PvE Healing

Healing advice and suggestions for in game encounters.

Raiding with an Alt character

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I just received clearance from my GM to raid in SSC with Saphfira. I know the last couple of posts had me express disappointment in my class, but that’s not the case. Mallet is my favourite character out of all of them. Let me explain the situation here. It only recently occurred to me that Carnage raids with four active Priests. Three of them are Holy and one is Shadow. I’ve never really played a DPS class at all throughout my WoW career. Even right now, Saphfira is Restoration specced. We only have one Shaman and she’s Enhancement. We’ve been sharding a ridiculous amount of mail healing gear. Last night in SSC, 3 mail healing items dropped (also 5 of 6 SSC bosses dropped within 3 hours which is a big plus in terms of progression).

Luckily, Maeve understood the point I was trying to make so I didn’t have to waste my breath explaining my situation. But here was the argument I was going to make: Three Holy Priests means theres going to be more competition for gear. Having a Resto Shaman would increase the diversity of the raid and not allow healing loot to be wasted. It’s basically another group getting totem buffs. Healing power isn’t going to go down a whole lot. It’s not like I’m requesting to swap Mallet for an Elemental Shaman. So it’s a pound for pound trade of healer for healer.

Is this something I really want? No, because I absolutely love playing my Priest. But having three Holy priests in the raid means its going to take three times as long for us of them to get geared up.

But we spent so much time gearing up Mallet and he’ll be wasted

Well no, it’s not an either/or situation. Mallet is clearly a superior healer in comparison to Saphfira in every respect. I think there may be certain encounters where having a Wrath of Air totem and a Mana Spring might provide some extra punch. It’s not like I’m going to stop raiding with both of them. Healing has always been my calling. Even back when I played Guild Wars, I had a Monk/Elemental (In PvP, I’d make an E/Mo which still cracks me up every time I see it). It’s also not like I’m going to be competing with another Resto Shaman in raids for gear either. There isn’t that much of a loss that’s occurring. It will be a huge benefit for everyone else because then I will be spending my DKP twice as much.

That’s another interesting ethical question that I’ve also had to wrestle with. How do I deal with gear? I’ve always been for progression. There will be mace and shield drops and that there is direct competition against Paladins. I’m fairly certain that I have more DKP then they do. But it wouldn’t be right for me to exercise option and bid. Damn all of these morals and ethics courses they make us take for Criminology.

I’m worried that there might be some contempt or that raiding with Saphfira would raise a few eyebrows here and there. I sincerely hope not. Really though, I’d rather prefer to raid with Mallet if I could. But raiding with four Priests made me think that could I not be utilized better if I brought a Resto Shaman instead.

In any case, it will still take some time before she’s up to SSC status. Here’s the highlights of her gear right now:

  • 3/5 T4 (head, gloves, shoulders)
  • Nightbane’s Healing Staff and Neck
  • 5/5 S2 Gear (Just for the pants)
  • Netherspite’s Mail Chestpiece
  • Gruul’s healing trinket

Saphfira presently sports approximately 1550 +healing. That is nowhere near high enough for Mag+ raids. There are some improvements that can be made:

  • A better mace to go with the Chess Shield (Essence Focuser)
  • Honor Hold head enchant
  • 81 Healing enchant to weapon

That should shoot her + healing to around 1660 and should last against encounters such as Mag, and VR.

Has anyone else had similar cases where they wanted to raid with alts? Did your guild shoot you down or guilt you into not using your alt? I’m lucky to be playing two support classes. I’m also lucky to be in such an awesome Guild where the leadership can understand what it is that I’m offering.

This brings up another question. How do Guilds handle alts for loot? Do they draw from the same character (IE, both Mallet’s and Saphfira’s DKP are cumulative) or are they separate (Both Mallet and Saphfira earn separate DKP and are exclusive from one another).

My Nightmare as a Priest

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I’m reading Leiandra’s post on the different types of healers and their functions. After reading some of the comments there, I felt like this merited a direct post reply on it’s own instead of a comment. I wager I’m one of the few players to have rolled all four healer classes. I’ve only raided with three of them (Priest, Shaman, and Paladin while my Druid is on the backburner somewhere at the early 50 level). Some of the comments I’ve read made me raise my eyebrow.

Elinor

I know my comparison is somewhat simplistic, but taking away +healing gear (should be the same for priest or paladin) a paladin’s biggest heal with appropriate talents is a 2.5 sec cast for 2740(840 mana). A priest with appropriate talents has a 2.5 sec cast for 3062(825 mana).

Of course there is a talent for paladins to reduce that cast time by .5 for the next 15 sec, and the 3062 for priest doesn’t include the talent to increase it by 25% of spirit.

Also a druid has a 3.0 sec direct heal for 3517 (935 mana).

