Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Learning to heal again

This last weekend I had a complete clusterfuck of an internet outage. Between pulling up fiber, capping the wrong person's access point, and a bunch of tom-foolery on the part of my cable company - I wound up missing night two of my 10 man, and almost missing night two of our 25 man Ulduar.

What I did have was a wireless modem that was supposed to give me 2.0 Mbps of full duplex connection (2.0 up and down) - which is at least satisfactory. I usually play on a 3.0 down and 1.5 up connection - so I figured it'd be alright.

Wrong.

I don't know if it was because the connection was wireless, if it was shared bandwidth, or what - but I spent the night trying to heal while bouncing between 800 and 3000 ping - and close to 15fps. I normally run 150ms with 60fps - even during the most intense Naxx AoE fests. Now though I was struggling to land any kind of efficient heal, and I was afraid I'd have to bow out to another raider. My biggest fear of course being that of missing out on my fragments...

What happened though was that my effective healing actually went up. I had to anticipate damage more than I have in the past, and really had to push to get heals in on time. Trying to gauge the time by keeping one eye on my lag and one on health bars meant I couldn't watch the raid like I usually do (for people in fires, etc) when leading - but at least I was healing strong.

Now that I've got my fast connection back, I am trying to keep that same mentality instead of slipping back into the comfort zone of reactionary healing. Obviously we're preemtive healers in Wrath anyway (same as in BC) where you're throwing heals out knowing that at any second the tank could be dropping. With all the haste we have now, it's tough to stop those casts from going off - even with a stopcasting macro.

In short, playing with a high lag made me a slightly better healer. Though I'm still letting the ret pally die...

2 comments:

  1. Last night I switched to holy for our Hodir fight (I had been MTing the rest of the instance, but our DK does Hodir well enough).

    I did 41% of the total healing, with our priest and druid at 25% and 23% respectively. Of course my overhealing was almost 52%.

    That may sound bad, but there are two mitigating factors.

    First off, we have a lot of overheal by design. Both Beacon of Light and Judgement of Light (I was the only pally) will do a lot of overhealing, 60% and 76% in this case. And the other factor is that it doesn't matter with our stupidly huge mana pools.

    A lot of other classes have smart heals and faster heals. That means I'm trying to snipe what I can, but often times my target will get a heal just before me. That and HL is a great spell with a huge crit chance (55.1% crits on that fight). This means it's going to overheal a lot. For example, on Frozen Blows I have Beacon up on the tank and just start spamming HL on whoever is lowest. If they were down 9k and I crit for 16k, well, that's a lot of overheal. It's just part of the class.

    In the mean time, they really ought to nerf Seal of Wisdom to base mana or something. I gained over 50k mana from SoW alone that fight, or an effective 580 MP5.

    http://wws.thewin.org/sws-hodir-1244093487/actor_0x0100000001ab6277.html#healing

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  2. The problem with nerfing an ability like that is while it may have a desired effect on the end game raiders, you may see a significant hit to players working up to that level. Much like the nerf to OOC Spirit regen seems to have hurt the leveling priest/mage community - a nerf here might have severe impacts on players running their first five mans.

    Also - I'd have to say that it's not very often you have the opportunity to just whack on a boss like that. There are a few cases where you can really build up your mana fast though. XT's heart, Razerscale, 2nd boss in IC if you're healing Steelbreaker first, etc.

    I put it in the same category as knowing when to hit DP during a down moment - sneak it in when you can. There are times you can't afford to sneak in that hit or two it takes to get a SoW proc (p3 Yogg imo) - so it's not a guaranteed mechanic for mana return.

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