The 9 healing 2 mp5 gems are indeed a "bargain", but remember if you have plenty of mana you have plenty of mana, more doesn't help. Of course you need to run numbers and see for yourself if 2 mp5 is really better than 9 healing for you.

On that note, you could say that no reaslitic amount of spell damage or attack power will add sufficient DPS to beat the enrage timer. Every little bit helps, both in improving gameplay and item choice. However improving your item choice is completely independant of improving your playstyle (in theory, in practice there is some correlation between playing well and choosing good items but this is far from a rule). Saying that improving gameplay is the best way to keep the tank alive, while true, doesn't mean anything about the effect of +healing on the situation.

But, any healer with the gear level appropriate to the tier of content you are dealing with WILL have enough plus healing to cover spikes, if he knows how to use it. His specific choices as to where he stacks regen or raw heal are just about 100% irrelevant if he knows how to time large heals to land immediately after a large spike boss skill.

I think the assertion that plus heal really plays a role in this is only true on much lower tiers of content, like heroics/karazhan, where you are much, much more likely to see people in blues with only 800, or 1000 + heal, if that.

Generally speaking, 9 healing/2mp5 is the best choice for a gem slot. Most healers also need 2 yellows for the meta gem bonus, so I ended up using 1x 9 healing/4 int and 1x 4 int/2mp5.

My personal choice is to stack +heal because I'm an alchemist, and mana isn't usually an issue, although I hardly neglect other stats.

Well saying "you just need skill, you don't need to optimize mp5 vs healing" in a "regen vs healing" thread doesn't really help with the topic on hand
After all, there is single, one best way to do something after all. Because if one way isn't the best, there must be another way that is the best. Determining what is best is a completely different story, and is what we're trying to do. Everyone know things can be done with less than optimal setups, but the purpose of these forums as far as I understand is for people to be able to learn how to not be less than optimal. And while skill plays a major role, gear choices isn't to be ignored.

You're right-- I wasn't trying to make the point was not that gameplay was more important than gear, though. I was trying to refute the point that tank deaths are due to insufficient HPS that could be remedied by +healing. It's just not true. Constant proactive casting of small heals, not successively bigger heals, is the foundation of preventing tank death. Regen helps with this by raising the level of sustainable healing and lengthening the time it can be sustained. Healing helps this by making a given rank of heal more effective.

Both +healing and regen help you sustain the playstyle that minimizes tank death-- maybe one or the other a little more for a given set of gear.

I still don't feel like I've hit a threshold where mana is irrelevant, even while chain potting. My total mana pool dictates what rank I use for normal spam, and how often I can uprank for an emergency or reach for a situational heal like PoH or Flash.

I also would caution against looking for a single universal optimal answer, particularly because healing is so situationally dependent and cooperative. A few healers specializing in a given playstyle can open the door for another playstyle to be particularly effective-- for instance, a few MT healers focused on optimizing low-rank spam enables someone to go for well-timed big heals to patch gaps, where that method would be unacceptably risky if everyone were approaching healing the same way.

Unless I misunderstood the OP, it seemed like his main concern was stacking +healing to prevent tank deaths due to spike damage. I was merely pointing out that a little more healing as opposed to a little more mp5 in spike damage situations will rarely if ever make the difference.

I'm not saying that these stats don't matter ever, but in spike damage situations their effect is minimal.

However, I'm going to have to disagree with there being one best way, not all healers do the same thing in raids (for example some may do raid healing, others doing steady MT healing and maybe some specifically covering spike damage) therefore optimal gear changes according to the specific type of healing that the person is doing.

What I'm saying is that if the heal lands at the wrong time it will be overhealing or the tank will already be dead, how can that be compared with DPS in terms of an enrage timer?

Weighing the stats against each other can't be done without citing a particular encounter because there are too many variables even considering only one role, things like "How many spike damage abilities does the boss have?" "What's the cool-down for each of those abilities?" "Can they be done back to back?" "How long will this fight last?" All these things can effect gear choices and should be taken into account from one boss fight to another.

First of all I agree with spike damage killing the tank that +200 healing couldn't have done much about. A tank dies to consecutive crushes in a short period of time or a crush plus some nasty special that healers should know it's coming with todays awesome mods.

