This is why you don't give healing trinkets to dirty shamans.

I heal for the niños.

My end game experience is quite limited as my guild is only just starting out in AQ these days. Based on my experience in both MC and BWL, as a priest, having my heals heal for around 1000 or so seems pretty efficient though.

In MC as a MT healer I pretty much don't have to rely on any other spell than 'Heal 2' on any boss. With my current gear it heals for around 1000-1100 per heal.

BWL is mostly the same, with a few exceptions (such as Vaelastrasz).

When forced to use flash heals on boss encounters I usually just use the highest rank flash... since in my experience the only times you're forced to use flashes you're also forced to heal for as much as you can with them.

On trash mobs I pretty much only use Flash Heal rank 5 or 6, for me Flash 6 heals for 1000-1100 and Flash 5 for 800-900 iirc.

If encounters in Naxx or post Sartura in AQ require a lot more healing per second than I can dish out with my current healing strategy then I'll have to adapt to that, but as it is my current strategy seems pretty comfortable for both MC and BWL.

Just checked on my shammy again, with my gear profile I hit 1400 LHWs no problem. My chain heals hit around 1200 normally and up to around 1800 on a crit for the first target.

Fully buffed, rank 10 renew heals for 466/tick, and my highest rank flash heals max out at around 1530. Heal rank 1 can heal for a little over 1200, and greater heal rank 1 is around 2100. Rank 3 renew heals for 267/tick. Greater heal rank 5 maxes at around 3360 for me non-crit.

This is with my +heal gear on (but still with 5/8 trans bonus), as well as Divine Spirit, Mark of the Wild (talented), and Blessing of Kings.

EDIT: This is with 1117.25 +healing with talents and spirit factored in (I'm not sure how decimals round when it comes to +healing, sorry).

if you have a .5 +healing decimal, the renew ticks with be something like 316,317,316,317,316 etc.

These numbers were taken with Spirit and Mark but not Kings

Heal rank 2 1400 avg
Gheal 2 2300 avg
Flash heal 5 1100 avg
Renew 9/10 419/459
Flash heal 7 1500avg

my gear is http://ctprofiles.net/763945

Edit-> For poster above me I have come to same thoughts as well. The more plus heal I get the stronger my heals become allowing me to reduce to a rank where my mana regen will come very close to what I am spending. The only place I find +healing useless is MC. With all the dispels and random crap that reduces int/spi by 50% the lack of mana/regen can really hurt you or put healers off of +healing. This is just what I have noticed doing MC recently. BWL, AQ, Naxx +healing is best stat ever because mobs have moves that can do an insane amount of damage in short amount of time making it a requirement that your heals heal for more.

I am gonna ask you the sam question I asked Wibble.
With the huge amount of +healing gear you guys have, why not consider using Heal Rank1 as your staple heal spell? Why stick to Heal Rank2..
Correct me if I am wrong, but any heal over 1k+ is sufficient in a raiding scenario taking into account other healers and overheals. Ofcourse, in an emergency or certain unique situations (patchwerk eg), you have to change your healing strategy.

Heal Rank2 gets full value from your gear. If you drop to rank 1 you lose some percentage of the +heal values. In general, I'd rather have my full value of +healing applied than lose some of it to the "this spell is learned before level 20" factor.

There's a very nice calculator floating around the interwebs that you could plug the numbers into and watch the graph if you want a visual representation of where heal rank 1 places. It's been too long since I ran the numbers on a priest for me to recall where all the break points are, and unfortunately I'm at work so I can't go run them again for you.

Right, there's a significant penalty to any spell learned before level 20. Heal 1 is learned at 16. The penalty is almost always severe enough to keep it from being worthwhile to downrank past that threshold. Same reason druids stop downranking at Healing Touch 4.

(And the calculator I used to rely on for visual illustrations of efficiency (probably the one you're thinking of, Anias) hasn't been updated since 1.10, so its values are severely off for the new heals.)

I switch what healing spells I use all the time and often switch out a few pieces for more healing or more regen but in general my flash heal does 1300, Heal rank 2 does 1200-1300, Gheal 3 about 2400 and gheal 5 near 3000. My renew does about 2100 total so 420ish per tick.

Over an 18 second period, you can cast 6 heal rank 2--they get 514% of your +heal bonus (total). In the same 18 second period, you could cast 5.14 Healing Touch rank11 if you had it--they get 514% of your +heal bonus (total).

