Flying high again!

So, I am back in the flying rotation, and I've got to say...it feels good!  

Me (left) and my crew - Nov '13

And, while we're tearing it up over the friendly skies of Afghanistan, I've had a few moments here and there to continue my raid healing experience.

I finished collecting the top tier transmog set:

And, while I was lucky to loot a Flex 540 item level staff off Galakras, I think the new look compliments the aviary look of the tier set:

I have 548 level shoulders, but I am currently equipping a 528 set piece from LFR so that I can experience the 2 piece set bonus: 10% extra crit whenever I use archangel.  This is HUGE as a disc priest, since I generally use archangel on cooldown while atonement healing.  That means more shields on raid members!  Still running around 300-800ms latency in-game, but I've now completed much of ToT (Throne of Thunder) on 10-man and most of the first two zones in SoO (Siege of Orgrimmar) on Flex.  Bottom line: I'm not slumming it in LFRs, and when I do LookingForRaid zones, I usually end up on the top of the meters.

I am countering the lag with prevention, and stats that compliment server-side heal decisions.  Crit, which automatically converts to shielding, is very effective when paired with atonement heals.  Cascade is proving to be valuable as a raid heal, which I often use on cooldown.  Oh, and mindbender is considerably better for me than solace.  Power Word: Solace requires me to use it on cooldown to receive the mana benefits.  Since my latency is high, that global cooldown can be a lot more expensive, and I don't always get the PW:Solace on cooldown.  Mindbender is available every minute and returns a considerable amount of mana with a single button push.  And of course, I am using spirit shell, paired with archangel and inner focus, to prevent damage.

Oh, and I am now a mere 2 Titan Runestones away from my legendary cloak, which has me very excited indeed.  I set a goal to achieve that by the end of the month, and it looks like I will exceed that goal handily.

Disc healing Afghanistan...Priest and Pilot is back, better than Iraq.

Priest and Pilot is back.

I'm about to pick up a full time crew and step out of the job I've been doing for nearly two months.  Up to this point, my Afghanistan experience has been 6 days a week in the "mission planning cell," or tactics shop, supporting our daily theater tactical airlift missions as the deputy chief of tactics.  All that means is that I am responsible at night for the development of the products our crews fly with, and occasionally I get to fly.

How does that relate to the common theme of this blog?

Well, I have had a consistent schedule, and I've made some time to play a game here and there in between my work shifts.  In contrast to Balad, Iraq, where I spent my first two deployments, this place has "high speed" internet in the rooms.

This time around, I set up the small form factor desktop and I use the same USB adapter as before, the AWUS036H that I used in Iraq.  Since the routers are close to the room, I ran the simple omni-directional antenna outside the door to my pod and mounted it using a magnetic base.  (I will create a separate entry for the LAN work I've been doing here to optimize my connection.)

So, the end result is that I have a decent connection which allows me to game online, to varying degrees.  Since arriving, I have taken my priest from itemlevel 485 to 530.  I've managed to complete every raid via LFR, with the exception of the final boss in Siege of Orgrimmar.  The 400ms-1200ms connection makes effective healing a challenge for sure, but I have even completed the Legendary questline through the metagem.  Now, I am patiently gathering the final pieces to earn the Legendary cloak, which will be the first orange item I have ever earned in WoW.

One important lesson I learned early on was that I could not compete as a reactionary healer.  With limited bandwidth and “red” latency, you need to fill a role that either prevents damage or automatically selects heal targets at the server level.  If that isn’t possible, you need to be able to direct heals as quickly as humanly possible.  These parameters drove me to atonement healing as a discipline priest, and forged the way I heal raids technically.

Atonement priests deal a portion of their healing via Smite, Power Word: Solace, and offensive Penance.  The damage is directly (and automatically) duplicated to the raid according to who needs the healing.  The value is great; it maximizes effective healing, reduces overhealing, and removes the time required for choosing healing targets.  When your latency is high, a player may be already healed by the time you select them and cast your direct heal, but atonement healing allows you to be just as effective as the nerd spamming chain heal.  Now, add Halo, Cascade, Spirit Shell, and Power Word: Shield to atonement, and you have a viable healing platform with moderate to high latency.

Addon-wise, some important things had to happen as I ventured into LFR (and later in flex raids through oQueue).  I researched macros for smite, shield, and my direct heals.  I am only in the rookie phase of macro use, and I combine that with a clean UI called "LUI."  These macros all include a mouseover function, which blends nicely with any raid frames.  I happened to settle on Grid2, primarily because of the simplicity and minimalist nature.  Thus, when I place my cursor over the tank’s “square” and hit the key for my PW: Shield, it will shield him even if I’m targeted on an enemy, another raid player, or myself.  Likewise, if I select the tank as my target and cast smite, it will cast against the tank’s target.  Built-in logic allows me to quickly select heals without having to spend valuable time searching for a target.  How a healer would ever succeed at high levels without these tools, I have no idea, but I met a disc priest today in Flex that uses more macros, no mouseover, and focuses on higher atonement dps and healing.  I should also mention that yesterday I ran a Flex 10-man Siege of Orgrimmar (SoO) and was the top healer of 3 healers, and my latency was consistently higher than 850ms the entire time.

