This patch is bad news for death knight tanks. I’m not very excited to see it go live. It seriously feels like this was the shortest ever time between two major patches, doesn’t it?
Yeah, I’m not really looking forward to the next patch, specifically because I’m playing a Frost-specced Death Knight. I’d just gotten him specced exactly the way I liked, and had made a really good macro for one-click fighting.
I SO didn’t read this right the first time…
Just give it a week or two and the guys at Elitist Jerks will have worked it all out. That’s their thing. Testing, crunching numbers, running spreadsheets, and figuring the next talent build and “attack rotation”. See what they come up with, and copy it.
Word.
Just be careful, Elitist Jerks is a fantastic resource, but sometimes they’re wrong, stubbornly wrong. That is, usually the numbers they provide are awesome, but sometimes someone reaches a conclusion and, because it was on Elistist Jerks, it becomes gospel and it’s horribly frustrating to see people hold onto that idea.
The other problem with EJ is that they tend to not only be theorycrafters, but most of them are seriously hardcore raiders, as in they’re always on the cutting edge of content, the whole guild is full of great players, and everyone in the guild is willing to adjust their specs and such to ensure maximum performance and that just isn’t the case a lot of players. Most of us have guilds that have some people willing to adjust specs, some are obsessed with where they place on DPS charts, some are friends who just aren’t very good players, or maybe a guild is just lacking a player that is willing to play a certain class/spec combination (for instance, we use to have several Holy Paladins pre-LK, and they all got bored and either went Prot, Ret, or rerolled).
So my advice with EJ is to use their theorycrafting, but always take it with a grain of salt. For instance, I usually agree with them (for instance, two of the three Priest specs I independently developed agreed with theirs point for point), but I often find I’m disagreeing with them on gemming and stat weighting (seriously, how can an iLevel 213 staff with MP5 on it be best in slot for Holy Priests when other staves clearly have more Spell Power and regen? I can’t get the numbers anywhere close to agreeing with that). I will say, though, that generally their advice on boss fights is very useful since, of course, they are hardcore raiders and have successfully downed harder bosses with less margin for error.
OTOH, it may be different for other classes and roles since healing isn’t a single objective maximization problem like DPS and, to some extent, even tanking is with threat being more or less a non-issue.
I’ve seen a lot of responses to my question, but I think this is the most complete, so I figure I’ll address this one. One aspect I hadn’t considered was alts as I just plain don’t have any (I think the highest one I have is something like level 12). I’ve personally just found the leveling process incredibly boring and I’d get in there and start leveling and get bored pretty quickly. I like a little bit of variety, which I suppose alts offer, but I generally figure I can get that variety with a respec or doing some pvp. As a Priest, I generally heal, but I can DPS as Shadow and I basicaly become a tank in PVP (“OMG! Clothie healer. Can’t…resist…attacking…him!”).
So on that end, I pretty much only play my Priest, and a lot of the stuff that you mention is stuff I’ve already done. I’ve already done all the Northrend quests, though I’ve spent some time trying to finish my oldworld Loremaster, it’s just about as boring as leveling to me. I have my professions maxed. I have Exalted reputation with all the Northrend factions and am just missing a few old world and useless reps (as in, I won’t do Shendralar, Dark Moon Faire, etc.).
I generally don’t enjoy the whole money making venture either; playing the Auction House is just tedious to me. I use to know someone who had 60k gold and over 20k worth of crap that he had to take time selling because if he didn’t he’d flood the market. He obviously knew how to play the market, but to do so he’d have to spend lots of time prospecting ore and cutting gems, and I just can’t see how sitting there staring at the profession bar go for half an hour is entertaining.
So, for me, the only real aspect to the game is the social part. Sure, I do spend time goofing off with people in guild chat. But it’s pretty much to the point for me where there aren’t any achievements left worth getting that aren’t related to raids, or at least heroics, or some PVP. So, it seems, all I really do with the game is log on to raid, do a couple dailies for cash, and do some PVP. And of that, even raiding is getting old (how many times can I clear Naxx and not need any loot), and for PVP, I’ve gone from ungeared (only my old S4 loot) to almost fully geared (missing 2 pieces of offset BG gear, which just nees grinding) in just about a 10-15 hours of it over the last couple of weeks.
Everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt. However, once you get a feel for how YOU play, they can still be a good starting point.
As for raiding, “hardcore” or otherwise, there is really only one yardstick I use. Did we succeed or fail. Nothing else matters. If the DPS is godly, but can’t or won’t control threat, they are “bads”. If the tank can’t or won’t control the boss and hold him in the right place, facing him away from the squishies, he is a “bad”. If the healer is making “pew pew” when he should be keeping the tank alive,. “bad”.
A group of moderately skilled and moderately geared players can sometimes make for a smoother run than a group of incredibely geared “leets”.
One of my “leading questions” for people is what mods they use. If they have a threatmeter and no damage meter, OK. If they have a damage meter and no threat meter, I have a concern. If they don’t wait for the tank to establish agro, I don’t care how geared or specced they are. If they constantly break the sheep or trap, they are “bads”.
I am one of those who will overlook the gear and the exact talent build, provided the person has an idea what they are doing. It’s a cliche, one we joke about in the guild, but it’s true - Rule 1 is DON’T SUCK.
And it goes on.
I pretty much agree with BlaM’s assessment of Elitist Jerks. Lots of useful information, but their final “best” optimizations make a ton of assumptions that simply aren’t relevant to the average WoW player.
BTW, BlaM (or any other healer), since you’re a primary healer, maybe you can answer a question or two about healing threat (I’m not a masochist enough to ask on the WoW forums). I’ll be dual-spec’ing into the Shaman Restoration tree with the new patch. There’s several talents that are primarily for healing-threat mitigation. One is a 15% threat reduction and the other gives a chance of reduced threat whenever I go below 30% health. Do I need to take these? I think my guild’s tanks are well-geared (correct me if I’m wrong, guys), and my healing gear will be mostly solo-quest rewards. From what I’ve read, I shouldn’t really need these, but I’d like to hear other opinions.
I’d rather use those 8 talent points to improve my healing directly, especially considering my mediocre healing gear.
I mostly agree here, though what I mean by hardcore raiding is a group that will raid 6-12 5 nights a week, and will beat their heads against a hard boss for hours on end. Many of these guilds will have certain people on standby, or sent out to respec because they’re looking for that one minor advantage to help them on a progression boss. Me, I like to raid, but I can only take so much endless wiping to a progression boss, especially when it’s either a complete lack of gear, or someone else’s fault.
As for bad healers, I’d say most reasonable healers know not to “pewpew” in anything remotely difficult (although current raid content is so easy I usuall do DPS at least some in pretty much every boss encounter except Saph, KT, and multi-drake Sarth). So, a healer DPSing in a raid encounter, to me, is so horrendously bad, I can’t even consider it. Instead, I’d say a bad healer is one who is trying to do too much, often not sticking to his assignment and people die as a result, or they do too much of someone else’s job resulting in them going OOM and not able to do their job as a result.
This I can also agree with. I’ve actually had easier runs of heroics when my group and I were undergeared because we knew we had to be cautious about pulls and not taking unnecessary damage and kill orders. Often now, when I actually do heroics, which isn’t very often, someone ends up goofing off (and I’m at least as guilty as anyone else) and it can make things go poorly.
Absolutely. I consider a threat meter to be a mandatory add-on for anyone who intends to do any serious grouping. Even I, as a healer, where it’s seldom of any use, have it installed just in case. And damage meters, while an awesome tool when used properly, usually ends up devolving into e-peen “Hurray, I’m #1”. There are times I wish I could turn off damage meters for the raid so people don’t get distracted. A good player can look at the numbers and find ways to get better.
For me, back in BC, I could easily tell a good Holy Priest from a bad one because good ones used Greater Heal, Renew, Circle of Healing, and Flash Heal was generally, at most, second or third among their heals, while bad ones would typically have nothing but Circle of Healing and Flash Heal, and could go a whole night without casting Greater Heal. But when people look at the meters they just look at who healed for the most and assumed they were doing well.
