You'll hear a lot of people talk about how Paladins or Discipline Priests are tank healers, or how other classes are subpar tank healers. I mean, everyone knows that Druids and Holy Priests are raid healers, and Shammies are Chain Healers, right?

The biggest mistake a healing lead can make, especially in a ten man raid when you only have 2 or 3 healers, is to pigeon-hole your healers based on their perceived niche. The larger the group, the more healers you have. The more healers you have, the more each healer can be specialized based on their niche. Thus we find ourselves in a situation where healers often have very specific roles in 25 man, but require a bit more flexibility in 10 mans. And too many people equate the strengths of each healing class in a 25 man to what their abilities will mean in a 10 man scenario.

Yes, some healers are better at certain tasks than others. However, never fail to recognize individual player style in combination with the flexibility of their class. A very important thing to remember is that all healing classes are balanced with abilities to heal single targets in addition to group heals. They absolutely have to be designed this way so that they can solo heal 5 man dungeons. Therefore, all healing classes can potentially do a stellar job with a tank healing assignment.

In order to break this down, we need to systematically break down the descriptions of single target healers and tank healers, and we also need to learn to differentiate between raid healers and AoE healers. Today I’m going to discuss single target healing.

Single Target Healing is an ability. It’s a niche that some healers, by design, excel at better than others. Tank Healing is an assignment. Got it? Wondering what the difference is? Well, it’s a subtle difference, I’ll give you that. The two classes most often referred to when discussing Single Target Healers are Disc Priests and Holy Pallies.

Last week Kurn had a post that discussed this conundrum with Holy Pallies, and it really got me thinking. Here’s a snippet of what Kurn said, but you can also read the whole interesting post yourself:

Single-target healing is our focus. True, this will generally be a tank, but that’s not always the case. Tank healing does not equal single-target healing. Apart from anything else, calling us “tank healers” completely ignores paladins who like to engage in PVP and arenas. There’s no way a mage, for example, can properly be called a “tank”, unless they’re tanking Krosh Firehand in Gruul’s Lair… Tank-healing is a subset of single-target healing.

I agree completely with Kurn (though I would probably flip that 3rd sentence and say that while tank healing IS single target healing, single target healing is not necessarily tank healing). And I will take that one step farther with Disc Priests.

When I was in charge of healing assignments in 25 mans, we had far too many Holy Pallies, and not enough raid healers. Therefore, when we had a Disc Priest, it was a challenge for me to come up with a specific assignment for them at first… and then I realized that most encounters have a situation in which a single player aside from the tank will start to take considerable damage.

Slag Pot. (Ulduar - Ignis)
Stone Grip. (Ulduar - Kologarn)
Bone Spike Graveyard. (ICC - Lord Marrowgar)
Mark of the Fallen Champion. (ICC - Saurfang)
Mutated Infection. (ICC - Rotface)
Penetrating Cold. (ToC - Anub'arak)
Legion Flame. (ToC - Jaraxxus)
Incinerate Flesh. (ToC - Jaraxxus)

Our resident Disc Priest could easily focus on these individual targets and allow the tank healers to continue doing their job and the raid healers to continue with theirs. It worked out fabulously – that is the strength of single target healing, and it does not necessarily need to be tank healing. I'll bet Kurn would agree that Holy Pallies would also do an excellent job at taking on these single-target non-tank healing assignments.

The Discipline Priest versus the Holy Paladin

There have been a lot of discussions lately about Disc Priests simply not being up to par as tank healers. Personally, I do not see a particular problem with tank healing as a Disc Priest in 10 man ICC (though I’m not a Hard Moder), but I can definitely see the argument in a 25 man raid.

The issue is actually less to do with single target healing ability, and more to do with the fact that most fights are two-tank fights to some degree – and Grace in effect punishes Disc Priests by 9% when we switch healing targets to try and heal two instead of just one. That is a significant gimp on our throughput. Pallies, on the other hand, can simultaneously heal the Main Tank AND the Off Tank through Beacon of Light (though they may not always choose to do this – see Saunder’s post).

Therefore, anytime there is a two tank fight, Pallies have an advantage over Disc Priests. In a 25 man environment, Disc Priests make better support healers for tanks, whereas Pallies can really do the brunt of the throughput healing. In 10 man, the problem is less extreme – Binding Heal, a Power Word: Shield, a Renew or a Prayer of Mending along with a splash heals from the raid healer will often be enough to keep up the OT until an actual tank swap occurs.

