Priestly Bubbles

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer?
Nymarie, Discipline priest

What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans)
25 man raids usually, some 10 man raids just for funsies

What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why?
Penance, I mean come on, who doesn't love Penance?

What healing spell do you use least for your class and why?
Renew-it's crap for Discipline

What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why?
Lol the same strength that Miss Medicina gave! The versatility! I can be a tank healer or a raid healer or just fill in the gaps.

What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why?
No real throughput. When Penance is down, I can't really compete with a holy pally.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you?
The best assignment for me is as the support healer. Healing both tanks and raid so that I can get all my best spells out there and be the most useful.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why?
Resto shammy. One of the coolest healers around. Pretty versatile and fun to heal with. And Chain Heal makes a neat sound when it goes off.

What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why?
Another Discipline priest. It sucks when you go to bubble somebody and see they already have the Weakened Soul debuff.

What is your worst habit as a healer?
Deviating from my healing assignment. My target usually doesn't ever die when I do this, but I do tend to be bad at throwing shields around the raid while tank healing.

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing?
When people yell "HEAL ME" over vent unless it's a tank saying "I'm picking up such and such mob, heal me." Or when people say "I didn't get heals" when asked why they died to fire...

Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing?
At the moment, not quite. I think Discipline is good yes. But I think they focused too hard on making Discipline so versatile that we no longer excel at either tank or raid healing like other healers do.

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer?
Did the tanks die? No? Good. Every once in a while, I'll pull out a Dispel meter, but healing meters (even those who attempt to measure absorbs) suck.

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class?
Hmm...there are a few. First and foremost is the one that's the most annoying: that's a PvP spec! No...no it's not. The next one is "Discipline is only for tank healing." Not anymore.

What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? A few things, especially if they've healed before. First, it takes a while to adjust to the fact that your spec is based on absorbs not throughput. And I see Discipline priests stacking spirit instead of int, because everybody knows that pallies and shammies use mp5 for regen and druids and priests use spirit right? Not quite...new Disc priests do not realize that they will get more regen and benefit from Intellect. But they learn.

If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)?
Very low overhealing, sometimes below the spriest and ret pallies. Average throughput and heavy absorbs. And lots of dispels. I am the DISPELLING MASTA!

Haste or Crit and why?
Both! They're both so beneficial that I can't choose just one!

What healing class do you feel you understand least?
Holy pallies. The only healer class I haven't played before.

What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing?
xPerl for raid frames and Healbot for shielding or healing dps. I still prefer keybinds to hard core macros.

Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why?
I like a balance, but the stats I tend to balance are spell power, intellect and crit. Usually in that order.


Well there it is! I meant to post last night but I got busy.

Hey guess what healers! Nym turns 21 today!

For several weeks, I have been unable to run ToGC10 with my guild. The first week I missed was the night I had no electricity til 4 am. Then after that, I didn't get an invite for whatever reason. I assume it's due to my spec. So on Friday, my guild tried what someone suggested to me about going shadow for Anub with 2 healers, a druid and a pally. This worked great every time…til phase 3. In phase 3, there was too much raid damage going around. So the guild leader and I put our heads together and this is what we came up with. Bear with me because this is a strange strategy but it worked.

Using 3 healers in phase 1 and 2 of Anub is overkill. That's why most strategies tell you to use two. My first job as the discipline priest was to drop the Frost Spheres. This way the dps could focus on the boss and adds and we didn't have a healer sitting around doing nothing. After dropping the four spheres in the four corners (basically) of the room, I targeted the boss and smite spammed his ass. That's right, smite spam. Well....more like holy fire, penance, smite spam. Anyway, point is this. I dpsed hard core, making sure to use my Arcane Torrent whenever it was up. When the boss got to 35% (and we had plenty of time), I shielded the entire raid. Then I waited for a few sec for my group to get to 50% and popped Power Infusion, healing them with Prayer of Healing. After Power Infusion went down, I pulled out the shadowfiend for mana and a tiny bit of extra damage. Then I rotated between using Prayer of Healing and shielding my group. When I got to 50% mana again, the boomkin tossed me an innervate. Not sure why, but he paid attention to my shadowfiend and when I had already used it and I was at 50%, he was gave me an innervate. Needless to say, I did NOT run out of mana.

