1. #1

    Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    There have been many priest that have told me there are specific things I can do to increase my healing while maintaining a healthy mana pool, such as using pure sp gems in red sockets, sp/int in yellow and so on, but when I ask another, they will tell me a completely different method (sp/haste in both yellow and red for example). Trying to find the "sweet spot" between regen and output, I've noticed that no matter what I do, I always end up with more regen than necessary, and not much of a change in my healing. I don't want to be a priest that is "forced" to use all my CD's to keep up in a raid environment, but I do want more output. Please provide me with anything you believe would be helpful for my situation.

    http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...ul&cn=Nachoman

  2. #2
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    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    Well, yours gear good firstly, so no worries there. You should probably get that Staff enchanted though.

    Well, gems are a tricky thing, everyone has their own opinion and it every gemming style is dependant on your healing style. Going by your glyphs, you are a Flash Heal healer over a Renew healers meaning Haste moves up the scale in that sector. Your output is important but there's no point being a God for the first two minutes of the fight after blowing Hymm and Shadowfiend and being useless, you are recognise regen is important however I question your Intellect stacking as Holy, even with Disc as your off-spec I feel it's a bit off.

    In my opinion, your Spell Power is healthy for your gear level. Your haste is fine, some would say it's a bit high for Disc but I wouldn't. I think your Crit is low for both specs as well. However, I do not think you should gem for Crit/Haste. I'd say pure SP in reds, SP/Int in yellows and SP/Spirit in blues when you want the socket bonuses. Try it out, if you find to be suffering from mana, maybe assess your healing "rotation". Swap your JC Int gems for SP, that's a big change to start.

    I apologise for this 4am post if there are mistakes.

    Oh, and cooldowns are there to be used, don't savour them unless there is a certain part of the fight you intend to use them, if it will save people, do it! Our longest CD is 8m, so it will be up for the next fight in ICC, maybe not in ToGC.

  3. #3

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    There are 3 things one can do to increase output.

    1) Cast faster. Means, more spells in shorter time span - meaning get more haste.
    2) Cast stronger spells - get more spellpower.
    3) Analyze your gameplay and tweak it to the maximum.

    You can ask 100 players, they will all give you their own input but it basically comes down to the three points I've mentioned. The bad thing is, people will suggest gear changes, gem changes but in the end your output will depend on you and tweaking your game style.

    Now, the things you should ask yourself:

    - are you trigger happy? Meaning, are you eager to pop that GS early to increase healing or do you use DH and ask other players in your healing team to do the same?
    - do you have useful macros such as /cast [taret=player] Circle of Healing so you don't have to select a raid member to cast CoH?
    - is your UI set up in such way you can easily see your procs (surge of light, serendipity charges)?
    - do you use any methods that help you cast more efficiently, such as mouseover macros or Clique?
    - is your flash heal bound to a key easily accessible to you? SoL makes up a large part of your healing, I have it bound with Clique on right mouse click.
    - do your raid frames display relevant data, such as where's your PoM and how many charges it has left. If your PoM ends up at a target that you are sure won't take damage - it's worth re-casting it. If it ends up on a melee person who you know will get damaged soon you can cast renew / fh / whatever you find suitable.
    -

    I am sure there will be gear change / gem change suggestions but they won't mean anything unless you ease your casting environment and make things easy to see. There are people here that really know how to optimize healing / dps gear so I won't attempt to advise on something I'm not that good at but I strongly suggest you revise your own playing style and see where you can reduce the downtime. A lot of healers heal in such way that they click on a person at the raid frames and then push their healing keybind. That's where a lot of people lose time. I find it incredibly faster that spells such as renew are bound to keys via Clique and you have reduced your downtime you get by click > target > push keybind.

    I don't know if you do all or some of the things I mentioned, I didn't mean to offend or be a smartass however it will come down to YOU and the environment you have set up for yourself to ease up your gaming

    Now I wish you good luck with getting proper gear optimization advices and I hope that there won't be much thread derailing. And gl with getting more output :>

  4. #4

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    If you want to make a substantial change in your throughput versus regen balance then gemming is not the way to go about it imo. I gem primarily for SP though I'll pick up purple or orange gems for a good enough SP socket bonus.

