Overhealing matters only if you are in danger of running out of mana before the boss is dead, reducing it does not make you a better healer always. Ending the fight with full mana helps nothing. On MT healing there's 2 normal ways of healing: Cast/cancel a big Greater Heal, or spam downranked Greater Heal without interruptions. When cast/cancelling, I chaincast GH rank 4 or 7, and let it go though everytime the MT is not full hp and cancel if full. Sometimes there's a lot of overhealing because the other healers are healing also. You need to also factor the latency: even if the MT is on your client screen full hp or close to it, in reality (meaning on server side) he might have already taken a big hit. This leads to the other method, meaning simply putting as much HPS as possible to the tank sustained. If I had the mana, I would chaincast nonstop max rank GH without any interruptions for the duration of the fight, but then the game would be obviously broken. However, with downranking you can easily find a rank you can sustain chaincasting forever, for me it's GH rank 2 without shadowpriests and greater heal rank 4 with shadow priest.

Both styles depends a lot of the situation, if there's many healers on 1 single target, chaincasting lower ranks might be a good option. If there's only a few healers on the target, cast/cancel of high ranks is extremely good. Keeping renew up on MT is a good help against burst on both methods, but most of it will be overhealing. As for addons, there's nothing you should get for timing your heals. You are seldom alone healing a tank, and if the other healer lands a 6k heal 0.01 seconds before you land your 6k heal with 100% overhealing, it does not make you a worse healer. Just keep channeling all the time, and let the heals land based on the tanks HP and your mana situation. Scrolling Combat Text offers a possibility to show the overhealing you do, and it might help if you are new to raiding.

This chaincast method of lower rank Greater Heals is often said to be bad healing style, but in my opinion it's very good on certain situations. The bad part of it is that it's based on your gear level, and requires very little actual skill (other than knowing when to use the method). But the difference of these methods is not that big always: which one is the safer for keeping the tank alive when casting same rank of spell, letting the heals land every 2.5 seconds or cancelling some of them? I often start long fights like Illidari Council's paladin tank healing (we uae 2 healers on him) with cast/cancelling GH rank 4, then move to cast/cancelling rank 7 as I notice I can sustain it, and in the last 20% I simply chaincast max rank GH without interrupting to burn the mana and to make sure we do not wipe because of MT dead.

Very interesting, how much +damage do you have in your DPS-gear on live? I have about +1100 holy damage and more crit/hit etc in my DPS gear but of course much lower manaregen. At what point is it more efficient to grind solo in pure healing gear rather than damage gear? Hmm.

I suppose a new "optimal" grinding gear will have to be worked out, where you get enough +hit and +damage while keeping your manaregen and +heal up as well.

Spell damage in my DPS gear is a laughable 450-500 or so, so your point of inflection maybe a little different from mine. While I suspect there would be a large group of people with more spell damage than me, 1100 spell damage seems at the high end for holy priest DPS set. (Unwanted epics from high end raids?). In my case, I actually got *more* damage wearing my healing epics than DPS dungeon blues.

I may do some further testing mixing and matching various pieces. For instance I have two pieces of the Mana-Etched which give a nice 35 spell hit. Of the DPS stats, I think spell hit would be the priority since the last thing you want is resists while your Shield is getting worn down. But you would only need to aim for the 5% level rather than the 16% raid boss cap.

Mostly craftables and Kara loot as well as the icon and quagmirran's eye, almost all epics yeah. I had lousy droprate on the shoes from Aran so I ran Kara too much. I even have the dagger from Prince for example since I was the only caster in the raid that didn't have it. Wasn't much else to spend badges or money on once I'd done all the healing crafting..

Agreed! I found the [Scryer's Bloodgem] invaluable on Leotheras since it almost caps the +hit against level 70 mobs by itself. That and something like the [Jewel of Infinite Possibilities] from Karazhan should do it for most farming.

After that you'll have to consider each slot on a slot-by-slot basis I guess, weighing the damage potential from DPS gear vs the mana regen on the healing gear. The [Earring of Soulful Meditation] is nice since it boosts both DPS (+22 static, +100 activate) as well as regen. If you have a real grinding build with spirit tap (unlikely at this point) and time it right I wonder how much you'd have to pause and drink.