So, fine, Disc Priests are weak compared to Holy Pallies in terms of Tank Healing, at least in 25 man. Even Ghostcrawler has admitted this, albeit somewhat cautiously and grudgingly.

Personally, I suspect that it’s not so much that Disc Priests aren’t very good at it, it’s that we just can’t compete with Holy Pallies. For a vast portion of the healing public, that competition factor doesn’t really come into play – but for those who are in progressive raiding guilds, it does.
Therefore, the problem with Disc Priests as tank healers is that we are quite possibly the perfect example of a Single Target healer – whereas Holy Pallies are dual target healers. And current fights are usually designed around dual- tanking.

Other Classes as Tank Healers

As I mentioned before, all healers can adequately tank heal when necessary. I’ll repeat myself here – it is a requirement of designing healers that they be able to maintain the tank and group because healers are not just designed around raid encounters. They also need to be able to do their jobs well in a 5 man scenario in which they are the only healer. This was the most important thing I learned from the Circle of Healers survey – most responders who were not of the “tank healer” category commented that too many people don’t understand that they CAN tank heal.

Of course they can. There were plenty of times when, as a Holy Priest, I had to tank heal. This is one of the strengths of the Holy Priest, for the record – the ability to slip into ANY healing role at a moment’s notice without any significant gear or talent changes. If the tank healer goes down, the Holy Priest can slip right in to the role quite easily. Yes, a Holy Priest can definitely keep the tank alive and do a damn good job at it – they’ve got the burst and the single target throughput abilities to do it. They have a solid, and yet simple, rotation – as well as some “health pool softening” talents with Renew (side note: how do you like the word I chose to describe HoTs? Health pool softening – yay? Nay?).

For most raiding purposes, what sets the role of Tank Healing apart from other roles is that of sustainability.

Holy Priests can slip in and do an admirable job. However, they are not usually the best permanent choice for the role because of sustainability. In many situations, a Holy Priest will really struggle with their mana if forced to heal a single target for the entirety of a boss fight. It’s much better than it used to be, of course – now that we don’t have to pop in and out of the five second rule to stretch our mana, we can do a better job of it. But even still, Holy Priests just don't generally have the mana regen capabilities of a Disc Priest or Holy Pally unless they really go out on a limb to gear specifically for it.

I regret that I’m not as well versed in the styles of Shammies and Druids, but I suspect that in order to perform at their best as a tank healer, it requires a specific talent and gear selection. I rather like Druids as tank support healers, but burst is not the strength of a Druid. In my opinion, the best tank healers are the ones that have a reliable burst throughput and sustainability.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this though – especially from you Shammies and Druids. How do you feel your tank healing abilities compare?

Later this week we will discuss raid and AoE healing.

From a healer's perspective, there's a lot of fancy schmancy terminology in WoW. You've got people discussing throughput, mana management, mitigation, effective health, AoEability, clustering, stacking, proactive, reflexive, reactionary, etc etc etc. Sometimes when I want to feel good about myself, I just start throwing around these words like how I used Foucaultian terms in grad school. Makes people think you're smart or something.

Inevitably, these terms will get confused and misused. People will use one term when they mean another, or perhaps not understand the difference between two terms. And that's fine – after all, knowledge is relative. What one word means to you is not necessarily what it means to me. But I won't bore you with critical theory and philosophy today (I always get especially philosophical at 6 am, I have no idea why).

Let's look at a primary example of a word that is often misused or misunderstood conceptually. Fulguralis calls me a word nerd for a very good reason!

Mitigation.

-verb

1. to lessen in force or intensity, as wrath, grief, harshness, or pain; moderate

2. to make less severe: to mitigate a punishment.

3. to make (a person, one's state of mind, disposition, etc) milder or more gentle; mollify; appease.

4. to become milder; lessen in severity.

Disc Priests are the king of damage mitigation amongst the healing classes, and I don't think there's any argument about that. However, I often hear of Druids being referred to as damage mitigators as well, and this grates on my word nerdiness, and does not accurately reflect the power of the HoT. If you say that Druids are damage mitigators, then it could be interpreted that a Disc Priest + Resto Druid is a poor healing combo for a ten man raid. This is absolutely untrue – Disc Priest & Resto Druid is a fantastic ten man healing combo.

I have been unable to find a term that adequately describes the purpose and power of the Druid HoT. The word for Disc Priest is, of course, mitigation, but I cannot conceive of a proper alternative for Druids. I understand, therefore, why people often refer to them as mitigative (lawl I will not be put off by that squiggly red line!).

