03-18-2008, 01:41 PM
If there was ever a post that said "Hey Bolty, please reply to me," I guess this is it. :) As a Priest who has healed in raids since MC and has just recently completed Black Temple, I can chime in here.
I could ask why your guild has trouble holding onto healers, but that may be diverting the subject too much. Suffice to say that if a guild has trouble keeping its healers, its often times the fault of the guild culture and not the healers themselves. Guilds with members who often blame healers for their own ineptitude (because the guild leadership lets them) or who have prohibitive dkp rules that stop healers from getting off-spec gear (for those who seek loot) will typically have a hard time keeping quality healer players.
But anyhow, to your questions:
1) Stats that are useful at all levels of healer Priest play are the standards: Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit. In Tier 6, Stamina takes off as a critical stat for survival against the numerous random-attack and AoE damage effects. It's no coincidence that Tier 6 healing gear is loaded with Stamina as a result. Stamina's more important than any other stat - I just downed Illidan wearing mostly Karazhan gear coupled with PvP S3 items to gain stamina, because my gear bites. But on the kill, I didn't die while 3 other healers did. Guess who did the most healing. :) If you can hit +2000 heal raid buffed, you're more than adequate for BT healing. If you can hit 10,000 hit points, you're fine. Regen is far more important than a large mana pool. You can crunch numbers pretty quickly that will show you how much more valuable spirit and mp/5 are compared to raw intellect over the course of a long raid fight. Priests look for a combination of Spirit and mp/5 and abuse the five second rule as much as possible. In 2.4, Spirit will start really pulling ahead in value over mp/5, and you can find other threads here about that topic.
2) Pre-TBC, +heal was everything, because downranking heals was so stupidly overpowered. Toward the end of the pre-expansion days, I was healing raid tanks with Heal rank 2. Not Greater Heal, Heal. Thankfully Blizzard nerfed that, because honestly, it meant that getting new gear just meant you could downrank more. Whoopie. Nowadays, how much you should give up +heal depends on the availablity of shadow priests in your guild and the amount of DPS your guild can put out. If you have regular attendance of shadow priests and will typically always have one to feed you mana, you can practically ignore spirit, mp/5, and int, and just go whole-hog +heal. Also, it depends on how good your guild's DPS'ers are. The longer fights last, the more longevity you need. You get into a feedback cycle where the worse your guild's DPS is, the more you have to gear for longevity, which means you have less +heal, which means you have to heal more, which means you have to gear more for longevity, etc. It's no coincidence that the better the guild, the more its healers gear for pure +heal. If bosses die in 5 minutes, you don't really have to gear for 10 minute encounters.
3) Flash heal is not for tanks. Tank healing for Priests boils down to one of two methods. Either you pick a low-rank Greater Heal (Rank 1 or 2, depending on taste and gear) and spam it up on the tank for an average hit of 3000 to 3500 healing, casting non-stop, or you cast max-rank Greater Heals and let them land if the tank is hurt *at all*; otherwise, cancel the cast and start another. Both of these methods work well, depending on how you have healing set up on tanks. You wouldn't want to have 3 Priests all using the max-rank method, for instance, because it's better to combine a max-rank healbomb healer with a steady smaller-heal healer. If you have a Shadow Priest in your group, you can cast GH rank 1/2 practically non-stop, indefinitely, especially with clearcasting procs. This is more like how a Paladin heals.
Obviously if the tank's down 18,000 hit points and you're caught out of a heal rotation, you spam Flash Heals, but otherwise you keep Flash Heal for trash healing where mana conservation is pointless, or else for quick heals on non-tanks.
Renew should always be kept up on a raid tank. Always. Make sure your UI can easily track when and if you have a Renew up on someone so you can refresh it when it runs out. One HoT alone isn't very significant when tanks are taking the ridiculous spike damage they take nowadays, but when you combine your HoT with HoTs from other Priests and Druids, the smoothing of spike damage they do is significant.
