This is a topic that has been discussed in a roundabout way in other threads on these forums, but I've never seen an in-depth discussion of the particular issue of healing spell choice. I'm looking at the choice of which priest healing spells to use, and when, and what the arguments are behind which choices to make.

Background: Our guild is currently working on Twin Emps in AQ40, but we've only had Nef on farm for 6 weeks, and our cloth drops and other healing drops have been fairly bad throughout our time in BWL, unfortunately. There is some debate at the moment in the priest ranks about how to heal and which healing spells to use. Some of this is motivated by my brother, who is a fairly new priest to the guild and chooses to use Heal X and Greater Heal X (cancelling when necessary) to conserve mana and cover for the possibility of a tank taking spike damage. On the flip side, several of the older priests in the guild use Flash Heal almost exclusively, calling it their bread-and-butter healing spell. In particular, my brother is taking flak for using spells other than Flash Heal on things like the Ossirian fight in AQ20 and the pre-Emps trash in AQ40. So the theory goes, the damage is coming in so fast there that you need to use your fastest heals to keep people alive at all, and that slower heals just aren't practical.

I'm going to give what I perceive as the correct reasoning behind healing spell choices and I'm looking for help in pointing out what I've missed, or additional insight and information, etc. etc.

To wit! :eng101:

Flash Heal -- Awful Mana Efficiency / Mediocre Heal per Second Output / Very Fast

The only time I would use Flash Heal is if a tank had taken spike damage and I wasn't presently casting a heal spell already. This would give the tank a buffer zone faster than anything else I could do except shielding, which usually one priest is assigned to do after a large spike. (Say, after an MS or UBS.) To use Flash Heal as a primary healing spell strikes me as a) wasteful of mana, since it's efficiency is so low, and b) not useful in healing a tank who is taking large amounts of damage, since the actual amounts healer are mediocre at best.

Heal X -- Excellent Mana Efficiency / Bad Heal per Second Output / Medium Speed

I would use Heal 2/3/4 for typical spamming of healing spells on a tank, cancelling when necessary and letting through when necessary to keep the tank topped off. Since Heal X has a very high mana efficiency rate, a priest with even mediocre gear can spam it forever without running OOM. On the other hand, if a tank is going to be taking spike damage, then Heal X won't help a lot since you aren't healing very much with it -- that's what Greater Heal is for.

Greater Heal X -- Medium Mana Efficiency / Great Heal per Second Output / Medium Speed

I would use Greater Heal in 2 situations. One is being assigned to heal DPS in a situation where the damage they are taking is predictable enough that I can heal a rogue or warrior to full with a Greater Heal and not be concerned about them dying in the next 2.5 seconds. This works best if I'm one of the only healers doing this, which is ideal for DPS healing. The other situation is where I was healing a tank who has the possibility of taking very large spike damage, say, the tank on Vek'nilash. In this case I would constantly spam Greater Heal and cancel it ~.5s before it lands, if the tank is still nearly topped off. If he takes the spike, my heal goes through with an effective cast time of two seconds or less and gives the tank a large buffer of health right after the spike, while not hurting my mana pool like a Flash Heal would have.

Side note: Here I would qualify druid Healing Touch as taking the "Slowpoke Speed" slot, while having insane amount healed per second and excellent mana efficiency. Then again I might just be biased in favor of druid-style healing here. ;)

So, what am I missing with this analysis? Do the older priests in my guild know something that I have missed? Is Flash Heal the king of priest spells, or is it time for us to re-evaluate our styles?

Greater heals are far more mana efficient. Your flash healing priests need to get out of the 'oh hey, damage, I should heal that' mindset. Gheal is more proactive. Flash heal is reactive. I'm not saying that Gheal should be used exclusively, but there is definately a time and place for both. As someone tasked with healing one of the emp tanks exclusively, I will never flash heal on emps unless something has gone to shit. And even then, that flash is generally on myself or another healer that got hit with a bug, or a blizzard. If I'm healing the tank, great odds that it's going to be a greater.

Once your priests start getting into better gear and 8/8 trans bonus you'll see the raw power of a rank 1 or 2 gheal. It's nuts. Just don't get used to it, since downranking like that looks like it's going to be getting hurt come expansion.

I haven't kept up with all the wacky changes TBC will bring toward healing. I hear that heals over time will stack, downranking of heals will see reductions in +heal bonus. One thing that won't change is that the healers which pay the most attention will likely end up being your best healers. Anyone can stand there and mash the flash heal key and scream for an innervate half way through a fight. Healers are going to have to learn to conserve mana to be successful in some of the longer fights the game has to offer, and that will involve selecting the best heal appropriate for the fight. It won't always be flash heal.

