Duct Tape and a Prayer

Inspired by Dawn over on WOW Insider, here are my thoughts on meta gems for priest healers, very quickly (and leaving out the gems that are clearly not healing gems):

• Beaming Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and +2% mana. The extra mana will vary depending on your current mana pool; the crit chance means that if you’re Disc, you’ll get another Divine Aegis for every 217 spells you cast, or 1-2 more per fight.
• Bracing Earthsiege: No. Gives 25 spell power and 2% reduced threat. Only take this one if you’re having trouble on the threat meters, which hopefully you aren’t.
• Chaotic Skyflare: No. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and 3% increased critical damage. That’s important. It’s tempting to think “oh, they mean “critical spell effect”. They don’t. It’s just damage. Steer clear.
• Destructive Skyflare: No. Gives bout 0.55% crit chance and 1% chance that offensive spells that target you will hit their caster instead. This is a PVP gem, although it can be useful for certain fights (those involving randomly-targeted spellcasts or poison affliction, for example). Spell reflect does not affect AOE spells, although it can redirect chained spells (like Chain Lightning).
• Effulgent Skyflare: No. Gives 320 health and reduces spell damage taken by 2%. Another PVP gem; if you’re really having that much trouble staying alive against PVE spellcasters, swap out one of your other gems for Solid Majestic Zircons.
• Ember Skyflare: Yes. Gives 25 spell power and 2% Intellect. This gem will directly increase your throughput, and while 2% Intellect doesn’t grant quite as much mana as 2% mana (Beaming Earthsiege gives about 72 more mana regardless of how much Intellect you have), it grants more crit and more regen.
• Enigmatic Skyflare, Forlorn Skyflare, and Impassive Skyflare: No. These give about 0.45% crit chance and various duration-reducing effects. They’re PVP gems with highly-situational PVE uses. Steer clear of them.
• Insightful Earthsiege: Yes. Gives 21 Intellect (about 315 mana, 0.125% crit chance, and mana regeneration that varies based on your Spirit), and every spell you cast has a 5% chance to restore 600 mana. That works out to an average of about 60 mp5 (which can go down if you insist on casting long-cast-time spells and up if you have lots of haste, as I do). This is the beloved, overwhelmingly-recommended meta gem for priest healers; over a 6-minute fight that adds up to 4,320 extra mana in your pool. Get this unless you can afford to be more concerned with throughput than mana.
• Powerful Earthsiege: No. Another PVP gem, this one gives 320 health and reduced stun duration. Not worth it.
• Revitalizing Skyflare: Yes. Gives 11 MP5 and 3% increased critical healing effect. That’s not healing chance; instead, when your heals do crit, they heal for 3% more. That means that if you’re Disc, your Divine Aegis will be 3% bigger too! The 11 MP5 is 792 mana – not fabulous, one additional spell over the course of a 6-minute fight, but it’s better than nothing.
• Tireless Skyflare: Maybe. This is another PVP gem, with 25 spell power and a minor run speed increase, but I ran with it for a long time. Part of this was because it helped me get out of the fire faster, and part of it was because I was entertained by running faster than anyone else in the raid. Sadly, it doesn’t stack with other speed-increasing effects. Go with this if you can’t get one of the others, or if you have a hard time staying out of the stuff on the floor.
• Trenchant Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives 25 spell power and reduces stun duration by 10%. It’s a PVP gem, but it has some uses in PVE. It’s not fabulous, but it can be useful for certain fights, especially in heroics. The faster you can get out of a stun effect, the faster you can start healing again. That said, if you have the chance to get another one of the gems, take it.

The bottom line: Get Ember Skyflare, Insightful Earthsiege, or Revitalizing Skyflare depending on your playstyle, with the first two recommended more highly than the third unless you really, really love Divine Aegis. Get Beaming Earthsiege, Tireless Skyflare, or Trenchant Earthsiege only if you can’t get one of the first three.

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>

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!

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.

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

And the result:

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 %)].)