A bit of terminology from last time:

• PPM is the proc’s built-in PPM constant.
• H is your haste factor (1 + your average haste %)
• D (used below) will be the duration of a buff

Our first basic conclusion was that if you ignore the possibility of proc overlaps, the uptime of a proc is:

We called this value  (lambda) for any given trinket. It’s a good approximation of uptime as long as uptime is low (overlaps are unlikely), and it will also come into many later results. Conceptually,  is the ratio of the buff’s duration to its mean proc time.

The next conclusion was that if you account for the possibility of overlaps, the uptime is:

Seeing how uptime (y) relates to lambda (x) is helpful. In the low range, they’re mostly the same (the curve approximates the y=x line). As lambda increases, overlaps becomes more important and uptime starts to slow down in its asymptotic approach to 1.

Today we’re going to see how this is modified in a few different scenarios.

The “Bad Luck” Correction

In the prior post I commented that the RPPM system was not a correction to increase your proc chance. But they recently added just such a correction in the case of trinkets (for now I won’t discuss why they might have done so). It kicks in anytime you haven’t had a proc for more that 1.5 times your mean proc time, and begins to rapidly increase proc chance. Specifically, from that point on, every 1% of MPT that passes increases proc chance by 3%. I’m not going to walk through in detail a calculation of how much this increases overall proc rate–it’s somewhat tedious and the focus of this post is on the results more than the derivation (and I don’t feel like LaTeX-ing the whole thing). I’ll include my original calculation in an appendix.

Here’s a graph comparing the two:

(Wolfram link for reference)

The x-axis is time, in units of mean proc time. The y-axis is the chance that your next proc will come at a particular time after the previous proc. As you can see, the two are identical until x=1.5, and then the new system (purple line) gives a burst of added proc chance that drastically shortens the tail of the curve.

Estimating the new MPT requires finding an equation for the new probability curve and integrating it (see appendix).  In general, what I computed is that, once the boost kicks in, the expected proc time is roughly half (48%) of what it would have been otherwise. Since you only reach that point 22.3% (e^(-1.5)) of the time all in all the average wait for each proc is reduced to 88.4% of what it was, or 13.1% more procs over a given time.

The Effect on Uptime

In the low-uptime case, where we can approximate uptime with  , then we would now simply take it to be  . Unfortunately, to account for overlaps, we can’t simply multiply  by 1.13 in the above formula. This implicitly assumes two events are independent (overlaps, and activation of the boost) when they’re definitely not. In fact, application of the boost can never cause an overlap unless   (which is far beyond the uptime range of any real trinket).

The correct model, fortunately, is even simpler. Multiply the previous uptime (including overlaps and all) by 1.13. After all, those 13% new procs have to happen somewhere, and they can’t contribute to overlaps:

If the equation bothers you because it’s not manifestly limited to 1 as an uptime should be, remember that it’s expressly valid only for   (and in that range it reaches roughly 88%). Essentially, what this is model is saying is that everything is happening as it was before, including overlaps, but total proc events are going to happen 13% more often.

Stacking Trinkets

Trinkets like Talisman of Bloodlust and Horridon’s Last Gasp have an added twist–on a repeat proc, they don’t simply overlap and refresh the prior buff, but also add another stack (up to 5). This makes the math more complex but still manageable.

Recall the logic of the main uptime formula from the prior post. In a Poisson or similar process, at any given moment, the chance of not having had an event in the past unit time is  .

But now in the  case where our buff us up because we have had a recent proc, we need further information: was the buff already up when this proc started? Well, the answer is the same–it was up  of the time. The memory-less nature of Poisson processes is key here–the answer to that question is the same no matter when you ask it (we’ve not accounted for the boost yet, but remember that it cannnot affect stacks or overlaps as long as ).

So at any given moment, the chance that we have at least one stack is , same as always. The chance that we’ll have at least two stacks is:

From here it’s easy to see the chance of having at least k stacks at a given moment. To find the overall average stack height (which gives our actual buff contribution), we need to sum all those components up to the maximum number of stacks, N:

Recalling the partial sum of a geometric series:

In our case:

This should be a clean formula you can use to find your average weighted uptime on a stacking trinket. As in the non-stacking case, to account for the bad-luck boost, simply multiply the entire thing by 1.13.

A complication not addressed here is that Talisman of Bloodlust itself adds haste, which changes the proc frequency slightly at each iteration. This is better handled in a simulation, but if you wanted to write it down as formula you could break the sum back out into 5 individual terms and independently compute lambda for all of them.

ICD trinkets

A lot of people ask how to correctly model trinkets like Wushoolay’s Final Choice (22 second ICD). This family of trinkets uses RPPM, but has an ICD anyway because their mechanics would be too messy if they allowed overlap procs. In this case, the mean proc time, instead of simply being 60/(PPM*H), should be:

The -10 is due to the fact that the RPPM system accumulates proc chance for up to 10 seconds. So on your first attack after the ICD runs, you get the benefit of 10 seconds worth of stored-up proc chance.

Since these trinkets do not allow overlaps, the uptime is simply the duration over the MPT:

Finally, the boost. Though there’s no firm confirmation on this, I’ll assume here that the time during the ICD does count as a time of no procs for purposes of the boost (this would be consistent with the treatment of the usual 10-second RPPM pool). In that case, you can simply increase overall mean uptime by 1.13 as usual:

Unerring Vision

A note on Unerring Vision of Lei Shen. Even though the nominal uptime of this proc is 4 seconds, the actual benefit lies in a set of DoTs with 100% crit rate that lasts long after the proc is over (it has little use unless you make use of this DoT effect). If it reprocs while the previous set of buffeds DoTs is still up, you’re going to clip them with new buffed DoTs. So for overlap purposes, the “duration” and “uptime” of UVLS are really analyzed with reference to the DoTs it produces, not the 4s proc itself. Keep this in mind when theorycrafting the trinket.

Beginning of an Encounter

Finally, one less technical discussion, about the beginning of a fight. When the RPPM system was first introduced, one important ramification of its time-independent nature was that you no longer got the reliable fast proc that ICD-based trinkets produced at the beginning of every encounter. But the “boost” reverts this change for most part, since you’ve necessarily been out of combat and not gotten a proc for a few minutes.

With high-frequency trinkets like the 3.3 RPPM melee trinkets, mean proc time may be 15 seconds or lower with some haste. At that frequency (say it’s exactly 15 seconds), after only 25 seconds out of combat, you’re guaranteed a proc on the first swing of the fight. (You’d normally have a 2/3 chance to proc on that swing, since you’ve pooled 10 seconds out of an MPT of 15, and having “failed” to proc for 1.67 MPT’s gives a further 50% boost.

On the flip side, if you’re a UVLS user with an MPT of 2 minutes, then after a typical 2-minute runback and reset the boost will not have kicked in at all. The 2 minutes still matter because you’ll start getting a boost if you fail to proc by one minute into the fight, but that doesn’t help you get a proc during your initial timer stack. Even if you’ve been out of combat (or not had a proc) for 5 minutes (2.5 MPTs), the 4x increase to proc rate as you start the fight still only means you start the fight with an effect MPT of 30 seconds, which is not a crisp start you can plan on. Only after you’ve been out of combat for roughly 10 minutes (5 MPTs) does the whopping 11.5x increase in proc rate mean that you can expect a proc in the first 10 seconds (which is great benefit, as you can now save timers for it). Now, this is a worst case–most people even with trinkets in the 0.5 RPPM range (say Breath of the Hydra) will have an MPT somewhat under 2 minutes due to haste. But point still remains that people with low-frequency trinkets can get a marginal benefit by avoiding using them for up to many minutes before an important pull.

As a general matter, the amount of time you need to have spent without a proc in order to guarantee a proc on the first hit of a fight is:

Where MPT is your usual mean proc time in seconds (60/PPM*H), so this could be also be written as:

Remember that H should be your haste with no procs or temp buffs active, as it will be on the first attack of a fight. Note that the result is quadratic in MPT, which explains why some trinkets get it so easily and some have to wait so much longer.

Appendix

This is where I first worked out the effect of the boost. I added a few notes at the bottom to try to make it understandable. Time is measured using the variable tau, which is a dimensionless time variable scaled so that MPT=1. The first task was writing the probability function P(tau) when the boost is present (for now assuming that it starts at tau=0), which was done with the differential equation involving Q(tau) (the cumulative chance of not having a proc by time tau). Then I integrate that new probability function to finds its mean (the 0.48 I mentioned earlier). All that’s left is to account for the fact that the boost doesn’t kick in until tau=1.5 by properly averaging the old and new functions together.

First though, a few loose comments on story (since I want to remain spoiler-free for now). The best part is the plot structure and associated twists. The game does have its “would you kindly” moment for sure, and the most important part of a story that visibly about a running mystery like this is that the reveal is properly anticipated (but not too overtly) by what came before it. In this they succeeded. It is rather enjoyable, bordering on necessary, to replay at least the opening portion of the game immediately after seeing the ending. You’ll feel some disbelief at the sheer density of clues, foreshadowing, and double meanings to which you were completely oblivious the first time.

The other story/atmosphere points I want to touch on are really gameplay comments in disguise. Combat based on big, open set pieces was new to the Shock series, and a setting that still “alive” was also new. Regardless of what you think of these individually, their mixture causes some deep problems with suspension of disbelief. Doing FPS-y stuff like looting everything in sight and leaving piles of bodies everywhere and fighting pitched battles with squadrons of enemies does not jive with a living, breathing city that you’re trying to take seriously as an immersive environment. I know you do those things in every FPS, but most FPSs don’t take a city and its identity as their main character. In Bioshock you explored Rapture once it was dead, and learned very vividly what it was like when it was alive. Deviating from that setup did not bring much of anything new to the table, and only caused Infinite to slide more into familiar FPS tropes than its predecessor.

Gameplay

The overarching theme here how completely different Infinite was from the usual Shock gameplay (meaning the SS2/BS1 archetype). There were pros and cons, but overall I would be happier if they’d kept it a Shock game at heart–an FPS with a very unique/immersive story is still a refreshing thing to have, but a Shock game isn’t something we can get from anywhere else if Levine’s crew moves away from them.

The most fundamental change, not necessarily good or bad, is that you can no longer carry health, mana, or large stores of weapons/ammo around with you. The upside is that your health/mana bars matter now–i.e. your health bar is actually your health bar, rather than having most of your health disguised in a pile of medkits in your inventory. It makes combat encounters self-contained–you have to get through each set piece with a fixed amount of resources, subject to your build. The downside it that it’s no longer a resource-management game, and there’s no question that long-term resource management was heart and soul of SS2/BS gameplay. Something like a regenerating shield, for example, would have been complete anathema to those games.

To their credit, this was largely done in service of a new combat dynamic–scrounging around for resources during combat rather than in between, which was actually a lot of fun. This also dovetailed very nicely with Elizabeth’s role, giving her a way to participate in combat that fit very well. It’s still a tradeoff though. To me, I really missed the main gameplay conceit of SS2/BS–each time I encounter something, what am I going to spend to deal with it? 3 Armor piercing rounds? The mana for one shot of Electro Bolt so I can wrench it? Bring it to a hacked turret but probably take some damage? Maybe I’m really running low on some things and it influences the decision.

Related to all this, something I started to mention earlier is that the sense of world was impacted negatively by the new combat framework. Resource-based combat works fine (works best even) when you move around a level often encountering one or two enemies at a time. It was great for horror settings, where that’s exactly the feel you want–exploring a level while not being sure what’s around the next corner. Changing the focus to big set pieces with swarms of enemies really contributes to another huge change from prior installments: the game is no longer scary. Exploring is completely safe, often because you’ve just cleared out an area and know there won’t be another big combat until the next one, also because even if you did encounter a random guard or to it couldn’t do anything to you that mattered. You’ll be full up on resources before the next big brawl.

