Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Still recovering from a cold, I went out to the Zoo with my Son and wife today.  It pretty much zapped every ounce of energy I had.  So I got on just long enough to run around and make my 3 pieces of cloth and then do my inscription research on Laneir.  Then it is off to bed with me!

Today I managed to do something I’ve never done before.  I got into a PUG raid where they DIDN’T take too many healers.  I did a 10 man Obsidian Sanctum because I knew again I would miss the guild one Sunday (middle of the day).  I was shocked when I realized that the only other healer was a restro Druid.  I actually got to do something and make a meaningful impact!  With 3 healers in a 10 man you are almost fighting over who gets to heal the people.  I don’t understand why people do that, it just makes everything go slower, it doesn’t make it safer   It was the first raid I’ve done in WOTLK where I felt I contributed something if you can believe it or not.

I don’t know what the optimal fun number of healers would be for a 25 man, maybe 3? 4 tops probably.  I think every 25 man I’ve done has had 5 healers.  It is always too many and again I feel worthless.  Mostly because everyone has tools to often get to everyone before me.  I don’t have much raid healing ability at the moment besides PoM.  The Shamans, Druids or Holy Priests get to everything before me.  Most of the time I give up and just do crappy dps till we get to a boss I can be somewhat useful on.  With less healers I actually get to do something and it becomes more fulfilling, and challenging.

After that satisfying run I went and did my oracle dailies and ended up watching LFG looking for my 25 man vault.  That never ended up coming but I figured I wanted to do something else so I checked the Heroic Daily was Azjol-Nerub.  So I checked out LFG and noticed a Prot Warrior sitting in there and just asked him if he wanted to start a group.

He was all over it and we quickly formed a group and went over there.  Everyone turned out to be pretty good quality and we had no problems.  No one died till the very end where the Feral Druid got caught in the pound.  Other than that it was super smooth.  A good way to end the night!

I get on thinking I was in the mood for healing so I look for what people are trying to do.  Inien jumps on shortly after I do so I think hey lets run something together.  I saw a Prot Pally shouting he was bored and wanted to do something.  I message him to see if we could talk him into Heroic HoS but he never replies.

I then get a message from someone about the heroic daily (Nexus) and I check and they also need a DPS.  So I say I’ll go and to invite Inien.  I of course then tell Inien I volunteered him to come.   Of course we get there and the tank seemed pretty good, he was well enough geared I didn’t have to heal him much.  We had a second mage Inien said had a weird spec, and a DPS warrior.

Well as sure as I could sense the impending disaster I notice after the first few pulls Inien is doing 49% of the damage.  I’m like oh no, but at least the tank is good.   As we progress the second mage isn’t even out dpsing the tank, while the DPS warrior was able to stay just barely above the tank.  We start fighting through the frozen guys and the tank doesn’t pull the guy back and gets feared into another group of mobs.    This happens some times and under normal circumstances I can usually pull us through it.  However with Inien having to do all the damage, and our tank running around like a mad man we wipe.

We go back and try again and almost the same thing happens.  I’m not really sure what the tank was doing but he kept running around like a crazy man, going out of my LOS or even RANGE!  Anyways we come back from the second wipe and I was trying to give some hits and the tank goes “I have to go my wife is angry at me”.  Then follows up with “I’d really like to finish but I have to go she is really angry”.  I was like wow that is one of the “best” excuses I’ve heard in while.  We of course abandoned grouping with the guys and that was the end of my instance attemps for the evening   Thankfully I have karma now and can label those people appropriately

So after I went up to the top of the Nexus.  Inien told me there is a quest up here that lets me practice for Malygos. So I try it and I’m absolutely horrible at it.  I killed my drake so many times while trying to figure it out.  The first issue was that I wasn’t using the small heal it has,I didn’t have auto self target on so when I clicked it gave me a hand, and you have to click on the drake (not yourself which I kept doing and it not working).  This was time consuming once I figured out what to do so I just turned on auto self cast.   I never really go the hang of it.  I also need to show the buffs on my pet bar which I don’t now because I couldn’t see the HOT on myself.  I’ll have to go back and practice more.

