Silmeria

What part of "drift from my assignment" did you not understand? Let me detail it out slowly:

I am healing a tank - one guy. I decide to heal another target for any myriad of reasons. This means I am not healing my tank under whatever burden he is taking.

Let me put this into a realistic scenario for you:

Me and another druid are healing one of the Sacrolash tank. I decide to peel off momentarily to triage a double sear that I feel isn't getting caught. Thus our tank is missing one dedicated healer at the time. Considering I simply need to triage the double sear briefly (and draw attention on vent if I REALLY feel it's getting missed), there's really no reason to take an entire 1.7s to do this when I can accomplish my same goal in 1.3s and get back on my tank. You really don't want to leave your tank unchecked anyway considering the severity of a Confound+MH crush series and then the forced tank transition. Getting caught in between that is not exactly an optimal position.

 

Idsapthat

Hey guys, ive read almost half of this thread (from about page 35 onwards, skipping the arguments and useless posts) and would like to ask:

My paladin, (sort of alt, want to become main...I have a 4/8 t6 rogue) is in some epics/blues, and i'm still confused about a few things.

First off: Overhealing.

How the fk do I stop it? I'm assigned to healing a tank, but by the time I get a 2 second HL7 off on him, hes already healed up and I overhealed for 3k. What is a good way to learn to predict damage and precast effectivley?

Next: I'm still confused as to what ranks of holy light I should be using. Currently, HL4, 7 9 and 11 I use. I don't know when to use what, because of what I said previously - by the time I get the heal off, the tank is topped off. (I'm always casting atleast 1 HL every 15 seconds to keep Light's Grace up.

Here is my armory: Foadadin (undergeared, I know - but I beleive that knowing all the fights helps out alot[I have done all fights countless times on my rogue])

Here is a WWS of an SSC run I did (my first ever 25 man as a healer) Wow Web Stats I had an spriest and resto shammy and had 0 mana problems healing the MT.

Thanks .

 

Palados

For that lvl of encounters you mainly FoL with some HL. As paladin you will always have high overhealing, just don't bother with it. And when what rank of HL to use - you need practice to feel it, thats it.

Predicting damage is partially possible if you know boss abilities and have timers. Earthquake on Morogrim, WW on Leo, beast within for Karathress etc are times when you could heal with HL without much overhealing. But really, don't look at your overhealing, unless it is like 65% or so.

 

Palados

@ Silm I agree that crosshealing with FoL is viable, but is it justifying using Souls redeemed over Lurker libram?

 

Maelstrom

Generally as a paladin healer you'll be assigned to "heavy lifting" healing such as the MT, generally you either have to have a ping of zero and the fastest caffiene fueled reflexes ever and stopcast heals if they're going to heal, or try to heal reactively. The problem with the former is that it's frankly impossible, and the latter is that your tank will die if they take a damage spike and you don't have some kind of heal incoming. Thus the most feasible solution is to precast heals and spam the tank in a sustainable manner. This is all terribly general since I've never played a healadin, but my impression would be that your overheal due to doing a FoL/Downranked HL rotation is fairly irrelevant since your position as paladin healer is to be the guy/girl that always has some kind of heal incoming because you can spam FoL all day and pop holy light as appropriate - as stated above like when boss abilities come off cooldown.

There will be some people that say "I get zero overheal and anyone else that gets overheal is bad", these people are either lying or all they do is wait for a tank to drop low and press nature's swiftness once every 3 minutes.

 

• frmorrison

Certainly play styles differ, but even up to Illidan just spamming Flash 100% will work fine. There really is not a lot of burst damage there.


Flash has less HPS than HL7, but costs a lot less mana. It is still worth using at some times.

 

• frmorrison

Heh, I don't recall him having Souls libram. Even so, losing 60 healing on Flash (assuming the target had light), is not much healing lost anyway.

 

fox

I'm in somewhat the same situation, my main is a mage but I don't have large amounts of raid experience. I have run SSC through Lurker and of course Gruul's/Mag so here are my 2 cents.

One thing that helps with the overhealing is to make sure you have all your healers using mods that can talk to each other. That way you can tell if there's a HoT, someone else is also casting a heal etc... This really only helps when you are straying from MT since MT can take spikes and as mentioned earlier in the thread your best strategy is to spam heals. Every WWS I've seen across many samples shows Paladins overhealing in the 30-50% range. Obviously lower is better but the real key is did the tank survive without you going out of mana.

