First one, Heroic Vortex Pinnacle!
I picked up healing once again! yay. now this blog can actually be useful for once (if you can read through all the QQ, that is). my first experience was with a few guildies and one pugger, which wasnt so bad. we had a raiding healer with us but she was asked to dps so i can practic some healing. we zoned into vortex pinnacle with me, my gf in her dk, a guildie tank, and a guildie shaman who's dpsing the fight. it was pretty intense up through the first boss. my gf took minimal damage, the tank took a lot of damage (and fell off the ledge several times) and the guildie shaman was doing pretty well as dps. after the first pull, i was pretty much OOM. everyone was alive, but i was OOM. You know that pull with the air elementals? all five of them? one was bound, so there were four at once hitting the tank. luckily, he was probably able to heal himself.
I got a little better with mana conservation after the first pull. We go down the first ramp, with each pull costing me about half my mana instead of all my mana. we slowly pushed towards the first boss and i actually drank, took mana potions and innervated myself after each pull. oh the fun of being mana starved!
at the first boss, i was at 50% mana going in. apparently my guildie figured i needed extra healing stress on my first time back! in any case, the damage was normalized after the first cyclone pull, and no one died. i was sitting at <10% mana for half the fight, but during that half of the fight, i really didnt need to heal much. I didnt even need to go treeoflife either, which is good because they look sooooo goofy healing.
anyway i was having a blast keeping the tank and the group up. it seemed that, not only were my heals hitting for a lot less and the mana costs were a lot more, the tank and group were taking a whole lot more damage than what i remembered in wrath. or maybe it was because everyone was overgeared in wrath. now although i was constantly healing in wrath dungeons (ABC of healing--Always Be Casting), i would usually never drop below 50% mana and my healing usually compensates for a lot of aoe damage that happens even in dungeons like H.HoR, or H.PoS. But in Cata heroics, my healing spells feel weak and overpriced, even for a decent group, where the tank knew how to tank and the dps knew how to stay out of bad, i still felt that my nourish wasnt helping much, my swiftmend (which used to be emergency) didnt do much, and my swiftness+HT (my other emergency) didnt really put much health back at all. i am not one of those who think tranquility is an emergency spell. sure it might be for 5-mans and some druids love it, but i find it very limiting. the amount of healing might be lovely, but channeling the spell limits me so much, i find it almost unusable, especially when i tried using it for a while, i'd break the channeling prematurely to do another, more important heal.
But anyway, my healing sucks, my mana efficiency sucks and my hope in all treekind began to erode.
and then the tank tells us he was tanking in healing gear. <.<
(oh and that i was also doing a great job for the first time back... right.)
So after he put his tanking gear back on, healing felt a lot better. even though i had craptastic healing touch and swiftmends, i found it a whole lot easier to heal. the fights became more mana efficient where i was able to heal several pulls without having to drink (except for those two pulls where we attack swirling wind things. its just fun trying to keep everyone up because damage was just everywhere.
Overall, boss fights were easy to heal, trash was a bit harder to heal and tanks in healing gear is pretty hard to heal... but not impossible. I welcome all the dps-geared tanks to come and give me a workout. well okay, maybe not. but at least i know if there are some who do come to tank with a couple of pieces of dps gear, i guess its okay. we'll be fine so long as they know how to tank.
And then, there is Heroic Stonecore.
After my first (mainly) successful stint at healing again, i decided to try my luck without my guildies. i grabbed my gf and we went on our way to another random heroic queue. My second try at healing heroics turned out to be stonecore. now every instance has their own bane, but this one has seven. yes seven. Four bosses and three types of trash groups that really makes this difficult. the first type is the group of five trash with Millhouse Manastorm. The second is the trash rock elemental. the third is the cultist trash after slabhide. add to that the meandering sentinels and the ogre and you have some of the most hated trash pulls in all of Cata.
First thing's first, the tank did not want to CC anything. after every pull, i was pretty low on mana. however, he did mark Millhouse with a Skull, so he wasnt completely clueless. but even there, i had to let one guy die. sorry ele shaman. you were good. but i cant keep everyone up.
on to the first boss and i was actually glad we were done with trash pulls. the boss was great until he did his crystal spit thing and out came the shards. my gf tried to blood boil them but did not get any help from any of the other dps. it all seemed like they were focusing on the boss. Death and decay has a long CD, so my gf could possible DnD down every other group of shards, but not every group.
So the first boss fight ended up with a wipe. first my gf dies, then one of the dps, then the other. the tank was last to die. he completely ignored the shards, or any other of the borers that were still running around. i dont know if he knew his team was in trouble. but i kinda figured he didnt like saving the day much. in any case, with nothing to save me from the shards, i died, then him. of course, he left the group. but that's okay. he wasnt a great tank anyway. someone who cant call out cc after the first pull, seeing that the healer was OOM, or help pick up deadly flying geods doesnt really deserve to move on in the instance. There wasnt even a word about who should do what. in any case, we figured most of it out for the second pull, which happened about 4 minutes later due to waiting for another tank. the short wait continues to prove my point that queuing while already in a dungeon is faster than queuing after you leave the group. but people still leave group whenever a tank would leave. too bad for them.
in any case, now that we know the shaman and priest (the other two dps) will not be assed to help with the geod shards, my gf decided to blood boil them on her own. any stray ones left will not pose much of a challenge to me. our second try was successful with a new warrior tank. people stayed out of the rumble/dust on the ground and adds were picked up pronto.
Anyway, moving on to the next trash pull. No one knows how to jump, aparently. Well i guess no one really knows that earthquak sucks. but then the priest got reminded that he can levitate people and so damage on the second rock dude was a bit less. still, the melee still took a lot of damage. but this wasnt due to the earthquakes as much as it was due to the shards. it looks as if these guys are able to summon one shard at a time, which blows up and kills people. but alas, the ranged dps, both of then, werent keen on this and we ended up getting hit by those shards several times. i actually spammed moonfire to get rid of two.
The dragon boss was easy peasy. everyone know crystal storm. everyone knew to get out of lava. everyone knew to stay away from the stupid shadows that shows you where the stalagmites will drop. and somehow, most of the people i was healing were in my LOS! a smooth fight, to say the least.
And then we get on to wiping on trash before Ozruk. I know ozruk. he's no softy. but the trash before him is pretty annoying. sentinels, omg they suck. so the first pull ended up being a two-group pull. how often does this happen? like every time i go there. someone always figures there's plenty of time to kill the sentinels. well one was able to get away and call for help. So two groups and two dead dps. not sure who anymore, but i knew there were some casualties. Oh and THAT pull forced me to finally pull out my tree form. Wow, the ugliness. You know my first post on this site ever? i take it back. I dont wanna be any kinda tree, ever.
So anyway, we get to Ozruk and the tank proceeds to "learn" the fight. obviously, only the tank was learning the fight. the other two ranged dps (magic dps right??) were not learning jack. they were paralized the whole duration of paralysis, which caused them 50k damage each time. and how often does he cast that? before every shatter, right? so each fight had a LOT of damage. the dps would suck below 5k dps because of the duration of the paralyze and the melee having to run out of shatter. so this was going to be a long fight no matter. what's very interesting is that each time i did a moonfire to get a dot on me, it didnt work. What i found out was that warriors' shield slam is able to dispell the spell reflect from Ozruk. well that was probably what caused the wipes all five times. Then i said im done and left.
At the end, the tank did learn to tank Ozruk well. The healer, well he figured he'd read up on why we failed (and found out). And the ranged dps who kept getting paralized? well i hope they find better groups where the healer and tank werent clueless to the mechanics.
I remember now why i stopped healing (and tanking) for a while. The job is almost a chore. i do like tanking and i do like healing. but when it comes to relaxing every night after work, i'd like to relax. and even if i die several times in an instance as dps, it's not as stressful of a death since, more likely than not, my existence in a group is trivialized by 67% anyway. and if you count total DPS, probably 80%.
Showing posts with label healing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healing. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Friday, December 24, 2010
What my Shaman can teach my Disc Priest
Wrath of the Lich King has taught me one thing. Spam.
Yes, that's right. Spam everything.
Resto Druids: Spam Rejuv.
Resto Shams: Spam Lesser Healing Wave
Disc Priests: Spam PWShields
Holy Priests: Spam Flash heal
Holy Palas: Spam Flash of Light (or Holy Light, depending on build)
Of course, after spamming these heals, there's always the obligatory bigger heals. Think of the spam heals as buffers.
Resto Druids: Nourish.
Resto Shams: Healing Wave
Disc Priests: Penance
Holy Priests: Greater Heal
Holy Palas: kinda stumped on this one.
And of course, these heals arent all set in stone, meaning you dont have to spam rejuv for a resto druid. i did an instance only putting rejuv on the tank with everyone else getting wild growth. back in the day... when healing was boring.
But what i want to talk about is the AoE healing that only a shaman can offer to a disc priest. Why not druids? they have aoe heals. yes, but that's instant. holy? that's dropped on people like a blizzard or a rain of fire. but shamans are different. see, their aoe is chain heal. and it's casted at a single person (and heals 2 or 3 additional players depending on glyph).
1. it is casted.
