DPS the targets in this order that is always changing, or we all die

I'd decided to give healing a try again. It was never my strength. I might even dare to say that I am awful at it. And yet, I cannot help but blame how healing is done.

Let us imagine if DPS had a two dozen targets. Each one would need to be attacked within a particular time, hit a certain amount, or else the raid could wipe. These targets would change unpredictably and frequently. There are too many to simply assign a DPS to each one. They have to each, somehow, know which one to damage, and make these decisions within fractions of a second. Meanwhile the healers keep healing their targets, because their healers are too damn stupid to not make their jobs harder.

Wouldn't that be terribly unfun?

With a coordinated group, perhaps it would be doable. With a small group, only five or ten, it would be doable. But when your DPS are dropped into a chaotic mob of uh, chaos, it gets to be more difficult. The mobs move, so you lock them in place, but of course if you lock their positions, then you can't really see what's going on in the fight and it becomes that much harder to predict what little you could before.

My own experience has always been rocky. I'd done it about since I started playing, here and there. I love filling in for a lost healer or a tough spot. As a primary job, I am just not good at it. I never have been. I tended to get mad at it, and yet often got stuck doing it. Something about it just doesn't work with my brain. Maybe it's just a lack of practice. It is not unlikely that a lack of gear causes some problems as well; I only just created an incomplete Timeless set, without a weapon, no trinkets or rings, and so on. I'm sure it adds up to a blue set, but when the tanks pull like they're expecting a healer in purples, I don't see myself as overgeared.

On the plus side, I had a lot of fun trying to figure out macros to make it work. Somehow I had managed to fit all my prot and ret abilities into an action bar and a half. I roll to another bar if I need AoE and some are macroed to fit in extra spells. Holy has not quite managed to fit comfortably. On the plus side, I may find use for my mouseover macros elsewhere; though ironically, they don't work as well when the spells are bound to mouse buttons. For some reason mouseover doesn't work on party portraits when the macros are bound to my mouse.

And of course, above all, it is something new to learn. I like having those things.

The other day I went healing with some friends. One was used to healing, so we made him DPS. The other tanked as usual. I learned that the second-to-last boss in Niuzao Temple does not summon adds if you're alone, and his damage isn't actually that high, so as the last one standing I was able to slowly, very very slowly, kill him for about 10% before my friends told me to stop wasting the time of the PUG people. I granted their request to no longer grace the group with my greatness and switched to ret for the last boss. Somehow having far superior gear in a role that I am more experience with led to a better outcome.

I'll heal some more. Some. 

Shared Health

What if groups shared a health pool?

Incoming damage is calculated, and able to be seen, individually (no hiding that you were in the fire). It then feeds into a larger, combined health pool. Overall damage taken in unchanged. If the entire raid takes damage, then the proportional spike is as big as ever. If a particular player takes damage, just as much healing is needed. But, the spikes that hit individual players are proportionally smaller relative to the health pool, giving more time to deal with such things. More importantly, this cuts the number of health bars to deal with by 80%. Now the 25-man raid has as many health bars as a five-man instance.

I'd heal that.

Coming tomorrow, the post you've all been waiting for: Cobalt ore.

How to get rid of wack-a-mole healing

Behold, The greatest idea ever: The server lies to us about how much health we have.

No longer would healers watch health bars because they would be utterly meaningless.  Healers would instead have to watch the environment.  Estimate people's original health pools, see how much they've been standing in fire, and assume the tank is about to die any second.  Exciting!

You're welcome.

Persuasive and Authoritarian Roles in the Holy Trinity

Some people tell you what to do and you have to listen because they're the ones in charge.  They have the law or guns or mind-control.  These are the authoritarians.

Some people convince you to do it by manipulation: bribes and blackmail and friendly smiles with the knife behind their back.  These are the persuasives (not a real word)(or so the authoritarians would say).

Some people don't tell you to do anything, they seem to never order anyone at all, but they are always there, making things happen, invisible and often uncredited, but necessary beyond imagination.  These are the nameless ones, because I can't think of a good label and maybe that works anyway.

Consider control over mobs within WoW.  I think we can map these labels onto the group roles.  Not the holy trinity of tank, healer, DPS, but to tank, crowd control, and healing. 

