The Daily Quest : healing

How Should I Enchant My New Staff?

matticus — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:52:29 GMT

I am now packing some serious heat. Well, no not really. But my healing has gone up slightly. Before, my main weapon was the Crystalheart Pulse-Staff which dropped from Mag. Now I have the Ethereum Life-Staff which drops from Solarian in Tempest Keep. Actually, they both look the same. The Crystalheart is the same model except the crystals on either end are red.

Anyway, let's compare the stats. For raid simulation (and the fact that I still had the buffs going from Tempest Keep), I consumed the three main Priest consumables:

Flask of Mighty Restoration
Superior Mana Oil
Blackened Sporefish

I applied the mana oil to both of my staves just so I could save myself the trouble of having to do math. I can keep Mallet suspended until I raid with him again on Thursday anyway. Remember, I do not have any raid buffs on other than consumables. Take a look at the following shot:

First, let's keep in mind that my Crystalheart Pulse-Staff has a +81 Healing enchant on it whereas my Ethereum Life-Staff has no enchants on it. I lost a small piece of healing crit chance, but I'm not worried about that too much. I also see a decrease in my healing by 30 points.

The above shot is the Crystalheart and the below shot is that of the Ethereum.

Comparison

The stat points were fairly marginal at best. I gained 1 stamina and lost 6 intellect (10 health, 60 mana). But look at the amount of Spirit that I gained. I picked up a whopping 62 spirit. A quick glance on the tooltip on the side shows that I lose 4 mp5 while casting, but I gain 23 mp5 while not casting.

So herein lies the dilemma. My original intent was to use one staff as my main healing staff and the other one to regenerate mana. Now I'm wondering which one to use for which.

I'm seriously considering putting Spellsurge on the Ethereum because I want to help my party out a bit more. I'm almost positive I can guarantee the effect to proc when the hidden cooldown is up.

Most raiding encounters are endurance based. They depend on how long you can keep your assigned tanks alive instead of how much you can keep them alive for. Since I already have 81 Healing on my Crystalheart, it seems kind of weird (AND STUPIDLY EXPENSIVE) to re-enchant it again with Spellsurge and put 81 Healing on my new Ethereum.

I lose the nice 4 MP5 while casting with the new staff. As a raiding Priest, I'm not going to be idling. I'm going to be using my global cooldown fairly often by tossing renews and PoMs everywhere. I will rarely, if ever, get chances to sit and just regen my mana. No one in my Guild uses Spellsurge at the moment. But maybe I can influence them to create a Spellsurge mana endurance group.

It looks so easy when you're comparing enchants on 1 weapon. When you're working with 2, it makes it a little more difficult because now you have to start planning for different scenarios.

How much mana do I gain as I'm casting spells? How much mana do I gain when I'm not? How much healing do I lose? Is the decrease in healing worth the extra longevity? How much mana do I gain back if I were to be innervated? What will benefit my healing the most? What will benefit my raid the most? Even now it's not an easy question for me to answer. Everything looked so simple the first time when I compared 81 Healing with Spellsurge. But there's a lot more to take into account when you are a raiding Priest.

Any healers out there? Discussion of any kind would help. Maybe there's a point that I've forgotten.

Like what you're reading? Matticus runs his own blog over at worldofmatticus.com. Come by, check it out, and drop him a line!

The 12 Hour Raid

matticus — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:41:43 GMT

I didn't really want to do it. It just... happened! Honestly!

12 PM to 330 PM

Keruen and I set up a half Carnage raid to go in to Zul'Aman (We didn't actually start pulls until 1 PM). We spent a few hours in there downing Bear Boss easily within three shots. The Robes of Heavenly Purpose dropped. Unfortunately, I was on my Resto Shaman so they went to Keruen since he was the only healing priest in there. I think we're a few weeks from being able to go for the time trials. We don't have a consistent number of personnel to go in with at the moment. Then we tried clearing to Lynx, but we had a number of players drop out. By then it was around 315 and with our SSC raid starting in a few minutes, we had no choice but to abandon it.

330 PM to 9 PM

Spent the 30 minutes getting something to eat and getting flasks and such (By the way, you know all those Apexis Shards you have? There's a use for them now at the Ogrila Quartermaster as you can use them to purchase Level 55 Potions for 50 shards and some silver).

Lady Vashj started off well enough. We were able to get her consistently into Phase 3. The main things that were killing us was a combination of Static Charges and poisons. After some more minor adjustments, Lady Vashj went down fairly cleanly as evidenced by my new Flickr shot. Her loot? Well, nothing I would be interested in:

Vestments of the Sea-Witch Krakken-Heart Breastplate A Champion and a Defender token

Then we jaunted over to Tempest Keep and here's where the fun began.

