TBC has introduced new spells, new mechanics, new raid sizes and new encounter designs. Old tricks no longer work like they used to. How have the changes affected your healing style?

Some points to consider:
- The addition of Prayer of Mending, a threatless (actually threat building for the tank) proactive small heal with anywhere from decent to incredible mana efficiency (depending on bounces).
- The downranking nerf (old news, but few have raided fresh content since it's introduction)
- Fewer healers, particularly so in 10-mans, increases the efficiency of timed large heals versus spammed mid-sized heals.

I'm sure general tricks for 5-mans could be discussed as well, now that we are moving to heroic dungeons, but I had mostly raid sizes in mind.

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On ranks and mana conservation:
Of current concern is the choice of ranks in mana intensive 10-man encounters. Making a small spreadsheet, I found that at around 1200-1500 effective +healing where I assume many of us are at the moment (buffed and specced), ranks 4-7 of Greater Heal have roughly similar HPM ratios. GHeal 3 offers the first real kink in the curve, with 3-5% better HPM returns than the best of it's big brothers. Nothing like pre-nerf, but a small boost nonetheless. GHeal 2 is only slightly better than GHeal 3, but GHeal 1 once again offers a decent increase in HPM. With multiple healers in 10-mans, hitting optimally with the larger spells becomes harder, although still far easier than in the 40-man environment. This leads me to think GHeal 1 or GHeal 3 are good choices for encounters where spamhealing or semi-spam is favourable (and mana is an issue), keeping maxranks of GH and Flash around for clearcasting procs. Castcancelling maxranks constantly is also quite valid, however.


On PoM:
One technique I've taken a liking to is utilizing Prayer of Mending to solidify tank aggro early on. With the brutal dps some mob packs can apply to the tank, with fewer healers to spread the threat, getting aggro on the pull has been a real concern for the first time in years. This particularly applies to multimob pulls. Spamming Prayer of Mending for a few seconds on the tank before laying the first GH has proven effective, even on bosses. Note that all PoM procs will apply the heal aggro to the person that is healed, which is what makes this tick.

And of course, on anything that regularly has multiple players take damage, PoM is extremely mana efficient, making it well worth keeping up at all times. Don't be afraid to recast it if someone that is unlikely to take damage catches the bounce. It's not a waste of mana, the waste occured when you happened to receive an unlucky bounce.

Today I discovered what paradigm-shifting spell that Prayer of Mending actually is. It's not readily apparent how powerful this spell is on first read of the description but with a little experimentation, it becomes apparent that this heal is going to become a class-defining ability once people learn how to use it.

First a little fact sheet:

* Has two talents to reduce its cost. Fully talented it costs 273 mana.

* With the correct talents and about 900 healing from gear it heals for about 1350 per charge.

* If all five charges are consumed, it gets a total of 215% from bonus healing.

* Threat applies to the player healed, caster receives zero threat.

* A single charge has the same efficiency of a flash heal and is more efficient if talented.

* Jumps to the person with the lowest percent health in group/raid within range (I'm 80% sure on this, needs testing)

All taken together, it's a spammable, threat-redirecting, efficient, intelligent, medium-throughput heal. Quite simply, it is amazing. I've taken to solely using PoM for the first 20-30 seconds of large pulls. I spam it on the tank as fast as it gets consumed. After about 20 seconds it's very difficult for me to pull agro. It doesn't quite have the throughput to keep a tank up if you're the primary healer in a heroic or if you're doing Karazhan, but in regular 5 mans, or if you're raid healing in a 25 man, or if you're the secondary healer, it is absolute godmode.

The question isn't whether this is an insanely useful spell, but if all its effects are intended and if not, which and when will they be nerfed.

I've been trying to point out this since beta- Prayer of Mending changes everything. You simply can't look at anything, talents- throughput- or efficiency without having at LEAST run some numbers on PoM or playing with it yourself. This one spell makes smart priests the strongest healers in any 5 man, and quite possibly any 10/25 man as well (I haven't had the chance to raid with PoM since beta)

You can force the procs. A skilled healer can micro manage the hp of any given group of people so that the PoM procs go where they want them to go the vast majority of the time by keeping the players that you want the procs to move to at less than 100% hp, and to keep everyone ELSE at 100% hp.

