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Spiritual Guidance: Holy priest stat weights revisited
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. It's been a pretty slow week for priest-related news, so it looks like I'll finally be able to get back on schedule and finish my stat weight series. It's funny how class news always sweeps through like a tornado, grabbing up everything in its path for a short time before disappearing. Personally, I'd prefer something more consistent, but I guess the only way Blizzard could manage that is do away with the other nine classes and change the game to World of Priestcraft. One class, 30 different specs ("paladin" would be one of them), divided up between two factions: holy and shadow. It'd be like the Crusades, or Aion, except not as depressing as both of those were.
Spiritual Guidance: Discipline priest stat weights revisited
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. Holy talent trees, it's September! That means we're closing in on a year since Cataclysm was released, and it's about that time when priests start feeling really insecure about their gear and stat choices. (It also time to stock up on those Midsummer Ground Flower fireworks I like so much. The Harvest Festival vendors sell them.) Who knows what causes it, but it seems like whenever six months goes by without major community discussion on stat weights, everyone starts thinking they're doing things wrong. My mailbox is testament to this strange phenomenon and admittedly, even I'm feeling susceptible to it this time around. Therefore, I decided that I'm going to be revisiting priest stat weights today so we can take a look at how things have (or more truthfully, haven't) changed since Cataclysm was released. I'll also be examining at how those stat weights play out in a few standard healing playstyles that have developed since the expansion launch. This week, I'll be covering discipline first because I have to maintain the myth that I hate holy priests; then next week, I'll release an almost identical version for holy priests.
Raid Rx: No pally? No problem
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host, Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus, is on vacation. Hello readers! Your favorite Canadian priest is off on some sort of an adventure this week so I'm here to cover for him. (I don't know the specifics, but I heard something about a Princess Leia metal bikini and twenty boxes of tropical flavored Fruit Roll-Ups. Your guess is as good as mine.) Usually I just handle priest healing over at Spiritual Guidance (thus, don't be surprised by the heavy priest bias) but I figured I could take a stab at this. I should warn you though: I'm no phlebotomist. I might need to stab you multiple times. No big deal right? I've got Flash Heal. Anyway, when I asked Matt what topic I should cover, he relayed a story to me on how his raid leader refused to start their 25-man ICC because the group had no holy paladin. The raid leader wanted someone who could "heal the tanks." This forced them to wait 90-minutes for a healadin while available healing priests, shamans, and druids were turned away. Sounds frustrating, yes? Matt suggested I tackle the topic in his place (probably so I can take all the flames), so here I am. So here's the situation: you're putting together a raid and either your normal pally is absent, for some reason (read: debauchery), or you're in a pug and there are no paladins to be found in ye ol' trade chat. What do you do? Can your other healers handle the tanks or are you doomed to a wipe fest?
Spiritual Guidance: A priest's guide to tanks
It was just another Sunday when Fox Van Allen woke to the mid morning sun on his face. He sat up groggily and looked around his quiet apartment. A moment passed before he realized something was wrong -- it wasn't here. "Not again ..." he muttered, his brows pressed in frustration. It must have gone back to her again. "Dawn Moore ..." he sneered while pulling himself out of bed. He didn't know what it saw in her. "Priest healing ... Bah! Who would want to do that?" Still, Fox sighed, his doubts gnawing at him. Why was Spiritual Guidance so fickle? I love tanks. Likewise, there have been many tanks who have loved me. There is nothing more beautiful than the love between a tank and a healer. It's actually a little known fact that every great love song ever written was written about a tank and healer. Every little thing she does is magic? Totally sung by a tank. Don't leave me this way: sung by a healer. Still don't believe me? Check out Heroes by David Bowie; it was actually originally written as a tank x healer duet. Just look at the lyrics: "And you, you can be mean, And I, I'll drink all the time." See? So, if you want to find your great tank love, if you want a tank that knows how and when to blow each and every one of his cooldowns to maximize every lasting second of your epic encounters together, then you are going to have to rise up and meet him. You need to be the healer his healer could heal like (if she stopped playing hybrid-spec player classes.) Luckily, you're already a priest, the most alluring of healing classes, but don't think that's enough. You need to be more than just some healer who heals him -- you need to understand him. That is today's goal.
