News and Opinion

General news and opinion about WoW.

POLL: Will you raid 10 man or 25 man in Cataclysm?

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One of the best — or worst things depending on your view — to happen to raiding in a long time was the inclusion of smaller group sized content. I talked a little bit about this over on BDTU with my pieces on the Evolution of WoW part 1 and part 2.

The trend started with the addition of Zul’Gurub, a troll instance of now infamous reputation, when it broke from the 40-man raid standard and offered 20-man content. It hailed back to the days of Blackrock Spire being a multiple group raid, and people loved it.

Karazhan further stoked the fires of the smaller group raid desire, and did so while offering epic and story filled content. Players loved it so much that the forums were filled countless replies asking for more smaller group . With Wrath came the revelation that all raid content would be be available in 25-man flavor as set forth by Burning Crusade, but also  in new raid 10-man flavor (all of the raid, less than half the calories). Different levels of gear purchasable by badges came out (as well as loot tables that varied between 10 and 25 man), and both 10 and 25 man raids dropped the same badges. The trick, and the problem, was that people felt compelled to run both 10 and 25 man versions to maximize badges. Some people felt that you absolutely had to run both to “beat the game”.

This is also a result of how loot was distributed. Badges gave you the entry level gear for the items at the end of this expansion cycle. Badges gave you the “entry level” piece for the tier set, this was considered the 10 man version of the tier. Tokens in 25 man raids would drop that allowed you to upgrade the 10 man piece to the next level up. Heroic 25 man dropped yet another token that allowed you to upgrade it to it’s maximum potential. You can see how it would be assumed the more badges you had the better gear you had and the quicker you could climb the gear ladder right?

Well, the devs didn’t like that, nor did less hardcore players (or those of us who don’t have the time to devote to constantly running raids all week long) and a new system was proposed for Cataclysm. The system says that the same content will be provided for 10 and 25 man versions, and the reward levels will be the same. That is to say that the Ilvl of gear will be on par between versions, and they will share the same loot tables. The major difference will be that 25 man will have more damage and more health to worry about in boss fights and such, and you will get MORE loot drops than the 10 man content does. Also, a raid regardless of being 10 or 25 man, all share the same raid ID and lockout. Do a  25 man version and kill a boss? Cool. Split into two 10 mans of the same thing and that boss is still dead for both groups. You can’t up-convert from 10 to 25, but you can down-size if attendance becomes an issue or some such.

So this brings up an interesting question for a lot of guilds and raid groups right now. Is it worth it to run 25 man content if the rewards for 10 are the same? Is the extra loot enough of a benefit to keep you raiding in 25 man content or do you give up and just say screw it? I know a lot of guilds are going through this debate right now. I know some of them personally. This happened in a smaller capacity when Wrath was announced to have 10 man content. Some guilds decided the smaller size was for them and paired down into tight-knit, more tactical 10 man groups. So now that the gear is equal level between 10 and 25, aside from quantity, I know many guilds that have weighed the pros and cons of both formats and decided to go for the smaller size.

My guild Unpossible recently had this discussion. We pulled all of the officers into a private vent chat and hashed it out. it was about even split on the case of 10 vs 25, and there were a lot of good points made. After a good half hour discussion, we decided that we would stay a 25 man raiding guild. Our structure was already in place and had been since the release of Burning Crusade, and it has been stable and working since. We have a dedicated group of raiders who love the group we are in and the dynamic we have going. We also decided that we just felt more comfortable in the 25 man environment.

For me personally, I voted in favor of keeping the 25 man raid group. I love the logistical challenge of tracking so many players — and yes I know it’s not the 40 man content or raids from vanilla but I served my time in those — and the dynamic we have set up between all the various parts of the raiding group works well together, and I’d hate to break that up. I also didn’t like the idea of balancing multiple 10 man groups. Something I’ve seen over the last few years, people have an easier time being benched for a raid than they do taking part in a raid that is behind another group. I didn’t want to breed an environment of Group A vs Group B and cause any unnecessary drama.

