Healing Spheres don't look promising at being cost effective unless you have no chi, and cannot heal the tank with your statue. Best used in downtime so the tank can heal himself up when needed.
Spell Details:
Healing Sphere
- 6k mana
- 60k heal
- 0 chi effect
Surging Mists
- 24k mana
- 75k heal
- 1 chi generation
Soothing Mists
- 2.8k startup cost
- 2.8k mana
- 16k health per sec/tick +30% (Enveloping Mists) = 20.8k hps
- 1 chi generation every 3rd hit
Enveloping Mists
- 0 mana
- 100k heal
- 3 chi cost
Mana Tea
- 12k mana return / 13.8k mana return (assention talent) per 4 chi + 10-20% from crit = 13.2k to 16.5k mana return.
So lets theorise that we dont need the Chi to AOE heal and our tank has fallen low. Also we cant heal him up with just Soothing Mists and Enveloping Mists. Lets also assume that other heals apart from healing sphere crit for more. I will give some benefit of the doubt to a normal healing rotation, like extra time on Enveloping Mists and increased crits.
Again the servers are down so I pulled these numbers from my head.
Spamming Healing Sphere:
5x healing sphere
- 5 sec
- 300k heal
- 30k mana cost
Normal Healing Rotation:
Soothing Mists:
Enveloping Mists
- 1 sec during Soothing Mists
- 120k heal
- 0 mana
- 3 chi worth of heal
Surging Mists:
- 1 sec during Soothing Mists
- 75k heal
- 24k mana
Mana Tea
- 1 sec
- 2.3 chi generated
- 7.59k to 7.93k mana return
Healing Sphere Total Cost:
Normal Rotation Total Cost:
- 305k heal + 10% bonus incase sphere crits are bad / mastery estimate = 335k
- 30.07k to 30.41k mana cost
OR
- 300k heal
- 26.9k to 27.23k mana cost
Therefore, Healing Spheres are not more effective. Since Healing Spheres cannot heal at a faster rate than this so its pointless to factor in Surging Mist spam.
Healing Spheres don't look promising at being cost effective unless you have no chi, and cannot heal the tank with your statue.
Although I will be dropping them in downtime so the tank can fix his own spike damage =]
Thanks for the input guys.