Proving Grounds

[Darksoldierr]

Dear Blizzard,

I love chain casted Pyros on one target. I love Hunters standing in fire. I love melee-Mages and ALL STUNS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIGHT! I also love Fear immune mobs when Fear is my only real CC, and absolutely no interrupts whatsoever. Thanks for all of this.

Sincerely,
Healy Priest

They are immune for hex too, only stuns works on them as far as i noticed

[yzzie]

Yesterday I got my "You're doing it Wrong" achieve in holy as dps (a spec I have NEVER played until yesterday), and yet still can't seem to get past wave 5 on gold healing as disc. I regemmed completely into spirit (had about 11K scaled down), took a spirit flask, food buff and tried almost every trick that has been posted... and still couldn't do it. Just kept hitting the same brick wall. It is definitely shaking my confidence. Guess I am just shit at it
On the plus side just tried out flex last night and had a fucking blast. Felt just as competitive and useful in the raid as ever. I can't start normal raids until I am back from overseas (and not raiding on a macbook air lol) but I think I'll leave PG healer gold for sometime later in the patch when I am bored (and it doesn't cost 3K to re-gem).

[Deleted]

Well, as holy I have about 10k spirit (after downscaling gear), since I pretty much gem and reforge everything to spirit and where I can't I got for mastery, also used spirit flask and mastery food. For disc I imagine I won't need that much spirit, but atonment heals for nothing and PW:S spam is expensive and spamming it is not a very smart thing to do. I'm not a great disc priest as I'm a reactive healer in my mind, so I don't really know "how" to get the party up as Renew is so ineffecient as disc and all I can use is GH. SS on tank sounds like it'd be very, very strong, but I do think I need atonment as part of my rotation so I need to get that heal for more.

I cant speak for endless because I didn't try it yet, but for the gold, I went first time with 5k spi and it was horrendous. With 6.4 k from flask and few reforges, and careful use of cds/abilities, it was a complete turnaround - so I reckon at least a 6 k is desired. I was careful to shield the bleed/get it up asap as its hard to recover with disc if you get more than one of them. Also, was careful to focus tank - used PS, SS with GH and even VS when he had the empowered big mobs. I dusted the old hymn+fiend trick and also made sure to use solace on cd. I assume everybody dispels asap, it can add to the dmg if left alone.

All in all, took a bit of learning and conservative behaviour. I reduced the dps myself as I didn't notice gaining significant breaks from it and it was draining my mana.

Keep in mind I don't have anything legendary, not meta, not cloak, nothing.

They are disabled anyway, I'm actually considering getting a set of gear to gem with spi gems and the normal meta. Rumour goes that also the sha gem doesnt get downscaled, so a sha touched wep might be a bonus.

After a few bad cycles of RNG and stupidity of the npcs, I got thru bronze and to the last wave of silver, before crashing and burning... Not sure what to do to push that last little bit out of my poor priest to get silver done. Am consistently hitting a wall btween wave 6.5 and 8.5. Am running Mastery heavy reforge, after getting all the spirit I can --- pushed it up to just under 9k stead of barely 7k after re-reforging and swapping some gems around. Am mostly atoning, spirit shelling before large grp damage spikes etc. At the later waves, the poor tank just gets wrecked and the mage / hunter become amazing retarded in their positioning / over-agroing etc.

Any tips, greatly appreciated.

Those waves are the ones that feel hardest, actually 8-9 feel like a small break in comparison, and things get again heavy on wave 10. You need to go into waves 9-10 with at least half of your mana pool, at least for me it felt needed.