So with Cataclysm on the horizon, has your guild discussed this at all? Has your raid group decided whether it will raid 10 man or 25 man content? Were you already raiding as a 10 or 25 man group? What do you think the benefits of both are? What about the drawbacks? I’d love to hear your opinions on this and see how the community as a whole has decided.

Will your guild raid 10 man or 25 man content in Cataclysm?

  • 10 Man / 10 Man Hard Mode (68%, 346 Votes)
  • 25 Man / 25 Man Hard Mode (20%, 103 Votes)
  • Banana (12%, 61 Votes)

Total Voters: 498

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Until next time, happy healing!

My experience with the Queue Q preforms

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I had a bit of time over the AV weekend and I wanted to spend some of it acquiring some honor. What’s the best way to do it? Queue for AV of course. What’s the better way? Queue for it in a preform.

But how do you queue for AV in such large numbers when its technically not allowed?

Enter QueueQ.

These guys are a no nonsense PvP organization that comes from a variety of servers within the Bloodlust Battlegroup. There’s a large vent that everyone connects to. Whether you are from Proudmoore, Kil’Jaden, Aman’thul or Ner’Zhul, everyone’s allowed to get in on the action. Each group is under the command of a preform leader who controls the play.

There isn’t a special technique to get in. When the leader calls for it, everyone queues at the same time. As soon as a number pops, everyone calls out which AV they get and they hold off until they see if enough in that preform get in. If yes, they take it and roll with it.

The level of precision and control in these raid groups is inspiring. Every group has assigned towers or objectives they need to go for. An auxiliary force is on standby in case Horde forces push past the bridge and start capturing bunkers.

Typically, there are two main ways to win:

The blitz

Full PvE gear is equipped, and its a straight charge to the end zone. Multiple tanks are needed to keep the battlemasters in check as Drek gets taken down fast. This yields something like 2000-3000 honor in under 6 minutes. This play is called when we’re lacking a number of preform players in the BG and we want to get it over with quick to start the next one and get more players involved.

I personally don’t like this method because of the lack of honor gain.

The finesse

This will vary from preform leader to preform leader, but it involves a combination of taking down Galv, capturing towers, and back capturing bunkers to maximize honor gains.

Not only is it more engaging, but I’m almost certain there is more honor gain to be had here. I’ve earned as much as 7000-8000 with every victory, but the wins range from 9-10 minutes after the gates open. With queue times factored in, I think this is the better of the two.

All in all, not a bad way to prepare for the upcoming rated BGs. I’m tempted to establish a Conquest weekend PvP division when Cataclysm opens.

Raiding discipline specs for priests in the Cataclysm 4.0.1 patch

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disc-401-header

If your guild still has intentions on raiding when the Cataclysm pre-patch occurs (patch 4.0.1), then you might be at a loss as to what to grab when you’re Discipline. I’ve got 2 specs for you to keep in mind today: 1 for straight support and 1 for farm content

 disc-401

31/3/2

Link to talent tree here

This is the one I would select if I was working on newer/progression oriented content still (any hard modes or getting Arthas down, for example).

Notes

I did not get Archangel and Evangelism.

1 point in Inner Sanctum was needed to put me over the top in order to get Power Word: Barrier, although that point can be used anywhere in that tree.

I opted for Empowered Healing instead of Divine Fury. At level 80, you’re not really expected to use the updated Cataclysm healing model anyway. That changes when you hit 85, of course. Although the health of players may jump up slightly (and the pools aren’t even finalized yet), I think the harder hitting heals are still better. I’m not using Heal much myself even though I grabbed Strength of Soul.

Darkness in the Shadow tree makes up the last 2 points. It was simply a filler for 2 talent points. Seems like it speeds up the times of all priest spells instead of just the shadow ones.

If you’re having mana issues, you might want to consider switching to Veiled Shadows. I honestly haven’t played much with it, but it could be the difference between having 1 shadowfiend in an encounter or 2. Again, its just an option.

