War-Crafting

Game mechanics, add-ons, play styles, guides, explanations and how-to’s.

Player Consumbles

by

What a nice break that was. If you haven’t figure out by now, I’ve set my blogging schedule to 6 out of the 7 days in a week. That day off is for me to brainstorm topics that are blogworthy. Yesterday was a nice break and I feel a little more refreshed. I didn’t have a lot of time either due to several hours of class immediately followed by a raid. I felt quite drained after that, and I do have some tips for you if you feel the same way. If you’ve noticed, I’ve developed a rhythm for my blogging. Nearly all of my posts will relate to World of Warcraft in one way or another. I’ll usually put out a large editorial during the beginning of the week that’s analytical in some aspect then follow it up wit a few shorter pieces. I don’t want to do a whole lot of number crunching as my numerous other colleagues are far more adept at it then I (Arts student, remember?). I’m also working on two side projects both related to worldofmatticus.com in some way.

There’s been numerous posts made by my fellow bloggers regarding the use of consumables in raids. I’ll summarize them really quickly (the Priest ones anyway).

* Blackened Sporefish (8 MP5, food) – Golden Fishsticks are nice, but the cost at acquiring them makes them not worth the effort as I place a huge emphasis on MP5.
* Brilliant Mana Oil (12 MP5, Weapon)
* Flask of Mighty Restoration (25 MP5)
* Super Mana Potion (Restores X mana)

But you know, our characters aren’t the only ones that need pick me ups from time to time. When I come home from a 7 hour day at University enduring monotonic lectures, I have an incredible urge to nap… until I realize it’s 30 minutes until raid invites. As a healer, there’s not a whole lot of healing that needs to be applied during trash pulls. There’s no sense in us wasting mana over healing when that mana could be put to better use in the case of an emergency (IE, extra trash accidentally pulled). I let the assigned MT healers heal, while I throw around Shields, Renews, and PoM’s. I flash heal if I sense extra support is needed.

Anyways, the point of today’s post is not trash healing techniques. I have my own personal consumables during raid time to help keep that much needed energy going during our raids. As a law student, I also need to cover my bases, therefore:

DISCLAIMER: Matt, his friends, family, affiliates (anyone who I link to or linked me), sponsors, organizers, and owners (henceforth known as Matticus) take no responsibility for any damage that may occur to you from utilizing the beverages listed. By consuming them, you do so at your own risk and Matticus cannot be held liable. If you are unsure about health hazards in regards to trying the following, consult your physician.
Coffee: This is the staple of any person in the workforce today. It is also the fastest growing choice of drink for today’s student. The potency can be customized to meet your needs, it’s quick to make, and the sweetness is entirely up to you. Personally, I’ve developed a taste for Starbucks coffee (Tall, Dark, no cream, no sugar, $1.75 in Canada). The main reason though is the convenience. There’s a Starbucks on almost everywhere. I’ve got one about 3 blocks away from home and I know if I have a long day ahead of me, I’ll make a quick detour.

Tea: If you don’t like the taste of coffee, there’s always this alternative. Japanese restaurants I frequent serve Green Tea. Aside from it’s various health benefits, it’s often helped me stay alert. You can also take a page from Captain Picard and try Earl Gray (add a bit of milk). Other avid users have included Bruce Wayne, Frasier Crane, James Bond, and Sir Leigh Teabing (DaVinci Code)

Red Bull: More commonly found in Jagrbombs, Red Bull has founded a counterpart within World of Warcraft: Crimson Steer. Too bad only Rogues benefit from it. I’ve never personally tried it because I always thought that it wasn’t strong enough for me. But now you can be like a rogue and spring that extra kick just when you think you couldn’t muster the energy (in our case, that extra heal).

Bawls: If you’re into the gaming scene, then chances are you’ve heard of this. It has a similar effect as all energy drinks (supposed to keep you awake for a long time). First time I tried this was when I was 16. I wanted to finish out that one game of DoTA at 1 AM so I popped it. Big mistake. Didn’t sleep until about 10 AM. Tastes fantastic though! If you need some energy, consider grabbing yourself a six pack of blue Bawls from your local 7-11 (Couldn’t resist).

Rock Star: This is what I consider the holy grail of all energy drinks. A few semesters ago, I committed a freshman mistake: leaving a paper until the last minute. I had to write a 1500 word paper regarding Canadian National Security and and it into my Political Science teacher. I didn’t start until 10 PM. This paper represented 50% of my grade and it was time to break open the glass because it was an emergency. So I reached in, blew the 24 hour cool down and took my first sip. Boy did it work or what? My mental state reached a peak of clarity that I never thought I’d feel again when I got my first shutout playing hockey. I pulled an all nighter going from 10 PM all the way next day to about 10:30 AM when it was due. After that, I went home and crashed. To my surprise and delight, I managed to get an A on it.

