How to improve my healing as a holy priest?

[Archicortex]

I'm having trouble getting as high up on healing as i'd want to. I started playing a priest about 1 week prior to Cataclysm release and last time i played one was in vanilla up to 60 as shadow, so i believe part of the reason i'm not performing up to par is lacking sheer experience, but that can't be the only reason i'm not doing so well. I have _very_ extensive healing experience on my restoration shaman (bleeding edge raiding throughout entire TBC), but for some reason i'm struggeling performing as well with a priest (No i don't mean meters, i mean generally compared to other players with the same spec)

Below you'll find my armory (EU) link and a link to my guilds' World of Log page. Before you do, these are the things i believe are making me heal a bit worse than i could;

- I Raidlead, so combined with low play experience as a holy priest it is destroying my concentration/focus some times. It's something i need to work on, i know, but if you have any tips i'd appreciate it.
- My latency isn't the best; i'm around 150-200ms generally, i suppose that has a slight impact too?
- My gear might not be completely optimized, but i believe it's very close to (except for the hit boots)
- I've noticed i need to get better on when to use Binding Heal and when to use Prayer of Mending. I generally use the direct heal spells instead of those spell.. So that's a possible Healing efficiency flaw right there.

Also worth noting. I've reforged to haste because i wanted to see how my healing was. I don't know if i've just gotten better since last time we did Halfus or what happened, but my HPS was higher after i reforged more into haste. Do note that my WoL tracker stopped early in our last run without me noticing so the only reliable data is Halfus.

Character name: Ratiolegis

Armory profile: /eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/grim-batol/ratiolegis/simple

World of Logs link for RealityCheckl (look for "Ratiolegis"): worldoflogs.com/guilds/104931/

I considered myself a pretty good healer back in the TBC days. And although i've not raided much (and definetely not healed since then) up until the release of Cataclysm, i'm left wondering what it is i'm doing that is fundamentally wrong.

[Haibara]

I'll start with gear, you have way too much haste if you ask me, I currently sit at 4.53% haste, with 3 point Darkness for 7.5%, this gives me 12.5% haste raid buffed and my 5'th Renew tick, the reason why I minimized my haste rating, is because of holy's mastery, it's almost a straight % increase to your healing, and haste rarely matters in current content, I "never" use flash heal. I currently sit at 102k mana fully buffed, and my mp5 while casting averages 5.5k without mana tide though I use JoAR, I'd say you want more spirit in your current gear, and try to replace those boots with the one's from hc HoO or VP vendor.

as for healing spells, this is something I worked out quickly Holy HPMana: Power Word:Shield=2.6 Flash Heal= 4.5 Greater Heal=5, HW:Sanctuary=5.4, Renew=5.5, Heal=6.6, Binding Heal=7.4, Holy Nova=9, HW:Serenity=10, Circle of Healing=11.8, PoH=14.1, Prayer of Mending 14.4, Lightwell 51.8 (8000 spell power 20% mastery)

as you can see the preffered spells are quite obvious, BH/FH get a small bonus due to stacking Serendipity, but try to work out a nice balance between hps and hpm, there are almost no abilitys wich deal more than ~60k dmg, so you should never have to worry too much about people dyeing because you use your efficient spells, granted they don't mess up, but that's their fault, this isn't wotlk anymore.

I could go into detail about each spell but there are several posts, not to mention the sticky wich does, so I'll leave it at that and hope this helped
armory if you're interested: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...r/shayn/simple

[Mazi]

I have to disagree with the above poster. I don't know why people push for the 12.5% haste Renew cap so much. Renew is such an inefficient raid healing spell right now that you don't need to worry about that. You aren't spamming Renew, and if you are using Renew it's on the tank which can be refreshed with Heal so the 5th tick doesn't matter, other than getting it to tick faster, in which case, as much Haste as possible is the ultimate benefit.

