I didn’t even realize it was still in the game until I went digging through my logs and did some solo-testing.

Fact: Illumination, which used to cost two talent points in order to get 30% of mana back on a critical cast, is no longer in our talent tree.

Fact: Aura Mastery is now in the same spot as Illumination was in our tree, using one talent point.

Fact: I received 1357 mana back from a critical Flash of Light. 1357 is 30% of 4525, FoL’s cost at level 84. I also received 1509 mana back from a critical Divine Light. 1509 is 30% of 5008, which is the mana cost of Divine Light at 84. More to the point, it SAYS that I gained mana back from my Illumination. Clicking on Illumination in the combat log gives us an out-of-date tooltip (because Divine Light isn’t listed, but you do get mana back from it). (Click for a larger version.)

Fact: I was able to proc Illumination’s mana return with a crit without having specced for Aura Mastery, so having a point there or not doesn’t affect Illumination, which means that it’s not “leftover” in the talent tree system.

Fact: While reviewing the logs from my Blackrock Caverns run the other night, I saw this in the power gains section:

Fact: As noted, Spiritual Focus has been removed from its spot in the holy paladin baseline abilities. This is visible by looking at the summaries of the three paladin trees and it is gone in practice as well, given that I have experienced spell pushback even with Concentration Aura up. Without Spiritual Focus, we have one less baked-in ability than the other paladins trees do.

Conclusion: Is Illumination replacing Spiritual Focus as a baked-in holy paladin baseline ability?

I see no other reason for us to be able to proc Illumination once we spec holy.

I didn’t notice this until today, while testing things out with Judgements of the Pure and I saw myself gaining mana back. That’s when I checked my combat log and then my parse from the other night. With 14% chance to crit, no wonder I didn’t notice this before when grouping. It just doesn’t happen enough due to lack of crits (crit rating from ICC gear translates to horribly low crit at higher levels) and rarely do you have time to even look at the numbers to notice whether or not you gained mana back from something.

Even the sound wasn’t something that tipped me off. If you listen carefully, there’s a small… magical sound, I guess, whenever you gain mana back from Illumination. I hear this all the time on live. It’s something I’ve heard all the time for 4 years. I’m used to it. So when I heard it (as I must have) during my recent BRC run, I didn’t think anything of it. My expectation is to hear it, even if I logically know Illumination is “gone”. So that didn’t tip me off, either.

Anyways. That’s my latest beta discovery. Off to see if I can get Ghostcrawler to confirm that this is intended.

EDIT:

A poster on the beta forums who actually wasn’t a tool offered this explanation (emphasis mine):

I still get benefit from Expose WEakness. I think its just that they didn’t remove the ‘spell’ completely from the game, so people who had it previously – sinc the talent doesn’t exist for them to remove by respecing you – will stay until they decide to wipe it. Prettymuch every beta and even some of the ptrs have had things like this happen.

Now that actually makes sense to me.

So I unspecced as holy and tried it out, not being specced at all.

Bam. Illumination procs a mana return.

I swapped to my ret spec and tried it out.

Bam. Illumination procs a mana return.

Thus, my overall conclusion is that it is a bug and because it does not exist in the talent tree to wipe it, it will persist until Blizzard actually removes the spell from the game.

My new question is why on earth would they take away our sweet, sweet Spiritual Focus, then? :P

Paladin Summaries

To begin, let us look at the paladin tree summaries, which let you know what abilities you get just for spending your first points in that tree. (Click for a larger version.)

Notice anything weird? Wrong? Strange?

How about the fact that the Holy tree only has 3 abilities listed, followed by their mastery, whereas prot and ret both have four?

Take a closer look at the Holy summary.

Holy Shock, fine. Walk in the Light (still at 10%, mind you), fine. Meditation (50% of regen while casting), fine. Mastery seems fine.

What’s missing?

I was about halfway through a Blackrock Caverns run last night when I realized what the problem was.

Spiritual Focus is missing.

Are you kidding me? There I am, in Blackrock Caverns, and someone, while running back to the group, accidentally pulled a pack of mobs and trained them right to us. We got a couple of them CCed, the tank grabbed the rest but there was a caster who wasn’t CCed who kept shooting me with Arcane Missiles. And my casts were being pushed back, even with Concentration Aura on.

I have faint hopes that this might be retooled or something, but for right now, it’s just gone. It seems as though Blizzard has completely gutted holy paladins.

The Trifecta of Doom Build’s Major Changes

I call this build the Trifecta of Doom Build because three major tenets of our class have been changed or removed, along with a couple of minor things.

1) Illumination has indeed been removed from the Holy tree. It’s just flat-out gone. Vanished. Poof. After four years of consistently nerfing a core talent in the Holy tree, Blizzard has finally gotten rid of it. I honestly have a visceral reaction to this change. They should have tossed it out four years ago. It would have been more along the lines of having a good friend die suddenly in an accident, rather than seeing that friend die a slow, painful death. Sure, it would have hurt like hell to begin with, but with it having only been part of Vanilla WoW, rather than Vanilla, Burning Crusade AND Wrath, it would have hurt less overall.

2) Divine Plea now only returns 10% of your mana over 15 seconds (down from 25%) and the cooldown has been raised from 1 minute to 2 minutes. Healing reduction remains at 50% while Divine Plea is active. Considering what an important role Divine Plea has played in holy paladin healing for almost two years, this definitely comes as a blow.

3) Spiritual Focus‘ disappearance was a wholly unexpected change. One of the few benefits to being a healer who mostly casts spells with a cast time is that, with Spiritual Focus (70% pushback resist) and even the base Concentration Aura (35% pushback resist), we were not able to be interrupted by damage. Sure, we were very susceptible to interrupt effects. There’s nothing quite as panic inducing as watching EVERY ABILITY YOU HAVE go on cooldown at the same time! But at least we didn’t get interrupted by damage.

Did you know that priests no longer have a pushback resist talent? And neither do druids. Shaman do, in their resto baseline skills, as do elemental shaman, and mages still have Burning Soul. But warlocks, priests, druids and paladins don’t have pushback talents or skills.

That’s 9 specs without access to pushback resistance (outside of Concentration Aura) versus 5 who do. Who here thinks that they’re phasing out pushback resistance entirely?

<raises hand>

The minor things I mentioned are the removal or change of most talents that actually improve our healing, as I mentioned the other day. We have precisely one talent in our first two tiers that actually improves healing, which is Divinity. We have Last Word, which increases the critical strike chance of Word of Glory, if used on someone under 35% health, yes, but this is not a flat increase. This is a random proc under certain conditions. We have cast-time reductions on Holy Light and Divine Light with Clarity of Purpose, true, but again, this isn’t an increase in healing, it’s just a haste increase on two spells.

Other Changes

Holy Power generation has been fixed, finally. I now can generate Holy Power through the following methods:

a) Using Holy Shock grants 1 charge of Holy Power.

b) 3/3 Tower of Radiance means that directly healing your Beacon of Light target with Holy Shock, Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine will grant you 1 charge of Holy Power. (Yes, using Holy Shock on your Beacon target still grants you 2 charges.) This eliminates the Word of Glory bug and removes the Holy Power generation from using Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance.

c) Using Crusader Strike , which is a baseline paladin ability in Cataclysm, will grant you 1 charge of Holy Power.

You also no longer get the red W buff that was a placeholder for Holy Power in your buff area. Holy Power charges are only visible on your character portrait. It does not seem as though there is a time limit on Holy Power charges any longer. When we had the little buff icons, Holy Power was lasting 30 seconds. If there’s no longer a duration, this is good and means we can store Holy Power charges, then drink, then move on to the next pull with a full Holy Power bar.

If there is a duration, it is certainly much longer than 30 seconds as I’ve been sitting here with 3 charges on me for about five minutes, now.

In the cosmetic area…

- Hammer of Wrath has had its graphic changed to the old 2H Weapon Specialization graphic from the ret tree:

- Cleanse‘s graphic has gone back to the old Purify graphic. I suppose this makes sense because Cleanse removes magic, poison and disease, whereas Purify only does poison and disease, and prots and rets won’t be able to remove magic.

- Clarity of Purpose‘s graphic is now the old Blessing of Wisdom graphic. This makes me happy. Blessing of Might now provides attack power and mp5, so to see the Blessing of Wisdom icon still somewhere in the game makes me smile.

Daybreak is a new talent that is actually surprisingly useful. The Glyph of Holy Shock now increases Holy Shock’s critical strike chance by 5% instead of reducing its cooldown by 1s, so resetting the cooldown on Holy Shock isn’t bad, especially if you proc Infusion of Light to get a super-fast Holy Light. (Too bad Holy Light still doesn’t heal for much of anything.) You can hit Holy Shock, then if it crits, you can hit Holy Light for a sub-one-second (and very cheap) cast and hope for a Daybreak proc, then go back to Holy Shock. Daybreak, by the way, has got a pretty “power aura” notification, as seen below. (And that was a Holy Light cast, by the way. 6782 at level 83. Sigh.)

