I can’t decide whether or not it’s odd that one of the reasons I want to learn to draw is that I want to be able to draw WOW fan-art.

Matt mentioned, in response to my post on Discipline priest philosophy a few days back, that he was still divided on the issue because he “likes crit for the RNG procs like Divine Aegis“. The problem with stacking crit for Divine Aegis, at least, is that DA only shields for the amount that’s actually healed. If your heal lands on someone who’s already at full health, and it crits, the Divine Aegis that pops up will absorb zero damage. This is, obviously, less than helpful.

Also, I haven’t done the math to find out how much crit you can get on gear, but I feel like you’re actually more likely to get a critical heal with multiple fast heals than you are with fewer slow heals at a higher crit percentage. I’ll have to look into that tomorrow.

So, yesterday my laptop’s hard drive decided it didn’t want to work anymore. My poor MacBook booted up to the dreaded question-mark folder, and just like that all my files and applications were gone. (I maintain hope, but nothing I’ve tried so far has worked.)

My desktop computer won’t run World of Warcraft for anything like a reasonable amount of time before crashing completely. Either it’ll reboot itself, it’ll shut down, or – most common – it’ll simply lock up completely and refuse to do anything until I reboot it. I have a suspicion that this is because I have a 400W power supply running about 500W of components (the DVD player just flat-out won’t work anymore), but I can’t afford to replace the power supply. On the other hand, it might be a video-card issue, given that things seemed to work okay for about a year with this computer and then all of a sudden stopped working, and also because it only hangs up when I try to do graphics-intensive things with it, like play games.

Either way, though, I functionally have no access to World of Warcraft for now, so I’ll be blogging in the dark, so to speak.

I see a lot of Discipline priests stacking Intellect, spell power, and crit rating. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is; in my mind, the best stats for a Discipline priest to stack are MP5 and haste, which a lot of Disc priests categorize as secondary at best. Now, at last, I think I’ve figured it out: Discipline priests who stack Intellect, spell power, and crit rating are Discipline priests who really want to be Holy priests who happen to have Penance.

Therein lies the problem. All of these Disc priests have got it in their heads that “Holy is the healing spec”. They truly want to be able to say “Disc is also a good healing spec!”, but so many people believe that the Holy way to heal is the only way to heal that these poor, misguided Disc priests can only heal by mimicking Holy abilities as much as possible. So they stack Intellect (to make up for not getting as much from Spirit as Holy priests do), they stack spell power and crit (to try to reach the same numbers on single heals that Holy priests get), and then they get relegated to single-target healing because they’ve focused on big heals so much that they don’t have the flexibility to do anything else.

I have a different philosophy. I see Holy priests as being about power: strong heals, a smart-targeting AOE heal, and the ability to keep going after death are their defining characteristics. Discipline priests, on the other hand, should be about speed and flexibility. The name of the spec says it all: Disc priests are tightly controlled, with shields, smaller but faster heals, and tiny buffs that make a huge difference. In an ideal world, instead of concentrating on making our heals huge and lumbering, useful only for single-target healing, we should be whipping around 1-second Flash Heals and, with Penance, be able to get three stacks of Grace on a target in 1.3 seconds. (With the Glyph of Penance and the change to Grace coming in Patch 3.1, a 1.3-second stack of Grace will be worth casting Penance even on an undamaged tank.) Disc priests should be healing as fast as they can target (and if my experience is any indication, mouseover macros or one of the healing add-ons will make that even faster); we have more than enough ways to stay on top of our mana pool, especially when we stack MP5 and glyph properly.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world; it takes 1640 Haste Rating to get a 1.5-second spellcast down to 1 second (and Penance’s 2-second channel down to 1.3 seconds), and the best we can do with gear, enchants, gems, elixirs, and Well Fed buffs is around 1100 Haste Rating – 500 or so short. Fortunately, as of patch 3.1, we won’t actually need to get that high! In fact, if we play our cards right and we’re willing to change our healing style somewhat, we’ll only need to get up to about 820 Haste Rating on our own, because we’ll pretty much constantly be under the effects of Borrowed Time, which increases our Haste percentage – not Haste Rating – by 25%. In 3.1 we can put points into Soul Warding, which lowers the cooldown of Power Word: Shield by 4 seconds – and since PW:S only has a 4-second cooldown, that means we can effectively cast it whenever we want, assuming the target doesn’t have Weakened Soul up. Since we can cast PW:S at will, we can ensure that when we need to cast, we’ll be under the effects of Borrowed Time (assuming we’re in a raid), which gives us half of the 1640 Haste Rating we need. If you happen to have the Egg of Mortal Essence and Embrace of the Spider equipped – each of which has a chance on spellcast (the Egg only on healing casts) to increase your haste rating by 505 – meaning that you could, briefly, be running at around 2750 Haste Rating, which is closing in on 100% haste (reduces cast times by 50%).