Haste vs. Mastery is really a preference. I find that in 10mans Haste is better, and 25s Mastery is better. Our main progression team is currently 10m so I stack Haste. I have noticed a small increase in my overall healing since swapping all of my Mastery to Haste. It really is personal preference. You can even just have both, but I recommend stacking one way or the other, as it gives you more overall effect. You're a little inconsistent in your gear, which I assume is just an oversight; you reforge Mastery to Haste yet you have a Mastery enchant on your gloves.

Talents
Surge of Light is pretty useless right now. In your Valonia log you cast Heal only 8 times without a single proc and Halfus was 6 Heals and no procs. Is that really worth 2 talent points? No. It will be in 4.0.6, but right now it's not.

Divine Touch & Rapid Renewal. Again, you're taking talent points that you aren't even using. These are pretty useless as well, until 4.0.6 - and even then Rapid Renewal is meh. You almost didn't cast Renew at all in either of those 2 fights. The only 2 fights that I have encountered where Renew is powerful in 10m are Council & Nefarian P1/P2. You should probably drop the Glyph as well.

I recommend going with something like this since you don't need State of Mind: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bchZfuRRRzrkfzoh

Yes, DP is weak, but it's a free healthstone and is getting buffed in 4.0.6. It's honestly better than any other talent you're forced to take unless you take 2pts in Divine Touch - which you can. Although Blessed Resilience is 5/10% in the tooltip, it's actually 15/30% because of a hotfix 3-4 weeks ago. It's a great talent to have; use your DP when you have BR if you can :]


Spell Choice
Valonia: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-ya...?s=2761&e=3131

This was a 6 minute fight and you only had 108k from Lightwell. This could be a few things:
1. Are your dps trained to click it?
2. Are you placing it in an ideal spot? IE, next to melee and within range of the tank, next to ranged
3. Are you casting it pre-pull & then again during the encounter?

A single Lightwell can easily pull off 200k healing.

Sanctuary is garbage for 10mans. Never use it. It pulls of like, 20k healing at best and costs 10k mana. You're much much much much better off dropping every other AoE raid heal you have, PoH, ProM, CoH. In 25s it's "ook" during big stacking high damage intake phases, but it's barely there. Don't use it in 10m, haha.

Prayer of Mending is very powerful on both of those fights with the AE damage. Some points more than others.

Anytime a group with 3+ members that need healing - PoH. 1-2, just cast Heal or Greater Heal. You're using Greater Heal a lot and I'm not really sure why. Are you tank healing? If so, your numbers will be skewed from the "norm." If you're raid healing use your main raid healing tools: ProM -> PoH -> CoH. When you take damage, Binding Heal. It gives you the boost to your next PoH / GH. You should really use them on PoH as much as possible, unless the tank is taking spiky damage.

Holy Word: Serenity is your friend! In 10m there usually isn't much of a need to ever be in Sanctuary - except super high damage phases like Feud on Chimeron. Serenity is one of your highest HPM heal, gives you the crit buff on the target (which, with higher Haste you can get 2 Heal/Gheals off while it's up) and it is instant cast. I've saved a lot of lives with this thing! Use it often! I'm not even the best at remembering to use this, practice makes perfect. :]

The best advice I can give you, and since you are a raid leader I assume you know this, is to know the fights through and through. Learn the damage patterns outside of the game and then you will know exactly which heal is the most effective for each situation. Be proactive instead if reactive and you will immediately notice an increase in your numbers & survivability of your raid.

Feel free to ask questions on what I said, I check these forums often. ^_^

Here's my guild's logs - Starmazin: http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/93381/ Armory is in sig

[Ynna]

Haste vs. Mastery is really a preference. I find that in 10mans Haste is better, and 25s Mastery is better. Our main progression team is currently 10m so I stack Haste. I have noticed a small increase in my overall healing since swapping all of my Mastery to Hate. It really is personal preference. You can even just have both, but I recommend stacking one way or the other, as it gives you more overall effect. You're a little inconsistent in your gear, which I assume is just an oversight; you reforge Mastery to Haste yet you have a Mastery enchant on your gloves.