One final point that was more of a straight negative for me was lack of character customization. This was the second main pillar of Shock gameplay, and unlike the above, I don’t see anything that was gained by carving it out. I went back and played BS1 for a few hours after I finished, and I’d genuinely forgotten how much character advancement that game had. At the time I looked on BS1 as a sort of stripped-down SS2, but now that seems harsh. It modernized SS2 with things like respec ability, but kept the main point: you have a lot of different ways to handle combat, even to be creative. BI retains some of it with the spells, but it’s harder and harder to get away from handling everything by shooting it in the head, and more of the spells serve mostly to facilitate handling/controlling large groups of enemies while you sequentially shoot them all in the head.

Conclusion

As far as conclusion to all this? It’s not that I didn’t like the game. But thinking through it in detail has caused me to solidify that initial uneasy “not as good as Bioshock” feeling (which is so easy to knee-jerk with sequels) and make it more specific. In some ways it made me realize that Bioshock was better than I remembered. Infinite limits itself by being set up like every familiar FPS and then excelling in a few specific areas (most importantly the detailed design of the world). But it can’t be more than a great FPS. Its predecessors are already widely recognized as more than that. It’s about more than stripping the “RPG elements” out of gameplay. In SS2 and Bioshock, the gameplay and narrative worked together to create an immersive experience. In Infinite, they not only work against each other, but much of the innovation that make SS2 and Bioshock unique is absent.

The project also liberally throws around STEM as a buzzword and links itself to several legitimate issues: harassment against women, and a drastic imbalance between men and women in technology fields.

Many parts of this Kickstarter were handled badly, but the part that stood out to me the most was the child exploitation angle. While not a violation of the Kickstarter ToS, interpreting the situation any way is problematic.

Before Susan Wilson clarified the intent behind the bullying and gender angles recently, I interpreted the situation in two ways:

• If the brothers were bullying their younger sister, the result is that the mother chose to commercialize and encourage the strife instead of putting an end to the bullying. Their bullying was left unchecked to fit into a tidy fundraising narrative, with an apology from the brothers only coming as a $10,000 stretch goal reward. An apology isn’t something you deserve if you only raise money. The whole message of this is that the child needs to rely on the goodwill and credit cards of outsiders, hoping she needs to sell her story well enough, to put an end to bullying.
• If they were having run-of-the-mill sibling rivalry, then the author exaggerated and fabricated events for publicity. This option of faking a situation to pander to a tired tried-and-true narrative is scummy in an equally bad way, that will damage the children when they grow up and realize they were publicly villanized for money. Or, it will encourage lying in the future as a way to make situations more marketable to get ahead in life.

When she described the intent behind the marketing, it didn’t make anything better:

“It was never intended to be this gender thing. It was literally two boys picking on their little sister, she stood up to them and it was game on – in a joking way. Even the boys were fine with it.”

Everything about this Kickstarter was deliberately marketed through the lens of gender. Pitting the girl against mean brothers was a phrase spam tweeted and put in a public place. The title was about proving her male siblings wrong. When briefly linking the project to STEM, it was done so by saying that the girl wanted to be a hero to other girls in technology. But besides these contradictions, bullying isn’t something you joke about or appropriate to add some “flavor” to your Kickstarter.

In a later interview, this description of the situation was given:
“Two very successful gamers reached out to me (unable to divulge) and said ‘I’m promoting this to my network, can you add some more tiers, higher level rewards?’ This is bigger than MacKenzie, people are loving this, and this is a generous group, and so I added – you saw the first time, I added $500, I thought that was amazing – well, then I got contacted back and was told, ‘no, make it $10000 here. Just do $10000, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.’ And I was like, ‘what are you saying?’

And literally, she helped me craft the message. It was almost her word-for-word what that says about the boys apologising. It was after the fact because we know it was about more than MacKenzie and the money was going to go to something else. I asked the boys, and the boys thought it was hysterical – yeah we’ll apologise if it creates something cool. My boys… the idea of them doing something to make the world a better place or being part of something bigger is cool to them. So, it was added after at the request of other people with money.”

This comes across as a bunch of clueless privileged people sitting around thinking that bullying is hysterical. Pay us $10,000 for a joke! Maybe it will work! Hilarious! (As a successful entrepreneur that’s tried indiegogo and Kickstarter before, why is she suddenly confused and acting like she was forced into putting up a $10k reward? Having done crowdfunding before, did she also think asking for such a huge reward without any idea of what the money could go towards is good?)

She’s also still throwing her kids under the bus here by shifting the blame onto her children instead of taking responsibility for the situation. First she’s held hostage by people pressuring her to make a $10,000 reward, next she’s held hostage by her kids suggesting jokes. (If that–an old indiegogo project from two years ago had Kenzie posting about her “bratty brothers,” which appears to make this an ongoing marketable sibling rivalry. Her post has since been deleted.) If there was serious bullying going on, casually discussing it as a Kickstarter is not how to handle it, and if the sibling rivalry was played up for publicity, that is tasteless.

The girl in question is exploited as well–she’s billed as a victim in all the marketing and she’s also shoehorned into some tired tropes. The parent takes pains to point out, in describing her gaming background, that she’s not a girly-girl, as if that has some bearing on her interest in games. In a recent update, she had to point out once again that Kenzie hates pink. Some parts of the Kickstarter sound like an adult had a firm hand in it, while other parts were deliberately written to sound juvenile. Brothers are stupid. Age-appropriate games are stupid. Classrooms are boring. Her friends aren’t hardcore. It’s hard to take a complaint seriously when the presentation has a consistent vaguely insulting tone.  If this is truly what the child was thinking, and not a calculated adult appeal for publicity, the parents should sit down with their children and educate them about respect and communication.

Not only is exploitation present in the summary of the Kickstarter, it’s the main advertising hook. The title is called “9 Year Old Building an RPG to Prove Her Brothers Wrong!”, and tweet spam included the phrase “Mean older brothers say she can’t so 9 yr old daughter’s proving SHE CAN build an RPG game AND pay for it “. The Kickstarter is focused on the sibling rivalry, with a brief detour to talk about the importance of STEM, a real topic many readers care about, but the mention of STEM haphazardly thrown into the description comes across as another cheap hook, instead of a legitimate issue. The camp is called RPG camp, not RPG STEM camp, as the writer describes it.

Maybe if the high-donation levels had included rewards relevant to STEM, a better connection could have been drawn, but the opportunity was passed up in favor of a written apology as a stretch reward. In a new backer update explaining how the excess money will be used, she doesn’t even mention STEM. Instead, the Kickstarter is dominated by discussion of how the brothers are vaguely mean to their sister, and how she needs revenge. It’s played up as cutesy laughs, and comes across as someone with a very nice life appropriating strife so that all those “poor and destitute” people out there can relate to it.

The author has been replying to many of the critics–some raise valid points, others are Internet trash–and her reply seems concerned but ultimately unsatisfying. She takes issue with people who think Kickstarter “should only be used for the downtrodden and the poor because it has the power to extend far beyond,” as several people have pointed out that she’s pretty well-off and didn’t need to raise outside funds for a camp. Kickstarter is not a place where people beg for money for “fund my life” projects–that’s against the ToS. It is meant to foster creative development. Between this and the gender angle as a joke, it sounds like a privileged person wanting her slice of the pie and attention that all those downtrodden people seem to be taking advantage of.

It sounds like a person who doesn’t understand that having spare cash changes the context of a financial situation. It sounds like it was written from a perspective of one that hasn’t had to think terribly hard about gender issues or the implications of being short on cash. The $10,000 flippant reward is explained away as something others suggested she should do when she hit her goal, but nobody told her to explicitly create such a large donation level with manipulative rewards and no plan on how to handle the money.

This Kickstarter comes from a place where people can make jokes about gender issues and feel entitled to money because they haven’t dealt with many hardships. She is trying to ally herself with an underrepresented demographic, women in tech, while not realizing how her financial privilege affects the situation. There’s also a dose of slut-shaming in Kenzie’s video, in which she mocks trophy wives and posts unflattering pictures of couples with taglines like “When any girl asks why she should study, show her this!” “So I never end up like this woman & Sugar Daddy becomes extinct.”

Her past crowdfunding projects have also used similar tactics in throwing buzzwords around and jumping on the bandwagon of popular topics without demonstrating a true understanding or empathy for them. One charts lifestyle trends of female entrepreneurs, with this dose of gender essentialism:

“Just as males are hardwired to be competitive hunters, females are communal gatherers. Our complementary genetics are how and why the human species has actually survived – which is an important point to remember btw.

So a woman’s natural preference to collaborate and communicate is actually a gender trait not a choice (or character flaw). And before this becomes an all or nothing distracting debate, I’ll readily admit this isn’t true for every female. So let’s continue. As a direct result of our genetic hard-wiring, females see ourselves in relation to others. Whether we’re babies, girls, teens or women, our personal happiness is directly (and naturally) based on how we see ourselves in relation (and compared) to others – primarily other women.”

A project called Girls Afraid of Money is about rebuilding a networking site for women so they don’t end up as “partying socialites and movie stars” or “girls that look like them – reality stars whove become rich and famous for behaving badly.” The title’s claim is not brought up in the Kickstarter.

Another project talks about veterans sewing superhero capes, but the sample picture used is a red towel on a dog. A project a relative made is called HELP Me Get These Kids Off Video Games, yet the project description mentions no games.

I delayed publishing this article because a Kickstarter update was posted I wanted to cover. In this update, it is revealed that the extra funds will go towards her game, including hiring professionals to work on it. Some funds will also be used to set up a new website, and of course she can’t resist the opportunity to stress that Kenzie hates pink when describing the title. If she gets corporate funding, she will consider making an annual conference. STEM is not mentioned at all in the update.

A website talking about games for children is a great idea, but I do not think she is the person to lead this, based on her track record in abandoning other projects and how she’s already manipulated her children. I would like to see a discussion that doesn’t include slut-shaming, everything described as “awesome” or “stupid,” or mocking those with different interests and familiarities with games. We can’t prove if the author is pretending to be her children, or if the children decided on their own that making a joke about bullying was a fun idea, but either way, I would like to see the uninformed privilege and gender essentialism take a less prominent position on the blog. (Since publishing this post, it’s come to my attention that a video was made in which her daughter talked about plans for the game, but came across as very uncomfortable/disinterested when pressed by her mother for game specifics.)

This kickstarter is not heartwarming when it’s been built on such a manipulative foundation. Many of us have painful memories of being harassed and excluded at work and in our personal lives, and to see someone appropriating them for publicity is infuriating. It is not a fine joke to lie about bullying for money and sell apologies to the highest bidder. The correct thing to do is to educate others who hold these toxic beliefs, instead of posting them to the internet for money and approval.

(Edit: Thanks for all the responses! I originally had this written a few days ago, and then wanted to mention her backer update, so I delayed it. Then when I was about to publish it today, I realized there was even more stuff on the Naruto-based video that was pulled, but figured if I stopped to include everything, this post would never get published and would start having a pretty sprawling scope. I’ll add a few links in where I can to other obviously contradictory evidence.)

Edit 2: As of this morning, Susan has pulled the $10,000 reward. She’s done so in a way that demonstrates no understanding of why lying about bullying is bad and makes it seem like she’s doing critical backers a favor. She defends her choice to frame the Kickstarter in that light and appears shocked that people would judge her children or parenting negatively so quickly. Well, how about you don’t deliberately advertise your campaign in a way that puts your children in a terrible light?

The original title and product description still furthers her fake bullying agenda. And even if that was all removed now, it wouldn’t fully absolve her as she used sensationalism and exploiting her children to build her initial publicity platform.

