HellFire's Home

Security

2011-07-29T08:29:00.005-04:00

So, since I have not talked about W.O.W. in some time, due to some changes within the game, both personal and game wise. I decided to do a few pieces on here about computers, just to try to share some info with people, in hopefully simpler terms then the major sites out there.

So, for today, lets talk about computer security. This is based on a clean install, but many of these tips can be used for existing PCs too.

There are several key points here, and failure at any of them can compromise all of them. Making sure you are secure is very important against identity theft, loss of productivity, loss of your memories, and can mean the difference between feeling safe about using your computer, and fearing it.

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Step 1) Lock down

When I re-install my Operating System (OS), the first thing I do is load on my drivers. Then I make a second Admin User. I then log into that user and install my most needed applications. Next up is my Anti-Virus. I then set up my OS how I want it to look. The whole process takes 6-8 hours, and I dedicate that time to it, so I am not tempted to go browsing the web, or install the lesser used apps during this time. Once done, I drop the Admin User that I created and have been using down to a restricted user with close to no rights on the PC.

Why is this? Well, I do not want the Super User on my PC to be my default user. This user has to much power to make system wide changes, and many virus's can exploit this. But, I have found, many programs do not like being installed, even when ran as a super user, in a restricted user environment. I also do not want many of my programs to boot up with the Super User, nor do I want to spend the time configuring the 2nd users desktop and start menu, manually adding each program that decided not to propagate through.

In Windows, you can change user permissions any time, by going to control panel and selecting User Accounts. If you are not the Super User or an Administrator, you will be prompted for an Admin Password to proceed. Make sure you have one set, it can be relatively simple.

I install the Anti-Virus last, because some cause conflicts when installing software or applications. The impact can none, or it can cause the apps to totally fail. And every type of issue in between. This seems more pronounced in full security suits.

I go with 3 types of Anti-Virus.

First is Avast. This will be my main defence. It has a real time scanner, it has system protection. It has a boot scanner, scheduler, and the free version is all that is needed. Download can be found here - http://www.avast.com/en-us/index.

With that being said, I also use malwarebytes & Spybot. These are both on demand scanners. You have to choose and run them. I fire them up about once a month, normally before going out or watching a movie, and check back a while later. I also use them if I think I have a problem.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/ - Malwarebytes

http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html - Spybot S&D

The three way protection scheme is good for most systems. I have run up to 7 at a time, but that is very much overkill.

Other popular ones, in no order.

Adware
Avira
Norton
Mcafee
Trend Micro
Kaspersky
AVG

There is no best, and it comes down to personal preference. Many of the pay ones you can find on sale, with rebates, on NewEgg for free, if you are patient. Every 3-5 days, a different one is offered.

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Step 2) Blocked

Once my PC is set up, and secured, I run scans just to make sure its all clean.

If I have something really questionable to run, I have an old XP laptop that I run it on. I only use this comp for testing things, maybe 2 or 3 times a year. If you have available an older pc after buying a new one, keep it around for this reason. It typically is about 30 minutes of extra work to test software, but it can save you days of work if you had to clean an infected main PC.

The next step is installing many of the smaller apps you use every day. For every program I use, I do the custom install. I make sure its not installing browser tool bars, or any extra programs.

Finally comes my browsers. I install firefox & google chrome. I prefer chrome, but its a personal thing. If I have an issue, I find that having a second or third browser available.

For both Chrome & Firefox, I recommend installing certain extensions.

Adblock - Blocks Ads. Ads are the most common way for malware to infect your system through trusted sites.

NoScript - Disables scripts on pages. This is the way harmful ads infect you most the time, and a hijacked website could also infect you this way (or a purposely malicious site).

Adblocks is the easiest to use. You just install it and no longer see 90% of the ads while surfing.

NoScripts tend to be a bit of a pain. You have to allow every website, after a week or so of using it, it is a lot better.

I will get into better browsing habits in a future post (probably).

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Step 3) Up, Up, And Updates

This is probably the biggest pain. Setting up your PC is a (hopefully) one time thing. In all likely hood, it will probably be done every 2 to 3 years. A clean install is good housekeeping.

Keeping it all updated though, blech. Personally, between our two main computers, I spend 2-6 hours a week on this. I could go to a lower update cycle, but the more diligent you are, the less risk you put yourself at.

The most important things to keep updates - Windows (or your OS of choice), your browsers, your anti-virus, your browser plugins (java, flash, black lists, etc), drivers (especially video), games, then apps.

Keeping your OS updated will patch the holes that the newest exploits have found to infect a system.

This is the number one most important thing you can update, and the good news, under default settings, most OS systems do this automatically. You still should check on none-critical updates, some of these must be installed manually.

Browsers -

Chrome will do this in the background, and updates take effect when you re-open it. You are never prompted or notified. (not 100% true, since I have noticed on the config menu, when open, that it says updates are pending, but the need to go into the menu is so rare...)

Firefox - I don't use firefox often, but I think it prompts you to restart when updates are downloaded.

IE - Updated in the windows updates.

Others - No clue, I don't use Opera, Safari, or others, but I imagine most are similar to firefox.

Anti-Virus - Most definitions are updated daily/weekly. The more often, the better. This is often very transparent. The engine updates are normally manually done, and will almost always require a restart of the PC (for active scanners). On demand scanners will often just need the program restarted.

Browser Plug Ins - Most should auto update, I check java & flash monthly just to make sure. Some will require browser restarts.

Drivers - These you may have to track down. Windows update may catch them, but be careful. I have had windows update over newer versions of drivers. Always best to get the latest drivers from the manufacture. I keep a favorites list of my SSD maker, my MB maker, Video Card, multimedia card, dvd rom, usb hub, mouse, keyboard, etc. When I buy a new device, I always download the latest driver, instead of using the included disk. Most of these I do not check weekly, or monthly, but every 2-6 months. Most I also go with a if its not broke, dont fix it (especially the bios).

3 types of software are typically offered.

Utility Suits. Typically contain drivers and advanced configuration options. Common for Video Cards, Printers, Motherboards. Less common for Mice, Keyboards. Can offer ease of updates, but can also include a lot of bloatware.

Drivers - Just the drivers, which is what the OS uses to talk to the hardware. Newer drivers typically offer faster performance, less buggy performance, stability fix's, better power usage, cooler performance (temp wise), and fix's for exploits.

Firmware - These typically are for motherboard chipsets, dvd roms, mice/keyboards, etc. It updates the chipset software, physically located on the device. I do these rarely, only if I have an issue it address's. If this update goes wrong, you will typically kill your device.

For gaming, the most important is your video drivers. This is because the makers often have software optimizations for your games, that make them run faster. 3-30% increase in performance for the games it specifies are common. Commonly, it will say like 2% better utilization for shadow rendering for all games, and 15% better for witcher2. I update mine monthly, or if I have an issue.

Games - Updates to games come in 2 forms. Voluntary, which you may download as patches from the developer or mod community, and install. Typically these you must manually install.

Mandatory, these are often downloaded when you try to login, and all play will be halted till you do.

Keeping games updated is important. The updates often fix severe bugs within them. Game performance may be increased dramatically, and most importantly, crash's will be lessened (in a perfect world) and corrupted saves should be avoided. Most current games will have automatic downloads. For older games, I keep a disk that has all the current patches saved to it so re-installing is easy.

One thing to note, game patches can be large, a recent witcher2 patch was almost 6gigs, and prevented gameplay for 2 or so hours. While downloading, other internet traffic on your PC and network will be affected, so I try to do them overnight, and install when I get up.

Also, keeping a game manager (such as steam) will allow you to keep several games updated all the time, so going back to play a game you haven't played in several months will not result in several hours of downloads when you fire it up. Checking on games not in the download manager, when your bored and just browsing the web, never hurts, for this very reason.

Other Apps - I check on them periodically, I check the "about" option in the main menu, and will normally jump to their website from there, after noting the software version, or use the in-built check for updates when available. I don't do this often.

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Step 4) Backing it up

I use Fbackup.

Backing up your system can be very easy or very tedious. The more work you put into the initial set up, the easier it is. This is probably the most overlooked part of computer security and safety.

Every friday, I have it automatically back up my system. I have a 2nd hard drive installed for this. This hard drive is only used for back ups (and as my virtual memory dump, since during normal activity, it has none).

How my set up goes, is that everything starts at 1am on Friday morning. At 1am, all my pictures are backed up. At 1:30, my documents. At 2 my music starts. At 2:30, my system settings (all my apps & windows settings) are done. At 3am, WOW backs up. At 4, the rest of my games are backed up. At 5, my game saves are backed up.

I do mirror back ups. So it only backs up the files that where changed, deleted, or added. Anything not touched is not updated on the backup drive or over-written. I also keep them un-compressed, so I can go in at any time and pull a file I need.

I try to keep the times to how long they take to finish, so there isn't any overlap. I check the program and the actual files periodically to make sure its all working.

My eventual plan, is to also back them up to the spare PC and to an USB external drive. I have everything set up to do this, but the finances. The external drive would be a monthly thing, and I would keep the drive at work for safekeeping.

I do it on Fridays, because I am more likely to modify (break) data during the weekend. I can also manually run the backups, which I often do after Kate downloads pictures to her computer.

I have had backups save me several times, and would never picture my computer safe without them.

On the backup drive is also a directory that includes every program I have installed on the computer (that I don't have on a disk). When I download an update, and verify it works properly, I over-write the install package on the back-up with the newest one. About once a year, I burn that to a dvd and put it in my binder with all the other dvds (and destroy the old backup dvd). I can not begin to tell how many hours this has saved me in the past.

Moving & Healing, Healing & Moving

2010-02-18T09:35:00.001-05:00

Fights now-a-days have more movement involved then ever before.

First, let me explain my set up.
I have a mouse that the scroll wheel can move left/right besides the normal scroll options. These mice are faily common & inexpensive. The scroll wheel tilts slightly.
It also has 2 buttons used for mouse speed right below the wheel. They are marked + - .
I maped the left scroll to J, right scroll to K. I then set them as straif left(J) straif right(k). The + - I set as move forward and move back.

This allows me to move while my mouse is over my raid frames and to continue to heal while doing basic movement (and why I will straif out of fire instead of moving forward/back most the time).

Using instants while moving:

Make sure all your spells are keybound.

Rejuv, Wild Growth, Holy Shock, Riptide, PW:S, PoM, Renew, CoH, Swiftmend, Barkskin, HoP, Divine Protection, and plenty of other spells can be cast while on the move. At the very least, you should have a tank targeted (no matter who your assigned to heal) so you can refresh or hit them with something. You can use self saving cool downs while moving (my self heal is bound to the scroll wheel being pushed).

The best way I found of getting used to healing and moving is, drum roll, PVP. WSG in particular. I stay with the flag carrier all the time and keep them healed. A couple of afternoons of doing that, and moving while healing will be second nature.

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The other way, for casted spells, is stagger running. You move 5 or 6 yards, hit your fastest heal, and then move again. This is useful sometimes (bonestorm with fire trails, slimes on festergut, etc) as long as the damage your taking is managable, and the heal you need to cast is critical.

Increasing raid dps

2010-02-13T07:57:00.001-05:00

We are healers, what can we do to increase raid dps?

We have several tricks we can do.

Priests:

Power Infusion: If we dont need the burst healing, casting this on a high dps caster, that benifits from haste, can help their dps in the long run. THe mana savings helps out on arcane mages too. - I tend to cast on a shadow priest or lock early in a fight, and mages later on in the fight. It helps the dot class's get their dots up, and mages typically have other cool downs going at that time that cancel out PI.

Divine Hymn - Poping when casters are low on mana will increase their dps. The more mana they have, or less cool downs they have to use the better.

PW:S - Cast on a mage with incantors absobtion increases their spell power when they absorb damage. Fights like Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Festergut/rotface, Queen all have heavy raid damage and keeping it up on a mage can be a large boost.

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Druids:

Revitalize - On an energy class (rogues & kitty druids) this spell can have the biggest effect, some reports saying about 30-100 energy a minute, though others put it at about 60 energy a fight. The more often rejuv & wild growth are used on these class's, the higher their dps can be.

Innervate - If used on an arcane mage, they basically can amp up their dps, since they dps cycle is totally decided on the available mana. They have a high dps portion, that burns out their mana pool, then a low dps cycle while they wait for mana gaining cool downs to come back up. Talking to a mage, and using an innervate early on in the fight on them, when its likely not needed by yourself, can be a large increase.

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Pallies

Hand of Salvation: using this on a class with little control over aggro - Warriors, DK, Ret Pallies, Locks, Boomkins, Kitty druids, Shadow Priests - who are catching up to the tank on threat, can allow them to continue full on instead of slowing down to decrease threat. Especially early on in a fight.

Hand of freedom on slowed melee people while they are catching boss's.

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Shammies - Mana tide totem if your in a group with either mages or hunters, instead of them losing dps to regain mana.

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Everyone able to dispell/cleanse

A lot of abilities, frostbolts, curses, diseases, besides inflicting damage, decrease the dps output of the targets afflicted. The faster we cleanse them off, the faster dps can get back to doing their job.

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A lot of this takes talking with other raid members, looking up specs, checking dps reports, watching omen, and looking at what different buffs & debuffs do. But by mastering these, we can increase the over all raid dps by several percent.

Communication

2010-02-12T09:07:00.000-05:00

I wrote several articles on my guilds healing forums, and decided to share them here too, incase it can help anyone else who reads this site. I will be posting 1 every few days.

