Holy Paladin in 4.0.1 - Part I

I am one of those people that do not moan about their classes. Well not much. It seems this time around its kind of harder to do. Holy paladins are changed, but I am not sure yet if they are 'damaged'. Let’s review what I did do once I went 'live' and how that did work out...

Rebuilt the Gui to the state it was minus Satrina Buff Frames. I currently do not have anything informing me about procs and transient states appart from the default 'Power auras' and some Pitbull 4 notations. This defo needs tweaking...

Bought some new Glyphs as per Rohan's advice which I found quite useful.

Now the hard part...

I tweaked my Haste, Critical and Mastery to the following (unbuffed):

• Haste 728 (quite low by some reports for 4.0.1, more than adequate for 3.X)
• - Crit 39% (probably could do with less as crit is less usefull now)
• - Master ~10% (this is new territory and current reports state that logs do not measure absorbsion - need to check)

With those options and the same talent trees Rohan suggested (31,0,5) I participated in a guild run in ICC, doing some heroic modes.

My reports are:

Paladin healing is, obviously, very different - it looks like we need some time to adjust to the new paradigm. Main changes went from a Pace-type of healing (FL repeatedly for minor damage, HS+Glyph for larger damage+splash, Beacon, shields etc) to a more synergetic style. Holy shock is our secondary resource "counter", Word of Glory is our mana-free-instant counter reset-er and we now have 3 core 'time' heals:

• Divine Light (expensive, slow and very-high-output)
• Holy Light (cheap, average-to-small output)
• Flash of Light (expensive, ultra-fast, high-output)

Coupled with the aforementioned:

• Holy shock (mana based, instant, procs Holy Power)
• Word of Glory (Holy Power based, instant, procs acute pain to my fingers...)

We are much less 'capable' than other healers when it comes to healing meters. I am having trouble determining what our niche is with the current build and I hope this will change within the next few weeks and hopefully some correcting tweaks. Instant (therefore extremely situational) heals in small-damage scenarios (damage either was small or other healers very fast) feels kinda... "where do I fit in"... Last but not least, it is ESSENTIAL to built the UI in an informative way. It may take a couple of runs to adjust to "looking for the right things"

Overall...

1. I am having trouble detecting our niche
2. I need time to learn and put inside my head the timings
3. I need to gain some experience with the new synergies
4. We need to 'measure' Mastery - I am not sure there is a reliable method there. Kinda makes me feel like a Disc Priest
5. I need to make our UIs assist 'counting' and 'pacing'

And I most definitely need to do a few more runs with an alternative build to be able to have a better insight on how the new Holy Paladin paradigm feels. I am particularly intrigued by Eternal Glory and the possibility of chain-casting WoG (which if it does happen it will be eventually nerfed "to the ground"). All in all, I am sure we will be tweaked as things are noticeable inefficient and things look less favourable for the time being. But I could be wrong...

DPSing in a healer's costume...

Yesterday Escape made a few attempts in killing Yogg without the help of Mimiron. We attempted to go with minimal number of healers and that meant that yours truly was to go DPS into the brain.

Facts:

• My gear is better than Naxx level by a couple of pieces but overall based on tier 7. I do not consider this as adequate and our RL and officers were aware of that.
• I have not raided significantly as retry, nowhere near as much as the 1/10 of my raiding experience as Holy which spans for about 4 years.
• I am accustomed to the healer's type of awareness, not a melee DPSer's and only now I am beginning to develop the latter (after the introduction of dual specs)
• I do not consider myself particularly skillful and I had never seen this fight from another perspective but as a healer outside the brain room.

As you can imagine my presence as a warrior of light was... miserable. I constantly failed to get out in time of the brain room, sometimes because I was not clicking properly, others because I was seemingly late. Although I can not fathom how faster I could be. That, coupled with some reluctance on certain parts of the fight and a misunderstanding with the portals did not help much. In fact it was so bad that I was banging my hand on my desk like XT having a tantrum. My wife-to-be was having seconds thoughts on my mental state... I am not happy at all wiping my raid, I am not happy at all wasting the time of others and I am not happy at all not being in control of my game. But...

Bearing in mind the facts above I must say I find it fairly reasonable. My performance I mean. Yes, the fact I sucked as DPSer. Out last attempt of the night was with the help of Mimiron, me healing in the brain room, our druid brain healer going boomkin and us one-shoting Yogg. Well, one-shoting him with Mimiron and me as healer at least :-p. I was sooooo pumped up with being back in the healers boots that for the first time in many raids I was first in healing. You see my healing style does not ever earn me any meter-prices; I like to believe (or fool myself) its more subtle. And no portal issues this time, going out of the brain room fast. Still... I felt so good to be in control of my game, so good to be back where I feel comfortable that I gave it all I had. Maybe it was guilt for screwing up and wiping my brothers-in-virtual-arms. Maybe because I wanted to prove myself to what I know best. Maybe because I wanted to have my vengeance from my other self. Kind of my real-life work situation these days. But that is a different matter...

Yogg fell, but I could not help thinking of what I had seen. I have been immersed in a different game, where my awareness of the surroundings was totally different. The closest experience I had of a melee play style was judging light in MC and smacking things with my Quel'Serrar for kicks. Ok and some 5-mans. But I had to make an impact here, watch the raid, stop thinking of those bars going black and watch the bloody clouds. Oh, the ordeal of a healer in DPSers boots...

