I need help with my spell rotations on raids to help control my overhealing percentage. To help people give opinions my major glyphs are Seal of Wisdom, Holy Shock and Flash of Light. My current healing statistics are 2,135 spellpower; 1,181 int; 21,829 mana; 31.64% holy crit; 285 haste; 214mp5 (out)/132mp5 (in).
Edit: Swapped out the Holy Light glyph for Holy Shock.
There is no spell rotation for healing. Use the correct heal in the correct situation.
If you're that worried about your overhealing, use faster heals. Overhealing usually happens because there are no healing assignments, so you basically want to get your heal in before the next healer does. Luckily you have Holy Shock, and when it crits, you get an instant Flash Heal, so you're looking at about 12k hp worth of healing in the span of one GCD.
Also, healing meters, HPS, things like that are not important to me, and shouldn't be of prime importance to any healer. What really matters is people not dying, all the while managing your mana. I can understand your concern for overheals, since it's a hit against mana efficiency, but knowing what heal to use in what situation is more important.
I've rarely seen healing assignments in our raids (they do not appear to be necessary), and since being a paladin makes me almost useless for raid healing, so I turn my attention to other things, like cleansing. I know my healing numbers are quite low in raids, but I usually stay under 5% overheals. I also push about 300 dispels over the course of the raid, usually more than 90% of the dispels of the entire raid. Things like that usually go unnoticed, but personally, I know I spent less mana and did less work than having to cast a heal (I wrote a post about it on the HDL blog), while preventing damage done to a raid member.
First of all, I'm going to respectfully disagree and say that numbers DO matter because, frankly, the game is based on numbers and generating numbers is essentially all we do. Believe me, Asian Dave, your cleanses never go unnoticed to me because I check every single Recount field when evaluating my performance (and the performances of others) after a raid. When Pat posts stats I look at individual fights and situations (trash mobs vs. successful boss attempts vs. failed boss attempts) because it helps me figure out what I should be doing better in certain circumstances.
I will absolutely agree that healing is mostly knowing what spells are best to use when, and you're not going to really know that unless you look at, you guessed it, the numbers. I'll even give you an example:
Feydrex, during his relatively brief stint as a bellligerent members of HDL, routinely meandered around the bottoms of the raid meters. As a shaman healer who tends to do pretty well, I glanced at his numbers more intently to find out what issues (besides gear level) he was having. I found, to my chagrin, that he rarely kept Earth Shield up (his procs were far lower than mine), used Riptide fewer than ten times a raid (compared to my hundreds), and accounted for between 70 and 80% of his total healing with Chain Heal. He gave me some nonsense about focusing more on not overhealing than anything else, but his overhealing was ridiculously high because Chain Heal is not always going to be the best heal to use in any situation as he seemed to believe.
I only found this out because I cared about the numbers and took the time to evaluate them. He chose to ignore my advice and call me condescending because of it, but that was his loss and not mine.
Some of it is indeed just common sense, like using faster, smaller, single target heals on KT because people are too spread out for Chain Heal to work well and too many people are taking damage at once to spam slow heals for an unnecessarily high amount.
Basically, Harold, I brought it up in the first place because you seem to focus on gear in lieu of everything else and the only questions you asked until this post were ABOUT gear. You can't be complacent with just having a high item level. If you want to get into Ulduar, you need to learn your class as best you can, experiment with different strategies in different situations, and check the numbers to see if those changes made you more or less of an asset to the encounter.
I was callous about bringing it up last night because I was drunk and you'd just finished making fun of someone for not performing well, which I must not have taken very well. I'm sorry for that, but in retrospect I don't regret it because gentler words might not've evoked such a quick reaction and I believe you'll be a better healer after the input you get from our other paladins in this thread.
I'm glad you have a different opinion. I understand it's useful to know when some people are not pulling their own weight, and this goes for all members of a raid, not just healers.