- be conservative with smiting, if you dont need the heal particularly, refrain from it.
- deal with the bleeds asap, unless your tank is dying
- be careful with lev 90 talents, dunno which you are using but halo/cascade are great ways to oom yourself. I took Divine Star, but didn't use it much due to moronic dps standing all over the place.
- I personally preferred solace over mindbender, for the extra mana, but req use on cd.
- make sure you can see the water bomb debuff on your frames and the Chomp (the bleed). Dealing with them asap can prevent a lot of dmg.
- dont hesitate using tank cds (even barrier, since the morons will never be stacked anyway).
- keeping grace on the tank helps; keeping rapture on cd helps; however, dont spam shields.
- time your hymn well, pref with a fiend/mindbender. If you use solace, use that too after hymn.
- dont spam prayer of healing with shell more than needed: use it more like 2xpoh and a gheal on the tank.
- glyph of bind heal, which I usually use felt like a liability; I took the dispel one.

I'm sure most of these are common sense, but it felt like something that needed dusting off after the spam mode of hc raids.

[Blachshma]

Any holys can comment on Serenity vs. Sanctuary for Gold and Endless? Serenity seems the natural choice given its more mana friendly and renew refreshing seems like a must but I'm tempted to try PoH. God I hate chakra with passion...

[l33t]

Completed Gold as Holy, without regemming, just using spirit flask. Basically I did kind of everything stated in guide - almost never flash/binding/great heal or PoH, just spam Heal. Mindbender on cd - well, its anyway a mandatory talent for Holy. Cascade to refresh renew. Single target chakra. Power Infusion. Glyphed Renew. Lightwell (helps A LOT!). Just the same old story, 5 man cata healing.
First 4 waves use only Renew and Heal. I think the worst is the 5 wave, with insane rabbits amount. So just pop up your PI and heal the hell outa party frames. If things start to get ugly throw Guardian spirit on tank and cast Divine Hymn. 5 wave is gamebreaker here, I believe. After it things become smooth, big guys are nothing in terms of healing.
I'm working ATM at endless 30 as Holy, that's where the real challenge lies. Had to regem every gem into Spirit one and replace a helmet for one with regular spirit-crit meta. Had to replace my Horridon trinket with darkmoon fairy one. Had to replace tailoring back chant for one with spirit. And I'm still working on wave 29
I'm kind of disappointed of PG because of player downscaling to miserable 463 ilvl. I'd rather had mobs damage and HP upscaled to my ilvl.

[Deleted]

Any holys can comment on Serenity vs. Sanctuary for Gold and Endless? Serenity seems the natural choice given its more mana friendly and renew refreshing seems like a must but I'm tempted to try PoH. God I hate chakra with passion...

I never understood the point of sanctuary chakra in a 5 man, most of the healing is single target (tank healing/spot healing).

[Deleted]

Serenity all the way is best Blachsma, except for wave 10, where you need to swith to smite chakra and burn down the adds. There is a case for switching to sanctuary on Wave 6 and wave 8, but it is risky, due to RNG with the rabbit bleed. I posted a guide with what worked for up to level 29 for me.

FDCL is less mana that mindbender on paper, however the mana you save from dealing with the bleed easily and from refreshing renews makes FDCL the best talent hands down for holy. No matter how much the extra damage from mindbender helps, I still find that the RNG is 1000x more punishing with mindbender. FDCL gives you a fairly strong proc to use for those oh-shit times.

The best thing you can do on proving grounds as holy however is to limit the damage using CC. Pick the right targets to CC and some waves become piss easy, rather than impossible. On my last attempt on the PTR, I got through level 19 extremely easily by keeping the hive singer CCd until the other two adds died. Then it was pretty easy to lock him down. I didn't get to level 29 that try to test it again though.

Tbh the biggest problem with holy is dealing with the 8th and 9th wave. The rest is fairly simple. I typtically have zero mana on wave 10, but that is fine because I just smite to burn the adds down so I have time to rest before the waves restart and heal the tank with FDCL procs and guardian spirit. The only other damage you got is a flamecaster that pretty much gets locked down hard by the rogue and mage, so he does next to nothing.