I'm not sure what you mean about the tradeoffs with heals. You will use practically every healing spell available to you while T6 raiding: Renew, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Circle of Healing, Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending, and Prayer of Healing. What makes Priest healing so dynamic and fun is that we have SO many options for healing, far more than the other classes. We're not the best at any particular segment of healing (HoTs = Druids, direct heals = Paladins, raid healing = Shamans), but nobody else can do it all like we can. Great Priest players know what spell to use at what time. For example, Prayer of Mending is absolutely stupidly OP against Gurtogg Bloodboil; yet, it's much less useful against Supremus, a fight where Renew dominates during the run-around-like-mad Phase 2. One sign of a poor Priest healer is a tendency to use one healing spell far more than anything else (like over 70% of their total healing). We're not Shamans who live and die by Chain Heal, or Paladins who exist to Flash of Light; we're Priests! A Priest who is showing 80% Flash Heals is basically a lazy Priest who is not maximizing the power of their class.
4) Blizzard nerfed downranking in 2.0, but it's still great. With regen rates the way they are for your level of gear, you can practically cast Greater Heal rank 1 indefinitely. This is especially true if you have 2pc Tier 5 bonus, which refunds 100 mana to you if your Greater Heal overheals anyone for even 1 point of damage. Depending on your level of +heal, Greater Heal rank 1 will hit someone for about 3000 points, which is excellent for sustaining tanks and topping people off. You may want to toy with Rank 2 as well, which takes less of a downranking hit so you get more bang for your buck.
There are some Priests who downrank Flash Heal. I'm of the personal opinion that those who do this are just looking to top healing meters and are trying to "ninja-heal" people faster. Flash Heal is your emergency heal (or trash heal) designed to heal people hard and fast. It was not designed to be a downrankable solution to beat other healers to a heal on someone. But you should try it out to see how it feels. Flash Heal takes a downranking hit pretty fast in terms of mana efficiency as you move down the ranks, too. Greater Heal downranks much better than Flash Heal. If someone is hurt for 2000 damage and needs a top off, Chain Heals and Flash of Lights are so much better suited to the job than a low-rank Flash Heal from you that keeps you in the five second rule. Else, you can cast a low-rank Greater Heal or even a Heal to top them off. As usual, the situation determines the heal.
5) When healing tanks, cast-cancelling is standard practice if the tank has taken no damage. As a Priest, Spirit is still your primary means of regen and staying out of the five second rule is a key part of your play - it makes Priest healing more difficult than Paladin healing, but also more interactive and fun (just my opinion, sorry Pallies!). That said, if you're queuing up a max-rank Greater Heal and the tank's down 1,000 hit points, let it land. Spike damage is insane in TBC, and you want your tank at 100% at all times. Overhealing should not be a concern.
It's astounding how much mana you can regen if your tank goes on a 10-second avoidance streak, especially if you combine that with a clearcast proc, a spirit-based trinket use, and Inner Focus. At times I can regain half of my mana pool with a good use of this combo. Priest healing is often done in huge bursts where you output like crazy, followed by a period of regen as the raid recovers. Not that you shouldn't be casting at all times; it's just that if you've been outside of the five second rule for a while, you need mana, and other healers have the situation under control, you might want to get some more ticks of regen in while you cast-cancel to cover an emergency spike.
6) Non 25-man content that simulates the large number of random-damage and AoE effects found in Hyjal and BT fights is pretty rare. You've got Gruul, which can be similar to a Naj'entus fight in terms of raid-wide damage + spike on the tank. But your guild would be so overgeared for that now, there's no challenge. Morogrim Tidewalker in SSC remains the champion of tank spike damage along with raid-wide AoE and random attacks all rolled into one boss in a Tier 5 instance. I've always argued that Morogrim was not tuned correctly, because his difficulty level belongs in Black Temple. Healing Morogrim is very similar to healing a number of fights in Tier 6 content and a tank even in Tier 6 can get smashed fast thanks to the shock + melee damage spikes.
In 5-mans, I'd say the Warlord at the end of Shattered Halls can be hectic. You've got burst group healing needed when he goes on his whirlwinds, but the burst damage on your tank would be minimal at this gear level as well. Shade of Aran is always a fun fight as a healer since you have to keep track of what all 10 players are doing while also remembering your responsibilies - don't move on flame wreath, etc. You need to keep tracking Aran's target and healing them, heal people caught in Blizzards, etc. Still, your guild is so overgeared for these fights that it won't do all that much to prepare you.
