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Raid Rx: Sports can help you heal better
Raid Rx has returned from retirement! Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. This week we look at how sports can help you improve your game! Spring is well underway in Azeroth! Although in my area, it ends up taking a little longer than most. This is a great time time for you to get back outside and start participating in a variety of sports (literally, of course). Most of you that are familiar with me know that I love playing street hockey and volleyball! I've started participating in those activities again and it reminded me of several aspects that are transferable to us healers. Winning teams share a certain amount of traits. Likewise, winning healing teams are no different. Hockey teams employ different strategies. The New Jersey Devils played heavy defense during their cup winning years while Detroit plays a strong puck possession style with emphasis on controlling the play. Your healing team could have different combinations of healers. Perhaps your guild has 4 Resto Shamans. Maybe your guild doesn't have any at all. Here are a few common themes that I've noticed.
Spiritual Guidance: Sartharion with all drakes
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. This week Matt offers some tips and insights for the healing Priests that are struggling with Sartharion and his 3 drakes up Welcome to the toughest raid encounter that Wrath has to offer. By the end of the first night, you will wish you decided to stay home and watch the latest episode of House instead.
Spiritual Guidance: The Undying experience of a 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 PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week Matt offers some tips and insights for the Priest aiming to go after the Undying title! I wanted to share some thoughts and tips this week on a successful Undying run I participated in with my guild. It continues to be one of the most challenging achievements in the game. To put it bluntly your entire raid group must navigate and clear out every encounter in Naxxramas without dying to any of the bosses. The amount of coordination, luck and skill needed is high. Remember that dying on trash is perfectly okay. It's the bosses where you can't afford to lose players on. But I want to let you all in on a secret. There's a trick to earning the Undying.
Raid Rx: 5 Heroics to help toughen your healers
Raid Rx has returned from retirement! Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! 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. This week we look at which heroic encounters will help strengthen your new healers and why! A question I get asked from healers is how can I prepare myself for raiding? On the other side of the spectrum, guild leaders ask me how can they judge or measure a healer in other areas other than healing output. Let's knock out two birds with one well timed stone.
Spiritual Guidance: PTR loot and hymns that will never be seen in game
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. This week, Matt checks out some of the PTR loot along and a suggestion of Hymns that we will never see in game. Have you checked out some of the drops from the PTR yet? There's a great staff from Iron Council that I'm definitely eyeing. I know a lot of spellcasters favour main hands and off hands. I always had a soft spot for staves (because of their looks). But most staves just could not compete with their main hand and off hand counterparts. Rapture will be an upgrade I'll be eyeing. There's also the Ironmender which is an offhand complement for Priests. I haven't seen any spellpower main hands yet but I'm sure there will be some popping up soon enough.
Spiritual Guidance: More 3.1 thoughts
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. After playing around some more on the PTR, Matt's got some more extended thoughts. That's a picture of the upgraded Penance! It looks really weird when you cast it on yourself. I imagined that the bolts would fly forward before arcing skyward and back down towards the original caster. Too much to hope for sadly. Maybe in a future patch! Hymn of Hope makes its triumphant return back to the Priest arsenal! For the past week, I've been receiving emails and DMs on Twitter asking me the same question: Why put in a Hymn of Hope glyph if Hymn of Hope is going to be removed? My personal theory is that it was just a general brain fart. Upon closer inspection and reflection, the motive's a bit different. We know Resto Shaman mana regeneration is the new standard that all healing classes are going to reach. Perhaps the theory is to nuke certain Priestly mana regenerative capabilities and then start from there.
Raid Rx: 3 steps to assigning healing roles
Raid Rx has returned from retirement! Every Thursday (usually), Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! 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. This week we're going to cover the steps in figuring out who heals who! Last week I looked at addons for the healing lead. I suggested using a combination of macros and addons like Surgeon General. But what about the actual logic and process of assigning healers themselves? As in deciding who covers who? That's a much more trickier process that comes with time and experience. I'll share some of the basic mindsets here. This week's Raid Rx is inspired by a topic from Plusheal. When assigning healers, I try to have a general idea of what the players and the classes excel at. I keep that in mind when picking out the healers and tanks.
