Duct Tape and a Prayer

(Largely copied from my comment on this WOW.com post.)

Yesterday, leading raid guild Ensidia claimed the world-first normal-mode 25-man kill of the Lich King. Last night, it was revealed that they’d used – knowingly or not – a bug that made one part of the encounter significantly easier. Early this morning, according to a blog post by raid member Muqq, they received 72-hour bans for using the exploit, and the achievements and items they gained from the encounter were stripped from the characters who participated in the kill.

Here’s the thing: It’s not about how easy the exploit is. It’s not even about whether Ensidia knew.

This is, to put it bluntly, almost universally a public relations coup for Blizzard. And Ensidia’s doing exactly what Blizzard wants them to do, whether they’re doing it consciously or not.

Consider:

Blizzard hasn’t publicly announced the ban. They know they don’t have to. They know that Ensidia’s going to rear up and complain about it. The people who care – the people who are gunning for firsts, the people who want to know about the fights ahead of time, the people who might exploit – now know that the top guild in the world isn’t immune from consequences; why should they think they will be?

Consider:

Blizzard says “We know about this bug and we’re fixing it as fast as we can.” hours before Ensidia says “They need to fix this bug!” All Ensidia’s doing is highlighting the fact that Blizzard’s on the job. Ensidia aren’t idiots. They know that an encounter that isn’t tested on the PTR is going to have bugs. There’s an in-game way to report bugs for a reason. In their rush to World First, they found a bug, and instead of being responsible as gamers and testing and reporting the bug, they were responsible to their sponsors and their egos and blew through the encounter anyway, and then downplayed the bug after they’d claimed World First.

Consider:

By saying “pull everybody off Cataclysm and put them on fixing this encounter”, Ensidia is saying two things: “the Lich King encounter is really important and everybody should want it to be right as soon as possible”, and “Cataclysm is huge, and its developers are the best at Blizzard”.

Ensidia isn’t even really taking heat – they just cool their heels for 72 hours and everybody rallies behind them for being underdogs. (Look at the comments here!) And Blizzard gets everything it wants – and all it took was a 72-hour ban. (Hell, I’m tempted to think that they knew about the bug and left it in on purpose.)

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!

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.

• 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.

At this point, it’s generally accepted that Discipline is an effective healing spec in PVE. It’s also generally – although less so – known that Discipline relies on shields and other mitigation to get much of its healing done. What doesn’t seem to be well-known is why Discipline priests love them some shields, and here I’m going to try to correct that. As always, correct me if you think my math is wrong or my conclusions aren’t sound.

Shields mitigate damage.

“Well, duh.” Sure, this one’s a gimme, but it’s also the most important aspect of shielding. Discipline priests aren’t the only ones who gain a benefit to their shields from spell power – the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield is increased by 80.68% of your spell power. But we also have a lot of ways to buff our shields. We get Improved Inner Fire in our second tier, which increases the contribution to spell power from Inner Fire by 45%; we have Improved Power Word: Shield as a tier-3 talent, which increases the damage absorbed by 15% after spell power is applied; we get Mental Agility in the fourth tier, which reduces the mana cost of our instant-cast spells by 10%; we get Soul Warding in the fifth tier, which reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by a further 30%; and we get Borrowed Time in the 10th tier, which adds another 30% of our spell power to the amount absorbed. (Sadly, Focused Power doesn’t improve PW:S – thanks to Rilgon for clarifying.)

A Discipline priest with all of these talents, and 2000 spell power – which is about average for a beginning raiding priest, in my experience – can cast shields that absorb about 4580 damage for 560 mana, or about 9.25 damage absorbed per mana spent. (For reference, our Flash Heal is about 5.46 healing per mana.) That’s a powerful, efficient mitigation tool, especially with the Glyph of Power Word: Shield, which heals the target for 10% of the potential damage absorbed (that is, the full 4580, not the damage that’s actually absorbed), and is affected by Focused Power.

And that’s just PW:S. Divine Aegis, our other major shield, costs us nothing at all (and scales nicely with spell power; we get 1 damage absorbed for every 10 healing on every critical heal we cast); the only drawback is that we can’t control when it goes up. Our third mitigation ability, Pain Suppression, is less often used, as it has a long cooldown and is reduction in damage rather than damage blocking like the shields.

Our shields don’t just mitigate for the target.

Every time a Discipline priest casts Power Word: Shield, the entire raid takes 3% less damage for 20 seconds. 3% damage mitigation to everybody in the raid, on top of the 4580 absorption for the actual target, can be the difference between a wipe and a successful boss kill. Sadly, Renewed Hope doesn’t stack, but at the least it means that PW:S should be used once every 20 seconds. However…

Our shields are fast.

