The great tragedy of healing is that the better your team gets, the more boring it becomes. It’s been said many times that while DPS can strive for bigger and better results on farm bosses, healers just see their numbers dwindle. Easy farm content leads to boredom, and in my guild bored healers lead to trouble. All of us enjoy the crazy chaotic fights with lots of running and stuff to do. Healychat after the first couple of Festergut wipes read like wide-eyed kids in a candy store: “Did you see that? There’s so much raid damage. It’s .. it’s AWESOME.”

This is particularly applicable to LFG pugs at the moment. Given a halfway decent tank, I can get away with Prayer of Mending and a shield or two, leaving me to space out and spin around in my chair for half the instance. So what’s an overgeared healer to do? SMITE!

I know a lot of healers queue up with DPS gear and specs now to help out with damage, but I’m not that brave. I burn through mana really quickly in my shadow set, and my hotbars and keybindings are all wrong for the kind of panicked “oh shit” healing that might be required. Besides, you never know how good your next Heroic tank will be. Instead, I like playing the Battle Priest, Smiter Extraordinaire. I’ve beaten DPS on many a pull, which is vastly more entertaining than dancing in the back of the room.

The secret to healer dps is this macro, which you probably already have in use somewhere:

/cast [harm,nodead][target=targettarget,harm,nodead] SpellName

Set up all your offensive spells to use this macro. Now you can DPS a mob without ever leaving your friendly target — instead it will hit your target of target. I use this to pop shadow word: pain, devouring plague, and shadow word: death on a boss as much as possible (assuming you can give up the GCDs). Hey, every bit helps, and I’m pretty sure my 200 DPS on Rotface was what put us over the top. Totally.

Anyway, this can be used with smite too, which is your friend on pugs. Throw SW:P on anything, and pop devouring plague and SW:D on the big baddie. Is there a single target? PoM and shield your tank, and Smite away! Is it a pack pull? Oh, you lucky dog, it’s MIND SEAR time. I love mind sear. I love it so much. All the tanks in my guild can testify to my love of mind sear, as it’s killed them each at least once. (What? I can’t stop and heal you, I’m clearly MIND SEARING. Duh.)

It helps to have a bit of +hit. I have 70 incidentally from a wand and offhand in my main gearset, which is good enough for me. The hit cap for Heroic bosses is about 130 for Alliance and 160 for Horde, not that it’s a huge concern.

A well geared healy priest can easily pull down 1-2k DPS during a Heroic (again, assuming a good tank), which means that you will clear the instance that much faster. Being a Heroic Battle Priest and occasionally beating Mr. Mouthy Noob Hunter on the charts has made LFG much, much more fun.

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Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic: Feed it a WoW macro, and it will explain what the heck is going on in those many square brackets. Oh, clever website!

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Healing, WotLK LFG, priest

So before you read this I should probably mention that I haven’t truly “theorycrafted” any of this. I’ve barely even done any independent research on it (although really there doesn’t seem to be a lot out there). Instead this is all just based on my observations and own sense of logic. If you see a flaw in my logic, feel free to correct me in the comments.

So you have a Val’anyr! First, let’s look at the proc for a holy priest:

1. It can come from any direct heal, as long as the target has less than 100% health.
2. It technically is supposed to proc off of each Prayer of Mending bounce, but I’ve only personally observed it going off the first one.
3. It does NOT proc off of Empowered Renew, much less regular Renew.

Okay, so far, so good! Now, how effective are some popular heals? For this, I’m just going to use my stats, which are pretty much, I think, your average “farm regular TotC” gear levels, averaged out with crits.

• Circle of Healing: heals for 2500, shield for 375 (2250 total if glyphed)
• Flash Heal: heals for 3400, shield for 510
• Prayer of Healing: heals for 3400, shield for 510 (2550 total, glyph agnostic)
• Prayer of Mending: heals for 5700, shield for 855 – 4275 (inc. 2pc T9 bonus)
• Greater Heal: heals for 6400, shield for 960

There it is, the closest I possibly have ever come to mathcrafting. There was division and everything! Anyway, okay, now we have our information mostly in line, what can I figure out from this?

First, if you are in a fight with regular raid damage, Circle of Healing with the bubble is badass. For 21% of base mana, assuming you have the CoH glyph, you have 2250 in shield damage thrown around on the average CoH. That’s the equivalent to having an entire extra person included in your CoH! Note that the shield is not large at about 375, but that’s not the point. 375hp will probably not save an individual, but 2250 damage absorbed by the bubble is 2250 damage that did not have to be healed, and that saves mana, time, and GCDs for all of your healers.

