I've recieved a lot of varied oppinions on the merits of wearing 8/8 Transcendence versus wearing a lot of the non-set pieces, which can generally get you a lot more +healing, something many also like. I only have five pieces myself, and while I could see myself wearing all eight on certain fights, I honestly don't think I would use it full time, but the point of this thread is to argue the merits.

Looking at just the armor slots, with full Transcendence, you get the following stats:
1% Crit
Intellect: 176
Spirit: 127
Stamina: 114
7 MP5
+300 Healing
5 pieces: When struck in melee there is a 50% chance you will Fade for 4 seconds.
8 pieces: Your Greater Heals now have a heal over time component equivalent to a rank 5 Renew.

If you were to go all out +healing, you could probably rationalize replacing almost all of the set pieces. That being said, the three piece bonus is amazing, and I would never live without it. Keeping the helm, gloves, and pants(which in my mind, are the best pieces relative to other options), you could replace the shoulders with Ternary Mantle, the robes with Robes of the Guardian Saint, the bracers with Bracers of Royal Redemption, the belt with Grasp of the Old God, and the boots with Boots of Pure thought. Doing so would give you the following stats:
+108 Stam
+138 Int
+97 Spirit
+411 healing
21 MP/5
1% Crit

The difference being(From Full transc to 3/8)
-6 stam
-38 Int
-30 Spirit
+111 Healing
+14 MP5
- Set Bonuses

That stat loss sucks, but the +111 healing gain is pretty significant gain. The 5 piece bonus is great in a few fights, but useless in many as well. That being said, the eight piece bonus is obviously the selling point. I very rarely use greater heal at this point, finding that heal with the 900 or so +healing I have is more then enough to use Heal rank 1-4 to great effect. I'm curious why other people think it is, or is not better, and welcome any thoughts on the matter.

This is only debatable in your mind at the moment because you don't have 8/8. The 8-piece Transcendence bonus is basically broken. The mana efficiency of Rank 1 GHeal with 8/8 Trans is absolutely disgusting. If you're still missing several pieces, then yeah, you're better off giving up the 5pc bonus to min/max on a slot-by-slot basis, while keeping the 3pc bonus.

I have the ability to get it. I'll follow your advice and try it.

Gloves aren't really that good. Worst piece of transcendence IMO. I'd rather keep Robes of Transcendence (awesome looks) and take Gloves of the Messiah over transc gloves. If you're aiming for random +healing items, but want to keep the 3-set transc bonus that is.

Gloves are the worst piece of Transcedence due to the crit wasting itemization points.

I'm currently sitting at about +900 healing, wearing Halo, Leggings and Bracers of Transcendence. I've considered picking up the last four pieces of Transcendence, as the Robes would be the only hard part, but purely from a numerical standpoint it doesn't look like a huge upgrade. With a couple items out of early AQ, I could hit +1000 healing, compared to about +900 in full transcedence.

GH1 + full renew ticks would be 9.4 hp/mana, compared to 7.6 for heal2 with the +healing gear. Obviously a lot better, but only for one heal per 15 seconds, and the rest of the time you have to either cast heal (and be less mana efficient than the +healing build), or overwrite the renew. It seems easy to run into the problem druids have with Rejuv where the HoT portion does a lot less than it should. If you only have half the ticks actually healing, then GH1 + Renew drops down to 7.5 hp/mana.

Also, I'm not entirly comfortable with the idea of using 2k heals primarily. Spike damage on our tanks has been going down, and thier health up, but having a tank down 2k compared to 1k is as much of a difference as a flask makes.

I've been curious about how damage taken by a tank has changed with newer instances. MC is pretty much a static damage taken per second, with little in the way of spikes.

BWL was the king of spike damage, with Broolord MS/Cleave/Blastwaves, and shadowflame + forced berserker stances.

But BWL also introduced the idea of stacking debuffs. This seems to be blizzard's pet way of killing tanks, from flame buffets to ignited flesh, and the noxious breath from the green dragons.

