Post by Rheyna on Dec 24, 2005 14:47:06 GMT -5
NOTE!!! As of the 1.9 patch, the section on paladins is all wrong. As of the 1.10 patch, the section on priests is equally wrong. Someday I will rewrite this, and get the new details right. In the meantime, the general outline is still correct, and while both the priest and the paladin have had significant changes in their details, the three kinds of healers still have the same types of strengths and weaknesses that they had when I wrote this.
((Completely OOC.))
I have three level 60 alliance healers, and I've got lots of opinions about how best to deploy them in groups. This entry, however, is intended to provide an overview of the three kinds of healers, and what resources each has available to her.
Here are my three healers:
Ljanna: Level 60 restoration druid. She's had other speccs, but since turning 60 has spent most of her time as a healbot druid. I have other druids for other kinds of play. LJ is about healing.
Nahyomi: Level 60 holy paladin. She's never been anything other than holy. I put her first 31 points in holy, and the next 20 in retribution. Her only respecc was to move some of the retribution points around. She has two sets of gear, one ordinary paladin gear and the other a mix of plate and mail chosen to support healing.
Rheyna: Level 60 holy/disc priest. She's never had one single point in shadow, ever.
Frequently Asked Questions about this stable of healing 60s
* Which one do you like to play better? It depends on what I am doing. They all have their charms. If I have to go to the plaguelands and thwack things, I want Nahyomi. If I need to sneak around a lot, I want Ljanna. If . . .. What? That's not what you meant? Okay. What did you mean, then?
* Which one is a better healer? Define your terms.
* I don't even know what that means. But the priest is the best healer of the three of them, right? No. It depends on how you define "best healer".
* Who does the best job healing in an end-game instance? Well, that depends.
* It sounds like all you are going to say is "that depends", which is annoying. What does it depend on? Well, that's an interesting question. Read on.
Priest Healing
Priests are usually built either spirit/int/+heal or mana regen/spirit/int. Rheyna is the latter, and when I'm done gathering her blue gear should have about 200 mana per tick regen OOC.
A 60 priest with decent blue int gear and good mana regen gear has an unbuffed mana pool well over 6000 points, minimum. Spirit/int builds will have even more. She's going to use that mana, of course, but the holy tree has made her heals more efficient than the base heals, so she's going to use it more slowly than you might think. The mana regen gear plus the use of some talent points means that this priest is regenerating mana even while she casts.
Priests use four main healing spells.
Flash Heal is fast to cast and does decent amounts of healing, but is the most mana-inefficient spell a priest has. Nevertheless, a lot of priest healing is done with this spell because it does heal a significant amount and is easy to chain. Since priest mana pools are fairly deep and regen nicely, the relatively high cost of this spell in mana per health restored is an acceptable loss. Threat creation is moderate.
Renew is a Heal-over-time (HoT) which does no healing burst but which restores health every couple seconds for awhile. Like most pure HoTs, it is often used as damage mitigation. Threat is realtively low (but not non-existent).
Prayer of Healing is an AoE healing spell that generates lots of threat. You will usually see a priest who casts it follow up immediately with Fade, unless Fade is on cooldown. It heals everyone in the party (but can't be cast cross-party in a raid). It has no cooldown itself, so can be spammed if you can tolerate the high mana cost and huge aggro that chaining prayers of healing would create.
Lesser Heal/Heal/Greater Heal. Three versions of the long-cast healing spell. This is the most mana-efficient and time-efficient heal a priest has, but even improved, it takes 3.5 seconds to cast. Experienced priests may use all three, and all the ranks of them to try to precision heal (give you just the amount of health you need, and no more, lowering the mana cost and avoiding overhealing). Other equally experienced priests simply use the various ranks of GH and ignore the other two versions.
