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The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons
My interest in Final Fantasy XIV is not purely about racing to the endgame, but I am well aware there is an endgame. And while I'm easily distracted by the pursuits of other goals such as leveling Arcanist, I'd rather be on the early side to the party. There's nothing wrong with not being the first at endgame, but I'd prefer to beat the rush, if you know what I mean. So my playtime has been focused a bit more toward getting to the end of the story quick-like. This also means going through a lot of Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons. I'm not quite up to the last rush, but considering a lot of people I see are still moving into stuff I left behind a while ago, I'm still a bit ahead of the parabola. So let's take a look at the dungeons along the path from level 1 to level 50 after the initial set (which I covered back in beta).
Patch 5.4: Patch notes updated with smart heal information
The latest iteration of the patch 5.4 patch notes has been posted over at Wowhead, and they contain some changes to AoE heals. As Perculia explains, Several heals now function like smart heals, in which the 6 most injured friendly targets within range, and minor guardians are no longer targeted. Affected heals are Healing Rain, Holy Radiance, Holy Word: Sanctuary, Light's Hammer, and Spinning Crane Kick. Smart heals are heals which, as Perculia says, pick out the players who need healing the most, and put their heals into those people. Previously, spells such as Healing Rain would target everyone inside them, whether they needed healing or not. That included players, hunter pets, warlock minions, everything. What was the problem with that? Well, particularly in 25-man heroic raids, spells like Healing Rain were causing massive input lag.
Are AoE heals too effective?
There's been quite some discussion of late around healing circles, with Game Director Tom Chilton commenting on how there had been too much of a move towards smart heals, and away from intelligent selection, as well as asserting that part of slimming down the button bloat could well be to remove the basic spammable low-cost heal from a healer's arsenal. And now, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is joining the fray, with the tweet below about AoE heals. @1990249 @NizHao As a general statement, we believe we made AE heals (for all healers) too important / effective once again. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) August 29, 2013 There is definitely some truth in this, firstly for "set and forget" AoE heals such as Lightspring or Healing Stream Totem, which aren't necessarily standard floor-based or spammable AoE heals, but still heal smartly in the general area as opposed to requiring the player to pick a specific target. Secondly, when "spam X when nothing else is going on" is the best strategy, healing quickly becomes boring.
The Daily Grind: Which class is the best healer?
I don't always play a healer, but when I do, I must have the best. And when I consider the best, it's a healer that can spit out heal-over-times with machine gun-like speed. That's why I particularly loved the Druid in World of Warcraft and the Warden in RIFT. It's so dang satisfying to stack up HoTs and see my healing outpace the incoming damage. Of course, my tastes in healing aren't everyone's tastes, and I'm no expert raid healer or anything. For those who love to play combat medic, which class do you think is the best healer? Or, barring "best," which one do you simply prefer? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
I hate scenarios
Behind the scenes at WoW Insider, we've been talking a lot about scenarios recently, for various reasons - some of which we hope to be able to soon share! In those discussions, I relatively quickly had to come out and admit, yeah, I kind of hate scenarios. It's not that I think there's anything actually bad about them. Maybe individual scenarios have certain annoying mechanics, I honestly haven't done enough of them to know. But I kind of dread doing them, and avoid them for the most part, and there is a very simple reason why: when I first go into one, I don't necessarily know what I'm supposed to be doing. I cannot communicate how much I despise that feeling. It's why I love being a healer. Here is your job as a healer, in any dungeon or raid ever: you stay out of the bad stuff on the ground and you play Rejuvenation (or Holy Light, or Healing Wave, or whatever) whack-a-mole with health bars. It's great. It's structured and straightforward and it's always the same. Sometimes there are additional mechanics you have to be aware of but, here's the thing - boss needs interrupts? Not a healer's job. Mobs need kiting? Not a healer's job. Turtles need kicking? Not a healer's job. Boxes need clicking? Not a healer's job (usually).
Breakfast Topic: Are you a happy healer or a reluctant healer?
I was smirking my way past the Gordon Ramsay-esque commentary on Twitter recently (go to the tweet to view it in all its unblurred, NSFW glory) when it struck me: Blizzard has created so many incentives to play a healer. Obviously, they've worked -- but are the healers enjoying it? As a long-time healer, I find myself broken-hearted at the idea that players are going through the motions of healing simply because for the sake of faster random queue times or to fill a hole in a roster lineup. Healing by people who aren't passionate about healing? Healing by people who aren't glued to the action? Healing by people who might be watching "other things" on another screen, or eating pizza, or, or ...? Dear readers, we're talking about saving lives here. I weep. Seriously, I weep. Still, there seem to be quite a lot of healers going about their business in today's game. If you're a healer, do you enjoy the role? Did you choose to be a healer of your own volition, or were you influenced by queue times, role benefits, or the needs of your raid or guild? If you were nudged into healing by outside forces, has it been worth it? Are you a happy healer or a reluctant healer?
