pvp-healing
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Five ways to help a healer in random battlegrounds
Do you wish there were more healers in random battlegrounds? Do you hang your head on the many occasions when your faction ends up with just one healer and the other side has four or five? Isn't your faction just the worst at PvP? Your faction, hey? What scrubs. So, what can you do to improve these healer numbers? What can you do to ensure there are more healers backing you up when you charge a boomkin, priest and elemental shaman at Lumber Mill all by yourself with your trinket on cooldown? Help your healers, that's what. Here's some insight for you from an experienced PvP healer: healing random battlegrounds is really not that much fun. There are various reasons why, and I'll get to them, but what we're really here to talk about is how you can make your healers' experience a better one. Why should you care? They'll keep you alive if you do. And being alive is considerably more fun than being dead! 1. Identification In order to help out your healers and keep them happy in battlegrounds, you'll need to know who they are. Now, when I'm healing, the first thing I'll do on zoning into a battleground is right-click my character portrait, go through the drop-down to set my role, and choose healer. My hope is that, by taking these simple steps, I can point out to those around me that I'm healing. I'm going to be keeping them alive, or trying to.
Keys to PvP: How to heal with keybinds, clicking and movement
WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who never clicks anything but her fingers. Welcome back! My previous two columns in this series talked about macros and the use of focus targets, and more recently, keybinds, clicking and movement. The latter topic sparked some debate in the comments; if you read Blood Sport regularly, you will know that makes me a very happy bunny. There were a couple of comments regarding left-handed players, an area that I'm feeling quite bad about my complete lack of knowledge on. I've been running around some Battlegrounds with my baby hunter, trying to work out some ideas for you, and man, do you guys have it rough. I found that a hand position of OKL; resulted in the best access to modifiers, if that's any help at all! Oh, and a right-handed Razer Naga is not a great mouse for left-handed use. But the main topic I'm here to address is healing. CaylynnRunner, berna.bleeker, adyuaa, and PeterAnagirou all talked about the trials of PvP healing as users of Healbot, VuhDo, Clique and the like, and that's what I plan to talk about today. Some of the folk discussing healing weren't happy with my advice in the article and felt that they had to move with the keyboard, many saying that Healbot or similar addons like VuhDo make it necessary to do so. As someone who learned healing by leveling healing characters purely in their healing specs, I had a similar battle on my hands when I went into any Arena or Battleground.
Your first Battlegrounds as a PvP healer
WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs. You've probably heard it approximately a hundred times in Battlegrounds, particularly if you play as either Horde or Alliance. Yep, they both have their moments -- the faction you're not in is no better than the grass is really greener on the other side of the walls of Orgrimmar. But that aside, you've probably heard people bemoaning the lack of PvP healers. "Hey," you think to yourself (like a good, contributing member of the team), "I've got that healer I leveled ... Maybe I should bring that character along to the next Battleground I do!" That would be your first experience of the sheer, unadulterated joy of healing Battlegrounds. You may note a small quantity of sarcasm there; you'll be cursing your kind heart as you're repeatedly ROFLstomped by two DKs. So how do you avoid your repeated untimely demise and start topping the healing chart in your local Battleground? And how do you transfer your skills into the Arena? First and foremost, PvP is not PvE. Well, duh -- revolutionary stuff. But seriously, the skills you learned in PvE won't really apply here. The damage is not predictable. You can't prepare for it. There aren't phases. Standing in the same place in each encounter won't work. You don't have a tank whose job it is to protect you. And in one similarity to PvE, once people figure out you're the reason why they can't kill that warrior, they're going to be after you. Sadly, people can't be taunted, even with yo mama jokes. Also, none of this is true -- but I'll get to that much later.
Patch 3.3.2: PvP healing change incoming
As many suspected might have been the case, the recent resilience change seems to have made healing a little too strong in PvP. To continue the efforts of slowing down the pace of PvP in the final arena season of Wrath of the Lich KIng, Zarhym has made the following announcement regarding healing Patch 3.3.2: Patch 3.3.2 is bringing about a change to the way healing functions in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp. We have applied a debuff to all players in these zones which will decrease the effectiveness of all forms of healing by 10%. This includes heals from items such as Healthstones and potions, however, it will not affect defensive shields or auras. This change is being made to balance the effectiveness of healing against the recent buff we made to the damage reduction component provided by resilience. Rest assured that we will be closely monitoring the effects both the healing and resilience changes have on Battleground, Wintergrasp, and Arena PvP game play to ensure that fights last a reasonable amount of time without overtly skewing the effectiveness of any class, role, or team combination. Should we hear any further announcements today, we'll make sure to keep you posted.
