galzohar

Every time you "stop casting" (move, or simply don't need to heal anything) it's like "starting the fight over" using the above model. The benefits are still quite small for 1.5s spells, though.

+healing doubles as regen by allowing downranking via the extra hps it gives, however haste also does that. +healing obviously increases your efficiency a lot more as the main benefit is the extra healing/mana done, the extra efficiency from allowing to downrank more / more often is rather a side effect (that is small, but not negligible).

Bottom line is if it's possible to go oom, haste is wasted, as you would use all your mana to heal wether you had haste or not, doing the same healing done. If it's impossible to go oom, regen is wasted as you don't use that extra mana to heal more anyway. Of course there's the slight side-effect of haste giving more burst that even if you're hurting for mana, you could possibly let other healers do more in "healing-light" phases and you do more in the "intensive spam heal and not care about mana or ppl die" phases using the mana you saved up. However this is rarely useful and even when it is its usefullness is small. Haste is primarily a "I can't use all my mana might as well increase HPS" stat.

 

Shamanaut

No. No it is not like starting over. In fact, it completely eliminates haste as a factor for LHW.

Say you cast LHW every 3 seconds.

Your heals then would land at

1.5
4.5
7.5
10.5

With a 33% increase your heals would land at

1.0
4.0
7.0
10.0

There is NO HPS gain at all from this. None. You are landing the same amount of healing in the same amount of time.
The heal itself being faster in this case does nothing but perhaps increase your effective healing at the expense of jacking some other healer. You decrease your overheal and increase theirs with no effective change in your HPS or improvement in the raids HPS.

You might look better, but you are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

 

◊ Shalas

If making the heal land sooner doesn't do anything useful, you probably shouldn't have been casting LHW in the first place. If you don't need to get a heal in before the next time someone takes damage, then HW or CH will usually be better. If they are going to die from the next hit, then haste increases the chance that the LHW will land before that next hit. If NS had no cooldown, would you not bother using it on LHW because it doesn't increase your HPS?

It's not really worth gearing for haste to improve LHW in PvE, but it's certainly not worthless.

 

Bungmeister

I can't really agree with that at all. At least in my experiences, there's a billion times that someone dies as I'm casting a heal on them. To say you're robbing someone assumes that you have someone that's going to land a heal there in time to save the person, and while that might be true most times, it isn't 100% of the time.

To carry that further, assuming you're using chain heals excusively, I'd venture to say that your 2nd and 3rd jumps on your chain heals are jacking a poor paladin who's single target healing that person.

My guess is that your raids tend to go very smoothly and controlled so damage is much more predictable. If that's the case, you're most likely right. However, in my guild's case, damage flows like money tossed out of a tower because everyone gets smacked all over by it. Definitely a YMMV kind of thing, but it's very raid dependant imo.

 

Shamanaut

We're talking tenths of seconds here, not the 1 second faster improvement from switching between HW and LHW. Remember too that the switch from HW to LHW without haste will not hit the GCD limit on casting speed. For all of those reasons, you would use LHW when you ended up in that panic mode of "I need to get the heal there now". So yes, haste might apply to that limited subset of times where getting the LHW there quicker saves the raid. It however does not improve HPS at all, and a shaman that is casting 20-30% LHW is using LHW as a support healing role, not as a "Save" role as there simply are not that many times in a raid where the saving someone aspects of LHW exist. I won't disagree that the value of haste to a raid and LHW isn't 0. But it is awfully close.

The purpose of healing in a raid encounter is maximizing HPS throughout the encounter, while maintaining sufficient efficiency to not go out of mana. The more you can do this the better healer you will be. The brief moments where you get the opportunity to make the save are not what anyone should be speccing for.

Of course, if NS was on a zero cooldown I'd use it on every single cast, regardless of spell. This would change the entire dynamic of the fight from other healers perspectives. The spells they choose would become different. The thing is, I still wouldn't be using LHW.

