Another video of my resto shaman killing a boss. I jumped straight to Malacrass because I find he is probably the most interesting boss to heal in Zul'Aman. He really does make me miss my aoe healing priest even more though. Spamming chain heal is not my idea of a great time. I am glad I had a resto druid co-healing this with me, it's a good match-up (I am very impressed with the holydin I've done this fight with as well, since this must be the worst fight to heal).
Showing posts with label Healing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Healing. Show all posts
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Thursday, May 12, 2022
Akil'zon Zul'Aman - Resto Shaman PoV
Just a video of me killing Akil'zon in Zul'aman with one of my guilds. I actually don't even like resto shaman healing that much but here I am, for some reason... In TBC resto shaman is still pretty boring. While I have some interesting things to do with my totems, I only have three healing skills and it gets repetitive very quickly. Maybe I should respec to enhancement, which I really like, and get a move on my healing priest instead.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Field Report #26 - The Shamanistic Ordeal
I got the closest I've ever been to a dungeon run that was not great the other night. After having done some tanking and dpsing I also got the urge to do some healing. I pondered the different classes and decided on a shaman. I pondered levelling as a dps and healing in dungeons, similarly to what I am doing with my tank, but felt like I wanted to try actually being resto. So then I decided against questing because questing as a resto shaman just seemed too horrible.
So there we have set the stage for my run in Wailing Caverns. I had turned 18 and done several very successful runs in RFC. I thought I would be able to heal a group through WC without too much trouble. I was only partially correct.
We got there and I immediately notice that the (level 20 warrior) tank didn't pull back with the raptors. Anyone who has done a run in WC knows that it is usually a bad idea not to, but I didn't really have time to react to before we suddenly had several more mobs on us. And when I say "us" I really mean "me".
I don't blame the tank for anything but failing to pull the mobs back, and maybe he was new to the instance, so that's fine. In the end it didn't matter because we made it through the overpull anyway.
Then the rogue speaks up. "Ey healer. Stop pulling all those extra mobs".
Eh, I'm sorry?
Ok, so we have another person who has never been to Wailing Caverns before apparently. It was true that I was low level (though not even the lowest level in the group). And because the mobs come running from afar they run to me first since I get aggro through my healing. I can see how the rogue put two and two together and assumed I was the problem. No biggie, let's just set the record straight.
I pointed out the emote in the chat and explained the mechanic. But the rogue refused to believe me. He claimed he had already done several runs without any issue. I didn't want to throw blame on the tank so I just said "fine, I'll stay all the way back here and we'll see what happens".
To no surprise, the raptors still came running. And they didn't just attack me. What was a surprise though, after I pointed it out the rogue actually responded with "I might have been wrong". Someone admitting they were wrong on the interwebs? That's as rare as a unicorn. But that is now the closest I have been to what could've turned into an angry run, and it wasn't very close at all. Classic is still showing itself at its best side, and the players playing it as well.
Speaking of shaman healing though...
Before level 20 when I get Lesser Healing Wave it is a whole lot of spamming Healing Wave! And unless you count throwing out the occasional Stoneskin/Strength of Earth totem that is literally the only thing I am doing (I interrupt some times too I guess). And since someone (yeah, me) decided levelling solely through instances was a good idea it's just been Healing Waves all over this place for the last four levels. Level 14-18 doesn't sound like it should take that long, but when all you do is press one button over and over it's unsurprisingly quite dull.
So why not just go quest? Good question. I've levelled my orc warrior and undead warlock pretty simultaneously, meaning I've done a quest on the one character and then gone and done the same quest on the other character (for the most part, the warlock did Stonetalon Mountains which the warrior has not). The thought of doing all those quests again on my troll shaman really didn't appeal to me. And especially not since I was going to go all resto.
For a short moment I thought about doing the quests in Tirisfal and Silverpine because I love those areas so much, but then I remembered that there is no shaman trainer over there so then the prospect of going back and forth every two levels to train didn't sound particularly fun either.
I am level 19 now. Next up is the horrendous Water Totem Quest at level 20 (if I remember correctly) and I'll get both Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Stream Totem. That's not bad. It'll give me a few more tools to work with.
Interestingly enough though, my ordeal with my resto shaman has made me come through whatever blockage I had regarding playing a healing priest (Heal! Shields! Renews! Lesser Heals! So many fun things!). So yeah, I am also leveling one of those now - a dwarf, because for now I've had enough of the horde areas for a while.
So there we have set the stage for my run in Wailing Caverns. I had turned 18 and done several very successful runs in RFC. I thought I would be able to heal a group through WC without too much trouble. I was only partially correct.
 |
| Happy Halloween by the way. |
We got there and I immediately notice that the (level 20 warrior) tank didn't pull back with the raptors. Anyone who has done a run in WC knows that it is usually a bad idea not to, but I didn't really have time to react to before we suddenly had several more mobs on us. And when I say "us" I really mean "me".
I don't blame the tank for anything but failing to pull the mobs back, and maybe he was new to the instance, so that's fine. In the end it didn't matter because we made it through the overpull anyway.
Then the rogue speaks up. "Ey healer. Stop pulling all those extra mobs".
Eh, I'm sorry?
Ok, so we have another person who has never been to Wailing Caverns before apparently. It was true that I was low level (though not even the lowest level in the group). And because the mobs come running from afar they run to me first since I get aggro through my healing. I can see how the rogue put two and two together and assumed I was the problem. No biggie, let's just set the record straight.
I pointed out the emote in the chat and explained the mechanic. But the rogue refused to believe me. He claimed he had already done several runs without any issue. I didn't want to throw blame on the tank so I just said "fine, I'll stay all the way back here and we'll see what happens".
To no surprise, the raptors still came running. And they didn't just attack me. What was a surprise though, after I pointed it out the rogue actually responded with "I might have been wrong". Someone admitting they were wrong on the interwebs? That's as rare as a unicorn. But that is now the closest I have been to what could've turned into an angry run, and it wasn't very close at all. Classic is still showing itself at its best side, and the players playing it as well.
Speaking of shaman healing though...
Before level 20 when I get Lesser Healing Wave it is a whole lot of spamming Healing Wave! And unless you count throwing out the occasional Stoneskin/Strength of Earth totem that is literally the only thing I am doing (I interrupt some times too I guess). And since someone (yeah, me) decided levelling solely through instances was a good idea it's just been Healing Waves all over this place for the last four levels. Level 14-18 doesn't sound like it should take that long, but when all you do is press one button over and over it's unsurprisingly quite dull.
So why not just go quest? Good question. I've levelled my orc warrior and undead warlock pretty simultaneously, meaning I've done a quest on the one character and then gone and done the same quest on the other character (for the most part, the warlock did Stonetalon Mountains which the warrior has not). The thought of doing all those quests again on my troll shaman really didn't appeal to me. And especially not since I was going to go all resto.
For a short moment I thought about doing the quests in Tirisfal and Silverpine because I love those areas so much, but then I remembered that there is no shaman trainer over there so then the prospect of going back and forth every two levels to train didn't sound particularly fun either.
I am level 19 now. Next up is the horrendous Water Totem Quest at level 20 (if I remember correctly) and I'll get both Lesser Healing Wave and Healing Stream Totem. That's not bad. It'll give me a few more tools to work with.
Interestingly enough though, my ordeal with my resto shaman has made me come through whatever blockage I had regarding playing a healing priest (Heal! Shields! Renews! Lesser Heals! So many fun things!). So yeah, I am also leveling one of those now - a dwarf, because for now I've had enough of the horde areas for a while.
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Field Report #25 - Who Needs Tanks and Priests?
No Tank
Interestingly enough I find there seems to be as much lack of healers as there is tanks when I am trying to group up in WoW Classic. This might be a bit skewed by the fact that I often play a tank and thus I spend more time looking for a healer than a tank. But as I've mentioned before, my experience of grouping for dungeons has so far been a positive one. This didn't change when I tried to get a group for Shadowfang Keep on my level 23 warlock the other night.
We did in fact find a healer but could not find a tank. I was worried the group would dissolve, but instead the healer asked the high-leveled rogue (27) if he'd be interested in tanking, saying that he himself was up to the task of healing him in that case. At first I was at least mildly concerned at the prospect of having a rogue tank, but when I remembered I could use my voidwalker as a back-up tank I thought it could, if nothing else, turn out to be an interesting experiment. The last time I tried to tank an instance without an actual tank was something like Botanica in Burning Crusade (we used a voidwalker back then too, as Demonology warlocks were pretty broken for a while).
I pride myself in being pretty flexible with group setups and especially with group progress, as long as whatever is happening isn't due to anyone trying to ruin things. We decided to go along with our plan and recruited another dps for the final slot instead. It turned out to be another warlock, so equipped with one high-level character (the rest of us were around level 23-24) and soul stones/healthstones/pets worth of two warlocks we took on Shadowfang Keep.
And really had no issue getting through it. While the voidwalker isn't the best tank (especially not at keeping threat), the healer and the fact that we managed to generally spread out damage pretty evenly across the group, made sure we got through it fairly smoothly. We did one silly overpull where us two locks and the priest died, but because of soul stones we were quickly back on our feet without much slowdown.
Everyone was having a blast, we were joking around and I ended up on friends list and in their guild (it turned out the other four in the group were already guildies, I hadn't even noticed until the end!). Everyone was doing what they could to move forward, no one called anyone out for the few mistakes that were made. We genuinely congratulated each other when someone else got a gear drop and there even was a blue BoE drop that no one tried to ninja.
To me it was the essence of what makes WoW Classic so damn good. It was one of those times when you regain faith in humanity and remember that the vast majority of online players out there are not toxic a-holes, but nice people who are just looking to have a good time. While I know asshats reside in WoW Classic as well, it's just the way some people are and they'll turn up in any population, I've always found WoW in general has been fairly void of the worst kind. Maybe I've just been lucky, but the way some communities in other games have been described to me I just don't see that happening in WoW.
No Priest
For the 8 years during which I played a lot of WoW I mained a healing priest for almost all of that and I never stopped loving it. I started playing it about 9 months after I first started playing (early 2006) and enjoyed it through thick and thin. I also played a lot of alts, of which tanks and especially warrior tanks became another favorite of mine. Rogues were probably the class I enjoyed and played the least (actually, feral dps druid I probably played less, but I tanked a lot as a druid). Now that I've started playing WoW Classic I am currently enjoying my warlock the most but I'm interested in playing most of the other classes too.
Weirdly enough, I really have no desire to play a priest though, whether healing or dpsing (not that shadow priest is viable for much else than questing in Classic). I played other priest healers than my main before and enjoyed it just as much, but this time around… it just feels wrong. I'm not sure if it's fatigue, the fact that priest healer is the class I know by far the best even from Vanilla WoW or simply the fact that it just wouldn't be the same somehow.
It's a bit of a dilemma because I actually would really like to heal. But the thought of priest healing doesn't appeal to me. I never enjoyed druid healing much for whatever reason. That leaves paladin and shaman. Shaman is the one I've enjoyed the most out of those two, but the thought of a) levelling a resto shaman and b) some of the totems quests that you have to do are really putting me off.
I am nurturing this idea that I'll level only through instances, saving me having to quest as resto, only doing the bare minimum of quests (like abovementioned totem quests) but I am worried that I'll quickly be bored with doing the same instances over and over. We'll see what I end up doing, I am in no rush either way.
I also realize that if this is the biggest dilemma in my life right now I can consider myself quite lucky.
Jaded
Meanwhile I am actually trying to not fall into the same trap as last time I played WoW, namely ignoring every other game out there. I really do want to play other games simultaneously, because if there is one thing that gives me existential angst it's the size of my backlog that I need to get through.
I am currently playing Resident Evil 2 remake Claire A (after completing Leon A) with the bf and also Jade Empire.
Jade Empire is one of those games I find quite meh but it's got flow enough to keep me playing at least. There are so many things about this game that are frustratingly close to being almost good that half the time I think I want to complete it just so I have a legitimate reason to write up a review of it, complaining about all these things. It's my intention to make that happen because I definitely have a lot to say about it. WoW Classic is not helping because it's difficult to motivate myself to play a barely engrossing game when the other option is one I thoroughly enjoy. Why do it then you might ask? Well because I want to check it off my list, simply! And write that review, like I said.
Images from classic.wowhead.com.
Interestingly enough I find there seems to be as much lack of healers as there is tanks when I am trying to group up in WoW Classic. This might be a bit skewed by the fact that I often play a tank and thus I spend more time looking for a healer than a tank. But as I've mentioned before, my experience of grouping for dungeons has so far been a positive one. This didn't change when I tried to get a group for Shadowfang Keep on my level 23 warlock the other night.
We did in fact find a healer but could not find a tank. I was worried the group would dissolve, but instead the healer asked the high-leveled rogue (27) if he'd be interested in tanking, saying that he himself was up to the task of healing him in that case. At first I was at least mildly concerned at the prospect of having a rogue tank, but when I remembered I could use my voidwalker as a back-up tank I thought it could, if nothing else, turn out to be an interesting experiment. The last time I tried to tank an instance without an actual tank was something like Botanica in Burning Crusade (we used a voidwalker back then too, as Demonology warlocks were pretty broken for a while).
 |
| SFK always makes me think of Tom Jones. It's a long story... |
I pride myself in being pretty flexible with group setups and especially with group progress, as long as whatever is happening isn't due to anyone trying to ruin things. We decided to go along with our plan and recruited another dps for the final slot instead. It turned out to be another warlock, so equipped with one high-level character (the rest of us were around level 23-24) and soul stones/healthstones/pets worth of two warlocks we took on Shadowfang Keep.
And really had no issue getting through it. While the voidwalker isn't the best tank (especially not at keeping threat), the healer and the fact that we managed to generally spread out damage pretty evenly across the group, made sure we got through it fairly smoothly. We did one silly overpull where us two locks and the priest died, but because of soul stones we were quickly back on our feet without much slowdown.
Everyone was having a blast, we were joking around and I ended up on friends list and in their guild (it turned out the other four in the group were already guildies, I hadn't even noticed until the end!). Everyone was doing what they could to move forward, no one called anyone out for the few mistakes that were made. We genuinely congratulated each other when someone else got a gear drop and there even was a blue BoE drop that no one tried to ninja.
 |
| It tries its best though. |
To me it was the essence of what makes WoW Classic so damn good. It was one of those times when you regain faith in humanity and remember that the vast majority of online players out there are not toxic a-holes, but nice people who are just looking to have a good time. While I know asshats reside in WoW Classic as well, it's just the way some people are and they'll turn up in any population, I've always found WoW in general has been fairly void of the worst kind. Maybe I've just been lucky, but the way some communities in other games have been described to me I just don't see that happening in WoW.
