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#1 Mar 12 2011 at 7:45 PM Rating: Decent
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Here are random thoughts on playing a Holy priest in various and sundry Cataclysm raids.

UNIVERSAL THOUGHTS
Chakra: Sanctuary is the norm for me while raiding. Area heals are something we do particularly well, and-- unlike in 5-mans where the tank takes most of the damage and you can milk Serenity for its mad efficiency-- there's lots of area damage to go around. There are particular fights and situations where Serenity is good, and appropriate, but Sanctuary is my default.

I see some priests running around with Inner Will. I generally disapprove of this. Inner Will only cuts the mana costs of some of your spells, whereas Inner Fire boosts the throughput of your whole ******** Proper cooldown use and knowledge of the fights will allow you to manage your mana effectively, and facilitate using Inner Fire over Inner Will. Therefore, we'll treat Inner Fire as the default setting, and I'll discuss specific instances where Will might be advisable.

Most sources of AoE damage in Cataclysm are *very* predictable. If you go into the battle with a plan on when you're going to use Sanctuary and Divine Hymn, you'll reap the rewards.

"Speed Bubble" = Shield with the Body and Soul talent.

Uses of Lifegrip: 94% annoying guildies during down-time/run-back, 5% pulling people away from certain death, 1% killing AFKers. Certain people die a lot to the elevator boss in Blackwing Descent. You know who they are. When you see them trying to be clever, a well-timed Lifegrip can give you a legendary reputation.

BARADIN HOLD
This fight reminds you that you have a spell called "Mass Dispel". Yay. Chakra: Sanctuary is a beast here... as predictable as the AoE is, Sanctuary can do significant healing, particularly on 25-man, while Circle and Prayer mop up. Renew and Circle make the Firestorm portion a breeze.

MAGMAW
Save Sanctuary for his raid-wide damage spell, Lava Spew; you waste it if you blow it on the random multi-player hits. Circle is better. Prayer of Mending is also good if you cast it on a tank shortly before the Spew, or on the parasite tank and his buddy. I like to use my Shadowfiend the first time his head's exposed and my Hymn of Hope the second, for the token extra damage; if you're having mana problems, a very early Fiend (say, 45-60 seconds in) could allow a second cast, depending on your spec.

OMNOTRON
On normal, a Speed Bubble can really help out the Flamethrower target. The regen from Arcanotron is quite nice. Remind people about your Lightwell. Know which bad guys to use your Hymn of Hope on. Toxotron/Arcanotron is a good combo. Wait for the poison cloud and adds to expire, then go (ideally inside the regen puddle to boot). You can plan to use Divine Hymn on one of the Magmatron AoEs, or you can save it in case someone is stupid and attacks a shield.

MALORIAK
Yeah, he's kinda easy. I like to Hymn of Hope during a blue phase, holy nova during green phase, top healing during red phase, and Divine Hymn after the AoE during the burn phase. Pretty blah.

ATRAMEDES
Conceivably, Inner Will would be a good swap during the air phase, since you're constantly on the move and using primarily Renew and Circle. Swap back to Inner Fire when Atramedes lands. The two most important things to do, though, are a) not get hit by stuff, and b) Speed Bubble your fire kiter. You know, the rogue that's running around like a madman after he hits the gong and the fire's chasing him. Position yourself within 40 yards of his kite path (harder than it sounds), watch him as he Sprints around, and hit him with a Speed Bubble immediately as Spring expires. He will love you for this.

You may think it's a good idea to use Lifegrip in a similar fashion. It's not, even if you're on his kite path. You're an eligible target for Sonar Pulse; therefore, you stand a substantial risk of yanking your kiter directly into a Sonar Pulse, or littering his kite path with Pulses/fire. This will have gruesome results. Just don't.

