I was wondering if the Spiritual Healing talent (priest) is an additional 10% to your base heal, or your total heal (including +heal).

If its to the base, it would seem that its advantages diminish, especially if using low rank spells that rely on +healing. Would Mental Strength be a better talent for a well geared Priest if this is the case?

Thanks!

Spiritual Healing effects the base spell and does not include your plus healing. As for comparing Spiritual Healing to Mental Strength, Spiritual Healing wins by a large margin. All Mental Strength does is give you ~700-1000 extra mana, that's like 3 Flash 7's or 6 Heal 2's. Whereas Spiritual Healing adds ~100 healing to your Flash 7, ~300 healing to your Gheal 5, and ~50 to your Heal2. Raising your max mana pool does nothing once you reach 6.5-7.5k mana. You don't need anymore. With regen you will never ever reach the bottom of your mana pool, and if you do you should be potting more often. Intellect has been a useless stat for priests since the end of Molten Core, and it probably would have been useless if there were other options for gear at the start of this game.

I'll say it again, you should never ever reach the bottom of your mana pool and an extra 700 mana does nothing for you.

For raiding, Spiritual Healing far and away beats Mental Strength. (I wouldn't say you never reach the bottom of your mana pool, but it's hard as hell, and once you do, 700 mana is a drop in the bucket.)

For everything else... meh, you could make a case for either, since I sure as hell reach the bottom of my mana pool in PvP a lot (stupid hunters and their Viper Sting), and even in 5 and 10 man instances there are a lot of fights too short for regen to really kick in.

Since raiding is the part you're really trying to min-max (honestly, once you're in tier 1 you can heal anything below UBRS with a 0/0/0 spec if you really wanted to), therefore, SH is the clear winner.

I agree with you Zwink for the most part. The only time I would *ever* take mental strength is in one of two cases.

1) You are horde (I'm not so this is in theory) and you need 1-2 priests to help out with disease curing or magic removal since atm there are no horde paladins.

2) You are a utility based priest on either side (similar to #1's requirements) and you end up doing much more then just healing.

That said, if you put healing over other utility, you will *never* need more then 21 points in disc and can probably get by with 16 just fine assuming you want the maximum healing abilities vs. mana conservation (i.e. you are on the MT more then you do spot renews - the points in the healing tree will be better spent).

That said, if you are going for 80%+ of your mana going to healing, mental strength is pretty much worthless.

Does Purification for shaman work the same way? Only effects the base spell and does not include +heal?

As far as I know the only healing increase talent that doesn't work that way is Healing Way, and I'm not completely certain about Healing Way either. (I'm just assuming it's applied last as it's a buff on your target, not a self-buff)

I wish...

Well, I did some testing in the 1.11 PTR and it certainly did then, it could have changed since.

http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=29202 Healing Way

http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=15356 Spirtual Healing

Those are different entries, so this is further reason that is does work after +healing.