I'm sure there are 100s of guides about how to be the best this, the best that; however, this community is full of the best players eq has to offer. Most of you have played, in some form or another, every class.
For some unknown reason.... I'm not the best player of my class in my guild. (I don't use mq when I raid - ok, slap me, but I want to do it for real). Is it because I can't click fast enough? Is it because I don't use the right spells? Help me! There's a little something, something I'm missing and I haven't learned it from boxing. Is my toon just not good enough, or is it me?
Chick as a guy that played a raid cleric for years before I ever thought about boxing let me tell you a little secret. I even raid healed as a shm for a couple of years. (all the while my main was a pally) Yes it sucks watching your main fall behind your other toons in gear because the raid needed healers. I no longer raid because I got burnout and now I enjoy MQ2ing the content.
First some background. I was normally 95% of the time in the MT group. I rarely parsed highest as a matter of fact I was middle of the road most nights, however, we usually won our fights every raid. Raid healing has changed over the years, but the amount you heal is not the important stat. What really matters is healing when it matters. Sure allowing the plugin to heal can win a fight, but it is those times when you have to make that human choice do I heal player x or player z and the wrong choice nets a wipe. The program may get the choice right sometimes, but I am willing to bet that it is always a black and white choice to the software.
In my opinion the most important skill you can have as a raid cleric is knowing the other classes. For example tossing a heal on an SK sure looks good on your healing numbers but did that SK really need that heal or would he have been fine with his next attack? Do you toss a heal to that necro that just drew aggro or start a big heal on the tank that "should be taunting" the mob and whose discs are down. You really need to get out of the mindset of being the top healer in the raid.
When you say best at your class what do you mean?
Doing little things that help the raid can go a long way. For example when I raided we would pre-buff all the tanks with DI, but I noticed that during the chaos of battle there were only 1 or 2 of us recasting it. My fix for this was to create a custom audio trigger informing me of which toon needs to be refreshed. From that point on I was able to help cover more tanks. I then went and shared those triggers with other clerics in the guild, for some reason some chose not to take the info, but we started noticing fewer deaths due to spike damage. Or how about you are tasked with healing 1 group but you notice a trend that toon a or toon b tend to die a lot on raids. Maybe it's from them sucking and not controlling aggro, maybe it's from there healer sucking or falling asleep, or maybe there are not enough healers to assign them one. What I did was put specific non-tank toons on my ETW. Keeping them up helps the overall raid dps which in turn nets a win or even a smoother win.
I can't really speak to using splash heals on raids because like I said I was usually in the MT group and I had to worry about massive dmg to tanks. I guess for me I just understood the roles of each class and I really could care less about being the best. When we got a win I got my chance at loot and we moved on.
One thing you will learn after years of raiding is you will NEVER be forced to sit out of a raid because there are too many healers. Another thing you will learn is that although healing can get hectic it is extremely boring.
Jokes aside, I don't know how to play a Cleric. I let Chat play my Cleric and she does great!