Al'ar went down after two shots. Void Reaver apparently has been modified or something. I noticed his bolts now come at us in an arcing fashion. I don't know if that has altered the speed at which they arrive, but we had some issues with him for tonight and wiped about 4 times before we killed him. By this time, it was about 830 PM and that gave us only one shot at Solarian.

We didn't get her down sadly. I really want her Ethereum Life-Staff. It's a fairly sizeable upgrade over my Crystalheart Pulse-Staff. What I plan to do is slap 81 Healing on one of them and Spellsurge on the other. I haven't quite yet decided which for which.

9 PM - 12 AM

My real life friends and I decided to go in and tackle Zul'Aman. This time, I would go in as my Priest. We came, we saw, and we conquered the Bear Boss after 4 attempts. Ironically, the same Robes that dropped earlier in the day dropped for me again and the other Priests were kind enough to pass them (We had four, COUNT 'EM FOUR Priests).

After that, we strolled over to the Eagle Boss. We didn't have a Rogue and could not exploit the gauntlet, but we did discover something intriguing.

One of the Shadow Priests had the brilliant idea of mind controlling one of the spawns that come up behind us. Shortly thereafter, the gauntlet waves stopped. The Troll he mind controlled disappeared. We were initially stunned at first but continued to press forward. Sure enough, the Troll on the steps who we're supposed to kill was not there. Like the Rogue infinite sap technique that GMW informed us about, I fully expect this one to get fixed at some point in the future. It was an interesting bug, to say the least. We didn't let it to go waste either.

Eagle boss went down in one shot. The Mojo-mender's Mask dropped. It went to our Elemental Shaman. Sweet deal indeed. We started plowing on over to Lynx Boss but we alas, we could not complete it due to people having to leave again.

Aftermath

I still had plenty of energy. I haven't done one of these in a long time. I know there's no way I'd be able to consistently do something like this. But it was fun all the same. Most of my work was completed on Saturday so I had the entire Sunday free. All of that just to upgrade my PMC Robes.

By the way, for all you aspiring Priests out there, I made my Primal Mooncloth Robe since the end of March. It is now halfway through November. Those Robes lasted me seven and a half months before I upgraded to the ones I have today. I cannot stress the uberness of those Robes anymore then this.

Sure you can try to gun for the Opera ones, but really the odds of that dropping have been quite minor for me. I have never seen it drop on my Priest. Not only do you need to get the correct boss, there's the item randomness factor. So bear that in mind if you decide to wait.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, we raided Zul'Aman with four Priests. One of them was Discipline specced with Pain Suppression. Amazingly, he worked out great! On bosses like the Bear where tanks were taking enormous amounts of burst damage, he activated Pain Suppression which made healing much easier. There were a lot of clutch moments. His healing wasn't terribly gimped either. I encourage more raiding groups to consider the viability of a Discipline priest until we can fully ascertain it's benefits. But for the most part, it looks good. Real good.

Matticus is currently sitting at school praying he doesn't get snowed in. Read move over at worldofmatticus.com.

Raiding with an Alt character

matticus — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 00:05:59 GMT

I just received clearance from my GM to raid in SSC with Saphfira. I know the last couple of posts had me express disappointment in my class, but that's not the case. Mallet is my favourite character out of all of them. Let me explain the situation here. It only recently occurred to me that Carnage raids with four active Priests. Three of them are Holy and one is Shadow. I've never really played a DPS class at all throughout my WoW career. Even right now, Saphfira is Restoration specced. We only have one Shaman and she's Enhancement. We've been sharding a ridiculous amount of mail healing gear. Last night in SSC, 3 mail healing items dropped (also 5 of 6 SSC bosses dropped within 3 hours which is a big plus in terms of progression).

Luckily, Maeve understood the point I was trying to make so I didn't have to waste my breath explaining my situation. But here was the argument I was going to make: Three Holy Priests means theres going to be more competition for gear. Having a Resto Shaman would increase the diversity of the raid and not allow healing loot to be wasted. It's basically another group getting totem buffs. Healing power isn't going to go down a whole lot. It's not like I'm requesting to swap Mallet for an Elemental Shaman. So it's a pound for pound trade of healer for healer.

Is this something I really want? No, because I absolutely love playing my Priest. But having three Holy priests in the raid means its going to take three times as long for us of them to get geared up.