To throw another 2 cents in here, I also noted you said Harold was asking more about gear, which is ok, but cannot be your entire focus. Even so, I'll say right now that I am HIGHLY selective of the gear I wear for healing. Even though I only have one set of healing gear (I have to juggle between healing and tanking gear), I make damn sure the pieces in it are the exact pieces I want, with the stats I want. This goes to the point where I pass on gear in raids like 25-man Naxx. Even though it might be of a higher item level than what I'm currently wearing, if the stats on it are not allocated correctly or there is a stat I do not want, I won't take it. This is partially the reason why I don't win much gear. I know the gear you won you've pretty much taken by default, which is ok, but I've earned each and every single piece of my gear. I know exactly what I have, and exactly what I need. Also in the process of picking and choosing the gear I want, and not just taking every epic that floats my way, I'm able to learn more about my class, even asking myself why I make these gear choices. In the end, I have a better understanding of my own toon.
Because of that, the way I gear may not agree with other paladins out there, but I feel it's the best way of using my abilities as a healer. The way my paladin is currently set up, is for int, haste, crit, and spellpower. I place absolutely zero weight on MP5. That being said, I still have 13 or so mp5 on my paladin in her healing gear, which is 13 too much for me, but I can't seem to win a piece of gear to save my life.
Basically, you need to understand why certain stats are good, and why some aren't. It's up to you to pick and choose how you gear (whether you just take anything that's purple, or whether or not you take mail), but also how you adapt your healing style to make use of that gear.
Not knowing that much about Pally healing, as I only ever did it for 1 level, I thought a Pally healer wanted the major glyph of Holy Light, as it provided a minor amount of group healing as well.
As a general rule of thumb though, a class is made up of both gear and spell/ability rotation, and knowing what to use in what situation. Never focus on one at the exclusion of the other.
-Mark
Alright, let's see what input I can give here...
Seeing as how the thread is titled Spell Rotation Help, that's what I'll talk about--and to be honest, I think a quick revamp of your spell utilization really will crank up your healing output and tone down your overhealing.
From personal experience, I find that I depend, even to a fault, on Holy Shock. Like Asian Dave already said, maximizing your effective healing while minimizing your overhealing really does depend on a competitive attitude towards your other healers. Now please don't take that the wrong way; all it means is that you have to understand that if you're not fast--and I mean fast--with your heals at the right time, another healer is going to pop one off on your target while you're still casting, and your heals end up piling up as overheals instead of effective heals.
Now let's not deceive ourselves into thinking that overhealing isn't going to happen. Paladins, as a rule, will always overheal drastically more than other healing classes. It just has to do with the fact that we use Judgement of the Light, and Beacon of Light, and we crit so much. There's not really much getting around it to a certain extent. BUT, as has already been said, focusing on rapid, small heals will help.
Here's my typical pattern:
Beacon of Light the tank. If nobody else is taking damage, then just spam Flashes of Light on him because you know he'll be taking damage consistently. Watch for bursts of damage in the raid. Holy Shock the ones who lose 20%ish or more of their health. Usually your HS will crit, giving you the (mmmm) Infusion of Light proc that we love so much. Pop it off in the form of a Flash of Light instant cast on the next-lowest person in the raid. Follow up with another, regular, Flash of Light, and chances are your Holy Shock will be cooled down again (especially since you have the glyph). Rinse and repeat, and Holy Light only if there's big burst damage that (and here's the important part) you know is not going to continue accruing. If you see someone drop to 15% life, and they're still taking damage, they're going to die before you can chug out a Holy Light. Otherwise, if you know it was just a burst and that they're done taking damage for a few seconds, a Holy Light will fill them right up and you can get back to what you were doing. Other than that, I very rarely drop Holy Lights.
That all being said, you can pretty much *cringe* ignore the tank while you're raid healing because of Beacon of Light, assuming that your raid healing is generating enough effective healing to keep the tank up, and assuming that you remember to refresh the Beacon consistently. That's not to say you shouldn't keep your eye on the tank at all times anyway, because he may need to have his ass saved unexpectedly at any time. But usually, Beacon is enough to keep him plumped up enough while you raid heal.
