Another reason for starting this blog is that I wanted to participate in Miss Medicina’s Circle of Healers survey.
* What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Kamalia, restoration shaman
* What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) 5 man heroics for the past several months, but I’d really like to get back into raiding (10 or 25 man)
* What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? I love Riptide. I was SO happy when Shaman finally got an instant-cast heal (and a HoT, to boot!). I suppose I might not have thought to mention it if I hadn’t already read Vixsin’s response, but I also adore Earth Shield. When I’m 50 yards behind the tank getting my loot off the last pack of mobs in a Heroic, it’s so much fun to see crit heals popping up as ES charges go off, and to know that the tank will be safe until I get in range again. For all that druids are suppose to be kings of the HoT, I really miss Earth Shield when I’m playing at being a Tree with my Boomkin.
* What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Like most other shaman, Healing Wave. It’s big, but it’s so slow… and I’m not packing enough haste yet for it to be fast enough to be worth using in most situations.
* What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? I think shamans have a great ability to customize their healing strategy to fit both the encounter and their group by wise totem choices. I love Cleansing Totem and Nature Resist Totem — they make the healing easier on me, if I’m in a 5 man, or on the rest of my healing team, if I’m in a raid, in encounters where poison/disease or continuous nature damage are factors. When I’m running Heroics I will often change my totem set based on how well I think the rest of the group is performing — if I think they need a boost, I’ll put down totems will benefit them, but if they’re doing just fine, I’ll use my default totem set that mostly benefits me.
* What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Mobility, mobility, mobility. With only one true instant cast spell and only one controllable HoT (Earthliving is a HoT, yes, but I can’t control when or on whom it will proc), shamans have to STAND STILL to heal effectively. I tend to do a lot of standing in the fire for a second while I finish a heal that I was already casting when the fire landed on me, then strafing out and Riptiding myself. Learning a fight that involves a lot of running around is very frustrating for me because it always seems like I can’t finish even ONE heal without the “RUN NOW” element(s) of the fight catching up with me.
* In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Tank/melee DPS healing. ES on the main tank, RT/LHW zapping spot damage, then CH off whomever of the tanks and melee is lowest in health for big damage spikes or AoE damage waves. Even when I’m theoretically assigned to raid healing I tend to do a lot of tank healing because I’m always keeping an eye on whichever tank I’m ESing.
* What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? I’m going to interpret this question as “if you were two-healing a 10 man raid, what healing class would you choose as your partner?” and say that I’m always happy to be two-healing with a Holy Paladin or a Resto Druid because these classes can have great synergy with a shaman and because if I’m with one of those classes I worry a little less about my own fumbles leading to wipes. To three-heal a 10 man raid, I think that Resto Shaman, Resto Druid, and either Holy Priest or Holy Paladin make a great team.
* What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Other resto shamans — especially in a 10 man environment. Not so much because of the gear competition issue, but rather because I feel like a more diverse healing team has greater flexibility to respond to whatever situation that might occur.
I love to have a Disc Priest in the healing team in a 25 man raid, but in a 10 man raid, I’m still enough of a reflexive rather than an anticipatory healer that trying to heal with a Disc Priest, when I can’t even see damage happening because it’s all getting absorbed, is kind of frustrating.
* What is your worst habit as a healer? I have so many “bad healer, no cookie for you” faults that I can’t pick just one…
I’m a keyboard turner. I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around how moving with the mouse works. I can navigate with the mouse when I’m auto-running, but in combat situations my mouse is dedicated to Clique+Grid and I do all my movement with the arrow keys (and Q&E when I know I’ll need to strafe).
I’m also not very good at anticipating damage and lining up my heals accordingly. Usually when I attempt this I misjudge the combination of my haste and my latency and my cast ends up landing in the 0.1 second before the damage wave occurs, instead of the 0.1 second after.
I tend to have mana troubles when a fight gets really crazy because I forget to refresh Water Shield on myself. Recently, though, I figured out how to make my WS show up on Grid, and that’s helped a lot.