The base talents are fairly self explanatory, but you have 5 points or so points you can shuffle around between Empowered Healing, Divine Fury, Darkness and Veiled Shadows

Playing it

Power Word: Barrier has a 3 minute cooldown. Use it where it can do the greatest good. Expect to see the bubble burst within a second or two of some type of AoE damage (which is the point).

If no one is in immediate threat of dying (anything less than 80%), and if you’re looking for a filler, use Heal on your recently shielded tank. Don’t rely on Heal too much as the method to spring someone from the brink of death. It would be used as a way to speed up the Weakened Soul Process.

You’re still using the Power Word: Shield, Flash Heal, and Penance spells the most.

Above all else, keep a close eye on your mana bars and adjust your spell usage accordingly. I think Discipline priests will have the easiest transition (alongside resto shamans) when it comes to healing in the next patch.

What about spec number 2?!

disc-401-a

33/3/0

Link to talent tree

This is the spec you’re using if you want to heal but help accelerate the DPS process a little bit. You have other strong healers in your raid and you will only pinch in when necessary to help. Don’t expect to crack top 10 DPS here or anything.

Notes

You’ve got the full Archangel and Evangelism combination going.

Completely skipped out on Inner Sanctum.

No access to Inner Focus.

Divine Fury is used for faster Smites.

Playing it

When you’re in DPS mode, simply build up Evangelism stacks to maximum and let it hold. When you reach a stage in the encounter where you need to do some healing (say after a Festergut explosion or after a bunch of ghosts from Lady Deathwhisper obliterated your raid), trigger Archangel. This gives you back some mana and more importantly it increases your healing by 15% (assuming full stacks). Use that time to get your tanks back up, your healers to full, and anyone else that’s low.

Its a fairly straightforward spec. It might take an encounter or 2 to fully adjust and appreciate the DPS side of things.

Feel free to post any alternative specs or suggestions in the comments. How are you liking the look of the Discipline tree so far?

Your beta and healing questions answered

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Last friday, I asked if you had any questions about the beta. Here’s what I received (rehashed somewhat).

On reforging

I have a piece of gear that had 60 haste rating, 60 spirit and 60 critical strike rating. Can I knock of 20 haste and 20 spirit for the combined equivalent to hit rating?

Nope. You can only convert one kind of stat into a different stat that the current gear does not have. In the case above, you can convert some of the haste rating into something like hit or spirit. Only one stat reforging can actually take place. You can’t split 20 haste into 20 mastery and 20 spirit into 20 hit rating. Once you’ve reforged an item, you can revert it back to its original form and then reforge it again.

On leveling

Where should I level first?

I’d suggest Vash’jir just to ensure you gain access to underwater breathing and underwater mounts. It really won’t matter though. The introductory zone you select should take you through 81 and you should be finished them around 82.

When a healer hits 85, about how much mana should they have?

I have almost 60000 right now with gear all over the place. I’d say at least 70000, but I wouldn’t be surprised to have 80000 with quest blues.

On raiding

How fast do you expect people to down first raid in Cataclysm after release?

I’m thinking the world first guilds will take down all the normal content.

On healing overall

From a healing command perspective, are we heading back to the days of organizational healing during vanilla?

Personally, I don’t think it will get to that point. During Blackwing Lair, I had to assign priests to stop healing for 2 minutes while someone went in and covered for them. I don’t foresee that quite happening in this expansion. Simply because waiting to regenerate mana for a minute or two just isn’t fun at all. One way to approach it is to compartmentalize your healers. Have 1 healer responsible for either each group or each area that happens to have players. I think healing assignments will need to be laid out and micromanaged.

Do we really have to DPS to heal?

No, not exactly. Those DPS talents in the healing trees are only there for times when you outgear content. I do not believe they are necessary for us to do our job as healers. As in, its not required for us to toss a few Lightning Bolts or Smites to get mana back to heal more. I can’t remember who calculated it, but something like 109000 mana was needed for priests before they broke even on Smites This figure is off actually. Disregard, but the point still remains.

