Spiritual Guidance: The healing priest's guide to raiding guild application trials

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her shadowy cohort Fox Van Allen makes her a sandwich.

Last week, I talked about the application process of joining a new raiding guild and all the little things priests have to keep in mind when venturing out in search of a new guild. This week, I'll be finishing the series with advice on how to seal the deal and become a full-fledged member of your new, dream raiding guild. To do that, you'll need to complete and pass a trial.

A trial is when you play with your potential new guild and show off your actual skill at the game, rather than just your shiny application. It is your one chance to show under their scrutinizing eyes that you're capable of slaying internet dragons with them. For a healer, this is a very stressful time, because it's not as simple as showing up and beating everyone else on the DPS meters. Even if you make no mistakes, it's hard to assess healers if other players around you are equally skilled. Let's discuss some of the finer points of showing others you're a worthy healer, and as the headline implies, put a priestly spin on it.

Communicate everything

Obviously, it's important to play well, but a healer's ability to communicate well is equally important to the ability to push buttons at the right time. Raiding is all about teamwork, so if you can't communicate effectively, you'll have a much harder time working with others than if you did.

Priests in particular have many things we need to talk about in combat. Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit, Power Word: Barrier, Hymn of Hope, Divine Hymn, and Leap of Faith are all abilities other players need to know are being used, so let everyone know when you're using them. You especially want to communicate their use if you have to (for whatever reason) break the original order you were assigned to use those abilities. You can use /say and /raid macros that tell players what you're doing, but it's always best to back up those macros with a comment in voice chat.

There are several other general things to communicate in a new guild as well. First, ask questions on fights you don't have experience with or don't know the strategy for perfectly. ("How do you guys spread out for this air phase?") Each guild does things differently, so knowing exactly how something is done will save you embarrassment. If you do make a mistake ("Oh my god, I just lifegripped the tank! I'm sorry!"), you should always admit to it and apologize, especially if you've caused a wipe. Doing so will make you seem accountable (which most people like in a raider), and if there is any way to salvage a mistake, sometimes you can do so if you're up front about it.

Finally, ask what your healing assignments are, so you know what the guild wants you to be doing as a healer on each fight.

Don't let your target die

Once you know who you're healing, it's paramount that you keep that target alive, no matter what. Prioritize that assignment over all things (except your own health -- you need to be alive to heal). You can heal other players outside your assignment, too, but if you can't comfortably switch off the tank, off tank, or whoever you've been assigned to heal, then don't. There might be a juicy health deficit in group 3 that hasn't been touched because the player was temporarily out of range, but you need to always prioritize your target. If your target dies, your guild will think that you're either incompetent or you care more about healing random rogues in group 3 than doing your job. Neither are desirable.

Should you fall behind on your target for whatever reason (healing that rogue in group 3) and you suddenly find yourself unable to keep your target alive, remember that you are a priest and have abilities like Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit. Use them liberally if you have no other way to keep your target from dying. After you've done so, remember to communicate. Tell your raid, "Hey guys, I had to use Guardian Spirit just now, so mine is on cooldown now!" This can create problems in some fights, but for most fights, your group can usually juggle around cooldown abilities and work through it -- but they'll only know to do this if you tell them. The end result of this is that the guild will know you know when to think for yourself to keep your target alive (even if it's your mistake that he needed the cooldown in the first place) and are able to resolve any problems that come from changing the plan mid-fight.

Numbers do matter

Everyone knows that meters don't matter so much for healers. Logically, we know that a player who lands a Flash Heal on a tank when his health drops to 1% is more beneficial to the raid than the player who ignored the tank to cast Renew on five players who had a 8% health deficit. (Sure, those people have to get healed eventually, but the player at 1% should take priority.) We also know that the player who consistently chooses what's best for the raid is better than a healer that obsesses over meter performance and is always at the top.

