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Ever surprise yourself?
Today, in Arathi Basin, my Tauren warrior took on six Alliance and won. This isn't me bragging: I fully expected to die. Usually when I do this kind of thing... in fact, in 99% of the times I've charged into a pack of Alliance or Horde when PvPing, I do die. It's usually a last ditch attempt to prevent a flag capture. I don't expect to live through it. But today, through some weird combination of skill, luck, and some poor choices and gear on the part of the alliance, I came out of it alive and they all died. (That rogue who showed up at the end helped, I admit it.)I know it won't ever happen again, but for just that moment (long enough for a mage to ride up and fireball me down, since I had like 200 health left) I honestly felt like I'd learned something new, made a shift in how I PvP in World of Warcraft, and even surprised myself with how good I could actually be at a part of the game I've never really felt that I excelled at. Now, I still expect that the next time I try this I will die, but I won't go in thinking death is certain, and that changes the way the whole thing feels. Almost certain death, slim chance of success, what are we waiting for? That dwarf knew what he was talking about.
Spiritual Guidance: Thirteen dos and don'ts of a raiding holy priest
Our Priest column is back! Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is now Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus, and this week he has compiled a list that raiding holy priests may find beneficial whether they consider themselves new or veterans. I've raided for a long time on my priest. My first real raid started with Zul'Gurub before I graduated to Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. Unfortunately, I started late in the game to the point where I never really appreciated AQ 40 or Naxxramas. Years later, I am now working my way towards Illidan after mopping the floor with Archimonde. It's difficult for a holy priest to begin raiding. The learning curve can be steep at times because there are so many options available. That being said, there are a few lessons I've learned from raiding that have proven universal. They had as much application back then as they do now and I wanted to pass them on to any new budding raid priests. Check out all thirteen tips, from reagents to situation awareness, right after the break.
Breakfast Topic: If you could have any spell in RL...
We get our motivation today from Thongsnapper (nice name) of Gorefiend who asks, if you could have any spell in Warcraft in real life, which one would you have? Hearthstone would be an interesting choice for sure, and Polymorph would make for an interesting life (though its uses might be pretty limited, considering that real life doesn't actually have aggro management), but I think personally I'm going to have to fall back on the old superpower standby: stealth. Moving around unseen just seems too fun to pass up.Actually, I might second guess that -- in terms of practicality, healing spells might actually be more beneficial to the world. Wave your hands, and any ailments, no matter how big or small, are done away with. I'll have to give this some serious thought. In the meantime, let's hear it: if you could have any spell from the game in real life, which one would you choose?
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy paladin gear enchants, part 1
A few months back, I did a rogue column on how rogues can enhance their gear with enchantments, gems, armor kits and the like. Well, it's time for paladins to get a similar guide -- in three different forms! Yes, since paladins have three main specs for three different roles, they need some wildly different enchantments. Today, we'll look at above-the-belt enhancements for a regular ol' endgame healing paladin, soon to be followed by prot and ret recommendations. (Shockadins, just grab the caster junk like usual.) Head Glyph of Renewal: This item, available for 90g once you get revered with Honor Hold or Thrallmar, gives you a one-time boost to your head item's healing and mp/5. Revered with HH/Thrall isn't too hard, and you need all the mp/5 you can get, so pick this up if you're planning on any serious healing. 10/10 PVE, 7/10 PVP. Glyph of the Gladiator: On the other hand, if you're the arena type and find yourself a bit lacking in the two key PVP stats, you might want to pick up this stam/resil item from revered with Shattered Sun Offensive. It's pretty useless for PVE, though, so save it for your _____ Gladiator's set piece. 3/10 PVE, 9/10 PVP.
The Light and How to Swing It: Badge rewards in 2.4
Now that the patch is upon us, it's a good time for reflecting upon all the new badge rewards available to us in the near future. As a hybrid class with 3 main viable specs (healing, tanking, DPS), it's no wonder that there's a lot of new badge gear for paladins in this patch. Allison did a fantastic write-up of new badge gear for druids a few days back, so I figured I'd follow her format as it relates to paladins! HolyItemization for Healing specs has been pretty solid when it comes to badge gear, and the new stuff is no exception. Just like the Pier 1 set that 2.3 introduced, you'll find lots of healing, spell crit and mana per 5 on the new gear... just more of it.
Behind the Curtain: How nice are you?
