Adventures of a Healing Priest

There’s one subject that comes up time and time again no matter how often it’s covered, so I’ll cover it now once and for all. That subject is UIs. I get asked about the add-ons that I use every day, but really, what I use shouldn’t be of concern. What is however important to know are the key-parts to make a healer UI efficient and good.

The particular add-ons you choose to do the job are completely up to you.

First of all, and most importantly, you want raid frames. Raid frames represent at the very least the health bar of every single raid member in a compact and easy-to-see format. While tanks and even DPS probably still want to keep raid frames somewhere on their screen to have a general overview of how the raid is doing, they’re absolutely essential to a healer. You want your raid frames to occupy a central space in your UI, but make sure they’re not obstructing your character in any way.

below your character’s feet or off to the side a little are ideal spots to place your raid frames. Healers most commonly use Grid, Vuhdo or Healbot for raid frames. Less commonly used because they’re not specially directed at healers and harder to setup are Pitbull and Xperl.

You also want to set up your raid frames to very visibly show common raid instance debuffs, such as Lord Marrowgar’s Bone Spikes, so you can immediately react to people taking damage.

Also fairly important, at least in a raiding environment, is a boss mod. Most commonly used are BigWigs or Deadly Boss Mods. Those alert you of boss abilities that are important to keep track of and especially important when you’re concentrated on other things – such as raid frames. While this is not an absolute necessity if you’re quick on your toes, most raiding guilds will require you to have boss mods.

Along with that, you might want to choose to deviate from the default interface when it comes to Player-, Target- and Focus frames to increase the visibility of important health and cast bars. I personally like having the boss we’re fighting to be set as my focus, so I can observe what ability the boss in question is casting and react to it quicker. Pitbull and Xperl commonly get that job done – Pitbull is harder to customize but provides a lot more options, and Xperl is simpler to use but plain.

Some people (like me) like to adjust their cast bars and put them all over their screen in more convenient positions than the default UI allows you to. This is in no way necessary, but does allow you to open up more space in your interface. There are a lot of good bar mods out there. Most commonly used I hear of Bartender and Dominos.

Lastly, it’s very useful to keep track of your own procs and cooldown timers. Various add-ons and dot-timers do this, but my favorites are PowerAuras and ForteXorcist. PowerAuras lets you create your own icons for any buff, debuff, proc or duration that you want to measure, so if you want to track anything without actually moving your eye from your raid frames, PowerAuras would be a good choice. ForteXorcist automatically tracks all your cooldown and buff-timers and aligns them on a simple bar for your convenience. This is obviously much simpler to use but provides less customization. Both add-ons do work well in conjunction and as mentioned, others get the job done as well, I just have no personal experience with them.

More or less optional add-ons for healers are damage/healing meters and threat meters, those are more important for DPS but do provide interesting statistics and info if you find room in your UI for them. Most commonly used are Recount and Skada for damage meters and Omen as threat meter.

Another very useful to have but by no means essential add-on is RatingBuster. This’ll give you additional info on every piece of gear in the game based on your current gear and talents, so you can see at a glance if an item drop is actually going to be a decent upgrade for you or not. Saves you a lot of math and manual comparison and minimizes incidents where you take a piece of gear and then realize it really was a sidegrade at best.

Those are the very basic add-ons that help you heal better and in my personal view enhance your game experience, but as mentioned before, this boils down to personal style and needs. If you feel one of these helpers is completely superfluous for you, don’t bother using it of course. You want to try to keep your UI as clean and uncluttered as possible while still having it provide essential information, else you’re just hindering your own gameplay.

And no matter what else you decide to use – since you’re going to be staring at your raid frames a good bit, make sure that they’re in a spot that at the same time lets you observe your own feet so you minimize standing in bad things on the ground.

And, also, to cover this once and for all, here’s a complete list of all the add-ons I use in alphabetical order.