Depending on how well you keep track of your bounces, PoM is also potentially a really efficient way to use your Val’anyr proc. Even with just one bounce, an 855 hp shield is not insignificant, and it gets ludicrously good the more bounces you have. I admit, I am fairly bad at keeping track of my PoM, so I probably only 3 bounces off each one, for a predicted shield total of ~2500. This is probably less important during a fight with very occasional raid damage, and totally amazing during something like Heroic Twins with constant raid-wide damage.

As a holy priest we aren’t often called upon to heal the Main Tank, but he or she should not be ignored when it comes to bubbles. Suddenly our mana-inefficent large heals become better when served with a large bubble. I always try and hit the MT with a Serendipityx3 Greater Heal when Val’anyr procs. If there is a lot of damage on the tank, follow that up with a Flash Heal and a fresh PoM — you just threw a 2300 hp bubble on them, too! I deeply enjoy this on a fight like Gormok, when the incoming tank damage is crazy.

Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and hasted Greater Heals are three really good ways to use your Val’anyr procs. Adapt to the specific fight and the kind of damage you’re combating, and enjoy the bubbles!

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Healing gear, priest

Augh, recruiting. Augh!

I hate recruiting. It’s too much like job hunting or other related real life chores. There are always a glut of guilds, too, so we all line up and flash our beautiful plumage and hope that we entice the right people. Recruiting makes me daydream about terrible things like one of the larger guilds on our server going belly up, allowing the rest of us to cherrypick from their remains.

And I realize this makes me sound like an old lady talking about walking to school in the snow, but the quality and stability of recruits seems to have decreased over the past year or so. It used to be that I could rely upon someone who transferred realms to at least seriously give it a shot. It cost them $25 to raid with us! Now a good 15% of the time a transfer will show up and then just disappear a week later. Why did you pay $25 to waste your time? Why did you pay to waste my time? A pox upon you!!

I have cranked up the recruitment machine to full speed this week, mostly with responding to “Looking for Guild” posts on the official Alliance Recruitment forum. This gets our name out there, which is great, although it has not escaped my attention that (to my recollection) we have never actually gotten a reliable new member from this forum. Everyone who isn’t a friend of a friend came from other, more niche-specific sites.

Also, while I’m ranting, where did all the mages go? I don’t think I’ve recruited a reliable, butt-kicking mage in at least three years. Fortunately we have a couple, as it stands, but another one would be nice!

Tips for people who are in a new guild:

1) Participate! Not just in raids — talk in gchat, talk with other members of your class, try and put together heroic runs, and so on. Get to know people, and let them get to know you.
2) Be on time for raids! It’s not a real job, but first impressions still count. I have people with years of seniority, and then you. Don’t give me an excuse to bench you in favor of the devil I know.
3) If your guild leader is female, and particularly if she has seemed the sensible type thus far, don’t join the guild and hit on her. A majority of new male recruits send me a “So, how YOU doin’?” whisper within moments of being invited. How am I doing? I’m running a guild. Any other questions, new guy?

/rant

PS: WTB mage, ret pally, and elemental shaman. We will pay you in puns, epics, and good times, although the dental plan is shoddy.

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Guild Management, Healing, Random guildleading

In the week since 3.1 was released I’ve been focused on getting the guild pumped up, leading raids, learning new bosses, figuring out dual specs, and recruiting, not to mention the new fishing daily and Argent Tournament quests. In fact, it was only today that I sat down with the Armory, Elitist Jerks, and a pen and decided that it was time to work out exactly what happened to holy priests with this patch and what I was going to do about it.

A couple of months ago I wrote about how my mana regen in mostly Naxx-25 gear was kind of silly. And it was! There was little consideration for regen mechanics, and mana pots were some archaic concept that we joked about in the healer channel. Fortunately — and unfortunately — Blizz was paying attention to that, and nerfed the 5 second rule into oblivion. My o5sr regen was decreased by 40%, and, oh man, do I feel every single percent. Ideally this will get better with Ulduar gear, but for now it’s back to mana pots, mana flasks, and any other tricks. Another interesting effect of the change is that I feel quite lost without a source of replenishment. Whether it’s heroics or just farming old instances for mounts, all this Int isn’t doing me a whole ton of good without a shadow priest or ret pally or someone similar around.

Along with the changes to mana regen came changes to our spells and talents. I’ve said before that one of the great joys of playing a holy priest is all the options we have in our toolkit, and I’m exceedingly pleased to see that pattern continue in 3.1. Prayer of Healing is targetable, Renew is vastly improved, and wonders of wonders, I actually have Divine Hymn on my hotbar. There are a few different play styles available to holy priests now, and the talents to suit it.