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I will talk about some ways to improve your communication skills in a raid enviroment.
Why is this important?
We see more of whats going on then anyone else. We see adds going towards the ranged/healer groups. We see people moving out of range. We should be the first to see critically low people.
What does this mean? It means we should be passing this info on to the people that need it.
If you see a mob going towards a healer, you should call it out. If a mage moves out of range of you, and no longer can recieve heals, the rest of the raid should be notified, so either another healer can pick him up, or he can use cool downs or move back towards the raid.
How can we practice this?
PVP:
Grab 2 or 3 friends. Go run WSG, AV, Wintergrasp. Get in vent. Say where the horde is. Corridinate flag captures or hangs. Always talk about what you see. Always keep people informed if they are moving out of your range. Announce on people when you use a cool down on them. Once your comfortable continually talking this over with people you natually talk with, moving into talking in a raid enviroment becomes second nature.
PVE:
Short of practicing in a raid, its much harder to communicate in pve. There just isnt as much going on in a 5man, but that doesnt mean that you cant just say what you see, announce cool down usage, and when people move out of range.
Keeping it simple:
Short msgs are better.
For my tanks, I will just say " Chaos, live" That means blow cool downs, I cant save you. With vent delays and people delays, it is much simpler then "Chaos, your out of my range, and I have no cool down to save you when I catch up"
Also, always start with the persons name. Saying their name will heighten their awareness, and they may react (or others in the group will know somethign is wrong an react). Again, saying "Kate, your out of my range" is much better then "I am out of range of kate, someone needs to heal her" The difference of 3 seconds there may be the difference between someone else getting a heal off and a dead tank.

Power Infusion & build updates

2010-02-02T11:30:00.000-05:00

So, today on the drive into work, I got to thinking of power infusion & gheal.

I plan on using gheal during burst portions of fights, and still use fheal for most filler. My reasoning, gheal will still tend to be overheal.
So that led me to thinking of burst. My fear, except for when I have borrowed time, gheal is still too slow. I am running at about 600 haste, and still its 1.9ish seconds. Borrowed time puts it at 1.5.
The second fear of gheal spam is that my mana pool is going to take a beating. With talents and the fheal glyph, fheal is more mana effecient. Gheal costing more then twice the mana.
But, that got me thinking of Power infusion. If I macro power infusion to my gheal macro, to cast on myself, then for burst damage, I will be at around 1.3 second cast of gheal + it will be much more mana effecient, and my gheal is hitting for 12k, 18k crits.
For times like festergut, princes when kates one is empowered, or any emergency healing where I need to belt out quick large heals, I can do that, then and it would be like another cool down to use. Plus the divine aegis shields it can build should be fun :)

So thats my thought, I will test out the macro tonight, and see how it works.

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Changes to my build recently - I took out all the points in spell damage prevention. Though I miss them, I have to be more aware of fire & ready to shield myself more often. I took 2 points in anti push back. Especially nice for rotface and those stupid slime, marrowgar & his bonestorm, and I feel good about the change. I took 2 points out of my holy crit, for the hasted gheal. I am at a good amount of crit, and so it will come between crit or haste, I am working on increasing my haste now. I almost want to push the haste envelope, and hit 750ish, see what happens. But, I have stripped away most my spirit/regen to allow for that, and though I am not running out of mana in most fights, there are some I am feeling the pinch (queen 10m for example). I may use trinkets to up my mana regen on fights where it is needed.

Tier 10 gearing

2009-12-22T11:02:00.002-05:00

Tier 10 is out, gear is released, now to decide on upgrades.

In looking at the gear lists, I noticed a few issues.

First, what I feel my baselines should be. I want 500 haste, 30% crit. Thats a bit less then I have now.
Spell power will never go down. Any upgrade over T9 quality gear will have more spell power.
In T9, I geared for haste/crit in several slots, ignoring similiar spirit/mp5 based items. This decision is now going to haunt me. Replacing one of those items with a regen item will drop me 50ish crit/haste. Replacing 2 can lopside me.

Some good things though. My helm is none tier. I can safely replace it with the tier10 helm, and keep my 4piece bonus. Replacing my shoulders next gains me 2 piece t10 at the loss of 4piece t9, which is a very fair trade.

My regen overall, is slightly on the low side. I want to up that for a while, so taking several regen pieces, and gemming again for some int will help out without a large, noticable decrease in throughput (since every piece will have more spell power anyway). Once my mana is stabalized for all current content, I can regem for more throughput.

I plan on gearing in 10m, and tweaking with 25m items. It helps that there are not a large amount of upgrades in 25 in the first wing, but a fair amount in 10.

Badges will take, at the most 13 weeks to get enough for every item I need. This will speed up with additional wings &, hopefully, VoA drops.

Not counting rings, taking all 25m gear that ignore regen (chest, offhand) and the bonespire as the main hand, I come out with just under 600 crit & 450 haste. Slightly below my target marks, especially on crit, and I will probably tune that with the rings & keep my crit trinket.

Head:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50765/crimson-acolyte-hood/
(T10) First upgrade for me

Shoulder:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50765/crimson-acolyte-hood/
(T10) 2nd upgrade, no real filler slots before I expect to have enough badges for this.

Chest: My non-tier choice, since for pure stats its either chest or legs, and the legs to be crafted use more badges & are much more expensive to be made, for the same exact stat gains. 2 choices (both badge chests and crafted legs have 3 gems).

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50974/meteor-chasers-raiment/
(emblems) This is where I plan on cutting my regen. Huge haste/crit gains in 1 piece. I will make up the regen through the spirit on other pieces.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50975/ermine-coronation-robes/
(emblems) The second choice, if I have mana issues.

Gloves:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50766/crimson-acolyte-gloves/
(T10) Anything else would be filler

Pants:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50769/crimson-acolyte-leggings/
(T10) Anything else would be filler

Wrist: Slim pickings. Loss of haste from t9, traded for regen.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50785/bracers-of-dark-blessings/
(10) crit/regen - decent, early bracers. Only 10m bracers for us.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50032/death-surgeons-sleeves/
(25) crit/regen - Only choice in 25m bracers.

Belt: Emblem belt wins out

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50997/circle-of-ossus/
(emblems) haste/regen - This is the belt you want

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50773/cord-of-the-patronizing-practitioner/
(10) haste/regen - worth taking as a standby till you can get the badge one

Boots:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/s/70553/sandals-of-consecration/
(crafted) crit/regen - The two sockets make these very attractive

Back: Gem slot makes this the winner among other 25m cloaks

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50469/voldes-cloak-of-the-night-sky/
(emblems) very nice cloak, anything else would be filler.

Neck:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50809/soulcleave-pendant/
(10) Crit/haste Amazing neck for throughput

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50182/blood-queens-crimson-choker/
(25) crit/haste - 25m version for throughput. Get ready to kill some dps to take it.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49975/bone-sentinels-amulet/
(25) haste/regen - not as much competition for this one. Nice slot to tune regen if needed.

Rings: Tons of choices, rings will be used to really fine tune stats. I will list the 5 25m drops (and dont forget the faction one). Probably one of my last upgrades, being used to swing haste/crit/regen as I see fit.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50008/ring-of-rapid-ascent/

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49967/marrowgars-frigid-eye/

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50174/incarnadine-band-of-mending/

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49990/ring-of-maddening-whispers/

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50424/memory-of-malygos/

Trinkets:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50339/sliver-of-pure-ice/
(10) Nice throughput/regen balanced trinket. Undecided if I want to replace my throughput trinkets with it.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50359/althors-abacus/
(25) Amazing trinket. 179 static spell power, and the proc, in testing last night, is doing 4-7% of my healing, for a total of around 50k healing per fight. Smart heal, targeting low health players.

Wand:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/51553/lana-thels-bloody-nail/
(10) Crit/regen. Also the only 10m wand for a healer.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50033/corpse-impaling-spike/
(25)haste/crit, no regen. Fine tuning piece

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50472/nightmare-ender/
(25)regen/crit. Fine tuning piece

Offhand:

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50173/shadow-silk-spindle/
(25)Haste/crit. Nice amounts of each

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50423/sundial-of-eternal-dusk/
(25)Haste/regen. Losing 60 crit for 60 spirit isnt my idea of a good trade off.

Mainhand: 3 Choices depending on where you want to boost your gear.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50028/trauma/
(25) Very cool proc, lack of stats makes it situational. Certainly will take if my other gear can support it. Massive healing numbers though.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/49968/frozen-bonespike/
(25)Certainly the weapon to take for crit/throughput. The offhand combinations make this superb.

http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/50181/dying-light/
(25) Huge stat stick. Tons of haste. If mana is still a problem, this promises to fix it.

20 ways to become a better player

2009-11-27T09:57:00.001-05:00

We all should be trying to be better players. Some of this comes just from experience in game.   Actually, most of this comes from in game experience. Some comes from other peoples advice and experience. I will explain some ways to maximize this.

1) Raid - we do this anyway.   Just always put out 100%. Dont accept 2nd best from yourself.

2) Read guides - EJ, Class specific forums. Other guilds forums. I also find reading some App's for many guilds helps here. I see advice they give recruits. I then can cross check that with conventional knowledge.

3) Armory - I look up any disc priest I see apping for other guilds. I look at what they have done. I look at their gemming & gearing choices. I try to think of how their choices might be better or worse then mine.

4) Pug - Pugs, especially bad groups in difficult content (even toc 5m heroic) can help you get better. Even if the group is a failure. A bad tank will help with threat management. A bad healer can help with personal survability. Bad dps can help tanks and healers learn how to deal with threat or increased incomming damage. Take each pug as a learning experience.

5) PVP - Hate it or love it, pvp teaches a lot of game mechanics. Movement, situational awareness, burst healing or damage.   Reaction time has to be increased. Tracking multiple units. Self preservation.

6) Cooldown management - Offensive or deffensive cool downs should be used as needed. Keep track of them. If you have issues with proper timing or useage, put reminders all over. As you get more comfortable using them, slim down the reminders till you dont need them or only need them in 1 spot.

7) Lead - Run some 5mans, 10mans, friend groups, pugs, whatever. But lead it. Direct people with what to do. Come up with strats. Try some achievement runs. But you decide how to do it. You learn a lot of how different class & group make ups can effect out comes.

8) Teach - Help other people with their class if you know it well. Help them with gemming. Give them advice. This can be easily paired with leading too. Explain encounters. Even if everyone knows them, just go over how you plan on doing it that evening. Also, write a guide. If your confident in your playing ability, then write about it. Write it for yourself only if you want. Detail what your different abilities do, how and when to use them. Write down your tips and tricks.   Explaining something is a wonderful way to help yourself learn more about it.

9) Read guides/watch videos of encounters - Read a bunch. Even if its farm content read up on them. You learn a lot of little class tricks by watching how other groups handle an encounter.

10) Fight Data - Get recount. Read the WoL's. On EJ & other sites, there are posts of other guilds WoL for your class. For your own data, look at how you died. If there was anything in your power to prevent it, start practicing that for next time. Check uptimes for various dots/hots/abilities. Check ability usage against others of the same class. Again, armory them to see if their stats are similiar enough to yours to make some things valid compairisons (haste may make one ability better then another for example)

11) Alts - Alts can teach you a lot about other class's. You can learn their strengths and weakness's. The same is true for using your class's dual spec to try something new. Just pug with it. Do Bg's. Get a better understanding of how other class's operate.

12) Read up on other class's - Understand how they work. Similiar class's to yourself can teach you a lot of how you can increase their throughput. Understanding other class's can help when you have buffs to put out. For example I have a buff that for 10 sec, increases a targets haste. By reading up on other class's I learn what class the haste is most benificial to, and can better make a decision on who should recieve it.

13) Achievements - Go for some. Find groups (or organize them yourself) for the group ones. Most, especially group ones, take a higher skill level, or sometimes just a different way of looking at the encounter. Keep trying till you get it. Some might need a different group comp, keep working on changes till it seems to be the right one.

14) Dailies - Learn better vehicle controle from the jousting daily. Can practice different targeting macros. Can overpull and practice defensive cool downs. And you make extra gold for doing them.

15) Timed runs - This can apply to anything. 5mans, raids, dailies. Set a time limit and try to meet it. Next time try to beat it. Find shortcuts in the game. Try huge pulls and coridinated CD usage to make them survivable.

16) UI Changes - Look at other peoples UI's. Browse class forums for UI threads, and view a few dozen. Take note of what you like them doing and incorporate it into your own. If you see a similiar trend in many UI's, try it. You may not like it initially, but its benfit may become apparant once you become used to it. (for me this was raid frames below my character instead of on the side, took me a few weeks to like them, and I believe it was one of the biggest gains I did, but in the begenning I hated it)

17) Macros/keybindings - Try some new ones. Experiment with focus macros or targeting macros. Add a few keybindings. Currently, I have about 18 in combat key bindings that I activily use. Now I plan on adding a modifer to them to double that number. I feel comfortable enough with those that I am ready for the next step.

18) Look at different ways to do stuff. Instead of wasd to move/strafe from the keyboard, I keybound wasd functions to my mouse. Left wheel is strafe left, right wheel is strafe right. Up senstivity is move forward, back sensitivity is move back. Now my mouse can seamlessly control all aspects of moving.

19) Try new aspects of the game. Anything you have never done in game, but have wanted to? Put aside a block of time every week to try it out. Set small goals and try to reach them. Might not make you a stronger player, but it does help your enjoyment and sense of pride in your characeter. And the better you feel about your character, the better you are likely to do. Self esteem goes a long way.

20) Go into every fight with confidence. Dont think every attempt is going to end in failure. Use every cd, ability, item & resource you have to provide victory for the group.

-------

I try to do small changes. I will work on one aspect of improving my playing ability at a time. I dont want to overload my self. Currently I am working on pvp. I see an improvement over a week ago when I started. I still have a lot of survivability issues to work through. My reaction time is still slower. Communication can be improved. I dont use these as excuses to why I fail. Instead I keep throwing myself at the wall, and hopefully, eventually, the wall will finally give up and fall.

I take 1 goal, be it UI changes, achievements, pvp, leading, etc, and work on that for about a month. After a month I see if there is a noticiable change. I have been raid leading, off and on, at different levels, for about 2 years now. I have always tried achievements, even before they existed in game. Faster runs of various content, different ways of doing encounters, etc.

Never try to radically change your play style. Dont take on to much. But, always look for ways to improve and work at them.

A lot of this is just my opinion, but its the template I use to help myself improve.

I also write on this blog. I know I am one of the few people that reads it, but thats ok. I do it more for myself so that I can learn. I re-read my articles. I try to read them as if I never did before. I write more for myself then for others, and post them on the off chance that they can help someone else.

How not to do an UI

2009-11-24T11:47:00.000-05:00

Whats wrong with this UI?

Way to cluttered springs to mind

But what parts?

Recount is huge. No need for it to take up so much room.

