Veldefice

Had a quick question about how to gem this piece...

Last night was our first kill of Twins and the healing shoulders dropped [Shawl of Wonderment]. I reluctantly got them... just because none of the DPS wanted the turn-in piece (which is quite awful as well), but this piece can be useful in a couple of fights (like Felmyst for example). It's still a huge hit in regen.

So my initial thoughts were to gem it with a [Teardrop Crimson Spinel] and [Sparkling Empyrean Sapphire]. After thinking about it a bit, maybe 2 [Sparkling Empyrean Sapphire] would be better since the socket bonus isn't that great? 20 spirit doesn't make up for the spirit loss from the T6 shoulders, but I guess 20 would be better than 10 :p

This is more of an sidegrade piece for me so I'm not rushing to get it gemmed out and enchanted. Just wanted some opinions.

 

Bjork

I had the same impression of the shoulders before the release of Sunwell, but I've changed my mind lately. I would keep tier6 shoulders with 2*10 spirit and gem [Shawl of Wonderment] with 2*10 haste rating - socket bonus is awful anyway. Then you can choose between 53 haste or regen depending on encounter. Seeing that druids got spirit on their shoulders, the mp5 on the shoulders seems like a sad mistake.

Grats with the shoulders, I will definatly take them if they drop.

 

Veldefice

Hrm... that thought went through my mind too (the haste gems) and I'll definitely consider that (considering that we have more Lionseyes than Crimson Spinels :p).

And thanks! It was kinda funny... but the other holy priest and I rolled and I lost the roll so I got the shoulders :P I'll find some way to utilize these shoulders.



Also, another thing. I know someone brought this up a few pages back, but the loss of stamina in many of the new pieces is quite... harsh. I have the [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] but I never wear it on boss fights since I'm under 10k health. I usually have to switch to the Kael neck for the stamina (and it's still a good neck). I'm considering going up for T6 boots next time as that's the last T6 piece I'm missing, but how are other people coping with the stamina loss? My [Boots of the Divine Light] have about 53 stamina vs the T6 boots which have about 29 (though I can put Boar's Speed for another 9). I just don't want to pick up all these cool items and have to switch them out for stam pieces on certain fights where there is a lot of raid damage.

 

constantius

I'm running 9,400 HP in Sunwell, and have had zero problems so far. If I die, it's because I took a 10k+ hit, not because the extra 600 HP would have saved me.

You wear the best piece for the slot, and ignore the stam. If you drop below 9k, *then* you start worrying, and do things like switch your neck for Sanguinar instead of Brooch, etc, etc..

If you're really worried, switch your potion usage around and wear the Fortitude elixir. It's really a non-issue.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

uh...ok

Two somewhat random questions:

1. I personally abhor using Flash Heal for more than 10% of a fight. My WWS usually shows me as using FH less than 5% of the time over a 4-5 hour raiding period - I'm one of the people who prefers to CoH/PoM/Renew and downrank GHs for trash. But with that said, has anyone tried raid healing on Twins without using it more than 50% of the time? It doesn't seem possible to effectively raid heal for that fight without extensive use of FH. There simply is no time to use anything else, given the number of targets taking damage from Sears.

2. I noticed last night that [Coral Band of the Revived] is actually very close to the SW trash ring [Ring of Harmonic Beauty]. Would you use the that over [Band of the Eternal Restorer]? I personally have decided to drop the Hyjal ring in favor of the Vashj ring in my recent decision to pursue a build with more spirit, but I wanted to hear what others thought about it. (Of course, if a second SW ring drops, I'm gonna be all over it...)

 

Veldefice

I'm usually at 9700 with all the gear I want and I just switch my neck out to hit 10k. This is of course with BoK.

It's nice to have a good amount of HP for many of the Sunwell fights... For example... if you get burned on Brutallus, it's much easier to give the burn healing a bigger cushion. Felmyst is also another one with Gas Nova + aura tick or Encapsulate.

But mm... I'll just eat more stam food.

 

constantius

1) Raid healing with Flash Heal on Twins is missing the entire point. Your job is either to:
a) stabilize the raid using CoH, giving the shamans a chance to heal them with CHeal
b) catch up low people with targetted Renews and Greater Heal

You can't sustain 3 minutes of all-out Flash Heal spam, and to do so implies that you hold yourself personally responsible for healing all 5 sear targets. That's just silly.

Besides, if you're not CoHing, then you should be assigned to Sacrolash tank healing, Alythess tank healing, or Conflagration 'tank' healing. Why waste time trying to do direct fast heals to people who should be getting healed by CHeal anyway?

