Abstract: Recent observations show that coronal loops are often subject to quasi-periodic behaviour known as heating-condensation cycles involving thermal instability and coronal rain formation. Numerical simulations suggest that the properties of such cycles are determined by spatio-temporal characteristics of the loop heating. It is usually assumed that for a heating-condensation cycle to be observed repeatedly in the same coronal loop, it is necessary for the heating to be steady and localised at the loop footpoints. I present observational evidence for coronal rain formation triggered by an impulsive heating event. I further show radiation-MHD simulations of coronal rain formation driven by self-consistent heating via Ohmic and viscous dissipation from small-scale reconnection events. These act as an evidence that our assumptions about the steady character of the heating need to be relaxed. I finally outline an on-going work involving convection zone-to-corona simulations on unprecedented scales in order to investigate the long-term response of the corona to realistic coronal heating mechanisms.