TankSpot - Healing Discussion

Strategy T10 HEALING bonuses

Unluckky — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:59:30 GMT

I am prepared to get flamed or w/e you call it because this may not be the place to post. I enjoy the forums on this site much more than some of the others...i feel there is less stupidity/trolling...just my opinion. Anyways, I am dropping a line for aliena and some of the advanced healers feedback on the priest t10 bonuses compared to the other classes.
So I see a lot of very useful t10 healing set bonuses 2piece and 4piece for paladins making spells they often use better. Not forcing playstyle changes. The druid ones are passive and can ONLY benefit. Haven't checked the shammy ones. WTF for the priest ones. I hate making wtf blizz threads (infact i have never made one, I enjoy WoW and i'll play it anyway they they put it out there) but seriously? Sooooo lets take flash heal a spell endgame priests "rarely" use and toy with "rotations" of priests who already have the most tools and take the most playtime experience to play well (which i thoroughly enjoy as opposed to the "spam" style pally healing.) It has just felt to me that set bonuses have been more gimmicky as WoW has progressed with tier gear to the point that I'm honestly not sure if this one makes sense. Disc priests who more or less spam FH will have the 2piece HoT overheal. And the 4piece for holy i think will go wasted more often than not. I'm a little frustrated, but maybe some of you other priests that do endgame raiding are excited about them. Last question is. With the new damage mechanics in ICC with the bosses doign less spike will the "spread out" damage find more uses for flash heal making these bonuses more viable? Let me know what you think.

Strategy Holy Priest Questions

intervade — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:25:25 GMT

Hey guys, I've been working with my holy priest for about 3 months now, I do enjoy it and I think I finally found a toon that Im actually good at. Anyways..

I've read the holy priest guide and I've asked around at some of the best healers on my realm and I'm sort of wondering what other peoples, I guess.. opinions are on stats.

Currently my stats are, self buffed:
SP: 2578
Holy Crit: 25.10%
Haste: 426
Mana Regen: 700 while not casting, 374 while casting.

I've been gemming with Purified and Luminous gems and a couple of Reckless here and there. I'm sort of wondering what really is the BEST stat from a solid priest experience in WoTLK.

Here is my issue. Spirit gives me constant mana regen and SP but the more I crit, the the more Holy Concentration procs which gives me more mana regen. So what type of gear/gems should I go for? Basically, I want to get through a fight doing really good healing, but not running out of mana. Obviously some cool downs help with that. So I'm in a toss up of Spirit, Crit and mp5. Also, someone suggested I be around 700-800 haste.

Can someone please give me something to go off of! Thanks!

General concerned with my own healing efforts.

roxyee — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:35:01 GMT

So my concern is that I may not be healing as well as I should. I heal along side of a holy palandin. When I look at the meters I always feel like Im letting my group down. The amount she heals is way different than the about I do . It would seem as though she might be haling 50% and mine is down around 20.

I've noticed that when I am disc the numbers arent so bad even if I am raid healing. Penance becomes very useful for getting members up really quickly... also pw:s helps to reduce damage.

I don't like to go holy becaue I feel I run out of mana a lot faster . Also personally I just dont see circle of healing as that much of a help cept in maybe situations like malygos.

So..... here Is my armory The World of Warcraft Armory

It would be a major help if you could give me some pointers on my spec.
Also is it possible to raid heal as a disc priest ?

General odd timing? or worse?

Doc309 — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:16:25 GMT

i was in a H-HoL. the daily, with a warrior tank.
i would bubble him when i thought we were ready to pull.
he would stand there for several seconds.
weakened soul would expire.
i would recast bubble, ... as he charged.
the bubble would hit him as he got to the mobs.
some of the mobs, would head to me.
i didn't see a thunder clap go off.
i'd bubble myself and run past him.
he'd pick them up. i would see him TC now.

after this happened 3-5 times, the party started questioning my use of bubble. "doesn't it reduce threat?" ... "did they change it?"

the boomkin even started backing up my heals...

i let the tank take some damage from them on, on the pulls... then keep his bubble up, then watch carefully his rage bar. he finished most pulls with a 75% full rage bar, or more.

what could i have said to them?

Doc

General PW:S and WorldofLogs

AnnaVictrix — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:01:29 GMT

Hi there.

