Penance Priest

EDIT: The nerf to the glyph of Penance, which was the spark that initiated the post below, has been repealed. Yay! I'm leaving this post up, however, because I remain amazed at how quickly so many priests started QQing in a way that seemed quite over the top. No doubt other nerfs are coming our way, sooner or later, so this is fundamentally a plea to remain calm :)

This is our moment, fellow discipline priests.  The nerf bat has arrived, and will be sharing its sting with us soon. The devs giveth, and the devs taketh away. How will we deal with it? This will be a rite of passage for us all. It’s initiation time for discipline. Call it our bar mitzvah.

Disc Priest 3.0

All was fresh and new. The world alight with possibilities. Undiscovered treasures built into our very nature. Slowly we found the Way to Be. We had dynamism, creativity, fluidity. Like the blossoming of flowers in spring, the endless joy of the New washed over us. And yea we sang.

Our singing was multilayered, complex, spontaneous. Bouncing between the perfectly timed Penance, a shield now and again, Flashes, Mending, a touch of Renew…plus the joy of giving (Power Infusing our mages) and of saving (Pain Suppressing our tanks). So much to do! And what fun doing it!

Disc Priest 3.1

The changes were few but significant. Spammable shields. Targetable Prayer of Healing. A lower cooldown on Penance.  Our rotations changed; how we responded to situations was altered more significantly that we might have thought.  Rapture was nerfed, of course, but that was a passive change, and did not affect play style significantly. There were plenty of other changes, including the way Grace and Renewed Hope work, but these were the big ones.

Now our play, while even more powerful, lost some of its pizzazz. All shields and Penance. More shields. And Penance. Oh, and some uber AoE heals…Prayer of Healing getting its due, and Divine Hymn saving the day more than once. But for the most part, what had been a challenging and creative interweaving of multiple cooldowns became a spamfest.

Our PvP viability shot through the roof. Self-castable Penance, and of course the lower cooldown. Glyph of Pain Suppression let us survive the loving attention we got from rogues.  Before anyone realized quite what had happened, discipline priests were on top of PvP healing once more. Interest in arenas surged.

Disc Priest 3.1.2

Our beloved Glyph of Penance…gone. Poof. Back to the original 8-second cooldown. A veritable eternity between casts! Plus the mana cost of shield is going up. Woe is us!

Like it or not – and I think I know which side we all fall on – this is the nerf bat. The touch that stings.

This is our initiation. Every other class & spec has been on the Blizzard rollercoaster, up and down, back up, back down. The discipline priest is a new creation, and this is our first significant nerf. (No, the nerf to Rapture does not count. Sorry.) And from the way I hear disc priests talking about it, you’d think the game was just about over.

The 2-second Glyph of Penance was, let’s all agree, a total win. How much did you pay for yours? 50g? 200g? 300g? We all wanted it desperately because we knew how over-the-top awesome it was. And guess what…Blizzard figured that out too.

Buck up, people. It’s not that bad. We healed just fine with the 8-second cooldown on Penance.  No, more than fine. We did so damn well that people started blogging (!) and writing web sites all about the joy and strength of our spec. In fact, it was (in my opinion) a much more satisfying challenge, having to bob and weave through cooldowns, rather than spamming two spells with a few extras tossed in for good measure.

You could say that this is a nerf designed to bring PvP priests back down to earth, with PvE priests the innocent casualties. This is how [mages/warlocks/ret pallies, heck you name it] sound when they are given a cookie that then gets taken away. Yes, we had a bite out of a tasty cookie. Mmmm, good. Now it’s back to business, and we will thrive once more. Not barely, but magnanimously.

Let me remind you: discipline priests rock.

Facebook

I <3 Ulduar.

A little context first. In BC I was with a casual raiding guild. It's a concept that I find hard to understand in retrospect -- “casual raiding.” We would wander into TK on Monday night, wipe twice on Solarion, then give up and go run heroics. I hated it. I tried to get people to go into ZA, but they were terrified. They went and leveled their alts instead of progressing their mains.

