Looking for more advice from the community since my last post had a ton of helpful answers.
I have a hard time breaking about 8kDPS over the course of a dungeon, particularly on fortified weeks. Tyrannical is a bit easier and I might creep up to 11k or so.
I’ve been told that druids and shamans can pump out 40k and I should be aiming for 20k, but I have no idea how that would be possible unless you don’t have to heal almost at all. No one’s amused when a tank falls over because the healer is DPSing. Do I risk letting a tank die just to eek out 2-3k more DPS? Tanks are definitely not always self sufficient on mythic+20s (most egregious offenders being NO burial mounds, TJS shas, HoV mortal strike packs and bears…)
Should I really be using Apothesis/Divine Word as a DPS CD? It feels dangerous not to be using them for healing large pack pulls. I tend to use one of those on every pack, either at the beginning when there’s still 6+mobs and the tanks CDs have run out - or for example this week at the end when everything is raging and hitting like a truck.
I DoT everything and try to Holy Fire when I can, and Halo once or twice per pack. And as the pack winnows down I transition to doing more damage so by the time we’re down to just two or three I’m usually chain smiting. I’m still optimizing my gear - since I prioritized ilvl over secondary stats - so my haste is comparatively low and mastery high, but I don’t think that’s the main problem.
What’s actually reasonable in terms of expected DPS? Does it vary by week or affix? And if there really are holy priests doing 20kDPS over a dungeon, please share your wisdom.
On the +21-22 key range I’m in all the top 10 damage logs for Holy. I average around 18-24k depending on the dungeon and affixes. If it’s a really bad week like explosive sometimes I drop to like 16k because I’m literally having to stop doing dps and blow up 3+ explosives constantly.
How much dps should you be doing? That’s really a subjective question because to time a +20 or less healer dps isn’t really necessary imho. However I would say aiming for 20k is a good overall benchmark.
It just takes a bit of practice. You have to use mouse over macros for healing so you can click a target, press dps spells, and if you need to heal people you mouse over on your frames.
Your priority dps spells are this though: Holy Fire (w/ Burning Vehemence and Empyrean Blaze), Divine Star, tab SWP everything, and cast Smites. 35% of your damage is just going to be from Holy Fire + Burning Vehemence alone. SWP and Divine Star will be about 10-15% each.
There’s also items and consumables that boost your damage.
- The Ragefeather trinket from Nok is an extra 4-8 million damage in a dungeon.
- Spiteful Storm trinket from Raszageth is good. You can run Spiteful Storm + Ragefeather for double dps trinkets, but I recommend using the Broodkeeper trinket.
- Glacial Fury phials = passive AOE damage increase
- Shocking Disclosure Potions w/ alchemy extending embellishment = you can pre-pot before the timer starts and get the 40s buff then immediately use another potion after it ends. I pop these almost on cd and it does on average 700k dmg a cast.
Also, your priority stats are Haste/Versatility > Crit > Mastery. Haste lets you get more casts out, versatility increases your damage, and crit is just good all around. Mastery is the least useful stat because usually your priority is to top people off to 100% in a few casts.
In 10.0.7 they’re making Divine Word really strong so if you run that w/ 2 points in Burning Vehemence you can probably do 25-30k overall dps on the high end.
So yeah, it’s just something you practice with. If you just focus on hitting Divine Star + Holy Fire on cd that’ll be half your damage in a dungeon. The rest are just filler spells with SWP and Smites.
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Biggest tip I could give is to use target of target macros. It let’s you press your damage abilities even when you’re targeting a party member. Basically it makes switching targets a lot less mandatory. The nice thing too is the ability works like normal when you’re targeting an enemy frame. So it’s easy to implement into your game play without adding more keybinds.
When it comes to DPS, holy does the least out of all the other specs in the game.
For me I do on average 11K overall on TYR, and 15k on FORT.
Here are a few tips:
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ABD (Always Be DOT ing) cast Shadow word pain on every target being damaged by your team. (mouse over macros make things so much easier)
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On FORT weeks, it maybe worth losing some HPS for more DPS. Burning Vehemence does a LOT of DMG, especially if you follow up with Holy Nova + Searing Light.
For Devine Word. I suggest using it for DPS only during boss fights when the team won’t take burst damage. First boss in Temple, last three bosses in SMBG.
Holy Priest is in a tough spot right now. Hope Blizzard helps out lol.
The buffed Divine Image in 10.0.7 will help.
My damage on the PTR:
- Smite = 9975 Holy Damage
- Smite w/ Holy Fire bonus = 12698
- Divine Image Smite (triggers off of Holy Fire + Smite + SWP casts) = 6172 per divine image (so 2 active is double that).
Our single target damage should increase quite a bit and you could even use Apotheosis as a dps cooldown to fast reset Chastise to get multiple Divine Images up. Hard to say how much overall dps increase it’ll be, but could be anywhere from 5-10k.
Do whatever damage you’re comfortable dealing while keeping everyone healed.
I know it’s become this strange obsession on this forum about how much DPS healers are expected to do. Unless you’re habitually pushing the highest end of keys, Healer damage is not really needed. If you try to hold yourself accountable to a number, people are going to die and that’s a much bigger DPS loss.
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It’s… kinda across the playerbase at this point. And generally when that happens, it becomes important to be accepted (or re-invited) to good groups.
And the reasoning for it is that healer damage becomes very important the higher your key goes, so people have started using it as a metric for being a good healer at a lower level than that.
While I do agree with the sentiment that your primary objective is keeping everyone alive, if you’re doing higher than 20s in a pug and you’re doing no damage, your chance of success in that key is going down. This leads to people trying to learn to maximize their DPS earlier. And to be fair, they probably SHOULD get comfortable with it earlier if their intent is to climb - healers do have a lot of downtime if they just don’t hit any damage buttons.
I feel like the problem with the mindset is that a lot of DPS will stand in bad stuff or not interrupt so u have to heal them more, then they will be like “why is ur DPS so trash healer”.
That’s really less of a case on higher keys because you’ll get one shot by most avoidable ground stuff if you don’t move.