What's with Medica 2

[GhostXO]

I'm raising my tanks right now and hoo boy 8/10 times I do a duty I get a White Mage that uses Medica 2 no matter what the healing situation is. If I'm at 5% HP, Medica 2. If I'm at 100% HP and so is everyone else, Medica 2. I understand it's a HoT and some healers use it during pulls so they can DPS more, but is it really worth it for that? Why not just put on a Regen? Medica 2 is 100 potency per HoT tic, and it tics 5 times, so 500 potency in total for the HoT. Regen is a total of 1,200 potency with 6 tics. The time spent casting a Medica 2 could just be spent casting a Cure 2 which gives 200 more potency than the Medica 2 and takes the same amount of time to cast. I'm purposely ignoring the initial 200 potency that Medica 2 gives, but if I didn't it would still be the same amount of potency as a Cure 2.

Is there something I'm missing about this skill? I feel like I'm going crazy from the amount of times I'm seeing Medica 2 being cast. Why is every healer I'm being matched with using it for big tank pulls where the focus is single target healing?

[Eclipse12187]

To put it bluntly, they’re bad. Throwing medica 2 up pre-pull is almost all going into overheal and can cause issues with initial aggro when pulling mobs in dungeons. In raids most fights open with a raidwide but the bulk of the healing from a precast medica 2 would have been burned by then. Personally it can be a bit of “I can buff my party!” Combined with ast and sch having prepull shields but anyway, medica 2 is used when you can afford to spend the time to let the regen work. If the regen doesn’t have enough time to work, whether it was used prepull when there’s no damage out or when people are already topped off then it was a pointless and wasted cast.

Just throwing this out there since I’ve had someone say I “wasn’t healing enough” because I was using glare when no damage was out so out of pettiness I left 100% uptime on medica 2. They still died (was a not mitigating tankbuster issue).

[Urthdigger]

Not sure, I think a lot of people see "Oh hey AoE regen!" and fail to look at the numbers. The regen amount is LAUGHABLY small. Granted, it's an effective option for if the entire party needs heals and it doesn't need to be right now, but if only one person needs to be healed or if heals need to be spammed there are FAR better options.

Though, it's not only healers who fall into this trap. I once had a tank tell me I should be keeping Medica II up on them full time XD

[QooEr]

Because theyre bad. i kind of wish overheal was shown in the game so people would see their spells are doing nothing

[ItMe]

That's like a SCH that only casts Galvanize

[Eloah]

That's like a SCH that only casts Galvanize

I think I get what you mean, but what you said doesn't make sense, since there is no way to "only cast Galvanize".

[ItMe]

I think I get what you mean, but what you said doesn't make sense, since there is no way to "only cast Galvanize".

Hahahah, whoops. You're right.
I tend to think of adloquium as my galvanize button lol

[BlueMageQuina]

I see more and more of this in ShB than ever before, especially since SE reworked tanking so that tank stance is generally all the aggro any tank needs. WHMs throw Medica II pre pull whether you’re in a dungeon or a trial, in casual or in savage, and now ASTs in Diurnal Stance have slowly started to follow suit.

As a WHM main, this irks me to no end. This is one of my two great pet peeves in a cohealer: prepull healing / needless overhealing. If the battle hasn’t even begun, why are you casting Medica II or Aspected Helios? It almost always falls off before the first raidwide anyway, so please explain yourself. Do you really miss Protect that much? (I do too, sad face.)

The MP issues the overuse of Medica II generates is what is most worrisome to me. I understand that the healing ticks are comforting to inexperienced or undergeared healers, or in new content, but this runs quickly into having very little resources when you need them. This is related to my second pet peeve: healers who don’t cast Raise. Sometimes they prefer to DPS instead, some wait for Swiftcast because the party will just all perish violently if they so much as thought about hard casting, some are just plain inattentive—then there are those healers, the ones we’re talking about, who are out of MP because they’ve casted 17 Medica IIs / Aspected Helios in the first seven minutes of the alliance raid.

This is unnecessary and it’s problematic for me, your cohealer. And in four man content, this is why you’ve taken aggro and died before the tank realized that entering the duty has turned his tank stance off.

[KDSilver]

You don't miss anything.
They're just not reading the tooltip and made the calculation.
They just thought "it's a regen" and that's it.

[LariaKirin]

You're definitely missing something, because you provided no context. We can't speculate on the motivations of a "hypothetical WHM who uses Medica II" without context.

"Why is every healer I'm being matched with using it for big tank pulls where the focus is single target healing?". I don't buy it.