I've seen some theorycraft suggesting that at 1500+heal the 81 healing enchant is less efficient than the proc based mp5 enchant.

The logic behind it was that at such high +heal levels each 1 point of mana is that much more valuable, similar to how 1 crit % becomes more worthwhile as a mages +damage scales.

Given the absurd amounts of +heal that can be achieved now, I don't see why one couldn't just stack on more +heal and drop another rank instead of picking up Int... This only works to a certain point, of course, and you are probably already at or close to that point. If one is going to drop a couple hundred +healing in lieu of Int, though, a downrank could probably get the job done as well.

As far as the HoT derail is concerned, I also get annoyed when some melee will take timed AOE damage and I HoT them, only to have someone else come off the MT and flash them up to full right afterward. This happens irregardless of strict healing assignments, so a lot of the times I don't even bother to waste my mana on non-MT HoTs.

I'm curious, how much downranking are you people doing now with over 1200 +healing?

About a month ago I started using priest greater heal rank 1 which heals for about 2500 as my workhorse heal. If the tank is below 75% I will cancel heal a top rank greater heal. It has increased my efficiency a lot. Should I be incorporating other ranks of heals into my healing as well?

Just a little personal sidenote, I compete constantly with a specific Pally in my guild for top spot on the heal meters. It's friendly, nothing major, but he consistantly beats me and I think it's because he heals over my HoTs for this specific purpose.

In all seriousness though, when HoTs are ticking on targets that aren't in any real danger the healers should call it out on Vent. I have to fight the instinct to heal DPS as well since I am usually a MT healer. Especially on Mag, where I am always a MT healer, I have to battle that "twitch" all the time. One thing I do find effective is calling out Warlocks to lifetap and then HoT them up. Usually I do it in a rotation and the other healers know not to heal that Warlock. Just wish I could get them to coordinate on Rogues, Hunters, and Mages now.

Can't speak for Priest healing, but I use rank 7 or 8 Healing Touch (out of 13 ranks) and I have 1743 unbuffed +healing. I use full rank HoTs all the time and keep rank 13 HT on my bar right next to Nature's Swiftness (Macro'd also) for "oh fuck" heals or enraged-boss spaming.

One idea I've been toying with is rank 4 Healing Touch. At this point it would be absurd to use rank 4 as it used to be used (since it's a 2.5sec cast, rather than 3sec and heals for so little baseline) but with enough +healing I wonder if it will ever be viable again?

You're looking at 1743 * ((20+6)/70) = 647 +Healing if HT4 was a 3 second cast (I think the formula is right), someone else can do the math for the 2.5 sec cast... looks pretty useless w/the downranking hit unless you had even higher +Healing numbers.

Maybe I did my math wrong here. Trying to find correct numbers for the downranking hit.

I think it'd actually be 1743 * ((25+6)/70) = 772 +Healing.

With Emp HT and 1743 healing, the numbers on HT4 look like this:
1743 * (31/70) * 3/3.5 * 1.2 = 794 healing + 404 average = 1197 * 1.1 = 1317 healing average for 166 mana. 7.93 hpm (148 mana and 8.9 hpm with moonglow) That is higher HPM than any higher rank HTs, but it's also a rather pathetic 527 hps compared to rank 13 which is 1849 hps and 7.41 hpm with moonglow.

Well... I guess with something like 2.8-3.2k +healing it would actually be a viable heal again. I am super bad at math. Would you mind running a quick equation for 3k +healing?

Someone above asked about innervates--I run a ton of spirit, but even with that and full mana regen in addition to the innervate itself, I really rarely find myself topped off partway through both because I don't get it till I'm actually low, and because if whatever we're doing is seriously so mana intensive that chain pots (etc) isn't cutting it, I'll be burning a huge chunk while it's ticking.

Now stacking innervates... THAT would be worth stacking int for =)

I'm running ~1650 unbuffed +heal (effectively 2100+ raid buffed) and using three ranks of gheal (max, 3, and 2), and I don't find my overhealing goes much over ~20% unless I'm deliberately spamming (end of gruul comes to mind). Even after the 2.0 change to downranking, every rank has a basically identical healing:mana ratio so tailoring the heal for the situation works nicely. I can imagine that if blizzard changes the way downranking works again I might be tempted to cut back a bit in search of more regen, or perhaps as my guild moves past gruul and magtheridon into 10+ minute fights.

As far as determining the "soft cap" for +healing it is very situational and there is no guideline. It depends largely on the gear available to you, the amount of healing you need to do with each cast to keep people alive in raids, and your personal style.

In this manner I am largely useless post TBC as I have turned casual and havent even gotten my Kara key after rerolling BE pally (</3 pallies btw, druid for life). That being said - pre 2.0 I was one of the "worst" geared druids in my guild sitting at 400-500 +healing, yet I was topping the heal charts repeatedly with right around 23% overheal. That was one of the main reasons I never gave into my class leaders frenzy to stack as much +healing as possible. In fact the 500 mark was my goal for +healing after that I started stacking regen more than +healing.