I know that, as a disc priest, it's fantastically difficult to judge your performance by way of metres, however, they can have their uses and, over the last few weeks, I've been reviewing my raid contribution via WorldofLogs. One thing still confuses me though; if I look at my PW:S, on both the main healing dashboard and by directly clicking the spell, it's giving me, for example:

# 478
Avg 1989.5

Now, I'm mainly on tank duty, so my PW:S can't be just wearing off without performing any of it's function ...

Aliena, in her disc priest guide, says:-

"With 2100 spellpower it absorbs 6500 damage".

I'm currently running with over 3k sp (25 man buffed), so I'd expect an absorb rate of around 9.5k. Is there a massive discrepancy in what's actually happening and what WoL is guessing/recording or should I be looking somewhere else in the log for the correct data?

Armory New To Holy Priest Spec--Advice Needed!

Blue — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:24:18 GMT

Ok, I almost never begin threads, but here goes:

My alt is a relatively new Shadow Priest, with a Holy secondary spec. I recently volunteered to heal in heroic toc, with my guildies, who were also on alts for a badge run. I was there for loot and badge, as my Priest has mostly been doing bgs, with a lot of pvp gear.

Well, after wiping the second time on the first encounter after jousting, I realised I was in over my head, in trying to heal, and we shifted around to a more effective setup. What I don't know is, just how I failed so badly...I mean, I suspect that I don't have my gear and maybe gemming in the right places, since I only have one set of gear, but I really did think I'd do better than only two minutes into the fight! It wasn't a mana problem, either...I think I probably was too slow with my heals, and really not comfortable with how I have Healbot setup, as I tended to just use target/mouse, and hot bar buttons, mostly.

Anyone have any advice on where I should start to learn healing, within the 5-man instances--maybe in the regulars, instead of Heroics? And, a point toward what to gem/enchant look for, as far as gear? Thanks for any pointers...at this point, I could probably heal better, while still in Shadow spec!

Thanks, and try not to laugh, too much...:o

Here's my Armory:

The World of Warcraft Armory

General pet peeves

Doc309 — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:26:18 GMT

it's been a long day of pugging, so i thought i'd vent here ... lol

there's a couple of things that piss me off when i heal. here are a couple of examples that all happened today.

'locks that life tap below 20% expecting you to "give" your mana to them.
dps that says "dps needs heals too" when they pulled off tank, and the tank is more damaged than them.
tanks that show up with less HP than you have mana.
ppl who wait for ressers to run back when they don't.
when someone doesn't eat during a reset and asks for heals. ( kk i'll heal you than drink... while you pull)
tanks that leave group after 2/3 bosses in an H, without saying anything and only needing something from 2nd boss.

what are your pet peeves as heals?

Doc

General Lightwell on Anub HM?

Njordus — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:14:56 GMT

So my 10 man group has been working on Anub HM for 2 nights now. We are getting him to <10% but inevitably somebody dies to pen. cold, or a tank dies while our heals keep the pen. cold person up.

We do it with 2 heals, and we haven't had our normal paladin this week (so that might solve it right there). But we usually have a priest, druid, or a shaman at our disposal. We were trying it with the priest and druid the other night.

Could lightwell be a solution here? If the healers can normally keep up the raid and tanks outside of pen. cold, could the persons who get pen. cold hit a lightwell to help them survive? Is this feasible?

General gear path and spec.

Doc309 — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:07:47 GMT

i just dinged 80 on my disc/shadow priest.
i play in germany on a us server. so can't make guild raids. 7pm server = 3am real life.
my gear path seems to be; get tailor to make craftables, guild daily H runs, toc, H-toc and badge loot. then maybe some pug 10s when i'm better geared.

i think i need to keep shadow spec til i'm done with the rep grinds.

disc seems to be well suited for 5mans... are there advantages holy has for 5s that i'm overlooking?

Doc

General Healing Grid Tutorial

Aliena — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:23:21 GMT

So. You're a new healer, or maybe an experienced healer, and you've heard about this add-on called Grid, but whenever you decide to give it a go it looks a set of hella ugly tiny boxes that just don't tell you anything and you don't know where to start to change this. Right? Right. You've come to the right place then.

Before you make any changes to Grid, get the Grid Mana Bars and GridStatusRaidDebuffs add-ons. Once you have those installed, we can start.

This is how Grid looks in its most basic form:

No worries, not for long. Go to "Frame", and change the settings according to the screenshot below.

Show Tooltip: Always
Center Text Length: 10-11, that way names don't get abbreviated at 4 letters.

Now, go to "Frame" > "Advanced" and make the following changes.

