Single-Target Priestly Healing in “Echoes of Doom”

Priest, Raiding 9 comments.

Friday night the fine people of the Drunken Badgers decided it was time to return to Black Temple and get our progression on.  In prior weeks, we managed to get to get up to Teron Gorefiend, but had never progressed beyond that point.  As many other people have noted, Patch 3.0.2 changed everything.  We trounced Teron Gorefiend.  We ganked Gurtogg Bloodboil.  We mauled Mother Shahraz.  We ran into a little bit of problems with the Council of the Illidari, but it was still impressive for a raid full of people who had never even seen the fights, much less participated in them.

While I might lament how our sense of accomplishment has been minimized by the nerfs applied in “Echoes of Doom,” it really wasn’t that that made the evening so unenjoyable.  It was more how ineffective I was as a healer.

As I’ve noted many times before, I’m a Spirit-obsessed priestaphiliac.  While many other healing priests gleefully opted to learn the forty-one point talent Circle of Healing, I clung tenaciously to my Improved Divine Spirit, lavishly sharing my Spirit bounty with friends, party members, and fellow raiders alike.   It meant that I not only brought my healing prowess to a raid but also some added utility that the other Holy priests were unable to do.  Despite lacking a group heal that was capable of being used on the raid, I was often near the top of the healing meters or even the top healer.  It ascertained that I was in fact a viable and contributing member of the raid.

Patch 3.0.2 has changed all that — especially in regards to Circle of Healing, which now heals the five people within range who have the lowest health.  I decided to stick with a variation of my 23/38/0 build that allowed me to remain mana efficient with decent heals while retaining my beloved Improved Divine Spirit; the two other Holy priests in our raid went a full sixty-one points into the Holy tree.  The disparity between our performance was so ridiculously enormous that I found myself disappointed by the changes.  Between two Circle of Healing priests and a Restoration shaman with Chain Heal, single-target healers such as people with my build or Holy paladins just couldn’t contribute in the raid.  By the time we managed to get a single heal off, some three so-called brain heals had managed to top off everyone who needed a heal.

I had effectively become superfluous.

I think what disappoints me most is not that I wasn’t beneficial to the raid, but how I felt that our priests were being pigeonholed into using a single spell for most of the instance.  While I’ve jokingly made derisive comments in the past regarding healers that only spam Circle of Healing¹, it seems like this is the only spell of use for the Holy priest.  And this saddens me because I love healing as a priest so much because I have so many spells within my arsenal, ranging from single-target healing, group healing, a preemptive heal, a spell that prevents damage, and more.  I was proud that I had a variety of spells at my disposal and knew which ones to use at the right time for the most effective and beneficial results.

Honestly, I chose to heal as a priest because pre-expansion I had grown tired of casting only one or two spells on both my Holy paladin and Restoration shaman.

While intellectually I realize that these talents are intended for upwards to level 80 instances and that I will be acquiring ten more talent points within the upcoming months, it still pains me that for the remaining weeks until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion a single target Holy healing priest who chooses to pick up the Improved Divine Spirit buff will be unable to contribute effectively or efficiently in a raid.  And I refuse to pick up a single talent so that I can mindlessly spam that heal and feel like I’m contributing.  So, rather than mope or decry how Blizzard has ruined me personally², I decided to take an entirely different approach.

Perky priestess Csilla Kovács — who has become my priestly pride and joy, standing well above my bevvy of other priests³ — has forsaken her Holy ways and gone Discipline!  And I’m loving it!

I’ve long wanted to try raiding as a Discipline priest, but had chosen not to because I was typically relied on heavily by my raid leaders to bring unadulterated healing power.  However, Discipline has found further utility in raids due to a number of changes made to the tree and the new talents that have appeared there since “Echoes of Doom.”  I’ve chosen a 59/2/0 Discipline build that lets me pick the talents that I think would make an effective single-target healer while bringing a lot of utility to the raid.  This build will morph into a 59/12/0 Discipline build once Csilla reaches the new level cap.

There are a couple of things of note with my new build.  The current lack of Holy Specialization means that my critical effect chance with Holy spells is pretty low at the moment, especially for what seems like a very crit-heavy tree.  By not having Divine Fury, the vast majority of my heals are currently ponderous and slow, but that is easily rectified with both Borrowed Time and the vast amount of Haste that I’ve collected on other pieces in the past.  In fact, I was amazed when Borrowed Time and a proc on the Scarab of the Infinite Cycle⁴ allowed me to cast a Greater Heal in under 1.5 seconds.  With Divine Fury, I could very well be casting Greater Heals in under a second!

