Regarding your above points, I think you overstate the case for CoH a bit.
1) In most of these cases, a combination of PoH and CoH is more effective (also including PoM where possible, of course). Najentus is the perfect case for PoH, the only reason to use CoH is to help with another group or to top up the last bit. Constantius' characterization of a stabilization spell fits much better here. Council is a good example since you can heal the melee while moving out of the way, and the front-loading effect helps. On Malacrass, I strictly disagree. The only reason to use CoH there as a main heal is if you happen not to have a Concentration Aura with you. PoH is far superior there due to its extended range. How often does the raid not manage to get closely together due to a WLs rain of fire, for example? In practice, even helping out with the other group is rarely a case for CoH, again due to range.
2) This is a better case for CoH as main heal, though PoH is still better if the damage take is large enough. I have usually only finished RoS with more CoH than PoH due to helping out with other groups.
Overally, I think Constantius' characterization of CoH as a stabilization spell fits better. Sure, CoH can be a main heal, but only in places, and mostly on the melee group.
PoH is only applicable to your group and that means its not applicable to the vast majority of raid damage to be healed. If you only limit yourself to healing one group in hexlord that is your problem. I heal both and very successfully I might add.
Depending on raid setup most of the healing you need to do is on groups other than your own. What you are referring to is simply bad positioning. Fixing the position to maximise CoH costs your raid nothing.
There is no such thing as a "raid stabilisation tool", which implies a capability only for slowing down damage. Overlapping CoH/PoM usage will top up people faster than overlapping chain heals can albeit at an HPM cost. Its obviously more effective to not CoH a group to full if you have shamans in the raid, so you can use it only on active damage if you want to, but that limits your use of CoH for no good reason.
No matter how you describe it CoH is a priests main AoE heal and its more widely applicable and versatile than PoH. PoH is a great spell I always spec healing prayers just so I can use it at will, but there is no denying that CoH is my main raid heal.
The beauty of a priest is that you have a selection of available solutions, which can be tailored to your healing style and practice. It galls me however when people think that because they can't use a spell in a particular way they assume its a problem with the spell.
2) Targeted raid damage, like Kil'Jaeden or Twin Eredars. Large ticks (2500+) on selected targets who happen to be in the same area to be hit by CoH. In this case, CoH is absolutely not a raid healing spell. It is a raid stabilization spell. The only purpose of it is to slow down the damage until the 'real' heals (mainly Chain Heal) can come along and really top someone up. You can't keep up with the damage by using CoH alone.
Alright 5 ppl in a group taking 2500 damage per second.
3 CoH priests can outheal this. 3 shamans cant. A single shaman will lose ppl in under 5 seconds. A CoH priest will start losing people at the 8 second mark.
Why is chain heal a "real" heal and CoH just a tool to stop the damage? Neither will outheal the damage on its own and if you add overlapping heals CoH/PoM have effectively the same HPS as chain heal (due to group limitations and stacking issues). You can use any combination of CoH and chain heal to heal the damage up. CoH can and will heal targets to full if so desired, unless there is a problem with group limitations.
Obviously its more efficient to *not* heal targets to full with CoH, that does not mean you *can't* heal them if you need to.
==============
It seems that empowered healing does benefit binding heal now. So I must admit I was wrong and BH is indeed the better emergency spell as long as you can afford it. If IHC is up binding heal should certainly be the spell of choice.
I dont understand how you can say CoH is only a gimmick spell used in certain fights. Does it scale that bad at lvl80 compared to 70?
Cause atm on lvl70, Circle of Healing is my highest hpm and hps spell by far, its insanely better than Gheal rank7 in every way.
I guess with serendipity and the new empowered healing it might be a big diff, but 2k on 6ppl instantly is vastly superior to 11k on a single target, even if its a 2.1sec cast. With the smarter targeting on CoH im so going to own healing done, shamans wont have a chance anymore.
No imp renew, with the new CoH mechanic i doubt ill use renew in raids, maybe Healing focus will be wasted with the pushback changes, i will have to see about that.
Dont think ill use lightwell either, sure it could be good but is it worth 1% crit? Also i have trouble seeing ppl use it, maybe in gimmick fights, where healing is hard.
