As we set up positioning I am constantly spamming my PoH to make sure my group is always in range of me so that none of them dies from that lovely little debuff of low health (creative name there blizzard). With the increased effectiveness of CoH I am able to cover two groups with ease, allowing more heals to be focused towards the tanks. Until the last phase I spend my entire time in my AoE heal stance to get the bonus effectiveness of it, the lower CD on CoH, along with the benefit to renew which I always place on all 3 tanks during the fight.

So I use healbot (OMG what a baddie :P) and make a customized debuff called “low health”, this way when any raid member is in the “oh sh*t might die zone” their raid frame turns pitch black for me, and only once they are healed up to above 10k do they go back to normal on my screen, it helps me track it a little better rather than number watching. Generally I use binding heals on single targets to gain Serendipity for when 3 or more in a group get the debuff so I gain the hasted Prayer of Healing. Binding heal is one of the best spells in the game for this fight as a priest, for one it guarantees that I am always in the safe zone, for two it gains Serendipity as I already mentioned, and lastly it is a fast cast. Often there is the situation where 2 in one group have the debuff and 3 in my other group have it, this is where priest OPness comes into play. I ALWAYS have at least one stack of serendipity up at all times so i do a power PoH on one group and CoH the other, BAM everyone is safe. Mastery plays a huge part in this fight due to the fact that if someone I just healed gets the debuff again, they have my mastery and my glyph of PoH ticking on them right away, sometimes making my life easier not having to direct heal them again.

Prayer of Mending on this fight is a bit tricky, sometimes it is great and bouncing between all 3 tanks repeatedly and other times it’s being useless and sitting on a random player. So during the “spread out” phase it isn’t my number one priority to keep on cd. If you don’t know the fight it looks deceiving for the healing department but truth be told there is a lot of down time for regen, which is great :). I have adopted the role of guardian spirit on the main tank  for Feuds 1 and 3. In theory this sounds great but blizzard can’t be relied on to make the encounters timers span apart perfectly so sometimes it is a little touch and go but for the most part it works out great.

For the Feud I place my Sanctuary circle, start running and apply GS/renew as I make my way to the group up point. I discovered the addon Recount hated this fight so I always have it disabled or else I am in a lag fest for when we group up. Once there I use CoH, one binding heal followed by PoH, rinse and repeat on all the groups. I am so proud of my guild members because I have an alert set up to tell me who clicked my lightwell and during that phase it is constantly going off! Directly after the first shut down I use my trinket to return ~6k mana to bump me back up a little bit. I also use shadow fiend fairly early to ensure I can use it twice, usually the 2nd time is during Mortality.
Our raid leader has it set up for when all the players with healing cds (tranquility, divine hymn, etc) should use them, I am not going to lie, when it is my turn and the group appears to be doing fine on heals I save Divine Hymn for the time right before we hit mortality. This is all dependent on if we fell behind on healing during the shutdowns. I don’t recommend doing this for fear your raid leader will have your head, mine likes me I think so when he reads this I won’t be in too much trouble :P.

Alright so we just transitioned into mortality. Here is our disc priest’s time to shine. Due to the high mana cost of the shields he throws out we have a rotation of Hymn of Hope set up so he can continuously spam. For this specific encounter I always glyph smite so that I can think I am helping a little bit. To be honest I have no idea how much my dps contributes during this phase due to the fact its around 2k but it makes me feel better and useful so I just don’t care. I usually pick a spot near the wall so that I can life grip one of Chimaeron’s targets away from him to buy us some time and then proceed to dot/smite/chastise until he is dead or I am dead. Depending how the disc priests mana looks I may or may not bubble myself to let him focus on others.
If you are a priest struggling to do this fight or just hate it, hopefully after reading this you may think of it differently on how well designed it is for a holy priest!

We still have a 2 week wait until Cataclysm goes live. And so it is time to keep up the blogging, this time we’ll talk about one of the most controversial changes implemented on this expansion: Healing.

For over two years, you could say we got spoiled with a really bad healing model. For the most part every single class depended on a couple of spells. Because mana pools and regeneration got out of control and because health pools and healing numbers just didn’t match at all.

Healing on World of Warcraft became a game of who could watch the green bars go down, and heal them the quickest. Haste got so ridiculously high that you would always use your most expensive spell, with a really short (if not instant) cast and get away with it every single time. Restoration druids became rejuvenation machines, disc priests forgot about everything but shields, and so on.

