Just to catch everyone up to date, here’s two facts that many WoW players already know. Bear with me if it’s old news:

Ghostcrawler is the Blizzard face behind whether they buff you or nerf you; and Ghostcrawler plays a Holy / Discipline priest.

Alright, now that we’re up to speed… here’s something you might not have read before! Ghostcrawler recently replied to a priest thread on the forums about his playstyle when he’s Discing and Holy’ing. It’s a quick and helpful read that healing priests across the Interwebs can benefit from.

Disc: PoM on cooldown. PW:S as much as you can (esp. on the Arcane mage until 3.3.3). Use Penance often when you need burst. Resort to PoH if a lot of people need healing at once, especially in 10-player raids where you don’t have a lot of other healers to pick up the slack. Keep Pain Suppression and Divine Hymn for emergencies. Use Power Infusion on a mage or lock if you don’t need it.

Holy: PoM on cooldown. CoH on cooldown if there is any raid damage. Renew to handle the rest of the raid damage. Flash Heal if someone is still low after all of that. Save GS and Divine Hymn for emergencies or timed boss cooldowns. I tend to use Binding Heal a lot more than most priests because it makes me feel smart, especially when globals are in question.

What I like: Feeling smart when I mix the right tool with the right problem. Saving lives when someone thought they were dead. Sitting there at full mana halfway through a fight because I didn’t heal when I didn’t need to. Penance in general. Body and Soul. Borrowed Time. Serendipity.

What I don’t like: Using CoH so much. Dealing with Weakened Soul (esp. as Holy). Lightwell. Seeing priests die. (In all honesty I don’t die a lot, but I see Spirits of Redemption constantly. I guess as a sweeping generalization, priests have the stare-at-Grid syndrome worse than other healers.) Blowing 3 candles every wipe. Looking like a mage if I pick the wrong gear.

This is obviously meant for PvE; not PvP.

My Discipline playstyle mirrors what Ghostcrawler mentions here rather fluidly; nice parallel there. As far as Holy though, I tend to use Flash Heal over Renew for patching up a raid, just on the grounds that it gets me closer to my precious Serendipity. Renew is something I reserve for tanks. I’m not sure if that’s an inferior decision or a decision based on taste, but it’s fun nonetheless to make the comparison.

Also, he’s darn right about Binding Heal. Most priests forget they even have it, and it really makes me feel smart whenever I hit my 7 key.

3.3 is aging like a fine cheese. Enough bosses have released in ICC now that I can come back to my original discussion on your raid getting it’s very own iPud (I’m Penancing Under Duress.) Since finding answers on what you should do in ICC-25 man is easy, let’s look at whether you should spec Holy or Discipline for ICC 10-man. (Which I’m running today, yay!)

Short answer: Do both.

Got duel spec? Okay, good. Now make one spec Holy and the other Discipline. You can get your 50g back doing your random daily later. (Need to have a DPS spec for switching roles because you have too many healers? I’d suggest switching roles per raid instead of per fight; it’ll simplify the dilemma.) Now I’ll go over the details why.

There are several bosses where you can play whatever floats your boat. Some say it’s great to have the damage reduction and bubbles in a raid for all fights, others say the impact Holy priests make on the charts is astronomical. If you want to be a winnar though, you’ll need Discipline for Saurfang and Holy for Festergut (some call him Sporeface.)

For Saurfang: Your bubbles are going to slow down how fast he gets runic power, and therefore how quickly he starts to mark people into a pit of utter doom. You’ll be amazed at the difference you make in this fight when you’re Discipline; no other healer comes close. (They might think they do if they’re chart whores though. )

For Festergut: Raid damage EVERYWHAR. Holy has an advantage here, letting you run around and CoH, not to mention the Serendipity build-up for your huge PoH spells. Plus, I’m a Holy fan, so… of course I’m going to recommend it for something. :p

Of course, if you don’t have dual spec–or you’re just unwilling to spec Holy and Discipline because the concept seems asinine (it used to seem stupid to me, too)–then you can play whatever fits comfortably with your playstyle. I personally stand by my theory that Discipline is more useful and Holy is more fun, but this is an opinion that can be supported or diverted with endless amounts of subjective numbers and theorycraft. In the end, you should do what’s right for you, and what’s right for your raid based on the other healer you’re paired with.

Today is rant day! I’m curious what the perspective of fellow healing priests (and other healers) are on this touchy question:

“Who gets to heal?”

