Well, OK, I do enjoy topping the meters from time to time when I really get into my groove or a fight seems tailor-made to a Priest’s healing style (I’m looking at you, Atramedes and Nefarian!), that’s just natural.

What I’m talking about is the conflict between being a big fish in a small pond and being a small fish in a large pond.

Fish?

It’s a metaphor.

As I’ve progressed through this game, the average skill and potential of the guilds I’ve been in has tended to improve each time, from the guild where the Maiden of Virtue was an insurmountable challenge to becoming stuck at Kael’Thas (twice) and finally to my present guild.

In each of my previous guilds (not this one!), I’ve eventually found myself topping the meters on a consistent basis, either as a damage-dealer or healer. Now I know that meters suck, healing meters in particular, that they don’t tell the whole story and that there’s more to a player than their ranking. So don’t write in! Just consider it a shorthand for “performance”, OK?

The point is, eventually you may simply outgrow your guild, you become the big fish in your guild’s small pond, and it may well be time to consider moving on.

What’s wrong with being the big fish?

If you’re happy where you are, then stay where you are. But there are some pitfalls to being the big fish.

Frustrated potential – This is probably the most significant problem you’ll find, sooner or later. If the rest of your guild is ‘lagging behind’ you in terms of performance, then you might not be experiencing the level of content, with all its associated challenges, that you really need to give you a truly fulfilling gaming experience.

This is a common source of friction in just about all raiding teams, and is very difficult for leadership to manage because the solutions take time, or might mean an unacceptable compromise on principles. You can’t simply “kick the bads and recruit better players” (because they might not want to join you, or their desires and needs might conflict with the guild’s founding principles) and nor can you expect a Hollywood-style inspirational speech (and certainly not a rant) to instantly boost your raid’s DPS output by 30%.

Usually a move to a more progressed guild is the eventual outcome. If you’re willing to stick with the guild though and work patiently with your guildies to develop their skills and inspire them to greater things, you may earn yourself a lot of respect and some friends for life.

No yardstick – The question every raider should be asking themselves is: “how am I doing”, followed by: “how can I do better”. When you’re in a situation where you have little or no competition, you will struggle to answer those questions and that can easily lead to stagnation.

Accepting that healing meters on their own don’t tell the whole story (or damage meters, to a lesser extent), they can at least be an indication of how you’re doing as a raider. If you’re always head and shoulders ahead of your classmate and it can’t be put down to assignments or fight mechanics, you have no immediate pressure to improve, nor any inspiration to derive from them.

This one can be a slow-burner, but eventually you will probably begin to feel like you want to feel a challenge to hone your skills, and to have someone to look up to and emulate.

The pressure to attend – While it might be great to be your team’s all-star player, particularly in smaller teams your presence might be make-or-break for success in a particular fight; or at least you might have that impression. Either way, that can lead to a strong sense of obligation to be at every raid.

Quite apart from the pressure being problematic in its own right, everyone needs a guilt-free night off from time to time after all, it also locks you into a class and spec. If you’re irreplaceable, you don’t have the freedom to change your mind at will, which might also trigger a change of guild.

Resentment – Finally, there’s the ever-present human nature to consider. This one depends strongly on your guild and team, and how you present yourself within that team, but there can be a certain resentment of the big fish that builds over time.

Maybe someone is worried that they’ll never get a regular raid spot while you’re around; maybe they don’t want your advice on how they can improve; maybe they think you’re trying to pull the guild in directions they don’t want it to go.

Whatever the reason, and however well-founded it might be, these feelings are real and can be very destructive if not dealt with. It’s possible that you can change how you interact, but maybe it can’t be fixed and a change of scenery ensues.

What about the small fish?

Well, unless you make only the tiniest step up the progression ladder, chances are you’ll find yourself struggling to keep up and maybe fighting for your survival within the guild. How much of this you subject yourself to depends on how ambitious you were when picking your new guild.

To make matters worse, your skills are likely to be at least a little rusty. That’s either the reason for the move or a likely corollary. So it’ll take a bit of time to stretch out your muscles and perform at your best.

The transition can be very tough. The automatic respect that came from being thought of as a “good player” in your old guild won’t be present in your new guild, which means you have to be very careful how you offer comments and suggestions. And, regardless of what anyone says, it is nice to see yourself on top from time to time.

