Healing in a raid

[gotmilk0112]

Now that I'm just one piece away from full pre-raid BIS, I was wondering how exactly one heals in a 40man? I've done plenty of 10/15man UBRS, but never a 40man.

Currently, most of my healing comes from R2 Heal + Renew, with max rank GH for big healing, and R3 Lesser Heal for small healing. I'm at 405 healing (346 on gear + 59 from 25% spirit -> healing) so not entirely sure which ranks I should be using; those just felt like the best overall for the amount of health people had in 5mans.

Is healing in a raid any different? Obviously with paladins, they'll be sniping most raid healing with flash heals, so I assume I'll be on tank healing? And obviously other healers are going to be on the tank as well, so I assume I'll just be cancelcasting R2 Heal most of the time?

I dunno. Never been in a 40man raid before.

[xutherogue]

First, priests will do both raid healing and tank healing. They are top tier at both. What you actually do in a given fight depends on assignments, but assuming FFA healing, I typically do whatever seems needed most. You should know what is actually important in a given fight. Consider broodlord, for example -- you heal tanks. If a dps takes a blastwave, that's really unimportant. The dps can go bandage, or slowly get spot heals, or something. Sometimes there are assignments, e.g. on rag, you have to have assignments due to positioning. In 40 mans, without assignments, it's a magical thing that the healing averages out, so that the tanks don't die. You are part of that machine, as is everyone else. Watch the tanks, don't be afraid to flash if you get scared they might die. Also, yes, cancel casting is great. In fact, you can get addons that track bosses swing timers, and time you casts around that. The spell you use when tank healing depends on a lot of factors.

As far as spells go, flash / heal / gheal / renew are all useful. Low ranks of heal are very efficent as you've found, so that's the spell you use when you need to stretch your mana pool. That said, don't be afraid to flash if you can afford it. As your guilds dps gets geared, you'll notice you have a lot of extra mana. At that point, flash healing makes your healing more robust, imo. There is a big opportunity cost in going for a 2.5 second and then having someone snipe it. That said, your gear isn't amazing, so that's probably not a viable option atm. But if you are using a lot of consumables (flask, sages, major manas, dark runes), you can spam flash heal at any gear level, so it depends on that too. All of this depends on the content, e.g. in naxx I think you use gheal a lot more (I've not healed vanilla naxx, tbh, but that's my impression)

[Ana]

Any LH scales terribly with gear because of the penalty for spells under lvl 20. You can safely remove them.
H1 is viable for a steady stream of small heals that cost next to nothing, the penalty is there but it's not too severe so you're able to output reasonable HPS. Not nearly enough for damage intensive fights, though.
Renew is a nice touch but pretty situational. Too mana inefficient for regular use. It's cool if you wanna slap an instant heal on some stray mage who got aggro and then don't want to pay any more attention to him. Or on MT against a doge (they can do a raid-wide stun, tank is prefered to survive it).

[gotmilk0112]

First, priests will do both raid healing and tank healing. They are top tier at both. What you actually do in a given fight depends on assignments, but assuming FFA healing, I typically do whatever seems needed most.

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. With 2.5 second heals, it felt like I was too slow to get any healing in before another healer got to it.

Also, is there some trick to seeing other healers' incoming heals on the raid frames? I use LunaUnitFrames, and in one UBRS I did, I could see incoming heals cast by the other healer. But then in another UBRS, I couldn't see incoming heals cast by the other healer. Is it because they're not using the same unitframes as me or something?

As far as spells go, flash / heal / gheal / renew are all useful. Low ranks of heal are very efficent as you've found, so that's the spell you use when you need to stretch your mana pool.

Should I be using any low ranks of Flash Heal?

Any LH scales terribly with gear because of the penalty for spells under lvl 20. You can safely remove them.
H1 is viable for a steady stream of small heals that cost next to nothing, the penalty is there but it's not too severe so you're able to output reasonable HPS. Not nearly enough for damage intensive fights, though.
Renew is a nice touch but pretty situational. Too mana inefficient for regular use. It's cool if you wanna slap an instant heal on some stray mage who got aggro and then don't want to pay any more attention to him. Or on MT against a doge (they can do a raid-wide stun, tank is prefered to survive it).

