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  1. #1
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    Could use a bit of advice

    Hey, I'm still kinda new at this whole healing thing. I've got a bunch of characters who tank or DPS or both, but for the 7 years I've played this game, I've never played a healer. I decided to finally level my priest and chose Disc as my spec-of-choice for leveling and Normal-level 85 dungeons. Now, I've recently finally gotten my iLvl above the old Heroics cap and I decided to finally give heroics a shot. As a tank, I know what I would *like* my healer to do, but I also like to try and play to their level, as to not stress them or the group out too much. I'd like the same attitude shown to me, but I've found that I'm the exception.

    That said, I do just fine in Normal level dungeons with both a AA/A Disc spec and the SoS Disc spec. Never had an issue outside of really bad tanks (in playstyle, not gear, that can be accounted for easily at this level of play) or stupid DPS who like to stand in stuff, which can he healed through most times, as you know. But when I finally got into heroics, I don't know what I'm doing wrong but nothing makes people happy and I'm seriously losing confidence. I do my damnedest to keep everyone alive, especially the tank. Keeping PW:S for Rapture procs (I have a timer on it), keeping up PoM, using Penance to stack Grace and for quick burst, PoH for DA and group healing, and either Smite/HF or Heal for low damage times. I know I need more practice, but these are heroics, not HC raids.

    Of the three heroics I've been in, two have been Pally tanks and one was a DK. The DK was arguably easier to keep up, but he had lower level gear (I'm assuming due to HP, as I didn't have the opportunity to inspect), but neither should be an issue, IMO. In all three heroics, even with no one dying (I can keep people alive, just lower HP % than full all the time), I got vote kicked within three pulls. First heroic was Lost City and I was kicked following the first pull. Now, I know the fights well, and I know this pull generally sucks if people don't do it right, but most people should overgear this stuff by now (especially this tank with 198k HP).

    Am I having bad luck, or do I need to relegate myself to Normals until I get more pieces of higher level gear? I don't play a lot, maybe 2-3 hours a couple times a week, so it's slow, but it's been that way for 4 years now; I'm used to it. I don't raid, and I'm not in a raiding guild, so I don't have a lot of people will or able to walk me through heroics in order to speed up the process. Anyway, with all that said, does the Priest community have any sort of advice for me? I'm willing to do whatever I need to do, including spec and learn Holy, if that's what will work better at my gear level. I've gone through all the stickies both here and EJ, and looked over several other Priest-oriented sites for help, but nothing I seem to do really helps much. Maybe I'm just a crappy healer who needs to go back to taking it in the face or smashy-smashy-type toons.

    Now, I know my gear sucks, I'm pretty freshly dinged, but here is what I have. I know my chest is not gemmed, that will happen soon. I just keep forgetting. My rep sucks, I know, I dungeon-crawled to 85. I don't have a ton of gold, but I'm trying to max enchanting ASAP, just kinda stuck at ~300 because of the lack of Arcane Dust at a decent price and people WAY overpricing BC greens. I'm working on it though, albeit slowly. So, here's my armory page. Critique away.

    http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...adran/advanced

    Try to keep the flaming to a minimum, please, I'm trying to learn here.

  2. #2
    You are getting kicked because someone inspected you and saw you have no gems and +agi to your gloves. I have zero rep as well, you don't often get kicked for no head/sholder enchant. Buy 2 +35int gems, or even lower if you can't afford those (dirt cheap on my server), put them in your chest. Put anything close to heals related on your gloves, buy a pair of white gloves from a vendor to enchant instead of using your equiped ones. Most people don't want to risk a run with a bad healer, especialy H lost city, and if they are at all worried they will inspect you, at which point those red flags get raised and your booted. Your low HP and Mana pools also get you noticed, and some people are just jerks and will kick anyone in low gear.

    Your reforging looks decent, your not geared poorly. How do you heal? Healbot/Clique or mouseover macros are considered the best ways to heal, if your not doing that already. Don't switch to Holy if you don't want to, you can heal anything just as well (overall) as disc.