Beyond Spirituality

Everyone accepts what the purposes of Int, mastery, crit, and haste are: to do more healing. You can do more healing in a given amount of time, you can do more healing with a given amount of mana (haste doesn’t actually do this, but that’s not for this post), and ultimately you can keep more people alive over the course of an entire encounter. The first premise of this article is that Spirit is no different. If you’re using a stat, it must be for the purpose of doing more healing, and its value is determined by how much more you can do (usual disclaimer applies throughout–”more healing” doesn’t necessarily mean more meter healing, it means fulfulling your healing tasks more consistently). In order to be worth using, Spirit has to pull its weight by allowing you do more than you could do with an equal amount of crit or mastery. I want to stress how different this is from viewing it as an independent requirement of some kind, a sort of “you must be this tall to ride” minimum to survive any encounter, before you can worry about other stats. It’s a stat like any other, and if it doesn’t pay its dues in terms of added performance, you’re free to replace it with a stat that does.

So what does Spirit do for you? It lets you use your non-cooldown heals more frequently. I’ll only briefly recapitulate the basic dichotomy between cooldown and non-cooldown heals here; it’s appeared in every one of my MoP healing posts thus far. Remember from the previous post that well over half, possibly as much as 3/4 depending on class, of your total available mana is from sources other than Spirit. Even if you had 0 Spirit, you’d be just fine casting your core short-cooldown heals as much as you wanted (Wild Growth, Penance, Holy Shock, Renewing Mist, Riptide, etc.). These heals are cheap and powerful, and form a sort of healing “baseline” that’s mostly unchanged by added mana reserves beyond what you start with. The most important point is that if you find you’re coming up short to cast these at the end of a fight, it is not because of insufficient Spirit. You budgeted your mana poorly and spent too much on less-efficient no-cooldown heals earlier in the fight.

This brings us to the first fundamental result: the goals of mana management.
1) Solve problems with efficient cooldown-bearing heals whenever possible. This very often means knowing when you can wait a few seconds to whack a particular mole (from the ABC of healing in the first post: Anticipate Damage). Without that anticipation, you have no sense of whether a particular person is at immediate risk of death and can’t make efficient decisions. When you spend mana on a Flash Heal when you could have Penanced 4 seconds later instead (or simply let the target top off from the background noise of smart heals in any raid), what you’re doing is overhealing, even though no meter will say so.
2) Whatever’s left after (1) is your allocation for spammable heals. Only experience can teach you to not bust that budget. Since it would take some clairvoyance to know how much you’re actually going to spend on core heals for the rest of the fight, this is an iterative process where you learn to adjust your spellcasting habits. But if you don’t consciously make this effort, it will never happen, and you’ll be one of the many healers who burns all that mana without even realizing it (partially because this isn’t picked up by any common metric like overhealing percentage). Think about this next time you’re in a conversation with someone who’s running well over 10,000 Spirit and is convinced they can’t cast their heals enough.

The way Spirit, or other talents or bonuses that produce mana, plays into all this is clear–it increases the excess mana you have to spend on the extra heals beyond your usual rotational casts. Without, at the moment, getting into an appraisal of the value of those added heals for each class, we have the conceptual framework. Int, crit, and mastery (in general) make all your heals stronger, while Spirit allows you to add casts of certain types of heals. The most important factor affecting its value is the efficiency of those filler heals. If it’s high, adding points of Spirit will add casts that might output more total healing than proportionally increasing all your heals with another stat (albeit with a loss of burst healing ability, which is significant). But if the filler heal is low HPM, then Spirit will be a weak stat because it doesn’t buy you as much healing.

Note that we’ve reached a completely opposite result from people with a “you must have this much Spirit to ride” concept of things. In their view, having more efficient heals (say, due to a buff like Rejuvenation got in 5.2, or to a set bonus) reduces your Spirit “requirement” because you need less mana to cast the same heals–you hear people say this all the time. But it’s a logical trap; we’ve just shown that a change improving the HPM of a spell like Rejuvenation increases the value of Spirit as a stat, so the intuition to wear less of it is wrong. The conclusion that Spirit became a stronger stat for Druids in 5.2, and that we should therefore value it higher in gearing choices, is a good practical application of this post so far.

Better Living Through Chemistry

Now an interlude about classes with secondary resources (Paladins and Monks). It adds a twist to the basic analysis above, but not any drastic change. The key is that since every Chi or Holy Power spender was paid for by some Chi or Holy Power generators, and you can lump those together into a sort of defined molecule of healing that has a certain mana cost, more or less like any other heal. For purposes of the above discussion, an Eternal Flame funded by Holy Shocks is a core cooldown heal, but an Eternal Flame funded by Flashes of Light on the tank is an expensive filler heal. The rest follows exactly as described above.

This is why both secondary resource classes are set up the same way. Some cheap, inexpensive generators that are rate-limited by cooldown or otherwise: Holy Shock, Renewing Mist*, Expel Harm, Soothing Mist (Renewing is actually not cheap, but unlike the others it does a large amount of healing on its own, so it plays a dual role as a conventional core heal and an on-cooldown generator). These provide baseline resource intake that is independent of mana supply. If you want to generate more than what you’re given by those, you pay a lot to use a non-cooldown generator (tank Flash, Surging Mist, or Jab), the equivalent of another class’s spammable heals. If this paragraph makes sense to you, you should understand why Holy Power generation from Holy Light, or Chi generation from the cheap 5.0 Jab, were both design errors that had to be fixed.

So it’s a little confusing at first since the same heal (usually Eternal Flame or Uplift) can be either in a cooldown or non-cooldown column. It’s clearer when you think of the whole molecules of spenders and generators together, each having a defined output and efficiency. The force of the chemistry analogy is that each molecule should have 0 net Chi or Holy Power use. Shock-Shock-Shock-EF and ReM-EH-Uplift can be examined through conventional HPM analysis just like any normal single heal.

Where it gets a little more confusing is that in real healing, you don’t just spam out all parts of a molecule in a row. A mixed chain of spenders and generators is a sort of soup from which you have to tease out what’s really happening. If you’re using Surging Mist to enable more frequent Uplifts (anticipating that Surging will replace Jab for this in 5.2), and you cast ReM-Surging-Uplift-EH-Soothing(2 Chi)-ReM-Uplift-Surging-TFT-Uplift, what matters is that mixed in all that you have two Surgings and the one Uplift they pay for. The rest of it is normal use of your cheap Chi generators and the spenders they support. So the analysis should be that you added one heavy mana expenditure (a Surging-Surging-Uplift group) to your baseline healing over that period.

Next Steps

Perhaps by now you’ve noticed that I’ve gone another whole post with no (explicit) math in it. But that is largely the point–this is all the sort of discussion that should be had before putting detailed numbers to paper. Both because understanding these strategic points can already help your healing without the heavy investment in complicated math work, and also because we shouldn’t be doing any computation without a detailed understanding of what we’re computing and why. I think the latter has been a problem with a lot of healing theorycraft over the years. My own is no exception here–much of these posts are new ideas I’ve had since MoP arrived, and I’d been analyzing healing for years before.

I’m expecting that the next post in this sequence will be a numerical comparison of various healing spells, informed by all of the discussion so far. This isn’t cast in stone since I’ll still have to do a bunch of research, but the most prominent things I’m thinking of are:

• What is the raw HPM of each class’s best no-cooldown heal? (Rejuvenation, PoH, Surging-Surging-Uplift, etc.). Keep in mind other factors–some are HoTs, some are smart. What if we restrict to a single target?
• What’s the total mana output on each class’s core heals if used on cooldown? (i.e. how does the total average MP5 of WG/SM/LB on cooldown compare to Penance/Solace/PoM/RapturePWS on cooldown?)

I hope this has been helpful for you so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

It’s not just me who thinks of Shattered Halls as the “original” Challenge Mode. It’s a comparison that comes up time and time again, to pretty much anyone who’s been WoW seriously for long enough to remember that zone (up to and including the designers who made Challenge Modes, who have cited Shattered Halls as an inspiration). My recollection is that a SH clear with the best time (saving all three prisoners) was distinctly harder than a Bronze at a typical Challenge Mode. It was probably more akin to Silver, when you take into account that mechanics were somewhat meaner back then, but the timing didn’t emphasize the “race” aspect as much; you mostly just wanted to clear without wiping.

Talking about this just now I remembered that, since I was the raid leader of a somewhat serious progression guild in those days, I had strategy posts on the guild forum about everything, including the Trial of Mercy (which was needed to attune to Tempest Keep until they did away with that in later patches). I thought people might find it interesting to see a description of what that zone contained. For now it’s a straight copy of the notes I made to try to get guild groups through the zone, no edits at all. When I have more time I might elaborate further (also, skimming my long strategy posts for each boss in original Naxxramas gave a burst of nostalgia; it might be interesting to make a post out of those somehow).

Without further ado:

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[Originally posted by me, on sigilguild.net, 4/16/2007]

Firstly, the way the zone works. The first segment of the zone, up through the first boss, is untimed. When you run out of Grand Warlock Nethekurse’s room towards the archer hallway, Kargath yells, and the timer starts. The Executioner (standing in that little alcove behind Kargath) kills the first prisoner after 55 minutes, the second after 65 minutes, and the third after 80 minutes.

To complete the Trial of the Naaru, you have to get a 100% quest drop off of the Executioner, who despawns after killing the third prisoner. To complete Imprisoned in the Citadel (a quest you’ll pick up along the way), you have to save the second prisoner.

So, for the Trial, you have 80 minutes get to the end. Actually, you have slightly longer–as long as you pull Kargath before he yells (and kill him), the Executioner won’t proceed.

Also, if you die, you’ll lose the timer debuff. It doesn’t matter; things still proceed as normal.

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Trash

Legionnaire packs. A Legionnaire and up to 6 other orcs (all the others are fully CC’able). Requires very careful CC and setup. The Legionnare must be killed first, or he will call in replacements for any other mob you kill.
Reaver–strong Cleave. Good candidate to CC every pull.
Darkcaster–surprisingly tame for a caster mob. Casts a Rain of Fire that shouldn’t cause trouble if you’re paying attention.
Acolyte–we always CC’ed them, but I don’t think I ever actually saw one heal. They Mind Blast and PW:S, at least.
Sharpshooter. Hit weakly in melee range. On Heroic, they no longer Scattershot, but they Viper Sting.
Brawlers and Savages–melee mobs. Can hit kind of hard, and think one knocks back, so be careful.

Houndmaster packs. The two Hound adds now hit extremely hard. Every 10 seconds or so, the Houndmaster yells, and breaks all CC’s on the Hounds. You can sheep the Hounds, but it requires really solid re-sheeping, and there’s still a chance of a Mage getting one-shotted. You can try to tank all three, but the tank will get spiked quite a bit. The best option might be to try to tank two and kite one (they have low HP), or to tank all three for just a few seconds so the tank has aggro on them, and then start CC’ing.

Basically, you have to break out the solid Heroic trash skills if you’re going to get through this. Have a careful CC plan that you use every pull.

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The run.

–Pull the Legionnaire at the closest point and you’ll only get one add. Then clear the hallway one by one.
–2x Sentry, watch for charges.
–Pull the Lego at the extreme end (left or right) of his path, and you’ll only get two adds. Then clear the room.
–2x sentry.
–Lego + 4. Start warming up your trash skills before the timed portion.
–Lego + 4.
–Lego + 5. This can be a tricky pull: Lego, 2 Reavers, and 3 Sharpshooter. Might want to have your healer LOS the Sharpshooters and CC the Reavers. Tank should try to engage Sharpshooters in melee.
–Lego + 6 (yes, a 7-pull). 2 are non-elite Fel Orc Converts. CC the Reaver, kill the Lego, and kill the two non-elites quickly to get things under control.
–Kill the sleeping mobs in the room, one by one, to avoid mistakes later on.
–Houndmaster. Learn to do this once, before the timed portion.
–Hop down into the slime hallway.
–Grand Warlock Nethekurse. Not hard at all. Get people at max range to they’re not killed during Death Coil, and top off the party before the 25% enrage.