This is assuming you do not have divine fury/IHT to improve heal cast time (which you should have obv).

If you have the talent, in that same 18 second period with talents:

you can cast 7.2 heal rank 2--for 600% of your +heal bonus (total)
you can cast 6 Healing Touch11--for 600% of your +heal bonus (total)


You get full value from your + heal gear on all spells beyond level 20, it's just that the cast time affects how much applies to each cast so that they keep the same value per unit of time. +Heal is badly labeled, it should really be +hp/s....

(Editted to remove potentially confusing rounding and avoid fussing about goofy priest spell times)

Heal Rank 2 and Greater Heal rank 4 have the exact same cast time. Base cast time 3 seconds, with Divine Fury (which you're stupid not to have) 2.5 seconds.

Not sure I'm following you here :p

Now you see why I haven't played a priest in a while =P

The spell cast times are goofy, my apologies.

You can change greater heal rank4 to HT11 if you like.

The point is that you get the same value over a fixed period (say 18 seconds) from your +heal on all ranks of spells assuming that the spell is >level 20 and you don't have a talent to improve the cast time of one spell and not the other.

Since this topic is about how much our heals actually heal for per cast, that was what I was talking about :p

But yeah, I see what you're saying and I understand that +healing gives the same benefit over time.

EDIT: You just said the same thing! I get it now :p

I think a more interesting question might be -- What does each instance require per 3second cast?

MC - 600
BWL - 800
AQ - 1000
Naxx - 1200

Seems to work for me....

I havent had Heal rank 2 on my bars for a while. My gear has been mainly the same for the last 3.5 months and I've been using Heal rank 1 since I broke the 1000 +heal mark. In general 1200 heals are good enough, but I bet I can find use for 1500 heals for only 33 more mana.

That being said, I'm going to experiment with heal rank 2 tonight and the next couple of days. I do use Greater Heal rank 1 which only heals for ~500 more than Heal rank 2 (~800 more than heal rank 1), but costs significantly more mana (174 vs 314).

My "staple" heal would be 1,200 for the question asked originally.

Just another question to pose: When do you guys think +Heal should be "maxed" (not by Blizzard but by yourself). I'm to the point where I think approximately 1,200 +heal (with spirit talent factored) would be more than enough healing and then I should focus on other stats (Sta, Int, Mana/5, etc). Right now I'm geared towards very heavy +Heal, but I'm leaning towards gear now with good overall stats as well as heavy +heal.

hmm, I was unaware of the penalty for spells below lvl 20. Interesting.

Anias (or someone else), could you be a doll and find out for me how much +healing is needed for Heal Rank1 to heal for 1000~ (keeping in mind obviously that Heal1 rank incurs a penalty)

I didn't do the math, but with 823 +heal gear and 232 spirit (881 +heal total with both factored in) my heals were all ~1,000 on heal rank 1. Most of the time they were well over, with a max of about 1031, but some still dipped into the 990s. I would go for about 850.

From the wiki...Many spells have multiple ranks. To avoid having players using these lower ranks to deal constant damage or healing at a negligable mana cost, any spell which can be learned at a level lower than 20 has a large penalty applied. If the spell has a shorter cast time, this is also taken in to account. This level penalty can be worked out by taking off 3.75% for each level lower than level 20. So EffectiveBonus = (1-((20-LevelLearnt)*0.0375))*ExpectedCastTimeBonus. With this said most mana effecient rank is usually lowest rank learned at level 20+.


Heal rank 1 is learned at level 16, and has a base 3 second casting time so it gains only (1-((20-16)*0.0375))*0.857==72.85% of the value of the +heal...
Heal rank 1 heals for an average of 318, and requires an extra 682 actual healing to tag the 1k mark. 682/.7285==936.17 (937) +heal required.
Talented (spiritual healing, uck) Heal rank 1 heals for an avg of 350, and requires only an extra 650 healing to tag the 1k mark. 650/.7285==892.24 (893) +heal required.


So assuming you have spiritual guidance and 200 spirit, it's between 850 and 880 +heal required. Just as the anecdotal evidence commented =P

This is a really good example of why spiritual healing and gift of nature need to apply after +heal....such pointless talents when you pick up decent +heal values. (and they can't really make them better by forcing us to use higher rank heals, because warrior HP doesn't scale as fast as healing WTB HT Rank 0...)

Good info. Thanks.

NP