I mentioned the other day that I have myself on group healing for Chimaeron. A commenter, ambient, asked this:
You haven’t group healed on your paladin in ages…is there a reason you put the druid and priest on tank duties and gave both the paladins group assignments?
I put the resto druid and one of my disc priests on the two tanks because we’d tried resto druids on groups on our first night on Chimaeron and it didn’t work out amazingly. I like to have one disc on a tank on any given fight because she prefers tank healing while the other prefers raid healing.
So why give the paladins group assignments?
Walks, the other holy paladin in Apotheosis, loves group healing. I stick him on the raid and tell him to beacon a tank and while he’ll need some help to keep the tank up, he’s excellent at using Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance to their maximum effects to keep up raid healing. He’s also just a great healer in general and a very strong player. So I gave him the melee group (group 2). While he wasn’t going to use Light of Dawn on them, he was comfortable with healing a group.
I, on the other hand, was not, but, by golly, if Walks could do it, so could I! Or so I reasoned.
I went in to our second night of Chimaeron attempts (where we killed him) with a really sub-par spec for the encounter. I have two specs. My “primary” is one I don’t use often, actually, and is the one I use to switch up things. My “secondary” is a very safe tank healing spec where I don’t presume that all my Holy Power will go to Light of Dawn and where I have Eternal Glory and all that jazz.
My spec last week that I used for Chimaeron didn’t have Eternal Glory. Which is pretty fail. We won anyways, but I knew I could do better.
So this week, this was my spec: 31/5/5
A Tower of Radiance-less, Aura Mastery-less spec with Blessed Life, of all things, that still had Last Word, Eternal Glory and a bit of extra judgement range, since I knew I’d be standing with a ranged group. My glyphs were Holy Shock, Seal of Insight and Word of Glory, plus Divinity, Divine Protection and Salvation. I made a macro to bind my Divine Protection use to Holy Radiance, which I used on every Feud, so that I wouldn’t be a complete idiot and FORGET to use Divine Protection, as I am prone to doing. It happens when you see EVERYONE IN THE RAID at one health, you know?
With Word of Glory, Holy Shock, Infusion of Light procs for faster Holy Lights/Divine Lights and Daybreak procs, it’s really not too hard for a paladin to group heal. Your attention CANNOT waver, though. No blindly clicking your heal button on a single target while you look around the screen at various timers or indicators, nothing like that — at least, not for me. As soon as my attention would slip, people would die. (I did apologize to my party beforehand.)
So I was a lot more prepared last night, thanks to my screwy spec. I kept Light of Dawn over Aura Mastery because my plan was to have some Holy Power saved up to blast a Light of Dawn now and again on Feuds, but hey, that didn’t work out. At least I remembered my Holy Radiance!
Anyways, I did want to share that. And I do want to talk more about the state of paladin healing, but I’m not ready to tackle it yet. Part of that post will expand on the answer I’m about to give for the second of ambient’s questions:
Why is it that you hate PotI? Did you mean to say that you love it? Cos I can’t see what the downside of it is.
I hate passive healing. I loathe it. Can’t stand it. I think every single heal that I cast should be something I meant to cast. I resent that Protector of the Innocent automatically heals me and I hate that it transfers through the beacon. I am a huge fan of pre-emptive healing and reactionary healing, but passive healing? Not something I dig. I feel strongly that my heals should be measured, careful, decisions, not “oh here, here’s a free heal for you AND your beacon target!!!”.
And I’ll get into that some more when I eventually tackle a post about some different ways of paladin healing in Cataclysm. :)
Passive healing via PotI and Enlightened Judgements doesn’t feel great, but I’ve felt a lot better about it ever since I started thinking about two things:
1) Paladins aren’t for dying. Shaman can ankh, druids have Rebirth, and priests have a fail-angel. Paladin flavor demands we are durable.
