So our guild is doing quite well.. despite the fact our healing overall is pretty crap, pretty damned crap tbh
Tanks die stupidly, meatshields die quickly, every huhuran brings me an adrenaline rush to see how low my hp goes before i receive even 1 heal etc.

And one of the key things I think is missing is a lack of HoT usage in general... sure the druids use it occasionally, but our tanks almost never have 2 HoTs on them at once, let alone anyone else having 1 at all for most fights.

Two reasons why I think this happens... one being that they dont understand how HoTs work exactly for a side-effective damage mitigation/general healing style, and the other being the healing/overhealing/effective healing meter... (god knows why so much is focused on this thing...)

also strange comments like "i cant keep more than 1 group HoT'd at once" or "its only 400 a tick..." just seem wrong as a former healer/hot abuser.... btw we're alliance (aka loladins-nocry-massmana) with quite a few druids (innervate plix) so even an intensive continuous casting should be able to be maintained on certain fights, atleast for awhile (aka huhu 30%)

Am i completly wrong in thinking how good HoTs are? are our priests/druids retarded?

any kind of backup with number/crunching or what'have'you appreciated :P

Just using top ranks for numbers, I dont know which spells druids actually use.

Healing touch is about 3.13 Heal/Mana and about 714 Heal/Sec for 860 mana and can crit

Rejuv is 2.47 Heal/Mana and 74 heal/second for 360 mana.

(correct me if I messed this up somewhere, or someone do talented math)

I guess if you just look at the raw numbers, you wouldnt use Rejuv much if at all, but just looking at raw numbers is dumb.

First, they stack so its just more heals.

Seconds, a lot of times people outside your main tank dont need to get crit healed for 4k life, a majority of your 860 mana is going to go to waste.

With proper NR, a druid can almost singlehandedly keep up a group in Huhu pre30% with HoTs.

Not using HoTs is a waste. They may heal for less per mana or second, but they are almost immune to being wasted due to overhealing, they stack with direct heals meaning more healing over all, and they have a lower overhead on your mana pool to use on people who dont need the big heals (rogues coming out to bandage from an AE, someone who took a cleave accidently, etc)

As stupid as this sounds...we still have tanks die all the time to ebonroc, firemaw, or flamegor right after the pull. People are afraid to pull aggro with a heal and shadowflame the raid, and oddly that happens quite often. Someone casts something right as the boss is moving into place, he rotates, and 30 people are suddenly at 10% health. We have the issue on Sartura at the pull as well, havent done Princess Huhuran yet, but perhaps the months of forced heal delays are causing your issues?

Its really just a case of your people needing to relearn to play if thats the case.

If the priests think its inefficient, thats just a mental lapse. With the raw amount of +healing gear ticking over the whole duration, you can have some amazing heal/mana nuumbers. I'd assume swiftmend would only make a druid want to use more HoT's :(

Every priest and druid that I've known has at least one HoT going at any time. If anything, they are issues in the runs I have over whose renew gets to tick on whom (so no overwrites).

It's very mana-efficient after only a small amount of +heal, and it frees you to heal others faster. Druids with Swiftmend, especially.

I use rejuvs when a lot of people need to get healed and are going to take some splash damage. If we're talking about healing an MT I rarely use rejuvenation or regrowth, it simply doesn't seem worth it to me. It's too costly and chances are it won't even heal for much.

Like I said, there are situations where HoT's are nice but I don't consider it a primary healing tool. Oh and all the issues you mentioned there have nothing to do with not using HoT's, more likely it's a case of stupid or slacking healers.

I would love to use hots a lot more liberally than I do now. They are a fantastic tool and I think I can say with confidence my raid does not use them to their full potential. The problem, in my eyes, is when I put a hot on someone (other than the tank) the damage the HoT would heal is more often than not healed with a direct heal essentially making my HoT useless.

The argument surrounding overheal with HoT's I think is misunderstood. HoTs don't tick (AFAIK) if the target is at full health, so there is no "overheal penalty" on the healing chart. However, you still incur the mana penalty for essentially wasting a spell when someone comes in behind you and puts a direct heal on the person. (Or worse yet, overrides your HoT with one of their own).

If I'm in a situation where I know I'll be the only person healing my group, I'll use HoTs a LOT. However, outside of that circumstance, mine just kind of go to waste unless they are put on the MT. In order for me to feel comfortable using them to use them to their full potential (ie, mitigate consistent incidental damage -- aoe, cleave, etc) I would need to be in a situation where I'm the one primarily responsible for my group and have no expectation of assistance from other healers in the raid.

What do other healers out there think on the subject?

Real HoT use requires real healing assignment and the ability for you to trust other healers to not waste your mana and other healers trusting you enough to let you handle your assigned DPS classes.

HoT's effectiveness is inversely proprotional the the amount of overhealing going on. They are much stronger in smaller groups. Keep close track the next time you take 1.5k damage or so, and watch how many heals you get.

Less healers = HoT's better. More healers = HoT's usually are not very efficient at all.

