So I trialed with a AOTC guild last night in Heroic CN and did horrible. To give you some numbers, in the Sludgefist kill, druid did 6.3k HPS, Sham 5.6K, other holy priest did 4.8k and I did 3.9k. At Sire, it was even worse, I was at 3.0k HPS, which is about 50% of the druid, sham. I went into the raid healing like I would in a Mythic + dungeon. Flash concentration to 5 stacks, spam heal, POM and CoH on CD. I would pop Hymn and Salv when the lead called for it.
What am I doing wrong? Should I be healing differently vs a Mythic +. For context, my ilvl is 220+ and I PUG’ed KSM. So I am at least a decent Mythic + healer with good gear. LFR is a horrible gauge but 9/10 times I am topping those meters doing the same thing I did last night.
When I looked into the other Holy Priest’s meters, her biggest contributors were echo of light and renew. So it would appear my rotation is wrong for raids and my stats are not optimal. (I am about 20% crit, 20% haste, 14% Mastery).
Any help would be great, especially those who heal high M+ keys and also heal in raids. What do I need to understand and how do I adjust me rotation to carry my weight in raids.
It would be cool to see your logs if you have them so we have a better picture of what you’re doing.
Besides that you’re pretty low on Mastery for raiding.
I’m 43% mastery on my raid build so my EoL does insane amount of healing.
For an FC build 20% haste seems a lot and you don’t really benefit from it that much. I literally have 8% Haste on my raid build and I always end 1st on healing meters in my guild mythic raid runs.
I figured people would want logs but unfortunately I don’t have any. I know that is a big piece of the puzzle. Sorry.
So Amantha, I noticed you also raid using FC. Is ideally rotation the same as what I described in my initial post? FC to 5 stacks, spot healing with Heal, PoM and CoH on cd, and your high mastery carries you to the top of the meters?
I wasn’t perfect in the raid and I need to get used to the damage patterns better but that will improve over time. I just want to make sure my approach to healing is right for raids. For example, I’ve read somewhere that a viable way to heal is renew spam in CN. Should I be doing that instead of FC?
Holy Priest in raid is pretty much centered entirely around flash concentration right now.
Your haste probably is too high and you need more mastery, but realistically it’s ilvl > everything else for holy right now.
In raid, the playstyle to maximize HPS is basically:
Pre-pull: Stack flash concentration and put out two stacks of 10 PoMs on the tanks.
Holy Word Serenity off CD.
Holy Word Sanctify off CD.
PoM off CD (with benediction)
CoH off CD**
Heal
Flash Heal to maintain Flash Concentration (and only to maintain flash Conc).
Holy Fire/Smite/SW:P to fish for Surge of Light while there’s no other healing to do.
Otherwise, hit your CDs when they are called for. It is possible to have your HPS get hit significantly by having a raid leader who wastes your CDs on damage that didn’t need the CD - or it might be the case that the other holy priest gets 2 salv casts and you only get 1 because your first salv is saved for later, etc.
** CoH off CD is something most priests do, but probably isn’t optimal. CoH is actually worse than Heal to cast if the Heal would get full value. It’s actually not a ton of healing in the grand scheme of things, so if there’s multiple people that have a decent chunk to heal, just keep hitting heal/serenity and ignore CoH. CoH only when you don’t think your regular heal cast will get full value or you need to move - because it’s a smart heal, it’s very good in the scenario that there’s light healing to do.
No. This only really works if you have a huge amount of mana at your disposal, and even then it’s not optimal - it’s just something that can work. For most priests renew shouldn’t even be a button you hit unless you need to move and can’t cast PoM/CoH. The vast majority of your renew healing should be from your Holy Word: Salvation and PoM Benediction, not casting renew itself.
Edit: had to make clear that I’m talking about maximizing HPS here.
That’s pretty much it.
FC to 5 stacks before pulling the boss. Spot heal with heal. PoM and CoH on cd.
I think your principal problem here is your stats.
Also are you running Trial of Light talent? That’s a noticeable hps increase.
Make sure you also use Salvation close to the start of a fight so you get to use it again at the end.
This makes me feel better. This isn’t far off from what I was trying to do so it’s just about getting better at it, which is fine because it was the first time in Heroic CN (haven’t even cleared normal mode lol).
With CD rotation, I was always the last one to use my CD so that is a contributing factor. Also, we basically one shotted every boss except Sire. The guild is doing mythic but trials in heroic so a lot of the times there wasn’t much to heal.
I was just shocked a bit. I wasn’t expecting to be at the top but I was so far behind in HPS…it was embarrassing, lol. In LFR, I’d just kill it in the meters, sometimes doubling #2. To see it so low was O.O
This is very important too. If bosses are getting one shot it means everyone knows mechanics and are pretty much well geared so basically everyone will get healed with Healing of rain/riptides and druid hots pretty much faster than your EoL.
The longer the fight the more HPS a hpriest does.
Yep agree with Amantha here, in this case it sounds a little bit like you were getting your heals sniped because they’re on farm and know exactly what to heal and when, and aren’t taking much damage overall.
Normally when we were trialing healers I’d try not to do this if I was trying to assess their HPS. But what was generally more important is that they didn’t die to mechanics immediately and were willing to communicate with the team and hit their CDs/utilities when they’re wanted.
