Showing posts with label gear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gear. Show all posts
Head? Meet Keyboard.
My experience with the two-trick pony healer over the weekend left me pondering the nuances of a skilled healer.

Of course, much like the Pretentious Priest, it is possible to make your way through a lot of content by merely bashing your face against your keyboard in rhythm to Tchaikovsky, as long as you bind all your keys to Flash Heal or Circle of Healing/ Penance. I mean, let's face it - it's not actually that difficult to buy yourself some top notch gear these days, and especially for healers, once you outgear an instance, you end up healing yourself out of a job.

There's all this talk going around about how much harder healing is going to be in Icecrown. Health pools will be larger! Heals will be smaller! There's a debuff thingie that will make your tanks weep with pansy-fication!

Rubbish, say I.

Well okay, maybe not total rubbish, but I do remain skeptical. I remember all the hubbub about Ulduar as well - how it was actually going to be HARD on healers. How mana regen was going to be tricky, you would have to choose your heals wisely. You would need to coordinate better with your fellow healers. Sound familiar to anyone else?

It didn't take long before healing was no real challenge in the first half of Ulduar. And it was the gear that made it so easy.

I'm not standing up here on my soapbox to tell you all that zomg healing is soooooo easy, why are you struggling?! This is a cakewalk! I could solo heal this lol. Especially since I'll be the first to tell you, I'm a middle of the road raider. I haven't seen most of the hard modes, and I'm certainly not on the cutting edge of the raiding scene.

What troubles me is how quickly healers are made obsolete. How, the better we get, the more we improve our gear, the harder we fight to learn all the best ways to use our spells, the nuances within the trigger finger dynamic... what ends up happening is that we heal ourselves out of a job.

Suddenly those 6 slots that were set aside for healers become 5. Because if you don't do that, then your healers CAN get away with Easy-button face smashing to fulfill their duties. You might as well turn that 6th slot into a DPS, so that we can take down the bosses faster. I'm not complaining about this decision - it is a practical one, and I understand it.

When the content is new, and your gear is beginner level for the instance, it's fun. It's a challenge. You have to think, and you have to make real choices. This person needs healing NOW. Should I use Renew? Or Circle of Healing to give others around him a little boost? Should I bubble or is there no risk of more damage coming at him. Should I use GrittedTeeth or AngelWings?

It doesn't matter how much health you add to the bosses, or even to the tanks. You can nerf regen all to hell. Gear is so easy to get due to the way badges are handed out like candy. The gear gap is traversed so quickly that it's not worth blinking. It's not worth worrying over. Oh you want to ninja my epics? Meh. I've got 18 more in my back pocket. Yawn.

We are able to upgrade our gear so quickly, and so easily, that Blizz is shooting themselves in the foot - the easier new gear is to acquire, the shorter our attention span becomes. This is due not only to us finding ourselves with no desire for anything that drops in the instance, but also because we gear up so fast, the instance is quickly turned into a moot point. A challengeless chasm.

Don't you love when people criticize something but have no solution to the problem? >.>

I have hopes for ICC, despite my skepticism. I hear murmurs of a healer glory encounter. I hope there are more of those in the future - Incinerate Flesh is my favorite fight mechanic so far (though I'm not as fond when I'm running Disc). But I am again brought back to the question: How can Developers fix healing? It doesn't scale with gear and encounter difficulty properly. At least for DPS, if you outgear the place, you get it done faster.

This is a question I'm still pondering, but I leave this for you readers to think about as well. I'm thinking some creative solutions lie in the D&D world. I'd love to read some creative thoughts on how to address this problem. Or do you see no problem at all? Tell me all about it by clicking that little comment button down below XD
PvE Healing Priest Enchants 3.2
Under each slot, I have listed the item enhancements generally in order from the best enhancement to least best. For most slots, I have a couple of options and ranked them this way, so that if you do not want to spend all the mats on the best enchantment (i.e. on a non-epic item that you will hopefully replace soon, etc), you can find a cheaper alternative that is still good. If you're still in greens and don't want to spend money on expensive enchants, at least pick up some Heavy Borean Armor Kits for the applicable unenchanted slots.

