I'd have to ask Syke, a priest on my server who is notorious for PvP healing. Also, he's gayer than I am. I did actually silence a warrior yesterday, to stop a fear bomb. We capped the flag and when the silence wore of he fear bombed. I felt accomplished.
I LOVE PvP healing as a priest. Fuck shadow for BGs. Dispelling and fear bombing and healing and buffing and keeping two rogues alive while they just slice up everyone around them.
Jesus, I felt awesome.
I think plenty of people would love pvp healing as a priest if they felt they could survive, which is why so many people love healing pallies in pvp.
Are blessed recovery, martyrdom, and blessed resilience enough?
I think you can skip blessed recovery. And yes, it's enough to get you started. Once you get some honor built up and start stacking resilience, your survivability will start climbing further.
Just keep your teammates aware of the fact that you should be regarded exactly like you are in PvE.. if something is beating on you, you're gonna need someone to pull it off. There's no two ways about it.
xzzy on
0
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
edited May 2007
At 69 I still use PW:S because if Mind Blast is on cooldown and the mob is on top of me, all I got is wanding or SW : D, which I have this awful habit of it backfiring with the mob dropping to 1% but not dying. I tried the don't use shield thing, but my downtime increased because I ended up burning more mana not less.
Also, psychic scream is situational. There are so many times I won't use it because I'm guaranteed to get adds.
At 69 I still use PW:S because if Mind Blast is on cooldown and the mob is on top of me, all I got is wanding or SW : D, which I have this awful habit of it backfiring with the mob dropping to 1% but not dying. I tried the don't use shield thing, but my downtime increased because I ended up burning more mana not less.
Also, psychic scream is situational. There are so many times I won't use it because I'm guaranteed to get adds.
I use psychic scream almost every pull at 66, even in humanoid camps. I just pull at the fringe and try to position the mob so that when it gets to me it has to run around a tree or something to get to the other mobs. If I do get an add I just dot it up, try to get one mindflay in and then mindblast, wand-wand-wand until I can SW:D. By this time the first mob has dropped to dots and if the second mob is a really vicious melee and takes more than 20% of my hp I just throw a VE into my next fight or cannibalize if it's up, (not an option for everyone, I know).
If I'm not in a humanoid camp I can scream without adds about 98% of the time. (That's an honest estimate, not a cliche.) The more you do it, the more you can account for its unpredictability.
I guess I would argue that it's situational when not to scream while solo grinding, as opposed to the other way around. Whatever floats your boat, though.
Also, psychic scream is situational. There are so many times I won't use it because I'm guaranteed to get adds.
At 70 I use Psychic Scream TO get adds.
I will Shield > Touch > Pain > Mind Blast > Flay > Fear > Touch mob #2 > Pain mob #2 > Mind Blast mob #2 (First mob dies) > Touch mob #3 > Pain mob #3 > Embrace mob #3 > Death #2 if it hasn't ticked to death > Flay mob 3# to death > Send Fiend onto #4 and just keep on rolling until I'm OOM.
I can kill about 12-14 Zaxxis mobs in Netherstorm before I consider my mana too low to pull another. I also have 2 +Damage Trinktes and Inner Focus that I cycle through. I can usually grind through the timers and use them each twice.
In my +spirit gear [get up to 360ish spirit while Spirit Tap'd], my mana pool is about 500mp smaller, so even if Spirit Tap ticks me to full [about 105mp/tick], as soon as I swap to my regular gear, I'm still a little short on mana. It might not sound like a big deal, but when I chain-pull, the DR starts to wear on me so I can't just keep pulling forever.
If one did start collecting PvP gear, where would you start? The boots/bracers/belt in BGs, or go straight for the Arena?
The arena gear is better, but it's obviously harder to get, and is a little bit catch 22 because having low stam/resilience in arena really starts to hurt as your rating goes up. And it takes awhile, depending on how many teams you're in, and how well your teams do.
If you want to PvP, grind battlegrounds for the honor reward gear. The aim is to get the 2-piece bonus as quickly as you can, so you can stack it with your arena 2-piece bonus. Avoid the off-pieces (belt, bracers, cape etc.), they have good stam and resilience, but there's no straight +healing option for them. Once you have 2 pieces decide if you're better off getting 4 pieces of honor gear or just buying offdrops. You really shouldn't be wearing 4 pieces of the honor set - it's hands down worse than the arena gear, and grinding BGs sucks. You want to shoot for 2 of each, and eventually all arena gear.
