So basically, im wondering how to improve my mana/heal efficiency. I have about +900 healing(not counting sg) +100mana/5sec and 300spirit. On a normal fight healing MT I am constantly casting a rank5 Greatheal aborting it manually when its not needed.
It depends on my focus and lag at the time but it can be pretty efficient for hps, but if I get lagspikes or lose my focus my overheal % shoots through the roof. I've heard alot of different things, everything from r1 greatheal to rank2 healspam, but im just wondering what the theorycrafty ppl here say. Also, we're just starting on the "harder" part of naxx (beyond the 3-4 noob bosses) Should the healing be any different here?
I have searched.

First of all, I can't say anything about healing in naxxramas, because we are only up to the twin emps. Personally I'm wearing 8/8 transcendence, so the first thing I do is a greater heal rank 1 to apply these wonderful extra hot, followed by a renew and than it's basiclly heal 2 spamming. When the t2-hot fades, I cast a new gh 1. I found that to be the best mana/heal efficiency, especially in boss fights, when there are usually a lot of healers on the maintank.
The strategy you have with gh5 seems to be very good for trashclearing, when you are the only healer on the tank, because I find it highly annoying when shammys or other priests spam their 1,5 sec heals while I'm trying to get a gh 5 off. If I'm healing the raid, I'm swichting between heal 2 and fh 5, depending, on how lazy I'm at this moment :)

In lag, you're better off just keeping a constant stream of small heals, since you will be unable to time your big heals correctly.

Personally I tend to rank2 healspam more times than not, because it's more chances to proc inspiration in addition to the mana efficiency and being able to smooth out the incoming damage. I still look for places to toss in a max rank gheal though -- generally I will queue up a greater heal constantly when I'm trying to sneak in some regen time.

Overheal is a largely overrated statistic. Yeah, it can point out chronic overhealers, but on many fights you're just better served being safe than sorry on heals. The nice thing about Heal2 spam is that it smooths out your overhealing too. There will be times you hit and 90% of it was overheal, but a lot of times it'll hit just as the tank takes another 1-2k damage and it fills up the hp nicely. (and a heal2 crit here is still good, while a gheal crit is largely wasted)

Finally some of it depends on your specific gear, and the healers in your group. I don't have 8/8 Trans (nor do I want it particularly as I have other juicy items from AQ40 instead) so using a gheal isn't quite as important as someone who does have 8/8 Trans. There are certain priests/druids that I know if I'm paired with on healing a tank that I can just safely chaincast Heal2... and if shit hits the fan I still have a decent mana pool left to crank it up.

Agree with Snowy.

Mostly heal rank 2, gheals when I have the rate of incoming dmg down, and I feel it's necessary, and flash if something goes wrong. Also, whenever i use inner focus I always try to cast a gheal with it. If it's free may as well make it count. ^_^

There's all sorts of strats to use, but as long as your mana looks good, IE you're not wasting it, but you're also not being stingy, then whatever is fine. With the amount of healing you have you're a pretty good candidate for downranking.

Oh also as another note, my personal pet peeve are those healers who downrank to heal 2 and forget any other heal spells existed. During raids and during 5 mans, it drives me nuts when I watch someone try to heal rank 2 when a flash was needed, or use x3 heal 2s when a simple cast of gheal would have done the same healing and then been quicker at putting you in the fsr.

I caution you on becoming this. You do have other heals for a reason, USE THEM ><

Yeah, you're at a tier of gear above me and dealing with bosses I haven't faced, so I can't give advice for everything. I'm at Emps/starting Naxx on Anub'rekhan right now. However, I've been doing this for quite awhile and had been interested in it long before I started.

When healing in a raid setting, I switch to an alternate bar full of mostly heal spells which I try to use in varying situations. I have similar stats to yours, so the numbers on my heals should be fairly similar to yours. (900 +heal with SG, 310 spirit, 30ish mp5) Like many others, I use alot of Heal Rank 2. That coupled with a 420ish renew tick can go a long way. As the situations calls for it, I'll move up my bar to heal rank 4, Gheal 1, Gheal 3, or Gheal 5. In really easy situations, you might be surprised how good Lesser Heal rank 3 is.

I rarely use flash heal. The only times I use it are when I'm healing the DPS with Flash 5 and being lazy, or I use Flash 7 because the person would have died otherwise. I use PW:S sparingly only because the other 3 priests that are normally raiding with me have the improved talent for it and I don't. It still gets quite alot of mileage on rogues during Sartura though.

Edit: ooh, I strongly agree with Lady Vex above. I forgot to note than unless I'm using IF for a Fort, I put the biggest heal possible on it. I've learned from my time that healing meters are useless. When I first started raid healing, I had my Overheals at about 7-10% because I thought that wasting mana like that was the worst thing you can do. Now if you look at it after a raid, it's somewhere between 20-30%. In any enrage @ 20% type fight, I'll chain a GHeal from 20% on if I have the mana to support it. If all my heals were overheals, and no one died except the boss, I consider that a win.