A good healer was the one who could move away from bad stuff while topping people off right away. And if you screwed up your job, people would die in a second, maybe two. Because in order to challenge the high amounts of healing going on, blizzard simply had to make us take that much damage instead. That is how we went from easy Naxxramas on 3.0, to Enraged Shamblers one shotting tanks with 90k health on heroic lich king.

However things change. And in my opinion, this time blizzard changed things for the better in regards to healing. Health pools have massively inflated. From having about 40k health average on tier 10, players have about 110k health on tier 11 gear (that’s more than 100% if you’re bad at math like I am). However the healing numbers have barely changed.

AoE healing really was nerfed hard. Those spells are now cost inefficient to spam, and if you play anything like you do right now on live, you will go out of mana within less than 30 seconds on Cataclysm.  Haste is no longer out of control, so we have a lot of long casts. And you can forget about instantly topping people off. It takes time.

It looks pretty bad doesn’t it? I have to be pretty honest… my first 2 weeks healing on beta I felt like things were out of control. Healing was dead. How could they possibly screw up healing so much? Rejuv spamming was dead, I could not even keep my party at full health during an encounter. Most of the time they were hovering in between 20 and 80% health. It felt like a very slow race against impending doom, because no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible to keep people at full health. I felt like I was drowning.

But then I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It took me a few weeks to adjust, but now Im absolutely in love with the new healing model. You have to know what spell to cast, and when to cast it. I was actually using most of the spells on my hand, I had to manage my mana really carefully, and rather than complain, it makes me sad when I play live as a healer, because all I do is spam rejuvenation and wild growth on cooldown. It feels dumb…. and boring. I do sincerely wonder how the hell we managed to not get bored after 2 years of mashing those 2 buttons every single raid.

With the new massive health pools, and the new healing coheficients, raid damage has been adjusted properly. Your raid members will not die because you casted your spell .2 seconds later. Your raid members will die because you did a poor desicion, and you used your mana efficient spell, rather than your quick inefficient spell. Your raid members might die because you spammed your quick inefficient spell the first minute of the fight and now you have no more mana, or similar reasons.

I have to be honest, it will take some time to adjust. Healing will feel much slower, because you won’t be able to fill up those green bars instantly like you have been doing the past 2 years, and you will feel severely punished because mana matters now. But if you give it some time, you will learn that a good player will always manage to adjust and learn how to take advantage of things. Mana will still be a resource you have to manage, but if you play properly, and put some thought behind your spell desicions, you should not run out of mana, at least not because you did something wrong.

Bad healers will no longer be able to hide under infinite mana pools like they have for the past 2 years. Good healers will shine more than ever… in 2 weeks. Until then, have fun with the shattering!

Well that’s interesting….

I loved the down ranking / mana management play style for healers which became necessity in Vanilla.  I think that down ranking developed an unfair reputation as being too easy while the mana management naysayers would always complain about having to stand around not casting to gain mana.  To counter the first argument of down ranking being “easy”, it was only easy in the fact that you could choose the spell/tool which best fit the requirements of the situation.  I had three ranks of Heal (1,2,3), two ranks of Flash Heal (4,7), and three ranks of Greater Heal (1,3,5) on my bar  … wow I did those ranks by memory.  Each spell gave me varied levels of healing and speed.  This definitely made healing easier, but only in the same way using a screwdriver on a screw is easy than using a hammer for a carpenter.  Down ranking allowed you to use the most appropriate tool for the situation.

Mana management and the five second rule allowed for someone to stop casting and regen mana.  This was a “boring” play style because it “promotes doing nothing”, that’s as far from the truth as you can get.  Any good healer in Vanilla used stop casting macros or stopped casts on their own when they were unneeded.  So when I spent 15-20s regenning mana out of the 5 second rule it wasn’t because I wasn’t casting any spells or engaged in the encounter, it was because I had strung together a number of cancelled casts and/or used inner focus and clear casting procs.  In fact I’d venture to say that I cast MORE spells and was MORE honed in on the incoming damage and healing requirements of an encounter because I was constantly casting and stop casting spells, lettings casts complete when necessary and cancelling when the healing wasn’t needed.

