Duct Tape and a Prayer

(Largely copied from my comment on this WOW.com post.)

Yesterday, leading raid guild Ensidia claimed the world-first normal-mode 25-man kill of the Lich King. Last night, it was revealed that they’d used – knowingly or not – a bug that made one part of the encounter significantly easier. Early this morning, according to a blog post by raid member Muqq, they received 72-hour bans for using the exploit, and the achievements and items they gained from the encounter were stripped from the characters who participated in the kill.

Here’s the thing: It’s not about how easy the exploit is. It’s not even about whether Ensidia knew.

This is, to put it bluntly, almost universally a public relations coup for Blizzard. And Ensidia’s doing exactly what Blizzard wants them to do, whether they’re doing it consciously or not.

Consider:

Blizzard hasn’t publicly announced the ban. They know they don’t have to. They know that Ensidia’s going to rear up and complain about it. The people who care – the people who are gunning for firsts, the people who want to know about the fights ahead of time, the people who might exploit – now know that the top guild in the world isn’t immune from consequences; why should they think they will be?

Consider:

Blizzard says “We know about this bug and we’re fixing it as fast as we can.” hours before Ensidia says “They need to fix this bug!” All Ensidia’s doing is highlighting the fact that Blizzard’s on the job. Ensidia aren’t idiots. They know that an encounter that isn’t tested on the PTR is going to have bugs. There’s an in-game way to report bugs for a reason. In their rush to World First, they found a bug, and instead of being responsible as gamers and testing and reporting the bug, they were responsible to their sponsors and their egos and blew through the encounter anyway, and then downplayed the bug after they’d claimed World First.

Consider:

By saying “pull everybody off Cataclysm and put them on fixing this encounter”, Ensidia is saying two things: “the Lich King encounter is really important and everybody should want it to be right as soon as possible”, and “Cataclysm is huge, and its developers are the best at Blizzard”.

Ensidia isn’t even really taking heat – they just cool their heels for 72 hours and everybody rallies behind them for being underdogs. (Look at the comments here!) And Blizzard gets everything it wants – and all it took was a 72-hour ban. (Hell, I’m tempted to think that they knew about the bug and left it in on purpose.)

Inspired by Dawn over on WOW Insider, here are my thoughts on meta gems for priest healers, very quickly (and leaving out the gems that are clearly not healing gems):

• Beaming Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and +2% mana. The extra mana will vary depending on your current mana pool; the crit chance means that if you’re Disc, you’ll get another Divine Aegis for every 217 spells you cast, or 1-2 more per fight.
• Bracing Earthsiege: No. Gives 25 spell power and 2% reduced threat. Only take this one if you’re having trouble on the threat meters, which hopefully you aren’t.
• Chaotic Skyflare: No. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and 3% increased critical damage. That’s important. It’s tempting to think “oh, they mean “critical spell effect”. They don’t. It’s just damage. Steer clear.
• Destructive Skyflare: No. Gives bout 0.55% crit chance and 1% chance that offensive spells that target you will hit their caster instead. This is a PVP gem, although it can be useful for certain fights (those involving randomly-targeted spellcasts or poison affliction, for example). Spell reflect does not affect AOE spells, although it can redirect chained spells (like Chain Lightning).
• Effulgent Skyflare: No. Gives 320 health and reduces spell damage taken by 2%. Another PVP gem; if you’re really having that much trouble staying alive against PVE spellcasters, swap out one of your other gems for Solid Majestic Zircons.
• Ember Skyflare: Yes. Gives 25 spell power and 2% Intellect. This gem will directly increase your throughput, and while 2% Intellect doesn’t grant quite as much mana as 2% mana (Beaming Earthsiege gives about 72 more mana regardless of how much Intellect you have), it grants more crit and more regen.
• Enigmatic Skyflare, Forlorn Skyflare, and Impassive Skyflare: No. These give about 0.45% crit chance and various duration-reducing effects. They’re PVP gems with highly-situational PVE uses. Steer clear of them.
• Insightful Earthsiege: Yes. Gives 21 Intellect (about 315 mana, 0.125% crit chance, and mana regeneration that varies based on your Spirit), and every spell you cast has a 5% chance to restore 600 mana. That works out to an average of about 60 mp5 (which can go down if you insist on casting long-cast-time spells and up if you have lots of haste, as I do). This is the beloved, overwhelmingly-recommended meta gem for priest healers; over a 6-minute fight that adds up to 4,320 extra mana in your pool. Get this unless you can afford to be more concerned with throughput than mana.
• Powerful Earthsiege: No. Another PVP gem, this one gives 320 health and reduced stun duration. Not worth it.
• Revitalizing Skyflare: Yes. Gives 11 MP5 and 3% increased critical healing effect. That’s not healing chance; instead, when your heals do crit, they heal for 3% more. That means that if you’re Disc, your Divine Aegis will be 3% bigger too! The 11 MP5 is 792 mana – not fabulous, one additional spell over the course of a 6-minute fight, but it’s better than nothing.
• Tireless Skyflare: Maybe. This is another PVP gem, with 25 spell power and a minor run speed increase, but I ran with it for a long time. Part of this was because it helped me get out of the fire faster, and part of it was because I was entertained by running faster than anyone else in the raid. Sadly, it doesn’t stack with other speed-increasing effects. Go with this if you can’t get one of the others, or if you have a hard time staying out of the stuff on the floor.
• Trenchant Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives 25 spell power and reduces stun duration by 10%. It’s a PVP gem, but it has some uses in PVE. It’s not fabulous, but it can be useful for certain fights, especially in heroics. The faster you can get out of a stun effect, the faster you can start healing again. That said, if you have the chance to get another one of the gems, take it.

