Silent resolve wont help you much with this. Untanked mobs will still go for you. Other healers dont have your burst and 8.3% less aggro on an untanked mob does not even register when you are bursting 3k HPS as the CC breaks. I have tried silent resolve and I still get aggro from CC breaks.

On aggro dump fights, silent resolve can help somewhat, but in reality fade will do the job perfectly well. At the end of the day though its a choice. If you dont like using PWS much there is no point in improving it. If you use it you should really improve it.

For the same reasons as above poster mentioned, I will not ever consider 0/5 SR. Admittingly, our raid situation might be different from others (far from ideal setup; often having no shammies/CoH priests and we're often forced to bring non-raider tanks that let adds slip more than once). Needless to say it makes me feel alot safer, and since I already get aggro regularly (maybe once every 2 weeks but that's still alot), I'm fairly sure dropping points means even more aggro.

Also, I don't think the argument "it will just go to the next healer" holds. Yes ofcourse it will go for the next (probably healer), but what if that healer is a pally? He can simply bubble and the tanks have another 10 seconds to fix their mess.

Agreed. I used to die A LOT back in ssc and tk. So much so that one of the officers offered to pay for the name change if i would make it Zomgdead instead of Zomgdie. One of our other priests asked how I was pulling aggro so much and asked how I was spec'd. He laughed at me and said go spec into silent resolve. My retarded nightly repair bills from pulling aggro vanished. I only have 4 points in it because I like to have holy nova for farming, but I think its a very good thing to spec for.

As far as the passing it off to another healer, as long as it isn't another priest it's an improvement. We're the squishiest of the healers let them go to the pally spamming FoL, he can bubble /lol and continue to heal, druids can pop bark skin, hibrenate, lolkitty run away. Shamans wear mail etc etc. Fact is they are better equipt to handle that loose mob than we are.

We generally use 2.5 healers for Bloodboil (3 during P1, 2 during Fel Rage), and if it's me and 1.5 shamans without Tranquil Air, I'm getting aggro warnings quite regularly. On our earlier attempts, I managed to pull a couple of times. Granted since then our tanks have learned to up their TPS quite a bit on the fight, but if I hadn't had 4/5 SR it would have made learning that encounter that much more difficult.

I also use PWS quite a bit and I agree that anything you use is worth improving, when it's cost-effective. I'm just not sure the gain to PWS is worth 3 points.

Sounds like a tanking issue to me. I think the only time I've pulled aggro on that fight was while I was trying to top people off during the transition from P2 back to P1. Fade stopped him about 2 steps from one shotting me. Lesson learned. We raid with multiple pallys so salv is never an issue either. I guess its possible your group comp could be having something to do with it, but it sounds to me your tanks really need to step it up.

I have to wonder if your pulling aggro healing how your dps manages to get anything accomplished.


Im in agreement with improved PW:S. There are much better places to use those 3 pts in my opinion.

On nights when our other CoH priests and resto shaman aren't there, I'm usually putting out 2.5 - 3k HPS with bursts as high as 4k HPS on Bloodboil. Even with 4 points in SR, BoS and TA that still comes out as roughly 600 TPS with bursts of 800 TPS. Given the random nature of the knockbacks, some nights this is fine and others I ride right below the tanks on threat. Our DPS can mitigate by DPSing lightly during the first phase, but as the bloodboil healer, I can't just not heal.

I hate being threat-capped as a healer, since it's much harder to "not heal" than it is to "not DPS", so anything I can do to limit my threat generation helps. With that said, if SR were situated in such a way that I couldn't get a key talent (i.e. CoH), I wouldn't go out of my way to get it. It's in a tier that I need a filler talent, and it gives me a benefit that I see results from.

Hey everyone, love the thread, very useful.

I have an issue though, I'm currently in a guild that's doing T6 content and I'm constantly on the bottom of the healing meters. As a general rule, I try not to pay attention to meters, but lately it's becoming bothersome. I'm not sure if it's A.) my spec, B.) my gear/gemming/enchants, or C.) my being ignorant and doing something blatantly wrong and not being aware of it.