This was an engaging system which gave you multiple tools and a very healthy set of risk/reward choices which ultimately required intense concentration and understanding of the encounter mechanics.

Sure, you could mindlessly spam Heal rank 2 and never go OOM, but spamming a 1k slow heal wasn’t always best for every situation.  You could also platoon healers and heal in “waves”, spending half your time afk regenning mana, but practicing constant casting with cancelling would result in a much more successful and fun play experience

You could do either of those things, but if you did you really didn’t heal as well as you could have.  That’s a fact.  And it’s the misconceptions spread by those “bad” play styles which led to Blizzard killing down ranking in the first place.

I look forward to a system and philosophy which attempts to mimic down ranking.  However I wonder whether simply introducing one spell will accomplish this.

The best spell in Vanilla was Heal rank 2.  This was the smallest/slowest spell which still benefited 100% from spell power on gear, back then blizzard used a funky system based on the level you learned the spell and your current level to calculate how each spell scaled with SP.

Here is a post I made almost 4 years ago about down ranking and Heal 2.

Matron – Jun 12 2006 LoD Priest Boards

“What is a second worth to you?

In WoW a second as a healer is sometimes all it takes to watch your tank go from full health to zero health. It’s scary how fast it happens sometimes.

However, on most occasions there are multiple healers on the MT, so they’ll be getting heals from a number of people. It’s in these cases where you really have to ask yourself how much a second is worth to you as a priest?

My point is as follows. Priests have two spells that they cast, at least two lengths of spells. 1.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds. Recently I’ve become quite enamored with the 2.5 second spells for a number of reasons.

My main goal as a healer is to fire off as many 1,000 point heals as I can. 1,000 is a decent goal and about what the max rank flash heal will do. So I needed to find a 2.5 second spell that heals for about the same. You won’t find it under the greater heals, they’re much too big. But if you look all the way back to your “Heal” spell you’ll find that around rank 2 you’ll start healing for 1,000 hp again. You learned this spell around level 20, but it’s a most useful tool at level 60 as well.

The difference between rank 2 Heal and rank 7 Flash heal? One second and 206 mana.

Rank 2 Heal – 174 mana – 2.5 seconds
Flash Heal 7 – 380 mana – 1.5 seconds

So here’s what you’re doing when you cast flash heal, you’re paying over double the mana cost for 1 second off your heal time. Now this is appropriate in certain situations, such as a crit on the main tank, but for 90% of the healing you’ll be doing in MC or BWL that one second is not needed.

I mean, how many times has a rogue pulled agro and taken a single shot from a mob and then the tank regains control? In this situation the rogue isn’t going to be taking any more damage for a while, it was a freak occurrence that they pulled agro at all. Why pay double mana to heal them one second faster?

My point is this… there are many times where one second doesn’t matter at all for healers. There isn’t any reason to pay TWICE the mana cost for the same amount of healing. You’re paying for the quickness of flash heal when you don’t need it.

If you start using Heal rank 2, you’ll see that your mana pool goes a lot farther than it once did, especially on boss fights that are long. Geddon, Golemagg, Domo, Rags, Kurinaxx, Rajaxx, the Drakes, Chrom, Nef…. All very long fights where going oom early is a really bad thing. Instead of holding back on healing, to save mana, instead switch methods. It’ll allow you to heal and conserve mana.”

Here is the problem I see with introduction of a 2.5s Heal spell… combined with haste and the upcoming slowing of raid damage, it is going to murder Flash Heal.  Heal2 murdered FH in Vanilla, why heal the same amount for more than twice the mana cost?  Damage didn’t come fast enough that 1s mattered.

Given haste levels the difference between FH and Heal is going to be LESS than one second.  In what meaningful situation will you require a 1s heal rather than a 1.6s heal which costs far less mana?  Never!

So by introducing a slower smaller spell Blizzard is going to kill Flash Heal.  I’m of the GH school of thought, I prefer a slightly slower but more powerful/efficient spell to expensive and “quick” spells, so I don’t really mind our focus moving away from flash heal.

But if Blizzard really wants to make healing more dynamic and interesting introducing this one spell is not the way to do it.  What made Vanilla interesting was that I had 8 single target spells of varying levels of healing, mana efficiency, and speed on my bar.  Often times damage would become more intense as a boss soft enraged or healers died and I’d simply move up a few ranks of a spell, sacrificing mana/efficiency for larger HPS.  Other times I’d get a good string of regen/rng and be able to amp up my rank usage to get rid of some excess mana.  When I was low on mana I could down rank even further, continuing to cast spells, but maintaining a steady mana pace which would last me til the end of an encounter.  I wouldn’t ever STOP casting, I’d only just shift gears a bid depending on the damage and mana situations.

