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 %)].)

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.

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.)

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.

In Naxxramas, one of the bosses, Heigan the Unclean, casts a debuff on everyone within 30 yards called “Spell Disruption“, which slows casting speed by 300% (effectively, your spells take four times as long to cast). Normally, this is a bad thing (although it doesn’t affect instant-cast spells).

However, Shadow priests can take advantage of this debuff. Spell Disruption increases the channeling time of channeled spells like Mind Flay, and also increases the spaces between ticks, so that, for example, a spell like Penance, which ticks once a second for two seconds (three ticks – 0s, 1s, 2s), will instead tick once every four seconds for eight seconds (0s, 4s, 8s).

Here’s the bug: Mind Flay does have its channeling time increased fourfold, from 3 seconds to 12 seconds – but for some reason, the tick frequency is unchanged. Where Mind Flay does damage every second for 3 seconds without the debuff, it now does damage every second for 12 seconds with the debuff. You’re getting four times as much damage for the same mana cost, making Mind Flay possibly the most mana-efficient damage-dealing spell in the game while under the effects of Spell Disruption.