Tanks hold aggro by mechanic and mind-control.  They use sheer numerical power to force enemies to attack them.  That's what aggro is, a number on a table that tells the mob who to attack, and tanks make very big numbers.  Taunts are the mind-control, forcing them mob, regardless of any other preference (except when specifically disabled) to attack the tank.  Tanks are ultimately about straightforward use of power to force the mob to do what they want.  As WoW tanking has evolved from aggro being difficult to survival being difficult (relatively speaking), this has become even more accurate as an analogy.  Indeed, authoritarians can impose their will, but then people try to kill them, with varying degrees of success.

Crowd control uses tricks.  The crowd control cannot easily tell mobs to attack them, but some classes can tell them to attack others.  They can pin mobs in place, stun them, fear them.  They kite them, using constant effort to make it happen, in contrast with the tank who can more often start off with aggro and keeps it, with little effort.  A kiting hunter cannot ever stand still because the mob is always moving, just as a persuasive leader must constantly counter the intellectual, or blatantly false but nevertheless convincing, attacks against him.  One misstep can be the end.  But the results can be more beautiful to see.  While the power of a tank may be impressive, everyone enjoys a story of intrigue.

And then there are the healers.  They don't tell anyone what to do, not directly.  Without them, everything else falls apart.  They are the bureaucrats and the secretaries, who we may see, but never quite acknowledge as essential, and they may try to keep it that way.  Their bosses are likely to be authoritarian or persuasive and neither likes to have their spotlight stolen.  If we notice an amazing healer, it probably means something went wrong.  They take the heat when someone stands in the fire.

Or if you were expecting this to be about God, then let's say God is the authoritarian, Jesus is the persuasive, and the Holy Spirit is the nameless.  It doesn't even get a name.  Sometimes it's the Holy Ghost, which sounds like the least terrifying Halloween movie ever.  God tends to kill people, the Holy Spirit does something I can't quite remember but is important, and Jesus once crowd-controlled a pack of demons by putting them into sheep and running them off a cliff into the sea.  And then he self-rezed and BAM, casted frost shock.

Should LFR form 10-man raids?

Currently, LFR forms 25-man raids. This has benefits and costs. Let's look at those.

Speed of raid formation
We know from random heroics that there is a relative shortage of tanks and healers. In a perfectly balanced system everyone would see approximately the same queue times, slightly above zero and varying with time, due to random variation in the number of tanks, healers, and DPS online at a given time. The average wait time of any role would be the same as any other. Obviously this is not the case.

25-man raids shift the required ratio of tanks, healers, and DPS. While only one or two more tanks may be needed, as well as more healers, the majority of the increase in raid size is from DPS. The overall ratio swings away from tanks+healers toward DPS, which may more closely match the overall population ratio. In contrast, 10-man raiding can simply double the requirements, leaving the general balance approximately the same. This means that we can expect 25-man raids to form more quickly than 10-man raids.

Or can we?

Let's imagine that players queue in at random times, and also randomly fail to accept the created raid (the dreaded red check mark followed by another few minutes of waiting). If two tanks, two healers, and six DPS are queued up, that's a 10-man right there. If we add more DPS, they don't have a group until we've added so many that a 25-man forms. That means waiting, which means more time for people to get bored and drop out, meaning a longer wait to form the raid.

The critical factor here is the size of the queued population. If it is small, then the 10-man raid will form more quickly, while a large queued population will make 25-man raids quicker on average by bringing in more of the overflow of DPS. Note that this does not mean the population that wants to use LFR. Players already in a raid are not queued and are therefore not available to form additional raids.  I'll come back to the logic, or lack thereof, of this later.

 Quality of Experience
I think I might enjoy LFR more if it formed ten-man raids.  With the current 25 it becomes a giant mess of players, crammed into small spaces, lagging out anyone with a low-end computer, and feeling like a zerg-fest rather than a raid.  Switching to a ten-man format could alleviate this problem.  Individuals could feel slightly more accountable and important, but with heavy nerfing they would have to try just as hard to wipe the raid.

On the other hand, that was some terrible math that I didn't do
If the overall population trying to raid is out-of-proportion with the 10-man raid size, there are going to be longer queues, even if each group forms faster, because each group is smaller.  It would be faster movement through a narrower pipe, and a pipe that for some reason blocks half the DPS from entering.

