The Best Laid Plans…

When I rolled Clergelam, it was because I wanted to heal. Due to Enhancement’s piss-poor post 4.0.1 performance and the fact that half of our guild healers had to quit due to real life, Elam was primarily resto for the last two months of Wrath of the Lich King raiding. (Ironically, this is the same spec Elam started WotLK with.) Fights like Heroic Sindragosa gave me an itch to heal, and with Cataclysm and Elam’s return to dual-wielding imminent, the choice became “what other hybrid do I heal as?” The answer was Smite.

Unfortunately, I’m not born to heal. I enjoy it on a Resto Shaman as a break from the repetitiveness of the weekly grind, but I’ve never managed to make a mainspec out of it. With Clergelam, I told myself this would be different, that the DPS nature of smite spec would be enough to convince me to give up my murderous ways and focus on saving lives. I told myself that this would be “the one,” the alt where I main-specced heals without a thought of changing.

Unfortunately, an Elam never changes it’s spot. I think part of it might have been the fact that they reduced the cost of Dual Spec by 990 gold. I think another part of it might have been my annoyance at Smite healing. I think a third part of it might be the fact that I really, really think Shadowform looks cool, in all it’s emo glory. And, a big part of it might have been the fact that no other spec allows you to turn your filler spell into a Death Ray from Space when turned into a goth turkey.

Clergelam is Shadow now. Not only is she shadow, but she’s dual-specced Shadow- one for battlegrounding, one for instances. I’ve fallen for this spec hard. It’s literally everything I want in a caster dps spec. It’s dot-centric like Affliction, but instead of having a lameass filler like Shadowbolt it has Mind Flay. The primary nuke not only hits hard, but it procs an ability that increases the damage of most of your other abilities. It’s a complex enough spec that I actually needed to download ForteXorcist for multiple-target dotting.

Most importantly, Shadow has Shadow Word: Death. Being a Shaman, I have never had access to an “Execute” ability. I’ve never even had one of the lame Mage-style executes, the ones that give you +% damage done to targets below x% health. On Elam, execute range is my least favorite part of a boss fight, as I get to watch myself dropping down below the classes that do more damage at the end of fights. When I mained Darwinism for a few months, Kill Shot filled me with joy whenever I pressed it. Shadow Word: Death is my new Kill Shot. Glyphed, I get to use it at least twice a boss fight, generally with disastrous results to my own hit points. (Not going to lie, I get some sort of  strange happy feeling watching my health drop from SW:D. Crits actually make me laugh out loud. ) It hits hard, it procs Glyph of Spirit Tap if it kills the target, it gives me 10% mana back of it doesn’t, and it’s just generally fun to use. I love it.

I’m going to have to respec one of my two Shadow specs heals eventually. The main reason for this is that I have a sick obsession with running Burning Crusade heroics when I’m between 70 and 75, and leveling Sashafears taught me that hour long dps queues waiting for a healer aren’t fun. I also think I should possibly break my illogical hatred of Holy and see if Chakra is everything it’s cracked up to be. (I doubt it.) Those will be respecs out of practicality, though. Shadow is my main spec now, and will remain my mainspec. Whether it’s multi-dotting mobs (550 dps on Golem Lord Arglemach? Yesplz.), masochistically executing bosses, or afking in Org in shadowform on my Turbo-trike, I’m sold on shadow.

Tags: 4.0, Priest

Less Than Smitten with Smite Spec.

When I started Clergelam on Tuesday, her creation was born out of practicality. I like healing quite a bit, but I’m not paying for a faction transfer for my 80 resto druid, I hate my 80 Paladin because I’m a classist jerk, and my hope for becoming WoW Insider’s new Enhancement columnist means my primary focus in Cataclysm will be to play Enhancement dual-spec (PVE/PVP). With that in mind, I looked to the priest. With the Shattering upon us and the advent of Tauren priests combined with Smitespam being the most interesting healing spec in the game, Clergelam took her first steps in Camp Narache. She was destined for greatness…or at the very least, destined to power her way to level 80 with instant queue healer dungeons.