I agree. I'm favoring Haste above Mastery and I don't see any problems with healing my (10man) raid.

Talents
Surge of Light is pretty useless right now. In your Valonia log you cast Heal only 8 times without a single proc and Halfus was 6 Heals and no procs. Is that really worth 2 talent points? No. It will be in 4.0.6, but right now it's not.

Divine Touch & Rapid Renewal. Again, you're taking talent points that you aren't even using. These are pretty useless as well, until 4.0.6 - and even then Rapid Renewal is meh. You almost didn't cast Renew at all in either of those 2 fights. The only 2 fights that I have encountered where Renew is powerful in 10m are Council & Nefarian P1/P2. You should probably drop the Glyph as well.

I recommend going with something like this since you don't need State of Mind: http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bchZfuRRRzrkfzoh

Yes, DP is weak, but it's a free healthstone and is getting buffed in 4.0.6. It's honestly better than any other talent you're forced to take unless you take 2pts in Divine Touch - which you can. Although Blessed Resilience is 5/10% in the tooltip, it's actually 15/30% because of a hotfix 3-4 weeks ago. It's a great talent to have; use your DP when you have BR if you can :]

Here I disagree. Surge of Light isn't that good at the moment, but the alternatives aren't that great either. I'm running Surge of Light at the moment (I skipped Divine Touch and Rapid Renewal, well, my spec is in my sig.) and doesn't proc often, but when it procs it's useful, more useful than Divine Touch or Desperate Prayer could be at the moment (the patch might change this).
Edit: If you'd like to take Desperate Prayer anyway, you could drop a point in Mental Agility, you probably don't need to max that one.

[Kaysha]

While I agree with most of the post you made, Mazi, this is one thing I disagree with:

Sanctuary is garbage for 10mans. Never use it. It pulls of like, 20k healing at best and costs 10k mana. You're much much much much better off dropping every other AoE raid heal you have, PoH, ProM, CoH. In 25s it's "ook" during big stacking high damage intake phases, but it's barely there. Don't use it in 10m, haha.

The main point to cast Sanctuary anyway is not because of its efficiency (both in HPS or HPM), but it is because it stacks with everything else you're doing - including moving, during which you can't cast PoH, and CoH and PoM may be on cooldown - so it effectively increases your total HPS while it's there. And unless I am mistaken, it also gets affected by Mastery, proc'ing Echo on the people healed through it.

Also, if you're a Raid Healer and mainly cast PoH, CoH and PoM, while not being in Sanctuary, you are missing the buff to those spells for the most part. Yes, it gives you a near-free heal every 10 seconds, but I think Sanctuary is more effective - but I admit, I don't have the numbers to either prove or disprove this.

Edit: Looked up the exact details for Sanctuary vs. Serenity Chakra.
Serenity: Increases the critical effect chance of your direct healing spells by 10%, and causes your direct heals to refresh the duration of your Renew on the target.
Sanctuary: Increases the healing done by your area of effect spells and Renew by 15% and reduces the cooldown of your Circle of Healing by 2 sec.

Both Chakra's affect Renew. One refreshes it, the other increases its healing. Serenity adds 10% crit - a stat which is unreliable at best - while Sanctuary gives a straight up 15% healing boost, while also reducing CoH cooldown. Another advantage of Sanctuary vs. Serenity: you don't have to cast a Heal first, to get it going and extend it, you can immediately start to throw PoM and PoH around and keep it running.

[Archicortex]

Thanks a lot for the time spent putting all that together and also reviewing my parses/profile.

The inconsitency in haste/mastery is mainly due to be testing different approaches hoping they'd improve my healing.
I've respecced, however i have not put a point in DP, in my honest opinion i find no real reason as to why I should pick it. Might be worth it for hardmodes after the buff next patch, but for the time being it's a talent point better spent elsewhere.