After that I continued my questing in the Basin, starting off with the end of my waygate chain.  It was pretty fun, they really like those vehicles   I got my quest achievement for the zone too but I still have some nessingwary quests to finish there I shall of course.

I was messing around on the PTR this morning while eating breakfast before work.  I setup my dual spec to be a shadow build, to go with my Disc healing build.  I decided to go try out, my heart was set to Zul’Drak so I was smacking down bad trolls.  I was amazed at how much damage I could do spec that way and I don’t even know what I’m doing.

I’m going to have to read a little on spell rotations and such because you end up with a lot more abilities as shadow than you have other wise.  The mobs were only 76 so they died a little too quick to get a real idea of my DPS.  I guess I could have tried a dummy while I was in IF   I was doing about 1200-1500 on these mobs without even knowing what I’m doing.  It makes me wonder how I come I run into so many terrible shadow priests in groups

The shadow build should definetely make my questing/grinding go much smoother!  So I’m getting kind of OK with dual spec now, though I still don’t know what the long term ramifications of this will be in the future.

Hopefully the server gets a little more stable and I can attempt to do some healing and see how the regen and rapture changes effect my mana management.  I was always careful, and had very low over healing so I’m going to guess I’ll do better than some with the changes.

Two really nifty changes applied to the PTR this evening.

• Grace doesn’t reduce damage dealt to the target anymore but now increases the healing received from the Priest by 3% (Up from 2%)

• Renewed Hope now also give you a 100% chance to reduce all damage taken by 3% for 20 sec to all friendly party and raid targets when you Power Word: Shield a friendly target.

At first I was like WHAT! They nerfed the damage reduction from Grace again (they did it during beta).  Then I read the next line, Renewed Hope changed, now it actually gives us Renewed Hope!  I think that is a way awesome change to the talent.  I hope this one sticks, can’t wait to try it.  Sounds really nifty and way better than the weak sauce it was.  Definetely very Disc appropriate AND powerful enough for the slot it is in the tier.  Of course Grace applying more healing, and lasting a little longer now is also a good thing.

Update!

Wow it is even cooler than I read on MMO.  It retained the 4% crit for Flash/GHeal/Penance on a weakened soul target, in addition to the new raid/group buff of 3% less damage.

Also I confirmed that you get the mana back from Rapture even if the shield dissipates after the 30 seconds without absorbing everything as well.  This is pretty good then, and people should stop complaining.  With the Int I have it basically makes my PW:Shield cost 35 mana. So we should still be able to do some nifty healing and be effecient!  Of course all is subject to change without notice yada yada.

I got on and kept my eye on LFG, nothing too much was peaking my interest so I just went off and did my dailies.

I was getting some of my Sons of Hodir done (seen here on my hippo) when I saw someone shouting they needed a healer for Malygos.  I thought man I’d really be interested in seeing that fight.  Then it changed from needing a healer to needing a Priest.  I thought wow it is destiny, so I gave in and sent a tell.  First the guy ignored me for a good amount of time.  Then he responded with what was my unbuffed spell power.  Then after I told him he told me after some time, “hold on” and then I never heard anything.  Inien noticed them in the Raid LFG and they had 10 people so apparently they found someone better than me   I really find it annoying when people act like such asses about PUGs.  Give my experience with this game even if the other guy had better gear I bet I was a better Priest

After I finished my son of hodir, I went over and did my oracle dailies.  Since I didn’t see any good groups still I went ahead and continued my questing in the basin.  Here I was getting this last animal hunt out of the way which had an item in my inventory

I also ended continuing the chain for the big titan lady which took me through the waygate to unguro   It was kind of a neat set of quests, I’m not quite done with the chain yet though.  I logged after this part and decided to do my inscription research and go see if I could mess around on the PTR for a few.

I was going to go mess around on the PTR but it was having major issues so I went ahead and got on live.  I ended up quickly joining a 10 man Vault group and did that.  It was pretty fun, and the other healer was actually another Disc Priest.  Nothing dropped that mattered to me so I left after that.

