Duct Tape and a Prayer

(If you look closely, you can see the transformation that got me the achievement!)

And the result:

Arguing that one ought to be able to send Bind-to-Account items to one’s characters on other servers (“otherwise it’s not really bind to account, amirite?”) is like arguing that one ought to be able to kill other players in one’s own faction on PVP servers (“otherwise it’s not really player vs. player, amirite?”).

Which is to say: both are equally ridiculous claims, akin to being vocally opposed to Dagger of the Rising Moon because it doesn’t really make the moon rise.

Blizzard has released PTR build 10571 for patch 3.3. It’s not a wide-sweeping build; in fact, there’s only one change that has direct bearing on healing priests. That one’s a doozy, though:

• Power Word: Shield: This spell can now be cast on non-raid/party friendly targets.

It’s nice for Blizzard to finally acknowledge that Discipline priests exist outside of parties and raids, but here are two questions I want to see answered:

• When I shield someone who’s not in my party or raid, who gets Renewed Hope?
• Does this mean I can shield NPCs?

Shadow priests

Shadow priests have also seen some sweeping changes:

• Glyph of Mind Flay now Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain changed to – The periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell restore 1% of your base mana.
• Glyph of Shadow now increases your spell power by 30% of your spirit for 10 sec. (Up from 10%) (Here’s the current version.)
• Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.
• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, and Vampiric Touch to benefit from haste. Both the period length and the duration of these spells will be reduced by haste. In addition, the mana cost has been reduced from 32% to 13% of base mana.
• Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff.

Read that last one again. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

In its current incarnation, VE is frustrating because it’s a debuff that doesn’t actually do anything to the target. By changing it to a 30-minute buff – which I assume is self-only, like Inner Fire; otherwise it would be completely overpowered (imagine tossing VE on a warlock) – Blizzard has saved Shadow priests a GCD per target and removed a major concern about their AOE damage. Since VE will be a self-buff rather than a target debuff, using Mind Sear in a multiple-target environment will be much more attractive; likewise, I can easily see a Shadow priest cycle being to tab-cycle around the adds dropping SW:P (since it restores mana with each tick), debuff the main target, and then alternate Mind Sear and Mind Flay, with Mind Blasts woven in to keep Replenishment up. (Keep in mind that I don’t know the Official Community Shadow Priest Raid Tactics – it just seems to me like that would work really well.) Likewise, I can see 21/0/50 being a very effective Shadow build.

Thoughts? Questions? Something I missed?

• how to play a priest: I would never dictate how you should play a priest. That said, I have a series of guides in the works that might be helpful.
• glyph of penance: Reduces the cooldown of Penance by 2 seconds. The recipe for this Glyph comes out of the inscription books dropped by Northrend bosses, and as such, the price can be relatively steep compared to other glyphs.
• discipline haste cap: 433 Haste Rating. You get 6% from Enlightenment and 25% from Borrowed Time. With Borrowed Time up, your GCD will be pushed down to 1 second, which is the farthest it will go.
• discipline priest best in slot and best disc priest gear: There are various schools of thought on that. I’ll try to post a list of my favorites among the current gear sometime this week.
• divine aegis: A shield that procs on a critical heal. It’s the “3D bubble” effect. Shields for up to 30% of the amount healed, stacks up to 10k damage absorbed. I still don’t know if it’s 10k total for a given aegis (if the total amount shielded reaches 10k, DA has to fall off before more crits will increase the amount shielded again) or 10k at any given time.
• discipline priest trinkets: You probably want Solace of the Defeated and Solace of the Fallen if you’re raiding endgame content.
• haste soft cap food: As above, the softcap is 433. You can bring that down to 393 if you want to use buff food like Imperial Manta Steak or Very Burnt Worg.

Actually, there’s one more I want to touch on:

• holy priest prayer of healing vs holy nova: POH is a more mana-efficient spell, and you can target it – Holy Nova is centered around you and doesn’t have as much range. But HN is instant; use it in a pinch, but not as one of your main healing spells. (Tip: Use Holy Nova in heroic Nexus when Grand Magus Telestra is throwing you around the room. You’ll heal your party and damage the boss!)

Blizzard has updated the Tier 10 set bonuses for healing priests – and, oddly, both of them actually sport different mechanics than the original versions. (This is especially odd in light of a comment made by Ghostcrawler last week that they’d generally worked out the mechanics and were fine-tuning specific numbers.)

The updated set bonuses:

• 2-piece: Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
• 4-piece: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

The 2-piece bonus continues a pattern Blizzard’s created of giving small heals HOT components and giving HOTs immediate-heal components, and as such, while it’s interesting to see priests’ utility heal get a HOT, it seems to largely be a rehash of Flash of Light.

The 4-piece bonus is a reworking of the original bonus (you may remember it from my last post); this version is, in my opinion, vastly preferable, both because it allows synergy between two heavily-used spells (which, as @Greth22 points out, feels elegant, even if we haven’t seen it in action) and because it doesn’t encourage Penance/COH-FH-FH-FH spam like the previous bonus did.

I continue to find it interesting that Blizzard is functionally equating the Discipline 51-point talent with the Holy 41-point talent with this talent, especially since they have much different cooldowns. Penance’s untalented, unglyphed cooldown is officially twice as long as Circle of Healing’s, although the channel time lowers the effective cooldown somewhat. To equate the strength of the 4-piece bonus on a Holy priest to its strength on a Discipline priest implies, I think, that Blizzard considers both Aspiration and Glyph of Penance to be mandatory, which seems kind of silly. Blizzard, you clearly want us to make the cooldown 8 seconds; just make the cooldown 8 seconds!

