Getting destroyed by trees and palliesFollow

(If this comes off as snarky, that is entirely not the idea.)

Are people dying to things linked to your healing? If not, then don't worry about healing meters.

Meters just give a number, and numbers don't mean anything without context. I am unfamiliar with the fight (been taking a break since it came out), but if you are seriously looking over your healing and not seeing anything in dire need of correction for that fight, then don't worry about so much.

And if your raid leaders asks you about your healing, tell him about everything you've looked through and thought about for the encounter. Any leader worth their salt will keep you around if only because you saw that it might be a problem and took steps to correct it on your own.

First things first;

-Your crit seems paltry, even for holy.
-You've got a good 2.5K less mana than me, 10% less crit, 100 less MP5 and the same amount of spellpower but nearly 5 times the amount of haste I have.
-Flash Heal accounts for an abnormaly large amount of your heals; 30% on most fights and up to 50% on some.

Your problem is that you're trying to be a utilityless walking HP5 buff A) on fights where druids fulfill this position better than holy priests and B) with severe emphasis on Flash Heal. The two don't really mix. If you want to forego stuff like Body & Soul and Inner Focus and focus purely on the healing, you need to be using a lot more CoH, PoH and ProM and a lot less Flash Heal (and a little less Renew, too). You need to make up your mind first; if you want to go the "LAWL HEALZ" path you need to drop Empowered Healing and the glyph of Flash Heal and focus on your AOE spells (I.E. grab Holy Reach, Test of Faith and possibly that second point in Surge of Light), and if you want to go the utility path (and thus use Flash Heal more than usual) you need to... grab utility talents.

Aside from that, you will probably want to drop some haste. 25% means that with the 6% raid buff shamans give you'll be just below the soft cap (33%, where your GCD goes down to 1 second) permanently, before even considering other [more situational] buffs. Especially with the amount of Flash Heals you seem to use, this is bad. I'd drop all the way to 19% if I were you (which means you'll still be on 25% with the shaman buff) and turn that loss of 6% haste into a gain of 6% crit.

That said, we're already talking about a pretty severe case of min/maxing here as you're still doing more than fine and the fights you score low on (Festergut and Rotface) are fights that particularly favour druids.

I cannot speak to the fights you're doing so don't take any comments I have as advice but just thoughts. In general if you're going to stack more crit and focus on AOE healing I would think Surge of Light and Holy Reach are both completely not negotiable at all ever. With SoL it's not about mana but about the instant Flash Heal. With a lot of crit you'll be getting one pretty much every time you throw down a CoH, which will most likely be every time it's on cooldown.

I have not raided in a long while and it could be completely different now, but when I was raid healing I found the synergy between those two talents, CoH, and Flash Heal to be crucial. I rarely if ever cast a Flash that wasn't SoL instant and free. It was pretty much a regular round of CoH, free Flash, PoM, Renew & Dispel until CoH is off cooldown, rinse, repeat. I also loved the Dispel glyph as a raid healer, considering how much dispelling I was usually called on to do. It's not a huge boost but it can make a difference.

Exactly - haste allows for more snipe heals which will be beneficial for your spot on the meters up to a certain point. Eventually, you sniping away all single target heals isn't going to account for the huge amount of raid healing druids (or Hp5-buff holy priests) will do with their AOE heals. Also, Flash Heal is valuable, just not as valuable as you seem to make it - as holy your emphasis should (especially on fights like Rotface/Festergut) be on AOE heals. The way you're playing holy is basically the way a disc priest plays on fights like Marrowgar.