Well I tend to cover my party with HoTs just before stage 2 @ Huhuran but that's really to make the transition smoother (if I'm high on mana, you get a shield too). But here's the thing - casting an "instant cast" HoT takes 1.5s - mine gives you 133 HPS @ a situation like Huhuran - this is nice to supplement spammage but it doesn't replace it. If you're dying @ Huhu, maybe you need more NR? Maybe your healer is being silenced? Maybe, there's a special Olympics for healing in World of Warcraft and they're just not winning.

Good tactic for healing on Huhuran's stage 2 is to have 1 healer : 1 waller. You know who to blame! Awesome. As well as this, if you don't need healing, they're able to cross-heal other targets (i.e. use HoTs), esp. the MT or other NR wallers whose healer may be silenced.

For most bosses, we do have all HOTs permanently ticking on our MT - although it's usually the person with the most +heal we ask to do this.

Hots are terrible hp/s, but decent mana efficiency if they tick for their full value. Many fights in wow are "do you have enough hp/s and can you maintain it without going oom", and you don't get every tick of the hot. They are really quite nice with hibernation/ZHC, and I use them alot when those buffs go off.

It's a nice incidental mitigation factor, and we tend to use them as such. Flattening the incoming damage spikes by having a trio of hot's ticking makes it easier to accomodate them while dealing with the occasional (I should really be running from that bug) moments.
It's also a very fast "toss this at that priest who's in the blizzard, go back to healing my tank" factor. As a druid, it's 1.5 seconds to toss off a rejuv. Sometimes that's all the time I can spare from my normal cycle on the people I'm supposed to be healing.

Aside on SM - I actually specced out of swiftmend, because I was running into the GC too much, and I couldn't use it to stretch my mana on fights where it mattered because I was healing with 4+ healers and not getting full use of my hots + SM. We definitely had too much SM going on =P I think we still have 2 druids with it atm, and I'm happy to apply the rejuvs so that they can mend them. (I'm 24/0/27 now)

Now in 5 mans? I use them alot. I also use rank 5? rejuv quite a bit since it's a crazy mana efficiency on splash damage, but it's definitely not my staple spell (hello HT, rank 3/4/7/11, wtb rank 0 HT off kel)

I would say that the real disincentive to Hot use is the Hp/s factor. It's pretty rare for it to be ok to leave someone low for 12 seconds while the hot tops them off. Think about c'thun or emps uppercuts, or anub'rekhan, etc. It's just hard to find 12-15 seconds of "waiting to be full health" in fights. So they're more useful as "this will blunt the beating" on MT's or people who are taking a steady damage input. Honestly, HOTS and Shield are overated. The number of "shield the tank after shadowflame" arguments I've seen convinced me that it's apparently very hard to look past "this is a shiny buff" and see "this is not enough HP/S to save us". (Either time your heals to land right after, topping him off by more than 1k, or shield before the flame, shielding after is for terribles )

I should probably be working, but trolling is more fun.

dont wanna derail it too bad...but:

Lightwell?

Personally I love it as itll let me(as a healer) replenish myself without wasting much mana.

Worthless for melee of course, but as far as its utility for the guys in the back? I just want some opinions on it.

My personal opinion is its good for 1/2 priests to have, just like Shadow-weaving. To be honest, I treat it alot like mana tide/Natures Swiftness. And since we make a habit not to heal other healers, its an efficient HoT.

Shielding AFTER SF is just kind of stupid, unless you're Alliance and don't have access to 8-10 Nature's Swiftness'.

Sheidling PRE-SF, now that's good stuff.

On topic: As for Renew, I tend to use it more on DPS (Especially Warlocks) and off-tanks than the MT. I obviously cast it on him, but it's not nearly as effective with everyone spamming heals, ideally keeping him near to, if not, topped off.

Loatheb

give your druids 2 piece dreamwalker, problem solved

I agree wholeheartedly with what Snowy said about how when there's more healing going around, HoT's become less usefull for their primary purpose ("fire and forget" -heals). Outside just the Main Tank(s) who should in hard fights have HoT's ticking all the time for that small extra bit of dependable healing the provide, it can be sometimes largly waste of mana to use HoTs on "random" folks unless you have superb communication with your fellow healers.
This being said it has worked relatively well for us atleast so far to have one 8-piece Transcendance priest tossing around Rank 1 Gheal + Renew on targets that are not only damaged but also likely to take damage in the near future. Good examples of this would be certain DPS in AoE-heavy fights or just Lifetap-happy warlocks. In some scenarios you can ofcourse HoT targets before they actually get damage if you know there's going to be damage very soon (for example tossing a Renews on people with low NR that are soon going to get volley'd by Lord Kri).

Still the main issue I see here is to communicate with your healers so that everyone understands the difference between:
A) HoTs that are there to provide that extra bit of healing/second for fast damage scenarios, or timelapse stunned healers, or whatnot.
And
B) HoTs that are meant to actually heal people for whatever amount they provide, and as such to avoid casting that extra Flash Heal to top out that targets healthbar.