CHIMAERON
On 10-man, use Heal/Serenity on people when they get hit; on 25, use CoH and Renew. Why the difference? The healer/raider ratio is lower on 25-man than on 10; with more people getting hit, there's more ground to cover, and Renew/CoH is faster. (I'm assuming you have all the applicable Renew talents here.) If a bile shot comes up immediately before a Massacre, you may have to get inefficient to cover the difference. That's okay. This is not a regen-intensive fight. You just have to last until the bad guy gets low; right before you push him over, blow all the mana you've got left to get people topped off before the burn phase. Your pitiful DPS is probably not going to be the difference, so don't sweat going OOM as you push him over. However, if you *do* have mana to spare, don't forget to go Chakra: Chastise for the extra damage!

NEFARIAN
This fight is amazing! Way cooler than Cho'gal in my opinion. I start the fight in Sanctuary to quickly heal up fall damage, then swap to Serenity to keep the kiters and tanks up. Once the Electrocutes start coming it's back to Sanctuary, using Sanc, CoH, and Prayer to recover while rolling Renews on the tanks (this involves a fair amount of running).
You can use Lifegrip on people who have trouble with lava, but that's a quick fix only. If people have problems repeatedly, verbal abuse or computer upgrades seem to be the only solutions.
I tried a bunch of different ways to do the pillar healing, this seemed to work best:
1) Get a PoM on yourself as the lava rises.
2) Use CoH while swimming.
3) Drop Sanctuary on top of the pillar.
4) Flash/Renew people at critical health.
5) Drop a Lightwell, and probably another round of PoM and Circle.
6) Swap to Serenity and use Serenity, Heal, PoM and Circle to last the rest.
The initial phase of the pillar healing is incredibly mana-intensive; I tend to drop down to around 20k mana before I stabilize. That's okay! There's regen opportunities after the pillar phase is over. On 10-man you can keep Renew rolling on everyone on your pillar, using Heal and Serenity to keep it up while PoM bounces. On 25, the number of people you're healing makes this prohibitively expensive. Any inefficiency results in you going OOM. If someone gets unusually low, Renew and keep it up with Heal after mixing in a couple Heals on others, but you really have to trust your healing partner on your pillar and NOT PANIC to make it through.
Once Nefarian lands I pop my Fiend, then Hymn of Hope after the first post-landing Electrocute (if I have above-average mana I'll wait and use both after the Electrocute). After that the fight gets pretty easy for a healer.


I'll post again with Bastion thoughts later.
#2 Mar 12 2011 at 10:00 PM Rating: Good
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For Nef, try Levitating the entire raid first. Simple trick to save you from healing the fall damage.

This is assuming you have the glyph, of course. But who doesn't? It's just too much fun.
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#3 Mar 13 2011 at 3:06 AM Rating: Good
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IF vs IW, if you cast instants often enough you should use IW as the 500ish SP from IF isn't worth the mana savings. I'm Disc and even with just PW:S and PoM use makes IW worth it for the mana savings. Not even PW:S spam, mainly just for Rapture and O-Sirt moments but when you SP is well over 5k you should look at IW and probably use it as the mana saving is way more useful than the paltry amount of SP from IF.

Plus has built in run speed so can use a non-run speed boot enchant.
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#4 Mar 13 2011 at 8:14 AM Rating: Decent
I use IW too, actually.

Considering throughput isn't a big deal in current raid content but sustainability is, even minor mana savings can be a real help. As Holy, a large chunk of your ******* is instant, and this not only solidifies the benefits of IW but, in a way, weakens the potency of spell power.

I'm not saying either one is wrong/right, and I imagine that a combination of what gear your using and which particular encounter you're on need to be established before anyone can say without a doubt. I will say, though, that I'm no longer even running LOM on about half the raid targets we do now.