The Colosseum: Footwerk of Korgath
The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.Footwerk the Druid is a member of highly rated 3v3 team, "Heal me Im strong" in the Vengeance battlegroup. In a time when healers are struggling to excel in the Arena, Footwerk has managed to make the traditional Druid-healer format a viable and powerful composition.And while we have the bad news that Footwerk may be leaving WoW, we were able to catch up with him to grab a few words for the Colosseum. Obviously, he wants to thank everyone in his guild, Drama, for all the fun and wishes them good luck in the upcoming Ulduar. But, good news for the Colosseum, he had a lot more to say.
Breakfast Topic: Should there be honor in PvP?
And by honor I don't mean the honor-as-currency system that's currently in the game -- I mean a sense of personal honor as in, there are things you make a conscious decision to avoid doing just as a moral gesture. I thought of this recently after a truly miserable losing streak in Arathi Basin. I wound up in three consecutive matches with a full complement of 15 Alliance players to 7 or 8 Horde (with both sides being PuG's, mind you). Being out-numbered and out-gunned sucks no matter what, but it's made immeasurably worse in places like Arathi Basin and EOTS due to the dwindling number of sites you'll have to rez when your side is being utterly destroyed. There was one particularly awful game where the Alliance decided to see how much honor they could get from us before the inevitable 4 or 5-cap ensuring their victory, and simply zerged us in the graveyard as we rezzed (or tried to). The feeling was made worse by knowing, having also played Alliance in BG's, that Horde would almost certainly have done the same thing had the situation been reversed. PvP is the subject of a lot of emotional dicussion in the WoW community as a result of situations like these, and I think we can all agree that it's not the losses that drive you nuts so much as knowing that the game is full of places and times where no amount of strategy or skill will keep you alive.There are a lot of things in PvP that I just don't like being a part of. I don't attack fellow Druids unless I'm attacked first (yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a surprising number of Druids subscribe to this). I don't join in when an enemy player is obviously being dog-piled. I don't /spit on opposing players or do other rude emotes, and I don't participate in griefing. There's not much about WoW's PvP system that's really all that fair to begin with, especially when compared to games more explicity designed around PvP combat, but in the back of my mind there's still that notion that your opponent should at least have a sporting chance. I risk being called a hopeless carebear for this statement, but I think "honorable kills" are a lot more enjoyable when there's a measure of actual honor involved.
Addon Spotlight: Healbot Continued part 2
Starryknight, GM of the iHorde guild on Executus, has written a comprehensive guide to configuring Healbot Continued. The developer of Healbot Continued actually pointed me in her direction, so you can bet this is a decent write-up. It also prevents me from having to re-invent the wheel, so kudos to Starryknight! Instead, I thought I would share some highlights of the guide, and my own tips and tricks to using Healbot Continued.Many of you who read part one of the Healbot Continued saga have asked if this addon is suitable for PvP healing. As it turns out, Healbot Continued has a skin pre-loaded with battlegrounds in mind. Called the Alterac Valley skin, it will build a frame that is well suited to healing your battleground group, but wait, there's more! Healbot Continued has a built-in range finder, which will fade out individual players' bars if they are out of your healing range. This is a great way to avoid wasting heals, although it can't save you from losing a heal because someone leaves your maximum range while you're midway through a healing spell.
Mortal Strike for all!
In the wake of the most recent PTR change to Flametongue Weapon applying a -50% healing debuff over 5 seconds and -- it now appears -- the Flametongue totem itself doing the same for others' melee attacks, a number of forum threads have popped up questioning the increasing number of these debuffs in the game. The funniest asks, "Is there some sort of Mortal Strike non-proliferation treaty that stops me from having Mortal Strike on my priest?" (short of Hex of Weakness, I guess). Suggestions include an MS effect on Crusader Strike, "MORTAL SHEEEEEEEEP!", and "Mortal Portal" for mages.The best argument I've seen is not that Mortal Strike or MS-like effects like Aimed Shot are themselves imbalanced, but they're bound to seem that way if healing is overpowered in PvP. Healing per second is nearly always more efficient than damage per second if you're specced for it, although that's cold comfort to yours truly while resto-specced and under heavy fire in battlegrounds or arena. Nobody knows if the newest version of MS is really going to help Shamans in arena, but between this and the nerf to drinking, it does look more and more as if PvP is increasingly being balanced around the notion of healers staying exposed (and vulnerable) for longer.
