What with all this patch nonsense and various RL issues, which include me staying at my parents’ house to dogsit and such, I have had remarkably little time to play or respond to comments or anything like that. By “remarkably little time to play”, I mean that I’ve run three heroics on the hunter and one on the paladin.
However, I’d like to ask you all, those of you who have raided since the patch:
How is raiding? Many of the blogs I’ve read indicated that people wiped repeatedly to heroic Lord Marrowgar. I’m curious to know how people feel, how strategies have or haven’t changed. How’s raid healing on heroic BQL or Sindragosa? How’s tank healing on Blood Prince Council or Festergut?
“wiping on heroic lord marrowgar” Its bad, but not quite that bad. Tank threat either got nerfed, or dps are just doing oodles of threat. I haven’t had the pleasure to play on the beta so i find myself using HS and direct heals on my beacon while I’m at 3HPW. We are(or i am)at the bottom of meters : tho logs don’t show Illuminated healing. I am in a 11/12hc guild we managed to clear 7/12. I found a quick fix to get RecountAbsorbs working with illuminated healing, and ended up coming in 3rd place for pp w/ 35% of my heals coming from my mastery(18%). I feel bliz defiantly need to include DL in iol proc or buff HL.
To sum up.. The new spells and procs make healing a lot more interesting and fun. But throughput just isn’t good enough :
Anyway here’s my armory, it hasn’t updated so. My spec doesn’t have blessed life. but 3/3 protector.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Saurfang&cn=Gortia
Yar, we just did some ICC 25 heroic tonight. We didn’t wipe on heroic Marrowgar, but it has been an amusing night.
For one thing, there seems to be a problem with projected textures – no death and decay effect on Deathwhisper, no frost bomb runes on Sindragosa, etc.
For people who have messed up buff addons like SBF, we were resorting to the default Blizzard buffs and debuffs UI .. and it wasn’t showing Unchained Magic for the ranged.
Damage seems to be up for everyone except, surprisingly, hunters, rogues and death knights. Maybe it’s the unfamiliarity of the new class mechanics, for the hunters. Rogues just seem to be the same, and death knights seem to be a little worse than before. All I know is that it’s good to be a shadow priest! I’ve done more dps tonight than I’ve ever done. 15k on Rotface, 11k on Sindragosa … I honestly expect some more ranged dps nerfs.
Tanking seems to be a problem, still, as far as aggro goes. Fade ftw! I have not yet tried tanking on my two tank toons, though. I have barely touched my alts, actually.
UI problems abound – addons are mostly borked. Especially the raid frame ones.
There seems to be a bug for inspecting people.
Oh, and they changed the sound of a priest slipping into shadowform. I know that’s super important to everyone. It sucks! In the words of a fellow shadowpriest, it “sounds like a dog chawing on a bone”.
I have honestly not touched my paladin – I’ve modeled her holy spec based on your wisdom and your lovely guides, but I’m afraid to get into Holy Shocking. I liked Beacon how it was before. :-( Guess I’ll just have to give it a whirl.
I spoke to our healers – they didn’t seem to have many problems healing the tanks on Festergut or the raid on Sindragosa. Most of the raiding problems stemmed from people still trying to get used to their class mechanics, but overall, it wasn’t much different for our guild.
On a side note, I’m looking forward to applying to Apotheosis. :-)
I just posted a huge QQ on my blog.
However, that being said,I’ve also been doing some more reading. Reforged a few more pieces for haste and spirit and popped a few spirit gems in. (Which felt *really* strange…) I’m hoping that will help with some of my huge mana issues Wednesday night during ICC.
Overall, I’m feeling frustrated.
I’m not really sure what problems people were having. We only ran into problems at Heroic Sindragosa and Putricide last night, which is pretty normal for us.
Other than our boomkin and destro warlock, who were sky-high, everyone seemed reasonable. Melee was down a bit, ranged was up a bit, but our #4 dps was a Ret paladin. We did have to Salv the boomkin 5s into each fight, and Salv him on cooldown, but that was more amusing than anything.
That being said, I’m not really sure I contributed much as a Holy paladin. I was easily the lowest on the healing meters. I think that if mana is not a concern, the other healers can simply put out a ton more healing than us. I only tried bombing Divine Light in H. Festergut, and that ate mana, but otherwise I pretty much stayed at 100% all the time.
However, at 85, mana is supposed to be a concern, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.
It’s not that bad at all.
