Addon release: Hero
I wanted to make a rather special post about what I’ve been doing recently, and specifically why my posting has been rather low recently. Much of my time over the past month or so has been spent on another WoW project I’ve been working on, and that is: I’ve been finishing up my first real WoW add-on.
It is now up on Curse as of a few minutes ago and I have relatively high hopes for it. I only started learning Lua (the language WoW add-ons are written in) a few months ago, so it’s been a bit of a learning process, but a tremendous amount of fun. If you have any interest in computer programming I would thoroughly recommend Lua as a great place to start. It’s a lovely little scripting language, very clean and easy to read, and very forgiving of mistakes
As for the add-on itself:
I started writing it because a) I wanted to learn Lua, and b) I wanted a better way of seeing what the other Healers and Tanks in my raid were up to. All too often I was finding myself using Pain Suppression just when the tank used Shield Wall, or Divine Hymn when the Druid cast Tranquillity. Sometimes you manage to pull off those raid saving ability uses, but all too often my plans were being foiled by other would be heroes all having the same idea. It was a wasted effort, Spiderman and Superman were both fighting to save the girl while the villain one shot the tank. The idea here then is to try and streamline things by helping you keep track of what’s going on in your raid.
Discipline FAQ
Starting a Discipline Priest and confused about something? Lets try and help out with some useful information.
What’s my spec?
See the article on Discipline spec here.
The standard spec is something like: 57/14/0 getting all the good heal talents in the Discipline tree, then going up the Holy Tree to pick up Inspiration.
Attribution: GENZOMAN
What do I shine at?
As a Disc Priest your specialism is Tank Healing and Damage prevention. Because you are a priest however you have a great deal of flexibility because of your huge range of spells. This means you can ably heal 5 mans, 10 mans as a Tank or a Raid healer, in 25 mans you are a great Tank Healer, and you make a good PvP healer.
Because of your shields you really shine in fights where there are periodic spikes of damage which you can prepare for by casting shields on people before they take damage.
PvE Stat values –
Not perfect, but a rough guide is something like:
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Intellect – 0.6
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Spirit – 0.22
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MP5 – 0.67
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Haste Rating – 0.59
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Crit Rating – 0.48
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Spell Power – 1.0
So you should favour Spell Power, Intellect, Haste, Crit, MP5 and Spirit in pretty much that order. However, obviously if you need more mana stack Intellect, if you need to do more healing stack Spell Power. If you have enough mana there is NO benefit to getting more Intellect, Spirit or MP5. Mana is only useful if you are spending it. If you finish fights with lots of mana, you should stop getting more.
“It’s not my fault!”
With the new five man Trial of the Champion I have seen a lot of anxious Priests looking for reassurance recently. Often many of them are new to healing and, after a lot of wiping, they were blamed, or blame themselves, for being unable to heal the first encounter. I think this speaks to a more general problem.
There are a lot of things that can affect you as a Healer, but which you have no direct control over. Acheron {link to Acheron Death Report add-on} will tell you how a player died – they were killed by shadow damage the healer couldn’t cope with – but it won’t tell you why. It won’t show that the Tank charged out of range, that the healer miss-clicked, or that the DPS is too low for the encounter. These are complex group dynamics that nobody thinks about when they go right, but when they go wrong a judgemental group can be quick to place blame, and an inexperienced Healer can easily feel responsible. So when things are going wrong, what is the best approach?
Don’t cry, just bring out the bag of tricks! There are many things that can go wrong, but even when it’s not your fault, that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do about it. As a Priest you have a really versatile set of spells, and making the best use of them is something you can and will learn from practice. It is not immediately obvious all the situations where Pain Suppression is useful, but over time you do pick up some tricks.
Healing Trial of the Champion: Twin Val’kyr
I apologise for this article being a little late, my guild didn’t get a chance to raid ToC until Tuesday this week (which in Europe is the day before raids reset) and I’d rather not post tactics without having some personal experience of the encounter. Now that I do:
Twin Val’kyr
Two bosses enter. Fjola Lightbane and Eydis Darkbane
The fight itself is probably the most straightforward of all the ToC fights so far and requires two tanks and probably no more than two healers on 10 man.
When you begin the encounter the two bosses enter from the large double doors at the back of the Arena. They will proceed to stand each side of the centre circle facing towards the raid entrance.
If you stand back when they enter you do not immediately agro them.
If you are facing them you will have the “Dark” Val’kyr on your left, and on your right is the “Light” Val’kyr.
