As is my wont this post got a bit long, so if you want to skip to a specific part here’s links to the discussion of spells, their costs and performance, Spirit Shell, Rapture, Talents and Glyphs.

Bear in mind that I’m still only level 86 as I write this, and the experience changes a lot as you level up.

The Gotcha Test

The first thing I do when I log into a beta or PTR is what I think of as the “Gotcha!” test. I take a close look at the HPS, HPM and costs of all our spells. Why? Remember Flash Heal in Wrath? And in Cataclysm? That’s what I’m looking for, a go-to ability that’s undergone a drastic shift. Here’s the list at level 85, at my gear level which is ilvl 404 on Live:

Priest Spells, Costs and Performance (Build 15677)

Notice that the mana costs are all nice neat round numbers. That’s because all healers now have a fixed mana pool of 100,000 MP (except gnomes, who have 105,000 MP thanks to our racial!) and spells cost a fixed percentage of our maximum mana.

No huge surprises in there this time, so I won’t go into too much detail. Most of the spells are where they have been in Cataclysm, which is nice. Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield remain our fast, expensive emergency heals. They have pretty punishing HPM and high costs, but they’re quick. Penance is still earning its cooldown with comparable HPS to Flash Heal but half the mana cost, and Prayer of Healing is still good when you have 3 or more people to heal up.

On the subject of abilities, there’s a new page on the spellbook labelled Core Abilities:

Priest Core Abilities Tab (Build 15677)

This is a helpful little nugget to nudge new players in the right direction when picking up a spec for the first time, or returning to a spec after a while away. It might be nice to draw attention to this tab more obviously, maybe as a tutorial tip, because it’s not even in the Talents window so you could easily overlook it.

Spirit Shell

While for a while Spirit Shell was an absorb replacement for Greater Heal, that design was rolled back in a recent build in favour of giving us GH back and redesigning Spirit Shell. Personally, I like what they’ve done with the spell.

Spirit Shell is a 15s self-buff on a 1 minute cooldown that turns all the heals you cast into absorbs with their own 15s duration. According to Ghostcrawler it’s been designed to take account of Divine Aegis (by increasing the size of the bubble by your crit chance so if, for example, you have 20% crit chance your bubble will be 120% of the size of the heal), the bubble size benefits from Grace in the same way the original heals would, and the bubbles also scale with Mastery. Note that the bubbles don’t “crit”, your crit chance has already been taken into account.

To put some numbers on this, imagine you hit Spirit Shell, then cast Greater Heal on your tank. Suppose, for the sake of argument, a baseline Greater Heal is good for 50,000 HP.
I have 15% crit chance, so that gives me a bubble of 50,000 * 1.15 = 57,500 HP.
I also have 25.73% stronger bubbles from Mastery, which takes my bubble up to 57,500 * 1.2573 = 72,295 HP.
Add in a triple-stacked Grace for a 30% boost, and my Greater Heal bubble is up to a whopping 72,295 * 1.30 = 93,983 HP.

That’s good stuff!

The current implementation is still a little early. Currently it’s not actually benefiting from any of those extra effects so we’re stuck with the basic heal. There’s also the open question, which Ghostcrawler acknowledged is still one they don’t have an answer for, of how stacking and capping these bubbles will work. Currently the Spirit Shell shields from different heals stack with each other (they create separate buffs for themselves depending on the spell) but casting the same spell twice refreshes the duration but replaces the absorb amount with the latest value, even if it’s lower.

I expect both of these behaviours to change and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the effect end up working more like DA does, where all the heals contribute to a single bubble buff which stacks up to a cap. The developers did point out that they don’t like us feeling like we need to spam something up to a cap (PoH/DA, anyone?), but I don’t think I mind that sort of mechanic. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

The utility of this is centred around preparing for and preventing damage. Know the Elementium Bolt is about to splash down, or your tank’s going to get Impaled? Get those bubbles out there to take the edge off it. The fact that it scales with Mastery means that you’ll get a slight healing boost out of this cooldown as well (Mastery affects the whole bubble, rather than just the DA portion of the heal), but the tradeoff if that you’ll have to have enough damage coming out to take proper advantage of the absorbs.

Rapture

Rapture is something of a vexed subject at the moment.

Rapture, on Beta and on Live, returns a lump of mana when your PW:S breaks; on Live it’s a fraction of your total mana, on the Beta it’s 150% of your Spirit. On Live this is (significantly) more than the PW:S cost to cast, making it an important source of mana regeneration, whereas on Beta the return is less than the cost of PW:S.

If we consider Rapture as a regeneration mechanic, it’s a slightly problematic one. The objections been gone over several times, including in the links above, but they more or less come down to difficulties in getting PW:S to break reliably when the damage is light or unpredictable or cases where you have multiple Disc Priests fighting over opportunities to bubble a single tank.

This unreliability is a problem on Live because Rapture is a form of “active mana regeneration”, like a potion on a 12s cooldown, and it’s a major part of our mana equation – we cast a bubble every 12 seconds to give us the mana we need to do whatever it is we actually want to be doing – and because it’s so powerful we don’t bother with Spirit for the most part. Imagine if your Shadowfiend had a 50% miss chance, or your Hymn of Hope didn’t actually give you any mana back half the time. Oh, wait…

However, Ghostcrawler explained that that this wasn’t actually the intention of Rapture:

Rapture isn’t trying to be Telluric Currents. You shouldn’t spam PW:Shield when you need mana. Rapture is intended to offset the cost of PW:Shield when the latter is used intelligently.

So instead of thinking of Rapture as part of our mana regeneration, instead we should think of it as a discount on casting PW:S as long as we don’t do it too often and pick a target that’s actually going to take damage. Think of it as a proc like Surge of Light, giving us a cheap PW:S every now and then instead of a free Flash Heal, only it doesn’t proc randomly but activates every 12 seconds instead. I still think there’s a possible issue with PW:S needing to break, especially in the case where you have two Disc Priests fighting over the damage, but you can at least see why that design is there, and that might be an application of the Divine Insight talent (call-ahead!).

Have a look back at the table, and look at the HPS and HPM of PW:S with and without Rapture. Without Rapture it’s still our best HPS ability, but the cost is punishing. Factor in a Rapture proc though and it’s suddenly right up there with our best HPM abilities as well.

There’s still one small wrinkle though, and that’s Meditation. You see, Meditation for Disc Priests is 25%, whereas it’s 50% for every other healing spec. The reason for this is that because Rapture makes PW:S so cheap and so powerful (when we weave it in) we can achieve the same output as the other specs for a smaller mana cost. To balance out this lower cost, our background regen is lowered to match.

The upshot is that if we don’t use PW:S at all, or don’t use it especially intelligently, we’ll end up a little behind the other specs mana-wise. If we use it exceptionally well, we’ll potentially end up ahead. Now the ball’s in Blizzard’s court, and they’ll need to tweak the numbers as the Beta progresses and we hit the level 90 content to make sure we’re balanced.

Talents

I’ve not done a talent run-down in a while, so let’s see where we’re at with those.

Level 15

Priest Level 15 Talents (Build 15677)

Level 15 remains the “CC” tier. Void Tendrils summons a Tendril for every mob within 8 yards of you that roots it for up to 20 seconds; Psyfiend lets you spawn a Psyfiend at a location you choose that fears a mob attacking you every 1.5s; Dominate Mind is Mind Control. Videos of the first two are below for your enjoyment.

Void Tendrils:

Psyfiend:

Personally I’d go with Void Tendrils as my standard pick, just because fear is often a risky proposition. But I can see a lot of value in the Psyfiend in PvP. Throw it down on a flag or into a tower and watch the fun, or maybe just use it to keep people off you.

Level 30

Priest Level 30 Talents (Build 15677)

At Level 30 you’ve got the movement talents. Body and Soul is the same ability we’ve known and envied for two expansions, only now it’s available to all Priests regardless of spec. The contender for PvE is Angelic Feather, which lets you place up to 3 feathers on the ground that grant a movement speed boost to the next person to step on them. If you have a known kite patch or need to keep someone moving at speed for a while then Angelic Feather is stronger than Body and Soul, but Body and Soul is more flexible if you just need to get someone moving and don’t necessarily know who it’s going to be. Tailor your choice to the situaion.

Phantasm looks at first glance like more of a PvP choice, although don’t rule it out entirely for PvE either. It makes your Fade remove all movement-impairing effects and makes you untargetable by ranged attacks and immune to movement-impairing effects for 3 seconds. The untargetability might have niche applications (I wonder if it would make you immune to Shrapnel, for example) but the freedom of movement could be handier.

I suspect the choice will usually be between Angelic Feather and Body and Soul for PvE, but it’s nice to have the option of Phantasm as well.

Level 45

Priest Level 45 Talents (Build 15677)

Level 45 is the first tier where you get to actually improve your output. From Darkness, Comes Light (FD,CL), which still has that extraneous and slightly grating comma, gives you a 15% chance to proc a free, instant Flash Heal when you use (most of) your single-target heals. The list includes Smite, but not Penance or Holy Fire; this may change, I’d certainly expect to see Penance in that list. Given the high HPS of Flash Heal, this is a strong talent if you’re using a good number of single-target heals.

Mindbender replaces your Shadowfiend and deals double the damage and gives back double the mana. Because everything scales off base mana and base mana is fixed, your Mindbender will return 72% of your mana bar (assuming he doesn’t miss) compared to 36% for the Shadowfiend. This extra mana allows you to use more of the expensive spells, and is a great choice if you don’t think you’ll see the benefit of FD,CL, if you’re AoE healing, for example.

And finally we have Archangel, another old friends that’s been opened up to all three specs. This is a straight up output boost for 18s on a 30s cooldown, assuming you’re able to weave in the requisite number of Smites, Holy Fires and Penances to stack Evangelism up to 5. That’s right: Penance stacks Evangelism now, one stack per tick, and causes Atonement heals as well, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting Evangelism stacked.

In this tier you’re picking what you need. The first two are all about efficiency, the third is about simple output. I suspect we’ll shift from the left to the right as the expansion progresses and mana becomes less of an issue, and at the start we’ll be interested mostly in FD,CL for tank healing and Mindbender for raid healing, although I’ll admit I’ve not sat down and worked through them in detail yet.

