An interesting and well thought out question from an Egotistical Reader - it’s one with a straightforward answer, but has a lot of layers.

The perfect question, in my mind, since I can ramble about the answer even though it’s easy.

Just a quickie.

I was wondering if flash heal 1 is an option to consider when not stressed healing but know there may be spike damage. With good healing gear and an appropriate build my understanding is as follows.

1) With the 5 second rule, most of my mana regen will be from build and equipment, MP5 and spirit regen while casting.
2) Dosent matter what rank used the equipment heal bonus is 100%, not taht rank one you get 10% while rank 10 you get 100%.
3) My renew is ticking away where it can
4) Frizbee is on cooldown.
5) Ive got bonus healing from gear of over 1500
6) Im not needing to be stopcasting Greatheal, or think i dont.

So i have a wee space of a second or so. Do I twiddle my thumbs, inspect my nails.

An option im considering is popping flash heal one out there on someone who can benefit from a HP top-up.

For not a lot of mana im going to heal them a nats bum plus my healing bonus, so 1500+ and a bit for someone well healing geared, for the same nats bum of mana. What are your views on this, is it worth trying or have i missed the obvious and am setting myself up for a fall?

An exampe of where i think it might be worth trying is curator if im healing the dps bods, renew and frizbee would be my mainstay and often the remaining likely healing needed will be small so if i have a gap would flash heal 1 be a go?

Thanks in advance
Bonesoul

Answer :

Grab your chalk and go stand up next to the chalkboard, and write this down 100 times.

Flash Heal should only be used if the target needs a heal RIGHTNOW.
Flash Heal should only be used if the target needs a heal RIGHTNOW.
Flash Heal should only be used if the target needs a heal RIGHTNOW.

Flash heal is a small, expensive, quick heal.

If you are a Raid Healer and you are healing in a situation where many people take a large amount of damage - where you have five people sitting at half health, and another shot could kill them - then flash heal. Whether or not you downrank your flash heal is your call - I’ll discuss downranking in just a moment.

If you are dealing with a more leisurely situation, where people need heals, but not necessarily RIGHT THIS SECOND (OMG), then use Greater Heal.

My normal Raid Healing spell is a downranked Greater Heal. Sure, it takes a little bit longer to cast, but it’s much more mana efficient than a flash heal would be.

Remember the rules of the Five Second Rule - you only fall into the five second rule AFTER you spend mana.

If you’re chain casting a flash heal, then you’re always in the Five Second Rule.

The extra time it takes to cast a Greater Heal as opposed to the Flash Heal doesn’t matter in this situation - you are still outside the FSR during your cast. Add to that the fact that you probably just topped off your target - they aren’t likely to need another heal for a while, and so you have more time to spend outside the FSR until you need to cast again.

You spent less mana per point of healing, and are casting less often.

You don’t want to overheal hideously, of course - that’s where downranking comes in. A downranked greater heal will have the same cast time, but will heal for less and cost less mana. You have tailored that heal for your target (the not-insanely-stamina’d-non-tanks) and saved mana while doing it.

In a perfect world, you would only heal as much as you have to, and spend as little mana doing it as you need to.

If someone only needs the amount of healing given by a Rank 1 Flash Heal, then I’m probably not healing them. They can wait till they need a real heal. It irritates me, leaving them with a sliver of health missing (like having a loose tooth that you keep twiddling with even though you know you should leave it alone) but if it takes two downranked Flash Heals to bring them up, then a downranked greater heal would have done the job in less time with less mana spent.

Also, I think there’s a misconception in the letter - number two. The bonus that a spell gets from +heal is not always 100%, nor is it always the same percentage regardless of which rank is used.

According to Lux Et Umbra, both of those assumptions are incorrect. If you look at the “coefficient” section of the guide, it shows you what percentage of your +heal gets applied to the highest rank of each spell. Beyond that, the “stats” section shows you the two ways that Blizzard penalizes healers for downranking. Unfortunately, the second way seems to be cut off or incomplete, but the gist of it is definitely that there ARE penalties for downranking past a certain point. They are not insurmountable penalties, and not nearly as severe as they could be, but you definitely don’t get 100% of your +heal added to every spell. And even if you know that your Flash Heal only gets 42.9% of your plus healing, not every rank of Flash Heal is going to get that much. Feel free to read the guide if you’re interested in more mathly things. I’ll do generalities with cheerfulness and moderate skill - I leave the number crunching for the experts.