As a CoH priest I'm generally on raid healing, and I use renew and GH1 very often. Any advice or direction to an answer that I overlooked previously in the thread would be very helpful.

Thanks ^_^

As a COH priest, your best quality is the versatility you can bring with switching from COH to single target heals on the fly. Near end game, your mana regen is absolutely ludacris, which means you can start forsaking some of the mana saving talents (like healing prayers) for things that will help your raid utility (like additional crit for inspiration). Often before end game, you're looking at being *EITHER* a COH or a single target healer (the determining factor is whether you have to get imp: DS). Glancing at your spec, it looks fine to me, some minor choices I would change, but the major things are taken care of.

Since you are doing T6 content, I would probably say that it's your technique that is failing. Some of your gear choices *I'd* change, but that's not necessary, a priest can safely do some of the T6 in PMC and karazahn gear. I'd suggest learning every fight, and starting to understand when HUGE bursts of damage are going to happen. Also, if you are using COH correctly, it's more powerful than chain heal. Setting up Najentus, Gurtogg, Illidan, Kazrogal, Anatheron, and Azgalor fights to effectively use COH requires pre-planning and working your strategies out with groups. Often, I would call out over ventrillo when one or two people were not in range of a pre-designated person in a group that I was centering my COH on. When you use raid icons on these people, everyone knows that if they don't stay within 18 yards (talented) of the person in their group with a raid icon, they will not get a heal (NO HEAL AT ALL). When people die because they are not standing near their raid icons, it's very evident, because other healers will not heal them either, they have a different job to do.

I suspect also that down ranking during times when you can get a full ranked heal off may also be an issue. This becomes less of an issue with experience in fights and pre-casting a greater heal. Bloodboil's tank target is taking a huge amount of damage: max rank gheal. Illidan's tanking target took a shear: max rank gheal. Najentus' targets a caster dps with his Spine: max rank gheal.

There is finally one more technique to use to increase your healing reflexes, fine tune your UI. Use mods like GRID, pitbul raid frames, mendwatch (for prayer of mending), classtimers (for your hots), quartz for cast bars of enemies, target of target of target raid frames (from pitbull), focus frames (from pitbull), and add the aforementioned afflictions (like shear and spine) to your GRID UI so you can see when someone is afflicted very clearly. The idea is that IT HAS TO BE CLEAR to you to allow you to react faster than everyone else. Watch your deadly boss mods / la vendetta / whatever else you want to use to know when an upcoming power will trigger and you will be required to step up your healing. This does sound trivial, but it helps alot more when you get into sunwell.

Hope this helps.

I had the same `problem` at first, on trash especially... on bosses, with everybody having it`s own task, i never had problems keeping up with the other healers...
We spend a couple of hours going through a lot of recount details one evening to see who had what playing style and where we had some problems... that cleared everything up.

I don`t know your situation,but some things to check or be aware of...

1. trash has healers fighting to heal up people... basicly, too many healers for the damage done.
T6-geared healers have mana to spare so they only use flashtype kind of heals, join the race or just let them fight.
I switched to `fast` healing instead of `cheap` healing... starting to use grid + clique was the major improvement.
It was a good thing to do, since in Sunwell now you need to react and heal fast, there`s a lot more raid-healing needed.

2. check overheal and latency... if you fall behind in effective healing but you`re way up in overhealing done there`s a problem. High latency will always have a big negative impact, i use Quartz bars, these include latency, so you can start the next cast on time and counter the latency a bit... if latency is fine, then you need to work on reaction times.

3. if other healers are healing your targets on bossfights you either have too many raidhealers, you`re reacting too slow or tasks haven`t been set clearly enough. I was iDS spec untill i switched because we had no CoH healer on RoS one night... i would always let the other healers know to prioritize the other groups first... PoH was more then enough to keep my group up on bloodboil, RoS phase 3 or Illidan p2, but only after we talked about it it was clear to everybody.

In the end it`s about optimizing the healing... for raidleaders healers is 1 group, if nobody died they`re happy, doesn`t matter who healed most... but it feels better if you can see you did a fair deal of the job.

