the one all about healing revisited

I, too, have been neglecting my blogging duties – ages and ages and ages and ages and ages ago Saunder tagged me to re-visit my answers to the Circle of Healing and re-evaluate them, which is a very sensible and useful idea. The notion of re-reading something I’d written made me quail to such an extent I kind of did the mental equivalent of sticking it to the fridge door with a magnet (MUST BUY CLEANING PRODUCTS!) but then Miss Medicina took her medicine … and now I feel I ought to as well. I have not, however, ever thought of myself as Tbizzle. I think perhaps this might be a failing.

Okay. Here I go…

The New Questions:

1. Reread your original answers to the questions. With the benefit of hindsight, score your own work in terms of its cringeworthiness.

OUCH. I hate reading my own stuff. So be assured that I’m a-cringing here.

I think the substance of it isn’t too awful though, and my thoughts haven’t changed so very much since writing it. I feel marginally less of a noob but I probably don’t act like it. Also I think I could probably take a crack at some of the more technical questions these days beyond “zomgomfbbqraidinghealingzomg!” which, err, I think comprised the majority of my answers last time.

I can tell you, for example, I’m secretly into crit. I mean, obviously I favour haste like a good holy priest should but … but … whenever anybody isn’t looking too closely I start piling up the crit. The reason for this is simply impact and vanity. The thing about haste is that improves your healing in a minuscule but blanket way. You’re not actually going to notice the fractional increase in your casting, and the fractional decrease of the GCD. It’s like, y’know, a sprinkling of icing sugar on a cake. Generally improves the whole thing in a way you pay no attention to whatsoever. But crit is a big shiny cherry. It’s a stupid thing to depend on really – better to have recognisable, trackable improvement over what is essentially potential that may never be fulfilled. The thing is when everything is going to shit and there is no hope for our plucky heroes BUT you suddenly land a critical heal … THAT feels amazing. Like I say, impact and vanity. I’m not proud of it. But I am a faithful worshipper of Lady RNG. Haste Versus Crit is the Achilles Choice of healing.

What’s really really embarrassing about looking over my previous answers though is that I say my favourite spell is Prayer of Mending. And it is. I love that dinging Frisbee of joy. BUT I was analyzing the healing logs of my last few raids and I don’t use the thing nearly as much as I should. In fact, I did about 50% less healing with it than the other priests in the raid. 50%?!!!?!! I know it’s been suggested before that I have problems with intimacy but for somebody who claims to love a spell, that’s a damn poor way of showing it.

2. Has your class’s healing improved in the area you identified as its weakest?

Well, uh, Blizzard hasn’t patched us or changed us so Holy continues to be the Mario of the healing world. I think they’re kind of in a bit of a bind with holy since it has no niche, and you can’t really give a niche because doing so invalidates every other healing class in the game.

3. Have you changed your “least favoured class to heal with”?

I’ve also figured out that my feelings on this subject have nothing to do with the class and all to do with the player, and it’s hypocritical for me to keep pretending otherwise. Currently I don’t like shaman because our guild resto shamans are largely tossers not very nice to me. (not you).

4. Did you read the entries from others in the webring, especially your class?

Yes I did, glutted myself on it, in fact. And I like to think I learned a fair bit. Whether I put any of it into practice is, ahem, another matter.

5. If Yes to #4, did you learn anything that made you a better healer?

Hopefully lots of stuff. I think mainly what I learned are slightly meta things though… how to evaluate myself as a healer, and how to identify and correct (try to correct) my weaknesses.

I’m marginally better at using Divine Hymn than I used to be – chances are I’ll throw it out at least once per raid, but the ten minute cooldown still feels horrendously prohibitive. What if I need it again in 7 minutes and 37 seconds, eh, eh?

But my energy at the moment is going into maximizing my Frisbee. First of all I had Vuhdo tracking it but spotting the little box when you have to scan 25+pets frames is insane and dammit there are more useful things my eyes could be doing – like giving me some situational awareness. And then I got POM Tracker – a really nice little add-on that tells you where your Frisbee is how many charges it has, and how much it has healed.

And then I realised I Was Doin It TOTALLY Wrong. Think of William Blake.