Being relatively new to AQ, what are your observations on the type of damage output/healing required for tanks in this instance?

I'm at least glad it's not just flash heal spam anymore.

As with most things, the way you look at the gear setup changes depending on if you are talking about the individual priest or all the priests in a raid. In my mind, having 2 or 3 8/8 Trans priests is important, but more than that just gets redundant. Like any good organization you need variety in order to cover a wide range of situations. You need priests that have gone heavy +healing to cover spike damage, and you need 8/8 Trans priests for the extra renew. Since my guild already has 2 8/8 Trans priests, I'm going with a big +healing/mana regen setup. This way the raid as a whole gets the best of both worlds.

For the individual priest, I'd say go 8/8. But that kind of defeats the entire point of being in a raid. :)

There's also the problem that the Trans renew takes 3 seconds before the first tick of healing. So if you have more than one 8/8 priest healing the MT, they may constantly overwrite the renew, preventing it from ticking.

Of course, this is easily solvable, but it is sad that a tier 2 8-piece bonus needs solving.

if you have access to it, an 8/8 will ake you one of the best healers in your raid. Not because you'll be landing the biggest heals 9albeit you will get some huge ones in) but because no matter what rank GH you cast you ALWAYS get the renew rank 5 buff on your target. With GH also now 2.5 second casting (with talents), and with 3 talent points in improved renew (no matter what priest build always worth gettign), you'll be landing 350+ ticks off of the buff easily for only about 3-400 mana. Which you will then regen insanely quickly.... Means effectively minimal downtime. C/f a screenshot shown by Gurg a few weeks ago where the guy with thr 8/8 bonus had headler 350,000+ hitpoints, the next closest 200,000.

edit: the way around having more than one 8/8 on the mt is to switch from them both using GH to one using Flash, should solve the problem, although spreading the 8/8 priests amongst the tanks will keep the raid up longer due to the fact nearly every raid encounter outside of molten core either benefits from having an off tank ready (Azuregos teleports at a very basic level), or Skeram if you are looking at Ahn'Qiraj at a more simple level. In fact, Skeram, The Bug Trio and Sartura all require at least 3 primary tanks so having an 8/8 (if possible) on all of them is hugely beneficial. Then put priests with miscelaneous gear (5/5 tier 2 and then 3 AQ/BWL miscelaneous pieces) as secondry healers on the tanks to pair up with the 8/8's.

excuse the grammatical errors :)

Uhmm, but i dont think that HoT component is affected by that talent. Its not even counted as "renew" in the first place.

If you are able to get the absolute ideal pieces for every slot, a pure +healing/mp5 build will be comparable to 8/8 transc. The ease of obtaining a full transc set makes it the better short term option for most.

I might change my mind when I see Naxx drops, but until then, I'll be hugging my Transc bonus tightly (well, once Nef stops being an unfair jackass) and focusing on getting the non-armor upgrades out of AQ. A priest with full transcendence and Ring of the Martyr/Augur Staff/Angelista's smashes a priest that blew his DKP load picking up the ideal +healing pieces and is still holding Benediction and other old options.

I lol'd at Zantetsuken's name change. Well played.

I'm not sure about the talent, I'll have to test that. But all your +healing counts, which is why it is so broken.

When I was a main healer on one of the tanks for Twin Emperors for example, over 10% of my healing in that fight was from that extra rank 5 renew, which has no additional mana cost. That means 8/8 Transcendence increased my total healing potentional by 10% without increasing any cost in mana.

It will be a long, long time before I get something that can replace this set.

Spells affected by Improved Renew:

http://thottbot.com/?f=s&affected=117191

Quite clearly omitted is http://thottbot.com/?sp=22010

No benefit from the talent.

Unless I misunderstand something you would need around 1400+ to get bonus ticks for 350+. That's only possible with trinkets right now.

Except for that you had to use a less mana-efficient heal to be able to get that 10%. How much of your healing is from GH compared to non-GH to get that 10%?