Get through it though, and maybe you’ve found your new home. At least for a while…

Possibly Related Posts:

• State of the Cataclysm

Well there’s nothing like leading a 25-man guild through a new expansion to suck up all of your free time, and nothing like writing up a thesis to suppress your love of writing as a hobby!

Anyway, what pearls of wisdom can I share?

Levelling

I’ve got my Priest and Paladin to 85 so far, and my Shaman is close behind at 83. I levelled Malevica as Discipline and had a blast. It wasn’t as quick as it could have been as Shadow, but I usually find that the time I spend reorganising all my bars and learning how to Shadow just isn’t recouped in time savings while levelling; that’s not to say that’s universal though.

On the other hand, I really regret trying to level my Paladin as Holy. Levels 80-83 were OK, but Uldum and Twilight Highlands were just pretty awful. And the problem was easy to fix: Exorcism just costs too much damn mana. I could keep Inquisition up fine but my main nuke is Exorcism. Exorcism does plenty of damage but just can’t be cast for long enough to kill more than one mob before needing to drink again. Give me a glyph, or even a talent, to reduce its mana cost by half and the problem is solved. It has no impact at end-game because DPS specs shouldn’t be mana-starved now.
But, I hear you cry, you’re doing it wrong! Why not just go Ret like everyone else? Well, I chose to go Holy because I was instancing a fair bit and trying to maintain two completely separate gear sets on an alt felt like just too much work. Plus, don’t forget, I’d just finished levelling a Priest as a healing spec with no problems.

And don’t even get me started on quest mobs with 150,000 HP for no very good reason. If a mob is in no danger of killing me (and in Cataclysm there’s no single quest mob which poses any risk to the player unless you’re AFK) then all you achieve by giving it twice the HP of a typical mob is making me press Nuke No.1 twice as many times. Which is boring, especially when I’m already killing mobs slowly.
Let me be clear, I’m in favour of big scary mobs at the end of quest chains, but what makes them big and scary should be more complicated mechanics to deal with and a real sense that they come close to killing me, not just more hit points.

On the subject of linear questing, I love the story-telling and how the heavy use of phasing keeps the zones feeling less crowded, and since my focus is getting to 85 so I can run heroics or raids the ease of finding quest hubs is a bonus. But I will admit that levelling my third character is feeling a bit less exciting when I know I’ve done every quest before.

Heroics

At the start of the expansion, Blizzard seemed to have achieved their goal of making heroics hard, even taking into account the huge numbers of people carrying around PvP gear or Shadow Priests with plate gear just to game the itemlevel restriction.

What they did well from my perspective is make the encounters problematic if your group tries to nuke ignore the mechanics, while making them fairly manageable if your group avoids the bad, interrupts the Spell-of-Death and kills the adds.

Which leads me to the biggest realisation I had while adjusting to the new expansion, and the best piece of advice I’d give to any new healer:

If the thought going through your mind constantly is “I can’t heal through this!!!”, there’s a very good chance your group is doing it wrong.

Of course, maybe you are just undergeared or not adapting to the new expansion at all, but bear in mind that it’s probably not your fault.
Case in point, my first (guild) run in Lost City was a nightmare. Especially High Prophet Barim (didn’t he use to sell reagents?) and Siamat. Why? We weren’t killing the Soul Fragments in time on the former and we were killing the adds too near to the group on the latter. And no one had the gear to compensate for it.

In WoW, people like to talk about Skill > Gear. Really it’s more like Potential ~ Gear x Skill. If you need a certain level of performance to defeat a boss, you can make it possible by raising your gear or your skill/execution/tactics, or both. Right now, as February dawns, the general levels of gear in the playing community are rising which makes heroics a bit more manageable for the average pickup group, yet they’re still defeating groups regularly if they ignore mechanics, which I count as a success.

Raiding

My guild is committed to 25-man raiding, and we’re 9/12 at the moment (Cho’gall is so dead this week!), making us the 3rd Horde guild for 25-man raiding (the other two are 10/12, curse them!)

