With the advent of examinations and other academic nightmares approaching, I found myself hard pressed to solo blog. Enter Pwyff: Restoration druid, PvP Veteran, and friend. He maintains his own blog over at Gameriot while allowing me the pleasure of relaying it to my viewers whenever applicable. ÂÂ
Today’s column comes from Pwyff. It starts with healing in Player vs Player combat. If you’re already aware of this, just skim it and come back next time. He’s working his way up from the bottom. Expect to see more advanced topics coming soon. If anyone figures out what an Ooglar means, please tell me.
Top 3 PVP Rules as a Healer:
1.) Don’t be fancy!
I sometimes find that healers will get too caught up trying to bait out CSes and interrupts. Quite simply, I’ve seen a WAR+PAL team go down because I decided to go Bear and intimidate the heals. The Paladin spent so much time watching me and trying to fake out an interrupt that his Warrior died while I sat in Bear and looked threatening. If you’re going to bait, fine, bait, but don’t be stupid and fancy with your stopcasting macros.
2.) Be aware of your surroundings! Don’t simply watch everyone’s HP levels all the time!
Keeping aware of where that Warlock is so you can line of sight a key fear is the sign of a good healer versus a bad one. If you see an enemy Druid getting focus fired, and he goes Bear; stay out of line of sight! This can severely cripple the Druid’s ability to get away from everyone by Feral Charging you.
If you see a Paladin or Priest trying to get close to you, run away! A lot of the time, they’re trying to get in that HoJ or Psychic Scream that will put a severe dent in your capabilities to do things. Keeping aware of your environment while healing ultimately leads to an increased capability of healing as well.
Furthermore, by keeping tabs on where your players are, and keeping communication lines open, you can create advantageous scenarios by positioning yourself in key protected areas where you can predict your players to be, and then get off heals. Finally, it prevents you from getting LOSed by your own team when they panic and try to run away.
3.) Keep everyone topped off, or as high as possible.
Only in very specific battles is mana efficiency valued at even near your capability of keeping an individual alive. Thus, while I’m sure it does pay to be as mana efficient as possible, do not make it your priority. Your priority should be always trying to keep your teammate(s) out of burst HP levels. That is to say, out of the level in which a team can consistently ‘burst’ your player down via a full out CD spam, or even a Mage pet nova, frostbolt, ice lance vomno. The logic stems from the fact that having no mana is better than having nobody alive. At least, last I checked.
Top 3 PVP Rules as a DPSer:
1.) Don’t be fancy!
This comes a second time around for the arena DPSer by the simple that some individuals tend to get carried away trying to create some kind of insane vanish immune cheapshot full-parry-chun-li-special type of thing. If you don’t think you can do it, and in attempting to do it, you mess up your chances at bursting someone down, don’t do it.
2.) Control is often greater than DPS!
This is always and constantly true. As, say, a Warlock, you may feel completely inclined to set up your full UA dot cycle on everyone within your grasp, but if this means that the Mage can’t sheep anything, you have to ask yourself; should I really be UAing the Pally?
The answer is no, so stop fucking doing it.
3.) Trust your healers!
As a DPS, you may find that when you get to a scary low digit of health, you’ll panic and turn Sword+Shield Defensive tanking (thus losing your team MS), burn a talent to get the heck out of there, or quite simply, run.
Don’t do it! Keep your healers in consistent line of sight, and always trust that they’ll let you know when they can’t heal you, or when they’re controlled, or when you’re out of line of sight. Arena is a team game, so always trust that your teammates will support you! This in turn will give you greater confidence in pulling off your bursts, because you won’t suddenly find MS missing on the target because your Warrior is hiding behind a pole, spell reflecting moonfires with his sword and shield.
Excellent post, and on something that I will likely never cover. Works for all healers, too!
Great post to feature! Just goes to show you that there’s always something new to learn. I would love to see a followup post describing just how to “fake out” heals, though. =)