WoW Patch 3.1 PTR Holy and Disc Priest changes
A lot of changes are being introduced for both types of healing Priests in the upcoming 3.1 patch. Some of them are expected and others are unexpected! As always, check out the full PTR notes (which are most likely incomplete). The promised changes to increase Holy's PvP ability don't seem to be here yet. I rubbed my eyes when I saw it because this wasn't the Holy tree I remembered. As an overall grade, I'd say there are some serious buffs being doled out for healing Priests. Our Area of Effect heals have been ramped up! Some notable highlights? Rapture has some new additions to it (It grants energy, rage, mana, or runic power to the target when it is removed). Prayer of Healing is no longer restricted to the Priests current party. Renew get's some extra nice bonuses in the form of an instant-application aspect and an overall spellpower bonus. Keep reading! Disc and Holy changes are after the break!
Spiritual Guidance: Too many Disc Priests?
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. Are there too many Disc Priests? Is it becoming overwhelming? The popularity of Discipline has started to spread. I don't believe it's been entirely adopted just yet. There's still a few hold outs who continue to think that Discipline is not able to hold it's own against the other specs and classes. By hold its own, I mean stand up and compare to. Now obviously other healing classes will believe that their class is superior and they should because we do have a certain loyalty to ourselves. I respect the capabilities of Paladins, Druids, and Shamans. I don't think they're inferior. But I'm still going to be a Priest for life. There can never be enough Disc Priests! I am proud to be a Discipline Priest. It is not just a style. It is not a simple technique. It is a way of life. I know that there are closet Discipline Priests out there. I get emails and messages from them often. There's always questions out about differences between a Holy Priest and a Disc Priest.
Spiritual Guidance: Your dual spec questions answered
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. Welcome to the delayed, dual spec edition! Dual specs will be here soon! What specs will you be going for? The marching orders have been given. With the green lighting of dual specs in the upcoming 3.1 patch, Priests of any discipline will be faced with an enormous decision that dwarfs the question of going Holy or Shadow (and Disc)! First, a brief history lesson. For the longest time, the healers struggled with questing. Soloing and doing dailies was a monumental effort due to the of our spec to Smite those that would oppose us! In Burning Crusade, our offensive spellpower was raised to so that it became a fraction of our healing spellpower. In Wrath of the Lich King, these become consolidated into one overall stat. We cried out that respec costs cut into our dwindling money pouches. Mistakes in one point were often costly. It wasn't fun having to switch from raiding to PvPing or farming. We ached for a method that allowed us to switch roles without the headache. Blizzard listened and they gave us dual specs! So, now what? How do you, the Priest, figure out what your second spec should be? If you're a tried and true healer who loves the thrill of healing in any environment, then you may wish to consider both a raiding and a PvP spec. If you're the type of player who prefers the ability to do some solo action, then you might opt for a healing and shadow type build. If you're not into PvP or that interested in doing any solo work, then a healing and healing spec may be up your ally.
Spiritual Guidance: Mana nerfs and Priest buffs
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. Spirit nerf's are coming! Is it really doom and gloom for the Priest class? Eliah did a terrific job summarizing the mana regeneration changes that are slated to strike in 3.1. The general feeling I'm seeing right now among the Priest community appears to range from the "OH NO! NO MORE MANA" to the "Eh, guess I better load up on Mana Pots since they're cheap". On a side note, when is the last time you had to pot in a raid? And I don't mean from immediately being revived in the middle of a fight. I distinctly remember running out of juice on Kel'Thuzad a month or so ago. In any case, there are some rumblings abound as to what sort of impact this nerf would have to our playstyle. The better question to ask is what impact this nerf would have to our gearing, gemming, and enchanting choices. The underlying point that seems to jump out at everyone is that Spirit regen is being decreased. Let's see what this implies for the Discipline and Holy trees respectively.