The power of mitigation healing is that it reduces the impact of a big burst of damage, smoothing the incoming damage out a bit, taking off the peaks of pain. HoTs have this same power, but in a different way. Mitigation smooths out the incoming damage. HoTs smooth out the health pool. They result in similar effects, but go about it in different ways. Both Disc Priests and Resto Druids are "smoothers" if you will – but they are inherently different in their processes, and misunderstanding the difference can be fatal.

The fundamental difference between the two is best described in an example.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you have a tank with 35k health. This tank takes a hit of 37k damage, and consequently dies. A Disc Priest can actively prevent this by using one of their many mitigative abilities – be it Power Word: Shield, Pain Suppression, or perhaps a well timed Divine Aegis proc. These "mitigation" abilities are, in effect, temporary hit points that will be absorbed before any of the actual damage. If I pop a 5k shield on the tank, I have effectively increased their health to 40k, albeit temporarily. This is enough to allow them to survive that hit.

A resto druid cannot give that tank temporary hitpoints. However, if my Penance is on cooldown, a Resto Druid can do something that I cannot. What if, right after that tank takes that 37k hit, and is down to 3k health, he continues to take melee damage? With his health so low, and all my cooldowns blown, he could die before I get my Flash Heal cast off. But if he has HoTs on him, he will have health trickling in that may be enough to keep him alive between the time that he took his giant hit and the time that my Flash Heal or Greater Heal lands. THIS is the power of a Resto Druid.

Of course, in the effort to find the right word for teh HOTNESS that is a resto druid, the Twitterati came out and threw me a variety of potential words to meet my demands. None of them were perfect enough for me, but some of them were pretty epic.

Cadistra and Angelya suggested "lifestream".

Angelya again: Trickling?

Me: Trickle top-offing?

Sheqeri: Increased effective health?

Dristanel: Flailing? Foundation HoTs?

Matticus: Health gappiness?

Nibuca: Hottification? Pre-cognitive burst smoothing? Bursty effective armor displacement stamina throughput druid mob tree? (I get this strange sensation as if she were almost teasing me...)

Wonderful suggestions, eh? But I do believe that Deyndor takes the prize for the best suggestion of all time: Colander Heals. (I made sure I spelled it right this time! Ever notice that my spelling errors are mostly limited to double consonant words?) Do you have a difficult time conceptualizing Colander Heals? Well, LET ME DRAW YOU A PICTURE

Alright, Aion has temporary control over my soul. It’s not that I like it better than WoW (far from it), but simply that it’s something new to me, with lots of different aspects I can analyze.

The other day, I healed my first “instance”. It works strangely in Aion, and I’m still rather new to the whole thing, so I won’t try to explain it. The point here is that I was in charge of healing a group of six. I had been playing the game less than 5 days, so unsurprisingly I was more than a little nervous. One of the good things about starting a game that is only 3 months old in North America, is that everyone is at least a little new, so they are more understanding if you are still trying to learn the basics… most of them are still learning too.

Despite the complete lack of healing interface add-ons (no add-ons in Aion, zomg), and regardless of my noobishness, everyone in the party was very pleased with how well I healed. I learned a lot about my spells during that run… “Ooooo! Hey look! I have a dispel! I didn’t know that…”, but there were a lot of things I didn’t need to learn. There are some aspects of healing that seem to be somewhat universal across MMORPGs.

• Watching health bars. In Aion and in WoW, if you are healing, you are keeping your eyes on everyone’s health bars. It’s a bit easier right now in Aion, because since there are no add-ons, and since I’m low level, the interface is very simple and clean. It’s easier to see when someone is at drastically low health. You have to split your focus between player status bars and your surroundings – and that is always tricky. It’s a skill you learn through lots of healing.

• The value of HoT effects. I don’t have any shields yet in Aion, but I know from my healing experience in WoW to keep a HoT up on the tank at all times. I currently have two different HoTs in Aion, but it unfortunately appears as though these two HoTs don’t stack. So, I know from my experience healing next to druids that I usually put the longer time, less heal per tick HoT on the tank, and the shorter, burstier HoT on some of the melee, or other classes that take damage. I also keep a HoT ticking on myself all the time while soloing and running quests.