This plan served me well in the beginning. Discipline is an awesome leveling spec when you hit level 10, as a single smite and a penance are a world of hurt for any mob brazen enough to touch your holyness. I plowed through the Northern Barrens. Quillboar, Savannah Hunters, even the dreaded giraffes had nothing on my mental discipline. Smite was not a terribly fun spell at this time, as it’s cast is as long as fireball’s but hits for half it’s damage. That fact was slightly clouded by the fact that Penance WAS a fun spell to cast. Every 12 seconds I could target a mob and have them in execute range before they were halfway to me. It was glorious.

Finally, after a good long 2-3 hours of /played, Clergelam was a teenager and ready to queue for her first instance. I was excited beyond reason. I’ve healed Ragefire Chasm on druids, on paladins, on shaman, on Donder and Blitzen. I’d even healed it once on my boyfriend’s priest, circa 2008. However, this Ragefire Chasm was the new post-Shattering Ragefire Chasm, tuned to put the older RFC to shame. And, I was smite spec. (Considering the first three talents in discipline are +6% Healing/Damage, +20% Power Word Shield Absorb, and -10% Mana Cost on Instants, I’m not quite sure why I identified as smite spec at such a young age. Adults told me “it’s just a phase,” and “you’re too young to know,” but by the Light I knew.)

It went abysmally. At  level 15, priests have access to three heals- Renew, Power Word: Shield, and Flash Heal. Flash Heal is the high throughput/high mana cost/low cast time heal every healer has now. Renew and PW:S are both instant casts. All of these are actually very mana intense spells. I was a cocky little priest, and we had an even cockier tank who hadn’t quite clued in to the fact that mana is an issue now and healing isn’t just putting PW:S or Earth Shield on the tank and afking. Due to my inflated ego, I brought 0 water. Due to his inflated ego, he proceeded to pull every trogg (including the first boss) in the first large room of RFC and die a horrific death while I was already out of mana from trying to roll renews and Power Word: Shields on my entire group. He apologized about not looking at my mana, I apologized for not looking at my mana, and we bro’d it up and proceeded to finish the instance without any further incident.

Level 16 saw me gain “Heal,” priest’s low throughput/low mana cost/ high cast time ability that makes patching up tanks a breeze. An incredibly boring, stagnant breeze that smells fetid and no one likes to do, but it gets the job done. Levels 19 and 21 gave me my first taste of smiting, giving me ‘Evangelism,” a talent that stacks every time you cast smite, ending at five. It increases your Smite/Holy Fire/Penance damage by 4% per stack, and reduces their mana cost by 6% per stack. At 23, you get Archangel, which consumes your Evangelism stacks to give you 5% mana back and increase your healing by 3% per stack consumed. In the 19-28 scheme of things, these talents are largely worthless. 5% total mana is a waste when Smite isn’t doing anything more for you than dealing damage, and the 15% healing buff will be spent making up for the healing you weren’t doing stacking Evangelism to five stacks. If I were to do the whole process again, I’d skip those talents for 23/25/ and 27, and use my talent points at 19 and 21 for Soul Warding, reducing the cooldown on Power Word: Shield by one second.

Level 31 is where Smite spec comes into it’s own. Once there, you hit 2/2 “Atonement,” which heals party members within 8 yards of the target you hit with your smite for as much as Smite did damage. It’s a smart heal, so it targets the person within 8 yards with the lowest health deficit. With 5 stacks of Evangelism up, it’s nearly as cheap to cast as heal, has a lower cast time, but does somewhat less healing…meaning it’s definitely not your throughput ability. (The unfortunate side effect is it doesn’t heal those pesky mages/hunters/yourself who are being inconvenient and not standing in melee range.) With access to Power Infusion coming at level 33, you can deal some damage while keeping on top of incoming party damage.