Speaking of Infusion of Light, it almost works properly, now. Instead of giving you an instant Flash of Light (as the live version does), it now actually reduces the cast time of your Holy Light by 1.5 seconds as advertised. Trouble is, it’s still currently consumed by your next Flash of Light, even though it does nothing for the cast time. Ah, beta.

Talents

Okay, since we’re moving into talent discussion, let’s take a look at what I think the best talent spec for a holy paladin is at the moment.

31/0/10

Let’s walk through it together.

Holy

Tier 1

Arbiter of the Light: 0/2. This is largely because it no longer adds critical strike chance to Holy Light.

Divinity: 3/3. No-brainer.

Judgements of the Pure: 3/3. Also a no-brainer.

Tier 2:

Clarity of Purpose: 3/3. 0.5 seconds off healing spells is a good thing.

Last Word: 2/2. In previous builds, I’ve scoffed at this talent. There seemed better places to spend one’s points. Not only do we no longer have better places to spend our points, but this is actually really useful in those “holy crap” situations. There are two particularly foul attacks by Evolved Twilight Zealots in Blackrock Caverns:

1) Gravity Strike: Inflicts damage equal to 70% of an enemy’s current health and briefly reduces its Attack Power.

2) Grievous Whirl: A vicious attack that causes the target to bleed profusely until fully healed.  Deals 750 damage every 2 seconds until healed.

The combination of those two? VERY BAD. So Last Word, while originally not as great as some of the other talents we could have picked up, does have its uses.

Blazing Light: 0/2. All damage. Damage of Holy Shock and Exorcism. Unless you want to be a Shockadin (which won’t ever be viable as a raiding spec, but definitely seems like a decent soloing idea), stay away from this.

Tier 3

Denounce: 0/2. If this worked the way Telluric Currents does for resto shammies, I’d be much more inclined to pick this up. As it is, it’s a free, instant Exorcism after every Holy Shock. Shockadin territory.

Divine Favor: 1/1. Different icon than the live version, different ability altogether, but 20% spell haste and 20% spell crit for 20 seconds on a 3m cooldown? Definitely worth the investment.

Infusion of Light: 2/2. Even if this didn’t lead into Speed of Light, this is still a good talent. Snag it.

Daybreak: 2/2. As I explained above, very nice to have.

Tier 4

Enlightened Judgements: 0/2. PVP talent. I mistakenly took this when I was respeccing because I’m apparently hard-wired to click on that icon. So when I ran Blackrock Caverns last night, every time I judged, I healed myself for 4.2k-5.5k. This heal can crit, too, and I saw crits of 6-7k.

Beacon of Light: 1/1. 50% of healing done is still better than 0% of healing done.

Speed of Light: 3/3. Excellent talent to reduce the cooldown on Holy Radiance and to help with positioning.

Sacred Cleansing: 1/1. I still can’t believe we have to waste a point just so that our Cleanse remains exactly the same as in Vanilla, BC and WotLK, but it’s well-worth the point anyways.

Tier 5

Conviction: 3/3. Bonuses to healing are good.

Aura Mastery: 1/1. Same as the live version, definitely worth the point.

Improved Concentration Aura: 2/2. With Spiritual Focus missing, presumed dead, this is a must-have. 50% chance to resist pushback for you and your group.

Tier 6

Tower of Radiance: 3/3. No-brainer. Any way to gain Holy Power is good. 267 charges gained over the course of my run last night.

Blessed Life: 0/2. I specced 1/2 for this last night to test it out. From what I can tell, this does require direct damage done from a mob in order to proc. I do not think AOE effects count, as I stood in Quakes and Blast Waves and such to no effect. It only granted me 61 charges over the run.

Tier 7

Light of Dawn: 1/1. Still has a crappy animation, but you should definitely take it.

Protection

Take no talents here.

Retribution

Tier 1

Eye for an Eye: 0/2. Worthless to us as healers.

Crusade: 3/3. Holy Shock’s healing increased by 30% is all we care about.

Improved Judgement: 2/2. It’s not quite as far as in Wrath (30yd as opposed to 40), but it’s well-worth taking anyways.

Tier 2

Eternal Glory: 2/2. What a freaking lifesaver this thing is. I gained 176 charges of Holy Power over the course of the run because of this talent.

Rule of Law: 3/3. Well, I can only get 1/3 at the moment, since I’m only 83, but we’ll want to fill this up to increase crit chance on Word of Glory and Holy Shock.

And that’s about it for talents. About the only wiggle room I see is dropping Conc Aura for Blessed Life or Enlightened Judgements, but if Spiritual Focus is really dead, I can’t advise that for any reason in PVE healing.

Blackrock Caverns

So I did a Blackrock Caverns run last night with a fairly decently geared tank from my live realm. As a healer/tank combo, we still waited about 15 minutes for a queue, probably due to the late hour.

After some initial lag issues relating to using addons, I turned them all off and just healed the way I always have in Beta — terrified because I can’t properly see things on my laughable version of raid frames.

It went reasonably well. The first boss wasn’t a problem. Even the second boss wasn’t too bad. The third boss was okay. That’s as far as I’d previously gotten, so everything beyond that was new to me. There’s a Core Hound fight, it’s AWESOME. haha. It was actually the one fight that I felt was tuned well for our group. It was annoying to be feared and have fire show up, etc, but I finished the fight with just about no mana and everyone alive. The damage wasn’t horrible, but it was challenging, particularly with a movement aspect.

The last boss is ridiculous. As near as I can figure, you have the boss and he has two adds. The adds are elementals. The adds do not go after whoever has the highest aggro on them, but rather, WHOEVER HIT THEM LAST.

Sounds like a fun mechanic, right?

Wrong.

These little bastards, if you’re close enough to them, inflict a debuff on you.

Would you like to know what this non-dispellable debuff looks like?

It’s called Crepuscular Veil. And it reduces healing done on its target by 99% for four seconds. It only gets cast when they’re in range, mind you, so you basically have to kite them. They are immune to stuns, but Entangling Roots work just fine. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if we had had a shaman for Bind Elemental or a warlock for Banish, but we didn’t. Our group was, I kid you not, four paladins and a feral druid.

Repentence doesn’t work on elementals. And they’re immune to stuns, so Hammer of Justice is worthless.

It’s clear that what you’re supposed to do is CC one of them and kite the other while you bring down the boss. A hunter would have been great. Anything with a pet would have been great, too — just stick the pet on one for a good 15 seconds or so, then pull the add off the pet, heal the pet, put the pet back on the add.

We couldn’t get it done with our group composition, although we got the feral druid to go resto and basically cast roots and then he and I were going to ping-pong the remaining add. It actually didn’t go that badly, but we’d tried 3-4 times or so and X (not xmolder, but the tank from my live guild) had to go, so we called it.

During one of the attempts, I noticed the druid dropped this green thing on the ground. “OH MY GOD,” I said out loud, to myself, “EFFLORESCENCE!!!!” So I went and stood in it! (Click for the larger version.)

Apart from that healing debuff, the Grievous Whirl and the Gravity Strike, things weren’t too bad. It was important that our tank be aware of his debuffs (charging into the alloys with 48 stacks of a “take more fire damage” debuff is bad!) and that the DPS watch the floor and not stand in front of mobs who cleave. But it wasn’t terrible.

What is surprising is the healing breakdown. (Yes, I logged the run. I love World of Logs.)

Here’s my healing by spell:

1) Holy Shock: 1,603,147 healing, 20.4%, 165 hits, 63 crits, 228 total. 21.7% overheal.

2) Beacon of Light: 1,186,292 healing, 15.1%, 357 hits/total. 29.2% overheal.

3) Word of Glory: 1,158,982 healing, 14.8%, 75 hits, 105 crits, 180 total. 10.3% overheal.

4) Flash of Light: 1,143,394 healing, 14.6%, 106 hits, 36 crits, 142 total. 14.7% overheal.

5) Divine Light: 1,124, 898 healing, 14.3%, 69 hits, 24 crits, 93 total. 9.2% overheal.

6) Holy Radiance: 561,679 healing, 7.2 %, 525 hits, 177 crits, 702 total. 36.1% overheal.

7) Holy Light: 494,658 healing, 6.3%, 66 hits, 16 crits, 82 total. 17.4% overheal.

8) Light of Dawn: 331,583 healing, 4.2%, 96 hits, 26 crits, 122 total. 37.5% overheal.

9) Lay on Hands: 144,643 healing, 1.8%, 4 hits, 1 crit, 5 total. 24.8% overheal.

10) Enlightened Judgements: 93,592 healing, 1.2%, 38 hits, 8 crits, 46 total. 58.4% overheal.

First of all, that’s probably the most I have EVER used Holy Shock in my life. Daybreak procced 93 times, which is nice, but it’ll also proc even if Holy Shock isn’t on cooldown, oddly, so that might or might not have had anything to do with it.

