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Spiritual Guidance: Macros for healing priests
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. Some time last year on Spiritual Guidance, I wrote an article on macros for healing priests. Overall, it was a simple approach to the topic, touching on some basics like binding consolidation, communication, and a couple of utility macros. The article generated a lot of discussion, and several readers submitted some quality macros for their fellow priests. Since a few of those macros are now outdated and I've added a few new macros to my spellbook in the interim, I thought now would be a good time to revisit the topic and look at what I've dug up in the past few months. Since these were accumulated over time, I haven't kept track of all the original authors of these macros, so if you see something in here you wrote, feel free to shake your fist at me.
Spiritual Guidance: Macros for priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. /target reader /wave /use The Mischief Maker There. I love a captive audience. This week I'll be writing about macros for priests. I will touch on why and how to use them, then provide a few useful ones that readers sent in during the past week. This article will not be an introductory guide for the use of macros because... WoW.com already had one of those. Hit the jump for the link.
Spiritual Guidance: Priest tier 10 examined
Every week (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 No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW. Tier 10 stuff is here! Okay, that shot above is tier 9. But we don't know what the tier 10 stuff looks like yet so I had to pick something! The tier 10 bonuses for healing Priests have recently been updated. We'll compare the before and after versions. They're expected to only be obtainable in Icecrown in patch 3.3.
Priest Q & A: Healers remain indifferent
The Q & A for Priests just came out. The first section had Ghostcrawler cover a brief history and the Blizzard perspective of Priests. We used to be the absolute top of the line healer many years ago. At the present, we have been balanced to become on par with the other healing classes (Druids, Paladins, and Shamans). The crustacean one is bang on when he states that Priests have a wide variety of spells to respond to nearly any situation. Let's get straight to it then. What do healing Priests have to look forward to?
Spiritual Guidance: Healing Mimiron
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 No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. Having some difficulty with Mimiron? Let me help! Mimiron. He is the bane of all healers. Even the most seasoned of raiding healers struggled initially with this gnome and his toys. Perhaps the class and spec that has the a difficulty adjusting to the challenges is the Discipline Priest. Let me help you get through it with a systematic breakdown of the four boss phases and how you can cope no matter which spec you are.
Patch 3.1 PTR Priest glyph changes thus far
One of the things Patch 3.1 is supplying in spades is glyphs and glyph changes. Every class is getting a ton of them, and it's really hard to keep up with them there are so many. Priests are coming out alright so far through the whole process, with a lot of our current glyphs being improved and our new glyphs being legitimately useful, if situational. Let's see what's new, shall we? Glyph of Fade - Reduces the cooldown of your Fade spell by 9 sec. (Old: Increases the duration and cooldown of your Fade spell by 50%.) This is massively better than what it was previously, and I suspect that this will become a popular Shadow Priest glyph in PvP. Two points in Veiled Shadows plus this glyph means a 15 second cooldown on Fade. Every 15 seconds, a Shadow Priest will be able to clear all movement impairing effects, assuming they have Improved Shadowform. That's pretty friggin' sweet.
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!)
Wrath Beta patch notes: Priest
My main is a Priest. A Shadow Priest, to be precise. While I started out Holy, my Priest has always been my main and probably always will be. The only thing that could possibly draw me away is my Protection Paladin, should my raid ever need another. Obviously, the very first thing I looked at in the Wrath Beta patch notes were the Priest notes. I've talked about what we saw in Alpha, and I was cautiously optimistic at the time. After seeing these notes... well... yeah, I'm still optimistic. I am (dare I say it?)... excited, even!I'll tuck my analysis behind the cut, but here are my three favorite notes out of the Priest notes: New Talent: Improved Spirit Tap (Shadow) - Gives you a 50/100% chance to gain a 50% bonus to your Spirit after gaining a critical effect chance from your Mind Blast or Shadow Word: Death spells. For the duration, your mana will regenreate at a 25% rate while casting. Lasts 8 sec. Lightwell (Holy): Cast time reduced to .5 sec, down from 1.5 sec. Charges increased to 10, up from 5. Now breaks from any attack that hits you for 30% or more of your total health. Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5. Shadowform (Shadow): Now has an innate 30% threat reduction. Now has a shapeshift UI.
