Merry Christmas!
Hope Santa was good to you. My mother told me long ago that Santa only comes to people who believe in him, so since I believe in any man that delivers…
Yes I have been quite on the blog front, but I’m not down and out. Just needed to find the meaning of fun again, which is kind of funny considering Wow is a game.
I was trying to pin point the reason for my malady, and I have come to the conclusion that I am having healing issues. I do not like healing holy at the moment.
Dislike. Detest. Hate. Abhor.
It’s been ok when I know the tank, but pug tanks, pug dps – its a pain. Some we will be fine on and we will even complete the dungeon, others multi wipes on the 1st boss.
It is against the core of a healers mindset to let people stay at half health. Must fill up health bar!
It has been a great source of frustration for me, and I can never tell when its my fault, or someone elses.
Eg if the tank dies in Grim Batol because the dps didn’t kill / cc the Malignant trog then its my fault for not healing the tank through the damage, because otherwise the rest of the party would need to know the consequences of that trogg causing a damage taken increase to the tank. A tank just sees his health going down. The Dps just sees the tank dieing and them getting agro. It’s quite easily the healers fault.
“I hope your better than the last priest” says one group.
” the two druid healers before you sucked” said another
I got into a cat fight with a dps when I suggested that ” Maybe the party was taking too much damage for the healers to heal” the freshly dinged and cheating to 329 ilevel dps told me to ” get out of his instance” for suggesting he was bad. it got a little heated and ” I told him to die in a fire.. oh wait he already was.. ” my fault for baiting, but I felt obliged to defend the healers that had come before me and suffered. It was funny cause that dps then made an alt on my server – to wait…. apologize – other people I know get people making alts on their servers to troll them or say nasty things. I get an apology.
I can’t see how a healer in this expansion could be lazy. Sure we make mistakes, or bad choices. I shouldnt have tried to cast a 2.7 sec heal when I have a 1.3 flash but panic healing is gonna run me oom.
The majority of my successes have been with friends – where I get to dps 🙂 I’m finally in better gear – with much lesser mana issues , and just really need the rep pieces now. I’m not touching the crafted pieces because I don’t believe that they are a significant upgrade, and in some cases of lesser stats then other pieces available, and wtf is with the +10 mastery stat gem socket bonus on the crafted dps belt, and where are the healing crafted legs. Not on the vendor.
I had planned on healing more in Cata – but I think my offspec shall be Shadow Pvp untill I overgear the mana issues for the heroic content.
I get the choosing the right spell for the damage being taken. I get choosing to prioritize targets I get the need to balance cool downs like Chakras and serendipity, – and balancing using mana pots and whatnot but this mana business. Why make the healers job even more stressful
Cata was supposed to wake dps up a little, that you can’t just faceroll the content and frack up because the healer or tank will save you, it hasn’t woken them up, it’s just shifted the blame entirely on the healer. We can’t output enough heals to cover up bad.
Of course it’s different with people you know. The people I run with have a no pug policy – they get people they know – heroics are done with everyone on vent.
Why do I still pug? – I want the freedom to run stuff when I want to. I like pugs, you learn new strats, get lessons in patience, and understanding, get challenged in different ways, but it’s getting bad trying to run them. I don’t have the heart anymore.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
The “best” part about not keeping people at full health is that when the fight is over, they didn’t get the memo that THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO EAT. If I didn’t have enough mana to heal you during the fight, bud, I’m sure as hell not healing you NOW. I’m drinking. You eat.
“what… no heal?” yep. rezing and buffing is a two drink process at the moment
I agree with you. I got kicked once because i couldn’t keep a tank in ICC gear up… I play as disco because i don’t want Blizzard to take away my fun. But its almost like going to hell every time i pug.
“Blame Game” is what people play not world of warcraft. Maybe i should play my Shadow offspecc more? We will just have hang in there and have a stress-ball or two beside the keyboard..
