Healing in a raid

[Garfunkel]

How are Priests the best at raid healing when Paladins snipe heals with flash? That was most of my experience with the only raid I did on another server (ZG), is that my heals kept getting sniped by flash-spamming paladins.

Why is this a problem? You're not there to grow your e-peen for topping the healing meters, you're there to keep people alive.

http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/RaidOverview.aspx?Raid=14593
Am I sad that I was #12 in efficient healing on bosses on that raid or that I was #6 in efficient healing on trash? No.
http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/RaidOverview.aspx?Raid=13926
Similar stats there. Sometimes I'm higher on the meters, sometimes lower. It depends on what you do - are you constantly on tank healing duty, are you on decursing duty, or raid-wide healing or a mixture of all three.

See this Raggy fight where I was healing the tanks:
http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/FightOverview.aspx?Raid=13926&Fight=9
Yeah, woohoo, highest priest on efficient healing. But only because I was spamming GH almost all the time to ensure that the tanks stay up. See how bad my overhealing was in that encounter?

Compare to this Gehennas fight:
http://realmplayers.com/RaidStats/FightOverview.aspx?Raid=14989&Fight=2
Should the healing officer kick me out of the guild because I was easily the "worst" healer on meters? No, because I spent the whole fight cleansing the raid.

You're not in a competition with other healers. The paladins WILL "snipe" your heals all the time. That's fine. It's why I only use H1 and H4 for raid wide healing - even if a rogue has taken more damage. Because one of the paladins will throw a quickie in there but my small H1 will top them up, not cause much overhealing and not spend much mana at all. Paladins are great for quick & small heals and keeping people topped up but priests are there to drop the big heals. No point in competing with paladins, you're wasting mana.

Priority #1 is to keep tanks alive, priority #2 is to have mana at hand so you can do your job. Everything else comes after. Sure you can artificially pad your healing meters, by healing dps standing in fire instead of getting them to move and that kind of crap. But if you want an efficient raid and a guild that can keep going for months and months instead of burning out, you better minimize deaths. Blacklisted had 37 deaths combined in our most recent two Molten Cores. For comparison - nothing against these guilds, just quickly pulled their stats out:
Convulsion 172 deaths
Entitled 122 deaths
Dank Budz Collective 215 deaths
Coalition 56 deaths
Kaamos 239 deaths
Drachensturm 73 deaths

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. If everyone uses Luna, all healers can see incoming heals easily and adjust their casts. It takes a little time and practice but once you're used to it, you can easily decide which spell to cast and whether to cancel or not. I save GH for tank healing in the encounters where tanks get heavy damage, H4 otherwise. H1 and H4 for raid healing, depending on how much HP they are missing and if anyone else is healing them. Max FH for emergencies along side PWS.

Hopefully your raid/heal leads and officers are smart enough to take more into consideration than just healing meters. Because otherwise you will never clear the harder raids. MC is easy enough that you can crawl through with hundreds of deaths and spamming flash heal but BWL will demand better teamwork or most healers will go OOM all the time.

[varth]

Garfunkle is correct, you just stick to your assignment and make sure you do the best you can. If you have a specific tank assignment you just pour heals into them regardless if they are topped off or not. I've hit insane overhealing amounts in MC runs when im assigned to a tank, but I've never had my assigned tank die where something didn't go horribly wrong.
Generally I just spam H3-4 depending on fight length, because I can heal with those the entire duration of most fights non stop without going oom. Especially on the more burst fights like Rag you should not cancel heals, one bad cancel right before a crushing blow can wipe the raid.
Healing is interesting because the difficulty can range so much depending on your guild. The upper tier disciplined guilds that don't stand in fire and have good healing assignments your role is rather simple.
in the shittier guilds you may need to cover multiple tanks, and there will be way more raid damage due to shitty positioning and reaction time.

[gotmilk0112]

For the setup: I would swap Inner Focus with pvp trinket (you want to be able to Focus + start casting something important instantly; current setup is either jumping around with left hand which is bad, or clicking focus which is also bad, or taking right hand off the mouse which is worse ). Also you can probably swap flash and wand, you don't need easily accessible wand

I'm using a Razer Naga. I can easily hit - and then any other of the hotbar keys really quickly.

Why is this a problem? You're not there to grow your e-peen for topping the healing meters, you're there to keep people alive.

I don't give a shit about meters either (really who would, it's a fuckin' 10 year old game, as long as you're not super-far below the other healers, who cares), I just want to make sure I'm not wasting my mana.

