Resto Nation

I was doing some post-mortem analysis on last nights raids with another NO DRAMA officer this afternoon and the topic of10-man healing came up. As I was answering some of his questions I got to thinking about Raid Healing, DPSers,  and Recount.

A healers use of Recount tells a lot about them, their motivations, and often what they are doing wrong. Healers (and raid healing in general) are also misunderstood by many DPSers. Recount does not help this.

I’d like to take this oppertunity to shed a little light on raid healing in 10-man progression in general and the use of Recount. I hope his helps.

The first thing that it is important to understand is…

LearnToPray’s Golden Rule of Raid Healing :

1. If the Tank dies it is the Healer’s fault.

2. If the Healer dies it is the Tank’s fault.

3. If the DPS dies it is the DPS’s fault.

This rules applies pretty much only to threat but it is true 9 times out of 10. The main exception being infinite range raid damage phases like XT-002 Deconstructor’s Tantrum and KT’s Ice Block.

The next thing to understand is heal priority. This is the De Facto 10-man priority:

Special Assignment (ie Slag Pot or Kologarn’s Grip) > Self > Tanks > Other Healers > DPS

So barring extra mechanics the highest priority DPS starts at #6. They do not like this. However it is the right call.

With 5 DPS who gets the first heal? This is where decisions about life and death are made. A good healing team will know each other and have a good idea of who is going to heal whom. However, if one of the healers in unavailable or a number of other factors occur a healer must decide on the spot.

This is what separates good healers from bad healers and makes great healers irreplaceable. Healers should ALWAYS have Recount running. Recount should ALWAYS be on Damage Done for the current fight. This shows you the top toons’ total damage on the boss as well as their DPS.

Your choice is now made for you. If DPS A has 3K DPS and DPS B has 1.5K DPS and both are at 15% health, DPS A gets the heal while DPS 2 eats the floor. This also gives DPSers a reason other than e-peen to top the charts.

As a healer you should be a inherently selfless team player. This is not always true. Healers who try and “top the charts” through Effective Heals or Lowest Overheals are not playing correctly and will hurt the raid by trying to be “better”.

As long as you don’t run out of mana, over healing is never a problem. Waiting to heal and under-healing to is a problem.

Assignment sniping, stepping on HoTs, and going OoM from spamming group heals all increase your Effective Heals at the expense of better play.

Healers with huge e-peens also tend to cause drama and get their feelings hurt. In rare cases healers will let other players die out of spite on a progression run. If I ever hear of this or know it is happening, that player is dead to me. They will be immediately gkicked, ignored, and banned for life. I have zero tolerance with that.

Another reason to not measure healers by only Recount numbers is beacause it is the same as DPS. Healers do two things: Heal (add numbers back to HP), and Mitigate (prevent numbers from being subtracted from HP). Recount only tracks Heals not Mitigation, which is actually better. This kills the overall numbers of Discipline specced Priests and 52 / 17 / 2 specced Holy Paladins.

Due to Beacon of Light and Glyph of Holy Light Holy Paladins also run an average of 50-60 % overheal. Resto Shamans also have large overheal with Chain Heal being the 3 or 4 closest toons. Druids do as well as their HoTs are commonly sniped and Living Seed is almost always and overheal.

I hope this post makes healers not already in the know better and the rest of the raid more understanding and knowledgeable.

Oh, and one last thing: Yes, every time you ask, we already know you need heals…

In the post-patch 3.1 world much has changed with skills and talent trees. This series of guides is designed to offer commentary on common end-game specs for seasoned players and dual-speccers alike.

Retribution Paladins in end-game PVE are all about one thing: DPS. Your goal as a  Ret Pally is to find the nearest face where you can smash your mace without killing yourself from recoil damage in the process.

Things have changed in 3.1. Physical damage is up while insane burst from Judgments has been nerfed.  While this is bad news for PVP, it is neutral if not slightly better for PVE.

The basic “first available priority cool-down” Rotation still applies. Skills are roughly the same and Seal of Blood really is the only choice.

The best current spec for PVE Raiding is 0/17/54.

This gives you every talent in the Retribution tree except for Seal of Command, which you are not using anyway, and the PVP talents which are useless against a Raid Boss.

The real newness comes from the Protection Tree and two great new mechanics. Both of them have to do with mitigating the biggest killer or Retribution Paladins, recoil damage.

The first is Divinity. On the face it looks as if it just buffs healing you receive by 5%. Good, not really great. The fact is that when you use Judgment of Light, every tick that heals the raid is considered healing done by you. Add this together and JoL is now 5% better for all Melee in the raid.

The second mechanic is that Divine Guardian now makes your Sacred Shield last one minute and increases the amount absorbed by 20%. This compounds with the fact that Sacred Shield as of 3.1 now scales with Sheath of Light. This basically means that keeping up SS will mitigate a great deal of the recoil damage caused by Seal of Blood.

The bottom line here is that a dead Paladin produces zero DPS.

This spec also gives Retribution Paladins the ability for Raid wide damage mitigation through Divine Sacrifice.

Three other talents that are important to understand are Improved Blessing of Might, Toughness, and Improved Righteous Fury.