Xperl showing xp bar for max level. Slim that down. Also Xperl buffs are a mess. He probably doesnt need party frames, he has buffs overlapping each other.

His personal buff bar is halfway into his screen. In a 25m that will just fill up the whole right side.

Hes got raid buff tracking bars, and its just all over the place on tracking. He has them on top of omen, giving a very cluttered look and making it hard to figure out what is where.

I dont even know where to begin with his buttons. Multiple health stones. Tons of mounts/pets. A net? The remote for brewfest? Every single ability ever trained....Mind vision is used a lot im guessing...

2 forts, 2 binding heals, 2 renews, lost in a field of buttons.

Scrolling combat text enabled for everything. Is every renew tick that important? At some point information overload from combat text makes it useless. Clue - that point is when its telling you numbers instead of procs. They dont matter. Knowing your spells crit for 9k is useless. its in the past. Having that much scrolling by makes you miss when procs do happen.

I am sure his cool down monitoring is important. I mean, I know I wait with baited breath for my HS to come off cooldown. Good thing that is actively tracked.

His life is being tracked in 4 different places. I feel bad about having 3 trackers. But 4 is overkill.

Power Auras - I dont know what hes tracking. But they are very much in your face. Maybe serindipity is worth tracking, I track it on 3 stacks. But his auras are very bright, and directly over his char model making it hard to see himself.

Text fonts are large, hard to miss, but also clouding the area under his feet.

Overall, there is way to much at his feet & character level, making it hard to see when a graphic on the ground is appearing there. His side to side visibility is limited, making positioning harder. Useless info is being thrown at him intermixed with useful, making it hard to decide what is needed and whats not needed.

He has the right ideas, but needs it massivly to be slimmed down.

Healing UI 4.5

2009-11-06T08:47:00.000-05:00

2 weeks ago, due to a graphical glitch & UI trashing, I was forced to re-install wow. I decided to take this time to clean up my UI. Its been through a lot in the last few months, and I had a pretty good idea now how to finish slimming it down while adding in some better tools.

3 things I backed up so I wouldnt have to redo all the configs. Vuhdo, MSBT, Satrina's buff frames. The rest I was able to get fully configured in an afternoon. SBF probably could have been 45 minutes. Vuhdo is just to big at this point. MSBT would have been another night of testing to see if I had it all right.

I dropped pitbull. Though it did most of what I wanted, I felt it was a bloated app to be running with vuhdo & xperl. And it was a configuring nightmare. I switched to Shadowed Unit Frames. I have most the options disabled, and it only appears while I am zoned into a raid. Seems very lightweight and offers just enough customizing to keep me happy. My unit frame set up only to show debuffs. Target unit frame only to show buffs. Target of target only set up to show debuffs. No more then 4 of each. I need to know debuffs on me (dont care about buffs, important ones I let power auras handle). I need to know if the boss got a buff. I dont care about the 50 debuffs the raid has on him. Typically a boss only gets 1-2 buffs. 4 Seemed plenty. Any more and if I selected a friendly unit, it became a mess. Target of target debuffs so I could see any debuff the boss hit the tank with. Same reasoning as with target, tank should never have more then 4 debuff types. If I select a friendly unit as a target, and they have selected the boss, I didnt want 50 debuffs overflowing my screen.

A lot of my windows I shrunk by about 20%. Primarily bartender, xperl, buffs, etc. Vuhdo is still the same size. I found, since I was used to now where things where, I could shrink them and still quickly get what ever info they where conveying.

Chat windows I redid closer to defualt (with trade/general in its own, seperate frame). Though I liked having loot & healing windows seperate, there where to many times it just didnt work out right for me.

I added Sexycooldowns bar. It allows tracking of internal cool downs of spells & items. In the picture above, you can see the cooldown left for rapture & pandora's plea. I still use Forte Exorcist for cool down tracking on a bar too. SCD I use for a long count. 5 minutes across the bar. I can easily see where all my cool downs are. I only have 1 cooldown over 5 minutes.   Forte I use as a short count. Under 10s. This is mostly to monitor my healing spell casting, like penance, CoH, PoM, etc.

I re-installed Quartz. Meh.   I had room in my viewport that looked bad. Quartz fit there perfectly.

SBF I cleaned up (actually a few weeks ago). Static auras appear in a block above my buffs, below the mini map.   This just allowed for easier displaying of all buffs otherwise the buffs flowed to the bottom of my screen.

ORA3 handles raid cool down monitoring. I have this set to monitor damage prevention cool downs and some other various ones. Mostly so I know what cool downs the tanks & healers have available to them. I wish I could easily organize it by unit name. Ideally I would like an add on that I could specify X people, it tells me if their cool downs are available, or when they will be, and if used, broadcasts it in a channel of my choosing.

Besides that, my UI is largely unchanged from 4.4. Most of the changes so far have been just tweaks on the existing infrastracture. My UI is still largely based on cooldown monitoring and made to keep my eyes on the center area of my screen, with needed info radiating out from there (dbm short bar/tank health/me & target/short CD count being closest to my feet).

Also, when not in a raid, all that goes away. None of it appears unless I am actually in a raid group. In that case, I just run xperl with party frames on the far left. SBF on the far right. And the info locked into viewport.

OMG DODGE NERFS!!!!!

2009-10-30T09:55:00.000-04:00

Some interesting info about tanking in the last few days.

The largest bombshell was Ice Crown Radiance.

For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

This should not be a suprise. The reason it was needed again shouldnt be a suprise. Yet people freaked out. Most of these people dont understand tanking or healing mechanics, see stats being reduced, and start screaming about the murder of their class.

Why is this needed? Because boss's do not scale. Our tanks do scale. In naxx, our tanks had 20-30% avoidance. In ulduar, this climbed to 40-60% avoidance. In ToC/3.2 they nerfed dodge, and yet tanks are still hitting 50-60% avoidance, with some specially geared warriors at 102% avoidance (for anub adds).

The only counter to avoidance, to make boss's threatening to a tank, is to either make them hit more often or harder. Neither of these have good consequences.

Gormok shows the danger of harder hitting boss's. A special ability + a melee attack is a dead tank. They have happened within .1 second of each other, for about 55k combined damage.   This leads to chaining cool downs to survive. And if for some reason a healer is incompacitated at that moment, its over. Or if a healer had to use a cool down early due to some random event spiking damage. Or just a parry hasted attack gibbing the tank.

The other alternative, faster attacks that are weaker, also does not always work out. A parried attack or a special ability in between two fast attacks can almost gib a tank too. This is very common to see during add tanking on anub. They initially hit harder, but less frequently. Now they hit faster instead. This favors warrior tanks with shield block slightly, and with special gear levels, warriors can trivalize the encounter, yet other tanks are at a disadvantage.

Reducing the dodge of all tanks by 20% is a even loss between all tanks. In 3.2 they reduced the co-effecient of dodge. This reduced the dodge of all tanks by about 4% but reduced it on druids by 6-7%. This was not an even reduction amount all tanks. Furthermore, since its only in ICC, new tanks are not going to be gimped by it.

The argument that tanks will then gut their dodge gear, and stack parry, is laughable at best, and retarded in practice. The ability to do so doesnt exist yet.   If you swapped out gear without dodge for gear with parry, your going to be in ilvl 200 & 213 gear. Maybe a few 225,232 & 245, but most the higher end gear has some parry, some dodge or some defense (which equates to dodge). Bottom line, it has 2 stats, and one of those stats will equate to dodge. And unless you can get below 20% dodge fully raid buffed, reducing dodge doesnt help at all. AND if you start stacking parry much past 30%, its, oh noes, DIMINISHING RETURNS!!!111EVENTYELEVEN!!.   And any tank that walks into ICC in gear to put him at under 20% is going to be a small, bloody smear on the back wall after the first hit.

In cataclysm, it would be possible since you could redistribute your stats on gear, but when we are a year away from that, I dont count that as a viable option.

What reducing the avoidance of damage is going to do is make it so that in-comming damage can be more reliable. Patchwerk, Thorim, Gormok - these are boss's that hit amazing hard. This is how I heal them.
(A)w22322232223w22322232223w223etcetc (w is shield, 2 is fheal, 3 is penance). Its just hitting my heals every time I can and not caring about overheal. (not my true rotation, since there is pom, renews, etc, but the idea).   I cant risk a 2 second gap of not healing or else the tank will die.

How I heal the same fight on normal. (B)w__2_3__2___3_w__2__3__2__3_w_etc. I can pace myself a bit. though what can happen is this (C)w__3________w___2_3____2____w_______3__etc. Long miss strings or small damage amounts make it almost boring. When I heal like (B) most the time its overhealing, but I dont really worry about that.

Now, vezax is much different  (D) W____3____w___2______3____w_____2____3___w____________3____2w_____3
I am only healing when a hit has landed. Penance shines here because then it instantly heals and I dont have to even cast cancel and worry about letting a heal accidentily get through. Shields also since they "heal" on the next hit. The affects of dodge show greatly here. He doesnt hit much lighter then gormok, but I also do not have other healers adding to the healing done to the tank. Spam healing on a fight like gormok on normal is more to make sure I dont get bored and walk away. Or to justify bringing 1 or 2 more healers so that they can get geared enough for ToGC.

What this change, hopefully will do, is make healing more like option B. Intelligent casting, not spammy, to keep a steady stream of heals on a tank thats taking predictable damage.

The other issue is that high health is a healers friend, and high avoidance is not. With high avoidance, 2 hit dead tanks, you never know when the rng is going to kill your tank, especially if your the only healer on that tank. Do a /roll. Do it 10 times. If 2 times in a row it rolled over a 80, your tank just died on Gormok. This is where my fix of putting multiple tanks to spam heal comes in, and cool down usage. Now do /roll. Do it 70 times. if you rolled over a 95 twice in a row, tank just died. The idea of reducing avoidance is to bring that number to 3 in a row. The tanks time to live increased because the spike damage is reduced. In a 30 second window he may take the same exact damage (which is their actual plan) but, their 5 second window of incomming damage is lower.

The reason why high health (or lower incomming damage) is our friend is because it allows an additional hit. An additional hit is another 2 seconds to get the tank caught up. Raid healers can react to a low tank and help out. Hots can tick. You have time to cast a larger heal. A life saving cool down can be better decided if its actually needed. You have a gcd to work with to remove the dot on the tank. 3 hits with lower avoidance feels better then 2 hits with higher avoidance. It lowers the tank death wipe it up and allows for more strategic healing models.

So, we will see how the theory crafters number crunch this over the weekend, and next week I will post on my thoughts of the healing model (and tanking model) Blizzard plans on implementing for 4.0.

Not a lot to report

2009-10-29T14:43:00.000-04:00

No new blogs recently. And thats because there hasnt been a lot to say.

Most of wow is waiting for every 3.3 news scrap. No stats on any gear has surfaced.

In 3.2, I have most the gear that I see as an up. Still a neck,cloak & wand that I want to upgrade to 245 ilvl. Couple of ToGC pieces to get, with their socketing goodness.   But the transition from 226 to 232 & 245 is near complete, and with it, my capabilities pre 3.3.

Even cutting back on mp5 (about 100mp5 less then pre 3.2) I have not noticed any real mana crunch.   I went from 31k mana pre 3.2 to 31k mana (buffed) now.   Massive regemming has kept that number constant. I climbed about 300 more spell power, 5% more crit & 150 more haste.   My throughput is much better now, and I feel it on certain fights.

Ive gained more healing experience. I have become more comfortable with the tools available to me. In a software sense, in a hardware sense, and in a meta game sense.

In software, I have refined my UI further. Couple of add ons & software changes to help me keep up. I had to redo my UI completely for a wow re-load last week. With it, I took what I liked about my UI and cleaned it up.   Things I felt familiar with at a glance now I was able to reduce in size. Things I didnt use I removed.

Hardware, I finally replaced my mouse.   Got back my beloved g5. The response time of mouse actions increased. The precision of it while tracking health bars feels much better. The mouse just feels much nicer.
I added mappings to the mouse. Straffing being handled by the scroll wheel. Added in some abilities to clicks.

Meta game, I am getting a better sense of the fights. Peeling away the layers to see deeper interaction and assisting of other players.   Getting a better grasp on other classes and their strengths & weaknesses, then working them into my capabilities.

---------------

Seeing the t10 priest gear, its meh. The black & white outfit looks good. The rest looks like something left out in a shed for 25ish years.   Sigh.   At least its not the mage gear.

For T9, I upgraded wrong. Maybe. I based my badge purchases based on stat gains only, and not on an upgrade path.   T10 brings a new upgrade strategy & I will have to re-evaluate how I plan to upgrade.

----

Finally a blue post today:

Healing

Healing has always been challenging and to some extent thankless in WoW. I don't think LK fundamentally changed that.

When I heal, I like to be challenged. Just buffing healing overall, or taking some of the challenge away from the healers, I don't think makes the game more fun for them. It might be fun for a week as everyone thanks you for doing such an amazing job all the time, but playing any game in godmode typically gets old after the initial rush.

What I mean is that one of the most boring experiences I can have in the game is to be a healer for a milk run in which a wipe is unlikely and nobody is going to take much damage. By contrast, you can still have fun in that situation as a DPS spec. You can see how fast the boss dies. You can see how much damage you can do. It can even be fun as a tank, because you can usually afford to drop some of your defenses in order to improve your dps and try and make the fight shorter. At the very least, you can try and see how much damage you can mitigate. It's possible to do some pulls and even weaker bosses with almost no incoming damage. All a healer can really do is try to heal as little or efficiently as possible, which really just means you're standing around a lot. Maybe you're tossing the occasional Wrath or SW:Pain or something, but that dps contribution is pretty trivial even compared to the trying-to-DPS-a-little tank.

Where I will agree we need to improve healing in WoW is in relationship to how much damage the tank is taking (or even a teammate in PvP). Damage to health is too high in almost all scenarios, such that only the really big, really fast, or really broad (group-based) heals count for much. Things that are fun for a healer, such as trying to be mana-efficient or matching the right heal to the right damaged character go away when you're just spamming like mad. None of this should come as news to readers of this forum, because it's the kind of thing we've said before.

