A Review on Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Gates to Infinity

I've come to realize that I am a pretty big fan of the whole "roguelike" game genre, and the reason why is spelled "Pokémon Mystery Dungeon". Until a couple of weeks ago I had never even heard of the term roguelikes, and I was thrilled to realize that although not a big game genre, there are loads of games out there for me to discover that will hopefully entertain me as much as Pokémon Mystery Dungeon has. I'll give you a quick explanation as to what a roguelike game means, before I need to take you a couple years back and some steps away from Pokémon Mystery Dungeon to give you the whole picture of my relationship with these kind of games;

"The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by level randomization, permanent death, and turn-based movement. (...)  Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features." - wikipedia.org

When I first played a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game I was struck by how similar it was in style to one of my old time favorites - Azure Dreams to the PS. I'm not sure how well known or popular Azure Dreams ever was (or is), but I put in so many hours into that game, without ever even finishing it. As with most roguelikes, the gameplay to Azure Dreams is fairly simple, and contains a whole lot of dungeon crawling in randomized levels that get increasingly harder. The penalty of dying is different from game to game, but normally you end up losing everything. In Azure Dreams the challenge is reaching the top floor of a tower, each floor being filled with treasures to find and monsters to fight. The trick to Azure Dreams is that everytime you leave the tower, you lose all your levels meaning you have to start from scratch each time. With you however you can have an amount of pets that fight for you, pets that will keep their level and thus be your main weapon against the monsters in the tower and towards reaching the ultimate goal of the top floor. It might sound confusing but is simple, in the end it means going in and out of the tower a whole lot of times, leveling up your pets to always be able to reach a bit further. The biggest critique against roguelikes has probably always been its repetiveness, it is basically designed around redoing the same thing over and over until you get it right.

Inspiration for Pokémon? Some of the Azure Dreams pets - angelfire.com

But then again, many, many games have this kind of gameplay as their core idea, games that usually end up being insanely popular. Tetris, Mario, even a game like World of Warcraft can be said to have this as their main selling point. And eventhough the main goal of most roguelikes is to grind through dungeons, there are often surrounding goals that can be achieved through all that dungeon crawling. In Azure Dreams and the current Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game I am playing, Gates to Infinity, a secondary goal is to build up a society outside of the dungeons where you can further increase your effectiviness inside the dungeons. Both Azure Dreams and PMD require you to gather a strong team of fighters to be able to counter all the kinds of mobs inside the dungeons. To me, roguelike is a game genre I can play for hours and hours on end, and simply not get bored of.

This strong and new found love for roguelikes in general and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon in particular has made me think that the PMD franchise is seriously underrated and unjustly frowned upon. Admittedly I've only played two games so far, but I know they are fairly similar in style and that I would probably enjoy all of them about equally much (ie a lot). Overall the PMD games are probably considered very simple roguelikes but to me that is probably the only really bad thing to say about it. When I read that the DS games had received an average of 6.5 score from ign.com I wondered if the reviewer disliked the games compared to other roguelikes or compared to completely different games. I for instance had loads of fun with a game like PMD: Explorers of Time, which was the first PMD I played. Now I realize that there is individual taste and that a 6.5 doesn't mean everyone will think it's just an "okay" game, but it insinuates that it's not a well designed game which I just don't agree with. Again, compared to what? To me it feels like at least this reviewer is hammering down on things that normally are at the core of a roguelike - dungeons that feel the same, and overall repetiveness. Interestingly enough these PMDs have received a much higher overall score from players than from "pro" reviewers. When I saw that the game I'm currently playing, PMD: Gates to Infinity, had received the low score of 4.5, I felt like I needed to give my PoV on this game series, a PoV from someone who actually likes the repetiveness and embraces it.

spelblogg.pricerunner.se

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Gates to Infinity Review

If you like Pokémon and you like roguelikes, you've definitely come to the right place with the PMD-series - offering a whole lot of both. In fact I'd start out right away by saying, if you don't find Pokémon absolutely awesome, you might consider PMD GoI (and pretty much all the other PMD games) a bit heavy on the Pokémon. In GoI you get to start out as one of 5 different Pokémon and also choose one of the remaining ones as your partner Pkmn who will be with you pretty much throughout the game. Depending on your choice you will get different types of skills, but GoI is a fairly easy game overall making the choice more one of taste than one of tactics.

In GoI the main story is about a human being pulled into the pkmn world to save it from "some big threat", and while the story progresses you can do the usual quests which in GoI means taking on jobs to go into dungeons and solve different issues - be it to subdue a boss of sorts, finding and item or rescue some stray pkmn. The story is far from boring although not very deep, but there is a lot of it. I've had cut scenes taking what must've been 15 minutes, and the story progresses fairly quickly meaning that you can have really long cutscenes between every other dungeon that you complete. Because of this I can definitely feel like GoI is a bit heavy on the dialogue side, which fortunately is saved by some really well written and funny characters in the game. The two main characters, namely yourself and your sidekick are probably the least interesting, but your surroundings, both the starting city and the society you build up throughout your playing contains some characters that had me laugh out loud and really feel for them. As a big fan of the whole pkmn franchise I simply love seeing pkmn in this personal and character driven way, considering how plain and comparatively insipid the pkmn are in the main game series. This is something I've mentioned before, but sometimes I really wish they'd borrow the idea from Digimon with pkmn that actually have personalities. Some of the interaction between the socially hateful Scraggy and the aloof Quagsire are simply hilarious and the way the loudmouthed Rampardos is trying to get the Cinccino to notice him is charming. This isn't a game just filled with pkmn that are simplistic and overly good, but with some really well written characters that really add to the overall feel.

gcentertainmentsystem.blogspot.com

The gameplay is pretty standard roguelike and if you've played any of the other PMD games you know what to expect. Every now and then a wild pkmn defeated in a dungeon will ask to join your team, and there are many different pkmn to catch. Just as in the main series, these come with different types that are stronger or weaker against other types. This is something I wish the game would make more of a tactical choice, and although there are certain game elements that reward you for giving some planning to your group composition, overall they really don't make much of a difference in the main story game mode since just about everything you can encounter can be overcome with relative ease. This is the only big problem I have with this game - it's a bit too simple and the big challenges are far apart and not even they are really that difficult. The game will shower you in useful items, meaning you very rarely run out of healing items or other things needed to be able to progress. You need Elixirs to up your PP, otherwise you eventually run out of usable moves. In the beginning I made sure to use the Elixirs as little as possible, assuming they'd be a rare commodity. After some gaming I have more than 60 lying around in my bank and I end up vendoring the ones I gather because the dungeons will provide you with more than you'll ever end up needing. After more than 30 hours of gaming I've only died once in the main story (after hours of easy gaming I was surprised by a pkmn that actually two shot me), and that is not because of my leet skills or cautious game style. It's unfortunate because there are many features in PMD GoI that could be used to force the player to do some real planning and thinking, like how certain types of pkmn get stronger certain days, but the easy difficulty level renders most of them pretty obsolete.

