Bitching About Nothing: Disc Tank Healing Experience in T11

So I never wanted to be a tank healer. I started my priest when BC dropped and my 40m guild broke up, unable to make the transition to 25s. All of BC I was Holy, because Disc was clearly a PVP spec @ the time. I stayed Holy until ToC came out; we were running with 3 good Holy Priests and that left almost no parity in the healing team. I decided to try Disc, just to give the raid some variety.

My early play as a Disc priest was still filling the same role as I did in as Holy, raid healer. I found the spec to be well suited to this task, pre-shielding for predictable damage spikes, and using penance and flash heal to catch up stragglers. It was fun. It was relatively easy. I topped meters.

Initially when my guild started T11 raids, we ran with 2 Holy Paladins, and both were very competent tank healers, so I was free to stack mastery to my heart’s content, and play in much the same ways as I did in LK, only substituting in heal and gheal and PoH for about 70% of all the bubbles I used before. It was fun. It was relatively easy. I topped meters.

Then we started to hemorrhage Paladins. One quit the game. The other just stopped logging in for some reason. We started recruiting. We had the one that was dead set on stacking mastery. He quit to go play in Rift. We had one that only showed up for 1 raid out of 3 a week. I’m using the term “showed up” in the sense that he came to the raid, not in the way that he did such an exceptional job that he was sorely missed when he wasn’t there.  Then we had a really good Pally healer for about a month. He did everything right, could keep up a tank no matter what happened, always used cooldowns without being told. He and his wife (a mage) transferred servers to go play with some RL friends that were coming back to the game.

So in all this I decided that I needed to become a competent tank healer myself. I find Disc has all the necessary talents to do the job, but not how I’d want to do it. My standard tank healing rotation is PW:S, Pennance to stack grace (and keep up my 4pc bonus), Gheal to take advantage of the hasted spell the shield gave me, then Gheal spam between ProM, Pennance, and PW:S /Weakened Soul debuffs. With points maxed in Train of Thought, and Inner Focus macro’d to Gheal, I never really needed to use Heal in tank healing situations. I think I figured out that ToT is worth about 1 manna free Gheal every 6 casts (with nothing cast between), and that puts it in Heal’s ballpark for casts per manna. I can’t honestly complain about utility overall; both Barrier and Pain Suppression are extremely good cool downs, but when an absolute massive heal is needed, I just don’t have the chops.

Thusly, Disc tank healing is very much about staying in the top 90% of your tanks HP pool. The only problem with this is other than the occasional few PW:S on people, or PoH in the melee group, much of Disc’s raid utility is underutilized. I find that on especially tank heavy damage fights I’m pre-casting & cast canceling to ensure that the tanks stay in a vertical position, when what I would like to be doing is flexing out to help with raid healing more.

I can’t in good conscience ask for a better cool down, and a buff to Gheal would be too good since I get nearly the same cast per mana as heal with it; so whats the fix? HOLY NOVA BABY! A decent buff to Holy Nova’s healing coefficient (even if I had to glyph for it) would be so awesome! It’s instant, so I could weave it in with my tank heals with little problem, it’s confined to a specific area, so it would rarely be OP. I know I know, I’m bitching about something that possibly nobody else feels the same way about. I know I could be (and do) Smite spam for Atonement etc. during my fee time, and that can effectively be construed as raid heals. I’m just not happy unless I’m also topping the meter all the time perhaps?

General 4.2 Impressions from PTR

So I’m starting to get really excited about patch 4.2 now that it seems to be shaping so very nicely. I may just be sick of the T11 raids. Not the fights themselves, I think they are well done an offer up a variety of different fight types and challenges. The zones however I find distinctly uninspiring. Firelands on the other had…wow. This raid zone delivers. I definitely get a feel for the fact that we are entering Rag’s how turf to bring the fight to him. I’ve PTR’d the 1st 2  bosses, and the fights defiantly seem like they are going to surpass T11 encounters in general complexity and boss design.

