Edit: Updated for the changes announced September 29th, about an hour before this went up. Typical…

The last couple of days saw not only the announcement of the much-anticipated (at least around here) Tier 13 Priest gear and set bonuses, but also the more widely anticipated 4.3 PTR patch notes.

So, what’s in store?

The New Outfit

Also available in tasteful blue or red, depending on your raiding tier of choice.

After my initial “WTF!” reaction, I sat and looked at the set for a while and it really grew on me. There’s definitely something Priestly about it, but not the gentle, friendly image of a Priest but instead has us putting our serious face on (literally), filling ourselves with smouldering, barely-restrained power of the Light and getting prepared for the grave business of taking on Deathwing.

How badass it’ll manage to look on a gnome though is anyone’s guess…

Set Bonuses

First, the bonuses themselves:

Healer, 2P — After using Power Infusion or Divine Hymn, the mana cost of your healing spells is reduced by 25% for [10|15 23] sec. (10 sec for Discipline, 15 23 for non-Discipline.)

Healer, 4P — Your Power Word: Shield has a 10% chance to absorb 100% additional damage and increase the mana granted by Rapture by 100%, and the cooldown duration of your Holy Word abilities is decreased increased by 20%.

Source | Changes from the first iteration of the bonuses are crossed out or in bold.

Before we delve in, a public health notice: these are very early ideas, are almost certain to be changed (as indeed it has already), and so on, you know the rest. I don’t usually like dissecting such early information, but it can be interesting to see where the developers’ thinking is on the subject.

So, let’s take a look.

The 2-piece bonus is still a head-scratcher at first glance. It’s been pointed out on EJ and elsewhere that this presents Disc Priests with something of a question: should we be casting Power Infusion on cooldown just for the mana reduction, or should we be saving it for when we actually need the throughput. PI has a split personality already, with the throughput and mana saving components. I find myself mostly using it as a throughput cooldown, popping it when I shift to the AoE-heavy part of a fight; I benefit from the mana reduction too of course, since PoH and PW:S aren’t exactly cheap, but the driver for its use is throughput, not mana.

If you really want to theorycraft the bonus you have to consider each fight, the circumstances in which you might want to use PI as a throughput cooldown and consider the opportunity cost (in mana) of keeping it off cooldown for special occasions rather than auto-casting it; that difference changes the on-paper value of the set bonus. I doubt you’ll decide to skip the bonus in favour of off-set gear because of it, but I do expect the numbers to go up a bit following real-world testing, to give a higher actual-fight MP5 equivalent.

Of course, those high-throughput moments are precisely when I’m likely to be hitting my expensive spells, so in that sense the bonus has some logic to it, it should help me get the best value from it. The Holy bonus doesn’t seem to have the same logic though; Lightwell isn’t really something you save for a sticky moment, I’d have thought you’d use it more or less on cooldown anyway. I can’t think of a better choice of spell off the top of my head though. Lightwell has now been changed to Divine Hymn, which is a better choice – a spell associated with a high-throughput moment where you will be casting big, expensive spells.

The 4-piece bonus for Discipline is, for me, uninspiring really. Every 10 times you cast PW:S (on average), it’ll absorb twice as much and give a double-sized Rapture proc. Now this in itself is a decent bonus: even raid-healing Disc Priests bubble someone at least every 12-15s for Rapture, so as long as you’re using PW:S regularly (probably on a tank to make sure it’s used) you should get the benefit. This may slightly penalise the use of PW:S as a pure raid-healing spell though, because a larger bubble is less likely to be totally consumed and possibly end up preventing what might otherwise have turned into a Rapture proc. Raid healers might think twice depending on their typical usage of PW:S, but for tank-healing it’s a solid bonus.

My problem is that in essence it’s a slightly unreliable but passive throughput and regen boost. I don’t object to fire-and-forget boosts, that’s what my Cauterising Flame is after all, but they don’t excite me much when I can’t see them except on the meters.

