Mencius

I have looked around the forums and haven't found anything pertaining to a +healing cap. If there's already something posted about this please let me know.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend this morning who told me that all the healers in his guild stop trying to get +healing gear after 1500 in favor of +MP5 gear because 1500 is the "cap" for +healing.

According to the rumor you gain 100% of your +healing bonus up to 1500 and only a small percentage on everything over 1500. Obviously shorter casts get less of your +healing bonus but he assured me that this was not the percentage loss he was talking about.

Assuming a 3sec cast (for me Healing Touch) he claims I would receive + 1500 to my base heal and only some unknown percentage for the additional 243 +healing I have above 1500.

I am going to sit down and test this as soon as the servers come back up but I figured I'd put it out there now. Has anyone else heard of this? Is there any testing done to support this claim? I'm extremely skeptical.

 

Nite_Moogle

I've never heard of this before and I'm pretty sure it's wildly inaccurate.

 

Mencius

Thats what I thought too... but I can't test it cause the servers are down right now.

 

• Chicken

The only thing I can possibly think of is that he meant that while there is no programmatical cap to the amount of +healing you can have, there is a practical cap on it in that you'll see relatively little use in making your heals stronger after a certain point. And because of that the healers feel they're 'capped' at 1500 +healing.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

◊ Shalas

This rumor's been around a long time and is quite false. Prior to the 2.0 changes it was trivial to disprove with Heal2, which for me healed for nearly triple it's base amount. The downranking change makes it harder to have a spell that actually is doubled in size, but it's still possible with HoTs.

 

Mencius

Well, currently my rank 7 Healing Touch is about double the base heal amount, which is why I was skeptical about this rumor anyway. Thinking back I could have sworn that I was getting the full amount on my 3sec casts but I wasn't absolutely sure.

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Norwest

Healing cap confirmed:
http://www.thottbot.com/?i=21114

 

Mencius

Touche

 

Lightshadow

Lol, there's definitely no such game mechanic--though to be honest, I'm considering swapping out some of mine for stamina actually. Dead priests only heal for 15 seconds

 

Mencius

While I suppose it is now apparent that this is infact "wildly inaccurate" I have been considering what Chicken said earlier. I wonder how much my current +healing lends to overheal "in practice". While I'm generally no where near the top of the overheal meter a 3sec cast (Healing Touch) does get beat out, often by Paladins and their FoL spam.

Perhaps I'll put in more Intel gear for a larger mana pool and a small amount to +healing thru talents.

Hmmm...

 

Deris

There never has been a cap to +heal as far as I know, and I used Heal R2 exclusively for a large portion of Naxx due to its retarded efficiency and it was healing for easily 5x? 6x its base amount iirc.

Regarding a "cap" that players put on themselves - I've always gone conservatively for +heal - I've never been a huge fan of exclusively stacking it, and always favor regen in place of +heal. I like to settle at round numbers as well - so I'll probably continue to gear until my FOL's are 1500 (w/o BOL) and my Holy Lights are 4k (w/o BOL) consistently, then just stick with regen/crit/stam. This also makes it alot easier on me in terms of theorycraft since I am bad at math, and adding 4000 up a few times is easier than adding 4122.

That being said - with alot of the current encounters I find myself using my Gladiator's set more and more. It could be because I tend to be that overzealous retard Paladin on a raid that taunts at the first sign of a mob not being on a tank, but gosh darn it I work hard to maintain that role, plus all the damage I take results in more mana for me! (Not many other healers have picked up on the fact that I take cleaves a little too often to chalk it up to "oops".)

But really your mileage will vary - as a Druid and being so HOT centric I'd imagine you want alot alot of +heal compared to a Paladin. But what do I know, I stand in cleave.

EDIT: New Post above me.

One thing I think alot of healers that are spirit based do not think about is potential regen during a fight. With the amount of Spirit some of you guys are reaching now a days - aren't you overfilling on Innervates? Wouldn't stacking a little more int help out in terms of giving you a "bigger bucket" to fill when you do receive an Innervate? (assuming you do). My memory is hazy, but I think I remember in Naxx getting an Innervate with 475 spirit and being almost FM going from less than 1k to 8k on my Priest. Does this situation happen to you?

 

Mencius

Just to clarify... I'm specced 27/0/34, so I'm not HoT-centric and I'm not stacking spirit.

I use Healing Touch as my main heal and throw off HoTs on DPSers who take infrequent damage just to get them back up to full.

That being said, yes, I'm thinking about more Int as a means of having a larger pool but I generally don't "overfill" with innervate. The reason being is that I know exactly how much my innervate will regen and use it accordingly. Additionally, I use Drums of Restoration and potions very early and can generally last through most fights without ever having an innervate on me.

