The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Ego Maildump
by Vonya
Another series of emails sitting in my inbox that need good responses. Names omitted to protect the curious – they can “out” themselves if they wish. =]
Firstly, I want to say I am not a healer, I have a level 30 priest who I want to level to 70 but I doubt I ever will.
I am first and foremost a tank, but because I am a guild leader, I am required to actually know something about healing, and the best strategies.
I have started reading you blog (I will read the rest when I get up tomorrow) but what I wanted to know is, are there any good calculators to check spell efficiency based on a priests stats at level 70 (across all levels would be nice, but I don’t see any chance in hell of that happening)
I have spent a few hours trawling through sites, and I have managed to find this;
http://www.nextrevision.com/wow/priest.html
Which I believe is very outdated…
Is there anything like what I need? Or any add-ons I could give the priests so they can monitor their efficiency during battle.
Thanks in advance
Firstly, I respect your desire to learn more so that you can become a better leader.
Secondly, that link has a lot of numbers on it. Not being a number cruncher myself, I couldn’t tell you how outdated it was and in what specifics it would need fixing (perhaps some of my fellow bloggers that read this can shed some light on it), but in an overall, broad sense, I can answer your question.
No.
No, there’s not a good way to measure the efficiency and quality of your healers. Healing meters are so far past usefulness that they really ought to be ignored. The tiny bit of help they CAN give is almost always outweighed by the panic and competition they incite among the healers.
It’s frustrating AS a healer to have no way to truly measure our usefulness and see where we can improve. Beyond qualitative measurements (someone died, or nearly died, or I think I’m too slow on reaction time…) there are no really good quantitative (My healing efficiency is at 3.45, and if I get this next upgrade, my efficiency will bump up to 4.6) measurement tools.
Especially since all the gear and numbers in the world won’t protect you from a healer whose behavior is sporadic. One raid, they’re at the top of their game. Next raid, they can’t even keep themselves alive. Maybe they’re busy watching tv, maybe they’re fighting with their parents over curfew or something – I don’t know.
The only “tool” that I’ve seen actually work for healers is CARING. They have to care. About their performance, and about the overall performance of the raid.
Not “care” about the gear, or the rate of progression, or where they stand on healing meters or whether they get to heal the main tank or not. The minute healing turns into a pissing competition, you may as well start packing your bags.
Without that ability to care, all you’ve got is dead weight.
As to addons and the like – I personally think that everyone in the raid should have VisualHeal installed, but at a bare minimum, every single one of your healers should have it. I think it helps efficiency and keeps people from stomping on each other when healing. I also advocate some kind of Unitframes addon, though that’s more a matter of personal preference than efficiency, necessarily. I like being able to make my health bars bigger, and to have something that outlines the frame in blue if someone is afflicted by something that I can cleanse. I love the section of the addon that puts a number showing how many HoTs are stacked on a person. (I use XPerl, for the curious). I think getting a Nostromo and learning how to use it can drastically reduce reaction time. I think knowing how to move using the mouse instead of the keypad movement keys is a huge benefit.
If I remember correctly, Kirk spent some time trying to find a way to create an addon that would measure exactly what you’re looking for (this was a while back). It was definitely an eye-opener regarding just how complex the algorithm would have to be.
But if you can find a way to install the very vital “Care 5.0″ package on your healing units, that’s the only addon you’ll really need.
—-
As an aspiring raid-healer, I’m trying to become keyed and geared for Kara. As in everything, it’s mainly a lot of my own research into how and what to go after. Farm for Primal Life for my PMC set… do dailies for rep to get an epic flight mount and the honor-rewards for gear for Kara… et cetera. I’m basing most of this on what Wowiki has for dailies, and what Matticus has said for his “gearing a 70 holy priest for Kara” posting.