2. it is directed at a certain person.
this is exactly like prayer of healing. =D
as a disc priest, i've almost never.... no, actually, i've NEVER used prayer of healing unless it was to top everyone off at the beginning of an instance after i blessed everyone with fort. there are simply better spells for me to use than prayer of healing when it comes to healing two or more people. heck, i skip the binding heal as well. but that was before cataclysm. that was back when mana didnt matter much. today, however, with flash heal being so expensive and pw:shield being so weak, we're stuck with heal and greater heal to do our work. now is a great time to pull out prayer of healing as a viable heal when 3 or more people needs healing at once.
honestly, i would never think of this before, but after playing a shaman, i have been "programmed" to toss chain heal often (for the haste proc). with this mindset, i can easily go on my priest and prioritize prayer of healing more. it does take some getting used to, but overall i think this is what blizzard wanted us to do anyway. we're all holed up into a certain healing "style". style doesnt mean more than having our own set of healing spells and ignoring everything else. but now, our style will incorporate more of the healing spells we used to ignore. this is a chance to use prayer of healing more, which i am glad to have. now if only prayer of healing gave me some other buff. that would be awesome.
Yes, that's right. Spam everything.
Resto Druids: Spam Rejuv.
Resto Shams: Spam Lesser Healing Wave
Disc Priests: Spam PWShields
Holy Priests: Spam Flash heal
Holy Palas: Spam Flash of Light (or Holy Light, depending on build)
Of course, after spamming these heals, there's always the obligatory bigger heals. Think of the spam heals as buffers.
Resto Druids: Nourish.
Resto Shams: Healing Wave
Disc Priests: Penance
Holy Priests: Greater Heal
Holy Palas: kinda stumped on this one.
And of course, these heals arent all set in stone, meaning you dont have to spam rejuv for a resto druid. i did an instance only putting rejuv on the tank with everyone else getting wild growth. back in the day... when healing was boring.
But what i want to talk about is the AoE healing that only a shaman can offer to a disc priest. Why not druids? they have aoe heals. yes, but that's instant. holy? that's dropped on people like a blizzard or a rain of fire. but shamans are different. see, their aoe is chain heal. and it's casted at a single person (and heals 2 or 3 additional players depending on glyph).
1. it is casted.
2. it is directed at a certain person.
this is exactly like prayer of healing. =D
as a disc priest, i've almost never.... no, actually, i've NEVER used prayer of healing unless it was to top everyone off at the beginning of an instance after i blessed everyone with fort. there are simply better spells for me to use than prayer of healing when it comes to healing two or more people. heck, i skip the binding heal as well. but that was before cataclysm. that was back when mana didnt matter much. today, however, with flash heal being so expensive and pw:shield being so weak, we're stuck with heal and greater heal to do our work. now is a great time to pull out prayer of healing as a viable heal when 3 or more people needs healing at once.
honestly, i would never think of this before, but after playing a shaman, i have been "programmed" to toss chain heal often (for the haste proc). with this mindset, i can easily go on my priest and prioritize prayer of healing more. it does take some getting used to, but overall i think this is what blizzard wanted us to do anyway. we're all holed up into a certain healing "style". style doesnt mean more than having our own set of healing spells and ignoring everything else. but now, our style will incorporate more of the healing spells we used to ignore. this is a chance to use prayer of healing more, which i am glad to have. now if only prayer of healing gave me some other buff. that would be awesome.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Post Patch 4.0 Musings - Resto Shaman
I am bored.
I really am. Of all the changes made to every class (some catastrophic, others not so much) i find that the shaman falls into the category of not so much.
What i did before the patch:
On me - water shield and earthliving weapon.
On tank - earth shield.
I am missing a few totmes. but that's ok. my elementals are there. my bloodlust is there. i'm missing the tidal something waves spell that gives my spells crit in emergencies. but that's fine. now its a little more built into a talent so that if my guy's low on health, i do some auto-crits anyway. that takes the thinking out of that. They played around with my healing waves a bit. now i dont even use lesser healing wave. or that instant spell they gave me that ate up my mana (kinda like what every healer gets now, right?). No, now all i use is riptide and healing wave. greater healing wave is new to me and is added for those ohsht moments where i forget that we're in a dungeon.
i am glad they took away a few buttons and gave me a few more that i'll never use. but whatever. now i am back to healing almost exactly as i did in the previous patch. the names of some spells might have changed, but the whole shaman healing mechanic remained relatively unchanged.
Before Patch:
Earth shield the Tank (or whoever).
Riptide for insta-heals (trigger tidal waves).
Cast tidal wave hasted Healing Wave x2
Riptide for insta-heals
Cast tidal wave hasted Healing Wave x2
repeat repeat repeat.
Sometimes i add in a chain heal if i feel like changing things up a bit.
Earth shield the Tank (or whoever).
Chain heal on lowest dps with most strategic position (trigger tidal waves).
Cast tidal wave hasted Healing Wave x2
repeat x2139482303.
After the Patch:
Please see above.
So what did change?
What i noticed first and foremost was that i never run out of mana. actually, i am healing on my shaman at level 70 last week (currently 74) and i almost never go below 90% mana even at the most demanding of times. my mana regen is almost off the charts. its completely crazy.
Second thing i notice is there's a lot less DKs tanking now. THANK ELUNE!!!! and when i do get a DK, they're actually tanks and not DPS wannabee making our lives harder bs crap shit bitch yadayada people who cant be assed to wait in queue.
Oh wait, this post is about my shaman. sorry.
Honestly, besides the addition of Greater Healing Wave and the removal of that one CD i almost never used and cant be assed to look it up, NOTHING has changed in regards to Shaman Healing.
Oh and my talents got wiped and several new talents were added, things were removed, etc etc etc. if you want more resto shaman healing detialed stuff, find a resto shaman blog. as far as i can tell, the talent trees were blah and the new healing mechanics are even blaher. See why im bored now?
I really am. Of all the changes made to every class (some catastrophic, others not so much) i find that the shaman falls into the category of not so much.
What i did before the patch:
On me - water shield and earthliving weapon.
On tank - earth shield.
I am missing a few totmes. but that's ok. my elementals are there. my bloodlust is there. i'm missing the tidal something waves spell that gives my spells crit in emergencies. but that's fine. now its a little more built into a talent so that if my guy's low on health, i do some auto-crits anyway. that takes the thinking out of that. They played around with my healing waves a bit. now i dont even use lesser healing wave. or that instant spell they gave me that ate up my mana (kinda like what every healer gets now, right?). No, now all i use is riptide and healing wave. greater healing wave is new to me and is added for those ohsht moments where i forget that we're in a dungeon.
i am glad they took away a few buttons and gave me a few more that i'll never use. but whatever. now i am back to healing almost exactly as i did in the previous patch. the names of some spells might have changed, but the whole shaman healing mechanic remained relatively unchanged.
Before Patch:
Earth shield the Tank (or whoever).
Riptide for insta-heals (trigger tidal waves).
Cast tidal wave hasted Healing Wave x2
Riptide for insta-heals
Cast tidal wave hasted Healing Wave x2
repeat repeat repeat.
Sometimes i add in a chain heal if i feel like changing things up a bit.
Earth shield the Tank (or whoever).
Chain heal on lowest dps with most strategic position (trigger tidal waves).
Cast tidal wave hasted Healing Wave x2
repeat x2139482303.
After the Patch:
Please see above.
So what did change?
What i noticed first and foremost was that i never run out of mana. actually, i am healing on my shaman at level 70 last week (currently 74) and i almost never go below 90% mana even at the most demanding of times. my mana regen is almost off the charts. its completely crazy.
Second thing i notice is there's a lot less DKs tanking now. THANK ELUNE!!!! and when i do get a DK, they're actually tanks and not DPS wannabee making our lives harder bs crap shit bitch yadayada people who cant be assed to wait in queue.
Oh wait, this post is about my shaman. sorry.
Honestly, besides the addition of Greater Healing Wave and the removal of that one CD i almost never used and cant be assed to look it up, NOTHING has changed in regards to Shaman Healing.
Oh and my talents got wiped and several new talents were added, things were removed, etc etc etc. if you want more resto shaman healing detialed stuff, find a resto shaman blog. as far as i can tell, the talent trees were blah and the new healing mechanics are even blaher. See why im bored now?
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
I'd Tap That
I play a warlock from time to time. Actually, i play three warlocks from time to time. I used to have it so that each of the three would have different specs. Akeelah on Ravenholdt is affliction and goes apeshit with the affliction spells. Rivendale, another Ravenholdt resident, is spec'd for demonology and tops meters 75% of the time running through outlands. he should be 65 or 66 right now and enjoys the aoe goodness of metamorphesis+rain of fire. he doesnt enjoy the soulfire procs as things die so fast by the time he is done casting the spell, the boss is already dead. El Segundo, (the second, as in, my second character) is actually Elsegundo from Shadowmoon and rocked Destro, until one day i logged on him and found out that his talents were reset. I promptly made him demonology that day since i cant friggin remember how to spec as destro.
In any case, when im instancing, playing around on my locks, i find myself doing a lot of tapping. Life Tap is one of those spells unique to warlocks, where we take some HP and turn it into MP. sounds reasonable. sounds awesome actually. mana regen? who needs that when you can have lifetap! its an awesome idea actually. i get all the benefit of having a full mana bar, able to dps and get things done without having to slow down for a drink or to wand things down. When im questing outside of instances, i also use lifetap. this is mainly because i know for sure i will be getting life back through corruption and sometimes drain life. why only sometimes? because corruption's life draining ability is good enough for me. after every fight, i can, if i choose to, bandage or eat. its pretty simple. and foods/bandages often give me health quickly as compared to drinking for mana recovery.
but you say, mobs are attacking me, why would i lifetap? because i have fear. i have howl of terror. and in dire straights, i have deathcoil (which is 200% cooler than the death knight's death coil, btw). what do all these spells offer me? one, fleeing mobs grab more mobs so i can drain more life, gain more exp, and run around to collect loot. second, they offer me a little bit of breathing room to regain mana, lifetap and apply my dots. i often go around and pick up at least four mobs for this to be anywhere effective. demonologist, i suggest you activate soul link. affliction locks have a bunch of talents that make draining life super easy. destro locks? sorry, you guys are drinking. play like a mage, drink like a mage. thats your punishment.
