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

With every patch come the usual slew of addon errors, and 4.1 is no exception. This time, however, there’s more than the usual random problems since Blizzard made a change to the format of in-game combat log events. This means that any addon which listens for and responds to combat events is at risk.

I’m going to assume you’ve turned on “Load Out of Date Addons” from the addon screen. If you’re still having problems with your addons, I have some advice.

Update your addons

And keep updating them. Addon authors are real people too, with real lives; they aren’t always able to respond to a new patch immediately, especially if they aren’t actively playing any more, but they usually get round to it in a few days. Be patient and keep checking the addon sites.

I like to install the Curse Client around the time of major patches because it makes checking for updates much quicker and easier.

Also, as Zelmaru pointed out in her comment below, addon authors often release alpha and beta versions of their addons quickly, and then a full release version once people have tested it for a few days. These early versions are generally quite safe to use though, and can get you through the early few days.
You may also find that other people have fixed some addons and uploaded “Fan Updates” onto the addon sites, usually WowInterface.
She gives advice for getting access to those versions, which can be found in the comment.

Look for replacements

If you’re a glass-half-full type of person, you might regard this as a good time to revisit your UI and look for replacements for older or less well-maintained addons. Titan Panel could be replaced by a LDB addon for example, or Recount by Skada, or XPerl by Pitbull4. (Those might be updated by now, they’re just examples of substitutes).

Toggle “Display Lua Errors”

If you’re having significant framerate issues, especially in combat, this might be because of a large number of addon errors being generates in quick succession. However, I have found a nifty trick that, while it won’t fix your addons’ functionality, does seem to resolve the framerate problems.

Go into Options > Interface > Help and turn on “Display Lua Errors”. Wait for the Lua error box to pop up (or make it pop up by shooting something), then turn off “Display Lua Errors” again. If you’re lucky, your framerate should be back to normal and should stay that way until you log off. Unfortunately you will need to repeat this process every time you relog, but it’s not a particularly onerous process.

Fix the addons yourself

If you’re not comfortable editing the Lua files themselves then don’t, just wait for them to be updated by their authors. However, for addons broken by the combat log change the fix can be pretty quick, if you can use a bit of intuition. If you’re in any doubt though, wait, or risk breaking your addons further.

Bear in mind I’m not an addon coder, but I did some poking around and have fixed a couple of my own addons. I’m including the following in case it helps other people, and I make no guarantees whatsoever!

Wowpedia describes the change thus:

The 4.1 patch added a new parameter, hideCaster, moving all other parameters beginning with sourceGUID one place to the right. Addons that haven’t been updated for 4.1 may not function correctly as a result.

What addons do when parsing the combat log is essentially split the long line into a number of chunks, assigning labels to each chunk. because Blizzard added an extra bit of information early in the combat log line, most of those labels now don’t refer to what the addon authors expect them to. Fixing them is therefore a matter of updating the combat log parsing functions.

An example, by way of illustration, is MikScrollingBattleText.

Open the file MSBTParser.lua, and look for the following:
Line 344:

local function ParseLogMessage(timestamp, event, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, recipientGUID, recipientName, recipientFlags, …)

Insert the term ‘hideCaster’ between ‘event’ and ‘sourceGUID’, and hey presto, the problem is fixed. You should now have a line that looks like:

local function ParseLogMessage(timestamp, event, hideCaster, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, recipientGUID, recipientName, recipientFlags, …)

Another addon that I have which I fixed manually was Death Note. For this one, you need to open the file DataCapture.lua, and search for the three (3) lines that need editing. These lines are quoted below, so you can use copy/paste to search. (Edit: This one is now fixed officially)

Line 17:

local function SpellAuraRemovedFilter(timestamp, event, hideCaster, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, spellId, spellName, spellSchool, auraType)
to
local function SpellAuraRemovedFilter(timestamp, event, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, spellId, spellName, spellSchool, auraType)

Line 24:

local function SpellCastSuccessFilter(timestamp, event, hideCaster, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, spellId, spellName, spellSchool)
to
local function SpellCastSuccessFilter(timestamp, event, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, spellId, spellName, spellSchool)

