Go for the best piece of gear for the slot. If a cloth healing piece drops that’s better than the plate, leather, or mail piece you’re using, by all means pick it up. However, healers that can only wear cloth should always get first dibs on it (and so on up the gear proficiency chain: Priests get first dibs on cloth, Druids get dibs on leather over Shammies and Pallies, and Shammies get dibs on mail over Pallies).
Expect to get a LOT of healing plate when you start running Naxx, too. Blizz was deeply stupid in the way they distributed plate loot tables: 1/3 is tanking, 1/3 is DPS, and 1/3 is healing. I am not making that up–someone actually ran the number on it. That’s right, Blizzard made ONE THIRD of the plate that drops in Naxx usable by a single spec of a single class. :smack:
Plate DPS aren’t going to want *any *leather piece over *any *plate piece, but the stat distribution *in general *does tend to be better on leather (five stat) than on plate (four stat).
Thanks for the info, both of you. Right now I’m trying to fill all three roles while leveling; my usual teammates are a Warlock and a Rogue, so I’m usually handling the tanking, healing, and buffing, as well as keeping my end of the damage up. Because of that, I don’t have much experience yet with gearing for a particular role.
Just out of curiosity, how are you defining “reasonably equipped”? In the case of both group situations my paladin was equipped with the “best available” gear that I found on the AH. She’s untwinked, but started with 10g of seed money from a lvl 50 toon that I don’t play any more. By lvl 23 she’d made enough gold from gathering herbs and leather and selling those on the AH to build up her own decent supply of gold so that she could buy the best stuff available on the AH.
I can’t speak to soloing Knucklerot & Luzran at 21 since I did them at lvl 18 with a group of similar-level (16-19) paladins, and now I’m lvl 23 and of course can’t go back in level to try it out. But I was indeed lvl 23 when my second group took on Dar’Khan, and he was knocking down my health much faster than I was taking down his. Keep in mind that I’ve already leveled one ret paladin to 80, so I think I’m pretty good at playing the class.
Now this bit interests me. In all my previous play on other toons, I’ve never pulled a “boss” out of a room and seen him come running out all by himself. Instead, I’ll pull a “boss” and he’ll run out with all his friends right behind him. And obviously I didn’t want that whole crowd crammed into a narrow corridor - I hate it when I can’t see what I’m hitting.
D’oh! Now this is one problem I have with questgivers handing out these quests when my character is still well below the appropriate level for the quest: by the time I’ve actually reached the appropriate level I’ve completely forgotten about those special quest items! I don’t think the other two players in my party used theirs either.
Cleared the temple beforehand, but interestingly, Dar’Khan never feared me (though I was not aware that he might do so). Maybe he tried but his spell missed me.
Anyway, I obviously didn’t do anything the way you suggested (since your suggestions came after the fact). I hadn’t previously tried to solo the quest - I had only looked into the room to see what was there, saw the guy had friends, and decided I would need to find a group. Once I found a couple other people, they both said they’d done the quest before with other toons and so I was depending on them to fill me in on anything I should know, and our plan of attack was based on their previous experience.
Of course, I know I could also visit WowHead.com or a similar site and probably get the same (or similar) information you gave, but as a general rule I like to try to figure out how to do a challenging quest on my own; I won’t resort to 3rd-party sites until I’ve tried 3-4 times, in different ways, and failed each time.
If nobody rezzes you, then you have no choice but to run back to the instance entrance and re-join the group (or give up and leave the group mid-run, which isn’t really nice to the others).
As for your gear, if you have any interest in running instances, then you should make a point of getting your gear fixed pretty much any time you find someone to fix it for you. I have an add-on (Titan Panel) that shows me the state of my gear at all times, and I generally don’t let it get below 90% unless I’m doing a tough run and getting killed a lot. Once, I ran an instance with an underpowered PUG and we wiped so many times I went from 100% to all red just in that one instance run, but that’s unusual.
Absolutely do NOT pass when you’re dead. You gave your life for the cause–you deserve the loot as much as anyone else there.
I’ve played a rogue and didn’t enjoy myself. Not my play style. I’m paying the $15/month. If I want to run a shadow priest or fury warrior, then by golly I will, and I’m not changing my play style just because some other players are jerks.
