Damage prevention and Ancestral Healing

Twice now I’ve made requests about getting more damage prevention abilities for Shamans, and twice I’ve been castigated by commenters for ignoring Ancestral Healing. That’s the Resto talent that will proc up to 10% damage resistance (Ancestral Fortitude) for 15 seconds after a critical heal. In the past it would proc an armor bonus up to 25%, but the flat damage resistance was added in a buff pass in patch 3.2.

It’s a nice effect, but it doesn’t meet my needs when I ask for the ability to prevent damage. Because:

1. I can’t precisely control when it gets applied. That comes from the nature of an on-crit proc. I have not fond memories of one of our Resto Shamans holding up pulls in Karazhan spamming rank 1 Lesser Healing Waves with cries of “Hold on, hold on! I need to proc the armor bonus!” When I know damage is coming, I want to take an active hand in preventing it. Not throw good mana after bad spamming overheals hoping to proc the effect in time.
2. It’s invisible. That might sound trivial, but the only way to know that you have spawned the effect on a target is to scrub their buff list for it. Feedback-free effects like this drive me batty. If Blizzard wants us to get our heads out of the UI and pay attention to the world, they’re going to have to start by keying important information visually and aurally.
3. While I don’t like whining about deficiencies with respect to other class’ abilities, it is markedly inferior to every other mitigation effect in the game.

I want damage mitigation to be a first-class mechanic in the game. And for that to happen, every healer (Druids included) needs to be able to effectively stop damage. It is no longer enough to spend your whole time responding to damage that has already been applied.

Hybrid healers and detritus spells

Somewhere in the depths of Blizzard’s database is information about who casts what spells and under what conditions. From that giant heap it’s a simple matter to see patterns of usage. For instance, when they noticed a disturbingly high number of Chain Heals coming from Enhancement Shamans on the General Vezax (hard mode) fight, they acted to stop that exploit.

Because of that knowledge, we can safely assume that the designers know when a spell falls into obscurity. If it remains ununsed for a long time, we know that they do not consider it a design priority to fix. How long has it been since Greater Heal was a part of a Priest’s regular setup? Why are Lesser Heal and Heal orphaned in the priest spellbook? When was the last time you saw a Druid turn to Healing Touch without Nature’s Swiftness? How many Lifeblooms do you see these days?

There’s a fundamental divide here between the healing classes. Priests and Druids hold down one side with a broad selection of multi-purpose healing spells. Shamans and Paladins anchor the other end, each sporting a svelte selection of highly focused spells. Priests and Druids both have a lot of healing spells. A substantial fraction of those spells go unused.

I don’t understand why there’s such a disparity in number of spells available to each healing class. Every healing class is also capable of DPS, and 2 of them can even do tanking builds. No class is a pure healing class. So why are Shamans and Paladins given so many fewer tools to work with than Priests and Druids?

As much as I admire the flexibility of Prests and Druids, I also appreciate the simplicity of the more concise Resto spellbook. I’d like to broaden the Resto Shaman’s situational abilities — ideally without creating a detritus of unused spells.

So here’s my proposal. Discard Healing Wave and replacing it with a Power Word: Shield-like ability. That would give us a anticipatory heal, which we sorely lack, without simply increasing the number of spells. At the same time it would greatly help pull Shamans out of the traditional pigeon hole of raid healing.

Tier 10 at last

Every other Shaman-related website and forum in the world has the picture, so here’s a picture of Graham Elliot Bowles instead.

From NBC Chicago. What you aren’t seeing in this picture are the itty-bitty boyshorts he’s wearing. I dare you to follow the link.My thoughts? Bowles looks likes he enjoys his lunches. And probably should invest some of his vast supplies of cash in fixing the buttons on that shirt. I hope he’s not in the kitchen like that.

As for the armor, I like it a lot. Very animalistic, which is in keeping with the real Shamans of the world. It looks like there’s some kind of stag head effect that will play on the shoulders periodically, too.

I’m even excited about the helmet. I believe that’s a first.

Ok, so consider the delay acceptable. It was worth it.

GridStatusChainWho: Going public

Without any reports of breakages or flaws, I have decided to go public with GridStatusChainWho. Links to the addon have been redirected to WoWInterface.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the Zam-owned WoWInterface website is about a zillion times more friendly than the Curse one. Zam is also the owner of Wowhead, after all. Following five baffling failures trying to upload my addon to Curse (Your project has no files! That file has already been uploaded!), I gave up in frustration. By comparison, WoWInterface’s uploader was 20 seconds of bliss.

