I just bound my E key to Escape in the settings, works like a charm to cancel casts with. Of course if you accidentally hit it when a cast is done you get the menu, but another click and the menu goes away.

esc can also make you lose your target, no? Personally I avoid using it for just about anything except untargetting (as I use sticky target to not untarget by accident).

Untargetting is generally less of an issue with healers, as they're constantly switching targets anyways, and their targets are generally more visible since most Raid UI's are better at showing group health bars than main targets health bars (plus no need to set main assist etc). It's generally not a factor though, just be sure to press it once.

Oh, that could be true. I use Clique and heal on my raid frames so I never cast heals "blindly" on my current target. If I do cast on my target I use clique on the target frame.

On that topic, I've taken to choosing some "critical" person as my real target, but primarily using Grid+Clique for the majority of the healing I do. The critical person is usually a MT, so I can watch their HP a bit more accurately.

Using Clique is very fast whem compared to click target+cast, but there is still time involved in moving the mouse and whatnot. Therefore, having a critical target/assignment as your normal target frame can make sure you never have that "lag time" involved when you want to heal them.

For instance, if I'm assigned to keep an eye on X person, but also raid healing I will be clique-ing on Grid, but watching the HP of my real target very closely. I may also fire off a PoM or Renew between casts with my normal keys. If I see a reason to stop to heal that person, I can easily cancel-cast into casting on my normal target with my hotbar, making sure I am getting a heal on my assigned person ASAP without mouse lag factored in.

Shaving seconds here and there is kinda important as a healer, as even a 0.1s delay can often mean the difference between life and death. Any kind of streamlining--be it keybinds, UI setup, macros, etc--can dramatically increase the chance of someone surviving.

So, on that note, I'd urge people to try to identify, "what kind of delays do I experience while healing, and why?" and do what they can to try to eliminate them. The act of making sure you're operating at your full potential all the time really can make a huge difference for your raid.

Of course, everyone can streamline a different way and, as most things, UI/control setup is a very individual thing. However, taking some nights to put some serious thought into how you can make your controls/UI work better for you is really worth it.

Surely the obvious way to stop casting without moving, jumping or potentially losing your target is to make a macro with just /stopcasting in it and bind that to a key close to WASD?

I hold down the right mouse button as well to move, turn, and strafe with A and D (natural setup for those raised on FPS). One significant issue I've found, however, is that if someone or some corpse is standing near me, I have on several unfortunate occasions accidentally targeted that person or corpse when I pressed the right mouse button to move, turn, or strafe. This is disconcerting, especially when I don't notice my target has changed, and I've just landed that crucial life-saving flash on dead trash, or worse, on a hunter.

Have you had this happen to you? Is there any way to make it so your right mouse button has no targetting function?

I also heal w/ clique and and grid and don't target to heal. I generally target the boss so I have an enemy cast bar. I set my focus as the critical person to heal (generally the MT, but on some fights like Illidari Council where I heal the mage I set it as that).

I do kind of wish you were allowed to have 2 focus targets! It would be nice to keep a boss like Illidan targeted to see what he's casting, but set the MT and warlock tank as your two focus targets. That would awesome, imo.

Use Player Targets, in a unit frame addon like Pitbull. It's basically a customizable user-settable Main Tank list.

I use it on Vashj every time we do her to track the people who will be covering elementals near me, to make sure they're always topped up.

How do you guys value spell haste? I figured it's quite useless for Flash Heal since when chain casted (which we tend to do) it only quickens the speed of the last one you cast, but given that we use Greater Heal much more often it seemed okay. My issue is that you need quite a lot to get more than 0.1 seconds off the casting time, and you need some specific pieces of ZA loot that are bad on their own, although 0.2 is achievable through the BT crafted stuff and the gloves and pants from badge rewards, albeit sacrificing (in my case) quite a bit of regen.

Is anyone going to stack this?

It is my personal opinion that as Imp DS priest Spell haste is only useful in the two following situations.

A) you need more Healing Per Second and B) you do not need more regen/are replacing faster less efficient heals with efficient non-overhealing gheals.