Level 60

Priest Level 60 Talents (Build 15677)

Level 60 is all about taking care of yourself. You get a choice of an instant 30% self-heal on a 2-minute cooldown (Desperate Prayer), a shield for 20% of your HP when you’re damaged below 30% of your health every 90s (Angelic Bulwark) and the new Spectral Guise.

Spectral Guise is an interesting talent. When you hit it you spawn a clone of yourself which your enemies will attack, while you get stealthed for 6 seconds or until your clone (“your true form”) is hit 3 times. You can either use the time to run away or to throw a couple of heals on yourself unimpeded.

Spectral Guise feels more solo- or PvP-orientated than the other two since you don’t often take direct attacks as a healer in raids, but it may be useful to save you from a powerful attack directed your way (again Shrapnel comes to mind), since you don’t share in the the damage your clone takes.

Level 75

Priest Level 75 Talents (Build 15677)

Here’s where things get really weird, with a jumble of talents. Twist of Fate gives you a 15% damage or healing buff after damaging or healing a target under 20% HP. I can see this possible being useful for handling low-health enrage phases: throw a HF on the boss at 19% and enjoy 15% extra healing for a while, as well as the more orthodox behaviour of rewarding triage-style healing of the lowest people when the raid is weakened.

Alternatively you could go for Power Infusion for 20% faster, 20% cheaper spell for 15s every 2 minutes either for you or for a friend.

The real wildcard is Divine Insight. For Disc Priests this procs from Penance casts and allows your next PW:S to ignore and to not cause Weakened Soul.
I can see two main uses for this. It’d be pretty handy if you needed a quick throughput boost on a single target because it would let you to throw out a PW:S, Penance, PW:S combination, and it would also be useful to let you maximise the frequency of your Rapture-cheapened PW:S casts even if you or another Priest has already got Weakened Soul on your target.

Level 90

Priest Level 90 Talents (Build 15677)

Until we’re able to actually play with these all we can do is speculate. I’ll link the three options, but reserve comment until they’re opened up on the Beta.

Your choice at level 90 is between:
Cascade, Divine Star, and Halo.

Glyphs

Since the Prime Glyphs have been removed, we’re left with the utility-focused Major Glyphs and the cosmetic Minor Glyphs.

The minors are all more or less unchanged. Shadow Protection went away with the removal of spell resistances, and we got Glyph of the Heavens instead. This one makes your Levitate targets appear to be floating on a cloud. Funky!

As for Majors, a lot are unchanged, but there are a few interesting changes.

• Glyph of Dispel Magic – Deals damage when you dispel an enemy, rather than healing when you dispel a friendly.
• Glyph of Purify – Heals 3% of max HP when you dispel a friendly. Dispel Magic is now our offensive dispel, while Purify is our defensive dispel/cleanse ability.
• Glyph of Fade – Reduces all damage taken by 10% when you Fade, which could be mighty handy.
• Glyph of Holy Fire – Makes Holy Fire instant-cast. Doesn’t save you any time if you’re able to stand still, but could add a valuable extra tool to our healing-on-the-run toolkit.
• Glyph of Levitate – Increases your movement speed by 10% while you’re levitating and for 10s afterwards.
• Glyph of Penance – Allows you to cast Penance while moving, but increases the cost of Penance by 20%. If you need healing on the run this is a good bet. The cost just stops it from being a no-brainer.
• Glyph of Power Word: Shield – Similar to the old version, but where the healing used to be a bonus, this time the healing is taken out of the absorb instead.

Possibly Related Posts:

• MoP Priest Spells
• MoP Talents and Glyphs
• Mists of Pandaria Talents

[MoP Beta] Snapshot of the Disc Priest is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

On topic, I’m finally in the beta. Broadband being what it is down here in New Zealand, with download caps being the rule rather than the exception, I’m not going to be able to download the whole thing until the end of the month, but I am logging in and beginning to explore, so expect to start seeing some beta impressions and commentary as the beta rolls on.

At the moment I’m busy sorting out the basics of the UI and spells. Addons are disabled at this point and /cast appears to be broken or extremely buggy in macros too. Folks, we’re doing this the old-fashioned way!
I’m also a little sad that my Savior of Azeroth title didn’t carry over, but I do still have my Twilight Harbinger so I retain some epeen potential.

I’ll be spending most of my time on Lost Isles-US, where I’m Malevica on Alliance and (when my premade arrives) I’ll grab some variation of that name on the Horde side too so I have the opportunity to test both factions.
I’m also intending to copy over my Paladin tank or a premade Paladin and perhaps other healing classes as well, but time will tell how much testing I get to do on classes other than the Priest.

As always I’ll categorise beta posts and mark them in the title, so you can avoid potential spoilers if you prefer.

So watch this space, and let’s have some fun!

4YXACBXEM73A

Possibly Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

[MoP Beta] Milestones and MoP Beta Coverage is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Context is King

I’ve been flirting with heroic raiding for the last two expansions, but it took me a while to work my way through the ranks of guilds raiding progressively closer to the cutting edge before finally ending up in a guild that was in the running for the top of the server charts.

WotLK was the first time I managed to join a guild that was running hardmode and heroic content, but we didn’t manage to kill heroic Anub’Arak or heroic Lich King on 25-man, only on 10-man with 25-man gear. Not that I’m not proud of the team I achieved those feats with, we all worked hard for them and they were a great bunch of people to raid with, but I still felt we fell short of what some members of the guild could, and probably should, have achieved in the expansion.

In Cataclysm I only got a couple of heroic bosses down in Tier 11 before rerolling yet again to Oceanic so that was a bit of a washout, and reaching 85 midway through Firelands pretty much put paid to my chances of earning a heroic Ragnaros kill before Dragon Soul (although we did go 6/7H post-nerf after starting the guild only weeks before). So DS with <;Abraxas>; was my big opportunity to really push progression and I’m very grateful for the opportunity and for the victory.

What my previous experience gave me was a sense of what heroic fights entailed mechanically but what I’d missed out on from being late to the heroic party and not raiding heroics relatively early, with less gear and thus at the difficult end of the progression curve was a sense of what those fights require of raiders personally.

Heroics Require Focus

And by this I mean total, full-time concentration. When an encounter is really stretching your team’s limits, when your tank is fractions of a second away from dropping dead and when those green bars just don’t seem to ever want to come up again you absolutely have to pay attention the whole time. Glance at your chat log and someone might end up dead. Fail to spot an enemy spell cast and don’t hit your cooldown in time, someone’s dead. Stand in the fire for a second too long and your HPS will be zero for the rest of the fight.

And it’s not just paying attention, it’s also having to constantly think. There’s so little time that you can spend just mashing the same button and waiting for a big blue DBM warning; instead you’re watching timers or learning to feel the fight so you can be ready for the next big thing to come at you, switching spells and healing targets on the fly, and working out what your fellow healers are doing.

And let me tell you, this gets exhausting. We raid 9½ hours per week spread over three nights which isn’t much by some standards, but we generally raid hard for those hours with quick re-pulls after wipes and as little downtime as possible. By the end of good progression nights I’m quite often completely frazzled and no use to anyone for a while afterwards. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy myself, but it’s hard work, mentally, and if you can’t keep it up for the duration of the raid then you’re just going to be wasting time by the end.

Heroics Require Motivation

So we’ve established that healing heroics is sometimes hard work and tiring; that inherently means you need to find your motivation.

You can be intrinsically motivated – motivated by your own reasons like killing bosses makes you happy or you have a desire to be the best healer you can be – or extrinsically motivated – motivated by something outside the task, maybe so your raid leader will stop yelling at you, or for bragging rights or a shiny mount – or a combination, and neither is inherently “better” than the other.

Whatever you use, you need to be able to stay motivated because healing heroic raids is not going to be fun all the time. For me, it’s a combination of factors, and they come in and out of play as progression rolls on, for example:

• At a basic level I want to kill bosses because it makes me happy to overcome a challenge I’ve been set, but I’ll admit sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the stress.
• I also keep turning up because my team needs me and I don’t want to deny other people the opportunity to raid and beat encounters. That’s partly intrinsic because I know that turning up is the right thing to do, and also partly extrinsic because I’ll lose my raid spot if I leave people in the lurch.
• I also set myself targets like improving my usage of a certain spell or cooldown, or beating my numbers compared to last week. Those small, measurable, achievable goals keep me coming back even when a boss takes weeks to move past and it’s frustrating as hell.
• And yes, I want to stand around Stormwind showing off the title and mount that are the metaphorical carrots dangled in front of me every tier. Nothing wrong with that as a motivational tool!

I think that a good team community helps a lot with motivation. If you feel loyalty to your raid team you’re more likely to want to come back day after day to help them out even when you’re not personally having much fun, and some healthy competition and banter can provide side-goals to keep you aiming at something.

Heroics Require a Thick Skin

This is probably the thing that I’ve struggled with the most. We don’t have a culture of yelling at people in Vent as a general rule, but I know when I’ve missed a cooldown or got myself killed or got someone else killed. I am my own worst critic and I set myself standards which are probably too high, and I’m very good at beating myself up when I don’t meet them.

At the end of the day, you need to remember that heroic raiding is difficult. You will make mistakes and you will cause wipes, everyone does. And because of that you’ll probably be the target of other people’s frustrations at times and even if you don’t get yelled at immediately or called out publicly you’ll probably feel it anyway.

Heroic raiding requires you to pick yourself up, acknowledge your mistakes (to yourself or to your team or both), learn from them, and move on.

Heroics Require Flexibility

Unlike normal modes, where the tuning is a bit more forgiving, heroic raids require the right composition. Over the years the definition of the “right composition” has been made a little more reasonable than stacking your raid with Shaman and making everyone take up leatherworking, but (pre-nerf, at least) 3-healing Ultraxion on heroic just wasn’t happening. So you need to be able to adapt yourself to the demands of the encounter.

For healers (and tanks too, probably more so than for healers) that often means being competent at a DPS spec or being willing to sit out for a mainspec DPS when there’s not a spot for you. I’ve sat on a few bosses and I’ve even tried DPSing, albeit without much success. Fortunately we have healers in the team who are competent in their offspecs, and they make up for my inadequacies!