No Priest
For the 8 years during which I played a lot of WoW I mained a healing priest for almost all of that and I never stopped loving it. I started playing it about 9 months after I first started playing (early 2006) and enjoyed it through thick and thin. I also played a lot of alts, of which tanks and especially warrior tanks became another favorite of mine. Rogues were probably the class I enjoyed and played the least (actually, feral dps druid I probably played less, but I tanked a lot as a druid). Now that I've started playing WoW Classic I am currently enjoying my warlock the most but I'm interested in playing most of the other classes too.
Weirdly enough, I really have no desire to play a priest though, whether healing or dpsing (not that shadow priest is viable for much else than questing in Classic). I played other priest healers than my main before and enjoyed it just as much, but this time around… it just feels wrong. I'm not sure if it's fatigue, the fact that priest healer is the class I know by far the best even from Vanilla WoW or simply the fact that it just wouldn't be the same somehow.
It's a bit of a dilemma because I actually would really like to heal. But the thought of priest healing doesn't appeal to me. I never enjoyed druid healing much for whatever reason. That leaves paladin and shaman. Shaman is the one I've enjoyed the most out of those two, but the thought of a) levelling a resto shaman and b) some of the totems quests that you have to do are really putting me off.
 |
| Not even the totem likes the totem class quest. |
I am nurturing this idea that I'll level only through instances, saving me having to quest as resto, only doing the bare minimum of quests (like abovementioned totem quests) but I am worried that I'll quickly be bored with doing the same instances over and over. We'll see what I end up doing, I am in no rush either way.
I also realize that if this is the biggest dilemma in my life right now I can consider myself quite lucky.
Jaded
Meanwhile I am actually trying to not fall into the same trap as last time I played WoW, namely ignoring every other game out there. I really do want to play other games simultaneously, because if there is one thing that gives me existential angst it's the size of my backlog that I need to get through.
I am currently playing Resident Evil 2 remake Claire A (after completing Leon A) with the bf and also Jade Empire.
Jade Empire is one of those games I find quite meh but it's got flow enough to keep me playing at least. There are so many things about this game that are frustratingly close to being almost good that half the time I think I want to complete it just so I have a legitimate reason to write up a review of it, complaining about all these things. It's my intention to make that happen because I definitely have a lot to say about it. WoW Classic is not helping because it's difficult to motivate myself to play a barely engrossing game when the other option is one I thoroughly enjoy. Why do it then you might ask? Well because I want to check it off my list, simply! And write that review, like I said.
Images from classic.wowhead.com.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Spirit Kings 10 man Normal Discipline Guide
A little late video guide to healing Spirit Kings as a discipline priest on 10 man Normal. If I ever get around to doing heroic modes, this is one of the fights I look forward to trying the most actually, because in normal it is very simple but you can definitely sense some potential in it.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Garajal The Spiritbinder 10 Man Disc Guide
My guide to healing Garajal on 10 man normal. Admittedly this is probably the easiest fight in the instance so not much needs to be said, but there it is anyway (you should watch it for the awesome music ;))!
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Disc + Renew = True?
Don't use renew if you're discipline.
That is what I've been hearing since forever, heck what I myself have been proclaiming for all of Cataclysm (and Wrath). It's been a truth for us for so long that we've probably completely missed out that it might not be true anymore. I remember when Renew was so bad I in fact considered not even using it in my holy spec. It was too weak and too slow to be worth the time and effort, and as holy I've already got a bunch of nice instants and on the run casts, so why waste a gcd on Renew? This was even more true as discipline since I lacked most of the talents that really could've made Renew worthwhile. But things have changed, and I think we need to take a second look at Renew and how useful it is to us now.
Renew has bad hpm
This definitely used to be true for a discipline priests, and is probably the main reason we decided that Renew was the enemy in the first place. But does this argument still hold? If we compare Renew to some commonly used spells;
IF = Inner Fire
IW = Inner Will
Green = Disc
Pink = Holy
we'll see that the hpm of Renew is far from awful anymore, in fact the difference in Renew hpm between Holy and Disc is about the same as often used spells like Heal, Flash Heal and Greater Heal. When disc it actually has a better hpm than Greater Heal and equals out to Heal, if we use Inner Will instead it has better hpm than Heal. Eventhough hpm always is subject to gear and other outside factors, this will hold true for most of you, and in any case it definitely warrants you to take a look at the current state of your own spells hpm. To say we shouldn't use Renew because the hpm is too bad as compared to Holy, or compared to other commonly used spells means we shouldn't use spells like Heal, Flash Heal and Greater Heal with the same line of reasoning.
It's mostly overheal
As with any other spell in your arsenal you have to decide whether this is true for you or not. Whether you end up using Renew at a good or bad time is nothing I can do anything about. Overhealing is indeed one of the weaknesses of Renew and one of the weaknesses of hots overall, mostly because of how fights (and incoming damage) are designed. As a druid/holy you take the overhealing into consideration when you use your spells, and we would have to do that too. But that is a problem inherent of the spell, not of a disc priest using it. It's not like it magically turns into more overhealing when we use it as compared to a holy priest - what we really have to focus on is whether it is worth the mana and gcd. We've already established that it's worth the mana, but what about the gcd?
It doesn't heal enough
It's a fact that Renew is weaker for a disc priest than a holy priest, and part of the long reasoning behind not using it at all has been that it hasn't been worth the gcd. Because even if the hpm is good, the hps might not be. I do think that out of all the arguments against using Renew, this probably holds the strongest. I'd even say that in most cases you'll probably want to use another spell, so what is Renew good for? First of all we have to remember that a lot of the strength from Renew as holy comes from talents and glyphs that are available to us as disc if we'd like. I'll admit that what we have to sacrifice to get Improved Renew probably isn't worth it, but Glyph of Renew might very well be. However, the real strength of Renew is that it also fills one big spot in our healing arsenal that currently is only filled by two spells, both with relatively long cooldowns. Just as with Holy, we should consider using Renew as soon as we have to move around, which in current content is quite often. Right now we've got the Shield and Prayer of Mending (or of course, Holy Nova), but both of these options are soon exhausted and on some fights with a lot of moveement there might be a lot of downtime for a disc priest unless we want to spam shields everywhere (tornadoes during Alysrazor for example). Instead of thinking that the Shield is our only option we should definitely consider spamming out Renews on anyone who's taken some damage - it is basically as throwing a Heal or Greater Heal on that target. The Shield isn't a heal in the first place, and we have to be able to acknowledge the times when the Shield won't do any good. During those times a Renew might very well be the answer. Renew isn't a substitute for the Shield, but a complement and should be treated and used as such.
And also
Renew does benefit a lot from haste being a really good stat choice for discipline priests. Stacking haste like I have ensures we easily get that extra tick. Each tick procs a trinket like DMC Maelstrom, can crit and crits procs Divine Aegis - that's worth noting too. If we know how and when to use our Renew it really only has one major drawback, and that is that it doesn't scale as well with spellpower as most of our other spells. Nonetheless, even without proper talents and glyphs it holds equal footing to spells like Heal and Greater Heal as shown above.
Other people have also voiced their interest in the efficiency of Renew, and whether it is worth implementing into our healing rotation or not. Here are a couple of other things said regarding the usefulness of Renew in t11 from forum threads here and here;
Venaliter;
Evrion;
Khendra;
Safia;
And a thought from t12, taken from a mmo-champion thread.
Peppercat;
Overall priests nowadays mostly seem to argue whether it is needed or not (kind of like the discussion about Atonement/Archangel), not whether it is worth the mana or time or not. Only you can know that for sure really. The above four points are pretty good ones (although I don't completely agree about the Holy Nova one since HN has a cap and really heals for so little).
The short version of it is;
Should we use a gcd for Renew instead of any other heal? No
Should we use a gcd for Renew when there is no other heal to cast? Yes
Like I said earlier it's not supposed to substitute for our other heals, and if you're standing in a safe spot you should probably always use another heal over Renew. But it is still a fact that our on the move healing lacks something and we shouldn't consider Renew completely worthless. As such, Renew definitely has a spot in our healing arsenal.
That is what I've been hearing since forever, heck what I myself have been proclaiming for all of Cataclysm (and Wrath). It's been a truth for us for so long that we've probably completely missed out that it might not be true anymore. I remember when Renew was so bad I in fact considered not even using it in my holy spec. It was too weak and too slow to be worth the time and effort, and as holy I've already got a bunch of nice instants and on the run casts, so why waste a gcd on Renew? This was even more true as discipline since I lacked most of the talents that really could've made Renew worthwhile. But things have changed, and I think we need to take a second look at Renew and how useful it is to us now.
Renew has bad hpm
This definitely used to be true for a discipline priests, and is probably the main reason we decided that Renew was the enemy in the first place. But does this argument still hold? If we compare Renew to some commonly used spells;
IF = Inner Fire
IW = Inner Will
Green = Disc
Pink = Holy
we'll see that the hpm of Renew is far from awful anymore, in fact the difference in Renew hpm between Holy and Disc is about the same as often used spells like Heal, Flash Heal and Greater Heal. When disc it actually has a better hpm than Greater Heal and equals out to Heal, if we use Inner Will instead it has better hpm than Heal. Eventhough hpm always is subject to gear and other outside factors, this will hold true for most of you, and in any case it definitely warrants you to take a look at the current state of your own spells hpm. To say we shouldn't use Renew because the hpm is too bad as compared to Holy, or compared to other commonly used spells means we shouldn't use spells like Heal, Flash Heal and Greater Heal with the same line of reasoning.
It's mostly overheal
As with any other spell in your arsenal you have to decide whether this is true for you or not. Whether you end up using Renew at a good or bad time is nothing I can do anything about. Overhealing is indeed one of the weaknesses of Renew and one of the weaknesses of hots overall, mostly because of how fights (and incoming damage) are designed. As a druid/holy you take the overhealing into consideration when you use your spells, and we would have to do that too. But that is a problem inherent of the spell, not of a disc priest using it. It's not like it magically turns into more overhealing when we use it as compared to a holy priest - what we really have to focus on is whether it is worth the mana and gcd. We've already established that it's worth the mana, but what about the gcd?
It doesn't heal enough
It's a fact that Renew is weaker for a disc priest than a holy priest, and part of the long reasoning behind not using it at all has been that it hasn't been worth the gcd. Because even if the hpm is good, the hps might not be. I do think that out of all the arguments against using Renew, this probably holds the strongest. I'd even say that in most cases you'll probably want to use another spell, so what is Renew good for? First of all we have to remember that a lot of the strength from Renew as holy comes from talents and glyphs that are available to us as disc if we'd like. I'll admit that what we have to sacrifice to get Improved Renew probably isn't worth it, but Glyph of Renew might very well be. However, the real strength of Renew is that it also fills one big spot in our healing arsenal that currently is only filled by two spells, both with relatively long cooldowns. Just as with Holy, we should consider using Renew as soon as we have to move around, which in current content is quite often. Right now we've got the Shield and Prayer of Mending (or of course, Holy Nova), but both of these options are soon exhausted and on some fights with a lot of moveement there might be a lot of downtime for a disc priest unless we want to spam shields everywhere (tornadoes during Alysrazor for example). Instead of thinking that the Shield is our only option we should definitely consider spamming out Renews on anyone who's taken some damage - it is basically as throwing a Heal or Greater Heal on that target. The Shield isn't a heal in the first place, and we have to be able to acknowledge the times when the Shield won't do any good. During those times a Renew might very well be the answer. Renew isn't a substitute for the Shield, but a complement and should be treated and used as such.
And also
Renew does benefit a lot from haste being a really good stat choice for discipline priests. Stacking haste like I have ensures we easily get that extra tick. Each tick procs a trinket like DMC Maelstrom, can crit and crits procs Divine Aegis - that's worth noting too. If we know how and when to use our Renew it really only has one major drawback, and that is that it doesn't scale as well with spellpower as most of our other spells. Nonetheless, even without proper talents and glyphs it holds equal footing to spells like Heal and Greater Heal as shown above.
Other people have also voiced their interest in the efficiency of Renew, and whether it is worth implementing into our healing rotation or not. Here are a couple of other things said regarding the usefulness of Renew in t11 from forum threads here and here;
Venaliter;
"Renew is just prone to overheal, but it has it's uses. It also has its detractors. In a way, they are right. You really should be casting penance, prayer of healing or mending and Shield. (higher hpm/hps) and renew takes a backseat to all of those.
However, I use Renew for things like furious roar, to stack healing on the tank while I am CC'd. If you know a big hit is coming, it's good to cast Renew on the tank pre-empetively."
However, I use Renew for things like furious roar, to stack healing on the tank while I am CC'd. If you know a big hit is coming, it's good to cast Renew on the tank pre-empetively."
Evrion;
"I love renew in PvP, great for folks taking a little damage or with DoT's on them that I don't have time to dispel at that moment. At least slows the drain until I can cast something larger."
Khendra;
"If you're willing to invest in Renew it can be very good. Renew hits 5 heals at 12.5% haste, which is easily reachable with nominal rating (~5%) and raid buffs, or automatic after 2/2 Borrowed Time. If you keep a constant 12.5% haste then you get 6 heals any time you have BT + Power Infusion/Bloodlust/Time Warp/Ancient Hysteria. 5-tic Renew is extremely efficient, talented and glyphed healing for nearly as much as Greater Heal for 1/3 the cost. 6-tic Renew is the most efficient heal we have available.
Mechanically, your raid should not be topped off all the time, making Renew an ideal tool for keeping people out of the danger zone. Renew is also the only means we have of casting two heals at once, effectively stacking throughput, which is very handy on tanks. Renew also helps proc chances on most trinkets and all weapon imbues. It's instant-cast and good for periods when your raid must move, extremely handy when used in conjunction with PW:S.
In short, yes, Renew can be good for any flavor priest."
Safia;
"Is renew good for disc? The answer is pretty simple to me. It depends on what you are doing and who you are doing it with. 25 man hardmodes, I wouldnt touch renew with a 10 foot pole. 10 man regular mode, depends on your healing assignements and who you are healing with. 5 man heriocs, I use it all the time."
And a thought from t12, taken from a mmo-champion thread.
Peppercat;
"Here's the truth about renew for disc; it's situational and only to be used if the following are true:
1.) You're moving
2.) PW:S is on the target/has been used on the target/You have put the amount of PW:S your gear can handle maintaining on the raid
3.) PoM is Out
4.)You are NOT moving into a stacked pile during an AoE damage mechanic where Holy Nova till Stationary is better
If these are the circumstances, renew's niche becomes clear. It's also not terrible to keep rolling on the tank, but definitely not needed.
