posted by Jindi at 12:36 pm
I play a lot of battlegrounds… 25k pvp kills since I started playing a bit over a year ago. Usually I rock the healing charts pretty hard, but it’s been especially great lately due to all the AV changes. AV is much more about pvp now, versus the pve ‘lunge for the throat’ tactic that produced 10 – 12 minute AV rounds. Not anymore. So far, my average round length is more like 30 – 45 minutes, and it’s *much* more fun now in 2.3 due to all the pvp action.
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In one round tonight, we’re stuck trying to round the corner at SP, because we’d pushed them back that far. They were pretty much all there, and we were pretty much all there also. This makes for maximum chain heal efficiency :) We’d be all clumped up and seed would be going off like crazy, pretty much ensuring that nothing will be lost to overhealing. I was hanging back enough that I wasn’t seen, and on one occasion I depleted my whole mana pool 3 times over, stopping to snack on mana biscuits each time. Finally they sent a high-powered hit squad around the corner and directly at me. I died and rez’d at SH…
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(incidentally this guy Tiberium used ritual of doom while we were waiting in the cave… it was a struggle to get enough people to click it, big surprise. I got sacrificed, but my ankh was up, so as soon as I hit the dirt, I bounced back up and was heading out the gate with the rest).
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Anyway, then I glance at the score board…
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Final tally:
posted by Jindi at 1:38 am
Netherspite’s green beam provides a buff to +healing spells at the rate of 5% per tick (ticks are 1 second). There is also a cost reduction of spells / abilities at the rate of 1% per tick, and a debuff that reduces total mana by 200 per tick. Don’t worry, though, all of the (adjusted) mana pool is refilled at each tick. Effectively, this means you can take mana pool size and divide by 200 to get the max number of seconds you can stay in the beam before reaching 0 mana, and losing the ability to retain the beam. Somebody else (e.g. a tank) should be ready to take over the green beam, or else netherspite gets leet heals.
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While in the green beam, spam heals, focusing on spells with low cast time. Pretty soon, the healing buff from the beam will make even cheap spells heal for quite a bit. There is essentially no mana cost here, so go as hard as possible, taking as much load as possible off of other healers.
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Just before running out of mana, drop a healing stream totem. In my case, this will tick for around 450 for the next 2 minutes, pretty much taking care of portal phase damage for my group.
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Let’s have a look at a graph of a netherspite encounter where I used this strategy.
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With my current gear, my healing throughput normally tops out around 1400 HPS or so when I pull out all the stops and have enough targets to soak it all up (little or no overhealing). I find it fairly interesting that this amount is very close to the amount of actual healing I was able to provide in this encounter *while in the green beam*. In effect, the bonus is almost completely wasted on overhealing.
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One problem with the green beam that might not be obvious is that once you stop receiving the buff, you have a smaller mana pool combined with normal mana regeneration. If you let the green beam tick all the way down to 0, you are now completely oom. Hope you saved mana tide and your pot cooldown :)
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Taking all these factors into account, I prefer not to own the green beam for the majority of any portal phase. I will step into it for a few seconds to get some regen, though, making sure that the primary owner of the beam isn’t out long enough to get exhaustion.
posted by Jindi at 12:39 am
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