Holy and gear scaling: Whats going on?

[ZombiePriest]

So just looking for some input please! I run as a Holy priest in a 25 man raid. We have the entire gauntlet of healers: 1 holy, 1 disc, 1 resto dru, 1 mistweaver monk, 2 holy pal and 2 resto shaman. We tend to overheal and would use 7-6 healers. What Ive noticed was that early on with Throne, I consistantly came in top 3 of our healer core. Just cant seem to outheal the one paladin. Now as we’ve all been gearing up and dropped down to using 6 heals on a more consistant basis, it is extremely rare for me to come in top 3 of our healers. What the hell happened?

None of the heals have drastically changed around their spells/talents or even their gemming. So I cannot quite get my mind around the big change here. It’s a bit frustrating to have done so well, keeping up the good work, and coming in 5th on healing. If its purely due to a scaling issue, will 5.3 put Holy in any better of a spot? :/

[Shandas]

I personally dont have any trouble with holy healing in 25man, i'm Allways top on durumu and Iron Qon but that might be because we have no paladin healers in my guild, how can you get that low with the insane healing from POM ? Are all your heals getting sniped or what? 7 healers is overkill for pretty much any 25man boss.

[Deleted]

there needs to be damage for you to heal it.
more gear on other healers means they're getting there first or simply preventing it with absorbs.
more dps generally means less damage to heal also (shorter fights, more mana to burn etc)

go disc if you want to top healing meters on old (not progress) content

[Theodoxus]

Or put another way - if your raid isn't dying, why do you care where you are on the meters? If it's not something that needs to be improved upon - as presumably you're doing fine, then why stress?

I've learned to tighten up on my heals and really watch cooldowns / use macros to maximize my healing potential, and have managed to increase my HPS by over 10k over the course of a couple weeks - but that's just a personal victory, and has no effect on my day to day healing meter placement. Sometimes I'm first, sometimes I'm 4th - meh. We don't die - so no one cares.

[Deleted]

As redsparowe says, you cant heal what isnt there.

with Holy pally absorbs (insane) and disc, they are absorbing the first x amount of incoming damage.

[ZombiePriest]

Its not a matter of trying to be cool on the meters; its a matter of trying to figure out what the hell happened. Ive been good with timing my heals and CDs. we do have a disc and 2 paladins in for most bosses. not sure if that has anything to do with it. POM is out on CD and generally is my top heal.

[Deleted]

exactly, you have 3 absorbers.

as their gear gets better, their absorbs get stronger. the more that your guild rinses and repeats bosses the less damage they are likely to take from mechanics of a fight.

less damage taken + more damage absorbed = nothing for "healers" to heal.

[ZombiePriest]

Simple enough concept. thank you folks :/

[Einai]

That has everything to do with it. If you're overhealing an encounter, or if it's farm content, holy is going to look bad on meters. Everything is being absorbed by your disc priest and 2 holy pallies. If you're 5th on meters on heroic progression though, that would be a different story.

[ZombiePriest]

We havent touched heroics yet :/

[Auntlinda]

Just want to say. I play holy priest and I have noticed our gear doesn't boost us quite as well some of the other healing classes. I'm at 520 ilvl at the moment and i really do not feel much more "powerful" than i did at 510 or even 500. With DPS classes your gear tends to ramp up your dps pretty consistently across the board, maybe Bliz uses a different gauge when measuring healers.
Something else to consider is that you might be hitting different haste / crit / mastery plateaus. Check the forums or use an addon to determine where you might need to reforge and it could make a world of difference.
One last note is check your specializations, i changed 2 of my "specs" and it makes a big difference.

[ramennoodleking]

Part of the problem is overhealing fights. Holy shines best when there's a near constant need to heal. More healers you have (not to mention absorbs) the less you will be able to profit from mastery. But with that number of healers is star prioritize spirit > haste and only take mastery and crit when you just can't remove it further. Then sit back out outsnipe everyone.

Even still...too many healers.