Aesthetics aside it’s a good bonus for a tank healer, and it’d be decent even for a raid healer because PW:S is fairly sparsely used anyway I’d just hoped for something a bit more fun.The 2-piece seems designed either to take advantage of or to encourage a more frequent use of Power Infusion and Divine Hymn, while the 4-piece is a simple output and regen boost as long as you use PW:S regularly.

(Incidentally, having got my 4-piece last week I had enormous fun freaking my tanks out on our next week’s Rag attempts by putting fiery circles near their feet. I’m not sure who thought of the bonus animation, but they have a wicked streak!)

The Patch

As usual, very little for Priests in the patch notes, although what there is is definitely worth a look:

Divine Hymn now affects 5 targets, up from 3.

Discipline
Atonement will now account for the target enemy’s combat reach when calculating proper range, enabling it to be used on large creatures such as Ragnaros and Ala’kir.
Divine Aegis has a new spell effect.

Holy
Spirit of Redemption has been rebuilt to address a few functionality issues and make it more responsive. Spirit of Redemption otherwise remains unchanged.
State of Mind has been redesigned and is now called Heavenly Voice. Heavenly Voice increases the healing done by Divine Hymn by 50/100%, and reduces the cooldown of Divine Hymn by 2.5/5 minutes.

Glyphs
Glyph of Circle of Healing now also increases the mana cost of Circle of Healing by 20%.

Source

For Disc, the big change of course is the new Divine Aegis bubble!

Ahem. Yes, unfortunately when I logged into the PTR client today it looked exactly the same as the PW:S graphic still. I’ll keep you posted if it changes though.

OK, more seriously, the Atonement change. Finally, two tiers later, Atonement works off the boss’s hitbox rather than the boss’s centre. I presume there must have been something big and scary and technical preventing this change from making it in earlier, or perhaps Ragnaros brought it to a head in a way that Al’Akir didn’t manage to. Anyway, good news.

Finally, a small buff to Divine Hymn for all Priests, with it healing 5 targets rather than 3. That should help its throughput for both specs, although Holy gets a much improved version as their new raid cooldown: double the healing and a 3-minute cooldown means Holy has its own Tranquility to play with. Now my initial reaction was (of course) to get all angsty and bitter, but actually there have been several fights where I’ve felt I could have been more comfortable as Holy but ended up muddling through as Disc because of the combination of PW:Barrier and an AoE phase. Now that Holy gets a powerful raid cooldown of its own the dual-spec option opens right back up again, and that can only be a good thing for the class. It’s no nerf to Disc, just a rebalancing of the specs in the sorts of bursty fights where Disc currently dominates because of a single spell. GC agrees.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Patch Preparation
• Heroic Ultraxion
• Dragon Soul Nerfs

Blizzard recently put out a call to the community for feedback on the classes, presumably with a view towards setting the direction for the next expansion and beyond.

There have been some great posts already for the Priest class, and the one thing that’s struck me from reading the posts from healers of all stripes is just how much of a range of opinion there is out there. In this spirit, here’s my two penn’orth!

What type of content do you focus on? [PvE/PvP/Both]

PvE, very strongly. I might wander into AV from time to time, but that’s really it for PvP.

If PvE, what type of PvE? [Heroics/Raids/Other]

Raids primarily. I’m not in server-first guilds, but I’ve generally worked my way through heroic modes to some extent.

If PvP, what type of PvP? [Arenas, BGs, Rated BGs]

N/A

What are your biggest quality-of-life issues? For instance, no longer requiring ammo could be considered a quality-of-life improvement for hunters.

The 30-yard range on our Holy spells (HF, Smite, Penance). It just seems a bit outmoded now, especially given that the Atonement spec exists and those aren’t spells we only use while soloing.

The other big thing that would make my life easier is better damage when soloing, or not giving mobs ever-increasing health pools. I don’t have a third spec for Shadow, nor do I particularly want to spec that way. It’s way better than it was in the TBC days, but places like the underground areas in Tol Barad with high HP mobs and very fast respawn meant I was almost unable to get out of combat down there.

Otherwise it’s little things like a crafted wand to go with every other class’s crafted relics (although the VP wand meant that wasn’t so much of a problem in T12, so perhaps T11 was an oversight).

