Priest Discussion

Discussion about the Priest class.

You heard it here first, and finals thoughts on Loot Distribution

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Nethaera wrote:Meditation is also going to get a bit of a bump up and it will increase to 10/20/30% mana regen as well.

I posted this earlier, but it didn’t hit home to me until I checked out the next druid changes. From what I understand, they get a similar talent upgrade, yes? If so, I suspect we’ll see an increase in healing endurance based fights. I’ve got 413 mana regen. Does that mean I will then end up with 537 mana regen? Honestly, I don’t know. My specialty has always been with theory and philosophy. I’ve never been good with hard numbers. I don’t know if that talent applies to your entire mana regen pool, or just your base without taking into account your gear, etc. So much for being a Priest resource, eh?

By the way, I got another post referenced on WoW Insider (1609 hits today). Apparently my Loot Distribution article generated a lot of views. From the responses, I could see that people were overlooking a few things and I want to elaborate just a bit more.

It will cover a basic DKP system, discouraging DKP hoarding, and a loot hierarchy [to prevent people from joining, taking loot, and then leaving].

Those three are the basic problems that many starting Guilds will have. Many new players have yet to embrace the system of working collectively together and achieving a goal. I wrote this article on the basic assumption that everyone is greedy and not willing to trust other players. Perhaps they’ve been backstabbed before in the past, or someone took loot and left, etc. I don’t know if a survey has been done on this, but I would hazard a guess that 30% of all loot acquired by a Guild will no longer be utilized by them: Players quit the game, players quit the Guild, etc, etc. It’s important to remember that these things do happen. There isn’t much you can do to screen for them. You can always consider it an expense. There is always going to be some kind of turnover.

Nadiaron made an excellent comment:

Nadiaron 03 Oct 2007 at 1:12 pm

Attendance is a horrible DKP modded system. It punishes people for having a vacation, and makes them less likely to want to come back afterwards. It also gives people who aren’t going to be sticking around, better gear whenever they have excess time to play WoW.

My response was already at the end of the article:

Matticus wrote:

No system is better then that of human discretion. Always use it. Different ways to handle loot are useful for different types of Guilds. Find out what works best for you.

Human discretion. Human… discretion. It can be misguided or it can be beneficial. If you’re going to have a player take off on vacation or who has family problems, it shouldn’t be difficult to suspend that player temporarily so that their DKP does not decay. There’s always going to be Pros and Cons to every DKP system. If there was a perfect system, I wouldn’t have a series on loot distribution. Instead, I would only have one featured article. Every Guild would be using it. The problem here is that no Guilds are made the same. Different Guilds have different needs. Some Guilds like zero sum. Some Guilds prefer to use timed accumulation. Some Guilds don’t use DKP and rely on Loot Council. The purpose of this article was to suggest a method by which new Guild leaders, who probably don’t have a clue what system to use, can start with. It offers a basic frame work of loot priority and distribution. In a nutshell, if you raid more, you’ll get rewarded. If you’re a veteran player, you’ll get it before the new guy. At the same time, if you’re a new guy, you are not completely shut out. A veteran player doesn’t need loot from an instance, his attendance goes down, his accumulated total goes down, but the new guy whose shown constant dedication in raiding for the past month has an equal shot at the loot.

Again, it is by no means the best solution. But it’s just a step in one of many different directions.

For cryin’ out loud, BUFF ALREADY!

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I need to de-stress myself. I just found out that this summary for a 27 page journal page article which had to be finished within 4 hours is actually due on Thursday. I had this one sitting on the backburner for a while, and it’s a great raiding topic to touch on especially for us Priests.

The short version: If that group isn’t your assigned buff group, buff them anyway.

The long version: Us raiders spent a lot of time buffing our groups. We do it so we can maximize the performance of everyone involved. Allow me to post an actual live transcript:

Raid leader: Everyone buffed? Good! Pulling in 3… 2…. 1…-
Random mage: WAIT! I DON’T HAVE FORT OR SPIRIT!
Raid leader: What the hell, why not?
Random mage: Sorry I zoned in late because I was repairing at a time when I shouldn’t have because you called for us to repair earlier and I didn’t because I was hungry and I auto-followed someone in.

Now the raid stalls for a priest to give him Fortitude and Spirit among other things. Then the buffers need to replenish their mana. By the time this happens, Paladin Blessings will have worn off (At least, last patch it would have).

Priest 1: Hey, he’s in your group, buff him.
Priest 2: I don’t have any candles. Besides, you were assigned to buff that player anyway.
Matticus: *sighs and gives the poor mage a 30 minute Fortitude and Spirit*

So is there a point I’m trying to make here? Yes, as a matter of fact there is. Follow whatever buff assignments your leaders tell you to do when you’re about to pull a boss, recovering from a wipe, or some other situation where everyone needs to be buffed again. If you have a few stragglers coming up behind you who didn’t get the group buff, just throw thm a 30 minute buff anyway even if he’s not in your assigned group. You can save a lot of time and minor heartache this way. Really, there are other significant things to argue about then whose responsibility it is to buff who. So save your efforts for that. What’s the most it will cost you? It will set you back one Conjured Glacier Water. And you got that for free!

Now I’m not a mage, so I can’t say this with absolute authority. But I enjoy the refreshing refreshments that these anklebiters throw out (assuming their Gnomish). To last a whole raid, I will need over one stack of water but never more than two. So Netherlord, I’m looking right at you. Hook me up with TWO stacks of water, NOT one otherwise I’ll have to open trade with you again at an inconvenient time for some much needed juice.

This reminds me of something else: Asking for water openly or just opening trade with a random mage in the raid. I am personally in favour of the latter approach as it makes it really convenient for a mage to just drag and drop water into the trade slots. Asking for water openly is like asking for a volunteer to do something. You shouldn’t bank on that. Push the issue and pop trade open with them. It also applies to buffs as well. Don’t openly ask for “Fort please” in raid. Either you’ll get overloaded with three fort buffs or none at all because the Priests assume someone else will do it. Whisper any Priest in the raid and ask them for a Fort.

Lastly, regarding rebuffing. Here’s another transcript:

Random Hunter: Fort please!
Random Priest: Looks like you already have it.
Random Hunter: It’s going to come off in five minutes.
Random Priest: *sighs, buffs*

It’s not a big deal, but again it saves on the minor stressors in WoW. If you have a buff which expires in another 10 minutes or even 15 minutes, right click it off. Chances are, the classes that can buff you will notice that it is off and reapply it again before you even ask. During every pull, as a healer, I constantly scan every member in the raid anyway so I know if there is a Fortitude or Spirit buff missing. But again, just click it off to save the questions.

I’m guilty of getting worked up over minor issues like this. I try to make raiding as easy on other people as much as possible by handing things out like that before they even realize it’s gone. It helps the raid transition and move much more fluidly. It helps to reduce any friction among member.

1% wipes are not fun

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We took on Leo yesterday and got him down to about 12% on the first try. Five straight attempts saw Leo float around during phase 3 between 15% and 1%. The last one of the night had him at 1% with two of our priests doing everything they can to kill him. Sadly, Smite rendered ineffective. Must make a note to Blizzard to buff Smite.

I have a sinking feeling that we could’ve killed the boss had I gone to repair when the raid leader called for it. But the only that was broken was my enchanted, gemmed T5 shoulders! SURELY it would not have made a difference between 1% and death! …Right? :O

Stamina, an overlooked stat for Priests?

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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.

The Oh $#@& Reaction

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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.