Penance Priest

I so totally shouldn't be doing this.

I'm writing on a hotel wireless, in the beautiful desert, awaiting my sunset photo op in Canyonlands. Rough, I know.

But Jessabelle upset me. She just posted on trinkets, and did it all wrong. It's ok, she's still a very good priest, and a cool lady. We all make mistakes.

Here is my trinket list. All but one are in my bags at all times. I hope this helps with your own gearup plans, even as we're in the denoument of a long hard road through Arthas' world.

• Time-Lost Figurine. I got this the first week I hit 70, while helping a friend farming his Sha'tari Skyguard rep. It used to be fun to run Shadow Labs while disguised as an Arakkoa. Now, well, it's still the best disguise in the game IMO.
• Vanquished Tentacle of C'Thun. Because who doesn't stop and stare at a tentacle in the Dalaran bank?
• Figurine - Ruby Hare. I don't PvP much nowadays, but when I do, the mobility boost is just too much fun. Call it the luxury of being human, and the price for not being an engineer.
• Sif's Remembrance. I just need 9 more people and I'll be able to Herald. Until then, I have a bag in my bank filled with 226s.
• Discerning Eye of the Beast. Holy Nova + Discerning Eye + Skellies in Culling of Strat = infinite mana. I don't use this as much as I used to, but definitely if I get Strat right after changing specs.

If you need to shard Solace or PLD to make room for one of these, don't hesitate.

-- disappears back into the Utah desert --

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Fair mage.

Delicate, like a flower.

Perhaps you are a gnome.

Even better.



Oh my, is it CC time again?

Would you mind —

That Vrykul could hurt us so.

Such big weapons! So fast! And so many of them!

Is turning one into a sheep too much to ask?



You, good mage, are the hero

Of this small but important moment.



Chaos! Vrykul abound, uncontrolled!

Only one wanders in circles

On four legs.

Smoke! Fire! Blizzards! Whirlwinding warriors!

Who could keep track in the madness?



/cast Holy Nova



“Who broke my —”

So sorry, mage.

I do not know how the sheep broke.

Nor why it ran straight to you,

Executing swift judgment for your offense.

Surely the sheep breaker should have

Drawn its ire, and not you?

I mourn.



Good-bye, fair mage. Good-bye.

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One of my most ecstatic moments in game was an hour-long AV back at level 59 in April 2008. I had twinked myself out, fine-tuned my spec (deep disc even back then!), and bought some great Outland greens. This match was particularly epic, featuring some great come-from-behind teamwork Ally-side. Yes, Ally teamwork…believe it.

I wrote this account right after the match. It really needs some editing, but I find that anything I try to do just ends up gutting the urgency and authenticity that was expressed in the moment. Enjoy!

 

Most battles in the Valley are won or lost before they even begin.

You enter the starting gate to prep for battle. You probably don’t know a thing about your fellow soldiers: Do they understand how the Valley works? Are they skilled at their job? And most importantly, do they know how to fight as a team?

But even more than all of that, you are at the mercy of the balance of power. The numbers, pure and simple.

This day we started out far behind. Our twenty to their thirty-five.

This battle was lost before it began.

When you start out at such a deficit, you’re hard-pressed to catch up. Sure, over the first 15 minutes or so you might get a trickle of new soldiers. But by then it’s usually too late.

We missed our initial push to kill the captain, so most of the team ended up back at the starting gate. By then, the enemy had killed our captain and had their full force on the road past Icewing Bunker. We were trapped, unable to move forward. At the bottom of the hill we fought for twenty long minutes, and through sheer force of will, or perhaps with divine intervention, we were able to push them back to Stonehearth Graveyard. And we took that graveyard with relish, and deep relief.

With our captain dead and one tower lost, our side was down hard. We had 200 reinforcements to their 400. In a situation like that, most teams will just lay down and surrender. Not today; our team had a desperate will to win.

Now with a forward graveyard, we were able to mount something resembling an offense. A few soldiers slipped past to Iceblood Garrison and mounted a small insurgence. Most of us were caught in a knot on the Field of Strife. And a large cohort ended up back at the defensive starting gate.