• Threat, zomg threat. Call it aggro or enmity or threat, whatever you like. It’s a balancing effect for healers. It used to be a lot harder to manage in WoW, but in late BC they changed some of the threat mechanics, so at end game, it’s almost a non-issue. In Aion however, at least at this level, it is a big freaking deal. The tanks only have so many taunt abilities (maybe only one) and it has a serious cooldown. I was constantly pulling threat and getting beat on. However, the Cleric in Aion is more along the lines of a traditional D&D Cleric – I can wear all armor classes aside from plate. So, decked out in Chain Mail, it’s not as devastating as it would be were I playing my priest in WoW.

• Triage. Anytime you have a certain class makeup with specific roles, prioritizing who gets healed first is a crucial component. Keep the person taking the beating up so that others who can’t handle the beating don’t die. Keep the people who keep others up. Keep the people who perform crucial duties alive. Keep people who can rez alive. In Aion, you can rez while in combat (something I didn’t realize until a bit later during our run… whoops), and if you buy certain implements, you don’t need to be a healer to rez others. With this knowledge in hand, I knew who had resurrection implements on them, and made sure to prioritize them along with the tank… at least if I go down, they can rez me. Anyone who can combat rez gets bonus triage points. There is a common philosophy that healers don’t need to know bosses or mob abilities… “just heal stuff”. This is not exactly true. Sometimes, there is someone else performing a crucial duty other than the tank. Anyone else remember the mage-tank fight in Gruul’s Lair? The mage taking on that task needed a special healer as well.

• Pre-Casting and Stop-Casting Heals. This is another reason why it’s good to know mob abilities as a healer. This was also the main thing that made the others in my party realize that, noob though I may be, I am a good healer. If you wait until after someone in your party has taken damage, it may simply be too late. Anyone who has ever been assigned to tank healing knows the value of a big burst, long cast time heal. Greater Heal and Holy Light often work best when you start casting them right before the party member takes a big fat hit. When I was healing in my Aion party, I knew when we went into some of the fights that some of those mobs started out hitting big… so before they even got a hit in, I had started casting my biggest heal. The tank never even had a chance to panic. He would take the huge damage, and half a second later, be healed to full.

• Know Your Duty. If I'm a healer, I need to be healing. I generally should not be worrying about contributing to damage. I know this isn't true in all games, and not always in PvP. But when in doubt? Just focus on healing, or you might get distracted and miss something important when someone needs heals.

• Watching the Target's Target. I didn't figure out until a day or so ago how to turn on this feature in Aion, and it was killing me. When you are spending more time watching bars and interface aspects than the actual creatures around you, you need to know who a monster is pursuing. If you just always assume it's the tank (which, in many cases may even be a fairly safe assumption), it's quite possible that someone will slip under the radar and get dead. This is another reason why I hate having to target someone to heal them - I want to keep my focus on the boss so that I always know who he's going after and prepare myself to heal them. For instance, in the Lady Deathwhisper and Onyxia fights, I keep the bosses targeted so I know who they will be casting their next frostbolt / fire breath / whatever on, so that I can bubble them before hand. Here's hoping I can figure out how to do this more effectively in Aion!
  

There’s something reassuring in knowing that if you can master the art of healing in and of itself, that skill and knowledge is transferrable. You still won’t walk in necessarily knowing what each of your spells do, or how to battle specific mobs, how you will mesh with other players and classes, but you’ll be on a solid footing from the start.

The strangest thing has happened over the course of the past week or so. Somehow I suddenly became - dare i say it? - a good healer.

Now, I'm not saying I wasn't a good healer before. To be quite frank, I really don't know if I was a good healer or not. I tried to make up for whatever I lacked by being generally jovial and apologetic. Oh and being a dwarf, and therefore awesome. It's not like you have to be some expert WoW player to surf on over to blogger.com and create a healing blog after all. Don't be fooled by all the *sparkly* rhetoric.

While this revelation did not occur to me until last night, it began on Monday night in our regular 10 man ToC run.

For various reasons, the entire night was somewhat frustrating for me because I am the kind of person that really needs to focus in order to do well. Some people can pay attention to 18 different things at once, and still do a great job - not me. One thing I canNOT multitask is conversation. When one person is talking to me IRL, someone is asking me questions in vent, I'm trying to keep up with both raid and guild chat, and then multiple people are sending me tells, I just lose it. It probably comes from deep seated guilt issue involving a childhood friend and a dog, or an abusive half aunt twice removed or something, but I can't drop a conversation when someone is talking to me. I feel like I need to keep up my end, or else I'm a total failfriend.