I should know better than to quote a meter which gives unbiased data from which to draw certain conclusions?
Well, assertion of that doesn’t make it the case. There’s a simply elegant addon one can load to account for the absorption one does and convert that into healing. My discipline priests use it, and we factor it in.
A healing meter isn’t useless. Recount is quite handy. For instance, it’s entirely possible (and indeed highly likely at the conclusion of each raid) for the respective people in charge to go through a parse for a particular fight and see who was doing what. Also, overhealing is only relevant if a particular healer is perpetually out of mana.
I’m not sure whence this argument against using any methodologically sound tool for objectively analyzing the performance of raiders came, but it needs to go back. The only other possible way I can see accounting for individual people’s performance is to guess: “boss died. everyone must have done great.” The meter itself isn’t alone super important. Then again, no other diagnostic tool in the universe is stand alone useful. It’s the wise interpretation of the data that is at issue.
Even in fights when I’m dispelling, my healing is still quite strong. I don’t see how dispelling duty somehow provides an excuse for suddenly not healing well. The only time I can see this being a great issue is when the healer/dispeller in question doesn’t appropriate prioritize his assignments.
Also, it’s completely false to suggest that a healing meter doesn’t show who was healing whom. Even recount has this functionality built in. All one needs to do is click a person’s name to get a good idea of what’s been happening. Indeed, that we have healing assignments implies that we’re aware of who’s responsible for what. A healing meter will elegantly show whether that healer was at least making an effort to keep his assignments up.
As one would expect, a raid healer’s assignment is to heal anyone who requires it. This might include tossing a heal at the tank, or cross-healing. The fight in question will decide that.
But let’s take a look at what a healing meter can tell us:
By clicking on Thetempist’s name, I can easily see how many of each heal he cast, on whom he cast it and what percentage each activity played in his overall healing done for any given fight. So, he’s assigned to heal the MT, Froussard. At the end of the fight, let’s say, the tank is dead. So, I’m going to get curious and look through the meters and combat log to see what’s amiss. If I happen to notice that Thetempist has cast 107 flashes of light, and only 3 of them are on Froussard, then I think the problem will be quite obvious. As the healing meter will have recorded, he wasn’t casting the bulk of his healing on his assigned target. The data are there; it only requires cursory analysis.
But then I’d get even more curious so I’d look at the parse of where his flashes of light were going. This would tell me his mindset (something the meter can’t speak to directly, but something which can inferred from the data); was he trying to raid heal? was he just spamming heals on himself because he forgot to target the tank? At the very least, these data will allow me to tailor my questions in a more logical fashion. I fail to see how this would be at all useless, let alone even more useless than a dps meter.
A dps meter is an excellent tool to figure out why someone’s dps isn’t where it should be based on said person’s gear, spec and how they perform against other similarly geared, specced people. The meter has to be read in conjunction with all other known data. This is hardly difficult. This is hardly useless. It’s essentially that unless we want to carry someone, everyone in the raid is expected to do his level best to maximize his performance. This can include certain things like turning off the television (something we caught by a WWS parse, which alone justifies our use of meters), bad rotation or whatever. I fail to understand how this would be useless to know: is it useless to know why someone’s performance is objectively below a base level? Or is it just enough to know that they aren’t performing well and since we have no reliable way to evaluate, we should write them off and not try to help them improve?
There are many benefits of having a meter running, and having knowledgeable people reviewing it so as to fine tune performance. I don’t think this is a casual/serious issue so much as a succeed/fail issue. If people are fine with carrying someone who refuses to do what’s necessary to improve, then that works for that particular guild/group. That, however, isn’t the normal way of things in raiding guilds.
To be frank, I’m a little shocked that you would write off the best tool ever designed to track performance in the game as being useless. But to use a similar tool of assertion: anyone who’s ever raided and read a healer/damage meter would be fully aware of the functionality it has, such as:
ability by ability parse covering number of uses, percent of overall damage/healing;
all targets said player has used some ability on, how often, what percentage of that person’s overall time was spent on said target, and what overall percentage of damage/healing done each ability did compared against player’s total package, and as compared against all other players’ efforts on that target.