All three groups managed to hold ground. Defense protected Dun Buldar with more strength than the numbers would suggest. The forward group took Tower Point. The group on the Field of Strife made very slow progress forward, not past the field, but at least not being pushed back.

While all this is happening, attrition is wearing down reinforcements on both sides. We’re somehow losing ground more slowly than they are. By 45 minutes in, we’re down 100 to 200.

Tower point changed hands, and changed hands again. We recaptured it at minute 50, with reinforcements fading, 80 to 30. Capturing the tower is not enough: it needs four minutes to burn before it falls. Worth 75 reinforcements, it is the one and only key to victory in today’s battle.

It’s now two minutes later, with two minutes until the tower burns. Reinforcements at 70 to 22. If we can hold for two more minutes, the battle is ours. Most of our team turtles up at Winterax. The one and only goal is to protect the tower…and to stay alive. Only for two minutes more.

Soldiers shouting on comm for the timer…“how long to Tower Point!?” Thirty seconds to fall, with reinforcements now at 65 to 12.

At five seconds to fall, five seconds to victory, we lost the tower. Reinforcements are 60 to 8. Our last hope is gone.

Most of the team is still at Winterax. Shouts go like wild over comm…“Get to Galv!” We’re a short ride from their captain, still alive after surviving our initial attempt. No more than a dozen of us brave the ride across the Field of Strife to Iceblood Garrison. Never in my days in the Valley have I seen Galv go down so quickly, or with so few of us fighting. My own healing spells were shelved for this brief moment of desperation. For this moment, I am no Holy Priest. I am a soldier.

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Happy Monday everyone! Especially in New Orleans. Awesome game, just awesome.

Ok, to the heart of the matter. I’ve been one of the most staunchly anti-QQ forces I know, both in this blog and in the forums I haunt. Typically QQ is a sign of some sort of failure: failure of understanding, failure to play with the right people, failure to adjust to changes in game mechanics, failure to listen, etc. I hate the inner experience you have when you’re complaining. I also hate the feeling of reading others’ (usually irrational and aggressive) complaints. It just feels gross, and it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon: it riles you up in the wrong way.

It’s a life question more than a game question: with all of its complexity, is life basically good but with bad stuff that happens? Or is life basically bad but with some good stuff that happens? If you take the latter position, you’ll QQ morning noon and night. If you take the former position, you might QQ, but it will be within a framework of positivity and forward motion. I strive for this philosophy.

However, not all QQ is just emo-ranting. I will be presumptuous and assume that there is more than some merit in the QQ that I’m collecting in this post. That, and it’s also a rant.

To spare you from repeated assaults, I’ve put in three QQs into a triple post. Aren’t I nice? I have a chance to get it all out of my system at once, and if all goes well, you won’t have to read QQ every post for the next three weeks. I’ve put each one in a separate post, just to allow the dialogue to make some kind of sense.

Here we go! It’s long, meandering, and has some intense moments. Brace yourselves.

Is Discipline Fun?

I made the mistake of looking at an old post of mine. It was the second post I ever wrote, called “Why Disc is So Much Fun.” I was still trying to figure out what the hell I was going to blog about, and I definitely hadn’t developed much of a writing style. In it I compared the Recount profiles between two priests, one discipline (me) and one CoH. (This was in 3.0.2, prior to the release of the Lich King content. We called Holy priests “CoH” priests back then.) Here are the graphs, just so you can see them without clicking through.

The bubbling joy I experienced with discipline was not only its novelty, but its versatility. Back then, I expressed my love for the spec because it “forces a degree of engagement and creativity,” which is displayed very nicely in the healing profiles above. I was using every tool at my disposal. The creativity and versatility were the source of the thrill of discipline healing.

Well, as you saw in my last post, discipline’s role (at least in 25-mans) is much more well-defined than it was in those frothy days, when we were all finding out how the new spec would work out. We’re now officially bubble spammers with a wee bit of tank support. The more I play 25s with an excellent team, the more I realize just how narrowly focused the tree has become. There are exceptions of course, and certainly in 10-man raids bubble spam isn’t really much of an option anyway, so there’s more room for creative play in that setting.

