War-Crafting

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

The Oh $#@& Reaction

by

Very sorry about the lack of updates. I’ve been overwhelmed with school. It’s only the first week and I’ve already been hit with several assignments! But it’s okay, because everything is fine now. I’ve gotten my time back from the hecticness of school. After perusing my daily dosage of blogs from my fellow Priests, here’s one that I want to share.

Ego provides an excellent overview of what to do when you pull a lot of mobs towards you without needing to. Her first rule in a nutshell? Don’t move, don’t worry, and most importantly don’t panic. In a party, getting aggro at worst will wipe the entire group. In a raid, getting aggro at worst will wipe the entire raid, rack up hundreds of gold in repair bills, and lose precious time in an instance. I want to provide you a list of actions that I execute whenever I gain aggro. If you see my spec, you’ll notice that I have zero points in Silent Resolve. That means it is quite likely and possible that I will pull aggro. Usually, I don’t but lets say for the sake of argument that I have. Most of these have already been repeated in Ego’s post, so I’ll touch on it briefly and add one more final step that many players overlook.

If you’ve taken any kind of logic and reasoning course or if you’re into computer programming, it’s kind of the same way.

If things go to hell, do this
else just heal the main tank.

I know that’s probably wrong, but I hope you get the idea. Here’s my sequence:

1st Option is Fade: Lowers your aggro temporarily. Problem? It’s on a 30 second cooldown. So if the mobs are out for healer blood, you have to live at least that long.

2nd Option is PW: Shield: Damage prevention. While you do this, run towards the tank. Don’t make them run after you.

3rd Option is Desperate Prayer: Granted, not all of you Priests have access to such a glorious spell. It is the ultimate Oh $#@& button. Take a few blows, then slam it to shoot yourself back to full. If you don’t have the ability to cast this spell, then…

4th Option is Prayer of Mending: It’s similar to a low cost PW: Shield. On your next hit, you gain this much health. Most of the time, mobs will hit you for under 1000. This spell guarantees that you will survive that one extra hit.

5th Option is to Die: This is slightly different in context but is still worth mentioning. This happened to us the other day. It wasn’t our best raid night, but we were in Voidreaver’s Room clearing out trash. One of our casters got caught facing the wrong way and got punted into another group. Instead of running towards the raid group and bringing extra mobs, he did the right thing and ran towards them and sacrificed himself to preserve the raid knowing that we were still under pressure from the initial mobs. In a raid environment, your first duty is to your raid. I cannot emphasize or stress this enough. There is only one main tank. There maybe 2 or 3 additional off tanks depending on the encounter, but there is only one main tank. Typically, there are 7 – 9 healers. If you go down it is not the end of the world. Let the others pick up the slack. So again, I will remind you. If you accidentally pull aggro from another group when your raid is not prepared, unequip your weapons and your wand and sacrifice yourself.

My panic buttons on my keyboard:
PW: Shield: 1
Fade: 2
Desperate Prayer: 3
Prayer of Mending: Ctrl+1

I usually never bother with binding heal. I almost never use it because I never find the right situation for it. Or I just forget and drop two flash heals instead. I suppose I should start using that more often. But it just feels so… weird.

I’ll have another large update tonight after the raid. I have lots of screens and it’s all sorted. Now I just need to upload them. Time for us to do some potential Priest theorycrafting and analysis.

Random Link Highlight: www.wowecon.com

by

Like many others of my brethren, I find it difficult to farm efficiently for gold. In order to get money, I need to either rely on daily quests or play the auction house. I stumbled upon this fine gem of a site several weeks ago and it only now occurred to me to share it with everyone else who has trouble making the barest of ends meet.

wowecon, through the use of addons and volunteers, is a huge price indexing database for items that are listed on the auction house. You can either do a global price check on an item (where it scans all servers where it is listed and takes the median price) or a server only check (of one faction). It’s really handy if you’re not near in Auction House and want to see what the average price of a Large Prismatic Shard is (16G worldwide, 19.99G on NZ, WTF!)

I’m not sure how it factors in the differences between buyout and bids. I’ll let someone else take a look at that and read it. I just want to know I’m getting a decent price for what i’m selling, which I suspect is what everyone else is looking for.

Actually, I’m not quite finished yet…

by

After Gruul’s last night, I popped onto a vent server of a guild that I am friendly with. I just joined the channel as they were beginning to engage Prince. I noticed some regulars and some new people who I assumed were pickups. He did a fairly decent job of explaining the fight, telling the MT where to stand, telling which healer should heal who, and all that. Then out of no where, someone else starts speaking up and re-explaining the encounter in a much greater detail (and he was wrong in some aspects) in a manner that was disrespectful.

Here’s my beef: If you’re the guest of a raid, that is, you’re not a regular member, you keep your mouth shut unless it’s something super important to say that the raid leader overlooked. Even then, there’s a certain amount of tact required. For one thing, you don’t just blatantly interrupt the raid leader as they’re speaking. There’s a certain amount of etiquette required. Even though WoW is largely considered a social game, a lot of players don’t have an ounce of social skills.