Johannah’s guild, Momentum, is over-flowing with healers. As the only healer that has healed and remained healing for the guild since it’s formation back in the Karahzan days of Burning Crusade, I can safely say that I have seen more drama over who gets to heal than any other kind of drama you can dig up for an inspiring update to Officer Chat.

And how we determine who gets to heal on which day has a stringent set of rules that are adhered to about as often as visitors adhere to the “don’t feed the animals!” signs at zoos.

One of the things that I find causes the most problems is healing yourself out of a job. What I mean by that is, right now, many guilds are using three healers for ICC-10; once ICC-10 has fully released and everyone has geared themselves to the brim, it will likely reduce to two healers. There are fights right now where we are already dwindling to two healers. Healers get better at the fights, get the gear they need, and heal themselves right into an alternate position.

The three healers then enter a knife fight in which the most passive aggressive person is at the top and the most non-confrontational person is at the bottom, with the person in the middle trembling in verbal fear. Never mind when, like this last Friday, four out of the ten people that can go all play a main spec healing role.

How does one expertly handle healing yourself out of job, or having too many healers available?

Through competition?

WoW.com asked the question once, “Is healing competitive?” You better believe it. One of the biggest reasons I heal Holy spec despite my revelation on the benefits of Discipline in 3.3–beyond the fact I think Holy is a more enjoyable experience–is that Holy simply pulls more on the charts. Immature players like to measure themselves through the numbers provided on these charts with no adherence to the Discipline absorption rule, and I got sick of the underhanded opinions derived from this method of thinking. (For the unfamiliar, this rule is that the Discipline priest is generally going to be 10% under the other healers due to bubble love.)

I have also noticed an amazing phenomena about two like-classes healing together. A Restoration druid by itself does not perform nearly as well as, say, two Restoration druid head-to-head for the trophy I-Am-Mother-Earth-Hear-Me-Rawr. A Holy priest in a VoA-25 did me the courtesy of molesting my Discipline heals, as I divulged in my last post, “Playing nice with other priests.” Strutting your muscles next to fellow kin is a popular practice for many players.

The biggest problem with gauging a healer’s effectiveness through competition is that it is not always an accurate ruler for skill. For instance, if you have one healer that does 4k HPS and stands in fire, and another healer that does 3.5k HPS and moves when they are in scary stuff, who do you think is the better player?

Through power?

In Raid Rx, writer Marcie Knox quotes, “This is where I control your raiding life. Those cookies better be in the mail!” Should officers get dibs on healing over the players beneath them? We all want to say “no” because of the conscientious angel inside our minds, but you know the power trip happens. You know people exercise their rank in their favor. My fear of this is so grand that I find myself DPSing more than any other healer (except maybe our recent Restoration shaman) in our guild. I just don’t like the idea of “guild-master’s-girlfriend-always-gets-to-heal” drama.

Sometimes that power needs to be exercised though. There is no justification for not making it through a progression raid simply because healer XYZ refuses to learn how to DPS and thus thinks it is okay to occupy the healing spot when they are breaking a fundamental rule, such as: not healing as much as healer ABC; or playing a class that fills the other healing role and negating the benefits of multiple healing classes/specs working together. Stubborn people weigh everyone down and “you’re exercising your power over me!” is a lame cop out.

Through taking turns?

This method, I thought, sounded the most amicable. If healer XYZ heals one week while healer ABC DPS’s, then the following week, healer XYZ should DPS and ABC should heal. An elitist guild would say “whichever healer is the most effective should heal all the time,” but that might really piss XYZ off and casual guilds aren’t about making members mad. Taking turns is the communal, non-conflict way of handling it.

Provided, of course, both XYZ and ABC can heal through the bosses without getting the raid spanked.

Be kind to your fellow healers and respect some of the critical rules of raiding.

In short, follow some rules of kindness with your healers and the raid:

• Don’t double class. If you are a priest, and there is another priest already healing (especially if that priest is your spec!), maybe you should let the other class heal. Variety is the spice of life. The same applies to two druid combos, two paladin combos, and two shaman combos.
• If you know one of the healers you’re fighting for a healing spot with DPS’s all the time, let them heal. It’s ridiculous to think you’re entitled to making their life hell.
• Get some DPS gear. There really is no excuse with the availability of tier 9 via running random heroics.
• Treat others the way you’d like them to treat you. If you expect your fellow healers to be semi-decent at DPSing, you should also be semi-decent at it. If you expect healers to share the healing role with you, you should share it with them.

Good luck playing your main spec role!