Renew has it's place in the disc arsenal, and anyone who tells you otherwise is spewing bullcrap. "
Overall priests nowadays mostly seem to argue whether it is needed or not (kind of like the discussion about Atonement/Archangel), not whether it is worth the mana or time or not. Only you can know that for sure really. The above four points are pretty good ones (although I don't completely agree about the Holy Nova one since HN has a cap and really heals for so little).
The short version of it is;
Should we use a gcd for Renew instead of any other heal? No
Should we use a gcd for Renew when there is no other heal to cast? Yes
Like I said earlier it's not supposed to substitute for our other heals, and if you're standing in a safe spot you should probably always use another heal over Renew. But it is still a fact that our on the move healing lacks something and we shouldn't consider Renew completely worthless. As such, Renew definitely has a spot in our healing arsenal.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Comments on "Ask the Devs - Healing"
I was very excited to see that Blizzard had thrown us a Healing "Ask the Devs", especially since it was pure chance that I noticed it at all, what with being away from mmo-champion for over three weeks. It finally held some words on priest healing, which I of course threw myself at like a pig throws herself in mud. Here are some of the things that were said and a little comment from me on them (shortened, you can get the full versions here).
Epicfail, some Taiwanese guy and Pikapika ask this question;
This is one of the things that has really bothered me about my "smart" heals, since forever it seems. As a priest I have a couple of those, Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing both randomly heal meaningless targets like pets and summoned pets from time to time. The only other healer to whom this is a major concern are shamans, because apparently Chain Heal can bounce to a pet, which honestly is even more annoying than having PoM or CoH do that. It's annoying because you know it's basically a wasted heal, and there is nothing you can do about it. It also makes it a lot harder to heal when the dk decides to pull out Army of the Dead, it is possible that all my heals from CoH hit a ghoul, and for each time I heal a pet instead of a player I've wasted mana and time. It's not a major concern but it's always bothered me that some targets are healable at all. Would it be so horrible if Bloodworms or Shadowfiend weren't healable? And like mentioned, some healing classes are more affected by this than others. I just don't see how fixing this could be so difficult, but apparently it is because this problem has been around for ages.
Blizzard answers;
I'm glad they've realized this, and I didn't know actually that non-pets didn't count towards the aoe cap (although it would've been really silly if they did, but you know how Blizzard are sometimes). I don't mind healing pets, but I don't want them to steal heals from target that actually need them.
Frazlo and some Korean guy asks;
I think that Blizzard did a pretty good job with shamans and priests, giving them tools to be decent tank and aoe healers as needed. They did fail on changing the roles of paladins and druids however, where I definitely agree with the people who think that druids are mainly aoe healers and paladins are mainly tank healers just as back in Wrath. You could argue that the way paladins and druids heal somehow force them into these niches, but I just don't think that is true. I don't think there is something inherently about hotting that makes it impossible to point heal with, or something about cast healing that makes it impossible to aoe heal with (just look at Prayer of Healing!). If you look at them just like that, then yes maybe. Hotting does work well for healing multiple targets for small damage because they're mana efficient and instant. Big heals work well for big damage for obvious reasons. But the real reason paladins can't do aoe and druids can't do tank (and remember I use the word "can't" as in "are less good at") are because they lack the tools. Paladins have decent aoe heals, but once they've spent their Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn they have nothing else. Druids barely even have a good, big heal that is worth throwing continously and that could save a tank in a pinch. But I think they could both be redesigned to do the other area of healing better. I think hotting could be designed to work for tank healing and cast-heals be designed to work with aoe healing (something along the lines with how GoAK works now perhaps?). Maybe Blizzard are afraid druids and paladins would become too good if they did this, and they're ultimately satisified with having two healers that are slightly more niched and two healers that are more to the middle.
Blizzard answers;
I think this is the problem. Blizzard are afraid to give druids tank healing tools and paladins aoe healing tools because they might be able to do both at the same time (kind of like how druids can keep LB on tank while aoe healing and the above example). I know plenty of druids who think they're good at tank healing, so we might already be there. I don't entirely agree that priests and shaman have to switch though. A shaman can keep Rain up while nuking a tank and as a holy priest I can keep Sanctuary and PoM up (and poke the occasional CoH in) while spamming a tank (as disc I have to switch, but Blizzard hate disc). But yeah, I can't throw GH and PoH at the same time (nor can a shaman do Chain Heal and GHW at the same time). A druid can do WG and HT at the same time though and a paladin can do Holy Radiance and DT at the same time. It's all about balances, but it's definitely possible.
Kahlan and Zerruhju ask;
This is a tricky one, but I agree with the general point here - why force disc away from shielding when that is what the class is about? But similar to how they revamped druid mastery to force druids to use their direct heals, Blizzard just can't make us all about shielding, because hots and absorbs are so superior to regular heals in most situations, especially absorbs. Blizzard says the same thing;
This is exactly what I have been whining about regarding the mastery vs haste discussion for discipline stat choice. If I focus on mastery, I will have awesome shields, but shielding alone isn't good enough in any situation other than 25 man raiding (similar to the debate going about holydin mastery vs haste now). For 5 and 10 mans I'll still need to mainly use my regular heals and that is where I will need haste. Problem is, making the shields too good is easy because they're instant and big and prevent damage. I think in a 5 man environment, the Weakened Soul debuff is enough to force us to use cast-heals inbetween the shields, and they probably implemented the Strength of Soul talent because WS was too punishing for point healing, but in raids we've got plenty of targets and the shield quickly becomes overpowered.
Blizzard continue;
This is partially another discussion, but I don't agree with Blizzard at all here. Let me just say I wish that how they see it really is how it would work but it's simple - Why would you choose someone who is less good at something to do that, if you've got someone who does it better? If you're going to play basket ball you wouldn't pick Zinedine Zedane, you'd pick Michael Jordan. Zedane is great at football, so you'll pick him instead when that comes up. The same goes for healing. Why would I put the paladin on aoe healing when I have a druid who does it better? As long as Blizzard design classes to do things more or less good (and I think that is inevitable), people will put whoever does it best in that position. I think Blizzard should acknowledge this and account for that when they design their classes instead of just saying "you should do something else because you can". We all want to do what we're best at, obviously.
Two korean guys ask;
The ye olde debate about whoever pulls the biggest load in a raid will never finish. I do think however that now more than ever, everyone really have to bust their ass off to get things done. Some fights are dead easy for tanks, some are extremely difficult. Most fights are fairly difficult for healers (as long as it's progression) but on the other hand I always felt like the very fact that we get to concentrate on those neat little frames made our job easier. We don't have to keep track of stuff that are out of our screen (much), we rarely have to keep track of advanced tactics like certain interrupts, target switching and whatnot, we can just focus on those frames and stay out of shit. No, I don't think healers have a tougher job, I think it's fairly even.
Some Taiwanese guy and Galadruin ask;
Blaming the healer seems 2006 to me. Now it's usually always the tanks getting the blame. I suppose this can differ from place to place and pug to pug, but overall I don't get much whine thrown at me as a healer, and that is far from being because I'm always such an awesome healer. I've had people die just because I had tabbed out (yes, shame on me) and they actually usually assume they did something wrong than that it was my fault! Do you think people still blame healers overly much? I get the impression we've actually got the easiest time right now.
Nehalim and some Russian guy ask;
This is a very good question, and something I have been pondering myself lately. As I've told you, I've moved away from spirit more and more because I just don't need that regen. My mana pool is usually not an issue at all during raiding or instancing, and I'd actually really have to go out of my way to go oom (it's usually in a fight that I don't yet know how to heal and where I heal more than I have to). It's always difficult to give players an impression that they improve and advance, without making them overpowering the old content. I think actually it's probably impossible not to. Now, I haven't had a chance yet to try out the new Firelands (I am slow, I know), but throwing new content at us is probably Blizzards best way to counter this effect. By giving new bosses that hit even harder and have even more aoe damage, they're forcing us to use more mana. Or they could just nerf our spirit like they did in Wrath. In either case, I'm not much worried about this issue. It goes back in forth in waves and always will.
Maladi asks;
Interestingly enough, I never thought that the holy priest lack of a 3 minute raid cooldown ever was a big problem - because we still have tools that people like having in a raid. As long as we do what we do good enough, people will want us. Blizzard seem to be on the same line;
Sergan asks;
I was assuming that the lack of changes, or notes of any kind really, regarding priests were due to Blizzard being happy about where we are at the moment. Or possibly because they had more pressing matters. In any case, I overall agree. Priests have always been fairly solid in their design, and eventhough Blizzard seem to be uncertain about how discipline should play their shields, how holy should play their chakras and how shamans should deal with raid damage, they've pretty much fixed many issues regarding that and have now turned their eye on the next problem - druid and paladin masteries. I bet priests and shamans will get plenty of love with the next content patch.
Anohako asks;
If you ask me, I'm quite pleased with the three-heal model. As a priest I use Heal and Greater Heal regularly (and I know many priests use Flash Heal about as often as it's supposed to, although I'm bad at using it). On my pally and shaman I heal with Holy Light/Lesser Healing Wave and Divine Light/Greater Healing Wave pretty much like I use the equivalents on my priest (and same with Flash of Light/Healing Surge). When I heal as a druid I use Nourish a little less than I would Heal, but still quite a lot. I don't use Healing Touch (except if the tank is the only one taking big damage) because it's usually less useful than spamming hots and I only use Regrowth when I've got a cc proc or I'm in ToL form. So druids are the only ones that work very differently from this system as compared to how the other healing classes use it - but they still use the skills (except maybe Healing Touch), just in a different way. What I like about it is that Blizzard really made our tool kit easy to understand. So eventhough they gave us more tools to use (making Heal a viable heal at all), they also made it very simple to identify when to use which heal. Not to mention how easy it is to switch between healing chars ;)
Blizzard answers;
More than any other class, healing really changes from raiding to 5 man (tanking does too, but healing even more imo). You go from having a couple (or many in 25 man) support healers, to being the only one on whom the rest of the group rely. It does make a lot for how you have to heal, and I agree that you sometimes have to be even better in 5 mans than you have to be in raiding, at least as far as healing goes (in raids you often have to succeed more with the fight mechanics rather than skilfull healing). Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you see it), 5 mans don't stay difficult for very long, but I rarely feel like I have to be more skilled healing than when I do new 5 man instances.
Now I will have to long until the next time Blizzard open their mouths about priest healing. Another two months?
Epicfail, some Taiwanese guy and Pikapika ask this question;
"Is it intended for “smart” heals and target capped aoe spells to heal companions/pets like bloodworms instead of players?"
This is one of the things that has really bothered me about my "smart" heals, since forever it seems. As a priest I have a couple of those, Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing both randomly heal meaningless targets like pets and summoned pets from time to time. The only other healer to whom this is a major concern are shamans, because apparently Chain Heal can bounce to a pet, which honestly is even more annoying than having PoM or CoH do that. It's annoying because you know it's basically a wasted heal, and there is nothing you can do about it. It also makes it a lot harder to heal when the dk decides to pull out Army of the Dead, it is possible that all my heals from CoH hit a ghoul, and for each time I heal a pet instead of a player I've wasted mana and time. It's not a major concern but it's always bothered me that some targets are healable at all. Would it be so horrible if Bloodworms or Shadowfiend weren't healable? And like mentioned, some healing classes are more affected by this than others. I just don't see how fixing this could be so difficult, but apparently it is because this problem has been around for ages.
Blizzard answers;
"True AoE heals (e.g. Healing Rain) will heal pets and guardians, but will not count those units towards the AoE cap. We’d prefer for “smart” heals to prioritize players over non-players whenever possible, and we’ll continue to improve the logic on such heals until that is the case – it certainly doesn’t feel particularly satisfying to see that you’ve just delivered a critical heal to a Bloodworm."
I'm glad they've realized this, and I didn't know actually that non-pets didn't count towards the aoe cap (although it would've been really silly if they did, but you know how Blizzard are sometimes). I don't mind healing pets, but I don't want them to steal heals from target that actually need them.
Frazlo and some Korean guy asks;
"At the start of Cataclysm, the the idea was given that developers wanted to step away from niche healing and let all healers be capable tank or raid healers. Has this goal since changed?"
I think that Blizzard did a pretty good job with shamans and priests, giving them tools to be decent tank and aoe healers as needed. They did fail on changing the roles of paladins and druids however, where I definitely agree with the people who think that druids are mainly aoe healers and paladins are mainly tank healers just as back in Wrath. You could argue that the way paladins and druids heal somehow force them into these niches, but I just don't think that is true. I don't think there is something inherently about hotting that makes it impossible to point heal with, or something about cast healing that makes it impossible to aoe heal with (just look at Prayer of Healing!). If you look at them just like that, then yes maybe. Hotting does work well for healing multiple targets for small damage because they're mana efficient and instant. Big heals work well for big damage for obvious reasons. But the real reason paladins can't do aoe and druids can't do tank (and remember I use the word "can't" as in "are less good at") are because they lack the tools. Paladins have decent aoe heals, but once they've spent their Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn they have nothing else. Druids barely even have a good, big heal that is worth throwing continously and that could save a tank in a pinch. But I think they could both be redesigned to do the other area of healing better. I think hotting could be designed to work for tank healing and cast-heals be designed to work with aoe healing (something along the lines with how GoAK works now perhaps?). Maybe Blizzard are afraid druids and paladins would become too good if they did this, and they're ultimately satisified with having two healers that are slightly more niched and two healers that are more to the middle.
Blizzard answers;
"Currently Holy Radiance can just be layered on top of the other heals, so the paladin isn’t shifting into group-healing mode the way a shaman can focus on Chain Heal or a priest can focus on Prayer of Healing."
I think this is the problem. Blizzard are afraid to give druids tank healing tools and paladins aoe healing tools because they might be able to do both at the same time (kind of like how druids can keep LB on tank while aoe healing and the above example). I know plenty of druids who think they're good at tank healing, so we might already be there. I don't entirely agree that priests and shaman have to switch though. A shaman can keep Rain up while nuking a tank and as a holy priest I can keep Sanctuary and PoM up (and poke the occasional CoH in) while spamming a tank (as disc I have to switch, but Blizzard hate disc). But yeah, I can't throw GH and PoH at the same time (nor can a shaman do Chain Heal and GHW at the same time). A druid can do WG and HT at the same time though and a paladin can do Holy Radiance and DT at the same time. It's all about balances, but it's definitely possible.
Kahlan and Zerruhju ask;
"What are the developers' thoughts on perhaps giving Discipline priests three strengths/types of shields/absorbs, in a similar manner as all other healers have three main heals? (...) Why does this become shorter and shorter, always saying we should go for direct healing instead? In that case you could play another healing class that has better direct heals."
