Ah, my bad. That makes more sense. I'm not sure if I'd call myself an experienced theorycrafter but heres my 2 cents.

The main loss is going to be raw healing output. SG/SH alone is a ~15% loss or so. EH is huge for our single target heals, and Clear Casting increases the mana effiency and OO5SR time considerably. Gains? 5%sta/int and 10% mana on top of that. And, two utility abilities: Power of Infusion and Pain Supression. Power of Infusion have many uses, from improving that lifebloom stack that runs on your mt, to giving a dps class a substansial boost when needed. Pain Supression in its new targatable form looks like a nice life saver, for those "oh shit" moments its going to be great. And it would absolutley trivalize elements of fights like kael, the pyroblasts are going to be much easier (and cheaper) to deal with.

I would probably see this as a better raid healing spec than MT healer, mainly because using the two utility skills would be easier if you're focusing on the whole raid rather than just the MT. Lack of Clear Casting and Empowered Healing would hurt more when healing the tank than raid as well, but as usual priests are rather flexible when it comes to asigments and if the situation calls for it you'll make a decent mt healer with

I'd probably focus on Healing gearing/socketing quite a bit, since thats the area you'll be lacking in.

The way I see it, you give up ~20% of your raw healing power and some minor mana efficency for the two utility skills and a larger mana pool. For encounters were you need burst dps and/or mitigration this would be a good trade, when you don't its obviously bad. Is it worth it? I'd say its highly dependable on encounter design, for the encounters I'm currently facing it wouldn't be. Who knows what the Sunwell will be like though.


I suppose a 41/20 spec would be easier to build for DPS than healing, but I got no interest at all in that and I don't think that is what you were asking for. A DPS healing/hybrid could work as well I guess, but same thing there.

I'd go something like this I suppose, could trade the holy spec for spell warding if you won't be healing tanks at all and a lot of the worthless disc talents are interchangable.

Basically the gains of disc are 10% more mana, 5% sta, 5% int, PS and PI. At the cost of healing through put, clear casting, CoH.

All told you're going to lose something in the neighborhood of 500-600 on Gheal.

with 1800 healing your gheal would receive about 1530 additional healing. With SG being at least 160 and probably more for most priests in t5 gear. and 10% healing and 20% additional coeefienct
Makes you gheal get about 2225 ( (1800+ 160) x (.85+.20 +.10)) additional healing before the the 10% added to the base as well.

Thats a difference of almost 700-800 healing per rank 7 gheal easily. The amounts are lower for downranked heals, but the % gap stays about the same.

With such a large gap I'd say you'd probablly have to up rank AT LEAST 1 and probably two ranks to stay competitive throughput wise But since you give up Clear casting, and don't really gain anything besides 15% more mana, its clear to see your healing throughput and longevity are severely curtailed. Assuming you had 14k mana raid buffed from the increased int ( unlikely btw) thats still only 1400 more mana OR 2 max rank gheals or a about 5 rank 1 gheals,

Thats the bad news.

On the good news side PI. Used on your useful PI would basically close the gap between you and a hoyl spec'd priest for 15 seconds ( 13.5 after gcd but whose counting) and then you'd return to being terrible. However due to the way PI affects lifebloom if you were to PI a well geared druid at the start of the encounter and said druid were to maintain his PI'd lfieblooms for a substantial duration the net gain would be fairly intense. ( I made a post on this its number 389 if you care to read more about it). My rough conclusions there were that if a druid could maintain his life blooms on a single target for 45-60 seconds the overal net gain compared to a CoH spec priest using Gheal, would favor the PI priest+ druid combo. the post I originally made assuming somewhat smaller margin ( since we were talking 31/30) than here, but calculations were made to favor unreasonable gheal use anyway, so its still roughly valid.