Should we be concerned that present beta healing has been pushed into the current PTR patch?

No. A least, not yet. There is still plenty of time. My guess is that they haven’t finished doing the numbers yet. There’s no point in having one set of numbers for 80s on the beta and another set of numbers for 80s on the PTR. May as well keep them about the same but get some extra information from the PTR and larger sample sizes.

Just how badly does mana management affect healing assignment sensibilities?

That’s a tough question for me to answer. The line between tank healing and raid healing is getting quite blurry. Even those paladins might be able to sustain a large numbers of players. You’ll want the players who have no difficult issues when it comes to mana management to stay on tanks. That is, they’re aware of their cooldowns and are willing to ask for the cooldowns of others. If the tanks can be kept alive long enough, enough DPS players should be able to take it down.

Are mana cooldown nerfs really bad?

Assuming the stats of mana when we hit 85 are true, we should see a negligible different when it comes to mana return. 3% Hymn of Hope at 85 with 80000 ish mana vs a 5% Hymn of Hope at 80 with 30000 mana.

On druids

Is our current mana inefficiency a result of poor gear? How do we compare in terms of mana efficiency to other healers that fill a similar healing niche?

It could be a gear problem, but it might not be.

Are there not enough resto druids in beta or are the developers simply not reacting?

Remember that Blizzard doesn’t always respond or address everything. If it were my class under fire, I’d be happy if they were ignoring the forums in favour of figuring out a solution.

Why bring a druid healer?

Innervate and Mark of the Wild of course! After seeing first hand how soft druid healing was getting to, I was inclined to agree with the sentiment that something isn’t quite right with yet.

Whats up with the Druid mastery?

For more information about that, you may wish to refer to Lissanna’s post.

[Thanks Lissanna]

On shamans

Is the day of chain heal spamming over?

Yes. Days of chain casting chain heal are over, at least in 5 mans. It is at best a situational heal. This is largely due to the mana consumption. In a raid, it could change. But for now, not so much.

Does healing rain stack?

Yes.

[Thanks Lodur]

On paladins

What is going to happen to the idea of a flash of light paladin vs a holy light bombing paladin?

In my opinion, gone. We have to use a lot more skills. If anything, Flash of Light will be the one we don’t see a lot of. It’s very much an emergency heal.

Does the Holy paladin mastery apply to over healing?

Yes.

Is Holy Power something that should be saved up to a max charge then used or just used when there are points active? Or is it purely a case by case.

The primary holy use for Holy Power is our mana-free heal, Word of Glory, which is instant.

Is light of dawn frustrating to use when players aren’t standing in the same areas?

Its fun to use but there are two issues with it:

  1. Seems to hit for nothing especially with the current health pools.
  2. It doesn’t heal the paladin caster at all.

What’s the new Divine Plea like?

Its a fairly big hit. Heals get halved for 50% for 15 seconds. The ability can only be used every 2 minutes. Its as if there’s no reason to even use Divine Plea unless you’re absolutely, 100% desperate. Divine Plea is okay now when we’re talking 20k Holy Light bombs and crits. But since its dropping in potency and is our go to heal, its been a bit of a struggle. Hopefully itemization would fix that.

[Thanks Kurn]

On priests

Does Life Grip work on targets at different altitudes? Can you grip people while moving or jumping?

Yes, so long as you have line of sight on a target. I was able to snag Lissanna around from the air. Even managed to pull the druid from underwater onto a boat! I know a number of priests appear to be a unfazed by it, but I know I’ll personally use it on players who are capping graveyards in Alterac Valley when we don’t want them to. I tried falling off a cliff so I could drag Lissanna with me but it didn’t work.

How effective is Power Word: Barrier?

Its okay. The strength of it seems to buckle fairly quick. I’ll put up a barrier just before an AoE phase of some fight with all players under the dome. Then it disappears a few seconds later. At level 85, it eats up something like 13000 mana. I wish there was some type of scaling effect where the damage prevented was proportional to the players standing within up to a certain point. I suppose that wouldn’t really work as well.