I'll let someone better qualified than me address the HL issue.

 

Silmeria

They're two different flavors of librams - if you have mana issues and are using holy light, then use the lurker libram. If you're not, use one of the many healing-esque librams with respect to what you're doing. Hell, change librams mid-battle if you want and can spare the GCD (e.g., we shift all paladins to raid healing once Sacrolash is down and leave the warlock healing to resto druids - I usually switch straight to a generic +healing FoL libram while dropping from the shelf).

[e]Correct, I still don't have the BoL libram from Kara (fuck that place) - but I would certainly cycle it into my options if I had it (especially when I have a shadow priest).

---

On the topic of overhealing - stop worrying about it if you're not running out of mana (this has been beaten to death in this very thread).

 

littlejim

I used to be in a guild where our paladins basically aproached tank healing with the policy of, "More overhealing is good, as long as it's on the tank and as long as you don't run out of mana." About a month ago i transferred to a guild where the other two active paladins prefer to cast flash of light on raid members that take damage, rather than spam on the tank, so as to preempt damage. They look great on the meters (which is of no concern to me, but is of concern to the raid leaders and class leader). We are currently farming black temple, so as to prepare for sunwell, therefore my question is, is this a seriously valid approach to healing bt? Is my current overhealing and general approach to tank healing unacceptable? What amoutn of overhealing do Sunwell holy paladins tend to average?). Please note that I'm aware that my gear is not good enough for Sunwell, but my request is simply an unbiased assessment of my playstyle. The guild and specifically, my class leader, seem thoroughly unimpressed with my "underperformance." I'm looking for support, or if I'm truely doing something wrong please help.

The last black temple raid i was given a spot in (I'm losing my raid spots over this disagreement in healing styles):

Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats

 

Malleus

Any approach is valid if the tank doesn't die, but some approaches are better than others.

In both the reports you provided, you're doing more raw heal than Jaya but he's only doing 80% of your overhealing. That means he's placing his heals better than you are. He is also - unsurprisingly - raping you shitless on bossfights, particularly in the first half of BT where he's doing double your effective healing. Nor is he slacking off on the Cleanses to chase the meter, as he's doing twice as many as you are.

The last and most significant point, though, is that your overheal is not falling appreciably on the boss fights. That means he isn't spamming it around while leaving you to do all the work. He's only spamming it around when he knows he can get away with it.

Conclusion: by diverting as much of their overheal as they can safely spare away from the tank and into raid support, the extant guild Paladins are generating far superior results than you do with your "keep it on the tank" approach.

 

Silmeria

Newsflash: Paladins with SPs and experienced in the encounters (Jaya) rape Paladins who don't have SPs (you). Experience will lend you the manner in knowing when you can cross-heal and when you cannot - it'll come with practice in BT, and it'll continue to some small effect in SWP (although no where near as much, BT is kind of a joke like that).

Some red flags I see in your parse:

You're losing fel-rage targets. Digging deeper, it seems you're flashing some Fel Rage targets late in the fight, which leads me to believe you're hurting for mana at that point (Unless you're flashing just to flash, in which case that's giant red flag). If you are hurting for mana, you need to throttle back on your tank healing and let HoTs do more of the work. Keep in mind Gurtogg starts off low in the damage curve, and you can pretty much just flash your heart out without risk. Monitor the acidic wounds stack and ramp up if it starts to get too high (e.g., your tanks can't force the transition at the right times for whatever reasons). You really shouldn't have to do that much HL-oriented tank healing here if things are going right.

Your council parse looks to be about what I would expect for a paladin solo healer assignment on Gathios.

You had a lot of deaths on Mother, but it looks like a lot of FA failure/bad ports (I especially love the druid casting tranquility in the middle of FA while standing on top of the raid - whoops!), so I didn't dig too much here. Although you do have a saber lash tank death while you were healing with FoL. I prefer triaging saber lashes with a HL, usually taking one of the OTs and leaving the other for someone else; your other healers should be helping here too, especially chain heal.

Most of your other meters just show inexperience, but they're dumb easy fights that aren't really worth looking into. It's easy to see why the other paladin does so much more healing - because he's primarily raid healing in a lot of fights.

On a tangent, some of your priests are Grade-A fucking awful. It's a shame if you're the only one getting slaps on the wrist, because the flash heal spamming Priests are an even greater offense (some of them are literally flash-healing their bloodboil assignments, jesus).