I LOVE PvP healing as a priest. Fuck shadow for BGs. Dispelling and fear bombing and healing and buffing and keeping two rogues alive while they just slice up everyone around them.
Jesus, I felt awesome.
I think plenty of people would love pvp healing as a priest if they felt they could survive, which is why so many people love healing pallies in pvp.
Are blessed recovery, martyrdom, and blessed resilience enough?
Nope.
I disagree, although I guess it depends what you consider "enough". Can I keep myself alive against most mages, rogues, hunters, shaman, paladins, warlocks, shadow priests long enough for my team mates to take care of them? Generally, yeah. I would consider that enough. Warriors kick my ass; I find them alot more difficult than I did as shadow at 60, but whatever. I don't want to be invincible, I just want to be a solid PvP healer. And priests are perfect for that.
Fighting rogues as full Disc is incredible. I don't care what people say: I reflective shield.
I can't imagine dealing 600-700 damage being more useful than being uncrittable for 6 seconds in any kind of group PvP. I guess if you did nothing but duel it would be cool, but meh.
After glancing through the Black Temple and Hyjal loot tables, I'm beginning to see Saeris' point about the lack of spirit on Holy Priest gear.
It doesn't surprise me. If fits entirely with Blizz's philosophy on *how* priests should heal. They nerfed downranking and gave us more +healing. My personal theory is that they tune boss fights so that priests run out of mana right at the end of the fight. If you aren't geared well, it's always much sooner than that. Now they are not giving us more spirit or mp5 gear to prevent us from being able to stack those items to circumvent their designs.
The other night I went through Shadow Labs and we rocked it. We killed Vorpal on the 2nd kite direction and didn't need the usual 3rd, so we had insane dps. We get to Murmur, and damn he wiped us 5 times because I would run out of mana healing just the druid tank. We'd get him to 1%, and I would burn through 2 mana pots, inner focus, power infusion, my shadowfiend, and a couple of trinkets. I even had mana oil and nightfin soup going. I was being VERY careful not to overheal if I could help it, but he would still empty my mana just before we could finish him off. The last try, the tank died and our rogue managed to stay alive and finish him off but only because I had just enough mana to throw up a rank 1 GH to keep him alive long enough for the final blow. I didn't think I was undergeared because I'm in all blues at this point, although no purples yet. Maybe it was the druid tank who just needed better gear so I wouldn't have to heal him as much, but it just reinforced in my mind the idea that Blizz tunes these fights for healing mana to last just so long, and you either kill the boss or its a wipe.
After glancing through the Black Temple and Hyjal loot tables, I'm beginning to see Saeris' point about the lack of spirit on Holy Priest gear.
It doesn't surprise me. If fits entirely with Blizz's philosophy on *how* priests should heal. They nerfed downranking and gave us more +healing. My personal theory is that they tune boss fights so that priests run out of mana right at the end of the fight. If you aren't geared well, it's always much sooner than that. Now they are not giving us more spirit or mp5 gear to prevent us from being able to stack those items to circumvent their designs.
The other night I went through Shadow Labs and we rocked it. We killed Vorpal on the 2nd kite direction and didn't need the usual 3rd, so we had insane dps. We get to Murmur, and damn he wiped us 5 times because I would run out of mana healing just the druid tank. We'd get him to 1%, and I would burn through 2 mana pots, inner focus, power infusion, my shadowfiend, and a couple of trinkets. I even had mana oil and nightfin soup going. I was being VERY careful not to overheal if I could help it, but he would still empty my mana just before we could finish him off. The last try, the tank died and our rogue managed to stay alive and finish him off but only because I had just enough mana to throw up a rank 1 GH to keep him alive long enough for the final blow. I didn't think I was undergeared because I'm in all blues at this point, although no purples yet. Maybe it was the druid tank who just needed better gear so I wouldn't have to heal him as much, but it just reinforced in my mind the idea that Blizz tunes these fights for healing mana to last just so long, and you either kill the boss or its a wipe.
I really hope you weren't healing him through the sonic booms.
I LOVE PvP healing as a priest. Fuck shadow for BGs. Dispelling and fear bombing and healing and buffing and keeping two rogues alive while they just slice up everyone around them.
PvP healing really is a lot of fun.. I have more fun doing it than DPS, because nothing pisses off DPS classes more than seeing all their damage erased. And I love pissing people off.