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

I was loving my Frisbee in all the wrong ways. I wanted to control it, you see, and track its dingy little movements. That is bad love. So I have set my Frisbee free. Unless it is somewhere there is a guaranteed ding (i.e. the tank), as soon as it is off cooldown I re-cast it. Because either in the cooldown period it has dinged all over and done its job or it’s squatting on some random mage doing fuck all, in which case there’s no point waiting for it to dribble away to nothing.

I feel like this is something I should always have known – or that anybody with half a brain could have told me.

But I treasure this knowledge more because it I learned it for myself.

Remember folks: if you love your frisbee, set it free.

6. What tools/resources or information do you think you would need to improve as a healer and how could that help the community at large?

Errr…pass. This sounds a bit organised for me. Seriously though, there are a lot of excellent resources out there, and they’re not that difficult to find.

7. What did you identify as your worst habit as a healer? Have you improved in this area?

Oh noes, I broke the questionnaire. I answered this above.

8. What did you list as your favorite healing spell and your least used healing spell for your class? Are these answers still true? If they have changed, what caused the change (i.e. patch fix, different healing environment, etc)?

My favourite healing spell is still my Winged Joy aka, less sentimentally, my Frisbee. And my least favourite still that bloody song… although I am better at singing it these days. As my guild can attest, TAM IS NOT A KARAOKE PRIEST!

Aaaaand…yay! I have done my healing homework. Can I have a gold star now, please?

Actually while I’m on this subject (the subject of healing, bwahaha) I’ve been thinking about disco versus holy (and so has everyone else). I have lately acquired both a holy and a disco spec, and I will admit that disco temporarily turned my head. I think it’s partially the novelty of learning something new but also disco is shiny as all hell because you get bubbles and a spell called penance that is sparkly. Funniest lookin penance I’ve ever seen in my life. Repent ye of your sins with this magic glitter. Srsly, REPENT YE, this is no laughing matter.

I spend most of my non-raid me time in disco. It’s slightly more durable for bumbling around the world and even in a PvE spec you can get a fair bit of PVP utility out of it – in particular it seems to render one indestructible. I was minding my own business fishing in Wintergrasp not so long ago when this Alliance punk comes up to me and starts trying to PVP my ass. Of course, I have no offensive spells at the ready because I’m goddamn fishing so I just sit there under a bubble casting renew and desperate prayer on myself (and intermittently psychic scream) while this really rubbish paladin wails away at me for what feels like thirty years. At the point that I’m typing /impatient at him, a kitty druid pops up from behind a tree and shreds him to pieces. And being disco makes healing 5-mans marginally more interesting than healing them as holy – plus there’s the added respect you get for not being a holy priest, which still bewilders me.

However, as far as I’m concerned, discipline is the new bisexuality. I mean, I know there are plenty of people out there who are genuinely discipline but there’s also a lot of people who are getting in on the action because it’s fashionable, and they think if they act like they’re disco on the dance floor it’ll get tanks interested… errr…okay I might have lost this analogy. But, seriously, I know this is probably going to get me pelted by tomatoes but here’s why I think disco is more popular than holy … and also … *ducks* why I believe it’s significantly less challenging, not in the literal sense of being 4 dummies lol but in a wider, conceptual sense.

Now, I know you can, and people do, raid heal as disco but most people see a disco priest and think tank healer – ultimately unless you have holy pallys coming out your ears (which is painful) in terms of the rest of the healing team the path of least resistance is likely to be sticking the disco priest on the tanks, as the spec is blatantly optimized for it. Now we all know that tank healers get more kudos than lowly raid healers so I suspect that if you’re the sort of person who wants either limelight or a feeling of personal importance, then going disco is one way to guarantee it. DISCLAIMER: I’m not saying disco priests are attention whores, but the fact of the matter is that there are two directions to come at healing and tanking (unlike DPS who just want to simply blow shit up) – you’re either the sort of person who wants to facilitate the fun of others or you’re a complete tosser who wants to make everything about you. Ultimately the relationship between tank-healer and raid-healer strikes me as being reflective of that between MT and OT – there are plenty of people out there who consider the OT as the “lesser” role, and wouldn’t deign to stoop, and some people are similar about raid healing.

