I Think That I May be in Love

Priest, Theorycrafting 1 comment.

I think that I’ve made it abundantly clear that I not only enjoy playing priests but I have no qualms in proclaiming my love of priests. I’m an unabashed priestaphiliac, having leveled numerous priests to 60 and one to 70. On the Feathermoon US roleplaying server I have three priests, one of each major tree. And I originally created this site in part to post information regarding my preferred class of World of Warcraft.

This all-consuming love extends beyond Vent, my raid’s and guild’s websites, and even this website; when people pose questions regarding priests on the server’s Trade channels, I’m usually one of the first priests to respond. This evening, following yet another foray to Mount Hyjal, that exact scenario occurred. A neophyte priestling was curious which stat favored priests more: Spirit or Intellect. In the twenty minutes that followed, me and two others discussed the benefits of both stats, why they were important, how to optimize the benefit from those stats, and our preferences regarding gear, gems, and enchants.

My joy of the evening, however, was further increased when not one, not two, but three other priestaphiles whispered me to thank me for my thoughts and share some of their own. For your benefit, I’ll post a short portion of one of those discussions.

Meet Mitsuomi, who enjoys longs walks along the Stranglethorn Vale beaches, the Forsaken, and priests. Furthermore, he has opened the discussion by mentioning my favorite priestly stat: Spirit. I exclaim my immediate delight in finding a kindred spirit.¹ However, I prove my geekiness by admitting that I not only have a blog, but it’s about World of Warcraft and I actually ramble about Spirit and priests on a regular basis.

We continue discussing our love of Spirit and its importance in a post-2.4 mana regeneration system — until I am interrupted. Of course, this cannot stand. Priests are infinitely more important! The discussion must continue! And so, I blow him off to continue our talk and tying in my second favorite class: hunters.

Yes, yes, tell me more. Whisper more sweet nothin’s into my ear, baby. You know I love it when you talk about Spirit. I have no shame when it comes to you.

Unfortunately, our discussion had to end shortly thereafter since I did promise to play on the Horde. However, Mitsuomi’s words linger in my heart even now. I’ve got that nice warm and fuzzy feeling still!

Related Posts

1. Priests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!
2. Blizzard Stole My Spirit!
3. Spirit on Arena Gear — Absurd!

Blizzard Stole My Spirit!

Priest, Theorycrafting 4 comments.

Tuesday evening following our somewhat successful raid on Mount Hyjal, I spent quite a while discussing with a fellow healing priest in my raid my recommendations on socketing his gear.¹ While I may have convinced him — and my beloved raid leader — the overwhelming benefits of Spirit in a post-2.4 mana regeneration system, a question came up while I was describing the talents and racial I possess that help bolster my Spirit stat.

As I outlined in my post Priests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!, there are a number of ways to increase your Spirit. Two of the ways represent what I considered the more dedicated end of the spectrum. The first merely required spending a single point in the Holy tree to acquire the fifth-tier talent Spirit of Redemption, which increases a priest’s Spirit by 5%. The second was by far the most obsessed way of increasing Spirit: it required rolling a human priest in order to take advantage of the human racial, The Human Spirit. This previously mocked racial prior to patch 2.4 actually increases a human’s Spirit stat by a full 10%. Between the two, that is a hefty chunk of Spirit that can be applied towards Bonus Healing and mana regeneration.

My raid leader’s question related directly to this talent and racial. He asked,

Does Spirit of Redemption and The Human Spirit stack with the Spirit acquired from gear?

Now, I blithely assumed that the answer was a resounding yes; I mean, Blizzard loves Spirit, right? Why else would they have put this previously neglected stat in the game only to give it that huge buff in patch 2.4? However, reconsidering my answer yesterday morning, I had to wonder if that was in fact correct. Do the two combine for a full 15% increase to all of the Spirit found on my gear? Or is there some other shenanigans going on that I just wasn’t aware of?