This is a tricky one, but I agree with the general point here - why force disc away from shielding when that is what the class is about? But similar to how they revamped druid mastery to force druids to use their direct heals, Blizzard just can't make us all about shielding, because hots and absorbs are so superior to regular heals in most situations, especially absorbs. Blizzard says the same thing;
"Balancing the Discipline Priest is often challenging because they can provide so much more damage prevention than the other healers. If Discipline priests had all absorb spells instead of heals, it might make them mandatory for all raids but weak when healing a 5-player dungeon. "
This is exactly what I have been whining about regarding the mastery vs haste discussion for discipline stat choice. If I focus on mastery, I will have awesome shields, but shielding alone isn't good enough in any situation other than 25 man raiding (similar to the debate going about holydin mastery vs haste now). For 5 and 10 mans I'll still need to mainly use my regular heals and that is where I will need haste. Problem is, making the shields too good is easy because they're instant and big and prevent damage. I think in a 5 man environment, the Weakened Soul debuff is enough to force us to use cast-heals inbetween the shields, and they probably implemented the Strength of Soul talent because WS was too punishing for point healing, but in raids we've got plenty of targets and the shield quickly becomes overpowered.
Blizzard continue;
"However, players who cling to the attitude of “I’m a Disc priest; I should only shield,” aren’t really understanding our design for the class. Ditto with druids who only want to cast hots, or paladins who only want to drop heal bombs on the main tank. “I’m good at something” isn’t the same as “I only do that thing.” "
This is partially another discussion, but I don't agree with Blizzard at all here. Let me just say I wish that how they see it really is how it would work but it's simple - Why would you choose someone who is less good at something to do that, if you've got someone who does it better? If you're going to play basket ball you wouldn't pick Zinedine Zedane, you'd pick Michael Jordan. Zedane is great at football, so you'll pick him instead when that comes up. The same goes for healing. Why would I put the paladin on aoe healing when I have a druid who does it better? As long as Blizzard design classes to do things more or less good (and I think that is inevitable), people will put whoever does it best in that position. I think Blizzard should acknowledge this and account for that when they design their classes instead of just saying "you should do something else because you can". We all want to do what we're best at, obviously.
Two korean guys ask;
"When healing, it is hard to see the overall screen because healers must keep an eye on the Raid frame. And due to PVP balance issues, dispels are only allowed for healer’s. This situation makes it too harsh for the healers and gives to much responsibility and also a burden because healers have to heal and move at the same time during raids. Isn’t this a little too harsh? "
The ye olde debate about whoever pulls the biggest load in a raid will never finish. I do think however that now more than ever, everyone really have to bust their ass off to get things done. Some fights are dead easy for tanks, some are extremely difficult. Most fights are fairly difficult for healers (as long as it's progression) but on the other hand I always felt like the very fact that we get to concentrate on those neat little frames made our job easier. We don't have to keep track of stuff that are out of our screen (much), we rarely have to keep track of advanced tactics like certain interrupts, target switching and whatnot, we can just focus on those frames and stay out of shit. No, I don't think healers have a tougher job, I think it's fairly even.
Some Taiwanese guy and Galadruin ask;
"Healers are usually responsible for the loss of the teammate, but not all the mistakes are made by healers, such as over taunt or damage zone avoidance. This also happens in the 5 man dungeons frequently. Is there any chance to add a design to punish damage classes with inappropriate behavior? Is there ever going to be a clear indicator that the indivdual [sic] died from "unhealable damage" in combat logs/on screen warning?"
Blaming the healer seems 2006 to me. Now it's usually always the tanks getting the blame. I suppose this can differ from place to place and pug to pug, but overall I don't get much whine thrown at me as a healer, and that is far from being because I'm always such an awesome healer. I've had people die just because I had tabbed out (yes, shame on me) and they actually usually assume they did something wrong than that it was my fault! Do you think people still blame healers overly much? I get the impression we've actually got the easiest time right now.
Nehalim and some Russian guy ask;
"How do you plan on addressing our inflating spirit and mana pools later in the expansion to keep mana a resource, rather than a solid blue bar?"
This is a very good question, and something I have been pondering myself lately. As I've told you, I've moved away from spirit more and more because I just don't need that regen. My mana pool is usually not an issue at all during raiding or instancing, and I'd actually really have to go out of my way to go oom (it's usually in a fight that I don't yet know how to heal and where I heal more than I have to). It's always difficult to give players an impression that they improve and advance, without making them overpowering the old content. I think actually it's probably impossible not to. Now, I haven't had a chance yet to try out the new Firelands (I am slow, I know), but throwing new content at us is probably Blizzards best way to counter this effect. By giving new bosses that hit even harder and have even more aoe damage, they're forcing us to use more mana. Or they could just nerf our spirit like they did in Wrath. In either case, I'm not much worried about this issue. It goes back in forth in waves and always will.
Maladi asks;
"Are there any plans to give Holy Priests access to a viable 3-minute raid cooldown? There are concerns that without a cooldown along the lines of Power Word: Barrier, Spirit Link Totem, or Tranquility, we may need to play disc a lot in firelands. Maybe simply an improved Divine Hymn? "
Interestingly enough, I never thought that the holy priest lack of a 3 minute raid cooldown ever was a big problem - because we still have tools that people like having in a raid. As long as we do what we do good enough, people will want us. Blizzard seem to be on the same line;
"(...) we feel the Holy priest toolkit overall is strong, that they provide meaningful contributions to raid healing, and are well represented in actual raid groups."
Sergan asks;
"Looking at the healer changes with patch 4.2, there are changes being made to paladins and druids, but there doesn't appear to be any for either the priest or shaman. Do you feel comfortable with where these two classes are? Where do you feel the other healers are at currently? "
I was assuming that the lack of changes, or notes of any kind really, regarding priests were due to Blizzard being happy about where we are at the moment. Or possibly because they had more pressing matters. In any case, I overall agree. Priests have always been fairly solid in their design, and eventhough Blizzard seem to be uncertain about how discipline should play their shields, how holy should play their chakras and how shamans should deal with raid damage, they've pretty much fixed many issues regarding that and have now turned their eye on the next problem - druid and paladin masteries. I bet priests and shamans will get plenty of love with the next content patch.
Anohako asks;
"Do you feel that the three-heal model you implemented at the start of Cataclysm is a success? Have you changed your expectations or goals in regards to the three-heal model after watching a tier of raiding? How do you feel about how the various specs are using or avoiding these three core heals?"
If you ask me, I'm quite pleased with the three-heal model. As a priest I use Heal and Greater Heal regularly (and I know many priests use Flash Heal about as often as it's supposed to, although I'm bad at using it). On my pally and shaman I heal with Holy Light/Lesser Healing Wave and Divine Light/Greater Healing Wave pretty much like I use the equivalents on my priest (and same with Flash of Light/Healing Surge). When I heal as a druid I use Nourish a little less than I would Heal, but still quite a lot. I don't use Healing Touch (except if the tank is the only one taking big damage) because it's usually less useful than spamming hots and I only use Regrowth when I've got a cc proc or I'm in ToL form. So druids are the only ones that work very differently from this system as compared to how the other healing classes use it - but they still use the skills (except maybe Healing Touch), just in a different way. What I like about it is that Blizzard really made our tool kit easy to understand. So eventhough they gave us more tools to use (making Heal a viable heal at all), they also made it very simple to identify when to use which heal. Not to mention how easy it is to switch between healing chars ;)
Blizzard answers;
"Overall, we still like the model and we intend to keep supporting it. One flaw with the system is that healers in 5-player dungeons often have to make harder choices about which of the three core heals to use at any given moment."
More than any other class, healing really changes from raiding to 5 man (tanking does too, but healing even more imo). You go from having a couple (or many in 25 man) support healers, to being the only one on whom the rest of the group rely. It does make a lot for how you have to heal, and I agree that you sometimes have to be even better in 5 mans than you have to be in raiding, at least as far as healing goes (in raids you often have to succeed more with the fight mechanics rather than skilfull healing). Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you see it), 5 mans don't stay difficult for very long, but I rarely feel like I have to be more skilled healing than when I do new 5 man instances.
Now I will have to long until the next time Blizzard open their mouths about priest healing. Another two months?
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
I dare you to get rid of Spirit
As a healer I've always had a very special relationship to spirit. It's been with me through good and bad, to some of us it has been among the best and most important stats while others have just shrugged at it and chosen intellect instead. It made gearing for a disc/holy priest like me living hell in Wrath, since it was a great stat for holy and not so awesome for disc. To holy it used to give both spellpower and regen, something Blizzard removed with Cata (giving us pure regen instead). This is really taking a step back to how Spirit first used to work for us healers.
In Vanilla most healers focused on something called the 5-second rule. Since our main way to regain mana during a fight was done when not casting, we had to find good opportunities to pause our casting to regen mana. This meant careful planning of our heals, and was nothing like the heal-spamming that was to come in Wrath. There were exceptions of course, paladins could often heal both spammily (yes, that is a word now) and endlessly thanks to the fact that all ranks of heals (back when we still had ranks) were equally affected by spellpower. This way paladins could use rank 1 Holy Light or Flash of Light, which cost nearly no mana, but still healed loads thanks to a bunch of spellpower. Other classes, like mages, had a certain gear set for equipping only when they used Evocation, only to get as much out of it as possible (back when you could swap any gear mid combat and Evocation was based on spirit). Back then Blizzard came to the conclusion that to reward healers for not healing seemed a little counter intuitive (although they seem to have wanted to return to that somewhat in Cata). Instead they wanted us to base our choices not on when to heal, but who and how. Healing changed quite a lot with Burning Crusade and although the 5 second rule existed all the way to patch 4.0.1 when it was removed, in practice it hasn't been in use much since Vanilla.
The removal of the 5-second rule with Cata means that spirit in itself doesn't give us any mana as long as we are in combat. But Blizzard had thought of tools that would help us with our casting/combat regen already before they made this change. Back in BC, because spirit would only affect regen out of casting, Blizzard implemented two "tools" that would make mana less of a concern for healers. The first was mp5, which they also removed with Cata to return healing more to the state it was in in Vanilla (and also because they did a general streamlining of stats). The second was various talents that would allow for our spirit regen to continue while in combat. These talents can look differently, but they have the same result - more mana. Holy priests for instance have Holy Concentration, which in its current shape allows for 30% of our spirit regen (that is out of combat mana regen) to continue while we are in combat. Another example is Clearcast, which by giving the healer a free of mana cast allows for him to stay out of casting for a longer period of time, making the 5-second rule stay in effect longer. Before they removed the 5-second rule, CC worked a lot like any regen talent. Because of the removal of the 5 second rule, CC has been nerfed since it now only gives a free cast, and no extra regen (since there is no out of cast regen any longer). I am not sure if Blizzard compensated for this by making CC proc more often, but it doesn't seem to be a major concern for druids in any case.
Like mentioned, spirit had a prominent role for some healers in Wrath, providing with extra stats like spellpower, while others had more gain from Intellect. In BC Blizzard also connected spirit and intellect by making spirit regen more the more intellect you had. Intellect became more and more important since it increased our mana pools, gave more crit and then also the added regen to spirit. Skills like Replenishment and Rapture were affected by max mana, not spirit, which made intellect even more important. The only healers who decided to stick with spirit were the ones who had some extra benefit from it. In a sense Blizzard had divided the healers into the intellect-regeners and the spirit-regeners, but overall spirit was definitely going out of style.
In its current implementation, what makes spirit so interesting is that it is both one of our most important, and least important stats. In itself, it doesn't actually really do anything for our healing. It doesn't actively increase healing output or throughput. It only makes sure we can heal at all, which in a way is the most important factor to any healer. Spirit could be compared to the dps stat hit - it doesn't do anything in itself, it just passively makes sure that all the other stats (strength, agi, crit, haste) are worth something at all. If you don't hit your target, your crit isn't worth anything. Spirit works much in the same way by providing us with more mana. If you don't have mana for your heals, all the haste in the world won't do you any good. But just as dpsers make sure to only get a certain amount of hit, I would like to argue that we healers should only get a certain amount of spirit. Some healers stack spirit, but I just don't see the point. Because spirit isn't worth anything as long as you actually have mana, there is no use to it whatsoever after the point where you have enough mana to tackle an encounter. Spirit works a lot like it did for those evocating mages back in Vanilla. As soon as they were done getting their mana, they quickly removed all their spirit again. Unfortunately we don't have the option to swap gear mid combat, but we can still keep spirit down to bare minimum. We should only use it as long as it is beneficial, and go for anything else when it isn't. The key is of course to identify that limit.
Unfortunately, that is far from as easy as just reaching some certain percentage as with hit. How much mana you need to have all the mana you'd might want during any of the current raid fights (and/or heroics) depends on a lot of different things. Not only what class and spec you happen to be, but also what the rest of your group looks like, and as mentioned your mana pool has to be able to sustain all the current content that you're interested in running. Change one of these elements and it is back to the drawing board. I do understand it if healers just decide to go for as much spirit as possible to cover all bases - on the other hand this is an endless resource of stat-tinkering if you're into that sort of thing. Back in Wrath when only a few classes had replenishment skills, you really noticed the difference in your mana pool when you didn't bring one of those classes. Nowadays we notice that druid innervates and to an even greater extent, shaman mana tide totems make a whole lot of difference. Whenever I oom on a fight where I usually don't, it's always a sure bet that we brought less or no resto shamans with us.
But it's not an impossibe task. Many of us, myself included, don't run in groups that change that much. Few raiders today can count themselves as lucky enough to have an active raider base that allows for major changes in a group setup. Changes do happen of course, and when we had one resto shaman quit and the other one go on a minor break, I noticed at once on my strained mana pool. I have gemmed and reforged with those resto shamans in mind, and removing them from my regen calculation made a big difference. Loads of spirit is also useful if you're prone to dying and being resurrected, because you've suddenly gone to 10% mana a lot faster than you had anticipated. Personally I don't believe in making too many changes to accomodate the "dying scenario". Hopefully any changes made beforehand will prevent you from ever getting into that situation. For heroics it's probably best to not count on any sort of support regen. There won't be a resto shaman there with mana tide, unless you happen to be that shaman. Don't count on the druids using their innervates on you. The chance that you'll be completely without replenishment is small, but still there. Point is, in most cases you'll be able to estimate your personal needs for mana pretty accurately if you just put some time into it. Once you have that figure you should add some to give you a little leeway, and then convert any excess spirit into more useful stats like mastery, haste or crit, depending on what happens to be your cup of tea. There are tools that can help you with these estimations, like any combat logger, with which you can get raw numbers of your mana output, compare between fights and get a final number on what you need to tackle the fights you're currently in. Another great tool is good old experience. Once you get to the point where you've done the same fight a couple of times, you're probably into a certain "rotation" on how you deal with the fight and should know fairly accurate how much mana you put to use. You're probably put to do the same task in each fight respectively, so even if some elements of the fight will change, you'll still have a pretty good picture of how you heal the fight. As soon as you notice that you have way more mana in the end of the fight than you should, you can start looking at converting spirit into other stats.
