Month: June 2008

 
Image courtesy of RobK

After spending my precious non-WoW time on Age of Conan, I felt it was time for a break. For a blog post, why not write up the ABC’s of raid healing? But it was late. This column was penned at around 12 in the morning. 

For once, I needed help. A quick glance at the Blog Azeroth chatroom showed some idle activity but I found the name I was looking for. Anna, with speed that not even Nature’s Swiftness could rival, agreed to team up with me to write this post. She tackled the odds and I took the evens. Here’s what I came up with. Don’t forget to check out the other half on Too Many Annas when you finish!

Brain heal: When in doubt, bring more Resto Shamans.

Don’t lose confidence in your abilities as a healer.

Forget the naysayers. Break your healing problems down to the simplest level and try to solve each one individually.

Heal. Heal more. Heal fast. Heal smart. Heal now.

Just when you think it’s over and your raid will wipe because you’re fresh out of mana, the boss will die. Good work!

Line of sight. Don’t ever lose it. Precious seconds lost because you were readjusting to the tanks position could mean an imminent wipe.

No matter how tempting it may seem, don’t try to over extend yourself. You’ll end up burning up your mana faster when it should’ve been saved for your main assignments.

Prayer of Healing, Chain Heal, Binding Heal, Circle of Healing, and Tranquility are some of the best multi-target healing spells in the game. Understand the most opportune times to cast those spells on your group. Start forcing yourself to use them. A 3 second cast to heal the entire group is better then Flash Healing for 7.5 seconds to get your group to full.

Read up on raid strategies and boss fights before hand. Knowledge truly is power. By understanding what kind of damage you’re up against, you can develop countermeasures against it.

Use your Mana Potions, trinkets, and other mana returning abilities wisely. Time them well and the mana you get back will sustain yourself for the entire fight. Time it poorly and the raid will sit around not laughing as you stand, manaless, in the comedy spotlight.

‘Xamine your UI. Do you really need all that crap on your screen as a healer? What can you do away with? What can you not heal without? Are you being overloaded with information that you don’t really need?

Zealous healers make the best healers. It’s hard to show enthusiasm and excitement. But the ones that do are the ones your Guild wants to keep.

I’m now 3/8 Tier 6. I have in my possession:

• Breeches of Absolution
• Cowl of Absolution
• Mantle of Absolution

Now you might be asking yourself how on earth I can get these 3 pieces without getting the gloves. It’s quite simple. Let me explain to you the system that I use. I call it “the method”.

What is the method?

The method allows you to spend your DKP in such a way that you can get the stronger pieces you want first while allowing you to get mediocre upgrade pieces slightly cheaper. It only works for certain classes and certain systems. My guild uses a 2 round blind zero-sum system.

I intentionally wrote off the Gloves of Absolution when we first started progressing into Hyjal. At the time, I was sporting the 2 piece tier 5 bonus which states:

If your Greater Heal brings the target to full health, you gain 100 mana.

That bonus is one of the top bonuses in the game for any raiding Priest. If you’re a raid leader and you need to decide which token goes to which player, make sure your Holy Priests at least get the 2 piece bonus.

In any case, I’ve passed on the gloves continually up to this point. They’ve gone for 50 when they first dropped. Now the price has decreased by 50% to about 25 which appears to be the going rate. By allowing the other classes in my tier set to spend their DKP on the earlier weaker tokens, this puts me in a position of strength to pick up another token later. Several weeks after we first downed Azgalor, we killed Archimonde and I snapped up the Helm. The weeks following, I was able to pick up the Shoulders and then the Pants after.

DKP doesn’t determine who gets what loot. It determines who gets what loot first. So by intentionally passing on the first token, I can pick up a higher tier token without having to spend as much because I know that my competition has reduced slightly. Furthermore, I get access to cheaper gloves because the classes that I do compete with already have them.

On the other hand, if no one goes for the gloves first, you can always lowball it with a minimum bid. If everyone else is conserving, that means you can acquire it for cheap first!

Due to some piercing comments, the below additions have been removed in addition to the comments.