I have to admit, when I saw Rapture be re-introduced in the latest Mists of Pandaria beta build, my heart sank a little. Rapture, at its core, is fundamentally flawed…. and for whatever reason, the devs at Blizzard fail to see that; Ghostcrawler included in that statement. In his reply to a thread back in early April, he said the following: “We agree that Rapture was a cool mechanic for Discipline, and we’d like to add it back, but have it scale with Spirit, so that Disc priests don’t neglect Spirit on their gear (or worse, get mad at us when priest gear that they share with Holy has Spirit on it).” What? No… just because something is “cool” does not mean it is a fun or even good mechanic. …

I spent a good deal of time in beta last weekend. I got myself to the current level cap (which is only 86), and did a good deal of questing. (Which, for the record I did completely as Atonement spec… Instant Holy Fire from the glyph is a lot of fun. More importantly 40k smite hits are purely delicious) More importantly I did some dungeon runs in Temple of The Jade Serpent, one of the new 5 mans, and healed as both Holy and Disc. I do, however, want to first tackle Disc healing since it seems to need the most amount of work. In case people missed it: both Holy and Disc have their own “filler spell”.  Holy has Heal and Discipline has Spirit Shell (SS). I won’t call it …

A large group of beta keys seemed to have been pushed out today… Good news! I has! So, with that said I am going to get right on some Mists of Pandaria priestly analysis, theorycrafting, and testing! If there are particulars you want me to keep an eye on that I am not covering, please feel free to email me and I’ll do all I can.

In typical raiding fashion, the “last pull of the night” became the killing attempt.  Deathwing has been vanquished and Azeroth is safe once again. Something Wicked of US-Whisperwind has completed all 25-Man Heroic content available and finishing the Tier at US 55th. I am proud to say I was a part of this kill! With all content completed, it gives us the opportunity to reflect on not just the Tier but also Cataclysm as a whole. What worked well? What didn’t? What was your favorite? High Level Post-Mortem Overall I really enjoyed Dragon Soul– I might be an outlier with my enjoyment of Dragon Soul, but I am trying to look at it exclusively from a Heroic 25-man perspective. A number of the fights had some really interesting mechanics that …

My Guild Leader used this phrase last week, and it got me thinking about how Zero Sum applies to a raid as a whole and to each of us individually. Calling mana a Zero-Sum Game is a great way of illustrating a practice we all should be using. The general gist of what we need to keep in mind with Zero-Sum Mana is: Unless you hit 100% mana at any point of the fight your cooldown usage should generally be as soon as possible.Try to think of your mana pool in terms of the whole length of the fight, not just as the number that shows on your character pane. Ask yourself, “how much mana is available to me cumulatively throughout the fight?”.  Using your restorative cooldowns will increase your fight-duration mana pool… not just your current total available mana. As …

Its been a couple of weeks since my last post, and that is by no means a sign of anything regarding ToaP… I simply have been busy with a number of things both in and out of game. I’ll keep my personal and professional life out of the blog, however I will make a post regarding the amazing folks of <Edge> on the US-Garona server… On the coattails of Edge’s 5-year anniversary, Edge officially retired as a 25-Man Raiding Guild. Edge slew Heroic Ultraxion, and capstoned an amazing run with 3 years of being top 100 US and 2 years of being in the Top 50 US.  I would be remiss not to personally thank all those in Edge, past and present, for an amazing place to call home on Garona. The …

There is a lot of information out there regarding Disc Priest secondary stats and statweights… a lot of information. To make matters worse, all that information is often contradictory to each other. Mastery is king! No, wait! Haste! No, Crit!!! Add on top of all that contradiction is that a lot of the information is in that “well, it works for me!” category…  which unto itself is flawed. I’ve seen a number of these forum threads fighting over this question, and have seen some– frankly, horrible answers. I’ve also gotten a number of emails asking me what I think… so, lets take a look. In my usual fashion, I am going to dive into some of the numbers, but not so many that we drown in pages of formulas and …

This is my first real foray into voice-over videos, so I am really hoping to get some solid feedback on this.  There are some great tutorial videos that focus on the overall strategy and do a great job at it. I must tip my hat to Kina and the folks at LearnToRaid and underscore the goal of this guide is to supplement those types of guides. The purpose of this guide is to provide insight to the Healer Perspective and point out specific points of strategy that healers will want to keep in mind while battling Heroic Hagara. This guide assumes you already have at least an understanding of the basic boss mechanics and abilities– consider this the “Healer Addendum” to a standard Boss Guide.   Good luck!!

As healers we all know the expression “Dead DPS does no DPS.”, right? Well, the same rule applies to us as healers. A dead healer can heal no one. Staying alive in a progression raiding guild is pretty much the first rule above all. Stay alive, stay alive, stay alive. Every Dragon Soul fight has substantial raid damage — especially the  Heroics. This means we’ll need to be putting out a good deal of raid healing, but it also means we need to do what we can to stay alive as long as we possibly can to heal through that damage. Both Holy and Discipline offer some great spec choices as far as survivability talents. Keeping that in mind, lets take a look at these options– some of which are often …

“Smite spam” : Before Cataclysm’s introduction to Archangel and Atonement, that phrase was often followed by “LOLOLOL Smitepriest”. Since the launch of Cataclysm, we’ve had several tiers of content to get used to Atonement Healing and Archangel.  Atonement and Archangel are now, arguably, the cornerstone of Discipline in 4.3… and in my opinion, nearly mandatory for Dragon Soul Heroic Encounters. The trick is to leverage Archangel to your advantage and not just use it haphazardly. Fully stacked, Archangel provides you with an additional 15% throughput for 18 seconds with a mere 30 second cooldown.  Despite it having a short cooldown, making it readily available throughout most of the fight, the best way for a Disc Priest to use Archangel is to know when the raid/tank damage is going to increase and demand …