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

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.

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• Heroic Firelands

I know I’m three months late, but in the last two weeks I finally took my first steps into the Firelands raid and killed my first few Tier 12 bosses. After hearing about the encounters from blogs, podcasts and former guildmates, and having been teased by the Molten Front dailies for those three months, I was itching to see what all the fuss was about.

So, was it worth the wait? Absolutely!

What I Love

The first thing I loved was zoning in and just panning across the wide open scene laid out in front of me; I was only a little disappointed that the view distance slider wouldn’t go that little bit further! This is a great way to imbue a raid with a real grandiosity and sense of size, and having hordes of trash as far as the eye can see, all standing between you and the Sulfuron Keep, sets the scene for a small band of intrepid adventurers faced with cutting their way through endless waves of enemies to reach the gates of the fortress. Of course, as efficiency-conscious raiders we immediately dispelled that particular epic feeling by proceeding to sneak around the edge, taking out the absolute bare minimum number of mobs necessary, but it looked great on zone-in, and that’s what counts, right?

Indoor raids can be fun too, but it’s tricky to give them a sense of real size. Tempest Keep, for example, felt pretty big, so bit that it had a giant phoenix flying around in the central atrium. The Bastion of Twilight, on the other hand, has a fairly similar layout but somehow never managed to feel properly spacious to me, Which is odd, because there are no fewer than three enormous flying things flapping around in there.
Personally I put it down to view distance: TK and SSC had good long lines of sight, you could look out across the water or down the long corridors; BoT on the other hand has a lot of short, narrow corridors with kinks in them that stop you from really getting a sense of size.

Enough about scenery! What about the bosses?

I really like Alysrazor as a fight. Like Nefarian from the last tier, I love it because it’s got a bit of everything thrown in: there’s tank-heavy phases when the Hatchlings are up, raid-heavy phases when she’s recharging and casting Blazing Buffet at the raid, and a nice awareness check in the middle with the tornadoes. The encounter is also pretty well-paced, so that I never feel that any one phase is dragging on or becoming repetitive, while never feeling like I’m being whisked along quicker than I can switch gears and adjust. Except maybe the first couple of pulls where I got roasted by a worm, clawed by Alysrazor and then seared by more than one tornado, but who can honestly say that wasn’t their experience too? As long as it becomes manageable once we’ve had a couple of pulls and worked out what’s going on, I’m fine with being a bit bewildered on the first try.

I’m also pleased to see a few more coordination checks being introduced in Majordomo Staghelm and Baleroc. I’m always drawn to these sorts of encounters, there’s something satisfying about a team working in harmony. I wouldn’t quite describe us as “balletic”, but it’s still a great feeling when it all comes together and we get that kill.

Overall, the Firelands bosses seem to me to do a decent job of checking the skills you’re going to need to combine to take on Ragnaros successfully: quickly reacting to Bad Stuff at your feet (Shannox), Bad Stuff coming at you (Rhyolith), dealing with incoming adds (Beth’tilac) and watching your debuffs (Majordomo Staghelm). It’s a key feature of the WoW encounter design for the trash to teach you about the tricks the bosses use, and the earlier bosses in turn teach you about the later bosses.

Oh yeah, and the bridge is amazing! Apologies if you’ve not got to Majordomo Staghelm yet, I know I should throw in a spoiler alert, but I’ll just say that SSC has been eclipsed in my eyes in this regard. If you’ve seen it you’ll know what I mean, and if you haven’t then you really need to give your guild a kick up the backside, because getting to 5/7 is worth it for this alone!

What I’m Less Keen On

I’m going to come right out and say it: loot. I mean, I understand why there’s little to no spirit cloth within the Firelands, I understand that I’m not supposed to be able to get spirit on absolutely everything and that I’ll end up with a mixed bag of drops, VP items, rep rewards and those oh-so-tasty crafted boots and do just fine, but the problem with offloading so much of the loot table to alternative sources is the feeling of wastefulness when, picking an example entirely at random (!), a cloak drops and no one wants it because everyone and their dog has already got the one from becoming friendly with the Avengers of Hyjal.
Thinking about it, I get that removing every slot with alternative gearing routes from the loot tables would leave them pretty sparse, and I can certainly see the advantage of giving people options, especially when a lucky drop could save you a couple of weeks of VP farming or a fortune on the AH, so I suppose my problem is really just with giving competitive gear for very low rep levels. I’d have preferred the friendly and honoured rep rewards to be 365, since you can reach honoured pretty quickly and without killing any bosses, and saved the 378 items for those who have spent a few weeks farming without getting the drop they were hoping for. Basically, give them a similar time to acquisition as the VP items.

I’ll throw in an honourable mention for another pet niggle of mine: invisible obstacles. It’s probably just me and my screen setup, but some of the terrain in the Firelands is very dark and there’s a couple of places, one of which is on the ramp down from the entrance, where there’s vertical spikes that I always seem to run into and end up feeling slightly silly while my mount gets in some treadmill time. I just can’t see them, the contrast isn’t high enough against the rest of the terrain.

The final thing I’m not thrilled with? I’m not that taken with Lord Rhyolith. I think it’s a combination of the fact that it’s more of a DPS-focused fight and that he’s apparently been nerfed a fair bit, but I just don’t find that much to hold my interest in the encounter. Healing throughout the first phase is extremely straightforward with little damage to worry about (and what there is is mostly people standing in the bad, which never feels great to heal) and the interesting final phase, where you might expect the opportunity to use personal cooldowns and throw up a Power Word: Barrier, is over so quickly and does so little actual damage that it leaves a really anticlimactic feeling behind.

