Penance Priest

I know you’re not a voyeur. Or competitive at all. That’s ok, I won’t judge you for it.

But you still probably check people out. Hey, someone’s gear says a lot about them, doesn’t it? It’s just a little, well, embarrassing to get caught inspecting someone. Or as soon as you click on them, you see that they’ve been targeting you. I’d prefer to just inspect people on the D/L. It requires just one mod and one macro, and no one will ever know you’re looking.

The Mod

Examiner is a replacement window for the inspection pane. It has lots of super features, including a cache (so you can see how someone looked last time you inspected them, even when they’re not nearby), a stat summary (it will add up all the hit rating, crit rating, etc, just from gear, not talents), and can retrieve achievements (though I keep this turned off…too much information for my tastes).

Those are all great features, but the real reason we need this mod for stealth inspection is because its window persists. I’ll explain in a moment.

The Macro

Here’s a simple macro that will open the inspection window on your mouseover target. No need to target them, just hover over their toon or raid frame. This is the core of our stealth operation. Ready?

/script InspectUnit("mouseover")

That’s all. A one-line macro to open up an inspection window on your mouseover target. The only problem is that as soon as you wiggle your mouse away from the target, the inspection window will disappear. So you can’t mouse over their gear…very frustrating.

This is why we need Examiner. Its window persists. Which means the window will stay open even if you move your mouse off the target -- it won’t disappear until you specifically close it. Voila!

Summing Up

Installing your stealth inspector is a simple two-step process. First, install Examiner. Second, bind the macro above to any key. That’s it. It’s almost too easy.

Bonus Addons

The first bonus addon is called oGlow. It’s the reason you see colored rings around everything in the Examiner window. It will put these rings (indicating item quality, of course) on every item in your bags as well, or in loot windows…basically anywhere you see an item icon. Makes it very easy to quickly see if someone’s epic’d out, or in mixed greens & blues.

The second addon is TipTac. It’s a tooltip replacement window, and it’s not directly related to our stealth inspection operation. It has a lot of great features that I won’t detail here. The one relevant feature is that if you hover over a toon, it will show you who that toon is targeting. So it’s a bit of stealth…you can tell if someone is targeting you without needing to target them.

Voyeur? Me? Never!

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Unless you've been hiding under a fragment of Val'anyr for the last month, you'll know that disc priests are the all the rage in arenas right now. FotM even. We got some huge buffs in 3.1 that increased our survivability in PvP tremendously. If you have enough resilience, it's actually fun to PvP as a priest nowadays.

I've done a ton of BGs, but until recently I didn't have good enough gear (or skills, I'll admit it) to even consider venturing into arenas. And now that I do, I found it very difficult to find out the right way to get started. How do you gear up? What sort of talents? Trinkets? Comps? Should I focus on crit or regen? In order to figure out how to best spend my honor points, I decided to consult the experts. The winning priests. And instead of trying to convince you that I actually know what I'm doing, I'm going to show you what they are doing.

I looked at 10 of the top priests in the 2s bracket (as listed on Arena Junkies). I looked at what gear choices they made, what talent choices, gems, professions, enchants. It's called a meta-analysis — instead of doing my own field research, I collated the results of the research that others did. You won't find me saying "here's the perfect/correct PvP build," because there is none. But you will find out what the pros are doing, what they find works.

YMMV, of course. What works in the 2700 bracket of 2s may be irrelevant in the entry-level 5s team you just started. And what works for someone with years of experience in arenas might not work for someone who's never PvP'd before. So everything here comes with a ton of salt. In fact, this is just a snapshot of what are certainly 10 works in progress. Some of these folks have probably already changed their builds or gems to adjust to changing circumstances.

Just to emphasize, this is not my opinion. My opinion doesn't count, since I don't have enough experience to act as any sort of authority. So unfortunately, I'm not the right person to ask "why?".

(By the way, I started this research for a thread on Wowhead. There's a lively discussion happening over there; check it out.)

I hope this sets you off on the right foot! Enjoy arenas, fellow priests, 'cause this is our time.

The Priests

I've linked talent specs here as well. A summary of specific talent points is below.

Bilian (Talents)
Shatoria (Talents)
Arterian (Talents)
Tkizze (Talents)
Felyn (Talents)
Ychytakaseto (Talents)
Sketched (Talents)
Butteslol (Talents)
Evleh (Talents)
Quuz (Talents)

The Comps

Seven partner with rogues. Two with ret pallies. One with a feral druid.

The Gear

Ok, here's where things get interesting! I haven't tallied every single piece of gear. But I was particularly interested in several gear choices:

• Main hand weapon
• Trinkets
• Gems (especially meta gems)
• Set pieces

Main hand weapon

Eight are using Torch of Holy Fire, one is using Deadly Gladiator's Gavel, one is using the Soulblade.

