On healing and addons

MoarHPS! had a post today where Codi defended her reasons for not using healing addons. Today's post was in response to a previous post where she merely noted how long it had been since she had started healing raids without the use of addons, and was attacked for it repeatedly.

Utter rubbish, that.

Why anyone would insult or demean another person or player just because he or she chooses to play differently is baffling to me. And the silliest part is that, when you distill any such arguments down to the basics, you find that ultimately the insulter is arguing from a principled standpoint. Which in this case means that the results of addon-less healing don't matter at all. It doesn't matter if the whole raid survives, the boss dies, everyone is competitive on the healing meter, etc. -- if you didn't use add-ons and others did, you're a worse player and everyone else only succeeded because they were able to carry you.

Now keep in mind here, we're speaking about running no add-ons, period. None. No Deadly Boss Mods, no Decursive, and certainly no Grid.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I do have two different perspectives. My wife, who's currently working on Heroic Lich King 25 and Heroic Ruby Sanctum 25 in her guild, uses a few add-ons, primarily DBM and Decursive, but heals totally with the default raid UI. She's very successful at it, and obviously the default UI gives a player enough information and flexibility to support the statement that "add-ons aren't required to achieve a high level of performance."

That being said, I do use add-ons myself -- the aforementioned DBM and Decursive, as well as Grid -- but not only do I have to honestly admit that they really provide a minimal additional benefit, but I've also occasionally found that using add-ons can actually impede one's ability to perform as a healer. For instance, when pugging a raid, seeing all of these unfamiliar names in an unfamiliar configuration on Grid, a healer could find themselves delayed in finding a specific one to start healing. This is because by default, Grid covers names on the unitframes when the unit starts taking damage, replacing them with health deficits or incoming healing. Jaraxxus, a frequent target of the weekly raid quests, is a good example. Can a healer using Grid with default options find the target of Incinerate Flesh before the affected raider blows up?

It could be difficult, going only by class colors in Grid or by checking tooltips. Could it be much easier to simply use the default UI, trade Grid's compact design for a wider, more expansive display, and find your healing targets quickly without fighting your addons?

I think that's not a far-fetched assumption.

Now on the flip side of the coin, I think it's far easier for most people to think of ways that not using add-ons can be a serious detriment to raid performance. The problem is that this is a very short-term viewpoint. And this only on bosses that the specific person has some lesser amount of experience attempting compared to the rest of the raid.

On brand new, never attempted bosses, everyone is on equal footing. A raider used to the default UI for buffs and debuffs will not have any less of an ability to see when a crucial debuff is applied, for instance, and being used to interpreting this method of displaying information, will not have any unnatural lag in reaction time or in processing new information.

Now, lacking timers and countdowns, like those provided by DBM, can introduce a bit of decision making lag or user input lag as the player becomes used to expecting these abilities or phase changes, but once the player is there and ready to expect these mechanics of the fight, not having DBM can actually be beneficial as a way to reduce to incidence of "tunneling," or simply staring at your screen not processing and changes in scenery going on around you because you're hyper-focused on irrelevant information. Every healer has experienced tunneling at some point, and I firmly believe that an over-abundance of information on the screen, of which DBM is a prime offender, serious decreases a player's ability to remain alert and ready for changes on screen. This is just a natural consequence of seeing all of this constantly changing information displayed in front of a person. That person will become deadened to some degree to the other changes going on in the encounter, especially those not displayed by an add-on -- e.g., boss movement, raid movement, etc.

All this back and forth basically amounts to the following: healing with or without mods and add-ons is ultimately a question of style. If you choose to use them, great. If you choose not to use them, also great. Just make sure that, whichever path you choose to follow, that you are getting the essential information that you need as a player at your current level of difficulty. Perform as required, and nobody even has to know which of these kinds of healer you are in the first place.

Enough said, now?

