Project Lore

During the (incredibly short) leveling process my Priest was mostly specced Shadow, with a little bit of Discipline thrown in for good measure. Upon hitting level 60, and no longer gaining the benefits of the Refer-a-Friend program, I promptly respecced Holy. It has been three weeks since the change, and I feel that I can finally weigh in on my decision with a semblance of intelligence. In weeks past, Solidsagart has gone from level 60 to level 66, sheerly through instances (along with some dungeon-based quests). I stuck to dungeons so I could prepare myself for group healing. Not to mention the fact that the grind as Holy would totally suck. Initially, my healing ability was appaling; ADHD would kick in and I stopped paying attention, stopped looking at people's health, or decided that I was DPS again, and wasted all my mana trying to contribute to the chart. What can I say, old habits die hard. I decided that the best way to overcome my need for DPS was to stop playing my Rogue for awhile. For more than a solid week, Solidsagart was the only character I played, allowing me to hone my healing skills, and grab some respectable gear from the early Burning Crusade dungeons. Another obstacle I had was to get used to multi-target healing, rather than a single-target mindset. Thankfully, my spec has some built in utility for AoE healing. While on the topic of my spec, I have heeded some of the insights from the previous post's comments. I decided that Guardian Spirit is indeed, nearly useless (thanks Ryan) . Along those lines is Spirit of Redemption. The talent is very situational, and doesn't increase my healing unless used.  It has only made a difference once to date. So, I will be moving that SoR point and Guardian Spirit's into Holy Reach (thanks Claxo). I thought about moving two points from Searling Light to have full Inspiration (as PopeSeanPaul suggested), but decided that I wanted some DPS buff, for when I grind between instances. As a personal experiment I will be dropping Silent Resolve, moving the trio of points into Serendipity to help with mana conservation (numerous people pointed out the overheals issue). I would like to think that I do not burn too much mana off overheals, but I know I burn some. On the flip side, I have yet to pull aggro from the tank. Hopefully, I can maintain that statistic. The slightly modified spec now looks like this. I doubt I will get any raiding time in before Wrath of the Lich King, so that report will have to wait a few months. I would also like to thank the players (not Goggins) who pointed out Grid and Clique, they have been wonderful additions to my suite of addons. Groupmates have loved my "Oh, SHIT!" button. :p

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Oh, god do I understand the pain to be a healer finally. Previously, I have leveled my Rogue, a Mage and a Hunter. Never have I truly focused on a healing class, or even a tank (that is my next project). That was until recently. Since I hit 60+ and have been voyaging throughout the Outlands, I have been bombarded with tells. Ninety percent of them, if not more, simply asked “do you want to heal x,” quest, instance, help in PvP, you name it. I am not ignorant. I knew that I would be receiving these tells as soon as I got into the higher levels of World of Warcraft, but the sheer number I've been receiving is astounding. Ironically, they would have never asked me had they looked at my gear. It wasn't until some friends ran me through Ramparts, Blood Furnace and Slave Pens a few times that I became a competently geared healer for my level. Before that I was decked out in level 35-50 gear from power leveling – as a Shadow Priest - via the Refer-a-Friend service. This was responsible for my health barely being over 2000 and my mana pool hovering in the 4000 range. Not exactly ideal. The main reason I rolled a healer is simply because they are always needed. On my other toons, I would have to spam the LFG, trade, city and general chat channels to try and find groups. Minutes to hours could go by before something solidified. Now I simply say “Healer LFG Slave Pens” and boom, I have an invite. It feels nice to be wanted. In my defense, I feel like I have always been kind to healers, as I never randomly whispered someone or harassed them to come on my run. To top that off, I always would hand them any items I did not need. Healers must have loved me when they grouped with my Rogue. As soon as I felt the group and healer were competent to finish the instance, I'd open a trade window and dump all my mana pots, spirits or mana regeneration food and mana drinks on them. Back in my raiding days, I heard that some Priests asked for me to be in their group in hopes of scoring free swag, maybe that is just my ego talking. So the moral of the story is, be nice to your healers. Like a good tank, they can find a new group quickly. They don't need you, you need them. Oh, except Goggins, /spit on him at any and all opportunities.