Firstly, that’s an unfair comment to make. If you’re going to compare healers, the assumption should be made that they are talented to the best healing spec available. There’s no point in comparing supposed healing classes without full and complete talents because there isn’t a player in WoW who raid heals with no talents spent in their appropriate healing trees. Don’t compare base heals or stats either because certain races and classes have a higher advantage over the other. If you’re going to compare healing output, then add an arbitrary base healing number that seems fair (like +1500 healing). Please, if you’re going to compare one class with another, make realistic comparisons.

So here’s the million dollar question. Is there one healing class better than another? It depends entirely on the encounter and on the situation. Let’s hypothetically say that there’s a 25 man raid team about to engage a boss. It’s your standard tank and spank encounter. Nothing special about it. Except for the fact that Crosbane, our boss, hits like a freight train for 30 minutes. Most healers would run out of gas long before those thirty minutes are up. Pally’s, not so.

They’re the energizer bunnies of WoW. They keep going, and going, and going. It’s true that as a Priest, we have the 5 second rule to fall back on and we would gain a crapload of mana back. Realistically, we don’t have that kind of option. If we don’t heal for five seconds, our assignments are dead. I suppose the best we can hope for is to light up a PoM, a Renew, and a Shield. That would us a few precious seconds to regen our mana. Then the boss crits.

Pally’s own us Priests, period. There’s a reason why many high end raiding Guilds no longer run Holy Priests as healers. We’re a dying breed. Sure we bring a lot of specialist skills like PW:S and Prayer of Healing, but well timed spam heals from Paladins keep everything going. The reason I agree with your assessment about Paladins being the King of Healing is because they would never run out of mana in endurance fights. I’m busy struggling and blowing my potions, yelling for Innervates, Mana Tides, using my Shadow Fiend, and theres Joe Paladin in the corner just spamming Rank 5 Flash of Light over there. Couple 3 Paladins, a Shadow Priest, and a Resto Shaman with buffed mana spring totems and you have a group that can heal indefinitely.

My WWS in Carnage shows our Healers with four Paladins constantly on top all the time. Master Harth, High Priest that he is, leads the way in over all heals so there is hope for us yet.

But you can’t expect WWS to illuminate the numbers for us all the time. It only shows us one side of the story. Different Healers are best suited for different encounters.

Take an encounter like Fathom-Lord in SSC for example. There are four bosses that need to be tanked. The Hunter boss spawns a pet every now and then, and the tank that’s tanking him needs to draw aggro on it as well. So here is this one tank that’s getting his ass handed to him by two Ford F-150’s. On top of that, there’s a freakin’ Whirlwind type thing that comes around and throws me in the air every once in a while. I’m so focused on my raid health that I always seem to miss it coming by. If it weren’t for my instant spells, he would be dead. Thankfully, the Hunter boss is the second boss that needs to die. With the damage input that Thor (my tank) is taking, it’s impossible to sustain it for more then a few minutes. Eventually, I would hit a time where my potion cooldown is used, my shadowfiend timer is down, and all the innervates have been used. In this short period of time, I would excel in my role no problem. I don’t have to keep him alive for an abysmally long time. Just enough to weather the storm.

Compare this to the last boss, the Fathom Lord himself. Initially Lang is over there with a Paladin. This Boss is last on the food chain. Paladins need to be able to keep Lang alive for at least seven minutes. Oh, and they have to heal themselves too. Lang may not be taking as much burst damage as Thor was, but he’s taking a beating for a longer amount of time.

Do you see the point I’m trying to make here? It’s nearly impossible to compare all the healing classes together. Each brings a different set of skills to the table. With the encounters in end game, I suspect that Paladins are better suited and utilized more often then not. As a Priest, I have enough spells at my disposal to react quickly enough to salvage a raid in case anything goes wrong. A Paladin won’t be able to recover as much. But their long term efficiency is so good that there is little reason for raids to go in the crapper.

Sooner or later, our class will go the way of the Dodo bird. Aside from broccoli, that is my greatest fear with Holy Priests rendered inert, useless, and outclassed in every aspect. I guess I better start accumulating Shadow Gear. Good thing I have a Paladin and a Shaman to fall back on.

Solarian down

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Presently, I’m sitting in Solarian’s room waiting for the leaders to say go. They’re talking last minute strategy right about whose tanking which. It seems raid prep time takes five years whereas the encounter itself takes five minutes. But that’s a post for another time…

[20 minutes later]

…And just like that, she’s dead. I couldn’t believe it. The third attempt and she’s down. There’s no way bosses can be THAT easy.  My pants dropped (that sounds bad, I know)! Replaced my Netherspite legs with Soul-Star Breeches.

Now we’re going to try out Alar with four tanks.