Once I got my rotation down, my group did not die. The amusing thing is that the tanks were in the group the druid healer was focusing on. So...the druid's group had him and the pally healer on it. Yet they were the ones dying. Not my group. But after Dema and I organized this strange strategy we downed him in only a few attempts. I felt good after that night. But I still want to know how groups 2 heal this. Our pally+druid couldn't do it, and that's supposedly the best comp.

Last night was 25 man raid night. We wiped on Faction Champions for 4 hours. This is the only fight in the game I hate. But I did notice something that made me happy. At the end of the night, my dispels for the entire raid was at 955. The next closest was a holy priest who goes discipline for FC at 611.

Yeaaaaah, I think I've secured my raid spot for a long time.

Well guys, I've been pretty sick lately. Missed work since Tuesday...woo...

On a happier note, I spent my sickly time getting Netherwing rep and I'm the proud owner of 6 gorgeous Netherwing drakes. I got the free one and then logged on this morning and my significant other had bought the other five and stuck them in my bank to surprise me. He says it's my birthday present since I turn 21 on Thursday.

Well, back to farming frost lotus for raid tonight. Hopefully we'll get somewhere on Faction Champions.

Very proud of Elitist today. Well done guys!

Northrend Beasts
We wiped a few times but we knew we had it. We ended up doing this with 6 healers. Healing was a little strained in Phase 2 and 3, but we were ahead of every single timer. Avoiding Icehowl's charge was what finally did it for us. All we needed to do was have every single raider paying attention. We also had a wait list threatening those who consistently died to stupid things. How shocking...very few raiders died.

Jaraxxus
Easy sauce. Our first try we got him to 20%. Our mistake was not arranging where our healers were. But that didn't take long to figure out. We put 3 healers on the left of Jaraxxus and 3 on the right. The ranged spread out in 2 groups, one to the North and one to the South. Anybody who got Incinerate Flesh ran towards the melee. This strategy worked and we killed him after about 4 attempts.

Faction Champions
This fight goes from being a hard burn to controlled CC. Without CC, it's impossible. I think the most viable way of doing it is locking down the healers and killing the painful dps. I'm kind of biased here though since the melee dps like to force me to eat dirt (or wood) every time I cast mass dispel. I'm pretty sure my rotation was Mass Dispel, Fear, run like hell, Mass Dispel, Fear, run like hell. I'm also pretty sure that I died early on the majority of our attempts because our CC wasn't well organized. We spent an hour on this fight and then it was bedtime. It didn't feel like we accomplished much besides realizing that we needed to do some research. But I think that no matter whether or not we decide to burn the healers first, CC will make this fight for us.

My guild doesn't run guild 10 mans usually. We don't get to do a lot of 10 man content because of this. Those who go to ToGC10 are friends of the person who hosts it. I go with a group outside of the guild. I was originally picked up as a pug healer for another guild's 10 man. They had been having trouble finding a third regular healer and were relieved to find that I wasn't a fail pug. So they asked if I would become their regular third healer. I told them I'd like that, seeing as how I don't have a regular ToGC10 group. With that group I hope to kill Anub on ToGC10 on Sunday afternoon. But tonight, my guild leader is hosting a "super leet" Ulduar hard mode group. I think he wants to get to Algalon at least, if not kill him. I was invited, signed up and hope I get to go. Here's to hoping I get to meet Algalon!

One more thing before I stop being such a chatty Cathy. I'd like to know other discipline priests' thoughts on gear. In our guild, druids and priests do not bid on mp5 gear and shamans and paladins do not bid on spirit gear. I have one such druid in my guild who finds it completely irritating that I can basically use anything, whether it has spirit, mp5 or neither. I informed him last night when the mp5 ring dropped that I would not be bidding against the shamans and paladins. I told him that once our two resto shamans and our holy paladin have the ring, then I will bid on it if it drops again. He was flabbergasted and asked me why I would limit myself when there is no reason to. I told him that I wanted to be fair to the other healers and as such I will bid on what a holy priest would bid on, unless the other healers (shamans and paladins) do not want it. I guess it didn't cross his lootwhorish mind that I could possibly think of the other healers when considering a bid. However, when it comes to dps, I don't hold back on bidding. Sorry guys, but you can bid on hit gear and I can't.


Figured out the "ban". Thanks to Apollia. My payment is pending, so I can't post til it goes through. How stupid is that...