We’ve done ICC 25 H with just Frost Wing and LK up, and yes there were a couple fights we wiped on once or twice (LM, BP, PP) – everything else was one shot. At the same time there were a couple fights we *breezed* through do to DPS increases. ICC took about 30% more time than usual, but was very doable, even on Hard Modes. Most of that delay was dealing with unusual DCs and addon issues.
Things I’ve noticed:
– Tanks are a bit more squishy. For instance we had our shadow guy tank die a couple times on Blood Council before I realised he just needed a heck of a lot more healing than he used to. Not horribly constantly squishy as much as more prone to suddenly needing emergency heals/dying in a few seconds.
– Tanks are having a lot more trouble keeping threat. Whether that is because they aren’t used to their abilities, they’re tuned wrong, or dps is just not being kind or is unpredicable with crits and such…I’ve seen people pulling of the tanks every other fight – something that *never* used to happen at all.
-Overal healing is good. Mana is fine more or less. Disc priests are broken. Our holy Paladin was pretty sad as well. Raid healing in general wasn’t an issue…just the occasional tank death. You can argue there a lot of problems with healing, but it “more or less” worked fine.
It’s much better than I expected.
I facerolled ICC normal on 2 chars (druid main and super undergeared priest on her first ICC). Not up to LK since we didn’t have time, but what we did was easy. The druid changes hurt though… and it’s not tree form. I think the cooldown is cool, but my Nourish is sooooooo slow and Regrowth is meh.
My boyfriend’s guild (11/12 25-man heroic) wiped for 1 or 2 hours of heroic Marrowgar 25 on patch evening. They haven’t raided since then so I don’t know if it was a real problem or just people not used to their abilities, not having addons etc.
Threat did seem to be a problem in my “main” 10-man. The DK DPS and boomkin kept pulling at Saurfang (the boomkin didn’t have Omen though) and the pally tank was pretty sad about the state of her class. The DK tank was my boyfriend on an alt, and he was clueless before this too, so I don’t think he knew what keys he was pushing :P
On my “alt” 10-man (casual guild on another realm) we had less problems. Maybe because the DPS isn’t so geared as in my main guild?
Healing tanks is less spam-stressy in my opinion, and I do find the time even on heroic bosses to throw out a smite now and then to keep Archangel up. What I will say is that tanks who have not yet embraced their new changes will struggle, and dps who do not aim to control themselves will die. (Case in point: heroic Deathwhisper, tanks do not pick up adds for some reason nor do they establish a good taunting rotation on Deathwhisper, leading the mage to kiting Deathwhisper around for a while minute while I pop cooldowns to keep him up.)
I noticed the holy paladin in the group was definitely fumbling around with what he was meant to do – I saw Fail of Dawn (oh, I do love it, but it is rather hilarious trying to get it right) shooting off randomly in odd directions, as well that he was running OOM spamming Flash of Light. As well, I felt healing in general was less smooth, a bit more clumsy, but it may be lag spikes etc. Having a huge amount of haste is really beneficial for all healers now though.
I would not call ANY healing class broken – just that we all need to re-evaluate our tools and how and when we apply them.
I’m feeling like my new niche is the same as the old niche, only with less power.
It seems to me that the best way for me at the moment to roll is to beacon one tank and spam ‘the rotation’ largely between the two tanks. Trying to zip heals out to others has been a little hairy. Part of that is my add-ons, which are still not entirely up to speed (everyone was showing up as in-range, all the time. Which they weren’t). I might be a more effective raid healer once I get all that squared away, we’ll see.
I’m definitely finding periods of time where it feels like my heals aren’t actually doing anything at all, and other times where it feels like they just pop people right up. I also think there were a couple of times last night where I fired off LoD on people who were in range, and it didn’t heal them at all.
I won’t complain about being last on the meters, because someone’s got to be, and we don’t heal to top the meters, but it’s definitely odd to find myself at the bottom after being on top for so long. On the other hand, my overhealing was lower than it’s been in ages; even PotI didn’t overheal for as much as I thought.
The new, ‘rotational’ style of healing is definitely taking me some getting used to. I don’t think I will say that it’s ‘bad’, but it IS ‘different’.
I keep posting that CRIT is extremely undervalued right now and on EJ is a post about GCD locking at certain Haste percentages. This was posted by Noules on the theory crafting heading:
Quick analysis:
Let following notation serve for rotations: S = Holy Shock, h = Holy/Divine Light, H = SoL Holy Light, I = IoL Holy Light, W = Word of Glory, X = some other 1 GCD ability.
