Duct Tape and a Prayer

Dear tanks and DPS who complain about getting Power Word: Shield (maybe because they believe that they are getting “rage-starved”):

SUCK IT, NOOBS.

Love,
Theande, Disc Healer

(Thanks to @Nibuca for the tip.)

Hi! Remember healing? That’s what this blog used to be about before Holidays and Achievements put together a For The Off-Topic! raid and took Healing down. It was a pretty epic battle, and Holidays and Achievements got their black war tags, but now Healing’s respawned and back in the fight.

Patch 3.3 revamped the LFG system and introduced cross-server PUGs, and thank the Light, they’ve finally got it right. PUGs are quick and painless – even when they don’t work out you tend to know in advance, like the Halls of Reflection group I had last night where the tank started out by saying “so, can anyone else tank?” – and it’s easy to rack up a few dozen emblems in an evening’s play. Even alts are getting in on the action – the gear-matching system is pretty good at ensuring that they don’t get into an instance they can’t handle.

That said, it’s not all peaches and cream – there are still a lot of things that can trip a group up. The advantage of the LFG system is that most of those stumbling blocks are player-induced, and there are things you can do to remove them. Here are some guidelines for making sure your PUGs go as smoothly as possible when you’re healing:

• Stock up on reagents before you get in the queue.

Every time. I know healers who join the queue from beside a reagent vendor so that they’ll be able to stock up again when they get out. I carry 60 Sacred Candles on me, but this weekend I decided to chain-queue from the Borean Tundra, and managed to get down to 3 candles before I gave up and went back to Dalaran. The sad truth about PUGs is that sometimes, you’re going to wipe – people don’t know the fight, don’t have the gear to complete the fight, or just plain screw up, and you want to make sure that you can keep buffing the group no matter how many times the Godfather of Souls eats yours.

• Tell the rest of the players up-front if you’ve never successfully completed the instance.

This is a matter of some debate among players – some say you should just not say anything to avoid being kicked for a more experienced healer, some say you should ask for the strategy just before the first boss because they’ll be invested in getting the boss down and won’t want to have to wait for another healer. Honestly, that just seems like dishonesty to me. It’s better to tell the group up-front that you haven’t been through the instance. You’ll sometimes get the odd jerk who kicks you from the group for being inexperienced, but I’ve found that most players are so eager to get going that they’ll gladly explain the fights to a new player, just so they don’t have to wait in the queue again. Of course, it’s easier to get them to go along with you if you’re appropriately geared (and don’t try to heal the first half of Old Kingdom in your fishing pole and hat…).

• Discuss loot rules in advance.

Nothing in World of Warcraft causes more drama and personal offense than loot. It’s far better to take fifteen seconds at the beginning of the run to figure out what everyone else thinks is fair. Remember, too, that you can’t roll Need on items of a different armor class than yours, even if you can wear them and they’re an upgrade. If you’re a druid, shaman, or paladin healer, and you know that something you want but that’s not in your armor class drops, you might also want to talk to the group and see if someone of the lower armor class would be willing to Need the item for you and then trade it to you – and if you’re a shaman, druid, or priest healer, consider offering to be the Need monkey.

Oh, and everyone Needs on Frozen Orbs unless they really don’t care to whom the Orb goes. It’s just common sense – no, you don’t need it, but “Need” doesn’t actually mean “need” here, it means “roll at the highest priority in a tiered system”.

• Talk with the tank about speed-pulling.

This is one of the drawbacks of PUGs being so quick and painless: lots of people want to get as many instances in as possible, and that means pulling as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that also means that tanks are paying attention to their health, not your mana bar (even though they should be). At the beginning of the instance, talk to the tank and agree on a signal for her to look for that indicates that you need to wait before the next pull. Otherwise you’ll find yourself going in with 3k mana – and inevitably that’s when the unexpected patrol comes around the corner.

• Make sure the group knows what you’re capable of.