Xzzy, is that some kind of addon you've got there that show's raid member's health bars? I've been trying to heal in alterac valley but dragging health bars out from the raid window and arranging them is fiddly and annoying.
Yeah, Grid is about as good as it gets for raid healing. There are mods that are probably "better", in terms of the total amount of information that's available, but none of them are as compact and purely functional as Grid.
Eh, I prefer Praid to Grid. They're both equally compact, but I feel that Praid is just more pleasing to look at, and less obtrusive when I'm DPSing.
Plus it's way less hassle reading the Praid shorthands (Ma for magic debuff, Rn for renew on target, etc) over memorizing what the silly boxes on each corner of each frame are set to.
Just hit 22 last night on my Troll ( 8-) ) Priest, my very first priest. Every ten levels is a goddamn goldmine for these guys, I had to completely redo my bars at 20 to accommodate everything which was a pretty kinda thing.
Anyway, since 20 I've been using a pattern similar to:
- Most damaging spell (usually Holy Fire, possibly Mind Blast or Smite)
- Flay once or twice until he gets to melee
- For high HP mobs, SW:P as the last Flay finishes
- Wand/Mind Blast when up until dead, repeat
Is this the right way to go about things? Will the pattern change as I level (oh god I can't wait for 30 and 40 and 50 at this rate)?
The other question I have is, what should I know about healing that's really, really important? At 19 I was the healer for a Wailing Caverns run, and I swear I saved the day like three times from our Mage's ineptitude (though one "save" consisted of making it out of the instance and rezzing vOv) through lucky healing and shielding, which was awesome. But I get the feeling I shouldn't have HAD to save the day with such... well, desperation, so I need to learn the tricks of the trade. I was using downranked Heal (actually Lesser Heal 3, since I had Heal 1) and full-rank Renew, with PW:S reserved for emergencies, but beyond that and "hael plz" I'm pretty clueless. Also, are there any mods useful to healing I should know about?
I haven't soloed as a shadow priest in a while but as a general rule:
- Open with Mind Blast.
- Immediately cast SW: P and back up after the global cooldown trips.
- Mindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflay.
- Wand down the last few percentages of the mob's life so you're out of the five second rule and get the full effect of Spirit Tab when it dies (may not be necessary, especially in the later levels).
- Smite and Holy Fire not ever.
Edit: Downranking doesn't seem incredibly beneficial until you get some decent +healing gear, which could be a while as awful as pre-expansion itemization is for healers.
You're more or less right about PW: S. It should be noted that you don't want to cast it on tanks if it can be avoided, as warriors and druids generate rage from blows which it absorbs, and pallys generate mana from healing which they wouldn't get if they were never damaged to begin with.
As to the question about healing mods, you don't really need anything beyond standard stuff for every other class, save a more comprehensive raid frame. Most people will recommend PerfectRaid or Grid (although I maintain that the former sucks now). Beyond that it's all preference.
I really hope you weren't healing him through the sonic booms.
Are you asking if he would run out of the sonic boom before it went off? If so, then yes he would, although sometimes he didn't make it all the way out. Since he was a druid with no intercept/charge abilities, it was tough to do. Probably why it was so hard to heal him.
although sometimes he didn't make it all the way out
If he wasn't getting out in time he was
a) standing too close, Murmur has a massive hit box
b) reacting too slowly
c) both
What I do is angle my camera during the entire fight so pressing forward insta-spins me around and I get out with easily a second to spare. I haven't gotten hit by a Sonic Boom in forever. Speaking of that though, does anyone know if the Sonic Boom slow is suppressed by charging after the 2.1 patch? Because if it does then even if the tank doesn't get out they can charge back in and save the healer some healing.
I liked PerfectRaid much more before 2.0 came and killed most of the aesthetic and functional appeal it held for me.
Star Trek UI ftw. The new PerfectRaid aesthetic, while being pretty nice, and leaps and bounds better-looking than CTRaid windows... just isn't Holo-Deck enough.
I'm thinking about making a priest and i'm trying to decide on race.
It will be alliance and the Draenei ability Symbol of Hope seems pretty great for a priest since it's a mana regen, but does it only work on your party? Or will it work on you if you're solo? WoWWiki isn't clear on that.
Mana regen, a race based HP regen and Fear Ward seems to be a pretty sweet combo for a priest.
But i'm a priest noob, so i could also be totally wrong.