Some points to consider about my rankings:
  • In general, these suggestions apply for both Holy AND Discipline specced PvE healers. The only caveat to that is that Discipline priests are more likely to choose Spellpower enchantments over mana regen enchantments, particularly if the mana regen is Spirit (i.e. Chest, Feet, and Wrists)
  • If you are not having any mana troubles, you may choose enchancements that give a bonus to crit or haste over mana regen (For instance, I use Arcanum of Burning Mysteries instead of Arcanum of Blissful Mending). This is perfectly fine.
  • If you primarily heal in 5 mans or (to a lesser degree) 10 mans, you are more likely to encounter mana problems, and I highly recommend you opt for mana regen enchantments.
  • You can also refer to Elitistjerks for their BiS enchants, as there are a few variations from my choices.

Standard Enchantments (Done by an Enchanter)

Chest:
Feet:
Wrists:
Hands:
Cloak (Engineers and Tailors have other options, see below):
2 Hand Weapon (Staff):
1 Hand Weapon (Dagger or Mace):
In addition, Enchanters may enchant their own rings with Greater Spellpower (you cannot have an enchanter do this for you, as it makes the item permanently soulbound).

Arcanums (Headpiece Enhancements)

Inscriptions (Shoulder Enhancements)
Scribes do not need to grind reputation - they have the ability to Inscribe their own shoulders at level 400 with much better inscriptions: Master's Inscription of the Storm or Master's Inscription of the Crag.

Spellthreads (Leg Enhancements)
There is no enhancement for Neck, Trinkets, Off-Hand Items, or Wands, although Alchemists, Jewelcrafters, and Engineers can make their own trinkets, and obviously various professions can make different other items. Although this post is not intended to be a guide to which professions are best for the healing priest at end game, I would be remiss if I did not list some of the other item enhancements that different professions offer only for themselves. These profession specific item enhancements CANNOT be stacked with standard enchants, but are usually superior anyway.

Tailors have two Cloak embroidery options that are better than the Cloak Enchants:
  • Lightweave Embroidery - This is a pretty substantial increase to healing throughput, but I do not use it because you cannot rely on the increase when you need it. I won't notice that it procs, and just continue my job as usual (/shrug).
  • Darkglow Embroidery - I prefer this embroidery, as over the duration of a fight, it procs often enough (~35% proc, ~60s ICD) to give me a reliable "mana regen" boost. Good choice for priests, who use a lot of instant or short casts.
Engineers:
  • Springy Arachnoweave - The basic stats on this enchantment alone are much better than the haste enchants offered by Enchanters, even if you never use the parachute because you have Levitate.
  • Hyperspeed Accelerators - This is a fantastic haste increase, and really more like an extra trinket with a short cooldown. You can tie this to a macro and use it every ten seconds, or use it fairly regularly, and save the burst haste for when you are in a healing crisis and need to get a heal on someone ASAP. Does not activate GCD and stacks with other group/raid haste buffs (i.e. Heroism).
  • Nitro Boosts - Unless you are really desperate for mana regen, this is far superior to the crappy boot enchants. Also, the run speed increase can get you out of bad spots in a jiffy (zomg eyebeam), or if someone is stupidly out of your healing range and dying, get you closer to them to save their butts (I'm looking at you, mages!)
Leatherworkers:
Don't forget to pick up an Eternal Belt Buckle for your waist (made by blacksmiths) to add another gem socket. In addition, Blacksmiths can add a socket to their own bracers and their own gloves.



Edited October 6th: Clarified more between Disc and Holy differences.
Edited October 9th: Added super pro tip from Fido about inscription of Dominance!

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Holy Priest Gems and Sockets
There's a really awesome website that I use whenever I'm deciding on gems called WoW Gem Finder. I was looking back through my Holy Priest Healing Guide, and realized that I never mentioned enchants or gems.  Enchants for another day, but I'll hit up gems now. I highly recommend checking out elitistjerks for gem suggestions if you are interested in the theorycrafting behind choices, though they have not updated with the new epic gems on the linked post - it's likely you will need to read through the thread.

However, I'm anal retentive, and cannot bear to lose a socket bonus, which EJ often ignores. Therefore, I always use a matching color for the socket. I find it handy to know what stats are related to which colors, so here you go.