The challenge is to get as close to zero mana each fight, after having burned through any regen tools that you might have (Divine Plea, Innervates, Shadowfiend etc), with the pot as a saver for special occasions. This isn't to put extra strain on your fellow healers, you're not supposed to just stop healing. Quite the opposite, by converting your spirit into more useful stats, you'll hopefully be an even bigger contributor to the overall healing output. Any mana regened at the end of the fight that isn't put to use isn't wasted mana, it's wasted stats. You could've had more haste, crit or mastery for those manas! I make it sound easy of course, but it is far from. Like I said, it is possible, and if you ever find yourself without something to do, you've just got yourself a challenge. Lose those spirits!
In Vanilla most healers focused on something called the 5-second rule. Since our main way to regain mana during a fight was done when not casting, we had to find good opportunities to pause our casting to regen mana. This meant careful planning of our heals, and was nothing like the heal-spamming that was to come in Wrath. There were exceptions of course, paladins could often heal both spammily (yes, that is a word now) and endlessly thanks to the fact that all ranks of heals (back when we still had ranks) were equally affected by spellpower. This way paladins could use rank 1 Holy Light or Flash of Light, which cost nearly no mana, but still healed loads thanks to a bunch of spellpower. Other classes, like mages, had a certain gear set for equipping only when they used Evocation, only to get as much out of it as possible (back when you could swap any gear mid combat and Evocation was based on spirit). Back then Blizzard came to the conclusion that to reward healers for not healing seemed a little counter intuitive (although they seem to have wanted to return to that somewhat in Cata). Instead they wanted us to base our choices not on when to heal, but who and how. Healing changed quite a lot with Burning Crusade and although the 5 second rule existed all the way to patch 4.0.1 when it was removed, in practice it hasn't been in use much since Vanilla.
The removal of the 5-second rule with Cata means that spirit in itself doesn't give us any mana as long as we are in combat. But Blizzard had thought of tools that would help us with our casting/combat regen already before they made this change. Back in BC, because spirit would only affect regen out of casting, Blizzard implemented two "tools" that would make mana less of a concern for healers. The first was mp5, which they also removed with Cata to return healing more to the state it was in in Vanilla (and also because they did a general streamlining of stats). The second was various talents that would allow for our spirit regen to continue while in combat. These talents can look differently, but they have the same result - more mana. Holy priests for instance have Holy Concentration, which in its current shape allows for 30% of our spirit regen (that is out of combat mana regen) to continue while we are in combat. Another example is Clearcast, which by giving the healer a free of mana cast allows for him to stay out of casting for a longer period of time, making the 5-second rule stay in effect longer. Before they removed the 5-second rule, CC worked a lot like any regen talent. Because of the removal of the 5 second rule, CC has been nerfed since it now only gives a free cast, and no extra regen (since there is no out of cast regen any longer). I am not sure if Blizzard compensated for this by making CC proc more often, but it doesn't seem to be a major concern for druids in any case.
Like mentioned, spirit had a prominent role for some healers in Wrath, providing with extra stats like spellpower, while others had more gain from Intellect. In BC Blizzard also connected spirit and intellect by making spirit regen more the more intellect you had. Intellect became more and more important since it increased our mana pools, gave more crit and then also the added regen to spirit. Skills like Replenishment and Rapture were affected by max mana, not spirit, which made intellect even more important. The only healers who decided to stick with spirit were the ones who had some extra benefit from it. In a sense Blizzard had divided the healers into the intellect-regeners and the spirit-regeners, but overall spirit was definitely going out of style.
In its current implementation, what makes spirit so interesting is that it is both one of our most important, and least important stats. In itself, it doesn't actually really do anything for our healing. It doesn't actively increase healing output or throughput. It only makes sure we can heal at all, which in a way is the most important factor to any healer. Spirit could be compared to the dps stat hit - it doesn't do anything in itself, it just passively makes sure that all the other stats (strength, agi, crit, haste) are worth something at all. If you don't hit your target, your crit isn't worth anything. Spirit works much in the same way by providing us with more mana. If you don't have mana for your heals, all the haste in the world won't do you any good. But just as dpsers make sure to only get a certain amount of hit, I would like to argue that we healers should only get a certain amount of spirit. Some healers stack spirit, but I just don't see the point. Because spirit isn't worth anything as long as you actually have mana, there is no use to it whatsoever after the point where you have enough mana to tackle an encounter. Spirit works a lot like it did for those evocating mages back in Vanilla. As soon as they were done getting their mana, they quickly removed all their spirit again. Unfortunately we don't have the option to swap gear mid combat, but we can still keep spirit down to bare minimum. We should only use it as long as it is beneficial, and go for anything else when it isn't. The key is of course to identify that limit.
Unfortunately, that is far from as easy as just reaching some certain percentage as with hit. How much mana you need to have all the mana you'd might want during any of the current raid fights (and/or heroics) depends on a lot of different things. Not only what class and spec you happen to be, but also what the rest of your group looks like, and as mentioned your mana pool has to be able to sustain all the current content that you're interested in running. Change one of these elements and it is back to the drawing board. I do understand it if healers just decide to go for as much spirit as possible to cover all bases - on the other hand this is an endless resource of stat-tinkering if you're into that sort of thing. Back in Wrath when only a few classes had replenishment skills, you really noticed the difference in your mana pool when you didn't bring one of those classes. Nowadays we notice that druid innervates and to an even greater extent, shaman mana tide totems make a whole lot of difference. Whenever I oom on a fight where I usually don't, it's always a sure bet that we brought less or no resto shamans with us.
But it's not an impossibe task. Many of us, myself included, don't run in groups that change that much. Few raiders today can count themselves as lucky enough to have an active raider base that allows for major changes in a group setup. Changes do happen of course, and when we had one resto shaman quit and the other one go on a minor break, I noticed at once on my strained mana pool. I have gemmed and reforged with those resto shamans in mind, and removing them from my regen calculation made a big difference. Loads of spirit is also useful if you're prone to dying and being resurrected, because you've suddenly gone to 10% mana a lot faster than you had anticipated. Personally I don't believe in making too many changes to accomodate the "dying scenario". Hopefully any changes made beforehand will prevent you from ever getting into that situation. For heroics it's probably best to not count on any sort of support regen. There won't be a resto shaman there with mana tide, unless you happen to be that shaman. Don't count on the druids using their innervates on you. The chance that you'll be completely without replenishment is small, but still there. Point is, in most cases you'll be able to estimate your personal needs for mana pretty accurately if you just put some time into it. Once you have that figure you should add some to give you a little leeway, and then convert any excess spirit into more useful stats like mastery, haste or crit, depending on what happens to be your cup of tea. There are tools that can help you with these estimations, like any combat logger, with which you can get raw numbers of your mana output, compare between fights and get a final number on what you need to tackle the fights you're currently in. Another great tool is good old experience. Once you get to the point where you've done the same fight a couple of times, you're probably into a certain "rotation" on how you deal with the fight and should know fairly accurate how much mana you put to use. You're probably put to do the same task in each fight respectively, so even if some elements of the fight will change, you'll still have a pretty good picture of how you heal the fight. As soon as you notice that you have way more mana in the end of the fight than you should, you can start looking at converting spirit into other stats.
The challenge is to get as close to zero mana each fight, after having burned through any regen tools that you might have (Divine Plea, Innervates, Shadowfiend etc), with the pot as a saver for special occasions. This isn't to put extra strain on your fellow healers, you're not supposed to just stop healing. Quite the opposite, by converting your spirit into more useful stats, you'll hopefully be an even bigger contributor to the overall healing output. Any mana regened at the end of the fight that isn't put to use isn't wasted mana, it's wasted stats. You could've had more haste, crit or mastery for those manas! I make it sound easy of course, but it is far from. Like I said, it is possible, and if you ever find yourself without something to do, you've just got yourself a challenge. Lose those spirits!
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Surge of Light vs Divine Touch
Although I enjoy discipline healing more than holy healing right now (which is a matter of taste really, not because I feel like the one is better than the other) there will be some fights where I will try to see if holy works better. Usually a fight where I am not put to point heal and have to move around alot. Such a fight is Atramedes. The other day when we were wiping our asses off on Atramedes hc again, I decided to give holy a shot, since our holy priest was performing alot better than me (we can't have that, can we?). Unfortunately my holy spec was still a shield-focused build, inspired by a post by Oestrus regarding whether the changes made to shields would make shielding the go-to spell for holy as well. I wanted to try it out, and did so, but I didn't like it. But that's matters for another post! The point is that I had to respec and I did during a break. As always when I respec my holy tree I pause a moment when I come to Surge of Light vs Divine Touch. Our holy priest in the guild doesn't use SoL, and I am definitely no fan of it either. Even after the buff, I feel like the throughput gained by it just is... pathetic, to be honest. But I know there are priests who say that "this is a great life saver" and "I just love it when it procs, that's when you really need it". I must say priests must be of an especially optimistic breed, because I just don't feel this way about SoL. I don't want to spend 2 tp into something that might, maybe, be useful. Because most of the time it won't. Problem is that the alternative isn't all that good either, being Divine Touch. We have to put at least 1 tp either in SoL or in DT, so question is, which is more useful? 5% (10%) initial healing on Renew or 3% (6%) proc chance for SoL?
At first I decided to see how often SoL procs throughout a random raid. Since our holy priest doesn't use SoL, I had to check out random priests over at worldoflogs.com. At least that information will be completely unbiased from any ideas of mine. I chose fights randomly, both 10 man and 25 man, normal modes and heroic modes. The first thing I noticed, which came as a little suprise, was that most priest had decided to go for both Divine Touch and SoL. They're both pretty weak talents, but DT is based on Renew and SoL based on Heal (which is the spell we mainly use to proc this). I'm not sure where the benefit lies in talenting for both, since we really just take these to get further down the tree. Alot comes down to healing style, do you use Renew or Heal the most?
I've said it before and I will say it again - I am no theorycrafter, rather I like to experiment with numbers to get the general feel for something. This time is no different. Therefor, I settled for 10 numbers of SoL procs and 10 for DT healing (I can't spend all day sifting through wol-logs!). Although that sample is ridiculously small, it will give a hint on the usefulness of these talents. Even small samples will get us an idea, with which we can work on. The number of procs I found from these priests varied greatly, between 1 to 46, but we're still talking raids that took at least 1 hour, to a maximum of 6 hours (not accounting for possible breaks). I didn't check priests from russian/german/other countries of which I don't speak the language. Neither did I check if they had only one point in the talents or two. Like mentioned, the efficiency of SoL heavily relies on your need to throw alot of Heal/GH/BH throughout an encounter. Most holy priests will mainly heal with PoH, CoH, PoM (and Lightwell if your raid is good). SoL procs very rarely from spells that aren't used very much. DT too is based on a spell that most priests just don't use very much. It is time to find out which one of these talents that seems to be the weakest.
If I were to make a mean value of the times of procs I found, it'd be a rough number of course, but it still gives a general idea about the efficiency of SoL. Nevertheless I've found priests who've had it proc 46 times over 4 hours and 1 times over 6 hours, so the differences can be great. It is important to remember this.
The average raid for my SoL-sample took 207 min. During that time, depending alot on fight and healing style, SoL procced roughly 15 and a half times. We assume they were all used, and that they all fully healed (no overheals). My Flash Heal heals for about 17k (only own buffs), which gives 263.500 extra, free of cost healing (assuming none of the spells crit). Over 207 minutes that is 21 extra hps. These are crude numbers, so let's also take a look at maximum versus minimal efficiency in my sample too.
Maximum (of sample): 36 procs over 3 hours is ~56hps.
Minimum: 1 procs over 6 hours is 0,7 hps.
Even if my sample is far from statistically reliable, I feel safe in saying that at absolutely best, optimal conditions, spamming Heal/GH/BH, no SoL procs being overheals, we can expect to get 100hps from SoL. Even if this already is pretty low, even in an optimal situation, it is clear that SoL can be next to nothing in usefulness, depending on healing style.
Let's look at Divine Touch for comparison.
For the Divine Touch sample, the average raid took 252 minutes and DT healed for an average of 416900. Over 252 minutes that comes down to 27 hps. Here too the differences between biggest and smallest gain were pretty big.
Maximum: 1367000 healing over 4 hours is 95 hps.
Minimum: 17000 healing over 6 hours is 0,7 hps.
Looking at this it seems like DT has more potential than SoL, but the sample is too small to say anything definite. Overall the gains are small whichever talent you choose, and which one will be better for you will depend alot on, like mentioned, whether you rely more on Renew or Heal (and GH/BH). As boring as it sounds, both these talents are pretty much as useless as we feel like they are. DT will buff your cushion-healing somewhat and SoL will occasionally provide you with that extra Flash Heal, but none of them will make a huge difference. The best thing you can do is spec for either and do two raids to compare which seems to work best for you. Personally I will go with DT, because I feel like it will suit my healing style better, and also I feel like Renew is easier used in the content that I currently play over Heal/GH/BH, since there is alot of aoe healing and moving around. Like my holy priest guildie said it - the better gear we get, the less will we use Heal.
Oh and as a side note, I decided disc probably will work best for Atramedes anyway, just have to regear for shield spamming and see how that works. UPDATE: Yeah shield spamming worked, he's downed!
At first I decided to see how often SoL procs throughout a random raid. Since our holy priest doesn't use SoL, I had to check out random priests over at worldoflogs.com. At least that information will be completely unbiased from any ideas of mine. I chose fights randomly, both 10 man and 25 man, normal modes and heroic modes. The first thing I noticed, which came as a little suprise, was that most priest had decided to go for both Divine Touch and SoL. They're both pretty weak talents, but DT is based on Renew and SoL based on Heal (which is the spell we mainly use to proc this). I'm not sure where the benefit lies in talenting for both, since we really just take these to get further down the tree. Alot comes down to healing style, do you use Renew or Heal the most?