But even though we know that, we ignore it a lot of the time. We ignore it because it's fast and easy to use a meter to judge someone's performance. If someone's healing isn't high enough, they must not be skilled enough or not trying hard enough, right? Not to mention, trying to assess someone on actual performance takes thought and effort -- and you have to pay attention! Pft! Forget that!

That's why meters matter when you're doing a trial. There will be tons of players, both members and officers, who will assess you with a quick glance at a healing meter. If you're sitting at the bottom, they will think less of you. So try your best to find a medium between greedy healing and helpful healing. Always keep your target assignment alive, then milk effective healing numbers from any target on which you can get a heal off. Frostheim would remind you that guild trials are a great time to heal hunter pets! (He'd also remind you that every time is a good time to heal a hunter pet, but we won't go into that.)

As a priest, you can of course find many ways to make sure you're getting lots of additional throughput. Use Circle of Healing on cooldown, and keep Renew up on anyone taking damage (as long as you can spare the mana). Use Greater Heal instead of Heal, just in case your target loses a tiny bit more health before you get your cast off. Always make sure Prayer of Mending is active and on cooldown. Set your boss timers to let you know whenever big raid damage spells are about to be cast, and time a Prayer of Healing just after or a few Power Word: Shields before so you can get full credit for the healing done by them.

Find your healing niche

Every raid group that is looking for a new healer has a hole to fill that is more than just a player vacancy. You might be getting picked up because you have Power Word: Barrier, but you aren't just there to cast that spell every 3 minutes (particularly if you happen to be holy.) Other healers will have things they naturally gravitate to doing when they aren't healing their assignment. Druids will often stack HOTs on players they think will take damage. Shaman might use Riptide on any random player who needs a heal. Paladins will be checking their hair. (For some reason, the expression "holy check" just fell apart in my brain.)

Your job as a new recruit is to find out what job isn't being taken. Is there a player in group 2 who never gets any heals cause everyone hates him? Make him your new best friend. Do the healers get too busy to heal themselves and die during phases with strenuous raid damage? Heal them!

Watch your raid frames carefully, and look for trends. Even if you don't necessarily know who is healing what, you should be able to see a pattern of what people tend to heal and not heal. Your job in finding your niche is to heal what isn't being healed. And if that's not a juicy enough assignment for you, then you can say "Screw finding a niche!" and try to do someone else's job better than they can (you smarmy bastard). If you do that, you'll need to be fast in switching between your assignment and everything else. Don't screw it up!

As a priest, play to your strengths when looking for your niche. If no one likes healing the tank, then arrange your gear, talents, and glyphs around tank healing (pick up Surge of Light, for example). If no one heals the raid, then make sure you've got all the spirit you can possibly get and go heavy with AOE healing and Renew (or shields, if you're disc). If you're one of two holy priests, try using the Chakra stance the other guy isn't and get what he misses as a result. If you're one of two disc priests and he's a shield spammer, stack up some haste and use Prayer of Healing more.

Ask what you can do to improve

My last bit of advice isn't so much about playing your class as it is political advice. It also happens to be more healer-specific than priest-specific, but don't mind that.

Because raid teams are delicate little ecosystems with relationships and structures that have existed long before your arrival, it's important to respect the structure of a raid team if you're to become a part of it. The best way I've found to do that is to ask your peers what you can do to improve. This will achieve a couple of things. First, it will help send the message that you care about fitting into your environment and growing as a player in general. Second, if you do have any problems, it will allow you to explain yourself (if you know what you did wrong) and identify any issues you didn't know were there. Asking in general will also help you figure out what the guild is looking for from a healer and help focus you on improving or emphasizing those traits. It also has the bonus of making you seem more amicable and thus make it easier to gain friends.

If you're not sure who or when to ask, go with your gut. I personally like to ask a player I respect, be it a healing lead or a good healer in the raid. I'll ask once a week, before or after the last raid of the week, depending on schedules. (Remember to be understanding of the person's time!) If you ask an officer, you'll have the added bonus of getting a person who might be voting on you later to think about how you've played. If you played well, they'll remember it better later when you lifegrip the tank. (What, you never lifegripped a tank?)

