Bandage Spec

Spam Healing Vs. Triage

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 07:45:00 +0000

Boosh.

Pardon the unstructure of this (Yes, I just made up a word), I've been busy these last few weeks and decided to finish up this post sitting in my drafts on my blackberry while I had some downtime away from home. This isn't up to my usual quality standards, but it's been on my mind and I've been ridiculously busy with a heavy class load and work. I'll try to polish it up a bit later if I get some time.

Now that Cata has been out for awhile, and we've gotten to play around with the new healing system, we can finally make some decisions about whether or not we actually like it. Was spam healing superior, or do we like that we've gone back to the triage days of old? Is triage "too hard" for people to grasp? Are we even truly on a triage system?

Spam and Triage defined

Spam healing is what we refer to the style of healing where one spell reigns supreme, and most others are ignored as they are deemed useless. Also, that one spell is usually fired continuously, or close to it. For example, in BC, Holy Paladins basically spammed a downranked Flash of Light. Or in Wrath, a Disc Priest's job was basically to roll shields on the whole raid.

Triage healing is where you pick the right spell for the right job, paying more attention to costs and using spells based on what is needed. It uses more of the toolkit, as we need to pay attention to heals per mana (HPM) more than heals per second (HPS).

What's more fun?

Honestly, I've loved healing through all of it. I enjoyed spamming and I enjoy triage, so I'll give a couple reasons for each.

I liked spamming because for one, it was simple. I didn't have to think about my spells that much, just who was getting hurt. I called it "masochistic whack-a-mole". It was fun for me because I liked the reactionary nature of it. Damage was coming fast, so you had to be quick moving from target to target. However, it had the drawback of being repetitive, fairly simple, and we didn't care about our resources, and teamwork wasn't an integral part. It really was whack-a-mole. It was difficult to distinguish yourself as a great healer, because it was so easy to be good.

Triage is a bit different. While we might not always be casting and damage is slower, we are more conscious of our resources and we get to use more spells. It's the same kind of quick thinking, but instead of putting more effort into picking targets, we put that effort into picking spells and rely on teamwork and assignments to handle a lot of the target work. It's easier to shine in a triage system because picking the wrong spells can lead to mana starvation, or player death. On the flip side, we are seeing less capable healers because people are struggling. this should resolve itself in time as people get used to it, but are we patient enough?

My Preference

Spamming was fun, I enjoyed it. But at the end of the day, I prefer the larger toolkit of a triage system. I love the rush of using the right spell at the right time and seeing my raid succeed. It's also nice just having some different buttons to press and more of a toolkit to use. I prefer the triage system, but it's presenting itself with a problem for healer balance since we're all using more spells than we were in the past.

I've seen more healers struggling now than ever though, and a lot of my healer buddies have been switching to dps. this should remedy with time, as people get used to it and more information is out there, but it's tough for now.

What about you, do you miss the system in wrath, or do you like the direction it's going now?

/bubblehearth

On Haste, Crit, And Other Secondary Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:05:00 +0000

Ah, the haste-crit conundrum. I'm not going to say I was completely avoiding talking about this, but I was completely avoiding talking about this. However, it comes up a lot and so I want to share my thoughts on the situation thusfar and attempt to give folks some sort of basic idea. Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm not really a big math person. I'll let the folks over at Elitist Jerks handle the math, and I'm going to focus more on what their numbers mean, and the practicality of them. We will go over numbers, but I see no need to reinforce the math they've already done, so any rating conversions are pulled from there.

My goal here is to just give you at least an idea of where to begin when looking at gear, particularly for reforging purposes. So to achieve that goal, we are going to take a look at haste, crit, mastery, and spirit. Let's look at what they do, how they interact, and what gives you more bang for your buck.

If you're a well versed Holy Paladin just looking for some haste and crit advice, feel free to skip on down, I know this post is a little long.

Mastery

First thing, let's check out our new stat, mastery. This one changes class to class, and that keeps it kind of interesting. While some classes stack it, Holy Paladins tend to avoid it, and I want to look at why.

What it Does

Our mastery is one that is pretty simple in concept, and sounds a lot better than it is on paper. Here's a link straight to what it does: Illuminated Healing. Seems simple right? Free shields sounds pretty awesome. So why don't we want to stack this?

We have to look at the way the shields work. When you cast a spell, a shield is placed on your target. This, we get. But, what we need to take into consideration is this: what if there is a shield on the target already? With how many instant casts we have and how quickly we are firing spells off, there's a good chance that the boss hasn't swung yet, thus, not using the shield already on the target. So, when we hit them with another heal, it doesn't place a second shield on the target, and it doesn't stack with the old one. This means that any unused shields are effectively wasted, pretty much the same thing as overhealing. So what DO they do if there's already one on them? It's pretty simple.

If the new spell is bigger, i.e the old shield was from a Holy Light, and I then cast a Divine Light, then the shield is overwritten by the new spell. So say my Holy Light hit the target for 5k, and put on a shield for 500. Before the boss swings again, I cast a Divine Light for 15k. The shield for 500 goes away, and a shield for 1.5k goes up. The 500 shield was wasted.

Let's take the reverse, using the same example. Let's say I cast a 15k Divine Light, putting up a shield for 1.5k. Then, before the boss swings, I cast a 5k Holy Light. Since this new heal is smaller, the shield for 500 doesn't happen, and the shield for 1.5k has it's duration refreshed. Still, the shield for 500 was wasted.

It's also worth noting that not all of our spells will even proc it. Radiance will not, Beacon will not, Protector of the Innocent will not, and Enlightened Judgements will not. Beacon is the big one here.

How well does it convert?

Pretty well actually. Just going to use the numbers from the EJ compendium since they did it nicely, using 100 rating. 100 mastery makes your shields about .7% bigger.

What do we do with it?

Reforge it. So many of the shields will be wasted with our quick casts, and shields altogether have been devalued a bit with the new healing model.

Spirit

What it Does

The basics of spirit are simple. It restores mana. It restores different levels in and out of combat, and doesn't scale with any lasting buffs. It also works directly with intellect. The more int you have the better spirit works for you. It also gives us hit rating through Enlightened Judgements, which is important due to the mana we get from Judgement.

How well does it convert?

This is complicated mathematically. The basic answer is it doesn't matter how well it scales, you need it so you're going to suck it up and stack it anyways.. The complicated answer, from EJ:

Mp5 In Combat = 0.0025 + Spirit * Sqrt(Intellect) * 0.0083625

I don't like math near enough to really care about that though.

What do we do with it?

Stack it. If there's no spirit on the piece and you find yourself even coming close to having mana issues, reforge to it.

Haste

It's not an accident I'm putting this before crit. I want to justify what I have to say about crit, at least to a degree.

What it does

Haste does a couple things. First, it lowers the global cooldown. Second, it makes your spells cast faster. Third, it can add extra ticks to Holy Radiance. This third reason is the big one right now. Haste is our big throughput stat.

How well does it convert?

Because haste does several things, let's look at all 3 individually.

Cast Speed

Again, let's use 100 rating. 100 haste provides .78% spell haste. Meaning, 100 haste makes your spells .78% faster. It takes a lot to see a real difference.

GCD (Global Cool Down)

The GCD is a big limiter in our actions right now. It defaults to 1.5 seconds, and can be lowered to 1 second via haste. Basically, this means that all your spells that are affected have a shared cooldown of 1.5 seconds before haste. To lower it down to 1 second, you would need 3489 haste rating, or about 27.24% according to Elitist Jerks. That is assuming full buffs, so that is a ton of haste. Not easily obtainable right now.

Radiance Ticks

The easiest way to explain the scaling here is to take a look at part of the table on the Elitist Jerks Compendium. I've cut out the extra buffs, we're going to focus on the static things only, so we are only assuming you have your judgement buff up, the speed of light talent, and the 5% raid haste buff, which you should always have. Let's take a look at the table:

From Elitist Jerks

The first and 4th columns are what concern us here. The first is how many ticks of radiance you will get, and the 4th is how much haste you need to make that happen.

The first extra tick should be easy, beyond that, it gets much more difficult.

What do we do with it?

This answer will probably vary a bit and I'm sure there will be some argument in the comments, but here's what I recommend based on my experiences raiding thusfar and how the cast times line up.

Don't stack it. You really don't want to stack anything but spirit, you want to ditch mastery and find a balance between haste and crit. Striking that balance requires you figuring out just how much haste is useful to you. let's be realistic. You won't get your casts very short with current gear, and a hundredth of a second probably won't make or break a fight. And the gcd cap? You won't hit it.

So what I would do, is use the table above, and figure out which tick of radiance you can get to. Have about 1200 haste? I'd recommend reforging out a little bit since you won't get that 14th tick. Able to hit the 14th tick (1860 haste) if you reforge to haste? Go for it. the lower cast times are just gravy. Use the table and radiance ticks as a guide. Get to the closest radiance tick. If you're over one slightly, no problem, it's still working for you. Extra haste is good. But, if you're feeling low on another stat, don't feel too bad about reforging it some.

Crit

What it does

I'm sure you understand what a crit is if you're reading this, so I won't explain that. But, let's look at why this stat isn't as bad as it was in the past.

In WOTLK, I jokingly referred to critical healing as critical overhealing. When mana didn't matter, we were spamming so hard we didn't really care if it crit or not, and the extra healing from criticals was overhealing quite often. Now, that's not so much the case. A crit is healing you don't have to do, so it saves you mana, and gets the target topped off quicker. But this is just the general usage. It also does a few more things for us since it can proc additional effects.

Infusion of Light makes your next DL or HL faster, and since we shock mostly on cooldown, this should proc quite a bit.

Conviction is the other nice thing crit does for us, but it's worth noting that even with crit chances as low as 15% this should still be up about 90% of the time. Since PoTI and Radiance can proc this, it won't fall off often. World of Logs can be used to monitor it's uptime if you're concerned about it.

How well does it convert?

Not well unfortunately. 100 crit provides about .56% spell crit. We also get spell crit from intellect, but it takes 649 int to get 1% int. But, it's still not completely terrible.

What do we do with it?

This kind of depends on where you're at. I've started reforging a bit of haste to crit since I had more than I was actually noticing. Use your own judgement here. If you have a crit/haste piece and need some spirit on it, but don't want to part with the haste, reforge it. Reforging has given us some flexibility, so take advantage of that. As healers, we have quite a bit more flexibility to play to preferences.

Hopefully this will clear things up a tad, and as usual, hit the comments or shoot me an e-mail with any questions.

/bubblehearth

Regarding Blessed Life in PvE

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 09:10:00 +0000

Rank 2 is just a 100% chance.

Not often I delve into more theorycrafty posts. Theorycrafting in general is difficult to understand for a large amount of players and that's not really the reader base I'm going for. I like simple information that is easy to understand and put into practice. A lot of times things are explained in a complicated manner and not given the proper context, which leads people to misuse the information. And frankly, I prefer to leave the numbers to those better suited to it. I do occasionally do my own calculations, but I'm a psychology student. Statistical analysis is about as mathematical as I get. However, combing World of Logs is something anyone can do so I wanted to just show some of my results here and throw in my two cents about this often debated talent.

So the first thing most people wonder about this talent is if it will work in PvE. The simple answer is yes. Most boss aoe abilities do count as direct damage and will proc this. One point in the talent is generally enough, as boss abilities generally will hit you more than once but not last more than 8 seconds. It should proc more often than not with just 1 point. Let's also look at the Wowwiki definition of direct damage:

Direct Damage, or DD, usually refers to any type of magic spell (or a component of a spell) whose direct effect is to cause burst damage (hitpoint loss) to one or multiple targets.

So is it worth the one point? Depending on who you ask, it varies. Let's look at some log reports for a week in which I had the talent, and when I did not, and see what conclusions we can draw.

Totals

Let's take a look at my power gains for two different nights. There was very close to the same amount of time spent in combat on both these nights and my total healing done was also close to the same, there was a 1 boss difference between the nights. It looks like one night we did Al'akir and one we did Atramedes. So it's not a perfect comparison but it's close, as you can see by my power gains.

Night 1, Without Blessed Life

Night 2, With Blessed Life (1 pt)

So taking a look at this, and just my Holy Power gains, my gains from Holy Shock were similar. Night 1 I gained 667 holy power from Holy Shock, and Night 2 I gained 660. Eternal Glory procs were also similar coming in at 180, and 193. Tower of Radiance varies a little more, as it depends heavily on the fights how much I heal the tank I have beaconed, so let's kind of ignore that talent for now, it doesn't have much to do with this discussion. Now, for all the holy power i gained from other sources, with 1 point in the talent, I only got 91 from Blessed Life. That seems like a lot, but this is over 4 hours. Let's break it down and look at a few specific fights to analyze it's value a little closer. For length's sake, lets look at some fights with a low amount of procs, and some with a high amount.

Low Proc Fights

The thing to keep in mind here is that I only have one point in this talent. This means I only have a 50% chance to gain it when hit, so these low aoe fights are somewhat subjected to Lady Luck. And in the case of this particular raid night, she was a cruel mistress.

Valiona and Theralion


0 Gains from 1 point Blessed Life

Took Plenty of Hits

This is a pretty low AoE fight. You basically only get hit when you stand in fire, get hit by blackout, or get hit by someone that doesn't run out of the group when they have Engulfing Magic. My suspicions in the case of a lot of these abilities is that they do not count as direct damage for the purpose of this talent. Which brings me to another point, it is difficult to determine what will and what will not proc it, and the definition of "direct damage" is a bit fuzzy. It's why I've waited to discuss this talent or stick it in my guide until I had some solid log reports piling up. It's just difficult to predict what will and will not fire it.

Magmaw

This one surprised me. It may just be the one point instead of two and a lack of luck, but I had 0 gains from Blessed Life for this encounter, and he does do a room wide ability. Let's look at my damage taken:

24 hits from Lava Spew and not one proc leads me to believe this does not count as direct damage, making this a useless point on this encounter. Again, this leads me to question the definition of direct damage.

Al'Akir

I wasn't going to post 3 fights, but this one was interesting. Take a look at my power gains, and my damage taken:


1 point Gained

I'd guess it was the melee attacks here that caused it, those were from a Stormling after a tank death, but again, the sheer number of things that cannot proc it is interesting.

High Proc Fights

Let's take a look at the fights that caused the most procs, which were actually a little surprising to me.

Conclave of Wind

My highest point gain fight in a 9/12 clear night

Again, it's tough to tell what was proccing it here. By the amount of times I was hit and the amount of points I gained, it was probably a combination of everything up there in blue, since a lot of those ticks of ice patch were too close together to have caused multiple points.

Atramedes

9, again, nothing too game changing, but it's a few free spells.

Modulation hits everyone in the room, and had to be a contributing factor here since a lot of those ticks of Searing Flame were too close together to proc. This is interesting because this room wide ability can trigger it, whereas Magmaw's was not. Again, perhaps it was simply poor luck on Magmaw, but it also leads me to continue questioning what will and will not proc it.

Conclusion

So for those of you too impatient to look at the data there, or who just want a simple answer on whether or not Blessed Life is worth it, my answer is:

How much do you care about 5 yards of Judgement range?

Yea, it's an odd answer, but we have to consider where you can pull the points for this from. The easiest place is Enlightened Judgements because even without it, if you have a decent amount of spirit you will still be melee hit capped, and you're only losing 5 yards on your judgement and a small amount of self healing that was likely overhealing anyways.

Basically, this talent is entirely optional. It's not game changing whether or not you take it, it's just some nice free holy power if you can spare the points. I'll probably keep one point in it for awhile, since I really don't miss the 5 yards yet.

I do have a question for Blizzard though: What the fuck constitutes direct damage, and can we please get some consistency?

/bubblehearth

How to Make Sense of World of Logs

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:57:00 +0000

Ah, finally. Technical difficulties aside, my guide to using World of Logs is finally finished, in some sense. As usual, I'm rather long winded so the videos are not short, but they encompass a good chunk of the site's basic features and should leave you comfortable enough to browse log reports on your own. Also, I'm absolutely horrible with video stuff, so don't expect anything fantastic. These are more about the information than the terrible editing job, so please forgive me there.

Next 2 vids are after the break.

As usual, if you have any questions beyond the scope of the videos, or are just having another general issue, drop me a comment or an e-mail and I'll do my best to help you out.

/bubblehearth

Holy Paladining in Cata - A Beginner's Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 20:54:00 +0000

A new expansion is here, and it's time to re-learn our class. Things are a little different than at 80, but overall, we're in a solid place right now. This guide will follow the same format as my previous guides, covering spec, gems, glyphs, and playstyle.

Last updated: Jan 27th, 2011

What to expect as a Holy Paladin

We are still primarily tank healers, but with our new AoE heals it's very possible for us to take on some raid healing duties as well. This makes dual healing in 10 mans much easier. It's also important to note that it's difficult for us to heal two tanks completely alone anymore due to beacon only transferring 50% of heals. Most likely, your role will be one tank and part of the raid. We also have much more mobility than in the past, allowing us to heal on the move. We are very well rounded and a great choice for someone who is newer to healing.

The Spec

It's not difficult to whip up a spec on your own, as it's fairly difficult to do it horribly wrong now that the trees only have 31 points. But there's some floater abilities that leave you some room for preference, so I want to cover the basic spec, and your options.

The Standard - This is the spec I'd recommend. It has everything you'd need in a well rounded build. You can very easily take one point out of Last Word and drop it into Improved Judgements in the Ret tree though.

My Spec - This is what I'm currently using. Only a couple points different atm, but this link will change as my spec does.

The Choices

There are some talents that are under debate and subject to preference. If it's listed here, consider it optional unless otherwise noted.