You can't control the rest of your team more than giving them general directions, such as staying together or wandering off on your own. As far as I know this is common for roguelike games and it works well. Because of the easy level of the game I almost always have my entire team walk off on their own, and I very rarely have to worry about them. The AI is nothing special, you can tell your team which skills to use so that they don't get stuck using Tail Whip five times in a row against a mob. Although not clever, the game play is simple enough to make sure the AI won't annoy you either. There are two things that keep me really interested and going in this game - finding the "hard parts" in the dungeons and advancing the village. Most dungeons will have one or several levels where you can find rooms filled with monsters or secret, harder to get to areas where the mobs are a lot tougher than the rest of the dungeon. When you enter these areas the difficulty level rises by a lot, and although far from as challenging as some of the harder roguelikes, they still require tactical thinking and good usage of items to be able to survive.

cheatsguru.com

If you end up feeling like the storymode is either too simple or too much story, GoI offers two other modes for those who just want to get into some dungeon crawling action. The first one, Companion Mode, allows you to suspend your story mode and set out into a dungeon with a second team - simply allowing you to do some dungeon crawling without all the dialogue and storymode interrupting your gaming. The second one is called the Magnagates, a feature I quite like since this is where the game offers some real challenge. By using the camera and looking for round objects in your surroundings you can open up a "magnagate" (walking around your home looking for them is actually more fun than it sounds), a dungeon in which you play a preset team of pkmn and encounter a bit more difficult enemies. You start each dungeon without any items, further increasing the difficulty, although your team keeps any levels you might've gotten previously. The big surprise to me was that if you lose a team member he is gone forever. I haven't even figured out how to fill out your team again, although I assume it is by having wild pkmn join, which means you need to be a lot more careful not to die in the Magnagate dungeons than the storymode and companion mode ones. My preset team started out with three pkmn and I accidentally lost one meaning that every Magnagate I do now is with only two pkmn on the team. Everything gathered in either mode will be sent to the main story mode.

Eventhough I'd love for GoI to be more challenging than it is, it still gets the overall gameplay right. I still find myself drawn in and wanting to do just that one more dungeon all the time. There are many things to do, many pkmn to love, and wanting to explore yet another dungeon just doesn't get boring. Without spoiling too much I can say that the storyline turned out to be more interesting for this kind of game than I initially thought, and although still not comparable to proper story driven games it at least offers some tiny surprises. If you enjoy the roguelike game style and happen to also be a pkmn fan, I don't see any reason not to play this game - not for the challenge, but for the experience. And maybe hopefully in the future, a PMD will be released with some increased difficulty - to me everything else about this game is just about perfect.

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide Part 3 - Spell Usage (Cooldowns)

Welcome to this second part of my part 3 (yeah I know it's confusing) on Spell Usage as a disc priest. 

In this part - Cooldowns

If you're interested in my previous posts, they're here;

Talent Choices
Stat Choices
Spell usage (Heals & Absorbs)

So let's get right to it
You normally turn to handling cooldowns once you feel like you've got a rudimentary idea of what your healing skills do and when you should use them. Although cooldown usage to some part also is about good reflexes and knowledge of your class, I personally feel like you get the most out of your cooldowns with careful planning and studying the fight you're about to tackle in advance. If you decide to jump into a fight and use your cooldowns ad lib, that is whenever you think is the best moment, you often end up realizing that you could've needed it even more ten seconds later. Or even worse, you end up not using them at all (or too little) for fear that a better situation will arise.

Over the years I have definitely been more of an improviser than a planner, simply because I thought that was more fun. I love the challenge of going into a situation largely unknowingly of what was  going to happen and see just how quickly I could work out a problem. I love the trial and error aspect of healing that way, but of course it will test the patience of everyone around you and not all guilds accept that. I've had to get more and more into the pre-planning style of healing (and especially cooldown usage) the more "serious" my raiding got, for obvious reasons.  But I do miss those olden days of just throwing yourself at a fight and work it out there and then.

To be able to plan your cooldowns correctly you of course need to know what they do, and in many cases also how you can connect them to the cooldowns of other players in your group or other cooldowns in your arsenal. Combining for instance Hymn of Hope with Mana Tide might be a good idea, or not, depending on the situation (or at least used to, now they don't really work together anymore). Some cooldowns can only be used roughly once per fight, whereas others can be used several times and so need different kind of planning and maintenance/build up. Overall however I find that cooldowns are in fact easier to get a grip on than the basic heals, exactly because you can plan their usage (at least mostly). Of course planning and execution are two different things, but that is where practice comes in. I will repeat the whole "planning ahead" part of cooldowns a bit throughout this post, just so you know.

- Archangel
Archangel is such a great cooldown it should definitely be used as often as possible. I find the real challenge to Archangel is often to keep the stack up, waiting for that best moment to use it, rather than knowing when to use it, because unlike most other cooldowns Archangel requires constant maintenance to be used properly. There is nothing more annoying than keeping up a 5-stack and seeing it drop off because there is an event or somethingother preventing you from refreshing it just before you really need it. This doesn't happen often fortunately.

I used to have real trouble keeping track of my Evangelism stack, it was one of 50 things I needed to keep track of and I just didn't glance up in the buff corner often enough. I highly recommend using some sort of buff tracking addon to make this job a lot easier. I use one to keep track of the Evangelism buff and one to keep track on the cooldown of Holy Fire, since overall I tend to only use Holy Fire to rack up a stack - unless I needArchangel quickly of course in which case I also throw in some Smites if possible.

I find the biggest mistake people can do with Archangel is often to not use it often enough. With a 30 second cooldown, and unless getting a new Evangelism stack is really a challenge, there is rarely any reason to save Archangel solely for the really big healing situations, it could and should be used for medium ones as well and heck even minor ones. As long as you make sure that it is available to you for the big ones you should use it as often as possible.

mrwallpaper.com

The big drawback of Archangel is knowing how it interacts with your absorbs and damage heals/Atonement, which after all constitute a big portion of our overall healing. It always annoyed me that Blizzard would give us a tool that wouldn't affect half of our healing, somehow that just felt like bad design to me. In the world of Blizzard programming, Archangel sometimes affects absorbs/damage heals and sometimes it doesn't, depending on which patch/bug sequence you're on. As far as I know, at the moment Archangel works with Atonement (damage healing) but not with pure absorbs like PW Shield and Divine Aegis. But I could be wrong, you would always want as fresh information as possible on that.

Because of the way Spirit Shell works (a heal transformed into an absorb) we can at least rest assured that Archangel will affect this skill, meaning that these two in combination basically is God Mode for any discipline priest - it wouldn't surprise me if some healers even have them macroed together.

- Desperate Prayer (talent)
I've written about Desperate Prayer in my talent section of this guide already. Personally I normally don't even go for this cooldown, but it is good to use in combination with for example Void Shift. Otherwise it is pretty straight forward and should be used any time you're in danger of imminent death. The trick is only really to remember to use it.

- Dispel Magic
Although not technically a cooldown skill, I've decided to put it here with similar skills rather than in the heal/absorb section of the guide.

The function of dispelling changed quite a lot in MoP, before this current expansion us priests had Dispel which would remove up to two magic effects, harmful on allies or beneficial on enemies. It also had no cooldown. Strangely enough, I doubt anyone considered this OP, except maybe anyone facing healers in PvP. I still remember having "dispel-wars" with other priests in different battlegrounds, thinking back it was kind of silly. I'm not for or against the changes made to Dispel, I accept them and understand why they were made although I overall didn't think there was much wrong with how things worked either. Clearly Blizzard was of a different mind and decided that Dispelling should require more thought and tactic to it than it had, which again is understandable.

Back before the changes, there was no real risk to using Dispel because you couldn't cast it on someone who had nothing to dispel (friend or foe alike). If the Dispel was needed it would go through and if it wasn't you hadn't wasted your mana or gcd on nothing. This is probably the change made to Dispel that still annoys me the most. There is simply more on the line when using Dispel now, since there is a real chance of uselessly wasting mana and time on a skill that wasn't needed because someone got there before you. What this all means is that rather than letting Dispelling be ffa, which it used to be (we occasionally assigned it just to make sure someone was on the ball, rather than being worried about overusing it we were worried about underusing it) Dispelling has now turned into one of all those things many healers like to plan and assign well in advance, making sure that any bad stuff that needs to be removed doesn't have every healer dropping everything to do it.

