Sorcerer / Sage Healing Compendium (Updated for 1.2!)

[masochism128]

(04-18-2012 11:43 PM)Petrus Wrote:  As I've said several times - you really need to be using consumption every time force surge procs, just as in pre-1.2. It's certainly possible to put 0/2 in dark resilience, and while I think that's preferable it's up to you and your raid/play style. But whether you're 0/2 or 2/2 you should have no difference in the amount of force you have.

So basically, what I'm saying, is that putting two points from dark mending to dark resilience doesn't make you have higher force. If you DO have higher force, it's because you weren't tapping as often with 0/2 as you were with 2/2. I suppose you could certainly make an argument where you said that taking less damage means you're capable of tapping more, giving you more force. I'd counter that and say that even with 0/2 I hit every tap, but I would understand where you're coming from. Either way - what it comes down to is that 1. you need to use a consumption on every force surge, no matter what your spec is, and 2. Short of not taking force surge/force bending - there's nothing in our tree that should really effect our force management in any significant way.

Function: Thanks - we did better last week though... long day I guess . But yeah, with 0/2 in Resilience I never died (before a tank/wipe) and the only fight I had force issues on was minesweeper, but that was because several mistakes throughout the coarse of the fight. Even on that fight though I didn't ever have to stop casting because of my force, I just dropped pretty far below 50%. I think I ended every other fight with between 60 - 80% force though.

Hi there. I'd just like to point out that if you are ending fights with 60%-80% of your force remaining you are either on content that's too easy or not healing to your best potential. Having any extra force at the end of a fight means you didn't use all your resources. Thus, you could have done more healing if you had used all or, more practically, most of your force. Ideally you want to end fights with a low amount of force: say, 10-20%, maybe less if its a really hard fight. As you learn a fight you should be getting a feel for how far you need to stretch your force. There's no need to maximize force regen, total healing is the only important thing.

That said, if healing output is not your limiting factor in downing bosses, changing your ability selection to not waste force probably won't do much for you. However, it often is helpful to do more healing when you're initially learning a boss than you're supposed to need to down the boss. Just seeing more of the encounter per attempt helps learn it faster. So, while you're on progression, not making use of every Force Surge proc is actually a good strategy.

[Function]

Masochism128,

I respectfully disagree with your opinion because even with the most complicated encounters the only time I'm ever below 40% is if something went wrong in the encounter multiple times. Those are the times my focus was spamming heals to keep people alive, and typically resulted in something going wrong in the encounter. I mean normally, I can sit in a double Revivication or Innervate myself back to full health after spamming consumption. It only takes but 10 seconds to get a significant amount of force back. It's important to mention that the only time you need to heal is if there are people taking damage. If someone is taking significant damage throughout the encounter, it might be wise to discuss the strategy being used a little. In end-level content for MMO's, DPS scales up as players get better, but HPS goes down as the members of the raid get better.

Lets use Soa for instance, during the phase where you are jumping down, the amount of dmg people are taking is managable. So during the "heal" moments, spam the crap out of consumption, and innervate. You're at full force when you're on the bottom.

Let's use Firebrand and Stormcaller as another example, during the time you're under the shield bubble, there really isn't that much damage going on. At least nothing that suggests you'll be spamming anything. During that moment, you can regain a significant amount of force as well.

Petrus is right that every encounter provides ample opportunities to manage your force.

[Petrus]

(04-20-2012 10:27 AM)masochism128 Wrote:  Hi there. I'd just like to point out that if you are ending fights with 60%-80% of your force remaining you are either on content that's too easy or not healing to your best potential. Having any extra force at the end of a fight means you didn't use all your resources. Thus, you could have done more healing if you had used all or, more practically, most of your force. Ideally you want to end fights with a low amount of force: say, 10-20%, maybe less if its a really hard fight. As you learn a fight you should be getting a feel for how far you need to stretch your force. There's no need to maximize force regen, total healing is the only important thing.

This just isn't true at all. Looking at hardmode Warlord Kephess that we downed: Myself and our Merc healer did 4.76 million heals. Total raid damage was 2.8million. I finished the fight with 60% force after DPSing for about 30 seconds.

"Total healing" isn't important - keeping people alive is. Using an Innervate instead of a DI is FAR more force efficient - so why would you aim to just barely have enough force to survive. If we do a fight *perfectly*, even on Hardmodes, I will never drop below 70% force - this is because I have the opportunity to only use my efficient spells - innervate, resurgence, etc. Bomb Healing DI's just to "use more resources" doesn't accomplish anything, and leaves me without options if something goes wrong.