Oh, final one: please can we have more undead mobs to CC? Not vital ones in boss encounters, I understand about bring the player not the class and all that, but putting an undead or two in trash packs would give us some reason to use Shackle again. You could make me extra happy by making the Glyph of Divine Accuracy affect Shackle too.

What makes playing your class more fun?

For me it’s really about shifting gears and making us use more of our abilities. Doing the same thing all fight can be dull, but a fight or raid where you can be on tanks for a while, then on the raid for a while, and then on quick triage for another period keeps me engaged. Priests have a lot of versatility and we make excellent “float” healers, it always feels good to feel like we’re using that skill set.

That versatility extends to gear as well. I feel that of all the classes we have the least constraints on stat choices. On the one hand it’s been weird in this expansion not to be stacking one stat exclusively, it’s made gearing a bit more complicated, but on the other hand it’s been really good to be able to pick and choose gear based on the fights to increase performance for a given situation, rather than having it pre-determined for everything.

We also have good utility, with tank cooldowns in both specs, and Discipline having an additional raid cooldown and Power Infusion to play with. I play to help the team, so having special moves to make the most of really works for me.

I like playing Discipline specifically because it feels more proactive than something like a Paladin or Shaman (I may be grossly misjudging these classes!); it feels like more of a cerebral challenge to predict where you’ll be needed and get prevention in place, rather than reacting quickly after the fact. You need both styles within a raid, and I like the interplay between them.
(On that subject I like the control that party-based PoH gives for proactive damage prevention, and I hope that doesn’t go down the smart-heal road).

What makes playing your class less fun?

Fights like Ragnaros where the mechanics prevent Atonement from working (the tanks can’t be within 15 yards of Rag without being in the lava) are a disappointment for me. Atonement isn’t always appropriate, but I do feel that it should be up to us to decide that or find it out.

Something else that makes playing a Priest less fun is Divine Hymn having an 8-minute cooldown and feeling relatively weak, especially when compared to Druids using Tranquility every 3 minutes and hitting more targets for about the same each. I appreciate that Druids don’t have any other raid cooldown so I can see why Tranq is where it is, but that doesn’t stop DH from feeling underpowered all the same when it is (inevitably) compared side-by-side, or even compared against just throwing Flash Heals out there. The +10% healing buff is nice though and can be used to good effect.

I suppose the other thing that bothers me is the lack of Minor Glyph options for me. As a raider my Shadow Protection doesn’t tend to run out (and it’s not a big deal if it does), so my third Minor tends to be Shadowfiend, which just doesn’t seem to every get used. Perhaps there’s room for more fun options like model changes for the Shadowfiend, tweaking the Archangel wings, or more practical ones like reducing the mana cost of Shadow Protection as well.

How do you feel about your “rotation”? (Rotation is the accepted order in which abilities are used to maximum efficiency.)

I think that Priests are in a pretty good place. We have a tool for most situations, and we don’t have too fixed a rotation to obsess over although we can settle into something approaching a rotation when we need a chance to think.

I like the interplay with Strength of Soul and direct heals allowing us to use our PW:S more often. Although I do find that the lowered Weakened Soul duration can take a while to reach my end, to the point where I often don’t cast a PW:S after lowering the WS duration to zero because I’ll just be told I can’t do that yet, which negates a lot of the value of the talent in a PW:S, Penance, Heal, Heal, PW:S type rotation. I wonder if it’s possible to fix that at all though, given the client-server nature of the game.

I’m glad there’s not much in the way of procs to watch out for, at least for Discipline, which allows me to prepare and think about my next move instead of switching around to react to some thing new, or generally having my flow interrupted.

What’s on your wish list for your class?

Really the things mentioned above. I don’t feel we’re really missing anything in particular because we have such strong versatility, it’s more a matter of tweaking what we have.