Second of all, look at the next few spells I used. Look at the percentages. 15%, 14%, 14%, 14%. With Holy Shock at 20% and my next four spells at 14-15%, that’s a pretty even distribution, particularly considering where holy paladins are at right now. I also could have used Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance a LOT more frequently.

And if I had used Holy Light every time Infusion of Light procced (63 times), then I probably would have had more Holy Lights used. It’s so difficult to think that the sound effect for IoL means I should cast HL instead of FoL. It’s a very different mindset, especially considering I’m still healing on live and can’t get used to the new way without screwing myself over on live.

What This Means

It seems to me that this is what they probably want — healers of all kinds to use different spells as appropriate instead of relying on one or two spells. But part of why I used such a variety of spells is because I wasn’t sure what to use next.

They say that Holy Light is our go-to spell. Well, it doesn’t heal for much. It’s okay that Holy Light heals for next to nothing IF you basically pair it with an Infusion of Light proc. If you don’t, it’s next to worthless. Like I’ve said before, I have 50k health in my HOLY GEAR. My tank last night had 75k health in a regular dungeon, not, you know, ICC. Do you know what a 6-7k heal does to a tank who has lost 70% of his existing health due to Gravity Strike? It as though you didn’t actually cast a damn thing. And it took you about 2.2 seconds to do it, with over 1000 haste, at level 83. If it took you .7 seconds to do it, which it does, after an Infusion of Light proc, that’s fine.

In my experience, Holy Shock is our go-to heal. I’m pretty sure I don’t like that. I’m also pretty sure that this is how Blizzard can justify the loss of Spiritual Focus. “But you’re NOT always casting spells with a cast time! Holy Shock! Word of Glory! Light of Dawn! Holy Radiance!”

And maybe they’re right. Maybe paladins are supposed to be the new mobile healing class. Except that Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance are on 30 seconds cooldowns, Holy Shock is on a 6 second cooldown and Word of Glory is dependent on a whole other resource that is, as I’m sure Walks will mention, strongly linked to none other than Holy Shock. And Holy Light, a spell with a stupidly long cast time, is supposed to be our go-to spell.

I just don’t understand what they’re doing. Usually, I can see the method to the madness, even if I loathe the method with all my being. But I just can’t see what they’re trying to do here. It feels as though Blizzard is all over the place with holy paladins right now. “No, don’t cast!” “But a casted spell is your go-to spell!” And then they throw things like Gravity Strike at us. The content is telling us to do one thing (Divine Light and Flash of Light fairly frequently) but our talents are telling us to do another (Cast Holy Shock ALL OF THE TIME!).

I’ve been thinking a lot since my run last night, while writing up this post and doing regular, everyday stuff. I don’t see what direction they want us to go in. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s too early in the beta to see that.

What I can see, though, is the death of the spec I have loved playing since July of 2006. That’s when I started really trying to level my paladin as holy and I’ve basically been holy ever since. I keep trying to make sure my emotions don’t overly inform my posts, but I can’t help but be disappointed. There is very little that is at all familiar about holy paladins right now. Illumination gone. Divine Favor changed. Divine Illumination gone. Divine Plea changed. Spiritual Focus gone. Sacred Shield gone. Flash of Light’s HoT gone.

The only thing I remotely recognize about paladins in Cataclysm is Holy Shock. Everything else is completely different or gone. The talent trees are dumbed down and you can now almost happen upon the optimal spec by chance, just by allocating 5 points per tier. And yet, the content is challenging to people in ICC gear?

I know. Tuning of the encounters, of the abilities, of the talents, of the glyphs, of everything. I know.

But I do think that this Trifecta of Doom build has turned a corner for holy paladins and I’m not quite sure we can ever go back.

Boy, I’m glad I went to bed last night…

Some things to note:

- Level cap to 85 (oh boy, more levelling, which means more screenshots)

- All instances (not heroics or raids, presumably) are going to be open

- Uldum and Twilight Highlands will be open

- Addons should be enabled

So… I’m going to be spending a fair amount of time on the beta trying to get to max level. I’ll do what I can to get into groups to see how healing is, but as it stands, I’m a little afraid.

At least I’ll hopefully have Grid and Clique? :) Cross your fingers that these aren’t broken. :P

In the future, I will have a write up of Blackrock Caverns (I need to finish that one, first), Stonecore (would like to do it a couple more times, I’ve only succeeded in it once) and the other instances, like the Throne of the Tides one I did.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten off my ass and spent this time working on the Apotheosis guild forums. Crazy that I don’t even have an 80 on the server my former guild was on and yet I’m doing guild paperwork…

Let us talk about our latest changes as far as they affect holy paladin PVE healing, shall we?

- Divine Plea now lets you gain 10% (down from 25%) of your total mana over 15 sec. Cooldown changed to 2 min, up from 1 min.

And holy paladins the world over screamed “nooooooooo!” This change reinforces two new ideas about paladin healing:

1) Intellect (which grants us mana, as you know, but will also be the new “spellpower” stat) will not be a regeneration stat for us. Intellect and haste and probably crit will be throughput stats for us, leaving Spirit as the regen stat. We will no longer want to stack intellect for mana regeneration purposes. We may want to stack it for throughput, but it’s too early in the game to tell yet.

2) Mana will almost certainly be a huge issue at all levels of progression. They’re changing how innervate works so that a feral druid’s innervate restores less mana than a moonkin’s or a resto druid’s — it’s now going to be based on the casting druid’s mana pool. The change to Divine Plea is almost certainly part of that same thinking. We appear to be going back to the days where we will be reactive healers instead of proactive healers.

- Lay on Hands cooldown reduced from 20 min to 10 min.

If this means my Glyph makes this five minutes, that’s cool. ;) No, seriously, this seems to be a positive thing, assuming they don’t revert it back to using all of our mana again, the way it did in Vanilla and Burning Crusade. I wouldn’t expect any glyphs to do anything significant to the cooldown, though.

- Tower of Radiance now procs from Holy Shock, Flash of Light, Holy Light or Divine Light.

Hello, nerfbat. Nice to see you again. Previously, Tower of Radiance procced from any direct heal to your tank — and that included Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance (formerly Healing Hands). That led to a ridiculous amount of Holy Power available to a holy paladin. I understand this change and, while it’s sad to see it implemented, it was just a matter of time.

- Blessed Life now has a chance to proc whenever you take direct damage. (Old – “All attacks against you”)

I’m going to have to wait to actually get on Beta once the realms come back up, but that’s interesting. It was not proccing from standing in fire in previous builds, though. This change will probably mean that AOE damage or other damage-over-time effects will not proc charges of Holy Power. This probably means that the very short time where Blessed Life was maybe going to be a PVE talent has come and gone and almost certainly means that it returns to the PVP talent category.

- Illumination is gone.

I had to read that one about six times before I actually believed what I was reading.

Illumination has had a long life. It was in the game from the beginning. Back in Vanilla WoW, this was amazing. You would get 100% of your mana back for every spell that crit. Holy Light crits? Here, have free mana. It was beautiful.

In Burning Crusade, they dropped the mana return to 50% and then raised it to 60%, which is the change that went live.

In Wrath of the Lich King, they dropped the mana return to 30% from 60%. Crit declined in desirability to the point where mp5 was usually a wiser choice for Holy Light spamming holy paladins, up to a certain point.

And now… it’s gone.

You know what, Blizzard? I would have been a LOT happier to see you pull the plug on it FOUR YEARS AGO than watch it die this horribly long, lingering death. Illumination has been a defining part of the holy paladin playstyle for the entire length of this game. Had they ripped it out four years ago, it wouldn’t have been as ingrained in paladin culture as it currently is.

It’s a sad day, really.

- Healing Light renamed to Blazing Light – Increases the damage of your Holy Shock and Exorcism by 10/20%. (No longer affects Word of Glory’s healing)

They must have figured “hey! While we’re at it, let’s just throw out the majority of the tree!” Not only did this change from Wrath to Beta, in that it used to increase healing by Holy Light, Flash of Light and Holy Shock and then just affected damage/healing of Holy Shock and the healing of Word of Glory, but now it doesn’t increase healing at all!

- Arbiter of the Light no longer affects Holy Light.

That’s a Tier 1 talent that affected the critical effect of your Judgements, Templar’s Verdict and Holy Light. Now it’s just a DPS talent.

- Conviction is back as a Holy Tier 5 talent – Gives you a 1/2/3% bonus to damage and healing for 15 sec after causing a critical effect from a weapon swing, spell, or ability. This effect stacks up to 3 times.

This is probably what is replacing Illumination. I did like that bonus of up to 9% healing, but it feels lacklustre, given that it’s based on crits, which are pretty much random. At least it’s a reason to keep crit on our gear?