[Younie]

Efficiency is irrelevant until you run out of mana. This discussion has been had many times, and it always ends the same, but suggesting to never use flash heal is wrong IMO. If you want to make it more complicated, and slow cast heal raid damage, then it's only increasing the odds someone is going to die. My point of view is that 2.5 second casts are a penalty, not the other way around. When you use that POV, you end up using flash heal as much as you can, but no more. Flash heal allows you to spread your heals out across more targets, gets them out quicker, reduces healers overhealing each other, etc. The only downside is the mana cost, which can be "fixed" by using consumables. (The consumables part is key -- you need to spam mana pots on cooldown. Even if you aren't flash healing, you ought to. Bring 20 mana pots to raids. They seem cheap on nost, so use that to your advantage.) Anyway, I'm sure a lot of people disagree with that point of view, but at least it's worth noting there are two sides to this. This is probably the only point of contention when it comes to priest healing, all of the other advise in the thread I agree with.
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The raw healing you're able to pull out with the same amount of mana is higher by using mostly slow heal than flash heals.
If you are fine mana wise using mostly flash heals, it probably means your guild could use way less healer and have a more efficient raid dps.
You argue that it's "dangerous" to use slow heal rather than flash heal. This is ignoring the fact that most damage are predictable and that spreading renews beforehand considerely lowers the healing to be done.
Besides, a situation where you'd "need" to heal the raid very quickly is usually a situation where the whole raid (including your group) needs healing, thus each priest topping his own group via PoH instead of flash healing random target.
Really, flash heal scales terribly as priest. It's a pvp spell nothing more.

[Tinkertown]

While healing meters are suspect, especially when comparing output from different raids, you can very easily pay far too little attention to them.

I'm not a huge fan of meters, since they sometimes encourage sub-optimal behavior, but using them as a rough personal guide to if you are improving basic areas isn't a bad idea. If you are slow, using too small ranks on your spells, gear inappropriately and/or abort spells to seldom you will heal significantly less than someone doing all that stuff better than you.

"Getting the job done" is cited way to frivolously in discussions like these, since it isn't outside the realm of possibilities that someone could do said job and half or even a whole other job as well if they can muster double your effective healing while still having the reaction speed to throw heals in the right spot.

If you run MC with 10+ healers, this isn't going to be obvious, but as we dwell further it is going to be more apparent and many "also ran" healers will get a rather rude awakening.

Also, Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield are very important tools for keeping people alive in many scenarios. Calling it e-peening to heal faster so that players are on non-full hp a shorter amount of time is just silly. If you are ending the fight with close to full mana because you just cast Heal 2-3 the entire fight, or to be lazy and never abort then you are probably just a significantly worse healer than that "e-peening" flash healing/GH4 using priest doing 2-3x your healing.

[Younie]

I'm sorry but even on warsong full t3 I find ways to be oom in MC without using flash heal a single time during the raid.
If I have mana to waste, I use it on Rmax renews or PoH on 2ppl deficit instead of 3. Those are way more efficient mana wise and hps wise.
Predicting damages makes you way faster than using a panic flash heal.
Ofc, you need the spell on your bars and ofc there are some scenarios it's the best choice. But if you have to use it on a regular basis you are definitely doing somethign wrong.
But don't you realise how ridiculously low is a flash heal compared to the total amount of damage done in a boss fight and to the mana required?
Seriously, if you can't get a slow heal off before it get sniped, just play paladin.

[Tinkertown]

My comment about Flash Heal wasn't really aimed at you Younie, but earlier posts in the thread.

I don't agree with you 100% either, but I think we are probably pretty close in our assessment of things given that you seem to use larger ranks of heals and I'd assume abort them on a regular basis when they end up not needed rather than spamming low rank heals indiscriminately as others in this thread has suggested. Flash Heal is situational yes, at least with 1.12 talent trees, although I'd say significantly less so than you indicate. But that is a matter of degree. I also don't share your view on Renew, a spell I have little love for in most situations.

But really, going oom in MC without using FH in T3? You must have been running with like 4 healers or had massive overhealing, or the worst dps imaginable otherwise I honestly don't see that particular scenario. Many MC bosses are like 20-30 seconds long in that gear and even with puggers tagging along 40-60 seconds is a short timespan to empty a T3 pool.

[Ana]

Maybe they thought it's Vael and chained PoH.

[PriestInOurTime]

Whenever someone who heals a lot less, like 30-70% less, says that the other guy is a noob or is doing it wrong you should be very, very suspicious.

[gotmilk0112]

Whenever someone who heals a lot less, like 30-70% less, says that the other guy is a noob or is doing it wrong you should be very, very suspicious.

Well that's the thing with vanilla healing; just because you're #1 on meters, doesn't mean you're being a good healer, per se. Just like how DPS padding the meters (excessive AoE, ignoring adds, etc) doesn't mean they're a good DPS.