This is especially important for priests. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who still don’t know that Discipline is a viable healing spec and wonder what Guardian Spirit does. Tell the group at the beginning “I’m a Discipline priest – that means you’ll be seeing a lot of shielding and fast single-target heals, but not a whole lot of AOE healing. Don’t worry, I know you’re taking damage, but I have to prioritize, and you might get a shield where a Holy priest would just drop Circle of Healing.”

• Even though you’re playing with players from different servers, you can still get a reputation.

Sure, you’re now pulling from ten times as many players and it’s easier to disappear into the crowd – especially since the odds are that the players won’t be from your server and won’t be able to badmouth you there. The bad news is that there are only ten or so realms per battlegroup – and word spreads fast. Don’t be surprised to find someone else from that server saying “man, I heard you were a total bitch, I’m not running with you.” Be a good player and a good human being – it might not get you more groups, but it certainly will keep you from getting fewer. Besides which, it’s just good practice to be a good person.

• Know your limits.

This one should be obvious. If you’ve tried this fight three times and can’t keep everybody up, it might not just be that the DPS is standing in the fire. Maybe you’re having a bad night, or maybe you’re just not geared enough for the group. You need to be willing to say “I’m sorry, guys, I can’t heal this fight, you should find someone else.” It’ll cost you some badges and loot – but you can always go in later and do it when you’re better-geared or more confident.

This should, thankfully, be pretty rare because of the gear-matching system, but it happens sometimes and the Good Player way to handle it is to bow out gracefully and allow someone else to take your place.

• Explain the fights if you’ve been there before.

In an ideal world, anyone who’s been through a fight before could explain it. Sadly, we don’t live in the ideal world. The DPS are focusing on the boss and on moving out of poisons, and don’t really care what the healer or other DPS are doing – and are paying attention to the tank roughly enough to make sure she’s still at the top of the threat meter. The tank is mainly worried about maintaining threat and the state of her own health bar. As the healer, you’re the one who’s standing back, paying attention to positioning (so you know when people are out of range and when someone’s about to step in a puddle. More than any other role, it’s the healer who’s concerned about everybody else’s tactics, and who has a broad perspective on the fight (literally – we need to be able to see everyone to hit them with heals). So if you’ve done the fight before, offer to explain it. Give suggestions if you can, and offer unique abilities that you have that can give the group an advantage (“Everyone stay within 20 yards of the tank so I can Mass Dispel the freeze effect” on Keristrasza, for example).

• Don’t be afraid to roll Need on upgrades.

There is a feeling among some healers – myself included – that we don’t really contribute as much to fights as everybody else. The elephant in the room here is damage meters – a lot of players believe that contribution to a fight is judged based on a player’s position on the damage meter, and since healers are almost universally at the bottom of the list, there’s a certain feeling that you’re not really contributing, and therefore don’t deserve as much of the loot. This feeling is amplified among strangers, since – as above – you want to be a good person, and you don’t want to get a bad rep.

I’ll put it plainly: that feeling needs to go away. You are contributing to the fight by keeping health bars up. If you weren’t there, the DPS wouldn’t be able to bring the boss down before the boss killed them. If you weren’t there, the tank would last about five seconds. You are just as much a part of the fight as anyone else, and you’re just as entitled to the spoils.

Even if the tank insists on referring to you as “healer” throughout the run. (Seriously, not even “priest”? You can’t even be bothered to figure out what class is healing you?)

Any others I’ve missed? Leave a comment!

• Recount and other damage meters are broken. It’s easy to understand, but almost impossible to fix:
  • Damage meters use custom chat channels to communicate damage among players in the group/raid.
  • If a player can’t participate in the custom chat channel, other players’ damage meters will only record damage if they’re within 5-10 yards.
  • Custom chat channels don’t work cross-server.
  • Therefore, if you’re more than 10 yards from a player from another server, you’re not getting their damage correctly.