But we spent so much time gearing up Mallet and he'll be wasted

Well no, it's not an either/or situation. Mallet is clearly a superior healer in comparison to Saphfira in every respect. I think there may be certain encounters where having a Wrath of Air totem and a Mana Spring might provide some extra punch. It's not like I'm going to stop raiding with both of them. Healing has always been my calling. Even back when I played Guild Wars, I had a Monk/Elemental (In PvP, I'd make an E/Mo which still cracks me up every time I see it). It's also not like I'm going to be competing with another Resto Shaman in raids for gear either. There isn't that much of a loss that's occurring. It will be a huge benefit for everyone else because then I will be spending my DKP twice as much.

That's another interesting ethical question that I've also had to wrestle with. How do I deal with gear? I've always been for progression. There will be mace and shield drops and that there is direct competition against Paladins. I'm fairly certain that I have more DKP then they do. But it wouldn't be right for me to exercise option and bid. Damn all of these morals and ethics courses they make us take for Criminology.

I'm worried that there might be some contempt or that raiding with Saphfira would raise a few eyebrows here and there. I sincerely hope not. Really though, I'd rather prefer to raid with Mallet if I could. But raiding with four Priests made me think that could I not be utilized better if I brought a Resto Shaman instead.

In any case, it will still take some time before she's up to SSC status. Here's the highlights of her gear right now:

3/5 T4 (head, gloves, shoulders)
Nightbane's Healing Staff and Neck
5/5 S2 Gear (Just for the pants)
Netherspite's Mail Chestpiece
Gruul's healing trinket

Saphfira presently sports approximately 1550 +healing. That is nowhere near high enough for Mag+ raids. There are some improvements that can be made:

A better mace to go with the Chess Shield (Essence Focuser)
Honor Hold head enchant
81 Healing enchant to weapon

That should shoot her + healing to around 1660 and should last against encounters such as Mag, and VR.

Has anyone else had similar cases where they wanted to raid with alts? Did your guild shoot you down or guilt you into not using your alt? I'm lucky to be playing two support classes. I'm also lucky to be in such an awesome Guild where the leadership can understand what it is that I'm offering.

This brings up another question. How do Guilds handle alts for loot? Do they draw from the same character (IE, both Mallet's and Saphfira's DKP are cumulative) or are they separate (Both Mallet and Saphfira earn separate DKP and are exclusive from one another).

Matt's bitchin' about lectures where people don't leave early enough. You can read more over at http://www.worldofmatticus.com.

Not... really a nightmare?

matticus — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:55:34 GMT

Turns out my response to Leiandra's post garnered a whole slew of responses of my own. I remain vigilantly aware of Blizzard's upcoming changes to our class. Our class evolution has gone from Grand Master Healer to a support medic on the front lines. That's all we are really... a support class. Sure we've got all of our awesome tools at our disposal. When's the last time anyone's really used Holy Nova on a tactically beneficial level? Last time I spammed Holy Nova was against a certain red dragon in Blackwing Lair. But that's when mana was infinite. Pwyff's comments were bang on when summarizing the strength of each healing class.

If we truly were the end all and be all of all healers, there would be no need for hybrid healers like Paladins, Shamans, and Druids. All raids would be filled with nothing but Priests. The reason why there is a sort of parity along the healing classes is because Blizzard wanted to make raiding flexible for a large amount of players. If all a raid needed were Priests, then the other healers would sit out and be unused. There had to be some kind of equality so that classes could be kind of interchangeable.

Anyone like problem solving? I love problem solving. Chances are, if you're playing WoW, you like problem solving. If you think about it, WoW is a big giant puzzle that's meant to be solved. This is one of the assignments I had for homework in my cognitive science class. So here's a puzzle for you<strong>:</strong>

<strong>The scenario</strong>

Three Human Priests and three Orcs arrive at Menethil Harbor, and they all wish to cross to Kalimdor. Fortunately, there is a boat, but unfortunately, the boat can only hold two creatures at one time. Orcs are vicious creatures, and whenever there are more orcs than Priests on one side of the river, the orcs will immediately attack the Priests and slaughter them. You must be certain that you never leave more orcs than Priests on any side of the maelstrom. How should the problem be solved? The foul orcs can be trusted to bring the boat back safely. There must be one creature in the boat to pilot it. If the Kalimdor shore has an Orc, and there is an inbound Orc and a Priest, the Priest will be ripped to shreds even though they're on the boat.

The problem is solvable with a minimum of 11 steps. I'll post a solution later. If you solve it, don't spit out the solution in comments yet, but DO say that you figured it out.

Matticus is wondering how on earth he's going to get the 20 potions, 2 flasks, and other consumables needed for raiding within 30 minutes before SSC tonight. You can read more over at http://www.worldofmatticus.com/.