I think the priests in your raid should quit the Molten Core mentality. Greater Heal and Heal are awesome spells. They should be the bread and butter. I use flash heal as an emergency spell, if the target is already debuffed with weakened soul.

For trash (including anubisath defenders or sentinels or wtf-ever the pre-emps trash is), Flash Heal is good enough, and arguably better because you spend less time casting per target.

However, for emps themselves, and any fight longer than a single mana pool of flash spam, your older priests are, not to put too fine a point on it, dunderheads.

Assuming equal gear, there's a distinct difference in both amount healed and mana usage (i.e. Heal/Gheal priests tend to use less mana to get more effective healing). Of course, this requires priests to be paying attention and actively cancelling overheals, rather than the reactive flash spam.

However, unlike DPS, healing can be 'good enough'. By this I mean if your Flash Healing priests are covering their jobs (i.e. tanks alive at the end of the fight) and aren't screaming for innervates every two minutes (i.e. relying on crutches), then I'd suggest leaving that particular hornet's nest alone.

In summary, for long fights Heal/GHeal is better, in short fights it's a tossup, but going on a moral crusade to convert the recidivist flashers may not be the best idea for guild harmony.

(As a matter of fact, I've noticed this very same flash spam in my guild, and I'm debating whether or not to mention it.)

Oops. Seriously though, if you're tank healing as a priest on emps, and you're spamming flash heal, that's just ... uh ... wasteful. Sure, it can be done, but it's going to be ugly and make pretty much everything harder.

(I'm also not saying you shouldn't flash at all on emps, there's a time and place for it, like when a UBS brings a tank to red, and after your shield he's still not out of red, that is a good time to flash - or hope.)

In any case, the other solution to OOM'ng is more potting.

Every healer should have:
- 10x Nightfin Soup. (Yes, it runs out 2/3rd of the way into the fight, but in the interim it's generated 960 mana for you, for the cost of half an hour fishing in Moonglade after the run.)
- 10x Brilliant Mana Oil charges. (So two full bottles.)
- 10x Mageblood Potions.
- 20x Major Mana Potions.
- 5x Demonic/Dark Rune (for those extreme 'oh shit' situations).
- 10x Greater Fire/Frost Protection Potions.

If they're skimping on that, work on that first (safest way to do it is to do an MC farm run for the guild bank with the express intent of paying for consumable use on emps).

edit: I should mention that a lot of tank deaths are to be expected on emps learning, and OOM'ng is to be expected as well, it's generally not worth 20g+ of consumables on a certain wipe. The cause (conversion to Heal) is worthy, the timing might have been a bit preemptive. Until you can last 8+ minutes into the fight unbuffed, potioning won't make enough of a difference.

Flash heal spam was a good strat back in something like 1.7

Since then priest slow heals got made less slow and buffed and the whole spellstopcasting requires keypress thing happened.

These old priests are probably 90% afk brain just doing the same thing they always did. Using flash exclusively on twin emps is a very bad idea, at best it means a lower output with a lot higher consumable use.

On the other hand your brother should use flash on shorter fights where HPS and regular healing are more important like trash. Defenders arnt the best example though as it can be long and someone assigned to say plague curing can afford to time the heal to not overheal without it being wasted or being dangerous.

Many old priests (myself included) spent a very very long time pre priest patch when the only reasonable spell was flash heal and you used it for everything. Gheal was hitting in the 4k range non crit if I remember correctly and it was horribly unwieldy. Changing thier healing style entirely was (and remains) hard. Also on many older servers that have NOT recieved thier hardware upgrades, lag can make spell cancellation difficult (I have to cancel with 1.5sec remaining or never).

All this combined can make priests that have a hard time letting go of flash heal.

Two thoughts though that I can't stress enough to the priests having difficulty catching me on the healing charts.