Once you can predict what's going to happen it's a lot easier.
#5 Mar 13 2011 at 1:16 PM Rating: Good
IW here as well, because going OOM is a bad.
#6 Mar 13 2011 at 3:33 PM Rating: Decent
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Quote:
Considering throughput isn't a big deal in current raid content but sustainability is, even minor mana savings can be a real help. As Holy, a large chunk of your ******* is instant, and this not only solidifies the benefits of IW but, in a way, weakens the potency of spell power.

The catch is that Inner Fire also improves your mana savings. More throughput means less needed heals to gain the same sustainability which equals less required mana.

I guess EJ will have the maths on this, somewhere.
#7 Mar 13 2011 at 4:56 PM Rating: Decent
I understand Moz and agree, but one cannot argue the potency of IW as a Holy Priest. There are many other heal/specs in which that buff would not be so powerful, but Renew, CoH, PoM, PW:S (for speed) are most of the main spells for a Raid heals Priest, and they are the very spells that are effected.

I don't mean to say that heal numbers aren't important, but basically you pay exponentially for more controlled HPS. Most of the time the big heals are not necessary unless you've already messed up. For instance, after much hair pulling I've learned that its relatively safe to bring up the group quite slowly in Magmaw after a Lava Spew. With this in mind, CoH -> PoHg1 -> PoHg2 -> Blanket Renew on critical targets -> PoHg1 -> PoHg2 -> CoH can allow your bonus effects to take their time and get the max potential.

This ends up conserving mana at the expense of single-target emergency HPS, but the interesting bit is that it still often nets top heals barring a Holy Paladin on Main Heal. I have yet to do 25 mans, something we're exploring right now, but I can only imagine (and I may be wrong) that the potency of these spells increases quite a bit.

This is what I meant when I said predictability nets mana conservation. Holy's MO seems to be heal once and wait a bit before healing the same target again. In this way, emergency heals especially on a single target net very little boon to the group or yourself unless, obviously, you're saving that player's life. Again, there are no encounters thus far in which that's an actual concern unless either you or they have already significantly screwed the pooch.
#8 Mar 13 2011 at 5:41 PM Rating: Good
Mozared wrote:
The catch is that Inner Fire also improves your mana savings. More throughput means less needed heals to gain the same sustainability which equals less required mana.


The question is whether in practice you would actually cast less, to the point of making up for the mana savings of IW. If there was a 100% efficiency of this transfer, then I could see the point.

Inner Fire only saves mana comparable to Inner Will if you do not increase your HPS. Would you really reach that "same level of sustainability", or would you surpass it, losing the mana savings?
#9 Mar 13 2011 at 5:43 PM Rating: Decent
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Heh. I think it's funny that, out of all the stuff I put up there, the ONE THING everyone wants to talk about is IF versus IW.

Quote:
Considering throughput isn't a big deal in current raid content but sustainability is, even minor mana savings can be a real help. As Holy, a large chunk of your ******* is instant, and this not only solidifies the benefits of IW but, in a way, weakens the potency of spell power.


I disagree with this in two ways. First, "a large chunk of your ******* is instant"... but Renew and PoM have very favorable coefficients, if memory serves. Only Circle and Serenity really validate this argument. Besides which, anything that boosts your spells boosts them twice-- first from the heal and second from Echo of Light. So those coefficients are somewhat misleading.

Someone above said that they rarely ever go LOM on most fights now. I would say that your thinking is probably distorted by fights you have on farm. If you have a fight on farm, what's a more likely cause for a wipe?
1) Someone does something stupid, ends up dieing, things snowball.
2) Healers run out of mana.
I would say probably it's #1. Sure, people being stupid can force healing inefficiencies that drive you out of mana, but that's improbable in my view and is partly addressed if you have superior throughput. Either way, I would gladly get some throughput in exchange for ending a fight at 20% mana instead of 30% mana. I find this argument applies to new content, too.

I would like to point out that I'm focusing on the particular case of Inner Fire versus Inner Will. I'm all about regen on my gear-- my favorite gem is Int/Spirit. But that's because regen on my gear is universal regen. My spirit score doesn't care if I'm casting Greater Heal, Prayer of Mending, or Mind Spike. A reduction in the mana cost of certain spells is, in the majority of cases, not worth the loss of universal throughput from Inner Fire.