I’ll also mention that you will sometimes need to work harder, and it might feel like you’re being asked to “carry” another role. We’ve all been there, when you’re dropping a healer because you’re hitting a berserk timer instead of giving your DPS the kick up the backside (you feel) they really deserve. Maybe it’s not fair to make you work harder, maybe other guilds manage just fine with 3 healers instead of 2, but you have to at least be willing to give it your best shot. Whatever it takes to get the boss down, even if that means going way outside your comfort zone.

Flexibility also means tailoring your spec and glyphs to the encounter you’re currently working on, and that’s something everyone will end up doing to some extent. Every fight is different and you can’t rely on one spec, one glyph setup and one reforge and never change anything for an entire tier. You need to think ahead about the mechanics, and look back at logs, to see where you can improve or what needs to change.

Heroics Require Analysis

Which leads nicely to the last thing on my list: you have to be analytical. Not your raid leader or your healing lead, you! And by “you” I of course mean “everyone”. You need to analyse your own performance, your raid’s performance and your strategy and also be able to communicate your ideas to the team (or at least to your raid leader) clearly and concisely.

Your raid leader will have an idea of the strategy they want to employ; they’ve watched the videos, read the guides, understood the mechanics and come up with a plan. Yet the boss is still defeating you. WTF?! Your raid leader will have questions you need to answer, and they can’t answer them on their own. Questions like:

• Why did you die? – Not “what killed you”, plenty of addons will report the proximate cause of your death, but “why were you able to be killed”. The answer might be that you stood in fire for too long, but was there a reason for that? Was everyone too clumped up? Were you preoccupied by too many things to watch? Is something preventing you from seeing the spell effects? Do we need to call out that mechanic? When your raid leader asks a question like this, pretend they’re really asking “how can we help prevent this from happening again”.
• Why didn’t X get healed? – Maybe X got 2-shot and you couldn’t have healed him up, that’s good information. Perhaps a healer was out of commission (Ice Tombed, maybe) and no one noticed. Maybe someone took an unexpected damage spike and everyone switched off the tank to heal him up. To answer this question well you need to understand your assignment and how it relates to everyone else’s, and bear in mind that those assignments might not be formal, they might just be what the healers expect each other to do.
• Why is your HPS (or DPS) so low? – Bad answer: “I don’t know”. Worse answer: “<;myClass>; sucks on this fight. Better answers should relate to the strategy or mechanics. Is there too much movement? Are you missing buffs? Are you not maximising AoE (or cleave, for DPS) opportunities? Bad timing for cooldowns? You get the picture.

I’ll repeat myself, because I think this is one of the most important things I’d tell a new heroic raider: When your raid leader asks a question about why something happened or didn’t happen, don’t stop at answering the question they asked. Instead pretend they’re really asking “how can we help prevent this from happening again?” and answer that question.

Sometimes you might not get your wish, but if you never ask then how will your raid leader know there’s a problem at all? They’re only one person, playing one role, they’re not omniscient.

Is It Worth It?

Absolutely, one hundred per cent, without a doubt.

But do bear in mind that heroic raiding will not always be fun. In the words of the great Del Preston:

It will not be easy.

You will get tired. You will get blisters. You will get aches and pains.

But you will also get good.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The First Cataclysm Raid
• Heroic Yorsahj the Unsleeping
• Wrath Raiding Retrospective

Reflections on Heroic Healing is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Clearly there’s not One True Answer for every player in every type of content at every level of the game, so let’s look at the Big Three: levelling, heroics and entry-level raiding, and hard-mode raiding.

I’m also going to conflate Evangelism/Archangel with Atonement here and deal with them together; you could take one without the other, but you probably shouldn’t.

Levelling

The emailer said they they’d levelled as Atonement all the way through to heroics and I cannot recommend this approach enough. If you ask me “Holy or Disc for levelling?”, it’s got to be Disc all the way, baby!

Whether you’re soloing or instancing Penance is amazingly powerful, and an Atonement spec is the icing on the cake: you’re in a great position to take on more mobs at a time while questing because you don’t have to trade off as much DPS time to heal yourself up, and in instances you’ll often find yourself not needing to directly heal the tank at all, just bubble and then Holy Fire and Smite to your heart’s content. Those tedious dungeons will just fly by!

Bonus points are available for topping the DPS charts, although you’ll probably have to wait for a boss for a chance to beat the tank.

Heroics and Entry-level Raiding

Here’s where things might be a bit more open, albeit only a little. Holy Fire/Smite/Atonement’s place in the max-level Discipline arsenal is two-fold:

• A cheap-ish, medium-throughput, spammable heal; and
• A means of preparing during lulls for a higher damage phase to come.

My answer to the “Atonement or not Atonement?” question in entry-level content is “Atonement, unless it’s really not working for you”. Let me explain why.

Consider the alternative, which tends to be some variation on this 31/8/2 spec. The main difference is that the 5 points in Evangelism, Archangel and Atonement have been moved into Strength of Soul, Train of Thought and 1 into Inner Sanctum to make up numbers. What that buys you is more frequent Power Word: Shields on your direct healing target (SoS reduces the duration of Weakened Soul when you use your single-target heals) and greater mana efficiency if you cast a lot of Greater Heal (Train of Thought will make Inner Focus come off cooldown sooner).

Notice that both of those talents only really make sense if you’re casting a lot of direct heals on a single target. If you find yourself doing that a lot, then knock yourself out and go grab an Atonement-free spec, but I’d wager you’re probably not.

While you might occasionally run into Lolarthass the Frost DK who didn’t get the memo telling him that no, Death Knights can’t tank in any spec any more, and especially not without some sort of tanking gear, and you might have to spam Greater Heals on him to keep him from being flattened by every trash mob he staggers drunkenly into, generally tanks will be able to hold their own and you won’t need to work too hard to keep people alive. In that scenario Atonement serves as a mana-efficient way to keep the group going through the moderate-to-low damage and the extra DPS you do will help speed things along nicely.

If your tank is complaining that you appear to be too busy DPSing and not healing, feel free to educate them on how things work for Discipline Priests these days and carry on doing what you’re doing. If you’re not wiping and no one’s dying (and the Moonkin isn’t spamming Rejuvs like there’s no tomorrow), then you’re probably doing it right.
And if your tank is insisting that Disc is a PvP spec (yes, it still happens) I suggest you /facepalm ostentatiously, /sigh deeply and drop group. It’s probably for the best.

In LFR the story is similar. Even if you want to be a dedicated tank healer, I strongly suspect you’ll not find enough tank damage to heal to justify the investment in that playstyle. LFR is dominated by raid damage at the best of times, and in a 25-man raid you’re likely to find yourself working with Earth Shields and Beacons of Light specifically placed on tanks as well as smart heals and Efflorescence that get aimed at the mêlée, so most of the healing tanks need is already being covered.
In my opinion, you’re better off practising weaving Greater Heals and Prayers of Healing in with Smites and Holy Fires and learning to read the encounters to find the best times to build Evangelism and to pop Archangel. That’ll prepare you better for the more difficult tiers of raiding.

But! Always bear in mind that Atonement remains a medium-throughput spell; you can’t just smite-spam and hope to top the meters, and it’s certainly not the solution to every healing problem, you need to get clever about things even in entry-level content. You will need to break out Greater Heals when your tank(s) are taking a beating, you will need to keep Prayer of Mending going when there’s regular damage (the whole of the Madness encounter, for example) and you will need to throw out Prayers of Healing when the group takes damage. Atonement is there to act as filler while you conserve mana and to build Evangelism stacks for when you need them later.

Hard-mode Raiding

When it comes to heroic (or progression) raiding, there’s a very strong case for taking Atonement on every encounter. In fact, Derevka made that case back in December.

The short version is that a 15% boost to your healing for 18 seconds every 30 seconds is just too good to pass up when the content is stretching your healing team’s throughput, and the added DPS you can contribute is invaluable when you’re bumping up against enrage timers. And there’s essentially no penalty if you know the encounter well enough.

Damage profiles on most raid encounters are cyclic, meaning that there are clear peaks where you need extra output and convenient troughs where you can build up Evangelism in preparation. If you’re progressing through heroic raid content you should be adept at reading encounters and spotting these phases and planning your Archangel use accordingly. You should also sense when you’re OK to Smite and when you should switch to “real”, targeted heals instead.

 
Ultimately, what sets the great healers apart from the merely very good is their in-depth encounter knowledge which allows them to pick the right abilities to use at the right times. For Discipline Priests timing Archangel is a huge part of that.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The First Cataclysm Raid
• Search Term Fun
• Atonement Improvements

Atonement, or Not Atonement? is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fight Summary

So you’ve killed Spine and now you’re ready for Madness. The good news is that Madness is probably easier than Spine, at least from a technical point of view, and the gear requirements are similar or lower. The bad news is that it’s another 14-minute-plus fight with a long ramp-up time.

There’s not too much different on Heroic, but if you’re used to normal mode you’ll have to tighten up quite a bit to get through it. You can take two tanks but it’s doable with one and you may find you need to go with one tank to beat the berserk timer.

I’ll cover positioning first, then we’ll look at the new mechanic in Phase 1, the Corrupting Parasite, then I’ll cover dealing with Impales before finally talking about each of the phases, including a close look at Phase 2.

Positioning

The first thing you’ll need to tighten up on is your positioning. The Mutated Corruption’s Crush hits very hard, around 80-100k, so you want to minimise the number of people hit by it both to reduce healer mana expenditure and to prevent a second Crush from killing someone. The way to do this is to have the ranged spread out in a curve near the back of the island behind the tank, and the mêlée spread out on the other side:

R are ranged and healers; M are mêlée; T is the tank; and the orange blob is the Mutated Corruption

That’s your baseline positioning while the Mutated Corruption is alive. There will be perturbations in response to mechanics, and I’ll get to those, but you should always aim to return to this general layout.

Phase 1 – Corrupting Parasites

This is the new mechanic on the islands. Twice during the phase, on a fixed timer, Deathwing will cast Corrupting Parasite on a random player. The first comes just as the first Impale is due and the second comes around the time the Regenerative Bloods spawn.

Corrupting Parasite lasts 10 seconds and deals increasing Shadow damage every second while it lasts, starting at 18,000 and topping out at around 80,000 (before resistances), so it’s worth assigning someone to watch this person so they don’t slip through the cracks. When the debuff ends it kicks out a Parasitic Backlash dealing 250,000 Fire damage to everyone within 10 yards and spawns a Corrupting Parasite with around 2.7 million HP. You need to focus on this because at the end of its 10-second Unstable Corruption cast it will explode, dealing damage equal to its remaining HP split across the whole raid.

