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!
My guild ran several ZA bear runs yesterday, with a variety of compositions. Two of the runs were successful. A couple more ended with the timer expiring in the middle of the lynx boss fight. One ended in an ignominious wipe on the trash before the bear boss. I healed a few of those, including one of the successes and the wipe. Here are my notes.
It came to my attention earlier today that my guildmate & fellow healer, Gnochi, was laboring under some surprising misapprehensions about how mouseover macros work. He seemed to think you waved your mouse over people’s avatars in game and pressed buttons to heal. Which you can do, but is not in fact how mouseover healing works. You use unitframes, just like you do with click-casting.
Here’s how to do it.
Somebody on my Twitter stream was asking about druids in the Chimaeron fight. The first time I was there I wondered what the heck Blizzard expected us to do on that fight, since the only heal fast enough to save a caustic slime victim (Regrowth) was too expensive to spam for the duration of the fight. It’s still true, so druids should be doing something else. But what?
The bare-bones outline of the Chimaeron fight:
The generally-used tactics are these:
The main tank holds the boss and piles up break debuffs. The second tank is a double attack soak tank: he or she taunts the boss just before double attack. The main tank takes it back afterward.
The raid spreads out to avoid splitting damage from Caustic Slime. Because it won’t kill you (1HP!) there’s no sense in splitting the giant damage. That would just give you extra targets to have to heal up, which is a waste of mana. Somebody must be assigned to healing these victims asap. If your raid has good positioning discipline, there will be only 2 to heal. (This is another one of those encounters where melee is a liability.)
For Massacre, the raid stacks up to maximize the benefit of aoe and group healing spells. It stays stacked during Feud because slime damage must be split while the life-saving buff is missing. This is when raids cycle damage reduction cooldowns and big heals.
During phase 2, pop Heroism/TimeWarp/Whatever and burn like mad. There’s no point to healing. Evasion tank, dump aggro, use all your survival tricks when he’s on you. Also, maximize his travel time to his next target. We love our bear tanks in this phase because a nice avoidance string can keep them alive for a long time while everybody happily does damage.
What do druids do in this fight? My usual raid make up has 1 holy paladin, 1 discipline priest, and 1 resto druid. The healing usually goes this way: I keep the main tank fully hotted and keep an eye on the off tank, who usually needs the big bomb heals. The off tank is the one raid member whose health has to be kept high. The holy paladin beacons the off tank and heals the raid after slime hits. I use Wild Growth on cooldown to ease the raid healing burden. If OOC procs I hit low health people with Regrowth; if not I throw Rejuv on them as a death-delaying buffer to give the holy pally time. (If not straight tank healing, that’s my role in most of these fights: a buffer. I give the other healers time to wind up.) The disc priest smites the boss and pays attention to the off tank. Everybody uses aoe healing on the massacres: Efflorescence plus WG plus Regrowth as you get procs. We cycle big cooldowns on Feuds. Because my raid usually has 3 druids (bear MT, moonkin, me), we also have a Tranquility rotation for Feuds.
I save tree form for phase 2, for the fast Wrath casts. Tree is 4 a spam moonfare LOL. I almost always have 0 mana left entering phase 2, however, if I’ve paced myself properly.
I have one other tip for this fight. Make sure your raid frames show people below 10K health differently from other people. Those are the urgent healing targets. The Low Health debuff is present on them, so you can use that as a handy trigger for display.
Chimaeron is a one-shot for us (unless something silly happens) and we have the Sound and Fury achievement for most of the guild now. So this approach works. I’m sure others do as well. This fight is mostly a quick-reflexes fight for healers, followed by periods of massive multitarget throughput. Holy priests probably rule on Massacres.
Aside: The word has got a Greek origin, so the ch is hard.
As usual, an agonizingly slow reaction to the evident need to buff a class & a near-instant reaction to the equally obvious need to nerf one. But better late than never on the shaman fixes.
I’m curious what the external cooldowns might look like. I sort of hope it isn’t as boring as making Barkskin something I can cast on another player. Though I’d take that instead of nothing, to be sure.
An interesting discussion of how hardmode raid encounters require cooldown rotations to preserve tanks from one-shot mechanics. Two healing classes have them. Two healing classes don’t. This has consequences.
This starts to feel more and more relevant to me as my guild eyes the last two bosses in tier 11.
This is the boring part where I look at the logs, poke at them, and try to decide what they mean and if I should change anything. I was assigned to heal Gnox, and note that I lost him right before the transition into phase 3. On the transition, I rebirthed him, chugged a Volcanic Potion, and popped tree form, in that order. When tree form expired, I used Tranquility. We had only one death during phase 3.
Spell choice looks almost, but not quite, Wrath-style. Rejuv, Lifebloom, then Wild Growth. The Lifebloom & Regrowth numbers probably come from treeform use. Note how weak Efflorescence & Living Seed were on this fight. Efflor was only useful on phase 1, and I didn’t use it much. Phase 2 featured too much motion, and I doubt I cast it at all except as a tank healing tool. I am seriously considering dumping both when patch 4.0.6 hits to get 6 points back to spend on throughput talents. Efflor is too situational and too weak, especially given where I expect Wild Growth to be in 4.0.6.
I probably used less direct healing on this fight than usual, because we were two-healing instead of three. Normally I’d be focusing more on a single tank, with spot heals on the raid. So I suppose I could expect more Living Seed procs in a typical fight than I saw last night. But I’m now thinking we should try two-healing more fights than we have been, where mechanics allow. (Conclave of Winds requires 3, for instance.)
Top 200 WOL parses analyzed. I link to the 10-person normal raid healer averages. Interesting, eh? Paladins really are at the top. Shamans, yeah. Weep softly until it’s time to toss down the mana tide.
