I don't understand why people are so down about Greater Heal and claim to almost never cast it. With 3/3 Improved Healing it is slightly better HPM than Flash Heal and *much* better HPS.

Flash Heal at 2400 SP, 30% crit and 25% haste
(2040 + .81(2400))*1.04*1.09 = 4516
4516*.7 + 4516*.3*1.95 = 5803 average healing including criticals
5803/521mana = 11.1 HPM
5803/1.20seconds = 4836 HPS

Greater Heal
(4270 + 1.61(2400))*1.04*1.09 = 9221
9221*.7 + 9221*.3*1.95 = 11849
11849/1050mana = 11.3 HPM
11849/2.00seconds = 5924 HPS


So Greater heal is almost 1100 HPS better than flash heal and similar HPM, and will scale better with increasing SP/Crit/Haste as we gear up in Ulduar (and takes advantage of BT haste better than flash heal does). I definitely plan on going 53/18 when 3.1 hits and utilizing mostly Gheal/Penance/PWS on tank healing. The loss of 3% crit from Focused Will seems insignificant when you consider that taking Improved Healing allows you to use Greater Heal instead of Flash Heal, gaining 1100 HPS.

Um the 25% haste occurs when?
I'm highly impressed that you were able to get 25% haste and 30% crit
I was also wondering if your including the fact that we have a talent that reduces FH by 15% mana cost? Spamming Gheal doesnt seem too intuitive since it leads to more overhealing than is necessary. Disc priests are in every way reactive healers, the quicker the heal the better, which is why I love PW:S-Penance-Gheal. But once a full stack of grace (which now increases healing by 9% instead of 6%) FH is better as a spammer
Not to mention with whispered stacking divine aegis, Crit is sooo amazing. So saying ill pass up on 3% Crit rating (which allows you to gear more towards that haste) is questionable.

25% Haste and 30% crit aren't insane numbers for raid buffed Disc priests. Keep in mind that you really need 11% haste through gear as you get 6% haste with Enlightenment(5% on live), 5% with the shaman totem and 3% with retribution/moonkin aura. 30% crit is really easy with moonkin aura/elemental oath and will get even easier with the +3% Crit buff that Discipline gets next patch. Yes I do realise that Imp.Healing builds can't get Focused Will.

As for the calculations seeing that he counted flash heal as 521 mana per cast I can say that yes the talent is calculated.

The problem with GH though is that it's really slow. It's the slowest heal that any healers use(considering Druids rarely use HT and shamans almost never use HW)and will most likely get sniped by paladins or fast cast heals. Generally FH is better because it's less likely to overheal. As GH is only used on fights with heavy hard hits I don't know if going so deep in Holy is actually worth it. It's basically a question between throughput and heavy hitting boss healing longevity so when our gear reaches the point where using GH frequently doesn't kill the blue bar then there's no point for Improved Healing. Stacking DA isn't such a huge buff though considering most DA are so weak that break with a single boss hit. Perhaps casting at full health will make slightly more sense now though, if our mana allows that.

Like HeadHuntress said, 25% haste and 30% crit are very reasonable numbers, and are actually below my raid buffed stats. Yes my numbers include the new Improved Flash Heal talent. Greater Heal can be just as reactive and "fast" as Flash Heal if you just precast it and cancel it before it lands if it isn't needed. Yeah that takes some skill and lots of practice to become proficient at, but it's a viable strategy. Consider this, when you are tank healing your Penance can either be on cooldown or available, if it is available then you can just sit and wait for the tank to take damage and then respond immediately with Penance. If Penance is on cooldown then you can start casting Greater Heal and cancel it at 0.5-0.7 seconds if the tank is still at full HP, and just keep doing that until Penance is available again.