Take this group- Warrior Warrior Rogue Mage Priest. Priest and mage stand at max distance, crank up the initial 1-3 PoMs that you can't control (and don't even need to control really) because everyone but the tank is at full hp. First time the Rogue/OT take damage- don't patch it, don't renew it. Keep all players that you expect to take damage at 90%hp or less, send your PoM out on the one taking the most damage, and watch it fly between the 2-3 players at less than 100% hp. Only problem is when PoM heals up everyone to full and you get uncontrollable procs flying off into your casters. On a positive note, priests can force the proc off themselves with a SW:D and back into the mess.

I consistently get 3-5 procs in 5 mans with 2 or more melee classes. I've got tanks with 100k healing at the end of instance runs.

Lemmie put it this way- Paladins pull healing aggro long before I do.

It's strong. It's arguably too strong. But got it feels good to know how to use something like this and have folks who swear on 1.5 healers/70 instance dazzled by the fact that you can solo heal it with your eyes closed.

BTW: MendWatch- must have addon! Really really helps visualize what's going on and can up your efficiency a lot.

Edit: Oh yeah. Since the procs aren't considered your heals- if you put up a PoM before combat starts, none of the procs will put you in combat. Excellent for tank/off tank fights and taking the edge off the initial healing.

And because someone will ask it eventually- the initial cast of PoM is the only thing that touches your GCD or the 5SR. Everything else is liek a weapon proc.

I've paid very close attention to mend watch while 5-manning and this has been the case every time. What this means is that in small group situations (5 mans or smaller), you can pretty much control who gets the next jump by timing heals. I don't know how the jump is determined with everyone at full health though, it seems fairly random. I haven't used it in raids yet, so I don't know how feasible POM control is going to be there, but in 5 mans its pretty remarkable. Although I will say it does get annoying if some random mage accidentally gets in melee range and gets hit by a single cleave, as the POM will likely jump to him and stay stagnant on (assuming the mage blinks away which they normally do).

I had written this in alt.games.warcraft about a month ago. It was part of my report of playing around with prayer of mending in Karazhan during the beta. I'm unfortunately not 68 yet on live, so I just wanted to know if the following still occurs, and if this spell is still game-changing:
"
Let's consider one of the first "tricky" pulls in Karazhan:
We got star, circle, diamond, cross and square coming, moon patrolling around. All are elites undead mobs.
no hunter in group - the moon cannot be pulled without pulling the rest of the group.
one priest in group (me :P) - only one shackle available.
no space to kite - moon will aggro when it comes near the fight.

Two tanks (a warrior and a bear).

tactic: shackle cross, bear takes diamond and square, warrior takes star and circle, group kills star, warrior pulls moon, then group kills all the bear mobs (diamond and square), then bear frees cross, group kills warrior mobs (circle then moon), then group kills cross.

Why did it work so nicely? And more importantly, why freeing up cross from the shackle before killing the rest of the mobs? Prayer of Mending is insane. I've specifically whispered the druid to try and tank his mobs relatively close to the warrior, because those mobs didn't cleave, and because I wanted to see how much distance was important. I was under the impression that, after a proc, prayer of mending goes to the closest guy who's not at 100%, with priority to someone who's below 70% or something. It's kinda smart & smooth. It makes me think of the way you could or couldn't control your tennis smashes or kicks in good old amiga games Great Courts & Kick Off ;)

And for the whole duration of the fight, my mendwatch was like:

Gunwald= warrior
Druidpt = druid
Vongrappel = warlock

prayer of mending (5) : Gunwald... *a couple seconds*
prayer of mending (3) : Gunwald (1200)... *three or four seconds here*
prayer of mending (2) : Druidpt (1200)... *a couple seconds*
prayer of mending (1) : Gunwald *recast on Gunwald*
prayer of mending (4) : Druidpt...*four seconds*
prayer of mending (1) : Gunwald *recast on Gunwald*
prayer of mending (5) : Gunwald... *a few seconds*
prayer of mending (2) : Druidpt (1200)

I don't know if I'm clear - it didn't have the time to register some of the bounces which looked like instant bounces. But these are how nearly fully proficient, maximized 5-6k instant heals, for 273 mana, look like. If Druidpt tanks the mobs further away from Gunwald than the closest warlock for example, the prayer of mending would be "deadlocked" by the warlock, if I may say so :P, and I would have to recast it prematurely. Likewise, if druidpt switched to cat form to kill the two mobs before going to tank the shackles, for instance.