To not notice these very obvious features, one must work really hard not to use the meter. This, to me, seems counterintuitive given that you’re aware that you can scroll a couple of tabs over and see overhealing done.
martu, I use Bartender4 and an old Logitech G15 (18 extra keys). During a boss pull I will use Immolate, Conflag, Incin, Chaos Bolt, BloodFury (orc racial), Lifetap. I may use CoE, CoA, CoD (at least one of these will be used, depending on the status of the raid and other locks, more may be used. I may also use RoF, Hellfire, Potion of Speed, Soul Shatter, Corruption (if forced to move, and there’s nothing better for me to use that GCD), healthstone, soulstone (I always keep one created during raids, sometimes I need to drop one in the middle of a pull).
Almost everything else is off to the side/invisible during a fight, and clickable when out of combat. I do move things around depending on the fight though.
ashman165, we had 3-5 locks in BC, and depending on how many mages we had with us we put up CoS, CoR (sometimes), and maybebe CoE. If there was a spare lock (usually) he’d put up CoD, as it was better dps than CoA and cost fewer GCDs. I’m still happy that 0/21/40 is dead, and that Sac has been removed. We’re a pet class, and I really hated that I got better dps from destroying my pet than keeping it out. I like the new way better.
In other (WoW) news, I started playing with multiboxing over the weekend. A simple set up using keyclone, focus macros, and my wife’s desire for a zhevra mount. Doing three mages to go with her paladin at the moment, but whatever she ends up with, I think I’ll keep with the multi-mage for awhile. It’s interesting how much my focus became on the mechanics of how I play the game, and how I can manipulate what I’m doing based on keypresses. Anyone have any experinces in this to share?
At the end of the day, like he says, you’re paying for the game. Play however you want (as wisely or not as you want). But with that comes certain things; if you play too oddly people won’t group with you. So, you’ll have to find a subset of the server’s population who likes your playstyle. On the flipside is that even if you’re the best player ever in your role, some asshole’s going to tell you to do something different because they have a different playstyle. These people are, quite simply, douchebags who should be placed on ignore and ganked for hours on end.
If someone doesn’t like your spec, and unless it’s completely retarded (like a tri-spec or something), then have them get on their character ____ (same class as yours) and show you how with the same gear level and a different spec, they’re able to significantly outperform you. If they can do that, then you might want to consider their advice. If they can’t, then again, they are quite simply douches who should be ganked for hours on end.
For instance, I had some asshat warlock who used to raid in TBC on a priest giving me a line of shit about having spent talent points in blessed resilience because it used to be for PvP, but now (apparently unknown to him) also has a wonderful PvE application. When confronted with the choice to either put up or shut up, he wisely chose the latter.
Yeah, as I’ve said, there are many configurations which are viable. But that rotation wouldn’t really work anymore since they’ve consolidated a lot of the curses.
I really enjoyed being able to sac my pet for a particular buff. In some fights, it was to help ease the strain on the healers, in others it was to do away with loss of GCDs by having to lifetap. In others it was just for sheer throughput. The fight, or even particular phase within one, largely dictated that.
Also, and this is a minor note, it was possible throughout much of TBC to have your pet rezzed and still keep the buff from the sacrifice.
I don’t enjoy not having the option on how best to optimize my performance based on my pet, alive or dead.
Personally, any time I clear vendor trash out of my bags, I make a point of doing it at one that can also repair, so I kill two birds with one stone and stay pretty close to max durability at all times.
1.) Yes, you *can *parse the information from a meter or WWS to tell you who’s doing the best job of healing. But that wasn’t your argument about why you were the “best” healer–it was purely how much HPS you could pump out, which is the most useless part of the meter absent any other information.
2.) Dispelling can account for a healing disparity when one person is doing dozens of dispells and another is doing zero. (Which I have seen happen.)
3.) Overhealing *is *relevant in the context of “omgz i beet u on teh healz metarz!!!” Let’s say Paladin A does 400k heals and Priest B does 500k heals, neither of them goes OOM, both their targets stay alive, and the difference can be attributed solely to overhealing. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Priests are better healers than Palandins–it just means that the Paladin A knows when to hold back a useless heal while Priest B keeps spamming them, and Priest B might run into problems later if mana ever does become an issue.