And with that, I will leave you again this week. I hope this was helpful to any of you starry-eyed raiders looking for a new home. Next week, we'll be moving onto guides for patch 4.2 and the Firelands. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions in particular you want covered, and I'll see where I can tie them in.
Spiritual Guidance has the inside line on pre-raid gear, valor point and raid gear, and healing strategies for bosses such as Atramedes and Chimaeron. Newcomer to the priest class? Look into Discipline Priest 101 and Holy Priest 101. Tags: application, apply, applying-to-a-guild, applying-to-a-new-guild, applying-to-guilds, class-help, disc-priest-spiritual-guidance, discipline-priest-spiritual-guidance, featured, guide, guide-to-priests, guild-app, guild-application, guild-applications, guild-trial, holy-priest-spiritual-guidance, priest-guide, priest-talents, raiding, raiding-guilds, talent, talents, world-of-warcraft-class-guide, world-of-warcraft-guide, wow-class-guide, wow-class-help, wow-guide, wow-priest, wow-priest-info, wow-priests, wow-talent-guide

Filed under: Priest, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance

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Spiritual Guidance: Priest healing tips for tier 11 heroic mode raids

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen is busy looking in the mirror instead of playing a proper spec. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com, produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

In previous weeks, Spiritual Guidance has tackled how to heal the various raid encounters in tier 11. This week, we're going to revisit each boss on heroic difficulty. Once more, I'll be examining which spec is better equipped to handle the fight while also examining the differences in the new encounter and how to deal with them. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started.

First, I want to point out that a major difference between any heroic and normal mode encounter is that abilities in heroic do an increased amount of damage. In order to avoid being redundant, please keep in mind that when I point out the differences between modes that the need for more healing will be assumed. If the increased damage significantly impacts the strategy of the fight, however, I will explain how.

Blackwing Descent

Magmaw Preferred spec? Either, though holy might be a tiny bit stronger here. Power Word: Barrier is almost useless on this fight if you use a spread strat (not all guilds do). Power Word: Shield is good for keeping low-health targets from dying to random Magma Spit, though. Holy priests have a slight mana advantage over disc priests when Magmaw is spiked, since they recover more mana while standing around doing nothing than disc priests.

What's different? More adds and splash shadow damage on random targets sub-30%. This doesn't make a big difference for healing if your raid spreads out properly. All the same, plan to use abilities like Divine Hymn after 30% to help keep your raid up. Lightwell is great, since players are spread out. If you're really having trouble, try to arrange your spread so that players in the same group are standing closer together. This will ensure that you don't lose range on some players with Prayer of Healing.

Omnotron Defense System Preferred spec? Either. There is plenty of raid damage, both AoE and single-target, and having one of each priest type is ideal for dealing with all the different kinds of damage.

What's different? Each golem has received new abilities in its repertoire. The victim of Acquiring Target will be hit harder, which means you'll want to use a tank cooldown like Guardian Spirit or Pain Suppression on him. Raid damaging abilities are obviously harder to deal with, but the one to use Power Word: Barrier on is Shadow Conductor. Incineration Security Measure isn't nearly as devastating, and a Holy Word: Sanctuary works out quite nicely on it. Priests of both specs should also keep in mind that you can save time by using Leap of Faith on the target with Shadow Conductor to get him back into the raid sooner.

Maloriak Preferred spec? Either. Holy is strong during the black phase for healing the raid damage, while disc could almost be considered mandatory for Scorching Blast on the red phase, since the damage is now quite strong.

What's different? A new phase, the black phase, requires a lot of raid healing, since the Dark Sludge spawned by the Vile Swill isn't always avoidable by melee. That's good for holy priests and spot healing disc priests. A new ability in this phase, Engulfing Darkness, is channeled on the main tank and reduces healing. A disc priest shield is very helpful to get the tank through the duration of the channel. Lightwell is still great on blue phase.