The short version is that you need the Parasite placed 10 yards away from other people and then you need to kill it, or at least bring it to a safe HP level (around 30% is fine, that’s 80,000 Fire damage per person), before it explodes. Where and how you do that is important though, because efficiency of DPS is a key factor on this fight so you beat the berserk timer on each island and, more importantly, so you have time in hand to take Phase 2 at your own pace.

The first Parasite on each island should be dropped right next to the Mutated Corruption, on the edge of the island, so that you can cleave the Mutated Corruption along with the Parasite. The Parasite is the top priority but adding extra damage to the Mutated Corruption is no bad thing. On the diagram above that’s between the tank and the mêlée so you may need to shuffle around to make sure there’s room, especially if you have more mêlée DPS than I’ve shown there. Also, be careful not to fall off the edge or the Parasite will end up on the wrong island and out of range of DPS. Not that that happened to me, of course…

The second Parasite will spawn as the Mutated Corruption is dying, so this time you want to drop it next to the Arm or Wing Tentacle instead. The Regenerative Bloods will have spawned by this time, so they’ll also be brought over to the Arm or Wing Tentacle and everything should be AoE’d down together for maximum DPS efficiency.

Running through, or standing in, Nozdormu’s Time Zone will slow the tick rate of the debuff, allowing you to extend the time before the Parasite spawns. Basically, you can use this if your Mutated Corruption isn’t quite dying in time to buy time for the tank to bring the Regenerative Bloods over, but if you find you’re waiting for the Parasite to spawn then go around the Time Zone instead. We found the Time Zone handy on the third island, but of course your mileage may vary.

Handling Impale

The Mutated Corruption’s Impale is a big deal on heroic. It deals 840,000 Physical damage as a baseline, and you really can’t afford to take a second one for twice that. Two things need to happen: you need a decent cooldown rotation for any Impales your tank(s) will take, and you need a solution to second Impales.

On the cooldown front, you will need to stack tank cooldowns and healer cooldowns to get through the damage. The first island is easy enough because you have Dream available, so any decent (40% or more) cooldown will do. On the next island you’ll need to stack two 40% or higher cooldowns, such as Shield Wall and Pain Suppression. On the third you’ll not have Alexstrasza’s 20% HP boost so this is a good time to pop a Last Stand-equivalent as well as those cooldowns, and on the last island healers’ 3-minute cooldowns should be up again. Remember that Power Word: Barrier can be used as a 25% cooldown, and if you’re really pushed Spirit Link Totem is a 10% cooldown, which might make the difference.
The Stay of Execution trinket is another 20% cooldown that tanks can use on every island (it applies after any other damage-reducing cooldowns have taken effect, so the damage cap isn’t a problem).

On top of cooldowns, Inspiration/Ancestral Fortitude are good for a further 10% reduction and should be kept up on the tank, and Demoralising Shout/Roar should be kept up on the Mutated Corruption for a 10% Physical damage reduction. Tanks also have their own damage reduction from their tanking stance, presence, form or aura (10%, 14%, 18%, and 10% respectively) which should be added in as well. And don’t forget the raid-wide nerf, Power of the Aspects, which as I write this is at 15%.

Big warning: “cheat death” abilities like Ardent Defender Guardian Spirit do not work on this encounter. AD’s 20% damage reduction does work, but it will not prevent a player’s death.

Just multiply together your cooldowns and damage reductions and check they’ll be enough. For example, here’s our setup for each island, with a Warrior tank:

1. 840,000 x 0.85 (Power of the Aspects) x 0.90 (Demo Shout) x 0.90 (Inspiration/Ancestral Fortitude) x 0.90 (Defensive Stance) x 0.60 (Shield Wall) x 0.80 (Stay of Execution) x 0.50 (Dream) = 124,921
2. 840,000 x 0.85 (PotA) x 0.90 (Demo Shout) x 0.90 (Insp/AF) x 0.90 (Def Stance) x 0.60 (Shld Wall) x 0.80 (SoEx) x 0.60 (Pain Suppression) = 149,906
3. 840,000 x 0.85 (PotA) x 0.90 (Demo Shout) x 0.90 (Insp/AF) x 0.90 (Def Stance) x 0.60 (Shld Wall) x 0.80 (SoEx, not totally effective because the hit exceeds the absorb cap) = 255,324 (Survived by using Last Stand and being topped off)
4. 840,000 x 0.85 (PotA) x 0.90 (Demo Shout) x 0.90 (Insp/AF) x 0.90 (Def Stance) x 0.60 (Shld Wall) x 0.80 (SoEx) x 0.60 (Pain Suppression) = 149,906

Now, for the second Impale on an island you can either have a second tank or use a neat little trick to avoid having to worry about the Impale at all. What this relies on is the fact that the Mutated Corruption will Impale anyone it can reach, so you can force it to Impale a specific person by having everyone run out so that they are the only person in range when the cooldown is up. Of course the soaker will also be taking mêlée hits too while before the Impale goes off, so they need to be able to take care of themselves for a short time.

The best choice for this job is a Shadow Priest, because they can use Dispersion to reduce the Impale to a meagre 57,834 Physical damage, and they can do this on every island. If you don’t have a Shadow Priest, you can use a Rogue or Hunter for the same job. Have them step in with Evasion or Deterrence up so they don’t get killed by mêlée swings, and as soon as they get the Impale debuff they should Vanish or Feign Death. This clears the debuff and voilà, you’ve skipped an entire Impale! Just make sure to let the tank get back in first afterwards, or else the keenest mêlée will get killed instead.

Phase 1 Overview

We’ve been through the new abilties in detail, but it’s worth stepping back and looking at them in context.

To begin with, island order. I recommend Ysera, Alexstrasza, Nozdormu and then Kalecgos, as on normal mode. With the extra Crush damage and cooldowns being tied up you need Nozdormu as long as possible, but you still need Kalecgos more to ensure you get everything killed in good time.

Here’s the order of events for a sample island:

1. At the start you’ll hit the Arm or Wing Tentacle for a while, then you’ll break off and get into your arcs ready for the Mutated Corruption. Do not bring the Tentacle under 80% HP on the latter two islands until after the Regenerative Bloods have been killed, you don’t want Blistering Tentacles when you’re busy dealing with other things
2. Shortly after that the first Corrupting Parasite will be cast, which should be delivered to the spot right in front of the Mutated Corruption
• On the first island you should ignore the Parasite, save DPS and use Dream when it is about to explode
• On subsequent islands it should be killed, cleaving the Mutated Corruption where possible
3. A couple of seconds after the Corrupting Parasite cast comes the first Impale. Stick with your cooldown rotation and all will be fine
4. You get a ~20 second lull here before the Elementium Bolt is cast, which all DPS should switch to and kill before it lands as usual
5. Shortly after the Bolt is dealt with the second Impale comes out. You’ve got a plan for this, so execute it
6. Immediately after the second Impale the Regenerative Bloods will spawn. These should be brought and misdirected to the tank and held while the Mutated Corruption dies
7. A few seconds after the Bloods spawn the second Parasite gets cast. This should be dropped over by the Arm or Wing tentacle
8. Once the Parasite is dropped and the Mutated Corruption is dead, the tank should drag the Regenerative Bloods over to the Arm or Wing Tentacle and the whole lot should be AoE’d down.
9. At this point the fight is the same as normal mode. Kill the Arm or Wing Tentacle, and any other tentacles that might spawn

On the fourth island you should handle the Elementium Bolt as usual, running away from it, popping PW:B if you use it and Tranqs and Divine Hymns if you have them. However to help prevent half the raid getting Crushed while clumped in the bubble you can have people with personal cooldowns stand outside the bubble instead. Your healers will thank you!

Each of the islands proceeds along much the same lines, although the general level of damage increases as you go along. There’s a lot to take in but there’s also a clear rhythm to the encounter which you’ll soon figure out, and it’ll end up feeling a lot less complicated than it looks.

Phase 2

Hopefully you’ve completed Phase 1 in good time, because Phase 2 is as much about control as raw output, although there’s a hefty burst DPS requirement too.

The Elementium Fragments are still in play, as are the Elementium Terrors. Handle them as you always would: kill them ASAP, use Dream if you get targeted by Shrapnel and tank the Terrors in the Time Zone to slow the rate at which they can stack Tetanus. On heroic 7-8 stacks is quite enough, needing external cooldowns and intensive healing to survive.

The new aspect is the Congealing Blood. These start to spawn at 15.9%, 10.9% and 5.9% from approximately the locations shown on the screenshot below, and slime their way towards Deathwing. If they reach him they heal him for 1% each. Even one getting through could spell disaster though, because if you take Deathwing above a trigger point he’ll spawn more Congealing Bloods when you DPS him down past it again.

Congealing Blood approximate spawn locations

The Bloods cannot be stunned, rooted or knocked back, so slows and AoE damage are vital here. Be careful not to overwrite slowing effects. We chose to have our rogue use Fan of Knives with Crippling Poison on the Bloods to keep them slowed, and we had a DK with Chillblains helping out as well while everyone else focused on killing them.

The key to this phase is control and not trying to do too much at once. If your tank can drop the Tetanus debuff easily (DK, Paladin) then go ahead and tank the Terrors with the Bloods and AOE everything together. However at 15% this isn’t necessary any more, you have time to kill each thing in turn, and the encounter feels a lot more manageable if you take your time.

Here’s the sequence we went for:

1. DPS Deathwing to 17% (not much lower so that DoTs and spellweave (the AoE bonus you get from Kalecgos) don’t take him under prematurely)
2. Kill the first Fragments
3. Kill the first Terrors
4. Push Deathwing under 15.9%
5. Kill the Congealing Bloods
6. Push Deathwing under 10.9%
7. Kill the Congealing Bloods
8. Kill the second Fragments
9. Kill the second Terrors
10. Push Deathwing under 5.9%
11. Kill the Congealing Bloods
12. Kill Deathwing, ignoring any Fragments that might spawn at the end

The timing was pretty tight on getting the second Bloods killed before the second set of Fragments spawned but we ended the encounter with 30-40 seconds in hand, so there was time for us to have waited if necessary to survive.