In addition, there are some changes coming down the pipe for healers that have me interested.  Some classes have what they consider to be significant nerfs (I’m lookin @ you Pally’s and Shamans), and Druids are getting a major mastery buff. Priests on the other hand seem to be staying fairly even with where we were, with the exception of the global healer change.

All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%).

Originally I was going to talk about the T12 Priest set bonuses, but they seem in a state of flux, swinging from a laughably bad lightwell clone one week, to potentially OP (on stacking phases) ability the next week.  

Talking To Mr. Robot

I stumbled into a very interesting website about a month ago called askmrrobot.com. The premise is simple, import your character and have Mr. Robot audit your toon’s enchants, reforges, and gemming to optimize performance. I find the interface very slick and easy to use, and it saves me tons of time with my old spreadsheets.

The only real gripe I have with the site, shouldn’t really be one because it seems unavoidable; there are no options to easily specify what your roll in the raid is. I’ve noticed that spell selection varies greatly for healers with role, and masteries complicate this further.  For example, Mastery is currently a much better stat for a Disc priest that is assigned to raid heal a 25 man because you’ll probably be throwing a lot of PW:S around big damage spikes. Conversely, if you run 10m raids as a Disc tank healer then you probably are looking more to haste and crit to support your assignment.

There are ways to account for these differences however; all stat weights are totally customizable, there is however no preset way to account for your play without fiddling with these. The problem is that, in general, if a healer is knowledgeable enough to properly evaluate secondary stats based on their role in a raid, then they most likely don’t need a site like Mr. Robot to help them work out issues with their gear.

All things considered, I do in fact use the site to help me finesse gear a bit. I haven’t noticed any drastic swings in performance one way or another, but it’s nice for quickly figuring out things like how much equivalent spirit a trinket is worth. Forum mods and site developers are very active and quick to answer questions, even when they are ones that have been posted 50 times before.  The development of their mobile app seems to be progressing nicely and will find its way onto my phone as soon as they put it up on the market. I urge all of the arm-chair-theorycrafters out there to give Mr. Robot a look.

~Swagg

Reference:

www.askmrrobot.com

Rebuilding: Pugging for Progression

     Sometimes it’s tough to rebuild. Personally I think one of the biggest problems my guild has faced since the release of Cataclysm is recruitment. In my experience, most guilds will invariably have some turnover when an expansion is released, and even to a lesser degree when a major content patch is released (or rather soon after). We’ve always run a fairly tight roster, preferring to have good people that you know how to work with over training up a bench roster of raiders. The problem is the best way to rebuild when those people leave.

     

     We have engaged in various forms of recruitment activity; from spamming in SW to posting on EJ and other well know WoW resource websites. By far the method we’ve gotten the best players from is pugging. Basically our strategy involves filling your remaining spots with pug players that undergo a relatively liberal vetting process, and the ones that work out well, you invite back. What I’ve found is that if you can get a good player to go with you into a raid 3 times, they will come to your website and fill out an app. It helps that we can clear about 6 bosses a night; killing bosses shows that the core of the group knows how to get things done. We usually end our 1^st day of raiding with some progression attempts at the very end. While these attempts do not always end in a kill, the overwhelming success that the run had in the night outweighs the discouragement that a pug may feel at wiping several times on that last boss.

     

     The downside to this strategy is that you have to teach a small number of people some fights every week. This is more of a strain on the raid leaders than it is for most of the group however; we don’t really schedule an official break, so most of us will dip out to get a drink or what have you while everything is being explained.

There is a definite benefit to not having pugs in the run however. As our ranks fill back up, fights are getting easier and easier. I’m really looking forward to the day when we get our last two kills and start hardmodes.