Last Word - I love this talent, but I've seen some other paladins skip it. My thoughts on the matter are that since tanks do not need to be topped off, you'll find them low enough for this to have use fairly often, and it can save a life. Alternatively, I often find myself using it to save a dps that stood in fire with my extra holy power. The counter argument is that generating the holy power you need will put the tank over 35% anyways, rendering this useless. I only use one point here, I stick the other in improved judgements. Both are good, but decide for yourself. One point here is necessary to move down the tree.

Enlightened Judgements - This is a great talent for a couple reasons. First, 10 more yards on Judgement. Second, your Judgement won't miss, meaning you'll get mana back every single time you use it. Third, it heals you. Between this and protector of the innocent you can almost completely ignore your own health.

Paragon of Virtue - This is the other talent I see a lot of paladins skipping, and while this is optional, I strongly encourage you to take it. It lowers the cd of 3 very powerful cooldowns. See the spell usage section for more information on individual uses.

Eternal Glory - Mandatory. Absolutely mandatory. The only reason I'm mentioning it is because I've seen it skipped. Especially now that Tower of Radiance doesn't affect Holy Light; Any holy power you can retain is mana saved, and that's a big deal.

Improved Judgement - More range to your Judgements. I stick one point in here that I take out of Last word. It's given me some more breathing room for range.

Blessed Life - A subject of some debate in the Holy Paladin community. I wrote a larger post about just this talent, but the short version is that it's ok, not amazing. It won't proc a ton but it's a small amount of free power if you want to give up judgement range.

Glyphs

With the way Glyphs have changed, we get some freedom to play around with them. This is awesome. It's much more fun to be able to swap a glyph in and out based on the fight, or choose based on playstyle rather than be stuck with certain ones and no flexibility. Let's take a look at our options.

Prime:

Holy Shock - A solid glyph. Recommended. It will proc more infusions, which is always good

Word of Glory - An excellent glyph. Highly recommended.

Seal of Insight - Our best glyph. Use it.

Divine Favor - Not a bad choice if you find yourself needing more time with it, but for the most part gear should outweigh the value of this one. Look elsewhere first.

Major:
There's quite a bit of flexibility here, a lot of good glyphs and none that are flat required. Don't be afraid to swap these as you need them.

Beacon of Light - Now that beacon lasts 5 minutes, this glyph has been changed to make it cost no mana. With Tower of Radience encouraging us to move our beacon around, this isn't a bad glyph, but it's also not our best mana saver either, since beacon is not expensive.

Cleansing - Since you can "miss" with a cleanse now, this is nice for fights where you know you'll be cleansing a lot. (You can cleanse a target with nothing to cleanse, effectively just wasting mana) With cleanse being 2x as expensive as beacon, this is a better mana saver.

Divine Plea - 5% more mana back from your plea. A very solid glyph if you need it, but I'll get more into plea usage later under my spell usage section.

Divinity - Another great glyph if you're having mana problems. You should be using this, it's our best major.

Light of Dawn - This glyph now just makes Light of Dawn hit 1 more target. The value here depends on if you need the mana from the other glyph choices, and if you actually have that many targets to hit.I find Light of dawn fairly unwieldy as is, and I have a hard time even getting 5 targets with it, so I see this as a wasted glyph slot for my playstyle. Check your own LoD usage and judge this one for yourself. Not recommended for newer healers or 10 man healers. Strongly recommended for 25 man healers.

Lay on Hands - To judge the value of this glyph we have to look at a few things. The first is what are you doing? Are you doing a heroic where you might need the cd more often? Use it. Are you doing a raid where the fight won't last long enough to use it twice even with the lower cd? Don't. Is there enough trash between this boss and the next for the 10 minute cd to be up? Don't. It's situational. It's a good glyph and I wouldn't go into a heroic without it, but for raids I swap it out sometimes, depending on how much we're wiping.

Divine Protection - This has quickly become a favorite of mine while raiding. It's saved me more than once. With only a 40 second cd with our spec, it's really grown on me to help survive big boss abilities.

Minor:

All our minors are uninteresting. Insight, Kings, and Might are the only ones that affect us, and they each just lower the mana cost of their respective spells by 50%

Gear

So now that you have your spec created and your glyphs picked out, it's time to ask yourself what stats to
look for on gear. What makes something an upgrade?

Intellect - This stat is the holy paladin's drug of choice. It gives us spellpower, crit, and increases our mana pool. Also, a little known fact: the higher your intellect, the more regen you get from your spirit. So this is definitely priority #1.

Spirit - This is your big regen stat after Intellect. Don't overlook it, as we don't have a large amount of mana tools anymore. If a piece doesn't have spirit on it, chances are it's not an upgrade or you should at least reforge to it.

Haste - This stat is becoming fairly lackluster, while it is nice, it's no longer king like it used to be since it takes insane amounts to affect us at all. Take what you can get, but don't freak out if your casts are still long. This should balance out in later tiers. (The new gcd cap is 3489 haste, just to give you an idea. This is according to the compendium on EJ though...which is just full of terrible information right now so I don't know how accurate it is.)

Crit - Now that illumination is no longer a talent, crit is really just a chance for a bigger heal. It's not terrible, but it's not great either.We have a much smaller amount of crit than in the past, so don't overlook it like we did in ICC. Crit is solid, it will prov infusion, which is very much a good thing. Go for a balance between crit and haste.

Mastery - I want to explain our mastery a little. It's important to note that if the shield is not used, and you cast another spell, they do NOT combine. If the first shield was bigger than the new one, it will refresh. If it was smaller, it will override it. We use a lot of instant cast spells now, meaning we heal faster than boss abilities swing, usually. This diminishes the mastery for us quite a bit. It's a good mastery, but I wouldn't bother reforging for it or trying to stack it just yet. Mastery and crit take the same amount of rating to gain 1%. (Reforging 1% crit will give you 1 mastery, whereas it would take more than 1% haste to give you 1 mastery. Haste rating scales differently.) If a piece has mastery on it and no spirit, reforge the mastery to spirit.

Reforging

Everything you have should have a little spirit on it. if it doesn't, reforge mastery. If it does, check your haste and crit. Reforge haste if it will not lower your cast time (Use an addon like Quartz to check your cast times) and reforge crit if it will knock you down .1 second.

Gems

Gemming your Holy Paladin is painfully simple, as long as you remember a few things about gemming itself:

-You do NOT need to match colors. Any colored gem can go in any colored slot. The colors are ONLY for
the bonus. If you match the colors, you get the bonus. If you don't, the gems still work, but you just don't get
the bonus. All you need to worry about is meeting the color requirements for your meta gem. As a holy
paladin, socket bonuses are never worth it.

-Bonuses can be filled by multi colored gems. An orange gem can be placed into a red OR yellow slot and
still count towards the bonus. Additionally, an orange gem counts as both a red AND a yellow for filling your
meta requirements.

-A prismatic gem counts as ALL THREE colors. So, if your meta requires one of each color, one prismatic
can do the job.

Meta

You'll have to do some math to decide what's better here. You have two options, the Cataclysm meta, Ember Shadowspirit Diamond, or the Wrath gem, Ember Skyflare Diamond. What needs to be observed here is the requirements to activate them. The Cata one requires 2 yellows. The wrath requires 3 reds. There is a 33 intellect difference between the gems. One red gem gives 40 intellect. Using two oranges to fill your meta equals 40 int, vs the 80 from using two reds instead. So it's 7 intellect more to use the wrath meta and use red gems. The hitch, though, is that we have some good socket bonuses. Check out this Chestguard of Dancing Waves, for example. It's more int to gem for the bonus than to just put reds in. So, you have to do a little math here. Do you have enough good socket bonuses to justify using yellows to activate it? Otherwise, use the old meta. Or, if you're short on funds, the old one is a lot cheaper at the moment.

Gem Slots

You will primarily be using the Brilliant Inferno Ruby. However, we are getting some decent bonuses this time around, so gemming all Intellect is not king anymore.My rule of thumb is that if it takes only one gem to activate, and the bonus is 10 int or better, gem for the bonus. If it takes more than one gem, 20 int or better. This is not a set-in-stone rule, just a guideline. Here's some gems you can use to fill bonuses:

Blue - Purified Demonseye
Yellow - Potent Ember Topaz, Reckless Ember Topaz

Random Tips About Gear

-Wearing all plate does give a bonus now, a straight 5% more intellect if you are only wearing plate. Keep that in mind when looking at gear.

-Where trinkets are concerned, you are looking for intellect with a spirit on use or proc effect.

Playing your Holy Paladin
I want to go over each spells usual use, and then get into some tricks I've learned to help things along.

Spell Usage:

Holy Light - This is like the "auto attack" of heals now. Don't be afraid to use this. Damage comes in slow and steady, you have time. In decent gear, you'll gain mana faster than you lose it when using this.

Flash of Light - Our highest HPS comes from this now. It's your "oh no" heal. don't lean on this too heavily, it costs a ton of mana. Generates 1 Holy Power when used on your beacon target.

Divine Light - Powerful, slow, and expensive. Unless you have an infusion proc ready, don't use this. If infusion is procced and you need a big heal, this is your spell. Power Auras is great for monitoring infusion. Another good use for this, however, is when your guardian is out. Since it only copies 5 casts, making them big ones is good. That is, assuming it won't be overhealing. Grants 1 charge of Holy Power when cast directly onto your beacon target.

Holy Shock - Use this pretty much on cooldown. Cheap, moderately powerful, and generates holy power. An excellent spell. Daybreak procs will let you use this more, and the built in "power auras" will show you when this is procced.

Word of Glory - Use this at 3 Holy Power. It's free (in terms of mana) and it's powerful. Don't be afraid to use it with less Holy Power if you need to though, it scales pretty linearly.

Beacon of Light - This should always, always be up. Healing this target directly with Flash or Divine Light now will generate extra holy power. Be aware that beacon alone may no longer be enough to keep a tank up, so keep an eye on them.

Aura Mastery - The biggest use for this spell is not doubling devotion aura or making you immune to silences. The biggest use is doubling magic resistance auras to reduce damage. Dragon about to cast a flame breath? Throw on resistance aura and aura mastery it for a huge reduction. This is incredibly powerful, although learing when to use it takes some time.

Hand of Sacrifice - This is almost as powerful as Pain Suppression, but don't forget that it makes you take damage too! With our current health pools, you won't even need to bubble when you use it anymore. Protector of the innocent should keep you alive. If you're worried about it, use Divine Protection in conjunction with it.

Divine Protection - Don't forget you have this. it's pretty powerful, make sure it's keybound. It can save your life.

Hand of Salvation - If you are getting used to healing and have some time to watch your threat meters, help out a dps by using this on them. The best time is to wait until they're just barely under the tanks threat. Since it is a percentage drop, the more threat they have, the more they drop.

Hand of Freedom - This spell works on a lot more boss fights than it gets credit for. On Rotface, the kiting tank might be slowed by running through slime, freedom fixes it. On Sindragosa, her breath slows down tanks so it takes them longer to get to ice blocks. Freedom fixes that too. If it slows you, freedom probably helps. It also helps on some weird things too, such as Icehowl in ToC. When he turns around and breaths, hand of freedom will take you out of that little stun it causes. i don't have any good Cataclysm examples for this yet, but I'm sure it will work still, and it's seeing plenty of use in heroics.

Lay On Hands - This spell is not something most paladins will use efficiently. It takes alot of practice and experience to know just when to pop it, but it can mean the difference between a wipe and a kill if used properly. I can't really explain when the right time is, just try to use it and get used to it, and make sure it's keybound. Don't be afraid to use it though, it's a cooldown that's meant to be popped. Also, it should be noted that mastery DOES put a shield on your target after using LoH, and it's a pretty big shield.

Divine Plea - Avoid this during fights. It simply nerfs you too hard now. Use it during phase changes or periods of very, very low damage, but keep it bound to a cancelaura macro just in case. Healing with this up just costs more mana than you'll gain now. Macro:

#showtooltip Divine Plea
/cast Divine Plea
/cancelaura Divine plea

Press the button once, plea goes up. press it again and it will take it off you.

Seal of Insight - Although it's a small amount, this will return some mana from melee swinging the boss. Take advantage of it. But, it is very small, so if you need to be at range to aoe heal, do that instead.

Light of Dawn - Our AoE heal. Be aware that it heals people you are facing, so pay attention to your positioning. It also uses holy power. The more you have, the better it is. It's pretty worthless with only one Holy Power, and 2 is not optimal either, but will work in an emergency. Using this on 3 holy power when you actually need the healing will be your best use.

Holy Radiance - A powerful aoe, but it is very expensive. Before you use it, ask yourself if you have enough time to single target your group up. This can oom you quickly.

Judgement - Use this on cooldown. Returns mana. Counts as physical damage and uses the melee hit cap to determine misses.

Guardian of Ancient Kings - A powerful cd. I use it in basically the same types of situations as I would use Lay on Hands. It does not copy AoE heals.

Avenging Wrath/Divine Favor - Mentioning these together since I usually use them together. They are both off the global cooldown so they can be macroed together if you so choose. These are great little cooldowns that are often overlooked.

Crusader Strike - If you're meleeing anyways, you can hit this for some extra holy power, but I wouldn't try to focus on it, since the damage is too low to matter and it does have a mana cost. It is a good way to get that extra holy power needed for Light of Dawn right before a big aoe though.

Misc Information
Addons
The default ui is actually useable now, but still isn't perfect for healing. However, if you must, check out my guide to healing with the default ui. It's a little outdated, since the new raid frames are out, but much of it still applies.

As far as healing addons go, I highly recommend Vuhdo, it simply is the best. I even have a guide on setting it up!