Does someone wanna talk about anything else I said?
#10 Mar 13 2011 at 6:27 PM Rating: Decent
Chahdresh wrote:
Someone above said that they rarely ever go LOM on most fights now. I would say that your thinking is probably distorted by fights you have on farm.

That was me!

I don't see how my view is distorted, though. It's not like any of these fights are lolez to us yet, but many of them are 1 shots. Familiarity with a target definitely changes the perspective of the fight and does help bring the total damage intake down (on some fights anyways), but Mana is a funny thing for healers: just a few hundred more spirit, for instance, can make a fight that would drain you in 2 minutes allow you to cast indefinitely.

Some of the fights just have so much **** that the heal levels just become a drain - it doesn't matter how good your gear is by current standards, chain-casting AoEs is going to force you OOM. It just depends on the urgency of the heals. If you can lessen your level of urgency you can take a much more effective route to healing your raid. It just depends on the encounter and the situation/phase. Sometimes you can and sometimes you can't.

Chahdresh wrote:
Does someone wanna talk about anything else I said?

I like how much you use Speedbubble for actually effective logistic purposes. It is definitely one of my favorite things about Holy, too! Definitely a good idea on Blizzard's part.

Edited, Mar 13th 2011 8:28pm by tzsjynx
#11 Mar 13 2011 at 7:01 PM Rating: Good
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Mozared wrote:
Quote:
Considering throughput isn't a big deal in current raid content but sustainability is, even minor mana savings can be a real help. As Holy, a large chunk of your ******* is instant, and this not only solidifies the benefits of IW but, in a way, weakens the potency of spell power.

The catch is that Inner Fire also improves your mana savings. More throughput means less needed heals to gain the same sustainability which equals less required mana.

I guess EJ will have the maths on this, somewhere.


The throughput increase from IF is so small that it just doesn't seem worth it; IW is 10% mana saving on many strong spells vs a 7% SP boost from IF.

The inflated mana cost of PW:S is one of the primary driving factors to use IW. As the mana savings on shield are huge and cheaper shields means I can use them more and not have to worry about my mana pool as much.
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#12 Mar 14 2011 at 3:38 AM Rating: Decent
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Use IW for any fight that requires movement, which is most of them. I've chosen not to put a speed increase enchant on my boots because IW is a little better. Find it odd that anyone should disapprove! Always use IF in PvP for the armor bonus.

Magmaw: Always take a potion of concentration with me, and use that in 1st exposed head bit, then fiend + hymn together 2nd one, then never have to worry about mana.

Maloriak: Use fiend on ads in green phase.

Atramedes: agree positioning to bubble kiters is a pain in the ***** hate this fight. Didn't know it's bad to use leap of faith, so thanks for that.
#13 Mar 14 2011 at 9:38 AM Rating: Decent
Callu wrote:
Always take a potion of concentration with me


Ah yes I have stacks of these!! There are a number of fights in which these lil suckers RULE!
#14 Mar 14 2011 at 10:26 AM Rating: Good
tzsjynx wrote:
Callu wrote:
Always take a potion of concentration with me


Ah yes I have stacks of these!! There are a number of fights in which these lil suckers RULE!


I haven't done much with mana potions during Cata. Thanks for suggesting these. I've got some on me now and I think I'll make that a normal part of my supplies. They were a lot cheaper than the high end mana potions as well.
#15 Mar 14 2011 at 12:18 PM Rating: Excellent
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I don't raid, but I do use Inner Will 95% of the time. So obviously, Inner Will > Raiding and this thread is moot.

I kid; the Potion of Concentration thing is a fabulous tip, which just goes to show you that you should skim threads even if you don't know who the bosses being discussed are.
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