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Raid Rx: The full healer skill set checklist
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Heading out to BlizzCon this year? Make sure you stop by the WoW Insider meetup! Would love to hang out and meet more of you and talk more healing shop! I get frequent emails from players who are new to raid healing. They're not necessarily new to raiding, but it does seem like a fair number of you out there have DPS characters that are your main. Maybe on the weekends, you switch to a healer for a different change of pace. One of the main topics that routinely appears in tweets, emails and carrier pigeon is the topic of healer skill set. What are the basic things that raid healers should know how to do? Is there anything at the advanced level? We're not going to refer to any items or gear in this post, largely because we're talking about what healers need to be able to do.
Raid Rx: How to handle button mashing syndrome
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Wildstar. Firefall. Counterstrike: GO. Novus Aeterno. Those are games I either looked at or tried out at PAX Prime in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. Keep them in the back of your mind if you're looking for future games to get involved with. And now, back to some weekly healing for thought! My friends, I have noticed a trend among newer healers. Players new to the art of healing are reporting some slight bruising or sore fingers. Now, I have a theory as to why this is happening: I call it button mashing syndrome. I was at a friend's place a while ago and watching him heal. He was really smashing the healing spells through that keyboard. But there is a fine line between mindless, panicky button smashing and tactical button mashing. Now, if you are a member of my guild, you would immediately attest to the fact that I am a button masher. In fact, when I'm speaking over Mumble during a raid, my players like to comment that it sounds like there's a building under construction on my end due to the massive sounds of keyboard pounding going on. (I'm actually sporting a Razer Black Widow Ultimate. If you're not familiar with it, the keyboard is reminiscent of the old IBM keyboard that was really clunky but durable.) So what's the difference?
Wasteland Diaries: The old vs. the new
When it was first introduced, the new combat system seemed pretty awkward and cumbersome. As with all new game systems, you just have to get used to it. Luckily, due to the extreme familiarity I have with Fallen Earth, I adapted fairly quickly. But I didn't like it much at first. It was too healer-centric in PvP, and it was nearly impossible to die in PvE with such a large health pool and awesome self-heals. Instead of grinning and bearing it, I complained and hoped for a fix. It got fixed, and though it's not perfect, it's pretty close. In this post, I will take a look at the new system and how it differs from the old one, now that I've had some time to think it over. I'm still not sure whether I like it better than the old system yet, but it's growing on me. There's a lot of stuff that I miss from the old system and a lot of stuff I'll never miss. Knockdown and stuns are two of those things. A lot of players were worried that the new combat system would take ages to tweak, but it seems like it's pretty close to the mark already. A few minor adjustments might be needed, but it's already close to a finished product from what I see. After the cut, I'll tell you why I think that.
Raid Rx: Reforging tools and concepts for healers
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Today we will dive into the wild realm of reforging. One of the DPS players in my guild moans about the players he sees in different pickup raids ("That guy has 900 hit rating -- wait, that's 900 hit rating over the cap!"). That's why this week I wanted to shine the spotlight on one of the reforging calculators that you may not have heard about. The place is called WoW Reforge! It does have a set of defaults for the different classes (including healing specs). As always with all calculators, you have the capability to adjust the weights and stuff on your own.
Ready Check: Dealing with a weak healer
Ready Check helps you prepare yourself and your raid for the bosses that simply require killing. Check back with Ready Check each week for the latest pointers on killing adds, not standing in fire, and hoping for loot that won't drop. Welcome back, raiders. Last week, we talked about how to handle a low DPS player within a raid. The article focused more on the way that players attempt to deflect attention from any issues that they might be having; while that's useful information, there are other sides as well. This week, we will be focusing on healers. Much as with DPS, there are no weak roles within a raid. Everyone has to perform up to par in order to succeed; furthermore, just like DPSers, healers can get equally defensive when approached about a problem. Join me as we explore many of the ways in which a healer can attempt to deflect proper blame against them and ways in which you can help them improve. Remember, a raid leader's strongest tool is information.