How nice are you in-game? Are you nice at all? Does your choice of characters reflect your personality in any way?I recently managed to get through to Outland with my Warrior in World of Warcraft, and I was tanking my way through Hellfire Ramparts with a PUG *shudder* when I got talking with the Priest who was healing us, and I was honestly shocked to realise that he was a complete tool. Not only was he a poor healer, he was rude, ignorant and refused to listen to friendly advice. I was shocked because I realised that I really do think that certain classes attract certain types of players. Simply because this person was playing a healing class, I expected them to be pleasant, polite and reasonably intelligent. The more I thought about it, the more shocked I became – not at the Priest, but at myself, at my stereotyping of people, at my naivete. It got me thinking – why would I think like that? Does it make any kind of sense, and what basis do I have for thinking it in the first place? Do certain classes and archetypes naturally attract certain personalities?
Shifting Perspectives: 2.4 Badge-A-Palooza, Druid style
Every week, Shifting Perspectives is written by someone who is not me. Except for that one time. Rather an addictive experience, stealing this column. Does anyone even read the italicized portion at the top? Hello? Nobody? I'm just gonna sing. "My baloney has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R, my baloney has a [censored over copyright infringement] (ed. just do the column, please).While I sincerely hope the rumors about the patch hitting soon aren't true because I'm sitting on all of 43 badges of justice right now (g@^#(*% mother-expletive piece of $%^@ fire resistance set), I am forced to admit that the times may possibly have caught up with me. I confess that for a long time I hadn't even looked at the new badge loot that will become available ingame, partly because things have gotten markedly busier with my guild of late and partly because I'd planned my 2.3 badge acquisitions very carefully and wondered if I could get away with keeping myself somewhat unspoiled for 2.4. That lasted until I found out just how expensive the 2.4 gear is actually going to be ("150 badges for a new weapon, Zach? Are you @*(#&#% kidding me?"). Noble effort while it lasted, though. Well, no more. If 2.4 does hit next week, I'm going to be ready to stand in front of the badge vendor and know exactly what I can't afford to buy for all three specs.This treatment looks exclusively at the new leather gear offerings available in 2.4 and assumes that you won't have access, or at least immediate access, to the new 25-man raid Sunwell Plateau. For my part I am still using six -- count 'em, six -- pieces of badge gear for various tanking purposes in Tier 6 content, which either says a great deal about the general quality of badge gear or says a great deal about how bad feral itemization is in endgame content. I'll be magnanimous today and say it's both.
AoC class interview: Tempest of Set
Last Age of Conan class interview we had a look at the Priest of Mitra, and now we're closing the chapter on the priest archetype with the Tempest of Set interview at Ten Ton Hammer. The Tempest is a mix of a few of the older classes, and will be known for its healing, AoE damage, and crowd control prowess.Evan Michaels mentions that the Tempest's healing abilities will be increased when they use some of their offensive spells, through buff effects. For example, one particular ability will make it so that using an offensive spell will place a stackable buff on the caster that will make their next heal more potent. Tempest's will have the largest AoE arsenal of any class in the game, and we are informed that even though many of their spells are "elemental"-based, there will be no environmental limits imposed (for example, a storm type spell not being usable indoors).
CC: How to run instances without a net
Running 5 man instances is the bread and butter of gearing up any PvE character. There are some short instances, and some longer ones. There are some bosses that are ready for fun, and others that like to die fast. Many people consider it a universal truth that all you need to do these instances is solid crowd control. When you're faced with a pack of six or seven level 70 elite mobs, the last thing you want is one or two of them running loose.But what can you do if you don't have any CC available? Are you just out of luck? Nope! There are a few tricks to running instances without CC, and if you pay close attention, you won't miss the lack of sheeps at all.In fact, you might just start preferring to run without crowd control entirely.
Hybrid Theory: Dear engineers, please build me a walking bank
Welcome to another installment of Hybrid Theory, wherein columnist Alex Ziebart assures the world that he does not, in fact, hate Retribution Protection Paladins. In fact, he raids with a Retribution Protection Paladin. Really. He does. Pinky swear. Nearly every hybrid has felt the sorrows of lacking itemization at one time or another. Every hybrid has seen its ups and its down, has watched class balance fall into and out of order, and embraced their spec through the good and the bad. Throughout all of this, though, there has always been one ever-present issue. Completely unchanging. Viability and acceptance? Oh, no no no.Bag space. The Blue Crew of Blizzard has made it very clear over the last few years that limited bag space is fully intended. It's viewed as an important aspect of game play. A mini-game, if you will. I must say, being forced into choosing whether you want to keep an item you enjoy or vendor it in favor of that new piece of resist gear that is mandatory for your raid's upcoming boss fight is the worst game ever. Sometimes little vanity items mean quite a bit, like your first epic. A lot of them are just plain neat, like the furbolg outfit maker.