One of the frustrating things now is with the Discipline Priest in our guild. He’s a very solid healer and originally went Discipline at my request right after 3.0 came out. I often get questions where people ask what’s wrong with his healing and why he’s so low on the charts, and I have to explain about how his healing mechanics work through absorption and all that.
Heh, if only this rule were universal…
For a short answer, those talents aren’t worth it, they look like PVP talents (Priests have similar ones, where they try to give them SOME kind of PVE utility, but they’re still more useful for PVP). I would imagine that those talents are not worth taking in the vast majority of cases.
For the long answer, healing threat is a complicated issue and it’s one that DPS and tanks generally do not understand because the mechanics are significantly different than how they work for tanks and DPS. There’s several important ways in which threat works differently:
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Overhealing generates no threat. So, IOW, if you have full health, even if I hit for for an 18k Greater Heal crit and all you have is prox aggro, you’ll maintain aggro.
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Healing generates threat at 50% the rate of Damage. So, say a Priest and a Mage are grouped together fighting a mob. If the mage hits the mob for 8k damage and I turn around and heal the mage for 8k (assuming no overheal), then I have only generated 4k threat compared to his 8k threat.
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Healing threat is divided equally among all mobs in combat. So, assume we have a Mage and a Priest again except now they’re fighting four mobs. Let’s say the Mage is using Blizzard and is hitting all four mob for 2k each (I have no idea if that’s a reasonable number or not, but let’s run with it to keep things simple), then he has 2k aggro on each. If, instead, the mage does a cast for 8k damage on one mob, then he has 8k threat on one mob and no threat on the other three. If, however, I heal the mage for 8k, assuming no overheal, then I have 1k threat on each mob, so in the first case, the Mage maintains aggro, but in the second, I get aggro on the three mobs he’s not attacking.
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How has threat is determined by the following: If you are in melee range of the mob an exceed 110% of the current target’s threat, the mob will aggro onto you. If you are at range, that threshold is increased to 130%. This is the only rule that is the same for everyone.
Using these rules, there’s a couple things that should be pretty obvious. In most situations, unless that tank is REALLY awful, there is no way I can ever catch up to him in threat. Our tanks generally put out around 5-6k TPS without even trying. To match that kind of threat and eventually overtake him, I’d have to consistently put out more than 12k HPS, which just isn’t sustainable over a long fight for anyone that isn’t a Pally (who, btw, gets free threat reduction, those bastards), and in fights where I am doing that, chances are the tank is building considerably more threat than that.
The only time you really have a problem with threat in the above situation is if your tank misses some early threat building abilities AND/OR there’s a lot of quick burst damage and healing. Of course, chances are that this is a tank gearing issue because if he’s missing, he need more hit or expertise, and if he needs a lot of quick healing, then he probably isn’t defense capped or just needs better mitigation. Either way, even in this situation, a little less threat won’t make a difference if your tank has none, so threat reduction talents don’t help here except in a vanishingly small number of situations and those are probably better managed in another way.
Another, and more important, situation about healer threat is when adds are involved. The thing is, since tanks and DPS cannot build threat on them unless they hit them, that means often untanked or unCCed mobs will have just prox-aggro, but since you’re passively building threat on everything, they will come to you. The thing is, you should be at range, both to avoid crowding and random unnecessary melee range damage, and because of the fourth point above, so adds should have plenty of time to be picked up by the tank. Second, even if you have lower your threat enough to avoid pulling healing aggro, they’ll just end up going to another healer instead, so all the talent does in that situation is put another healer in trouble instead of you.
Pesonally, I like to be the one who pulls healing aggro and, being a Holy Priest, I generally am more often than not. I like that because I have more tools to manage pulling threat than any other healer, including Binding Heal, Power Word: Shield, Desperate Prayer, Fade, and even Guardian Spirit. The other reason I like it is because the add tank generally knows where any adds he misses are going to go, and he or I can adjust our positioning or duties accordingly.