Yet somehow, through the tears and frustration, and arguments, we got to Anubrekhan for only the second time in our short ToC10 experience, and we two shot him. And it was the best New Patch Eve raid ever. I was finally able to accept that 3.3 was coming, and embrace the new content knowing that I had finally seen the last of the old. True, it wasn't hard mode, and it wasn't 25 man, but I don't really care.

And the best part is, we successfully made it through phase 3 the very first time we'd ever seen it. I thought for sure it would be a struggle for us healers. But as a Disc priest? It's just awesome. I spent the entire time throwing bubbles and making last second saves with uber bursty Penance. Three times I let someone get below 5% health before I finally blasted them with a Penance. It was like this delicate ballet, and I was in the middle doing my Penance Pirouette.

And just as I'm really starting to have fun and get my groove on, SHAZAM I have a new achievement, and I'm looking around me saying "What? That's it?"

****

Yesterday I successfully pugged several of the new 5 mans as well as some other random heroic dungeons.

The crowning moment each time for me was Ick & Krick. Similar to the rogue in ToC 5 man, there are pools of poison that spawn in which you do not want to stand. But what I noticed was that you can see the pool splurge poison thingies being thrown at you, so you can move out of the way before they land (although you do seem to take one tick of damage before they even land, which is rather annoying).

I guess to many others this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but to me it was. For once, I proved that I am capable of good situational awareness. Before I specced Disc, I was always staring at healing bars, and never noticed these things. The difference is that as Holy, you are reacting to the damage people take, whereas for Disc, you are primarily trying to prevent it. Since you are attempting to prevent the damage, you need to be more aware of what damage is coming in - and if you have everyone shielded, you can afford to spare a few more glances around instead of glaring at green bars the whole time.

I'm not saying one spec is better than the other. But, having now healed higher end content in both specs, I'm integrating the lessons I learned from both of them and becoming a better healer because of it. (I was also quite proud of myself for spontaneously remembering to use Shackle Undead during Halls of Reflection on annoying random ranged ghosts.)

The point of this post is not to toot my own horn. My entire premise for writing this blog, and for reading so many other healing blogs, is that I firmly believe that we become better healers by learning about other healing classes. Although Holy/Disc are not two different classes, they are vastly different specs. And I can say, without any hesitation, that learning both specs has improved my healing skills for each one. It goes beyond healing better with members of different classes and specs, and relates more to the different skills used for each healer type.

Holy taught me trigger finger reflex response.

Disc taught me awareness of incoming damage.

Shadow taught me that just because a spell looks weak on the tooltip doesn't mean it's not super strong in practice. (Why hello there Vampiric Touch, so nice to meet you.)

My experience with the two-trick pony healer over the weekend left me pondering the nuances of a skilled healer.

Of course, much like the Pretentious Priest, it is possible to make your way through a lot of content by merely bashing your face against your keyboard in rhythm to Tchaikovsky, as long as you bind all your keys to Flash Heal or Circle of Healing/ Penance. I mean, let's face it - it's not actually that difficult to buy yourself some top notch gear these days, and especially for healers, once you outgear an instance, you end up healing yourself out of a job.

There's all this talk going around about how much harder healing is going to be in Icecrown. Health pools will be larger! Heals will be smaller! There's a debuff thingie that will make your tanks weep with pansy-fication!

Rubbish, say I.

Well okay, maybe not total rubbish, but I do remain skeptical. I remember all the hubbub about Ulduar as well - how it was actually going to be HARD on healers. How mana regen was going to be tricky, you would have to choose your heals wisely. You would need to coordinate better with your fellow healers. Sound familiar to anyone else?

It didn't take long before healing was no real challenge in the first half of Ulduar. And it was the gear that made it so easy.

I'm not standing up here on my soapbox to tell you all that zomg healing is soooooo easy, why are you struggling?! This is a cakewalk! I could solo heal this lol. Especially since I'll be the first to tell you, I'm a middle of the road raider. I haven't seen most of the hard modes, and I'm certainly not on the cutting edge of the raiding scene.

What troubles me is how quickly healers are made obsolete. How, the better we get, the more we improve our gear, the harder we fight to learn all the best ways to use our spells, the nuances within the trigger finger dynamic... what ends up happening is that we heal ourselves out of a job.

Suddenly those 6 slots that were set aside for healers become 5. Because if you don't do that, then your healers CAN get away with Easy-button face smashing to fulfill their duties. You might as well turn that 6th slot into a DPS, so that we can take down the bosses faster. I'm not complaining about this decision - it is a practical one, and I understand it.

