My current strat for healing at level 80

[uwmarko]

If you're like me, you might have been stunned after the patch to find out just how bad it is to have only single target heals (LoD on a 30 sec cd doesn't count) that vary in efficiency/throughput but not in the style of healing (our raid utility healing: GoHL, SS+hot, JoL, all gone). So I figured I would pass along the current strat I have been playing around with that is starting to show some promise for healing icc at level 80...

-- Emphasize haste/spirit in your gear (reforge away crit), keep beacon on the main tank and JotP up.
-- Your spam spell is just holy light on the beacon in order to generate holy power, toss out FoL/DL on the beacon as needed based on incoming damage. Goal is to try to keep 3 stacks of holy power up as much as possible.
-- Use WoG for useful spot healing tanks/raid, don't just spam it when it's available or to heal a raid member who took minimal incidental damage. Since you're casting heals on the beacon fairly frequently you don't have to worry about the stacks of holy power falling off.
-- Try to keep HS available for spot healing as well rather than using it every time it's up as a primary source of holy power, in which case it's probably on cd when you actually need it.
-- Be liberal with your use of hand of sacrifice; this ability combined with PoTI greatly enhances your ability to heal the tank with more mana efficient spells than FoL/DL. Pre-patch you would probably hand of sacrifice and heal yourself, letting the beacon then heal the tank. Post-patch you use hand of sacrifice and direct heal the tank (or another raid member depending on incoming damage), letting PoTI heal yourself.

Note that a key philosophical difference pre/post patch here is that before the patch the beacon was used to heal the tank, as opposed to here where primary role of the beacon is now to generate holy power by casting direct heals on the tank and the actual healing aspect of the beacon is reduced to incidental-style healing as you spot heal the raid.

Anyway, just my two cents. So far this is the most promising of a variety of strats I've tried in 10/25-icc HMs. Comments/suggestions?

[Natrii]

honestly, I find myself using holy shock on CD, LoD is fun for a lot of situations. For the most part I use flash of light...a lot. Yeah it is kinda a hog so you gotta use it sparingly. WoG I use it when ever it is stacked to 3, I don't like wasting holy power generation. Really its not that bad, My numbers are a ton lower now, and we are not tuned for 80 as well as the other healer. But we can still get our job done, just not as well as we would like.


BTW LoD is a bad Idea when your vid settings are turned up and 3 army or the dead are out...you will see spots for 10 mins :P

[TickTickTick]

Weel, to be honest, I'm doing something really opposite. I reforged all my haste to crit / spirit (and believe me, it wasn't such big loss. -3% haste for about 8% crit). I'm using my holy shock on CD, and thanks to often crits I'm having DL -> HL combo requently. Word of glory also used as much as possible. Yeah but, that's the charm of our new playstyle - it's open to everyone.

[Fiercon]

Thanks for that post uwmarko. I guess this is one viable strategy to put things up. It .. well .. leaves us with the tank healing role at the expense of being able to only heal one efficiently.

If you're like me, you might have been stunned after the patch to find out just how bad it is to have only single target heals (LoD on a 30 sec cd doesn't count) that vary in efficiency/throughput but not in the style of healing (our raid utility healing: GoHL, SS+hot, JoL, all gone).

This is exactly what I was trying to convey in my poll that noone understoood -.- ... thanks for pointing this out!

I'd like to point out one thing you mentioned

-- Try to keep HS available for spot healing as well rather than using it every time it's up as a primary source of holy power, in which case it's probably on cd when you actually need it.

I think this to be the most important thing to do IF you are using the "directly healing the beacon" strategy. Let me clarify:

HS generates 1HP, healing the beacon with DL/HL/FoL does too. So shocking the beaconed tank essentially does not waste a HP but because you heal the beaconed target with all your heals anyway you ar generating lots of HP.
So if the HS is spent somewhere else you essentially can spotheal someone not beaconed and still get HP out of it. So saving the HS for good situations is (again: with this strategy) the better idea.

Now to my concerns:
Isn't (almost exclusively) healing the beacon a huge hit on your throughput? 50% healing that is just not allowed to land seems quiet a large hit on HPS. Granted - you get loads of HP but at the expense of 50% of your healing that did go nowhere.

[JonBoy2001]

I agree with swapping crit to haste. I did this last night in addition to swappping out some gear for haste and things felt better. (along with the slight healing buffs) A slow Holy Light will force you to rely on Flash of Light, which will just eat your mana away. In current ICC raiding, with spikey damage going around, a constant stream of HL on the tank won't kill your mana, even if there's no damage.

I'm using HS on cooldown, and throwing out as many WoGs as I can. A 1hp WoG isn't too bad, so I wouldn't be afraid to use it if you need some instant healing, then follow up with a FoL.

I've yet to practically use Divine Light. If someone is at low health, more often than not, they'll die before DL can go off, or another healer will have already gotten to them. I'm sure this is different in Cataclysm, but it just doesn't work for ICC atm.

IMO, FoL is our emergency goto heal instead of HS. With enough haste, it's around a 1 second cast time. I use it mostly for those heavy aoe situations where LoD didn't catch some people.

Light of Dawn can be tricky to get off right. I'm usually positioned behind the melee since I took only Elightened Judgements for increased judgement range, so I mostly only get melee with it.

As far as the mastery goes, the latest alpha of recount is tracking it, and tbh, I'm unimpressed with how much actual abosrbing it's doing, when it actually does absorb.

I really think using a mix of all the spells is what works out right. Before last night, I hardly used FoL for fear of running out of mana. After doing some liberal trial and error, sparing FoL just left me with over half my mana at the end of fights, and I just stressed myself needlessly relying on HL for all my casting healing. If they're at half health or less, use FoL imo.

Oh, and I forgot about Bacon! Tanks love bacon! Anyway, I look at BoL now as being able to take my healing eyes off the tank only once in a while instead of all time time. If the tank is the only one taking damage, I direct heal. If not, I don't.

[uwmarko]

Now to my concerns:
Isn't (almost exclusively) healing the beacon a huge hit on your throughput? 50% healing that is just not allowed to land seems quiet a large hit on HPS. Granted - you get loads of HP but at the expense of 50% of your healing that did go nowhere.

I may not have phrased the directly healing the tank portion very well. It's only slightly different philosophically from before the patch...pre-patch the tank takes damage you heal someone else because there's no point in directly healing the tank, you only lose that heal. With this strat when the tank takes a big hit you directly heal the tank (e.g. FoL) instead of healing a raid member. This direct healing for holy power (and to efficiently heal the large incoming damage), allows WoG to be your primary spot raid heal and HS more as your backup spot heal. In general this means you have two solid instant casts up and ready at all times (which is actually an improvement from before the patch).

In a 10-HM Deathwhisper kill, WoG was 17% of my total healing (39% overheal rate) and HS was 15% (50% overheal). So WoG and HS are major sources of healing, but rather than spamming them (like to heal 1k incidental damage on a raid member), you're saving these and watching the raid to heal a reasonable amount of damage on someone. HL/FoL/DL were used (primarily DL in this kill) to generate holy power for WoG, as opposed to the majority of strats I've seen previously that focus on HS as the primary source of holy power which means HS is generally on cd at any given instant. Being caught with 0-1 stacks of holy power and HS on cd is a horrible, powerless feeling for me when I see someone suddenly take a big hit. Personally, I have not been successful in executing any of these strats (that doesn't mean they aren't perfectly viable, it just means I haven't had success)...my numbers with these strats have all resulted in my effective healing being slashed by 25-50% on HM fights, with many of my heals either getting sniped by other healers or the target dying due to long cast times and not having HS up when it's actually needed (someone about to die).