Here’s a graph from our raid last Tuesday, covering 7 bosses. I removed the Glyph of PWS and Divine Aegis from the graph, since they aren’t spell-casts. There are 662 shields and 17 ticks of Penance in the graph. And a single Divine Hymn out-healed my entire use of Penance for the night.

I’m thinking about renaming my blog “FUCK YOU BLIZZARD.” If our ridiculous and broken one-trick pony-of-a-spec doesn’t get fixed on day one of Cataclysm’s release, I’m folding my healing robes and burning them. Yes, I know discipline has a powerful role in raids. Yes, I know GC recently declared that discipline “is in a good place at the moment,” which means it’s unlikely to get fixed. That doesn’t mean it’s fun to play. It’s not. I don’t play discipline for its function. I play(ed) it because it rocked, because it “force[d] a degree of engagement and creativity.” It revitalized my interest in healing, which had gotten rather dull at the end of BC. The chart above shows the current state of affairs: there is an absolute and total lack of engagement and creativity. Props to those who still enjoy discipline. Seriously. Meanwhile, I’m begrudgingly bubble-spamming my way to glory, hoping for the change that I do not expect to arrive.

On to QQ #2 »

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One year ago, Blizzard unvelied a massive overhaul of all the classes, including new 51-point talents. We were still level 70, weary from long months of hard raids, looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King (which was about a month away), and eager for something new and exciting.

We got unified spell power. We got barbershops. We got super-easy-mode nerfraids on which to test out our new talents.

And by golly, we got Penance.

This brought the hitherto unfocused discipline tree into relief. It went from bitter toddler to vibrant teenager overnight. From a PvP-only tree whose top-tier talent was about survival, to a PvE-focused tree whose top-tier talent was clearly the best single-target healing spell in the game.

It was so fresh and novel that it almost felt like a completely new healing class. To this day, it still does.

Looking over some of my old posts—especially this one, in which I listed the gear I was wearing the day I installed Lich King—reminded me of just how exciting that time was. I had completely revamped my equipment from spirit-based holy gear to a full crit-based set (almost spirit-free) that I had been building for shadow. Somehow I scraped together a ridiculously high 21% crit, and was totally wild-eyed as I watched the soap bubbles pop around the raid, as they did so often from PoM, Penance, and PoH.

We've had a long year, with ups and downs just like every other class. But I can safely say, one year later, I still love it.

Thank you Blizzard!

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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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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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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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Here's reason #1 why I love the penance spec.

Check out the recount data from a recent raid. This was a TK pug, not a lot of leadership, so healing assignments were pretty lax. And being a 25, things were sloppy all around. (It's my least favorite number, 25, by a long shot.) Being a pug, and with many people never having done TK before, we only got down 2 bosses, with a single attempt on a third. In other words, this ain't the most representative sample, but it will do.

Here is my recount profile:

And the profile of "S", a CoH priest with similar gear level (very different stat profile of course, since I'm a crit stacker atm):

The CoH priest was pretty on the ball. I've seen profiles that were 90% CoH, even more. I've also seen recount data for me that was almost perfectly evenly split amongst the top 5 or 6 spells; Flash Heal was definitely the main spell for this discombobulated pug.

Look at the number of casts for each of us, in addition to the pie charts. I'm using all my tools, all the time. He's using spells in exponentially decreasing frequency. Granted, I should have been PoM-ing more often, and probably renewing as well. But for now, that's not the point. The point is that the spec both encourages, and even forces a degree of engagement and creativity that I have not experienced before as a priest.

And an engaged player is more valuable to your team than a bored or unhappy player. Which is what I was during that brief "let's try CoH" phase of my career. I'm not imposing that experience on other CoH-ers, but certainly many of them are people who were forced to respec because of the demands of T6 content, not because of the pleasure of the playstyle.

Next post will be another analysis of the same raid. But it will be more of a QQ on "Why a raid leader would still not want to take me, even if I'm a better player than the CoH priest."

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