My top priorities would probably be, in no particular order:

• More damage or less tank-like mobs to help the soloing/daily-completing process without requiring a respec to Shadow
• Longer range on Smite and Holy Fire (and Penance if possible) and no more bosses that render Atonement more or less automatically ineffective due to range.
• Something to make Divine Hymn feel like it packs a bit more of a punch when used in a tight spot
• Something to Shackle every now and then!

What spells do you use the least?

From my healing toolbox, Renew, probably. It just doesn’t compare favourably enough in HPM terms to the alternatives, even compared to Flash Heal (Renew: 7304 HPCast, 3.09 HPM; FH: 11627 HPS, 2.78 HPM in my gear), to make it a go-to spell for Discipline, and there aren’t enough talents points spare to buff it enough to make it worthwhile. I’d use it more as a tank heal if it could auto-refresh like Chakra: Serenity makes it do for Holy.

Other than that, Mind Control, Mind Vision, Mind Soothe and Fear Ward. These are all situational. Fear Ward hasn’t been much use lately because of a lack of fearing mechanics on bosses, which might be something to pass to the designers to look into. I really do love the quirky functionality of Mind Vision and Mind Soothe though, they’re just not especially raid-relevant, although I did read a suggestion elsewhere to add an enrage dispel to Mind Soothe which I thought was a great idea, assuming there’s a need or desire to spread that around any more.

Possibly Related Posts:

• 4.3 Quick Guide for Discipline Priests
• The (Not So) Short Guide to Discipline 4.1
• Discipline 4.0.1 Guide

A thought occurred to me this evening while responding to comments on my gimmicks post: I write some of my best material in comments, rather in the posts themselves.

It seems odd to me. I mean, I typically draft and redraft posts, sit on them for days, remove great swathes and so on, all with the aim of hitting “Publish” on a piece of (hopefully) well-formed and well-reasoned prose. When replying to comments, on the other hand, I tend to let my thoughts flow more freely and don’t usually spend too much time on editing.

I think the reason why I personally feel I write better in comments is that I’m responding to something specific, which focuses my mind and forces me to really examine my thoughts and opinions in one particular light. When I’m writing the initial post I can find myself trying to corral multiple thoughts on a given subject down into some sort of coherent whole, sometimes in quite a short space of time, and sometimes there are inconsistencies and things I’m not 100% settled on that make it through.

Commenters are very good at spotting those, as well as throwing new thoughts into the mix that help crystallise things for me. Comments can make you ask “Did I mean to say that?”‘ or “How could I express that more clearly?”, as well as thinking “I really hadn’t considered that side of it before”. All of which makes for a better blogger.

Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying to blog readers that their comments are extremely valued, much appreciated and a hugely important part of the process, and to bloggers to embrace the dialogue that you can have with commenters even if they don’t share your point of view.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Knock, knock!
• [Cataclysm Beta] I’m in the beta!
• Beginnings

Blatantly stealing a great idea, and if I could remember where I’ve seen this done before I’d give proper credit to the person who inspired me!

I thought I’d take a look through the more popular search terms that have brought people to my blog recently, and hopefully highlight some of the answers I have buried away in obscure corners of the site, or provide answers to questions I’ve not addressed directly before.

Disc Priest Stat Priority

I got a lot of searches for this or similar questions. I’m not sure there is a short answer to this one, other than “it depends on what you’re doing”. It really does depend on what you’re doing, whether it’s tank healing, raid healing, 10-mans or 25-mans.

In 25-man raids I was typically assigned to raid healing, and for that I really wanted Mastery and Haste since my rotation was generally PoH-heavy with PW:S interspersed as dictated by my mana. In 10-man raids where I’m assigned to a tank I still want Haste so I don’t panic quite so much at the enormous gaps between heals, but I prefer Crit over Mastery because apparently (as far as my reading seems to be telling me, although I do want to follow this up) my use of Divine Aegis is lower as a single-target healer and getting more crits on all my heals (and the boosted DA shields that come with them) is more valuable than boosting the DA portion directly.

The best advice I’ve read, and I happen to agree with it based on my gut feeling, is to carry Spirit on as many pieces as you can since it’s still our best secondary stat; after that don’t be afraid to grab Haste where you can regardless of your role and raid size until you feel comfortable with your cast speed, but focus on stacking either Mastery for a raid healer or Crit for a tank healer.

