Advanced Topics in Priest Play

[Lissa]

PoH seems to generate more expressions of jitters about aggro than any other healing spell and yet the only times that I have problems with PoH pulling aggro is when I pull mobs who have not been previously locked down by the tank.  That is, I only pull those mobs who would have been pulled if I had used any other healing spell instead .  My experience is that aggro only seems to be generated in WoW by the amount you heal the person who is currently being attacked by the mob -- and not, as some people think, by the amount healed on all of the players on a mob's hate list.  I think some people are thinking of other games and assuming WoW works the same way, because my experience of WoW tells me a very different story from what some other people say.
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The problem isn't so much that PoH itself generates more agro, it that overheal seems to generate the additional agro and with PoH, you're more likely to hit an overheal than with other Healing spells (overheal is when you heal more health than the person has damage). A number of Priests did some tests on this during Beta on the Priest board and found that overheal is probably the worst thing that you can do in the game, one of the minor reasons a few Priests were up in arms over critical heals in general. From what they were able to surmise from testing was that if you overhealed, you generated more agro than if you underhealed. How much additional agro was generated was unknown, but it some cases, the closer the person was to full health with an overheal occuring, the worse the agro attained was. Thus if you used a PoH where you were untouched while members of your group were in various states of damage, you would overheal on yourself and possibly other group members and the agro generated was greater than it would have been through using the other burst spells (Flash and Greater Heal).

While Overheal can happen with any healing spell, even Renew, it can be far more dangerous with PoH if people aren't down much health and the PoH overheals them garnering the Priest more agro than they were expecting.