I’ve loved the pace of the raids so far. We’ve generally spent at least a couple of hours on each boss before downing them, so there’s not been a Naxx moment where an entire wing drops in a night. Trash is well-designed, often demonstrating the principles of the fights (Ascendant Council is a great example) and making you think, while not taking hours to plough through.

My favourite encounters are probably Chimaeron, for daring healers not to heal and then challenging them to switch gears in a second, and the Conclave of Wind for the incredible scenery as well as the coordination needed of the whole raid.

25-man raids do seem to be in dire straits at the moment though. On my server a lot of the big Horde 25-man guilds either broke up into 10-man guilds around the expansion or have subsequently dropped to 10s. We have no plans to change the format of our guild, but if I were looking to set up a new guild I certainly wouldn’t be trying to start a 25-man guild.
I’m not predicting the death of 25-man raiding though, just a consolidation into a smaller number of guilds dedicated to the format.

Shameless plug

Mental is currently looking for a few more good applicants to top up our roster, particularly a couple of reliable healers. If you’re an EU player looking for 3 nights a week 25-man raiding, you could do a lot worse than Mental!

The Blog

I’m still here and I do intend to post more, especially as the guild/raid leadership demands begin to lower a bit, but I also have a lot going on and honestly TH4H is dropping quite a way down the list.

I will be updating the raid strategies by the weekend though, I know some of them are way out of date. I’ve got up-to-date versions on my guild’s forums that just need converting.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The First Cataclysm Raid
• Cataclys-meme
• Venturing Forth into the Cataclysm

A (power) word about Power Word: Barrier, prompted by the latest Beta build (13277).

The latest change is:

Power Word: Barrier – duration reduced to 10 sec, down from 25 sec. No longer absorbs a given amount of damage, now reduces all damage done to friendly targets by 30%. While within the barrier, spellcasting will not be interrupted by damage.

Source

A brief history

If you want to explore the history of PW:B properly, you need to go back to February 2009, before Ulduar was released, when Wryxian posted a list of upcoming Priest changes for the 3.1.0 patch, including:

Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).

Unfortunately the spell never made it into the game at the time, much to the disappointment of Disc Priests the world over.

Over the following year it seems Blizzard hadn’t given up on the spell, and PW:B made a reappearance in the Cataclysm class previews in April:

Discipline will finally be getting Power Word: Barrier as a talented ability. Think of it like a group Power Word: Shield.

The closest analogue to PW:B is the DK Anti-Magic Zone, but it has some important differences, such as a way to counter it in PvP (since it absorbs all damage, not just magical damage).

Early versions on the Beta were buggy, absorbing the wrong amount of damage or disappearing almost instantly. Finally though, the spell evolved into a working version and hit the Live servers with patch 4.0.1.

The version which made it to Live in 4.0.1 has the following functionality:

Power Word: Barrier          Level 80
30% of base mana            40 yd range
Instant cast                 3 min cooldown
Summons a holy barrier on the target location that absorbs ((19005 + (6 * $SP)) * .20) damage done to friendly targets within it each time they take damage. While within the barrier, spellcasting will not be interrupted by damage. The barrier lasts for 25 sec or until it absorbs (19005 + (6 * $SP)) damage.

Put simply, the barrier absorbs around 45000 damage in total, with an individual cap of around 8500 per person within the barrier, then it will disappear.

The new Beta build changes the function pretty fundamantally:

• The mechanic is no longer an absorb, just a flat 30% damage reduction
• The duration is fixed at 10s, rather than being variable anywhere up to 25 seconds depending on how much damage is absorbed
• The cooldown is down to 2 minutes, instead of 3

The problem

So why this big change to PW:B?

I think the underlying problem is the way the absorb cap works, which changes how the spell behaves in different raid sizes.

Suppose you cast PW:B on the melee DPS group (since they’re grouped up already); in a 10-man raid that might only be 2 people, while in a 25-man you’re probably looking at 8 people. Since the overall absorb cap is the same in each mode, your PW:B is used up a lot sooner that you expect in the 25-man situation (it’s ‘balanced’ around 5 people benefiting).

Raise the absorb cap so that it lasts a reasonable amount of time in 25-man and you end up being theoretically able to cover the whole raid for several seconds in a 10-man, which is a little overpowered. A flat 30% reduction on the other hand works in a predictable way, regardless of the raid size.