Oh, I also forgot about Prayer of Healing. Not many people down rank that, but I highly suggest it. There are quite a few times where my whole party could use 600 extra health.

Easy, just heal according to the damage taken and duraction expected.

I think the idea behind gheal is that we get to take advantage of the 5 second rule and spirit up. Since max rank Gheal will usually top off a tank, it allows a bit of time between having to cast it, therefore we get a little extra mana boost. At 300 spirit that's a good 75 mana per tick, if you're lucky you can get 2-3 ticks between heals. On the other hand Heal is a cheap-slow cast flash heal. If the tank is the only thing taking significant damage and there's a handful of healers on him, spam away. It's unlikely you'll run into mana problems even on 7 minute fights.

You really can't ask what heals you use on a tank unless you define the situation. I think anything in BWL or lower can be Heal spammed. In AQ there's various fights where big healing is required but it's still generally mindless. In naxx every fight will demand different tactics and roles. I enjoy this aspect of it, gone are the days of flash spamming till I'm numb.

well the thing is I believe that my regen is being utilized best with gh5 spam since because i dont release it unless the tank is below 80% there can go some time between actual castings. For the higher naxx bosses, I dunno but alternating between gh5 and fh7(emergencies) (or heal2 for efficiency) seems like a bang, dont really see what other heals theres a point in casting.

depends really, i mean your just spamming heals yes, but when to abort and recast another heal and the whole "if you fuck up we wipe" thing makes it pretty demanding tbh. Especially with wow's spikes.

i use only a select few heals;

Greater Heal (highest rank), Renew (highest rank), Flash Heal (Highest rank) and Heal (Rank 4)

If MT is tanking small, consistent damage, i will toss on a renew and use Heal R4 as much as i can.

If MT is tanking large, sparatic damage, ie twin emps, i'll usually time GH's and maybe throw a flash/shield every now and then as needed.

If MT is tanking large, consistent damage, ie patchwerk, depending on how many others are healing that MT and also depending on what type of heals they're using, i'll either spam flash, spam GH or a slight combination of the two.


And i believe certain AQ40 fights are the highest encounters i'll use Heal R4 in. Personally, I heal without hesitation of mana efficieny since I que my own innervates thru a macro as i need them. That's not so say I overheal, but i will not hesitate to go thru the raid panels and completely dump my mana topping everyone off...

Heal 2 is the one for spam.

FH5 and occasionally FH7 when it has to be fast.

GH1 for MT taking big steady damage. GH5 when I can time it properly (on shadowflame incoming alert) or when a smaller heal wouldn't help anyway.

I use a far too large selection of different heals. Primarily for MTs I use Heal rank 2 and max rank Renew however. And the occasional Greater Heal rank 1 for the 8-piece tier two HoT. Inner Focus + Max rank GH is useful at times too, and has caused some silly deaths on my part when we were Warrior tanking Vek'caster and I landed a crit Greater Heal shortly after a teleport with no overhealing.

I'm considering switching over to Heal rank 1 though, Heal rank 2 generally resorts in about 200 overhealing for me from consistent damage, and that's exactly what the difference between rank 1 and 2 is at for me right now.

Plus I have highest rank Flash Heal available for emergencies. I rarely use it, but at times it's invaluable.

I also have 3 different grades of Prayer of Healing ready to cast at all times, and Lesser Heal rank 2/3 for quick minor spot heals (Filling up people from a minor piece of damage). If I'm feeling lazy in certain "easy" fights I just chain-cast Lesser Heal rank 3 all fight long with no worries about mana.

All the above observations are based on having approximately +900 healing.

Like some other poster in this topic, I'm wearing still full Transcendence, and I plan to do it for a long time in the future. When healing a tank, I start with GH1 since the dual HoT from set bonus + max rank renew with +950 healing is good for balancing the heals needed. While the HoT's are ticking, I can heal other target's or spam heal rank 1 or 2 on tank, provided he has several other healers also. Heal rank 1 is often better, the difference of 1050 and 1300 heal is often trivial in situation, where you would be casting either of those heals in first place.

If I'm healing the raid in general on bosses, my most used spell is greater heal rank 1 without a doubt. If the target is healed before my heal lands, no problem, the free HoT will still stays there and the 1250 renew might still be helpfull if he takes more damage. Also, renew rank 3 is really great for small patch healing, 90 mana + 1 global cooldown is often a small price for over 1k+ healed over time. I often cast greater heal rank 1+renew rank 3 combo, most DPS guys will get topped with that and with minimal mana used.