When the content is new, and your gear is beginner level for the instance, it's fun. It's a challenge. You have to think, and you have to make real choices. This person needs healing NOW. Should I use Renew? Or Circle of Healing to give others around him a little boost? Should I bubble or is there no risk of more damage coming at him. Should I use GrittedTeeth or AngelWings?

It doesn't matter how much health you add to the bosses, or even to the tanks. You can nerf regen all to hell. Gear is so easy to get due to the way badges are handed out like candy. The gear gap is traversed so quickly that it's not worth blinking. It's not worth worrying over. Oh you want to ninja my epics? Meh. I've got 18 more in my back pocket. Yawn.

We are able to upgrade our gear so quickly, and so easily, that Blizz is shooting themselves in the foot - the easier new gear is to acquire, the shorter our attention span becomes. This is due not only to us finding ourselves with no desire for anything that drops in the instance, but also because we gear up so fast, the instance is quickly turned into a moot point. A challengeless chasm.

Don't you love when people criticize something but have no solution to the problem? >.>

I have hopes for ICC, despite my skepticism. I hear murmurs of a healer glory encounter. I hope there are more of those in the future - Incinerate Flesh is my favorite fight mechanic so far (though I'm not as fond when I'm running Disc). But I am again brought back to the question: How can Developers fix healing? It doesn't scale with gear and encounter difficulty properly. At least for DPS, if you outgear the place, you get it done faster.

This is a question I'm still pondering, but I leave this for you readers to think about as well. I'm thinking some creative solutions lie in the D&D world. I'd love to read some creative thoughts on how to address this problem. Or do you see no problem at all? Tell me all about it by clicking that little comment button down below XD

I generally detest blogging about… well, blogging. It’s like making drama about drama. A topic, squared, does not necessarily increase the amount of interest on that topic. Meta-blogging is really not my thing.

Be that as it may, I am currently having a previously only internal debate regarding the direction of this site. No, I’m not going to stop writing it anytime soon. I have 12 drafts in my blogger queue, 7 drafts sitting on ScribeFire, and 18 emails I have sent to myself with other column topics I’m working on. And let’s not forget the giant Healer Survey data analysis that glares at me angrily every time I sit down to my macbook with the intention of running dailies. This brain, it’s like a fountain I tell you. A FOUNTAIN OF SPLENDOR. There’s no risk of drying up anytime soon.

But… what is the purpose of Miss Medicina? If I had a mission statement, what exactly would it say?

When I originally began to write this (with lots of encouragement from Fulguralis and Fuubaar), my premise was simple - a blog about healing philosophy. Not traditional theorycrafting, because math is like, hard, but a different kind of theorycrafting that comes from finding overarching general patterns amongst how healers heal, how they play, and the nuances of healing style. I planned to start with healing as a Priest, expand into Holy Healing (by progressing into Holy Paladin information), and then slowly begin integrating Nature Healing with Druids and Shammies. First and foremost, I wanted to write a blog that would be a resource for new healers. I wanted to help them cover the gap between “l2play n00b” and an Ensidia application.

The progression never happened. It’s not because I don’t love resto shammies (why does Word keep trying to change this to shimmies?) and druids, but more because I struggled with my Paladin, and then kept going back to my lovable, huggable, femdwarf priest. There are plenty of people who are altoholics, who simply love playing lots of different classes. I, however, judge everything against my Priest. I love everything about the Priest class. I love my class so much that when I play OTHER games I always pick the priestliest character class I can find (such as my 4e cleric). When I try to level a new alt, I never get past the early teens… unless it’s another priest. Yes, that’s right. Arguably the most detested class to level, and it’s the only class I’m interested in leveling. That having been said, I certainly enjoy reading about other healing classes.

So therefore, as it happens, I have posted a lot more information specific to Priests – yet even here I’ve made a distinction. I’ve completely ignored that shadowy spec, because I wanted to restrict my focus to healing (hello… Medicina?). So now I’m in something of a conundrum that really grates on my type A – I-like-things-in-neat-little-categories brain. If I’m going to focus on priests, shouldn’t I include more shadow priest discussion? If I’m going to focus on healers, shouldn’t I expand to more than just Priests?

This is one of those things that makes Priests a somewhat tricky class about whom to write. Of the four healing classes, you have two full blown hybrids that can cover every role (Druids and Paladins), one class that has 2 DPS trees and 1 healing tree (Shaman) and then you’ve got Priests, with 2 Healing specs, and 1 dps spec. I don’t read a large number of Shaman blogs, but of the ones I have seen, there seems to be some struggle with this as well. For priests, most of the time you find people either writing solely about the Healing Priest (Holy & Disc), or the Damage Priest (Shadow), and ne’er the twain shall meet.

