08-09-2005, 06:07 PM
MongoJerry,Aug 9 2005, 06:54 AM Wrote:You're probably thinking of my mini-guide to healing that's posted in the strategy forums, but I never said that greater heal would be used for most of my healing. I said that I could see maybe trying to make it about half my healing if things worked out right. But that statement assumed an investment in Improved Healing, which reduces the mana cost of Greater Heal by 15%. But, since I play on a PvP server and do a lot of PvP, I've had to abandon that idea and switch to a hybrid build. Silence and Mind Flay are just too important to give up in PvP, and without Improved Healing, there's no benefit to casting Greater Heal over Flash Heal. One might think that there's still a slight mana cost benefit to Greater Heal, but in reality overhealing and the inability to take advantage of critical heals reduces the mana cost savings significantly. I don't remember the last time I used Greater Heal. It's been a while.
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So I'll chime in with my lower level priest experience ;) All of this is 5 man (not raid) but I wanted to comment on the relative gimpiness of Holy due to its tendency to boost Greater Heal.
I use Greater Heal most of the time (actually it's just plain Heal right now, but the point is the long cast big heal). I find it to be more mana efficient (even though I'm currently fully Shadow specced at level 38) principally because of the regen I can get by casting less frequently. With no +crit gear and no Holy Spec I rarely critically heal anyway so I don't overheal much.
However, "most of the time" is when things are very controlled. Main tank is taking all the damage at a rate I can predict, etc. In this situation, it is highly unlikely that my mana efficiency matters one whit. When the stuff hits the fan, I am using flash heal and renew, and PW:S. Then mana efficiency is really needed (and right now I don't have it with the Shadow tree). I don't see the tendency to use Flash changing significantly no matter what spec I might have.
Once I've had a little fun toying with Shadowform, my plan is to respec to a tri spec, mostly for mana efficiency. I haven't soloed signficantly since level 23 (one of the benefits of being a priest on Terenas with a decent sized group of similarly leveled lurkers) so my shadow spec is kind of silly -- more than anything it is nice for when trying to run instances shorthanded for the challenge.
Currently my plan is to go something like 21 disc/22 shadow/8 holy, but I keep changing my mind. I'm mulling several specs, but I am rarely tempted to go further than 10 points into Holy, as I don't see the sheer usefulness of Flash Heal going away at any level. Inner Focus is hard to ignore.
When things get ugly I use flash heal, and so most of the Holy tree is unattractive when compared to Shadow and Discipline. And I'm pretty much a pure PvE grouping priest even if my current spec doesn't show it.