So yesterday afternoon, I logged into the game intending to discover this answer. After finding a quiet and isolated corner of the Mage District in the human capital New Stormwind², I removed all of the armor, equipment, weapons, and other items on my character to get a base reading of her Spirit. From the image below, we see that Csilla has a mighty 174 Spirit unbuffed.

Pretty impressive, no?

The next step was to start adding gear and buffs in order to get a variety of numbers for comparison. I jotted down quite a few combinations of gear to acquire Spirit numbers; I recorded:

• The amount of Spirit that I had on the gear, gems, and socketing bonuses;
• The number of Spirit that the tooltip claimed was added to my Spirit; and
• The total Spirit according to my stats.

An hour afterwards looking at the numbers I had recorded, I was confused. I had two theoretical scenarios. In the first, the racial and talent bonuses were added up and then multiplied to the Spirit found on my gear, resulting in a 15% increase. In the second, the two shared a multiplicative relationship; in this case, I should have seen a 15.5% increase in Spirit.³. However, I wasn’t seeing any of these.

Could I be that wrong? Or was I getting wires crossed somewhere? Maybe there were just too many things to factor in. So, to make sure that I wasn’t crazy, I hit my local trainer and dropped all of my talents. Yes, my beloved Spirit of Redemption — and its 5% increase to Spirit! — was gone, but now I could see for myself how The Human Spirit applied to my gear. In the table are just a few of the numbers I recorded:

In other words, I was getting more or less what I expected: a 10% increase to Spirit on the gear I equipped — just as the tooltip for The Human Spirit read. However, I started to notice something and started comparing the Expected Spirit from gear with the Actual Spirit displayed on my character sheet. And then I got cranky. You see, I had expected the calculations to round up as necessary, favoring the player. Instead, the equations seem to truncate the number to the ones place. In other words, in many of the examples I was losing up to 0.8 Spirit.

As I told a friend⁴, this cannot stand! Blizzard’s callous disregard for my Spirit stat saddens me immensely! By truncating the number, they’re taking Spirit from me. As I told my raid leader, there will be buckets of blood and bones shall litter the streets of Azeroth until this is rectified.

Blizzard stole my Spirit; I want it back.

Related Posts

1. Priests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!
2. Spirit on Arena Gear — Absurd!
3. We’ve Got Spirit — How ‘Bout You?

Arena Shape-Up — Redux!

Player versus Player, Priest 3 comments.

I’ve been horribly remiss. Back in May I described in Arena Shape-Up! the staple Discipline Arena build, which coupled the Discipline tree’s high survivability with some of the pertinent talents of the Holy tree that would allow an Arena healer to perform well, even under pressure. At the same time, however, I also mentioned that this was actually one of two builds I was considering in my glorious return to lackluster performance on the battlefield. Time passed and I never actually got around to describing that build.

I’d like to take the opportunity this afternoon to rectify that mistake.

45/16/0: Variation on a Theme

If you compare this build with the 42/19/0 Arena build mentioned in Arena Shape-Up!, you’d find a lot of similarities. It has the core survivability talents, such as Unbreakable Will and Improved Power Word: Shield, as well as keeping both Power Infusion and Pain Suppression, which are — of course — the crux of any Discipline Arena build. It also retained those fluff buffs¹ such as Blessed Recovery and even Martyrdom to some extent. And, of course, we still kept that dreaded Holy Nova so that we can spam rank 1 Holy Nova to break stealth, interrupt cast times, and prevent people from drinking or bandaging.

In fact, unless you look very carefully the two builds might even look identical.

There are, however, a few major changes to this build. First off, the entire point of this build is to pick up Reflective Shield. This talent allows 50% of the damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield to be reflected back onto your opponent. Prior to 2.4, this talent was almost entirely avoided by most Arena playing priests. The main problem lay in the fact that Reflective Shield had the nasty side effect of breaking those forms of crowd control that could be broken by damage. For example, if a warrior managed to get Rend on the priest just before her magely companion sheeped him, the first tick of the bleed effect would reflect half of the damage to the warrior and break the crowd control.

This was often considered a bad thing. We want to avoid breaking crowd control. This was especially a problem in 3v3 and 5v5, where teams are often built around select forms of crowd control.