And if at any time a druid is maintain lifeblooms on two tanks non stop, or if he can go the entire cooldown of PI ( thus allowing a second druid to roll PI lifeblooms) the healing advantage just continually lengthens. There are problems with gaps in the encounters that druids traditionally let lifeblooms drop, and encounters where staying in range of the tank for a minute straight can be arduous (Hyjal mostly). in any event this is the easiest and most readily available method for a 41 disc priest to keep his raid's healing throughput competitive even when he himself has lost a lot of throughput, and all it really requires is a Resto druid to roll lifeblooms.

Honestly the lifebloom thing alone is probably enough to justify a 31/30 spec if you really wanted. So what about 41. Well PS has obvious advantages. the msot appealing case is Bloodboil. there are seeral applications here.. A) On a fel Rage'd clothie, B) on a MT who can't seem to be passed by second aggro to drop stacks, PS's deaggro would probably force the swap. Additionally its basically like another BoP, it has the advantage of working on spell dmg and the like as well. So you could theoretically PS people who eat supremes volcanoes, are terrible at dodging RoF/doomfire, but there is the problem with identify their stupidity before the decreased dmg is so marginal that you'd have been better off healing them. Its also a deaggro for Moonkin/Ret paladins/Ele shamans and threat capped Sps/locks. All in all though none of these applications really strike me as anything you could fix with player skill, better healing, and maybe a hunter misdirect.

the only other place a Disc priest has the potential to gain ground on a holy priest is in the area of dispelling. Assuming you're not taking dmg talents, improving your dispelling is really the only course available. While the advantages of saying 15% mana on mass dispel and 25% on normal dispel is not bad at all, I don't know of any fight with a sufficiently high dispel need that these talents would ever compare favorably to the mana saved through downranking your more powerful heals as a holy spec.

lets back that up with some math.

Teron gorefiend- immolates roughly every 10 seconds we'll say. Assume you're the only one dispelling immolates. 365 I believe is the bass cost for dispel. Making the mana cost 273 for our PS build and 328 for our holy build. for a total of 55 mana saved per dispel. or in our example 27.5 M/5 I'm fairly sure 27.5 mp is not worth 3 talent points. and case in point assuming you up ranked from gheal 1 to rank 2 due to need more throughput as PSis costing you 72 mana per cast. and I'd assume you'd cast at least 2 heals between immolates.

In any event I personally don't see it worth the drawbacks, but if you were dead set on it there are some ways to lessen the impact.

the most obvious way to me is to gear/spec to use more renews/PoM.Pick up 4 pc t5, maybe an ashtongue talisman and renew your way to victory. the gap between your renew as PS and CoH is closer than the one between your gheals. If you at least try and take advantage of this fact, you could probably become more competitive. People complain a lot about "Oh renew overheals or is useless". etc etc but I honestly can't remember the last WWS were less than 44% of my healing was from renew. Its plenty viable, and as PS its probably more viable than trying to compete with Gheals. And obviously any other spell that doesn't get the benefit of Empowered healing is a good choice as well. So PoM should also be used extensively ( though imo it should be anyway).

In any event thats my opinion on the matter. 31/30 viable with a good druid, 41/20 potentially viable with a REALLY good druid on some encounters, but man do you really not get anything to help yourself out

don't forget that pain supression also reduces aggro with 5% so no it won't be spammable on the main tank.

Benefits / Losses to 23/38 versus 21/40?

I'm the only raiding holy priest in my guild, so I have been specced 23/38 since hitting level 70. However, we've had everything on farm for a few months now. I recently got the 4 piece tier 6 bonus and now I question whether I should spec into a 21/40 build. I was just wondering about the total loss of caster dps / healing with improved spirit versus me gaining an additional 8% bonus healing effects to my greater heal.

