Healing in MC?

[ima_nerd]

I read the Priest guide and that's what taught me how to heal in the first place so don't refer me to it :rolleyes: (excellent job on it, MongoJerry)

Basically, I've heard two strategies for healing tanks. One is to just spam FHeals all over the place, efficiency be damned, that's what rotations are for. Another is to have one person hitting the tank with FHeals to keep him alive and protect against crits while another Priest casts GHeal to actually do the healing. The second options seems better to me because it seems that the GHeal Priest could last a very long time before he needed to regen mana. Of course, if he couldn't last a whole fight, it wouldn't matter because he'd still need a backup to rotate with.

In short, I'm very confused.

My spec is going to be 31Disc/20Holy and unless that is going to absolutely suck, leave my spec be. I want to go Disc because well, Holy sucks and I'm looking forward to changes in the Disc tree moreso than I am looking forward to changes in the Holy tree. I'm going to mana/5sec gear from DM which shouldn't be too hard to get since my guild will be running me thru like crazy since I'm one of 3 Priests 45+ :P

Take your time answering, it'll be at least level 58 before I'm in MC :lol:

[MongoJerry]

Basically, I've heard two strategies for healing tanks. One is to just spam FHeals all over the place, efficiency be damned, that's what rotations are for.

As I mention in my guide, unless you have Improved Healing, the difference in mana efficiency between Flash Heal and Greater Heal is minimal due to the fact that Greater Heal has a tendency to overheal and due to the fact that the criticals on Greater Heal tend to be wasted. So if you don't have Improved Healing, then I wouldn't bother to use Greater Heal.

Another is to have one person hitting the tank with FHeals to keep him alive and protect against crits while another Priest casts GHeal to actually do the healing. The second options seems better to me because it seems that the GHeal Priest could last a very long time before he needed to regen mana. Of course, if he couldn't last a whole fight, it wouldn't matter because he'd still need a backup to rotate with.

Well, first, you're assuming only two healers. That's not a typical situation on a main tank in Molten Core, so I'm having difficulty picturing the situation. Perhaps an example would help me here. Second, if you want to have your healers split up like this, then you need to talk about how they have their mana conserve options in CTRaidAssist set. In The Core, we set our Flash Heal levels to -1300 and I personally have my Greater Heal option set to -2600 (for those cases where I'm conserving mana and use Inner Focus to cast a Greater Heal). If you set it up this way, then the Flash Healer will end up doing 90% of the healing and will have his or her mana drop like a stone. If you have them both set to -1300, then the Greater Heal healer will overheal all the time. If you have them both set to -2600, then you're letting your main tank's health drop a lot before he gets healed and therefore he or she runs the risk of having a couple of badly timed critical hits kill him or her.

If I'm low on mana, I will occationally switch to using Greater Heals if I'm in a crowd of healers healing the main tank. The idea is that I don't really want to heal, because I want to regenerate mana, but if the main tank's life drops down that far, then I do want my heal to go off, mana regeneration be damned. I suppose I could also accomplish this by changing my Flash Heal mana conserve option to -2600 on the fly, too, but I hate bringing up the CTRaidAssist options window that blocks most of the screen during a fight.

[Tal]

Since I may be called upon to heal in MC does the nature of the encounters tend to force you to flash heal most often MJ?

[Hedon]

Flash Heal is going to be THE primary spell you will be using in MC, period. Well somtimes you will want to use a Prayer of Healing, or an occasional Renew, but almost never Greater Heal. Your Manasave will cancel the spell before it takes effect as other healers will not allow to let someones health drop so low, that Greater Heal becomes effective. It's just to risky.

So you are left with two options: disable Manasave and therefore heal inefficently as you will most times greatly overheal, or leave Manasave enabled and have most of your heals canceled. In any way, you will not make the most out of your healing/mana potential.

Look at the priest: the most distinctive spells the priest has over e.g. restoration specced druids are Flash Heal and Prayer of Healing. When it comes to powerful but slow heals the restoration specced druid is about equal and concerning HoTs even better than a priest.

Raiding is basically an execercise in specialisation. You will be asked to do what you are best suited to. For priests that is flash healing and group healing through prayer of healing as well as dispelling of course.

In IFFHDS we always mix priests with druids for MT healing. So we get the strong HoTs of druíds and the fast Flash Heals of priests combined. Priests also take care of healing the ranged damage dealers, as those often require shielding (especially these fragile mages) and when they get hit, it is often through some kind of AoE so that the entire group takes damage, which makes Prayer of Healing especially useful. Rogues are often healed by restoration specced shamans, as well as priests.

Greater Heal: void of any use past Sunken Temple :P

[Icebird]

I'd like to know what people set their mana save options at. I'm beginning to suspect they're too low on my priest, leading to overhealing.

Greater Heal only seems to be useful in situations where the tanks are taking steady, predictable damage and your target isn't getting cross healed much. I've used it to keep a warrior up in a core hound pack fight, but much otherwise (except for the situation MongoJerry mentions - you've used Inner Focus and want to get the maximum bang for your buck).

Chris