When the raid makes mistakes, which can happen often and at any time - we have to burn through our force. There were two points in our hardmode warlord kephess kill where I went from 60% force to 15% force healing up a mistake that we made. Because of good force management I was able to get back up to 80%+ force both times. If I had been at 10 - 20% force here, it would have been a wipe.

Look at Toth/Zorn. The last 10% of that fight is the HARDEST part to heal, both because the soft enrage and a possible hard enrage. If I go into that section of the fight with less that 50% force it's probably a wipe, as bomb healing is mostly what I do there.

The only thing that should *ever* come before force regen is keeping someone alive - because if you don't have a good pool of force you wont' be able to keep people alive later.

You're argument would only be true if "total heals done" was important in some way - and even then it still isn't accurate. Every time you use consumption you gain more force. To say that we shouldn't be using it is silly - more force = more heals. Just because I finish the fight at 60 - 80% of my force doesn't mean that I only used 40% of my force throughout the whole fight. There are MANY times (5 on warlord kephess) where I went from about 30% force all the way back up to 100%. That is FAR more total force/healing done than anything you'll see if you worry more about "using" your force than "gaining" your force.

Edit: Just to show - 2 hours of warlord kephess HM attempts last night (and then a kill). 187 force surge procs and 243 consumption uses. Warlord Kephess is just *full* of opportunities to tap back to full force - of course there's also plenty of places that'll run you out too. Can't be afraid to use consumption, and any down time you have should be spent regaining force. (Except on some possible burn phases, I did DPS down a couple of things to help out - but only when I knew I had a regen phase after.)

[masochism128]

Thanks for the responses. I feel like I'm not making myself really clear, though. First off, I'm not saying "don't manage your force." I'm also not saying "bomb heal when you don't need to." Excess force is only an issue when you wipe and more healing could have kept you alive longer. I understand that we use more force than just the 650 we start with. I'm not saying "don't use consumption."

My basic point is that if you have any force left over at the end of a fight, either when you kill the boss or, more importantly, when you wipe, that you could have done more healing than you did. Time spent casting Consumption is time spent not healing, and you also damage yourself when you use it now, which can potentially be a problem. In fact, your point that there are a plethora of chances to get back to full force during damage lulls only reinforces what I'm saying.

Innervate has a 7.5 second cd with our 2set bonus that everyone uses in pve. In general, 1 consumption every ~8 seconds takes up (for me) 1.4 seconds away from other heals. Having to use Innervate on cd can delay the average cd of Revivification and Resurgence, but I'm going to assume that a Force-Bending Revivification will take precedence over Innervate and that you will have Force Bending up already whenever Revivification comes off cd. This means that using Consumption once every 8 seconds will delay the average cd of Resurgence and take the place of either 1 Static Barrier or 0.6 of a Dark Infusion.

Resurgence will then have around a 6.9 second average cd instead of a ~6.7 sec avg cd, and you will lose around 2,500 healing from the missing Static Barrier or Dark Infusion cast. Delaying Resurgence won't do too much harm, but losing out on 2,500 healing in that 8 seconds amounts to around a 300 hps loss compared to not using Consumption in that time frame.

In practice it's not feasible to completely skip a bunch of Force Surge procs though. Usually what I end up doing is using Innervate less often during burst healing situations, then taping back to full during damage lulls. It's important to remember that Innervate is a hpf gain in the long-term but a hps loss in the short-term. Static Barrier, Resurgence and especially Revivification all have better hpct.

In general, the effect of not wasting force is actually pretty small. This is simply because of how ridiculously much of our healing comes from Revivification. That's probably why you guys haven't felt the effects. It's also important to remember that I'm not saying that you have to let your force steadily drop down to 10% over the course of a fight. I'm simply saying that extra force at the end of a fight is resource that was wasted. It may or may not have been needed, but it certainly wasn't utilized.

[Petrus]

I do get what you're saying, but I've still got a couple issues with it.

First off, you can't time a fight to end it with 10 - 20% force, and you can't not worry about your mana. There ARE a lot of opportunities to regen mana, but only if your raid provides them. Every single one of them can be taken away by a mistake a player makes. The point is, you need to keep your force up all the time if possible, because you never know what's going to happen next.

Secondly, just a little point - Revivification actually doesn't make up much of our heals in EC (except on minesweeper) because depending on your strat it may only hit 1 or 2 people. Resurgence or Innervate are almost always my top heals - and that's casting revivification on every CD.