Breakfast Topic: Your greatest WoW save
I no longer remember the exact boss or who was raiding with me, but I do clearly remember having a conversation with a friend while I was healing Karazhan. At the time, I was grumbling that I didn't think we had the right group composition to do an encounter successfully -- but it was only after the group's other healer died that my friend agreed. Of course it was then that I decided this wasn't going be a wipe -- something I hadn't thought was possible until just then. (Certainly no one was more surprised than I was when I pulled it off.) Whether raiding or not, we all have close calls in game -- that was only one of many I've had. But it was certainly memorable. So what about you, dear readers? Share your stories, your near-misses, your especially memorable almost-but-not-quite deaths.
Crowdfunded 'My Carnival' is a video game designed to help children with cystic fibrosis
AccessAble Games has announced a new campaign to raise funds for a free video game designed to help children with cystic fibrosis learn how to perform their breathing exercises correctly. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that requires daily physiotherapy training, and while experts say there are some tools out there to teach affected children already, they're not as helpful and entertaining as they could be. Enter My Carnival, which will use a standard PC mic to track a child's breathing in and out, and can be adjusted depending on the child's ability. Once the breathing is tracked, My Carnival then translates that into playing games at an busy carnival, having the player do things like fill a balloon with a water stream. You can contribute to the project right now. AccessAble's "tipping point" budget of $29,000 would cover just four minigames, but the full budget of $40,000, if raised, would provide for eight minigames total. Currently, the team has only raised just over $1,000 with 23 days left in the effort.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Support in League of Legends doesn't mean healing
Out of all the roles in League of Legends, support is the most misunderstood. People expect supports to be similar to healing classes in other games, the kinds of characters who knit sweaters and cook dinner while the real warriors go out and fight on the front lines. When people first learn about the metagame, they often have the mistaken impression that because the support doesn't farm, there are fewer expectations of the playstyle. However, supports are less like MMO healers and more like the shortstop in baseball. He's not a baseman, but that gives him flexibility to be where a baseman can't be. He's constantly in the thick of the action, and his team regularly relies on him to make plays. In League, the support's freedom from farming gives her the freedom to roam, to fish for aggressive opportunities and shut down the enemy. She can even wander into mid lane or the enemy jungle in search of these opportunities. Far from a shrinking violet, the support is one of the biggest playmakers on her team. I got my start in LoL playing support, and it's a role I inherently understand well. I'm not really happy making aggressive lane plays and would prefer to relax and let my mechanics win my games for me (hence why I like ADC), but when thrust into the role of playmaker, I do reasonably well. For team leaders or just people who like to make others play by their rules, support is the role of choice.
Why don't you tank or heal?
I had an interesting conversation on Twitter with Bashiok late last night on one of the trickier questions Blizzard face in their current content, and indeed, in queue-able content since they introduced the dungeon finder, and latterly the raid finder. @jagoex The off-spec loot option in 5.3 might help a bit. Some future ideas may help a bit. How do we get more people to tank/heal? - Bashiok (@Bashiok) April 8, 2013 The key is, of course, the final sentence. How does Blizzard get more people to tank, and indeed, to heal? It seems to us here at WoW Insider that a key part to answering that question is to establish what's stopping people tanking and healing in the first place. Hence the question in the header, why don't you tank or heal? Why does it matter? Well, for those who don't tank or heal, there are currently rather long queues, in the Raid Finder as well as the Dungeon Finder. If whatever's stopping people can be dealt with, and more players take on these roles, then queue times will drop for everyone. WoW Insider has some theories about potential things that are stopping people, but do tell us what you think.
Why aren't more healers queueing for the Raid Finder?
