My recollection is one of the many threads on priest alliance heals discussed that there was a huge difference in how the radius was calculated in addition to the fact that the raw numbers were different as well. As I recall it, the cleric alliance centered on the tank which fired it while the shaman alliance was centered on the mob that the tank was fighting and thus the shaman alliance had a much higher chance of hitting all nearby melee characters. At least that's sorta how I remember it and was one of the main reasons we wanted shaman to use their alliances rather than druids or clerics. Could anyone point me to that old post and/or revisit this with CoV factored into the discussion? As ToV moved into the routine farming mode I know that we really slacked on alliance heals. The several beta raids I've participated in CoV indicate that we are going to need to put alliance healing back into regular play.
i think the heal radiates from the tank. but the range of the heal from highest to lowest is shm/cle/dru. and the base healing from highest to lowest is dru/cle/shm. i remember the post i believe you are referring too and i think that was the reason that shm were given alliance duty. i'd search for it, but man the forum search ability is poopcity. i could totally be wrong about all of this (other than the forum search being poop) ~
This is from a thread I wrote four years ago but the range and relative heal amounts have not changed since. Ignore the "Large Rain Heal" because those are fulmination effects that are mostly useless given that, due to the activation limit, they take pretty much 4 min. to proc and will not land when the raid needs them the vast majority of the time: As far as the targeting for the rain heals go, all three should be centered around the target with the alliance buff given the wording in the spell descriptions ("healing rain over them" "to all nearby allies"). For some reason, though, the cleric alliance seems to be the only one that does that with the druid and shaman alliance centering the heal on the priest who proc'd the rain heal. I am not too sure about the mob because if that were the case, there would be no difference if the mob were near the tank who was tanking it, right? Where would the heal go if the tank was standing around not tanking anything? This means that outside of rare situations where the tank is not standing near the rest of the raid, you would want to use the spell with the most range on the rain heals (shaman) to ensure that most people get them. Though the range of the shaman rain heals (a 10 ft. difference) is only slightly better than the cleric alliance, the slightly better heal on the cleric alliance is not worth missing people who were standing slightly out of range. I guess some raid teams might want to take advantage of the druid rain heals because they are the strongest but something to keep in mind is that these rain heal procs are not fully focused like our splashes since they are not technically cast by us. This means that any heal difference would need to be a lot greater than 3-4k to make any meaningful difference. As far as alliance being useful in CoV, I think it still is but it's not the spell it used to be after the activation limit. It is well worth casting because it does a lot of potential healing for little effort, but it will not make a huge difference against some of the AOEs that the raid designers intended to be impossible (or at the least extremely difficult) to heal through. That is mostly because alliance procs are dependent upon single-target heals (group heals and splashes will not proc them), so you're pretty much depending on a lot of priests casting single target heals in situations where they should be casting group or AOE heals. If you can get all your priests to do that (cast single target heals when everyone is dying around them) and cast their heals on different targets to get around the activation limit on a single target, alliance could make a dent in large AOEs, but it's a pretty big ask when group heals and squall/splashes can more effectively (and immediately) counter that damage.
Also it should be noted that the Cleric alliance procs as long as the allianced person has LOS with their target (will not proc if they have no target). Druid and Shaman alliances don't proc if the healer and allianced target don't have LOS.
Thanks, Raccoo. I made these (crude) pictures to hopefully help in showing how the priest alliances actually work: I still am not sure if this is intended behavior, as the descriptions for both spells do not imply that there is any difference in how they function. Both state the "healing rain" from priest heals will be placed "over them," with "them" clearly referring to the target of the alliance: I submitted a bug report in-game but due to the difficulty in testing, I do not expect anything to come out of it. At the very least, I am hoping that the descriptions will at least be updated to reflect actual functioning of the spells so priests will have some in-game guidance on their usage.
Alliance is great, mainly for offsetting all the raid AEs. All the guilds I know of rely on shaman alliance due to its large range. When they nerfed it to only procing off the tank ever 1.5 seconds it pretty much negated the whole fulmination part of the spell. Its a shame they did that, as it was a neat thing to the spell before, but its definitely not why you should be using it anyway, all the meat and potatoes of the spell is in those proc'd rain heals(even though it won't credit the healer who is procing them.) Really a big raid make or break buff.
that is fine ** if ** shm is line on sight with the tank they casted the alliance , and if the shm is not too far from the mobs to kill or tank to heal so they can receive the heals who would land on shm ( and 60 feet from that shm ). there are some raids that i don't bother to cast shm alliance , like tofs #1 or empyr #1 ( when we returning there for some ach's for new recruits ) because i know i will be oor to receive the rain heal on me or line of sight from the tanks .
Hello, We just tested this again today and can confirm that it is still working how Clarisa posted. Bump up for visibility!