What I would like to see in Cataclysm is higher health pools but also lower heals (and tank avoidance) overall. Hopefully everyone won't be on the verge of almost dying, yet the risk of overhealing will be more real such that you can't just madly spam all of the time if you want to make it to the end of the encounter.

A similar thing is true for PvP. If health pools are larger, but heals smaller, then you see folks with health in between 100% and 0% more often.

Maybe, in the future, I will go through some of those points. If this is their plan, it will be a radical change over healing for the last few years (not neccesarily a bad one)

Healing UI 4.4

2009-09-15T09:33:00.000-04:00

So, this is the near finale version of my UI. There is not much left to change that isnt merly cosmetic.

Vuhdo is handling my raid frames. Ranged is on the left. Healers to the right, melee to the right of healers.

Tanks are center, with larger frames, and showing target & targets target. This is so I can see easily tank switches or the life of various mobs they are tanking. This serves the same purpose as tank windows, and the only reason tank windows are still even on my screen is so I can check when I am leader or if you have a ranged target to follow.

Pitbull is being used for my focus target, my unit frame & my target frame. These frame are none interactive (mouse can not select) and are there only for buff/debuff & life monitoring. Also set up to show cast bars. I have thought about making targets clickable, but its been minor.

Xperl is also being used for the same purpose on top, unit frame, targets, etc. This is clickable, and is useful for marking, promoting, etc.

Both pitbull & xperl have many modules disabled to keep memory usage down.

Satrina buff frames being used for my buff monitoring. These are seen on the right of my screen. Buffs have the blue duration bar. Debuff monitoring is to the right of them about 1/2 an inch. SBF is also used for target buff monitoring. This can be seen to the left of my map. The shortest duration buffs & debuffs are shown below that, and is montoring my targets target. Useful for fights like thorim, so I can see when the boss uses his special ability.

Rangedisplay info is displayed near my focus target, main target, and above my tanks. The one above my tanks is my hover range. As last night proved, this is very very useful for fights like IChm.

Bartender handles my buttons. The buttons near my chat frames are always shown. The buttons above my unit frame (health options) and target frame (mana options) are only shown on hover or while in combat. If I am flying around, I dont really need them. I tried many locations, and found that in an emergency, I needed them easily accesable. And I needed them visible so I had an easy time of judging cool downs.

Opie manages my out of combat abilities. I keybind, for example, buffs to the g1 option on my keyboard, and when I hit g1, a small button ring appears at my mouse. I move the mouse in the direction of the buff I want, and release the key, and the spell is cast. I have many OoC abilities (mounts, buffs, flasks, professions, gear, typed commans like vent info, etc) set up on their own G keys (using the g15 keyboard). This cleaned up my bartender frames considerably. The full set up g15 keys are actually on bartender, it fades out of view while in combat, and is replaced by omen. This way, when I forget where something is, I just need to look there.

Fortexorciste now only manages cooldowns on the bar to the right of my tanks. 90% of the options in there have been disabled.

Sexymap still handles all my map needs.

DBM handles all my cool down monitoring. I use dbm spells to monitor raid cool downs. Monitored are shield wall, Guardian spirit, Misdirect, Innervate, Pain Supression, Last stand, Barkskin, Hand of salvation, and about a dozen more. Most of these I had to build in myself, but really does help me know what we have available at any time.

DBM bars for actions being performed now moved to above my tanks frame.

Miks Scrolling Combat Text gives me more of the above info, but in txt form nearer to the center of my screen. For life saving cool downs, it tells me who cast it, who its on, and then when it expires it tells me.

Prayer of mending tracker for tracking prayer of mending. This is the small bar right above my chat frame.

Power Auras for trackign short duration buffs on myself

10m version. Only change really is vuhdo. The frames are divided by party, and party 1 shows target and targets target (again to help with tank target changes) while party 2 only shows target.

----

I will say, there is now really nothing that I want from my UI that isnt supplied. Some of the addons can use more polish (building debuffs into vuhdo or cd's into dbm is a pain).   But I am not sitting there going, I wish I could see this.

I dont like using 3 different unit frames.   If I could shorten it to just 1 I would, but none do what I need. I could probably dump xperl, but its minimum system usage and is easy set up for party & personal frames.

This week, Vuhdo updated to allow "self" as a group option.   If that was a month ago, I probably would have dumped xperl & never loaded pitbull. But now that I have them all playing nicely, and pitbull just gives me more useful info then Vuhdo can.

I feel it safe to say that this is what I am going to use. Add on tweaks from their developers will change things slightly. Addons that get discontinued can be replaced, and that may change things a great deal, but for now, I am happy with it.

----

Addons:
(there are others used for alts or that I load on demand)

Deadly Boss Mods - Raid & boss cooldown & ability timers
Fortexorcist - Cooldown management
Satrina Buff Frames - Buff montitoring
Omen - Threat monitoring
Recount - Combat log viewing
ora2 - raid management
Prayer of mending Tracker - tracks PoM
Range Display - display relative range of several targets.

Fubar - Addon management & plugin resource
Bartender - Button Management
Sexymap - minimap configuation
Addon control panel - allows for enabling/disabling addons without logout
Opie - additional button options set to keybinds.
Button Facade - allows for skinning of buttons to match a style. Affects several add ons.
Sunviewport - Section off parts of the screen as blank space (where my chat window is, the blue bar and all below it)

ChatMod - Chat box options
Wow Instant Messaging - Personal chat windows with tabbed display.
clearfont2 - font normalization accross addons.

Xperl - Main unit/party frame (party hidden in raid)
Pitbull - Unit frame, focus & target monitoring
Vuhdo - Raid frame

Inquest - quest/achievement tracking
Atlasloot - loot lists for boss's
tradeskillinfo - complete list of tradeskills & paterns
bagnon - bag management for your toon & allows bank viewing for your toon & alts
outfitter - equipment swapper

Fubar plug ins -
Guild Fu - see whos logged into the guild
Friend Fu - See whos logged in on friends list
Channel Fu - see whos logged into the various chat channels
tradeskillfu - tradeskill management
performancefu - shows system stats
durabilityfu - durability info
moneyfu - toon & account gold tracking
bagfu - bag space

Choosing Gear

2009-09-14T15:49:00.000-04:00

ToC is out now for a few weeks. Badges are being accumulated. DKP is being spent. How do we choose our upgrade path.

I do a few things.   First, when the stuff first is shown on mmo champ from the ptr, I drool a bit over all the nice shinies.

Then I start looking at my gear. I look at the upgrades available to each slot, and look for my largest upgrade slots.   What the vendor offers. What can be crafted? What is upgraded in 10m & what only can be upgraded in 25m.

Then the stats, which offer the largest stat gain.   Weapons tend to be very large spell power gains and a linear upgrade in other stats.   Chest/pants/helm tend to be large stat upgrades. Gloves/shoulders/belt/shoes tend to be average stat gains. Rings/neck/bracer tend to be the smallest stat gains.   Trinkets are much more specialized. A low level trinket may be a higher benifit for various reasons.

Also, Cloth items tend to offer stats a priest would want overall. Jewelery/weapons tend to be itemized more for broader access. t9 has no priest only trinket. t8 had 1 (spark of hope, in 10m ulduar). t8 had 2, but they benifited holy priests primarily. (of course holy priest/resto druid here is interchangable).

You may have a choice of several cloth items. One would have haste, one would have crit. Both would have spirit. Rings/neck your choices are a lot less. Might have only one. Even if you get 2 rings, you probably will have a haste one & a crit one being offered.

Then comes the choice of forgoing spirit/mp5 for a second througput stat. To me, this is a dangerous road. Taking haste/crit over regen can be very risky.   And we are losing a large amount of regen just in weapon upgrades.   No staff & only 1 mace offer any regen (in the form of mp5) in any normal mode of ToC. This 1 upgrade cost me roughly 50mp5 off my buffed regen.

That isnt bad on the face of things.   But then looking at wands, the only wand comes from 10m beasts. It has no spirit. 10 more mp5 gone.

Next up is wrists. 2 choices look nice. The 2 crafted wrists. One has spirit. One has haste (both have crit).
Now, when I decide on the one I will get, once 3.2.2 comes out, it will be me looking at my gear, and deciding if I need a bit more haste (I want to be near 500) or more spirit (I want about 400 mp5 casting unbuffed). Right now I am 50 below both these numbers.

I dont use complicated spread sheets to decide upgrades. Right or wrong, I dont agree with them for a healing standpoint.   They dont take into account your play style, your healing assignment, battle length, or emergency modes.

Healing Assignment - A raid healer needs more prolonged healing ability at a sacrafice of throughput. You dont need to heal 20k in 2 seconds. You need to heal 3 or 4k to several members in 10 seconds. You still need emergency heals for people in critical danger of death, but you need the mana/regen to keep going with large cost heals.

Tank healers need throughput. Your heals need to be large enough to keep up with all incomming tank damage.

Battle length - a 5 minute fight typically has more incomming damage, and thus needs greater throughput then a 15 minute fight, where more regen would win out.

Emergency mode - This is either low life enrages (Anub for example) or times when several healers are dead and you must cover. It now is a race between your remaining mana pool from the first part of the fight & your throughput. If you only have 2k mana left, but can hit for 20k a hit, your going to run out of mana before saving 5 people. If you have 15k mana left, but only can heal for 5k a hit, your not going to be able to keep up with incomming damage.

The problem with most stat weights, and most sites that I read up on (world of matticus, bobturkey, several other blogs, EJ, etc) is that they weigh throughput highest. Haste & crit overtake spirit on gear.

Within a few points, all gear from a ilvl will have identical stam/int/spellpower.   They may reduce int/spellpower with the inclusion of a gem slot.   Where they differ is in the inclusion of spirit/haste/crit.   They will have 2 of these. What most stat rankings do is put haste & crit over spirit/mp5.

If you take the BiS offered by most of these guides, you will end up with about 100-200 less mp5 then by not taking them. You also will end up with unfavorabley high amounts of crit & haste.

Not to say haste & crit isnt good. Crit I find to be too spikey though.   Its great when it makes that huge heal get a tank fully up. For disc, penance pulses are decent at 30% buffed crit. Crit isnt going to make fheal great though. Divine aegis is nice with crit, it will build though. Shields dont benifit from crit at all (minimal with glyph). Haste also is descent, but at around 400, I feel comfortable, at 500 I will be happy.

Holy, I am still happy with the 30% crit / 500 haste goal. More isnt going to dramatically increase my healing output.

Then comes spirit vs mp5.   I will always take spirit unless there is no similiar ilvl item.

These are things that stat weights wont help me decide. They cant know that I feel my mana is good 80% of the time, but that 20% of the time, I really wish I had 10% more regen.   Or that, with present gearing, I am already at soft caps.   A spread sheet would help with that one, but its something I know, and it cant be truly helped. Cataclysm will even the soft caps a bit with stat re-allocation, but thats a year away.

I feel that healing gearing is the most personal decision based selection of gear of any class.   Tanks, surviving takes precedence.   Threat output is a sidegrade of survival with whatever is baked into the gear, they dont take a low stam piece just cause it has more hit.   DPS follows strict spread sheets. Either a piece is a dps increase or its not.   Survivability and longevity do not play into raw dps output. A dpsr wouldnt take a piece that increases mp5 over a throughput piece. And most dps class's are based on them not needing to worry about longevity choices on gear. Healers are the only class that has to worry, at a large degree, to throughput & longevity.

The only person that knows if my throughput is enough to heal what I am doing is myself. I have cut down into the 200 haste range. I felt it, heavily. The only one that knows that my regen is to low is me. I feel, right now, that it is just about as low as I feel comfortable.   If I time all my cool downs correctly, I dont go oom on 95% of the encounters. Miss a cd by 30 seconds, and I risk having to hit a pot on 30% of the encounters. Miss a cool down by a minute, and I can be screwed.

Regen is weird though. One week, on lord jaraxxus, I can blow through my complete mana pool, pots, fiend, everything. And the following week, doing the same assignment, I can be fine. Incomming damage can change drastically.

So, the tldr version.   Gear for what you feel is lacking. Haste/crit or regen. But keep in mind, when reading stat weights, that your playstyle & assignments can change your personal weights.

I plan on taking weapon/wand & possibly bracers having no regen stats. And all other items to have spirit or mp5.

Cataclysm Thoughts

2009-09-01T11:41:00.001-04:00

WoW Cataclysm has been announced, and with it, a lot of changes to how the wow world works.

1) Two new race's, Worgan & Goblins.
As alliance I will be making my two Worgan (male & female).   I will be making a male DK & female rogue.   These are toons that I have currently, but just dont like the look of them very much (male human & male NE).  The Worgan seem suited best for dps (1% more damage) and the sprint ability will be very nice for melee, and compliment both class's nicely imo.
I am happy with the worgan, glad we are getting a class that can act a bit more ruthless.
I wish for goblins, they did a neutral race that got to choose a side. And given Horde another race instead.   Guess I cant get everything.

2) New class's for existing races.
I like some of the new line ups, but it wont make me go back and redo any existing characters.   Gnome priests are going to be very nice (gogo 5% more intellect/spell power).

3) Redesigned racials
I havent seen a lot of people mention this one. It was announced that existing racials will be changed to match the feel of the new ones.   Who knows what we will be getting.   My guess, 1 combat passive, 1 combat click, 1 none combat passive.

4) Redesigned old world
This is going to be the big change.   Everything else is just fluff.   We are getting WoW2. The lvl 1-60 experience will be brand new. Some places will look the same. All new quests.   All new terrain. This actually will make me want to lvl up my rogue. Quest items designed to be actually logical (no more str/spirit bow quest rewards, yay).

5) Flying in the old world
This needed the redesigned world to work. The existing land is flat & uses LoS to hide gapping holes.
This will allow a ton of new interaction. Flying over, see a lvl 20 being killed by stitches? Swope in and blast him. Some lvl 30 being ganked in STV?   We will be closer to our friends leveling when they will need help. We can stop in on the way to flying to the new heroic, aoe a few gorrillas for them, and move on.
Interaction will be higher again.  Maybe its just me, but at 70, if I was flying through hellfire penisula and saw a group with fellreaver or in Nagrand and saw a group working on the Gronn, I would through a few heals and help out.   Being able to do that in the old world is really going to be nice.

