Cataclysm Healing

[crowdx]

Hi all,
so on other forums I am seeing a lot of QQ'ing over the latest Pally healing "nerf" , how do you guys feel about healing in Cataclysm? My current team that I am leveling to 85 has a druid healing and so far it has not been too bad. With the re-working of the spells etc it does seem like spells such as nourish have less healing power and so can force me into using higher mana spells.
How are you guys dealing with it? What are your main healing spells in dungeons for Druids, Priests or Pally?

[Malgor]

I fail at the new dugeons so I can't give a great perspective of that.

On my highest geared team (5400gs average) I can only kill the first boss in BRC, trash and other things are no problem and the problem isn't healing it's mechanics and me on a slow learning curve. This is my druid healer team. This team is currently 81.25.

On my lowest geared team (4000gs average) I can't kill the first boss in BRC, but have no problems with the trash and can complete all group quests easy. This is my shaman healer team. This team is currently 82.3.

To heal effectively I think you just have to use what suits your style. Personally I think druids are the best healers, but many say that discipline priests are the best healers. Everything is always situaltional though.

My two guildmates with similar mixed teams have no problems with BRC, so I know it's just me that is being unskilled and unwilling to adapt (yet).

[shadewalker]

I am running a Prot Pally, Holy Priest, Arcane Mage, Ele Shaman, and a Balance Druid, I just hit 83 with my team. I have cleared BRC, TotT, SC, and VP so far. Stone Core was probably the hardest for myself (especially the last boss).

I started the first instances with the same setup i had for Wrath, basically flash heal for any slaves and greater heal for my tank. this worked ok, it seamed to heal enough but flash heal ate into the mana if i got into a situation where i needed to heal my slaves much. I changed flash heal out for heal as it is supposed to be the new "mana efficient" heal.... I found that while it may be efficient, it did not heal enough to keep my team up. The cast time of heal just seems too long for the amount of healing i get out of it. Any time where 2 or more of my slaves were taking damage i just couldn't easily out HpS the incoming damage.

Right now I am using greater heal for all my toons (in addition to PWS and renew if needed) and it is working out much better (but renew also seems to do less healing).

regarding AOE heals, I am not getting much out of them at all. Holy Nova seems to heal for much less than in wrath as does Circle of Healing. I have been meaning to change my AoE heal macro to Prayer of Healing but i have been lazy and not gotten around to that yet.

I guess these are all the changes we get to learn from with the increased health pools in Cata.

[crowdx]

I am wondering is it that the heals are still healing the same amount but all classes now have much more HPs and take more damage and so takes much more healing?

[Ualaa]

Mana is important, as well as mana efficiency.
But the instances should be doable, with an adjustment to healing strategy.
I mean, the game is balanced around one-player per toon.

We cannot just spam Flash Heal on a Priest, like we could pre-Cataclysm.

I'd imagine those who adapt to the changes are successful.
And those who cannot change, are whining on the Blizzard forums.

There are quite a few videos of instances being cleared, so they are doable.
I've not tried any, so cannot say what needs to be changed.

[Khatovar]

My healer is a shammy, which you didn't ask about, but she feels pretty gutted on a lot of her heals. Chain heal and Healing wave aren't even worth using. They heal for nothing, leaving me with my mana-pig heals for direct healing. My mana goes down as fast as health goes up.

Non-healer healing has become pretty vital for me, at least until I can get some decent gear going. I've spec'd both my pallies into WoG, and I've got a mass healing button set up to have both shammies drop Healing Rains and both pallies drop Holy Radiance. I've found just depending on my healer alone to take care of healing was not working.

[Enoah35]

So far I have completed:

BRC: Not hard but was level 82 when I cleared. No healing issue
Tott: Was quite hard but completed. Not much healing issue
SC: Completed 3/4, needed a friend healer to finish off with the last. Major healing issue on last boss and some trash.
VP: Completed at level 84(yes pretty high...). Healing issue on trash.
HoO: Haven't done yet.
GB: Completed. Serious issues on trash packs, 2nd boss.
LC: I just can't beat the last boss... way too much damage going all around.

I am running with Prot pala, Arcane mage, destro warlock, Disc priest, elemental shaman. I always have the shaman use
chain healing to help out the aoe healing but doesn't help much. I tried holy but I have a hard time tracking chakra up on
mid fight, and the loss of penance was quite big, so back to disc again. I use PoM alot now, as well as renew compared
to in wotlk, and I think I better replace flash heal with G heal since when I panic I just spam flash heal which empties my
mana instantly. I also put holy radience (I think this was the name) on my paladin to help out the healing, as well as putting LoH in my hot bar for emergencies. I may start putting healing stream totem instead of mana spring...