In Cata I fear we’ll only really be using 3 spells in GH, Heal and maaaybe Flash Heal rather than the 3 Heals, 7 Flash heals, and 5 Greater Heals we could choose from in Vanilla.  Three spells does not offer the same flexibility and pacing opportunities which 15 spells do and I don’t believe that single target-wise we’ll really be gaining a new “tool” in Heal, we’ll just be replacing FH entirely.

More thoughts on Cata changes later in the week as my cynicism subsides.

Check out the interview here.

Here’s how.

Northrend Beasts –

The first encounter of ToGC gives us plenty of opportunity to use PWS effectively.  In P1 Gormok will be using Staggering Stomp on a predictable cooldown, shielding the melee groups along with your tanks will absorb the majority of this damage.  Melee taking the brunt of raid damage is a common theme in raid encounters.  Because preventing damage is often dependant on knowing when and who will be damaged, learning this lesson is important for a disc priest.

Phase one’s major concern is tank deaths, so you might want to wait until a later phase to focus solely on bubble and instead spend more time spamming tanks with penance, greater heal, and PWS.

Phase two is all about the melee again.  Paralytic Toxin is most dangerous when multiple melee get it.  Your ranged raid members can spread out and avoid many applications of the toxin, but your melee will invariably get themselves in trouble if they’re bunched.  Simply keeping PWS on all melee going into P2 is a smart idea, if you apply it before the worms even come out then weakened soul will wear off quite early into this phase.

This is an example of a disc advantage over other healers.  During transitions while other healers are simply resting on their laurels the disc priest can use this time constructively.  Looking for these opportunities is paramount to having success as a disc priest.

Phase three has more raid damage than you’d think.  Between whirl, massive crash, and arctic breath your raid members actually have a decent chance of dying.  This is the first instance of ToGC where we can apply the “If I shield this target, the entire shield will be used” rule.  This is an important rule in deciding how to spend gcds in this instance.

If your entire shield will be used then PWS offers huge HPS for the priest.  Simply spamming PWS on every raid member will prevent a lot of arctic breath + massive crash related deaths, on a phase where the DPS requirements can be quite tight for newer raids.  Since tank damage isn’t too intense during this phase the disc priest will get a lot of mileage out of bubble spamming.

Jaraxxus –

There isn’t a lot of healing that needs to be done on this encounter in general.  Bubble spam really shines on encounters with a lot of periodic or heavy random raid damage.  The only opportunity to bubble spam effectively on Jaraxxus is when volcanoes and infernals are up.  Pay close attention to DBM or whichever boss timer you’re running, the melee groups are once again good targets to bubble prior to the volcano and once more when their weakened soul debuff runs out.  The damage can come quickly for a few moments following the spawn of multiple infernals and keeping all your dpsers alive will be key in limiting the overall number of add phases and adds per phase.

Faction Champions –

There are a number of healing strategies which are viable as disc here.  You can be a mass dispel bot, a shield bot, or single target heal.  I feel that the value of mass dispel, aside from getting the initial heroism off the mobs, is overstated by many priests.  Yes this fight mimics arena to a degree, yes mass dispel is good in arena, and yes it can be good in this encounter.  But there are many more valuable things you could be doing as a disc priest to help your raid rather than mass dispelling.

The danger in this encounter is focus fire damage on your raid members.  Getting a few scattered dots off your raid with MD is not going to keep anyone alive.  Deaths come from 4-5 mobs focus firing on people.  The two other focuses (bubble spamming + single target healing) are much more helpful in keeping raid members alive than MD will be.

The bubble spamming method involves simply spamming your entire raid with PWS.  This is an encounter where most everyone can be expected to take 7k damage over 30s, so once again you won’t run into too many wasted bubbles.  That really isn’t our concern with this encounter though.

What we’re most concerned about with bubble spamming is artificially increasing everyone’s health pool by 7-8k.  This is what you’re doing when you bubble someone.  It now takes an extra 8k worth of attacks before someone gets insta-gibbed, and healers will have a moment more to react to this incoming damage on anyone.  If you have reactive healers assigned to the raid, functioning in a bubble spamming role will help give them time to react to target swaps by the mobs.