So I should be using H1, H3, and GHmax ?

For reference in my gear H1 heals for ~650, H3 heals for ~1000, and GHmax heals for ~2500

[Ana]

I use H2, H4 and GH3 (you don't really need those huge 2,5+k healbombs until Broodlord, I guess). H1 is more situational, like single healing an ad on Majordomo or one hound from a pack (if people even bother with assigning healers there). If there's nothing keeping paladins busy elsewhere, they will probably snipe your super small heal. I wouldn't complain, saves my mana for the actual important moments.

And yes, Luna only shows incoming heals from people who also have it. So either your guild makes sure every healer uses Luna, or you're basically left in the dark.

Btw flash heal always good to have

[gotmilk0112]

Btw flash heal always good to have

But what rank? Is it worth it to downrank FH?

This is what my current setup looks like:



H2, H4, GH4, Max renew/bubble, Max flash heal, PoH1, PoH4

[Ana]

I edited my post but Nost forum decided to eat it. #blizzlike
Anyway, my logic is this: flash heal is way too mana inefficient to be anything more than an "oh shit" button much like PWS (slightly slower, so for smaller emergencies, and you can use it multiple times). So, since you're trying to save the player / raid / whatever from a disaster, you better do it fast. So, max rank, imo.
Besides, +healing scaling is awful for 1.5 sec cast spells (keep in mind flash isn't 2 seconds minus 0.5 from talents, it's 1.5 base cast time), so you aren't even saving much mana by downranking.

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

[Younie]

Hello, I haven't read the whole thread so I may repeat what others already said, but I hope it will still help.

First of all, Flash Heal is to avoid at all cost. The only 2 situations you should use flash heal are:
1) An emergency heal. Which can be needed in 2 situations:
a) You didn't precast on a tank or you didn't precast on a DPS which had an aggro notification (pulling aggro on aoe trash pack typicly). Those scenario should not happen after a while if you're experienced and have a proper UI.
b) On warlocks hellfireing trash pack. In this case, you may not have enough time to even precast a big heal. When ZG comes out, the trinket will tackle this problem.
2) Flash heal can also be used to "snipe heals" .... typicaly to "top meter" when you run through very fast encounters or encounters where you are way overgeared. There is absolutely no point in that, besides increasing your epeen.
To make it short about flash heal: Most of the damages are either spread a lot in the timeline or predictable enough to precast. So healing them "faster" has absolutely no point besides sniping heal and increasing epeen. And only applicable if you're way overgeared or the encounter is fast enough not to have mana issue.


Concerning the other spells and how you "should" play, it depends on a lot of factors. Only experience can help you improve, but anyways here are some stuff good to know:
>PoH and/or Holy nova are the most effective spell mana and hps wise if they don't go in overhealing. So always keep an eye on your own group and use them as soon as it is efficent enough (2-3 ppl with health deficit).
>You can usually predict damage. Spread R4 renews on the raid memebrs that will take damages before damage happen.
> Once damage has already happen, stop spreading renews and top everyone up with Heals or GH.
> If a dps pull aggro or if there is a tank switch, you can be sure other healers will be slow on them, so precast somethign on them (or shield if caster).
> Always keep an eye on ranges: if a tank goes to china or in los, he will usually be forgot by other healers
>YOur role is both tank/raid heal. What to prioritize depends on what teh other heals do well or wrong. Try to analyse what other healers focus on, and do the stuff that are left over

[xutherogue]

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.

As far as ranks go, I use gheal 2/4, flash 2/4/7, heal 2/4. I didn't mention specific ranks on my original post because choosing what ranks you want on your bars is a more personal decision IMO. I've never found an argument for a specific rank of any heal being quantifiably better. You'll figure out what you want as you go. That said, it's important to have something like SCT so you get a feel for how much you are healing for, and more importantly, how much you are overhealing (so that you can reduce it). It's also good to have the missing hp amount display on your target frame so you can make the decision properly.

[Kjepp]

In fact, you can get addons that track bosses swing timers, and time you casts around that.

Do you have a name for such addon?