My Nightmare as a Priest

matticus — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:10:22 GMT

I'm reading Leiandra's post on the different types of healers and their functions. After reading some of the comments there, I felt like this merited a direct post reply on it's own instead of a comment. I wager I'm one of the few players to have rolled all four healer classes. I've only raided with three of them (Priest, Shaman, and Paladin while my Druid is on the backburner somewhere at the early 50 level). Some of the comments I've read made me raise my eyebrow.

Elinor

I know my comparison is somewhat simplistic, but taking away +healing gear (should be the same for priest or paladin) a paladin's biggest heal with appropriate talents is a 2.5 sec cast for 2740(840 mana). A priest with appropriate talents has a 2.5 sec cast for 3062(825 mana). Of course there is a talent for paladins to reduce that cast time by .5 for the next 15 sec, and the 3062 for priest doesn't include the talent to increase it by 25% of spirit. Also a druid has a 3.0 sec direct heal for 3517 (935 mana).

Firstly, that's an unfair comment to make. If you're going to compare healers, the assumption should be made that they are talented to the best healing spec available. There's no point in comparing supposed healing classes without full and complete talents because there isn't a player in WoW who raid heals with no talents spent in their appropriate healing trees. Don't compare base heals or stats either because certain races and classes have a higher advantage over the other. If you're going to compare healing output, then add an arbitrary base healing number that seems fair (like +1500 healing). Please, if you're going to compare one class with another, make realistic comparisons.

So here's the million dollar question. Is there one healing class better than another? It depends entirely on the encounter and on the situation. Let's hypothetically say that there's a 25 man raid team about to engage a boss. It's your standard tank and spank encounter. Nothing special about it. Except for the fact that Crosbane, our boss, hits like a freight train for 30 minutes. Most healers would run out of gas long before those thirty minutes are up. Pally's, not so.

They're the energizer bunnies of WoW. They keep going, and going, and going. It's true that as a Priest, we have the 5 second rule to fall back on and we would gain a crapload of mana back. Realistically, we don't have that kind of option. If we don't heal for five seconds, our assignments are dead. I suppose the best we can hope for is to light up a PoM, a Renew, and a Shield. That would us a few precious seconds to regen our mana. Then the boss crits.

Pally's own us Priests, period. There's a reason why many high end raiding Guilds no longer run Holy Priests as healers. We're a dying breed. Sure we bring a lot of specialist skills like PW:S and Prayer of Healing, but well timed spam heals from Paladins keep everything going. The reason I agree with your assessment about Paladins being the King of Healing is because they would never run out of mana in endurance fights. I'm busy struggling and blowing my potions, yelling for Innervates, Mana Tides, using my Shadow Fiend, and theres Joe Paladin in the corner just spamming Rank 5 Flash of Light over there. Couple 3 Paladins, a Shadow Priest, and a Resto Shaman with buffed mana spring totems and you have a group that can heal indefinitely.

My WWS in Carnage shows our Healers with four Paladins constantly on top all the time. Master Harth, High Priest that he is, leads the way in over all heals so there is hope for us yet.

But you can't expect WWS to illuminate the numbers for us all the time. It only shows us one side of the story. Different Healers are best suited for different encounters.

Take an encounter like Fathom-Lord in SSC for example. There are four bosses that need to be tanked. The Hunter boss spawns a pet every now and then, and the tank that's tanking him needs to draw aggro on it as well. So here is this one tank that's getting his ass handed to him by two Ford F-150's. On top of that, there's a freakin' Whirlwind type thing that comes around and throws me in the air every once in a while. I'm so focused on my raid health that I always seem to miss it coming by. If it weren't for my instant spells, he would be dead. Thankfully, the Hunter boss is the second boss that needs to die. With the damage input that Thor (my tank) is taking, it's impossible to sustain it for more then a few minutes. Eventually, I would hit a time where my potion cooldown is used, my shadowfiend timer is down, and all the innervates have been used. In this short period of time, I would excel in my role no problem. I don't have to keep him alive for an abysmally long time. Just enough to weather the storm.

Compare this to the last boss, the Fathom Lord himself. Initially Lang is over there with a Paladin. This Boss is last on the food chain. Paladins need to be able to keep Lang alive for at least seven minutes. Oh, and they have to heal themselves too. Lang may not be taking as much burst damage as Thor was, but he's taking a beating for a longer amount of time.

Do you see the point I'm trying to make here? It's nearly impossible to compare all the healing classes together. Each brings a different set of skills to the table. With the encounters in end game, I suspect that Paladins are better suited and utilized more often then not. As a Priest, I have enough spells at my disposal to react quickly enough to salvage a raid in case anything goes wrong. A Paladin won't be able to recover as much. But their long term efficiency is so good that there is little reason for raids to go in the crapper.

