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Spiritual Guidance: Tools to evaluate a Discipline Priest
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. After a minor hiatus, Matticus examines the pain that many Discipline Priests experience: That they're just not good enough and how to even the odds. Apologies for the lengthy delay. I needed to grab some field data which took way longer than it should have. Coincidentally enough, Amanda Dean wrote about this very same issue a few days ago concerning healing meters and Discipline Priests. It still makes me sad every time I read about this. A raid leader or heal leader asks a Discipline Priest to go back to Holy because they feel their performance isn't good enough. In most cases, I think it's just them not truly understanding how Discipline works. It has always been about prevention not healing.
Spiritual Guidance: Reacting to the Circle of Nerfing
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Today Matticus will examine the Circle of Healing nerf. In case you've missed the news, it's been announced that Circle of Healing would be getting a 6 second cooldown. I had a feeling the nerf would be happening and I can't say I'm surprised. It does make me cry a little bit on the inside. Is it justified? How can we adapt? Read on!
Training Dummies in capital cities
If you've been exploring your capital city, you may have noticed something new. Grandmaster's Training Dummies now hang out in the cities, casually waiting for enterprising player characters to come and beat them. (I don't judge their lifestyles, I'm just reporting the facts.) If you're looking at the picture on the right, you're correct in your keen observation -- the clever training dummies even carry the flag of your opposing faction.The dummies are level 80, obviously in preparation for Wrath's release on November 13th. We were fortunate enough to get them in the content patch, but it does lead to a few questions. What are these masochistic constructions for? What is their purpose? Do they give you anything?Dr. Boom in Netherstorm was a staple of Hunters', Warlocks' and Mages' theorycrafting. The analysts of the communities would park themselves on a crate, and fire away at the goblin. Using AddOns likes Recount, or combat log parsers like WWS, they'd leverage the information to draw conclusions about which damage rotations and talents yielded the best results.Target Dummies fulfill the same role, but are a little more universally accessible. (Melee had problems with Dr. Boom, since they could find themselves getting blown up by adds.) They also have benefit of not being out in the field. While safe and protected in your capital city, you can fire away until you feel confident in the data you're seeing.There's a caveat to the dummies, however. Some spells (like Siphon Life) don't seem to give accurate results. Also, since the dummies aren't the specific bosses you'll be fighting, you're not going to get the exact same numbers as you would against the real thing. They're intended, after all, characters to practice on, not simulate the actual fights. Edit: As some commenters have pointed out, there are level 70 and 60 dummies to be had also, in the same general area as the level 80 versions.
Raid Rx: Analyzing your healers Part 4
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. That above is the fun product of Wordle. I creatively call it "WoW WWS Healing". Click on it to give it a spin of your own. So, if you've just randomly stumbled upon this multi-part saga on WWS meets healing, here's a lovely link to get you caught up. For the rest of you operating with mere short term memory lapses, this link right here will transport you to the example WWS we've been mulling about. But more on that after the jump.
Raid Rx: Analyzing you healers Part 3
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. A lot of times when I'm sifting through data on WWS, I feel like I need Sherlock Holmes' hat and magnifying glass. Today is no exception. If you're just joining the series for the first time, here's a link to get you caught up. The rest of you should recall that we left things on the cusp of actually going through WWS. Today we will rectify that and get into the nuts and bolts of WWS healing analysis. See you healing sleuths after the break!
Raid Rx: Analyzing your healers Part 1
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. Holyrizz, a Dwarf Holy Priest on Thrall, sent in this screenie of RoS. You know the best part? The tiny mage peeking out from under all of the raidframes. Click on it for a bigger version. Doing the assignments is the glamorous and most visually apparent part of being a healing lead. Every boss fight you dish out tasks with a hefty side of sage advice like "If it's on the floor, stand in it no more." and my favorite "Ok, one more time with feeling." after some rather nasty wipage. The healers look to you for guidance and the ability to use each class to their fullest potential. Well, in order to do that last part, you need to be serious about the real purpose of you position: setting the bar for performance expectations and helping every healer reach or exceed them. This isn't an easy task by any means, but it's definitely something that needs to be done to maintain the well-oiled machine that is your healer group. In this series, I'm going over how to analyze your healing team, including various tools and techniques, plus how to relay that information back in a way that motivates a healer to change. Note that I didn't say it'll motivate them to like you and bake you cookies. If that's what you're going for, you need to switch to Guild Nice Person and save yourself the heartache. Today I'm going to talk about my philosophy when it comes to analyzing classes you haven't played, plus what you need in place to perform a solid, thorough critique of you healers.
Hybrid Theory: Performance Assessment
Last week we discussed the fact that raw DPS is not a good indicator of the strength of a hybrid. The quality of a hybrid, or a person that plays a hybrid, will not easily be seen by looking at traditional damage and/or healing meters the same way you would for 'pure' classes.Before I go on, I'd like to reiterate my disclaimer on this topic: Just because your class or spec is not expected to top damage meters, that does not mean you should become complacent about your DPS or Healing effectivenessity(use it, love it) in a raid. You should always strive to be a better player and find ways to improve yourself. If you think you've hit the ceiling of what you can accomplish, work harder to break through it.
Raid Rx: Little guild, little guild... Let me in!
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. I had planned to finish the title with "Not by the hair on this Dwarf's chinny chin chin!!" but I've been foiled by the T5 hood. Sad. Many moons ago, I covered what a healing lead needed to get their 25-man off the ground and into mob-infested content. Today I'd like to look at the other side of the coin - what it takes to get into a 25-man raiding guild as a healer. There are two common paths into 25-man raiding. The first is bum a ride with your Karazhan groups to Gruul, Mags and onward into infamy. This is pretty ideal since everyone you're playing with is continually at the same level of progression, like gear and raid faction rep. You should also have some experience playing with your fellow healers, at least in pairs. The second way to get into 25-man raids is to transfer guilds, typically because your current one has been unable to progress for whatever reason. This isn't always an easy process, especially since guilds can be as picky as they choose and it's up to you to make a good impression. Since this is probably the most difficult way to get into 25-mans, I'm going to cover what you need to do to be successful at getting your foot in the door from entry to end-game guilds. Right after the break, that is!
Raiding without addons
Raiding is notorious for the number of addons necessary. Just off the top of my head there's ora2, Omen, Deadly Boss Mobs, Recount, and WoW Web Stats logging. If you're like me you're an addon addict to boot and probably have dozens, if not nearly a hundred, other addons to make life easy.But in all honesty, are these addons really necessary for raiding? There's some interesting arguments both ways.One of the most convincing that I've heard is that if Blizzard really wanted you to use things like Omen, they would have built a threat meter into the game itself. That does make sense in a lot of ways. The rebuttal to this argument is that Blizzard provided a huge Addon API for programmers to make things like Omen.
WoW Web Stats reveals the ins and outs of your raid
WoW Web Stats(or WWS), if you're not aware, is a popular raid assessment tool written by Lossendil. It has recently received some sweet loving from the author in the form of an overall revamp, and now bears a shiny new orangey-brown coat to accompany that same great taste we know and love. Using an uploaded combat log(/combatlog in-game) pulled from your WoW folder, WWS parses it into a neat and clean report for your perusal. Right at your fingertips is your basic overall damage meter and healing meter, and if you dig a bit further, there's so much more. With the ability to see each boss encounter and attempt individually, each players' spell usage, the buffs and debuffs on a character in any given encounter as well as a variety of other things, this is a tool that shouldn't be overlooked if you're in the raid game.