Overall however, the way we use Dispel hasn't changed overly much (focusing just on the "removing beneficial effects on enemy"-part that is). In a raid you should be well informed and communicated with other players in your group who can Dispel regarding what needs to be removed and by whom, making good usage of the skill a matter of remembering when to use it rather than a matter of any quick thinking (or skill tbh).

- Hymn of Hope
HoH has been pretty much the same since we first got it. Apparently it was a priest racial initially (ie only available to one race of priests), but I don't even remember that. It has had a few tweaks to the mana return and cooldown length, but all in all it's still a one-time-per-fight use skill that returns some mana to you and a couple of your friends. With good timing it can be used several times per fight, although rarely more often than twice. And timing is what this baby is all about, making it one of my favorite cooldown skills. A simple rule of thumb is that the longer the cooldown is on something, the more important it is that you really know when to use it properly. This is obvious since if you miss-use it you probably won't get a second chance that fight. Timing is just maybe even more important when you're dealing with a channeled spell.

wow.joystiq.com

There are several factors to consider when trying to figure out the best time to cast a Hymn of Hope. In order of importance;

1. A window of time long enough - no need to move around or having to cast any other skills that would force you to interrupt easrly and so basically waste your cast.
2. Combining it with other skills for greater effect - For example Shadowfiend for more mana return or haste effects for faster casting.
3. Combining it it with other players skills for greater effect (for them or both of you) - For example Divine Plea for paladins.

The way I normally use HoH is that I find a good window of opportunity to make sure I have the 8 seconds (modified by haste) to channel. A good way to use it at the end of a Power Infusion for instance, to tap in to the haste gain. I also announce well ahead of time that I will cast it, to allow other players to adapt to it in case they want to use some cooldown of their own at the same time. For example I will say "after this aoe I will use HoH" or "I will use HoH in 10 seconds" - although I rarely actively try to time my HoH with other players skills unless it is vital for the fight, simply because it's not often practical to do so. I will weigh in requests, for instance if I intend to use the HoH in the next 10 seconds and the paladin asks me to wait two more seconds for his Divine Plea I will see if it is doable. Overall I consider it more important to get the cast done, and preferrably as often as possible during a fight rather than accomodating one other players needs. Try to see when the earliest possible time to use it is so that you can get two casts in to the same fight, for really long fights you might even get in three (first at ~1 min mark, second at ~7 min mark and third at ~13 min mark for example). Ideally you want an idea ahead of time of possible windows of opportunity and also how long the fight can be expected to be. After that it's just trial and error until you've found the perfect spot, and it's quite rewarding when you really get a HoH in good.

- Inner Focus
Since the cooldown on IF isn't overly long, and you can further shorten it with skills like Train of Thought, I normally don't give my IF usage more thought than making sure I use it as often as possible. If you know there is a big heal required shortly, trying to time it can often be a good idea, especially for the added Divine Shield bonus that it wields, or combining it with Spirit Shell, but overall you'll see the most use out of it if you use it off cooldown - at least that is my personal experience. I remember some priests used to have it macroed with PoH, maybe even I did at some point, to make sure to save it for those big aoe heals when needed. This is not necessarily a bad idea, but again - this comes off cooldown often enough that I rarely consider it needing much tactical thought behind it. By using it off cooldown you ensure to get the most hps gain from it (obviously that doesn't mean wasting it when it would only turn into overheal). Rather use it one time too many than one time too few though.

- Mass Dispel
Priests are the only ones lucky enough (?) to have a skill like Mass Dispel, allowing us to dispel several targets at once, be it friend or foe. It too, just like Dispel overall, has gone through some changes but historically this skill hasn't been used very much anyway. This is probably because Blizzard didn't want to make it mandatory to have a priest in the raid, rather just a benefit for the few times when Mass Dispel could come in handy. The instances where a large group of enemies or allies needed dispelling have because of this simply not been that many. Most of the time it has been a case of saving time, rather than mana and I can only think of one really good example of where Mass Dispel is a way better choice than a simple Dispel/Purify, which would be the petrify debuff cast by the trash mobs in Mogu'Shan Vaults (iirc). As mentioned, this is more often a convenience thing than an actual necessity. Obviously there are opportunities where Mass Dispel is the better way to go, but normally they are quite obvious - Mass Dispel is to dispel many targets quickly, to save time and mana from using several single target casts instead. By reading up on the skills in a certain encounter in advance, you should be able to figure out whether a Mass Dispel will be more beneficial to the raid as a whole than handling it the old fashioned one-by-one way, and after that it's just a matter of remembering to cast it (and also to notify your raid that you've got it covered to make sure no one else wasted their mana).

- Pain Suppression
PS looks pretty straight forward at a first glance, and the tricky parts really come down to execution. Unlike many other cooldowns that you can plan and time well in advance, PS normally requires a lot more minute timing and adapting to current situations. You might know exactly which powerful skill from the boss you want to save you tank from, but timing the PS is still not always an easy thing to do - especially since you want to make sure PS doesn't run out before the skill is being done.

wow.tcgplayer.com

As with most tank cooldowns, you will probably have had word from your raid leader (or otherwise responsible for cooldown assignments) on the proper time to use it. If this is the case you need make sure you have your gcd ready for it exactly when it is needed. There will also be times when you're allowed to use PS "as requried", which is where the real challenge, and fun, is. As with most cooldowns, with some knowledge of the fight you will have a general idea as to where a PS probably will be useful, and as with most cooldowns I will advice you to not be afraid to use PS in fear of wasting it and then not have it ready when it's "really needed". Getting the feel for the fight will allow you to determine, as quickly as possibly preferrably, whether your healing team can deal with a damage situation or not. If not, use PS, that is what it is designed for - a dead tank won't help the raid in any way and you should consider a dead tank and an unused PS a failure. If you have the mental capacity for it, it's also always a good idea to announce PS usage, so that others healers know what kind of damage they can expect to have to deal with, and whether they want to use a cooldown on their own. It is annoying when several healers accidentally use powerful cooldowns at the same time, but that is part of raiding. Again, you don't want to be the healer standing with unused cooldowns when the raid wipes.

- Power Infusion (talent)
I've written about Power Infusion in my talent section of this guide already. Personally, I'm all for using PI as often as possible, I just hate seeing cooldowns not being used. As with most cooldowns however, there will most likely be situations in the encounter where you simply want/need that extra output and trying to combine PI with other cooldowns such as Spirit Shell or Archangel (or omg, both!) will make you a proper Terminator. But reversed, since you're healing.

- Power Word: Barrier
PWB was rumored already for Cataclysm and I remember totally loving the idea of a group wide bubble. At first I didn't expect it to be a big raid cooldown, although that does make sense, but more of a Prayer of Healing with just a bubble/absorb component (which is kind of what we got in Spirit Shell instead). What PWB turned out to be, an expansion later, is quite good and it has joined the lines with all the other raid cooldowns, siding next to the Divine Hymn that holy priests have (disc priests used to have both raid cooldowns, but DH was much better for holy priests). As such, it should be viewed as pretty much any raid cooldown - it has its drawbacks and benefits that makes you want to consider when to use it but most likely you will be on an assignment, just like with Pain Suppression.

