Healing Heroics for Holy Priest

Recently I've been able to finally heal some heroics on my priest. His average item level is around 338 and is lacking in the mama regen department, but I managed to keep everyone alive pretty well.

Overall, I feel very comfortable with healing as Holy. Compared to my Paladin, I feel like healing on the priest has a slower pace to it. I don't have to constantly cast spells on a normal pool because I can let Renew and Prayer of Mending do most of my work. Staying in Chakra: Serenity makes Heal even better with the improved chance to critical, and having my Heal spells refresh Renew is a great tool for keeping it up on targets without having to spend more mana.

As far as overhealing goes, the main culprits were Renew, Prayer of Mending, and Prayer of Healing. There are times when Renew is ticking before the tank has taken damage, and Prayer of Mending heals for over 10k when the target only took a hit of 7k. But, those heals are always going to contribute to overhealing, my problem is Prayer of Healing. I've found few situations where all five party members require me to use Prayer of Healing (and Circle of Healing for that matter). It's gotten me thinking that if this spell is only going to heal 3/5 group members (at best), then I should just cast a Heal on everyone instead. Obviously time becomes the limiting factor here, but I think that I'm going to start limiting my use of Prayer of Healing so that it's not overhealing so often. Circle of Healing may be in the same boat, but it doesn't heal for as much and it's cheap and instant.

All in all I am really enjoying how healing on my priest feels. I feel comfortable with my mana and my output (providing a fight is not going terrible), and with tools like Lightwell, Leap of Faith, and Body and Soul I really like the utility that I can bring.

I'm going to try to test more on the PTR and post about how Mastery is for Holy Paladins in 4.2, so we'll see how that goes.

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. 

Gearing my Holy Paladin

Until my guild starts raiding, I've been running every heroic under the sun. I've been pretty successful so far, and a lot of that success has to do with my gear. Obviously I'm going for plate gear with intellect on it, but what do I look for once I've found the intelligent plate?

What to go for.
First of all I want gear that has spirit on it. If I have a peice that doesn't have any spirit I want to reforge either Crit or Mastery for spirit. Second, I want gear that has haste on it. Haste makes the global cooldown and my cast times slower, and with enough of it I get an extra tick from Holy Radiance. I try to reforge crit or mastery to haste. Crit is preferred over mastery, but I'm not going to reforge for it anytime soon.

What to gem for.
I like to match sockets, so for red gems I go with +40 int gems, yellow sockets get +20int +20 haste, and blue gems get +20int +20 spirit. This way I'm getting my main stat, intellect, and the spirit and hast I need as well.

What to enchant for.
I go for intellect enchants, spirit enchants, and haste enchants for my gear. Same reasoning as before, when enough haste I can increase my output, and with enough spirit I won't run out of mana.

So far that has been working pretty well for me. I haven't had any mana problems, and there are very few times where someone dies as a result of my healing. They might die because they stood in the fire for too long, but rarely is it because of my inability to save them.

I hope this helps you with your gearing choices. It has defintiely helped me.

Healing Heroics: Not that scary anymore.

Recently I've been healing more and more of the heroics that Cataclysm has to offer, and my experience in them is getting less painful each time. From my first heroic in Deadmines, to my most recent in Shadowfang Keep, and everything in between I haven't felt the same stress when healing heroics now. What is accounting for these pleasant heroic runs?

Granted I have better gear now, the groups I've gotten have been pretty good, I've been able to learn fights with guildies, and healing as a paladin has been really fun. Why does healing as a paladin feel so awesome?

Being able to heal through AoE raid damage is why. Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn are really fun to use. Beacon of Light is stong, don't get me wrong, but HR and LoD are the game changers. Holy Radiance, while at a hefty mana cost, shines when everyone is taking huge chunks of damage at the same time. While it won't heal everyone to full, it while help keep people from dying while you finish them off. This makes AoE heavy fights much more manageable. Popping this at the right time (and not being afraid to use it) can make healing easy and I dare say overpowered.

Light of Dawn plays a similar role in making the healing game easier. It has been nerfed, and it doesn't seem to be powerful numbers wise, but it is in a sneaky way. You can essentially shoot 5 Holy Shocks at your group at the same time with not mana cost to you. So that's nice. On top of that the health buffer, if you're able to hit everyone in the group with LoD you'll be able to transfer a significant amount of healing toward you tank at no cost.

