Zinn @ Twister Nether Blogcast

Dear readers, I have some exciting news to share with you. This upcoming Sunday the 12th of May, I have been asked to guest speak on the ever lovely podcast show Twisted Nether Blogcast. I am honored and thrilled to have been asked and am really looking forward to it, I think it will be a lot of fun!

This will be the first time you'll get a chance at hearing my sweet voice (ahem) and also hear me inadvertently make a fool of myself (which I almost did there trying to spell that word). I have no idea what to expect and I have never done anything like this before, but I love talking as much as I love writing so I am sure it'll be fine, and hopefully even interesting.

The show is at 8pm PT, which unfortunately for me is 5am my time. I have an evening shift just before and a morning shift of work just after so I am certain to be somewhat dazed and confused at the start, but some tea will get me on track.

I'd love for you to show up if you're curious about anything about me or anything else I might be able to answer (like; why is protection warrior so much fun?). After 8 years with WoW (has it really been that long...) there are tons of things to talk about, so we'll see what subjects we come up with. Hope to see you there!

EDIT:
Here is the link for anyone who wants to hear it.

Field Report - Boulevard Of Broken Games

How about another update on what's going on around here gaming wise?

World of Warcraft
First up, now that I am playing WoW less and less I've noticed something very interesting that I really was wrong about in the past. I've always thought that my WoW-gaming took time from other things that I should or could be doing. I even mention that in my previous Field Report, saying that all the time not spent playing WoW should give me loads of time to do other things I wanted to do. I don't necessarily mean studies, chores, sleeping or work (although also occasionally that) but mostly other games that I wanted to play. I've always been curious about loads of different games but WoW was just always so available, ready, easy to jump in to. I knew exactly what I had to do and eventhough I normally ended up for way longer than expected or planned, I always had the feeling that I could jump in and out of that game easily whereas most other games take some time to get in to and aren't as easy to just quit whenever you want.

This meant that I always had the impression that I chose WoW over other games simply because I was too lazy to get invested in anything else. Turns out, that wasn't the case at all. Now that I don't play WoW that much, I normally don't do anything really! Yeah, how depressing does that sound. I will expand further on this in its own post, so I will leave this thrilling subject here for now, but trust me I will rant on about it eventually because the reality of it really confused me.

Kotor 2
There is much to like about this game and a couple of things to not like so much. Unfortunately, there is a disturbance in that balance and the dark side is definitely starting to take over. The story is ok, and after rewatching the old Star Wars movies I just find it even cooler to be running around in the Star Wars universe. Suddenly I have the new found love for all things Star wars because hells yeah, it's awesome. There are loads of things to do and discover, I've never gotten stuck so far wondering what to do next and I totally love the combat system, honestly. Although the AI isn't always the cleverest and my team mates keep running in to close combat before throwing bombs, but ah well. Things like that rarely bother me as long as they're not game breaking.

I can sense a crash coming...

What is completely ruining the experience however are the myriad of bugs and crashes that this game suffers from. And then I've even updated it with the TSL Restored Content Mod which apparently was going to take care of the worst glitches. Crashes are somewhat ok, when I first started playing Settlers 2 way back when, that used to crash on me every 5-10 minutes (no kidding) but I still kept on playing it. Admittedly I would not have that level of patience nowadays, but a crash every now and then is ok. Just remember to save. The bugs however... now they really push my buttons. Mostly because they're not tinu bugs, like falling through the world somewhere or the game crashing if you do some weird ass combination of commands. No, these are bugs that mean that if you happen to choose the wrong dialogue option somewhere, the event doesn't unfold like it's supposed to. You have to go back to an old save and read up on the internet how to do it step by step right so that the game understands to move on. I can forgive this once in a game, maybe. But every other quest? Come on! Right now my Google Search history is full of things like "kotor 2 Onderon Crash", "kotor 2 Dantooine Crash" and "kotor 2 confrontation with Atris bug". Grr.

I had one where fortunately I had an autosave not long back to remedy the situation. But without a walkthrough it would've taken me a very long time to figure out exactly what step I had done wrong to make things screw up. There are many options to screw up when only one is the right one! And now I am currently stuck on basically the same thing, only this time I can't find out what I've done wrong. I'll have to restart an old save and just hope that it is old enough to fix whatever went wrong, but I'll be seriously pissed if I replay all of that and get the same result.

