So, I just started Holy (not this character, I have a priest alt) healing a few days ago, and I remember the last time I tried to heal, I think it was MoP or Legion, can’t remember which, it was right after they gave us the “3 heals” where you had a quick and fast heal, a slow but cheap heal and then a slow but huge heal.
Nowadays, it just seems like there’s the slow cheap heal, and the quick heal. But…
I noticed after several dungeons that I can spam Flash Heal all I want, it heals for about the same as regular Heal, and I’m not gonna run out of MP anyday soon whatsoever.
So… why do we have Heal, then? It seems useless. Takes way too long to cast, only heals for a smidge more than Flash heal and ever since I dropped it and started spamming Flash Heal, healing dungeons has been 10x easier.
It’s my perception that, in retail, except maybe for long fights, the flash heal is the goto spell. If you use it and are not running into mana problems, there’s no reason to consider the slower healing spell.
In wow classic, the goto spells appear to be heal and greater heal depending on how fast damage is happening, and renew. Flash heal and power word: shield are more for emergencies. There’s a position held by some that the healer should keep different ranks available for healing spells so that you don’t over-heal the target thereby wasting mana.
Why does retail still have heal? Quite possibly because it’s a legacy spell and it’s lack of usefulness has not yet been realized by the devs.
So as holy as long as you are cycling your holy words properly, mana will rarely be an issue.
This is particularly true thanks to our current 4 set. Simply put heal is just extremely mana efficient, flash heal isn’t. That’s really it, you’d use heal normally yo heal damage when there’s no rush, it would applies a bigger echo of light, etc etc.
But yeah Holy is extremely mana efficient right now, you can run out of mana if all you press is flash heal every gcd but currently unlikely
It’s because Blizzard keeps flip flopping on it. In Shadowlands all we did was spam Heal with Flash Concentration because it casted as fast as Flash Heal after 5 Flash Heals. Then we had Lightweaver for a while before the Divine Image update made it obsolete.
They should just merge Flash Heal + Heal into one heal at this point.
It’s not a matter of flip-flopping, it’s a matter of damage happening too fast that renders heal obsolete. The reason Flash concentration was used was it put that more efficient heal at a faster cast speed and heal just always healed more.
You can easily see the contrast in game design between Classic/SoD and current retail. Classic/SoD has more of the RTS and resource management roots while current is more real-time-action based with react-fast-or-die mechanics and combining raid wide burst and rot damage profiles that heavily lean towards fast healing.
To put this in perspective, in classic/SoD, there is heal sniping, that is healing someone before someone else can so you can heal parse better. It’s 100% unnecessary and is purely for the parse. If you don’t have that mindset in retail, people die.