2) Beacon is now 50% throughput. Getting a portion of that missing 50% back through self-healing and additional passive Beacon transfer seems like an acceptable trade. Extra happiness comes from tier 11 raid encounters demanding a lot more raid healing which makes passive self healing useful in a lot of circumstances.
I figure part of being a good raid healer is keeping yourself alive. Passive self healing means we have one less raid member to freak out about.
Like my Drill Sgt said “If you are not cheating, you are not trying hard enough”
PotI is not cheating but, if you do not “feel good” about it then it is close.
Healing is now more complicated and content is now more challenging. Until everyone I am healing gets up to speed and stops causing wipes, I am gonna use every trick I can find.
A win is a win.
I’m in agreement with Kurn regarding the passive healing. That said.. you’d pretty much be dumb not to take it. It helps out a lot and we *are* balanced around it. So we just have to take it. The 30% nerf is going to suck, only because now we’re going to require some attention from our other healers (or ourselves) that we didn’t need to before.
I’ve also been very tempted to not pick up LoD in my holy spec. Ever since the nerf to ToR and LoD after the first week or 2 weeks… I just haven’t really used it, except for in heroics after pulls when I’ve just felt lazy to not cast 4-5 HLs to top people off. It’s just.. not enough throughput. I’d rather spend that holy power on WoG, and hope for a proc. Especially when people are low, because if you get an EG proc, you’ll get 2 (hopefully) last word procs as well.
WoG is just far and away better than LoD now, to the point that I don’t want to use LoD. (all my opinion mind you) If 5 people are dmg’d, hey, it can save me gcds, but I don’t think it’s saving me mana or a good use of throughput. I have HS, WoG for instants and great throughput.
I’m actually quite a sad panda at the lack of use of LoD. I am in agreement that LoD required a nerf since that first week was retardedly easy, but I’m back on the other side of the fence saying it should go back to cd. At least then I’d use it! It’d be nice to decide “aoe vs. single target” but BoL pretty much determines which one I’ll use. LoD heals for a lot, and the xfer outheals WoG.. why would I ever use WoG? If WoG heals for 18k and crits for 24-28k, while LoD heals for 6, and crits for 9.. I mean.. why use it? EG procs really really help not only with movement, but throughput.
Bah, I’m rambling. So yeah.. passive healing is boring and bad for the game. Just like smart heals. My two cents.
I must live in a different world. I don’t think PotI is cheating, or wrong, or passive healing – it’s part of my heal. Honestly, if you consider PotI to be wrong, then Beacon must be wrong too. I just mentally add this to every heal I cast (the tooltip) “Heals your target for X, and heals your BOL target for X/2 + 3k”. Can you imagine our quality of life without BoL? Ugh. Personally I think the nerf to PotI is a bit much, but eh. What can you do.
I use the hell out of LoD on Nef, Chrom (fued only), Cho’Gal, and the twin dragons. Oh, and Maloriak and Atramedes. And Al’akir. Halfus depends on the drake comp. Oh, and Magmaw. I guess I’m saying I use LoD on 3/4 of the bosses, but a large portion of that may be because it’s 2 healer 10m raiding. 25m would probably be different.
I love the state of Paladin healing now. Not really looking forward to the 10% hit to our spell costs, but the DP buff will mean I actually use that regen tool and it’ll work out fine.
I’m not sure how much I like being a tank healer, but I appreciate getting to try something different since I obviously didn’t have a handle on raid/group healing. I *think* I did better being a tank healer for that fight.
I think overall the group-up assignments of who was doing what on which collapse helped make that entire fight easier to tolerate. I think mostly to time the cooldowns on different things, and I know I appreciated knowing when to save ToLawl, when to Tranquility, etc.
@adgamorix
You 2 heal 10m content? How do you keep your mana up if you don’t use DP? (I assume you don’t since you mention “actually use that regen tool”) I also don’t like to use LoD (again, in 10m content, 25 would be different) simply because we 3 heal fights so I’ve left AoE healing to the holy priest. I will use HR, but it’s not like I need to use it on cd or anything when he’s AoE healing.