Going Gnome

I have a history of switching my toon around for racial spells. I started in vanilla as a dwarf priest for Fear Ward before it was a baseline spell. In Wrath, I decided I'd rather be human because Every Man and a bonus to spirit was more useful than Stoneform and a bonus to guns -.- . Now that I've done 90% of the Cata raid encounters, and all of the 5 man content, I've noticed that Every Man is nowhere near as useful as it once was. While I'll forever love my large dwarfish beard, I decided that I would try a gnome. I've found that I like playing a smaller character. The 5% bonus to mana doesn't hurt either! The only problem I have now is trying to avoid standing in the fire while admiring how frigging cute I am.

PW:S Nerf from 4.06

If you didn't see this coming then you just weren't paying attention. The PW:S spams-a-bility garnered by Disc priest in 4.06 was good, too good. There are multiple logs posted by top guilds with their Disc priests spamming shields like it was LK, being funneled Innervates and working a mana tide rotation just to keep it going. While nobody is going to complain about being OP from the 1st person perspective, I think most Disc priests can admit that it's more fun utilizing a full complement of spells and trying to maximize buffs and an effective spell rotation rather than clicking over and over again on unit frames with one button.  What I don't understand is how the 4.06 PW:S ever made it to live. Simple napkin math from looking @ patch notes indicated that with enough Mastery and SP, this was going to happen, so how did the dev's miss it?

Diagnosing Problems and Giving Feedback using WoL

He’s dead! My guild was previously stuck on Atramedes (bleh bleh bleh) for some reason for the last two weeks, and seemed to be making no progression what so ever on him. Every attempt ended the same way, boss @ 50%, and way too many people dead to kill the dragon for the number of shields we had left. We changed the strat many times. We stacked, we spread, we had designated people ring the gongs, we had whomever was kiting the flame ring their own gongs; the whole gambit. One of our officers (and healing lead) gave a mini-speech about how we seemed to struggle on fights that required more raid-awareness. She was right.

Feedback to fellow guidies is tough to give, and sometimes tough to receive. What I’ve found helps is getting cold hard facts to help support your feedback, and that’s where World of Logs comes in. It’s easy to argue with who said they saw what during the core of the fight, but a combat log sheds a stark like on the ins and outs of an encounter, assuming you know what to look for.

Step 1, figure out how people are dieing.

The easiest way I’ve found to identify what’s killing who, is to look @ the death log. Figuring out what’s killing people seems like a no brainer, but sometimes it’s tough when you’re in-game. When you’re looking @ an individual attempt (or series of attempts), try to find trends in what you see. For example in the screen shot below, I see players taking massive damage from Searing Flame, and then dying from Modulation.  

We figured out right away that we needed to get on the shield quicker to mitigate Searing Flame damage.

Soooo, we fixed our Searing Flame problem, but were still experiencing too many deaths, so back to the logs. The next logs we looked at showed tons of deaths from Modulation, but no significant damage in the log to proceed it. This means we had people carrying too much sound. So who do we talk to? We COULD just yell @ everyone not to stand in the fire, but yelling @ everyone often times does not work. Feedback needs to be personal, and specific. We started looking @ who was accruing too much sound by seeing who was getting hit by abilities that add sound.

You can easily determine who gets hit by specific spells right from the front page of your log. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the main overview page and look for the window called the Spell List. This is a list of all the spells present in the log, and you can see details by clicking on them. Sometimes you will see a spell listed twice, but you can tell which one your looking for as soon as you click on them. In this case, the 1st Sonar Pulse shows the boss casting the ability, and the 2nd is when a player gets hit.

In this fight, we wanted to see who having a hard time dodging the Sonar Pulse, and getting too much sound added before Modulation. We can do this by finding the spell name in the list, and clicking on the link. This log is about 8 attempts, and indeed some of these are added from standing in stuff on purpose to get dead quicker after a wipe is called, but if you’re looking @ this in a more real time scenario it’s more relevant.