Not as safe as this - en.m.wikipedia.org

If you like to help out with proper usage assignment it's worth noting that PWB has a group up requirement that is pretty limited compared to other raid cooldowns - it has a shorter range than for instance Tranquility and Devotion Aura. On the other hand it is one of the few raid cooldowns that is placeable, meaning it doesn't necessarily emanate from the caster. This makes placement easier in some cases. I also find that PWB works better as a single target cooldown than many of the other raid cooldowns. This means that if you're in a fight where there isn't any particular aoe damage to mitigate, PWB can also double as a very useful single target (most often tank) cooldown. It's also not channeled like Tranquility or Divine Hymn and can be used on the run. The most dangerous thing you can do with PWB is overestimating its usefulness. It's a good skill, don't get me wrong, but it "only" reduces damage taken by 25%. Sometimes, this turns out to be a lot less than you anticipate (especially since they nerfed it from the initial 40% and some *me* had difficulty adapting to this change). As with any absorb, PWB suffers from not actually being a heal - which is both good and bad. Because of this, PWB is often best used in synergy with an actual healing raid cooldown, such as Divine Hymn or Tranquility.

- Purify
Purify used to be meshed with Dispel Magic and called simply Dispel, as mentioned already under Dispel Magic. The friendly dispel has changed more than the hostile one, most notably adding a cooldown. This means Purify has the same tactical properties to take into consideration as Dispel Magic, but adding not just risking wasting mana and time, but also run the risk of not having the skill ready off cooldown for the next time.

To me, this has both added and removed from the fun of using Dispel. Back in the day, I used to take pride in being a sniper dispeller or the healer assigned to do all the dispelling. It was a job I considered important, and it was! I remember the dispelling you had to do on Iron Council, if you were half a second too late one of the tanks would be dead from the debuff. There are many examples like it, where quick  dispelling reactions could make or break a try. The changes to Dispel haven't necessarily changed that fact, they've just forced it to be every healers business rather than just ones. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but I personally always found extra enjoyment in being able to pull off a good job on a personal assignment. With the way Purify works nowadays, it's just another skill added to the long list of "things to time in the ballet-routine that is raiding". Obviously it's a personal opinion of mine, but I've always enjoyed the encounters that allowed for a bit of personal judgment and touch more.

Because of this, what I said earlier about Dispel Magic is even more true for Purify, so I'll just quote myself;

"In a raid you should be well informed and communicated with other players in your group who can Purify regarding what needs to be removed and by whom, making good usage of the skill a matter of remembering when to use it rather than a matter of any quick thinking (or skill tbh). "

- Shadowfiend/Mindbender
I've written a bit on the usage of Shadowfiend/Mindbender under the talent section already. As with Hymn of Hope, Shadowfiend is a skill you should aim to get out as often as possible during a fight. A bit easier to time than Hymn of Hope, Mindbender still has its drawbacks that you need to take into consideration, most notably the fact that it requires a target to hit on to actually do any good. This might sound easy enough, but you'd be surprised how difficult it can be to find a suitable target for your little crawler when you need him, without it diverting too much time and effort from everything else you're doing. I've miscast Shadowfiend a trillion times, simply because I'm thinking he is easier to use than he really is. It doesn't actually take very much to properly use this skill however, and once you're into the routine of the encounter you should know exactly when to cast it - a pro tip is trying to time it with a Hymn of Hope cast, something you really should try and do if it's a mana intensive fight.

- Spirit Shell
Spirit Shell - also known as that "bitchin' cooldown that made disc priests OP and awesome again". Spirit Shell is yet another skill implemented in MoP in an attempt from Blizzard to make Disc Priests more about absorbtion healing, than just the old Shield. I know Blizzard have been struggling, basically since since the creation of the game, to figure out just how to do this without overpowering the class, and rumours have been going high and low over the years of possible skills, PWB being one of them as mentioned earlier. Overall, I am very pleased with the changes they've made and Spirit Shell is definitely a part of that. It's a great cooldown to complement PWB and allowing us disc priests to really make a choice between healing and absorbing, bringing something unique to the healing table - which is why I love disc priests so much.

It's so good, even Bleach has it - bleach.wikia.com

Spirit Shell itself is fairly simple in concept, it converts your heals into bubbles instead, and as with most cooldowns it mostly comes down to timing and identifying when absorbtion is the better choice over healing. All the usual rules apply - remembering that absorbtions aren't actual heals and therefore a "before the fact" rather than "after the fact" healing method. Keeping this in mind is the key to using Spirit Shell successfully, and to be honest this should be hardwired into your backbone if you've chosen to play a discipline priest any amount of serious. You will want to use Spirit Shell to bolster your targets for incoming heavy damage, be it aoe on the raid or heavy swings on the tank. 

The difficulty normally comes down to finding a good window of opportunity to load up some absorbtion on your target of choice, you don't want to do it too early so that the bubbles wear off before the damage comes in and not too late so that you don't get full use of the cooldown. One of the few big drawbacks and really annoying things about Spirit Shell is also ending up having wasted a lot of mana on building up shields that then don't get absorbed. As with most other cooldowns, the more you know about the fight the better you will be at using Spirit Shell. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind;

- Can be used with Inner Focus for extra output.
- Can be used with Archangel for extra output.
- Stacks, up to a percentage (60%) of the casters max health.
- Overrides Divine Aegis.

Combining cooldowns like Inner Focus and Archangel with Spirit Shell is a good way to boost its effectiviness, and tinkering around with these cooldowns to time and line them up with eachother is one of the fun challenges to getting the most out of them.

- Void Shift
I haven't really figured out why Blizzard thought this was a necessary spell for us priests to have. Discipline already has Pain suppression, added with the possibility to use PWB and Spirit Shell as single target cooldowns as well. Holy priests "only" have Guardian Spirit, so maybe it was more to bolster their tank saving capabilities than disc priests. However it may be, I consider Void Shift one of the trickier tank cooldowns to use - mostly because one of you will still be very close to death when you decide to use it, meaning you will need to be very careful and probably prepare well ahead before popping it. Using it whenever the tank isn't dangerously close to death probably isn't necessary, and when he is and you use it, you'll end up with 25% health. 25% health isn't necessarily an extremely bad position to be in, unless you're the tank - but for most raiding encounters it's still something you want to avoid. Saving the tank just to have the healer die two seconds later isn't going to help the raid much in the long run either.

Because of this, I consider Void Shift even more of need of planning and preparing than most other raid cooldowns. Personally I find it a lot of fun to be able to use PS, PWB and most other cooldowns mentioned above at my own disposal as much as possible, but Void Shift not so much. If you have Desperate Prayer, macroing these two together (first using Void Shift, then Desperate Prayer) could be a very good idea. Otherwise, making sure you have a Shield and announcing that you'll soon be low on health is definitely recommended before using it. In any case, be absolutely sure that there isn't any kind of damage incoming that will have you take more than 25% damage in the few couple of seconds after a Void Shift that you are the most vulnerable.

I might make it sounds like Void Shift is impossible to use, which of course it is far from. Some fights definitely make it more difficult with a lot of aoe damage going around. I think the priest community is still somewhat divided on the usefulness of Void Shift - the pvpers think it's awesome and most pvers find it a bit too risky. Like I said, I do consider it among the trickiest raid cooldowns to use, but I'd still advice you to not count it out. Always keep it handy in the back of your mind in case something happens, and it will probably end up saving the day at some point. I think I've said it plenty in this post already, but it's fitting that never has it been more true than when using Void Shift, the ending skill of this post - the more knowledge you have the fight beforehand, the better you can time your usage wisely!

Top 5 Things Pokémon Should Borrow From the Digimon Games

Being a pretty big Pokémon fan (who am I kidding, a massive Pokémon fan) I always assumed that Digimon was nothing but a bad ripoff of the big Nintendo/Game Freak-franchise (just like any big selling franchise ends up spawning loads of copies, like Harry Potter/Twilight clones all over). They have trainers that battle with creatures that end in -mon? They evolve? Puh-leese. And the fact that I hadn't heard much more about it than that just cemented my assumption that everything about Digimon was bad compared to Pokémon (the logic of a child). Until I for some reason stumbled upon a game - Digimon World - and decided to try it, because why not. And found out that Digimon is actually not a bad game at all, that it in fact has a lot of features that I wish Pokémon would've had or at least get around to implementing anytime soon (X & Y *cough*).

