6.1 Patch Notes Review – now in Stereo!

Okay, well actually, more like in mono, but whatever. The point is, yesterday Hamlet and I live-recorded, rather than live-Tweeted, our thoughts on the healer balance portions of the patch notes. We’re a little disorganised since it was a pretty impromptu thing – maybe 30 minutes after the patch notes were posted? – and we didn’t have a great deal of theorycraft results yet, but we still managed to talk for nearly an hour about the changes, why the specific talents were chosen, what we think they’re likely to do for talent balance, and of course, the benefit of Tweeting while in-game 😉

We still don’t have a title, but click here to listen to our 7th healer discussion podcast – patch note notes! And most of the theorycraft results are now in, so as you listen, you can follow along with the numbers in HealerCalcs.

Also, I’ve been remiss in not posting a little link here each time I do one of these. If this is news to you, and you want to catch up on the previous 6 shows as well, you can use his podcast tag to find them all. 🙂

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Patch 6.0.3: Raid Cooldown Overview

Contents

Healer Throughput CDs

Non-Healer Throughput CDs

Damage Reduction CDs

Damage Reduction vs Throughput

MoP vs WoD Comparison

Conclusions

Appendix 1: Available Raid CDs

Appendix 2: Methodology

Now that I’m progressing steadily through Mythic content and actually healing again (most of the time *glares at Tectus*), it’s time to dive back into one of this blog’s staple topics: raid CDs! I’ve been thinking about them a lot ever since I noticed how big of a difference it made when I used my CDs twice during a fight instead of just once. And I don’t mean just my throughput – which I rarely look at! – but moreso my mana efficiency. What makes raid CDs feel so different in Warlords? And what does it mean for how I should be using my cooldowns in raid encounters?

Warlords of Draenor is an exciting new world for healers – a world that we’re probably still getting a little bit used to, one in which our healing decisions actually matter. It’s a stark contrast to the Mists of Pandaria healing style, where I felt like the depth of the healing game eroded as we progressed through raiding content, and while there were many culprits, the Mutually Assured Destruction of raid CDs was one part of it. Our CDs were too powerful and too plenty, and what’s worse, non-healers had CDs that could be just as powerful, meaning healers were riding the bench while their hybrid DPS counterparts were covering our shifts!

Every raid leader in Mists of Pandaria, particularly SoO

Sure, Heroic Thok would not have been possible without non-healers’ CDs being as prevalent as they were. But does that make strong non-healers’ CDs a good thing for the game, or does it make Thok a bad fight? I think the latter, personally; while there was some fun gameplay for your raid leader in organising the CDs to fire off at the right times, so much of that fight was decided by our raid leaders rather than our own healing instincts, and that was just dull.

To address these issues, the developers have redesigned raid CDs, removing some, nerfing others, and restricting certain CDs to heal-specs only. And, having realised that spell behaviour alone was not responsible for the way raid CDs were used in MoP, they’ve also changed encounter mechanics and increased player health pools relative to heal size. All of these changes have been aimed at making our raid CDs less powerful than they were in Mists, so that we feel like our actual healing decisions make more of a difference than our ability to press our CD buttons on command. But how successful were these changes at creating this kind of environment? We’ll have to look at a lot of parameters to find out. If you’re anything like me, that thought (mm, parameters!) makes you feel happy and a little tingly all over 😉

In this article, as in previous posts in this series, I’ll provide calculations of typical raid CD throughput/mitigation, explore a little bit about the philosophy of raid CD usage, and compare raid CD potency to that of previous content patches. I’ve tried to avoid repeating too much of the theory I established in those earlier articles, so if you find yourself needing – or wanting – a refresher on the benefits of effective health CDs versus pure healing CDs, or the quasi-qualitative evaluation of Spirit Link Totem’s health redistribution effect, well, that’s all still there. But for now, let’s get started on dissecting the Warlords raid CD landscape, shall we?

Out of Office Reply

I probably should have posted this before I left, but I was pretty busy.

I may not be responsive for the next three weeks because I am overseas for BlizzCon and related post-Blizzcon traveling. I am hoping to still add some content to this site while I am away, but that will depend on how much fun I am having! 🙂

In the meantime, I just finished up a huge project for Wowhead – strategy guides for the 8 Warlords dungeons – so if you need your Dayani-writes-too-much fix, check those out.

