Was this a Priest only thing or did all healers have to do it?
Druids regularly used Healing Touch (Rank 4) as a mainline heal spell, because of the reduced cast time while having a significant coefficient.
It definitely wasn’t a Priest only thing.
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Paladins did it also. Not sure about others but i assume so.
All classes down rank certain spells for Mana efficiency.
Warlocks had a couple spells that weren’t used for their rank-based effects. When fear juggling with Curse of Recklessness, for example, all you wanted was the immunity to fear, so you’d use rank 1. Similarly, since Drain Soul was useless for DPS, you’d only ever use rank 1, casting it at the very last second as your target dies to get a soul shard.
I don’t remember using any warlock spells between 1 and the max rank available, however. Some have said healthstones cast with different ranks counted as separate inventory items, but I never bothered with that.
Spells from below level 20 don’t scale well with spell power, so the earliest heal after level 20 is usually the heal you will be using. It costs less, casts faster, and a lot of your healing power comes from your gear.
This is probably true as mages would do the same with mana stones in tbc.
OK, forgive my ignorance…but what is “downraking”?
(My first thought was: “By the old gods and the nude, ANOTHER Vanilla term I do not know?)
In Classic, most classes don’t replace their abilities with the higher rank abilities. You have access to Rank 1 to whatever rank you have trained of that ability. The lower rank ones cast faster and cost less mana.
An exception to this rule is something like a rogue, their abilities just upgrade themselves and their spellbooks don’t end up filled with low rank abilities.
https://classic.wowhead.com/guides/spell-down-ranking-classic
It is casting a spell other than the maximum rank available to you.
Mages would use rank 1 frost spells to kite mobs for example. Healers might use a lower rank heal in interest of either mana efficiency and/or to minimize overhealing as some of their heals could get very big relative to the health pools of some classes(hi mages!).
For clarification, when you look in your spell book, you’ll see a new copy of each spell for each rank you get of it at higher levels. So
- Healing Touch (Rank 1)
- Healing Touch (Rank 2)
- Healing Touch (Rank 3)
etc.
The lower spells are often more mana efficient and the amount of healing they do is largely affected by your healing power from gear rather than the base spell, so as long as you don’t need a full strength heal, you can spam lower spells with less worry about mana, while still getting a fair amount of the healing.
Thank You all for curing my ignorance!
(And I am NOT being sarcastic here.)
I guess I never even thought of such gameplay, but makes perfect sense; as well as a method I must practice.
Also: did I spell the term wrongo boyo: “downranking” not “downraking”?
That’s the one.
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Thank You Urskrah!
(For, as we can say with Tolkien: “You are the fighting Urskrah!”)
When you reached certain levels, you got to buy new ranks of your spells from your trainers. The new ranks cost more mana and did more base damage or healing. Spelldamage or healing power was added to the base damage or healing of the spell in a proscribed way such that (especially healers) could get better healing per mana by using lower ranks.
Spell ranks disappeared completely in the Cata pre-patch. In the Wrath, pre-patch they were “broken” to remove advantages to downranking in the healing per mana, but the lower ranks still existed. People had addons to send messages every time you used a downranked spell. A discipline priest actually used a downranked power word: shield on the Lich King fight because any shields that broke at the same time would all return mana via rapture (which had an internal cooldown). So, you used the appropriate downrank to have infest break all of the shields but not to drop anyone’s health below 90%. (Frankly, that was really, really boring and so effective that it is probably the reason that spell ranks were removed from the game).
Everyone that uses mana will down rank at some point.
Shaman down rank Earth Shock for a low cost interrupt.
Mages down rank Frost Bolt for a cheap slow.
Druids use rank 4 Healing Touch as it’s the most efficient mana/health spell they own.
One thing to note about efficiency for healers is that you generally need some +healing to make the downranked spells more efficient.
Paladins will use rank 4 and 6 Flash of Light, but baseline without any +healing rank 6 does an average of ~2.6 healing per mana consumed while rank 4 does ~2.3.
However with even just the +115 from Blessing of Light those numbers become ~2.9 per mana consumed with rank 6 or ~3.5 with rank 4.
So you’d use Flash of Light rank 4 for efficiency and rank 6 for healing output.
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So, the better your +healing becomes, the better downranking is for saving you mana in situations when you don’t need the full healing per second of which you are capable. If you don’t downrank, you have to play serious chicken with people’s health or end up overhealing (ie wasting mana).
I’m excited to start gathering my gear for this again, I carry a Arcane Damage and Healing set for this build: https://classic.wowhead.com/talent-calc/druid/BB_EPHwAA800xA
This is what my gear looked like at 40:
https://i.imgur.com/P1ycnZr.png
I have used, sometimes, a lower rank shadow bolt if I need to fire one off faster.
Health stones were pointless to use lower rank (unless giving it to a lower leveled player), they all shared the same CD.