Tanking and Healing Prince the easy way

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The Prince engagement is a royal pain in the ass (excuse the pun). A lot of players have difficulty with the randomness. It’s an extra variable that causes unneeded stress and can force the most disciplined of teams to lose focus and scatter Aside from his Enfeeble and Shadownova’s, the boss would be an easy takedown. It’s the damned Infernals which throw everything into disarray. After pugging with a few groups, I’m amazed to still see people attempt to do it how it was meant to be done: running around aimlessly.

But wait! What if I could guarantee you that I could take his Infernal’s out of play entirely? That you would no longer have to worry about Infernal’s affecting your main tank and raid? That would certainly make the fight all that much easier, wouldn’t it?

You know that the Infernal’s AOE strikes deal damage in a circular fashion. The platform is a square (kinda) with a few odd cracks along the sides. If you can position the tanks and the raid into such a position, then you would be free from the random variables being thrown at you.

Placement

best shot I could take of prince and the raidI’m sure many of you are already aware of the Prince’s M.O. (Modus operandi), therefore I won’t comment too much about that. If you examine the various screns littered throughout the post, it should give you a rough idea of were to position yourself and the raid to avoid infernals. When you’re running into the room, the raid stands on the far left wall with the tank placed further up. You’ll need to wiggle and adjust a bit until you can find that sweet spot.

Might take you a wipe or two to get it.

An infernal between the raid and the MTIf you have unfortunate cases where an Infernal lands between the MT and the raid, your melee guys are to fallback to the rest of the group and sit out for the fight until the Infernal’s gone. Have them throw knives or bandage or something. But whatever they do, ensure they pull back. There is a small margin of error in this positioning. As healers, too close against the wall means you do not have line of sight with the tank. Too far out puts within range of Infernals. If your tank can find the spot and your raid can get to the right location, you will take no damage from Infernals whatsoever and will not be required to move.

Healing

Where the raid isPhase one is a walk over. I advise you to put a Paladin on Dispel duty. You want to conserve your mana for more important parts of the fight later. Maintain your hots at all times. Refresh them when necessary as soon as the last tick hits. The moment you go into Phase 2, coldowns should be blown. This needs to be the fastest 60% -> 30% takedown ever. I have seen cases where tanks can eat 20000 damage within seconds.

Overheals are important. Do it. When you get down to 70% mana, use your shadowfiend. Mana potions need to be used to help supplement when necessary. Don’t go into each encounter with less then 4 mana potions (I blow no more than 3). The most important thing is to get out of phase 2 as fast possible. You’re still going to have Infernals drop on you, but they should not be damaging you.

Tango down

Once you push into phase 3, ease off the gas pedal for a little bit because the worse part is over. With Prince’s damage output back to phase 1 levels, there isn’t the feeling of panic or terror. However, his axes start chopping away at your raid team. Assuming your team consists of three healers, ensure that you have at least two people on the MT and one healer on the raid. Ideally, the axes healer will be the person with the lowest amount of mana greater than zero (a healer with no mana is generally useless). The axes don’t deal a lot of damage, so it should be no problem for healers with 10% – 20% mana in THEIR gas tank.

The most crucial change listed is your tanking position. With the Infernal’s out of play, then running around the room is no longer required. Rinse, repeat, acquire phat loot.


On another note, I met another girl today in real life who plays WoW. Go figure. Addenum: I found a map which displays what I’m talking about perfectly. Courtesy of flavaguild.com.

About Cooldowns

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My Raid Leader made a comment about cooldowns the other day that I thought I would share with everyone,

Use them. Please.

In SSC, it takes about 10 minutes to clear Hydross. Heroism is on a ten minute cooldown. Our Priestly minion is on a five minute cooldown. Innervate’s on a 6 minute cooldown. Cooldown mechanics were thrown in by Blizzard to be used in a limited basis so they could not be abused. That doesn’t mean that they should not be used. In the past, I’ve treated cooldowns like superweapons from Red Alert 2: To be used in case of emergency or in a game breaking situation. Upon further reflection, I realized that they’re not really game breaking.

A fight like Hydross has an enranged timer of nine minutes. Our Shadowfiend cooldown has five. That means we pretty much have free spells to cast for the first 2 or so minutes. For example, in the opening pages of Hydross, I would open up with Shadow Word: Pain, renews, several smites, and maybe a few heals here and there. After that, I’d drop a shadowfiend to get all that mana back. Because really, in the first part, the tanks aren’t taking a lot of damage anyway that a couple of flash heals can’t mitigate.

On trash, there might be a few tricky pulls. A well timed Heroism could cut through trash like a Kansas tornado. It makes for quick takedowns. You’ll still have the cooldown available for the boss anyway because you’re not stupid enough to blow it on the last trash pull, RIGHT?!

But yeah, gauge the time it takes for you to go from boss to boss. Be liberal about the use of your cooldowns.

Five more minutes until my Criminology Midterm. Panicking is a very viable option.