Most difficult healing spec atm?

[Tyandor]

TBH I don't think healer classes are hard to play (still have to try monk), but the challenge of healing doesn't really come from the class, but more from what you are put up against and most of the time you have to tools to deal with it. Sure some classes have advantages over others in certain situations, but lets be honest: how often do you heal alone in a raid? It's a team game. I personally have more trouble with Paladin, but that's because I've always mained a resto druid and my first char was an affliction warlock, so I have a great affinity with HoTs and DoTs, so it feels more natural to me. Healing is most definitely not a pure numbers game. That's why I actually liked the start of Cata in the dungeons. Yes I've cursed a lot and almost had a weak moment of throwing the towel in the ring, but it made you a better healer. The PuG raids I had at that time where amazing because every healer who could get through the heroics knew how to heal. I remember when ZG/ZA and I healed ZA on my discipline priest in just 346 gear (the bare minimum). At the first boss we killed it in one go, I was out of mana and everyone lived with most of them with about 10-20% hp left. That's the moment you know you that you know what the hell you are doing and it feels great you played to the max potential. Still one of the dps had the nerve to complain and asked me when I was going to start healing... again nobody died. The times I only had to do Siamat in randoms because the healers dropped group (and man that one was mana intensive with blues and greens).
It's more of a preference which healing style suits you best so some classes may be 'difficult' because of habit, but really the difficulty is in the content most of the time and not the class which is great, because I can't stand clunky-ness.

[Abysal]

At the moment I have

RDruid, Mistweaver, Disc at 90
RShaman 89
HPaladin 88

Haven't tried Holy Priest since 4.2

For me, hardest to easiest in 5.1:

Mistweaver->RDruid->Disc->HPally->RShaman

Oddly enough, this almost perfectly mirrors the number of healing cooldowns each spec has.

[Cattlehunter]

Having played holy pally, disc/holy priest, and rshammy at 90 for a while (no exp. with mistwaver or druids), I'd actually say that resto shamans are the most difficult.

Keep earth shield up 100%, but don't recast it before the charges are expired; keep unleash life on cooldown to use HR every cooldown; keep healing stream always on cooldown and make sure that it's always on that cooldown when you need to use either tide; use primal elementals before healing intensive phases, but don't waste their dps when they're up and you don't have to heal a lot; try to recall all totems 1 second before they expire to regain the mana spent, but make intelligent choices about when to recall a near-expired totem based on how much time is left on other active totems, and how important those are at the time; make sure the tank has 10% bonus health all the time (which is not stacked by riptide ticks, frustratingly); track every other healer's mana to make sure it's used when they need it as well, not just yourself; only chain heal off targets with riptide on them, making sure you have those targets in range of CH bounce range from where the healing is needed; make sure you're positioned properly when using spirit link totem (I really wish they made this targeted, instead of having appear behind you to the left); make sure you don't actually *kill* your tank with spirit link totem...

Of course there's a bunch of other stuff, like interrupt when needed, dispell buffs, stun with capacitor if needed, time cooldowns, make sure to set up conditions perfectly for ascendance, don't cast relevant without tidal waves active, how their mastery works, etc, but that's mostly pretty similar to what other healers have to deal with.

Maybe it's just me, but I find rshamans way harder to deal with than any other healer I've played. Personally, I think hpaladins are the easiest healer, and I play mine well enough to get ranked top10 in some 10m heroics. It's just really hard to make a mistake as a holy paladin; you can't really fuck things up for yourself by playing poorly, except maybe by running out of mana, but as a rshaman you can fuck yourself up royally by not keeping important abilities up ~99% of the time, or by timing things badly. Holy paladins have to watch, like, one proc, and keep track of one 30 sec hot, and even if you go full retard mode and just spam overheals on everyone you'll still do fine thanks to the mastery making them extremely forgiving of poor play.

[HamSandwichFace]

lol.

Shaman is easy.

RT on CD (generally rolling on tanks for HP buff)
UE your HR
HST on CD
do random stuff in between
Refresh ES

Monk is easy

SZ uptime of 100%
TP uptime of 100%
Renewing Mists on CD
Mana Tea on CD
Uplift @ 2 Chi
TFT every 45 seconds after the initial usage (try to time so you can uplift during big amounts of raid damage)
Expel Harm on CD (cheapest chi generator)
Surging Mists when you have 5x Vital Mists

I don't think any of the healing classes are particularly hard to play. The healing class that's hardest to play (to easiest) would go from UP > OP so (IMO): Druids > Holy Priests = Shaman = Paladin > Mistweavers > Disc Priests

[Maxvla]

Monk is the hardest no doubt. 3 resources to monitor, tracking hot coverage for uplifts, then you have your cooldowns and you are position dependant, then you also have melee healing which is annoying on multi mob fights or fights where mobs move around a lot.

