The Suffering Inflicted on Holy Paladins by Heroic Thok 25

Raid: Your numbers suck on Thok. Make them not suck.
Me: /cry

We’ve been working on Heroic Thok for a few weeks now. The strategy has been worked and reworked, we’ve gotten into the flow of the fight and we’ll probably kill that big hungry (thirsty?) dinosaur on Saturday.

It was brought to my attention, frustratingly, that my healing numbers on that fight were, well, abysmal. I haven’t been looking at numbers lately – now that most of my cohealers consist of three disc priests and a shaman, looking at numbers is just asking for misery. (When all the disc priests are away or healing as holy, I can often squeeze into second place behind our shaman on the meters, but there’s no way I can get any impressive healing in with 3 disc priests in the raid. One cannot heal nonexistent damage and Illuminated Healing just doesn’t do the job.) But I’ll take their word for it. I’m silenced more often than not on that fight. I’ll believe any accusation of fail healing.

So. Paladin problem or player problem? And can I fix it?

Paladins and 25 Heroic Thock

The first thing I did was head over to World of Logs to see how the fight is going for everyone else. (See this post if you’re curious about my World of Logs searching procedure.)

I got rid of the Asian servers, because, well, their playing conditions are too different from ours and their logs are written funny. Then I had a look at how Holy Paladins measure up there in the US and EU.

As of today, Dec 13, 2013, in the top 800 parses, 22 were paladins (2.75%…If all healing specs were made equal, one would expect around 17% – 1 in 6 – representation). And here’s how the top 5 pallies did:

#363 with 326k hps, Dec 4.
#380 with 324k hps, Nov 27.
#561 with 299k hps, Dec 12.
#634 with 289k hps, Dec 3.
#645 with 288k hps, Dec 3.
.

If you look at the top 150 all pally ranks, HPS varies from 326k to 233k. Let’s have a look at other classes:

Disc Priests: 515k to 356k
Shaman: 458k to 314k
Druids: 380k to 278k
Holy Priests: 432k to 276k
Monks: 354k to 264k

It seems pretty clear to me that we are lagging behind, significantly when compared to Disc Priests and Shaman, and moderately when compared to the other specs. Which leads to the next question, what are the most performing Holy Paladins doing to avoid the bench?

Selfless Healer vs Eternal Flame

Out of those 22 paladins who made it to the top 800, 18 of those used the Selfless Healer style.

Honestly, having tried to heal the fight with Eternal Flame for a few weeks, I’m surprised any Eternal Flame users made it into the top. Silence much, anybody?

Quickly, I switched my talents. Then I was faced with another question. How, in the name of the light, do I heal like this?

I took the top 5 paladins (forever more known as “The Top 5”) and checked out their cast log. Thankfully, it was pretty unanimous and consistent throughout the fight:

[20:59:19.598] Light of Dawn (HoPo = 0)
[20:59:20.647] Judgment on Thok the Bloodthirsty (HoPo = 1, SH = 1)
[20:59:21.621] Holy Shock (HoPo = 2, SH = 1)
[20:59:22.644] Holy Radiance (HoPo = 3. SH = 0)
[20:59:23.506] Light of Dawn (HoPo = 0)
[20:59:24.444] Judgment on Thok the Bloodthirsty (HoPo = 1, SH = 1)
[20:59:25.454] Holy Shock (HoPo = 2, SH = 1)
[20:59:26.458] Holy Radiance (HoPo = 3. SH = 0)
[20:59:27.503] Holy Radiance (HoPo = 4. SH = 0)
[20:59:29.149] Light of Dawn (HoPo = 1)
[20:59:30.148] Judgment on Thok the Bloodthirsty (HoPo = 2, SH = 1)
[20:59:31.146] Holy Shock (HoPo = 3, SH = 1)
[20:59:32.289] Holy Radiance (HoPo = 4. SH = 0)
[20:59:33.269] Light of Dawn (HoPo = 1)

Regardless of whether the Jailer was up, or how far along they were in Thok’s screeching phase, each Light of Dawn was cast with 3 charges of Holy Power. The Judgement-Holy Shock-Holy Radiance rotation was flexible based on what was off CD (and possibly the needs of the raid). I noticed, as well, that Holy Radiance was usually cast with only one stack of Selfless Healer. (Two paladins, #2 and #3, I believe, were using two stacks of Selfless Healer during Holy Avenger. As far as I could tell, nobody else was doing that. #5 didn’t even use Judgement during his first Holy Avenger).

The Cooldown Usage

I picked this particular screenshot because it illustrates pretty much every cooldown strategy I noticed among The Top 5.

1- Beacon of Light Swapping: 3 out of 5 moved their Beacon from tank to tank, although at different paces. Note, however, that all 5 were the only paladin healers in their raid.

2- Pre-potting: Two of them (and maybe others, WoL doesn’t always catch buffs that are cast before the fight starts) pre-potted with Int potions. 3 of them used Int potions later on, during the second or third Screech phase.

3- All the Throughput CDs, ALL OF THEM. After Heroism/Bloodlust/Timewarp (BHT): Everyone waited for HBT to wear off, then blew their Holy Avenger-Divine Favor-Guardian-Avenging Wrath combo. Based on how long their kite phase was, some (such as the paladin above) used all 4 again on the second Screech phase. Those who had shorter kite phases used only Holy Avenger and Divine Favor during the second Screech, and everyone used everything again for the third Screech. Note that all the top pallies killed Thok during or right after the third Screech phase.

Another note on the throughput CDs – my copally and I experimented with CD timing last week and it is essential to wait for BHT to wear off before popping everything. You won’t heal worth shit of you pop anything during BHT.

