World of Warcraft Discipline Healing for the Rest of Us

So I have never been one who liked HOLY spec on a priest it is too much easy mode to me (NOTE: this is a personal preference not a judgement). I come from an Everquest healing background which allowed me to have diverse options when healing and also be a preventative healer which I prefer to spamming one/two heals over and over.

With the introduction of Penance coupled with Power Word:Shield Disc has become a very viable raid/tank healer. In my opinion more tank then raid but I will get into that a little later.

My one huge recommendation to you should you choose to spec Disc is know that most of the time other players are not going to understand how effective you really are. You will usually (NOT ALWAYS) be second to a holy priest or pally this is due to very little information about how awesome we are, and RAID leaders doing little to no research on viable classes/specs and still raiding like this is Burning Crusades. Take it with a grain of salt as you are able to get in to RAIDS and even Heroic 5 mans people will become more educated and you will be asked back.

Second big thing IGNORE meters they can not possible tell your effectiveness in a RAID and any raid leader using them to make decisions about healers is not doing their job properly.

So lets get into stat stacking because the question is asked over and over and argued about everywhere. Generally it is Holy speced priests not understanding the stat stack is DIFFERENT and that what may be good for them might not be good for their disc counter part. So lets go with the most important stat first

Spell power (SP): By far and away the most IMPORTANT stat to stack. For the most part you can not have enough. When ever possible you should be gemming and enchanting for it. I have been known on occasion to drop a socket bonus to use a Runed Cardinal Ruby especially if it’s some stupid bonus like Spirit. It is going to raise the effectiveness of everything you do as well as allowing your PW:S to absorb just a ton of incoming damage.  With that being said you of course can not ignore the other stats we need.

Intellect (INT): Ok so the major debate that lies here and how to weight it  and BLAH BLAH BLAH… a lot of talk without a whole lot of easy to read reasoning behind it. Here is what I see first and foremost your mana pool is directly based on this stat so in order to cast you must have it. Second it will add to crit which is one of the stats we will work later. (On a side note this secondary crti thing not as big a deal as you would think since you need 166 int to get 1 percent crit)

Ok so now we move into the seriously debated stats CRIT/HASTE/SPIRIT/MP5

First if we are talking a RAIDING disc priest lets just get sorta ignore MP5 and SPIRIT. The reason is that you will get all you need from gear. You never need to “stack” those stats. The reason being that first of all we should very rarely be outside the 5 second rule (which is the nice way of saying we should be perma casting) and because of this spirit does very little if nothing for us. As far as MP5 in a raid situation you will have sick mana regen because of all the raid buffing and Rapture.

(mana pool) x Return Percent from rapture(1.5/2.0/2.5) / 12 * 5 = X MP5 (stolen from Ejerks)

For the nitty gritty facts lets just say that if you mana pool is in the 21k range and you are SW:P the tank when ever possible then you will see a return of like 150MP5 added to your current MP5.

So all that being said when possible you should chose MP5 gear over spirit gear and never ever gem/enchant for either.

Now this is the the area we differ greatly from holy priests, stacking spirit is something they do.. why ? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care I don’t spec holy I don’t heal holy and truth be known if it were the only option for priests with healing like back in the day I wouldn’t play a priest.  Ok mini rant over .. moving on…

So what do we have left ? CRIT and HASTE

Critical Strike: Ok in my opinion this stat is more important then stacking haste. Once you get haste to about 11 percent is it useless for us .. so good rule of thumb stack crit and hope the gear will have enough for you hit the 11 percent cap. Divine Aegis is one of the main reason to stack crit where you can and when given a choice over haste or crit gear you should pick crit. A free bubble is a free bubble. The other reason is a critting flash heal is just awesome. It is low cast time, low mana and just be spammed like crazy. This stat right now is the one I am working and I will tell you it has helped my through put  a ton I am critting for near 8k on a flash heal. So I Flash heal, crit and now they have divine aegis which lets me be able to take a moment to bubble (Power Word:Shield) another raid target.

Haste: So yeah a lot of talk about GCD (Global Cool Down) which in easy terms is the time it takes for your spells to be able to be cast again. Even instants cant be rapid fired. With haste you can drop the GCD to 1 second but that is as good as it is going to get on that. Haste will still continue to drop cast times of your spells though. This is important because even though it is not as effective as a Holy Priest for us to cast Prayer Of Healing/Greater Heal sometimes it is just a must and dropping the cast time of these beast healing spells will help the Raid in the long run. A good rule of thumb on haste is cap it at 11 percent.

On a side note today is the release of 3.3 patch so I will have to take sometime and see how much this effects our healing and if the new encounters are making anything different.

Back to World Of Warcraft

So yeah .. I have been playing this game which would more then likely explain the lack of posting here lately. I thought I would try to use my WoW playing to create some interest in writing here.. so here it goes.

Tech and I restarted on a PVP server as horde instead of Alliance this time. We really are having a great time. We chose a Paladin and Priest, which may seem odd from me since I already have the Ally priest on Senjin but what the hell I really like that class.

We spent most of our time so far in a guild called Heretic. We have met some really cool people and also helps our good friend was already playing over there. We have since moved on from that guild to a new venture with No Breaks. I will go ahead and post our less then stellar fun here to include vent chats, silly fun in guild and every time I get tail swiped into the whelps!

Everquest 10 Years and Counting

With the 10 year anniversary of Everquest upon us I took time to look around the EQ website and read up on the event. This got me a thinking  about the old days,so I decided to log in, just for the fun of looking around for a few. Got online and did the customary /who all friends just in case any of my old buds were online. No such luck. Then I checked out the /claim and got my 10 year cake! Yeah! Did a /played for my own information, my first character isn’t quite at 10 years yet, not until February. Then I noticed I had a bunch of other claims available to me.

