Resto -- Healing Touch

[AngryLakitu]

Are you using it? Does it do things?

After two (three? four?) expansions of glyph-ed Regrowth pretty much nullifying Healing Touch, I'm continuing to just Regrowth spam in-place of using Healing Touch. Not really having mana problems, but there are times I do wish I had some larger heals -- especially with Nature's Swiftness gone.

Does Healing Touch fit in your rotation or is it still a dust collector? Interested in some takes so I can gauge what my use case might be.

[Hypasonic]

I used to use it to get my harmony buff up, but now I honestly can't remember the last time I used it in legion. When the raids come out, it will probably see some uses. When a tnak is hotted and just needs some extra heals, but not in any danger of dying, or if you roll with the abundance talent.

[Alltat]

It's decent. It actually heals for a non-trivial amount, while costing basically nothing. Regrowth also isn't nearly as powerful as it used to be, and the HoT is a much bigger part of it, so Regrowth spam isn't what it once was. The HPM of Regrowth is terrible, and right now it's probably the only spell that can actually get you OOM.

If a tank already has Rejuv and Lifebloom and a Regrowth HoT and still needs more healing, Healing Touch is actually a decent option. When raiding starts and there are more people who can pile heals on the tanks, I expect that niche will disappear.

[Natureseer]

very good for efficient tank healing, particularly if the tank has 3+ hots (which they should)

[Deleted]

Yes all the time in 5 mans

[ryklin]

between the crit rate, living seed, and lower cast time, regrowth is going to be generally superior in places like dungeons where mana is usually a non-issue (unless it's a pug), and not much of the spell's budget is in the hot, the hot is mostly just some miniscule healing to provide more mastery bonuses

However, if you have any concern about mana, healing touch has some good sides right now, like how if your mastery isn't very high and you've gone into tranquil mind (and thus blessing of the world tree), it actually has higher hpm than rejuv giving it some niche use in raids while trying to save mana or if you aren't running germ to help top people off (which is going to be fairly likely in most raid fights). This could be relevant as I expect inner peace to be a go to on more fights than spring blossoms (which is basically huge mastery/hot buff) or germ.

although the above part will change some once people get down to the bonus rejuv duration in the artifact

healing touch's main issue in mop and cata was that it actually wasn't much more mana efficient than regrowth, and in wod, it just fell too far behind too fast, but here I think rejuv>healing touch or lb>rejuv>healing touch could be a nice way to get some heals onto someone w/o too much mana investment


That all said though, the cast time is such a major detraction and the mana gain from using it instead of hoping the target gets healed up another way or placing other hots on them, it just seems very inconsequential, it'll probably fall behind fairly quickly unless we see some long fights where we get a few targets with some dots on them, but I plan to try using it some on nythendra and renferal which both fit that bill to some degree (although I think on both those fights we'll just be too busy aoe healing) as way to get some extra targetting healing without talenting into germ.

Just based on every expansion before, such small amounts of healing for such long cast times will fall behind quickly unless blizz can actually succeed in making a low mana regen healing model, which they've failed at trying to restore for 3 xpacs now (wod might've actually worked if not for the whole everburning candle and trinket balance fiasco followed by socrethar trinket). And even if blizz does somehow succeed by just keeping mana regen gear weak for the whole xpac, they greatly risk making healing boring where all you do is spam wrath/lightningbolt/smite while waiting for high damage or just straight up too difficult for even the high percentiles of the pve playerbase and even small amounts of mana inefficiency will be deadly.

[-aiko-]

I use it quite a bit on the tank. Pretty powerful when you have your HoTs rolling and costs next to nothing. Never use it on other party members though.

[Deleted]

I use it every time when I can savely say "I got a spare second standing around and casting HT".

If the tank is >50% health for instance, or some DD took damage and I'm pretty sure he won't die in the next 5 seconds.

Amalgam's Seventh Spine actually makes HT a spell that regenerates mana, since spamming HT actually still is a slight mana gain per second.