All of this relates back to my objection to your original point. You said, more or less, “Priests make the best healers because my HPS top the meters.” That’s it. Nothing about whether other people were doing something other than spam healing, nothing about whether part of that healing was overhealing that others may have avoided and thus done lower HPS (regardless of whether or not you had the mana to waste), nothing about whether you were putting those heals on the person you were supposed to.
Now, I’m not saying that you’re a bad healer or that Priests aren’t the most efficient in terms of mana-to-heal ratio, I’m just saying you’re making a bad argument for it. Can Recount or a WWS report provide a lot of very useful information about healing? Absolutely. Are total heals or HPS a reliable measure of how “good” a given class or person is at healing? Absolutely not, without other context.
Healing meters aren’t useless, no. Topping them certainly is. My holy pally can push through an absurd amount of hps, but there’s rarely any point to doing so, as the techinque cause me to reach equally absurd amounts of overheal (I’ve hit 88% before, when proving a point to someone). What matters in how many people die when you have healer set X as opposed to healer set Y.
Recount is awesome for tracking who’s healing who, but not for telling me when. Need to have grimreaper as well, because it doesn’t matter if I healed tankX for 80% of his healing taken, if I didn’t drop an HL on him in the 3 seconds between the hits that killed him. In fact that would rather conclusively prove I’d failed, even though recount said I’d done my job. Like any tool, properly used it’s very beneficial, improperly used (say used in isolation) it’s actually a detriment.
At the end of the day, the meter is a great tool, but it doesn’t matter who’s on top of it if the boss is dead. To me, the greatest benefit of it is to look and see what other people did so that I can inprove my play. Winning recount doesn’t kill bosses, and like my IRL boss says be careful what you measure, as you elcit behavior through measurement.
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Repairs: always. Naxx and Ulduar give you the oppertunity to repair after every wipe, so you should never, ever have broken gear in either of them. It’s like reagents and raid consumables, just a basic expectation.
I’m sorry. I don’t recall saying that my hps is the only thing I consider. However, it’s worth noting that you seem to have skipped over the entirety of my post in that I specifically, and at length, discussed why it’s important to properly interpret the data. Even if you can’t get your meter to only take into account effective healing, it’s quite simple to do it by hand by merely subtracting out the overhealing from the total healing, figuring out which spells did the overhealing, and averaging the cast time per number cast and adjusting the hps. These things aren’t at all difficult. Particularly since it requires no independent creation of math because one may simply go to elitistjerks.com and look at their formulae. A little basic algebra and voila, solution.
Again, as I said, it isn’t just the meter; it’s the analysis of the data taken in conjunction with all other relevant data. To do otherwise would be odd and intellectually dishonest.
Fair enough, but am I really supposed to factor in every bad decision a raid leader makes? I tend to work under the premise that generally, smart choices are made in raids, for the fight(s) at hand.
Even if there’s no choice but to have one person do all of the dispelling, why do you set it up as though this can’t be taken into account when looking at their performance? A part of which, presumably, is doing the job they’re given. If their job is dispelling, then it’s easy enough to see how well they did by counting the total number of possible things they were supposed to dispel and comparing that against the total number of things they actually did dispel.
That notwithstanding, even on Heigan when I’m the only priest, who is invariably tasked with dispel duty, my healing is still right at the top and yet no one dies from the diseases. I would posit that if a healer is bemoaning dispel duty as being the ruination of his healing ability, this is an excuse as I know several priests, myself included, who can do both without great difficulty.
Also, on Noth the Plaguebringer, when I’m healing on my druid, I handle all decurses and still manage to tank heal and cross heal. When I heal it on my priest, we have a mage who does it and his dps doesn’t seem any the worse for wear.
See above. We only factor in effective healing.
Also, I haven’t met this priest you hypothesize. Part of the priest healing technique (at least until the last major patch) was in stopcast healing. Priests are by habit keen on not loosing some unwarranted heal as the idea is to keep a huge heal always on the verge of being landed. To do otherwise is merely to be a healbot, which won’t get one far in one’s raiding career.
I said no such thing. It’s ridiculous to say that I did when that wasn’t even the topic we were discussing. We weren’t talking the world of all healers; the issue at hand was specifically in the whack-a-mole game that is raid healing.
