I'm fairly new to WoW (about 4 months) and I decided to make a new Night Elf Priest. I have been reading through a bunch of the comments on here and I don't understand some of the abbreviations you all are using. I'm only a lvl 16 at the moment but I intend to use it as a healer primarily. Anyway, what do the following abbreviations mean? Feel free to throw in any others you may know.
OO5SR
mp5
OOM
IFSR
Also, I don't understand the cancel/spellcast thing about saving mana. How does that work? Obviously, I have a lot to learn, lol. Thanks in advance!
Just to clarify on a point, with a few exceptions, you should ALWAYS be at least pre-casting. Remember, the secret of the five second rule is that it only goes into effect IF the spell actually goes off AND it uses mana, so as long as you cancel when it's not needed, you can improve reaction time without accidentally putting yourself I5SR.
To better explain, let's try an example. Let's say you're running a five-man instance and you're on a boss where it's primarily the MT taking damage. If you wait until he's taken damage to begin casting GH, you have human reaction time plus lag plus the cast time before he actually heals. Assume 100-200ms lag and 180-200ms reaction time (from wikipedia) and 5/5 Divine Fury, that's 2.8-2.9s before he gets a heal, during which time he could be hit again. OTOH, if you are pre-casting, lag and reaction time are irrelevant, and the effective cast time is reduced is most cases. If the spell is already casting, and even if he takes damage RIGHT after you start casting, the maximum time before the heal hits is 2.5s.
When I pre-cast, I usually wait until about 1.9-2.0s before I cancel and restart. Always wait until at least 1.5s (to account for GCD), but always subtract your lag and reaction time from the upper end (I have several piece of haste gear, so that's why mine is lower than expected). This means, absolute worst case is the MT takes damage RIGHT when I cancel, but because I'm using the /stopcasting macro (which is lag free as of Patch 2.2 or 2.3, I can't remember), the absolute worst possible case is 2.5s, but the average time is about 1.5s before the heal lands, or just over half the time it takes for reactionary healing.
Now, obviously reactionary healing is a necessity when group or raid healing, but even then, I do reactionary healing when people need healing, and then I either start cancel/casting on a tank or on another raid member who is likely to take damage next (often a Shadow Priest from SW:D, a Warlock that is low on mana and may life tap, or melee).
Now, that's not to say there aren't cases where it makes sense to just stop healing. For instance, when we were doing Tide Walker, I was usually the primary healer for the Murloc tank. When doing this, I would stack as much haste as I could, start with a shield, PoM, and renew, and spam GH7 when they got to him to maximize my HPS. Unless we were low on AOE, I could keep this up just fine as long as I just sat there and regenerated mana when the Murlocs weren't around. By maximizing my personal burst HPS like that, it allowed the other healers who weren't on MT healing to focus more on the Watery Graves and raid healing after the quake as I needed very little help. Of course, we haven't done him since well before patch 2.4 when spirit was massively buffed, so I could probably do plenty of other healing as well.
Erm... hope I didn't confuse the issue.
Thanks for the help! I have another question. I know what IDS and CoH mean, but I'm not sure what the actual difference between them is. Obviously the CoH build includes that talent, but I understand the two builds any further than that. Thanks again and sorry if I'm asking something that's already been answered. It just means that I somehow missed the post that it was in.
Nevermind, I found what I was wanting to know.