The comment policy here is thus: don’t be a wannabe-alpha-geek “I’m right and you’re stupid” dickweed, and I won’t delete your comment.
This post brought to you by “killjackal”, who was a wannabe-alpha-geek “I’m right and you’re stupid” dickweed, and whose comment was deleted. (The worst part? He wasn’t even right.)
Better late than never! Here are my favorite posts from the WOWoblogosphere over the last week! (I think I am getting bad habits from Euripides!)
First, some departures: Saresa of Destructive Reach and Vonya of The Egotistical Priest are taking sabbaticals from blogging. Best of luck to you both!
Did I miss you? Is there someone I’m not reading that I should be? Let me know in the comments below!
At this point, it’s generally accepted that Discipline is an effective healing spec in PVE. It’s also generally – although less so – known that Discipline relies on shields and other mitigation to get much of its healing done. What doesn’t seem to be well-known is why Discipline priests love them some shields, and here I’m going to try to correct that. As always, correct me if you think my math is wrong or my conclusions aren’t sound.
Shields mitigate damage.
“Well, duh.” Sure, this one’s a gimme, but it’s also the most important aspect of shielding. Discipline priests aren’t the only ones who gain a benefit to their shields from spell power – the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield is increased by 80.68% of your spell power. But we also have a lot of ways to buff our shields. We get Improved Inner Fire in our second tier, which increases the contribution to spell power from Inner Fire by 45%; we have Improved Power Word: Shield as a tier-3 talent, which increases the damage absorbed by 15% after spell power is applied; we get Mental Agility in the fourth tier, which reduces the mana cost of our instant-cast spells by 10%; we get Soul Warding in the fifth tier, which reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by a further 30%; and we get Borrowed Time in the 10th tier, which adds another 30% of our spell power to the amount absorbed. (Sadly, Focused Power doesn’t improve PW:S – thanks to Rilgon for clarifying.)
A Discipline priest with all of these talents, and 2000 spell power – which is about average for a beginning raiding priest, in my experience – can cast shields that absorb about 4580 damage for 560 mana, or about 9.25 damage absorbed per mana spent. (For reference, our Flash Heal is about 5.46 healing per mana.) That’s a powerful, efficient mitigation tool, especially with the Glyph of Power Word: Shield, which heals the target for 10% of the potential damage absorbed (that is, the full 4580, not the damage that’s actually absorbed), and is affected by Focused Power.
And that’s just PW:S. Divine Aegis, our other major shield, costs us nothing at all (and scales nicely with spell power; we get 1 damage absorbed for every 10 healing on every critical heal we cast); the only drawback is that we can’t control when it goes up. Our third mitigation ability, Pain Suppression, is less often used, as it has a long cooldown and is reduction in damage rather than damage blocking like the shields.
Our shields don’t just mitigate for the target.
Every time a Discipline priest casts Power Word: Shield, the entire raid takes 3% less damage for 20 seconds. 3% damage mitigation to everybody in the raid, on top of the 4580 absorption for the actual target, can be the difference between a wipe and a successful boss kill. Sadly, Renewed Hope doesn’t stack, but at the least it means that PW:S should be used once every 20 seconds. However…
Our shields are fast.
The other key ingredient of Soul Warding, mentioned above, is that it reduces the cooldown on our Power Word: Shield from 4 seconds to 1 second – essentially, we can cast it as often as we want, since the global cooldown (normally 1.5 seconds) is always going to be at least as long as the Power Word: Shield cooldown. We don’t have to worry about whether we’re wasting a cooldown on the DPS who’s in the Slag Pot just in case the tank needs it in three seconds, because we can toss out shields as fast as the GCD will let us. Speaking of which…
Our shields make us faster.
Borrowed Time also increases our spell haste by 25% for 6 seconds or until the next non-instant spellcast. (Channeled spells, like Divine Hymn and Penance, count as instant-cast.) That improves not only the speed at which we can cast our spells, but our global cooldown as well. With Enlightenment (another 6% spell haste) and some minimal +haste gearing, we can get off a PW:S – Prayer of Mending – Penance – Flash Heal combination in 4 seconds, a burst of healing that can bring a tank from 1% very nearly back to viable health. (With proper macros or add-ons, all four spells can also go to different people, making us decent raid healers as well.)
Our shields restore your energy.