Not to divert the topic too much but.....


I've been seing spreadsheets showing that Renew 10 is just as good as Renew 12, as it still gains 100% bonus from +healing, ticks for only slightly less, and costs significantly less. I'm afraid to try it out for myself though. Anyone have opinions on this either way?

Should be simple enough theorycrafting. According to wowhead Renew 10 heals 970 hp for 410 mana and Renew 12 1110 for 450 mana. Just according to base numbers renew 12 is slightly better with 0.1 hpm more.

After that it gets more complicated of course what with talents and gear. However both the talents and the gear should treat the spells equally if they both get 100% +heal.

Let's for arguments sake say that you have 3/3 Improved Renew, 5/5 Spiritual Healing and 5/5 Mental Agility; not uncommon in a Disc/Holy iDS-build. We'll also make it easy and assume +1900 heal.

Renew 10 = (970+1900)*1.15*1.1 hp for 410*0.9 mana = 3630hp/369mana = 9.8 HPM
Renew 12 = (1110+1900)*1.15*1.1 / 450*0.9 = 3795hp/405mana = 9.4 HPM

Well whaddaya know, renew 10 is actually more efficient. Renew ticks 5 times and you lose a total of 33 hp per tick, not very noticeable either.

Given the above suppositions renew 10 would tick for 726hp and renew 12 for 759hp with renew 10 being 36 mana cheaper.

Inquiring minds want to know at what point renew 10 gets more hp per mana, should be easy enough. Just substiute X for 1900 and equal the two equations and you get:

((970+x)*1.15*1.1)/(410*0.9) = ((1110+x)*1.15*1.1)/(450*0.9)
((970+x)*1.265)/369 = ((1110+x)*1.265)/405
(1227.05+1.265x)/369 = (1404.15+1.265x)/405
3.325339+0.003428x = 3.467037+0.003123x
0.000305x = 0.141698
x ~= 465

So once you get +465 healing renew 10 gets more efficient than renew 12. Useless trivia of the day.

The answer? You don't.

I went on to PTR with my primary healing gear, swapped out my OH (Fathomstone)/Wand(The Black Stalk)/Neck (Adornment of Stolen Souls)/Cloak (Drape of the Righterous) and otherwise was wearing my normal raid healing set. I had around 1900 +Healing, 850 +Holy damage, 14% crit, and 229 Mp5. With Spirit Tap up I had around 1000 +Holy damage. With Spirit Tap + Earring of Soulful Meditation up I had around 1250 +Holy damage.

Just for giggles, I speced into a fun 28/28/5 build:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

(Why did I take Holy Nova? No clue, honestly. Wanted to see if it still sucked. It does.)

I went to SMV and decided to do some quests I had been avoiding like the plague on my Priest... result? Average of 600 DPS on every mob. Zero downtime. Never dropped below 90% mana. Fought end-to-end mobs for roughly an hour. Never used Shadowfiend, no consumables, no drinking. (Spirit Tap + Earring at the same time gave me 1130 OOC regen @ 1560 Spirit...so it would be pretty difficult to run out of mana.)



Could get ~2k Smite crits on a regular basis, with ~2.4k with Earring up... Mind Blast + SoL as an opener if I got a closing crit was always funny. Many mobs didn't even require SWP to kill very quickly, and most mobs could not break through a single PWS if I used it.

So, with the appropriate setup, holy grinding is now quite efficient and fun. No more painful process of not being able to kill anything and drinking after every pull. To the contrary, my Priest might be a better farmer than my T5+ geared Mage.

Obviously, without Spirit Tap the efficiency would go down somewhat... however, even with a cookie-cutter healing build, if you have a DS-style setup you will still be able to grind with great ease and little downtime. I'm rather certain that for the purposes of downtime, correct usage of Earring and Shadowfiend would eliminate any need for drinking. The nice thing about Spirit Tap is the extra +150 damage, but it's not like killing stuff with "only" 850 +damage is too painful either.