The following is the current (datamined) Healing Priest Tier 10 4-piece set bonus:

• Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.

With my current haste rating, Penance has a 1.64-second channel, leaving me 6.36 seconds to cast Flash Heals before Penance’s cooldown is up. (I’m glyphed and have Aspiration.) Since my Flash Heal’s cast time is 1.31 seconds, I can cast it 4 times before Penance cools down, with 1.12s left over.

The math for determining how likely a percentage-based proc will go off is 1-[(1-proc chance)^(number of opportunities)]. (It seems unnecessarily complicated, but that’s how probability works.) In this case our proc chance is 0.15 (15%), and our number of opportunities is 4.

If I’m just spamming Flash Heal until Penance cools down – which I rarely am, but let’s assume it for the sake of a best possible scenario – then my chance to reduce Penance’s cooldown by at least 1 second is 1-[(1-0.15)^4], or 47.8%. Given that, roughly every other Penance cooldown will be shortened by at least 1 second.

(Without going into the math, the increased number of casts from dropping Glyph of Penance and Aspiration don’t justify the extension of the cooldown.)

For the record, if you’re just spamming Flash Heal after you use Penance (which I hope you’re not) and assuming 0 Haste (I hope you have some), you have 15% chance to reduce Penance’s cooldown by 4.5 seconds, 27.8% to reduce the cooldown by at least 3 seconds, and 38.5% to reduce the cooldown by at least 1.5 seconds. (Remember, the proc doesn’t go off until the Flash Heal spellcast does, so you have to let Penance cool down by at least 3.5 seconds – 2 seconds channeling Penance and then 1.5 seconds casting Flash Heal – before you can trigger the bonus at all.)

Incidentally, due to the nature of the problem, there is no point at which you’re guaranteed a proc. You get to 99.9% chance of having triggered the bonus at some point at about 27 Flash Heal casts, but it’s possible to beat probability and go forever without having triggered the bonus proc. That said, with no Haste, on average you’ll reduce the cooldown of your Penances by about 0.6 seconds. (If you have Haste, the average reduction is [0.6 * (1 + Haste %)].)

Let us assume that you are a DPS player. And let us assume that you are wondering why your health is allowed to dip so low while other people seem to be topped off all the time. (If neither of those apply to you, you’re not getting the point of “let us assume”.)

Here is the fundamental thing to understand: it is a matter of triage. Healers are pretty much constantly making decisions (consciously or, more likely in veteran healers, not) based on the basic question “what’s the best thing for me to do if I want the group to succeed in this fight?” The specifics are much more, well, specific, but that’s the underlying root of all of the decisions a good healer makes. It means that we make some choices that look odd to an observer who’s not privy to our decision-making process, too. For instance, if your raid healer sees that you are at 10% health but not taking damage, and another DPS is at 30% health but losing 10% a second, your raid healer is going to heal the second DPS and not you. It’s going to look like they’re healing someone who has higher health than you do – but all you see is their health go from 30% to 50% while you’re still down at 10%. You don’t – and, frankly, can’t be expected to – see that functionally, you’re stable and they’re crashing.

On the other hand, a popular conception of healers – and one that healers love to propagate – is that we are all-seeing, all-knowing masters of the raid’s health. According to this conception, your healer knows when you’ve been bad or good – when you’re standing in the void zones or not running out of the shadow crashes – so be good, for goodness’ sake! The truth is that that’s actually somewhat accurate – but not because we’re the Great and Powerful Oz. The fact of the matter is that if you keep standing in void zones, we’ll be able to see your health go down repeatedly, and wonder why we keep hitting you with heals. It’s an indirect sort of knowledge, as though you were an Earthlike planet around a distant sun and Grid measured your gravitational perturbation. As a rule, we don’t know why you’re losing health, or why you’re stable and the other guy’s fading fast – we just see the gravitational effect of damage and want it to stop.

Along those lines, the other secret that healers don’t want you to know is that even if you habitually stand in void zones, even if you stand in shadow crashes, even if your DPS is on par with our 45 mage who just struggled through Ulduman, even if you are totally clueless, we will do our absolute damnedest to keep you alive. Regardless of how many mistakes they make, we hate letting people die. Seeing a health bar go to zero hurts. We’ll get mad at you, we’ll complain, we’ll scream over Vent that if you stand in another god damned void zone we’re just going to let you die, but when we’re actually in combat, our best possible scenario is ending the fight with everyone alive, and we’ll include you in our normal triage because regardless of how mad we get, we still don’t want to have to rez you at the end of the fight.

(Note: this doesn’t apply if you’re a douchebag. Abuse the healers and God help you, ’cause nobody else will.)

The bottom line is this: try not to take damage. If you do, we’ll do our best to be there for you. Just don’t assume that you’ll get the first heals, and don’t assume you know why you didn’t, and don’t complain when you don’t, and we’ll get along just fine.

• Brewfest has been extended by two days, until 11:59 PM server time on October 5. This is not a permanent extension to the holiday, just to this year’s event.
• The preview content for patch 3.3 is Icecrown Citadel: The Frozen Halls, a new series of five-player instances that focus on Jaina Proudmoore and Sylvanas Windrunner leading players into a back entrance of Icecrown Citadel while Arthas is engaged at the main gates.