Cast PoM everytime you can. Get a meter that assignes PoM healing correctly (Recount is good at this). A lot of your healing can come form PoM if you are playing well and most metres don't assign it to you. Some hyjal runs it is my single biggest source of healing done at nearly 25% for the entire evening.

I can't emphasise enough how important good raid bars are for showing bad stuff happening to people, learn to read em and react accordingly. One particularly good feature is when grid and others show who is currently the active target of a mob. Especially on bosses there is often a travel time on the RSTS effects and the bosses target a player momentarily to cast the secondary target system. Use this advance warning to get a heal warmed up to land almost the instant the frostbolt, plague, AoE lands.

As I'd also agree with gear being no issue in t6 as long it's not blue anymore and provides some decent spirit, I'd also go down the UI-line.

In my experience many healers that stay behind their 'gear'-possibilites just dont have the overview. This has been discussed many times before, but still I think you can't overrate the performance-boosting features that especially GRID offers.
In combination with some instant-binding tool if you're to lazy for macros (click2cast or clique) you'll be always on top of things, who gets damage where aggros what...and in most bossfights GRID's 'show aggro'-function will easily show you targets of special boss features way before bossmod etc will even announce them, be it winterchill's grave, bb's fel rage, najentus' spike, Illidans flames or whatever else.
you'll see there's so much to heal, so mana management comes up next, but there's nothing I could add to what's already described in the first post.

I know that there are still tons of 'you are a bad healer if you need addons blah' out there, but no one can seriously tell me he'd heal better without.

Ah the Imp PWS vs. Silent Resolve debate has finally landed on the EJ forums as well. Though I think by now all that needs to be said has been said already (I personally raid with 1/5 SR + subtlety simply as a filler talent to the next tier, but +7 all resistances is sounding better and better these days). In any case, I wanted to address this one point that I noticed:
Except that once those skeletons have spawned and your renews are still ticking, those skeletons will start running to you like it's their job. Unless you're talking about having those Renews top your targets off before the skeletons spawn (though that's probably not possible since the aura's still ticking at that point), any Renew that's still ticking in proximity of the skeletons WILL in fact generate threat.

But really, it isn't hard to just find your pally tank and go stand in the consecrate. Fade will buy you more than enough time to do that anyway.

Admittedly I did once think about respeccing back into SR while we were still learning Felmyst, but once I learned to hold back a little at the beginning of P2 (and NOT roll Renews on 10 different targets, but rather just top them off with CoH or FH), there wasn't any need.

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Regarding Clique: I've gotten flamed for this in the past and I'll probably get flamed for it again now, but I'm a pretty firm advocate against using Clique for primary healing unless you have and use backup keybinds for your heals as well. The only place I see Clique having in a raid (or anywhere, really) really is for dispels, since one-click dispelling is obviously much better than click+keybind dispelling. My issue with relying on Clique for primary healing (without backup keybinds) is that it greatly limits your ability to heal on the move. It also encourages tunnel vision healing because not only does it effectively make it possible to heal with one hand tied behind your back, it ties up your mouse so you can't use it to adjust your camera while healing and/or moving.

There are undoubtedly plenty of successful priests who do use Clique as their primary form of healing, so this isn't meant to be a jab at them. But I personally don't understand how one could stand the limited mobility and awareness that mouseover healing forces you into, and I can't imagine trying to do any kind of half-serious PvP with it either. Though all these feelings might just be because I have a pretty heavy first-person shooter background.

Bellezza, many popular meters, notably SWS and WWS assign healing from PoM to the target healed because it comes up in the combat log as "Tanks PoM heals tank for 1800". Others have managed through clever coding to track the PoM bounces. If you rely on a meter that does not track you PoM contribution you will look like you are doing worse than you really are as PoM should almost always be one of you top 3 healing spells for damage healed of the course of the instance. Another thing if you are using recount is the graphical healing done breakdown you can pull up at any stage to see how you have been doing your healing, this can be a very powerful tool to help you improve. Renew below 10% of your healing? probably you need to do a better job of keeping it up.. etc.