Shaman healing so far in Cataclysm

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I’ve been spending as much time as I can in the Cataclysm beta, and trying to maximize as much of my time as possible healing. I mean, after all that’s what I get paid for right?

You may be asking yourself what this song has to do with this post? Honestly a lot of folks think that shaman healing has gone down hill and have thrown their hands up and walked away. Some of these folks just think healing in general come Cataclysm will be so broken it wont even be worth it. I’m here to assuage at least the shaman portion of that fear.

Mana and triage

For as long as shaman have been healing we’ve been a bit of a mana battery. Between our passive regen and our spells and abilities that are geared towards doing nothing but giving us mana back. The problem is that with Wrath most healers were mana batteries. Rarely running out of mana means you can heal almost perpetually through the vast majority of non hard-mode encounters.

This makes for very boring healing, and that is something that the developers have been trying to tackle for a long time now. With the reduction of mana, and the increase in the cost of several of our healing spells, it forces us to triage our heals and essentially move away from mothering a group. Most people have seen this as a fault of the new healing model. I, however, find it incredibly liberating. Granted shaman have fared better than most other classes in this regard because  we are technically the healing model for cataclysm (or so the blues tell us). We’ve been given the tools to heal effectively, and balanced to a point where we don’t over power every encounter and actively have to pay attention and manage healing spell choices. I don’t run OOM unless people are doing very, very stupid things and I’m forced to compensate (a la a mage hugging a dragon cause he though it was cute and needed a hug).

Right now if you yell at someone to not “stand in the bad” a lot of the time they will simply ignore you since healers can just dump heals on them and get through the vast majority of effects out there. If you’ve done any PUGing before you’ll have found it at least once. That hunter that doesn’t want to get out of the fire so he can squeeze off a couple more shots to up their DPS while you dump heals on them. They expect it, and if they don’t get it you are instantly a “bad healer”.

I’ve talked about this on several of my wow.com articles lately, but there is an emphasis on personal accountability. Even if you have the mana to heal someone, they may still die. Pardon my french for a minute here, but bad shit really is bad and players should avoid it at all costs. This includes Tanks and Healers. Doing the dungeon finder in the beta has gotten to a point where players know now they have to manage their own health a little bit, and the curve has gone from nightmare healing to perfectly manageable. If the changes stand and force healers to triage the heals, it will force a shift in the perception of healers. Not saying there wont be players who yell at the healer when they die (those jerks will always exist, sadly) but I think most people will come to stop expecting you to be the only one responsible for their health.

The impression that I get

Overall, healing on the shaman in the beta has been some of the most fun I’ve had to date. I absolutely love having to pick which heal is best for the situation and love the fact that not EVERYTHING is about Chain Heal or stacking pure haste. Honestly I think shaman have the perfect number of healing tools to work with in any given fight. Every new ability compliments each other, old abilities have been given just enough of a tweak to make them interesting. Overall it feels fresh, new and exciting.

I don’t feel over powered, but I do feel capable. I don’t feel like there is anything I can’t do without a little hard work. I still get a twinge at certain bosses in the 5 mans, knowing what they can do and looking at a group composition planning my heals for which ability. It’s exciting and I feel like a tactician rather than a small child playing whack-a-mole at the local carnival being swindled out of my $2. I mean I’ll always be a healer, but it feels like I’m falling in love with it all over again. There’s excitement and consequence and every death isn’t all just on me. I know that priests and shaman have fared better than paladin and druid healers so far, but I think in the end it will balance out and everyone will have as much fun as I do right now.

In conclusion, at least for shaman, the world is not ending. The sky is not falling, and ultimately we’ll be better off in the end it seems. GO TEAM SPIRIT FINGERS!

So I’m going to spend my weekend healing 5-mans and recording videos, anything specific you guys want to see from the beta? I’ll do what I can to provide!

Until next time, Happy Healing!