For this, I suggest a hybrid model: Form 10-man raids by default, but if the DPS backlog grows too large, form 25-man raids until it has been reduced.  This would put the average raid size and composition somewhere between 10 and 25, allowing it to more closely match the overall ratio of players.  If there are a lot of DPS one night, it will skew toward 25 to let in more, while if the DPS are lower, it will create 10-man raids.  This wouldn't help much with any imbalance between tanks and healers.

The hybrid model should result in faster queue times for everyone, better matching the requirements of the raids to the available population.  As an added bonus, it could give Blizzard a way to measure how many people actually want to raid in each role.  If the queue times between roles are more similar, then players will be more likely to play the role which is most fun, with less distortion from queue times.  In the future  Blizzard could use that information to form better raid sizes and ratios of tanks, healers, and DPS.  Imagine that, having data on what people want to play based on what they do, rather than what they say they want to do, or what they do when we provide a distorted incentive system.  It's like science!  But sadly, with fewer lasers.

I'm afraid of healing

I don't see how anyone could possibly be a new tank. It sounds terrible. It looks terrible. You try to do a small pull to make sure you can handle everything and you get yelled at. You try a bigger pull and if anything slips away you get yelled at. Meanwhile some jackass DPS is running all over the place pulling more shit and you get blamed if you don't attract it like a gas stream from a dying star inside the event horizon. To be clear, I mean that there is a dying star and the gas is heading toward the black hole, I'm not suggesting that the star itself has passed the event horizon. That would be very hard to picture.

Meanwhile your gear needs work, because if you're a decent human being, you've not been stealing all the gear from tanks while you've been not tanking, so you're running around in some mix of garbage and trash with maybe a few DPS items that were, sadly enough, better than your actual tanking gear. If you pull more mobs, you're going to die. But fortunately, the idiot DPS can probably tank better than you, because they're at double the item level due to ridiculous amounts of stat inflation, and yet, for some reason are still in your random group.

I am, with all due modesty, an incredibly arrogant person within WoW, not because I think I'm an amazing player, but because when I put on a shield I take that as a cue to be a total dick if I'm in a bad mood. It's sort of like the Zimbardo prison experiment, in that it's a bunch of students role-playing being complete assholes and forgetting that they are dealing with actual human beings deserving of some basic dignity, like goblinism.

What this all means is that when I get treated like dirt, I brush it off, because it's all coming from non-tanks. You know, inferior beings. So I can roll through it and not care.

However the concept of healing nearly reduces me to tears. As hard as things sound for a new tank, at least they have the ability to, slightly, influence what gets pulled. They're up front and know what is going on, and wrong. But the healer, they're like a Seinfeld in that one episode where they tie him to a car and use it to make him exercise. If you've seen the episode you know exactly how badly that turns out. If not, let's just say there is a blood and then blood. But thankfully, no death knights.

I suppose I can see how a veteran healer can keep going. And a totally new player, I can see how they'd pick that role once. But then it all goes to hell. And while Churchill said "if you're going through hell, keep going", he never had to heal a heroic random, so what the fuck does he know? And don't you dare Godwin this with some comparison to Nazis.

It can't help that at low levels, as well as high levels, the healing specs are terrible for soloing. So then the healer is either soloing like crap or until level 30 is trying to healing with a different spec and probably has no regen so they're drinking every other pull and probably getting voted out for waiting around so much. Maybe heals should be free until level 30.

Mages need buffs

By buffs I of course mean giving them a tanking and healing tree. Frost seems like a good choice for tanking, particularly after they screwed up and made blood the DK tanking tree. BLOOD IS STUPID! Fact. Fire has a cauterization theme going for it, but I doubt that would get past committee.

While we're suggesting ideas, why not an acupuncture tree for rogues? Maybe a "shadow healing" tree for priests? I'm just saying, priest sounds like a healing class, so maybe it needs more healing options. But if I really had to pick, I'd go with arcane. It just feels right. Frost and ice are hard and slow enemies, fire blows shit up, and arcane manipulates things. For example, Slow could slow down the rate at which you die. Arcane Blast would be an excellent quick heal. Arcane Missiles are really just Penance with a different shininess.

This is obviously a pretty major change to a class that has been around, and been more or less what is currently is, for a long time. And it would create all sorts of problems such as figuring out how to make a cloth tank without needing a whole new brand of itemization. Maybe spirit could give armor, thereby ensuring that the tanks get into fights with the healers for gear, which is something WoW has been lacking ever since paladins stopped using spell power swords.

