Healing: 5 v. 10/25

Ok, so as most people know, 5mans are alot different that 10 or 25man raids. For a few reasons. Bad guys hit lighter, its easier to outgear a 5man, theres only one tank/healer, etc. For our discussion purposes, those are the 3 important  keys to focus on. First, bad guys hit for less, and when you combine that with #2, man their damage (not including the new 5mans. those guys still hit kinda hard) looks meager. 3rd, you’re the only healer. If a dps dies, it’s not because your raid-heal partner failed, it’s cause you failed (or you let them die on purpose because they were stupid, which I do often.) So, lets start with the simple facts of a 5man that everyone has probably experienced all ready. The tank needs to live. You need to live long enough to make sure the tank survives the encounter. The dps *should* live long enough to survive the encoutner as well. If you and a dps or two die during the fight, but the bad guys all die, mission accomplished. It may have been pretty sloppy, your group may not be happy, but you guys got the job done (Obviously this is a gross over-simplification).

Healdin 101; Utility cont.

Today we finish our discussion of the various utility spells available to the paladin class. Yesterday I went over the auras, judgements and blessings briefly. Today we take a look at the wide varity of seals and the touchy-feely “Hand” spells.

Healadin 101: Utility

So, the original conception of the paladin in Vanilla WoW was a utility class. We couldn’t tank, we could barely dps, we were mediocre healers. What were we good for? Utility. We could buff the shit out of any class, with BoK being almost required for any paladin. We had our auras, our touchy-feely hands, our judgements. We were a support class in it’s truest form, while the warriors did the tanking and the priests did the healing. We ran around with giant +str +int +heal 2hnad maces, whacking things in the head while throwing out an occasional heal or three.

There are 4 types of spells available to us, which I consider to be utility spells. These are; Auras, Judgements, Hands and Blessings. Now, some could say there is a 5th category (seals) which I will discuss in this post, simply because I don’t know where else to talk about them, however I don’t consider them as true utility spells because they do not affect the group at all.

Healadin 101; part 1

Good morning everyone, quiet down, let’s get this started. Now, I am professor Llothan, this is healadin 101. Hopefully you are all here because you want to learn how to be an awesome healer or because you have a paladin friend who needs some help but has not the resources to do the research on their own. If you’re taking this as an elective or just trying to fill credits, get out.

Well, now that the rabble have left, let’s start with some basics shall we?

Healadin 101: an Intro.

So, after finishing off ToC10 for the first time ever, we finished our weekend by bringing in some new faces for an Ulduar run on Sat/Sun nights. V.V

Admittedly, I suck at tanking Razorscale. We wiped on the old bitch 4 times, mostly because I and my pali co-tank kept getting overwhelmed with adds (idiot on turrets and overeager dps dont help). At our best, we can get upto Thorim and Hodir easily, but we still struggle with Freya and have only tried Mimi once. This weekend we got down FL, XT, Razor, Kolo and Auriaya. 5 bosses compared to our usual 9. Bleh.

So, one of our issues (not including Razorscale, because that fight the healers were not the problem) was bad heals. Saturday was fine. We had our bo0mkin hero healing and our usual Shamy-raid healer on…well…raid heals. But we had a new healadin come in. First off his spec was messy. It was all over the place. My spec-OCD kicked in, and anytime I see more than 55-56 points in a single tree I get woozy. This thing was 63/8/0. BLEH. To make it worse, in the first tier, he put 5 points into ImprovedSealsofDPS, and 0 points in YouCanHitMeButMyHealWillStillGetOff. /facepalm. His Recount(tm) activity sheet looked like this: Holy Light: <10, Flash of Light: 2. That was it. A two-button healer, and only like 12 casts total. Sunday we had failadin and two other totally different healers and the only boss we got was Auriaya. Everyone else just roflstomped us for 2 hours.

Anyways, as a very confident healadin, I have made it my mission to help him. So, as I go through the process of crafting him into a winadin instead of a failadin, I will be posting several entries in a “Healadin 101” format, to help all aspiring winadins out there on the intertoobs.

