Why pallies should consider healing instead of DPS in BGs

OK, this isn’t about telling anybody how to play. It also isn’t about drawing early conclusions regarding patch 2.3, the only thing I know is that a boost to Ret in PvP isn’t going to make me change my playstyle overnight.Why heal in AV - 1We had one of those longer AVs last night, right after the previous days’ honour had been accounted for. Look at this baby.
Want to take bets which player got most honour out of this BG? Now I’m not into shameless self-promotion, but on the same scoreboard sorted by healing done, the second player is over 200k below me, with a lot more damage dealt, lot more personal deaths, and, at the end of the day, lot less honour from that game.
The interesting part is this other screenshot here, showing just how much honour I got from that game. On the previous day, the honour earned was from two games, here it is from that one single AV. For that matter, my +heal is far from stellar, I’m still sitting slightly below 1k (doing AV to actually purchase a couple more purplez). But just as in PvE where we’re the best single target healer, nobody keeps a warrior or a bear slaughtering foe after foe for hours at length. Toss in a blessing of protection from time to time and you can bet that you’re just ruining that warrior’s enemy’s day. Or moment. Whatever.

There’s actually another lesson hidden in these two screenies. You’ll notice that this game lasted 62 minutes, we got all objectives but took ages to win because Alliance turtled in the whole time. Tonight we had another game exactly like it, we took every objective, they had near to nada, but we ended 10 minutes earlier. Longer AVs give more honour

A shame really, because it cost us about 250 honour. Yes, you actually only get full AV honour when the game lasts longer than 1 hour. So when you don’t manage to rush-finish within 20-30 minutes and you’re clocking in close to the hour mark, you have a lot to gain by not suddenly rushing the game to a conclusion for a bit longer (provided the tactical situation allows it, of course).

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5 Responses to Why pallies should consider healing instead of DPS in BGs

  1. Adventsparky (84 comments) says:

    Show off ;) bring some of that to the arena :P

  2. Gwaendar (217 comments) says:

    I need EotS marks, 30 more of them, and it will take ages to get them in our Battlegroup. PCT out? :)

  3. Zerei (14 comments) says:

    Wow 451 HKs…I usually try to stay out of the hour+ long ordeals as I don’t have the patience anymore. I’m one of those people who likes just running in there, tossing some heals, and yay we win or lose.

    Impressive nonetheless :) The games I’m in for AV tend to look similar, just smaller as the games are quicker.

  4. Gwaendar (217 comments) says:

    Yesterday I actually had a 1h22 game (reminded me of the good ole days before the first AV tweak which removed most of the cool stuff, games which would last 4h in average) where we even saw the Ice Lord, ended up at 1.2M Healing Done, nearly 900k above anyone else. There’s probably a relation between the length of the game and the lack of healing in that one. I blame the matchamking system, though.

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