This is an issue that not only focuses on self preservation, but also enables us to provide our groups and people around us with better survivability. Just like dps needing to live to be more effective, we do as well.
Now in war I have noticed several routes that people have taken to approach effective survivability. The first is to stack tons, and tons of willpower. While I think that will power is important, it won’t save you when the going gets tough. This is because although it increases your healing output, it stunts wounds and toughness so if you are jumped you don’t have a buffer protecting you.
The next area is toughness, while I don’t think this is a super important ability for a healer I do think that having a bit of toughness is a good thing. Overall it will mitigate incoming damage, and being a cloth/medium armor wearer we are in a boat where we have to rely on this.
The final area that I will talk about is wounds. Personally, I think that this is the key stat to survivability. The more wounds you have the more time you have to react and the more time people have to come and help you and or buffer the damage of your opponent. This is important in that if you are jumped, or group attached it becomes more and more difficult to heal through the damage being put out onto you, so you need to have the ability to sideline some of that damage so that you can get your hots, shield, and them straight heals going. I will not say that this is the end all be all stat, but I do think that it is the most valuable one.
Beyond that, I think that ultimately you need a well balanced combination of willpower, toughness, wounds, and resistances. Although I did not talk about resistances, they are very important, but a little more negligible in this context. Each member of this trinity will help you keep your group up as well as yourself by making you less of a speed bump and more of a road block to others. Because at the end of the day we are the corner stone to any group weather it be pve or pvp, we control how the fight goes.
So...as many stories go I started out last night with my guild playing musical keeps. Destruction had yet to come out and pick a fight so we wanted to have fun and keep people on the influence/renown grind. As the war band grew with people from other guilds, and just general puggers the complaints started to come in, not only in war band chat but also in region.
People in MMO's complain about everything, more over, they like the all present comparison to WOW. Mind you I quit WOW back before BC, but none the less people think that a 4 month old game should be on par in terms of polish as a 5 year old game. This is wrong and sad as well. I do think that there is place for complaints, especially in a games infancy, we are there to shape it. As paying patrons to a business, if the service sucks something has to change. Mythic has stepped up to this calling and is meeting the demands.
Beyond that though...it is hard for people to grasp that this is a different game with different mechanics so it will feel differently and have different goals. I remember when I started playing wow at release that it took almost a year before I felt the game was 100% stable, Mythic has for the most part done that in a few months. I think this is partly due to the fact that Mythic pushes fixes and patches as the complete them as apposed to waiting and pushing a 3gig patch every 6 months.
All in all, this is an excellent game, and will grow to meet the player’s needs. If not it can and will go the way of the Dodo.
I will be posting a walk through of Sigmar Crypts in the next couple of days to co-inside with my walk throughs of the Altdorf city dungeons.
The biggest allure to T4 is oRVR, especially attempting to control zones and lock others out for your side’s control. There are many factors that go into the equation that have to be accounted for in order to achieve the magic number of 100 victory points. Last night was a good example of this on Skull Throne. We, the order, had made a push on Dragon Wake by successfully capping all of the battle field objectives as well as both keeps. From there, the war bands split up to perform several roles.
One group started the dreaded PQ grind, which too many is seen as the worst part of flipping a zone, the fact that you are reliant upon non-pvp goals to achieve a pvp goal. Additionally, as released by Mythic, there is a limited amount of VP that can be gained by going the route of PQ's and they add a ton of time to the goal, but it is also the most stable way to flip a zone because there really is no competition.
The next area is actually doing oRVR and destroying the other war bands, but this is harder than it seems. Outside of defending the BOF's/keeps that you already own, if the opposing faction has half a brain they will stay out of the oRVR area and force you into the last option to gain VP's.
Scenarios...This is often the make or break section of flipping a zone in that you need to go into each scenario with premades of 40's or people very close to 40 in order to be effective, because destruction will be doing the same. This is when you don’t send in the b, c, or d teams, this is when guild premades are needed. Last night this is where order faltered in flipping Dragon Wake, they started off strong, very strong, 91 VP in about 30 min, but when people started queuing for scenarios, more and more lower level people started to hop in. Additionally they where not hopping in to them in premades, but as pugs. Then to compound the problem they did not follow directions but went off to do their own thing. In a scenario you are either winning or losing, and when it is a Premade against a pug, you will be losing badly.
So after about an hour of trying to flip, pugs killed the goal, in fact they set order back many, many, many hours in work. At that point it was time to go do something else. I do think that lowbies have a place in flipping a zone, they are excellent people to help defend or do the PQ’s but when it comes to winning and losing a scenario, it is key to have people at level cap with the gear to make the competitive.
Last night I started doing something new with the guild. I have taken over the role of running order PVE for us all and I have been getting people into it. So, we decided to run some lairs. Now before, when I ran lairs on my destruction toon, they dropped...next to nothing, but this changed here recently.
So we started out in Kedrin Valley and ran the first one. Things went well, we had a few in the guild who had no interest in doing anything pve, and that was fine. From there we went to Caledor and ran one then the call to defend a fortress came and we stopped.
We had two decent drops, and it was a fun run. We have begun a very long pve journey.
Now to the heart of this; the usefulness of lairs. The armor pieces that we have seen so far are mediocre compared to the easily accessible set pieces, but the jewelry that they drop have some very nice stats on them. For instance last night we had a ring drop for dwarfs that had +% to dodge, parry, toughness, and resistances. This was a very nice item, and I was glad that we had an ironbreaker with us for it.