  3. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by ajanu View Post
    You are getting kicked because someone inspected you and saw you have no gems and +agi to your gloves. I have zero rep as well, you don't often get kicked for no head/sholder enchant. Buy 2 +35int gems, or even lower if you can't afford those (dirt cheap on my server), put them in your chest. Put anything close to heals related on your gloves, buy a pair of white gloves from a vendor to enchant instead of using your equiped ones. Most people don't want to risk a run with a bad healer, especialy H lost city, and if they are at all worried they will inspect you, at which point those red flags get raised and your booted. Your low HP and Mana pools also get you noticed, and some people are just jerks and will kick anyone in low gear.

    Your reforging looks decent, your not geared poorly. How do you heal? Healbot/Clique or mouseover macros are considered the best ways to heal, if your not doing that already. Don't switch to Holy if you don't want to, you can heal anything just as well (overall) as disc.
    Explanation for chant to gloves... lol, i ran out of Vellum and used the closest thing I had when I was leveling. Yeah, I need to get some gems in there. You're probably absolutely right though. I mean, I don't really ever inspect anybody unless something is wrong, but yeah. No gems and +5 agi to gloves is a bit weird. I guess if you can't see that I'm also leveling enchanting like you can on the Armory, that would set off a couple red flags. Noted.

    To heal I use a combination of addons, but mainly it's just binding spells to keys and click and heal. Maybe this weekend when I get more time I will give Clique a try since it works so well with Grid. I tried VuhDo but didn't really care for it. I've got that Rapture proc addon, NeedToKnow for timers and such, TukUI for a base, and Gnosis cast bars.

    Also, I meant H Halls of Origination. Lost City pulls are nothing compared to the first one in HoO if not done by someone with experience.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    Your gear is fine for normal heroic instances, and you seem to have a grasp of the basics from your post at least. Just keep trying, you're never going to meet the people you randomly run heroics with so don't take it to heart if random strangers do kick you... They just want to take the path of least resistance, and unfortunately that sometimes means not putting up with a healer that can't handle (or that they think can't handle) chain pulling packs of mobs.

    It probably isn't a learn to play issue, just give it another couple of goes... or run with some friends who won't kick you. The people that play this game are not a very friendly bunch

    I was going to put in some macros that might help you (Holy Fire/Smite macros that don't cause you to lose your healing target) but apparently the forums won't let me post them, and I cannot send you a PM because I havent enough posts. I guess someone with a higher post count can do that, or you could google them I suppose.

  5. #5
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    Try getting two pieces of T12 asap. They can be bought with JP and should be quite a large boost for you

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heap View Post
    Try getting two pieces of T12 asap. They can be bought with JP and should be quite a large boost for you
    Yeah, that should happen very soon. Was thinking of grabbing the 359 ring and the trinket first, but you think the 2pc would be better?

    Quote Originally Posted by Isda View Post
    Your gear is fine for normal heroic instances, and you seem to have a grasp of the basics from your post at least. Just keep trying, you're never going to meet the people you randomly run heroics with so don't take it to heart if random strangers do kick you... They just want to take the path of least resistance, and unfortunately that sometimes means not putting up with a healer that can't handle (or that they think can't handle) chain pulling packs of mobs.

    It probably isn't a learn to play issue, just give it another couple of goes... or run with some friends who won't kick you. The people that play this game are not a very friendly bunch

    I was going to put in some macros that might help you (Holy Fire/Smite macros that don't cause you to lose your healing target) but apparently the forums won't let me post them, and I cannot send you a PM because I havent enough posts. I guess someone with a higher post count can do that, or you could google them I suppose.
    Actually, I have a target of target HF/Smite /castsequence for my smite-spam spec and I absolutely couldn't live without it. Thanks for the kind words though. Ugh, life as a healer is definitely more stressful than a tank.