Welcome to the broader world, my baby. I hope they’re nice to you out there.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about a design decision that went into this thing. A quick recap of what it does (in case you didn’t see it before): GridStatusChainWho provides a status in Grid that will highlight units getting hit with your Chain Heal. Because spacial awareness is so critical to a Resto Shaman, this sort of feedback can help optimize spell selection.

Now Shamans aren’t the only healers out there with smart or spacial-based heals. Priests have their Circle of Healing and Holy Nova. Some Paladins are rocking Glyph of Holy Light to effect spacial raid healing. Druids spurt out a Wild Growth when the boss so much as glares angrily at the raid. Would these spells benefit from the same kind of highlighting?

The reason I think the information this addon reveals is mission critical for Shamans is that knowing how many people are near a unit can change the priority weightings of the spells you might cast. It is wasteful to cast a Chain Heal on a moonkin standing way out in the back of the raid. Chain Healing the tank might be worthwhile, as long as it can be expected to bounce to the melee.

Held to the same test, the other possible spells it could be examining don’t pass. Three of the spells aren’t targeted at all. Knowledge of who has been hit by Circle of Healing my interesting, but it certainly isn’t going to change your decision whether to cast it. Glyph of Holy Light is targeted, but I suspect that Paladins aren’t using the secondary area healing as a significant factor in their spell selection process.

It could be easily modified to detect other spells, if there is sufficient interest. And volunteers to test. But for the time being, it is happily a one-trick pony.

Power Auras, part deux

Updated on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 11:00PM by Llyra

A couple months ago I came across a blog post that made me want to revisit my Power Auras config over on Mystic Chicanery. What I learned from that article is how to make a logical AND. That enables all sorts of conditions that would otherwise just get noisy.

That’s something I was tremendously excited about when I first encountered it. The addon has come a long way since then, and things that required multiple conditions before can now be done with a single rule. It is still useful. For example, you can express that if someone in the raid has Moonkin Aura AND you don’t have Gift of the Wild. Hunters can make a rule to suggest flipping into Aspect of the Viper when they are low on mana AND are not already in that aspect. Try as I might, though, I can’t think of a general Shaman case that isn’t better solved by BuffEnough. If anything ideas strike you, check out Nibuca’s post on the subject. Then come back here and tell me about it.

The trip was not a total loss because I have upgraded my auras in important ways. A refinement to my Water Shield detection pops up the icon at 0 stacks during combat, or when it is less than 3 stacks outside of combat. Never enter a fight with less than 4 stacks of Water Shield. I also made totem rules to tell me when I am standing in range of caster-friendly totems.

I’ll tell you one thing about Power Auras, though. It takes a lot of CPU, compared to other addons. And it’s hard to configure. Wait, that’s 2 things. I’ll tell you 2 things about Power Auras. They say Grid is hard to configure. But it’s just tricky to find where everything is. Once you know where to look, it becomes easy. Power Auras keeps being hard. Things you expect to work just don’t sometimes. I once sat fiddling for hours trying to get two timers running for different spells, and eventually just surrendered. I couldn’t do it.

One other thing about Power Auras. (Did I say 2 things? I meant 3 things.) A well-configured Power Auras is totally worth it. Blood, sweat and many tears left on my keyboard, and I am better informed than ever. Not just more informed — better informed by the data I need right now.

An example will explain why there is blood on my keyboard. To make my out-of-combat Water Shield rule, that triggers if I have fewer than 4 charges, took me about 30 tries to get right. The crux of the issue was that I could not make a (Stacks<4) condition work. Or (Stacks<=3). What finally worked was hitting the Invert flag and using (Stacks>3). In other words !(Stacks>3).

Now, I am a professional programmer; I’m no slouch at slinging bits. I know that the all those conditions are equivalent for integer math. The fact that only one worked is damning evidence there’s some busted logic cooking away in this addon. More proof: I copied those rules to make analogs for my Enhancement spec with Lightning Shield and my out-of-combat rule failed again!

But I have no come out the other side, and am better for it. I can share with you the fruits of my labor. Power Auras rules are importable. So if you’d like them, you will find them below the cut.

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