Spec and Glyphs

There’s a bit of everything to deal with, so picking a focused spec is a little tricky. I stuck with the Atonement spec because with the fixed range on Atonement you can do a good job of smart-healing people from Crushes. Plus Atonement benefits from the double damage on the Arm and Wing Tentacles for the third minute on each island making it competitive HPS at a very low cost. Archangel is also great to pop when the Blistering Tentacles spawn for a bit of an extra boost to your raid healing, and for healing up after the Elementium Bolt on the fourth island.

Although PW:B gets used I found that people weren’t standing in it enough to make the glyph worthwhile. I ended up settling for PW:S, PoH and Penance as Prime glyphs. Penance is good as a quick heal on Crushed people, for keeping Inspiration on the tank or for keeping up my Heart of Unliving stacks, and I was casting PW:S frequently for Rapture procs.

For Majors I swapped Dispel for Glyph of Prayer of Mending, since there’s nothing to Dispel, and because PoM should be bouncing for most of the fight.

And once again, get the Glyph of Fading. You’ll need it every time the Regenerative Bloods come up, and every little helps.

Cooldown Usage

Your tank cooldowns will be almost entirely dictated by the fight and your strategy. Because you’ll typically spend up to 2 and a half minutes per island you can’t guarantee that your 3-minute cooldowns will be available for the same point on every island, so play it safe and plan to have them up every other plate. Your PW:B will be needed on the fourth island, so avoid using it on the third, although there may just be enough time between the first impale on the third and the Bolt on the fourth, it’ll depend on your raid’s DPS and speed.

In Phase 2, Pain Suppression should be used on the Terror tank when their Tetanus stacks reach 6 or above, followed by spam-healing until the debuff fades. You can either use PW:B on the raid to mitigate the damage later on or on the tank again for the next set of Terrors, depending on the other cooldowns used. Bear in mind that if you can get a few raid members to stand in it Spirit Link Totem can be a lifesaver for a Terror tank, giving them access to a much larger effective health pool, so you may wish to use your PW:B on the raid instead.

Leap of Faith isn’t a terribly useful ability on this fight if the strategy is being executed correctly. You can extract people who are slow to move away from the Mutated Corruption before an Impale, but otherwise no one should have trouble getting to where they need to be.

Timing Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope is tricky here. Ideally you’d get them in three times, given a 14-minute-ish duration, but it’s quite possible you just won’t need them on the first island. I’d recommend using them early anyway, you might help someone with the Hymn of Hope and the DPS from the Shadowfiend can help get the Mutated Corruption out of the way a fraction quicker. And even if most of the mana is wasted, it’s better than not casting them at all.
If you cast them after you’ve healed up the first Parasite explosion you’ll have a mana deficit to recover, and then you can cast them together on the third island and on Deathwing’s head during Phase 2.

Other Tips

Keep Fade handy for the Regenerative Blood spawn, especially if you’re 1-tanking the fight. Fade early too to avoid getting any DoT stacks and keep them going where they’re supposed to.

Rapture is so important for maintaining your mana on this encounter. If you’ve got a bit sloppy up to now, it’s time to get back on the straight and narrow. Remember, even after the Mutated Corruption dies there’s going to be enough raid damage to burst the bubble pretty reliably so cast it on anyone when the Rapture ICD expires and enjoy vastly improved mana regen.

That same raid damage also means PoM will almost never fail to use all of its charges, making it quite mana-efficient and a good use of a GCD. Keep it going as much as is practical, especially once the Arm or Wing Tentacles are below 70%.

On the first and second set of Congealing Bloods in Phase 2 you can help with some Mind Searing. Remember to pick a mêlée DPS to sear off instead of tab-targeting a Blood, or it’ll get interrupted every time the Blood dies.

Finally, not a Discipline tip but a good one anyway: if you have trouble with the portal at the entrance sometimes sending you to Wyrmrest Temple instead of the Maelstrom, go up onto the Skyfire gunship and talk to Sky Captain Swayze to set it in motion, then use the portal in the bridge to get to the Maelstrom. After that, the entrance portal will go to the right place (until the instance resets).

Good luck, and have fun! Comments, questions and additions appreciated.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Heroic Spine of Deathwing
• Heroic Hagara the Stormbinder
• Heroic Ultraxion

Heroic Madness of Deathwing is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

For a few months, at least.

Big congratulations and thanks are due to everyone <Abraxas> of Dath’Remar who’s been part of our Dragon Soul journey. There have been tough and frustrating times, but we’ve managed to pull through and it was worth it in the end.

Keep an eye out for my Heroic Madness healing and strategy guide and a retrospective look at Cataclysm and Dragon Soul, and once Blizzard pulls their finger our and gives me my Beta invite I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say about that as well.

Finally, if you’re in the market for a guild that raids in the New Zealand time zone (GMT+12) and want to help make us an even stronger force in Mists, you’d be mad not to visit http://abraxasguild.wowstead.com/ and see if you like what you read. We’re on the lookout for people of any class or role to help us farm heroic Dragon Soul, clear up old heroic achievements and help us hit the ground running in Mists.
 

Most annoying things: 1) Warlock shoulders, 2) There's a "u" in Saviour, damn it!

Congrats to Xillionaire on our first of many Life-Binder's Handmaiden mounts

Possibly Related Posts:

• Back in the Game

Tellisa, Savior of Azeroth is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fight Summary

On heroic, the Spine of Deathwing fight demands precise timing, fast target-switching, efficient healing and a lot of patience!

The fight will take at least twice as long on heroic as it does on normal because each Burning Tendon has a greatly increased health pool. You should expect to take two burn phases to remove each plate instead of just one. What this also means is that there will be a lot more Corrupted Blood spawning than you would normally be used to, making Blood control by tanks and Blood removal on the rolls much more important.

For ranged DPS, dealing with Fiery Grips quickly becomes really important, given that each tick can take 1/4 of your health away and you might not be healable at that moment. You want to be in position to DPS the Corruption immediately, but you also need to stop DPS quickly once it’s released or you’ll kill it early and end up with an extra Amalgamation killing people. The margin for error is fairly small here. I’ll talk about the timing in detail in the section on Hideous Amalgamations, but if you time things carefully you can avoid having a Fiery Grip during the Burning Tendons phase, which is a huge DPS boost if you’re having trouble getting the Tendons down reliably.

For healers, besides needing a bit more work to remove the Searing Plasma debuff on people and the fight going on a lot longer, the only major mechanic to be changed is the addition of the Blood Corruption debuffs, which I’ll give their own section below before other sections on dealing with Hideous Amalgamations and Corrupted Blood.

Blood Corruption

Every Hideous Amalgamation that spawns will cast Blood Corruption: Death on a random player in the raid. This is a magical debuff with a 15s duration. When it gets dispelled it jumps to another random player and may either stay the same or change into Blood Corruption: Earth. The duration persists through dispels, so you have 15s total before it expires. When it does expire, if it’s still Death (red icon) it will explode and insta-wipe your group; if it’s Earth (yellow icon) it will grant that player Blood of Neltharion, a 20% damage reduction for the rest of the fight (including through combat resses (Anyone able to confirm this?)), stacking up to 2 times for 40% total.

One person (25-man teams may want a second person) should be assigned to dispelling this, and their priority should be:

1. Get rid of any red Death debuffs
2. Get the yellow Earth debuff onto the tanks, up to 2 stacks apiece
3. Get the yellow Earth debuff onto anyone who is likely to pull aggro on Corrupted Blood later in the fight, which tends to mean healers and perhaps melee DPS too.

Because you want this damage reduction on the tanks as soon as possible, the best way to begin the encounter is to kill all four Corruption tentacles, then wait on the roll until all 4 Amalgamations have cast their Blood Corruption. Then roll and throw them off. This gives you 5 Blood Corruption debuffs to work with right from the start and believe me, getting your tanks sorted early when you’re not panicking about healing all the things is a good feeling.

Amalgamation Management

Speaking of those Hideous Amalgamations, let’s look a bit more closely at when, where and how to spawn them, dump them and kill them.

As I’ve mentioned, you want to spawn four pretty quickly at the start, so on the ‘pull’ you’ll kill all four of the active Corruptions; To help your tank pick them up it’s worth killing one side and then the other rather than a random order.
These four are going to be held by the tank(s) until they’ve cast their Blood Corruption and then you should execute a roll to throw them off. At this time, kill the new Corruption and the fight begins properly.

Because the Amalgamations have pretty high health and their Superheated Nucleus pulses hurt a lot you really don’t want them to reach 9 stacks before you’re ready, so make sure your Corrupted Blood is killed on one side of the Spine and your Amalgamations are tanked on the other.

The timing on the Amalgamation’s death is very tight. You need to be watching its health bar, the number of dead Bloods (Residue) on the ground, and the timer for Fiery Grip, and making sure you’re ready to move at the precise time. When there is ~6 seconds to go on the second Grip of that phase, move the Amalgamation across the Spine and into the pile of Residue. It should get to 9 stacks immediately and start pulsing. Hopefully it was at ~5% or less HP when you started moving, and if it’s much above 10% then you may have problems. While the Amalgamation is moving the melee DPS should work on finish off the Amalgamation, the ranged DPS should be DPSing the Corruption to break the Fiery Grip, then switching back to either finish off the Amalgamation or start work on the Burning Tendons.
If you got the timing right there will be a Fiery Grip right after the Burning Tendon goes away, so be ready to quickly kill the Corruption to break it out, then rinse and repeat the previous process.

After every plate is removed you’ll want to execute a roll to clear out some of the Corrupted Blood. Spawn an extra Hideous Amalgamation (so you can soak up more Residue), then AoE down the Corrupted Blood that remains, using raid cooldowns to prevent the Burst damage from killing people. Start the roll as you drag the Hideous Amalgamations through the Residue pile so it soaks up as many as possible, and then the roll will throw it off the Spine safely.
Once again the timing is tight: you should be in the process of starting the roll because if the Amalgamation absorbs nine Residue it will start to pulse, and you really need to minimise the number of pulses it can get off before flying away. If you’re fairly quick on the roll, you’ll also avoid getting a Fiery Grip during the roll, which helps a lot.

