If you know what school of damage you are about to take, the two kinds of 'healing' (either resistance potions or healing potions) are equivalent.

Scenario: I get down to X hp, knowing I'm desperately close to dying from the next AoE <arcane> damage that should hit me for at least as much as an arcane prot pot will absorb.

Actions:
A) so I swallow an arcane prot pot. After the arcane damage is over I have X + prot absorb - AoE damage

B) so I swallow a health pot. After the arcane damage is over I have X + health pot - AoE damage.

In (A) I end up with more hp than (B), on average (& indeed could be the difference between living & dying). In a simple sense, then (A) is strictly superior to (B)

The tricky part is that since I don't visibly have more health, a healer might try desperately to heal me (because they also know I'm close to dying from the next AoE arcane damage - but didn't notice the arcane protection potion buff on me) anyway. So, while the prot pot may've saved the healer mana overall (since they didn't have to heal me so much after the AoE), it still lead to someone else dying, perhaps. (because the healer decided to focus on me, when they didn't need to) A healing potion gives an immediate result that a healer can easily see & factor into their prioritization.

Can we stop the potion discussion? Even if it were an advantage, most people are aware of protection potions, and it is therefore not relevant to this thread anyway.

Note the only healing talents that affect Vial's heal are the Priest 10% more healing from Holy and Pally 5% more Holy crit. Also any +spell crit talents will affect the heal's chance to crit as well.

I believe he was referring to things like Fel Armor and the Rogue talent Quick Recovery.

I haven't seen [Charged Crystal Focus] mentioned. I hope it's not too obvious for this thread, but since I still don't see many people farming my Bash'ir Landing I assume they aren't very popular. I haven't played the Ogri'la minigame in a long time but I still use these farmable healthstones on a regular basis. The [Depleted Crystal Focus] they come from is not bop, so if your raid tank (and/or main) has the apexis shards you can farm them off-character, or even buy them on the AH. They obviously share a cd with HS but they stack to 20 and have no uniqueness restriction, allowing you to HS more than 3 times in a fight.

I use the macro below to save space on my actionbars. It doesn't show me what HS(s) I have available but I know if I hit the CCF button and I have any HS in my bags it will use the HS instead.

#showtooltip Charged Crystal Focus
/use Master Healthstone
/use Charged Crystal Focus

On that note, on fights like Magtheridon or Felmyst where you have free positioning before the pull, you can drop a Soulwell just before pulling to allow people to restock stones during the fight. It lasts 5 minutes, so that's potentially 2 extra HSes.

E: One more of my own tricks - the Abyss Shard from the lvl50 Warlock quest can be used to gain a free soul shard every 30 min. Simply equip it, summon the voidwalker, and walk far enough away that it despawns.

I was never very impressed with the Abyss Shard. For the inventory slot it takes up, I could just hold another shard, so long as you watch your shard count more carefully.

It only has a 30-minute cooldown, so it's conceivably 3 shards for attempts on a boss.

Ok, I've read through this entire thing, and havent seen this mentioned.

Old ZG rep/quest. It requres Revered with Zandalarian Tribe so if you're a new character, it's a pain, but sometimes you can still get ZG runs going and hardly anyone needs the coins/Bijous, and I've been able to get most of them on some runs on my alt..

This quest gives you 3 guardian elixirs which are actually very usefull depending on the fight.
Especially the +20% runspeed and spellreflect ones are usefull and scale just as good if you're lvl 60 or 80
(unless the reflect one has any type of reduction at higher lvls, but runspeed wouldnt have at least)

They're unique, so you can only gather one, but you can have several of the mats to get one stored. I usually go and grab them when I'm bored, but the +20% runspeed one is actually the best buff in the game if you're farming

Spellreflect:
Sheen of Zanza

25 Spirit and 25 stam:
Spirit of Zanza

+20% runspeed for 2 hours:
Swiftness of Zanza

Oh and I saw it mentioned, but with no link. If you're alchemist, being exalted with theese can actually be an occasionall huge advantage as you can get immune to and out of stuns in emergencies.

Recipe: Living Action Potion

has anyone tested if [Sulfuron Slammer] clears the shadow debuffs from eredar twins?

One I've found... heroism increases shadowfiend attack speed only if the shadowfiend is active when heroism is popped.

So, just get your friendly shammy to call before he pops heroism and voila.... extra mana return

/tar Shadowfiend
/cast Blessing of Might

Seems simple enough if they really need the mana.

It's actually a fairly substantial amount of free mana to put BoM on a Shadowfiend, but I really don't think many priests are needing it these days.

Those aren't available until Brewfest so it's currently impossible to try this out.

It works of you put Blessing of Might on the Priest too. And Leader of the Pack.

Wrath of Air, Strength of Earth of Grace of Air are the best though, because you can "double dip". The Shadowfiend will convert the spell damage from Wrath of Air to obscene amounts of mana and also it converts a percentage of the priests AP/Strength/Spell-damage into its own damage mechanics. Battleshout is worth a solid +100 mana on average per a hit on mob that is NOT debuffed. (so extra 1100 mana).

Haven't seen this one mentioned yet:

During Zul'jin phase 3, casting classes can use a spell that has a cast time then immediately follow with an instant cast and only get hit once by the tornadoes. This works for all classes, so a priest can use Binding Heal -> Renew, a mage can Fireball -> Fireblast, a boomkin can Starfire -> Moonfire, etc.

delete

We've tried that, and it's not very reliable. Looking back over combat logs, you'll sometimes see an extra hit that looks exactly like the ones you get when you cast something, except not directly associated with a spell. It seems like the damage has a cooldown (albeit short), and casting two spells at once simply queues the second round of damage. It doesn't always happen, though--whether or not it works might be latency-related.

It's worked for me intermittently with Starfire -> Moonfire. It seems like they have, as you say, a very brief cooldown. The problem with the fight is rarely can you chain cast without moving, and it only works if I'm spamming moonfire at the end of the starfire cast like I would when chain casting to minimize latency. I don't know how it would work with fireball, unless you're waiting on the missile travel time to fireblast.

I noticed this behavior yesterday, by accident (and before reading this post/thread).

I must admit I have a fair amount of haste for a healer (202), but I noticed I could chain off instants and not take full damage. Prayer of Healing -> Prayer of Mending combo for example. (What -really- made me notice it, I usually prayer of mend myself, then that causes the damage, which procs my prayer of mending to jump... but I started noticing my prayer of mending wasn't jumping even after I had took damage... but the damage was from the prayer of healing).

I am almost positive the same behavior would happen from Fireball -> Fire Blast, or Frostbolt -> Icelance.

I've noticed that the damage always comes arcing to me from a tornado, and that when several are close to me, I'll take damage from both the cast and an instant afterwards, but if not, I usually don't. The theory I operate on (conjecture, but it seems to work), is that each tornado has a cooldown for how often it can zap you. If only one is in range it can only zap you once within the time frame (seems to be about half a second). But if two are in range, one will zap you for the cast and the next will zap you for the instant.

Sometimes there's a long delay between the cast and when I actually get zapped because all the tornados are far away, I've often tried to slip a fast cast into that gap thinking I might avoid a second zap but I never seem to be able to. I do believe it could be possible if your cast was fast enough.

Rank 1 Immolate and Corruption return the same amount of health as max rank with the Tier 6 2pc bonus. Handy in BGs.