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I believe that one of the biggest issues with raiding and partying in World of Warcraft is ego. So many people out there think that they know the game better than the creators themselves.  That confidence can often be a player's downfall. The fact of the matter is this, probably less than 1% of World of Warcraft players know it well enough to be considered experts at the game. Sure, many players known their class very well, but do they know its utility for raids, parties, Battlegrounds, Arenas and every boss fight? Not likely. What about the other classes?  Do they know how to get the most out of the Auction House? The ins and outs of WoW's scripting language? The often neglected lore? Doubtful. You may think I am here to gripe about how we could all open our eyes and learn a little from our guildmates, PUG-mates or Buddhism, but I promise you that isn't the case. Sure, I showed an officer last night that he could link his professional abilities rather than telling everyone what he can do, but he was gracious about learning from the “new blood.” I am actually here to ask for help. If you have been following my blog here at Project Lore, then you know that I made a Priest alt for the Refer-a-Friend promotion. I have never, ever, in all the MMOs I have played, gone healing. With Wrath coming in less than a month's time, I figured now is as good a time as any. With the refunded talent points I created this healing spec. Let me restate this, while I know the basics of healing, I certainly do not know the nitty-gritty details. My spec was designed to reduce casting time and mana consumption, while bolstering heals and crit heals and the chance to crit. Survivability was an afterthought. I do realize that being new to the “keeping people alive” rather than “killing everything that moves” mentality will likely cause me to waste tons of mana on overheals. So, the Serendipity talent is something I will likely move too. So Priests, and healers in general, now is your time to shine. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated – that means the first poster better have some good input – and it just doesn't have to be talent spec pointers. Good addon, macro or rotation suggestions are welcome too! I did create one macro already, my personal “Oh, shit!” button which I stole from my brother's old Priest. It yells, says, sends to party and raid the following message: “Fox! Get this guy off me!”

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This is the first of many features about addons I use in order to make Juggy the best shaman ever and Xenophontos a halfway decent warlock. Grid is an addon I used much more while I was resto and main healing, but it is still pretty useful even while I'm enhancement. An Ace addon, grid displays party and raid health bars in a compact form, and it gives loads of information using very little screen real estate. This means that at a glance, you can see how your raid is doing. By default, it displays each party member as a small square within a grid. I think that is where the name came from, but can we ever be sure? One of the great included features of grid are the inverted health bars, meaning it fills up a dim box with color as the player loses health, making it easier to spot who needs healing in a large raid. There is also a built in range check that can automatically dim all player's boxes who are out of range. This feature is invaluable, since trying to heal players who are out of range can waste a lot of time. It's also a great feature for battlegrounds, allowing you to become top healer and help your side win. Lastly, my favorite feature of Grid is its use of the incoming heal module, which shows a visual estimate of any incoming heals on any target in the raid from anyone using Grid (or any other ace addon that has the incoming heal feature). If all of the healers use this addon, you can avoid a lot of overhealing. There are also border colors, center icon, and other corner icons that are configurable to show tons of different statuses of each player in the raid. I do like to make a couple of tweaks to the defaults, though. I play on a relatively high resolution, and I find the default size of the squares too small. So, I scale it up in the options. As a shaman, I have two dispel options, poison and disease. The standard set up has all types of debuffs appear as a single mark in one corner of the player's box. I go in and change it so that magic debuffs and curses don't show up and poisons are in one corner while diseases are in another. That way I know which button to press or totem to drop in order to cure all of my party members. I also like to be able to see when Dorkins is going to run out of mana, so I've picked up GridManaBars. This takes a slice of the square and turns it into a mana bar. Imagine that! Most of the other options are fine for me on their default settings, but Grid is highly flexible, so play around and look at the documentation to find the settings that work best for you.

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