Atramedes Preferred spec? Holy, though Atramedes is very popular for discipline priests trying to shield spam their way to a record healing parse on World of Logs. There is a lot more random raid damage in the fight than anything else, which means holy shines. Being able to move around faster with Body and Soul is also helpful when you need to dodge Sonar Pulse. You can dodge them no problem without Body and Soul, but the speed bonus means you can get where you're going faster and start healing again sooner.

What's different? Almost nothing. To date, the fight has been nerfed so many times that the differences between heroic and normal for healers is insignificant. Making sure your raid is topped off before Searing Flame is a little bit more important, but even if half the DPS die during the span of the encounter, you should be able to down the boss. (You can use Power Word: Barrier on Searing Flame, too, but that would imply you went disc for this fight, silly.)

Chimaeron Preferred spec? Discipline. The fight isn't dramatically harder on normal if your healers check their egos and work together. Disc is ideal for spamming Power Word: Shield in phase 2 (when players become immune to healing), but a holy priest specced into Soul Warding is plenty effective.

What's different? The major difference is that when Finkle's Bile-O-Tron robot is knocked offline, Chimaeron will attack the tank instead of fighting itself. Plan to use a tank cooldown, Guardian Spirit, or Pain Suppression whenever the bot is down. You can also use Barrier and Holy Word: Sanctuary to deal with the increased damage from Caustic Slime while the bot is offline.

Nefarian Preferred spec? Discipline. The increased heroic damage makes reoccurring abilities like Electrocute extremely dangerous to your raid's well-being. Disc will be strong because of Power Word: Barrier, which takes the edge off Electrocute. After that, disc single-target healing is preferred because raid damage is relatively light (outside of Electrocute) and because most of the time, your raid is separated into smaller-sized groups.

What's different? Explosive Cinders in phase 2 will require players to temporarily leave their platforms so as to not kill your group with the detonation. These players will require hard healing but nothing unmanageable. You'll want to use Pain Suppression (or Guardian Spirit if you choose not to follow my advice) when you or a fellow healer on the same platform gets Explosive Cinders. This will help to ease the amount of extra healing required from Explosive Cinders when a healer is preoccupied. I would recommend grabbing Desperate Prayer in the holy tree for this fight in case you have to jump in the lava more than once.

Throne of the Four Winds

The Conclave of Wind Preferred spec? Either. In general, this fight isn't about what spells or abilities you have in your toolbox, just that you use some sort of healing spell at the right time in the right place.

What's different? There are new abilities in the fight, but nothing that will dramatically change the way you heal. Just focus on being where you're supposed to be and dodging Wind Blast if you end up on Rohash's platform.

Al'akir Preferred spec? Holy. Serendipity is strong on most fights, but on this fight in particular, being able to heal bomb a player with a speedy Greater Heal is almost essential to surviving the duration of Lightning Strike. Your single-target Chakra shines here because of Holy Word: Sanctuary, which beats out Penance by being instant. Being able to sprint with Body and Soul is also great for moving in for Wind Bursts and out for Squall Lines. You'll want to grab Soul Warding so you can have a little bit more healing during Lightning Strike than you would normally.
What's different? Lightning Strike, as I already mentioned, is especially volatile because of its 30-second duration. Nothing else should stand out for healers though.

The Bastion of Twilight

Halfus Wyrmbreaker Preferred spec? Discipline, though not because of Smite spamming (that has ceased to be necessary or viable like it once was.) Instead, you want to use disc because there are so many tanks required for the fight, and a Power Word: Barrier can be used to apply a cooldown to all of them at once. Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit are handy here as well.

What's different? Having all the drakes out at once means tank damage is intense at times. You can deal with this like you usually do as disc or holy, but try to stay ahead so you don't end up having to use your cooldowns outside of when the tanks call for them.