I think that the overall benefit for these lie in the fact that they are quick, and in most cases not exceptionally hard to get to, and they are a fun way to break the stress of rr grinding.
Since I have not seen much on this I thought that I would do a multi-part discussion of Altdorf city dungeons. The first of which would be Sigmar Crypts.
This instance is a 6 man zone for level 40 players. It is recommended that you have a few pieces of your annihilator/Bloodlord set before doing it, even more critical if you are a tank. This zone is centered on none other than a crypt that is full of undead, ghouls, spiders, and tome raiders.
It provides a bit of fun challenge with out taking forever to complete. This dungeon drops the sentinel items, and provides a lot of really good corpses for scavenging.
The other dungeon in Altdorf is Warpblade tunnels. Warpblade is alto darker than what you are exposed to with Sigmar. This zone is heavily filled with Scaven, and most pulls are very large groups. These instance/instances are certainly harder than what you face in Sigmar crypts, but, it is also extremely rewarding by providing you with more items for the sentinel set.
The next installments I will delve deeper into Sigmar Crypts by doing an in-depth walk through of the zone and fight theories.
I have to say that my current guild is probably one of the best that I have had the chance of being a part of. Largely because they cherish us healers. When things go wrong, they ask us our opinions as to what caused it. When things go right, we are thanked for the work. In all it is a nice change of pace compared to what has been the norm.
I have been in guilds, here really recently, that are only there to use you, have no since of loyalty and will stab you in the back at first chance. They think that dps is king and don’t realize that logistics wins battles. It is good to see these two in back to back runs, and I am glad that the people who I play with seem to grasp this. Behind every strong pvp team there is a healer keeping them up.
So this weekend I was privy to be a part of a fortress defense, not once, not twice, not three times, but four. Three happened on Saturday night, and one happened on Sunday morning. The first three that I was a part of, destruction brought out at least 5 war bands to fight against the 2 that order had. The sheer amount of people brought the node down as soon as destruction made it into the lower floor of the fortress. After everything came back online...they had to start the push over with less people and once again, they make it into the fortress and we drop offline once more. Finally we get something of a fight when they get in, with both sides having greatly diminished numbers and they get stuck on the floor below the lord’s room. As more and more people trickle in blink and the node goes down. This is when I called it a night
finally, a clean fight happens on Sunday morning. I log in and see that the fort is being attacked so I rush there. We successfully hold them off being out numbered two to one but the fight was great. Lots of people, lots of spells and loads and loads of renown.
All in all it was a good time this weekend in terms of oRVR. Order finally flipped a zone and controlled it for several days, destro brought out the rock once more and we had to defend against the horde, and when I say horde, I mean 5-8 full war bands +. It was in all a great time and look foreword to the fight that will happen over this coming holiday weekend.
Standing in the middle of the battle field with my staff in hand, I slowly get into play with the on coming horde that I will be facing. The dust from the mass over the rise begins to kick up and the thunder of hundreds of feet piece my ears like nails on a chalk board. As the crest the hill the tank begins to charge and I begin to cast. A quick tab to the sword master, I throw him a shield of saphery and funnel essence just in time to watch him get trampled in the swarming mass. I snap over to a bright wizard and begin casting heals only to have him die two casts in. The control of the fight becomes easier and easier as time passes and the enemies begin to dwindle, and forces begin to rally on targets, or so it would seem. This is when the problem arises, reinforcements.
Like so many other servers, Skull Throne has a problem with population imbalances, and even with the best organization, you will still run in to zerg fights with insurmountable numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy getting a good fight, but as a healer in a pvp game it is rough. You are torn 10 ways to Sunday trying to keep everyone up with a very limited amount of people helping do it. This certainly plays to a disadvantage, and I would like to say that it is isolated but even when I am in the zerg on my Zealot, I still run into this issue. The overall lack of people playing healers.
Healing in general is a art, I have been in fights that my normal group is way outnumbered or taking a keep with people who have a huge advantage by being in the defensive and never lost a soul, but...when it comes to keeping more and more and more people this starts to get harder, even more so when your tools have been greatly diminished.
Over the last few patches, Mythic has weakened healers’ ability to heal, not necessarily directly but it is there. When damage is increased on classes, but there is not healing increase, or increase to survivability of a healer there is an issue. When there is the ability to perpetually disable a character, there is an issue. These are key things that seem to be over looked day-in and day-out. Last night was a good example for me of the negatives of disable. On multiple occasions I was attacked, with is fine it is part of pvp, but I was stunned for the entirety of the fight, no way to defend, no diminishing returns nether. This is really a new development. Additionally I would run into situations where 3 people would be able to drop a tank getting full healing from an archmage and a runepreist. This also should not be happening...but I digress on this issue.
This is the least of the problems of a pvp healer, no love from developers, no love from the people you keep up, and a steady drop in active healer population. You never hear at the end of a fight thanks, or rarely do you, but dps gets praise for it. Development teams seem to be in an anti-healer state right now where the are more concerned about us dealing more damage than upping out healing output, and finally the overall lack of healers or people who are good healers heading for the greener pasture of a dps class. These all seem to come to mind as developing concurrent issues.
I will leave it at that since I think that I am beginning to rant about this topic, but I do feel that healers are at a major disadvantage right now and it is sad that we are in it this way. In the end, things will get brighter, but it is darkest before the storm.
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