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

My favourite fight of this expansion so far has to be Nefarian’s End. Not because of the environment, although the moving platform and lava pouring from the walls is a great setting for a fight, but because in this encounter I really feel like I can flex my Priestly muscles: I go from tank healing in Phase 1, to intense multi-target healing on the platforms in Phase 2 to a mix of the two as we push through Phase 3. It feels good to shift gears during a fight.

Phase 1

In this phase I’m assigned (with a little informal help) to the Onyxia tank. Because there’s just the tank in range for most of the phase I’ve kept hold of my Atonement spec and use a mix of Smite, Penance and PW:S to keep the tank up. Binding heal helps get my health back up after Electrocute, and I can PW:S myself so a Tail Lash and Electrocute combination doesn’t embarrass me.

With Train of Thought shortening the cooldown on Penance and Archangel helping with throughput and a little bit of mana return, it works out as a pretty mana-efficient way of keeping a tank up when there’s no concerns about the heals going anywhere else.

Plus, although I might not do much damage to Onyxia I do manage to crank out around 8k DPS during Phase 1 and every little helps!

Phase 2

Here’s where we really kick it up a notch, and Disc comes into its own in this phase.

Right from the start I throw a Power Word: Barrier onto my platform as I’m jumping up onto it, which is a massive help getting the group stabilised. If you’re taking an Electrocute in this phase though, you might want to save the PW:B for later to make dealing with the damage spike easier.

Once everyone on the platform is safe, then the rest of the AoE healing tools come out. My team assigns a single group plus 3-4 others onto each platform, so I cover the single group with Prayer of Healing and keep up the rest of the players up with Prayer of Mending on cooldown and Power Word: Shield as often as I can afford it. Any PW:S cast without a corresponding Rapture proc is an expensive proposition but also provides extremely high throughput in a situation like this when you know the absorb is going to be used, as well as improving the throughput of the Prayer of Healing. For me it’s a judgement call, depending on how I’m doing mana-wise.

I tend to use my Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope in this phase to prop up my mana, particularly if I get a lucky coincidence of Lightweave and Power Torrent.

Phase 3

In Phase 3 I tend to be assigned to a tank. On the Nefarian tank Heal becomes the bread-and-butter spell instead of Smite on the tank, because Atonement is too unpredictable with large numbers of other players in close range. On the add tank though it’s really useful to weave Smites in with the Heals to take advantage of the throughput boost from Archangel when the adds’ damage starts getting heavy.
You can also make good use of PW:B or Pain Suppression when Electrocutes are due either on the raid or the tank.

If you are assigned to the raid in this phase, spreading some Divine Aegis around with Prayer of Healing when an Electrocute is due will take the edge off the damage spike.

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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.

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Great news for those of us still loving the Atonement spec in the form of a couple of recent hotfixes.

First:

The range of the heal on Atonement has been increased to 15 yards. It has been verified to be working correctly for the priest and party/raid members.

(Source)

This is a change we’ve been calling for for a while. You stil don’t get total control over the heal if the melee are taking damage as well, but it makes it much more likely that you’ll be able to hit the tank with Atonement at all.

And second:

The healing effect from Atonement is now being effected by healing modifiers correctly.

(Source)

This means that Atonement is being buffed by both Twin Disciplines (6%) and Archangel (15%). These are multiplicative, so for every 1000 points of Smite, you get 1060 points of Atonement normally and 1219 points of Atonement under a 5-stacked Archangel.

So you can finally push the Archangel button guilt-free now, since you don’t lose the 15% bonus from dropping your Evangelism; it gets transferred to Archangel, and you can rebuild your Evangelism for a bigger buff.

However, Grace does not affect the size of the Atonement heal, according to my testing this evening. It would be nice to have this, especially for tank healing, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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From following the EJ Discipline Compendium discussion, and from occasionally painful experimentation, I’ve settled on some basic tricks for getting started with Discipline healing in Cataclysm.

Spec

I’ve settled on a 33/8/0 spec, although the two points in Inspiration probably ought to go in Veiled Shadows Darkness instead. I’ve taken Inspiration to help the raid out.

