Until recently, my talent spec has been: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dVg0sm0oZfVxcc0mx

I really like the effect of Spell Warding, since, in my opinion, any mana/time spent healing myself is better spent healing tanks or DPS.

That said, some specific encounters in Naxx (primarily Patchwerk) have demonstrated that it is much more beneficial to the raid as a whole to keep Inspiration up as much as possible. So, to help ease learning on these encounters, my new spec is now: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=dVg0sm0oZfxxcc0mx

However, I'm still debating which talent spec is better for overall use in PvE. The usefulness of both always seems to be, for the most part, exclusive (fights that have raid-wide AoE tend not to have heavy physical damage and vice versa). Obviously, I could always spec for whichever type of fight is causing trouble at the moment, but I'd prefer to find a good general build to minimize respec costs.

I was hoping to elicit some responses from the rest of the community to see what other people think of the two talents and their comparitive usefulness.

(As a note, I do not yet have 4 pieces of Faith which obviously boosts the value of Holy Specialization significantly)

Spiritual Guidance is pretty weak for a healing talent. If you are having a problem keeping up Inspiritation, drop the 4 points in that and get Holy Spec. Or at least spend 2 of the points in Spiritual Guidance in Imp Prayer.

In my optinion Holy Spec is a must have if your goal is to proc Inspiration reasonably often. Priest gear tends not to have a lot of +crit on it, which means you could (depending on your gear) boost your crit rate by 50% by speccing Holy Spec. Although crits are of course nothing to rely on, as the damage gets spikier through the instances a 5% +crit might save some lives.

Regarding Spell Warding, I found to be useful when I had my Honorwhore-weeks and was specced as full pvp supporter. For it to be worthwile, you would need an encounter where excusively you are hit by some non-lethal mob aoe. Against a shadow flame Spell Warding wont help you, and in all cases of raid-wide aoe I remember at this time of the day not only you get it, but other players in your group as well, making it neccessary at some point to use PoH. Shades of Naxxramas or the trash before the Grand Widow for example. You might take 10% less damage by their aoe, but at some point you will need to cast PoH anyway, healing not only the others but you as well.

I too believe Spiritual Guidance to be a rather weak talent. With full Faith you will have a raidbuffed Spirit of ~400 resulting in 100 +heal for 5 talent point. Back in MC when you already had 350 spirit raidbuffed, but only ~200 +heal the additional +heal from Spritual Guidance might have been a nice boost. The above mentioned full Faith with weapons/trinkets of matching quality grant you more than 1000 +heal, and the 100 +heal from Spiritual Guidance offer a mere +10%.
The +100 spell damage you gain might be nice for the weekly warsong, but the rest of your spec holds nothing offensive in it, and Spiritual Guidance alone wont make you a nuker.

side note: it's a) 3:00 am and b) english isnt my native language

I don't think it's all that important for horde priests to have inspiration anymore, now that Ancestral Fortitude is only 3 points and very easy to pick up; your shamans should have no issue all having it.

In my opinion I would stick with Holy specializaton over Spell Warding, as Eleni said, unless you are being single targetted by magic damage, (eg. Fireballs in Ony phase 2, or Shadowbolts in Nef phase 1) SW is a pretty useless talent. Holy specialization on the other hand gives you a passive percentage to both conserve mana due to bigger heals and slap on Inspiration.

Also I disagree with the people who said that SG isn't a very good talent, anything that gives me more +heal is my friend. This may be because I focus on +heal and Spirit as my 2 main stats, but I think combining the two is invaluable.

-Imi
60 NE Priest
The General Public
Laughing Skull

AFAIK Shamans have a much higher base crit percentage than Priests because of their Int/Crit ratio. Plus IIRC their set gear has more +crit on it whereas your average BWL Priest will have stuff like Benediction's +2, +1 off Transcendance if shitty set gear is your jazz, possibly +2 off of Eye of the Beast, +1 off Dragonslayer's Signet (Yuck), and, um, yeah. Holy Specialization seems like such a waste to me. My spec is:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

(Side note: Holy Nova should probably be somewhere else, but meh)

So far I have noticed at least one instance of a difference from Spell Warding in AQ last week where I got hit by a poison volley from one of the bug thingies followed by a cleave from one of the Sarturaesque mobs preceding Princess and I went down to 37 HP. It was pretty sweet.

Shaman/Priest have the same int/crit ratio (59.5 int per crit). However, Shaman have 5 to crit with spells with around 160 int, the Priest has 5 to crit with around 225 int. So the Shaman should have more crit than a Priest (especially if they have Ten Storms).

Still, even with Shaman around I would think some Priests should get Inspiration, and Holy Spec is a good way to fuel it. Sadly, losing Spell Warding seems to be the best way to do that.