If you are thinking 21/40, you might as well go 20/41 and get circle spam...the benefits of having it as a utility spell outweighs the benefit of divine spirit. You will also use less candles

15% more mana is not really 15% more mana... Even with a 20k starting mana pull 15% is 3000 mana which is far less than 15% of the amount of mana you spend in the fight if you add to that 20k whatever you get from potions, mp5, spirit etc... Not to mention if you have a shadow priest...
Holy talents add to your healing regardless of how much mana you have - the more mana regen tools you get in a raid the lower the benefit of that lame "+15%" mana is, while the +% healing remains the same, at least when comparing to something like the +10% healing talent. Not to mention with enough regen the mana restored from clearcating alone will beat that. If the 6% clearcasting affects 50k of your mana spent in a fight it will be more powerful than 15% extra mana to a 20k base pool. And obviously in reality you will be far lower than 20k base and probably higher than 50k mana used as well. Not to mention this is only 1 of the many taletns in the holy tree you're losing.

I've been doing some reading and thinking and I had some questions about the 23/38 Holy build. In particular, I'm still thinking about the 23 Disc talents. I agree with all of these but five that I'm still debating where they should go. I have not been raiding very long, however our healers do not seem to have a problem pulling aggro. When they do pull aggro, its usually because of a broken shackle or a mistake that Silent Resolve probably wouldn't help them with anyway. I know personally that I couldn't pull aggro if I wanted to even when criting my highest rank greater heal. Thus, the five points in Silent Resolve seem confusing to me. For the most part, these seem to be filler points that are getting the build up to Improved Divine Spirit. After spending the 2 points on the second level for Improved Power Word: Fortitude, three more points have to be used before you can access the third level. The only one even slightly useful to a raid is Silent Reolve so I can see putting three points in this. However, I would personally put these into Power Word: Shield. Although it is worthless for raids where the mobs hit too hard to make it worthwhile, it is great for Heroic Dungeons (especially in PUGs where an idiot DPSer may keep pulling aggro and Power Shield: Shield is the only thing that can keep his squishy butt alive long enough to land a heal) and it is expensive to respec back and forth for dungeons and raids. After Meditation and Inner Focus, the build needs one more point to be able to access the fourth level. Again, there aren't many useful choices of where to put this point so I could see why to put this in Silent Resolve. However, I wouldn't put this point in Silent Resolve because I have no aggro problems. I instead would put this into Absolution. I have read that Absolution is not worth the points and I agree, however at least it is saving me some mana where I see no benefit to Silent Resolve so far in the raids. There are also certain fights where I am dispelling pretty often and the small gains from Absolution may save me a hundred mana or two. After putting the four points into Mental Agility, the build still needs one point to get to Divine Spirit. Here is where I actually see an advantage to not putting that point in Silent Resolve. Mental Agility works on instant cast spells, such as Renew, that I use constantly in raid healing. Thus, I can see true benefits from the 2% gain the last point in Mental Agility would give. So I would suggest one of the following 23 point Disc builds.

OPTION 1 (Better for pure raiding, and only two points different than the current)

23 DISCIPLINE

Unbreakable Will 5/5
Silent Resolve 3/5
Improved Power Word: Fortitude 2/2
Absolution: 1/3
Inner Focus 1/1
Meditation 3/3
Mental Agility 5/5
Divine Spirit 1/1
Improved Divine Spirit 2/2

OPTION 2 (Better for flexibility and unless aggro is a problem for a healer, loses nothing to the above)

23 DISCIPLINE

Unbreakable Will 5/5
Improved Power Word: Fortitude 2/2
Improved Power Word: Shield 3/3
Absolution 1/3
Inner Focus 1/1
Meditation 3/3
Mental Agility 5/5
Divine Spirit 1/1
Improved Divine Spirit 2/2

Like I said, I haven't been raiding very long so I could be way off or missing something major. I just wanted to throw this out there and see what you guys thought of it. We are currently raiding in SSC, Gruul's, Tempest Keep, ZA, and the occasional Kara still.

Also, sorry for the novel written above. I'm long-winded

Considering what you use PW:Shield for, 300-400 extra HP, is well worth it.