Corrupted Blood Management

Mostly because of the length of the fight you will have to deal with a lot more Corrupted Blood on heroic than on normal, and you will need to carefully manage this to stop it causing too many problems.

The first thing to sort out is positioning. On the first plate it’s not so important, but from the second onwards your Blood tank will be having trouble picking the Bloods up fast enough. The best way to have the Bloods remain under control here is to have the ranged and (especially) healers position themselves near the Blood tank so that the tank’s AoE/cleave attacks alone are sufficient to pick up the incoming Blood, leaving taunts free for the few which genuinely go astray.
Pay close attention and be careful to run away when the Amalgamation is due to die, because getting Fiery Gripped next to the Nuclear Blast is just embarrassing.

The next thing to deal with is not killing too many Corrupted Bloods. Any Blood that is killed (barring the Blood that gets thrown off in rolls or used for exploding Amalgamations) will just come back later once it’s slimed its way to the fiery pits at the side, so killing more Blood than you need to just means you have to heal through more Bursts. When each Burst is around 10k Physical damage raid-wide, that’s a lot of unnecessary mana spent. DBM can keep track of how many Residue are on the ground, so keep a close eye on this number and don’t go crazy.

The only way to actually get rid of Blood, which you’ll want to do to keep your tanks from getting splatted on the last couple of Amalgamations, is to throw Residue off. I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t repeat myself.

The final thing to talk about is what happens on the last plate. Once the second plate has been blown off you’ll have AoE’d down most of the remaining Corrupted Blood and thrown them off with Amalgamations in a roll. After this, the first Amalgamation on the third plate should proceed more or less as before, but the rate at which new Corrupted Bloods are arriving is pretty high and after the first Tendon phase your Blood tank will be taking a real beating from all the Blood, requiring very heavy, focused healing.
At some point that tank may very well need to start kiting; if you’ve been on time (2 grips per Amalgamation) and throw off enough Blood, this shouldn’t need to happen until the second half of the last plate, the 6th Amalgamation. The less kiting the better, because it’s easy to make a mistake and have a tank die. The Bloods can be stunned, including by a Paladin’s glyphed Holy Wrath, which helps with the kiting, and Life Grip can be used to help your tank keep distance. If they feel they might take a few hits in passing, they’ll need a cooldown to get through it.

Because one tank is engaged in kiting full-time and not in picking up new Blood, your Amalgamation tank will need to take over picking up the Blood instead. The ranged and healers need to move over to that tank to help with the Blood pickup, and healers need to be aware and give them extra healing. Everyone should be extremely careful not to kill any of these Bloods so the Amalgamation doesn’t gain stacks prematurely.

Spec and Glyphs

As a Disc Priest your primary jobs here will be damage mitigation, dispelling, and DPSing, in that approximate order, and for me that meant an Atonement spec. You could go a different way and go with a tank-healing build with Train of Thought and Strength of Soul if you want more single-target efficiency, but because of the way Grace works and the fact that absorbs don’t help to remove Searing Plasma debuffs you’re far better off letting the other healers focus on clearing the debuffs while you cover the dispels and use PW:S to protect people with Searing Plasma who are taking, or going to take, damage. Atonement is a pretty mana-efficient way to heal, assuming the damage isn’t wasted, and does seem to prefer people with Searing Plasma debuffs (perhaps it sees the debuff as a deficit?).

The key to surviving the fight as a healer is efficiency. Spamming GH bombs around the place for 12 minutes just isn’t practical, nor is it necessary. Slow and steady is the key here.

You’ll also want to pick up Soul Warding so you can quickly throw out a few bubbles before the Amalgamation hits 9 stacks or before a roll.

Glyphs-wise, go with Glyph of Dispel Magic and the Glyph of Power Word: Shield for a bit of extra healing, and make sure you have the Glyph of Power Word: Barrier for the same reason.

And if you don’t have the Glyph of Fading yet, go get it for this fight, you won’t regret it. And keep it, it’s pretty much the only useful third minor glyph. (When was the last time your Shadowfiend died?)

Cooldown Usage

Work with your fellow healers on cooldown rotations. You should expect to have them up once per plate, but not once per Amalgamation. The points where cooldowns are valuable are the rolls, especially if you’re AoEing Blood, and when the Amalgamation pulses at 9 stacks.
We chose to use PW:B on the first roll, then after each plate when Blood was being cleared out before the roll. Tranqs are good to use during or right after rolls to clear out remaining Searing Plasma debuffs and get people topped up. Because of the long cooldown, save Divine Hymn for during or just after the final roll, once the second plate has been removed.
A special note on Spirit Link Totem: the effect ignores Searing Plasma! You still can’t heal the person directly, but healing pumped onto the raid as a whole gets shared with them, so this is hugely valuable when debuffed people people might otherwise die from incoming damage, so we found this handy when the Amalgamation was pulsing.

I found two important places for Pain Suppression, but there was time for at least one other use as well, your choice. The first is on the Amalgamation tank before first roll, when there will be four Amalgamations active. The second important use is on the final plate, where your Blood tank might need to call for it if they run out of stuns or personal cooldowns. Besides that, use it freely on either tank if they start taking too much damage or even on a healer if Bloods have got away.

Besides rescuing people who are standing in a bad place (under the Nuclear Blast, or too far out for the Blood tank to hit their Bloods, for example) this can be used to help keep your Blood tank stay away from the Bloods while kiting them. If you want to use this it’s best to plan it in advance so you can be standing in a sensible place and facing the right direction. There’s nothing quite like failing to LG because you’re facing the wrong direction!

Your Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope can and should be used together on this fight where possible. Bearing in mind the 12-minute duration you should expect (unless you have extra talent points in it, in which case go your own way on timing too) to get 2 Hymns and 2 Shadowfiends in. I went with throwing out both on the first Burning Tendons to get them on cooldown and they’re not wasted because I’ve usually just burned a ton of mana moving 5 Blood Corruption debuffs around the raid, and then I can use them again on the last Burning Tendons, on the first burn because I really don’t have the time to sit and channel on the second burn.

Other Tips

I think I’ve covered most of it above. I should just re-iterate the need to keep an eye on your mana and be efficient. Don’t look at the meters on this fight because you should expect to be behind, but you bring vital mitigation to the fight as the only way (outside a Spirit Link) to protect people with Searing Plasma from incoming damage, and that can be a life-saver. Plus you free up other healers to do their thing by covering the dispelling duties and add a bit of DPS to the equation.

Good luck, and have fun! Comments, questions and additions welcome as always. (Grav, I’m looking at you!)

Possibly Related Posts:

• Heroic Madness of Deathwing
• Heroic Hagara the Stormbinder
• Heroic Ultraxion

Heroic Spine of Deathwing is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fight Summary

The heroic version of the Hagara encounter shares the same mechanics as normal mode, but how you approach them needs to be a lot more coordinated in order to get through the fight safely. I’ll break down the differences by phase: normal, Frost and Lightning, and explain how we handle each phase.

Normal Phase

As I’ve said, there’s no new mechanics here, but you do need to be a lot more careful.

The biggest change, which I’ll mention first because it affects everything that follows, is that we choose to tank Hagara near the edge of the platform, by the portal, instead of in the middle, or wherever she happens to be. This is for two reasons: it reduces the risk of Shattered Ice landing on a ranged DPS, and it keeps the tank and melee near where they need to be for Phase 2.

The whole raid needs to be aware that the Ice Lances are a little different on heroic, because the stacking debuff they apply increases Frost damage taken, rather than slowing attack speed. That means you need to share the soaking duty around so that people aren’t taking excessive damage. With strong healing and/or cooldowns someone can survive solo-soaking at a push, but it’s better to share. Also remember that there is a short (3 yard) splash, so don’t get too up-close and personal with your soak-mate. This stacking debuff also makes Shattered Ice a potential one-shot ability, so it’s important to say well behind Hagara at all times as she prefers targets in front of her.
Assigning fixed positions is tricky here because there’s some randomness in who gets targeted and where the orbs spawn, so all of your ranged players (DPS and healers) will need to use their initiative and be actively soaking. We did find it helpful to have people generally hang to one side or the other though, so you don’t end up all clumping at one side. We also avoid crossing the beams by having people move around so that they’re on the appropriate side of the boss, and get targeted ranged to move in close to the melee pack (but not splashing close, of course). The aim here is to make soaking as simple and predictable as possible.

Ice Tombs are still cast on two random players and operate the same way as on normal. It’s a good idea to assign a spot for these part-way between the boss and the middle of the room so that you don’t risk blocking the healers’ line of sight to the tank if they appear in an unfortunate location.

The other big difference concerns Focused Assault. On normal you can just strafe away and she’ll not chase you, but this doesn’t work on heroic where she will merrily follow you. There are two ways to avoid this.
At the start of the fight, and after a Frost or Lightning phase, she will try and cast Focused Assault quickly, so the tank should stand near the edge of the platform and wait for her, so she wastes most of the channel time moving to you. Healers will still need to work hard to keep the tank up if he does get hit though, 50k per 0.5 sec still hurts! At other times, pop a tank or healer cooldown when it’s due, and have another player stand at range and taunt Hagara once she’s casting Focused Assault, with the MT taunting back again before she reaches the ranged. A Holy Pally works well because they have plenty of self-defence, but anyone with a real taunt will do (unfortunately Hunter taunts do not work, it does need to be a “tank” taunt from a Warrior, Druid, DK or Paladin).
In theory Focused Assault can be handled with just cooldowns and heavy healing, but with soaking and possibly Ice Tombs for healers to deal with it’s best to play it safe and minimise your exposure to the damage.

Frozen Tempest

OK, this phase does have one new mechanic to deal Frostflake. This is a magical debuff placed on a random player which slows their movement speed by 10% a stack, stacking every 1 sec up to 10 stacks. When this is dispelled it leaves a patch of frost on the ground that slows movement speed for 50% for anyone inside it. This is rather detrimental to staying out of Ice Waves, so dropping one is to be avoided.
Luckily, dispelling it while the person is inside the bubble prevents the Frostflake Snare from going down; so anyone who gets the Frostflake debuff should immediately step inside the bubble and stay there until they are dispelled, then move out again.
If this is your job, make sure that you have Watery Entrenchment as a custom debuff so you can tell when it’s safe to dispel someone.

