PvE Healing

Healing advice and suggestions for in game encounters.

7 Pointers for a Stress Free Raid

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Image courtesy of _AcE_

Your back is straight and rigid. Your eyes are glued to the screen. You’re screaming and yelling so loud your parents are wondering what’s going on. Your heart’s pumping blood at an insane rate.

But are they happening for the right reasons?

The above symptoms could either represent the elation of an imminent boss death or an incoming raid wipe.

Raiding can induce an unhealthy amount of stress. There are many potential sources of anxiety and frustration. There could be a variety of reasons for the pressure you’re feeling. Maybe it’s a bad night overall. Maybe there’s some internal business that needs to be sorted out in your life or in the guild that’s functioning as a dark cloud over everyone. Not everyone’s immune to it but there are ways to deal with it.

Inhale and breathe: Those breathing exercises you read about near the health section of your newspaper next to the horoscope and Sudoku pages actually work. When boss loot is being distributed, take a moment and close your eyes. Block out the raid mentally or turn them down if necessary. Inhale slowly, count to 5 then exhale. Repeat the exercise 3 more times before retuning your mind back to the raid. Of course, you might have to pass on this if loot drops that you need.

Reduce wiping on farm content: This is a separate blog post on it’s own. Wiping on farm content and farm trash is the biggest source of headaches for raiding guilds. Encounters that should be easy end up being catastrophes for raid groups. Stay focused and do your part. Play to your highest potential and respect the boss that you’re working on.

Don’t skimp on raid buffs: When we were killing Archimonde the other day, I had a Priest in my raid who dropped 30 minute forts on everyone. I cursed out loud in vent and applied my 60 minute Ferrari buffs. I had a feeling people were going to complain about the 30 minute buffs anyway. Instead of berating the other Priest about it, I bit my tongue and overwrote his buffs with my own. Even though the odds were good we’d wipe repeatedly on Archie, it was the principle of the matter. In the long run, you end up using more mana and spending more time individually forting people than you would with group buffs. Over a prolonged period, this time spent on individual buffs could have gone towards working on Archie.

Listen to music: I set my iTunes volume to 25%. Whether I’m mentally dancing to Chris Brown (Forever!) or swaying my Dwarf hips to Gloria Estefan’s Everlasting Love, music is an enormous form of stress mitigation. Just don’t play your songs intentionally over vent. Not everyone has the same tastes.

Prepare yourself the night before: I like to lay out my pants and shirts before major stress inducing days where I have to deliver presentations or crapshoot my way through exams. I do it to reduce the mental load I know I would get the next day. It’s bad enough I’m trying to remember certain points or formulas. I don’t need to add extra stress to myself by wondering what I need to wear and what color socks have to match with my shirt and stuff. Likewise, the night before the raid, check that you have enough potions, candles, mana oils, and other consumables in your bag so you can go through the next day without having to frantically scour the auction house last minute before your raid.

Grab a cold one: Nothing is wrong with a little alcohol during raids. Certain Resto Trees might prefer wines whereas certain Dwarves prefer the strength of beer or ale. Regardless of you preferred beverage of choice (be it alcoholic or non), it does help relax and ease the tensions accumulated during the day.

Take a day off: No, I don’t mean from raiding. I know some of you hold specialist positions in your raid. See if there’s a volunteer willing to do the job of healing assignments or marking sheep targets or even leading the raid. There’s a practical argument for this suggestions. What if you were running late or if an emergency prevents you from raiding? It’s nice to know you have a number 2 around to take over and cover for you.

5 Signs of the Vigilante Raider

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dark-knght

Bruce Wayne: I’m doing the best I can, with what I know.

***POTENTIAL DARK KNIGHT SPOILERS BELOW***

After my raid wrapped up on Thursday night, I was due to catch up with a dear lady friend of mine. She had free movie passes and being the gentleman that I am, I offered to help her use them! She agreed and we both watched The Dark Knight at 11 PM. Like everyone else who watched it before me, I thought it was one of the top movies this summer if not the entire year.

Whether you’ll openly admit it or not, there’s a little bit of Batman in each and everyone of us when we play WoW. Don’t believe me? Here’s my list:

Adapting roles – For certain classes, they have to adapt to the needs of the Guild. Thankfully as Priests, we don’t have this problem. Classes like Paladins have to change their specs to fill a need that the Guild has. A spectacular Resto Druid I know made the decision to go Feral after we lost a tank just to maintain the Guild. Towards the end of the movie, Batman had to turn into whatever Gotham needed him to be. In this case, he became their villain to preserve the image of Harvey Dent.

Constantly improving – Whatever challenges the game throws our way, all players need to improve themselves to face them and beat them. Batman gets chased down by dogs and has difficulty moving his head. He gets his buddy Fox to modify his suit to minimize the problems they cause. Us WoW players will always be tinkering with our gear. Sometimes we want to increase our healing throughput. Other times we like to increase our endurance and we switch our gear as necessary.

Friendly support – Where would we be without our Guildmates? Not raiding is the first answer that comes to mind. In addition, I like to cultivate and maintain a vast network of friends willing to exchange services that I may need. Batman would never have been able to fight crime without the assistance of Lucius Fox and Alfred by his side.