The problem here is relying on a shaman to be the fast healer using an inefficient spell compared to paladins who do have a relatively efficient fast spell. We loose 40% efficiency by casting faster. Paladins loose 10-15%. In the old days (Pre TBC and the CH targeting change) this was exactly what shamans did, specifically because the horde didn't HAVE another 1.5 second heal. The inefficiencies were acceptable because there is a need for small fast heals in a raid. Coupled with a Chain heal that was almost worthless as it's jumps were not intelligent, LHW made sense. This sort of mentality however needs to change. Using inefficient heals in the raid, when more efficient heals exists means that you are limiting your raid. You are either bringing too many healers, which hurts DPS, to make up for the efficiency drop, or your healers themselves are using bad gear specs (More MP5 and less heal) to increase their duration. The efficiency increase between LHW and HW/CH is significantly better then a Paladin's increase between FoL and HL. Does it eliminate entirely the need for LHW? No. LHW delivers a bigger punch then FoL, and sometimes that is necessary for the saving aspect of LHW. But it shouldn't be necessary for LHW to fill the continual small heal requirements of a raid. Remember, for raid content, it isn't about individual performance, it is about raid performance. If we are forcing the raid to perform worse for our own benefit, is it really better? Ask the warlock who puts up CoA instead of CoR with a 10 melee raid. And then see how long he keeps getting invites if he doesn't learn. The exact same thing applies here, but since healing breakdowns aren't as easy to spot in reports as dps breakdowns, the problem of healers relying on incorrect heals goes undetected.

 

Shamanaut

No. I wouldn't be jacking the poor paladin. Say 3 rogues and the MT take damage. I start proccing a CH on the MT. The paladin subsequently starts casting a FoL on rogue 1. That FoL will land 1 full second before my CH, which instead would jump to rogues 2 and 3. I *MAY* jack the paladins second heal, but that is only because he is casting a heal that at best could land 3 seconds after my 2.5 second heal started casting. To me, jacking a heal is when you cast that 1.5 second heal 3/4ths of a second after your priest starts a low rank greater heal or something along those lines. When you needlessly force someone else to overheal.

I can't argue with you that in the types of raids you seem to have, the value of LHW is increased. The problem is, is that really the type of raid most people are experiencing?

If your raids are such that people are repeatedly dying while your 1.5 second heal is inbound, and if dropping that heal to 1.2 seconds would save them, I'd argue that your raids have much bigger problems then haste rating for your healers. If anything, improving your healers overall efficiency and fixing your guildmates inability to stay out of damage would go much further at making your raids better then the current situation which seems like your healing is nothing more then a string of going from emergency to emergency. Backing down on DPS so people don't pull aggro (Which I'm guessing is the majority of the reason your raids are so chaotic) will cause encounters to last longer until the threat issues your tanks are having can be fixed. That means a longer, but more stable encounter. And that means more chance of success and more need for healing efficiency.

Would you mind posting some WWS's of your raids? I'm really curious to take a look at what is going on there.

 

Jamegumb

Correct...my bad, I flipped em. 1 int = 1.19425625 healing assuming the 1.1heal/3.75mp5 ratio.

So it all boils back down to what you are gearing for...if it is max hps and mana is not a concern then you should use
1 int = 0.4675 heal with BoK (notice I value mp/5 and mana at nothing here, and the applicable stats become heal, crit, int, and haste).

After that it really depends on how much you value mp/5.

Apologies for the earlier goof, and thanks for the catch.
--JG

 

galzohar

If you have to move 50% of the time and can choose when to actually move, hasting your LHW will increase the amount of LHWs you can cast in the fight. Of course again the increase is rediculessly small and haste is not worth it for the increase, but it's not totally useless.

 

Beta

We are not saying that they will die, but to me I feel that having like 4k or less hp is critical and they may die in matter of second or two. Healing is totally depending how your raid and raid healers perform, single healer seldom matters much. And about raid, our atleast takes huge amounts of dmg all the time in BT, almoust every single fight except akama.

But back to original, I do feel that if I start to heal more with HW, specially random people, my own heals will be then overheals. So would haste change that enough to be competitive stat.