The most important scrolling text option to have is that it shows overheal separately form regular heals. Standard SCT will do this and it helps you understand when you are overhealing, this allows you to change up your tactics.

Something I neglected to add, an option in GRID allows you to see other GRID users casting healing spells and estimates the amount of healed on the GRID bar for that heal. This will show you when other people are cueing heals and allows to prioritize someone who may not be receiving a heal, higher on your list. This also shows you as a quick indicator if your heal will overheal or not. Of course, this relies on other healers using GRID too, but honestly, who doesn't use GRID?

One other add-on i find very usefull to limit overheal is 'VisualHeal'
A very simple, but extremely clear, easy to see gimmick... it shows you how much the heal you're casting will heal your target for... showing a green, yellow or red bar for expected overheal (not counting on crits ofcourse).

I found this one trying out different things, and i've never turned it off since...

VisualHeal - WowAce Wiki

I use Grid but I explicitly turned that feature off when they made it available in a recent patch. The amount of spam that feature puts on my Grid hurt more than it helped. A corner that's set up to show inc heals is more than enough.

Supposedly there's some way to show multiple squares on a corner to indicate the *number* of inc heals to that target too. That would probably be useful, but I'd probably ignore it anyway.

What I've always wanted as a raid healer was a Pitbull/Xperl/aguf-like Unit Frame addon that allowed for the creation of an arbitrary set of unit frames (i.e. not party, not raid, not Main Tank) for the targets *I* want to monitor in a raid. The closest implementation of this that I've seen is oRA's Player Targets. Except oRA doesn't show cast bars or debuffs, which almost completely defeats the purpose of having Player Targets to begin with. (though admittedly, it's still nice when doing AV with a group of friends) I'm actually fairly surprised that *none* of the existing well-known unit frame addons have this capability, especially since it comes with the default Blizz UI.

There was talk of this idea a while back for Grid, or at least something like it. Basically, you could put a "box" around targets you wanted to watch especially.

While I could see these options being potentially helpful, I also see them as causing tunnel vision. Being a healing leader I -hate- saying this, but sometimes you make the greatest contribution by cross-healing off of your assignments and saving that one guy or group. It has to be done with great judgment, but it still helps.

I could see a "box" or a separate "group" as being dangerous. It allows you to instantly identify your assignment - good. However, it also causes people to focus too hard on their assignment, and perhaps miss the bigger picture. I know for a fact that on a fight like Fel, I've been looking around on Grid and noticed someone not in my party who really needs a shield or ProM or heal...and yet I still have no trouble finding "my group." It's great to monitor a specific set of people, and it's how I assign, but I want them to see everyone, not just those select few. It makes for a smoother implementation over all.

I prefer to stick to the normal Grid setup. For debuff-based assignments, like Flame Sear etc, I love being able to put them into my Grid and go.

You can tunnel vision without special frames... may as well argue that tank frames are bad for the same reason.

There aren't many instances where you need to specifically watch someone who is neither in a specific group nor on the MT list though. The one example I can think of is that my guild's Kalecgos strat involves members of group 5 being assigned to go with groups 1-4 (we use a 4 portal rotation) and the raid healer in those groups is responsible for keeping the 1-2 people of g5 who are with their group alive.

I wasn't thinking about it in terms of my assignments. I want to see the cast bars of a few select healers in my raid, or at times, all of them at once. The easiest example that comes to mind for me is Brutallus healing where such a feature would allow me to easily see if all the healers managed to sync up, so I could properly "desync" from their heals. Or I'd be able to see which healers are failing to line up their heals properly before a stomp.

I already currently use my Focus frame for this purpose - usually to watch a new recruit or to monitor a fellow healer just to see what they're doing. I found that just by doing this alone, I was able to reduce both of our overheal by a significant margin (assuming the other healer isn't downs-healing with Clique - but sometimes even if they are, I can tell who they're casting on pretty easily). Of course I wouldn't recommend doing this for all the healers in your raid, but doing so for a particular subset of healers - in particular those who share your assignments - would be tremendously useful.