Do not exit the room after killing Nethekurse. Take a short afk break, have people raider if necessary. Then buff up and advance through the door.

TIMED PORTION BEGINS.

–The archer hallway. Every few seconds (maybe 30?), two new adds run down the hallway, until you engage the mini-boss. Quickly work your way down, chain-pulling two static mobs at a time. When you reach the end, wait for two spawns, kill them, kill the 4-pull of static mobs, wait for another spawn, kill them, and engage the mini-boss.

–Blood Guard Porung. New Heroic mini-boss. Both adds are fully cc’able. Porung’s only trick is a Fear. Long cooldown, but he can use it once early. We had the tank wear a PvP trinket to break it. Have people stand at max range and watch their aggro, and you should be able to just path him around during a Fear anyway.

–In the next hallway, you do not have to pull any of the Gladiator packs at the sides. Just stay carefully in the center at all time.
–There’s a Houndmaster patrol that you can pull before the Lego pack. Be careful with the Hounds in Porung’s small room.
–Lego + 4. Be careful not to pull the extra mob on the right.
–A few single- and double-pulls of the ones training on the dummies.
–Careful pulling the next Lego pack. You have to stay in the middle of the hallway, and might need to back up to avoid a Houndmaster patrol.
–Kill the Houndmaster patrol.
–2x Champion. Easy, but not CC’able.

–Warbringer O’mrogg. Thunderclap, Fear, and Burning Maul (when his Maul burns, he does increased damage for a bit, then he Blast Waves twice). Here’s the current hypothesis on the aggro mechanic: when the heads yell, the current MT has his aggro value switched with that of some random party member.
This fight is always a scramble. Regardless of your group setup, you have to be ready for the boss to be on non-tanks. Have Stam gear on and heal through it. You want to burn him down as quickly as possible.
The only way to get some degree of control over the fight is to remember the aggro mechanic. Ideally, you want to all 5 party members to have their aggro as equal as possible. Sometimes, DPS classes can carefully keep their threat above that of the tank, resulting in a non-switch where the boss simply remains on the tank. Healers should probably have Salv off, to keep their threat up. Tanks might have to hold back a little–if you get too far ahead of everyone, you wont be able to get the boss back after the first swap. If you have two people capable of tanking, you have have both of them keep their threat roughly equal and above everyone else.
Remember that KTM is only reliable until the first swap.
Don’t give up too much DPS in an effort to control the mechanic perfectly, because it won’t happen. Just try to keep track of what’s going on, while you burn him hard and be ready to heal anyone he switches to.

–2x Champions.
–The Assassin hallway. Expect to find at least 6 Assassins. They will usually open with a stun, but will sometimes Sap. You can have your tank lead, with the party ready to CC if he gets Sapped. You can lead with a Mage walking backwards, ready to mash Blink. There are many safe ways to do it. Perception also works. Clear the Assassins out of the first half, being careful to avoid the Houndmaster patrol.
–Pull the Houndmaster into the area cleared of Assassins.
–Clear the rest of the Assassins.
–2x Champions, with a possible Assassin add.

–Kargath Bladefist. Sweeping Strikes, periodic Orc adds of all types, some kind of charge, and Blade Dance. At every stop during Blade Dance, he swings in a huge 15yd arc, and on Heroic, it can hit cloth for upwards of 2500. If he Blade Dances while Sweeping Strikes is up, he can destroy any cloth-wearer in seconds.
You want to make sure everyone can survive 4, or a least 3, hits of Blade Dance. This means cloth-wearers need to try to find some HP (And remember things like Devotion, Inner Fire, and Ice Armor). Limited Invulnerability Potion can help make this a lot safer for some classes. Be ready to click on one if you take 2 hits within one Dance.
Make sure people are spread out through the room and don’t move much during the fight. Having people within Blade Dance range of each other can lead to hilariously quick deaths. Position the tank at the door to pick up each add that runs in, while the DPS burns down the boss as quickly as possible. You need to kill him before there are too many adds for the tank to handle, and you’d like to endure as few Blade Dances as possible.

–After Kargath is down, you just have to kill the Executioner, who’s basically a simple trash mob, to loot your quest item.

James says she “freaks out” when she hears people say that her book encourages domestic violence. “Nothing freaks me out more than people who say this is about domestic abuse,” she says. “Bringing up my book in this context trivializes the issues, doing women who actually go through it a huge disservice. It also demonizes loads of women who enjoy this lifestyle, and ignores the many, many women who tell me they’ve found the books sexually empowering.”

You can read the whole thing here.

In addition, she’s been blocking people who raise abuse concerns on her twitter feed and referring to them as trolls. In response to this mess, @50ShadesAbuse has been recently created to raise awareness of E. L. James’ failure to realize that touting her book as a realistic manual to finding the perfect relationship is misleading and potentially dangerous. A lot of people could stomach the phenomenon of this book’s popularity better if it were treated as fiction instead of a realistic, safe, or healthy model.

Unfortunately, that feed’s creation has also unearthed many rabid and often contradictory defenses of 50 Shades. You should read Jenny Trout’s excellent and calm rebuttal of all of these arguments.

This brings me to the point of my own post. I’m often lightly snarking 50 Shades on Twitter and here, but haven’t fully laid out what bothers me so much about it. There’s a danger of sounding redundant with so many recent excellent blog posts out there, but since E. L. James uses her clout to silence people who voice their opinions, the more awareness raised, the better.

50 Shades of Abuse

50 Shades of Grey promotes and glorifies abuse. It spreads its abusive taint over every interaction between Christian and Ana, including but certainly not limited to sexual ones. As a side note, the BDSM angles are actually rather tame compared to run-of-the-mill erotica, and the parts that stand out are memorable for the wrong reasons: lack of even basic safety precautions, and absence of any clear communication about consent.

Supporters of E.L. James like to turn accusations of this sort into evidence that the complainer is sexually repressed, unenlightened, and is sadly disgusted by any non-conventional relationship. Nobody is arguing here that BDSM is abuse. (If you are in fact arguing that, the rest of this article is probably not for you.) People are arguing that someone buying your spouse’s company in order to spy on her emails, deciding what type of birth control she should be on without her consent because you “dislike condoms”, flying across the country to meet her when she specifically wanted to go on vacation to get distance from you, and bruising your spouse so she can’t expose skin during a beach vacation is abusive. Abuse is present in the BDSM-lite interactions, but that is because Christian Grey is a fundamentally flawed character whose abusive tendencies extend to all aspects of his life, not that BDSM is fundamentally harmful. They do incredibly boring stuff like go out to eat pancakes at IHOP, and he’s still abusive to her there.

“You simply don’t understand kink!”

While the whole steaming heap of arguments in defense of 50 Shades are problematic, I need to take some time to explain that the specific rebuttal “that’s not abuse, that’s BDSM” especially bothers me. If I had encountered this book 10 years ago, there would have been massive emotional trauma as a result. I had a lot of controlling adults in my life growing up. I’m torn about giving details–I feel exceptionally childish making serious statements without an explanation, but don’t want to focus the post too much on myself. I’ll just give one example:  I had this one piano teacher who enjoyed videotaping lessons, screaming at me off-camera, and getting me to cry. He convinced my parents I was playing poorly because I didn’t watch the videos enough. So I watched myself crying on tape and being told I only performed well when I was yelled at for four years.

Needless to say, trying to reconcile actual adults being controlling and manipulative with the idea that BDSM was something I was maybe interested in exploring was a minefield as a teenager. All my actual experiences pointed to the fact that adults only used control to hurt each other and the last thing I needed to deal with was thinking about control/power issues in any context–even unrelated. I had periods of self-loathing, and tried to block it all out of my head growing up so I could focus on getting away from my family and town.

So to others who have been exposed to controlling/abusive relationships, the abuse angles may stand out more vividly instead of the tame (honestly) sex toys. I also think of readers that may be younger and more impressionable, that haven’t been exposed to something so drastic, but still have fears. If I suddenly want to stop, will this person respect my wishes–since I won’t be able to physically defend myself if my verbal plea is ignored? I’m new to this and very self-conscious, will I be made fun of? I’m not sure exactly what I like–is someone going to take advantage and manipulate me? What if I want to try something new and it was too intense, and now I’m an emotional mess without support? All the above scenarios have negative endings in 50 Shades, and instead of being treated as a badly-written work of fiction, people are treating it as gospel.

The way the book treats BDSM, already difficult for some people to openly admit to liking, discourages unsure or fearful readers from wanting to explore it further. And certainly fans smugly justifying things as “that’s not abuse, that’s the way things should be” is not going to make someone who has dealt with very real issues of powerlessness and abuse feel at ease. A lot of fans like to say that their sex life was better after reading this book, but if we’re going to play strictly by personal experiences, a large group of people also feel sick after reading this book. So let’s dispel the notion at the outset that all criticism of this book somehow arises from intolerance of non-vanilla relationships.

50 Shades in the Media

E. L. James vacillates between describing her book as a how-to sexual manual, when explaining its popularity, to touting her book as an imaginative work of fiction, when the accusations of abuse glorification pile up.

There are some other darker reasons why it’s popular. 50 Shades is a safe book for the media to use when describing female sexuality. It’s another way to belittle us. Women are meant to be voracious and undiscering consumers of culture, and this book poses no threat to the status quo. We need to buy clothing and makeup to find our hidden selves that we’ve lost. We need the right products to attract men we haven’t been able to lure otherwise. We’ve too stupid to understand math or science, but aren’t discerning or talented enough to make it in creative industries. We get mocked with shopaholic and fashion victim jokes all the time, except when it’s a wedding or birth, because those are Special Days that instead should get milked for their full and absurd monetary value. And now, instead of wondering if the Victoria’s Secret bra highlighted in [Generic Magazine] makes you look sexy or stupid, you’re staring in front of the cheesy 50 Shades-themed sex toy display.

It fits perfectly within this narrative that women are turning out in droves to buy a poorly-written book featuring a doormat for a heroine, whose one contribution to the landscape of popular culture is that it makes them work harder in the bedroom. Add to that a dash of class privilege–the origination of the “mommy porn” label from wealthy New York housewives apparently reading it during the day–and it’s a media darling. Everyone is comfortable with the interpretation that women have bad taste, want to spice up their sex lives, and enjoy being abused. There’s even a chapter where Christian decides that Ana should be on a birth control pill and justifies it as that he knows her body better than she does! (Her response is along the lines of “Yes…and oh god, he’s hot.”)

I also really can’t take reviews seriously that say this is groundbreaking erotica, when this series frequently uses the term “down there” to mean one of a dozen different body parts.

Glorifying 50 Shades

Attempting to view 50 Shades as both fact and fiction, as the author would like us to–depending on her mood–lead to amusing results. I got stuck on how Anastasia, the apparently inspirational heroine, was introduced to her alternate-reality version of BDSM. It’s quite the opposite of how a reader seeking insights would hopefully embark on a process of discovery. As a person who hasn’t even kissed someone before the book started, let alone masturbated, she’s plunged into an intense relationship that she’s not comfortable with any aspect of and is forbidden to talk about with her friends. She gets laughed at when she doesn’t understand the wording of the contract defining their relationship (yet another nonsensical idea presented without question in this book–not really standard practice for learning and exploring). She complains about the contract and her limits get overruled. He pushes her too far in their first intense exploration, and then guilts her into apologizing when she has an emotional breakdown instead of saying the safeword.