I dont want to depate anyway which is better topping raid LHW or CH, its totally matter of raid as said, but while looking your WWS data, average hit 2253 + 46% overheal = 1200 effective heal with CH? it seems that your random healing with CH1 and most of those wont jump to other targets, which would make LHW save time unless mana isnt problem or HW7 much more mana effecient. Or do I read WWS data wrong?

 

Shamanaut

I can see that, except the number is extremely small. The benefit is only gained during the time your moving while in GCD. I'm not saying it is totally useless, but the effect is so small that I doubt it can even be measured in meters in a real world scenario. Lets say you drop your LHW to 1.2 seconds (Which is probably close to the theoretical maximum with gear currently in game) and need to move for 50% of a fight. Assuming that, you get 30 seconds of casting every minute. That would be 20 LHW's at 1.5 seconds or 25 at 1.2 seconds cast time . That results in 5 additional LHW's per minute. That equates to 166 HPS assuming a 2k LHW. And that is in the most extreme case favoring haste that I can see even being conceivable and assumes perfect timing with moving as soon as your heal ends. So yes, the effect isn't 0, but it requires extreme cases such as this to even show a benefit on LHW, and perfect play to boot. This is the theorycrafted maximum that I could ever see (And I know of no fights that require 50% movement time that allow you to stop every 1.2 seconds to cast then require you to move again).

 

Shamanaut

No, my WWS shows that I am a victim of WAY to much mp5. Something I'm trying to correct. As a result I just stand around and spam chain heals in anticipation of it doing something. You read the reports exactly correct. I am overhealing simply because I can't burn mana fast enough.

Remember that WWS also shows individual jumps, so really my average chain heal is healing each person for that much per jump. So it is 1200 effective heal * however many jumps it takes. These are rank 4 and 5 casts.

 

Skyhoof

I see no advantage to using LHW to top off a raid -- even if you are devoid of paladins and their flash heal.

However, which heal to use becomes more complicated when we want to land a saving heal to prevent death. Someone has only a few hit points left and if they don't get a heal NOW, they are going to die. What do you cast? We'll assume that NS is on cooldown.

If there are multiple healers on the target, I might cast LHW. My hope is that they are going to get multiple small heals in 1.5 seconds, which will give them enough health to survive the next blow, etc. But what if you have no idea if anyone else is going to heal the target? In that case, I use Chain Heal. If they have gotten that low, something is going wrong. They are probably not the only person taking damage. By casting chain heal, I not only give them more health but those around them.

 

Shamanaut

My decision point for this is generally "How many other people are down a lot who shouldn't be". If its 3 or 4 unexpected targets getting low, I will use Chain Heal because the likeliness of another healer also blowing a fast heal on the same target is low, plus the hope that a jump will occur. If it is only 1 unexpected healing target, I will use LHW, mostly because I'm assuming there are multiple small heals inbound to that person, and odds are good my chain heal will be behind all of that and just be pure overheal.

 

Bungmeister

But that's part of the issue isn't it Shamanaut? I notice there's a huge amount of emphasis on these boards for efficiency, but my guess for many people is that you end up with like 50-90% of your mana bar still full. In effect, the water-shield buff and mana spring (and spriest if you have one in your group) has bumped shaman regen past the point of sacrificing responsiveness for efficiency. My hunch is that if you keep the 4pc T6 bonus and swap other items to haste, your HPS from CH will increase, and as a result you might even be able to squeeze 1 less healer for another DPS.

Is it beneficial or needed? With the current content, probably not although it does help quite a bit for a 2 healer ZA setup.

Regarding your previous post though, you can come up with examples for any situation. For instance, what if the "poor pally" was mid-cast to heal a "random mage" while you wind up your CH. Following the Pally's FoL, he swaps to FoL Rogue-1 who happens to receive your 2nd hit of CH healing him to full causing your Pally to 100% overheal.