4- Selfless Healer Stacks: The paladin on the screenshot hit 3 stacks of Selfless Healer twice. Which, as I mentioned in the last section, seems typical among the top 5. No one seemed to really worry about SH stacks.

5- Devo Aura: I suck and forgot to show Devo Aura on the screenshot. If you wondering, this paladin used it for each Screech phase. As for everyone else, it seemed to depend how fast they moved through the fight. Those who phase changed too quickly used their Devo during First and Third, or during Second. This is something to be agreed upon among all the paladins in the raid since Devo Aura really makes or breaks this fight.

The Plan!

On the condition that I am not benched this week in favor of one shaman and six disc priests, here’s the improvement plan:

1- Selfless Healer with Light of Dawn cast at 3 charges of Holy Power. Judgement-Holy Shock-Holy Radiance-type rotation.
2- Pre-pot FTW!
3- Wait until AFTER HBT to cast ALL THE CDs.

Wish me luck!

World of Logs Log Browser meet Player. Player, meet Log Browser

Protip: You can scroll to the bottom of this post (and click on the “Read the rest…” link if viewing from the main page) for an example WITH PICTURES using Eternal Flame and Holy Power.

Megaera’s stupid Diffusion has been keeping me up at night. (Which, I suppose, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It does means there’s nothing more pressing in my life to ruin my sleep.) But, as a kid, when something bothered me, I was always encouraged to write about it. (With nice handwriting and proper spelling and grammar.) So write about it, I shall. Some day.

It occurred to me first, that I’ve never really written about World of Log’s Log Browser. Since my ripping my hair out probably isn’t the best scenario to cover the basics on (and narrowing in on one mechanic from one fight makes it hard to keep the post up to date), I figured I’d do a little formal introduction to World of Logs’ Log Browser.

Finding the Log Browser.

The Log Browser: Why Would I Use It?

The Log Browser is a search tool for the Combat Log.

See, (if it’s still mystery to you,) how World of Logs works is that someone in your raid is saving their Combat Log to a document-type file on their computer. They then upload that file into World of Logs. World of Logs reads it and translates it into those meters, tables and graphs that we love so much.

But! Should you need information that isn’t provided by those meters, graphs and tables, the original Combat Log is still available on World of Logs, through, *drumroll*…. The Log Browser!

Generally I’ll use it for:

Timestamps: When was a spell cast, when did someone take damage, how often does an event occur in an encounter, etc.
Dispels: Who dispelled who, what and when. (Also applies to Interrupts)
Spell Behaviour: If I’m studying a spell and want to know what it did each time instead of the average provided by the spell breakdown page.

And…I’m sure there are other uses, but those are the ones that come to mind. Timestamps tend to be the bulk of my Log Browser usage – it’s the best way to find those extra details about a fight that the basic strat guides don’t tell you.

As for how to get started, use it as you would the “Damage Done“, “Damage Taken“, “Healing Done“, etc. features. Pick a fight (or a boss). In the image above, I’ve got a Heroic Megaera fight selected because blogging has forced my WoW life to now revolve around Heroic Mageara. Then select “Log Browser” from the correct drop down box.

The Log Browser: Think of it as a fancy Google search bar

The Log Browser was probably the last WoL feature I started using because I found it rather intimidating. (I still don’t use the Expression Editor…every time I think “oh the Expression Editor might be useful to answer this question!”, I’m quickly and brutally reminded that I have no basic understanding at all of the language spoken by that Editor.)

Once you get familiar with it, though, using the Log Browser is as easy as Googling yourself.

Your first view of the Log Browser. I did not censor anything. Please do not stalk my guildies.

The first thing you want to do, before anything, anything at all, is hit “Remove” where is says “Queries Show all events (remove, copy)“.

Reason for that being, until you remove this “Show everything” command, the Browser will constantly just show you everything, ignoring anything you ask of it. This will make you cry (or at least, very, very sad). I have much experience.

As for those buttons along the bottom, here’s a quick translation of what they mean, in Google terms:

1- “Add Query” means “Search bar will pop up”
2- “Run” means “Google Search”, or “Enter”
3- “Copy Query set” and “Paste” are, well, copy and paste options that you’ll find useful if you expect to redo the same search in the future.

So after removing the “Show Everything“, hit “Add Query” to get the action started.

Next step is don’t panic! The form looks a lot worse than it really is.

Using the “Add Query” Form

It looks all tough but it isn’t.

1- Event Type: This is to either widen your search (example: search for all Summons), or narrow it (example: search through a mage’s casts and only show misses). You can check as many or as few boxes as you want, depending on what you’re looking for.

2- Actor: You would put a character’s name (either a player or an NPC) here if you want to search through all the lines of the Combat Log where that character is mentioned, regardless of whether they were on the casting or the receiving end (example: if I want to look at all heals I cast as well as all heals that were cast on me, I would put my name in the “Actor” field). You’ll probably leave this field blank most of the time.

3- Source: This is where you’d put the name of the character doing the thing you’re interested in (example: if we were to look at all the heals I cast, we would put my name in the “Source” field).

4- Target: You’d put the name of the character on the receiving end of the event you want to study (example: if we want to see all the times I took a fireball to the face, we’d type in my name in the target field)

5- Spell: Enter the name of the spell you want to observe. The field seems to be case-sensitive so you have to type them exactly as they’d be written in your Combat Log (or Wowhead) (example: if we’re interested in Light of Dawn, we’d type in “Light of Dawn” with L and D capitalized).

6- Spell ID: If you aren’t having luck with a spell name (it happens sometimes), you can use the spell ID number. You can find that number on Wowhead in that spell’s URL (example: for Diffusion, use Spell ID 139993).