Passive Patricide

If Luke had just learned to heal Vader might have lived.
That's what happens when you don't learn to heal: your dad dies

-Iapetes

I'm stealing that.

-Klepsacovic

Replacing the Holy Trinity with One God

And I am his prophet.

What is it that keeps the idea of a tank alive? Yes, exactly the same thing that keeps the tank alive: healers. Without a healer, even a tank will die. And when the tank can die, is he really a tank or just awful DPS who survive a few more seconds but do a lot less damage? Yes.

So I introduce to you a magical world in which queues are instant, no one heals, and no one tanks. In this magical world everything hits a lot softer but has a lot more health. Rather than healing or tanking, we just take turns casting Taunt Everything and then bandaging.

Does this sound skilless and boring? Of course it does! I bet some players might even enjoy it. So of course we have to fix that.

Step one: Add a few mobs with AoE. These will interrupt bandaging, ruining the taunting rotation since the next guy in line will still be half-dead. So we need to focus on them, possibly with death or possibly with CC.

Step two: Uh.

Okay I give up, I hate this idea. We're all doomed. If we separate out roles, we're going to have shortages which vary wildly with the content. Heroics: not enough tanks or healers. Raids: too many tanks, not enough healers. Great system! If we remove the trinity then it turns into a muddled pointless mess of taunt rotations or even worse, we have to all play dynamically with cooldown usage, kiting, and CC to prevent death.

It's time to stop lying.

I know social pressure is tough, but fight back, be honest. This is mostly aimed at healers, but can be applied to anyone, just substitute the appropriate words to match your own situation.

How often are you offline because you don't want to heal? That's hiding. Maybe it's on an alt, maybe it's in another game, maybe it's in that strange place called Real Life. This doesn't apply to actually being called away. But why do you have to hide? Imagine a glorious world in which you can just say that you don't feel like healing.

Oh, people won't be happy. They're used to healers either healing when asked, or not being there at all. When you hide, you also hide your refusal, and therefore your choice.

So log in and say it: you don't feel like healing. At first it will be a shock. But give it time and someday, people won't feel entitled to your heals and you won't feel like hiding when you just want to do something else.

The rest of this is aimed at the people who are outraged. Except the part after that.

Dear assholes,
People don't always stay offline because they want to. Sometimes it's because logging in means being bombarded by urgent requests by you. Whether online or offline, that is their choice, to say yes or no. It's pointless to drive them offline, just because you think being online makes them your servant. That only encourages burnout, making it harder to find them in the future.

So when you see your healer friend on his alt and ask him to heal, take no for an answer, it's his right.


As you might have guessed, this was triggered by RealID and the ability to see friends on alts. It's coming. People will have to choose: do they want to refuse a friend invite or do they want to turn down requests for runs? I'm leaning toward the first, because while I regard it as hiding, it's also much more private, thanks to information chaining out to friends of friends. I already have my friends and we know our alts and can turn down whatever we don't want. We don't need to be tied into a friend friend with whom we don't share that understanding.

Can NPCs make us feel better?

For my most recent random BG I got Strand of the Ancients. It's not my favorite, but I enjoyed it more than expected. Except for one thing: The DK who kept whining about heals. Then I want to play Team Fortress 2 and kept hearing people thank the medics no matter how often they died.

Does TF2 have a better community? Are DKs just antisocial fucktards? Maybe.

Or maybe it's that no one ever said anything at all to the medics. I didn't see a single typed word or anything on the voice channel (tough maybe I just wasn't in it). Nor was I hallucinating.

Instead it was the automatic response of the characters. When they get healed up, they thank the medic: "hey thanks, doc", "you're a great doctor!"

Is this an incentive for healers to heal? Certainly it helps that medics are terrible at offensive action, but no one has to pick a medic. Could the simple responses of the characters actually be a reward for those who play medics? They know it's automatic (at least I think they mostly do; I know I didn't for a while), so it's not as if they are thinking "this person was appreciative enough to say something." But people can respond to that which appears human.

Should BGs have a random "X loves your healing!" emote? Would that encourage more healing, and help to reduce the impact of that DK who wouldn't shut the fuck up?