Totem Talk: Chaos at the back of the party!
Totem Talk is written by Matthew Rossi for shamans, and the people who love them. You'd better be one of those people that love them or are them... is them? Wait, how did this paragraph get away from me so fast? Crap, don't die, don't die, don't....whew, the heal landed! I'd better burn an NS and drop a Healing Wave on it, just to be sure. Man, the paragraph's health just started bombing!So you've decided to heal. Maybe you're full resto, or maybe you're an enhancement or elemental shaman but you have good healing gear and you need to heal for some reason. Perhaps your raid needs just a little extra healing. Perhaps you really just want to get that Shadow Labs run out of the way before 2.4 comes in and the only slot open is for a healer. Maybe you just like being yelled at by people if you don't keep them at full health at all times. I'm not going to sit here and psychoanalyze you, oh my no. First off, have you seen my picture? If I were you (and I'm not, I'm me) I wouldn't take any mental health advice from that guy. He looks kind of insane. Secondly, it's not Totem Talk's aim to discourage you, but rather to facilitate you in any way we can. If you want to spec resto and heal, we want to help you. If you want to heal as an enhancement or elemental shaman, we're on board. If you want to rob several banks and then flee to Prince Edward Island, you're on your own. We're terribly lazy.We've discussed the nuts and bolts of shaman healing before, so today we'll mostly touch on it but not go into detail to that extent.
Interview profiles Age of Conan's Priest of Mitra class
Imagine if Snow White's wicked queen gazed into her magic mirror and asked, "Who's the most badass priest class of them all?" Judging from the info Funcom provided in a recent interview with Ten Ton Hammer, the answer would be "Age of Conan's Priest of Mitra."Healers in AoC don't select a target and heal just that target, nor do they automatically heal everyone in their group. Rather, they heal all friendly targets standing in a 120 degree cone of effect in front of them. We'll call those spells "CoE heals." The Priest of Mitra will get bonuses to his or her damage output based on how many friendlies he or she has healed recently. He or she will have an ability called "Reciprocal Healing" that will allow him or her to AoE heal friendlies when affected by a CoE heal from another healer -- making groups with multiple priest-types particularly potent.Perhaps most impressively, the Priest of Mitra will have access to a wide and dynamic range of crowd control spells by level 80 -- including "stun, fear, knockback, snare, and blind abilities." All that and more in the interview. Check it out.
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.
PvP for the beginning HK: 11 rules for the starter weasel
It is not unusual for younger or less experienced players to approach me with questions on my PvP experience."Allie," they ask. "How can we avoid sucking like you?""Well, first it helps to have a functional mouse," I always say, favoring them with a benevolent smile whilst swirling a fine glass of port. "Click-to-move is usually impossible when neither your right mouse button nor scroll wheel actually work. You'd be amazed at the number of problems you can pin on your refusal to replace a relatively cheap piece of equipment. Never, ever, get rid of Mr. Gimpy if you want a ready excuse for being a keyboard turner."They scribble this and then look at me reverently, hopeful for any additional pearls of wisdom I might drop. However, after receiving so many queries and accidentally mistelling most of them with, "I can tank, but gimme a sec to get rid of this punk who's bugging me," I have decided, in the spirit of all gifted Machiavellians, to preserve my bad advice in a medium more lasting than /w.For beyond faulty mice, children, we get into more advanced and underhanded PvP tactics...
New Flametongue bugged
As predicted, Enhancement Shamans got some nice buffs yesterday, including the addition of a Mortal Strike-like effect of reduced healing to the Flametongue weapon.But the weapon hasn't quite had the desired effect yet on the PTR. In fact, as World of Raids has posted, it actually does exactly the opposite. As you can see above, Flametongue is actually adding to heals on the target of the attack, not halving them as its now meant to. No doubt this will be fixed before long, but a note to whoever's working on the Shaman class on the PTR: you should have used that minus sign in the code there, not the plus one.