6) Re-using old content
I am fine with this. Even if they scalled up all the old instances, it would be fine. Deadmines is a good choice though. Its relativly short.   Everyone remembers it, and has a lot of memories from there.  The worgan instance also is being re-used. Overall, both fit the new content comming out. But there are new instances too. I am not worried. And no matter how new something is, 3 weeks into 85 I am going to be just as sick of it.

7)Stat Simplification
A lot of people seem to view this as a bad thing.   Personally, again, doesnt bother me.   Intellect into spell power. Good.
The removal of Attack Power from gear. Great.
I think gem colorations are going to change a bit. Below is how I would like to see it.
Blue will be the longevity gem still. Spirit/Stam. Keeps you in the game longer.
Red the DPS gem. Intellect, Agility, STR. Base stats that are increased.
Yellow the modifier gem. Haste/Crit/Dodge/Shield block/Hit/parry/anything else.

Really, what it comes down to is that instead of a piece of equipment having 50 agil & 50 AP, it will have 100 agil. Your stats stay the same. (if 1ag = 1ap, I am simplyfing things here).

We already see this in coli. There is only 1 piece of gear for each spec. In ulduar there where 2. For healing, you typically had a haste belt & a crit belt.  ToC only has an Ilvl 252 haste belt. So the only thing that changes is that instead of me getting a belt with spell power on it, it would only have intellect.
I would gem it to min/max the best stat anyway, so thats not changing.

Tanks not having to worry about defense caps is a great thing. Just ask any feral druid if they want to go back to the old system. Get an upgrade. No more regemming with 200g gems gear that you just regemmed 2 nights ago to balance. The existing system is painful at best and the freedom of the new system will be great.

I do wish that they went with Int = crit (and removal of crit stat) Spirit = Spell power,

8) Stat Modification
This is where you can have your equipment re-made minus 1 stat, and gaining a new one. At first I hated the thought. I just imagined every dps class with 0 HP on their gear.
But reading into it, I like what they plan on doing.
You cant change HP.
You can remove an existing stat (or reduce) to add a stat not on the gear.
Casters can remove spirit to add hit.
Healers can remove hit to add spirit.
Hitting the crit soft cap, remove crit from a piece to add haste.
Healer dpsing. Redo gear to get to the hit cap.   Dont need to carry 3 sets now.
Tanks can tune mitigation stats even more.
DPS can tune hit and be capped all the time.
Less sharded gear, since it can be re-tuned for someone.
Using this system, they can drop more similiar items in an instance. Main spec/off spec roles will be near gone.

9) Guild Progression
A big suprise. The top 20 contributers of the day/week in the guild earn experience for the guild. This is capped at 20 people, and is decided by whoever earned the most for the day.   This keeps it fair for small guilds and will prevent the "mega guild" I was initially afraid of from being needed.
Helps keep guild loyalty and the feeling of contributing to the guild (instead of the current dumping gray items in the guild bank way).
Bnd To Guild patterns help here too. Leaving a guild returns these to the guild bank so that another crafter can learn them. Your character becomes more tied to the guild and investing in a member does not become as dangerious.
Also allows for incentives to attracting new members.   No longer is a guild tabard the best that can be done.
The guild trees will define the role of your guild. Raiding guilds having free flasks & reduced repair costs. PVP guilds might instead have increased honor earned. A casual guild might have increased gold from mobs & faster flight times.

10) Path of the titans
The theory of this one is great. I am not sure how I feel about every aspect of it. I like more ways of advancing my character at 80 once I am done my rep grinds & am off a night for raiding.   I am worried about the gap it will cause for people that only have time to raid vs the ones that can be on every night.

11) Talent trees
They want to simplify them. Get rid of the talents that increase crit by 5% and stuff.
The tree have gotten bloated over the years. Probably a good time to prune them.

11b) I would like to see the trees reduced in light of the path of titans. 1 point per 5 levels maybe. 30 points to top tier. Make them really define the spec.  (below is just my opinion and is based on no released info)
The PoT can do the filler. The stat increases. The healing & dps increases. 1 path can increase healing/regen stats. 1 path can increase dps/hit. Threat reduction can be here.   1 path can increase pvp survivability. 1 path can be tanking/threat increases.
With these types of things removed from our trees, they can focus on the true builds.
For priest, disc can all increase shielding & damage prevention. Holy can really focus on raid healing & shadow be just dps.   The talents can give us the spells to do this like now. But the redundant stuff can be taken out. With half as many talents needed to refine our tree, we dont need as many talents.   They can be simpler & more exact in their nature.

The problem with this is that it doesnt fit nicely with PoT being released slowly at lvl 85.   You would need the compliment of them while leveling or else low level content, with everyone at that level, will be difficult. New lvl 85's also will feel very gimped. They will be lacking the rep enchants. They will be lacking the best gear. And now they will be lacking the PoT gains.

12) Professions (all below my opinion)
They are mostly normalized now.   Probably continue the trend into Cat.
I would like to see JC patterns redone a bit.   The token system is annoying. Its free gold, but makes getting a lot of patterns painful. If I need to get all the patterns for myself & kate, as a fresh 80, I would need to spend 2 months of dailies.
Inscription research is equally bad.
Basing some professions on RNG or long grinds while others are not is just annoying.
Blacksmithing/Engineering/Tailoring cost gold for patterns (tailoring has 2 rare patterns from grinds)
Enchanting/LW cost expensive base materials
JC cost daily token (or expensive very very rare items) 3-6 tokens per plan
Inscription has expensive items to randomly learn a pattern
Inscription/Alch has a daily/weekly CD ability to randomly learn a pattern.

IMO it should be as follows
Every profession has its special BoP item learned from the trainer
All items up to and including blue items trained
Rare reagents gotten from a daily. (dragons eye for JC for example) Used in crafting the epic items.
Epic plans from boss drops/reagent turn ins/rep vendors.   All share a common pool.

Equal footing for any play style.

13)race/faction changes
Meh, bound to happen. Doesnt affect me in the least. Will stop people from saying how OP a racial is and make a ton of money for blizzard.

14) cross realm lfg
Good change for people that cant find groups.
Hopefully a system to combat ninjas.
I dont plan on needing it, but lfg is something you rarely plan for when you find you need it, and having more options is a good thing.

------

I am excited about Cataclysm.   I like almost everything I have seen.   WoW continues to evolve and grow. In some points while growing you have to simplify systems to keep them from becoming out of control. The way they are choosing to do it I have no issues with.

I dont care about everyone having the same stuff. It happens now. If I see an ulduar priest, they have the same gear as me.   In the end, its how I play my character that defines who I am. That wont change.

Application Questions

2009-08-28T08:21:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, I wrote a post in the officer forums suggesting some new application questions. Some of these where based on questions I had wanted to ask people we denied. Some where based on questions I had wanted to ask other guilds applicants. Some where questions I wanted to ask people on forums. Some I just made up.
They are almost all mean & offensive to some one. Take them lightheartedly. None are probably meant against you or anyone you know....

Part 1: The QUESTIONS.

Where you dropped on your head as a child.
Yes/No
If yes, how many times?

Did you eat paint chips as a kid.
Do you still eat paint chips?
Are you eating paint chips right now?

How high are you:
1) I dont do drugs
2) Well, I am on a plane, cruising at about 1800 feet.
3) Buzzed
4) Wow, have you ever looked at your hand man, I mean, really looked at it.

Which of these is a sentence?
A) I have to be at ulduar at 8pm.
B) I have 2 b at ulduar at 8pm.
C) I hv 2 b 8t ulduar 8t 8pm.
D) Ulduar at 8pm, I have to be.
E) Writing the above has killed so many brain cells, I cant think of anything for E....

Which of the following apply (please check all that do)
My Parents
( ) Are ok
( ) Did a lot of acid in the 70's
( ) Are brother and sister
( ) Stopped paying for my bail
( ) I stabbed my parents because they didnt invite me to their guild
( ) I am a genitic experiment and am actually a super smart dog
( ) where killed in a back alley after a show. I am really batman, but would like to keep it on the down low.
(Note - In the case of stabbed parents, we invite him to guild. We then server transfer and all put in for a name change. In the case of a super smart dog, auto guild invite, thats just cool. Batman is also an auto guild invite. )

Are you a
( ) Dedicated raider
( ) Ninja (of the thieving type, not the super cool assasin type)
( ) moron

Which of the following has prevented you from raiding
( ) Traffic
( ) Family emergency
( ) Running around stv killing gorrilas or something
( ) Hitting your finger hard against your keyboard
( ) Yelling at your mother to make you meatloaf
( ) Computer issues
( ) Account hacked
( ) not owning a clock
( ) work
( ) animal porn
( ) too drunk to log in
( ) other ____________

Why is your class the worst class?

Your emblems of conquest should be spent on
( ) Upgrades
( ) Tier gear
( ) runed orbs for crafted mats you wish to use
( ) runed orbs to sell the AH so you can afford your elwyn forest prostitutes.

Reason for lack of enchants or gems:
( ) Dont care
( ) no funds
( ) waiting for you guys to buy them for me
( ) really just dont care
( ) I dont take this game as serious as you guys, and thus shouldnt be expected to do 30 minutes of dailies a day for a week, even though I will spend 5 hours a day running SM for the tabard or kissing frogs in some god forsaken back woods of dustwallow marsh for some achievement. But I am casual and expect you guys to gear me up totally. Then Ill complain when I get out dpsed by tanks and stop raiding. But, I will still continue to sign up for raids, just wont show.

What Color of fire is ok to stand in?
A) Red
B) Yellow
C) Green
D) Blue
E) All of the above
F) Trick question, everyone knows its Clouds.

Why are you not signed out in your raiding gear/spec
( ) I dont want people to steal my epics through an armory hack
( ) I dont have good gear, so will pretend I do
( ) I accidentily logged out in my fishing gear
( ) Wow man, you like, can check that?

If your grandmother was on vent or read guild chat, would she hit you with a broom? Y/N

What is the likely hood that we will hear a bong noise at any time from your vent?

You and your best friend are being chased by a tiger. Do you trip your friend?

Your dog has:
( ) Eaten your homework
( ) Eaten your mic
( ) Eaten your modem
( ) Eaten your neighber, so you have to afk for a min
( ) Eaten all of the food, you can no longer pay for wow. In a week you will be in a new guild though.

You would like to flask before raids, but are not sure which one to use. How do you decide?
( ) Look on EJ
( ) Ask an officer or class lead
( ) Ask a knowledgable player in guild
( ) Ask the audiance
( ) Phone a friend
( ) Use the cheapest one on the AH
( ) Use a random one. Eeny Meeny Miny Moe was invented for a reason.
( ) Im leet, I dont need flasks

How drunk do you start the raids?
( ) I dont drink
( ) Buzzed
( ) I can legally drive, so its all good
( ) I just puked a bit on the keyboard, but its all good
( ) Im glad I got the Carried status tonight, cause I need a free ride

Follow up, by end of the raid, how drunk are you
( ) I still dont drink
( ) After that wipe on hodir, I needed a little something
( ) Wow, my keyboard has chunks stuck in it now
( ) Thud (head bangs against the desk, passed out, good thing Im being carried)
( ) Those pink elephants play pretty well

Chose your knowledge of your class from the list below
( ) Ebayed
( ) Ebayed but read at least 1 post on mmo champion
( ) Ebayed but read at least 1 post on EJ
( ) Leveled to 80 as a dps spec, but I am sure I can tank/heal just fine, ive been in parties of good ones. Its so easy
( ) Stacking Spell power on my hunter is good, right. ARCANE SHOT is a spell. WOOT.
( ) I have all my spells on a random macro on my 1 key. DPSING IS EASY.
( ) Healing is so boring. I just use 1 ability over and over.
( ) I read up on EJ and stay current on class mechanics, especially after a patch change.

How many wipes have you caused
0 - Oh, I am supposed to have raided at least once before applying?
1 - oops
2 - 10 - I am trying to appear modest
10-20 - I am being honest
20-5k - LOL whats fire, LOL look at autoshoot, LOL afk - hey why did we hit the enrage at 1%, LOL whats threat?, LOL who needs to read a guide

Give reason for leaving old guild
( ) Guild disbanded
( ) Once, one of the officers hurt my feelings
( ) Didnt get a drop off a boss I wanted
( ) Not progressing fast enough
( ) Wiped once. Im Johnny Never Wipes. That was un-accaptable and has tarnished my reputation. I was going to commit suicide but decided to join you guys instead.
( ) Seriously, thats my name. Its Welsh or something.
( ) Got promoted to officer & ninjad the guild bank. Do you guys have an officer position by chance?
( ) I was just to awesome for my old guild, and they didnt understand that. I can tank, dps & heal at the same time, on my rogue. Really. I am just that good. They just never let me in on any of the raids for some reason.
( ) I was, like, always high, and like, always late. Sometimes, like, I was drunk too. But like, they where like totally cool with it and it like never caused a single, like problem man. Then like, one time I like wiped us and like got gkicked for like no reason. It was like a total bummer man.
( ) I had sexual relations with the gms mother, wife, goat, and couch. It was a misunderstanding.
( ) I just like apping to guilds to see who wants me, then when accepted, I ninja gquit my old guild, collect a few epics from the new guild, then hop again. You guys are totally cool with that, right?

Boss is at 2%. The last tank just died. What do you do
( ) hit all your cool downs, dps potions, and try to burn down that last bit
( ) run to the door. No repair bill for you
( ) run to the door. The hunters, rogues, mages, and NE's are trying to get out of a repair bill, its your mission to stop that from happening. Repairs are an important part of the wow economy.
( ) huh, I was afk the whole time. Stupid scrubs wiping at 2%. The dps should be better.
( ) Now is your time to shine. The last one alive. Kiting the boss all through the instance for the next 2 hours, while the rest of the raid watches helplessly. He will kill you, you cant do 2million damage, but you can play hide and seek. Rest of the raid goes gets dinner.