So when should you lifetap?
Lifetap between spells. yes. please. i hate healing warlocks who dont lifetap between spells. i dont mind the lifetap, really i dont. the less you have to drink, the faster we get through our instance. but the problem lies in this, i've finished drinking and ready for the next pull. then the lock decides to lifetap. like wtf? it also happens at the end of the fight, when im low on mana and im drinking. they lifetap and wait. they dont sit to eat. nothing. im drinking so you drink. please. its only polite.
For affliction locks, there's a lull when it comes to casting. when? when you're waiting for haunt to fall off, or when you're waiting to refresh unstable affliction. sure i might fill in that wait with a shadowbolt since you do want to keep your improved shadowbolt debuff up, but lifetap dammit. dont wait. just do it. i tap right before i get my haunt back. really? yea. it works awesome.
For demonology locks, you're working a different set of spells. try to get it in there somewhere. you dont get a nice health return like from Haunt. but you do get some health back. demo locks are a little more reliant on the healer to heal us tho, so remember when a good time to tap would be. during the fight. this is when the healer is able to toss you a renew, or a rejuvenate, or a riptide before they go back to healing the tank. it flows for them.
what i find in instances is that warlocks dont lifetap as often as i'd like them to. not only that, when they do lifetap, they do it at the most inconvenient times.
1. tap during combat, in between spells and upon anticipation of a big heal from Haunt. if you do this right, you wont have any mana or health problems. any gaps in health will be covered by the healer.
2. tapping after a battle will annoy your healer (ie. me) because i would have already evaluated everyone's health and, after topping everyone off, would have started to drink. if you lifetap now, chances are i wont heal you until the next pull. why? because i dont know if i have "extra" healing to spare. actually, whats more the case is that i dont have time. i have to first shield/hot/buff the tank first, then i can go to the lock and heal you. and by then, you're in need to life tap again because you're now low on mana. that's just how it goes. its kinda like a domino effect here.
3. same as #2, dont lifetap right before a pull. it annoys me as now im thinking, crap, this guy might die. and you might just die. please dont do that. tap when its safe. tap when you know you're getting health back from your spells first and foremost.
4. dont take it personally when you dont get heals. eat a health stone. cast corruption on everyone. drain life. if it stifles your dps, know that this is because you're bad at managing mana/tapping. its your fault and only your fault.
5. run with the mentality that you dont need the healer to heal you all the time. again, you have health stealing spells at yoru disposal. use them. when you're sitting there at 100% health, those spells are wasted. why? because they're not healing you. you cant have more than 100% health. so tap once, get it refilled, tap again. easy isnt it?
im just rambling now. life tap is your friend. it helps you dps longer. please use it. but use it wisely. weave it into your rotaions. dont drop to 0% mana and tap all at once. that's annoying. especially if im healing you. it shows you dont know how to manage your mana. its a game within a game. if you dont find it fun then maybe you should have been a mage, or a hunter. anyway, that's really all i have to say.
oh and to the druid who said that his mana pool is not my mana pool, a big middle finger to you. then dont heal me. i can heal myself. no im not writing this blog entry just because of one experience with a bad healer who doesnt know that healing me = less healing overall. but im writing this because some people still dont know how to life tap, or dont know when to life tap. last straw was when i was in an instance with two locks, both of which likes to tap at the end of a fight. grrrrrr.
anyhow, heal the lock. lock does more damage (instead of just standing there with zero mana or wanding). things die faster. when things die faster, i dont have to heal the tank as much. i dont have to heal the melee's collateral damage as much. i can start to regen out-of-combat mana earlier. i will drink less. i will finish the instance faster. i, as a healer, would love to heal locks who lifetap. i dont know why others dont. its stupid.
In any case, when im instancing, playing around on my locks, i find myself doing a lot of tapping. Life Tap is one of those spells unique to warlocks, where we take some HP and turn it into MP. sounds reasonable. sounds awesome actually. mana regen? who needs that when you can have lifetap! its an awesome idea actually. i get all the benefit of having a full mana bar, able to dps and get things done without having to slow down for a drink or to wand things down. When im questing outside of instances, i also use lifetap. this is mainly because i know for sure i will be getting life back through corruption and sometimes drain life. why only sometimes? because corruption's life draining ability is good enough for me. after every fight, i can, if i choose to, bandage or eat. its pretty simple. and foods/bandages often give me health quickly as compared to drinking for mana recovery.
but you say, mobs are attacking me, why would i lifetap? because i have fear. i have howl of terror. and in dire straights, i have deathcoil (which is 200% cooler than the death knight's death coil, btw). what do all these spells offer me? one, fleeing mobs grab more mobs so i can drain more life, gain more exp, and run around to collect loot. second, they offer me a little bit of breathing room to regain mana, lifetap and apply my dots. i often go around and pick up at least four mobs for this to be anywhere effective. demonologist, i suggest you activate soul link. affliction locks have a bunch of talents that make draining life super easy. destro locks? sorry, you guys are drinking. play like a mage, drink like a mage. thats your punishment.
So when should you lifetap?
Lifetap between spells. yes. please. i hate healing warlocks who dont lifetap between spells. i dont mind the lifetap, really i dont. the less you have to drink, the faster we get through our instance. but the problem lies in this, i've finished drinking and ready for the next pull. then the lock decides to lifetap. like wtf? it also happens at the end of the fight, when im low on mana and im drinking. they lifetap and wait. they dont sit to eat. nothing. im drinking so you drink. please. its only polite.
For affliction locks, there's a lull when it comes to casting. when? when you're waiting for haunt to fall off, or when you're waiting to refresh unstable affliction. sure i might fill in that wait with a shadowbolt since you do want to keep your improved shadowbolt debuff up, but lifetap dammit. dont wait. just do it. i tap right before i get my haunt back. really? yea. it works awesome.
For demonology locks, you're working a different set of spells. try to get it in there somewhere. you dont get a nice health return like from Haunt. but you do get some health back. demo locks are a little more reliant on the healer to heal us tho, so remember when a good time to tap would be. during the fight. this is when the healer is able to toss you a renew, or a rejuvenate, or a riptide before they go back to healing the tank. it flows for them.
what i find in instances is that warlocks dont lifetap as often as i'd like them to. not only that, when they do lifetap, they do it at the most inconvenient times.
1. tap during combat, in between spells and upon anticipation of a big heal from Haunt. if you do this right, you wont have any mana or health problems. any gaps in health will be covered by the healer.
2. tapping after a battle will annoy your healer (ie. me) because i would have already evaluated everyone's health and, after topping everyone off, would have started to drink. if you lifetap now, chances are i wont heal you until the next pull. why? because i dont know if i have "extra" healing to spare. actually, whats more the case is that i dont have time. i have to first shield/hot/buff the tank first, then i can go to the lock and heal you. and by then, you're in need to life tap again because you're now low on mana. that's just how it goes. its kinda like a domino effect here.
3. same as #2, dont lifetap right before a pull. it annoys me as now im thinking, crap, this guy might die. and you might just die. please dont do that. tap when its safe. tap when you know you're getting health back from your spells first and foremost.
4. dont take it personally when you dont get heals. eat a health stone. cast corruption on everyone. drain life. if it stifles your dps, know that this is because you're bad at managing mana/tapping. its your fault and only your fault.
5. run with the mentality that you dont need the healer to heal you all the time. again, you have health stealing spells at yoru disposal. use them. when you're sitting there at 100% health, those spells are wasted. why? because they're not healing you. you cant have more than 100% health. so tap once, get it refilled, tap again. easy isnt it?
im just rambling now. life tap is your friend. it helps you dps longer. please use it. but use it wisely. weave it into your rotaions. dont drop to 0% mana and tap all at once. that's annoying. especially if im healing you. it shows you dont know how to manage your mana. its a game within a game. if you dont find it fun then maybe you should have been a mage, or a hunter. anyway, that's really all i have to say.
oh and to the druid who said that his mana pool is not my mana pool, a big middle finger to you. then dont heal me. i can heal myself. no im not writing this blog entry just because of one experience with a bad healer who doesnt know that healing me = less healing overall. but im writing this because some people still dont know how to life tap, or dont know when to life tap. last straw was when i was in an instance with two locks, both of which likes to tap at the end of a fight. grrrrrr.
anyhow, heal the lock. lock does more damage (instead of just standing there with zero mana or wanding). things die faster. when things die faster, i dont have to heal the tank as much. i dont have to heal the melee's collateral damage as much. i can start to regen out-of-combat mana earlier. i will drink less. i will finish the instance faster. i, as a healer, would love to heal locks who lifetap. i dont know why others dont. its stupid.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
I Heart Shields
i like shields. i really do. they make life a little easier when it comes to healing. now i havent played holy paladin healing much (since he's holy pvp, and i do mainly pve crap) but i have played the other classes. what i find most awesome is that each class has its own version of a shield, whether it seems like it or not.