Line 338:

function DeathNote:COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED(_, timestamp, event, hideCaster, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, …)
to
function DeathNote:COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED(_, timestamp, event, sourceGUID, sourceName, sourceFlags, destGUID, destName, destFlags, …)

I also found that Incubator2 had problems. In this case, the substitution is:

Line 755:

function mod:COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED(_, timestamp, eventtype, srcGUID, srcName, srcFlags, dstGUID, dstName, dstFlags, …)
to
function mod:COMBAT_LOG_EVENT_UNFILTERED(_, timestamp, eventtype, hideCaster, srcGUID, srcName, srcFlags, dstGUID, dstName, dstFlags, …)

Once again, if you aren’t comfortable doing this then just wait. Not every addon looks identical, and not every addon is coded so it’s simple to spot where you need to make the changes. On the other hand, if you can figure it out then you might just be able to DIY fix your addons and get them working quicker.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The (Not So) Short Guide to Discipline 4.1
• Healing and Addons

4.1 is upon us, so here’s a quick guide to how it will affect you as a raiding Disc Priest. (This is by no means exhaustive and I reserve the right to edit it over the coming days).

Discipline Highlights

Divine Aegis duration has been increased to 15 seconds, up from 12.
Power Word: Shield duration has been reduced to 15 seconds, down from 30.

This pair of changes is intended to limit any temptation Disc Priests might feel to drift back to bubble-spamming again, particularly as gear levels and therefore mana regeneration improves. The change to PW:S’s duration should be something that most Priests won’t really notice, since I doubt many of us were blanketing the raid before this change.

The DA change is a nice improvement though. In 25-man raids there are a few occasions where maintaining DA on all 5 groups was useful, and a 12s duration made that difficult/impossible. For example, on Atramedes you could rotate PoH across each group to heal them up after Modulation and put up a protective DA bubble for the next one, this extra time allows you room to refresh it on the first groups with a follow-up PoH.

Power Word: Barrier’s cooldown has been increased to 3 minutes, up from 2, and its effect has been reduced to 25%, down from 30%.

Blacksen did a really in-depth write-up of the changes to the cooldowns across the classes that are in 4.1, so I’d direct you there if you’re interested.

The changes to PW:B (and Divine Guardian) seem intended to bring all the main cooldowns into line with each other, setting 3 minutes as the standard duration and presumably bringing the effectiveness in line as well. This probably has advantages both in terms of encounter design (where the number and strength of available cooldowns per minute is better-known to the developers, boss specials can be better-designed around this figure) and in terms of raid balance (when every cooldown is on the same interval and has approximately the same effectiveness, that removes one reason for picking one class over another).

As a Disc Priest I’m obviously slightly disappointed to be nerfed, but the change from 30% to 25% isn’t game-breaking and if that’s what it takes to better balance the raid cooldowns then I’ll trust Blizzard’s judgement on this one.

Holy Fire damage has been increased to be approximately 30% higher than Smite.
Atonement now works with Holy Fire in addition to Smite.
The direct damage portion of Holy Fire can now trigger Evangelism.
Glyph of Divine Accuracy now also affects Holy Fire in addition to Smite.

A whole raft of changes to the Atonement/Archangel/Evangelism healing style here.

The short version is that Atonement and Evangelism have been changed to incorporate Holy Fire as well as Smite: HF will heal with Atonement and the initial hit will also add a stack of Evangelism. To help facilitate this, the change to the Glyph of Divine Accuracy removes the annoying risk of wasted time (and possibly a dead tank) due to a missed HF.

These changes mean that HF should be an integral part of the AAE rotation again. The bump to the output of Holy Fire is a straight throughput increase for the rotation, and of course now that we’re casting HF routinely and without penalty the Glyph of Smite reprises its place amongst our Major Glyphs, for another flat 20% increase to the output of the AAE style.

Of course, the AAE approach still isn’t as predictable as directly healing your target when there’s multiple possible targets for the Atonement heal to land on, but where it is usable you should see significantly improved results. As an enthusiastic supporter of the AAE spec I’m rather pleased about the output buff as well as being encouraged to add an extra spell to the rotation.

