However, Lightwell isn’t inherently a bad spell. It just has a bad reputation. Since we know Blizzard is keeping it for Cataclysm, here are three ideas for fixes that improve the usability of Lightwell without impairing its intent.

Lightwell 1: No target switching

Lightwell creates a holy Lightwell. Friendly players can click the Lightwell to restore 4620 health over 6 sec. Clicking the Lightwell does not change your current target or trigger the global cooldown. Attacks done to you equal to 30% of your total health will cancel the effect. Lightwell lasts for 3 min or 10 charges.

This is the smallest change, but might be the hardest to implement: Lightwell no longer transfers your target when you click it, and doesn’t require a GCD. This makes it quite a bit more attractive to DPS and tanks, who no longer have to stop DPS in order to receive healing from the Lightwell. (They do still have to be near the Lightwell, however, which makes traveling mobs difficult.)

Lightwell 2: Buffing

Lightwell creates a holy Lightwell that radiates healing energy. Friendly players within 20 yards of the Lightwell receive the Lightwell Radiance buff; removing this buff heals the player for 4620 over 6 sec. Players who trigger this effect become Enlightened and cannot be affected by Lightwell Radiance for 30 sec. Lightwell lasts for 3 min or until 10 players have become Enlightened. Attacks done to you equal to 30% of your total health will destroy the Lightwell.

This removes the need for clicking on the Lightwell altogether. It does remove finding and removing a buff, but my recollection is that there are macros that can do that; in fact, I suspect that if this version went live, there’d be a UI mod that added a “Trigger Lightwell!” button dead center on your UI.

Addons and macros aside, the advantage to clicking a buff rather than clicking the Lightwell is that you know where your buffs are. Part of the problem with Lightwell is that sometimes you have to hunt it down, or it’s in the middle of the boss, etc. By making it a buff to be clicked, positioning of the Lightwell only matters insofar as you’re within its buff radius.

Lightwell 3: Auto-healing

Lightwell creates a holy Lightwell that radiates healing energy. Every 6 seconds, Lightwell heals the friendly player within 20 yards with the lowest health for 4620 over 6 sec. Players healed by Lightwell become Enlightened and cannot be healed by the Lightwell for 15 sec. Attacks done to you equal to 30% of your total health will destroy the Lightwell. Lightwell lasts for 30 sec.

This takes all of the interaction out of Lightwell. Instead of requiring DPS to trigger their own healing, Lightwell becomes a hands-off smart heal. While I do like the interactive aspect of the first two versions, I also like how this version of Lightwell becomes a complement to Prayer of Mending.

What do you think?

Are any of these worth pursuing? Should Blizzard just get right of Lightwell altogether? Or do you like it the way it is?

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Post tags: Healing, Instances, Priest, Raiding, Talents

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I know that keeping the names of various abilities straight isn’t easy, especially when there are so many of them. But I think we can pretty much all agree that we’re never going to see priests casting Presence of Mind. Thus:

• POM (or PoM if you’re feeling pretentious) is Prayer of Mending.
• PROM is what you attended when you were a junior and senior in high school. (Or will attend, if you want to make me feel old.)

We don’t need “ProM” to distinguish our healing spell from the mages’ self-buff. Nobody’s actually going to make that mistake. Yes, a mage can occasionally have POM and POM on at the same time, but here’s a protip: it doesn’t actually matter unless you’re making the point that you can have POM and POM on at the same time.

Remember: POM is a spell. PROM involves formalwear. You can remember this with this simple mnemonic: “R is wRong.”

Thank you for your time. Refreshments will be served by the mages.

-Chris

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Post tags: Blog, Priest, Silly, Snarky

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• Warriors are getting Heroic Leap, an ability that lets them jump directly to a target and automatically cause a Thunder Clap effect to all nearby targets, thereby generating snap AOE aggro.
• Priests are getting Leap of Faith, an ability that lets them pull an ally (in their party or raid group) back to them from up to 30 yards away.

This cannot be a coincidence.