Icon Border Size: 1
Icon Size: 9
Border Size: 1
Corner Size: 6
Font: Colibri v1 or any other crisp font you like
Font size: 9
Frame Height: 27
Frame Texture: Graphite
Frame Width: 50
Orientation of Frame: Horizontal

You should have something like this so far:

Click the Plus next to Advanced, click on Mana Bars and select
Side: Bottom
Size: 30

Then go to Layout and make the following changes:
Solo Layout: None
Party Layout: By group 5 w/ pets
10 Player Layout: By group 10 w/ pets
25 Player Layout: By group 25 w/ pets
Battleground Layout: By group 40

Clamped to screen: Check
Frame Lock: Uncheck if you wish to move grid around, check if you want to keep it in place
Padding: 0
Spacing: 5
Scale: 1.3-1.5
Border: Set opacity to 0% on the slider.
Background: Set opacity to 0% on the slider.

It should look like this:

Now go to "Status" > "Colors", select "Pet Coloring by Owner Class", click on "Class Colors" and change them to your liking.

Then go to "Status" > "Health" and make the following changes:

Then adjust "Status" > "Raid Debuff" to your likings. Hands down most useful grid add-on.

Afterwards, go to "Status" > "Range", "More than 40 yards away" and change it like this:

Then go to "Status" > "Incoming Heals" and enable it if it isn't.

That covers the most useful visual adjustments. Now to actually have stuff show up in grid. You can either download an add-on called "GridStatusHots" which is useful, or add indicators for grid yourself. If you're new to Grid, I'd recommend downloading "GridStatusHots". Then go to "Frame", and click on the Plus next to it to expand it. Now you see how it pops up all those different places on the Grid that you can add indicators to.

For example, "Border" should have "Your Target" enabled.
"Healing Bar" should have "Incoming Heals".
"Center Text" should have "Death Warning", "Debuff: Ghost", "Feign Death Warning", "Health Deficit", "Incoming Heals", "Offline Warning" and "Unit Name".
"Center Icon" should have "Raid Debuff" and "Debuff Type: Curse/Disease/Poison/Magic".
"Top Left Corner" should have "Aggro Alert".
"Frame Alpha" should have "More than 40 yards away".
"Mana Bar" should have "Mana".

How you set up everything else and what buffs you want Grid to show is entirely up to you. I'll walk you through adding one example, a weakened soul debuff.

Go to "Status", "Auras", click into the field below "Add new Debuff" and type "Weakened Soul", then hit enter. A new field will pop up called "Debuff Type: Weakened Soul", click on this. Adjust color and Priority to your liking, make sure it's enabled, then go to "Frame", "Center Icon" (or any other place you'd like to have it show", and enable "Debuff: Weakened Soul". Now, whenever you cast Power Word: Shield on anyone and they're afflicted by Weakened Soul, it'll show up as the center icon provided no debuff or buff of higher priority that shares the center icon is currently on the target.

Also very useful is to enable "GridAlert" for "Aggro" and "Detox". This will give an audible warning whenever there's a debuff you can dispel or you get aggro. Make sure that in "GridAlert" > "Triggers", the right triggers are set. For that, go to "AggroAlert" and make sure that under "Player Gains" "GridAlertAggro" is written. Under "Debuff Type: Curse/Disease/Magic/Poison" (depending on what your class can dispel) make sure that under "Any Unit Gains" "GridAlertDetox" is written. Following that same pattern you can set up different audible alerts to your liking.

That concludes the basics of Grid! Should you have questions about my setup or specific buff questions, feel free to ask here.
Also, you may have to relog to make changes appear.

General Spellcaster Maces. For healers... AND DPS?

Pavidus — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:24:12 GMT

If a healer needs a spell caster mace that drops, should that healer have priority over a Ele Sham/Boomkin/Spriest?

Here's the story. Our first Sufferings End dropped off 25Anub this week. (Finally) And we use EPGP for out loot system. One of our Resto Druids had the highest priority, so he gets it. However, a specific person in our guild, the trouble maker, decided to message him during loot distribution and say, "I can't believe you're taking a DPS weapon." And a few other pathetic remarks, that should really warrant a gkick.

Anywho, the Resto Druid, being the cool kind of guy he is, succumbed to the pressure by this Ele Shaman and passed on it. I got the mace because I was next on the priority list, and I offered numerous times to give back to the rightful person. But he refused because he didn't want to be the target of the drama.

Now there's confusion in my guild as to what a DPS spell caster weapon is, and what a healer weapon is.