BigWigs
ButtonFacade
ClearFont2
Dominos
ForteXorcist
Grid
GridStatusRaidDebuff
KGPanels
Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text
Outfitter
Pitbull
PowerAuras
Prat
Quartz
RatingBuster
Satrina’s Buff Frames
SexyMap
Shared Media
Skada
TidyPlates
TipTac
TitanPanel
XLoot

My UI is covered in-depth in TankSpot.com’s UI section and is available for download on WoWinterface.com, all it takes is a google search. And, lastly, if you have a question addressed at me that are not UI-related, I’m most likely to see it & reply on Twitter.

I’ve put off making this post way too long, so I hope it won’t end up being too long.

I’ve been a priest since early BC and have always been in love with the healing versatility of the class. We’ve lost some of that during Wrath mainly due to the elimination of downranking, but even though I still miss it terribly, the class is still plenty of fun without it.

I do like that with the changes made to disc, we get a completely new style of healing made available to us and it’s come a long way since the start of Wrath.

Let me start out with what I currently like and dislike about both specs. More often than not I play a holy priest and not a disc priest, but it’s an enjoyable change every once in a while and very useful on certain encounters.

What I like about Disc:
1.) Utility. It’s not exactly on par with a druid’s utility provided by Innervate, Battle Res and Revitalize, but nonetheless Rapture, PI, PS and Renewed Hope provide utility and make having a disc priest in the raid desirable.

2.) Shields. I like the idea of ‘overshields’ – giving people more health than they actually have and in turn lowering the chance of burst damage deaths. The fact that it’s an instant cast makes it an amazing “oh shit” button.

3.) Prayer of Mending. I’ve loved this spell since I first used it and it’s one of the things that made playing a priest attractive to me.

4.) Rapture as mana management ability. To be a good disc priest, you want to make the most of Rapture, which means you want to put shields on people that are actually going to take damage instead of mindlessly spamming it. On top of the larger mana pool – which means better Replenishment – Rapture aids mana management which makes it easier for Disc priests to itemize for throughput.

5.) Borrowed Time. What Serendipity is for Holy, Borrowed Time is for Disc, except even better. Prayer of Healing would find no use in Disc if it wasn’t for this little talent, so I love it a lot.

What I dislike about Disc:

1.) Penance. Yes, I actually don’t really like Penance. It’s a great spell in theory and it does help provide a single target burst on targets that are low, but since it’s a channeled spell it seems to always cast with a slight delay. Maybe it’s just me, who knows, but that’s one of the singlemost annoying things about Penance. I completely dislike its 10-second base cooldown timer as well.

2.) Weak non-absorb healing throughput/tank healing flash heal spam. The disc tree does not present very many good throughput talents for spells other than PW:S, which means single target (non-absorb) heals are weak compared to holy or other class’s single target heals. In fights where we can just spam PW:S we won’t really notice this of course, but fights where we’re forced to single target heal or strictly tank heal, we lack behind everyone else.

3.) Multiple disc priests in a raid will stand in each other’s way more often than not. It’s of course still possible to bring 2 disc priests to a raid… but the weakened soul mechanic does prevent multiple disc priests from being as effective as they would be on their own. You don’t run into that problem when you bring two healers of any other class/spec.

4.) Tier set bonuses. Why insist on making them work for holy AND disc at the same time? They are completely different healing styles and should have different tier gear/set bonuses to better complement each spec.

What I like about Holy:
1.) Versatility. What made me fall in love with the class and stick with it. I love my gigantic tool box.

2.) PoM. Even more so than as disc thanks to the additional throughput provided by the holy tree. Main healing tool on any heavy AoE fight and  used on cooldown.

3.) CoH. I’ve loved this little gem since tier 5 and even though it’s changed a lot, it’s still worth keeping it off cooldown in any AoE fight. I like that it takes some thought to figure out the best person to cast it on to yield the best results.