I am leaving out a significant factor: medics heal by continuously firing their healing gun onto a target and get kill assist credit on the players they heal, meaning that they can easily rack up huge assist counts while staying just behind the front lines.

Self-Righteous Sunday: Love is in the Air

Ha.

I did the holiday boss trio yesterday. The pet dropped. The winner immediately offered to sell it for 1.2k gold. Eventually he went down to 500g and said he was being nice.

I didn't think nice meant rolling need on something you don't want, just to sell it right back to us. I thought greed was for greed rolls.

Someone who already had the pet was rather critical of him. I don't remember if he had rolled or not. If he had, what was his plan, to only charge 400g?

Love.

Ha.

This is the unloving, uncaring, unemotional PUG that Elnia spoke of.

What a glorious celebration of love! We steal and bribe and wish never to see each other ever again out of the belief that if we avoid that group we can avoid that sort of person while we carrying on being that sort of person and claim self-interest.

People turned into little goblins, went undercover on a quest. Then they went to Ulduar and farmed bracelets to sell. How art imitates life. An arbitrary holiday makes us feel compelled to do strange things, give strange gifts, in hopes of reward which may never be gotten and may be worth nothing at all; and someone finds a way to profit from it.

How appropriate for it to be depicted as a disease, a plague, a chemical agent sent out to weaken us, make us lambs to be slaughtered. We set out to cleanse ourselves of this, to destroy the source, and are rewarded with candy and slutty dresses. We do it again the next year.

We waited endlessly for candy, clockwork on the hour. Sometimes we didn't get what we wanted. We didn't like that. We don't wait anymore. We go to Ulduar.

Healers are nice people.
They might not love anyone, but they must love everyone.

My priest did her transmute and alchemy research. She made some cloth bolts. She queued for randoms and eventually left because of unresponsive idiots. No one listened to her.

Prayer of Mending is amazing.

We noticed in Nexus that the DPS warrior was afk following the mage. I tried to vote kick, but it kept saying I can't kick shortly after combat. Apparently a minute is shortly after combat. Eventually he came back after what was apparently ten minutes. Bad timing, since I'd just thought of several ways to get him killed since I couldn't kick him. I mention this and how 10 minute unannounced afks are for emergencies. Not smoking a bowl and "wtf guys why didn't you say anything on vent?" Smoke your bowl, I don't care. Go afk to do it, fine. Go afk for half the instance and leech xp the whole way. Fine! Just fucking say something, don't randomly vanish. I called him an inconsiderate ass, the 80 tank and lolret started defending him and then kicked me.

Huh?

The person who doesn't go afk half the instance without saying anything is the one who gets kicked? I can be abrasive, but am I rude to anyone who hasn't already revealed himself to be a total jackass?

I requeued, got an instant group. Someone left the moment I joined. We didn't requeue. I asked about that and got promoted. I didn't understand how the other person found it easier to right-click me and promote to leader than to hit O and select "yes". We got a replacement. The tank ran straight into a pack of spiders and I got covered in the poison that increases mana costs. That pack can be avoided without any sneaking, you just have to not run headfirst into it. I left, frustrated and annoyed with humanity.

Perhaps I lack the unrelenting love needed to be a healer. Perhaps all the love has left everyone and is just floating in the air as a choking, mind-numbing perfume.

How to make healers awesome

Pardon me being three months behind, but I inhabit a very small part of the blogosphere. A small piece of the WoW blogosphere. It's tiny. "That's what she said." Very mature.

Mordiceius asks Why can't healers be awesome? Good question! I suggest that it's because healing is innately not very awesome. And game design makes it even less so.

Think about what a healer does. They stand there as something smashes your face in. Then they heal you up again. And then JUST STAND THERE. Maybe they heal you again and again, but the main action of a healer is just standing there doing absolutely nothing to prevent your head from being removed.

Think about a tank now. They are the ones preventing you from losing your head. They scream their heads off and make the enemy so mad that it can attack no one else. They pull out shields and deflect the enemy attack. They turn into bears and just take the hit. Just like that. Or they dodge it because we all know bears have moves. They surround themselves with frost and use their weapon as a barrier, deflecting attacks and turning them right back (parry haste ftw? maybe?). Point is, tanks are fucking badasses.