MY view is: 3 Spell caster DPS classes are able to use maces. And those 3 classes also have healing spec. That is the only reason they are allowed to use maces. There are no spell caster maces with hit rating. (at least, not that I can find) Barb of Tarasque drops off NRB. That is a DPS weapon. It is the DPS spell caster weapon, equivalent of Sufferings End. They are the only 2 spell caster 1 handed weapons in 25ToC/ToGC. One can only be used by DPS, and the other therefore, is for Healers. That is MY view.

I'd love to know what you all think. I'd especially appreciate a response from Aliena.

Thanks.

Paladin Pally cleansing...

Aubrye — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:47:08 GMT

My only experiance with pally healing so far as been in Heriocs doing the grind for badge gear. My gear is getting up there now, and the only thing I ever have trouble with is fights where pretty much the whole party needs cleansing at once. So far, the only addons I've been using are Pitbull and decursive... and decursive is awful. It is stuck on the opposite side of my screen and it takes too much time plus the global cd to cleanse and then heal my party. I know I need clique and mouseover macros, just wondering if there was another addon that would tell me who has a debuff that I need to cleanse and do the only thing I liked from decursive-- some kind of sound that will alert me to the debuff and who has it quickly.

Strategy Biting cold

Griff — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:43:50 GMT

Does anyone know what raid marks DBM uses for biting cold in p3 heroic anub?

Edit: Doh, I meant penetrating cold

Guild Relations Evaluating new healers, how do you do it?

Amamaeth — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:49:42 GMT

So here's my situation. I play in a casual progression guild. We only raid 25 mans 3 nights a week, but when we raid we work on hard modes etc. We recently picked up a new priest at the recommendation of a few guildies. Now, we don't have class leads, or even role leads, just officers and everyone else. So one of the officers (really 2nd in command) asked for my opinion on the new priest...

Now, I'm pretty observant when I raid. When we raided with her we do most of our easy content cause she's in mostly naxx gear. The only "hard" content we took her on was yogg+3 so I use that as a frame of reference. I looked at the meters, saw she was really high on it and thought to myself, "that's pretty odd.." So I paid a bit more attention to what was going on and dug a little deeper. She was given the assignment (based on the fact that she was holy with a shadow off spec) to raid heal. Her primarily cast spell was Flash Heal and had a 50% overheal for all our attempts. She also ran herself OOM before phase 2 even started. If you aren't familiar with how yogg goes, phase one is the add phase and there is little to no raid healing needed if your dps is good at interrupting.

Well I report this information to the officer, saying that I think she's flash heal spamming the tanks during phase 1 and running herself OOM and generally not approaching the encounter and her role in our raid intellegently. Officer asked me to talk to her, stating I knew more about priests then said officer and that maybe I could help. "Of course," I say, I'm more then willing to help out anyone who needs it.

Here is the problem and the TL: DR sum-up. I approached her as nicely as I could. Said basically 'hey we really like you and think you are a great priest but there's this little problem on yogg that I want to address blahblahblah'

She did not take it well at all. First she says "well I've been healing since vanilla and I know what I'm doing," and that "we just have different styles of playing." Afterwards she didn't talk to me until just before the raid started (about a good 10 or so minutes) saying, "I just don't know how to handle this info." She seemed genuinely offended that I even tried to critique her.

So what should I do now? Do I try to talk with her again? Ignore it? Write her off as a lost cause? Was I in the wrong thinking there was a problem? What would you do?

General Val'anyr & Blessing of Ancient Kings

Tobius — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:51:28 GMT

I play as a Disc priest and recently managed to complete Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings - Item - World of Warcraft

I'm still trying to get my head around the buff, I have found some info which suggest :

Shield stacks with itself
Overhealing adds to the shield amount once proc is up
Max shield of 20k

I have to admit I hadn't realised the stacks with itself part until now. For fights where I am trying to shield as much incoming damage as possible, such as melee on Gormok I would have thought to get the maximum absorption up I would want to PW:S the guys in melee and when the Blessing procs from Val'anyr to get as many stacks of the shield up as possible on them. The quickest / best way would be to PoH the melee group(s) as much as I can whilst the buff is active?

Last Northrend Beasts go I did a similar strategy but only using one stack of the shield (one PoH cast to get melee buffed) : World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis this worked well but it is incredibly mana intensive!

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to getting the most benefit out of the proc? I want to make sure I am getting the most out of my shiny new mace :)