You can enter more than one name in each field, as long as you separate them with a comma and no space (example: if I wanted to look at Holy Shock and Eternal Flame, in the spell field I’d write “Holy Shock,Eternal Flame).

You can also leave fields empty if they won’t help you narrow your search to the data you want.

Log Browser: The Limits

The Log Browser is awesome, but there are a few limits to what it can do. (The gaps in the Log Browser functions are probably filled by the Expression Editor, but the Expression Editor is beyond my humble abilities.)

– It can only show a certain number of lines, starting at the beginning of a fight/time selection. So unless you’re looking for something that happened very early on, you have to be specific in your searches.
– You can’t automatically search for specific Timestamps. There is no way to see all and only the events that happened between 1min30 and 1min36.
– The Timestamps don’t line up exactly with the times shown in the graphs elsewhere in your parses. The graphs are more like approximations, so expect some discrepancies when comparing log timestamps to graphs.

You can, however, somewhat bypass the first two limits by going to a graph page (Damage Done, Healing Done, etc), selecting a period of the fight you’re interested, right clicking on the highlighted zone and hitting “Set page to selection”. From then on, WoL (including the Log Browser) will look at that selection instead of the whole fight. (Huuuuuge thanks to Kurn for teaching me that. I owe you one!)

And the rest is just practice and creativity!

For visual types (like me), there’s a fun (by my standards) example after the cut.

A Look at my Heroic Megaera Logs

Two weeks ago, I did a fun healing experiment comparing my performances with Divine Purpose vs Holy Avenger. While there could have been a few other factors affecting my throughput, I was confident enough with the results that Holy Avenger became permanently lit up on my talent thingy.

Two weeks later and I’m still satisfied.

The Curious Case of Megaera, the Many Headed Beast

In my experiment post, I wrote the following:

I purposely left out 4 fights, each for unique reasons.

[…]
3- Heroic Megaera: The end result wasn’t consistent with the other fights and I thought the reasons were interesting enough to merit their own blog post.
[…]

A little bit late, but here is that blog post.

I’m aiming to use it as an intermediate World of Logs exercise on comparing healing spell choices. I’m running on the assumption that you all already know how to find your healing spells on WoL because, for the last two weeks, you’ve been playing around with the parsings tool and spying on pros.

I’m using the Heroic version of the fight, but it’s similar enough to the regular version that anyone who’s vaguely familiar with the fight should understand the analysis.

So anyway, when I did my HA+EF (Holy Avenger and Eternal Flame) experiment, this is what happened on Heroic Megaera:

Before Holy Avenger

Week 1

ps. Look at Pally Tank Theck, sniping heals from the healers!

Week 2

After Holy Avenger

When you look at this, your heart sinks, your stomach feels a little queezy and a dark cloud of discouragement hangs over your head. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

But before we dismiss Holy Avenger on Megaera, let’s look a little closer. We’ll ignore CD usage since my CD usage between fights should be pretty similar, other than Holy Avenger, which we’ve already accounted for.

This is what happened during nerf week:

(If your browser makes the writing look all tiny, you can right click on the image to put a larger version in a separate tab.)

See Diffusion?

Diffusion counted for 11.4% of my healing. 5 MILLION. Right after Mastery and Beacon, BAM! DIFFUSION!

Diffusion in a healing spell breakdown, in theory, means you healed someone who just got an Arcane Breath (only available on Heroic!) to the face. It’s supposed to take 10% of the effective healing on that person and redistribute it to others in range.

In practice, it’s pretty random. I spent hours with the log parser when drafting this post, trying to figure out how I ended up with so much Diffusion healing on that attempt and I have no idea. I didn’t even know about Diffusion healing at the time. (If there’s interest, I could write a post about Diffusion Log Parsing adventures but I’ll leave it out of this post since it’s pretty long and boring, and a tad more complex than I want to get into right now.)

Because Diffusion seems to only heal when it feels like it, without involving much control from the player, when analyzing logs and comparing my performances, I’d subtract Diffusion healing from my total healing count.

Next, notice Arcing Light (Light’s Hammer) as my 4th healing spell, for 4.8 million.

Then we see Eternal Flame for 4 million and Light of Dawn for almost 3 million. (Total Holy Power healing = Eternal Flame + Light of Dawn = 4 million + 3 million = 7 million)

Now, here’s my spell breakdown for week 2 of non-Holy Avenger:

In comparison, Mastery did a tad less healing, Beacon a tad more. Eternal Flame was about the same (4 million) and Light of Dawn a little less (2 million) for a decrease in Holy Power healing by one million.

A major difference would be Holy Prism instead of Arcing Light, which did 1.8 million healing…less than HALF of what Arcing Light did for me last time.

As for my “With Holy Avenger” Logs

If you counted the number of healers on the meters, you’d notice that we did this kill with 6 healers instead of 7. Which means more healing to go around, but also more dps and a resulting shorter fight (so we’re expecting a higher Healing per Second, HPS, but the total overall healing could be more or less).

Still, Mastery is my top heal, with comparable numbers to the two previous weeks, with Beacon as a second, again with comparable numbers.

Then Eternal Flame, doing more healing than the past two weeks, but no Light of Dawn, resulting in a lower overall heal from Holy Power (5.7 million).

What really sticks out, though, is the uselessness of Holy Prism here. (And I confess that the only reason I was using Holy Prism was because I had forgotten to respec for the fight.) While I’m sure Holy Prism could do the job if it were cast every 20 seconds, on schedule, I find this fight too busy for regular Prism casts. Besides, Light’s Hammer comes off CD just at the right time for Rampage where its little spidery light tangles shine to their full potential.

