I would never, ever drop Divine Fury. GH being 2.5s instead of 3s is a world of difference in almost every possible way. Even for people who rely heavily on Flash, Binding, or Circle of Healing, you will still have to GH every so often--having it cast that much faster is night and day in terms of it people survive long enough to actually recieve the heal.
Pretty much every primary spell cast-reduction talent for every class is universally trained, and I don't think Divine Fury is an exception to that rule.
I've been more or less a passive observer in this thread (albeit a very interested one) up until now, but I feel it's worth reaffirming this opinion. Divine Fury is as close as anything in the holy tree comes to "gimme points." As in, no matter what spec you're doing in holy, expect to put those points there. All other things being equal, I would not drop any points out of Divine Fury.
My education in journalism has taught me nothing - edit for clarity
Divine Fury is more-or-less what makes GHeal worth using. Now, depending on the raid, class balance, the encounter, your healing assignment, and so forth, you may sometimes use very few GHeals. Maybe none (melee healing on VR). But GHeal is one of our core heals; sooner or later you'll want to cast it...and when you do, you'll want Divine Fury.
If your looking for a place to save a few points, look into Holy Spec. Yeah, Inspiration procs are awesome, but if you think about the mechanics of Inspiration uptime, you'll notice that there are diminishing returns.
Inspiration Uptime = 1 - (1 - crit%)^(15/(second between heals))
Assume a heal landing every 3 seconds. With your stats and:
0/5 Holy Spec = 1 - (1 - 0.0838%)^5 = 35%
5/5 Holy Spec = 1 - (1 - 0.1338%)^5 = 51%
Alright, an extra 16% of uptime on the Inspiration buff is cool - hell, it's almost increases the uptime by 50% - and it certainly nice in some situations. But is it worth 5 whole talent points? Meh.
For the person who said binding heal, yes its nice, but you cant use it while
A) you are dead
B) When you are running away from fatal attraction
So with the need to pick up divine fury, and the desire to max spell warding it seems the only option is to drop holy spec. That being said, not sure if anyone who is good at the math side of things could say HOW many points to drop.
As noted in quite a few other posts, HS has diminishing returns for inspiration, so how many points is optimal.
A) you are dead
B) When you are running away from fatal attraction
Point A doesn't work with Spell Warding either, so I fail to see how it's a valid argument.
I'm only working on RoS currently, but I would hope that you have other people healing you as you're running away from Fatal Attraction.
Assuming you're Imp DS spec, yes you cannot take any points from the Disc tree, as you stated. As I think it was posted earlier, Inspiration is something that you could probably drop. If you have a Resto shaman in the raid, they're of course able to provide the same exact buff (granted yours is still not there).
If you decide to go that route, then you could also take out the remaining points from Holy Specialization, as your critical heals do not benefit you in any other way beside Inspiration, unlike a Paladin.
Still, despite that most bosses have some sort of magical effect, I think you would only want it for select encounters where there is great risk in you taking burst damage or very quick dots.
I wanted to add.. that while, YES, a Resto Shaman can apply a 25% armor, it's more efficient for a Resto Shaman to raid heal. Resto Shammy can tank heal, there's no doubt about that. However, there's no other healing class with a spell similar to Chain Heal. CH is ridiculous for fights such as Void Reaver or Hydross.
As for speccing into Inspiration.. I do it because nine times out of ten, our Priests are assigned to healing tanks. Most Warrior tanks will NOT reach the armor cap (Druids can, though!), thus making the 25% armor amazing for hard hitters like Morogrim. (Unless you use a Druid tank, which is wise to mitigate crushing blows.)
Last edited by Rhylie : 09/16/07 at 12:59 AM.
Reason: Mis-titled.
For the person who said binding heal, yes its nice, but you cant use it while
B) When you are running away from fatal attraction
Why run by default? So far Binding Heal has made FA almost trivial to deal as a priest. Just shield yourself as soon as you realize getting ported, and during the global cooldown use hs/check your position/select some other guy ported for a target as a binding heal. If you are not ported to any of the camps this should fail only if your Binding Heal target dies before your cast is done or runs out of LoS (I can remember this happening twice in over 10 kills). When PoM is fixed you have time of 2xglobal cd to react.