Before dual spec, it seemed that we Priests had something of a standoff. Many who were healers were adamantly opposed to Shadow, and many more Shadow Priests were sick of being asked to heal. The lines have blurred a bit with the release of Dual Speccing. Many of us who were once solely healers picked up a Shadow spec for the purposes of grinding dailies, or other every day tasks.

Dual Spec has allowed me to play around with shadow in ways I never had before. I have a lot of questions, and a lot of topics I could write about shadow priesting, especially as I have recently begun raiding as shadow (the irony is that these are alt runs – everyone else brings an alt, and here I am, just running a different spec on the same toon). But is this really the place for it? Can Miss Medicina bear the weight of so little focus?

Ideally what I would prefer is a place to regularly write about Priests specifically (all different manifestations), and another place for Healing Philosophy in general. Until such an opportunity presents itself and is settled, however, Miss Medicina remains as it has been – a healer’s blog, with a special interest in Priests of the non-shadow variety. If, however, I were to have a weekly post specific to Shadow Priests, would it merely annoy my readership?

What a heavy Friday topic. I am having an identity crisis, it appears. Which role am I first? The Healer or the Priest?

I'm so excited! My first email request for aid! It was like a little christmas gift in my inbox, and I giddily unwrapped it, squealing the whole time.

Yes, yes, I'm a dork, shut it.

So! My first emailed question was from a holy priest who was looking for help with some problems she found herself having with mana regen. As someone a bit new to the whole raid healing thing, she sent me an email with the following request.

"I don't do much raiding, I'm mostly healing five-mans, but I decided to really go for it and respec for raid healing. I followed your suggested build but I have one huge problem: my MP5 is only 348 during a fight. I don't think my gear is terrible, but I enter ToC-10 and I find myself popping my mana pet before the impaler is down. Heck, even in a heroic I see my bar get hit hard (albeit I mostly see this with under-DPSing pugs). "

(For privacy reasons, I'm not revealing her name, but she reads this blog, so if she wants to step up and say hi in the comments, she's welcome to do so /wave!)

I took a look at her gear and her stats, and the 348 number seemed to come from in "while casting" mana regen, unbuffed. I let her know that there was some tweaking she could do with her gems and replace some items with a bit more crit and less haste, but aside from that, it didn't look like gear was the real problem here. 348 while casting is similar to what I have, unbuffed.

I wanted to pass along the following considerations I emailed to her, because I think a lot of Holy Priests struggle with mana regen in the beginning of their raiding career. People can look at your gear and stats and spec, and tell you to pile on more spirit or intellect, but that's not always the problem. So if you're having mana regen problems as a Holy Priest, and you can't find anything really wrong with your gear, consider the following:

• What sort of buffs are you running with? In a ten man scenario, it can be a lot trickier to get the right raid balance that will give you all the mana regen buffs you would ideally like to have. Because of this, I usually have far more mana problems in a 10 man than in a 25 man. In 10 mans, i have the flask of pure mojo and spicy fried herring for personal mana regen, but I also depend quite a bit on getting a blessing of wisdom or mana spring totem in there somewhere, and always, ALWAYS Replenishment (frost mage, shadow priest, ret pally, destro lock, or survival hunter). The raid makeup may be something that you have absolutely no control over, but take a look at what you've got in your raid mix. If you're running with a pretty steady group, and your buffs will likely always be the same, then you can make adjustments to your gems, enchants, and talents accordingly.

• What are the other healers doing? What is the healing makeup? are you running 2 healers or 3? If you're running with just 2, then you probably will run into more mana problems. If you are running with a pally, are you wasting your mana having to help on the tank too much? If there's a druid, are you spending a lot of mana trying to heal up targets that are hotted when you don't need to? I'm not fond of pointing fingers at other healers when there's a problem, but healing should be a team - if one person is running out of mana, then it's a good idea to talk about it with the other healers to see what changes can be made.

• What is your casting style? I can throw in a couple of pointers on mistakes I've made in the past that left me mana starved, and you can check to see if you are doing any of the following things.

1. Overusing Serendipity stacks - Everytime I see 3x Serendipity, i desperately want to use it properly. But the truth is, if you do this in a ten man you are going to go OOM pretty quick. Dont feel like you have to use it just because it's there. Use a Circle of Healing if you can, because it's cheaper and pretty powerful. You shouldn't need to use Greater Heal at all if you're on raid heals (except for Incinerate Flesh), especially if there's a third healer.


