Duct Tape and a Prayer

According to the last poll, 75% of you wouldn’t pay for a WOW guide under any conditions, 12% would if the preview were good, 6% would if the guide’s author were authoritative, and 6% would if the author were authoritative and the preview were good. That’s about the mix I expected. Thank you!

New poll, because I’ve been thinking about which characters I’m going to drop in favor of worgen once the expansion drops. Right now I’m going with my warrior and my warlock; I would have done a worgen druid, but let’s face it, you’re not going to actually see worgen form, ever, if you’re a druid, so why not just work on the night elf druid I already have?

Anyway, now I want your opinions! Which classes are you going to roll once the expansion drops?

Read more…

Because I’m curious!

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If you are like me – and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be like me?* – you have seen Ratatouille, and remember the critic Anton Ego’s final review of Gusteau’s restaurant:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

I am here today to tell you that, in fact, the former is true, at least as far as playing WOW is concerned. Perhaps not everyone can become a great chef, but anyone can become a great healer.

You will say to me, “but Chris, I cannot heal to save my life.” (I am, incidentally, reminded of a MAD magazine cartoon from many, many years ago: “If you never hear ‘Fix this crankshaft or we’ll shoot you in the head’, why do people say ‘I couldn’t fix a crankshaft to save my life’?”) But the truth is, I believe you can heal. You just don’t know how to heal well or effectively. Maybe your DPS ways are too ingrained in you; maybe you don’t have the attention span to focus on such a small chunk of screen (if you happen to be using Grid or unit frames); maybe you don’t really understand how your healing class works. The bottom line is that it’s not a matter of inability. It’s a matter of lack of skill.

Betty Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, gives an example regarding being “talented” at art: suppose reading were treated the same way as art. Teachers would just give young students a book and step back, not instructing so as not to interfere with the students’ “creative reading”, and at the end, maybe three or four out of a class of 20 would have learned how to associate the words they spoke with the letters on the page and to read successfully. (Remember: no actual teaching at all, just leaving the kids alone with the books.) Parents of the kids who’d learned could say “oh yes, Mary has a family history of reading, her aunt Lisa was quite a reader”, and those who hadn’t could say “well, she just doesn’t have the talent for reading; she’ll find something else she is good at”.

The idea, of course, is that art is a skill that can be learned rather than a talent that must be innately possessed. The same is true of healing. Those players who are excellent healers from the outset have no special talent, no innate gift that allows them to heal better than anyone else. It’s just that their brains happen to have been tuned to the way healing works when they first started, so they were able to pick up the skill much more quickly than those whose brains were tuned to other activities (such as DPS, tanking, or shuffleboard).

Over the next week or so (it’s indefinite because of the imminent holidays), I’ll be erecting a series of posts on the skills needed to heal, how to acquire them, and how to retune your brain so that the skills come more easily and more naturally. Hopefully, at the end of it, we’ll have a whole bunch of people who have renewed faith in their ability to get a group safely to the end of an instance.

I’ll borrow a bit from Havi here, since even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing all the time, she does a damn good job of making everyone think she does.

What I’d like in the comments:

• Your opinions on what skills make a good healer.
• Your experience with learning how to be a skilled healer.
• Funny stories about having not been a skilled healer.

What I don’t want:

• Shoes.

Happy Christmas Eve, and I’ll see you all soon with the first post in the series!

* </facetious>

If you are following me on Twitter, and if you have logged on at just the right times, you may be aware that my wife has started a business providing copywriting and consulting services to small businesses. She wants to work with bloggers, designers, and other creative types – especially people who run handcrafting businesses, of the type you’d find on Etsy.

At the moment, she’s running a holiday giveaway: she’s giving out two one-hour consulting sessions, where she’ll go over the presentation of your site and your web copy and help you figure out how to draw more readers and get the readers you do have to stick around more (and, if you’re selling something, to buy more of what you’re selling). There’s no obligation on your part – all you have to do is head over to this post and leave a comment, and you’re entered into the drawing. The deadline for entering is 11:59 PM EST this Saturday, so head over and leave a comment.

(It is possible that you are now saying “but Chris, what can a copywriter do for me?” I could respond in a number of ways, from listing generic benefits to actually going to your site and giving some pointers, but the bottom line is this: if you go comment on that post, it costs you nothing to find out what a copywriter can do for you!)