How did I miss the existence of this site? You’re all fired!
As you’ve probably noticed, a lot of healers feel that Cataclysm healing is all out of whack. This problem is not something you notice in 5-person instances or heroics, though the problem with healing being stressful instead of fun is evident there. All five healing specs can competently heal the 5s, however, and I don’t want to write about fun just yet. I’ve just been in two successful nights of raid-healing and have been pondering the experience.
It’s in raiding where things start to get weird. It’s in the heroic-mode raids where they get professionally weird, if you believe the top-end guilds.
Here are the trends:
Holy priests rule at AOE healing.
Holy paladins rule at single target healing and are good at AOE healing. They have the highest raw output.
Druids are good at single target healing and weak at AOE healing.
Shamans sit at the center of their totems and weep softly. Every three minutes, they stand up long enough to throw down Mana Tide.
So why did it work out this way?
The simplicity of Prayer of Healing is its virtue.
It is a direct multi-target heal that does the bulk of its healing up front then leaves a mastery-procced hot behind. It does not require its targets to group up or change their positioning in any way. It doesn’t require any procs to achieve its best results, nor does it require any effects to pre-exist on the targets. It also isn’t “smart”, so it wasn’t nerfed to merry hell and back the way Wild Growth was.
The Sanctuary chakra makes PoH better, but you can enter that state by casting PoH itself then boost it further by casting PoH some more. The Chakra state mechanism does add some complexity, however.
The simplicity of paladin healing is its virtue.
Holy Light, Holy Shock, and Flash of Light are simple, direct single-target heals. Cast them and get the maximum benefit straight off.
Paladins don’t need to satify any preconditions to get their best healing throughput, such as casting a HOT on your target first the way a druid does. Paladins don’t need to wait for procs to get the best healing numbers from these heals, the way a shaman does. Riptide, get the Tidal Wave procs, then cast Chain Heal to get the most. Or they need Unleash Life. Paladins don’t need to anticipate the incoming damage patterns and pre-enter a Chakra state the way priests do.
Paladins simply cast a heal.
Paladins don’t have the AOE healing ability of the holy priest, but that’s okay. They can heal the raid in their own special way: direct healing on people who need it, while their two passive heal echo talents spread some of that healing onto 2 additional people. Their target, their beacon target, and the Paladin himself, all healed at once, through simple straightforward spell-casting.
Simple, direct heals give the paladin total control. This has traditionally been seen as the downside of the class, yes? Just three healing spells to cast and a pile of weird utility abilities. But the simplicity is still there, even with the new arsenal, and it’s paying off.
The class is designed around having Rejuv ticking on targets before the druid gets to work. The mastery, the talents, the playstyle, everything. However, Rejuv is too expensive to cast on more than a couple of targets right now, by design. The precast HoT was deemed to be too valuable in a healing model that was supposed to be about triage and damage that didn’t kill its victim right away. (Note that raid encounters don’t work this way, despite everything we were told.) So the class is hamstrung.
The druid can competently heal the single target that Lifebloom is ticking on, however.
Hell if I know. The mastery sucks? No synergy with the proc-tastic nature of its heals? This makes me wonder about masteries. I know that druids don’t like theirs and usually reforge mastery away from gear in favor of spirit or haste.
Healing masteries with preconditions will always be weaker than masteries without.
Druid Symbiosis: Increases the potency of your healing spells by 10% on targets already affected by one of your heal over time spells. Each point of Mastery increases heal potency by an additional 1.25%.
Paladin Illuminated Healing: Your direct healing spells also place an absorb shield on your target for 10% of the amount healed lasting 8 sec. Each point of Mastery increases the absorb amount by an addtional 1.25%.
Discipline Priest Shield Discipline: Increases the potency of all your damage absorption spells by 20%. Each point of Mastery increases the potency of absorbs by an additional 2.5%.
Holy Priest Echo of Light: Your direct healing spells heal for an additional 10% over 6 sec. Each point of Mastery provides an additional 1.25% healing over 6 sec.
Shaman Deep Healing: Increases the potency of your direct healing spells by up to 20%, based on the current health level of your target (lower health targets are healed for more). Each point of Mastery increases direct heals by up to an additional 2.5%.
The paladin and holy priest masteries are straight-out useful and will remain so. The shaman mastery will become less valuable with gear and as groups learn to master encounters. The druid mastery pushes them strongly into the tank healing role and weakens them as raid healers, because their spells are all designed to be weak until boosted by hots. The disc priest mastery is an interesting case because disc priests can no longer bubble spam; it might bias them toward point healing now and strengthen them as raid healers later in the gear curve.
Simplicity always wins, and it’ll probably be months before Blizzard stops being stubborn about this. Bring a pally, a holy priest, and one of whatever else you feel like to your 10-person raids. You probably won’t really suffer until you hit the heroics if your players are good.
The PTR patch notes offer some hope for druids in the form of reduced Rejuv costs. There’s nothing there for shamans yet, however.
This is really the problem in the non-Paragon & Method middle-tier guilds, like mine. I’m not at the level where the imbalances in class design are visible yet. I’m at the level where I’m aware they’re coming, aware of what I lost by leveling away from 80, and very aware of what my stress levels are. They were way too high in those Omnitron attempts.
Can I heal? Yup. Am I having fun raid healing? Not so sure about that. I’m going to ride it out and enjoy the playing with friends aspect of raiding. Behind the scenes I’ll probably level a paladin so I’ll be able to heal in raids if druids really do pan out the way they’re projected to.
Since I am collecting links. I wonder why Blizz didn’t take the beta feedback seriously.