Eh, probably, but I've ditched a bunch of PvE talent points (Silent Resolve FTL) because I started PvPing, but I stuck with the Holy/Disc thing because it's just way too good to give up in raids and passable in PvP. Spell Warding I think has a dual purpose, not too shabby in PvP and mitigating damage = less needed to heal, so I don't feel too bad/gimped to have it.

And it's not as if Spiritual Healing is universally better. SH is great for flash heal, but for renew it's about even with SG and for my current primary spell Heal Rank 2 it's pathetic.

I guess if you're really hurting for points in Holy... but there aren't a lot of places to directly improve your throughput in the Holy tree, and SG and SH are certainly among those.

I'm just bitter from being around too many WoW forum mouthbreathers who are convinced that because SH only adds about 45 HP to a Heal 2, it's worthless, and MS ("it scales with gear! I'm going to go masturbate to my additional 700 mana, which is 70 more bonus mana than I had in blues") is automatically better. But I'm derailing again.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxMhsZfyxcc0qt

try this build,made for 6t3,no mental agi/silent resolve since u got those bonuses from gear.

while doing boss progresses in new instances SoR and lightwell makes more help then few more points in Disc tree.
lightwell+SoR > 4% mental agi

No, it really doesn't, those talents are not very good. I'd rather have an extra point in mental agility or imp. prayer of healing then SoR or lightwell.

There are very few talents I'd give up for SoR or Lightwell.

Yes. While on paper Lightwell maps out to very efficient healing, in actual practice you're rarely ever reaping its full benefits. AOE breaks the HoT like it would a bandage, and there's the added disadvantage of it being a stationary bandage that people have to spend time running to and back from. When I had it, I'd put it down for Firemaw, Sartura, and in the path of roaming melee for Emps, but that's about it--there just aren't enough useful situations that warrant spending the points to get there.

Which brings me to Spirit of Redemption, which has gotten a whole bunch of tweaks of late but still just isn't very good. It's another talent that looks good on paper ("hey, healing when I'm dead, awesome"), but it's one that you're rarely going to get any use out of. If you're using POH on Huhuran, happen to be soaking bolts for some reason, and happen to die, okay, you could conceivably keep POHing. But some of the problems are:

1) Reliability. I would run into this issue most often in Naxx, but it's happened elsewhere as well: I die. No angel at all. or, I die. Angel finally pops and I have 5 seconds of healing left. or, I die. Angel finally pops and I have two seconds of healing left. It might be due to the lovely Ner'zhul lag or something else, but this talent was never something I could count on to work properly 100% of the time, so right off the bat you can't get full use out of it.

2) Range. You can heal when you're dead but you can't move when you're dead. Therefore another aspect of SoR's usefullness is further restricted to people who happen to be in range of where you died who need healing while your window is up. Maybe POH will heal your whole party. Maybe it'll heal two. Maybe it'll heal none. Maybe you'll be casting a gheal on an out of group warrior.. who helpfully runs out of range while you're casting and wastes 2.5 seconds of your spirit time. If you have squeakywheel or a similar mod, maybe that would help, but I found that if I tried single-target healing while in spirit form, I was spending most of my time trying to find a target in range, which is a waste. Not to mention that that small window of healing is rarely ever a boss-breaker, except on Huhu if you happen to die before your group.

So, yeah, that's a long way of saying that most anything is better than these two talents, and certainly something like mental agility, which you will always get the benefits from, outweighs two situational and in some cases unpredictable talents.

Lightwell just ends up wasting your mana in my opinion. There is usually atleast three or four healing meter champions that have the whole raid up on the screen that will just destroy what you are trying to accomplish. Not to mention you have to spec into a death proc talent before you even get lightwell. With proper positioning I find it rare that I die before the raid wipes, making lightwell a 2 talent point investment. ><

To the OP: Do you think specing into inspiration and having its support talent holy specialization, is worth it even though it really only shines in 3 or 4 encounters in the game while spell warding has a broader effect? Do you think going this spec pigeon holes your gear choices a little but more that usual?

Looking at your talent spec I also noticed that you are speced for your longer heals. I assume you use heal rank 2 and other variations like most other priests. Do you find that at all contradicting to your want to have the inspiration proc on the MT all the time or does it work out fine?

I would be interested in seeing the effects of just using a down ranked Flash heal in a build like yours to maximize your number of crits while having some sort of mana efficiency. To me a build like this is really only for learning new encounters and getting the most out of your character in the short time frame that attempts on new encounters take. Mental Strength over Spiritual Healing might be an option if that is your sole purpose of this build. We all know how easy fights can get after a first kill so switching to a more efficient build once a new encounter is learned or instance cleared seems like a reasonable thing.

