Friday 4 June 2010

Undergeared Healing Experiance

Haveing run with undergeared for awhile now i'm gradually strating to pick up the art of healing at low gear levels, because of the differance between the strength and regeneration healing becomes far more technical at low gear levels.

The main point that all our healers have to go on is quite simple, the correct use of cooldowns (both tank saving and mana restoring) at the correct time.
Even when i've been DPSing as shadow i've always payed attention to the mana of my fellow healers and have timed my hymn of hope and divine hymn spells when they needed it most.

A big example is on one of our saurfang wipes i managed to time my hymn of hope to restore the mana of both the shaman and paladin healers (and to lesser extent the Arcane mage) by a small bit which helped them plug along for another 30 seconds or so.
When the paladin healer went down at around 15% I immediantly brought out the big guns and hit Divine hymn to stabilise the raid then I started using Flash heal until i ran out of mana, in my atempt at a cluth healing situation we managed to get to 6% on that wipe.

Of course healing is a very complicated game and something I have to ask is what point does the game end?, one of the best experiances i've had healing for Undergeared has undoubtfully been jaraxus in totc10.
while the fight may have been one shot it was by no means an easy accomplishment as when our 3rd leg healer fell down at 25% things started getting hairy and then we ran out of mana just as the boss was at 10%.
Both of us (me and the shaman healer) had no mana and had to keep a group of 9 people alive for at least 30 seconds before the boss went down, in my opinion it is at this point that the healing game begins neither healer can just throw mana at a problem anymore as they don't have any to spare.

Basically what happens at this point is that you have to cast a heal every time you've generated enouth mana to cast one and you damn well better make sure you cast the right one or else it's basically over at that point.
Due to the lack of raid health healing spells like Circle of Healing become considerable more potent as they can hit multiple targets for the full amount, you can also throw any surge of light procs where they're needed immediantly as it won't effect your mana regen (5 second rule).

The tanks represent a completely differant problem as they will always need a steady flow of heals to live, needless to say that all of my surge of light procs went here and I also made sure that circle of healing would always hit him too.
Other then that I also hit the tank with Greater Heal (it heals the most and has a higher mana efficency then flash) whenever I had generated enouth mana to do so.
Sometime during the last 5% I managed to throw Guardian Spirit on the tank too which both of us simply let proc and then followed up with a few heals to keep the tank going when were realy hitting rock bottom.

The DPS were almost abandoned and left to their own devices, if they couldent live on the rare Circle of healing and Chain Heal spells we throw out maybe every 10 seconds at best then they would just have to die as we just couldent spare the mana for them.

I remember haveing a similar experiance in naxx25 at the very beginning of wrath and most veteran healers know what I mean when I say that healing dosent realy begin until your out of mana, because when you just come down to it these days healing involves wasting a lot of mana and being in a situation where it's just you, tirage and your most efficent healing spells can make you panic greatly.

Nothing is more exciting to me as a healer then pulling through what at first appears to be an enevitable wipe though nothing but serenity and the best application of your spells.

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