Resto Nation

Having just recently gotten back into blogging I have not as of yet been tagged for this meme. I’ll go ahead and do it anyway!

1Q: What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
1A: Koramoor, Paladin, PVE Holy 51/5/15 and PVP Holy 51/20/0

2Q: What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
2A: Raids 10 Hard and 25 Normal, I also PVP heal BGs and 5v5

3Q: What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
3A: Beacon Of Light. With patch 3.2 is in insanely powerful.

4Q: What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
4A: Holy Shock. I love it, I glyph it, I should use it more. I seem to always catch it on cool down.

5Q: What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
5A: Tank Heals. With the buff to Beacon a good Paladin can heal 2 tanks at the same time in normal mode encounters. Plus our raw thoughput is huge.

6Q: What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
6A: Group heals. We have none. Period. Beacon and Divine Sacrifice don’t count.

7Q: In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
7A: In most fights it is Main Tank heals with OT or “Special” assist (ie Ignis Pouch, Lord J’s Incerenate Flesh, etc.)

8Q: What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
8A: My Discipline Priest. She is the most fun to play and love the mechanics. If I wasn’t so attached to Koramoor, Koramaar would be my main.

9Q: What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
9A: Shaman. I love the idea of it, but I hate the totem mechanic.

10Q: What is your worst habit as a healer?
10A: Not trusting my fellow healers.

11Q: What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
11A: With other healers it is not taking care of their assignment. With DPS it is standing in fire and running out of range. With tanks it is chain pulling.

12Q: Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
12A: Yes, I think healer balance is pretty good right now.

13Q: What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
13A: Recount and World of Logs.

14Q: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
14A: That we are two button healers. I use 18.

15Q: What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
15A: The value of Sacred Shield. Refresh it every 30/60 seconds. Really do it.

16Q: 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)?
17A: Top of the Healing Done and Overhealing Charts.

18Q: Haste or Crit and why?
18A: Haste. Speed is life. Holy Light takes forever to cast.

19Q: What healing class do you feel you understand least?
19A: Shamans, I just don’t play mine as much as I should.

20Q: What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
20A: I use Grid and Clique. I also have 15 mouse-over macros bound to my Logitech G-13.

21Q: Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
21A: Right now I stack INT because it is just still too good. I’ll keep stackin until Blizz gives me a reason not to.

Since he has not posted it yet, I’ll go ahead and tag Hikari from Lowered Expectations… even though he is a belf…

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…

Hi all. Busy day so I don’t have a lot of time to post, but I wanted to let everyone know that after some RL difficulties Siha from BananaShoulders.com has returned!

I can not begin to tell you how much I have learned about how to be a healadin from Siha. Her site is a wealth of great resources. If you’re a Holy Paladin you need to read this site at least twice a week.

Here are a couple links to some of her best posts:

Holy Paladin Pre-Raid Gear List

Gemming Your Holy Paladin

Holy Paladin Gear Enhancements 101

Spellpower and You: Gearing in WotLK

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.