[00:02] my guild where we help players get into Mythic Plus content. And in helping players jump into their first keystones, I saw a similar struggle between multiple players, struggling to do damage effectively while also not
[00:14] getting hit with avoidable mechanics. This is normal actually, and those two are definitely linked. So, let's talk about them. The most important thing for a new player to learn, getting into harder World of Warcraft content. My
[00:27] name is Baza the Healer. dive in with me. We're going to start by talking about eyes up, then gapless GCDs, and then comfort. So, what do I mean by all that? Eyes up should be kind of self-explanatory. I mostly want your
[00:41] eyeballs here where the action is, where the spell bars are going off and the floor bad and all that stuff is going on because if you can't see what's going on, you're likely to die. But in order to keep your eyes up, you need to have a
[00:53] better understanding of what's going on down on your bars. So, this is the part we talk about being gapless. And you might be like, "What do you mean by that, Bowser?" All right, I got you. A gapless global cooldown. A global
[01:06] cooldown with no air gaps. For the uninitiated, your global cooldowns, that you hit an ability. If something on your bar doesn't spin, that means that it's moves have their own separate global cooldown, like Groveians. And then there
[01:22] are things like expel harm, which are a half global cooldown and take half the amount of time to finish. Your goal is to typically have your damage routine or your healing routine or whatever have little to no gap between each spell. So
[01:35] it should look something like this. Now, that being said, you might play like, "Bowser, what about those times where I don't have buttons to press?" something to press all the time and so
[01:48] resources or waiting to press a button. And that's fine. It's more about being gapless when you need to be gapless rather than like always trying to maintain this gapless state. And you're going to have little gaps here and there
[02:01] when you go to dodge something or if you're tripping over your buttons and Yeah, when you're learning, you're going to make mistakes, but the goal is to become gapless, at least to the best of our abilities. And part of the reason
[02:14] we're doing this is that we want to be comfortable with our spec. You see, part of your goal in Mythic Plus in raid and PvP is to be so good at your spec that it is relatively second nature. You know where your interrupts are, your crowd
[02:29] control, your defensives, and your damage buttons. So, it is possible to be doing everything at the same time, right? You can hit a defensive, interrupt a spellcast, and then get right back to doing damage. And so
[02:41] little more complicated than that. I'm going to go through each of the roles and kind of what they should be focusing on as it really does differ between tank, healer, and DPS. That being said, I hate to bring up a reference I've
[02:53] already made recently. In competitive card games, you're going to have what we call lines. Finding a way to play the hand that you've been given, finding a way to use the cards that you have to draw, shuffle, discard, and whatever you
[03:05] need to do to get your hand ready. This is such an important staple of World of Warcraft as well. You have procs to react to, resources to manage, and especially for tanks and healers. They sometimes have to really play their
[03:17] cards differently depending on how much danger the party or themselves are in. roles, giving you advice in each part. them, but if you want to jump to your own part, skip around. We're going to
[03:30] start, however, with DPS. The DPS have a lot to learn here. If Fantasy 14, you might be used to having one kind of static rotation with very little to react to. World of Warcraft doesn't operate that way. A lot of the
[03:44] damage here you have to react to because you get procs or maybe you get bonus resources and you can spend those to do more damage. Furthermore, your rotation changes depending on whether you're doing single target uh second target
[03:57] joins in the frey later, if it's three target or if it's mass AOE or just like a normal five target AoE. Definitely check your relative guides for your DPS to kind of figure out what you should be doing in those situations, but it really
[04:09] does change. And sometimes you're in AoE, but there's a priority target, something that is incredibly deadly that absolutely needs to die, and that's going to change what you do. Or there's just a higher health mob than everyone
[04:21] else, and you don't want to be stuck in single target. So doing priority damage actually becomes a time save at a certain point. So it might be worth learning if you do any of that or how you do it. There's also cool techniques
[04:34] like funneling. Uh to quickly describe funneling, right? Something like feral druid, the more rips they have out, the more chances they have at their bite becoming free. A free bite is a fully powered up bite. So, as you can imagine,
[04:46] get a lot of bleeds out. You can bite the main target a whole lot. Super important stuff. So, if you can funnel, that's also a cool thing to learn. You defensives and your crowd controls that you need to have ready as well, just
[04:59] like everybody else. But because you're damage focused, a lot of the times you are doing similar actions back to back and it's actually maybe the easiest. It's just the fact that there are so many ways to optimize the DPS skill
[05:11] ceiling goes really high. So hit the training dummies, practice against them. somebody who's instructed fighting games and competitive shooters for years now, this stuff really does help. Like 2 to 3 minutes, even 5 minutes a day makes a
[05:25] it once or twice a week, I think you're going to find that like you feel way more comfortable and confident. You can also go into delves or just into early get a sense of rotating your cooldowns. But if things are dying too quickly, you
[05:40] might not get the full scale of it as there are specs like boomkin or shadow everything dies so quickly you didn't really get started and thus it can be a little hard if everyone's overeared to learn in like a plus four. You might
[05:53] really feel the difference. But if you're at that point of gear score and players, you're probably ready to step up the difficulty a little bit. So that's not a bad thing. On the tanking side of things, yeah, you have to do DPS
[06:06] dummies, learning your single target, just as helpful on tank. The problem with tanking is that it's kind of only half the battle, right? You have this entire defensive side of your kit. Not
[06:19] to mention, you typically have defensive procs, things that happen because you parried or you blocked or you dodged. This is going to massively change how you do your rotation. There's even stuff like on Brew Master where they get to do
[06:31] more damage with their pet that they summoned, Nazo. I think I said that right. Because if you're clearing stagger from taking damage, you do more taking more damage, you do more damage.
