The Daily Quest: Flash heals
by Alex Ziebart 
Mar 12th 2010 at 10:00PM
The dungeon finder has been doing bad things to me lately. Bad, bad things. Really bad. I've been... well, I've been healing. A lot. When the dungeon queue for a healer is approximately thirty seconds long as opposed to the thirty minute long DPS queue? I'd rather help the problem, not add to it.
To celebrate (read: lament) my newly found love of what we in the business call 'the heals' we'll be taking a look at healers 'round the blogosphere.
- Whether or not healers should need to worry about their mana has been a hot topic in the community recently. Check out Restokin's take on the issue.
- Life in Group 5, a resto shaman blog, teaches you how to analyze combat logs for healers.
- The Physician's Log, who is very quickly becoming a regular here in The Daily Quest, talks about being a new healer and the potential stresses that come with it.
- Lodur discusses the death of healer niches... and I think he's saying something else, too. Seems fishy to me.
Filed under: The Daily Quest
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
someone473 Mar 12th 2010 11:04PM
Awesome picture.
Avan Mar 13th 2010 12:45AM
More bosses need to mana burn, or have auras that increase the cost of spells by some percentage. It would be a cheap way to combat the mana non-issue, but it would get the job done.
Meanwhile, healing niches are good in a way. You should be able to define "tank healing" and "raid healing" as niches. All healing classes should be able to enter those niches, though. If you want a raid healing paladin, then you should be able to have one at the expense of not being able to tank heal. If you want to be a tank healing druid, then give up your raid healing. There are a ton of opportunities for healers as it stands, so you shouldn't have to be forced into a niche and reroll if you don't like that niche. Unless you're a priest, of course, at which point you're pushing yourself into the exclusive "utility healer" niche.
Lissanna Mar 13th 2010 1:19AM
Mechanics specific to some boss fights is fine, but healing is also right now about how fast you can spam heals & get them to land "first". It didn't used to always be like that. There are different models that WoW healing has gone through.
loop_not_defined Mar 13th 2010 1:17AM
My DPS queues have never been anywhere close to 30 minutes...
On a side note, something happened in LFD this morning that completely caught me off guard, and....was very embarrassing.
When playing my Priest, I normally queue as Healer/DPS, although really, who am I kidding? I'm going to be the healer. So this morning, when doing ToC, I stared at my screen for a bit during the trash before Eadric. I couldn't figure out why someone else had the healer icon next to their portrait. No wonder healing the tank was so easy!! Huge /facepalm moment, then switched to Shadow between pulls and apologized to the group.
Sqtsquish Mar 13th 2010 3:11AM
well that is awesome- grats to you :D
Possum Mar 13th 2010 5:22AM
It's incredibly uncommon as 99.99% of the time if you enter as healer/dps you'll always get heals but it does happen. Same thing happened to me on my baby druid leading to "who is healing?"
Muse Mar 13th 2010 5:50AM
Same, I was on my shaman at the time. It gets very confusing to suddenly respec, it's like all the keybindings have to be unbound in your brain first before it starts making sense again.
Tetsuo Mar 13th 2010 1:04PM
Same thing happened to me, only I was queued as tank and dps on my pally. 4 pulls into fos and the group was yelling at me to stop tanking. I checked the roles and sure enough, the other pally was marked to tank.. lol
Dominique Mar 13th 2010 3:25AM
is Talent Hunter part of world of Warcraft? I found this link when I did a search for Talent Hunter on google:
http://tw.wowarmory.com/talent-calc.xml?c=Hunter
George Mar 13th 2010 4:28AM
His looks suspiciously like a phishing link. I'd advise not clicking till further verification can be made.
George Mar 13th 2010 4:37AM
Tested the link myself on my sandbox computer. It links to the Armory for Taiwanese servers. Totally IRL facepalmed at that one. Sorry for the initial suspicion dude. My only excuse is it's 4am and I'm only awake for bio reasons.
Anyway, to answer your question, as far as I can understand it, yes. Talents are a big part of WoW, and the official armory sites, as well a others like Wowhead, have talent calculators so you can map ot a talent path when not playing the game.
Dristanel Mar 13th 2010 8:37AM
Thanks very much for the link!
Now I have to get off my arse and make a new post. ;)
UTech Mar 13th 2010 11:31AM
I think Lodur's mistaken about druid healing prior to Wrath. In vanilla WoW, the only reason a druid was invited was if they were specc'ed for Innervate. Push that one button and be a mana battery for the priest. That's it. In BC, it was Lifebloom. Push one button. At least, though, we were actual healers, even if it was only to roll Lifebloom on the tank(s).
Finally, in Wrath, trees are proper all-round healers, and I for one am pleased with that.
gamerunknown Mar 13th 2010 2:30PM
I didn't get the whole "mana regen is no longer a concern for healers in wrath", all the way up to ToC 25. As a holy priest I was top on heals relatively frequently, but mana problems were my top concern... then I got spark of hope and solace of the defeated. Since then I've needed to use hymn of hope for myself roughly once, whereas before I'd have to line it up exactly right to ensure that the tanks wouldn't be taking too much damage and that I could use it in conjunction with shadowfiend for more mana regen.
I think it depends on your playstyle: if you know the healers you're running with and they're assigned to specific groups, you don't have to switch back and forth from tank healing to raid healing to whatever. You can concentrate on a few targets and can afford down time, even if your gear isn't as high as others. If you're competing with perhaps one other player with huge haste gear while 3 other healers are just above judgement of light/vampiric embrace healing, then ensuring you have a high enough mana regen becomes a huge concern, especially if you're not sure the tank or raid will survive during a divine plea or hymn of hope.
I think Cataclysm could go relatively well or disastrously for a healer in the second category. If they nerf mana regen but keep the long cooldowns for a priest's mana returning abilities, then large portions of the fight will be spent wanding, which I really doubt was what they wanted when they said mana regen should be more active. If they reduce hymn of hope to a 12 second cooldown and a 6 second cast time that restores 500 mana to party members (or similar), I'm sure it could work very well.
Coldbear Mar 15th 2010 12:47PM
http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=204915
Just saw earlier today that someone has started spreading malicious copies of Rawr through the WoW forums(e.g. http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=12899880685&sid=1) the malware itself is embedded in the main executable base-64 encoded, i don't know exactly what it does, i couldn't be bothered making a VM sandbox, but the scan results are here: http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/535c57286fbec99c36438b6bfc1ed85d0d7e9dc20d29de22243f82ad37ef2532-1268575061
Coldbear Mar 15th 2010 12:47PM
The malicious copy is hosted on mediafire, and they've shamelessly ripped the youtube video and reuploaded here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfYiZ8J5Oug