I’m Still Alive (barely)

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Not much time to write anything informative or analytical today. Even though it’s labor day, I’m still one of the poor chaps that needs to go work. After that, school starts tomorrow and I should be back to my usual daily schedule.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take any shots yesterday of Gruul since the bosses went down way too quick and there wasn’t a whole lot of healing required. But, I did get this gem…

Somehow I got knocked into the air and miraculously landed on this ledge without sustaining much damage.

After the raid tomorrow, I will continue and finish up my piece on raid healing: what spells to use, when to use them, and who to use them on. I’ll post screenshots of the raid at varying stages to detail what’s going on inside my head.

Forget 28/33, try 20/41 with Circle of Healing

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Many Priests advocate using the 28/33 build. Heck, my priest has the exact same build. But if all of your Priests have Improved Divine Spirit, then doesn’t that kind of render that spec pointless? You may as well change it up and vary it up some. I don’t think you really need 4 Priests with Imp. Divine Spirit, do you? If you examine the holy tree, realize that heals can still get boosted higher. So let’s check out my proposed build and when to put it to good use.

Here’s the overall chart:

Most of these choices are self explanatory, but I’ll highlight the important stuff.

Discipline

Silent Resolve: This one’s an optional one here. If you have trouble with aggro management (or have a really bad tank), then pick this up. Otherwise, blow a point in Absolution and max out Mental Agility to achieve your 20 points in Discipline. My personal stance on this is that Silent Resolve should not be needed due to 1) A Priest who is aware of his/her aggro 2) A tank that can generate insane threat 3) A raid with enough healers to help even out heals on the tank so not anyone healer is over extending him or herself. If you’re somehow catching up to the tank, drop a PW: Shield, Renew, and fade for a few seconds.

Holy

For the most part, the Holy tree is remarkably similar to the standard 28/33 build except for the extra extensions at the end of the tree.

Empowered Healing: 20% extra healed with Greater Heal and 10% extra on Flash and Binding Heal. Ain’t that just peachy? Not much else to say about that besides the fact that it IS awesome to increase your healing by a fairly substantial margin. You may not think 10% is much, but 10% additional healing over a 30 minute is a damn lot of healing.

Circle of Healing: Finally we come to the most controversial spell in the Holy tree. A lot of Priests slam Circle of Healing because they don’t consider it useful or mana efficient or some other excuse that I haven’t thought of. Start thinking in terms of situational healing. Now when would it be a good time for me to ever use a spell similar to Holy Nova, that can be used on any target in a raid, which would heal their party? What class would you surmise takes more damage? That’s right, Melee classes. Face it, these poor suckers have to stay point blank staring at the butt of some boss having to repeatedly run out and bandage before being able to go back in because healers can’t be spared to keep them alive or topped off.

Remember, this spell is entirely situational. I would not recommend speccing Circle of Healing if you are working your way through Karazhan. It’s just not worth it on a ten-man group. But once you get to the 25 man raids, you’ll start having heavy DPS groups consisting of classes like an Enhancement Shaman and four Rogues (hypothetically speaking). On a fight like Voidreaver, who steps on players within Melee range for a lot within a few seconds, a spell like Circle of Healing would be a blessing. Why? You’ve healed about 2500 HP in total. That’s almost the same as a max rank Flash of Light. You can’t use Prayer of Healing because it only heals players within your party. But Circle of Healing heals any player within the raid and their party. One of my fellow Priests in my Guild does this very thing. Every time we engage a boss where Melee classes are allowed to step in, he assigns himself to healing the DPS because his build allows him to do so without much problem. It’s time inefficient to flash heal five times over five players. It’s also inefficient to lob 5 renews. Three or four pumps of Circle of Healing can breathe enough life to your specialist group and ensure damage dealt is still maximized.

Us Priests have so many different Healing spells at our disposal. The trick is to discern which is right for what situation.