Holy specc priests have one more useful skill: Spirit of Redemption. When a priest with this skill dies in combat, nearby party members get a burst of healing (over 1000 points each) and then an HoT of another 1000 or so points. This is the closest thing any priest has to wipe prevention, and it's not really wipe prevention so much as buying time for any backup healers to get into position and start healing.
Deeply Holy specc priests also have Holy Nova, which is instant cast, damages everything and heals everybody for a small amount and generates no threat whatsoever. I use this when I need to help a lot of people at once, usually to hold the party while I follow up with Prayer of Healing.
Fundamentally, a priest has four things to do in a raid during combat: (1) heal everyone, (2) do so in such a way that she minimizes the aggro she produces, (3) do as much as possible to help manage aggro, including using her bubbles and her Fade ability, and (4) cleanse magic and disease. In undead instances, she will also be doing CC with Shackle.
Of course, a priest has unlimited OOC rezz spells, too. Given a 5- or 10-man run with no pallis or other priests in it, the priest is my choice for main healer, simply because of the rezzes and the deep mana pool.
The weaknesses of priest healing are that the emergency party heal creates so much aggro, that there is no instant heal, and that she has no real wipe prevention tools.
Paladin Healing
(Note: this material is accurate up through patch 1.8.4. The test server has already made it clear that in 1.9, this is be largely inaccurate. I'll write an entry about paladin healing when 1.9 goes live.)
A 60 paladin with decent blue healing gear should have unbuffed mana around 4300-5500 with armor still in the 4000-6000 range. This is a very hard healer to kill. Moreover, paladin heals generate either no aggro or very little aggro, depending on the circustance, so they change the aggro patterns in the room the least of all alliance heals.
Paladins have three healing spells:
Holy Light is the one most pallis use most of the time. It casts faster than druid or priest big heals and restores quite a lot of health.
Flash of Light is a smaller heal that casts a little bit faster. Many pallis call it Flash of Craptacular Light (including me from time to time) as it has little utility most of the time. There is one exception to this statement. If a palli is healing a main tank, putting Blessing of Light on the tank and then starting with lower rank Flashes is a great way to mitigate damge without overhealing. In fact, this is the most mana-efficient way there is, with any healer, to keep a MT going in the early part of a long battle.
Both Holy Light and Flash of Light are subject to an extreme improvement through talents. It is relatively cheap to make it so that whenever these spells crit, you get the mana you spent casting them back (in other words, crit heals cost zero mana). Moreover, with one additional talent point, you get the ability to FORCE a crit heal once every two minutes. (And other crits that just happen while this ability is on cool-down still cost no mana.) Almost every PvE palli has spent these points. This makes a giant difference on how far that smaller mana pool goes when being spent on healing.
The third paladin healing spell is called Lay on Hands and it makes this noise when you use it. Unimproved, it has a 1-hour cooldown and when you cast it, you burn all the mana you have, but you also heal your target for a total amount of health equal to your entire health pool. This is a last-resort heal, but it has saved many near wipes.
Paladins have the most controversial bubble in the game, as it provides 12 seconds of total immunity at the cost of a 50% slowdown of physical actiion (but not of casting). It can only be self-cast, but it does come in handy for healing oneself or one's companions -- no spell interrupts while bubbled!
A healing palli in a raid will be healing, cleansing (poison, disease and magic), and buffing (because palli buffs last 5 minutes or less, except for the very rare improved Blessing of Salvation which lasts 15 minutes).
Of course, a paladin has unlimited OOC rezz spells, too. I'm willing to main heal a 5-man with my paladin but sure prefer it if there is a shadow priest, feral or moonkin druid, or second palli around to back me up when things get messy.
Paladins also have a wipe prevention tool in the form of Divine Intervention (DI).
The weaknesses of paladin healing are the lack of an instant heal, an AoE heal, or a HoT heal, and the lack of an other-directed bubble to protect one target while she heals another, so the first target is still alive when she gets back to him.