Trinkets

9 Medallions (one human, of course)

For the second trinket, interesting choices were made between defense, offense, or regen.

Defense: 4 Battlemaster's Bravery
Offense: 1 Platinum Disks of Sorcery, 1 Forethought Talisman
Pure Regen: 1 Spark of Hope, 1 Spirit World Glass
Hybrid Regen: 2 Living Ice Crystals, 1 Je'tze's Bell

Gems

Meta gems leaned heavily towards regen.

6 Insightful Earthsiege
2 Tireless Skyflare
2 Powerful Earthsiege

For other gems, here is the total number of points allocated to each stat:

+834 Resilience
+603 Stamina
+317 Spell power
+120 Hit rating
+40 Spell penetration
+18 MP5
+16 Haste

Set pieces

Every priest had 5 set pieces, mostly Deadly of course. I did not consider offset pieces (cloak, rings, etc) for this analysis.

Of the 50 total pieces, 48 were Mooncloth (spirit), 2 were Satin (crit). The satin pieces were on two different priests, so all 10 of them had the 4-piece set bonus.

Enchants

For now, I just looked at the enchant choices on chest and bracers:

Chest
7 Resilience
2 Health
1 Stats

Bracers
7 Spellpower
3 Stamina

Professions

Of the relevant professions, 6 were engineers (for nitro boosts and hyperspeed accelerators), 4 were enchanters (for rings), and 3 were jewelcrafters (for uber-gems).

Talents

All 10 priests were disc/holy, anything from 57/14 to 60/11. Rather than list every single talent, what I've decided to do was present only those talents which are confusing or debatable, and see what our experts chose. You won't see Penance listed below; that's a given. But Absolution? Here you'll see that 16 points out of a total of 30 were chosen. Since it's a 3-point talent, if every priest took it in full you'd see 30/30. The 16 points means that it was not universally considered required. Some took 2 points, some 3 points, and some zero. I haven't correlated anything here, so this just gives you a sense of how essential each talent is considered, nothing more.

If you wanted to look at a "template" build, look at Shator. It's a good place to start.

Discipline Silent Resolve - 30/30 Improved Fort - 11/20 Martyrdom - 6/20 Meditation - 30/30 Inner Focus - 10/10 Absolution - 16/30 Mental Agility - 30/30 Improved Mana Burn - 20/20 Reflective Shield - 18/20 Focused Power - 20/20 Enlightenment - 20/30 Focused Will - 30/30 Power Infusion - 10/10 Improved Flash Heal - 3/30 Renewed Hope - 16/20 Divine Aegis - 15/30 Grace - 19/20

Holy Healing Focus - 19/20 Improved Renew - 21/30 Holy Specialization - 20/50 Spell Warding - 8/40 Divine Fury - 40/40 Desperate Prayer - 10/10 Blessed Recovery - 2/30

Glyphs

10 Penance
6 Inner Fire
5 Pain Suppression
3 Shield
3 Renew
2 Dispel Magic
1 Smite

Base Stats

Stam
Median: 1362
Range: 1312 - 1493 (wide)
Notes: Median health was 20480, which includes (for some folks) a +hp chest enchant that doesn't show in the stamina value.

Int
Median: 737
Range: 729 - 762 (narrow)
Notes: Median mana pool was 14638. Other than one person who stacked int, all priests had int values within about 15 of each other.

Spirit
Median: 624
Range: 561 - 742 (wide)
Notes: Median regen (out of 5sr) was 315.

Bonus Heals
Median: 1891
Range: 1799 - 2069 (moderate)
Notes: The priest who stacked int also stacked heals; she is the high value in both stats, and the lowest value in regen and stam.

Hit Rating
Median: 118
Range: 90 - 122 (narrow)

Haste
Median: 48
Range: 0 - 110 (moderate)
Notes: Turns out the Torch of Holy Fire, the best weapon in the game (pre-Ulduar), has exactly 48 haste. Hmm. Only two priests had other haste pieces or gems above the amount on the Torch, so this stat was definitely not a priority for our panel.

Crit
Median: 58
Range: 0 - 109 (moderate)
Notes: If you consider how much crit a PvE disc priest will stack (in the neighborhood of 700 crit rating), the numbers here are so close to zero we might as well just call them a wash. Another non-priority stat.

Resilience (did you think I forgot?)
Median: 919
Range: 802 - 1115 (wide)
Notes: The lowest and highest values are both extreme outliers. If we remove those two from consideration, the range is actually very narrow: 905 - 928 for all the remaining priests.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!)

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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?

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