Those two points have come directly from dropping Strength of Soul, and I’ll explain why.

Power Word: Shield is either used on the raid to mitigate predictable damage spikes, or on the tanks to keep Weakened Soul up. In both cases, reducing the duration of Weakened Soul can actually be a disadvantage, which is why I’ve not taken any points in Strength of Soul at all.

What’s more, with Train of Thought and Inner Focus macro’d to Greater Heal, the HPM of GH and Heal are essentially the same. As long as it won’t be overhealing, GH is the heal of choice because you need fewer casts and less cast time to put out the same healing, leaving you more time to think, or to do other things.
Limited Heal casts also reduce the value of Strength of Soul.

Early theorycraft suggested putting one point in Strength of Soul and using one Heal in the rotation in order to make the best use of the Rapture internal cooldown, but all that achieves is making PW:S closer to mana-neutral. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s not a big win either, and that point can be used elsewhere.

Raid healing

As much as it pains me to say it, you’ll probably find it easier to just suck it up and go Holy. I succumbed last night and the difference when I’m dealing with multiple targets is night and day.

(Cue the best part of an hour resetting all my bars from Shadow, trying to figure out how to make Holy Word: Chastise work, and setting up VuhDo and PowerAuras again.)

If you’re stubborn like me and really want to stay Disc, or you need to fill in the raid healing role in a pinch, here’s some basic rules:

• Prayer of Healing heals for basically the same as Heal on each target, but costs just under 3 times as much. So if 3 or more people will benefit from the healing, use PoH. Remember that PoH can be used with Inner Focus to save you a chunk of mana, and you can use it with Power Infusion to speed up the cast and reduce the cost significantly.
• If only one or two people will benefit from the healing, stick to Heal/Penance. It’s slower, but more mana-efficient.
• If you can foresee damage PW:S isn’t a bad spell to use, especially if you can make use of the Rapture internal cooldown every 6 12 seconds. You certainly can’t spread this around the way you used to though, Rapture is what makes PW:S remotely practical.
  (Incidentally, I’m looking for a decent internal cooldown monitor, preferably without having to install ForteXorcist. Suggestions welcome.)
• Renew is quite situational. It’s not as mana-efficient as Heal/Greater Heal if you have time to cast them (for me, 2.4HPM for Renew with Inner Will vs 3.33HPM for Heal), but it’s good if you’re on the move a lot and especially if you glyph it and drop a couple of points into Improved Renew (if you’re focused on raid healing, there are points you can free up.) [Edited, thanks to Aventera for the experience].

The thing that makes Disc more difficult in a heroic dungeon, where you’re filling both the raid and tank healing roles, is that unless you’re very good at anticipating damage you’ll probably end up using much the same tools as Holy for raid healing, only they’ll all be weaker than their Holy equivalents.
Add to that the fact that you’ll have 20% less combat mana regen and probably won’t have Replenishment to make use of Disc’s bigger mana pool, and it’s not an easy ride at all.

Oredith on PlusHeal summed it up neatly:

[Disc is] definitely viable, but you’ll work harder to make it so. If you decide to go that route, no one will fault you, but just keep in mind that there’s a path of lesser resistance.

Tank healing

Tank healing is a little more straightforward for a Disc Priest. Here’s my simple decision rules:

• Start with Prayer of Mending and Power Word: Shield before combat, as always.
• Get Penance on cooldown as your opening heal.
• Keep Weakened Soul on the tank, and keep Penance and Prayer of Mending on cooldown.
• If you can use Smite/Atonement, use that as your filler with Greater Heal when you need a catch-up.
• If you can’t use Smite/Atonement (because the tank’s too far out or the melee are stealing your Atonement heals) use Greater Heal as your filler spell, waiting to cast it until it won’t be wasted. If the tank just isn’t dipping far enough to justify a Greater Heal, either just regen some mana or look for someone else to help out.

I intend to keep persisting with Discipline, feeling it out and refining my technique. It’s more work than Holy though, so I’ll be using both specs, following that path of lesser resistance, depending on what’s best for the fight. Ultimately, my guild comes before my attachment to a single spec.

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