Speaking of restoring tanks, Rapture, in tier 8 of our talent tree, restores 2.5% of our total mana when one of our shields is dispelled or completely spent (but not when it wears off without being used up), and restores 2% total mana, 8 rage, 16 energy, or 32 runic power to the shield’s target. That restoration alone is a reason for us to want shields up on as many players as possible (even though the effect has a hidden cooldown), especially in AOE fights like Loatheb, XT-002, and Ignis.
Our shields, in short, are awesome.
Any questions or comments? Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments!
Seriously, you’re going to hurt yourself.
I have three feeds from WOW Insider going: The Queue, The Daily Quest, and anything tagged “priest” (that last one can get really annoying when the authors/editors of, say, All The World’s A Stage decide to spam every possible tag they can on So You Want To Be A Herbalist). Today, in the Priest feed, the Forum Post of the Day came through. It was about Discipline priests in raids, and how a raid leader was singling out a Discipline priest because his healing on the meters was under par. Amanda’s final comment really rang true: “It’s not about being a star, or a prima dona [sic], raiding is about working together as a team to accomplish a common goal.”
This is going to come as news to a lot of raid leaders (go on, raise your hand if you are one), but really and truly, Ulduar is not Galaga. Galaga is about getting the highest possible score; that’s the whole point of the game. Raid leaders tend to treat raiding like it works the same way – they see the healing and DPS meters as high score charts, and penalize raiders who don’t get onto the charts. The problem with that is that unlike Galaga, World of Warcraft raiding actually has a very concrete win condition: did you defeat the boss? If you defeated the boss, the entire raid wins. If not, the entire raid fails.
If the raid isn’t failing – if you’re successfully downing the bosses you want to take down – then there’s no reason at all to single anyone out on the meters. You met the win condition! Clearly everyone is doing at least as well as they need to be, or else you wouldn’t be successful.
If the raid is failing, everybody needs to step up a little more. It’s really tempting to go through the high scores – sorry, the meters – and identify the people who aren’t scoring as high – sorry, doing as much damage or healing – and try to “fix” those people. (In the example in Amanda’s post, the RL asked the priest to go Holy to increase his HPS.) Unfortunately, that simply won’t solve the problem. Unless you’re being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, fixing a single person isn’t going to make the raid go from not killing the boss to killing the boss. When a raid fails, nobody is exempt. If the raid isn’t doing enough DPS but the healing is okay, the healers can look at ways to keep the raid alive a little longer after the enrage timer hits, or to damage the boss between heals. If the raid is doing enough DPS but important players are dying, the DPS can work on staying out of the fire or taking the adds down a little faster. I don’t mean that the DPS is exempt from improving in the first scenario or the healers are exempt in the second; I mean that everybody shares the responsibility of a failed attempt.
(If you are being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, the meters aren’t going to help you anyway.)
I’m not saying that meters are useless. The best – perhaps the only valid – use of meters is to check your own performance in the raid (and even then it’s not necessarily accurate, like the Discipline priest example above, which is why WOW Web Stats is handy), and to look at other raid members to see what you could be doing differently. Raid leaders, though, should be paying attention not at individual raiders – because I will guarantee that there isn’t a single player in the raid who can’t improve something – but at the statistics of the raid as a whole. It’s obvious, but damaging to the egos of the other raiders, that if you think a single person is holding you back enough that you can identify them as the cause of your wipes, it’s actually the whole rest of the raid that needs work.
Really, guys:
I’m going to have to start talking about draenei lesbians and fruit plucking more often.
I could go on for pages about my reasons for writing this blog (okay, I probably couldn’t, but that’s because I’m naturally terse), but really they all boil down to one overarching reason: I want to make your WOW experience better, and mine by extension.
I can do a lot of that here on Duct Tape. You get to benefit from my experiences and experiments, and they make me a better player as well. But lately I’ve been feeling like I can’t do enough here.
I’ve also been seeing a lot of my fellow WOW bloggers complaining about their hosting recently. Their blogs aren’t customizable enough; they don’t have space to host their images or media files; they want a different platform altogether.
So I’ve put together The Story Thus Far. The first part – the bit that’s up now – is a way for you to host your WOW blog, whether you’ve started it elsewhere and want to move it or you want to start a new one. The details are all on the main page, and as an added bonus, signing up before 11:59 PM this Monday, 5/11, gets you the first year free and a 50% discount for the rest of the life of your blog. There are no setup fees or hidden costs (although there is one feature I haven’t listed there yet, because I’m not sure how I’m going to work it yet).
