by Kianor » Mon Dec 10, 2007 5:29 am
Last night, I main healed in Crystallos for short periods when the cleric was afk or medding. I could barely cope, as long as we had single pulls and no adds or splits. Which is pretty limiting really. Mind you, adds or splits gets dangerous whoever is healing.
The tank was a TSS/Solteris geared level 79 paladin (Amanensia). I am similiarly geared but only 77, so I don't have the new heal yet, or Ancestral Intervention. At times, even after the mob was slowed, I was chain healing and the tank's health was going down faster than my heals were taking it up. Without tricks and without the paladin helping heal himself, it would not have worked.
I don't know what Ancestral Intervention is like to work with, but I expect it helps a lot, particularly in tricky situations. But I've found that compared to all the other healing classes, including paladins, we're very limited. We have one main heal, one main HoT, we're efficient but lacking in variety. Our group HoTs are nice, but they're not really life saving. We're short on fast heals, and direct group heals. I hope AI makes up for this shortcoming, I'll find out once I get it.
Shamans are not bad healers, in most group content we can cope, but we're nowhere near a cleric, and significantly behind a druid. Even paladins have more life saving tricks - group heals and large fast heals - than we do. In cutting edge content such as Crystallos, we struggle, and if shamans are meant to be able to main heal that with a knight tanking, I'd say they need to revisit our healing abilities.