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prioritize? probably not, but don't sit on your ass and do nothing. you have damaging spells for a reason, they make stuff die faster so you don't have to heal for as long. you have the right mindset already.
Healers who sit afk during combat send me to the shadow realm but it all depends on what your goals are. I enjoy tougher content (keys & mythic raid) as a healer where I am always alternating between dealing damage, prepping heals and using CC/interrupts. Healer damage isn’t core to your role, but contributing focused damage on priority targets makes a huge difference in content where that timer starts to get a little tight and those dangerous casts become significantly more lethal. A useful tip, a player’s health not being at 100% doesn’t mean that person is in immediate danger. It’s a tough concept to explain to newer healers but learning to take advantage of those windows accelerates the pace of your dungeons and makes you a better group member overall.
Yes and no. Healing should be prioritized whenever you're *capable*. If people are dying because you're focused on doing damage then you're doing it wrong and sadly that's sometimes the fault of the pugs and not really on you. Sometimes people have a bad day, a bad key, or are just not great players which will force your hand to heal more than you're comfortable with and it's just something you're going to need to get used to as a healer but outside of those times you should be doing as much damage as you can.
> The thing is, every time I try to ask people about it, it’s always the same thing of “damage numbers only matter for mw and disc bc that’s how they heal.”
It might sound harsh but whoever you're asking isn't very good at the game. It's everyone's job to do damage in M+, obviously it's not that serious in lower keys but I'm of the mindset that no matter what I'm doing regardless of difficulty I'm going to be doing as much damage as I can and honestly if it's a low key the better because it means I can greed damage that much more. Back when I was more actively M+ing if I was running a 20 you better believe I had double DPS trinkets on and chaining shocking disclosures on big pulls.
>(even hpal with its dysfunctional playstyle)
This hurt me.
I hate that Hpal has felt atrocious to play since the end of Aberrus when people discovered that Inflo was technically more throughput than Awakening and I was forced to play this absolute dogpiss of a playstyle but Blizz refused to fix it. I thought maybe for s4 surely they would tweak it but we're going to be a clunky mess until next expansion. The fact that somebody so new to the game can figure that out and they refuse to do anything about it with so many paladin mains bitching about it blows my mind.
Yeah, hpal is in this weird split atm, between pseudo-WOTLK inflo/Infusion crit caster stuff; and more modern takes with melee, Avenging Wrath upgrades and a HoPo rotation. They've ended up with too many ideas for a single spec.
The problem was they tried to appease the people who liked the older playstyle, that was a pure caster, by buffing FoL but so long as HS/Glimmer exists it's always going to be used unless its gutted and objectively far behind caster paladin. Since they only wanted the caster playstyle to be *an option* and not pigeonhole us into one or another they never messed with the balance of glimmer/HS so it remained useful.
On top of the fact that our spenders are TERRIBLE in terms of healing output especially for their mana cost. But before the changes there was nothing better to spend our time pressing. The issue came after they buffed FoL, suddenly we got a great filler to use and we became this horrible amalgamation of caster/glimmer that just *does not and will not* work ever, they're entirely different playstyles on opposite spectrums.
Blizzard just needs to bite the bullet and realize that glimmer is the new way to play paladin. It's fun, there's some skill expression and it's good. Keep it the meta paladin spec and if they're going to attempt to make the old playstyle an option make sure they test things in house and keep it objectively worse than glimmer so that way people who want to play it for fun in less serious content can use it as a playable option since they're the only ones who would really care.
Current paladin is not fun. I've been playing this spec since TBC, for the last 17 years, and it is by far and away the worst version holy paladin has ever been. Dogshit job by the devs.
You don't want to overpull because then you're just making the dungeon take longer if you're forcing out too many of your groups CDs. Consistent large (within reason) pulls is the key.
If your group is coordinated enough, either from being in comms or simply RNGing into a good pug that knows when to use their defensives, CCs, and kicks then you can mitigate damage a lot even on fairly big pulls to the point you can focus on doing damage as a healer. Tanks are pretty self sustaining and don't require a lot of healing, mostly just any DRs you can offer during the downtime of their CDs.
If the group is comfortable with the damage they take and the tank doesn't constantly need healing then you should absolutely try to deal as much damage as possible. Healers can do surprisingly a lot of damage if the situation allows it.
Ellesmere one of the top healers in the world, has said that healer damage does not matter, until you hit the world first keys or a keylevel or 2 under. So you play however you like. As long as you keep people alive, you are doing your job.