Valiona and Theralion Preferred spec? Either. Disc is good for placing Power Word: Barrier when your group gathers up for Blackout or to port down to the twilight realm. Holy priests are good at keeping the raid heals going while dodging the various stuff on the ground. Holy will want to shy away from spamming HoTs, though, in case they get targeted by Engulfing Magic.

What's different? A shadowy twilight realm was added to the fight, but nothing about it is specific to priests. There is still plenty to heal, though.

Ascendant Council Preferred spec? Holy. The sheer amount of random raid damage is best tackled by holy priests. Body and Soul is extremely useful for getting to a Gravity Well or tornado (Call Winds).

What's different? There are extra abilities added to the first two phases. Gravity Core in phase 1 is great for priests of either spec. Simply have your priest stand outside the raid stack and use Life Grip on the player who receives the debuff. This will ensure the ability doesn't tick inside the raid. In phase 2, Leap of Faith is also useful for grabbing players to an ideal location to kite frozen orbs through flame patches.

Cho'gall Preferred spec? Holy, for the same reasons I stated in my original guide to Cho'gall. The ability to switch between Chakra stances lines up perfectly with the cooldown on Chakra (something we still need to be mindful of, even when the duration is unlimited). Disc priests can be useful, however, if your raid decides to force one player to Corruption: Absolute. Fully corrupted players are immune to healing, but they can still be shielded.

What's different? Unfortunately, very little. I guess the developers thought the normal version of this fight was interesting enough for healers already, that raising the tuning on it all was enough.

Sinestra Preferred spec: Holy, because of how you can use Guardian Spirit on your first Wrack target. By dispelling Wrack later, you make all the derivative dispelling easier, so if you Guardian Spirit a player who is about to take a lethal tick of the first application of Wrack, you'll be buying yourself more time later.

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The Light and How to Swing It: Dealing with healing caps

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, or catch me weekly on the Matticast.

If you've ever played a DPS class, you're familiar with working with stats with caps. You have to worry about hit and expertise caps, and there have even been haste and crit caps, too. While playing the min-max game with these stats can be entertaining, healers rarely have to worry about stat caps. Our primary stats, intellect and spirit, don't have any caps to speak of. We do have a few haste breakpoints where we get bonus Holy Radiance ticks, but haste and mastery don't have any hard caps that we can reach. We can pick up any healing stat without worrying about having too much of any given stat.

Instead of dealing with stat caps, healers deal with spell caps. DPS classes have an optimal system or rotation that they follow, but healers have several spell options they can choose from. Each spell has its own limitations, and knowing when to use what spell is a key part of playing a healer successfully. Holy paladins are especially familiar with these issues, as our spells tend to be in flux nearly even patch. Learning how to work around each spell's strengths and weaknesses will ensure that you always use the right tool for the job.

Reaching the HPS cap

Every time a tank dies, a holy paladin learns a little more about himself. I tend to view every tank death as a personal failure. The most common cause of tank death, in my experience, is doing too little healing per second. I'll get complacent while using my cheaper heals, and before I can react to a change, the tank gets smashed.

When you're healing a tank, you're essentially playing tug-of-war with the boss. The boss is doing a certain amount of DPS to your tank, and you need to do a certain amount of HPS to counter that. The boss might change his DPS values up and down at different times to try to throw you off balance, so you need to counter with the proper HPS choices quickly. The tank's life becomes a buffer, giving you a few precious seconds to react to the boss' latest attacks.

If the boss is doing more DPS than you're doing HPS, you have three choices: lower the boss' DPS, increase your personal HPS, or ask for some help. Asking for help should be our last resort, so let's focus on the first two options.