Really any raid frames will work, just make sure you're using some sort of mouseovers or click bindings so you don't have to target your heal target. My guide to the default ui will explain mouseovers better.

~~~

As usual, if you have any questions or are just having trouble, comment or contact me and I'll help you out as best as I can. Also, if you're a numbers person and want more information on the math behind our spells, here's a link to the compendium on Elitist Jerks.

/bubblehearth

10 More Tips For Cata Healing

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 04:43:00 +0000

I rather like this picture. Thanks Google!

I wanted to have my "How to Paladin" guide updated by today, but alas, work has gotten the better of me, and between that and gearing up, I just haven't had time to properly finish it. Expect it early next week. Anyways, thanks to some links, and a big thanks to the people who linked to me, I've been receiving a ton of e-mail in response to my Cata healing tips for Paladins. People have still been expressing some concern to me though, and I've been asked several times for more, so I wrote up a few more general tips to survive through these beginning gear levels on my Blackberry at work today. Hurray smartphones! Anyways, here's a few more tips that will hopefully help somebody out.

1. It's OK To Leave People's Health Low

This is kind of the same thing I said in my other post, but I really want to stress this. People do NOT need to have full hp all the time. A good example of this is the first boss in H SFK. When he lifts everyone into the air, he takes everyone to 1 hp. It doesn't matter what your hp started at, he takes you to 1. So Until he starts his dark archangel form, it really behooves you to not top dps off. It saves a ton of mana. This type of situation is abundant in the new design, so familiarize yourself with it. Just because the bar isn't full doesn't mean they're going to die.

2. Heal Reactively

This goes against the design of WOTLK. In Wrath, the goal was to heal proactively, and have tor heals land right as damage did, to minimize the chance that the tank would take a second hit before you could get another heal off. This isn't the case anymore. React to incoming damage. Proactive healing now often leads to overhealing, which strains your mana. There are times for it, but the general rule of thumb here is to be reactionary.

3. Stay Calm

This is self explanatory, but hard to do. It can be difficult to stay calm and focused when it seems like a lot of damage is coming in, but it makes it a lot harder to triage when you don't have a clear head. If you can stay calm and focused, you're less likely to start spamming your bigger heals and running yourself dry. Just remind yourself that even if the tank or someone else dies, It's still very much possible to complete the encounter or pull. Just keep your cool and do your best.

4. Understand The Mechanics

This ties into everything else. You need to understand the fights. Ask questions if you need to. If someone dies, or starts taking a ton of damage, it's a lot easier to evaluate your own performance when you know what caused it. Did you not plan your spells correctly, or did they stand in something bad? It's very important to understand the flow of damage in order to deal with it.

5. Enchant Your Gear - Even The Bad Stuff

I know this can be a strain on the wallet, but it can save you a ton of frustration and repair bills if you shell out the gold for cheap enchants. Most basic enchants you can buy on scrolls on the ah for next to nothing right now due to all the enchanters leveling their skills. the little bit of extra stats can go a long way.

6. Understand Your Gear Level

10 more average ilvel is absolutely a world of difference. If you're really struggling, maybe you need to hit some normal dungeons first. Work on rep, get a few more upgrades. We only went up 5 levels so stat inflation is pretty huge. I went from ooming on trash pulls to coming out of most boss fights almost full with just a few upgrades, and that is after they nerfed Paladins. (We're still OP though)

7. Don't Just Say It's Too Hard - Be Specific

A lot of e-mails I've gotten have been folks just saying healing is too difficult. I can't help you if you say that, and you can't help yourself. Be specific. What are you having issues with? Mana? Throughput? If you don't know the problem, it's a lot harder to research a solution. Yes, healing is more difficult now. But there's plenty of people doing just fine, and lots of us are willing to help you if you're willing to be helped. That can't be done with a completely negative attitude.

8. Avoid AOE Healing Unless It's Necessary

Most AOE heals aren't cheap. Before you use it, ask yourself if it needs to be done, or if you have time to Holy Light/Nourish/Heal/Healing Wave them up one by one. I see a lot of healers blowing all their mana right before a phase change when they'd have had plenty of time to single target for a lot cheaper. This just goes back to understanding the encounter.

9. Check Your Spell Usage

Make sure you're running some form of healing meter, such as Recount or Skada. These allow you to monitor your spell usage. If your expensive heals are falling amongst your most cast, you are probably doing something incorrectly.

10. Talk to Other Healers

I am constantly bouncing ideas off other healers. On my server, in my guild, on forums, through e-mail; Bouncing ideas off eachother and sharing knowledge back and forth will only make you stronger. If you're struggling, try to approach someone in a reputable guild on your server and ask for help, or post on Plusheal, or send one of the many wonderful people out there who manage healing blogs an e-mail. There is help out there. Don't be afraid to ask. Hide behind anonymity if it makes you more comfortable, but seek help if you need it. Healing is a ton of fun right now, and I'd hate for anyone to miss out just because they got frustrated and were too scared to ask for help.

/bubblehearth

Did We Really Not See This Coming?

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 23:12:00 +0000

MS Paint: Because Photoshop wouldn't open and I was short on time.

Let's be honest. As much as I hate to admit it, as someone who plays more than one healing class....Paladins were OP. You're lying to yourself if you say otherwise, or at the very least you haven't done a raid and seen how we utterly destroy other healers in mana efficiency and output yet. That was remedied with the hotfixes last night. Folks, Tower of Radiance has been nerfed. Light of Dawn also got hit in the swinging of the bat. (I mean seriously, look at that guy's arms!)

Initially I was, like many of you probably are, pissed. But, after I thought about it a little, we had this coming. I'm not saying it brings us inline though, we still have some kinks to work out, let's take a look.

Why ToR and Light of Dawn were OP

To understand why these warranted a nerf, lets look at what made them overpowered in the first place. I mean, at first I was right there with the pitchfork, ready to head on down to Irvine, but a little thought changed my mind.

The way that most Paladins were healing was pretty much this:

Holy Shock -> Holy Light(x2) -> Light of Dawn

(I'll be honest, I wasn't. I liked Word of Glory better. But I'm horrible at facing the right direction.)

Anyways, this was overpowered because it used very, very little mana, and the overhealing from the group was still going to the tank. Even at a 50% reduced rate, it was still a ton of healing for a very small amount of mana. It meant we were powerful, and efficient. Mostly, other healers were complaining. (They had a right to)

The Nerf

So Blizzard's answer was to change ToR so that Holy Light no longer generate Holy Power when cast directly at our Beacon of Light. This reduces our mana efficiency by way of giving us less free heals. Also slows down the rate at which we can use WoG, slowing our output.

Light of Dawn also took a hit, suffering a fairly hefty nerf, although I don't have exact numbers.

Why This Isn't The End of The World

Tower of Radiance still provides a valuable talent in that it allows us to get some free heals as a reward for using our expensive ones in periods of heavy damage. It still accomplishes that goal. Light of Dawn I'm still iffy about though, I find it very difficult to use and unwieldy in raids, but that's a different issue altogether. This should bring us closer in line with other healing classes. In other words, we should be squirming a little more.

The Problems This Brings

Now, this wouldn't be complete without a little rant, as I am annoyed. We just lost a huge chunk of our efficiency. Yes, we were more efficient than other healers. But, there was a reason. Spirit is our only real regen tool. We don't get a shadowfiend, or a totem, or an innervate. (A few of those we can bug other people for...but the same argument can be made that the other healers can as well. Let's assume were all using our regen tools for ourselves. Which will usually be the case.) Guess what we have? Divine Plea. This will never get popped when it's really needed. The only time we can really use it is when there is a break in damage, and we often have to /cancelaura it off once the damage starts up again. We no longer have the necessary cushions to use it. This leaves our options pretty limited. Sure, we can just use bigger heals to get through the 50% nerf, but they're expensive. By the time plea comes down, we would have gained nothing, or very little. We will need some sort of small compensation to our regen in the long run here, and I'm sure we'll get one.

Possible Options

So, what can they do to help our regen, and make us a little less bitter? I've got a few ideas.

Make Plea Better

An obvious suggestion, but it might be too overpowered depending on how they handle it. In my opinion, remove the 50% reduction, and increase the cooldown to make up for it. It would actually let us use the spell.

Buff Holy Shock

There's kind of two choices here. They can buff the actual output of it, but even that isn't necessary. What I want is a lower cooldown. Just one second lower. That lowers the time to 3 HP by 3 seconds, which over the course of a fight, adds up.

Talent Crusader Strike To Be Cheaper

Yea, I know we can glyph it. Don't make us waste the slot. Roll it into ToR to make the talent more attractive.

Make ToR Less Talent Points

Free us up a bit to grab some other toys, such as Blessed Life. (Still testing what procs that in raids though)

Give Us Another Way To Generate HP

Such as making Flash and DL have a chance to do it on targets other than just our Beacon. I understand the talent is meant to make us want to heal our beacon directly, but we are going to do that anyways. And if it's really necessary to give us an incentive, treat it like ES. Change the glyph to increase healing we do directly to the beacon.

~~~

Nerfs are never fun. But, if you're going to be playing a Paladin, get used to the lollercoaster now. They won't leave us defenseless.

/bubblehearth

10 Tips for Cata Healing on a Pally

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 19:46:00 +0000

Don't freak out! We're still OP!

Now that I've gotten a decent amount of heroics under my belt, I can honestly say I have never had more fun healing. Every one of my spells has a purpose, and managing mana isn't as bad as I thought it would be. However, I've been sad to hear that a few of my friends who are healers are throwing in the towel because they feel it's too difficult. Don't give up yet! Here's some notes that should help you out a bit when it comes to adjusting to this new system.

1. Don't top the Tank Off

This is the hardest thing to get used to. Your tank doesn't need to be at full hp all the time! The less you overheal them for, the less mana you're wasting. Keep your tank high, but unless you know a big hit is coming, there isn't really a reason to keep him at 100% all the time like we used to.

2. Don't be afraid of Holy Light

I know, it feels weak. But in most situations, this spell is enough to get the job done. My mana actually comes back faster than I use it if I'm using Holy Light and Holy Shock as much as I can. This spell WILL be your primary heal. Get used to how it feels.

3. Use your Holy Power

Make sure you have something to monitor your Holy Power. When it hits 3, you should be using it. With Tower of Radiance that should be fairly often. Don't be afraid to use it before 3 if necessary either; Word of Glory scales fairly linearly. It's not a huge waste if you use it at 2. Mine heals for just over 5k/point, non crit. It's tough to get used to a new resource, but it's powerful and costs no mana.

4. Don't be afraid to use cooldowns

I'm using them less now that I am geared from the heroics, but coming in, cooldowns were my best friend. There is no shame in using them often. Glyph yourself for Lay on Hands when you're running 5 mans. Use it if you're scared, or if you're oom. Same thing with your guardian, it's a powerful cooldown that can save you in a pinch. Get in the habit of popping them. You also should be aware of Aura Mastery + Resistance Aura; There are a lot of nasty magical damage fights, that can soften the blow a bit. And lastly, Hand of Sacrifice is still there, and it's still a great tank cooldown. Hand of Sacrifice also shouldn't be feared. With the Protector of the Innocent talent, it shouldn't gib you anymore even if you don't bubble when you use it.

5. Don't expect Beacon to do all the work

Beacon is flat out not strong enough to take care of a tank on it's own now. Healing your Beacon target directly is something you should be doing frequently. Not only does it keep them alive, but it generates holy power.

EDIT: We've been nerfed. Tower of Radience no longer works with Holy Light. This seems bigger than it is, I'm not a fan of the change, as it is a very significant nerf to our regen, but at the same time, ToR is still doing what it's supposed to. Heavy tank damage, when you're flashing, you're getting extra hp for WoG. This still keeps our biggest heals cheaper than other healers. It sucks, but it's not the end of the world.

6. Judge on cooldown

Fairly self explanatory. Judge a lot, it gives you a decent chunk of mana back.

7. Use Flash Sparingly

It's expensive. You'll run yourself oom if you try to rely on flash. My general rule of thumb is Holy Light unless the tank is under 30-40%, or there's 3 people that need healing. Granted, there are exceptions, but you'll be able to easily judge it with a little practice.

8. Divine Light should only be used if you have an Infusion proc

Don't touch it otherwise, it's too slow. Use Flash instead. Power auras can be used to monitor procs pretty easily. I've had a few requests for a video on how to set up power auras, and it's in the works.

9. If you're oom, chances are it's not your fault

If you're not spamming Flash or using Holy Radiance on cooldown, you shouldn't be running out of mana. if you still are, check your groups damage. Is someone standing in fire, or taking otherwise unnecessary damage? Running oom is a good sign that your group is missing something. Take a second between attempts to re-evaluate. Unnecessary group damage is then only thing that's been running me out.

10. Don't use Plea during a fight unless there's a phase change...

...and even then, have it on a cancelaura macro. It nerfs you pretty hard, so you don't want to try to heal with it on anymore. Even cushioned, it can often end up making you waste as much mana as you're gaining. Save it for when no damage is being taken, even if you can only get a tick or two in before you have to cancel it off.

~~~

Heroics in Cataclysm are tougher, yes. But don't be afraid, people will adjust. Heroics having mechanics like they do means raiders will be more used to not standing in the fire in your pug raids. It might take awhile, but they're excellent practice for weaker players. With a little practice it will make you a better healer, and a better player overall.

If you're having particular difficulty with something specific, drop me a comment or an e-mail and I'll get back to you as quickly as possible.

/bubblehearth

Organizing A 10 Man Team

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:17:00 +0000

Slightly related: Are you a healer in search of a 10 man, hard mode progression raid for Cataclysm? My 10 is seeking a healer; Preferably a druid, but anything other than pally (I know, most of my readers) would work. We'll be raiding 7-11pm PST on Wednesdays and Thursdays. If this sounds like something that might interest you, contact me and we can talk about it further. I promise I won't bite.

As I was perusing Blog Azeroth the other day, this weeks shared topic, suggested by Shop of Runeforge Gossip, caught my eye. Catch his post here. Anyways, he proposed the topic of 10 man raids, and what goes into forming them. To quote him:

"...this has gotten me thinking about how we think of classes. We tend to see them mostly as what buffs they bring and their DPS. But often other things are important too, and even more so given that Blizzard wants us to pay more attention to things like CC, mana management, that sort of thing (no more simple stand and DPS fights)"

I've been thinking about 10 mans a lot lately. I want to look at his proposed topic, as well as other things that you need to think about when dealing with a 10 man.

Benefits of 10 mans

Recently, due to some real life drama, the same drama that has slowed my post frequency, I've had to make a decision about how I want to move forward within the game. I am a hardcore raider. I have been since vanilla, and I really don't want to give it up. With the new raid design I am able to focus on progression in a 10 man environment instead and keep my schedule light. This is excellent. I don't have to herd 25 people, I don't have to find 25 high quality raiders, and I can still focus on progress. 10 mans are now offering the same rewards as 25 mans as well, so we shouldn't end up behind in the progression curve. The benefits to 10 mans seem pretty obvious, but what people aren't paying attention to are that there's still some things making 10's difficult.

Difficulties of 10 mans

The first thing to remember is that we won't be storming through 10 mans while outgearing them like we have in the past. You can't waltz in in 25 man hard mode gear and smash it all, because the gear will be the same. This right there ups the difficulty.

You also have to take into account that less people is in fact, less people. I know, such a difficult concept. But, people seem to be forgetting that this presents a few difficulties. The first being if someone dies in a 10 man, your group is hurting more than it is in a 25. One death is a larger percentage of the groups damage or healing than in a 25 man. Pretty obvious, right? A less obvious disadvantage of numbers here is that subs are more difficult to deal with. Because you are trying to balance buffs, gear everyone up, keep people in their preferred role, and get everyone their raid time, it's harder to rotate them in in a 10 man. It's more likely that your entire 10 man will show up than in a 25. In a 25, even with a high attendance policy, you can expect 2 or 3 absences a night. Things happen, it's easier to deal with with 25 people.

Every player has to be giving 110% in a smaller environment. It's just less forgiving, and people are forgetting this. Blizzard is looking to make the progression paths for 10 and 25 man raids about equal, but I think people will end up a bit surprised at how much more skill 10 man groups will take. That is, assuming Blizzard accomplishes this goal. I'm sure I'll revisit this topic at a later date.

Putting Together a 10

When it comes to actually assembling a smaller group, there's things you need to be careful of that are usually less concern in a 25. I want to break this down into a few categories: Teamwork, balance, buffs, utility and gear.

Teamwork

The most important thing within any raiding team is teamwork. This means a little more in a smaller environment. Your healers need to trust eachother, your tanks have to communicate, and your dps have to compliment one another and work together to get things good and dead. Also important to teamwork is personalities. Making sure the people all get along well and mesh right is more important in a smaller group. because there's less people, there's a higher chance that everyone will end up talking and joking around a bit. One person that doesn't fit in is more likely to feel like an outsider. I don't talk on vent much in a 25 man. i understand the leader is trying to get things done, and there are a lot of cats to herd. However, in a 10 things are explained more quickly and this leaves more time for bullshitting. Make sure everyone gets along.

Balance

Balance goes beyond the conventional sense here. I'm not referring to class balance so much as group balance. Figure out what your group is good at, and balance around it. For example, my group is mostly caster oriented. This means that when considering the composition, I made sure to only pick classes that compliment eachother. I'm not going to pick a class that brings nothing to the table for everyone else. Everyone in the raid is there for a purpose. Going even further though, it's important to look at not only main spec balance, but dual spec balance. If someone doesn't show up for a night, if your group gimped unless you get the perfect sub, or can you shuffle people are to make sure all the puzzle pieces still fit? The important thing to remember concerning balance is that no one person should make or break the group. You are a team, and should be resilient.

Buffs

This topic should be fairly self explanatory. Whatever your group is balanced around, make sure you have the proper buffs. If you have a caster balanced group, bring all the caster buffs. If you have to sacrifice a melee buff, not a big deal. The new buff system has made it incredibly easy to do this, so just double check that you have everything you need. It's also worth trying to make sure that if someone with a giant buff (i.e. heroism) is a no show, someone else can provide it, whether that be via main or off spec.

Utility

Shop's actual shared topic comes into play. Thinking beyond buffs, what else does your group have? Do you have slows incase another LK type encounter comes into play? Do you have a mana tide totem, or perhaps an innervate incase a healer needs it? Do you have appropriate crowd control? Can some of your dps self heal in a dire situation? These are all valid things to think about when putting your group together. Just because it isn't a commonly thought about buff doesn't mean it can't contribute to the kill.

Gear

In order to progress quickly, gearing quickly is something you should focus on. With that in mind, you can balance your group to help facilitate as little gear sharing as possible. To re-use my previous caster heavy group example, I shouldn't just load up on mages and warlocks. They need all of the same gear. I can spread this a bit by getting a boomkin instead, or perhaps an elemental shaman. Try to make sure you are covering all type of gear, so that nothing is going to waste. This will help your group gear up as quickly as possible so you can push forward.....in theory. Drop rates can be a pain.

~~~

A lot needs to be taken into account when forming a group of any size, but with less people, it's more important to pay attention to the little things and learn everything that the classes you are bringing can do. Familiarize yourself with other classes, and double check what specs your pure dps classes are intending to play. Making sure everyone compliments each other and fits together like a puzzle are key to a solid group setup. Spend some time finding the right fits, it will work out better in the end.

/bubblehearth

Is A Main More Than Just A Class?

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:39:00 +0000

My name is Aunna, and I'm an altoholic. My healers are my favorites, but recently I've been playing my hunter more than usual, and I've made a little warrior tank. (Gnome tanks are adorable!) I was having a discussion with a friend, and we began talking about the class changes, and he mentioned how he doesn't like the changes to his main class, but is very fond of an alt now, so he was considering switching mains. I've swapped mains in the past, but I've never had as many things on my main as I do now. I can't imagine not furthering the work on just her, and leaving alts as alts. When has there been too much work into a toon to swap anymore?

I like all my characters. If you asked me which one I liked the most, I would say my Paladin. However, if you rephrase the question a bit, my answer would be different. For example, if I lost my account and had to start from scratch again, what would I make first? My answer would not be the same. I'm not sure what it would be, but it wouldn't be a Paladin.

I love the mechanics of my main, but I love the same things about my alts too. What keeps me there isn't the class. It's the amount of work put into her. The titles, the achievements, the mounts. Things that just aren't viable on alts. Even beyond that, it's the reputation I have. The fact that people know my main. Her name is familiar on my server, and I often name drop her to get into groups on my alts. There are a ton of things that I just can't re-create on another toon, and that's what keeps me from swapping.

For the foreseeable future, my Paladin will remain my main. I will keep putting work into her, and making her as amazing as possible. I will also continue raiding on my alts, but they will never get the same amount of care that she does.

I'm really curious to hear from someone who does swap mains a lot, especially if you are a hardcore raider or have something otherwise unattainable on a former main. How can you handle letting go?

/bubblehearth

Holy Paladining in 4.03 - A beginner's guide

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:36:00 +0000

Mmmm, shiny new stats page.

Now that 4.01 is out, and we have some class changes upon us, I wanted to re-write my Holy Pally guide to give folks that are a little stuck an idea of what's going on. This will just cover basics, and it's worth noting that things will be quite a bit different at 85.

What to expect as a Holy Paladin

We have changed fairly drastically in 4.01. No longer are we the tank healing nukers of wrath. Were now a great deal more mobile, have a new resource to watch for, new spells, and an aoe heal. While we still possess tank healing capability, the way in which it's done is different than before.

The Spec

Now that the talent trees are 31 point trees, it's a great deal more difficult to mess the spec up. But, as we don't yet have access to all of our points, you may be left wondering where to put a few, so let's take a look at a cookie cutter build.

Standard 80 Healing Spec - This is pretty much the build I'd recommend. There's some tempting talents, such as 6% more healing done across the board in prot, or putting a second point into Last Word or Paragon of Virtue. You will get those, but not yet. Tanks aren't dipping low enough to warrant Last Word, and Paragon of Virtue just isn't as good as some of the other things available right now. With how reliant you will be on Holy Shock and Word of Glory, it's worth beefing them up for the time being.

