give your druids 2 piece dreamwalker, problem solved

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.

I started experimenting with Renew rank 2/3 a few weeks ago on Viscidus, where I'm healing the mages. It was awesome. Been using it ever since on dps classes/people who don't really take much damage. Of course, in raids it does happen that when someone loses 500 hp they get overhealed for 5000 hp, but not all too often. Renew rank 2 costs 58 or so mana, rank 3 is 95ish. With my gear rank 3 ticks for ~205, so around a 1k heal for 95 mana. That's incredibly awesome in my opinion.

Only times I really use highest rank renew is on warlocks so they can lifetap their mana back, or sometimes on the main tank when I know I will have plenty of mana for the rest of the fight.

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.

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.

This thread is making me think that I am doing something wrong...I use renew all the time. During just about any fight I will be throwing out renews, and hitting Gheal rank1.

For priests...

1. Most of the time the target is healed before renew finishes.
2. Much of the time the target has renew on it, thereby making it a waste of time to check the target's buffs.
3. If I'm not terribly pressed for time(like on Huhuran pre 30%, sub 30% I have to use flash heal because I usually get stuck with the my-guild-got-me-200-NR-but-I-use-dps-gear-on-huhu-instead-to-boost-my-epeen rogues), I can just use HealR2 which is faster and more mana efficient than my highest rank of renew.
4. If it's a fight where players NEED to be full health(Anub'Rekhan), I can't dick around with renew.

If I do a Strath or something where I'm the only healer, I'll bust out renews on everyone then go pop a zombie up the ass with the large end of my benediction. But if I'm in a raid I'll rarely cast renew for the reasons above. In AQ40/BWL it's been mostly about HealR2, but in Naxx so far, man, I need to flash to keep up with the damage. I use greater heal on Raz at least, but that's 2-3 casts inbetween my MC duties.

Another thing to note, is that either way you do it, Renew is just a minor spell compared to our other healing. If you were to be the main healer of a tank, and the only one to renew it, your renew healing might account for 10-15% of your total healing.

With sort of a side comment that hasn't been touched on -- a big deterrent to HoT usage for me was a bad UI that only showed 8 buffs on a target (standard Nurfed). The Nurfed alpha can show up to 16, though, and this made a huge difference because I could ACTUALLY SEE IF THE DAMN HOT WAS UP THERE. I'm sure there's a million UI's that show that sort of stuff that I just wasn't aware of.

As far as HoTs themselves go, they play an important role in two fights, obviously -- Lethon and Maexxna. Any of those fights where the whole raid gets stunned or banished or webbed and the tank is just sitting there helpless getting beat on. Other than that, I just try to make sure renew's up on the MT, but it usually gets overwritten with a rank 10 (which I don't have) and it doesn't matter.

I'm not a healer, I'm my guilds MT. These are just thoughts that struck me reading this post.

1. But if your target is the main tank, that renew helps on further hits, does it not?

2. Maybe an assignment for non-MT healers could be done for HoTs in a case like this.

3. Don't take them. Damage meters shouldn't really be a factor in the raid, IMO. Huhuran is meant for casters to unload, and rogues to sponge. If they can't fit their role in a fight, don't bother.

4. No argument there. Fun (albeit buggy) fight though.

Bocheezu: if you're liking Nurfed's UI, but not the unit frames, I'd suggest Perl Classic (same looks, but shows 16 buffs iirc).