But don’t ever, ever, ever, do that. Ever. I mean it. Don’t do it.

Seriously.

Bags!

by

It’s a common phrase that Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander, the First Wizard in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, uses when he curses. It is also something that helps us Priests acquire some form of income (at least, us Tailors anyway). As first seen on Curse, there is a strong hint that our bag space will increase in size yet again. That means we don’t have to wait for all the Imbued Netherweave Bags to sell. It means we don’t need to spent countless of hours marketing our Primal Mooncloth bags only to have it replaced in a patch before WotLK. Check out the following statements made by Drysc on WoW’s US Forums.

Drsyc says:

We’re mindful of space concerns, and increasing the base backpack size is certainly a possibility for the future. We have other space and storage increases currently in the works for release before Wrath though, and we’ll be talking about those soonâ„¢.

Can you give us those Super Backpacks from the PTR the 36 slotters i still has space issues even using those XD.

Probably not. But don’t worry, there’s better stuff in the works.

Now, if you’ve been able to read between the lines, then you’ll be able to deduce the two messages that were subtly said. First, there are things better then 36 slot bags being worked on. There’s a good chance now that means we will be producing a lot of bags en masse. That also means we will have to pair up with a sharpshooter to help us farm the necessary materials required for them. That also means more tailoring skills that need to be leveled. Am I the only one that ever sits here once in a while and asks “Geeze, does this game ever END?”

Second, notice how Drysc, a representative of Blizzard, has trademarked the word “soon”. Even Blizzard will now acknowledge that they no longer set final concrete release dates on their projects. But that’s okay, because I’ve always loved Blizzard ever since I started playing Warcrat 2 when I was 9 years old. That was the first game where I first discovered a cheat code (show me the money)! I’ll end off this post with a WoWWiki definition of Soon.

Soon
Copyright 2004-2007 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. “Soon” does not imply any particular date, time, decade, century, or millennia in the past, present, and certainly not the future. “Soon” shall make no contract or warranty between Blizzard Entertainment and the end user. “Soon” will arrive some day, Blizzard does guarantee that “soon” will be here before the end of time. Maybe. Do not make plans based on “soon” as Blizzard will not be liable for any misuse, use, or even casual glancing at “soon.”

Guess I’ll cross my fingers and wait for Duke Nukem’ Forever.

Stamina, an overlooked stat for Priests?

by

This one’s going to be a short and quick post because I daresay the point that I’m trying to drive home will not take long to figure out. Several days ago, a prominent Guild on Ner’Zhul disbanded due to lack of attendance and other factors that kill Guilds (hmm, a good blogging topic). Needless to say, we signed several of their players in the hopes that it might solve a few of our attendance problems. Summer’s now over, everyone should be back to a fairly stable schedule right?

Wrong. One of our Feral druid gets hit with an evening shift. Our Paladin suddenly has a life. One of our Rogues mysteriously vanishes (Go figure). Getting those extra players helped a lot. By the way, in other Guild news, Dinosaur disbands and joins Dissonance (both top 20 Guilds on NZ, I think).

Tonight was Serpentshrine Cavern. Since we were shorthanded a player, we opted for Lurker first. Two wipes later, we trekked back to Hydross. A colleague over at Priestly Endeavors published his own suggested requirements for raiding in terms of individual player stats. At first I disagreed with him at the amount of gear and such that was required. But something happened in our attempts against Hydross that made me think twice. For those who are unfamiliar with the fight, Hydross has an attack called Water Tomb in which he encases a player in a bubble of water which does approximately 4500 damage over 5 seconds. Furthermore, players within a certain radius around him will also get entombed but thankfully that spell does not chain past the second player. In addition, Hydross applies a stacking debuff where all players within the raid will periodically take increasingly more punishing frost damage (Water tomb hurts more). One of the new Priests we picked up today just died within the first minute or so of the encounter. His health was approximately 7400ish fully raid buffed. It looks as if he had 5800 base health.