I'm writing this because i have been thinking about the differences in playing styles between my druid (which i love love love) and my shaman, as well, with my priest and my paladin. heck, throw in my death knight and warlock (because they can heal themselves!) and we'll have a nice healing party. i'll bring the kungaloosh.
Lets start with the obvious, priest's Power Word: Shield. I wonder if there are any other "Power Word" spells. anyway, this is the obvious shield, with disc getting a secondary shield as well. this shield rocks my socks and it does exactly as it says, it shields. damage taken is damage absorbed. makes sense right?
The second shielding type of healer is the paladin. his shield absorbs damage as well. but it also increases healing on the target with the shield with this thing called a HoT. like the shield above, it lasts for a certain amount of time or until the shield is completely used.
The third class with a shield is the shaman. now his shield acts a little different because it shields the person kind of. what it does is each time it gets whacked, it heals the bearer of the shield by a certain amount. its not as effective as the priest shield with its "partial" absorb, but it has one thing the other shield doesnt have: longevity. it lasts for quite a while, and only needs to be refreshed when the shield runs out of charges. whether it has 8 charges or 2 charges, the heal per hit will be exactly the same. only limitation is that this shield only works on one person, per shaman, at a time.
The last type of shield isnt really a shield at all. it comes from the awesome tree druids and they call it rejuvenation. this spell is an inexpensive heal over time spell that simply exists. if your "shielded" party member gets hit, it will kick in once every three seconds to heal him back up. if the party member doesnt take any damage, it overheals, but its waste is neglegible (liken unto a shield that doesnt get used up).
people will argue that the druid talent living seed can be this shield. i find it lacking the very basic concept of a shield. the fact that it only plants by chance makes it unreliable. with all the other spells, the shield can be cast at-will, barring any cooldowns or debuffs. although living seed may seen like a great "sheild" type spell, its very situational and would probably be considered a proc heal that may or may not be used. what? well what if the tank gets a living seed proc, awesome! but what if the tank is also at full health? that next hit, whether it be blocked, parried, dodged, or taken, will still cause living seed to burst, thus wasting a good heal. i'd love living seed to go off if the tank were to die. that would rock.
but anyway, rejuv is a shield. it is also a hot. but it acts as the shield in many cases and tops people off nicely. it is used in conjunction with swiftmend and nourish to blow away the competition. it is the base for which druids get their healing bonus. sounds like a sacred shield, power word shield and earthshield to me!
anyway, those are the shields in my life and i love them.
I'm writing this because i have been thinking about the differences in playing styles between my druid (which i love love love) and my shaman, as well, with my priest and my paladin. heck, throw in my death knight and warlock (because they can heal themselves!) and we'll have a nice healing party. i'll bring the kungaloosh.
Lets start with the obvious, priest's Power Word: Shield. I wonder if there are any other "Power Word" spells. anyway, this is the obvious shield, with disc getting a secondary shield as well. this shield rocks my socks and it does exactly as it says, it shields. damage taken is damage absorbed. makes sense right?
The second shielding type of healer is the paladin. his shield absorbs damage as well. but it also increases healing on the target with the shield with this thing called a HoT. like the shield above, it lasts for a certain amount of time or until the shield is completely used.
The third class with a shield is the shaman. now his shield acts a little different because it shields the person kind of. what it does is each time it gets whacked, it heals the bearer of the shield by a certain amount. its not as effective as the priest shield with its "partial" absorb, but it has one thing the other shield doesnt have: longevity. it lasts for quite a while, and only needs to be refreshed when the shield runs out of charges. whether it has 8 charges or 2 charges, the heal per hit will be exactly the same. only limitation is that this shield only works on one person, per shaman, at a time.
The last type of shield isnt really a shield at all. it comes from the awesome tree druids and they call it rejuvenation. this spell is an inexpensive heal over time spell that simply exists. if your "shielded" party member gets hit, it will kick in once every three seconds to heal him back up. if the party member doesnt take any damage, it overheals, but its waste is neglegible (liken unto a shield that doesnt get used up).
people will argue that the druid talent living seed can be this shield. i find it lacking the very basic concept of a shield. the fact that it only plants by chance makes it unreliable. with all the other spells, the shield can be cast at-will, barring any cooldowns or debuffs. although living seed may seen like a great "sheild" type spell, its very situational and would probably be considered a proc heal that may or may not be used. what? well what if the tank gets a living seed proc, awesome! but what if the tank is also at full health? that next hit, whether it be blocked, parried, dodged, or taken, will still cause living seed to burst, thus wasting a good heal. i'd love living seed to go off if the tank were to die. that would rock.
but anyway, rejuv is a shield. it is also a hot. but it acts as the shield in many cases and tops people off nicely. it is used in conjunction with swiftmend and nourish to blow away the competition. it is the base for which druids get their healing bonus. sounds like a sacred shield, power word shield and earthshield to me!
anyway, those are the shields in my life and i love them.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Brd is the Word
Rockdarr, Lv. 55 Orc Shaman
Imagine that, three nights in a row and we end up doing BRD, blackrock depths each night. My shaman Rockdarr and my gf's paladin Kriss7 ended up in BRD for the 15th time this past week. Since people start brd around level 52, and move on to BRD Uppoer City!!! at level 54, we have been through this dungeon more times than we'd like. especially when no one can figure out how to really get the "random dungeon completion" for doing the upper city.
through one of my first trips to brd, after a wipe, i picked up the stoneforge key quest that got me the, well, stoneforge key. this just gave me access to the rest of the city. it wasnt all that awesome really. basically i had to kill a boss, turn in the quest, and from between this dead guy's legs, out comes a key. yep, thats how it happened. i kid you not.
but brd holds several items of interest to me. one, full clears means 1 more level (actually now, about 80% of a level). two, i get to see some super silly accidental mass pulls. three, the opportunity to see the highest dps die several times. and four, craptastic items that actually look cool, especially weapons.
but other than those things, there's really not too much i want to take from these instances. like SM or Uldaman or Sunken Temple, i wanna get out of there as soon as possible.
BRD isnt like Maraudon. Mara is split up into three sections. but each section has a different look and feel. it could have possibly been three different instances, each with a different entrance and no connection between them. Instead, we're given a massive dungeon with two different entrances and a possible item to teleport us to the beginning of the third section. kinda involved, which is good, but still. i'd rather be told i cant enter Mara-falls because i havent done Mara-ugly yet.
BRD changed that. They added the requirement of a key and still do! Not only that, they drop us into BRD thinking we'll do the upper city. but we're sent to the beginning of the map and no one really knows we're in the dungeon group for "upper city" until after we kill the prison boss. everyone stands there confused and wonders where their ballsack of goodstuffs is. but its not there. we dont get the message that we're done. so we move on forward and try to kill as many bosses as possible. i have the key, so i open the locks and we go through every single boss we can kill. NONE gives us the acheivement for finishing the upper city portion of BRD. none. /sad
Am i complaining? sort of. i dont mind the large dungeon. with a good group, thats a lot of experience. i went from level 52-55 over the weekend. it was easy. i did get a few groups that stopped after a few bosses. there's really no incentive to stay after the prison boss. but others stayed, and thats how i got my key. i find that the level 55's would rather finish the whole instance than requeue because its basically the final push to get to outland. everyone's sick and tired of dungeons. everyone's sick and tired of trying to deal with groups and fail tanks (i dont know why, but they all seem to be druids).
Queue times have increased. from 10 minutes to 20-30 minutes. why? because no one wants to run the dungeon any more. i mean at level 55, there's just a few more levels til we hit the next continent. some are already out there trying to kill things. others are better off questing or finishing off some chain quest they've been meaning to do. others dont mind a little bit of pvp. but really, before i hit outlands, i'd like to complete blackrock spire (another stupidly long dungeon, and doesnt look like a spire at all), scholomance and stratholme. when people hit 55, they're able to make themselves a deathknight. but there's so many people i see playing on alts that this reason is a bit pushing it. so... why the queue times have gone up i have no idea. these are only my guesses.
in any case, i think the last azeroth dungeon we'll be doing in LFD will be blackrock spire and scholo. on my other alts, i've never been in a group for stratholme. scholo, yes. UBRS yes. upper black rock spire. ubrs.
most scholomance groups make it all the way to the end. most ubrs groups usually die out since no one knows where the hell to go for anything. we dont even know how to capture the worg for the pet.
In any case, i've seen BRD more times than i really care to see. although i am a healer and i look mostly at healthbars the whole time. i still find it very dull to see the same content over and over and over. i dont mind having choices, but make them well-defined. the way brd is laid out, no one really knows where to go. if we're doing upper city, drop us off in upper city. if we're doing prison, make sure everyone knows we're doing prison. tell us who we have to kill to finish the dungeon. i think we've killed every boss in brd without getting the upper city acheivement (although i got the acheivement for completing all of BRD. what??)
Xylie, Lv. 36 Belf Priest
My priest is named after two things. One of my friends on wow is named something similar. Xylie is also named after one of my daughter's mermaids. actually from the movie A Mermaid's tale. tail, tale. get it? old pun. i know.
I got into a random the other day. Yes i know, randoms are so much easier to do than questing. why? because i get to learn healing. as very many people know, leveling as a healer sucks. the old way of doing it was to level as dps then switch to healing/tanking at level 60, or 70, or now, 80. but those days are gone thanks to LFD. it has made finding groups, and leveling as holy, restoration, disc, "heals" much much easier. sure, people can get sick of dungeons. but that's the nature of anything you do over and over and over again (besides sleep, ofc). In any case, leveling as a healer is much eaiser (minus the stupid tanks and stupid dps out there) now.