The build focuses on single target healing prowess with added utility, especially with Power Infusion and Pain Suppression.  The goal isn’t to get the large heals of the Holy tree⁵, but rather reduce the amount of healing that is required.  This is accomplished by making heavy use of Power Word: Shield and talents such as Divine Aegis and Grace.  The build also has a very different emphasis for gearing.  In the past I would select gear, gems, and enchants that increased both my Bonus Healing and my Spirit; instead, I’ll be stacking for Bonus Healing, Intellect, and Haste — a combination of stats that will supposedly be very common in Wrath of the Lich King where much of the gear appears to be Haste-heavy.  The lack of Spiritual Guidance and the changes done to Improved Divine Spirit that grant a flat increase to Spell Power as oppposed to a number based on a percentage of the player’s Spirit stat means that Spirit is significantly less important to me now.

At the moment, I’m trying to decide if it would be best to select gems with the Critical Strike Rating such as the Potent Pyrestone or Intellect like the Luminous Pyrestone.  While five Critical Strike Rating is near 0.23% crit, five Intellect is both a little over 0.06% crit and 75 mana.  Though I will have less mana regen due to the reduction of Spirit on my gear, Rapture seems to be very effective in keeping my mana pool mostly full.  Furthermore, as a human Discipline priest I have both The Human Spirit⁶ and Enlightenment, both of which are likely to increase my Spirit so that I still have some semblence of Spirit-based mana regeneration.  As a result, I’m not sure if I really need to increase my mana pool further.

Oh, and Penance is a simply amazing spell!  I was using this both in grouping with people and on the battlefield and it’s just an incredibly versatile spell.  If I chose to use a Power Word: Shield prior to casting Penance, I was able to quickly top off a player or strike my enemies.  It’s the priestly version of the paladin spell Holy Shock, but so much more fun!  Plus each hit of the channeled spell has the opportunity to give a Grace buff, which means that in two seconds a Dicipline priest could both reduce the damage taken by his target by 3% while increasing the healing she does by 6%.  Some basic theorycrafting shows that this spell may have both a higher Health Per Mana and Health Per Second than the staple priestly healing spell Greater Heal.

Discipline truly is love.

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Why Has the Light Forsaken Me?

Priest 5 comments.

I don’t understand it.  I just don’t understand it.  Over the years, I’ve formed a connection with the priest class, coddling my girls, learning how the class was played, and then adapting when those rules changed.  I’ve studied, applied, practiced, and learned to love my class of preference.  My adoration of this class has gone far enough that I have over the years leveled some five priests to sixty and beyond.  On the Feathermoon US roleplaying server I have three priests alone, each with a different tree specialization so that I can further better understand the class.

And yet, I feel as if I haven’t done enough for the Light.

The Eye of Divinity: used with both The Eye of Shadow and the Splinter of Nordrassil to forge the Balance of Shadow and Light, the epic priest staff Benediction.¹  I’ve long since called this my “white whale” since I have never managed to acquire this item.  In the time when Molten Core was end-game raiding, The Eye was promised to other priests within the raid.  When I was in a later raid, we never saw it drop.  And recently, my luck with rolls on this item has been nothing short of abysmal.

This evening I had the opportunity to return to Molten Core yet again in my quest to acquire The Eye.  We originally started out with two priests: myself and one other, a Shadow priest.  Within the hour and a half it took to down bosses and douse the appropriate runes, she had left and no other priest had filled her place.  I found out later that this was intentional, because the raid leader had learned of my plight and was eager to aid me in my quest to acquire my heart’s desire.

We battled Majordomo Executus and his cohorts, using all of the powers we possessed.  Afterward, we stood over their bodies and eagerly eyed the cache that Ragnaros’s minion had left behind in his harried flight.  And what, when we open the chest, do our eyes feast upon?

The Ancient Petrified Leaf.

Seriously.

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Epic Troll is Epic

General, Warlock 3 comments.

What do you get when you take a deviant warrior who trolls the warlock forums?  Epic Rick Roll thread!

Recently Sar of Destructive Reach posted about a thread that appeared on the warlock forums demanding that Blizzard remove all warlocks from the game.  Except all wasn’t as it appeared!  No, instead the thread was perhaps one of the best planned Rick Rolls that I have ever had the displeasure to stumbled across.  Ordinarily a link to the song or lyrics is embedded somewhere in a message or post.  Such blatant attempts rightfully deserve the scorn that typically results.  The original poster, however, was much more clever than that!  Rick Rolls of this caliber are few and far between.

