5.0.x and Mists of Pandaria: Holy and Discipline Priest Info

Welcome to patch 5.0.x! You’ll have a few weeks to get yourself acclimated for the great levelling push in under a month. Whether you plan to dungeon grind or quest your way to 85, it doesn’t hurt to refresh your skills.

Priest changes and additions

  • Fixed mana pools! We’re now down to 100k mana at level 85. For reference, Circle of Healing costs 3200 mana, Flash Heal costs 5900 mana, and Renew costs 2600 mana. Some reforging may be needed for regen purposes. We’ll have 300000 at level 90.
  • Our ranged slot is gone! But, we can now use Wands in our main hand. So if you happen to have a heroic Wand but haven’t been able to get a heroic main hand or staff, congratulations! Wand stats have been buffed to account for this.
  • Divine  Hymn is no longer available to Shadow Priests or Discipline Priests.
  • Dispel has an 8 second cooldown. Mass Dispel has a 15 second cooldown. Fights like Spine of Deathwing have been compensated accordingly.
  • Chakra spells can be used directly. You don’t have to follow it up with a trigger. Remember to bind both Chakra: Sanctuary and Chakra: Serenity.
  • New Discipline spell: Spirit Shell
  • Inner Fire increases spell power by 10% instead of a static value.
  • Power Word: Fortitude increases Stamina by 10% instead of a static value.
  • Evangelism built in to both Discipline and Holy. However, only Discipline can activate Archangel.

Playing styles

Holy

Holy users, you’ll just need to get accustomed to Chakra and stance switching. Nothing else has really changed dramatically. If you’ve been a Holy player before, congratulations! There isn’t much to learn. Lightwell now has the option to be made more “user friendly” via Glyph of Lightspring.

I do have one request though.

Blizzard, is it possible to add a visual distinction between Lightwells that can be clicked versus Lightwells that can’t? Maybe make Lightspring blueish instead.

lightwell-spring

Discipline

With Archangel and Evangelism available all the time (as in, not needing a talent), those of you who are familiar with keeping Archangel stacks active during heated moments will be in good shape. Sadly, Glyph of Power Word: Barrier is gone. Spirit Shell is a new ability which turns Heal, Greater Heal, and Prayer of Healing into absorption shield generators.

About Spirit Shell

  • Will scale with your crit chance
  • Scales with Mastery: Shield Discipline
  • Scales with Grace
  • Unaffected by Archangel
  • Unaffected by Inner Focus
  • Maximum ceiling of ~60% of target health (Tried with different gear combinations, but needs additional verification)

General changes

  • AoE looting. By far the best change of the patch.
  • Battletags. No more having to hand out email addresses anymore. Why couldn’t they have just started with this in the first place?

But wait, there’s more!

Recommended glyphs

For raiding

Prime glyphs have been taken out. But there’s lots of glyph selections now. Take your pick!

Talent notes

Tier 1: Level 15 (Crowd control)

Tier 2: Level 30 (Movement)

  • Body and Soul: If you’re one of the few Priests in raid, great! Suggest using this for pickup raids like the raid finder.
  • Angelic Feather: Anyone who runs over this will gain the speed benefit. If you need additional precision when it comes to targeting, opt for Body and Soul instead. In practice, I’ve seen cases where the wrong person makes up a feather or someone just strolls near it without realizing it.
  • Phantasm: Probably best for PvP. Though there are a few raid encounters which have slowing effects.

Tier 3: Level 45 (Mana)

Tier 4: Level 60 (Defensive)

  • Desperate Prayer: This spell has served me perfectly in previous expansions and it’ll continue to do the same. When you get access to Void Shift at level 87, what I like to do is Void Shift a tank who has low health and then immediately use Desperate Prayer to restore health from the inherited pool I took from the tank.
  • Spectral Guise: Best for PvP.
  • Angelic Bulwark: Neat for not having to worry about your own survivability as much. Think of it as a safety net.

Tier 5: Level 75 (Extra power)

  • Twist of Fate: Don’t underestimate this. An additional 15% healing for 10 seconds if you heal someone below 20%? In a raid environment, it’s possible to keep this buff up for long stretches at a time. Heck, Circle of Healing alone should help maintain it on most bosses.
  • Power Infusion: Available only to the casting Priest.
  • Divine Insight

Tier 6: Level 90 (AoE)

  • Cascade: Loving Cascade for raid play.
  • Divine Star: Best used if the majority of the raid group is stacked together.
  • Halo: Do not use this in dungeons. The potential to unintentionally pull mobs is high (personal experience).

