In the week since 3.1 was released I’ve been focused on getting the guild pumped up, leading raids, learning new bosses, figuring out dual specs, and recruiting, not to mention the new fishing daily and Argent Tournament quests. In fact, it was only today that I sat down with the Armory, Elitist Jerks, and a pen and decided that it was time to work out exactly what happened to holy priests with this patch and what I was going to do about it.

A couple of months ago I wrote about how my mana regen in mostly Naxx-25 gear was kind of silly. And it was! There was little consideration for regen mechanics, and mana pots were some archaic concept that we joked about in the healer channel. Fortunately — and unfortunately — Blizz was paying attention to that, and nerfed the 5 second rule into oblivion. My o5sr regen was decreased by 40%, and, oh man, do I feel every single percent. Ideally this will get better with Ulduar gear, but for now it’s back to mana pots, mana flasks, and any other tricks. Another interesting effect of the change is that I feel quite lost without a source of replenishment. Whether it’s heroics or just farming old instances for mounts, all this Int isn’t doing me a whole ton of good without a shadow priest or ret pally or someone similar around.

Along with the changes to mana regen came changes to our spells and talents. I’ve said before that one of the great joys of playing a holy priest is all the options we have in our toolkit, and I’m exceedingly pleased to see that pattern continue in 3.1. Prayer of Healing is targetable, Renew is vastly improved, and wonders of wonders, I actually have Divine Hymn on my hotbar. There are a few different play styles available to holy priests now, and the talents to suit it.

I was always an unrepentant Renew spammer in Vanilla and TBC raids, and I missed that in WotLK. (Renew was grossly inefficient and just not quick enough to be worth it after 3.0.) I quite happily sunk six points now into Renew and Empowered Renew, and use it much as I suspect a Discipline priest would use shields — bored? throw some Renews around! Prayer of Healing has become pretty outstanding, although I admit I’m still training my brain and my fingers to use it as often and as correctly as I should. And I was never one to fuss too much with the o5sr tricks (Clearcast! Inner Focus! Trinkets! Surge of Light!), but I am entirely diggin’ the new Serendipity. Weaving Flash Heals and Prayer of Healing has already proven to be very nice, and will only get better the more I get used to it.

So what of Greater Heal, our eternal staple of heals? If your healing style includes GHeals, then it’s supported by both the old and new talents. If it doesn’t, though.. now, since 3.1, you can free yourself from all your old talent point ways! Let go of Divine Fury, or say goodbye to Improved Healing. The new math even shows that Empowered Healing is not as essential as it once was, depending on what spells you usually use. (Remember, if you want to tank heal, you should probably go Disc and do it right. Holy priests are for raid healing now.)

Tonight I’m going to respec to something like this, if not exactly that. I’ve given up Inner Focus, Improved Healing and Empowered Healing in favor of Healing Focus, Body and Soul, Test of Faith, and most of Blessed Resilience (for the healing bonus, not the damage reduction, natch). It’s a very, very, very “raid healing”-oriented spec, with bonuses for Renew, PoH, CoH, and PoM, and reductions to GHeal and Flash Heal. I’m a little concerned about giving up Inner Focus and not 100% convinced about the usefulness of Body and Soul, although the brainiacs over at EJ say it’s a good choice.

We’ll have to see how it plays in Ulduar, but I’m initially pretty intrigued. Ghostcrawler promised a long time ago that healing Priests would be made more interesting to play in 3.1, and by golly he may just have been right.

After Razorscale, the next item on the Ulduar docket is XT-200 Deconstructor. This is another fun fight with some interesting mechanics, and my guild handled the multiple bombs impressively well. We spent 90 minutes on him last night in Heroic, and got him to about 20% on the best attempt. Our approach to new bosses is generally the same each time:

1. Die a few times while we learn the mechanics. Don’t push anything too hard, don’t pick on performance.. just watch.
2. Solicit ideas for improvements from the raid. How is everyone doing? Tweak the strategy.
3. Start to push performance a bit. Why did X die? Was there a problem preventing Y from happening?
4. Die a few more times, then refine the strategy as necessary.
5. We’re probably hitting the enrage timer by this point, but have things relatively under control until then. Now apply DPS. No, more. More. Moooore. Keep going. Yay!