My Twitter will probably be blowing up with pictures from BlizzCon and the Wowhead party and whatnot. If you are coming to BlizzCon I would love to meet you, so please come find me!

Through the Dark Portal: Warlords Pre-Launch Celebration

A couple of weeks ago, the @Blizzard_ANZ Twitter account posted something about a Pre-Launch Celebration event being held in Sydney, featuring WoW designer Ion Hazzikostas. I replied to the Tweet in a joking way, not even necessarily sure I wanted to go since I am Officially Freaking Out about all the things I still have to do before I leave for BlizzCon (10 days. Oh my gosh. 10. Days.). But then I got a DM saying that if I wanted to go, they’d set aside tickets for me so I didn’t have to try my luck with the Eventbrite process, and well, that kind of cemented it for me – if they were going to be that considerate to me, I pretty much had to go! So I made it happen. 🙂

And I’m glad I did, because it was a great evening! So here’s a recap of all that happened, with plenty of blurry pictures because I swear there is something wrong with my phone camera (or maybe I am just perpetually nervous):

This super cool smoke & projected light portal was our entrance to the Pre-Launch Celebration.

The Hamlet and Dayani Show?

A.K.A. “Because I needed another project…” 😉

Hamlet and I got together today (let’s ignore the fact that it was 3:30am for me) and recorded a little podcasty-kinda thing where we just generally chatted about healing topics, primarily things that we had wanted to say last week on Wowhead Weekly but didn’t get to.

He’s hosting it over at his blog, so you can find it here:

http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/2014/10/19/healing-discussion-podcast/

I’ll note that we’re pretty amateur here – just recorded a conversation in Mumble, and probably weren’t as candid or comfortable as we might have been without that little blinky red light – so view this as a trial more than a finished product. Let us know what you think; if this sort of thing seems generally interesting we may do it again whenever we have a backlog of topics to talk about 🙂

Patch 6.0.2: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

It’s been one day since Patch 6.0.2 was applied, and as Mythic raid logs accumulate, we’re starting to see some familiar trends. Before people get too worried about What This Means For Warlords Healing, I want to jump in and address the issue. The TL;DR is: this month is meaningless, and absolutely none of this has any correlation to how the healing game will play out in Warlords of Draenor. But that is just the short story – you all know I’m going to provide you with the long story, too 😉

So here’s what the rankings looked like earlier today – highlighting Warcraft Logs’ new RaidBots-esque feature:

The first day of Mythic SoO raiding shows absorbs are still king

(And here’s the direct link to that report – mind you, the graph is skewy because there’s no option other than “view the last two months”, but Mythic rankings were only added yesterday; the table below still gives us the same information.)

These results seem to contradict the developers’ intention, and many of the things I’ve written here, about absorption healing not being as powerful in Warlords. Discipline Priests and Holy Paladins are on top, like they have been all expansion, but this doesn’t mean that Warlords hasn’t fixed the absorption issue. All it means is that it takes more than a bit of class tweaking to fix the absorption issue.

There’s a lot of things at play here beyond the numbers issues that are highlighted by that table. Numbers can be tweaked, and probably will be, but that won’t bring around the Warlords atmosphere we all crave. Here I’ll break down all the various reasons why I casually dismiss this entire month as “Magical Unicorn Fairyland Raiding”, and assert that nothing we do until December 2nd will really matter. A lot of this will apply to DPS as well as healers, so tell your friends 😉

Another Quickie: Guides, Site Updates, and My First Podcast

So, I have about 15 minutes before I have to go get ready for a party, but I thought I’d just post another little update here:

1. Wowhead Healer Guides

With 6.0.2 right around the corner, I’ve updated the Holy Paladin, Mistweaver Monk, and Restoration Shaman guides to help you cope with the changes that are coming. The top section, “6.0.2 Survival Guide”, will list the most important changes that will affect you on Tuesday as you venture back in to SoO. The rest of the guides focus on what you’ll be doing at level 100, which is still a good read, but probably not as important as knowing exactly what’s going on for the next month.

2. Site Updates

You may have noticed there’s a “Warlords of Draenor Info” button on the top menu bar now; it’s where I’m going to put the analogues of my “What’s New in MoP” class pages, when I finally get them written. For now, there’s a comprehensive overview of what generic things are changing that will affect all healers – stuff like mana, how the new stats work, and some details about the new healing model.

