Like any other form of PvP, you either love dueling or you hate it.Dueling is a great way to learn how to maximize abilities and test combos and macros.There are very few established guidelines for how to appropriate ly duel.Borkovic of Caelestraz asked in the official forums if it is acceptable to heal in a duel.Fliara of Terenas stated that protocols vary depending on server and faction, and suggested that rules should be established beforehand.
The first response, by Mlcho of Kirin Tor who takes an "all's fair in love and Warcraft" approach, was met with considerable agreement throughout the thread:
Use everything in your power to produce a win. Who cares if you use a pot? Who cares if you bandage? If they whine, it's because they weren't prepared.
Or, how to celebrate the birth of a nation via an ugly series of Horde losses in Arathi Basin:
1. Every single Alliance character in the game has a Black War Tiger.
2. Every single Horde character in the game has a Black War Raptor (yes, myself included).
3. I could be wrong, but I don't think "Lich King" is pronounced "Lick King," as I keep hearing it pronounced on my server.
4. However, it might be because the word looks somewhat Germanic, and I will be unable to keep a straight face for the duration of the next expansion.
5. To the point of losing it completely if I hear "World of Warcraft: WRAAAAAAATH OF THE LICK KING" intoned by the Deep-Voiced Serious Trailer Guy.
6. How male human characters run. There's a lot of great animation in the game. This is not one of them.
7. Practically every main-tank of every Hordeside raiding guild is a male Tauren.
8. An egotistical male Tauren. Look, Spanky, just because Bulwark of Azzinoth is bigger on you than anybody else does not mean that the same is true of appendages elsewhere.
Our Priest column is back! Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is now Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus, and this week he's going to help you survive like Gloria Gaynor - so you don't end up singing the song that Too Many Annas was singing not too long ago.
If you're not a big fan of PvP, chances are you probably rolled on a PvE server! But for the rest of us Priests who have rolled on PvP servers, Priests have a long and illustrious history of being the first to get targeted and the first to get taken down. Seeing as we don't do anything much other than healing and supporting our mates, it's a given that we come under heavy fire first. Outside of battlegrounds and arenas, world PvP is still an integral part of the game, so travelling outside the sanctuary of Shattrath City has become a dangerous place. When your raiding guild is being deployed to Serpentshrine Cavern, Caverns of Time, Tempest Keep or any other places, you just might find yourself having to defend the Summoning Stone due to a lack of neutral guards. After all, the guild that possesses the stone has the ability to summon reinforcements quickly. Although Warlocks can now summon stragglers inside instances, it still pays for a Priest to know how to defend themselves in open combat. Today, we'll start with the basics: talents and gear.
Our Priest column is back! Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is now Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus, and this week he's written different "If" statements to follow.
Summer is almost upon us and I hear Mount Hyjal is lovely this time of year! Honestly, I believe everyone playing right now needs to go in at least once and just experience the place. It is essentially the successor instance to Black Morass with multiple incoming waves consisting of various Undead trash. Not since Karazhan have we Priests needed to utilize our Shackle Undead extensively in another raid environment.
The latest patch has opened the raiding doors wider and allowed more players to experience some of the most complex encounters in the game. This week, I'll help walk you through Mount Hyjal and offer some advice and tips in what I consider the most punishing raid instance devised.
Running 5 man instances is the bread and butter of gearing up any PvE character. There are some short instances, and some longer ones. There are some bosses that are ready for fun, and others that like to die fast. Many people consider it a universal truth that all you need to do these instances is solid crowd control. When you're faced with a pack of six or seven level 70 elite mobs, the last thing you want is one or two of them running loose.
But what can you do if you don't have any CC available? Are you just out of luck? Nope! There are a few tricks to running instances without CC, and if you pay close attention, you won't miss the lack of sheeps at all.
In fact, you might just start preferring to run without crowd control entirely.