If you’re interested in single target healing I highly recommend /focusing a dangerous mob.  Typically I /focus the warrior, rogue, or hunter as they seem to be the mobs most responsible for deaths in our raid.  By focusing on the warrior I can see his target the very moment he switches.  Rather than reacting to the first or second attack by the warrior on a new target, and by that time it may be too late, I’m simply reacting to the switching of targets and I’m able to heal that person preemptively.  Having 1-2 healers /focus mobs in this way has been very helpful in our kills.

One more bit on MD in this fight.  It certainly has uses, cleaning off heroism/bloodlust being most important, but I don’t think that any of the damage or HoTs you’re pulling off are going to make or break the encounter.  Your DPS focus target should be continually stripped of buffs by your shaman and shadow priests and removing HoTs from mobs that aren’t being focused is worthless.

Removing DoTs from your raid is valuable, but DoT damage isn’t going to be responsible for any deaths in your raid, it’s the focus damage that’s more concerning.  Spending a gcd MDing a few DoTs off your raid is NOT as good a use of a gcd as healing the raid member currently being focus fired by 4-5 mobs.

Twins –

This is my favorite fight as disc in ToGC!  There have been a lot of misconceptions about Disc since it became raid viable in 3.0, people like to pigeonhole disc into being a single target healing spec and holy into being the raid healing spec.  This is more wrong than people realize.  Disc is a GREAT raid healing spec.  The strength of this role for disc has nothing to do with hasted PoH and everything to do with PWS.

With raid buffs my PWS heals/prevents for 10-11k.  Hasted PWS takes 1s to cast.  On Twins your entire raid will take at least the minimum 7-8k over 30s for each PWS to be fully used.  This means that every PWS I cast will prevent/heal for 10-11k.  That’s 10-11k HPS.  If you use ProM on cooldown you can expect to add another 3-4k HPS.

Disc priests should be using a 9x shield, 1x ProM rotation on Twins.  Simply go down your raid list spamming shield, it’s that simple.  This strategy allows you to remain mobile, since shield and ProM are instants, and guarantees you very little overheal.  A druid or holy priest spamming rejuv/renew on the raid might have 8-10k HPS, but they suffer from a large amount of over heal using HoTs.  Bubble spamming is the easiest HPS to capture on this encounter and every raid group should have one priest in this role.

Anub –

Disc priests have an important, yet ultimately limited, role for this encounter.  Penetrating Cold healing involves 5 targets getting a debuff which will kill them in 3s unless they receive a heal.  A disc priest shielding targets is highly effective in preventing these deaths.  LoD uses two disc priests for Anub and has the raid split by groups so that each disc priest handles a different portion of the raid.  One priest shields groups 1,2,3 and the other priest shields 3,4,5.

Using this strategy you have to be pretty quick to realize that if your groups don’t have a lot of PC people, or none at all, you’ve got to help the other priest with their groups because they have all five people.  Some raids might heal PC by healing off raid symbols or other assignments, every strategy probably has their advantages and disadvantages.

There really isn’t a lot of healing to do in P1 or P2 on Anub, it’s basically about executing your penetrating cold healing, limiting healing otherwise, and pushing DPS in P3.

Unfortunately absorbed damage DOES heal Anub, so you can’t simply shield spam your way to victory on this fight.  Oh well, 4 of 5 encounters where you should beat every other healer by spamming one spell isn’t bad.

Bottom Line –

In Ulduar and ToGC there are many encounters where spending every gcd on PWS is an absolutely viable and effective strategy for a disc priest.  PWS offers very high HPS when fully absorbed (10k+) and does not often suffer from over heal in this day and age of massive raid damage.

Remember to stay aggressive with your casts, look for opportunities to shield during phase changes and downtime, and always anticipate damage.  Study the encounters, know who will be most likely to take damage (melee on 99% of encounters, warlocks on faction champions, etc).  It takes a pro-active disc priest to beat traditional healing specs in raid healing.

If you’re a disc priest being pigeon holed into tank healing, struggling to break 3k HPS, or you’re made to go holy because “this encounter has lots of raid healing”, think about unleashing your potential with a new bubble spamming role.