Lore-masters tune up their hogs to cruise the mean streets of Isengard
Lord of the Rings Online: Rise of Isengard is bringing plenty of class changes, tweaks, and updates to the table, and the hybrid Lore-master class is waiting for the dev love with arms wide open. While Turbine's talked about the class' increased ability to be a reliable off-healer, word is coming out of the beta that there are many more changes than just the ability to slap a bandage on a wounded ally. A Casual Stroll to Mordor reports on how the improved skills function in play. These include the ability to stack up to three Burning Embers DoTs on a target, the combination of two Signs of Battle powers into one Wizard's Fire, a nice 10% buff to pet damage through Sign of the wild: Rage, and a much more versatile Improved Staff Sweep. There's also word on the new Lore-master pet: a Limrafn. While Lore-masters were originally slated to receive an Auroch pet, apparently the common complaint about the pet's size ended up swaying Turbine's mind. The Limrafn is a floating ball of light that doesn't attack, but instead assists the Lore-master in the off-healing department. Lore-masters will also see one of their lesser-utilized trait lines -- Keeper of Animals -- given much love in the form of tempting abilities and buffs.
Raid Rx: The evolving healing strategy
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Before the age of videos and dedicated boss pages, boss kill strategy was extremely elusive. We're talking back during the vanilla era of Warcraft. The time it took for guilds to crush bosses took weeks (sometimes months). The top-end 40-player raiding guilds all consisted of the best that the game had to offer. Guilds below them had a player consistency involving 10 really good players, 25 mediocre ones, and five AFK raiders. How did those players learn? Who did they get their strat videos from? With no Encounter Journal, everything was done from a trial-and-error standpoint. The general plan for healers in these pioneer raid teams? Heal all the things. Eight to 12 healers were used (at least, when I did them) for learning. It was a race to see if we could stay alive long enough to destroy raid bosses. Some of the bosses in Blackwing Lair took 20-30 minutes. Fast forward years later, and now we have all these different tools at our disposal. There are videos and the attached commentary that walks players through what happens on select stages of an encounter. Blizzard itself has provided a database of abilities within the game. Walk-throughs are littered across the internet on major information sites, blogs, and forums. Rarely is there ever a unique strategy to a boss, because we watch the pros undergo various attempts with different approaches. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don't. Eventually, they settle on a method that delivers constant kills. That information gets released and filtered down to the rest of us, which we then adapt ourselves. Originality isn't exactly common anymore.
Is it time to kill tanking?
Please note I said "tanking" and not "tanks." If you know a tank, give him or her a hug. He or she isn't clad in cold metal or an angry bear that will tear off your face because of you; it's those pesky mobs. The tanking system has long been somewhat problematic in World of Warcraft. While it scales to some degree, from 5-man dungeons to 10-man raids, the scaling falls apart when we get to 25-man raiding, which currently demands about the same amount of tanking as 10-man. You can get through most of Firelands with two tanks, no matter your raid size. Majordomo Staghelm only requires one tank, again, no matter your raid size. This means that the scaling from five to 10 works, but as soon as you go from 10 to 25, instead of needing 2.5 times more tanks, you need no more tanks. The other problem is simply that there already aren't enough tanks for every 5-man group. When the Call to Arms feature was announced for the Dungeon Finder tool, it was created out of the simple fact that we're not seeing the distribution we'd expect in the playerbase. In order for the Dungeon Finder to work without significant group queues, we would need 20% of the people queuing up to be tanks (1 in 5 = 20%). This is not the case. People simply don't want the perceived group responsibility of tanking. It's why changes were made to CC mechanics that allow groups to CC on the fly without pulling. It's why Call to Arms exists. And yet, despite both of these changes, tanking was still so unattractive to players that threat itself needed to be redesigned. All of this work to try and get people to tank. Maybe the problem isn't the players here, though. Maybe it's the role.
Raid Rx: Healing Majordomo Staghelm
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Anyone else excited about transmogrification? I'll be shooting for tier 2, tier 5 and tier 6 looks. I'd rank those three as the greatest-looking priest sets of all time. But we're not here to talk about things like cosmetic looks, because no one cares about that stuff, right?! This week, we duck back into Firelands and take a look at Majordomo Staghelm. Among encounters that emphasize the use of cooldowns, the heroic phase of Halfus would be the Superbowl of all healing cooldown encounters. But the 25-man version of Majordomo, I would classify as the Olympics. There is a ton of preparation that needs to happen before throwing the entire raid in there. Before we devise a strategy that's going to work for you, there are a few questions you'll want to ask. How many healers do you want to take in? How many overall defensive raid cooldowns are available? Is your DPS amazingly high?