[AngryLakitu]

I use it every time when I can savely say "I got a spare second standing around and casting HT".

To me that means catshift and do DPS, not use HT.

--
I'll try rolling it in with some tank healing as suggested. Most of the time, though, if I feel I have enough time for a HT then I should have time to DPS and that seems like a better use of time.

[Alltat]

To me that means catshift and do DPS, not use HT.

Lots of fights require (or strongly encourage) you to stand at range. Either so you don't get hit by something unnecessarily, or so that you don't drop some obnoxious effect on the melee. If you have to run in, do some cat stuff, then run back out again in three seconds, not much cat stuff will be done.

healing touch's main issue in mop and cata was that it actually wasn't much more mana efficient than regrowth...

From what I remember, Regrowth spam was actually more mana efficient than Healing Touch spam in MoP, at least if you had the spell glyphed. A pretty big part of why few people like the spell today is because it has been literally useless in the past. The set bonus from Siege of Orgrimmar gave it a niche by making it instant, but it was still underwhelming.

Just based on every expansion before, such small amounts of healing for such long cast times will fall behind quickly unless blizz can actually succeed in making a low mana regen healing model, which they've failed at trying to restore for 3 xpacs now (wod might've actually worked if not for the whole everburning candle and trinket balance fiasco followed by socrethar trinket). And even if blizz does somehow succeed by just keeping mana regen gear weak for the whole xpac, they greatly risk making healing boring where all you do is spam wrath/lightningbolt/smite while waiting for high damage or just straight up too difficult for even the high percentiles of the pve playerbase and even small amounts of mana inefficiency will be deadly.

Blizzard always say that they want a low mana model, but considering how they've consistently added talents, trinkets, and set bonuses for every single healing class in every single tier that offer plentiful mana, they sure aren't putting much effort into achieving that goal. People will use Healing Touch occasionally for the first week, rarely for the first month, and then take it off their action bars. And no one will miss it, because it's an inherently un-fun spell. The whole idea of it is that you stand around casting for ages and then nothing significant happens.

[Nythiz]

Are you using it? Does it do things?

After two (three? four?) expansions of glyph-ed Regrowth pretty much nullifying Healing Touch, I'm continuing to just Regrowth spam in-place of using Healing Touch. Not really having mana problems, but there are times I do wish I had some larger heals -- especially with Nature's Swiftness gone.

Does Healing Touch fit in your rotation or is it still a dust collector? Interested in some takes so I can gauge what my use case might be.

Haven't really used it since god knows how long ago really.

IMO Regrowth is superior in most ways. Tank healing would be the only real useful place where HT comes in, but the thing is with 3 default hots rolling (LB / Rejuv / Germination), regrowth is better as it adds a 4th HoT, which increases your total healing by another 15-20% (depending on mastery). That increase alone makes it blow HT out of the water.
Now HT would still have a role if Rejuv+Germ+LB+Regrowth aren't enough to keep the tank alive. At that point you could start spamming Healing Touch. But since I roll with Cenarion Ward, I prefer to just pop that. There hasn't ever really been a time where those 5 HoTs (+ Ironbark) aren't enough to keep a tank alive.

I can see HT being decent if you're somewhat undergeared and you really need to spam heal the tank to keep him alive. But the issue with HT is often that the cast time is long enough for the tank to seriously chunk in between casts.

If you're using HT because "there is nothing else to do" than you're better of DPSing or casting some random pre-hot rejuvs around.


tl;dr
Healing Touch is worthless; and with blizzard changing all the offspecs to also use Regrowth, instead of Healing Touch, I see no real reason why this spell is still in the game.

[Drekor]

It's still a habit for me to occasionally cast it because of the old mastery but it's really not worth casting at present although the upcoming nerfs to RG and buffs to HT may change that.

[theburned]

It's still a habit for me to occasionally cast it because of the old mastery but it's really not worth casting at present although the upcoming nerfs to RG and buffs to HT may change that.

way to be completely ignorant, HT is not getting buffed by much, we are looking at around 3% mathematically, while regrowth is getting massively buffed.