At about 1600 +healing I'm mostly looking at regen upgrades at this point as mana gives me flexibility in what I can do at any given point. I don't know maybe priests and druids would want to go a bit further because of better scaling on the longer cast times, but I never played either of those in raid environment.

Now if you let your healers have shadow priests (or have some to spare over DPS), amount of regen you get from one shadowpriest dwarfs what you could get out of gems and enchants. So if you're spoiling them like that ofcourse they should go for +heal.

On the other hand, style plays a part as well, with my current 180+ mp5 (+ LCPB, PoVE, spellsurge, insightful) while casting I can chaincast top rank FoL for more than 10 minutes without any pots to OOM. Clearly if you're an FoL spammer my level of regen is a bit much.

As a Paladin, I've noticed that +healing makes an enormous difference on my heal selection - with low +healing, Flash of Light is essentially useless against any meaningful damage, while with high +healing, it becomes a useful soaker. Similarly, Holy Light Rank 4 catches up (and gradually exceeds) the amount healed by Flash of Light as one increases +healing, allowing for a combination of mana efficiency and preparation for spikes. (Light's Grace rank 4.)

At the same time, there's only so much use you can get out of +healing, particularly when we're dealing with minor choices. I generally try to put together balanced sets, and I certainly wouldn't, say, take the mace off of Prince over the one from Maiden in order to get healing at the expense of other regen stats, but increasing +healing does prove pretty valuable for me.

I've always been a believer of a balance between +heal, mp5 and spirit. Lately I've been running alot with a shadowpriest in my group and i'm beginning to wish I had some items with more +heal on since mana just becomes a nonissue on the encounters i've seen so far (VR & Hydross down).

The stat i have most problems with is Stamina. 6251 health unbuffed in my best healing gear is a bit lower than I want.

As a warrior, i've had my share of "oh sorry, heal was almost finished" deaths, so i think i might be able to show my point of view

very often however, it's not going from 100 to 0, but from 100 to 40, get 1-2 small heals, and then 50 to 0, while the big heals are still casting

some hundred heal more on those small heals might make it possible to survive the second blow with a few hundred HP left, surviving long enough for the big heals to land
so a few hundred +heal on the spam healers might help out here

i guess there would be other ways to solve this, but i'm not that much in the know about that "magik" stuff you do ^^

just my 2 cent

But a few more mana regen might give the healer a few extra heals that can save the day

There will always be the best but you mostly look at your own situation and see what you think you are missing.

The mana/5 to healing equivalence bothers me. On one level, you basically have to have something of a ballpark idea of how one equates to the other, otherwise you get something like the Nightbane neck, the Gruul neck, and the Kael neck, stick them next to each other, and scratch your head not knowing whether the Kael neck is an upgrade or not. On another level, there's really no good way to do it.

You could treat it as a spell cycle problem: I imagine that my typical spell cycle is that I cast X spells in Y seconds, and calculate how much health is added by +healing versus how much mana is regained by regen and by extension how much health I could translate that mana into using Z spell... but now we're getting farther into theorycraft and farther away from actual bosses and their actual healing demands. And I discovered when I was doing this that the ratio you get out of such a calculation changes as you get more +healing: at 1000 healing I got something like 1 mana/5 = 3 spirit = 7 healing, but as I get more +healing mana/5 becomes proportionately more valuable. So you can get a ratio out of this, but whether it's actually useful for anything is an excellent question.

You could treat it as a sustained HPS problem: if I get X healing, I can downrank to rank Y for the same HP healed, saving me Z mana every time I cast a spell, compared to the amount of mana I could regenerate at the same time. But this only works for a few breakpoints, so if you're asking whether you want 20 more healing or 3 more mana/5 it's not particularly helpful unless that 20 healing pushes you over a breakpoint.

Personally, I can always use more regen, but I can't always use more +healing, and the +healing tends to show up on my gear without me seeking it out.

I'm aware of what has been said about this earlier in the thread but if a tank is dying to sudden spike damage then it is a question of player ability, unless you are undergeared. Yes, the luck factor is also there but if it happens consistently then it's not luck.