Optimize Your Raiding Time

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First off, some benchmarks are in order after reading Kirk’s ideal stat requirements for holy priests, I must respectfully disagree. Mind you, my guild is 3/6 SSC with Mag and VR on farm. Shade of Aran has a Poly/Pyro combination that will blast players for about 7k damage. While he is correct that there is a certain threshold in terms of HP that a player should have, I don’t believe having it as a base stat is necessary as much of the healing gear in the game does not carry much emphasis on stamina. Here’s a screenshot of my stats before and after buffs (and yes, that is 13.3k mana):

Base Stats Base Stats

Next, I wanted to build off of Kirk’s guide on forming a raiding group, I wanted to follow up with making the most out of your raid time. Face it. We waste a lot of time in raids farting around and just slacking off in general when we could be pulling mobs and downing bosses. My Guild has a time window of three hours from first pull before we call it a night. Every precious second of raiding counts. Unless you’re a super hardcore Guild who raids every day, chances are you don’t have a lot of time on encounters. It seems the primary respawn timer is two hours. That’s not a whole lot of time to work with.

The next time you attempt a raid boss, try this experiment. Start timing your raid and see how fast they can ready up before the next pull. This means from the time you wipe, to the time your entire raid team is alive with full health, full mana, and full buffs in front of the boss. Unless your Guild has the discipline of the Queen’s Guards, you’ll be amazed at the time it takes. I guarantee it.

Thankfully, there’s many different ways for you to trim the fat and get as many attempts in as physically possible.

Release and Run Back

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out when your raid wipes. But if you’re new to raiding, here’s a few tell tale signs:

  • Your Main Tank dies
  • Over 50% of your healers are down
  • Over 20% of your raid is down within the first minute of the pull
  • A class with a specific role goes down (ie, mage tanking mage on the High King Maulgar encounter)

Now don’t get me wrong. It is perfectly possible to recover from sloppy mistakes in raid. Obviously if the boss is down to 5% or less, keep plowing away. But back to my original point, let’s try not to prolong the fight. Don’t run around trying to escape him. Run to him, die, release, and run back. But there is an exception to this…

Use Protection

And I’m not referring to a Trojan. I mean use wipe protection. It will save you a lot of time. Warlocks have soul stones. Paladins can Divine Intervention. Shamans have the ability to self resurrect themselves. If you can time it properly, have a Druid battle res a priest or someone and make sure he doesn’t accept it until after the encounter resets. Meanwhile, raid members should move to a safe location away from the boss if the raid leader calls a wipe that is within range of a person who can resurrect. The only players who should not be withdrawing would be the main tank who ought to try and stay alive as long as possible to allow the rest of the melee to get some distance. Once you get that done…

Res Ressers First

I should not have to say it. But I still see it happen so it must bear repeating. A lot of beginning players aren’t aware of this, but always resurrect other players who can res first. Instead of ressing a mage or a warlock, pick up a paladin or a shaman. Just imagine it as a snowballing effect. Try using a res notifier. I believe CT Raid has one built in as does X Perl.
Ressing multiple targets

Now you can res to other players together instead of one other. Then the four of you can res another four and so on and so forth. Ideally, it would just be tanks and other melee running back in through the front door. Typically, they’ll have a lot of ground to cover between the entrance and where your encounter is. Which leads to…

Summon the Runners

Remember back before we had summoning stones? We relied on Warlocks to summon the whole raid into the door steps of MC or BWL. Sometimes it seems as if people forget they have this ability. If there is a Warlock alive, have him start summoning players the moment they zone in. There are instances the trek back to the boss is agonizingly long. You’ll shave precious seconds or even minutes which could be used towards engaging the boss.

Buffing

There’s a neat utility called XRS (X Raid Status, I believe) which comes with X Perl Unit Frames.What it does is scans every player and lists what buffs are missing for them, so players don’t have to keep asking for buffs repeatedly. The raid leader presses the button, and it spits out the list.