You claim that getting a full stack of Grace somehow makes Flash Heal "better as a spammer" compared to Greater Heal, which is absurd. Grace effects both spells equally and is already included in my calculations above. Divine Aegis is also already included in the calculations above because I gave the crit heals a multiplier of 1.95 instead of 1.5. The fact that it stacks now increases the value of crit, yes, but Promethia has posted ample evidence that DA utilization was already somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% so DA stacking now probably isn't going to make as big a difference as you believe.

Perhaps i was a bit haste with the gearing; however the point of grace was to state that most damage done is more effectively healed by a flash heal because of the grace bonus, the 1.3 seconds you spend casting a gheal only to have it interrupted is all the time it takes to cast a flash heal, and what happens when the heal you just finished casting is needed .2 seconds after you stopcasted it. Gheal just isnt worth it. because of this situation. You are almost always guaranteed to need the flash heal when you finish casting it (because it is about half the healing of a gheal, takes half as much damage to merit the FH)

In current raiding, the only 25-man fights where Greater Heal seems useful are Instructor Razuvious (on the understudies) and Sartharion with a voidwalker tank -- fights where you're healing something with an enormous health bar. On most other fights, even a BT-hasted Greater Heal often doesn't come in before the target has received enough healing that you should have just used Flash Heal.

If the mana regen nerf succeeds and healers can no longer afford to crazily spam heals on anything with a less-than-full health bar, Greater Heal (and hence, Improved Healing) may become more valuable. Increased availability of BT from Soul Warding might also make it more attractive.

The major reason greater heal isn't used more is that its only significant advantage (as you point out) is HPS. When a fight is HPS limited, there's nothing wrong with using greater heal. The thing is that HPS is almost never the limiting factor of an encounter. So that large HPS advantage ends up being irrelevant a lot of the time.

Saying "you have too many healers then" is fair enough, except if you decrease the number of healers, you still don't end up with HPS being the limiting factor. Instead you typically run into mana being the limiting factor first.

Moreover, overhealing is a significant concern since if it greater heal overheals by more than flash heal (which it often does) then it doesn't take much of a differential before greater heal's efficiency drops below flash heal's and the HPS gap diminishes.

But the biggest problem to me with greater heal is the difference in cast time. HPS is not a very important stat IMO. Others may disagree and that's fine, but I am more concerned about minimizing the probability of death, and that is not so strongly related to maximizing HPS as it is to minimizing the size of time gaps between heals.

As a healer, there are few things I hate more than losing a tank 0.1 second before my heal completes. It has happened to me many times, and not coincidentally that happens most often with greater heal. Sometimes I know in hindsight that a flash heal would have been "enough" to keep the tank up, so that has made me wonder what this added HPS really buys me. If flash heal will work at all, flash heal is "safer", so I find I use greater heal only when flash heal simply isn't enough HPS to keep up... and that is just not common. The relevant question to me is why give up that safety and go with a longer cast spell? For more HPS?? Not a good enough reason IMO.

By your numbers, greater heal is 22.5% better in HPS, but it is 66.7% longer to cast. Your contention might be that the HPS gap is significant while the cast time difference is not, but I feel exactly the opposite: the cast time differential can make the difference between a tank living or not while the HPS is unlikely to make up that difference.

Now don't get me wrong: I think greater heal has its place, and I try to use it whenever I think it is safe to cast and enough of the heal will probably land. I often use it solo healing a tank taking big hits (e.g. patchwerks), and maybe we'll see more of that in 3.1. But most of the time, I find it safer to use flash heal.

A few specific replies to some of your previous posts:
- The benefit to grace isn't about grace benefitting flash heal more than greater heal but that stacking grace as quickly as possible is a function of cast time, not HPS. From that POV, penance is best, and flash heal is next best. Greater heal spam takes 66.7% longer to stack grace. Also refreshing the buff is cheaper with flash heal. A similar argument applies to inspiration. Not a huge deal, but still an advantage to flash heal.