Comparing Two Paladins on a same attempt

On my “after Holy Avenger” attempt, my copally, who wasn’t using Holy Avenger kicked my butt on the meters. Solidly. So let’s look at what he was doing spellwise.

Our two top spells, Mastery and Beacon, were fairly comparable and his Holy Radiance was only slightly less than mine.

Then his 5 million Arcing Light points and laughs at my 1.7 million Holy Prism.

He did 3.5 million healing with Light of Dawn and 2.3 million with Eternal Flame for a total of 5.8 million Holy Power healing (slightly more than me).

And he got lucky with 1.4 million more Diffusion than me.

The moral of this story is, I guess, don’t use Holy Prism on this fight.

Conclusion: A Lesson Learned

Last night I made sure Light’s Hammer was ready to go on the pull. And I also followed Aladya’s example in planning CDs for Rampage. (Obviously, I couldn’t execute it quite as perfectly as he does, but the general CD timing was there.)

The end result looked like this:

Still below our meter whores Druid and Shaman who play meter topping games with each other, but still solid. Especially since I died near the end.

And in closing, my spell breakdown from last night, analyze it how you will.

How To Use World of Logs to Spy on Pros (Also Heroic Megaera Holy Pally CD Usage Discussion)

EDIT: Want to learn even more about World of Logs and Holy Paladins? Lucy over at Intellect Plate has a comprehensive and excellently written guide which touches on this topic and so much more, I highly suggest you check it out! (I wrote this post merely days after her guide was published, not realizing that she had already covered pretty much everything I bring up. I swear this was an unfortunate coincidence and I offer her my apologies.)

I’m always getting told that my World of Logs posts are long and boring, and the only people who would make sense of them are people who don’t need to be reading World of Logs tutorials anyway.

Yes, yes, no one ever words it quite like that. THATS STILL WHAT IT MEANS.

So I am going to try again.

In my last couple of posts, I mentioned creepy stalking looking up the pros and admiring their use of cooldowns. I didn’t go into details on my procedure and perhaps there are people out there at this very second thinking to themselves, “I wish I could look at Pro logs but every time I open World of Logs I get dizzy and sleepy.”

To those people, I present: How to Use World of Logs to Spy on Pros

And for intermediate WoL users, those of you who pull up CD graphs but aren’t too sure what you’re looking at, you guys can scroll down to the last section. There we are sipping tea and calmly discussing Megaera rampage CD usage.

Finding An Interesting Log

1) Go to http://www.worldoflogs.com

Simple enough?

2) Select HPS

3) Select your region (US&EU for me) and desired Mode (25 Heroic for me), in that order

4) Choose your boss fight and hit “Rankings” (for this post, it will be Megaera)

5) Select the little Holy icon under “Paladin” and choose a recent log from a paladin on server where you understand the language.

I’m sure Афиа is amazing, but deciphering his or her spell names just won’t be worth the trouble. You want to go with a recent log too, as fight mechanics and class intricacies change over time. The more recent the log, the more likely it’ll give you an accurate representation of that fight for your class.

6) Click on a Paladin’s name, and check out their spell breakdown tab before hitting the “Buffs Cast” tab.

I’m not sure what general etiquette is for using screenshot’s of a stranger’s logs. To give credit where credit is due, these are Aladya’s (from Method) logs from June 5. I picked these particular ones because the CD timing on them is perfect for teaching. If it’s inappropriate for me to use them, I will take them down and apologize profusely.

7) To view CD usage click on the “#” next to the cooldown(s) you’re interested in

Note that you can also select debuffs, and under the “Buffs gained” tabs, you can view uptime of buffs or debuffs that are cast on a player by someone or something else. For the sake of this discussion, though, we only care about Holy Pally CD casts.

8) Admire the graph you’ve created

Discussion

First, there’s a graph with pretty squiggly lines. The light yellow one shows damage the raid is doing (we don’t care about that at this time) and the orangish line shows damage taken by raid. If you’re colourblind, you can distinguish them (at least on this fight – and that’s why I picked this fight) because damage taken spikes at 6 specific spots.

Those 6 specific spikes are Rampages.

Under the pretty squiggly graph, there are green bars. Each green bar shows you when a buff was active. If you mouse over a green bar on World of Logs (note, this won’t work on my screenshots!), a tooltip will pop up showing who had that buff on them. Especially useful for assessing Eternal Flame usage, but also helpful if you happen to be interested in Beacon, Hand of Purity or Hand of Sacrifice targets.

From this graph, we can see that our pro paladin has Eternal Flames running throughout the fight on a number of people (the brighter a green bar, the more people that buff is on).

We can also breakdown his CD usage per rampage:

Rampage #1: Holy Avenger, Divine Favor and Avenging Wrath. (Guardian of the Ancient Kings was used as well – I forgot to add it when doing the screenshot.)
Rampage #2: None
Rampage #3: Holy Avenger and Devo Aura.
Rampage #4: Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor
Rampage #5: Holy Avenger
Rampage #6: Devo Aura, Intellect Potion (also Guardian of the Ancient Kings, missing from screenshot)

Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor were used again at the very end of the fight. (Had it taken longer for the last head to die, they could have been used on the last Rampage, but DPS was too high and they weren’t off CD yet.)

I added Divine Plea to the screenshot as well, you can see how it was used shortly before the third and fifth rampage.

Now, when I’m writing Holy Pally beginner CD guides, I always say “Don’t use Divine Favor and Avenging Wrath at the same time, you just get more overheal and less time with an active throughput CD“. I stand by that. For 5s, most normal fights and periods of lowish damage, at least. When damage is periodically intense (such as this fight) and every ounce of healing will be useful, you might as well hit with everything you have. Plus, the earlier you use your CDs, the more likely they’ll be up at the end.