How do you build your HP? Just DL and HS? Very curious how you 2 heal cho’gall, nef, and halfus. I assume you stack spirit and haste.
@Rahmiel
I use a liberal amount of judgement, spirit, and Tyrande’s doll. I put on just enough haste to drop my Holy Light under 2 seconds, and then went for crit. I practically live on Holy Light.
There were a few fights that we had to use three healers on at the start (Halfus, Double Dragons, and maybe Omnitron), and obviously we use 3 healers for Vortex and Nef (simply due to range).
I stack HP with Holy Shock and have started using Blessed Life for the bonus hits of HP.
Our raid is also different I think in that every class that can self heal, does – especially on Chimaeorn (this is basically everyone except the mage, boomkin, spriest, and hunter).
For Cho’gal we handle the fight like this. Everyone but the MT stacks on Cho’gal’s butt until an add comes out (for interrupts of MC’d players). I put BoL on the MT (who handles the adds), and I stay on the OT during that phase with BoL covering the MT. Our Holy Priest bounces spells around the raid, and I use Holy Radience a lot. Since I’m in melee range, I also sneak in my fair share of auto-attacks when I can – I generally pull in about 20k mana return that way.
cho’gal kill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnSIjw2TNuM
Armory – http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/stormscale/pistonhondo/simple
Cho’gal WoL – http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/ivaw1eyckgex0pbr/details/1/?s=4631&e=5054
@adgamorix
Awesome.. yeah I’m gearing the same way and I do love it. I really find crit and mastery to work really well together (much like spirit and haste). I’ve done cho’gall but only with 3 healers. I’ve also started up my own new raid group so naturally still using 3 healers. I’ll be interested in seeing if with some gear, we can shave down to 2 and perhaps “blow shit up” before we run oom.
I find I oom really fast if I use HR a lot, which is why I usually leave that up to the priests unless we really need the aoe healing (such as in the burn phase of cho’gall). Then again, I don’t normally stand in melee range of the boss. However I do judge when I can.
Anyway, thanks for the tips… will have to check out your vid to see who your other healer is. Is Blessed Life really worth it? I figured only direct dmg attacks, and only every 8 secs. Seems a little bit of a waste to me.
It’s not a question of “is it worth it”, it’s more like “Is it worth it over the OTHER talents”. As long as you have enough Spirit so that 1/2 in Enlightened Judgements gives you your hit cap, you can shave one point there, and one point out of Last Word. You’re giving up a little bit of a self heal on Judgement, and 30% crit for one spell, cast when a person is sub 35% HP (Awesome for Chimaeron). Looking at my logs from the whole night, I generated 610 HP from Shock, 92 from Eternal Glory, 91 from Blessed Life, and 70 from ToR. I’d say that it’s delivering. Is it “AMG AWESOME” – not really. But it is a few HP that I can use for something else.
I use HR selectively. Shadow phase on Cho’gal, or when he has shadow fists. Strikes on Magmaw, Atramedes after a pulse, etc. My co-healer was a resto druid, but now we use a Holy Priest.
I stand in melee range because we have 2/3 melee people (dep on num of tanks). This means I don’t need as many points in Judgement range, so I can put points elsewhere.
About heaing. Well, we use our own strategy for Chimaeron. Especially for tanks. We do not switch tanks. Instead we have an offtank, that taunts the boss only for few seconds to eat Double Attack debuff and then MT taunts boss back.
This allows us to simplify tank healing. We put Beacon (one on 10man, 2 on 25man) on MT and we heal only an OT. With this strat MT needs to be aways above 10k HP (and BoL fits perfectly here), but OT needs to have always 100% HP. We killed so Chimaeron without problems on 10man (Paladin kept both tanks without switching BoL/Targets), now we try to use the same strat for 25man. Mostly our tank healing paladins have also time to HS/WoG sometimes another ppls.