1) If you have mana at the end of the fight- you lose (there are rare exceptions). Trash pulls, dump your entire bar into each trash pull. Waste your mana! Get your hands dirty! Don't you dare cancel spells unless you're running thin on mana! If a pull has ended and another hasn't begun yet- get your ass on the ground and drink. I don't get to the top of the meter by being prissy about my overheal or mana conservation on trash. We've got people so scared of overhealing and so focused on mana conservation they're at half mana or more at the end of the fight and are only doing a quarter of the healing that I am. YES conservation is important. Knowing when to conserve is vital. I downrank a lot of heals... but when someone needs that heal- pronto- they get it. Keep top ranks and super conservative spells both in easy access. I keep rank7Flash heal, rank2Heal, Rank1FlashHeal, and either Rank1GHeal or top rank Gheal on my bar (depending on the fight) If someone needs 650 points of healing, don't let them grow mold just because it's not convenient to the 2 spells you might have on your bar, get them 650hp of healing. Flash heal is still my bread and butter spell- I use it and Renew to about 30% mana, at which point I switch to R2Heal. My goal is to be casting 85% or more of the time during trash and to be within 500mana of the bottom of my pool by the end of it. Conservation ONLY matters if you're OOM before the end of the fight.... OR if there's special circumstances regarding spike damage that you have to be able to heal quickly but which might or might not happen. (EX: I patch heal on Anub- I use the most conservative spells I can and stay at 75% mana in case we have a sudden death and need a lot of quick flash healing that will empty my mana pool)

2) If you're oom when a heal is needed- you lose. Know your mana pool and regen like the back of your hand. Know your available spell ranks and know about how much healing you can put out with them. A good rule of thumb is to keep your mana pool consistantly right at the %hp of the boss until the last 10%. If you're spending faster than the mob is dying you need to 1) pot or 2) downrank. Again, flash heal is my bread and butter spell until I get close to meeting the bosses hp with my mana pool. At that point I downrank to Heal2 or pot. Use the lowest rank heal that you can to heal the relevant amount of damage. If the person only needs 650hp, spending 300mana on a flash heal for 1400 is stupid. Downrank to rank 1 flash heal for only 125 mana and next to no overheal.

There's never one perfect spell for all healing.

As for Twin Emps (which is what seems to have spawned the concern- like it spawned the awareness of downranking in my guild as well) I keep renew up always (I have the highest renew at the moment) and spam rank2heal inbetween moving around to avoid damage. I heal from the floor. At the time that we killed them, I was using top rank flash heal and potting 4-5 times per fight (this was also back when a stack of MM cost you 2g... ymmv). It only matters how you do it if you're healing contribution is low, or you're oom. Casting/canceling GHeal is fine, if you're still contributing on a fair basis. I've seen folks who sat on a full mana bar for 30+seconds through Emps with a spell ready and just kept canceling while the people with faster heals and reflexes shouldered the entire burden of the healing without them. That's NOT okay. If that's what's happening, talk to your GHeal guys and tell them to downrank for smaller, cheaper heals, and get out there to contribute. Conservation should never, ever, come at the cost of the other healers being forced to heal as though you didn't exist. A better contribution in that case would be keeping an eye open for spike damage and shielding while still keeping up a steady, smaller healing stream.

Spell choice depends entirely on gearing (my gear allows for stunts that a lesser geared person couldn't attempt to pull off), situation (If I'm healing the mt my heals will be different than if I'm patching the raid), encounter (Patchwerk requires osmething different from Nefarian), spec (I'm usually shadow spec so I usually lack the -.5sec off heal talent), and how the healer can work thier spec. A canceling style of healing wouldn't work for me- my computer and server are far too slow. I've got a good eye for managing small heal amounts and keeping watch over 40 people at once, so putting me on patch-the-raid duty works very well while putting the slower GHeal casting folks on tanks works better.

(edit: didn't mean to quote)

Flash heal doesn't have horrible efficiency, it's just the mana/s that is naturally high. Mana-wise, you wouldn't spam gheal 4 either. To compare different heals I would point you to the healbot simulator that I updated recently (not completly though, I'm pretty newbie with flash and don't have much time nowadays) :
http://www.skav.org/theorycraft/heals.php

Example result with talents and gear :
http://www.skav.org/wow/heals2.jpg

In many cases there is no reason not to use flash heal. It's the most reactive heal, with a good hp/s, and you're supposed to use your mana anyway.

For twins we use a "balanced" healing strategy. Some people spam efficient heals (flash of light, heal 2, healing touch 4) to heal efficiciently the small/medium damage spikes, some people cast/cancel big heals to recover from big damage spikes. Usually one priest cast/cancel flash, which is assured to land at least once before the next damage.