For progression fights – whether you’re doing crazy heroic modes or you’re working on normal Horridon, you can plan your CD usage based on fight length and the time it takes for CD to come up. And then your “Buff Cast” graph can look like this one.

Ending Words

I was going to end this post by adding a few more CD graphs of top Holy Paladins. Then I realized that I’d be wasting a precious exercise opportunity. So go, use the instructions here to find other examples of Holy Paladin CD planning!

Hours and hours of fun, I assure you!

Holy Avenger and EF Blanketing – The Results

As I was researching yesterday’s post (and by researching, I mean creepy stalking top Holy Pally parsers on World of Logs), I noticed that every one of them was using a healing technique I hadn’t tried:

Holy Avenger on CD, Holy Power built through Holy Radiance and Holy Shock and sunk via Eternal Flame blanketing over as much of the raid as possible.

I checked both 10s and 25s, under the Heroics tab. Both used this trick, though 25s players seemed more likely to blow Divine Favor and Avenging Wrath at the same time as Holy Avenger (time for a macro?) while 10s generally staggered their CDs out more.

So it seems I’m well behind the times (that’s what happens when WoW takes the backseat for months), but I’m sure I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE.

Plus before and after screenshots are always tons of fun.

The Changes

On top of using the Holy Avenger trick, I also started tracking Illuminated Healing (Mastery). I doubt it made a significant difference but it did lightly influence where I would cast my Holy Radiance/Holy Shock/Eternal Flame.

Our healing comp was a bit different than last week too. Last week my Copally was away, and this week we were missing our Monk and Druid S. This would have an effect on how each of us heal in comparison to one and other, but I really don’t think it would account for a drastic change. After all, we rarely use the same healing comp on a given fight from week to week anyway.

In terms of gear, if you look at the past few weeks, my gear will have improved, but between this week and last, the only differences were how I found two pieces that made me to think “I could have sworn I’d reforged these!“, and my weekly VP gear upgrading. So, some influence on my stats, but less than a clear change.

Notes on Throughput and Functionality

This is obviously a post on throughput. Throughput has its place. After all, if healers can’t keep up with the damage or with their teammates, they’re holding the raid back. Plus, guild and healing leads from all brackets (yes, I’ve seen leads from guilds who can’t kill normal Horridon obsess over healing meters) don’t see past meters and HPS. So meter milking is a good skill to have if you want some peace and quiet.

However, throughput is not a replacement for functionality.

A healer’s first priority is to keep the raid (or healing assignment, depending on the team and the fight) alive through every mechanic. Standing still and spamming heals isn’t a luxury most of us have access to. (And even if it were, it doesn’t sound very fun, you know?)

My poor copally, who ended up, without his knowledge (if this were real science, this experiment would never make it past the ethics committee) being a control subject, is by far a better healer than I am. I spend more energy looking up techniques, but he makes less mistakes than me, and doesn’t panic and freeze up the way I do. When it comes to choosing a paladin for exploratory fights, he is the obvious choice.

Once your priorities are covered, though, there’s nothing wrong with taking your art to the next level and squeezing extra out of your character.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Holy Avenger to a freshly-pressed, new paladin. I’d like to see a new paladin healer master Beacon healing, Holy Power cycling and cooldown management before adding yet another CD. Once those are down, then by all means.

For your amusement, here is a list of my screw ups last night as I tried to fit the new technique into my routine:

1- On H-Jin’Rokh, dropped a fissure in the middle of raid.
2- On H-Horridon, almost got eaten by my pink dino (have really no idea how I survived that)
3- On H-Council, drowned in Quicksand
4- On H-Iron Council, got 3 stacks of flame lines, had to bubble, then had no bubble left to mask my inability to handle tornadoes. Also missed my pre-tornado Aura Mastery.

While on the average raid night, I earn no shortage of “that’s not good” and “Rykga, Rykga, Rykga“, the above aren’t mistakes I typically make (except for pre-tornado Aura Mastery. I always screw that one up.)

But enough chitchat. Here are the preliminary results of my healing with Holy Avenger experiement. (Also keep in mind that I was very clumsy with the technique. Imagine what this would look like if my CD timing were perfected!)

Preparing a Fight with World of Logs

When I want to really prepare for a fight, I don’t watch dozens of videos, I don’t compare various guides. Nope. When I want to go above and beyond to prepare for a fight, I go to World of Logs.

It can be more time consuming, but the depth of information is priceless. Plus, for those of us who need to apply knowledge in order to learn (if you were the kid who taught themselves math in high school by doing the exercises before reading the theory, WoL fight preparation is for you!), I find it’s the only way to get a solid idea of the fight before the pull.

Since I’ve been studying WoL a lot lately (and spamming posting my findings on my guild forums), I figured I’d share my approach, in case some of you would like to give this method a try.

Note that my strategy for tackling logs varies a bit from fight to fight depending on whether I want to observe general damage patterns, tank healing strategy or boss mechanics. It also depends on how much I already of the fight (learning the heroic version vs a completely new fight).

Together, you and I are going to prepare for Heroic Imperial Vizier Zor’lok.

1- Decide what we’re looking for

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you won’t find it!

Let’s figure out our needs:

1) We (I) already know this fight on normal so we’re not too concerned about mechanics.
2) We know that this is a “heal through Force and Verve and don’t get hit by disks” fight so we’re not too interested in general healing strategies.
3) We do, however, want to get an idea of the overall damage patterns so we can choose our glyphs, talents and plan our cooldowns.

