fungchewuchi
Master of the Flying Guillotine
Ayamechan’s guide to pug bg disc
Or “How to play as a team without coordinating”
About me:
I’ve healed pug bgs and twinked for years, I’m no professional gamer but I think I do well above average. I’m a very offensive healer, and I completed the original battlemaster achiev save I think 1 of the subachievs before it got nerfed, while entirely alone on random queues. There’s more success to be had with voice chat, called targets, assist macros, and such, but I think I have some wisdom to impart for the more average random queuer. I’m not going to be focusing on gear choice, stat priority or the normal things you see here about how to create a character, but instead how to USE it.
A useful metaphor to consider:
The biggest concept I don’t see covered anywhere else I’m going to call “plate spinning”. As in, those old variety acts where a juggler would have a bunch of thin wobbly poles and a buncha plates that (s)he’d set spinning atop them, the novelty being how much the person can multi-task keeping many plates going at once. There’s a limit to how many things at once someone can pay attention to, and the attention given to each degrades as a person tries to do more. This reveals itself in many places throughout gameplay and conscientiousness of it is to your benefit. To some degree, it is the measure of your comfort with a class and what you achieve through practice with it: you start to take your eyes off your spellbar, then your cooldown timers, and such more and more as you get to “know” them, freeing up your attention more to things like positioning, and eventually you’re using addons for enemy action visibility. When there’s several good enemy healers in a group clash, straining their ability to multitask is usually the goal to endeavor towards: the likeliness of being able to burst any one target down increases when you have them spreading their attention as much as possible. And verily I tell you: even sucky teammates can be very worth healing as their very existence costs the attention of your enemy. The average player isn’t wise enough to completely ignore the useless enemy until all better work is done, and will spend globals for their ez hks to their ultimate detriment.
Why Disc:
The biggest advantage disc has over any other spec in 20s is that it has two schools of healing. Holy has https://www.wowhead.com/spell=17/power-word-shield, https://www.wowhead.com/spell=47540/penance, https://www.wowhead.com/spell=19236/desperate-prayer; https://www.wowhead.com/spell=186263/shadow-mend is shadow. This means you suffer far less for having been interrupted than anyone else. This should not make you lazy about fake-casting, but as often as you’ll have 3 interrupters training you and getting interrupted becomes inevitable, it is significant survivability. SOMEBODY could well die when you’re interrupted, but it’s less likely to be you. There is no 1 right answer about when to cast and when to save what when under such pressure, as it vacillates depending on what you’ve already just been doing: if you’ve just shielded many people and yourself, getting interrupted shadow leaves you more vulnerable until the cds are up. If few shields have been put out, there’s wide raid dmg, and you get interrupted holy, you’ll be struggling to keep up with your single target heal. Generally I think it’s better to get interrupted holy if you’re worried about dying yourself. Oh, and get https://www.wowhead.com/item=32578/charged-crystal-focuses for OP healthstones of last resort.
On damage-dealing healers:
Survivability, plus a lot of talents clearly geared towards damage dealing, to me, encourages a very offensive playstyle. I read often here people complaining about healers doing damage instead of healing, so I want to be specific about what I mean here. For 60-80% of the time, the focus is probably strictly healing and otherwise assisting (dispel, fear, what have you). For another 20-30% of the time or so, there’s no significant threat of anyone dying and you’re on the good side of a lopsided fight: why not end it faster and top everyone off as they’re mounting up to move on. A measely 10-15% of the time arises a few situations where I do believe damaging instead of healing, even when the groups under great pressure, is a good decision. And that’s because dead players stop dealing damage. This does not mean losing focus on the healing, and especially does not mean chasing a target into poor positioning. Truthfully, the benefits are more than dmg prevention: he’s not ccing etc either, but underappreciably, gcds of people across the whole team are now going to be spent on other things than him; everyone in the locale is spinning 1 less plate attention-wise and that’s huge.