Sooner or later, our class will go the way of the Dodo bird. Aside from broccoli, that is my greatest fear with Holy Priests rendered inert, useless, and outclassed in every aspect. I guess I better start accumulating Shadow Gear. Good thing I have a Paladin and a Shaman to fall back on.

Matticus is taking a break from studying for his midterm in an hour. You can read more over at [www.worldofmatticus.com www.worldofmatticus.com].

My Raiding Interface

matticus — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:02:32 GMT

There has been a flurry of Raiding interface posts (courtesy of Kirk and Galadria). I'm going to show a screen shot of mine in a moment and label all the present addons in the screen. But first, I want to show you an addon that will blow your mind away as a healer and make you drool. Check out the following shots:

Now that I've caught your attention, you will most likely be asking yourself "OMG WTF IS THAT?". This, my friends, is a raid user interface called http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/7738/" Pitbull]. You can find a copy from Curse Gaming.

As you've seen from the shots above, it has a special feature which functions like bullet tracers. It graphically generates a line from you and your raidmates to the players they are healing so you can visually see on your screen who is healing who, with what heal, and when it hits in real time. Is that not mindblowingly awesome? It's like little lasers! Now healers can really pew pew. I believe the numbers you see on their names are the estimated heal amount.

But there is a problem.

With all the graphic generation, heal calculation, and so on and so forth, you will need a nuclear reactor to power your computer. As much as I want to run this, I know my computer would buckle especially in a raiding environment. So to you healers who have kickass machines, give this a shot. It's got a ton of more features as well, but that part caught my eye the most.

Here's the interface that I use. Make a note of the numbers that I photoshopped in there:

1: This is singlehandedly the most important addon you will ever use in your WoW Raiding career. You can skimp out on the heal addons, and the threat addons, and the pretty addons. But get Deadly Boss Mods. It highlights important knowledge and phases during your encounters. It is an absolute must.

2: X-Perl Unit Frames is my primary UI of choice when interacting with my party and my raid. It boasts a whole slew of options and is compatible with CT Raid, oRA2 and a few others. It's able to show me the target of my target's target (four windows). It can show all MT targets. It shows who's targeting you. It shows who's also assisting you. It also shows players with buffs that you can provide. It's an easy way to spot if a player is missing Fortitude or DS. It's also got a built in range finder, spell cooldown (you can see how long before you need to refresh renew), if the raid is down it shows who has soulstones or Shaman's self res active, and most importantly, your screen flashes if you pull aggro.

3: I use Bongos 2 to manage my extensive array of options and choices for my bars. If you look really carefully, you can even see the way I bind my keys. It allows me to flexibly move my map, my bars, my FPS and castbars all around. Note that I don't have my menu's or my bags on screen (I rely on Esc. and Shift + B for that respectively). I cannot emphasize the use of shortcut keys enough.

4: I like my map square so I can see more surface area. Thank you Squeenix. It doesn't really affect raiding at all, but alas.

5: I didn't like the way Blizzard organized my buffs, so I turned to CT_Buffmod. I do believe you need to download the core, however...

6: KLH Threatmeter (or KTM)]. It's a way to graphically view your own aggro and threat generation. Normally I disable the view but keep the transmission enabled to free up more real estate on the screen. A lot of my colleagues have suggested Omen due to its ability to track multiple aggro tables. Personally, it isn't a factor for me because all I want to do is transmit my own threat. I spend more time viewing health bars then I do threat levels.

7: Finally the last one I use is Natur EnemyCastBar so that I can see at a glance what is being cast by my target. It's an excellent tactical addon to download to help you prepare for any incoming spells or attacks. Allows you to deliver an appropriate and timely response.

There ya go! That's how my setup is at currently and it's served me well. It delivers a lot of information that I need so I can calculate my next move.

Matticus forgot to turn off autojoin for Alterac Valley while healing for Gruul and wiped the raid. You can read more over at http://www.worldofmatticus.com

81 Healing vs Spellsurge

matticus — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 06:41:55 GMT

Here is an important question that needs to be answered. You've hit 70 and you just got that ultimate 1H mace or that ultimate healing staff. What enchant do I put on it? Do I want an additional +81 Healing or Spellsurge? Neither of them are cheap to begin with but both will really benefit healers. But, let the analysis begin.

81 Healing

This enchant increases the amount of healing you can potentially do by 81. It's sold by a vendor (Almaador, at the center of town) and requires you to be revered to learn how to perform the enchant.

Spellsurge

This enchant offers a unique mechanic in that it does not offer a constant benefit like 81 Healing does. It's a random world drop so you might have a better chance of winning the lottery instead of getting it. The tooltip suggests that it has a 3% chance of proccing the effect which provides 100 mana over a period of 10 seconds to your entire party. But for the effect to occur, your party members need to be within 30 yards of each other.