Not only was I wrong about that however, turns out it's not even that clear which game came first or if any ripped off the other. Digimon seems to based off of another Bandai toy - Tamagotchi, rather than Pokémon, so although Pokémon was released a bit earlier (1996 vs 1997), the idea for Digimon had probably been around since before then. Not to mention that Pokémon might be based off of Tamagotchi as well and in the end you have a soup of ideas where it's just not fair to call any of them a rip off from the other. Let's just be pleased to conclude that either way, we ended up with some really good games and that's pretty much all I care about in the end.

Admittedly, if I had to choose only one of the two, I would easily choose Pokémon over Digimon. I don't even know if Digimon has a TCG (but I bet it does) and I never watched any of the anime. Digimon World for the NDS is still the only game I have played of all the Digimon games and I haven't even completed it. For all the good things about Digimon there is still just something about Pokémon that makes it better, in my opinion. Be it something as abstract as "feeling" or maybe the simple fact that it completely overwhelmed me when I was young and that Digimon just never got the chance to do that. Pokémon definitely has a better story and music than Digimon, that's for sure. Nevertheless, here are the top 5 things I wish that the Pokémon games copied/borrowed/got inspired by from the Digimon World games.

5. Speed actually makes a difference
In the Pokémon games, having a Pkmn with more speed than another does one simple thing - it allows it to hit first. It always bothered me that having 1 more speed or 100 more speed than X pkmn didn't make any difference, you still "only" got to hit first. Getting to go first is a good thing, sure, but it still makes the stat seem a bit pointless to me, especially since there are many ways to compensate for low speed, like loads of hp or defense.

In Digimon however, the more speed you have, the more hits you get to do before the enemy. If you're fast enough you can get to do two hits or even three before it's the other Digimons turn, giving that stat some real value and visible result. The way its implemented in Pokémon makes me feel like the developers thought that speed was a stat they needed to have in there, but they just didn't want to do anything with it. In Digimon, speed is a stat as good as any of the others and it adds some real tactical value to the battle. And no matter if you have a lot of hp or defense, if you have to take two hits for every one you get to do, you're still up for a challenge.

4. Gearing up
In Pokémon, the only way to change the stats of your pkmn (besides leveling them obviously) is to buy or find them stat changing food, things like Calcium, Iron or Protein. These are expensive and hard to come by, and best of all, they change a stat by 1. Yes 1. Obviously this is to make sure you don't overpower your pkmn too much, although everyone does that anyway by simply farming them to level 99 before going in to the Pokémon League. Surely there could be better ways to be able to tweak your little fighters a bit without making the game too easy?

Clearly this is something someone has thought about already -  by LRFL Deviantart

How about being able to gear them? Nothing fancy, maybe a bit of armor and a weapon, or a pretty accessory to put around your Charizards arm (if he'd let you), that make them just a bit stronger and different from all the other wild pkmn that you run across (I don't really count the Hold Items). Digimon lets you do just that. The gear not only increases some of the basics stats, it can also give you extra resistances against certain schools or status changes (like Paralyze or Poison) or allow you to use certain skills as long as the item is equipped. To me, it gives me the feeling of being able to personalize my fighters a bit more, adding yet another layer of tactic to the fighting and it gives me an option against harder enemies - rather than having to farm ten extra levels, I can choose to buy some nice, expensive gear to give me the upper hand. And if there is anything I love, it's choice.

3. Raising your Pokémon yourself
In Pokémon, the only raising done is leveling your pkmn. You can also pair pkmn together and see if they lay eggs, and then you have an egg to hatch. But most of the raising job is actually made by the owners of the Daycare Center. You just leave them there and pick them up after a while hoping they've turned into something fancy (which is based on steps I think). Wouldn't it be more fun to have a more active role in your pkmns life?

In Digimon, the Farm to raise your Digimon is required but I would probably prefer it to be more of a side-hobby if ever implemented in the Pokémon games. Just like the whole Beauty Contest thing (which I never really did), it's something to do on the side if you feel like putting more time into your pkmn. The Beauty Contest is boring compared to having your own Farm however. In Digimon, you can have several Farms that are designed to hold different type of Digimon, you can have several Digimon in each Farm and you can customize your Farms to raise certain stats with your Digimons. By questing and especially fighting wild Digimon, you collect food for your Farms, and your Farm Digimon gather money for you in return.
Although the Farm is required in Digimon you actually don't have to put much time into it if you don't want to, but if you like the whole idea there are loads of things to do. It makes the Daycare Center seem so half-assed and I would totally love to be able to put some time into all those pkmn that just gather dust in the PC instead. Imagine being able to let them run free instead, with mutual benefit for you both?

So green and lush (spriters-resource.com)

2. Multi-battles as standard
I'm going to be a bit sacrilege here and say that considering how much time you put into battling in Pokémon, it's not actually all that interesting. Although the battling in Pokémon in a way is what the whole game is all about, I've always felt like there is so much unused potential in the concept. I can understand that they wanted to start out with a very simple style initially - but it's about time to heat things up a bit, and having just added another pkmn to the fight over the course of 7 Generations (Red/Blue, Gold/Silver, Sapphire/Ruby, HeartGold/SoulSilver, Diamond/Pearl, Black/White, Black2/White2) is frankly insulting to most pkmn players intelligence. As you should've noticed so far from this post, I think pkmn simply could do with a bit more tactic and depth, especially to its battling system.

This is something that Digimon does much better. I agree there is something very intense and personal about pitching your awesome Alakhazam that you've put so much time into, against that last pkmn of smug-faced Gary. But the really epic battles of pkmn make out maybe 5% of the game, the other 95% are mostly grinding random Zubats and other low-level pkmn that really should know better than to attack you at all. There are the occasional different-styled battles to spice things up in pkmn, but they're few and to be frank, a bit awkward.

In Digimon, every battle is a multi-battle. You can have up to three Digimon in battle and you can meet up to five (I assume, since there is room for five, although I have never met more than three). Whenever one faints you can replace him with relief-Digimon on your bench (or revive him of course), just as in pkmn. Throw in the added level of effect that different speed has on your fighters and you get random battles that stay interesting and a lot less monotonous way longer than most of the pkmn battles do. I have yet to flee a Digimon fight, whereas in pkmn you eventually get to the point where you just don't want to spend PP on something that is 50 levels below you (which is another Pokémon could learn from Digimon, having a base skill that doesn't cost any form of move points!). In Digimon, you get a list of Digimon turns, and with some planning and clever use of moves you can avoid taking damage all together, if you focus your fire on the right enemy. Each battle has more elements to keep track of and more choices that change the outcome, keeping even simple battles fun. Pokémon could definitely learn from this. X & Y are going to do this a bit more, let's see if they do it better than previous games. (And, slightly unrelated - all Digimon get experience from a fight, not just the ones in the battle. How awesome would that be in Pokémon!)

1. Several evolution trees
In Pokémon you can occasionally find Pokémon with two evolutions, at best (unless you count from baby Pokémon, in which you can get three). There are exceptions (Eevee most notably) but the big majority of Pokémon only have one or no evolution, although the constant addition of new games has given a lot of Pokémon evolution they didn't initially have, both good and bad ones. Evolving your pkmn is one of the most fun things you can do in the whole game series, if you ask me. It's unfortunate therefore, that it really could've been so much better.