The primary example of when I damage when many say healers should heal is when targets are getting close to dying and then being rescued by enemy healers, resulting in a tremendously extended engagement. If I recognize this pattern (or honestly am just feeling rawr today) I’ll be adding a schism mind blast sw:d in there when I see him getting close, to finish the work and get the enemy player off the agenda, without losing sight of the plates i’m spinning healing-wise, even if some plates look pretty wobbly but I’m confident the exchange is worth it.
Now, another situation is when two large groups are clashing, both are being healed well, and no opportunity is presenting itself anywhere for a kill. Naturally you’ve already thrown down your battle standard for 15% health to your teammates. Again, you’re not in a coordinated group, so getting everyone to “focus blahblah” is a pipe-dream. You’re not going to help much of anything throwing random mind blasts around, and though there’s no dire threats, there’s healing to be done. This is where talents like dark archangel are fun, and where some multi-dotting and RESPONSIBLE throwing out of casted dmg can be of use. Enemy healers having an easy time of keeping 2 or 3 targeted people among 6 when those other 4 plates are humming along fine will start to make mistakes when all 6 start wobbling some. Of course, your dots alone won’t amount to much, but often you’ll have someone else try multidotting, and just the unpredictability of people target-switching can “make things happen” where they weren’t, and you can do your small part to help that. Nothing wrong with throwing out swps in general when you’ve got nothing pressing to do healing-wise, just be mindful of people’s cc. I like to keep a dot rolling on any rogue/ferals i see just to crap on their days, refreshing it as a parting gift if need be.
On Atonement:
In the 20s bracket, https://www.wowhead.com/spell=81749/atonement is best not to focus on. I would not recommend it as a healing strategy as the damage patterns you encounter will not match up against it well. It's not big enough for single heals or fast & wide enough for aoe. Mind blast and penance are the better damagers. So you only end up smiting when there's nothing to heal and your other dmg abilities are on cd. Orrr pehaps when saving your burst for the right moment.
All that said, there's no reason not to consider a smite-your-target's-target-when-targeting-a-friendly macro if you'd prefer to follow your tank's target instead of whatever wow has implemented for auto-target smiting, so you don't have to de-target tank to dmg and can be that much lazier in dungeons.
#showtooltip smite
/cast [harm] smite; [harm, target=targettarget] smite; smite
On positioning:
As for positioning in the group, you of course have the option all healers do to stand behind your teammates where you’re difficult to reach, and this is great in many situations: highly recommended. You don’t do more healing for being in melee range of an enemy, nor can you bubble LOL out of a bad spot like a holy pally. You can’t ghostwolf n snare totem away like a shammy, or have the billion escape tools those slippery fuzzballs have. Any bad situation you get into, you’re going to have to walk your ass out of. Keep that front-of-mind if you’re feeling leeroy. Don’t get further ahead than you feel you can get back to safety if everyone were to suddenly turn on you. Facing wet noodles, who cares, but even 1 burst twink on the other side commands your respect. I suppose I generally end up in a range that’d put me targetable by most the enemy dps, but not their healers behind or sit-back dpsers. I can step a little forward when pressuring or a little back when pressured, generally just behind the clash. The most difficult choice to get right is when to help chase/kill an enemy healer that’s playing defensively behind their group. The right answer is usually not to. You’d prefer not to poorly position yourself when assisting a kill, but there are times when your uncoordinated team are making that their unspoken choice and it’s either going to succeed or be disaster anyway.
As req'd, on talents:
The honest truth is that no one talent is significantly playstyle-changing. Even in situations where you know what comp you're going to be grouping with ahead of time, I don't believe the slight minmaxing you can do in that regard ends up being significant until you're truly upper-echelon, and this is not a guide for such people. I would suspect the difference is less than being interrupted or ccd a single time or not over a the course of a fight. You are FREE to try new things or stick with what you like without penalty: they're mostly all fine choices.
