1. #1
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    [Healing] Priest vs Pala for Raiding Beginner

    Hi. This Expansion I want to start raid healing and I'm really unsure if I should start out as a Priest or Paladin.
    From what I've read so far is that Discipline requires a great deal of knowledge of the encounter in order to "prepare?" the raid for incomming damage to heal efficiently.
    Since it would be my first time raiding as a Healer since BC I'm really unsure if I'm up for the task. Holy Paladin looks quite interesting for me and it's a tie between that or a Priest.
    To be completely honest here I prefer a more relaxed healing mechanic.



    I'm asking this in the Priest forum because there is no dedicated Healing forum from what I've seen and I hope to get some unbiased answers.


    I'm thankful for any kind of help.

  2. #2
    This is just my opinion of course, but I would say that paladin is indeed a much more "relaxed" healer than a disc priest.

    Disc requires that you watch a bunch of mini-cooldowns (Archangel, Spirit Shell, Penance, Power Infusion, Mindbender, Holy Fire) as well as encounter timers so you can stack Shields on the raid at the right time and "prepare" them for the damage, as you said. Paladins have more reactive heals and their toolkit is more straight forward.

    That said, while disc might take longer to learn and master, it's insanely fun once you get into it.

  3. #3
    Both classes have their own strengths and weaknesses. A lot of the "feel" of healing depends on what kind of content you're doing and how serious the groups are that you'll be running with. Healing is never relaxing (but IS really fun!) if you're running with fewer healers to get that extra DPS to push a heroic kill, but it's a complete snoozefest if you run with an extra healer or the rest of your healing team is super pro.

    Disc is a strong mitigation healer - in some cases, a good disc priest can prevent most damage from incoming boss abilities, but it does require you to know that the damage is coming about 15 sec or so in advance. Given all the boss mods and timers that are available, that's really not a tall order. The one aspect of playing a disc priest I *love* more than any other class is the ability to save people with low HP - your shields will effectively increase their health to survive hits that would otherwise have killed them. Disc can be somewhat high risk/high reward, in that if you mistime a spirit shell, your healing will go down substantially - even more so if your raid is counting on you to use it as a raid CD in a specific point of the the fight.

    Pallies are very versatile, they're pretty solid healers on tanks and raids. Additionally, there is some flexibility in how you play the spec - at high levels, some pallies actually blanket the raid with Eternal Flame, making the playstyle similar to that of a resto druid. Granted the typical "stack holy power for light of dawn" approach also works well. But here's where I say it's important to know who you're running with. A lot of groups stick holy pallies on the tanks. In this situation, you should still be able to help your fellow healers with the raid, and for some healers finding this balance can be very stressful.

    I wouldn't worry so much about having to micromanage cooldowns with either spec - there's a few simple addons that can help you a ton with this. I'd definitely recommend looking into a few addons like some kind of boss mod as well as an alert mod like weakauras. Even if you use the default UI and unit frames, you'll still want to take time to set up macros you need and move things to convenient places. If you want to go custom, be prepared to invest even more time. I cannot stress enough that as a healer, having things in familiar places that make sense to YOU is absolutely critical. Make your UI work for you, not against you.

    No matter which class you pick, your experience with healing is going to depend a lot on your other healers, as well as how well you know the fights. Healing in 5-man instances isn't really a good basis of how healing in a raid might feel, but you can get some ideas of basic playstyle. You can also watch boss kills of others who play those classes and get an idea of how each one plays. Hope this helps.

  4. #4
    Holy Priest Saphyron's Avatar
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    tl:dr

    Each class has point where they are good at choose the point you feel you will do the best job and master it.

    Here is my point of view on the matter.

    For reference Was raid healer as holy back in ICC and in DS
    Right now I am playing disc in our progress.
    Have in my team a insanely good Holy paladin that surprises me time and time again.

    Holy is what was and is known as the raid Healer. They insanely good reaction healing and smart heals that tries to top up people who is lowest on health. There heals are based getting people up with strong AOE heals, but they don't lack in the tank healing department. There is just many other classes better to do that.

    Disc is harder to play efficiently but when mastered can be a better AOE healer than Holy. They are based on preventing damage to come onto the raid and increasing people's effective HP by putting big shields on the raid. Disc works really well together with a druid or Holy priest in that they prevent as much damage as possible and the other healers heals whatever did not get prevented. Disc priest is also excellent Tank healers more so than Holy. I would say Disc as itself is multi purpose healing class that does it job REALLY well if paired up with the right classes.

