FINALLY

In a fit of good timing, my guild finally downed Anub'arak on ToGC 25 last night. We even did it with 25 attempts left, meaning we were able to procure a nice, shiny chest for our efforts. A bit late, but only two weeks into ICC, so I'm pleased as punch with this progress. It also means we get most of Christmas week off since we don't really have content to push!

I have mixed feelings on Anub. With the way our strat played out, I didn't really have much to do during p1 and p2, then my assignment ramped up to the mega-stressful in p3 (I got the fun job of healing two penetrating colds so we could add an extra DPS). I went Disc as there really isn't any point to going Holy for Anub'arak except possibly for the access to Guardian Spirit and Body and Soul (cover for kiting mistakes, on p3 tanks, etc).

Tank healing Anub'arak is easy, to be honest. It's a spam fest. So, I'm not going to talk about that (plus, I don't have experience doing it on 25!). The real terrorfest of Anub'arak, and the one that healers get the least practice on, is p3. On Heroic, the idea with P3 is to keep the raid's health as low as humanly possible, since it is a massive health leech (rather literally, dropping a tank for that fight if you have an unhittable add tank is something like adding a DPS or two to the encounter above the one you may have brought instead).

This is generally managed with making the heals for the raid consist solely of Healing Stream Totem, Vampiric Embrace (though with the change our spriests stayed at least half health -__-), and Judge of Light. It's not especially fun to watch the bars sink like that, but you get used to it after awhile. Now, the main danger to keeping the raid this low is Penetrating Cold. It's one of those fun, random target debuffs that hits five raid members at a time, doing 6000 frost damage (unmitigated by resist, etc) every three seconds. The important thing about this it doesn't tick until three seconds after its application, so healers have to make sure PC victims have enough health to soak a tick before the tick happens. How to heal PC is pretty much the hardest part of the encounter from a healing perspective.

Preliminary ICC Thoughts

From a tank healing perspective, it's the same old, same old. I mean, there are only so many things to change up when you're healing a tank.

The raid healing isn't satisfying yet, to be honest. Now, this is the first four bosses, so it's not quite fair to make a judgement on the instance yet (it'd be like judging all Ulduar on Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT, and Ignis... though those are more interesting to heal. Hrm). But, for the most part, the healing is very whack-a-mole with slow damage intake. A slight disappointment, but, again, these are the first four fights. In longer instances fights get progressively harder as you move through the instance, so I'm not too concerned yet.

+ Marrowgar has bone spikes as the main source of raid damage, then covering for fire and WW failures. This is fine, as it is supposed to be the gear/coordination check of the instance, and gear checks often center around DPS requirements, and tank + tank healing ability.
+ Lady Deathwhisper has some light AoE once you get to p2, but the amount of AoE there was similar to healing Thorim hard mode without Thorim present if your raid can control the fight well enough (and not have too many ghost fails). The P1 AoE could get heavy, but it was nothing intense (random whack-a-mole shadowbolts and Death and Decay ticks).
+ Gunship Battle is pretty much all on your tank healers again with some light raid damage, especially if your raid is good at moving out of targeting radicals.
+ Deathbringer Saurfang has some intense single target raid healing involved, but not too many multi-target effects (I pretty much heal the entire fight with Flash Heal and PoM, EXCITEMENT). Basically, controlled whack-a-mole on steroids (our healing lead is joking that his Heroic strat is going to be five holy paladins and a holy priest).

Now, I know that from what I've seen of the next quarter the healing is going to become a bit more dynamic, or at least heavier on full raid damage. I will say that while these fights are in the "hurr whack-a-mole" sector of raid healing, I can see the potential for the hard modes to by more dynamic than the disappointing ToGC model of "lol it hits harder."

Holy - Part Two - Gearing

In gearing a healer of any variety, there are two stages: regen and throughput. Basically, you gear for and gem regen until you have enough mana to get through 90% of encounters (there is no situation where you'll never, ever run out of mana if you look across all fights, I refuse to believe it). After you no longer have mana issues assuming you use your CDs, stop stacking regen and even replace gems and enchants for increasing your throughput. Having to use Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope to get through a fight doesn't mean you need more regen. You only need more regen if you can't get through the fight AFTER you use Fiend and HoH (and mana pot). If you never, ever use Fiend, drop regen or evaluate if you need to cast more spells. It's wasted throughput you could be gearing for or wasted mana you could be using.

Holy - Part One - Talents and Glyphs

I'm going to start my guides with Holy, as it is my favorite of the two specs and my primary raiding spec (my disc spec usually only comes up in 10 mans and when 25 mans are missing all of the tank heals, or when I run five man instances). Remember that holy is a low mana efficiency (a.k.a. a mana hog) raid healing spec. If you want to focus on tank healing in a raid, go Disc or reroll. Yes, a holy priest can heal a tank in a pinch or be the offhealer for a tank (which is a common assignment for any healer on any given fight), but it is honestly a waste of the spec unless the fight requires no raid healing. I know that Disc has a different playstyle than Holy, but unless your comp is something like two holy priests for a 10 man, you are being utilized poorly to the detriment of the raid unless you are on as heavy a raid healing assignment as possible.

Holy is somewhat annoying in that there are several specs that are "good" raid specs.

Dictionary Time

Before I get into the swing of writing a guide, I figure I should define a few terms just in case readers don't understand them and run into these in the middle of a guide and go "huh?" They're pretty common in the theorycrafting community, but I don't know how widespread they really are outside of it.

Things to come...

Making guides takes awhile. Well, thorough ones anyway. Within the next few weeks, I'm hoping to finish a series on each spec (Holy and Discipline) in terms of talents, gearing, spell usage, and all that fun stuff. I suppose once I'm done with that task I'll move on to more vague posts on the joys of raid healing and how to set up healing in 10s and 25s, but it's a lot of guide to write.

I rolled a priest. Now what?

So, you want to heal. You rolled a priest, the quintessential healing class. The next question is, now what?

Oh hai

Hello there!

This is WoW blog and is meant to serve as a guide of sorts for healing priests, mostly aimed at tackling healing from a raiding perspective.

I am currently an undead priest raiding with a hardcore casual guild. I'm pretty darn good at it. No, I don't want to share what guild I'm in or what server (though we are first Hordeside, the server is a bit backwater, so this means we're 4/5 ToGC, and are focusing more on our last achievement for Ironbound proto-drakes than hardmode Anub'Arak.25).

I'm hoping to make a guide that is less "the way healing is" and more based around identifying how to set yourself up and supporting the healing core of your own raids. I'm attempting to integrate some math and situational specs/gearing instead of speaking in absolutes based only on my own raid experience. I will be making some posts related to five man content and fresh 80s, but most of this blog is centered around raid content, and the healing benchmarks are more based around having raid gear available to you. While this is easier to attain even as a five man-only healer than it has been in the past, don't expect to hit gear/stat benchmarks as a fresh level 80.

I don't know jack or squat about good PvP play, so I'm not even going to pretend. PvP is good for your reflexes, and I've seen some really good healers come from PvP backgrounds (high reaction time, good dispel reflex, etc). I've seen bad ones too, but point is, if you're afraid to PvE heal, starting in battlegrounds never hurt anyone as a training tool.