Somehow this is glorified. Christian buys Ana a diamond bracelet to hide the bruises he gave her through poorly restraining her (which itself was a misguided punishment for dressing too revealingly on the beach). While he makes her too nervous to eat, all of their expensive meals are described in loving food-porn detail. The book can sell any and all of this behavior as romantic because Christian is a wealthy and attractive male, something society drills into women to aspire to obtain as a life goal. Consumer culture wants your partner to spend lots of money on you, and Christian certainly fulfills that fantasy.  Five-course meals! First edition books! Computers and cars as gifts! Personal shoppers from Neiman Marcus! Honeymoons in Monaco! Olympians as personal trainers! As Roxane Gay put it in her brilliant article The Trouble With Prince Charming Or He Who Trespassed Against Us: “A prison is still a prison when the sheets are 1200 thread count.” It’s no surprise that spending money is viewed as the sign as a successful relationship. Would this relationship be just as exciting if Christian kept all of his stalkerish behaviors, but didn’t follow up each instance with an expensive gift?

I’ve been putting video guides of zones I’ve finished so far here. I do think those should be helpful for anyone who’s trying to learn any specific instance. But I also wanted to make a post with general information on things you might want to know before making a challenge mode group.

This is primarily for people who are trying to get good at the zones to achieve a certain time (whether your time goal is gold or something lower). If you’re just looking to run a zone once for a daily, which is incidentally the fastest way to get VP, it doesn’t apply as much.

Scheduling a Group

Scheduling a challenge mode group is much like a raid team, only much simpler with only 5 people. This is mostly obvious, but I highlight it only to point out that in order to succeed at zone, you need to bring the same group of 5 people for a substantial number of attempts. Simply going and running a zone once with a group and then running it again with a different group isn’t going to work. Even more so than in raid content, your team of 5 will be working together to plan a routine for a lot of detailed strategies, and you need to be able to progress as a group. Schedule a few hours with a group just like you would for a raid.

Similarly, whatever your goal is (e.g. gold), I’d recommend you stick with one zone until you get it, before moving on to the next. The experience of sticking with the zone and getting familiar with it with the same 5 people, ideally in one sitting, will get you there a lot faster than switching zones in order to get your title/mount and then coming back for golds.

Something to think about is whether you want to have only 5 people who come regularly, and not be able to run if anyone is out, or have a few extra and clear zones multiple times to get every person through each one. The latter is not so bad since, like with raids, once you know a zone it is much easier to swap one person and still clear it.

Class Setup and Talents

Gold can be achieved with basically any reasonable group setup. However, making sure you meet a few basic criteria will be helpful:

Buff/debuff synergies. The usual stuff from raids–you usually can’t meet all of them in a 5-man, but you can get pretty close. In particular, if 2 of your DPS are of the same type (physical or magical), try to make sure they’re not missing anything important like their haste buff. Remember a Hunter can fill in whatever is the most important buff that you’d be missing otherwise (including Bloodlust, which is generally an important one). If you’re missing Stamina (no Priest/Warrior/Warlock), a Runescroll can get you 8%, which is nearly as good.

Melee vs. ranged DPS. There’s no hard and fast rule here, and some zones can be done with any amount of melee, but in general having two ranged and a melee will be a convenience.

AoE stuns. These are worth their weight in gold. Having two in the group is great–the third is less valuable due to DR, but if you’re moving quickly it lets you potentially use stuns on more packs. All CC/utility is going to be helpful, but I’m singling out AoE stuns because of how instrumental they can be in hard trash packs. AoE silences and to a lesser extent AoE disorients are also great because they can be chained once stuns are on DR.

While not technically a stun, there is also a special honorable mention for Army of the Dead, which can severely neuter whatever is the hardest trash pack in a given zone. Not to mention, the Death Knight can also bring Remorseless Winter, a great AoE stun, and if that’s not needed, there’s always a use for Gorefiend’s Grasp.

AoE roots are a bit less desirable since they can result in melee DPS being instantly killed. Similarly, AoE knockbacks are more situational–they disrupt DPS and sometimes can’t be used for fear of aggroing extra mobs. When safe though, they can provide a valuable extra interrupt or few seconds’ reprieve for a tank.

Beyond this, I’m simply going to say that every class has its utility and has to think of ways to use it. Preemptive HoP can allow a healer to stay at range during a tough pickup without getting aggro. Silencing Shot can get casters to come into the clump of mobs so they’ll be in the stun rotation. Ursol’s Vortex can help a tank kite. Success in challenge modes often comes down to people being able to make strong use of their utility effects.

Consumables

You obviously want to be flasked while running them, and using typical raid food. As always, don’t get caught up obsessing over things like 300 stat food, but use whatever you’d use in a raid. There are only a few challenge-specific things:

Invisibility Potion: Challenge modes have a minimum number of trash mobs you must kill to complete the zone, but this is generally tuned to allow you to skip a few packs. The easiest way to do this is to use Invisibility Potions. You’ll want to have a good supply whenever you’re doing your serious gold attempts. There is also a Lesser version that may be cheaper and is often sufficient.

Regular Potions (DPS/mana). I only want to point out that, unlike in a raid encounter, you break combat at times during challenge modes, so you can potentially use more potions. The flip side is that Invisibility Potions put your potions on a 10 minute cooldown, so if you Invis early in a zone you may not be using any potions for the rest of it.

Restorative Amber: The tooltip says they restore 150k mana over 20 seconds, but in fact they restore 300k mana over 10 seconds, making them twice as fast as normal drinking. Your healer will definitely want these (buy from the quartermaster at Klaxxi’vess). You can’t break the effect just by moving or casting like with normal food; you should make a “/cancelaura Restorative Amber” macro to make sure you can stop drinking if you need to before 10 seconds are up.

Runescroll of Fortitude: As mentioned above, can provide a Fort buff that’s just about as strong as the Priest/Warrior/Warlock one (8% rather than 10%). If Runescroll III isn’t on your AH and you don’t have a scribe handy, Runescroll II still gives 7%.

G91 Landshark: A cheap engineering-crafted item that’s usable by anyone, this does an uncapped AoE of about 40k damage per target. When killing any numerous pack of trash mobs, using one of these (they have a 1 minute cooldown) is worth the 1 second cast.

Drums of Speed: Handy in a variety of places of course, if you have any leatherworkers. The materials are very easy to acquire if anyone in the group has a skinning alt.

Worth noting that since there are no repair costs in challenge modes, the cost isn’t that bad compared to raiding, but can still be a little higher overall depending on the price of the Invisibility Potions.

Gear

All items in challenge modes are scaled down to ilvl 463. Since at this point you probably have an ilvl 463 or better in every slot (if you don’t, you should try to fill them in), there are only a few considerations:

• Since different items can have different secondary stats, you may swap around a little from your raid gear depending on what abilities you might be using more in a 5-man. i.e. If AoEing a lot favors a different stat for you, or if you’re a healer and you want to gear for max throughput at the expense of regen (I recommend this).
• Hit/expertise stats are not scaled down, so you will still not miss. Haste is however, so if haste breakpoints are very important to your class you should check your haste inside a challenge mode zone (from the Horde/Alliance towns in Vale, it only takes a minute to zone into Mogu’shan Palace and check). In theory you might drop your hit to the level 92 cap to gain other stats since challenge trash is only 92, but you spend enough time in combat with bosses that this is probably not worth the trouble.
• Items with sockets are still better than items without sockets, sometimes by a noticeable margin (the scaling system doesn’t account for sockets perfectly). Likely a nonissue as your raid gear probably has all your best items with the most sockets already.
• Trinkets may give you more options than what you have in raids, since any trinket of ilvl 458 (JP upgraded to 466) or better is a potential choice. Of all the MoP trinkets you have, you can decide which has the best stat allocation for you. If you have any 458 trinkets that might be useful at all (for example Zen Alchemist’s Stone can be quite good), you should use JP to upgrade it before the upgrade system is removed in 5.2.
• Set bonuses and Sha-touched gems are not active in challenge modes, so these are not gear considerations.
• Enchants retain their full value. For expensive weapon enchants, remember that any socketed (not Sha-touched) weapon, even an LFR one, is effectively “best in slot” for challenge so you should feel free to enchant it if you have one.

For the most part, this really does mean you can walk in in your raid gear, with haste breakpoints being the most likely exception. But given how easy it can be to swap between gear/reforge sets with an addon, it can be worth reshuffling things to be a bit more optimal before spending a whole evening in challenge modes.

Planning and Executing Runs

The first issue is to try to know the zone a little in advance. You may not remember the heroic version well if you haven’t done it in a while, and even then, if you’re seriously thinking about doing challenge modes, heroics were probably so easy for you that you didn’t notice all the mob abilities (especially trash). Suffice to say, you will need to know what even the trash packs do. Wowhead’s zone page (e.g. Scarlet Monastery) has an “NPCs” tab that’s very helpful for this (the pages for individual spells can also show the damage difference between heroic and challenge). You can click through to any individual enemy type to see its abilities. Watching a video of the zone is also a good preparation, and can give you ideas about the route to take.

Once you’re in the zone, the main philosophy is to first plan out the whole run, and then try to execute it for gold once you know the whole plan. Don’t fall into the trap of starting, and then resetting each time something goes wrong. As any speedrun enthusiast knows, there are a number of problems with this, chief among them that you never practice the end. You also never establish good time benchmarks, or see how timer usage affects later parts of the run.

The first thing you should do is at least one complete run of the zone, not resetting no matter what happens. For each boss or trash pack that you wipe to, when you do kill it, take note of whether you think you have a reliable plan or whether it is likely to wipe you more times unless you practice it more. Also track how many mobs you’ve killed, and depending on whether you’re replicating a route you saw in a video, which packs you can skip and still make the enemy count. Don’t hesitate to intentionally wipe on pulls if you think more practice is needed to make sure you can do them reliably.

A particular point sticking point is the invis potion. If your invis routine is messed up in any way (someone gets broken out, someone aggros something, someone is in combat at the wrong time, the group miscommunicates on timing, etc.), you have to reset the run and moreover, you have a 10 minute waiting period before trying again. This is another reason why you don’t want to be doing runs with full consumables until you know the route–once your failures start incurring a 10 minute wait, you want as few as possible. Practice the invis potion once during practice runs (even though it “wastes” 5 potions) just to make sure everyone knows exactly where and when you enter and exit invisibility. After that, simply clear the trash you’d otherwise skip on practice runs (don’t worry about doing it fast) so that you can practice the parts of the zone that come after.

Raid markers persist when you resist a challenge mode, so you should place them down liberally on your first practice run–most importantly mark the locations where you enter and exit invisibility, and then any other significant things that come up along the way.

Remember that you cannot invis pot in combat, so take two seconds on Mumble to confirm that everyone’s out of combat before clicking them. Also remember that using an ability like Stampeding Roar or Aspect of the Pack will break the user out of invis; that person has to use it before drinking the potion.

If you have a Rogue in your group, Shroud of Concealment not only avoids much of the above hassle, but potentially allows you to skip trash at two different points in the zone as long they’re 5 minutes apart. It also lets the group continue using potions for the entire run, which is a nice DPS increase.

Once you’re done with a complete run on what you think will be your final route, you have to ask if there are any sticking points. Is there any pull that you’re not comfortable one-shotting? Typically people in the group are working out things like “when we pull trash pack X I’m going to use spell Y on mob Z to make sure it doesn’t cause a problem.” The tank and healer typically have to make note of what packs will instantly flatten the tank unless cooldowns and spam heals are used preemptively. You know who stuns first on every hard pack and exactly when they’re going to (i.e. the moment the mobs are all clumped near the tank)–the tank and healer will be counting on that to happen so they use their cooldowns after the stun and not during it. The healer knows when he drinks and how he’s stretching each mana bar between combat breaks (in general you are rarely out of combat except when forced by the zone design or when your healer needs it during a lot stretch).