- Regarding the health where flash is better, I definitely think a 7K or 8K anticipated deficit is better for flash heal unless you don't care much about HPM. The heal will crit 30% of the time. Since as you say "anything less than 3K is not something that needs to be immediately healed, you can't really say failing to critting is a big problem. Greater heal seems like a waste since with that size deficit, average overhealing will be much worse with greater heal than with flash heal. On the other hand, if mana is no issue, and you have the time, greater heal is much more likely to top off your tank "just in case". Most of the time, I don't really think about greater heal until I'm looking at deficits well over 10K. You can't leverage its HPS advantage much until it is unlikely to overheal.

- At 3K deficit, the overhealing problem for greater heal doesn't go away. In fact it's worse. Both flash heal and greater heal will overheal, but greater heal will overheal more. More simplistically: both heals will top off the tank, but flash heal will do it much faster and for less mana.

I think alot of you guys are forgetting how much better Divine Aegis is on a greater heal than a flash heal. Most of you love crit and gear for it like maniacs as disc (which is fine with the new DA rules), if you then stop using greater heal you lose alot of it's strengths. It doesn't matter if you might overheal with a big chunk on a greater heal, when the HPM is about the same of a flash heal (if specced so) and you have a rather high chance of proccing a large aegis.

The HPS gap is bigger than you have calculated, even with overhealing included when you start taking DA into account and that's fairly significant seeing how much better shields are vs heals on tanks.

Your scenario is not valid. Tanks gets hit for 10k every 1.5s. No healer can heal him alone. And if you include another healer, then you have overheal
probabilities that you need to take into account.
All what your scenario tells us is that gh has better hps than fh. yes, we know it. And it was said that in some cases, (eg. Razavious), gh is the spell to go.


Basically, the main question is what you aim to maximize. Personally, I consider that what matters is the death tank probability, not the hps.
There is an obvious connection between both : if your hps is too low, your tank will die. Period.
But as soon as the hps is enough, augmenting hps is not always equivalent to a survivability increase.
Consider the theoretical case where you could land a very big heal (let's say 1000 k) every minute. Your're the clear hps winner. But the problem is that your tank will die during the 1 minute cast time.
Now, this was an over-emphasized case, as most of it would be overheal anyway. I don't think that a very big heal of, let's say, 30k, that would take 5s to cast would be very useful in "normal" case. Reason is that 5s is just too long, and your tank may need heal during the 5s period.

The theoretical reason for this is clear : once your hps is greater than the received damage per second of the tank, then there is only one possibility for tank death : you get an unlucky series, and your tank run "temporarily" out of life. The problem with humans is that this temporarily is definitive.
So, to decrease the likelihood of this bad luck series, you have too possibilities : either you keep the same "spacing" between heals, and you increases the heal size. Or you keep the same hps, but you decreases the heal spacing (and decreases their size). If you want mathematical models, consider random Brownian process, with a derivative towards infinity. And compute the probability to hit zero from one positive point. The more bias you have, the less likely it his (that's the increased hps solution). But the smaller your steps are, the less likely it is also (that's the more frequent heal solution).

Trouble with this is that's very hard to optimize. It depends heavily on the damage pattern, and tank healthpool. If tank health pool is big enough, like for Razzavious, then gh is the solution. If what you want to do is not to keep the tank alive, but at an enough high level of HP, with (hateful) big strikes coming in, then gh is also your solution.
But in many other case, I would say that fh is better than gh for keeping a tank alive.

GH is not "so much better". With stackable DA there is nothing wrong with FH really. On live GH crits dictate to wait for DA to be used before you FH or Penance again, with DA stacking you have no limits. Yes GH procs higher shields but when your tank is down by 6k GH is next to useless. The purpose of GH is to heal hard hitters or save a tank through a burst. Big shields or not, it's still quite expensive(not HPM but as a value)and slow so it's likely to get sniped. Keep in mind that even if it heals for 5k it's still wasted. Stopcasting GHs is really hard if you are not alone healing the main tank, if you are solo healing it's achievable.

