07-16-2005, 05:10 AM
Bolty,Jul 15 2005, 09:01 PM Wrote:Anyway, to close out, back to healing: the only way I'd ever be at the top of a healing list is if my own personal group wound up needing a ton of healing to pull it out of a fire. I treat my mana pool as sacred and preserve it as much as I can for when Things Go Wrong⢠so that I can do my job best. That will never make me #1 according to pure number crunchers.
Good players in a raid will get a decent feel for who are the better healers, and hard numbers are not necessary to back that up. The Priest who shoots his load less than 1 minute into the fight by overhealing is USELESS, but will be #1 in healing done! So when his partymates die because he was out of mana, it must be the other Priests' fault, no?
Yep, I hated when these mods first came out, because I do think that for a couple of weeks, our whole raid got worse for it. Not only were people trying stupid things to shoot to the top of the list, but also it encouraged individual play rather than thinking about the group as a whole. It's not so bad now, since they don't show the damage meters as much as they used to, but I never liked them.
Like Bolty, I'm almost never near the top of the healing list. Actually, it's usually the druids who are near the top, because the way their spells work, they end up overhealing a lot, which the damage meters don't take into account. For myself, I'm proud of the fact that I do two things: I dispell a lot, which is often much more important than actual healing, and I know *who* to heal. My raid tanks do not die on my watch, darn it. If I wanted to shoot to the top of the list, sure I could pop some Flash Heals and renews on random mages and rogues not in my party. But if we want the raid to survive, it's the main tanks that count, and it's their health I focus on. I conserve my mana for their sake just in case something goes wrong (i.e. an add comes, or some other priest let their tank die in a multi-mob raid fight). I'm not going to go around blowing my mana on other players who aren't my responsibility and then find that I don't have enough mana to keep my main tank alive. It's not going to matter if a mage has his or her life topped off if the tank dies and a Molten Destroyer decides to go tearing off after that mage.