Manipulating the Five Second Rule
As I have already covered what the FSR is in my initial posts, so I am going to assume that anyone reading this far in understands its mechanics.
In order to maximize your time out of the FSR, if you have any form of instant cast spell that you are planning on using in a spell rotation, you always want to cast the instant cast spell immediately after casting a timed or channeled spell. What this does is maximizes the time you spend out of the FSR by having to cast a longer timed spell, and then as that spell goes off, when you activate the instant cast spell, you enter the FSR immediately once the instant cast spell goes off.
Basically, if you cast an instant cast spell before casting a cast-time spell, it causes you to already be inside the FSR for the duration you are casting the longer spell, so you don't regen any mana from Spirit.
Examples:
A
druid is on raid healing. Someone has taken splash aoe damage. The druid will toss a down-ranked regrowth (2.5 second cast time) on them and immediately swiftmend or rejuv or lifebloom them as the regrowth cast time ends.
A priest is healing a tank. The tank takes a large spike of damage while the priest is casting a greater heal (2.5 second cast time), and as the heal lands on the tank the priest casts Prayer of Mending to buff the tank in case he takes another heavy hit. Classes that have channeled or cast-time spells want to use a down ranked version of their longest cast time spells as their main heals in order to give a decent amount of regen time, pack a heavier amount of healing, and these spells cost less then faster cast spells on average.
Priests use Greater Heal, Paladins use Holy Light if main tank healing, Druids are just OP and don't need to worry about this, unless they are having difficulty only rolling Lifebloom and Rejuv, and Shamans use Chain Heal and Healing Wave. These spells will give optimal regen time.
Shorter cast spells should only be used on squishier targets who are in need of health quickly or they will die, as these spells use more mana more quickly because we have a tendency to "spam" them.
Paladins are exempt from this because Flash of Light, if used correctly and literally spammed non -stop during certain boss fights, can offer a great buffer for other healers to work with, and if they crit decently, will regen mana for the paladin. Some paladins enjoy healing like this, others don't, so try each out and find what you like and are comfortable with.
In order to counter effects of latency/lag on your casts, I recommend getting a mod that allows your cast bar to show a latency meter on it which will tell you when you can presumably cast your next spell. Xperl has one that you can enable in your character pane cast bar, and Ecastingbar or Quartz have them as well.
I recommend Quartz out of the three.
Over HealingOver healing is one of the most confusing bits of information given to us by various healing meters, and Wow Web Stats if you use it. Initially, when WoW was still new, and healers were able to down rank their spells to bare minimum lvl 20 spells and use that as their main heal, over healing was a bad thing. It meant the healers casts were going off too late as the other healers in 40 man raids were casting, and the healer wasn't stopping their casts and conserving mana, and the heal was technically "wasted".
If this happened with all of the healers because they were stuck in a "loop" of their casts all going off at the same time, a wipe would usually occur after the healers were oom, and healers would be blamed for it. It was very important to collaborate between each healer and see when they were casting and try not to cast at the same time as them. Of course, in those days, healers would do healing rotations with healing the MT, and their was usually only one MT to heal. Things were a bit simpler, but now with the expansion, things are far different.
Raids often require two or more tanks, and with 10 mans, there are usually two or three healers present. Mechanics of certain classes have been changed to give them different ways of healing and off setting the HUGE amounts of damage that raid encounters now dish out to tanks.
Quoting Hammaerus on the Slack forums:
Here's the two major questions I always ask myself after fights:
a) Did someone die?
b) Did I run oom?
(I'm always raid healing, so for me its "someone" - if you're tank healing, just worry about the tank)
Analysis:
Result #1: a = no, b = no: good job - fight is on farm
Result #2: a = no, b = yes: good job, but work on mana efficiency next time
Result #3: a = yes, b = no: I screwed up, should have been healing more
Result #4: a = yes, b = yes: not a good sign - fight needs work
**Result #5: a = no, b = yes, but just as fight ended: perfect job, that's exactly what you want
Bottom line: if you didn't run oom, and someone / your tank died -
that's bad. Its much better to get 70% overhealing and have your target
live than to let them die.
What does this mean? If you find a pull / boss where your target
dies a lot, start spam casting your biggest / most powerful heals on
your target(s). Don't worry about mana efficiency or overhealing at
all, just SPAMCAST. If you run oom during the fight, let the other
healers know and rest a bit to get some mana back, then jump back into
the fray.
If this gives you result #2, then ok - now try backing off slightly
the next time. Then slightly more. Then slightly more. Until you reach
Result #5 (target alive, oom at the exact end of the battle). Then stick with what you're doing.
If you keep getting result #3...that's not a good thing. Overhealing
<> bad; heal target dead = bad. Ask for more help on your target,
and change your strategy until you're at least getting result #4.
If you keep getting result #4, ask for more help in healing your
target. We're a team, and if we need to re-allocate then so be it.