Back to Kirk, it appears as if he is correct to a certain extent. The amount of HP he recommends for his level of raiding is a little more generous. There’s no possible way to sacrifice healing and MP5 gear for a little more stamina. You really don’t need over 7000ish base health in Kara. It’s true there are certain encounters where you will take a lot of damage (For instance, Aran’s Poly-Pyro, or Illhoof’s sacrifice). But for the most part, you just need above 7.2k using whatever buffs you can slap on yourself. You also need to pray your tanks are able to do their job and hold their aggro. That’s not a problem in a 10 man instance like Karazhan because there isn’t a whole lot of pressure or damage being applied to you (the priest) or to your raid. But once you get to an instance like SSC, it definitely is a whole new ball game. Maybe the only person who might’ve been able to save our poor Priest was a player with reflexes equal to that of Martin Brodeur. But I applied my method of raid healing and was not able to restore his health quick enough.

A lot of Priests emphasize the importance of +healing and MP5. Don’t get me wrong, I do too. After that incident today, the second stat I would take a long hard look at is stamina. It’s one of the reasons why I spent DKP on my [item]Crystalheart Pulse-Staff[/item]. Strangely enough, that item dropped again last week and no healer took it so it became sharded. How unfortunate. I guess players really want to go after their Light’s Justice/Aran’s Sapphire combination instead of spending their DKP to get loot that will help them.

It’s midnight, but before I go to bed, just think about this:

What’s the point of having all that healing and all that MP5 if you’re not alive to utilize it? I know I would get more healing if I stayed with an LJ/Aran’s Sapphire duo, but I would not be of any use to my Guild if I was dead half the encounter.

Healing a Raid: A Priestly Perspective

by

To end off the week, I will help all of you budding raiding priests who have never joined any groups larger then 10 (AV an exception). Yeah, you the one who has never once set foot inside MC or BWL or Naxx or Zul’Gurub or any of those old fun instances that we used to do before. By the end of this column, my hope is that you will be able to excel and surpass the expectations of your raid leader.

I wont touch on the spells specifically and what they can do. You leveled from 1 to 70 on your own. If you don’t know the capabilities of the tools at your disposal, then you have no business playing a Priest. But I will guide you on when you should use them.

Your raid makeup could consist of a variety of different healer classes. More often then not, you as a priest would make up several of those slots. Let’s now for the sake of argument pretend that you’ve been assigned the dreaded task of maintaining te health of your raid as opposed to healing a single person. It’s such a daunting task healing 4 other players in a party. Now you’re responsible for 24 others. What do I do?

Let’s check out the toolkit. There’s a reason why Blizzard gave us to much stuff to work with.

Renew: Cast this on targets that have taken hits but are not expected to take damage again. Examples would include mages, hunters, or other ranged DPS (maybe rogues). It’s a relatively cheap heal over time spell where you don’t need to tie up your 1.5s cast time or our 2.5s cast time. But don’t forget to stack these up with Renews from other priests. Our main tank sometimes has up to Renews on him at any given time.

Flash Heal: I tend to downrank my heals a little bit here for two reasons: 1) Reduces mana cost 2) Less overhealing done. I’ll use a flash heal between ranks 4 – 6 depending on the situation at hand. In some cases, I will use a max rank flash heal just because tanks are taking so much damage that my heals are only maintaining his health instead of restoring it up. Used mainly on players taking damage frequently such as the main tank or in an emergency.

Greater Heal: The big brother of Flash heal. This one I keep max ranked. You don’t have to. Its entirely up to you and your playing style. Drop these ones on your main tank or your assigned healing target.

PW: Shield: There appears to be much controversy over the usage of this spell. Philosophically, I disagree with many other priests on how and when it should be used. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Your duty is to the raid. If spamming shields every 40 seconds is the only way to do it, then you spam it and you like it. Usually though, I will cast it if a tank jumps from 100% to 40% (or any number below 10000 health). These bosses hit like a freight train on afterburners. I’ve seen players get taken out with an 8k crit followed up by an 11k special attack. I am one paranoid priest.

Prayer of Healing: Don’t spam flash heal 5 times to heal your party. It’s a huge waste of time. Just drop a Prayer repeatedly until everyone’s back to full. 3 seconds on a prayer versus 7.5 seconds on flash heals. Usually, once the boss executes some sort of AoE damage which nails your group, you’ll want to cast this.

Prayer of Mending: Use in case of an emergency. The amount of damage it heals is a little more then the amount of damage received. But I am referring to a normal hit not a special attack at will knock off a good portion of the tanks health.

In case of emergency, break open glass

You’ll remember the other day I wrote about what Priests should do in the event they have pulled aggro. Here’s the other side of the equation: What to do if the tank has less than 10% health and in imminent danger where he could die and wipe the raid. Follow this process to ensure maximum possible survival.