87 dps is low for that level, but Herod’s bladestorm ability causes him to go immune to damage for 10 seconds at a time. He bladestormed five times, so fifty seconds of the fight were spent not doing anything but casting heal. (Since he’s immune, I couldn’t heal those pesky melee standing in bladestorm with Atonement.) Atonement still was my most healing done, and I rocked everyone but the tank on damage. (In the mage’s defense, he was casting one every minute or so.)

The problem with this spec? Not every instance is Scarlet Monastery: Armory. In SM:A, healing is easy enough that Power Word: Shield+Atonement can keep up the tank and melee while a penance every 10 seconds or so will patch up any extra damage coming in. While boss/mob health was tuned to proper levels, their damage output is very lackluster. This isn’t the case for a lot of the instances coming up within the next level bracket. All three Dire Mauls, Scholomance, Stratholme, all have boss fights that can do pretty baller damage, and most of them have closely packed mobs that result in tanks picking up more groups then they’re meant to handle. In these cases, you’re relying on rolling shields on people with aggro, penancing the tank, Prayer of Healing when the entire group has damage coming in, and using heal to patch up minor inconveniences because you don’t have the time to build Evangelism to 5 stacks. And, Evangelism is an ability that encourages you to hate your tanks. Either they’re too careful and pull too slowly and Evangelism falls off (20 second duration seems like a lot of time at first glance. In reality, it blows. And it got buffed by 5 seconds in 4.0.3.), or they’re too reckless, pull everything, and you can’t get Evangelism to the 5 stacks you need for smite. I’m not saying that Smitespec doesn’t work as a healing spec. This is my first priest, and she’s level 46. I’m most definitely not an expert. However, I find the entire spec to be less enjoyable to play as a healer than restoration Shaman/Druid, which makes it decidedly middle of the line for me. (Holy priest is fourth, paladin is fifth.)

On another note, though, I’ve found some uses for Smitespec far beyond being the main healer of the group. In that role, I found myself frustrated and not wanting to queue. However, queuing as dps is an entirely different matter, especially for instances that I saw the healer struggling in (Scholomance and Dire Maul: Gordok Commons) were the two huge ones. My dps as shadow is averaging between 200-225 on boss fights. As smitespam, it’s 150-175, so about 3/4 of what my dark side can do. However, Vampiric Embrace blows as a hybrid healing ability, while Atonement provides the healer with a low throughput heal that tops off tanks and melee every 2.5 seconds. If things get really dicey (or the healer dies to aggro), I can pop Archangel and do 15% more healing and put out the same throughput as the healer was.

If healing heroics at level 85 is as hard as the beta forums suggested, I can see a dps smite spec as being one of the most desired dps specs in the game. It has it’s issues- while we can glyph for 18% smite hit (allowing us to hit heroic/raid bosses), dpsing smite priests will have to gear for the 18% hit for penance/holy fire. With no spirit-to-hit conversion like most hybrid healer/dps classes have now (ele shaman/shadow priests/boomkin), that will become exceptionally annoying. Additionally, with a tree with only 8 dps talents in all (Evangelism, Archangel, Atonement, Power Infusion, Train of Thought), it’s dps continues to fall short of actual dps at every bracket.If it retains the 3/4 ratio that I’m seeing now, I see potential in it. Having a dps/off-healer has the power to make a lot of Cata heroics much easier on healer mana (some regular 5 mana boss fights had me casting healing rain on cooldown on beta as enhancement). However, if the dps falls significantly shorter than that of actual dpsers, it will be essentially the same as having two healers queue…which could prove helpful, but incredibly tedious for heroics balanced around 3dps and one healer. If the damage can remain high, there might even be a niche for smitespam priests as the third healer in 10man runs. There were a number of fights in ICC 10 where we three healed and it was overkill, but two healing proved too difficult on the healers while we were learning the encounters. Having a third healer who keeps up the dps while managing to relieve some of that burden from dps could be exactly what the doctor ordered…provided it’s balanced in a way that actually makes the spec attractive to play.

Tags: 4.0, Priest