Frustrated & Looking for Advice

[lemaurey]

So I've been healing on my Paladin since 3.2 wrath (when I started playing) and all throughout it, I've never been able to be a GREAT healer on the charts.. like you know mid-pack got bosses down but never standing out.

This x-pac has had pallies continually at the top, and in getting with the guild I'm in (one of the better on our weak server) I've been avidly trying to improve my own healing to BE that top healer. I got my 4pc just now, but have been in mostly epics for a while. I've spent the past weeks studying top guilds videos/layouts to pick up healing style and UI's...

I gathered that when nothing is happening, cast Holy Light to keep a heal going somewhere. If panicking, hit Flash of Light to keep someone up.. if someone's taking hard damage but has time to be healed use Divine Light as a go-to. And obviously Holy Shock/Judge whenever it's off cooldown.

Yet in tonights Al Akir (3 healed with 2 druids) I could never stay close in healing done. I'd be up there in HPS (9.4k +) but was only doing 19-20% of the healing... and it's frustrating! Especially when these videos in both 10's and 25's have Paladins sitting at 12k hps consistently outhealing every other class..

Is there something I'm not picking up on? Is there some all powerful paladin trick I am missing? :P

Keep in mind I'm asking for help on how to be that over-the-top guy, the guy. I'm not saying I'm struggling with healing, that's not the issue... I'm just trying to be a Superstar healer

---------- Post added 2011-06-05 at 08:21 AM ----------

Oh, and the addons I use are:

VuhDo, DBM, ShadowedUF, Bartender, NugComboBar, Omen, Recount

[Playintrafic]

You need to be clipping those druids targets. If the druid has thrown out Wild Growth on the raid, and Rejuved 2 people... You need to heal the 2 people he rejuved up to 100% so that his rejuvs are basically in effective.

My druid will have 51-56% healing on any given week on aragaloth, and we run with a dk tank and a holy paladin. As well as a ret paladin. So the holy paladin usually has around 40% healing done. But he usually spanks me @ healing per second. As soon as a meteor slash hits, the tank is full. But while he is healing the targets that take the bigger damage, I am healing more targets than him for smaller amounts.

Holy paladins are very challenging to AOE Heal. You need to make good useage of LoD and POTL. Remember that you can split holy power heals. Each smaller holy power heal will still heal you for a good amount, and half that will transfer through your beacon.

I will split my HoPo heals on my paladin alt quite often. 3 1 HoPo WoG heals the same as 1 3 HoPo wog, but you get hit by POTL 3 times instead of 1.

I will also beacon swap as much as possible. Tanks dont need incoming heals literally every second, so If I can swap my beacon off the tank to heal someone who is critical, and another person who is not quite critical, I will do that as well.

Divine Purpose plus Holy Radiance rocks. I can do a massive amount of burst aoe healing with that.

[Valamivan]

You need to be clipping those druids targets. If the druid has thrown out Wild Growth on the raid, and Rejuved 2 people... You need to heal the 2 people he rejuved up to 100% so that his rejuvs are basically in effective.

That is just.... not a great advice to give. You are suggesting to waste the druid's heals so he can spoil the druid's meters and so get higher up on the chart? That's just silly. Do what's best for the raid. And on that note, if nobody's dying then the healing is enough. Doesn't matter if it's 5k or 15k HPS. Forget the numbers.
Druids at the moment can ride the meters quite well so just accept it. But you will save the day when burst is needed (though they will still top the chart).

I will split my HoPo heals on my paladin alt quite often. 3 1 HoPo WoG heals the same as 1 3 HoPo wog, but you get hit by POTL 3 times instead of 1.

That is another bad advice. Although 3x1hp WoG does equal 1x3hp WoG (at least I think so) the cost is that you will spend 3 GCDs instead of 1, which you can't afford in heroic raids (even in some normals) and the 2 extra PotI heals won't make up for that, they are tiny.
Beacon-swapping although can be useful that is not the case when one tank starts losing health rapidly. In that situation, again, you can't afford to spend one GCD on not healing. I wouldn't overdo it. If you can plan ahead and you know you will need to heal another tank for a while then of course it's the right thing to do - but if you do it every 5 second you will end up spending a lot of mana to gain slightly more holy power (unless glyphed, but I myself couldn't fit the beacon glyph into my book). Actually I'm no longer certain it is worth it, I know people were doing it a few patches back, but not sure you would still wanna do it.

On fights where there is no stacking you won't be great compared to the druids. Especially in 10mans. But to give a more specific advice, for Al'Akir: We do this from P2 so casters stack up, melee dealing with the sparkles outside the stack. With you standing in the stack LoD and HR will do quite well. Although Al'Akir is not the most healing-heavy fight (on normal at least), and when there isn't much damage there won't be much healing needed, so don't expect doing 15k HPS.

All in all, leave the charts for the DPS. You are a healer, you don't ride the charts. You heal when it's needed on who needs it and in best case just as much as needed. That won't always produce impressive numbers.

[lemaurey]

Yeah, I've been told to not pay as much attention to charts and just do the task of healing... 1 of the druid healers in our group said the fact I had been so mana efficient having almost a full bar in p3 was useful because he/she was at about 20% mana and struggling to pop heals off waiting for innervate to come off CD.

Still that made me feel slow and clunky, like I could/should have been doing more.. I mean I was healing the whole time (at that 9k hps rate) but I still had a full bar, yet the druids healing at 11-12k hps were having mana struggles.

All in all it doesn't bother me HORRIBLY.. I've always been an advocate for not healing when its just unnessecary just to try and boost your chart #'s but at the same time especially on wipes, that "you're not doing enough" feeling lingers when your in the bottom of the charts in healing done despite good HPS and mana management.

[Deleted]

Being outhealed by druids is absolutely no cause for concern, and if you saw a paladin do more HPS than a druid on Al'Akir the paladin was just a much, much better player than the druid. On that particular fight a druid should do several thousand HPS more than a paladin ever will. If you end up competing with druids on HPS regularly on several fights that's a sign to replace your druids, the current situation is perfectly normal.

The monstrous amounts of healing druids can do with HoTs all around is unbeatable by any healer, especially not by paladins. It's the paladin's job to heal the people who need more than just HoTs and while this will give significantly less HPS than blanket raid healing, it's an important job that paladins are reasonably good at doing. With that mind set, the help on AoE healing you can provide comes at a small cost through the one GCD every 30 seconds for HR and LoD being a substantial beacon heal.