XRS

The onus is then on everyone else to buff the rest of the raid. The only buff that you absolutely need on trash is Power Word: Fortitude. Otherwise, you can just whisper a player to toss a 30 minute one instead of repeatedly asking for it in raid. This is one of my pet peeves in raiding is people asking for buffs in the middle of trash. Whatever it is, it can wait. It’s just trash. You shouldn’t even need Salv right away if your tanks and healers are able. Hopefully, you’ll be given a 5 minute one in between trash pulls as the raid is steaming along. The last thing players need is a break in momentum. If you’re a buffer and you notice someone is missing a buff, just take the time and give them a 30 minute even if you’re not the person assigned to buff that group. Just do it, and it saves time, frustration, and heartache.

Preparation

Illidan has taunted us by continually saying that we are not prepared. Shut him up by proving him wrong. Mages should start conjuring water and food before everyone even gets to the instance. Bandages should be made before the raid. Most importantly, repair, repair, repair. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had the urge to strangle guildmates for failing to repair. You know there is a raid. There should be no excuse for you not to be repaired 100% on first pull.

AFK’ers

Alterac Valley isn’t the only instance to suffer this problem. Raids will have problems of players going AFK. Even I am guilty of this. But I’ve learned and gotten better. I try to time my AFK’s on trash pulls knowing that my presence is not essential. Bad times to go AFK are the pulls just before the boss, pulling the boss, or during the boss encounter. Do things that you would normally do before going on a flight to London. Make sure you go to the bathroom, and make sure you grab a bite to eat. I’ll admit I don’t have the luxury of eating at my computer on some nights. My family’s quite traditional and is required to eat at the dinner table sometimes during raids. I go there, I wolf it down, I come back during trash pulls not during Tidewalker or Lurker.

Hopefully, these tips will help streamline your raid some more so you can get in an additional 2 or 3 shots at the boss.

Play of the Week

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What’s one of the biggest thrills you get from playing WoW? Doing a five-man quest with two players.

Doc and I wanted to wrap up the Ashtongue quest series which culminated in you killing a mounted Orc on a Netherdrake. Oh it was a glorious battle indeed. Wave after wave of Shadowmoon Orcs rushed against us the moment we touched down and killed the channelers. Eventually I drew aggro since it was just me and a hunter. Naturally this gave him free reign to just shoot everything. I think there was a point where I was down to 6% health and still managed to survive. What helped was that the incoming mobs were ranged and shooting their pathetic arrows at me. This allowed me enough time to predict their next shot so I can time my heals accordingly. If you ever find yourself being under siege, spam everything you have to stay alive. Remember, forget what you’ve been taught at the academy. In the real world of WoW, the law of the jungle reigns supreme.

Even in WoW, rules are meant to be broken.

Matt’s on Curse, and PvP Zones: The Good and the Bad

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I’ve recently started blogging over on Curse about a week or two ago to help boost my traffic and viewership. Boy, all I can see is that it works. If you check out Curse, you’ll see my name mentioned on the front page (unless they’ve loaded up on news that it goes down). I’ve teamed up with another blogger there to create a blog called The Daily Quest. We were stuck on ideas for names, and this popped in my mind as I was bombing cannonball stacks. And why not? We’re both writers who enjoy what we do. Other than that, nothing else has really changed. My content will still be published here and there to reach a wider audience. So without further adieu, here is today’s piece.

PvP Zones: The Good and the Bad

Don’t worry, I have absolutely no intention of blasting WSG, AB, EoTS, or AV. That’s already been done to death by countless others and I see no need in further adding my 1.8 cents to that pile (Canadian, remember?). With the release of Burning Crusade, Blizzard decided to add extra PvP related gimmicks to various zones in the outland after the huge, “success,” they had in Azeroth (Eastern Plaguelands) and Kalimdor (Silithus dust stuff). After that mammoth of a post I wrote yesterday about Priest gear and the time it took for me to make all the links Curse-able (Thanks Kody), I needed a break so let’s check it out shall we?