Analysis

So which is the better one to get? 81 Healing will increase your healing by that amount. Assuming you heal for 1000 points without any modifiers, then 1000 casts of that same flash heal will net about 1,081,000 healed. But Spellsurge restores mana over time. Furthermore the effect stacks from multiple players who have that enchant on their weapon. So, if 5 players had it and all 5 procced, you're looking at 500 mana over 10 seconds to everybody in the party. I've seen on the WoW Forums as well as WoWWiki that the actual proc percentage is approximately 15%. If you're in the raid environment, it wouldn't work if all 25 players had it. It applies strictly to your party within the raid. It's important to keep in mind that Spellsurge has a hidden cooldown of approximately 50 seconds. That means that if you kept spamming any kind of spell, the Spellsurge effect can only happen once every 50 seconds assuming it does proc.

Ideally, I'd be able to test this in a lab setting with three groups: An experimental group with all 81 healing, an experimental group with all Spellsurge, and control group. But alas, I don't have access to such resources.

The Argument for 81 Healing

If you don't see yourself raiding very often or if you are placed in a group that does not have a whole lot of other casters in it, then you will want to augment your own heals and add that extra power. Who needs Spellsurge if you're going to be the poor guy who has to sacrifice 81 healing so that everyone else in your party can get that extra mana back?

The Argument for Spellsurge

On the other hand, as you progress through the game you will begin to encounter bosses that will test your endurance. If you can work with four other spellcasters and agree to get this enchant, your longevity will increase by a lot. You will see a lot of mana returned. More mana means you last longer, right? Utilitarianism is the the concept of the day.

The Middle Ground

Get both. All you really need is two weapons. Don't forget that you can switch weapons while in combat. So slap Spellsurge on a mace that as mp5 or Spirit or something that helps you regenerate mana. Keep your 81 Healing on the weapon that you use most of the time. If you start running out of gas, switch from your Healing mace to your Spellsurge mace and let the rest of the group know. Now if you really want to be fancy, pick up another mace or staff which has high intellect and put 30 Int on it. Equip it before the encounter so you have a high starting mana pool. Once you get a spell or two off, switch back to your healing mace. You will essentially be getting an extra flash heal or two. That's my personal opinion. Be flexible, adapt your enchants to your needs.

Anyways, back to Fathomlord now. We were able to take down the Shaman and the Priest. Pretty good progress... 3 more hours left. I love my macbook. It lets me blog and raid at the same time. Doing it in windowed mode will lag. I'm tempted to install WoW on it and see how it performs, but I purchased my Macbook purely for academic reasons.

EDIT: Fathomlord down at 9:52.

EDIT: Whoops, I forgot to mention that your flash heal doesn't get the full bonus from 81 healing. Just keep that in mind if you're ever doing your own calculations. I don't remember the exact formula off the top of my head, but I'm sure that new Curse wiki for WoW will have it.

Matticus is presently busy chilling in Serpentshrine Cavern while awaiting a res. Read more at http://www.worldofmatticus.com

Healing a Raid: A Priestly Perspective

matticus — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:20:18 GMT

To end off the week, I will help all of you budding raiding priests who have never joined any groups larger then 10 (AV an exception). Yeah, you the one who has never once set foot inside MC or BWL or Naxx or Zul’Gurub or any of those old fun instances that we used to do before. By the end of this column, my hope is that you will be able to excel and surpass the expectations of your raid leader.

I wont touch on the spells specifically and what they can do. You leveled from 1 to 70 on your own. If you don’t know the capabilities of the tools at your disposal, then you have no business playing a Priest. But I will guide you on when you should use them.

Your raid makeup could consist of a variety of different healer classes. More often then not, you as a priest would make up several of those slots. Let’s now for the sake of argument pretend that you’ve been assigned the dreaded task of maintaining te health of your raid as opposed to healing a single person. It’s such a daunting task healing 4 other players in a party. Now you’re responsible for 24 others. What do I do?

Let’s check out the toolkit. There’s a reason why Blizzard gave us to much stuff to work with.

Renew: Cast this on targets that have taken hits but are not expected to take damage again. Examples would include mages, hunters, or other ranged DPS (maybe rogues). It’s a relatively cheap heal over time spell where you don’t need to tie up your 1.5s cast time or our 2.5s cast time. But don’t forget to stack these up with Renews from other priests. Our main tank sometimes has up to Renews on him at any given time.