So, why did I like this question so much, despite the fact that I totally picked it apart and then set fire to the pieces?

Because it was a SMART question. If downranking is good, why not downrank this? Why not downrank always? It’s a logical assumption, and it’s certainly not an uncommon one. It’s difficult to measure and compare healing, and people have to ask smart questions to come up with clever new ways to be a good healer.

I ramble a lot, so here are my points when it comes to the use of flash heal and downranking :

1) Flash Heal is inefficient enough that you should only use it if you are patching up the raid from frequent AOE damage and you’ll start losing people if they don’t get heals as quickly as possible.

2) I personally do not have a downranked Flash Heal. The way I figure it, if the situation is dire enough for someone to need a Flash Heal, then they need as much heal as I can cram into that cast time. This is my personal choice, and I’ve yet to find logic that convinced me otherwise.

3) For normal patchy healing, I will use a downranked Greater Heal.

4) For Tank healing, I almost always use fully ranked Greater Heal.

5) If my tank is not geared as well as I am, I will downrank my primary heal for him. I do this because otherwise I’ll be overhealing like mad, it will take longer for him to need the entirety of the heal I can cast, meaning spike damage will be much more disastrous, and I can save mana doing it.

6) Mana Efficiency is one of my favorite buzzwords, but it means less than nothing if you are sacrificing the lives of your raiders to accomplish it. “Hey guys, I finished this fight with a full mana bar!” is a SHAMEFUL thing to say if you’ve got a pack of dead raiders littering the ground around your feet.

Now, aaaaaaallllll of that being said, the original email was more asking about the viability of using a downranked Flash Heal to pick up random bits of the raid when things weren’t hectic, just as a “hey, they could use a bit of a top off” situation. Most of that wasn’t really targeted at the emailer - it was just random soapboxing.

Although the emailed situation is not quite the dire situation of someone using Flash Heal exclusively to raid heal, the reasons for not doing that match the reasons for not doing this.

If I’m worried about soon-to-be-incoming damage, and someone doesn’t need a full heal, I’ll toss a Renew out there. The renew patches the damage they’ve taken, and will help smooth out the damage that they are about to receive. Best of all, it does it while I’m not looking, so if someone else needs a big heal, I know that StabbityDeath the rogue will be fine because he’s got my HoT on him.

Despite the threat of one of my more numerologically-nuanced fellow priest bloggers whipping out a calculator and providing colorful graphs to prove just how wrong I am…I do not think that it’s a good idea to use a rank 1 Flash Heal to clean up minimal raid damage. The mana inefficiency is bad, that is time you could spend in the FSR, Flash Heal should be kept behind an “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” wall, and downranking is used more to boost the efficiency of your HEALS than to boost the efficiency of your MANA (the latter being a handy side effect of the former).

So, to answer your question, in my opinion, you should either leave them alone, use a downranked greater heal, or renew, depending on the situation. =]

You get bonus points for your knowledge of renew, frisbee, and FSR. <3

Also, don’t forget to send your mana pet in during Evocation on Curator, you cannot SPEND the mana returned quickly enough.

Also the second, you shouldn’t need to cancel heal if you’re assigned to cleaning up raid damage - it’s a tactic used more on those assigned to tank healing of some sort.

And I’ll return to my Raid Healing series when you people stop sending in such good emails.

Seriously. Not my fault at all. This is all. Your. Fault.

Not feeling very good today, so I shall continue with my firmly established laziness of giving Ego MailDumps instead of long, thought-out posts.

=]

I have a quick question for you re: holy priestage, and you have probably had the answer ready since reading the subject line, but there we go.

Quite simply, aside from the obvious aesthetic and sheer bouncy-fun bonus points (á la Arcane Explosion), does Holy Nova really have much going for it? It sounded good at the time, when I got to it in the tree, but now i’m wondering if I’d be a fair bit better off reassigning that talent point. And rather than sift through sites and sites trying to get a simple (and non-flamey) answer, i’d email someone whose writing and priestliness have both impressed me thus far, ever since I started my priest and my girlfriend linked me your blog. There, obligatory flattery over as well

Sorry if you are uber busy, and thanks for your time, and for your wondrous bloggyness. Oh - and what’s the gentle snowflakes reference?

Cheers,
-Jon

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Our Raiding Officer has joined the bandwagon (even going so far as to create an “Egotistical Relief Fund” board on our forums) and has graciously contributed today’s post!