So the idea is that I would still use Grid to heal, but the cast/mana bars of the other healers in my raid sitting somewhere in my peripheral vision is something that I've wished for for a long time. And of course, there's always the "I'm doing a BG with a few of my friends and I want to see their cast bars, buffs and debuffs, and ToT, just like I'd be able to in an Arena match."

I'd probably go and implement it myself (for pitbull or something) if I wasn't so damn lazy. :P

Ah ok, I gotchya.

The easiest thing I found for managing healer mana is "Litmus" of WoWAce. It's a little frame that you can filter things out of (IE I filtered out Hunter/Mage) and also allows you to see who has an innervate. Very nifty. Only complaint is that while you can filter classes, you cannot filter people, so you end up with spriests and elemental/enhance shamans (and maybe a lazer turkey if your guild rolls that way) in your frame. Other than that, it's a nice mod.

As for me, I often do what you do. I'll /focus someone, and if I really want to multitask I also take advantage of my mouseover healing and just have my target as another healer. A frame which showed all healers would be interesting, but would have to be highly intuitive; else you get a bunch of DPS in there too.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I personally would ever use it =/ I'd probably get it if someone made it and fool around a bit, but I'm too set in my ways and a new frame would just confuse and befuddle me (think crotchety old man.)

Also:

This is true, but speaking from practice, you're much more likely to have a bad case of tunnel vision with too many frames and too strict of directions.

If you have all the treat reducing effects in your raid 3 more points in silent resolve only reduce your threat by ~8%. Although ppl say that silent resolve makes a huge difference to their not pulling aggro, it is only a false impression. 3 points in silent resolve reduce the amount of times you pull aggro by a small margin. They do not under any circumstances make the difference between getting aggro all the time and not getting any aggro.

3000 HPS at 65% total threat reduction is 975 TPS. With 3 extra ranks of silent resolve its 855 TPS. If 120 TPS extra on the burst is causing you to overheal, fade will catch it.

I also do not like clique but for a different reason. Its simply not as good as mouseover macros, which I have keybound.

Your view is strongly subjective and cannot really be related to other priests. I do not find that mouseover healing limits my ability to move and see what happens during the fight. On the contrary it enhances it, by eliminating the switching between targets. More importantly in addition to my focus frame I get an additional free frame (my target frame) for monitoring a second target (usually the boss). Having practiced this for such a long time and combination of both the keyboard and mouse I do not feel my movements restricted in any way by mouseover healing and I regularly re-arrange the camera mid-fight to visually monitor things. I think the reason is that you too unused to moving with the keyboard, but that is a subjective issue.

The best part about mouseover macros is that you can target them directly on targets on your screen. I cannot imagine anyone healing 100% effectively without the freedom. This is doubly important for dispel. This is a core reason for why I do have clique installed, but I use it extremely rarely. Most of my keybinds allow me to use click+cast in addition to using single key stroke combos for casting spells on myself. E.g. T doubles up as a mouseover macro a click+cast keybind and alt+T casts it on me.

Pitbull has a number of extra frames you can use, but they do require some setting up.

As for PvP I could not fathom how you could not use mouseover macros, especially on 2v2. Monitoring both opponents at once is essential for success. I personally got as high as 2100 rating last season and having mouseover macros was an important advantage.

Fair enough, and I suppose at the end of the day it has most to do with what you're comfortable with. I do have a question though: did you start off with mouseover macros pretty early on or did you only start adopting them when you found the need to monitor multiple targets or to do one-click dispelling?

I'm still inclined to think that for someone who has no prior experience or adaptation to one particular method vs. another, the chances of them becoming a keyboard-turning, unaware healer are much higher if they start out with the Grid/Clique combo than if they didn't, if only simply because the Grid/Clique combo encourages (rewards?) people to be lazy. I also maintain that for dispelling in 2s, you're much better off if you just have separate keybinds for dispel self, dispel teammate, dispel target, and dispel focus. Hitting a key is still faster than clicking on a specific spot on the screen.