War-Crafting

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

The Reality of Healing Heroics and Tips for Holy Priests

by

heroics

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.
– Newt Gingrich

I’ve scheduled a tentative 10 man Naxx on Saturday. We’re projected to have around 8 players that are capable of reaching that level by then. After that, I’ll have no choice but to pug the other 2 slots.

Since I’ve hit 80, I’ve started working my way through a few heroics to try and get some badges.

Let me tell you, it is not easy.

It has been such a long time since I had to work this hard to heal. I have to drink after every pull. Every cooldown needs to be noticed and taken into account. Every spell cast needs to be carefully thought out. I’m sitting at ~470 mana regeneration with a few quest and instance blues. The rest are filled out with T6. There are times when you have no choice between letting a player die to prevent an overall wipe. It’s absolutely tough.

Over the past few days, I had the opportunity to heal Halls of Lightning and the Occulus (on Heroic since they were the dailies). There’s a few things to remember:

  • We don’t outgear the instance: It’s a fresh start for everyone. The playing field has been leveled. I’ve resorted to using consumables to help finish off my old stock of TBC food. This goes the same for tanks.
  • We’re going in blind: We don’t know the instance. I don’t like going into a fight without knowing what I’m up against. I keep WoWhead open and WoWWiki to understand what abilities bosses uses and develop a counter for it. Two things to watch for is debuffs and any special animations on the ground or spells that the bosses use. Watch for the in game boss cues. It’s a hard lesson to learn every time.

One thing that most Priests (or all healers) will find when healing any sort of high end instance is that they’re running out of mana. Don’t forget that it takes more Spirit now then it did back at 70 to reach the same level of mana regen. The amount of Spirit required to reach ~1000 mana regen is much higher then it was at 70.

Here’s a few tricks to help out:

  • Hymn of Hope: It’s an 8 second channel spell and you’re going to be hard pressed to find time to use it. Observe the boss and find a pattern. See if he has a long cooldown for an ability. Put a shield on the tank, a Renew, and a Prayer of Mending. Top up the rest of the party as best as you can. Hit your Hymn and pray to the highest deity you know that you can maximize the use out of it. You can break it early. I set my personal limit to around 50%. If the tank reaches 50%, I’ll break my Hymn and start healing.
  • Shadowfiend: Since it’s a 5 minute cooldown, this is the first trick in the book I’ll use. In the event we wipe, I should have it up for the next attempt.
  • Runic Mana Potion: I’ll typically blow a potion in conjunction with Hymn of Hope after it’s cast. I don’t try to save it. I try to be liberal with their use.
  • Guardian Spirit: Don’t think of it as a healing bonus spell or a way to prevent the person from dying. Think of it as an instant 50% health return. Gauge how much damage the tank takes roughly per hit. If they take 5000 damage blows and your tank is at around 7500, slap the GS up there and stop healing. Watch as the tank’s health rockets back up to 50% while you spend precious seconds just regenerating mana.
  • Pain Suppression: A lot of beginner Priests like to use Pain Suppression when their tank is really low on health. I don’t advise this since they run the risk of tanks dying. I drop Pain Suppression when tanks have near full health. I can stand there and mana regen knowing that my tank is taking reduced damage buying me more time to get more mana.

I’ve spent an average of nearly 3 hours per heroic dungeon. I’m way in over my element. But hey, that’s how Matticus rolls! I’ve always been a front line player!

Still looking for Mages, Warlocks, Hunters, Shadow Priests, Shamans and other healers! If you know of any that want to progress, tell them to drop me a line!

10 Tips for Extreme Leveling to 80 (without denting your wallet)

by

extreme

I hit level 80 last night around 8:45 PM. Most of the player curve is around the 74-75 area so I’m considered “ahead” of the curve. Although I could credit my leveling speed to my “Asian racial (25% extra stamina when really focused on a goal, cooldown: once every 365 days)”, there’s a few things to keep in mind if you really want to get to 80 as fast as possible.