    Normally I would say Paladin are tank healers. But as said earlier our Paladin Healer surprises me with how efficiently he can keep people topped up without wasting any mana. Paladin due to Beacon of light is properly the best tank healers out there. They can easily keep main-tank and off-tank alive without breaking a sweat or getting help from other healers. But lately they seem to do really well AOE heals in no movement to light/medium movement fights. Can't say much other than if you are good Holy paladin you can push of easily stress in the fight from everyone.

    Well this is just my opinions.

    Though just for clarification:

    3-man teams
    Disc is works really well together with Druid/Holy and Shaman
    Holy works really well together with Disc and Shaman/Paladin
    Paladin works really well together with Holy and Druid/Shaman

    Well shaman works well with everyone due to the nature of being called jack of all trades.

    In my Raid group we are going Disc paladin Shaman.
    Reason is that Disc seem really good in this tier and our Paladin is a insanely good healer.
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  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by chaosjones View Post
    Well shaman works well with everyone due to the nature of being called jack of all trades.
    Wait, was not Holy Priest jack of all trades (master of none) because of their chakra ?

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Ksiadz View Post
    Wait, was not Holy Priest jack of all trades (master of none) because of their chakra ?
    Chakra is bad for versatility, not good, because holy priests have to choose either raid healing or tank healing form, which leaves them weak at the other one. Other healers don't have to make that choice. Plus holy isn't tuned very well right now.

    As for disc priest vs. paladin, roll a priest if you like complicated stuff and a paladin if you don't. I think other posters have covered the current state of disc pretty well. It isn't particularly hard to play, with the right addons and once you know encounters, but it still requires keeping track of more than other healers have to.

  7. #7
    Holy Priest Saphyron's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Maleric View Post
    It isn't particularly hard to play, with the right addons and once you know encounters, but it still requires keeping track of more than other healers have to.
    Even without addons its not hard to play. I would say Disc requires more awareness of encounter than addon usage. Personally the only addons i use is Bartender, omen and DBM.

    ---------- Post added 2012-12-08 at 09:12 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Ksiadz View Post
    Wait, was not Holy Priest jack of all trades (master of none) because of their chakra ?
    Nah Shaman has always been jack of all trades. they just reforge a little around to better suit the role.

    Shaman is not better than lets say Paladin or Disc for tank healing but he can take the role if needed.
    Shaman is not better than druid or holy priest in aoe healing but he can take the role if needed.

    Also have no clue how monk is in healing have yet to raid with one.
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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by chaosjones View Post
    Even without addons its not hard to play. I would say Disc requires more awareness of encounter than addon usage. Personally the only addons i use is Bartender, omen and DBM.
    How do you keep track of Evangelism stacks?

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Maleric View Post
    How do you keep track of Evangelism stacks?
    Evangelism shows up as a buff on you, its not too hard to just look at your buff list and see it, not to mention the standard spellbar actually "procs" when you get 5 stacks and lights up, bartender should do the same.

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Nestar View Post
    Evangelism shows up as a buff on you, its not too hard to just look at your buff list and see it, not to mention the standard spellbar actually "procs" when you get 5 stacks and lights up, bartender should do the same.
    So every time you want to see your Evangelism stacks and duration, you try to pick it out from the ever-shifting forest of buffs next to your minimap? That sounds really painful.

    The bar proc could be useful to see when you're at a five stack, but it doesn't tell you remaining duration.

  11. #11
    Honestly, I don't find it that bad for me. There's all of 7-8 buffs at any given time if you use the consolidation feature for standard buffs. Other than that they go in order they were received, so it'll likely be near the beginning of the list, also not many buffs will have a stack number on them. And really if you're letting evangelism stacks fall off, you're doing it wrong. The idea is to use them up on cd. To keep up the 25% healing buff, obviously depends on the fight.

    If it's that hard to look up there, you could always add a tracker of sorts, many good addons for this, I use Gnosis personally (that's not one of the things I track in disc)

  12. #12
    holy priests are terrible in 25 mans, but they're not too awful in 10 mans. you can abuse the single target 'tank' chakra with cascade (which will refresh renew in the single target chakra, which hits every raidmember in a 10 man) to be basically your default stance. it's not as good as disc, for sure, but it's not the complete joke spec that it is in 25 man raiding.

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