DPS aren't quite as much. After all, they won't do much to keep you from losing your head, but they will potentially remove the enemy's head. They'll stab them. They'll swing a hammer that just knocks it right off. They'll set them on fire so their heads cease to exist. DPS aren't as badass as tanks, but they are as badass as the huge boss trying to remove your head.

Healers stand there and wave their hands and you don't die. And that's it. You still lose ten gallons of blood. You still lose limbs. While it is kinda neat to be making all that regrow, it's so reactive. At best they'll put a glowy bubble around you that will negate a small percentage of the horrible pain that is coming.

Can this change? Can healers be badass? They could be made into something similar, but more badass. I previously imagined making DPS more group-oriented by allowing them to return attacks from enemies. But you know what? Screw them! Let's give that to the healers instead.

How about instead of Sacred Shield absorbing some tiny bit of damage every 6 seconds if it instead gives the tank the equivalent of a second shield, or a shield at all, which they can use to block more and increase their damage. Yea, let's see that, a BEAR WITH A SHIELD. You think getting mauled by a bear claw hurts? Imagine if that is backed up with a magical shield tearing across your face. This would be temporary of course, but healers would be a bit cooler if they could at least play the person who throws the gun to the hero.

Let's up the ante. How about healers healing vengefully? Ultimatums. "If you dare touch him (the tank) you will suffer the wrath of [Naaru, Elune, the elements]." Think the disc talent for a reactive shield, but times a hundred. The healer would magically contribute his or her weapon to the cause of the tank, fighting along with it. They would parry attacks and swing right back.

At the least they could play the martyr. Take the damage suffered by the group into themselves; perhaps at a 10% rate, and then recovering it over time. Healers would act in rotation; absorbing damage until near death and then recovering while the next takes over. Think of it as divine sacrifice/hand of sacrifice, but more powerful, combined with an automatic HoT on the healer when the effect ends.

I must admit, I rarely heal. I hate the reactive nature and the stress of it. I have no confidence in my ability to heal. So I leave the final word to the healers: What would make you more awesome?

A new approach to dealing with damage

Currently damage is mostly dealt with by two types of players: tanks who mitigate it and healers who undo it. For tanks it's mostly about gear while for healers it's mostly about fast responses, anticipation of damage, and somehow surviving knowing that a single screw up can kill everyone. I admire healers for this. DPS don't do much in this process. You might see a ret throw up a sacred shield or maybe a mage or warlock throw up a specific absorb type, but in general DPS aren't involved in the damage control.

Let's change that.

I propose a way for DPS to increase their damage by protecting the raid. It would be a way to redirect certain types of hostile spells to themselves, absorbing most of the damage, and as they get more they accumulate spell combo points. These could be released for various devastating attacks.

Imagine you're on Thorim and Sif is throwing around a lot of frostbolts. You could throw up a resist aura and heal through them. Or, you could get a mage. They could redirect the bolts to themselves and with frost ward absorb the damage. After a while they could strike back with the absorbed damage. Other classes and specs would have similar abilities: shadow priests, warlocks, and DKs controlling shadow. Fire mages, destruction warlocks, and elemental shamans would control fire. Frost mages, DKs, and elemental shamans would control frost. Arcane mages, DKs, and warlocks would control arcane, though warlocks would retaliate with shadow damage. I spent too much time typing those out: the idea isn't meant to be so specific.

Lore-wise some of these might not make enough sense. A warlock protecting the group doesn't seem to fit, but maybe if it's boosting his ability to hurt other people? If it's a net gain in pain, a pain profit if you will, perhaps he'd do it. Other classes would seem to make more sense since several are healers or tanks and mages aren't social rejects (well, maybe only in lore)*. Hunters might have some sort of special arrow which they shoot at spells to catch them and then can be shot back, maybe this would tie into arcane shot.

What would rogues do that would help the group? They're not nice or even casters, so I'm not seeing any potential spell-control utility. Maybe they could have an anti-melee ability: looping a string around the enemy's weapon and pulling it taut, so when they swing at the tank it gets pulled back towards them.

* No crying, it's a joke, I have enough water for now.

How Discipline Priests are Awesome

What do most healers do? They heal. Someone takes damage and they heal it. This is not just boring, it's also cruel, putting the tank through endless torment while never allowing them any reprieve. Those healers which mercifully allow them the sweet embrace of death are insulted, called noobs.