7) Inexperienced healers typically don't have good UI setups. Half of being a good healer is having a UI that enables you to:
a) quickly see who has aggro
b) quickly see who has important debuffs that need clearing
c) quickly see who has important debuffs that can't be cleared, but will require healing (Doomfire, for example)
d) quickly see who is in range
e) quickly see who is getting heals
f) quickly see who is taking immediate damage
g) quickly see who is taking non-immediate damage
h) quickly heal anyone necessary (knowing who is necessary *right now* is half of this)
i) quickly monitor all 25 players
Notice the word that keeps getting repeated. If you are healing in a raid environment and you find that your eyes are darting around the screen to find out information, it will take you just that much longer to react to something. Healing is very very twitch in this game, and you have to be able to quickly process information and react to it. A bad UI can make even the best player a poor healer. If your UI can't tell you who has Doomfire, fix it. If your UI can't tell you who just got Spined by Naj'entus, fix it. If your UI can't track who is about to be Envenomed by the Council, fix it. If your UI can't tell you if you have active Renews or Prayer of Mendings on people, fix it. Spend *a lot* of time and effort on your UI and you'll be rewarded. Expect to constantly improve it as you play an encounter and think afterward, "I wish it were easier to see and react to X." Then you'll hunt for a mod or configuration that'll do it.
Experienced healers have fine-honed UIs. There is no perfect UI, because what works for one healer will be terrible for another. But the worst thing is a lack of willingness to experiment and improve to see what works best for you. Example: I used to be a target-healer, meaning that I would click on a target and then press a keyboard button to perform a heal. This was developed way back in the Molten Core days when that's just how you healed, period. For TBC, I forced myself to start mouseover macro healing and after a few days, I've never looked back. It's just plain faster to hover one's mouse over a unitframe, smack a heal button, and move on - this also lets you maintain your target and see what they're doing more easily.
Inexperienced healers get outhealed massively by experienced ones and just figure it's due to experience or gear. Experience does matter a hell of a lot - simply knowing an encounter and knowing who takes damage when is very helpful - but a lot of the time as well it's because the experienced healer has put in dozens of hours into a UI that lets them beat the other healer to the punch, being more aware of incoming damage effects and raid status.
Hope this helps.
-Bolty
I could ask why your guild has trouble holding onto healers, but that may be diverting the subject too much. Suffice to say that if a guild has trouble keeping its healers, its often times the fault of the guild culture and not the healers themselves. Guilds with members who often blame healers for their own ineptitude (because the guild leadership lets them) or who have prohibitive dkp rules that stop healers from getting off-spec gear (for those who seek loot) will typically have a hard time keeping quality healer players.
But anyhow, to your questions:
1) Stats that are useful at all levels of healer Priest play are the standards: Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit. In Tier 6, Stamina takes off as a critical stat for survival against the numerous random-attack and AoE damage effects. It's no coincidence that Tier 6 healing gear is loaded with Stamina as a result. Stamina's more important than any other stat - I just downed Illidan wearing mostly Karazhan gear coupled with PvP S3 items to gain stamina, because my gear bites. But on the kill, I didn't die while 3 other healers did. Guess who did the most healing. :) If you can hit +2000 heal raid buffed, you're more than adequate for BT healing. If you can hit 10,000 hit points, you're fine. Regen is far more important than a large mana pool. You can crunch numbers pretty quickly that will show you how much more valuable spirit and mp/5 are compared to raw intellect over the course of a long raid fight. Priests look for a combination of Spirit and mp/5 and abuse the five second rule as much as possible. In 2.4, Spirit will start really pulling ahead in value over mp/5, and you can find other threads here about that topic.
2) Pre-TBC, +heal was everything, because downranking heals was so stupidly overpowered. Toward the end of the pre-expansion days, I was healing raid tanks with Heal rank 2. Not Greater Heal, Heal. Thankfully Blizzard nerfed that, because honestly, it meant that getting new gear just meant you could downrank more. Whoopie. Nowadays, how much you should give up +heal depends on the availablity of shadow priests in your guild and the amount of DPS your guild can put out. If you have regular attendance of shadow priests and will typically always have one to feed you mana, you can practically ignore spirit, mp/5, and int, and just go whole-hog +heal. Also, it depends on how good your guild's DPS'ers are. The longer fights last, the more longevity you need. You get into a feedback cycle where the worse your guild's DPS is, the more you have to gear for longevity, which means you have less +heal, which means you have to heal more, which means you have to gear more for longevity, etc. It's no coincidence that the better the guild, the more its healers gear for pure +heal. If bosses die in 5 minutes, you don't really have to gear for 10 minute encounters.