The biggest thing I'm seeing other paladins do right now is try to take Improved Judgement. I can't stress enough how much you do not need this. Yes, your judgement will have a shorter range. Yes, it sucks. But you just don't have the points for what is essentially a quality of life improvement over raw throughput. Blizzard is forcing us into melee range more than ever, and you'll still get some range out of Enlightened Judgements, so don't worry about it too much.

Blessed Life is apparently proccing off some aoe abilities, but it's not clear whether this is intentional, so choose for yourself whether a point there is worth it or not. It's not worth 2, even for pvp 1 is more than enough.

As always, if anything here is unclear or if you just have a question, or maybe want to argue my logic with me, drop a comment.

Glyphs

With the way Glyphs have changed, we get some freedom to play around with them. This is awesome. It's much more fun to be able to swap a glyph in and out based on the fight, or choose based on playstyle rather than be stuck with certain ones and no flexibility. Let's take a look at our options.

Prime:

Holy Shock - A solid glyph. Recommended. It will proc more infusions, which is always good. But, if you need to swap something, I'd suggest losing this one first.

Word of Glory - An excellent glyph. Highly recommended.

Seal of Insight - Our best glyph. Use it.

Divine Favor - Not a bad choice if you find yourself needing more time with it, but for the most part gear should outweigh the value of this one. Look elsewhere first.

Major:
There's quite a bit of flexibility here, a lot of good glyphs and none that are flat required. Don't be afraid to swap these as you need them.

Beacon of Light - Now that beacon lasts 5 minutes, this glyph has been changed to make it cost no mana. With Tower of Radience encouraging us to move our beacon around, this is a pretty damn good glyph.

Cleansing - Since you can "miss" with a cleanse now, this is nice for fights where you know you'll be cleansing a lot. (You can cleanse a target with nothing to cleanse, effectively just wasting mana)

Divine Plea - 5% more mana back from your plea. A very solid glyph if you need it, but I'll get more into plea usage later.

Divinity - Another great glyph if you're having mana problems.

Light of Dawn - This glyph now just makes Light of Dawn hit 1 more target. The value here depends on if you need the mana from the other glyph choices, and if you actually have that many targets to hit. I'll probably skip this one until I get some gear at 85, then look at my group's damage in 85 raids and decide. Since I'm focusing on 10 mans, there aren't enough melee in my group to actually warrant the extra target.

Lay on Hands - To judge the value of this glyph we have to look at a few things. The first is what are you doing? Are you doing a heroic where you might need the cd more often? Use it. Are you doing a raid where the fight won't last long enough to use it twice even with the lower cd? Don't. Is there enough trash between this boss and the next for the 10 minute cd to be up? Don't. It's situational. Not a bad glyph, but I wouldn't consider it a staple of my healing spec.

Minor:

All our minors are uninteresting. Insight, Kings, and Might are the only ones that affect us, and they each just lower the mana cost of their respective spells by 50%

Gear

So now that you have your spec created and your glyphs picked out, it's time to ask yourself what stats to
look for on gear. What makes something an upgrade?

Haste - Still an awesome stat. However, it's lost some value for us now that were using so many instants. There's still some debate in the holy paladin community about how much you should have, but personally I'd still recommend using 750-900, at least until Cata comes out.

Intellect - This stat is the holy paladin's drug of choice. It gives us spellpower, crit, and increases our mana
pool.

Spirit - This is your big regen stat after Intellect. Don't overlook it, as we don't have a large amount of mana tools anymore.

Crit - Now that illumination is no longer a talent, crit is really just a chance for a bigger heal. It's not terrible, but it's not great either. You should get enough of it without necessarily trying to stack it. Reforge some to spirit if you feel like you are having mana problems.

Mastery - I want to explain our mastery a little. It's important to note that if the shield is not used, and you cast another spell, they do NOT combine. If the first shield was bigger than the new one, it will refresh. If it was smaller, it will override it. We use a lot of instant cast spells now, meaning we heal faster than boss abilities swing, usually. This diminishes the mastery for us quite a bit. It's a good mastery, but I wouldn't bother reforging for it or trying to stack it just yet. If you feel like you must have it, reforge crit for it. Mastery and crit take the same amount of rating to gain 1%. (Reforging 1% crit will give you 1 mastery, whereas it would take more than 1% haste to give you 1 mastery. Haste rating scales differently.)

Gems

Gemming your Holy Paladin is painfully simple, as long as you remember a few things about gemming itself:

-You do NOT need to match colors. Any colored gem can go in any colored slot. The colors are ONLY for
the bonus. If you match the colors, you get the bonus. If you don't, the gems still work, but you just don't get
the bonus. All you need to worry about is meeting the color requirements for your meta gem. As a holy
paladin, socket bonuses are never worth it.

-Bonuses can be filled by multi colored gems. An orange gem can be placed into a red OR yellow slot and
still count towards the bonus. Additionally, an orange gem counts as both a red AND a yellow for filling your
meta requirements.

-A prismatic gem counts as ALL THREE colors. So, if your meta requires one of each color, one prismatic
can do the job.

With these simple rules in mind, gemming is incredibly simple, to the point of being boring. Use an Insightful Earthsiege Diamond in your meta slot, then put a Nightmare Tear into your helm socket, as helmets usually
have the best socket bonus. Now, your meta is filled just but putting on your helmet! Fill every single other
slot on your gear with intellect gems.

Another option we have now, since intellect gems are red, is using an Ember Skyflare Diamond, but since we won't be using plea a lot and seal of insight is base mana, not max, it doesn't help regen. I'd still recommend the insightful.

Random Tips About Gear

-Wearing all plate does give a bonus now, a straight 5% more intellect if you are only wearing plate. Keep that in mind when looking at gear.

-t10 4 set bonus still sucks. Get 2 set using shoulders and helm, then offset pieces are better.

Playing your Holy Paladin
I want to go over each spells usual use, and then get into some tricks I've learned to help things along.

Spell Usage:

Holy Light - This is like the "auto attack" of heals now. For most wrath content, it's just too weak and slow to do the job.

Flash of Light - Our highest HPS comes from this now. It'l be your main tank healing tool.

Divine Light - Powerful, slow, and expensive. If the tank is taking heavy damage, this is the tool for the job.

Holy Shock - Use this pretty much on cooldown. Cheap, powerful, and generates holy power. An excellent spell. Daybreak procs will let you use this more, and the built in "power auras" will show you when this is procced.

Word of Glory - Use this at 3 Holy Power. It's free (in terms of mana) and it's powerful.

Beacon of Light - This should always, always be up. Healing this target directly now will generate extra holy power. Be aware that beacon alone may no longer be enough to keep a tank up, so keep an eye on them.

Aura Mastery - The biggest use for this spell is not doubling devotion aura or making you immune to silences. The biggest use is doubling magic resistance auras to reduce damage. Dragon about to cast a flame breath? Throw on resistance aura and aura mastery it for a huge reduction. This is incredibly powerful, although learing when to use it takes some time.

Hand of Sacrifice - This is almost as powerful as Pain Suppression, but don't forget that it makes you take damage too! A good thing to do is to bubble when you use this, although usually casting a couple heals on yourself is enough.

Hand of Salvation - If you are getting used to healing and have some time to watch your threat meters, help out a dps by using this on them. The best time is to wait until they're just barely under the tanks threat. Since it is a percentage drop, the more threat they have, the more they drop.

Hand of Freedom - This spell works on a lot more boss fights than it gets credit for. On Rotface, the kiting tank might be slowed by running through slime, freedom fixes it. On Sindragosa, her breath slows down tanks so it takes them longer to get to ice blocks. Freedom fixes that too. If it slows you, freedom probably helps. It also helps on some weird things too, such as Icehowl in ToC. When he turns around and breaths, hand of freedom will take you out of that little stun it causes.

Lay On Hands - This spell is not something most paladins will use efficiently. It takes alot of practice and experience to know just when to pop it, but it can mean the different between a wipe and a kill if used properly. I can't really explain when the right time is, just try to use it and get used to it, and make sure it's keybound.

Divine Plea - Make sure you cushion this spell when you use it. By that, I mean use something that increases your healing to offset it. Only use it when there's minimal damage going out.

Seal of Insight - Although it's a small amount, this will return some mana from melee swinging the boss. Take advantage of it. Just don't be in front of the boss, you'll cause it to parry your tank.

Light of Dawn - Our AoE heal. Be aware that it heals people you are facing, so pay attention to your positioning. It also uses holy power. The more you have, the better it is. It's pretty worthless with only one Holy Power, and 2 is not optimal either, but will work in an emergency. using this on 3 holy power when you actually need the healing will be your best use.

Misc Information
Addons
The default ui is actually useable now, but still isn't perfect for healing. However, if you must, check out my guide to healing with the default ui. It's a little outdated, since the new raid frames are out, but much of it still applies.

As far as healing addons go, I highly recommend Vuhdo, it simply is the best. I even have a guide on setting it up!

Really any raid frames will work, just make sure you're using some sort of mouseovers or click bindings so you don't have to target your heal target. My guide to the default ui will explain mouseovers better.

Things are changing pretty quickly, so

/bubblehearth

A Look At Cata Healing, Part 2: Class Design

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:54:00 +0000

So I'm posting this a little later than originally anticipated, but mostly because of a bug with druids on the beta that I've been waiting for them to fix to get a more accurate scope of the class. They still haven't, but I suppose it's not a huge deal. Anyways, after many, many Cata heroics, I must say, I'm having a blast with the new healing system. I told myself I wouldn't spend so much time on beta and I'd enjoy the last bit of the expansion, but wow. They done good.

Recap

In part one of my look at Cata healing, I went over how healing has worked in the past, where it is now, and where it's going. This time around I want to just take a brief look at each healing spec and how it handles in heroics. One thing to keep in mind throughout this is that this is just a look at healing in heroics. Raids are not yet available for testing, and a huge part of healing is how the classes work together, so this really is just a general look at how things feel when healing something solo.

Druid

My druid has gotten the least playtime out of my toons on beta, but not because it isn't a total blast, because it is. There's just a bug right now that makes lifebloom not work with mouseovers or click bindings, and it's rather frustrating. But, it's not too difficult to work around, and the class is a blast.

I've mentioned before that druid gets the least of my attention in live. There's just something about it that makes me prefer my other healers. To be honest, the only reason I specced it resto was because I love tree form, so, when they announced that that was going away, I was a little apprehensive. That is, until I played it.

Trees became extremely strong tank healers. You can slowly roll out your lifeblooms, pop up a regroth and rejuv, and then your nourish will keep lifebloom from falling off. Throw in how incredibly powerful healing touch is, and if you're in a bad situation, you have the tools to get out of it. As for mana, trees now provide replenishment, and your hot ticks have a chance to restore mana. This is a little interesting, because they're the only healing class that doesn't have to do damage to get mana back. You can also spec into free wraths that can proc instant starfires, so leveling as a tree wasn't too bad, and it's quite a bit of fun in pvp.

Tree of life was something I was disappointed in, but after playing with it in it's cooldown form, it's one of my new favorite spells. It's very well designed for group healing, but I don't feel like it has a large amount of single target use beyond the extra 15% healing. For lifebloom, it lets you put it on more than one target, which I never really felt the need to do, but again, lifebloom is buggy. It makes regrowth instant cast, which is wonderful for large amounts of raid damage. It also makes wild growth heal 2 additional targets, putting the final glyphed count up to 8. Between that, and swiftmend proccing a new ground based aoe heal, group damage is no problem either.

Overall, I wasn't disappointed with my output or my mana use, but I did find it interesting that this is the only healing spec that doesn't do damage for mana.

Shaman

This is the spec I felt changed the least. It plays fairly similar to live in that shaman really were the only healer that I feel uses their entire toolkit in wrath. That continues on, and they added some cool new spells.

One big weakness of shaman is that movement hurts them a lot. They did a little to combat this by giving them a new instant heal that heals for a small amount and increases healing done by your next healing spell by 20%. This does affect individual riptide ticks, so it's a good spell to pop before that for a little more healing on the move. They also get a 2 minute cooldown that allows casting while moving for 10 seconds. I didn't find myself needing it a whole lots, but there were a few fights where I found myself relying on it for heavy damage periods. It definitely has it's use.

Healing raid is a nice new aoe that solves the problem of people being too far out of range to bounce chain heal, since it puts a visual marker on the ground that range can use to make sure they get healed. It expands the toolkit a bit to take it from melee healer to being able to heal the entire raid effectively.

As for mana regen, the basic tools are still there. Water shield and mana tide are the big ones, but you also have the ability to cast lightning bolt, and as long as it lands, you get some mana back. The only problems with this though, are that it still has a cost (1400) and after factoring that in, at least in my current gear it's only giving me about 300 mana (1700 total, minus cost). This wouldn't be a huge issue, except the spirit->hit talent isn't really attainable by resto shaman, or at least it's not desirable to get it. This makes even one miss a huge deal as it takes almost 5 lighting bolts to make up for the one miss. I found myself hitting this when I had nothing else to do, but I don;t see myself using this much in raids unless they either remove the cost, or grant resto shaman hit in a more desirable area of the talent tree.

So output is good here, the two biggest problems in live are lack of mobility and difficulty healing range. Both of those have been addressed. The only problem I'm having with shaman right now is how undesirable the mana regen mechanic through lightning bolt is. A good compromise there would be to remove the cost, but lower the return a bit. Hopefully we'll see some fix in that area.

Priest (Disc)

Disc priests are going to be doing a lot more damage than other healers. Smite is becoming a powerful tool in their arsenal, providing a plethora of benefits. It not only smart-heals someone within 8 yards of the boss for 80% of the damage caused, but it also gives you stacks of evangelism to use with archangel, and lowers your pennance cooldown.

With mana return, we again have to do some math and take the cost of the spell into account. At level 85, my smite costs me 3088 mana per cast, and a 5 stack evangelism gives me about 17k. This is only ~2k mana profit for quite a bit of ramp up, but, it scales with man mana, and smiting is providing all those other benefits as well, making it worth it. Missing is still a problem, but as gear levels get higher this will just get better.

Absorbs are working well, and there's some exciting new tools for tank healing, such as lowering the duration of weakened soul when you heal a target. This has made tank healing fairly simple. Between that, smite, and penance, it hasn't been a huge issue to keep tanks up. With group healing, Power Word: Barrier provides a little time to catch up on the aoe damage.

Mana hasn't been a huge issue, and if you're a fan of bubbles, disc is still a blast. Having to do some damage while healing is a bit odd, but it grew on me really fast.

Priest (Holy)

This spec I've been having a blast with, and is probably one of my favorites right now. Much of the same things going for disc still apply, but there's a few differences.

Mana is a little tighter, as smiting doesn't give you any benefit other than evangelism. Missing is costly, and with no hit, it can be a problem. Use your cooldowns well though, and you'll be fine.

Chakra is incredibly fun. It's a little hard to explain, so here's a link to the 3 talents that apply to it: Chakra, and state of mind to keep you in a chakra state. Basically, you pick your chakra state, and you can be in it as long as you want, but you can only change it once every minute, as chakra itself has a cooldown. Picking the right state is really a fun mechanic. We also have revelations, which gives us a new spell based on our chakra state. It took some presence of mind to get myself to use this extra spell a lot, but once I got into the habit it really was a ton of fun.

I have been having a blast with holy, but mostly because of the large toolkit. I cast every spell I had at least a few times throughout each instance. All of them have a job, and using them at the right time is quite a challenge, and very fun. (Yes, even Lightwell.) Mana was tight, but once I got used to using the right spells, it wasn't too big of a deal. Just make a macro for your water key that lets the tank know you're drinking.

Paladin

After you get over crying that your crit chance is like 5%, down from the 50 you're used to, and your holy light only hits for a god 5k, paladin is a ton of fun too. Our new aoe heals work well, mana isn't too terrible, we have a good amount of cooldowns, and holy power is awesome.

It's quite odd using holy shock every chance I get, but the large amount of instant casts we have really add something to the game that we didn't have before; We can move. On top of granting holy power, which lets you use word of glory, which saves you a boatload of mana, holy shock is also our most efficient heal, and you'll want to use it as much as possible. Between procs and it's short cooldown, you'll be firing it off a ton.

Holy power is a little odd, but you generate it really quickly between holy shock and tower of radiance. With beacon only transferring 50% of your healing, you'll get some use out of tower.

Beacon is something a few people have expressed concern to me about, but my advice to you is this: Don't freak out. It was overpowered before, just accept it. The new design makes it so you can't ignore the tank, but don't have to focus on him the whole time either. Trust me, it's fun.

Mana was a little annoying on my paladin because of the low amount of mana returned by seal of insight and the low-ish proc chance, but, take into account that other healers have to spend mana on their gaining attacks, and missing is a big deal for them, and it's not so bad. The new divine plea is a little tough to pop though. With how weak heals are, it's difficult to cushion.

We have some powerful cooldowns now between lay on hands only having an 8 minute cd, and guardian of ancient kings only having a 5 minute cd. The guardian copies your next 5 heals, which effectively doubles your output for a few seconds. It's enough to get you out of a tight spot.

