Penance Priest

Every time I do a raid with another priest, I come to the same conclusion. A raid leader would either need to be nuts, or really clever, to take a disc priest over a holy priest. Here's the first thing anyone will see when they look at our performance in Recount. Here "S" is a CoH holy priest with about the same gear level as me (with a totally different stat profile of course). "B" is another CoH priest, not only lower gear quality, but out to lunch, so pay no attention. All charts are from a partial run of TK with a decent quality pug. And while it's instructive, I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this data set! (Oh and if you're not familiar with Recount, it's basically the add-on to track battle stats. Bars are color-coded by class, so the white bars are the priests, green are the hunters, etc. And of course the window title indicates what graph you're looking at. So in the graph at left, it's showing that "S" did 2.09m in total healing, and I did 862k.) Thanks for coming Paolo, you've been...a really nice guy. Keep practicing! Mitigation you say? Yeah, ok, whatever, would be great to see you do more healing though. Meanwhile, as long as we're waiting for loot to be distributed, might as well have a look at some other pages in recount, just for kicks. Oh interesting! He sure kept himself busy doing...whatever it is disc priests do. Since it wasn't healing, maybe he was...buffing everybody? Hmm. But he cast about 25% more spells than CoH man, for what that's worth, even though CoH is instant-cast, and "S" is probably spamming it most of the time. Anyway, at least it seems he wasn't afk, so I can't boot him for that. Wait a second, I thought we had three priests. Why weren't the others doing any dispelling? We have all sorts of magic debuffs to get rid of...damage increasers, sleepers. Not sure exactly how to measure the value of this, but damn, he seems to be pretty attentive to the raid. So how do I score this guy? Seems seriously engaged, using all his tools, attentive to the raid. Supposedly he has some awesome buffs, but who knows, can't see those in recount either. And he says he does a ton of mitigation...yeah, ok, probably. His 13% haste (with talents, plus haste procs) doesn't show up anywhere on the charts. But one thing that does show up is that his heals hit for less, at least 15% less. And his overall healing done is less than half of what our CoH healer does, no arguing with that. So? Do we bring a disc healer or not?

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Here's reason #1 why I love the penance spec.

Check out the recount data from a recent raid. This was a TK pug, not a lot of leadership, so healing assignments were pretty lax. And being a 25, things were sloppy all around. (It's my least favorite number, 25, by a long shot.) Being a pug, and with many people never having done TK before, we only got down 2 bosses, with a single attempt on a third. In other words, this ain't the most representative sample, but it will do.

Here is my recount profile:

And the profile of "S", a CoH priest with similar gear level (very different stat profile of course, since I'm a crit stacker atm):

The CoH priest was pretty on the ball. I've seen profiles that were 90% CoH, even more. I've also seen recount data for me that was almost perfectly evenly split amongst the top 5 or 6 spells; Flash Heal was definitely the main spell for this discombobulated pug.

Look at the number of casts for each of us, in addition to the pie charts. I'm using all my tools, all the time. He's using spells in exponentially decreasing frequency. Granted, I should have been PoM-ing more often, and probably renewing as well. But for now, that's not the point. The point is that the spec both encourages, and even forces a degree of engagement and creativity that I have not experienced before as a priest.

And an engaged player is more valuable to your team than a bored or unhappy player. Which is what I was during that brief "let's try CoH" phase of my career. I'm not imposing that experience on other CoH-ers, but certainly many of them are people who were forced to respec because of the demands of T6 content, not because of the pleasure of the playstyle.

Next post will be another analysis of the same raid. But it will be more of a QQ on "Why a raid leader would still not want to take me, even if I'm a better player than the CoH priest."

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