General WoW Gaming

Not restricted to healing, but PvE and PvP discussion on alts or non-healing specs.

Your Dark Side: Forcing the Wipe

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dark-side Normally I’d advocate fighting to the last man, but have you ever considered just throwing in the towel? Today’s post is inspired by Kregath’s topic on the Plusheal forums asking a tell-all of a question:

Have you ever been a bad Priest on purpose?

This got me thinking. What is the worse thing that a Priest can do?

The answer: they can not heal the raid and a wipe will happen as a result.

When working on a difficult boss that requires everyone alive, there may be attempts where you lose one or even two key players. Let’s assume for the moment that these key players are healers. They are the only ones tasked with the job of maintaining the raid. The other healers are too busy watching specific players.

As such, it would be difficult for your tank healers to transition over to raid healing because you’ve gone from 7 healers to 5. This increases the strain to the point where it becomes possible to lose a tank or lose the rest of the raid 1 by 1. With key players dead, the odds of a wipe continue to increase.

If you have an indecisive raid leader, why not force the wipe? You know in your hearts it can’t be done.

“But Matt”, I hear you say, “This goes against everything you have ever taught us!”

Rules are made only to be broken, young Padawan. If your leaders aren’t willing to accept defeat and try it again with a raid that’s all alive, then sometime a quiet nudge in the form of a wipe might be all that’s needed.

After all, wouldn’t you rather wipe at 95% then at 25% especially on a 10+ minute encounter?

Things to remember

  1. If you’re going to force a wipe, then you’ll want to do it discreetly.
  2. It’s best to be a healer with tenure so if you get called for it, you can play it off as an innocent mistake.
  3. Have an arsenal of excuses ready. With the Olympics on, Women’s Beach Volleyball is an excellent reason (I <3 Misty May).

Have I ever intentionally wiped a raid before? Nope. I’ve never had to, thankfully. I would definitely consider doing it if the circumstances were extremely dire enough. Although I wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend doing this at all, your Guild may not be willing or perceptive enough to call a wipe even though it may be in their best interests.

On that note, what would Brian Boitano do?

Spell Haste: Why You Don’t Need It

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Image courtesy of andrewatla

A few words on Spell Haste: I can tell that Spell Haste is going to be the next big epeen-measurement stat. There are a couple of reasons behind this, the biggest one being that Sunwell fights are so demanding that Spell Haste is indispensable to heal all the incoming damage. The thought process runs something like this: If it’s good enough for Sunwell, it’s good enough for everyone, right? In fact, the more you have, the better you must be, right? Nope. Of course not – if that were true, I wouldn’t have a reason to post.

Sorry, I missed a left turn at Albaquerque. What is Spell Haste? Simply put, Spell Haste allows you to cast the same spells – faster. 15.67 of Spell Haste is a 1% casting-time reduction. Haste can also decrease your global cooldown to a minimum of one second. (That’s at something like 475 – effectively haste-capped. At this point, I’m not entirely sure it’s even possible to stack up that much spell haste. It certainly isn’t possible without running your other stats into the ground.)

As cool (and useful in Sunwell) as Spell Haste is, there are a lot of reasons it just doesn’t live up to the hype:

Sloppy Healers

Once in a while, some misguided soul will compare healing a raid to playing whack-a-mole. Maybe it’s accurate for your first few raids – before you figure out much about game mechanics and set up your UI properly you might have no idea who was going to take damage next. This is probably why you see so many entry-level wws reports showing an abundance of Flash Heals; the healers just aren’t experienced enough to not play a reactive game. But good healers know their fights, know their raid-mates, and know their raid frames well enough to start a cast before damage happens. Giving those same, inexperienced healers spell haste before developing their other, more relevant stats first, simply reinforces that gut reaction o-m-g-he’s-gonna-die-i-gotta-toss-healz-nao mentality. Spell haste won’t make inexperienced (or bad, for that matter) healers better, but it will train them to think faster is better – when really, planning ahead and paying attention is better.

Opportunity Cost

Flash back to Economics class with me: Opportunity cost is the cost of resources that must be given up in order to obtain other resources. You’ll notice a pattern with pre-Sunwell Spell Haste items – to get the haste, you have to give up mana regen.

Exception: Brooch of Nature’s Mercy, which is worth farming Eagle Boss in ZA for its Spirit alone.

As you’re working your way through content, you have a lot to think about in terms of stat-balancing. Your +healing must be high enough to handle the incoming damage, you have to have enough regen to last the entire fight, and you have to have enough Stamina so that you can actually do some healing. If you’re not to the point where most of your slots have few upgrades, you probably don’t have stats to spare. If you think you do, you probably don’t have enough regen. These other stats are so important for T4, T5, and BT/Hyjal content that giving them up for a stat that is not required is foolish. Wait to stack Spell Haste until you really can afford the cost to your other metrics.

Running Out of Mana

One thing that I notice most often with premature Spell Haste stacking is that casters run out of mana.

Quickly.

Why?