What does disc do? Well it does still heal, but it does it in a better way. If you think that disc shields, you wrong. There's no such thing as shielding. There's a reason it's thought of as proactive healing: that's what it is.

Here's how it works: A disc priest casts power word shield, let's say it absorbs 3k damage (it's a lowbie). The tank then gets hit. Damage is absorbed, right? WRONG! Instead the priest goes back in time and uses future knowledge to perfectly time a flash heal. The result is that the tank appears to take no damage because the heal is perfectly timed. Think of it as giving a blood transfusion the instant someone gets shot.

TL;DR: Disc priests are cool because they can travel though time.

HP sharing is caring

Tamarind over at Righteous Orbs got me thinking about caring. She focuses more on gender issues, which I don't mean to discount, but I'll try to focus on the overall relationships of tanking, healing, and DPS. Her overall theme is one of caring, we all feel safer with a tank who cares, especially if we're the vulnerable healer.

My main is a prot paladin. She's female, I'm male. I feel different tanking on her than on my male warrior or male druid. She's more arrogant and sometimes bossy. Is that just more stereotyping, that a female cannot be protective and leading a group, that she must be aggressive and offensive?

My paladin has a mildly annoyed face at all times. It was intentional. After playing a FHP for a few levels I was disturbed by the way her face did not change whether she was standing around chatting or smashing kobold face. In reaction to this, my belf has a perfect face: it looks appropriate for combat without being too ugly for standing around. But it also doesn't make her look very friendly, a little bit hostile, in fact. I hope that my paladin's offensive personality is due to her appearance, not to stereotyping about her sex-role combination.

I remember being DPS for a female druid once. I felt very safe, as if I was the cub of a momma bear and everyone knows, you do not f- with the momma bear's cubs. At times I've wanted to make a protective female feral, but I have a very strict rule about female tauren: they are only allowed to be played by female humans. I get very annoyed when people break that rule. Yes, it's silly, but too bad.

Why don't we care about DPS?
I don't mean we don't care about how well they play. We do. If we didn't we'd not see "lf DPS naxx 10, 4k+ will be gear checking." What I instead mean is that, at least to me, we care less about the intrinsic value of DPS players. They're just DPS. They're not like tanks or healers. We value them. Why?

I think it's about the sharing of HP. Tanks give their health to the healer, saying to them "I will shield you with my very life." In return the healers say "I will keep you alive, but you must protect me in turn." It is a reciprocal exchange of trust and life. They each owe their existence to the other.

DPS are left out of this. They do not save the lives of the healers. They do not save the lives of the tanks. Oh you might see a sheep on a loose mob, but how often do you see a mage throw himself on top of a healer?

In kind healers are often reluctant to save DPS. After all, DPS frequently create their own problems; they DPS too soon and get aggro, they stand in the wrong place, they don't use bandages or healthstones or potions. The relationship is more one-sided, a bit leeching, with the DPS expecting heals but offering no protection in return.

Can we fix this?
Could DPS be brought into the fold? They could gain some protective capabilities for others. Imagine if a mage could cast mana shield on someone else. Or if a warlock could put soul link on a fellow caster. Make it use the SP of the recipient as a scaling factor with DRs like armor so it would approach 20%. This would make it effective to put it on healers or at least other DPS without making it a huge EH gain for tanks. Even if it only was put on other DPS, it would make DPS more protective and that would make them a little bit more like the tanks and healers.

Worst reason ever to go holy

I suppose there are worse reasons, such as getting into groups despite hating the spec, but this is clearly number two.

I was looking through my bank and noticed I had a few slots used for "well maybe if I get that item with this set of stats then I'll need this to compensate for that and maybe I'll go this spec and need that bonus and..." In other words, wasted space. I decided to fix this.

First off, why do I have an ungemmed, unenchanted 7.5 prot chest in my bank and a gemmed, enchanted 7 prot chest in my bags? I fixed up the 7.5 and ditched the 7.

Alright, I don't plan to be holy any time ever, but if I'm going to have all this holy gear I might as well be able to use it. So I go poking around set bonuses vs. off-set higher level pieces and decide on the set bonuses. Being able to vendor the offset stuff for gold was probably the major deciding factor.