The situation where I see spell haste being most immediately beneficial to a priest are encounters along the lines of Najentus and Teron Gorefiend. These encounters have multiple people taking small amount of dmg at an irregular pace. This means small quick efficient heals are the way to go. A unskilled priest might try to maintain flash Heal spam in an encounter like this but baring regular innervates he'd be wickedly inefficient. And a better priest might try a mix of renew/PoM, and rank 1-2 Gheal, but may find Gheal a little too slow. Thus spell haste.

Without tailoring in 2.3 ~240 spell haste is obtainable. I personalyl see 190 rating in 2.3 as something of the baseline. it would include [Blessed Band of Karabor] x 2, [Shroud of the Highborne] [Angelista's Sash], [Swiftheal Wraps] [Brooch of Nature's Mercy]

190 rating equates to 12.1 haste ( for comparison if you added the mainhand/offhand/swiftheal shoulders you'd be at 16.8% haste)
12.1% haste translate into 2.25 gheals unless I'm really bad at math. So 6 slots of gear for basically a quarter of a second off one's gheal. honestly even in an ideal case its hard to make the case for it. The only real "argument" to even consider is that by and large the slots you're replacing have lesser itemization values and so the hit to your regen or other stats is less than if the spell haste had been on a chest or weapon. That and consumables, a SP, even a resto shaman in 2.3 all regenerate far more mana than a couple slots of gear.

The question becomes how much of the increase in potential HPS am I actually using and how much is the lost regeneration affecting my total healing output on an encounter.

Personally if I had the above gear I would consider using them on Najentus/goreifend style encounters but by and large particularly as a priest, and especially as a CoH priest, there are plenty of instant cast options that are efficient enough to stay competitive with healing wise that gimping your regeneration is not the answer. It does make the Brooch an interesting option though since it keeps its spirit instead of stamina, more drops like that and you could have a case for dropping stamina for spell haste which is less valuable in many encounters than regeneration.

Long story short given the plethora of instant cast spells in a priests arsenal and the dubious benefits and high costs of spell haste, its unreasonable to make spellhaste a part of your everyday raiding gear, but it is not worthless to gather for certain situations or when your group make up will give you increased mana regeneration.

One thing I neglected to mention is the benefit of haste that does apply to flash heal and thats in the improving of reaction time, by virtue of the fact the heal lands sooner after you pressing the button. This is useful, but its very hard to quantify, and tbh largely mitigated by simply playing better or by having better players healing with you.

Only 2 healing priest spells that really benefit from spell haste are greater heal and prayer of healing. Others, even if they get faster somehow, will still have the same 1,5second global cooldown limiting them, thus in long run not making them any faster in reality.

Not worth it, unless you extensively use greater heal. Even then only if you really need more heal/sec since haste stat seems to have replaced all regen stats in gear it's in.

Currently for priests regen > spell haste so those items look bad to me. Maybe once 2.3 goes live it will become a more desirable stat but it really looks to me as if blizzard has simply invented a new stat aimed at dps casters, where spell haste is of significant value, and assumed that the value translates directly to healers.

That it doesn't is because of the essentially zero sum nature of healing, where you can only heal for the damage done and in 99% of cases it doesn't matter if the heal arrives now or 0.2 seconds later.

Just for comparison this is 2/3 the haste from [scarab of the infinite cycle] and even at that level I never felt that spell haste did that much for me.

Healing spell haste probably works best for those paladins that spam holy light or for shaman with chain heal as haste on a 3 target heal is far more powerful than on a single target heal.

Treeform druids and Priests on the other hand gain far less from spell haste because of all the instant/fast casts that we have.

Yep I agree with the main reason spell haste not being that great on most fights is that it's already not that hard to achieve enough HP/s, and even when it is, the cause for low HP/s is usually low mana anyway forcing usage of lower hp/s higher hp/mana spells, afaik. Haste is a pure HPS increase without efficiency increase, unlike +healing which increases hp/s by not as much as haste but also increases hp/m, and since mana isn't really unlimited, more hp/m allows for hp/s increases in most fights.

However in the situation where mana is rather unlimited and there is a dire need of more HP/s, haste is definitely not a bad idea. I would at least keep an alternative set with max HP/S regardless of what I'd consider best for the standard encounter.

Well I don't think anyone is suggesting that all haste drops be sharded as soon as they appear, but realistically players will want to save their badges/DKP/gold/HoD for gear that is actually useful all the time. I'd like nothing more than to grab a full set of haste gear and play around with it for kicks in heroics and whatnot but I'm sure as hell not going to sacrifice loot prioirty to do it.