Bear with me. (Warning: I like easy math, so I’m using VERY rounded numbers and assuming no Quartz, Lag or other fun stuff)

Say I have a 10k mana pool, and that each Greater Heal costs 500 mana. This means I can throw out 20 of them before I go out of mana. But, I also have 250 Mp5. Each of those 20 casts took 2.5 seconds – a total of 50 seconds.

So I accrued 10 full ticks of my Mp5 – an extra 2500 mana.

An extra 5 Heals. An extra 12.5 seconds of casting.

Which, thanks to the magic of Mp5, bought me ANOTHER 1094 mana.

ANOTHER 2 casts, ANOTHER 5 seconds – and I’m done. (Because that only bought me 250 mana, which added to the 94 I had left over isn’t enough to cast another heal for this experiment.)

So TOTAL, my 10k mana pool and 250 Mp5 bought me 27 heals over 67.5 seconds. (There is a FABULOUS mod called Dr. Damage that will show you all of this in a tool tip.)

If my G.Heal hits for 6k, I just healed for 162,000. But what if we trade regen for S.Haste? Okay, now I have a 10k mana pool, each heal costs 500 mana, so I still get to throw 20 of them before I go oom. But NOW, each of those 20 casts took TWO seconds. So NOW, it only took 40 seconds. Which means I only got 8 ticks of my Mp5, which is now 200. So I only got back 1600 mana. An extra 3 heals. An extra 6 seconds of casting. Only 300 mana back. Suddenly, I’m done. (Sure, I could wait 1 second, and buy a 24th heal but then i’m REALLY done – and it takes me longer to get back in the game, because my regen is less.) Total: 23 heals over 46 seconds. 138,000 healing. Down 24,000. Down by more than my Main Tank’s pool.

For what? To get that 138k out fast enough so that it’s overheals? Because in 95% of the raiding-game, you don’t need to throw ’em out that fast to keep up with the damage, so they would be wasted. But you’re not chain-casting? You’d have more time to regen mana? Great. Then you really don’t need the Spell Haste.

Lack of Available Gear

Another reason not to fuss over Spell Haste too much is how little gear there really is out there with Spell Haste on it. WoWhead lists 29 Priest-friendly healing items with Spell Haste GAME WIDE. Of these, 16 drop in SW, 1 in Hyjal, 2 in BT, and two require Hearts of Darkness. So unless you’re very wealthy or your guild is working through advanced End-game, you have 8 options total – and a few of those are for the same slots!

Not Fully Developed as A Talentable Stat

As Priests, we have a couple of talents that reduce the casting time of certain spells. Could be divine fury, could be shortening up our Mass Dispel or Mana Burns. But, there is no far-reaching talent option to truly take advantage of this stat wholesale. Yet. I anticipate that WotLK will bring a lot more viability to this stat as a whole, with the introduction of talents like Improved Holy Concentration. The new content will probably require a decent amount of Spell Haste, but, as currently implemented, the fact that Spell Haste gains no help from any available builds further decreases the value of gaining it as compared to other stats – spirit or +heal – that DO gain multipliers from our available talent trees.

Sunwell fights are a holy-crap-did-you-see-that-by-the-skin-of-our-teeth kind of experience. I know a guy who, before the 2.4.3 nerfs, was spending nearly 1,000g on Mu’ru attempts PER NIGHT. (Scrolls, haste pots, elixirs, repairs, etc. He’s actually leveling an herbalist just to take the pressure off.) The best comparison is to old-school Naxxramus. You just don’t do Sunwell unless you’re really dedicated to the game, and long after WotLK comes out, veteran raiders will be swapping stories about how hardcore the fights were, and what a mind-bender it was.

Luv,
Wyn

Assigning Healing Strategy – Part 2: Double Shifting Healers

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Image courtesy of hkarl

Welcome to the second in a 5 part series here on World of Matticus. For the next several weeks, I’ll be covering the rare topic of assigning raid heals. No one really wants to do it but it’s the most important job in the raid and I’ll provide a basic overview of the process and some advanced tips!

In case you missed it:

  1. Week 1: Recognizing Class Strengths

Throughout your raiding career as a healer, you will find that the measure of being a good healer is underscored by one question:

Do you keep your target up?

When you start approaching T6 content in Hyjal and Black Temple, keeping a player alive indefinitely (or at least, 5 minutes) is not just a good skill, it is a virtual requirement. Your healing boss should be able to put any healer on any tank for any trash pulls and not have to second guess their decision. This is the personal standard by which I base my healers on.

So what’s the next step?

Find out if your healer can keep up two targets.

As the healing stratician, I get the pleasure of doing all the assignments for all the bosses. Sometimes it has to be done on short notice and it’s nice to know I’m not the only one in the game that has to to pull off a hail Mary. Unfortunately, I don’t get much say in who stays or who goes. I can’t pick my lineup because I never know what crew I have to work with on any given week! This is a challenge unto itself because certain classes are optimized for different roles and I have to be really creative in order for our group to find success. We raided all of SSC and nearly all of TK without a Resto Druid. It’s doable but it’s tough.