The use of Lightwell is something i ask up to several times during a raidfight in the hopes that people will actually click and use it! The positioning is generally as good as it should be (and our raids are also range-heavy so they should be able to click them much easier) and i really can't explain why it's not used more often other than our raiders being spoiled by 3 healer setups on almost all fights.

We had a 6% wipe on Ascendant Council the one time we got to p3, so we'll probably go again sunday and obviously i'm even considering changing our setup to a 2healer one (me and hopefully our paladin if he gets online). Which means i need to heal more efficiently than I am. With the suggestions and changes made (20% EoL now, up from 13-14, reduced haste by 8%) to my gear and spell priorities i'm hoping for better results.

The thing about being proactive is still hard since i'm losing attention due to raidleading, pointing out flaws and hoping to correct them mid-fight in order to avoid wipes and whatnot. So i always end up not being completely "on the ball" which is very different from back when i healed as a resto shaman as i know how important it is to analyze both the raid, the boss mechanics and also general player behaviour in our guild when it comes to healing efficiently.

Anyway i'll keep trying to improve and tweak things as much as I can. I'll get back to this thread with more feedback on Sunday after our raid as i believe i still have a long way to go.

[Mazi]

While I agree with most of the post you made, Mazi, this is one thing I disagree with:



The main point to cast Sanctuary anyway is not because of its efficiency (both in HPS or HPM), but it is because it stacks with everything else you're doing - including moving, during which you can't cast PoH, and CoH and PoM may be on cooldown - so it effectively increases your total HPS while it's there. And unless I am mistaken, it also gets affected by Mastery, proc'ing Echo on the people healed through it.

Also, if you're a Raid Healer and mainly cast PoH, CoH and PoM, while not being in Sanctuary, you are missing the buff to those spells for the most part. Yes, it gives you a near-free heal every 10 seconds, but I think Sanctuary is more effective - but I admit, I don't have the numbers to either prove or disprove this.

Edit: Looked up the exact details for Sanctuary vs. Serenity Chakra.
Serenity: Increases the critical effect chance of your direct healing spells by 10%, and causes your direct heals to refresh the duration of your Renew on the target.
Sanctuary: Increases the healing done by your area of effect spells and Renew by 15% and reduces the cooldown of your Circle of Healing by 2 sec.

Both Chakra's affect Renew. One refreshes it, the other increases its healing. Serenity adds 10% crit - a stat which is unreliable at best - while Sanctuary gives a straight up 15% healing boost, while also reducing CoH cooldown. Another advantage of Sanctuary vs. Serenity: you don't have to cast a Heal first, to get it going and extend it, you can immediately start to throw PoM and PoH around and keep it running.

Oh I know how useful Chakra: Sanc is. The point was really that he hadn't used Holy Word: Serenity at all. The main thing is that it's not the end of the world either way. Both are great buffs and neither hurts you by healing the other way. IE AoE healing in Serenity or single healing in Sanc. That's the beauty of a Holy Priest.

A real example of this would be Cho'gall. Yeah, he does some AoE every once and a while and it knocks people low, but this is not immediate danger. You have plenty of time to heal them back to full so it is far more beneficial to be in Serenity for the tank healing and instant heal rather than going into Sanc just to heal them up. You have to think of your personal utility over increased healing sometimes.

Just from my experience I've found that I don't spend that much time in Sanc in 10m and perform just wonderfully. I love Holy Word: Serenity as it nearly "replaces" the need for Flash Heal and allows you to easily weave in and out of tank healing and raid healing - which is almost a requirement in 10m. Now, in 25s, that's a completely different story. I spend most of my time in Sanc purely because I'm going to be raid healing far more damage for a longer time.