Overall Binding Heal is one of the best heals we have, no other healer can as reliably as priest keep their target up while healing themselves. Of course it's situational, but those situations where you take damage are often the most important ones you need to handle. End of BT is full of those: Gurtogg when Fel rage, Mother/Illidari Council overall, Illidan p2. Without Binding Heal I would find those much more difficult, dying is not an option. However, I still have 5/5 Spell Warding, but if I would respec now, I would drop some points from it.
Lightwell object increased in size to make it easier to click.
For the person who said binding heal, yes its nice, but you cant use it while
A) you are dead
B) When you are running away from fatal attraction
So with the need to pick up divine fury, and the desire to max spell warding it seems the only option is to drop holy spec. That being said, not sure if anyone who is good at the math side of things could say HOW many points to drop.
As noted in quite a few other posts, HS has diminishing returns for inspiration, so how many points is optimal.
I used to be a huge proponent of Spell Warding. One thing I've come to appreciate as I've gotten more experience with a given encounter is knowing/anticipating what can kill you, how fast something can kill you and how much time you have to recover. My Current Spec pretty much removes most of the "survivability" related talent points including Silent Resolve and Spell Warding. I've found as my guild has progressed, our tanks have gotten better with threat generation, and I've gotten better with my own survivability.
IMO, there is really no one spec that maximizes MT healing and raid/patch healing, so realistically you should be trying to maximize the healing role you do the most. Giving up the survivability talents has put me as close to maximizing both as I can, while still keeping my focus of raid healing.
Been skimming through this post on and off for a while now, but not one person has talked about this talent. Paired on the same tier as spell warding and to some extent holy specialization (due to the 2 3 point talents in the higher tiers) as one of the three skills you need points in to push higher up the tree, the question comes down to which 2?
I currently clear Hyjall, and am workign on Illidan. Every single boss in Hyjall and BT do raid spell damage whether it is azalgor's RoF, Supremus volcanos, etc.
That being said, where do you take points from to put them in to spell warding? 5% crit seems to much to drop as it reduces inspiration procs, and overall healing and HP/s.
That leaves Divine Fury as the apparent odd talent out, as the 5 points make the spell more versatile and increase its HP/s, but looking through WWS logs, the 5 points do not increase the actual healing number produced by GH.
Your thoughts would be awesome
Take it from a shadow priest who occasionally straps on the healing gear for 5 mans or whatever -- Divine Fury is not the talent you want to be giving up. It directly reduces your throughput if you drop that talent, and that's not really a good thing to be doing.
I am admittedly new to raid healing, I've only been doing it through BC. I was able to pick up bits of information from jaded shadow priests who said that renew was their bread and butter, but I tried somethings out on my own and would like to compare them to people's findings here.
This thread also talks a lot about gear, but as it's moved on, it's talked about how to heal and how people find themselves healing to maximize their efficiency.
I recently transferred servers, but before that in my small pond of a server, I was very competitive healing wise with some of it's healing elite. Later on I even joined a guild for the simple reason to see how I stacked against one of the best raid healing paladins. I'm fairly proud of myself, but, I'd love to learn more. Which brings me to the reason of my post. Transferring servers another priest was able to keep up with healing on the Magtheridon fight simply by using renew for about 1/2 of his healing. I use renew as more of an after thought (Something that I just healed that is going to take consistent damage i.e. a tank it still makes up about a 1/4 close to a 1/3 of my healing). I've started to change that around and have incorporated a rank 6 renew into my healing line up, and I've been able to edge up my healing by about another %.
I try to stay first or second in healing, for most of the fights though I tend to be head and shoulders above my nearest raider. (About 5 sometimes 9% above them) When I used recount I was able to see what people were doing and how it effected their healing (I run both SW Stats and Recount now) So I've adopted it, certain portions of a fight I'll only use renews. Lurker is going to be submerging I try to hit as close to 0 mana as I can, because when lurker re-appears my pot cooldown tends to be up, I can pop my bangle and occassionally (twice a fight) I can use shadow fiend. I'm back up at full mana no problem. I have popped inner focus after my shadow fiend because a spout is coming (I'm just using Lurker as an example because it's the most recent fight in my memory). So now my bangle is ticking and I'm waiting to cast Greater Heal. Which seems to me a lot of people have abandoned (especially after coming to this new server where more holy priests were left from pre-BC). With the in combat mana regen I have (Raid buffed 308?) Full rank greater heal, full rank flash heal, full rank renews aren't a problem. I was wondering how I'm going to have to adapt this later in SSC for Leo and Vashjj and into MH and BT.