Anyway, the point is, Discipline priests can – and should – get insanely fast and incredibly flexible. It requires a certain degree of reflex time, and a certain willingness to play whack-a-mole, but once you’re up to speed – so to speak – you should be rising back to the top of the healing meters and providing significant mitigation, simply because you can get the heals out faster than any other class/spec in the game.
948
1640

As you may have suspected, I have some comments on the changes to priest glyphs in Patch 3.1. The effects are as listed on WOW Insider.

• Glyph of Psychic Scream – Increases the duration of your Psychic Scream by 2 sec. and increases its cooldown by 8 sec. Not a particularly good glyph. I don’t think anyone is saying “gosh, I wish Psychic Scream lasted longer and I couldn’t cast it as often”.
• Glyph of Fear Ward – Reduces cooldown and duration of Fear Ward by 60 sec. I’ve railed against this glyph before. The change just makes it suck more.
• Glyph of Fade – Reduces the cooldown of your Fade spell by 15 sec. With LK tanks’ ability to generate massive threat, this is rarely needed, but it’s still a good standby if you run with PUGs a lot. Removing the duration aspect was good too.
• Glyph of Inner Fire – Increases the armor from your Inner Fire spell by 50%. This might be good for hardcore PVPers, but I suspect that they can find better glyphs. Outside of that demographic, I don’t know anyone who uses Inner Fire for the armor
• Glyph of Mind Control – Increases the duration of your Mind Control spell by 30 sec. This is either going to be mandatory for DPS priests running heroic Naxx, or it’s going to be banned.
• Glyph of Smite – Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting Smite by 100%. I hope this is a minor glyph. It’s good for a minor glyph, but awful for a major one.
• Glyph of Dispersion – Your Dispersion ability now also clears movement impairing effects and makes you immune to them for its duration. Wasn’t this supposed to be a baseline component of Dispersion in the patch? Or has that been changed?
• Glyph of Guardian Spirit – If you Guardian Spirit lasts its entire duration without being triggered, your Guardian Spirit cooldown is reset to 60 sec. Holy priests and tanks will love this one.
• Glyph of Penance – Reduces the cooldown of Penance by 2 sec. Addresses a common complaint. Practically required for Discipline priests.
• Glyph of Mind Sear – Increases the radius of effect on Mind Sear by 5 yards. This is not what people wanted from a Mind Sear glyph. Glyph of Mind Sear should deal some damage to the primary target or allow Mind Sear to be cast on friendly targets (but still harm only hostile targets)
• Glyph of Hymn of Hope – Your Hymn of hope provides 3 times the normal amount of mana per time, but its duration is 50% shorter. I can only imagine that the developers working on glyphs and the developers working on skills don’t actually talk very much. If this stays live, it’s very much in line with the Renew glyph. PVPers will shun it; it’ll be a nice holdout in PVE.
• Glyph of Pain Suppression – Allows Pain Suppression to be cast while stunned. The Discipline priest’s answer to rogues. Au revoir, stunlock.

Also, Aetherial Circle downed 25-man Malygos today for the first time. Grats, guys!

Edit: Here’s Stephi’s slightly more detailed write-up of the run. If I’d known you guys were short a healer…

(HT: WOW Insider)

In a break with Blizzard tradition, Ghostcrawler spoke on the official forums today to give us specifics about the upcoming mana regen changes. As it stands now, Spirit-based mana regeneration is being reduced by 40%, and the various talents (like Meditation in the priests’ Discipline tree and Spirit Tap in the Shadow tree) are being buffed by 67% to compensate. The end result is that casting mana regen – within 5 seconds of casting a spell – will remain roughly the same, and non-casting regen – more than 5 seconds after casting a spell – will be reduced by almost half. (X non-casting regen:0.3X casting regen::0.6X non-casting regen:0.5*0.6 = 0.3X casting regen, for those of you who remember the SATs.)

For many priests, this won’t really make much of a difference. Non-Shadow priests who don’t have Spirit Tap will see a slight increase in downtime between fights when they’re soloing, but other than that, nearly every build I’ve seen relies on Meditation, Spirit Tap, or both to preserve mana regeneration – unlike druids, who have had to dance in and out of the FSR for a while now in order to keep up their mana regeneration. Some priests do the same gimmicking of the mechanics to get as much non-casting time as possible during a fight so that they can hammer people who are taking damage with Greater Heal, but I suspect that that’s a tactic to allow priests to continue a BC healing strategy that simply isn’t as good in LK.

Will this make Spirit a weaker stat, and +mp5 and Intellect stronger? Not really. Anyone who insists on gimmicking the FSR as mentioned above might think it is, since the difference between non-casting and casting regeneration has been lessened, but part of the point of the change was to make it so that healers would stop cast-dancing. Players who insist on continuing to game the system in that fashion may, in fact, continue to find that Spirit is better for their staying power – I haven’t done the math, to be honest – but I actually still prefer +mp5 to Spirit. Here’s why:

At the moment, with 984 Intellect and 697 Spirit, I gain 609 non-casting mp5 (183 casting) from my Spirit. My Spirit therefore gives me about 0.27 casting mp5 per point of Spirit. (I talk in terms of casting mp5 because that’s where straight +mp5 shines and Spirit can be compared directly, and because it’s not changing at all in 3.1.) Straight +mp5′s item budget is 2.5 times that of Spirit (2.5 points per mp5, 1 point per Spirit); therefore, Spirit needs to give me 0.4 casting mp5 (1/2.5) before it reaches the item-budget efficiency of pure +mp5.

