All Stories

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.

• Step 1. Stack +heal until you hit about 1950 unbuffed. Then stop worrying about it.
• Step 2. Get your while-casting mana regen to around 200 raid-buffed.
• Step 3. Make sure you can get to 10k stamina with full raid buffs.
• Step 4. Get your mana pool up to 10k
• Step 5. Stack spirit ’til doomsday.

Why?

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!

Image courtesy of ijsendoorn

Here’s a sight that I’m starting to see more often around the WoW blogosphere. Bloggers are shifting the focus of their blog onto something else entirely. Incidentally enough, a post on the Blog Azeroth forums asked this very question:

Does anyone have any experience of changing the focus of their blog? I like being the Feather Duster, but would it be a bit dishonest of me to keep going like that, when a large proportion of my posts will be about alts?

Those of you just starting blogging have time to think and to plan ahead. The blogs that are already established have problems doing a 180 shift and writing about other topics on a full time basis.

Why is that?

When you brand your blog, brand it as you

Whether you’re aware of it or not, the moment you start a blog it is considered your image. You have to pick your face and your brand accordingly. Many WoW bloggers blog from the perspective of their class. Some solid examples here are dwarfpriest and resto4life. Instantly by looking at their web addresses, you already know what they’re going to be about.

By that same token, when you look at a blog url like worldofmatticus.com, www.groupsofwords.com or toomanyannas.com, you don’t have that same feeling of knowing what you’re getting yourself into. Heck, you might not even be aware that they’re WoW blogs. But this gives us an advantage further down the road.

ChickGM asked me  a good question a while ago:

Why World of Matticus? Why not World of Mallet?

When I started my blog, I did not know how far I wanted to go with it. I didn’t know if I would be changing the focus of my blog in the future. I didn’t know if I would still be playing and writing about my Priest 8 months down the line or if I’d be bored. That’s why the blog is named after me and not any of my toons so that I have the flexibility to change.

Another possibility is if I decided to change servers and the name of the toon was already used. Wouldn’t be cool now, would it?

What’s wrong with changing focus?

Nothing.

Imagine what would happen if:

• Coke stopped selling drinks and sold cars
• Nike stopped selling athletic wear and sold desktop computers
• Amazon became a lingerie and womens wear company instead of being an online shopping powerhouse

It’d be weird at first, right? It would take time to get used to the fact that your favourite companies aren’t selling the products you wanted from them in the first place. The end result is that you turn to their competition to get the stuff that you want.

Let’s apply this perspective to WoW blogs. I have a Shaman kicking around that I use if muscle is needed anywhere. There’s a few select blogs that I go to in order to catch up on Shaman related stuff.

What were to happen if they were to one day stop writing about their Shaman and decide to write about Mages instead?

And this right here is a big pet peeve of mine. If I go to a Shaman blog, I want to read about Shaman stuff. I’m in for a surprise if I go to Warlock blog to read about Warlocks and find out that the author has shifted his focus to Hunters even though everything about the name, the layout, and the posts just scream “WARLOCK STUFF”.

What would happen if Phaelia decided to just write about Rogues one day and switch her mains? It would suck massively :(.

So for all of you potential bloggers out there, keep these ideas in mind when you first start writing. If you pick a brand and a name that’s distinctly associated with a class, you will find it hard to shift later on down the road when you’ve already established yourself as an authority in said class. If you don’t have a problem with that, then by all means feel free to continue.

I just want to repeat myself and say that there is nothing wrong with changing your focus if you can plan for it accordingly.

But if you do plan to change, expect a pretty hefty uphill battle as you may lose some readers. It could take some time to re-establish your audience numbers to what it was before the swap.