(For those wondering, my gear setup for this was basically Whitemend Hood, Adornment of Stolen Souls, Drape of the Righteous, 3 Piece PMC Set, Bands of Indwelling, Light's Justice w/ +81 Healing, Fathomstone, The Black Stalk, Earring of Soulful Meditation, Ribbon of Sacrifice, Jade Ring of the Everliving, Naaru Lightwarden's Band, Soul-Strider Boots, and T5 Pants/Gloves.)

In regard to DPS vs. healing gear? Unless you have super-pro DPS gear, don't bother. Seriously. Light's Justice with +81 healing is more +dmg than any blue "DPS" weapon with +40 spell damage, for instance. I only swapped out a few pieces that seemed a bit better for the job (Drape of the Righteous is especially good, and my normal healing neck is not high on regen) but, realistically, even my mostly-epic DPS gear (which is around 875 +damage) simply could not compete with having ~850 static damage in mostly healing gear with significantly higher regen. If you have Imp. DS due to a raid spec, it's especially a no-brainer.

I apologize in advance if this has already been posted in this thread, but for those who don't visit the WoW Priest forums often, I find Nightshroud's Priest Healing Calculator to be quite helpful when trying to come up with the HPS/HPM numbers for specific gear levels and talent specs. (You'll have to either download it and open with Excel or make your own local copy on Google Spreadsheets to fill in values.)

In fact, if you look at the spreadsheet, you'll note that just like GHeal, Renew increases in HPM as you downrank after a certain level of +healing.

That said, I'm unconvinced of the effectiveness of downranked Renews. Looking through the WWS parses of my past several raids at various locations, Renew typically accounts for somewhere between 10-20% of my healing done, and its average overheal is usually at around 10%. I suppose it may be worth trying using a downranked Renew for a night or two to see if it pushes that number further down without adversely affecting its effective heal.

I didn't want to clutter the newer thread with some off-topic discussion regarding the effects of 2.3. Particularly I've been trying to put together an effective PVE raid build to test on PTR and just can't seem to get happy with one. My questions for 2.3 are as follows:

1. What would be a good PVE/raid oriented 41/20/00 (or something similar) build? Please discuss why you chose some of the less obvious talents.
2. What role do you anticipate someone with this spec stepping into? MT Healing, Raid Healing, something else (hybrid) maybe?
3. In T5/T6 gear what gems would you use to support this build, and why? I don't want the typical Royal Nightseye because of overpowered rounding explanation. I want thoughts as to what gems best support this role.
4. As an aside, any thoughts regarding Spell Haste? After reviewing the ZA loot, it appears that there are a significant number of pieces with spell haste, and those items with spell haste are lacking a pretty significant stat to some priests - spirit.

Anyway, we've got plenty of time before 2.3 comes out, but I just had some questions I figured I'd throw out for discussion. I'd appreciate your thoughts on any and or all of the questions I posted above. I do apologize ahead of time if I play Devil's Advocate or appear to nitpick any answers. I'm a Spirit focused, COH Priest that raid heals 95% of the time...so I'm trying to broaden my understanding and expectations for 2.3 so that I don't go in with tunnel vision.

Just to clarify - do you mean 41 in holy, and 20 in discipline? The spec you mention there is 41 disc 20 holy, but even with the changes to Pain Suppression I doubt the discipline tree is really raid-viable (and thus I doubt it is the one you mean, especially given that you mention CoH).

That aside, the answers to most of your questions are unchanged from the positions outlined previously in this thread: the buffs that priests are receiving, while not inconsiderable, will not actually have a big effect on playstyle in raids (IMO, at least). The Med change means spirit becomes more valuable but the implications of that have been well hashed out already in the last few pages.

My thoughts on spell haste are that it is a generally underwhelming stat for priests, for several reasons:

1) Haste is most effective when you are chain-casting i.e. trying to increase either your damage or healing throughput. However, unlike dps classes, where more dps = better, once healers reach a certain level of hps any more is essentially unnecessary.
2) Priest mechanics also penalise you for chain casting, as our regen model and itemisation assumes a non-trivial amount of spirit, which is most effective when we can get some O5SR ticks - so our regen system is in direct tension with haste.
3) Haste seems to invariably replace one or both of spirit/mp5 on the item where it occurs. YMMV but I am definitely not prepared to take the longevity hit so that I can cast 2s greater heals.
4) Only two of our heals, GH and PoH, really benefit from spell haste. The latter is already situational and/or largely replaced by CoH when specced for it. The former is generally used for MT healing, in which case you are either spamming down-ranked heals or cancel-casting, neither of which make really effective use of haste.
5) There are other classes (e.g. paladins) who excel at efficient, short cast-time, medium-payload heals. It seems redundant to try and duplicate their strengths (which would take ~300 haste at a minimum).

