I have played a rogue for so long that I’m embarrassed to tell people my time /played. I can do the Mutilate attack rotation in my sleep. I could count out the cooldown timers with my eyes closed.
But healing seems to be eluding me. I’ve tried healing on my Disc priest. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to hold up my end of the healing in raids.
Yesterday we went to Naxx 10 on an alt run. Most of us were undergeared, but we knew the fights. We didn’t have any healing assignments since we all knew what to expect. My healing skills are pretty weak and during the run I was well, well below the Naxx-25-geared holy pally in every measure of healing. I installed the Recount Guessed Absorbs add-on so I could add in my shields to my total healing. Even with that, I was still far, far behind the pally – less than half of his total healing and HPS.
I rationalized it – saying to myself that Disc priests are mainly single-target healers and since we were busy sniping heals around the raid I couldn’t show my true healing power.
We got to Gluth. I was assigned to the two tanks in the front of the room. Finally, a true main tank healing assignment that is perfect for a Disc priest.
And I failed. I could not keep the tanks up. Looking at Recount for the fight, my healing output was under 900 HPS. I was mainly rotating Flash Heals and Penance, and it simply wasn’t enough.
After the raid I compared notes with the pally healer. When he needs a big heal he tosses a Holy Light that lands for 10k or more. Wow! My best heal, Penance, hits 3x for about 1.6k each for a total of 4.8k (non-crit). What’s up with that? Not only that, but his spell crit is at 48%! Mine is less than half of that!
My priest is not that well geared – mostly Naxx 10 epics (iLvL 200) with a few blues scattered around and the odd iLvL 213 mixed in there as well. He has just a hair under 2k spellpower when fully raid buffed. I think that the problem is his crit rating. Right now he has only 21% crit, and more crit would mean more Divine Aegis procs as well as bigger heals and higher HPS.
I decided to browse around WWS and look at the performance of other Disc priests on the Gluth fight. The first obstacle was simply finding a Disc priest. I’d click on a raid, see a priest healing, click on the priest, and find he was Holy. Again and again and again. It took me a half hour of searching to find a Disc priest healing the Gluth fight. When I did find it, I saw that their spells were hitting harder than mine. By a lot.
So I need to figure this out, or change to Holy, or drop this character. It would seem that the solution would be more spellpower to make my heals hit harder, yet other priests with comparable gear are getting much higher HPS. Maybe I need to sacrifice spellpower for crit rating. I’ve looked around the internet and haven’t found any obvious help. If anyone has any good Disc priest resources to suggest I’d appreciate it.