Healer trialing with guilds is a often a joke because of a lack of general awareness of what healer parses really mean. Don’t kick yourself over a bad trial and/or low numbers. It is not worth it. Also, there are ways to gear up to maximize how you look, for example by equipping lower ilevel gear that has a socket, leech, or better secondary stats when by doing that you are sacrificing your main stat, like intellect, plus stamina–which can play on your parse percent for your ilevel. I have seen countless dps do this, citing their parse for their gear level when their actual damage would have been higher had they simply equipped the higher ilevel gear instead, but wanted to look better in the eyes of others.
Most importantly, healers overheal. I’d look at your overhealing numbers. You can be doing everything right but are simply in a group that is healing the content easily. HPS numbers are not like DPS numbers. The healing that can be done is limited by how much there is to heal. There are loads of other factors too–like if other healers have “smart heals,” if a disc priest is sniping with Spirit Shell, etc. I have gotten poor numbers in one group and 95% parse numbers in another group the very same day with the very same gear because in the first group the healers were all highly skilled and in the second it was the opposite.
Second, there are a lot of factors involved unrelated to the healing itself. When you join a group you may be unfamiliar with the group’s strat, and in some cases the strat can have been set up in such a way that you can’t do your thing. For example, the set up for managing the mechanics can have been set up in such a way that you have to move a lot and/or so that you are doing something else in the middle of when you would normally want to cast Divine Hymn, or do your ramp if you play Disc, etc. Plus the other healers may be familiar with the habits and strats and timing of the other healers in the group in terms of their CD use, where you are not, for example.
In the end remember that you are shopping for a guild as much as the guild is shopping for raiders. Gaming is not a like a job, but in some ways it is the same. In other words, if you or anyone expected you to be at the top of your game the first time you join a group, that is unrealistic in a lot of cases.
That said, this does not mean you ought to be sitting on your hands though. You might need to up certain secondary stats to increase your numbers, like mastery for raid healing on your holy priest. You might also need to study the parses of the holy priests getting solid parses to see what they are doing differently. Etc.
You were getting sniped and their healers were probably overgeared and handling it all with ease. Trial run is basically about you making sure mechanically you are sound and aiding in the healing while keeping up DPS due to nothing else for you to do.
Don’t sweat it. If the guild seems enjoyable and people good… you’ll be fine. Sounds like you were doing proper play, but hard to compete with 226ilvl players on farm.
Even if you are optimized, I don’t think can do much against optimized Druids and Shamans in this raid tier (all other things being equal). Priests channel a bulk of their casts. Druids and Shamans have their AoE HoTs that scale really well with large, stacked groups. That’s why some people say get your mastery up so your Echos of Light can compete for ticks of healing with theirs. Priests can pump, when those other AoE HoT classes aren’t healing.
In previous threads, it was said that usually really organized groups have rotations where they get maximum uses out of all their healers and this isn’t an issue. With heal sniping, see previous paragraph.
I don’t know what the word is on the next raid if stacking will be discouraged or not. If so, it’s going to take a large chunk of the aforementioned healers output.
We’re actually better at heal sniping because of how good Flash Conc. heal and holy words are. The objective isn’t to get mastery up so it can compete with HoTs. HoTs are inherently slower heals. Mastery just will get you more value than haste.
For example, if we pull altimore, and the second the lunge happens I queue up a HW:Sanc on the melee group, there’s not much that a druid can do to snipe that from me barring a perfectly timed Wild Growth (but even then, I’m going to suck up their HoT healing, not the other way around). But to do that, I need to have advanced knowledge of the fight. If I’m trialing for a guild that’s already deeper into mythic, chances are they’re going to know way more about the fight than I do and I’m not going to be ready to HW:Sanc there. So the Druid WGs, and the situation isn’t dangerous enough for me to cast my HW, so my HPS looks lower.
Realistically heal sniping is not what you should be doing because it’s not going to help clear the fight. But a lot of guilds do judge based off your previous HPS - so if you’re looking for guilds it can be good idea to join pugs and just intentionally snipe everything to make your HPS look great. Because you can point at your logs for them to see big HPS numbers. This isn’t how guild recruitment SHOULD work, but unfortunately it often does.
But if the raid group has a set CD rotation that handles all the big mechanics, and nobody’s really screwing anything up, there’s just not going to be a ton of spot healing to do. Especially in an overgeared heroic.
I would like to know the details of how their AoE HoTs work (Healing Rain and Efflorescence) with their target caps and which players are chosen to heal. I’m not sure if it’s a “smart heal” that continually changes target or tops off a player and then switches to another. Or if it’s just random targeting to anyone within the zone.
I don’t know if we’re better. They all have instant cast heals. Shamans can suck up all healing with multiple Riptides before we’d get another Serenity or Sanctification off. Same thing with Rejuvenation. And, in between cooldowns, Echoes of Light are competing with Healing Rain and Efflorescence for ticking heals. And those Echoes are only applied on targets you have healed (this is why I try to make sure Prayer of Mending is always on cooldown), whereas organized Raid groups in this tier are trying to stack already set up to maximize those other AoE HoTs.
But, as you said, the goal is to keep everyone alive. If they have one healer way at the bottom doing more dps than healing, the groups has too many healers.
You gotta snipe the $#!^ out of the other healers. As a holy priest you are far better equipped to do this than others. Unless you’re 2/3 healing heroic you’re not going to push meters this late in the tier without it. It’s not a good practice whatsoever when you get to Mythic, but if meters is all they want you give them meters.
Post your logs and I will tell you how to master the art of heal sniping. You get better at it as you do the raid more and know where all the damage comes in.