With the pally, the aoe has been fun, mana has been manageable, and we've retained our utility spells that drew me to it in the first place. It's a pretty good balance.

~~~

Overall, I've been thoroughly enjoying the changes. It's going to take some getting used to, but don't freak out.

/bubblehearth

A Look At Cata Healing, Part 1: General Design

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 22:32:00 +0000

I couldn't think of an appropriate image, so here's an adorable kitty.

So I've finally had time to actually play with (almost) all my healing characters now fairly extensively in an instance setting on beta, and I must say, It's quite different. Not that I've had the chance to play with it, it's time for me to pontificate about the new system's ups and downs. This will be split into two parts, this first part dealing with general design of the healing system, and a second part dealing with individual classes and my thoughts on the changes to them. The second part will be posted in a few days.

Healing in General Throughout Time

I love healing, and if you're reading this, chances are you do too. I've been healing on one toon or another since vanilla, and it's seen some interesting flows. Way back when, priests were THE healer, druids were healing touch spamming and innervate fuel, paladins were buff bots, and shaman spammed frost shock or something; I didn't play Horde until BC so I don't know about them.

Anyhoo, with Burning Crusade we saw a shift. 4 specs could solidly heal, but we still had some issues. As a paladin, I actually broke a mouse button spamming Flash of Light. As a priest, I never had to use a heal higher than Greater Heal Rank 1. Druid, Lifebloom was all you needed to win. And again, didn't have a shaman then, sorry guys. Anyways, my point is, we all had these exciting spells that we never used. The toolbox was large but we only needed to use a hammer.

Wrath saw some more changes. Disc was added as another viable healer. Mana was no longer an issue and overhealing meters became a thing of the past. Spamming hard and spikey damage became the norm. And throughout the course of the expansion, each healing spec has fallen deeper and deeper into it's own specialized role. Is this a good thing? Is it fun? I mean, I've enjoyed it alright, but could it be better? Blizzard says yes, and I'm inclined to agree.

Problems

All that being said, there are some big problems with the current healing model, and it's time to change it. Healing is a core element of being able to make interesting encounters. It affects how damage is dealt, how we deal with hazards, how fast things need to die, and much more. Not to mention, it's a dated system that's falling, and it's time for an upgrade. Let's look at some of the biggest issues right now.

The Toolkit

Every healing spec has a rather large amount of heals, many of which get ignored. If Blizzard wants to give us new tools to play with, they have to make sure we need them. The system needs to be changed in order to make us use everything we've got. One reason I've always enjoyed holy priest is because of the sheer amount of spells to deal with the situation. Healing is getting to a point where you might only use 1/3 of your given toolkit and it's perfectly ok. While there of course needs to be some ceiling, in general, making use of more spells and making more decisions is more fun.

Healing Affects Encounter Design

I can't stress this enough. Look at current encounter design. For lack of a better term, it sucks. The biggest problem I have with it is the spiky damage and the giant amount that the random number generator has to factor in in order to make something difficult. Just as one example, an achievement like A Tribute to Immortality factors in a great deal more than player skill. You're fighting the random generator a ton on a fight like Faction Champions. By scaling back healing, and making us care about mana and forcing us to choose the right spells, Blizzard is opening a door for themselves to scale back burst damage and have fights rely less on RNG, and more on proper management of the encounter. Boss fights have much more potential to be interesting, and fun, rather than frustrating.

Spamming Sucks

Pretty self explanatory. As a holy paladin, my job is usually to spam holy light the whole fight, whether or not the tank needs it, just to deal with any sudden bursts. As a tree, I'm rolling rejuvs to deal with damage that might take barely half the heal. This just isn't fun. Scaling back damage and forcing us to manage resources should allow them to design encounters so that not only do we not have to do this, but we will be punished for it. It will give us more time to watch our positioning, dps if we so choose, or use more utility spells to help the group.

"Bring the Player, Not the Class"

With a further emphasis on 10 mans, healers cannot be so specifically role oriented as they are now for this to work. Currently, you'd be laughed at for trying to dual heal Lich King with paladins. Yes, it's possible, but most groups won't do it. In order to make it easier for groups to form up and get things done, and to further rely on player skill, they need to bring us out of our niches slightly. The new design does this quite well.

Potential Problems With The Cataclysm Design

All that being said, there's some things I'm still a little worried about, having messed around quite a bit with the new system. To me, the pros of changing it outweigh the cons, but they're still worth mentioning.

It's More Difficult

The new system takes more thought than the current one. If you aren't careful, you'll oom, or you'll let someone die. Currently, there's very little penalty for being bad, or, it's easy for a better healer to carry the weight of a poor healer in a group. From what I've played so far, it's quite a bit more difficult to manage things if your gear is slightly under. Maybe it's just me not having faith in the general populous, but I'm a bit worried about pugging.

Tree Form Is A Cooldown

Obligatory QQ. (I actually love the cooldown, more on that in part 2, but I was a fan of broccoli tree)

Teamwork Isn't Happening Now

As I've stated before, teamwork is a large part of healing. However, at the moment you can get by with very little of it. It used to be bad to peel from your target, and ok if the tank was sitting at 80%. You didn't want to top him off because he didn't need it. It's moving more in that direction, but with how large and diverse this game's community is now, and how frequent pugs are, I just don't see the necessary teamwork happening right away.

Is The Design Change A Good Thing?

Overall, I'd say it's an incredibly good thing. Being able to fix poor encounter design alone is enough of a reason to sway me, but throw in a reason to use all my spells, and having to think rather than abuse my poor mouse, and you have me sold. I'll get into specific class design changes more in part 2, but I think things are going the right direction. At the very least, it's not worth preaching the end of the world (of warcraft) like some folks have been. I'm trying to stay optimistic.

/bubblehearth

Why The Paladin?

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:30:00 +0000

I have a ton of healers. An unhealthy amount even. So one question I get a lot is "Why do you play your Paladin? What makes you like it more than your other healers?" It's kind of a hard question to answer, but there's a few things about the Paladin that just have me hooked.

Utility Spells

This is probably the biggest reason. While all classes have some utility spells, the difference between a good Paladin and a great one is how well they use their entire toolkit. Using a freedom on a kiter to break a slow on hard mode Saurfang, popping a Hand of Protection on a healer that has pulled agro, Using Divine Guardian when most of the raid doesn't have enough spores on Festergut, and saving a wipe with a well timed Lay on Hands. Things like that are what make it fun for me. Long cooldown abilities that require split second decisions on whether or not to use them. It fits the way I like to play.

I Like Tank Healing

When it comes to tank healing, Paladins are the best. Even with the changes to the healing system, I feel like Paladins are still slightly ahead in this department. Raid healing is fun sometimes, but for me, I have a better time when I'm focused on managing a few targets that are getting hit hard over a large number taking moderate damage. ~~Of course, I enjoy being that asshole Paladin with a beacon on the tank nuking all your hot targets to e-peen on meters too.~~ I mean, I like to help out with raid healing when the tanks aren't in danger.

I Prefer Chunk Heals Over HoTs

I just don't like HoTs. It's why I stopped playing Age of Conan. I guess I'm just kind of an instant gratification kind of guy, but I really dislike waiting for hots to tick out. My resto druid sees the least playtime of all my healers, and this is the biggest reason. It's not that I don't find them powerful or recognize their incredible use, it's just not for me.

I've Had The Character For a Long Time

I can't change mains at this point. I've got too much invested in my Paladin. My shiny "Light of Dawn" title, my frost wyrms, rare stuff from BC. There's just too much time put into her to change now. It seems silly, but I'm attached to her. I absolutely adore my other healing toons, but they will never get the attention my Paladin does because of this.

Pallies Fit The New Healing System Well

Paladins fit the new triage healing system wonderfully. I've played all of my toons at endgame and she is just the most fun for me. While a huge toolkit, such as a Priest's, is a blast at times, I enjoy just having a limited amount of heals and a ton of utility spells. Plus, Holy Power is a fun change.

I Didn't Always Like My Paladin...

I'm not just a general Paladin fanboy in every game I play. I've never played one in anything else, and I don't think it will be my go-to anywhere else either. Matter of fact, back in vanilla, it was the one class I refused to play because "Those stupid Paladins are so cheap! I get them almost dead and they bubble, then I do it again and they LoH, argh! Why would anyone play that stupid easymode class?!" But, here I am. My Priest will always have a special place in my heart, my Shaman will always be a total blast, and my Druid will always be a fun change of pace, but my Paladin is my true love.

So What About You?

Why do you play what you play? Why is your main your main? What draws you to that over your alts? Or are you someone that just can't pick a main? Post a comment here, or, if you have a blog, write up a post about it and link it here. I'm interested to see why folks choose what they do. Plus, with RL eating me alive these last couple weeks I've been reading more and writing less. Hopefully that will change again soon.

/bubblehearth

My UI

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 04:26:00 +0000


Not my normal ui, but I do have a better version of it saved in my Reflux that I use for PvP. Super adorable, right? Click past the break for my actual raid ui and a breakdown of my mods.

I've gotten requests for this a few times since posting my Vuhdo Guide, so I just want to quickly run over the mods I use so I can point people here when they ask. I use the same basic ui on all 4 of my healers, and I use it on my hunter as well, just replacing Vuhdo with Shadowed Unit Frame's raid frames instead. This will be explained in two screenshots, one out of combat explaining the basic things, and one in combat. I change my ui a ton, but I've been really happy with this one and it's what I've used almost exclusively for PvE since ICC came out.

My UI out of combat:

Click for a larger image

I have a very large monitor, so screen real estate isn't an issue for me. This allows me to use the 3 chat boxes I use, and keep more on my screen than I would if my monitor was smaller. But, basically everything I need is there. Anything not explained in that screenshot is explained in the one below, except OPie, which just isn't shown at all. It's where I store my mounts and buffs.

My UI in combat:

Click for a larger image

Basically, the goal with the design was to show everything I needed to see without the screen getting too cluttered. I used my character's feet as the focus point, so it's not far for me to look to make sure I'm not standing in a fire. The most important things are close, and the stuff I care less about is closer to the edges. I forgot to label Tidyplates, but that's what the bars above the enemies heads is.

Mods I use:

ACP: Addon control panel. Lets me turn things on and off without a relog.
Align: Puts up a simple graph paper type grid on the screen so I can make sure things are centered.
AtlasLoot: Boss loot lists.
Bagnon: Backpack replacement. Puts it all into one big bag.
Bartender4: My action bar mod.
ButtonFacade: Makes bartender and my buff bars match. Using the "Aperture" setting.
Chatter: Chat mod.
Chinchilla: Minimap
CurrencyTracker: Broker plug in. I use it on my TitanPanel and on Bagnon to see my badges and honor.
Gladius: Arena unit frames. Not shown above, as that's only my pve ui.
GrizzlySharedMedia: More fonts and bar options for the various mods that use them.
MikScrollingBattleText: Scrolling combat text replacement.
Omen: Threat Meter
OmniCC: Puts numerical cooldown timers right on the icon of spells.
PowerAuras: Mod to monitor various procs, buffs, and conditions.
Quartz: Casting bar.
RatingBuster: Turns stats into useable numbers. (eg. tells me how much crit x amount of int will give)
Reflux: Profile swapper. Swaps out your entire ui based on different profiles. I have 3 fully different ui's saved.
SatrinaBuffFrame: Excellent buff replacement.
ShadowedUnitFrames: Unitframe Replacement.
Skada: Modular damage and healing meter.
SunnArt: Viewport and viewport art. there's various art packs floating around.
TidyPlates: Nameplate replacement. I use the Threat Plates Beta one.
TitanPanel: LibDataBroker dock. There's a ton of mods that do the same thing, just used this one forever.
VuhDo: Incredible healing raid frames.
DeadlyBossMods: Boss timers and warnings. DXE is another alternative that I really enjoy.
PallyPower: Tracks my pally buffs.
Afflicted: Not shown. PvP ability timers, only used in my pvp ui.
OPie: Not shown but I AM using this. It's where I keep my mounts and buffs.
teksLoot: Super simple, super awesome loot window replacement.
ActionBarSaver: Allows you to save button positions. A must-have if you respec a lot.
Broken_Queue: Data Broker plug in for bg and dungeon queues.
Broker_Equipment: Broker plug in for the Blizzard equipment manager. Makes it easier to update and swap.
Broker_GroupHelper: Broker plug in for group functions, like linking vent, readychecks, swapping loot, etc.
ArenaHistorian: Keeps track of my arena matches. Who we played, how long it took, ratings, etc.
InterruptBar: Keeps track of enemy interrupt cds. Only used in my pvp ui.

~~~

If you have any questions, shoot me an e-mail from my contact page or post a comment. I'll get back to you within a day or two.

/bubblehearth

Healing Peripherals

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:04:00 +0000

While this works all well and good, I highly suggest upgrading.

Good peripherals can really aid in the job of keeping people alive. Personally, I just don't like the feel of a standard 3 button mouse and a basic keyboard. I have small hands, so it's just not realistic for me to be able to reach my "9" and "0" keys while still being able to use "WASD" to move. Plus, as a healer you are most likely using either mouseovers, or click bindings. Both of these methods of healing can be greatly enhanced by getting some better peripherals. Depending on how much you want to spend, there's several options available.

Mice

If you take nothing else from this post, do yourself a favor and invest in a gaming mouse with some extra buttons. You won't regret it. Especially if you use mouse click bindings, a few extra buttons go a long way. I've used 4 or 5 different mice, but my best experiences have been with Razer.

Razer DeathAdder

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: Yes
Cost: $60 from Razer's site, though you can find it on sale elsewhere sometimes.
# of buttons: 5. The two extra are on the left side. A left handed version is also available.
Link to product: Razer's Site

This was the first gaming mouse I ever bought, and I loved it. It was incredibly comfortable, it fit my hand like a glove. Only having two extra buttons was simple to get used to, and they were placed in a good spot on the mouse. Razer also includes drivers to change keybinds very easily. The sensitivity on this thing was a little high for me, and it's one of the least sensitive models they sell. However, that is also easily changed through the drivers, and you can even save profiles if more than one person uses it and likes it on different settings. I used it for over two years before it finally gave out on me, the scroll wheel stopped being able to differentiate between up and down scrolls. As far as price goes, it's a good investment, although I'd check local stores such as Best Buy, or Fry's Electronics (if you're lucky enough to have one nearby) for sales.

Razer Naga

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: No
Cost: $80
# of buttons: A whopping 17, on the left side.
Link to product: Razer's Site

I haven't used this one first hand, but I've heard good things from friends and guildies. As with any Razer mouse, you'll get comfort and high sensitivity out of it. This mouse used to be only mappable via the number keys or number pad, but it looks as though a recent driver update changed that. It now has full remapping capability. This thing was made for MMOs. While it has too many buttons for my personal taste, if you're looking for an all in one keybinding machine, this will do it.

Razer Mamba

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: No, price tag is too steep. But there's some serious "want" coming from me here.
Cost: $130
# of buttons: 7, extra are on the left side.
Link to product: Razer's Site

This thing is awesome. It's both wired and wireless, and it's rechargeable. The extra buttons are all easy to reach, and it's got a comfortable design as well as incredible mapping and sensitivity options via the Razer drivers. The drawback here is the pricetag. But, if you're looking for a good wireless mouse, this will do it.

Razer Lachesis

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: Yes, it's my current mouse.
Cost: $80 (I caught it on sale for $30 at Fry's, picked up two at the time)
# of buttons: 9. Two on left, two on right, two in middle.
Link to product: Razer's Site

I'll be honest here, this isn't my favorite mouse. I liked the DeathAdder better. It is an ambidextrous mouse so it's not as comfortable ad the right handed Razers. The extra buttons are great, but I really don't use the two on the right. They're a little difficult to hit, and I've had problems with them bugging out, so I turned them off. It also took me awhile to figure out how to bind the extra buttons (If you are having trouble with it too, post in the comments or e-mail me and I'll whip up a quick video to show you the ropes.) But, for the price I paid, this thing is still a damn good mouse, and the four extra buttons I do use all work fantastically. It's got a good warranty though and it does what I need for a good price. If you can catch this thing on sale, it's worth it. I wouldn't pay $80 for it though.

Other Mice

There's some other mice out there, but I'm not going to lie, I'm a Razer fanboy. They've served me well, and the warranties are solid. However, Steelseries and Logitech also make some great gaming mice and might be a little cheaper. It's worth looking around first. I highly suggest getting a 5 button mouse at the very least if you use click bindings. You won't regret it, and once you get a gaming mouse you won't want to go back.

Keyboards and USB Keyboard Extensions

If mouseovers are more your thing, or if you want easier bindings, a better keyboard is also a good investment. I've used quite a few, and while most are made for FPS games, they're usually simple to configure, often it's just plug in and go, or they include drivers.

USB Number Pad

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: Yes
Cost: Varies, I've seen these anywhere from $5-$30. Shop around.
Link: Targus Numeric Keypad At Staples (At the time of posting, this one's on sale. These things are easy to find and super cheap.)

Back when I used mouseovers, I used one of these in conjunction with my keyboard. I kept it on the left side of my keyboard and bound the keys to various things. It was just easier to reach than the standard numpad on the right side. It's super easy to bind since it is just a number pad, but the flexibility of it being on a usb instead of attached to the board is pretty nice. It's a cheap solution for the budget conscious healer.

Z-Board

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: Yes
Cost: $60 for the WoW keyset one.
Link: WOTLK Zboard Keyset at Newegg

Haven't used this for WoW, but I did use it in some other MMO's. The Zboard is kind of nice because of the ability to pull the keyset off and replace it, and there's a couple that are specifically built for WoW. This can free up a few bindings for you.

Logitech G13

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: No
Cost: $67 at Newegg
Link: G13 at Newegg

This is the little sister of the G15. It's basically just a pad of extra buttons that connects via USB. I had a friend who recommended this for mouseover healing. It's got the screen that the G15 has, a thumbstick for movement, and supposedly has in-box WoW support. Having not used it myself though, I can't say much about it. There are a large number of similar products out there from other companies. A little web browsing will show you more if this is something that interests you.