I can see it now: the warrior Heroic Leaps to a group of mobs and aggros all of them, not just by body pulling but with Thunderclap. As soon as the Thunderclap lands, the priest uses Leap of Faith to bring the warrior back to the group, safely away from patrols and other mobs that might be close enough to body-pull if the warrior were to tank in place.

If Mind Vision counts as line of sight, a priest might even be able to pull a warrior safely to a hidden corner so that caster mobs would have to come running. (Even if it doesn’t, all it takes is the priest ducking out for a moment.)

Heroic Leap and Leap of Faith will be a revolution in pulling techniques, I’m telling you.

What do you think?

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Post tags: Cataclysm, Instances, Priest, Raiding

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• Heal: I’ve never really understood why Blizzard has chosen to make healing spells progress like this. We start with Lesser Heal, get Heal at 16, and get Greater Heal around 40 if I’m remembering correctly. Every time we go up a step, the previous step becomes useless (less healed for the same amount of mana). Mages don’t have Lesser Fireball, Fireball, and Greater Fireball; why are healing spells stacked this way? Regardless, it’s nice to see some more granularity in the healing spells available to level-capped priests.
• Mind Spike: You might remember a variant on this ability used by various voidwalkers and similarly-aspected creatures in Outland. (I’m thinking in particular about the voidwalkers around Oshu’gun in Nagrand.) This is useful for Shadow priests who – as they said – don’t have time to set up a rotation or who are locked out of Shadow spells (since it’s Shadowfrost, it won’t be stymied by school-lock mechanics). But as a baseline spell (it shows up at level 81 and they’ve said they’re not extending the talent trees beyond 51 points), it’ll also be useful to Disc and Holy priests in similar situations – it has a faster cast time than Mind Blast (and no cooldown) and no self-damage component like Shadow Word: Death, so we’ll be able to use it to DPS when we’ve been school-locked.
• Inner Will: This is going to be fabulous for raiding Disc priests. We’ll be much more mobile and we’ll have mana reductions on many of our key mitigation spells (PW:S and Pain Suppression, I’m looking at you). Based on this, I suspect that we’ll be seeing more talents and glyphs that remove the cast time of some our healing spells as well. (“When your Penance critically heals a friendly target, your next Heal has a chance to become instant-cast.”)
• Leap of Faith: It’s like Death Grip for friendlies. Here is where I’m going to deviate from the general healing population: if you are outright refusing to heal someone because they’re standing in a ground effect, you are a bad healer. Placing them lower on the priority list? Sure. It’s their responsibility to get out. But it’s your responsibility to heal the group. If you won’t do that, you shouldn’t be healing. We’ve come to a point in WOW where a lot of healers are saying “I’m just healing the tank, the DPS are on their own”, which is patently ridiculous. (Yes, I know I’ve been guilty of saying this myself sometimes. Shame on me.) Leap of Faith is a mitigation tool when someone’s standing in the fire; it’s like Power Word: Shield, except that it won’t run out. Added bonus: Leap of Faith + Inner Will = nobody ever has to do Frogger again.
• HOTs and DOTs will now benefit from haste and crit by default. This is cause for celebration, but I wonder: is this limited to priests, or is it a general change? And will Shadowform get a different bonus since it’s losing the haste/crit bonus?
• The changes to Spirit buffs – removing Divine Spirit, and making Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild not affect spirit – feel kludgy to me. Why not just drop Spirit entirely and go to straight MP5/HP5?
• “We want to improve Discipline’s single-target healing capacity.” Um. What does Blizzard know that I don’t about Disc priests’ ability to heal a single target well? “You’re awesome, and we want to make you totally awesome.”
• Power Word: Barrier: Finally. I’ve been waiting for this since the Wrath beta!
• Shadow Orbs (part of Shadow mastery): this looks like a cool mechanic. Wait for the minor Glyph to turn the orbs into ravens.

What are your thoughts? Leave me a note in the comments!