Confusing? Fun! (ailover-sync.blogspot.com)

In Digimon, every Digimon has not one, but several evolution trees to follow. To evolve a Digimon you have to meet certain requirements, just like in Pokémon - reaching a certain level and sometimes also other things like holding a certain item or having killed enough of a certain type of enemies. Most Digimon start out as an "In Training", eventually choosing one of normally three "Rookie" Digimon, which in turn can continue on to Champion, then Ultimate and eventually Mega Digimons. The evolutions are usually quite different in style, allowing the player to customize their Digimon group into what they like and find interesting to play. But it doesn't end there. You can also Degenerate your Digimon, allowing the player to try different evolution trees depending on where they are in the game and what kind of fighter they need (only drawback is that you have to relevel them). This also makes it a lot more interesting to keep several of the same type of Digimon, because they can evolve into completely different styles in the end.

This adds so much fun to the evolution progress, and pretty much each level my Digimon gain I make sure to check out their Digivolution trees to see which path I want to take and what there is left to do to get there. The better evolutions are harder to get, adding extra challenge, or even giving things left to do on a Digimon that is already evolved to the max if you feel like changing its route into a stronger or simply different one. In the end this has me swapping around Digimon a lot more than Pokémon, trying different tactics, rather than just boosting up a few Pokémon to make sure I brute force the encounters (admit that is how most of you play Pokémon!).

------------------------------

You could argue that some or all of the above things are ordinary or maybe unoriginal features of most rpg-games, and that the way Pokémon does it makes it special and should be left alone - why change something that works? Overall I agree, like I said initially I still prefer the Pokémon games and there is definitely something about them that make them more interesting. Digimon does feel a bit generic in style and I bond better with my Pokémon than I ever think I will with any of my Digimon, for many reasons. The above list is not meant for Pokémon to copy straight off, but I do consider some of them weaknesses in Pokémon that could be done more interesting - yet keep the Pokémon feel. Maybe what I really want is for Pokémon and Digimon to have a spin-off love child, keeping the best from two very interesting and fun worlds.

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 3 - Spell Usage (Heals & Absorbs)

Welcome to the third part in my guide to how to disc priest heal, full with personal anecdotes and small history lessons, just the way we love it, right? This time I thought I'd talk a bit more on skills/spells (I use it pretty interchangeable in this context), how and why to use them, love them and treat them like they deserve, good and bad. I realized this post was growing out of proportion (yes, that is why it has taken such time to write) and decided to cut it up into smaller pieces in turn, bear with me if you will.

I've often argued that priests probably is the healing class that has to juggle the most skills around when healing. Whether this is, or ever was true, is up for debate and it definitely depends on what you mean by "use while healing". Some healing classes have use of, for instance, some attacking skills while healing occasionally (setting aside the obvious Atonement usage of attacking skills) so question is what should be counted towards a normal rotation. Paladins for instance might have fewer heals but instead have a lot of cooldowns to keep track off. Overall the score board is fairly even across the healers and in either case there are definitely a lot to keep track off. Some skills are used continously throughout a fight, some are used only once or twice in a fight and some are used once or twice in a raid (Divine Intervention is a good example, although it doesn't exist anylonger). Being able to acknowledge which skill to use when is the essence of healing and what sets a skillful healer apart from a newer one. Preferably this will eventually sit in your backbone, where you'll react with instinct based on experience on a given situation rather than thought, since thinking is sometimes too slow.

From wowwiki.com

I can still clearly remember the feeling of being a new healer, and this feeling is also refreshed each time I try to heal on a class I am not as familiar with as the priest. Most of the time things go easy enough, but every now and then you'll end up in a situation where you'll require some quick reactions and ever quicker thinking. When this happens, remember that one of the key rules to healing is;
"It's always better to do something rather than nothing". Even if you panic and use the "wrong" heals, wrong being a less appropriate heal than another one, it is still always better than not healing at all. There are very few instances where this is not true, the only time I can think of are the rare occasions where healing actually does damage instead (Anub'arak in Trial of the Crusader comes to mind). If it turns out you made the wrong choice and you eventually have to pay for it by ooming (which is mostly how you pay for a bad usage of skills), at least you might have saved your raid some time to get more practice on the fight (including yourself), or your instance group some time to salvage the situation. Otherwise, you'll learn more quickly that you chose the wrong spell when you see people quickly dying around you. I make it sound worse than it, since in fact this risk is nothing exclusive to healers. Every class has their task to make sure the boss goes down - the triforce of tanking, spanking (dps), and healing.

If you're really interested in becoming pro at healing, try to see every failed situation (ie wipe) as a possibility to try out a new, better way to tackle the fight. Think about your choices and try and figure out if you could've used a skill differently somewhere. Was Flash Heal the right choice or should I have gone with Greater Heals? Should I have waited another ten seconds with the Power Infusion? Maybe if I use a Shield first and then cast a heal? Even after 6 years of raid healing, I still love to analyze my own skill usage and I often find things I could do slightly differently to up my game.

I can honestly say this has helped me a lot with keeping my patience when I've had wipe nights that go on for hours. Even when the dying has nothing to do with what I'm doing, I know there is always some little thing I can tweak or do even better to ease things up for the people around me. Ideally, if you use your skills good enough, it allows some leeway for the rest of the group to do those occasional mistakes that are almost inevitable. This is what I really love about group efforts in mmorpgs - seeing how the dynamic of group and individual skill eventually is rewarded in achieving your goal (hopefully, at least!).

Knowing what each skills do is obviously the first step towards knowing how to best use them, after that comes loads of practice, but don't worry - healing is fairly simple to learn, but challenging to fully master. This is why it never really gets boring (or at least I don't think so).

So let's get started with the skills, sorted by alphabetical order and type;

In this part - Heals/Absorbs

Categorizing heals and other skills used while healing isn't such an easy task. A skill like Penance for instance can be used for both healing and dpsing, and a skill like Power Word Shield isn't even a heal in the technical meaning. Penance also has a cooldown and PW:Shield causes a debuff which in some situations work as a cooldown, so where do they fit? I have chosen to categorize them in the area they normally work under. Although Penance can be used to dps, that is rarely how it is used when raid healing, and the cooldown is too short to make anyone really think of it as a proper cooldown skill (imo same goes for Cascade, Divine star and Halo although their cooldowns are even longer). The absorbing feature to discipline healing is a big part of how we heal, so I thought it be simplest if we consider them heals in a way. In the end it doesn't really matter which category a skill falls under, the important thing is that you understand what it does and doesn't do so that you can get the most out of it.

Also from wowwiki.com (they be handy)

- Binding Heal
I have somewhat of an ambivalent feeling toward Binding Heal. Although it's actually quite a handy heal and I use it quite frequently, it just not one of my favorite heals. It doesn't feel like it fits in with the other "heals", Heal, Greater Heal and Flash Heal, but it does actually fill its very own little niche and I know I love having it when I really need it (which sounds obvious). I often have the feeling that Binding Heal isn't strong enough or too expensive and that the work can be better done by combining other heals instead - sometimes this is true. But one should not underestimate the power that lies in being able to heal yourself while healing everyone else - in fact one of the first things I really struggled to learn was to remember to heal myself (as I have mentioned before). The problem with Binding Heal is that it takes a while to learn how to use it, when does it apply and when could I indeed be better off using other heals. It's easy to either completely forget about this underestimated gem or overuse it in the idea that it is extremely mana and time effective.

In reality, Binding Heal costs just less than Greater Heal or Flash Heal and heals a bit less as well. Since the heal is split between you and your target, in a way, it's important to think about that it won't save the day but rather give you another moment to think when things are getting hectic.

