Restored

As of yesterday, everyone is dressed. Of course I got so used to seeing my tauren bankalt in his undies that I left him like that. Don't be startled if you're in TBluff and a half naked tauren runs past you...it's just me! During this whole ordeal, I spent a little time playing an alt I have over on Terokkar. My orc shammy. Had a blast doing some pvp. Enhance shammies can kick some bg butt! That renewed my interest in PvP and I've been having a great time healing on my resto shammy. If you're a PvE healer and you're tired of the grind, go heal some battlegrounds. Every bg is different. Loads of fun and terribly under-appreciated! Battlegrounds can be awesome and painful one after another. Nothing sucks like getting owned. But nothing rocks like stomping the other team. I would enjoy bg's alot more if I could get the target off my back, but hey...such is the life of the healer!

Healer assist.

Do you help your healer? I started WoW as dps. A warrior, a priest (shadow) and a shammy were the first toons I leveled. I didn't want to tank and honestly rarely healed. I think wailing caverns was the last instance I healed on my priest! I enjoyed the simplicity of dps. It wasn't until recently that I started to actively heal on my shaman and priest. Once I started, I noticed a change in how I dps. Up until recently, I took my healer for granted. I didn't make things difficult by pulling or grabbing aggro or anything, I just assumed my heals would come when I needed them. But recently, I've noticed that I pay as much attention to the group (via grid) as I do when I heal. If I'm on my shammy I almost always ask the healer if they have a preference for totems. Some appreciate the extra armor of stoneskin (if you have a DK in your group stoneskin should be your default totem as HoW does not stack with SoE totem). Some want cleansing totems in HoR or AN or any of the poison throwing instances. Some healers would rather have the benefit of health or mana totems. If your healer is a shaman, check what totems they are dropping and change as needed. Duplicated totems have no added benefit. Depending upon the situation I find myself throwing bubbles on party members when I'm on my spriest (the final boss in FoS comes to mind...you know the one where dps never stops on "mirrored soul"). I can think of many instances where the extra bubbles made a significant difference. Of course how and what you do depends upon the healer, the instance and the situation. Don't assume your healer needs your help, but don't assume they wouldn't appreciate a little as well! If you started as a healer, do you dps differently? If you play multiple classes do you find that it affects how you play generally?

Mitigate...the untold story

Well, thanks to Miss Medicina for setting off a world-wide firestorm debating the proper use of healing terms such as reactive, direct, and mitigate. Currently at the forefront of WoW philosophizing...mitigation vs. prevention. Or something like that. Anyway, reading Miss Medicina's post and Wugan's follow up one realizes that there are many different ways to define and interpret healing and the words we use to describe it. There are a few words that came up in particular. The word that started it all was mitigation. To lessen. In healing terms to lessen the effect of damage. By definition all healing spells are mitigation spells (for the sake of argument, "all healing spells" includes actual heals, shields and poison/curse/disease eradicators), because all of those spells have the potential to lessen damage. A shield will lessen damage, in fact it may prevent the damage from a blow entirely. In a raid/instance, it is unlikely that a shield will be entirely preventative, as it will more than likely absorb the maximum amount of damage before it times itself out. For the sake of easy numbers lets say the shield could absorb a 5k hit and the tank was hit for 10k. 5k damage was prevented....and the 10k hit was mitigated....it was lessened in severity. Now, if the hit was only 2.5k and the mob only hit once before he died, then yes the bubble was entirely preventive. A cleansing totem can be both preventive and mitigative. Hunter gets hit by poison bug in AN. Damage starts to roll. Cleansing totem ticks and abolishes poison effect. It has mitigated the effect and prevented further effect. Can a healing wave do this? Or a flash heal? No. They can only mitigate damage. Damage occurs and a traditional heal spell heals the damage...mitigates it...lessens it. Life was removed from our health pool, and the spell filled it again. So all healing type spells mitigate, but they don't all prevent. Some can do both...but not all.

So, if we're clear on my vision of mitigation vs. prevention, let's move on to the next set of words I saw. Proactive vs. reactive. To be fair, the spells themselves are neither proactive or reactive (for the most part!). It is how they are used that is proactive or reactive. If a druid casts an HoT in anticipation of damage, it is proactive. Same for a shield. Same for a chain heal. If it's cast before damage, to either prevent or mitigate by landing as close to simultaneously as possible...it is proactive. The key word is before. A bubble could be cast as much reactively as it could proactively. The priest sees a dps going down but the tank requires some fast healing. The priest could reactively bubble the dps to prevent or mitigate further damage. Therefore, I suggest that proactive and reactive be reserved to describe healing itself. The style with which one heals. Obviously any healer uses both, and all healing spells could be used both ways (for the most part! One would not cure disease or cleanse something proactively so those dont apply). I also said the spells themselves are not pro or reactive, rather it is the cast that is. Casting an earth shield is proactive. However, I would say that the way the spell itself works is entirely reactive, as is PoM. I suppose they are proactively reactive. We still on board here?
The last pair of words I saw were direct vs heal over time. This is the obvious one. All traditional spells fall into one or both categories. I think really, these are the only two words we need to describe traditional healing spells. Do they fill the health pool right away, slowly, or a little of both.