Surge of light is very tempting, since free heals are sweet. But where the hell am i gonna fit in time to cast a shitty little flash heal, the global cooldown will screw my hps over. If i had the points sure, but i dont see what i should remove for it.
IHC +ToF vs DP , I dont think DP will make enough difference, sure IHC is not very good either but im going to try it out and see how it feels.
Im planning on gearing for pure HPM. Int spirit crit, no haste unless i have too. Haste is a nice bonus but it is not as dependable as a shitload of mana.
If blizzard want any pve priests to spec disc they have to boost that tree by alot, it has no purpose at the moment.
Yeah yeah you can get some decent hpm hps, it has nice passive talents as well. But without CoH you will be really gimped compared to a holy priest. Healing output cut down with 20-40% overall.
Penance is just not good enough, they must remove the CD and make it better than Greater heal, then a disc priest might do some good.
But then fights aren't about "winning the meter". They are about everyone doing their job.
"2k on 6ppl instantly" is not "vastly superior" to "11k on a single target". It may sometimes be. There may be fights with heavy AoE damage that make it worthwhile to throw around CoH every time it's off cooldown. There may however also be fights in which it has no use.
If there are 6 damaged people all lacking more than 2k and one of them down 13k (almost dead) and you know some damage will come in soon (pulsed AoE or whatever). Then throwing in CoH is not goind to save anyone. The mildly injured people will live anyway. The other one will die. Using GH would have been the better choice.
Edit:
So far most beta testers have said that Penance is great. I don't think you should dismiss it before raid healing with it at 80.
Edit edit:
No more cooldown on CoH. I missed that I guess. Still sometimes other heals are better.
CoH hasn't had a CD for many patches. It still shows up in the (woefully behind) patch notes, but it's not really there.
As far as Penance, I'm not sure if it's people who haven't used it, or people with vastly different experiences than I have, but I really like it. I'll agree with many people who feel disc as a whole isn't quite strong enough to keep up with holy, but penance isn't the reason. With even just a little haste, my penance ticks every .8 seconds, which provides a nice buffer on a tank for other heals to land.
But then fights aren't about "winning the meter". They are about everyone doing their job.
"2k on 6ppl instantly" is not "vastly superior" to "11k on a single target". It may sometimes be. There may be fights with heavy AoE damage that make it worthwhile to throw around CoH every time it's off cooldown. There may however also be fights in which it has no use.
If there are 6 damaged people all lacking more than 2k and one of them down 13k (almost dead) and you know some damage will come in soon (pulsed AoE or whatever). Then throwing in CoH is not goind to save anyone. The mildly injured people will live anyway. The other one will die. Using GH would have been the better choice.
Edit:
So far most beta testers have said that Penance is great. I don't think you should dismiss it before raid healing with it at 80.
Edit edit:
No more cooldown on CoH. I missed that I guess. Still sometimes other heals are better.
In a scenario favoring Gheal it is of course better than CoH, IF you are the only healer.
On live atm, in a 25man raid. If i try to cast Gheal on a raidtarget i will 9 times out of 10 overheal because our haste stacking shamans/paladins beat me too it. I could cast flash heal, but its a really shitty spell both hpm and hps wise.
So no, i would cast the CoH.
Priest is a healing output class, not a precision healer. Let paladins do that, they are built for it.
Im thinking 27/44 might be even better, until i have enough crit to make IHC worth it.
Something like this, Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft If DS is worth a point, the 15% int should be very nice and alot more dependable compared to IHC, DP and ToF. Though i dont want to loose guardian spirit, it seems very nice.
It should be noted that once you get 2500 spellpower, and all the usual raid buffs, and if you spec 5/5 DP (a reasonable # of 'ifs'), CoH starts to hit, non-crit, for just over 2k (with ToL aura). Additionally, it has a solid chance of critting 1-3 of its hits. In a situation like that, it becomes much more similar to what we are used to, which is a heal that lands for ~ 10% of the target's life. Having 6 targets, and intelligent targeting, is actually rather silly.
Last night we were speed-clearing Naxx.25, and in spider wing we 'accidentally' pulled 4 packs at once. I just started spamming CoH, and it was hitting 4-5 people (for actual heals, not overheals) on every cast, since the raid was so clumped up. In a situation like that, it actually worked quite well as a raid healing spell.
