Holy Paladin Healing,

As my guild has gotten closer to leveling to 25, my girlfriend and I have jumped back into running guild heroics. This has allowed me to heal heroics again, and I have really enjoyed it. So, I wanted to share my strategies for healing heroics, and healing in general. 

Holy Powah....err Power

Holy Power is your friend. You want to generate Holy Power as much as you can, so you'll want to use Holy Shock as much as you can. Being able to generate Holy Power often, allows you to use Word of Glory more often. More Word of Glory means more free heals, and that is always good. You can also use Light of Dawn with your Holy Power, but unless you're going to heal at least three of your group members with it the output isn't as good. I compare Light of Dawn to my priest's Circle of Healing, only it's a lot less useful. 

Beacon of Light is a must 

Always, always, always put this spell on someone who is going to take high amounts of consistent damage. Typically this target will be your tank, and you will be so glad that it is. I remember when this spell went live near the end of Burning Crusade, and it was a lifesaver when I was healing heroics then. While it will provide the majority of your overhealing, if have the glyph all of that healing is free. Even without the glyph since it lasts for 5 minutes if you cast it before a fight the mana cost won't really be an issue. Use it, use it, use it, you'll forget about it when it is up, and notice your tank dying when it's not. 

Holy Light is your friend.

Holy Light is your least expensive heal, and it will be your most used spell after every run. If my target is above 40% health, I'm going to use Holy Light (unless I can use Holy Shock of course). I also won't heal my target unless they've lost 10 thousand health. Even though Holy Light is cheap, I still want to reduce my overhealing whenever I can. 

Divine Light

Divine Light is our biggest heal. I use this whenever the tank is getting below 50% health, and whenever Holy Light won't be enough for one of the dps. Be careful not to rely on its potency unless you need to, it is very easy to spam in a pinch, but if you're not careful you will run out of mana before you know it. 

An added bonus to Divine Light is its ability to grant a charge of Holy Power when you heal a target who has Beacon of Light. This is very helpful for charging up your Holy Power, and really helps you pile on the Word of Glory. 

Flash of Light 

Flash of Light  is our fastest heal, and should only be used when you target is going to die. When Holy Light and Divine Light aren't fast enough, Flash of Light is a must. Like Divine Light, you will need to limit your use of this spell. It is very expensive, and will run your mana into the ground if you're not careful. 

When you need to bring someone back from the brink of death Flash of Light is great. Don't forget about Holy Shock and Word of Glory, though. Holy Shock may not do much healing, but Word of Glory is and they are both really cheap and instant. Sometime 1.5 seconds still isn't fast enough, and if you can send a Word of Glory instead it could mean the difference between life and death. 

We can raid heal now right?

With the addition of Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance combined with Beacon of Light, our ability to heal multiple targets has tripled in strength. Holy Radiance is a must have for certain fights, and while it won't do all of your healing it will serve as a much needed health buffer while you're casting your heals. I like to use this with my cooldowns whenever possible. Making the healing from this spell more powerful really helps when the boss is dealing massive damage to your whole group. Don't be afraid to use it on trash, and combine it with Light of Dawn whenever you can. Don't use it on cooldown though, it has a hefty mana cost and a 30 second cooldown. If you use it at a time when you don't really need it, you're going to miss it when people start dying. 

Using Cooldowns 

I try to save all of our cooldowns for boss fights. We have so many to choose from that it is always best to have a lot of options when we need to keep people alive. Whether you're increasing your haste and crit, increasing your healing done, or summoning a shiny winged guy with a sword to help you heal we have three tools to help us heal more. On top of that we can reduce the damage that we take, reduce the amount of damage someone else takes, protect someone from physical damage, and protect ourselves from all damage . And if you choose to you can increase the power of your auras. So many ways to save people on top of our healing spells. Do not use them lightly, but don't be afraid to save a life when you can. Too often I forget to use a lot of these, and at the end of a fight I think about how much easier it could have been if I could have remember to press the button. 

I think that about covers everything that I wanted to mention, and I hope it is helpful. The best way to heal, is always the way that you find to be most useful, and never forget it. 

Healing Dunegons as a Holy Priest

Jumping back into talking about some healing. Yesterday I was dpsing with a guildie who is new to healing as holy, and as we went through he reminded me that finding the right balance of spells to use is not easy by any means. This is not meant to limit your spell usage only to those I have mentioned. The key to effective healing is always through trial and error. Learn what your spells do and evaluate how you can best use them. This is meant to be a starting point for anyone unsure about what to do.