And I’m very bad about healing the tank rather than the other healing assignment I’ve been given, and it has, on more than one occasion, led to a wipe. It’s worst if Bear Tank Husband is one of the tanks — because of leveling together and running instances together and so forth, I heal him whenever he’s taking damage totally instinctively. Thus, the best assignment for me, specifically, is as a tank/melee DPS healer.
* What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? Folks blaming the healers for a wipe, when I know that I and the other healers were healing our tails off trying to keep things-gone-wrong from getting past the point-of-no-return. It gives me a huge guilt complex and damages my confidence in my own abilities and competence.
* Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Absolutely. I believe that the best healing team is a diverse healing team, because each class has strengths and weaknesses that all work together synergistically.
* What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? Well, did we die? If we wiped, was I the first healer to go down? Am I keeping ES up on the tanks and WS on myself consistently?
On Recount, I look at where I’m falling relative to the other healers in the raid. I’ll quote Miss Medicina because she said it pretty well already: “check my healing output against my overheal amount, and compare it to the other healers in my group. I have a basic idea of where I should fall on the healing meters, and if I’m far above or far below, that gives me an idea of how the healer balance is working out.”
I also use Recount to keep tabs on my spell distribution. My three main spells (CH, RT, and LHW) should be the top three and at about equal percentages; if they’re not, I’m not being as efficient or effective as I could be. If ES is coming in as one of the top three, I’m not paying enough attention.
* What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? That we’re only worth bringing to a raid for Bloodlust.
* What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Matching names in your raid frames with characters running about the playing field so that when you see your raid frames dropping, you can correctly choose your spells and CH people who are bunched up or RT/(L)HW someone who’s standing alone.
* 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)? In a 25 man raid, when I am one of 5-6 healers, I tend to be 3 or 4 on the total amount healed ranking and last in the HPS ranking. My overhealing number is generally about 50% of my effective healing number, and I am usually among the lowest in the overhealing ranking. It’s not uncommon for me to be beating another healer in the effective healing rankings by a small amount and be totally overshadowed by them in the overhealing rankings, showing that a) I’m unintentionally sniping a lot of their heals and b) the other healer is putting out a TON more healing than I am. As noted above, I like to see CH, RT, and LHW as my top three spells in approximately even percentages, with Earth Shield, Ancestral Awakening, and Earthliving following in smaller, but again approximately even, percentages.
* Haste or Crit and why? Haste, haste, haste! The faster I can cast, the better I can cope with high mobility fights, and the more useful HW becomes. Crit is nice, but I would rather not have to depend upon critting reliably to be able to heal reliably. I am nowhere near the haste soft cap yet, which is why I am still running with Guiding Star and Pulsing Spellshield equipped even though I have Surgeon’s Needle and Pride of the Kor’kron in my bags (not to mention that I never got any of the weapon drops from ToTC and have been on hiatus from raiding for pretty much all of ICC so far — but even though I would lose haste, I would totally take and equip a Trauma if I ever get the chance to roll/bid on one).
* What healing class do you feel you understand least? I don’t feel like I really fully understand any of the other healing classes because I haven’t played them (much) myself yet, but probably Disc Priests, simply because shielding seems to be such a different mindset than “big heal, little heal, slow heal, fast heal” toolbox the other four healing specs have.
* What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? I use the basic, unmodified form of Grid, and Clique for healing. I also have DBM, Recount, and Omen. I have a macro to trigger my trinkets, but since I favor trinkets that don’t have an on-Use effect because even with the macro I’ll probably forget to use them, I don’t use the macro much, either… it’s a vicious cycle. I also have a Tidal Force + Nature’s Swiftness macro that I had to disconnect from any other healing spell and bind into my main action bar before I was able to use it effectively.
* Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? Haste, as explained above, is king of the resto shaman stats, but I haven’t gemmed flat-out for it because I feel like my spellpower is still a little low. Thus, I have Reckless Ametrines in my red sockets, especially when I can eke out another few points of spellpower with a socket bonus. Crit and regen I try to keep balanced.
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