In conclusion...all healing type spells mitigate. Some prevent. Some do both. The healer casts his/her mitigatory or preventive (some of which may or may not be direct or heal over time) spells in a proactive or reactive manner. Man I am so lost. Feel free to comment on my awesome philosophization.

Migraines, healing, grid and healbot...

Okay, so my intent was to post my thoughts on grid vs healbot yesterday. Unfortunately I was sidelined by a migraine. I've only had one other migraine in my life, about 7-8 years ago. For those of you who get these anymore than once per month....I bow to you and offer my sincerest sympathy. I don't get headaches in general that often, but when I do they're usually not much more than a nuisance. Migraines however....man, that knocked me out. Fortunately I only had morning appointments so was able to leave the office and sequester myself in a room with some painkillers and no lights until it went away. Needless to say, I wasn't feeling all that great so WoW wasn't on my list of priorities. A little later in the day I did get in a random 5 man on my shammy. Which leads me to the second topic in my title....healing.
I am still a relatively new healer. I'm no longer at the bottom of the learning curve, but certainly not at the top yet. Truthfully I have been known to drop a group when the HoR or PoS loading screen pops up. I just haven't felt ready to heal those. And I figure the group is now in front of the queue so they'll replace me in less than a minute...no harm, no foul. Yesterday however was different. I queued for a random as a healer and sure enough up pops PoS. I let group know that I had not healed this instance and they were all okay with it. Everything started out quite well. Moved through the trash without any problems. Got to Garfrost and finished him off no problem. Of course it was after Garfrost that I realized I had entered the instance without any mana restoring beverages....duh. Fortunately mana regen with water shield and mana totem is pretty fast so again group was okay with my noobishness. Moved on to Ick and Krick, one shot. Easy. Everyone did what they needed to do. Cleansing totem was a great help and despite retpally dc'ing during fight we still did it relatively easy. So far so good, I was feeling pretty confident. Of course its the mobs on the hill as you move up to the ice tunnel that are the real test. First group, tank falls off side and loses aggro...which quickly shifts to myself and the others.....wipe. No problem, we dust ourselves off and get back on it. Tank marks everyone this time and we knock out the first group. Hate those fire guys man...they are killers! Mark second group and finish them. Then we move on to the skeleton guys. Thinkgs get a little laggy and I don't get a heal in time and tank dies...el wipo (that's spanish for "wipe"). No problem, we're all okay finish off the rest of the skeleton yucky melee and caster guys. We get to the tunnel and all run for the middle plate/disc thingy. Tank spams thunderclap, I throw RT's on as many people as I can and we easily make it through the first wave. Then tank decides not to wait for everyone (not sure why???) and start second part. Myself and another caster who were getting mana are left behind...result....le wipe (that's french for "wipe"). Tank apologizes, we rez and everyone arrives at tunnel entrance and for some odd reason the tank starts in...ZOMG! We're all at half health and half mana, but we manage to pull it off. We agree to one shot tyrannus which we do actually quite easily. A good learning experience over all. Thanks to the boomkins colossal dps (retpally and spriest were not so stellar, but not bad) we made it! I had just changed my glyphs too. I now have earth shield, LHW and CH. LHW works perfectly for the other 5 mans, but for these ICC 5 mans, it's definitely underpowered. You must use HW. Fortunately with the speed buff from RT, HW works very well. Big heals, relatively fast. I am considering changing to HW glyph instead of CH glyph. Totem choices for PoS. Obviously the cleansing totem for the ick/krick fight (I use mana otherwise). Wondering if the frost resist totem is useful and if so do the benefits outweight the loss of the flametongue totem (my default fire totem). Otherwise, stoneskin and wrath of air for the other two.
On to the great grid vs. healbot debate. Crankyhealer pointed me to a great comparison that had already been written by Keeva at Treebarkjacket. A better and more thorough comparison I could not have written. The only thing I had to add probably has more to do with clique than grid as grid and healbots frames are pretty similar (grid being a little more modifiable with addons). One of the things I didn't like about clique was that binding spells to an unmodified left, right or middle mouse click leads to all kinds of problems when using those buttons for their other ingame uses. It is possible that I have not figured out some modification that makes those functions only apply when over a grid unitframe, but not sure. The mouseover click feature of healbot is smarter so it literally only applies when you're over a unitframe. This means you have more possible mouse key bindings. For me, shift and control are the only easily useable modifiers, so that gives 9 bindings on healbot to cliques 6. I use a combo of keyboard and mouse so it's not a huge deal for me particularly with the limited shaman spells. Priests however have just under one thousand spell choices, so having those truly functional extra three mouse click bindings is really nice. As I said, I may have missed something in the setup that negates all of what I just said, but for now that is my two cents (for what it's worth!) on the topic. Again, check out Keeva's post for a really nice, easy to read and thorough evaluation.
That is all.