- Daybreak (Tier 3) *New* – Your Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light have a 15/30% chance of resetting the cooldown on your Holy Shock.

This does not make any sense to me whatsoever. Holy Shock is, at base, a six second cooldown. There’s a Glyph (that may no longer exist at release, who knows? It’s currently still in the game and active.) that reduces this to a five second cooldown. With Word of Glory, you don’t really need your Holy Shock to be off cooldown. But will we, based on future content? It may well be the case.

Even if we don’t want it, we’ll probably need to take it anyways, though.

I’m looking at the previous build’s tree, keeping all the changes in mind, and I’m stuck needing one more point in tier 3 before moving down, and then I get stuck again on Tier 5 until I put in another point somewhere. So I could fill out Daybreak and the new Conviction to get all the way down to Tier 6… and then I run out of places that I want to put my points with only 28 spent in the tree altogether.

Honestly, I don’t want to take Denounce, Arbiter of the Light, Blazing Light, Enlightened Judgements, Improved Concentration Aura (although this is likely what I will end up taking, barring other changes) or Blessed Life. But I’m going to have to in order to get down to Light of Dawn.

Am I alone in wanting to heal and, you know, not DPS while healing? Am I the only one who doesn’t think a holy talent like the new Denounce is fun?

- Denounce revamped – Reduces the mana cost of Exorcism by 25/50%. In addition, you have a 50/100% chance when casting Holy Shock to make your next Exorcism spell instant and cost no mana.

I don’t want to do damage if I’m on my paladin. If I wanted to do damage, I would play my hunter or my mage. You know. Pure DPS classes.

It seems to me that the holy got nerfed out of the holy tree in this build, assuming MMO-Champion’s information is accurate (which, let’s face it, it probably is). Doesn’t it seem wrong that out of the first six talents in the holy tree, only three of them have anything to do with healing, and only one of those three has anything to do with the total amount of healing from any spell?

I know they have to give prot and ret something to make spending points in holy at least attractive, the way they gave us some ret talents that are at least useful for us, but the ret talents that affect healing all still do damage! Except for Eternal Glory, which has a chance to not consume your Holy Power, which ret and prot pallies can then use… to do damage!

So where are OUR healing talents? There’s basically nothing left in the tree that increases our healing, apart from Divinity and the holy-baseline “Walk in the Light”, which grants us a whopping 10% extra potency on our healing spells.

I’m not asking for us to go back to the days where priests, for example, had 18 million talent points all improving different types of heals. But certainly improving the strength of our heals needs to happen. Otherwise, what’s the point of being holy?

I titled this post “Don’t Panic. Yet”. I sound like I’m panicking. I’m not, I assure you. Beta is still buggy. We don’t even have a release date. There is a lot of time yet for holy paladins to be refined. For all I know, they’ve bumped up Walk in the Light to 30% potency and changed all the mana cost values. Who knows?

What we know so far is this:

- They seem to be pushing Holy Shock beyond anything else.

- They don’t want us to regen mana from Divine Plea.

- They don’t want us to regen mana from crits.

- They may want us to do damage in encounters, similarly to Priests and Smile, Druids and Wrath and Shaman and Lightning Bolt.

Everything else is up in the air. I’ll have more details once the servers come back up.

Don’t panic yet and feel free to leave your feedback here. I’ll be posting about this build on the official forums and would love to bring your feedback to Blizzard.

Welcome to my Holy How-To for PVE Paladins. This is the ninth of what I hope to be a great many posts aimed at helping holy paladins succeed at PVE content. I will focus primarily on max-level talent specs, glyphs, enchants, gems and the like, including tools, tips and tricks that I use, but I hope to touch on levelling content and advice as well.

Today’s post will focus primarily on the use of Righteous Fury. True, Righteous Fury is most often left to the domain of the protection paladin, who needs the extra holy threat on their abilities to gain and then maintain aggro.

“But Kurn,” you might say, “I thought this was a HOLY how-to?”

Indeed it is. We’re going to look at the use of Improved Righteous Fury while healing as a holy paladin through T10 (ICC/Ruby Sanctum) content.

Why you Should Get Improved Righteous Fury

More often than not, holy paladins who are raiding Tier 10 content should be specced at least 17 points into the protection tree in order to pick up Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian. One of the ways we can get there — maybe even should get there — includes dropping three of those points into Improved Righteous Fury.

“Kurn, what are you talking about? I don’t need 80% extra threat on my holy spells! That’s all I have! I don’t want to pull aggro!”

No. You don’t need an extra 80% threat on pretty much every single button you push. That would be a bad call, for the most part.

But sometimes, you should use it. Improved Righteous Fury means that when you turn on Righteous Fury, you gain 80% extra threat on all your holy spells and that you take 6% reduced damage. On certain fights, it can be very beneficial to take less damage and the threat won’t be a problem.

You probably should be spending 17 points into protection anyways. You have to drop points in the first three tiers to get to the fourth tier, for Divine Guardian. Why not drop three points into Improved Righteous Fury, which has some use, as opposed to Anticipation, for example? Anticipation gives you 1% dodge per point, up to 5 points. Newsflash: Icecrown Citadel has a persistent, zone-wide debuff called Chill of the Throne. Even if you had 5% dodge from Anticipation, you’d still be at 0% dodge, because of the debuff. So drop three of your points into Improved Righteous Fury instead.

Now that we’ve ascertained that you’re not wasting any points on the talent, merely re-allocating talents from elsewhere in the prot tree, let’s talk about when to use it.

When to Use Righteous Fury

The golden rule of Righteous Fury usage is as follows, in haiku form:

Never, ever use

Righteous Fury on trash or

on boss fights with adds.

You’ll get the most bang for your buck if there’s AOE damage going on as well or if there’s unpredictable damage that may target you, but that’s the basic rule.

In practical terms, here’s a guide for when to use RF or not. Note that this assumes you are, in fact, specced for Improved Righteous Fury, because otherwise, there’s no point in using it at all.

Marrowgar: Yes! AOE damage from Coldflame, Bone Spikes. There are no adds.

Lady Deathwhisper: No! Adds out the wazoo! You’ll end up tanking half of them.

Gunship: No! Adds everywhere, plus the enemy captain can totally kill you from range if you have aggro on him. (Trust me.)

Saurfang: No! Despite the damage from Boiling Blood or Mark of the Fallen Champion, you do not want to get hit by Blood Beasts who follow normal aggro rules. They are particularly dangerous on heroic.

Festergut: Yes! There’s all kinds of AOE damage like Vile Gas, the spore damage plus, hi, Pungent Blight. Even on heroic, when Putricide throws Malleable Goo out, these are RANDOM and not affected by regular aggro rules.

Rotface: No! The oozes are not tauntable. The last thing you want is for six oozes to come beat on you. A holy paladin I used to raid with ALWAYS forgot to take off his RF after Festergut and ALWAYS died here. Always.

Professor Putricide: Eh… The adds on Putricide do not follow standard aggro rules, so it’s safe to use it here. On regular, you shouldn’t need 6% extra damage reduction, but on heroic, it comes in handy on Phase 3 in particular. (Also handy for the Unbound Plague.) It’s safe to use, but isn’t spectacular on this fight except for P3 of heroic.

Blood Prince Council: No! Apart from the fact that you have three separate bosses, you also have the Dark Nuclei running around that DO follow normal aggro rules. Besides, if executed properly, there is very little raid damage that you will encounter, even on heroic.

Blood Queen Lana’thel: Yes! She has a persistent shadow aura, which gets worse the more people get bitten on heroic, plus a variety of attacks on the raid (Pact of the Darkfallen, Swarm of Shadows, Bloodbolt) and she’s a single mob with no adds. This is pretty much the perfect fight to use Improved Righteous Fury.

Valithria Dreamwalker: No! You are going to be putting out a STUPID amount of healing as a paladin, since you almost certainly get to go into the portals. All of that healing has threat. Add 80% threat to a 50k Holy Light on yourself that is then beaconed to the dragon and HEY, that’s a lot of freaking threat on everything in the room! Even though on heroic you will be taking damage from your Twisted Nightmares stacks, it’s not worth the damage reduction.

Sindragosa: Yes! Another fantastic example of when to use Improved Righteous Fury. There’s a persistent frost aura, there’s random Ice Tombs, there’s Instability… This is fan-freaking-tastic.

Lich King: No! Way too many adds throughout the fight. Shamblings Horrors, Drudge Ghouls, Val’kyrs, Raging Spirits and Vile Spirits. I’m not sure if the Val’kyrs and Vile Spirits follow regular aggro rules (pretty sure the Valks are random), but there are just way, way too many adds on this fight to risk using Righteous Fury.

Saviana Ragefire: Yes! Just your raid group and her, plus AOE damage from her Enrage and Conflag make this a good miniboss to use Righteous Fury on.

Baltharus the Warborn: No! He spawns one or two adds (depending on 10/25) and what’s the golden rule? Don’t use it on a boss fight with adds.