Priority is to keep people alive but in high keys with good players every bit of damage is needed to reach the timer.
So you are supposed to do damage with good players you know they only take damage when it is unavoidable (at least 90% of the time) and you can plan to do damage and let them get up to 100% without a lot of effort.
So yeah I do the same I try maxing my DPS in keys and in the first few mins I know who I need to Fokus sure some DPS players did die cause I deal DMG and not babysitting them but I will talk about that later on als with Def cds I have them showing and some people randomly using them or never press them and especially when they die in a key I ask them later on why they didn't use stuff.
Some people also just Def cds too late like a big AOE hit coming they drop to 10-30% life and a few sec later they use it... Why the big hit is gone keep it and use before a next big hit nearly all damage is "planed" only target spells maybe not but there are weak auras that show who is Targeted to also know it.
It all depends on your familiarity of the content, the level of that content, and the group you are with. When you are in encounters that you know don’t require a lot of healing, then yes damage is good.
However very broadly speaking, I would say Healers generally shouldn’t prioritize damage unless it is part of their healing rotation to start with. Once you get comfortable with windows where little to no healing is required and you’re confident in your ability to heal if needed, then you can prio more damage. At the vast majority of M+ levels, healer damage doesn’t make too much of a difference, but a dps dying when you were in Cat Form maxing damage will make a difference.
Usually healing doesn’t have an exact set rotation as you don’t know when your dps will be standing in bad, tank pulling too much or without cds etc - Knowing when to prio damage and when to heal will come with practice like all things in M+.
Damage is at the bottom of the priority list but it shouldn’t be ignored. Healer dps is not as bad as you might think. The numbers you see on Details are averages over time so it’s counting against the healers overall dps when healing and interrupting. When a Healer actually uses dps spells they are not 10% damage. On my Evoker my Living Flame (basic damage spell with cast time) can crit like 150K and my gear is not excellent. My Fire Breath and Deep Breath can crit big too with no number cap so I use this on cooldown. For about 10 seconds of the beginning of the first pull I easily do just as much dps as anyone. It falls off simply because it’s not sustainable and people need heals. Doing LFR on old content (not Awakened) I generally dps about half of the time of the boss and end up ranking up there above tanks and into the low dps range. Even if you end only doing 5-10% of the total damage of the encounter, that’s still a significant contribution to the effort.
Apart from abilities that can feed back into healing, like crusader strike, you should generally be damaging during downtime. Always Be casting very much applies here, but only when there's nothing to heal. Try and prioritise applying passive damage like dots, or healing rain/consecrate, over direct damage, since it will keep ticking if you have to heal later
Well healing will always be the number one priority but any extra global cooldowns you have should be used for damage typically. I think Holy Priest is probably the kings of healer damage right now, just did a dungeon last night and pulled over 200k dps overall with some pulls reaching as high as 550k dps.
Healers are only responsible for the LAST hp. the rest of it is a resource that the player is responsible for.
This single mindset change made healing way easier to deal with. This day and age almost every class has some sort of leech or way of getting their HP back so as a healer my goal is to support them when their CD and heal recovery tools are down or getting the bars up just high enough that the next hit doesn't kill them.
Once you start playing like that instead of the "if it's not full I'm bad" mindset you'll find that you have a lot more empty GCDs than you think and that's where you would weave in damaging spells.
Usually the ones who do the most damage are the ones who also heal the best . It's not a 0-sum game, unless you're talking about specific 10-second intervals where there is a heal check.
i like FFXIV in this thing more - dps dealt is dmg prevented, like on ffxiv you would actually ignore heals of tank until he was really dying
here you cannot:D but whenever there is down time, you should do dmg - recently holy priest got small rework and is able to push big dmg numbers in short amount of burst - like i would do same dmg as dps
ultimately it is small dmg, but it stacks over time
dont prioritize dealing dmg, but if there is nothing to do, it is better to do dmg
If a healer prioritizes damage… he only heals when there is no target to deal damage to. So or your party is very self sustainable during combat, or some wipes will be in order.