Coming up

Stuff I'd like to accomplish (WoW-related) in the next couple weeks:

• Finish levelling enchanting to at least 400
• Continue working on Netherdrake rep (I seriously want one for some reason. I think I have always been jealous of those people flying around on them in BC). Want to get exalted in two weeks with some lucky egg farming.
• Make a Wispcloak for my healing set.
• Enchant my healing set, including head and shoulders. Consider using Cowl of Vanity (gemmed and enchanted) for my healing helm instead of Cowl of Innocent Delight as I am now. Was going to save Vanity for a DPS helm once I got enough +hit to replace Faerlina's Madness but Ulduar is shifting priorities. I don't want to spend 250g doing that to only replace it in a week.
• If I swap helms, it seems likely I will have to switch in Legwraps of the Defeated Dragon (which is arguably only a marginal upgrade if at all) to replace Leggings of the Instructor, an awesome item even though they come from 10 man Naxx, just to make up that +hit. I was hoping to hold out for Kel'thuzad's leggings, but the likelihood of getting those if they drop is slim. However swapping out Leggings of the Instructor when in Shadow spec will make them into full-time healing legs, a role they excel at.
• Run 10 man naxx for some non-dps items to fill out my healing offset. Notably belt and neck. As a corollary, pick up whatever's available in 25 man Naxx. If we actually run it. Otherwise 25 man Naxx is getting pugged like whoa, bads and all.
• Work on fishing and cooking now that those balls-tastic quests to progress past 225 are gone. Considering letting Zerkker be my cook and fisherman, but it will be a while before I can cook useful food for my priest if I go that route.
• Somehow find the time to do enough dailies to fund all this AND pay for progression raids 3 nights a week.

This is all a tall order. The money issue is a big one, as the gear switching, if I go ahead with it, will gain me very little actual improvement in exchange for 500g all told (about 350g for the gems, 160g for the enchantments). Considering I hit 4000 dps fairly easily I don't think anything's particularly wrong with my gear setup that I would need to fix right now. I'm not going to be zerging 10 man Sarth+3 anytime soon, but that wasn't in the cards anyway.

And this is all assuming I have the time to accomplish any of this.

Ignis and XT

Last night we made some attempts at XT-002 Deconstructor and Ignis the Furnace Master. And yes, there were lots of crotch jokes on Ignis. I think we added a couple new words and phrases to our guild lexicon on that one.

Although we didn't down either of them, we made some progress. I'm going to go through some of the things we learned both for my benefit and the benefit of any readers (yeah, right).

• There was a rumor going around that killing Ignis adds 1 minute to the enrage timer on XT. This is false.
  
• Ignis' and XT's trash really isn't so hard on 25 man. At least that, or we've gotten much better at dealing with them.
• Positioning is key on Ignis. For that fight, our best attempt had all of the casters grouped up at the center of the room while the MT shuffles Ignis back and forth in front of the waterfall pool, angling him so that the scorches don't fall into the water. The problem with this strategy is that the Scorch patches make kiting the adds through them difficult for the OTs. Walking right in front of Ignis a whole bunch of times is just asking for it.
• Our sticking point at the moment with Ignis is our kiting strategy. Slag Pot (aka "crotchal") duty is handled. MT heals are handled. We only lose our MT or any crotched player when the buff stack on Ignis becomes too high for us to handle healing the MT and healers have to shift their attention (futilely, but it's the natural reaction). If the MT is going to die, it usually happens during or immediately after Flame Jets.
• I fucking blow at Disc healing (my dual spec). At least I have some good excuses. My offset, while including a couple best-in-slot healing pieces pre-3.1, is really shoddily prepared. I also am using a +hit necklace solely because it has Spirit on it, and a cloak and a belt (the belt with +hit on it no less) with all DPS stats on it simply for lacking a better option. My Shadow spec boots pull double duty as healing boots (best in slot, natch). Thus I heal with Icewalker on my boots like all the pros do. Though, admittedly, Icewalker is a halfway decent enchantment for a Disc healer. Also, Discipline-spec healing is much much different from what I was used to as a long-time Holy-spec healer. Much more fast paced, almost no OO5SR (Out Of Five Second Rule) dancing, spamming Power Word: Shield (which, by the way, is AMAZING with Disc talents)... it's a bit too much too much to process and perform at the moment, although I'm getting better quickly.
• Penance and PW:S are the best spells for a Disc healer on this fight (MT duty and Slag Pot duty). Along with the obvious bouncy-bouncy PoM. Slap your raid leader if you're Disc and s/he puts you on raid healing (gasp) . Actually, if s/he puts you on anything BUT single-target healing.
• Flame Leviathan is much, much more fun with 25 people. :)

I'm confident we'll get Ignis down on Friday (although, myself and my beautiful wife-to-be will not be able to attend). I'm equally confident that Razorscale, once Ignis is down, will suddenly seem to get much easier. She may well go down on Friday as well.

Next up, a general status post.

New Divine Hymn

Okay, so I lied.

