Healery responses!

Well. I wasn't actually tagged, but I saw this and.. well, why not?
(Previously seen on Miss Medicina and Righteous Orbs)

The healing meme-that-is-not-a-meme:


• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Amharach, Disc Priest. (Formerly Cazenovia, resto druid)
• What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) At this point, mainly 10/25-man raids. I don't do a lot of heroics on her simply because I'm lazy and don't really need the emblems anymore.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. If you've never really looked at a priest casting it, do so. It looks awesome, and its looks are not deceiving.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? It's a tossup between Divine Hymn and Greater Heal. Divine Hymn is for the moments where I either sit there panicking thinking we're going to wipe because there's crazy damage and people at low health, or for when I just got rezzed mid-fight and realize people need lots of heals and I don't have a lot of mana. (That's also the only time I ever remember to use Inner Focus, eep.) Greater Heal.. it's a slow cast and feels like a mana sink. I use it on Jaraxxus where people have Incinerate Flesh and I can spare the time.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Mitigation. I do love my bubbles! If I know there's a lot of incoming damage, I like the challenge of being able to time it so the bubble eats most of that damage (think Ony's Flame Breath) and saves other healers from needing to help pull the tank back up from half-health or less.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? Lack of multi-target AOE heals. If I'm put on raid healing, I'll be oom incredibly fast trying to flash heal, bubble, and penance people up to full health. There's probably a fair amount of overhealing at that point, and not an awful lot of mana regen going on.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Tank healing, hands down. Partly I feel that disc priests are stronger on the tank than the raid in most cases, and partly I know that my raid-health-awareness is terrible. I, personally, am a much better healer when I have 2-3 people/tanks to focus on. Having 25 health bars to watch is intimidating and leads to a lot of overhealing on my part.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Probably Shamans. They're very strong aoe healers, and they have the raw healing output that I don't.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Ehhh.. it's tough to judge given that I'm primarily pugging on Amharach. In a PuG, probably holy priests and paladins. It's hit and miss as to whether the priests will let me bubble, and if there's a paladin in a PuG I'm typically assigned to raid healing because I'm *not* a paladin. Assuming all skills are equal, I'd probably say I have the most challenges with druids.. but it's been a long time since I've had the chance to two-heal anything with a druid. I'm afraid I'd not recognize the hots and try to get people up to full health in my free GCDs.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? Not trusting other healers. Again, I imagine this comes from not running with many consistent groups on her. If people get low, I try to get them back up rather than trusting that someone else will take care of it.
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? 'Heal me!' on vent. Unless you're a tank who just got rezzed or a rogue stealthed because he's low on health, chances are I probably know you need heals. I duo-healed TOC-10 with a paladin a few weeks ago; we lost a few people in a few fights bcause there are only so many GCDs to go around. If the tank needs heals, the tank is going to get healing priority over all you DPS. Sometimes you should've avoided the damage, and sometimes I just don't have time to heal you right now.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Yes. I can MT heal and hold my own, my raid healing isn't amazing but it's made up for in the tools that I have (bubbles, divine aegis mitigation).
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? Is everyone standing at the end of the fight? Failing that, are the tanks standing? Why did people die - is it something I reasonably could have prevented? (Much as I'd like to, I can't heal through stupid, and I won't do so at the detriment of the tank.) I'll look at Recount as well, and if my healing done + guessed absorbs leaves me close to the other healers, I'm usually pretty pleased.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? Most annoying: Disc priests can't heal well. Possibly biggest: Disc priests can AOE heal as well as holy priests, so dpriest/paladin is perfectly fine when we know there's going to be aoe damage! In the raid I mentioned earlier, yeah, we did fine.. but the pressure was definitely on for both of us and I credit the paladin's past experience healing with dpriests for how well it went. I've honestly been pretty spoiled with my priest, a lot of people know either that I'm a good healer or know how a disc priest works, so I don't end up facing very many misconceptions in raid.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Bubble. Bubble bubble bubble. A lot of dpriest healers I see don't keep a shield on the tank; they don't shield themselves when they're getting low; they may or may not be penancing/flash healing whenever possible. I know holy priests don't use PW:S as much, and it's just kind of a mindset shift, I think.
• 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)? That really depends on whether they know what they're looking at! Disc priests are typically fairly low on raw healing done.. when I'm topping the meters by a fair amount I start to get worried. However, if you combine guessed absorbs + healing done, I'm typically on par with one of the top few healers. Meters won't show a lot of overhealing.. if anything, I probably over-bubble, but I'm still figuring out how to judge that.
• Haste or Crit and why? Right now, I think the sweet spot for me is about 400 haste, and crit from there on out. I wouldn't mind getting it a bit higher, but I'm not feeling like my spells are taking too long to cast and gimping my healing. Around 300 haste, I felt like if I could get my heals slightly faster I'd be a lot more effective, but your results may vary!
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Resto shamans / holy priests. I've got a basic understanding of both, but I really don't know their strengths at all. I played a resto druid for awhile, and I've got a good grip on paladins.. but I was a terrible holy priest, and just don't understand shamans the way I'd like to yet.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Mouseover macros and Grid. The only corner indicators I have are for PW:S and the corresponding debuff.. I really need to get a POM tracker either integrated into Grid or separate from it. My feeling is that by recasting it once it's off CD, I'm wasting some of the useful charges.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? It's a weird balance. I'm gemming primarily Intellect, gearing for spellpower and crit, and looking to keep my haste at about 400. More intellect = better regen/crit.


I'm tempted to respond as Caze, but I think I put enough resto druid-y stuff in there to keep my druid side happy, especially since my druid knowledge is.. well.. lacking nowadays.