For many, the role of the Healer is something to be avoided all together. For the few, however, healing is a meaningful, rewarding and challenging job, albeit an often-thankless one. Being a healer also tends to make one a popular player. This popularity can wane at higher levels if you don't pick up on a crucial principle: your job is more than just healing. Depending on your class, you will have other duties that include keeping buffs on your companions, de-cursing them, stepping in front of the mage if he or she draws aggro and the list goes on. Addons are one way that the aspiring healer can shift some focus towards his or her other duties. By taking some of the busy work out of casting healing spells, buffs and keeping the party free of curses, poisons and/or diseases, programs like Healbot Continued can take you from being a good healer to being a stellar and indispensable member of any group.
Healbot Continued uses the embedded Lua scripting language to reconfigure information vital to healers. This retrofitting presents an easily manageable interface that helps you maintain a greater degree of situational awareness. For many of you wondering how this works, it's simply a matter of our program, Healbot Continued in this case, listening to the World of Warcraft client for events. In combat, information is literally flying back and forth between the player (client side) and the game server (server side). Healbot Continued simply listens in and picks out information it wants. This is true of almost all addons, which sift through event information for a variety of purposes. Healbot Continued is easily one of the more powerful addons around, as it goes above and beyond what is normally expected of healing addons.
So you're rolling your first character... or perhaps rolling the latest in a series of alts. And for some crazy reason you've picked a Priest. Maybe you just like being blamed for every instance wipe in every group you'll be in. Maybe you enjoy being yelled at for not healing in a battleground when you're at the top of the DPS chart. Maybe you enjoy leveling at an insanely slow pace (at least until you get in the level 40 range). (Okay, it's really not all that bad -- at least not all the time. After all, I've leveled two priests to level 60 and beyond and I'm a perfectly rational, sane individual. Right?) I couldn't say why you rolled a priest -- I'm only here to help you along the way. So read on as we discuss the journey from level 1 to level 15.
If this sounds like fun to you but you haven't yet rolled your priest, check out the last episode of Spiritual Guidance, where we talk more realistically about whether Priest is the class for you and cover picking the right race for your newbie-to-be.
Ah, the class trinity. The three basic group roles that seem to be set in stone throughout MMOs. On this sunny Sunday morning we won't stress your brain too much -- we're just asking which part of the class trinity you find yourself on. Is tanking the way to play? Is healing the most fun? Is DPS your thing? Cast your vote and we'll see which of the trinity wins out!
I definitely recommend reading the entire article, but for those that may have a short attention span (or are alt+tabbed from a raid at the moment and don't have a lot of time), she makes some valid points about healing trinkets, so I'll attempt to summarize.
Her main point is that most trinkets follow the same basic formula:
The average trinket Use says : Increases X by Y for Z. Where X is damage or healing, and Y is the amount that it's increased (often in the 200 range) and Z is the length of time that it's affected, usually 15-20 seconds.
While a class that constantly spams heals, like a Paladin, would receive most of the benefit during the time the trinket is active, a Priest tends to follow up a big heal with a HoT and then try and wait for the 5 second rule. While this may maximize their mana efficiency, it minimizes the impact the trinket has while active.
She goes into more detail than what I've mentioned, so be sure to check out her blog for a fun and engaging read!
Consider this the beginning of Season 2 of Build Shop. I've given each class a turn (for real this time), and now I'm going to kick things off with another build of my own, this one on my main. Priest is the first class I got to 60, and the first class I got to 70. Although I leveled to 55 or so as Shadow, healing is really what I love on my priest, and I've been various kinds of Holy since then.
My current build isn't really original; in fact, it's probably the most common PvE healing build for priests right now: 23/38/0. Take Discipline down to Improved Divine Spirit, and Holy down to 3/5 Empowered Healing (skipping Lightwell and Circle of Healing, in my version). The main alternative builds would probably be 21/40/0 or 20/41/0, and there may not be a clear-cut "best" build out of the three.
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by David Bowers and Dan O'Halloran.
