Sunday, February 14, 2010

Circle of Healers: Revisited

Miss Medicina has tasked the Circle o' Heals to review our responses and think upon our original answers. Here goes!

  • 1) Reread your original answers to the questions. With the benefit of hindsight, score your own work in terms of its cringe-worthiness.
Hmmm not much has changed aside the deep-end-dump into the haste pool with the GotEM changes and a Rapid Rejuv glyph that has made glyph-switching mid-raid in ICC a necessary and annoying task. I'm still comfortable with my answers :)


  • 2) Has your class's healing improved in the area you identified as its weakest?
We still have no shields. I don't see that changing anytime soon, though I'd still love to see a barkskin that I can toss to a friendly target!


  • 3) Have you changed your "least favoured class to heal with"?
Nope :) Still prefer cohealing (in 10's) with anyone that isn't another resto druid, for versatility's sake. I don't mind another tree in 25-pugs, though, since they usually prance around as raid healers and let me do my "I want to heal the tanks, too!" thing.


  • 4) Did you read the entries from others in the webring, especially your class?
Indeed!


  • 5) If Yes to #4, did you learn anything that made you a better healer?
Hearing of mods/macros/healing styles that I hadn't previously considered is always beneficial; more importantly, reading the other class' answers gave me insight on my cohealers' skills and abilities. I also added quite a few new blogs to both my official blog roll and to my huge Google-Reader list, which have brought me lots of interesting reads each week!

A few of the responses reinforced my belief that my own class tends to underestimate itself in being able to do more than just raid-heal or use any spell other than rejuv/WG. It made me sad, but it made me a better blogger (I hope) by being able to address these issues and anticipate comments when I blogged about anything contrary to the "druid raid healer" ideal (especially crit/haste changes and talent selection).


  • 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?
I got Rul to make a resto shaman blog. One more to fill out that disparity in community information!

Beyond that, though, I'm happy with the resources available to me. I enjoy digging up strats and considering mechanics through fellow bloggers, as they offer a wider range of opinions and experiences than I can find just within my guild, and overall a warmer and more helpful atmosphere than can be found on official forums. Plus, the forums don't have stick figure guides... I'm a visual learner, what can I say!


  • 7) What did you identify as your worst habit as a healer? Have you improved in this area?
My bouncy attention around the raid sometimes allows hots to drop off a tank at inconvenient times. I've worked to ensure I only let them drop if the tank is stabilized (not counting LB blooms, of course)... or at least I hope I have. No one has screamed at me about it, at least >.>

ICC has brought out an awareness of a different weakness of mine, however: I am not a very good heal leader/healing coordinator, on the fly. I hate forcing others into a specific job. I second-guess my decisions because I don't want to force anyone into a spot where they feel they can't perform their best or feel trivialized. I KNOW I don't know everything about my cohealers, and forget specific abilities that may lead them to be better in one role or another. I prefer flexibility. I also don't like bossing people around :)

It wasn't necessary to micro-manage 10-man healing before ICC. We didn't NEED heal assignments through (most) of Naxx, Uld, and ToC. In ICC, we do need the assignments for many fights, and it's taking some getting used to.


  • 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)?
Favorite is still Rejuv, least used is still Tranquility. I have pulled Tranquility out in very rare cases of high raid damage, Sindragosa being one of them, but of all my healing spells, it remains the least used.

But still the prettiest.

/p Pretty lights! Gather close for healing!

4 comments:

Kulat/Kriyet said...

Hi Kae,

My guild is just getting its feet wet in ICC 10-man. We normally run 2-healers when raiding (small casual guild), but are trying to make it 3 for ICC, so I am actually finding myself more of a tank healer at the moment than tree-of-all-heals which I have historically geared & talented for.

I'm also floundering a little bit since the de-haste patch - I feel my timing is off, and not sure if the Rapid Rejuv glyph is helping or hurting.

Can you be more specific about your glyph-switching? Like what are you swapping the RR for, and for what fights?

Thanks muchly,
Kriyet

Kae said...

That's actually a post I've been working on writing up :) A lot of it seems to be based on whether I can/need to use the WG glyph in a fight: in some cases, such as Blood Queen, you are very unlikely to hit 6 people (including pets) due to spreading out. A lot will depend on your group makeup and strats, so the short answer is to just judge for yourself whether you need to be raid healing (RR and WG), moving around a lot (nourish is "bad"--though still a quick cast), or heavily tank healing (nourish is good/necessary).

I have a post in the works that goes into it all in more detail :)

Kulat/Kriyet said...

Thanks!

I'll look forward to those posts.

I actually got rid of the WG glyph about a month ago - looking at my parses, I just wasn't hitting 6 people often enough to warrant using the space. If I was in 25-players more often, I would consider picking it up again, but there's very few fights I'm seeing where a 10-player group has 6 people taking damage all in range of me consistently. Usually with tanks & melee it was 4 or 5.

Kae said...

Some raids don't seem to group up as much as mine does. We like to spread the AoE love, to the point where I actually feel gimped not having the WG glyph to spread out to 6 players. It will regularly hit pets, of course, but it does that unglyphed as well, often snagging a WG from a melee who could make use of the HoT from a revitalize standpoint. With 6, it is that much more likely to catch the players!