There is a !meme going around the healing blogs. I have been instructed by Amber that I am to fill it out and post it here. Since I value the life of my Sinister Squashling, I obey:

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Theande, Discipline Priest.
• What is your primary group healing environment? 25-player raids, though those are thin on the ground these days.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. It’s fast and has three chances to crit! Its only drawback is the extraordinarily long cooldown.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Desperate Prayer. The only reason I have it talented is because I had nowhere else I wanted to put the point.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Mitigation. Discipline priests use a lot of shields! Preventing damage > healing it after the fact.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? We don’t have any strong AOE heals, which limits our utility.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Flex healing. Discipline priests do best when we’re going where we’re needed – we’re fast and light on our feet for a reason.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Probably holy priests, because we complement each other.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Resto druids. Their HOTs account for a lot of my overhealing.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? Using spare GCDs for DOTs instead of shielding…
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? It’s a toss-up between tanks who drag whirlwinding mobs back into the casters and DPS who think the healer isn’t paying attention to the health meters.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Reasonably. It would feel more balanced if Blizzard included mitigation in the healing reporting.
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? The logs posted by the raid leader afterward, mostly.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? Another toss-up, between “Disc is just for PVP” and “Disc is only good for tank healing”.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? That preventing someone’s health bar from going down is just as valuable as making it go back up.
• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? Moderate overhealing, lower healing than other healers because of all the time spent shielding.
• Haste or Crit and why? Haste. Discipline priests should be fast, getting heals to their targets almost as soon as the damage is taken – not slow and clunky and relying on big numbers and Divine Aegis.
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Resto shamans.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? I use Grid to keep track of health bars (although it’s falling out of favor with me) and FortExorcist to keep track of cooldowns.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I tend to stack Haste and Intellect; faster heals mean that I need more mana (and more regen). After that, spellpower, then crit, then anything else.

There, now my Squashling is safe.

I will not threaten their Sinister Squashlings (or any other pets), but those who must complete this or suffer the (kind of plush, actually) consequences are Shy and Tart.

• 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!)

I’m thinking of doing a photo-travelogue of Old Azeroth, before Cataclysm sets in. Any opinions on where I should start, and what direction to travel?

A quick update on this:

• I’m planning on starting as a level-1 alt and traveling the world. (Yes, I am going to spend a lot of time as a ghost.)
  • I may level this alt to 10 before I set out proper.
• This isn’t going to be “a memoir of leveling”; it’s a deliberate, Pausanias (or Bill Bryson, as you prefer) -style travel journal, going to different interesting places and recording them for posterity.
• This is going to be on a new server, one I haven’t played on before, to avoid the temptation to supply this character with gold and gear.
• I welcome guest stars, but I won’t be taking on permanent traveling companions.

I’ve stopped raiding.

Don’t get me wrong – I love raiding, and I really like the group I’ve been raiding with. But right now, my son just came back from his summer in California and has started school (he’s in 5th grade this year – I can barely believe it), my wife is going back to being a full-time student (to finish an English/Business degree), and I’m working 50 to 60 hours a week (and that doesn’t include the time I’m spending training up on work-related skills). Plus, we have a new dog who needs to go out regularly. All of that comes together to put me in a situation in life where I really can’t put together three or four uninterrupted hours at the times when my guild raids.

Because I feel guilty about not raiding, I’ve been avoiding playing my priest – I think I’ve been in the new 5-man all of three times (not for lack of trying – someone else always gets to the healing spots first), and of the new raid I only ever saw Northrend Beasts. I’m kind of tired of dailies, and I don’t do heroics (for a lot of reasons – one being that as a healer, I’m the one who’s going to take the blame, deserved or not, if the group fails). Instead, I’ve put a lot of time into my rogue alt (she’s level 44 now – I’m averaging about a level a day for the last two weeks), since I can play her in little bits. (Heirloom shoulders, chest, and dagger mean she’s doing just over 100 DPS and getting 120% XP from killing and quests, so I’m cruising right along. I’ve been out of rested XP since level 27…)

