Healing vs. Mana per 5: Part 1

Well, I've already posted something comparing spirit to MP5. Now how does healing work with this equation?

+Healing is invaluable and irreplacable in certain situations. It is the only way to increase your healing per second. If the tank is going down too fast, and threat and mana aren't issues, you need more +healing, pure and simple. (Or the tank needs to put on a shield :-P)

However, for the most part this isn't an issue, and more people are concerned about running out of mana. So how can +healing help this?

Traditionally, +healing has allowed healers to downrank their spells. We have Greater Heal ranks 1 - 7. Here is how they are mapped out (for these numbers, I'm assuming you have 3 points in Improved Healing and 5 points in Spiritual Healing since that's what I have. Check your own numbers to do the calculations for your spec.):

Rank Mana Cost Average Amount Healed
1 315 1052
2 387 1340
3 463 1675
4 557 2092
5 604 2288
6 638 2466
7 701 2849

Now, I use Greater Heal Rank 6 right now. If I were to downrank to rank 5, this would mean my heals would be 178 smaller, but would cost 34 less mana. Since Greater Heals get .83333 of your +healing, (6 +healing = 5 +healing to Greater Heal), My Greater Heal rank 5 with +214 healing would heal for the same amount as Greater Heal rank 6 with 0 +healing.

So I guess the question is, which one should I use? This depends on you mostly. Theorycraft cannot dictate playstyle. First thing you need to do is determine how big you want your heals to be. I personally like my greater heals to hit the tank for around 1/3 of his max HP. This is because I like to use big heals for maximum regen time, but I don't like to have a chance that the tank will be 2 shotted if I don't get there in time. So I shoot for 4K Greater Heal. How much +healing do I need to achieve this? With Rank 7, I'd need 1381 +healing. (I have an increase in 12% to +healing for Greater Heal, since I have 3 points in Empowered Healing, so I technically only need +1229 healing for this) I currently have +1569 healing self buffed. This makes my Rank 6 Gheal hit for on average 4223, so that's why I use rank 6.

Next post, I'll talk about how to determine whether you should seek out more +healing, or if you should seek out more +MP5 and spirit, and what ratio makes the most sense.