The trick is trying to wedge in BH between the times you need strong single target healing and strong aoe healing. BH is often a good choice for mild to moderate aoe healing or when you somehow end up being the one taking a bit more damage. So the way I usually end up using Binding Heal is when I'm the one who needs some healing but there are also targets around me that could use a little fix-me-upper. By throwing around a couple of BH's I've healed up myself and made sure no one is too low at the moment. Another great time to use BH is when you're actually being focused for damage, since it's a good way to keep yourself alive while also still helping out on the overall healing, as long as the damage on you isn't too high for BH to handle obviously. BH more than many of your skills might require some experience before you feel like you fully know where it fits into your healing arsenal, but it should definitely not be ignored just because it seems out of place. When used correctly it is one of the heals that makes me grateful to be a priest.

- Cascade (talent)
As mentioned in my previous post, Cascade is the 6th tier talent I've ended up liking and therefore using the most. Not only is Cascade a good heal when used at the right time, it's also very pretty (don't underestimate the importance of this!). Jokes aside, the visuals of Cascade will often lure you unto using it more often than what is actually called for, since it not very useful when the raid gets grouped up - this is when you should use Prayer of Healing instead. Cascade should be viewed as exactly this, a supplement to Prayer of Healing, especially for a spread out raid that PoH might have trouble reaching or for heavy aoe where you want Cascade to jump around doing its magic while you also cast PoH. What to think of isn't the damage incoming as much as the positioning of the raid. If there is any form of aoe and the raid is fairly spread out, you're probably well off using Cascade.

- Divine Star (talent)
I'll be honest straight away and say that other than for lulz when it first came out, I have never really used Divine Star. It just doesn't appeal to me, although the requirements for using it succesfully aren't necessarily stricter than for the other two (Halo and Cascade) - it's all about the placement of the raid. Like I mentioned above when talking about Cascade, and also mentioned in my Talent section of this guide, I think that tier should complement the usage of Prayer of Healing. The reach of PoH is one of its biggest weaknesses, compared to Cascade and Halo, a weakness it would only share with Divine Star (the other weakness being the group targeting, but that can be handy at times as well). This means Divine Star and PoH are meant to be used in roughly the same situations, and I prefer to diversify my healing arsenal to cover my bases. Also, Divine Star is further "replaced" by any holy paladin in your group who has Light of Dawn, a skill that works very similarly to Divine Star. Of course, if you know you're getting into a fight that is all about the stacking, ie making skills like Cascade and Halo pretty much useless, Divine Star is the way to go. Personally that is how I think Divine Star should be viewed, as an option to Cascade when Cascade simply isn't usable. It probably won't happen often.

- Flash Heal 
FH has gone from being our bread and butter heal in Wrath to rarely being used at all in early Cataclysm. Back in Wrath, FH was the spell you spammed - it was quick, fairly cheap and healed for a decent amount. In Cataclysm they decided to change all the "Heals" (Greater Heal, Heal and Flash Heal) to actually work the way their names intended, meaning Flash Heal instead became a quick and expensive save-the-moment heal rather than the staple heal it had been. In fact, FH was so expensive in early Cata I considered it barely usable with lowbie gear, which was a dramatic change from it had been. Instead we had to work with the re-instated Heal (more about that on Heal), and the difference could barely have been bigger.

From something called dmz-gaming.com

I remember going from loving FH to hating it in mere days, and the feeling of disappointment over the new function of FH is a blow that I simply have not really been able to get over. In hindsight I realize something had to be done, FH had taken over completely by the end of Wrath and GH barely saw the light of day (Heal was thrown into the basement long ago). But the feeling of FH suddenly being so difficult to use in early Cata made me scorn it, and eventually almost forgetting it all together. As my gear eventually got better and FH actually became a viable spell to use in the right situations, I really had to struggle to get it back into my rotation. I had locked it out somehow, working in other skills to replace it, and still today FH is one of the few skills I don't consider myself fully profficient at - thankfully I love a challenge.

So how are we supposed to use FH today? The easy way to think of it is - whenever you need a GH but don't have the time to cast one. The only thing Flash Heal has over the other Heals is its speed, and when speed is what you need, FH is what you will want to use. With good knowledge of the fight and some planning, FH isn't used that often - mostly to save up a doozy someone in the raid might have made. Since Fh is so mana-inefficient, it is important to know (intuitively preferrably) that another spell doesn't work as well, unless someone is on the brink of death and about to take another hit (in which case you might want to Shield them first anyway), I've often found that a Greater Heal might do the trick, unless your haste is really, really bad. Like I mentioned, I ended up replacing FH for other skills in the situations I would normally use FH - often a GH and/or a Shield will work out as good or better. After some time you will most likely get a feel for it since it depends on things like your casting speed, assignments and a dozen other things that are personal to your raid environment. So again - use FH whenever you want a GH but just don't have the time for one.

- Greater Heal
Back in the day, GH used to be the spell that replaced Heal at around level 40, rendering Heal virtually useless for the rest of the game. For some reason, Blizzard thought of GH as a rank upgrade to Heal rather than its own skill, which was something that always confused me. It seems they've decided to think otherwise since Cataclysm, where Heal became a heal in its own right meaning we had to find a somewhat new area for GH to fit into. Fortunately, the step wasn't big - GH is still pretty much "the bigger Heal" although nowadays not necessarily the better choice as it used to be.

At the beginning of Cataclysm, Blizzard wanted every healer to have a couple of base heals in their arsenal - the fast but expensive heal, the slow and cheap little heal and the slow and cheap big heal. Mana consumption wise, Heal is among the cheapest skills but as soon as your gear starts getting better you will most likely still substitute Heal for Greater Heal (and also especially since everyones hp pools get bigger and Heal just overall seems like a waste of time). I realize there is equally much said about Heal as Greater Heal here, but they do really go hand in hand in much. The way you use Heal in early game is most likely how you end up using Greater Heal in later game.

Greater Heal is a very good base heal, but it does require knowledge of timing to be able to be used properly, especially in more pressing situations like progress raiding. It is comparatively slow and the way I end up mostly using it is either to top people off when things are a bit more relaxed or to get that bomb heal on someone after first securing them with for instance a PW:Shield. The biggest mistake you can do with Greater Heal is using it when you don't really have the time for it, something that is surprisingly easy to do. Like mentioned, this is often when a FH comes in handy instead.

- Halo (talent)
As with the other tier 6 talents, I've said most I had to say about Halo already in the talent section of this guide.

This is unfortunately not what Halo looks like in-game.

- Heal
I've already mentioned Heal quite a lot in conjunction with Flash Heal and Greater Heal, so a bit will be repeated here. Until Cataclysm, Heal was pretty much a useless spell past level 40 ish, when you got Greater Heal that completely replaced it. They were basically the exact same spell back then, only GH was bigger, leaving no reason to use Heal. Back when spellranks were still around, rank 1 of GH was still better than the highest rank of Heal, as I mentioned it seemed like GH was pretty much designed to actually replace Heal, which might explain its rather uninventive name.

But that was then and Heal has been allowed in from the cold since. Come Cataclysm, Blizzard probably realized the silliness in letting us priests have an entire skill in our spell book that we never, ever used. In early Cata, Heal was pretty much our "carpet-heal", ie meant to be spammable and giving us a tool to top people up without having to use up too much mana, a role that FH had previously held. This was especially interesting to us disc priests since Renew wasn't as useful to us as to Holy priests, and because our other cushion spells had become a lot more expensive (FH and PW:Shield).

The usefulness of Heal depends a lot on your gear however, as I came to realize. When Blizzard first implemented the changes I was thrilled as to the idea around their new function, although a lot less thrilled about how they practically turned out to work, which was shit. With really bad gear, which you normally have before you start raiding (comparatively), Heal turned out to be too weak and too slow to do what Blizzard wanted it to do - with better gear however you soon had the mana and eventually mana regen (when mana pools became same sized) to use Greater Heals instead, leaving Heal a very small niche to fill. At first you're basically forced to use it because your gear probably won't allow you to use too many GH, FH or Shields, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's very good.