There are some great guides out there for levelling -TO- 70. But as many have said, the game BEGINS at 70. And I haven’t found a good guide on what to do -AT- 70.* In a nutshell, can you give an idea (if you can remember back to your newb-ness at 70) what you did to gear up / rep up / enchant up / spellthread up / gold up / key up to get to where you were fit to begin raiding? Was there a daily checklist you performed? My goal right now is: all available daily quests + 1 Mote of either Life or Water + 2-3 battlegrounds for honor for my Vindicator’s Silk Cuffs. Every day. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Also, I’m 2nd in command of my (still very small) guild, and the most organized one of the bunch, so any help for aspiring 70s / raiders (regardless of class) is GREATLY appreciated.
* Maybe, since I’m at 70, people assume we’ve passed some type of Blizzard-sponsored Darwin test?
Thank you SO MUCH for a great blog with tons of answers. Your “Main Assist” post is a must-read for anyone I group with. Learn it, live it, love it.
Main Assist love!!!
Ahem. Sorry.
Sounds like your goals are spot-on, with one addition – Instance.
Instance, instance, instance. Heroic or not, it doesn’t really matter. A week away from the game, and I get rusty as all get out. Grab you some friends and go blaze through instances. Have everyone make a wishlist, so you can vary the instances you hit. Have a hunter that really wants the bow from Heroic Steamvaults? Go for it! Get your badges and then taunt them mercilessly for their cruelty to fish every time they loose an arrow.. Do you have all the Sha’tar rep you need for that loverly hammer? No? Go do some instances in Netherstorm – surely someone else from your group needs gear or rep from there. You yourself should have some nice upgrades out of there too – gloves and trinket from Botanica, boots from heroic Mech…
Badge rewards are pretty good (and getting better with 2.4). There’s a lot of great gear out there that you can get via questing and instancing.
But most of all, spend time with your friends. Get yourself a group that’s comfortable with each other and just go demolish things. It is, in my opinion, the most fun this game has to offer – given a choice between an instance run and farming, I will chose the run every single time. =] (barring health issues, when I shouldn’t even be logged in)
—
Having followed your excellent blog for some time now, I have tried to remember some of your healng tips and/or been entertained by things I cannot yet do but look forward to!
I am a 65 season Shadow spec priest, on EU (RP server), just shy of 66. My guild is a fun, relaxed group, fairly small and with many people holding down jobs (you know, the stuff that always seems to interfere with WoW
We’re probably not that serious but we do a fair amount of instances and try hard to help each other – we’re very frank if we’re too busy. I have been asked if I’d consider switching spec and thus function. Well .. I’ve healed a little bit recently and either enjoyed the (new) challenge or sweated thru my robes when it didn’t quite go (healing 4
70’s I found somewhat tricky as a Shadow priest….).Thus I wonder if you could take time from your busy yet exciting blog schedule (have I fawned enough?!) to advise on some *basics*.
Thing like:
- what talents in YOUr opinion are really handy – what not.
- what addons help a lot when healing (what do you use?)
- specific healing strategies (I thing your ‘Tier’ article is darn handy
here)
- any other helpful advice given your experienceFYI I was a tank before on an RP-PVP server so this is my first real experience with a magic user class beyond level 15 .. .I feel I’m still learning. I must say the Binding Heal (frisbee) is darn cunning …. Anwyays, even if you don’t respond to this one do know that you have one more admirer in the Blogosphere =D and do please keep up the informative posts!
Well, never let it be said I was immune to flattery. *winks*
I’d like to take this time to point out the search box up at the top right side of my blog (up in the sky graphic). I’ll be the first to admit that I HATE searching for old information on blogs. I hate hate hate hate it. I truly do. I cannot even in the slightest fault someone for asking a question that I’ve already blogged on, because most blogs (mine included) don’t have the most informative tagging, and I refuse to just scroll back through past posts. Pfft. No way, no how.
But the search function on my blog actually seems to do a decent job (I was shocked, myself), and for someone like yourself, who seems to have an excellent idea of what you’re looking for, it should be perfectly suited. I’ve been on blogs before where this wasn’t true – I’d do a search for “freeze trap” and wade through pages and pages of posts, never finding the one I was looking for.
