Hi all,

I thought in these days about the best way a shaman can heal.  For the non-shamans, the shaman has basically two kinds of healing (excluding the chain one). There are 6 ranks of Lesser Healing Wave (LHW) and 9 ranks of Healing Wave (HW).

The most common way a shaman heals is the following:
If the target needs large amount of health then use HW rank 9. Otherwise, use LHW rank 6.

This is also because having 15 other buttons on your screen for all the heal ranks is too much (in addition to the almost 20 totems... ).

So far so good. Unfortunatelly in places like MC where if you are not assigned to a main tank and have
to heal your group and the entire party, it's better to save and use our mana in the most efficent way.

These pictures



show the two kind of healing compared.
The first picture shows the healing in function of mana spent.
The second picture shows the healing/sec the target received ( average ) in function of mana spent.

Just examining the lines you can say: well, the LHW is the most efficent one, I don't need to use HW!
Well, in general this is a "sort" of rule to follow, but is too pessimistic.

Let's create a better rule. If you don't have any +healing gear (we will cover that later):

The rule is: "Do not use Rank 3,4,5,6 of your HW (4 fewer buttons on your screen). Instead you can use 
Rank 1,2,3,4,5,6 of LHW and for the same amount of mana spent you recharge your target with more health and quicker!

If you have +healing stats on your gear then all changes. The +healing stats are related to a spell of 3.5 secs. So you should consider an adjustment of 43% for your LHW and 71% for your HW.

For example:
+200 heal stat => Real healing improvment for your spells:
+142 boost for HW (2.5 sec cast), +86 boost for LHW (1.5 sec cast).

The following pictures

 

The first pictures above is with +170 healing. As you can see with +170 healing, now your HW ( in ranges Rank 3,4,5,6 ) gives same heal of LHW. +170 is the minimum stat you should have to make your HW asefficent as LHW.

But, there is a but! Usually to gain +healing gear you lose out on +intellect gear, so your mana pool decreases. For example, I lose 300 mana to obtain +130 heal.

With a mana pool around 6000 (fully buffed) I can do:
16 * LHW Rank6 = 16 * 915 = 14640 health ( average )

to gain +130 healing I loose 500 mana so I can do:
15 * LHW Rank6 = 15 * 987 = 14805 healt ( average )

so better to give up 500 mana and gain +130 healing.
I considered the worst case scenario ( no crits on healing spell ).

If you see something wrong on my thoughts, just let me know.

A couple of hints:

- What to do when you are not healing because your target has full health? If you do melee you take the risk to be affected by an AOE so you have to heal yourself ( waste of mana ) so the best thing to do is to use HW rank1 ( only 28 mana and 1 sec cast) over and over on the main tank until you get a crit increasing for 15 secs the armor of your target by 25%.

- Use the mana conserve feature on RaidAssist in order to interrupt your spell if at the end of cast your target is full health.

- Use CastParty ( it will choose for your the best rank for each kind of heal )
_________________
"Shamans heals themselves. By working through their pain, they learn to help others."
-Wounded Healin'-