You get the idea. The point is that all these things happen naturally in a practice run, and the main effort required is to remember them and plan to repeat them. It’s much like learning a Heroic raid encounter–you build a routine of who does exactly what exactly when. The difference is that all boss fights have some degrees of repetition. But a challenge mode, though not longer than a long raid boss, is a series of totally different encounters strung together, so there can be a lot to plan out.

Conclusion

The first conclusion about challenge modes is that you should try them. I made this point about healing in a recent post, but it applies to anyone. The challenges you face are different than in any other type of content, and you will learn to play your class better. The second is that, while they are hard, the gradations of difficulty make them a lot more accessible than they seem. With raiding, if you can’t kill the boss, there’s no consolation–you’re just stuck. With challenges, if gold is still beyond you and your group, you can still work on silver and have a very similarly rewarding experience to show for it. There’s no reason not to try, and I hope this post has somewhat demystified them.

The only thing you have to do after reading this is find 4 friends who are also interested. I believe that even in this age of LFR, that is not too much to ask.

If you’re new here, much of this blog covers game-related topics, but I do have another 50 Shades piece from the summer. It’s called 50 Shades of WoW and mashes up the game my website covers with the awfulness of 50 Shades.

Anyway, onto food in Book 2:

Christian ordering Ana to eat gets really fucking weird in the second book. We learn he’ll stop ordering her around to eat when he wants sex, even when minutes ago he appeared so worried she was starving. He doesn’t appear genuinely concerned for her at all: ordering her to eat is just another way he can control her when he can’t control her with sex.

This book makes the first book seem healthy in comparison. I’m going to organize this book slightly differently and summarize all the food references for each day, because some days have plot arcs that center around food consumption. These chapters are also laced with control about Ana’s body–from “small” things like arguing to let her drive with music on, to majorly wtf things like forcing her to use birth control because he dislikes condoms, even down to scheduling appointments without her knowledge.

Day 1: Ana hasn’t eaten for four days

We start off the food analysis with a bang:

 ”I am finding it difficult to eat. By Wednesday lunchtime, I manage a cup of yogurt, and it’s the first thing I’ve eaten since Friday. I am surviving on a newfound tolerance for lattes and Diet Coke. It’s the caffeine that keeps me going, but it’s making me anxious.”

Anxious? How about, faint and passing out.

This is due to Ana deciding to break up with Christian, so she must fill the roll of an innocent martyr by starving and punishing herself. In this section, she also notes that her roommate, Kate, is probably drinking a cocktail on a warm beach. Kate is often set up as a contrast to Ana and is the target of much illogical snark, such as being shamed for being openly affectionate to her boyfriend or vocal about Christian being creepy. Kate has no inhibitions, so of course she can eat as much food and get as much pleasure as she wants. Ana has to torture herself every step of the way, because she’s a good virtuous girl.

Day 2: Ana breaks her fast, is full after five bites of steak

When dressing up for her friend’s art show, Ana notices that “the dress is looser on me than it was, but I pretend not to notice.”

Christian notices it as well, saying “When did you last eat?” by way of a greeting, upon first interacting with her after their breakup. He then comments at the event, “Those beautiful eyes look too large in your face, Anastasia. Please tell me you’ll eat.”

The bizarre symbolism that starving herself represents independence, while eating represents capitulating to Christian’s whims, is further developed in the resulting dialogue:

“Yes, Christian, I’ll eat,” I answer automatically, a platitude.

“I mean it.”

“Do you now?” I cannot keep the disdain out of my voice. Honestly, the audacity of this man—this man who has put me through hell over the last few days. No, that’s wrong.    I’ve put myself through hell. No. It’s him. I shake my head, confused.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Anastasia. I want you back, and I want you healthy.”

However, in spite of this angst, they can both agree to drink white whine at the reception without hesitation. Ana is only internally worried that Christian, a wine snob, will hate it.

They’ve only been at the show for a few pages, but Christian abruptly orders Ana to leave and get food (and also is condescending to Jose):

“I’m taking you for something to eat. You’re fading away in front of me. Find the boy, say good-bye.

“Please, can we stay longer?”

“No. Go. Now. Say good-bye.”

See, Ana is trying to be all feisty and stubborn about her food ideals, but Christian here is being all dommy and ordering her around and aww, he knows what’s best, he’s a man that wants her to eat. /puke

Christian then orders “sirloin steak cooked medium, béarnaise sauce if you have it, fries, and green vegetables” for Ana, who complains that she doesn’t like steak, but interrupts the conversation to order a bottle of wine without second thought.

Ana’s reaction to seeing the steak placed in front of her is: “Holy hell. Food.”She’s too nervous to eat, as usual:

Deep down I know I’m hungry, but right now, my stomach is in knots. Sitting across from the only man I have ever loved and debating our uncertain future does not promote a healthy appetite. I look dubiously at my food.

Christian is ever-so-caring, using this as an opportunity to crack a joke at beating her, which was the reason she broke up with him less than a week ago:

“So help me God, Anastasia, if you don’t eat, I will take you across my knee here in this restaurant, and it will have nothing to do with my sexual gratification. Eat!”

Of course, when she calls Christian Sir, he stops bossing her and decides it’s totally fine she’s only eaten half a meal in the past week, so they can moving onto the sexing again. As she’s complaining she’s full and can’t eat anymore, she takes a “sip of the delicious wine.”

 Day 3: Christian is upset she’s not eating more, so distracts her with sex during dinner

We start off the day on a tentatively positive note, with Ana eating a banana for breakfast. We learn of this when Christian emails her asking if she’s eaten, and then he snarks her small breakfast saying she’ll need “more energy for begging,” so that’s less positive. She then has a pastrami sandwich for lunch without much fanfare. Hooray!

Alcohol is again never an issue, even in the presence of people she’s uncomfortable with, so she drinks three beers at a staff party with her creepy boss present.

After Ana expresses outrage that he bought the company she works for, they go home to…eat. He’s annoyed she hasn’t eaten dinner and narrows his eyes, but she insinuates she wants sex instead of food. There is a really strange exchange over the next few pages in which they alternate between making out and Christian criticizing Ana for not eating more:

 ”“I see,” he says, and his lips press into a thin line. “Come, let’s have something to eat.

Oh no!    “I thought we were going to bed! I want to go to bed with you.”

““You need to eat and so do I,” he murmurs, burning gray eyes gazing down at me.    “Besides . . . anticipation is the key to seduction, and right now, I’m really into delayed gratification.”

“He smiles at me tenderly. “Eat. You’re too slender.”

“I’m still mad that you bought SIP, and now I am mad at you because you’re making me wait.” I pout.    “You are one angry little madam, aren’t you? You’ll feel better after a good meal.”

They decide to go to the grocery store, since he’s annoyed she has no food in the house. We also learn that Christian has never learned to cook, which makes sense because he cares about food so much. However, he decides that they can eat later, orders her to put the chicken in the fridge, and then pulls her into the bedroom for sex.

He then spoils the mood after sex by saying that they need to eat. So basically, he tries to make Ana feel bad about sex by not meeting his demands, and then makes Ana feel bad about wanting sex by saying she should eat. Ana is more than willing to admit though that she’s a great cook and Kate is a terrible cook–of course Kate is a terrible cook, all she likes to do is publicly make out with her boyfriend and has no problems enjoying a good meal, unlike Ana.

Christian then attempts something romantic with restraints and ice cream, but she thinks “Okay, enough” after being fed one scoop and shuts her mouth and shakes her head.

He scoops another spoonful and feeds me some more, then he does it again. Okay, enough.    “Hmm, well, this is one way to ensure you eat—force-feed you. I could get used to this.” Taking another spoonful, he offers me more. This time I keep my mouth shut and shake my head.

Yeah right, you care so much about her eating habits, you instantly dropped all interest in food twice in two days when sex was hinted at.

Day 4: Christian decides what birth control Ana should be on

After taking Ana to get her hait cut at the salon his ex runs goes sour, they find themselves awkwardly back at home. Left alone, she starts off dancing around the room as she cooks brunch for Christian, but by the time they sit down, she loses her appetite because he brings up past relationships.

The food at the charity banquet is pretty fancy, and she does manage to eat it because she realizes she is “famished.” Salmon tartare, duck breast, figs and maple ice cream, cheese, coffee.

On a related note, since food is one way to symbolize control of Ana’s body, here’s another shitty angle of controlling her:

“What did you mean about a big day tomorrow?” I ask to distract myself.

“Dr. Greene is coming to sort you out. Plus, I have a surprise for you.”

“Dr. Greene!” I halt.

“Yes.”

“Why?

“Because I hate condoms,” he says quietly. His eyes glint in the soft light from the paper lanterns, gauging my reaction.

“It’s my body,” I mutter, annoyed that he hasn’t asked me.

“It’s mine, too,” he whispers.

I gaze up at him as various guests pass by, ignoring us. He looks so earnest. Yes, my body is his . . . he knows it better than I do.

S’ok, just starve yourself for the rest of the book to show you’re empowered and are independent in spite of agreeing to birth control you don’t want because your hot boyfriend declares he owns your body.

Day 5: Ana actually eats 2.5 meals

You know a relationship is trusting and positive when your reaction to being asked if you’ve eaten breakfast is “uh-oh.”

“Are you hungry? You didn’t finish all your breakfast.” He glances quickly at me, disapproval outlined on his face.    Uh-oh. “Yes.”

“Lunch first, then.

They go out to spend a lovely day sailing in the bay, with chowder and beer for lunch, and Italian food for dinner (on “unfeasibly large” plates). It’s just punctuated by ominous messages like following throughout, which make the mood creepy instead of romantic:

I am less nervous of his moods, confident that he won’t punish me, and he seems more comfortable with me, too.

Day 6: Mrs. Jones, the only non-threatening female, cooks Ana food, which she likes.

Day 6 is a ray of sunshine, at first. Mrs. Jones makes pancakes and bacon for Ana, which she eats without drama. She then likes the chicken sandwich Mrs. Jones has packed for lunch, and when she’s “starving” again in the evening, she’s able to eat a “delicious” coq au vin, once again cooked by Mrs. Jones.

Ana is predatory towards every other woman in the book though, even her best friend Kate, so this really just shows that she likes Mrs. Jones because she’s relegated to the mother/caretaker role and isn’t a sexual threat to Christian.

Day 7: Ana hears about Christian’s ex and loses her appetite

Day 7 begins on a positive note, as Ana once again eats pancakes and bacon made by Mrs. Jones for breakfast, and tuna salad for lunch. She then goes for three beers and a brandy with friends after work, instead of dinner. This is alright, except then she declares she’s not hungry at 11pm.  Christian makes food and forces her to eat it.  However, when he tells her about one of his exes during dinner, she is naseaous and throws her meal in the trash.

Day 8: Ana oversleeps and forgets to eat

Ana oversleeps because she was so distraught the night before, misses breakfast, and only has a latte for lunch. She’s interrupted when she goes to get an afternoon snack at work, and finally has a full meal when she eats Mrs. Jones’ chipotle for dinner.

Day 9: Ana is ordered to eat breakfast and dinner, because she’s not eating on her own

Ana tells Mrs. Jones she wants a light breakfast, but Christian’s lips twitch and he snarks her small meal: “Eat your granola, all of it, if that’s all you’re having.”

After she inherits her boss’ job after being at work for a week, she is so busy that she forgets to eat lunch.

For dinner, they go to a fancy restaurant, where she eats the oyster appetizer sexily because Christian is feeding them to her.