4.) Serendipity/PoH. In progression raiding – whenever the raid does not yet outgear an encounter – PoH shines and Serendipity keeps it from being too slow and clunky, although I’m not sure that’s really the best way to handle it. But until I come up with some omgamazing idea to improve the system, I’m just gonna stick to “I like it”.

5.) Talent choices. Disc has a cookie cutter build, holy can play around with talents a little. That also means you’re forced into making choices – do you want the throughput from Blessed Resilience/Test of Faith or do you want the utility from Body and Soul or are you a Renew Fan and want to spec 3/3 Emp. Renew? Making choices based around your playstyle and raiding content is something I like about the holy tree.

6.) Guardian Spirit. Especially in progression raiding. I’ve caught myself fairly often (since hard modes have been released) wondering if going disc for this or that encounter is worth it vs. giving up Guardian Spirit. Big staple for new encounters.

What I dislike about Holy:

1.) Lack of utility. We have Guardian Spirit and that’s it – Body and Soul if you want to get technical, but nothing that even touches Battle Res, Innervate, Bloodlust/Heroism, Rapture/Revitalize, Beacon, Blessings, Mana Tide…

2.) Greater Heal. It’s not actually a bad spell, but I don’t have 13 talent points leftover that are needed to make it useful. I would however love to get that part of my versatility back that I lost when downranking was wiped out. Nowadays, if I want to tank heal, I go disc. I would like to be able to be an effective tank healer as holy as well, but right now, that’s just not feasible.

3.) Lightwell. People are so centered on their main tasks and – if you’re lucky – not standing in stuff that the thought of watching their own health and running over to click something to heal themselves is not something that would enter most people’s heads. No matter how much you want to bash it through their skulls, I don’t think Lightwell is a concept that’ll catch on, ever. I do like the idea, but right now it seems little more than a neglected little ball of tears because hardly anyone specs it.

4.) Again, tier set bonuses. The -only- useful set bonuses this expansion have been 2 piece tier 7 & 9. I look at druid set bonuses and consistently throughout every tier they get bonuses that benefit their main healing spells – Rejuvenation and Wild Growth. I look at Holy set bonuses and see filler spells – Flash Heal, Renew, Prayer of Healing, Greater Heal. I would like to see some inventive set bonuses benefitting PoM and CoH, or in disc’s case PW:S and Penance.

Those are my main complaints with the priest class as it is right now. Now what some people have mentioned – mana issues – I cannot agree with. Of course you’re gonna have mana issues if you do progression content and gem for all haste. Mana management depends on your play- and itemization-style. You CAN conserve mana on any given fight and you can still do very well on meters. You don’t have to have 1300 haste to be a viable holy priest. If you have mana issues, take a good look at your gear and playstyle and make adjustments. Other classes may have an easier time being mana efficient (cough druids), but that doesn’t mean we have to run oom.

For Blood Princes, we typically use a healing setup of 6 healers consisting of 1 holy paladin, 1 shaman, 2 trees, 1 disc and 1 holy priest. Hots are very useful in this encounter since at times everybody will be so spread out that it’ll be almost impossible for you to have everyone in range unless you’re positioned in the dead center.

That’s also the reason holy priests and to a degree shamans are less efficient at this fight than druids and paladins have the potential to be. Disc priests are very useful since most of the outgoing damage is predictable and can be pre-bubbled. The raid should aim to minimize knockbacks from empowered shock vortex and kinetic bombs hitting the ground, since relocating in this fight often leads to death.

Tank damage is moderate but does require approximately two full-time tank healers. Beacon is amazing on this fight since Valanar and Taldaram tanks will be taking consistent damage.

Blood-Queen Lana’thel is a stressful healing fight. There will be significant, consistent raid damage going out at any given time. We also take 6 healers to this fight, typically 2 trees, 2 holy priests, 1 shaman and 1 holy pally. Shamans, holy priests and trees all make excellent raid healers for this, having a good mix of them is recommended. As long as you have a good bite order and your healers can keep up with the outgoing damage, this fight is not overly tough.