Other bugs include graphic crashes for no damn reason at all. How do you solve it? Just go into graphic settings and change a setting. Any setting. Doesn't matter if you change it and immediately change it back either, as long as you've pretended to change something it usually works. Having to start most gaming sessions doing what feels completely meaningless also doesn't add much to the fun.

This would be ok if I had cracked or otherwise pirated the game, then I just get to suit myself. But I've paid for this bastard! How can they release such an unfinished game?! It makes me want to scream, and it definitely doesn't want me to play. Kotor 2 should be happy it is as entertaining as it is, because otherwise I would've given up on it long ago in favor of games that actually work. Which is any other game.

Divine Divinity
I had only seen my ex bf play this game a little and didn't think much more of it than that it had to have one of the worst gaming titles ever. Divine Divinity? How about Awesome Awesomeness or Long Longevity? It gives me an excuse to use the phrase "hey, what a tautology" for the first time ever and I am going to take it. Good thing the game is a lot better than its title and until now I've spent some 40 hours playing it. It's very straightforward with its dungeon crawling, skill and stat choosing system, making it resemble most RPGs released around this time. And eventhough there is a lot of "down time" ie time spent mostly running around, trying to find the next thing to do or figuring out how to solve a quest I realized that it doesn't bother me at all. Because I always know what to do next, and if there is a 10 min run to get me to where I need to be, fine. At least I have a clear goal. There is just always something to do and you rarley get stuck not knowing what to do next. Just walk into an area of the map you haven't been to yet and bam, talking tree that summons 30 zombies suddenly attacks you.

Can't have slaughter without laughter

Another thing that I enjoy about old RPGs compared to many other old games are that they give you choices. And I don't mind good vs evil choices, but the choice to leave an area or a quest for now and come back to it later. It feels refreshing when stuck somewhere that I don't have to bash my head against a wall or something that just feels tedious. Instead I can come back to that place later with new eyes and motivation. This is something I really miss about old school console games generally.

Skyrim
I bought this little thing way back, like I don't even know how long ago. I am pretty sure it was last year somewhere. But I've been afraid of it, frankly. I just knew this sucker could hog loads of time from me and I wanted to be ready for it. If I start playing a game I want to invest a lot of time in, I want to make sure I have a lot of that time to invest. At the time I bought it I was playing a bunch of other games, and thought I needed to wait a bit with this one. My goal was to finish either Kotor2 or Divine Divinity first, because I think I am good enough to at least juggle two massive RPGs at the same time. When Kotor2 went all emo on me, and after having tried to fix it for what felt like the hundredth time, I decided I deserveda break. Good old fun really, because playing games shouldn't be about fixing them all the time, it should be about playing them. So I finally dared to start up Skyrim. I've only played a bit into it, I'm level 6 or so and have done the first handfull of quests. So far so good.

There are minor things that bother me about it, things only nitpickers would care about (and I happen to be one, at times). I don't know why, but the scandinavian accents everyone is using kinda bothers me. I realize it's to give that "norse" feeling that they clearly want the beginning of the game to have (what with the Nords and all) but for someone who is surrounded by that accent all the time (I probably suffer from it myself) it just sounds weird. There are also some control choices I found counter intuitive, like favoriting items in the menu with the F button, but you don't use those favorited items outside the menu with the F button  but with the A button. Instead you change camera zoom with the F button. Why? Little things that just... yeah ok, let's move on.

Overall I obviously think the game is really fun so far, it's just the kind of gear collecting-dungeon crawling that I (and most other people) enjoy so much. I was warned by some friends that this game too constains its fair share of bugs and glitches, but since it's a Bethesda game I was prepared for that.

Guild Wars 2
When I last wrote about GW2 I was quite optimistic and had much fun with it. shortly after that, my interest in that game completely died on me though and I can't even remember the last time I logged in. It has to be well over a month ago now. I did have fun with it but I think after a while running around doing nothing I sort of realized that all that was leading anywhere. Comparing it to games like Divine Divinity and Kotor 2 that I was also playing I didn't have a goal, no ending to strive for, and simply discovering the land lost its appeal to me. Not knowing what to do initially seemed refreshing and fun, but soon made the whole experience seem kind of pointless. After ten levels or so I thought I had gotten down the general idea of the game, the feeling of the skills and the surroundings. I realize that it might be like judging WoW after having played through Barrens up to level 10 on one character. Obviously there is loads more to discover for me in GW2 if I want to. But I don't, really.


