Understanding +healing

[Emmalina]

Something important to consider in with all the +heal inflation is that +heal does not affect all spells the same. Renew gets 100% of your +heal, top ranked Greater Heal gets 86%, and top ranked Flash Heal gets 43%, Circle of Healing gets 21%. Base Flash Heal already has a lower amount healed per mana than Greater Heal, and this efficiency difference will increase as you gain +heal.

In the extreme case, if you choose to only use Flash Heal, you're taking advantage of half the +heal that you'd utilize using only Greater Heal. This difference won't be so extreme in a regular situation where you use both, but keep in mind that base GH is more mana efficient than FH, and GH scales significantly better with gear.

That isn't to say that Flash Heal isn't a good spell, obviously there are many situations that require a quick FH to keep someone up, but using it as the bread-and-butter heal will chew up your mana quite a bit quicker than using GH. Additionally, using a bunch of smaller heals will leave you in the five second rule longer than using 1 or 2 larger heals, decreasing your spirit-based mana regen.

In the end everyone's got a style, and if Greater Heal is not well suited to your style, then it won't be an efficient or effective spell. All things considered though, it does provide for appreciably higher sustained healing output than FH.


WoWWiki has a bunch of numbers regarding coefficients, and you can find that and a bunch of other Priest mechanics information here:
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t23790-priest_holy_raiding_compendium_v2_wow-2_4_3_a/

There's a lot of opinion that presented as fact in terms of talents, gear choices, UI setup and such, so take that with a grain of salt.

[Shadowwolf]

I think spec weighs heavily on this tho.

As full Disc, my preferred spell of choice is Flash Heal. Rarely do I use GH, only when I know its of better value and I have time to cast it. Fights like Zul'Jin where I take dmg on every cast I use it 100% of the time to get the most "bang for my buck" since its going to hurt me 1350 each cast.

Stacking +healing and +mp5 has benefited my heal style where I very seldom go OOM unless im having to spam the spell constantly to keep people alive. 14k mana takes a while to burn through and my Flash Heal hits for about 2500, crit is 3200, meanwhile my GH only hits for 4400 or so normally, 6-7k crit, but I dont count on crits all that often as my crit % is fairly low. At around 900mp5 in raid not casting, roughly 400 casting it takes a while for me to lose mana, again, unless im spamming it constantly without a break. In terms of efficiency I can see GH is probably a better value compared to mana cost, but considering im only loosing a little less than half healing for roughly half the mana cost on a Flash Heal, its not hurting too badly. Granted on raids I mix it up but my primary cast is always Flash Heal. To me ~3s for a 4400 heal is simply too long of a wait time when I can at least get in 1/2 that in 1/2 the time. ~3s can mean a lot of dmg on a tank on a fast and hard hitting boss like Morogrim or Gruul with 8+ growths. Id imagine I could change up my healing methods more if I stacked on a fair amount of haste to lower my GH time as well as went holy for the talent reduction, tho I tried a full CoH Holy build and no offense to those who are Holy spec, I lasted all of 1 raid in SSC and changed specs back to Disc. My heal output didnt increase by all that much with the Holy build and CoH was garbage after I saw its limitation on groups. Lightwell was also LOL since it cancels the regen if the person gets dmgd, which on most raid encounters, most of the raid is going to be taking at least some damage, that and its 5 charge limit made it almost useless. My mana pool, regen, and even +healing went down also as a Holy spec because I grossly underestimated [spell=34912]Enlightenment[/spell].

The Holy tree in general has always needed work and they always seem to get close to fixing it, but never quite push it over the edge to fixed and leave many things somewhat "meh". Im probably going to stick with Disc for WotLK as well with the mana returns and damage absorption benefits within the talents (http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent=biGh0IxtrxsifRtf). The Disc build makes it a highly beneficial healing spec then where as of the moment with BC, its somewhat of a supportive healing role on raids (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxghuhgtr0qtfx).

I think with a heavy holy build GH would probably constitute the bulk of your heal casts with talents and added bonuses to it, but for Disc I dont see a high value in it as a primary heal spell due to its slow cast time since Disc misses out on the .5s reduction and the fact that with the added regen features in a Disc build the efficiency of Flash Heal seems to be almost on par with a Holy priests GH efficiency.