How do you heal?

This question was posed to our heal core by one of our (now ex) tanks.

I was curious what the most used spells are from each of the healing classes. I noticed a weird (from my point of view) change since BC and classic wow healing...I'm curious what abilities people use because back in the day people used big spells, like druids would use their weird half balance half resto specs and use healing touch, and priests would use greater heals and pallies would use whatever their big heal is.

But now it seems people use their 1.5 or faster spells to heal. I don't think i've ever seen anyone cast a greater heal on someone except to heal a rezed person after a wype.

It was a pretty valid question, though my guess is that it stemmed from his dying a few times the night before on trash or 'farm' bosses.

Unfortunately this question has no clear cut answer. There's no optimized rotation for any of the healing classes, as every boss/trash/5man is different. As a Paladin tank I knew going into a pull that unless something went really wonky, I'd run a 9/6/9 rotation and take a nap. On my warrior it's a priority system, I think DKs have a rotation, and druids are like warriors (I think).

A lot depends on the enouter in question, and the party/raid makeup. Is it my 10 man with a disc priest and a tree? 5 man with no healing stream totem or ret pally JoL? Hard mode encounter? Is my paladin partner there? There's too many variables to give a straight answer.

FoL vs HL - Round 1

I'll admit it - I'm a FoL spammer still. 5-6k crits, 1 second cast times, and endless mana - this makes for a great buffer. Now, there are those out there that will flame this style of healing, saying it's dead and gone, and that any paladin who isn't spamming HL is being carried. To them I say...maybe.

When I say I'm a FoL spammer, that doesn't mean I'm stupid about it. It takes knowing the encounter and knowing your team to plan your healing. When the tank starts to get a lot of Kologarn debuffs, or Mimiron does his Plasma Blast - you bet, I'm on HL. Regular Ignis hits? FoL.

What I've found is that while I 'can' sit on HL nukes all night, the deficit is being picked up by our priests and druids. While I'm winding up the bomb, they've sniped all the healing. If I use FoL instead, it slides in nicely and keeps us all from wasting our heals. As fights dip into the intensity bucket however (more stacks on Thorim, hard modes, Frozen Blows, etc), my healing picks up as well. If I've been managing my CDs and mana properly, I can dip into the HL well and start cranking them out.

Communication

This is the real key between your healers, well, communication plus trust. Trust that your raid mates are doing their assigned roles, and communicate when things start going sideways. Announce your HoS or Pain Suppression so multiple CDs don't get blown on the same save. Let people know when you're out of tricks to get mana back and that you're sucking on the fumes of Replenishment.

Good communication lets you work through a double trash pull with a faceless one on Vezack. Poor communication lets you work it out on the corpse run.

***Edit - it seems I have more than one blog, and I accidentally posted this yesterday to my personal blog (which I'd forgotten I had). So there will be a double post today.