Flash Heal spam as a bread and butter heal died the day the priest review came out in the 1.10 patch. Before the review, the reason why FH was used almost exclusively was because GH wasn't much more mana efficient, the 4.0s cast (3.5s with talents) was so long that using it was extremely risky, and even the lower ranks healed for thousands of HP (too much). However, after the review, GH suddenly became much more attractive as a result of the cast time reduction, and efficiency was boosted. It then became smarter to adapt to the longer cast time of GH over FH, and use the mana efficiency to simply pump out more healing in a given fight.

That having been said, remember that mana efficiency is only an issue in an encounter where you might actually run out of mana. On many trash pulls, FH spam works just fine because there is no real danger of going OOM. It's also a necessity in certain situations, like trying to heal up AOEers who are taking a lot of melee damage.

The best healers are the ones that are proactive in anticipating damage, and can instantly decide on which spell (and which rank) to use to keep people alive. For example, start that GH1 cast (probably about 1600-1900 HP healed in typical endgame raid gear) when your tank is at a 1000 HP deficit, and by the time it lands he'll probably be at a 2000 HP deficit, nearly topping him off. It's much more efficient than choosing to cast a max rank FH to try to perfectly heal that initial 1000 HP deficit, only to find that after it lands the tank still has a similar deficit because you forgot to account for the incoming damage in the time it took you to cast. Not only are you healing better in the former scenario, but you're also doing it with better mana efficiency. Over a long fight, this typically manifests itself as a healer topping the healing meters by being able to get the first heal in and getting a lot of heals in because of the increased mana efficiency due to intelligent choices on which heals to use. Slow heals will also train your healers to start to heal damage before it has come...once you get to C'Thun, you can often tell who your strong healers are and which healers are weaker simply by seeing how long it takes for a person who is hit with Eye Beam to get healed to full. Groups with strong healers will have that person topped off at most 2 seconds after it hits, and groups with weaker healers will often take 4 seconds or more to get people topped off because they only started casting after the Eye Beam hit. May not sound like a big deal now, but that second or two saved is often the difference between surviving or dying to a double Eye Beam.

In short, FH has its place but you'll never replace GH/Heal as your main bread and butter healing spell. Smart use of the slower cast spells forces healers to be more on the ball, and that results in better healing in general. As such, it is in your guild's best interest to have healers wean themselves away from the FH spam and reactive healing mentality, and nudge them towards the mana efficiency and proactive healing mentality. When you start doing the really hard content in Naxx, you'll simply have no choice.

I would argue that tank healing is an art in and of itself- learing to anticipate rather than react is very important for efficiency especially on fights like TE where you're going to be fairly strained already.

It's not, however, the only healing a healer needs to know.

Heals over 1500hp are often too unwieldy to use on dps classes not designed to stand up to a lot of damage- in 3 seconds you can easily lose a totally unpredictable rogue to cleave damage. This isn't particularily important until you get up and out of BWL level healing- but the further into AQ40 and Naxx you go, the more healers in general should know about raid healing in general. I see priests trying to aim Heal and GHeal at mages reactivly when there's a roflcopter chasing them down and you just can't reactive heal with 2.5 second spells reliably on people with less than plate.

It makes me sad when the tanks are all at 100% with hoTs merrily ticking and the healers are proud and happy while dps gets picked off one by one because the healing focus isn't quite large enough to catch them.

Hots are the proactive heals for DPS classes in my opinion. You can't time a big heal unless they're the specific focus of some event (AoE etc)- but you can guess that sometime in the next 15 seconds that guy is going to need 900hp (he's heading towards a mob that cleaves or does some periodic damage), and 2 ticks of that renew at any time in there will take care of them without any additional attention from you. Add that together with fast reactive heals for when things go south quickly and you'll come out of boss fights and trash alike with more people alive and more overall contribution.

Renew is easily one of the most powerful spells in a priests spell book if used well. I'd argue the same for rejuv and druids- especially with both classes getting solid benefits from 2pc T3.

If the gear or initial skill are lacking, pots can force the encounter. While learning the encounter and for probably a month afterward (Aside from C'Thun, TE has had the longest time from first kill to feeling like it was really on "farm" so far. C'Thun still feels dicey but pots won't fix that. Only lobotomy + ebay will fix that I think....) I potted like crazy.

If healers are having trouble getting through the fight initially- the first thing to check is to make sure that they've got thier pots up. Yes spell changes may help- but potting gives you more "wiggle" room then anything else.

Also check enchants- everyone should be sporting weapon enchants, chest/bracer/gloves/boot enchants and quite a few should have Shoulders/Hats/Legs enchanted too. It's the little things that can really make the difference for a fight that's kinda shaky.