I’ve also put up a new guide to Choosing a Healer, with a totally subjective opinion-based matrix of descriptors for each class’s Warlords playstyle. If you’re wavering on what class to play, or just feel like seeing what’s happening to your class in the expansion, have a look!

3. BlizzCon Prep

I guess I haven’t officially announced this here before, but I am going to BlizzCon this year and have been crazy busy preparing for that. It’s eating up a lot of time! It does mean I’ll be out of the country for launch, so I’m working hard on getting things ready before then so all I have to do while traveling is press a few buttons and you’ll all have the updates and guides that you crave.

4. Guest on Wowhead Weekly

Just a couple days ago I was a guest on Wowhead Weekly, along with Hamlet. It was a pair of firsts – their first show with guests, and my first time ever on a podcast! I had a blast. We talked about healing in Warlords and mostly about how it isn’t as scary as you think. I didn’t have time to address all the topics I wanted to — believe me, I can go on about healing for hours — but I hope you’ll find it informative and at least a little entertaining. And I can always answer questions here or on Twitter if there’s something you wanna know that Hamlet or I didn’t cover on the show! 🙂

A Quickie: Stuff I’ve Been Up To on Beta

Hey everyone, I’m still alive! *waits for you all to finish cheering*

I have been rather lax here at Healiocentric, and it isn’t out of lack of things to say. I have a lot of things to say. I just haven’t been finding a lot of time to say them, because I’ve been spending so much time on Beta. This post will be sort of a run-down of all the fun things I’ve been doing, that have kept me away from all of you lovely people for a while.

Before I begin, I just want to say: I love healing in Warlords. Love. The dungeons feel challenging and have a lot of BC flavour, with interesting trash mechanics that can’t be simply ignored, and in raid tests so far I’ve used a larger subset of my toolkit than ever before. Mana matters, choosing the right target to heal matters, and healer balance is mostly okay. I’m enjoying myself again, and after a year of SoO, Warlords is like a breath of fresh air.

So anyway, on to the rest of the post!

1. HealerCalcs

This is Hamlet‘s baby, but I’ve been babysitting it for him on occasion. HealerCalcs is a comprehensive multi-spec spreadsheet that models individual spells as well as healing rotations. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible, and while it is still a work in progress, it’s really fantastic for getting an overview of how each healing spec is performing.

Off-topic: ALT:ernative Chat’s “10 Years: 10 Questions”

As WoW‘s 10th anniversary looms over us all, the ALT:ernative Chat blog is running a “10 Years: 10 Questions” project that I thought might be kind of fun to participate in. She’s posted 10 questions for anyone who plays WoW to answer, so I strongly encourage all of you to participate if you’d like! Check the above linkydink for the deets.

And now, for more information about me than you probably care to know, my answers to the 10 Questions:

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I started playing Warcraft so that my boyfriend would agree to buy, and wear, brown shoes with his brown business slacks.

He always wore black ones, and it bugged me. He’d started playing World of Warcraft and was getting pretty caught up in it, and I didn’t have much interest in the game myself. But he’d been wanting me to play with him, so I saw an opportunity and made a proposal. He agreed that if I played WoW with him for a whole week, he’d try out brown shoes.

It’s now 8 years later, and he’s got brown shoes, and I’ve got a crazy WoW habit. 🙂

Warlords Update: Resto Shaman Talents & Minutiae

There’ve been a few changes to Resto Shaman in the Beta that I thought I ought to cover, since a couple of my WoD Mini-Analysis posts focused on these spells and Talents in their first incarnations. This should be a “short post”.

Just to keep myself feeling all proper and academic-like, I should acknowledge that I’ve used Hamlet’s HealerCalcs spreadsheet – which I’ve been helping him maintain, in lieu of building my own spreadsheets – to hammer out some of the mathematical details herein; he’s been posting about it over at his blog if you want more details (see here and here).

Riptide Rebalanced

Riptide’s sources of healing have been shuffled around. The initial heal has been increased by about 70%, while the HoT effect has been reduced by about 20%. This change was probably aimed at reducing the benefit of the Riptide glyph (and perhaps even at shifting the balance of power of Riptide itself, since HoT effects are strong in Warlords).