More specific commentary on each talent I think only speaks to the obvious:
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=214621/schism is the choice for more offensive focus
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=109142/twist-of-fate is the choice for the most defense
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=193134/castigation is a nice half-way between the two
And on PVP talents
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=197535/strength-of-soul is probably what I'd consider the default choice. A boon to self-survivability when starting out, with above-average benefits in general.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=196162/purification isn't commonly taken, but plausibly, if I felt I kept teaming with trinketless people getting ccd a lot I might consider a try.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=196439/purified-resolve I don't really see being worth it. Maybe for FC escort duty? Pass.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=214205/trinity is one in all honesty I've not investigated. I strongly suspect that until later levels where more talents can be taken that all synergize together, it isn't an option to smite-focus yet.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=197862/archangel Obvious oshit healing cooldown.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=197871/dark-archangel Obvious dps cd for group. My choice of the moment as I'm encountering big group clashes often.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=215768/searing-light Lackluster as won't be smiting often.
Stat Priorities:
Intellect > Haste > Vers > Crit.
Mastery is healing-only and will not help you do damage, so more a matter of opinion. If I cared mostly about healing, I imagine it'd rank in between vers and crit. The wow 20 atlas and shadowlands enchant scaling guide do fine jobs of helping you find gear to your opinion: the choices are fairly obvious with the above priorities. The F2P&Vet armory list is then good to compare your ideas to others. Personally, after getting "bis" by these terms, I later traded out some vers for crit, as I was surviving without issue, and one of the crit setbonuses was within reach of a tradeoff I deemed acceptable. I also chose 2 less stam and 1 more int pants for the same reason. I'd recommend focusing on the self-survival vers offers as a beginner. Largely, I would not favor stamina over int where a choice is to be made between the two: more power I deem better for survivability than more health. With one exception, and that's if you find yourself often dying within a stunlock. Then yes, it's time to look at more stam. I opted to gem int/vers instead of int/haste for the survivability, though that defies the stat rank.
A few items to mention:
- I won't rehash the general item enhancement info you'll find elsewhere here, but in short, as with any char: grab your engineering tinkers, leatherworking pants chant, https://www.wowhead.com/item=75525/alchemists-flask, https://classic.wowhead.com/item=20749/brilliant-wizard-oil is imho the choice for us, drums potions and such as you prefer.
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=128827/xalatath-blade-of-the-black-empire?bonus=0 is probably best of the legion legendaries because you can enchant both main and offhands.
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=32578/charged-crystal-focus as mentioned before. They're huge.
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=18606/alliance-battle-standard cheap 1 time buy
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=32640/tense-unstable-diamond is still overscaled compared to other meta gems, but ofc it's crit. https://www.wowhead.com/item=25893/mystical-skyfire-diamond#taught-by-item or skyflare the consensus seems to be that they're underwhelming. I thought it was ok. I've not evaluated every meta gem, but in general I'm underwhelmed by them. (BTW, despite the wording, I believe all stun "resists" were changed to teeny tiny flat reductions.)
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=11808/circle-of-flame?bonus=6712 should definitely be in your bag. Easy to get to drop, and gives you the option to never oom or need to drink again. The meta is currently very mana-hungry, and I probably end up wearing it about half my games.
- I'd recommend a pvp trinket in general. As a human I'll try to skirt by on just https://www.wowhead.com/spell=59752/will-to-survive and hope I don't get magic ccd too much. I don't think it's really viable to otherwise go without.
- Everyone remembers https://www.wowhead.com/item=49110/nightmare-tear (+3 all) but noone seems to love https://www.wowhead.com/item=42702/enchanted-tear (+2 all)!
A final note:
Twink healing rando bgs is probably second only to twink speed-tanking dungeons for getting people to spontaneously tell you they're having a great time and are very glad to have met you. Yes, pairing up with other op twinks is fun too, but don't underestimate your ability to put sparkles in someone's eyes, flyin around in a cape like a superhero.