This is, of course, as a Discipline priest. Holy priests can take Spiritual Guidance, a talent that gives them up to 25% of their Spirit as spell power, which may modify their preferences somewhat. Without the added benefit of the Holy talent, though, give me mp5 over Spirit any day. (The same is true, incidentally, of food buffs; the best Spirit food (Cuttlesteak) gives me +40 Spirit, which works out to about 11 mp5; the second-best mp5 food (Rhino Dogs or Pickled Fangtooth) give me 12 mp5 and don’t even require Northern Spices.

Woo, tangent.

Want to really get good at healing? Find a group in their low 70s, strip naked, and heal Nexus. (Consider offering to pay their repair bills to assuage their fears and really put the pressure on you.) Oh, use your highest-ranked spells – you don’t get any benefit from downranking anymore. But other than that, don’t give yourself any buffs, don’t eat any food, don’t wear anything that gives you any primary or secondary stats. (I have a Frayed set from the human starting area, plus a white Quarterstaff from the vendor in Stormwind.)

When you’ve shown that you can heal Nexus without any benefits from gear, food, or other buffs, move up. Heal Azjol-Nerub naked. Then Old Kingdom or Drak’Tharon Keep. Continue onward. If you reach a point where you truly can’t move on, find the minimum you can do it with. If you find that you can successfully heal Utgarde Pinnacle, start over with heroic Nexus. Again, keep going until you can’t anymore.

Find your minimum for each instance. Keep figuring out new ways to lower that minimum.

If you really think you’re up to it, try healing 10-man Naxx in the buff.

Then, when you actually put all your gear back on and go heal Naxxramas or Obsidian Sanctum or Eye of Eternity, bask in the pure luxury of all that mana, all that spellpower, all that crit and haste and regeneration, and stick to the habits you’ve ingrained from instance after instance of having to be as efficient, adaptive, and free-thinking as possible.

(As a side benefit, you’ll discover that you’re more likely, when gear for you drops in a raid, to say “…do I really need to spend the DKP on that?”.)

Is it, perhaps, silly to have a “World of Warcraft” tag on a World of Warcraft blog?

My draenei Death Knight Sisuphe (I tried to be thematic without being stereotypical) hit 70 last night. As a matter of self-congratulation I bought her the Glyph of Death Grip, to replace Glyph of the Ghoul (I don’t generally have my ghoul tanking, and I’m willing to make the slight DPS sacrifice for the added pulling speed).

I mentioned to Jess last night (who’s just starting her first two Death Knights) that as long as I keep an eye on runes and Runic Power, I can pretty much go indefinitely (thanks to Death Strike, Rune of the Fallen Crusader since 70, and, when I need it, Blood Presence). It’s pretty amazing – especially having leveled a priest first – to realize that I’m breaking 200,000 XP per hour, without the Rested bonus.

My Death Knight, Sisuphe, is about 120k XP from 70 right now, and it occurred to me today (since I’m starting Howling Fjord, which is recent enough in my memory from leveling my priest that I can compare) that solo fighting as a Death Knight is different from soloing as any of the other classes I’ve leveled. In particular, because a Death Knight’s cooldowns are generally moderate – not short like a caster’s usually are, and not long like a warrior or rogue’s – and because all of their pulls (aside from body pulling, which I generally don’t like to do, largely, I suspect, because I’m used to playing casters) have dependencies that don’t recharge out of combat, I spend a good deal of each fight setting up the next pull rather than maximizing my DPS.

For example: let’s say I use Death Grip to pull Mob 1. Death Grip has a 35-second cooldown, lowered to 25 seconds by Unholy Command; I can usually finish a fight in about 10-15 seconds. This leaves a gap of 10-15 seconds when I can’t use Death Grip to pull Mob 2. Therefore, I have to keep an eye on my Runic Power; my other pulling ability of note is Death Coil, which requires 40 Runic Power. Ideally, I’ll have plenty of RP left over after a fight – unless I’ve used abilities that consume it to increase my DPS, like, for example, Death Coil. So I have to moderate my DPS in order to save up Runic Power so that I can use Death Coil to pull the next mob I need to fight. (Ideally, in fact, I’ll have 80+ Runic Power, because I keep my ghoul set on Defensive; casting Death Coil causes him to go after the targeted mob, and so I need to throw up a second Death Coil to keep the mob attacking me!) Of course, by the end of the second fight, Death Grip will have cooled down, and I’ll be able to use it to pull Mob 3.

(Naturally, this could all be avoided if I just went and bought a Glyph of Death Grip, which resets the cooldown on Death Grip when I kill a target that yields honor or experience. That would make this a trivial exercise. :)