Question on healsFollow

I have reached lvl 61 now and intend to do instances in OL. This will be my 1st time doing heals in instances. I have read alot about down ranking heals etc. What I would like to know is that when flash heals, greater heals are good for. For example is Flash heals and renew enuff for normal instances. What about heroics, do I need to switch to renew and greater heals for boss fights? What about kara and other dungeons. I hope the experience healers who had done this before can assist me so that i can have a better understanding on heals. Also what use is there for down ranking.

Thank you so much for your kind assistance on this.

The things you need to be concerned with in an instance are your aggro, not having people die, and your manna.

Once you get to level 68, you will get Prayer of Mending, and it will make a good opening spell. This is because it gives aggro to the tank and not you. For now, you don't have that option.

Once the tank has engaged the enemy, give him a moment to establish aggro. Then throw renew on him. Keep renew on him the entire fight. Renew will slow the incoming damage, giving you time to throw flash or greater heal. Also use renew as a quick way to throw some heals out to others in the party, so you can go back to the tank. If you had PoM, you would throw that into the spell rotation as well.

Once you have started to heal, you may have adds head your way. Be ready with fade, to decrease your aggro and send them back to the tank. My healing is high enough that I actually gave up a bit of +healing to carry a Timelapse Shard trinket as a second aggro reducing spell.

Flash heal is quicker and uses less mana than greater heal, but heals for less and is less mana efficient. Some people try to mostly use greater heal for the mana efficiency. It depends on the situation. I use both.

Downranking is a way to conserve mana, but Blizzard is soon making changes to eliminate its advantages. I wouldn't bother with it at this point.

Your AOE heals are Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing (if you have the talent). Some mobs do aoe damage to the entire group, or the entire group may be down in health. These heals are great for those occations.

Binding Heal will heal you and the target. It's great when you need to heal fast, but need heals yourself too. There are certain occasions (Nightbane's skeletons) where I basically spam this on everybody as they all take damage.

Beyond this, you should be ready to Dispel magic and disease, and shackle undead.

You need to be able to use all of these abilities quick. I especially recommend keybinding fade and shackle undead (use a focus macro). These you will want to be able to hit fast without even moving the mouse.

When you start raiding in larger groups, you should look at addons that provide you the information you need, like Grid or Healbot. Whether you click heal with your mouse (Healbot or Grid with Clique) or select with the mouse and use keybindings to heal (what I do using grid), you want to be able to heal quickly. Selecting a target with your mouse, then mousing to the spell on your taskbar, then back to another target, then back to the spell bar isn't going to cut it for long.

One last comment, don't shield the tank. Tanks need to gain aggro. Only use your shield on the tank if you need to have time to throw a heal or he will die.

Just get in there and practice. Priests are a very versatile class with many healing abilities. Each lends itself to a different situation. Have fun, and good luck in that instance.

I'm Holy, 16/45/0 for CoH http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxg0zhZfxtcfMaVhVo

edit... Oh wait, you meant the op. Time for more coffee.

Edited, Aug 29th 2008 8:44am by dadanox

That, basically.

And after every Binding Heal, spend 5 minutes worshipping the person who made that up. Best idea Blizzard had ever... "Damn, stuff is getting messy, time to spam Greater Heal on the tank... Oh damn, now I've got 2 mobs on me... Ah never mind, lets just continue spamming heals, except now I'll use Binding Heal instead of Greater Heal."

And also another tip that just sprang to my mind;

When you PoM the tank, PoM jumps on you and you are not getting hit, throw a Shadow Word: Death on the main target; it'll force your PoM to jump back to your tank and hopefully stick around him this time. Loads cheaper (both in mana and cooldown time) than just recasting PoM, and you're dealing a bit of damage as well.

You made the right choice. Keeping the tank alive is your first priority.

Some of the most satisfying boss kills I've had are those where we had failed several times, finally got the boss close to death, and I basically decide nobody else but the tank gets my attention until the boss goes down.

One last thought, be sure you always have more than enough mana potions, water, and reagents on you.

Gratz on a great first run.