Shared Topic: Holy Light vs. Flash

So, Ophelie over at the Bossy Pally has a great post about Healadins and their makeup. No, not which shade of lipstick best matches the t10 shoulders…but rather the difference between a Holy Light paladin and a Flash spam paladin. Yes, they are different.

Now, Ophelie was inspired in her post by Ferraro (I’m going to avoid any talk of controversy that surfaced over a month ago, cause honestly, that’s a dead horse) who does a great job of breaking down the differences.

Check out those two if you want to know the breakdown comparison of one vs. the other. That’s not what I’m gonna write about since it has already been done much better than I could have by those wonderful women.

Healing Meme

No, I was not tagged in this infamous healing meme going around. That’s ok, I’m the new kid on the block who no one knows of yet. I’m gonna answer the questions anyways cause I can 😛

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
  Llothan, Healadin
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
  Typically 10mans or 5man heroics
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
  Bubble 😀
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
  Divine Illumination >.< I always forget to use it, although I’m getting better
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
  We heal like a freight train…plus I almost never go Oom
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
  group healing more than 3 people and movement.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
  MT or OT. I’m usually stuck on an MT, and I have no issue with it, but the pressure can be a bit heavy at times
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
  Disc Priests. They have yummy shields that make my job easier
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
  I would say druids, simply because they don’t offer much else. Shamans have cleansing totem/heroism which makes my cleansing worries easier, priests have bubbles and I don’t mind other Holy Pali’s as long as they don’t beacon my target. Keep your heals to your own tank.
• What is your worst habit as a healer?
  Getting lulled to sleep by periods of no damage, running up to melee the boss, and dieing to some AoE effect (or falling off the platform in Kologarn….yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah…)
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
  People telling me how to play. This really goes for any class/role I perform. I spend a lot (more than I should) of time out of the game reading up to try to improve myself in anyway possible. I don’t someone telling me my mana is running low, or that I should use X spell more often. Fuck off. I won’t tell you when to use heroic strike if you don’t tell me when to use holy shock….asshat.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
  Every class has their niche, regardless of role. Pali’s dominate as tank healers, hell I can even keep up BOTH tanks on most fights by myself. As long as my partner(s) can handle the raid, paladins are great in any group. Plus being able to cleanse magic/disease and poison is saweeeet.
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
  Not to beat a dead horse, but if my tanks live, I win. Recount is a joke for measuring whether or not your a good healer. The only thing recount does is tell you who you spent most of your time healing, which is more important for me to pay attention to as a raid leader, not a healer. If we wipe cause a tank died, I look to see if the person assigned to them spent a majority of their time healing them, or f they died due to a voidzone/hateful strike/deep breath etc, which are things the tank should avoid, not the healers fault.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
  That healadins should be able to take a 18k+ shot from a boss and live “cuz you have plate” Yah thanks, and your point?
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn?
  When to use Holy Light vs. Flash of Light/Holy Shock.
• 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)?
  I usually am top of the chart, cause I’m always on tank heals. And they would notice my biggest heals would be Flash, Beacon and either HS or Judge of Light 😀
• Haste or Crit and why?
  Crit gives us mana (yes I know they nerfed it) and help us hit like a truck.
• What healing class do you feel you understand least?
  Priests….which is why I just rolled a baby priest who I hope to get to end game for ‘Clysm.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
  Healbot and Xperl Raid frames. HB does everythign for me that I need it to.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
  I generally stack int and crit. I think I have roughly 40% crit, 12% haste, 2500 spell power and about 25k mana. Need moar crit! :O

PvE vs PvP

So, as I have said before, I am a very active raider (usually 4 nights a week for roughly 3 hours, depending on the content) and I really enjoy 3v3 arenas, even when we lose 9 out of 10 matches for the week. In both cases, on my paladin, I am a healer. Most people in my situation would use one spec for pve and one for pvp. I don’t. And you know what, I don’t think I need to. When we first started arena-ing I did make my offspec a pvp healadin bubble spec. It was ok, we did OK. Granted we had very little pvp gear seeing as we were jsut starting out. However, I decided that I wanted the option of doing something different on my paladin in those situations where I really want to run a 5man, but theres already a healer or if I’m too tired to heal and someone else is willing to. So I went back to Ret with my offspec. And you know what, my arena team has seen no slowing even though I use a pve heal spec. Beacon of light is nice, my heals are a bit faster and hit alot harder. So while I may get incapacitated for longer (if the opponents are smart/good) but my heals hit harder to make up for the burst. I don’t expect to ever hit 2500 rating, so I’m okay with using a PvE spec, and so are my teammates.

