by Sylvant » Tue Jul 21, 2015 1:25 pm
I did not read all comments and its quite possible you got the correct answer, but what i read is only players repeating what they heard/read somewhere without actually understanding downranking entirely. The same players that kept advising you to downrank heals.
First of all, Munzwurf has good points and his thoughts are in the right direction. Ppl that hurry with keywords obviously didnt read his topic content and "overhealing" and "mana"(efficiency) are invalid for his case.
Low level healers(lvl 20 in particular) have almost no use for downranking, unless they need to make sure their target is constantly topped. Like Munzwurf already said, higher ranks have higher base HPM factor. Not only they will give you more healing for less mana, but you can also make use of the mp5 rule at best. IN a perfect world you can cast a 3sec heal for example, wait 2 seconds, then queue another heal, this will give you an out of casting reg tick in between. Nonetheless the only way to keep tank alive at low levels, is using the strongest heals you posses. E. g. using r2 lesser heal will barely cover single hit of a monster. R3 could help you keep your target topped, but at the cost of worsе mana sustain. Using Heal r1 however, gives the most reliable healing, at a cheaper mana price, reduced even further if you have the chance to make use of the mp5 trick. Not to forget flash heal, does reliable healing amount, beats even Heal in terms of HPS and has hpm on par with most of them, where the difference is so low, that will barely be a factor in 100 casts.
The core about downranking is related to spells coefficient(how they scale of bonus healing). If you have none, which is likely to be the case at low level, there is no benefit of downranking. Having good amount of bonus healing makes lower ranks which have good coefficients reach a very high HPM. Obviously this becomes true later in game. At very high healing bonus, its possible to use rank 4, or even rank3 strong heals, which have a shorter casting time(the case with druids, which dont have a reliable fast heal). However you cant go all the way to earliest heals ranks, because additional penalties to spell coefficients applies.
Avoid overhealing is an obvious addition to downranking and i dont think its needed to discuss. The idea is clear to everyone- if your target requires 800 damage recovery, but your highest rank heal does 1500, you want to use a lower rank, which is closer to 800 amount, to save mana.