The Art of War(craft): Healing rules in PvP
I chuckled the first time I heard Watchkeeper Gargolmar yell out, "Heal me! Quickly!" in Hellfire Ramparts. It reminded me of some players in PvP who don't keep their AddOns in check, emoting '<insert annoying player name> calls out for healing!' every time their health precipitates into killing blow range. Here's a tip: if you want to be healed in PvP, don't ask for it. Unless it's an Arena team and you're communicating your every move to your teammates, don't use emotes, don't yell, and don't rant in chat about not getting heals. If you do that, your chances of getting a heal drops considerably. I'll confess that I sometimes deliberately ignore players who have that emote automated. I mean, at least get creative about it, right? If the emote went something like, "<insert dying player's name> is about to die! He pathetically grovels for help! Healing would help him get back into the fray!" healers might consider healing you. Maybe.Healers don't have it easy. They are the unsung heroes of Battlegrounds. They are the silent partners in Arenas. They are the players in the background that help make things work. If DPS classes are the stars, healers are the supporting act. In fact, if a healer is doing his job right, he shouldn't attract any attention at all. Instead, the only thing you're supposed to see is an invincible force of destruction -- usually *cough* an MS Warrior -- mashing faces with impunity. The best healers are almost invisible, healing from the sidelines, letting their allies do the dirty work and racking up the killing blows. And when they do get noticed, some healers can be pretty resilient themselves, being almost as difficult to take down -- if not more -- than their charges. Here are a few rules to mull over when dealing with healers in PvP.
WoW Rookie: Knowing your place in an instance
Last week on WoW Rookie, I showed you the instances you might want to run in your first forty levels. This week, I'd like to tell you more about what to do when you get there. As you level up, playing your intended role becomes more and more important. There are three (or four depending on who you ask) main roles in an instance: tank, heals, damage (dps), and crowd control (cc). The typical instance team includes a tank, a healer, and three dps/cc characters. Read on for more about these specific roles.
Addon Spotlight: Healbot Continued part I
For many, the role of the Healer is something to be avoided all together. For the few, however, healing is a meaningful, rewarding and challenging job, albeit an often-thankless one. Being a healer also tends to make one a popular player. This popularity can wane at higher levels if you don't pick up on a crucial principle: your job is more than just healing. Depending on your class, you will have other duties that include keeping buffs on your companions, de-cursing them, stepping in front of the mage if he or she draws aggro and the list goes on. Addons are one way that the aspiring healer can shift some focus towards his or her other duties. By taking some of the busy work out of casting healing spells, buffs and keeping the party free of curses, poisons and/or diseases, programs like Healbot Continued can take you from being a good healer to being a stellar and indispensable member of any group. Healbot Continued uses the embedded Lua scripting language to reconfigure information vital to healers. This retrofitting presents an easily manageable interface that helps you maintain a greater degree of situational awareness. For many of you wondering how this works, it's simply a matter of our program, Healbot Continued in this case, listening to the World of Warcraft client for events. In combat, information is literally flying back and forth between the player (client side) and the game server (server side). Healbot Continued simply listens in and picks out information it wants. This is true of almost all addons, which sift through event information for a variety of purposes. Healbot Continued is easily one of the more powerful addons around, as it goes above and beyond what is normally expected of healing addons.
Breakfast Topic: AV play style poll
I have a confession to make. I love doing Alterac Valley, but I hate being stuck babysitting flags. I am not a defender- neither at a flag nor at the general's end of the map. As I mentioned on the WoW Insider Show, my main is a Resto Shaman. On Cyclone Battlegroup there seems to be a race to get away from the flag once it's been taken. The last one left is the "defender." Being a healer often times I drink after a taking a flag while everyone else dashes off. I win the right to watch the flag. I stay there and call out incomings. I will not leave a flag undefended, but if there's any way I can scoot out of there, I will. Resto or Holy (depending on class) defending a flag is a terrible waste of healing. I'm more of a speed bump than a defender. I don't kill much as Resto. I do my best, and I can stay up for a while. Hopefully some DPS will show up before I drop. I would much rather be on the front lines, healing the assault forces. I prefer to rush forward and facilitate forward momentum with my heals.
Synthetic rubber mends itself after being sliced
Self-healing materials are far from revolutionary, but a team of gurus at France's National Center for Scientific Research has teamed up with Arkema to create a newfangled material that can literally reattach itself if simply pressed together after a break. Reportedly, the self-mending takes place due to weak hydrogen bonds that mesh networks of ditopic and tritopic molecules back together, essentially acting as a kind of "atomic glue." The matter is able to reconnect with any long lost pieces at room temperature (at least 68°F), and apparently, creators are already looking to commercialize their discovery and get products on the shelves within two years. So much for breakaway cables, eh?[Via Physorg]