What this does, in effect, is give us a Priestly twist on Divine Sacrifice. Plunk it down and get people to run under it, and they all get a 30% cooldown. Or, to quote Matticus, we’ve been given “Power Word: Suppression”!

My thoughts

I’m slightly disappointed that the new PW:B is a bit less exciting and unique than the old one was, but I do understand why the change was made and I think it’ll be better for us in the long run.

It was very frustrating to put a PW:B down in a 25-man raid and have it disappear in seconds, and it has the side benefit of making the otherwise tempting Glyph of Power Word: Barrier a more practical choice again. And it’s still in keeping with the Discipline position as a damage absorber/preventer.

I do wonder, in the light of this change, if there’ll be changes made to Pain Suppression, since there’s a lot of overlap now. My worst fear is a shared cooldown (two damage reduction cooldowns means one every 1 minute 12 seconds on average, which is quite a lot) and my brightest hope is a stronger damage reduction on PS to better differentiate it from PW:B. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Way too much of my time for the last day or two has been spent flipping between a couple of notable blogs, working my way through not just the posts but the comments. And it’s been a sobering, and at times frustrating, experience.

There’s no way I’m intending to throw more fuel on the fire here by raising the particular issues yet again. I’ve been more interested in how the discussions have progressed in very general terms, and discussions in general.

Accessibility

These days, just about anyone with the inclination can open up a blog and start sharing their thoughts, observations and opinions with the world; I think that this is, on the whole, a Good Thing. Progress is made off the back of the open discussion of ideas between different people, and the blogging community is a good recent example of that.

The other side of the coin is that this increased accessibility brings with it people with an extremely broad range of life experiences, educational backgrounds and language skills, all eager to engage in discussions. However, all these participants have very different expectations and personal standards of argument, which can act as a major impediment to constructive discussion that both sides need to work to overcome.

Logic

[Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher, and I’d value correction if I’ve misrepresented anything here.]

For a couple of millennia now (at least), people have been studying the art of the argument: logic. Alternatively described as the “science of valid inference”, a key goal of logic is to take facts and evidence and draw valid conclusions from them; the rules of logic (theoretically) ensure that our conclusions are ‘correct’. However, humans naturally tend not to think logically, and thus may arrive at ‘erroneous’ conclusions. (Arguably this is compounded by the relative lack of critical thinking training in modern education systems which means that many people are not equipped to make or defend logically consistent arguments.)

Which can all get rather frustrating in a discussion when you can spot a pretty big logical hole in someone’s argument but can’t find a way to get them to recognise it. In this situation, I personally find myself somewhat at a loss because after all, I’ve explained why the logic is flawed, it’s blindingly obvious (to me), so surely the person should correct or withdraw their argument. And yet they don’t. Which is why I try and avoid debating online!

Common logical traps

I’m not going to go through them all, I’ll settle for a couple of links. I just want to hit a few of the more common ones I spotted recently.
I’ve tried to be as generic as possible, but a couple of topical examples have slipped in.

Ad Hominem
This one gets a crazy amount of mileage, especially on the internet. Simply put, an ad hominem argument tries to discredit the argument by attacking the arguer. If someone proposes an argument, the logical strength or otherwise of the argument is not affected by the qualities of the proposer, thus an ad hominem argument is not a valid rebuttal.
Poisoning the well is a subset of the ad hominem, where negative information about an arguer is presented before their arguments in an attempt to influence the reader. On a blog, for example, you should be careful how you introduce a link to a post you’re disagreeing with.

The Slippery Slope
The slippery slope argument asserts that a small first step will inevitably lead to a succession of subsequent steps, and is often used to oppose change. In the example of feminism, one might claim that if we insist on having equal gender representation, we’ll inevitably end up with appropriate representation based on race, disability, sexuality, religion and so on. Essentially the argument is not against the first step, but the entire chain of events.
Logically speaking, it is invalid to argue on the basis of the entire chain of events, unless the inevitability of the chain can be established. Now, in the example here, you can make a reasonable case for the chain, but it will be uncertain.