This all changed in 2.4, when various changes were made to talents that in the past would break crowd control. If we take a moment to read the patch notes, we see:

Reflective Shield: The reflective damage from this talent no longer breaks crowd control effects which break on taking damage.

Problem resolved! Suddenly numerous priests considered picking up Reflective Shield as a way of providing somewhat significant damage to their opponents without ever casting a spell on them. How significant? Let’s take a moment to examine that. A rank 12 Power Word: Shield is capable of absorbing 1,315 damage while benefiting from 30% of our Bonus Healing stat²; with three points in Improved Power Word: Shield, we can further increase the amount absorbed by Power Word: Shield by 15%.

Now in my admittedly subpar Arena set, I currently have around 1,750 Bonus Healing unbuffed. How much damage absorbed does that translate to?

[1,315 + (0.30 × 1,750)] × 1.15 = 2,116 damage absorbed.

And half of that would be reflected back when Reflective Shield is applied, meaning that our target could reflect up to 1,058 damage to the person doing damage to him. Now, this isn’t like something to raise our collective nose at. In a fight where we’re playing a predominately healing role, even that little bit of damage could be enough to help us secure a win. That is a good thing. We like good things.

The problem with Reflective Shield, however, is the fact that the added damage has the nasty result of generating more rage for warriors, which those same warriors then use to smear our pancreases into the dusty floor. My hope with this build, however, is that the number of warriors that I come up against in the 2v2 bracket aren’t so overwhelmingly numerous that I run back to my friendly neighborhood priestly trainer for a quick — and costly — respec. Looking at the real time Arena ranking stats at SK Gaming, I see that warriors are pretty popular in my Battlegroup³, with the greatest percentage of players over a 2,200 rating favoring the classic Warrior-Druid combination with a grand total of 17.9%.

Fortunately, I’m an extremely casual Arena combatant and would be enough if I finally managed to break an 1,750 rating. This is in no way I’d ever find the time⁴ to make it to the 2,200 tier.

Another concern with this particular build is that I dropped the five points I invested for rank 5 Silent Resolve for a paltry rank 1 Silent Resolve. While many people tend to consider the ability as a strictly raiding talent and having little effect on player versus player combat, the 20% spell resistance can be a huge factor. As I noted before, any spell removal that is resisted means that your opponents have to spend more mana to remove it, sometimes resulting in them spending valuable mana that would have otherwise been spent on healing allies or damaging opponents. Furthermore, it may mean that an important ability stays up longer. We like that.

If I really felt the need I could snag those points out of Enlightenment and place them back into Silent Resolve where they rightfully belong.  However, in speaking with others who have considerably more talent, experience, and knowledge than I possess, I have the suspicion that Silent Resolve is a larger factor post-1,750 and in larger brackets, when dispelings and purgings become more frequent.  From my limited experience, I don’t recall running into it too much prior to 1,600; in fact, the main time I saw it was when we ended up against teams in Season 3 gear who — as my Arena partner and I guessed — we most likely either selling Arena points or blasting through the lower brackets to sell another high-ranked Arena team.

What’s the Verdict?

Overall, I’m leaning towards the 42/19/0 build I described in Arena Shape-Up! I think that it will serve me better and that overall I’ll be more successful with it. I might take an after or even a week to explore this other build just to get my grubby paws on Reflective Shield; I know that personally I’ve been eying the talent for quite some time now but hesitant to snag it due to the fact that in the past it would break crowd control.

And, no, I haven’t quite leveled my Discipline priest up to 70 yet. She’s languishing around 62 or so, which is so close to 70 that there’s no excuse why I haven’t gotten off of my butt to get the job done. I guess Rahel Isera’duna is doing what she does best — being a recalcitrant, cantankerous bitch.

Related Posts

1. Arena Shape-Up!
2. Spirit on Arena Gear — Absurd!
3. Priests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!

A Player’s Secret Weapon: the SWOT Analysis

Priest, Theorycrafting 3 comments.