Instant seller's remorse because it hit me: The off set holy stuff matches. Blue pants, blue chest, blue shoulders, gloves that don't match at all. I'd look pretty cool in this stuff! Looking cool outweighs gold, so the tier 7 got destroyed in favor of the off-set stuff. Now I was looking pretty cool. And still needed gems and enchants. Well, I loaded those up, spent maybe 200g, but hey, I'll have a cool-looking set if I ever use it). And then it hit me: I'll never use this. It will look so cool and that will go to waste! There's only one solution:

I had to go holy.

What to spec...

I've been flip-flopping on dual specs recently. Prot will definitely be one of them. I like tanking and it's very useful for soloing things that aren't supposed to be soloed. But what about the others?

Holy:
Easy group invite
Useful for some soloing
I really like long-range judgements

Retribution:
Good for single-target killing
DPS doesn't have so much pressure, but maybe that's just because I'm bad
Hitting bad things is fun

At first I was sure it would be holy. Recently I've been ret and having a lot of fun and my gear has gotten a lot better. Now again though, holy is sounding useful. Still, fun is of highest importance and I don't like paladin healing much. Ret wins.

Now how do I spec with all the changes...

Describe the Aspects of the Game

Forum thread started by Crygil.

It's commonly held that there are three or four main segments of the game: Ranged/Melee DPS, Tanking and Healing. What does that mean to you and what defines each role in your mind? If you had to break down each class, and section it into its most appropriate area, where would you place them? After hashing that out, which segment do you fall into and why do you enjoy playing in that segment?

I think it should be broken down even more and isn't even complete yet.

DPS is a combination of dichotomous: melee-ranged and physical-magical. Classes may do more than one of these, though usually with some focus. For example magi are magical ranged while hunters are physical ranged, though with a little bit of magic. Rogues are pure physical melee while shamans are a mix of physical and magical melee, though definitely based around physical.

Tanking is a subset of an overall group role of damage mitigation. Mitigation, aggro, interrupts, and CC are distinct roles.
- Personal mitigation (armor, avoidance, cooldowns)
- Group mitigation (bubbles, armor multipliers)
- Crowd Control, this is the ultimate mitigation because it is often a total damage elimination, at least from one mob.
- Interrupts
- Aggro control, keep aggro off the rogue (low mitigation) and on the tank (high mitigation)

Healing is pretty straightforward: undo damage. In comes in two types: magical ranged and physical melee (bandages).

Buffing some of these overlap due to how stats affect multiple aspects
- Damage increases: more AP or crit or whatever
- Healing increases: SP, crit, healing multipliers...
- Stat increases: Prayer of Fortitude, Arcane Intellect, Blessing of Kings

Did I miss anything?

If I had to pick my favorite role, I'd say mitigation and aggro control. I've argued in the past that healing is the last thing to fail. Healing is the final action, it's the backup plan. Tanking? That's the first thing you do. If no one can survive the hit, you're done. There's nothing to heal and the DPS won't live.

It is always the healer's fault

It's true and this is one of the biggest problems with healing.

To start off, there are obvious times when it is the healer's fault and there's no denial. Sudden AFKs, being undergeared, whatever, obviously those are all the fault of the healer. That's really nothing special.

The bad part of healing is that everything else also becomes your fault.

DPS and how it is your fault
DPS is low so the fight takes too long so you go OOM: Get better gear or heal more efficiently.
DPS pulls aggro and dies: Heal them, shield them, bubble them, there are ways to save them.
DPS dies in a fire (don't we all wish?): Heal them, shield them, save them.

Tanks and how it is your fault
The tank can't hold aggro, DPS dies: See earlier case of DPS and aggro.
The tank is undergeared, takes too much DPS, and dies: Get better gear or spam more and he'd live.
The tank is undergeared, takes too much damage over the fight, so you go OOM and he dies: Heal more efficiently or get better gear.

As a general rule, death is caused by a lack of health and healers are the best at increasing health, and therefore preventing death. Ultimately just about any death can be blamed on a healer.

I don't intend to blame healers for everything, but instead just to point out that the mistakes of others are passed by the game onto the the healers. Every 'challenge' in the game tends to involve either someone taking extra damage or dying, and except for a very few strict DPS-limited fights (Thaddius is the only that I can think of, even Gruul could potentially be solved with better healing), all fights ultimately shift all burdens to the healers.