On Sapphiron, the only people I could actually heal with CoH were a group of 5 melee. Everyone else was too spread out, and Flash was far more efficient for topping them up.
@ Shaara: I like CoH. It's a good spell. But you can't consider a 1.1k heal to a person as a primary heal in a situation with large amounts of damage coming in. You gave the example of a shaman with people taking 2500 ticks ... in that situation, you're going to fall behind using CoH just the same as the shaman would. It's not sustainable alone. And if all you're doing is using CoH to delay the time when someone will need to *actually* heal the person, then it's not a healing spell, it's a stabilization spell, as I described.
For KJ, yes, I use CoH. But I only use it:
1) When we collapse
2) When the raid has taken damage from darts (primarily)
Darts hit for ~ 2k, single shot, raid-wide. And there's 25 people within 10' of each other. It's a no-brainer to hit a few CoHs and top people up.
But primary raid damage (Fire Blooms/Legion Lightning)? You can't effectively use CoH, and using it means you're spending GCDs on something that should have been a real heal, to take someone from 6k to 12k, not from 6k up to 7k only to have the next tick drop them to 4.5k.
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
Slow? 2.5 seconds is not slow at all. I have not seen a single raid encounter where gheal is not an excellent raid healing single target solution, from karazhan to illidan.
There are only two heals slower - Prayer of Healing and Healing Touch (which isn't castable in Tree of Life in BC). Check the Priest's healing configuration on an arbitrary Illidan kill. I think you'll find that this sort of healing isn't remotely unusual for precisely the reason I mentioned: Greater Heal is too slow to use as a heal on dps.
"2k on 6ppl instantly" is not "vastly superior" to "11k on a single target". It may sometimes be. There may be fights with heavy AoE damage that make it worthwhile to throw around CoH every time it's off cooldown. There may however also be fights in which it has no use.
It's not just 'heavy AE' damage. Remember, just because someone is down 11k it doesn't mean you have to heal all that damage yourself. You've got other healers in the raid, and its a lot easier to keep someone alive when you're stacking a bunch of little heals than it is when you're depending on a single large, slow heal.
Imagine you have two spells, one that heals for 5k and one that heals for 10k. You've also got two players with 10k damage and two healers that can heal them.
If both healers throw their 10k spells, you have a 50% chance that they'll choose the same target - and one of those spells will be wasted. However, if both healers throw their 5k spells, then even if they choose the same target no healing is wasted (they'll both choose the same target with the follow-on spell and still not overheal).
While this example is ludicrously simplified, it should be easier to see that - all else being equal - quicker, small heals are inherently better than slower, larger heals when you're trying to coordinate multiple healers.
What you need to do is escape the mentality of having to do it all yourself and understand what they other healers need to be doing. No, a single hit from a CoH won't save anyone. But a hit from a CoH, a bounce from a Chain Heal, a stray Flash of Light and a PW:S will save them even though none of these spells individually heals them more than a small fraction of their health.
So far most beta testers have said that Penance is great. I don't think you should dismiss it before raid healing with it at 80.
Penance is a great spell. The 50 points you took to get there are terrible for raid healing. If a Disc Priest isn't focused on one target, they lose most/all of the benefit from Renewed Hope, Grace, and Divine Aegis. At which point you're now also badly geared for your spec since spell critical is horrible stat for a Discipline Priest if DA isn't effective.
It should be noted that once you get 2500 spellpower, and all the usual raid buffs, and if you spec 5/5 DP (a reasonable # of 'ifs'), CoH starts to hit, non-crit, for just over 2k (with ToL aura). Additionally, it has a solid chance of critting 1-3 of its hits. In a situation like that, it becomes much more similar to what we are used to, which is a heal that lands for ~ 10% of the target's life. Having 6 targets, and intelligent targeting, is actually rather silly.
Last night we were speed-clearing Naxx.25, and in spider wing we 'accidentally' pulled 4 packs at once. I just started spamming CoH, and it was hitting 4-5 people (for actual heals, not overheals) on every cast, since the raid was so clumped up. In a situation like that, it actually worked quite well as a raid healing spell.