There are many things that allow one to deal with spike damage better:

- Tank geared for stamina/armor.
- A healer trio consisting of one healer acting as stabilizer (best choice is resto druid with stacked HoT's, holy pala with FoL spam) and two healers acting as refillers (holy light pala, priest) that pre-cast the big heals. The stabilizer tops of the tank, and slows down the rate at which he loses health. He responds to spike damage with fast, quick heals. The refillers are pre-casting big heals constantly, only letting them go off when the stabilizer won't be able to top the tank off before the next attack.
- Putting both refillers next to each other so that they can see each others casting cycle
- Good raidhealing. If the raidhealing is bad, the main tank healers will be forced to help out which can easily lead to problems. Sometimes less is more...
- On the other hand, it can be a good idea for certain fights to have excess healers on the maintank. Especially when you can't rely 100% on all healers, for whatever reasons (Los, fights which force people to move, things that can take out healers from the fight such as watery graves on Morogrim, etc)
- Let your healers practice pre-casting if they are not good at it. Healing the maintank on King Maulgar with 2 healers is good practice, perhaps 3 healers depending on gear.
- Priest and shaman heals on crit proc Inspiration/Ancestral Fortitude which works out to be about -8% damage taken on our maintank.
- Healers that enable a castingbar for the boss can anticipate incoming damage much better.
- The same is true if the boss has a relatively slow attack speed, then it's possible to synchronize heals with his attack speed, allowing in flawless pre-casting.
- If multiple tanks are juggling a boss between themselves, it's essential for healers to know which one has aggro at the moment. There are various addons that help with that.

Shanaya,
Doing healing assignments since start of TBC

In SSC and TK your healers should put Royal Nighteye's in their sockets, and aim for a decent amount of mp/5 meanwhile keeping something around 1500-1800 healing.

Reason why tank dies is spikedamage and for us: also running with 1 less healer.

As a shaman you should aim for Alot of mp5 meanwhile keeping something like 1500 healing unbuffed, since you will be put on randomhealing(usually)


Also know it wasnt what you asked but when they enter Hyjal and BT they should aim for more raw stats and +healing (since they should by then have enough mana regeneration)

But royal nightseye will always be the best gem as a healer!, combined with some dazzling talasites for setbonuses and meta gems.


ps. every healer should have the addon Grid in your raid, its a must have for a healer. it really is ds.

I have to agree with the folks who are crying "skill", from my perspective BC healing has the highest correlation between effectiveness and actual skill. I generally set up healing assignments for our raids, and never do I think about the relative gear of the healers (unlike the tanks, where gear is a large factor). In reality, our lower total healing, total mp5 healers are the ones who get the more difficult assignments, and they still show up on the top of the effective healing, they show up on the top of their assigned target's healing breakdown...they are the ones who take care of business.

What I will say for the OP is that SWStats or other similar mods which parse and breakdown what happens during each attempt are invaluable, even tho they are mostly used for epeen flexing and "Damage Done" spam, I pore over each healers "Healing Breakdown", each tanks "Healing Info", this gives you tons of insight into who was effectively performing and who was failing miserably or spam healing raid to get higher on the meter, etc.

About gear: non-raid gear (crafted, heroic, quest, etc) competes until deep into the tier 5 content, just adding to the unlikeliness of gear being the problem.

If your tanks are dying, look to the tanks gear, and look to the healers skill, because it is VERY unlikely that healers gear is the problem.

There are some interesting tailoring recipies in Black Temple: Swiftheal Mantle (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32585) and Swiftheal Wraps (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32584). Both have Equip: Improves spell haste rating by 27 (or 28). Havent really seen spell haste before in healing priest items (cloth + healing item). Those need quite expencive materials to make, but I really want to try them one day. Anyone have tried already? Or some nice theorycrafting available? When you start to have nice gear, is it worth to heal faster? Im so noob with Spell Haste that any opinion would be welcome... There are also healing ring in BT with Spell Haste.

I've messed around with spellhaste, and from what I can tell it's probaby best suited for classes with longer heals. On a paladin, when using Quartz casting bar, I notice that the haste gained on my spellcasts isn't performing the effect most people believe it to (increase casting speed faster than the listed speed). If anything, spellhaste is reducing the penalty I have for lag on the end of my spellcasts, so I'm really just getting closer to a "normal" cast speed.