Stupid tanks still exist, especially those who insist on pulling large quantities of mobs while the healer is drinking. also for the druid who insists on pulling more and more mobs, especially when the healer jumped into the dungeon mid-fight, fuck you. learn to respect that others zone into dungeons and most often, expect a minute to ready themselves. the grim guzzler isnt exactly the best place to chain pull anyway, especially with knockdowns and curses up the wazooo.
Speaking of curses. i landed in a RFK group the other day and was healing the tank pretty effortlessly. its funny that the tank mentioned that i was pretty good at healing. not only that, that i was spot on with my decursing and dispelling. why isnt that what healers do anyway? but he's mentioned that his whole day was littered with horrible healers. i gave myself an immaginary pat on the back. but decursing is as easy as a mousewheel scroll up/down (i made it that way). mouseover macros are awesome. remind me to add that function to Rend on my warrior. that would be a nice addition in between thunderclaps. thats all tanks do anyway. run in, thunderclap, revenge, rend, thunderclap. thats really all i need to do to hold aggro. but that's an aside and i should really talk about healing. lol
in any case, at level 36, my healing consists of Power Word: Shield, which is a stupid name for "Shield". or "Bubble". but i think of Divine Aegis as the "bubble" and PWS ans the "shield". so lets leave it at that. i've yet to get divine aegis anyway. what im really looking for is mana returns on used shields. meaning, whenever one of my shields gets used up completely, i get some mana back. this will be awesome although i really dont need mana regen right about now. i put a shield up on a tank, stand there for 30 seconds, then run to the next group, reshield. i might toss a heal. and that's about it. things get hairy when i get tanks that insist on tanking several groups at once. although it is a little more fun that way, my mana drops like a rock.
Here are my priorities when healing.
People Priority:
Me. Tank. Good DPS. lowest dps last.
Spell Priority:
Shield. Flash Heal. Greater Heal. Prayer of Healing. Renew.
Renew is last? yes. its an aweful spell for disc. it has its uses. like if i shielded someone, and let renew do the ticking. that would usually be used on a dps and not the tank. coming from a druid healer, who has HoTs of every flavor, you'd expect renew to be up at the top of my priorities. i would too! and that's what i used to do when playing my priest. but after a long time playing disc, i have switched over to a more direct heal and mitigation approach to healing. it just takes a little getting used to. but after seeing how lackluster renew is for a disc priest firsthand, it wasnt hard to shed the habit of blacketing HoTs.
tanks get more direct heals if i can help it. its mainly because the tank's health is going down faster than the rest, and a renew wont fill up a health bar. however, it will help to keep him from dying should i get a nasty chain pulling tank. i usually keep flash heal very handy, which is why my next talent points would be to lower the cost of my flash heal. lately though, my flash heal only heals for about 15% of the tank's health. hopefully, my spells will catch up. i do like to see about a 25% gain on each heal, much like how most other "flash" heal type spells work. oh well. it will improve in time.
Imagine that, three nights in a row and we end up doing BRD, blackrock depths each night. My shaman Rockdarr and my gf's paladin Kriss7 ended up in BRD for the 15th time this past week. Since people start brd around level 52, and move on to BRD Uppoer City!!! at level 54, we have been through this dungeon more times than we'd like. especially when no one can figure out how to really get the "random dungeon completion" for doing the upper city.
through one of my first trips to brd, after a wipe, i picked up the stoneforge key quest that got me the, well, stoneforge key. this just gave me access to the rest of the city. it wasnt all that awesome really. basically i had to kill a boss, turn in the quest, and from between this dead guy's legs, out comes a key. yep, thats how it happened. i kid you not.
but brd holds several items of interest to me. one, full clears means 1 more level (actually now, about 80% of a level). two, i get to see some super silly accidental mass pulls. three, the opportunity to see the highest dps die several times. and four, craptastic items that actually look cool, especially weapons.
but other than those things, there's really not too much i want to take from these instances. like SM or Uldaman or Sunken Temple, i wanna get out of there as soon as possible.
BRD isnt like Maraudon. Mara is split up into three sections. but each section has a different look and feel. it could have possibly been three different instances, each with a different entrance and no connection between them. Instead, we're given a massive dungeon with two different entrances and a possible item to teleport us to the beginning of the third section. kinda involved, which is good, but still. i'd rather be told i cant enter Mara-falls because i havent done Mara-ugly yet.
BRD changed that. They added the requirement of a key and still do! Not only that, they drop us into BRD thinking we'll do the upper city. but we're sent to the beginning of the map and no one really knows we're in the dungeon group for "upper city" until after we kill the prison boss. everyone stands there confused and wonders where their ballsack of goodstuffs is. but its not there. we dont get the message that we're done. so we move on forward and try to kill as many bosses as possible. i have the key, so i open the locks and we go through every single boss we can kill. NONE gives us the acheivement for finishing the upper city portion of BRD. none. /sad
Am i complaining? sort of. i dont mind the large dungeon. with a good group, thats a lot of experience. i went from level 52-55 over the weekend. it was easy. i did get a few groups that stopped after a few bosses. there's really no incentive to stay after the prison boss. but others stayed, and thats how i got my key. i find that the level 55's would rather finish the whole instance than requeue because its basically the final push to get to outland. everyone's sick and tired of dungeons. everyone's sick and tired of trying to deal with groups and fail tanks (i dont know why, but they all seem to be druids).
Queue times have increased. from 10 minutes to 20-30 minutes. why? because no one wants to run the dungeon any more. i mean at level 55, there's just a few more levels til we hit the next continent. some are already out there trying to kill things. others are better off questing or finishing off some chain quest they've been meaning to do. others dont mind a little bit of pvp. but really, before i hit outlands, i'd like to complete blackrock spire (another stupidly long dungeon, and doesnt look like a spire at all), scholomance and stratholme. when people hit 55, they're able to make themselves a deathknight. but there's so many people i see playing on alts that this reason is a bit pushing it. so... why the queue times have gone up i have no idea. these are only my guesses.
in any case, i think the last azeroth dungeon we'll be doing in LFD will be blackrock spire and scholo. on my other alts, i've never been in a group for stratholme. scholo, yes. UBRS yes. upper black rock spire. ubrs.
most scholomance groups make it all the way to the end. most ubrs groups usually die out since no one knows where the hell to go for anything. we dont even know how to capture the worg for the pet.
In any case, i've seen BRD more times than i really care to see. although i am a healer and i look mostly at healthbars the whole time. i still find it very dull to see the same content over and over and over. i dont mind having choices, but make them well-defined. the way brd is laid out, no one really knows where to go. if we're doing upper city, drop us off in upper city. if we're doing prison, make sure everyone knows we're doing prison. tell us who we have to kill to finish the dungeon. i think we've killed every boss in brd without getting the upper city acheivement (although i got the acheivement for completing all of BRD. what??)
Xylie, Lv. 36 Belf Priest
My priest is named after two things. One of my friends on wow is named something similar. Xylie is also named after one of my daughter's mermaids. actually from the movie A Mermaid's tale. tail, tale. get it? old pun. i know.
I got into a random the other day. Yes i know, randoms are so much easier to do than questing. why? because i get to learn healing. as very many people know, leveling as a healer sucks. the old way of doing it was to level as dps then switch to healing/tanking at level 60, or 70, or now, 80. but those days are gone thanks to LFD. it has made finding groups, and leveling as holy, restoration, disc, "heals" much much easier. sure, people can get sick of dungeons. but that's the nature of anything you do over and over and over again (besides sleep, ofc). In any case, leveling as a healer is much eaiser (minus the stupid tanks and stupid dps out there) now.
Stupid tanks still exist, especially those who insist on pulling large quantities of mobs while the healer is drinking. also for the druid who insists on pulling more and more mobs, especially when the healer jumped into the dungeon mid-fight, fuck you. learn to respect that others zone into dungeons and most often, expect a minute to ready themselves. the grim guzzler isnt exactly the best place to chain pull anyway, especially with knockdowns and curses up the wazooo.
Speaking of curses. i landed in a RFK group the other day and was healing the tank pretty effortlessly. its funny that the tank mentioned that i was pretty good at healing. not only that, that i was spot on with my decursing and dispelling. why isnt that what healers do anyway? but he's mentioned that his whole day was littered with horrible healers. i gave myself an immaginary pat on the back. but decursing is as easy as a mousewheel scroll up/down (i made it that way). mouseover macros are awesome. remind me to add that function to Rend on my warrior. that would be a nice addition in between thunderclaps. thats all tanks do anyway. run in, thunderclap, revenge, rend, thunderclap. thats really all i need to do to hold aggro. but that's an aside and i should really talk about healing. lol
in any case, at level 36, my healing consists of Power Word: Shield, which is a stupid name for "Shield". or "Bubble". but i think of Divine Aegis as the "bubble" and PWS ans the "shield". so lets leave it at that. i've yet to get divine aegis anyway. what im really looking for is mana returns on used shields. meaning, whenever one of my shields gets used up completely, i get some mana back. this will be awesome although i really dont need mana regen right about now. i put a shield up on a tank, stand there for 30 seconds, then run to the next group, reshield. i might toss a heal. and that's about it. things get hairy when i get tanks that insist on tanking several groups at once. although it is a little more fun that way, my mana drops like a rock.