Note, you’ll miss out on a lot of the lore and the story. But I’m proceeding on the assumption that it is not a primary concern.

  1. Accept all quests in the area without reading the backstory. 4 out of 5 times, the quest involves you killing something or picking something up. Read what you have to do, and go do it. You don’t need to know about the circumstances behind the objective.
  2. On quests where you need to pick up items off the ground, keep looking for others. It takes a few seconds to loot one anyway. Use the time to spot.
  3. Forget professions. Worry about them when you’re 80.
  4. Train at every 2nd level. Unless there is a specific spell that you feel you really need, it takes a lot of effort to fly down to the port and boat or zepp back to your capital cities.
  5. Keep the autorun handy. Read up on WoWhead or your favourite leveling guide to find out what you need to dow hen you get to your destination.
  6. Chunking. Just like how I sometimes write my posts in massive chunks or blocks, do all the quests in an area. I’ll usually do 7 or 8 quests at a time per hub and do a gigantic turn in.
  7. Know your damage rotations. Find out the fastest way to kill things even if it means being inefficient. You’re trading efficiency for speed. Find out what the “execute” range is. A typical Smite and Shadow Word:Death will kill any mob with around 3000 health remaining. Holy Nova will clean it up.
  8. Blow your cooldowns. You’re not fighting a raidboss. Everytime Heroism is up and you have to level an entire camp of Gnolls, do it. If Power Infusion is available and you get to blow up Murlocs, use it. Maximize the useage. If it involves you killing 60 Rhinos for Nessingwary, it’s a green light to pop trinkets and just nuke the place.
  9. Consumables. Chances are, you still have still have some Mana Potions and food or flasks left. Use them as you’re leveling. They’ll provide a slight edge.
  10. Know how much resource it takes you to kill a mob. For example, I know it takes me ~3000 mana to bring a whelp down to its knees. For most mobs, its around 3000 – 3500 mana. If I can squeeze off one more kill before drinking, I’ll do it.

What other tips would you suggest for players that want to level fast?

“Matt, heal me! Why are you running?”

by

Oh, it just brings tears to my eyes when I anticipate hearing those phrases again. To level with me is a most unique experience. You can ask Wyn that. You can ask any of my friends that. You see, I have this knack for simply attracting mobs. Whether I move or whether I don’t, I am a virtual magnet for them. I’ll try to slip between 2 mobs breathing a sigh of relief when I’m almost through only to find to my surprise that I end up getting both of them.

Sometimes I’ll panic and run if I think the situation’s a lost cause. Usually I’ll stay and fight. Until I realize I’m fresh out of gas (and mana). As a frequent multi tasker, sometimes my attention won’t be focused on the mob or the task at hand. I usually need a “gentle” reminder of this from time to time.

Aurik and Sephrenia want to issue a gentle reminder to tanks and DPSers that if you’re going to level with them, they understand and know that you will need heals. Because if you don’t get heals, you die. And if you die, they die. Ergo, it is in their best interest to heal you.

But if you’re rolling with me, remind me that you’re pulling so I can switch back into the game and watch you. Great raid healer. Not the best grinding healer.

While I don’t like hearing the phrase heal me in raids, I’ll frequently issue the instructions for extra heals on a player if the situation calls for it (damage debuff, impending big hit, healing reduction debuff).

Circle of Healing Redux

by

As you may or may not have heard, Blizzard is revisiting the idea of bringing in the CoH cooldown. I’m not sure where to start on this or how to begin.

Something that I feel has been overlooked is that there seems to be a feeling that raid instances right now at 70 (post nerf) are representative of what raid instances are like at level 80. A lot of players, right now, are a little overgeared for the content that they’re doing (again, due to the nerf).

Path of least resistance (or effort)

I was first exposed to this idea in my first year of psychology. The general premise here is that people, animals, or even machines will choose the path of least resistance or effort in order to get to their goal. Applying this to healing, we’ll see one person taking a shot for 2000 damage for whatever reason. I myself have been known to tap CoH once or twice to bring that one person’s health back up. Is that a loss of mana efficiency? You bet it is. But efficiency goes out the door if your mana regeneration is able to offset the mana loss within seconds.