I've said it before and I will say it again - I am no theorycrafter, rather I like to experiment with numbers to get the general feel for something. This time is no different. Therefor, I settled for 10 numbers of SoL procs and 10 for DT healing (I can't spend all day sifting through wol-logs!). Although that sample is ridiculously small, it will give a hint on the usefulness of these talents. Even small samples will get us an idea, with which we can work on. The number of procs I found from these priests varied greatly, between 1 to 46, but we're still talking raids that took at least 1 hour, to a maximum of 6 hours (not accounting for possible breaks). I didn't check priests from russian/german/other countries of which I don't speak the language. Neither did I check if they had only one point in the talents or two. Like mentioned, the efficiency of SoL heavily relies on your need to throw alot of Heal/GH/BH throughout an encounter. Most holy priests will mainly heal with PoH, CoH, PoM (and Lightwell if your raid is good). SoL procs very rarely from spells that aren't used very much. DT too is based on a spell that most priests just don't use very much. It is time to find out which one of these talents that seems to be the weakest.
If I were to make a mean value of the times of procs I found, it'd be a rough number of course, but it still gives a general idea about the efficiency of SoL. Nevertheless I've found priests who've had it proc 46 times over 4 hours and 1 times over 6 hours, so the differences can be great. It is important to remember this.
The average raid for my SoL-sample took 207 min. During that time, depending alot on fight and healing style, SoL procced roughly 15 and a half times. We assume they were all used, and that they all fully healed (no overheals). My Flash Heal heals for about 17k (only own buffs), which gives 263.500 extra, free of cost healing (assuming none of the spells crit). Over 207 minutes that is 21 extra hps. These are crude numbers, so let's also take a look at maximum versus minimal efficiency in my sample too.
Maximum (of sample): 36 procs over 3 hours is ~56hps.
Minimum: 1 procs over 6 hours is 0,7 hps.
Even if my sample is far from statistically reliable, I feel safe in saying that at absolutely best, optimal conditions, spamming Heal/GH/BH, no SoL procs being overheals, we can expect to get 100hps from SoL. Even if this already is pretty low, even in an optimal situation, it is clear that SoL can be next to nothing in usefulness, depending on healing style.
Let's look at Divine Touch for comparison.
For the Divine Touch sample, the average raid took 252 minutes and DT healed for an average of 416900. Over 252 minutes that comes down to 27 hps. Here too the differences between biggest and smallest gain were pretty big.
Maximum: 1367000 healing over 4 hours is 95 hps.
Minimum: 17000 healing over 6 hours is 0,7 hps.
Looking at this it seems like DT has more potential than SoL, but the sample is too small to say anything definite. Overall the gains are small whichever talent you choose, and which one will be better for you will depend alot on, like mentioned, whether you rely more on Renew or Heal (and GH/BH). As boring as it sounds, both these talents are pretty much as useless as we feel like they are. DT will buff your cushion-healing somewhat and SoL will occasionally provide you with that extra Flash Heal, but none of them will make a huge difference. The best thing you can do is spec for either and do two raids to compare which seems to work best for you. Personally I will go with DT, because I feel like it will suit my healing style better, and also I feel like Renew is easier used in the content that I currently play over Heal/GH/BH, since there is alot of aoe healing and moving around. Like my holy priest guildie said it - the better gear we get, the less will we use Heal.
Oh and as a side note, I decided disc probably will work best for Atramedes anyway, just have to regear for shield spamming and see how that works. UPDATE: Yeah shield spamming worked, he's downed!
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Stat Choices for Discipline Priests
Stat choices for discipline priests in Cataclysm have not been easy. Especially since the changes brought on us with 4.0.6 have we seen the priest community divide with loads of priests screaming "mastery!", "crit!" or "haste!". But one has to be best, right? Not necessarily. The reason for this schism among priests right now is that no stat is beneficial to all our spells, all stats scale and synergize with eachother and in the end it will come down to which way you prefer to heal. Seriously. Even EJ will tell you to "Keep a balance to your other secondary stats. None of them are great, but they synergistically increase each other's values." The first choice is easy - as long as you have mana issues, spirit is your best secondary stat. Once mana becomes less of a problem however, we can start looking at our other secondary stats - Mastery, haste and Crit. This post will aim at taking you through these three secondary stats, and discuss how they work and hopefully help you decide which one you prefer. I can't and won't tell you that one is better than the other because this will come down to personal preferences. I will try to explain why I have chosen the way I have, and why you should go my way, and why you shouldn't.
Not just what, but how.
Choosing a secondary stat won't just be a matter of choosing the stat based on what it does, but also how well it does it, both in term of function and in term of value. All three stats can be evaluated based on function and values. Remember how Armor Piercing worked in Wrath? It removed a percentage of the targets armor (ie made you hit as if the targets armor was of lower value). Armor Piercing was one of the most valuable secondary stats for most melee dpsers back in Wrath, but only once you reached a certain amount. In cataclysm, many argue the same way about haste. Although each point of haste is theoretically worth as much, in practice there are certain values that will benefit you more than others because of what they practically do to your spells. We can probably agree that what we want to achieve is being able to "heal as much as possible". This definition does include mana management since a healer without mana won't be healing very much. Because of this we have to look at what our secondary stat do, how well they do it, and what spells will be affected. Cataclysm introduced Mastery, somewhat as the black sheep. Unlike the mastery for holy, the discipline mastery won't affect all of our spells. In fact all of our secondary stats affect our skills very differently, and this is where our choice has to be made. What skills do I want to buff?
Mastery
I've played mainly with mastery up until now, for a simple reason. When I started out healing in Cata I played mainly as holy, because discipline was still dragging on alot of issues and just weren't performing as well. Mastery proved to be a great way to boost healing throughput without penalizing mana management, which is something haste will do. This is true for both holy and discipline, but to various degrees. To holy, most spells, and especially the most used spells, are affected by mastery. For discipline this is not so. Discipline mastery will only affect our absorbs, which means our Shields and our Divine Aegis procs. Before 4.0.6 when Shields were still relatively weak and PoH (one of our most used spells) couldn't proc critted DA, mastery was a fairly weak stat for discipline. The buff to shields has buffed our mastery as well, so it has definitely become alot better.
You need 179.28 mastery rating for 1 Mastery.
Pros
Although priests are far from any agreement in this matter, it seems like most are leaning towards haste being the best throughput stat for discipline at the moment. This does rely on one factor being completely covered however - that of mana management. Haste is more healing, simply put, but the more spells you cast the more mana you will make rid of. Unlike Mastery, Haste won't improve the spells you cast, it will only allow you to cast more of them. Simplified you are choosing between throwing a few, bigger spells vs alot of smaller spells. In early Cataclysm, the choice seemed clear. Triage healing was the way to go, simply because we had to. Our mana didn't allow for us to Gatling Gun our spells like in Wrath, and haste became a secondary stat most priests didn't dare to look at (holy priests thought about getting that extra tick on their renew, and that was about it). But the better our gear gets, the better haste gets. Our spells become bigger thanks to more spellpowers which means we don't have to "patch" them up with stats like Mastery if we don't want to. With more regen comes the possibility to throw more spells, and this is what discipline (and holy) priests have been starting to return to. But what if our spells already are instant? It is true that alot of Discipline healing is based on instant cast spells - Shields and PoM. For these spells, haste will only affect the gcd which is 1,5 seconds for most spells. More haste will lower the gcd to a maximum of 1 second, allowing for more Shields to be cast within the same time frame. Also, by lowering the cast time of your Heal/GH/BH you will be able to faster recast Shields on the same target with the SoS talent.
Haste is a rather good rating if you are one of those Atonement priests. If you like to smite your way through stuff, which I personally think works ok for heroics but not so well for raids, you won't have any gain from Mastery (except for the occasional DA you proc) but plenty of gain from Haste and Crit. More Haste will allow you to stack Evangelism faster, which for many priests is the main goal of smiting overall.
You need 128.125 haste rating for 1% Haste.
Pros
Crit is tricky. It does affect some important spells, like Inspiration and Divine Aegis, and critting a heal isn't a bad thing to do. On the other hand, crit is the most rng of the three secondary stats. Having a certain amount of crit won't benefit all of your skills and most importantly it won't affect them all the time. It will only benefit your overall healing to a certain degree (approximately the amount of crit you have). Does this mean that 15% crit will increase your healing effectiviness by 15%? Not at all. You can't count on your crit throughput unless you have a very high amount of crit (which we won't get without sacrificing too much of our other stats). Theoretically, all the crits you get during a certain time frame could be overheals or otherwise non-beneficial for the situation. Unless we have a really high amount of crit, we won't heal as if our spells will crit. This means you will keep on casting your spells with their non-crit value in mind, easily making alot of the crits overheals. It is only when your spells are insufficient that crits are welcome. Healers tend to avoid getting into situations where we have to rely on luck to get the job done.
Like mentioned, Crit is a fairly good stat if you use Atonement. Smite healing is effective in that it has a high hps without being very mana expensive (unlike other fast spells like Flash Heal), and with alot of crit you can proc loads of DA from all that smiting.
You need 179.34 crit rating for 1% Crit.
Pros
Because of the unreliability of crit, and the fact that it doesn't actually affect a spell that makes out some third of my total healing done (note that I write "my" here) I have chosen to mainly focus on haste vs mastery. That doesn't mean that there aren't priests out there who have focused on crit and do a great job anyway (link in german), which just emphasizes the difficulty in saying that one secondary stat is better than another. Ideally we'd put all our eggs in the hps basket, meaning we'd convert spirit (which is useless as long as you have enough mana and regen) to Mastery and Haste (and crit if you like that). To most of us it is still a tough choice to remove spirit meaning we have to choose between the throughput stats and not between regen vs throughput stats. However it is worth noting that if you feel like mana isn't much of a problem for you, converting spirit into the other secondary stats is the best idea, and this is also something currently being discussed around the bloggosphere. Like I started out saying, what secondary stat you should choose for yourself comes down to your way of healing. A thumbrule is that haste is good for raid healing, because of faster PoH, Mastery and Crit is better for tank healing. I'm in a position where I switch between the roles, so I will have to balance the stats. This is a situation I think most discipline priests are in actually.
To try to find out if there was a big difference between lots of haste or lots of mastery (I did not check crit) I decided to reforge my gear completely. From being all Mastery to all Haste, I also switched some gear from Mastery gear to Haste gear.
I lost 2 points of Mastery, from ~18,5 points Mastery to ~16,5 (or 5% absorbtion).
I gained about 5,5% haste, from 5% to 10,5% (unbuffed).
Here are some comparison logs between two raids. I've picked out the fights that were the most alike between the two raids in terms of my spec and role in the fights. The raid compositons were about the same, I used the same flasks and food, but note that there are still differences between the fights of course.
The fight healed with Haste is to the left and the fight healed with Mastery is to the right.
Let's take a look at healing values.
Interestingly enough, my average absorb with shields actually rises on two fights with more Haste, rather than with more Mastery. Divine Aegis on the other hand drops in absorbs. These logs are from two raids only one week apart, so I couldn't ascribe that difference to gear, neither was there a big difference in raid setup as mentioned. Statistically there isn't much to get from these numbers of course, because it's just one raid of each, but it does highlight the point that whether you choose Haste or Mastery (and maybe even Crit) as your primary stat, things won't change dramatically. When people tell you to keep a good balance, they are right. I don't post these logs to give you proof of one way or the other, but to give you a general idea about what these differences could do, or rather don't do (and encourage you to experiment a little with stats yourself).
How did the change feel? I did feel like mana was slightly more of an issue, but I will ascribe that to the fact that we had one less Mana Tide for the Haste-raid than for the Mastery-raid. Regarding comfiness I really liked having faster spells. With the haste I had the cast time on Heal/GH went down to near 2 seconds and with PI/BL I got down to 1,5 sec cast. My overall performance didn't change much though, it seemed like my hps went down a little with more haste which could be because the strength of Discipline really lies in Shields at the moment and it is difficult to compensate that with more PoH (which is mainly why you'd want alot of haste). In my case we already have a bunch of good aoe healers, and boosting my own aoe-healing will get me higher on the meters, but will it benefit the raid? Being able to keep up strong single-target healing is just as important although it doesn't look as cool on the meters. We have to evaluate our own role in our raids and gear suited to that role.
Where will I go from here? What do I recommend? Depending on your current gear I do recommend getting a fair amount of haste, maybe some 15-20% raid buffed (which isn't too hard to get) and then go for Mastery. I wouldn't recommend going for Crit, because I feel like the other two stats are outperforming it, but I won't tell you crit is bad either. Crit on gear isn't something to avoid, but I wouldn't gem/enchant/reforge for it if there are options to go for Haste or Mastery instead, simply because they are safe throughput stats and Crit isn't. For single-target healing (and multi single-target healing) I don't have any problems with keeping Inspiration up on my targets even when not gearing for crit.
As boring as it sounds, a balance does seem to be the best idea, and testing with different values for yourself will probably be the best way to find out what suits your healing style. Because the stats affect different parts of your healing, it does depend on your healing role and the fight you are fighting to find the best stat for you.
Not just what, but how.
Choosing a secondary stat won't just be a matter of choosing the stat based on what it does, but also how well it does it, both in term of function and in term of value. All three stats can be evaluated based on function and values. Remember how Armor Piercing worked in Wrath? It removed a percentage of the targets armor (ie made you hit as if the targets armor was of lower value). Armor Piercing was one of the most valuable secondary stats for most melee dpsers back in Wrath, but only once you reached a certain amount. In cataclysm, many argue the same way about haste. Although each point of haste is theoretically worth as much, in practice there are certain values that will benefit you more than others because of what they practically do to your spells. We can probably agree that what we want to achieve is being able to "heal as much as possible". This definition does include mana management since a healer without mana won't be healing very much. Because of this we have to look at what our secondary stat do, how well they do it, and what spells will be affected. Cataclysm introduced Mastery, somewhat as the black sheep. Unlike the mastery for holy, the discipline mastery won't affect all of our spells. In fact all of our secondary stats affect our skills very differently, and this is where our choice has to be made. What skills do I want to buff?
Mastery
I've played mainly with mastery up until now, for a simple reason. When I started out healing in Cata I played mainly as holy, because discipline was still dragging on alot of issues and just weren't performing as well. Mastery proved to be a great way to boost healing throughput without penalizing mana management, which is something haste will do. This is true for both holy and discipline, but to various degrees. To holy, most spells, and especially the most used spells, are affected by mastery. For discipline this is not so. Discipline mastery will only affect our absorbs, which means our Shields and our Divine Aegis procs. Before 4.0.6 when Shields were still relatively weak and PoH (one of our most used spells) couldn't proc critted DA, mastery was a fairly weak stat for discipline. The buff to shields has buffed our mastery as well, so it has definitely become alot better.
You need 179.28 mastery rating for 1 Mastery.
Pros
- Buffs some our most important spells (Shields and Divine Aegis)
- The only stat that provides pure healing throughput without drawback
- Doesn't affect half of our healing (Penance, Heal, PoM, PoH to mention a few) except in a secondary way, ie critted heal = DA which is affected by mastery.