Still... I am not giving up. I will continue to gear my paladin for retribution and I will be there when my RL needs me. Even that will be a rare occasion, rarer as I continue to fail :p . My holy set is almost complete, some tiny bits and pieces here still needed. Granted, it will take some time before I develop the situational awareness of a DPSer. But... as with anything in my real life that is difficult and seems daunting, or impossible... I will push forward as much as I can afford. I'll try to not do it at the expense of others.

Vengeance will be mine... Cookies too...

Quick 'n Dirty - II

The last few days have been spent running around the major cities, fragrance all over the place, seeking candiebags and rose petals. Unfortunately, meeting the ever elusive candie bag was as difficult as Baron's mount in the good old days. Blizzard claimed they hotfixed the drop rate but I saw no difference. In fact I had two bugs the very first day of the even but saw none in the next days. Ironicaly, the candy missing is the Be Mine! for the Be Mine! achievement...
Oh well, next year...

Still, I had some time to gather up gear for my Holy-PvP and Retry-PvE sets. I had some badges lying about, bought the odd resilience gear just to give it a try and compare it to my tier7.5 and went around pissing horde off with my shields :-p. I must say Holy palas remain powerful as ever, just as the class-population reports from top arena teams depict. Oh, and Death Knights are

I think its time to do some 10-mans to get some nifty epic items and then wait patiently for patch 3.1.

Not much to report otherwise, our Sarth3D tries are still going, hindered a bit from the lack of healers. But we will get those lizards eventually.

Dual Specs and Bartle's gamers

So, dual specs will be with us soon. Assuming there will not be any bugs with the interface, the switching and all that... there are few things worth considering.

The first thing is the mechanics. How will the switching take place?

It has been mentioned in the past:

Swapping specs (going from A to B) will truly be free in towns and possibly during the prep phase of PvP. In an instance it may cost a nominal fee (think reagent level). We want you to be able to do it when you want to do it, but we also don't want to slow things down if everyone is constantly flipping spec from fight to fight. But if it's free in town, then obviously it can't be more of a burden out of town than just hearthing and being summoned back is or nobody will use the remote option. (Ghostcrawler on Dual-Spec)

Interestingly, there is no mention of such a thing in these `preliminary' info. To be honest, I appreciate that there needs to be some policing of the changes, but from my completely lazy point of view I'd rather there was not. Still, certain assumptions like not being able to switch in an arena game, or in combat, go without saying. It remains to be seen what the devs will think about it. Besides, the mechanics might as well change along the way. What is mentioned, and could not have been otherwise, is that the glyphs and bars will change accordingly. Very convenient indeed, almost like having two separate chars (but with the same Achievements :P )

Second is the effect they will have in the game:

For starters, it is a massive addition in my opinion in the game. Almost groundbreaking. The reasoning is simple. For that, we must first look on gamers types. I have been fortunate enough to be in the same University as the controversial Richard Bartle, the 'father of MUDs' as we used to call him. He probably does not know my existence as I was under the supervision of another researcher there, who nonetheless always spoke highly of him. During my stay there I encountered his Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology (rough info here) which essentially classifies gamers in three categories:

• Achiever
• Explorer
• Socialiser
• Killer

These categories exist within each gamer by some percentage, as you can see in the aforementioned link. I'd like to think myself as a 50% Achiever , 25% Explorer, 20% Killer and 5% Socialiser (no, I did not take the test, its a rough estimate :-p). An AEKS for short. With all respect to R. Bartle, I am going to use his classification in a crude way.

Dual specs will appeal essentially to Achievers and Killers. Possibly under certain circumstances to Socialisers. But mainly the first two categories will see DSpecs as more appealing. Achievers will be able to use the dual specs towards... achievements. For example Holy Paladins might be able to go Prot, tank the odd instance and have higher chances of completing dungeon achievements. Others might do the same in raids or pvp. Arena teams can become more flexible. All in the name of going further, higher etc. On the other hand some achievers might think of gearing up a second spec almost to the bone is an achievement itself. With DSpecs switching between the specs and being in groups becomes easier. I would place in this group even pure DPSers, which may see less benefit in DSpecs, like say healers or tanks. Having the option of getting two tweaked specs (whether PvP-PvP, PvE-PvE or the more common PvE-PvP) is a step towards increasing the means for achieving more.

Killers will be benefited even more (killers can be healers, this is not a dps tag, more like a 'I crunch number and I pwn' tag, although the closest paradigm to Bartle's definition is the PvPer). The option of raiding like Holy and smacking things, like Retry in my free time, is hugely appealing for me. One of my paladin guildies wanted to tank for ages but due to our Holy heritage from the MC days, never put his mind to it. Now he has the chance. We all get to see another aspect of tha game, for which we were `cut-off' to a certain extent. We can explore the ‘art’ of that other elusive spec that we only tried the odd-weekend or in the PtRs and Betas.

Overall, I think Dual Specs will add a subtle variety in the game - the art of tweaking your toon, collecting the gear or mix and matching with your friends in groups. Its quite funny, but yesterday I was looking for groups to complete my Elders of the Dungeons achievement. One of my guild mates was in there with an alt, asking for people to join. But he was looking for a DPSer. Where is that secondary retry spec when you need it...

/Lance

P.S. The next post will be about the negative aspects of Dual Specs. Or to be precise, the issues that might arise once they are ingame.