Because of the need for dispels it’s best to all move around as a group during this phase, taking out each crystal one at a time, as opposed to just spreading out into smaller teams. We use a raid marker, the purple on the screenshot in the next section, to mark the Crystal where we all start.

Big Note! Hand of Freedom, Cloak of Shadows, Druid shapeshifting and any other effect which removes snares or magic will count as a dispel, so these must be avoided unless you know you’re safely inside the bubble. Your team mates will not thank you if you try and be clever!

Pro tip from Grav: it’s pretty safe to use Aspect of the Pack in this phase and the 30% movement speed boost is a big help to stay ahead of Ice Waves, get into the bubble, and dodge the falling ice things. The falling ice will daze you though, so don’t get hit by it!

I should also address an alternative strategy, which is to have your ranged and healers group up in the middle of the platform while your melee run around the edge. This lets the ranged DPS have free rein to DPS any crystal, and negates the need for them to move if they get Frostflake. The damage is fairly high but at high enough gear levels and with three healers it is possible to heal through this damage. However this strategy is designed as a DPS boost at the expense of healer sanity and it’s probably not going to be necessary now we’re at the 15% nerf point, but it is an option if you’re really struggling with DPS.

Lightning Storm

The main difference in this phase is that there’s twice as many Lightning Pillars as on normal (8, up from 4) and the damage from the chain lightning is a lot higher than on normal and gets higher as the phase goes on, so you really need this phase over as quickly as possible so people take as few ticks as possible. Doing that requires quite a bit of coordination, and a battle plan.

Have a look at the diagram and screenshot below. I’ll point out a few of the important features and what the markers mean.

Hagara Lighting phase positions. Blue markers are Lightning Pillars, Numbers are raid members, Raid marks are to help line up the diagram with the screenshot below

Heroic Hagara Lightning Phase Positioning

In the diagram the Pillars are the blue markers, numbers refer to raid members and the raid markers line up with the screenshot.
Also, Boss Blueprint needs to go to eleven!

When the phase starts the tank grabs the add and positions it on the yellow marker, labelled “1″. As it begins to die, people should break off and get into their assigned positions before the tank and players 2 and 8 finish it off and start the chain. The add’s death should activate the southern-most pillar, then the Chain Lightning will jump to player 1, then to 2 and 8, and will continue from there.

The more eagle-eyed of you will have spotted a mathematical conundrum: there are eleven spots, but only ten raid members. This is where you’ll need to be clever and use your raid’s tricks to fill the spots. You’ll need to at least get all the spots covered, but if you can reuse more people then then you can free up a healer or two to stand centrally and focus on healing through the damage, which helps massively.

The first trick is to use a permanent pet (e.g. Warlocks, Hunters and presumably Frost mages and one flavour of DK) to occupy a spot because Lightning will happily chain through them and they can be positioned in advance. On the screenshot above you can see a wolf in position in the upper right; on the diagram that’s position 7, and our hunter occupies position 6. NB pets can aggro the boss, so remember to run them carefully around the outside!

The other trick is to make the most of mobility abilities. Hunters have disengage, Mages have Blink, Warriors have Heroic Leap or Intervene and Warlocks have Demonic Teleport. They can easily cover a position early in the chain and then quickly change position and slot in later in the chain as well. For example in our particular case we have a Warrior take position 2 and then leap out to take position 4.

Even if you don’t need to reuse people, those movement abilities should also be considered when assigning people, so that you assign people with movement abilities to the furthest positions.

The other thing to stress which helps a lot with reducing damage taken is to move into the middle of the room when you’ve done your job as a link in the chain so you don’t take any more damage than is absolutely necessary.

Spec and Glyphs

This isn’t really a demanding fight, healing-wise. It can get intense during the lightning phase if your coordination is less than ideal, but otherwise the healing is fairly pedestrian.

I’d recommend taking Soul Warding to help spread bubbles around to buffer people during the Lightning phase, and because the damage is in waves there’s good opportunities to make the most of an AA spec as well. If you go that route you’ll want to pop your wings for the the Lightning phase, which is where the raid damage gets really high.

If you’re on dispelling duty for Frostflake then you should pick up the Glyph of Dispel for some free healing. I’d also recommend the Glyph of Prayer of Mending, since you’ll get good uptime on PoM on this fight, especially in the Lighting phase.

If you’re the only Priest and confident at both specs, this is a reasonably good fight to switch to Holy for utility: Body and Soul is handy for getting people with Frostflake to safety quickly and HW:S can heal people in Ice Tombs.

Cooldown Usage

There’s not really a great time or place to use PW:B on this fight, because it’s pretty spread out. You could use it at the start of the Lighting phase, which will save some mana, or perhaps to provide a safe spot for some Ice Lance soakers.

PW:B can also be used as a weaker replacement for Pain Suppression on the tank for Focused Assault. Either hold tank cooldowns until asked, or use them proactively if a healer or especially if your Focused Assault taunter gets Tombed.

As I mentioned earlier you can use leaps/teleports/blinks to move people around the chain in the Lightning phase. Life Grip is another trick you can use, although if you use it to bring someone to you you’ll increase their total damage taken as lightning bounces between you and them until they get to their assigned spot. Give them a bubble and PoM to help out.

Although it’s more risky you could also LG the tank away from a Focused Assault if you have no taunter available, but you might also upset your melee DPS and risk hitting the wrong people with Shattered Ice, so use this as a last resort.

The Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope used together should be used after the first Lightning or Frost phase, because the boss will be taking increased damage and not dealing any. Almost like that downtime was made for us! You can use a Concentration potion on the next one, if you need to.

Other Tips

Atonement has no line of sight requirement, so if the Ice Tombs go down near to the boss you can get heals on the frozen people to buy some time. The same applies for ground-based heals like HW:Sanctuary, Efflorescence and Healing Rain.

Good luck, and have fun!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Heroic Madness of Deathwing
• Heroic Spine of Deathwing
• Heroic Ultraxion

Heroic Hagara the Stormbinder is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Obviously the blogosphere has been analysing this as well and rather than linking to every post, I’ll just refer you to MMO Melting Pot who have posted a couple of excellent round-ups with enough links to keep you going until the beta arrives.

Here are the things that jumped out at me most, and the reasons I’m looking forward to Mists.

Priestly Things

There wasn’t a lot of focus on classes specifically at the press event, but they have recently been drip-feeding information in the form of talent “trees” and a recent update on the Priest class design.

When the trees were first released a lot of people noticed that Discipline had lost quite of few of the abilities we currently enjoy, and were understandably a bit apprehensive about losing some of our trademark flexibility. Originally they said:

Our intent is to make the healing styles between the two as different as possible, while cutting down on the number of rarely-used-yet-core spells that each spec has

A perfectly reasonable position; Discipline rarely uses Renew and neither spec uses Holy Nova much. As much as we like to talk about picking the right tool for the job, when one tool can do every job pretty well the others will tend to get left in the metaphorical shed to go rusty. In theory we can use Holy Nova while running as a group, but in practice it’s usually easier to just run first and then throw out an extra Prayer of Healing instead, and even heroic encounters generally aren’t tuned quite tightly enough that you need to heal that quickly to save a wipe.

As it turned out though the change, at least for Prayer of Healing, has been reverted. Quoting CM Kaivax again:

Prayer of Healing can be used by Holy and Discipline once again. We realized that the goal of making Holy Nova an effective AE healing tool was problematic. It meant that we would have to change Holy Nova so thoroughly, that it was becoming a second Prayer of Healing.

In the current spell design paradigm, instant-cast AoE tends to come with a cooldown or high mana cost as a penalty (see: Wild Growth and Circle of Healing or Healing Rain), and it also has to be flexible enough to be a staple AoE heal for Disc Priests instead of a situational ability (caster-centred counts as situational because it requires control over positioning and its value varies strongly from fight to fight). Put those constraints together and you’re left with either a Circle of Healing lookalike (instant but with a cooldown) or, well, Prayer of Healing. One alternative would be for Disc to only have a situational AoE heal; for a discussion of why that wouldn’t fit too well into the current game, see Holy Paladins in WotLK.

I applaud the aim of the developers to further distinguish Holy and Discipline. I love that each spec gets its own way of going about things and attacks the healing problem from a different direction, and on the whole I’m encouraged by what I’m hearing. I like the sound of Discipline swapping Heal for Spirit Shell (a single-target, medium cast-time, fairly small bubble; what I’ve taken so far is that Spirit Shell is to Power Word: Shield what Heal is to Flash Heal) and I’m looking forward to playing the beta and getting my hands on the talents and new abilities and seeing what I really make of them in practice, rather than just speculating based on tooltips.

Talents and Glyphs

The big news, which isn’t really news but is worth bringing up again, is the removal of the Prime glyph slot. Basically the job done by Prime glyphs is now done by talents instead. Apparently Blizzard intend to expand the range of cosmetic effects offered by the Minor glyphs to compensate.

In Mists, both glyphs and talents are changeable using a new reagent, the Tome of the Clear Mind. If you want to change a talent, you consume one reagent to ‘forget’ one row of the talent tree and you can make that selection again; you clear talents one row at a time, you don’t have to respec entirely just to swap one level of talents.

According to MMO-Champion, Blizzard will “also chang[e] major glyphs in a way they think will surprise and amaze players.” I stand prepared to be surprised and amazed…

Dungeons

Only dungeons since there wasn’t much about raids, except to tell us who the end boss of the final raid will be. I won’t spoil it, for the handful of people who haven’t already been spoiled.
They did also say that Tier 14 will feature 14 bosses split into three instances, which is a pretty good way to start the expansion. I’m actually OK with funnelling players down into one final raid at the end of the expansion, but at the start it’s important to have a good range of equivalent difficulty places to see, especially when you’re gearing up your raid team and you can’t assume a certain gear level like you can in later tiers. Getting stuck on an early gearcheck boss would be a real turn-off, but this way you can swap around and try each of the entry-level bosses and get some gear into the raid.

