Over at the PlusHeal forums, a poster I’ve come to respect very much both for her knowledge and her eloquence is Beneficence. She started a most interesting thread in the Priest Forum, stating the following:
A combination of improved efficiency and more consistency on flash heal, higher server latencies post-wrath and better reaction times have really lead me towards Flash Heal much more. Despite blizzard’s attempts to herd us back into religious mana conservation, the regen scheme is still something you can ‘graduate’ (as they put it) out of on many fights, so greater heal’s added efficiency isn’t so crucial.
She went on to point out that on her latest Naxxramas run, only three percent of her total effective healing was from Greater Heal (GH).
I popped into game to look at my Recount stats for last night’s Guild-first clear of the Military Quarter (Heroic). We had a lot of wipes on Instructor Razuvious and even more on The Four Horsemen (Gothik the Harvester was a one-shot; yay!).
Because I ended up being the main healer for one of the understudies on Razuvious, I had a much higher overall use of Greater Heal, with 17.8 percent of my total effective healing. However, on Four Horsemen, GH was only 2.8 percent of my total effective healing, which is much more typical of my healing output these days. In fact, for our final successful attempt on Four Horsemen, my spell use, in descending order, was Circle of Healing (CoH), Flash Heal (FH), Prayer of Mending (PoM), Renew, and Greater Heal.1
Here is my take on Greater Heal today, as I posted in the PlusHeal thread.2
As a Holy Priest, pre-3.0, GH was my #1 spell, by a wide margin. Given my mana pool, spirit, Mp5 and gear, I could pretty much spam GH nonstop and not be concerned about going OOM.
Post-3.0, mana management is a much larger concern; still, I rarely find myself unable to cast, unless I’ve been battle rezzed and Innervate isn’t available, or I’ve gotten careless/panicky in the heat of unexpected things happening in a fight. However, given Glyphs, the greater efficiency of Flash Heal (compared to pre-3.0), and the nature of fights, the precedence of spells is generally something similar to PoM, Renew, Flash, PoH, CoH, Binding, Greater. (Could be I’ve simply become a better healer, too.)
Too often, my GH cast is a tenth of a second (or less) too late; I’ve also become much more used to casting Guardian Spirit, Flash, Greater. A well-placed Lightwell doesn’t hurt a thing, either.
Unquestionably, GH remains much more efficient than FH, all other things being equal. However, all things are not equal, including (and especially) cast time: I can frequently cast three successive Flash Heals (with Surge of Light) in less time than it takes for a single Greater Heal (no, I’m not especially geared for Haste at the moment).
Is Greater Heal dead? No. However, it’s not a one-size-fits-all; rather, like every other spell we have now, it’s much more a situational heal than it used to be.
What are you seeing with respect to your own use of Greater Heal? More, less, about the same? And does it vary between Disc and Holy? (After all, with Borrowed Time, Disc Priests can really cut the cast time on GH.) Let me know in the comments your views on this still-powerful spell.
- I confess to spamming the hell out of CoH in that fight; it’s going to be interesting when there’s a 6-second cooldown on it. On the other hand, we should have the fight down better, and Meteor damage shouldn’t be so severe. ↩
- As someone presciently pointed out in the post above mine in the thread, “…greater heals will have a renaissance in Ulduar.” ↩
Heya! I like that this discussion is being turned into a blog post. Like many people, I find it odd that Gheal is being used so infrequently. I grew up on stopcasting Gheals and topping off with Renew, so the new healing took a while to get used to.
As a Disc priest, I limit the use of my Gheal to two situations. First, sometimes a DPSer will have taken a buttload of damage but be in no danger of taking any more (this happens most in 5-player content). I’ll often let them sit for a while until I’m happy with my other charges and then wind up a Gheal, knowing that I can make up the time spent on that DPSer with a Penance for someone else taking some heat.
Second, Gheal is part of the ultimate HPS combo. If my tank drops to some obscenely low level (like Maexxena, Patch, etc.), then my PW:S+PI>Penance>Gheal>PoM will output ~30K healing in less than 5 seconds. Clearly those situations don’t happen often, but taking a tank from dead to full that quickly produces a warm and fuzzy feeling.
[...] Is Greater Heal Dead? (Kestrel) [...]
Hi Juzaba! Thanks for stopping by.
Comments like yours, with practical tips for healing, are precisely why I blogged this issue. (Well, also to maybe drive more people to PlusHeal!) That is a great healing combo for a Disc Priest. Since I have 2 or 3 in our raid group, that should be a great help to me when we discuss how to recover a tank.
I tend to use GH alot in nax25 when healing the tank, and special fights where alot of predictable spikedamage is a fact. And when i get a free spell from clearcast or inner focus i always tend to stopcast GH, simply because i like to think that everything else is waste
) i never really uses great heal anymore, it has slightly less punch as disc then holy, i use most of the haste procs on penance wich in many ways acts as a new gh for me. i dont use PI on myself, i dont feel i ever need it really. if i need it i always feel that it would be to late to cast it now.
However when i’m allowed to play as disc priest (and that being more often after patch
With the nerf to CoH i belive more holy priest will use GH more often, but however mana issues isn’t really issues if you grown up with stopcasting GH. On last HC patchwerk (as holy) with guild, the druid was innervating themselfs, the shaman got oom when patchwerk had 10% left (after getting a innervate) resulting in one of the OT’s dropping, however i had 45% mana left (with mostly disc orriented gear, so 1k int about 500spirit) and no problem whatsoever with holding my OT up with the help of hot’s from a druid, and thats without using shadowfiend.
Where i’m going with that? GH is a real powerhouse when a holypriest want to get the gas strech out for as long time as posible and still always have a big heal in the pipe so if the tank get’s a nasty hit you can just let it through and save the day
And saving the day is what its all about!
[...] An excellent thread on Plus Heal has caught my attention and it’s a topic that’s also been picked up by Kestrel. [...]
Ah, greater heal we barely knew you. Exellent thread, keep them coming.