Straw Man
The straw man is another very common internet fallacy, which consists of subtly, or not so subtly, distorting your opponents’s position to a form which can be argued against, and then claiming victory. While you’d think this would be easy to spot, a well-constructed straw man can be very hard to pick out.
Sometimes a straw man argument might be made unintentionally through a misunderstanding of a position, in which case it can be very difficult if you are unable to convince the other person that their argument is invalid.
The best way to debate around a straw man tends to be to keep the discussion focused on, and clarifying, your actual position.

Ad Populum
Go to the official forums, pick a role board and just dip into a few posts. “Everyone knows…”, “All my friends think…”, “The majority of the player base…” and so on, are arguments ad populum (to the people); the argument being that because a large, often overwhelming, number of people believe something to be true, it must be true.
I’m sure you can think of any number of exceptions to this rule…

Cherry-picking and Anecdotal Evidence
These two are broadly related, so I’ve grouped them together.
Cherry-picking is the selective use of data which support a claim over data which do not. Anecdotal evidence tends to be used to provide a counter-example which is overgeneralised to make a point. Wikipedia’s example:

“My grandfather smoked like a chimney and died healthy in a car crash at the age of 99” does not disprove the proposition that “smoking markedly increases the probability of cancer and heart disease at a relatively early age”

Both of these practices are logically dubious and do not provide sufficient basis to support an argument in themselves.

Argument from Fallacy
This is a subtle one, but also one that you’ll see a lot. The argument from fallacy says that if you find a flaw in my reasoning, my conclusion must be false. I’m going to borrow another example from Wikipedia to explain this better:

Tom: “All cats are animals. Ginger is an animal. This means Ginger is a cat.”
Bill: “Ah you just committed the affirming the consequent logical fallacy. Sorry, you are wrong, which means that Ginger is not a cat”

Bill is ably demonstrating the argument from fallacy for us in his statement (Tom’s logic is flawed therefore his conclusion must be wrong). In fact, all we can conclude based on Bill’s statement is that Ginger is not definitely a cat.

Where this crops up a lot in internet debating is where someone will look at an entire article, find a piece of flawed reasoning and then use that to assert that the conclusion of the article is wrong. Of course, the conclusion may be unsupported if the logical argument for it is invalid (until the author corrects the error), but that doesn’t automatically make it false or mean that the opposite is true. This can be a very frustrating tactic to debate against.

Argument from Personal Incredulity
From time to time on the beta I might catch myself saying things like “I can’t believe Blizzard would want my heals hitting for so little, it must be a bug”. As an opinion it’s fine (“I think this might be a bug”), as a logical assertion it’s not. Another way this shows itself is in statements like “I can’t imagine anyone enjoying…”.
The point is, just because you can believe it or imagine it, that doesn’t make it impossible or untrue.

Loki’s Wager
This ia a new one on me, but amazingly common. It refers to the position that a concept must be clearly defined in order to be discussed. In the recent feminism discussion, for example, I spotted a comment or two along the lines of “feminists can’t even agree what feminism is!”. This sort of general argument tends to be employed as a silencing tactic or to derail a discussion.

Incidentally, read the Wikipedia definition for this one, it’ll make more sense.

Psychologist’s Fallacy
The psychologist’s fallacy occurs when we assume that we are objective, while in fact we all have biases and prejudices which influence our thoughts, beliefs and actions.
Again, this can be a very difficult one to argue against, because most of our biases are subconscious, making it rather difficult to convince someone that they have them. A good education in critical thinking tends to at least begin to break this one by showing you how much influence your subconscious has over you.

Argument from Tradition
The last one I’ll touch on is the idea that, to put it slightly over-simplistically, something is right because this is how it’s always been.
This is based on one or two flawed premises:

• The old way of thinking was proven correct when introduced – in reality this may be false, and needs to be backed up.
• The past justifications for the tradition are still valid at present – in cases where circumstances have changed, this assumption may be false.

The feminism case arguably hits the second of those premises. Society changes over time, expectations change, morality changes, opportunities and participation change. Thus a re-evaluation of the norms in the fantasy genre might well be justified.

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Since this was first posted, the party UI and options have been developed further. Please check out my update post for the differences.

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I’ve managed to heal a fairly dismal 2 instances, and we never finished the Stonecore. Still, I’ve had a good play with the new party healing UI, so it’s time to share some thoughts.