3) Flash heal is not for tanks. Tank healing for Priests boils down to one of two methods. Either you pick a low-rank Greater Heal (Rank 1 or 2, depending on taste and gear) and spam it up on the tank for an average hit of 3000 to 3500 healing, casting non-stop, or you cast max-rank Greater Heals and let them land if the tank is hurt *at all*; otherwise, cancel the cast and start another. Both of these methods work well, depending on how you have healing set up on tanks. You wouldn't want to have 3 Priests all using the max-rank method, for instance, because it's better to combine a max-rank healbomb healer with a steady smaller-heal healer. If you have a Shadow Priest in your group, you can cast GH rank 1/2 practically non-stop, indefinitely, especially with clearcasting procs. This is more like how a Paladin heals.
Obviously if the tank's down 18,000 hit points and you're caught out of a heal rotation, you spam Flash Heals, but otherwise you keep Flash Heal for trash healing where mana conservation is pointless, or else for quick heals on non-tanks.
Renew should always be kept up on a raid tank. Always. Make sure your UI can easily track when and if you have a Renew up on someone so you can refresh it when it runs out. One HoT alone isn't very significant when tanks are taking the ridiculous spike damage they take nowadays, but when you combine your HoT with HoTs from other Priests and Druids, the smoothing of spike damage they do is significant.
I'm not sure what you mean about the tradeoffs with heals. You will use practically every healing spell available to you while T6 raiding: Renew, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Circle of Healing, Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending, and Prayer of Healing. What makes Priest healing so dynamic and fun is that we have SO many options for healing, far more than the other classes. We're not the best at any particular segment of healing (HoTs = Druids, direct heals = Paladins, raid healing = Shamans), but nobody else can do it all like we can. Great Priest players know what spell to use at what time. For example, Prayer of Mending is absolutely stupidly OP against Gurtogg Bloodboil; yet, it's much less useful against Supremus, a fight where Renew dominates during the run-around-like-mad Phase 2. One sign of a poor Priest healer is a tendency to use one healing spell far more than anything else (like over 70% of their total healing). We're not Shamans who live and die by Chain Heal, or Paladins who exist to Flash of Light; we're Priests! A Priest who is showing 80% Flash Heals is basically a lazy Priest who is not maximizing the power of their class.
4) Blizzard nerfed downranking in 2.0, but it's still great. With regen rates the way they are for your level of gear, you can practically cast Greater Heal rank 1 indefinitely. This is especially true if you have 2pc Tier 5 bonus, which refunds 100 mana to you if your Greater Heal overheals anyone for even 1 point of damage. Depending on your level of +heal, Greater Heal rank 1 will hit someone for about 3000 points, which is excellent for sustaining tanks and topping people off. You may want to toy with Rank 2 as well, which takes less of a downranking hit so you get more bang for your buck.
There are some Priests who downrank Flash Heal. I'm of the personal opinion that those who do this are just looking to top healing meters and are trying to "ninja-heal" people faster. Flash Heal is your emergency heal (or trash heal) designed to heal people hard and fast. It was not designed to be a downrankable solution to beat other healers to a heal on someone. But you should try it out to see how it feels. Flash Heal takes a downranking hit pretty fast in terms of mana efficiency as you move down the ranks, too. Greater Heal downranks much better than Flash Heal. If someone is hurt for 2000 damage and needs a top off, Chain Heals and Flash of Lights are so much better suited to the job than a low-rank Flash Heal from you that keeps you in the five second rule. Else, you can cast a low-rank Greater Heal or even a Heal to top them off. As usual, the situation determines the heal.