Clique/Grid vs. Healbot

Much has been written about which healing add-on is the best. Truthfully I don't know that one could be objectively proven better than the other. I don't think it's a stretch to say that it comes down to personal preference. I personally use grid and clique. I found the basic functions of both to be very easy. Grid gives me a simple, clean unit frame that shows all that I need it to show. With a little work it can be modified to fit your tastes. Clique is a very simple way to bind spells to mouse/key clicks.
Healbot is an add-on that I am not at all familiar with. I have never used it. I've heard people sing it's praises many times however. So many times in fact that I decided I should check it out. I have a 42 druid that I have never healed with. I decided to download healbot and check it out. I have only just started so have little to report as yet. I expect that after this weekend I should be able to give an informed report as to the the plusses and minuses of both. I can say this now. I often hear that healbot is much better/easier out of the box. To be honest I found the setup and initial use to be no easier and no better than clique/grid. Both took about the same amount of time and effort to get it set up as a useable healing add-on. Anyway, if I'm feeling adventurous I'll even try healbot on my shammy. Might be a better experiment anyway to try both on a healer I am comfortable with.
Any suggestions or pre-experiment thoughts/advice?

Priest vs. Shaman healing

So my healing experiment continues. As I've said, I have healed quite a bit with my shammy now. I've done quite a few heroics and feel pretty comfortable. For the most part, with earthshield, riptide and an occasional LHW, the tank is quite easy to top off. Riptide has a longer cooldown than I'd like, but it works well to top of individual damage and chain heal is great for group wide damage. Range, casting speed (including the fact that there is only one instant heal) can be an issue but it forces you to be aware of where your group is. Generally one CH followed by 1-2 LHW's for those that were missed by CH works great. Yesterday I decided to try out my holy priest. Granted he is only in about half healing gear, but I found priest healing much harder. There could be several factors here. I chose VH as my trial grounds. DPS was very underwhelming with top being around 2100, lowest 1100. However, this is not PoS or HoR. It's VH, and that should be enough. We got Xevozz as second boss and tank was having a hard time kiting him around. We had alot of those spheres and the squishier DPS were not moving well and I couldn't keep them up. It was taking too long to burn him down and group wiped twice. It could have been a combination of these things, but I just felt underpowered and awkward. For the tank, things were easy, PW:S, PoM and rolling renews. With heavy group wide damage however I was at a loss. I'd have a PoM going around at all times. CoH just didn't feel like it was doing it. Plus, with the longer cooldown I was having to use FH to top people off. With the fast and furious damage that comes in during Xevozz I just couldn't keep people up. The group was getting too spread out for HN to be of any use although maybe the extra dps could have helped. TBH I forgot about guardian spirit and that could have helped too. I'll find out today!

Shaman healing

Wugan posted a nice piece about shaman healing over at Flow. And thanks to Miss Medicina for linking it in the first place. One of the great things about shaman healing is versatility. Now I often bemoan the fact that I don't have all that many instants. Only one to be exact. Riptide. But it has a nice instant heal and then keeps rolling after that. When followed by a chain heal or a few lesser healing waves, it's a very powerful combo. Of course the shaman must be very aware of party movement because of cast time. The versatilty really comes in with totems. It's great to be able to adjust your totems for the specific situation. At this point I'm only running heroics, but I change up my totems frequently throughout an instance. In AN or TOC (with rogue) I will definitely drop my cleansing totem. Nature resistance is nice for lighting damage. Stoneskin totem is really nice for some damage mitigation (but if there's no dk and I'm in a nice mood, I may drop strength of earth for you...maybe). Frost resist. Fire resist. Even dropping your elemental totem during tough fights (black knight, phase 2!). We have so many choices. For me what works well is to have my default totems set up (stoneskin, flametongue, mana, wrath of air). I then have my other common utility totems set up on their own bar (using bartender), cleansing, life, resists, elementals, etc. It's nice to just drop my defaults and then change as needed with a click. Using key bindings and clique/grid then puts all of my healing spells within easy reach and keeps a nice clean interface for me. Right now I have RT, LHW and CH bound to my F, E, and R keys. Earth shield, cleanse spirit and HW are then bound to the mouse through clique. So far it's working well. Any other ideas or thoughts on how you've streamlined things or things you've done to tighten up your healing?