I think it might have happened when I ran into my first dungeon. I didn't go into it, mind you, because I think I was still way too low level. But I stood outside a while, looking at the people standing there, presumably gathering groups, while also asking for people in chat. And it just sort of clicked with me. I'm not in to this anymore. I've done it in WoW for years and just feel like doing something else for a change. Doing my own adventures now, adventures with a clear goal and not the ever climbing stair of increasing stats and levels into infinity. Besides, just as in WoW I don't know anyone who plays GW2 and so I would have to experience all that with strangers. I could make friends, of course, like I've done in WoW a million times. But right now I am not ready to move from one MMORPG to the next. I think I simply need an interlude of other type of games for a little while. I just don't feel like investing myself in the massiveness that a MMORPG is. We'll see in the future.

And then...
There are always other games I play a little bit every now and then. I just secretly bought a copy of RE4 to surprise the bf. We've played through RE1, 2, 3 Survivor, Code Veronica, Zero and RE1 Remake so far so RE4 feels like the next step. I'm really looking forward to getting started on that! Me and the bf also had a discussion about whether FFVIII is a good FF. He doesn't think so but personally, I quite like it, but I never got very far since my copy kept crashing in the same place. I decided it was time to test it out again, but alas - it's still crashing at that same place. What happens is that it never finishes loading between screens in the Galbadia Missile Base, and overall the loading takes ages even when it does work. I tried different things, avoiding certain areas, opening and closing the disc tray, creating a new save file, but nothing seems to work. Either I chance it and start up another save file, but I doubt that is the problem (since no other game has any issues of this sort). My other option is to buy another copy of the game, and I might get around to that eventually because I actually really want to finish that game.

I recently bought a bunch of old RPGs that are lying in wait for me whenever I finish Divine Divinity, for instance Baldurs Gate 1&2, Planescape Torment and NWN. I'm also pondering buying the old Fallout games. I also want to play the Mario & Luigi games for the DS, I've played Partners in Time and loved it and would like to try Bowsers Inside Story too. Right now I definitely feel like I have more games to play than I have time, but at least I have things to do, whenever I don't end up just not doing anything (as mentioned above). Until next time gamers.

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 2 - Stat Choices

Welcome to my second part of How to Disc Priest, this time we'll take a closer look to one of the favorite subjects for any disc priest to argue about - stats. More specifically what stats to choose, and why.

Previous post in this guide;
- Part 1: Talent Choices

Over the course of WoW, what stats you want to go with as a disc priest has rarely been set in stone. Even Icy-Veins state that;

"The statistic priority as a Discipline Priest is very much subject to personal preference. Your final choice will depend greatly on your spell usage, healing style, and encounter requirements, and we encourage you to experiment until you find what works best for you."

Most of the time there has been a primary stat we want to stack as much as possible, and the secondary stat has mainly been up to playstyle. There are usually recommendations as to which stat is overall the best one, overall in this case meaning "for most encounters" and/or "for most playstyles". And that's in the end what it really comes down to - what are you fighting (dungeons, pvp, raids) and how are you playing your priest? Other factors that will affect your choice somewhat are raid composition, for instance which other healers you run with, and your gear level. If this all seems like too many factors to think off, don't worry - hopefully it will be somewhat clearer once I am done here (I'll try at least).

What are stats anyway?
So how do we know what stats we want to use? Is it fine to just read what someone says in some think-they-know-it-all-blog (like this one) and smack it all on to my gear? Maybe, but wouldn't it more interesting to know the reason to why you want a certain stat over another? I've always thought so, and it has helped me greatly to adapt to certain encounters and raid groups over the years. It has meant going against the stream on several occasions, but most of the time it has worked out better for me rather than just assuming that the general advice will work solidly regardless.

Stats do one thing - boost our output. Be it passively via stamina or spirit, or actively via spell power, in the end stats are all there to make sure you can do your job for as long and as much as possible (obviously I'm not thinking of strength or agility or other stats that don't do anything for us). You should be able to look at any stat and think "how much more healing will I get from 1 more point of this?". Sometimes the answer is straightforward - 1 more spellpower might give you 1 extra heal point. Most of the time however the answer is heavily dependant on outside factors and this is exactly why you need to know more about each stats function to make the right decision and this is something I've written about before.