The gm accidentily sends you 2k gold. What do you do?
( ) Elwyn Forest hookers
( ) Elwyn Forest hookers
( ) Elwyn Forest hookers
( ) Send it ba... Who are am I kidding, Elwyn Forest Hookers

How is your interenet connection
( ) Stable
( ) I have never DC'd. I also am a liar, and think that you would believe this.
( ) I DC infrequently, but it does happen.
( ) Graveyards cause me to DC, so I will probably DC after a wipe.
( ) About as stable as a 3 legged cow in a field during a thunder storm.
( ) Dial Up FTW
( ) Morse code FTW

Computer
( ) Top of the line
( ) Top of the line (for 1988)
( ) Etch a sketch

Part 2: Denials.

Big Denial: (this one will make the applicant cry and probably go full emo. His father will be very disappointed in him)

applicationGreetings (name)

We have reviewed your application and have decided to deny it. You are a fine example of someone that has failed at their class. The class knowledge you show is equal to a dead badger. The badger may even have a slight advantage on you, and actually made it to recruit status.
You should read at least 1 guide about class mechanics. Even reading the class mechanics of a class you dont play will help you become better.
It is obvious that you have been carried thus far in the game. You probably die about 3 seconds into a pull and still feel justified in rolling for loot at the end of the night. You think that +3 stam is really going to make you better?
The healers are out to get you. Thats why they never heal you. It is a Elune wide conspiracy to keep you down. Its not cause you stood in front of the boss and got a 30k cleave. As a mage. On Sapph. The tanks, they also are out to get you. That cleave, the tank should have totally taunted. And the tank runs omen so you dont have to. They should be taunting when they see you have threat, not you controlling it.
Your lack of enchants is because you are waiting for better gear before enchanting it. Hopefully you find a guild that will pass all the epics you need to you first, so you can enchant and gem it and be a productive member of the raid.
A guild currently working on getting a heroic instance on farm status is more you speed. Look into one. Dont be suprised when they deny you too, but take it as a learning experience.
Your grasp of the english language is bad at best. If you actually could type or speak a complete sentence, the paramedics might have gotten to you in time to prevent the brain damage you obviously suffered.
If I had a bowling team, you would be the kid who disenfects the teams shoes. You would probably be kicked from the team for not being able to fulfill that one duty.
I actually feel bad that you may be one day/may currently be/have been a member of society that actually makes decisions that affect people. But I get myself to sleep at night being sure that the highest career position you will ever have is the guy at the gas station pumping the gas. I just hope I get the right change back and you dont spill to much gas on my car.
In short, GL on not drowning on your own vomit tonight and finding a guild more your speed.

(as a side note, recently I had a gas station attendant miss my gas tank. My vote, if he ever applies, it immediate denial)

----------------

Short Denials:

-Stuart Smiley Denial-
DENIED
cause your not good enough, geared enough, and gosh darn it, we just dont like you.

-Joke-
Greetings -name-
We are a lighthearted guild, and like telling jokes and such. One of my favorites goes as follows:
Bill was in the army. One day, his seargent tells him to step forward. The seargent then says "Son, you cat has died"Bill, shocked at this sudden news, tells his seargent that he needs to be more sensitive & learn how to break bad news to people. He tells him that next time, tell him that his cat is on the roof. The following day tell him his cat had fallen off. The following day, tell him the cat had died. The seargent says if thats what he wants, he will try to accomodate his wishes in the future.
A few weeks pass, and Bill is once again asked to step forward. "Son, your mother is on the roof"
.....Anyway, now that we have had a slight chuckle at Bills expense, -name- , your application is on the roof.

-The analogy-
Have you ever gone to the movies, and seen a movie that the dialog was just painful. The characters under-developed. At the end, you are disappointed. Even worse is the ones where you get halfway through the movie, stand up, go to the manager, and demand your money back.
Here I am, demanding 30 seconds of my life back, because that's all I made it through your app before I couldn't stand the epic fail of it anymore.
On the bright side, at least you probably wont end up servicing heroin addicts in the back rooms of clubs to make ends meet after a terrible movie and become un-touchable in holywood ever again. Probably.....

-The amusement park-
Your Ilvl must be this high to get a free ride.

-The Clue-
It was -Applicants name-, in Northrend greens, that was denied in RS.

-Mad Libs-
__(your name)__ was denied because of __(adjective)__ failure at knowing their class.

-The your mother-
Your mother is only half as bad as you, and she got denied. But, Trunos still loves her.

-The Scooby Doo-
If it weren't for those meddling kids, you would have been accepted.Now, its time to unmask you.uh oh, its EPIC FAILURE MC DENIED.We knew it all along, didnt we Shaggy.

-The Smurf's-
Your name, Denied Smurf

-Star trek-
-Applicants name- gets to wear the red shirt today. Get ready to beam down to the planet.40 minutes later of captain kirk hitting on aliens.-Applicants name- is dead.

-The commercial-
9 our of 10 doctors recommend denying your app.

-Warning-
Surgeon Generals Warning: You should be denied as you epic failure may cause cancer.

Part 3: New Guild Rank.

We have started a new guild policy. It is called the Carried One. Every night, before raid, we pick from a list of people that opt in. You can AF on a healer, un-equip all your gear, and get priority on all loot, dkp free. After the night is done, you get 50% of the gold paid in repairs by the other 24 members sent to you. After 3 wipes, if it looks like we wont down a boss, you may DC since we dont want to waste your time. After 1 night of this, you may decline the rest of the invites till you again get pulled into the Carried One spot.
Would you like to opt in for this?

(comic at top from saturday morning breakfast cereal)

UI updated

2009-08-25T08:15:00.001-04:00

Above you can see the newest changes to my UI.

I left xperl for VuhDo raid frames.

VuhD:

Raid layout is the biggest change. Instead of having the raid set up in their groups, I have them by assignments. This allows me to easily watch tanks or healers (or the ranged/melee dps) and react to damage spikes on those groups.

With the grouping of tanks, I made their frame larger & showing buffs in some of the extra room on their frames. This is just so I can better judge incomming damage on them & yet keep the rest of the raid frames slightly more compact.

I can move people from one group to the next just with a right click ->role assignment. Vuhdo also auto assigns people into groups but I have seen it miss a lot (put all shammys in healing, all pallys in melee dps).

Vuhdo also allows for custom buff/debuff monitoring. I added Beacon of light, shield walls, etc to it. Now an icon shows up for those people with these buffs without me having to search.

MSBT moved slightly to compensate for new frame layout.

DBM bars moved to the right, near my buff bars. I also installed spell timers for DBM. This keeps track of many CD's for raid members. Helps me keep track of hero's, BR's, innervates, etc.

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Things to do:

I am dumping quartz. I was hoping it would show when I was locked out of a school of magic, but its been near useless. I have some other add ons to try.

Clean up panels a bit more - I have to move my focus target. I need to finish my spell builds in vuhdo.

Clean up dbm. Filter things like MD from showing. Make sure the bars dont overlap.

Redo g15 macros. They dont show (on hidden) but the keys g1-g12 are mapped to the spells right above my raid frames. I have reconfigured that bar so many times that they are out of order again. (g13-g18 are my dps spells on the center bottom row, starting with holy fire)

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Things that cant be seen:

Vuhdo has a seperate 10m configuation. This shows me just the 2 groups as arranged by normal raid frames. Also shows me everyones target.

Also, vuhdo is configured to show me whos in a vehicle, and replaces their health bar with the vehicles. Shows in a pine green.

Vuhdo auto loads my set up depending on if I am in a 5m/solo (set to show nothing) 10m, or 25m. I also have 1 set up with standard raid groups so if I am in a fight where thats more useful, I can easily switch (loethab being an example).

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Solo/5m party frames still handled by xperl. I just think xperl looks better. Most of xperl is disabled in the main addon set up screen to prevent loading.

Deciding Upgrades

2009-08-21T10:28:00.000-04:00

How to decide when to replace tier pieces can be a difficult decision. Especially now with the new emblems.

Last night I got my t9 shoulders. This puts me at 1piece t9, 4piece t8.

The t8 bonus is pretty big for disc (250 spell power for 5sec after a pw:s). In practice, I should have this buff 30% of the time while tank healing.

For holy, its not as big, since shields are not in the healing rotation nearly as much.

The 2piece t9 is 20% more healing from prayer of mending. This is a very good bonus too. For both specs.

2piece 28 is meh at best (10% crit on prayer of healing) and 4 piece t9 is worth going after (10% more absorbed by divine aegis & 10% more instant heal from impowered renew). The bonus different depending on if your deep disc or deep holy, since thats the only way to get the talents.

So, how to replace. First what upgrades do I want?

Chest off of beasts of northrend.
Tier Helm
Tier gloves
Tier pants

The Tier chest can be gotten instead of the drop one, and then I can get the badge helm.
Overall, they will give me about the same stats. I am just trying to stay away from a blue gem slot in favor of yellow or red.

So, after normalizing stats (normal epic gems instead of JC epic ones), I came up with the following numbers. (stam was not counted into total gain)

Gloves:
17stam
31 int
-11 spirit
18 haste
2 spell power
Total gain: 61 points

Helm:
28 stam
18 int
16 spirit
7 crit
19 spell power
Total Gain: 60 points

Pants:
28 stam
11 int
22 spirit
10 haste
19 spell power
Gain: 62

All 3 give similiar stat bonus when looked over.
Gloves I am giving up a lot of spirit for intellect. I am also breaking even on spell power gains.
This is mostly due to traiding out a blue gem for a yellow gem.

Helm is pretty much a linear upgrade.

Pants I am losing a yellow gem for a blue gem. This is seen in the small int gains compaired to the large spell power & spirit gains.

So then it comes down to which to upgrade?

This depends on the following variables.

Chest drops and I recieve it. I can then safely upgrade my helm knowing I wont be taking the badge one.

If the chest doesnt drop & I get another token in the next 2 weeks, gloves are a viable option.

If the chest drops & I get a token in the next 4 weeks, then helm is the option.

If the chest doesnt drop & I get a token in the next 4 weeks, then I can get the gloves and wait till I get another token & see if the chest drops before token 4 & emblems are recieved.

Pants are the last tier piece. Trading out a yellow gem for a blue gem makes them slightly spirit heavy. Though they are still an upgrade I dont feel they are as large of an upgrade as the other pieces.

At that point its balancing out the cost of 75 emblems (for the none tier helm) vs my dkp.

Unused emblems are also going to be soaked up with the ring upgrade and in 3.2.2 the crafting orbs are being released. At a cost of 15 emblems each, I need 60 emblems for my bracers.

Another thing to keep in mind is cost of the items. The gloves, competive in emblem cost, can get me 2 piece tier9 bonus for only 45 emblems. The helm would be 75 emblems. Thats an additional week of raids & 5mans for almost the same total stat gain.

The ring & orbs will be filler items. If I just recieved token 3, I have 90+ badges, and know I probably wont get token 4 for 3 or 4 weeks, I can safely get the ring (or some of the orbs, which will also be available on the Ah for a price). Depending on who needs them in guild for crafting, might be able to pick orbs up for dkp cost too.

But that all is in the balancing act. I am very ocd in my upgrading. I keep track of cost vs gains.
If I can pick up big gains early on, it will help me even out later. I would rather get 2 or 3 small gains then 1 big gain, since I find the small gains add up very quickly. At least for main slot items. Small gains on jewerlery tend to be very slight for their up front cost. The 35 emblem ring is worth about 30-40 points, costs 35 emblems. Not horrible, but prevents me from being able to fill out t9 4piece if I have the tier token.

Tier 9 Gear stats

2009-08-13T10:03:00.000-04:00

With the release of T9 & the 4 new instances that it brings (10m, h10m, 25m, h25m) there is a lot of new gear to look at.

But in going through the gear, I was suprised at how few choices there really are. In 25m there is typically only 1 item for any given slot that meets basic requirements (int, spirit, haste/crit, spell power). 10m there are some slots you can not even fill.

Some trends I noticed. Blizzard has said that mana regen for healers is still to high. It looks like in T9 they are fixing this by reducing spirit (and slightly increasing mp5 but I will discuss that in a bit) on items. Intellect is increasing at normal rates.

Disc is now better served by mp5 then spirit. But, I dont know if its needed yet to gear for mp5. Mana going into t9 isnt a huge issue. Yes, its tight, but as gear level increases, the mana pool will increase and there will still be a net gain in mp5.

The big difference is that the spirit on tier gear & main slot items becomes more important, and that taking jewelery items that dont have it becomes slightly riskier. The reason for this is the weapon slot. Regen on weapons is limited to 1 mp5 mace in 10m & some hard mode chest items.
Losing 10% of your regen on an weapon upgrade is a large hit. Holy loses far more from the fact that there is no spirit based weapon till 25m hard mode.

The tier gear is still straight spirit based. So, going for the 4 piece bonus will still give you a large amount of spirit.

For item values,I perfer

Intellect
Spell power
Spirit
Haste/crit at roughly an equal amount.
Gem value red/yellow then blue.
Red/yellow socketed with 12spellpower/10 int
Blue with 12 spellpower/10spirit

Red gem gives 23 spell power, yellow gives 20 int. 2 r/y gems in 2 sockets give you 24/20, a gain of 1 spell power. Minor, yes, but if your gemming might as well get every ounce you can.

In t8 I am within 1-3% +/- of the soft caps for haste & crit for both specs. So as long as they both go up in value roughly equal I am ok. I favor haste slightly since, outside of heroism, hitting the gcd hard cap isnt easily attained.
Crits diminishing returns and general negative aspects (pushes into overheal more, unpredictable/spikey healing) makes it less optimal after 30%.

Tier 9 set here - http://www.wowhead.com/?itemset=-140

5piece t9

463 stam
463 Int
372 spirit
215 crit
149 haste
629 spell power
1 meta, 2r, 2y, 3b

My current t8 (with t810m shoulders, rest 25m) stats

359 stam
359 int
314 spirit
117 crit
177 haste
452 spell power
1meta, 3r, 2y, 2b

Gains:
104 stam
104 int
58 spirit
98 crit
-28 haste
177 spell power
-1r, +1b

Since we only need 4 piece for the set bonus, we have several choices. Swap out any 1 piece for a piece with higher values that we would like.

From badges we can choose shoulders or helm.
From boss drops we can choose legs or chest.