If you’re interested in other takes, Matticus (twice!) and Derevka have also posted about this, amongst others.

Although this is currently just being used for the party interface. I’m assuming this will be extended and used as a replacement for the default raid frames as well, so some of my thoughts and comments may also have raiding in mind.

What does it look like?

This:

Or, when things are a bit calmer, this:

And in full context (1680 x 1050), it looks like this:

It looks something like a hybrid of VuhDo with Grid. It’s fairly compact and clean-looking without sacrificing too much functionality for compactness. It also fits well with the rest of the UI in general, which is a big plus.

Personally I don’t tend to get too wrapped up in aesthetics, and this is nothing really revolutionary, so I’ll skip on quickly.

Information display

How does the healing UI do straight out of the box? Actually, pretty well, with some caveats.

Class-coloured bars

The first thing I noticed when I looked at the UI in a freshly-formed group was that the bars are class-coloured Grid-style. I understand that UI design is a hugely subjective area, but I’ve never managed to see the appeal of class-coloured bars.
I don’t feel that class-coloured bars actually give me any information I need. Rarely do I think about what class someone is before healing them and the only situations I can think of where I’d need to know are when people are dead, and their bars are a uniform grey (I might choose to combat res a Druid, or not to combat res a Shaman, for example).

The argument for bars which change from green through orange/yellow to red as HP falls is that it draws your attention quickly to those in need of a heal and gives some indication of their state, in a more noticeable way than just shrinking the health bar. When you’re scanning 25 bars, a big bold colour change jumps out at you. So having class-coloured bars feels like a missed opportunity to give me information.

A more nitpicky point is that the standard DK colour could do with being made a bit bolder. It’s quite tricky to spot the health deficit on Sielydine’s bar, at least for me in my computer room in daylight.

Role icons

In the upper left corner of each bar is an icon representing the role of each player as assigned by the Dungeon Finder. It’s a nice feature to have, for sure.

Ideally I’d probably prefer to be able to hide this information, since it tends to be something you look at once and never again and it’s currently taking up space, but given that the purpose of these frames is to Just Work™, hiding the icons behind a hotkey or right-click probably isn’t an option.

Target and Aggro indicators

The screenshot just above is a good example of this. The player you currently have targeted, in this case Muhmann, gets a cream-coloured border around them. Players with aggro get the expected red border, with arrow embellishments for good measure. These are standard features for raid frames these days. The target indicator seems to have higher priority than the aggro indicator, but the red arrow marks still show through since the target indicator doesn’t include them.

I’m a little confused about the other frame colours though. Let’s have another look at the first screenshot I posted (reproduced below, to save your scrollwheels):

Mogy is the tank this time; he’s got the cream border because I’m targeting him, and he has aggro because you can see the red triangles. All fine and dandy.

It’s not made clear what the yellow and ochre borders around the others represent. My guess is that they’re part of the aggro indicator, corresponding to people with moderate and high threat. I’m basing this mostly on the fact that they’re a similar shape to the red aggro indicator.

Incoming Heals

Another nifty feature you can see exemplified in the screenshot above is the display of incoming heals on the bar. There’s not a huge amount to say about this really, incoming heals show up as a big bright green chunk on the end of the bar, overheals spill out beyond the bar (which is good, it lets you see just how much of an overheal you’re casting) and the size of the bar appears to be more-or-less accurate, although I’ve not been able to fully test it with Mortal Strikes etc yet.

For this to be really useful in a raid situation it needs to be able to show other people’s heals as well as your own, so if Blizzard do make this the template for new raid frames I hope they’ve built that functionality in, but for a party just showing yours is plenty.

HoTs and Debuffs

For discussion purposes, here’s that screenshot, repeated once again:

Working from the top, the blue circle in the top-right corner of my frame shows at a glance that I have a magical debuff. If you want to find out at a glance what debuff it is, that’s in the lower-left corner where all the debuffs are displayed together as standard icons, growing left to right. Both the small indicator and large icon will display tooltips on mouseover.

Moving down, Mogy has both PW:S and Weakened Soul, while below him Pjata only has PW:S. HoTs appear all together in the lower-right corner, growing from right to left.