In order to come up with this number I took my playstyle into account (I liked HT more than HoTs since rejuv's would hardly ever tick fully with druids throwin em around with 1000 +healing or so), I took the casting penalty into account (when I figured out the "cap" I used rank 5 as my standard heal, and adjusted it later for rank 4), and I found how much +healing I needed for the desired rank to heal how much I wanted (~1000hp per cast). This was all before 2.0 so it came out to around 365 for rank 5 (ZG/MC gear) and when I changed to rank 4 this number went up to 578 since I also found I didnt need the full 1000 on all my heals with our set of healers.

In the end - there is no set cap that will work for everyone. The best part of healing is the ability to pick and choose different styles based on what works best for you, and in this way there is no good way for other people to set requirements for others when it comes to gear as long as they perform up to, or past expectations.

PS - the math involved in figuring out exactly item level wise would follow the same restrictions where it would be based largely on which rank you wanted to use. You could then figure out how much 1 mana gave you from the heal, and determine when the .45 modifer from +healing to item level was better spent on the 2.4 modifier of m/5 (1m/5 = 5.33 +healing or 5 if you want rough estimates).

Well played.

As much as I liked the imbued netherweave set for getting to 10k hp for gruul before the nerf, I think it's a bit too much of a sacrifice for stamina. Essentially the way I'd want to do it is to go through my gear, figure out what didn't have any/much stamina on it and then see what else was comparable that did have stamina on it.

Looking at your armory profile:

-> The signet of the violet restorer (kara rep) ring
-> The cloak off prince or the heroic badges cloak
-> The offhand off Moroes or The Lamp of Peaceful Repose (Arcatraz)
-> Soul-Wand of the Aldor (Shadow Labyrinth)
-> If you're willing to give up the PM set bonus, Vestia's Pauldrons of Inner Grace (Mech)

Stuff like that, it definitely depends on what you have access to and how much instance farming you're willing to do.

I got the signet (the revered one), got the sould-wand of the aldor.
The cloak is a good suggestion. I'll hope that it drops today

Access is not the problem, full heroic, karazhan on farm, gruul on farm, ssc 2nd boss. Only Magtheridon is kinda a red flag here. Dunno why

I totally agree with you that the imbued netherweave set does have a nice stam bonus, but at the same time you are giving up way too much for it. I just think 10k is over-doing it if you aren't into PvP (which i'm not).

Are there any weapons out there that would be suitable? Got Gavel of Purelight on the bank but that's not really doing it for me. Also got the Epoch-Mender (+37 stam) but again giving up nearly 160+heal :/

I have heard this rumor several times over the past six months without substantiation.

However, I would not be surprised if a guild asked it's healers to cap +Heal at some point. A healer's healpower is often used as a benchmark of his or her capabilities, and many priests have focused on healpower to the detriment of other stats. The best priests will have a variety of equipment and switch it out depending on the situation.

Personally, I think the best measure of a priest's capabilities is the number of party members still standing at the end of the fight.

I do not think that means what you think it means.

Regarding HoTs -- agreed, they just don't seem that useful in a raid setting unless you've really set up your healing rigidly, and even when we have explicit assignments, I'll generally see some stray heals being thrown around to people who look like they need it.

Given the slow tick rate of rejuv, I barely ever cast it any more except to immediately swiftmend it (basically a slightly expensive 1.5s heal). If I really want to hot someone, I'll cast lifebloom -- it's cheaper and starts ticking immediately. Like you, I'm mostly HT specced, which isn't the most exciting healing in the world, but it's how I find myself making the most difference.

One nice thing about 5-mans, you can mostly keep track of all the healing going on, which allows for some nice finesse in rejuv, lifebloom, and swiftmend. Too bad that mostly goes away in the raidgame.

Going with HT spec (Moonglow, TS, GoN, Emp HT) at 3000 healing.
As you can see, 13 is really just a terrible spell, it's mana cost is too high by proportion (it should be around rank 9's hpm). Rank 4 still isn't really usable at this point either, healing for under 2k with 3k on your gear is just silly, you may as well be casting Rejuv 13 over Rank 4 really. (4325 healing for 377 mana)

Bah, seems as if rank 4 will never live up to it's prior glory. However, rank 6 and 7 look nice at 3k +healing. Too bad I already use rank 7 constantly. Thanks for the math BTW.

Back to the original topic, I've been discussing a soft healing cap with some guildies and we've all pretty much agreed that 1600-1700 is pretty good cap, after which mana regen becomes more important. I am going to be replacing some of my enchants with mana regen ones.

Side note, every healer in my guild and mana DPS casters all have spell surge and when we stack at least 3 people with it in a caster group along with a shadow priest our mana regen is fucking insane. Definately worth a look if you want to max out your MP5.