On Sapphiron, the only people I could actually heal with CoH were a group of 5 melee. Everyone else was too spread out, and Flash was far more efficient for topping them up.
@ Shaara: I like CoH. It's a good spell. But you can't consider a 1.1k heal to a person as a primary heal in a situation with large amounts of damage coming in. You gave the example of a shaman with people taking 2500 ticks ... in that situation, you're going to fall behind using CoH just the same as the shaman would. It's not sustainable alone. And if all you're doing is using CoH to delay the time when someone will need to *actually* heal the person, then it's not a healing spell, it's a stabilization spell, as I described.
For KJ, yes, I use CoH. But I only use it:
1) When we collapse
2) When the raid has taken damage from darts (primarily)
Darts hit for ~ 2k, single shot, raid-wide. And there's 25 people within 10' of each other. It's a no-brainer to hit a few CoHs and top people up.
But primary raid damage (Fire Blooms/Legion Lightning)? You can't effectively use CoH, and using it means you're spending GCDs on something that should have been a real heal, to take someone from 6k to 12k, not from 6k up to 7k only to have the next tick drop them to 4.5k.
Yeah but your last example is not a very good one. You get two CoH's in the time it takes to cast one Gheal, so its 12ppl getting a 1k heal vs 1person getting a 6k heal. We are talking twice the hps here.
Lets say we got 3 priests with CoH, should they each cast a single 6k Gheal on the raid, for 18khealing, or 2 CoH's for 2x3x6x1k=36k healing.
Chainheals aimed at lowhp targets is a much more effective way
I know it's not as good as CoH but when talking about lack of AoE healing with Disc I think people are forgetting that Holy Nova is now trainable and with the +40% healing on Holy Nova Major Glyph (at the cost of -40% damage) it gives us another reasonably good instant AoE heal. It's not as mana-efficent as CoH, which is where Disc would lose out to Holy Priests, but we are mana-efficient in other ways and I think that would off-set the cost somewhat.
In my tests at L70 on the PTR with 1032 Spellpower and the Glyph attached, Holy Nova actually heals for more than CoH per cast. The issue is that it costs too much mana to spam it effectively, but for your "oh crap" AoE situation I see it as an excellent addition for Disc Priests who are doing PvE healing.
Originally Posted by MavSteele
As far as Penance, I'm not sure if it's people who haven't used it, or people with vastly different experiences than I have, but I really like it. I'll agree with many people who feel disc as a whole isn't quite strong enough to keep up with holy, but penance isn't the reason. With even just a little haste, my penance ticks every .8 seconds, which provides a nice buffer on a tank for other heals to land.
From what I've seen on the PTR so far I love Penance. I've been Holy for over 2 years but I'll be giving Disc a real chance when the patch comes purely because I love the deep Disc talents so much now. It won't give as much healing throughput as Holy Priests will and therefore might not be first choice in high-end raiding, but for the 10-man content I'll be concentrating on in WotLK it should do fine.
PoH is only applicable to your group and that means its not applicable to the vast majority of raid damage to be healed. If you only limit yourself to healing one group in hexlord that is your problem. I heal both and very successfully I might add.
Depending on raid setup most of the healing you need to do is on groups other than your own. What you are referring to is simply bad positioning. Fixing the position to maximise CoH costs your raid nothing.
Regarding the Hexlord scenario - if you go there without epic shadow resistance, you don't really heal both groups during spirit bolts - the HPS just isn't there. If you do go there with epic shadow resistence, healing is trivialized, so that's not worth discussing. What you can do is stabilize both groups OR heal one and help out on the other. Just stabilizing isn't a cool idea, depending on who gets hit by soul siphon next. You definitely want to have people mostly topped up at the end of spirit bolts. And for your own group, PoH just has a higher HPS than CoH, besides being a good use for Inner Focus. Even if you intend to use CoH on the other group, not using PoH for your own group is less than optimal. PoH is just better for that purpose. As for positioning on Malacrass, do remember that a warlock's rain of fire frequently lasts well into the spirit bolts, making positioning situational. This also applies to a few other play abilities.
Now, if we presume we want to heal "best", not "best on meters", there's no reason why you should want to do more than help out on the other group.
