Having raided a couple of times now and seen how 4.0.1 has played out, I went back to rehash my 4.0.1 guide. I’m still getting quite a lot of hits for it, so I figure it’s a useful exercise.
All I can say is Wow! I really missed just how little use there was for Heal in 4.0.1. That unfortunate misjudgement had ended up tainting my talent spec suggestions (Strength of Soul rather loses its shine when you never cast Heal) as well as cropping up a couple more times throughout the guide.
I’ve remedied that embarrassing little problem now, thankfully, and the guide should now correspond a lot better to the actual 4.0.1 experience.
With retrospect I realise that a slow-and-small-but-cheap spell would have been tricky to shoe-horn into the existing content, but I can’t help feeling an opportunity has been missed to practise using it in a raid situation where we’re not also trying to contend with new fight mechanics at the same time.
As it is, with almost infinite mana in ICC gear you can just do what you always did, spamming Flash Heal on tanks and bubbles on the raid.
Ah well, this just postpones the learning phase, I suppose.
This cheered me up. I had discovered this also and thought I was doing it wrong.
I tried, I really did try to use Heal where I thought I ought to be using it, so I’d be in good habits come December, but it really just doesn’t compete with Flash Heal at all.
I’ve also tried to stick Heal somewhere into my healing pattern, but it was just like trying to sew with a bone. With almost unlimited mana resources it’d be foolish not to sick with the old habits.
I also missed those wasted talent points, just like I did miss that Inner Focus is not working anymore with Divine Hymn. But who reads tooltips carefully nowadays.. 😉
Cheers on the update!
Was really tough to work heal in. One of the very few times I use/used it was during the Deathbringer fight, insta-shielding the blood victim, then immediately firing off a heal or two to get the weaken soul debuff to the point where I could re-shield and the player would suffer no damage from blood.
Overall though, I’m finding that I simply cannot raid heal effectively with Holy. I’m trying to force myself to go Holy in ICC10 (2 healing), but run out of mana most times. There just is no time to use heal to conserve mana. Conversely, Disc remains quite easier, with far fewer mana concerns. It’s almost fun running out of mana with Disc with the fun Smite x 5 + Archangel talent. Holy could use something similar, for sure.