We will calculate cast/cycle time in units of GCD, since everything except Holy Shock cooldown scales with haste, including GCD.
Note then S = I = W = X = 1, h = 5/3 and H = 5/3.9 (I is actually ~25% haste after JotP or about 15% before (this is the TOR rotation)
SIhW = 3 + 5/3 ~= 4.67 GCD => ~17% haste after JotP, 7% haste before
SIhhW = 3 + 2*5/3 ~= 6.33 GCD => ~ 58% haste after JotP, 45% haste before (almost certainly unreasonable without heroism; note this is the best case scenario for 3x Holy Light)
SHhh = 1 + 5/3.9 + 2*5/3 ~= 5.62 GCD => ~40% haste after JotP, 29% haste before (non-TOR)
SIhh = 2 + 2*5/3 ~= 5.33 GCD => ~33% haste after JotP, 22% haste before
—————
So at certain Haste percentages you just ignore Haste till you can jump to the next level. Also he explains that Crit always benefits healing on every cast, while Haste does nothing for the spell we cast the most, i.e. HS, WoG. Also that Crit over the length of the fight saves mana and increases output.
I bet money that if you guys used equal amounts of Crit and Haste it would improve output and you would use less mana as having bigger heals. At 40% crit being raid buffed would be close to 50% Crit and that would be a huge effect on HS, WoG, HL, DL, FoL, HR, LoD and proc rates.
Sorry I missed this quote that was the point of the Haste discussion.
Noules:I’m surprised this hasn’t been addressed more. The big problem with haste will be that it will not scale as well as one might expect due to the fixed 6s HS cooldown. Given that pretty much any ‘rotation’ will have HS being used on CD and that the first HL/DL after the HS is the most efficient, there’s definitely going to be plateaus for haste benefit (though as usual, dependent on personal latency).
On my way out the door, but wanted to post this:
Richard – expect that discussion to change very soon as the latest beta build removes the 30% haste to FoL, HL and DL and adds 1/2/3% flat spell haste. See my latest entry for the change.
I don’t know if anyone’s reported issues with the flex lock system, but we had some serious problems.
Tuesday night, the difficulty was set to 25 player heroic. No one raided, but a few people went into ICC anyway.
Wednesday night, those people couldn’t physically get into ICC unless we summoned them in on normal. Swapping it back to heroic booted us from the instance.
When we get to Saurfang from Gunship, we’re in combat and we can see the flying frostdrakes below us are aggroing the raid. So we jump off the edge (missing people due to combat + teleporter). Come back in and some people end up in combat, some are stuck at Light’s Hammer again. So we 12 manned it. (and then called it bc the GM was pissed and the teleporter wouldn’t work bc we’re constantly in combat)
Thursday night, even more people couldn’t get in (myself included) even though the raid was formed on normal. We had to have the RL run in, set it to heroic->normal and then have everyone run in. (no combat issues)
I’m so frustrated with the stupid flex lock system, I want to bash heads in.
Raiding’s been alright. My GM is frustrated with people not showing up, so she’s frustrated by external issues that make raiding miserable. I can say that normal encounters are a breeze, (like 12 manning Saufang) we haven’t been able to do heroic.
Projected textures not working really killed us. We couldn’t do Halion, and she ends up physically turning to debuff someone. Not Cool.
As for priests?
Disc:
I feel so clunky and inadequate compared to druids (who are INSANE right now) and Holy priests (also insane), so it looks like it might be back to tank heal assisting with a pally. I love Power Word Barrier though.
Holy?
Mechanics are cool, but it’s a lot to keep track of Chakra CD’s and Holy Word CD’s and then the corresponding chakra heal. But it is very fun to goof around with.
Shadow:
THE most fun I’ve ever had dpsing. And I was shadow when you could do awesome stuff like kill yourself with shadow word death. Looks like i’d be able to do that again! mwahaha
(TL;DR, I’m undecided about this patch. Lots of frustrations and cool things at the same time.)
Ohh.. I don’t like those changes to Speed. We only raided once this week, but got down Marrow, Saur, and Queen on Heroic, which wasn’t too bad at all for three hours and a few attempts on the others before we switched ’em down.
I feel like, even busting my ass, using gold-spray-paint on cooldown, and ramping up WoG as often as possible, I was still under (80% usually) all the other healers. Priests were getting amazing numbers – this is where I get REALLY jealous – with different spells as appropriate each fight. Really, really reminding myself that it’s too early to think about changing mains… but priests are having wicked fun right now.