Now that I’m looking at a specific detail of who is getting hit by the bad stuff, I know who I should talk to. I usually do this in a whisper before I call someone out in vent out of courtesy. In the case of this encounter feedback would look something like this: “Hey man, you are getting hit by Sonar Pulse a lot. When I say a lot, I mean like 50% more than me, and 80% more than someone who is doing this right. I can’t heal you if your 1 shot by Modulation, so dodge more circles for me and I swear your DPS will be better than if you’re tanking the floor for ½ the fight.”

It’s amazing how effective a whisper usually works for me in this type of situation. I hardly ever have to take it to the next level, which for me is calling people out in vent during the fight, now that I’ve used the logs to pinpoint who I should be looking at.

Stuck

Ever been stuck on a boss? I mean stuck like you've watched all the videos, read all the strats, tried every variation you can think of and STILL can't kill a boss? It's very frustrating to say the least and my guild is going though it now.

It's Atramedes. Yes yes, I know. He's not a hard fight. Super easy on 10m as well, but for some reason on 25 my guild cannot get this guy down. Our best attempt tonight was 29%, but that was pure luck (imo). We can do 50% every time, but after that, people end up dieing. This is especially frustrating when there is nothing you can do to help as a healer. There isn't a real stringent healing requirement on this fight, everyone has to stay out of the bad stuff or they get a full sound meter and get one-shot by Modulation. I have people getting 20-30 hits of the sound rings even though the raid leader is really good about reminding people that keeping your sound low and not getting hit with anything is the priority in this fight. It doesn't help that we pug 2-4 slots every week, but some of our better pugs are joining up every week. But still, DON'T STAND IN THE BAD STUFF is a fairly core game mechanic for all players, isn't it?

I'm a Lazy Priest

So clearly I'm a lazy player. I've been a bit put-off by heroics in Cata. It's not that they are hard specifically, I quite enjoy the challenges they present when I want to do something challenging. Almost ever since the introduction of heroics back in BC, they were never something I did when looking for a real challenge. Heroics for me were always something I could mindlessly do while joking in guild chat. I ran heroics the way I see other people leveling alts or fishing; just a way to pass the time between raids and farm up some gold etc.

Since Cata release, I've been slacking on gearing up my priest the way I should. I've been doing heroics, but only one a day for the VP's. Lazy lazy lazy! This past fweek I've resigned myself to the commitment it takes to run heroic dungeons. They are not hard per se, but simply contain mechanics that can not be taken for granted the way I used to while in dungeons. As a result of this revamp to WoW the game IQ of your average player seems to be starting to raise as well. I don't mean that as a slight, but if there were never any compelling reasons for a group to utilize CC and play effectively around the concept of near-deadly boss mechanics, and personal health management, then there was no reason for everyone to learn to play that way.

I've noticed something changing recently with how smooth my pugs are going in heroics. I can't really attribute it to my newly founded resignation on how Cata works, my experience in heroic dungeons by running them more frequently, the elevated game IQ of the WoW player base, or the fact that my gear is much better than it was. Possibly a combination of all of these factors even. Soon perhaps I may find myself coasting through heroics again. Then what will I bitch about?

Secondary Stat Rankings

So based on the PTR 4.06 changes to Disc, I’m re-evaluating my stat rankings for “secondary stats”. Without some drastic change to the current system, Intellect will be the “best” stat for the balance of this expansion, and since every bit of cloth in the game has it, I just weight it as the highest and ignore it afterward. Basically I feel like I need to bump Mastery up for better PW:S as opposed to keeping it on par with crit for DA. I also favor the Spell Power stat on weapons a bit more because of the changes in PW:S contribution from it. Haste moved up a bit since there may now be times when I'm trying to throw a bunch of shields out.

My new stat weights are:

Int: 1

Spi:  0.8

SP:0.7

Mast: 0.65

 Haste: 0.4

Crit: 0.4

My LootRank link is here if you want to see how it all shakes out gear wise.