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I’ve seen some discussion on the official forums lately about Restorative Flame vs. Healing Invocation. Folks are wondering which is better, and while claims have been made on both sides, I have yet to see anyone really test it in a controlled environment. This is a very valid question, however, because Restorative Flame and Healing Invocation are used for exactly the same thing – keeping the tank up when he’s taking the beating he damn well should.
To test this, I went 51-point in the Purifier tree and the Sentinel tree (not at the same time, obviously). To make the testing as streamlined as possible, I did not take any talents from the other souls during my testing, but I did cast the Purifier’s wisdom buff, since a Purifier would always be using that.
I then went and chain-casted each heal on the healing test dummy in Meridian for two minutes, as measured by a stop-watch on my computer. During this time I had Rift Combat Parser running to grab my healing. Since Rift Combat Parser only kicks while you’re “in-combat” and you don’t go in-combat by healing the dummy, I had to cast an offensive spell on the nearby boss dummy beforehand. Thankfully, the in-combat state does not wear off until you walk away from the area, so I could chain-cast my healing without interruption.
Here are my results. The top is Sentinel casting Healing Invocation, the bottom is Purifier using Restorative Flame.
Now, you might be saying “Damn! That’s a big gap!” It is, and it is instantly recognizable as you cast. Each Healing Invocation heals for about 300-400 more than Restorative Flame. Crits show a bigger gap, of course, since Sentinel has a +crit damage/healing talent baked in to the tree.
There is one catch here. As a Purifier, Restorative Flame places a damage shield on your ally, and that doesn’t show up in the parser. With my spellpower (715) this shield worked out to 405 damage. In my experience, if your tank is being hit by elite mobs in a dungeon, that entire shield will easily be consumed by the time your next Restorative Flame hits. So I counted the number of times I casted Restorative Flame (it was 38) and then multiplied that by 405, to reach a number of 15390. When you add that onto the 61261, you receive a total of 76651. That’s still 12375 less than the Sentinel, or to say it another way, the Purifier with Restorative Flame was 14% less effective than the Sentinel with Healing Invocation.
The conclusion, then, is that Healing Invocation is better. That does not necessarily mean the Sentinel is the best healer, but it does mean the Sentinel should have a slightly easier time keeping up the group’s tank.
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