Matticus just gave the priest community a heads-up on the new Divine Hymn currently on the PTR. There was a seemingly minor change to the tooltip wording that seems to indicate Divine Hymn will soon be a raid-wide "smart heal." His comparison to Circle of Healing seems pretty much spot on.

This is a potentially raid-saving spell available to ALL priests that gives us shadow priests in particular a little bit more utility in a raid context. I already have it ingrained in me to use Hymn of Hope when necessary from raiding with my fiancee, a healing priest. This new Divine Hymn will just give me another good reason to pop out of Shadowform in crunch time. And don't forget Hymn of Hope is getting a major facelift as well.

Let's hope this change goes live.

State of a shadow priest

I suppose my first actual post should be a summary of some kind of where I feel shadow priests stand in relation to other classes and roles in WoW, as well as a biography of my own experience as a priest. Should be easy, right?

Shadow priests have come a long way since vanilla. Even though I was primarily a healer throughout pre-BC content, and almost all shadow spec throughout BC, I have some cross-spec experience in both eras. In vanilla, summarizing shadow priests is fairly easy: we were a diet warlock. One calorie, no carbs. Our best use was stacking Shadow Weaving on targets to boost the damage of the warlocks in the raid. Damage, even in decent gear (which I actually had, surprisingly enough), was abysmal. Vampiric Touch didn't exist, and Vampiric Embrace was a sub-par ability. If you were a shadow specced level 60, most people would call you a noob and tell you to go heal. Of course, this was also the period during which Discipline was an awesome healing tree and Holy, in comparison, was woefully underpowered until Priests finally got their second talent review.

In Burning Crusade, the addition of Vampiric Touch to our arsenal was a huge hook in the opposite direction. Suddenly healing priests were hard to find in the upper echelons of raids. Some top-end guilds completely lacked healing priests of any kind. Shadow priests were the indispensible mana-batteries of the raid. Our damage still sucked, but at least we could do more than a trickle of healing. Instead, we were needed solely to give caster-dps classes and healers the longevity they needed for boss encounters. Our damage abilities were just gravy. It wasn't even until later on in BC, when gear improved, that shadow priests began to do respectable damage. The fantastic scaling abilities of Vampiric Embrace all but guaranteed a raid spot for well-geared shadow priests. I would estimate I spent 90-95% of my raiding time as shadow spec, speccing holy for brief periods for a refreshing change of pace. And then patch 3.0.1 happened.

Everything changed. Shadow priests were finally a dps class, at the cost of our wonderful ability to restore mana. Instead of mana return, gear levels were measured in dps. Mind Flay could crit. Mind Blast no longer drew tremendous amounts of aggro, finally making it the primary dps ability it wanted to be throughout BC. Devouring Plague was no longer the horrendously overpowered racial class ability of undead priests (*tear*). In many respects, we were much more like warlocks.

At first, I found this confusing, and annoying. "What good is 0.25% mana per second?" I asked. Replenishment seemed a pale shadow of Vampiric Touch, a woefully inadequate bone thrown to what I saw as a spec gutted to the core. I could see my raid spot fading away as I competed with pure dps classes now instead of having a niche of my own. Wrath of the Lich King came out and I started a Death Knight, spending most of the first months of the expansion levelling the Flavor of the Month and making half-hearted attempts to return to my priest. I lamented the loss of our indispensibility and waxed nostalgic about our halcyon days of yore.

When I finally returned to my poor, neglected shadow priest (after a brief flirtation with levelling as Holy) I found something shocking--doing damage was fun. All I needed was a fresh perspective. Once I got my head out of the past and wrapped my brain around the new, improved shadow priest, I found myself actually enjoying it. Now, you couldn't tell me different. I finally saw the incredible improvements made to the spec, including the Shadow Weaving change (it never really made sense as a debuff on the target), a phenomenal AoE ability in the form of Mind Sear, the threat reduction while in shadowform, the talent to reduce and virtually eliminate spell pushback (one of my major complaints in BC), and many others I won't bother to continue to list. I cut my Death Knight out of my regular play experience, only hopping on to tank heroics and raids when desperately needed, and haven't looked back since.

Now, here I am almost fully Naxx-25 geared, averaging 3300 dps in a sub-optimal spec. I frequently outdamage mages (mages!) and never pull aggro, a common experience in BC. I can still restore your mana, and pew pew while doing it.

We've come a long, long, way baby.