Duct Tape and a Prayer

I’ve been packing my wife up for a vacation today and seeing her off to the airport, so I haven’t really had a lot of time to put together a post. The 3/31 Linksation will be put off until 4/1 (and no, it’s not a joke), and I’ll have some more comments on Discipline, haste, crit, and gear later in the week.

In the meantime, enjoy the Plague of Hakkar decimating Ironforge (way back before Naxx 40!).

Click for full-frontal flowchart action:

Do I stay Discipline and try to get a raid slot in a guild full of healers, or go Shadow for ranged DPS, which we’re apparently short of – and then not get to roll on the healing gear? Or should I stop playing my priest altogether for a while and focus on leveling an alt? Doing that might deprive the guild of a warm body for raiding, but I haven’t been doing any raiding for a few weeks anyway (which is why I’m not getting any slots these days) and they seem to be doing fine without me.

I’d like to err on the side of fun – but I’m not really sure what that is right now.

1. Do not let anyone tell you how to play.
2. Listen to the players you think are better than you are.
3. Always try it yourself before you decide.

Here are my favorite posts from the last week from the WOW blogs that I read. If there’s an order, I invite you to find it! Also: as of this post I’m including the author’s Twitter link if I know it. If I haven’t linked you, let me know what your Twitter username is so we can connect!

• Meet the Jynx from Girls Don’t Play Games
• Shot Rotations: Why We Don’t Macro Them Anymore from The Hunting Lodge, by Brigwyn
• Heigan Dancing Lessons for Your Pet, Movie Included from Aspect of the Hare, by Pikestaff
• Spirit Beast Phalanx from Big Red Kitty
• The S.O., the WoW, & the Deal from Holy Discipline, by Anea
• The Straw That Broke Dueg’s Back from Holy Dueg!, by Dueg
• Really, Silver Hand? Really? from Less QQ, More PewPew by Daniel
• Achievements: the New Progression from Mend Pet, by Brajana
• Anujaresh: Epilogue / Dreams and Shadows, Part 1 from Pixelated Executioner, by Pix
• Under the Helm: Why We Are Hated from RuneTap, by Lyliith
• Rapid Recuperation is Hard from Stabilized Effort Scope, by Rilgon
• G13 Revisited from Tank Like A Girl, by Kadomi
• Major Tanking Glyphs in 3.1 from The Scourge
• To Sleep, Perchance to Cramp from Temerity Jane, by TJ
• A Healer’s Most Important Skill from World of Matticus, by Matt
• This Comic Has the Space Goat Seal of Approval from World of Warcraft, Eh?, by Cadistra

As always, if you have any recommendations, leave a comment!

We’ve had a few months now to settle into Wrath of the Lich King. (Long enough that you’d think I’d stop typing “Lick King” the first time, every time. Entirely different game, that.) We have a major patch coming up, including a massive new raid dungeon and a class overhaul so large that Blizzard is resetting talent points. Given that, it’s no surprise that the WOWblogosphere has seen a proliferation in the last few weeks of posts about How To Apply To Guilds, How To Play Your Class, and How To Be A Good PUG Member, and as a WOW blogger I feel that I ought to contribute to the discussion.

As a healing priest, you have three major responsibilities:

• Give out buffs. You have two major buffs for other party members: Power Word: Fortitude and Divine Spirit. Yes, I know the Prayer buffs cost reagents; stock up on them. A good practice is to have at least 40 candles in your bags at any given time. You also have lesser buffs, Shadow Protection and Fear Ward. These can be used situationally – but when the situation comes up, do remember to use them. If you can, bring some of the party-wide Feasts to the group; they’re not particularly hard to make anymore, and especially if you’re PUGging, there’s a good chance you’re going to be running with someone who’s forgotten food. On the other hand, bring elixirs, potions, and flasks only for yourself (unless you have a prior arrangement). The beauty of Feasts is that everyone can use them; not so much for flasks.
• Deflect damage. Discipline priests are better at this than Holy priests, with various improvements to Power Word: Shield and the talent Divine Aegis. Every healing priest should also have Inspiration, which is a Holy talent that increases the armor of the target of a critical heal by up to 25%.
• Heal damage. Here is where I’m going to deviate from the conventional wisdom a bit: if your party is still alive at the end of the fight, you’re doing your job right. Ignore healing meters. Ignore overhealing. Ignore other healers telling you how you should heal. If your party lived, you won. That is the bottom line; don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. (Keep in mind, too, that just because the party died doesn’t mean it was your fault. There’s not a whole lot you can do when the tank, not understanding the concept of “soak the damage, we’ll heal you”, decides to drag a Whirlwinding boss back to the casters.)

That’s really it. Aside from your general responsibilities as a group member, that’s all you have to do to be a successful healing priest.

No, really.

I’ve been receiving a number of pissing-contest comments recently. (No, I haven’t approved all of them, or even most of them.) Mostly they take the form of “well, this contradicts what conventional wisdom says I should think, so clearly you are wrong“. Mostly, also, they are from – as Slashdot so elegantly puts it – anonymous cowards.

