How does a priest heal in 25-mans?

[Professor Frink]

A few years ago MongoJerry wrote a sticky topic "Advanced Topics in Priest Play" that laid out the basic rules of how to heal in a group environment--how much your heals do, which is appropriate to use in what situation, etc. It's been out of date for a long, long time now but I've had a hard time finding its equivalent for the endgame BC 25-man world.

Right now I'm playing a shadowpriest in a guild that's downed Illidan twice and is having great difficulty repeating the feat (8 hours of wipes over 2 days just ended in a no-kill this reset). We've always had high healer turnover, and right now we're rarely getting as many healers in as we need to do various encounters (which is too many), we're having trouble getting new recruits, and the healers we have are unreliable attendance-wise and less than stellar performance wise. I'd like to switch roles to become a healing priest, as we wouldn't have much trouble filling my DPS slot, and I'm getting a little bored of it anyway.

The problem is, I haven't healed anything seriously since doing the tier 0.5 upgrade questchain. I don't even know where to start, and I don't trust the healers we currently have to really know anything about how to play their class, and I can't find anything that looks like quality advice on the Internet. It seems that healing is usually learned through experience as you move through the game, but that's a luxury I don't have as we don't run anything but Hyjal and Black Temple.

So I'm wondering if anyone has information or references that would let me skip as much of the trial-and-error phase as possible. Specific things I can't seem to get straight answers on are:

* What stats do I need to be useful at all in T6-level content, +heal/regen/manabowl wise?
* How much +heal should I give up to get a point of Spirit, Int, Mp5, etc?
* What spells do I use? If I'm assigned to keep up a tank, should I be using flash or greater heal? Should I keep up a renew? What are the basic tradeoffs between heals now?
* Should I be using downranked spells? How do good healers go about deciding which downranks to use?
* Is queueing up and cancelling heals to stay inside the 5SR something I should be doing normally, or only when I'm desperate for mana?
* What non-25 man content, if any, would be the best practice for healing in Hyjal or BT?
* What do good endgame priests know that inexperinced priests don't even think to ask about?

[Bolty]

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

[Concillian]

Aside from what Bolty said, I will add that you do learn a lot from experience. It's not DPSing, where you can look at spreadsheets and figure your theoretical DPS and work your rotations to maximize potential. You have to react to things as they happen, especially when other healers go down.

I will absolutely second the importance of stam. I think it's as important as any other stat and I use 9500 buffed as a personal minimum goal... and I haven't even been in BT yet where the real raid-wide damage happens.

I think it's a tendency of new-ish priests to over-emphasize regen. It's one of the easy things to chart out "offline" and I see it regularly that new priests are gemming and enchanting purely for regen. While this may have been the way to go before the buff to Meditation, I think it's not needed now, and will be absolutely overkill in 2.4 for halfway decently geared priests who will gain another 50-100 MP5 inside FSR.

As far as actual healing, it's easy enough to get into a cast / cancel rhythm and spamming GHeal 1-4 is easy enough (GHeal 1 is the most efficient heal for 2 reasons.... Gheal procs clearcasting and lower ranks ("Heal") do not, and it gets the bonus from empowered healing). What I learned from experience didn't help that kind of healing much at all. It more helped in emergency situations.

When I started, I'd see an emergency situation and go "oh crap <cast ProM or shield>" Now I see an emergency situation and cast Flash heal first, then ProM or shield. If 2k will save him, then ProM wasn't useful anyway... and if you can't cast a 1.5 second heal spell, then no other healer can save him either. Flash heal + Prom or shield is our version of Regrowth + swiftmend.

Other than that, communication is key. If there are challenging issues to a fight, work it out with your healers and / or tanks what priorities are. 2 priests mashing shield or ProM in an emergency does no good, work out one to shield and one to ProM... for example. Or work it out so that like a priest does FH + shield, and a pally uses holy light instead of his flash.

I think healers are the most flexible in their gearing stats. You can be effective with mediocre gear if you know how to react. The flip-side of this is that, as you have experienced, you can have super geared healers with lackluster performance. The same is true to a certain extent for DPSers, but really it's way more straightforward for that role.

[Treesh]

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.