I guess this is less of an issue for those guilds who are killing time farming Illidan, but most of us haven't quite got there yet :P

Comparing upgrades is quite impossible when you take DKP into account, as every guild is very different about it
Of course if you have to choose between a haste item and T6 you should probably pick a T6 piece ;p but if no healers go for those haste items for those very reasons, the DKP cost for those should drop dramatically for most reasonable loot systems, wouldn't it?

It its interesting to note that the 4pc T4 bonus, fully stacked, amounts to 25% haste on greater heals, or 393 haste rating. But of course this means no other set bonuses available either. Still, in the case where HPS is more important than any other consideration, fully stacking with Flash Heal Rank 1 pre-fight, and then 2s Greater Heals for the rest of the fight, with only 4 slots of gear sacrifice and a periodic Flash Heal, isn't too bad.

For those who forgot all about it:

Each time you cast Flash Heal, your next Greater Heal cast within 15 sec has its casting time reduced by 0.1, stacking up to 5 times.

My favorite gems are 22 healing, 10 spr, 11healing healing/5 int( for meta gem), 4 mp/5 and similar

Long story short. Healing throughput is very important, and of many encounters its much more important than regen. And for fights where regen is important say on Bloodboil, Teron, maybe RoS phase 3, as a pries you'd probably be getting an innervate anyway ( especially if CoH spec'd) which makes 5/10 spr beat out 2/4 mp/5 in almost all situations.

Furthermore you can get 25 ( flask), 14 (oil), 8 ( food), 140( super mana pot with alchemist stone) mp5 from consumables, but the most plus healing you're going to be able to get from consumables is like 50 ( elixir) 8 (draenic wisdom elixir), 44 ( food), 24 ( and 12 mp/5 from oil)

35 mp5 > 126 healing ( but brilliant mana oil > superior imo) in most situations. This means using consumables for mana regen costs you about 3.6 point of healing per point of mp/5. Compared to gems where 1 mp/5 = 5.5 healing. Since there is eventually a limit on the amount of regen necessary it only makes sense to get that regen from where its "cheapest" in terms of itemization, and then focus the other aspects of your gear on throughput. I.e. use mp/5 consumables and get healing orientated gems. Personally I find plenty of gear ( esp t6) has plenty of mp5, that gemming for healing and spirit is more "balanced" and overall productive than simply stacking more mp/5

I've also yet to encounter an encounter where I said "Man I wish I had less healing since I can't down rank anymore"

Edit for the 4pc t4 guy-> You do realize you need to cast 5 flash heals for 1 gheal at 2 second cast time right? I.e. the buff is consumed upon casting. the set bonus is not bad, its a nice bonus for playing "Catch up" on healing, but its certainly not a substitute for haste, nor a reason to not upgrade your gear.

I am COH spec and choose +10 Spirit gems to fill the blue socket. Currently, regen isn't an issue, but neither is +Healing for me. I sit at over 700Spirit and 2400+Healing fully raid buffed. I go through maybe 3-5 Super Mana Potions during our 2 day clears. My point is this, if you aren't pressed for +Healing or regen currently, then you should start thinking about how you want your gear to support you for when you are on newer, more challenging content

For me, I wanted something that scaled. With 2.3, Spirit becomes an even more incredible stat to carry as a Priest. I agree, as a raid healer it's tough to find those times OO5SR, however they do exist, and it's a matter of maximizing those moments through Inner Focus, Trinkets, and Pot Timers.

One thing... I highly suggest putting the +22 Healing red gem in your T6 gloves. I was stupid and just saw the blue socket and thought...blue gem. The socket bonus is worthless, and it's a great opportunity to boost +healing for no loss to socket bonus.

I agree on that. Even though my gear isn't spectacular, I'm finding that just potting + food/oil/flask is more than enough regen. I'm currently gearing for more stam/spi and +healing than I was before, and I can notice the increase in my throughput.

Also, I never noticed that the 4pc T4 bonus only affects a single heal. I thought it was bad before, but GAWD. :x

Is 11heal/5spirit a typo? I looked but can't find such a gem. If it exists then that would be better than 11heal/2mp5 forsure for 2.3.

That pretty much makes the whole idea useless. They should make tooltips more clear!