For Heroic Deconstructor you will be well served by reading the summaries over at Tales of a Priest and World of Matticus — both are written from a healing perspective, but give a good overall view of the strategy. For our 10-man kill we followed the 25-man strategy with one twist: during heart phases, all the DPS stayed on the heart, and the healers did their worst on the corner adds. The small bots have very little health in 10-man, and I was able to holy nova out a group of them in 4-5 casts.

Right now we’re on the “apply more DPS” stage of Heroic Deconstructor. I actually expect to be here a lot with Ulduar bosses. They all seem VERY finely tuned for maximum DPS, with ugly enrage timers. Thus far I’ve really been enjoying the fights — the mechanics are neat and the scenery is pretty — but they’re definitely a challenge. Sometimes I get frustrated when I’m reading the Raid and Dungeons forum and all the posters are full of, “Ulduar is easy, if you’re not on Y-S by now you’re bad and you should feel bad.” And then I do feel bad!

I love my guild, I love the people in it, and I think we have some very skilled players. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the curve set by R&D trolls is a false one. Although still, I wonder: what makes my guild different from a ‘hardcore’ one? Is it strictly a matter of time, six hours in Ulduar vs. however many? Is it the fact that we usually have a couple of folks on every roster who are awesome people and try hard but just don’t perform as well as others? Is my raid leading style holding us back? I am in fact not the uber strategy master. I don’t know how to play every class, I’m not a raid math guru, and I don’t yell at people. I just.. listen to all the suggestions and feedback and try and synthesize and present it in one cheerful voice. Do we need someone meaner on new content? Someone who actually confidently knows what they’re doing? Hmmm.

Anyway, Ulduar is great, the Cats are great, and we’re kicking ass, but there is always room for improvement and part of my job is figuring out how to make that happen. Or maybe I just have a case of the Mondays.

After two nights of trying, last night my guild finally defeated the Door Boss in Ulduar and zoned into the instance for more than 10 minutes. I’m not sure what Blizz did, but to their credit the server was rock solid last night and it was a real pleasure to see some new content. A big part of the fun was trying bosses with very little information. Previously by the time we got to a boss there was a tried and true strategy that had been used hundreds of times. We may have tweaked it a bit on occasion, but generally we just read the very detailed write-ups, watched the very detailed videos, and did what we were supposed to do. This time, though, we’re walking in with a very general overview of what the boss DOES, and… that’s about it. It’s awesome.

The most difficult part of Flame Leviathan was organizing 25 people into vehicles. Does everyone have a gunner? Are you all in? Now now, I’m sure X didn’t mean to steal your tank. No, stop trying to blow each other up. Sigh. Once that was over, though, we just kind of rolled our way through it and killed the boss on the third attempt. I would love to tell you our strategy, except I spent the whole fight tossing bombs and giggling to myself. I will say that we all somehow stumbled into getting the Heroic: Shutout achievement, which was pretty amusing. System Shutdown, eh? Maybe I’ll look into that for next time.

There’s no trash between Flame Leviathan and Razorscale. There are two alternating phases to the first half of the fight, which you’ve probably read by now: one with many adds and lots of fire, and one with an angry chained dragon who needs DPSing. For the second half of the fight, you need to keep Razorscale moving so the tank doesn’t stand in fire, and switch tanks occasionally to avoid too many stacks of an armor melting debuff. We didn’t kill her last night, but we did get her to 5% in a very controlled and repeatable fashion, so I feel confident in sharing our strategy as a good one.

First, we broke the raid into two groups. Each group had even numbers of melee and ranged DPS, two tanks, and three healers. A seventh healer was on harpoon duty. (Although there’s quite a bit of raid damage while the adds are up, I think we’ll try it with six healers next time.) One group went north, and the other south. We tried to tank the mobs perhaps 2/3rds of the distance between the harpoons and where the tunnelers appear. First priority for DPS was Watchers, who cast chain lightning, and then Guardians. Occasionally a Sentinel will appear. They whirlwind, and hit hard. Whichever tank picked up the Sentinel would drag it into the middle of the room and then all ranged would immediately stop what they were doing, turn around, and blast it. Avoiding fire really is key to this fight, and you should keep people topped up on health as much as possible.