It can also be Blizzard's fault as well and not the guild's. Raid healing has almost none of the art of healing in it. Heroics and five mans have so much more of the art of healing. Raid healing is almost always more just brute force. The best advice you give is queue-and-cancel healing. That isn't an artform. That's brute force healing. "Spam until it's not needed" is brute force healing and boring as hell. I really, really enjoy healing. And I've raid healed with some fantastic folks, but raid healing is simply boring as hell. There are very few fights where you have to push the balance between throughput and mana conservation because they've added in so many enrage timers to make sure the DPS is performing as well as the tanks and the healers. Raid healing has simply lost its fun for me anyway and it has absolutely nothing to do with the guild or the loot system. It's pretty much completely how blizzard has set up the raid encounters that has ruined it. My healer is my shaman and I got just bored to tears raid healing with her, even on FFA healing. The priest is more fun, but really, healing hasn't changed since release. You've gotten new tools, but healing is still healing - you balance throughput, mana conservation, threat and timing. It's been that way since the beginning and it'll probably always be that way. For some fights, you rate throughput over mana conservation; other fights threat is more sensitive than mana conservation. That is the basic rule of healing and one that really doesn't change regardless of what class you are playing and what encounters you're doing. The fun of healing, the art of healing is knowing when to shift the balance around and in raid healing, there aren't nearly as many times when you are shifting the balance around.

That being said, it really is about the UI you use. It does make a big difference. In addition to what Bolty said, make sure you get some way of tracking not just your HoTs, but all those beneficial gains on players as well. Track the druid HoTs, track holy shield on your pally tanks, track inspiration/ancestral healing, track last stand. By seeing all of those, you can better predict if there's going to be massive spikes or if the tank is going to be easier to heal for a short time. It also allows you to see if there's already a lifebloom on one of your DPSers and if you know that the DPSer probably won't get hit by the incidental damage again, that lifebloom will more than likely top off the DPSer so that's someone you don't have to worry about. Find a person who isn't taken care of and needs healing. I generally have my combat log set to show dodges, misses, parries with the tank so I know if they've gone on a streak and to make sure I'm not asleep at the wheel when the avoidance streak stops. You don't have to have a ton of mods to do this now. There are some who swear by grid and clique and having pretty much every other mod under the sun and there are some minimalists. The default UI has been much improved over the years, but there are still some holes missing. The mods I use to fill those holes are Natur's (shows me the pretty little gains I mentioned), Unit Range Check (adds a range finder to the default UI frames, only supports the healing classes), and MendWatch since you're a priest (that's a link that will download it directly). Natur's does also track Prayer of Mending gains on folks, but mendwatch does show how many jumps there are left and Natur's doesn't. I do agree that you have to find what works for you, but I wanted to give you a bit of a headstart on healing mods.

To sum up, healing is about gathering as much pertinent data as quickly as possible and being able to process it and use it as effectively as possible. That's why your UI is so important and why you have to tailor your UI to you. Everyone processes information differently so how the information is presented usually should be different as well.

Side note to Bolty: About time you stopped gimping yourself by target healing. ;):D

Edit: Oh, and in case you are a minimalist with mods, you can also set up your default combat log to show different things in different colors to parse the log more quickly on the fly as well. Depending on your reading speed, you may find this helpful. I live by the combat log. :) You can set up multiple windows and set the filters to only show specific things in each window. Color coding the text is immensely helpful for those times when the combat log is just getting spammed. You can also see if you need to put shadow prot up (if it's a fight you aren't used to). That's how I would cheat on my shaman in new fights to tell which totem to put down and when - reading the combat log. I don't do as much on the priest as I did on my shaman, but I also knew the fights better when I took my priest in.

[Kevin]

Bolty covered pretty much all of it, I'm just chiming in a bit, I don't have a priest in end game raiding, I did pre TBC stuff on a pally and a druid (so before druids were super HoTies) and I did post TBC healing on shaman. I've not seen BT or Hyjal, just SSC and TK. But as Bolty said. Healing hasn't really changed. The encounters have changed allowing certain things to seem like it's new but if you healed pre TBC when you or the tanks weren't overgeared for the content (which they may have been even if they were in greens but using heavy consumables) you could see much of this in play.