Flash Heal: I tend to downrank my heals a little bit here for two reasons: 1) Reduces mana cost 2) Less overhealing done. I’ll use a flash heal between ranks 4 – 6 depending on the situation at hand. In some cases, I will use a max rank flash heal just because tanks are taking so much damage that my heals are only maintaining his health instead of restoring it up. Used mainly on players taking damage frequently such as the main tank or in an emergency.

Greater Heal: The big brother of Flash heal. This one I keep max ranked. You don’t have to. Its entirely up to you and your playing style. Drop these ones on your main tank or your assigned healing target.

PW: Shield: There appears to be much controversy over the usage of this spell. Philosophically, I disagree with many other priests on how and when it should be used. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Your duty is to the raid. If spamming shields every 40 seconds is the only way to do it, then you spam it and you like it. Usually though, I will cast it if a tank jumps from 100% to 40% (or any number below 10000 health). These bosses hit like a freight train on afterburners. I’ve seen players get taken out with an 8k crit followed up by an 11k special attack. I am one paranoid priest.

Prayer of Healing: Don’t spam flash heal 5 times to heal your party. It’s a huge waste of time. Just drop a Prayer repeatedly until everyone’s back to full. 3 seconds on a prayer versus 7.5 seconds on flash heals. Usually, once the boss executes some sort of AoE damage which nails your group, you’ll want to cast this.

Prayer of Mending: Use in case of an emergency. The amount of damage it heals is a little more then the amount of damage received. But I am referring to a normal hit not a special attack at will knock off a good portion of the tanks health.

In case of emergency, break open glass

You’ll remember the other day I wrote about what Priests should do in the event they have pulled aggro. Here’s the other side of the equation: What to do if the tank has less than 10% health and in imminent danger where he could die and wipe the raid. Follow this process to ensure maximum possible survival.

1 – PW: Shild (Prevent further damage) 2 – Prayer of Mending (Mitigate further damage done) 3 – Renew (Constant heals) 4 – Flash Heal (Fastest way to heal. We’re concerned about time now) 5 - Repeat step 4 until he’s back up. Use shield’s again if your assignment’s health is questionable.

Other Healers

Usually, if there’s other healers on the tank, you’ll have no idea what kind of spell they’re casting. But here, time is of the essence. Drop flash after flash until he’s back in the game. Let other healers drop the big heals. Either way, get your assignment topped off. If you and your other heal happen to both drop big heals simultaneously, there’s a 3 second window where the tank could get critical’d and spontaneously die. You don’t want this to happen so be on the safe side and spam flash.

Exercises

So here, I took random screenshots through the past few raids with our raiders at various stages of decay. More often then not, you’ll encounter such similar situations. Take a look at them and think to yourself what you would do, who you would heal first, and why.

Here is shot number one. Light damage has only been applied to the raid. Matticus (Mallet) is in the uber healing group. Lang is down 25% (our main tank) and Bdon (an off tank) has also sustained hits as well as the rest of the melee DPS in his group. Although you can't tell, I have Lang selected. But it looks like Cheever also has him selected too. So my play here is to deselect and drop a prayer of healing to top off the group. Then I'd probably take care of the rest of the DPS.

This shot was taken too late. But look at the assist window on the right. This shows us who is healing Lang: All five of us. If that happens, just move off of him and take care of someone else, like Bdon.

Ah, our first casualties of the night. Going to save my own skin and heal myself. There's no real danger at this point so long as the tanks are still alive. We lost a healer (with 6 left) and an off tank (with 3 left). No big loss, no sense of panicking.

Again, cursor on Lang shows that I'm not the only one on him. Renew, Prayer, move on. Let the Priest and the Paladin on him take over with flashes and greater heals. Dropped renews on everybody on group 5 and group 3 that was wounded. Keep the shield cooldown on standby in case Lang gets spiked again.

Now we've got some real pressure applied to the raid here. A lot of damage has been done and the raid is in various health states. I included my target of target of target window along with my Nature Enemy Cast Bar (NECB). Seeing how my group is wounded, I light off a Prayer of Healing. Then I noticed Mirri was also in the process of casting and is closer to getting the heal off. I cancel my prayer, and default to healing the tanks starting with Lang and Bdon. Once they're up, I ease off and begin my renew cycle on DPS.

Now we've got some serious problems. We're down a healer and the tanks are taking serious damage (465 doesn't seem like much). When you get to a case where you have multiple tanks with relatively low health, pick one and stick to it until they're topped. I chose Blori and called out in vent "I'm staying on Blori". This cues the other healers and frees them up knowing they don't have to worry about him as much. For example, now Mirri can heal Bdon or Dager can heal Lang without needing to rotate flashing Blori. Communication is important. Let the rest of the healers know who you're healing.

