In raid last night, we are progressing through Normal, we got a late comer to our raid (friend of the tank). He was a Resto Shaman and geared much better than I was, I was glad to have some help and hear a new voice on Discord.
After a couple of bosses, he whispers me that his numbers look so good because of my heals.
I said, “You are sniping my heals?”
He said, “Yup, that’s how Resto Shaman works.”
The last I heard of healers sniping heals was the Disc Priest and that was, for me, back during Warlords of Draenor. I’ve not seen many Disc Priests in my playing arena lately.
So, I doubt him enough to come to this forum and ask, “Was he sniping my heals and making himself look good?”
I was parsing well before he came and then I was in the basement – but that could have been anything like a death or that we were progressing and learning fights.
High burst damage bosses = reactive healer does better.
Slow rot damage bosses = proactive healer does better.
It is that simple.
You’re doing normal, which means healing requirement is low, which means your parses will be bad if someone else is actually pressing buttons.
In normal pretty much anyone can heal snipe because of how low the hps requirments are if people are playing appropriately, even us resto druids can with how much of our power budget comes from regrowth right now and how mana efficent we can be. Pretty much all the fights til altar one healer could die or be afk doing less then tank hps numbers and youd be fine as long as the other 2 are trying in a 15-20 man sized group.
Shamans are pretty good at it since their mana problems were fixed, holy priests too, pally and monk take a little bit of ramp and prep so it might be a bit harder for them if they arent wasting cooldowns on it but again normal has so little to heal you dont really have to save or coordinate cooldowns to get through bosses.
Evokers and disc are closer to us in that they have a proper set up for burst so theyre less likely to snipe passively in low content.
2 Likes
More than a few variables involved, but if you are playing a proactive healer reactively, that is going to be basically the easiest healer to snipe. The current druid toolkit leans in that direction with the “keep abundance up, plant and cast regrowth” playstyle.
But it’s more complicated than that really. Logs and parses need to be taken in context. Many of the top druid parses are still very rejuvenation heavy, which is much more proactive, though more mana intensive. It’s difficult for a reactive healer to snipe a proactive healer who did a proper setup before the damage hits.
Additionally, a shaman has less overall agency over their healing compared to a druid. A shaman can’t control who their totems heal after they throw them down. A shaman can’t control who their chain heal hits after that first target. Shaman cooldowns are powerful, but have a long cooldown timer. In contrast, a druid has a lot of control over exactly who we are healing. We can fill-in gaps in burst healing with shorter cooldowns such as convoke or just using our normal toolkit with a pre-ramp.
Finally, it’s worth considering that our current apex talent encourages a degenerate playstyle that involves focus healing ourselves and overhealing ourselves like crazy simply for the sake of maximizing Everbloom. While this will give you a good parse in many cases, you have to ask, objectively, how much are you actually contributing to your raid? When you are doing 3-4 times more healing to yourself than the other healers are doing to themselves, and that healing on yourself is the difference between their parse and your parse, did you actually do better than they did?
Consider making the active tank (the tank who has aggro) your lifebloom/everbloom target instead. After all, they will be the one taking the most damage, so they are a legitimate target for your heals. While you won’t be able to cheese everbloom quite as much, we’re still the best tank healer in the game, and if you put that to use effectively, the shaman likely won’t stand a chance.
2 Likes