[Krunsh]

I have played a hunter as my main since classic. I earned my rusted proto Pre cata, don't stand in fire, 1700 in pvp, killed deathwing pre nerf on normal, haven't done any raiding in mop simply because I don't enjoy it anymore and don't have the time I used to to spend to do it.

Can't get past silver because my aoe feels like trash in both BM and Marks. I haven't gone in with survival yet. I will multishot roughly 20 times to kill the aoe adds and have to spend 12-16 seconds steady/cobra to regen focus. Idk if it's just me, but my Aoe even throwing down explosive and glaive feels like im just lobbing moist noodles at them.

[Anastacy]

As of this posting, ranked 30 out of Priests.

Went Disc. Psyfiend, ToF, Mindbender, and DS are key for talents, IMO. Glyphed Smite but prolly gonna swap to Binding Heal, and used Purify and PoM glyphs (latter really helps w/ Chomps).

What helped me the most was learning to SS about 10 seconds before next wave ( don't SS first round; cooldown will be ready for every wave after). Wave 8 is killer sometimes, but BH glyph should help.

Also, identify what mobs the DPS attack first. It's 99% the same every time. This will help with burst and ToF uptime.

And as others have said, keep Grace on tank for Enrage mob waves (and prolly wave 8), but otherwise I was good to use offensive Penance. I baaaaarely used Heal, lots of PoH at times, DS if I could Lifegrip the tank closer, and PW:S outside of Rapture only in dire situations. Also used Inner Will so Rapture is actually a mana gain.

My best run (wave 27?), I even actually made a lot of mistakes, but RNG was very favorable to me until the end. . Other times RNG is such a cluterfuck that I'm screwed by wave 15.

[Axi]

Disc: Gold after about an hour completely unoptimized, 5 second lag spikes killed my first two runs at it, then cleared it third try with 210k mana left.

On to Endless I guess, need to try mindbender to see if I prefer it also.

[TirielWoW]

I did this pretty heavily on the PTR, and disliked it so intensely (after spending hours and hours bashing my head against the really early, completely broken version) that I haven't been able to bring myself to go back and regem and re-enchant all of my gear to do it properly.

Suffice it to say, the only thing it's taught me is to never run with bots. Ever. Because they will stand in fire, fail to use their DPS CDs, fail to focus targets down one at a time, fail to get out of the fire, fail to use their active mitigation, etc.

But if that Mage bitch yells at me one more time for not being able to heal her through chain Pyros (FAST HEALS ARE GOOD FOR EMERGENCIES LIKE THIS) or dispelling two Aquabombs at the same time (more a problem on Endless, but I digress), I will string her up by her own entrails.

[snaxattax]

i found twist of fate to be completely phenomenal for the healer challenge. one shot gold in unoptimized/no meta disc set with zero setup. remember to fear/root as much as you can to avoid the damage, and that the 500 all stat flask works here (i really think the extra health + spirit is better than the 500 int from the usual flask).

also doing you're doing it wrong, doing the tank challenges as disc was quite easy as well. fear and PoM are incredibly effective here, as well.

[Lovestar]

Suffice it to say, the only thing it's taught me is to never run with bots. Ever. Because they will stand in fire, fail to use their DPS CDs, fail to focus targets down one at a time, fail to get out of the fire, fail to use their active mitigation, etc.

It's excellent training for PUGs. :p

I rationalize it as "fight mechanics". Yes, technically, it's the NPCs being 100% retarded. But practically, it's no different than a specific fight quirk which causes your expectations to change. From there, it's a matter of pushing yourself to adapt to unexpected situations. It's frustrating, but also beneficial and rewarding, IMO.

[TirielWoW]

It's excellent training for PUGs. :p

I rationalize it as "fight mechanics". Yes, technically, it's the NPCs being 100% retarded. But practically, it's no different than a specific fight quirk which causes your expectations to change. From there, it's a matter of pushing yourself to adapt to unexpected situations. It's frustrating, but also beneficial and rewarding, IMO.