Light and Dark Aura’s
Stationary on the floor in front and behind of each Val’kyr will be a spinning portal-like object, one light and one dark, making four in total. Clicking these swirly portals will give the player a dark or a light aura.
Having the one of these auras will absorb much of the magic damage done by the Val’kyr of the opposite colour. You will also throughout the fight get a DPS boost against the Val’kyr of the opposite colour to your aura. Therefore the Tanks and all the DPS for the Light Val’kyr (for example) should all have the Dark aura to boost their DPS, and mitigate the raid damage they receive.
Each Boss does raid wide ticking magical damage to the entire raid. They also periodically cast some AoE’s around themselves for magical damage. If you have an an aura, either light or dark, it will negate the damage done by one boss so every player, even healers should have one to substantially reduce raid damage (and boost DPS).
Positioning
It is best to split the raid in half and have tanks and healers pick the portal appropriate for the Val’kyr they are attacking. For healers, either aura is fine but it’s good to have a mix so that you always have some healers healing even when others are swapping aura’s throughout the fight.
The two bosses share a health total so in theory it doesn’t actually matter which you DPS, however for various reasons it’s good to have the raid evenly split between them.
What glyphs should I take?
Picks first, then there is a run down of all the majo glyphs incase you want a little more information.
Picks
Discipline Picks
I raid with Glyph of Penance, Glyph of Flash Heal, and Glyph of Power Word: Shield. In ten mans I would consider dropping Flash Heal for Glyph of Prayer of Healing if you can spare the mana.
Holy Picks
My picks would be Guardian Spirit, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Healing. If you need more mana take Flash Heal over Guardian Spirit for 10 mans, and over Prayer of Healing for 25 mans.
Shadow Picks
My picks would be Shadow, Shadow Word: Pain and Mind Flay as they offer the best DPS boosts and the range advantage from Mind Flay glyph can be a massive boost in certain situations.
Rundown of all the options:
Shadow
Dispersion : Reduces the cooldown on Dispersion by 45 sec.
You should not really have mana issues as Shadow so being able to use Dispersion more often would only really be useful for avoiding damage. It doesn’t work on many dangerous boss abilities. Essentially this is a PvP glyph and not worth it for PvE.
Mind Flay : Increases the range of your Mind Flay spell by 10 yards, but it only reduces the target’s movement speed by 10%.
A definite PvE glyph and not a bad one. For fights with positioning advantages like Hodir, Iron Council, Vezax etc where you don’t always have a choice where to stand, this glyph is a really nice one. Even where it doesn’t matter where you stand, any time you spend chasing the boss to get in range is a huge amount of wasted DPS.
Tracking your cooldowns
It’s hardly news, or it certainly shouldn’t be, that Priests, just like every other class, spec and mob under the (fake) sun have cooldowns. As a DPS you use your cooldowns in a straight up rotation. Unless you are waiting for a DPS burn you spend cooldowns pretty much as soon as they are ready. As a healer you’re blowing cooldowns in response to the positioning of all the pretty multi-colored health bars and the abilities of the boss. In either case it’s important to keep a tight track of all your cooldowns. As a DPS player if you don’t recognise that Mind Blast is ready, you lose DPS. As a healer on the other hand the danger is not a loss of DPS but possibly the loss of a player.
There are two things you can do wrong. The first is to forget to use a cooldown. I’ve talked about this a little in the “Being a Hero” posts: If players are dying and you are consistently finding you have Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit, Divine Hymn, Face etc off cooldown then you could probably of handled things better. Don’t assume the mistake occurred when the player died. Often I realise that the mistake was not letting that player die, but occurred ten to fifteen seconds earlier when I ought to have used Divine Hymn or Pain Suppression to get control of the situation. The death is result of something which I failed to do much earlier.
The other mistake, and the one that I usually make, is to try to use a spell when it is on cooldown. Most commonly this occurs with very short cooldown spells like Penance where you want to use it very often. It also occurs commonly with very very long cooldown spells like Divine Hymn where I try to use it and forget that it is still on cooldown from the previous boss attempt. Trying to cast a spell while it is on cooldown is often the worse mistake. If I try to cast Penance on the tank and nothing happens I usually will hesitate. “What happened? Am I silenced? Oh Penance is on cooldown, is it almost ready? Should I wait one second for the cooldown to end?” Usually the tank dies about now.