  Seriously, I’ve seen Recount come up more than 3,000 DPS short for some players from other servers, just because I was healing (back with the ranged DPS) and they were meleeing.

• Roll Need on Frozen Orbs unless you truly don’t care who gets it. Stop thinking about “Need” as meaning “I need this for X specific purpose”, and start thinking about it as meaning “the highest priority in this loot system”. Rolling Need is the only way to distribute that Frozen Orbs are distributed evenly among group members. If you truly don’t care who gets it, roll Greed or pass – but then you don’t get to complain when someone else rolls Need, because it doesn’t matter to you, right?
• EDIT: Reader protomech confirms that BOP items can be traded cross-server! Thank you! Can someone confirm whether BOP items can be traded to a player from another server, if they were eligible to loot the item and you’re within the two-hour trade window.? I’ve received comments going both ways and I’d like to know.

A quick catcher-upper: in WOW 3.3, if there is an enchanter with a suitable skill level in the group, group members will be given three options when loot drops: Need, Greed, and Disenchant. Disenchant is a fancy way of saying “Greed, but I want the enchanting mats rather than the item”. If you click Disenchant, you are treated exactly as if you had rolled Greed, and roll along with the other people who rolled greed, but instead of Spellweaver’s Skullcap of the Skunk, you’ll get seventeen Infinite Dust in your bags. (That I initially typed “Arcane Dust” should tell you that I don’t deal with enchanting very often.)

This is being implemented because in WOW 3.3, you’ll be able to PUG with characters from other servers. This sounds awesome in theory, but in practice it’s limited because you can’t trade items to characters from other servers. That includes enchanting materials. So the common practice of letting the enchanter in the group roll Greed on the drops, and then disenchant at the end of the run and hand out the proceeds, won’t work if you have someone from another server in your group.

There are four main objections I have seen to this. They are:

• The game is using my tradeskill without my consent.

Well, no. The game is using your level of skill with a given profession to trigger a flag in the system; if the flag is triggered, the game does the disenchanting. You don’t have to do anything. Your profession isn’t being used. You’re just toggling a yes/no switch.

• Sometimes I don’t want to give my fellow party members enchanting mats, because they haven’t earned them.

I will be blunt: you are a douchebag who needs to put the game down and spend some time in social-acclimation classes. These folks come highly recommended.

• If anyone can generate enchanting mats, the market for them will go down.

You haven’t thought this through. Here’s how economics works: People roll Disenchant because the mats sell better than the gear itself. The supply of enchanting mats grows slightly (but not very much; as a rule, roughly the same amount of mats is going to be on the market – it’s just going to be coming from different people). The price drops. People roll Disenchant less because the mats aren’t selling as well. The market price stabilizes at slightly under the original rate.

So yes, instead of 100g for an Abyss Crystal you might get 95g. Forgive me for not feeling particularly sorry for you.

• If people can roll to disenchant, I should be able to roll to get the contents of mining nodes, herbs, and skinnable mobs.

Nope. 100% wrong. Here’s why: you can’t pick up a Saronite Vein and cart it back to a vendor to sell. End of story. Without an enchanter in the group, the gear’s still there to pick up and sell. Enchanters just make it easy to turn gear into mats; this is especially true of BOP gear, which – in the absence of an enchanter – can only be vendored.

Without a miner, that Saronite Vein might as well not even be there. Without an herbalist, every single Frost Lotus in the instance goes to utter waste. Without a skinner, those worgs will just lie there and rot.

The only valid comparison is suggesting that maybe cloth (Frostweave etc.) should have a Need/Greed/Bolt option, and if you want to suggest that, well, be my guest. I suspect that that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee, but you’re welcome to try.

The bottom line is this: the Disenchant option is an unqualified positive addition to the game, and the people who are complaining about it either haven’t thought it through or probably shouldn’t be interacting with other human beings.

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.

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.

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.