Druid Healing
A 60 druid with decent blue healig gear has an unbuffed unbuffed mana pool between 5000 and 6000 points. A fully restro specc druid can also cast Innervate on herself or on someone else, so in the case where she innervates herself, her mana pool is about twice its base size. (Of course, innervate has a 6-minute cooldown.)
Druds have four healing spells.
Rejuvenation is a HoT with no initial burst heal. It is low-threat and very mana efficient. It stacks with Renew and with Regrowth, so you could have three HoTs working on you at once. Stacking Renew and Rejuv on offtanks and other people you won't be healing soon is a good way to help them last a lot longer. (If you have a purple leaf buff, you are carrying an Rejuv.)
Regrowth is an HoT with an initial burst of healing. It is the most mana-inefficient heal that druids have, and produces moderate threat. However, it repairs damage and then mitigates additional damage. It's a handy mid-level heal on someone who is taking more damage for awhile to come. Its buff is a green leaf.
Healing Touch is a long-cast big heal (3 seconds, fully improved) that is more mana efficient and health-per-second efficient than Greater Heal of the equivalent rank. However, it is very high threat and very easy to interrupt, even with talents to reduce spell interrupts on heals.
Tranquility is an AoE heal for the druid's party that cannot be targeted outside that party. It is channeled and has a cooldown on it, so it can't be spammed. With talents, you can make it zero threat, but if you are already on the hate list, it doesn't make aggro go away. And when you need a party heal, you are generally on the hate list. To make this work, a druid almost always needs to cast barkskin on herself (it's a pretty bogus self-bubble with a different graphic), and it's nice if she can get a priest to bubble her, too. If she takes damage and doesn't resist, a single tiny little hit will break the spell, which will remain on cooldown as if it had cast completely. When this spell goes off properly, it's a very effective tool, but it's risky, even when it's zero threat.
Druids can use talent points to get a cool-downable ability called Nature's Swiftness to cast an instant heal, which can be used on any non-instant non-channeled healing spell. It is most often used to respond to a tank getting several crits in a row on him, to get him back before he dies.
Under very rare circumstances, a properly specced druid can get into a state of clearcasting where her next non-instant heal will cost zero mana. If you ever see this in a raid, though, there is something very wrong. It's mostly useful for soloing, and since the druid had to hit something several times with a wepaon to procc it, that's just unlikely to happen in an instance. Still, while soloing or duoing out in the world, combining this with Nature's Swiftness means instant free heal, which can destroy a devilsaur who thought he was about to get a tasty druid-licious sandwich.
A healing druid will be healing, cleansing curses and poisons, and watching to see if anyone needs a battle rezz during a raid. The battle rezz is, of course, the druid's anti-wipe tool. This is a fast (2-second cast time) rezz that can be used in and out of combat and that rezzes its target with a bunch of health and mana present (unlike OOC rezzes, which get you back with very little health or mana). In addition, druids can sleep beasts and dragons, so may be doing CC during fights, too.
The weaknesses of druid healing are the cooldowns on various useful skills, the lack of an other-directed shield of any kind, and the cooldown on the combat rezz.
All right already, enough with the technical talk!!! Who's the better healer?
*sigh*
If I have to main heal a 5-man party, I want the druid, preferably with a palli in the party to provide OOC rezzes. If there is not a palli like that, then my second choice is the paladin as main healer with a feral druid as her DI target. If there will be no backup, then the priest or the paladin, depending on how good the main tank is.
For a 10-main raid that has two healers, I want one druid and one priest. (Did you notice that if you have a druid with either a priest or a paladin, then you have covered all debuffs, even curses too high-level for a mage to remove?) If I have to solo heal a 10-man with a fighting backup, I want the priest, regardless of whether the backup is a paladin or a feral/moonkin druid.
In larger raids, there will be a healing strategy that will take into account all the healers present and any of these three healers can function effectively as part of that team.
One More Thing: a note for tanks and others protecting healers....