[Toned]

Triage is key...

You can get away in most cases with just keep your group at 50% health. Then keep the tank at 75%+ depending on the fight. You want to use the most efficient spells as possible don't healing surge spam to keep yourself topped off you will oom before the boss is even close to dead.

A good combination for keeping the tank up as a resto shaman is riptide > 2 healing waves repeat... if damage gets heavy riptide > 1 or 2 greater healing waves depending on dmg > healing wave if you only had to do 1 greater... repeat.

All of the normal cata dungeons are very easily multi-boxed I've succesfully cleared them all with Pal + 3 ele + 1 resto.
The heroics on the other hand hehe. They're challenging and I like it, but I guarantee blizz nerfs them down. There is no way
your average player base will be able to clear these.

[crowdx]

Well personally I have only had difficulty in fights where tank has been taking extreme damage, otherwise my Druid has been fine on mana.
I do agree with a lot of the comments here, it seems that it is now VERY helpful to have more than one class that can help with the heals. With my current team every class except my mage can heal themselves if needed, I am wondering with my next group how it will work with the addition of 2 warlocks and either tanking with a DK or a warrior.
Fun times ahead :)

[doommachine]

so chain heal is worthless? There goes my plan...any idea if it would be best to have all your healers the same class/spec to make healing simpler?

[Starbuck_Jones]

With a paladin and 4 shaman team, having one dedicated healer and a second shaman ready to go to heal has never failed me yet and still proves to be very effective when the healing gets rough. 4x healing totems, 2x chain heal and now with the over powered word of glory 25k heals with a priest shield, and never running out of mana, the only thing that can kill you are mechanics you are not prepared for.

[howster]

Pre cata my druid healer never used lifebloom just in rare occations. No i have to use it all of the time for replenishment, otherwise he's mana gets drained quickly. Having no problems when i do use it, and no problems in instances healing wise. Using isboxer's repeater region give me full control over my healing spells.

[doommachine]

so holy pallys are better than druids? My plan for 10/25 boxing raids was to have a mix of shaman and druid healers....are holy pallys that much better than druids to warrant me (or anyone) mixing shaman/pally heals instead?

[Mercbeast]

so holy pallys are better than druids? My plan for 10/25 boxing raids was to have a mix of shaman and druid healers....are holy pallys that much better than druids to warrant me (or anyone) mixing shaman/pally heals instead?

Frankly, it would not shock me if in what you are trying to do, druids might not be the better choice. No class heals really well now. Paladins have OOM issues just like everyone else, what is nice about druids is, they sort of have fire and forget healing if you stack enough of them together. Throw 5 hots in a 25 man raid, and the guy you just hotted is gonna be good.

But then maybe not!

[crowdx]

Druids have a lot of mobility in their healing, unlike Pallys (unless this changed in the expanison).

[tanknspanker]

I hated the fact they nerfed the pally in healing :(
running in bg's with my pally dk team, light of dawn was the way to aoe heal,
from how c it, they nerfed the light of dawn by half..

the mana is lol now to, i was supposed to litterally just go to a BIG group of allys in my dk group without ANY mana issues..

its a big pitty they nerfed the pala :(

[doommachine]

@merc In the same post you basicaly said to use said to use druids or to not us them...i take that as it realy being anybodys guess as to what is better, especialy 6 months down the road. I just figured that even tho none are any good now due to lack of gear, that there would still be one that stood out as the favorite/best. If this was wrath i think id be fine with 6 shammies chain healing, but that got nerfed into the ground. And with my lack of experience i have no idea what to do.

[Kalros]

Well, here's my take:

I run a Holy Paladin and my team is 85 now and almost in all 333 Item level gear (some 346). I have done every Normal instance in Cataclysm and several bosses on Heroic.

Mana efficiency/regen can certainly be a problem at times. Once I hit about 83, it was bad. Really bad. But after getting several gear upgrades it is manageable. Had to adjust my Paladin's healing macro a bit for efficiency (and I'm sure somebody here can give me some pointers to make it even better), but now I can definitely last several minutes on a Heroic boss fight before going OOM. Here is my healing macro:

/target party1
/cast avenging wrath
/castsequence reset=combat holy light, holy light, holy light, holy light, word of glory
/cast holy shock

I have a separate "Oh Shit!" key for his quick heals in case the tank gets REALLY low on health. I also have a separate key set up to cast divine plea and drink a mana potion.