I say this not as a plea to keep you from asking questions, but rather to point out a nifty feature of the blog. =]
To answer your questions, I’ve rated talents based on my opinion (and you get extra bonus points for emphasizing my personal opinions, because that’s what these are) on this post. The comments have a lot of good information as well, so I recommend continuing past the end of the post. *grins*
The addons I haven’t done an official post on. The answer to the first email has my best recommendations for healers – and I’ll mention it again, the VisualHeal Addon is a godsend, but ONLY if all your healers have it installed. Installing it on non-healers is so they can see when they have an incoming heal.
The last two I try to do in posts in general – I need to do specific posts on my helpful advice instead of just peppering it in other posts, and I hope to do more specific healing strategies for some fights, since I can’t find very good information on it sometimes, and have to wing it when our guild hits new content. =]
Thanks muchly for the email!
—
Disc vs holy
What is the difference and which one is better at being raid healer?
Short and to the point, I like it.
For raid healing, Holy is the better choice, hands down.
With one minor caveat – you always want to have one priest that is specc’d deeply enough into Disc to get the Improved Divine Spirit – you only need one priest to get the buff, but by doing so, they cannot reach the Circle of Healing spell at the bottom of the Holy tree, which is a staple of 25-man raid healing for a priest.
There is, arguably, no reason to go further into the Disc tree than that if you are a raid healer. Typically, that one healer will get the buff and spend the rest of their points in the holy tree. Some exceptions apply to this, of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a “normal” raid healing build being balanced more on disc than holy. My build is slanted at being the priest bringing the extra buff, and I still have more points in Holy than in Disc.
Disc is a good place to get some talents, even if you’re a primarily holy healer, but in a general sense, it’s considered the pvp tree for the priests, as it has a lot of survivability talents in it.
As always, comments from the Ego readers are not only allowed, but encouraged. <3
March 6th, 2008
In response to the first letter, there is a tool out there that can assess the efficiency/effectiveness of individual priest spells.
http://priestheal.googlepages.com/priest_heal.htm
The site allows you to type in your character name and realm. It pulls your information off of the armory and calculates the healing per mana, average normal heal, max crit heal, etc of all of your healing spells and every rank. I find this tool very useful in determining which spells to downrank and the appropriate downranked level.
As far as I know, however, there is not yet an adequate mod that gauges the overall effectiveness/efficiency of healers in a raid. This, however, I believe is true for most classes anyway. This game is way too complex for there to be any single number that defines the usefulness of any player.
~ Clariph
P.S. Props to Ego!
March 6th, 2008
Dear Ego,
Thanks muchly for your answers. Embarrased to say it but just AFTER I hit send on my previous email, my brain informed me that there was a search box … so found your post on talents too. Yay! Made some notes myself and plan to post on our forum for a discussion (e.g.: I don’t think we need me to go for Circle of Healing but perhaps branch out more into Disc for Divine Spirit – that sort of thing).
Anyways, have you tried/heard of Decursive? I note it has just stopped being maintained but it lists things you can put debuffs on … a quick play seemed to indicate I should use it as well as VisualHeal.
It resideth here: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/427/
Oh and I seem to recall you mentioned Mendwatch too ?
Cheers & hugs from the EU,
Immemar
March 6th, 2008
@Clariph
lessthanthree.
@Immemar
I’ve never tried Decursive – I have my cleanse spells on mouseover scrollwheel macros, so when I see Xperl light up someone in my raid window, I just move my mouse to their healthbar and spin the mousewheel to cleanse. My mouse is already in that area in order to do the healing, so it’s just a quick flick of the wrist to cleanse for me. I think Decursive requires more movement and actual clicking and possibly alt and shift clicking as well, so it wouldn’t work for me, personally.
I used to use Mendwatch, but I dropped it during one of my addon upgrades and haven’t really missed it much. It became less useful when I started healing with other priests, anyway, since it didn’t differentiate on whose frisbee it was.
