holy priest healing is trivial. Follow

his words, not mine.

beware to the tldr crowd.

Odd post. He goes ahead and names some reasons why holy priest healing is one of the harder playstyles in the game (if not the hardest) and then proceeds to say "and thus is why it's easy".

It was nontrivial in LK because you had no time to think about it and if you got it wrong someone died, no saving throw.
It was supposed to be nontrivial in Cata because you are supposed to consider what's the best spell in relation to your mana trend - and it's possible that the best possible spell is "None of the Above, at least for the next five seconds".
If you have a slower pace and insufficient resource concerns, you're looking at Bodhi's Complaint.

I thought it was terribly written, it might not be filled with leetspeak and grammatical errors but it contains way too many words.
Basically, his wall of text can be summed up with "Priest healing is slow and lacks challenge because you have 2.5 seconds to ask yourself what the best spell would be to cast next (out of 3-4 spells) and too often there is more than one right answer to that question."

Edit: Or yeknow, what Bodhi has said before in about 1 sentence instead of a thousand sentences.

Edited, Jan 14th 2011 11:15pm by Aethien

tl;dr is in my post, I just cut out all his pseudo science.

If you happen to disagree with his premise that deciding which spell to cast in your 2.5 second window is trivial, the whole argument falls apart of course. You can't put a personal opinion as an antecedent in a logical argument.

edit: I don't think it is trivial, personally. Depending on the boss, healing assignments and mana available not to mention hp remaining of your target; it can be very hard to choose the best spell quickly especially in a healing intensive fight like P1 of halfus wyrmbreaker. Further, there might not be a completely right or wrong choice, more like a choice between mana efficiency and risking the life of the target both of which could cause a wipe (dps dying leading to the enrage timer wiping you, or going oom leading to tank death later).





Edited, Jan 14th 2011 8:37pm by ArtemisEnteri

TL;DR! :P

Talking about it 3-4 weeks ago it really was trying to extricate it from the whole easy/hard or gear discussion towards a discussion about the fact that cast times have doubled and incoming damage vs healthpools has slowed the pacing of healing down to a snails pace.

It isn't interesting, clutch healing is gone, due to extended cast times and slow incoming damage it is pretty hard to make a poor choice because you have all the time in the world to think about it. It is also hard to be challenged. Even on fights that are supposed to be healer intensive like Chimaeron.

Let me state this, because it needs to be said.


Your experience doing 5 man heroics via the LFD tool is not an accurate measure of the content.


That is in no way a aspersion, or me trying to be rude to you Mazra. It is just that you are playing at a lowest common denominator level. Not to say that there aren't moments when what you said are not true, however even for an experienced healer 2 gcd, can be a lifetime.


In a raid, with 2 or 4 other healers looking out it is even more true. It also isn't just that, in TBC you had a small fast heal and a large slow cast heal. So you had to be aware of incoming damage beforehand and have that slow heal queued when it was coming or get caught and lose a tank. Now you have a large small heal to quickly hit the tank, though spamming it will leave you oom. That small heal that is fast actually breaks the paradigm of TBC healing.

Never claimed that my 5-man experience was an accurate measure of the entire content. It is, however, a pretty good measure of the 5-man content, which is what I'm having trouble relating your stories to. Hence my question.

I take it the answer to that question was 'yes', in which case I can't argue with you as I don't raid.

3 seconds might be a lifetime in a raid, but in a heroic, it's one heal.

I know what coordination can do. Take our guild runs vs my PUG runs. First time I ever set foot in BRC was with Aeth and the guildies, and we got the achievement on Corla. Second time, this time with a PUG, we all know the Beauty fight, but we wipe three times on it before disbanding.

If they're going to balance this game's content around the organized minority and over-gearing, I'm out. That's what six years of gaining 5-man content experience with strangers is telling me.

They want to implement an IQ check in a game that's been a moron magnet for years. I'm all for kicking the dumb to the curb, but this is just way too late.

To be fair without proper CC that fight should be skipped, which is why in 4.06 they are removing one of the 3 pups.