The Light and How to Swing It: Keeping the tank alive
Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we examine how to handle situations where the tank is getting destroyed, and we're tasked with keeping them alive. Tank death. It's one of the worst ways for a raid encounter to end: abrupt and usually absolute. In a dungeon, you've typically only got one guy who can take a few blows, and so the enemy will start cleaving your soft DPS. Blizzard balances each raid encounter around the idea of having two tanks, so the other tank is often busy with their own duties, and can't survive the double duty. With this era of multiple enrage timers and tight DPS requirements, there's really no room for bringing a spare tank for the 'just in case' situation. Holy paladins are uniquely designed to be the masters of tank healing. We've got multiple cooldowns we can use to reduce their incoming damage, and the most potent HPS toolkit available. A tank has to actually try to die when we've got the Holy Light firehose aimed at them. However, even with all these abilities at our disposal, a tank can still eat dirt halfway through an encounter if we're not playing our best. Read on for a discussion on how to keep your tank up during high damage situations.
Shifting Perspectives: Restoration 101
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, a quick and dirty guide to raising one's tree from a young sapling to a mighty oak, or other suitably impressive arboreal species. Whenever other columnists here write really good columns, I sit at my computer and swear a blue streak, for I am a jealous god. Sacco, damn him, turned out a great article on the basics of elemental shamans, and for a while I've been kicking around bits and pieces of 101-esque columns for all four druid specs. This was the last shove I needed to get that done. While I expect our new balance blogger (a.k.a. Murmurs, the person I will be forcing to do all my number-crunching in the future with bribes or, when necessary, threats) will address moonkin, I'll cover bears, cats, and today, trees. A quick note on what I want to accomplish here: I'm addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become reasonably competent healers quickly. By necessity, that means we're going to gloss over a few finer points; this is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. When I say (for example) that Improved Tranquility needs to be dragged out behind a barn and killed with an axe, I'm not going to spend paragraphs explaining why that is, or examining situations where you could actually get some use from it. If you think I've glossed over something truly important, please drop a comment and I'll direct readers to anything they really need to know.
The Daily Quest: The new Restokin druid blog
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.The name Lissanna is well-known to many Druids. She has been posting quality feedback and guides on the Official Forums Druid class section for years. Now she has started her own blog, Restokin, to post her guides, analysis and opinions on the many different Druid specs. Here's a sampling of what she already has up: Druid Leveling Guide (alt link) Feral leveling Balance leveling Low level Battleground advice Q&A and links to additional resources Additional advice & What to Wear Bear tips: AE pulling with Hurricane How to heal in 3.1: Restoration PvE healing (alt link) Tank healing – Nourish supported by HOTs Tank healing – Lifebloom strategies AOE raid healing – Wild growth and other HOTs Recommended talent spec(s) Glyphs for tank & raid healing Nourish testing on the Patch 3.1 PTR She also has many articles about the recent PTR changes and links to the community response on the Official Forums. Stop by and leave a comment.EDIT: As you can imagine, her site is getting a lot of traffic at the moment, so if you can't get through, try again in a little while. Alternative links to the Druid Leveling Guide and Resto Healing Guide are added above. Submit a guide, post, podcast or resource for inclusion in TDQ, by using our tip line and we'll consider it for a future TDQ post.
Raid Rx: Healing assignments
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. If you're tuning in from last week, you'll see I doubled the amount I was going to cover about paladin healing. Pictures are worth 1k words, you know. Enjoy! Being an avid WoW Insider reader and a Raid RX loyalist, you've been working hard to get ready for your first 25-man raid. You have your pre-raid check list done. Seven healers including yourself are ready to heal and be healed. This week I'm going to cover the final step in getting your behiny mixed up in some 25-man raid healing action: Healing Assignments. Or, as I like to call it: "This is where I control your raid life. Those cookies better be in the mail!"