Take stamina for instance. By 99,9% of the healing community not even mentioned when talking about stat choices. That is because nowadays, most of the time you get enough stamina passively to not ever have to choose stamina over almost any other stat. This does not mean stamina is a meaningless stat worth ignoring however. I remember back in Wotlk (I think it was), casters were required to have more than 10.000 hp for certain encounters, or they were just too difficult to keep alive. Some had to actively enchant/gem/gear for stamina to get up to those numbers. In many ways stamina can be considered the very basic of stats, which without all the other stats are completely meaningless, because a dead healer won't heal anyone. No matter how much spell power, intellect or haste you might have, if you can't stay alive you're worthless to the group anyway.

Now I am not trying to tell you to throw every other stat out the window out the window and stack stamina, I am merely trying to point out that stats might seem simple at a first glance, but they often correlate both to eachother and outside factors that make them worth giving many extra thoughts. Rarely is that more true than for disc priest, who have many skills that are affected differently by different stats. Most of the time this is something I have enjoyed about being a priest, sometimes however it has been quite frustrating.

As you can see I am clearly in favor of adapting your stats to your playstyle rather than adapting your playstyle to your stats, although of course overall a good balance is the best. But, this must never mean that your choices should handicap your raid in any way (this is especially important in progress raiding, less important in whatever you deem to be easy content). Don't pick a stat just because "it's more fun" or "I like to crit" like one shaman told me when I had some questions about her gearing. Let there be thought behind your choices and even more important, firm results. Play around, but make sure that you in the end are able to perform the job you're there to perform. Disc priests have the benefit of being allowed a lot of leeway in their stat choices, but if something turns out to work a lot better for you, you should definitely consider running with it even if it's not an immediate favorite of yours. I have on occasion been allowed to try out some weird ass ideas, but that is because I've had a lenient raid group. Don't do that without asking first.

To wrap up this rant somewhat, here are a couple of things to keep in mind about disc priests and stats just to give you an idea as to the complexity;

• Stats affect our spells differently. Some spells benefit more from a certain stat than others. We have skills that are more actively affected by mastery (fx PW:Shield) and more passively affected by mastery and actively by haste (fx Prayer of Healing). Because of this it's important to consider spell usage and the encounter when choosing stats.
• Some stats boost eachother, so that having more of one makes another better. The more mastery you have, the better haste becomes. The more crit you have, the better mastery becomes. The more mastery you have the better crit becomes. There are correlations between most stats.

You're probably thinking "yeah that's all swell, but what does it mean?". Or maybe you skipped that wall of text up there and jumped straight to this section. Either way, let's get to the actual stat choices.

What do our stats do?

Intellect - Has long been our go-to stat, since we used to have a big portion of our mana regeneration through intellect via Rapture, back before it was nerfed to only proc once every 12 seconds and worse, when they locked our mana pools to set amounts. Intellect is still a very important stat to us, it's just had to make some room for spirit as our mana regen stat instead. My personal stand point on Intellect is that it is the most important stat for us right now, but only if you have enough spirit to be comfortable with you mana regeneration. Intellect will give you bigger heals, which in turn means you have to throw less heals and therefor might need less spirit. It's important to find a good balance here, but overall, start to really stack Intellect once you've reached your spirit comfort zone. More about that up next.

Spirit - Spirit is both one of your most important stats and least important stats. Without enough of it, all your other stats are pretty useless, since you won't have the mana to cast them. Once you do have enough mana regen however, any additional spirit is basically useless since you only need as much mana as you need to keep everyone alive for whatever you are killing. How much that is of course totally depends on your playstyle, whether you're doing mostly raids or dungeons and raid composition (if you happen to do regular raiding). I found that a good benchmark to aim for was crossing the 10.000 combat regen mark for raiding. After that you will need to simply estimate based on whether you oom a lot or not if you need more spirit or not. As long as you still have trouble with your mana pool, pile up some more spirit (or consider if you're using your spells wrong, more on that in spell usage in another part). As soon as you notice that you end the encounters with some mana, without struggling throughout the encounter to not oom, no need for more spirit!