While writing the Azeroth Ethicist article on whether it's ethical to "cheat" the Raid Finder's loot distribution system, I linked a post from The Grumpy Elf about the lack of healers in the LFR queue and the effect it's having on queue times. There was an observation there about how LFR healing may actually be more stressful than its normal counterpart: No matter what, you name it, everything in the LFR when done wrong screams "the healers will fix it". Dropping the bad where it should not be, no worries, the healers will fix it. Not using your defensive cooldowns, no worries, the healers will fix it ... even in the LFR if you do not follow mechanics it hurts and puts all the pressure on the healers. There are a lot of reasons why the LFR queue is so long these days for the average player -- ilevel requirements (though Blizzard's made it easier to get gear from older raids to address this), the sheer popularity of new content, and, as Ghostcrawler pointed out, tanks and healers who queue with their guildies -- but I think Grumpy Elf has a point. While I've mostly tanked in Mists of Pandaria, I healed my way through the Raid Finder in Dragon Soul, and the number of players who took unnecessary or avoidable damage was depressingly high. You expect that with anyone who might be new to the instance, but it wasn't fun seeing a raid with lots of people in normal or even heroic tier 13 ignoring, say, the players trapped in Hagara's Ice Tombs. So for the healers out there, here's a question: Are you queuing for Raid Finder raids? If you are, is the job noticeably more difficult or stressful than it is with your guildies? If you aren't queuing, why not?
Pro Tip: Damage meters don't tell the whole story
Some people /ignore others in random raids or dungeons for language or bad play. I add to my instant /ignore list those who spam the meters in raid chat. Anyone who cares about whose bar is the longest is already measuring on their own screen. Not only is the reporter almost always on the top (and conveniently never reports when s/he is below), but displaying the damage done for a fight to the same raid who's on the meter is just pure epeen spill. Asking for a damage meter is just laziness (or, in rare cases, a really crappy computer paired with a log-intensive fight). Let's not forget that problem of boiling a player down to a single number. All three roles of the holy triad have a complex set of abilities for every encounter.
Six simple tips for getting started in healing
A little while back, we had six simple tips to getting started in tanking. In the brief introduction to that, I asserted that tanking was among the more stressful and pressured roles in WoW at the moment, just because of the low numbers of tanks compared to others in situations like raids, particularly the Raid Finder. While the same is not true for healers in the raid finder, you're the only one of your kind in 5-man content, where you're likely to start to learn to heal. Healing's a little tricky to get started with, just because there's not much scope to practice out in the world, without other players. I would definitely have a go with all your spells out in the wild, just to see what they do, but it's only going to be when you get into an instance that your skills are actually tested. Starting as you mean to continue One of the things that's going to affect your gameplay and learning experience as a healer is how you're getting started. Leveling a new healer from scratch is a great way to go, as the low level dungeons are pretty well stress free, and you'll get your abilities little by little, so you can learn how each one works and, just as importantly, weaves in with the other spells at your disposal.
Officers' Quarters: An overhealing intervention
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Healing can be a tricky thing to evaluate, but crazy overhealing combined with mana problems makes for an easy diagnosis. This week, an officer wonders how she can approach the problem in a guild where constructive criticism isn't always welcome. Hi Scott: I am an officer and raid healer in a casual raiding guild that has a 10-man team attempting current content. We aren't progressing fast ... but everyone feels good about where we are. Except for me. Don't get me wrong. I am never frustrated with the group as a whole for our attempts. Most of us are parents with full time jobs and there are only a few who have the time to even hit VP cap during the week. Some are (rightfully) terrified of LFR. But almost everyone gives 110 percent. My issue is with my co-healer, who handles tank healing. This person is a good sport and a good player. They contribute to raid materials, are always willing to help gear folks, and they are always at raid on time and ready – three big wins in any officer's book. The issue is that they are a really bad healer. They are constantly overhealing encounters by 20 to 60 percent of total healing and are out of mana before the encounter is half over – after cooldowns. They are always on the top of the healing charts, but their effective healing (total healing minus overhealing) is way low.
Where does the pressure lie in healing?
I used to be a healer, once upon a time. It was in the days of vanilla, when being a healer consisted largely of staring at 40 bars, pressing Flash Heal, and occasionally mixing it up with a bubble or Heal Rank 4 while swigging potions like they were going out of style. It was a very different time, and healing was by and large much less complex than it is today. My guild didn't use Vent, so I did all the healing rotation calls via macros on my keyboard -- that's how easy healing was. I had time to press macro buttons and pay attention to calling things. But at some point that guild fell apart, as guilds are wont to do on occasion. And since server transfers weren't even a possibility at that point in time, I simply rolled another character on another server, vowing to take a break from any and all raiding. It lasted until paid server transfers were added as a feature, at which point my priest was promptly moved to my new server and I began healing again -- this time, in battlegrounds. I helped a lot of friends by healing them while they tried their hardest to get High Warlord in the original honor grind. So what happened? Well ... healing happened.