Regarding the "stabilization" nature of CoH:
Originally Posted by Havoc12
There is no such thing as a "raid stabilisation tool", which implies a capability only for slowing down damage. Overlapping CoH/PoM usage will top up people faster than overlapping chain heals can albeit at an HPM cost. Its obviously more effective to not CoH a group to full if you have shamans in the raid, so you can use it only on active damage if you want to, but that limits your use of CoH for no good reason.
...
Why is chain heal a "real" heal and CoH just a tool to stop the damage?
Time to reuse this one: "Well, if all you have is a hammer, then for sure every problem looks like a nail."
CoH is absolutely ideal for healing damage on a group of 4-5 that happen not to have a holy priest in the group. It's also ideal whenever you need to heal multiple targets while moving - expensive, but instant. For most other uses you - as a raid - have a better tool. It's still a fair tool for many uses, but is it a bread-and-butter heal? Certainly not. Just because we *can* use it for many healing problems that doesn't mean we *should*. If a druid can do extraordinary HPS on 4 tanks in MH, why should I bash in my CoH there?
So far CoH feels like a main heal in a good number of places in BT and SWP. However, it only does because some encounters have really been designed for it, which Blizzard has officially acknowledged and "promised" not to repeat.
Anyway, looks like next week the CoH we all know will be gone.
Last edited by Hegen : 10/10/08 at 3:34 PM.
Reason: Clarified
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
Penance is a great spell. The 50 points you took to get there are terrible for raid healing. If a Disc Priest isn't focused on one target, they lose most/all of the benefit from Renewed Hope, Grace, and Divine Aegis. At which point you're now also badly geared for your spec since spell critical is horrible stat for a Discipline Priest if DA isn't effective.
I'm inclined to agree. If you're specced discipline, you don't want to be assigned to raid healing. From my experiences, Penance is actually a better spell than GHeal because it has similar HPS, better HPM, and most importantly, heals faster. The speed is what really makes it great. As you know, it also has 3 chances to crit and proc DA, which can further smooth out a spike of damage that a tank has taken.
In addition, I've also found a use for it to heal someone in the raid who's low during "AoE" phases while the tank has sufficient healing coverage, but the raid is in more danger than usual. The discipline PW:S is also great for that application as you can PW:S the tank and then Penance someone in the raid who's low, and still have time to charge up a GHeal for the tank afterwards safely.
Totems, tree aura and so on, all of which stack multiplicatively with DP, but only additively with MA.
I do believe MA stacks multiplicatively as well, and I'm sure you are smart enough to figure out why, without me explaining A spell with 10% mana cost reduction and +10% extra healing should be roughly 1.1*1.1 times more efficient. Of course
There are only two heals slower - Prayer of Healing and Healing Touch (which isn't castable in Tree of Life in BC). Check the Priest's healing configuration on an arbitrary Illidan kill. I think you'll find that this sort of healing isn't remotely unusual for precisely the reason I mentioned: Greater Heal is too slow to use as a heal on dps.
Err, here you go again with the "arbitrary" WWS's without actually understanding the fights themselves since you haven't actually been there... The raid damage in Illidan is both predictable and slow enough for downranked GHeals to do the job (and do it more effectively because the amount of damage an individual takes is higher than the amount a Flash can heal for). In all likelihood, this priest was probably using a lot of Flash Heal because he greatly outgears the encounter so he can just toss Flash Heals left and right to stabilize raid health while letting Chain Heals top people off.
On Live, at least (since you're posting a WWS from Live), Flash Heal is only a decent raid healing spell if either:
- efficiency doesn't matter at all (i.e. you outgear the encounter or it's trash, or you have a Shadow Priest)
- the damage is occurring so fast that you simply don't have time to GHeal (i.e. Twins)
Otherwise, Greater Heal is usually a far better spell to raid-heal with simply for the fact that it does more healing for less mana.
If anything, that WWS you linked is a rather unusual kind of breakdown for an Illidan encounter.
Err, here you go again with the "arbitrary" WWS's without actually understanding the fights themselves since you haven't actually been there... The raid damage in Illidan is both predictable and slow enough for downranked GHeals to do the job
Just chiming in to agree with this completely. I only ever cast flash heal during Illidan if somebody else has dropped the ball or something has gone wrong and a flames victim or somesuch and somebody has gotten very low. Sometimes I'll stagger a flash heal followed by a greater heal right after a transition, as well, but nowhere near that WWS' percentages.