The other thing about being disco is that solves the problem of purlieu. Purlieu, for them as care, is a historical term for a tract of land bordering a forest, formerly included within the forest boundaries, and still partially subject to laws of the forest (I mean, as regards hunting game, not, like, dealing with dryads). Therefore a purlieu man is, err, well “he that hath ground within the Purlieu, and being able to dispend 40. shillings by the yeare of freehould, is upon these two points licensed to hunt in his owne purlieu.” You see where I’m going with this? What do you mean “no I don’t’?” Purlieu, I understand, is very important in geek culture, although they don’t call it that, or even really acknowledge it – for example we have a friend who is very into boardgames, but instead of just liking the occasional boardgame like the rest of us, he treats them like they are his purlieu. Nobody shall be permitted to like boardgames, or win at boardgames, as much as he. It’s grossly tedious, quite frankly. Just grow the fuck up. But I’ve seen geeky types do this over pretty much everything, from their broadest hobbies to the sort of cheese they buy. (I know I’m talking about ‘geeks’ like I’m not one here… but actually compared to some of Chas’s friends I am a bastion of cultured sophistication, a fucking bastion I tell you)

And healing, I think, is often very similar – especially because there will be a group of you, all fighting for some degree of precedence, and therefore you have to lay claim to purlieu or find yourself out in the cold. In an ideal world, of course, the healing team would be, y’know, a team and this bullshit wouldn’t matter a damn but a lot of the time healers are scrabbling for niches, desperate to prove their worth and establish their purlieu. And the thing about purlieu is that it isn’t just about claiming what’s yours, it’s about nudging other people out.

It’s why healers can be such wankers about healing – insisting you have in the past two-healed something is a way of claiming purlieu. Not only are you the bigger, better healer but you’re effectively diminishing the role of the third guy by undermining his importance to the raid. Just the other week, I had a disco priest bitch me out for casting bubbles … which, of course, being a well-behaved little holy priest, I wasn’t. It was, in fact, the OTHER disco priest and he did a “oops, hah hah” about it but he basically just cocked his leg over the raid and made sure we all knew it. He was THE disco priest, you see. Nobody else could prevention-heal within the boundaries of his purlieu.

It all becomes infinitely easier, of course, if your class already claims purlieu for you: which, to a large extent, disco priests and holly paladins do. And by healing in a way that is noticeably different to the “bar go down, bar go up” of yer bog standard priest healing, so do shaman and druids. A holy priest, by contrast, has no obvious purlieu. We are not the best raid healers, we are non-ideal but functional tank healers. Being able to do a bit of everything does not niche protection provide, in fact it leaves you hanging in the wind a lot of the time. It’s a strength of holy priests, actually, but it’s a hard strength to sell. I mean why have somebody who can do a bit of everything if you could have somebody optimized for the job at hand? Ultimately if every holy priest left my guild en masse … it’d be fine, you’d just cover our raid healing with the shamans and druids, and cover the tank healing with the pallys and disco priests. If our druids left? Or our pallys? We’d be painfully and openly screwed, because although it’s perfectly possible to heal a 10-man with three holy priests the idea of it makes me flinch a bit. Holy priests are augmentary healers, and they only really shine against other classes. So there’s a degree of relief, I think, in being disco and able to say outright: you need me for this, and will always need me for this, suck it up.

The other thing about disco is that it’s NOTICEABLE healing, and people do notice, and love you for it. You even get little extras like power infusion which is basically Catnip to casters. Everybody loves a disco priest because you feel secure when that golden bubble of light pops up around you. I get thanked for my healing as a disco priest far more than I ever have as holy – the bubble clues people into the idea that something went slightly wrong, like they stood in fire, or they pulled aggro, and that you SAVED them. “Thanks for the shield, man” they say, gratefully. “You pulled my arse out the fire there.” Nobody has ever thanked me for a well placed flash heal. That isn’t because people are ungrateful sods who don’t deserve my healz, it’s simply because they don’t notice. Bar go down. Bar go up. It is the default pattern of damage and renewal in a raid. A bubble, by contrast, is white a knight, galloping to your rescue. Flash heal is basically just a plaster when you’re already bleeding. And quite frankly I think we’d all rather feel like Superman than Doctor Quinn.

And finally disco is just plain easier. Sorry, but it is. Not, I hasten to add, because of the spec itself but because of the niche it occupies. So tank healing, right. Pffft. I say pffft to your tank healing. Obviously, it has more responsibility attached to it compared to raid healing in the sense that if the tanks go down the raid will soon follow but pressure is a different kind of difficulty. I am rarely on tank duty, partly because I buckle like a wet paper bag under pressure and I don’t like responsibility, and also because I’m not great at it and haven’t had much practice, but when I have the sheer clarity of it is incredible.