Wasteland Diaries: It's fixed
During the past couple of weeks, I haven't been playing Fallen Earth too much. I have been waiting for some changes to come along. I found the new combat system to be a bit too slow-paced and dull. It was very centered around healing. He who healed the best generally won the fights. I prefer a system in which he who deals the most damage is more likely to win. There are, of course, other tactical considerations involved in both types of combat, but the overall feel was just plain wrong in the healer-centric combat system. I'm happy to report that some changes have been made to the system. There are still a few things I don't like about the 1.9 patch, but 1.9.2 fixed almost all of these issues. I won't say it was a perfect patch, but it was very close. There are still some minor issues I'd like to see addressed, but these are probably conscious design choices that are working as intended. In this post, I'd like to cover what has changed, why it's so great, and what we will see in the coming months. The urge to log into Fallen Earth is coming back to me, and it is all due to this new patch. After the cut, I'll explain why.
Raid Rx: Tagging out and tagging in healers
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Ever had to swap a healer in the middle of a raid? Maybe he requested it. Maybe he's experiencing connection-related problems. The most common reason I can think of is because he's not able to handle his position well at all. I'm also guessing you tried to switch healer assignments in case he kept striking out. Clearly that didn't work, because you're in the process of bringing in a new player to replace him. When doing this, you need to talk to the player twice: once to signal his stepping out, and then once again after the raid for a diagnostic on what he messed up on.
Raid Rx: The power of audio cues
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. I have a hypothesis I'd like to share, and I'd love to hear your take about this in the comments. Healers react better to sound as opposed to visual cues on the screen. We should embrace this. Now, this isn't to say we need to clutter Mumble with various players calling out different abilities. There are a few addons out there (such as GTFO) that make use of sound indicators whenever you're standing in something you shouldn't be standing in. Healers have a heavy responsibility to: Oversee the raid. Watch the ground they're standing on. Remove or mitigate boss buffs or debuffs. Constantly range check their healing assignments (like tanks). Gauge the timing of mechanics or phases. Used cooldowns (depending who you are). I'd like to think most of us can handle that simply by staring at the screen. With the assortment of timers and other visual addons, we're exposed to a plethora of information used to feed us information. The sad part is that it can be extremely overwhelming, to the point that we don't know what to do next. That split-second decision could be the wrong move because we reacted to something that wasn't as important. For example, I may have cast Prayer of Healing on the group, but I would not have done that if I had realized earlier that the boss did his super move, causing a death to a tank or another player.
Addon Spotlight: Adding on to the Blizzard Raid Frames
Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. One of the great joys of writing Addon Spotlight is watching the evolution of addons and their relationship to World of Warcraft over time and how the effectiveness and usefulness of certain addons wanes and waxes like the phases of the moon. Blizzard's new raid frames have not replaced my own custom job, but they have been getting progressively closer to a complete package, as I discussed only a few weeks ago. But there are ways, friends, of adding on to even the Blizzard default raid frame setup to give them just a bit more substance. Today, I've got three little additions to the default Blizzard raid frames that can help you with targets, marks, and debuffs. If you like options, these addons will add a ton of them to the Blizzard standard setup, making the entire package look a little more like Grid. So sit back, relax, and check out these new additions to the Blizzard default raid frames.
The Daily Grind: What was your favorite experience as a healer?
If you're going to play a game in which your allies will rush forward into their imminent death despite your best efforts, someone's going to need to take the task of keeping them from death. Sometimes the healer is up on the front lines like the Warrior Priests of Warhammer Online, but most often your job in the healer is to stand back and keep everyone alive in spite of their determination to stand in fire. It's not a glamorous job, but boy is it ever important. From games like World of Warcraft that require a dedicated healer to games like City of Heroes where your "healer" may have no direct healing spells, the third part of the holy trinity sees the least direct action but still tables a lot of responsibility. So what's your favorite experience from taking on the role of the walking band-aid? Were you stuck in a group with members who couldn't keep themselves alive at all if not for your healing? Or is there a particular game that always made healing feel more fun than any other task in the game? 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!