Btw I love your blog ❤
ilevel 200 trinkets on a tank on normals 😦 not even questing trinkets, and all my stress balls are at work 😦
Last time I did any healing was the day LK(10)hc fell. And did it feel good!!! Both the kill and the idea that I could stop playing what I didn’t want to.
I did have fun after mastering that particular fight. But I quit the same day and now I endure the 30 mins queues and to be honest I don’t mind at all. Do the dailies, level up Archaelogy, go do 1-2 runs for the Winterspring Tiger. Or just chatting with the guildies. Eventually I doi get my run and I have fun: I run away from fires, I MC the targets I want (nobody seems accostumed to MC yet) and rock the meters and occasionally I sufer from the the PugFail syndrome, but even there I try to have fun. I won’t go healing when I don’t want to. Maybe you should do the same. 😉
40-46 min ques for me 😦 – Ive often forgotten I’ve been in a que as I go about my dailys/whatnot and seen the instance pop.
I’m a PuG DPSer. I have never, and will never say anything to a healer other than “thanks”. I’ve tried healing. It’s damn hard and the crap you get is unbelievable.
Every healer/tank blog on the planet has talked about how hard healing is in Cata, and that Bliz meant it that way.
How can anyone have missed that?
Kudos for that player who apologized. Just keep “ignoring” the idiots and you’ll eventually just get the normal players who appreciate healers.
It’s funny, when I’m in a fight and I see my health bar is low, I don’t think “where’s the healer?”, I think “where’s my health pot?”, or “Fire! Owee hot!”
need more loc rocks! There have been some good runs. so I don’t think its alll me, and half the dungeons i’m entering are in progress because they lost /kicked a healer already so its certainly a common problem.
I get less heat while pugging as a healer when my character:
– is female
– wears a crimson hat
– compliments the high defense and HP of tanks and DPS
– says “sorry” for little errors, like healing too closely
– doesn’t hesitate to take off her pants/robe when other characters are checking her gear “You starin’ at my ass?”
lol – im not sure I could stop myself from laughing telling them what big hp they have
hehehe
At the risk of jinxing myself, I’ve only encountered one stuck on stupid tank. But honestly, I also feel like I outgear a lot of the heroics as is. And I do notice the difference between when I first started doing them and doing them.
I’d also say, cheat a little. Ghostly Elixirs either should be stupid-cheap or it should be stupid-cheap to make them, but the 225 spirit is super-worth it. Not sure off the top of my head what race your priest is, but Shadowmeld is a Elune-sent especially coupled with Fade; I rarely die.
Lastly, maybe you should try Discipline, which has a cheap “panic” heal in Penance and also Power Word: Shield; it also has 1 tank cooldown, 2 tank/raid cooldowns and Power Infusion for yourself. Quick instant shields of 10k are also pretty win, and so is using Borrowed Time to do a whole mass of stuff, like quicker dispels and what not.
Perhaps though, maybe you should seek/question your holy play-style. That said, I think Chakra is stupid and so is Surge of Light; thank god the latter is being fixed in an upcoming patch. I really have no need nor time to cast Heal. If I could possibly use Heal on a target, I might as well just wait around and use Greater Heal. If the target needs healing and I know the target might need healing later, I can use Renew. Thus, having a Chakra-state that requires Heal to activate and Surge of Light only proccing from Heal is incredibly dumb. Thankfully, Discipline does not have these problems.
For what it’s worth, Discipline has the highest single-target HPS in the game, higher than that of a Holy Paladin. And that is w/o counting Absorbs (from either class).
Man, I said lastly a while ago; but… Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box either. If you’re having mana issues as Holy, try using a Guardian Spirit on the tank to buy time to channel Hymn of Hope; the tank won’t die. As both specs, I also often use Leap of Faith as another tank CD and I have saved several tanks from death by using it. If you’re low on mana, a clutch Leap of Faith can pull the tank out before a boss kills a tank.
