit-stat stuff (thanks to Meditation talents), just make sure you pick up enough raw Mp5 as you go so that you don’t have a gap here while you continue to improve your gear. (Remember that fully raid-buffed means food, elixirs, all buffs, and mana oils. Don’t have a “buff?” use a scroll.)
3. Some fights call for stamina. You’re allowed to swap no more than 2 pieces of gear from your normal healing set, and swapping them can’t drop your Mp5 or +heal below the prescribed levels. If you need to toss on 1 or 2 PvP pieces to do this, it’s okay as a beginning crutch, but this is your biggest reason to ditch crafted healing gear as quickly as possible. It’s just not viable past entry-level T5, and with all the options available to replace it, there’s really no excuse for gimping your essential stats with PvP gear. Don’t forget about consumables, either, and keep yourself shielded through the high-damage times of these fights.
4. You need a good pool of mana to work with, so that you can play with your regen in terms of trinkets, fiend, and freebie casts. Having a decent pool just gives you more flexibility and less stress. Besides, the Int you need to create this pool helps you get the most out of your spirit.
5. Spirit increases your 3 main stats: Non-casting regen, +healing, and regen-while-casting, provided you’ve taken the right talents. You just can’t have too much of it.
But what about Spell haste? Spell haste is a beautiful thing, IF AND ONLY IF you are not sacrificing other stats to get it. It doesn’t matter if your heals are faster if you yourself die or (most commonly) you spam yourself oom because your regen can’t keep up. Most of the gear currently available with Spell Haste comes at the expense of mana-regen. (The notable exception being the much-cited Eagle-boss neck from ZA, which is currently best-in-slot for Holy Priests) The vast, vast, vast majority of Priests that are gearing up simply need to focus on improving their other stats to the point that they are viable to raid in full-blown T6 content before worrying about Spell Haste.
Luv,
Wyn
A blog can only do so much. A blog is a virtual canvas for an author to paint their thoughts onto. A few weeks ago, I asked if you were interested in taking part in a community with other like minded healers. An overwhelming number of you said yes.
Today, I’d like to introduce Plusheal as a new place for you to get acquainted with other healers and healing bloggers, with the goal of sharing information to make us all better healers.
You might wonder why I’m starting a healing community when I already have this blog?
Well, a blog:
* Presents topics guided by the original author
* Is an outlet for one voice
Whereas a forum forum:
* Empowers readers to create and participate in their own discussions
* Is a potential outlet for multiple voices
At Plusheal, we’re hoping to foster discussions among groups of players, beyond the scope of the limits offered by blog conversations. I’ll be joined there by other healing bloggers like Anna, Siha, Auzara, Lume, Pat, and of course, Wyn who’ll be helping me with the community as it grows and sharing their expertise with the rest of us. I hope to see a lot of you over there, too.
Special thanks to my speechwriter. You know who you are!