Now that we’ve figured out what we’re looking for, we’ll know not to waste time on individual healer spell breakdowns or incoming tank damage logs.

Instead, we’ll probably spend a lot of time looking at the “Total Damage Taken” graph and matching the spikes with the boss abilities from the Log Browser. We’ll probably also look at the “Deaths Overview” page to see what attacks tend to kill players. We might also want to compare a tank and a non-tank’s Damage Taken graphs with the Total Damage Taken graph.

If this is gibberish to you, don’t worry, I’ll explain it all in time.

2- Collect some background information

It does help to review a strat guide to get an idea of spell names (and general mechanics if this is a completely new fight) before perusing the logs. Even if you can’t understand general strat guides (I usually don’t), keep them opened in tabs for references.

Let’s open the Icy Veins strat and Pardeux’ strat.

3- Find some Logs

To find logs, select the fight (1), the size/difficulty (2) then the link to the kills (3).

To get a decent idea of what you’ll be facing, you’ll want to pick the logs of:

1) A recent kill (patches and hotfixes constantly change fights).
2) A kill in your language (it’s a lot of extra work to decode a foreign spell names).
3) A kill from a guild with comparable dps/healing strength.

There are 106 pages of Vizier kills and I know my guild struggles a bit with dps performance, so I’m going straight to my URL bar (1) and to enter page 101 (if you’re not sure of the URL, go to the very bottom of the page and click on the “next” link on the far left. That will bring you to page 2. Then go back to your URL and replace “2” with “101”.)

The “US Guild!” logs seem perfect – fairly recent, in my language and probably in my guild’s dps range.

I’m going to choose logs from another guild in the same range as well for comparison purposes. I’m also going to pull up logs of a recent kill by a top notch guild (in the first 10 pages of the kills list) so I can see how the fight looks when executed perfectly.

4- Note the Length of the Fight

Our “comparable” fights:

And our “top notch” fight:

Building our strat: Knowing the fight varies between 7 and 10.5 minutes is important for cooldown planning. Because the fights are long, we know we can use our “long” cooldowns like Guardian of Ancient Kings twice, and our “medium” cooldowns like Avenging Wrath or Divine Favor at least twice, preferably 3 times.

5- Look at Damage Taken

If you choose Damage Taken from the dropdown bar, you’ll get a graph with a lot of lines. Scroll down to the list below the graphs and uncheck every box. You’ll end up with graphs like this:

The first two are our comparable guilds, the last is the top notch guild.

These graphs make me giddy because they are very much alike. Which means the damage patterns will look like this: spiky at first, then a lull with possible minor spikes, then several intense spikes for the last ~1/3 of the fight.

See the 5 buttons on the top right corner, just under “Total”? You can play with those to check who died to what and when, verify when adds die (not shown in the images I posted, but there are 2 adds in the fight) and show/hide heroism (heroism is shown in the images as the large blue bar).

Building our strat: This fits perfectly with our cooldowns! We’ll pop Guardian of the Ancient Kings and another cooldown for the first major spike. We can use other cooldowns if there are spikes during the “lull” phase, and all cooldowns should be ready for use by the time the final spiky phase comes along. As well, spikes mean we’ll probably want to spec into Holy Avenger for the yummy burst healing.

6- Match up Damage Spikes to Boss Abilities

Open the log browser.

Once you’re in the log browser, remove the current query (1) (I’m not sure why “Show all events” comes up by default. It did take me a long time to figure out how to use the log browser because of that.) then hit “Add Query” (2). Once you’ve entered your query, hit “Run” (3).

When you hit “Add Query”, the “Add Query” window pops up. The log browser only shows a limited number of lines so you have to be specific in what you’re looking for. It does take a little practice to become good at finding what you’re looking for but once you figure it out, it’s simple.

For this analysis, I want to look at spells cast (1) by the Source Imperial Vizier Zor’lok (2) (note: spelling is important when using the log browser). Then I hit save.

After running the query, the log shows all of Zor’lok’s casts.

The rest is just matching up the spells to the Damage Taken graph. Note that there is often a 5-15 second difference between the timestamps on the log browser and the timestamps on the graph, which can be frustrating and confusing.

We can conclude that all the first minor spike is probably Pheromones of Zeal damage (I would guess comparable guild #2 started the fight on the first platform, hence why they only have one spike at the beginning while the other guilds have 2 spikes), the second is Force and Verve, small spikes in between are people getting hit during Attenuation, medium spikes are likely Converts and the major spikes at the end are Force and Verve during the final phase.

Building our strat: Force and Verve is going to hurt a lot, so we should be ready with our cooldowns as soon as he starts casting it. We also know that Force and Verve and Attenuation are physical damage so Devotion Aura will be useless against them (Devo Aura might be helpful would be during the transition between platforms or MAYBE during Convert, since those are the only times any Magic damage will be going out). Hand of Protection, however, might be nice making Clemency an interesting talent choice. We should glyph Divine Protection, and we could combine it with Unbreakable Spirit instead of choosing Clemency as well. Because Force and Verve is AoE damage while we’re grouped up, Light’s Hammer is a good talent choice too. Holy Prism may also be an option, though I’m feeling more Light’s Hammer.

7- Peak at the Deaths Overview

The deathlog is probably my favorite part of logs because it shows you who dies to what and when. During post-raid analysis it quickly tells you who’s dying to avoidable damage. In a pre-raid analysis, it tells you which abilities to be ready for, and helps you differentiate deadly abilities from abilities that just hurt a lot.

In this kill, 10 players died to Attenuation, 10 died to Force and Verve and one tank died to normal melee damage.