I use my real name on this blog. All I ask is that if you want to leave a comment, you provide some way to consistently identify yourself; I don’t care if you use “Marilyn Monroe” as long as there’s some consistency between comments. Since I started Duct Tape, I’ve trusted commenters to do this on their own, but it’s clear that there’s a certain segment of the commenting population that I simply can’t trust that way. It sucks, because I know that in order to cut out the people who are doing the wrong thing, I have to put an extra burden on the people who are already doing the right thing, but I hope in the end it makes this a more pleasant place to be.

The bottom line is that I’ve decided to enable comment registration. Basically, you need to register as a user here at Duct Tape before you comment. Accountability goes a long way toward cutting down on comments like “you’re wrong because you just are!” (and didn’t we get over that in the fourth grade, guys? really). Registration should be a quick and easy process, but if you have any trouble with it, drop me a line by email (canthony AT etherjammer.com) or on Twitter (@etherjammer) and I’ll see what I can do.

According to Ghostcrawler, the Tier 8 healing priest set bonuses are as follows:

• 2-piece: Increases the critical strike chance of your Prayer of Healing by 10%.
• 4-piece: Increases your spell power by ~250 when you cast Power Word: Shield; lasts until cancelled.

The 2-piece bonus is good, especially now that Prayer of Healing will be targetable. The additional crit will be a pleasant perk for Holy priests, and I can already hear the Discipline priests in the crowd squealing with joy at the thought of Divine Aegis proccing on an entire raid group at once.

The 4-piece bonus, on the other hand, is going to be a source of some contention. In fact, Holy priests are already starting to whine about it (read one post down in the thread linked above), since they seem to be under the impression that as Holy priests, the use of Power Word: Shield is absolutely inconceivable. In their defense, Discipline priests use the spell a lot more thanks to all the talents we have that improve it, and Disc priests will complain if Holy priests throw up a shield in a situation where it would have benefitted a Disc priest to do so. That said, relax, Holies! Get the staff out of your ass and realize – as GC rightly points out – that just because you don’t think if it as a Holy spell doesn’t mean you can’t use it!

For Discipline priests, on the other hand, this bonus is the bee’s knees. I’ve already talked about using Power Word: Shield regularly in fights, because of Borrowed Time, and the 250 additional spell power we’ll be getting with every PW:S cast makes the spell even more vital to a well-worked Discipline rotation. Now I just have to figure out the optimal balance of Haste and other stats (Schmigz did a pretty good job of convincing me that Intellect was a better investment than MP5, but I’m still not sure what I want the weights to be).

One thought: at the moment, the buff on the 4-piece bonus is “until cancelled”. Expect the devs to “clarify” that soon, either by replacing it with a duration or by making the next spellcast cancel the buff. (I’ve seen some people read it as “until PW:S is cancelled”, but the Shadow T8 4-piece bonus has the same “until cancelled” duration, and it triggers off Mind Blast, a spell that doesn’t have a duration, so I find that unlikely.)

For the last year or so, I’ve had trouble playing World of Warcraft on my desktop computer. The game would load, but after a while – sometimes seconds, sometimes an hour or two – the whole system would crash, either freezing up, rebooting itself, or just shutting down completely.

After some troubleshooting I narrowed it down to the video card and the power supply, but I didn’t know which was actually causing the problem (and I didn’t have a good way to test either). I knew that the video card was at least the immediate source of the issue, since the crashes were also happening when I was manipulating lots of images in Photoshop and doing other graphically-intense things, but I didn’t know what the underlying cause was – in other words, was the video card failing, or was it just crashing because the power supply wasn’t providing enough power?

This all came to a head last week, when the hard drive in my laptop failed. I’d been using said laptop to play WOW, so losing it essentially meant losing WOW. And indeed, for a week I played WOW occasionally at best, never counting on my desktop to be up for long.

This week, I replaced my power supply (thanks to my parents, who want me to be able to do artistic stuff in Photoshop). On Monday, I installed the new supply. Today it’s Friday, and things have been running without a hitch since then. I’ve had WOW up for hours and hours without trouble, I can open dozens of images in Photoshop, and everything is running smoothly.

So hopefully you’ll start seeing more posts here from me again!

I just realized that I haven’t posted here since last week. That’s the consequence of not really playing WOW since then, I think. (Now that I have a replacement hard drive for my laptop and a replacement power supply for my desktop, though, I’m mostly back in business.)

While I’m gearing back up, here are my favorite posts from the WOW blogs I read from the last week, roughly in order of the blogs’ titles:

• Miracles Can Happen from Aspect of the Hare
• Spirit Beast Pull-Toy from Big Red Kitty
• Six-Word WOW Stories from Holy Discipline
• Raidiquette: The Lost Art of Not Being an Ass from Holy Dueg!
• My Power Auras Setup from Mend Pet
• I Hope We Have An Exchange Receipt from Pixelated Executioner (and not just because Pix namechecks me!)
• Dispelling the Myth – Mail-Wearing Mages We’re Not! from Stabilized Effort Scope
• Things That Make Kadomi Happy from Tank Like A Girl
• Evolution of Personal Professions from The Scourge
• Polymorph: Memesheep from When Enraged
• 5 Reasons Why the PTR Sucks from World of Matticus

A few special mentions, too:

• Rilgon, of Stabilized Effort Scope (linked above), turned 23 this week. Happy birthday, Rilgon!
• Kelly A., the creator of World of Warcraft, Eh?, posted two caricatures of Dueg, Anea, and her own characters: Stop Doin’ That and Cadistra Do-Right.