The Rest

Dispel Magic can only be used on the casting priest as a baseline effect.
Discipline and Holy: Absolution (new passive) enables priests to use Dispel Magic on up to 2 harmful effects on friendly targets.

This change shouldn’t make any difference to Discipline or Holy specced Priests, but if you’re accustomed to having your Shadow brethren help with dispels in a pinch then you’ll need to rethink that from now on.

Note that this doesn’t affect our ability to offensively Dispel, regardless of spec. Not a surprise there, it wouldn’t be in keeping with Blizzard’s current direction if they narrowed the number of range of specs with offensive Dispels.

Inner Will and Inner Fire now last until canceled.

A nice quality of life change here.

OK, it’s not the biggest deal, but it’s technically a buff!

Priests now innately have 100% pushback protection from damage while channeling Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope.

This is a much bigger deal. Even if you bubbled yourself just before starting the channel this would often not be enough to get you through without losing at least one tick of the channels, and particularly in the case of Divine Hymn this could cost a significant chunk of healing when you need it most.

As with the other raid cooldown changes I see this as a measure to normalise the effect, making it more predictable and thus better-balanced and easier to design around.

It is now possible to remove Weakened Soul effects that were a result of another priest’s Power Word: Shield through Strength of Soul.

I suppose if you had multiple Disc Priests in raids, or a particularly bubble-happy Holy Priest, this could be helpful. It’s a nice, sensible change anyway.

Mind Sear damage has been doubled.

When you have a burning desire to break the CC on those tricky trash pulls, now you can do it slightly harder 😉

Other Healers

Druid: Efflorescence has been redesigned. It creates a healing zone at the feet of a Swiftmend target, but this healing zone now restores health equal to 4/8/12% of the amount healed by Swiftmend to the three most injured targets within 8 yards, every 1 second for 7 seconds. This periodic effect now also benefits from spell haste, but the individual ticks cannot be critical effects.

In case you’d missed the memo, this is a buff to Efflorescence overall, making it like a much lighter, area-limited version of Divine Hymn. However, from our perspective as a non-Druid, we need to be aware of this change. When there are a lot of players inside the Efflorescence zone, the new version will bring up the lowest health bars but leave the higher ones alone, while the previous incarnation would have brought everyone up equally.

When it’s important to top off the group (before an Electrocute, for example), you might be better off focusing on the groups and players with the smallest health deficits rather than those most injured, since you’re now competing with yet another smart heal on the most injured players.

Shaman: Spirit Link Totem (new talent) reduces damage taken by all party and raid members within 10 yards by 10%. This lasts 6 seconds, and every second it is active the health of all affected players is redistributed among them, such that each player ends up with the same percentage of their maximum health. This counts as an Air totem and has a 3-minute cooldown.

This new raid cooldown is going to prove very interesting; Again, I’m going to refer you over to Blacksen’s End for a very detailed write-up with examples.

Spirit Link Totem is a sort of combination of PW:B and Divine Hymn, in that it both reduces damage taken and helps rescue people from the brink of death. The value of the totem very strongly depends on the nature of the damage being taken. Consider the following examples:

1. Chimaeron’s Feud Phase – If you use it on the raid, Spirit Link Totem is essentially reduced to a 10% damage reduction here; everyone is taking similar damage and therefore their health pools will all be roughly even, leaving little room for health redistribution.
2. Omnotron Defense System (Arcanotron) – In this case the damage from Arcane Annihilator is focused on 3 people (on 25-man) at a time, so Spirit Link Totem looks like a great tool to bring their health back up by taking a small amount from the health bars of everyone around them. However the spread-out nature of the fight, combined with the relatively small 10-yard range of the Totem, means that the effectiveness is significantly reduced.
3. Cho’gall – Whenever Cho’gall has Flame’s Orders or high stacks of Twisted Devotion the tank will be taking unusually high damage while the raid will not. Under these circumstances, where the Totem has time for its redistribution effect to work, this can significantly reduce the net damage the tank takes by effectively spreading it out across the melee/raid.
   You might also be able to use this to good effect in the final phase if the redistribution is not affected by the healing reduction of the tentacles; I’ve not tested to see if this is the case, but if so, it opens up some interesting possibilities.