This it the last in a series of features talking about How To Group With A Druid. I've already covered bear tanks, cat druids and Moonkin. Today, I will be exploring what Restoration druids bring to a 5 man group as well as what they don't do. If you feel I've left out any important points, be sure to leave a comment below! We love comments like healers love aggro control.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A RESTORATION DRUID
HEALING: Druids are built to be solid healers in both regular and heroic 5 man instances. They don't have to drop 40+ talent points to be good at it. Don't be surprised if you're druid healer is actually specced 31 points in Balance and 30 points in Restoration. That's more than enough for them to get you through alive.
On the other hand, don't be screaming for healing non-stop if you are not the main tank. It's your job to control your aggro, not the healers job to blow half his mana on non-tanks. I understand mistakes happen, wandering mobs appear out of nowhere, the MT gets overwhelmed and loses control of an add or two. But if the healer is dumping more healing on you than the MT for every encounter, you need to scale back your dps or talk to your tank about their taunt tactics.
Every Saturday (usually), Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!
Healing spells are to a priest what fire spells are to a mage. Other schools tend to be more efficient in raids (shadow for priests, frost for mages) and are generally thought superior for leveling, but when you think of a priest, you probably think of heals first, just like when I think of a mage, the first thing I think of is a nice fat pyroblast headed right for me. So it comes as no surprise that we have quite a variety of heals.
Over at Blessing of Kings, Coriel has a great explanation of how the paladin's to-be-changed Illumination talent -- which has been happily residing in the holy tree since the game's release -- became such a thorny problem.
The talent (as it exists now) returns the base mana cost of a healing spell to the paladin when the healing spell crits. (It costs 5 talent points to bring it to this level of effectiveness and requires 15 points in the talent tree. So a fully maxxed illumination will cost you 20 talent points in the holy tree.) The end result is that, overall, the paladin receives a mana discount on their healing spells equal to their spell crit rate. Prior to patch 1.9, a paladin could boost his or her holy spell crit rate by 5% through talents (priests have a similar talent that boosts holy spell crit), but it was difficult for paladins to get any other spell crit gear. The plate itemization simply didn't exist and there was heavy competition for generic items that a paladin could use like the Azuresong Mageblade.
I have previous expressed my burning hatred for whirlwinding mobs, and very few people are fans of getting feared into a nearby group of enemies.. But while leveling my pally, I've rediscovered my least favorite mob action of all time -- enemies that heal themselves when they're at about 20 percent health. These mobs also seem to conspire and wait until my Hammer of Justice in on cooldown, so all I can do is flail impotently with my big axe as they heal to 80 percent and laugh at me. I can also do a quick mana tap and arcane torrent, but by the time I think of that they're usually healed already.
As I write this, I'm fighting caster murlocs who are underwater, heal themselves, and run away when they're low on HP, which has got to be some kind of record for most annoying mob abilities combined in one. What is your most hated mob ability -- healing, fear, daze, or something even more sinister?
In some guilds, the healing meters are all that matter. Never mind that the information such metrics provide is nearly worthless in determining the "best" healers in your group. They completely ignore important utility abilities (such as res, dispel, and buffs) and say nothing on the very important subject of mana management. Despite this, in some guilds, your place on the healing meter is going to determine whether you get to stay in the guild -- or not. In this light, helpful forum poster Nurf has decided to enlighten us on how a priest can stay on top of the healing meters. Though the post looks suspiciously like a step-by-step instructional manual of the worst way to keep a group alive -- and it makes me very sad that any healer would need to follow such instructions in order to stay in their guild. My advice: if your guild drives you to these measures, gquitting would just be easier!
However, whether you're a priest or otherwise, these instructions are a humorous look at some of the tricks of the trade -- and everything that's wrong with evaluating a healer's performance purely based on heal meters.
Like any other form of PvP, you either love dueling or you hate it. Dueling is a great way to learn how to maximize abilities and test combos and macros. There are very few established guidelines for how to appropriate ly duel. Borkovic of Caelestraz asked in the official forums if it is acceptable to heal in a duel. Fliara of Terenas stated that protocols vary depending on server and faction, and suggested that rules should be established beforehand.
Running 5 man instances is the bread and butter of gearing up any PvE character. There are some 
Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them, brought to you by 
I have previous expressed my 
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