Proving Grounds: Healing

Hello!

Now I remember reading about the proving grounds before it was released within its respective patch, and I remember thinking to myself "seriously, how hard can it be? why do I have to prove myself?".

So once the patch hit, I never did check out the proving grounds, dps, healer, or tank wise.

My main concerns were, what if it's too easy, or I wouldn't have the patience to do it for however many minutes!

So anyways there was talk about it in guild over the weekend and I was adequately bored enough so I decided to try out the healing one, except is it cheating being a resto druid? Cause I one shot it all.

Bronze: You kind of just roll your lifeblooms and rejuv on the tank and have the range stand inside your mushroom efflorescence and pretend to look busy. Moonfire and wrath at will.

Silver: You kind of just roll your lifeblooms and rejuv on the tank and have the range stand inside your mushroom efflorescence and pretend to look busy. Moonfire and wrath at will.

Gold: You kind of just roll your lifeblooms and rejuv on the tank and have the range stand inside your mushroom efflorescence and pretend to look busy. There's a little less uptime to moonfire/wrath for the first few waves but on the last one when the mage cast Timewarp I naturally popped HoTW and wrathed away. There's also a single dispel that is supposed to be complicated, and some AOE, of course, you should always save wild-growth with the 100% haste buff from that one talent, that's just a rule I have for myself. And I think there's a little bit of fire and ground effects to avoid. Of course when the big things come out you cast your bark thing on the tank so they take less damage and maybe throw out a healing touch, but remember to watch for dispels and move around.

A Question About Endless: So I didn't bother doing endless cause I heard it was THIRTY waves? Aint nobody got time fo dat! So my question to anyone who has finished endless, is it the same difficulty as gold, just 3x longer? Is it harder than gold AND 30 waves? Is it actually 30 minutes? In 30 minutes we could clear a good portion of SoO!

Summary: Anyways, I do believe gold and endless can prove to be valuable practise for those pursuing professional healing, HOWEVER the NPC's I found were pretty good at moving out of bad, which does not happen in real life, since in heroic modes an extra second or two of standing in bad on one raid member could make or break the entire encounter! Most of the extra damage onus is on yourself to move out of bad while healing, which I found there wasn't enough bad on the ground to avoid.

This training puts you into a good mentality for raids as well, since you'll start to rely on the other 2 healers less (unless you have a disc priest, if so just let them absorb the shit out of everything until they change healing in WoD) and let's you focus on your own reflexes.

Proving grounds emphasizes on many of the personal rules that I have created for myself in regards to healing:

1. Heal cheap. Ever since the changes in Cata, I have been healing super cheap. Stingy on rejuvs, utilize lifebloom uptime 100% and actually put nourish on my bars! It's not a matter of not utilizing mana effectively but realizing how LITTLE you can get away with while also topping the healing charts, there's a big difference there. Of course in the last 30 seconds of a fight I blow all my mana for no reason at all.

2. Heal smart. That's quite vague, this pretty much means to anticipate damage for every single raid member at any given time and also manage which spell you are GOING to cast on them before the damage happens. If I know an AOE is coming up I will pre-plan who to swift-mend and if they get topped up, who is 2nd in priority. It's also learning how much damage each person takes, and what they tend to stand in/weak to/strong to. Now if you get the pleasure of playing with 2DK tanks and a disc priest, just read your favourite novel and pretend to look busy (jokes). It's also about knowing where to stand and where not to stand and managing your movement transitions while accounting for everything I have mentioned above.

Okay it seems I only have two rules, with the latter being rather comprehensive. But once you've mastered this it allows you to do amazing "oh shit the other healers have died EMERGENCY TIME healing", which is what proving grounds is trying to do, except toned waaaay down.

So yeah, should I bother with endless? Thirty minutes seriously can it be shorter like five minutes and they just throw all the mobs out at once?

Turny the Impatient Un-Endless Tree