Officers' Quarters: My rant about raid roles
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. It's been a long time since my last rant, but I read something today that really irked me, and now I feel compelled to write this column. I don't want to quote the email because the person involved asked a question that had nothing to do with this topic, and he was really just an innocent bystander getting hit with the shrapnel of a raid team willfully blowing itself up. The part of his email that set me off was essentially this: "Our realm has very few healers, and we haven't been able to recruit one for months. As a result, our raid team is disbanding, and the raiders are going their separate ways. Our guild might lose every single officer except me." To this I respond: What a bunch of selfish jerks.
Resto druids vs. the world: Healer balance in tier 14
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. Today, it isn't enough that mistweavers are taking our gear -- now they're taking our jobs. The beginning of an expansion is usually a bad time to write deep, meaningful, and typically pompous posts on the "state of the class" and whither the druid and all that crap. For that matter, the beginning of Mists of Pandaria struck me as an especially bad time, because so much of what we were used to in WoW got changed and sent everyone scrambling. Toss in a brand-new hybrid class (the monk), and you've got the perfect storm of elements that make evaluating healer performance a dicey proposition at best. I poured myself a nice cocoa, kept an eye on World of Logs and Raidbots, and watched as the numbers rolled in and a legion of holy priests tore their garments and cried out in despair. Given that patch 5.1's now live, it seems an appropriate time to swirl that cocoa, take a look at how healers did in tier 14, and ask what's likely to change. As of now, it seems apparent that: Holy priests were actually right. Monks kicked your dog, seduced your mom, stole your XBox, and drove off in your car. Paladins are still topping the charts on certain encounters, but they're no longer dominating all of them. Shaman have improved a lot from their lackluster performance in Dragon Soul. Resto druids are back in same boat we were in at the beginning of Cataclysm, and it's not a very nice boat. Just for fun, here's a Shifting I wrote almost a year ago on healer balance in Dragon Soul, if you'd like to see how classes fared in the last tier of raid content.
Tanks, healers, and a daily problem
As someone who plays a guardian/restoration druid, I've had mixed feelings about Blizzard's move to the "dailies model." Of course, you don't need to be playing a tank or healer to feel that way -- it would appear that everyone on the planet has mixed feelings about the seemingly-endless march of Mists of Pandaria dailies -- but there's an special agony to them if you don't have a battle-ready DPS spec. Beefy mob health pools make killing anything as a healer last the approximate length of the Roman Empire, and because quest mobs rarely hit hard enough to make Vengeance a threat, tanks don't fare much better. I will grant that grinding Golden Lotus to revered did give me the opportunity to finish Gone With the Wind after all these years. (Spoiler alert: The North wins the Civil War.) Now, dual-specs exist for just this reason -- i.e., so you don't have to quest on specs that are really designed for group play -- and I could avoid this problem if I really wanted, but here's the thing: I really like being a tank/healer. Whatever it takes to be a truly competitive DPS, I just don't have it, and I will tank or heal 5-mans and raids, happy as a clam, and hopefully contributing to a lower dungeon queue. By contrast, dailies leave me trying to collect every quest mob in sight to get enough Vengeance to AOE them down efficiently, but it feels really inconsiderate to do this while other players are trying to get the same mobs. And other players are always after them, because everyone's on the same rep grinds. Every day is like being trapped in the starting zone of a new expansion, and I honestly don't know if I have it in me to do this all over again on my alts (who are -- surprise, surprise -- tanks and healers).
Raid Rx: Healing through Gara'jal and Spirit Kings
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. A few weeks ago, Joe wrote a piece about personal survivability on my blog. After healing some raid finder and pug runs, I wanted to help echo his sentiment. Whenever there's a new expansion, there's always additional abilities, bosses, and so forth. There's new players picking up the game and old players returning. It bears some reminding that you absolutely should help look after yourself. Your class has talents that helps you live. Use them!
Raid Rx: Healing through Feng
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. We'll get into healing tips for Feng momentarily but I wanted to examine the state of raiding healers. It's been a couple of weeks since Mogu'shan Vaults opened up for raids. We've got another week and a few days to go before Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Springs open. A quick cursory glance at the preferred healers show that monks are the class to be right now. They appear to be dominating at the 25 level while in normal 10s, we're seeing additional representation from shaman and paladins. Priests have received some minor hotfixes. Prayer of Healing and Prayer of Mending was buffed by an additional 25% not too long ago. 5.1 is introducing another set of changes to priests: Chakra: Serenity now increases single target healing by 25% (was 15%). Chakra: Sanctuary now increases area healing by 25% (was 15%). No additional healing changes have been announced for the other classes yes, but I'd expect some more tweaks coming down the road.