The Story Thus Far will have a phased roll-out, though, like the Shattered Sun Offensive. This is merely the first stage. Keep an eye out for further community-oriented features; it’s important to me to help the WOW blogging community feel like a community instead of just a random assortment of players, and to help even players who aren’t WOW bloggers to be part of that community. I’ll keep posting here with updates about the next phase of TSTF, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in a WOW blog, or in new hosting for your existing blog, please head over and take a look.
I don’t know why Disqus is refusing to acknowledge these comments. I’m getting email notifications, but they’re not showing up on the blog.
On Math is Hard, Zusterke wrote:
I wasn’t aware in your previous posts that you had it miscalculated. Perhaps you valued haste higher because of it? Hmm. Still going to lurk on your blog :) I wanna know where you’re going with this.
Anyways, an interesting point: various sources of haste stack multiplicatively for your cast time but it doesn’t stop there. When checking your throughput you get:
new hps = (old_base_heal/old_base_time) (1 + haste1) (1+haste2)… (1+crit/2) etc..
So in terms of throughput, your sources of haste aren’t just multiplicative with eachother but with all factors that increase your throughput (including SP). As they are a product, the largest product can be created by balancing the stats (not just A > B but A/B = best ratio). And this balance is quite easy to work out! Since all your throughput stats gain equally from borrowed time & enlightment, you will obtain the same ratio whether you include them or not. You can work out the balance between haste, SP, crit etc without BT and Enl.
(Unless you hit the softcap)
Maths can be fun, no? :)
And on A Quick Update, he wrote:
So, in fact, it hastes 2 spells. Your PW:S and your next spell. Very nice :)
The other day, I was in a group for heroic Utgarde Keep with one non-guild member, a DPS warrior who’d put all 71 of his talent points into Arms. I noticed at the beginning of the run that he had some mismatched gear – pants with Spirit, mail shoulders, etc. – but I figured as long as he knew what he was doing, everything would be okay.
It wasn’t. We had enough DPS from other sources to carry him, but he was barely pulling 700 DPS. Midway through the run, after Prince Keleseth hadn’t dropped anything useful for him, he asked the party, “My friend said I should get PVP gear to make me better. What’s the best way to do that?”
I don’t really remember what the rest of the group said to him; it was along the lines of “no, get boss drops in PVE”. It was pretty clear that he didn’t know what boss drops to be looking for, though, and I got the impression that the response confused him. So I sent him a whisper: “You can look at Wowhead to find out what items are best for you. Here’s a link:” And I pasted in the URL of a Wowhead filter that contained warrior-friendly gear in Northrend. (I think this was the link I gave him.) “You should also take a look at WOWWiki to see the kinds of things warriors want on gear.”
He asked for a minute to go AFK, and we proceeded without him for a minute or two. When he got back, he ran back to the group and whispered me back. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I never knew about those. I’m going to read them after we’re done.”
“No problem,” I replied. “You might also want to check out the talent calculator on Wowhead, and there are a couple blogs that are useful for warrior stuff.”
He thanked me again, we proceeded to take out the twins and Ingvar, and then he left the group. The next time I saw him, in Dalaran, he’d swapped out all of his warrior-unfriendly gear with warrior-statted heroic blues. I whispered him again. “It looks like you’re getting some better gear!”
“Yes, thank you! I didn’t even know what good warrior gear was. Wowhead helped a lot. Now I know what to look for.”
We have a problem, guys.
It’s certainly nothing life-shaking or insurmountable. We can work through it if we want to. But it does need to be addressed.
Here it is: our problem is that we think of players who don’t know what they’re doing as “bad”.
They’re not, really. They just don’t know what they’re doing. They aren’t playing consciously – they’re just picking up gear and taking talents that look like they ought to be handy or cool. They’re warriors taking a +spell power mace because it has higher DPS; they’re Restoration druids in +hit gear, because if their offensive spells miss, their healing spells might too. But this isn’t about badness. It’s just about inexperience.
See, if you’re reading this blog, I can make a couple assumptions about you, the foremost being that you’re interested in how Discipline priests work. That is, after all, mostly what this blog is about. You wouldn’t be here looking for [redacted because I don't want to show up in Google searches for those things]. You’re probably aware that I’m not the only WOW blog on the planet. You probably know that there are official forums for World of Warcraft. You might have a Twitter account where you discuss WOW.