I was always an unrepentant Renew spammer in Vanilla and TBC raids, and I missed that in WotLK. (Renew was grossly inefficient and just not quick enough to be worth it after 3.0.) I quite happily sunk six points now into Renew and Empowered Renew, and use it much as I suspect a Discipline priest would use shields — bored? throw some Renews around! Prayer of Healing has become pretty outstanding, although I admit I’m still training my brain and my fingers to use it as often and as correctly as I should. And I was never one to fuss too much with the o5sr tricks (Clearcast! Inner Focus! Trinkets! Surge of Light!), but I am entirely diggin’ the new Serendipity. Weaving Flash Heals and Prayer of Healing has already proven to be very nice, and will only get better the more I get used to it.

So what of Greater Heal, our eternal staple of heals? If your healing style includes GHeals, then it’s supported by both the old and new talents. If it doesn’t, though.. now, since 3.1, you can free yourself from all your old talent point ways! Let go of Divine Fury, or say goodbye to Improved Healing. The new math even shows that Empowered Healing is not as essential as it once was, depending on what spells you usually use. (Remember, if you want to tank heal, you should probably go Disc and do it right. Holy priests are for raid healing now.)

Tonight I’m going to respec to something like this, if not exactly that. I’ve given up Inner Focus, Improved Healing and Empowered Healing in favor of Healing Focus, Body and Soul, Test of Faith, and most of Blessed Resilience (for the healing bonus, not the damage reduction, natch). It’s a very, very, very “raid healing”-oriented spec, with bonuses for Renew, PoH, CoH, and PoM, and reductions to GHeal and Flash Heal. I’m a little concerned about giving up Inner Focus and not 100% convinced about the usefulness of Body and Soul, although the brainiacs over at EJ say it’s a good choice.

We’ll have to see how it plays in Ulduar, but I’m initially pretty intrigued. Ghostcrawler promised a long time ago that healing Priests would be made more interesting to play in 3.1, and by golly he may just have been right.

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Healing, WotLK patch, priest

Occasionally I try and prompt my guildies into posting something here, and today it actually worked. Thae has been with the guild in various forms for about three years now. He is pretty infamous for being cranky and telling people to die in a fire, and we love him for it.

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Hello, my name is Thae, and if you look closely you’ll see a silent “Rockstar Shaman” in my name. I am currently a Resto Shaman (“Healy4Life” /gangsigns), healing face for Machiavellis Cat. I have been encouraged on numerous occasions to share something with the WoW community at large. A running joke in the guild is that I have a mythical list on which are the names of all the factions, items, instances that have double crossed poor Thae. And so I bring to you the following commentary:

Things I Hate, By Thae of Uldum

The Red Dragonflight is currently at number one. Why? Simple. Keristraza, a certain mace, a terrible voice, and thirteen runs through Nexus. I was lead to believe the mace would drop. Keristraza had other plans. And to add to that, Alexstraza is a bit of a flake. And Sartharion and his three underlings — what sort of male dragon simpers about protecting eggs? The Red Dragon flight is totally on my list.

Cooking vendors, all of them. They still will not hand over a recipe for a chocolate cake. How am I ever expected to become a proper Chef without it? I run their errands daily, I pick their horrid mushrooms, I push the Rhino population to the brink of extinction, and still, no cake.

Fish I believe everyone on Uldum, even those who have not done any fishing, have caught Old Ironjaw. I have not. This vexes me greatly. Therefore, fish are jerks, and jerks get added to The List.

Liore, the GM of Machiavellis Cat She runs a great guild that relies upon teamwork. I am not doted upon, given the first shot at loot, or considered the best healer ever. The guild was dumb before I arrived, and I am not thanked enough for bringing it forward to modern times.

The Oracles I’m up to my third egg now, and still no mount. The gall of these… things is incredible. I’ve appeased their Great Rain Stone. I’ve fought primordial elementals at their behest. I’ve slaughtered the Frenzyheart tribe enough times that Darfur looks down right peaceful. All I ask is a mount. It doesn’t seem like much.

(The End)

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There’s a post over at World of Matticus on A Healer’s Most Important Skill which is, apparently.. spam healing. Hmmm. Perhaps I’m missing something, but while there are times when pure raw output is important, I would have considered flexibility and  situational awareness as being much more important than standing there hitting one button over and over and over.

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World of Warcraft soft drinks, in Alliance and Horde flavors.

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Healing, Random rants, silly