I'll reprise what I said in the 2.3 patch notes thread regarding spirit.

Now since I don't have any haste items at the moment I'm of course no expert, but I can tell you how I think.

Haste feels like one stat that you either need a ton of or it isn't worth it. To get greater heal from 2.5 to 2.0 sec you need 20% haste and to get to 1.5s (optimal) you need 40% haste. You'd have to give up on mana regen entirely to get those numbers.

You'd be an insane healer, until your mana ran out. Healing is not DPS, you still need to cast the same amount of spells to heal your tank. Faster spells lets you have faster reaction times, which I guess would be the point of spell haste for healers, but priests can also spam fast 1.5s casts which are mana inefficient if they need to.

I'm not against haste really, it is just that it is too costly in item levels and most often replaces mana regeneration. Since it increases healing done over time it is really more analogous to +heal in a way but less versatile since it doesn't affect HoTs or instant spells.

How many healers in BT guilds have more than the haste rings and maybe the cloak equipped?

Comparing the healing mace from ZA with the mace from Vashj (about the same itemlevel) you trade 28 stamina and 11mp5 for 30 haste rating (1.9%), or 0.05s shaved off your greater heal. Am I the only one not wanting that trade?

Fortunately, if you're not the only Holy Priest or Shaman in the raid, the chances of maintaining a high Inspiration/Ancestral Healing uptime on the MT are vastly increased. As the number of Inspiration-enabled priests in your raid increases, the less it matters for everyone to stack crit. I think that's the true power behind having every healer who is able to spec into it.

I have my doubts about Holy Reach, but I find Healing Prayers to be indispensable given the content I'm doing and the gear I have. I'll spec out of Healing Prayers the day I'm confident that I will never run OOM during a fight again.

There is a much simpler way of calculating Inspiration uptime. The chance that Inspiration is up at any time depends solely on what happened in the last 15 seconds. Let

G = Number of Greater Heals cast in the last 15 seconds.
F = Number of Flash Heals cast in the last 15 seconds.
C = Crit change for Greater and Flash Heals.

Probability that Inspiration is active = 1 - Probability that Inspiration is not active = 1 - (1 - C)^(G+F)

So assuming 12% crit rate and 6 Heals cast (G+F) we get the uptime of 53.6%.

Let add the fact that we have 2 priests healing this target with 12 crit chance each and roughly 6 heals every 15 seconds. Then the uptime becomes 1 - (1 - 0.536)^2 = 78%.

Looking up armor damage reduction formulas from WoWWiki, at 20k armor Inspiration will reduce incoming damage by 16%. So with the uptime of 78% we are looking at a total decrease in damage of around 13% with two priests. With just one priest the damage reduction will be 8%. I think this is a very substantial decrease in damage.

Despite that however, I feel that spell warding is a better talent since priests are the most fragile healers and most of the Bosses in BT/Hyjal have raid wide spell damage abilities.

Ah, very nice. That's another way to look at it.

If we say the priest has 8% crit without talents and 13% with full holy spec then you get a reduction of 6% and 9%, so the additional 5 talent points only increases the effect of the buff by half.

Two priests with 8% crit net you 10% reduction, so two priests with just the base 3 points in inspiration is better than one priest with inspiration and full holy spec.

If you look at it that way then Holy Spec feels a bit like Imp PW:S. Sure it couldn't hurt, but that's a lot of talent points for so little effect.

I hear you, I've just changed my spec into this 18/43/0 and there are some choices in it I'm not so certain were the right ones. Main changes are that I droped some mana efficency talents (2pts less of mental agility, no healing prayers) for spiritual guidance.