    Otherwise if I want to eat into my mana I just switch out a piece of Spirit/Crit gear for a piece of Crit/Haste gear. This is particularly easy to do given the relative weakness of T9-4set, and for that matter T10 set bonuses.

    Merlin's Robe, Bejeweled Bracers, Leggings of Woven Death etc. All these allow substantial amounts of Spirit to be switched into throughput. Other options are pieces of T-10 shadow gear - the chest, shoulders & head are all Crit/Haste.

  5. #5

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    Well as Ultima said: Your gear is good, so maybe it's something else you need to change.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ultima
    Going by your glyphs, you are a Flash Heal healer over a Renew healers meaning Haste moves up the scale in that sector.
    From your spec I would say you use renew quite a bit since you have 3/3 in both Improved Renew and Empowered Renew. Personally I have found Renew to be bad compared to Flash Heal in ICC. A good example is Lady Deathwisper. The random shadowbolts she throws out is perfectly matched by a Flash Heal and then your healing tagets is at full health just in case a Death'n'Decay lands under them the next second.
    I switched to a spec looking like this: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...&version=11159 and my healing output on ICC fights increased. I keep one point in Empowered Renew to be able to proc Holy Concentration on Renew cast.

    If You are not having mana problems you should consider changing you Spark of Hope to another trinket. Lord Marrowgar drops a very nice trinket with 158 spellpower.

    Btw. what is your current output and what would you like it to be like?

  6. #6

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    Sorry about the unenchanted staff, just picked it up today (until I can find a better offhand than Ironmender to use together with Hammer of Purified Flame).

    I tend to Renew and Flash Heal at about the same level, so I don't highly value one over the other, since different situations call for a different reactions. Below is an OLD log of ToGC that I was able to salvage, please use this to try to get to know my healing style. Please note that although this is an old log, my healing style has not changed much since then.

    http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat...285#healingout

    I use Grid and Clique to heal together with Power Auras and OmniCC, seeing as it provides the most effective way of healing that I know of. Throughout the fight I usually won't stop casting (unless the fight requires me to do so).

    My only other trinket at the moment is Tears of the Vanquished, and considering I will gain tons of regen from both Spark or Tears, I use spark because of the small SP gain I get from it. I am working on getting an output trinket though.

    Also I have an old UI screenshot that shows all my addons during a fight,

    http://i37.tinypic.com/v741gx.jpg

    This image is also very old and I have added OmniCC and have also moved many buttons around. The heals on the right side bar are just there to see what gets locked out if I get Curse of Tupor, so don't think I'm a heal clicker (not my style). More input is always appreciated, and if it will help me reach my full potential be as harsh as you would believe you have to be.

    Edit:
    Quote Originally Posted by Kírja
    Btw. what is your current output and what would you like it to be like?
    Any type of increase would be desired, seeing as I know that I am far from my maximum potential as a healer.

  7. #7

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    To get more output given your current style, get more haste up to a certain point, then spellpower. What is a good haste value will vary from player to player and style to style however; if you are spamming Prayer of Healing, no amount of haste is enough, but if you are using small spells all the way, 300 haste should be sufficient for most needs.

    To get more regen, stack intellect. Many players will claim that spirit is our "best" regen stat, but if you want to maximize the gains per itemization, opt for a combination of intellect+spellpower instead of stacking spirit. You cannot avoid spirit, and spirit makes intellect better, so the optimal gear is probably gear with spirit on it - just don't gem for it. It will make a notable difference.

    As syanid says, the biggest change you can do is probably changing your style. Holypriests have many viable healing styles, but none of them work everywhere. A renew-spam happy priest will do excellent on twins, but not so much on northern beasts. A PoH-spamming priest will do great on kologarn, but will have massive mana troubles on twins. A priest focusing on instant heals will have a massive advantage on heavy movement fights like marrowgar, but the key thing with this style is knowing when to stop running and pull a big heal to avoid deaths. To play a holypriest well, you should master many different styles IMO. Styles ultimately need to be backed up by glyphs and gear, but you can do well by adjusting slightly anyway.