In order to reduce the boss' DPS, the tank (or raid) can use some of their cooldowns to mitigate some of the damage. Every tank has a couple of cooldowns at his disposal that help drop incoming DPS, and so you should coordinate with your tank to use those cooldowns if you're finding that you don't have the HPS to keep up. We can also use our defensive cooldowns, like Aura Mastery and Hand of Sacrifice, to reduce the damage that our targets take. Finally, you can also use CC or interrupts to knock down your enemies' damage, where applicable.

Defense isn't everything

Cooldowns are nice, but they're not always the answer. Sometimes, regardless of what cooldowns are active, spamming Holy Light with every global cooldown won't keep someone up. If you find yourself without enough GCDs, you might just need to use a bigger spell. While Holy Shock and Holy Light are great for saving mana, their HPS won't keep up a tank that's under pressure. There are situations where you just need to start dropping Divine Lights if you're going to keep someone alive through heavy damage. Avoid using Flash of Light if you can, as it takes the HPS/HPM balance too far and will rip through your mana way too quickly. When it comes to holy paladin spell selection, the real choice comes down to Holy Light vs. Divine Light.

The key to choosing between Divine Light and the other, cheaper heals is knowing how much damage your tank is going to take. If it's just a short period of burst, a few Divine Lights won't break your mana bank. If it's going to be a sustained session of spamming DL, you need to make sure you have the mana for it.

On a fight like heroic Halfus, where spamming Divine Light is really the only option, we have to use every trick in our book to prevent ourselves from simply running out of mana. Every gear upgrade we gets goes towards increasing the number of DLs we can cast per fight. DLs are typically the limiting factor of any mana pool, and so you want to spend the ones you can afford wisely. If you do have to spam Divine Light, you can mitigate the amount of mana you spend by utilizing Beacon of Light and Tower of Radiance. If you just have a single target getting slammed, you can toss Beacon on them, and then use your ToR holy power points on free Words of Glory. I use this strategy on several heroic encounters, as the free WoG every few seconds comes in handy for reducing my total mana expenditure.

The final way to increase your HPS is to use an offensive cooldown to boost your healing output. Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor both boost our healing significantly, and our Guardian of the Ancient Kings assists with this, too. Between our defensive and offensive cooldown options, we can tweak the DPS/HPS balance in our favor.

Defensive cooldowns tend to be the most potent when the tank is getting hit for huge amounts, while offensive cooldowns work best when the tank's life is descending smoothly. How much less do you have to heal when a tank has Shield Wall up? You'll never know until you try, so you need to test the potency of each cooldown to know when to use them.

Hitting the mana wall

While it's easy to tell you to just use Divine Light more often if your tank is dying, you also can't sustain a 100% Divine Light cycle. We simply don't have the mana to spam our biggest heal like we did in Wrath. Without careful use of our cheaper heals, we'll run out of mana before an encounter is over. We have to be as efficient as we can without letting anyone die.

Riding the line between doing enough HPS but yet reserving enough mana is one of the major difficulties of playing a healer. In Cataclysm, we don't always have to top everyone off. I see a lot of newer holy paladins pulling out their big heals on every pull, when they can usually get by with far less.

For example, against Bloodlord Mandokir, we don't have really heal anyone besides the tank. Mandokir's debuff, Ritual of Bloodletting, won't kill a player as long as they have a few hundred life, and his power move, Devastating Slam, kills on impact. There's no reason to spend the time or globals on healing the group, since they're in no real danger.

Similarly, when facing Cho'gall, your raid won't take much damage during phase 1. While they'll get blasted during the Shadow's Orders phases, you have a ton of time to heal everyone up. You don't need to be in a rush; you can use Holy Light to get everyone back up to full before the next Shadow's Orders phase. While Divine Light might heal twice as fast as Holy Light does, Holy Light can do it for a fraction of the mana. Lean on Holy Light and Holy Shock whenever someone isn't in any immediate danger of dying.

If you find yourself running out of mana, you should approach it from two directions. First, try to get more mana by using Divine Plea and Judgement as often as you can. Second, try to use cheaper heals whenever you can.

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