Edited, Aug 31st 2008 5:16am by dadanox

Don't even bother getting into the habit of that. They're changing the potion dynamic whereas you can only have 1 potion per combat session. "Potion Sickness" I think it's called in the future.

Thank you so much guys. Beginning to love healings since i am always dpsing and wanted to try heals. Did Ramps yesterday. Heals didn't go that well but my grp says it was good. Its just the durid tanks loses aggro and comes straight to me. I use Fade and run back to the tank. This happened a few times. Also I noticed that CC wasn't going that well. The hunter traps and somehow it breaks. Adds turn against me when I am healing and the grp is not interested in keeping me alive. I had to keep heals on everyone without even caring about my HP till I died. Overall I am learning to heal and will not heal in heroics or kara etc till i am pretty fimilar with healing. Me being a dpser before now feel for the healers. Sometimes I wonder how hard is it to keep the group alive when they are not following for example CC, banish demons etc. Poor healers. I told my guild about this.

Btw yea I am working on cooking and fishing togather for food buffs. Was using them. Once i reach 375 in tailoring, then I'll drop mining and try alchemy. For now I wanna save for my flying mount. :)


Once again thank you soo much. Have a great week.

I agree with you. I should have kept myself alive. Well these are the things i like to hear so that i can improve myself in being a good healer.

Anyway I don't have binding heals yet as I am currently lvl 63. Should be getting this at 64 and would love to try this as well.

Thank you

Cheers

Thank you and I will try too :)

I don't really like the sound of this tip.
For the mob to come after you in the first place, you must have drawn 130% of the tanks threat. That can be a decent margin. Your Fade ability does not drop all threat, or even a percentage of your threat, it is a FIXED amount of threat.
If the Fade doesn't cover that threat gap, you may find yourself getting beaten to a pulp, and be an uncomfortable distance from the tank.

Also, while your mind is busy with running away from a mob coming for you, you are less aware of the groups health level, and are limited in the healing spells you can use while moving.

Although I don't play a priest, I will do up a sticky for you all to work with that has basic healing/play styles as well as a wiki guide. That way those of you with more experience than I can edit it and help us make you a decent guide.

Ok, here's the template on the wiki in the form of a guide for you all.

Edited, Sep 9th 2008 10:57am by Wordaen

Please, please don't do this in high level content (read that as anything at 70).

You start off by saying it will work most of the time, then say it's situational...

Coming from a tank and a healer I'd like to discourage you from running away from the tank. Seriously don't do it. I'm not saying that you can't stay alive while doing this (nor that there aren't rare occasions when this might be helpful) I'm saying you increase the chances of something going wrong needlessly in most situations. If a mob has broken CC or you have an add or one's pulled away from the tank etc, it is NOT your job as the healer to be dealing with them other than to ensure the tank can pick them back up as soon as possible (by using threat reducing talents etc), in fact in those situations you should be concentrating more on healing so the tank/dps/cc can take care of him. By trying to deal with it yourself you put you, and by virtue of that, the rest of the group at needless risk, it's frankly irresponsible healing in anything other than very specific circumstances (ranged casters for example).

Running away from the tank means he have to chase you further, if not to actually hit the mob, then in the case of paladin tanks Righteous Defense to get you in range so he can taunt or Blessing of Protection, warriors to intervene etc etc all of this will decrease the amount of time and thus threat he's building on his current target and can have a cascading bad effect. If it goes wrong, and you gotta admit this isn't a foolproof scheme you have, then you're going to have to use more abilities which will build more threat on this mob meaning the tank has to work even harder to get him off.

You might well get away with this in lower level dungeons but in level 70 content, heroics especially, seconds matter. If the tank doesn't need your full healing power on him while you're running around "playing" with this mob then he can most certainly be taking the damage from the mob in the first place, negating any need for you to "help out".

Fade first, if he goes back to the tank wonderful, if he goes for the dps, then they are usually better placed to deal with him than you.

If there's a loose mob you want him either CC'd or back on the tank asap, not running around between you and the tank while you should be focussing on him/her in the first place.

Edited, Sep 9th 2008 4:21pm by cococj