Summary:
- Choosing between consuming echoes with spell or lbing and then healing yourself with that spell could come down to a numbers thing where you simply do the math and pick the option that does the highest healing, but in practice it's more about the damage pattern and what kind of healing you need in that specific moment.
- Once you have your tierset complete, lbing a sb is always better than echoing it on pure raw healing. This can easily change with balance changes to any part of the whole sequences, including ve
- You would never lb some spells that just don't fit into a lb window, like db or rev.
- Adding or removing carrier effects that lb but don't echo or echo but don't lb like s14p, coy and reverb can swing this choice one way or the other.
A common problem when learning Preservation is not being able to properly assess when you should echo ve to heal with lb instead of directly casting a heal like sb into the echoes. This mainly comes with experience but there is some general points that can be made to help you understand what to do on different situations, these are:
- Current tunning: Buffs or nerfs to ve, lb or the spell you plan to echo can change what is the better option.
- Healing profile: Depending on the type of healing you need, echoing a spell directly might be better or worse than using lb.
- Avaliable resources: Different spells interact in different ways when echoed, some parts of them might carry over and some don't, and depending on whether you are using ta echoes or manually casted ones, this might affect your choice.
We can dive into these points in more detail to help illustrate when you would make one choice over the other.
1) Current Tunning
For this it's generally a math question, as we can calculate how much a given spell would heal people when echoed directly as oposed to used into lb. As an example let's use sb, which is the most common choice to cast into a lb, and compare two potential scenarios with it assuming you are playing Chronowarden.
You use ta to cover your five man group in echoes, and then you are choosing between casting sb directly or first using ve to trigger lb and then casting echo and sb on yourself. Thanks to our improved tc in TWW we can easily fit a rank 4 sb into the five seconds lb window after an echo. With that in mind we can check the numbers:
Disclaimer: the numbers used are the current spellpower healing of the spells as of the time of this writing, sb and ve are also increased by lushg, I am assuming your chronofs hit for the max amount which should be the norm and I am separating healing done to yourself as both scenarios would cause overhealing on you and we care more about healing the rest of the group here.
Scenario 1: ve into echo and sb
| Spell | Healing on the group | Healing on yourself |
|---|---|---|
| ve | 552 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 4 (players) = 994 | 552 |
| sb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 3 (players) = 2,818 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) = 939.4 |
| echoed sb | 671 * 1.05 = 704.5 | |
| reverb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) * 3 (players) = 845 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) = 281.8 |
| lb from sb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.18 (lb transfer) * 4 (players) = 676 | |
| lb from echo sb | 671 * 1.05 * 0.18 (lb transfer rate) * 4 (players) = 507 | |
| lb from afterimg chronof | 609 * 0.18 * 4 (players) = 438.48 | |
| chronofs | 609 * 2 = 1,218 | 609 |
| Total | 7,496.5 SP | 3,086.7 SP |
Scenario 2: sb into the echoes
| Spell | Healing on the group | Healing on yourself |
|---|---|---|
| sb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 3 (players) = 2,818 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) = 939.4 |
| reverb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) * 3 (players) = 845 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) = 281.8 |
| echoed sb | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 4 (players) = 1,208 | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) = 301.95 |
| echoed reverb | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 0.3 * 4 (players) = 362 | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 0.3 = 90.5 |
| afterimg chronof | 609 * 2 (players) = 1,218 | 609 |
| Total | 6,451 SP | 2,222.6 SP |
As we can see, on this example lbing sb is better, plus if we look closely at the different effects happening, most of the healing of scenario #2 is sb itself, and this doesn't increase as the amount of available target does: its always fixed as you plus three other targets.
The only part of this healing that increases as we cover more people are the echoed sb and echoed reverb healing, which is small compared to the hard casted sb as echoed sbs don't benefit from s14p. Even the chronofs from afterimg are already capped at three targets.
Scenario #1 however has way more parts that keep increasing as we keep adding more targets, like all the ve and lb healing. This means that the difference between the results will only increase when you step into a raid and are able to lb more targets.