Take Squeakster's example above. Boss hits for 10k each 1.5s. GH hits for 11k, FH for 5.5k. Tank gets a 10k hit and you critically heal with GH for 16k bringing up a 4.8k shield. Tank gets another hit for 10k and the shield absorbs half of it so it's down by 5.2k. Why not FH to top his health instead of waiting for a second hit to make GH actually useful?

This discussion isn't a new one(the whole FH Vs GH)and you can find situations where one is heal is superior to other. Thinking or saying that you can actually heal with only one of the two isn't insane and it's viable for most fights, but it's not the best use you can make of them. Smart and efficient use of both is the way to go. The fact that with a second healer on the tank GH will overheal for a lot due to it's cast time gives you many reasons to use FH instead. And if it's a Paladin pairing with you your choices are limited with 1.5s HL bombing the tank.

You'll have to be an idiot to never use Flash Heal if you're disc and that's why I'm not saying how good Flash Heal is because everyone knows so. The reason why I'm advocating use of Gheal is because people are stopping to see a reason to use it, not because I think Gheal should be used instead of Flash Heal at all times.

Just as you're saying there will be scenarios when Gheal is very valuable and scenarios when Flash Heal is the best. In most fights however you'll find opportunities to use both for maximized efficiency, and if you want to be the best you can be this is how you'll play. The priests on these forums saying they'll remove Gheal from their bars are limiting their priests, which really isn't my concern. What I don't want is new priests to read these forums and think that Flash Heal is the solution for everything because that will have the same backlash effect on the community as when the holy priests were spamming smart target CoH all day long.

My comments were not intended to dismiss the utility of Greater Heal, only to argue that it does not have enough utility in 25-man raiding to justify a 53/18 spec.

I think it's far too early to make definitive statements such as that. While I hope Improved Healing will not be necessary for discipline, you must consider the (somewhat) minor throughput you lose in disc, compared to the potential mana saving. I think a 53/18 spec will be viable in 3.1 at lower gear levels, just maybe not for raiders who're pretty much equipped in full BiS come ulduar. Moreover, the option of speccing Improved Healing will allow for increased throughput gearing.

Even if only casting BT hasted Gheals, I'll not be surprised to see 53/18 being a viable spec. That said, I'm planning on using the usual 58/13 myself, with Fheal being the preferred spell of choice. I'll not be afraid to dip deeper into holy and change to more Gheal use if mana situations require it, though.

Yeah, I think taking greater heal off your bar would be very silly. It sits right next to flash heal on my bar, and I am always looking for opportunities to use it. It's not a tool I'd throw away, nor forget about.

It's a little ironic to me that people are feeling greater heal is getting unfairly treated since there was a period of time (not very long ago) where flash heal was looked down upon because greater heal was both more efficient and had more HPS, so the logic was more or less "why would you ever use flash heal?" That kind of thinking was also too monolithic.

I honestly feel that one of the best ways you can tell a good priest from a mediocre priest is by looking at how many of their abilities they use. Priests have a wide array of abilities, each with different properties, and when I see abilities that are never used I simply don't believe it was because those abilities never had good applications. Instead I believe the player simply wasn't thinking about them when the opportunity came along.

I don't know that we really disagree here. Healing requires good judgement, which includes considering the incoming damage on your target and how other healers may affect you optimal healing tactics. My own healing style is relatively miserly -- i.e. I view heals as a necessary evil, and I only heal when I really have to. So if I can wait and leverage the HPS advantage of greater heal, I will. Sometimes I find other healers panic more easily than I do and interfere with my plans by topping the target off. So I can end up forever cast-cancelling unless I call off other healers and tell them to leave my target alone -- I've got it. But if I'm solo healing a tank, then I can apply a sensible approach like that and everyone is happy.