The bottom line: Get Ember Skyflare, Insightful Earthsiege, or Revitalizing Skyflare depending on your playstyle, with the first two recommended more highly than the third unless you really, really love Divine Aegis. Get Beaming Earthsiege, Tireless Skyflare, or Trenchant Earthsiege only if you can’t get one of the first three.

According to the last poll, 75% of you wouldn’t pay for a WOW guide under any conditions, 12% would if the preview were good, 6% would if the guide’s author were authoritative, and 6% would if the author were authoritative and the preview were good. That’s about the mix I expected. Thank you!

New poll, because I’ve been thinking about which characters I’m going to drop in favor of worgen once the expansion drops. Right now I’m going with my warrior and my warlock; I would have done a worgen druid, but let’s face it, you’re not going to actually see worgen form, ever, if you’re a druid, so why not just work on the night elf druid I already have?

Anyway, now I want your opinions! Which classes are you going to roll once the expansion drops?

Read more…

Because I’m curious!

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The RSS2 feed is working again. This means that if you had subscribed to this blog’s feed but were not seeing my posts in your favorite blog reader, you should be seeing them again. If you’re not seeing them, please leave me a note.

If you are like me – and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be like me?* – you have seen Ratatouille, and remember the critic Anton Ego’s final review of Gusteau’s restaurant:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

I am here today to tell you that, in fact, the former is true, at least as far as playing WOW is concerned. Perhaps not everyone can become a great chef, but anyone can become a great healer.

You will say to me, “but Chris, I cannot heal to save my life.” (I am, incidentally, reminded of a MAD magazine cartoon from many, many years ago: “If you never hear ‘Fix this crankshaft or we’ll shoot you in the head’, why do people say ‘I couldn’t fix a crankshaft to save my life’?”) But the truth is, I believe you can heal. You just don’t know how to heal well or effectively. Maybe your DPS ways are too ingrained in you; maybe you don’t have the attention span to focus on such a small chunk of screen (if you happen to be using Grid or unit frames); maybe you don’t really understand how your healing class works. The bottom line is that it’s not a matter of inability. It’s a matter of lack of skill.

Betty Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, gives an example regarding being “talented” at art: suppose reading were treated the same way as art. Teachers would just give young students a book and step back, not instructing so as not to interfere with the students’ “creative reading”, and at the end, maybe three or four out of a class of 20 would have learned how to associate the words they spoke with the letters on the page and to read successfully. (Remember: no actual teaching at all, just leaving the kids alone with the books.) Parents of the kids who’d learned could say “oh yes, Mary has a family history of reading, her aunt Lisa was quite a reader”, and those who hadn’t could say “well, she just doesn’t have the talent for reading; she’ll find something else she is good at”.