One was odd had like 1000 uses left to it. Gift of Lost Legacies.. so I claimed it. I received two 10 stack of potions 3 pieces of armor all better then what I had on .. it was the Defiant stuff.. a new weapon (which I did have better of) and a  book with 5 charges of port to PoK. I think this is awesome, part of the problem I have had in the past with trying to go back to Everquest, is that my gear just is not good enough for the newer zones. This allows me to gear back up and go hunt without having to go back to the older expansions that no one is in to get re geared. One of the potions is the Adventurer Potions which allows you to increase your exp for 30 minutes. I guess you can now buy these with real cash. So they have given returning players 5 hours of increased exp which is nice. I have not checked out the new mercenary system, but I think it has something to do with hiring PC’s to hunt with you. I find that kind of sad, means that the server populations have dropped so much people need to hire people to hunt with them. eqtheme

Things To Do When Your Waiting For Mobster Energy

I am sure we all know what I is like to sit and wait for your energy to increase so you can go do another mission in Mobster, it can be like waiting for water to boil. So what I do while I am waiting is play another game, makes the time pass really fast and then I am happily surprised when I window out of my game and all my energy is full again. So I thought I would feature a few games that are easy to play, suck a ton of time, and are addictive like mobster. My first fun little game is Garden Wars, whew I love this game. Something about Shooting Gnomes, Peeing Cherubs, and Windy Bottomed Flamingos that just really gets my attention. The game requires you to kill bugs before they get to your flowers. You have cash you earn after every completed wave so you can add more gnomes, cherubs, bug houses, and other cool stuff. There is something like 15 different scenarios with a whole bunch of waves that increase in difficulty. Also there is a cool area where you can try strange challenges like the never ending bug wave or some craziness like that. Anyway, you can Get Garden Defense™ FREE with a 30-day trial to GamePass. The cool part is that They let you try all the 100’s of games they have on Real for 60 minutes for free, and then if you end up keeping your membership you get one free game a month plus discounted rates on all the other games.

Monster Mash Is Major Fun At A Cheap Price

Every once in awhile I get a little MMO burn out and have to take a break. It isn’t that I don’t want to play games I just want to play something a little mindless. I have a lot going on at most times and usually don’t have hours to devote to playing a game. In order to keep my sanity I do need to unwind sometimes, this is when I turn to doing silly online games and such. I am a big fan of Real Arcade. I have a membership to them and get my game every month. I tend toward being a time management freak. I play them all Diner Dash, Flo On The Go, and Build A Lot to name a few. Read more

Normal Geekz Playing Rock Band

Ok so here is the deal I spend a lot of my time watching youtube videos of people playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero. The one trend that I have seen is that all these videos seem to be of people who are awesome at it, but what about us regular folks that are playing for the sheer fun of the game. That is why I wanted to make this video of me and my kids playing.

So to set the scene this is me, my 2 sons and my soon to be brother in law. My sister is the camera “person” and isn’t happy about it either.. She totally didn’t want to have to film us. We have been playing for about 3 hours now when we decide to get the camera out. I wanted to thank my kids and Andy for letting me film them and then put our silly asses on the internet, Read more

Honor Unbound/Mixed Nuts An Everquest Guild

Ok so next up on my dedication of old school Everquest guilds will be Mixed Nuts/Honor Unbound. First off let me just say I was the leader of both of these guilds. We started off as Honor Unbound, which was chosen as the name by Fazter. We later needed to make a new guild because back in the day if someone joined your guild you could not disband them unless you knew they were online. This made things very difficult if you had a falling out with someone. You could not see them is they were anon and you could not disband all of their alts. Anyway, needless to say we did run into this problem. We made a new guild by the name of Mixed Nuts, which still exists to the day. I have met so many wonderful people through my EQ travels. Some of the most fun I have ever had in my life has been raiding with the group of people that fell under the Mixed Nuts spell. We were a “fun” adult guild. We raided and did people’s epics. We were in no way uber, but wonderfully capable. We ran events like the Monkey Mash, where you built a level 1 monk and then went to the arena and dueled with other level ones. You were only allowed to roll /random 69 in our guild and if you by chance got a 69 you were awarded from the guild bank. So below is a video I made to share some of my memories.

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Of The Rings Online And The Game Stutter

So, in the never ending saga of trying to get Lord Of The Rings Online working on my machine I have found out a lot. First, like I said in a previous post, defragging helps a ton! Second, if you are having an issue where while you’re playing the machine just freezes for a good 10 seconds, then defragging is not the problem. I have messed with all the settings in options and only one seemed to fix the issue. Under Troubleshooting there is an option to slow down the game speed. I am not sure why this has fixed my problem but it did. I thought at first it could be my on-board sound (yeah I know it is ALWAYS the on board sound) but it wasn’t. I actually turned off the sound and disabled it in my bios. This did not fix it. I then tried moving my video card settings down a bunch. I was playing in the lowest setting, still had the problem. Read more

A Mom’s Story of Guitar Hero 3

So one night about 6 months ago my husband and son walk into the house with this game for the XBOX 360. When I see it I am no more excited about it, then I get about any other Xbox game out there. I am not a fan of console type games. That is not to say I havent had a few I liked, because I have. I toally loved the first Lord Of The Rings game.. lots of puzzles and an all around good time. I also really liked Jade Empire and Dreamfall, but for the most part it really is not my bag. So they get it out of the box and get the nice wireless guitar all put together and start up the game. Read more

Drunkards Of Norrath a Cazic-Thule Guild

So I was sitting around, and looking through myspace, trying to find some old Everquest friends. When it realized that searching down some of the old guilds would be fun and maybe pay them a little tribute. My first pick is Drunkards Of Norrath. Read more

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