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Post tags: Cataclysm, Discipline, Holy, Patch, Priest, Shadow, Talents

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Since then, though, I’ve stopped raiding as much. Part of it is a desire to spend more time with my family, and part of it is that I have dangerously high blood pressure and an anxiety disorder, both only very recently diagnosed, and I’ve been instructed to not spend all my time in front of a computer. So when I have played WOW, I’ve been focusing on other characters. I have a death knight at 72 – a friend and I just did Wrathgate last night. My paladin, Rolastra, is now 43 and rising quickly. My rogue Tiryns is 52. I have a hunter in her mid-30s (and another, long-neglected hunter at 64). And last night, it all came to a head. I realized that I wasn’t healing because I was sick of healing. It’s just whack-a-mole with Grid and mouseover macros instead of a foam-rubber mallet, and frankly the foam-rubber mallet is at least satisfying. Healing doesn’t hold a candle to the tense excitement of tanking, or to the gratifying “thunk” as your DPS’s weapon collides with the boss’s ass.

In fact, I’m so committed to not healing anymore that I’ve wiped the slate clean. I’m thumbnailing this for your sake; click on it to get the full image.

So because of that, and in honor of Baenhoof finishing my commissioned portrait of Theande, and because Easter is coming up and it’s a time for renewal, and because the first of the month seems like a symbolically good time to make changes, from now on, Duct Tape and a Prayer will be no more. Instead, you’ll be reading Heirlooms and a Prayer, which is all about leveling alts (well, I guess I don’t have a main anymore, so leveling characters) and then sending their heirloom gear off to more characters when I’ve gotten them to 80. It’s about a journey, from 1-80 on as many characters as I can manage. (+20% XP doesn’t hurt!) But mostly, it’s about never fucking healing again, no matter what.

(Hell, my paladin doesn’t even have Holy Light on her action bars.)

Come back tomorrow for the new and exciting Heirlooms and a Prayer!

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Post tags: Fuck That Noise, Healing, Meta, Priest, Psst Are They Buying It

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3.3.3 changed the 4-piece set bonus for the Sanctified Crimson Acolyte’s Raiment, the healing priest Tier 10 set. Before the change, the set bonus was:

• (4) Set: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

Now it’s:

• (4) Set: Increases the effect of Power Word: Shield by 5% and Circle of Healing by 10%.

This is a pretty significant change, and one which a lot of priests are bemoaning; where the old version rewarded tactical use of cooldowns and variety of spell use, the new bonus just provides a passive bonus, and rewards spamming.

First, let’s be honest: this is continuing in Blizzard’s current trend of making content accessible to more people. The people who like the old bonus and who are bemoaning the new one are the ones who would have gotten T10 first – but there are a whole lot of players who are going to be getting at least four pieces of T10 who don’t have the tactical skill to make good use of the original bonus. To them, the new version of the bonus is a better bonus, simply because it doesn’t require as much thought; they can put more of their attention toward healing the people who need healing (or shielding the people who need shielding), instead of having to worry about whether their 20% proc rate went off.

What’s curious to me about the bonus is that while Holy priests get a bonus to a spec-defining talent (Circle of Healing), Disc priests get a bonus to a baseline ability. Any priest can benefit from the bonus to Power Word: Shield; only Holy priests will benefit from the 10% COH buff. I suspect that’s why the PW:S buff is only half of the COH buff: it’s more generally usable. It’s also on a shorter cooldown than COH is – in fact, for Discipline priests, it’s on a global cooldown, which means that this buff is just promoting the view of Disc priests as bubble spammers.

Mostly I’m just disappointed in this change. I’ve long believed that tier gear should be the best gear available for a given class and spec (and I’m aware of the argument that “then we’d just have everyone of a given class looking the same”, to which I say: given the prevalence of players relying on Elitist Jerks and Best In Slot lists to tell them what they Have To Equip, we have that anyway). If tier gear were the best gear available, the set bonuses would be icing on the cake – and because they wouldn’t be necessary to entice characters to wear the gear, they could (and should) be interesting. In fact, tier gear used to be that way – check out the Vestments of Transcendence, the priest Tier 2 set, whose set bonuses included “When struck in melee there is a 50% chance you will Fade for 4 seconds”. By changing the T10 set bonus from an interesting bonus to a purely utilitarian bonus, Blizzard is sending a message that they don’t consider tier set bonuses to be icing on the tier-set cake; they’re a necessary part of the gear, and necessary to entice players to get the gear.