The way I ended up using Heal was to literally spam it as soon as time allowed me to do so, saving mana for the more hectic fights. This means especially during easier encounters and inbetween fights. Whenever someone takes too much damage for Heal to handle, and that happens quickly, you'll have to resort to more expensive spells. Fortunately, in the best of worlds you'll mostly end up using Heal in dungeons where you'll be allowed drinks inbetween fights (who am I kidding though, that never happens). When I started raiding, my mana regen and mana pool had become good enough for me to be able to keep using Heal all over the place until I had something more important to do, in that sense it made me feel a lot like a Holy Light spamming paladin. But eventually Heal was yet again replaced by Greater Heal, and that has been especially true in MoP to me, where I've basically stopped using it alltogether for most raid encounters.

From wow.joystiq.com

- Penance
Penance is one of, if not the most, iconic spells of the discipline priest (rivaled only by the Shield). Penance has always been one of our strongest heals with both good hpm (heal per mana) and hps (heal per second), limited by a cooldown. It's one of hell of a restriction though, but on the other hand it makes Penance pretty easy to use - every cooldown. Unless you're tackling aoe damage, or obviously when no one is damaged enough, there is rarely any reason not to throw off a Penance. Penance has long been used to quickly stack up Grace on a target, mostly the tank, which is very useful if you ever happen to be tank healing.

Penance is so handy it's easy to rely too heavily on it, forgetting that it is actually a really quick hot and not a "proper" heal. This does matter, because when your tank is taking really big blows (or anyone else for that matter), a well timed GH might be more needed than a Penance, if the Penance can't get your targets health up quickly enough. It's easy to think that a 1,5 sec really strong hot should get the job done, but if you only knew the amount of times people have died while I've had a Penance going on them that very moment. What you need to remember is that for all its strengths, Penance is not instant, and sometimes it needs to be cast a bit more ahead of time than you'd think.

EDIT: Reader Shanthi pointed out a notable change to Penance that is possibly the most useful way to use Penance in current content (~patch 5.3), since Atonement healing overall has become a much more used tool by discipline priests in this expansion.

"Penance is actually quite useful in raids cast as an offensive spell. It used to be clearly the best way to use it, but Blizzard nerfed it's atonement power a bit (90% healing power as Atonement) but it's still worthwhile. It adds a stack of Evangelism and ends up as three smart heals, going to the people who need it most. Which means it is actually useful to cast on cooldown even during AoE damage, as it's almost like a PoM that jumps three times instantly."

This is thanks to two important changes made to Atonement healing in this expansion;
Patch 5.0.4 (2012-08-28): Now also includes damage from Penance.

Patch 5.1.0 (2012-11-27): Healing range increased to 40 yards, up from 15.

(wowpedia.com)

Especially the last change, increasing the range, made all the difference to Atonement healing as before this change Atonement was basically only for (unreliable) tank healing and therefore only used for very specific fights (like Halfus in BoT back in Cataclysm). With these changes however, Penance works just like Shanthi describes, giving us even more use out of this already great skill.

- Prayer of Mending
PoM is definitely one of my favorite healing spells overall. I think the whole "smart healing" function has allowed me to anthropomorph it, imagining it might actually have its own personality. Maybe this also says something about how Forever Alone I am if I try to befriend my own spells. But I bet most of us have done it... right? Anyway, I just love the feeling of seeing my PoM jump around doing its job while I do mine. But there are reasons to love it even if you don't give your spells names like I do.

PoM is very mana efficient, and has historically been worth using even if you only expect it to jump once (especially with the glyph that increases healing on the first jump). In most environments you can expect PoM to jump at least twice or so, and there is rarely any reason not to keep this up off cooldown.

- PW: Shield
Discipline priest signature spell, the Shield has had a bumpy ride throughout our healing history. Back in Vanilla, the weakness (and confusion among Blizzard devs what absorbtion healing was really all about) of Shields and absorbtions in general  made discipline priests basically impossible to play. Ever since then the Shield has gone from being too powerful to being too weak, and still Blizzard seems to have a hard time balancing this skill. The whole idea of absorbing damage instead of healing it after the fact is already putting discipline priest at an advantage, which is why the Shield has come with a couple of disadvantages over the years. We have Weakened Soul, a talent to lower the cd on Weakened Soul, a cooldown on the Shield, a talent to remove the cooldown on Shield and more, talents that increase our healing on targets with Shields and so on. Blizzards trouble has probably been to make sure the Shield is a good tool for the discipline priest to use while not making it too powerful for the holy priest to use.

Because of constant changes to the balance of the Shield, it's gone from being spammed all over the place (like the heroic Lich King fight) to being used only every 12 seconds for the Rapture proc. Overall however, the Shield has served us well, and I've always been one of the people to promote its use. I still do, to a big part because if you're doing progress raiding, the Shield is one of the best skills you will have in your spellbook. It is easy to overuse, and it can burn through your mana like no business at all. Personally I find that your goal should be to be able to have a mana pool that can sustain your usage of Shield in a regular raid fight, including any mana returns you might have. 

This doesn't mean that I'll tell you to use it without any thought. But a Shield can pretty much be up on the tank (or other main damage taker) as soon as the Weakened Soul debuff is gone. Whenever you know someone is going to take damage, I don't see any reason not to use a Shield on that target. Earlier, before we had Barrier, I would've told you to cushion as many people in the raid with a Shield before a big aoe. Blizzard wanted to change this behavior and mana nerfed the Shield enough to make that a punishing act. Then they gave us an option in Barrier, which obviously is what you should go for when aoe damage is concerned. But whenever point damage is what you're dealing with, a Shield is a good way to start.

Keep in mind however that for all its awesomeness, the Shield doesn't heal any damage. This might seem obvious but is actually really important to remember, because it makes the Shield useless unless you know that your target is going to take damage within the next 15 seconds (which used to be 30 *sob*).

Also from wow.joystiq.com - I would never play a nelf priest.

- Renew
Renew is in a sense the opposite of Shield. I don't mean that in a mechanical way, but more in how you should view it as part of your arsenal-way. To a discipline priest, Renew is weak and most of the time not worth your gcd. That doesn't mean Renew is completely useless to us. As long as you have low level gear you might have trouble keeping up Shields and Greater Heals, keeping a couple of Renews on your party is a very good substitute. Renew is also, not counting PoM, our only instant heal. One of the biggest strengths of the Shield is that we can cast it on the run, allowing the discipline priest some mobility when healing. As soon as you end up in a situation where people don't take continuous damage but still need to be healed up however, the Shield won't help you anymore. If you're at the same time also on the move, Renew is pretty much all we have to go to. When does this happen? Whenever the encounter requires the raid to move continously from some sort of damage for instance - it can be difficult to tell who is going to take damage (ie fuck up) and who is not, making Renew an overall better choice for healing than the Shield. The air phase or rings on Atramedes is a good example, but many boss fights have these kind of encounters.

Closing Word For This First Part of Part 3
It would be typical me to have forgotten a skill in my eagerness to write everything that came to mind about them all - feel free to correct me if you notice anything like that or anything else you don't agree with. Keep in mind that most of my suggestions are based on an overall style of healing rather than one that is suited for whatever might be the endgame progress raid dungeon when you're reading this. This allows, at least to some extent, for the ever coming changes to classes that occur in a game like WoW to still fit this guide somewhat (I hope). The aim is for it to fit MoP as a whole, rather than a specific raid and give you a general feel for a spell rather than how to use it in a specific encounter - that I leave up to you to find out on your own this time (that is half the joy of healing!). Look out for the next part, in which I will talk a bit more about our cooldowns! And hopefully that won't take as long to produce, no promises however.