While we have not been raiding, I have been PvPing a lot. Let me tell you: it takes five dps (and one needs to be a caster) to take me down with Protector of the Innocent + Blessed Life + Eternal Glory. There is no way these talents will last, but here’s hoping that Protector becomes something less mind-numbingly dumb.
I’ve been reading a lot of complaints about Holy Paladin throughput that make me rather sad, but the general opinion seems to be that we have to work twice as hard to do half the healing that a druid or priest can manage and our spell rotation is inflexible (or just too slow) when dealing with burst. Many people seem to be favoring Flash of Light over Divine Light in an effort to keep tanks up.
Re: Discipline Priests
Since several people have posted about Disc without mentioning it, I just wanted to point out there are widespread reports that Atonement is bugged (not healing at all at this time). It certainly wasn’t working when I tried it out. It’s *possible* to play Disc without it…but I’d definitely call the spec “broken” at this time as our new “go to” heal isn’t, well, healing.
@Kaleri
I had completely forgotten about not being able to see projected textures. I agree – totally frustrating. While this simply required more raid awareness and “guessing” on Lady Deathwhisper’s Death and Decay and Hodir’s Flash Freeze…I’m scared to go near Sindragosa. Being unable to see the Frost Bomb projected texture seems like it’s going to make hard mode impossible.
All I have to say is Heroic ICC just got easy. We didn’t start wiping until Putricide, and that was just because of people relying too much on addons to tell them they have plague and not actually paying attention.
Princes isn’t that bad as a healer, especially holy pally.
All in all I am having a blast with my paladin.
@ ecclesiastical discipline
Yep, projected textures being fudgered made for some really frustrated raiders.
Re: Disc priests
I found Atonement worked extremely sporadically. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Very strange. But I did see a few heals after my smites (archangel is so cool!)
I have yet to try Holy in a raid, but my raid buddy was kicking some serious ass in Chakra: Renew.
I did a full regular ICC 10 clear on my Priest these last two days. (My Priest is finally a Kingslayer! Woot!) I ran into lots of things in there that are bugged. Warlock summon stones were completely bugged and didn’t work at all.
Atonement heals sporadically at best – most of the time it is not at all. When it does work, it is a glorious thing! The Atonement heals will proc a Divine Aegis as do Renew crits. I am unsure why my guild feels it is necessary to have 3 healers for everything so I got to Smite spam quite a bit. Power Word Barrier doesn’t seem to absorb as much as it should but I can’t justify loosing haste in favor of Mastery right now.
All of the drakes flying around in the sky are cracked out and flapping their wings a million miles an hour. There was no weekly raid quest. Not sure if that was a bug or they removed it.
The Gunship bugged completely out. It disappeared, taking with it our loot and leaving everyone still in combat. We all decided it was a good idea to kamikaze ourselves off the edge – the ship came back with the loot but we were still in combat. We all managed to get back in the instance and then some random NPC appeared out of nowhere on Deathbringer’s rise and started attacking people.
The other wings were pretty easy. The projected textures stopped working so no one could see the icy stuff on the ground at Sindy. This made for many wipes and we called it until the next day. Some raid members got the textures to work again but others could only see one Pally’s Consecrate but not the other two Pally’s Consecrates.
The Lich King was a little better. At this point we were rezing outside of ICC and being alive with a sliver of health – having to fly our own mounts into the instance instead of being dead on a gryphon. This made for some hilarious rezes. Their bodies would still be up at Lich King so I would rez them. Once they took the rez (even though they were technically alive), they would dismount and fall to a horrible death. Once they were dead again, they finally got the ghost gryphon to work like normal.
Archangel was a life saver on Lich King. I had blown all my mana returning CDs so I decided to Smite myself some more mana. Fully raid buffed it restored around 9K mana and I had the added bonus of 15% extra healing. This was especially nice since it was healers getting pulled into the sword each attempt for some reason.
I don’t think Disco healing feels inadequate at all – it does have a few bugs to work out. My Fiancée normally blows me away on healing charts on his Pally but this time he was only doing a fraction of what he normally does. I was sitting at number one heals the whole night against a Holy Pally and a Resto Shaman. I honestly didn’t know how to react to that… other than, Hell yeah! :p
Andy – Tank threat might not have been nerfed so much as the tanks don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. ;)
Would love to see your fix for Recount, btw. I can’t find absorbs in the combat log at all.
Another person thinking throughput isn’t high enough — and I still agree.
Any reason you went with 3/3 PotI instead of 2/3 PotI and 1/2 Paragon of Virtue?