Less than a month to go before panda-monium hits! You’ll be ready and supporting your guild in no time!

Malygos Phase 3 Made Simple

malygos-p3

“Anyone have any tips for Malygos Phase 3?”

This is a common question I’ve seen on my Twitter that I’ve decided to address.

The phase 3 of Malygos is difficult for players the first time they run into it. It generally takes a number of wipes before players figure out what to actually do and how to do it.

When I explain this fight to pickup groups or other guilds, I try to keep things as simple as possible.

Setting up

As phase 2 ends, the entire instance is going to fill with bright, seizure inducing colors.

To make sure everyone’s in sync and starting in the right area, I get everyone to snap and move down to the southern side of the platform. Look on your minimap for this if you have to. I ensure everyone stays together as much as possible.

Note the red dot in the diagram above.

As the platform breaks apart and your raid falls, see to it that no one touches their flight controls. Let Malygos settle down and park himself. Once he does that, the raid leader cues the raid to climb.

Climb directly up until you’re at head level with Malygos. For the remainder of the fight, this is where you’ll be on the Z axis of things. You don’t have to worry about climbing or diving. You and your raid are only going to focus on strafing.

Movement

Note the four dark blue (navy) circles on the map above. Those are going to be the 4 points everyone will navigate to.

Now that the raid is head level and starting at the south position, you’re going to move towards the east, north, west, before heading back to the south.

In other words, fly counter-clockwise in 90 degree increments. You don’t have to do this constantly. Only move when the raid gets hit with a static field (30 yard AoE damage spell). See a static field? Move east. Another static field? Head north.

For the DPS

Even though I’ll have anywhere from 6 to 7 healers for phases 1 and 2 on Malygos, I’ll specifically jump into the play on phase 3 to help DPS. I like to get another healer to do it with me. This drops healing drakes down to 4 but increases attacking drakes by 2 (or having a net result of 20 firebreathing drakes).

Flame spike: Damaging fire attack that awards a combo point at the cost of 10 energy

Engulf in flames: Finisher that adds a DoT effect. The more combo points, the longer the duration of the DoT. Can stack.

As you can see, the more Flame Spikes you cast, the more DoTs you can add and the longer they last. It takes a while to build up momentum.

For the sake of simplicity and those doing it the first time, I suggest going for a 1-1-1-2 rotation.

On a side note, I think the guild best is currently at 22 stacks. Can’t remember if it was one of my Warlocks, a Hunter, or Kimbo (Ret Pally) who pulled it off.

For the healers

First thing’s first. What you may realize is that your raid frames are going to be useless! They don’t show the health of the drakes! There are a few addons that combat this, but I’m going to assume that you completely forgot to get them.

Press Shift V. This brings up healthbars on to the screen. At this point, you’re going to be relying on heads up healing. In other words, you’ll have to filter out the players with low health bars, target them, and heal them.

Revivify: 10 second HoT. Each application adds 1 combo point. This can stack up to 5 times.

Life Burst: This is an AoE healing finisher which increases your healing done by 50% (and lasts longer per combo point). If you have maxed out combo points (5 of them), the spell will heal around 15000 across all friendly targets within 60 yards.

This is like extreme whack-a-mole.

You may not have combo point indicators so you’ll have to keep track of it mentally in your head. And since Life Burst is a large AoE, you don’t always have to target the weakest drake. Just pick one and slam the key and it should engulf everyone.

For the DPS and healers

Lastly is the Flame Shield mechanic. Any spell that registers combo points will work (Revivify or Flame Spike). The more combo points, the longer the shield.

You’ll want to use this when he targets you with a Surge of Power. Having Deadly Boss Mods installed will cue a large warning on your screen that Malygos is looking at you.

Even though he looks at you, you still have time to build up points to survive. A lot of players will panic when this happens and feel helpless.

Get a grip on yourself and calm down.

When he looks at you, there are 3 seconds before he fires his laser beams. The beams will last 5 seconds. You just need to have the shield up for a portion of it to survive. With luck, your AoE healers can still catch you while the beam is going off to help mitigate some of the damage.