I guess in a matter of speaking healers do feel "capped" at a certain point and the only reason up to now that I've never really questioned stacking +healing is because I like using Nature's Swiftness + Rank 13 Healing Touch to save tanks; I can crit mine for well over 9k which is often a wipe-saver.

Because my own mana usage has never really been a huge issue I guess I've never considered stacking MP5, though in the long run it seems to be more and more appealing. As the fights get longer and the mobs hit harder I wonder where the real "cap" for both +MP5 and +healing is. Having to use higher ranks of heals to compensate for harder-hitting mobs obviously takes more mana, making MP5 more useful. Converesely, having more +healing will allow you to stay at whatever rank you like to use and maintain your mana that way.

EDIT: Grammar, Typo

 

Deris

Ah okay we just have one tree so I assumed you were tree as well. He usually just stands there, throws hots and /dances so my experiences with druids healing is limited to mostly that.

 

Mencius

Tree form sucks, BTW. Though that could change with 2.1 and the Lifebloom fixes.

 

Deris

Well the bulk of healing is done with Paladins (usually 2-3) and 2 Holy Priests, with 1 or 2 Resto Shamans covering everything else (cleave happy melee fall into the equation here) with Chain heals. The tree fits in perfectly since he can hit people not topped off, anticipating damage, or Warlocks crying about mana or about the fact that they didn't get a Shadowpriest. Tree is usually one of our top effective healing done as well with incredible efficiency - whereas us single-target stuck-in-the-dark-age spammers are bottoming out at 40~% sometimes overheal. (I like to think alot of that is chalked up to crit. At least it lets me sleep better at night.)

 

Mencius

Yeah, we get those overheal numbers routinely. Pallys are always 30% or more overheal while I am generally around 8-12%. I think this really has to do with the FoL spam crit-heal method employed by most Pallys. But I think it has less to do with the crit and more to do with the spam. Granted, tanks would probably die otherwise, so who knows. Not withstanding, Pallys are always our top healers, as would be expected.

Interesting your healer set up. We generally run with 3 Pallys, 2 Druids (specced like me), 2 Holy Priest, 2 Shadow Priest. All our Shaman are enhancement, though when they heal they do well.

 

Iol

My girlfirend plays a Tree druid, with 61 points in resto and now she's at 1475ish + heal buffed. and she is a big fan of spirit too. With the Tree of Life's mana save on Hots the amount of healing she put is unreal. She may not have the best HPS or throughput however you call it, but her efficiency and raw healing out put are huge. The trick is to put her on Raid healing, cycling a Rejuv + Lifebloom on many people that took some dmg. The rest of us paladins, shaman and priest can focus so much more on tanks because she got everyone else covered. And she's keeping a rejuv on the tank too for a handy Swiftmend.

 

Quasar

Not to derail the thread, but that's a misconception that I constantly see popping up.

It's that HOT healing has remarkably low overheal. It doesn't. If I cast Rejuv (assuming it ticks for 500) on a target with 9900 out of 10000 health, in two ticks he'll be full and I'll be sitting pretty with 1000 effective healing and 0% overheal... except for the fact that the other two ticks of rejuv are technically 'overhealing' the guy for another 1000. So technically, I'm really at 50% overheal, but the meter doesn't show that.

Now, suppose Johnny McNottoppedoff is back at 9900. Paladin McCritheal starts casting a FOL after my Rejuv lands. My rejuv ticks and let's say heals for 500. FOL lands for let's say 1500 (no clue what the real numbers for that would realistically be). I'm sitting at 500 effective healing and 0% overheal. Paladin guy however is weeping at having 500 effective healing but 66% overheal! However the remaining ticks of my Rejuv constitute 75% overheal for the mana I spent.

Now, on the other hand, if my second Rejuv tick heals Johnny to full and he's hit back down to 9900 again, my Rejuv tick will still be chugging away and patch him back up to full, giving me an actual overheal of 0% with 2000 effective healing. So HOT healing can have actual low overheal, but likely the 'efficiency' people are seeing is just meters being unable to show what's really happening. Maybe people know that and simply don't consider HOT overheal a waste; I do, though, because if I spent mana to get 2000 points of healing and only used 1000 of it, I just wasted mana (i.e. maybe I could have downranked).

Which kind of leads to another thing about HOT healing, its position on meters. I think it depends on the fight. As feral spec, I was top effective healing on nightbane once where all the other healers had massive overheal, because I was patching charred earth damage and such the whole fight while they were focusing on keeping the tank alive, which of course lends itself to overheal. Because my HOTs got to sit there merrily ticking away, I made good use of the mana spent and got a lot of healing done. This is especially true for DOT fights, where I might heal someone to full, but when they take damage again the HOT is still there patching them up.