Astonishing many people who originally expressed disgust at his outbursts, Mac of the Detheroc US PvP server cleverly hid the lyrics to the Rick Asterly song “Never Gonna Give You Up” within his series of rants against warlocks.  Nobody seemed to catch on that the beginning letter of each sentence spelled out a line from the song.  Gleefully I’ve watched the thread throughout the day and laughed as more and more people replied without any idea of what was going on.  Even though many people went out of their way to explain exactly what had occurred, it seemed that few people read beyond the original post.  Ridiculous!

So, reading that today made me laugh.  To see all of those warlocks get angry over a finely played Rick Roll was hilarious.  Other than the fact that it was so difficult to recognize initially and many people couldn’t quite seem to catch on.  ‘Locks in that thread just didn’t seem to get it.  Obviously it was a troll.  Very good one, too!

Everyone should take the opportunity to check out the thread “Remove warlocks from the game” for a quick laugh!

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Embracin de Shadow

Priest 3 comments.

I’ve been a bit busy as of late, between my mother’s current health dilemma and my own continued problems with my right arm. As a result I’ve been a bit out of touch with anything outside the circle of my family — which has worked well, since I haven’t really been up to dealing with peoples. You know how it can be sometimes. Part of that was not logging into the game for a couple of days, except once or twice when I decided that I’d been neglecting Irenke the troll Shadow priestess on the Scarlet Crusade US roleplaying server¹ for far too long.

It’s been a very, very, very long time since I’ve played a Shadow priest. The original Csilla — affectionately referred to as Csilla 1.0 — was Shadow. However, that was pre-The Burning Crusade, when I realized how much I really enjoyed healing more than serving as a mana battery. As you may recall, the role of the Shadow priest pre-expansion was pretty hazy, since the class offered little synergy and had less sustained damage than other casting classes. Being the self-proclaimed priestaphiliac that I am, I decided that it was high time that I climb back into the saddle and level a Shadow priest again.

If anything, trying to remember that I’m in a group to do damage as opposed to heal will bring hours of amusement to my friends and guildmates.

There are a couple of things that I noted since deciding to forsake Holy and Discipline to return to my Shadowy roots:

• Shadow priest is for damage. I’m having a hell of a time remembering that I’m in a group to kill stuff and not to keep things alive. I spend a lot of time watching people’s health in case I need to step in to heal. I keep hoping that it’ll be easier once I pick up Shadowform — and I’m no longer physically capable of healing.
• Smite is for Holy or Discipline priests. It’s a bad habit, but I rely heavily on Smite to do damage as opposed to utilizing the appropriate Shadow spells, making me a poor Shadow priest. It’s one part habit and partially due to the fact that I’ve put the spell in a readily accessible location for keybindings.
• Spirit Tap is love. It’s absolutely wonderful to have Spirit Tap in a build again and to not feel guilty for having it. As I’ve noted many, many times before² that I adore Spirit with every fiber of my being and anything that can increase my Spirit by a full 100% gets all sorts of thumbs up from me.
• Shadow priest is not mage. Specifically a Frost mage. I miss Frost Nova. And Frostbolt. And Counterspell. And, hell, I just miss playing my mage. It’s hard to play a damage-dealing caster class and not have those spells to fall back on.
• Aggro is a pain. I miss the good old days when Silent Resolve was applicable to Shadow damage in addition to Holy and Discipline threat. It’s not so bad now, but I’m frightened of when I start doing some mediocre damage that doesn’t rely on Smite-spam.
• Centaur aren’t de obligin sort. Three times now I’ve gotten stuck or interrupted by centaurs, whether it’s on my way to get into an instance or to meet up with some others. All of the hassle makes me want to come back when I hit 70 and murderlize some tribes. I’ll personally help the tauren in their war against the centaur — and enjoy every moment of it.

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Tickle-Me-Tallaa

Piroska, Roleplaying, Theorycrafting 3 comments.

This is the kind of abuse and tomfoolery that Piroska Al’shar has to deal with. Here she is, attempting to reclaim the former glory of House Al’shar, and she has to deal with her youngest sister’s reputation for antics in the bedroom. This is exactly the reason why the House acquired some negative reputation; behind her father’s blind backing of Kael’thas and then selfish, self-serving behavior like Tallaa insinuated in the letter, she’s got her work cut out for her.

Not that this prevents Piroska from using the four Light Feathers that she received in the mail.

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