I was thinking maybe I’d do a 25man vault after that but ended up in a 25man OS.  While I was waiting for that to come together I ran around and made my cloth for the week.  It is so convenient having it all in one place now   Eventually we filled up the group and started on it.  Things went fast and easy.  As usual there were too many healers so I didn’t have much to do

I also ended up looking horrible because I kept getting hit by the stupid fire wall.  I had never been in a group where the tank would move the dragon all the over the place which kept throwing me off.  Of course I can still heal and absorb the damage it isn’t a big deal but someone now always has that stupid mod that makes fun of the people   I think I got hit twice, but again I never seen anyone run around with the dragon before!

After that I ended up logging off live.  I stayed on Skype with Inien to listen to his horrible horrible Heroic HoS run.  After finishing up some non game related stuff I went and got on the PTR which was working only slightly better.  I purchased my Duel Spec and played a little bit with that system.  The way it is right now it doesn’t require anything to switch which is kind of neat.

I was messing with trying to create a smite build, but was really having trouble coming up with something that made sense after all the changes.  With the switch from BC to WOTLK they removed some of the talents in Disc that were useful for it, mainly the +hit for smite/mindblast and the extra damage/crit you could get.  They made some changes to Shadow Form that may allow me to use a lot of my current gear.  Your dots can now crit in Shadow Form which may make things interesting.

I’ve never been shadow in my life, but my smite isn’t looking as viable so perhaps I might actually given in and do a shadow build.  Who knows maybe I’ll like it.  Plus the other advantage is I might be able to speak with more authority about all things Priest, instead of just 2/3rds

The Rapture nerf is the end of all Disc priests!  Yes I’ve been checking the forums for reactions to 3.1.  Yes it is a HUGE nerf, but they intended to nerf all mana regen apparently.  I personally thought they would leave Rapture alone because it was consistent, and controllable.  However I apparently was wrong…

I’m not as freaked out about it as most people.  For one this is the 1st day of the PTR and things are not set in stone. And Two there were several changes that increased our efficiency such as the 30% reduction in the cost of PW:Shield, 15% reduction in the cost of Flash Heal, and the freeing of enough points to get Improved Healing for a 15% reduction in the cost of Penance.  I don’t know if all these things together will make up for the mana loss from Rapture but they certainly lessen the blow.

It isn’t as if Rapture doesn’t give mana anymore at all, they changed Serendipity to have a completely different purpose now.  I think the biggest fault with Rapture is that it requires the entire shield to be absorbed in order to give mana, which means most likely only the one you cast on the tank will ever give you mana AND it can only happen every 12 seconds.  Of course the 12 seconds doesn’t matter much because you still have weakened soul to worry about.

I still like Disc and won’t change over just that.  I am sure there are more changes to come on the PTR.  I’m still wondering where my PW:Barrier is.  Surely they wouldn’t specifically tell us about a new spell then decide not to put it in a week or two later.

Well it looks like things came out after I went to bed with the new patch 3.1 and as of this morning the PTR seems to be up but a little unstable.  I logged in after it patched looked at my talents for about 1 minute then the world server crashed   You can read all the notes over on MMO-Champion.

Looks like they messed with a lot of things in Disc, some I’m not happy with.  First of which there was no AOE Shield!   I dunno if they scrapped the idea or just haven’t got it on yet.  Second was they messed with Rapture.  It now only gives mana from the shield and nothing else, not even divine aegis.

Some good things though, Divine Aegis now stacks and can be up to 10k on a level 80 character.  When your shield breaks and gives you mana back from Rapture it also gives the person you shield mana/rage/runic power.  They put in a talent that removes the 4 second cool down on PW:Shield FINALLY and as a bonus decreases the mana cost.  They also put in a new talent for flash heal that reduces its cost by 15% and increases it chance to crit on targets below 50% by 10%.

With all the reductions in talent costs and the removal of a few I can get everything I had been getting, plus the new talents and manage to get Improved Healing to make Penance even more efficient

It is time to go to work, so I’ll be following up later with some testing   Oh and the mana changes?  My out of FSR mana regen is about HALFED, my in FSR regen is about the same.

I wasn’t really in the mood for WoW tonight for some reason.  I did get on to do my cooking daily, and my inscription research on Laneir, but other than that I did other things.

I did keep an eye on the PTR however and get myself copied over finally as I watched the queue slowly shrink.  People are really riled up now but it probably won’t be another day or two before it is up from the sounds of things.