Druid is easiest along with shaman. Druid has one resource and is the most efficient with it compared to all other healers, can cast any spell from anywhere, has no vital cooldowns except tranquility. Ironbark and Tree/Vigil are important for min-maxing but they aren't really a raid cooldown because their percentages are too low and last for too long. Shaman is a bit more position dependant, but overall their spell choices are just as limited as druids and their spells are mostly smart, they have more raid cooldowns but the are powerful enough to know exactly when to use them, not vague like druid cds.

[HamSandwichFace]

Monk is the hardest no doubt. 3 resources to monitor, tracking hot coverage for uplifts, then you have your cooldowns and you are position dependant, then you also have melee healing which is annoying on multi mob fights or fights where mobs move around a lot.

No, lol.

Mistweaver is pretty simple to play.

[Meia]

No, lol.

Mistweaver is pretty simple to play.

Depends what level of play you're on and how much you want to get out of what you're doing.



First things first when it comes to any new fight as a monk healer: How can I adequately heal this? Do I want to blanket the raid in HoTs, and then use uplift as my major chi spender? If mobility is very high, can I travel with enough people to make SCK worth my while to cast, and in that case do I use chi burst on the correct targets to dump chi?



In essence, here's what I have to monitor as a heroic raiding monk, and I guess people tell me if this sounds difficult, as messing up any of these leads to much much less return on your mana:


-Renewing Mist targets, how long is left duration wise, how many is it on.

-Thunder Tea usage. How long before the next big surge of raid damage is there, so I can take the 10 seconds to set-up it's use and blanket the raid in more HoTs, so I can get the max usage out of Uplift?

-Chi. Am I making sure to use up any chi I have to make sure I don't "lose" it by earning it while I have max chi? To couple with the use of uplift, do I have enough chi on me to cast it in rapid succession when I need to? Can I use another quick hot and a SCK to generate enough chi to get one more burst out of a 13-15 Uplift burst before it goes back down to 6 a second later?

-Are my tea stacks going too high? Can I save them for another part in the fight using fight mechanics so I can use them when I need to use SCK more on top of the HoTs, effectively doubling the mana I use in a short time?




I played a priest from vanilla, all the way to mists. When I first read about Mists, I quickly figured out the 3 styles of monk AoE healing. Only after I started raiding on her did I realize that a good monk mixes all 3 of them. With the mana changes, this makes it much harder, but still manageable. A good healing monk will finish the fight still being able to cast, without any extra tea stacks on them, while hopefully topping meters. If you mess up at any point during a fight, even for a period of 20 seconds, you won't make it the whole fight. I cannot imagine any other healing class being in this position right now, or managing as much as I have to on a fight by fight basis.



The nerfs were needed, as you could get a LOT out of it with half the effort before. Other talents like Chi Torpedo I never dreamed of taking before, until mana became a precious commodity again.

[Maxvla]

No, lol.

Mistweaver is pretty simple to play.

Everyone in this thread is going to say their class is the easiest without looking at anything objectively. Are you really going to sit here and say tracking all that crap isn't harder than throwing out rejuvs and wild growths from anywhere with a resource you know you have without looking? If you want to cast an EM or uplift you either have to keep track, or look. Both of those is harder than just having mana. Having to use so many globals on mana management means you are constantly having to choose between mana and healing. A druid only has a 3 minute mana cooldown.

I'm not saying any healers are all that difficult, but answering the thread starter, there are significant differences.

[Divineknight13]

ive not tried disc yet cuz ive not played a priest but i would say

druid > paladin > shaman > priest > monk


monks are just completely mana inefficent after the nerfs its just stupid also went from the most fun healing class to the single worse healing class in 1 patch

[PowerGamez]

I'm not sure - I'm only experienced with Paladin and Shamans. These are both relatively easy to play - shaman's especially.

All the rest of my healers are 85.

PvP Wise: Druid > Shaman > Meh

[Proberly]

Not gonna vote on the poll, since I've only played holy paladin so far this expansion.

But I would guess that doing a perfect job as a druid should be "hardest".

[ThrashMetalFtw]

A lot of ppl aren't getting the point of this thread. Current balance issues has NOTHING to do with how hard a class is to play.

Even if a Disc Priest played to 75% efficiency is most likely going to beat anything else, that does not make it an easy class to play. We are talking about "which class is the hardest to completely master", not "which class is the easiest to top healing meters with".