Bottom line - don't get caught up in WWS, Damagemeter, Recount or any other idea that states that over healing is a bad thing. There is a difference between wasting your heals when your target didn't need healing at all, and keeping heals in-bound to your target because if you didn't, they would die. It is simpler to just cancel-cast using a /stopcasting macro and offer on-demand healing to a tank then to let your heals go off when the tank was topped off, then the mob getting two lucky crushing blows right as they were at full health, and the tank losing over 60% of their health - would you rather have someone with a heal incoming at that moment, or have healers not casting and the tank falls over from the next non-crit hit?
Always keep in mind that if everyone survived or their were minimal deaths and the encounter was finished, people were rezzed and loot was given out - then you did your job and you should be happy with that, over healing or not. You don't HAVE to keep everyone topped off, but you can at least say you kept them alive and downed the boss! =)
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Spell Haste
Copied directly from a thread about spell haste on plusheal.com. ( Be warned, this is coming from the view point of someone in a tier 6 raiding guild, so not all of this will apply to people still gearing up healers for tier 4 and 5 content.)
In this thread I'm going to outline the value
of spell haste and give you guys quick numbers on how much haste it
takes to get to certain landmarks for healing.
Currently spell
haste is at a value, determined by Blizzard and their gems, of 10 spell
haste = 22 healing. Quickly recap how gems are worth (only listing
healing ones).
Red - 22 Healing (all)
Blue - 10 Spirit (Druid,Priest), 4 mp5 (Shaman,Pally), 15 Stamina (not needed)
Yellow - 10 Haste (all), 10 Int (Pally), 10 Spell Crit (Pally)
So in essence it is as follows:
22 healing = 10 Spirit/Int/Haste/Crit = 4 mp5
Giving us all the half gems:
11 healing = 5 Spirit/Int/Haste/Crit = 2 mp5
So
Blizz is saying, we think 10 spell haste is = 22 healing etc. etc. But
in reality we get a lot more benefit out of haste, a lot.
Please correct me if I am wrong, I know what I know for priests but for you other three classes I still have learning to do.
Druids - Healing is the most important by far, followed by haste (to a cap for an extra global cooldown), then regen.
Priests - Need a great mixture of haste and regen in the form of spirit, followed by haste.
Shaman - Need a mixture of haste, healing, and regen. Are all three equal? Or do you guys need one more than the other?
Paladins - A mixture of haste, healing, crit. Is regen needed when you have high enough crit?
I
have come up with a rubric (guideline) for how I gem my gear and so far
it is working great. Red (11 healing 5 spirit), Blue (10 Spirit),
Yellow (10 Haste). I follow this exactly and currently I am still
finding I am a bit low on regen, but that is substituted with
consumables so I really only want more haste.
It is different
with each class of course because for priests we get very little
benefit from +healing to our main spells (CoH and PoM), after that we
get full benefit on greater heal, and partial on binding/flash.
Shaman,
you guys see great benefits from healing and haste on chain heal. I
think that once you hit a healing and regen cap, the only thing to do
is go haste. It will significantly increase your HPS.
Druids,
you guys should try to obtain the haste to get that extra GCD in your
cycle. Acquire the haste pieces but also some fights you won't need it
so make sure to be socketing stuff with full 22 healing.
Pallys,
again haste will increase your HPS significantly and since that is what
we are concerned with nearing the last few fights on sunwell that is
what we need to work on.
Spell haste - FROM ELITIST JERKS FORUMS
Formerly a worthless
stat, haste serves a purpose now that it reduces the GCD. It does this
using the same formula that it reduces spellcasts with, meaning your
GCD will be: 2355 / ( H + 1570 ), where H is your haste rating. There
are two primary uses of haste: first, to attempt to stack haste high
enough to achieve a 5 GCD cycle, as opposed to the normal 4 GCD cycle
(see the section on "Rolling Lifebloom" if you don't know what this
means). This allows for some interesting 5 GCD cycles, for example see
the "Healing Strategies" section and look for the "hasted" multiple
tank cycles. If you are interested in pulling off a 5 GCD hasted cycle,
you will need a theoretical minimum of 113 spell haste in order to get
a 1.4 second GCD. It is extremely likely that you will need more than
this in a real-world situation due to latency effects, and possibly
significantly more. Druids later in this thread have reported success
in the 250-280 haste range.
The second use of haste is to allow
us generally deliver healing more quickly by speeding up the GCD. Even
if you do not have enough haste to achieve a 5 GCD cycle, a moderate
amount of haste will improve the speed of the rejuvenation+swiftmend
combo, allow you to deliver healing to a tank in crisis faster, and
allow you to spread HoTs around the raid faster. If you intend to use
haste in this fashion, it can be very useful when you are splitting
your attention between a single tank and the raid. For this reason I
believe haste is a useful stat to have on a generalist healing set.