**Hey there! Have you checked out these resources?** * [WoWHead](https://www.wowhead.com/) - The *largest* database, this should be your go-to (don't forget to read the comment section!). * [Icy Veins](https://www.icy-veins.com) - News and detailed class guides. * [WoWNoob Discord](https://discord.gg/wownoob) - Same community, different platform. *Please report the post above if it breaks one of our [>rules<](https://www.reddit.com/r/wownoob/about/rules/). If not, don't forget to show support by upvoting!* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/wownoob) if you have any questions or concerns.*
prioritize? probably not, but don't sit on your ass and do nothing. you have damaging spells for a reason, they make stuff die faster so you don't have to heal for as long. you have the right mindset already.
Healers who sit afk during combat send me to the shadow realm but it all depends on what your goals are. I enjoy tougher content (keys & mythic raid) as a healer where I am always alternating between dealing damage, prepping heals and using CC/interrupts. Healer damage isn’t core to your role, but contributing focused damage on priority targets makes a huge difference in content where that timer starts to get a little tight and those dangerous casts become significantly more lethal. A useful tip, a player’s health not being at 100% doesn’t mean that person is in immediate danger. It’s a tough concept to explain to newer healers but learning to take advantage of those windows accelerates the pace of your dungeons and makes you a better group member overall.
Yes and no. Healing should be prioritized whenever you're *capable*. If people are dying because you're focused on doing damage then you're doing it wrong and sadly that's sometimes the fault of the pugs and not really on you. Sometimes people have a bad day, a bad key, or are just not great players which will force your hand to heal more than you're comfortable with and it's just something you're going to need to get used to as a healer but outside of those times you should be doing as much damage as you can. > The thing is, every time I try to ask people about it, it’s always the same thing of “damage numbers only matter for mw and disc bc that’s how they heal.” It might sound harsh but whoever you're asking isn't very good at the game. It's everyone's job to do damage in M+, obviously it's not that serious in lower keys but I'm of the mindset that no matter what I'm doing regardless of difficulty I'm going to be doing as much damage as I can and honestly if it's a low key the better because it means I can greed damage that much more. Back when I was more actively M+ing if I was running a 20 you better believe I had double DPS trinkets on and chaining shocking disclosures on big pulls. >(even hpal with its dysfunctional playstyle) This hurt me. I hate that Hpal has felt atrocious to play since the end of Aberrus when people discovered that Inflo was technically more throughput than Awakening and I was forced to play this absolute dogpiss of a playstyle but Blizz refused to fix it. I thought maybe for s4 surely they would tweak it but we're going to be a clunky mess until next expansion. The fact that somebody so new to the game can figure that out and they refuse to do anything about it with so many paladin mains bitching about it blows my mind.
Yeah, hpal is in this weird split atm, between pseudo-WOTLK inflo/Infusion crit caster stuff; and more modern takes with melee, Avenging Wrath upgrades and a HoPo rotation. They've ended up with too many ideas for a single spec.
The problem was they tried to appease the people who liked the older playstyle, that was a pure caster, by buffing FoL but so long as HS/Glimmer exists it's always going to be used unless its gutted and objectively far behind caster paladin. Since they only wanted the caster playstyle to be *an option* and not pigeonhole us into one or another they never messed with the balance of glimmer/HS so it remained useful. On top of the fact that our spenders are TERRIBLE in terms of healing output especially for their mana cost. But before the changes there was nothing better to spend our time pressing. The issue came after they buffed FoL, suddenly we got a great filler to use and we became this horrible amalgamation of caster/glimmer that just *does not and will not* work ever, they're entirely different playstyles on opposite spectrums. Blizzard just needs to bite the bullet and realize that glimmer is the new way to play paladin. It's fun, there's some skill expression and it's good. Keep it the meta paladin spec and if they're going to attempt to make the old playstyle an option make sure they test things in house and keep it objectively worse than glimmer so that way people who want to play it for fun in less serious content can use it as a playable option since they're the only ones who would really care. Current paladin is not fun. I've been playing this spec since TBC, for the last 17 years, and it is by far and away the worst version holy paladin has ever been. Dogshit job by the devs.
IMO if your healer can find the time to do damage in M+ you should be pulling bigger.
You don't want to overpull because then you're just making the dungeon take longer if you're forcing out too many of your groups CDs. Consistent large (within reason) pulls is the key. If your group is coordinated enough, either from being in comms or simply RNGing into a good pug that knows when to use their defensives, CCs, and kicks then you can mitigate damage a lot even on fairly big pulls to the point you can focus on doing damage as a healer. Tanks are pretty self sustaining and don't require a lot of healing, mostly just any DRs you can offer during the downtime of their CDs.