Instead of 10 bars all screaming for attention like hyperactive children you have one … maybe two. And although tank damage comes in hard and fast, which can make you catch your breath a bit, the patterns of it – once you’ve been through a fight a couple of times – are measured, and easily predicable. Unlike those other 8, fragile screaming children, any one of which could rip aggro or run giggling into fire at any second and without warning. And everything about a tank is designed to survive incoming damage. What about that warlock, eh? He’s like a big walking target made out of bone china and squashy fruit. The life expectancy of a warlock once she starts taking damage is about 0.8 seconds, I kid you not. Every time a purple bar starts flashing, or highlights red, I fair near faint in terror … and half the time the bugger is only lifetapping anyway. And let’s talk about LoS and range, as shall we? In a high mobility fight, as well as avoiding all the shit that’s lying on the floor or whizzing through the air that wants to kill you, a raid healer is ALSO trying to stay in range of the other 10 people who, needless to say, are trying to avoid the very same shit. I swear to God, it’s a nervous breakdown just waiting to happen.

Tank healing, by contrast, is peaceful. Yes. Peaceful. As long as you’re in range of one dude, your angle is covered. As long as nothing awful happens to that one bar, you’re sorted. And the other amazing thing about it is, you know that crazy wide-wide awareness you’re meant to be having? As a tank healer, you don’t need that. In fact, you probably shouldn’t have it. Part of the reason I’m such a tragically awful tank healer is that I can’t let go of the raid. I can’t help it. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that warlock dip a fraction and the moment my attention wavers, the moment I think “oh, I’ll just stick a shield and a renew on him, what’s the worst that could happen” the tank has met the floor in a permanent and painful way. As a raid healer the “you have your assignment but you should be watching everything” mentality means that if the raid dies, it’s your fault, but it means that tank goes down, it’s your fault as well. You shouldn’t have let your renew slip, you should have realised something was wrong and spammed a few heals in that direction, you should have thrown down guardian spirit, in short you should have done something. BUT, if you’re a tank healer, and the raid keels over, it’s very much not your fault. It wasn’t like you could stop healing the tank to heal the raid, right?

And finally let’s talk about what the lovely Miss Medicina calls rotational versus reflexive healing. I’m not arguing for all of one, none of the other here – but tank and healing are a bit of both. But, although you need to be knowledgeable about when and how damage is coming, tank healing is primarily rotational. As long as your Frisbee is flying, your renew ticking, your grace stacking and bubble, errr, bubbling then there’s nothing for you to except hit penance every time it’s off cooldown and cement the gaps with flash heal. And yes you want to time it right – you don’t want your bubble fall off the second the boss uses his Tank Face Nom ability, and you don’t want penance to be on cooldown when you need it most. But the point is, if you’re doing that rotation right, if you’re anticipating the damage spikes, if something goes wrong: there was nothing you could have done. It was not your problem. You did your job, other people fucked up, and you don’t have to take responsibility for it. This is, needless to say, a wonderful feeling.

Because raid healing is more reflexive than rotational (although, of course, it does have its rotations – stacking serendipity for example) there is literally always something you shoulda coulda woulda done better if only if only if only. If a fight goes wrong, there are thousands of things that you could have done differently – should you have cast guardian spirit on the warlock just then or kept it back, had you run left instead of right, you should have been able to save the mage, if you’d been stacked a third serendipity before casting PoH that time the raid would have taken less damage… it’s endless, endless and impossible. And even though you ask yourself these questions, it ultimately never matters because every fight is going to be subtly different anyway. There’s no guarantee that the rogue won’t eat a cleave this time. What if the mage runs left not right? Without the security of a rotation, there’s always a potential universe in which you could have done better and done more.

Just to conclude this, and as ready your tomatoes, I’m just going to emphasize that I’m not saying disco is easier and better than holy in any MECHANICAL sense. When it comes to healing, I swing both ways, and I appreciate both for their differences, you know what I’m saying? But I also think in terms of stress, role and prestige it is undeniably better to be disco, which is why so many of us are heading that way.