2) Of course [Coral Band of the Revived] is very close to [Ring of Harmonic Beauty]. That was the whole point of them putting the ring into Sunwell ... it's the first real upgrade we've seen since SSC that actually allowed for stat stacking instead of the millions of stam/int/heal/Mp5 options we've had. My eventual goal is [Ring of Harmonic Beauty] x2, with a couple of Karabor / etc sitting in my bag for heavy haste fights.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

uh...ok

It was more that I noticed that if I wasn't FHealing a couple Sear targets (and 2 FHs was usually all I could get off) when it happened, people started dying, especially if it was a case where someone was getting Sear a 2nd time in a row. It just didn't seem like the Chain Heals were hitting fast enough - but perhaps that just means we still have a bit of learning to do.

 

Veldefice

What I do for Twins is after Flame Sear hits, flash heal one person, shield another, Prayer of Mending another, then CoH if a group is low.

Gheals were generally used for tanks and people with conflag. I actually did a Prayer of Healing during one attempt :p (almost entire group was hit with Flame Sear).

 

Havoc12

That is only at peak, I can peak 3.5k HPS with pom and gheal alone and 5k HPS with AoE heals. That does not mean I can maintain it.

There is a hard limit to how much HPS you can squeeze from flash heal. Even though max HPS is 1.6k and in your case 2k given the haste you have. Its impossible to chain cast FH the way you chain cast gheal rank 3. In fact no matter how much haste you have if you are casting FH once every 2 seconds on average, your burn rate will be 470/2*5 = 1175 mp5. Given an total regeneration of say 800 mp5 (which is a reasonable amount) you are looking at a burn rate of 375mp5. This burn rate will eat through a 10k mana pool in 133 seconds.

If you are casting flash heal once every 3 seconds you can maintain it for a very long time with 800 overall regeneration. A flash heal every 3 seconds is just about 800 HPS with zero overheal. For some of the short fights, which dont last more than 5-6 minutes, flash heal spam can be sustained at a rate of once every 2.5 seconds resulting in HPS around 1k with zero overheal.

Both the numbers and experimental observations (WWS and recount stats) show that when using mostly flash heal 900 HPS is the absolute limit of sustainability. Tbh most people who use a lot of flash heal, can't even break 600 overall HPS (with pom and renew included).

What would I do if someone had a 3k deficit? Well that depends. Is he taking active damage? If so gheal or pom. Otherwise if its not active, am I in a hurry to do something else? Is he in danger of taking more damage in the next 10 seconds? If I am not and he is not in danger, gheal. If I am and he is not in danger renew. If I am in a hurry and he is in danger, flash heal.

 

Bjork

I'm not using Flash Heal as my only primary spell, this thing started with Flash Heal not being mentioned as one of the primary heals for a priest by someone speaking for "all" priests I just said "hey, I play priest on a high level (I like to think) and I use Flash Heal as one of my primary spells". And btw - to renew someone who is in need of a 3k heal, sounds like a good idea to get 80% overheal on your spell. At least in my raids CH will make sure of that

My point here is very simple: I use Flash Heal on almost every bossfights. It can be anything from 5-20% of my total healing. Of course a priest spaming Flash Heal with my gear will be oom after a short while - even given 1200/430 mp5 raidbuffed. But that doesnt mean that it is a good idea to use downranked Greater Heals over FH9 if the latter can do the job 100%. Priests also works together with Shamans in doing the raid healing on many encounters (Twins comes to mind). Sometimes Shamans are unable to get enough HPS on one target and they only need a bit of help to make it go through (it can be anything from bad play by the Shamans, to a Shaman unable to heal for a few seconds etc). A priest can then Flash Heal the critical target and help the Shamans to get on top of it again. To say that Flash Heal is not useful in p1 of the Eredar Twins encounter sounds really strange.

When we're talking about peaks to HPS, that's actually quite interesting given the last encounter available in Sunwell.

 

Plea

You two are claiming the same thing, with different words maybe. A priest can Flash Heal the critical target? Yeah, that's dictionary definition of Flash Heal.

 

Starfire

I am still a fan of on-use trinket pom tank / renew tanks before the pull. You can pretty much use a trinket before every trash wave in Hyjal.

In response to Kalcegos, CoH works with the "safe zone" strategy too.

As far as Brutallus, we put a CoH priest as the burn healer, they can help CoH up groups in between burns.

 

Neeklus

Quick question about Improved Divine Spirit and Spiritual Guidance. Do the two talents stack? So in total, taking both, you'd gain spell damage and healing equal to 35% of your spirit?

 

Lambi

Yes.