    If you want a lot of throughput, start using big heals. Big heals means "anything that is not flash heal", but primarily PoH - in addition to your other short cooldowns like ProM and CoH. A holypriest spamming flash heal only will simply not do well on the meters. That's not the same as saying that flash heal is useless. It's unfortunately my most used heal in ICC since there is heavy spot damage going on, and flash heal is our best tool for the job.

    The same argument can be made against renew unless the target keeps on taking damage. Just throwing renew around on targets taking sporadic damage is not going to give you a notable effective HPS. The downside to using multitarget heals is the massive manacost. PoH is anything but cheap, and you will bleed if you are stacking spirit for this. Switch to int, see the light and spam PoH more freely. Ultimately, I can massively recommend getting the good regen trinkets, they really work and clear up a lot of the need to gear for regen. We have healers that swear by a double solace, in return they hardly need to gem for anything but throughput. Without some decent regen trinkets, you will need to gear very differently. Keep that in mind, and remember that anyone recommending you to stacking heavy spellpower usually have their regen needs covered this way.

    Another thing... mouseover macros. They really really rock, and shorten reaction time by a split second. Which in turn mean you land your heal faster.

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  8. #8

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    Syanid already pointed the most important things out.

    I am the one socketing everything for regen (Int, Int/Spi, Int/SP) and picking as many items with haste as possible. Currently I'm at the haste soft cap (~830 hasterating unbuffed) so my GCD is raidbuffed at 1 second. Advantages: Faster heals save lives better than stronger but slower ones do - just my experience. Also you get faster dispels and more possibility to react fast to unsuspected things. But you could also pick less haste, less regen, more crit and more SP, there is nothing wrong about it.

    The main thing to improve your output is - as already mentioned - to improve your playstyle.

    A good healer knows the encounter, knows his tanks and even knows which of the damage dealers have worse movement than others. If you know all these things you can pretty often estimate where the damage is coming in, and this advantage results in a faster reaction.

    And a good holypriest knows his spells and when to use them. We are the healing class with the greatest variety of spells and there are so many different situations to deal with, so we can use nearly everything given to us. Try to learn the amount of healing every single one of your spells heals (addon: drdamage) and how fast it is, learn to estimate the range of your CoH, keep an eye on your PoM (addon: pom tracker) and keep it jumping etc.

    Use a good healing addon. Grid+Clique, Grid+Mouseover, Healbot or my personal favorite: Vuhdo. Every click or key pressing (<- is that the right word?!) costs time, valuable time you don't have if you want to save lives.

    The last thing I want to mention is the assignment of the healers. If everyone has his specific job to do there is less interference, less overheal and thus more output. In addition to that it's very easy to see which of the healers are doing a good job and which don't (better than just looking at a healing meter).

  9. #9

    Re: Holy Priest in need of guidance.

    A lot has already been covered here, so I'll avoid reiterating too much. Your gear is pretty reasonable, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. If I were to throw in my opinion, I'd say you may have a little too much crit that you could trade for more SP and/or Haste, but it's not that big of a deal. From the quick UI link, that looks to be reasonable in order too, so I don't think that's an issue.

    As others have said, I think the real key is mastering multiple styles. As said, obviously, the Renew spammer does well on Twins and badly on Jaraxxus and vice-versa for the Flash Heal spammer, but understanding the fight and being able to pull off both styles successfully, and having the gear and spec that provides that flexibility, is what seperates an exceptional Holy Priest from an average one.

    ICC makes even greater use of varying styles. Marrowgar is an awesome fight for Renew, Deathwhisper is great for Flash Heal, and Saurfang is great for a patient Holy Priest who can manage his mana. Moving on to the next wing, Festergut involves being able to switch between these styles on the fly because it goes from heavy raid damage to heavy tank damage to burst damage, so being able to switch from Renew, to Flash Heal, to managing mana and ramping up for PoH spam is what it's all about. I think mastering these different styles will show you the greatest increase in throughput.

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