AoE healing, like someone earlier in the post said, just plain sucks. My Elemental Shamen can barely do any healing at all with their chain heals anymore, so I'm actually considering just having them do Healing Surge on themselves when they get low as opposed to the futility of a chain heal cycle.

But thats my take, for what its worth.

[shadewalker]

in regards to my earlier post, I have started playing around with chakra on my holy priest and i am starting to like using heal much more now. I can can keep renew rolling and heal is usually all i seem to need for my tank not to mention it uses a lot less mana. I am still working out the best way to get chakra macro'ed and how to monitor it's status on my main.

[Daeri]

/cast avenging wrath
/castsequence reset=combat holy light, holy light, holy light, holy light, word of glory
/cast holy shock


Since a very recent hotfix, holy light doesn't trigger "tower of radiance" anymore, no more HP using this spell :(

[Kalros]

Since a very recent hotfix, holy light doesn't trigger "tower of radiance" anymore, no more HP using this spell http://www.dual-boxing.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Yeah, I dont keep my tank Beaconed anyway. I always keep it up on my mage. The Holy Power comes from the holy shock going off whenever its up. Typically by the time the sequence gets to WoG, I've built up a full charge of HP

[Daeri]

Yeah, I dont keep my tank Beaconed anyway. I always keep it up on my mage. The Holy Power comes from the holy shock going off whenever its up. Typically by the time the sequence gets to WoG, I've built up a full charge of HP

I guess you're doing this because your mage is your most fragile toon, and the only one that can't heal himself. Quite clever setup in fact. I only play my holy pally solo but I use radiance a lot during heavy damages phases (each boss seems to have at least one) so I guess you could make good use of this aoe spell if only you can get all your toons quite close to your paladin. Not sure how this strategy would translate to a multi boxed team though.

[Kalyse]

I'm thinking about actually running two healers.. what do you guys think? I was going to have two mouse broadcast regions, one for healer A, one for healer B. I run pally 4x shaman. I think heals are more important than dps.

Also how do you guys use healing rain?

[birdbleed]

I'm thinking about actually running two healers.. what do you guys think? I was going to have two mouse broadcast regions, one for healer A, one for healer B. I run pally 4x shaman. I think heals are more important than dps.

Also how do you guys use healing rain?

Gunsun has a thread in the group comp forum that you may be interested in. He's running 2 resto shaman, and has been reporting that it's going very well. There are some good ideas in the thread.

[Tonuss]

I am wondering is it that the heals are still healing the same amount but all classes now have much more HPs and take more damage and so takes much more healing?
Based on my very limited experience (two non-heroic Stonecore runs at 85 for a guildmate) this is part of it. Players will have 95,000 to 150,000 (or more?) health at level 85, and you are no longer able to heal a player from 0-100% with one or two heals, and your 20k crit heal is only going to fill up 15-20% of the tank's health bar. At the same time, mobs do not seem to be able to quickly drop a tank's health so that you find yourself spamming heals (unless your tank is awful).

What they've done is made mana an issue again, and they added some challenge by making it difficult to simply spam a heal and keep everyone topped off. I did not have an issue keeping everyone topped off, but again I was level 85 in a level 83 normal dungeon. I like the new healing setup, you get to show some skill by selecting the right heals at the right time and keeping people alive is no longer a case of topping everyone off all the time and not worrying about overhealing due to excess mana regen. It does seem to make it tougher on multiboxers, because it's something else to track during a fight.

[Lpwned]

You guys tried NO healers yet? Its working for me just fine

I run 4 Ele shammys and my friend tanks on a Prot Pally (4 DPS 1 tank). We seldom have a problem with heals or manna. (Yea yea, I know you can only do it on this type of comp)
How? Earth living weapon and unleash (30% more healing on next heal) followed by a Healing surge = full tank HP (100K+). Raid damage? 4X healing rain baby :) All my guys use EarthLiving weapon and are specked into improved healing (6% more healing, 15% more healing taken!) after Insta ghost wolf. Each tick of healing rain has a change to proc EarthLiving on the target, and with 4X of them rolling… well you get the idea.

Heals are NOT a problem for me. I can roll heals between my heavy hitting spells to maximize damage and healing. I tried a healing spec and found that the healing and manna efficiency was nowhere close to what I could get running 4 Ele with intermittent heals.