Sacrifice – Are you willing to swallow your pride and bench yourself for the good of the Guild? Batman made jaw dropping decision to reveal his identity to turn himself in only for Harvey Dent to cover up and sacrifice himself instead. As a raider, there are times when you’ll be called upon to do things you don’t want to do. When you accept it, you’ll find it really isn’t all that bad. Sometimes you just have to walk away.

Making tough choices – Healers face bad choices every raiding night. Who do we heal first? Both are equally important. We can’t heal one without losing the other. Batman could only save 1 of the 2 hostages and he chose incorrectly based on information that was switcheroo’d. Sometimes you can’t make calculated decisions. Not all of the information necessary to make the right choice is there. Everything needs to get pieced together but the pieces don’t fit. As a result, a hard choice needs to be made on what action is taken next.

See what I mean? There’s always a bit of a vigilante in everyone. Some of us are adept at hiding it well. Others aren’t so lucky. 

Time Saving Tip in Black Temple

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Black Temple’s a sickeningly long instance. My guild only logs about 12 hours a week raiding. I’m hoping to appeal to some raiding readers for some help. Aside from the usual time saving tips in Black Temple, can you think of other ways to shave minutes or even seconds off while clearing through?

Here’s an example:

A variety of tricks can be used in conjunction with Blessed Medallion of Karabor. This means your Guild will have to have killed Illidan. Anyways, when you kill Teron Gorefiend, equip the Medallion and use it to port to the entrance. Hop on to your mount of choice and zoom into the entrance. Talk to the Draenaneanainnie ghost (thanks Ratshag), and you’ll get ported to the other Draenaneanainnie ghost. While it may not seem like much, it has the effect of shaving five years off the run down (to me at least).

Aside from that, do you have any time saving tips? Are there any particular mobs that can be skipped? Shortcuts that no one knows about? This doesn’t have to even be limited to Black Temple. I’m thinking about compiling a future post on raiding shortcuts and I’d love to hear some more from the readers!

(On other note, approaching the 500k traffic mark. Oh boy.)

WoW Resources for the Wyn

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tools
Image courtesy of woodsy

I’m a tremendous advocate of using all the tools available to evaluate and improve your toon, your gear, and your gameplay. (It’s how I first met Matt!) Hands-down, the most valuable resources for learning to play are other players willing to share their experiences. Even with access to some great minds, though, it helps to know what questions to ask to get the most bang for your buck. Besides that, I’m an information junkie. These are, in no particular order, some of the resources that have helped me the most in my quest for Priestly perfection.

Be.Imba.hu – The first online character auditor. Takes a look at your gear, the available gems, enchants, and add-ons and gives you a solid opinion of what stats are best for you, and what level of content is appropriate. I’ve found it a little cut-and-dry, but a very useful place to start.

GankBang – The armory, comparative. Wanna know how you stack up to the other Priests on your server? Wonder no more. Great tables, which you can organize by stat, show you how you compare. Be aware that you may need to manually update or add players.

warcrafter – The ultimate armory sandbox. Load your character, change enchants, gems, or see what your stats would be if you were in full T6. (Or T3!) Now you can REALLY find out if +6 stats or +15 spirit to chest is a better idea.

Arena Points Calculator – Arena points calculator. Plug in your rating, guesstimate your points. Hooray!

WoW Reputation Calculator – Tells you how much rep you need to hit the next level with any Burning Crusade faction. And tells you how many instance runs it’d take to earn it. This gem has helped that 21000 rep look much, much more manageable, and helped me make decisions of which instance to run for max. rep reward.

Warcraft Realms – Statistic crawler for all realms. If you feel like your faction is hopelessly outnumbered… it just might be. This sucker breaks down all kinds of information – and is especially helpful if you need to know when it’s time to start recruiting from off-server.

WoW Character Watch – Allows you to stalk anyone and everyone. Really great if you want to follow up with an applicant or a former guildie.

Edit: I dunno how I forgot this one, but Mapwow is Google-based maps for WoW. It shows herbalism nodes, mining nodes, and a million other VERY handy things.

WoW Web Stats – Upload your combat log for a bird’s eye-view of what really happened. Have a few different people from the same raid do it for extra well-rounded-ness and you have a hell of a tool for improving not just your own gameplay, but the synergy of the entire raid.

Love forums? Two you should check out are the official Blizzard Priest forums (No, Really!) and Elitist Jerks. (I have another favorite that Matt launched a while ago which you are no doubt already familiar with.)

Here are my favorite threads from the first two:

Lux et Umbra  – The greatest intro-to-priesting guide I’ve ever read. I have stolen so, so, so much from her….

Elitist Jerk’s Holy Raiding Compendium – Required reading for any Priest wanting to raid.

Another great guide written by DwarfPriest – it’s a work in progress, but holy cow, what a piece of work

I left off things like the Armory, WoWhead, Bosskillers, and WoWwiki. If you’re reading World of Matticus, and you DON’T know about those sites, you should’ve spent a little more time getting to know Google.

Luv,
Wyn

P.S. I gotta stop letting Matt write my headlines!