In cases where incoming damage is high and I have multiple healers on my target, that might shift me towards flash heal more, but it really depends on what the other healers are doing. I don't know that I can generalize except to say if timing is more crucial, I go with flash heal, but if HPS is more important, I may use greater heal. What the other healer is planning matters a lot. For instance, if I'm with a holy priest who will be spamming greater heal, I'm more likely to worry about both the gaps between heals and overhealing, so my thinking might be that I'll do flashes to make sure there are no gaps in the incoming healing, and the other priest can feel safer taking the time to churn out the slower, high HPS cast. But there may be good reason for us both to do greater heals. The only thing I'd say is that you should think about it and not simply default to one or the other.

Politics get in the way of good thinking, though (and come to think of it, that is true in life in general). A lot of times it makes good sense to wait and just do a greater heal because there really isn't an urgent threat on the tank and you can safely do that. But unless there is very good healing discipline in your raid, others will heal the target before you do. Some may feel forced to abandon greater heals simply because they will fall off the meters otherwise from getting sniped.

It's not completely fair to say to those people that they should just ignore the meters and do what makes sense. If they can get away with that, then great, but not everyone can. My advice is to do what you have to do politically, but realize that you're doing it for political reasons, not because it's the optimal healing strategy.

Hello to all, may i have a question please?
I was wondering about encounters that ignore PW:S and maybe Aegis. I know Loatheb fight does, i've heard Patchwerk hatefuls ignore shields (not sure if its true), are there any other encounters like that? Like, does shielding work on Kel'tuzad's Ice Blocks, or you have to real-heal the target to save it?
Thanks in advance

PW:S works for both Frost Blasts and Hatefuls. So far only loatheb deathbloom ignores it.

Yeah I thought this too. Hmmm...

I thought only the Deathbloom ticks ignore it -- I thought the "bloom" at the end *is* absorbed.

The fact that it's health percentage based is totally irrelevant. I can assure you that just shielding a target is enough for its survival. Considering it deals 104% of the total health via 4 ticks(26% per tick)so it's quite easy to test if it works or not as 1 shield is enough. Another easy way to notice it is that when you shield the target it feels like the next tick does no damage. Sooo yeah you were prolly on drugs as I was using PW:S to save people since my first KT kill(I have no clue about vanilla KT).

Yep PWS works on Frost Blast, I was actually just looking at a recent WWS:

0:02'08.063 Kel’Thuzad Frost Blast hits Munchen for 4999 Frost.
0:02'08.172 Squeakster Glyph of Power Word: Shield heals Munchen for 1116.
0:02'08.188 Munchen gains Power Word: Shield.
0:02'08.875 Kel’Thuzad Frost Blast was absorbed by Munchen.
0:02'09.657 Squeakster Penance heals Munchen for 2991. (1541 Overheal)
0:02'09.829 Squeakster Power Word: Shield was removed from Munchen.
0:02'09.844 Kel’Thuzad Frost Blast hits Munchen for 4177 Frost. (822 Absorbed)

Don't forget that it's not just GHeal that's affected by 3/3 Improved Healing. After the patch I fully intend on using the Penance glyph, which will make the 53/18 spec even more attractive. A 15% cheaper Penance with a further 2 seconds off it's cooldown will be the most powerful tool in my arsenal. Having ventured onto the PTR I can report that the damage on tanks is definitely a step up from what we have currently, so I see GHeal having just as big a role to play in our future healing as Flash Heal. As Promethia says, the best priests are those that use the full range of their abilities for any given situation.

From what I have seen on the PTR, with the Penance glyph I felt I wanted to use Greater Heal less often.

In order to warrant taking Improved Healing you really need to use Greater Heal to a larger degree. The mana reduction on Penance alone isn't enough to make it that worthwhile, except maybe at early gear levels or for specific fights(hard mode Vezax). Just looking at Penance you are getting only 24.14mp5 per talent point spent on Improved Healing, even Rapture's poor mechanic has been worth more for me on the PTR at ~52mp5 per talent point spent. If you are overly struggling with mana either look at what you might be doing wrong or you can switch to the 53/18 spec.