So the druids (including me) in my guild are having a discussion of Rank 3 vs. Rank 4 HT.

The question is simple: sure, Rank 3 uses only 56% of your +healing (due to penalties for lesser cast time and being a pre-lvl 20 spell), but it's got a very low mana cost and .5 faster cast time.

Any theorycraft or real life reasons not to use Rank 3? I personally believe Rank 4 to be more effective by far, both from the abstract math side (better use of +healing bonus, by far) and the reality that my Rank 4s hit for 850-950 which seems far better than the 400-550 that Rank 3 hits for.

Thoughts?

400-550 is way too low a heal for most fights. R4 and R5 was my personal Fav heals. I could generally sustain R4 ht chain casting for the entire Anub fight and that worked well.

What if someone were running 700-800 +healing...Rank 3 still not worth the hit?

It does not seem worth the cost of losing at lot of that healing (do to pre lvl 20 issue), just for .5 seconds off the cast time, and saving a small amount mana.

And the heal will not do much, since it only gets around 50% of your healing.

Try using CT calculator to figure out when rank 3 is worth it.

CT calculator might do the same thing, but if you're interested in the efficiency of your spells and the "numbers" then I can recommend this addon

http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...eorycraft.html

It's been 100% accurate on my priest, although it tended to bug on a few of my dps caster alts.

Edit: sigh at making no sense with scentences.. :(

As a general rule, healing touch rank 3 has little utility in situations where HT4 would not cause significant overhealing. That is to say, healing touch 4 is lowest you should go in most situations. Of course, if you want to just heal someone to full who's taken 600 damage and your HT3 hits for 600, the use is justified.

However, for MT healing, you will usually end up just confusing yourself as to when a heal should be land and when it should get canceled. You are forcing yourself to cast-interrupt-cast every 2 seconds instead of 2.5 seconds which will in the long run result in more mistakes. In terms of saving tank against spike damage, HT3 is just weak. 600-700 healed is quite a bit less than 1100. That such casts are slightly faster doesn't really justify use I think.

With 882 healing it heals for 700-740(though I don't have gift of nature, so 800 or so). If you got like 1100+ healing it might be enough, though in naxx now im finding r4 isnt enough in many fights at 1150 a heal.

So duno ;0 if you stacked to hell your healing it will be good..but you would need very good gear, or gimp yourself mana regen wise.

With 1067+ the healing is around 850+ with the 10% more in restoration talent. Mixing the ranks works well, I use mostly rank 4 though eventhough it's the least efficient (hpm)

As for the gimping mana regen wise, most high end good +healing items also posess mana regeneration stats. I'm at ~115mp5 now(with the 30% from sr/talent) oO

Heal +% talents affect prior to gear (unlike damage). Gift of nature would put you closer to 750-760 than 800.

the higher your healing, the less you'd want to use ht3 over 4 because of the massive penalty at that point. its just not cost effective past 4.

HT3 gets a smaller hp/s boost from +healing than HT4.

Like Kobalt said, a lot of the fights in Naxx have enough damage incoming or hit hard enough that it's often not even viable to use Rank 4, much less Rank 3; and you'd pretty much need a lot of Naxx gear to make using Rank 3 worth it. Maybe after you've killed Kel'thuzad and you're grinding up exp in Outlands or something :p but I couldn't see it being terribly useful in a raid setting.