What Is Ramping in WoW? Why Do Healers Ramp?

[00:02] or to ramp in World of Warcraft before. It's a very important concept and one you might even know from other games. While I plan to cover the healers, I will also give examples for DPS and tank as well. My name is Baz the healer and

[00:15] what the heck is ramping? Ramping is probably best defined as building up resources in order to expend later for a larger reward. If you play Magic the Gathering or Pokemon TCG, you've certainly seen one of these two cards.

[00:30] These are excellent forms of ramping. In Pokemon, this hydrapple EX does more side of the board. Normally, you can only attach one energy a turn. But given cards like Teal Mask, Ogreon, EX's ability, allowing us to attach a card

[00:45] and draw for the turn, you can draw a lot of cards, attach a ton of energy per turn, and very quickly by your third turn, you can probably hit like a truck. You can also just literally think of a ramp like Tony Hawk, right? You get

[00:58] speed, you hit the ramp, you go higher in the air, you can do a trick ramping. There are many classic WoW examples of ramping, but before we get to Desoline Priest and all the healer examples, let's start with Boomkin. Boom can have

[01:10] two dots, Sunfire and Moonfire. Sunfire makes targets afflicted take more nature damage, while Moonfire does the same thing, but the targets will take more arcane damage. Sunfire hits like a bazillion targets, though, while

[01:23] Moonfire only hits up to two targets at a time. This does mean that getting a lot of these out can take a while, but it's not all bad. Using this move and the damage from these moves has a chance to give you astral power, which you use

[01:36] on your spenders. Starfalls is your big AoE spender, which does arcane damage. When in your lunar phase and spells are crashing down, you can build a ton of astral power in a short period of time and spam a good amount of starfalls.

[01:50] This ramp does take a bit to get started, but the end result is massive. Another form of ramping is funneling. Feral Druid has a very potent example. They have a talent called Apex Predators Cravings that reads that their rip

[02:03] damage has a chance to give them a free bite. and not just a free bite, which is their strong single target move. It does do a bit of cleave, but it'll also pretend that you've consumed the maximum number of combo points. So, by getting

[02:15] as many rips down as possible, we can funnel all of these bleed procs into a single target for massive damage on that target, making them a phenomenal choice for priority target damage. This makes me wish that the analogy I used earlier

[02:29] into a funnel, but I already did two today. You're not getting another one out of me. Tanks don't have a ton of ramping. Prot warrior can get more healing from bleeds with the right talents, sure, but that's not really a

[02:41] huge ramping process. But I guess a good example is guardian druid. And how did I end up with four druid examples on this list? Guardian gets rend and tear, a thrash you put on a target makes you do 2% more damage to them and take 2% less

[02:57] damage. Now, it stacks up to three times and four depending on your hero talents. But given the amount of armor and self-healing bear does, it goes an extremely long way in helping them stay upright. Once the thrashes are down,

[03:10] it's a bit easier to maintain survivability. That opener on bear can without a bark skin or some other cool down to help you out. But once those cooldowns wear off and all the thrashes are placed down, it's usually much

[03:23] easier to stay upright without having to spend too many resources. Most healers have a ramp. Some don't really have a ramp, but we can still talk about the ramp-like things they have to do. As I said, the best example

[03:35] is probably discipline priest. It's the classic ramp healer in raid and in dungeon. Discipline puts down atonements on targets. This makes them take bonus discipline priest, but more importantly allows damage from the disc priest to

[03:51] convert to healing. This is done for the same amount of targets with atonement. It's not like spread out among all targets. If a target has an atonement, healing as everyone else before any other modifiers or grievous wound

[04:03] effects. In a raid, it can take somewhere between 10 to 12 seconds to fully ramp. But one of the tools that helps you out with this is Powerword Radiance, an AoE heal that applies five atonements. While a touch shorter in

[04:16] their atonement duration, it's a quick way to kickstart your ramp. But because you have two charges, you can and will run out of charges. Manually ramping your dungeon party allows you to save a charge. So, it's possible to radiance to

[04:29] kickstart your heals, manually ramp when it's about to end, heal through some more damage, and then radiance to heal again and reapply atonement, etc. Ramping might cost a touch more mana, but ends up being worth it almost every

[04:42] single time. But if you time any of this wrong, your party could be dead before your damage even hits the enemy to heal your allies. Holy Priest also has a ramp. They have a few tools, but the big one to talk about is prayer of mending.