March 6th, 2008
@Immemar
I would be very sorry to hear that Decursive is no longer maintained. Aside from updating the mod for new patches though, Decursive is about as good as it gets for removing unsightly debuffs from your friends. Our guild requires Decursive for all debuff removing classes, and it drastically reduces reaction time in regards to removing dangerous debuffs (Maiden’s Holy Fire, Shade of Aran’s Mass Slow, any polymorph on your friends).
March 6th, 2008
Instead of Decursive I use Smartbuff/Smartdebuff. I’ve never had any problems with it
March 6th, 2008
hrm. I hate Xperl. To each his own I guess
-
@first emailer: Healing efficiency has be argued since pretty much day 1. I particularly don’t think there is any way to really measure it. I suppose in the end what really matters is a) did you ‘win’ the encounter, and b) if you did, were you oom at any point and unable to participate for x amount of time? And there are about 900 ways to argue those two. :/
Regarding meters – they are not completely useless, but they are pretty much over-emphasized a lot of the time. First off, when I say meters I refer to Recount only. It seems to work the best imo, next to WWS (which has its own issues). Using the meters you can watch trends to see who is always up in the order or who is always down in the order. Individual encounters won’t tell you much, but if you watch them for a pattern you will see a performance discrepancy among your healers. with Recount you can also see the details of who healed who with what spell, real time charts, see who died to what, yada yada. Basically it is a mini-WWS. I use it all the time, but like I said meters are better to show a trend in things and less useful for a single encounter.
@second: I agree with Ego. In fact, if you are trying to gear/key up for Kara, then dailies really won’t help that much. You are better off doing instances, getting badges and raising your rep for rewards. Especially the Shatar hammer which I think is the best you will get until Prince. Been a while since I was breaking into Kara, but iirc I think I was in mostly just the dungeon set and I had that Underbog(SV?) staff. If you are getting your PMC stuff and instancing, then you are well on your way.
@third: My raid addons are ORa, Deadly Boss Mods, sRaidFrames, Clique, Omen (although I don’t use it…just a habit from my dps days), Recount, sct, sctd, SorrensTimers and Wardrobe 2. I also use Perl unit frames, and Bongos2 (not really raid specific, but I cant really play anymore without them lol ). You can find most of those at WoWAce or just google. Im going to check out this VisualHeal mod I see mentioned. Never heard of it until now.
@five: I have to disagree with Ego here. As of right now, Imp Divine Spirit is not needed and I would argue that it is actually a detriment to your raid to spec it. We haven’t raided anything with Imp DS in months. I’ve run a lot of boring and confusing numbers on this, but overall you are WAY, WAY more effective spec’ing deep into the holy tree. DS has a noticeable effect on maybe 5 people in the raid, this is because in general, spirit stats are really, really low in addition to only half of your raid having *any* benefit from it all. So, you will be helping yourself, maybe another *healing* priest, the *healing* druids, and maybe a pally who for some unknown reason has high spirit. Other than that, its useless. With CoH, you are helping everyone, especially the melee groups. It is hands down more effective than Imp Spirit has ever been, especially when you get into Mt Hyjal and Black Temple.
Having said that, I would re-evaluate when 2.4 finally comes out. Because of the spirit changes, it may actually be worth it to have a priest spec Imp DS.
March 6th, 2008
@Strayfe & Immemar
You can also configure Grid to work the same way. I have it show magic and disease effects on my party members for easy dispels.
March 6th, 2008
@Hildi concerning point #5
You don’t bring a priest with Imp Spirit for the bonus to spirit. You bring that single spec’d priest for the +damage and +healing associated with the buff. Other classes besides holy priests and resto druids may not stack spirit, but they’ll have it on their gear regardless. To say that it only benefits 3-4 people in the raid is inaccurate. It benefits over half the raid when you consider all the healers along with the DPS casters. Overall, the biggest benefit to Imp Spirit buff is increasing raid DPS.