From personal xp: Never played a Monk, but it fills the exact same role as a RDruid

Resto Druid > Holy Pala > Holy Priest > Resto Shaman > Disc Priest

And yes, I absolutely loathe Disc. Fucking boring shitspec. That doesn't take away the fact that it's the hardest healing spec (by far). That said, all of them are still very easy if you have any kind of raiding xp and understand general game mechanics.

This is my own personal rule for Dps, but it applies to Healers aswell: If you can play one, you can play them all...

[Blackmist]

Depends on what you're healing. The tank, the raid or the meters?

[HamSandwichFace]

A lot of ppl aren't getting the point of this thread. Current balance issues has NOTHING to do with how hard a class is to play.

Even if a Disc Priest played to 75% efficiency is most likely going to beat anything else, that does not make it an easy class to play. We are talking about "which class is the hardest to completely master", not "which class is the easiest to top healing meters with".

From personal xp: Never played a Monk, but it fills the exact same role as a RDruid

Resto Druid > Holy Pala > Holy Priest > Resto Shaman > Disc Priest

And yes, I absolutely loathe Disc. Fucking boring shitspec. That doesn't take away the fact that it's the hardest healing spec (by far). That said, all of them are still very easy if you have any kind of raiding xp and understand general game mechanics.

This is my own personal rule for Dps, but it applies to Healers aswell: If you can play one, you can play them all...

Playing a Disc Priest at maximum HPS basically means ignoring half your spells and focusing on about 4, I hope you realise this.

[Cookie]

1.) That statement is incorrect, learn to play disc before speaking up.
2.) Maximizing the meter is not the optimal way to play any healer spec.
I hope you realise this, but I seriously doubt it.

[Frozenbeef]

Mistweaver...5.1 just trod them into the ground >.<

[Shink]

i played pretty much all the healers before mop and they haven't changed much at all but mistweaver looks like its the most difficult to keep up with, its not "hard" but it's not "ima afk while i let my cat press holy radiance to keep u guys up ok?"


mists are "fun" for the short term but it'll never have the same feeling other healers have, atleast not yet anyway


Holy paladin ftw

[LKPVmnjler]

spirit shell is really good but keep in mind it's not a fire and forget ability. you can have it fall off just before the aoe hits and you won't be topping the meters. you can have aegis stacked with shell afterwards absorbing everything and you will. it also makes most of your stuff not heal so you have to remove the shell too when it would be a waste to shield people instead of healing them (aka after the aoe is over but your shell is still up, you would simply reshield ppl but they arent gonna be taking dmg, so you have to realize this and remove the shell buff to actually be useful)
its also very reliant on having the groups being set up well. the fight not being one where everyone is spread out a lot and because the prayer of healing originates from the target you cast it on, players not in range of that target aren't going to benefit so you can't just pick any member of a group, there is almost one player per group that is position in the most optimal place to cast prayer of healing on, as to be able to hit all the other players.

so basically, do it like this: think that shell doesnt exist, judge the priest based on that. you see it has so many things to use and to track.
tracking prayer of mending for example, how many stacks does it still have, on who is it, is he gonna be taking any damage, only then can you truly answer whether you should recast it with the remaining question being on who.

you can do this for some other abilities as well. pain supression reduces damage taken, it doesnt actually save a low hp target from death. it alleviates pressure. you dont get an automatic trigger to use it, in fact at first i found myself not using it at all, why is this? because when a target gets low you heal them or they die, whereas many other of the main heal spec save cds are made for when a target gets super low on hp. so you can't use pain supression. you have to once again plan it out, use it when a tanks mitigation cds are on cd etc.
however we also have the low hp save cooldown, void shift. however i can actually kill myself when i use that at a wrong moment.

[Zues]

So don't be stupid and watch timers before popping spirit shell/any kind of shield so they're not wasted? Timers that come with either DBM or BigWigs and 95% of the time have pretty accurate timers?

And if you're not using pain supp, I'm not even sure what to tell you. CDs are there for a reason, learn when to best use them. It's not like Disc has any tricky ones.

[Toxigen]

I love how people are still using healing meters to determine class difficulty.

This is a toss-up between Monk, Resto Druid, and Resto Shaman...depending on the encounter and raid composition.

Resto Shaman are oh-so-powerful in the correct hands...its just the vast majority of R-Shammies are complete garbage with no ability to think on the fly...like the rest of the WoW "raiding" community. I think R-Druids have the highest skillcap in PvP for sure...but PvE its hard tellin' without knowing encounter and raid comp specifics.