Posts with tag Healing

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

There's been some large changes to healing for some of the classes in recent builds. This week, we'll recap and go through the classes to see what's new. You might be interested to know that at level 89, my priest has 250k mana. Who wants to wager that 300k mana is the maximum cap at level 90? Remember with the new intellect and mana system coming in with the expansion, intellect stats no longer raise the mana pool anymore. Your mana regeneration is governed strictly by your spirit levels.

Priest

Lightwell receives a few tweaks to the healing numbers. More importantly, it now has a glyph that completely changes the functionality of the spell. Glyph of Lightspring turns Lightwell into an automatic healing ability with a catch. Lightwell will only heal players with health lower than 50%. It will only perform the check once every 5 seconds. That is a fair compromise to me. I've never been truly satisfied with Lightwell since my experience has shown me that most players never click on it when it really matters. At least this glyph helps remove control from them and I gain the knowledge of my Lightwell kicking in when it'll be needed.

It's been known for a while that spirit gear isn't on the list for the most part right now for players leveling in Mists. DPS cloth abounds, and the idea the designers have is that you can just reforge the DPS gear into healer gear easily enough (or at least reforge it so that it's passable as healer gear).

In part, this concept comes from the new rewards system, where you don't see all the gear rewards the quest giver offers but rather only the ones that are specific to you. As a solution to this, Blizzard provides green gear vendors that distribute off-spec gear.

However, Ghostcrawler announced today that Blizzard's going to offer more spirit gear again via quest rewards. This is in part due to the constructive (read: non-trolling) feedback it's received on the issue.

Ghostcrawler

After reading more of this feedback and looking at the zones, we're concerned that there aren't enough quest rewards with Spirit on them. We are leaning towards offering more, as choices, so that players who feel like their Spirit is low can choose to have more.

source

So rejoice, healers! Getting geared up will be a bit easier for you now.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

After covering monks, priests, paladins, and druids, there is one class left to review: shaman. How are they going to fare entering Mists of Pandaria?

Totems ... gone!

Just kidding!

They're not really gone. They've switched to more of a utility focus now. Looking at the entire list of totems available, not a single one provides any type of stat increase. Totems that provided passive buffs like Flametongue Totem, Mana Spring Totem, and Stoneskin Totem have been removed. Healing Stream took a nerf cannon to the face, now only affecting a player now instead of whole groups.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

You know, after reading through and playing around with a holy paladin on the Mists of Pandaria beta, it looks like paladins didn't get a ton groundbreaking class changes. In a way, though, that's a good thing! You still get to keep the same style of play, except you have a few new spells and abilities to really augment your healing even further. You don't even have to learn any new playstyles.

If you're an awesome healer now, then you should have no problems moving into the next expansion at all. The additional AoE helpers are a bonus. Even though Holy Radiance is awesome, it'd be nice to have a few other AoE healing spells for a change.

I like to think I'm a decent rogue. My DPS is pretty good, I know my rotation like the back of my hand, and I've got orange weapons with which to stab things. More important than that (to me, anyway) is the fact that I use self-heals almost religiously, without thinking about it. I think a good portion of that comes from having been a healer originally and having an understanding about healing and just how difficult it is. I don't want to make it more difficult; I just want to happily stab things. In order to do that effectively, I need to not die.

That said, I love Lightwell. It's a nice little spell that priests toss on the ground, and you click it to use it. Earlier versions of Lightwell were a little clunky and difficult to use, but today's version is pretty streamlined. I don't lose my target if I click the Lightwell, and I don't have to be on top of the thing to click it. It's a handy little heal to have, much like a Healthstone or even Recuperate. Since I'd rather be using DPS-boosting potions than healing potions, I'll take any little heals I can get.

Oddly enough, not everyone does. And I can't quite figure out why.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Last week, we covered some of the more notable monk abilities along with the expected playstyle. Recently, the level cap on beta has been raised to level 87, allowing every class access to their new level 87 spell. Much of the talk this week on the major sites and blogs is about Symbiosis. We touched on it several times, but now we get to take a closer look at it in further detail.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Ghostcrawler introduced the monk in detail to us back during BlizzCon 2011. We didn't have as many details available to us until we entered the beta stage of the game. This week, I want to introduce you to the different aspects of healing monks.

The mistweaver monk is a stance-based class that has two forms of energy at their disposal: mana and chi.

• Stance of the Wise Serpent Healing stance that replaces your energy resource bar and turns it into mana and converts your spirit rating into spell and melee hit rating. Abilities that would have cost energy now cost mana.
• Stance of the Fierce Tiger Increases your damage done by 20% and allows access to a different set of offensive abilities.

When healing, you'll mostly be in the Stance of the Wise Serpent.

In terms of equipment, monks can use axes, staves, maces, fists, swords, and polearms. Your preferred weapons will mostly be staves or maces (although that may change as more items are revealed). For armor, you'll have access to leather and you'll get the 5% intellect from Leather Specialization. Like the other healing classes, your mana regeneration is going to rely on spirit.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

You'll notice that there are a ton of new glyphs that have been added for all the classes. That list is by no means exhaustive. I also noticed some slight changes in the way certain spells work. I can assure you it won't be anything too drastic, but these changes are enough to keep you interested and wondering. This week, I'll be rounding up what we know healers will be getting, as well as any other notable modifications.