Encounter design has let the priests start using all the tools they have though and have somewhat limited choices for other healers. I know I've seen druids and read bout others that used to be spec'd to maximize healing touch (resto / balance builds) that gave it up because the way encounters were set-up they ended up casting more like a tree anyway. Shaman are generally doing the right thing by casting chain heal in most situations. Even if they only heal one target if they were downranked on that CH they may have still been using the most efficient heal for that situation. Pallies that love to spam FoL or even Holy Light (generally downranked but with a 2s cast after you fire the first one off it's generally fast enough especially if you need a bigger heal) are probably doing the right thing as well. I have noted from observing priests (and I've played with several very good priest though several of them have been pulled away from the game by real life) that they do seem to get use many more tools and that those tools are the best choice for that situation they weren't just using them to use them. Even lightwell appears to have places where it is the best tool to use. This is a good thing. Priests should be the premiere healers (unless they change them to be like the other healing classes and give them 2 DPS trees or a tanking and a DPS tree, in which case they would have no reason to claim the need to be. Right now they still kinda have 2 healing trees and 1 DPS tree though balance is starting to get it's own identity for PvP). It's nice that tools that used to be only nice toys for 5 mans, and I say toys because while it may have been the best tool to use 5 mans are set up so that you can easily do it without that tool, have valuable uses in raids. Priests are turned into a weaker pally or shaman in raids now.

But like Bolty said, get a UI that works for you. I've always been a hover caster, a lot of that came from doing a lot of my learning how to heal as a pally and a druid growing up. I didn't need to constantly heal folks so I would often times flop between kitty and healer as a druid and old school pallies could be very deep in ret and still have all the really powerful healing tools from holy so you could be a DPS + healer. You didn't want to switch from the DPS targets in those cases just for the reason of keeping DPS going. And when mods started to show up that let you see what your target was casting and who they had targeted this became ever more valuable for healing.

My UI isn't as streamlined for healing as it should be on my shaman, but I've always made sure that I can hover heal how I need to. I also like to have an indicator that tells me exactly how many HP the target is down and how many they have left, not just the percentage. I used to use this to nail the heal that would get the person topped off with as little overhealing as possible. But overheal is less of a factor in TBC raids than it once had been when you needed longevity but you didn't have the gear to really make it happen. Now the biggest value for me is that since I'm not an every day raider anymore I would have no clue that if so and so's bar was 75% how much they are actually hurt and if they can survive another hit before getting a heal or not. As a shaman since we are so good at FFA raid healing this mostly just tells me who the CH should be cast on since the first hit is the biggest. If I were on a priest it would let me make choices of other heals, though as Conc said if it's a FFA situation flash heal first is generally good enough but you can see if you can not flash and get away with a prayer of healing (if prayer is appropriate), etc.

Pre TBC I didn't really use any healing macro's at all, partly because some of the tools you have in macros now you didn't have then and I don't really have too many of them now but I've experimented with some of them to get better. I don't downrank as much on my shaman as I used to on my pally and druid pre TBC but my L67 priest downranked a lot in 5 man content. This wasn't so I could spam all day but it was the old mentality of conserve as much mana as possible, mainly so that we can pull faster since I'll need to drink less and you can pull with just the healer and tank in most 5 mans your CC and DPS can be drinking for the pull and react later. Of course a healer can be drinking for a lot of 5 man pulls as well but you at least should be in position to react. It also makes OHB better when Thrall just wants to keep going like a good tank should. :)

Of course the other thing I do with my UI is try to make it so that I'm not mod dependant. This means I mimick what I can do with the default UI as best as I can. I have lots of hotkeys but they are all configured via the default bars. I don't even generally change bars, stuff is set up so that bar six over there on the side may have a spot that is hotkeyed to the 'c' key or whatever. It means that if I lose my keyboard I can do everything way less efficiently via pure mouse clicking. If I lose the mouse I can do everything via keyboard but I lose efficiency there as well since it's set-up to use both in concert. This is a concern because while I don't want to use the wireless keyboard and mouse I currently don't have a better option (and I don't actually pay for my own WoW subscription either). It also means that if a patch broke every mod I use (which isn't very likely anymore with the long PTR times and sticking with a lot of Ace2 and other mainstream stuff) that I can still at least function well enough to heal. I got burned by barmods in the past and getting too reliant on them so I changed my philosophy on how to deal with that and the default UI provides enough hotkeys if you spend the time. Since one of our major raiding nights is Tuesday (because when we started to raid for some reason Tuesday had a higher availability than any other night besides Friday, this may have changed but we haven't changed the schedules) having a UI that can function if lots of mods break is good too. I lose efficiency no doubt, but since I'm a shaman and raid design says that chain heal is probably the best heal 90% of the time you can get away with less efficiency. Know where your cleanse keys are bound and make sure the most used totems have hotkeys (I use YATA for totem management and there are some totems that simply don't have normal hotkeys anymore but that I could get back if I wanted) even if I don't ever use those keys and I can still work well enough to get us through the raid assuming the tanks, DPS and other healers weren't crippled too badly by the patch.