I'm resisting the urge to kill my guildies today. We got to Phase 3 on almost every single attempt of 25 heroic NrB. Our problems were either we lost too many people on Phase 2 because people weren't spread out, or weren't letting the tanks get aggro, or were too close to the worm. One of the dps actually died to standing in poison! That's pug stuff! If we made it to Phase 3 with everybody alive and both worms dead, somebody had to get hit by Icehowl's charge. Anyway, we got super close but...no cigar.

Guess who was the first person to die to fire. Me. Yeah, uh huh, Nym died to fire. You know how often that happens? Never. Nym is the one that the raiders are saying "just freaking die Nym so we can zone in". After that wipe, which we did get to the end of phase 2, my guild leader says "Nym...no one died on Phase 1 except you. What happened?" So I read my combat log to him. Here's a brief overview of what it said:
Nym takes initial damage from fire bomb (2k ish)
Nym gains Nym's Power Word: Shield
Renewed Hope spam!
Penance at tank
Some other spell at tank
Nym takes 7k! Damage from the 4 stack fire bomb dot
Nym takes 7k! Damage from the 4 stack fire bomb dot
Nym takes 7k! Damage from the 4 stack fire bomb dot
Nym has died.
Abuh??
The best part was watching the warlock who usually stands next to me skirting around the fire to look at my body. He then announced in vent, "Invisible fire-1, Nym-0". There was no fire near my body. Probably about 10 ft away was the fire that had hit me initially, but there was no other fire. The holy priest and I then decided that Levitate would be the way to go. While our specific tank wasn't tanking, we hit every dps and healer in range with Levitate. He stood on the right side of the boss and I stood on the left. This made Phase 1 smooth as glass. Not only did NOBODY die to fire after that, but ranged dps sky rocketed because they didn't have to continuously move of fire. I would suggest doing this for hard mode NrB. For one, it reduces the amount of raid healing you have to do so you can focus on tanks. It raises your ranged dps. And it altogether avoids the invisible fire bug.
Anyway, if we don't get this boss down on Thursday, I'm going to be very surprised and very annoyed. So much progress last night!

On a happier note, we did regular ToC25 first and I finally won a second trophy.
Tier9.25 Pants FTW!
Zabra's Leggings of Triumph
Gemmed with:
+23 Spell power
+20 Intellect

After wanting to murder my guildies for not spreading out in phase 2 of heroic Northrend Beasts on 25, I made a suggestion in the healing channel that we move on. But the raid leader said, "Head to Sartherion!" Abuh?? So we slowly start heading there... While on the way there, our raid leader gives a nice little speech. "3d is all about situational awareness and coordination. If you get hit by fire walls or void zones, you do not get to roll on the drake." So we're practicing coordination and situational awareness with the reward of a cool looking mount? Okay. So we down it with a ton of people dead. Uh huh...and we wonder why we can't do hard modes. Anyway, we loot the dragon and move on to Ulduar.
We called a wipe on Hodir at 4%...once again, situational awareness. Raiders dying or not standing in the right buffs. I was #7 in damage done in my offspec shadow gear. I beat the new shadow priest. >_> Bad times. Both the guild leader and one of the officers applauded my dps and told me that it was bad that I was outdpsing an spriest in better gear than me. One of the officers asked me why my main spec wasn't shadow! I told him that shadow isn't very good except on gimmick fights.
So we didn't accomplish much except for realizing that most of our raiders lack situational awareness…but I did get a nifty title. Twilight Vanquisher woo!

Okay updated healing Priest Tier 10
2 piece bonus - Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
4 piece bonus - Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.
2 piece bonus I can definitely deal with. The 4 piece bonus I can see as viable. I assume whenever it procs you will get some sort of buff letting you know that if you flash heal you can use another Penance/Circle of Healing right away. Much better than the original. I think I may get this 4 piece.

Healing Priest Tier 10-
2P Bonus - After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
4P Bonus - Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.
Okay the 2 piece bonus sounds fantastic. That is well thought out. The 4 piece bonus-what? Penance has a 8-9 sec CD if you're specced correctly and have the glyph. So if it's a 15% chance, what are the odds that it even resets it before it's already up? I hate math so I'll let others do the math but I don't see this as viable. Also, as a priest, it annoys me slightly. I like playing priest because we have so many different viable healing spells for different situations. This 4 piece bonus will just make us FH spammers...like paladins. No thanks.