Dragon Night

So, in our guild we have this thing called “Dragon Night” It’s been every thursday night for the last 6 weeks, and was my little brain child. Our official guild raids are on Friday/Saturday nights, and not everyone can make both those nights, but they want to be able to raid a second night each week. Although, originally it was an excuse for our top raiders to go back to Maly and (finally!) get our gor’ram CotFW titles, it has turned into quite the popular event in our guil, with this week being the culmination of that. For the last few weeks we ahve had 10-14 ppl for it each night. Last night: 21. Huge increase. Within thiese 21 people we ahd a large range of gear and ability. So I had an idea; instead of running 2 diff groups and balancing out the experience in each group, as my GM had wanted to do, I decided to do a rotating roster, and bring in ppl to the raid that was appropriate for their skill/gear. Let me backtrack a second. Dragon Night consists of 3 raids; Sartharion, Malygos, Onyxia. The first time we did Dragon Night we got Sarth 1D w/o even trying, and we have been working our way up to 2D and 3D.

So, I took the freshest raiders (mostly ppl I had never raided with and didn’t know what they were capable of) to ObSanc, with my warrior. We were short on tanks/heals so I had some of our more experienced ppl jump in to help out so that we could pretty much carry the fresher dpsers through the easy raid. And things went smooth, a few of them put out some impressive dps, and we brunt through the place easily with only one death on trash (i died to the giant fireball) and no deaths on sarth.

After that, I took some of our more experienced raiders who still need to work a bit into EoE. This didn’t go well. Our dps was way to light and ppl just did NOT get the mechanics for phase 3. We kept hitting the 3rd phase with about 1min left on enrage, and ppl get getting blasted by his surge of power and not shielding. So, I had put an hour limit on each raid, to keep things from getting a bit out of hand, and we hit that hour after only 3 attempts, so we called it.

After the EoE mishap, some of us were jonesing for some revenge. We took it out on Onyxia. We had 2 ppl with us who had never done the fight (OT and healer) and our Spriest kept getting DC’d on the first whelp spawn, so our first attempt was a bit rocky, with ppl learning the fight. Our 2nd attempt had some more DC’s plus a healer running way to far forward on the initial pull and getting cleaved to death. We got the bitch on our 3rd attempt, with only me dieing (healing on my pali) to an unfortunate combo of an elite Guardian, lag and a deep breath. She still has yet to drop my healadin helm, and I’m gettin pretty pissed at her. She better drop it next week!

Being overgeared is fun!

So, I logged on late last night, only to find most of my guildies had already run the daily. Syl hadn’t yet, so we decided to scrounge up some deeps and go squish some bugs. The surprising thing was that of the three dps we found (one guildie lock and  2 randoms: rogue/kitty) only one of them was in epix. It made me kinda reaize how us veteran players take for granted the gearing process and how ToC5 has changed that process a bit. Anyways, these two randoms were realy nice ppl who knew their classes well, and I was glad to have traveled with them. The kitty got the tank trinket off the 2nd boss and our lock got the wand of Anewb. Anyways, back to the point of this post; having an overgeared tank and healer makes heroic a joke. Our dps was light, with none of them being above 2k overall. That’s fine, we had not a single death! Syl never lost aggro (except the one time I pulled off her, healing aggro ftw?) and it was a nice breezy 10-15 minute heroic Azjol run. Good times for all.

 

Edit: I think I’ll do a post later about other things veteran players take for granted, as I think that would be a fun brainstorm!