People tend to think of druid healers as being more robust than priests, since druids wear leather and priests wear cloth. This is simply not true. A priest with Inner Fire up probably has the same or even better armor than a druid in comparable leather gear. They are both squishy and both go down fast!
((Completely OOC.))
I have three level 60 alliance healers, and I've got lots of opinions about how best to deploy them in groups. This entry, however, is intended to provide an overview of the three kinds of healers, and what resources each has available to her.
Here are my three healers:
Ljanna: Level 60 restoration druid. She's had other speccs, but since turning 60 has spent most of her time as a healbot druid. I have other druids for other kinds of play. LJ is about healing.
Nahyomi: Level 60 holy paladin. She's never been anything other than holy. I put her first 31 points in holy, and the next 20 in retribution. Her only respecc was to move some of the retribution points around. She has two sets of gear, one ordinary paladin gear and the other a mix of plate and mail chosen to support healing.
Rheyna: Level 60 holy/disc priest. She's never had one single point in shadow, ever.
Frequently Asked Questions about this stable of healing 60s
* Which one do you like to play better? It depends on what I am doing. They all have their charms. If I have to go to the plaguelands and thwack things, I want Nahyomi. If I need to sneak around a lot, I want Ljanna. If . . .. What? That's not what you meant? Okay. What did you mean, then?
* Which one is a better healer? Define your terms.
* I don't even know what that means. But the priest is the best healer of the three of them, right? No. It depends on how you define "best healer".
* Who does the best job healing in an end-game instance? Well, that depends.
* It sounds like all you are going to say is "that depends", which is annoying. What does it depend on? Well, that's an interesting question. Read on.
Priest Healing
Priests are usually built either spirit/int/+heal or mana regen/spirit/int. Rheyna is the latter, and when I'm done gathering her blue gear should have about 200 mana per tick regen OOC.
A 60 priest with decent blue int gear and good mana regen gear has an unbuffed mana pool well over 6000 points, minimum. Spirit/int builds will have even more. She's going to use that mana, of course, but the holy tree has made her heals more efficient than the base heals, so she's going to use it more slowly than you might think. The mana regen gear plus the use of some talent points means that this priest is regenerating mana even while she casts.
Priests use four main healing spells.
Flash Heal is fast to cast and does decent amounts of healing, but is the most mana-inefficient spell a priest has. Nevertheless, a lot of priest healing is done with this spell because it does heal a significant amount and is easy to chain. Since priest mana pools are fairly deep and regen nicely, the relatively high cost of this spell in mana per health restored is an acceptable loss. Threat creation is moderate.
Renew is a Heal-over-time (HoT) which does no healing burst but which restores health every couple seconds for awhile. Like most pure HoTs, it is often used as damage mitigation. Threat is realtively low (but not non-existent).
Prayer of Healing is an AoE healing spell that generates lots of threat. You will usually see a priest who casts it follow up immediately with Fade, unless Fade is on cooldown. It heals everyone in the party (but can't be cast cross-party in a raid). It has no cooldown itself, so can be spammed if you can tolerate the high mana cost and huge aggro that chaining prayers of healing would create.
Lesser Heal/Heal/Greater Heal. Three versions of the long-cast healing spell. This is the most mana-efficient and time-efficient heal a priest has, but even improved, it takes 3.5 seconds to cast. Experienced priests may use all three, and all the ranks of them to try to precision heal (give you just the amount of health you need, and no more, lowering the mana cost and avoiding overhealing). Other equally experienced priests simply use the various ranks of GH and ignore the other two versions.
Holy specc priests have one more useful skill: Spirit of Redemption. When a priest with this skill dies in combat, nearby party members get a burst of healing (over 1000 points each) and then an HoT of another 1000 or so points. This is the closest thing any priest has to wipe prevention, and it's not really wipe prevention so much as buying time for any backup healers to get into position and start healing.