I try to log on to Theande and Sisuphe once a day to transmute and do the Jewelcrafting daily, respectively, but I don’t always remember, and I’m running out of green Northrend gems to feed the daily – and I really don’t want to have to fly around Storm Peaks two dozen times gathering ore again. (I know, I bought Sisuphe’s epic flyer so she could do exactly that, but I do my best farming when I can play uninterrupted and, as above, I don’t really get uninterrupted time these days. That’s one of the reasons I love my rogue – if I have to step away, I can just stealth in a corner until I get back.)

I am happy about most of the changes in 3.2 (the Penance cooldown was a nerf, and honestly we should have taken the +5% crit they offered us in exchange in 3.1), and I’m really looking forward to the reworked Onyxia in 3.3 and to Cataclysm. But otherwise – well, I don’t really have very much to say about WOW right now, I think.*

All of which is to say that I’m sorry posts have been thin on the ground here lately, and I don’t know when I’m coming back.

* Yes, I’m consciously invoking this in order to kick-start my creative brain. Don’t tell it that, though, or it won’t work.

You may be aware that for the last couple weeks, I’ve been fighting a script-injection infection on etherjammer.com. Last weekend was the third in a row that I’d been infected, and I finally got annoyed enough to nuke the site to the ground. Nothing left except directories. I even destroyed the hidden files.

Today I’m finally bringing things back online.

You may notice some quirks as the blog reasserts itself. Things may not be as you remember them – I kept the posts and comments but couldn’t save the blog settings, so I’m reworking it from memory, and from changed tastes. I’ll be back in posting trim here soon enough. For now, I’m happy enough that I’m back at all.

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!

• Anea shares her thoughts on leveling a tanking warrior.
• Euripides joins my guild!
• Faulsey has a run-in with the worst paladin ever.
• Pike rambles at length about hunter specs and their in-game applications.
• Shawndra is a real Shadow priestess! (I have a very similar screenshot from Theande’s brief ill-considered Shadow stint in the early 40s. Even had the same hat!)
• Blessing has guidelines for what makes a good guild.
• Dueg knows from bad healing.
• Professor Brigwyn teaches Hunter 101.
• Amber is a healer, if one with multiple personality disorder.
• Lenelie (who is not on Twitter, apparently) tells you what to do with all those healers you have lying around on your raid roster.
• Dan wants you to remember that we’re not in Burning Crusade anymore, “Shot Rotation” Jenkins.
• Grimtorn, whom I believe is still technically on hiatus, nonetheless has a three-part series on what the well-dressed Unholy Death Knight wears to a Necropolis.
• Brajana would very much like to actually finish Ramparts, thank you.
• Andrea of No Stock UI debates the merits of healing with add-ons.
• Pix wants to tell you the story of a new Death Knight (part 4, but the rest of it’s linked).
• Jessika is, like most of us, still a noob.
• Tart needs to get better at updating.
• Syrana thinks being cancelled is funny.
• Klinderas examines pets of Cunning.
• Spooncraft wants a new T-shirt logo and wants to send someone to BlizzCon, and has stapled the two together in a contest.
• Rilgon thinks Clique will help him heal better.
• Kadomi wants to take you shopping in the Wrath raids.
• Arrens has been reading too much Joseph Campbell.
• Arcania explains why she feels compelled to actually role-play in a role-playing game. The horror!
• Jezriyah wants that one particular belt.
• Matt shares the only functioning phone booth with an infinity sign in all of Azeroth.
• Cadistra and Kissless turn some unfortunate centaurs into jerky.
• Zannniee is starting up a new writing project.
• Eric explains why math is good.
• Troy debates the merits of hybrid vs. pure DPS.

Did I miss you? Is there someone I’m not reading that I should be? Let me know in the comments below!

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 :)