Pacing yourself is overrated. A common healer mistake, one that I am particularly prone to even now, is that mana must be carefully managed and paced so that it's parceled out evenly through the encounter. After all, you don't want to go out of mana, do you? Especially not in Clutch Time, when it's getting late and the clock is ticking down and the home team (that's your raid) is down by a few points?
The problem is that all damage really is created equal. Well, not precisely and I'll get to how it's not, but it's still a good generalized principle which I'll illustrate with some back-of-the-envelope math (I call it Casual Jerks theorycrafting).
Formulas Are Pro
This is your raid's effective health:
Health Pool(raid) + Mana Pool(healers) * HPM(healers) + Combat MP5 Regen(healers) * HPM(healers)
HPM = heals per mana point
Combat MP5 Regen = every source of mana regeneration combined and placed in a standardized "per 5 seconds" frame of reference
(Bonus points to those who noticed I didn't reduce the equation to its simplest form. I chose not to just to make each element discrete: the literal health pools plus the healing done from the healers' mana pools plus the healing done from the mana the healers regenerate through the fight.)
There may be some slight alterations one could make to that (troll racial health regen for the win?), but that pretty much sums up all the health that the raid will have available to them for the entire encounter. We can view it as one large health pool that the raid draws from collectively. This is clearly not accurate in every way, as individuals do not share in the collective so losing a certain 180k health from that pool (say all the hit points of a particular tank) has a pretty major effect. But it works for the point I am about to make.
All of that health is what is available to you and, beyond making sure that everyone has at least 1 hp at all times, you just need to ensure that the boss health pool goes to 0 before that raid health pool goes to 0. Even if only 1 hp remains to the raid (maybe to an intrepid healer who dealt the coup de grace before being coup de graced herself), if the boss hit 0, you are the winners.
Your mana pool, as a healer, is one piece of that collective health pool and, with certain major caveats that I will detail in a moment, it doesn't matter when you use that mana pool, just so long as you do use it.
Let Me Repeat That With Pizazz
Let me put that another, more controversial way: it is better by far to go out of mana halfway through the fight (bearing in mind the caveats I am about to mention) than to wipe with any mana left in the tank. The reason for this is simple: your contribution to the raid's health pool is fixed for any single encounter. It is the amount of heals you can cast with your mana pool, factoring in the regen you experience during the fight. This and no more. Paced, not paced...it is virtually fixed (with yet another caveat, which is also coming in just a moment).
This means that whether you use those heals early, middle, late or carefully measured out over all those periods, your contribution is the same. Hypothetically, if you burned through your mana in the first minute of an eight minute fight, that means less healing for your other healers and they now have more mana for the remaining seven minutes.
More Fine Print Than A Predatory Bank Loan
Now before I get comments telling me what an irresponsible piece of advice that is, let me finally get to the caveats which are rather important.
All of the above only holds true as long as you are observing all of the following caveats:
Caveat No. 1: You are not overhealing. Well, duh. Any heal that is an overheal is wasting mana and reduces your fixed contribution to the Raid Effective Health. For shame.
Caveat No. 2: You are not causing other healers to overheal. Heal sniping (that is, rushing to cast an unnecessary quick heal to address damage that another healer has covered) is just as criminal as sniping in real life with guns. And if another healer overheals due to you, it's just as bad as you overhealing.
Caveat No. 3: Your zeal to heal during a certain portion of the fight is not leaving other healers at max mana. If you burn through your mana to such an extent that other healers aren't healing at all, and therefore sitting at mana cap, then they are wasting potential mana regen...which is part of their "fixed contribution" to raid health. Uh oh, that "fixed contribution" is looking less and less fixed. Didn't I have a caveat about that? Yes, it's coming soon.
All three of those conditions must be met for what I said above to be true, that it doesn't matter when you spend your mana and when you go out of mana. The moment any of those three aren't true, you're not doing it right and if you go out of mana, you've hurt your raid.
Fixed Contribution Caveat: Okay, so about that fixed contribution I kept mentioning. It's not really fixed, but I simplified it to make a point that I feel is valid. First of all, my claiming it fixed based on my cute little toy formula was based on ideal play: you are never overhealing and never wasting mana regen and you are exercising every cooldown to increase your mana regen optimally. People don't play perfectly, so that rather "unfixes" your contribution. Further, even if you played optimally, there's that pesky "HPM" variable in said formula. You can and always will adjust this on the fly and depending on how you adjust this (to balance with throughput aka heals per second), your contribution will be variable.
Okay, that was the caveat. The caveat essentially boiling down to "What I said before isn't really true." However, the overarching point is that there's a limited range to which you can change the raid's effective health pool based upon your stats and, whether we call it fixed or not, it doesn't matter when you use your portion of the raid's health pool, as long as the Basic Three Rules (given above) are met.
Okay, So What's Your Point?
So why am I mentioning this, in such a long-winded manner, at all? To say this: when in doubt, use mana. Don't be silly and spam your most mana inefficient spell from the start of combat until you run dry, but don't cancel a heal because you're unsure of whether you'll need that mana later. That damage must be healed...if not by you, then by one of your fellow healers. If you heal it, then a fellow healer doesn't and she will have more mana later which balances you not having that mana later. However, if you don't heal it and someone dies and the situation devolves and you wipe with 40% of your mana...well, my friend, you just paced yourself out of some shiny purple fancies.
It's tempting to try to use mana evenly over the course of the fight so that you run dry the moment the boss wheezes, falls over and says, "If it weren't for you meddlesome kids...!" before expiring. But since fights proceed in a non-linear manner and the exact time is not always the same, it's generally very hard to pace it out precisely.
From my experience (and we can file this in the "my experiences not necessarily typical" category), most wipes are not due to the healers running out of mana (when it comes to raids; heroic five-mans are another story when the healer is only just barely geared enough). Instead, most wipes (other than ones caused by failure to observe the fight mechanics) occur because the throughput at a certain moment was not sufficient between all the healers. No correctly handled raid mechanic leads to more damage than appropriately geared healers are capable of healing through. So, unless the mechanics were not handled correctly or people were not appropriately geared, these wipes are due to simply not healing enough: either not casting a heal when you could have or not casting a sufficiently strong one because you were conserving mana.
So the take-home, as far as I'm concerned is that it's better to err on the side of running out of mana too early rather than too late. It's better to challenge your mana pool than to play it cautiously. You must observe the three caveats laid out above, but as long as you have, heal away.
You may say I'm being a tad extremist about using mana with wild abandon, but there's a reason for that. I believe that healers are, by nature, overly cautious and it leads to less performance than they are capable of. This includes myself. I think it's worth harping on this, that a point of healing late in the encounter is not worth more than a point of healing early in the encounter. As long as your healing is not being wasted or causing another healer to waste resources, all healing is created equal. Therefore, so long as you are using all your mana and all your mana regen capability, it really doesn't matter where you use it.
Caveat About The Entire Post: None of this holds true for those rare encounters where the boss regularly reduces players to a percentage of their health or to a set amount of health. In this tier, that means Chimaeron and his little brother* Baron Ashbury. In those fights, obviously, there's plenty of chance to waste healing and therefore you do need to pace yourself. But that's one of those freak show gimmicks in which the laws of time and space don't hold true and you do what you must to survive.
*May not be lore-accurate
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