[Cata] Time to remove Heal from the game?

[Sinn]

I DO like heal and try to use it when I can (which is not that often, I admit).

However, its main problem as I see it is that on most bosses and with decent gear, people are looking for HPS, which discredit heal. But if people are having a hard time with mana, heal is a good choice. Less mp5 and lower manapools could give it more importance in MoP, as its earlier importance in Cata.

[sarad]

I'd like to see what happens when you do throw in Serendipity, because, while I may be a new-ish Holy priest (but 400 geared), and since mana is rarely a concern, do fill with Flashes to build the serendipity stacks. I rarely cast a PoH or GHeal without at least 1 stack of serendipity. Plus Serendipity uptime is greater than Evangelism, and you included Smite/Holy Fire with Evangelism up.

That aside, like I mentioned, I fill with Flash/Greaters, and never use Heal except to get into Serenity Chakra (which I really only use in H Yor'sahj and Spine >_<). So, like others, I agree that it's useless. Just don't see the point in removing it, since low-level Holy priests still use it in conjunction with serenity to avoid overhealing and OOMing.

[Zombina]

This isn't a fully thought out idea, so it might stink from the start, but would making a larger variance between the upper and lower base healing of heal make it more interesting/useful, at all? Like making it so it has the potential to outperform Gheal if you are filler spamming it longterm, but not reliable enough to be the only heal if you need a big cast?

[Sketch95]

Im surprised how many people like Heal. Its the most useless heal spell in the game. Blizzard is forcing me to cast very long spell that heals for nothing. I dont want to buy razer naga mouse or whatever to bind all my healing spells. This spell doesnt deserve a spot on my 6 button mouse. I think balancing between Gheal and Fast heal is the way to go. Sorry for bad english.

Oh i forgot Ghostcrawler thinks that players heal others by clicking spells on action bar then clicking on raid frames. There was a blue post about healing and he just said it.

[Fenixdown]

For me, Heal has been a useless spell for most of the expansion. Early heroics and early 4.0 raiding I used Heal, but as I obtained gear and could increase regeneration throughput I could also begin to phase the spell out.

Personally, a spell you have as a "filler until you get more gear to use better spells", which in essence is what Heal is, is indeed a useless spell. I want all of my spells to be useful all of the time, or at least as often as they possibly can. I think the very last time I ever used Heal was on Baelroc normal. It's not even on my bars in Dragon Soul because as holy it doesn't give me much benefit to have it there and as discipline I don't encounter mana problems.

The question then becomes this. What are the alternatives? I know other classes do, in some cases, use their "Heal" spell (or their equivalent), however in those same cases those specs have talents that add something extra to it. Should something be included for Heal to make it like, say, a shaman's Healing Wave or a Paladin's Holy Light? however, priests also then have Binding Heal, so the question then becomes does this just make Heal a slower cast Binding Heal that's more mana efficient?

As far as MoP is concerned, I have not had much time of late to get into a dungeon and see if Heal makes it back to the necessity forefront as it did in the early stages of Cataclysm. However, I'm off work tomorrow and that's exactly what I'm planning to do. I will let you know how things play out.

[zakaluka]

Danner, I agree with your goal here - heal is pretty bad, really wish it was better. I also agree with underdog, there's an aspect you missed (talents & procs), also rfx - you're going into a kind of detail here that's a little crazy . Although, that's a foul I've been guilty of.... a lot.

Check the beta thread, there's enough evidence to suggest blizz could be tuning regen around base heals. And, base heals got buffed substantially. In the current iteration of the beta, very few spells beat Heal in effic. Not only that, but it actually has good HPCT now. Maybe the spirit of your wish is already granted.

If number of keybinds is your worry, maybe uninstall clique and write your own macros. I've been running on one hotbar with binds for a while now, where I used to have 48 keybinds (4 full hotbars).

[Sakamae]

Nourish and Holy Light are better as fillers, since they do other things besides heal (I can use Nourish to keep up Harmony and refresh Lifebloom during a lull, for instance).

I use Heal to refresh renew on my targets in serenity......but I do think something needs to be added similar to Nourish in the Druid tree. If you have 3 targets with rejuv on them, the cast time is reduced by "x" percent depending on talent points. I think heal would get used a lot more if we had a similar talent in our tree, some way to reduce the cast time. I don't MS heal, so the majority of the time I'm healing is running CTA or LFR. In 5 mans, yes, I use Heal all the time, even now that I far outgear the content. Most of the time the damage just doesn't call for GH. Serenity with renew and heal, with PoM on CD....unless the tank really doesn't know what they are doing, there's not much damage going out where I can justify using GH all the time. If I'm raiding in a 25 man environment, I would never use it. I'll use it in 10 mans here and there, but I don't heal those too often.

Just because you don't see the use for a spell now...at the end of an xpac....when mana and efficiency don't matter....doesn't mean it won't be used again, or changed before MoP.

[zakaluka]

I dont want to buy razer naga mouse or whatever to bind all my healing spells. This spell doesnt deserve a spot on my 6 button mouse.

If you click heal, priest is kind of the wrong class anyway o.o

[Themos]

Up to now, ctrl/shift/alt modifiers on a regular 5-button mouse has been enough for me.
I've been musing about my likely binds in MoP once addons are enabled in beta.