Deeply Holy specc priests also have Holy Nova, which is instant cast, damages everything and heals everybody for a small amount and generates no threat whatsoever. I use this when I need to help a lot of people at once, usually to hold the party while I follow up with Prayer of Healing.
Fundamentally, a priest has four things to do in a raid during combat: (1) heal everyone, (2) do so in such a way that she minimizes the aggro she produces, (3) do as much as possible to help manage aggro, including using her bubbles and her Fade ability, and (4) cleanse magic and disease. In undead instances, she will also be doing CC with Shackle.
Of course, a priest has unlimited OOC rezz spells, too. Given a 5- or 10-man run with no pallis or other priests in it, the priest is my choice for main healer, simply because of the rezzes and the deep mana pool.
The weaknesses of priest healing are that the emergency party heal creates so much aggro, that there is no instant heal, and that she has no real wipe prevention tools.
Paladin Healing
(Note: this material is accurate up through patch 1.8.4. The test server has already made it clear that in 1.9, this is be largely inaccurate. I'll write an entry about paladin healing when 1.9 goes live.)
A 60 paladin with decent blue healing gear should have unbuffed mana around 4300-5500 with armor still in the 4000-6000 range. This is a very hard healer to kill. Moreover, paladin heals generate either no aggro or very little aggro, depending on the circustance, so they change the aggro patterns in the room the least of all alliance heals.
Paladins have three healing spells:
Holy Light is the one most pallis use most of the time. It casts faster than druid or priest big heals and restores quite a lot of health.
Flash of Light is a smaller heal that casts a little bit faster. Many pallis call it Flash of Craptacular Light (including me from time to time) as it has little utility most of the time. There is one exception to this statement. If a palli is healing a main tank, putting Blessing of Light on the tank and then starting with lower rank Flashes is a great way to mitigate damge without overhealing. In fact, this is the most mana-efficient way there is, with any healer, to keep a MT going in the early part of a long battle.
Both Holy Light and Flash of Light are subject to an extreme improvement through talents. It is relatively cheap to make it so that whenever these spells crit, you get the mana you spent casting them back (in other words, crit heals cost zero mana). Moreover, with one additional talent point, you get the ability to FORCE a crit heal once every two minutes. (And other crits that just happen while this ability is on cool-down still cost no mana.) Almost every PvE palli has spent these points. This makes a giant difference on how far that smaller mana pool goes when being spent on healing.
The third paladin healing spell is called Lay on Hands and it makes this noise when you use it. Unimproved, it has a 1-hour cooldown and when you cast it, you burn all the mana you have, but you also heal your target for a total amount of health equal to your entire health pool. This is a last-resort heal, but it has saved many near wipes.
Paladins have the most controversial bubble in the game, as it provides 12 seconds of total immunity at the cost of a 50% slowdown of physical actiion (but not of casting). It can only be self-cast, but it does come in handy for healing oneself or one's companions -- no spell interrupts while bubbled!
A healing palli in a raid will be healing, cleansing (poison, disease and magic), and buffing (because palli buffs last 5 minutes or less, except for the very rare improved Blessing of Salvation which lasts 15 minutes).
Of course, a paladin has unlimited OOC rezz spells, too. I'm willing to main heal a 5-man with my paladin but sure prefer it if there is a shadow priest, feral or moonkin druid, or second palli around to back me up when things get messy.
Paladins also have a wipe prevention tool in the form of Divine Intervention (DI).
The weaknesses of paladin healing are the lack of an instant heal, an AoE heal, or a HoT heal, and the lack of an other-directed bubble to protect one target while she heals another, so the first target is still alive when she gets back to him.
Druid Healing
A 60 druid with decent blue healig gear has an unbuffed unbuffed mana pool between 5000 and 6000 points. A fully restro specc druid can also cast Innervate on herself or on someone else, so in the case where she innervates herself, her mana pool is about twice its base size. (Of course, innervate has a 6-minute cooldown.)