Figuring you have 100% chance to get each item, you should probably take the chest.

t9 chest gives
103stam
103int
82sp
r/b 7spellpower
82crit
140 spellpower

Boss drop chest (off northrend beasts)
103stam
103int
90 spirit
r/y 7 spirit
74 haste
140 spell power

You can also take the helm instead. You are not losing/gaining much (bit of crit) and getting a yellow socket to replace the blue t9 socket. If you need more crit then this is the better option (and keeping the crit of the chest too)

You are gaining haste (more important then the crit, slightly), better sockets & balancing gear better.

The legs trade haste for haste, come with 2 B sockets. For strickly holy, they are better, but not for disc.

Shoulder trade crit for crit & you lose the yellow socket in the tier gear for a blue socket.

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How about the off tier pieces.

Say hello to haste city.

Looking at cloth that has spirit (and no hit) at ilvl 245
Feet, waist, wrist, back, badge ring

Crit
Ring from anub
Off hand
crafted bracers (have blue socket)

There is no neck or weapon or wand with spirit.
There are haste + crit versions of each, in 10m & 25m

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Trinkets

the 10m trinket is pretty bad.
56 mp5, then the spell power stack which gets to 528 spell power. Looks nice. Till I realized that the 528 spell power is 20 sec, then 2 minute CD.

the 25m trinket isnt bad, 150 spell power. Stack effect ends at 128mp5 as long as your casting. Better for disc then holy. But overall, not a bad trinket. Fills the role of a throughput trinket & regen trinket.

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In the end, take 4 piece t9. Take either the boss drop chest or the badge helm, depending on if you feel crit or haste is lacking. After that, its only 1 item in each slot that is even usable, so there is no question on it. You can also of course take 5piece but then that extra blue gem starts to be painful.

You will lose a bit of crit from equiped slotted items. You will gain crit from the neck & weapon slots & lose regen from those same slots. No matter what, your crit & haste will climb and be pushed into the soft caps. Regen shouldnt actually drop from what we have now, but I dont see it increasing (or the need for it to) like other stats. The way I figure it, unless fights are 30%+ longer then presently, more regen wont add much. And at 30% longer, that gives access to another mana fiend.

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Finale numbers, if all pieces of gear are replaced from t8(my current gear) to the new gear
(swapping t9 chest for boss drop one, though in reality I may take the helm). I also did not include weapons or my belt into these calculations. I have not decided how my weapon upgrade path is going to go and my belt is already t9. I calculated all gem bonus & epic gems in slots.

t8
stam: 692
int: 678
spirit: 622
crit: 208
haste: 347
spell power: 1143

t9:
stam: 740
int: 880
spi: 671
crit: 245
haste: 470
spell power: 1316

Gains:
stam: 138
int: 202
spi: 89
crit: 48
haste: 123
spell power: 173

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Looking at the actual numbers, spirit will actually take a beating. Losing the spirit from the neck slot hurt. Thats not factoring in the spirit loss from a weapon upgrade or wand. That can be as high as 146 less spirit. Putting the total at -57 spirit. Is that horrible. No. The higher intellect, mp5 from the intellect, ragains from mana fiend & replenishment should put us at about equal to now, if not still ahead. I would rather take the higher upgrades, and if it really hurts, socket for it, but I think I will be ok for mana. A trinket change can also push the mp5 to insane levels if wanted.

Haste goes up by a larger margin, but thats where taking the helm instead of the chest would even them out to roughly equal amounts. The intellect gains will equat to about 1.5% more crit too.

Trinkets I didnt include since I am generally happy with mine and will probably continue to use them unless I start to have mana issues and can get the one from 25m. If my mp5 is good, I will probably continue to use mine for a bit longer.

Finally, I didnt include the weapons because there that can be such a big deciding factor in gearing. The staffs will provide a large amount of stam & int + sockets, haste, crit but little gain in spell power. The mace/off hand will provide some spirit, depending on which, some mp5, and more +heal at a loss of int. I dont know which is better yet. They will probably have to be their own, seperate article.

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Item lists:
mmo champion loot lists - all t9 raids- http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=870
wowhead t9 list, complete set - http://www.wowhead.com/?itemset=-140
Crafted gear - http://www.wowhead.com/?search=royal+moonshroud
Emblem gear - http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=minle=245;maxle=245;ub=5;cr=24:118;crs=1:47241;crv=1:0

My UI - 3.2 raiding version

2009-08-11T08:08:00.000-04:00

Since 3.2 came out, I decided to revamp my UI heavily. I tried several different styles, and looked at dozens & dozens of different healers (and other class's) UIs. I went to PlusHeal and looked at top healers like Matticus. I went through just the forum posts. I went through recruits.

The UI is very subjective. What works great for 1 person may be horrible for another. For a while, my goal had been to make all my toons have a similiar look. This helped me always find where my health pots where, or find my most used abilities easily. What I started to notice though was that I was basing my healing UI around alts that I only used for dailies. I decided to keep my alts under the universal frame, but make Crysts very specialized.

In doing this, I had to decide several things. What was my role in raid? I am typically tank healing. I also do some raid healing or raid assist healing while maintaining tank healing.

More importantatly, I am the Healing Class Lead. What additional info should I be looking at in battle?

What I decided on:
Xperl for unit frames - I have used this from day one, very comfortable with it.
Recount for monitoring deaths & statistics
Satrina's Buff Frames for mine & my targets buffs - This replaced CTmod.
MIKS Scrolling Combat Text - for ability monitoring.
VisualHeal - Track incomming heals on my target
Bigwigs & DBM - Track boss abilities
Bartender - Button placement & Configuation
PoM Tracker - Track my PoM & charges left on it
Decursive - Track debuffs I am capable of cleansing.
Power Auras - Track short duration, on use abilities

Those are the major ones that impact my raiding ability. The rest are cosmetic or used to just simplify OoC tasks.

For placement, I tried several places on my screen for almost every tracker. I finally went back to what I was used to. Raid frames to the left of my char. Add ons clustered around the raid frames. I moved them in a tiny bit to bring them closer to the center of my screen & allow trackers greater freedom around them. This helped in me not needing as many redundant trackers in different quadrants of my screen. This was the major change from 3.0 to 3.2 for me. In 3.0 I had my raid frames to the left. My trackers on the right.

I freed up the area around my toon more. I shrunk most bartender buttons to being just big enough to read CD durations. The only ones I kept easily clickable are my dps ones, since I typically only use them for dailies or burn phases, and for me, that doesnt involve moving. I had no easily remembered keybinds for them, and would probably spend more time trying to remember them then just clicking.

In 3.1 I went a bit overboared on buff tracking. I cut that back quite a bit. I still am tracking all tank survival abilities & healer abilities that prevent instant tank death. I moved them to more easily tracked locations under the new UI. I slimmed how xperl tracks on targets and instead am using SBF to track the buffs in an out of place location. This is primarily to see if someone is missing a buff or something. While healing the buffs on my target are not a major concern. (I wish xperl allowed more buff/debuff filtering modes).

Decursive was moved to a place where I am more likely to see debuffs. For a long time I just used xperl for my tracking. Until Yogg, this was never really a big deal, since most fights where either magic debuffs or disease. Yogg I learned I needed better monitoring. The decursive live monitor windows fills this role nicely. Prioritized groups 1, then 2. Then priests.

VisualHeal I moved to a place where I can actually see it. It shows a large green bar when I start a cast indicating my targets health. Any additional heals also show on the bar. It adds up the estimated heal amount, and will extend a red bar past the edges if over healing will occur. It also updates in real time. Much easier to decide if my heal should be allowed to land using this. It does not take hots into account. It also does not work well with instants or channeled spells.

DBM & Bigwigs I moved the bars to different locations. DBM I have towards the center of my screen. Big Wigs I moved to below my raid frames. Only because I couldnt disable the bars on either one & they both have some parts I like. DBM I keep because everyone uses it, so we are all on the same timer. BigWigs, imo, has better proximity monitoring & shows life on fights like freya & mimiron.

Miks scrolling combat text - I use this exclusivly for monitoring tank death prevention abilities. It tells me when such an ability is used. It tells me when the duration ended. Tells me who it was casted on & who casted it. I have this info displayed above my raid frames.

I also use it to tell me when a spell comes off cool down. This appears directly below group 1 & the bartender buttons.

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Complete list of Add ons

Wim - Chat msg windows
Clearfont2 - Font pack for wow
Chatmod - chat window options (sticky channels and such)
Bigwigs - Boss ability monitoring
DBM - Boss ability monitoring
Xperl - Raid frames
Ora2 - Raid utilities
Headcount - dkp/loot admin
Decursive - Debuff monitoring
Satrina's Buff frames - Buff/Debuff monitoring
PoM Tracker - Prayer of Mending tracking
Power Auras - Ability proc tracking
Ellipsis - Short duration buff tracking
Omen - Threat tracking
Recount - Statistic tracking
Annoyingbuffreminder - Reminds me to buff
Bartender - Button layout & config
Outfitter - Gear set ups
Bagnon - bag & bank management
Tradeskillinfo - list of all crafted gear
Tradeskillcd - Easily check cooldowns for trade skills of alts
Atlasloot - Loot list
Sexymap - Minimap configuation
Cartagrapher - Main map configuation
Sun Viewport - Allows the screen to be sectioned off for cosmetic reasons
Raidmobmarker - Easily mark targets
Fubar - menu/configuation/status bar

Guild Fu - tracks guild members online

Friend Fu - tracks friends online

Performance Fu - system performance

Durability Fu - tracks durability

Money Fu - tracks gold across the account

Bag Fu - bag usage

Broker2fubar - allows more mods to interact with fubar

My Healing thoughts

2009-08-10T09:04:00.000-04:00

--This is cut and pasted from my forum post on Rising Storm. I tried to update most the info to 3.2

Some background on my healing. Cryst has mostly been holy specced for all the content I have done. I have raid healed kara, za, ssc, tk, mh, bt. I have done MT healing & have done raid healing.
In wrath, I have healed every heroic, all of naxx, sarth+2d, most of ulduar 10m & 25m.
3.2 I am dual specced Holy & Disc. Most my 3.2 experience is MT healing as Disc.
I read up on healing from elitiest jerks, various blogs, and any forums I have access to. I wont crunch the numbers, I let others that better understand them do that. But I pay attention to the results.
Cryst started as a herbalist & alchemist. Mid kara I switched herbalism that didnt do much to enchanting for the ring enchants. With the alchy stone, I still had a huge mana gain through potions. Mad alchemist potions allowed me to time mana gains with health gains for great effects.
Healing:
Flash Heal - glyphed it is now the most mana effiecent heal we have. Used often.
Greater Heal - old primary heal, now too mana in-effiecent to be spammed & to slow for most healing. Used for predictable damage on a MT or for massive burst healing, but generally will run you oom.
Prayer of Mending - Just as amazing now in wrath as BC. Only thing, the threat it causes is now attributed to the caster. Careful on casting pre pull.
Binding Heal - good for catchup. Limited use to proc crit abilities.
CoH - Still amazing. Even after the soon to be 6sec cooldown will be a great spell. Instant cast, castable while moving. Smart healing. In its present form, its too powerful. I dont like the fix, but its still great.
Desperate Prayer - mana in-effiecent, but its a cookie.
Renew - Decent for holy, not a good use of a gcd for discPrayer of healing: very long cast time, high mana cost, large amount of healing done on the party targeted.Shield: Very useful for disc, limited but useful for holy.
Penance: Very fast healing for disc
Pain Suppression: Situationally useful for disc
Cleanse disease/dispell: needed for their intended fights. I keep the one I need keybound to my mouse click.
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I still use Hover macros. I changed my macro a bit so if my mouse isnt over someone, it heals my selected target instead. Allows for a bit more flexability. Also if no one is selected it will then heal me. Disabled for long cool down abilities so I dont accidentily use them (GS & PS).
I did a ton of UI cleaning for wrath. At some point I will post pictures.
I still have a ton of data incomming, but its now much more specialized. I only look at the data I need for the fight I am in. I also worked very hard to open up the whole center of my screen, so I dont stand in fire.
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Talents:
Links to be included - My Holy build is slightly modified from the traditional for use as a 10m 2 healer set up where I have to tank heal & raid heal.
A solid disc build. Focused on tank healing.
Disc tree:
Twin Disciplines: more spell power for instants. Prayer of mending, shield, renew, etc all benifit.
Power word fort: more health for the raid/party.
Improved inner fire: 45% more spell power
Meditation: must have
Inner focus: Kinda meh with the new mana regen system. Not much else to spend the point on.Improved PWS: For disc builds, increases your primary mitigation spell.
Mental Agility: 10% mana savings on instants. Needed to get to next tier.
Mental Strength: 15% more intellect. In ulduar gear, its more then 3k extra mana, unbuffed.
Soul Warding: Removed the 4 sec cd on PWS. This allows raid spamming of the shield, which opens up disc to help raid heal. This changed the Disc playstyle enough to make it raid viable imo.100k healing done with PWS glyph procs on maly, phase 1 & 2, is what this is, and 700k avoided damage through absorbtion.
Focused Power: 4% more healing done. .5 sec dispells. Decent.
Enlightment: 6% more spirit & haste. The spirit, meh. The haste, it allows for less haste gear.
Focused Will: 3% more spell crit. Other parts are pvp based.
Power Infusion: Mini heroism. I try to remember to cast it on a high dps mage in range of me, when I have a gcd to spare.
Improved Flash heal: Less mana on FH & increased crit on low health targets.
Renewed Hope: The reason to keep shields up on your tank. 4% crit chance on targets affected by weakened soul. The 4% less raid wide damage is amazing. Congrats, you just raid healed 4% of all damage taken. With no overheal. And no one will ever thank you. But whenever someone is at 4% or less life, you just saved them.
Rapture: gain 2.5% of your total mana when your shield is fully absorbed. Also, your shielded target gains back mana/rage/runicpower/energy. Shield yourself on any aoe fight. Always sheild the tank. Get mana back. Scales with Intellect.
Aspiration: reduces the CD on all disc spells by 20%. Take this for the penance CD. The rest is gravey.
Divine Aegis: Your spell crits shield the target for 15% of the amount healed. Stacks. helps even out tank damage.
Pain Suppression: 40% less damage, 5% threat removed instantly. Good for a large incomming spike damage on a tank (or for pulls). Limited use because of the 5% threat reduction.
Grace: Each heal on the target increases healing done by you to them by 3%, stacks 3 times, lasts 10 seconds. 9% more healing done to the tank. Good reason to stay focused on your target. Penance will instantly rebuild all 3 stack by the end of the channel.Burrowed time: casting PWS grants you 25% spell haste on the next spell cast.
Penance: fires 3 bolts of healing power at the target. About 3k healing each, in 2 seconds. 8 sec CD after glyph & talents. It should be noted the first bolt is instant cast, so you instantly heal for 3-5k, then the next two come out over the next 2 seconds.

