Paladins and Druids to get a Lift

[MongoJerry]

I'm not saying any of these fixes would necessarily work, but IMHO and with my limited experience, I think they'd be the perfect solution to the Flash Heal vs. all other heals argument. It wouldn't do much of anything in the way of improving the Holy Tree, but at least it would round out the healing options a bit, instead of being a one-trick Healbot (you'd be a multiple-trick Healbot instead! ;)).

Priests are already multi-trick healbots as it is with Renew, Flash Heal, Shield, and Prayer of Healing. Then there's Dispell Magic, Cure Disease, and first aid bandages, too. For my part, I don't need the additional headache of having to fit Greater Heals in there, too. However, I have often thought that if Master Healer reduced the cast time of Greater Heal by a full second rather than a half a second, then that would make it and Greater Heal somewhat interesting.

I think the reason why Greater Heal has an advantage over Flash Heal (besides somewhat higher efficiency) is because of the way the new Spirit system works. This is especially noticeable in Molten Core and Raid situations.

Yeah, you're right that the new change to spirit does make Greater Heal somewhat more mana efficient in raids. We actually tried using Greater Heal on a Molten Core raid once for a couple of bosses, and I frankly would have liked to have experimented with the idea more. The trouble with using Greater Heal in a large raid setting, though, is the old mantra "Things Go Wrong" and when you're fighting a large Molten Core raid boss, there's ample time where "Things Go Wrong."

To take advantage of Greater Heal's mana efficiency, everyone would have to set their mana conserve options down to a low value -- to around 65% rather than the more normal 80-85% Flash Heal level. That's already asking your main tank's health to get pretty low. Then, one can imagine that sometime during a 15 minute fight, the main tank's life might be at 66% and then the tank might get hit by two or three critical hits in a row. With Greater Heals reducing the frequency of heals landed by more than half, it's easy to picture a point where a tank dies before a four second spell cast manages to land -- especially in situations where there are only a few healers healing the main tank because other healers are healing other warriors who are tanking side mobs or are just healing random other people in the raid party. Even when there are a large number of healers healing, though, chaos and randomness show that over a course of a long fight there will be times when most of the healers line up their heals with each other and again, at those points, a tank will be susceptible to quick poorly timed hits. With Flash Heal, the tank starts off with higher health and heals are landing more frequently, making the raid less likely to be hurt when "Things Go Wrong."