[nobodysbaby]

Hpriest do scale badly compared to others mostly because we can't reforge Spirit into output or take gears without Spirit & output trinkets like many other can at 320+ ilvls. It's not imagination. Yeah, dmg patterns and co-healers matters and generally absorbs will do the job before you'll get the chance. GOSH, I really start to hate all these absorbs, it's just too fucking much. I want to /slap myself when chaining SS & dpsing playing Disc.

Doing 106k hps on Garalon the first kill in a few blues/476 epics (470 at the most?) and 60 ilvls later 130k hps. The big difference is I used to heal without a Disc back then and without crazy absorbs. Sure, you can argue it's a mix of everything, also I have yet to see a boss who does constant, pulsing AoE 100% of the fight, there are none in ToT, as most fights favours putting up absorbs pre-burst on neith 1 min timers.

One thing for sure is that Holy does not have good fillers for those tank dmg/random dmg times. Renew? Yeah, riiight. FH/GH? Bubuye mana. We're better off idleing to save for those bursts. "Change Chakra", uh, no, maybe for 10's but for 25's the random dmg is better healed still with PoM/CoH or even PoH. We need that Chakra limitation to go first of all. We need Serenity constantly, not only when first gimping AoE heals by going ST Chakra. Holy are by far the worst triage healer, pretty much only suitable for AoE healing. This is a big tribute to lower hps, not that is matters a ton in the long run, since we do ok during heavy dmg.

Oh, about those haste limits; why exactly would you want a certain haste lvl? Renews..? Sanctuary? Only one even worth mentioning imo is Lightspring at 4721, wich is pretty laughable that it's not more beneficial to reach hastecaps.

[ramennoodleking]

Haste for hpriests now is more to push PoH cast time down. Unfortunately haste doesn't really help any of the other main staple spells, so there's a degree of waste associated with it.

[blargh312]

Haste for hpriests now is more to push PoH cast time down. Unfortunately haste doesn't really help any of the other main staple spells, so there's a degree of waste associated with it.

The problem is all the secondary stats have a degree of waste for Holy. EoL overheals a ton, haste past a breakpoint only benefits PoH and the GCD, crit contributes more to overhealing than anything else. It's basically just pick whichever one sucks the least.

[snaxattax]

play crit disc, acquire meter

[nobodysbaby]

The problem is all the secondary stats have a degree of waste for Holy. EoL overheals a ton, haste past a breakpoint only benefits PoH and the GCD, crit contributes more to overhealing than anything else. It's basically just pick whichever one sucks the least.

Agree. Poor scaling. If Sanctuary, EoL, Hymn (that doesn't gain extra ticks...) and Renew would have been better atleast Haste would've been good. EoL is way too much overheal unless fights are consistent raid wide aoe (wich are none in ToT, aka Garalon as I mentioned). Crit is meh, it doesnt get a double-value into dps/manaregen/proccs/absorbs or anything else like most other classes either.

Concensus; we gain less from stats generally compared to others and we are also too dependant on Spirit for regen.

[Kalmah]

If you run the same healing comp for weeks, disc and paladin healing will go up, while everyone else's healing should go down. This has nothing to do with scaling and everything to do with the amount of damage to be healed remaining more or less constant and absorbs being first to count.

If you want hps to go up over time, you need to cut a healer everytime the extra gear allows you to.

[Tsuna]

Paladins gearing up means they steal your heals with Illuminated Healing. That and the tanks are taking less damage. Really that's it. You can steal the heals back by going disc, as a paladin healer myself I can attest to the fact that we HATE that shit. But it is what it is, don't worry about hps, the only real question is did the boss die or not.

[Noradin]

If you run the same content again and again, healing numbers should go down anyway - its just that direct healing with cast time goes down first, followed by smartheals and then absorbs. It has nothing to do with scaling or healing potential or even how secure the raid is against dying, the only thing that progression on meters reflect is the order in which the wow servers resolve damage intake.

You could do 1T hps and some other healer caps out at 1 aps, if there is only 1 dps incoming he will come out with more 'effective' healing done. It means nothing, not even that your healing wasn't effective to beat the encounter, it was just ineffective on the meters.

With the introduction of a sizable amount of absorbs the 'effective' in 'effective healing' on the logs lost most of it's meaning, people just haven't realized that overhealing and effective healing numbers on the logs can't tell you as much as before, yet.