Friday 27 March 2009

Healing Heroic OHF... as enhancement

Thursday night, the Naxx raid is cancelled, and we are a-bored and looking for things to do. Someone asks to do Black Morass for their Alchemy specialization quest, so Kam jumps into the party. The group dimly recalls some irritating design from the past where you need to do Old Hillsbrad Foothills before BM, so it's off to OHF first. The party consists of a tankadin, 2 mages, warlock and Kam the enhancer. "Who will heal?" someone says... umm I guess Kam can throw some heals out I say, and so it begins. We did normal OHF and BM, during which hardly anyone needed healing anyway, so Kam was meleeing all the time. Healing Stream totem ftw! Then some mad man suggests we try heroic OHF... how hard can it be?

Kam carries a scrappy set of healing gear with him (to compare offspec raid loot against), so on it goes, and his spellpower goes from around 1000 to almost 2k. This is a good start. Then I switch to my healing bar... (the group have already pulled twice while I was trying to sort myself out), what spells do we have here...

Lesser Healing Wave. Nice and quick, this will get the mages out of a tight spot if they pull aggro. Except it seems to restore the tiniest chink of health. I guess thats Kam's lack of healing power and any resto talents whatsoever. Instead, let's try...

Healing Wave. This is more like it, a nice big heal on a ... umm 3 second cast. I had a faster heal when I was resto, but now HW is taking ages and if any DPS pull aggro, I have to use LHW as they are dead before this goes off. Still, its good for healing the tank, who isn't taking a lot of damage. Kam's lack of spell power means the heals only restore a small bit of health anyway. It's ok, if anyone else takes damage we always have...

Chain Heal. Without Improved Chain Heal, this thing was useful for topping up the ranged but of course the tank was standing too far away for it to bounce from tank to ranged, and I am the melee. Oh gods we've pulled 3 buildings at once! Mobs... everywhere, damage... all over the party. Chain heal for the... loss it turns out, curse Kam's lack of spell power in his melee/spell damage spec.

Of course, I had Earth Shield on the tank anyway so they... nope, Earth Shield is a talent in the resto tree. Riptide? Nope, resto talent. Kam had to resort to spamming Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave if the DPS got into trouble, and I managed to lose a Mage when he got aggro and Kam was being interrupted by bad mobs (I can haz no Healing Focus, see?).

Despite the basic Shaman healing spells being quite... basic, the group managed to successfully infiltrate the Castle and were well on their way to rescuing Thrall when my WoW client locked solid and stubbornly refused to let me log back in again. I would have got away with it, if it hadn't been for those pesky crashes.

Roll on 3.1 and dual specs I say, when I can get me a proper set of healing spells and throw some mean Riptide/Tidal Waves/Chain Heal action out.

5 comments:

Skraps said...

One question that may be silly, may not be. But were you rolling with Earthliving on both your Main and off hands? I found I actually had more spell power dual weilding Earthliving than I had when I first speced resto.

I felt I was a very competent healer up to early heroics in wrath with the dual Earthliving setup, and you know even as enhance, I wasted a glyph on chain heal, because you know! 4 hops! excellent for the emergency oh Sh*t raid heal.

Rakhman said...

Hmm good question. As I recall, I had a resto shield equipped so I only had 1 earthliving on. I'll take a look at putting two on, maybe the extra spellpower on the shield is less than the +150 I would have got from earthliving. Very good question there :)

Skraps said...

The real nice thing about the dual earthliving is it doubles your chance for a earthliving proc, essentially 80% proc rate, so almost every heal. Also sometime 2 procs for a glyphed chain heal.

I love enhance healing. too bad it doesnt work in raids.

Skraps said...

Opps I meant 40% I fail at math. Turns out I thought 20% x 2 = 80%.

Anonymous said...

Can Earthliving double proc? If not, the chance is a bit less than 40%. (When both weapons proc at the same time, I believe you only get one, but I could be wrong)

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