And currently HT is worth casting whenever you want to put in more healing into a specific target which already has all trivial hots on him, and you do not want to cast regrowth on them for mana purposes.

[Alltat]

And currently HT is worth casting whenever you want to put in more healing into a specific target which already has all trivial hots on him, and you do not want to cast regrowth on them for mana purposes.

Or you already cast Regrowth on them and is letting the HoT tick. The HoT is a much bigger part of the spell than it was before (~20% compared to like 2% in WoD). So with that being stronger and the new mastery being what it is, casting one Regrowth and then Healing Touch has become a sensible approach.

[Drekor]

way to be completely ignorant, HT is the one getting nerfed (mathematically, realistically it will be slightly better.), while regrowth is getting massively buffed.

And currently HT is worth casting whenever you want to put in more healing into a specific target which already has all trivial hots on him, and you do not want to cast regrowth on them for mana purposes.

How is going from 400% SP to 450% a nerf?

Also RG is getting nerfed, if all you consider is the spell itself it will have more power yes but going from 60% crit to 40% and going from 80% living seed down to 49% is a massive loss and doesn't get made up for by the significant buff to it's base power. Although now that I'm looking at it RG will still completely outclass HT regardless.

[tratra]

so far on dungeons its not needed. never have mana problems and hots are enough, on free time am just dpsing instead.

I guess its going to be used a lot while raiding depending on my mana.

[theburned]

How is going from 400% SP to 450% a nerf?

Also RG is getting nerfed, if all you consider is the spell itself it will have more power yes but going from 60% crit to 40% and going from 80% living seed down to 49% is a massive loss and doesn't get made up for by the significant buff to it's base power. Although now that I'm looking at it RG will still completely outclass HT regardless.

You do realise that the living seed benefit from crit remains pretty much unchanged, right? 80% of 430% SP (current RG) vs 49% of 700% SP is 344% SP and 343% SP, so crit scaling will be much stronger because going from 350% SP to 1043% is much stronger than going from 215% SP to 774% SP.
While also the baseline spell with 0% crit from gear (which would be best case scenario)
The current would be on average 550% SP, while the new one would on average be 627,2% SP, while also being better when it doesn't crit, which happens. In this case we are looking at a 14% buff, at 20% crit its 661,6% SP vs 765% SP which would be a 15,7% buff.

Okay I did some math on HT, and unless you have a very high amount of crit 30-40% range it maths out to be a slight buff, mostly in the range of 3-5%, not the suggested 12%, very insignificant and the increase in spell power is mostly to weigh out for the loss of Living seed healing, and not having to count on living seed healing makes the spell a bit better aswell.

Or you already cast Regrowth on them and is letting the HoT tick. The HoT is a much bigger part of the spell than it was before (~20% compared to like 2% in WoD). So with that being stronger and the new mastery being what it is, casting one Regrowth and then Healing Touch has become a sensible approach.

Regrowth hot wasnt a thing in WoD, if you knew what you were doing you were using the glyph to get 100% crit chance with regrowth (unless ofc you used rampant growth for some reason.)

Casting regrowth is not something you can afford outside of OoC procs in raids. (Unless ofc it is necessary to keep the player alive which I did account for in my original statement.) In dungeons mana is largely irrelevant, so using regrowth in place of HTs is generally the best option.

[ItachiZaku]

It is definitely filler for me, after the lb/rj blanket, and obviously in pvp with talent (it applies rejuv on target and removes roots).

[Deleted]

In dungeons, quite literally never. If you need to do actual tank healing on top of your HoTs you RG/SM/CW, if you don't you let your HoTs do their work and HoT other people instead or go cat when feasible and refresh MF/SF and cast wrath when not. There's something to be said for tunneling efficient heals into tanks in a raid setting, but realistically there will nearly always be more worthwhile things to do like (pre-)HoTing other people.