That's just personal preference though. There are things that I would like to do with my UI at times that I don't always do because if that mod broke and I got too reliant on it I'd be screwed. Does this mean I'm not as good of a healer as I could be? Yes it does. But I think most of the other healers I've healed with will say that I'm always good enough for what we are doing and I'm not even a full time healer, I think this holds true for past healing as well. I've never felt I was the best healer in a 25 or 40 man but I've never felt I was a liability (unless I'm having a really bad night). I have played with some healing crews where I felt I was the worst healer there but those were crews that were so good that I felt I could put them up against any other healing crew in some theoretical healing competition and they would hold their own. There are some nights where I just play like crap though, and the UI has nothing to do with this, like when I know that Jawana was in the demon chains and mouse over and heal a fully healthy Elixin, or when I know that JB is getting hit with Hydross's water tomb (or whatever the damn bubbles Hydross does in the water phase are) and I end up canceling my heal on him or when I know that Lurker actually goes 380 degrees with the spout and since I'm trying to keep totems hitting the MT that I need to shuffle or get back in the water and I don't. So I can still play a healer badly but I would have played my tank or DPS badly that night as well.

But yeah several classes are their UI, though some can get away with a weaker UI in PvE, I can't imagine anyone getting over 2000 in arenas with the default UI and not having done a lot of hotkey work. Not having something like Proximo at the very least to track the opponents I can't imagine. But I let myself be a bit more mod dependant in PvP because at most if I break I'm only potentially inconveniencing 4 other people. If I can't function well enough for the raid I can be hurting 24 other peoples play time. But again with Blizzard being better on giving out info on how mods will be affected and with most developers having a chance to mess with stuff on the PTR and with mod sights having better servers and ways to deal with patch day mod feeding frenzies I'm probably more cautious about mod usage than I should be.


Anyway there is a wall of text from GG to basically say "What Bolty and Conc said" and proably what Treesh said too as I know she posted while I was making this post but I haven't read hers.:)

[Icebird]

Going over similar ground to other posts, but here's my two cents:

Gearing:

I look for +heal first. Then where possible I avoid items which have no stamina on them. A healthy life pool is nice to have. The current regen formula favours a blend of spirit and mp5 on gear. The 2.4 patch will push the equation heavily in favour of spirit. Spirit boosts priest's healing as well as their regen, so my advice now would be to avoid where possible any items without spirit on them (like Garments of Temperance or the Leggings of Eternity). Intellect tends to take care of itself.

Tank healing - cast-cancelling vs down ranking

This is mostly a matter of personal preference I think. Playing from New Zealand, lag is usually an issue for me, so I've adopted a safety first approach of chain-casting down ranked heals. Kaz'Rogal is an exception however. Greater Heal is the spell of choice for healing tanks - particularly since both the Avatar 2pc bonus and Absolution 4pc bonus favour greater heals. Keep up a renew on the tank, use PoM if the fight warrants it (PoM is a little bit of extra aggro for the tank so its always good to "prime" the MT with it on pulls).

Raid healing

Priests can pretty easily switch from tank healing to raid healing as the encounter demands. Your choice of spells will depend on both the encounter and whether you're speccced for CoH or not. Some examples: Gorefiend and Shahraz lend themselves to renews; on Illidari Council I use Flash Heal mostly when raid healing; on RoS and Bloodboil I use mostly Circle of Healing and Prayer of Mending.

UI

I'd reiterate all the comments about finding a UI that you're comfortable with. A good set of raid frames can make all the difference. Try to look for ones where you have a lot of control over what buffs/debuffs are shown and not shown. Black Temple is full of debuffs that can't be dispelled, but will affect your healing if you know who has them (fatal attraction, bloodboil, agonizing flames etc etc).

Consumables

Part of the learning curve for any healer is knowing what fights you'll need all the mana you can get, and which fights you can save money on. In other words, your mileage may vary on the need for flasks, elizirs, food buffs and weapon oils. But regardless of how much you buff up, I recommend carrying a large supply of mana pots and also Dark or Demonic Runes for emergencies (Dark Runes can usually be bought off the Auction House).