Or “How to play as a team without coordinating”
About me:
I’ve healed pug bgs and twinked for years, I’m no professional gamer but I think I do well above average. I’m a very offensive healer, and I completed the original battlemaster achiev save I think 1 of the subachievs before it got nerfed, while entirely alone on random queues. There’s more success to be had with voice chat, called targets, assist macros, and such, but I think I have some wisdom to impart for the more average random queuer. I’m not going to be focusing on gear choice, stat priority or the normal things you see here about how to create a character, but instead how to USE it.
A useful metaphor to consider:
The biggest concept I don’t see covered anywhere else I’m going to call “plate spinning”. As in, those old variety acts where a juggler would have a bunch of thin wobbly poles and a buncha plates that (s)he’d set spinning atop them, the novelty being how much the person can multi-task keeping many plates going at once. There’s a limit to how many things at once someone can pay attention to, and the attention given to each degrades as a person tries to do more. This reveals itself in many places throughout gameplay and conscientiousness of it is to your benefit. To some degree, it is the measure of your comfort with a class and what you achieve through practice with it: you start to take your eyes off your spellbar, then your cooldown timers, and such more and more as you get to “know” them, freeing up your attention more to things like positioning, and eventually you’re using addons for enemy action visibility. When there’s several good enemy healers in a group clash, straining their ability to multitask is usually the goal to endeavor towards: the likeliness of being able to burst any one target down increases when you have them spreading their attention as much as possible. And verily I tell you: even sucky teammates can be very worth healing as their very existence costs the attention of your enemy. The average player isn’t wise enough to completely ignore the useless enemy until all better work is done, and will spend globals for their ez hks to their ultimate detriment.
Why Disc:
The biggest advantage disc has over any other spec in 20s is that it has two schools of healing. Holy has https://www.wowhead.com/spell=17/power-word-shield, https://www.wowhead.com/spell=47540/penance, https://www.wowhead.com/spell=19236/desperate-prayer; https://www.wowhead.com/spell=186263/shadow-mend is shadow. This means you suffer far less for having been interrupted than anyone else. This should not make you lazy about fake-casting, but as often as you’ll have 3 interrupters training you and getting interrupted becomes inevitable, it is significant survivability. SOMEBODY could well die when you’re interrupted, but it’s less likely to be you. There is no 1 right answer about when to cast and when to save what when under such pressure, as it vacillates depending on what you’ve already just been doing: if you’ve just shielded many people and yourself, getting interrupted shadow leaves you more vulnerable until the cds are up. If few shields have been put out, there’s wide raid dmg, and you get interrupted holy, you’ll be struggling to keep up with your single target heal. Generally I think it’s better to get interrupted holy if you’re worried about dying yourself. Oh, and get https://www.wowhead.com/item=32578/charged-crystal-focuses for OP healthstones of last resort.
On damage-dealing healers:
Survivability, plus a lot of talents clearly geared towards damage dealing, to me, encourages a very offensive playstyle. I read often here people complaining about healers doing damage instead of healing, so I want to be specific about what I mean here. For 60-80% of the time, the focus is probably strictly healing and otherwise assisting (dispel, fear, what have you). For another 20-30% of the time or so, there’s no significant threat of anyone dying and you’re on the good side of a lopsided fight: why not end it faster and top everyone off as they’re mounting up to move on. A measely 10-15% of the time arises a few situations where I do believe damaging instead of healing, even when the groups under great pressure, is a good decision. And that’s because dead players stop dealing damage. This does not mean losing focus on the healing, and especially does not mean chasing a target into poor positioning. Truthfully, the benefits are more than dmg prevention: he’s not ccing etc either, but underappreciably, gcds of people across the whole team are now going to be spent on other things than him; everyone in the locale is spinning 1 less plate attention-wise and that’s huge.