I have greater heals 1, 3, 5, ... ... on another bar and I switch to that occassionally but that tends to be at the start of fights like Hydross or Morogrim. As the fight progresses I'm right back to using my max ranked GH. I still haven't been passed up in healing, but what am I missing by using my max rank heals if there isn't a mana problem? My current Over healing tends to be somewhere in the margin of 40% where that priest below me is 22%-25%.
Also I've been thinking about picking up JC'ing and dropping enchanting for that trinket, how much money/time am I looking at to be doing this (if anyone has gone down the same road).
Also I've been thinking about picking up JC'ing and dropping enchanting for that trinket, how much money/time am I looking at to be doing this (if anyone has gone down the same road).
If you're going to drop a profession just to get a trinket, don't pick up JC. Pick up Alchemy and make the Alchemist's Stone - it's by far the best healing trinket in the game. With it, often times a singe Super Mana Pot will refill almost half my mana bar, and for more mana intensive fights in the game (Vashj is a good one - I'm one of the healers in the middle area/top platform, and I'm always waiting for my Pot CD to be over so I can pop another) it can make a huge difference.
Super Mana Pot materials are fairly cheap, and if you decide to go Potions Mastery (which you should if you already have elixir masters in your guild), you'll be making tons of extras.
I would have to agree with not picking up jc just for the trinket. I'm our guild's only jc, but I rarely use that trinket for any fights. I prefer earing+bangle for most fights.
As far as using renew I think it depends on the fight and your raid composition. If you have a fair number of pallys that will generally spam different ranks of flash of light to top off raid members, then you'll find that while you cast renew you may not be getting much out of it. I use a mod called Hotman that actually will show you how much the renew healed for. Most of the time I'm lucky to get a single tick. I've defaulted to using more CoH and PoM over renew in the fights where I've seen it expire with either 0-1 tics. Other fights like Anetheron I find are really renew-friendly and I use it much more in that fight.
Hello, a priest in our guild who's specced imp. Divine Spirit claims that having PI too benefits the raid more.
Searched but couldn't find any about PI, so here I am asking the almighty priest theorycrafters
Is it worth giving up the talents below for 10% mana and lets say giving PI to resto druids with rolling lifeblooms, or whoever benefits the most from it?
He looses:
Clearcast
Empowerered Healing - his max rank greater heal heals for 100 less.
He gains:
10% more mana, and some more -threat which doesn't matter except at trash most of the times.
Transferring servers another priest was able to keep up with healing on the Magtheridon fight simply by using renew for about 1/2 of his healing. I use renew as more of an after thought (Something that I just healed that is going to take consistent damage i.e. a tank it still makes up about a 1/4 close to a 1/3 of my healing). I've started to change that around and have incorporated a rank 6 renew into my healing line up, and I've been able to edge up my healing by about another %.
I have greater heals 1, 3, 5, ... ... on another bar and I switch to that occassionally but that tends to be at the start of fights like Hydross or Morogrim. As the fight progresses I'm right back to using my max ranked GH. I still haven't been passed up in healing, but what am I missing by using my max rank heals if there isn't a mana problem? My current Over healing tends to be somewhere in the margin of 40% where that priest below me is 22%-25%.
If you don't mind looking at sloppy WWSs you can compare me (vurrin) to the rest of the healers on kael and some rage/najentus learning here Kael
Note: that on most farm encounters I place around 2-4th in healing on the meter.
I personally am that guy who uses renew for a large portion of his healing. I can tell you straight up I very seldom down rank my renew. Sure people get topped off or whatever but honestly the longer and more mana strained a fight is the more effective Renew and down ranked Gheals become. Additionally I'm also the guy whose uses PoM far more than anyone else. these parses weren't particularly PoM friendly, but I am still fairly sure I casted PoM at least 3 times as often as the other priest and that if you added the PoM healing proportionately to both our healing done it'd make up over 10% of my healing done.