2. Are you catching all your surge of light procs? Unlike Serendipity, the proc for SoL is much shorter, so you have to be sure to use it faster - and you definitely want to use it since it's free! If you find that you're missing a lot of the procs, pick up an add-on like SurgeTrack.


3. Are you bubbling too much? For disc, you can never bubble too much, but for holy, our bubbles arent that great, and theyre kinda expensive too. In a 10 man, the only person I ever "pre-bubble" is the tank when he's pulling, and a feisty mage here and there - if you try to bubble too much, you will end up OOM.


4. How are your overheals? If you run with a druid, check their overheals as well with recount, because often the overheals credited to a druid are actually due to another healer healing over their hots. This is inevitable, and to a certain extent completely acceptable - but if someone has a HoT on them, and they are unlikely to be in any immediate damage, let the HoT do its job. Make sure if you are running with a tree that you have an addon that tracks who has HoTs on them. If you aren't running with druids, are you and another healer often going for the same target? There are addons that will let you know who the other healers are healing (Healbot will do this if multiple people use it), but sometimes you just need to watch them, or have better assignments, or communicate more, that sort of thing.
   

She responded to my email to give me a little update about how things are going, and she mentioned something that I wanted to address as well... but this post has already gone on long enough, so I'll save it for another day ;)

In true Miss Medicina form, I started writing my piece on reflex and rotation yesterday, and it just got way too TLDR, so I tried to split it up a bit. This chunk seemed the easiest to divide from yesterday's post.

The Theorycrafting Behind it All

I've posted before about the problems with theorycrafting, and I wanted to bring it up in regards to my continuing topic of reflex and rotation, because all my pondering on the difference between these two has affected how I see theorycrafting for healers.

Of course theorycrafting is useful, but how you use it, or perhaps when you utilize it differs slightly between the rotational and the reflex healer.

Much of the theorycrafting used to prepare your character takes place outside of a raid setting - how you choose your talents, the enchants, gems, and gear you choose, the consumables you will bring to a raid. It comes down to min-maxing your gear, and choosing your talents based on what you expect you will use most during a raid. Or, perhaps you choose the talents you think are best, and intend to train yourself to use the proper spell combinations that will benefit. Either way, once you're actually in the raid, that is where your efforts come to fruition.

If you are working on a rotation, you are working the theory in as you cast... because your rotation is based on maximizing your potential. Perhaps you know the exact moment when it is best to pop your cooldowns, knowing when they will be available again. You will make the choices needed to keep the target alive while simultaneously maintaining Grace, or building stacks of Serendipity.

But when you are a reflex healer, you need to put more preparation into the theorycrafting before the raid, and the best thing you can do to improve your healing skills are to develop the proper habits. Trigger fingers need training! When you are responding to unpredictable damage, or popping a reflexive reaction to something, you may not have the time to calculate in your head what is the best spell for you to use to maximize output while minimizing mana usage. My use of Circle of Healing on one target who takes damage? Perfect example. I don't think about how wasteful it is - I respond. I have developed a bad habit, and trained my trigger finger that way.

This is not to say that Rotational healers do not have to train their fingers, or make snap decisions. Nor do I mean to suggest that Reflex healers do not come into a raid with an expectation of what spells and cooldowns will work best in combination. All healing classes have a combination of both Rotation and Reflex based methods in order to allow all of them to be effective as the sole healer in a 5 man scenario. At end game, however, each class begins to display more strength in one realm or the other.

For instance, I've used Pallies as an example of rotational healing... but all those "Hand of..." tools are indicators of different methods of "emergency response", if you will. If all you ever consider is the best rotation for healing single or dual targets, you won't know what your "extra appendages" are for (you know, like me).

If the Holy Priestess does not work some rotation into her raid healing, and intends to respond purely by reflex, then she will not be adequately prepared when massive raid damage hits everyone. If she has not built up her stacks of Serendipity, if she's already blown her Divine Hymn cooldown, then she's left scrambling to top people off before they find themselves dangling limply and lifeless from Kologarn's fists, because a Circle of Healing may not be enough, and the cast time on a non-hasted Prayer of Healing is painful.

***

Thanks for humoring me in one of my biggest rambling "philosophy of healing" segments ;) If you ever needed proof that I love theorycrafting (perhaps sans numbers), this was for you!