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Spiritual Guidance: How to increase your HPS as a holy priest
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. Remember last month when I talked about increasing your HPS as a discipline priest through an aggressive style of healing? Well, this week I'm going to do it again for holy priests. So if you've be looking to climb up the healing meters and make other healers hate you, stick around. The philosophy behind increasing your output as a holy priest is quite different than that of a disc priest. It's still very greedy but it's not nearly as competitive, since it doesn't require you to directly snipe heals from other healers. Instead, you'll be searching for every half second where you can utilize your most powerful spells and do so before other healers have the chance to do something similar. Just like with disc priests, you'll be milking your mana bar for all it's worth and spamming your regenerative cooldowns whenever you can.
Spiritual Guidance: How to increase your HPS as a discipline priest
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. I received an email three weeks back from a discipline priest who told me she thought her performance on the healing meters was too low. Though there wasn't any pressure on her from her guild to change what she was doing, she was bothered that her peers often outhealed her by a significant amount -- even another discipline priest with worse gear and a laggy computer. She told me she'd first noticed it at the start of Cataclysm, despite the fact that her performance on meters should have gone up with the change to combat logs (which allowed absorption from Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis to register on meters). She kept up with her assignments regardless, and none of her targets ever died, but something just didn't seem right to her. The priest linked me her armory but said that she didn't think it was anything to do with her gear choices, which I agreed with upon my own inspection. She also described what she was casting, none of which seemed horribly egregious to me. What could be wrong?
The Light and How to Swing It: Healing is a zero-sum game
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Have you ever cut a cake at a party? Dividing a cake into portions is an example of what economists call a zero-sum game. The total amount of cake is fixed, and you can slice it how you see fit. There's only so much cake to go around, so giving someone a bigger portion means that there's less for everyone else. You can't take half of the cake for yourself without reducing the size of the other pieces. In a zero-sum game, you're sharing a limited resource with your fellow players, and one person's gain is another's loss. Healing is a zero-sum game. Over the course of any given encounter, your raiders are only going to take so much damage. If one healer is handling 75% of the incoming damage, then there's only 25% of the incoming damage for the other healers to handle. The more HPS a healer does, the less their teammates are capable of. DPS classes work in the opposite way, where the more DPS one class does, the more DPS everyone does. Because of this unique zero-sum game that healers compete in, judging a healer's performance can be difficult.
The Light and How to Swing It: Straight talk about holy paladin healing
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how come I had to use Lay on Hands to save that tank. You've heard me talk about Cataclysm's revolutionary triage paradigm of healing, and you've read all about the new Three Heal style for heal design. Every healing class starts with three nearly-identical healing spells as a baseline. The devs then sprinkle in a few extra heals to make each class somewhat unique. Add in a variety of AoE and specialty heals, and you've got a recipe for any one of the healing classes in Cataclysm. We were subject to a lot of retooling to get our holy tree to fit into this model, but it was definitely a success. While it's fun to discuss the paradigm from a bird's-eye view, it's also not representative of actually healing encounters. WoW isn't played with a pen and paper, but with a keyboard and mouse. Every boss encounter requires different techniques, and their varying mechanics are key in determining the best course of action. How can we take what we know about the new healing paradigm and actually apply it to real encounters? What heals are holy paladins really using today?
Spiritual Guidance: Is Greater Heal on Life Support?
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Is the Priest usage of Greater Heal fading away? Matticus shall answer! An excellent thread on Plus Heal has caught my attention and it's a topic that's also been picked up by Kestrel. It's about the current use of Greater Heal (or lack thereof). Check your meters. Specifically, check your cast sequences. See if you can determine how often you use Greater Heal on a typical night. If you're a player who uses it often, I applaud you. From a mathematical and healing efficiency stand point, Greater Heal has the edge. Under lab conditions. Except raid environments aren't lab conditions. Let's go into detail about when Greater Heal is used in Discipline and Holy after the break.
Raid Rx: Analyzing your healers Part 4
Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. That above is the fun product of Wordle. I creatively call it "WoW WWS Healing". Click on it to give it a spin of your own. So, if you've just randomly stumbled upon this multi-part saga on WWS meets healing, here's a lovely link to get you caught up. For the rest of you operating with mere short term memory lapses, this link right here will transport you to the example WWS we've been mulling about. But more on that after the jump.