Many thanks, even if I didn’t realize it was an Ego post because I thought it was a regular raiding reminder and thus am posting this HOURS too late and am thus a really horrible person because it was his first post for me ever and I should be giving him a better introduction than this.

*gasps for breath*

*runs and hides*

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I was catching up on my blogs this morning (haven’t had time to since last Tuesday, I think, so I was waaaaay behind), and I saw a post by Big Bear Butt Blogger reminding Blizzard to add FUN, not just content.

I fired up my comment, and then decided I’d do a little post on it instead.

To set the scene, “fun” things are those that don’t impact progression, have nothing to do with balancing or unbalancing classes, and really have no purpose beyond looking cool. BBB’s examples ranged from the most commonly anticipated feature in the upcoming expansion (if you guessed instances, you’d be wrong…it was HAIRSTYLES) to the removal of the ghost wolf from being tameable by hunters without giving some kind of replacement.

Ghost wolves may break lore, but in truth, it was just another skin for a common wolf model. How much does it take to add another skin? Same wolf, same capabilities, no better or worse than other hunter pets….just something different.

My Suggestions :

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I’ve been getting some really nice emails lately, that have been sort of wasting away in my inbox.

But tomorrow I have a dentist appointment, and my first class this semester dropped a doozy of a hardware requirement on me, so I need a gimme post for tomorrow. This counts as Thursday’s post, since I probably won’t be able to post it.

Gonna drop both emails here, you guys are the most knowledgeable and talkative group of commenters a blog could ever hope for, so maybe you’ll have the answers I couldn’t find. =]

Two great questions ahead, folks. Strap on your seatbelts.

I have two more lined up and rotting in my inbox that I may post on Friday out of a sense of guilt for not actually doing a post this week.

<.<

>.>

Depends on how intensive my Ruby on Rails homework is. =]

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Guest Blogger today, as the title indicates. I demand more EgoTank!! (Seriously, folks, I’m trying to entice him to be a co-blogger. I’ve even offered to change the name of the blog, or send him care packages with cookies. The man’s a stone.)

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A simple phrase, it implies that one should strive to be worthy of the rewards, and the rewards will come as a result. First deserve, then desire. The entire PVE boss/loot structure is built around this, in that if you can’t kill the boss, you don’t get shit. You don’t get the gear first and promise to get good enough to kill the boss later.

The most common debate among all guilds at any level of raiding is “How do we distribute loot?”. Because no two people can really agree on the definition of “fair”, and if you beat a dead horse hard enough, the violent twitching may impart a morbid mockery of life to the desiccated husk. My guild’s leadership is currently making that bitch dance the Charleston.

What’s “fair”? How do you decide which healer gets that nice healing mace? Which tank should get dibs on that sweet armor? Which DPSer would get the most mileage out of that insane trinket? Who should the tier whatever token go to first? DKP? Zero-sum? EP/GP? Loot council?? /random???

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A continuation of the Raid Healing Roles series. Previously, I introduced the idea that healing in a raid is different than healing in a regular instance. I also discussed some of the core philosophies of a Tank Healer, Raid Healer, Backup Healer, and Hybrid Healer as well as some tips for filling those roles as a priest.

Role Recap
A quick summary of the different roles :

• Tank Healer - Heals the main tank, the person assigned to take the controllable damage in a fight.
• Raid Healer - Heals the rest of the raid, mitigating the unexpected and/or uncontrollable damage in a fight.
• Backup Healer - Assists the Tank (or Raid) Healer with their job.
• Hybrid Healer - Primarily does dps but can be expected to assist with emergency heals on rare occasions.

Healing Classes
Alrighty, let’s take a look at the healing classes available, shall we?

• Priest - Jack of all trades. Short heals, long heals, instant heals, hots, frisbees. I AM BATMAN.
• Druid - In tree form, CANNOT CAST LONG HEALS. It sucks, but dem’s da rulez. Master of HoTs, ruling over the kingdom of Gradual Heals with an ironwood fist. I am so envious of Lifebloom I could spit acorns.
• Paladin - Undisputed king of Constant, Steady heals, with an X-Files-Worthy inability to run out of mana that makes me want to kick them in the back of the shins when they’re not looking.
• Shaman - If Blizzard gave them HoTs, they’d be cackling madly as they pushed Priests off of their already precarious position as primary healers in WoW. If there is something a shaman can’t heal, I haven’t seen it, and if you want to argue the point, I know someone who will be tapping briskly at your doorstep just before you feel a hoof inserted somewhere unpleasant.

