Just some notes after going through logs on a raid night. I’ve been experimenting a bit to figure out if Burst of life is worth it (as well as a couple other talents). Found some things that took me by surprise.
Burst of Life
BoL + Life Cocoon absorb+heal is very slightly stronger than just Life Cocoon.
It’s not a smart heal.
BoL does not heal the target you put Life Cocoon on. It will heal only allies around the target. This was surprising to me because the tooltip reads the same way Yu’lon’s Whisper (and Sheilun’s Gift) does (YW: “healing up to 5 allies within 15 yards” | BoL: “restores [] health to 3 nearby allies.” | SG: “healing up to 3 nearby allies for…”)
Turns out this point was incorrect. BoL will heal the LC target if the LC target is still below 100% hp when LC expires. Otherwise BoL heals another nearby ally.
Sheilun’s Gift
I only talented this with Shaohao’s Lessons and as part of experimenting, only cast it when I had 10 clouds. I had three casts over a 6:30 minute heroic Broodkeeper and got the lessons of doubt, fear, and despair in that order. Given its charge time to build up to 10 clouds, I could’ve cast it twice more. I’ll say that the buffs didn’t noticeably affect my healing in the moment… and I’m interested in experimenting with it in an M+ setting. I’m also curious about the Veil of Pride talent given:
Surprising amount of healing. Three max cloud uses accounted for about 3% of my overall with the strongest cast amounting to 90-100k healing on each of the three allies.
It’s not a smart heal. It seems to target the closest allies which can make maximizing it difficult.
But, it does heal the target as one of the “three allies” in the tooltip.
Overall, it seems niche, but useful in that niche. Really interested to see this in a M+ setting. The cast time is long, but feels shorter than an Upwelling talented Essence Font at max stacks paired with a Thunder Focus Tea… maybe about the same as a non-TFT’d, non-Upwelling EF. So, it’s long, but not that janky. I think in a raid setting, the Veil of Pride talent is probably the better choice for more casts while the buffs are probably more useful in M+, but will have to test it out.
I’ve found it very useful for group wide mechanics in M+. Lets you recover the whole group in an “oh sht” moment without having to rely on bad fistweave RNG
If you pop SG even with 1 charge before every revival in raids you can squeeze a bunch more healing out of revival. Esp if you got Lessons of Doubt or Anger. I’ve been trying to EF-SG-Revival now for my revivals - or at least make sure EF is on as many people as possible before I SG+Revival, ( but with CF/Upwelling I dont always need to EF first ). Mind you the haste buff wont be much of a buff if you get that lesson.
In raids I started popping it around 6-10 stacks unless I am expecting revival to come off CD soon. Been trying to pair it with every Yu’Lon too in raids. I find Im not holding it to 10 stacks as much in a raid settings, but raid night is tonight so Ill have to test more.
In m+'s it’s basically another cooldown, Ill rotate it with Mote, revival, and Yu’Lon and I feel like now I have just the right amt of cooldowns, but even when I dont need the healing I was popping it at 8-10 stacks for the lessons to deal more damage on bosses or save trash packs. I love getting the duplication effect.
I haven’t found the non smart healing to be an issue yet myself. If you’re holding for 10 stacks it’ll nuke heal people to full if needed or you can hold for less stacks and use it as a vivify cleave replacement, I find 10 stacks can overheal often because sometimes there isnt enough damage going out - but when you do need it it’s big. Im finding we don’t always need to stack it to 10 in raids too because it’s pretty strong at 6-8 stacks.
IMO the other talent for faster mist gen cant compare to the lessons. They’re just so neat and fun
Is that a smart heal? If so, it’s the first smart heal in the game since 6.0
EDIT: with the description ‘splits to injured allies’ it really doesn’t seem to be, the usual smart heal description is to heal the ‘most injured ally’.
My understanding is that it will only heal injured people, not anyone at max hp, but it doesn’t prioritize anyone at low Hp. So it has just as much of a random chance at healing someone at 10% as someone else at 90%.
That said in a 5 man getting 3/5 is still pretty great.
With my raid build usually just SG for a quick lesson and then Revival most of the time. In raids I run an oldschool Legion type AT/non fey line build and I take rising mist, so assuming I am RSK-ing to extend the EF HoT I usually have enough EF’s covering the group when I need to revival. The EF is mostly for the extra gust of mists on revival honestly because I run higher mastery. Timing it isnt a huge problem for me either at 25% haste because it brings it down to 1.6 sec cast.
Ill need to test more tonight in raids but Ill prob TFT a full upwelling EF->SG->Revival and then followup with one or two RSK ( depending on tea of plenty ) for RM. Ill just do SG->Revival if there is full EF coverage already to not waste mana.
Im not an expert though and Im sure there are better ways to do it. It’s just neat we can buff most of our Revivals with a lesson. The haste lesson wont do a whole lot for revival though, so there is a bit of RNG to it but the odds favor us.
If timing wills it too you can even have 2 lessons up when you hit revival ( if you cast a 10 stack SG and then a 1-2 stack SG 8 sec after the lessons can overlap or double up. ( can get 2 lessons at once ) It’s not easy to pull off though and doesn’t last long, might be enough to double lesson a revival but Ill play around with that idea more tonight, just thought Id also mention it.
Sheilun’s is really big. Healing feels endless at this point. The talent was doing near ~13% of my overall healing in RLP.
Dungeon:
3rd healing CD that has a short CD + mega healing/dmg buff. This talent is a juicer. Never have a moment of worry because of how much burst healing this thing can do. Its avg-ing 240k per cast + buff. Insane healing.
Raid:
Sheilun is already doing more HPS than misty peaks in raid by quite a bit. I wasn’t even really healing last night and it did more (I was going for 99’s in damage). Also added a good 700-1700 dps to my raid fights. Everything went up last night because of the buffs. BIG BIG revivals! I was avging 1.4mil revivals on broodkeeper.
So, I checked my logs again. Seems that with four healers covering our raid group, we all triaged on the same targets. By the time LC expired on some of my casts, the target was already healed to 100%, so BoL healed three nearby allies. However, there were some instances where BoL did heal the LC’d target when it expired.
So, I’ll revise my original post and say that it seems like BoL will heal three allies when LC expires. If the LC target is still below 100% health, BoL will heal them. If not, BoL will heal a third nearby ally. It definitely isn’t a smart heal though. If the LC’d target is missing 100hp, BoL will just overheal them.