You Don't Know What it's Like to Heal as a Priest!

So something came up today that reminded me about the Priest QQ that goes around, and which I occasionally take part in but mostly in my head because frankly I enjoy healing as a Priest and I think we're pretty damn cool.

There are a few reasons for this:

• We have the Massive Toolbox of Save, which the other healers can't boast.
• We're extremely versatile - like all of the other healers, we are a Hybrid healing class. In our case, however, rather than being a Hybrid of both one healing spec and a couple of DPS or tanking specs, we are a Hybrid with TWO whole healing specs and one DPS spec (which has a lot of QQ of it's own going on right now, from what I hear).
• We're the only healers stuck in Cloth gear. That means we're the squishiest, most vulnerable healing class (imho). We get to wear pretty dresses, so we're all geared out for our funerals, because we make tasty targets in both PvE and PvP (though in PvE we're juicy targets only if someone's screwing up - the tank, the Priest themselves, or the DPS... you know, the entire group can conspire to kill a Priest, but if you're using Fade properly you can easily determine who deserves to die).
• Our Priest racials were so broad in terms of spectrum and variety that they had to go out of their way to spread the love amongst the whole class and take out the nerf bat, rather than favoring a select few races. Our Priest racials were a nice bonus for some of us, and a min/max necessity for others of our kind. We got some special love during Vanilla, and some of us still chose races other than the min/max preference anyway AND STUCK WITH THE CLASS THROUGH TWO EXPANSIONS. That says something for our class, I think.
• We're Priests. If you list off the names of the different healing classes and ask which ones sound like the main healing class, odds are extreme that Priest will be the class chosen most often. The game has been out for 5 years now, all veteran players understand what classes excel at which roles, and still, guilds, groups and raids love them some Priest Healer love.

As healing Priests, we can and will fulfill any healing role given to us.

Granted, our gear will limit us to some extent, but at the same time, an under geared Priest can still heal extremely well while under geared if the group or raid they're healing knows what they're doing. Others present who know how to stay out of the OMGitBURNS bad stuff and do passable DPS or tanking allow a healer of any stripe to do their job efficiently and well.

Gear will allow us to heal harder, faster, and looking snazzier than the next guy. Gear's great that way. What gear will NOT do is actually make us play better.

The Priest who can heal 10k HPS is only useful if she is alive. When you're dead, you do 0 HPS. You can be Soulstoned and pop back up, and as soon as you get fire or void or whatever lobbed at you and forget or miss that fact, you're back to 0 HPS. You can be Battled Rezzed - you're going to stand in the fire and do a little dance right before you hit the floor again, because you're special that way.

Now an honest mistake is one thing. Chronic offenders are another matter entirely, and those are the healers I'm referring to. Doesn't even have to be Priests specifically, obviously (Shamans get one extra shot at not failing, but if they're in the fires, they're just going to die one more time than the rest of us can).

I have a friend who's Healing Lead in her guild. She's NotAPriest [TM]. She's got like five or six Priests she's in charge of. There are some issues with the healing team in general, and she winds up picking up the slack for the lot of them a whole lot (at least, this is the impression I'm getting). She's a nice woman, though a bit gentle. She doesn't want to offend anyone, but she wants her healers to step it up - perhaps jogging up a few levels, in fact.

She's getting Priests (one in particular) telling her that she's NotAPriest [TM] and thus she can't possibly have any idea what the Priests are dealing with, and what they have to work with, when healing an encounter.

To which I, as a fellow Priest, must say, "What the hell?"

We're Priests. We're healers. Healers should work together and support one another, encourage one another. Priests in particular should do what they do best - we need to be versatile. We have a ton of spells available to us to save someone's ass. We can cast direct healing spells, we can cast group heals, we can cast AE heals, we can cast HoTs, we can cast Bubbles and we can cast reactive Prayer of Mending.

We can do pretty much everything anyone else can do. We don't do it BETTER than the other classes as that's not our role in the game (that's speaking as a class on the whole), but we can do it just as well. If we are played well, we WILL do it better than another class's character whose player only doe a so-so job. If we are played poorly, we will do a crappy job and think that our class as a whole is underpowered. Or, we will do a crappy job and not even notice, because the rest of the healers did a good job and carried our asses through encounter after encounter.

I get the impression she's hearing, "We're Priests. We can't heal XX way." I'm not sure I understand how that works. We can do everything - EVERYTHING - and yet there's a way of healing which we cannot manage?

I'm a Disc Priest. I can Raid heal. I may not feel like I'm doing it well, but if that's my assignment I'm going to do my Arthas cursed best to do a fabulous job. Why? Because I take pride in being a Priest and know that my Class can accomplish anything we're assigned to accomplish, healing wise.

I've been a Holy Priest primarily until very recently, I healed in ToC, I know what we're capable of in there. Holy Priests can tank heal - it's true! We can heal a tank when we're Holy specced. Certain talents within the Holy tree make it more manageable than if we hadn't taken those talents, but even without them we Priests can cope and adapt and manage to do a really good job at it... unless we've got our heads jammed so far down our belly buttons we can only hear the gurgling rumble of our stomachs screaming for OP Healing spells.

I know that as a Class we're encouraged to use Flash Heal and completely ignore that other spell (Greater Heal, anyone?), but I've always been a fan of the GHeal spell. It's certainly not my primary spell, but it's not off my action bar and it's actually got a key click bind on my Clique addon. It's monumentally slow as a Disc Priest, but sometimes I get the very odd urge to use a Greater Heal (or I just mis-click...) and it goes off.

As a Holy Priest, with Serendipity running at a full stack, it's a very decent spell to use. I wouldn't recommend it on anyone who has a small health pool to begin with, but for those characters that have a decent sized health pool (tanks, anyone?) it makes for a fabulous heal nearly as fast as a Flash Heal with a ridiculous health restored to mana ratio.

If you're running an instance that your raid is equipped for, if your Tanks are geared appropriately for the content (even if you're a bit undergeared), Greater Heal can be ridiculously useful. Flash the tank, or someone in the raid who's unlucky/stupid, get your Serendipity up to a full stack, and let fly on the tank. Or just keep that full stack running until "Oh crap," the tank takes a big hit and the Greater Heal becomes necessary. Take your pick, mana dependency can stink. We really shouldn't bottom out on mana during an encounter unless our DPS is doing a shoddy job, or WE'RE wasting our mana needlessly. We have our Shadowfiends, and we ought to have mana potions, and we can make use of Flasks of Pure Mojo and +MP5 food. If you're running out of mana and using all of these tools, someone's messing up - I can't tell you whether it's you or your DPS, but someone's messing up. (Or you're attempting content your members aren't prepared for, in which case, it's usually the DPS messing up, though through no fault of their own... this is when it becomes the Raid Leader's fault, unless you all went in knowing that you were in for the impossible, in which case you should already understand that this schpiel doesn't apply to you anyway)

TLDR: You're a Priest. You CAN fulfill any role assigned to you unless you're participating in content you have no right being in, or your head is jammed down your belly button. If your DPS can't do enough damage, or your tanks can't take the hits, it's fantastic if you can pull them out of the hole they've dug for themselves ... but when you can't? It's not because you're a Priest.