Traditional Role Assignments
The “traditional” healing assignments for the classes are based on the way things are usually done. We’ll cover those first, since you can’t explain how something is different from the norm without covering what is “normal” first.

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Guest post today from Shatter, kicking off my Tuesday hiatus for classes starting this semester.

From here till finals, every Tuesday post will either be done by my friends taking pity on me, or won’t happen at all. Many many thanks to Shatter for kicking this off for me, he pulled me out of a tough spot since I didn’t have time to write one today.

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If you are an officer in any guild, there will come a time when you are forced to have “The Talk” with someone. It is a very difficult thing to decide who becomes the person who has “The Talk” with the member of your group that needs it or even, how to approach the topic at all. Some people simply cannot take criticism, and to receive it akin to a deathblow. Some people simply cannot take a “you could improve” no matter how soft you cushion the blow, and then there are those who simply will not unless you smash them in the face with your concerns.

So what is the magical way to deal with a concern in the guild?

In short, there isn’t one.

Tact is perhaps the safest route to take, but it is one that we must use with caution. As said, if we over inflate how tactful we are, then it can lead to the discussion seeming like cotton candy, while if we use too little we come off as a brazen bastard. For all intents and purposes, we will assume that I most often act like a brazen bastard. If a problem is there, I move to correct it directly. No frills, no fancy wording. “1+1 = 2″. Get it? Got it? Good!

But even I know when that isn’t going to work. Paper thin-skin is a very dangerous thing to deal with, especially when the most someone has to do to get away from a situation in WoW is simply typing /gquit. From a raiding perspective, this is most often the risk run when dealing with someone’s playing ability. Player Ability is far more important than Player Gear, as the latter can be enhanced by simply sitting on /follow.

The Golden Rules that I have, if they me called that, are few and far between. But if you wish to at the very least exonerate yourself of being blamed for being too blunt, then attempt the following things:

1. State that they are a valued member of the team. – This instantly lets them know that you are not simply picking at them; you are attempting to fine tune, not replace an instrument that is in your choir.

2. Be confident in what you’re saying; assertive, not aggressive - More than likely, the person is going to try to bitch their way out of it, first. Simply remind them that if you did not care you would not be having this conversation at all. You want them to do better, for both themselves and the group.

3. Keep reminding them this is a group effort. – One of the most important things to do is remind your player that they are helping everyone. This isn’t about them not being bad, this is about them not being as good as they could be.

4. Thank them for all they’ve done. – Carrot and the stick. Remind them when all is said and done, that you do realize how much they have worked (if they have). Tell them that if they need help, you would be glad to do it. You’re opening avenues here, not closing them.

Granted, this list is for someone who is pretty open to change. If the person becomes hostile instantly, smack them in the mouth and tell them to sit the hell down. While this may seem a bit brash, it works at times. Stereotypical as it may seem, more often than not if you are dealing with a TANK or MELEE DPS, they generally have more of a competitive nature that anything less than full assertiveness will not break through. Remind them of your position if things get heated.

But the most important thing is making sure that your 25-Man Team doesn’t become a 24-man by chasing a member off. It’s very difficult to do, but cutting off one’s nose to spite their face is never the best option. So long as you can find a way to channel your efforts into something positive, hopefully the problematic member of the guild will see there is more at stake than their own ego and come around to see things your way.

If not, well. Somethings were simply not meant to be.

A continuation of the Raid Healing Roles series. Previously, I introduced the idea that healing in a raid is different than healing in a regular instance. I also discussed some of the core philosophies of a Tank Healer, Raid Healer, and Backup Healer as well as some tips for filling those roles as a priest.

Hybrid Healers
The hybrid healer should be treated as a Big Red Button. The sincere hope is that they are, 99% of the time, allowed to focus on dps. Whether they are a boomkin, an elemental shaman, a shadow priest…pick your favorite hybrid, it really doesn’t matter.

Most of the time, they should be another dpser. If you need them to heal more than 40% of the time, then you need another healer, not a hybrid. Either that, or you don’t get the right to judge them on their dps, since their spec and gearing is probably nonstandard.

So what is a “Hybrid Healer”?

A Hybrid Healer is someone who primarily fills another role, but is able to pick up healing if something goes terribly wrong. They are not expected to have the healing power of a dedicated healer, but they can very easily mean the difference between a successful boss kill and a wipe.

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