[06:44] you'll in turn do more damage because you are taking more. So you're not a training dummy. So off to delves with you. Delves and dungeons by yourself is a good way to practice. Bran on DPS is challenge mode and healer Bran makes
[06:59] your life a little bit easier if you're still learning. Also, damage Bran likes to rip off of you. So if your threat isn't very good, then Bran's actually you'll get to practice getting enemies back. Something that you'll be very
[07:11] happy you have practiced. Sometimes those pugs have no trigger discipline and myself included. So, it's very important to learn that skill. You have to learn how to juggle your defenses while also doing your damage. This isn't
[07:23] at it. It's just there's a lot of different lines you can play depending on what cooldowns or procs or things you have up to use to defend yourself and do damage. Furthermore, as a tank, you kind of set the rhythm of crowd control and
[07:37] want to be able to keep your eyes up so you don't say aim a frontal at the entire team, right? That's not something you want to do. If you decide to step it up and go into a dungeon, mythic zeros or even heroics by yourself can be a
[07:51] great place to practice. Just um beware about it because that's the damage of five players going into a tank because the damage doesn't just all go to the tank, it goes to your teammates. So, when all of those spell casts are going
[08:05] more than a tank can handle. If you're listening to this video in season 3 of The War Within, Priy of the Sacred Flame has a nice easy first pull with the test your defensives and make sure things are working. That being said, you
[08:19] your limits as a tank. Just know that the going into a dungeon alone thing is shouldn't be judging yourself too harshly when you die because even pretty
[08:31] well geared, it's possible to die on some of those poles as a solo tank. Healers, similarly to tanks, yeah, go practice your damage rotation, too. Thankfully, healers have the easiest damage rotation out of anyone, so this
[08:43] shouldn't be too typically hard to figure out. But now, it's time to learn training dummies, and I do recommend hitting them as this will give you a sense of what kind of procs you can get and what they look like and see some of
[08:56] dummies are always taking damage and they're always low health, so this might give you some false numbers, but that's okay. Hitting the dummies is nice, but then it's time to go over to delves. When it comes to delves, you need to
[09:08] understand that tank Bran's actually a really good practice. He likes to stand and stuff and take a lot of damage. He does not have a lot of self-healing, but he does have some mitigation. This means that you will need to heal him and
[09:20] yourself as damage comes in, but you also need to do damage in order to clear time. It will take quite a while if you don't contribute, but that's what I want you to do. that allows you to get the experience of doing your damage and
[09:34] for healers as they get better at the game. And I actually think that tank brain is a fantastic way to do that. Just know as a healer, if you start practicing in dungeons, lower level keys can be a bit of a wild west situation
[09:48] getting a really good group or a bunch of newbies or people that don't even realize that they're standing on top of the fire and dying. So, it can seem So, while you're trying to get comfortable, you might get pushed to
[10:01] your limits, but try to make sure that you're doing the best you can. And don't worry about it because realistically, you're going to get into more keys than most DPS players will. So, you should be able to get back in no problem. Also, if
[10:14] something keeps glowing or you keep getting extra damage on a move and you worth looking it up. Type in the spell name or the name of the proc or whatever it is, and you'll find it either in your spell book or on your talent tree. This
[10:28] "What is happening? What is this proc that I'm getting? Why does it keep you might be like, "Oh, wait. That makes so much more sense. Now all of a sudden, happen more often." So, I figured I'd let you know. These search bars, by the
[10:43] options menu has one. I needed to say that in a video. So many people forget like anything in here. You'll find a control. You'll find a graphic setting. Just Just type in the options menu. It's It's great. Now, I go over all of this
[10:57] to help you keep your eyes up. Why? What's so important? Well, as we said, spell casts, right? Spell cast, floor bad, frontals, you name it. A lot of the mechanics that are going on happen, you know, at the top of the screen or in the