Honestly Renewing does have its flaws. it is relatively low healing per second, so its easy to fall behind other healers in terms of sheer throughput, and if you compound that with heavy PoM use which isn't reflected on most meters at all its easy to say "Soandso is under performing", when really they are simply healing differently. Also not every fight is suited for renews. For example on a fight like Leotheras I very seldom renew, but even then very seldom renew for me still means maintained on 1 or two tanks durign human phase
The disadvantages of using max Gheal is that its less efficent by default and its more prone to overheal as well so you take a double hit on it. Additionally low ranked Gheals with 2 pc T5 coupled with high regen can essentially become nearly free to cast or certainly highly sustainable spells even when spamming.
Honestly if you're canceling max ranked gheals and if other healers are doing similar things you're leaving your tanks open to get burst down. And I find it hard to believe that you don't have mana concerns if you use max rank Gheal as your primary gheal. As for 40% overheal thats really not too bad if you're consistently healing a main tank type target with gheals and such. Just remember Renew and PoM really don't count at all towards overhealing since renew won't even tick ( as far as the combat lgo is concerned) if the target is full hp and thus doesn't over heal.
Hello, a priest in our guild who's specced imp. Divine Spirit claims that having PI too benefits the raid more.
Searched but couldn't find any about PI, so here I am asking the almighty priest theorycrafters
Is it worth giving up the talents below for 10% mana and lets say giving PI to resto druids with rolling lifeblooms, or whoever benefits the most from it?
He looses:
Clearcast
Empowerered Healing - his max rank greater heal heals for 100 less.
He gains:
10% more mana, and some more -threat which doesn't matter except at trash most of the times.
Well, if your druids could maintain a rolling lifebloom indefinitely once PI'd he'd probably have a case( it'd be close to 120-140 healing per second additional for the entire duration of a fight if the druid trinketed and maintained it the entire time, and he could maintain it on 2 people easily), but at least in my case druids quite commonly drops their lfiebloom stacks, whether be because of a pause in the fight, or mistiming a heal elsewhere in the raid, or getting slept/tombed/shade so its unlikely that PI empowered lfieblooms would stay up long enough to say have two druids with PI'd lfieblooms rolling, but in theory that is of course possible. So lets take a quick gander at the max possible benefit of PI on a resto druid.
We'll assume our druid here is using Living Root+ essence of the martyr and that his base lifebloom ticks for say 250
so 250 base + 621 healing ( from trinkets) at 7% of + healing per seconds times 3 stacks of lifebloom = 750 + 124 or 874 base lifebloom per second tick
874x 20% = 174 (1048 total)
So in a best case scenario PIing a lifeblooming druid net gains roughly 174 healing per second per target with 3 PI'd lifeblooms on them. Now 174 healing per second is certainly an impressive amount but bear in mind you're coordinating a random proc trinekt + a click trinket + PI and you have to wait for the old lifebloom stack to drop before you can apply the new ones. And it takes about 5 seconds to get a full stack rolling again as well.
That would far outweigh a little extra Gheal and even clear casting if once arranged the druid could maintain that indefinitely AND if the target of those stacks was using at least some of the additional healing.
As for some quick math on the benefit of gheal/clear casting. PI CD = 3 min. Chain casting max rank gheal for 3 minutes( he'd be oom probably since we're talking 50k mana in 3 minutes) = 72 casts or 7200 extra healing( according to the above posters claim about the benefit of emp healing) on gheal and 4.32 clear casting procs. If PI is worth 174 extra healing per second then the druid would have to maintain 1 set of 3 lifeblooms on a target for 41 seconds ( ignoring any additional healing gained during the set up time) to out heal the best case scenario for gheal, can't really factor in Clearcastings except to say it'd be required to try and achieve this best case scenario for emp healing.
As for raid viability you then have to consider which raids don't lend themselves well to having 1 maintank soak a lot of dmg, which encounters have stuns and silences or random shit that might keep a healer from keeping their lifebloom stack up etc., and Are your healers coordinated enough to pull off the set up.