Shifting Perspectives: PvP as a moving target
Every week, John Patricelli of Big Bear Butt presents a well-researched, educational, and entertaining look at the state of the Druid class in WoW today. This week we said, "Screw that," and got someone off the street. Veronica: Look at you, all helpful.Logan: Your peskiness being unleashed on Connor brings me joy. Annoy, tiny blonde one! Annoy like the wind!-- Veronica Mars, "An Echolls Family Christmas" With apologies to Diane Ruggiero, the writer of the episode quoted above, but I find Logan's snarky comment (did he even have another kind?) to be a perfect, albeit general, means of describing successful Druid PvP.Let us be frank; I am not, nor am ever likely to be, a hardcore PvPer, and to a great extent this post is directed mostly at people like myself. If you're one of those Druids carrying a 2K+ rating in full Vengeful, then I invite (nay, implore) you to leave comments and corrections based on your own experience, but the article's mostly for regular folks like me, who may not even particularly like PvP but recognize that it is desirable or perhaps necessary, given our ingame goals. As such, most of this applies to battlegrounds, and on a later date we're going to get into arena. Today, we are simply going to talk about how to avoid letting your PvP experience turn you into a miserably unhappy player who would rather undergo an appendectomy via Roto-Rooter than set foot in another EOTS.
The 7 best trinkets in the World of Warcraft
You know, if there's one thing I have noticed digging through my bags, it's that I have a whole mess of trinkets. Of all the gear slots, it seems like trinkets are some of the most versatile and swappable. Depending on whether you need a bit more hit rating, a bit more critical strike rating, a bit more mana regeneration, a bit more health, a bit more armor, or you plan to go PvPing for a bit, you can fill up bags upon bags alone with a whole bunch of trinkets, waiting for the right moment to spring them. Then there's the really bad ass trinkets. I'm not talking trinkets that are traditionally defined as "useful," I'm talking about the trinkets that make you into the life of the party. The ones that make other people notice you, make them stand up and say, "Woah, that guy is using some CRAZY trinkets." You know what I mean. Stop trying to get yourself that Ashtongue Talisman, these are the REAL deal.
Build Shop: Priest 41/20/0
It's Tuesday again -- and you know what that means. It's time for your weekly dose of talent spec dissecetion with Build Shop! This week we're checking out another Priest build, this one focusing on the much maligned Discipline tree. Though the tree is still an odd assortment of talents (some mana management, some damage improvement, some buffs for our buffs...) with no easy path to the top, it's slated for major improvements in the next expansion and is getting a bit of love in the upcoming patch 2.3. With the 41-point talent, Pain Suppresion, being re-envisioned for patch 2.3, I'm thinking Discipline may be worth a whirl for a healing Priest. And, hey, even if things don't work out, it can't be as bad as Lightwell.Will Discipline really be a viable alternative build in 2.3? Read on for my thoughts.
Priests are lacking in discipline
It's official: even Blizzard rep Eyonix says that Priests are somewhat vague on the whole discipline thing -- not the virtue, that is, but the talent tree. Responding to a forum question asking "What is the purpose of Discipline?" Eyonix said:Though some priests have found a use for the discipline tree, right now, it doesn't quite have a solid purpose/goal, but rather seems to act as a supporting tree. This is something we plan on addressing with Wrath of the Lich King. Originally, the goal of the tree was primarily intended to provide staying power, vs. the holy tree which provides throughput. Also, so you're aware, the 41-point discipline talent, pain suppression, is being changed to be usable on others for patch 2.3. I'll admit that my own priest is sadly a mere level 8, but I'm aware that this has been one of the big priest issues for a long time. One of my friends strives to be one of those special priests who have "found a use for the discipline tree" and he seems to do pretty well at it, though he admitted that he recently changed some of his talents around, leaving behind lesser-used talents in discipline in exchange for some holy talents. He refuses to give in and become yet another shadow priest, since he revels in succeeding at something few other priests try.I would be quite interested to see how Blizzard changes the discipline talents in the next expansion. Will they stick with the original "staying power" idea, or will they go for something new? What do you think needs to be done?