On the subject of gearing up, they’re talking about a revamp of Valor Points as well. Again, according to Wowhead News, the idea at the moment is to use them like the Crystallised Firestones from Firelands as a way to upgrade the item level of gear. Presumably, instead of saving up 2200 VP for some new legs, you just upgrade your old legs to the current item level. It’s not clear if you can get more than one tier of upgrade out of an item, or if any item will be upgradeable or if there will be limitations by slot (in the same way VP gear has not covered every slot thus far); either way, if the drop rates are kept similar to the current rate, gearing up this way will take a while so you’ll still want drops rather than just getting BiS T14 and waiting to upgrade it.
It’s an interesting change, although I don’t know if it’s as big a gain as it sounds. Under the Cataclysm system you might be looking at a new VP item with an inferior stat mix and that obviously won’t be the case under the Mists system, but on the other hand in Mists if you have a suboptimal piece you won’t be able to replace it with a better VP set, you’re stuck upgrading your existing item or waiting for a raid drop.

At the moment we know about three 5-man dungeons. Scholomance appears to have been given a revamp to bring it up to end-game level and streamline it a bit. Presumably like Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep it will have a low-level normal mode and a high level heroic mode, but it’s not clear. There’s also the Stormstout Brewery and the Temple of the Jade Serpent. For details on those, WoW Insider has a good preview.

Challenge Modes

Something that was promised to us a while ago is the Challenge Modes, which aim to give experienced players a reason to get back into the 5-man instances and challenge themselves, similarly to the way ZA bear runs were aimed. You are also ranked against your server and your guild, so you can get some friendly competition going (although Wowhead News says this only opens up once you’ve completed all the gold medals).

The “Challenge” in the name is all about speed. The faster you complete the run, the better the reward:

• Bronze – Is worth an achievement. Most decent groups with a bit of coordination and practice should be able to reach this level.
• Silver – Gets you transmoggable vanity items with no stats but with a vanity set bonus to encourage you to complete the set. This is new gear, not old sets, and you don’t (as far as I can tell) get a free choice. The fact that it’s stat-free stops this system feeling mandatory, something you have to do to get raiding gear.
• Gold – Gives you access to a nifty mount.

I quite like the idea of challenge modes and I’ll definitely be taking part in them and trying to grab a good haul of gold medals. The only thing that bothers me a bit about them is that the challenge is all about speed, rather than some other measure of skill. In theory speed is a measure of the whole group’s skill: you need a strong tank to chain-pull, an efficient healer to limit deaths and drinking time, and obviously good DPS to kill the packs quickly; in practice I find that the pressure tends to fall more heavily on the tank to keep the pace high. And if someone disconnects, there goes your gold medal.

I’d have preferred to see some sort of measure based on execution rather than pure speed, like the way some of the dungeon achievements work at the moment. Perhaps a combination score based on interrupts, damage taken (avoiding the bad), as well as the speed of the kill and probably other factors as well. Then again, if you’re pushing for Challenge Modes then I guess it’s assumed you already know those things and don’t need the extra training.

Scenarios

Something I’d not really heard much about before is the Scenario system. These sound like expanded versions of events like the Flamegate area in Hyjal where you get to defeat Ragnaros while questing, the Wrathgate event or the Crucible of Carnage, but with a stronger group focus and with the tasty carrot of Valor Points. They’re also level 90 only, and not quest based. Given that they reward Valor Points, will they become effectively lightweight instances with a different focus or will they be limited to once-through special events?

An example is described by Wowhead News:

Players are tasked to help a Brewmaster find a spice that’s only useful when it rains. At first, players save some villages and buildings. You then help the Brewmaster create the lager as it’s raining, while she’s besieged by Sauroc. In the final phase, you defend the brewery while putting out fires – a giant Sauroc with a huge sword is trying to destroy the building.

Unlike old-style group quests where you had to ask the zone for help; this time there’s a Scenario Finder tool to help you automatically get a group together for a Scenario. The group you make does not depend on having a tank and healer so you can tackle them with whatever players are queueing for the Scenario at that time. I wonder how flexible the group size is, because the numbers of people can vary massively at different times. It’s also not clear if this system is cross-realm, but since it uses instancing there’s no reason why it couldn’t be.

If they can be differentiated sufficiently from dungeons I think this is quite a neat approach to group questing, although I think that not scattering them throughout the levelling process misses an opportunity to get some handy practice at group interaction before the level cap.

Professions

I’m quite a fan of professions, and I’m always interested in seeing what we’re getting in the future. Unfortunately the main professions weren’t really covered at this recent event, although there were some interesting teasers for the secondary professions.

Archaeology is getting new items, but it is also getting a faction associated with it, the Lorewalkers. When you turn in Pandaren artefacts you get snippets of lore and cut-scenes. The point, apparently, is to provide a stronger grounding for the profession within the game. Personally I’d also like to see the items either be upgradeable (maybe even through archaeology itself) or new items added as tiers are added to the game. In Cataclysm the equippable items stopped at level 359.

For the chefs, there are four specialisations to work on, and you’re able to work on all of them eventually. Each specialisation is related to a primary stat and presumably opens up recipes that grant that stat. Priests would probably go down the Intellect or Spirit route, depending on what’s available.

On a related note, Fox van Allen at WoW Insider recently penned an open letter to Blizzard describing his views on professions in Cataclysm and what improvements he’d like to see in Mists. It’s an excellent read but way too long to discuss in detail here so I’ll just recommend you read it instead.)

Odds and Ends

On the quality of life front, we’re apparently getting AoE looting. This is something that we’ve been waiting patiently for for quite some time. Apparently Star Wars included it, and magically it turns up in Mists. Still, I shouldn’t complain, it’s a handy feature whatever prompted its inclusion.

There will not be any revisiting of item levels in 5.x. In the past the developers talked about a possible “item squish” because numbers were beginning to grow a little too big to be easily handled: six-figure damage numbers popping up, four-figure stat values on gear and so on. Instead, they’re going with compressing numbers of five or more figures using “k” or “M”. For example, a 120 000 healing crit would display as 120k instead. Similarly a boss might have 435M health.

Something that has a lot of people relieved is the addition of an extra character slot. For some it still won’t be enough, but for the rest of us the eleventh slot is a nice gesture, letting us have a new Pandaren or a new Monk without having to select an existing character to let go.

Conclusions?

Obviously at this point it’s impossible to call the expansion a hit or a miss. I’ve skipped over quite a few of the more well-known new features because they don’t interest me much; but just like I don’t feel threatened by the game’s inclusion of Arena, I doubt “my WoW” will be ruined by the addition of Pet Battles. I will say that the addition of challenge modes should give me something new to do outside raiding, and multiple raids per tier along with the possible return of world bosses could provide some well-needed variety to the raiding scene.

Blizzard also hinted that the beta is pretty close, so hopefully I’ll be able to get stuck in very soon and help them make the game as polished as we expect, and of course to report back on how I feel the features are working.

Possibly Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Reasons To Look Forward To Mists is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
Type "H" For Heals by Malevica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Go into your image folder
Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
Challenge six new bloggers.
Link to them.

Well, as far as I know I’ve not been tagged yet, but since most of my blogroll has already joined in I’m going to do it anyway. Sticking it to the system, yeah!

Feel free to tag me retroactively so I don’t appear quite as sad though!

My WoW Life in Pictures

Unfortunately I only actually have five sub-folders in my WoW image directory, which is something of a problem given the meme. So instead I’ll give you the sixth image from each of my sub-folders. Once again, screwing the system. Such a rebel!

1. Cataclysm Beta

   

   The new Cataclysm Beta water, with my (at the time new) Frostbrood Vanquisher on display

   I took this image early in the beta, simply because the new water texture was absolutely breathtaking compared to what was available in the live game at the time. It was jawdropping.

   Plus, I wanted to show off my new mount, even if it was only the 10-man version, we were really proud to get them.

2. General Screenshots

   

   Myself and my favourite tank as dancing Night Elves in Darnassus, dressing in just our guild tabards

   Back in 2007 myself and my favourite tank were in the Royal Guardians guild on Perenolde-US. One day, for reasons which are lost to the mists of time, we decided to roll level 1 Night Elves, slip on a guild tabard, and entertain the denizens of Darnassus. As I recall, there were games involved too, in particular a sort of tag game with Heavy Leather Balls.

   A nice bunch of people for my first experience in WoW

3. Strategy

   

   Oh, the horror of trying to explain this to 25 people...

   This brings back some memories. If you don’t get it, let me explain.

   On the Lich King encounter, there were these Val’kyr who would grab three of your party and fly with them to the edge of the platform and then drop them off. It helped to kill them if you kept them going all the same way so you could AoE stun them and cleave them. The direction they flew was a straight line from the middle of the room to the edge, so where you stood when you were picked up determined precisely where they went.

   This diagram shows why, for a given tightness of group (the white circles), it was better to have that stack point further out than right in the middle. If you stand in the more central stack point but off to the sides of the white circle, the val’kyr’s path could be the edge of the red zone. Whereas if you stand on the edges of the white circle that’s further out, the range of paths is much narrower.

   My contention was that narrowing the possible routes and getting more reliable cleaving and stunning would outweigh the disadvantage of the val’kyrs starting a little closer to the edge of the platform.

   Not visible in this screenshot: AVR scrawls all over the place, showing in no uncertain terms exactly where to run when Defile hit.

4. Other People’s Screenshots

   

   Levitated Kitties oscillate between sinister and scared

   This is Malevica, apparently in Shadowfang Keep for the Love Is In The Air holiday, being stalked by my favourite tank, this time in Druid form.

   I’d levitated her, and apparently she’d decided to get revenge while my back was turned. Sneaky!

5. Miscellaneous

   

   An applicant who holds the key to rejuvenation. And not a Resto Druid

   Oh, saving the best for last!

   I can’t claim credit for this post or the detective work that went into it, but it’s a masterpiece indeed.

   The assumption we made was that the applicant had not in fact discovered the secret to eternal youth, but was just a teenager lying about his or her age to get past a 18+ rule that’s as much there for new members as it is for existing ones.

   Kids, if you’re going to do this, at least make it convincing and just add 5 years to your actual age. That way you’ll be consistent even when you tick over a year, and 5 is a nice round number that’s easy to remember.

Passing The Torch

Here’s the challenge, finding people in my Google Reader who don’t appear to have joined in yet. So I hereby tag the few people below, and anyone else who reads this can consider themselves tagged as well.

With a Heavy Leather Ball.

In no particular order:
Evlyxx of Evangelism
Gina of Healbot.net
and Therya of Shaman Nebula

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The Sixth Meme is a post from Type "H" For Heals.
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