On a side note, don't mock click healing. Some of the best players in the game have been clickers. At the end of the day, you're capped by GCD - who cares how you do it. Just getting into the spell queue is more than plenty.

[Mikael123]

Heal is useful for me for example in 5 man groups. In a situation where the tank only takes low dmg and I have penance on cooldown I cast heal to keep the tank at full hp. In that scenario heal is more efficient than flash heal and greater heal. So all your fancy calculations fail at taking overhealing into account as far as I can see from the brief look I had at it.

[Prod]

Heal is useful for me for example in 5 man groups. In a situation where the tank only takes low dmg and I have penance on cooldown I cast heal to keep the tank at full hp. In that scenario heal is more efficient than flash heal and greater heal. So all your fancy calculations fail at taking overhealing into account as far as I can see from the brief look I had at it.

In that scenario, what I used to do is just precast Greater Heal. If tank takes no damage within the next 1-2 seconds, cancel and cast again. If the tank does take damage, then finish casting.

[Themos]

You're ignoring the magnitudes of both spells vs the total health of your targets. Gheal, especially if it crits is too much for a nontank. Looking at current MoP numbers, I did a run healing a Monk Brewmaster tank with ~175k total health, and my Gheal was critting for 90K. Nontank players were between ~120-140K. What are you going to do, not heal them at all until they are sub 30% effective health before you'll let a Gheal through?

Heal has its place. Removing it, as well as the other equivalents from the other healing specs is not good direction.

[Ferocity]

What sucks is Heal is just as slow as Greater Heal. I wouldn't mind Heal being only marginally better hpm than GHeal if it was at least 2.0-2.25 second base casting time, putting it between our "fast" Flash Heal and our "slow but heavy" Greater Heal.

Yeah that's why I think it could use shorter cast time.

Cast on move, short cast time, probably due to PvP reasons we won't see such changes though.

[xEvangelionx]

If I'm not mistaken, a lot of healing classes have this 'problem' due to well how the spell power scales. And though, they don't use that spell constantly they do to help strengthen their healing arsenal...
Of course, I play a Holy Paladin but the principal is the same... You don't stop healing because a pre-cast heal could save a wipe even with some crappy low HPS/HPM spell.
Waiting for damage is, not an effective healer because who knows what will happen during the encounter. Someone might go 'LOL shit son! I just taunted by mistake' and you are caught off-guard because you just stood there... You're more alert even if you keep casting. View 'Heal' as a filler spell.

[tomehere]

I like Heal, and I think it has uses. When a player has a small health deficit, you can use it to keep them topped off. It doesn't cost much, and while you could argue that it doesn't make that much of a difference, Hp is Hp, and theres not really any reason not to use it if things are under control. I will say however that it's grown a lot less useful to do that now, since the majority of players are not worried about mana anymore. I think its a problem with gear and mana more then the spell itself though.

Oh! and how could we forget about it reducing the ws debuff? I like using heal for that too. ;P

[babylon]

i almost never use heal *now*, when my gear is all pretty and shiny, but i remember using it a lot when doing cata hcs in blue(/green) gear, i even remember using it in bastion and the other one, first cata raids

[LolretKJ]

Very interesting read, I've always had an alt priest that switches between holy and disc and I've never even bothered to put heal on my bars.

[shanthi]

You're a disc priest. Penance is on CD, as is Holy Fire, and the tank is taking very minimal damage. The group is also pretty much full HP. What do you cast? Do you do nothing then cast greater heal when the tank finally takes damage? No you don't

No, if you refuse to cast Smite (to do a little damage, build a stack of evangelism and do some atonement healing) then you cast Greater Heal. As a discipline priest, overhealing is not a significant problem, because you can count on something around 20% (depending on your crit levels) of your healing to also add an absorption shield. Greater Heal is not much of a mana sink and with appropriate proc'ing of Rapture, mana really shouldn't be any kind of factor for any content other than perhaps Heroic Spine or Heroic Madness (this is assuming decent gear for the content you're doing...discipline priests are really well set for mana).

In addition, of course, having a Greater Heal in the process of being cast means that if the tank takes an unexpected spike of damage during that cast time, the Greater Heal will land that much faster.

I used Heal a little when doing heroic dungeons to gear up for raiding at the start of the expansion, but it very quickly stopped being a spell I used. Smite and Greater Heal provide superior benefits, even if the Greater Heal won't be 100% effective healing, without being an undue drain on mana.

[Ethas]

It doesn't really hurts to have it. You can refuse to use it if you don't want to. Also Heal was my most usefull spell at first Cata heroics (5 man obviously) as Holy priest. And with incoming new expansion we need a cheap heal because we can't use most of our toolset at the start of expac (well if Blizzard won't change it).

[TaurenNinja]

Heal is fine by itself (I used it quite a bit at the start of Cataclysm, but it had less and less usage as time (and gear) went on).
It was actually my most used spell in the 5mans at the start of Cataclysm (I was Holy back then). Otherwise I would have gone OOM so fast I wouldn't have been able to down every boss.
The only problem with Heal is: the better gear you get, the less need you have for it anymore.
Maybe Heal should heal for less but also have a very short cast time or instant cast with a short cooldown. That way you could use it more often when nothing's going on. But in a raid there's little reason nowadays to use Heal because 2.5s is too long and the heal is too weak.