Actually, I was slightly surprised by this at first, until I figured out you put such a huge emphasis on Flash Heal and had it glyphed and talented. I don't suppose you've ever done the really hard fights like heroic Anub, Algalon or Mimiron HM? Or even Iron Council HM? Those were the only fights I had slight mana problems on when not managing my cooldowns well enough and taking a potion, but I've got a feeling your gearing wouldn't hold it at all there. Also, you're welcome =)


I can see very well where you're coming from Tea, and am I right in saying that the last time you raided was before the Serendipity change? What you're describing now is (apart from the Renew & Dispel) an optimal 'rotation' in fights with heavy AOE damage, though right now you're more likely to cast a couple of non-instant Flash Heals every now and then. At our best, a holy priest counters a burst of AOE damage with ProM+3X Flash before the burst, and then hastened PoH > Instant Flash > CoH > Instant Flash > (Flash >) hastened PoH > CoH > ProM. Shamefully Renew completely loses its use when things get really dicy and the GCD it costs is no longer worth it.

I have not done Algalon or Anub HM on 25, but have done Anub HM on 10, IC HM on 25 and Mimiron HM on 10 and 25...still rarely if ever have mana problems. That said I'm still looking for ways to increase MP5, as this was your suggestion, but my priority for the moment is on crit.

To be clear, I intend to give your suggestion a good faith effort and see how it works for me. I don't want to "backtrack" gear wise to get more crit or MP5, but I will look for gear w/ these qualities going forward and see how it works. I've changed the spec, regemmed as much as I am comfortable with for now...and I'm sure there will be a learning curve (hopefully a short one). I'll let you know how it goes :)

Thanks again :)

Edited, Jan 18th 2010 12:33pm by margeux

Well, on another note, if you are absolutely sure you will not have mana problems even on intensive encounters (Try Val'kyr twins heroic on 10-man as a benchmark), mp5 loses all its value and spirit loses half of it which means you shouldn't go for it and possibly even avoid it. Spirit and more specifically mp5 are the only two stats that have a hard cap that changes depending on your group make up, encounter and playstyle and it's never a bad thing to keep that in mind. Ideally you end each fight just as you run out of mana, but seeing as that's impossible (gearing for fights like Jaraxxus mana-wise would ensure you ran OOM within minutes on fights like Deathwhisper or Marrowgar) the 'hard cap' is set on the hardest encounters in the game.


Great, be sure to keep us updated, I'm curious how it'll work out for ye =)

As a little update on this, now what I've done Festergut on 10 and 25-man and Rotface on 10-man: I wouldn't worry about your healing done as a holy priest on either of those fights, as unlike it might seem at the start, they all favour any other class than a holy priest.

Holy priests are specialized in healing up bursts quickly by launching a hasted PoH when needed, colliding it with a CoH while ProM is jumping around. And ideal fight for us is one like Kologarn, with a large AOE burst every 30 seconds. Both Festergut and Rotface have raid damage going on constantly. In Festergut's case this is actual AOE damage, which means that the constant AOE damage can be countered by a druids' constant HOTs, and on Rotface this means that people with quick single target heals (paladins and disc priests) are going to snipe the heals away from you on the targets who get the disease while the AOE damage that is present in the encounter is so constant the druids are going to get all that healing done. On both fights the larger part of the raid is stacked up on the boss which means that a paladin's Glyph of Holy Light is going to earn him sh*ttons of healing. In addition to this, Festergut also slightly favours disc priests because literally every shield they cast is going to get full absorbs.

In the end, the only class you'll be able to compete with meter-wise are resto shamans. And even they have a slight edge over you because Chain Heal is a smart heal.

So when all is said and done, what I've said still stands, but I really wouldn't worry about the meters on these two fights. They are very ingenious in that the massive AOE damage appears to favour holy priests at first glance, but end up favouring every class that isn't a holy priest.

Edit: And in less than 3 hours I find myself at least partially eating my own words - scrolling through all our Festergut attempts on Worldoflogs, I do notice I managed to end up second on one try; a try where I cast pretty much nothing else than Prayer of Healing. Which means both my previous points would still partly work, though (if your manapool can somehow take it) foregoing Flash Heal altogether for pure PoH spamming does seem to be a more effective technique for that fight.

Edited, Jan 29th 2010 5:40am by Mozared