P.S. Discipline is probably better aligned with Shadow than vice-versa. Holy Priests have the highest Spirit-coefficient in the game, almost 2x better than any other spec; however Discipline Priests get good returns on Intellect, Crit and Mastery, which aligns them closer to Shadow Priests.
ive been trying to ask / perve / on the healers we have been running with, and our main one is a disc priest – and he seems to be doing ok. I have tried a few specs/styles but most mana efficient seems to be using that heal, and the heal chakra, Been good with binding heal, and glyphed prayer of healing, I tried with lightwell, and without it – and have found no joy 😦 I shall try disc and run some normals and see how I go – otherwise I shall hang up my spirit hat and robe.
p.p.s I also changed my email addy in my comment just for you, this one is aligned to my WoW account =p
mmm what would I do with an email addy?
You tell me! The possibilities are endless.
For Discipline, you should just macro in your Inner Focus to both Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing; also don’t bother using Heal. There’s never a time to use Heal as Discipline.
/cast Inner Focus
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/cast Greater Heal
Oh yeah, and Inner Will stacks additively with Mental Agility, 25% cheaper instant casts.
Going with an LFD pug is asking for trouble. It’s like going into the biker’s bar in string bikini. Just don’t!
Why? The only problem I have encountered in PuGs so far is people giving up. (I guess it’s the “lets lose quickly” ones from BGs.) On the other hand, maybe their hasty quit saves me from suffering a horrible person in my party (for example, them).
Maybe the experience is different for DPS, I am quite surprised with the ramp up of difficulty, they managed to include a DPS race in quite a lot of bosses, they still have to avoid fires and on top of that, they have to suffer through 1-hour queues according to what many people say.
I had the same problems you did when I first started healing heroics. I was never so frustrated playing WoW as I was in Grim Batol on the last boss when we wiped twice at 2% because I was OOM. I’m a holy paladin and was using every trick I had to get mana back throughout the 6 1/2 minute fight. I gave up in frustration after 6 attempts. The guild group I was running with were pretty good, so the problem was me and I knew it.
But that fight motivated me to enchant my ilvl 333 gear (Was planning to wait for ilvl 346 heroic loot) and buy the rare gems instead of the uncommon ones I had socketed. You’d be amazed the kind of difference that alone makes to a slightly undergeared healer. I’ve started telling my guildies this as well and for a couple that I run with regularly I even bought their enchants for them to make my life easier.
I also made a macro that I used when I first started running Cata dungeons after I was kicked from a group because of a stupid tank: “Welcome to Cataclysm Ladies and Gents, where Crowd Control is necessary even in normal dungeons. If your tanks run into packs of mobs with no thought to CC and die in 5 seconds to massive damage, the fault is NOT your healer’s, so don’t blame them.”
Oh and if you are going to PUG heroics you can’t be slow to kick the idiots from your group. If they refuse to learn how to handle the fight mechanics so we can be successful they can’t waste my time. I’m generally more lenient on boss fights with this than trash and also more lenient if it is a person’s first time in a dungeon, but I almost never bothered to kick people from heroics in Wrath and I’ve done it a few times in the last two weeks.
I seriously recommend you to gather your groups manually. It takes time, but you can usually go for several instances in a row and check people’s armory before accepting them. You’ll also will have the opportunity to go overboard with crowd control classes which makes healing so much easier. And, if you like this approach to efficiency, you can even turn down all cloth DPS classes, claiming all cloth gear to yourself!
I havent tried healing yet – only shadow but im having a blast helping where i can on trash. Got glyphed scream and specced into psychic horror and silence. Also popping both hymms often to help out healers when things get rough on boss fights.
feels nice to bring some utility and to actually be using all my spells.
But you’re right about pugs – I’ll stick to guild runs only ty!
people are dumb, if im dps and taking enough damage to kill me its because im doing something wrong – not because the healer isnt healing me enough lol.
You’ve articulated my frustrations beautifully. Unfortunately, I’ve stopped playing because I found the game more stressful than fun. I love healing, my toons, and my guild, but after so much frustration and shifting of blame to the healer (even if not by Blizz design), I couldn’t do it anymore. As you’ve stated before, “I don’t have the heart anymore”.