Raid Rx: The value of the all-purpose healer
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. When it comes to setting up healing in raids, we like to lump healers into different specializations. We have players who strictly tank heal or raid heal. In some cases, there is a specific role they need to play within the encounter (like kite healing). Blizzard has done a great job of trying to equalize the healing classes to the point that they can do everything competently. Even then, we continue to instinctively place the different classes into specific healing roles. If you are a healer who has traditionally done only one type of healing, then it is time to diversify.
Review: Healbot now available for your iPad or iPhone
There is no shortage of World of Warcraft applications out there for your iPhone or iPad device. You can check and optimize your gear with Mr. Robot; you can chat and play the auction house with the official Mobile Armory; and you can protect your account from hackers with the Mobile Authenticator. This week, you can add another app to that list: Healbot, a free, stand-alone iOS game that simulates World of Warcraft boss fights from a healer's perspective. Your party takes damage; it's your job to heal through it. If the boss hits zero before your party does, you win. Just like real life! Well, real life in Azeroth, anyway. If the name app's name sounds familiar, that's intentional. According to the game's developers, Healbot is "based on the mechanics of the Healbot mod in WoW." But how does this simulation stack up against the real thing? And is it worth your dear, sweet, precious time?
Raid Rx: Guide to healing Alysrazor
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. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. Up for a really big bird? Maybe a little BBQ bird? Although more of dragon than anything, Alysrazor does sort of look like a bird. This fight isn't really as challenging as Baleroc, but it does have a fair share of obstacles. You'd better be able to heal on the move, as this encounter will throw a ton of stuff your way when you least expect it. Know where your tanks are at all times, because if the monsters they're tanking become really angry and throw a tantrum, you'll need to step up and keep them alive. If you have a basic understanding of the encounter, keep reading. You may wish to refer to the encounter journal or other resources to get the whole picture of what is going on and what the different roles are.
Behind the Mask: The truth about healing
One of the main reasons I decided to cover the Inferno archetype a couple weeks ago was because I felt I should showcase the importance of a self-heal for all characters. In Champions Online, freeform characters can select any powers they want, and the most important powers to choose are heals. Why? There's a lot of core elements of CO's design that correlate well with having healing powers. In any game, self-heals are effective, and unless they perform poorly, they tend to be highly valued. When a hero can select any powers, heals just naturally gravitate to the top of the list. But there are a few other things that make this pattern more significant.
TERA play diary takes you to the Oblivion Woods
TERA news has been at a premium lately, and aside from yesterday's BAM reveal, it's been all quiet on the Arborean front for some time now. Luckily, En Masse has graced us with its latest TERA community play diary, and our intrepid hosts -- Jason "BrotherMagneto" Mical and Evan "Scapes" Berman -- are back to guide us through the upcoming title's fantasy dreamscape. This time, the pair are causing all sorts of trouble in and around TERA's Oblivion Woods, and there's a bit of discussion about new spells (including AoE heals and a crowd-control ability known as Ishara's lullaby). As per usual with the community play diary series, there are also several gorgeous screenshots to be had, so head to the official TERA website and have a look.
Spiritual Guidance: Should a healing priest learn to shadow?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore isn't here this week, and Fox Van Allen is just being his usual shadowy stuff. Instead, you're stuck with Matt "Matticus" Low of World of Matticus and Plus Heal! Greetings, minions of the light! As you can tell, resident priestess Dawn Moore is not here this week. That means you are stuck with blessed with my presence for the day! As a priest, you have the luxury of blowing stuff up or healing damage. Your leaders may periodically ask you to switch roles because of the nature of the encounter or composition in a raid. I have recognized the usefulness that the flexibility offers, but I also understand that my lack of shadow skill can be detrimental to the team. So just how important is it to learn how to DPS? I'm also going to add a minor comment about priests in Firelands and the dominance of discipline over holy.
