Healing for Tenacity Pets

I have said it before and will say it again. Pets are specifically de-tuned tanks. They have everything they need to be able to tank and can hold aggro off healers just fine most of the time, but they cannot tank like full fledged player tanks only because they have that functionality removed.

This is a mistake on Blizzes part, but by speccing pet self-heals you not only keep to the spirit of pet tanking (which relies on big heals instead of mitigation) but also avoid having to make the healer work too hard.

But what Nordh says is true in principle, if your pet cannot hold aggro of the heals the equation will not work out no matter what else you do, no amount of downranking will help. Your pet needs as many heals as it needs and getting less than that will cause a wipe as surely as losing aggro will.

Since I've been having some fun healing Dny's turtle, George, for the past two months or so, this seemed like an appropriate forum to share a bit about it. Please forgive me for my lack of technical terminology. I have no idea about numbers or stats, but I do know what has worked for us.

My priest is spec'd as both Holy and Discipline (so slightly schizophrenic) but she prefers to go Holy when she heals George. Like any tank/group dynamic, I've found that Holy, although slower to implement, hits harder and is able to keep George relatively safe and yet is forgiving enough to allow me to heal the group as well if things start heading south.

There has been a lot of concern about the healer pulling aggro off the pet tank, but I have to say that this has never been a problem for us. The first three things that I throw on George before he runs into any fight is Prayer of Mending, Power Word: Shield and Renew, three wonderful spells because they are all instant casts, can be cast before the fight, and they keep George safe for the first few moments where he has to grab aggro.

After that, I must agree with Durante when he says that I do a good imitation of a holy pally because Flash Heal becomes my best friend at that point. But once the CD's on Prayer of Mending and PW:Shield finish, I zap George with those again... Rinse and repeat.

Dny has won the hearts of all the guild healers and they have all agreed that it is both a novelty and really lots of fun to heal George. He hardly takes any damage. And he doesn't shout at the healer when things go wrong.

However, that being said, it's always good to have a backup plan and I have several mango-hits-the-fan spells that I find very useful.

"Fade" has helped a lot during those dicey moments where loose mobs have suddenly taken a liking to my priest. And often, when other players have stolen aggro, I am grateful for a certain Holy ability called Serendipity (which stacks and allows the beautiful spell, "Prayer of Healing", a huge group heal, or "Greater Heal" to be cast much more quickly - from 12% to 36% faster - after casting Flash Heal).

One of the loveliest discoveries for those "oh heck what do I do??" moments is "Guardian Spirit". This spell allows the heals to be 40% more effective while it is active, and it prevents the tank from dying. If the tank should kick the bucket, he usually comes back with 50% health and can continue the good fight. But to our delight, George, comes back with full health! Hooray for Pet Tanks!!

It's been a lot of fun healing George and we're learning new things every day. Perhaps I'll get the opportunity to share more trials and tribulations in the future, if my post has not been too painful.

One reason holy is better than disc for pet tanks is the fact that disc normally loves using shields, and shields don't get the healing bonus on pets as far as I know.

My concern over holy was that it might be less able to deal with spike damage. While may well be true, the BIG reason to not go Disc is actually it's lack of group heals.

With holy the group heal feel like a normal heal to George hehe.

But yeah, shields too...

I had a somewhat overgeared holy priest heal my pet (a "hydralisk", the glitched croc') in ToC heroic earlier and according to him it felt like healing a blue geared tank because the damage recieved is less spikey, but i took great care to inform the entire party of the theoreticals beforehand so it went smoothly except for once where i, due to lowering my gfx settings, didnt see the poison...yeah, would've caused a wipe it if wasnt for Guardian Spirit kicking in at the last moment and bringing my pet up max hp again . Despite *insane* heals on his part he never got over my pets threat which made me smile, one less problem to keep in mind.

Still, i think a Discipline priest would fare better since Divine Aegis should scale with the increased healing (% of ammount healed), shouldnt it? it'd make for some fearsome bubbles, and mitigation.

Good point about Divine Aegis, I didn't realise that. As I say, I found Disc to work quite well personally, but when the group starts taking damage it goes pear shaped pretty quickly.

I found that healing the pet tank more or less effectively is only a small factor when it comes to choosing between Holy or Disc. It boils down to the same dynamic that I have to guage with every group.

If the tank is holding aggro successfullly and the DPS are being wary, Disc is fantastic (being more of a single-target healing spec). For the pet tank, I find that Disc handles the spike damage very well. And with the Disc ability, "Borrowed Time" (which grants 25% haste after casting PW:Shield, and makes the Shield more effective by 40% of the priest's spell power), it allowed me to cast lots of quick little heals, as well as being able to Shield George every 10 seconds (once the "Weakened Soul" debuff has worn off). And as Virge mentions, Divine Aegis is a beautiful bonus too.

It is a pity, as Nordh mentions, that the Shield wouldn't get the Healing bonus. But in spite of that, it's a fantastic mitigation utility and the Disc's priest's best tool apart from Penance (big and dramatic instant heal).

Disc is a lot of fun, but unfortunately I have only had the opportunity to use it to heal George on several short occasions. I'm really hoping that after the patch, that'll change.

The new Mend Pet of post-4.0.1 is awesome for pet-tank healing. I was in a random H Nexus earlier today when the tank just left before the first pull for no apparent reason. I remarked, "wonder why he left, I could pet-tank this with no trouble". Healer said "lol, go ahead while we wait for another tank", which on my server can be 10+ minutes at times. Dropped Jeeves and got my old tank gear, pulled out Sherman the bear, and proceeded to take down everything up to that splitter boss (forget her name) before a tank queued in.

Mend pet was ticking for 5746 every 2 seconds, that plus the healer's spells always kept him at 95-100% health. Even on the first boss, he never went under 70-75%, though he got lucky and didn't take any crits.

When I did a test to see what my bear's health was in ICC self-buffed, and had him at a little over 76k, Mend Pet was doing well over 11k per tick, which is pretty damn impressive. Not enough by itself obviously, but a massive improvement over what we would have had before Mend Pet got its much-needed buff.

Still haven't managed to convince a group of my buds to let me do an ICC boss, but with the return of crit immunity, plus the major health boost, I hope to finally get in there and do Marrow, Rot, and Sindy sometime after the initial Cataclysm rush dies down somewhat, and we overgear ICC normal even more than we do now.

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