A Duct Tape post about gear wouldn’t be complete without some numbers, so here you go.

• Circle of Healing, without any other modifiers, heals for 958-1058 per target. Its spell power coefficient is 40.29%; I think 2800 spell power is a reasonable number to go with for a priest in T10, so that adds another 1128 (2800 * .4029) to the spell, giving us an average per-target heal of 2136. An additional 10% to that is about 2350 per target, for a gain of about 1068 healing every 6 seconds.
• Power Word: Shield, without any other modifiers, absorbs 2230 damage. Its coefficient is 80.57%; the aforementioned spell power adds another 2256 absorption, yielding an average per-target shield that absorbs 4486 damage. With the set bonus, that’s 4710 absorption, or an additional 224 every 4 seconds. Discipline priests, however, have not only a 15% bonus to PW:S but a shield that can be cast once per GCD – that is, once per second for a properly-hasted Disc priest. (This is, I admit, a little unfair to Holy priests, since I’m denying them the benefit of Divine Providence and other talents. The problem is that while Circle of Healing doesn’t have a prerequisite – only any other 40 points in Holy – Soul Warding, which gives the cooldown reduction to PW:S, requires Improved PW:S, which gives the +15% bonus. So I have to include Imp PW:S to get the once-per-GCD shield, but strictly speaking, it’s possible to have Circle of Healing without any talents that give it bonuses.) That 4486 damage absorbed becomes 5159 damage with the 15% bonus, and the tier bonus brings it up to 5417, or 258 extra absorption every second. If the priest is bubble spamming, that’s 1547 extra damage absorbed every 6 seconds.

In other words, even though the PW:S bonus is smaller, the actual effect – assuming that all you’re doing is casting PW:S every chance you get – is about 45% larger than the bonus Holy gets. If we assume that Blizzard wants the bonuses to even out, then we can safely guess that they think that Discipline priests are casting Power Word: Shield roughly once every other spell. That seems to match with the popular perception of Discipline priests, and therefore with how (we can assume) most of the non-high-end Discipline priests are playing – which again points to the conclusion that Blizzard is trying to open the tier gear up to less hardcore players.

I’m not really sure how I feel about that, in the end. Yes, I’d like the tier gear to be the best gear available. But since it’s not, there’s a significant part of me that’s pleased that a larger portion of the player base has access to it. After all, tier gear isn’t really a sign of elitism if the elitists are going to be wearing something else.

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Post tags: Discipline, Gear, Healing, Holy, Priest, Raiding, Talents