This is the second paragraph in a row in which you’re comparing a raid healer against tank healers; the two aren’t directly comparable.
Also, again, you have glossed over the whole idea that a meter is a tool, the utility of which derives from wisely interpreting the data.
You are contradicting your earlier assertion which was, “Anyone who knows anything about healing in raids knows that healing meters are even more useless than damage ones.”. It can’t be true that they are absolutely useful in providing a lot of useful information while at the same time being useless.
Again, you’ve completely ignored my several statements which explicitly delineate that a meter is a tool, the utility of which is in how the data are used.
Sigh. ashman, I direct you again to the post I was originally replying to:
“topping the healing meters”
“gives me serious challenge for hps and overall healing”
“I can pull out 7k hps for about 2 minutes”
:rolleyes:
Show me there where you wisely interpreted that data, or gave any arguments other than “I do more totals heals/HPS than everyone else.” As I have stated before, and everyone else seems to understand (thanks Redwing), I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that you’re argument is poorly supported. In other words, “Cite?”
This past weekend, I rolled a warrior on A-Bronzebeard, and man. It was great being able to take on 3 mobs at-level and come out still swinging on the other side. Woo-hoo! I’m so used to having to be careful about what I’m hitting, so this is great. Just keep smacking them around, pop a pot, smack some more, pop Gift of the Naaru, back up, smack until they stop moving, and bob’s your uncle.
I gotta admit, she’s more fun than the tauren druid on H-Borean Tundra even though they’re at similar levels at the moment. (Druid tried about 4-5 times to take down Arrachea, and kept getting assaulted from behind by other mobs, especially those goddamn swoops and cougars. If you heard some faint yelling Sunday, that was very likely my reaction to the latest beatdown)
lizardling, use Warriors with caution, or you’ll find yourself getting smooshed when you head back to a squishier alt. (I find myself occasionally having moments of, “Oh yeah, I can’t actually sit here with ten mobs hammering on me at melee range.”)
Yeah but people don’t ask men to breastfeed their children either. I just said get used to getting asked or play something else not that you can’t play what you want.
I was struggling for an example and I caught my mistake right after I clicked the post button.
No but if it is going to bother you to have people ack then you might want to play a class where people don’t ask.
Like I said, I probably have some presumptions I have carried over from EQ (and granted in EQ clerics were good for nothing but healing and warriors were good for nothing but tanking) but I seem to recall Blizzard saying that warriors are the baseline for tanks.
My retadin is only 40ish so you probabbly know more about the class than me but when I soloed him I used the aura that increases armor, I used the judgement that increases damage. I bubbled at one point to heal myself and then when I was nearly dead again I used LoH. I think I soloed him at 22.
I take a lot of risks when my bubble is cooled down.
Yeah I think it does like 300 or 600 dmage (I forget which, it might even weaken him a bit because I died a lot before I remembered that I had a clickable item).
Its not a matter of principle for me. I don’t like looking us strategy on places like wowhead because it is just too much of a pain in the butt, so I usually wait until I run out of ideas. I was surprised he was pullable, then he feared me into the room and so I went around a corner and when I still couldn’t kill him I suddenly remembered the clickable item and then it all worked fine.
That’s kinda what I don’t like about my DK. It spoils me for classes that have to work for a living. Don’t get me wrong I love the ability to get througha fight against 3 mobs of the same level with almost all my hit points but it makes it that much more frustrating when I die. On the other hand, my druid knows where almost every graveyard is in every zone I play.
I agree that the meters are useful tools. But I’m also one of those that goes :dubious: when someone tells me they top the meters in damage on every run.
When I’m in a DPS role, I’m watching a lot of things other than those meters. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, if I top the DPS meters, but let an add kill the healer, I have failed. If I pull the boss’ aggro and he turns around with a conical AoE and kills all the squishies, I just wiped the group. If I miss a debuff I could have dealt with and the tank or healer dies because of it, it’s my fault.
You obviously know what the meters are for and how to use them. But there are a lot of DPSers that I wish would just uninstall Recount. I think they’d be better group players without it.
Woo-hoo! I’m so used to having to be careful about what I’m hitting, so this is great. Just keep smacking them around, pop a pot, smack some more, pop Gift of the Naaru, back up, smack until they stop moving, and bob’s your uncle.