And so begins the technical discussion on atonement healing in current raids, both 25-man Looking For Raid (LFR) and 10-man+ Flex raids.  What sets some disc priests apart in the raid setting in Throne of Thunder (ToT) and SoO?  It all comes down to two elements: HPS (healing per second) and damage prevention.  The former includes a proper management of your available mana, appropriate stats on your gear, and simply keeping people from reaching zero.  The latter requires a knowledge of the fight, situational awareness, and appropriate use of preventative spells, such as Spirit Shell.  I’ll be talking a lot about those elements of healing over the next few months while I’m out here.

On the road again, but managing to stay connected

I am on the road again, and although I am sad to be away from my wife, I'm trying to make the most of my travels.  I explored some new areas, worked in a military capacity, and had a few hours to play WoW and Hearthstone.

On the Hearthstone front, I can tell that it will continue to be a fun game to play, especially when the connection will not support higher level LFR groups in WoW.  There is only so much WoW daily quest grinding you can tolerate, after all.  Hearthstone is a great deal of fun, although it requires uninterrupted time to play each game.  It is also a game that will require you to lose a lot before you have a decent deck, from what I can tell.  I have probably opened 5 or 6 bonus packs of cards so far, using gold that I obtained from daily quests and victories.  I am becoming quite familiar with the feeling of losing to other players, and even the NPC practice opponents destroy me quite often.  Even with a deck that includes blue and purple cards, it seems to be a very luck-dependent game.  An addicting and fun luck-dependent game which will probably consume some of my actual income for new card packs.

On the WoW front, I reached ilvl 488 by completing the Golden Lotus revered grind and running quite a few LFR groups.  I finished Throne of Thunder today, concluding the list of available LFR instances, although I observed 75% of the Lei Shen fight as a corpse.  I still have no idea what killed me.  But I have put epic pieces in ever slot except trinkets...those simply elude me, and I anticipate more rep grinds to obtain those.  I do not expect to have a good enough connection to continue running LFR groups, so my priest will likely remain my best geared character for quite a while.  

I am bringing directional wifi antennae, and multiple wireless cards and connection points in hopes of developing a reasonable and reliable connection with which I can skype my wife and play an online game when I have time.  Remembering my last two deployments, I am bridling my optimism so that I am not sorely disappointed when the internet sucks.

So, I'm preparing to shift to alt leveling and rep/heroic gearing.  I have a goal to level some classes that I have not ever played so far, such as lock, pally, shammy, and monk.  And, I am completely unfamiliar with my DK, druid, and hunter, which are all sitting patiently at 85.  Smoogestab, my rogue, is now at 86.  Icy veins seems to be the new go-to place for leveling and gear questions, and I have adopted their combat rogue leveling strategy, paired with a good leveling addon.

As far as UI stuff goes, I have experimented with quite a few addons recently.  So far, I have settled on Dominos, Recount, Dugi, Atlas Loot, and a leveling addon.  I am still looking for a good unit frame and cooldown addon for both my priest and all of my alts.  I am tolerating Healbot and TellMeWhen, and I dislike the xPerl unit frames I currently have installed.

Cataclysm...2500ms style

I'm sitting here on my new 2011 macbook pro using bootcamp for Windows, in a place called the USO (an organization that does things for our troops). They have free (slow) wifi, WoW works to some degree, and I have made some progress while I've been out here.
Kyle Rudd, a friend who has played with me since beta, encouraged me to continue the blog, and the timing is perfect for that. Today I'll cover:

• Options for high latency OR low bandwidth connections in general
• "GCDA" or Global Cooldown Availability
  
• Applications for tunneling that will work with WoW on either Mac or Windows
• The effects of bandwidth/latency problems on disc and holy specs
  
• Gameplay suggestions for instance play as a priest in poor network situations
• WoW suggestions in general for consistently crappy internet situations
• Cataclysm options for someone in my situation
• Mouseover, the new standard for healing in WoW
  

I'll start by saying that I did buy that directional antenna, and it is fully functional. That means that I have a consistent internet connection in my room here in Iraq. It does NOT provide any noticeable performance increase over my old omni-directional antenna, only a more stable connection to the routers. While the latency fluctuates between 700ms and 10,000ms in game, the bandwidth is so restricted that instance play of any type is impossible under ANY circumstances. My connection provides 20Kbps during the best performance hours, and less during peak usage hours. So, like last year, in order to get some JP and start the gearing process, I still have to find external sources. However, I'll talk about what I have been able to do with that connection.