Here are my priorities when healing.
People Priority:
Me. Tank. Good DPS. lowest dps last.
Spell Priority:
Shield. Flash Heal. Greater Heal. Prayer of Healing. Renew.
Renew is last? yes. its an aweful spell for disc. it has its uses. like if i shielded someone, and let renew do the ticking. that would usually be used on a dps and not the tank. coming from a druid healer, who has HoTs of every flavor, you'd expect renew to be up at the top of my priorities. i would too! and that's what i used to do when playing my priest. but after a long time playing disc, i have switched over to a more direct heal and mitigation approach to healing. it just takes a little getting used to. but after seeing how lackluster renew is for a disc priest firsthand, it wasnt hard to shed the habit of blacketing HoTs.
tanks get more direct heals if i can help it. its mainly because the tank's health is going down faster than the rest, and a renew wont fill up a health bar. however, it will help to keep him from dying should i get a nasty chain pulling tank. i usually keep flash heal very handy, which is why my next talent points would be to lower the cost of my flash heal. lately though, my flash heal only heals for about 15% of the tank's health. hopefully, my spells will catch up. i do like to see about a 25% gain on each heal, much like how most other "flash" heal type spells work. oh well. it will improve in time.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Learning to Heal
I have been leveling my shaman with my girlfriend's paladin (well kinda. half the time we're playing on our own because we're not really home together at the same time except for 11pm to 2am. and 2am is when I sleep to get up for work at 8am the next day. yea kinda nuts.) and it has been a blast so far. as many of you know, I have leveled up a paladin as a tank a year or two ago and it was pretty fun to actually be able to kill several things at once, albiet slowly. with a ret paladin, I usually try to keep it to two mobs at once, but killing speed is roughly the same. I find mana management with the ret paladin a lot easier than with the prot paladin. earlier this year I started a ret paladin on a new server and leveled him all the way to 80. I really wasn’t planning to do much with him but to save up his triumph badges for some pvp gear and try out pvp a little. but this was before my gf decided to start playing.
Lately, the new server is basically where im spending a lot of my time when on WoW. over the past two and a half weeks, I've leveled up a disc priest to 30 and a resto shaman to almost 40 as of writing. The Warlock/Priest combo is on hold until my gf gets sick of the Pala/Shaman combo. although I highly doubt she'll stop playing the paladin, as she's already level 40. in a couple level's she's going to have a whole bunch of new spells and abilities that will actually make the paladin a little more involved. the only proc she really has to manage is Art of War. everything else are just new attacks or new seals, in which she's already familiar with.
Im learning to heal with my priest all over again. Its really difficult to heal in the beginning as most of my spells are not talented, my gear was crap and the tanks are all newbs. but as time progressed, I got a little better as well as the groups. things began forming and falling into place. no longer do I see fail groups. I see more competent groups as I continue to level on beyond the basics of RFC, WC, VC, RFK and Stocks. Actually, I've begun to see much more improvements to the groups when running RFK and Stocks and now, as im doing SM more often, I find that everyone, especially the tanks, know exactly what they're doing. well almost. there's still tanks with LOS issues, or tanks who don’t pick up the casters and whatnot, but they're still learning. at least, im not healing squishybear or onetargetwarrior. everyone's utilizing their AoE abilities and it rocks. Even the casters, who usually aggro on me when I heal, now are LOS'ed back to the tank, if not, I reply with a Wind Shear and they come running into the tank's Thunderclap or Consecration.
At around level 25, things began to take form as a disc priest. my shields are buffed, my healing is better, my mana and regen is a little better and my heals are a little more efficient. namely, I have flash heal sheild and heal ready to go. I don’t have my favorite moves yet (pain suppression, penance, divine aegis) but they'll come in time. Somehow im learning to heal with a disc all over again. it wasn’t so fun the first time around, but that's mainly because there wasn’t a random dungeon finder tool. but now, I queue up and I go. quests? what are those?
The same thing happened with my shaman at around level 25. He became much easier to play due to the addition of some abilities and spells. prior, I was using healing wave. that's the only healing spell I had. my totem selection sucked too. it was one earth totem, and one fire totem. I didn’t even get my water totem until about level 25. glyphed water shield is great as it returns mana to me passively and when I get hit. having four charges makes it even better. what I try to do is grab aggro from one mob first just to get my water shield charges to go off. In any case, mana regen is a lot better. additionally, with two healing spells and some very nifty totems, healing has become a lot more versatile. the addition of a damage buffer and a HoT from my Earthliving imbue makes healing even more involved. it is no longer cut and dry with just one heal and no real supporting spells/abilities.
But learning to heal with the shaman has got me thinking about the uniqueness of all the healing classes. Namely, how to use my totems as a supporting role for the group. Paladins have their blessings and hands. which is great. these are direct spells and such. priests have fortitude and a few other buffs. druids have paws (Mark of the Wild). But shamans have totems. and these totems do different things based on what I decide to put down. faster attacks? more spell damage? slowing mobs down? doing damage? adding armor? all of these things can be done with totems. and I get four differen types to play around with at the same time. fun times when you have another shaman in the group. I usually put down healing specific totems and overall support for the group. but my fire totem is always the magma totem because I find that a 6% damage increase to spellcasters simply isnt as great as having a 30% increase to all dps. what? yes. I do 30% of the dps in most groups with that totem. whatever gets us through the instance faster is fine by me.
now the fire totem, in this case, the magma totem is my fire totem of choice, always gets planted at my front left. and so I try to position myself close enough to the group to drop that totem as close to the group of mobs as possible. in a pull, I usually accomplish this even before I have to heal the tank. sometimes I can pull off a fire nova before I even have to heal. a fire nova is basically "activating" your fire totem to blow up things around it. this causes massive damage all around. and if the tank has 4 or 6 mobs on him at one time, I usually do awesome damage. sometimes I do pull aggro but that doesn’t last too long. the tank would pull them back a quick second later. what this does, however, is cause my watershield to pop, giving me a bunch of mana back. I do want this to happen. and sometimes I purposely pull aggro with my fire nova (although I sometimes get more mobs than I want) in order to get some mana back.
I find that with this method, I have very little mana problems. I often drink but I do know that when I do DPS with the totem, I am expending a lot of mana. I am not complaining, since healing alone would take up a small amount of my mana supply but remain pretty boring. im sure as I level on, things will get a little more exciting. I will have to heal more and use more spells. im anxiously waiting earthshield, chain heal and riptide. with those added to my arsenal, I hope to never have to use Healing wave again.
Q for all the shaman healers: How often do you use Healing Wave anyway? I would assume that Lesser Healing Wave +glyph is the way to go for quick healing, chain heals for multiple targets and riptide +LHW for big heals. this is my theory since I am unable to test any of this out at the moment. I am level 38 currently so I don’t have any of those spells to work with. I want to know this because I want to know if I should respec my talent points later on, meaning, once I get riptide, do I want to remove my talents from all the Healing Wave talents? the one that reduces cast time by 0.5 seconds? the one that increases healing done from HW by 8% per talent point? I find myself using Healing wave less and less. Much like how I don’t use greater heal at all on my priest. I use shield, flash and penance. on my druid, I use healing touch (the Healing wave equiv) only with swiftmend. Just pondering right now. not sure what to do, but im more of a ABC caster (always be casting), so I prefer to continually cast Lesser healing wave than to cast Healing wave, wait 5 seconds, cast HW again, wait 5 seconds, cast HW again.
Thanks in advance!
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tanking and Gemming for the Asshats
This is a little related to the previous post, which is why i titled the post that way. but... it is not entirely. What i do like to talk about is the issue of tanks. No, not asshat tanks, but asshat healers or dps who look at a tank's health and decide that they have a crap tank. what i mean is this...
I zone into an instance and see four other players, one of which is the tank. now the very first thing i look at is who's the tank, and so i can set my focus on him. i rarely look at his HP if im dps, but i will glance at it if i was healing him. His health will give me a guage of exactly how much attention i have to give to him while healing the instance. that's basically it. i dont check his gear to see if he's crit immune, or check to see if he's even got the right types of gear on. i just take it by faith that the tank knows what he's doing, no matter the level of HP he may have.
Why do i say this is because i oftentimes find people commenting on the tank's health as the determining factor as to how well an instance will go, or if there are hiccups, who the first person to blame would be if we were to have to point fingers. of course, in a bad pull, the tank will usually die first, or if the tank has abilities on cooldown, the dps and healer may die before the tank has the opportunity to grab aggro. this happened to me the other night where adds aggroed and went straight for the AoE-ing dps and i couldnt do anything to stop them for maybe 4-5 seconds.
New tank
When people do see a tank with say, 25k health, a few things go through their minds, im sure. and one of these things is that the tank is "new". new to what? well, for a lot of people, they may assume the tank is "new" to tanking itself. a person new to tanking may be a liability for the group, as the dps and healer may feel like guinea pigs at this point. but the fact of the matter is everyone's learning, we just dont want them to learn while pugging with us, ESPECIALLY if they're tanks. correct? i mean we can deal with bad dps, or bad healing (even bad healing has its limits), but bad tanking is a no no. a new tanks, 25k health tanks all somehow equate to possibly bad tanks.