So I never had the experience of pushing into new content. I got pugged into a few T6 raids, but they were a whirlwind. I was just a hired healbot.

I joined my current guild during a time when (A) Naxx was on farm, with only S3D remaining to be conquered, and (B) Lol Naxx? In other words, until now, WoLK has not exactly provided much of a challenge.

And...more context:

When I first encountered WoW, looking over my friend's shoulder as he was playing, I was completely confused. What the hell was the point of running around, killing a diseased bear, then running to the next bear and killing it? It held zero appeal to me. Then he described instancing. Five people who all needed to work together to accomplish a goal. You couldn't pick any five people, you needed people to fill specific roles. And they couldn't just do what they wanted: the healer had to heal, because there was no extra wiggle room for them to help out damaging the boss. In other words, teamwork. A well-oiled machine. Now THAT sold me.

It's like sports -- individuals who excel in individual events like powerlifting or gymnastics are amazing and inspiring. But more than that, what excites me about sports is when you have great individuals working together as a team, like in basketball or hockey.

Teamwork is why I started my WoW account. I don't mind playing solo or doing dailies. But the high points of WoW are all about the teamwork. And that doesn't mean just having more than one person in a group -- it means coordination, flow, trust, and everyone bringing their A-game to meet a challenge that can't be met without those factors. The more tenuous the situation, the more it demands that everyone is working at 100% capacity, the more satisfying the result. If you only need 90% or even 95% of your attention, it's just not IT.

So. Ulduar.

I love the fact that it's hard. Wiping is stressful. There are two responses to stress: either you give up, or you rise to a higher level. If you want to rise to a higher level, stress is your best friend.

I love the fact that it actually requires 25 people. Not 10 people with 15 tag-alongs. Not one person who knows the fight, 5 people who can listen, and 19 people who only know their best pewpew rotations. You need 25 awake people. Most (if not all) of them have to come prepared, having studied the fights, color-coded their raid frames with key debuffs, etc.

I love how it separates the social players from the serious players. Folks who love bantering even when it's obvious we're unfocused and struggling to make progress, versus folks who want to hunker down and find out what we did wrong and how we can improve.

I love how it brings out the best and the worst in people. Those who somehow forget to flask for a boss, versus those who couldn't imagine not being flasked for a progression boss. Those who ponder and complain in vent when they die, or those who wait patiently (even humbly) in support of those who survived and are still in the thick of it.

(Why would I want to see the worst in people? Of course I don't...but the fact that Ulduar brings out both the best and the worst is, to me, a sign that it hits the mark. Less stress would produce the sort of negative, backsliding results that we experienced because of lazy-mode Naxx; more stress would have us all quitting the game. Just the right amount, and we have progress.)

I love how I died in the fire on my first Razorscale attempt. No excuse -- fire is fire, whether it's the first attempt or the 20th. But I never die to void zones, and here I was so challenged and focused that I missed the obvious. If it were easy I wouldn't love it!

I love how much it stresses not only the individual, but the team. As other bloggers have noted, Ulduar has the potential to tear guilds apart. If that's the only possibility, let's all give up now, shall we? Because it also has the potential to bring teams together. And not in some huggy-feely kind of way, but in a functional, dynamic, higher-order-of-doing-business kind of way. A team that is willing to struggle and succeed is better in the end by a wide margin. Better doesn't mean more higher-level epics, or achievements ticked off the list. It means they have a higher degree of integration, or ability to work as a team, because they've tackled a harder project.

Personally, I'm thrilled by the stress. I want to rise to a higher level, both as an individual and as a team. I want my team members to want that too, of course, since that drive is the only thing that will bring us to that higher level.

If I stand alone in this, so be it. But Bravo, Blizzard!

Facebook

Are you bored with Naxx? Too easy and basically a waste of time? Fun to blast through it, sure, but uninspiring, right? Well then. Blizzard feels your pain. They have an answer too: “Do the achievements, and then tell us it’s too easy.”

