Originally Posted by Latira
I have read and heard many references to "prehealing" or "preloading heals", and understand that one's skill with this separates the good healers from the excellent healers. I have not, however, been able to find any discussion on the actual mechanics involved. While the concept is not exactly rocket science - time your heals to land immediately after your healing target takes damage by preanticipating the boss's attacks - implementing it is proving elusive. I would like to hear from other healadins how best to follow the bosses' actions.
What mods/addons do you use? (I tried using Quartz to show a Swing Timer for my Focus, but either my understanding of Quartz is all wrong, or I didn't set it up right.) Or do you literally just "watch" the boss, memorizing what he does before each style of attack?
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There's two components:
1 - Overhealing to preempt damage spikes. This was made popular on Brut in Sunwell, but it's been around forever. Most people did it inherently by spamming Flash just to have something to do. It's simply spamming when you have nothing else to heal, because there's really no reason to ever stop casting as a Paladin. Sync'ing to swing timers is an exercise in futility.
2 - Sync'ing castbars. This is the "trickier" version and what you really want to improve on. It's very simple in reality. Anything that has some type of cast-bar damage, you will usually want to sync your heal to land as soon as the damage impacts. This is to prevent cast+melee gibbing in particular, but it also allows you to begin working on the backlog of damage if the damage happens to be gargantuan. However, be careful not to undershoot the timing or you will simply massively overheal and worse, set yourself back an entire GCD. There are a few instances in the current content where this applicable:
- Sartharion and Breath Attacks. Sarth's flame breath has a very distinctive cast bar; set Sarth as your focus and monitor it. When you see the cast bar toggle, sync your heal and begin casting. Sarth can definitely breath+melee gib your tank if you're doing 3 drakes and all of your healers are slow on the heal.
- Malygos and Breath Attacks. Malygos' breath is particularly damaging on a tank, there's also a delayed bomb component to it as well. Malygos can also breath+melee gib your tank, especially if Malygos has eaten a spark.
- Backside of 4H. Both bosses have a cast-time nuke as their primary damage, and it even has travel time to boot, so you must sync to the cast-time and travel time. This is more an educational experience as the chances of you doing is pretty minimal as long as you're handling things correctly. Use this encounter as training, as you will.
There are probably others, but these are three distinctive ones off the top of my head. Obviously you can extend the second component to any type of RSTS cast time ability or RSTS ability in general. If you have aggro warnings enabled in grid, you can usually deduce RSTS targets without even bothering with target of target. Trying enabling aggro monitors on Razuv sometime to determine dagger targets before they are even hit with the debuff / indicated by the raid warning. Again, this is mostly an exercise as the lethality is rather low.
Methods to implementation:
Grid + Aggro Warning. I use a red border whenever someone has "aggro". Aggro in grid is defined by target of target, so if a boss turns to face someone to use an RSTS, you will get a momentary warning on that. It's up to figure out the patterns between RSTS and genuine true "time to eat your face" aggro. Target of Target is identical if you want to use that.
Quartz + Focus. I use a focus cast bar with a gargantuan size. When it pops up, I know something that I conciously focused on is happening, and I react appropriately.