Infraction for P.C.: Anonymous poster

Kaubel · 12/03/09, 7:23 AM

Post: [Resto] Best Practices: PvE Healing Discussion
User: P.C.
Infraction: Anonymous poster
Points: 10

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

That's two in two days. Did someone at the asylum leave the front gate open again?

Original Post:

I'm wondering if anyone who is experienced in healing Heroic 25 Anub penetrating cold can help me, specifically healing two people each time the debuff is applied.

My guild was really gunning for insanity this week, since 3.3 is looming. Usually, the guild uses three healers on tanks, and three healers for the five debuffs, with two healers (disc priests) taking two and a druid will take the remaining one. I've usually been on tanks, but tonight I was asked to heal two debuffs. And failed miserably, losing people to the first tick.

I've always approached stuff analytically. In this instance, considering my ping was about 350, means I have about 2.65 seconds to heal both targets. I have about 900 haste, so raid buffed my LHW is about 1.1x seconds, meaning I have about 0.4 (ie 2.65-2.2x) seconds of reaction time, if I do LHW x 2 for both in order to heal before the debuff hits.

So I figured I should start with Plan A, which is LHW one + Riptide the other in the three second window, thinking that this will give the needed health at the beginning of the cast for debuff no. 2 instead of at the end, making it much safer. However this didn't work at all, riptide was healing only about 4k non crit, combined with initial 1k health that everyone is at, leaves that player at about 5k, and penetrating cold was ticking for 5.2k, not to mention the leeching swarm is ticking too, so I would lose people every time riptide didn't crit.

Next I changed to plan B, which is LHW both targets. Since this is a bit more tight, I changed to haste elixers and food buffs to give myself more time, and practised in P1 to see if I can heal both targets before they took any damage. It was about 50-50, I suspect due to different latency at different points in time since I spotted quartz showing 450ms red casting bars intermittently, but could probably also mean I'm a bad player and have bad reaction time so I never get the casts off in time. Going into P3 this method is unreliable as well and really isn't better then Plan A and I'm still letting people die.

Now, I've done Plan A before and was successful at it back when the guild got 25 attempts, however thinking about it now, that could have been just luck with my Riptides critting a lot, my assigned debuffs hitting people with Frost Pots or abilities to remove the debuff such as paladins, mages or rogues, or people had a bit more HP then usual (such as right after JoL+LotP heals/tanks/previous PC target and still had high health) and non crit riptides weren't fatal. Even letting 1-2 people die at the end still enables us to limp through the encounter. Obviously I can't rely on these sort of stuff in an insanity run.

Asking another shaman in the guild that sometimes heals the debuffs, he just LHW + Riptide two different people similarly to my plan A. He's got better gear then me, probably about 100-200 haste more as well as 100 SP. I'm not sure if that would make that much of a difference in terms of inital non-crit riptide heals being 100% reliable. He says just keep spamming heals as well after the inital combo (which I've been doing), but this didn't really help with my issue since my problem was the initial tick. So far I tried to maximize my performance by:

1) Correct addons and debuff displays - I'm using Xperl and added the custom debuffs in, it's very clear and I'm not wasting time looking for debuffs. I know which ones are assigned to me instantly
2) Maxing SP with SP flask/food/gear changes, so riptides can heal for more initally. Doesn't improve enough for 100% reliability on non crits, although I haven't tried changing my gems all to SP ones yet. I suspect the latter will work although I'd have to change gems every week.
3) Maxing Haste with food/elixir for 2 x LHW, works when they both land but unreliable at best
4) Not casting at all before debuffs so I'm not caught halfway in a GCD and losing precious time
5) Keeping Tidal Waves up before the debuffs hit. This helps with the size of LHW hits but doesn't really address the key issues in both Plan A and B.
6) Use crit elixir and food for Plan A to get riptide to crit more. Not very reliable.

I'm out of ideas and was pretty cut up when I was told to go back onto tanks and a disc priest will do the debuffs, and we proceeded to kill Anub the next attempt. Since my group relied on my totems for healing in P3 I wasn't benched, but I felt like a liablity and would have been so if not for totems. I have always been quick with things like dispels and debuff healing but I'm really starting to doubt myself. I would really appreciate it if someone could offer some advice. Please keep in mind that something like changing roles or increasing healers on the debuff isn't what I'm really looking for, since it's not improving my healing but offloading it to someone else and the guild could do it with three already. I'm looking for specifically healing the two debuffs in my current situation.