Dahrla – haha, I heard about projected textures issues!
Wow. Not showing Unchained? hahaha.
Don’t be afraid of Holy Shocking — it’s kind of what we need to be doing. And I miss the old Beacon of Light, too.
Glad to hear you’re enjoying shadow priesting and that your healers were okay on Fester and Sindy!
Stay tuned for posts at the Apotheosis website regarding recruitment. :)
Janyaa – Can you go into more detail about your mana issues?
Breathing is good, by the way. Helps with frustration. :)
Rohan – I’m very amused by the constant salving of the moonkin! And I’m glad you didn’t run into too much trouble in your raid.
Our mastery isn’t showing absorbs from what I can tell, so I imagine you’d be higher up if they were showing. That is, if the mastery isn’t entirely bugged and just not absorbing anything…
I can speak from experience that FoL and DL spam at 85 won’t cut it, which is why I’m trying to rely more on HS, HL and WoG than anything else, although I’m finding times to use FoL and DL as well.
Pleasure to see you over here, by the way. I’ve been reading your blog for what seems like an eternity. :)
ecclesiastical discipline – Glad to have another relatively smooth raid report.
How are discs broken? And how did you combat the occasional tank deaths?
Keep us posted. :)
Jen – It must be neat to have so many perspectives to draw from! I’m sure that gear + unfamiliar mechanics for tanks = threat issues for sure.
Sorry to hear you’re not thrilled with Nourish and Regrowth. If it helps, I can totally relate. ;)
Lidanya – Light of Dawn’s got a funny animation. It’ll shoot off wherever your feet are pointed, but the heal actually goes where your toon’s face is pointed!
Ack, FoL spam? /facepalm
Not to argue about being broken or not, but when could one call a class broken? Is it when you stand there for 2 seconds waiting for your 6 second cooldown to be up? Is it when you feel useless in a raid? I’m just curious. I keep waiting for holy paladins to get better… and what I’m seeing is too little and too slow, so far. :/
Thanks for your two cents, mind you. I’m really pleased so many people are sharing.
jeffo –
I’m feeling like my new niche is the same as the old niche, only with less power.
You seem to have a way with words, buddy! I like that line a lot.
I sort of view the style as being more prioritized, kind of like hunter shot rotations in Wrath:
HS -> WoG -> HL, in that order. But I’m not really ready to get in depth on that.
Would love to hear more about your overhealing, particularly for things like Divine Light.
—
4:08am. Bedtime. More responses soon.
Avenging wrath has always just been a really unattractive spell to me, I prefer to keep forbearance for those oshit moments when i need to use bubble. For the recount fix, you must be using Recount, Recount guessed absorbs, and Recount heals & absorb —
Go into RecountGuessedAbsorbs in your addon folder. Open GuessedAbsorbs_Mode in notepad, scroll down till you see Sacred shield under paladin. On the line directly below that enter this;
[86273] = 6, — Illuminated Healing
Good luck.
O I’m a total noob. Of course wings don’t cause forbearance anymore. I guess its just out of habit : I know i will be changing a point >.> THanks. Another thing on holy paladins i made a lolspec for dueling which is this
http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#schrdrkuubbZf:Mcakoz
And i gotta say i have some unbelievable burst damage.
Just to chime in… We did 10/12 heroic icc this week.. 1st nite sucked as a Holy Paladin… just too different…
After some changes, second night was much better…
Bottom line – fun, more mobile, more tools… no throughput… the druid doubled my heals and hps… was even with me on dreamwalker… on H Sind… Just watched everybody die.. nothing I could do about it… I hate direct healing beacom target.
Using holy light alot as a filler to get more word of glories until shock comes back up… 3 holy lights for a shock. As fight progresses, I move into more Flash of Lights, but only as needed… only use divine light when I know there’s damage coming. Cast is just too long… end up breaking it off if it doesn’t appear to be needed…
Trying to figure out if it is better to holy light beacon and then WoG or just heal whoever needs it and let WoG’s come up through shocks as it comes off cd..
If you wait around and heal stuff when its needed, priest / druid soak it all up..
Almost feel like they should combine ret and holy together. heal when needed, otherwide, dps. Now that would be some utility…
I think I’ve got a handle on it right now. I guess Im lucky because I only started playing in May of this year.
I really didnt think I was going to enjoy it but I’ve surprised myself and I am.
I agree, we did 11/12hc. The second night was allot better after getting used to using hpw. And i still topped vdw using fol and hasted DL’s shamans allot closer to me than before tho :