How do you heal as a holy priest?

[PapaNasty]

Ok here's the situation in brief:

I have 3x characters, a prot palaldin (80) and a hunter + holy priest which are 70, neither of which I've really played since bc.

I've got 2 weeks holiday, and was thinking I might start levelling my hunter / priest. I've never actually had to kill shit with my priest (Was my brothers and I just took it when he quit and used it to heal raids at 70), but was a pretty good healer in bc

My plan, is to level my hunter and if I see instance groups which need a healer I'll take my priest along, so that I don't have to solo anything.


Has healing changed much since bc?

As I've heard the word "Flash Heal" bandied around alot, something which to be honest I never even setup on my bar during bc, instead using Greater Heals + CoH + Shields + Renew + PoM as my primary healing spells. Will I need to change my healing style now? Or is Flash Heal still as mana inefficient as previously

[jello]

Yea, since they got rid of down ranking spells, flash heal is pretty much a necessity now. Still keep tank renewed and launch PoM whenever it needs to be done. I really only just shield casters if they pull aggro as a quick method of mitigation.

So yea, FH, PoM and renew I'd say are my top three abilities. (of course use the situational heals when needed, binding heal CoH, PoH..etc.)

[Kelesti]

Flash Heal, when glyphed (-10% mana cost) is roughly the health-per-second and health-per-mana as Greater Heal (give or take 10% in favor of Greater Heal). But realistically, with Clearcasting changes, Greater's going to have a greater impact on your healing style than Flash heal will (with exception to Surge of Light procs, obviously).

Learn to use this macro:

/stopcasting
/cast Greater Heal

First, put a Renew on tank (Improved? Yes, glyphed is your choice though) and a Mending, and start spamming that macro until roughly 70-80% of your heal is needed, let it land and get some mana from Serendipity, lather, rinse, repeat.

[Ananan]

The annoying thing with stopcasting was always that you have to write stopcasting macros not only for Greater Heal but for all your spells really. If PoM comes off cooldown while you're casting those GHs you want a /stopcasting /cast Prayer of Mending macro, otherwise you're wasting time and mana. If a Binding Heal is suddenly needed you want one for that. Etc.

And that's when it gets clunky and not very user-friendly.

[PapaNasty]

How I am currently used to healing, is I use a mouseover macro for all of my heals and then use that in tandem with grid, and have a /stopcasting infront of my dispell so that I can just hit that when I want to stopcasting (and then do my PoM etc straight away after)

But yeah, essentially the poster just before, was saying to flash heal until I get clearcasting? and then to switch to greater heal but delay the heal a little so that it's effective healing is used (+ slight overhealing so I get manaback proc (+I have t5 2pc so would work well)

Sound like a solid plan

[Swedishcow123]

Nowadays I only use Gheal on the tank, perhaps on high hp dps in 5-mans.

In raids, I usually stick to raid healing, and only use gheal if I'm assigned a tank (patch, sarth, things like that)

Otherwise there's not much to think about, always have a PoM bouncing, have a renew on the tank, circle if 3+ raid members are hurt and not too spread out and Flash the night away.

But with Glyph of Flash Heal, you should be all right.

I do miss the old days though, I felt more in control of my mana back then, now I can literally spam Flash Heal if there's a replenishment buff in the raid.

[Girryn]

There is this great built in stopcasting feature in wow called esc. its in the corner of your keyboard.

[Izenhart]

Flash Heal, when glyphed (-10% mana cost) is roughly the health-per-second and health-per-mana as Greater Heal (give or take 10% in favor of Greater Heal). But realistically, with Clearcasting changes, Greater's going to have a greater impact on your healing style than Flash heal will (with exception to Surge of Light procs, obviously).

Learn to use this macro:

/stopcasting
/cast Greater Heal

First, put a Renew on tank (Improved? Yes, glyphed is your choice though) and a Mending, and start spamming that macro until roughly 70-80% of your heal is needed, let it land and get some mana from Serendipity, lather, rinse, repeat.

Gah, again with the Stopcasting Priest usage.
This is refered to Tank healing= Almost never.

