So I never wanted to be a tank healer. I started my priest when BC dropped and my 40m guild broke up, unable to make the transition to 25s. All of BC I was Holy, because Disc was clearly a PVP spec @ the time. I stayed Holy until ToC came out; we were running with 3 good Holy Priests and that left almost no parity in the healing team. I decided to try Disc, just to give the raid some variety.
My early play as a Disc priest was still filling the same role as I did in as Holy, raid healer. I found the spec to be well suited to this task, pre-shielding for predictable damage spikes, and using penance and flash heal to catch up stragglers. It was fun. It was relatively easy. I topped meters.
Initially when my guild started T11 raids, we ran with 2 Holy Paladins, and both were very competent tank healers, so I was free to stack mastery to my heart’s content, and play in much the same ways as I did in LK, only substituting in heal and gheal and PoH for about 70% of all the bubbles I used before. It was fun. It was relatively easy. I topped meters.
Then we started to hemorrhage Paladins. One quit the game. The other just stopped logging in for some reason. We started recruiting. We had the one that was dead set on stacking mastery. He quit to go play in Rift. We had one that only showed up for 1 raid out of 3 a week. I’m using the term “showed up” in the sense that he came to the raid, not in the way that he did such an exceptional job that he was sorely missed when he wasn’t there. Then we had a really good Pally healer for about a month. He did everything right, could keep up a tank no matter what happened, always used cooldowns without being told. He and his wife (a mage) transferred servers to go play with some RL friends that were coming back to the game.
So in all this I decided that I needed to become a competent tank healer myself. I find Disc has all the necessary talents to do the job, but not how I’d want to do it. My standard tank healing rotation is PW:S, Pennance to stack grace (and keep up my 4pc bonus), Gheal to take advantage of the hasted spell the shield gave me, then Gheal spam between ProM, Pennance, and PW:S /Weakened Soul debuffs. With points maxed in Train of Thought, and Inner Focus macro’d to Gheal, I never really needed to use Heal in tank healing situations. I think I figured out that ToT is worth about 1 manna free Gheal every 6 casts (with nothing cast between), and that puts it in Heal’s ballpark for casts per manna. I can’t honestly complain about utility overall; both Barrier and Pain Suppression are extremely good cool downs, but when an absolute massive heal is needed, I just don’t have the chops.
Thusly, Disc tank healing is very much about staying in the top 90% of your tanks HP pool. The only problem with this is other than the occasional few PW:S on people, or PoH in the melee group, much of Disc’s raid utility is underutilized. I find that on especially tank heavy damage fights I’m pre-casting & cast canceling to ensure that the tanks stay in a vertical position, when what I would like to be doing is flexing out to help with raid healing more.
I can’t in good conscience ask for a better cool down, and a buff to Gheal would be too good since I get nearly the same cast per mana as heal with it; so whats the fix? HOLY NOVA BABY! A decent buff to Holy Nova’s healing coefficient (even if I had to glyph for it) would be so awesome! It’s instant, so I could weave it in with my tank heals with little problem, it’s confined to a specific area, so it would rarely be OP. I know I know, I’m bitching about something that possibly nobody else feels the same way about. I know I could be (and do) Smite spam for Atonement etc. during my fee time, and that can effectively be construed as raid heals. I’m just not happy unless I’m also topping the meter all the time perhaps?
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