Let me reiterate, you don’t have to have your shield up the entire 5 seconds to survive. So if you’re caught with your pants down without any combo points and he’s looking at you, fire off 2 or 3 combo point spells and hit your shield. You should be able to survive it with slight scale damage.

Reminders

  • Run south going into phase 3
  • When Malygos levels up, climb up to him and reach head level
  • Strafe in 90 degree increments going counter clockwise
  • DPS: 1-1-1-2
  • Healers: 3-3-3-3-3-4 and press Shift V to toggle health bars
  • Don’t panic when he catches you with no combo points since you still have time

Good luck and good hunting!

Priests: Matt Needs Your Help!

My bosses at WoW Insider have commissioned me to write a piece on how Priests will change in Wrath. Specifically, how we can adapt to all the changes that are going on. But, I need your help. I’ve played Naxx and Obsidian Sanctum extensively. I’ve done a few 5 mans. Things have become second nature to me now.

Ask me questions. I’m giving myself 72 hours so I can have this piece for your Sunday morning consumption. 24 hours right now to gather as many questions as possible, another 24 to pick out the ones that I think are the most important, and another 24 to go in game, get the shots, get the techniques, and get the evidence I need to share with you what I’m doing and why.

Paladins, Druids, Shammies sorry, I can’t help you here. But feel free to ask anyway! Maybe you have some questions about synergy between other healing classes. It doesn’t have to be just Priests.

I’ve dedicated myself to helping this community. But I can’t do it alone. There’s no such thing as a stupid question.

I’ll be pulling questions from this Plusheal thread that Doug started and from any comments that I garner from here as well.

6 Signs You Masturbate Too Much

We all do it at some point, but we all deny it. Yet we do it because it brings us pleasure and sometimes we have to hide it from other people. Obviously as this is a WoW based blog, I am referring to WoW masturbation. It can be incredibly unhealthy for you. If you start noticing the following signs, start looking for help right away.

Tired

1: Extreme Fatigue

You start feeling tired throughout the day. Why? Because you have been up all night again playing with your toons. Your eyes are nearly blood shot. When you go to bed, your hands are shaking incessantly from the surge of Red Bull and coffee. But you still do it anyway because it’s only one more attempt. Then two. And it slowly snowballs after that. Before you know it, it’s 3 AM and you have to get up at 5.

2: Self-Admiration

So you got yourself some nice shiny purples and you are spending most of your time checking yourself out and showing yourself off to everyone you know. Damn, man! Go and do something with all that gear and make yourself useful, eh?

3: Obsession

You have to fire it up every day because you can’t seem to get satisfied.
You have to finish every quest.
You have to get the best possible gear.
You need to farm as much gold as possible in case the economy crashes.

Hell, you ARE the economy!

4: Can no longer perform

You just can’t keep it up anymore when you’re depended on. Your marks are slowly dropping away. You’re blowing off important emails from Bob in accounting while you’re busy reading up on your favourite blog. Your productivity in life is slowly withering away top the point where you can’t seem to look yourself in the mirror anymore.

5: Losing touch with people

Your friends don’t even bother inviting you to Friday night poker because they know Friday’s a raid night for you (sniff). But that’s okay, because you need the money that you would have lost to pay off your WoW bills. Your boyfriend or girlfriend has to buy the game just to speak with you and hold a conversation. Normally I would suggest watching TV, but with the writer’s strike happening…

6: Physical pain

This one applies to me. My back hurts. It’s probably due to sitting down in one position for too long. It pays to get up once in a while and walk around the house. In fact, I’ve made a conscious effort to get out of my room and my house at times to grab some coffee. Most of my blog posts are being written via pen and paper initially before being typed on my computer. During long raids, I like to fix myself something to drink. If your joints start feeling sore and your limbs are feeling cramped, change your posture or consider playing standing up for a few minutes. Learn some Yoga.

Here’s an idea I’ve been thinking about: Everytime you wipe, do 10 push ups.

Hopefully these telltale signs will be noticed by you in time for you to act upon them. If you think you have a problem, seek help immediately. There’s actually an Online Gamers Anonymous. Consider seeking counseling or other extreme forms of treatment. If you think you have the will, then you might be able to quit WoW cold turkey by uninstalling the game in order to get your life back on track. Video game addiction is being considered for the DSM. Let’s not forget that people have died from WoW.

Remember, WoW is only healthy in moderation!