The idea, of course, is that art is a skill that can be learned rather than a talent that must be innately possessed. The same is true of healing. Those players who are excellent healers from the outset have no special talent, no innate gift that allows them to heal better than anyone else. It’s just that their brains happen to have been tuned to the way healing works when they first started, so they were able to pick up the skill much more quickly than those whose brains were tuned to other activities (such as DPS, tanking, or shuffleboard).

Over the next week or so (it’s indefinite because of the imminent holidays), I’ll be erecting a series of posts on the skills needed to heal, how to acquire them, and how to retune your brain so that the skills come more easily and more naturally. Hopefully, at the end of it, we’ll have a whole bunch of people who have renewed faith in their ability to get a group safely to the end of an instance.

I’ll borrow a bit from Havi here, since even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing all the time, she does a damn good job of making everyone think she does.

What I’d like in the comments:

• Your opinions on what skills make a good healer.
• Your experience with learning how to be a skilled healer.
• Funny stories about having not been a skilled healer.

What I don’t want:

• Shoes.

Happy Christmas Eve, and I’ll see you all soon with the first post in the series!

* </facetious>

If you are following me on Twitter, and if you have logged on at just the right times, you may be aware that my wife has started a business providing copywriting and consulting services to small businesses. She wants to work with bloggers, designers, and other creative types – especially people who run handcrafting businesses, of the type you’d find on Etsy.

At the moment, she’s running a holiday giveaway: she’s giving out two one-hour consulting sessions, where she’ll go over the presentation of your site and your web copy and help you figure out how to draw more readers and get the readers you do have to stick around more (and, if you’re selling something, to buy more of what you’re selling). There’s no obligation on your part – all you have to do is head over to this post and leave a comment, and you’re entered into the drawing. The deadline for entering is 11:59 PM EST this Saturday, so head over and leave a comment.

(It is possible that you are now saying “but Chris, what can a copywriter do for me?” I could respond in a number of ways, from listing generic benefits to actually going to your site and giving some pointers, but the bottom line is this: if you go comment on that post, it costs you nothing to find out what a copywriter can do for you!)

If you’d like to get the Winter Veil achievement but haven’t started the Skyguard/Ogri’la rep grind yet, good news: you don’t have to in order to get Fa-la-la-la-Ogri'la. You can go straight to Ogri’la and start a very brief chain there to open up “Bomb Them Again”, which is the quest you need for the achievement.

• At Ogri’la, pick up “The Crystals” from Chu’a'lor. (Gather 5 Apexis Shards and return to Chu’a'lor. Skip the follow-up.)
• Still at Ogri’la, pick up “Our Boy Wants To Be A Skyguard” from Torkus. (Gather 10 Shards, go to the Forge Camp to the south and trade them for an Unstable Flask of the Beast, return to Torkus. Don’t get the follow-up.)
• Still at Ogri’la, pick up “The Skyguard Outpost from Chu’a'lor. (Report to Sky Commander Keller at the Skyguard Outpost.)
• At the Skyguard Outpost, pick up “Bombing Run” from Sky Sergeant Vanderlip. (Use the provided bombs to destroy 15 stacks of Fel Cannonballs at the Forge Camps to the north or south, then return to Vanderlip.)
• At the Skyguard Outpost, pick up “Bomb Them Again” from Sky Sergeant Vanderlip. (Use the provided bombs to destroy 15 more cannonball stacks.) This is the quest you need for the achievement. The only time you need to have the Holly buff is when you are turning the quest in! There is no need to have it on when you pick the quest up or while you’re doing the bombing run itself.

Hope that’s helpful! My Death Knight went from never having set foot in Blade’s Edge to having the achievement in about half an hour this morning, and most of that was grinding for Apexis Shards.

Dear tanks and DPS who complain about getting Power Word: Shield (maybe because they believe that they are getting “rage-starved”):

SUCK IT, NOOBS.

Love,
Theande, Disc Healer

(Thanks to @Nibuca for the tip.)