Conical Effort

Following the recent patch and buff to PW:S I switched my offspec back to Disco from Holy. And then promptly logged off. However, last night I got pulled in to BoT as a healer so I got to try it out in anger.

I’m feeling much more confident with disco healing now. Partially this will be down to better gear, even if it is focussed on Shadow spec. We started with Ascendant Council. I stuck with Inner Will, kept PW:S on both tanks and PoM on cool down. Then in P1 it is Smite spam for Atonement on the frost boss ready for the fire shield and Archangel, Inner Focus and a PoH on each group. For P2 PW:S and PoM are mostly sufficient with the occasional Penance. I was surprised to find myself hitting P3 with over 80% mana. In P3 it is bubble spam, PoM, the occasional Flash Heal and of course Divine Hymn at the last. Simples.

Of course that took us about 8 wipes to get right. Keeping the two bosses health level in P2 seemed tricky and our first couple of goes in P3 we suffered from excessive chain lightning due to being overly bunched.

The rest of the night was on Cho’gall. I did get to DPS on a couple of attempts but we lost people so I went back to healing. A different fight though this one. Rather than just using Smite spam to get stacks ready for Archangel I was using it continuously. I’d toggle Inner Fire on and Smite spam. Then when Rapture was available I’d toggle back to Inner Will for a PW:S and PoM and then back to Inner Fire and Smite. Weaving in Archangel, Inner Focus and a PoH to cover for raid damage. Sadly whilst we got into P2 a couple of times we haven’t got that sorted. A kill is imminent though.

Whilst I’m still #3 for healing, there’s no longer much in it. Paladin tops the meters as main tank healer and the shaman obviously has better raid healing. But I’m feeling in a much better place about my healing. The ability to swap easily between Inner Fire and Inner Will is really nice: use the former for Smite + Atonement heals and switching to the latter for shields and PoMs. For quick spot healing the combo of Penance (for Grace) followed by PW:S and hasted Greater Heal is really nice too.

So my last post was all about going Shadow main spec. Does that mean I’ve given up on healing? In my mind I had. However we’re still kind of struggling off and on for healers on our raid nights so I got asked to resurrect my offspec and pitch in. We were starting on Magmaw at the time and it was suggested I go Holy and I figured why not. Couldn’t be any worse than Disco. And it wasn’t. In fact it was pretty much just as bad.

However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. As it turned out I was healing about as much as the resto druid we had, both of us well behind the holy pally. This was still enough to get the kill and move on. Even though the numbers were low I was reasonably pleased with this as it was my first time Holy since Vanilla and first time playing with Chakra.

Since then I’ve healed a few more fights. Most notably break 10k hps on Halfus. This boggled me and was a bit of a breakthrough point (though I’ve not come close since). I was struggling after a couple of attempts and then got a piece of advice from one of our other priests (a social who raids occasionally). The advice was simple – alternate PoH on each group and use PoM and CoH on cooldown. I was amazed at the difference it made and managing not to run out of mana on the fight!

I’m still sticking with Shadow mainspec but I’m going to pay more attention to my Holy offspec now. First thing I need to do is sort out UI and keybindings for efficient use of Chakra. Specifically – swapping between the AOE and single target modes for efficiency.