- Haste: More haste will make for faster casting which will provide more Shield and DA uptime.
- Crit: More crits equal more DA procs
Although priests are far from any agreement in this matter, it seems like most are leaning towards haste being the best throughput stat for discipline at the moment. This does rely on one factor being completely covered however - that of mana management. Haste is more healing, simply put, but the more spells you cast the more mana you will make rid of. Unlike Mastery, Haste won't improve the spells you cast, it will only allow you to cast more of them. Simplified you are choosing between throwing a few, bigger spells vs alot of smaller spells. In early Cataclysm, the choice seemed clear. Triage healing was the way to go, simply because we had to. Our mana didn't allow for us to Gatling Gun our spells like in Wrath, and haste became a secondary stat most priests didn't dare to look at (holy priests thought about getting that extra tick on their renew, and that was about it). But the better our gear gets, the better haste gets. Our spells become bigger thanks to more spellpowers which means we don't have to "patch" them up with stats like Mastery if we don't want to. With more regen comes the possibility to throw more spells, and this is what discipline (and holy) priests have been starting to return to. But what if our spells already are instant? It is true that alot of Discipline healing is based on instant cast spells - Shields and PoM. For these spells, haste will only affect the gcd which is 1,5 seconds for most spells. More haste will lower the gcd to a maximum of 1 second, allowing for more Shields to be cast within the same time frame. Also, by lowering the cast time of your Heal/GH/BH you will be able to faster recast Shields on the same target with the SoS talent.
Haste is a rather good rating if you are one of those Atonement priests. If you like to smite your way through stuff, which I personally think works ok for heroics but not so well for raids, you won't have any gain from Mastery (except for the occasional DA you proc) but plenty of gain from Haste and Crit. More Haste will allow you to stack Evangelism faster, which for many priests is the main goal of smiting overall.
You need 128.125 haste rating for 1% Haste.
Pros
- Increased healing throughput
- Effects all spells
- Is the "cheapest" rating.
- Only efficient if you have the mana and regen for it
- Mastery: Haste has no gain of Mastery
- Crit: Haste has no gain of Crit
Crit is tricky. It does affect some important spells, like Inspiration and Divine Aegis, and critting a heal isn't a bad thing to do. On the other hand, crit is the most rng of the three secondary stats. Having a certain amount of crit won't benefit all of your skills and most importantly it won't affect them all the time. It will only benefit your overall healing to a certain degree (approximately the amount of crit you have). Does this mean that 15% crit will increase your healing effectiviness by 15%? Not at all. You can't count on your crit throughput unless you have a very high amount of crit (which we won't get without sacrificing too much of our other stats). Theoretically, all the crits you get during a certain time frame could be overheals or otherwise non-beneficial for the situation. Unless we have a really high amount of crit, we won't heal as if our spells will crit. This means you will keep on casting your spells with their non-crit value in mind, easily making alot of the crits overheals. It is only when your spells are insufficient that crits are welcome. Healers tend to avoid getting into situations where we have to rely on luck to get the job done.
Like mentioned, Crit is a fairly good stat if you use Atonement. Smite healing is effective in that it has a high hps without being very mana expensive (unlike other fast spells like Flash Heal), and with alot of crit you can proc loads of DA from all that smiting.
You need 179.34 crit rating for 1% Crit.
Pros
- Is our only source of DA (except Prayer of Healing)
- Is our only source of Inspiration (if you have that talent)
- Doesn't affect our Shields at all
- Is the most unreliable of all secondary stats
- Mastery: Crit has no gain of Mastery
- Haste: More haste equals more spells equals more crits (during a time frame).
Because of the unreliability of crit, and the fact that it doesn't actually affect a spell that makes out some third of my total healing done (note that I write "my" here) I have chosen to mainly focus on haste vs mastery. That doesn't mean that there aren't priests out there who have focused on crit and do a great job anyway (link in german), which just emphasizes the difficulty in saying that one secondary stat is better than another. Ideally we'd put all our eggs in the hps basket, meaning we'd convert spirit (which is useless as long as you have enough mana and regen) to Mastery and Haste (and crit if you like that). To most of us it is still a tough choice to remove spirit meaning we have to choose between the throughput stats and not between regen vs throughput stats. However it is worth noting that if you feel like mana isn't much of a problem for you, converting spirit into the other secondary stats is the best idea, and this is also something currently being discussed around the bloggosphere. Like I started out saying, what secondary stat you should choose for yourself comes down to your way of healing. A thumbrule is that haste is good for raid healing, because of faster PoH, Mastery and Crit is better for tank healing. I'm in a position where I switch between the roles, so I will have to balance the stats. This is a situation I think most discipline priests are in actually.
To try to find out if there was a big difference between lots of haste or lots of mastery (I did not check crit) I decided to reforge my gear completely. From being all Mastery to all Haste, I also switched some gear from Mastery gear to Haste gear.
I lost 2 points of Mastery, from ~18,5 points Mastery to ~16,5 (or 5% absorbtion).
I gained about 5,5% haste, from 5% to 10,5% (unbuffed).
Here are some comparison logs between two raids. I've picked out the fights that were the most alike between the two raids in terms of my spec and role in the fights. The raid compositons were about the same, I used the same flasks and food, but note that there are still differences between the fights of course.
The fight healed with Haste is to the left and the fight healed with Mastery is to the right.
 | |
| Magmaw - 1000 more hps with Mastery than Haste. |
 |
| Omnotron - 2000 more hps with Mastery than Haste |
 |
| Cho'Gall - 400 more hps with Haste than Mastery |
 |
| Magmaw |
 |
| Omnotron |
 |
| Cho'gall |
How did the change feel? I did feel like mana was slightly more of an issue, but I will ascribe that to the fact that we had one less Mana Tide for the Haste-raid than for the Mastery-raid. Regarding comfiness I really liked having faster spells. With the haste I had the cast time on Heal/GH went down to near 2 seconds and with PI/BL I got down to 1,5 sec cast. My overall performance didn't change much though, it seemed like my hps went down a little with more haste which could be because the strength of Discipline really lies in Shields at the moment and it is difficult to compensate that with more PoH (which is mainly why you'd want alot of haste). In my case we already have a bunch of good aoe healers, and boosting my own aoe-healing will get me higher on the meters, but will it benefit the raid? Being able to keep up strong single-target healing is just as important although it doesn't look as cool on the meters. We have to evaluate our own role in our raids and gear suited to that role.
Where will I go from here? What do I recommend? Depending on your current gear I do recommend getting a fair amount of haste, maybe some 15-20% raid buffed (which isn't too hard to get) and then go for Mastery. I wouldn't recommend going for Crit, because I feel like the other two stats are outperforming it, but I won't tell you crit is bad either. Crit on gear isn't something to avoid, but I wouldn't gem/enchant/reforge for it if there are options to go for Haste or Mastery instead, simply because they are safe throughput stats and Crit isn't. For single-target healing (and multi single-target healing) I don't have any problems with keeping Inspiration up on my targets even when not gearing for crit.
As boring as it sounds, a balance does seem to be the best idea, and testing with different values for yourself will probably be the best way to find out what suits your healing style. Because the stats affect different parts of your healing, it does depend on your healing role and the fight you are fighting to find the best stat for you.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Healing changes - Discipline being nerfed (and other things)
Said I;
Said Blizzard;
Sure, I knew they'd do something. Things were crazy. This is just how crazy;
Instead of capsing some curse words, which is what I feel like doing, I'd like to hold a moment of sad faces.
:(
:(
Good, now that that is out of the way... Wait, just another one - :(
And now that my initial pouting has been poured into some sad faces let's try to be objective about the changes. So, we knew it was coming. And considering all the things Blizzard could've done to "fix" us, this was among the better. I'd be alot sader if they had reduced the effectiviness of the shield, for example. Increased mana costs are something we can work with, it is something that good healing techniques and gear can counteract - bad spells are always bad spell however. So on the bright side, this nerf is probably the best that could've hit us. How will this change our way of healing? We will probably keep shields up on our main targets just as before, but be a little more conservative when it comes to targets that we don't know will actually benefit fully from it. For example I shielded all the targets on my platforms on Nef 25, and I probably won't do that after this change. I realize Blizzard don't want us to go back to spamming on one spell, and don't want us to rely too heavily on it either - and I don't mind that. They have been doing the same thing to Rejuvenation to quell the Rejuv spamming druids (with limited success I'd say). The very reason Blizzard nerfed Shields and Chains Heals to the ground at the beginning of Cata was to make sure we'd look at other spells as well, they just went a little over the top in those cases. They buffed both Chain Heal and Shields in 4.0.6 to counteract this, and now they drag Shields back down again. Blizzard is like a yoyo! Sometimes they will just "accidentally" yoyo you in the crotch when they try to show you some fancy trick.
Also, I love the wording of "We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent". 33% is "slightly more"? Me and Blizzard clearly don't agree on the definition of "slight", but oh well.
In other news, the other healers are becoming some changes as well (same source as above);
Basically, shaman healing depends the most on the infamous triage healing, and the less triage healing there is, the tougher it is for them to compete on the meters. Shamans are simply the healers that get to do their job last, when everyone is down and under. If the other healers never let, or never are forced to let, people down low on health, shamans won't get to do much work. The design of fights is what could change this, but as Blizzard already have told us it is "easier to buff Restoration shaman rather than nerf everyone else or rebalance the encounters". Bye bye Triage healing? It was fun while it lasted. A 15% straight buff to all healing spells is a huge buff and resto shamans across the bloggosphere are doing the macarena (so is my resto shaman of course). I can't help but feel like Blizzard are overdoing it again however, will this go the same way disc did? We'll see.
And also (same source as above);
Although I do agree that shamans deserve a nice raid cooldown I don't agree that they're really that replacable (not taking elite hardcore endgame guilds into account). They have a really nice setup of buffs (totems, BL) and they don't suck miserably at healing. But, all those buffs are provided by some other class as well (except mana tide) and their healing is at the bottom of the list. I wouldn't mind at all if Shamans got something like Tranquility/Divine Hymn or some damage reducing cooldown like Pain Supression/Divine Guardian/Hand of Sacrifice. I think the reason they don't is because they used to be special enough with their totems and BL, and now they're not anymore so Blizzard have to react to that.
Druids on the other hand don't need a raid cooldown. First of all they already have good raid cooldowns in Tranquility (which now is better than Divine Hymn) and Rebirth. Add Innervate to that. Also I feel like the unique healing style of druids is not easily filled by another class. Hots are so powerful I consider them to be sort of a "continous healing cooldown". Shamans even have a special cooldown to be able to do what most druids can do basically all the time - run and heal.
"Shields are extremely good (so good I am smelling an incoming nerf)"
Said Blizzard;
"The cost of Power Word: Shield is being increased by 33%. While we wanted Discipline priests to be able to utilize this spell more often and with better results, we also did not want it to be the main spell (and often the only spell) used while in groups. We don’t find this to be a particularly compelling playstyle and have found that it encourages players to avoid using other spells such as Penance. We believe that using a shield in a tight moment is totally appropriate, but we don’t want it to be incredibly efficient to do so with more frequency than that.<br /> <br /> We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent. The tooltip will not reflect this change until a future patch, however. Ideally, Holy priests should not notice much of a change to the Power Word: Shield costs."
Sure, I knew they'd do something. Things were crazy. This is just how crazy;
Instead of capsing some curse words, which is what I feel like doing, I'd like to hold a moment of sad faces.
:(
:(
Good, now that that is out of the way... Wait, just another one - :(
And now that my initial pouting has been poured into some sad faces let's try to be objective about the changes. So, we knew it was coming. And considering all the things Blizzard could've done to "fix" us, this was among the better. I'd be alot sader if they had reduced the effectiviness of the shield, for example. Increased mana costs are something we can work with, it is something that good healing techniques and gear can counteract - bad spells are always bad spell however. So on the bright side, this nerf is probably the best that could've hit us. How will this change our way of healing? We will probably keep shields up on our main targets just as before, but be a little more conservative when it comes to targets that we don't know will actually benefit fully from it. For example I shielded all the targets on my platforms on Nef 25, and I probably won't do that after this change. I realize Blizzard don't want us to go back to spamming on one spell, and don't want us to rely too heavily on it either - and I don't mind that. They have been doing the same thing to Rejuvenation to quell the Rejuv spamming druids (with limited success I'd say). The very reason Blizzard nerfed Shields and Chains Heals to the ground at the beginning of Cata was to make sure we'd look at other spells as well, they just went a little over the top in those cases. They buffed both Chain Heal and Shields in 4.0.6 to counteract this, and now they drag Shields back down again. Blizzard is like a yoyo! Sometimes they will just "accidentally" yoyo you in the crotch when they try to show you some fancy trick.
Also, I love the wording of "We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent". 33% is "slightly more"? Me and Blizzard clearly don't agree on the definition of "slight", but oh well.
In other news, the other healers are becoming some changes as well (same source as above);
Are Shamans really in such a bad place? I won't disagree on them being in a badder(er) place than all the other healers, but is that due to lack of healing throughput or bad healing design? I will shamelessly ninja a quote from a shaman guildie of mine, when we discussed this matter on our forums, because he makes a really good point (the graph he is referring to is the one I linked up there);"We are also applying a hotfix for Purification for the Restoration shaman passive from 10% to 25%. We think that shaman healing per second is not as competitive with other healers and while we hoped to bring down Holy priest and Holy paladins (in particular) in 4.0.6, which we did, shaman still appear to be behind. In this case, it is simply easier to buff Restoration shaman rather than nerf everyone else or rebalance the encounters."
"I dont agree that the shamans situation is as bad as the graph says... however we are in a pretty tight spot today... not due to our abilities but due to our dependancies.
I think that Shamans can perform just as good as other healers as long as the positioning allows for effective use of healing rain and if the raid takes big chunks of dmg that gives us a chance to make use of our mastery.
I also think that we will perform better the more the healercommunity learn to not compete over the heals. A major part of our heals comes from helaing rain and earthliving which can be considered hots... today we tend to top ppl up quicker than needed using expensive heals wasting mana, instead of letting the heals already on the targets do its job."
Basically, shaman healing depends the most on the infamous triage healing, and the less triage healing there is, the tougher it is for them to compete on the meters. Shamans are simply the healers that get to do their job last, when everyone is down and under. If the other healers never let, or never are forced to let, people down low on health, shamans won't get to do much work. The design of fights is what could change this, but as Blizzard already have told us it is "easier to buff Restoration shaman rather than nerf everyone else or rebalance the encounters". Bye bye Triage healing? It was fun while it lasted. A 15% straight buff to all healing spells is a huge buff and resto shamans across the bloggosphere are doing the macarena (so is my resto shaman of course). I can't help but feel like Blizzard are overdoing it again however, will this go the same way disc did? We'll see.