Personally I like HoT's especially because they're instacast and you can top a slow heal with a HoT without giving in to further time in FSR, but I suppose stuff like that is all about every healers personal preference. Can't really benchmark healing like you benchmark DPS. With healing it's either good or it isn't and that's all, pretty binary stuff.

Does renew rank down as efficiently as say...Healing Wave?

Most of our shamans like to sit right around a 1k heal mark, ranking down our spells as gear gets better. I am well aware that priests often rank down to GH1 or Low rank Flash heal. Does deranking a HoT function in the same way? I've seen a few priests well over 1k +healing. I'd think even rank 5 or 6 renew would get enough benefit from that to be very viable.

If you're tanking a high spike damage boss, you want to have rejuvenation, regrowth, renew, gheal renew, ancestral fortitude/inspiration, and healing way (if horde) on you at all times. I don't care if it's slightly less mana efficient for you to keep these up, I don't want to die.

Lucky you, my 2.5 second cast 1k heal is about 190mana...so I'd say ya, thats pretty awesome. :)

While that's good efficiency, that's not a very good comparison considering that renew is 15 seconds.

I personally don't derank my rejuve because 1: my rejuve gets bounced most of the time anyway with how many druids we use. 2: people either get healed really fast, making it pointless anyway, or they actually need the hp that a higher rank rejuve gives. 3: Swiftmend. If something suddenly goes wrong, i don't want to see 'swiftmend...800.' The tanks should -always- have rejuve up for swiftmending.

Plus, even though you can rejuve/renew in 1.5 seconds, the first heal tick doesn't come until the 3 second mark. Which is enough time to cast a healing touch or greater/heal or two flash heals, and gives them all of the benefit up front. And is cheaper, mana wise. And you can cancel the spell if they get healed by someone else, and it can crit. And there are a lot of fights where leaving people not topped off means people are going to be one shot. But then, you can't healing touch people while running from a dark glare, chasing the tank on anub'rekhan, dodging tornados on ossirian, etc, and rejuve+renew stacked means a pair of healers can rapidly heal multiple people, and so on.

Basically, good healers know when and when not to use all of their heals.

If people are dying, it's not necessarily a lack of HoTs. It sounds like your heal squad is in general undependable through bad talents/gear/player skill. Or maybe your tanks have terrible gear and your rogues dont wear resist stuff. :V

Also they changed HoTs to do one tick of overheal. They didn't do that in the past.

edit: changed wording so i didn't look entirely retarded.

Yeah they now heal for the same amount every time it ticks now, but does not tick when you are at full HP. If you've lost 200 hp, that renew you cast on yourself is gonna tick for whatever your normal renew tick ticks for, where as it earlier only healed you for 200hp.

And to Beef, of course. Really hard hitting bosses is something else. Was just saying that low ranking your HoTs can be pretty awesome for its use (like group healing on Viscidus, along with Heal rank 2 chainspam).

I'm glad this came up, I've been looking for a good healing theory thread for a few days.

I've been looking for an excuse to use HoT's on many boss fights, however WoW is a very reactive healing game. Healers get maximum mana effeciency heals with relatively low cast times with scalable ranks. This is opposite to Everquest, where reactive healing resulted in complete heals, but with extradordinaly long cast times. This made heal over times far more important in order to mitigate damage during a healing chain. This truly does not apply in WoW.

There are a few reasons I don't use a lot of HoT's during 40 man raid boss fights. One is mana efficiency. While I agree that too many people get hung up on pure mana effiency while healing, however it is important. The great thing about Healing Touch is I can scale it's ranks to fit with the situation that results in a large heal that is very effecient. So, I can use a rank 5 on a rogue that will top them off with little over heal for 243, or cast a rejuv for 360 mana that will take 12 seconds to complete it's heal cycle. My rank 5 HT is 5.4 mana per hit point, where my rejuv is 4.4 mana per hit point.

When healing a main tank global cooldowns and general mana situation also discourage me from using a lot of HoT's. Firstly, when I cast a rejuv, it will take me 1.5 seconds before I can start casting a spell that will provide an immediate and large hit point heal. Secondly, when I cast a heal over time, I can feel it's impact on my mana pool, especially during a long fight like Twin Emps. It's difficult to sustain your mana pool over a fifteen minute period if you use a lot of heal over times.

Really, the best way to use heal over times is to assign one druid/priest dedicated to tossing heal over times on your tanks, and really nothing else. For a druid to cast both of his HoT's, it will cost him 1240 mana, which is pretty rough and will require regening while the heals tick.


It's interesting, but really my conclusion is that is difficult to get away from using the large reactive heals beacuse that is the way WoW is designed. Low cast time mana effecient reactive healing is the nature of WoW, and I don't think HoT's are designed to have a whole lot of use. Someone prove me wrong.

With the 2-piece Faith bonus being a 12% mana reduction for Renew, perhaps HoTs will shine in some of the deeper Naxxrammus encounters we have yet to see.