Improving merc heal efficiently Follow

I've never bothered with merc gear because I am also not at all impressed with the stats. However, every little bit helps so if you can afford to buy it, the gear will improve your merc. I think merc aa's are probably a lot more impactful, but you can't buy those except the hard way---with experience.

You have to take an active role in managing your merc to be efficient. Hotkey passive efficient and balanced. On a single pull have efficient on. Let the healer cast the promised heal and the hot then bam hit passsive key. (rinse and repeat) Keep merc on passive after the fight, due to they love to heal even if your at 99 % health. If you die and are getting a res make sure merc is on balanced for the best res and buffs it has. I saw a journeyman healer merc try to cast a 90 % res when it was on efficient.

Yup. Blocking the slower casting spells is a decent approach. Just remember to unblock them when not moloing with your healer. You can also change the stance to reactive and it should force the healer to use faster heals (but burn through mana faster as well). That should work about the same, I think. I honestly use a healer merc so rarely with my paladin, that I usually don't pay that much attention. I typically just leave it on balanced, because I've got sufficient healing to make up the difference, and I'm usually more concerned about long term mana use (cause paladin dps aint so hot against anything not undead). I figure once I've got "enough" healing to manage the incoming dps, I can kill anything given enough time.

For a warrior tanking tougher mobs and/or multiples, I can see that even a modest healing delay being a problem though.

I started out using balance on my healer merc thinking it'd save mana and such and that that would be needed Then switched to reactive when it looked like the problem was more of the healer not healing fast enough. Maybe on parse (if you can parse it), there is a difference, but I could not tell any difference "from the seat of my pants" using balance or reactive. When I did HA nameds at 85 to 92ish or so, the healer would go OOM and I'd wipe, even with using my shaman to support heal. But that was a DPS problem or a mob tuning problem. Now, I never see my merc healer low on mana and I always leave the healer on reactive. They regen very fast. I pull and tank with my warrior, so the mercs always has a second or two to meditate and seems that's all they need.

At 85 (I started back up with all heroic characters) and a fresh zero AA merc, I did get my healer merc low on mana as well as the caster. At 105 all AA's maxed, I don't think I even see them drop below 80% for experience grind. I am sure a group with a dedicated tank and a fast bard puller running around grabbing more mobs while the group is still fighting can get the mercs low on mana, but it seems next to impossible for me to. And I am not slow on pulls, I get all the DH HA's done in 25 minutes or less, it's just I can't tank and pull.

Sippin, the majority of the time, the mec healer does great and I hate having to concern myself with healing. If it were only my tank that I had to heal, no problems, but occasionally you get adds, over-agro, what ever and now my enchanter, shaman, wizard or caster mercs or the healer himself or a pet needs a heal. This is where I fail hard at healing. When I use to box a cleric, by the time I noticed anything other than my tank needing a heal, it was already too late. The merc healer actually does great at healing the non-tanks when agro is lost on my tank. And since I blocked HoT and promise line of heals on my warrior, I haven't had any problems with my healer being too slow to heal.

Edited, Jul 1st 2015 10:36am by Boop

Um yeah. My cleric is REAL good at popping his invulnerability proc when he gets agro. LOL

Block complete heal on yourself and pets too. It's a 7500hp "complete" heal that takes 10 seconds to cast. Merc actually has higher HP heals that cast much faster for a little more mana. If you died and thought "that merc just stood there doing nothing...", it was probably casting complete heal or you had a merc casted HoT on you. Get rid of those.

Edited, Jul 21st 2015 11:31am by Boop