I’m one of the cynical crowd who took that as a copout. “We have no new content, so let’s convince them to do it standing on their heads. Yeah, that’s the ticket. That ought to keep them busy.”

Well folks, we did 8-man Naxx this week, and let me tell you: it was the best time I’ve ever had in there. Seriously.

Oddball makeup

We didn’t try to min-max our group. The guild had 18 people online on a night with no scheduled raid (we finished all our 25s). So we decided to split into two Naxx runs: a 10-man gearup team and an 8-man achievement team. The 8-man was filled with excellent players:

MT = prot war
OT = fury war (with prot gear)
Heals = disc priest, resto sham
DPS = 2x warlock, hunter, rogue

I’m sure if you wanted to do an 8-man run there are better comps and worse comps. This might be a C+ as far as raid comp goes. But we know each other, and trust each other to perform well. But any way you slice it, it felt like we were seriously short-handed. Go figure.

Can you say “challenge”?

We had no pally buffs, no battle rez, and omg no replenishment. I used more mana pots in one night than I have in six weeks. Someone drilled a hole in the bottom of my infinite mana pool. Remember struggling through long fights?

When we needed our fury warrior to offtank, she swapped gear, but did not respec. So she didn’t have the ability to hold aggro on multiple mobs with ease. Remember playing with inept tanks who couldn’t keep aggro? No walk in the park, that’s for sure. Having a smart hunter with fast frost traps is a lifesaver, but still no substitute for a real tank. With only eight people, we didn’t think we had the luxury of bringing a second dedicated tank.

Remember your first Sapph, when your group’s dps was scary low? How long did that fight take, like an hour? Could you keep your mana up? Have you done Gluth without mages or a zombie offtank?

All I can say is THANK YOU to Blizzard for not including 4H in the achievement. We filled our ranks to 10 just for that fight, which was a total breeze.

Just doo eet

This was the most fun I’ve ever had in there. We were stretched, forced to be creative, and couldn’t be sloppy. Being Naxx25-geared is great, but we didn’t feel overgeared at all. We wiped plenty of times, at least four times on Sapph. Yes, you heard that right – a Naxx25-geared group, Twilight Vanquishers all, and we wiped multiple times on Sapph. On Gluth. Heck, even on Faerlina when we thought we could just blast through her enrage without killing the adds.

Someone will laugh at us and tell us how easy 8-man is if you are just careful. Ok, fine. But I promise you this: whether you’re super-careful or not, overgeared or not, have an optimal group makeup or not, ate wheaties for breakfast lunch and dinner or not – you will be challenged by doing this achievement.

And if you love the game, not just the satisfaction of zerging through content that’s too easy, but you really love a challenge that’s just within reach if you give it everything, then you will absolutely love this fight.

Facebook

I have tanked Razuvious once before, and it was successful. Moderately. We won the fight, but it was not elegant.

Three days after we did S3D, we're in Naxx and I'm up. We have no shadow priests and only two healpriests. I'm not terribly confident, and tell the raid leader that, but we'll go anyway. We're having a blast plowing thru the place. My tanking fails miserably, and we wipe. No big deal, but the raid leader is already offering to bring his priest.

Second try, this time with me healing and our raid leader priest-tanking, and it's a perfect kill. His spec was irrelevant, his skills apparent. No hard feelings, no big deal. After Razuv he goes back to his mage and we continue pwning.

(And if you were thinking "Ha! Vindicated!" or some such thing, then you missed the point of the previous post. Knowing when you're not the best man for the job is just as important as knowing when you are. Go team!)

Facebook

Holy cow. We got it! I wish I had grand strategic tips to share with you, but this post is about something else. (Actually here’s a grand strategic tip: keep the tanks alive. You heard it here first!) Mainly though, I’m surprised at how excited I am at having been part of a team that conquered Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I mean, drakes. Yeah, drakes. I couldn’t sleep, and I’m having a hard time at work today. WOOOT!