The toughest issue you’ll be faced with is Lana’thel’s AoE fear followed by Bloodbolt Whirl. We found a good way to deal with it is to have at least 2-3 priests in the raid – one is assigned to Divine Hymn the first Bloodbolt Whirl and another Divine Hymns on the second Bloodbolt Whirl. Also one of them fear wards the shaman in the healing group so he can time a tremor totem to pulse as soon as the fear goes off and the other one fear wards the priest that’s assigned to Divine Hymn. Any leftover fear wards should be used on trees.

Bringing a disc priest is worth it if the priest in question is good at raid healing as disc. Innervates should be reserved for healers if neccessary.

Valithria Dreamwalker turns the tables around and your healers decide the encounter while your DPS and tanks play a support role by doing add control. That doesn’t mean you should bring a ton of healers though, because the less damage your raid takes, the faster the battle will be over. That means you want to make sure to avoid any AoE damage that you don’t necessarily have to take.

We also take 6 healers to this, sometimes 7. Paladins and druids are best suited for this encounter, but don’t fret, the normal mode is not badly tuned so other classes do a good job as well. The best way to end the encounter quickly is to have your highest single HPS classes – that means any holy paladin you have, then druids since their hots tick for a long time while in portals – and if you don’t have a lot of either of those, shamans or priests – take a portal every time they spawn and to never let their stacks fall off. 2 healers should remain outside the portals to take care of raid damage.

Whenever you pick up an orb, the timer on your buff gets reset to 35 seconds left, so make sure to pick up one last orb right before you leave the emerald dream and enter another portal as soon as the next wave spawns. That way, your stacks should never fall off and you’ll quickly stack them to more than 30. At that point, you should have at least 3-4 healers that have a 300% increased healing buff or more which should end the encounter very quickly.

Sindragosa is another constant raid damage fight, but it also packs significant tank damage while at the same time you’re often forced to regulate your casting frequency thanks to Instability. Again, we typically take 6 healers – 1 tree, 2 holy priests, 2 holy paladins and a shaman. 7 healers may make this easier if you’re having issues.

Healing in phase 1 is fairly straightforward – the entire raid will be taking damage and your main tank will need constant attention, but as long as people watch their debuffs, you shouldn’t be faced with any huge damage spikes. Reserve your instant spell casts for Blistering Cold and make sure to pay special attention to the main tank while everyone repositions to their original spots.

It’s also a good idea to hot anyone that’s about to get encased in an ice tomb so they’re at full health when asphyxiation starts. There should be little to no healing at all needed during her airphases. Keep in mind that not line of sighting the ice bombs properly will kill you in heroic modes, so normal modes are a good way to practice this.

Phase 3 too is mainly about people watching their debuff and resetting their stacks, but you’re suddenly faced with line of sight issues as well. Make sure to have vent communication going on so at least 2 healers are always able to heal the tank while others go to reset their stacks. Maybe even set up a rotation so people reset their stacks on every second block. Hots and spells that aren’t affected by line of sight such as PoH are obviously very good in this phase.

Make sure to have sufficient instant casts available for tank healing on Blistering Cold. If necessary, have Guardian Spirit or Pain Suppression ready. The best time to use Emergency Abilities such as Divine Hymn and Tranquility is phase 3. Also make sure your healers are aware of any impending tank swap.

Lich King is a very varied encounter, but almost all incoming damage is predictable. Again, we take our usual 6 healers to this. 2 holy paladins, 1 tree, 1 shaman, 1 holy priest with body and soul and 1 disc priest.

The biggest source of damage in phase 1 is Infest, which has a 2 second cast time and your priests should time Prayer of Healing casts to land right after Infest goes off – same with Shaman’s Chain Heal. Infest is on a 30 second timer, so your disc priest can pre-bubble as he sees fit. Main tank damage will be consistent but not a threat in this phase, offtank damage might be spiky thanks to Shambling Horrors enraging, so make sure someone tranquilizes them immediately.

