Why am I sucking on the meters?

[gotpriest]

Normally, my answer would be "screw the meters, people are alive, call it good." But lately I've been running a lot of pug raids where I'm getting nailed to the cross for my healing.


Armory: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...&cn=Priesticle

I find I'm competitive against Shamans, but get completely blasted out of the water by Druids and Paladins.

I don't know personally what I'm doing wrong. PoM every 10 seconds, CoH on Melee every CD, SoL procs used on whoever needs health. Renew on everything within reason without running OoM.

I don't feel its gear holding me back. Priests used to be on top when it came to healing and now I feel like the rear of the fail train.

Any advice?

[Mr_Bojangles]

Needs more renew IMO

Empowered healing is a bad talent, take take the points out and top off improved renew and empowered renew, and fill out blessed resilience. If someone needs healing and isn't at risk of dying very soon, you should use renew before flash heal, even if you have surge of light.

You say CoH on melee every CD, I want to make sure you realize they changed it to a raid wide smart heal, so that it will heal anyone within range regardless of group. You shouldn't use it on cooldown, but in response to an aoe damage. Also, prayer of mending is a 7 second cooldown, make sure you throw it on the tank and let it bounce from there for best affect.

[harky]

It's possible that you're getting killed due to raids having too many healers. Someone is going to suffer when you have too many healers. Most raids you only need 5-6 healers now and some bosses need less. Having more means tons of overhealing.

Without a parse it's really hard to say what you're doing wrong though, not really worth trying.

[gotpriest]

Do you truly let it bounce or renew it every 7 seconds? I find that if I let it bounce, it goes to a mage that won't get any use out of it.

Thanks for the advice on Renew - tbh I'm not using it that much as a heal. My raid reports usually come out PoM - CoH - FH in that order.

I CoH the Melee because they get hit by AoE's the most, and if I CoH a ranged, all too often they're not within 12 yards of someone else, which mitigates its use to me.

Thanks for the spec advice as well.

Admittedly, I just came back from a 16 month Hiatus. Did Priests start getting the shaft recently? I feel my tank healing is horrific at best compared to Disc nowadays.

[harky]

Priests have been behind since Ulduar, it's nothing that new. 16 months is a while though, so.. Anyway, Disc is much better on tanks and yes, Renew should be your primary heal and should (on most fights) beat CoH and PoM by a substantial amount.

[shags the penguin]

Depends:

Often a large amount of healers can result in a harder time for priests and other direct heal classes since normally 3/4 of a spell is wasted as overheal where as a slow ticking dot.

Also depends what you are raiding but gear could be a major factor...(always think of gear last though improve yourself before using gear as an excuse very limited people play at a top level but think they do ) If your raiding ICC 25 then i would expect other healers to out gear you by a rather large amount you SP seems a little low for that but w/e

[gotpriest]

Mostly ToC / Ony / VoA 10/25. Some ICC 10, and I expect to fall behind there, as my gear isn't necessarily up to par there yet.

[shockedandawed]

Don't feel bad if a paladin tops healing meters. In any situation where there is a ton of dmg on tanks and or raid a good holy paladin can beat any class beacon/1 second holy lights are a pretty big deal. Also druids are just rolling hots and have an aoe heal from wild growth its expected they should top the meters when there is intensive raid dmg. Just make sure your target does not die.

[kayaus]

Healing meters are so BS you shouldn't even pay attention to them. You have to realize that lets say the tank gets hit for 30k and a pally has a big holy light about to land on him for like 25k that means in the meters he will get the 25k and you if you're fast enough can only get the 5k thats left to heal. Meters are all about who can snipe the required healing first and sadly for holy priests all you can do is precast PoH then CoH and maybe holy nova or something right after big raidwide damage if you really want to get those numbers. All in all a Druid rolling HoTs or a Shammy spamming CH will most likely get to it first which means their meters will be amazing but yours maybe not so much. This of course is not true for all fights because stuff like Sindragosa with constant damage is very nice for us but in the end healing meters are all about who can snipe (whether they are trying to or not) heals the fastest.

[magicism]

You can spam Renew for more through-put but it isn't really fun. It will get you higher on the meters.

But then you will probably find Ghostcrawler complaining about Priests being too boring or some more bullshit like that.

[rubberbands]

What pugs are you doing? VOA? ICC25? In any case for ICC 25 holy priests are in a very weak position right now, both for the case of meters and general feasability/usefulness/contribution. Contrary to popular opinion I believe we are also currently the least versatile healer, and yet still suffer from bad scaling (CoH mainly), a terribad T10, and possibly alot of bias from GC.

A large part of why we're doing bad on meters is that most encounters really warrant flash heals from the holy priest. Most AOE will be out metered by a drood (not saying that trees are bad if they know what theyre doing). Which is where you get the "blanket renew to top meters" path as mentioned by magician. If you're in a pug and dont know the leader hey its his problem if hes tunneling the heal meters. Don't let it affect you. You can choose to either play to go all out to cheese the meters or play the proper way. TBH I'm not surprised that I'm usually also way below on the meters.