On other fights, though, where healers are casting direct heals on other targets, my HOTs generally go wasted if I'm not careful, because I'll Rejuv someone, they get healed to full, and my mana is 100% wasted. So it really depends.

Anyway, really sorry to go on a massive tangent, but I keep seeing this pop up (this thread was sort of losing its focus anyway), and at least from my perspective it's a misconception (to others it might not be). For what it's worth I doubt there's a +healing cap, but I ramp down my +heal if it means boosting regen. On longer fights it's crucial. I think it's good to have a suit of both, though. I.e. spellsurge regen suit versus +81 heal max heal suit (great for Shaman to have for Earth Shield, btw).

JUICE! Aww I'm sorry. Did... did anyone want some juice?

 

Mencius

You are absolutely right about overheal to mana ratio on HoTs. Its a very common misconception. With the build that I have I don't usually use HoTs so this doesn't effect me much but I do see it a lot. The tree druids we have in our guild seem to be consistantly out of mana and are lowest on the heal meters. This is most likely do to the fact that their HoTs are being healed over by quick Pally heals.

As far as a game-mechanic cap on healing I think we can all agree that it does not exist at this point, and I won that bet with my buddy. However, this whole thing has definately got me thinking (and I hope others) about trying to find a player implemented cap on healing and figuring out where the right balance is for each class.

Obviously with the new changes to all healing classes in 2.1 things are going to change. It would be nice to figure out the breaking point between +healing and MP5, which is better for what classes, and where the "cap" should be for each.

I think that's the real topic of this thread at this point.

 

Quasar

Is that something you can really even quantify? It's so subjective to the fight (type, effects, duration, adds, size), the healing style (direct, downranking, hots), the raid setup, etc. that I find it to be really a personal choice.

JUICE! Aww I'm sorry. Did... did anyone want some juice?

 

Mencius

I am just talking in general terms. I mean, obviously there is a personal judgement involved but it is possible to say things like:

"On these types of fights I use XYZ for this reason"

"But on these types of fights I use ABC for this reason"

I think it's possible to get a rough guideline for what people can strive for.

And at the very least I'd like to hear what other people find effective. I know I constantly question my style and gear selection in order to find out what might be more useful.

 

Coriolis

The problem with thinking of it this way to my mind is the itemization. At least at this point for shamans I don't see some big choice between gear with lots of mp/5 vs. gear with lots of healing. The best gear has a good amount of both - and because of the way blizzard itemization formula's work a balanced set of (useful) stats on an item will be more effective then an item that stacks a single stat. The only time you have much of a choice is on enchants and even then only on bracers/weapon (i.e. spellsurge and mana/5 vs. +healing). Even with gems we don't get much of a choice since royal nightseyes are so much better then everything else.

The other reason not to stack one or the other is because they benefit from each other, i.e. +healing increases the healing you do per mana while regen lets you have more mana to do that healing with.

And lastly even with the downranking nerf you can still downrank spells to avoid overhealing quite easily if you find you heal for too much. You will not be gaining additional hpm like before, but with a decent amount of +healing (1300+) you won't be loosing much either (at least for shammies).

Maybe other classes have more of a choice but as a shaman I'm not really seeing it.

 

◊ Oggie

Actually, that's a pretty decent idea- you should be able to figure the relative break-even points of mp5 vs +healing per class per a given ilvl per time in 5sr. Then you can find the 'best' piece for your class and playstyle, mapping easily.

Um....not it?

And on the derail, I think it would honestly help so much i fthey just made HoTs tick at full hp. Then if they ever revert the SA change my paladin will be drowning in mana and my evil plans will come to fruition! MUAHAHA! Plus it'd be funny to see shammies using healing stream totems topping out that overheal...

 

Mencius

Well, in all honestly, having HoT's tick even on full HP targets would effectively show just how much mana is wasted. I can't tell you how many times I've said in Vent "I'll just HoT the rogues..." and not 2 seconds after I do, they are healed by someone else. Whats worse, when the other healers take their minds off the tank to heal half HP DPSers who are in no real danger the tank dies.

Sometimes I wonder what I even have HoTs for.

 

Deris

Ah I guess this is something I didn't account for. I typically along with another Paladin have the highest overall healing done - sometimes an order of magnitude higher than others, but I guess on effective healing + overall healing HOTs don't get taken into account and really belie how much output the HOT healers actually have. Not to mention Earthshield/PoM gets chalked up to the target being hit. This really supports other healers being nearly as good as Paladins in overall healing, its just that our parsing tools suck .

In defense of people spamming low HP targets to full asap - I attribute that to twitch, ADD and instinct. I see a box (I use Grid) that isn't full - I tend to click and heal without thinking assuming another target doesn't need it more. I guess I should try to limit my healing to targets missing larger amounts of HP and allow the HOTs and Chain Heals do their work.