Whilst these mistakes will always occur, they are definitely reducible if you find ways to better keep track of your cooldowns and display this information. My suggestion is Addons and, in my view, displaying the same information in multiple places on the screen makes a big difference. Providing redundant information means that wherever your eyes are looking, whether it’s health bars, action bars, or you’re trying to manoeuvre around the battle field, you’ll always have the important information right in front of your eyes. Obviously don’t make the information too intrusive, if you’re obscuring big parts of the screen that’s bad, but I think the mistake I used to make was thinking that I only needed to display each bit of information in one place.
My Addon suggestions are:
OmniCC – Displays the cooldown of your spells numerically on your action bars. This is much much easier to see than the standard blizzard effect which is neither quantitative nor very obvious at a glance. Works fantastic without much tweaking at all.
PowaAuras – A very popular Addon amongst DPSers to track important debuffs but this mod is extremely powerful. You can make it display icons, or shapes on the screen in response to all sorts of things. It will show you when spells are available, the cooldown remaining, when you, your target, your focus etc have certain buffs or debuffs on them. All kinds of things. For example: When a spell becomes available the icon appears, when the spell is used the cooldown timer appears. When I get a Serendipity buff the icon appears, additional stacks of the buff are displayed by additional icons stacking up in a tower so they are easy to take in at a glance. Anyway, definitely 100% recommend it for pretty much anything you want to do.
Satrina Buff Frames – A very powerful Addon for displaying buffs and debuffs for your player and your target. I use it for displaying things like Renew, Weakened Soul on my target so I know when these spells are worth recasting. It’s also great for showing up important debuffs. For example, Bosses with uncommon but key abilities like Ignis’ Slag Pot can be displayed very very clearly on your screen when they occur without otherwise intruding on your play. Again, like Powa Auras this mod takes a while to tweak with.
So, if you are finding yourself failing to use, or trying to use cooldowns you can’t, then consider ways of better displaying that information in your UI
Being a Hero: Pain Suppression
Pain Suppression:
Instantly reduces a friendly target’s threat by 5%, reduces all damage taken by 40% and increases resistance to Dispel mechanics by 65% for 8 sec.
Pain Suppression does a lot of heavy lifting for the raiding Discipline Priest. It’s on a short enough cooldown that you can use it several times in a fight and it can be a very versatile tool. In some fights you pretty much have to use Pain Suppression at a particular moment to save a tank. I’m thinking of things like Sartharion’s Fire Breath with two or more drakes. Or Mimiron’s Plasma Blast in Phase One. Here specific boss abilities have to be countered by the tank or the healers so there is not much choice.
In other fights you are free to use Pain Suppression whenever you like so you can use it whenever things are getting dangerous. My Super-Number-One-Awesomest-Pain Suppression-Tip is: If things start to go wrong, or look like they might, cast Pain Suppression on the tank.
If the tank is in trouble, cast Pain Suppression on the tank. If another player is in trouble, cast Pain Suppression on the tank. If you are in trouble, cast Pain Suppression on the tank. If the whole raid is in trouble, cast Pain Suppression on the tank!
That may sound stupid but hear me out. You have a limited attention and can at best only be healing a few players at once. If you cast Pain Suppression on the tank that frees you up to heal other things. The point of Pain Suppression here is not to buy the target time to live, it’s to buy you time to heal other people. You cast it on the tank because then for 8 seconds you can heal whoever needs it.
Imagine that ten people are taking raid damage. Pain Suppression would only protect one of them. If that one person is the tank then you are free to cast big AoE heals on the other nine.
Imagine that one person has aggro from a mob. Casting Pain Suppression on them might be wasted. If they are fast they might Feign Death, Bubble, Fade, Ice Block or have the mob taunted off them. If they aren’t they might just die. In any of these situations you’ve wasted your Pain Suppression. On the other hand, cast it on the tank and you will never have wasted it. You are guaranteed to have absorbed fifteen thousand damage or so and you’ve bought yourself eight seconds to heal the rest of the raid, regenerate mana, re-position yourself or giggle at your dead raider.
Finally imagine if you cast Pain Suppression on a shaman. It will absorb 40% of the damage they take. A typical shaman has maybe 20k health which means at best they can be hit for 28k before they die. On the other hand, cast Pain Suppression on the tank and you can spend the next 8 seconds healing that shaman and helping them survive much more damage. Casting PW:S on them would absorb 6k, and a Penance another 12k. That’s already much more healing than Pain Suppression would have given them.
So ultimately casting Pain Suppression on the tank gives more guarantee that it will:
Prevent more damage
Last the full eight seconds
Allow you to do more healing to a larger number of people.
Tip: Often cast-able on NPCs which can be very powerful in boss encounters like Razuvious where the NPCs take much higher than usual damage.
Spot Heal 