Datanka is very kindly illustrating what a debuff with multiple stacks looks like. The number is nice and clear and readable, although it does obscure most of the icon. With space being at a premium though, some sacrifices are inevitable, and in this case I’d rather see stacks (which are hard to work out) than the icon (which you can figure out from context).

What you don’t get is any way to see the duration remaining as a number, only as the grey overlay. There’s just no way to fit that onto the icons sensibly, but I do prefer to see a number, since I often find the grey overlay thing a bit too tricky to discern.

I didn’t manage to catch a screenshot of this, but diseases work in the same way as magic debuffs do, with a small orange icon in the top-right and a “proper” icon in the lower-left. The last image on Matt’s first post shows this though.

I’m sort of torn on the dual debuff indicators. I imagine the top-right corner indicators are intended to highlight that someone has a debuff, to draw attention more quickly and help you select your cleanse spell of choice while you look at the icon and decide how you want to respond.
I’m all in favour of simple tricks to grab attention (see the discussion above about bar colours) but I’m not sure a relatively tiny icon is the best way to do it. I’d be happier seeing larger debuff icons (with thicker coloured borders) instead and the indicator space used for something else. I can’t help feeling like it’s awkward having related information in opposite corners.

Overall though the debuffs icons are pretty clear, stacks are obvious, the debuff type is readily apparent and they’re arranged logically in corners, so for a default, no-configuration UI this is actually really good.

The main missing feature that will be familiar to many of us is the ability to set up custom debuffs for special attention (Harvest Soul, Frost Blast, Penetrating Cold, amongst others). I’d love to see it, but I think that level of customisation is probably beyond the scope of what Blizzard is trying to achieve here, and possibly beyond what they’d be comfortable with including in the default UI.
Especially since different players care about different debuffs (for example, I don’t highlight Chilled to the Bone, while a melee DPS might want that displayed prominently).

Configuration

The thing to remember about this UI is that it needs to Just Work™ without needing to be configured or customised, and it needs to work for all classes, not just healers.

As a result, there’s not much customisation. Your layout choices are limited to showing pets, main tanks and main assists and keeping groups together (as opposed to sorting by name or role). You can also opt to turn off incoming heals, aggro highlights and to filter only buffs you can dispel.

Wishlist

If you’re used to healing with VuhDo, Grid, Healbot, Pitbull, Xperl or another set of full-featured, customisable raidframes you’ll probably find this quite limiting. This is not going to replace those addons, but it’s a pretty good compromise solution which shouldn’t impair your performance too much if you have to resort to using it (except the whole no click-healing thing…).

As Matt commented, “It’s important to discern between must have and nice to have but can probably heal without it type changes.” The danger is that if you add too much configurability, or too much information, you destroy the simplicity which is the whole point.

With that in mind, here’s my wishlist for must have items. These are things which I found actively obstructing my ability to heal effectively.

• Let us choose between class-coloured and HP-coloured health bars. I thought about including this on the nice-to-have section, but actually this was causing me to neglect people or incorrectly estimate people’s status
• Instead or as well as the previous point, brighten up the bar colours a bit, since some of the darker shades (DK in particular)can be tricky to tell from the background
• Provide numerical timers, at least for HoTs. Make the icons bigger if need be

And the nice-to-have items:

• Resizable bars. These are a decent compromise, but I did find them a little small at times. I tend to err on the side of larger boxes because poor eyesight combined with a high resolution screen is a bad combination
• I personally tend to find it creates information overload, but numerical health deficits for players are fairly common to see in healing interfaces, especially when overhealing matters
• Click-healing. The ability to bind spells to mouse buttons and modifiers. Not as the only way but many people find it a very intuitive way of healing. Unconfigured, a left-click could just be bound to targeting as normal, which wouldn’t interfere with people who didn’t want to click-heal. If you wanted to use a menu on someone, you could bind “menu” to something, or target them the old-fashioned way

On the whole the new party frames are a big step forward, and actually more-or-less a complete solution. They’re not perfect for me, but ‘perfect’ is a very subjective concept and the default UI is, after all, an exercise in compromise.

Possibly Related Posts:

• [Cataclysm Beta] Cataclysm Party UI Revisited
• Getting Started As A Healer
• Smite Healing – Tips