Either way, the mendwatch would look like:

prayer of mending (5) : Gunwald... *a couple seconds*
prayer of mending (4) : Vongrappel *recast on Gunwald*
prayer of mending (4) : Vongrappel *recast on Gunwald*
prayer of mending (5) : Gunwald... *a couple seconds*
prayer of mending (4) : Vongrappel *recast on Gunwald*

As you can see, in the first scenario I can cast other heals, I can smite (600dps!), I can wand, I can even holy fire, monitor a shackle, or even talk in raid chat. In the second scenario, spamming my pom key is just because I'm slacking and letting the other healers do the real job.

It's a subtle switch in attitude and healing gameplay, but it really works."

I've also described the prayer of mending as "a priest's invisible pet that spams flash heals". I'd be glad to know your opinions now, and I'd be happy if someone could correct my observations or tactics based on live experiences.

I've had a couple of times where MendWatch "lost" a proc in the number sequence, which is either a fault with the mod, or mending moving faster than it can track.

What I do know about instant move procs- they won't circle a group off one pulse of damage. Like an aura- each aura tick will force the proc along once rather than whirling it around the group instantly.... it wouldn't surprise me to find that there's a tiny cooldown on moving the proc along, although those crazy "lost" procs make me wonder.

I lose procs mostly when I've got a tank/offtank situation going on rather than with cleaves and auras.

Thanks for the heads up on this. I've been wondering if someone was going to make a mod to help track this. It's sort of difficult for me with my current UI setup to monitor what my mend is doing. Being able to track it will help me up my efficiency even more.

With my current gear and talents, PoM is 25 heals per mana if all five charges are used. I'm still in shock. Paladins can suck it, priests are the most efficient healers by far now if properly skilled.

I never took any threat reducing talents on beta but starting with PoM, followed by Renew usually gave tank enough time to establish aggro so I could cast Greater Heal safely by time tank was ~3k HP down.

Prayer of mending cannot buy silent resolve back when prayer of healing and your party's resistances come into the equation.

I tend to consider Prayer of Mending as a threat reduction to the damage dealers, and Silent Resolve as a resistance buff to the damage dealers. I don't know if many share this approach though.

I'd just like to emphasise the viability of SW:D as a 'bouncer' for PoM on a priest- using rank 1 SW:D and running into melee range to pick up a PoM bounce, healing yourself for a nontrivial amount for minimal mana cost and only a GCD. It's something many priests I have run with have begun ranting about it.

PoM truly changes priest healing, and I'm glad to see EJ posters start in on the usability of it.

It's worth mentioning that unlike Earthen Shield, PoM is quite litterally -not- a lifesaver. It will not keep you alive if you take damage to reduce you to 0 HP, you must be able to survive the hit in order for the heal to take effect.

Circle of Healing is very disappointing to me so far. Maybe I just haven't figured out how to use it effectively, but it seems to me to be almost complete garbage. The first problem is that it scales horribly and heals for a very small base amount of healing. From the standpoint of raiding, the ability of a spell to scale with gear upgrades is very important. CoH almost completely lacks the ability to scale. In fact, given +900 healing and the amount of health people have at 70, it is "outscaled" to the point of uselessness on a group in average level 70 blues. It will just get worse as raiders move into level 70 epics.

The second problem is the range on it. You need to carefully manage to positions of the people in your group/raid to get any amount of usefulness out of it. It will be extremely rare to hit more than three people at a time with it, and that's usually if you're lucky to have three melees in a group or something. 15 yards means everyone has to be standing on each other's nuts and the natural tendency of experience raiders is to spread out because standing close to other people usually gets you killed.

The third problem is its horrible mana cost and efficiency which is exacerbated by it's near complete lack of scaling. For it to be even nearly as efficient as a flash heal you need to hit 3-4 targets (haven't done exact math). Efficiency is always the healers mantra and this just totally goes against that. A priest would never want to fall back on spamming CoH to keep a group up because they'd run out of mana in literally 5-10 seconds.

Outside of maybe some specific boss encounter strategy with very precise positioning I cannot see how this has ANY uses. There is always a better tool for the job because CoH has so many drawbacks and limitations. It frustrates me because most 41 point talents in the game are tree-defining abilities and in fact I think that's what they should be. But priests have always had garbage for tree topping talents and CoH doesn't break the tradition. Once again I have 41 (used to be 31) points in holy and I don't have the ultimate talent for the tree. It's a joke and I don't know where Blizzard is trying to go with it. Hell, if they had made CoH a learned ability (or just gotten rid of it) and had Prayer of Mending as the ultimate ability, that would have actually fit. PoM is unique enough and useful enough to be a worthy 41 point talent. Sometimes it just seems that the players know a hell of a lot more about the game than the designers to and it can be frustrating.