Basically even in an optimal world a druid needs to maintain the lfiebloom stack well beyond the duration of PI to make it worth using, if that happens, I think setting up a fairly close to optimal lfiebloom/PI is a lot easier than spamming max rank gheals for 3 minutes +P
If there is any errors in my druid math or if I need to show my work for some of my assumptions just let me know.
Edit I think my base lifebloom tick of 250 is probably a bit too high but the overall difference it'd make if the true number was 20-30 points lower is like 10-20 healing per second gained.
Hello, a priest in our guild who's specced imp. Divine Spirit claims that having PI too benefits the raid more.
Searched but couldn't find any about PI, so here I am asking the almighty priest theorycrafters
Is it worth giving up the talents below for 10% mana and lets say giving PI to resto druids with rolling lifeblooms, or whoever benefits the most from it?
He looses:
Clearcast
Empowerered Healing - his max rank greater heal heals for 100 less.
He gains:
10% more mana, and some more -threat which doesn't matter except at trash most of the times.
I think it really depends on your raids make up, class balance, and member consistency. I was finally able to experiment with CoH once we had other priests that had consistent attendance so I knew the raid would not be without Imp Divine Spirit. In that balance, with the druids and pallies we have, I would feel comfortable with our DS priests going to PI. I've had PI before, and I agree it's a good utility spell. Not only the Druid benefits that you mention, but helping with burst DPS in emergency fights, or even just pretending to be a click-trinket for myself.
I think this becomes even more viable in the future if they make the proposed changes to Pain Suppression. Having a utility priest that can essentially give a second shield wall to a tank and a PI to a druid or DPS caster starts to make more and more sense. They are still a novelty, and I still can't imagine having more then 1 in raid rotation, but I can see the potential.
He looses:
Empowerered Healing - his max rank greater heal heals for 100 less.
He has less than 800 +healing?
With below average of 1800 +healing, the difference of 0 empowered healing and 3/5 empowered healing is 238 for rank 7 Greater Heal. The difference between 3/5 and 5/5 for GH rank 7 is 158, total difference is 396. It also scales reasonable well with gear, with my +healing unbuffed (2356) the differences are 311 between 0/5 and 3/5, and 208 between 3/5 and 5/5. Total gain for GH rank 7 is now 519 from 5/5 empowered healing talents.
Lightwell object increased in size to make it easier to click.
I knew the value of 100 extra healing on Gheal rank 7 with 5/5 was way too low, but honestly I was more focused on the more easily calculated and evaluated value of the effect of PI on a Lifebloom stack.
After talking to the druids in my guild we calculated that with Living root + essence of martyr + PI they could have lifeblooms ticking for ~1174 per second at 3 stacks (roughly t5 level gear), but we also agreed that waiting for living root to proc would largely cut into the feasibility of such a ridiculously large Lifebloom tick, plus most of the druids need to use alchemist stone + mana potions to maintain Lifebloom stacks while doing other tasks.
Re: CoH vs. iDS - can't believe this arguement is still being waged here.
The following is merely my opinion, but it is based on first hand experience of my own healing hands and eyes, and those of the other priests in our guild.
As I see it, there is a progression, not just in gear and difficulty of raid encounters, but in talent specs as well. In the beginning, there was karazhan, filled with small groups of crappily geared raiders who needed every edge imaginable to overcome their crappy gear and win upgrades. It was here that iDS was deemed a necessity and it was also here that priests were determined to be second rate healers, paling in comparison to the everlasting spam-healers we call paladins. Like a fool, I accepted these assumptions and worked under them well into SSC and TK.
In SSC and TK, a certain shadow priest in our guild kept goading me to try CoH, so I accepted the challenge and told him I would quantitatively prove to him how worthless it was compared to the iDS buff. Mission failed. I couldn't prove it all. In fact, my performance began to skyrocket, and as I gained experience with CoH, it went even higher.