When the first three harpoons were ready to shoot, our seventh healer would run over and pop them, and then wait for the fourth. She would then give a warning on Vent, and DPS would move into position for the dragon. I think more than anything this last harpoon is where we can optimize our DPS. Popping it too early means melee in particular are slow to get going, costing valuable damage. You want to make sure that no Sentinels are up, the tanks securely have any extra adds, and DPS are ready to rock. When those conditions are met, bring on the dragon, use Heroism/Bloodlust and cooldowns, and kick her ass. The raid takes very little damage during this phase, so healers can help with DPS as well.

We traditionally needed just a few seconds of a third landing phase to get her to 50%. I think ideally you’d only need two landing phases if you tweak things just right.

Once Razorscale hits 50%, she is grounded and can be picked up by a tank. The tank should move her slowly and constantly to avoid standing in fire — much like tanking Grobbulous. Razorscale has a raid-wide debuff that will eventually kill you, and a second one that melts the tank’s armor, so you’ll want to kill her quick and swap tanks occasionally.

We consistently got to p2 with 0-2 people dead, but hit the enrage timer before we could kill her. I think with a little tweaking of harpoons, this dragon will be toast. It was a great, fun fight with unique mechanics, and I can’t wait to see what else Ulduar has in store for us!

It’s here! It’s here! It’s finally here! I can’t believe they surprised almost everyone, but it’s finally time for Patch 3.1. I’m freaking out. I actually had a hard time sleeping last night (neeeeeerd!). I feel like I should be stocking up on canned goods. THE PATCH IS NIGH!

I would love to post something useful here about new priest specs or Ulduar or crafting changes or, you know, anything tangible and helpful. Instead I am mentally running around like a chicken with no head trying to get myself and the guild ready to rock.

Ahhhhh, what is my new spec? Did we mention the later raid time tonight? Will the servers be up? What are people doing for dual spec? What’s that — who’s getting the legendary mace? Umm.. I.. um.. Which boss is fourth in Ulduar? Will Grid be broken? How many healers do we need on the raid? Did I remember to buy Shadow glyphs before the prices go up?

Man I love big patch days. Seriously. It doesn’t get more exciting. Good luck out there, WoWnauts!

Patchy Links!

• Holy2Shadow dishes on  The Flame Leviathan
• No Stock UI points out 3.1-Ready Mods
• Dueg agonizes over dual specs for healy priests
• Highmesa ponders which  Argent Tournament NPC pets will be the most popular

There is excitement in the air, and a buzz on the streets. It’s.. almost.. PATCH TIME. My money is on April 21st, and I cannot wait. It’s been six months since we’ve received any new content, and fortunately this patch is stuffed full. So, in an attempt to both provide a moment of reading entertainment and sort out my own scatterbrain, I give you:

Liore’s Big List of To-Dos For 3.1

-> Read up on any changes and write strategies for the first few Ulduar bosses.
- Ask officers to help!
- Flame Leviathan, Ignis, Razorscale … I think.

-> Finalize both my specs. Buy glyphs and gems now before prices go up.
- Test of Faith as useless as it looks?
- I have no idea what’s going on with the Shadow Tree. Go read EJ, you scrub.
- If I’m going to spend 6 points on Renew, I better start using it more.

-> Encourage guildies to do the above.

-> Create and publish Val’anyr policy
- Thinking we’ll go with officer vote to set priority 1 and 2, with healy officers excluded.
- Read a rumor that shards are BoE. Check on this!

-> Read up on most recent Argent Tournament info, and plan which pets/mounts/treats I want
- Hint: All of them.

-> Review recruitment info, do another advertising blitz when 3.1 arrives
- DPS DPS DPS DPS.
- Keep in mind that some bored Cats will be returning.

-> Stare at list of core raid team, ponder implications of dual specs

-> Anything I can make gold with as a herb/alch in 3.1?
- Probably not. Boo.

I know people who collect swords (in game!), folks who are eternally searching for the perfect hat, guildies who change hairstyles on a daily basis. The fact is that WoW has a very visual component, and I think it’s fair to say that most frequent players develop an attachment to their main and want to see them look coordinated or pretty or badass. I am a big fan of min-maxing, theorycrafting, and using math voodoo to make Liore the best she can be at healing or DPS, but there is one area where my resolve weakens, and that area is staves.