Wolf King Warrior

Click for a larger image

Have I used it: Yes, current favorite extension.
Cost: $55 at Amazon
Link: Warrior on Amazon

I scored this bad boy for $20 at Fry's a couple years ago. It still works fantastically. However, I had a really hard time finding a link to it, so it might be tough to get one, especially for a reasonable price. $55 seems a bit steep. Anyways, it's basically what you see there. Just a round keyboard with ~55 buttons on it. If you bind something here, it binds on your regular keyboard too. The advantage is that those of us with smaller hands can reach all the F keys, shift and ctrl, and 0-9 without taking out hands off of "WASD". I just bound WoW's menus, like the character screen, to number pad values instead of keys to free up B, C, O, etc for bindings. I originally bought this for Age of Conan because I had a hard time reaching buttons for combos, and started using it in WoW shortly thereafter. The learning curve on it only takes a day or so, and it's really portable due to small size so you don't have to leave it behind when you play elsewhere. It fit in my laptop bag.

~~~

Basically, you're looking to free up more slots for binding. My current set up is a Razer Lachesis with a Wolf King Warrior and a standard HP keyboard, and it's fantastic. Easy to use, fairly cheap, and it'll last. It's well worth the investment to make things a little easier and streamline your healing. If you've got a favorite peripheral, post it in the comments!

/bubblehearth

In Defense of Lightwell

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 02:17:00 +0000

While browsing the cata beta forums, I noticed quite a few threads about Lightwell. The general consensus is that it sucks, and there's nothing to be done to fix it, so get rid of it. But, there's a few folks who rather like this interesting little spell, myself included. Before you get out the torches and pitchforks, hear me out. This spell has some use.

Cons

So, why don't people like it? There has to be a reason people hate it so much, right? I'll admit, some things are wrong with it, but it doesn't mean it's a bad spell.

It doesn't move - Once you place it, it's in that one spot for 3 minutes. It doesn't move, and if you have to run out of range of it, you can't use it.
The click radius is fairly small - You have to be within about 5 yards of it to click on it.
You have to click on it - This alone is an annoyance for some. To get the heal, you have to physically click on it.
The heal breaks if you take more than 30% of your hp as a hit - This makes it kind of useless to place under a tank, in most situations. there's still some fights that this tactic works for.
Limited charges - It only has 10 charges. It can't be spam clicked anymore, but it still has some limitations.
Requires other players to click on it - This is a big one. The people taking damage actually have to click on it to make it work. They often don't. They either won't realize it's there, won't care, or won't use it right.

Pros

So, it's a limited use spell. Big deal. There's still some good qualities. I know there's not much here, so it looks like the cons outweigh it, but bear with me here.

Powerful - Each Hot tick heals for over 4k with 3300 sp. It ticks 3 times, and has 10 charges. So you're looking at 120k potential healing done from it.
Off the GCD - After the initial cast, the heal is off the GCD. You don't need to stop to use it.
You can click it while casting - You CAN click it while you're casting. You don't have to stop what you're doing at all.
Cheap - Only 656 mana.
Only one talent point - Seriously. It's one point.

Uses

The uses are what make this spell good. Or at the very least what makes it worth the heavy cost of ONE talent point.

As a self heal - This is what I use it for. I hate desperate prayer. I don't know why, I just don't like it. So for less mana, Lightwell is my choice. I usually just stand near it, and pop it on myself as needed. Since I can do it mid cast, I've grown to like it.
Healing other healers - When working with healers that know me, they expect my lightwell and use it the same way I do for self healing. This is less common in pugs, but if you explain it to them then call it on vent when it's there and remind them to use it, it's nice.
As a raid heal - If you remind them it's there, this can be great when thrown into melee or ranged. It's a powerful heal, you just have to get them to use it.
As a landmark - Think Festergut here. You can use it as a collapse point for spores, and have folks click it after the debuff comes out.
As a tank heal - On fights with fast damage, but not spikey, you can drop a lightwell on the tanks and it won't cancel. It's an easy 12k heal.

So while it's not a particularly popular talent, don't underestimate it. And for the low cost of one point, why not have another heal in your arsenal? Give it a try.

/bubblehearth

Adjusting To A New Guild

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:15:00 +0000

The Old Guild

Recently my guild decided to call it quits until the expansion. Not everyone was ready to put more time into hardmode Lich King, and that's fine. However, a handful of us also weren't ready to give up quite yet, so many of us have server transferred to find a new guild, myself included. The last week has been my first with a new raid group in about a year, and it's been quite an experience so far.

Finding a New Guild

I was unable to find a guild of the progression level I was looking for on my server. As it's a smaller server, I wasn't surprised. So, I headed over to the cross realm guild recruitment forums to see what was out there. I also checked a couple other resources, such as Plusheal and Tankspot. I was still on the fence about transferring, so I didn't post anywhere, just lurked. A few websites caught my eye, but most of the guilds just didn't stand out to me as being a good fit. I knew what I was looking for, and there's no reason to settle for less. Eventually, I stumbled across one that seemed like a decent match, and shortly after I found out that a couple friends from my old guild had joined up in the same spot. I still wasn't completely sold, so I made a character on the server to talk with an officer, and see what the community there was like. I know trade is a cesspit, but it gives a good idea of the progression of pugs there, which is something that's important to me. I'm a healaholic so I need a good community for my alts. After scoping it out, it seemed like a good match, so I decided to apply.

Applying

Any decent raiding guild is going to have you fill out an application. It's just standard. If you are looking for top end progression, and the guild you're looking at doesn't require an application, you probably can't expect much out of them. It doesn't have to be complicated, but some sort of screening process saves both them and you from wasting your time and, in the case of a server transfer, money.

As someone who spent over two years guild leading, applying to a guild is easy for me. There really isn't a trick to it, and that, in itself, is the trick. What I mean is that if you just fill it out completely, and professionally, you're fine. Don't leave anything blank, if they ask for something that you don't know what it is, such as a WoL report, look it up. Don't say you don't know. Some of the worst apps I've ever seen were people who just blatantly did not understand what kind of guild they were applying to. Anyways, I'm getting off topic...

Adjusting

Acclimating yourself into a new guild can be almost like throwing yourself into a new culture. I came from a fairly quiet guild. We talked and had fun, but guild chat was never all that busy. The new one is completely opposite. Sometimes it's scrolling so fast I can't read it all. Add in not recognizing any names, and it's a little bit of an adjustment. I'm not a very outgoing person, so maybe it's just me.

The first order of business when I join a new guild is to learn names and voices. Well established guilds often call each other something other than their ingame names. Sometimes it's a real name, sometimes it's a nickname, and sometimes it's an old characters name. As a healer, it's important to learn this quickly, as people aren't going to be used to having a new guy there and often call things out with "me" or "I" and leave you guessing. I cleared out a spot in my ui and turned on Ventrilo's overlay feature. In the past I've set up a second monitor to acheive the same effect, but either way works.

Guilds are going to do some fights differently as well. The easiest way to pick out differences is to find out if anyone in the guild has filmed their kills. Because I transferred somewhere where a few old guildies were as well, all I had to do was ask them what the new guild does differently. Worst case, step up and ask for an explanation. Most guilds will be happy to if there's new folks in the raid. The worst thing you can do is say "Well my old guild did it this way, and we should do it like that". You're there to raid with them, not the other way around.

Spend some time reading the guild website. Get a feel for how they do loot, and any required addons. Sometimes they don't update this as frequently as they should, but it should give you some basics. At the very least it will give you some questions to ask.

The roughest thing for me so far has been adjusting to the new healing team. I'm used to a high communication environment where assignments are spelled out before every fight in healer chat, even though we all know them. It made things simple. These guys all know what they're doing and haven't communicated it to me, which is a two way blame street, because I haven't really asked. I suppose the fear of looking like an idiot for asking just needs to be balanced against the fear of looking like an idiot for wiping the group.

Here's my plea to heal leaders out there: Your recruits are nervous. Talk to them. Explain how things go, and do assignments before fights for awhile to get them comfortable. Even at high levels of play, it can help make adjusting less awkward! The worst thing you can do is tell them how the person they're replacing did things. Instead, tell them how the team does things and where they fit in. When you say that their predecessor did things a certain way, it comes off as you wanting them to play just like them, and that's not reasonable. Your recruit is not the former member, don't expect them to be, and don't treat them like that. Explaining things from a team standpoint will make them feel a lot more welcome. Even if they have big shoes to fill, you shouldn't keep reminding them. It will only stress them out, and in turn you will probably see sloppier play.

It's been a rough transition, but it's too early to tell if this will be a good fit. The people seem nice, but it's always intimidating coming into an older guild where everyone knows eachother well, and you're just "the new guy". Anyone have any tips to make the transition smoother? At the end of the xpac, I can't be the only person trying to adapt to a new guild for Cata.

/bubblehearth

PvP Healing For The PvE Healer

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:50:00 +0000

My heart goes out to combat medics.

The end of the expansion is the best time to capitalize on aspects of the game you don't play often. It could be leveling alts, working on achievements, farming gold, etc. What I want to focus on right now though is PvP. And this isn't going to be a "this is how you do it" article. I just want to point you in the right direction to have a little fun healing in a PvP environment.

Why Should I PvP?

Some people flat out don't like PvP. I can understand that, I wasn't a huge fan either. However, it can be a ton of fun once you get going, and can provide some other benefits:

Cover gem costs - You can get solid color gems (red/blue/yellow) for only 10k honor each. This is just a couple games, and can save/make you gold while just blowing off some steam.
Learn your class better - There's a ton of spells that have PvE application, but a large amount of people don't use them. In order to do well in PvP, you need to use everything in your arsenal. Learning to use those utility spells in a bind can have a huge benefit in PvE.
Learn to handle tough raid damage - There's no threat in PvP. So in a large scale PvP environment, you will find yourself dealing with a large amount of damage on several people. It's great practice for tough raid damage.
Up your awareness - In PvE, you can memorize boss mechanics and you're done. PvP, you need to constantly be aware of what's going on, and adjust. This can have a huge payoff when you're working on progression content.
Epeen - There's not a large amount of PvP healers, and often times one good healer can turn the tide of a match or a battle, especially in smaller bgs like Warsong and Arathi.

Ok, So Where Should I Start?

The first thing you are going to want to do is gear up. This is the most frustrating part. If you try to bg or arena without PvP gear, you'll probably end up quite bitter about it. However, it's easier than ever to get quality PvP gear without feeling like you're powerless. The biggest thing to remember here is that stats aren't really important, so your 277 helm is NOT better than the 232 PvP one. People like to beat up healers, and a little resilience goes a long way.

Badges - The Furious gear you can buy with Triumph Emblems from heroics is 2 seasons old. This does NOT make it useless. It's actually still great for bgs. You can get 5 pieces of PvP gear without ever stepping foot into a battleground or arena. Alternatively, if you have spare frost emblems, you can spring for Relentless gear. This is last season's and is well worth not buying primordial saronite for awhile. It's high quality gear, and easy to get.

Honor - While you can buy the Furious chest/helm/shoulders/pants/gloves with honor, I don't recommend it. The first thing you want to spend honor on is the off set pieces, such as the trinkets, belt, boots, rings, neck, etc. They cost quite a bit of honor, so don't use honor on something you can get with badges from heroics. Farming badges without PvP gear is much less frustrating than farming honor in PvE gear.

Arena Points - Even if you hate arena, I really recommend buying a 5v5 team charter. You get the same amount of arena points at 1 rating as you do at 1500, and that's 344 arena points per week. It's fairly simple to just go in and lose 10 games per week for the extra points. Just spam trade chat with "LFM 10 5's for points" and you should find a few people fairly quickly. While you won't have the rating requirements to buy current season gear doing this, last season (Relentless, same you buy with frost emblems) can be bought with a mix of arena points and a small amount of honor. This is a very simple way to get good gear.

Vault of Archavon - It should go without saying that this is a simple way to get PvP gear. Just make sure you run both 10 and 25 each week, and try to find a class run of 10 instead of a random mix. It will decrease the chance of you losing the gear to someone else.

Wintergrasp - There is a cape, and shoulders that are purchasable with Wintergrasp Marks of Honor. You get these from doing WG. If you lose, you get one. If you win, it depends on your rank, and you can get up to 3 if you're a First Lieutenant. I wouldn't waste these marks on anything but the cape and shoulders though. It's also worth noting that the weekly Wintergrasp quests have an honor payout close to 25k. An easy 25k honor every week is pretty nice. If your faction is the minority on your server, this will be a lot harder.

Talent And Glyph For PvP

Just gear won't usually cut it. Talents and glyphs matter. Especially with dual specs out, it's pretty easy to build yourself a PvP spec. There are a large amount of survival talents that can really ease the frustration of constant deaths. As far as what spec to choose...there's quite a bit of flexibility here. Play with it, and see what fits your playstyle. On my Paladin, I use a different spec for every bracket of arena, and any of those specs, plus a couple others, work great for bgs. If you're just looking for a spec to copy, Google is your friend. Arena Junkies is also a good resource site for talents and some tips and tricks.

Don't forgo glyphs either. They are immensely helpful. A couple examples of glyphs that can keep you alive are Glyph of Salvation for Paladins, and Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem for Shaman. The Stoneclaw Totem glyph is an especially good example, as it's a large amount of a Shaman's PvP survivability. It doesn't need to be down for the shield to be up. You drop the totem, the shield goes up, and you can drop another.

Battleground Specific Tips

Keep your cool - Try not to get mad if you lose. Yes, you're there to win, but more importantly you're there to have fun and heal. Just do your best, keep your team alive, and try to keep light spirits about it. You'll be a lot happier when you stop paining every loss. If you're losing a lot of randoms, try queuing for a specific bg that your faction tends to win for a game or two, or take a 5 minute break between games to try to make sure you don't have any of the same people in your group.
Queue with friends - As a healer, it's nice to have someone to pocket heal. Queuing up with a few friends or guildies makes things a lot more fun.
Be vocal in BG chat - Especially in Arathi, people are going to like to leave you alone to defend a base. This sucks. If you're the only one defending a base, call out that you need help. Also, calling out incoming attackers helps a lot too.
Stand back - Don't stand right in the middle of the action. Try to stand back, or even hide a little.

Arena Specific Tips

90% of Arena is experience - REMEMBER THIS. Don't be discouraged if you aren't doing very well. Just try to learn from every game, and apply what you learn. Learning how to beat different comps takes some time, so be patient. You will lose a lot. That's ok, everyone does when they start out.
Find good teammates - This can be taken a few ways. You can find teammates who are patient, but experience arena veterans and can help you learn, or you can find teammates that have no experience either but you have good synergy with. Don't try to jump right into a high rated team with seasoned PvPers if they don't know you're a little wet behind the ears still. You can find patient, skilled PvPers, but it can be difficult. So take your time in your search.
Synergy is key - Working well with your teammates, and using a good composition are both important. Research what comps are doing well, and try to run that. Spend some time doing things with your teammates, whether it be arena or bgs, and try to get used to eachothers playstyles.
Keybind, macro, mod - While some people prefer the vanilla ui in PvP, for most of us it won't cut it. I'll have more on mods below, and there's plenty of resources for macros out there.
Learn other classes - Knowing who has what is invaluable. Do a little research on other classes. Learn their abilities, so you can counter them. It's especially important to know the classes of your teammates. If you don't know what they can do, you won't have good synergy.
Be vocal - Call every little thing that happens on vent. Target swaps, when you pop cds, when a big heal is coming so they don't move out of LoS, etc. Your team should react accordingly. Vent is there, use it.

There's a lot more that can be said, as arena is a cruel mistress. Just remember that it's mostly experience, try not to get discouraged, and do some homework on it and you'll be fine.

PvP Addons

As for raid frames, I still use Vuhdo in PvP, but I keep a second bar of mouseovers for things like Wintergrasp, where not everyone is in my group. I don't know if it's necessarily the best PvP raid frames, but I've enjoyed it, and it allows me to customize debuffs well so it's worked for me. Whatever works best for you here is probably the better option.

Power Auras - Get it. Learn it. Love it. It's endless what you can do with this. I have it set to play a noise and put a big icon on my screen when I get interrupted or silenced, as well as about 20 other notifications. The possibilities here are endless.

Gladius - This is the standard arena enemy raid frame. It allows click bindings and is pretty customizable.

Arena Historian - Keeps track of your matches. What comps and teams you beat often/lose to is all recorded, so you can analyze it and adjust.

Interrupt Bar - While this mod isn't perfect, it works alright. It basically lets you know when enemy interrupts are on cd so it's safe to cast.

Tidy Plates - These nameplates are great. They show your debuffs above the enemy's nameplate so you can track it, as well as a plethora of other options. Nameplates are awesome in PvP, and this little tool adds quite a bit to the table.

~~~

PvP is a great way to blow off some steam and kill some time. Now that the end of the expansion is here, it really is the best time to give it a try. Who knows? You might like it.

/bubblehearth

Teamwork and Healing

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:51:00 +0000

B.A. is totally the Shaman, screw the Night Elf Mohawk crap.

Teamwork is a big deal when healing, I think all healers understand that to a degree. But, do we really understand just how much teamwork matters? With the changes in Cataclysm's healing model, teamwork is looking to be a bigger deal in the coming expansion than it has been before, and were all going to need to adjust our skillset. I want to discuss how teamwork is currently factoring in, where it's headed, as well as some general tips on working with your fellow healers.

Teamwork and Wrath's Healer Design

The face of raiding is largely different in Wrath than it has been in the past. Pick-up-groups are common, and 10 mans are popular. Factor in the healing design, and teamwork is hardly necessary for most normal mode content. It's very simple for a stronger player to make up for any slack. Because we aren't worried about mana, most people aren't concerned about watching their overheals, peeling from assignments is common, and most of the raid is topped off most of the time.

Now, this isn't the case all the time. Once you get into harder content, or running with a regular group, it becomes more necessary to work together. Chances are you have someone doing assignments, and communication becomes more common. But, for the bulk of content, most healers really don't pay much attention to their peers. It's just not all that necessary.