Of course the "that was then, this is now" caveat comes into play because while I do raid heal intensively with GH on Illidan, it is mostly downranked. Although with the overheal kickbacks from Wrath talents similar functionality will continue, I would imagine. Quite a bit of raid damage all through BT and the early Sunwell I've done is well accounted for by using greater heal.
I do believe MA stacks multiplicatively as well, and I'm sure you are smart enough to figure out why, without me explaining A spell with 10% mana cost reduction and +10% extra healing should be roughly 1.1*1.1 times more efficient. Of course
The interesting thing about this is that MA is actually a bigger HpM boost than DP for (specifically) CoH.
Healing / Mana = HpM (I think we all agree? )
Now, take DP, which scales Healing by 10%:
(Healing / Mana)*1.1 = 1.1 * Healing/Mana
and compare MA, which decreases Mana by 10%:
Healing / (Mana * 0.90) = Healing / (Mana*9/10) = 10*Healing / 9*Mana = 1.11 * Healing/Mana
It's tiny, sure, but when you're comparing talent-to-talent, MA actually grants slightly more HpM than DP. Of course, that's only one metric, but I remember someone back a few pages claiming that DP granted more efficiency than MA, and I don't believe you can accurately state that, in any context.
Of course every talent is modified multiplicatively by every other raid buff talent: if I multiply either of the above by a healing modification ability, you end up in the same boat. Let's assume I apply Spiritual Healing and Tree of Life to both of the above "fictional" one-talent only situations:
DP:
(H/M * 1.1 * 1.06) * 1.1 = 1.2826
MA:
(H/M * 1.1 * 1.06) * 1.1111 = 1.2956
MA still wins. /shrug In fact, any time you have an 'equal' mana-reducing talent and a healing-increasing talent (where equal = same percentage scaling), the mana-reducing talent will always grant slightly more efficiency, where efficiency is measured as HpM.
[e] My gut feeling about talents is that a 20/51/0 spec, with 5/5 MA and 0/5 DP, plus 2/2 SoL, 6/6 IHC, and 2/2 HP is the highest 'efficiency' build you can put together, at least with respect to instants. When you start asking "what about when I use Binding Heal", then it becomes a lot more screwy. Still, MA applies to both PoM and CoH, as does Twin Disciplines, Spiritual Healing, Spiritual Guidance (indirectly), and Divine Providence.
I don't believe 6/6 IHC or 3/3 Serendipity are optional talents. It's possible you could argue for losing 2/2 HP and 2/2 SoL, although with crit rates going the way they are, I suspect SoL is rapidly becoming a 'must have' talent (I had 26% last night in Naxx.25, and I'm nowhere near done my T7+ gearing). HP really depends on how much you use PoH and PoM, and if you picked up MA. If you didn't get MA, then HP is likely required, just to reduce PoM to manageable levels.
[e2] I'm assuming there's some kind of spirit boost ability in the raid, be it another priest with DS, or a warlock with a felhunter out granting the baby version (64 spirit instead of 80). That much spirit is too high of a regen boost to truly give the "highest efficiency" spec without it present (25/84 Mp5).
Last edited by constantius : 10/10/08 at 5:58 PM.
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
Didn't they add that CoH takes up 24 % of your mana pool, which stops you from really spaming it, and making you use it a bit smarter? 24 % is a huge chunk of mana, I'm not sure if the mana gain is enough to let you use it as we can now?
Didn't they add that CoH takes up 24 % of your mana pool, which stops you from really spaming it, and making you use it a bit smarter? 24 % is a huge chunk of mana, I'm not sure if the mana gain is enough to let you use it as we can now?
When a spell says it uses a % of base mana, the mana its referring to is not your whole mana pool, but these figures (from WoWWiki):
Level 70: 2620
Level 80: 3863
Therefore, 24% of base mana on CoH is actually ~629 at 70 and ~927 at level 80 before talents.
[e] Oops, those are the costs for Rank 4, the level 65 CoH. The level 70 and 80 ranks are 21% of base mana which become ~550 and ~811 respectively. Slightly worth noting is the level 75 CoH is also 21% base mana.