Both spells are situational, and require some thoughtful positioning, but when the stars align the green bars shine (see what I did there). If you're a paladin, and struggling with keeping everyone alive start incorporating this into your arsenal. You'll be delighted at how much smoother keeping people alive becomes.   

What a Catacalysm!

It has been a while since my last post, but, as I stare at this computer wasting time that could be spent doing homework, I think to myself that wasting a few more minutes couldn't hurt. So Cataclysm is out! As a breif overview, I am very happy with the game so far. My time spent healing has been limited, and I have yet to begin leveling my priest. With that said, though, I definitely think that most of the discussion that I touched on with 4.0.1, proved to be right.

The game of healing has changed dramatically. Everyone has around 100k health, and our heals are not much stronger now than they were at 80. Through the few heroics I have had the chance of healing, I can say that the changes aren't as overwhelming as I thought they would be. The game is more about keeping people from dying rather than keeping everyone topped off, and I like that. The mana game is very interesting (and frustrating at times), and there are very few times when I am not actively saving lives :)

As my guild slowly gets our feet wet in more of the content, I will try to post more regularly about it. I'm not quite sure how many of regular readers I have, but to anyone reading this, I hope that you find this blog to, at the very least, help you waste time that you could could have otherwise spent studying.

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 :)

The New Raid Frames

With patch 4.0 new default raid frames were introduced. As someone who does not use any addons, except for Recount, Decursive, and Deadly Boss Mods. So, these new raid frames were a nice addition for someone like me.

If you haven't noticed the new feature, or you don't care because you use Grid or Xperl or whatever, I find these new raid frames to be a pretty nice addition, and they have some nice features that could allow you to not use on of your addons (saving up some needed memory).

After using this for the past couple of weeks doing heroics, there are some very nice features. Starting with the least important, I like that I can see class color. Adds some pazazz! Next thing I like is that I can move the raid frames a lot easier now than I used to. This goes along with another feature that I like, which is that my bar is included in the raid frames. That allows me to not have to look at my own health bar, and instead I can see it included with all of the other health bars, very handy. I like that I can see the buffs and debuffs that people have on them with more detail than before, but sometimes they take up too much of the bars. And lastly the most important feature with the new Raid Frames, that I have found to be really super totally awesome, is show incoming heal and show health lost.

Now I know that these features come with most UI addons, but since I don't have these, I find this to be especially awesome. Being able to see exactly how much health a person has lost, allows me to more accurately choose the right heal for the job (reducing overhealing), and being able to see how much my Renew and Mastery heals will heal for lets me know if I really need to cast a Heal, or if those HoTs will do the job for me.

These two features will be very useful in a raid becuase I'll be able to tell whether I need to heal someone or not. Overall this will help healers become more efficient, and accurate when keeping a raid alive.

Forgive me if you use an addon that already allows you to use these features, but to those who don't I hope that you think that they are as awesome as I do.

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.

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.

Why I like bad tanks.

I love it when I see a tank with less than 30k health. I love seeing a tank who is clearly not defense capped. And I love it when that tank is horrible at holding agro. "But CrusaderSev that's crazy, a bad tank couldn't bring any good." Wrong! A bad tank means that I get to heal. And I mean really heal!

My priest is a Kingslayer and has everything from Icecrown (cept a stupid wand). My paladin has his 4 peices of teir 10 (though most everything else is from ToC 10). By no means are my healers in super amazing gear but they vastly out gear the content present in heroics. If I am unlucky enough to get into a group with a tank who is as geared or better than me, then that means a boring run. He takes little damages, the dps take little damage, and I am playing the "you don't need to be topped off" game.

In the past I would resort to wearing level 60 gear sets. Not only did I look awesome (Banana Shoulders FTW!), but my spell power and mana were lowered enough to make me feel like I did when I first started. I had to use my heals more because one was no longer enough. That got to be pretty fun, but I found that most people didn't really like that very much. Because on the off chance that things did go wrong, things got a little bit scary for them. So I have stayed in my normal gear sets hoping for the group that has a poorly geared tank.

I was very disapointed last night. The tank we started with had less than 30k, and couldn't keep agro off my girlfriend's mage, and I was happy. Then my girlfriend and a warlock get one shotted from pulling agro, and our feral druid swaps to bear and tanks the rest. My disapointment arose when said druid had 60k health :(

Now I know that if I want a challenge I can go and play with the LK some more. But I don't really have the time to play with Arthas now that classes have started. So I'm just going to have to wait for that bad tank/group that makes a boring heroic a little less boring. Another reason to look forward to Cataclysm.