First, I want to introduce everyone to a new article type here at Tales of a Priest: Flash Heal.
Flash Heal is a short, quick, and easy to understand post. Flash Heal is something you can easily read on a flight path. Flash Heal is meant to be less involved and detailed than a full article you are used to seeing here at Tales. Flash Heal will be a post that will give you some form of tip, trick, or gem of insight on anything from a spell to a boss mechanic.
Leap of Faith, (aka. Lifegrip) I will admit, really wasn’t something I was looking forward to when first announced. Why is it MY job to pull YOU out of your own stupidity? Someone standing in Valiona’s flame breath? Use Leap of Faith. However, after using it in many raid applications for reasons beyond saving your stupid ass, I love it.
There are situations where Leap of Faith is a much quicker and faster way to manage fight mechanics. You can use LoF to quickly get a tank away from one of Cho’gall’s Corrupting Adherent’s pool of blood. When kiting Atramedes’ Roaring Flame Breath use Leap of Faith to increase that kiting distance– Those examples aside, here are many other great, and strong applications of Leap of Faith that may be forgotten.
Dodging Enrage Mechanics:
The 1% wipe. We’ve all seen it. “If we only had a few more seconds, he would have died!!”. Enter Leap of Faith. Usually as a healer, you have a pretty good idea when the fight is starting to fall apart. Many of the fights in T11 content have some form enrage (soft or hard). When you see this coming, start to position yourself in a place where you know you’ll provide the maximum distance from the boss and the tank– you’ll have the tank out of melee range, as well as provide some valuable DPS time when the boss lumbers after the tank in those final moments. The most obvious boss encounter this works well on is Chimaeron, in his burn phase- but the logic can be applied to anything from Halfus’ to Maloriak . (Just don’t pull him into a pack of adds)
Emergency Tank Cooldown:
If you can use Leap of Faith to buy time during an enrage, why can’t you use it as an Emergency Tank Cooldown? Provided you are in a safe position, (and not on a boss with a “cleave” or “cone” mechanic) you can LoF your tank out of the melee range of the boss, providing the valuable few seconds for heals to get off, defensive cooldowns to reset, and your raid to be saved. You should use LoF as a “last resort” and use Pain Suppression or Guardian Spirit when available. Warning: this can be dangerous if you pull the tank out of range of other healers, (remember your tank’s back will also be turned- but if your tank understands LoF, they should know to turn) or will completely screw up your positioning of your strategy– but with a discerning eye and quick reflexes, a repositioned raid is better than a wipe.
Leap of Faith is a great spell in our toolbox… and can be a lot of fun to use on corpse runs, and downtime during raids… to ping-pong your local Boomkin… across the room… 4 times.
