Priest healing is hacks. No joke, no lie, Circle of Healing, Renew, Prayer of Mending, all total hacks. I love it.
I completely blew up the healing according to WWS in my first-ever guild raid on my priest on Proudmoore. No joke. #2 on the night, with 15% of the heals. #1, a very geared resto shammy with 24% of heals. #3 was the healing officer, a holy paladin (I swear, she’s pretty much the equivalent of me over in that guild) with 15% of the heals (I beat her by 23k healing). Rounding off the bottom three; a shammy healer, another Circle of Healing priest and a resto druid. I should note all of these people, barring the other CoH priest, have more +healing than I do, and the other priest is around my level.
Sn the Maulgar death, I was third, behind Great Resto Shammy and Healing Officer. Same on the Gruul death.
Circle of Healing cannot possibly be so overpowered that I’m outhealing GOOD resto shammies or GOOD resto druids, so I’m wondering what’s up with them. Lack of experience, maybe? I mean, I’ve done Maulgar and Gruul so many times that I can recite the kill order without thinking, I can talk about the debuffs/silences/adds ’till the cows come home without batting an eyelash… So when the Healing Officer asked if I could watch the hunters on Kiggler, I was like, haha, sure. I wound up off-healing one of the warlock tanks, too, and then ran up to help heal the mage and the MT on Maulgar.
And the funniest thing happened when I turned to start healing the tank on Maulgar.
I actually ran out of mana. And my mana potions were on cooldown!
Now, see, as a holy paladin, I run out of mana. I do. But like, a second later, I have enough to cast a reasonably good-sized flash of light. And if it crits, I can almost immediately cast another one. Plus I have Divine Favor, Divine Intervention… I have so many ways to get off another cast that I am almost never in the situation where I can do absolutely nothing. But I was, tonight, on my priest. Because, you know what? Renew, Circle of Healing and Flash Heal are frickin’ expensive compared to pally heals! And logically, I know that, but now I know it practically as well.
So there I was, just about to pop my shadowfiend and send it over to chew on Maulgar, when I hear someone on Vent ask for an innervate for me.
And I got one.
And… it actually did something. My OOC mana regen is pretty sick in the face, considering I have all of 1650 healing with the healing food buff. I think the last time my pally got an innervate was when a druid of ours got bored during an Illhoof kill and he saw I was more than halfway through my mana. Which is as it should be, really. But it still surprised me to get an innervate tonight. :)
So on Gruul, where I have always healed the MT or the OT, I got the following assignment:
“heal around, heal everyone you can”
Coming from my perspective, healing the crap out of people by running around and casting renews, circles of healing, the occasional flash… it’s tremendously awesome. Traditionally, I stand there on my pally and don’t move for anything, not even Cave-Ins, unless we’re past Grow 4 or 5. Even then, I occasionally bubble. And I spam the living crap out of the tanks.
Tonight, I gloriously ran around Gruul’s room, tossing renews, throwing out circles, prayers of mending on the tank and off-tank. I’d keep renews up on both for the silences. And I didn’t blow anyone up at all, which I was a little wary of, since I can’t bubble out of the slow effect from the upcoming Shatter after a Ground Slam. But it was all good!
We one-shotted him and Teeth of Gruul dropped, as well as my T4 pants. I won the necklace when the Not So Awesome Shammy Healer passed to me, due to the spirit on it. And then I won the roll on the pants, but told them it was okay and I would pass for someone else’s main-spec and our feral druid got his pants, which were a nice upgrade for him.
All of this happened on Tuesday night, after 45+ minutes of lag and errors retrieving character lists caused us to call our raid on Eldre’Thalas. It’s weird, it’s like RIGHT when we were trying to get into the instance, the server literally took a dump on us. It just wasn’t meant to be tonight, I guess. Which is okay by me, because I got to play with my new guild.
I need to talk to Healing Officer a bit about the way people are organized and some gear some people have (there’s a prot pally who has a non-spell-damage weapon with Deathfrost on it as his tanking weapon, and is using a Lamellar Chestpiece for his tanking chest…) but I kind of like these folks. The downside is that one of the guildies, when speaking on Vent, sounds almost exactly like one of my exes…
I’m excited for our next raid, which should be Wednesday night. Off to SSC, with any luck!
It’s kind of weird; I feel so inadequate about healing on my priest because my pally has nearly 2k healing unbuffed, but I think I could probably out-heal my pally on the priest. Apparently, I know something about healing.