Double shifting the Healer

There are going to be times where you can get away with not having a full healer’s attention on a tank. The reason for that is because there are other healer’s on said tank. I often feel uneasy having only two Paladins on a main tank. I know I would feel more at ease if there was at least one more. However, I also know that due my personnel, I can’t spare another player on them full time.

What I can do is split a healer’s attention between two tanks. If I don’t have a Druid, I’ll put a Priest on it. Generally speaking, a Druid would be my top choice due to the nature of the class. Barring that, I’d take care of it myself personally. If I’m not able to, I’ll flip a coin and pick a Paladin or a Shaman.

The principle here remains the same. What we’re doing is taking a healing class and assigning them two different players to keep alive. In the end, we’ll have something that looks like this:

Alpha Tank
– Pete the Paladin
– Paula the Priest
– Darren the Druid		 Bravo Tank
– Pierce the Paladin
– Pavol the Priest
– Darren the Druid

Understand that in most boss encounters, only one tank is necessary. But also understand that there are some fights where the boss encounter requires more than 1 tank to eat damage or to tank a different NPC. Here’s a few player examples of when double shifting is a good idea:

  • Covering a player 2nd on threat
  • Highest person with health gets a Hateful Strike
  • Multiple tanks on multiple mobs

Hopefully you’ll be able to understand the message I’m trying to convey here. Fights will become more complicated for you as you progress through the game and double shifting healers is one way of answering the challenge. Sometime early next week, I’ll illustrate in further detail how a Priest can double shift in terms of spells and things to watch out for (might use that for a WoW Insider post actually).

How about some concrete examples of which bosses to double shift on? Pulled from WoWWiki we have:

  • Supremus: Hateful strike – ~7 – 10k melee damage to the target with the highest current health inside melee range.
  • Gruul: Hurtful Strike – Always hits the second highest aggro target within his melee range; therefore essential that any melee DPS classes maintain their aggro level not only below that of the MT, but also below that of the OT.
  • Magtheridon: Phase 1 – It is theoretically possible for a moderately geared healer to cover the first two tanks on the Warlocks especially now that the encounter has been considerably nerfed.

Next week, we look at the pivot healer! See ya then!

16 Suggested (and Unlikely) Priest Glyphs

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Image courtesy of Lucretious

We’ve seen evidence of what a few of the new Glyphs look like (lucky Druids). But what exactly would Priest glyphs be? Join me today as I use a combination of mad 8 ball skills, crystal balls, and fuzzy dice to predict what our class Glyphs could look like.

  • Glyph of Strengthened Soul: Empowers a Minor Glyph to reduce your Weakened Soul debuff by 3 seconds.
  • Glyph of Renewed Vigor: Empowers a Major Glyph to return 3% mana of your overall Renew cost per tick.
  • Glyph of the Matrix: Empowers a Major Glyph to grant your Greater Heal a chance to increase a player’s dodge rate by 25% for 3 seconds.
  • Glyph of Angelic Intervention: Empowers a Major Glyph to increase the effects and duration of Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending, and Renew by 20% if all 3 spells are present on a target.
  • Glyph of Certainty: Empowers a Lesser Glyph to increase the cast speed of your Flash Heal by 15%.
  • Glyph of Light’s Reach: Empowers a Major Glyph to increase the number of targets healed by Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing, and Prayer of Mending by 1.
  • Glyph of Penance: Empowers a Minor Glyph to increase extra the duration of Shadow Word: Pain and Holy Fire by 6 seconds.
  • Glyph of Admiral Ackbar: Empowers a Major Glyph to increase all healing effects done by you by 75% if Power Word: Shield is active.
  • Glyph of Fortification: Empowers a Minor Glyph to increase player’s armor by 2000 in addition to the Stamina increase.
  • Glyph of Uncertainty: Empowers a Lesser Glyph to decrease a players movement speed by 20% if affected by Psychic Scream.
  • Glyph of Death’s Grip: Empowers a Lesser Glyph to grant a 3 second stunning effect to Shadow Word: Death and increasing the damage taken by the Priest by 50%.
  • Glyph of Mortal Recognition: Empowers a Major Glyph to grant your healing spells a 50% chance to ignore the Mortal Strike effect on a player.
  • Glyph of Focus: Empowers a Minor Glyph to avoid interruption, ignore silence effects, and reduce silence durations when casting Flash Heal by 20%.
  • Glyph of Veritas: Empowers a Minor Glyph to prevent the next 1000 damage a player absorbs if your Greater Heal or Flash Heal brings the player to full health.
  • Glyph of the Crouching Tiger: Empowers a Lesser Glyph to increase damage done by your weapons by 500%.
  • Glyph of Purity: Empowers a Minor Glyph to allow Dispel to remove an additional debuff or buff from friendly or enemy players respectively.

Don’t forget, these aren’t the real deal (yet). But these are Glyphs I’d love to see for Priests when they’re released although I admit some of these do seem a bit over powered. What about you? What Glyphs would you like to see for your class? Are they serious or just for kicks?