Hearken to me brothers and sisters of the cloth and let me regale you with the tale of the priests who spanked the paladins. Know that I focus on my healing assignments and help out others as long as my focus target isn't in danger of being jeopardized. I do not heal to "win" on the healing meter. I do, however, look at the meters after a major encounter as a source of feedback to improve my methods. The only person I compete against on the healing meter is myself and my past record for a given encounter is what I'm always trying to beat. Unfortunately, like it or not, officers still put more weight on healing meters than they really should, imho. Fortunately for our priests, I started spanking the healing meters after picking up CoH. For SSC and TK, CoH is useful on all trash. As for bosses, I found Loot Reaver, Al'ar, Solarian, Vashj, and Hydross to be particularly well suited for the strengths of this spell.
My Class Leader is also the healing team leader and makes the assignments for heal team composition and targets. We've always had a dedicated melee dps group, but I started noticing that new boss strats included positioning assignments which kept members of each group near each other - further ramping up the potential of CoH.
When we started doing MH and BT, the CoH talent went from being fairly useful to damn near indispensable. Not only were there broad applications on trash and boss fights in general, but some of the bosses seem downnright designed for this spell. At this point, my CL had seen enough of CoH in action, that he dropped iDS and picked up the talent for himself. That was the last we saw of that buff in our raids and don't expect to see it again in the future. For MH, I mostly use CoH on the melee group, though there are times when other groups find benefit as well, but I don't sweat it so much. I haven't seen much of the Archimonde fight yet, but will be soon (we killed him btw) and I'm told that CoH is invaluable there. In BT, all trash pulls find good utility in CoH, and the bosses... oh sweet Jesus, the bosses:
Najentus - CoH domination
T. Gorefiend - CoH domination (if you're lucky enough not to be the "chosen one" too early)
Bloodboil - CoH domination
RoS - who run RoS-town? Priests run RoS-town!
Mutha - doing her Sunday, but from what I've read, I expect to see - CoH domination
So, from my own experience - CoH rocks. Sure the choice between iDS and CoH is a no brainer. That is to say, if you're well through SSC/TK and eyeing MH/BT, you'd have to be brainless to choose iDS.
For raid healing, I found it untrue that CoH is only effective if you have shamans augmenting it with CH. I love having shammies helping with the raid healing, don't get me wrong - they're good at it and we spank them too (but not always, just generally).
If you want to be valued for your buff and exist as a husk of your former healing greatness, then keep iDS. The casters and healers will appreciate it, no doubt.
If you want to reclaim your throne as a HEALING GOD. Then drop iDS like a bad habit and redeem yourself. I know, I know, the dps'ers and other healers will cry about it at first. But all babies will cry when you take away the boob. Fact of the matter is, if you want them to grow up and be independently successful, you'll need to ween them eventually.
Nobody complains about the loss of the buff. What is more important to them is not having some minor boost from a buff, its having a high-output healer who can spank damage on a consistent basis in a variety of situations - and that is uncontested now.
Nobody complained when the resto druids said, "I need to keep my innervates for myself because it allows me to be a much better healer and go the distance more easily." We could all see that they were justified. Just as everyone can see that the priests are justified in dropping iDS for CoH. The proof is in the pudding, cupcake.
I still haven't been passed up in healing, but what am I missing by using my max rank heals if there isn't a mana problem? My current Over healing tends to be somewhere in the margin of 40% where that priest below me is 22%-25%.
If you don't run out of mana overhealing doesn't mean anything. Accordint to wws, on last Kael'thas kill my overhealing was 47%. I ran out of mana 5(?) seconds before kael died. I wasn't willing to take the chance that someone dies and ruins whole attempt. Bigger heals are safer heals when damage can be spiky.
Also I've been thinking about picking up JC'ing and dropping enchanting for that trinket, how much money/time am I looking at to be doing this (if anyone has gone down the same road).
As someone already said, if you are going for a trinket take alchemy. In addidion to +15 all stats, the equip: effect is worth 30-50mp5 (depending on pot you use, +53,333mp5 for [Fel mana potion]) if you use a pot every cooldown.
Re: CoH vs. iDS - can't believe this arguement is still being waged here.
The following is merely my opinion, but it is based on first hand experience of my own healing hands and eyes, and those of the other priests in our guild.