I really disagree about Sanctuary itself though. Yes it has high HPES, but I just can't bring myself to say it's worth it. If you're using it on the move it's even less worth it. Because it heals for so little it's proccing tiny, tiny EoL ticks and still, just isn't worth it. I have used it and experimented with it in 10s and I just don't really see the need for it unless everyone is stacked and there is constant incoming damage that must be healed right now. I even defended Sanc just like you did at one point and continued to use it, but it just really isn't needed. Especially when you compare it to the Druids' & Shamans' ground heals. We just have so many other tools that we really don't need it. You can find plenty of discussion about it in both mmo holy priest guide and EJ.

[Maxpowr]

I side with mazi about my feelings on sanctuary (the spell) also. The only fights I would even consider using it are Chimaeron and Cho'gall. However, for the amount of healing done compared to mana cost of it (a whopping 8k+ mana), PoH wins every time. If they either cut the mana cost or increase its HPS, I may see myself using it but even then we have so much AoE utility it's not even funny.

You are far better off trying to get your raid to use lightwell than dropping sanc.

[Kaysha]

You are far better off trying to get your raid to use lightwell than dropping sanc.

I do both . And maybe I am lucky, but tonight the (Glyphed) Lightwell got drained pretty often before it could expire .

[ainra]

Related, but not as helpful... I get sad when lightwell expires because noone clicked it! Sometimes it is frustrating because of positioning. If someone stands close to it/on it, it can be hard to click.

In other news! I have not done a single 10 man so I honestly have no idea how the transition is from 25s to 10s. I will say that healing is, and always has been, based a lot on personal preference. You just need to find the best way to be efficient and effective, however that might be. This is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to the haste or mastery discussion. There are pros and cons to each, it's just what works better for you and your raid. I do not agree with stacking haste to get that extra tick of renew because, come on, renew is NOT our top heal anymore (and you don't seem to use it at all - I suggest adding that especially when in Serenity chakra, but it's boosted with Sanct too so it's still helpful to toss it on tanks). I wouldn't get to some magical number and say 'OK! Another tick of renew, the spell I use ALL the time, so I can stop stacking haste!' It's just silly to think that way! So please, don't blindly follow that. If renew IS your top heal (that's kinda scary, but to each their own!) then take that into consideration. If it is not, look past the magical numbers!

On the note you made about binding heal and PoM... I'd say if there is any type of damage going out where PoM is useful, CAST IT. CAST IT CAST IT CAST IT! As far as binding heal goes, since it costs the same mana as fheal, it's worth using anytime you are short health and the rest of the group/raid isn't (ie: when you wouldn't be casting PoH/CoH instead).

From looking at your logs a little, I wouldn't say you're doing bad at all. I would say, as stated above, that HW:Sanct is craptacular for the amount of mana it costs. I honestly have only ever used it on Al'Akir (and a few normal bosses that were easy/boring where I had excess mana). It's just not worth it. You'd probably be better off casting PoH. The only other thing I would note is your use of Gheal. As I said before, no knowledge or experience with 10ms in this expansion, but it seems like it wouldn't be the best thing to cast. If you are tank healing, I'd imagine you might use it at times, but getting better use of HW:Serenity might be useful for you.

[zodiaak]

I feel your frustration with it. I prefer disc but have been playing holy and not doing so well. I had read mastery > all, read the arguements for the haste vs mastery discussions and agreed with mastery. I stacked mastery and still had horrible results. So after thinking about it for a while I reforged to haste (doing 10ms btw). Pre-raid I told my raid leader that if I was still frustrated with my performance after that night, I would bring my gnome into a nearby lake, drown her, and reroll.

I got to tell ya, the haste made a huge difference. We 3 heal and by the end of magmaw I was doing 38% total healing with druid and pally below me. I did find lightwell placement to be easiest with melee because they tend to use it more often than ranged do. Although Im still waiting for the buffs to disc to switch back, holy wont be as annoying to play now. I think I can claim haste saved my gnome priest from a watery grave

[Nørf]

What struck me is that you dont even have renew as a top 7 spell used in the raid 23/1.
You really need to start putting up a renew on dps when they take damage and always keep it up on tanks. I have had yet to see a log where a holy priest didn't have renew as a top 3 spell, so thats surely the best improvement you can make.
As earlier mentioned, haste > mastery for 10 man. I recently reforged every piece to haste and my healing went up by 10-15% and I'm now on par with our druid and paladin with least overhealing done. Heal is your friend with high haste so go for that and renew.