Chakra, learn it, live it, love it
So to start off, for most dungeons you'll spend a lot of time in Chakra:Serenity. For the excetion of trash and bosses with heavy groupwide damage, your main healing spell will be Heal, and being in Serenity just makes the most sense.

Lightwell is your Friend
Before I jump into spell usage, I want to add that casting Lightwell before every boss fight is important. Even if no one else uses it, if the only healing doe to you is through the Lightwell, it has saved you from casting heals on yourself, which is totally worth it.

PoM
After a few nights of running dungeons I was able to see just how much of my healing is coming from my spells. The winner by far is Prayer of Mending. I use it every chance I get always on the tank, and it is by far my leader in healing done. Always use Prayer of Mending!

Healing slow with Heal
Next up is Heal. I use this whenever my targets have 50% or more health, and only if they have taken enough damage (normally around 7,000) first. I like to try to keep Renew on the tank as much as I can. This isn't too hard as long as I'm in Serenity as the Heals refresh its durration.

Emergency use only
I only use Flash Heal if someone is in danger of dying, or if I have a Surge of Light pop up. It is an expensive heal, and while it grants Serendipity, it's not really needed outside of emergencies. Typically if someone needs a big heal Greater Heal will have enough time to land, so casting Flash of Light outside of Surge of Light to maintain Serendipity isn't needed.

Group Healing at its Finest
If atleast 4 members of the group have taken significant damage, I use Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing. If I have to use these spells often, I should be in Chakra: Sanctuary so their potency is buffed. The same goes for Holy Word: Sanctuary, I try to only use this when the group is stacked up so that it is healing to its fullest. These three spells can cause the most overheal, so don't waste them if you don't have to.

Renew and PW:S
There are times when Renew is really awesome and great to spam on the group, but there aren't many of these times. I've found it's most use to come on the tank. The same goes for Power Word: Shield. With its steep mana cost I try to only use it to give someone the Body and Soul speed boost.

Wraping up
In general try to reduce your overhealing as much as you can. Ideally you should be able to stay below 10% overhealing. Remeber Prayer of Mending, and don't forget about your Chakra and the Lightwell.

How I use the Healing Meter

For a while now I have been using Recount as my damage/healing meter addon thingy. When I used to raid, I would use the healing meter to tell me how much healing I did and compared that to the other healers in our raid. When we began working on and finally killing the Lich King, I used it to also see how much overhealing I was doing compared to the other healers. And since then I have stuck with Recount to show my how much overhealing I do in the heroic 5 mans that I run.

Now you might ask why would I care about overhealing, those heroics are easy. You're right, they are very easy, and that is exactly why I am looking at what percentage of my spells are overhealing. I know that the amount of overhealing I do does't really matter because the instances are easy and I am no where near running out of mana. But the reason that I am doing this is to try to hone my skills. I need something to keep the trivial instances from feeling trivial.

Now how do I do this? Well, I start by just healing. I don't avoid overheals, and I won't not heal someone just because I think it will overheal. I try to make good decisions when choosing my heals. At the end of an instance if I made good enough decisions throughout then my overhealing should be relatively low. For me I measure relatively low as being around 20 and 30% overheal.

With that said, there is a big difference between my priest having 30% overheal and my paladin having 30% overheal, and to tell what the difference is Recount comes in handy. On my paladin, for example, I have three main heals that are going to overheal almost all the time. Protector of the Innocent, Beacon of Light, and Enlightened Judgment. All of these are mana free heals (I have the glyph of Beacon of Light so it is free), and Enlightened Judgments is actually giving me mana because I Judge with Seal of Insight and gain about 400 net mana. Knowing that these three abilities account for more than 60% of my total overhealing lets me know that when the meter says that I did 50% overhealing, I actually only had about 20% overhealing (just throwing numbers out there). Which tells me that I made good decisions the majority of the time.

As far as my priest is concerned, he does not have as many free heals that are going to overheal. My mastery often overheals, and my Althor's Abacus are really the only two sources of free and often overhealing spells. so when the meter says that I did 50% overhealing, I know that I was not making good decisions picking spells.

Now I know that in a five man I do not have to worry about other healers. Making decisions is very easy because I do not have to account for incoming heals, but I figure that if I am able to get more used to making good decisions when choosing the right heal in a five man once I am able to factor in other healers I'll be in pretty good shape.

I have essentially gone from never worrying about overhealing, to using it as a gauge of my awesomeness :)

Chakra feels awkward...