-Clarify this. By efficiency I mean my healer’s manna bar (Not the manna / heal). When your healer is OOM… you wipe. My ele shaman’s manna goes down a LOT slower than a solo healer’s did. And I lose a lot less than 1/4 my damage running all Ele.

[Bigfish]

I'm not too impressed with the curent state of healing. Seems more punitive to the healing role than anything. I can understand that they didn't want fast big efficient heals, but it feels like they just set things to slow small but efficient and fast big ineficient ones. I guess I'm sort of happy the current system favors a transition to a healerless dynamic. Might have to re-evaluate my groups though.

[olibri1]

I'm not too impressed with the curent state of healing. Seems more punitive to the healing role than anything. I can understand that they didn't want fast big efficient heals, but it feels like they just set things to slow small but efficient and fast big ineficient ones. I guess I'm sort of happy the current system favors a transition to a healerless dynamic. Might have to re-evaluate my groups though.
If you look at the big picture, it's hard to see what other choice they had to get here. If you want to move to a new system where people don't get 1-shot anymore, then how else do you make the game continue to be interesting for healers? However, IMO, they made the move too quickly. Healing is by far the most challenging aspect of the game right now.

[Bigfish]

If you look at the big picture, it's hard to see what other choice they had to get here. If you want to move to a new system where people don't get 1-shot anymore, then how else do you make the game continue to be interesting for healers? However, IMO, they made the move too quickly. Healing is by far the most challenging aspect of the game right now.

Well, I'm always in favor of moving away from dedicated healers in favor of highly synergistic classes, which would have been the ideal situation and seems to be the road we are heading down with things like Word of Glory and Discipline Priests, but it seems like we went from OOM-is-a-bit-of-an-issue to no-one-OOMs because OOMing isn't fun, but that made everything too easy, so now OOMs, OOMs for everyone! Really, it would appear to be a text book example of pendulum nerfing.

But then, I've advocated doing away with the holy trinity for years, largely because it seems intent on pigeonholing some poor suckers in to babysitting health bars, which is no where near as fun as beating the tar out of something.

[confusedtx5]

I've definitely noticed a difference while dungeoning. Its a very different feel to wotlk healing; in a good way though.
Its like our health pools quadrupled over the levels, mana costs of heal spells went up with hp, but the actual heal amount stayed like it was at 80.
Be smart with your mana and its great, but abuse it and its noticeable.

Last dungeon I did was Halls of Origination @ 84. Keeping ES up on the tank, and I was getting away with riptide -> GHW, GHW as my main heals, Healing rain, Chain heals, and Healing wave for the team.
Riptide is good heals per mana used, so I was defaulting to it as much as possible.

[Redbeard]

I just hit 84 last night and tried to go back to the Stonecore to try the last boss again (who i havent been able to beat yet) before bed... I was able to smoke this dungeon (up until the last boss) at 83, and am unable to clear the 2nd boss at 84... i just run out of mana. Its very annoying. I know I need some more gear upgrades, its just very disconcerting to level up and go backwards in power though.

I know itll be fine when i get some better gear... just complaining... blah.

Very interested in seeing how my disc priest healer is going to feel at 85.

[olibri1]

Healing is very different than wotlk. You may not have a gear problem and more an issue with learning the new mode of healing. It sure took me a while to learn it.

[Toned]

Healing is all about triage now. Keeping your group topped off 100% of the time is going to run you OOM insanely fast.

You need to keep your healer and dps with enough life that they stay alive, but don't waste time and mana healing them to full health pools are much larger now, and heals are slow and steady or fast and costly.

Your tank is really the one you want to keep topped off, and don't just spam fast heals like WOTLK you will be oom. Ideally you want to be casting shields/hots and mana efficient small heals constantly on the tank where your mana barely moves, and then the slow big heals for the "spike" boss damage.

Healing isn't the only issue make sure you manage your tank cooldowns accordingly.

[gunsun]

I understand the complaints. I tore up stonecore at 82, except for the last boss, and now at 85 I'm having mana issues trying to finish the place off. I've noticed similar issues with other zones. VP was a faceroll at 82, but has actually gotten harder the more I level.

I've noticed three annoying details:


My tank's damage mitigation is amazing compared to 82 but the casters have not improved at all. So the trash mobs with AOE skills can still take 10% off everyone's health if you don't move fast enough.

My casters are around 92-95k health each, but they only have mana pools around 66k. I've been equipping everything I can find with int/spirit/haste trying to get their mana pools up and cast big heals fast. Most of my team is in caster cloth.