Raid Rx: Help! How do I start organizing my healers?
Raid Rx has returned from retirement! Every Thursday (usually), Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! 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. This week I explore a few questions that new healing leaders have. This is a question that caught my attention on the Plusheal forums. Julanna just became their guild's de facto healing lead and had some important questions to ask. So, I have become our de facto healing lead. We have very little structure. We need some. I am not sure how to get some coordination going between our healers. How do you communicate with your healers? How much do they expect from you in terms of instructions or advice? Is it before the raid? During? How can you get the raid leader to understand that healing assignments other than "don't let people die" are important and make things go better (especially if it is a tank with a healer alt)? I am not positive about assigning other classes of heals, and I am the only holy priest. Any resources out there I should look at? That may inform me of other classes basic skills, spells, etc? Or any advice you may have from a newb officer, newb healing lead, newb progression raider from a new guild? I'll break up these questions individually and answer them based on my own experience.
PvP upgrades incoming for Shadow Priests
I have to be honest, this sort of falls into the realm of non-news here, but it piqued my interest anyway. Ghostcrawler recently hinted about some PvP upgrades for Shadow Priests, and it came up again last night. GC didn't give any specifics, only said that they hoped to announce the details 'soon.'Despite the lack of details, I'm really looking forward to these announcements. I'm a Shadow Priest at heart, and while I'm perfectly fine with respeccing for different parts of the game, it would be nice if I didn't need to respec Discipline if I wanted to be truly effective in PvP. The biggest thing I'd like to see is some more debuff protection. Yeah, we could use more survivability for sure, but right now I think a lot of classes have that issue. My biggest Shadow Priest specific annoyance is not being able to keep DoTs up on a target reliably.So we'll see what happens. Whatever it is, I'm looking forward to it. It is fun to go Discipline now and then, but being able to hold my own as Shadow would be pretty nice. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
Spiritual Guidance: Secondary stats and what to stack
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. Some requests were made recently to help newer Priests figure out what secondary stats are important and what to aim for. Matticus shall help! I know when I started playing World of Warcraft, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to secondary stats. To be fair, stats like Hit didn't exist back in the day. This post is meant for newer Priests who aren't quite sure what these secondary stats do or what they mean. Just to be clear, primary stats are base attributes like stamina and intellect. Secondary stats are things like haste and critical strike rating.
Spiritual Guidance: 3.0.8 for Priests
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 looks at the upcoming 3.08 patch. I thought we'd be getting the 3.0.8 patch last week. I guess I need a new magic 8 ball. Hopefully it will come out this week instead. In any case, here's several of the big changes you can expect along with a list of bug fixes. Mind you, most of these aren't game or class breaking type changes. At least, not to me. You may feel otherwise.
Spiritual Guidance: What each type of Priest can do and arena musings
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. This week, Matticus looks at what a Priest can do and reflects on his experience so far in arena. I managed to get myself into a pickup heroic Naxx group the other day. No, it wasn't on my Priest. The Priest is my baby and I can't lock him into such raids while we're still raiding. It was my Shaman that I took into heroic Naxx. After Flame Shocking and Lava Bursting my way through both Spider and Plague Wings and the first two bosses of the Military Quarter, we came across the Four Horsemen. (Yes, there is a point to this, keep reading!)