The contradiction being that the raid wipes due to us not having Inspiration? Raid success on most encounters based off of a % crit chance on your healers sounds completely retarded. What happens the other 80% of the time when you don't crit (assuming a decent crit rate)? Or what happens during a 15 min fight when say 4 or 5 people don't crit an inspiration proc onto the MT within 15 sec of each other? I don't think there is a single encounter in the game that is only accomplishable by requiring a specific talent spec and I hope it stays that way. Thus the question below the initial statement.

There will always be times when inspiration will not be on the tank. Healing in my opinion is based more around consistancy of heals and precasting for damage spikes rather than luck on crit chances.

Assumptions:
-We want Spiritual Guidance as with ~400 raidbuffed spirit the benefit for Flash Heal and Heal(Rank 2) is bigger from SG than from SH
-We want Spiritual Healing as well since +healing is always good and it equals 256 +heal for Greater Heal(Rank 5)
-We want Mental Agility since, well since its good

That leaves us with 20 (21) points in Disc and 31 (30) in Holy.
Holy talents I consider mandatory for a pure raid build:
-Healing Focus 2/2 (you wont heal against a NX trash mob hitting you, but there is lots of AoE around)
-Improved Renew 3/3 (an already manaefficient set-and-forget spell gets even better, plus you need 5 points in tier 1)
-Divine Fury 5/5 (huge hp/s increase)
-Improved Healing 3/3 (makes you last much longer and increases hp/m greatly)
-Spiritual Guidance 5/5 (with good gear and most of all for Heal(Rank 2) users)
-Spiritual Healing 5/5 (gear independant flat increase especially for Greater Heal)

So we use 23 of our 30/31 points in holy on the key talents which leaves us with 8 points to freely distribute with the dictate of 20/21 points in the first 4 tiers.
There are some talents to safely ignore, namely:
-Holy Nova (I have yet to find any raid encounter where it is superior to my other arsenal, mainly due to the horrible cost)
-Blessed Recovery (Anything that melee-crits you in a raid instance has most likely one-shotted you. In PvP I get a hit-crit for 200 and BR starts ticking for 16. I get an ambush crit for 1800 and BR still ticks for 16 meh)
-Holy Reach (Our offensive spells are irrelevant, Holy Nova useless, and with a little positioning skill people shouldnt be outside of your PoH range)
-Searing Light (I am no nuker I am no nuker I am no nuker)

This leaves us with 7/8 talent points depending of if we want Divine Spirit from Disc to put into:
-Holy Specialization (~50% increase of our crit rate, 5% crit mean 2,5% more healing reduced by overheal)
-Spell Warding (Benefit in AoE-heavy encounters, Horde Priests benefit more from it due to lack of BoK)
-Inspiration (Great for learning encounters espcecially when your tanks are undergeared. Better for Alliance imho since we dont have Shamans with Ancestral Healing)

Logical combinations are either Holy Spec + Inspiration or Holy Spec + Spell Warding since I consider Inspiration without Holy Spec wasted talent points as our crit rate in set gear is rather low.
With me being an alliance priest, I would put 4/5 points in Holy spec and 3 in Inspiration since BoK allows me to get over the magical 5k hp buffed. If I was Horde, I would probably consider Spell Warding neccessary and put 5 points in it and the other 2/3 points in Holy Spec since Inspiration is pretty bad without it and you need to have 20 points in the lower 4 tiers anyway to get to tier 5.

Under the assumption that you want Divine Spirit that leads you to:

Alliance: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxRhsV0oZfLxcc0Vx

Horde: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxRhsV0oZfix0c0Vx

That was a pretty good analysis of the Holy Tree, thanks.

However, I think Holy Nova is worth the one point. It may not be that useful for raiding, but I always like the option. It's decent for PvP (destealth and flag interrupts). Also, on my last Nef kill, I had computer problems and got disconnected. When I came back (with full mana), Nef was at 23%. With all the mages and locks down, and not many others up, I spent about 3/4ths of my mana bar on the threatless Holy Nova and managed to get them down. It's quite possible that one point in Holy Nova saved the raid.

Just as a frivolous aside, does anyone else steal a point from Divine Fury to spend elsewhere? Maybe it's because I'm on a Battlegroup 3 server but has anyone actually noticed a difference between having 4/5 versus 5/5?

With 1.12 lifetap changes, lightwell is suddenly very good again. It's warlock candy.

I dunno about that. Warlocks will still lifetap to the same level of health, and they'll still lifetap at the same frequency. They'll just spend fewer 1.5second cooldowns doing it.