Disc healing 25man Cho'gall

Mastery - Mastery has historically been pretty much on par with haste, and it has basically been down to personal preference. Do you want to cast faster heals or have bigger absorbs? Although the disc community has seemed to lean slightly towards favoring Mastery since what seems like forever, I've always been a haste-fan myself. It's simply felt better, and trust me, I regularly tried gearing/gemming mastery to see which seemed better. Come MoP and especially enter Spirit Shell, and I feel like things have changed however. Back in Cata my heals consisted of roughly 10% shields and 15% DA. 75% of my healing was unaffected by mastery, while only 10% would be unaffected by haste. These numbers did not change much with mastery heavy gearing, because Prayer of Healing was such an important spell to us back then (as it still is) and it loved haste more than mastery.

Nowadays however, mastery also boosts our healing, meaning it is less of a one-or-the-other choice that it used to be. Because of Spirit Shell combined with Shield and DA, absorbs now also make up a much bigger portion of my, and probably your, healing than it used to. Spirit Shell is one of the most powerful tools a discipline priest has when wielded correctly, and boosting its output is definitely recommended.

Haste makes you cast out spells and thus get up Spirit Shell faster, but you risk only wasting Spirit Shell absorbs this way since it doesn't stack. With Mastery on the other hand, your Spirit Shell will become stronger, which you definitely want. Because of this, and the general awesomeness of Spirit Shell, I recommend going for Mastery as your main secondary stat.

Haste - Haste has been my favorite stat for most occasions, and only rarely did I spec mastery (and never crit). Because of the resent changes to the discipline spell book and choice of spells (read: inclusion of Spirit Shell and even more preference towards absorbs), mastery has overtaken haste in MoP. A lot of priests would even put crit, a stat I've always scoffed at, higher than haste now for the same reasons (and more about crit in a second). Personally I still prefer haste, since crit, unless you have shit tons of it, is still an unreliable stat whereas haste affects almost all of your spells no matter how much or how little you have.

Crit - So let's talk a bit more about crit. As I just mentioned, crit has come in from the cold in MoP because of a couple of changes to it made in MoP. A critical cast now gives roughly 200% heal rather than the old 150% (or something like it), unless you are a discipline priest. If you are (and I think you might be), you get a Divine Aegis proc equal to the amount healed. Divine Aegis is affected by mastery, which you should have a lot of and therefor they are great. You want many Divine Aegis.

Crit still suffers from the major drawback of its unreliability however, meaning that even if you have loads of crit there will be occasions where you don't crit. Theoretically you could do a whole fight without crits. It won't happen, I know, but it points at a flaw of the stat I simply don't like about it. Haste is now considered weaker, but at least it delivers. When I have one point of haste, that haste will give me haste to all my casts (with few exceptions), whereas a point of crit might only benefit me occasionally. And maybe not even when I actually want it to. Crit is dealing with probabilities, and I've always wanted to cut uncertainties out from the equation.

There is obviously a point where crit is so useful that the stat on average outweighs its own uncertainty, in the end this is something you have to notice for yourself depending on your playstyle.

TLDR!
So to conlude, here is my personal suggestion for how you should prioritize your stats. You might not agree, your friend might not agree, some other blogger somewhere might not agree - this is my personal preference, it works very well for my playstyle and I couldn't recommend you more to test different things yourself if you have the time and interest;

1. Spirit (until satisfied with combat mana regen)
2. Intellect
3. Mastery
4. Haste
5. Crit (crit being the joker here, you either love it or hate it).

And what should I gem/reforge/enchant to?
The obvious answer is that you should reforge/gem to whatever boosts the stat you need. Below are some suggestions, there is also the Perfect cut of the green quality equivalent. Here is a good list too.

Red - Brilliant Primordial Ruby (320 int)
Blue - Sparkling River's Heart (320 spirit)
Yellow - Quick Sun's Radiance (320 haste) or Fractured Sun's Radiance (320 mastery) or Smooth Sun's Radiance (320 crit)
Purple - Purified Imperial Amethyst (80 int + 160 spirit)
Orange - Reckless Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 haste) or Artful Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 mastery) or Potent Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 crit)
Green - Energized Wild Jade (160 haste + 160 spirit) or Zen Wild Jade (160 spirit + 160 mastery) or Misty Wild Jade (160 crit + 160 spirit)
Meta - Revitalizing Primal Diamond (432 spirit and +3% crit effect) or Burning Primal Diamond (216 int and +3% crit effect).  

 For enchants I suggest you check out Icy-Veins list, it's good and probably better than anything I could produce.