Now here’s the important part: because of the spotlight fallacy, we assume that in general, people are like us. (It’s a very focused spotlight in this case.) We assume that Discipline priests read the Discipline priest blogs, and read the official forums, and use Wowhead, and read up on boss fights in WOWWiki, because that’s what we do. So when we see other players in gear that isn’t itemized for their class, who have talents that we wouldn’t have chosen, who don’t know how the boss fight works, we assume that they’re just Bad Players – that they haven’t assimilated all the stuff they’ve been reading, or that they’re consciously ignoring it.
Sure, that’s true in some cases, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that 95% of the World of Warcraft player base doesn’t visit the forums on a regular basis, and that probably 50% of active players don’t even know that there are official forums. They’ve never heard of WOWWiki or Wowhead. They see the tooltip on Spirit that says that it helps health regeneration, and figure that sounds pretty good. They aren’t bad. They just don’t know about the resources.
Here’s an open request: the next time you see a “bad player”, send them a whisper. Say “hey, I see you’re wearing thus-and-such” – or have this talent, or whatnot – “that I wouldn’t expect a warrior” – or whatever the player’s class may be – “to wear. Why’d you pick that piece of gear?” Establish a dialogue, rather than just writing the player off as bad. If it turns out they’re one of the vast number of players who don’t know about gear itemization, Wowhead, and the link, give them links; help them educate themselves. If they’re trying out something different, talk to them about it and maybe you’ll learn something. And if they say “shut up, mind your own business”…
Well, then they’re probably a bad player.
Did you notice the most important clause in the previous section? Go back and look. See if you can figure out what it’s going to have been. (I love the pluperfect.) I’ll wait.
*dramatic pause*
It’s “help them educate themselves“.
See, all the websites in the world aren’t going to do an uneducated player a lick of good if all the player does is follow the advice of those websites blindly. They’re going to be just as uneducated, but now they’re letting someone else tell them what to do instead of picking it up piecemeal based on tooltips. They’re in a worse situation than they were before, because now they’re going to rely on what you’ve shown them. What happens when the site you’ve shown them is down? What happens if the game changes but the page doesn’t (as seems to be the case with much of WOWWiki at the moment)? They’ll be back to groping at tooltips to help them figure out what to do next.
I’m sure you know the expression about giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish. I don’t need to repeat it. But the lesson applies nonetheless: help uneducated players educate themselves. Don’t just say “you need strength gear”, explain what Strength does for a warrior and compare it to other stats. Don’t just rattle off a Best In Slot list (you’ll notice I haven’t updated my Naxx lists for Ulduar yet); help them figure out why each piece of gear is desirable. Perhaps most important, let them make their own decisions about gear; guide them, but don’t define for them. The goal is to have players be playing consciously.
And yes, “I like the way it looks” is, at its heart, a conscious decision. Just so we’re clear.
I’ve done some testing, and BobTurkey and Jedimax, who commented on Math is Hard asking about whether Borrowed Time reduces the global cooldown, will be pleased to know that, in fact, it does. Also, interestingly, Borrowed Time begins when you cast Power Word: Shield, and is not consumed until the spell it affects has finished casting, so it reduces the global cooldown both of PW:S and of the spell it affects. In other words:
This feature of Borrowed Time, in fact, makes its effect on the GCD particularly easy to test for yourself. Cast PW:S on yourself and then cast Flash Heal; since FH’s cast time is normally 1.5s, and the GCD is normally 1.5s, Flash Heal’s cast time should end just as the GCD does no matter how much haste you have.
As always, if I’ve done something wrong or you have a different experience, let me know.
Here’s me: Theande of Aetherial Circle on Drenden. Yes, I’m not in the best gear (but check out my shiny new shoulders from XT-002 Deconstructor!). I’m at 425/433 haste rating, which is good to know (I hadn’t actually looked until now); at this point I can start gearing for crit.
Here’s my talent spec, which I think is pretty standard for Discipline priests. I specced into Desperate Prayer because it was recommended to me, but honestly I never use the spell, so the point would probably be better spent in Healing Focus or Unbreakable Will. You’ll notice that I have Glyph of Dispel Magic; this is because I haven’t been able to find a Glyph of Penance!
Comments and questions are welcome, but to reiterate, “you’re doing it wrong” isn’t welcome here.
@that_ghoul_ava @Ranedor86, I'll send again. I was worried that I'd offended you! (Mar 07 2010 at 22:57)
@that_ghoul_ava, I'm waiting for a response from you and @Ranedor86 - did you not get my @/emails? (Mar 07 2010 at 22:49)
@matticus, not quite yet. Next 24 hours, yes. (Mar 07 2010 at 22:12)
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