General Zarithrian: No! More adds on this miniboss means it would be a very bad idea.

Halion: Yes! Particularly if you’re in the twilight realm, as there is a persistent shadow aura down there. You can also use it up top to help prevent 6% of the fire damage you’ll almost certainly be taking.

How to Use Righteous Fury

“Kurn, seriously, I don’t need to know this. You hit your Righteous Fury button to turn it on. Duh.”

Yeah, but it’s not a good idea to have it on immediately, even on most of the fights you should be using it for. Why?

Well, let’s talk a bit about threat. Please note that I am Bad at math and I’m not exactly sure about the finer points of threat, but I’ve done a lot of reading and I kind of think I’m right. If I’m not, tell me and point me to resources showing me I’m not.

All healing spells have an innate threat-reduction modifier as compared to damage spells. Barring any talented threat-reduction, one damage point against a mob equals one point of aggro, or threat. Every healing point is worth 0.5 points of threat.

Further, paladins, for some reason, have even that threat modifier halved. So every time we cast a healing spell, we have 0.25 points of threat per point of healing done.

Example:

10,000 health spell * 0.5 (healing spell modifier) * 0.5 (paladin healing modifier) = 2500 threat.

If we then add Righteous Fury to the mix, it looks more like this:

10,000 health spell * 0.5 * 0.5 * 1.8 (Righteous Fury does 80% more threat) = 4500 threat.

Of course, back when Wrath came out and they got rid of Blessing of Salvation, Blizzard decided to “bake-in” extra threat with regards to the tanking classes. So when a DK hops into Frost Presence or a warrior into Defensive Stance or a druid into bear form, or when a paladin turns on Righteous Fury, an extra 43% threat is added.

So as soon as we add Righteous Fury, we not only get 80% extra threat on our holy spells, but an extra 43% of threat across the board, since every action we take should be causing extra threat. That should include healing spells, but is definitely where my theorycrafting comes up short. In the couple of small tests I conducted, which meant face-pulling something while at low health, with Righteous Fury on, then healing myself and noting the threat on Omen, a paladin does double-dip on threat modifiers.

10,000 health spell * 0.5 * 0.5 * 1.8 * 1.43 (baked-in threat) = 6435 threat.

Now consider the ICC buff. Assume that your Holy Light crits for a fairly reasonable 25,000 and you have Righteous Fury on as you attempt Sindragosa. Let us assume that you pre-cast that Holy Light just as, say, Sindragosa is landing, aiming to hit your tank with that Holy Light right after Sindragosa hits your tank for the first time.

25000 * 0.5 * 0.5 * 1.8 * 1.43 = 16,087.5 threat

Now, assuming I’ve done my math properly, here are the first two attacks that a bear tank in my guild had on Sindragosa and the resulting threat. This does not include any Misdirections or Tricks of the Trade and assumes that druids *do not* double-dip on the bear form/baked-in threat modifiers. Given that I took my feral druid out into the world and feral faerie fired things and watched Omen (1322 threat from an 862 hit of FFF), I can only assume that they do not double-dip on Bear Form and the 1.43x threat modifiers get, since 862 * 1.43 = 1232.66, which is as close to 1322 threat I can go without going over. (Adding the 1.3 from bear form gives 1602 threat.)

Faerie Fire 1437 * 1.43 (baked-in tank threat) = 2054 threat

Maul 5619 + 422 (Maul bonus) * 1.43 = 8638 threat

Total threat = 10692

Granted, overhealing does not count in terms of threat, but Sindragosa hits hard enough that you could theoretically out-threat the tank on the pull. This illustrates how Righteous Fury is still a tricky thing to use.

In an ideal situation, with an ideal tank and very little lag, this should not be a problem. You will likely encounter a time where it IS a problem.

So, here’s my advice:

Turn Righteous Fury on 10 seconds into the encounter.

There’s no longer a mana cost associated with it, so it won’t be an issue in terms of mana to pop it on after about 10 seconds. While it’s unlikely that you’ll pull threat, even if all of my math is correct, it IS possible to do so and so you’re better off giving your tank a head start, just like the DPS does. Believe me, I’ve stolen aggro from a tank on a Sindragosa pull more than once!

You can also turn it on and just not heal right off the bat, but the pull is a dangerous time in the fight, due to positioning, so you probably DO want to heal — just not with Righteous Fury on.

This includes being careful with Halion as soon as a phase changes. At the start of Phase 2 and at least up top in Phase 3, the tank will need to gain aggro on the dragon. I like to bubble in P3, pop Hand of Sacrifice on my tank and then heal while immune to basically everything. This gives my tank a good headstart on threat, particularly while it’s just me and them hanging out up top while we wait for the DPS to come back.

But is 6% Worth It?

Remember this image from a screenshot I posted a couple of weeks ago?

That was with Righteous Fury on. I clearly took something like 30k damage from the Ice Tomb and two others around me. Without the 6% damage reduction, do you think I would have lived?

Here’s the damage I took:

[20:59:10.819] Sindragosa Ice Tomb Madrana 11915  (R: 3169)
[20:59:11.242] Sindragosa Ice Tomb Madrana 12134 (R: 3227)
[20:59:11.242] Sindragosa Ice Tomb Madrana 10389 (R: 4737)

Now, let’s look at those numbers, assuming the same resist, and assuming no Righteous Fury, meaning 6% more damage on each hit.

[20:59:10.819] Sindragosa Ice Tomb Madrana 12676  (R: 3169) (761 more)
[20:59:11.242] Sindragosa Ice Tomb Madrana 12909 (R: 3227) (775 more)
[20:59:11.242] Sindragosa Ice Tomb Madrana 11052 (R: 4737) (663 more)

Assuming I was topped off, that would have been a 1740 overkill on that last Ice Tomb, since I had 34897 health total. So even the total of 2199 extra damage reduction came in very, very handy here.

One Thing To Note

Through Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum, there are no fights where the boss completely drops aggro and runs around, smacking everyone else down. (Although Lady Deathwhisper reduces the tank’s ability to build aggro, this is not an aggro wipe. Still, due to the adds, you should not use Righteous Fury here anyways, as previously noted.)

Long-time raiders may recall Supremus in Black Temple and Leotheras in Serpentshrine Cavern who, among others, will drop aggro either randomly or at specific points in the encounters. It is never recommended that you use Righteous Fury on any fight where the boss wipes aggro!

Final Remarks

So there you go. You now know how and when to use Righteous Fury effectively to take full advantage of the 6% damage reduction Improved Righteous Fury brings you. Just don’t forget to turn it off while going from boss fight to boss fight. ;)

Do you make use of Righteous Fury differently? Do you even bother? Do you use it regularly? How do you feel about the fact that this talent does not appear to exist in Cataclysm?

I’ve populated the list with a few names and blogs already, but haven’t been able to verify progression in some other cases.

Requirements (may be subject to change, but we’ll start out with this):

1) The blogger must be at least 9/12 ICC HM (that’s 10 or 25, although if you’re doing 10, you shouldn’t be decked out in all 277 gear). This can mean that the blogger has reached that stage with her current guild or a previous guild. Please let me know what the progression is in the comment itself. (Note that I’ll take your 25m progression over 10m if you’re wearing lots of 277 gear.)

2) The blogger must be a woman. This means that the blogger should say somewhere (either a blog post or in the About section) that they are a woman. Gender of the character does not matter. ;) (I will also include self-identified MTF transgender individuals as female bloggers, should any exist, mostly because I’m inclusive in general, but also because my previous post was spawned in part by my annoyance with the male-dominated heteronormative narrative that exists in WoW.)

3) The blog should primarily be about WoW stuff. If your blog is mostly you talking about what movie you saw before you went off and spent a couple of hours in ICC, you won’t get listed. I’d really like for this to be a solid list of women who are progressed in this game and who really talk about the game on their blogs.

A proper submission:

Kurn of Kurn’s Corner (http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com), is 11/12 ICC 25 HM and here is her armory: (link)

Please note that this is not any kind of effort to be elitist or to snub women who may be less-progressed! This is really a sort of experiment to see how many women out there are progression raiders who blog about WoW to help me see if my initial theory was right or wrong. (I believed that the reason there weren’t, from what I could tell, a lot of progression-minded female raiders who blogged was because there weren’t that many progression-minded female raiders at all.)

Also, the 9/12 HM requirement is arbitrary, I know. I put it there because I feel that most raiding guilds can eventually get Lady Deathwhisper down on heroic (typically the 9th boss on heroic you’ll do) but that, for whatever reason, a raiding guild may struggle once they start banging their heads against the walls that Putricide and Sindragosa represent, even to the point of giving up and no longer raiding.

I have a feeling that this post may be updated fairly regularly. ;)

25-man Progressed Female Raiders who Blog

(Please note that progression listed below is for Icecrown Citadel 25-man hard modes.)