Building our strat: This just re-enforces what we already know: Force and Verve is going to hurt (so all CDs, talents and Glyphs toward burst healing and reducing physical damage), and we should concentrate extra hard during Attenuation.

Conclusion!

There you have it! We’re set for Imperial Vizier Zor’lok!

And for your enjoyment, attached is a copy of what I posted on our guild forums.

Troubleshooting – “Help! Why are my numbers low?”

I don’t get questions very often. Not blogging much anymore will do that. But over the years, there’s been one question that’s come up a lot:

“How do I get my numbers up?”

Its cousin question is worth mentioning too: “This paladin is new to my guild and their numbers are terrible, what are they doing wrong?”

Obligatory Side Note on Healing Meters

Do I really need to say that healing meters should be approached with caution? After so many essays around the WoW community about how healing meters work, I’m probably wasting my typing energy, but to avoid having to clarify things later on, here’s your basic “how to look at healing meters“.

When looking at healing logs, look at the big picture. Healing meters are a detail in that big picture.

Let’s look at this snapshot:

The random pally is slightly behind the random druid. Not a big enough gap to send out alarm bells. Different fights and different healing strategies might give one player more healing done than another. Heck, I’ve seen Baleroc logs where the Death Knight tank was way ahead of any healer on the meters.

But there could be a problem. The random pally could have let their assignment(s) die while goofing around, blowing cooldowns. They could have kept healing after a wipe was called. They could have been spamming healing on themselves while standing in crap. The recorded segment might even have been too short to get a clear image of the general healing output.

The random pally’s numbers aren’t a problem, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that random pally is problem-free.

As for “You”, You’s numbers are a problem. But maybe You died early. If it’s a one-time occurrence, it’s nothing to be concerned about. But if all of You’s healing meters look like this, then this post is for You.

Your numbers are low because…

1) You’re not casting enough

I’ve got Codi‘s cheerful voice stamped in my head from the Raid Warning Holy Paladin Roundtable: “ABC! Always be casting!”

This is the main problem with low numbers. You’re not going to get any healing done if you’re not casting heals. (Duh)

Case in point, lets look at the amount of casts from each paladin from the above snapshot:

Random Pally:

You:

You cast 7 Flash of Lights while Random Pally didn’t, but otherwise:

Random Pally cast 21 Divine Lights while You only cast 8.
Random Pally got 163 Beacon of Light transfers while You only got 69.
Random Pally cast 28 Holy Shocks while You only cast 14.

Get the idea?

Lows cast numbers are usually cause by one or more of the following:

– Waiting for damage: This is super common in new holy paladins. Don’t wait for damage. Unless you’re pressed for mana or you’re clearly not expecting any damage, you should have holy lights and holy shocks going at pretty much all times. Also learn each fight’s damage patterns to anticipate when to start reving up those massive heals.

– Bad healing frames: You need frames that leave enough room on your screen to see the fight, that make targeting heals easy and that let you see the buffs/debuffs you need to track. If you want a big selection, Grimmtooth wrote a fantastic frames comparison series. Otherwise, I suggest using whichever addon the other healers in your team use. That way, if you need help, you’ll have a few experts at your disposal.

– Bad computer/internet: It sucks, but you wouldn’t play hockey with a broken stick and broken skates, would you? If your equipment is so bad that you’re not able to do anything in raids, hold off on the raiding until you can get some functional equipment. (The good news is that the equipment requirements for raiding 10 mans at a casual level aren’t that high.)

– Low haste: Actually, when huge discrepancies occur on healing meters, gear differences will be the most minor factor. I mean, gear will up your numbers, that’s why we get gear and gem it and reforge it. But among the other low healing output culprits listed here, gear will have the least effect.

Your numbers are low because…

2) Your Beacon Strategy Needs Tweeking

Now that you’re casting more, have a look at who you’re casting Beacon on. If you’re unsure of how to visualize Beacon (and other buff/debuff) uptime, I’ve got a detailed how-to at your disposal.

– Keep it up: On the picture here, Beacon fell off. Beacon should be up at all times. All times. If your Beacon is falling off, find some frames that show you clearly how much time you have left on Beacon.

– Choose your target carefully: Beacon of Light targets should fit in with your healing strategy. When you’re talking about strategy in your healer chat pre (or post)-pull, bring up your reasoning for your Beacon target so your teamates can work with it. While Beacon alone won’t keep a tank up, it’ll still be a major part of your healing and it’s very important to do it right. You can read about choosing a Beacon target here (it’s a bit dated and was written with 25s in mind, but the gist of it is still applicable).

Your numbers are low because…

3) You’re Not Using Cooldowns

When briefing new paladins, I often stress the cooldown rotation aspect of paladin healing. We’re like tanks that way: we’ve got so many cooldown that we’re not healing anywhere near our full potential if we’re not using them regularly.

The cooldown usage for “You” here was actually pretty good (especially considering this was a 4 minute Ragnaros attempt). Divine Favor or Lay on Hands didn’t show up on the list, but otherwise, You was using their toolbox pretty extensively.

When remembering to use cooldowns is an issue start practicing. Run some 5 mans or some battlegrounds and hit your cooldowns whenever they come up. Once they become second nature, reflect on the opportune moments to use them. But get in the habit of actually using before you start sitting on them “just in case”. We have so many cooldowns that you’ll usually have at least one available for emergencies.

Your numbers are low because…

4) You’re Using the Wrong Spells

This is the least likely to responsible for low healing numbers. After cooldown and Beacon usage is out of the way, our healing is pretty straightforward: Holy Shock on cooldown, Holy Light as a base heal and Divine Light as a major-damage heal. Some paladins use Flash of Light when in an emergency. (I’ve seen some use Flash of Light as their base heal, but I wouldn’t. It’s a lot of mana wastage.)