Holy:
Improved Renew: Increases later renew talents too.
Holy Concentration: spell crit is extreamly valuable, and is expensive stat on gear
Divine Fury - decrease casting times of needed spells
Insperation: 10% less damage on targets after you crit heal them.
Desperate prayer: 1 talent point for a oh no button. Improved Healing: 15% less mana for your spells is good
Spirit of redemption: take this for the 5% spirit, not the improved death. Its hard to find a talent that gives you 5% of any main stat for 1 point.
Surge of light: try it. Its really cool. I use an addon to track procs and tell me when I have it. I will cover later. gets better with crit.
Spiritual guadance: 25% of your spirit is now +healSpiritual healing: improves healed amount by 10%
Holy Concentration: Spell crits increase mana regen by 50%. This counts for both while casting and oo5sr casting.
Empowered healing: larger heals
Serindipity: Gives a combo point like effect. Pretty cool overall. FHX3 then GH. I use a buff tracking program to let me know when I have 3 stacks.
Improved HC: Makes a good talent better. Hasted, higher proc rate & charges
CoH: The reason to go Holy. Raid healing with glyphed CoH is the primary function of a holy priest.
Test of Faith: mixed reviews, I like it though. On a fight like patchwerk, this talent shines.
Divine Providince: More healing again, this time for lesser used spells. Taken for the reduced CD of PoM. at 7 seconds, its rare you will bump into it expiring, especially with 2 piece t7 bonus (1 extra charge)
Guardian Spirit: simply amazing
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What I skipped:Disc:
Unbreakable Will: Stun & silence mechanics, outside of pvp, are rare. When they do come into play, they are meant to be livable through.
Silent Resolve: Healing threat should be a none issue. Either you have 100% of the threat, or not even close to enough to have an issue.
Martydom: PvP talentAbsolution: Not enough dispelling to warrent the mana savings
Improved mana burn: PvP talent
Reflective shield: only damage you take is reflected, PvP talent.

Holy:
Healing Focus - are you getting hit? are you living through the hits? Pushback changes have made this nearly useless for a raiding build, especially when you dont have the points to spare. Situationaly useful if your in an incounter that has pushback. I speced in and out depending if there is a fight like mimiron (pre-nerf).
Holy Reach: take it if you want instead of improved renew or test of faith. Not going to be a big increase though. CoH being smart now targets near by low health members. If you want, 1 point here doesnt hurt much.
Healing prayers: Losing test of faith or similiar amount of increased healing for increased mana. Mana wont be an issue. At least the mana cost of prayer of mending & prayer of healing. Though healing is a huge chunk of mana, there is only 1 fight I use it a lot in.
Lightwell: the day dps promises me that they will use lightwell, is the day I will put a point into it. Anyone after that night that didnt use it will never be healed again.Its a great in theory talent, but its hard enough to remember to use cookies & pots. Now to convince them to remember to run over to lightwell and click it?Anything else is pvp or dps. I actually speced into this for mimiron learning. Macro to announce in raid when dropped. If 2 charges where used each attempt it was a lot.
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Guardian spirit: instant castlets look at this spell in 2 parts.40% increased healing on target. With this on a tank, I have hit over 26k crits on a greater heal.For situation that just went bad, this can help you keep up with healing long enough for dps to drop a mob. Can even out enrage damage for soft enrages of bosses too. There are several boss's in naxx that enrage at certain life percents. This makes healing 20k+ hits that much easier for all healers involved.second effect:If the target dies, GS is instead consumed and the target gains 50% of their lifeA lot of things kill targets.Comming out of a stun to a tank with 5% life. pop GS. start healingBoss enraged: pop GSSlimes in naxx: GS will make you able to run through them.Heigan, someone fell behind, GSI use it on myself so I can avoid moving out of an aoe and keep heals up during fights like loken in HoL.Its also very cheap. less then 300 mana.its a 3min cd. Multiple priests can chain them together.I mostly use it to save a warrior from using shield wall ( or other tanks their abilities on longer CD's) for short but expected burst damage. The glyphed version is even better. If the target doesnt use the on death effect, the CD is reset to 1min.
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Stats:
Spirit: most basic stat you could want.
Spell Power: Once mana becomes less of an issue, Spell Power is what to gem with. I would say, at around 300mp5 casting, unbuffed, spell power overtakes spirit.
Intellect: Your shadow fiend & replenishment is now based off your max mana, so in a raid setting, intellect plays a huge roll. I would rather gem Int then spirit.
Haste: Your health per second goes up, your health per mana stays exactly the same.
Crit: Procs several abilities, besides giving large health spikes.
For Ulduar, I feel:Spirit - 1100Intellect - 1100 Spell power - 2k haste: 300+Crit: 20-25%
Spirit: Once you reach the point of not running out of mana on trash, spirit loses a lot of effectiveness. 4 minutes of fully buffed/replenished chain casting is another target.
Intellect: trumps spirit in a lot of ways. Instantly gives you more mana to work with. Increases crit rate a small amount. The big gains of intellect is with Hymn of hope, Shadow fiend, replenishment.One of the biggest ways to get most your mana pool back, cast shadow fiend then instantly hit hymn of hope. Shadowfiend returns mana based on your max mana. Hymn of hope also returns mana based on the max mana pool, but it increases your mana pool by 25%. So the fiend will return even more man. If un-interrupted for the full channel, and no fiend death, I can get back 80%+ of my mana.
Replenishment & rapture both gain more use based on mana pool.
Haste: For holy, you want about 12-15% haste.For disc, you want 9-12% haste.
Crit: You want about 30% raid buffed. Afte 30%, you start hitting diminishing returns.
I would never gem for crit or haste. They do not scale, and the soft caps are met just with what is included on gear in ulduar.

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After 2 years+ of being alchemy, I dropped it for JC.Why?Because I started to view alch as a reactionary skill. I used my alchemy stone and potions to bring my mana up after it got low. But if I didnt use a potion, the stone lost value.
With JC, I gained 33 more spirit from epic gems. Fair trade for the slight amount of mp5 I lost from mixology (+15 mp5 from flask of mojo)
I also gained the JC owl. It replaced my alch stone. I macroed the owl to my greater heal. I then gain 2300 mana every 5 minutes. I lost 2300 mana from my mana potion + alch stone ability. But I gain that mana now most fights.Then, if the fight is over 5 minutes, a 2nd owl. I now have gained 2300 more mana then alchemy could ever give me.
After hitting ulduar, the trinkets will be replaced, the JC sockets still are BiS. Leatherworking wrist enchants or BS socket in the glove may give you more stats in T9, but do you want to be the priest with BS?
The Tailoring cloak enchants & inscription shoulder enchants are very nice items too.
Herbalism & Mining give no great healing benifit. Skinning gives a small amount of crit.
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Holy Healing batman:
Shield the tank. Especially as disc.
Dont PoM the tank pre pull. THreat goes to you now. (some reports show it just goes no where, but its not reliable).
Dont pre renew the tank. That tick will cause you more headaches then it will heal.
Keep a twitchy finger over fade on a pull. If your going to die to mobs, it will be during the pull or when a CC breaks. Fade should be ready for those time.
Heal who your supposed to: its your job to keep your assignment alive. Not your job to keep others alive.In parties, its your job to keep the tank alive. DPS gets healed when its safe to do it.Its also your job to keep yourself alive. Try to use shields, fade, instant casts or avoid damage.
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Actual healing & the meta healing game:
Im not going to get into basic healing guidelines. By 80, these tend to be understood.
What I want to discuss is the priest healing flow.
Flash heal gets cast in 1.5 seconds.Greater heal, 2.5 seconds.Unhasted of course.for every 6 greater heals, 10 flash heals can be cast.They both have the same crit chanceA crit can cause 2 mana free greater heals OR mana free, instant flash healA crit also can give you 30% hasteA crit will always cause your target to get 25% more armor.Looking at this, flash heal will give better returns then greater heal, for the same amount of time casting (15 seconds). What you do lose is some health on the target. But for most fights, especially with multiple healers, flash heal just procs more abilities in the same amount of time.
Prayer of mending can also crit. When it crits, it can also proc SoL, giving you an instant cast FH.
With 20% crit, CoH will proc SoL 50% of the time. I have used this to force procs.
Prayer of healing should only be casted under hasted conditions (burrowed time or seridipity 3 stack). Other wise your healing will be sniped by faster heals. Best practice, get your haste proc right before the aoe hits and then use it. Most ulduar aoe is predictable.
Basically you want every spell to crit, and every spell to over heal by 1 health.
For disc, fast burst healing mode. PWS (procs burrowed time, 25% spell haste) penance (doesnt consume BT) then FH (comsumes BT). The BT proc will still affect the GCD of FH. In 4 sec (PWS GCD, Pennance (2sec) FH (.75 sec cast), you healed/prevented, with 30% crit, 40k of health. Disc is mostly about managing cast orders.
I also will cast shields during free GCD on myself or others to keep the burrowed time debuff up & to allow them to regain mana if there is aoe, or other OTs (that another disc priest isnt activily healing).
Raid healing on disc can be quit interesting. Its much faster paced then holy healing & your numbers will be very low. You basically want to shield any that either is about to take damage or just took damage. Shield then a BT hasted PoH can be very large health restored/prevented.
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Gear:meta gem: [u]http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41401[/u]Insightful earthsiege diamon,by far, the only meta gem you should use.21 intellect, 400 mana and small amount of crit.45 sec icd on 600 mana proc.No other meta will give you the returns as this one will.
Weapon enchant. 45 spirit - until your mana pool is good63 spell power81 spell power on staff - Spell power after your happy with mana.
Most other enchants come down to the same thing. Spell power or spirit if a spirit one is available.
Haste on cloak. the 10spirit & reduced threat is meh.
Gems:Dont miss gem colors. Never a reason to.
Blue: spiritSpirit & intellect or Spirit & spell power in a blue socket.
Red: Spell power
Yellow: Intellect
Elitiest jerks has spirit = intellect for 1v1. since both gems are +16, take the one that matches.

On epic gems, the red is 23 spell power. Intellect is 30 int. If you take the orange spell power/int and socket into both a red & a yellow gem slot, you get 24 spell power, 30 intellect. 1 free spell power. Wish I knew that before I socketed :(.
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Trinkets:
I like static abilities with click on use regen. I can then tailor the regen to my needs.
Above I mention using the owl macroed to greater heal, for max regenning.I then use my spirit trinket when I can break the five second rule, through clear casting. Since I dont have to worry about random procs lining up to give me back the best return for my mana.
Spell power proc or click trinkets assume you will be casting during the whole proc time. This is pretty rare. As a priest with spirit based regen, you are trying to not cast, not cast as often as possible.
Haste proc trinkets suffer the same issue.
I really liked my troll talisman too. [url=http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37734]http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37734[/url]Nice to catch up with tank healing or even out enrages. Good synergy with multiple healers.
In Ulduar 10m, there is a trinket, 100 spirit, reduction on spell cost by 44 mana. This is the highest regen trinket available to a holy or disc priest.
For my other trinket, I have been using eye of the broodmother. Gives me a large crit chance & stacking to 125 spell power. the 5 stack is easy to regain.

For trinket slots, I like having one throughput trinket (crit/haste/spellpower and constant boost like broodmother) & 1 mana trinket. I will keep others in the bag, but rarely switch them out.

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Potions:using a potion used to be like voting. Pot early and often.Now, since I only get 1, I wait till I am out of mana. whats the difference if I gain 3k mana at 700 mana or 17,000 mana? That potion still allowed the same exact amount of healing to be done.
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Mana fiend:Use it early. The more mana you have, the more you get back.If you can, use it right before a heroism. The returns are much greater when he is on crack.Pop hymn of hope for even more mana goodness right after summoning. Hymn will increase your mana pool, increasing the gains from the mana fiend.
I have now found 20-25% is a good point to reach 100% mana back.
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Glyphs:
Glyph of Flash Heal: Since FH has become the base heal, this glyphs mana savings are pretty high.
Glyph of PW:S: Heals the target for 20% of the shielded amount when cast. I like it.
Glyph of Penance: Must Must Must have for a disc build. Must have. Reduces CD by 2 sec
Glyph of Guardian Spirit: Must have for a holy build. reduces CD to 1min if GS isnt used to save the target.
Glyph of CoH: Increases the targets of CoH by 1. Very large increase in raid healing throughput.

Glyph of levitate: very nice. Levitate across ooze in naxx. First spider boss levitate to avoid fall damage. Use levitate a lot more. Just cancel at a good time. Levitate expiring will cancel a spell cast.
Glyph of shadow fiend: 5% mana returned if he dies to damage. its decent
Glyph of shadow protection - Either this or reduce cost of Fort. I would rather the extra time.
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Dual Gearing for Disc/Holy
A few pieces (namely trinkets & tier pieces) get swapped out, but I try to keep my gear for disc & holy pretty much universal. This means I gear a bit less for spirit then what Holy wants, and a bit heavier for intellect. In the end, I may lose 20 or 30 spell power but I gain a fair amount of int which helps my crit rating, which gives me higher regen in holy & a higher base pool for replenishment effects.
My haste in holy is a bit low, but it is still passable, and I keep a few haste pieces to help it when I swap specs.
I have not found a huge reason to keep a full holy & full disc set. Without min maxing I am able to keep both stats in the desiable ranges. I just have to be a bit more selective on upgrades and hold onto old jewerlery to make up the differences.