There has been a lot of discussion about Chakra, and not all of it has been positive. I personally thought that it was a cool idea, and I was really looking forward to seeing it be the reason that Holy is fun to play. By my use of past tense you can tell that I am disappointed in the current state of Chakra.

In case you don't know, Chakra is a spell on a one minute cooldown, where after you click it the next heal (and by heal I mean Heal, Prayer of Healing, Renew, and Smite) that you use will put you in a specific Chakra state for 30 seconds. Each Chakra state improves the spell that you used, and (provided that you spent the necessary talent points) casting that spell will extend the time that you are in the Chakra state. Sounds great right?

It's not as great as you might think. First of all it is a lot to keep track of. When I tried to describe it to my girlfriend she threw her hands up and said "that is too complicated." While I don't disagree with her, I think that main problem is that Chakra itself has a cooldown (of one minute), and it has the feeling of locking you in to a certain spell.

This problem of locking you in, can cause a lot of opportunities to make a mistake. If you use Heal, for example, after hitting Chakra, but you are transitioning into a phase of the fight when you need Prayer of Healing or Renew, you can't change Chakra states until that phase is (most likely) over.

On the surface Chakra looks like it adds some nice potency, but in practice it has only added constraints and has mostly been useless. For instance, if I am in Vault of Archavon, and one of the bosses does their AoE, I might go into Chakra State: Prayer of Healing. Allowing me to raid heal effectively and all is well. But, that period of AoE only comes in bursts, I'm not spamming Prayer of Healing and Chakra goes away until I can use it again. It's good for one or two casts (in this case).

I am sure that there are a lot of situations where this spell comes in handy, and instances in Cataclysm might prove to make it's one minute cooldown more understandable. Currently, thought, it lacks fluidity, and there doesn't seem to be a seamless transition between Chakra states. My suggestion would be to make the spell not have a cooldown, or become some sort of passive ability. This definitely could make Holy overpowered, but given the current state of Holy's viability making Chakra more powerful might turn out to balance things out nicely.

About Surge of Light

I have seen some points that have been brought up about Surge of Light. Currently this talent gives you a 6% (if you spend two points in it) for your Smite and Heal casts to allow you to cast Flash Heal instantly, without mana cost, and without a chance to critical.

Before 4.0.1 this talent gave you the ability to instantly cast a mana and crit free Flash Heal 50% of the time after you get a critical with any of your spells. This allowed for instant Flash Heals to proc very often. Which in turn allowed you to obtain 3 stacks of Serendipity very easily, which also made casting a faster Prayer of Healing (or Greater Heal) easier.

Now the proc chance is very low. And by very low I mean that if I were to cast 100 Heals in a row, Surge of Light would only pop up 6 times. In a night of raiding (in WotLK content) spells like Renew, Prayer of Mending, and Circle of Healing are the major spells that are used. So out of the total amount of heals you cast the chance to pop a Surge of Light is even lower. Making a lot of raiding holy priests (a lot better than me) find this talent to be very useless.

I personnaly specced into Surge of Light. I have been running a lot of heroics, since I stopped raiding, which means I have been using Heal more often, so it is more useful to me than the alternative (Tome of Light: reduces the cooldown of Holy Word spells). Having said that, I definitely think that the proc chance is too low. I like having talents that cause spells to pop up, but I like them because those procs actually happen. With Surge of Light, it rarely pops up. If they want to keep it from being OP, I would either let it take the form of the older version with a 25% instead of 50% chance, or allow it proc off of all spell casts at the same 6% as it is now.

Something to make it cool and useful. Right now it feels like one of those old Darkmoon trinkets, or one of those Vanilla legendaries with a cool put rare proc.

The new healing model

I will start by saying that I have really enjoyed healing on my priest and paladin. Now here is why.

The introduction of Heal and Holy Light as the medium efficient heal. This change has really changed how I have appraoched healing. I have a choice to make. If a tank is near half health do I use Heal because it's cheap, or do I use Greater Heal because they might die if I don't top them off soon enough? If a dps just took a huge chunk of damage do I use Greater Heal to get them to full health, or do I use Flash Heal because the sufficient heal won't get there in time?These options are a welcome change from the previous model of healing. (these apply to paladin just insert Holy Light, Flash of Light, and Divine Light respectively)

The new mechanics for priests and palains. For my paladin I really like how Holy Shock is the go to spell because it will buff the other heals. With the four peice set bonus on my teir 10 a Holy Shock critical makes Holy Light cast ridiculously fast, which is very cool. And I really like the options I have once I get 3 charges of Holy Power. Do I use Word of Glory now, or save that instant for when I won't have time to cast something?