The setup

On our previous attempts we got very close. Enough that I was convinced we’d have it in one more solid night of working on it. Unfortunately I would be missing that raid for other commitments. So needless to say I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be part of (what I expected would be) our guild first. And on our kind-of-sorry server, only three other guilds, both factions included, have done it.

I logged on 3 hours after raid time, just to check mail and say hi, see how it went. Before I could say boo there was a raid invite from the GM. Whoa, ok cool! At the same time I noticed our raid leader/officer logging off his priest and onto his mage. My first guess was confirmed in raid chat: they had been struggling for 3 hours, gotten him tantalizingly close (3 drakes down but no healers left when they got to Sarth himself), and needed a different healer. I just joined this guild, so I don’t actually know how well our raid leader plays his priest, but his mage is crazy good. I was honored that they felt I’d make enough of a difference that they were willing to stay late to give it another shot.

The kill

It took fifteen minutes. Probably the longest boss fight I’ve ever done. It was damn solid, with maybe six or seven dead by the end of it, and it only took one attempt. (Well, one attempt after I joined, probably closer to ten attempts for everyone else…) I’m convinced we’ll repeat it pretty easily. Voidwalker tank, 65k health before the debuff, made my job almost easy for most of the fight. The warlock who made it happen won the roll for the mount. Perfect.

What is Disc anyway??

After the fight I checked my raid leader’s priest out on armory to see what the big fuss was about replacing him. His gear was a mix of the awesome and the old, some Naxx25 and some T6. Should easily be serviceable by a skilled player though. Then I checked out his talents. Have a look.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxIMuhMtresifRxbx

Say it with me. Oh. Mygod.

Yes, it’s a discipline spec. But wow…it looks like an oddball pvp spec, maybe thrown together before a fast arena match. Hard to know why one would put that many points in the disc tree and not take Penance. My only guess is that he’d never used Penance before and did not expect to learn how to use it without practicing.

Ok, so in all fairness, he’s a great raid leader, a super mage, and just an all-around terrific guy. I’m sure he stepped in on his priest because they were short a healer, not because he’s a committed priest. So I’m not really harping on him personally. It just made me realize that even a priest can completely misunderstand the discipline spec. And by that I mean, WOW, so far off the mark that he’s discipline in name only.

He’s not the first. Other disc priests I’ve seen on our server failed in more subtle ways: stacking too much spirit, or missing a few key talents, that kind of thing. Usually I chalk it up to a holy priest wanting to see what the fuss is all about. Which is of course kind of sweet, and certainly a good thing for everyone.

Know thy class! Hell I haven’t had more than 14 points in holy since Penance first appeared on the scene. But I find it terribly important to have some grasp of talents in the holy tree and cookie-cutter holy priest specs.

Ok, just a skitch of ego

This isn’t a “me me” blog; I try to keep it philosophical and practical. But if there’s a time for a little bit of patting myself on the back, I think this qualifies. I’ve had the honor of being called a clutch player more than once. I’ve been called in at the last minute to (hopefully) save a failing raid twice on Kel, once on Sapph, and back in the day on Nightbane. Anyone who’s paying attention in my raids knows that I don’t top meters and never will; certainly if you’re reading this blog you understand that as a fundamental mechanic of the discipline spec. So what is it that makes someone clutch if not massive HPS? Is it all my shiny purples?

Well just imagine you were there at the start of the S3D raid. Our raid leader is on his mage, his main, waiting to see if any other healers log on. They knew I wasn’t coming, but I’m sure they were hoping for others to pop in. Nope. “Sigh, ok, I guess I’ll bring out my priest, let’s go!” That, dear readers, is not confidence inspiring. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, but it counts for a lot in a team situation. If you’re not 100% confident in your main tank healer, isn’t there a little part of you that’s scared, maybe already given up?