Cataclsym's Revamped Healing Design

With the expansion nearing, and the changes to it's healing design, teamwork is something we need to think about again, especially in a pug situation. Blizzard has stated that their design goal is for mana to matter again, and for it not to be such a big deal when people aren't topped off. Sniping that druid's hots to e-peen on meters won't be such a hot idea when you're ooming because of it, and spamming your bombs to get there before other healers will just make you look like a tool when we all dust off our overhealing meters.

Knowing what your other healers are supposed to be doing, knowing when they need help, and knowing what they're capable of so that you don't waste mana are going to become important skills again. This may seem familiar, these are things we all worried about in BC and Vanilla, but pugging has never been nearly as popular as it is now. My concern is that bad healers are going to be tougher to work with, because we won't have the mana to overheal like mad and cover the slack. Working as a team and understanding strengths and weaknesses quickly will become more important.

Easy Ways to Improve Teamwork

Get a Healing Lead

If your guild doesn't have a healing lead, get one. It doesn't mean they have to be better than everyone, it's just someone that has a basic grasp of each healing class. Just enough to understand how they work and assign them targets accordingly.

Use a Custom Channel

Having a healer channel is great. It's a good place to ~~plot the deaths of melee dps~~ coordinate assignments without cluttering raid chat. It's pretty simple to make one. Type /join nameofchannel and you're done. Have the other healers do the same, and you have a private communication channel. It's generally a good idea to invite the raid leader as well, and possibly your main tanks. It's easier to ask the raid lead a healing oriented question there than in raid chat. Even if you';re just pugging, you can make a custom channel and reuse it for your groups. Just name it something like "pugginheals". Doing this with pugs provides a sort of second perk. Anyone who doesn't leave your channel is still there, so when you're looking for another healer to fill your raid, you can ask there and it's someone you've run with before. It's a good idea to make a macro or something and let people know if they'd like to leave they can just type /leave nameofchannel though, and inform them that they're welcome to stick around.

Stick to Your Assignment

I know in current content it is really tempting to swap targets and spam the whole group, even if your assignment is just tanks. It's not going to be a good idea in Cataclysm to waste mana doing that if you don't need to, so talk to your current guild's healing team now about not peeling, and getting used to working together. This will give you a better feel for individual players too, and will allow you to adjust assignments as needed to make up for weaker players later. This is harder to do in pugs though, use your judgement and prevent wipes in those situations.

Configure Raid Frames To Show Other Healer's Heals

Most raid frames include something called LibHealComm. This shows you when other healers are casting heals on a target. Try to get used to seeing this and working around it. It will keep you from overhealing, and can save a life by preventing two healers from neglecting someone. If you have space in your raid frames hot icons area, consider showing some other healers's hots in one slot as well. In 10 mans I like to turn on Druid's rejuvs when I'm on my paladin to avoid sniping them.

Coordinate Cooldowns

Use your healer channel to coordinate who is going to use mana cooldowns first. Then, when any healer needs mana, they can just call it on vent, and you can make sure you don't have any cooldowns wasted. You can do the same thing for defensive cooldowns. For instance, when our tanks called out that they needed a cd, our disc priest was always the first responder. If his was down, then one of our holy paladins was assigned to second, and the other to third. Showing defensive cooldowns on raid frames also helps with not overlapping these. My guide on setting up Vuhdo has a portion on configuring that.

Communicate Communicate Communicate!

Really the key to good teamwork is communication. If you're raiding as a healer and do not have a microphone, do other healers a favor and get one. But, that's not enough. You have to USE IT. For some reason I run into more shy healers than any other class. Don't be! Call out when a tank is out of range or LoS, call out when you're debuffed, call out when you need mana, call out if you're cc'd, and call it when you just plain need help! Other healers aren't going to tease you. Good communication skills are incredibly important, so don't be afraid to use vent.

Another little trick I like to do is set up a special push to talk for vent that only healers and my tanks can hear. Doing this is really simple, and here's a quick video on it:

With all the changes coming in Cata, it's going to be more important than ever to be a team player, especially in a pug. Working on some skills now will really save you a headache later.

/bubblehearth

BA Shared Topic - Group Relations, Assisting Your Healers

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:01:00 +0000

So I really liked the idea for the shared topic this week over at Blog Azeroth. This week it's group relations; how you can go above and beyond standard play to assist and protect members of your group. I want to focus particularly on what a dps can do to help me out as a healer. Little things that aren't required, but would definitely impress me, and maybe get you into my good graces so I'll heal you on trash. I'm looking at you, fury warriors!

1. Watch your threat on trash!
This seems like a no brainer, but please, please watch your aggro! It's frustrating as a healer to be playing roulette with my casts on trash because Captain Cleave couldn't wait to get going. Give your tank a second to pick up threat so your healer doesn't have a heart attack.

2. Ask for Salv if you need it.
This is more paladin-y than healer-y, and it's more of something I can do for you, but it's kind of a pet peeve of mine that no one ever asks for Hand of Salvation. If you know you're a threat rocket, ask for it early on so you can go balls out faster. This also goes for other cooldowns though. Need an innervate? Ask. Need a freedom? Remind us! We get busy and forget these things.

3. Ranged, keep an eye on your healers.
Melee, you're off the hook here cause you're usually further away, but ranged, keep an eye on us. If you see a mob running at a healer, attack it. Better for you to take a hit than the healer. Plus, if you die saving us, that's some serious brownie points for later fights when we have to pick between two heal targets, or when were choosing who to DI. CC also helps here. Something as simple as leaving a freezing trap at your healer's feet can save a life.

4. Use your healthstone.
I'm guilty of this myself, but dps, when you're low, don't forget that cookie! It can buy us some precious time to get you up. Don't forget about racial and profession heals either, such as Gift of the Naaru and Lifeblood. Every little bit counts in a hectic moment.

5. Defensive cooldowns, use them.
DPS often have some sort of defensive cooldowns they can use in a tight moment, don't forget to use them! It can buy the healers some much needed time. Warriors, make a shield wall macro. You can swap weapons in combat. Druids, you have barkskin. If there's heavy aoe, use it! Paladins, Sacred Shield yourself, especially if there's a paladin healer in your group. Every little bit of reduced damage is reduced healing strain.

6. Dispel
I know dispelling is usually a healer's job, and it messes with your precious GCDs, but if you notice group health is low, and a large amount of debuffs out, a few cleanses can go a long way. Another situation I'm in often is getting polymorphed and unable to do anything. Watch for things like this, set special warnings on your raid frames for an incapacitated healer.

7. Communicate
This is directed more at tanks than dps, but it's still huge. Communicate with us! Tell us when you're popping your cooldowns, and tell us if all yours are down. Were watching a lot of other things, and probably aren't concerned with your Shield Wall cooldown, until you suddenly squish and we still had Pain Suppression off cd. Calling out taunts for your healers also goes a long way. If you have to, macro a /ra message to your taunt to convey it automatically.

8. Use raid frames that clearly show range.
Nothing is more frustrating than prepping a big heal on a dps only to have them run out of range of it right before it goes off. Keep raid frames up, and make sure you have a range indicator on it. Most heals are 40 yards.

9. Watch line of sight.
Ok...this might be more annoying than range issues. Please watch your line of sight! Remember that most healers can't cast while on the move, so you can't go around a corner, or up some stairs, and expect them to follow. If it's urgent, call out where you're going so the healers know to watch out.

10. Unless the fight mechanics require otherwise, group up!
Many tools in the healing toolbox require you to be within a certain range of another target. If you stay closer to each other, then your shaman doesn't have to cry that their Chain Heal isn't bouncing, your druid is getting more out of each Wild Growth, your paladin's Glyph of Holy Light is doing impressive splash, and your priest doesn't need to worry about Circle of Healing range. I notice ranged are especially horrible at this, and I can see myself /ranting at it a great deal in cata when I'm trying to fire off my paladin stream totem and my cone heal. Stack up when you can, your healers will love you.

You should go check out RestoDude's post on this topic, as the shared topic this week was his idea. It's quite a good one. Any other ideas on how dps can help out healers? Or maybe there's something you as a dps or tank could use your healers doing? Post a comment!

/bubblehearth

More H Pally Beta Info - Build 12759

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:42:00 +0000

New beta build, new stuff to talk about! Sorry for the sloppy/ugly format, just trying to get this posted for my own use more than anything else. I do have some screenies of the new holy power ui element though.

General Changes
-Mastery is in! I'll have a more detailed write up on it soon, I'm just running into the problem of "I haven't seen any gear better than my 277's yet so I haven't replaced anything" syndrome.
-Plate specialization is in, and pretty cool. When wearing only plate, you get 5% int. Straightforward, beneficial.
-Relics have stats now. Buy yourself a higher ilev one cause the 200 one sucks now. The wrathful one I use hasn't changed at all, but the rest have. Kind of interesting. They have sockets now, and just stats. Looks like "shield slot 2.0". I'm going to miss the interesting effects, I hope some stay in.

Talent Changes
-Enlightened Judgements now just heals you when you judge. No more hit rating for holy. BOO. Extra range has been moved to the ret tree, and is necessary to pick up to move further down it anyways.
-Divine Favor changed to something we'll actually use! Increases spell haste and crit chance by 20% for 20 seconds, 3 min cd. I will definitely use this. Way more attractive than it's previous form.
-Last Word is worth putting a point in, for lack of a better option.
-We have a choice to make in the ret tree. Two attractive talents, not enough points for both. It's either extra crit (15% for 3 points) to holy shock and word of glory, or 40% chance (2 pts for 40) that Word of Glory won't use Holy Power. Tough decision without being able to actually see them in a raid, but for now, I'm leaning towards crit. I dislike "chance to" talents.
-Judgement range moved to the ret tree, but we have to grab it to move down it anyways. Max of 30 yards now.
-Infusion of Light is still working on both Holy Light and Flash of Light. Talent reads HL, buff reads FoL.

Ret changes that interested me
They got a gap closer. Increases movement speed by 30% for 4 seconds when they judge a target more than 15 yards away. In before "ret dead zone".

UI Changes
New holy power ui element is here, and it's pretty!

Click for a larger image

This is just kind of a basic quick analysis, nothing big. But, it gives me more to write about. Going to have to start collecting some mastery gear. I have alot of questions about this shield thing...

/bubblehearth

Game Sound And Healing

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:57:00 +0000

The argument of whether or not game sound is helpful crops up from time to time in raids, and so I wanted to take some time to point out why you, as a healer, are gimping yourself without it. However, I enjoy listening to music while I raid as much as the next guy, so I want to share some tips about how to make game sound, vent, and your music all live together in harmony. It seems like something small, but by not using game sound, you're taking out an entire sense. That can seriously gimp you, even if you don't think it is.

Even the default sound options are fairly flexible

Now, before you grab the torches and pitchforks, let me be clear about what I'm talking about. I'm only talking about sound effects. Not music, not error speech. Those don't affect your gameplay in nearly the way that sound effects can. Actually, I'd recommend keeping game music OFF when raiding, or at least at a low volume.

Why is game sound so important?

I can answer this very, very simply. Healers tunnel vision. Don't deny it, we all do it. Heavy damage comes in, and your eyes go straight to those little whack-a-mole bars and don't come back. It's an easy thing to do, even among the best. . As a tank or a dps, I'm not half as concerned with game sound as I am when I'm healing. Healers simply have more to monitor. Imagine watching the boss, your raid warnings, and 6 ability cooldowns. Factor in monitoring your resources, and making sure you're not standing in the fire, and you have alot of things to look at. Now add in 25 health bars that you're not only watching for drops, but agro, debuffs, range, etc. That's a ton of information for your eyes to process.

Blizzard designed the encounters with sound in mind. When Lord Marrowgar yells "BOOOOOOONNNNNEEESTOOOOORRRRRM!" he's not doing that to be funny. He's doing that to let you know that that safe spot you're standing in where there's no fire has just moved, and your raid is going to be taking heavier damage. When Sindragosa yells "Your pathetic magic betrays you!" she isn't doing that just to be annoying. (Although sometimes I wonder) She's telling you that unchained magic has gone out again and you need to be aware of who it changed to, so you can adapt heal targets accordingly. Watching chat for these cues really just doesn't work. Even if you have some sort of superhuman brain and can process all that visual information, there might just be a lot going on in chat and you can easily miss it. The audio cues are there for a reason, why gimp yourself by not listening to them? By not having these on, you might be performing well as an individual, but you can always do better, and your performance as a member of an adapting team is gimped.

On top of the warnings Blizzard gives us, if you're raiding, you're using an addon such as DBM, DXE, or Bigwigs. All of these have audio warnings built in. If you get a big nasty debuff on you and need to move, it plays a noise. By not having to count on yourself seeing the warning, and just being able to hear it, you can react faster. This also gives you the flexibility to make those warnings smaller on your screen, freeing up valuable real estate, because you don't have to make sure you see them.

Sound can also be a tool in more ways than most people use it now. Did you know you can set Vuhdo to play a noise when a certain debuff goes out? I have it set to play a bell sound when Saurfang puts out a mark, to make sure I don't miss it. Power Auras also has sound options. I actually recorded my own voice and I use that in conjunction with power auras in pvp. When I get silenced, I hear me yelling "BAM!", and when an enemy pops a defensive cooldown like bubble, I hear me yelling "CD'd!". In a hectic pvp environment, warnings like these help monitor your environment on a much higher level than you can with only visual cues. And sometimes showing it both ways just helps your brain process it better.

But I can't hear vent with game sound on!

So turn it down! I'm not saying it has to be at bleeding ear levels, it just needs to be on. I actually play with my game sound turned down very quiet. I put my master volume at about 10%, then crank my sound effects down that low too for an even quieter effect. This leaves it just loud enough that important things, like boss cues and mods, are loud enough to hear, but less important things, like casting noise, is quiet. There are a few mods that add on to the default sound mixer, and the simplest one I use is built right into Titan Panel:

Extra volume controls through mods can really help.

Things like this really simplify the process of getting those volume levels just right. Finding the balance between usable game sound and quiet game sound takes awhile. If there's just too much noise for you in general, it's also really simple to replace game sound files with something else, like nothing. You can record silence and replace it. It can be a long and complicated process to do that, but it can be done. I got rid of the gun noise on my hunter because it was loud and annoying.

It should also be noted that VENT LAGS. Don't count on your raid leader to call it out. Even with 1 ping to your vent server, because of the way vent works, you are hearing it 500ms after they said it. Game sound is more reliable.

I like to listen to music while I raid, so I leave sound off

Why not do both? I do. There's several ways to make this happen, and what works for you will vary based on your hardware. I am fortunate enough to have a good sound driver with a built in mixer, which allows me more customization of individual programs, so I can crank wow down further, and vent up louder. The same types of things can be done for music.

My realtek sound driver that came with my comp. It lets me change each program individually, and I can change my speakers and headphones independently.

If you're lucky enough to have something like the above image, doing both game sound and music is simple, and even if you aren't you can go about it much the same way. I run my vent, and my game sound (turned down) through my headphones. I then run my music through my speakers, but keep it quiet enough as to not bother my guildies when I am trying to talk, be considerate. If you're using Winamp, all you have to do is go into preferences and change your output to your speakers, and you're done. If you're using Windows Media Player or iTunes, It's a little rougher, unless you have a USB mic. Just close everything, unplug your USB headset, and fire up your Media Player/iTunes, then plug in your USB headset and open vent and wow. Your music should go through your speakers and everything else through your headset. A USB headset really does simplify things a ton when trying to configure audio outputs, but it can be done with standard mic jacks too, which are what I have at the moment.

The other option, if you can't get any of it working, is to use a different device for your music. Burn a cd, or put your iPod through speakers. For awhile I was streaming Pandora on my phone, and had my phone plugged into my computer speakers. Point is, there's a way to make it work, so this really isn't a valid excuse.

The trouble is worth it

As a healer, these extra warnings by way of game sound are invaluable. They allow us to focus our eyes on healing, and our ears on the encounter. Healing tunnel vision is a serious problem, especially amongst newer healers, and something as simple as low volume game sound can make a world of difference. Try it. With the right volume levels, you might like it.

/bubblehearth

Holy Paladin - A Beginner's Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 08:13:00 +0000

So I know there's a large amount of holy paladin guides out there, but someone asked me a question in trade today that got me wanting to write this. How do you play a Holy Paladin? I couldn't really give a quick and simple answer, so i wanted to make a post to cover the basics, so when I get asked this, I have a reference to link to. It's the end of an expansion, and I know a large amount of this information is changing soon, but it's also the ideal time to begin playing with your alts and offsets, so here goes.

What to expect as a Holy Paladin

Before I get into "how to play", it's important to know what you're getting into. A lot of people will basically tell you to "gem int and spam holy light", and while there's some truth to that, it's barely scratching the surface. Holy pallies are incredible tank healers with an underestimated toolkit. With only 3 basic healing spells, and no real hots, it seems limited. A good holy pally will keep the tank alive with their heal spells. A great one will use their entire toolkit to become an irreplaceable utility machine. It's a specialization that can be as simple or complicated as you want to make it, and what you put in, it gives back. But, you have to start somewhere, so let's cover the basics.

The Spec

There's two holy specs that are considered viable, but when it comes to raiding, only the second one is widely used.

Option 1: This spec is not something I'd recommend for raiders. It's the Flash of Light spec. It's best use is if you're someone who is just looking to do heroics, and that's it. But, as someone who is just focusing on heroics, it works great. You don't need the powerful cooldowns in the prot tree, and the extra crit in ret can help offset bad gear a tad. I've included glyphs in this link; if you're just looking for a spec for heroics, go ahead and use this.