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• Beaming Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and +2% mana. The extra mana will vary depending on your current mana pool; the crit chance means that if you’re Disc, you’ll get another Divine Aegis for every 217 spells you cast, or 1-2 more per fight.
• Bracing Earthsiege: No. Gives 25 spell power and 2% reduced threat. Only take this one if you’re having trouble on the threat meters, which hopefully you aren’t.
• Chaotic Skyflare: No. Gives about 0.45% crit chance and 3% increased critical damage. That’s important. It’s tempting to think “oh, they mean “critical spell effect”. They don’t. It’s just damage. Steer clear.
• Destructive Skyflare: No. Gives bout 0.55% crit chance and 1% chance that offensive spells that target you will hit their caster instead. This is a PVP gem, although it can be useful for certain fights (those involving randomly-targeted spellcasts or poison affliction, for example). Spell reflect does not affect AOE spells, although it can redirect chained spells (like Chain Lightning).
• Effulgent Skyflare: No. Gives 320 health and reduces spell damage taken by 2%. Another PVP gem; if you’re really having that much trouble staying alive against PVE spellcasters, swap out one of your other gems for Solid Majestic Zircons.
• Ember Skyflare: Yes. Gives 25 spell power and 2% Intellect. This gem will directly increase your throughput, and while 2% Intellect doesn’t grant quite as much mana as 2% mana (Beaming Earthsiege gives about 72 more mana regardless of how much Intellect you have), it grants more crit and more regen.
• Enigmatic Skyflare, Forlorn Skyflare, and Impassive Skyflare: No. These give about 0.45% crit chance and various duration-reducing effects. They’re PVP gems with highly-situational PVE uses. Steer clear of them.
• Insightful Earthsiege: Yes. Gives 21 Intellect (about 315 mana, 0.125% crit chance, and mana regeneration that varies based on your Spirit), and every spell you cast has a 5% chance to restore 600 mana. That works out to an average of about 60 mp5 (which can go down if you insist on casting long-cast-time spells and up if you have lots of haste, as I do). This is the beloved, overwhelmingly-recommended meta gem for priest healers; over a 6-minute fight that adds up to 4,320 extra mana in your pool. Get this unless you can afford to be more concerned with throughput than mana.
• Powerful Earthsiege: No. Another PVP gem, this one gives 320 health and reduced stun duration. Not worth it.
• Revitalizing Skyflare: Yes. Gives 11 MP5 and 3% increased critical healing effect. That’s not healing chance; instead, when your heals do crit, they heal for 3% more. That means that if you’re Disc, your Divine Aegis will be 3% bigger too! The 11 MP5 is 792 mana – not fabulous, one additional spell over the course of a 6-minute fight, but it’s better than nothing.
• Tireless Skyflare: Maybe. This is another PVP gem, with 25 spell power and a minor run speed increase, but I ran with it for a long time. Part of this was because it helped me get out of the fire faster, and part of it was because I was entertained by running faster than anyone else in the raid. Sadly, it doesn’t stack with other speed-increasing effects. Go with this if you can’t get one of the others, or if you have a hard time staying out of the stuff on the floor.
• Trenchant Earthsiege: Maybe. Gives 25 spell power and reduces stun duration by 10%. It’s a PVP gem, but it has some uses in PVE. It’s not fabulous, but it can be useful for certain fights, especially in heroics. The faster you can get out of a stun effect, the faster you can start healing again. That said, if you have the chance to get another one of the gems, take it.

The bottom line: Get Ember Skyflare, Insightful Earthsiege, or Revitalizing Skyflare depending on your playstyle, with the first two recommended more highly than the third unless you really, really love Divine Aegis. Get Beaming Earthsiege, Tireless Skyflare, or Trenchant Earthsiege only if you can’t get one of the first three.

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Post tags: Gear, Priest

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1. Smile
2. Practice, Man, Practice

Anyone Can Heal

If you are like me – and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to be like me?* – you have seen Ratatouille, and remember the critic Anton Ego’s final review of Gusteau’s restaurant:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau’s famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

I am here today to tell you that, in fact, the former is true, at least as far as playing WOW is concerned. Perhaps not everyone can become a great chef, but anyone can become a great healer.

You will say to me, “but Chris, I cannot heal to save my life.” (I am, incidentally, reminded of a MAD magazine cartoon from many, many years ago: “If you never hear ‘Fix this crankshaft or we’ll shoot you in the head’, why do people say ‘I couldn’t fix a crankshaft to save my life’?”) But the truth is, I believe you can heal. You just don’t know how to heal well or effectively. Maybe your DPS ways are too ingrained in you; maybe you don’t have the attention span to focus on such a small chunk of screen (if you happen to be using Grid or unit frames); maybe you don’t really understand how your healing class works. The bottom line is that it’s not a matter of inability. It’s a matter of lack of skill.

Betty Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, gives an example regarding being “talented” at art: suppose reading were treated the same way as art. Teachers would just give young students a book and step back, not instructing so as not to interfere with the students’ “creative reading”, and at the end, maybe three or four out of a class of 20 would have learned how to associate the words they spoke with the letters on the page and to read successfully. (Remember: no actual teaching at all, just leaving the kids alone with the books.) Parents of the kids who’d learned could say “oh yes, Mary has a family history of reading, her aunt Lisa was quite a reader”, and those who hadn’t could say “well, she just doesn’t have the talent for reading; she’ll find something else she is good at”.