You may take a personal hit on raid healing efficiency, but the benefit of the raid outweighs your personal loss, especially if you have other CoH spec’d priests or if you’re not in BT/Hyjal.
March 6th, 2008
@ First Email – This link was already posted but I’ll do it again. http://priestheal.googlepages.com/priest_heal.htm
Now this will only tell you how much each heal will heal for and it’s efficency compared to other heals. To get a sense for how your healers are doing there are a couple things you need to use, imo. Get Wow Web Stats. You can break down who cast what on who. This will help you see how much healing everyone is doing, and if two people have similar roles you can figure out why one is out healing the other. Only use meters when comparing 2 people of the same class doing the same job. You also need to talk to your healers. Ask them if they had to Pot more than normal, if they felt they had to cover someone elses assignments.
@ Second Email – Pretty much what everyone said. Heroic Badge gear is very good now, so just running heroics will get you enough gear to heal well into T5. Regular instances have alot of upgrades as well. The PMC set will last you until T5… maybe longer with the 2.4 buff.
@ Third Email – In 2.3 I think Imp Spirit is not worth losing 2 points in Empowered Healing and CoH. However in 2.4 you can bet your holy but someone will be Imp DS in our raids. If you are an Imp DS Priest the normal build is 23/38 if you are CoH the normal build is 1X/4X really alot of room to play with CoH builds.
I use Pitbull for my raid frames. I am getting a new computer next week and will be revamping my entire UI though. I used Xperl but couldn’t figure out a few options I wanted to change. Pitbull takes a little more intial set up that Xperl but I think it is more user friendly once it is up and running.
March 6th, 2008
I personally can’t heal a group/raid without Grid (http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/9503/).
In one spot I can see the health of everyone, any debuffs on them and if they’re ones I can do something about, whether pw:shield/weakened soul and hots are on them, whether they just got aggro from something and will need a heal, whether there’s another heal incoming on them, etc. It’s highly configurable so it can take awhile to initially set up, but I would be completely lost without it now.
March 6th, 2008
@Birkin: whew. sorry for the wall of text. I hope I didn’t crit anyone.
-.
Ja. I understand what Imp DS does and what its for. And I stick by what I said. I’ve run the numbers before (a few times, actually), and frankly the added benefits are minimal at best and far, far outweighed by CoH or heavy Holy build priests. We clear all current content with no problem with no DS buff, and we learned and cleared Hyjal/BT the same way. It simply isn’t that big of a deal. It has nothing to do with my personal numbers or not. When we have an app (who is invariably specc’d for spirit), we see absolutely no noticeable difference with or without the buff.
Now, if you have constantly have 3+ healing priests in the raid, then I would suggest one of them be spec’d for it, simply because 3 CoH priests is um…slightly overkill.
With whatever final spirit changes in 2.4, I will look again and maybe change my mind, but right now Imp DS means to me and my raid this: nothing.
March 6th, 2008
“Healing meters are so far past usefulness that they really ought to be ignored.”
Unfortunately I disagree with this statement Ego.
I agree with the overall theory behind healing meters being no value… BUT
I use SWStats fairly regularly as a way of checking what spells healers are frequently using, to get an idea of whether they’re trying to be efficient, or just snipe as many heals as they can. On top of that, checking who healers have been healing in each attempt gives a great indication of who in the raid is doing their job.
The simple part of checking who is winning on meters is more often than not, something to overlook, but it is a great reference if you pair it up with the overhealing meter, skills breakdown, and target breakdown (who the target healed)
just my 2c,
March 7th, 2008
@ Hildi. You are completely correct. Due to the fact that DS does not stack, you really only need one priest specced far enough into Discipline to get the talent. All other priests should have some sort of deep holy build (unless they are Pew pewing, of course).
March 7th, 2008
@Hildi
“You bring that single spec’d priest for the +damage and +healing associated with the buff.”
This is exactly what I said. You bring one DS spec’d priest for the raid buff, and the rest should be CoH.
Just because you don’t notice a difference without DS, doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference.