New for druids

Cenarion Ward appears to be a Prayer of Mending-like spell without the subsequent charges. Good spell to open with before an engagement. Won't have to pre-HoT as much. Just remember to pre-Ward.

Wild Mushroom: Bloom! Hope you love 'shrooms, since you'll be gaining the use of these in addition to your Balance friends. Anticipate a moment where big AoE healing is needed, and plant 'shrooms. Detonate after raid group takes a hit, and relish in the healing spores that explode.

Regrowth can be glyphed to remove the HoT component. Benefit? 40% increased chance of a critical heal. I guess you can configure a HoT-based class to switch to a non-HoT direction.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Did you manage to knock out heroic mode Hagara? Wondering where to go next? The summoner of ooze, Yor'sahj should be next on your list. Perhaps the biggest change in heroic is the extra ooze that spawns that your raid needs to deal with. This means Yor'sahj has more abilities with which to assault your raid. This encounter doesn't exactly have a set script, since Yor'sahj cycles through different slime combinations.

For healing setups, I strongly advise bringing in no more than six healers. Healers will want to configure their UIs so that they can view Deep Corruption debuffs on their raid frames. All in all, Yor'sahj hinges heavily on the ability of your raid to react to the different combinations.

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and cohost of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how

Last week was a massive update to the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator for shaman in general but especially for restoration shaman. There were quite a number of surprises, a fair amount of tweaks and the implementation of a brand new mystery in our yet-to-be-named level 90 talents.

Among all those changes was one that I didn't bring up. Instead, I wanted to wait until this week because I felt the topic required a bit of time all to itself. That is the change to Riptide in the new talent calculator. No longer will it be consumed by Chain Heal whenever we cast it on someone with Riptide as our primary target. This is certainly a cause for celebration, and as I imagined it in my head, Chain Heal gently wept with happiness at the news.

While we're at it, be sure to enjoy the ukulele stylings of Jake Shimabukuro, who is a genius on the uke.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Were you excited about the latest changes that were made to the Mists of Pandaria talent calculator that was introduced last week? Some earth shattering changes all around but who do you think won out? Let's examine!

There are no pure DPS classes in World of Warcraft that use two-handed melee weapons to deal damage and only one pure DPS class that can even equip them. There are literally hundreds of two-handed melee weapons in this game. This has always annoyed me, because I love big weapons. I know you know this about me.

One of the reasons I hate the argument that pure DPS classes should have dibs on top DPS weapons is that in order for me to play a character that uses a two-hander, I have no choice but to play a hybrid. In fact, in order to play as melee DPSer at all, I either have to play a rogue (all three rogue trees dual wield small, fast weapons) or a hybrid. Those are my options. If I wanted to play ranged DPS, I could pick from one of three possible pure classes, but if I want to melee, I'm forced to either give up the weapons I enjoy and take up a playstyle I don't like or accept that I will be forced to DPS at a penalty and be expected and/or pressured to tank.

This to me is asking me to pay twice, and it's unacceptable. Last week, Ghostcrawler posted an excellent discussion on class and role that I highly recommend everyone check out, and it seriously has me pondering what design I'd prefer for World of Warcraft and indeed how I feel about classes and roles entirely.

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (lead developer) published a developer blog post a few days ago and shared thoughts about roles within the game. DPS classes tend to have multiple specs that can be switched to in order to provide a different set of damage spells and utilities. Some of the examples cited included warlocks and rogues, since they're straight DPS classes. Would it be possible to hypothesize and think about single-role healing classes with varied specs? While I don't think it is unheard of, I can already think about the different logistical and gameplay difficulties that are going to come with it.

For DPSers, you have that role divided between those players in the ranged group and those belonging to the melee. With healing, you're limited with just being purely at range. There isn't a classified melee-only healer (and we don't know entirely how the monk will play out).

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

The recent nerf to Dragon Soul with the release of patch 4.3.2 means more players are now within striking distance of Morchok on heroic modes. He's a boss that serves as an execution check for your raiding group more than anything else. If your raid group mastered the art of healing through him on normal, then it should have no problem doing it again on heroic.

Just be prepared to do it twice.

The biggest hard mode change is that Morchok clones himself. His clone has the exact same abilities as Morchok prime, except the timing will be off. Your raid will be splitting in two and pulling the two bosses away from each other. You can envision the fight as two pseudo 10-man groups fighting (or two 5-mans, if you're in a 10-man raiding group).

Come into the raid with six to seven healers, if you're a 25-man raiding group. Actually, I'd consider bringing seven if it's the very first time. For 10-man, it is not uncommon for groups to bring in up to four healers for the first time. You'll need them, due to the amount of damage being dished out to the raid. Ideally, try to insist that when your raid leader splits the raid into two groups, the players will show up in your raid frames in different groups. Having all of the players in group 1 and 2 on one side with groups 3 and 4 on the other can be beneficial. The side that is tanking Morchok is the one that could benefit from the extra healer, as it seems more damage is done on that side.

I strongly recommend bringing in tanks with their four-piece bonuses, because they will be an incredible asset.