The idea, of course, is that art is a skill that can be learned rather than a talent that must be innately possessed. The same is true of healing. Those players who are excellent healers from the outset have no special talent, no innate gift that allows them to heal better than anyone else. It’s just that their brains happen to have been tuned to the way healing works when they first started, so they were able to pick up the skill much more quickly than those whose brains were tuned to other activities (such as DPS, tanking, or shuffleboard).

Over the next week or so (it’s indefinite because of the imminent holidays), I’ll be erecting a series of posts on the skills needed to heal, how to acquire them, and how to retune your brain so that the skills come more easily and more naturally. Hopefully, at the end of it, we’ll have a whole bunch of people who have renewed faith in their ability to get a group safely to the end of an instance.

I’ll borrow a bit from Havi here, since even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing all the time, she does a damn good job of making everyone think she does.

What I’d like in the comments:

• Your opinions on what skills make a good healer.
• Your experience with learning how to be a skilled healer.
• Funny stories about having not been a skilled healer.

What I don’t want:

• Shoes.

Happy Christmas Eve, and I’ll see you all soon with the first post in the series!

* </facetious>

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Post tags: Anyone Can Heal, Community, Groups, Healing, Instances, Priest

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SUCK IT, NOOBS.

Love,
Theande, Disc Healer

(Thanks to @Nibuca for the tip.)

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Post tags: Groups, Healing, Instances, Priest, Shield

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Patch 3.3 revamped the LFG system and introduced cross-server PUGs, and thank the Light, they’ve finally got it right. PUGs are quick and painless – even when they don’t work out you tend to know in advance, like the Halls of Reflection group I had last night where the tank started out by saying “so, can anyone else tank?” – and it’s easy to rack up a few dozen emblems in an evening’s play. Even alts are getting in on the action – the gear-matching system is pretty good at ensuring that they don’t get into an instance they can’t handle.

That said, it’s not all peaches and cream – there are still a lot of things that can trip a group up. The advantage of the LFG system is that most of those stumbling blocks are player-induced, and there are things you can do to remove them. Here are some guidelines for making sure your PUGs go as smoothly as possible when you’re healing:

• Stock up on reagents before you get in the queue.

Every time. I know healers who join the queue from beside a reagent vendor so that they’ll be able to stock up again when they get out. I carry 60 Sacred Candles on me, but this weekend I decided to chain-queue from the Borean Tundra, and managed to get down to 3 candles before I gave up and went back to Dalaran. The sad truth about PUGs is that sometimes, you’re going to wipe – people don’t know the fight, don’t have the gear to complete the fight, or just plain screw up, and you want to make sure that you can keep buffing the group no matter how many times the Godfather of Souls eats yours.

• Tell the rest of the players up-front if you’ve never successfully completed the instance.

This is a matter of some debate among players – some say you should just not say anything to avoid being kicked for a more experienced healer, some say you should ask for the strategy just before the first boss because they’ll be invested in getting the boss down and won’t want to have to wait for another healer. Honestly, that just seems like dishonesty to me. It’s better to tell the group up-front that you haven’t been through the instance. You’ll sometimes get the odd jerk who kicks you from the group for being inexperienced, but I’ve found that most players are so eager to get going that they’ll gladly explain the fights to a new player, just so they don’t have to wait in the queue again. Of course, it’s easier to get them to go along with you if you’re appropriately geared (and don’t try to heal the first half of Old Kingdom in your fishing pole and hat…).

• Discuss loot rules in advance.

Nothing in World of Warcraft causes more drama and personal offense than loot. It’s far better to take fifteen seconds at the beginning of the run to figure out what everyone else thinks is fair. Remember, too, that you can’t roll Need on items of a different armor class than yours, even if you can wear them and they’re an upgrade. If you’re a druid, shaman, or paladin healer, and you know that something you want but that’s not in your armor class drops, you might also want to talk to the group and see if someone of the lower armor class would be willing to Need the item for you and then trade it to you – and if you’re a shaman, druid, or priest healer, consider offering to be the Need monkey.

Oh, and everyone Needs on Frozen Orbs unless they really don’t care to whom the Orb goes. It’s just common sense – no, you don’t need it, but “Need” doesn’t actually mean “need” here, it means “roll at the highest priority in a tiered system”.