The primary example of when I damage when many say healers should heal is when targets are getting close to dying and then being rescued by enemy healers, resulting in a tremendously extended engagement. If I recognize this pattern (or honestly am just feeling rawr today) I’ll be adding a schism mind blast sw:d in there when I see him getting close, to finish the work and get the enemy player off the agenda, without losing sight of the plates i’m spinning healing-wise, even if some plates look pretty wobbly but I’m confident the exchange is worth it.
Now, another situation is when two large groups are clashing, both are being healed well, and no opportunity is presenting itself anywhere for a kill. Naturally you’ve already thrown down your battle standard for 15% health to your teammates. Again, you’re not in a coordinated group, so getting everyone to “focus blahblah” is a pipe-dream. You’re not going to help much of anything throwing random mind blasts around, and though there’s no dire threats, there’s healing to be done. This is where talents like dark archangel are fun, and where some multi-dotting and RESPONSIBLE throwing out of casted dmg can be of use. Enemy healers having an easy time of keeping 2 or 3 targeted people among 6 when those other 4 plates are humming along fine will start to make mistakes when all 6 start wobbling some. Of course, your dots alone won’t amount to much, but often you’ll have someone else try multidotting, and just the unpredictability of people target-switching can “make things happen” where they weren’t, and you can do your small part to help that. Nothing wrong with throwing out swps in general when you’ve got nothing pressing to do healing-wise, just be mindful of people’s cc. I like to keep a dot rolling on any rogue/ferals i see just to crap on their days, refreshing it as a parting gift if need be.
On Atonement:
In the 20s bracket, https://www.wowhead.com/spell=81749/atonement is best not to focus on. I would not recommend it as a healing strategy as the damage patterns you encounter will not match up against it well. It's not big enough for single heals or fast & wide enough for aoe. Mind blast and penance are the better damagers. So you only end up smiting when there's nothing to heal and your other dmg abilities are on cd. Orrr pehaps when saving your burst for the right moment.
All that said, there's no reason not to consider a smite-your-target's-target-when-targeting-a-friendly macro if you'd prefer to follow your tank's target instead of whatever wow has implemented for auto-target smiting, so you don't have to de-target tank to dmg and can be that much lazier in dungeons.
#showtooltip smite
/cast [harm] smite; [harm, target=targettarget] smite; smite
On positioning:
As for positioning in the group, you of course have the option all healers do to stand behind your teammates where you’re difficult to reach, and this is great in many situations: highly recommended. You don’t do more healing for being in melee range of an enemy, nor can you bubble LOL out of a bad spot like a holy pally. You can’t ghostwolf n snare totem away like a shammy, or have the billion escape tools those slippery fuzzballs have. Any bad situation you get into, you’re going to have to walk your ass out of. Keep that front-of-mind if you’re feeling leeroy. Don’t get further ahead than you feel you can get back to safety if everyone were to suddenly turn on you. Facing wet noodles, who cares, but even 1 burst twink on the other side commands your respect. I suppose I generally end up in a range that’d put me targetable by most the enemy dps, but not their healers behind or sit-back dpsers. I can step a little forward when pressuring or a little back when pressured, generally just behind the clash. The most difficult choice to get right is when to help chase/kill an enemy healer that’s playing defensively behind their group. The right answer is usually not to. You’d prefer not to poorly position yourself when assisting a kill, but there are times when your uncoordinated team are making that their unspoken choice and it’s either going to succeed or be disaster anyway.
As req'd, on talents:
The honest truth is that no one talent is significantly playstyle-changing. Even in situations where you know what comp you're going to be grouping with ahead of time, I don't believe the slight minmaxing you can do in that regard ends up being significant until you're truly upper-echelon, and this is not a guide for such people. I would suspect the difference is less than being interrupted or ccd a single time or not over a the course of a fight. You are FREE to try new things or stick with what you like without penalty: they're mostly all fine choices.