And also (same source as above);
"We agree with the sentiment among some players that Restoration druids and Restoration shaman are lacking in the healing cooldown department. The shaman buff and Power Word: Shield adjustment above should bring all healers reasonably close in terms of throughput. The decision on who to bring then might end up being dictated by the strong cooldowns offered by paladins or priests."
Although I do agree that shamans deserve a nice raid cooldown I don't agree that they're really that replacable (not taking elite hardcore endgame guilds into account). They have a really nice setup of buffs (totems, BL) and they don't suck miserably at healing. But, all those buffs are provided by some other class as well (except mana tide) and their healing is at the bottom of the list. I wouldn't mind at all if Shamans got something like Tranquility/Divine Hymn or some damage reducing cooldown like Pain Supression/Divine Guardian/Hand of Sacrifice. I think the reason they don't is because they used to be special enough with their totems and BL, and now they're not anymore so Blizzard have to react to that.
Druids on the other hand don't need a raid cooldown. First of all they already have good raid cooldowns in Tranquility (which now is better than Divine Hymn) and Rebirth. Add Innervate to that. Also I feel like the unique healing style of druids is not easily filled by another class. Hots are so powerful I consider them to be sort of a "continous healing cooldown". Shamans even have a special cooldown to be able to do what most druids can do basically all the time - run and heal.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Impressions of Holy in 4.0.6
Although I am totally in love with disc at the moment, I wanted to try out the changes made to holy too. I'm just too curious to not to! We've already got a bunch of holy priests in my guild, so they usually want me to go disc, but for the easier bosses they don't mind much either way. We started out on heroic Halfus, and because I feel more comfortable in my disc spec at the moment, I decided to not start out experimenting with holy here (also we already had two holy priests, and the raid wanted a Barrier). Instead I did the rest of BoT and Conclave as holy, and here is my verdict - a slightly wiggling hand (which means; not much has changed, we're about as good as we used to be, but since everyone else seems to have gotten a buff, except paladins, it really doesn't leave us in a very interesting position).
Here were some of the questions I wanted to get answered when I tested it;
Is renew worthwhile now?
Although the hps of Renew wasn't improved, only the hpm, I had somehow hoped that might still be enough to make it more worthwhile. Many holy priests will have removed as much as possible associated with Renew - talents, spell usage, even glyphs (I didn't go that far yet, simply because I haven't found a better substitute). Renew is like the Akhenaten of spells, it goes its own way and so we don't want to have much to do with it. We wanted it to work kind of like Rejuvenation, blanketting our targets to give us time for the next heal. This is how it was used in Wrath, and I liked it. Renew was never as good as Rejuvenation, but in Cata it dropped to near uselessness. I removed it from my prime keybinding (right mouse) to a less important one (alt+left mouse). I hoped that since Shields got a comeback (and some comeback that was), maybe Renew would've become a little better as well. But the problem with Renews was never that they were too mana consuming, they just don't heal that much. The hps is about one fourth of our slowest and smallest heal - Heal. It has the same hpm as Greater Heal, but 1/10th of the hps. Instead we can have it on multiple targets simultaneously, but that's alot of gcds used to get it to some proper hps. Renew isn't bad, I just don't know what to do with it? It's not good for blanketing, it's not good for cushioning. Right now I feel like, and a commenter pointed that out as well, it is best used when you can't use any other spell. Like on the move and CoH is on cooldown. IF you were put to tank heal, Renew is a decent complement to rolling Heals. But how often will you focus on tank healing as holy? Not very often, I can tell you that. Nonetheless, I feel like that is where my Renew fits the best - as a complement to my Heal (or as mentioned, for something to do on the move).
So again - did renew become more worthwhile? Not really. The way we used it previously got buffed in that Renew costs less mana, but I don't see us using it more. The problem areas are still there. It doesn't heal much enough and it doesn't heal fast enough. It doesn't really have any own area of coverage, so to speak.
Do we really need State of Mind now?
I did play around with SoM before the patch to figure out just how useful it was. As I argued in another post, it doesn't really bring any extra healing throughput, and could barely be counted as a utility talent. It was a "comfy" talent, and the usefulness of those are very low. SoMs only usefulness was to make it slightly easier for us to switch stances. Having no point in it meant I had to recast Chakra every 30 seconds, and since I most often use Chakra: Serenity, that meant clipping my stance by some seconds (while casting Heal to refresh the new stance). That wasn't the end of the world, but having one point in SoM sure made things alot comfier. So that's what I used. Post-patch, I decided to try out using no point in SoM again, because possibly, they made it even less useful. Now SoM doesn't increase the duration of your stance, it lowers the cooldown of the skill, so that you can switch stance every 24 seconds instead of 30! Useful? Not very often. I rarely feel like getting stuck in the wrong stance is the problem. I can't remember the last time I thought "drat, I wanna switch stance noooow or everyone is going to die!". With some moderate amounts of planning, this will never be an issue. Considering Chakra now lasts for 1 minute and the cooldown is 30 seconds, switching stances has become alot easier. And best of all, we don't have to worry about rolling heals to keep up our stance (one of the things I didn't like about Chakra). It's not like we had to do it, but you know... So to answer my question - No. We don't need State of Mind.
What about PoH and CoH? How big were the changes?
Like I wrote in my post on disc, the nerf to PoH is very noticeable, but no one will be suprised about that. I was suprised at how good CoH had become however. 30% is alot of course, but I had it crit some 10-12k the other night. This of course makes Glyph of CoH completely mandatory. PoH will still be your main healing done, simply because it is spammable while CoH isn't. But if you keep CoH on cooldown it will at least be second on healing done, and in fights where we move alot, it will jump to first place. Like I wrote about in another post, this still means we got an overall nerf to our aoe healing output, but it doesn't mean we suck at it now. We're still among the best aoe healers, especially with spread out targets (where rains and efflorescences don't work very well).
And the new Prayer of Mending glyph?
I could whip myself. I had completely forgotten about it for my raid, so I haven't actually got to test it myself (and that means the pom in my logs is unglyphed, sadly). Unglyphed, one bounce has about half the hpm of a Heal, which means it had to bounce at least twice to be as mana efficient. It still meant most of us used it every cooldown, and in raids especially you could count on it jumping more than twice. Increasing the first jump by 60% healing effectiviness doesn't mean we'll change the way we use PoM. We'll still want to use it every cooldown. But it means that it has become alot better for our first target, which usually is the tank. So it's just a straight up buff. Considering our Major Glyphs weren't exactly the shizzle, we just got another mandatory major glyph.
And now, some logs! I only did 4 bosses as holy, and since I was disc for heroic Halfus the Worldoflogs will be mixed up with that, so I won't add that here unfortunately. Hopefully the logs will still give you an overall idea about how holy healing looks right now. Basically, it's still alot of aoe.
The reason I am really low in some fights and higher in others is due to various factors. One reason is of course because it takes a while to get efficient after not having healed that way for some time. Also I tried to experiment with the usefulness of Renew for the first fights. And another issue was that I always drop to some 2-6 fps on V&T (I forgot to cut out the comparison for that fight though. Or was I unconsciously trying to hide my abyssmal performance? Hmmm). Another reason could be an issue I graced upon in my post about disc healing. The better gear the raid gets, the more healing becomes like it was in Wrath. Triage healing goes out the window, healers have mana to start spamming their heals, and sniper heals are the ones that are going to "win". The reason disc priests and resto druids topped the meters back in Wrath was because their heals healed "first". Absorbs goes before everything else, and then resto druid hots lay there as a blanket of heals, always grabbing hp. People with slower heals like paladins and shamans dropped on the meters, not because they were less good healers but because their heals worked in a different way. They had the big slow heals. We are seeing this returning more and more now in Cata. Disc and resto druids lie high because of the mechanics of their heals. Holy used to be able to lie high because they blanketted the raid with Renews, which worked pretty much like Rejuvenations. That isn't the case anymore. Holy has become pretty much like Shamans in that they work mainly with slow heals. In a fight with little aoe damage (like Ascendant Council), holy and shamans will drop because they don't have the sniper healing. Does this make any difference to how good a class is? Not at all, it only means some healers eat the cake faster. If there is still cake left when they've had their share, the other slower healers will take care of it just as good. Just in another way. This is something I might expand upon in its own post.
Overall Holy is still as good as ever. Chakra has been made alot smoother, in other cases things work pretty much like before. PoH was nerfed, CoH was buffed, leaving us with basically the same aoe healing output. Renew hasn't changed much. Not much is new! But the healing environment changes, and so holy might seem like it's in a different position. But it really isn't.
Here were some of the questions I wanted to get answered when I tested it;
Is renew worthwhile now?
Although the hps of Renew wasn't improved, only the hpm, I had somehow hoped that might still be enough to make it more worthwhile. Many holy priests will have removed as much as possible associated with Renew - talents, spell usage, even glyphs (I didn't go that far yet, simply because I haven't found a better substitute). Renew is like the Akhenaten of spells, it goes its own way and so we don't want to have much to do with it. We wanted it to work kind of like Rejuvenation, blanketting our targets to give us time for the next heal. This is how it was used in Wrath, and I liked it. Renew was never as good as Rejuvenation, but in Cata it dropped to near uselessness. I removed it from my prime keybinding (right mouse) to a less important one (alt+left mouse). I hoped that since Shields got a comeback (and some comeback that was), maybe Renew would've become a little better as well. But the problem with Renews was never that they were too mana consuming, they just don't heal that much. The hps is about one fourth of our slowest and smallest heal - Heal. It has the same hpm as Greater Heal, but 1/10th of the hps. Instead we can have it on multiple targets simultaneously, but that's alot of gcds used to get it to some proper hps. Renew isn't bad, I just don't know what to do with it? It's not good for blanketing, it's not good for cushioning. Right now I feel like, and a commenter pointed that out as well, it is best used when you can't use any other spell. Like on the move and CoH is on cooldown. IF you were put to tank heal, Renew is a decent complement to rolling Heals. But how often will you focus on tank healing as holy? Not very often, I can tell you that. Nonetheless, I feel like that is where my Renew fits the best - as a complement to my Heal (or as mentioned, for something to do on the move).
So again - did renew become more worthwhile? Not really. The way we used it previously got buffed in that Renew costs less mana, but I don't see us using it more. The problem areas are still there. It doesn't heal much enough and it doesn't heal fast enough. It doesn't really have any own area of coverage, so to speak.
Do we really need State of Mind now?
I did play around with SoM before the patch to figure out just how useful it was. As I argued in another post, it doesn't really bring any extra healing throughput, and could barely be counted as a utility talent. It was a "comfy" talent, and the usefulness of those are very low. SoMs only usefulness was to make it slightly easier for us to switch stances. Having no point in it meant I had to recast Chakra every 30 seconds, and since I most often use Chakra: Serenity, that meant clipping my stance by some seconds (while casting Heal to refresh the new stance). That wasn't the end of the world, but having one point in SoM sure made things alot comfier. So that's what I used. Post-patch, I decided to try out using no point in SoM again, because possibly, they made it even less useful. Now SoM doesn't increase the duration of your stance, it lowers the cooldown of the skill, so that you can switch stance every 24 seconds instead of 30! Useful? Not very often. I rarely feel like getting stuck in the wrong stance is the problem. I can't remember the last time I thought "drat, I wanna switch stance noooow or everyone is going to die!". With some moderate amounts of planning, this will never be an issue. Considering Chakra now lasts for 1 minute and the cooldown is 30 seconds, switching stances has become alot easier. And best of all, we don't have to worry about rolling heals to keep up our stance (one of the things I didn't like about Chakra). It's not like we had to do it, but you know... So to answer my question - No. We don't need State of Mind.
What about PoH and CoH? How big were the changes?
Like I wrote in my post on disc, the nerf to PoH is very noticeable, but no one will be suprised about that. I was suprised at how good CoH had become however. 30% is alot of course, but I had it crit some 10-12k the other night. This of course makes Glyph of CoH completely mandatory. PoH will still be your main healing done, simply because it is spammable while CoH isn't. But if you keep CoH on cooldown it will at least be second on healing done, and in fights where we move alot, it will jump to first place. Like I wrote about in another post, this still means we got an overall nerf to our aoe healing output, but it doesn't mean we suck at it now. We're still among the best aoe healers, especially with spread out targets (where rains and efflorescences don't work very well).
And the new Prayer of Mending glyph?
I could whip myself. I had completely forgotten about it for my raid, so I haven't actually got to test it myself (and that means the pom in my logs is unglyphed, sadly). Unglyphed, one bounce has about half the hpm of a Heal, which means it had to bounce at least twice to be as mana efficient. It still meant most of us used it every cooldown, and in raids especially you could count on it jumping more than twice. Increasing the first jump by 60% healing effectiviness doesn't mean we'll change the way we use PoM. We'll still want to use it every cooldown. But it means that it has become alot better for our first target, which usually is the tank. So it's just a straight up buff. Considering our Major Glyphs weren't exactly the shizzle, we just got another mandatory major glyph.
And now, some logs! I only did 4 bosses as holy, and since I was disc for heroic Halfus the Worldoflogs will be mixed up with that, so I won't add that here unfortunately. Hopefully the logs will still give you an overall idea about how holy healing looks right now. Basically, it's still alot of aoe.
 |
| Valiona & Theralion - Lots of aoe damage and running gets the new and improved CoH to first place. People are also very good at using the Lightwell! (Although there was competition from two more Lightwells). Prayer of Mending should be higher, but I forgot to glyph it /facedesk |
 |
| Ascendant Council - I'm very low because there wasn't much to heal except in the last phase (I really should've saved the overhealing logs to compare myself with the other holy priest). Renew is pretty high on healing done, but then I am using both Glyph of Renew and the Improved Renew talent. |
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| Cho'Gall - More healing to do, I turn up the gears (maybe I am also just getting into it, after a break from Holy tbh) |
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| Conclave of Wind - No use comparing with the other healers here. Since we play on different platforms, one self will always be highest on the meters. Renew on top? :O Yes, very little aoe healing on this fight (only during the times I was healing Nezirs Ultimate). Most of the time I healed a tank. |
Overall Holy is still as good as ever. Chakra has been made alot smoother, in other cases things work pretty much like before. PoH was nerfed, CoH was buffed, leaving us with basically the same aoe healing output. Renew hasn't changed much. Not much is new! But the healing environment changes, and so holy might seem like it's in a different position. But it really isn't.
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