I reread my very first post on beginner discipline healing. It's still pretty accurate for what I was healing then, but now that I'm into hard modes I don't heal like that anymore. It's only been about a month and a half and I've already changed my healing style due to these hard modes I've been getting into.
Well I'll keep posting tidbits on stuff I learn. It was just amusing to see how far I've come in a month.

I'm on a constant quest to improve my healing as I'm sure most players are in whatever they do. Tanking, healing, dpsing, even PvP. It's been pretty slow at work so I decided to try my hand at this math crap some healers talk about. I calculated each one of my spell's average healing per second and healing per mana and pretty much backed up what I thought about my healing. I used the logs that our guild uses from our last raid. Gonna post it here for anybody to review.

Starting with Prayer of Mending
Average ProM heal-5296-Jumps up to 5 times
Mana cost w/Mental Agility-521
It is difficult to determine what ProM's healing per second is due to the fact that you don't know when it is going to do each jump. I did calculate what its healing per mana is however.
Healing per mana-46
46 healing per mana is highest out of all the spells I use. This is why I have this spell constantly jumping on high AoE raid damage fights.

Penance
Average Penance heal-4143-Typically 3 times
Mana cost-618
Healing per second-6215
Healing per mana-20
Fairly high healing per second and fairly high healing per mana make this spell my best single target spell.

Power Word: Shield + Glyph
Average PW:S Absorb + Glyph heal-8235
Mana cost w/Mental Agility & Soul Warding-666
Healing per second-8235 Instant absorbs and healing
Healing per mana-12
Surprisingly its healing per mana was not as high as I expected it to be. I guess this is why shield spammers stack lots of intellect. This spell has very high healing/absorbs and this is why shield spamming is viable. I use shields quite a bit even when I'm tank healing.

Flash Heal
Average Flash Heal-5469
Mana cost w/Improved Flash Heal-591
Healing per second-4558
Healing per mana-9
Flash heal's healing per mana is fairly low compared to the other spells. Its healing per second isn't bad and as it is a very quick cast time, it is a decent spell to use.

Greater Heal
Average Greater Heal-12371
Mana cost-1236
Healing per second-5176
Macro'd to haste trinket healing per second-6217
Healing per mana-10
Contrary to popular belief, Greater Heal has higher healing per second and healing per mana than Flash Heal. I do tend to use this spell more than the average priest but typically only with the haste trinket, so that my target doesn't die while I'm casting it.

Binding Heal
Average Binding Heal-4470-2 heals
Mana cost-1043
Healing per second-7450
Healing per mana-9
This spell is basically a double flash heal. Its high healing per second makes it very useful but it is still very situational. I have to be taking damage for this spell to be used to its max potential.

Prayer of Healing + Glyph
Average Prayer of Healing Heal + Glyph HoT-5155-5 heals
Mana cost-1854
Healing per second-10,785
Healing per mana-14
Macro'd to Power Infusion
Mana cost-1483
Healing per second-14399
Healing per mana-17
According to the math, this spell is very valid for AoE healing. I had to do this math at least 3 times to make sure I wasn't doing it wrong. Even with its decent healing per mana, this spell still costs enough mana to make a priest pause before they spam it. The other issue with this spell is the overhealing. It should not be used unless that entire group is low.

Renew
Average Renew tick-2092-5 ticks over 15 sec
Mana cost w/Mental Agility-591
Healing per second-697
Healing per mana-18
The healing per mana isn't bad but the healing per second is. I only use this spell on the start of pulls or in between phases like in Northrend Beasts. Otherwise, it's a waste of a global cooldown.

And just for my curiosity-Divine Aegis
Average 2186 instant absorbs for every crit

My math is probably wrong somewhere since I did this in between doing timesheets/physician visits/orders here at work. Feel free to correct me.

As an after thought, to those who think I'm a strong advocate of "Discipline/Shadow is fine!!", I'm not. I think these two specs could use a little love to get them on par with the rest of healers/dps. However, just because the two specs are a little behind doesn't mean they suck. And honestly, the game is about having fun. If you're not having fun because you're not the best, play an overpowered class. Don't just sit on the forums and bitch to everybody else. No one wants to hear it. With that said, if you've got some good ideas on how to fix these specs, feel free to share. The "QQ my class sucks" helps no one. The constructive "this is how I think we should fix it" helps people get to thinking and could possibly get Blizzard's attention.