Then he demands her to eat her real dinner, and she just wants to have sex, so he jokes about hitting her again if she won’t eat.

“Eat,” he orders. “I am not taking you home until you’ve finished your meal, and then we can really celebrate.” His expression is so heated, so raw, so commanding. I am melting.

“I’m not hungry. Not for food.”

He shakes his head, thoroughly enjoying himself, but narrows his eyes at me just the same.

“Eat, or I’ll put you across my knee, right here, and we’ll entertain the other diners.

He then says that she doesn’t eat enough, and she both likes being this skinny but doesn’t want to dwell on why.

 “Eat this,” he murmurs, his voice low and seductive.    I willingly comply.

“You really don’t eat enough. You’ve lost weight since I’ve known you.” His tone is gentle.

I don’t want to think about my weight; truth is, I like being this slim.

Day 10: Ana’s friends notice she lost weight

Kate has noticed Ana has lost weight, after not seeing her for only two weeks. She also manages to sound negatively concerned and happy with Ana’s appearance at the same time:

“You’ve lost weight. A lot of weight. And you look different. Grown up. What’s been going on?” she says, all mother hen, concerned and bossy. “I like your dress. Suits you.

Day 11: Ana makes birthday food for Christian, who is annoyed she’s wearing a short dress

Ana makes Christian breakfast in bed and then “watercress, cilantro, and sour cream dip to accompany the salmon” for his birthday lunch, but he’s annoyed when he sees her set the table, because he dislikes her short dress.

“You like it?” I give him a quick twirl. It’s one of Caroline Acton’s purchases. A soft turquoise sundress, probably more suitable for the beach, but it’s such a lovely day on so many levels. He frowns and my face falls.

“You look fantastic in it, Ana. I just don’t want anyone else to see you like that.

He then compliments her on her cooking and she “blossoms under his praise.” She decides to bake him a chocolate cake, and he gets annoyed that she is going outside in a short dress for ingredients:

“I’m just heading to the store to pick up some ingredients.”    “Okay.” He frowns at me.

“What?”

“You going to put some jeans on or something?”

Oh, come on. “Christian, they’re just legs.”

He gazes at me, unamused. This is going to be a fight. And it’s his birthday. I roll my eyes at him, feeling like an errant teenager.

She follows this up with thinking “I have a tiger by the tail. He’s going to be mad when I get back.” at the store. While cooking in the kitchen she senses a “frisson of alarm” and she apologizes to him for wearing the dress and not knowing what came over her.

After sex though, he loves what the cake tastes like and jokes that sex is a good apology. She laughs with relief, which is a really strange first emotion to have after you give someone who loves you a delicious cake. What was she dreading?

Ana’s rebellion here parallels her anorexic defiance. She lashes out in a way to show that she’s not submissive and can defy Christian, but the book critiques her “independent” actions. She repeatedly tries not to eat, and then realizes she is starving. She prank-calls Christian in Book 1 when she’s drunk as a joke, but then nearly passes out so Christian has to save her. She goes to the store and realizes that yes, Christian is right, her skirt is short. She apologizes for wearing the short skirt and apologizes by having sex. But whenever she cooks or has sex with Christian, things are wonderful.

While their fanciful NDA may be finally ripped up, their relationship is firmly cemented in the underlying darker principles of it–that Ana shouldn’t disagree with Christian. If Ana just agrees with Christian, she won’t have to think and things will be fine. If she defies him, things aren’t fine. And she defies him over stupid things, so that justifies his control-freak nature. If she wasn’t such a woman in need of saving, Christian wouldn’t need to be rude to her while saving her.

Spellpower

All heals scale linearly with spellpower–there’s a base heal amount and then a spellpower term with some coefficient particular to each heal. An interesting point in MoP is that for nearly all heals, the base amount is scaled to be roughly 11,000 times the coefficient. For example, Divine Light has a mean base heal of 16817 and a coefficient of 149%, a ratio of 11287. For the HoT portion of Lifebloom, the base heal of each tick is 9315/15 = 621, and the coefficient is 5.7%, for a ratio of 10894. I actually don’t know of any heals off the top of my head that don’t follow this, but there are probably a few.

The significance is that heals tend to scale in proportion with each other as your spellpower increases. With 11000 spellpower, they all do twice as much as they do with 0, and so on. Since for raiding purposes, your spellpower is affected by a 10% buff, the better rule of thumb is that the base heal is worth 10,000 spellpower. This is handy to keep in mind, as it gives you a concrete picture of what a spellpower increase means to you. If you had 20,000 spellpower when you started raiding and now you have 30,000, you can expect that all of your heals are healing for 1/3 more than what they were before (and that’s before mastery scaling and any other benefits you might have).

An interesting footnote is that for DPS spells, the number seems to be closer to 2000 or even less, rather than 10,000. In general they seem to want the steady increase to healing spells over the course of an expansion to be much less dramatic than DPS.

Intellect

The main function of Int is to provide spellpower. The only additional note that applies to Int specifically is that it scales 5% better than spellpower due to your armor specialization or equivalent cloth bonus, 5% better again due to raid buffs, and potentially more if you have talents like Heart of the Wild.

Int also provides chance to crit, although it’s not very much. Consider the crit contribution of 1 Int to be about 1/4 of a crit rating. Spellpower, being a primary stat, should generally be worth about twice as much as crit rating, a secondary stat. So Int’s spellpower contribution is an order of magnitude more significant than its crit contribution.

Mastery

Now we start getting into something interesting. 600 mastery rating gives what was called, before MoP, “1 Mastery.” They don’t show that on the character sheet anymore, but it’s still convenient to compare mastery bonuses in terms of the % increase for each 600 rating.

Monk: 1.2%*
Druid, Holy Priest: 1.25%
Paladin: 1.5%
Disc Priest: 2.5%
Shaman: 3%
*Monk is irregular since the mastery bonus is then multiplied by an individualized modifier for each spell, and for other reasons.

Druids have the simplest healing mastery. Harmony is a flat % bonus to all healing, so long as you have cast a direct heal in the past 20 seconds (in practice, this has 100% uptime). So that’s an interesting starting point. For the most boring possible bonus, the uniform % to all throughput, the standard of mastery scaling is 1.25%. Not much more to say there.

Holy Priests are similar, getting 1.25% via Echo of Light, applying to all heals besides Renew ticks, Holy Word: Sanctuary, and Lightwell. Maybe we’d have expected a small bump upwards to the bonus since it excludes a few heals, but I guess they thought it was a small enough portion that it won’t throw off scaling. We might also expect the lingering HoT to be a slightly less effective heal delivery than the Druids’ straight-up increase, or the shield-oriented bonus of Paladins and Disc Priests.

Disc Priests are interesting: fully double the usual scaling, applying only to PW:S and Divine Aegis (looking at the 5.2 version that excludes Spirit Shell). Without conducting a study of Disc logs since this post is a survey: if PW:S and 50% of the value of crit heals and Prayer of Healing collectively account for about half of what Disc Priests output, then their double-strength mastery scaling will be roughly in line. Disc is also a good case study for how this is sort of high-level scaling analysis can predict balance problems. 5.1 Spirit Shell by itself gave full mastery scaling with up to 25% uptime, controlled by the player, stackable with other buffs, and in shield form. This is definitely suspect for a mastery bonus that shouldn’t be affecting more than about 50% of total healing even if it were randomly distributed.

This is the sort of analysis we might hope to do in more detail when getting into meaningful questions of comparison across all classes. Shaman get an interesting quick note, since their 3% Deep Healing balances against a blanket 1.25% mastery if typical heal targets are at around 58% HP. Monk mastery is the only one that’s not a loose variation of a flat % to some subset of your heal spells, so there’s no general way to predict how it will scale without going down the whole spell list. I imagine they had to balance it mostly ad hoc, and similarly, evaluating the size of the bonus for Monks can’t really be done without quite a lot of arithmetic.

Crit

Crit increases most heals for most classes by 106% with a meta gem. Its scaling is generally weaker than mastery 600 at rating for 1%. Discipline effectively has a (300+Mastery)% bonus on non-PoH heals due to Aegis and in fact crit outscales mastery quite heavily for these heals. This effect might be more noticeable after the 5.2 Spirit Shell changes.

There seems to be a widespread mental slant against the value of crit for healers because of the chance of overheal (or a slightly related argument that I think has a little more merit, the inconsistency of it). I’d be careful about writing off the value of crit in this way. I don’t actually know of any good evidence that increased critical healing cancels out most of its effect by increasing your overheal ratio (this would be a good log study). In general you want to watch out for the “it’s all overhealing” argument, because it can be applied to pretty much any healing stat (and tends to be in most forum discussion) without much reasoning beyond that fact that it’s easy to picture in your head.

Most heals overheal quite a bit–look at any log. The question when adding to your healing output in any way is whether the new healing is likely to, on average, have the same efficacy as the prior healing, or more, or less. Maybe you’re inclined to argue that crit heals must have lower effectiveness because they can only be effective if the underlying heal would have been fully effective. But this argument generally applies to increases from spellpower, crit, most masteries, HoT breakpoints, and (slightly modified) haste. It’s neither here nor there.

Short version: added healing is what it is. Even though increasing your total raw healing output isn’t itself a goal the way it is for DPS, one can generally expect that small increases in raw healing, other things being equal, will manifest as similarly-sized increases in effective healing.

Haste

This is where we get a little less mathy and have to think back to the principles again. The math of haste is not mysterious at all: 1% to everything you do for every 425 rating. But let’s pause at “1% to everything you do”:
–cast time of anything is reduced by 1%.
–you burn mana 1% faster while taking advantage of this.
–your cooldowns aren’t changed.
–HoT spells might get extra ticks, but to avoid any quadratic scaling, they either have a constant cast time (Rejuvenation, Renew), or have cooldowns, so they get no other benefit (we should make note to further examine Riptide in this regard).

So the first red flag is that for spells with cooldowns, haste is positively unexciting. This is important because the relationship between cooldown and non-cooldown spells is an important one that’s going to be developed more in later posts. Generally, healing class design tends to have some strong, efficient spells delineated by coodowns to establish a sort of baseline amount of output, and then spells you can use in the remaining time that can be modulated more widely based on healing need, time, and mana. The stratification between cooldown and no-cooldown heals isn’t totally strict (in particular, Prayer of Healing really pushes some boundaries). It’s an interesting pattern though because, like the Int scaling, it appears designed to reflect a desire to dampen the scaling of healing classes as gear increases.

End digression. Haste doesn’t let you cast Circle of Healing or Holy Shock or Spirit Shell more often. In fact, whatever effect there is on cooldown spells, haste generally lets you use them less often, assuming you actually make use of the haste to spend mana on no-cooldown heals more often.

Haste is hard to make a case for in specs that, like healers, have dead time in their rotation. People tend to point out the value of haste in burst output. My basic problem here though, is that nearly all stats (other than regen) increase your burst output. Mastery (where it applies), crit and spellpower all give you that added burst HPS at 0 mana cost, while haste gives it you at mana cost increases in full proportion to the added spells you cast.

So we’ll see where we wind up in terms of haste after a closer look at class mechanics, but it’s an uphill battle.

The one completely different effect of haste is HoT breakpoints, which do function like other stats in that they increase healing per cast. You have to be careful not to overempasize this though. In the long run, haste increases healing per HoT cast by an amount equal to the % haste increase, nothing more. So the clumpiness of the haste benefit to HoTs can be used to your avantange when you are close to a breakpoint and can get a chunk of healing for a few extra stat points. But once you’re there, you have to pay full price to get the benefit of the next breakpoint anyway. So you should know your breakpoints to make the proper small-scale adjustments, but Druids are the only healer who use HoTs so much that haste is a “true” increase to a significant portion of healing.