I'd be interested to see what a HT spec Druid or maybe a priest casting mainly Greater Heals could do with the haste, but for a paladin I don't see it as worthwhile when one heal is 1.5sec base and the other is 1.75 (through set bonuses). The most a healer can get would be 196 (9.33%), which would cut .28 seconds off a 3sec HT or .23 seconds off of a Greater Heal. For Quicker spells (1.5 sec) it's only .14sec off or .19sec off for 2 sec. Doesn't seem worth losing a ton of +Heal or Regen for.

I find that (similar to some others who have posted in the thread) if I seek out the mp5 I know I need to have, a sufficient amount of +healing will come as well.

The key here for my particular situation is that if I were to totally regear myself with +heal and / or spirit in mind with only what is currently available to me, I might gain around +250, maybe even +300 healing. That would put me at somewhere a little under +1900 healing. For some, I realize that this seems like a great upgrade and perhaps even worth the regearing process, but in my own case I've just now hit a "satisfactory" ~140 mp5 unbuffed, and keeping that is a much bigger priority (I'd lose a substantial amount of it in that same "regearing" process).

As someone who was neither intelligent enough to take Tailoring for PMC nor wise enough to level Alchemy back in the day, regen is a much bigger deal for me if I don't want to blow what little gold I have available to me on a constant flow of mana pots for progression raids.

Basically, I think that if you're getting epic gear of Kara+ level, you should have the necessary +heal to keep your raid up if you don't totally suck at healing... which is saying more than you might think. If you are having consistent issues keeping tanks up, I'd definitely tend towards taking a look at how exactly the healers are doing their job rather than what they're wearing. It's just too hard to NOT have sufficient +heal / spirit if you're getting the "expected" upgrades as you progress, in my opinion.

A little tip for /stopcasting macros with 1.5s cast spells is to ignore whatever addons you have to help with it and just hit the macro whenever your global cooldown is up. That way you guarantee to have effective cast time as close to 1.5s as possible (compared to any other method). Also, if you're doing that, haste for 1.5s cast spells is absolutely useless in terms of hp/s.

I like to think of it this way:

If you ever finish a fight with more than 0 mana, potion timers up, or whatever, your regen was a waste for that fight. Unless you ran out of mana and couldn't heal when you needed to, and you were chain-chugging mana pots on every timer (preferably with an alc stone), then you don't need more regeneration. (From a pure min-max efficiency standpoint, not caring about potion costs or whatnot)

On the other hand, +heal is as close as you can get to "attack power" for a healing class - by which I mean your stat that is always useful, all of the time. This isn't completely true, of course, because of over-healing, but in any given fight I'd rather be able to heal for more consistently than have regeneration that may or not be useful.

If I were a chain-heal spamming shaman, then yeah I'd probably go more for regen since they actually have mana problems, but as a paladin I really don't understand why you wouldn't go +heal, then crit (since it also increases your HPS), then mp/5. I don't even bother with Mighty Restoration flasks anymore most of the time.

As an aside, given limited gear selection choices, for most people this is really just a question about gems and enchants rather than full-blown armor differences.

If your tanks are dying it can also have alot to do with your actual tank - pay close attention to whether they are infact putting up demo shout and tclap and keeping them up all the time. Being on the ball with shield block and almost never being crushed (this is fight dependant some bosses attack too often to be able to block everything, like morogrim) is also crucial. Get a good mod that tracks the info before the tank's death - something like recount from the mod forums will tell you what the tank got hit by (crushed or not, etc.) and at what times, this can give you a good idea of whether you got unlucky, the tank was being silly, or your healers are asleep.

Generally speaking if the tank went 2.5-3 secs taking damage without a heal, and a heal would've saved him I would blame the healers in most circumstances (unless they got graved or what not). However if your tank took much higher then normal damage (no demo shout or something of the sort), got crushed, or just plain had a stupid spike then either blame your tank or just write it off as bad luck and move on. I'd also much rather priests/shamans heal the MT for the armor buff (and the healing way stacking for shamans) with some HoT help from the druids and the pallies/druids on raid healing, unless you're doing something like VR where the benefits of CH are obvious.

Just want to emphasize this. Having recently started using recount I found the death tracker to be one of the most useful addon features I have now. Knowing exactly how your tanks die is a huge step towards them not dying on the next attempt.