Disagree. I can reason with actual flesh and blood human beings, and if they continue to be fuckheads, I can vote to kick.

[Lovestar]

Disagree. I can reason with actual flesh and blood human beings, and if they continue to be fuckheads, I can vote to kick.

Yeah, but if a boss fight has some mechanic, for example, that temporarily nullifies a tank's mitigation and is designed as a healing challenge ... you can't "kick" it away. Or a phase of insanely-high pulsing raid damage that simultaneously requires the raid to be spread out. And so on.

Basically, PGs are balanced to be doable (like a boss fight), but they may require you to break your habits and think differently (like a boss fight). I found myself yelling at the NPCs and blaming them and getting angry. Then I thought to look at it from a different angle, as built-in mechanical challenges, and push myself to adapt to them instead. It became a lot more fun.

[dmfg]

As of this posting, ranked 30 out of Priests.

Went Disc. Psyfiend, ToF, Mindbender, and DS are key for talents, IMO. Glyphed Smite but prolly gonna swap to Binding Heal, and used Purify and PoM glyphs (latter really helps w/ Chomps).

What helped me the most was learning to SS about 10 seconds before next wave ( don't SS first round; cooldown will be ready for every wave after). Wave 8 is killer sometimes, but BH glyph should help.

Also, identify what mobs the DPS attack first. It's 99% the same every time. This will help with burst and ToF uptime.

And as others have said, keep Grace on tank for Enrage mob waves (and prolly wave 8), but otherwise I was good to use offensive Penance. I baaaaarely used Heal, lots of PoH at times, DS if I could Lifegrip the tank closer, and PW:S outside of Rapture only in dire situations. Also used Inner Will so Rapture is actually a mana gain.

My best run (wave 27?), I even actually made a lot of mistakes, but RNG was very favorable to me until the end. . Other times RNG is such a cluterfuck that I'm screwed by wave 15.

I've got 2 runs to wave 16 and got absolutely destroyed there both times. I can't finish off 15 in time, and the combination of the AoE adds and chomp is brutal. How do you deal with chomp? Sometimes it just feels like there's nothing I can do to get them back up except emergency Void Shift..

[Basmothh]

I've got 2 runs to wave 16 and got absolutely destroyed there both times. I can't finish off 15 in time, and the combination of the AoE adds and chomp is brutal. How do you deal with chomp? Sometimes it just feels like there's nothing I can do to get them back up except emergency Void Shift..

Ensure your raid is topped off before Wave 15 ends, SS 5-10s before Wave 16 to negate the first Chomp, use AA before second Chomp to ensure tank is topped off as him getting that Chomp is what will wipe you.

I would also space out the CDs - PS for Wave 15 and Barrier for Wave 16 after the respective first Chomps for each wave.

[Anastacy]

Chomp from the spawn is handled by SS. Everyone full health (or close enough) + absorbs = no Chomp debuff.

Chomps after SS have worn off (or lacking other absorbs like DA) are best handled by a glyphed PoM, Divine Star, or Penance.

[Blachshma]

I never understood the point of sanctuary chakra in a 5 man, most of the healing is single target (tank healing/spot healing).

Usually I'd agree, as its common sense. Serenity is also more mana friendly as well. The reason I was asking is purely to see if in this case I would have to get some more DI procs, hence more smart AoE. In Serenity, the Heal + glyphed Renew combo just did not seem strong enough, and I did need to use an occasional GH.

[Deleted]

Usually I'd agree, as its common sense. Serenity is also more mana friendly as well. The reason I was asking is purely to see if in this case I would have to get some more DI procs, hence more smart AoE. In Serenity, the Heal + glyphed Renew combo just did not seem strong enough, and I did need to use an occasional GH.

In some waves sanctuary ismore efficient but the problem is the 30s cooldown. In the entire wave you might need strong single target (to get hte bleed off the tank for example) for literally 10s and you can't do that with chakra.