A common mistake/problem I have with my current pattern is that, like I said, I depend almost too heavily on my Holy Shock. I love my crits and my Infusion of the Light proc just too damn much to refrain myself from blowing my Holy Shock every time it's up. This has given me some problems, though, in that I don't save it for emergencies. I've caught myself a couple times spam clicking my Holy Shock when it's on cool down while a tank dies because I was greedy and threw it out already. But, I am still of the opinion that Holy Shock is a healdin's BEST friend, and it should be used frequently within reason.
Whew, hope that post was helpful, like, at all. I'll take a look at our Naxx 10 numbers from last night and see if there's anything else I can dig up to offer you.
Alrighty, I just poked through the numbers for last night, and one HUGE thing popped out at me immediately:
You didn't use Beacon of Light--at all.
Even though I said Holy Shock is a healdin's best friend, Beacon of Light is just a plain necessity. Without using Beacon of Light, you're severely limiting your potential. Almost 40% of my healing done on the tank last night was thanks to Beacon--it's an enormous efficiency booster. When you Beacon the tank, as long as your raid healing is mostly effective, you can practically double your healing output due to the fact that the tank is always taking damage and therefore always benefits from Beacon.
Also, when looking at overhealing, I actually did more overhealing (by percentage) than you did. I also noticed that you just plain weren't casting heals nearly as often as I was. Taking into consideration Holy Shocks, Flashes of Light, and Holy Lights, you tossed out roughly 300 fewer heals than I did last night. Please please please don't take this as condescending, I'm not trying to be on a high horse, I'm just making comparisons in the hope that it will unearth some helpful information.
So, my opinion is: If your fear of overhealing is motivating you to actually withhold from throwing heals when they would be effective, then forget about the overhealing thing for now. As long as you are throwing fast (i. e., instant) heals frequently, then I don't think the overhealing issue is anything crucial to worry about for the time being. I think the overhealing thing came up as a concern on the night that you later told me your healbot wasn't letting you cast Holy Shock, so it might be a moot point anyway.
Second, you've got to be using Beacon of Light all the time. There's just no getting around the fact that Beacon is what keeps paladins viable as a healing class. Without it, we are severely inferior. Use it, embrace it, appreciate it.
Let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything I can do to help you out.
Quote from: Acree on Sat, 2009-05-02 : 14:45
Not knowing that much about Pally healing, as I only ever did it for 1 level, I thought a Pally healer wanted the major glyph of Holy Light, as it provided a minor amount of group healing as well.
As a general rule of thumb though, a class is made up of both gear and spell/ability rotation, and knowing what to use in what situation. Never focus on one at the exclusion of the other.
-Mark
hoyl light sucks, imo. most of a pallys heals should be HS/FoL, unless they're lazy like me and would rather just spam holy light.
Holy light is a pretty good spell. It's the biggest and best scaling nuke heal in the game currently. And geared correctly, it can do more hps than any other heal in the game.
When I MT healed, I'd use holy light almost exclusively, since with my gear, I have the cast time down to 1.5s, so I could easily spam it and use it as an emergency heal.
With the big nuke heal you run out of mana too easily.
Divine Plea remember now cuts your healing 50%.
sigh
I've never had many problems with mana, aside from the amount wasted from people being dumb. Gearing correctly and knowing when and what heal to use is an important part of mana conservation. Even with 13 total mp5 (+wisdom or water totem), I don't seem to have issues mainly because Replenishment and Divine Plea are insanely advantageous for paladins.
Divine Plea is partially situational, but the fact that it has a 1 minute cooldown means it's intended for use throughout the fight. Lots of paladins cry at the 50% healing hit, but it's no worse than a mortal strike. And keep in mind, that it's a buff which is self-dispellable. Let it tick for 6 seconds, then click it off, and that's 10% of your mana right there. Another thing to remember is that if you're nearing 20% mana and it's the first time you've hit Divine plea for that fight, then you're doing it wrong.
Sara, I don't see anything wrong with your liberal use of Holy Shock. It really is the best heal per mana per second that paladins have. It's a great heal to have when on the move. Understandably, not having it available when it's on cooldown sucks, but that's where stacking haste can make a difference.