The Priest Healing Mana Efficiency ThreadFollow

I posted this to my guild forum, thought I could get some good ideas here as well. Go!

With the changes to downranking, potion use, and mana costs, mana management while healing is more important than ever. I thought we could have a thread where we all post our tips and tricks for good mana management. Here are the ones I know, please add!

1. Use your Inner Focus, Trinkets, and Shadowfiend early and often. With boss fights being what they are now, it seems doubtful we'll see a fight where you can use your Shadowfiend twice any time soon, but it still makes sense to pop these tools early in the fight, in case you can use them again. Obviously, don't use your Shadowfiend until your mana's gotten low enough for him to fill you up.

2. Use Inner Focus wisely to get out of the five second rule. Don't waste it on a low mana spell. If you're going to use it with a Gheal, count to 2 first if you have the time. Use it for the next spell after a Holy Concentration proc for maximum time outside the FSR.

3. Cancel Cast. When you aren't healing other party members, keep a Greater Heal in the pipeline at all times, but use stopcast or another interrupt to make sure you only land it on the tank when s/he needs it. This may help you get a tick outside the five second rule.

4. Flash Heal is your new downranked Gheal. Personally, I didn't use it much before, because the mana/healing ratio was poor. But now it's better than a big mana Gheal that you don't need, probably even with Serendipity. Of course, for Disc priests, Flash Heal has become important anyway.

They may have eliminated chain potting, but you still do get one pot. Use it.

Hymn of Hope - this gives mana to you and your party. Find a time when people are good on health and use it. If the fight goes long enough, use it again.

It depends on what you like I think; I prefer doing my maths on the spot, so I know they apply right then with those buffs and this gear. The basics remain the same as long as I don't respec though.



I agree with that too. Ofcourse the content you're in matters quite a bit here, but Inner Focus+Prayer of Healing is lovely. The two combined should give you about 45% crit chance per target. That alone is nice enough, but you're bound to get a proc (Surge of Light, Holy Concentration, Divine Aegis) from it as well.

Recount will show you how much healing is done and how much damage is taken in battle.
Drdamage is something every player should have, and is somethig completely different. It automatically calculates damage (or healing) for all abilities, it includes any modifiers (auras, procs, talents, etc), and then shows you the final amount on the icon. Further, you can see your coefficients, chance to hit, and all that in a tool-tip (you can choose how detailed tool-tips should be). So, it shows you exactly what you need to heal efficiently, and you can even choose to display how many casts you have until out-of-mana.
There is not much of a difference in mana efficiency, between Flash Heal and Greater Heal if you are not using any modifiers for casting time or mana reduction. I dont spec Holy, so that's about the most I can say for those two spells.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/dr-damage.aspx

Edited, Nov 26th 2008 11:23pm by sederix

Hmm.
I know I'm a bit of a newbie. But following the concept of Triage has always served me well healing in other MMOs.

Triage is a medical term, for sorting out patients based on the seriousness of their symptoms to try to make sure limited resources are spent to save the most lives during an emergency. Likely, because the concept is so common sense, everyone's naturally applying this to some extent or another already. Prioritizing the middle-ground seems the most intuitive; Red (Needs immediate attention or will not make it- Tank after AOE still holding hate), Yellow (Hurt, but not in as much danger as the red - High Threat DPS after AOE), and Green (Hurt, but not in danger - Other group members caught in AOE). How you handle that is largely up to you, But I'd hazard a guess that Shielding the Red and some kind of AOE heal that tries to hit more Yellows than Greens is probably pretty common.

It's in calling the Black and Whites that people might find some uncommon mana efficiency.
Calling the middleground colors is about prioritizing how you heal, calling the white and black extremes is about choosing not to heal. The Whites are those with only a scratch, the Blacks are those who will not make it.

For the most part it's pretty intuitive to call Whites in the micro-sense of a singular battle. We prioritize healing based on need, and the person with only a scratch isn't as needy as the tank being hammered. I think that common sense concept can be extended into the macro-sense of an entire instance as well. Since people regenerate their health at a decent clip between battles, you might not want to reflexively renew that one DPS with about 1/4th of his health gone. This is if your finding yourself strapped for mana and especially if your already under the 5 second rule. Yes, it's nice to top people off, it gives people a certain degree of confidence to know your watching their back. But he's walking wounded, and if it comes to choosing between giving him psychological assurances that you'll be there to actually being able to do so: it's probably best to let him walk it off.

Calling the Blacks is something I haven't yet experienced a challenging enough instance to give a proper description of. (And who knows? Maybe there isn't one in this game). So far, only the players who are overzealous and accident prone tend to be Blacks, largely because they've wandered off from the rest of the group and they're too far away to be helped anyway. In theory, however, this is the DPS who for some reason or another gets pounded during a very challenging fight. It's not your everyday DPS grabbing aggro, the situation requires a rapidly dwindling and already low mana pool and imminent danger. You have to make the choice between trying to save (perhaps futilely) one of many DPS or having enough mana to keep up the Main Tank for the rest of the fight.
It's Mana Efficiency, in a split-second Ruthless Efficiency kind of way.



Edited, Nov 27th 2008 3:54pm by Zemzelette

I went back to shadow for leveling and I heal as shadow as well. I went far enough into the disc tree to pick up meditation, the rest into shadow. I've gotten much better at managing my cooldowns now since shadow is difficult to heal in. I now use renew, flash heal, and PoM. I also try to put up VE and my two insta dots for a bit of extra healing.

So far I haven't had any real mana issues, but I suppose I'll be switching specs back and forth as I get higher in levels. Then back to holy for raiding.

Oh, I'll admit wholeheartedly; I have absolutely 0 experience with the high man-count Raids WOW is known for. My End-Game experiences are from another MMO completely, so while I feel pretty comfortable speaking in fundamental abstracts, I'd never get specific about something I have no experience of. I'm sorry, I should have probably been more clear about that.

I agree, certain positions in the party are of more importance to the whole, and should accordingly get a higher priority. My introduction was a bit long-winded, but really the advice wasn't about the prioritizing itself. The meat and bones of what I was trying to say was: Make the Judgment Call of not Healing.

You're right insomuch that the method that leads to this action is prioritizing, but the effect is Mana Efficiency in the sense of the battle as a whole. And so I think it's relevant to the thread. How applicable to each facet of Endgame is something I don't know. I was hoping the advice was general enough to be generally useful.

Edited, Dec 4th 2008 9:08pm by Zemzelette