Druds have four healing spells.
Rejuvenation is a HoT with no initial burst heal. It is low-threat and very mana efficient. It stacks with Renew and with Regrowth, so you could have three HoTs working on you at once. Stacking Renew and Rejuv on offtanks and other people you won't be healing soon is a good way to help them last a lot longer. (If you have a purple leaf buff, you are carrying an Rejuv.)
Regrowth is an HoT with an initial burst of healing. It is the most mana-inefficient heal that druids have, and produces moderate threat. However, it repairs damage and then mitigates additional damage. It's a handy mid-level heal on someone who is taking more damage for awhile to come. Its buff is a green leaf.
Healing Touch is a long-cast big heal (3 seconds, fully improved) that is more mana efficient and health-per-second efficient than Greater Heal of the equivalent rank. However, it is very high threat and very easy to interrupt, even with talents to reduce spell interrupts on heals.
Tranquility is an AoE heal for the druid's party that cannot be targeted outside that party. It is channeled and has a cooldown on it, so it can't be spammed. With talents, you can make it zero threat, but if you are already on the hate list, it doesn't make aggro go away. And when you need a party heal, you are generally on the hate list. To make this work, a druid almost always needs to cast barkskin on herself (it's a pretty bogus self-bubble with a different graphic), and it's nice if she can get a priest to bubble her, too. If she takes damage and doesn't resist, a single tiny little hit will break the spell, which will remain on cooldown as if it had cast completely. When this spell goes off properly, it's a very effective tool, but it's risky, even when it's zero threat.
Druids can use talent points to get a cool-downable ability called Nature's Swiftness to cast an instant heal, which can be used on any non-instant non-channeled healing spell. It is most often used to respond to a tank getting several crits in a row on him, to get him back before he dies.
Under very rare circumstances, a properly specced druid can get into a state of clearcasting where her next non-instant heal will cost zero mana. If you ever see this in a raid, though, there is something very wrong. It's mostly useful for soloing, and since the druid had to hit something several times with a wepaon to procc it, that's just unlikely to happen in an instance. Still, while soloing or duoing out in the world, combining this with Nature's Swiftness means instant free heal, which can destroy a devilsaur who thought he was about to get a tasty druid-licious sandwich.
A healing druid will be healing, cleansing curses and poisons, and watching to see if anyone needs a battle rezz during a raid. The battle rezz is, of course, the druid's anti-wipe tool. This is a fast (2-second cast time) rezz that can be used in and out of combat and that rezzes its target with a bunch of health and mana present (unlike OOC rezzes, which get you back with very little health or mana). In addition, druids can sleep beasts and dragons, so may be doing CC during fights, too.
The weaknesses of druid healing are the cooldowns on various useful skills, the lack of an other-directed shield of any kind, and the cooldown on the combat rezz.
All right already, enough with the technical talk!!! Who's the better healer?
*sigh*
If I have to main heal a 5-man party, I want the druid, preferably with a palli in the party to provide OOC rezzes. If there is not a palli like that, then my second choice is the paladin as main healer with a feral druid as her DI target. If there will be no backup, then the priest or the paladin, depending on how good the main tank is.
For a 10-main raid that has two healers, I want one druid and one priest. (Did you notice that if you have a druid with either a priest or a paladin, then you have covered all debuffs, even curses too high-level for a mage to remove?) If I have to solo heal a 10-man with a fighting backup, I want the priest, regardless of whether the backup is a paladin or a feral/moonkin druid.
In larger raids, there will be a healing strategy that will take into account all the healers present and any of these three healers can function effectively as part of that team.
One More Thing: a note for tanks and others protecting healers....
People tend to think of druid healers as being more robust than priests, since druids wear leather and priests wear cloth. This is simply not true. A priest with Inner Fire up probably has the same or even better armor than a druid in comparable leather gear. They are both squishy and both go down fast!
