Have you tried having the tank block the promised and heal over time spells? That is what I did on my mage pet tank and the cleric merc seems to heal him a ton better since then. Btw, I would definitely recommend your puller block those spells also. Blocking the heal over time spell will allow the puller to get heals faster when they get a dot or something on a pull. Blocking the promised will do the same, PLUS help prevent healer agro during a pull because the puller ran out and tagged some stuff right before the promised goes off.
In your experience, what skins perform better? I've only tried a cookie one, a skeleton, and currently have DE. Can't tell any difference; still have fights where my merc just stares into nothingness and does not heal. Edit: I forgot I also tried a high elf; while she is the best looking imo, still heals like crap.
Promised is supposed to apply a timed buff that fires a self-heal when it ends. The mobs are supposed to see it as the puller or tank healing themselves, provided they did not "see" the healer cast it in the first place. Might be different on mercs though.
I can understanding blocking the Light line of heals due to their long cast times but blocking Promised Renewal is silly! It's a 0.5 second cast time and the merc will immediately cast other heals as necessary. At the 18 second mark you get a really nice big heal and every last bit of the hate generated is granted to the tank and not the healer merc.
Wait you block light spells by the cleric merc? I thought it was just the HoT and promise ones they would block so it would only cast the light spells.
Mercs are (or were) aware of 'pending' heals like elixir/promised; and would not heal people with them pending unless they got really low. It used to be a problem that they wouldn't even heal people with druid/shaman regen, and you had to click it off to get heals.
Yeah, it is possible I was noticing something different. Though I was seeing lots of healer agro like this until I blocked it. Granted, maybe because the heal hadn't hit yet the merc was maybe running out and casting another heal on me mid pull. Though, that isn't supposed to happen either when set as puller.
Yeah, that is why I block them... to get the light spells which cast faster. I mainly pet tank though so maybe they treat normal tanks better. When pet tanking I was often seeing a promised followed by a hot followed by waiting until the pet got below a certain point. Which is fine if the mob being tanked isn't a hard hitter. On harder mobs I would be using mage heals so much that I might as well not even have a merc healer up. Once I blocked those two spells though I seldom even had to watch the pet's hp. It is possible this is an issue with Aegis, iceflame, etc. These reduce incoming damage in spurts. So maybe that messes up the merc's healing rhythm? Aegis blocks/mitigates first few hits and merc thinks it isn't a hard hitting mob so does the hot/promised and goes afk? Then by the time it realizes it is hitting hard and is about to speed up heals I'm hitting aegis and/or casting my own pet heals because of the merc afk. So the merc gets out of rhythm again. Who knows. I just know what works for me. Thought it might be worth a try for the OP.
I found that having a cleric account was more cost effective than having a merc cleric. A real cleric can heal you faster than a merc cleric even if you aren't always healing with your character. Oh, and you get cooler buffs.
A real cleric played average > merc cleric. However as a bard the ability for me to run around really fast and fade into places past see invs made me stop using my paid cleric account and switched to only using the merc cleric. Given there are times when it is worth suciding the cleric then dragging it in and rezing the real cleric with a merc cleric. It was so rare that I needed a real cleric so I stopped paying for the cleric account so I didn't have to deal with running him around. One thing that would get me to start paying and playing a real cleric would be if they fixed pathing so it would be able to follow me when I levi off a ledge to another area without falling off and getting stuck like a merc cleric which I don't have to pay attention to following me around.
Unless it has been a recent fix that wasn't mentioned, Mercs have always seen Promised Renewal and the Elixir line of spells as things they take into consideration for whether they will heal you or not. Mobs consider it as being the Player healing themselves, cleric Mercs consider it as healing that will happen and hold back from casting other spells. Similarly, the Mercs do the same thing with HoT spells like Elixir, they will consider the ticks as expected incoming spells and not heal as often. It is the reason why Mercs healers regularly have a dip in performance when the get access to the new versions of these spells because they are more efficient. You blocking the longer casting time spells may just cover these issues because you are limiting the merc healers to those spells and quick heals. If take regular med breaks I suppose that would work.
That's because heals don't use world geometry, they seem to only check if you are in range, or a legal target. edit- and i realize heals are what we were talking about in the first place, and it's mostly offensive spells that fail to land against a target underwater when you are above. But i think of mercs as NPCs and their rules for casting definitely seem different from PCs.
