WotLK HPriest Mana Issues

HPriest Mana Issues

Hello all,

I need some help. I am playing an Hpriest, and I am having really bad mana issues. I always heard Hpriests had great mana, and my shadow spec basically never runs out. Most other healers in the raids I do seem to have great mana control, even other priests. I have 3.7k GS, and have 20k mana buffed. Is this enough? Should I have more spirit? Am I not healing properly, or minding the 5 second rule enough? It is frustrating because I cant OOM in a boss fight after just a few minutes of casting. Maybe it comes with more skill and understanding of my abilities, maybe it comes with gemming and enchanting better, but any help would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more info about how I am built i am happy to provide.

Focus on spirit stat on items, farm trinket - Solace from ToC 25. Also use your shadowfiend and hymn of hope for mana regen. In raids also other classes can help you with mana regen for example druid - innervate or shaman - mana tide totem.

PS Check this guide http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=448147

Quote:

Originally Posted by Farkas94

Hello all,

I need some help. I am playing an Hpriest, and I am having really bad mana issues. I always heard Hpriests had great mana, and my shadow spec basically never runs out. Most other healers in the raids I do seem to have great mana control, even other priests. I have 3.7k GS, and have 20k mana buffed. Is this enough? Should I have more spirit? Am I not healing properly, or minding the 5 second rule enough? It is frustrating because I cant OOM in a boss fight after just a few minutes of casting. Maybe it comes with more skill and understanding of my abilities, maybe it comes with gemming and enchanting better, but any help would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more info about how I am built i am happy to provide.

Any healer needs to manage their mana by simply anticipating damage. If you heal only when theres damage coming in, you would usually be fine. Unless you overheal a lot. Or the Raid you're healing for is too undergeared or you're too undergeared for the raid. or you don't have enough spirit in your gears.

Tldr: Could be numerous reasons but we can't help you without seeing your gear, spec and healing spells used.

Hi!

My best advice as a main Holy Priest is that you must learn when to use which spell. Holy Priest have the most variety of spells in the game and must, therefore, choose (or know) when to use what.

Is you need specific advices of how to play you priest, add me in Icecrown (Elviis) and we can chat more.

Just remember that Prayer of Mending is one of your best and more mana efficient spells. Renew is really good if you have Empowered Renew and Improved Renew (a lot of healing for a bit of mana). For example, in heroic dungeons, you can go by just with renews, prayer of mending and flash heals (do not get Glyph of Renew).

For stats, prioritize Spirit.

Good luck and if you have any question, write me a letter in game.

As your most efficient spells, I forgot to add Circle of Healing (instead of Prayer of Healing).

Holy definitely has mana issues if your tank / party are undergeared or incompetent in ways that some classes like especially resto druid just do not have to deal with.

In general, the main major factors are overhealing and overpulling. Overhealing is pretty easy to understand, and you have direct control over that. This advice is for Wrath era content.

Single target:

Greater Heal is just too big. I seldom ever use it unless I have a proc to burn while the tank is chunking down on a boss. Flash is 90% of what I cast, even though it's the same efficiency after glyphing and whatnot - because it's less likely to overheal normally and any bonus from crits is free so it doesn't matter if the crit overheals. Another important factor is that you want to smooth out the spikes your tank is taking. If you're casting a slow heal, a spike could kill the tank before you can react. Lots of fast little heals smooths that out and gives you breathing room to move around. And of course fast casts give more procs, and procs are the reason you exist as a Holy priest. Shield is almost useless because it triggers a global cooldown and just isn't efficient for the amount of hp it gives. I only use it to prevent pushback / channel loss on someone (including myself) or if I'm desperate while moving (I have it glyphed for run speed because it's fun, so when you bubble the ***** mage he can run out of the fire). Renew is... ok. I guess. It's there. Or whatever. The important thing about it is that it's efficient and instant.

If you're not blasting Greaters on targets while they're at 70% hp or more, you're not likely to ever run out of mana. Just know how much you heal for when you don't crit, and ignore crits because they're just free extras not something to rely on. Don't just mindlessly spam heals. Being familiar with the specific fight helps, though this is not FF14 where everything is scripted there is some predictability to how bosses behave.