Improved Blessing of Might is the single best blessing a Ret Pally can have.  Here is the math of IBoM vs. Blessing of Kings assuming base STR of 1605 and AP of 4701:

Blessing of Kings: + 353 AP > 25.2 DPS

Improved Blessing of Might: + 756 AP > 54 DPS

Two Points in Toughness decreases the duration of all slowing effects by 12%. This means your mace hits their face more often, thus more DPS. The 4% increase in armor is a nice bonus as well.

Two Points in Improved Righteous Fury decreases all damage done to you by 6%. However, Righteous Fury increases all threat from Holy spells by 90%.

Ret Paladins have a hard enough time with threat as it is. This should only be activated when using Divine Sacrifice to sink damage.

Righteous Fury + Avenging Wrath + Consecration =  Dead Paladin (see above for Dead Paladin DPS)

Did Retribution Paladins get the nerf bat? Without a doubt.

Can they still top the meters with this spec? Absolutely.

Move over, I would argue that they now have much more survivability and bring more utility to the raid.

Check back soon for part 3 of the 3.1 Spec analysis when I return to my leveling roots, The Tankadin.

Also make sure not to miss Part One of the Series: Healadins.

In the post-patch 3.1 world much has changed with skills and talent trees. This series of guides is designed to offer commentary on common end-game specs for seasoned players and dual-speccers alike.

In part one of 3.1 Spec Analysis I am covering the role that is nearest to my heart, Healadins.

The currently popular specs fall into two different schools of thought:

Crit and HPS (think Holy Priest): Sanctity of Battle, Divinity

Damage Mitigation (think Discipline Priest): Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian

Sanctity of Battle (51/0/20)

Holy: SoB is very much like the crit heavy pre-3.1 spec used by most PVE Healadins. It takes most of the Holy tree, avoiding PVP talents and cleansing buffs.

Although Improved Blessing of Wisdom does not stack with a Mana Totem, the renewed focus on mp5 makes it worth taking for times when there is no Shaman in your group. Aura Mastery and Blessed Hands are situational at best and should also be avoided. In the Retribution tree Benediction is a clear winner. After this pick up the three Crit enhancers for a total of 8% Chance to Crit (367.2 crit rating).

 Improved Blessing of Might is the best thing you can offer any Melee DPS, even better than Blessing of Kings.

Pursuit of Justice offers a base movement increase which, as most raiders know, is invaluable.

The Rough Math vs. No Talents:  +9 Spell Crit, + 16 Spell Haste, + 3984 Heal Per Second, + 12.87 Heal Per Mana.

Divinity (51/5/15)

Holy: Divinity uses the same Holy Tree as Holy:SoB, however it modifies the other trees to trade burst healing (Crit) for fight healing (Throughput).

In the Retribution tree Sanctity of Battle and Pursuit of Justice are both not taken. This frees up 5 points.

Those 5 points are put in the Protection Tier-1 replacement for BoK, Divinity.

The tool tip on Divinity looks as though it is a clear choice, however as Healadins are usually Main Tank healers I find burst healing much better than overall throughput.

I also like Pursuit of Justice due to the numerous movement fights ( Sartharion, Heigen, Thaddius, etc.).

The Rough Math vs. Holy:SoB: -3 Spell Crit, Same Spell Haste, +68 HPS, + .23 HPM

Divine Sacrifice (52/14/5)

Holy: DS is built from the popular (and over-powered) Healadin Arena Season 5 spec. It is all about mitigation. The thought is that there are some situations where you can not heal through damage. There are events like Sartharion + 3 Drakes and Ulduar hard mode fights where if the Tank takes all the damage he will die no matter how many heals you throw.

This spec uses the same base 51 point Holy Tree as the other builds and adds Aura Mastery for its situational use during Fire, Frost, and Shadow Resist Auras.

The spec bypasses the Crit in the Retribution Tree but takes the 5 points in Benediction.

The other 14 points are spent to get you to Divine Sacrifice, the paladin mitigation talent in the Protection tree.

Along the way Divinity to help with self heals during a non-bubbled or half-bubbled DS and pick up some of the throughput lost from Retribution.

The tier two talents are largely PVP talents and are taken to meet the tier three requirements, as you don’t need the extra dodge.

Tier 3 gives you Divine Sacrifice and Improved Righteous Fury for the additional self-mitigation.

This spec should only be considered as a main spec for very well geared healers in the most bleeding edge content.

Divine Guardian (52/17/2)

Holy:DG is a more extreme version of Holy:DS.

3 points are sacrificed from Benediction to get 1 point in Toughness and 2 points in Divine Guardian, both in the Protection tree.

Conclusion

At Tier 7 and 7.5 Holy:SoB is going to be the best. As you progress to the point where you can get more than 24% Crit from gear Divinity starts to make more sense. The argument for Divinity gets even better the more Crit you get from gear. 

Once you have cleared Ulduar on normal mode and begin to go for hard modes and achievements your gear should be sufficient to go with Holy:DS or Holy:DG. Both would be a valid choice, however the most extreme content should be done with Holy:DG.

If you want to dual spec two PVE healing specs based on situation need then one spec from each of the two schools, based on gear level, would be a fine choice.

If you are a Retadin or Tankadin dual specing heals with off-spec gear use Holy:Divinity as your other gear should have excess Crit.

Stay tuned, next time I will be exploring my dual spec choice, Retadin.