I’m trying to get threaded comments and editable comments working nicely together. It’s not going well. If anyone has any suggestions, I welcome them.

In the meantime, here’s a comment topic for you, in honor of 3.3’s new Need Before Greed system: what’s your favorite piece of “wrong” gear – gear that’s not in your “optimal” armor class but that you can still wear, and that you prefer to wear over the available gear that is “optimal”?

Just so we’re clear, spending hundreds of dollars buying booster packs of the TCG (or on eBay) to get a chance at a Spectral Tiger Cub is okay, but spending $10 at the Blizzard store to get a Pandaren Monk isn’t?

I just wanted to make sure we were all clear on that.

(For the record, I think it’s fine. It’s just not in my budget right now.)

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!)

• 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.

It’s almost certain that you know by now that Ghostcrawler (Greg Street, the lead systems developer for WOW) is taking a break from posting on the official forums. For a while now (it feels like about a year and a half), GC has been the players’ direct link to the development team, and right now he’s pulling back from posting (not from reading the forums or from his actual job) because an increasing number of forum posters think it’s okay to vilify and attack the messenger (GC himself) rather than deal with the message being presented.

Nice job breaking it, “hero”.

First off: guys? All nerdrage does is make you look like a f%^&ing moron. Seriously, it would be difficult to find a better way to make yourself look like a batshit-crazy imbecile than to shout seething, frothing invective over a video game. I am not generally one to say “it’s just a game”; I think it’s dismissive and patronizing. But when you’re getting so angry about a game that you’re risking an aneurysm? Chill the f%^k out.

That said: the big issue these days, at least among Shadow priests who like to bitch about how their class is underpowered, is that (some) Shadow priests feel that they are underpowered at 80. The systems development team, led by Ghostcrawler, disagree with this sentiment; they think Shadow priests are in a good place. I am being kind to the forum posters here, because what they are actually saying are things like “I have this WOL parse that shows that I do less damage” or “I have anecdotal evidence that shows that I do less damage” or “categorically, Shadow priests do less damage, it’s a known fact”, all of which are pretty damn stupid.

• “I have this WOL parse that shows that I do less damage”: Time for a lesson in basic statistical analysis. One data point is not enough. Two data points are not enough. Even if you have 50 data points, if they’re all about the same person, that doesn’t tell you about Shadow priests, that tells you about that Shadow priest. “But Chris,” you say, “a lot of people are showing WOL parses!” Yes, but this brings in bias: you’re seeing a lot of data from priests who are doing “subpar” damage, and not a lot of data from priests who aren’t, and it’s entirely possible that that’s because the priests who are doing okay on the meters don’t feel the need to come bitch on the forums. Meanwhile, Ghostcrawler and his team really do have access to the raw data from all the fights. I have no idea how long they keep fight data but it’s certainly more than 24 hours. They can actually see how all the Shadow priests are doing. And no, they’re not obliged in any sense to show it to you.
• “I have anecdotal evidence that shows that I do less damage”: You know that old joke, “the plural of anecdote is data”? That was a joke. The plural of “anecdote” is “anecdotes”. There is no reliable data present. It’s incredibly easy to generalize your own experiences; we do it every day, because we love having things in common with other members of society so much that we falsify commonalities based on nothing more than speculation: “if I experienced this, surely everyone else did too”. But there is no such thing as “anecdotal evidence” because nobody who knows what they’re doing is going to take an anecdote at face value. If you don’t understand why, I invite you to read up on observer bias, the fragility of eyewitness memory, cherry picking, and fiction.
• “categorically, Shadow priests do less damage, it’s a known fact”: man, do I even have to go here? This isn’t an argument, it’s whipping your dick out and expecting people to ooh and ahh over it. (And frankly, fella, there ain’t much there to ooh and ahh over.) Let’s restate that in a way that makes plain the absurdity of the statement: “It’s self-evident that I’m right, because I’m right.” You don’t offer evidence, or even argument. You just state your preferred conclusion and then go off to be self-satisfied. A word of advice: generally, when you use this tactic, you’re wrong. Just so we’re clear.

When you can get past the paucity of data – when you figure out that your own experience isn’t necessarily everyone else’s – when you stop trying to win arguments with your penis size – maybe, maybe you’ll get that pony – or figure out that you already have the damn thing and just had to shovel your own manure out of the way enough to see it.

(Apologies to Emily Dickinson for that last paragraph.)