Could I have used a Flash Heal? Yeah but it takes casting time.
How about a Renew? Yeah but it takes about 15 seconds for the full duration to kick in
Circle of Healing heals that minor damage extremely quickly and leaves me open for spell options without causing me to wait for the spell to go off or eat a channel or something.

This is partly the case because of current nerfed raid content and the way our spells work. It’s a smart heal, it’s the fastest heal, and it’s brain dead easy. I’m sure we can all agree on that.

With the complete gear reset at 80, I strongly doubt we’re going to be able to get away with non-stop CoH casting. I know I couldn’t. I was extremely limited with my mana regen and my overall mana pool. I confess I did start with PvP gear and I encountered some difficulty then. Yet, after daily Naxx and OS runs on 10s and 25s, I amassed a decent collection of PvE healing gear. I still found it difficult and strenuous. As this was largely a pickup group, maybe I was overcompensating in some areas.

The benefit of Circle of Healing is that it can heal a lot of players really fast.
The cost of Circle of Healing should be the fact that it taxes your mana pool.

I’m not quite sure if that’s possible. I can see why they want to include the 6s cooldown because there are a staggering number of players using it (at 70 and at 80 when I played). Maybe if they included a scaling cost with the spell it would be acceptable. The ability to heal a lot of raid damage really fast is an excellent tool to have. But it should come with a severe price or penalty. I don’t think time, a wonderful resource that it is, should be the case. Perhaps base cost + a percentage of healing done in that one cast? I don’t know. I’m not a game developer.

Regardless of what they do, Priests will easily remain the most diverse class. I’ll continue to play mine well into Wrath. Even if they do bring in the CoH cooldown, we still have Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing. Zusterke, on Plusheal, started some preliminary work on Holy Nova and it’s effectiveness.

By adding the glyph of holy nova, the spell has become quite a powerful healing spell. It is able to output more healing than circle of healing, up to a point where it rivals prayer of healing. The recent mana cost reduction boosted this spell even further where it has become a mana efficient spell, in comparison to the priest’s other AoE spells.

He might shoot me if he feels it’s a little outdated. But not much has changed yet so I think he’s definitely in the ballpark (or ice rink).

Plusheal has more great discussion about this.

Priest CoH Cooldown Returns?

by

Matticus has no comment at this time. But, I felt that the readers should be aware of this thread. It was tried before in the summer but they removed the cooldown. They’re thinking about bringing it back again (note the dates).

We’ve tried to keep up with all of the several threads that spawned as a result of my last comments. People have made some really good points.
Based on feedback from this forum, elsewhere and our own brainstorming, what we are thinking about right now is something like a 6 sec cooldown for Circle of Healing and Wild Growth.

We’re less concerned about Chain Heal, in part because it’s not instant, prevents movement, falls off with multiple targets, and is the spell that shamans are supposed to be hitting, while priests and druids have many other spells.

At 6 seconds, you would still want to use CoH/WG in the right situations (though hopefully not *every* time they are up), but you’d also want to use other spells during the cooldown. To be fair, a lot of priests and druids are asking to push other buttons. 🙂

This sounds like a potentially scary change because it has a lot of ramifications — one of the reasons we are mentioning it so early is to get feedback. We don’t want Resto shammies to push other healers out of raids. We would change some of the encounters knowing that CoH spam was no longer possible.

And

Yeah, we did. We thought it would feel like a big nerf and changed our minds. But seeing the state of healing at 80 makes us think it might be the right call again. When AE healing is so prominent, it also makes specs without great AE heals (Holy paladins and Disc priests) feel useless.

Assume that we would lower Wild Growth by the same proportion as Circle of Healing. The exact numbers aren’t as important to this discussion as the concept that you can’t hit the button whenever you want.

Reactions?