Body and Soul is very useful for the plague – put it on the person that gets plagued immediately so even slow people make it to the Shambling Horror before it gets dispelled.

Phase transitions to the ledge should be called out on vent so everyone is close to the ledge ahead of time and you avoid unnecessary damage taken. On the ledge, spread out into at least 3 camps so Pain and Suffering damage stays controllable. Raging Spirits need to be faced away from raid members.

In the third phase, you’re faced with defile which means your raid members will be more spread out when infest happens, make sure to heal up any straggler before the dot grows too big. Also, Body and Soul again is very valuable for people that get defile cast on them. It’s a 2 second cast time, so if you put it on them immediately they can run the defile to the south or north corner a good ways out of the group before it goes off.

Soul Reaper deals a ton of damage so set up a cooldown rotation ahead of time and make sure vent communication is good.

Again, make sure people are close to the ledge when the transition to phase 4 happens so no one takes excessive Remorseless Winter damage. Once you’re in phase 5, the worst part is behind you. Keep up the Soul Reaper rotation and make sure that whoever gets Harvest Soul cast on them receives enough healing to survive the channel. Also, the person that gets chosen must interrupt Soul Rip downstairs by any means.

Vile Spirits might cause some spike damage so keep an eye on your ranged raid members. Disc priests may want to pre-bubble them.

That’s about all the tips I have, so good luck in the second half of Icecrown Citadel!

I started playing WoW back in vanilla cause my boyfriend at the time tried to get me into the game. Before I’d ever played it, I dismissed it because I felt it was too comicy and bright and that I could never get involved in such a fake world. Sorry Blizzard! I was young and naive.

Still, I tried it, and made a Night Elf Druid on the Moonrunner US server. Why that class and race? Being the girl that I am, I wanted to be an elf, and I liked the versatility that a druid seemed to promise at the time. I leveled exclusively with my boyfriend, who was a human warrior, but that actually ended up taking away from the game for me. I mostly just ended up following him around healing him, instead of thinking for myself, or even reading quest descriptions. He also had a short fuse and would get pissed at the game easily.

In short, I didn’t actually learn anything about the game, the wit behind it, the lore or the mechanics and it put my boyfriend in a bad mood, so upon hitting 60, where he quit out of boredom, I was left without gold not knowing what to do – and if you remember how hard it was to make gold in vanilla, imagine how hard it was for a complete moron at the game to have any source of virtual income, so I quit as well and didn’t touch the game until a couple months after BC hit.

Real life friends had picked the game back up and asked my boyfriend and I to pick it back up as well, and after a bit of convincing, we did. I decided to handle things completely differently this time around though. For one, we started up on the horde side.

Blood elves had been released – so hooray, I could still be a skinny chick with pointy ears – I decided this time around I’d go for the “master of healing” instead of what I perceived druids to be in vanilla – “less than good at everything” and, I decided to level all by my lonesome to actually have an idea of what I’m doing.

So my priest was born but the idea of healing quickly lost appeal when I realized how tough leveling was as a squishy thing all by myself. Wands became my best friend until shadowform, and even that was painful. But I was determined to find out what it was like to reach the level cap and actually have a functional character to do endgame things with.

So after lots of virtual sweat and corpse runs and hatred for Hellfire Peninsula as well as Fel Reavers, my baby priest eventually hit 70. I had found out how to facemelt at that point and most of my real life friends had quit the game again before hitting 70, so the idea of healing took a big backseat and I started a career as shadow priest.

In Karazhan. Boy did I get lost in that place and found out in just how many ways I can kill myself with shadow word: death. But I was good at what I did – in Karazhan – so I stuck with it. Stuck with Karazhan. For months. About half a year in total, really. Yes, half a year of Karazhan. At that point I decided I’d tasted blood and wanted more, so I left my guild that was going nowhere to actually see some content.