Spirit

This section is a bit of an outline or placeholder; a full followup to the Int/Spirit article will be a post of its own. Here are the most salient things to keep in mind.

Spirit does not let you cast your efficient cooldown-bearing heals much more. It might, to the extent you reduce use of them somewhat when really strapped for mana. Mostly though, this means you weren’t budgeting mana well when you had less of it, if you weren’t already using your most efficient heals as much as you could.

So in some ways it’s similar to haste in that Circle of Healing-type spells don’t get much out of it. The benefit of added mana accrues primarily to whatever you freely cast in between, which you can now do more. Even without making assumptions on how you cast, at least take in the concept: the value of Spirit depends on which spell you will actually cast more with each marginal point. If that spell is an inefficient filler like Regrowth, you might be better off doing what you can to bolster other parts of your healing rather than relying on it more. If your mana->throughput factory is Prayer of Healing, maybe we’ll find that you can take that Spirit all the way to the bank.

One unique Spirit mechanic in MoP is Rapture. At first glance it’s worth 200% Spirit every 12 seconds at most, or 0.83 MP5 per Spirit. This is perhaps a bit concerning since the entire value of Spirit otherwise is 0.56 MP5 per. The reality is trickier than that though, since it requires an investment is PW:Shield, which is not particularly efficient. But given that Discipline Priests are already trained to make use of the mostly-free shield, the net mana on their balance sheet really does increase by 0.83 MP5 per Spirit added. Even though this post is only a preface to full-blown class balance analysis, we have definitely found something to put in our notebook for later. For some reason when Spirit was standardized for all classes, Disc Priest was left with a very strong Spirit scaling mechanic that more than doubles its value, and intentionally or not, they’re the same class that can pour every point of it into the PoH machine.

Total Mana

Most classes have a mechanic that returns mana based on a % of your total mana pool.

Druid: 20%/3min from Innervate.
Paladin: 12%/2min from Divine Plea
Priest: 27%/3min from Shadowfiend or ~16%/min from Mindbender. After the patch, another 6%/min from Power Word:Solace may become much more popular.
Shaman: Nothing outside of the net gain from Telluric Currents, but they do get at least 2138 MP5 (fixed) from Water Shield, and a discount on crits with Resurgence.
Monk: 1% for each Chi spent from Mana Tea. Can be worth upwards of 20%/min.

Nothing too deep here, but I’m kind of surprised this isn’t a little more uniform. I’d imagine that that class balance would be a little easier if the high-level mana economy was generally expected to be equal for everyone (but still provided by different class mechanics). It seems like unnecessary work to give Monks hundreds of thousands of mana with Mana Tea over the course of a fight and then have to balance the class around the increased resource pool.

The only material thing to add here is that Ember meta is worth 6000 mana times the benefit listed above for your class. So Druids and Paladins are looking at around 30 MP5, Priests 80 MP5, and Monks around there or a bit higher (minor effects like Hymn of Hope don’t change this much). All of these amounts are a bit lackluster next to even a modest crit bonus; the mana-oriented meta needs an update to reflect MoP mechanics.

One thing useful to keep in mind is in total, where you get the mana that you spend over the course of a fight:
300000 starting. In a 5 minute fight, this is equivalent to about 5000 MP5.
6000 MP5 constant base regen.
Above amount, up to around 5000 MP5 depending on class from class-specific mechanics.
6000 MP5 from Spirit if you have about 11000.
Again this was very rough since I didn’t want to break it down by class in service of a small point. The point is that most of the mana you get to spend over the course of a fight is quite fixed, with the Spirit slice really only occupying 1/4 or 1/3 of it. The bulk of your mana is from the constant sources you tend not think about and aren’t much affected by gear.

Conclusion

This was the framework for looking at healing spells and abilities across all classes in more depth in the future. The high-level overview of each stat and how it behaves is context for what we might expect out of different spells and how they should scale with gear. The next step will be to start digging into classes individually, and seeing how they fit into the expectations and patterns described above, when taking into account their various mechanics in full detail. Only then will we equipped to look upon the entire picture of WoW healing at once with sufficient perspective to tackle complex problems such as class balance.

Healing Meters: 2 comments

I’m going to present two seemingly contradictory arguments here, each of which (hopefully) has no obvious flaws. Think about how you might reconcile them with each other while you read the rest of this piece, and going forward after that.

1) The only relevant healing “meter” is the one that counts how many people died during the encounter. With DPS, every added point of damage done affects how quickly the fight ends, which has an actual impact on your likelihood of victory. But with healing, your players took X total damage over the course of the fight, and your healers healed it all off. As long as nobody’s HP touched 0 between point A and point B, it matters very little exactly how you got there. Unlike the DPS meter with is continuous gradations of success, the healing team reaches a very binary result. At the end of the day it either succeeded or failed. In fact, the realization that the healing team can do almost nothing to change the total amount of healing they do over the course of a fight reveals the futility of healing meters–how can they reveal who’s contributing more to overall success when they merely show how good you are at taking little pieces of the same pie from others in your team?

2) People die when the healing output is momentarily overwhelmed and too much of an HP deficit (e.g. too much unhealed damage) accumulates at one point in time. The best way to avoid the chance of this is to heal off each piece of incoming damage quickly and fully. The more you can do this, the more you can keep the raid in a stable state where you’re ready to address the next bit of damage just as sharply. In general, the amount of effective points of healing a person does shows how often they’re the first to whack each particular mole, which shows how proficient they are in addressing incoming damage quickly. The more people you collect together who are individually good at doing this, the more responsive of a healing team you are likely to have on the whole, and the less often something will slip past all of them.

Healing is Different from DPS

Well, yes, it is. Usually this sentiment is merely meant to say, “the meters aren’t everything,” which I touched on just now. I want to dig more into a difference that permeates the actual playstyle, and I’ll do it slightly backwards by talking about what mistakes mean in each context.

For a DPS player, every deviation from perfection, no matter how small, is added together and tallied into the bottom line at the end of the fight. Any moment you didn’t execute to the razor’s edge can’t be recovered from–it’s damage lost even if you do the rest of the fight perfectly. Good DPS players keep these losses to a minumum even in the presence of complex encounter mechanics that they have to weave into their rotation.

For healers it’s quiet the opposite. Any error that doesn’t cause a death, not only can be recovered from, but almost certainly will be irrelevant a few seconds later. Once you square away any resulting instability from a spot of bad healing and get people to comfortable HP again, the relevance of the mistake is almost nil. At worst, you use more resources than necessary (mana or cooldowns), reducing your cushion for further imperfections later in the fight. Essentially your whole job is to play for some minutes straight without any single failure of attention so egregious that it allows a death (or minor error combined with perfect storm of bad luck that causes a death). Don’t get me wrong, on hard encounters it’s quite a lot of work to juggle all the things that require your attention without dropping one. But that’s what your game is–just do whatever you need to do in each passing moment to not let anything crash to the ground. Because if nothing crashes, at the end you still take a bow and nobody notices the difference.

Solo Healing

One thing I can’t stress enough is that you should try healing solo, in an environment that’s at least challenging enough that you have to think about your spell usage. Unless you’ve been playing for more than a few years, you might not ever have done this, though no fault of your own. The newly-instituted Challenge Modes are the first content in quite a while that’s meant to challenge a solo healer. The last time was the “heroic” 5-mans back in TBC and WLK (ironically, now the name of the easy 5-mans, but they were initially designed to be hard, before the advent of the LFD system). I suggest you do some Challenge Modes, regardless of whether your personal skill level has you achieving Bronze, Silver, or Gold scores.

The benefit of healing solo is not merely that you can’t rely on others to cover your gaps (also, it’s no longer ambiguous who’s at fault for healing errors), although that is good training. It’s that you can figure out how to address each incoming bit of damage on your own terms, using the most efficient tool that still is sufficiently safe. If you’ve been too long used to raid healing with its widespread obsession with meters, it might almost be a shock to realize that your goal isn’t to figure out how to slam every possible target up to 100% HP before the guy next to you does. And in fact, you’re going to have difficulty doing well in challenge modes until you make that shift, because healing that way is not only terribly inefficient, but tends not to prioritize the most important threats.

Put yourself in a situation where every spell you cast is put to the test of whether it’s really best one. Because if some other spell reduces the change of wipes you’ll start using it to stop having to reset the zone, or if some other spell uses less mana you’ll start using so you don’t waste time drinking, or if some spell isn’t really necessary at all you’ll DPS for a few seconds instead because it has a visible, measurable impact on your goal. And finally, if you need any more convincing, remember that a few challenge modes a week are by far the quickest way to get your VP up to cap.

Principles

I’m going to try to sum up in few basic guidelines to keep in mind. I think these do a better job of orienting yourself in the right state of mind than the common platitudes of maximizing effective healing, minimizing overhealing, etc.

1. Anticipate Damage. Much has changed in healing since vanilla raiding in 2005, but one thing has been constant: the hallmark of a strong healer is anticipating damage before it happens. You simply cannot transition from being a good healer to a great one if your attention is limited to the damage people have already taken. It goes from basic considerations like knowing instantly when somebody has aggro so you can start to react before the HP bar drops, to more complex tasks like knowing when certain boss abilities are coming off cooldown so you can save the healing spells that “match.” And beyond that, to having such a full understanding of an entire encounter that you know what damage patterns are likely to be coming for many seconds in advance.

2. Be Surgical in Spell Selection. This is a refinement of the usual “low overhealing” criterion. The underlying principle is to deal with each incoming damage event in way that preserves the maximum resources for future events. Resources are typically both mana and cooldowns. The goal of achieving the best possible matching of healing tools to incoming damage applies at many skill levels. Lower in the learning curve you might simply be looking for the lowest mana cost spell to address a given situation. But at more advanced levels, you might have a sense of which cooldowns are most valuable in the upcoming seconds (this requires Anticipating Damage) and weigh all of those factors together with mana efficiency and choosing the heal with the right “shape” for the damage pattern. Point is, finding the heal that minimizes overhealing is far too elementary of a guidelines for spell usage. The better underlying principle is to use a spell that solves the current problem while leaving maximum options available for subsequent events.

3. Consider the Entire Situation. Your life as a healer does not solely reside in the group HP bars and how you fill them up. Positioning, utility and personal survival are key. This sounds trite or obvious, but the point of including it here is not only that these things are just as important as your actual healing function, but that you have to integrate them into your healing strategy. You can’t plan for how you’re going to heal off a difficult boss ability unless you account for your own movement. You can’t make good use of support spells unless you know what’s going on across the raid (other than HP levels), and unless you have the GCD to cast them. And finally, a point that is woefully underserved by having only one sentence in an entire post on healing, you can’t heal anyone when you’re dead on the ground. Especially because healers are not tied to their bottom line the way DPS are, you can and should look for any opportunity to pay attention to these non-healing related goals.

Conclusion

All three of the above are in service of an underlying philosophy: an encounter is a puzzle and you have a limited set of tools and resources. Your goal is to, as closely as possible, map your available spells onto all of the events that happen over the course of the entire encounter in the way that most tightly fits. Doing it perfectly is impossible since you don’t know in advance exactly how things will play out (this is the fun part, of course). But you know a lot, and the ability to leverage what you know about an entire encounter into the best spell selection moment-by-moment is where all the intricacies of healing lie.

The point of this post was to outline how I think about healing. It doesn’t precisely address the discussion surrounding Int vs. Spirit post, but I hope it serves as a better starting point for discussion on a part of WoW that’s gone too long without more solid strategic development. The overarching set of guiding principles should not only pave the way for more detailed looks at issues like regen/throughput tradeoffs, but should preface more analysis of all healing classes that I hope to get into when 5.2 arrives on PTR.