I don't think such debates are very fruitful, but it all falls on the responsiveness of your healers along with the discipline of the raid....and without posting WWS (cuz my GL would kill me as there's some fail in there), I guess it suffices to say we have DPS who like competing with each other, Aussies with high ping, and very suicidal AOE. In a way, it's bad, but I'll live with it if that's what it takes to keep people entertained enough to keep coming back week after week while waiting for more content.

 

Skyhoof

I agree with your assessment of the impact of haste on LHW (which is zero). However, it brings up a broader concern I have about haste. My concern is that any time there's a "gap" in casting because you move or no one needs heal, it diminishes the returns on haste. The heal itself lands faster but you aren't able to cast more heals in a given period of time (or only a few more). I made this post a little while ago.

Here’s a link to Daidalos’ spreadsheet that I modified:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...I4gmcKYw&hl=en

Please note that I only modified the calculations on the Chain Heal tab.

When I wear my haste gear during a raid, I just don't notice much difference in my healing done. Sure, I cast faster but my total healing done does not seem to increase as much as I would expect. Now, this is during a "normal" fight. There are a few that are very haste friendly because you literally are spam casting and never move and they don't last that long (i.e. Teron Gorefiend).

 

Daidalos

I have a 2.23s CH or some such. It will go even lower when I get the cloak off Illidan and HPS will go even higher when I get the 4th pc of t6. Why stack haste? I have more than enough mana for every fight. I can pot to increase mana should somthing go wrong. I suppose I could use haste pots but with mad alchemy and combat pots so cheap I find that between the 2 I am always with enough mana.

The faster your heal lands the better. The other major benefit is being able to land more heals in the same amount of time means healing of more targets. If you usually run with 6 healers simply having to heal a large number of people that means running with 5 healers with alot of haste could do the same job (assuming mana is not an issue). The less healers the more DPS you have which makes the fighter shorter and easier on the mana. THe HPS increase along with the reaction time decrease means I feel my effectiveness as a healer has increased a great deal after stacking haste.

 

Shamanaut

Regarding the first paragraph - Yes, I agree. The buff to mp5 lately has changed the playing field entirely. That doesn't mean we should be less efficient. It just means we should be trading mp5 for other stats.

Regarding the paladin thing, Anytime that someone starts a cast WELL after I've started mine is responsible for their own overheal. That isn't my responsibility to cancel my heal because someone else has fired up a quicker heal. Is it harder to react to chain heals because of the jump not appearing as an incoming heal? Yes. But that would then result in some of that overheal that can't be removed from the game. That differs entirely from me casting a 1.5 second heal on a target down 2k health when my mods are already showing incoming heals on that target, with the explicit hope of getting my heal in first.

 

Jamegumb

Haste to heal comparisons are tough even assuming something like a 2k heal shaman.

If I compare an item that gives me 125 heal to an item that gives me 100 heal and 25 haste I have to look at the spells I cast that are benefited from heal or haste...they include:

Chain Heal
Healing Wave
Lesser Healing Wave
Earth Shield
Searing/Magma/Nova Totems
Spell Damage Spells
Shocks

For me, I'd eliminate the spell damage spells and shocks as I usually don't cast them often enough in a raid...e.g., I use flameshock to intentionally break sheep and then plead innocence by saying "shaman don't have dots."

I'd look at how often I cast each of these spells and I'd come up with a healing equivalent calculation that would include:

The percentage of time I cast each spell.
The benefit of 25 haste over 25 healing for chain heal and healing wave.
A penalty (in reduced heal) for healing wave
A penalty for reducing the healing AND threat generated by earth shield.
A penalty for reducing the dps of my searing and other applicable totems.

To complicate matters, WWS doesn't attribute ES and totems to a specific shaman.

If I'm comparing haste to crit, earth shield gets removed from the equation.

Ideally you would like to replace mp/5 gear with haste.