Warrior: Rallying Cry (new ability) is available from trainers at level 83. It temporarily grants the warrior and all party or raid members within 30 yards 20% of maximum health for 10 seconds. After the effect expires, the health is lost. It has no cost, no stance requirements, and is not on the global cooldown. It has a 3-minute cooldown, but also shares a cooldown with Last Stand.

You’d be well-advised to keep your eyes peeled for this one, to make sure that when it ends everyone is over 20% HP. It could be very handy, for example, on Chimaeron if the raid is in danger of dying during the Feud, or on Chimaeron Heroic to extend the final phase for a few seconds longer if people are in danger of dying to the soft enrage (Mocking Shadows) as you might be on your early attempts.

General Changes

The Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms will now identify which class role is currently the least represented in the queue, and offer them additional rewards for entering the Dungeon Finder queue and completing a random level-85 Heroic dungeon.
The least represented class icon will show within the Dungeon Finder to indicate the role that is eligible to earn the bonus reward.
Players must queue solo with the currently indicated least represented class (by the system) and complete the dungeon up to and including the final boss in order to be eligible for the bonus reward [… which may include]: gold, rare gems, non-combat pets, and (very rare) mounts.

While most of the shortages these days tend to be tank shortages, it’s quite possible that we’ll find healers in demand from time to time. It’s also possible (at least it was on the PTR) to have more than one Call to Arms active at the same time, depending on how the thresholds are set up we might see a healing Call to Arms fairly often or very rarely indeed; only time will tell.

A dead player can now be resurrected by targeting them using the Party or Raid Frame even if they have released. No more hunting for corpses.

About time too. I wonder if this will also fix the problem of someone releasing during a resurrection cast.

Conquest Points are now purchasable from the Valor Quartermasters at 250 Conquest Points per 250 Valor Points.
Honor Points are now purchasable from the Justice Trade Goods vendors at 250 Honor Points per 375 Justice Points.
Justice Points are now purchasable from the Honor Trade Goods vendors at 250 Justice Points per 375 Honor Points.

If you’re gearing a new toon then being able to spend some time in PvP and translate that time into PvE points, albeit at a 50% mark-up, could prove quite appealing. Similarly, another outlet to bleed off excess Justice points, this time into Honor points to build up a PvP set, is a welcome addition.

Possibly Related Posts:

• 4.3 Quick Guide for Discipline Priests
• Priest Class Feedback
• Discipline 4.0.1 Guide

I recently did a clean installation of WoW for a new account and rolled (of course) a Discipline Priest. But something was bugging me: Penance and other channelled spells not only turn your character to face your target but this also makes your camera turn to face them.

In a boss fight, for example, my camera is usually facing in a particular direction to watch something specific, and the last thing I want when I throw a Penance at an off-tank or aggro-monkey DPS is for my camera to swing violently around.

The Cause

The key to figuring out the cause is that this doesn’t happen to me on Malevica. That’s because the account is much older. (This might also be the case for many of you reading this and thinking I’ve gone mad!)

You see, it turns out this behaviour is controlled by an option that used to be exposed but now isn’t, so new installs default to the annoying ‘turret-mode’ and there’s no obvous way of fixing it.

Enter the non-obvious!

The Solution

Edit: Zhiva in the comments suggested a much simpler way of achieving the same result as my original instructions (which appear below). Simply type:

into your chat window in game and you’re done. No messing with configuration files required, which is a plus.
Thanks for the tip!

All you need to do is add a single line to one of your WoW configuration files, as follows:

1. Make sure WoW isn’t running.
2. Navigate to your WoW directory .
            (e.g. C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\)
3. Head into the WTF folder, then Account, then the folder for the account you use.
            (e.g. C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\<ACCOUNTNAME>\
4. [Optional but highly recommended] Make a backup copy of config-cache.wtf somewhere safe, just in case something goes wrong.
5. Look for an entry containing:
            SET cameraSmoothTrackingStyle “1”
   If this line exists, change the “1” to “0”.
   If this line does not exist, add the line:
            SET cameraSmoothTrackingStyle “0”
   to the end of the config-cache.wtf file and save it.
6. Restart WoW and enjoy!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Atonement and Penance Bugs – Updated
• Smite Healing – Tips

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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