I've always hated SG. It's so obvious what a terrible talent it is compared to the shaman/druid/paladin equaliants. We get a worse modifier on spirit instead of intellect. Intellect is always going to be higher than spirit with the options currently avalible unless you specifically pick non-optimal routes and sacrifice a whole lot of mana/5s which even after the change will be a superior stat. The talent comes out in the ballpark of 0.75%-1.25% increase in healing per point depending on what spells used. Paladin/Druid version is worth about twice that and Shamans get three times as much out of it.

Despite that, I'm going for it this time mainly to see how I cope with the decrease in mana efficency. We're currently working on Archimonde and mana efficency is the least of my worries for that fight, going out of mana isn't an issue. The only fights so far I've had any sort of mana problems with so far is Najentus and somewhat Terron. The lack of healing prayers will hurt in these fights, no doubt, but I'm sure I'll manage.

Spell warding is something I've always included in my talents from the day it was added. 10% mitigration of pretty much all damage I take is just too good to pass up on. Of course just about all damage these days are avoidable and I strive to get as little out of this talent as possible. But it's still quite a signifigant boost to your survivability those times you mess up or you get an unlucky grip of the legion with pot on cooldown just before an airburst or whatever. It adds to both burst protection and healing efficency on you by a substansial amount, if theres any talent I recomend newly recruited priest to get, this is it.

This spec is obviously geared for what I'm usually doing myself and my roles changes frequently. Priests are probably the most flexible healers, so I do everything from straight MT healing, Raid Healing only to a hybrid of both depending on what the encounter in question demands.

I've always tried to aim for balanced stats, in the past I always went for royal nightseyes or the 2mana5s/4int gem when I had to fit a yellow slot. However, I'm planing on going over to more healing focused gems with my tier 6 gear, while still following the socket colours. It's a bit of an experiment of mine to see how a more healing centered approach will work out.

Like someone else wrote before, it's terrible in its current form. I've got it on my ring, but thats only cause the alternatives are non existant in tier 6 content if you're not into spell crit. If they'd add it to items that already had int/spi/sta/heal/mana/5s on them I'd be all over it with the way the ilvl formula works, but I don't see that happening. Maybe if they replaced the int instead of spi/mana/5s on the items instead I'd consider it, but I don't really see it as a very good stat for healers.

---------------------
I don't really see the raid game changing that much for priests post 2.3. You'll have a bit more mana regen, and tanks won't get parried as much. Best gear is still the ones that have both spirit and mp/5 on them, and straight mp/5 is still better than just spirit though the gap ain't as large any more. Maybe I should make the paladins and shamans happy and go for the bloodboil cloak instead of trash drop one... I don't really like the change. It makes senseless spaming even more efficient, I rather enjoy trying to get as much OO5s regen. Adds another element to the game, I would rather have seen the regen spirit provides when not inside the 5s rule buffed.

Edit: Hm, my calculations of spirit vs mp/5 didn't include human spirit or spiritual guidance before. It looks as if, with this spec and human racial, spirit gems are going to be better than healing/mp/5s ones for the blue socket slots. Cloaks I mentioned becomes pretty much equal. If my spirit buff bitch ain't in the raid the value of these items decreases though, and it pretty much forces me to remain speced with SG that I'm not terribly found of.

My main beef with 2.3 as a powergamer is that my choice of Dwarf Priest is no longer optimal for PvE raiding. I lose the fearward advantage and get a PvP advantage (Chastise) which I don't want; and the Human Spirit racial gets even better since spirit gets better. It's like they're getting a free kings buff regen-wise. I'll admit I haven't tried to weigh the Human racial against the Draenai, maybe theirs is even better regen-wise.

They've also said that they're looking into revamping spirit for WotLK. It's almost enough to make me want to level up a human priest alt to switch mains when WotLK comes out, but only almost. (All that levelling! Ugh.)

I'm thinking that they'll probably nerf racials that scale too well, like the straight percentage on a stat or health. I somehow have a hard time seeing the dwarf +10 FrR worth as much as +10% spirit or +10% int. They've nerfed almost everything else that scales at this point and racials have been untouched since what, beta?

