Weekend (28 Feb) - A Friendly Visit to the Violet Hold

Weekend (28 Feb) - A Friendly Visit to the Violet Hold

On Friday night Sis and DER agreed to three man the Violet Hold with Philly. Philly had worked hard earlier in the day and had DINGED! to level 75. Philly was going to be the healer, testing out her disc spec gear and to get some practice in healing a group in a dungeon. Violet Hold is an interesting dungeon. It is conveniently located right inside the city limits of Dalaran, and the whole encounter takes place in one room with two floor levels. In normal mode there are 12 waves of mobs, and three bosses. There are only a few seconds between each encounter, so there is very little time to buff, drink to regen mana, etc. In other words, it was a good test for Philly, who hoped to be able to heal random dungeons to help her level faster and perhaps pick up some dungeon gear. VH is rated for levels 75-77.

DER, a death knight, was tanking, and although he was not fully outfitted in tanking gear or tanking spec, he was a level 80 and should have no trouble tanking the mobs and bosses of VH. Sis was a level 77 warlock, and would be our DPSer. Yes, normally a group would have five players, but for the sake of practice we figured we could manage with three.

Sis was running a little bit late, so DER and Philly decided to start on the trash mob waves without her. DER was in mostly DPS gear, I believe, and was able to both tank and kill the trash mobs, which popped out of various portals around the room in groups of 1-3. Philly, however, ran into problems almost immediately. Despite having a healthy amount of mana for her level (around 14k), Philly burned through it at a staggering rate, and her mana regen barely moved the mana bar. Philly found herself having to take quick drinks in between even the trash mob waves to gain back a little mana, and even so with each new wave her mana dropped even further. The two of us died when we tackled the first boss, because Philly went out of mana and couldn't heal DER.

At the same time Philly was trying to practice her spell rotations, as well as test out her other spells. She was as awkward as a newborn colt. Healing as a disc priest is nothing like healing as a druid, but ingrained druid practices kept slipping in and messing things up.

Sis arrived in time for all three of us to take a second shot at VH. This is an all or nothing fight, so that we had start over from the beginning when we wiped. Philly worked on her spells, but again had immediate mana trouble. Philly had to partly abandon one of the fundamental tactics of a disc priest, which was to maintain a Shield on the tank at all times. The mana cost was just too high to sustain that. But that meant casting more healing spells, which also drained mana. We got farther into the waves, but wiped again.

Philly was learning her spells and getting better at casting them. She was learning to stretch out her mana as far as it would go. On our third attempt we not only killed the first boss, we killed all three bosses, clearing the instance. Pretty nice for a three person group.

That didn't mean Philly was happy, though. Something was very wrong with the way Philly was geared or specced, or how she handled her spells, or maybe all three of the above. She simply should not be running out of mana this fast.

Philly was very grateful for the practice, but now she had to study the results and figure out where she needs to go from here. She was not ready to heal in the random dungeons.

We moved on to get in some pvp, but I'll cover that in a later report.

Philly decided to post on the wowhead priest forums to see if she could get some guidance on what parts of her game needed improvement. And over the course of the weekend she got a very good assessment and some excellent advice.

First, everyone agreed that Philly had a gear problem, and it came from a misunderstanding on my part. The stats spirit (spi) and mana per 5 (mp5) are the primary stats that increase the rate at which mana regenerates itself. Both of these stats are low on the priority list of stats that disc priests should have. Some guides I'd read went so far as to state that disc priests should never bother with +spi at all.

That advice is true to an extent, but mostly it relates to players who have already reached level 80. At lower levels, like Phillie at level 75, adequate mana regen does require some spi and mp5. Philly had been avoiding +spi and going after spell power, crit, and +int primarily. In the forum post, Philly was advised that while her choice of stats were sound, she couldn't ignore +spi and mp5 completely. Philly needed to add +spi/mp5 to improve a very poor mana regen rate.

As Philly replied in the forum post, gear can be fixed, and she embarked on a plan to make those improvements. But it can't just be a gear problem. It wasn't.

The tips Philly got were numerous. The best one was to not forget about shadowfiend. This is a priest pet, kind of like the druid's trees, that are used primarily as a long cooldown attack. However, the shadowfiend is also a source of mana regen. It's on a 5 minute cooldown, and is sort of a priest's version of a druid's Innervate spell. Definitely a spell Philly wants to remember to use on boss fights.

The most complicated tip described how it was better in the long run to keep casting shield on the tank versus using healing spells like renew and flash heal in it's place. I had a hard time seeing how that would reduce mana usage until I was walked through it.

When a Shield is cast on a player, a debuff called Weakened Soul automatically procs. Technically, what it does is stop the priest from casting another shield on the same target until weakened soul wears off. Without such a debuff shields could be constantly refreshed and no mob could ever do any damage to the shielded target.

That didn't seem to have any bearing on mana, though, until it was further explained that another talent called Renewed Hope was also involved. When weakened soul is active, renewed hope increases healing crit for the player who has weakened soul, AND reduces incoming damage to everyone in the group! In other words, Keeping weakened soul active (by continuing to cast a Shield each time weakened soul expires) reduces the amount of healing that has to be done, saving mana.

Philly opted not to take a another tip to change one of her glyphs. The spell Penance is a channeled spell that not only heals the target, it can proc other buffs like rapture, grace, and inspiration, all of which aid healing and/or regen mana. This is one of the hardest concepts to get my head around - all these buffs that proc when certain other spells are used. Keeping track of what procs what and what procs are active is going to be the toughest thing to learn, but it's critical to a disc priest.

Anyway, one suggestion was to drop the penance glyph (which reduces the cast time of penance, so it can be used more often) and replace it with the flash heal glyph, which reduces flash heal mana cost by 10%. Philly wants to test things out with the penance glyph using what she's learned first, before determining if she still needs more mana help by using the flash heal glyph.

Philly hasn't had a chance to test out her tips yet, but she did make some good progress on improving her gear, with more focus on +spi and mp5. The mana regen rate during combat is now much higher, and Philly is looking forward to putting all this to the test some time this week.