Options for extremely high latency or very low bandwidth connections in WoW.
Under the worst conditions, understand that your gameplay changes dramatically. You need to familiarize yourself with the concept of queuing your spells and building specs that improve general survivability. Here's my first example: I rolled a DK alt (more on that in a moment), and using a frost spec, I will Q up an obliterate and half the time Killing Machine will proc in the 2-3 seconds it takes for my command to reach the servers, process, and get back to me. Using this strategy of ability selection, I can actually anticipate events and speed up the grinding process. As a priest, this is even more difficult, and I HIGHLY recommend speccing for HoTs and DoTs. Hunters and warlocks, by my estimation, are probably the very best classes for high latency connections, because you can "fire and forget" and much of the work will continue to be done while your computer waits for the server to fill you in on what's happening.

Global cooldown and you...most of our overseas users already know this...
The global cooldown is a limiting factor for all competitive players on good connections...in PVP especially, but also in raid healing situations as both disc and holy (especially disc). It is the rate at which you can cast spells one after another. On a poor connection, though, your GCD changes completely, no longer limited by your character, haste, and that little circle thing on your boxes that goes clockwise to tell you that you can cast again. On a poor connection, you are guaranteed that you will never run up against the GCD again, rather you are just waiting for your GCD to even become available! Instead, you have to wait for the server to see that you casted and to be able to process your next request.
Example: you cast PW:Shield on someone and choose Prayer of Mending as your next spell. When you activate PW:S, that icon will highlight until the server sees that you casted it, and by the time it goes grey (indicating a successful cast), it's guaranteed to already be past the GCD timer (approx 1 second).
What you MUST do on a poor connection is queue up your next spell, but sometimes not immediately. You can't spam every spell on your bars and expect the server to cast them in order...otherwise we'd do this with good connections. However, you can spoof the connection by simulating a GCD before selecting your next spell. Aside from abilities that do not trigger the GCD (trinks, Power Infusion, Archangel, chakra), you can only select one spell in sequence. I HIGHLY recommend using your non-GCD abilities EVERY time they're available and activating them during that anticipated cast, before your queued ability. In this example, I'd cast PW:S, then immediately select archangel or PI, then select greater heal. Shield would cast, there would be a standard delay, depending on your connection, then the server would activate your PI and cast gheal once it caught up. (For my DK, I often Q up non-GCD abilities during that in-between "lag void.")

Tunneling WoW...a month of research and effort to save YOU some time.
USE LEATRIX LATENCY FIX...first step on any network, windows OR mac.
Learn how to ipconfig /release /renew /flushdns if you are on a wifi network that drops you frequently or seems to slow over time...this actually helps me on the connection in my room (Babtel....boooooo....hisssssss).
It is entirely possible to tunnel to log on, but not easy to describe. I began experimenting with the Tor network, as well as Your-Freedom, PuTTy with SSH to a shell server, and eventually settled on HighPingBuster.

• Tor: is SLOW, due to the p2p nature. It is not ideal for any games, although it can be used to get things like Steam online, or for downloading patches. Tunneling WoW through Freecap is one option, and if you can get the Tor network online, you should be able to get the downloader working through Freecap. Word to the wise: Widecap is best for this, because you can set profiles and capture the "extra" exe's that are running, such as Blizzard downloader. In my opinion, the Tor network will really frustrate you. However, using Tor with Firefox is an outstanding way to access sites such as HBP or Your-Freedom in a lockdown situation such as mine. Those sites are normally blocked, but Tor allowed me to get the files downloaded to use later.
  
• Your-Freedom: this is a better platform for tunneling, and it's free. If you have a poor connection, chances are you'll never exceed the bandwidth or streams allotted. Similarly, programs like Pcap are not bad utilities to actually tunnel your specific programs (just throwing out different ideas, I've tried them all and each requires tutorials). I used google to research the configuration for both WoW and Steam.
• I tinkered with PuTTy and buying my own Linux shell. The company I chose never configured the shell server, but I think this is a VERY strong option...read on.
• HighPingBuster is a pre-configured tunnel program specifically designed for WoW and other online games like Rift. It actually uses an embedded PuTTy program and they have a pre-loaded list of shell servers around the world to choose from. I love how they let you ping the servers through their app. It is extremely simple to set up, and it's only like $6 a month. This is a great option for connecting to WoW on a network that blocks WoW! It does not, however, help much with our crappy satellite connection. I thought I noticed a slight reduction in ping, but I honestly think it's about the same as without...but it always allows me to log in. NOTE: if you have connection issues with HPB and it was just working earlier, quickly uninstall and reinstall...that has helped me three times so far.

I'll cover the rest of the topics in my next post, because I actually want to log in and play right now, and a seat just freed up where nobody can see my screen (not supposed to online game on this network and military guys talk so much crap when they see people playing games). More to come, hope this helps...email me with any specific questions if you're in a situation like mine.