Quote Originally Posted by The_Great_Samulas View Post
Quicken can be instrumental in saving a bad situation or in certain encounter types (many epics), but it tends to be over-used. This is particularly noteworthy on newer players that tend to leave it on and use it as a "crutch". You see it also on veteran players that get addicted to it and never grow out of its use. Here is my view on quicken:

Quicken is a powerful feat that can greatly reduce your reaction time and save characters from catastrophic damage. Because of this, many actually use it constantly, as has been mentioned. The down-side of this is healers actually become reliant upon it and never grow out of its use. You don't need it on almost all of the time once you are experienced (and provided you have concentration). People get used to it though and decide they can no longer keep people up without it. Quicken doesn't help you with interruption on heal scrolls, so if you have no concentration you can be interrupted by just about anything, when scrolling (a big mana saving technique). Quicken itself wastes tons of mana (15-20% of your mana pool will go to quickening on a proficient caster, more if not). On an end stage cleric with 2100-2300 mana this is 315-460 mana just to quicken things. Basically a mana pot. Not to mention the fact that it actuallly can kill mana saving healing techniques you can use, because only big heals are actually feasible with quicken. And what about actually being a cleric and not a healbot? You going to quicken all your offensive spells too?

There are techniques to prevent interuption of spells that you will never learn if you don't try to wean yourself off the quicken crutch. You can't even try them if you don't get concentration. One of the biggest mana saving things a caster of any type needs to learn is the proper use of metamagics. You can always spot the cleric relying upon quicken - he's the one with no mana...
This can be true, especially in 6-man group situations. Of course, if you're a melee divine, quicken is non-negotiable, but if you're a caster, there are indeed situations when it can be turned off.

However, this seems to become less the case in many epics, where the reaction time is absolutely essential, and it also opens up the use of the most mana-efficient heal spell, Mass Heal.

So yeah, a time and a place, and all that. You just need to recognize what a situation means. And I agree that concentration is a must, as heal scrolling reliably is the only thing that makes some of the more attrition-style epics affordable in terms of consumables (thinking mainly of ECoF, EDA, or EADQ1).