I love staves. They are big and fantastical and often iconic. Think of priests running around with Benediction, or the corn staff from the green dragons. Ever since I first set eyes upon Will of Arlokk (can we get the Zul’Gurub armor designers to come back, please?), I was sold on Liore being a staff wearer. This wasn’t a very controversial decision in Classic WoW, particularly with Benediction around.

Maces plus an offhand gained some traction in TBC, although Solarian’s Ethereum Life-Staff and the Priest on a Stick were still pretty competitive weapon choices for their armor tiers.

So here we are in Northrend, and, sadly, maces really are the way to go. There are plenty of good weapon choices and lots of great offhands floating around, whether you’re healing or DPSing. And I had indeed remained true to my inner min-maxer and stuck with my mace. Oh sure, I managed to fairly obtain a Spire of Sunset and a Staff of Restraint, but although both are gorgeous they currently sit in my bank, two more exhibits in Liore’s Gallery of Staves. They just .. weren’t.. quite enough.. to make me switch.

Then, last night, Gluth fell and suddenly IT entered my life. My precious! You can keep your theorycrafting, jack, because I have DAMNATION. Oh, sweet Damnation. My new weapon math goes as such:

(awesome name + badass model + spinny bits) > dumb mace

I lost some spell power and am going to have to regem a couple of sockets for +hit, but la la la I do not care. Sometimes a girl just needs a big fancy stick.

My recent treatise on How to Quit Your Guild seems to have gained some notice, and this morning was linked in a retort by Gevlon. He recommends that people in most situations refuse to go quietly, decline to talk to their officers, call specific people out, and basically try and cause as much unrest as possible. Perhaps it’s my Canadian politeness, but I just don’t see the point. If, as in his example, one feels that their guild is not strict or focused enough, why not just move to another guild that better suits the player? Doing that and having a hissy fit against the machine seems .. selfish, to be honest. Your old guild will, ideally, continue to be happy with their old ways, and you will be happy with the ways of your new guild. Everyone is happy, and basic social niceties still stand. Hooray!

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My fledgling shadow UI is atrocious. Witness the horror that is currently my playing area (cropped to show just the center):

Blargh! So first on the left and top right of my character I have ClassTimer. I added it on the right just so I could see when Shadow Weaving was fully stacked, and my Inner Fire timer and a few other things show up there. I’m starting to think that I should just move it back down to my user frame. I don’t need to check on Shadow Weaving THAT often, and running around out of combat with an Inner Fire timer floating in the middle of nowhere is making my OCD side crazy.

Since I was already using ClassTimer, and I’m used to how it looks, I’m still using it on the top right for debuff bars. I should, really, eventually switch this over to DoTimer, although it kind of intimidates me. (I unchecked the “Simple Mode” setup for DoTimer, and my jaw fell to the floor.) I DID manage to get it set up correctly as a cooldown timer, which you see on the lower right of my character. The biggest adjustment I made was having the “ghost bar”, like Mind Blast in this image, last 15 seconds so it will definitely catch my eye.

Right above my user frame is Quartz. Quartz is, as many people know, an awesome casting bar. The latency and GCD information is stuff I need to see — while I was quite good at anticipating the GCD on my healing spells, for some reason I am terrible at it with shadow. Quartz has little extras that pop up every so often during combat (debuffs? something..). Usually this happens in the middle of fighting a rather cross dragon, so I just shout rude things at my monitor and promise to look into it later.

Right now I’ve kept my old Pitbull user frames, complete with the totally unnecessary casting bar.

I played around a bit with IceHUD as a replacement for Pitbull, but I’m not sure my brain is ready for that big a switch. I also tried EventHorizon as a replacement for both ClassTimer and DoTimer, and while it’s a really neat way to view spell priority it just didn’t groove well with my playstyle. It’s worth a test for the unique “Guitar Hero”-like display if nothing else.

I am usually so careful about my UI, moving elements one pixel at a time until I am satisfied, and this is a dog’s breakfast. I’ve already noticed an overall improvment in DPS, though, so I suppose I’m just breaking a few eggs to, eventually, make a sleek face-melting omlet. Right?

On a seperate but also mod-related topic, I have never ever found an Auction House mod that I liked until No Stock UI recommended Auction Lite. It is quick, light, and adds some pretty awesome functionality to your buying and selling. It even inspired me to try my hand at “playing the AH”, and I’m pleased to say that thus far I’ve made 10g profit from buying low and selling high. I will try to not spend it all in one place.