Someone tell me there’s a reader out there old enough to remember Larry Bird. (He played basketball in the 80s, the decade of A Flock of Seagulls and leg warmers, god help us.) Bird was one of the greatest players ever, whose genius was not his ability to pound the lane through traffic, or hit three-pointers, although he did that and more. What made Bird special was his ability to make other players better. One statistic that he owned was assists. That’s right – even though he was a fantastic rebounder, free-throw shooter, and ball-stealer, his presence on the court was not all about himself and his chart-topping performances. He was a team player. (In basketball, for those not already in the know, an assist is when you give the ball away to someone else to shoot.) Sure, he could trash talk on the court, and he was league MVP three times, so there’s no question he was a star. But he passed the ball like no one else, knew what the other team was doing better than anyone else, and made good players play like great players like no one before or since.

And that, dare I say it, is what makes someone so valuable. They must be able to do their job, and you must be able to trust that they’ll do it with as little ego getting in the way as possible. And if they do it with dignity, confidence, and maybe even style, then you are freed to do your job, without being in any way distracted by doubt.

Hello, my (toon’s) name is Paolo, and I am a team player.

Hm, is that ego? Being proud of being a team player?

Facebook

EDIT: This article is a bit dated. There are at least two addons that were created after I built these macros that you should check out. Both Announce and GuardianSpirited do what I'm trying to do in these macros, only more elegantly and more reliably. The macros are still fine, and certainly more lightweight, but they're no longer your best choice.

At some point you realize that you can do more than just

/cast Power Infusion

Here are some upgrades to your PI macro, culminating in what I think is just about the best you can do in the limited space of a macro.

Round One: Adding a whisper

Before any raid, I’ll usually alert my intended victim of what’s about to happen. Getting PI’d is fantastic, but if you’re not ready for it, it can be a bit jarring. So I just let them know that they’ll be getting hit with it when it’s up.

Then, when I cast PI, I’ll send an automatic whisper to the target so they know what just happened. Of course, they can see the animation and feel the haste, but the whisper is generally appreciated.

/cast [target=mouseover] Power Infusion
/run SendChatMessage("You just got Power Infusion...haste it up!","WHISPER",nil,UnitName("mouseover"))

Round Two: Linking the spell, and adding a Quartz timer

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. But I like to anyway :)  Here’s the same macro, but this time the spell is linked, rather than just named. Also, I’ve added a line that tells Quartz to put up a custom timer bar (enable the “mirror” function within Quartz, then play around with it). If you’re using other methods for managing your cooldowns, the Quartz timer can certainly be removed.

/cast [target=mouseover] Power Infusion
/run SendChatMessage("You just got "..GetSpellLink("Power Infusion").."...haste it up!","WHISPER",nil,UnitName("mouseover"))
/quartztimer 96 Power Infusion

Round Three: Error checking

I used the above macro for a long time. Unfortunately, it does no error checking. So if my target is out of range, they of course won’t get hit with PI, but they’ll still get the whisper. Same if the spell is on cooldown; they get a message but no buff.

The two LUA functions we’re adding here are IsSpellInRange and GetSpellCooldown. I’ve removed the Quartz timer, because I can’t include it within the error check. (I.e., the timer will display when I click, even if the spell fails.)

This uses some handy programming shortcuts in order to minimize the number of characters in the macro. Still, it’s about as sophisticated as you can get within the 255 character limit. (This is 217 characters, so there’s a little wiggle room.)

/script local u,pi="mouseover","Power Infusion";if IsSpellInRange(pi,u)==1 and GetSpellCooldown(pi)==0 then SendChatMessage("You just got "..GetSpellLink(pi).."!","WHISPER",nil,UnitName(u)) end
/cast [target=mouseover] Power Infusion

Briefly, what’s happening is this. In the first line, we’re sending the recipient a whisper, but only if the spell will land. To test if the spell will land, we’re checking to see if the target is in range and if the spell is off cooldown. (We’re not checking for line of sight, though that could probably be built in as well.)