12/12:

Avalonna at Tales of a Priest (co-blogger)

Dawn at Disco Priest

Vixsyn of Life in Group 5

11/12:

Aislinana of Empowered Fire

Angela at Restoration Druid

Bellwether from 4 Haelz

Beruthiel at Falling Leaves and Wings

Cassandri (and Lathere) at HoTs & DoTs

ecclesiasticaldiscipline at ecclesiastical discipline

Foofy of Foofy’s CupCake Factory

Keeva from Tree Bark Jacket

Kurn at Kurn’s Corner (tip: you are here!)

10/12:

Codi at Moar HPS!

Elsen at The View Through the Branches

9/12:

Anafielle over at Righteous Defense (co-blogger)

Jasyla from Cannot be Tamed

Napps of Mama GM

Ophelie of Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon

10-man Progressed Female Raiders who Blog

(Please note that progression listed below is for Icecrown Citadel 10-man hard modes.)

11/12:

Jen of Stories of WoW

Kae at Dreambound

Laranya from Root & Branch

Larísa at The Pink Pigtail Inn

Leafie at Leaf-head

Vidyala from Pugging Pally

10/12:

Ailinea of Playing with Fire

9/12:

Arioch of Clearcasting

So in the midst of all these posts (there are so many that I couldn’t possibly link all the ones I’ve read recently), I realized I had a lot of things to say. I don’t really talk much here about being a woman in this game or the strange reactions I get when it’s discovered that I AM, in fact, female, or how I deal with people’s reactions. I also haven’t spoken much about the lack of other capable women at high-end levels. This seems like a perfect time to address some issues and throw my own views out there.

Where I Began

When I started playing this game, and I know I have mentioned this before, I rolled a male toon. I wanted to be an Alliance hunter, didn’t want to be a dwarf and thought Shadowmeld was basically the coolest ability in the universe. (And I would argue it still beats the hell out of Stoneform.) So my choice was to be a Night Elf. But was I going to be a male toon or a female toon? Apart from the fact that the female toon’s idle animation is to bounce (which Jasyla once said was them working their calves!) I probably would have chosen a male toon anyways, just to avoid the extra attention. I’ve been part of online communities since 1985/1986 and extra attention is just part of being a woman online. I’ve had my fair share of people crushing on me, but I’ve also had my fair share of ugly incidents, including one where someone tracked me down and left harassing voice mails because I was exerting my moderator privileges on a specific community and was doing so fairly firmly with regards to this one user. As a result, my number has been unlisted since the late 90s and will remain unlisted. This is something that, as a woman, you might actually have to concern yourself with, particularly if you’re using your real name somewhere.

So, the chance to have a male character, thereby mostly avoiding the vast majority of even virtual harassment? Talk about amazing. I could be as anonymous as I wanted, running around this beautiful world, playing, learning and never have to say a word. (This was before I had any idea about TeamSpeak or Vent, mind you.)

Where Have All The Women Gone?

The Beginning (Fated Heroes – February ’06-January ’07)

When looking back over the last five years that I’ve played this game, I realize that I have progressively moved from the realm of “women are everywhere” to “… where the hell are all the other women?”. In my very first guild, we had Tia, a female warlock who was an officer and who kicked ASS. We had me, as a kickass hunter, we had several DPS and several healers who were women. We even had a tank in training who was a woman. Then again, we had virtually no tanks, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that we had the one, lone woman in a semi-tank role.

Early Burning Crusade (March-May ’07)

In my next guild, we had a female MT, then myself as one of the main healers, another woman as a healer and I believe we had a couple of female DPSers (at least one mage), all in one Kara group. Again, no real lack of women, since that was about 40% women for any given Kara run. The guild stopped raiding after many members of that Kara group were ninjaed by the top guild on the server, and so I went off and formed Apotheosis with Maj and the others shortly after.

Apotheosis (June ’07-March ’09)

In Apotheosis, during Burning Crusade, we were overrun by women! :) We had me (although I was the only female officer), but we also had Shamalah (! I didn’t forget you!) who was an ele shammy/moonkin, Osephala (ele shammy), Darista (arcane mage), Criza (fire, then arcane mage), Lax (arcane mage), Q (resto druid), Aaza (hunter), Legs (holy priest), Myth (enhance shammy), Fallon (rogue), Kam (warlock/warlock tank), Eviil (warlock), Purple (warlock), Becca (warlock) and probably at least a couple of others that I’m blanking on. Everyone I named was a regular raider at some point in the life of Apotheosis during Burning Crusade, most of them all the way through. Yes, there were nights when our casters were all women. Most nights had a minimum of 8/25 raid members being women. Some nights, we did actually outnumber the boys.

What was awesome about it was that it was only remarked upon a couple of times. Everyone just took it in stride, even though it isn’t really all that common. My guild was respectful, for the most part. I did outlaw various words, mind you — but it wasn’t because of the women in the guild, it was because I felt it was important that the majority not make possible minorities feel uncomfortable. My old guild was sort of a haven for me where I didn’t have to worry that my guildies were behaving inappropriately. I didn’t have to worry about being painted with the same brush as some moronic bigot or close-minded ass. We enforced a couple of language-related rules and they rarely needed enforcement.

That we had a lot of women never seemed to me to be a big deal. Until my guild stopped raiding 25s and I struck out on my own, just a few months after Wrath launched.

To Bronzebeard (March-September ’09)

I joined my Bronzebeard guild and discovered another female tank; the first one I’d really seen since my Kara days. There were some other women scattered through the DPS and the healers, but nowhere near the amount of women we had in Apotheosis. And the attitudes towards women were different, too. When I first opened my mouth on Vent, everyone was like “OMG SHE’S A GIRL”. I laughed it off, but at the time, I was inundated with whispers from my brand-new guildmates, telling me I sounded sexy or that I had a hot voice. I knew then that my time with my Bronzebeard guild was going to be very different from my time in Apotheosis.

The Bronzebeard guild, even with the female tank, wasn’t particularly heavy on women when I first joined, but we added to the ranks with some awesome healers (Fad and Carm to join Kal and myself) and some women who were DPS. We had about 5-10 women depending on the raid makeup on any given night and they were spread out pretty well in terms of roles.

Unfortunately, this is where I encountered one of Those Women. You know, the ones who like to try to woo the menfolk, who like to tease them, who think they can get by on their perceived looks? Yeah. And, unfortunately, she became an officer. And even more unfortunately, she became a raid leader, once the gnome raid leader gquit in a huff.

I’ll get back to women and leadership in a little while.

To My RL Friend’s Guild (September ’09-June ’10)

When I joined my previous guild, the one where my RL friend the resto druid is healing lead, I took about ten steps up the progression ladder. Where my previous guild had not downed heroic Northrend Beasts after 36 attempts or something, over two weeks, this guild hadn’t even TRIED TOGC, due to farming TOC25 and TOC10 and, I believe, still running some Ulduar for my friend and her mace.

So I was there for our first attempts in TOGC. We raided on the Sunday and the Monday and got NRB down on the Monday and again on the Wednesday.

I’m looking at a screenshot of us working on heroic Jaraxxas. The MT is yelling at everyone, cussing us out over the previous attempt. In the screenshot, I can clearly see my Grid.

There are precisely two women in the raid. Myself and my RL friend. That’s it. Everyone else is a guy. A month later, another screenshot. Still two women in the raid, me and my RL friend. And here’s us doing Steelbreaker last. Still just me and my RL friend. It isn’t until the former hunter officer was talked into coming back that we had a third woman in the raid, and she wasn’t even regular for a couple of months. Granted, we ran with a pretty tight roster, at least in terms of tanks and healers, but in terms of DPS, we had a bit of a revolving door. Lots of people couldn’t stand the MT’s abuse, particularly when the RL just stopped playing and the MT took over as RL. You would think that SOME of the DPS would be women.

But no.

We only added one more regular woman to the raids before I left that guild; a mage who was pretty good (and is, sadly, in a romantic relationship with that “only thinks outside the box” priest, you may recall from previous posts). We had a couple of female healers in and out over the course of the 9 months I was there, but at most, there were only four women in the raid on any given night. Actually, I should say that there was a maximum of four women raiders in the guild at any given point while I was in that guild.

That’s less than half, even a third of what we ran with in Apotheosis in Burning Crusade. And the two most dedicated women raiders (myself and my RL friend) were both healers.

It was with that guild that I earned Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25) and worked on heroic Lich King for two nights before I knew I had to leave the guild to escape the toxic environment there. (How my friend continues to put up with it, I don’t know.)

To My Current Guild (June ’10 – present)

My guild master is a woman. She’s fantastic. She is to this guild what I wish I had been to Apotheosis. She’s also a kick-ass resto shammy who will do healing assignments if the regular healing lead is doing raid leading.

One of my two raid leaders is a woman. I cannot express how awesome it is to have a female raid leader *who is not me* (or that crazy one from Bronzebeard). She’s also a kick-ass rogue.

