Browsing the archives for the healing tag

Secret Design of WoW PvE: Your role in a PvE raid

Jul 8, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
GoW
Secret Design of WoW PvE, world of warcraft

The series: [Intro­duc­tion, and a call for com­ments, Solo Dif­fi­culty vs Group Dif­fi­culty, PvE vs PvP, Vari­ety vs Spe­cial­iza­tion, Solo Per­former vs Group Util­ity, Your role in a PvE raid]

This is how every tal­ent tree of every class fits into a pve raid.

This list assumes play­ers at the same skill and gear level. Every­one knows some­one who will say “how can you say that X does more dam­age than Y, my friend is Y and zomg pwns all in a big raid guild, blah blah”. The guild you men­tioned doesn’t have the same qual­ity at every per­son, your friend hap­pens to be the best player in that guild. Your friend would prob­a­bly be the best at any class they chose.

Also, many raid encoun­ters specif­i­cally high­light one class’s fea­ture over another. So these com­para­tors don’t hold true for every event in the game.

Now, notice that I’m not list­ing every pop­u­lar build. The typ­i­cal hunter beast­mas­ter build is 41÷20÷0 or 41 points in Beast­mas­ter, 20 in Marks­man­ship, 0 in Sur­vival. The typ­i­cal com­bat rogue build is 40-odd points in Com­bat, 20 or so in Assas­si­na­tion. This isn’t a cat­a­log of every build for every class, just sweep­ing gen­er­al­iza­tions by tal­ent tree.

Finally, if I’ve made any errors, please leave a com­ment, and I’ll update this list.

Last updated 2008-07-18. Includes revi­sions from Kiki­das (war­lock), Las­sira (hunter), and Kadir.

Com­mon to All roles

Druid - good gen­eral pur­pose raid buff, good debuffs, good caster util­ity with inner­vate, good raid util­ity with in-battle resurrection

Hunter - good ranged phys­i­cal dam­age, nice vari­ety of debuffs, best aggro man­age­ment, can help man­age the aggro of oth­ers, infi­nite dura­tion of dam­age (unique for ranged classes), awk­ward crowd control

Mage - excel­lent ranged sin­gle target/aoe dam­age, pure dam­age class, caster raid buffs, decent aggro man­age­ment, good crowd con­trol, free food/drink

Pal­adin - excel­lent raid buffs via bless­ings, mul­ti­ple pal­adins stack very well in raids due to wide vari­ety of these bless­ings, good vari­ety of party buffs in auras, nice buff/debuff melee option in judgments

Priest - decent raid buffs, good threat man­age­ment, lim­ited crowd control

Rogue - pure dam­age class, excel­lent single-target melee dam­age, good aggro management

Shaman - excel­lent group util­ity via totems

War­lock - excel­lent sin­gle target/aoe dam­age, best dam­age over time, good debuffs to either do dam­age or enhance any­one else’s, free health potion equiv­a­lent between fights, lim­ited crowd con­trol, good raid wipe recov­ery via soul­stone, lim­ited aggro management

War­rior - enhances party health or melee dam­age, good aoe melee debuffs

Dam­age / Dps

Druid (feral) - good melee phys­i­cal dam­age, enhances raid melee dam­age, dam­age doesn’t scale through endgame due to item­iza­tion
Druid (bal­ance) — good ranged magic dam­age, enhances group caster damage

Hunter (beast­mas­ter) — excel­lent ranged phys­i­cal dam­age, enhances group dam­age of any type
Hunter (marks­man) — PvP dam­age spec, can also be excel­lent PvE dam­age with mid-tier raid­ing gear and up, good phys­i­cal dam­age group buff
Hunter (sur­vival) - PvP survivability/control. Also good raid util­ity in deep endgame PvE raid­ing via Expose Weak­ness, enhances all phys­i­cal damage.

Mage (fire) — high­est sus­tained ranged magic dam­age
Mage (frost) — PvP survivability/control, low­est burst dam­age and high­est dura­tion
Mage (arcane) — PvP burst dam­age, high­est burst dam­age and low­est duration

Pal­adin (ret­ri­bu­tion) — PvP dam­age. Also excel­lent party dam­age buff in large raids.

Priest (shadow) — decent ranged magic dam­age, good debuffs, excel­lent group util­ity in con­stant mana and health regen, dam­age doesn’t scale through­out endgame due to itemization

Rogue (com­bat) — high­est sus­tained melee phys­i­cal dam­age
Rogue (assas­si­na­tion) — my wife says, “Good ques­tion, what do full assassination/mutilate rogues do that com­bat rogues don’t?“
Rogue (sub­tlety) — PvP survivability/control.

Shaman (enhance­ment) — good phys­i­cal melee dam­age, greatly enhances group melee dam­age
Shaman (ele­men­tal) — PvP nuking.

War­lock (afflic­tion) - excel­lent dam­age against bosses, excel­lent raid util­ity via var­ied mob debuffs; aggro prob­lems due to most dam­age being DoT and there­fore hard to slow down when prob­lems arise.
War­lock (demonology) - good raid dam­age, most self-boosting abil­i­ties, ver­sa­til­ity via dif­fer­ent pet sac­ri­fices
War­lock (destruc­tion) - PvP burst dam­age; can be excel­lent in deep endgame raids with appro­pri­ate crit gear. (look­ing for more info)

War­rior (arms) — PvP dam­age; how­ever, with suf­fi­cient phys­i­cal dam­age sup­port (usu­ally in mid/deep endgame) mob debuffs enhance phys­i­cal dam­age to make an arms war­rior use­ful.
War­rior (fury) — good melee phys­i­cal dam­age, good melee aoe