March 7th, 2008
Hey, I have a 69 Disc/Holy priest w/904 +healing self buffed. I intend to run Kara and further with him spec’d as is which is 33/28 going down disc to power infusion and down holy to spiritual guidance5/5, improved death and spiritual healing 2/5. Currently I am a healing machine and have challenged other Holy spec healers to do a better job than me (equally geared) and havent found one. My guilds full of Deep holy priests and only 1 has Imp. DS but he stopped there, Power Infusion is just too awesome combined with a trinket that gives +220 heal and Imp DS when having Spirit stacked above MP5. I am not saying my heals hit harder by any means, but currently my parties survive just as well with my heals as with a holy priest.
March 7th, 2008
“The only “tool” that I’ve seen actually work for healers is CARING. They have to care. About their performance, and about the overall performance of the raid.
Not “care” about the gear, or the rate of progression, or where they stand on healing meters or whether they get to heal the main tank or not.”
Yeah!
*hugs* ^_^
March 7th, 2008
I use sRaidFrames instead of Xperl, it uses a lot less memory and tells me exciting things like who has aggro and when a fear ward is used. For dispelling, I use Clique.
I actually find IncomingHeals, another Ace addon, to be much more useful than VisualHeal. IncomingHeals tracks all the healing done in the raid right on your raid frames, so if you are raid healing, you know that the other raid healer is already healing that rogue before you even start casting (or have finished your last heal!) It tracks everyone’s HoTs like VisualHeal does, but if you are keeping HoTs on multiple tanks (Vashj, anyone?) you can easily track them all with IncomingHeals.
And to that budding level 70 healer…I didn’t bother with dailies. Dailies may get you gold, but aside from the rep items (which really aren’t that expensive), gold isn’t going to get you the gear and experience you need to be a good raid healer. If your guild doesn’t have the personnel to pull off lots of 5-mans, get as many people as you can and pick up the fifth (or fourth and fifth). I made myself a little list of possible gear upgrades and where they were found, so I knew which dungeons I should push the hardest.
March 8th, 2008
Wow, nice letters. I could write a huge post about each one… but I’ll try to keep it short and sweet
#1 – meters aren’t effective on healers who know what they’re doing. They can help identify the less experienced crowd.
When they let an assigned target, ask why. Politely!
If they say OOM, ask about their mana regen strategy (ie do they use pots every CD?).
If they just HAD to help over there, ask them to trust the other healers more and emphasise that their assigned target is relying solely on them.
If they “just couldn’t keep up”, look at their spell selection. They should have 15-20% healing from renew, no more than 15% MAX flash heal. Use WWS and Recount to get this info.
If they were ganked, talk to your tanks. Maybe a mob was untanked or a tank was incapacitated. It’s also not unusual for a DPSer to pull aggro then FD/IB/Soulshatter and it run straight to a healer.
Expect your good healers to behave badly on trash, ie flash everything in sight. Trash is boring for everyone but especially healers.
Finally, I say this every post, but the most important quality in a raidleader is diplomacy. Your goal is to understand the situation and help your compadres deal with it, not to tell them they’re wrong and have to do it just like you say. Just a word to the wise, I’m sure
#2 – Wishlist. Wishlist, wishlist, wishlist. Wishlist, wishlist. Wishlist. Wishlist, wishlist, wishlist.
As in all life, if you know what you want, it will come in good time. Spend an hour on WoWhead and lootzor.com. You can filter for pre-raid items. l2love the filters. l2abuse the filters.
Start healing heroics with 1200-1400 +heal. You can go Kara with 1400. For SSC/TK you should have 1800 and a good chunk of HP as well, 9k raid buffed (fort, motw + kings) or you will die SO many times.
Enchant and gem. Head, shoulders, knees and toes (kidding), chest (mp5), bracers, gloves, legs and weapon.
Trinkets ARE important. Go to gankbang.com, find some people with about the right amount of +heal for your level and check their trinkets.
Money is important… with enough money you can do amazing things. My lock hit 70 and put on 7 epics, for example. However, fun is more important. Without fun, you will burn out.