But if you want to get technical, lets look at “You”‘s spell breakdown again.

Holy Shock wasn’t used on cooldown. Holy Light should have been cast a lot more. A lot more. There was mana wastage with 7 uses of Flash of Light – if there were truly 7 emergencies during that attempt, at least several could have been avoided with a more consistent use of Holy Light.

As for Holy Power sinks (Word of Glory vs Light of Dawn), Word of Glory is the typical option in 10s and when healing a non-Beacon target. Light of Dawn is fantastic in 25s (though there has been some tweeking with the Holy Power sink spells so I don’t know if Light of Dawn still offers more tank healing via Beacon than Word of Glory) and has some leverage in 10s when the team is grouped up for major splash damage.

Your numbers are low because…

5) You’re Not Judging Enough

Random Paladin:

You:

Unless there’s an excruciatingly healing-intensive moment, Judgement should be used on cooldown. On cooldown.

The first paladin here judged 12 times, the other judged 7. Something’s not right.

While Judging won’t directly increase your healing done (the tiny self heal you get from judging is insignificant) the effect it has on mana during the fight is noticeable. More mana means more freedom to use bigger heals and less Divine Pleas, which will influence your output (and usefulness).

I keep a button with Judgement on my bars so I can see when it comes off cooldown, but you’ll find that with some practice, you’ll feel the rythm of paladin healing and will just know when you can cast it again. Keep the attack target targetted (or have a Judgement macro that assists the tank) and bind Judgement to an easy key (I move with ESDF, so I have Judgement bound to “R”, it’s super easy to hit).

So Cast, Judge and be Merry

There you have them: the keys to keeping up with your teammates in terms of healing done. Don’t stop casting, put some thought into your Beacons, use your Cooldowns, pick your spells properly and judge. That’s all there is to it.

Holy Paladin 4.1 Mastery with World of Logs Pictures

Patch 4.1 brought on some changes to our Mastery. Two changes:

1) Shields last 15 seconds instead of 8.
2) Each point of Mastery increases the amount absorbed by 1.50%, up from 1.25%

These changes triggered the following question: Should I still avoid Mastery?

My generic response was: “I don’t have any logs to look at and I haven’t had the chance to read about others’ experiences, but the changes look pretty minor to me.”

Now that I have looked at the discussions on Elitist Jerks and Plus Heal, or rather the lack-thereof discussions, my answer is pretty much the same. I find that, with the exception of intellect/spell power which pwns them all, the value of all our throughput stats is somewhat subjective. Haste is generally preferred as the few extra casts during a fight are more practical than unreliable Crit procs or the mini-heals during global cooldowns Mastery shields offer.

One person on EJ brought up logs of someone who was getting some nice bang for his buck out of Mastery, which I felt like talking about.

Deaths Overview Game – The Solution

Yesterday I posted the following image and challenged everyone to figure out how these two players died simultaneously:

Everyone who volunteered an answer (including a couple of guildies over vent last night) was on the right track. It’s impossible to tell exactly what happened from the very limited information, so I was really impressed.

The solution after the break! (Sorry people reading from feedreaders, I can’t manually truncate posts that go to readers.)

World of Logs: Looks at Deaths (featuring the Lich King)

Note: I’d like to give a big thanks to Kurn for her help is preparing this post. ❤ Even without seeing the logs, she was able to catch some things I didn’t.

So I received this question the other day:

We’re working on Lich King [10 man] and we’re dying a lot to Infest, especially when I [disc priest] get picked up by Valks. Can you show me log-reading tricks so I can figure what our healers are doing wrong?

Like any other question I get, I immediately countered with “Can I post about it on my blog?”

It’s a bit strange writing about World of Logs (and the LK fight) this late into the expansion, especially with the patch coming out tomorrow and most everyone being stalled for a few days. Hopefully, though, WoL won’t face too many changes. While the fight will soon be obsolete, I’ve got my fingers crossed that working with WoL will essentially stay the same.

As usual, if any of you readers see something I missed, feel free to weight in. Only keep in mind that the raiders in these parses are not my thick-skinned, accustomed-to-being-blogged-about guildies. Most of them don’t know they’re making an appearance here, so please be tactful. Also note that they have killed Lich King and this is really just an exercise in WoL reading.

Also, if you’re looking for more about parse reading, please see:
A close look at World of Logs (Kadomi – Tank Like a Girl)
An Intro to WoL: Wading through the data (Vixsin – Life in Group 5)
The Next Step with WoL: Healing Analysis (Vixsin – Life in Group 5)
Raid Rx: How to read healing parses (or meters) (Matticus – WoW Insider)
What Can Healing Meter Tell You? (Sydera – World of Matticus)
World of Logs and Evaluating a Paladin Healer: Some Basics (Yours truly)
Lets help this Holy Pally not suck at Putricide (Yours truly)

Step One: Looking at the Fight

After an evening of wipes, you’ll want to look at any attempt that lasted longer than a minute or two. For the sake of this post, I’m going to pick Try #5. At 5min47s, it’s long enough for stuff to happen, but short enough to make the graphic editing simpler.

Since I’m looking at deaths and, thus, causes of wipes, I want to take a general look of what happened during this attempt. World of Logs graphs different aspects of the attempts, notably your raid’s damage output, your raid’s healing output and the damage taken by your raid. To get an overall picture of a multiphased fight like the Lich King, I’m going to go with Damage Taken.

And now you see a nice collection of squiggly lines with a few straight lines cutting through them.