There is a technique used in the business world that can provide valuable information that is often later utilized in strategy formation and selection. Known as the SWOT analysis, it examines the environmental factors that might influence a company, venture, or project to determine its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By identifying strengths, companies can gain a competitive edge over their competitors while overcoming weaknesses that might prevent them from pursuing future opportunities.

Two months ago, I found myself applying to one of the top raiding guilds on my server as an alternate or sub. While the entire ordeal eventually fell through and my current raid decided to step foot into Mount Hyjal and Black Temple — thereby negating my need to find a raid in those instances — one of the questions posted in their somewhat lengthy application reminded me of a SWOT analysis. They asked:

What do you feel your classes strengths are? Weaknesses?

Now, a cautious individual might have taken a moment to consider her response. Perhaps, wanting to make as good an impression as she possibly could, she might have even done some research in order to sound intelligent, knowledgeable, and correct. Not me! Within moments I had written a diatribe regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the priest class¹ that easily dwarfed the rest of my answers on their application. I only reread my response to verify its spelling and grammatical accuracy.

My response² was more or less as follows:

The healing priest lacks the unadulterated strength of every other healing class in any one specific area: paladins have unparalleled single target healing, druids just blow our paltry Renew away, and shamans frequently outperform us in unspecced multi-target healing. Our heals are slow, ponderous, somewhat efficient, and don’t excel in any one area. Our fastest heal is also our most mana inefficient and suffers from little benefit from Bonus Healing.

However, priests are pretty damn versatile. We have multiple single-target heals, a heal over time, one unspecced group heal, a pre-emptive heal, a heal that allows us to heal both ourselves and a buddy, and the list goes on and on and on. While we were moderately efficient pre-2.4 with some forethought, we’re now mana powerhouses with the change to a Spirit-based mana regeneration system; how many other classes have you come across that can hit the 1,000 mana regen OO5SR mark with full raid buffs? And, like our Restoration druid counterpart, we’re capable of regenning up to 30% of our mana while casting, which allows for greater sustained performance than classes that gain no benefit from Spirit and instead stack MP5 (which typically possesses a high ilevel than both Intellect and Spirit combined).

As a human Holy priest specced with Spirit of Redemption and possessing The Human Spirit, I have reached over 900 Spirit in full raid buffs and have 1,500 mana regen OO5SR with my trinket. With some foresight, thought, and good use of talented abilities and trinkets, I can heal and keep healing past the point many other classes might be begging for an Innervate or hating the mana potion CD.

And that’s all she wrote. In three paragraphs, I managed to summarize what I felt were the strengths and weaknesses inherent in my preferred class. It must have been somewhat well written, given the fact that one member claimed that it was probably the best application that they had ever had the pleasure of receiving. Score one for me!

So, how was I able to fly off of the cuff and easily comment on my class? Because, whether or not I was aware of it, I was performing a SWOT analysis on my class on a regular basis. The power and also the shortcoming of a SWOT analysis is that it is done such that it has information regarding the near — if not immediate — future. So while the information you collect may be correct at this very moment³, it’s probably going to be inaccurate even as close as six months down the future. As a result, they’re supposed to be reviewed and updated on a regular basis.

As an avid theorycrafter, I spend a lot of time reviewing my performance, researching what others have to say about the class, and investigating possible future changes. All that information allowed me do keep a running SWOT analysis in my head. I have to know my class’s strengths in order to utilize my abilities and talents to their fullest potential; I need to know my weaknesses so that I can work to overcome them; I need to find out what changes Blizzard may be implementing in future patches so that I can learn what opportunities or threats might arise that would affect my performance.

I don’t know if I should feel impressed or sheepish that I applied the knowledge garnered while going to college on a computer game. I highly doubt that the parental units would have approved!

Related Posts

1. Priests — Examine Your Spirit Stat!
2. Spirit on Arena Gear — Absurd!
3. Single-Target Priestly Healing in “Echoes of Doom”

Blissfully Bonded with Your Spec

Eszti, Hunter, Roleplaying 7 comments.