Nothing I do, atm, is helping heal scaling or mana. I'm running 2x resto and have moved away from chain heals to direct heals for everything (since so many talents buff direct heals) and I'm still having issues. Currently I direct heal the 2 dps, with the 20% self heal from the resto, then I self heal, and I still barely scratch my health pools.


I'm trying different combos of waves, trying to find a balance between good heals and good cast speed. It's very frustrating. On a plus side, the 2x healing stream totems generate 1800 hp or so per tick, so minor aoe can be ignored.

I'm able to finish zones but I stop to drink all the time.

I'm working on an update to my 2x resto build. I've got a bizzare talent and macro setup that really helps with mana regen but I haven't found a graceful solution to group heals yet. I'm also about 10 item points from entering heroics, so my time is spent farming drops and reps for gear.

[gunsun]

I'm changing my healing model to adjust to Cata, too. However, the complaint that the non-heroic instances get harder the more you level is real and annoying.

A healing spell's power doesn't go up, just it's mana cost. Everything is a % of the pool now. So the strategy that works at 82 breaks at 83, then you get a strategy at 83 that works and it breaks at 84. I'm at 85 now and reworking my strategy, yet again, for 85 normals.

If anything else was breaking, like caster dps pools, then that would be something. Punishing healers for leveling doesn't make much sense to me, but I'm on the tail end of it and putting it behind me.

I'm assuming I'll reconfigure yet again for heroics until the gear scaling helps with the current-non-scaling mana pools.

[gunsun]

Not to rant too much, but here's something else that bothers me.

I'm running a frost mage because of frost's survivability and mana replenishment. Sometimes he's arcane.

Frost is the worst dps of the 3 specs. I know that and I'm cool with it; however, my frost mage will 1-2 times a fight proc a 55k hit. Not only that, but it's instant cast and mana free.

If my healers would proc an instant, mana free heal that was only 20k I'd be happy. They don't.

I've got no problems with a design change that says one resto shaman can't chain heal a group to full health anymore. That's fine. But two dedicated healers have issues direct healing three characters?

Currently 5 arcane mages can clear normal instances. I can clear them on a mixed team, but boss fights take 3 times longer.

If healing is meant to be a challenge, why can you make successful groups without healers?

[Kalros]

I will say that it DOES get better with gear, at least for my Holy Paladin, for sure. However I also had to adjust my macro for more mana conservation over better healing (which puts me into the "Oh Shit!" situations alot more often). Once my Paladin started collecting 346/359 gear, it got better and better.

The thing I'm wondering now is wether I want to start stacking INT or Spirit gems.

[gunsun]

The few upgrades I've got have helped.

From some research on elitist jerks, I'm enchanting/gemming/reforging for int/haste on my team. Spirit seems to only help mana regen out of combat. I'd rather have more mana in combat. And I'd rather have faster heals than the occasional crit.

Does anyone have a better strategy for gear? I'm trying to find items with more int/spirit than stam, but the ratio seems to be 2 stam for 1 int atm.

[Toned]

Spells scale with level so if you aren't upgrading your gear as you level your mana last less and less

[Toned]

The few upgrades I've got have helped.

From some research on elitist jerks, I'm enchanting/gemming/reforging for int/haste on my team. Spirit seems to only help mana regen out of combat. I'd rather have more mana in combat. And I'd rather have faster heals than the occasional crit.

Does anyone have a better strategy for gear? I'm trying to find items with more int/spirit than stam, but the ratio seems to be 2 stam for 1 int atm.

Spirit helps your not casting regen.... if you stack spirit just stop casting and it will go up.

I'm a fan of Int and mastery right now.

[gunsun]

Spells scale with level so if you aren't upgrading your gear as you level your mana last less and less

This is a good point and a mistake I keep making.

I keep thinking like I'm in Wrath and spells aren't a % of my mana pool. I still like INT for the rest of what it does, but big mana pools aren't that meaningful anymore. Maybe they were a % and just smaller in Wrath?

Either way I mostly ignored spell costs before Cata.

[gunsun]

My bad, yet again, they aren't a hard % of the mana pool. Some spells are and I wasn't looking closely at all of them. So I guess larger mana pools are more useful.

[genghiskhan]

if all the spells were a straight % then youd never have to gem or enchant for your mana pool and you could reforge "away" from your mana pool.

[genghiskhan]

if theyd just shorten the bandage cooldown...