Recently I’ve been playing a Holy Priest as main again. I haven’t picked this particular class up in a long, long time and had good reasons of doing so. Holy Priest has always had a love/hate relationship for me.

I absolutely love healing as the class. I’ve started healing as Holy way back in TBC when Circle of Healing had no cooldown and my first raiding guild brought three Holy Priests along to every raid because of the amazing raidhealing spam, mind you this was before the rise of Restoration Shaman and their damned Chain Heal. I’ve healed for a long time on my Priest, carried her over to WotLK and healed all the raids there up to Icecrown Citadel. Fast forward to Cataclysm, I raided a few times on my Priest then for fun and again played Holy. This was during the Dragon Soul times where I could just fuck about in LFR and still do comparatively well as Holy compared to other Healers. They also introduced the new way of Holy healing then where you had to pick a “Chakra” that would decide whether you would be good at single target healing or at tank healing. I fiddled around with it, found it to be fun but since my Priest was Horde and I was maining as Alliance I didn’t pursue it any further.

Now I’m back on Holy Priest as my main once again and I still love the class. I have amazing raidhealing potential and I notice every gear upgrade that I get my hands on. However… I fall behind. Compared to our other healers I feel like I’m the weakest link of the raid. On meters they just jump ahead in every aspect. I oom during most fights, not probematically though since I always time my Shadowfiend well, heal my ass off while trying to stay alive myself and it just doesn’t seem to be enough to keep up with the rest on the healing meters.
And that’s exactly the reason why I hate meters so much. I feel like I’m doing much more/better healing than I’m actually doing. I save people from deaths, use my raidcooldowns in the best possible situations and in general try to get the most healing out of my character that I can. “But dear girl, why worry about meters when you feel like you’re doing fine?” Well as some of you may know, meters are everything when it comes to deciding who to take to what raidboss and when. As raid you rather have people that do consistantly well on the meters because you know they can put out a good amount of healing. So when you fall behind on the meters it’s a bad sign.

Even the DK Tank surpasses me on the Healing meters 🙁 This was on Paragons…

I’ve tried to think of reasons why I’m falling behind as Holy so much. The specc has gotten some love from Blizzard and is in the best position of the entire expansion so I don’t really understand why I’m not doing well. I have researched a bit, looking at what other Priesthealers have to say about this subject and a lot of it boils down to the amazing 2set (and 4set) bonus that is on the latest tier. I don’t have that. In practice this means that I lack +100% healing on both my Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when I have two stacks of Serendipity. This is a lot. You can’t even begin to imagine how much healing power I miss on those spells. Doing double healing? YES PLEASE. But no I’m missing out on that.
Another reason could be that when it comes to gear I’m a bit behind on our other healers. They’re almost full flex-geared while I’m still running around with some Timeless Isle and Throne of Thunder items. It holds me back. I notice immediatly when I get an upgrade on my gear because my numbers go up. Furthermore they all have their respective set bonuses (be it only 2 or 2 and 4) while I lack on this part. Maybe when I get up to par gearwise I’ll get up to par healing wise. Who knows?
The last reason could be that I’m just really sucky on my Priest and doing everything wrong, which I doubt. I’ve checked some sites and I have the right talents and glyphs and seem to be using my cooldowns well. My gear is properly enchanted and gemmed and I even managed to get the 16.65% Haste breakpoint while still keeping more than enough Spirit and Mastery. I just don’t know and it’s frustrating me.

And the only reason it is frustrating me is because I can see my “performance”. If I had no idea about what number I was pulling healing wise I’d probably be much more relaxed playing the game, like I am in FFXIV where there are no meters and you succeed as healer when you can keep everyone alive. It doesn’t matter there as much as it matters in WoW and I sometimes wish that they would remove all sorts of damage and healing meters from WoW and just let us play the game and feel succesful when we down a boss and not when we’re number one on the meters while doing so.