New 80
There are many who have been in the game for a while leveling their alt tank and barely reached 80. there are also others who have joined the game several months earlier and have finally made it to 80, ready to tank heroics. i've encountered many people who do 2k dps, heal wonderfully and tank like leetsauce who have just dinged 80 that day, the day before, or somethind during the same week. last week i had the experience of seeing one party member say, i just dinged 80 today, with three more people saying how they're new to 80 as well. i was the only one who couldnt say that. instead, i said i dinged 80 a year ago.
it was kind of refreshing to see fresh new 80s running heroics and not judging each other. what's funny, or sad, is that it's usually always the raiders who seem to compare and belittle everyone else. now i am not saying every raider does it. what i am saying is that when it does happen, its more likely than not, a raiding individual pugging his daily random heroic for his frosties.
So these tanks with 25k-ish health who just dinged 80 are often criticized for their low health, but my contention is why? that's usually what tanks had the day they started heroics when wrath came out. and that's a somewhat middle-ground. i started tanking at 23k health. and before ulduar hit, i had maybe 28k health at most. i struggled to even get close to 30k health. but now we see tanks with 40k health and think that everyone, upon reaching 80, should have those numbers. its almost infuriating to see people who really do not have any idea how overboard that number is. i mean think of it this way, if a new 80 tank were to tank normal utgarde keep or nexus, that's basically what a 40k health tank is like doing heroics.
The Fallacy of HP
I just came across a post this morning about effective health found here. Think Tank on Armor. He thinks about armor pretty much the same way i think about avoidance. it basically increases your effective health. now he has a pretty detailed example of how it relates to healing, and i cannot agree with him more about that. although in heroics, the amount of overpowered healing can bsically negate his claims, in raids, it is quite different. armor is king. avoidance is queen. and HP is the jester.... according to me.
Before we go on, i'd like to tell you my stand on HP. its subpar. it really is. anyone telling you to stack stamina as long as you have the minimum defense rating has no idea what he's talking about. it does make sense on its own tho. if you take everything else out of the equation, of course, the more stamina you have, the more damage you can take. but we live in a very multi-faceted world (of warcraft) and therefore, we have to take many other factors into consideration.
Note: the following examples will not include hard numbers but will describe the basic concept of the stats i will be talking about. if you want exact numbers please go to sites like elitist jerks or tankspot.
Mitigation: What Armor Does. the person who prioritizes armor when gearing will see a lot less damage per hit. overall, he might have more damage if he doesnt have enough avoidance. assuming that he's being healed sufficiently, his armor is negating a fair amount of the hits. the more armor he has, the less damage he takes per hit.
Example. Lets suppose a mob does an auto attack for 10k health. Lets suppose he only does auto attacks.
If the person taking the hits has zero armor on, each attack will damage him by 10k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 4th hit.
Lets say the person puts on armor (all other things being equal, including health, i know, not realistic, but this is to prove a point) so that he will negate 50% of the damage made to him.
If the person has armor to negate 50% damage, each attack will damage him by 5k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 8th hit.
Now consider that each hit from the mob takes 1 second. if he had zero armor, he would die in 4 seconds. if he had 50% damage mitigation from armor, he will die after 8 seconds. (i just made a quick example of TTL, or time to live).
Armor increases TTL, reduces damage taken per hit and makes life for the healers a whole lot easier.
See how armor works there? HP isnt really the "end all" of all tanking stats. by all means no. lets move on to the next item.
Avoidance: Total Avoidance is the sum of several stats, including Dodge, Parry, and Block. These stats are the basis of helping a tank NOT take damage. What i mean is a dodged attach will hit for zero damage. a parried attack will hit for zero damage. block is a different animal and has its own damage reduction amounts and things. but we know for sure one thing, dodge and parry negates 100% of any hit.
So lets take block out of the equation to make things simpler and pretend we're talking about DK tanks or bear tanks.
Lets take the tank from the Armor example and say he has 40k health, with 50% damage mitigation from armor. that is what we'll work with.
Lets say it's a DK with a dodge percentage of 24% and a parry percentage of 21%. This gives the DK a total of 45% avoidance.
This means that 45% of the mobs attack will not hit the dk at all. With some math here, we can estimate that per swing, the mob will get about 2750 damage. since each swing is 1 second apart, the tank will essentially take 2750 damage per second. with a tank of 40k health, it will take the mob 14.55 seconds to kill the tank.
Now 14.55 seconds is better than 8 seconds (armor only) and a whole lot better than 4 seconds (no mitigation).
Note/Edit: Please note that avoidance is on "chance per swing" and not an actual percentage of damage reduction. because of this, if you get unlucky and get hit on all swings, your TTL will actually be 8 seconds. If you're lucky and are missed on all swings, your TTL will be indefinite, or forever. Because of this reasoning, a more statistical analysis will have to be done, as in, if each hit from a boss has a 45% chance to miss (55% chance to land), what's the probability that the tank will survive for 15 seconds? i believe this will result in some z-score and bell curve with deviations and such. but if all swings were to be distributed evenly, i would give the tank about 15 seconds to live. again, more complex (and more accurate) calculations can be fould elsewhere. i am merely giving an overview, showing the basic concept.
To Sum Things Up
I know this has been a long post but i really wanted to go through just what exactly soaks up damage. i know that on a 1 to 1 ratio, health points can be seen and understood universally among everyone. if a mob hits a tank for 3k damage, that's 3k health gone. but what they do not see is that the mob usually hits everyone else for 8k damage and that the tank is often parrying or dodging attacks more than half of the time. they dont see that. dps usually does not see that. it is really only the tank and healers who really see this mechanic at work. why else would a boss 1hit a warlock to death? but dps doesnt see that and calls himself a squishy. sure, he's truly a squishy, but he doesnt exactly know why or how or what it all really means.
AND in order to help ease the minds of these misguided dps, the tanks do not take the time to explain all of this to the dps. instead, they appease the dps by gemming for stamina, enchanting for stamina, use health/stamina enhancing armorkits and drink elixirs of mighty fortitude. The tanks end up trying to make the dps and healers feel a little more at ease by enhancing the only number the dps and healers can actually see but because of this, they leave little room, if any, for other stats like armor and avoidance.
True, as people gear up, they will encounter gear with higher amounts of stamina and armor. so why bother when you already have 560 defense rating and a billion armor points? shouldnt they be entitled to spread out their stats with more stamina/health? well with better armor comes more stamina anyway, so the inverse can also be argued. why not gem defense when you now have more stamina? see what i did there?
But instead, i see bear tanks gemming for stamina. I see dk's gemming for stamina. i see paladins and warriors gemming for stamina. and as a healer, i always have to cringe at these tanks. i hate, as much as i complain about boring heroic runs, i hate healing 50k health tanks who stack stamina. i constantly have to heal them. there is really no break for me at all in heroics when healing these guys. this takes a toll on the healer (so the dps, although they feel really comfortable running along with a 50k health tank, they dont realize that there is less time and mana for me to heal them should they need any kind of healing) and when we get into harder fights where there's collateral damage, aoe damage, or just random damage, i find little time to heal the dps or myself.
ATTENTION ALL TANKS: THERE ARE BETTER STATS THAN STAMINA!!!
For bears:
Gem for Agility. Agility (Agi) will increase your armor. with the bear shapeshift multiplier to armor, you get even more armor per point of agi than the other plate wearing classes would.
Agi also increases your dodge percentage. this is your only aviodance stat, so beef (or bear) it up as much as you can with agi. Its really easy for bears. we only need one stat to deal with.
For plate wearers:
Gem for Defense even past the crit immune level (currently at 535 for heroics and 540 for raids). The more Defense (Def) you have, the more you're able to dodge and parry at the very least. not only will you increase your chance to avoid a hit, you're also giving yourself a Def buffer should you get a better piece of gear with less Def but having more Armor/Stam/Dodge/Parry/etc.
You cannot gem for Armor, but you can enchant and use armor kits for more armor. However, i would try to go for the best piece of gear with the highest built-in armor, gem for defense, enchant it with stats, armsman, or threat.
For both bears and plate wearers: There are plenty of resources online. I know things can be confusing and information can be scattered over the internet. but the information is out there. If you have any questions or need directions on where to go for your class, please feel free to reply and i will try my best to point you in the right direction.
Also, there is the argument about magical damage ignoring all armor and even avoidance. In this case, if armor and avoidance are negated, then a thinking person would indeed switch out his gear and use some magic resistance gear or stamina gear. Now if the fight was a mix of mostly physical hits with some magic damage, then the thinking person will have to evaluate which he prefers to mitigate and which would be more important to mitigate on the whole of the fight. you can always change gear after the fight to suit the needs of the next fight.
Again, to all tanks, there are better stats that just stamina. to all dps and maybe healers, there are much better ways to guage and judge a tank than by his health pool.
I zone into an instance and see four other players, one of which is the tank. now the very first thing i look at is who's the tank, and so i can set my focus on him. i rarely look at his HP if im dps, but i will glance at it if i was healing him. His health will give me a guage of exactly how much attention i have to give to him while healing the instance. that's basically it. i dont check his gear to see if he's crit immune, or check to see if he's even got the right types of gear on. i just take it by faith that the tank knows what he's doing, no matter the level of HP he may have.
Why do i say this is because i oftentimes find people commenting on the tank's health as the determining factor as to how well an instance will go, or if there are hiccups, who the first person to blame would be if we were to have to point fingers. of course, in a bad pull, the tank will usually die first, or if the tank has abilities on cooldown, the dps and healer may die before the tank has the opportunity to grab aggro. this happened to me the other night where adds aggroed and went straight for the AoE-ing dps and i couldnt do anything to stop them for maybe 4-5 seconds.