[11:10] middle of the screen and not on your bars. But it's not just about keeping your eyes up. You do need to look down. It's more about how often you look down. If you know where your cooldowns are, if you know where to look for your
[11:22] important buttons, you can look down briefly and pick your eyes back up. It's an incredibly important skill. And if you play healer, it's even more not just their cooldowns, but the health bars of their teams and the enemy name
[11:35] everywhere. The more comfortable you are, the better. This isn't going to be the UI video. I do plan on making another UI video pretty soon, but here's the thing. If you have to dash your eyes all over the screen in order to get
[11:49] basic information, that's not good. Like some people have default party frames in the top left of the screen, and that's just not easy to heal. So, make sure you but it doesn't get in your way of playing the game. I go for a UI that's a
[12:04] streaming. People can watch it on mobile and kind of read what's going on, and that's important to me. But if you have a really big monitor or you have a away from it, you're going to want to change things so that you can see them.
[12:17] Everyone's setup is different, but I will go into this in depth in the UI A good example of everything we've talked about is preservation of Ooker. The start of a poll tends to go the same way. I always prep the pole by either
[12:32] getting some reversions out or using my temporal anomaly. Then once the poll has Typically speaking, doing damage at the start of the pull is the easiest time to do it before any major damage has started to come out onto the party. As
[12:46] teammates's health bars to see if anything's going on. Double check to make sure my tank is good. Look up at the mobs to see if there's any damage happening and then adjust accordingly. And during all of this, I can look down
[13:00] on my bars to see what moves are coming back up. both my damaging fire breath, my essence that I use to disintegrate that I can also use to heal, and of course other major cooldowns that I might be able to use. As people take
[13:14] glances to make sure I still have a skill. Knowing that if I press a button that I haven't pressed in a while, there's a very high chance that it's up with cooldowns that are 15 seconds and 12 seconds long. Some of them are 20 to
[13:28] 30 seconds long, so I really do need to take a glance every once in a while. But it's this ability to swap from my bars to my party frames to the enemies in front of me that allows me to better use my cow control, better use my damage and
[13:41] my healing to keep everyone alive without causing any issues. But I can only do this because I know what button is verdant embrace its R and I don't know that it's there and I know that it's up very frequently. So I can use it
[13:55] pretty often if I know I haven't pressed it in, oh, say 10 to 12 seconds. And if I'm pressing it often, I'm going to be double-checking my bars because I don't want to be sitting there mashing a button that I can't press yet. So,
[14:08] I'm able to maintain this because I already know where everything is. I'm able to look down, get the job done, look back up, and do what I need to do. There are times where I'm just healing. I'm checking my feet, making sure I'm
[14:20] not about to get hit with a spell, and I'm constantly looking at what cool down I can use next because there's so much incoming damage. But that's usually more of an emergency and having to give up a bit of my safety or a bit of what's
[14:32] going on in order to keep people alive is sometimes needed and you got to hope case something bad happens. But when the going gets rough, it does become hard to healers have it the hardest, it's still a very learnable skill and DPS and tanks
[14:49] will have an even easier time of it. So really work on becoming comfortable and getting those eyes up. Once you're there, everything else from adjustments to your damage to making sure you're positioning better come easily. And
[15:03] had a lot of fun teaching the Keystone Academy, and I plan on doing many more lessons. As I come up with cool ideas and we end up talking about interesting back the lessons here if there's something worth making a video on. But
[15:17] if you want me to dive into a topic in particular, let me know in the comment subscribe button. I love you and I'll see you all in the next one. Take care, friends. Which is why healers have it the hardest
[15:30] here, but it's doable and if a healer can do it, then anyone can do it. And so I highly re Oh, that sounds really insulting.