This gives the rough priority: Intellect -> Spirit -> Crit (tank) = Mastery (raid) -> Haste.

However, the above priority absolutely is not set in stone. If you’re feeling like you’re slow to react and it’s causing you problems, then by all means grab some more Haste. I know I’ve felt sluggish on some encounters so I’ve gemmed a couple of Reckless Ember Topaz and reforged some of my remaining Mastery to Haste instead of Crit. Especially with reforging available you can try different combinations and see what works for you, your playstyle and your raid’s needs.

[Strength of Soul] vs [Train of Thought]

An interesting question. I currently have a few specs that I use, the main ones are Archangel specs and they differ in their application and in whether or not they take SoS and ToT.

If I’m tank healing I tend to use a 32/8/1 tank-healing spec which takes both Strength of Soul and Train of Thought. ToT is great when using Greater Heal a lot, because I have Inner Focus bound to GH and PoH so I use it every cooldown and it saves a lot of mana. SoS is great in this spec to allow me to maximise my Rapture returns by making sure to throw a direct heal on the tank every 12s, or throw shields on more frequently for higher throughput.

If I’m more involved in raid healing I drop SoS in favour of points in either Soul Warding or Darkness since I don’t cast many direct heals, but although the benefit is fairly small I’ll generally keep ToT in there. I like the reduced Penance cooldown I get from spending time Smiting either to get and keep Evangelism up or just to heal the melee or the tanks during slower phases.

Cata Haste Hots

My very old post from the Cataclysm Beta about how haste affects HoTs, DoTs and some channels (not Penance), is still the most visited page on my blog on a day-by-day basis.

Here’s the summary version, but I’d invite you to read the original post if you want to understand the theory, it’s still as true today as when I wrote it back in the day.

• The total duration of your HoT, DoT or channel does initially reduce with haste as the tick intervals get shorter.
• When you get enough haste to fit an extra half-tick into the nominal duration you get given a whole extra tick and the duration jumps up to it’s nominal duration plus half a tick.
• If you cast a HoT while under a haste effect, such as Borrowed Time, all your ticks will be hasted, not just the ones that go off while the buff is active. However, the spell tooltip and the HoT buff you get both (misleadingly) update as soon as the haste effect fades.
• Haste rating per 1% Haste = 128.11

So for a 12s Renew with 3s ticks, you get an extra tick when you get enough haste to bring the duration down to 10.5s (i.e. 12s – 3.0s/2), and the duration jumps up to 13.5s (i.e. 12s + 3.0s/2), and you get 5 ticks instead of 4.

The haste points to get an extra tick for each HoT are:

As to whether a given breakpoint is worth going for or not, that’s a question for your class guides to answer. HPS increases linearly with haste, there’s no jumps there; the advantage is that a longer HoT needs refreshing less often, leaving you with an extra GCD or even two to do something else, and less mana required to keep the HoT refreshed.

Vuhdo Smite Macro Hostile Target

Quite a few people are looking for macros for Smite macros. I did post a few in my Smite Healing Tips post. There’s information there on making various Smite macros, from one which will Smite your target (if it’s hostile) or your target’s target (if it’s friendly, for example a tank), through a macro which will Smite your focus or let you make your target your new focus and Smite that if you press a modifier key, to a macro which will find something hostile in front of you and let you Smite it until it’s dead, then pick something else automatically.

I also included a section in there about how I set up VuhDo to show targetoftarget for the Main Tanks and bound Smite to my hostile left-click for hassle-free Smiting from the raidframes.

I’m working up to doing a UI post soon, just as soon as I’m happy enough with my UI to show it off. I’ve been saying that for at least a year though, so don’t hold your breath!

Cata Disc Priest Guide 4.1

I’ll assume this searcher was a bit confused, since Rage of the Firelands has been out for several months now.