A big bag of Blu-Ray hurt for Apple
Just the other day I was wondering on this very site just where Blu-Ray has been on Macs, and yesterday's big Apple event gave us the answer: Blu-Ray, according to Steve Jobs, is just "a big bag of hurt." Apple says they haven't settled on an HD format yet because no one else has either: "the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting until things settle down and Blu-Ray takes off in the marketplace," said Jobs. He might as well have added an "if it does" on the end of there -- Sony, spurned by the Betamax loss, wants to make sure they get credit when Blu-ray gets popular, and for that very reason it may never be.In fact, if Apple has their way, there may not be a physical media of choice for high-definition content -- Phil Schiller pointed out that iTunes has plenty of HD TV and movie options without ever tying Apple down to licensing a specific format.Which is exactly everything we said last week. And I'm drinking the kool-aid, actually -- a while back, I was one who would have said that people need their physical media, but nowadays, I'm not so sure. I haven't bought a DVD, HD or otherwise, in months and months, and yet I've purchased and seen plenty of HD content in iTunes and over my Xbox and cable connection. Blu-Ray may have won the HD disc format wars and claimed the country, but maybe there's nobody living there any more.
Wrath of the Lich King will ship on DVD only
One of the most annoying things about installing World of Warcraft is that chances are your installer discs are in CD format, hence it's "discs" instead of "disc." That means you do a lot of swapping CDs out while installing the game. Okay, so that's obviously not a deal breaker, but it's still annoying. We have good news: both the Collector's and regular editions of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion will ship on DVD. Hurray! We already knew this about the Collector's Edition, but that the regular edition will too is good news.Here's the bad news: they'll only ship on DVD. So if you're got a really, really old computer (and WoW will run on really, really old computers so you might), you'll be scat outta luck. That is, until a digital download version comes out. Inevitably it will, of course, but it probably won't be on day one. No Death Knight for you!Thankfully, this is not 1997, so we imagine that only a very tiny minority of WoW players will be bothered. And if you are affected, go buy a DVD drive for 20 bucks, you cheapskate! We thought we'd give you the heads up just in case.
Koraa chats about Priests
We're a little miffed about recent priest changes here at WoW Insider. Both Holy and Shadow were worked over pretty well with the nerf bat in build 8926. Fortunately, Koraa (class designer) has announced some upcoming changes that are, for the most part, buffs, and that show that they're definitely thinking about the class. Let's see what's behind the curtain. Holy: Holy Concentration will "scale with spell crit instead of just a flat %." I read this as meaning that instead of being a 6% chance to gain HC, the chance will be some fraction of your Holy crit chance. But why not just make it a 50% (or whatever) chance on heal crit? Divine Hymn now has an HoT in addition to the CC. This makes it more obviously a clutch spell, and I think it will be handy. Blessed Recovery is getting buffed to "roll" like Ignites do used to: each new crit will add to the HoT and refresh the duration. Lightwell is gaining the ability to show how many charges are left on it by clicking it. OMG, finally! This spell is now totally worth taking. Please scrap Lightwell already, people.
8926 a test of faith for Holy priests
If it hadn't already become clear that 8926 was a nerf build, looking at the list of Holy Priest changes would make it pretty obvious. Let's go over some "highlights," shall we? Twin Disciplines now only affects instant spells (previously affected all spells). This is utterly ridiculous. Alright, it may have been marginally overpowered before, but now it basically only affects five six spells: Renew, Power Word: Shield, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Shadow Word: Pain, and Shadow Word: Death. It no longer fulfills its function of being decent filler for people who aren't Disc to get to the next few tiers down. Improved Holy Concentration now increases the chance you'll enter Holy Concentration by 1/2/3% (down from 4/7/10%) and also increases your spell haste by 10/20/30% (down from 20/40/60%) on your next (down from "three next") Greater Heal, Flash Heal or Binding Heal spells after you gain Holy Concentration. Lasts 20 sec. So they took a talent that people were already complaining was underwhelming and hard to use, and cut it by two-thirds. Excellent. Test of Faith now increases healing by 2/4/6% (down from 5/10/15%) and spell critical effect chance by 2/4/6 (down from 4/7/10%) on friendly targets at or below 50% health. Same story as Imp. Holy Concentration. Why would they do that? I honestly don't understand.