There’s a lot of things you don’t do in life.
You don’t date your best friend’s sister
You don’t tell racist jokes at your black girlfriend’s house (saw the movie on tv yesterday, it was pretty funny)
You don’t go over to someone’s house and tell them how to do things without being asked to
and you sure as hell don’t overrule the raid leader

If you’re going to go join a pug raid with another guild, it’s important to remember that you are just a guest. If you leave a bad impression like the aforementioned fellow did, don’t expect to get an invite back if they ever need an extra body. It’s wrong, rude, and impolite. It took me an insane amount of effort to tell that player to stuff it. But of course, I wasn’t in the raid nor was I in the guild and I did not have the authority to do it. After speaking to a few of the players afterwards, they agreed with me in thinking that that player was a pompous zealous idiot. While his intentions were good, he mistakenly assumed that my friends were all idiots who were starting Prince for the first time when most of the players in the raid already have half the gear that he drops. It almost sounds as if he’s got some kind of superiority complex involved where he likes to tell players what to do when they don’t need to hear it. Don’t insult their intelligence. In addition to that, the extra crap he was spewing out was largely irrelevant or had already been covered. It was already 11 PM server time, and he was wasting precious raiding time.

My friends, when you have a chance to join a pickup group to raid Karazhan or Gruul’s, mind what your manners. You are a guest of the group, nothing more. You can be replaced at any time if they feel like it.

I’m Still Alive (barely)

by

Not much time to write anything informative or analytical today. Even though it’s labor day, I’m still one of the poor chaps that needs to go work. After that, school starts tomorrow and I should be back to my usual daily schedule.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take any shots yesterday of Gruul since the bosses went down way too quick and there wasn’t a whole lot of healing required. But, I did get this gem…

Somehow I got knocked into the air and miraculously landed on this ledge without sustaining much damage.

After the raid tomorrow, I will continue and finish up my piece on raid healing: what spells to use, when to use them, and who to use them on. I’ll post screenshots of the raid at varying stages to detail what’s going on inside my head.

Forget 28/33, try 20/41 with Circle of Healing

by

Many Priests advocate using the 28/33 build. Heck, my priest has the exact same build. But if all of your Priests have Improved Divine Spirit, then doesn’t that kind of render that spec pointless? You may as well change it up and vary it up some. I don’t think you really need 4 Priests with Imp. Divine Spirit, do you? If you examine the holy tree, realize that heals can still get boosted higher. So let’s check out my proposed build and when to put it to good use.

Here’s the overall chart:

Most of these choices are self explanatory, but I’ll highlight the important stuff.

Discipline

Silent Resolve: This one’s an optional one here. If you have trouble with aggro management (or have a really bad tank), then pick this up. Otherwise, blow a point in Absolution and max out Mental Agility to achieve your 20 points in Discipline. My personal stance on this is that Silent Resolve should not be needed due to 1) A Priest who is aware of his/her aggro 2) A tank that can generate insane threat 3) A raid with enough healers to help even out heals on the tank so not anyone healer is over extending him or herself. If you’re somehow catching up to the tank, drop a PW: Shield, Renew, and fade for a few seconds.

Holy

For the most part, the Holy tree is remarkably similar to the standard 28/33 build except for the extra extensions at the end of the tree.

Empowered Healing: 20% extra healed with Greater Heal and 10% extra on Flash and Binding Heal. Ain’t that just peachy? Not much else to say about that besides the fact that it IS awesome to increase your healing by a fairly substantial margin. You may not think 10% is much, but 10% additional healing over a 30 minute is a damn lot of healing.

Circle of Healing: Finally we come to the most controversial spell in the Holy tree. A lot of Priests slam Circle of Healing because they don’t consider it useful or mana efficient or some other excuse that I haven’t thought of. Start thinking in terms of situational healing. Now when would it be a good time for me to ever use a spell similar to Holy Nova, that can be used on any target in a raid, which would heal their party? What class would you surmise takes more damage? That’s right, Melee classes. Face it, these poor suckers have to stay point blank staring at the butt of some boss having to repeatedly run out and bandage before being able to go back in because healers can’t be spared to keep them alive or topped off.

Remember, this spell is entirely situational. I would not recommend speccing Circle of Healing if you are working your way through Karazhan. It’s just not worth it on a ten-man group. But once you get to the 25 man raids, you’ll start having heavy DPS groups consisting of classes like an Enhancement Shaman and four Rogues (hypothetically speaking). On a fight like Voidreaver, who steps on players within Melee range for a lot within a few seconds, a spell like Circle of Healing would be a blessing. Why? You’ve healed about 2500 HP in total. That’s almost the same as a max rank Flash of Light. You can’t use Prayer of Healing because it only heals players within your party. But Circle of Healing heals any player within the raid and their party. One of my fellow Priests in my Guild does this very thing. Every time we engage a boss where Melee classes are allowed to step in, he assigns himself to healing the DPS because his build allows him to do so without much problem. It’s time inefficient to flash heal five times over five players. It’s also inefficient to lob 5 renews. Three or four pumps of Circle of Healing can breathe enough life to your specialist group and ensure damage dealt is still maximized.

Us Priests have so many different Healing spells at our disposal. The trick is to discern which is right for what situation.