As I see it, there is a progression, not just in gear and difficulty of raid encounters, but in talent specs as well. In the beginning, there was karazhan, filled with small groups of crappily geared raiders who needed every edge imaginable to overcome their crappy gear and win upgrades. It was here that iDS was deemed a necessity and it was also here that priests were determined to be second rate healers, paling in comparison to the everlasting spam-healers we call paladins. Like a fool, I accepted these assumptions and worked under them well into SSC and TK.
In SSC and TK, a certain shadow priest in our guild kept goading me to try CoH, so I accepted the challenge and told him I would quantitatively prove to him how worthless it was compared to the iDS buff. Mission failed. I couldn't prove it all. In fact, my performance began to skyrocket, and as I gained experience with CoH, it went even higher.
Hearken to me brothers and sisters of the cloth and let me regale you with the tale of the priests who spanked the paladins. Know that I focus on my healing assignments and help out others as long as my focus target isn't in danger of being jeopardized. I do not heal to "win" on the healing meter. I do, however, look at the meters after a major encounter as a source of feedback to improve my methods. The only person I compete against on the healing meter is myself and my past record for a given encounter is what I'm always trying to beat. Unfortunately, like it or not, officers still put more weight on healing meters than they really should, imho. Fortunately for our priests, I started spanking the healing meters after picking up CoH. For SSC and TK, CoH is useful on all trash. As for bosses, I found Loot Reaver, Al'ar, Solarian, Vashj, and Hydross to be particularly well suited for the strengths of this spell.
My Class Leader is also the healing team leader and makes the assignments for heal team composition and targets. We've always had a dedicated melee dps group, but I started noticing that new boss strats included positioning assignments which kept members of each group near each other - further ramping up the potential of CoH.
When we started doing MH and BT, the CoH talent went from being fairly useful to damn near indispensable. Not only were there broad applications on trash and boss fights in general, but some of the bosses seem downnright designed for this spell. At this point, my CL had seen enough of CoH in action, that he dropped iDS and picked up the talent for himself. That was the last we saw of that buff in our raids and don't expect to see it again in the future. For MH, I mostly use CoH on the melee group, though there are times when other groups find benefit as well, but I don't sweat it so much. I haven't seen much of the Archimonde fight yet, but will be soon (we killed him btw) and I'm told that CoH is invaluable there. In BT, all trash pulls find good utility in CoH, and the bosses... oh sweet Jesus, the bosses:
Najentus - CoH domination
T. Gorefiend - CoH domination (if you're lucky enough not to be the "chosen one" too early)
Bloodboil - CoH domination
RoS - who run RoS-town? Priests run RoS-town!
Mutha - doing her Sunday, but from what I've read, I expect to see - CoH domination
So, from my own experience - CoH rocks. Sure the choice between iDS and CoH is a no brainer. That is to say, if you're well through SSC/TK and eyeing MH/BT, you'd have to be brainless to choose iDS.
For raid healing, I found it untrue that CoH is only effective if you have shamans augmenting it with CH. I love having shammies helping with the raid healing, don't get me wrong - they're good at it and we spank them too (but not always, just generally).
If you want to be valued for your buff and exist as a husk of your former healing greatness, then keep iDS. The casters and healers will appreciate it, no doubt.
If you want to reclaim your throne as a HEALING GOD. Then drop iDS like a bad habit and redeem yourself. I know, I know, the dps'ers and other healers will cry about it at first. But all babies will cry when you take away the boob. Fact of the matter is, if you want them to grow up and be independently successful, you'll need to ween them eventually.
Nobody complains about the loss of the buff. What is more important to them is not having some minor boost from a buff, its having a high-output healer who can spank damage on a consistent basis in a variety of situations - and that is uncontested now.
Nobody complained when the resto druids said, "I need to keep my innervates for myself because it allows me to be a much better healer and go the distance more easily." We could all see that they were justified. Just as everyone can see that the priests are justified in dropping iDS for CoH. The proof is in the pudding, cupcake.
I don't know if I can agree with this viewpoint. You can't directly say that either CoH or ImpDS is better than the other, because they do different things. ImpDS is a dps buff, and CoH is a healing enhancement to the class. We recently had our holy priest respec CoH, and he is loving it, and CoH provides a great deal of effective healing to our raids. However, we still have an ImpDS Priest, and that probably contributed greatly to the decision to allow a CoH priest.