The roster of this guild is substantially larger than my last one, so I could be wrong, but apart from the GM, the RL, myself, one other healer and one DPS, I think everyone’s a guy. Five raiding women, three healers, two DPS, zero tanks.

We’re 9/12 ICC 25 HM. And we raid with five women, sometimes as few as one on any given raid night.

It doesn’t feel the same as my previous guild, though, and I attribute that to the fact that the GM herself is a woman and one of the raid leaders is. Seeing women in positions of power makes me feel like less of an oddball than I felt in my previous guilds.

Strangely, being a woman in my last guild wasn’t so bad, really — I was treated like anyone else was and, ultimately, that’s what I want. I don’t think that being treated like anyone else is something that requires a lot of women around. By that, I mean that I don’t think women need to be commonplace within a guild in order to “overlook” (or, perhaps more accurately, “not care”) that a player is a woman.

Women Missing at Higher Progression Levels?

However, based on this small sample, it appears likely that the more progressed a raiding guild is, the fewer women are part of that raid group. I’m not saying that the more progressed raid groups are more progressed because there are fewer women, though! Maybe it’s that the more “hardcore” culture doesn’t appeal to women the way it does to men.

Ophelie mentioned in the comments on Codi’s blog that she had trouble finding progressed female raiders (who blogged) to link to: “I found very, very few female bloggers who were progressed raiders.” Ophelie linked to Codi, myself and Dawn Moore’s Disco Priest. Kind of slim pickings, eh? I could point to Avalonna and Derevka (even if Derevka’s a guy, Ava’s a girl) over at Tales of a Priest, since I know they’ve downed LK on Heroic 25. That’s pretty progressed. But I really don’t know of a lot of other progressed female raiders who blog.

Does that mean that there aren’t a lot of female raiders or there aren’t a lot of female raiders who blog? There are a lot of people who blog, even though bloggers still are probably a very tiny portion of the 11.5 million person playerbase.

Just based on my firsthand experience, I have to assume that a lack of progressed, female bloggers is because of a lack of progressed female raiders. This is an exceptionally small sample size, obviously, but I can’t help but feel that progressed female raiders are rare.

My first question is “why?”

As I said, I don’t think it’s because women are just naturally going to bring guilds down in quality. :P I think there’s something about the intensity required in a progression guild that might not be as fun for most women as it can be for guys, if that makes sense. There’s a lot of strategy involved in World of Warcraft, even just as a single player within a group. One has to listen to instructions and perform on cue and basically not screw up. A lot of the decisions one has to make are of the “split-second” variety.

Fortune magazine had some data about men and women’s decision-making styles that I thought was interesting. I’ve underlined the portions that I believe are specifically relevent to progression raiding “culture”.

Men love to lecture; women like to listen.

Men are more likely to act alone, apt to blame others;
Women collaborate, listen, and build teams.

Men are more focused on long-term results, women on short-term goals.

Men put more weight on the how the decision will affect the competitive environment; women consider how it will affect the team.

Men exercise their decision making power, if they have it.  Women want to work through people, even if they have the decision-making authority.

Men are more-likely blindsided by a crisis, where women will more often see the crisis looming (e.g., a woman anticipated the Enron disaster).

Men think men are better at problem-solving or decision-making. Women think women are better at both.  However, if the job is in general management, both sexes think men are better decision makers. The exception is in “female” jobs, such as human resources.

Raiding is a strange activity. You need to do *your* best in your role in order for the team to succeed. But if that involves switching DPS off the boss on to adds, or stopping DPS for a phase change or to move, that switch or the brief stoppage of DPS can affect your total damage. So, acting alone, a lot of DPS will ignore calls to stop/switch/etc. We’ve all seen people “tunnel” (vision) through X, Y or Z and cause a wipe or a near wipe.

The competition between DPS (or even healers — see Suzushiiro from Big Crits for a high-profile example of a healer who humps the meters. Around 2m45 in Week Four’s episode of Big Crits is where you can hear him talking about Sindragosa.) is healthy in some ways, but very unhealthy for your raid group on the whole in other ways.

Healthy: Good competition to be tops on the meters means people want to pull out all the stops and perform to their highest ability.

Unhealthy: Pushing phase changes or not killing adds can totally wipe your raid. (Healer version might include not cleansing or decursing or not swapping to, say, the Jaraxxus Incinerate target. Or not moving out of a Shadow Trap on heroic Lich King.)

Time and time again, the people I see screwing that stuff up — tunnelling — are men. The women respect the assignments they’re given, more often than not, in my experience.

Example:

Picture it. Black Temple, facing Gurtogg Bloodboil’s room.

We reorganized all the groups in the raid so Group 1 would be the first to eat the first Blood Boil, Group 2 would be the second, Group 3 would be the third, Group 1 would be the fourth and Group 2 would be the fifth.

Our fully-holy priest (ie: with Circle of Healing and no Divine Spirit) was seen as our “strongest” AOE-healing priest. We put him in Group 1 and told him he was healing Group 1. The priest who was the best technical healer, who could live without CoH and still heal well and effectively, was put into Group 2 and told to heal G2. They were both men. Our third priest was holy with CoH and was a woman. She was also a bit of a part-time raider, due to work, so she wasn’t quite as geared or quite as familiar with the fights. We put her in Group 3 and told her to heal Group 3, which meant she only had to heal through one Blood Boil per phase.

We told the priests, specifically, to use Prayer of Healing to help heal through Blood Boil. That that was why they were in a group, that that was their responsibility. Our G2 priest (hi, Euphie!) had even found the sweet, sweet rank of PoH that was the best one to use for output and for mana conservation. (I miss downranking!)

For something like four or five wipes, Group 1 kept dying due to Blood Boil. Could not figure out why. Group 3 was fine, Group 2 was fine, Group 1 kept dying.

Our melee officer, whom we called Football, finally looked at his Recount (back when Recount was new!) and was like “Kurn… that G1 priest? Is healing his group using only CoH.”

The female priest had no problems listening to us. She trusted us, she knew what she was doing was for the team.

The CoH-happy priest in G1 was asked what the hell he was doing. “Healing my group?” he said. “PoH is too expensive, I’m oom all the time, can’t heal.”

“Are you downranking to the rank Euphie said to use?”

“No…”

“Do it.”

Once he did, we were able to heal through the encounter beautifully.

To me, it was clear that he was trying to conserve mana by using CoH instead of PoH so that he would have enough mana for the second round, trusting in his CoH to hit his group and keep them topped off enough that he didn’t need to use the mana for PoH. He acted alone. He was trying to stay competitive. He had the decision-making power in the moment when he realized PoH (max rank) wasn’t viable and so he decided to use CoH.

The female priest listened. Did what was best for the team. Didn’t seem to care about being competitive. Listened to us when she had to exercise her own decision-making, in the moment of the encounter.

That’s one way in which it seems women are naturally good at raiding; we listen, we like the team, we like to work through people.

However, there’s another facet I underlined which might very well explain why progression raiding might not necessarily appeal to women:

Men are more focused on long-term results, women on short-term goals.

From expansion to expansion, you’re looking at almost two years. Two years. That is a long, long, long time. That is an eternity. It’s one thing to go on a pug and raid for three hours every once in a while to build up your character. It’s another thing entirely to apply to a raiding guild where they expect you to be there at least 75% of the time for, basically, the rest of the expansion. It’s daunting!

Maybe this is why so many men are GMs; they have a goal, they want to achieve it, nothing stands in their way.

When I was a GM, I had that goal too, but I focused on the short-term. What do we need to recruit? What boss fight is next on our list? Actually, funny story that illustrates that perfectly…

I believe that we had downed Hydross, back in SSC, with only a little bit of concerted effort and then went on to The Lurker Below, which gave us a lot of trouble, actually. So much trouble that I’d basically only glanced at some strats with regards to the other bosses we could attempt (Tidewalker and Leotheras) after Lurker. On a new reset, we got Hydross down easily and most things clicked for Lurker and Lurker died, early in the night.

And I had NO idea what boss to hit next.

I believe my precise words to my officers were: “… shit. Anyone know where to go next?”

Since then, I always research a couple of bosses in advance, but if not for the quick thinking of Football, who had already done reading, I believe, we wouldn’t have even known right away to go for Tidewalker. (Elite murlocs FTL.)

So that’s my guess. I think that women may not like the overall idea of showing up, night after night after night over the course of the expansion. I think we’re more focused on shorter-term goals; getting hit-capped, getting a specific item, downing a particular boss, than we are when it comes to downing, say, Illidan. While downing Illidan might have been a motivator for Majik, for example, even when we were back in Kara, I was thinking more about just getting Shade of Aran down for the teleporter, or getting Curator down to get someone T4 gloves.

I’m not saying this applies to all women, but I think that it probably plays a large part of why women are suddenly almost absent, comparatively, when you look at more progressive raiding guilds.

