Wednesday, July 08, 2009

News from the web, holy paladin & disc priest

A very interesting post on Banana Shoulders (up again yay !), about Epic Gems in patch 3.2. And a good post about Burnout on Causal Hardcore.

About myself, getting ready for the 3.2 patch, getting used to play priest with my dranei alt. Discipline Priest is so much more fun to play than a paladin, I've yet to really get experience in raids with her, but have played a few hours in Nax 25, done a few tries with Malygos 10 (but phase 3 kills pick-up groups that don't know it), killed Sartha 10, cleaned Nax 10. Not much ulduar but she's a bit underdressed for that.
In the end, raiding clearly reduce the number of skills you use, you tend to go for effectiveness and drop all the "fun but not optimum" skills depending on your talents.
What are the skills I use as a paladin more than one each 2mn ?
Flash Light, Holy Light, Holy Shock, Judgement, Sacred Shield, Beacon of Light.
What are the ones I use as a disc priest ?
Power Word Shield, Penance, Renew, Flash Heal, Prayer of Mending.
Surprisingly I'm using more skills on my paladin on a very regular basis. But if you look at them, only 3 are heals, one urgent, one big one "continuous". There is very little thinking to do, you just react in urgency. The Sacred Shield compared to the priest shield is near to useless from a healer point of view (even if it has a very good mitigation in the end, it does not prevent someone from dying in an urgent situation as a priest shield does, and it is limited to one target now).
I'm experiencing a much more diverse and fun healing game with a priest than with a paladin. Just because I have to think, to chose, before using a skill, what I don't do much with my paladin. It is the difference between a bazooka and a sniper rifle :P

Do you have experience with different healing classes ? Do you have opinions on them ? Please share your thoughts with me :)

4 comments:

  1. I'm curious too (by the way, I'm a new reader), I've wondered how healing as a priest would compare to the pally. After starting to do OS and a little bit of Naxx here and there, I'm seeing places where Pallies really shine, but given 99% of my grouping to date has been 5 mans, and given for the longest time heroics were honestly pretty fricken hard, esp. dealing with aoe damage (like HoS lightning event), I wonder if I've just been making life more difficult for myself. Especially seeing buddies dinging 80 priests and healing heroics that same day. As you say, everything with the pally is a reaction in urgency, which is cool in its own way. A quick pea shooter or a bazooka that takes just a little too long to hit its target--how about something in between FoL and HL already. Guess the only way to know is to get on leveling a priest up. Maybe it's just a "grass is greener" sort of thing.

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  2. I understand your frustration, heroic were a chore for me too as a pally, until I get to full epic. I was doing heroics when I was still in full blues, perhaps one epic, and it wasn't easy. One of my "errors" was to stuff for int & crit from the start. It is much easier to do heroics as a pally if you aim for spell power at first, and then when you're into raids change your focus for more int & crit which are our long fights sustainability stats.
    Heroic Uthgarde pinnacle gauntlet and Halls of Lightning are probably the worst you can have for us. I've finally decided that, if you can do it, not moving during the novas in HoL and healing all your group with a Beacon on your tank is easier for us.
    Pallies definitely shine more into raids, where they are, still up to now, the best single target healers of the game.
    This is another reason why the 3.2 change, that change us to be "hibrid" raid healers is not to my liking, going completely the other way of what pallies have always been.
    Don't drop your pally, a priest is definitely easier to play in heroics, but your healing strength in raids is something you'll like :)

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  3. I am taking a wait and see attitude to the changes. I will take a look at the bubble damage mitigation spec though, with 54 Holy 17 Prot, as opposed to my current 51/5/15 spec currently.
    I am taking some time to level my shaman from 33 to 80 just in case though. I convinced a real life buddy to level a priest who could go disc, with me raid healing as the shammy if the pally gets broke.
    My guild needs more healers anyway so, it's cool, either way EJ will figure some way for us to still be uber awesome at something, I can always offspec as a tank for a while. And if they break us for a while the population will go down, and maybe we will get a nice buff, for once. It would be a welcome change.

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  4. After some raids post 3.2 on my paladin, the mana nerf through Divine Intellect & Illumination hurts but not that much.
    You have to be less spamy with Holy Light, but with the awesome Beacon we have now they are less required on the tank, if at all (you'll toss them on someone else and your tank will get healed for all of it).
    Beacon of Light jumped from a good skill to an "awesome must have up at all times" skill. Using it I can mostly keep up both of our tanks in the Coliseum by myself, and I'm still mostly in Nax25 gear (I love my crits).
    I surely have to mana pot more than before, but I should concede I had nearly removed them from my bars before.
    All in all not much of a change, not exactly the same gameplay but not really game breaking as I feared it would be. We're still the same, just doing it slightly differently.

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