This one was a big giant leap of faith. One of our healers is offline and one of the tanks is under enormous stress. Notice that my target is Maeve. Also take a note that there is only one other healer besides me who has Maeve targeted. Bdon is a hit away from going under. But seeing as the assist window only shows two healers out of six who have Maeve targeted, it stands to reason that the other 4 must most likely be on Bdon. There is no other player in the raid who is prioritized higher then he is. Although there is no way to say for sure (unless I clicked him to determine the assists), I do believe it's a logical conclusion to make.

In any case, you may or may not encounter such situations like that in the future. Just remember, if one person dies, it's not the end of the raid even if it is the main tank. Hopefully, your off tanks are quick enough to jump in and snap up the loose mob. The important thing is to develop your own style of healing and work with the others in your group. Don't panic. Keep your cool and prioritize your targets. Good luck!

Matticus just finished farming up 5000 gold for his epic mount on his Shaman so that he can farm faster and more efficiently. Read more at http://www.worldofmatticus.com.

The Oh $#@& Reaction

matticus — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:02:34 GMT

Very sorry about the lack of updates. I've been overwhelmed with school. It's only the first week and I've already been hit with several assignments! But it's okay, because everything is fine now. I've gotten my time back from the hecticness of school. After perusing my daily dosage of blogs from my fellow Priests, here's [http://egotisticalpriest.omen-guild.net one that I want to share.

Ego provides an excellent overview of what to do when you pull a lot of mobs towards you without needing to. Her first rule in a nutshell? Don't move, don't worry, and most importantly don't panic. In a party, getting aggro at worst will wipe the entire group. In a raid, getting aggro at worst will wipe the entire raid, rack up hundreds of gold in repair bills, and http://www.worldofmatticus.com/2007/0.../optimize-your-raiding-time/ lose precious time in an instance]. I want to provide you a list of actions that I execute whenever I gain aggro. If you see my spec, you'll notice that I have zero points in Silent Resolve. That means it is quite likely and possible that I will pull aggro. Usually, I don't but lets say for the sake of argument that I have. Most of these have already been repeated in Ego's post, so I'll touch on it briefly and add one more final step that many players overlook.

If you've taken any kind of logic and reasoning course or if you're into computer programming, it's kind of the same way.

If things go to hell, do this else just heal the main tank.

I know that's probably wrong, but I hope you get the idea. Here's my sequence:

1st Option is Fade: Lowers your aggro temporarily. Problem? It's on a 30 second cooldown. So if the mobs are out for healer blood, you have to live at least that long.

2nd Option is PW: Shield: Damage prevention. While you do this, run towards the tank. Don't make them run after you.

3rd Option is Desperate Prayer: Granted, not all of you Priests have access to such a glorious spell. It is the ultimate Oh $#@& button. Take a few blows, then slam it to shoot yourself back to full. If you don't have the ability to cast this spell, then...

4th Option is Prayer of Mending: It's similar to a low cost PW: Shield. On your next hit, you gain this much health. Most of the time, mobs will hit you for under 1000. This spell guarantees that you will survive that one extra hit.

5th Option is to Die: This is slightly different in context but is still worth mentioning. This happened to us the other day. It wasn't our best raid night, but we were in Voidreaver's Room clearing out trash. One of our casters got caught facing the wrong way and got punted into another group. Instead of running towards the raid group and bringing extra mobs, he did the right thing and ran towards them and sacrificed himself to preserve the raid knowing that we were still under pressure from the initial mobs. In a raid environment, your first duty is to your raid. I cannot emphasize or stress this enough. There is only one main tank. There maybe 2 or 3 additional off tanks depending on the encounter, but there is only one main tank. Typically, there are 7 - 9 healers. If you go down it is not the end of the world. Let the others pick up the slack. So again, I will remind you. If you accidentally pull aggro from another group when your raid is not prepared, unequip your weapons and your wand and sacrifice yourself.

My panic buttons on my keyboard: PW: Shield: 1 Fade: 2 Desperate Prayer: 3 Prayer of Mending: Ctrl+1

I usually never bother with binding heal. I almost never use it because I never find the right situation for it. Or I just forget and drop two flash heals instead. I suppose I should start using that more often. But it just feels so... weird.

I'll have another large update tonight after the raid. I have lots of screens and it's all sorted. Now I just need to upload them. Time for us to do some potential Priest theorycrafting and analysis.

In addition to the Daily Quest, Matt runs a WoW blog where you can find more related articles on Priests, Shamans, Guild Management techniques and more. Check it out at http://www.worldofmatticus.com/.

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

matticus — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 11:26:43 GMT

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. But again, this is entirely optional and up to you.

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.