I was actually pretty bored with shadow at that point and had leveled a warlock that quickly turned out to be equally as boring, so I was a little stuck on where to go from here, when, sometime in early Serpentshrine Cavern, my guild at the time was lacking a healer and I jumped in with my priest for Lurker.

I was terrible. But, surprisingly, I wasn’t AS terrible as I thought I would be, and I was very intrigued by healing outside of a 5 man setting. Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing quickly struck me as “if I hit those, I don’t suck as bad” buttons, so I just decided to go with it and since then, I’ve rarely gone back to DPSing in a raid setting.

Certain fights in Black Temple and Sunwell absolutely sold me on playing a holy priest and made me love and adore the class.. and also made me experiment with how to get the most out of it. Some of you may recall Gurtogg Bloodboil in Black Temple – I miss that fight. Constant party-wide damage, with Prayer of mending and a no-cooldown Circle of Healing. Holy priests were completely and absolutely overpowered for it,  and I enjoyed finding new and exciting ways to stretch my mana pool and break the healing meters.

Felmyst in Sunwell was another fight that I looked forward to every week and one that priests were invaluable for. I can’t deny I miss that – class homogenization makes raid balance easier, but being relied upon for a fight and getting to use spells that are normally buried on some faraway keybind made raiding exciting. Not to mention Sunwell’s overall difficulty, but hard modes more or less achieve the same thing.

Anyway, even in fights where I couldn’t abuse overpowered mechanics like CoH, I enjoyed and loved my class. Priests were so versatile – I had amazing raid healing as well as longevity as a tank healer thanks to downranking and a useful greater heal. Having an efficient tool for every job I was assigneed to is what made me love my priest.

Then the Wrath beta hit and I was lucky enough to get a beta key in my mail, so I decided to make the most of it and leveled to 80 in the beta as well as participated in the daily Naxx resets.

Beta as well as the early Naxx days had me quite peeved at the development since downranking was completely eliminated from the game. To make up for it, we were given a no-cooldown smart heal CoH, and the only spell rivaling it in raid healing was Wild Growth. Good, completely overpowered times. While I enjoyed that, I was peeved at the lack of versatility. It was clear I had lost my role as jack of all trades and was pushed into the role of raid healer – which I prefer to be, but boy did I miss downranking.

Then CoH got nerfed, but PoH got buffed as well as Serendipity changed, so again I was peeved but consoled although at that point it was becoming apparent what potential druids had as raid healers. Then – I think in Ulduar it was, PoH got nerfed as well and druids had 4 piece tier 8, so the gap began forming. I actually greatly enjoyed Ulduar because of its hard modes, and the challenge they brought after Naxx, but

class balance has had me pouting a couple times since then.I did not enjoy ToC, neither class-wise nor content-wise, but I also worked in retail at the time so my limited playtime prevented me from burning out on WoW.

I’ve been enjoying myself as a priest in ICC again, but this is mainly due to the encounter design. At this stage of the game, I am a clear raid healer. To tank heal, I have to respec. So while I retain the ability to fill both roles, I miss the efficiency I had of performing both tasks so easily at the end of BC.

I also dislike the widening gap between druid potential and priest potential that I’ve been trying to ignore for most the expansion.

But, at the end of the day, I still get to cast Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing, the two spells I fell in love with so long ago, and I make health bars go up while having pointy ears and ride dragons in a colorful fantasy world, so as long as those things remain, I look forward to the next hurdle and a whole new opportunity for class balance – Cataclysm.

[22:00:54] [W From] 80:Mitosis:4: Skada: Absorbs and healing for Total, 19:59:25 – 01:01:09:
[22:00:54] [W From] 80:Mitosis:4:  1. Aliena   38635675 (16.2%)
[22:00:54] [W From] 80:Mitosis:4:  2. Job   35068443 (14.7%)

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