[skill]Word of Healing[/skill]
As much as some people would hate me for it, I have to say that this is my favorite Monk elite next to something like, oh, Spellbreaker (even though they are used in completely different instances). While others prefer LoD for it's low energy cost, party-wide heal, I don't find it to be particularly beneficial to my play style.
When I play PvE, I wait until my party members (or heroes) are below 60% health and I spike-heal them. I, in my experience, notice that monster damage is largely concentrated amongst two or three single targets of the entire team. When these members begin getting spiked to below 50% health, Word of Healing (in conjunction with Holy Haste and Divine Boon) can take any one of my party members from 30-40% health to 90-100% health in an instant. Now while LoD is an (extremely) efficient party-wide heal, and I won't deny that for a second, it seems to only be useful (to me, at least) in massive party-spike situations, which when playing Prophecies (my main campaign of choice) is not exactly something that comes up every other mob. Maybe in the later missions, Hell's Precipice with the Sparks and their massive AoE output, but otherwise WoH seems to be the main heal in my arsenal.
I do everything with the exact same skill bar, the exact same hero setup, and the exact same henchmen. I always use WoH and I've encountered very little trouble. I always support myself with MoW running a BiP build, so I almost never run out of energy (Divine Boon
This is of course speaking out of experience with WoH only.
The other day I attempted to run a slightly modified version of my current healing build except for the fact I swapped WoH for LoD and attempted to do any of my usual boss runs (for skill capping) and it just didn't cut it. If anything, it felt like it required more team maintenance because I was either waiting for my party members to drop to less than 80% health before I'd cast it, unintentionally cast it while they were above 80% health and waste my energy out of sheer habit (not that it's really a problem, but it certainly wastes more energy than I'd like in conjunction with Divine Boon), or just spam my other healing skills because they honestly seemed much more effective. Obviously LoD is somewhat tailored to specific builds, but as a spike-healer that relies on my allies being under a certain portion of health for maximum efficiency, it just doesn't really have a solid place on my skill-bar.
What are your thoughts on the two?