 

Hellfire Peninsula

The Good

This would the first PvP area that players encounter as they start to level from 58 – 70. The gimmick here is that killing members of the opposing faction or capturing the three points of interest (Stadium, Broken Hill, The Overlook) would net you honor tokens which you can turn in for some cool swag. In addition, if a faction held all three towers, that faction would get a zone wide buff good for PvP or PvE purposes (5% damage, still good in
instances).

The Bad

Those three points change hands more times than Paris Hilton. It takes a party or even a small raid to maintain control of the points. No one’s going to take the time to do that. Players capture them then bugger off allowing the other side to take control and back and forth it goes. Make it more difficult and add something to dissuade the other side. I’m sure the Legion could install some Fel Flak Cannons around the area, which could be controlled by the faction owners of the points.

Zangarmarsh

The Good

A fair number of guilds have begun to enter Serpentshrine Cavern. That makes it beneficial to help get the zone wide buff (Also 5% in damage). What we have here is two towers flanking a middle tower. Capture them, and you get possession of a flag. Plant it at the central spire to gain the buff (No cheating, you can’t mount or shapeshift). Remember those marks you got in Hellfire? Yeah, they’re still good here. I know the Alliance one is somewhere a little ways from Telredor. I don’t have a clue where the Horde one is. Oh, you also get a graveyard in the middle.

The Bad

Did anyone really have an idea of what to do? There weren’t any instructions on how to properly get the bonuses. Talk about being noob-friendly. Aside from the graveyard, there wasn’t much of an incentive to do it.

Terrokar Forest

The Good

Here we go! This is one of Blizzard’s finest. Capture five Spirit Towers, and the entire zone gets 5% additional damage and 5% additional experience gained (Those of us at level 70 should gain 5% additional gold from mobs). Note that the effects last for six hours. After that time is up, the control of Towers can be disputed. With the Towers under your control, the Auchindoun instances now have Spirit Shards that can be looted from the bosses within. These Shards can then be turned into the Spirit Sages (Allerian Stronghold for Alliance, Stonebreaker Hold for Horde) for some cool epic swag. As a Holy Priest, he didn’t have much to offer me. What a waste.

The Bad

Players are too busy bombing eggs to help. The distance between Skettis and Skethyl Mountains makes it difficult to assist. I can’t count the amount of times I’d be busy trying to capture towers and yelling for raid invites and I’d get whispers saying: “Hold on! Just a few more eggs and I’ll be right down!” Get the Skettis Bird guys to start laying some eggs on top of the Spirit Towers. Make it easier for us to bomb them and capture them.

Nagrand

The Good

So here’s a town that’s capturable via PvP. All you need to do is bomb to submission the Guards (if there are any) and then make like Counterstrike radio spammers and “storm the front”. Your reward? Halaa, which is a town rich with amenities such as quest givers, vendors, and a (you guessed it) 5% damage increase buff across the zone. There’s 4 of these flight post things you can interact with that stuff you on a Wyvern (weird) which flies you around the city for you to lob explosives on players and guards below. When the Guards are neutralized, players go in and must defend the flag as it is being hoisted. Congratulations! The day is yours.

The Bad

It needs a flight path. Seriously. Or some kind of a portal which will shuttle us between the towns and Halaa. If only I had an epic mount to get me there. I think Halaa also needs some Flak Cannons. Nothing would bring me the satisfaction of shooting down a 64 Rogue who laughs, sneers, and spits as he flies by knowing there’s not a damn thing I can do about it (until he lands, anyway).

Wrath of the Lich King is promising additional World PvP fun. I’m waiting eagerly to see what it brings. That means more things to do in between those 50 minutes AV queues (Come on BG 9, I know you can do better). For the time being, we can only hope Blizzard might add another PvP gimmick in Netherstorm. I’d love to have 5% additional damage when taking on Kael’Thas. You know there’s this really popular map called DoTA on Battle.net, which might be adaptable to WoW…