Your Questions, My Guesses

I asked you guys if you had any questions for me about being a female raider and such and you guys had a lot to say.

Mailynn asked:

Do you think women raiders aren’t taken as seriously? / [D]o you think women tend to avoid tank toons because of the tendency to be, like me, emotional about things?

Absolutely. I have had people be very surprised that I am a halfway decent player. I think that as soon as some people hear a woman’s voice on Vent (or whatever voice communication you use), their interest is picqued but their level of respect drops until proven right or wrong. Just because I have an awesome voice doesn’t mean I can’t play, but it might mean that people judge me to be inadequate until they’ve seen me play.

Do you think women don’t play tank characters because of the preconceived notion that tanks == men?

I can’t answer that for all women everywhere, but I’ll tell you why I don’t play a tank very often. The combination of melee-range (I hate hearing all the hits and blocks and parries, but I like the other noises — heals, for instance), the fact that you’re basically staring a boss in the crotch (or knee or whatever) and the sheer responsibility makes me decide it is less fun than, say, healing.

I initially didn’t tank because I didn’t know how. Now that I know how, I choose not to do so, because I don’t enjoy melee-range — or the view. ;) But I still find that responsibility daunting. Tanks are hugely important in this game and if they don’t perform their roles adequately, you threat-cap the DPS, the healer gets eaten, you hit enrage or you die early and you wipe.

Why, for instance, did Apotheosis have no female tanks? Well, we had lots of people playing as tanks at least somewhat regularly throughout BC – SC, War, LP and B as warriors, Anta and Dayden as pallies, Fin, Poo and Kaiu as druids. They all just happened to be guys. I was the one who was actually the add tank on Hydross for a few resets between losing Anta and gaining Dayden. (God, that was crappy, but not as crappy as murloc add tanking on Tidewalker, which I also had the, er, “pleasure” of experiencing.)

We just didn’t get female tank apps. Plenty of DPS apps from women and a good amount of healer apps, too. It just turned out that all of our tanks were men.

In looking back at my Wrath experience, which now comprises four guilds, if you count Apotheosis, I have raided regularly with one tank who was female.

I don’t think emotion plays into it — perhaps women tend to be a little less reckless than guys? Every male tank I’ve ever played with LOVES running in headfirst and grabbing aggro. I am always much more cautious. “Is my cooldown ready? How’s my mana/rage? How’s my healer’s mana?” It’s like I have a mental checklist I go through before I pull. A male tank (or perhaps just a more experienced tank) may just charge in and chain pull and not give thought to the things I do. That’s not to say that they’re playing poorly, but I am definitely more cautious when tanking. That might play into it. I think a tank probably SHOULD be careful, but not as cautious as me.

Also, do people really believe that the only reason women raid is because their significant other raids/plays? / Does this [...] mean that men often equate to two people applying instead of one? / Are women viewed as only capable of minor supportive roles and thus lack the motor skills to do anything other than mash a few buttons?

Some people do believe that the only reason women raid is because of their SO. Actually, I take that back. Some people believe that the only reason women raid is because of their boyfriends. More than once, I’ve been asked why my boyfriend and I don’t raid together. Seriously. (In response: I’m single at the moment and I started playing WoW of my own accord, thanks.)

As to your second question in there, as a former guild master/officer, there was a definite prejudice against the female partner of a male applicant. If a husband/wife team apped to Apotheosis, I know at least some of the guys who were officers were going “Oh God, she’s going to be terrible”. How do I know that? Because I worried about that, too. Far, far too often, women who apply with their husbands or male partners are not appropriately geared/etc for the content their male partners are geared for. As such, one gets used to thinking “oh man, she’s gonna be horrible”. It’s not something of which I’m proud, and I obviously don’t think all women are terrible, but this is a pattern. It makes me want to shake the female players out there and tell them to research their class before applying as a raider with their significant other.

I’m not sure if women are only really viewed as being in support roles (hybrids, healers) because I’ve raided as a healer for four years. I’ll say that people have been surprised that I’m a good hunter, though.

Kaleri asked:

What do you think about women choosing healing classes?

Well, I chose to be a healer because I enjoyed it. It was very different from DPSing and brought my focus off the game field and on to my group members. I like the ability to really contribute to keeping people up. Killing Vashj for the first time was because I popped Lay on Hands on our sole remaining tank and it CRIT for 15k and Vashj died 20-25 seconds later. You rarely get to make that big a difference as DPS, so that’s what keeps me as a healer. Everyone always needs a healer.

I think women in general might choose healing classes because society tells us that’s what we should do. Take, for example the Star Trek series. I choose them because they’re science-fictiony and we’re dealing with a fantasy MMO and I think there are a lot of similarities between the two genres.

In the original series, you only had Uhura, communications officer, as a major female character. She wore a miniskirt.

In TNG, you had Dr. Crusher and Counselor Troi and Lt. Yar. Yar dies in the first season and that leaves Troi and Crusher as the two major female characters and they’re both in the caretaker role.

On DS9, you had Kira and Dax. Kira was the first officer of the station and she was pretty kick-ass, but she was also very religious, which made Sisko uncomfortable and he doesn’t always take all this “emissary stuff” seriously. So right there, you have this difference — Kira, the woman, is religious and Sisko, the commander, the MAN, is not. Ergo, Kira, despite being kick-ass, is relegated to being someone who is not always taken seriously due to her religious convictions. Dax was less seen as kick-ass and more seen as “brainy” and “sexy”, IMHO.

On Voyager, you had Captain Janeway, Lt. Torres, Kes and Seven of Nine. Janeway was shown to be very much kick-ass and strong… until she fell in love with a hologram. Torres was strong… until she fell in love with Tom Paris. Kes… well, she eventually left, leaving Seven as her sort of replacement. Seven of Nine was bad. ass. She was a freaking Borg! In spandex. And high-heels. She wasn’t very emotional, acting very much like Data from TNG or Spock from TOS and while she was very much capable of being kick-ass, as soon as she showed any emotion, she was pretty much helpless.

All of that to say that even in a genre like science-fiction, it’s always the men who are the “strong” ones, the ones who kick ass and take names and even though they have HELP from the women, the women are ultimately weaker than they are. Or at least, that’s my (very basic) reading of gender roles. So if a woman wants to be helpful, useful in this game, she won’t roll a tank (IMHO). She’ll roll a hybrid and be okay with DPS and healing, but the tanking is “for the men”. In my opinion, based on gender roles in our pop culture. And WoW is definitely part of pop culture.

I like what you had to say about your bear. “sometimes I feel like I get less hassle if they think I’m a guy” I agree. I think people are more likely to just think “that guy’s a moron” if I make a mistake and they think I’m a guy, versus “goddammit, girls can’t fucking tank”. :P

thansal said: I do think that being a tank and a raid leader require similar personality traits. Specifically they tend to lean in the direction of the ‘type A’ personality.

While I do think that more raid leaders and tanks (and they’re definitely not always one-and-the-same) exhibit more ‘Type A’ traits, there’s nothing I can find that tells us that men are more likely to be Type A as compared to women. But I do think this is an interesting point in general. Reading the description from the page I linked above is pretty much a classic tank or raid leader.

So. There you go. Over 5000 words of my thoughts and stories. What are your thoughts? :)

What about, exactly?

Well, I have things to say about being a woman who raids, about how I’ve seen the decline of women around me as I’ve moved to more progressed guilds, about the lack of women as tanks and other stuff, including questioning why the Leggings of Concentrated Darkness look like this on a female toon and like actual slacks on a male toon. (Couldn’t find a screenshot of the men wearing them. Gee. I wonder why not?)

But, like I said, not right now. If you have any questions for me about being a female raider, leave them in the comments and I’ll be happy to address them in my upcoming post.

In short, go watch my YouTube videos if you’re bored. ;)

Hope to post a fair bit this week despite the craziness going on, but if not, there are thousands upon thousands of words on this very blog for you to read through and a couple hours worth of videos on YouTube. Go forth and read/watch. :)

Tonight:

[19:44:21.389] Professor Putricide casts Unbound Plague

This is the second plague of a set.

[19:44:21.399] Moonkin’s Unbound Plague fades

This is the first plague the moonkin has passed to a warlock.

[19:44:21.399] Moonkin afflicted by Plague Sickness from Moonkin

This is the moonkin getting Plague Sickness at the same instant he has passed the plague off.

You may notice that this is 0.01 seconds after Professor Putricide has cast the second Unbound Plague.

[19:44:21.413] Moonkin afflicted by Unbound Plague from Professor Putricide

This is the moonkin getting the NEW plague almost immediately after passing the old one off to the warlock. He does NOT have Plague Sickness at the second that Putricide casts Unbound Plague. .01 seconds before he gets Plague Sickness, Putricide cast the new plague. The rule has always seemed to be that if you have Plague Sickness, you cannot get a new plague.

How’s that for some crappy luck? Gah.