Groups:

Group heals is where you'll burn almost all your mana, and it's the easiest to lose efficiency due to overheal, by far. Prayer Of Healing (NOT Mending) is basically the main group heal because of its simple and direct behavior: you cast it, it heals, done. You can modify it a little to give a small hot after it lands, great for efficiency, but mostly because other stuff sucks. The important thing is that it's spamable and reliable. Circle is what sets the men apart from the children. Chain Heal has a cast time, druid flourish is a hot, disc priests don't have it. Circle can eat mana if you're blowing it on a target that isn't near enough to any others. Groups that are spread out will chop the efficiency a ton - don't use it if you can't hit four people with it. It's not something to just always throw, even though it's really nice. Also be mindful of the cooldown. The main time to use it is as a followup to Prayer, because, frankly, Prayer doesn't heal for *that* much at a time. Hymn heals for more and faster, but has a long cooldown. Think of it as a shorter duration Tranquility with a limited number of targets affected. It's a good "oh ****!" button when you can sit down and channel (use shield on yourself first, very important to not lose ticks!), but the 8 minute recast means you'll almost never ever use it... because you can basically do the same thing that Hymn would do by just casting Prayer + Circle. The difference is that Hymn affects anyone in your raid, but Prayer only affect the targeted group.

Prayer of Mending is where a lot of noob priests blow tons of mana for not much effect. The important thing to understand is that Mending will always bounce. It does try to bounce to the lowest health valid target in range. Do not ever use it in a situation where the group is not taking periodic AoE damage. If several members are engaged simultaneously, it can do well enough, but usually noob priests are throwing it on the tank "just because", and then it bounces to the hunter who's behind you and then just sits there until it expires. Honestly, Mending kind of sucks in the vast majority of situations.

Lightwell. It would be so, so good. If you could only get players to ****ING CLICK ON IT. Since you can't get people to click on it, you may as well not have it. Do not stand on top of it, it makes it impossible for them to click on it. It's great for those roaming arena battles that are so common in Wrath content. It's fabulously mana-efficient, and it doesn't cost you aggro. It's amazing. But no one clicks on it....

Overpulling....

Warmane has a cultural problem. It's not old school. In the old days, players were afraid of dungeons. Mobs would kill the entire party dead if you had more than two elites beating on your tank. Sap, trap, sheep and fear, you had to CC absolutely everything other than what the tank was killing. Those days are long gone, and KIDS THESE DAYS want to just zerg through mindlessly pulling and killing everything they can see. Because they have an attention disorder or whatever excuse they come up with.

This is a huge problem because tanks often have never played a healer and they are not paying attention to you or their own hp, they're just assuming they're invincible. This is not technically true. And tanks should know better. And it's insanely frustrating and toxic for them to take the healer so for granted like that. And it's the main reason no one ****ing wants to play a healer because it ****ing sucks. Tanks usually have absolutely ****ty gear, and worse they often try to tank without a shield, especially while you're leveling or in non-heroics. They will just assume they're awesome because max-geared healers have been able to keep them alive, and they never noticed. If you're not a max-geared healer, and your tank is a moron and undergeared, you'll have problems and they will overpull, and they'll die, and the group will wipe, and it won't be your fault but you'll get blamed for it. Because that's what tanks do. If they wanted to be responsible and aware of others, they wouldn't be playing a narcissist class. Unfortunately for them, this isn't Candy Crush. This is a game that wasn't originally designed for children.

So.

What choices can you make in reaction to this? What is the gameplay decision available to you? How do you counteract that?

You hearth out when you realize the tank is gonna die. Then you block that tank as soon as you're through the loading screen. And then you block anyone in the group who doesn't take your side immediately. If they mention anything hostile to you at all, you block them. Don't respond, don't engage, don't talk about it with them. Just instantly block them. Nothing good can come from validating them by trying to have a conversation to explain all this to them. They will not listen, they're not interested in listening. You'll only waste your time and get more frustrated about how it sucks to be a healer. Yes, you'll feel bad. Yes, you'll question your choices. That's normal, that's fine. Consider what you did. Evaluate how things worked out. Try to get better if there was something you did wrong. The tank overpulling is not something you did wrong.

Raids. If you're in here asking for advice about how to play a holy priest, you aren't ready for raids, don't worry about it.

Lmao the above is so true. I had two hunters in FoS that wouldn't stop dps'ing after multiple wipes during the mirror damage phase. As the healer who got mirror damaged, I died twice. They said things like "wtf just heal yourself man".

Another group just now had a high geared tank and hunter. They decided to pull the whole room, 12 mobs + boss taking 20k damage/sec. When we wiped the hunter was like "healer doesn't know what abolish" is. Like yeah, some disease magically killed you, instead of the 12 mobs hitting you at once.