Another difference with this version is that the spell itself is cast after the whisper. If we cast it before the whisper, the cooldown will of course be in effect and the whisper won’t be sent.

If you have any additions, corrections, or anything to improve upon in this macro, please send them along!

Addons

There are two addons that I know of that can be used for this sort of thing. CastYeller is made to order – it’s designed to let people know when a spell is cast successfully. It can whisper the target, post to a custom chat channel, or to the entire raid. I haven’t quite gotten it to do what I want, but YMMV of course. Definitely worth a look.

Aftercast is another option. It looks like it’s no longer in development, so I haven’t even downloaded it to try. I’d be curious if anyone has this working, or if there are other addons that are useful for spell announcements.

Bonus macro: Pain Suppression

What’s different here? Not much, to be honest. The only thing is that we’re no longer interested in sending a whisper to the target, but to the raid in general. This lets everyone know you’ve blown your cooldown to save the tank (most likely) or dps (shame on them!).

/script local u,ps,c="mouseover","Pain Suppression",GetNumRaidMembers()>0 and "RAID" or "PARTY";if IsSpellInRange(ps,u)==1 and GetSpellCooldown(ps)==0 then SendChatMessage(ps.." on "..UnitName(u),c) end
/cast [target=mouseover] Pain Suppression

The chat channel will be set dynamically based on whether you're in a raid or a party; if you’re testing it out solo you’ll get an error message saying that you’re not in a party.

Facebook

Right after I wrote the other two posts on information management, I picked up the delicious Illustration of the Dragon Soul. I knew I needed some way to keep an eye on it, and using the main display of raid buffs was just not gonna cut it. Finding its icon in all that chaos is not my idea of a user-friendly interface.

What I’m using now is an addon called NeedToKnow. It was designed for tracking the time left on buffs and debuffs, which is exactly what’s needed here. In fact, it also tracks the count of stackable buffs, like rogue poisons, so it fits Dragon Soul just perfectly.

Below is a screenshot of NeedToKnow in action. The top bar shows Dragon Soul’s stack count (10) and time remaining (9s, but the “s” is a bit hard to see under the white spark). The bottom bar is for Renewed Hope, taken off the 3.1 PTR, which if you hadn’t heard yet, will be doing some of the heavy lifting that Grace used to do:

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.

This is a raid-wide buff, so I’ll be tracking it using NeedToKnow. In practice, I doubt it will be something to be concerned about, as it will likely be up 100% of the time without trying.

One other buff I’d like to track this way is Heroism. Because Power Infusion doesn’t stack with Heroism (well, at least the haste component doesn’t), I want to know when Heroism is about to end. As soon as it does I’ll be able to pop PI on my friendly caster and be assured they’ll get the full benefits. Here again, hunting for the Heroism icon in the chaotic and ever-shifting list of raid buffs is the wrong way to do this; having a bright timer bar in a fixed position on your screen is the right way.

Oops! I hacked your code

So, yeah. NeedToKnow is great. The only problem is that this wunder-trinket has a reaaalllly loooonnnggg naammme. And the way NeedToKnow is coded puts the stack count to the right of the buff’s name. Without the hack, the purple bar would say “Illustration of the Dragon Soul [10]”. This would be fine except for the fact that I don’t want my bar to be wide enough to show all that text. And once you shrink the bar, the stack count gets hidden behind ellipses.

The minor hack job I did was to move the display of the stack count to the left of the buff name, as you see in the screenshot above. If you want to do this yourself, you can edit the LUA directly. About 25 lines from the end is a line that says “if (count > 1) then”. The line that immediately follows is where the bar’s text gets set up when a stack size needs to be displayed. I’ve changed mine to read

text:SetText(count.." - "..bar.auraName);

Um, please don’t ask me for programming help! If you’re not sure of what you’re doing, make backup copies, and go slowly, or just skip this bit. You’ll still love NeedToKnow.

Facebook