Anyway, I don’t have a current (4.2) guide up at the moment. The closest I have is my old 4.1 guide. There’s not much that’s changed since then, but it’s not been updated since April so use with caution. An updated Discipline how-to is on my list of things to do, but I really can’t give any sort of definitive timeline.

In the meantime, by way of 4.2 disc priest guides, I’d recommend Zelmaru’s 4.2 guide or the 4.2 disc guide at Manaflask.

Penance Not Turn Me

You probably want this post about stopping Penance turning your camera.

Unfortunately, as Zinn pointed out in the comments, there’s no way to stop Penance actually turning your character. I presume this is because the developers aren’t willing to let Penance be cast while facing any direction on a hostile target, but they do want it to be castable in any direction on a friendly, and there’s some limitation in the tech that means the only way to implement two rules for a single spell was to make it turn you to face your target when that target is friendly.

It is a pain, for example when running out of fire you have to make extra sure that you’re definitely facing the way you think you’re facing after Penancing a team-mate or you might get a big surprise. Maybe 5.0 will fix it…

Healing Ascendant Council

This, and the rest of my mostly incomplete and horribly outdated Cataclysm raid guides can be found in the Cataclysm raid strategies section in the menu above.

I may, now I have more inclination to write them, get around to posting some more up-to-date guides, although I suspect I won’t bother for Firelands since other people have got that covered.

At this point I’ll throw out a recommendation for Beru’s healing video guides, which mostly cover heroic modes. I figure you’ve already seen the basics over at Tankspot, Icy Veins, Learn to Raid or your site of choice. Beru writes the Falling Leaves and Wings Druid/healing blog, but although there’s a Druid slant to them the guides are useful to any healing class.

And finally…

I Can’t Type h

Amazingly, not one but two people searched for this. We’ll leave aside the apparent paradox of using the letter “h” in a search about not being able to type “h”. We’ll assume that these people have used a different computer to search and aren’t suffering from either an inability to recognise certain letters or a fear of typing them.

My advice to you folks would be twofold: First, check for the presence of dirt/crumbs/fingernail clippings/jam/hair/insects trapped under your “h” key and preventing you from pressing it down. I use one of those “air duster” cans to blast this sort of stuff out, but a vacuum cleaner or just your own breath will work.

If that doesn’t shift it, maybe your keyboard really is just wearing out. If you’ve worn out your “h” key specifically, then maybe you should take less damage!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Atonement, or Not Atonement?
• 4.3 Quick Guide for Discipline Priests
• The First Cataclysm Raid

I’ve read a few posts recently talking about so-called “gimmick fights”, and the alleged abundance thereof in Cataclysm raiding and Firelands in particular (as a sign of the decline of design standards in WoW, the coming of the End Times, that sort of thing).

Now I’m actually enjoying most of the Firelands fights (with the previously-noted exception of Lord Rhyolith) so reading these posts got me thinking about my feelings on the fight mechanics in the Firelands.

To start with, I wanted to think about when I’d object to a gimmick fight. My personal definition of a bad gimmick fight would be one where the fight revolves around one specific mechanic that will inevitably make or break the raid and that gets handled by a small subset of the raid; the implication being that the remainder of the raid is left with a fairly mundane and ultimately unmemorable encounter. If you’re the one the gimmick is aimed at, it’s great; otherwise, well, maybe the next one will do it for you instead.

Let’s look at the fights (that I’ve done) in turn, in the light of that definition:

• Beth’tilac – Well, you do split the raid up, and only a couple of people get to climb the web to the upper level, but once you’re up there you’re pretty much just tanking/healing/DPSing while not standing in the fire or falling down the hole. I actually think the group downstairs has a more interesting time of it. Personally I don’t mind the climbing-onto-the-web aspect because it’s essentially just two tanks dealing with multiple bosses in separate locations, and we’ve seen that in a great many encounters over the years. And if you happen to lose one of the web people, you can replace them, it’s not an inevitable wipe; I see this as analogous to a player going LD in any other fight.
• Shannox – The trick here is getting Riplimb trapped in one of the crystal traps Shannox puts down. Or you could slow him instead, so the tank has time to lose his stacks while Riplimb is running in slow-motion back to the boss. One of the tanks does have a specific trick that can make things easier, but the whole fight doesn’t revolve around that mechanic alone, so I’m not sure I think this is a bad gimmick fight either. It’s just a mechanic like kiting or CC.
• Rhyolith – I’ve talked about him before, I think this one is a gimmick fight that I object to. It’s a pretty pedestrian (/rimshot!) fight apart from the driving, and if your raid lacks awareness or a strong voice directing things you can easily be wiped by getting it wrong. Perhaps it’s my perspective as a healer, but if the steering goes well the encounter is really dull, while if the steering goes wrong it’s practically unhealable, so the course of the fight is more or less out of my hands.
• Baleroc – Definitely a fight with a strong mechanic to focus on, although not in the negative sense where only a few people are participating. At least on 10-man, where almost the entire raid is involved in handling the various mechanics: tank swaps, healer stacks, DPS positioning to take the crystals. I’d class this as a legitimate mechanic, akin to passing around the plague on Putricide.
• Alysrazor – I’d be very reluctant to write this off as a “gimmick fight” simply because of the guy in the air. Sure, it’s important that you have someone who can do a good job up there, so in that sense the fight hinges on the gimmick, but there’s a lot more going on than just that, at least for the tanks and healers. And you can easily replace the guy up there if he dies mid-fight, it’s not an insta-wipe.
• Majordomo – Definitely not a bad gimmick fight in my book. The whole raid is involved with the positioning and debuffs, there’s no one special person with a special job.

You know when you say a word so many times that it seems to lose its meaning? Just me? OK…

Anyway, what I’d draw out from the list above is that whether a fight is hopelessly gimmicky or mechanically interesting depends very much on how you define the term, and maybe on your perspective and role. Quoting Shintar:

It’s just that it seems to me that unless you get to be the special snowflake to handle the boss’s unique mechanic, most of them aren’t really all that interesting… or maybe it’s just a healer thing.

Well, there’s a couple of things I’d say to that. Firstly, I think that a lot of this feeling comes about as a result of the evolution of encounter design and the player base to the point where “don’t stand in the bad” and “switch to adds” are neglected as mechanics, they’re just baseline aspects of a fight. So an encounter with adds, Bad Stuff on the ground and a funky mechanic is regarded as having a single point of interest for the raid rather than three. Wind back the clock to the ‘glory days’ of Vanilla or TBC and a lot more of the fights are of the simple “stay out of the bad” and “switch to adds” type.

What’s more, look at the list as a whole and you’ll see that the fun stuff is distributed across the group, with healers, tanks and DPS players all getting their share of fun mechanics to play with. As long as you’re not actually bored while waiting for ‘your fight’, then I think the balance is OK. Think about the alternatives: give everyone a special job on every fight and the learning curve could be pretty brutal; on heroic sure, go wild, but at least on normal mode I think you need to limit the novelty a bit. Or you could remove the gimmicks again, but I think there’d be even more complaints about that. At least these days you get to choose who learns to handle the gimmicks too, it’s not random.

For me, the issue of “gimmick fights” comes down to striking a balance: if everyone else is just left to tank and spank and it makes no difference at all if one person fails at their special job (Teron Gorefiend or heroic Anub’Arak, for example), I can see that there might be a problem with the design (although actually I feel that on heroic even these sorts of gimmicks are fair game); but speaking for myself I’m fine with a “gimmick fight” if the rest of the raid has a significant part to play as well (think back to Valithria Dreamwalker – sure, if your healers sucked really badly you wouldn’t win, but you could have plenty of influence on the outcome from outside too), and the spotlight gets spread around enough. None of the fights on this list are tank-and-spank-while-someone-else-does-the-killing type affairs.

Ultimately though, whether you get along with a particular encounter design paradigm is a personal thing and people have a right to prefer different types of fights; ideally there would be a good mix of encounters with new gimmicks and more traditional mechanics so that everyone can find something to love. Let’s hope the final raid in 4.3 lives up to everyone’s hopes.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Heroic Firelands