Of course being a powergamer is a sad state of mind, but I can't help it. Ah well, at least I had my glory days pre-TBC as a dwarf.

i just got a shock when i saw how good the lady vashj healing ring became with the 2.3 spirit buff. the karabor ring isn't close to it, especially since i'm a human

seeing how they mix up pvp with pve we might start seeing some superb healing loot from arenas, and then dwarf isn't so bad

I think you mean TBC but yeah, racials have always been imbalanced. This latest patch changed the equation a bit though so that the Humans got better while the Dwarves got worse, seen from a PvE perspective. Any patch has the potential of doing that I guess, but you can still moan about it when you're on the "losing" side.

I apologize for not clarifying my initial post. I was speaking about a 41/20/00 build with respect to Pain Suppression (41 Points in Discipline). I have a significant amount of experience with the COH build (41 Points in Holy), but I wanted to see if the Pain Suppression build would even offer anything viable in a raid setting. I was hoping for the more experienced Theorycrafters out there to offer some comments that could enlighten a narrow-minded COH spec as to possible benefits, specs, roles, gearing etc. for a build that maximizes the Discipline Tree. I personally won't be respeccing to Pain Suppression for my guild when 2.3 goes live, but likely one of my guildmates will. My guild is on PTR and a fellow Priest and I were just discussing the options and pretty much hit a brick wall, so I seek any thoughts you guys might have. My questions reworded:

1. Is there a raid viable 41/20/00 Discipline build? If so, why did you pick the talents you did?

2. What role do you anticipate someone specced with Pain Suppression filling (MT healing, raid healing, hybrid other)?

3. What kind of gems and gear do you think would best support a Pain Suppression build (i.e., How would you gem/gear to maximize your role mentioned in #2)?

I thought about a raid Pain Suppression build when I first heard the changes were coming, but it felt like it would gimp healing too much. I basically came up with the following post on our guild forum as a sort of stream of consciousness:

The start is pretty basic, the same as my current Imp DS build. Later I chose one point in Focused Casting to cap my hit for inner demons (with a trinket) and capped Mental Agility and for lack of anything else Mental Strength.

Currently: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

At this point I ran out of things to pick that I felt added to my own viability in PvE to any great degree.. and I had 10 points left.

So I went with one point for Power Infusion, could be good on some bosses if the one I buff doesn't get threat.. great to combo with Heroism for example on Void Reaver. But then...

Wand Spec, ludicrous of course. Martyrdom, I'm not supposed to get critted in PvE and if I do I generally die. Improved PW:S... maybe, but it is very little gain for so many talent points. Absolution, a bit cheaper on spells I hardly use. Improved Inner Fire, a pretty silly talent for PvE. Improved Mana Burn, maaybe if we still did AQ40. Force Of Will, I'm not supposed to DPS. Reflective Shield, a small amount of damage that gives no threat..

Since I had to choose I went with 1 more point in Focused Power to cap my +hit vs same-level foes, good for Inner Demon, Mind Control and Shackle, and 3 ranks in Imp PW:S for lack of anything better.

At this point I unlocked Enlightenment which is a pretty decent talent really, so 5 points in that and finally a point in Pain Suppression.

Currently: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

This leaves me 20 points for Holy which really gimps that tree, but then that was inevitable. It was fortunately enough to get Divine Fury and Improved Healing but not anything with +healing which gimps my heals. How much however I'm not sure without a lot of calculations..

Final build: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I'd have to say I'm torn... it does reduce my effectiveness as a healer but on the other hand it would improve my utility for the raid with another DPS buff (Power Infusion) and an extra shieldwall for the tanks. Ultimately I guess it depends on how much they buff Pain Suppression and if it really does end up being viable in PvE..

I think Blizzard is more worried about making it so Disc will be viable in the expansion. A 41/30 build would be better off than a 41/20 build by a decent margin. The problem, however, is that they'll probably try adding a talent in deeeeeep disc that will make you want to go 51/20... and you're back to square one.

Personally, I'll be sticking w/ Imp DS and as much Holy as I can get, unless 51pt Holy is actually worthwhile. 23/48 will be delicious. ^___^