New tank
When people do see a tank with say, 25k health, a few things go through their minds, im sure. and one of these things is that the tank is "new". new to what? well, for a lot of people, they may assume the tank is "new" to tanking itself. a person new to tanking may be a liability for the group, as the dps and healer may feel like guinea pigs at this point. but the fact of the matter is everyone's learning, we just dont want them to learn while pugging with us, ESPECIALLY if they're tanks. correct? i mean we can deal with bad dps, or bad healing (even bad healing has its limits), but bad tanking is a no no. a new tanks, 25k health tanks all somehow equate to possibly bad tanks.
New 80
There are many who have been in the game for a while leveling their alt tank and barely reached 80. there are also others who have joined the game several months earlier and have finally made it to 80, ready to tank heroics. i've encountered many people who do 2k dps, heal wonderfully and tank like leetsauce who have just dinged 80 that day, the day before, or somethind during the same week. last week i had the experience of seeing one party member say, i just dinged 80 today, with three more people saying how they're new to 80 as well. i was the only one who couldnt say that. instead, i said i dinged 80 a year ago.
it was kind of refreshing to see fresh new 80s running heroics and not judging each other. what's funny, or sad, is that it's usually always the raiders who seem to compare and belittle everyone else. now i am not saying every raider does it. what i am saying is that when it does happen, its more likely than not, a raiding individual pugging his daily random heroic for his frosties.
So these tanks with 25k-ish health who just dinged 80 are often criticized for their low health, but my contention is why? that's usually what tanks had the day they started heroics when wrath came out. and that's a somewhat middle-ground. i started tanking at 23k health. and before ulduar hit, i had maybe 28k health at most. i struggled to even get close to 30k health. but now we see tanks with 40k health and think that everyone, upon reaching 80, should have those numbers. its almost infuriating to see people who really do not have any idea how overboard that number is. i mean think of it this way, if a new 80 tank were to tank normal utgarde keep or nexus, that's basically what a 40k health tank is like doing heroics.
The Fallacy of HP
I just came across a post this morning about effective health found here. Think Tank on Armor. He thinks about armor pretty much the same way i think about avoidance. it basically increases your effective health. now he has a pretty detailed example of how it relates to healing, and i cannot agree with him more about that. although in heroics, the amount of overpowered healing can bsically negate his claims, in raids, it is quite different. armor is king. avoidance is queen. and HP is the jester.... according to me.
Before we go on, i'd like to tell you my stand on HP. its subpar. it really is. anyone telling you to stack stamina as long as you have the minimum defense rating has no idea what he's talking about. it does make sense on its own tho. if you take everything else out of the equation, of course, the more stamina you have, the more damage you can take. but we live in a very multi-faceted world (of warcraft) and therefore, we have to take many other factors into consideration.
Note: the following examples will not include hard numbers but will describe the basic concept of the stats i will be talking about. if you want exact numbers please go to sites like elitist jerks or tankspot.
Mitigation: What Armor Does. the person who prioritizes armor when gearing will see a lot less damage per hit. overall, he might have more damage if he doesnt have enough avoidance. assuming that he's being healed sufficiently, his armor is negating a fair amount of the hits. the more armor he has, the less damage he takes per hit.
Example. Lets suppose a mob does an auto attack for 10k health. Lets suppose he only does auto attacks.
If the person taking the hits has zero armor on, each attack will damage him by 10k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 4th hit.
Lets say the person puts on armor (all other things being equal, including health, i know, not realistic, but this is to prove a point) so that he will negate 50% of the damage made to him.
If the person has armor to negate 50% damage, each attack will damage him by 5k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 8th hit.
Now consider that each hit from the mob takes 1 second. if he had zero armor, he would die in 4 seconds. if he had 50% damage mitigation from armor, he will die after 8 seconds. (i just made a quick example of TTL, or time to live).
Armor increases TTL, reduces damage taken per hit and makes life for the healers a whole lot easier.
See how armor works there? HP isnt really the "end all" of all tanking stats. by all means no. lets move on to the next item.
Avoidance: Total Avoidance is the sum of several stats, including Dodge, Parry, and Block. These stats are the basis of helping a tank NOT take damage. What i mean is a dodged attach will hit for zero damage. a parried attack will hit for zero damage. block is a different animal and has its own damage reduction amounts and things. but we know for sure one thing, dodge and parry negates 100% of any hit.
So lets take block out of the equation to make things simpler and pretend we're talking about DK tanks or bear tanks.
Lets take the tank from the Armor example and say he has 40k health, with 50% damage mitigation from armor. that is what we'll work with.
Lets say it's a DK with a dodge percentage of 24% and a parry percentage of 21%. This gives the DK a total of 45% avoidance.
This means that 45% of the mobs attack will not hit the dk at all. With some math here, we can estimate that per swing, the mob will get about 2750 damage. since each swing is 1 second apart, the tank will essentially take 2750 damage per second. with a tank of 40k health, it will take the mob 14.55 seconds to kill the tank.
Now 14.55 seconds is better than 8 seconds (armor only) and a whole lot better than 4 seconds (no mitigation).
Note/Edit: Please note that avoidance is on "chance per swing" and not an actual percentage of damage reduction. because of this, if you get unlucky and get hit on all swings, your TTL will actually be 8 seconds. If you're lucky and are missed on all swings, your TTL will be indefinite, or forever. Because of this reasoning, a more statistical analysis will have to be done, as in, if each hit from a boss has a 45% chance to miss (55% chance to land), what's the probability that the tank will survive for 15 seconds? i believe this will result in some z-score and bell curve with deviations and such. but if all swings were to be distributed evenly, i would give the tank about 15 seconds to live. again, more complex (and more accurate) calculations can be fould elsewhere. i am merely giving an overview, showing the basic concept.
To Sum Things Up
I know this has been a long post but i really wanted to go through just what exactly soaks up damage. i know that on a 1 to 1 ratio, health points can be seen and understood universally among everyone. if a mob hits a tank for 3k damage, that's 3k health gone. but what they do not see is that the mob usually hits everyone else for 8k damage and that the tank is often parrying or dodging attacks more than half of the time. they dont see that. dps usually does not see that. it is really only the tank and healers who really see this mechanic at work. why else would a boss 1hit a warlock to death? but dps doesnt see that and calls himself a squishy. sure, he's truly a squishy, but he doesnt exactly know why or how or what it all really means.
AND in order to help ease the minds of these misguided dps, the tanks do not take the time to explain all of this to the dps. instead, they appease the dps by gemming for stamina, enchanting for stamina, use health/stamina enhancing armorkits and drink elixirs of mighty fortitude. The tanks end up trying to make the dps and healers feel a little more at ease by enhancing the only number the dps and healers can actually see but because of this, they leave little room, if any, for other stats like armor and avoidance.
True, as people gear up, they will encounter gear with higher amounts of stamina and armor. so why bother when you already have 560 defense rating and a billion armor points? shouldnt they be entitled to spread out their stats with more stamina/health? well with better armor comes more stamina anyway, so the inverse can also be argued. why not gem defense when you now have more stamina? see what i did there?
But instead, i see bear tanks gemming for stamina. I see dk's gemming for stamina. i see paladins and warriors gemming for stamina. and as a healer, i always have to cringe at these tanks. i hate, as much as i complain about boring heroic runs, i hate healing 50k health tanks who stack stamina. i constantly have to heal them. there is really no break for me at all in heroics when healing these guys. this takes a toll on the healer (so the dps, although they feel really comfortable running along with a 50k health tank, they dont realize that there is less time and mana for me to heal them should they need any kind of healing) and when we get into harder fights where there's collateral damage, aoe damage, or just random damage, i find little time to heal the dps or myself.
ATTENTION ALL TANKS: THERE ARE BETTER STATS THAN STAMINA!!!
For bears:
Gem for Agility. Agility (Agi) will increase your armor. with the bear shapeshift multiplier to armor, you get even more armor per point of agi than the other plate wearing classes would.
Agi also increases your dodge percentage. this is your only aviodance stat, so beef (or bear) it up as much as you can with agi. Its really easy for bears. we only need one stat to deal with.
For plate wearers:
Gem for Defense even past the crit immune level (currently at 535 for heroics and 540 for raids). The more Defense (Def) you have, the more you're able to dodge and parry at the very least. not only will you increase your chance to avoid a hit, you're also giving yourself a Def buffer should you get a better piece of gear with less Def but having more Armor/Stam/Dodge/Parry/etc.
You cannot gem for Armor, but you can enchant and use armor kits for more armor. However, i would try to go for the best piece of gear with the highest built-in armor, gem for defense, enchant it with stats, armsman, or threat.
For both bears and plate wearers: There are plenty of resources online. I know things can be confusing and information can be scattered over the internet. but the information is out there. If you have any questions or need directions on where to go for your class, please feel free to reply and i will try my best to point you in the right direction.
Also, there is the argument about magical damage ignoring all armor and even avoidance. In this case, if armor and avoidance are negated, then a thinking person would indeed switch out his gear and use some magic resistance gear or stamina gear. Now if the fight was a mix of mostly physical hits with some magic damage, then the thinking person will have to evaluate which he prefers to mitigate and which would be more important to mitigate on the whole of the fight. you can always change gear after the fight to suit the needs of the next fight.
Again, to all tanks, there are better stats that just stamina. to all dps and maybe healers, there are much better ways to guage and judge a tank than by his health pool.
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