 

Lambi

Socket with 2 yellow gems instead for 20 haste. The socket bonus is really really bad, but try playing with haste a while and you'll see just how good it is. Everything can't be measured by theorycrafting, so try out haste gear and see what happens. I'm at around 250 haste rating atm and this suits my healingstyle perfectly... a 0.2-0.3 sec lower gcd will do wonders for your healingstyle even on spells like renew and shield you'll really notice the difference.

I'm doing M'uru atm and I can't see myself using regen gear over haste gear there.

 

Havoc12

He views flash heal as a secondary heal and personally so do I. If you say that flash heal is used between 5 and 20%, I would hazzard a guess and say so do you in truth. Looking at the effect of haste on flash heal is kinda pointless, when other spells make up 95-80% of your total healing.

As for overhealing on renew. It may overheal and then again it might not. On average because the damage is healed gradually, renew is excellent for healing this level of static damage in a high raid damage senario. CH has smart targeting and a 2.5 second cast time. Unless keeping raid HP as close to 100% as possible is a requirement of the particular fight. Renew stays on for 15 seconds and hence there is every chance that you might get additional ticks anyway, if the target takes damage again. With all things considered including the possibility of the target getting topped off, I consider renew to be far more effective use of my mana and time than FH, a view I can happily say is vindicated by looking at my statistics.


I also use flash heal, but why use it when its not necessary? If you have the time to use a downranked gheal or its safe to use renew why spend extra mana doing it? If your prefer to do that, its naturally your perogative. If it works for you great. That does not necessarily mean that its the most effective way of going about it.

 

Gnizz

I find myself using Flash Heal pretty frequently. There are certain fights, mainly in Sunwell where fast reaction actually is far more important than efficency. For god's sake, if I can heal more safely with Flash Heal, im gonna do it. Theres no way to let someone die just for conserving mana. Most fights don't last that long, and a well used Flash Heal is worth it.
The benefit of Healpriests is our flexibility. Why shouldn't we use it? It's no use if someone dies, even if we run oom faster, Flash-Saving people gives the raid the chance to actually beat an encounter. And if youre forced to heal 30-40% via FH, you should.
This doesn't mean that good assignments are needed in order to provide efficient healing throughout an encounter, but FH is a Tool we should use. In my experience, a downranked GH has not enough HPS in most cases.

 

constantius

First off, most fights *do* last that long, where "that long" is measured in terms of how long you can sustain your healing style for. Brutallus, without a shadow priest, and without mana spring, is quite long enough, thank you very much, *regardless* of what your assignment is. Same goes for Kalecgos. Felmyst is an obvious exception since P2 is a solid 30 seconds of regen time, so you could just spam Flash Heal if you wanted to.

A well-timed, well-used Flash Heal is a valuable thing. No-one is saying that it is not! However, to emphasize use of FH over any of our other heals is completely ignoring the strengths of our class, and turning yourself into a gimped, inefficient, non-blessing-bringing paladin. And we have paladins to do that. Play to your strengths, people!

Compare Flash Heal to Flash of Light (with Blessing of Light), and you'll see why it's dumb to cast FH more than 5-10% of the time. If you do, you might as well replace yourself with a paladin ... they can do it better.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

cruumash

Spell selection shouldn't be driven by what feels good, its driven by what works well. If a fast spell works in a context, don't use a slow spell because it makes you feel better. Dogmatic approach to healing makes one inflexible and leads to poor play.

 

Gnizz

Neither do I , but I just wanted to state that you can't really parse the value of FH form any WWS because it's use is very situational.
I think exactly this is the strength of our class. We can heal nearly as reliable as a Paladin, we can smooth out damage with Renew & PoM, we can heal whole groups... and we can of course save peoples lives with PW:S and of course Flash Heal...
Of course its necessary to make reliable healing possible, its a fact I dont want to touch.

 

Bjork

1. Flash Heal has a lot higher HPS than Flash of Light. Yes, FH costs more mana, but this whole argument has been centered around keeping high HPS and using the Flash Heal's utility which is the best fast heal in the game. (This is even more true when almost no top-guild would have BoL on other than tanks.)

2. No-one has said that we should spam Flash Heal all the time. I know I've said that combinations of Flash Heals, PoM and renew (and PW:S if you want) can be a very powerful way to heal for an IDS-priest on some encounters/phases. Yes, with fast mana-burn, but it's a good way of getting high HPS. By using Flash Heal like this together with PoM and Renew I will say a priest is indeed playing on his strenghts.

Since all this have been said before, I will consider myself done with this whole "Flash Heal or not Flash Heal"-argument. Sounds like a good time, as your arguments are starting to get quite insulting and weak