Yellow Sockets: Intellect, Critical Strike Rating, Hit Rating, Resilience, Haste, Defense Rating
Red Sockets: Strength, Attack Power, Agility, Parry, Armor Penetration, Expertise, Spell Power, Dodge Rating
Blue Sockets: Stamina, Mp5, Spirit, Spell Penetration

You can see, just by looking at the color -> stat conversions that Red Sockets are for spellpower, Blue Sockets are for regen via spirit/mp5, and Yellow is for all the fun stuff. I've italicized the stats that are generally useless for priest gemming in PvE raid healing. You could argue that stamina is a good choice, but unlike the days of Primal Mooncloth sets, we don't really need to gem for stamina anymore, as we get plenty naturally from our gear.

For blue sockets, I always choose Spirit over Mp5 due to Spiritual Guidance. Maybe mp5 is actually better, and if I wanted to, I could do some maths, but like, math is hard, so... no. Spirit it is (see, this is why I recommended elitistjerks!). I never use a solid blue gem for my blue sockets - if I need more mana, it's better to use Intellect, at least for raiders. For mages and warlocks who are determined to take advantage of socket bonuses as well, spirit may be a better choice for you too, due to talents boosting spellpower through spirit.

For Red, of course I always choose spell power, since there aren't any other good choices.

Where you really start to see differences among priest choices and gear levels comes in the yellow socket. When you are first starting out, always pick Intellect for more mana and mana regen. Once you have a solid mana pool and no longer need to panic about your mana sustainability (which, for the record, is a lot easier in 25 man raids due to more buffs), you can start picking up crit and/or haste. I try to balance between the two stats, but plenty of people have a preference for one over the other.

Now that I have so much intellect, mana is rarely an issue for me, nor is crit. I prefer to gem for Intellect over crit, since you do get some crit boost from intellect. However, I do not necessarily recommend this if you really do need a lot more crit.

I've listed my top choices for each color socket. The first gem is the epic, the second is the rare gem equivalent. If you are not yet ready to blow large amounts of gold on the epic gems (new to raiding, doing heroics, 5 mans, etc), pick up the lesser gem with similar stats.

Yellow:
Red:
Blue:

I usually pick my gems based around current prices as well. Runed Cardinal Ruby is always ridiculously expensive, so I look for different combinations that will add up to the same amount.

For example: Let us suppose that I have Savior's Slippers, with one red socket and one blue socket. Instead of choosing Runed Cardinal Ruby + Sparkling Majestic Zircon, I may find that it is cheaper to socket 2x Purified Dreadstone, which would actually give me +1 spellpower over a Runed Cardinal Ruby which is usually very expensive.

In reality, it is unlikely I would use any gem that has spirit on it in anything other than a blue socket, but you get the point. Creative combinations and careful shopping can save you lots of gold on gems, and potentially net you better rewards. For Blue Sockets, I always use a combination gem. For Yellow sockets, I always use a solid yellow gem. For red sockets, it depends on the current price of Runed Cardinal Rubies.

In short? Don't gem for spirit or mp5. If you need to use a blue gem (socket bonus, meta bonus, etc), use a purple or green gem that includes spirit. If you need mana regen as a raider, gem for Intellect (this is slightly less true for those who focus on 5 mans - the more people in your group, the higher the chance you will receive more benefits from intellect regen opportunities). Once you have enough mana, pick up crit or haste. Always gem for spellpower. Combine multi-colored gems to save some gold.

Meta Gems

For your Meta Socket, the following are the only real options for a Holy PvE Priest:
  • Beaming Earthsiege Diamond - Easy socket requirement to achieve. If you are in need of a lot of extra crit, this is a pretty good choice.
  • Bracing Earthsiege Diamond - Threat should NOT be an issue for you. If it is, there are more important problems to address. The only time that threat may potentially be a significant problem is in 5 mans with a fresh tank who is learning the ropes. Therefore, this is ONLY a decent choice if you are with a group just starting 5 man heroics, etc.
  • Insightful Earthsiege Diamond - My favorite meta. The mana restoration proc happens quite a bit for Holy Priests, as we are often using lots of instant heals mixed in with quickie flash heals.
  • Ember Skyflare Diamond - Always a solid choice. Insightful meta is better until you build up solid mana reserves, at which point this becomes a great meta, particularly since it scales so well with gear.
  • Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond - Don't be bad. Blizzard put this here just to trick you. Just say no to "increased crit heal effect" which half of the time translates into "increased overheal amount and therefore a complete waste NYAH NYAH". You canNOT rely on crits when a heal is needed, and "increased critical healing effect" is very different than increased spellpower, which is RELIABLE. Also, I recommend Spirit or Intellect over mp5.




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