Circle of Healing questions & answers!
I was tagged by Angelya of Revive & Rejuvenate (which is a great name for a healing blog, by the way), so here are my answers.
1. What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Leafie, restoration druid.
2. What is your primary group healing environment?
10-person raids. I do some 5s on Leafie but only as many as I am forced to do to cap out Valor for the week. Though I did a lot of 5s healing early in Cata to gear up for raiding.
3. What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Lifebloom. Nobody else has anything like it! It’s so cool to spread Lifebloom around on the raid and watch the health bars all jump up when it blooms. Also I love the bloom sound.
4. What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Regrowth. Expensive to cast; the weakest “flash heal” of any of the healing specs. The talents that boost it are lackluster, so nobody has them. It’s cast only on ClearCasting procs and even then only when I don’t want to wait for the bigger blast of Healing Touch.
5. What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Mobility used to be the hands-down answer to this question back in Wrath. It’s still true today but we are no longer the jump-n-hot class any more. Right now I’d say that sustained high-throughput AOE healing is our strength. The three-minute cooldown on Tranquility is a huge deal.
6. What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
No damage reduction cooldown to give away, unlike all the other healing specs. Also, we lack strong single-target burst. I can heal the entire raid quickly & effectively, but I can’t heal a tank up fast without sweating. I particularly notice this on Alysrazor when trying to get a tank back up into a safe zone after Gushing Wound falls off.
7. In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
I have no idea because I no longer raid 25s. I raid the 10s, where personal responsibility is much more demanding and every single player has to be good.
In the 10s, the best assignment for me is minding a tank while healing the raid. In my usual raid team, we usually figure out which tank the holy pally is healing primarily and which tank is getting my Lifebloom stack. From there we’re flexible because cross healing is the norm in 10s.
8. What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
I think holy pallies make good partners for resto druids. The two styles are quite different from each other so they complement each other.
9. What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
It’s never the class I hate. It’s always the player. Growl.
10. What is your worst habit as a healer?
Casting Wild Growth as a nervous twitch. Until I got some significant raid gear, this was running me out of mana.
11. What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
When somebody says after a wipe that “the healers need to be watching for this or that.” We already are, I guarantee you. If somebody didn’t get enough healing, we know it, and we know whether it was because they ran out of range, or should have been using a cooldown, or were standing in crap, or if we just plain missed it. We take it seriously when we lose people.
12. Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
Yes. Sometimes I worry that the druid is overpowered just now, but then I remember that we have no way to reduce incoming damage. We have to make up that difference with sheer throughput, which skews the meters. With a discipline priest, you don’t take the damage to start with, which is so much more powerful than the ability to heal it after the fact. But we’re in a good place right now, much better than we were at the start of Cataclysm.
13. What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
Did my assignments live y/n? Also, I’m finding that making video recordings of raid fights has been amazing for figuring out what I’m doing right and wrong. It’s so much easier to look at a fight when you’re not in the middle of the stress of playing it. You can see if you were standing in the right places, moving the right ways, reacting fast enough to events, keeping various spells on cooldown & so forth. The videos have also been helpful in evaluating my user interface setup. I highly recommend this to everybody. The Macintosh WOW client has video built right in— press a shortcut key and boom, you’re recording yourself.
14. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
That all we do is raid heal. Lifebloom is such a powerful tank healing tool. I can keep up a tank all on my own under significant damage (Nefarian in phase 1, for instance).
15. What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
The Lifebloom stack timing. Every 7 or 8 seconds, you’ll be returning to the tank to refresh the stack somehow, usually by casting Nourish. Your attention cycles around from the tank to the raid back to the tank on a timer, almost.
16. If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
Overuse of Wild Growth, a tendency to use Nourish when I should have gone for a bigger heal.
17. Haste or Crit and why?
Haste. Druid hots benefit from haste at predictable breakpoints, and we need gobs of it to hit them. I am slightly surprised this question doesn’t ask about Mastery. Maybe it’s still too weak for most of the healing specs? Right now I am, no joke, reforging for Mastery instead of Haste. I seem to be doing pretty well and not going too crazy because of slow cast times, so maybe it’s working.
18. What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Shamans. I’ve never played a shaman past level 10 or so. I have only the vaguest idea about how their healing works.
19. What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
I use mouseover macros heavily. Every single one of my cast-on-others spells is triggered by a mouseover macro. In addition to that, I use a Pitbull 4 layout that I designed myself and have been working on for some time. The goal of the layout is to have healthy, safe players shown in quiet, non-obtrusive frames. The frames get more attention-demanding as the player takes damage. The default state of a frame is to fade into the background when all is well.
I run Decursive but only for the “bong” sound it makes when somebody gets a condition I can cleanse.
20. Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
The reign of primary stats in Cataclysm means that I stack intellect early and often. There’s no point doing anything else. Intellect double-dips for my mana pool and my regen. I would also note that gems and enchants contribute a smaller overall percent of your stat budget than you think, even with the burly Cataclysm gems. Stacking via gemming does less than it used to.
Tagging… Gnochi! Tell me all about disco priests!