To answer your original question, both styles are fine for BT if nobody is generally dying. BT is kind of a joke and because most of the tank damage is very predictable and not too variable, you can eventually adopt a mannerism in knowing when you can simply leave your tank and heal elsewhere. You'll see this in some places in SWP, but not too often. Considering you pulled a solo-heal assignment on the Gathios tank without splattering yourself, I think you're fine, but watch out for overextending yourself on tank healing and then leaving yourself tapped on your other duties (Gurtogg especially).

 

littlejim

Silmeria, I think you've got your analysis spot on. I burned far too much mana on the tanks at Gurtogg and ended the fight with little more than flash and gift of the naaru for the fel rage target (something I hope to never repeat.) If I recall correctly, i was out of mana when the saber lash death occured for the the same reason of burning too much mana early in the fight. We've had some very bad tank deaths recently, such as phase changes on Illidan and the Gathios tank on council, so I've become unneccesarily trigger happy with my holy lights. You're right, I'm hurting from not having the experience, so I'll just give it time. Thanks for the help. Maybe I'll drop a line for the priests too.

 

Secta

I'm not entirely sure if it's fixed, but I was almost certain when they announced the changes to Libram of Souls Redeemed, I saw no affect to the benefit that Flash of Light gains. You should look into sometime, I'm pretty sure it still receives 120+Healing. I may be wrong though.

 

Silmeria

Pro-tip: Don't heal yourself unless absolutely necessary, let others heal you so you get the mana back from SA.

 

• frmorrison

I just tested Souls, it definitely does what the tooltip says it does, which is Flash gets bigger by 60 and HL gets bigger by 120, and the bonus is affected by crits.

 

Palados

3% more healing for fol/hl or averaged 5% less mana for HL. Libram usefullness will therefore depend on HL/fol ratio and the fact if you crossheal (on non BoLed targets) or not. For me Lurker libram is better, for FoL spammer - +heal librams. You could always switch them in fight but GCD isn't worth it to be honest. At least in fights where every bit matters, like M'uru. Today at the attempt before the kill we wiped due to the fact that I spent GCD at stunning the mage and suddenly tank got double flurried to death till HL11 landed.

 

Malleus

The trick being to figure out when it is absolutely necessary. The number of times I've died because a raid healer has thought, "Malleus is a healer, he can take care of himself" are probably equalled only by the number of times we've wiped when I've thrown a heal on myself thinking I'm about to die and the tank has died to a spike... generally followed by the raid healers all landing a heal on me.

I'd like to say the solution is to kick ass until they all get it into their heads that MT-healing Paladins are their number one priority, but there's too many exceptions to that rule.

 

nader

Well i'm not really a high-end raider, but my personal rule of thumb is if I go below 50% for more than a few seconds, i start to heal my self. The mana back from SA is nice, and the raid healers in my guild typically go for us first, but a dead pally has 0 mana! :P

 

Silmeria

M'uru is pretty much made for the lurker libram, in my humble opinion, yea.

This is why I like to stun zerkers and not mages. Especially if they're flurrying. The chances of your tank dying to only one zerker is much less than if two zerkers are up. I have to juggle re-sealing JoW on every mob, so I'm very sensitive to the juggling of GCDs against healing on this particular encounter.

 

• frmorrison

I took a look at the Beta forums to see how Sheath of Light was working. SoL's HoT effect will overright the previous HoT, even if it is a weaker HoT and only tics every 3 seconds.

That does lessen the value of the talent a bit, at least for MT healing.

 

Acryon

TBH, if you are using FoL 100% of the time on fights like Gurtogg and Council, I feel sorry for your other healers having to pick up the slack.

 

• frmorrison

I never use Flash 100% of the time, in any instance. Throwing away 11% crit and higher HPS is silly.

However, assuming Flash is all you did and no one else followed your playstyle, someone needs to do the big heals, your raid would be fine in all of Black Temple. The instance is that easy.

 

Palados

You can as well sing songs on vent and tell some jokes instead of FoLing and it will hardly influence things in BT :P, that small will be 100% FoLer contribution.

 

Malleus

Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I don't think "You can slack off all you like in BT so long as nobody else does" is quite the message we should be sending to healadins looking for advice.

That said, depending on how you stack your healers FoL remains very usable in early BT and all of Hyjal. But if you're using it all the time and leaving the work to others, you should not be surprised if you lose your raid slot because frankly, you're a waste of space.