H*R on
Nintendo Network: WarrenMSP 3DS: 4184-2362-9697 PSN: Skywarrd
Posts
I think you can skip blessed recovery. And yes, it's enough to get you started. Once you get some honor built up and start stacking resilience, your survivability will start climbing further.
Just keep your teammates aware of the fact that you should be regarded exactly like you are in PvE.. if something is beating on you, you're gonna need someone to pull it off. There's no two ways about it.
Also, psychic scream is situational. There are so many times I won't use it because I'm guaranteed to get adds.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
If I'm not in a humanoid camp I can scream without adds about 98% of the time. (That's an honest estimate, not a cliche.) The more you do it, the more you can account for its unpredictability.
I guess I would argue that it's situational when not to scream while solo grinding, as opposed to the other way around. Whatever floats your boat, though.
At 70 I use Psychic Scream TO get adds.
I will Shield > Touch > Pain > Mind Blast > Flay > Fear > Touch mob #2 > Pain mob #2 > Mind Blast mob #2 (First mob dies) > Touch mob #3 > Pain mob #3 > Embrace mob #3 > Death #2 if it hasn't ticked to death > Flay mob 3# to death > Send Fiend onto #4 and just keep on rolling until I'm OOM.
I can kill about 12-14 Zaxxis mobs in Netherstorm before I consider my mana too low to pull another. I also have 2 +Damage Trinktes and Inner Focus that I cycle through. I can usually grind through the timers and use them each twice.
In my +spirit gear [get up to 360ish spirit while Spirit Tap'd], my mana pool is about 500mp smaller, so even if Spirit Tap ticks me to full [about 105mp/tick], as soon as I swap to my regular gear, I'm still a little short on mana. It might not sound like a big deal, but when I chain-pull, the DR starts to wear on me so I can't just keep pulling forever.
Oh woe is me.
The arena gear is better, but it's obviously harder to get, and is a little bit catch 22 because having low stam/resilience in arena really starts to hurt as your rating goes up. And it takes awhile, depending on how many teams you're in, and how well your teams do.
If you want to PvP, grind battlegrounds for the honor reward gear. The aim is to get the 2-piece bonus as quickly as you can, so you can stack it with your arena 2-piece bonus. Avoid the off-pieces (belt, bracers, cape etc.), they have good stam and resilience, but there's no straight +healing option for them. Once you have 2 pieces decide if you're better off getting 4 pieces of honor gear or just buying offdrops. You really shouldn't be wearing 4 pieces of the honor set - it's hands down worse than the arena gear, and grinding BGs sucks. You want to shoot for 2 of each, and eventually all arena gear.
For other gear, the following are pretty good until you have the spare honor to replace them:
Hierophant's Sash
Adal's Recovery Necklace
Runed Dagger of Solace
Wand of the Netherwing
There's a few other things but nothing really springs to mind at the moment.
I disagree, although I guess it depends what you consider "enough". Can I keep myself alive against most mages, rogues, hunters, shaman, paladins, warlocks, shadow priests long enough for my team mates to take care of them? Generally, yeah. I would consider that enough. Warriors kick my ass; I find them alot more difficult than I did as shadow at 60, but whatever. I don't want to be invincible, I just want to be a solid PvP healer. And priests are perfect for that.
And Pain Suppression is basically dispel-immune, making Disc more appealing.
Still not worth losing Blessed Resilience.
Being able to spam /laugh while a rogue tries to solo you down in 5v5 is even more interesting.
I can't imagine dealing 600-700 damage being more useful than being uncrittable for 6 seconds in any kind of group PvP. I guess if you did nothing but duel it would be cool, but meh.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
It doesn't surprise me. If fits entirely with Blizz's philosophy on *how* priests should heal. They nerfed downranking and gave us more +healing. My personal theory is that they tune boss fights so that priests run out of mana right at the end of the fight. If you aren't geared well, it's always much sooner than that. Now they are not giving us more spirit or mp5 gear to prevent us from being able to stack those items to circumvent their designs.