If you grind the motes (they’re really cheap on the AH now y’know…) grind at least a whole primal at once. You waste too much time travelling otherwise.
At this stage in TBC, normals are for rep. Very few items are worth wearing once you start getting badge loot. Get into heroics and Karazhan ASAP.
Consider arenas and BGs. They’re the bane of my life, personally, but the arena weapons are godly. Even if you lose continually, just make a new team.
#3 – frisbee is PoM.
I use Grid and Clique to raid heal and cleanse, the rest of you are infidels who deserve to be burnt at the stake >:D
I use Pitbull for party frames when not raiding.
BTW, I love clickhealing so much, I clickdps with my affliction warlock while listening to my iPwn.
#4 – Holy.
I’m another ImpDS nonbeliever. My mage has 200 spirit or so… bump to 250 with ImpDS… 10% or whatever of that is 25 +dmg. Woohoo. It’s not *totally* insignificant, but don’t expect flowers and candy. CoH is situational, true, but it rocks hard when you need it.
March 8th, 2008
Thanks for the reply!! I’m number two… wait, er… that doesn’t sound right.
Currently at 1300 +heal unbuffed, with most everything from Matticus’ wish-list minus the trinkets, rings, feet, pants, and headpiece. Gah! When put like that, I’m soooo far away…
A little more rep = Watcher’s Cowl, Glyph from HH, ring from HH, LC Prayerbook, and Golden Spellthread (which I’ll save for Whitemend Pants). I’m currently running Silver Spellthread on my Pants of the Naaru.
And a lot more farming = the rest of my enchants (weapon, gloves, cloak) and the Whitemend Set.
Any constructive advice from those that want to armory me (Citabria, Quel’dorei) is always appreciated! (Yes, I’ve gone Imp DS, at least for now).
And I’m at 1 of 3 key frags — waiting on some friends and guildies to get flying mounts so we can progress together.
Thanks again for the Main Assist post. That is one that I go back to and harp and harp on fellow guildies to read. Well, “harp” is a harsh word – I should say, “threaten with /gkick”.
March 10th, 2008
#3
Ego’s post about Healer’s talent is pretty much spot on! However, I kind of disagree where crit is not a high priority on list. Currently, my crit is 18% for holy. My goal is 25%. There will be time when you have to spam GH like there is no tomorrow. You barely can keep the tank alive but when ur GH crits, it gives you a little bit of breathing room and give you enough time to cast a PoM/Renewl to help healing the tank. The temporary boost also help you stay out of FSR.
The down side when your heal crits is the aggro also increase. If you dont have Silent Resolve, make sure you get Salvation when grouped with a Pally. You’ll need that to lower the threat otherwise, you’ll be spending time dodging and not healing.
March 10th, 2008
@Everyone
Meep! My email has been exceptionally tardy on these, I didn’t realize all this was stacking up till I got a great big giant stack of bricks dropped on me. Lessee…
As to ImpDS – the affect it has on any non-spirit-dependent class can be anywhere from minimal to unimpressive.
The combined effect it has on a caster-heavy raid, especially with priest and druid healers, is well worth the effort of having a single priest spec into it, in my opinion. You’re right though, that it’s a lot easier to make the sacrifice of CoH if you’ve got multiple priests to choose from. =]
Concerning Healing Meters – detailed spell output such as some addons (Recap) and WWS can provide are more than just healing meters. When I say “useless” I definitely mean the meters that just have graphs for healing output. The detailed spell information is useful to someone who knows how the various healing classes work, and is a bunch of gobbledegook to someone who doesn’t. They’re a great tool for raid leaders to use – but I still say the pure healing meters are like throwing a bucket of blood into the water near a bunch of previously passive sharks. *winks*
Awesome responses, people!
July 3rd, 2008
[...] debate about how useful healing meters are is a long and sordid one. I did a quick search and found a lively and intelligent debate on the subject in the comments of one of my previous Maildump [...]