5) When healing tanks, cast-cancelling is standard practice if the tank has taken no damage. As a Priest, Spirit is still your primary means of regen and staying out of the five second rule is a key part of your play - it makes Priest healing more difficult than Paladin healing, but also more interactive and fun (just my opinion, sorry Pallies!). That said, if you're queuing up a max-rank Greater Heal and the tank's down 1,000 hit points, let it land. Spike damage is insane in TBC, and you want your tank at 100% at all times. Overhealing should not be a concern.
It's astounding how much mana you can regen if your tank goes on a 10-second avoidance streak, especially if you combine that with a clearcast proc, a spirit-based trinket use, and Inner Focus. At times I can regain half of my mana pool with a good use of this combo. Priest healing is often done in huge bursts where you output like crazy, followed by a period of regen as the raid recovers. Not that you shouldn't be casting at all times; it's just that if you've been outside of the five second rule for a while, you need mana, and other healers have the situation under control, you might want to get some more ticks of regen in while you cast-cancel to cover an emergency spike.
6) Non 25-man content that simulates the large number of random-damage and AoE effects found in Hyjal and BT fights is pretty rare. You've got Gruul, which can be similar to a Naj'entus fight in terms of raid-wide damage + spike on the tank. But your guild would be so overgeared for that now, there's no challenge. Morogrim Tidewalker in SSC remains the champion of tank spike damage along with raid-wide AoE and random attacks all rolled into one boss in a Tier 5 instance. I've always argued that Morogrim was not tuned correctly, because his difficulty level belongs in Black Temple. Healing Morogrim is very similar to healing a number of fights in Tier 6 content and a tank even in Tier 6 can get smashed fast thanks to the shock + melee damage spikes.
In 5-mans, I'd say the Warlord at the end of Shattered Halls can be hectic. You've got burst group healing needed when he goes on his whirlwinds, but the burst damage on your tank would be minimal at this gear level as well. Shade of Aran is always a fun fight as a healer since you have to keep track of what all 10 players are doing while also remembering your responsibilies - don't move on flame wreath, etc. You need to keep tracking Aran's target and healing them, heal people caught in Blizzards, etc. Still, your guild is so overgeared for these fights that it won't do all that much to prepare you.
7) Inexperienced healers typically don't have good UI setups. Half of being a good healer is having a UI that enables you to:
a) quickly see who has aggro
b) quickly see who has important debuffs that need clearing
c) quickly see who has important debuffs that can't be cleared, but will require healing (Doomfire, for example)
d) quickly see who is in range
e) quickly see who is getting heals
f) quickly see who is taking immediate damage
g) quickly see who is taking non-immediate damage
h) quickly heal anyone necessary (knowing who is necessary *right now* is half of this)
i) quickly monitor all 25 players
Notice the word that keeps getting repeated. If you are healing in a raid environment and you find that your eyes are darting around the screen to find out information, it will take you just that much longer to react to something. Healing is very very twitch in this game, and you have to be able to quickly process information and react to it. A bad UI can make even the best player a poor healer. If your UI can't tell you who has Doomfire, fix it. If your UI can't tell you who just got Spined by Naj'entus, fix it. If your UI can't track who is about to be Envenomed by the Council, fix it. If your UI can't tell you if you have active Renews or Prayer of Mendings on people, fix it. Spend *a lot* of time and effort on your UI and you'll be rewarded. Expect to constantly improve it as you play an encounter and think afterward, "I wish it were easier to see and react to X." Then you'll hunt for a mod or configuration that'll do it.
Experienced healers have fine-honed UIs. There is no perfect UI, because what works for one healer will be terrible for another. But the worst thing is a lack of willingness to experiment and improve to see what works best for you. Example: I used to be a target-healer, meaning that I would click on a target and then press a keyboard button to perform a heal. This was developed way back in the Molten Core days when that's just how you healed, period. For TBC, I forced myself to start mouseover macro healing and after a few days, I've never looked back. It's just plain faster to hover one's mouse over a unitframe, smack a heal button, and move on - this also lets you maintain your target and see what they're doing more easily.
Inexperienced healers get outhealed massively by experienced ones and just figure it's due to experience or gear. Experience does matter a hell of a lot - simply knowing an encounter and knowing who takes damage when is very helpful - but a lot of the time as well it's because the experienced healer has put in dozens of hours into a UI that lets them beat the other healer to the punch, being more aware of incoming damage effects and raid status.
Hope this helps.
-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.