When you are on raid, a.k.a 80% of the time as Holy Priest, Flash Heal will definetly beat Greater Heal in terms of usage.
You'll find out that you won't even have the chance to cast any Greater Heal on non Tank players, except for huge damage output at certain bosses, (Gluth, KT, 4H, Sarth) simply because it's a too long to be cast spell compared to the other that will full up the raid.

[Abandon]

There is this great built in stopcasting feature in wow called esc. its in the corner of your keyboard.

Why use two buttons when you can use one?

[Synge]

Why use two buttons when you can use one?

Agreed. Having it macro'd to stopcast increases reaction time by 50% as it only requires a single button press instead of one.

Pending how one's hotkeys are done, that reaction time can be more variable than simply 50% (assuming Greater Heal is hotkeyed to F1 or the Tilde).

As for the desire to stopcast in order to do a PoM or something, that seems rather unnecessary - I can't see any situation where getting a PoM out immediately is imperative to success. I see the point of it maximizing efficiency, but that's just going too far in my opinion.

Only things I'd bother stopcasting are:

Greater Heal (for mana efficiency)

The following all for "OMG Moments":

Guardian Spirit
Power Word: Shield
Fade

[Savannah]

I'm a huge fan of my priest because of all the spells we have to work with. I'll admit though, that I'm certainly not the most efficient healer you'll ever meet, so take what I say with that grain of salt.

Currently Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing are my "go to" spells. This isn't much different from the way I've always been.

Renew and Prayer of Mending are almost always up on my tank. I also renew when I know a lot of people are taking light damage but aren't in danger of dying.

Circle of Healing has become less and less a part of my everyday use. I never liked it, but fell into habit of casting it because it was easy. I use it now mostly preceding or following a PoH when the whole raid is taking AoE damage. It's also a great way to top of a group, proc Surge of Light, and get a free heal on the tank.

Flash Heal has two uses, in my opinion: 1. Yay! Surge of Light! 2. OMG THE MAGE IS DYING WTF!!!
I would never spam FHeal. It's boring.

Guardian Spirit is possibly my favorite new spell (not my new favorite, mind you) and will definitely move into my list of all time favorites when they finally work out all the little bugs associated with it. It looks cool, it works well, and having a cooldown that actually affects the group is wonderful (we use it in rotation with shield wall, for example; also, it has saved my party from wipes when 5 or 6 groups pull).


But to answer your question more directly, no, healing hasn't changed much since BC. CoH is less useful, Lightwell is better than it was (I still don't have it though....), and Improved Divine Spirit is a waste of talent points (go full Disc, or full Holy, don't bother with a straddle spec). Really, just sit back, spam greater heals as necessary, and live with the realization that healing is completely broken (boring) right now.

[Moxal]

On Greater Heal:

I rarely use it outside heavy tank damage fights (Patch, etc), and heroics anymore.

Our main healers are getting to the point if I toss around too many greater heals (dying dk, pally, feral, etc) my overhealing shoots though the roof, since we usually run with 1-2 resto druids, 2 holy priests, 1 pally and +1 of something else, if they're on.

But to add my own flavour of what was said above: Renew and ProM on the tank, and flash heal and greater heal as needed.

If there is constant aoe damage, keep ProM bouncing around (especially nice with 2 piece T7 bonus).

And PoH+CoH is some nice burst heals (especially with PoH glyph) for your group/others (loatheb for example).

Hope this helps.

[Neichus]

Greater Heal I think has become somewhat more situational than in the past, however I think part of this is the present situation in raiding rather than a fault of the spell.

Priest spells are fundamentally opportunistic: you look for an opening and use one of your many different heals. The problem with Gheal is that it's two main opportunities are: a) Somebody is far down and another healer isn't going to catch it, b) You know several seconds in advance who will take a large amount of damage (such as a dragon breath). In the present raiding environment, healing has generally been easy enough that other healers who just roll out steady streams of stabilizing heals (druids, paladins) will nullify most of the low-health situations people face (so most of situation a's). All this leaves are a few specific instances where if you properly pre-cast a Gheal it can be a huge help, but those are usually the minority of situations.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. As was also touched on Flash Heal has moved from "Inefficient Emergency Only" to "Mid-level Workhorse Heal", which helps cover the holes that down-ranked Gheals used to fill.