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When I wrote my guide to 4.1.0, I commented that most Priests wouldn’t really notice the change because we weren’t blanketing the raid before. This is true as far as end-game raiding in concerned, but as I’ve been levelling my new Priest through the 80s I’ve found myself becoming very aware of the change.
Here we have a classic example of a change to end-game balance having enormous knock-on effects elsewhere in the game.

Solo Shielding

On the positive side, in most of the levelling content game you can bubble yourself and be all but invulnerable against modest-sized groups of mobs; they just can’t break through your bubble. The downside of that is that while previously they had 30s to achieve this, and usually got there eventually, now they only have 15s and quite often they don’t. Every PW:S you cast on yourself costs a ton of mana, and there’s no Rapture to recoup some of that very high cost.

You can of course pull larger groups, but if you do then you run the risk that they will break the bubble and then make short work of you before you can recast it, since by definition if the bubble breaks early then you’re still afflicted by Weakened Soul and can’t re-shield yourself. The balance here can be quite delicate.

So that’s problem number one, shielding while solo is extremely mana-inefficient, and no one likes drinking!

Dungeon Shielding

The next problem comes when you join a dungeon group. There’s two problems here.

First, you have the issue of mobs not having time to break the shield before it fades as described above, which means that most packs are just not capable of giving you any Rapture returns. This makes shielding tanks in instances, especially those before the mid-80s, extremely inefficient and expensive, and you end up having to avoid it.
I have no problem with changing and adapting your healing style as you level in principle, but I’m usually thinking about adding in new spells as you learn them; this is training people out of using a bread and butter spell that’s a standard part of healing at 85, and that just feels wrong to me.

The other problem arises when you try and pre-shield your tank for a pull. You want to do this because it’s a great way of protecting him from the big up-front hit when the mobs all notice him, and stops you getting aggro immediately when your first heal or shield lands in combat. However 15s, while it sounds like a large window, is very easy for a tank to squander; 30s is a lot more reasonable. A shield expiring a few seconds after the tank pulls is a waste of mana, certainly isn’t going to proc Rapture, and when you recast you’re back where you started in terms of threat.

Solutions?

Let’s be clear, I agree with the change in raids at 85, and I accept that that’s where Blizzard have to focus their efforts to balance things. I do think this is one of many really good examples of unintended consequences, where a perfectly reasonable change to one area of the game causes problems elsewhere. (For more, see PvP!)

Unfortunately I don’t have a simple solution. You could attack the problem in multiple ways, but none will solve things completely.

You could make mobs deal more damage, but then you’d need to change every other class’s damage and healing numbers to compensate, either to boost self-healing or to allow them to kill the mob quicker.

A better approach might be to change the spell: You could have a longer duration for most of the game, and then shorten it progressively as you approach 85; Or you could come at it from the other side and weaken the bubble at lower levels, scaling it up to full strength as you get to 85.
You’d have a huge backlash in the community though, whichever option you chose, and you still have the problem of a spell which changes form dramatically as you level up. Perhaps that’s acceptable as long as the usage remains consistent, but I think there’s a risk of confusing players with a mechanic like this.

Really I’m out of ideas at the moment. I’d be interested in what people think could be a solution to this little issue.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Getting Started As A Healer
• State of the Cataclysm
• Cataclys-meme

When I first came across this week’s Blog Azeroth Shared Topic from Amaranth of Specced for Drama I was a little puzzled by the question: “What is your favorite profession and why?”. I mean, as a progression raider it doesn’t matter what my “favourite” profession is, I simply take what benefits me most. There’s no emotion involved, right?

Well then I thought about the question a bit more and realised that actually I do have an answer to the question. Two, in fact.

Tailoring

Malevica is a tailor, and has been since I rolled her back in 2007. Even when Tailoring went through its darkest days in early Wrath (Darkglow wasn’t worth much and they’d just taken away the idea of BoP crafted epics) she didn’t drop it and pick up Jewelcrafting or Enchanting like every raider worth her salt ought to. Here’s the point: I’d grown attached to it!

Tailoring had become a sort of underdog in my mind, and while I was the only tailor in my guild I felt like I was keeping something alive, keeping the faith somehow. I had to believe that one day it might be improved again and I’d be vindicated in my steadfastness. Plus, I didn’t want to waste the hundreds, maybe thousands of stacks of cloth that I’d sunk into it. Now, of course, Tailoring is the pick of the crop for most, if not all, caster classes.

Malevica is a tailor today, and the new baby Priest I’ve recently rolled on a fresh server is also a tailor. So I’d say it’s a good candidate for my favourite profession, if for unconventional reasons!

Engineering

I know it’s probably an obvious pick but Engineering is still, for me, the most fun profession in the game.

It’s been watered down a bit in recent times to keep its measurable benefits in line with the other professions, but there’s still plenty of interest to be had. Parachutes and rocket boots and the Cardboard Assassin make for a lot of fun as well as providing utility to your team. You also get the Flying Machine mounts and the convenience of Jeeves and MOLL-E when you’re out in the world.

It’s a shame that the pets and Mechano-Hog were made BoE, because they were great ways to distinguish yourself as an engineer, but I can definitely understand the desire to give engineers an income stream. It’s still a very expensive profession to level in a hurry, but I doubt you’ll regret it!

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