  7. #7
    ATonement is fantastic for heroics, keep up with that but you seem to stack master which becomes more beneficial for raiding. I find haste to be way more useful in atonement specs. With that low of haste you aren't going to be able to get spells out fast enough. Focus more
    Energy on shielding the tank and slamming poh and gh on the group. Borrowed time is also helpful for this, since hopefully mana isn't an issue. You have proper raid frames like grid or vuhdo, right? Icons on those help you keep track of your weakened soul, shield and pom

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by construkt View Post
    ATonement is fantastic for heroics, keep up with that but you seem to stack master which becomes more beneficial for raiding. I find haste to be way more useful in atonement specs. With that low of haste you aren't going to be able to get spells out fast enough. Focus more
    Energy on shielding the tank and slamming poh and gh on the group. Borrowed time is also helpful for this, since hopefully mana isn't an issue. You have proper raid frames like grid or vuhdo, right? Icons on those help you keep track of your weakened soul, shield and pom
    That definitely makes sense. My issue with haste was (quite honestly) RegorgeLite andf wowReforge told me Mastery was the way to go. Heh. I know that with more Haste, you're casting more spells, which will ultimately cost more mana, but Mastery doesn't affect heals directly anyway. I'm basically only using PW:S for Rapture procs and DA is free, basically. Plus, since many tanks way outgear heroics, my PW:S may not even break before it would fall off and less mastery would help Rapture proc more reliably. This is not often the case right now in normals, but it might help mana issues a bit in Heroics making absolutely sure that Rapture is gonna proc when I think it should.

    I'll give the Haste advice a try tonight. Also, I use Grid with several of the plugins that are popular. Don't know the names off the top of my head, but I see most people using them. Need to set them up a bit more, but so far right out of the box they're great.

  9. #9
    You mentioned having played a lot of other toons, pick up as many BoE JP and VP items as you can on your other toons. This is huge. You have a lot of gear to buy on your own with JP/VP, any piece you can grab on another toon will help. Just doing the quests in Deepholm gets you honored with Therazane and allows you to buy the first level shoulder enchant. You mentioned being a bit low on gold, doing these quests will net you quite a bit of money in the process AND give you gear to DE and get mats for enchanting. It doesn't take long at max level to burn through those quests. Do the Thrall quest line that was added before 4.2 in Hyjal for a 365 cloak, and just doing the initial Molten front quests gets you a 365 neck. That was the first thing I did when my latest toon hit 85. Look at all of the reputation rewards for the different factions and determine a tabard priority. There are a lot of good 333-359 items that you can get from them, and you're running the dungeons already.

    As Ajanu mentioned, buy green quality gems at least to fill those slots. They should be pretty cheap on most servers, except the reds. There are a lot of cheap non-standard enchants that you can use temporarily, like haste/spirit to bracers, +35 int to cloak, spirit to chest, etc. Check these out, because a lot of people make them to level, and then they don't get consumed as quickly through the AH. I know the bracer enchants were below 10g each on my server.

    I would pick up Core of Ripeness and then two piece T12 as the first JP items you go after. The two piece T12 bonus is quite strong and well worth it at lower levels. If you can afford a Darkmoon Card Tsunami, grab that. If you're up for some dailies, even the Mandala of Stirring Patterns isn't too bad from Baradin's Wardens or the Moonwell Chalice from Molten Front. Trinkets always give you the biggest bang for your buck, lower level slots like jewelry not as much, so don't prioritize those.

    Keep at it and best of luck!
    Last edited by Sakamae; 2012-02-03 at 07:53 PM.

  10. #10
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    T12 2piece gives you 470 or so mana every 5 seconds. It's pretty crazy, especially at your ilvl.

    So yeah, that'd probably be my first priority

  11. #11
    My advice is to spec shadow and dps for a few days, get gear that way. Spirit= hit rating so you can use the same stuff for heals and dps. Most groups wont kick low dps, those happen all the time, but an undergeared tank or healer stands out a lot. After you're mostly epics try healing again, you will find it a LOT easier. I did this with my shammy, started as ele, built resto set, then had a great time as heals.

  12. #12
    Get grid side icons, and let omnicc give timers to them. I have weakened soul on right, Pw:s on left and Pom on bottom. Let's you know who has what and how much time is left on each

    ---------- Post added 2012-02-03 at 12:34 PM ----------

    That layout for grid works great for all heals btw, just change the icons for each class for whatever hots or short term buffs you need to keep up. Beacon, riptide, earth shield, rejuv, etc.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by construkt View Post
    Get grid side icons, and let omnicc give timers to them. I have weakened soul on right, Pw:s on left and Pom on bottom. Let's you know who has what and how much time is left on each

    ---------- Post added 2012-02-03 at 12:34 PM ----------

    That layout for grid works great for all heals btw, just change the icons for each class for whatever hots or short term buffs you need to keep up. Beacon, riptide, earth shield, rejuv, etc.
    I need to do that, and get used to looking at bars, not so much what's going on on the screen. Hard to break old habits.