Lets run the numbers again but this time echoing 10 people with two tas:
Scenario 1: ve into echo and sb
| Spell | Healing on the group | Healing on yourself |
|---|---|---|
| ve | 552 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 10 (players) = 2484 | 552 |
| sb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset increase) * 3 (players) = 2818 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) = 939.4 |
| echoed sb | 671 * 1.05 = 704.5 | |
| reverb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) * 3 (players) = 845 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) = 281.8 |
| lb from sb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.18 (lb transfer) * 10 (players) = 1,691 | |
| lb from echo sb | 671 * 1.05 * 0.18 (lb transfer rate) * 10 (players) = 1,268 | |
| lb from afterimg chronof | 609 * 0.18 * 10 (players) = 1,096.2 | |
| chronofs | 609 * 2 = 1,218 | 609 |
| Total | 11,414.2 SP | 3,086.7 SP |
Scenario 2: sb into the echoes
| Spell | Healing on the group | Healing on yourself |
|---|---|---|
| sb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset increase) * 3 (players) = 2818 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) = 939.4 |
| reverb | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) * 3 (players) = 845 | 671 * 1.4 (Tierset) * 0.3 (reverb) = 281.8 |
| echoed sb | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 10 (players) = 3020 | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) = 301.95 |
| echoed reverb | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 0.3 * 10 (players) = 906 | 671 * 0.45 (ta echo) * 0.3 = 90.5 |
| afterimg chronof | 609 * 2 (players) = 1,218 | 609 |
| Total | 8,807 SP | 2,222.6 SP |
And so on five targets echoing a sb is worse than lbing it, and adding more targets just increases this gap. However on real scenarios the gap between the two is close enough that whichever one of the two you choose to do will most likely be enough healing to cover a given damage event on m+.
As for the whole thing, when to echo a specific spell as oposed to lbing it can come down to a numbers scenario where buffing or nerfing the spell itself or ve can heavily affect the result. For this one it is important to be on top of the latest balance changes to the spec to be aware of changes in this type of decisions but also in practice doing healing at the appropiate times it usually more important than doing the exact specific chain of spells that results in higher on-paper numbers.
2) Healing Profile
Talking about the healing profile you need, there is a very simple example to illustrate the point: you would never ever lb db. This is because lb transfers part of all the healing you do to yourself during the five seconds it is active, while db does a large amount of healing but over a longer period and on several different targets.
It doesn't make sense to ever try to fit into lb a spell that does it's healing in a way that isn't compatible with lb, so things like db and rev are out of the question, and only burst healing spells like sb, lf and ec are worth any consideration. If you need over-time healing over a long period of time, you would simply echo the db directly to get two hots rolling on the group.
Even for burst healing spells like sb, the way they do their healing is still relevant when choosing one over the other. echoed sbs apply reverb to all healed targets, while lbing an sb would only apply it to four people at most. Furthermore, lb requires you to first cast ve, and then stand still casting sb all the way to rank four to do the complete healing of the combo, while when directly echoing sb you can start the cast before the damage comes and then release your sb right as it hits and you are then free to do other things or move around to dodge mechanics as needed.
On the oposite side it's also important to consider that using ve into the echoes could result in faster healing than waiting for the sb cast to finish which could result in someone dying, and in general using common sense and pressing your buttons quickly instead of freezing to think about what you are supposed to do would result in better outcomes during regular gameplay.
3) Available Resources
For a final consideration, different parts of different spells might transfer throught echo or not, a good example from the tables above is s14p which heavily increases the healing of sb but doesn't transfer to echoed versions of the spell, which means you can use it to increase the healing of a sb you cast on yourself and so increase the amount that is transfered via lb but you can't use it to increase how much echoing the spell directly heals for.
Another common example of this is coy, as if you try to mass echo a lf all the echo copies won't get buffed by coy but you can lb a coy lf and transfer the buffed heal.
On the opposite side of this we have reverb, which applies fully to any echoed sb which means it spreads to the whole group when echoing directly but only hits the four targets of the main cast when lbing.
This is a bit of a complex topic, and as I said at the start in the end it comes down to experience with the class to reach a point where you are confident enough to make these decisions on the fly on a moment to moment basis. You now have a bit more knowledge about how these things work but the actual ability to execute on high stress scenarios will only come with a lot of practice. Good luck.