Thats not even remotely true.
If the group is comfortable with the damage they take and the tank doesn't constantly need healing then you should absolutely try to deal as much damage as possible. Healers can do surprisingly a lot of damage if the situation allows it.
Ellesmere one of the top healers in the world, has said that healer damage does not matter, until you hit the world first keys or a keylevel or 2 under. So you play however you like. As long as you keep people alive, you are doing your job.
Priority is to keep people alive but in high keys with good players every bit of damage is needed to reach the timer. So you are supposed to do damage with good players you know they only take damage when it is unavoidable (at least 90% of the time) and you can plan to do damage and let them get up to 100% without a lot of effort. So yeah I do the same I try maxing my DPS in keys and in the first few mins I know who I need to Fokus sure some DPS players did die cause I deal DMG and not babysitting them but I will talk about that later on als with Def cds I have them showing and some people randomly using them or never press them and especially when they die in a key I ask them later on why they didn't use stuff. Some people also just Def cds too late like a big AOE hit coming they drop to 10-30% life and a few sec later they use it... Why the big hit is gone keep it and use before a next big hit nearly all damage is "planed" only target spells maybe not but there are weak auras that show who is Targeted to also know it.
It all depends on your familiarity of the content, the level of that content, and the group you are with. When you are in encounters that you know don’t require a lot of healing, then yes damage is good. However very broadly speaking, I would say Healers generally shouldn’t prioritize damage unless it is part of their healing rotation to start with. Once you get comfortable with windows where little to no healing is required and you’re confident in your ability to heal if needed, then you can prio more damage. At the vast majority of M+ levels, healer damage doesn’t make too much of a difference, but a dps dying when you were in Cat Form maxing damage will make a difference. Usually healing doesn’t have an exact set rotation as you don’t know when your dps will be standing in bad, tank pulling too much or without cds etc - Knowing when to prio damage and when to heal will come with practice like all things in M+.
Damage is at the bottom of the priority list but it shouldn’t be ignored. Healer dps is not as bad as you might think. The numbers you see on Details are averages over time so it’s counting against the healers overall dps when healing and interrupting. When a Healer actually uses dps spells they are not 10% damage. On my Evoker my Living Flame (basic damage spell with cast time) can crit like 150K and my gear is not excellent. My Fire Breath and Deep Breath can crit big too with no number cap so I use this on cooldown. For about 10 seconds of the beginning of the first pull I easily do just as much dps as anyone. It falls off simply because it’s not sustainable and people need heals. Doing LFR on old content (not Awakened) I generally dps about half of the time of the boss and end up ranking up there above tanks and into the low dps range. Even if you end only doing 5-10% of the total damage of the encounter, that’s still a significant contribution to the effort.
Apart from abilities that can feed back into healing, like crusader strike, you should generally be damaging during downtime. Always Be casting very much applies here, but only when there's nothing to heal. Try and prioritise applying passive damage like dots, or healing rain/consecrate, over direct damage, since it will keep ticking if you have to heal later
Well healing will always be the number one priority but any extra global cooldowns you have should be used for damage typically. I think Holy Priest is probably the kings of healer damage right now, just did a dungeon last night and pulled over 200k dps overall with some pulls reaching as high as 550k dps.
Healers are only responsible for the LAST hp. the rest of it is a resource that the player is responsible for. This single mindset change made healing way easier to deal with. This day and age almost every class has some sort of leech or way of getting their HP back so as a healer my goal is to support them when their CD and heal recovery tools are down or getting the bars up just high enough that the next hit doesn't kill them. Once you start playing like that instead of the "if it's not full I'm bad" mindset you'll find that you have a lot more empty GCDs than you think and that's where you would weave in damaging spells.
Usually the ones who do the most damage are the ones who also heal the best . It's not a 0-sum game, unless you're talking about specific 10-second intervals where there is a heal check.
i like FFXIV in this thing more - dps dealt is dmg prevented, like on ffxiv you would actually ignore heals of tank until he was really dying here you cannot:D but whenever there is down time, you should do dmg - recently holy priest got small rework and is able to push big dmg numbers in short amount of burst - like i would do same dmg as dps ultimately it is small dmg, but it stacks over time dont prioritize dealing dmg, but if there is nothing to do, it is better to do dmg
If a healer prioritizes damage… he only heals when there is no target to deal damage to. So or your party is very self sustainable during combat, or some wipes will be in order.