The state of healing in World of Warcraft Patch 5.2 Throne of Thunder

We’ve had two full days of raiding in 5.2 and all the new bosses in Throne of Thunder, and things are either looking great or downright horrible, depending on which healing class you roll with, or the class you happen to have your raid stacked with.  Here is how things are looking at the moment, based on class feedback and world of logs data, which just finally updated ranking information.  It is worth noting that many top end guilds (though not all) are hiding their logs or running mixed groups of alts/mains to maximize gear and there are some bugged logs from PTR which should be removed soon.

Paladins

Holy Paladins are sitting pretty.  Right now, they dominate the World of Logs with ranks for every fight in Throne of Thunder, and seems very little has changed regarding overall output.

Pally healing seems a bit more mana intensive so far in ToT, so don’t be surprised if you are swapping out some of your mixed gems for straight spirit to compensate for it.  And make sure you are calling for innervates, mana tides, using mana pots and pleaing, and pallies should expect to see themselves at or near the top of the meters along with disc priests.

Priests

Disc priests are the other healing class that completely dominate world of log rankings.  For all the disc priests who QQ’s over the patch notes, clearly their output has not been affected to any great extend at all, but with disc still able to go to town with absorbs “healing” before most other healing classes can heal it themselves, it would have taken a pretty huge nerf to disc to not see them at the top of the meters.

There were a lot of changes made to holy to make it much more attractive to priests, it has been the spec pretty much ignored this entire expansion thus far.  Unfortunately, it seems only the die hard holy priests are using it, not many discs are trying it out yet.

There still isn’t much data if there is another fight like Tsulong in ToT where discs had to respec to holy in order to heal Tsulong, although that did give discs some foundation at holy to be able to play around with it more in 5.2.

And a quick note to holy priests, Guardian Spirit is currently bugged in 5.2 and isn’t always working (“Guardian Spirit sometimes does not proc its heal and lifesaving effect.”)

Monks

What happened to the mistweaver monks?  Following true to fashion, the new Pandaria class has been significantly nerfed both in throughput and overall AOE healing.  Fistweaving seems to be the playstyle Blizzard is steering monks, where mistweavers should be doing about 50% healing and 50% dps mix.  So mistweavers who have ignored fistweaving thus far because they want to be fulltime healers are having to completely change their playstyle.  But even with the 50/50 healing/dps split, monks should find themselves near the top of healing meters, and somewhere above the tanks on dps, as it stands right now.

And monks who have been bragging about their mana regen in 5.0 and 5.1 are suddenly going to have to start watching their mana efficiency, especially while fistweaving, and glyphed mana tea will likely become mandatory.

Monks still are lacking a significant raid cooldown, outside revival (which cannot be used on all fights in ToT) and life cocoon, and with fistweaving being where Blizzard wants them to be, it would seem that it is the tradeoff for a better raid CD.

There are some monks here and there in the World of Logs rankings, but definitely not to the extent we have seen them previously.

Druids

Say hello to rejuv spamming!  The changes to rejuv make it a rediculously cheap heal (although some are speculating it could be nerfed) to blanket the raid with, and then those overheals get put into mushrooms for a nice raid CD.  However, this playstyle will get pretty boring quickly, unless you just want to mindlessly spam rejuv while watching YouTube in your other screen.

Naturalist (Passive) saw all of druid’s healing increased by a flat 10% and it has made them perform better as well, and the results from logs are showing their increased healing.

Make sure you are remembering to use your new wild mushrooms from overhealing, there are some impressive numbers showing up from the mushrooms for those who are remembering to do them and tracking the capacity of the shrooms from overheals.

More on Resto Druid Changes on: Restokin

Shamans

Ouch, what a fall shamans have taken since the glory days of the first month or two of Mists of Pandaria when stacked raids and healing rain where king.  Shamans just didn’t scale very well with better ilevel gear compared to other healers in 5.0 and 5.1, and slowly saw their effectiveness drop the further into T14 they got.  And 5.2 has not been kind to resto shamans for a couple reasons.

First, it seems nearly every single fight is a “stay spread and move out of bad”, which is definitely not a shamans forte in their healing toolset.  Very few fights seem to have a “stack up and raid heal through damage” mechanism to them, which is unfortunate because so much of resto shaman output healing is unleashed empowered healing rain.  It almost needs an option for a glyphed healing rain where the size of the rain is larger, but it caps out at X number of heals per tick.  Secondly, so much moving with only a single instacast (riptide) and Spiritwalker’s Grace having a long CD and short duration makes healing difficult as well.

Not surprisingly, there are very, very few shamans ranking, and most seemed to be fights that were underhealed or other healers died early.  Fortunately for resto shamans, they still bring pretty powerful cooldowns to raid which will hopefully keep raid leaders bringing them, even if overall output is significantly lower.  Healing tide is the strongest “omg, this damage is going to hit the entire raid hard” CD of all the healers, and healers love mana tide so they can best it up more.

More on resto shaman changes: Life in Group 5

Overall

We are only two days into the patch but it appears that disc priests will continue to dominate the rankings in Throne of Thunder along with holy pallies, with resto shamans at the bottom of the heap.  Do keep in mind that Blizzard is continuing to hotfix – both buffs and nerfs – so I can imagine we will continue to see changes over the next week or two once they have more significant live data to look at.  So before you /wrists and reroll your beloved resto shaman into a disc priest or pally, wait and see how things shake out over the next week or two, and I will update the state of healing in 5.2 after that.