[Archicortex]

As stated, waiting for tonight's raid to see how things go. I'm probably changing our raid setup from 3 to 2-healing Council. Me (Holy) and a Druid.
Additionally there should be a Shadow priest, 2 warlocks and one DPS DK in the raid with some self-healing that ought to help in staying alive.

It's probably worth noting that my MS has been reduced from 150-220ms to 60-80ms by installing the "Leatrix Latency Fix" script which can be found on Wowinterface. Imo it makes up for (a fair bit at least) the 0.2sec increased cast time on heal/Gheal as a result of going Mastery>Haste.

Nørf: I'll try healing with mastery and see how it goes. I can easily change back to focusing on haste if it doesn't prove to do well enough. But as you just mentioned above, your overhealing was reduced and general HPS went up, meaning you're simply able to "snipe" more heals in the sense that you're using direct healing spells such as Heal to keep a player up. 0.2sec on Heal and GHeal isn't going to lose me a fight, i'm certain, especially not with improved latency when 2 healing an encounter. I am of course assuming that you are 3healing 10man and thus haste may be more beneficial to avoid too much overlap/overhealing from the other 2.

[Nørf]

Yes that's correct, we are using three healers. However, it is ofcourse up to you what you go for, but I hope you will discover soon enough how overpowered haste is compared to mastery in 10 man. Best of luck to you.

[Archicortex]

Killed council, a lot of either unlucky wipes due to getting a Vacuum spawned on us or in our flee-path, or some crazy stuff with LUA-errors, crashes and the like. The other thing was that the kiting in p3 wasn't really good, forced us to move a lot which resulted in earlier casualties.

Either way, here's the log; worldoflogs.com/guilds/104931/
I 2 healed Council with Mastery on all slots reforged, gemmed and enchanted.

My healing actually SUCKED on council, we only managed because i picked it up in p3, but the druid was carrying the fight in p2.

Any advice on what to improve? My armory profile is found in the OP and you can tell that i've reverted back to focusing on haste. So i've reforged, enchanted and regemmed haste in every slot possible.

[Kelesti]

I 2 healed Council with Mastery on all slots reforged, gemmed and enchanted.

I found your problem. Good for you for going back to haste.

[Cerunnir]

Haste vs. Mastery is really a preference. I find that in 10mans Haste is better, and 25s Mastery is better. Our main progression team is currently 10m so I stack Haste. I have noticed a small increase in my overall healing since swapping all of my Mastery to Hate. It really is personal preference. You can even just have both, but I recommend stacking one way or the other, as it gives you more overall effect. You're a little inconsistent in your gear, which I assume is just an oversight; you reforge Mastery to Haste yet you have a Mastery enchant on your gloves.

I feel going a balanced path is best for me, I try to keep haste and mastery *roughly* balanced. I linger around 10% haste (+3% from talents, +1 from goblin +raid buffs.) and 15% mastery.

I must say, im mostly on raid healing duty.. and priests is just absolutly sickening at that job. The raw output of prayer of healing/circle of healing, PoM spam during AOE phases is pretty neat. (As a bonus its pretty mana efficient healing aswell)

[Ultima]

I found your problem. Good for you for going back to haste.

What's hotter, your new avatar or this statement? Hm.

[Juber]

I have noticed a small increase in my overall healing since swapping all of my Mastery to Hate.

Bash that keyboard for improved healing! <(^^)>
Good post, with an epic typo attatched in it.

[Mazi]

Bash that keyboard for improved healing! <(^^)>
Good post, with an epic typo attatched in it.

haha. good catch. :P