They provide different roles, and cannot be compared directly. If your goal is to "win" at healing (if there is such a thing), CoH will bring you closer to that than ImpDS will. However, from my personal experience, everything becomes much easier the more you cater to your dps and tanks. As a healer myself, it's hard to admit, but our job is much more competency and technique, and much less about numbers than either of the other two roles. Adding to dps is a great way to relieve stress on the healers, as the fight ends quicker. This is much more important IMO than being able to heal more powerfully.
In short, I believe that dps upgrades in general are to be valued much more highly than healing upgrades, and this has to be taken into account when deciding whether CoH or ImpDS is better for your guild.
I don't know if I can agree with this viewpoint. You can't directly say that either CoH or ImpDS is better than the other, because they do different things. ImpDS is a dps buff, and CoH is a healing enhancement to the class. We recently had our holy priest respec CoH, and he is loving it, and CoH provides a great deal of effective healing to our raids. However, we still have an ImpDS Priest, and that probably contributed greatly to the decision to allow a CoH priest.
They provide different roles, and cannot be compared directly. If your goal is to "win" at healing (if there is such a thing), CoH will bring you closer to that than ImpDS will. However, from my personal experience, everything becomes much easier the more you cater to your dps and tanks. As a healer myself, it's hard to admit, but our job is much more competency and technique, and much less about numbers than either of the other two roles. Adding to dps is a great way to relieve stress on the healers, as the fight ends quicker. This is much more important IMO than being able to heal more powerfully.
In short, I believe that dps upgrades in general are to be valued much more highly than healing upgrades, and this has to be taken into account when deciding whether CoH or ImpDS is better for your guild.
I agree to this to an extent except for the fact that going from Imp DS to CoH is a right of passage in my mind. Once you reach a healthy amount of +heal it is only in your best interest to switch to CoH. It opens up a number of possibilities. Those that are still applying their finishing touches to their gear should stay with Imp DS. The buff definitely takes precedence. Nevertheless, when they finally "evolve" in terms of more advanced gear and experience newer boss mechanics they will understand why full empowered healing and a versatile healing spell is superior.
I wouldnt call Gurtogg CoH domination,with debuff doing 800DPS on group and you providing 700HPS with constant spam,it doesnt seem to be a good choice mana-wise.
I wouldnt call Gurtogg CoH domination,with debuff doing 800DPS on group and you providing 700HPS with constant spam,it doesnt seem to be a good choice mana-wise.
I use all my abilities, CoH isn't the only button I push on this encounter, but its certainly the leading heal for me.
I don't know if I can agree with this viewpoint. You can't directly say that either CoH or ImpDS is better than the other, because they do different things. ImpDS is a dps buff, and CoH is a healing enhancement to the class. We recently had our holy priest respec CoH, and he is loving it, and CoH provides a great deal of effective healing to our raids. However, we still have an ImpDS Priest, and that probably contributed greatly to the decision to allow a CoH priest.
They provide different roles, and cannot be compared directly. If your goal is to "win" at healing (if there is such a thing), CoH will bring you closer to that than ImpDS will. However, from my personal experience, everything becomes much easier the more you cater to your dps and tanks. As a healer myself, it's hard to admit, but our job is much more competency and technique, and much less about numbers than either of the other two roles. Adding to dps is a great way to relieve stress on the healers, as the fight ends quicker. This is much more important IMO than being able to heal more powerfully.
In short, I believe that dps upgrades in general are to be valued much more highly than healing upgrades, and this has to be taken into account when deciding whether CoH or ImpDS is better for your guild.
You win at healing by analyzing how you heal, learning from your encounters and doing progressively better with each attempt.
I agree with you about dps upgrades. The best upgrade you can give them is longer life expectancy, a nominal amount of +spell damage or +heal is far outweighed by this. The melee dps are firmly in my camp on their preference, and the casters don't seem to care because they're fully capable of taking their dps/healing output and threat right to the redline without the buff.
You're certainly entitled to your opinions if you still believe iDS is a necessity. But I'm here to tell ya, and I guess you'll just have to take it on faith if you've never given CoH a serious test drive - there is a higher plane of holy priest existence. Don't be afraid to step into the light...
09/14/07, 3:32 AM
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