[04:55] Mending will heal a target when they take health damage and jump to a new target. If you get a lot of these out before a big AoE damage event, and they put in a ton of work in the background with its 8-second cooldown, that can be

[05:08] you need to remember to keep using them almost on cooldown. On Oracle Holy Priest, you can sometimes reduce the cooldown of your next three spells and you could use them all on mending. And because Oracle sends out bonus mending

[05:22] to another target, it is possible to ramp much quicker if your hero talents are good for it. All right, Mistw Weaver has a lot of ramp, but I'm going to keep could be here for days. Healing people with your Jadefire teachings heals for

[05:37] percentage converted damage turned to healing on your allies. Note that this is split evenly among five targets. If you're healing one or two targets, it's very efficient. But split all that healing among five targets and it can

[05:49] take a while to heal them up. But your renewing mist is a heal amp with the talent chi harmony. This simple heal over time now turns into a 30% healing boost. Enveloping mist will provide one random renewing mist on a target. Rising

[06:05] sun kick will also do that. And your chi cocoon will apply both an enveloping mist and a renewing mist to the target. So you could in theory set up an enveloping mist, get your two charges of renewing mist out on some teammates, run

[06:18] in, hit your rising sun kick, start your Jadefire teachings, and you could ramp out of control very quickly and do a massive amount of very mana efficient healing. But it actually doesn't stop there. Renewing Mist gives you a chance

[06:30] at Zen Pulse, making your often instant cast single target heal, Vivify, heal significantly more. And it also heals through Renewing Mist as well. By cleave with your vivify, but if I'm being honest, it's not the strongest,

[06:45] but with a Zen Pulse, it's quite a bit heavier. This allows you to quickly cast while doing your healing and top someone off, reducing the targets that you're your fist weaving is more efficient. Combine this with a cool down like Shia

[06:59] House's Teachings or Chi, and you have some next level HPS that isn't rivaled by many healers. Restoration Shaman has some ramp, but it's a little less about ramp and a little more about timing. Casting a riptide gives you two stacks

[07:13] of title wave, which reduces either the cast time on chain heal and healing wave, or ups the critical effect chance of healing surge by 30%. Riptides are not just good as spot heals, but they also can add bonus stamina to the target

[07:26] with the right talents. Chain heal is okay on its own, but when powered up by various talents, it's your best AOE heal. High Tide requires you to spend a certain amount of mana to make your next two chain heals extremely powerful.

[07:41] Casting chain heal makes your rip tide stronger, stacking two times. So, while you don't always need to ramp, there's this really powerful feedback loop. mana to make sure that your High Tide is ready to go before a major healing

[07:56] event. You can also ramp your healing totems. You could run healing stream totem, drop two of them, reset and get a third one out, and then a healing tide totem as a giant ramp to help in the background while you hit other heals.

[08:10] amount of healing in the game, but this is something that you could do to kind of help you through a major damage event and make it significantly easier to keep up with the heals. Shaman and Monk both have what I like to refer to as momentum

[08:23] based ramps. It's more like a ramp to build up speed and once you get the tools going, they work extremely hard at carrying your healing inertia, if you will. It's sort of hard to describe unless you've played it, but once you

[08:35] get it rolling, it feels like you really get to maintain that speed. Restore also works with momentum, but it's more like pumping a halfpipe than a singular ramp. Oh, I did it again. Anyway, resto druid mastery states that they do percentage

[08:50] overtime effect that they have on a target. It only affects that specific target, mind you, but it's possible to get many heals down. Lifeloom gives you target affected and you can have two of them out. Having one of them on you will

[09:07] increase how fast your healover times tick. Okay, given all of that, we can use efflloresence to give spring blossoms. If players are stacked, that's one stack of our mastery. Rejoove is a basic instant cast heal over time. So,