If you have 3 maces:
Mace A has: +450 heal and +50 haste
Mace B has: +450 heal and +10 mp5
Mace C has: +500 heal

If mana is not an issue, Mace A is always better than Mace B.
If you are clearing trash in black temple, and spamming chain heal Mace A is arguably better than Mace C.
If you are clearing trash in hyjal, and spamming chain heal while dropping fire nova totems, Mace C may be better than Mace A.
If you are in a boss fight that is threat sensitive and you are earth shielding the MT, Mace C is most likely better than Mace A.

Then you obviously have those situational boss fights where haste may be more important, especially if you are not ESing a target that benefits from additional threat.

--JG

 

Skyhoof

What raid frames or mods are you using that show the incoming heals? Will it work if a healer is not actually targeting the person they are healing (i.e. using Clique, Healbot, etc)?

I tried the mod Incoming Heal but all it showed me was how much the spell I was casting would heal (gee, thanks, I never knew my HW was good for 5K). I even had another healer install the mod thinking that perhaps we both had to use the program for it work but neither of us had any luck seeing who the other person was about to heal.

 

Jamegumb

I'm pretty sure both Grid (w/ healer layout) and Healbot show incoming heals (I use Grid).
--JG

 

Shamanaut

I'm using grid. Not sure on the backend logic, and I know it isn't 100%, but it is definitely showing some of the incoming heals on some of the targets.

 

Vurrin

I believe by default grid shows incoming heals as a green icon in the lower elft hand corner. Its not perfect, and not everyone's heals show up usually, but it allows me to yell at healers when everyone switches off the maintank after a raid aoe as well as pick targets a little better in that I can start my gheals on players who appear to not be getting heals.

 

Skyhoof

OK, so Grid definitely shows incoming heals. Can anyone who uses Healbot post with a definitive answer? Also, do you know exactly what sort of heals it fails to show as incoming? For example, is Prayer of Mending the main one it misses?

Also, with Grid, will it show an incoming heal even if I'm not targeting that person (using Clique for example)?

I currently use Xperl. It shows HoTs on the target (but not incoming heals). This alone has greatly helped our Druid healer, who screams much less now about us healing targets that he is already healing. I can only imagine what I could do if I knew who was about to get a heal. I'm hoping someone is going to post that something other than Grid also provides this utility. I just hate the way Grid looks (even though it's awesome in every other respect).

 

galzohar

If everyone target to heal player targets from ORA2 or any other addon lets you see what other healers are targeting. If a few don't target to heal though, this method isn't working. For grid I never managed to make it show incoming heals in a useful way.

Remember having 50% mana left at the end of the fight is far from having twice as much mana as you needed. If you have 12k mana, 50% is 6k. In the fight you probably used 30-50k mana or something of that magnitude, so having 50% mana left means you had 12-20% too much mana, not double. Of course you can do this more accurately to figure out exactly how much excessive mana you have and how likely you were to actually use it.

 

Bungmeister

Daidalos - That's kinda how I feel as well. I run 2400 healing unbuffed. Considering that mana isn't a issue, I can sacrifice around 100 healing and get around 150-200ish haste. Now, the view is I am perhaps "stealing other people's heals", but look at it from the raid's perspective. Coming from a guild who's overall DPS is probably considered "middle of the pack", it allows for us to perhaps drop 1 healer and grab an extra dps.

Of course, for Illidan clearing guilds, is this improvement a necessity? Probably not, but I would like to think that Sunwell will present itself healing challenges that will push all of us to be as efficient and responsive as we all can be.

Otherwise, I can just sit there and spam chain heal rank 4 blindly and needlessly because I know my spriest will keep my mana bar pinned above 95%. (And the only reason I would be there would be to mana-spring and mana-tide for the spriest who's keeping the mage's mana up)

But going back to the haste question, I think to say that I started my heal before you, it's your own fault that you're overhealing is simplistic. We don't all have the same computer, connection, ping, FPS etc. If you are on the laggier end of the spectrum, stacking haste might not be a bad idea. I would think that the total HPS of your healers should be a consistent sized pie, and we're just looking at improving people who's "slices" are too small and/or changing the number of "slices" (# of healers) completely.