Originally Posted by Crow
On another topic - Could anyone on the PTR tell us, how does Guardian Spirit work on Teron? And on Azgalor? I was always looking forward to this skill being our limited version of Soulstone, which would make stacking multiple priests in raid slightly better now, that CoH is not supposed to be king anymore.
One time I was doing Teron on a rogue, and I got the debuff. Everything was fine and it was getting close for me to get out to my corner when I took a huge amount of shadow damage and almost died. I immediately popped Sprint, CoS, and fumbled for my Healthstone while running away from the raid. I actually ended up taking some more damage (which took me below 0hp) at the same exact time I hit my CoS/Healthstone, so constructs popped on top of the raid... but I was still alive, and I had no pet bar.
If I were a bettin' man I'd say Guardian Spirit would yield less than desirable results.
My own spreadsheet is about 75% done (will link it when complete), but the CoH results were kind of interesting.
Once you factor in expected overhealing percentages, and likely targets hit, then CoH actually (depending on beforementioned assumptions) has about 70% more eHPS and only slightly less eHPM than GH, and almost identical numbers to PoH.
This includes crits, free spells, talents, serendipity, etc as well as 25% overhealing for GH, 20% for CoH and 25% for PoH.
I assumed all Glyphs as well, and with CoH averaging 5/6 targets (smart raid targeting) and PoH averaging 4/5.
I was surprised how well CoH looked. It won't save individuals per se, and if you aren't careful about when you use it your ratios (targets hit / overhealing) will deteriorate, but overall it looks pretty strong.
And, yes, there was about a 0.8 HPM drop on CoH when I went from MA to DP, and about a 0.4 HPM drop overall across the mix of spells I assumed (15 GH, 40 FH, 25 CoH, 25 PoM, 5 PoH).
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. There are several examples in early BC of fights where the HPS difference between Flash Heal and Greater Heal is important; for example, Malchezaar circa March 2007. As an example in later BC content, look at Gurtogg's Fel Rage, particularly on a cloth wearer.
Yeah, the problem with using a word like "rarely" is that everyone has a different sense of what that means. There are certainly encounters where you want to max out your HPS at the expense of all else -- don't get me wrong. I'm just saying there are many cases where trading off some HPS for speed makes a lot of sense. Yet I know some healers are so incredibly focused on HPS that they stop thinking about the big picture. Choosing the best heal is a judgement call that has to consider the current context. As long as people are thinking about that, then I'm happy.
Also, we're all extrapolating our experience into WotLK when we really don't quite know what we'll see exactly. For all I know, fast heals will be largely irrelevant in WotLK because you always have time to pull out a greater heal. But part of the fun is adapting your healing style to the changing situation. I don't really want it to be the same.
Originally Posted by Liriel
I don't think FH playes a role in a tank emergancy situation.
It depends on the situation, of course, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it never has a role.
In cases where you have plenty of time to land a greater heal, then you'd do that.
Otherwise, you might choose from an array of "panic" buttons -- shield, guardian spirit, pain suppression, etc. So you may just play those and go back to greater heal if it's safe.
Or you may have others covering the crisis, and in that case the crisis "isn't your problem" and you just keep pumping HPS via greater heal.
Otherwise, you may be down to just binding heal and flash heal as options, and binding heal is better if you have the mana to spare.
However, if mana is tight, binding heal may land you completely OOM and flash heal isn't drastically smaller. That's a lot of options to run through before you get to flash heal, but I would not categorically eliminate flash heal in a crisis.
Truthfully, this comes up more for me when I'm not with a group I know and trust well. But I have definitely seen logs where my flash heal landed right before a would-have-been-deathblow and a greater heal would not have been there in time. So I don't regret using flash heals when I'm worried. I can't think of a single case where I used a flash heal and in hindsight should have used greater heal, but I can think of cases where the reverse was true.
Overall, my view of flash heal is that you consider using it when health bars are too high for greater heal or too low. "Too high" and "too low" are both subjective calls, of course. But I think there is a place for it at both ends of the health bar.
10/10/08, 8:28 AM
A spell with 10% mana cost reduction and +10% extra healing should be roughly 1.1*1.1 times more efficient. Of course 