If you don't want the challenge there are regular dungeons. Which are pretty forgiving.

Trust me when I say that 5 man heroics are in no way focused on a skilled Minority, this is not Sunwell Plateau, or trophy bosses like Anub 25 HM, Firefighter, Yogg 0 or Lich King 25 HM.


You don't need uber skills, amazing strat, 1000's of hours of play time or vent to overcome this content. If you want to do heroic and get the increased gear reward you will need to be able to do the basics. CC, interrupt, not stand in aoe and know basic kill orders (dps the caster first, not the warrior mob etc).

Basically PvE 101 type skills, not master level co-ordination. That wasn't necessary in Wotlk. You could stand in AOE full duration and not die, you could pull multiple pulls and aoe etc. No more, 5 man and more importantly 5 man heroics are a tool designed to help and in some ways force raiders to learn the basic skills that they will need to be successful with in PvE 10 or 25.

I know. A lot of people know. Unfortunately, even more people don't.

It's not that I don't want the challenge, it's that I know what it will lead to. I know how the heroics work by now. I know most of the boss fights by heart, and if I don't, I've got mad pro Google skills and will know the fight in a minute.

The problem is that a lot of the fights are downright frustrating if you're doing them with people who can't adapt to these changes. One person killing a purple trogg on General Umbriss usually means a wipe. Add the odd chance of getting into a Grim Batol HC PUG with no CC, spice it up with a little 30-minute queue and you've got a big cake of failure.

To emphasize, it's not that I don't want heroics to be challenging. I just think it's too late to make these changes.

This is the quintessential quote of this expansion - for a myriad of reasons. First off, the very first few people in 3.0 that went off to do 80 heroics found a relative challenge. After half the players were geared it became ridiculously easy, and after everyone was geared it became trivial: The night I dinged 80 on my newest Paladin (pre-cata 4.0) I was not only tanking heroics but was tanking 3.3 heroics with ease - this was not the case in 3.0.

Now backwards to 2.0 - hell even 2.3. Heroics were not done by everyone. They were done by Hardcore PVEers looking for helpful gear to fill in Raid gear slots they were still missing. No JPs, no dungeon finder, no mercy - and TBC dungeons were rather easy but certain encounters on heroic became immense headaches.

Back further to Vanilla and we see that things were not even laid out as clearly or easily to navigate. Many dungeons were plain impossible without a perfect group make-up. Encounters were created to be diverse and a lot of trash was designed to recreate a group-versus-group idea that you would be fighting an equally matched party every time you pulled. Much less organization and explanation lead to much more challenging dungeons even with relatively weak and uncomplicated encounters and trash - and the rawness of it all meant players had to adapt and learn very quickly.

Now, today, they have an extremely easy to learn (the monsters literally tell you everything they do and you can click on it to see EXACTLY what it is) fluent and constructed encounters that are made to be beat not by figuring out a puzzle but by sticking to an exact script which is handed to you. This happens -> do that. Then this happens -> do that. These encounters are easier to learn than 3.0 Wrath Encounters! Sure there are differences based on group makeup, but these are literally written-in-stone encounters and many of them can not be over-geared and need not be worked around. Easier to learn, more necessity to put what you've learned into action.

But even with these simple scripts that are spelled out for us, very laid back players are unable or unwilling to learn how to do these fights. If they are not up to the challenge then they should just stick to regulars. Its what many of us did in TBC, and Heroics didn't even exist before that. Wrath spoiled A LOT of players into thinking/expecting that they could do heroics. But why should they be able to with no effort?

Normals are forgiving, they are easy. I went into a Random Normal once by accident - Lost City - and it was 3 DKs and a Rogue. Everyone pulled agro, we had no CC, they did not understand/listen to me about the boss encounters, and yet we had no deaths. Sure I had to LG a guy once, but for the most part the Normals are there to show you what you are supposed to do without killing you: Cata Normals are Wrath Heroics, Cata Heroics are TBC Heroics. This isn't wrong, this is what they wanted.