    Before someone tells me I need to be aware of shit around me, yes I know. But I'm so used to not paying much attention to Unit Frames outside of my own and my target that it's definitely a new way of looking at things. At least it's not as bad as it used to be when my friend was my main healer in BWL when I was an OT. "I don't even know what these bosses look like. All I ever see are 40, hopefully, green health bars, so for all I know Blizzard's art department could be a bunch of 5 year olds."

  14. #14
    Definitely set mouse over macros then
    If you haven't. Clicking is sooo slow.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by construkt View Post
    Definitely set mouse over macros then
    If you haven't. Clicking is sooo slow.
    That's basically adding [@mouseover] to everything right?

    #showtooltip
    /cast [@mouseover] Heal

    That about right? I'm a macro idiot, but grasp the concepts.

  16. #16
    Yeah. That's it

  17. #17
    Couple of thoughts for AA/A, I'm far from the best Priest out there but I've been Smiting my way through this expansion -- it's fun to go into LFR and see how many DPS you can out-DPS

    /cast [harm] [@targettarget,harm] Smite;
    allows you to smite while keeping your tank targeted

    The big thing I wish I knew when I was trying to heal heroics in blues: Using Archangel isn't going to be a mana gain for a while (stacking Evangelism back up costs about as much as you get from AA at this point), but you're going to want to use it any time it's up and you're falling behind on heals. At low gear levels you'll want to use it preemptively to keep yourself from falling behind in the first place. Consider macroing it into your big heals if you can't remember to keep it going as it will really help.

    You should actually prioritize Crit over Haste, at least until you've gotten rid of most of your blues. Ultimately Haste is going to be better because of the "granularity" of the healing going out, so to speak, but it also increases mana consumption. Crit gives more oomph without the extra stress on your mana pool. Later you're going to want Haste > Crit >>> Mastery. Get the Thrall wedding quest cloak ASAP, even though Haste/Mastery is your worst stat combo atm. Definitely get Tsunami, I'm still using mine. None of the tier set bonuses are any good for Smite, but 2T12 is beneficial any time you have to stop Smiting (I'd aim for the gloves and legs, and the shadow T12 chest). Gear's mostly been touched on already and yeah, definitely gem and enchant, even gear you think you'll replace soon.

  18. #18
    Crit if you want to put out a lot of hps and make your shields useless maybe. Most heroic priests go haste/mastery balance with an aa spec. You also should not need to have a tank targeted. Keep your target on the boss
    To watch casts and mouse over all heals.

  19. #19
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    If you want to be a pure PvE healer I recommend mouseover macros/Clique or Vuhdo's mouseover function. However, if you ever want to maybe try arena I recommend that you get used to target healing and skip mouseover macros. Using mouseover in arena is terrible.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by killahgrag View Post
    but most people should overgear this stuff by now (especially this tank with 198k HP).
    im gonna risk a guess here, that ppl who overgear the old heroic 5mans content dont really go there anymore.
    when someone starts to be able to sign to troll places, goes to troll places, when someone can go to twiligh 5mans, goes to twiligh 5mans and then lfr.

    what i can recommend in order to gear faster is pvping. depends on battlegroup, in mine (aliance side) avs are the win. spamming av during av-weekend can get you a lot of honor very fast, which can be traded for justice points and get you some nice pve vendor gear.

    as for your gear - you have pretty low spirit, hows your mana? spirit isnt all that very important for a well geared discipline priest with a lot of intellect, but the lower is the gear, the more important spirit is. ignore it if you never have mana problems

    i see that you have 2 discipline specs, i recommend trying out sos one sometimes, just to make sure your not falling into smiting-only habbit (i have nothing against aa spec itself though!)

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