As far as the fact that you can heal more if you use consumption less - sure, that's true. I don't know if I agree with 300 HPS, especially since I've yet to be in a fight that requires 100% uptime on healing. Even if it's true though, again, it's not about the healing done - it's about keeping people alive and having the right tools for the job. I'd rather do 500 less HPS but always have the force I need to heal as much as I need, than do more healing but run into situations where I miss a regen phase and we have to wipe.


And any force we have is potential energy. I wouldn't call a full force bar at the end of a fight "wasted", I'd call it "utilizing our abilities". The more force we have, the longer/better we can heal for. That's a tool right there that we can't ignore. There are several bosses where at 15 seconds before the boss dies they can do massive damage - and you need that full(ish) force in case that happens.

[Arulan]

It isn't about how much Force you have at the end of the fight but by how much you use Consumption/Noble Sacrifice throughout the fight. Your goal is to find the best moments to use Consumption and of those Consumption uses make the most use of Force Surge procs. If you can use Consumption less in total by doing this while maintaining your Force at the appropriate amount then you do gain in overall throughput.

This "debate" is very situational. For one it depends, much like Petrus has commented on, being prepared for possible mistakes. This doesn't necessarily have to translate to decreased overall throughput. You can simply use Consumption more (4x + Force Surge proc) during a "safe" (safe can mean a combination of either safety to yourself from dying by being low on health and less need for the raid/tank to be healed) time to bring you to close to full. Then, if the mistake does occur, you're ready, if it doesn't you don't have to waste as much time using Consumption any time in the immediate future (aside from Forge Surge).

The boss in which you're facing makes much more of an impact on how you should manage your Force than anything else. With experience or knowledge of the fight, you can simply anticipate when to use Consumption and when you'll need more Force. Focus targeting the boss among other things will give you an idea of the duration/pace of the fight in order for you to prepare.

[Lucrecien]

Quote: My basic point is that if you have any force left over at the end of a fight, either when you kill the boss or, more importantly, when you wipe, that you could have done more healing than you did... I'm simply saying that extra force at the end of a fight is resource that was wasted. It may or may not have been needed, but it certainly wasn't utilized.

This is a pretty silly way to think about healing. Total healing done is irrelevant; if the raid survives it doesn't matter whether I blew the 70% force I was sitting on at the end of the fight to pump out another couple hundred thousand points of total healing. Aside from /flexing over log reports, anyway. Healers' goal isn't to pump out the biggest numbers possible, it's to be as efficient as possible.

[Lucrecien]

Quote: Resurgence will then have around a 6.9 second average cd instead of a ~6.7 sec avg cd, and you will lose around 2,500 healing from the missing Static Barrier or Dark Infusion cast. Delaying Resurgence won't do too much harm, but losing out on 2,500 healing in that 8 seconds amounts to around a 300 hps loss compared to not using Consumption in that time frame.

This is silly math.

Let's consider a fight that ended with everyone surviving and me at 80% force. Had I been playing perfectly from the standpoint of throughput, this means I could've used consumption eight fewer times over the course of the fight. That's 10-11 seconds that could've been used casting heals (really slightly less as without using consumption I wouldn't have had the spare force to cast the heals, but whatever.)

Assuming I've been prioritizing use of shield, innervate and revivification (as appropriate), I probably spend those ten seconds casting dark infusion. Five dark infusion casts represent 20-25k healing, depending on gear. Over the course of a four minute fight, that is perhaps 100 HPS, and the HPS value of not using consumption decreases as the fight gets longer.

ed: and realistically it's even less than that, since 1) you probably can't get five infusion casts off in the ~10s specified, and 2) you probably actually have less than 10s, since you'd have to use consumption at least once or twice to provide the additional force to cast those heals.

[Physics]

question has anyone got any logs on talent " Subversion " for 84 force and 4.26 total cast time(-Alacrity) 30% extra force regen is a much better filler then affliction or shock .... this is just imo would like so help to confirm or disprove cheers

[Function]

I believe it doesn't scale well for regen for a healer, but does pretty good when you're DPS stacked with Lightning Effusion/Sith Efficacy. I believe the problem with Subversion is that it requires three casts of Lightning Strike to maximize the gains. That's about 90 Force + 4.5 seconds. You should regen about 24 of that.. so the total cost in force is 66 Force. You regen 84 after that. I think the only way it makes sense to have Subversion is if you keep that buff stacked which is usually a difficult task without macros.