[09:21] we could totally ramp this on everybody before a major damage event. Then, we before a major damage event. Then, we could lifelume ourselves, lifelume

[09:43] more damage than others can be swift mended to consume the heal over times to get a large heal on them. And oh, another heal overtime effect. And then middle of all of this, start casting their own healover times and instant

[09:56] cast healing spells. And good lord, it is a ton of healing when it's ramped. halfpipe analogy is that I'm showing you the boom box build where you boommywave your spells to get your mana back and to do some healing. Because of dream of

[10:11] scenarios, it converts wrath and starfire damage is healing and doubly so every minute from a star surge or when you pop the 5-minute cooldown. So you

[10:23] can ramp in one direction, getting all the heals down, then blast damage to keep the heals going, and then go back and re-ramp the heals, go back to do like a halfpipe. You're genuinely pumping different sides of this

[10:37] contributing to healing, everything running smoothly. Holy Paladin doesn't have much in the way of ramping. Heralds of the Sun kind of does, but I'm going you about that. For the most part, holy paladin doesn't do a lot of multiple

[10:53] things with one button. You get one heal per button or one holy power per button. usually not the strongest heal in the game. But because you have a move called beacon of virtue, you can press this low cooldown move and have a couple of

[11:07] seconds to AoE heal. But if you're not prepared before that window goes up, you could miss a lot of precious AoE healing. So, it's important to have your cooldowns right before you press the button or in the case of divine toll,

[11:22] making sure you press the button, then hit divine toll to get some extra AOE healing in. Some of your cooldowns are giving you a multi-hit holy shock. So, the holy shock and it's going to give you three combo points or holy power.

[11:36] You want to make sure that you use those inside of the AoE window so that you can do something like say beacon of virtue, word of glory, holy shock. It hits three times. Word of glory. Holy shock. It hits three times. Word of glory. And

[11:49] that can all fit, but time it wrong and oh yeah, it doesn't feel great. Preservation has a lot of ramping and preparing. And it does so to react to heals in an instant. Echo copies direct healing spells. So by getting a few out,

[12:04] you can cleave with a healing spell. Temporal anomaly gets out five of these, but at half the potency, and it will never overwrite a more powerful one. So you can get two, maybe three echoes out, throw a temporal anomaly, and AoE heal

[12:17] the whole party. But those echoes, the reason you can only get two to three of them out is that you have essence, a unique resource that needs to recharge. Some of your heals and attacks like living flame and reversion can grant you

[12:30] an essence burst. And this essence burst allows you to cast echo for free or to get some mana back with disintegrate. Echo last 18 something seconds. And temporal anomaly, which is your main way of getting AoE out quickly, is up every

[12:45] 12 to 13 seconds. So, it is possible to have a temporal anomaly ready while your echoes are still sitting on your teammates. This ramp and loop turns into a healing back-to pack damage events in really creative ways. Preservation

[13:00] evoker only has one available move to heal at all times, and that's living flame. Everything else is a cool down. And while living flame is a good heal, it's like a flash heal or a heal on holy priest. It's only so good in single

[13:13] target by default, but by using your echoes, you can make all of your heals hit multiple targets, double up on a single target, etc. But you need to keep rotating your cooldowns and getting essence burst to keep the party going.

[13:25] My favorite way of playing preservation is to let the echo sit on my teammates and then when I need to heal, I cash out the echoes and then throw another whole lot to heal, you can use reversions or living flames to get more

[13:40] essence burst to then either do more damage or to ramp into yet another heal. It's a incredibly enjoyable feedback loop. And hopefully now ramping makes a bit more sense. It's not a hard concept on a basic level, but it's fascinating

[13:54] how many ways you can ramp in games. I didn't expect to have parallels to card games and skateboarding, but in context, they're extremely similar. If you have me know down below. And of course, if you want to share a ramp with me, right?

[14:08] Whether there was something lost to time or a favorite setup that people had that's, you know, no longer in the game or a DPS one that I just missed, let me know because I mostly just focus on healers. Take care, friends. I'll see

[14:21] healers. Take care, friends. I'll see you all in the next one.