• Talk with the tank about speed-pulling.

This is one of the drawbacks of PUGs being so quick and painless: lots of people want to get as many instances in as possible, and that means pulling as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that also means that tanks are paying attention to their health, not your mana bar (even though they should be). At the beginning of the instance, talk to the tank and agree on a signal for her to look for that indicates that you need to wait before the next pull. Otherwise you’ll find yourself going in with 3k mana – and inevitably that’s when the unexpected patrol comes around the corner.

• Make sure the group knows what you’re capable of.

This is especially important for priests. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who still don’t know that Discipline is a viable healing spec and wonder what Guardian Spirit does. Tell the group at the beginning “I’m a Discipline priest – that means you’ll be seeing a lot of shielding and fast single-target heals, but not a whole lot of AOE healing. Don’t worry, I know you’re taking damage, but I have to prioritize, and you might get a shield where a Holy priest would just drop Circle of Healing.”

• Even though you’re playing with players from different servers, you can still get a reputation.

Sure, you’re now pulling from ten times as many players and it’s easier to disappear into the crowd – especially since the odds are that the players won’t be from your server and won’t be able to badmouth you there. The bad news is that there are only ten or so realms per battlegroup – and word spreads fast. Don’t be surprised to find someone else from that server saying “man, I heard you were a total bitch, I’m not running with you.” Be a good player and a good human being – it might not get you more groups, but it certainly will keep you from getting fewer. Besides which, it’s just good practice to be a good person.

• Know your limits.

This one should be obvious. If you’ve tried this fight three times and can’t keep everybody up, it might not just be that the DPS is standing in the fire. Maybe you’re having a bad night, or maybe you’re just not geared enough for the group. You need to be willing to say “I’m sorry, guys, I can’t heal this fight, you should find someone else.” It’ll cost you some badges and loot – but you can always go in later and do it when you’re better-geared or more confident.

This should, thankfully, be pretty rare because of the gear-matching system, but it happens sometimes and the Good Player way to handle it is to bow out gracefully and allow someone else to take your place.

• Explain the fights if you’ve been there before.

In an ideal world, anyone who’s been through a fight before could explain it. Sadly, we don’t live in the ideal world. The DPS are focusing on the boss and on moving out of poisons, and don’t really care what the healer or other DPS are doing – and are paying attention to the tank roughly enough to make sure she’s still at the top of the threat meter. The tank is mainly worried about maintaining threat and the state of her own health bar. As the healer, you’re the one who’s standing back, paying attention to positioning (so you know when people are out of range and when someone’s about to step in a puddle. More than any other role, it’s the healer who’s concerned about everybody else’s tactics, and who has a broad perspective on the fight (literally – we need to be able to see everyone to hit them with heals). So if you’ve done the fight before, offer to explain it. Give suggestions if you can, and offer unique abilities that you have that can give the group an advantage (“Everyone stay within 20 yards of the tank so I can Mass Dispel the freeze effect” on Keristrasza, for example).

• Don’t be afraid to roll Need on upgrades.

There is a feeling among some healers – myself included – that we don’t really contribute as much to fights as everybody else. The elephant in the room here is damage meters – a lot of players believe that contribution to a fight is judged based on a player’s position on the damage meter, and since healers are almost universally at the bottom of the list, there’s a certain feeling that you’re not really contributing, and therefore don’t deserve as much of the loot. This feeling is amplified among strangers, since – as above – you want to be a good person, and you don’t want to get a bad rep.

I’ll put it plainly: that feeling needs to go away. You are contributing to the fight by keeping health bars up. If you weren’t there, the DPS wouldn’t be able to bring the boss down before the boss killed them. If you weren’t there, the tank would last about five seconds. You are just as much a part of the fight as anyone else, and you’re just as entitled to the spoils.

Even if the tank insists on referring to you as “healer” throughout the run. (Seriously, not even “priest”? You can’t even be bothered to figure out what class is healing you?)

Any others I’ve missed? Leave a comment!

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© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Groups, Healing, Instances, Priest, Raiding

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