The other night I went through Shadow Labs and we rocked it. We killed Vorpal on the 2nd kite direction and didn't need the usual 3rd, so we had insane dps. We get to Murmur, and damn he wiped us 5 times because I would run out of mana healing just the druid tank. We'd get him to 1%, and I would burn through 2 mana pots, inner focus, power infusion, my shadowfiend, and a couple of trinkets. I even had mana oil and nightfin soup going. I was being VERY careful not to overheal if I could help it, but he would still empty my mana just before we could finish him off. The last try, the tank died and our rogue managed to stay alive and finish him off but only because I had just enough mana to throw up a rank 1 GH to keep him alive long enough for the final blow. I didn't think I was undergeared because I'm in all blues at this point, although no purples yet. Maybe it was the druid tank who just needed better gear so I wouldn't have to heal him as much, but it just reinforced in my mind the idea that Blizz tunes these fights for healing mana to last just so long, and you either kill the boss or its a wipe.
Do you have a link to complete loot tables?
I really hope you weren't healing him through the sonic booms.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=6968fce01ae14907ac90880a2eb77629&topic=215.0
Most all of the Hyjal cloth healing loot has no Spirit, but some of the Black Temple stuff does.
Of course, when it has +spirit, it doesn't have mana/5.
It's basically shoehorning you into Tier 6 if you want balanced healing gear.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Xzzy, is that some kind of addon you've got there that show's raid member's health bars? I've been trying to heal in alterac valley but dragging health bars out from the raid window and arranging them is fiddly and annoying.
Plus it's way less hassle reading the Praid shorthands (Ma for magic debuff, Rn for renew on target, etc) over memorizing what the silly boxes on each corner of each frame are set to.
Anyway, since 20 I've been using a pattern similar to:
- Most damaging spell (usually Holy Fire, possibly Mind Blast or Smite)
- Flay once or twice until he gets to melee
- For high HP mobs, SW:P as the last Flay finishes
- Wand/Mind Blast when up until dead, repeat
Is this the right way to go about things? Will the pattern change as I level (oh god I can't wait for 30 and 40 and 50 at this rate)?
The other question I have is, what should I know about healing that's really, really important? At 19 I was the healer for a Wailing Caverns run, and I swear I saved the day like three times from our Mage's ineptitude (though one "save" consisted of making it out of the instance and rezzing vOv) through lucky healing and shielding, which was awesome. But I get the feeling I shouldn't have HAD to save the day with such... well, desperation, so I need to learn the tricks of the trade. I was using downranked Heal (actually Lesser Heal 3, since I had Heal 1) and full-rank Renew, with PW:S reserved for emergencies, but beyond that and "hael plz" I'm pretty clueless. Also, are there any mods useful to healing I should know about?
- Open with Mind Blast.
- Immediately cast SW: P and back up after the global cooldown trips.
- Mindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflaymindflay.
- Wand down the last few percentages of the mob's life so you're out of the five second rule and get the full effect of Spirit Tab when it dies (may not be necessary, especially in the later levels).
- Smite and Holy Fire not ever.
Edit: Downranking doesn't seem incredibly beneficial until you get some decent +healing gear, which could be a while as awful as pre-expansion itemization is for healers.
You're more or less right about PW: S. It should be noted that you don't want to cast it on tanks if it can be avoided, as warriors and druids generate rage from blows which it absorbs, and pallys generate mana from healing which they wouldn't get if they were never damaged to begin with.
As to the question about healing mods, you don't really need anything beyond standard stuff for every other class, save a more comprehensive raid frame. Most people will recommend PerfectRaid or Grid (although I maintain that the former sucks now). Beyond that it's all preference.
does not compute
If he wasn't getting out in time he was
a) standing too close, Murmur has a massive hit box
b) reacting too slowly
c) both
What I do is angle my camera during the entire fight so pressing forward insta-spins me around and I get out with easily a second to spare. I haven't gotten hit by a Sonic Boom in forever. Speaking of that though, does anyone know if the Sonic Boom slow is suppressed by charging after the 2.1 patch? Because if it does then even if the tank doesn't get out they can charge back in and save the healer some healing.
Star Trek UI ftw. The new PerfectRaid aesthetic, while being pretty nice, and leaps and bounds better-looking than CTRaid windows... just isn't Holo-Deck enough.
It will be alliance and the Draenei ability Symbol of Hope seems pretty great for a priest since it's a mana regen, but does it only work on your party? Or will it work on you if you're solo? WoWWiki isn't clear on that.
Mana regen, a race based HP regen and Fear Ward seems to be a pretty sweet combo for a priest.
But i'm a priest noob, so i could also be totally wrong.
3DS: 4184-2362-9697
PSN: Skywarrd
And I love my Draenei priest.