Of course, this is probably a little different for you as a Shaman since I think your aggro management tools are severely limited compared to mine, but if you find you’re often dying to adds, it’s either a positioning problem on your side or, more likely, the tanks need to do a better job of picking up adds and responding quickly when you say you have aggro.
How so? The only threat reducer I’m aware of is the Fanaticism talent, which is pretty deep into the Retribution tree. If you’re that far into the Ret tree, you’re not going to be that great a healer as it is.
It’s not a talent, I just remember reading somewhere at one point that Paladins passively generate 70% of the threat that other healers do without any talents. Unfortunately, in the write-up I did, I didn’t include a cite, so I can’t seem to find where I read it. So… I don’t know.
I do stand firmly by my statement that paladins are bastards though.
Yes, yes we are. We’re like the golden children of WoW.
I’m actually really looking forward to playing a Holy Paladin (respeccing at 80). Should be fun.
Since my paladin just reached lvl 60 (and looks muy muy sexy in her Bloodscale armor), I’ve got to ask this question:
When they patch the game and take a skill that formerly required completing a quest chain to learn, and make that skill purchasable from a trainer instead …
Whythe hell do they leave the original quests in there??
Guy in the Cathedral started me off on the quests to obtain my charger, making me very glad I had saved up more than 1000g, because after spending 480g for Journeyman Riding (with what that riding trainer charges, you’d think he would dress better), 80g for a Swift Palomino (since I don’t actually get the charger until lvl 61) and then 150g to obtain that exorcism censer from the priest in IF, 60g for Arcanite Bars from the AH, more later for other barding materials, and eventually another 150g or so to pay Elmore to make the barding, that 1000g is pretty much wiped out.
I had already handed over my 150g to the priest in IF when a guildmate said, “Noooooo! Don’t do it! You can get your charger from the trainer for 17g!” D’oh! Too late! Yeah, I saw it at the trainer for 17g, but when the quests were assigned I assumed that 17g was just the fee for teaching me how to summon the charger. The quests made me think I still had to earn it.
Another question: Two days in a row now, the same tauren has “hit on” my human female pally. Now, I know Alliance and Horde can’t understand each other’s languages, but this tauren player is doing something so that the words, “Shockmaster thinks you are a sexy devil” appear in orange text in the chat box. How is he doing that? Some secret emote?
I hear now, it will be next week. That gives me time to do a screen capture of my talent builds, if I decide not to change anything (because I’m expecting a "talent point reset).
There’s a super-secret way to communicate with the opposite faction, and it’s using emotes. So if he were to go “/s I think you’re a sexy devil”, you’d get garbage, but if he says “/e thinks you are a sexy devil” it basically just replaces the /e with your name and makes it all orange text since, well, you can still understand emotes. But, shh… don’t tell anyone or they might “fix” it.
I seriously doubt the patch will be next week. Before large patches they normally start the completed portion of the patch a few weeks ahead of time. This usually includes art, model, and sound files, so it can actually be a significant portion of the patch. But this way, when it comes out, everyone doesn’t hit the server trying to download 500 megs all at the same time. I expect 3.1 is no less than 2-3 weeks away, possibly more.
… can I get fixed? I’m getting clobbered by the Defias womens in Westfall (I’m level 14), and since there aren’t any quests to be had in Goldshire, I made the inn in Stormwind my new 10-20. There’s only one wagon in the trade district and that guy wants to know about some kind of convention somewhere…
Making very little progress in levelling right now, but also haven’t been playing regularly.
I learned how to fly on the Gryphon, but I don’t want to do that too much when my quests are within running distance…
Thanks
Q
First of all, there’s an inn and various vendors in a place in Westfall called “Sentinel Hill”, which would be handy place to base yourself while adventuring.
Second, when in Stormwind in the same courtyard as the auction house is an armorer where you can get repairs.
Third, if you look at the mini-map there is a little magnifying glass icon around 10 o’clock. Or sometimes it’s another icon. Click on that you’ll see a drop-down list of things you can look for, with “repairs” as one choice. Click on that and the icon turns to an anvil and repair vendors are indicated by a yellow dot on the mini-map.