The other key ingredient of Soul Warding, mentioned above, is that it reduces the cooldown on our Power Word: Shield from 4 seconds to 1 second – essentially, we can cast it as often as we want, since the global cooldown (normally 1.5 seconds) is always going to be at least as long as the Power Word: Shield cooldown. We don’t have to worry about whether we’re wasting a cooldown on the DPS who’s in the Slag Pot just in case the tank needs it in three seconds, because we can toss out shields as fast as the GCD will let us. Speaking of which…

Our shields make us faster.

Borrowed Time also increases our spell haste by 25% for 6 seconds or until the next non-instant spellcast. (Channeled spells, like Divine Hymn and Penance, count as instant-cast.) That improves not only the speed at which we can cast our spells, but our global cooldown as well. With Enlightenment (another 6% spell haste) and some minimal +haste gearing, we can get off a PW:S – Prayer of Mending – Penance – Flash Heal combination in 4 seconds, a burst of healing that can bring a tank from 1% very nearly back to viable health. (With proper macros or add-ons, all four spells can also go to different people, making us decent raid healers as well.)

Our shields restore your energy.

Speaking of restoring tanks, Rapture, in tier 8 of our talent tree, restores 2.5% of our total mana when one of our shields is dispelled or completely spent (but not when it wears off without being used up), and restores 2% total mana, 8 rage, 16 energy, or 32 runic power to the shield’s target. That restoration alone is a reason for us to want shields up on as many players as possible (even though the effect has a hidden cooldown), especially in AOE fights like Loatheb, XT-002, and Ignis.

Our shields, in short, are awesome.

Any questions or comments? Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments!

Seriously, you’re going to hurt yourself.

I have three feeds from WOW Insider going: The Queue, The Daily Quest, and anything tagged “priest” (that last one can get really annoying when the authors/editors of, say, All The World’s A Stage decide to spam every possible tag they can on So You Want To Be A Herbalist). Today, in the Priest feed, the Forum Post of the Day came through. It was about Discipline priests in raids, and how a raid leader was singling out a Discipline priest because his healing on the meters was under par. Amanda’s final comment really rang true: “It’s not about being a star, or a prima dona [sic], raiding is about working together as a team to accomplish a common goal.”

This is going to come as news to a lot of raid leaders (go on, raise your hand if you are one), but really and truly, Ulduar is not Galaga. Galaga is about getting the highest possible score; that’s the whole point of the game. Raid leaders tend to treat raiding like it works the same way – they see the healing and DPS meters as high score charts, and penalize raiders who don’t get onto the charts. The problem with that is that unlike Galaga, World of Warcraft raiding actually has a very concrete win condition: did you defeat the boss? If you defeated the boss, the entire raid wins. If not, the entire raid fails.

If the raid isn’t failing – if you’re successfully downing the bosses you want to take down – then there’s no reason at all to single anyone out on the meters. You met the win condition! Clearly everyone is doing at least as well as they need to be, or else you wouldn’t be successful.

If the raid is failing, everybody needs to step up a little more. It’s really tempting to go through the high scores – sorry, the meters – and identify the people who aren’t scoring as high – sorry, doing as much damage or healing – and try to “fix” those people. (In the example in Amanda’s post, the RL asked the priest to go Holy to increase his HPS.) Unfortunately, that simply won’t solve the problem. Unless you’re being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, fixing a single person isn’t going to make the raid go from not killing the boss to killing the boss. When a raid fails, nobody is exempt. If the raid isn’t doing enough DPS but the healing is okay, the healers can look at ways to keep the raid alive a little longer after the enrage timer hits, or to damage the boss between heals. If the raid is doing enough DPS but important players are dying, the DPS can work on staying out of the fire or taking the adds down a little faster. I don’t mean that the DPS is exempt from improving in the first scenario or the healers are exempt in the second; I mean that everybody shares the responsibility of a failed attempt.

(If you are being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, the meters aren’t going to help you anyway.)

I’m not saying that meters are useless. The best – perhaps the only valid – use of meters is to check your own performance in the raid (and even then it’s not necessarily accurate, like the Discipline priest example above, which is why WOW Web Stats is handy), and to look at other raid members to see what you could be doing differently. Raid leaders, though, should be paying attention not at individual raiders – because I will guarantee that there isn’t a single player in the raid who can’t improve something – but at the statistics of the raid as a whole. It’s obvious, but damaging to the egos of the other raiders, that if you think a single person is holding you back enough that you can identify them as the cause of your wipes, it’s actually the whole rest of the raid that needs work.