For my priest I have enjoyed how Chakra has been working. Certain cases are better for corresponding Chakra states, and there is a decision to be made there as well. Surge of Light procs are a nice way to save some mana (I just wish it had a higher chance to proc), and like my paladin I really like the healing mastery bonus.

Mastery has turned out to be a very nice change. For my paladin I add some extra mitigation (which explains why Sacred Sheild went away), and for my priest the added heal over time helps me heal someone and not have to use a wastful heal to "top" someone off. Balancing how much mastery I go with, and making sure I still have enough Haste, Spell Power, Mana, Spirit, and Crit is a nice added bit of depth to stat choices.

So all in all I am very pleased with all of these changes. I know that a lot of people are not very pleased with these changes. To those people I say "QQ Moar!" The game is changing, and healing is changing with it. Hop on and enjoy the ride, or role a dps.

Overhealing, and my Healing Approach

Since I started healing on my paladin through BC heroics, I used the approach of "big hit, use Holy Light, small hit, use Flash of Light." It worked pretty well, and during that time I began to get pretty good at keeping the green bars full.

Then Wrath came, and with it brought the "OMG everyone is taking big hits!" approach. As I began raiding in Naxx, and OS 25 man, it seemed as though everyone in the raid was taking a lot of damage. Combine that with my position as the tank healer, I began using the "use Holy Light" approach. No matter how big or small the hit was this was my heal of choice. This caused a lot of overhealing to be done. But it worked, all the way into ICC.

And then I started playing my priest. As I progressed through ICC 10, I found that about half of the fight were perfect for me. Whether there was constant pulsing AoE, or splash AoE damage, I used Renew, CoH, and PoH accordingly. I noticed though, that I was contributing to a lot of overhealing. Especially once my former guild began to work on the Lich King. So I wanted to start smart healing. Rather than throwing my array of heals at situations blindly, I stopped to think "Do I really need to cast that now, or can it wait?"

This shift in my approach, helped me become very efficient (notably on the Lich King fight itself). I would still use Prayer of Mending on cool down, and keep Renew on the tanks, but I became a little bit more selective on when I would use my other heals. Making sure they would not overheal, so that I would not waste my mana on heals that weren't needed.

Since I stopped raiding, I've kept this approach into my daily random heroics. Trying to fine tune my strategy and seeing a long I can wait to fill the green bars.

Now that I've begun testing my new spells and talents on my paladin and priest, I have tried to keep up with smart healing. And it has been going pretty well. with the change to Heal and Holy Light, I have that cheap small heal for when little damage is going out. I have the fast larger heal for when people get low, and I have the slow big heal for when people need to be brought up.

I have been working on utilizing these three heals when they are needed, while still using the rest of my arsenal when needed. While every fight, and group set up may shift my strategy, I still try to avoid overhealing as much as I can. This mini game that I am playing to keep people alive, while reducing wasted heals is why I like healing so much. The balance between mana efficiency and still preventing deaths is why I am especially looking forward to Cataclysm because overhealing will matter.

OMG I MOVED MY SPELLS!!!

After a good conversation with my friend about our keybindings and where we put our spells, I have come to a conclusion. My system didn't really make that much sense.

To start, the way that I set up my bars on my two main healers is as follows: I would put the three spells that I use most often at 5,6, and 7 with the rest going around those three. I wanted the main spells to be centrally located so that I could still reach the plethora of other spells in my arsenal if I needed to. This caused me to realize that a lot of the spells at the far reaches of my bar aren't really being used that much, and if they are they are being click. If they are going to be clicked that means they don't need to be on the bar.

So I reelvaluated. Now I have my three main spells at 3, 4, and 5 (GASP!!!!!). Big difference right, I know. But it has made a difference. My action bars seem more streamlined now, they feel effecient, and I feel like all is right with the world of action bars (a great idea for the next big MMO btw). I have healing and mana cooldowns above my bar and to the right, I have my dispells and "OH $*it" buttons above the bar and to the left, and my buffs to the far right. I move the AoE heals and the single target heals around depending on the content (raid AoE is closer to the big three, pvp single targets closer you get the idea).

After trying this out over the past week I am happy that I changed things up. From leveling to raiding my bars didn't really change. I would find a place for new spells, until just about every spot was taken. Now I've realized that I don't need Mana Burn on my bar all the time. I can keep those barely used spells where they belong, in the spell book until I need them.