As I started reading the post, it reminded me of me in instances below Lv50 where I healed a lot of instances, though I wasn't specced resto or boomkin.
I did it largely because of my RDM experience. For all the non-FFXI gamers, that means Red Mage (Somewhat similar to Druid in the sense that it could do just about everything assuming you had gear for it) and more specifically,
curing parties (in WoW talk:
healing parties) and maintaining the spell Dia (similar effect as FF except it also has a dot effect) on all or most of all targets pulled.
I throw in the whole curing vs healing because I remember the first time I asked in WoW, "Am I curing the party?" and then I darn near got chewed out for not using the right lingo! Then I saw the OP's signature and it all made more sense haha.
There's a lot of differences between the two games. Sometimes playing in on what you know from another game will get you in on some lecturing or worse, an undeserved bark of orders or *** chewing.
You see, in FFXI, a Red Mage worth their salt will cast Dia on 95% of all targets. Occasionally there's other things that come up that require more attention and you find yourself casting something else instead of Dia as more or less the first spell per pull.
In World Of Warcraft things are often a lot more faster paced and that's by design. FF on most trash targets isn't going to make a whole lot of difference to anyone except the person casting in terms of using up that Global Cool Down (the cool down most every ability/spell triggers for all classes that prevents you from using another ability/spell until that cool down has cleared) and then too, the cost of mana.
And for many folks, it's not just the cost of mana for that pull that they worry about. It's also the down time between pulls waiting for casters to recover mana.
Quote:
Is Faerie fire really a waste of mana?
Personally I think a mob that dies faster is a mob that does less damage meaning that I have less healing to do. Right?
In FFXI, Dia's effect is a fixed percentage of FFXI's version of armor called defense, regardless of target.
In WoW, FF does more for physical attackers on cloth or lightly armored targets than it does on heavier armored targets and then too, it does more for physical attackers the more armor penetration they already have.
In lower levels, essentially no one has armor penetration access on their gear so the stacking effect that can be seen at higher levels can't be seen at lower levels.
Overall, WoW's Fearie Fire in lower levels is worth less than Dia 1 was worth in FFXI in lower levels, in parts because of the dot effect, and because FF's duration is often cut very short on targets that die in far under 30seconds.
Personally, I'd suggest to reserve your use of FF for the first target of a group pulled or big targets (bosses) as the healer/dps caster, and that's assuming you don't have a feral druid in the group, because if you do, they should be casting theirs. Outside of that, use it anytime it's obvious your tank isn't having a difficult time to survive and you don't have something better to cast: IE overgeared for the instance.
Edited, Jan 8th 2009 3:51pm by Torzak