Yesterday Pike of Aspect of the Hare made a post that caught my attention. In “Feelin’ it: A Manifesto“, she describes one very interesting way to decide which spec to choose as a hunter. In her advice, Pike says:

Close your eyes for a moment, forget the world around you, forget your day job or your classes at school and feel that you are a hunter. What does that mean to you?

The goal, from what I can tell, is to pick the spec that suits to your perception of that class best. For example, if you envision a hunter as being intimately tied her to animal companion and benefitting from the synergy that the two share, it should make sense for you to pick Beast Mastery. If, on the other hand, you envision a hunter as wirey and agile, capable of using her knowledge of the terrain and her opponents to survive, Survival is the best of the three for you! Finally, a Marksmanship hunter would most likely be the one interested in the intricacies of being a hunter; she’s meticulous, skilled, and extremely precise.

Aside from how unusual this may sound to some people, I was actually drawn to the post because I used the same methodology in selecting my hunter’s spec years ago when I first rolled her on Feathermoon. As a roleplayer, I have very clearly defined personalities for each of my girls tumbling about in my head and their conduct in-game is heavily influenced by that perception. For example, my perky priestess Csilla is the middle child of seven. As neither the youngest nor the oldest, the brightest nor the dumbest, she didn’t get an overwhelming amount of attention in her youth; as a result, her driving goal in life is to be noticed — mainly by selfishly¹ helping others as frequently as she can so that she can feel needed or important. In-game, this translated into being a healing priest, because — as she’s wont to say — them healer fellahs, they’s always needed!

My kal’dorei huntress is much of the same. Having spent her initial five centuries of life living in the forests of Ashenvale in almost total isolation, Eszti has an almost feral quality to her. While not lacking in basic social necessities, she’s always had this feeling that she doesn’t really belong well in the company of others. She’s aloof, feral, and tends to move with a coiled readiness — when she’s not moving in her traditional loping gait. Therefore, it just made sense for her to be a Beast Master, even if it was at a time when the tree was considered ill-suited for anything outside of the Battlegrounds.

Furthermore, Eszti has the habit of trying to relate normal, everyday things to her perception as, well, a creature of the wild. For example, she considers her friends and guildmates² a natural extension of her pack. As the uncontested alpha female, she takes her repsonsbilities to her pack extremely seriously; it’s not unheard of for her to react with surprising ferocity when a member of her pack is in imminent harm. This has made her very adept at combat, especially back in those days when my friends and I used to roam around Azeroth perma-flagged.

Ask the level 60 mage who attacked Eszti, her lover, and his childhood friend while exploring the Eastern Plaguelands. The Forsaken tried to pick Mcdowl off while he was separated from the group³. When Eszti and Tanriel appeared to aid him, the cowardly mage mounted and fled. While Tanriel rushed to Mcdowl’s side to care for his injuries, Eszti took off after the mage — on foot, having switched to Aspect of the Cheetah⁴. She then proceeded to destroy him single-handedly, using Concussive Shot and Wing Clip to slow him enough to keep him in range while the screeching bird eviscerated him with his claws and she let loose with her arrows.

There’s a reason why her nickname is “Iron Legs” and it isn’t just because she has legs that would put Tina Turner to shame.

However, as I noted in “An Owl is an Owl,” Eszti’s relationship with her animal companion is not that of many hunters you may see in-game. She and Alatus aren’t the type to curl up together around a fire in the evenings or play games; the two are in constant in competition to see who will finally settle out on top and they frequently test the boundaries of their relationship. While Eszti may be aloof yet polite, Alatus is prone to nipping people, disobeying commands, and glaring dolefully at those around him. Despite this added dynamic, the kal’dorei and the bird work extremely well together and are boon companions.

Thanks again, miss Pike, for the insight. While I remain Beast Mastery now due to the amount of damage it does and how it suits my playstyle, it was nice to remember again those carefree and innocent days when I first was exploring the hunter class.

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1. An Owl is an Owl
2. Ten Things You Didn’t Know About My Girls
3. Amani War Bear Spotted!