This is a bit oftopic, but if here's someone else than me who uses standard blizzard target frame or CT_MOD target's target frame, this mod might be good for you, even if you are not using full tier2: http://home.no.net/ninagirl/
The addon shows small icons on the sides of the unitframe, so you can easily see does the target have both HoT's or which one of them is missing.

I use healrank1 spam and maxrank flash for damage spikes. Sometimes Gheal rank 1. Renews only at certain times / fights. I also pop Gheal 5 with inner focus for huge spikes.

Depends on the encounter.

HealR2, FH7, GH5 and GH2 are the ones I have on my bars.

This is exactly my setup (except I use Heal Rank 3). I like the "Keep it simple, stupid" methodology. :)

We are up to Firemaw in BWL at the moment and I have about 550-ish healing (with SG). I think what you use as a Priest also depends on your other healers. We have excellent healers in our guild and I do a lot of cancelling my HR3/GH5.

Are you a healer who gets assigned to tanks (MT/OT healer) or DPS? I find my overheal percentage rises on greatly on trash or when I am not assigned to tanks, since it is harder to predict spikey damage on DPS classes and I tend to spam one too many flash heals on them. I am learning to shield/flash and pause on squishy classes to let all the other EM healers catch up though.

When I was playing my priest I used CastParty to bind mouse buttons for Emergency Monitor and ctraid raid buttons. I think now ClickHeal is something that does this very well as well (there are probably others). Its a huge saving in reaction time when you can heal with 1 click instead of 2. The other nice thing is that you can heal something other than what you have targeted - so if your a MT healer, you can always have the MT targeted but toss off renews and heals on others without shifting targets with just 1 click.

Pretty much rank2 heal, rank1 or rank3 gheal, renew, pws, and occasionally flash5 were all I ever used up to c'thun.

What I'm seeing in Naxx (on the receiving end, from sct) is that heal2 is still the major powerhorse for most encounters. Some of course demand high level gheals (patch, loath) but most of the encounters have the entire raid taking lots of damage, so heal2 spammed across the raid is great. With a high enough mana regen (not 8/8 trans) you basically will take 10-20 mins to go OOM since you regen most of the heal2 mana every cast.

Whats more interesting in our guild is the tier3 debate. Most of the priests don't care at all about tier3, and most say they won't give up 3 trans for tier3. Thats pretty sad itemization on blizzards part :(

i know, retarded.com

You can still pick up quite a bit of Tier 3. 5/8 & 8/8 Trans isn't that crazy.

Heck, there's a lot of fights still that I wouldn't want to give up the 5 trans bonus, let alone the 3. I cannot count the number of times something has whacked me for 2-4k and auto-fade procced and saved my ass. Happened at Raz just last week. Having said that, Faith is a strict upgrade across the board but the set bonuses are lackluster at best:

2 piece is okay, I still use renew enough for that to help.
4 piece is garbage, depending on a gheal crit for only 500 extra healing is vastly inferior to the 8 piece Trans bonus from gheal which doesn't require a crit!
6 piece is garbage, since when was aggro from healing a common problem?
8 piece is underwhelming. The set bonus could be 24 mp/5 all the time and it still wouldn't be anywhere close to imbalancing. (but would at least make breaking 3 pc Trans possible at last)

Various fight require different styles, but to take the twin emperors as an example: (since it's probably the hardest straight-up heal one tank fight I've been a part of to date)

I basically spam heal rank 2 with no regard to overhealing whatsoever until I run lowish on mana. I'd roughly guess that about 10% of these land in full, 30% are complete overheal, and the remainder are partial heals.

At that point I'll likely switch to cast-canceling greater heal 5 usually in combination with inner focus until I basically regen all that mana. This is probably the most efficient route from an overheal point of view (and very satisfying when you land those 5kish crit heals with no overheal!), but it's not what I'd regard as the best way to keep the tank alive. The emps are a fight where a tank missing a few hundred hp is a tank needing a heal, and gheal5 is not the best way to do that. I pretty much just feel this is the lesser of the two evils when the alternative is eating consumables.

With 350 spirit, 3pc trans bonus alone gives you 35mana per 5 for five seconds after you cast.

This is why most priests will be stuck with 3pc trans in raid PVE until maybe TBC raids.

As a priest with +943 heal, 8/8 Trans... At 25% health or below, I use PW:S. Usually there's a gaggle of healers throwing a heal on that person at this point, so the instant pseudo-heal gives time for a real heal to land if that target is in the process of taking damage. At 25-40% health, I use Flash Heal (rank 7) to get them out of the 'danger zone'. Above 40% I use the appropriate rank of Heal/Greater Heal to top off their health. I use Renew on MTs, and warlocks as needed.

Edit: My response isn't restricted to an MT. That's how I heal everyone.