More specific commentary on each talent I think only speaks to the obvious:
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=214621/schism is the choice for more offensive focus
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=109142/twist-of-fate is the choice for the most defense
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=193134/castigation is a nice half-way between the two
And on PVP talents
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=197535/strength-of-soul is probably what I'd consider the default choice. A boon to self-survivability when starting out, with above-average benefits in general.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=196162/purification isn't commonly taken, but plausibly, if I felt I kept teaming with trinketless people getting ccd a lot I might consider a try.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=196439/purified-resolve I don't really see being worth it. Maybe for FC escort duty? Pass.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=214205/trinity is one in all honesty I've not investigated. I strongly suspect that until later levels where more talents can be taken that all synergize together, it isn't an option to smite-focus yet.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=197862/archangel Obvious oshit healing cooldown.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=197871/dark-archangel Obvious dps cd for group. My choice of the moment as I'm encountering big group clashes often.
- https://www.wowhead.com/spell=215768/searing-light Lackluster as won't be smiting often.
Stat Priorities:
Intellect > Haste > Vers > Crit.
Mastery is healing-only and will not help you do damage, so more a matter of opinion. If I cared mostly about healing, I imagine it'd rank in between vers and crit. The wow 20 atlas and shadowlands enchant scaling guide do fine jobs of helping you find gear to your opinion: the choices are fairly obvious with the above priorities. The F2P&Vet armory list is then good to compare your ideas to others. Personally, after getting "bis" by these terms, I later traded out some vers for crit, as I was surviving without issue, and one of the crit setbonuses was within reach of a tradeoff I deemed acceptable. I also chose 2 less stam and 1 more int pants for the same reason. I'd recommend focusing on the self-survival vers offers as a beginner. Largely, I would not favor stamina over int where a choice is to be made between the two: more power I deem better for survivability than more health. With one exception, and that's if you find yourself often dying within a stunlock. Then yes, it's time to look at more stam. I opted to gem int/vers instead of int/haste for the survivability, though that defies the stat rank.
A few items to mention:
- I won't rehash the general item enhancement info you'll find elsewhere here, but in short, as with any char: grab your engineering tinkers, leatherworking pants chant, https://www.wowhead.com/item=75525/alchemists-flask, https://classic.wowhead.com/item=20749/brilliant-wizard-oil is imho the choice for us, drums potions and such as you prefer.
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=128827/xalatath-blade-of-the-black-empire?bonus=0 is probably best of the legion legendaries because you can enchant both main and offhands.
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=32578/charged-crystal-focus as mentioned before. They're huge.
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=18606/alliance-battle-standard cheap 1 time buy
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=32640/tense-unstable-diamond is still overscaled compared to other meta gems, but ofc it's crit. https://www.wowhead.com/item=25893/mystical-skyfire-diamond#taught-by-item or skyflare the consensus seems to be that they're underwhelming. I thought it was ok. I've not evaluated every meta gem, but in general I'm underwhelmed by them. (BTW, despite the wording, I believe all stun "resists" were changed to teeny tiny flat reductions.)
- https://www.wowhead.com/item=11808/circle-of-flame?bonus=6712 should definitely be in your bag. Easy to get to drop, and gives you the option to never oom or need to drink again. The meta is currently very mana-hungry, and I probably end up wearing it about half my games.
- I'd recommend a pvp trinket in general. As a human I'll try to skirt by on just https://www.wowhead.com/spell=59752/will-to-survive and hope I don't get magic ccd too much. I don't think it's really viable to otherwise go without.
- Everyone remembers https://www.wowhead.com/item=49110/nightmare-tear (+3 all) but noone seems to love https://www.wowhead.com/item=42702/enchanted-tear (+2 all)!
A final note:
Twink healing rando bgs is probably second only to twink speed-tanking dungeons for getting people to spontaneously tell you they're having a great time and are very glad to have met you. Yes, pairing up with other op twinks is fun too, but don't underestimate your ability to put sparkles in someone's eyes, flyin around in a cape like a superhero.
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