Tanks

Deathknight - best tank for caster tar­gets (accord­ing to cur­rent pre-expansion information)

Druid (feral) - best tank for melee tar­gets, best single-target off­tank, gear is prob­lem­atic in scal­ing through­out endgame (also, can switch with­out respec to cat-dps between fights)

Pal­adin (pro­tec­tion) - best tank for mul­ti­ple targets

War­rior (pro­tec­tion) - 2nd best at every­thing deathknight/druid/pally are good at, also great generic sur­viv­abil­ity tricks for boss fights

Heal­ers

Druid (restora­tion) - best heals over time, best healer on the move

Pal­adin (holy) - best single-target healer

Priest (holy) - 2nd best at every­thing druid/pally/shammy are good at
Priest (dis­ci­pline) - PvP healer, good raid caster buff

Shaman (restora­tion) - best multi-target healer

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Raiding does not mean Skilled

Jun 12, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
GoW
iconic players, world of warcraft

(Related post: Max level does not mean Skilled.)

There’s a class of player who feels that their sta­tus in the raid­ing game means that they’re Right. They label other peo­ple noobs, and the silly thing is that peo­ple believe them. “I have this awe­some item, you don’t, there­fore I know what I’m talk­ing about and you don’t.” This frus­trates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very per­son­able, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the orig­i­nal WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was look­ing for a more relaxed play­time require­ment while still play­ing at a high level. A per­fect fit!

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Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

May 31, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
GoW
world of warcraft

(Related post: Take the Group Role)

The fol­low­ing state­ments are all true for raid­ing guilds:

  • The health of a PvE guild is dic­tated by its abil­ity to progress through the game’s con­tent at the guild’s expected rate.
  • Groups and raids live or die based on being able to assem­ble, launch, and progress. A suc­cess­ful raid has all three roles (tank, heal, dam­age) filled to suf­fi­cient levels.
  • The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in a typ­i­cal suc­cess­ful raid is some­thing like 2÷3÷5.
  • The ratio of tanks/healers/damage in total avail­able, raid-ready play­ers on my server (and I have no rea­son to think this is unique) is along the lines of 2÷3÷25. I just made these num­bers up, but this is what I’ve seen. You can always, always find another damage-person to come along.
  • Offi­cers are invested in their guild’s con­tin­ued exis­tence and success.

The log­i­cal sum of these points is that offi­cers of PvE raid guilds, even casual ones, should take up the roles that are most needed to keep their guild raid­ing, namely tanks and heal­ers. Even if the char­ac­ter is not their main, they should have an alt ready to step into one of these needed roles should some­one decide to retire from the game, lather up with crazy sauce, or just hit the next stop on the pro­gres­sion train.

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Not Pushing the Button

May 27, 2008, last modified on Aug 2, 2008
GoW
world of warcraft

I’m a healer. I have other toons: a raid-ready tank that I love to play, a cou­ple of decent dps toons. But in my heart, I love being a healer.

I’ve recently real­ized that peo­ple who are annoy­ing tend to die more often in raids where I’m healing.

For exam­ple, my guild’s cur­rent off­tank is as annoy­ing as hell. He’s the liv­ing exam­ple of the Dunning-Kruger effect… I could go into great depth, and I very well might in a future piece, but suf­fice to say that there is often an under­cur­rent of pri­vate tells derid­ing him dur­ing every raid he par­tic­i­pates in. How­ever, our guild is like a fam­ily, and he’s the weird cousin who makes it to every cook­out. His avail­abil­ity is decent, he’s not com­pletely ter­ri­ble at his class/role, and he tries to be friendly even if he lacks the social skills to pull it off. But there are all-too-frequent occa­sions where I wish I had a but­ton I could push that gives him an anony­mous elec­tri­cal jolt in his real-life chair.

Actu­ally, as it turns out, there’s a lit­tle but­ton that I don’t push that does the same thing. It’s actu­ally a series of but­tons, each of them bound to heal­ing spells. He dies more than average.

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Fools, Silence, and Damage Reporting–supplemental

Apr 28, 2008
GoW
world of warcraft

(Pre­vi­ous article)

While it’s a bad idea to link your dam­age meters over a com­mon chat chan­nel, it’s a very bad idea to link your dam­age report if you’re a dam­age dealer and you’re that one dps’er who con­sis­tently does less dam­age than the tank. What you’re try­ing to say is that you out­per­form the healer at doing dam­age, but what you’re really say­ing is:

“The healer’s good enough to keep every­one alive and also do 30% of the dam­age that I’m doing.”

The healer’s dam­age is basi­cally like the rock bot­tom of dam­age per­for­mance in a raid. Heal­ing does zero dam­age. You are also say­ing that you don’t under­stand groups enough to know what the dif­fer­ent roles do, but you aren’t going to let that slow your spam­ming down. This is a chain of thought that will imme­di­ately lead oth­ers to group with you less, because vet­er­ans will sense that this is prob­a­bly the tip of the iceberg:

  • you roll for gear that doesn’t apply to you and then throw a fit when some­one tries to tell you how your char­ac­ter works
  • you don’t under­stand or don’t care about crowd control
  • you cry and blame some­one every time you die
  • you go afk with­out warning
  • you com­plain about repair costs
  • you never have elixirs/poisons/food buffs
  • you use curse words in a way that’s not inter­est­ing, rel­e­vant, or funny

Not every­one is all of these, but usu­ally these char­ac­ter flaws don’t come in sin­gle serv­ings. Most peo­ple went to the all you can eat Buf­fet of Broken.

And yes, this was all that a sin­gle dam­age meter post said. And inci­den­tally, this per­son lived up to many of the above-listed predictions.

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