I looked back at some previous posts over the last few days, specifically at I Don't Heal; I stand there and Regen!. This post was very...down i think is the right word. I know that I mentioned that I wasn't QQ'ing or anything of the sort just presenting my situation, however it still came off a little...I like the word down - so I thought I would update a bit on what I have experienced.
As I expected the mana pool got a LOT better. I picked up probably another 20k mana since that post, and probably another 2k incombat regen (Holy priests get a huge amount of their regen from straight regeneration, we don't get all those fancy "% of your mana pool" things like Divine Plea and Rapture). In fact, raiding tonight we cleared BWD (except Nef, that silly dragon refuses to die, not that we've really been able to put in attempts for a fortnight now), and I didn't go OoM on any of the boss fights, trash with the pull as I was swapping specs, then a second group face pulled by mistake I did. What's more, I actually realized on a few fights that I hadn't popped my Shadow Fiend yet, just as the boss was dying, of course this may have something to do with the fact our newest healer Rillfane seems to think of me as a lightning conductor and is constantly dropping his Innervate on me on CD, however I'm choosing to ignore that for argument's sake!
I did swap to holy shortly after that post, however I swapped out my Shadow spec for the week to give Disc a bit of a try, we thought the extra CDs would be helpful on Nef, and given that I am healing the Onyxia tank, Atonement should work out very well. I tried it out tonight on Maloriak, the fight seemed pretty well suited to Discipline, as long as I am healing the Maloriak tank, and it worked out VERY well, my mana pool hardly ever dropped, the casters were again thanking me in extremely quick to respond whispers (now that I think about it, maybe those are add-ons....) for my Power Infusion, that Pain Suppression saved a tank, and my Power Word: Barrier is AMAZING on the red phase. I still haven't got to try it out on Nefarian, as we are holding off on him until one of our regular dps comes back (we really don't want to get our first kill without him, and his dps, raid buff, and cc are pretty intricate parts of our strategy), however it is definitely a spec that has major uses in certain fights.
In summary (yes I know grade seven English teacher, that's a bad way to start a conclusion...), things DID get better, the change in healing style was huge, and I think getting used to it was so gradual and such a natural thing to do that I really don't know when I stopped freaking out and going to flash heals, and instead went to greater heals and trusted that next hit would get dodged. I am still loving this change in style from pop everything and hope to keep him up, to conserve mana and prioritize. And they didn't take away our pop-everything style either, if you need proof, try two tanking Heroic Halfus now, you would be surprised how well you can rotate cooldowns and how fast you can burn mana throwing serendipity bombs.
Well, you just always look like you could use an Innervate! ;) Actually you usually get it because you're almost always lower on mana than Janyaa, and as long as I'm not completely running on vapor, I figure you getting 20% of my maximum mana pool and me getting 10% is better than just me getting 10%. Numbers are hard and all, but that does seem to be of greater benefit to the raid. So usually whenever Power Torrent procs and I have Innervate available I look your way.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't read your December post, because I obviously wasn't with Jubi back in December...I actually don't think I started raiding at all until January, but I felt pretty much the same way you did the first few times my old guild worked on Magmaw...'how am I ever going to be able to have enough mana to get through this?' It didn't help that my old guild was not so good with dealing with parasites, but even if you do those well, there's a ton of unavoidable raid damage on that fight. Of course, I'd sometimes felt similarly when healing heroics and getting geared up, and there were plenty of times when I was totally hating being a healer and thinking maybe I should go boomkin.
Ultimately, gear and learning the fights made a huge amount of difference, and being a healer is not so frustrating anymore. I don't know that I'd really say I prefer it to the ICC model, as I didn't really feel there was all that much wrong with ICC healing. They added a mana component, but they really didn't take away the huge raid damage spikes that I at least thought we were supposed to be getting away from. I guess there are fewer fights like Sindy or Blood Queen where you have persistent aura damage, but on the whole the changes haven't led to exactly the sort of more 'tactical' healing style I was expecting initially. But even if it's not exactly what I was expecting, I'm finally having fun with it, and I guess that's what really counts.
I actually really agree with you that Blizzard has definately given a lot more damage spikes than I had expected too. It's one thing to give us a lot of heal-heal-heal-greaterheal, style mechanics, but there are still those times when I have to go all out to keep a tank alive or a dps, that deffinately makes me wonder what Blizzard was doing. Having said that I can quickly see it getting back to the "heal your ass off" model, given that we're not in heroic gear yet and already seeing a pretty huge increase in our ability to sustain throughput.
ReplyDeleteYeah. My healing style at this point is actually not terribly different from what it was in Wrath. The main difference is that while I'm using Rejuv a lot (since we still have Rejuv + WG as the vast majority of our raid healing toolkit), I'm now waiting until people actually take damage to pop a Rejuv on them, unlike in Wrath where you'd just roll HoTs on people whether they needed it or not, on the chance that they MIGHT take some damage somewhere along the line. I could potentially see rolling pre-HoTing coming back for druids if we continue to gain in-combat regen at a good pace as we get better gear.
ReplyDeleteThere are still aspects of the new healing paradigm I'm not wild about. I still don't really like the homogenization of the direct heals of each class into filler heal, big heal and quick heal, and I especially don't like what they did to Regrowth in order to make it fit into that system. I also still miss being a tree full time, although perhaps not as much as I thought I would. But on the whole, now that we've adjusted and geared up a bit, it seems fine. I do kinda wonder how many healers just gave up before they got acclimated and geared? I guess not that many, given that tanks remain the bottleneck in dungeon finder groups. ;)