Huntering Makes Me a Better Pally, and Other Stories

So last night was like raiding in the Twilight Zone. First off we only had 6 healers and 2 paladins total. Not having 3 paladins and the subsequent buffs makes me uncomfortable. Plus it's a lot of extra work on the 10 min buffage front since you're trying to fake a 3rd pally all evening. I'm a creature of habit, so casting mights was a bit strange feeling.

We started the raid and grabbed a resto shaman when he logged on to give us 7 healy types. On the first Teron attempt I got marked for constructs. I haven't had constructs in so long, I was pretty surprised. So once I have about 20 sec left, I headed over to the corner. I spammed the AoE attack then ran forward to shakle them. Somehow one missed the spell, so I slapped an Ice Lance on him. As the rest of the constructs began to pop, I lanced them as well. Unfortunately the one that intitially made a break for it did reach the melee group with a little health left, but by this time the person's mobs that died before me were tearing up the raid.

So I ran over and did my AoE again before picking up where I left off on the lances. I think all of mine were killed before they took out anyone (and a shammy agreed with me on this), and I found myself helping out on other people's.

This situation is a lot like kiting mobs on my hunter. Even the slowing is the same. And I've been practicing this for months now. It really has helped and given me the confidence to nuke constructs into oblivion. :D

On the down side, I'm not very happy with my healing right now. I'm coming in at the bottom of the meter, about 3% behind the other paladins and not even in the same hemisphere as the CoH Priest and Shaman. Yes, 3% isn't really a big deal, and I do have to stop healing on trash to do assignments, but still... Comparing me to the other pally last night, it appears that the issue is my Flash heals about 63 hp less per cast.

Sure that sounds like I'm some sort of psycho that is worrying about a tiny amount of healing. The issue is it adds up. It's not unusual for me to cast Flash over 100 times per fight. So if I'm behind 6.3k per bosses and we kill 5 bosses, I'm looking at a 31.5k healing difference.

I also noticed last night that I'm crusing with a ton of mana for most fights. I started picking up on the big heals, but I need to start paying attention to my mana usage more. It's a waste to have half a mana bar left over when it could have been used to keep people alive.

I also got into a discussion with a holy priest about raid consumables. I normally don't use much and he always has at least food and an elixir on. I think I might do a discussion around this in an upcoming WI article because I'm still not convinced what I should be doing. On one hand, I don't feel like people are dying due to a lack of healing in most cases. I can't heal you through a 10k hit unless you're a tank. On the other hand, maybe that's the difference between me and the other paladin.

All of this stuff is surfacing because we're now farmers and what used to be hard is now much easier due to our skill and better gear. I'm just looking for optimization tweaks to get me back with my buddies is all.