Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Healing and Rezzing the Dead

I have been healing a lot of dungeons on Brieonna, my Holy/Shadow Priest, in the past few weeks. Most have been good but some have been really bad. Every once in awhile you will get a tank that is just not geared enough, can't hold aggro, and takes massive damage constantly. Those are a little more of a challenge than a tank that is correctly geared, but not impossible.

If a tank is taking massive damage and I have to spam greater heals on him, that is ok, as long as he can hold aggro. When the tank is taking massive damage and can't hold aggro, then the rest of the group takes massive damage as well (basically a group of tanks, some wearing cloth) I have to spam heal the entire group throughout every battle and that gets old fast.

When fully buffed my healer has around 121,000 health and 80,000 mana. I always get a little nervous when the tank has less buffed HP than I do. That is usually a sign they are not very well geared. As I have only been healing normal dungeons while I gear, I come across a lot of tanks that have less HP, fully buffed, than I do. I have found that skill will play a big part in what happens from there on out. I had a tank with 98k buffed HP that was easier to heal than one I had earlier with 147k HP. It really depends on how well they can play their toon, if they know how to use their CD's and when.

As I have gone about as far as I can with normal dungeon drops, Justice Point gear and rep gear I am now looking towards healing heroic's. I still have 2 more JP pieces to get for my Shadow set then I will have gone as far as I can with JP and I will need to start collecting Valor Points. I healed one heroic so far and that was Stonecore. It was brutal but we made it through. It was not only the first time I ever healed SC, it was the first time I ever did it on heroic. I queued into it by mistake.

The thing I am working on now is managing my mana better. A lot of healers over heal. I was one of them and it makes for OoM (Out of Mana) pretty quick. Currently I am using my HoT's (Heal over Time) a lot more and letting the tank get down to around 75% before I throw a regular heal (Greater Heal or Flash Heal) on him. I went from almost out of mana on trash fights in a lot of dungeons to coming out of it with 80% or more mana left. As I have high regen I am usually 100% before the next trash fight. Usually the tank will need no more than a HoT to get him through most fights. The better tanks that is, ones that are actually geared for the role they are playing.

I will be starting heroics this week, that is exciting and scary at the same time. I always have Shadow to fall back on if the healing doesn't work out lol.