I came to the same exact conclusion. My only thought would be that mana conservation will be such a priority that the much cheaper HW will be the trash heal or the raid/party "top-off" heal when the tank is full.

In terms of efficiency, GHW at high gear levels will only begin to match HW at low gear levels. By efficiency, I mean heals per mana (hpm).

HW at 5k spellpower works out to be able 2.75 hpm. At 10k spellpower, it would be about 3.5 hpm.

GHW at 5k spellpower is 2.154 hpm. At 10k spellpower, it's 2.769 hpm.

However, there's a bit of risk in casting a high-mana cost spell that might be overheals. If someone else beats you to the punch, you could cast a 6.6k GHW for no benefit -- all overheals. If it had been a HW, you would've only lost the 2k mana cost.

As it stands, you will need to think about what is appropriate at what time. If you don't want to run out of mana, you're going to want to avoid overheals and use GHW as a situational spell (at least for some time).

You guys didn't miss anything. They changed direction fairly late in the beta about how healing should be from a decent model to a dumb one and they won't listen.

Originally healing was supposed to be " use main heal and the skill is using the right heal for special situations. Emergency heals vs let them get low and use big heal."

But then they decided people were using the standard heal too much and not the extra special ones so they castrated the standard heal. Now the model is " Race the boss. Do you go OOM before he dies?"

I don't see this working especially with heroics being what they are. No one liked the 3 hour heroic shadow lab runs. No one liked going OOM as a healer in Hyjal.

Instead of making the small heal the standard they made the big one it once everyone gears enough to be okay with being 20k down I'm hit points. If they make it so no one can be like that, it means the healers go OOM too fast. They traded a decent model for an untenable one.

Joe...you're missing my main point though. Not too far into the future, GHW will give more health per mana used. You'd use less mana overall to heal a tank using GHW than regular HW. I was estimating having around 10-11K spellpower in T11... Kaleokalani showed the math where at 10K spellpower GHW is more efficient. Looks like Cata shammy healing (tank anyway) will end up not much different than LK Pali healing.

re: Angus.

Going OOM during a boss fight - back in the day - was just the way it was. You chain chugged pots [oops - can't do that], brought along a mana battary [oops- nerfed that], stacked MP5 gear [not anymore]. You get the point.

Back in the day, we drank between every trash pull. And we liked it! Darn kids these days with their limitless mana.....

I agree with you the neutering of HW. HW is now like 'heal' was to priests. Why bother? We have Healing Surge [flash heal] and GHW [Greater Heal] HW more mana efficient, but with a 3 second cast time, whats the point?

I know that everybody has more health now. But unless they are balancing to make every fight REALLY long [big health pools, less damage per attack] no one will bother with HW. If your tank is going into the tank health wise, there isn't time for 3( 9sec no haste) HWs. Especially since they nuked our haste.

Actually, the efficiency levels stay constant regardless of SP.

Consider this: The base heal of healing wave is 3846 and greater healing wave is 10258. Devided by their multipliers we get 3846/0.3 and 10258/0.8 which both comes out to almost exactly 12820. This is the hidden SP level that gives us the base numbers. Any additional level of SP will add .3 healing to HW and .8 healing to GHW. Since the quota of the mana costs are constant and the healing output scales linear the efficiency quotas will stay constant.

If we look to healing/mana at the base it's 1.94 for HW and 1.55 for GHW. This means that HW is 20% more bang for the buck through all values for your SP.

What might change is the situations where you need a heal as strong as GHW. Though, you are gonna need to reach almost 22000 SP before your ordinary healing wave equals the base level of healing/(second casttime) as your ghw. And at this point, you can land heals at 27,9k non crit without talents with GHW.

I'm pretty sure our SP scaling will follow the ramp up of incoming damage, so my bet is that HW will stay our efficient go to heal unless other things change.

(this is back of a napkin excel math so I can be wrong, but I think I'm right)

@Mir - My understanding of the equation is different (I could be wrong).

If
HW costs 1981 and heals for 3846+.3*SP
GHW costs 6607 and heals for 10258+.8*SP
then
the HPM for HW is always 125% that of GHW.

The HPM for GHW at 12,000 spellpower may be better than the HPM of HW @ 6500, but the HPM of GHW with 6500 or 12000 SP is always 80% of the HW HPM for that spellpower. At least if those are the equations.