Chris

[psublue]

* What stats do I need to be useful at all in T6-level content, +heal/regen/manabowl wise?
Too many people put an emphasis on +healing, and they're incredibly stupid for doing so. Stamina and mp5 (particularly spirit-based regen) are THE most important stats in T6 content. You can't top the healing charts if you're dead or out of mana, it's that simple. I'd say once you hit around 2000 bonus healing, you can really start looking into maximizing your other stats. Having over 10k health and 10k mana is a good target depending on your play style.

* How much +heal should I give up to get a point of Spirit, Int, Mp5, etc?
I'd say as long as you're above 2000 bonus healing (the target I set for myself, at least) then you can start swapping gear, enchants, and/or gems to maximize your other stats. I'd prioritize stamina -> spirit -> mp5, because in BT, you'll need the stamina to stay alive.

* What spells do I use? If I'm assigned to keep up a tank, should I be using flash or greater heal? Should I keep up a renew? What are the basic tradeoffs between heals now?
I heal with GH3 unless my target is really taking a beating, in which case i switch to a max-rank GH. Flash Heal is really a situational thing, and I only use it when my target needs a heal NOW. Keeping up a renew on the tank is always advisable, but don't waste the 1.5 second global cooldown if you can't afford to. It's better to heal your tank than put a Renew on him if he's going down quickly. As far as tradeoffs between heals, they're the same as they always were: FH sacrifices mana efficiency for speed, and GH sacrifices speed for big numbers.

* Should I be using downranked spells? How do good healers go about deciding which downranks to use?
Downranking is king in raid healing. Which rank you use is entirely up to you. I use GH3 for about 3.9k - 4.1k when raid-buffed, but it's entirely possible to use GH4 or GH2 if you so desire. However, I would say never downrank any other spells - you'll need all you can get from FH in the event that you need to use it.

* Is queueing up and cancelling heals to stay inside the 5SR something I should be doing normally, or only when I'm desperate for mana?
I cancel heals a lot, but not because I'm worried about mana regen. In all honesty, most fights don't pose too much of a regen problem for decently-geared (and moderately intelligent) holy priests now that regen has been significantly changed. I cancel heals because I don't want to overheal. If I line up a GH3 (3.9k - 4.1k on average) and notice that my target is now only down 1000 health, I cancel my heal. The fact that I am probably now outside the five second rule is just an added bonus.

* What non-25 man content, if any, would be the best practice for healing in Hyjal or BT?
Nothing will ever duplicate the experience of healing a 25-man raid, but whatever you choose to do, do it with the people you normally raid with. It gives you a great opportunity to get to know the people around you, to learn their bad (and good) habits, and to become more comfortable with them. If you run Kara for badges, ZA for timers, or whatever else, it gives you a chance to notice that maybe your normal 25-man OT is slow to generate threat, or that your mages are slow to iceblock when they pull aggro, or that your hunters perpetually forget to turn off their pets' taunt. Little things like that will give you an edge over other healers when you hit 25-mans.

* What do good endgame priests know that inexperinced priests don't even think to ask about?
Most inexperienced healers simply don't put themselves in a position to succeed, either because they are too lazy, too arrogant, or too dumb to make the adjustments to their UI, keybinds, etc. Make sure everything you need is accessible, even if you might only need to use it once during an encounter. That means hotkeys for Fade, Abolish Disease, Mass Dispel, Dispel Magic, several ranks of GH, CoH, PoM, etc. and so forth. If you use different unit frames, set them up so that you can easily see who has aggro, who has magic/disease debuffs, who is missing your buffs, who has PW:S, etc.

The single best piece of advice I can give is this: PAY ATTENTION. Inexperienced priests will often ignore (or fail to notice altogether) things like curses, poisons, magic/disease debuffs, and other factors which might cause decreased healing, movement impairment, slowed attack/cast speed, etc. Ignoring these things on tanks can often lead to either a dead tank or a DPS class pulling aggro, and ignoring these things on a DPS class can lead to (big surprise) a dead DPSer. Failing to notice that your tank has 3 mobs instead of 2 will lead to a dead tank very quickly.

Priest healing is, in my quite humble opinion, the most difficult and therefore the most rewarding when done well. So go do it well, and be rewarded:)