Option 2: This is the standard holy paladin spec. It has everything you need to keep the tank up through even the worst damage. While some may argue that Aura Mastery and Divine Sacrifice aren't useful, they're wrong. Both are incredibly powerful cooldowns, and in the right hands, they can save the day. I will explain some uses for them below. This spec also includes some floater points, and there's a few places that those can go. Here's some options:

Improved Devotion Aura - This is a good place for them. A straight 6% increase to healing as long as you have an aura up. However, it should be noted that this doesn't stack with similar effects, so if there's a prot paladin or a tree in the raid, these points aren't getting used, and you should look at some other options. I like this talent for 10 mans, but 25's I can usually expect someone else to be bringing the buff, so i look elsewhere.

Improved Blessing of Wisdom - The one point already in here is actually optional, and can be swapped out for improved concentration aura if you prefer. The reason this is optional is because it doesn't stack with a resto shaman's mana spring totem. If you pug a lot, it might be worth grabbing, and if you are in a steady raid, talk to the other holy pallies and the shaman, see if someone else has it improved all the way before you drop this.

Improved Concentration Aura - If someone else is providing Improved Blessing of Wisdom, this is a good place for the points. It's not required to have to not get pushed back, but it might be useful to someone else in the group.

Blessed Hands - Personally, I like this talent, and I fell it's underrated. But, I'm used to paladin healing, so i'm often watching omen and salving dps who are getting high. However, that's not the real reason this is a good talent. It's the 10% increase to your Hand of Sacrifice. That puts it in line with Pain Supression, but it's important to remember it makes you take more damage too, so you'll probably need to save your bubble.

Random Talent Tips:

-While you are speccing into Improved Righteous Fury just to go further down the tree, you can take advantage of it by healing with it on. This will give you 6% reduced damage taken, and you shouldn't pull agro off your tanks, even with it on. It's also useful to make sure that healing agro goes to you and not the squishy priest. Just be careful with it on fights with adds, if they're spawning a lot and your tanks are slow you might want to turn it off.

Glyphs

There's a few solid options for glyphing, but three really stand out.

Major:

Seal of Wisdom - This is a required glyph. On top of it being 5% reduced mana cost, this is already the seal that you will be wanting to use just because it's a good seal. The large amount of mana return that comes from seal of wisdom puts this glyph far ahead of the Seal of Light glyph.

Holy Light - This glyph is another must have. Since you are primarily using Holy Light, and primarily healing tanks, this glyph will splash some extra healing to the offtank and the melee. It does more healing than you'd think, and there's no competition for this glyph.

Beacon of Light - I love this glyph. I was skeptic at first, but there's a few reason why this glyph is so good. The first being that beacon is not a cheap spell. The less you have to apply it, the more mana you save. The second reason is that this keeps your beacon and your sacred shield from falling off at the same time. Having an offset there is useful to stagger the time that you're reapplying buffs instead of healing. If you use this glyph for awhile, you will hate how often you have to reapply beacon without it. It'l grow on you.

Holy Shock - This is the other glyph I've played with instead of beacon, but I've really only found it useful in high movement fights, so i stopped using it. It's still a fairly good glyph though, so it's worth mentioning.

Minor:

Lay on Hands - The only good minor. Take it. Love it.

Blessing of Wisdom - This is nice if you only have a couple paladins, and need to spread buffs. You can use a 30 minute to get a longer buff on the other paladin, then replace your own with a 30 min BoW. Like if you have a ret and a holy pally in the group, the ret can do kings, you can do 30 minute might, then 10 minute wisdom yourself. Because of the glyph, it's a 30 minute buff for both of you.

Blessing of Kings - Really there just isn't many other options, but this glyph is kind of nice anyways if you need to rebuff someone who died in combat and got battle rezzed, Saves a little mana.

Gear

So now that you have your spec created and your glyphs picked out, it's time to ask yourself what stats to
look for on gear. What makes something an upgrade?

Haste - The first thing you should look for is Haste. Haste is an incredibly important stat. Were using a fairly
slow spell, so we want to get the most out of it. How much haste is enough? You want, at the very least,
about 680. If you have a ret paladin and a shaman in the group, this will put your global cooldown at 1
second and your flashes at one second. However, you won't always have those buffs, and your holy light can
still get faster, so more doesn't hurt. I run anywhere from 750-950.

Intellect - This stat is the holy paladin's drug of choice. It gives us spellpower, crit, and increases our mana
pool which makes us gain more mana from divine plea, replenishment, and seal of wisdom.

Spell Power - This is usually the next thing I look for. Holy Light scales very well with spellpower, so it
doesn't need to be your first priority, but it is directly related to how hard your heals will hit, so don't forgo it
completely.

Mp5 - This is your big regen stat after Intellect. If you can find a haste/sp/mp5 piece, take it.

Crit - Although this stat was king early in the expansion, it's lost a large amount of it's shine. You shouldn't
really have to try for crit. If you aren't avoiding it, you won't have to worry about it. Your crit will go up well
enough on it's own from you just taking upgrades for other reasons.

Gems

Gemming your Holy Paladin is painfully simple, as long as you remember a few things about gemming itself:

-You do NOT need to match colors. Any colored gem can go in any colored slot. The colors are ONLY for
the bonus. If you match the colors, you get the bonus. If you don't, the gems still work, but you just don't get
the bonus. All you need to worry about is meeting the color requirements for your meta gem. As a holy
paladin, socket bonuses are never worth it.

-Bonuses can be filled by multi colored gems. An orange gem can be placed into a red OR yellow slot and
still count towards the bonus. Additionally, an orange gem counts as both a red AND a yellow for filling your
meta requirements.

-A prismatic gem counts as ALL THREE colors. So, if your meta requires one of each color, one prismatic
can do the job.

With these simple rules in mind, gemming is incredibly simple, to the point of being boring. Use an Insightful Earthsiege Diamond in your meta slot, then put a Nightmare Tear into your helm socket, as helmets usually
have the best socket bonus. Now, your meta is filled just but putting on your helmet! Fill every single other
slot on your gear with intellect gems.

Random Tips About Gear

- The t10 4 set bonus is garbage. Your time until healed on your target will be longer with it than without it, so use only the helm, and the shoulders. Get offset pieces for the rest.

- The best in slot libram is the Libram of Renewal, which can be bought for 15 heroism emblems. Don't worry about the item level, 10% off your main heal is huge. The only other real option is the Wrathful libram, but that's a little harder for most folks to obtain. Just remember how well holy paladins scale with spellpower, so the small amounts from the other librams just aren't worth it.

- For trinkets, your best option is going to be to always use at least one intellect trinket, then use a regen trinket. The easiest ones to get are the Sliver of Pure Ice off 10 man Marrowgar, or the Purified Lunar Dust for 60 frost emblems.

- Don't forget that Plate is not your only option. If you see mail gear with better stats, take it!

Playing your Holy Paladin
I want to go over each spells usual use, and then get into some tricks I've learned to help things along.

Spell Usage:

Holy Light - This will be your main heal. It's a nuke, but with the glyph splash, it's very nice. This spell will keep your tank alive. You will overheal alot, but, such is the folly of healing in this epansion. Mana shouldn't be a problem, if it is, see my post on mana management.

Flash of Light - This spell is more of a judgement call. If you know the damage is low, you can use it to save yourself some mana. Or, if you need a quick heal, it's a good go-to. But, understand that it doesn't scale nearly as well with spellpower as holy light, so if you even slightly think it won't do the job, use holy light. I mainly use flash when i have an instant cast proc from a holy shock crit, or to top off random folks in the raid during periods of low tank damage.

Holy Shock - While it might be tempting to use this on cooldown, it's really not in your best interest. There's 2 situations I particularly like this spell for, the first being movement, since it's our only instant heal, and the second being immeditately following a holy light if the tank was extremely low. It's instant, so a holy light followed by a shock is a quick 30k health back for the tank.

Beacon of Light - This should always, always be up. If there's only one tank, put it on the tank and spam heal the raid. If there's two tanks, put it on one and heal the other. there's no reason to not have beacon up.

Sacred Shield - Keep this up as much as you can. It absorbs a fair amount, allows your flash of light to put a hot on the target, and increases your flash crit chance. I like to put my beacon on one tank, and my sacred shield on the other.

Judgement of Light/Wisdom - Deciding which judgement to use is pretty easy. If there's no other paladins, use judgement of light. It's a phenominal amount of healing, and should be kept up 100% of the time. However, if there's another paladin, it's worth communicating with them to make sure both get put up. It's worth noting that the only thing that increases Judgement of Light's healing is the talent Divinity, so if only of the paladins has that, make sure that's the only putting up JoL.

Divine Plea - This is our main mana return, but be careful when you're using it. Make sure you have something to offset it with, like Avenging Wrath, or our t10 2 set bonus, or a trinket. A good time to use plea is between phases on a boss, or periods of low damage. If it's heavy damage and you have no offset, ask for an innervate instead.

Seal of Wisdom - This spell provides a ton of regeneration through melee attacks. There's no cooldown to how often it can happen. A good way to make sure you stay at the top of your mana pool is to stand in melee range to heal, and hit the boss a time or two after every few heals. Your haste rating increases your melee attack speed too, so it helps with this. Also, healing with mouseover macros or a mod that assists with click bindings will prevent you fram having to deselect the boss as a target.

Divine Illumination - With the t10 2 set bonus, use this in conjunction with Divine Plea. Without the set bonus, you can use it on cooldown, or just during periods of heavy damage when you're spamming holy light hard.

Aura Mastery - The biggest use for this spell is not doubling devotion aura or making you immune to silences. The biggest use is doubling magic resistance auras to reduce damage. Dragon about to cast a flame breath? Throw on fire resistance aura and aura mastery it for a huge reduction. Blood Queen just go up in the aur and start bombarding the raid with shadow damage? Shadow resist and aura mastery to help mitigate it. This is incredibly powerful, although learing when to use it takes some time.

Hand of Sacrifice - This is almost as powerful as Pain Suppression, but don't forget that it makes you take damage too! A good thing to do is to bubble when you use this.

Hand of Salvation - If you are getting used to healing and have some time to watch your threat meters, help out a dps by using this on them. The best time is to wait until they're just barely under the tanks threat. Since it is a percentage drop, the more threat they have, the more they drop.

Hand of Freedom - This spell works on a lot more boss fights than it gets credit for. On Rotface, the kiting tank might be slowed by running through slime, freedom fixes it. On Sindragosa, her breath slows down tanks so it takes them longer to get to ice blocks. Freedom fixes that too. If it slows you, freedom probably helps. It also helps on some weird things too, such as Icehowl in ToC. When he turns around and breaths, hand of freedom will take you out of that little stun it causes.

Lay On Hands - This spell is not something most paladins will use efficiently. It takes alot of practice and experience to know just when to pop it, but it can mean the different between a wipe and a kill if used properly. I can't really explain when the right time is, just try to use it and get used to it, and make sure it's keybound.

Divine Sacrifice - This spell got nerfed a few patches ago, but it's still beyond glorious. The key to it is that while Divine Sacrifice is only party wide, it triggers Divine Guardian, which is a raid wide 20% flat damage reduction. This is incredible!! For example, on festergut, when he does his pungent blight, if you pop this, someone who only had 2 spores instead of 3 will live. If your entire raid only had 2 spores and would have wiped, you can save them with this. It's only a 2 minute cooldown, and there's one last trick to it: a cancelaura macro. Divine Sacrifice is mediocre are best. You don't want to have to use a bubble to mitigate party damage, you want to save that for your hand of sacrifice. The real gem with divine sac is divine guardian, and that's triggered just by pressing the divine sac button. So, you can make a macro to cast divine sac, and turn it off, and divine guardian still works as normal! Here is the macro that every paladin shouldn't be without:

#showtooltip Divine Sacrifice
/cast Divine Sacrifice
/cancelaura Divine Sacrifice

That's all there is to it! Just press the button TWO TIMES and it will cast and cancel divine sac, but divine guardian (the 20% reduced damage) will still go up!

Misc Information
Addons
The default ui really isn't built for healing. However, if you must, check out my guide to healing with the default ui.

As far as healing addons go, I highly recommend Vuhdo, it simply is the best. I even have a guide on setting it up!

Really any raid frames will work, just make sure you're using some sort of mouseovers or click bindings so you don't have to target your heal target. My guide to the default ui will explain mouseovers better.

The Holy Paladin toolkit is a great deal bigger than people give it credit for, and using every utility spell you have is the difference between being good, and being great. If you have any questions, drop me a comment or an e-mail and I'll get back to you as quickly as I can! Also, I apologize for the lack of editing here. Blogger's text editor managed to delete half of this, so I rewrote it, and am too tired to go over it again.

/bubblehearth

Spirit to Hit Conversion: Best Thing Ever? Quite Possibly.

noreply@blogger.com (Aunna) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 05:23:00 +0000

When I say I love all things healing, I am conveniently forgetting to mention something: I hate leveling. Leveling healers is pretty much the worst thing ever. Sure, you can sit there for an hour while ten mobs beat on you, but that's about how long it takes to kill them. Yea, you can group up and instance easier, but isn't that what dual specs are for? I'm sure plenty of people level as a healing spec just fine, but I'm not one of them. It's pretty much the only time I DO bust out a dps spec, as most of my toons are usually dual specced healing, whether that be for pve and pvp, or simply utility for different fights. So, how does this change affect the hardcore health bar junkie? Do we need to start building up an offset just to level without missing every other shot? Short answer: Nope.

Alright, go ahead and do a happy dance. I'll wait. Matter of fact, I'll join you in spirit via this wonderful video:

Ok, that's out of my system.

This means something a bit different for each class, so let's break it down and take a look at how each one will be affected, and why you don't need to build a dps set for leveling, giving you more shiny emblems for things of more financial importance.

Paladin

Click for a larger image

EDIT: August 14th, 2010. The Paladin spirit-hit talent has become baseline for being holy. We no longer have to spec into it.

As the only healing class without a casting spec, unfortunately the healadins must still build an offset to avoid grinding up slowly and painfully to 85. But, this still affects us in some really positive ways, and I'm still super enthusiastic that they decided to include this for holy paladins in spite of us not sharing gear with a dps caster counterpart, and part of it is why I'm showing melee hit in this screenshot, and not spell.

As a Holy Pally, a large amount of healing done comes from Judgement of Light. Now, consider this example: You're on Twin Valks. There's two mobs, and just one of you. You know the aoe is heavy here, and you want to do as much group healing as possible. You look at your judgement spell, and notice that it has a 10 second cooldown, and lasts 20. Being an enterprising young paladin, you judge one, wait the 10 seconds, then judge the other. Now, with debuffs out on both mobs, you just reapply it on cooldown, and you're good. Until you miss. With judgement becoming only one spell baseline to all pallies again, this loses some luster with more than one pally in the group, but when we're seeing more 10 mans I think this will still hold some use.

The other big deal here is mana regen. Much of a pallies regen comes through Seal of Wisdom. Now, a good strategy with this is to weave in SoW between heals. Less misses decreases time between ticks. Because this and judgement are both based off melee hit rating, we don't even need a large amount. One point in the talent might be sufficient, assuming you dont mind less range on your judgement.

The third use is pvp. Nothing is more frustrating than a missed stun or kill shot, and getting hit capped as a healer is rough. This will help immensely.

Priest

Click for a larger image

EDIT: August 14th, 2010 - Priest talent changed to 50/100% like the others.

Now, this one is a bit tough to speculate on for a few reasons. The first, the talent doesn't seem to be working. I'm not wearing a single piece of hit gear in this screenshot, only my healing gear. This is the only toon where I'm getting a flat 0. The other reasons this one is a bit odd is that out of all the classes, it's the only one deep enough into the dps tree that a healer can't grab it. So, priest healers are a bit out of luck here for pvp and raid dps purposes, they'll still need hit gear. I'm assuming the priest conversion is lower because cloth gear will still have hit, whereas with mail and leather they wanted to have more people using the same gear. However, even with this only affecting shadow, it's not all bad. This talent (when it starts working) will assist with leveling priests, you won't have to have a second gearset. It will also help part time shadow priests. Your 10 man have 3 healers, but this fight only takes two? This will help the gear race, as more of your healing gear will be alright to dps with.

Shaman

Click for a larger image

Again, it should be noted that I don't have dps sets in wrath. This is in my healing gear, with 0 hit on it. I was pretty pleased to log onto my shaman and find I had over 30% hit at level 80. It drops as you level, as all stats do.

Being able to just throw together an ele spec, not change any gear, and speed up the leveling process was wonderful. I can still take healing upgrades when I quest, and not worry about having trouble with mobs. And when I start raiding, I won't have to grumble when I'm asked to dps for a fight, because I can swap out minimal gear and still help my group.

This one is actually low enough in the elemental tree that a healing shaman can reach it if they wanted to put a point or two there. With the new talents encouraging healing shaman to shock and lightning bolt for mana returns, just like paladin, this might not be a bad use of points if mana is a frequent issue.

Druid

Click for a larger image

The only hit piece I've got on here is my offhand, which I've been stuck healing with. This one is also only level 80, so the hit hasn't diminished by hitting 81 yet. In healing gear, I'm sporting over 35% chance to hit. This will drop, but this talent is still unique compared to the others. First, it's only 2 points. Second, it's low enough in the tree that a resto druid can grab it for pvp, and third, it gives 4% hit just for taking it, 1% more than the shaman, at 1 point less. The uses are pretty much the same though, pvp, leveling as balance without a gear swap, and being able to be more flexible for your group in 10 man raiding, without being a gear hog.

~~~

I'm curious to see if healers will be easily hit capped at 85, or if they'll need a hit ring or something to fill the gaps. For various reasons, weekend dps, pvp, leveling, and group utility, this is a wonderful change. And to top it all off, it helps less loot rot, which means more purples for all.

/bubblehearth