1 – PW: Shild (Prevent further damage)
2 – Prayer of Mending (Mitigate further damage done)
3 – Renew (Constant heals)
4 – Flash Heal (Fastest way to heal. We’re concerned about time now)
5 – Repeat step 4 until he’s back up. Use shield’s again if your assignment’s health is questionable.

Other Healers

Usually, if there’s other healers on the tank, you’ll have no idea what kind of spell they’re casting. But here, time is of the essence. Drop flash after flash until he’s back in the game. Let other healers drop the big heals. Either way, get your assignment topped off. If you and your other heal happen to both drop big heals simultaneously, there’s a 3 second window where the tank could get critical’d and spontaneously die. You don’t want this to happen so be on the safe side and spam flash.

Exercises

So here, I took random screenshots through the past few raids with our raiders at various stages of decay. More often then not, you’ll encounter such similar situations. Take a look at them and think to yourself what you would do, who you would heal first, and why.

Here is shot number one. Light damage has only been applied to the raid. Matticus (Mallet) is in the uber healing group. Lang is down 25% (our main tank) and Bdon (an off tank) has also sustained hits as well as the rest of the melee DPS in his group. Although you can’t tell, I have Lang selected. But it looks like Cheever also has him selected too. So my play here is to deselect and drop a prayer of healing to top off the group. Then I’d probably take care of the rest of the DPS.

This shot was taken too late. But look at the assist window on the right. This shows us who is healing Lang: All five of us. If that happens, just move off of him and take care of someone else, like Bdon.

Ah, our first casualties of the night. Going to save my own skin and heal myself. There’s no real danger at this point so long as the tanks are still alive. We lost a healer (with 6 left) and an off tank (with 3 left). No big loss, no sense of panicking.

Again, cursor on Lang shows that I’m not the only one on him. Renew, Prayer, move on. Let the Priest and the Paladin on him take over with flashes and greater heals. Dropped renews on everybody on group 5 and group 3 that was wounded. Keep the shield cooldown on standby in case Lang gets spiked again.

Now we’ve got some real pressure applied to the raid here. A lot of damage has been done and the raid is in various health states. I included my target of target of target window along with my Nature Enemy Cast Bar (NECB). Seeing how my group is wounded, I light off a Prayer of Healing. Then I noticed Mirri was also in the process of casting and is closer to getting the heal off. I cancel my prayer, and default to healing the tanks starting with Lang and Bdon. Once they’re up, I ease off and begin my renew cycle on DPS.

Now we’ve got some serious problems. We’re down a healer and the tanks are taking serious damage (465 doesn’t seem like much). When you get to a case where you have multiple tanks with relatively low health, pick one and stick to it until they’re topped. I chose Blori and called out in vent “I’m staying on Blori”. This cues the other healers and frees them up knowing they don’t have to worry about him as much. For example, now Mirri can heal Bdon or Dager can heal Lang without needing to rotate flashing Blori. Communication is important. Let the rest of the healers know who you’re healing.

This one was a big giant leap of faith. One of our healers is offline and one of the tanks is under enormous stress. Notice that my target is Maeve. Also take a note that there is only one other healer besides me who has Maeve targeted. Bdon is a hit away from going under. But seeing as the assist window only shows two healers out of six who have Maeve targeted, it stands to reason that the other 4 must most likely be on Bdon. There is no other player in the raid who is prioritized higher then he is. Although there is no way to say for sure (unless I clicked him to determine the assists), I do believe it’s a logical conclusion to make.

In any case, you may or may not encounter such situations like that in the future. Hope this column helps you deal with any scenarios that show up. Remember, don’t panic. Keep your cool and prioritize.

Some New Loot and Players You Don’t Want to Party With

by

Lurker was taken down in one attempt as was Tidewalker. I picked up a [item]Luminescent Rod of the Naaru[/item] which is an upgrade from the [item]Blue Diamond Witchwand[/item] that I had for a long time. Looks like I won’t be replacing these any time soon. Next items that will upgrade for me are T5 Legs from Fathomlord, his shoes, or the random craftable shoes that drop in TK and SSC.

I was digging around my screenshots folder today looking to clean stuff out. I had forgotten about these two gems. Just read the chat. Tell me I’m not the only person that’s ever happened to before.

And I swear I will finish this mammoth of a piece on how to raid heal. I’ve been examining my Blog stats and in particular what search terms people type when they find it:

how to be a good priest healer in world
how to be good holy priest wow
how to be a good priest warcraft
best holy priest raiding

So yeah, I can tell that there are some players out there who want guidance. And guidance I will provide! I don’t want to just type out what to do, I will show you what to do. Hopefully I can do it tomorrow. Only 3 classes and no raids…