At my buffed +healing of 2300, imp shield is worth nearly 400 HP. A flask of fortification gives 500 HP to the tank. 400 more HP on shield is more than worth 12% less threat, which in the stage of the fight where its possible for me to pull aggro, is probably less aggro than the tank can generate with a single ability use.

As for the value of CoH. Here is a simple example. Hex Lord malacrass.

Its about 7k damage (with shadow prot) over 10 seconds to 10 ppl, so 7k HP/sec

One prayer of healing one your group and 2 CoH on the other group take 4.5 seconds and will heal one group for 2.3k per person (average) and the other group for about 2.1k per person (average). Repeating this takes another 6 seconds. So by the end of the bolts you will have healed one group for 4.6k damage per person and the second group for 4.1k damage per person. About 3 seconds after the spirit bolt volley ends, you have healed nearly 60% of the spirit bolt damage all by your lonesome at a mana efficiency of 11%. Add a pom to the mix at the begining and the CoH priest can effectively heal all of the spirit bolt damage within 15 seconds. No other healer can achieve the same without blowing cooldowns and even with cooldowns the CoH priest still comes on top.

Lets see the imp DS priest. PoH heals one group for 2.3k, flash heals 2ppl. This takes 6 seconds. PoH again for 2.3 and one more flash heal. 3.5 seconds afterwards he has healed one group for 4.6k and 3 ppl for 2.9k each. In addition he can't afford to take more than 1 point in healing prayers so his PoH is already less mana efficient. He has healed about 45% of the total damage at a mana effiency of about 7%. He has healed 25% less and is 46% less mana efficient. A paladin spamming holy lights can heal approximately the same with better mana efficiency.

Another thing I find interesting is a comparison between spell warding and holy specialisation with healing prayers.

Fight 1) Wow Web Stats

Holy priest here does not cast any PoH but casts about 20 prayers of mending. He suffers 6k fire damage. 4% of 6k damage is 240 damage. 20 prayers of mending *70 = 1400 mana.

Fiight 2) Krauken - WWS

Krauken takes 5k fire damage (4% = 200) and casts 8 prayers of mending (2 ranks in healing prayers = 8*70 = 560 mana)

Fight 3) WWS Loading...

Predz takes 9k fire damage (4% = 360) and csts 17 prayers of mending (2 ranks in healing prayers = 17*8 = 1260 mana.

Lets look at high astromancer solarian. For the same fight, its about 8k magical damage. or 320 HP. Even one prayer of mending with 2 ranks of healing prayers saves you 70 mana which is equal to 420 damage (assuming a lowish 6:1 effective healing to mana ratio). In order to make 2 ranks in spell warding worth 2 ranks in healing prayers you need to take at least 10k elemental damage per Prayer of mending you cast and 30k damage for each PoH. I cant honestly say that I have seen many fights where a healer can expect to take more than 40k spell damage and in cases of raid damage PoH and PoM should be used quite a lot.

Also the benefit of 2% more crit with a base crit of 11% (due to int and 2 ranks of holy spec) is 1% more HP/mana on critable spells and HP/sec plus 6% more inpisration uptime if you are spamming the tank. If the tank takes say 400k damage with a 16% boost to armor for inspiration 6% more inspiration uptime is equal to 3840 damage. With 6:1 effective healing to mana ratio this is 640 mana. 640 mana is the equvalent of 10 PoM or 3 PoH. If you heal about 300k damage with critable spells over a long fight than 1% more HP/mana is equal to another 3k damage. So even in a fight that heavily favours inspiration and crit its generally difficult to offset the mana gain from healing prayers with holy specialisation. Overal healing prayers saves you more mana than spell warding and divine specialisation can.

Nice writeup, thank you.

There are incidental benefits to Spell Warding and Holy Specialization though... while you have shown both to be significantly less valuable mana-per-mana, they both are mitigation talents. This means there will come a time when you or the tank is momentarily at 100 health after a big hit... and having one of those talents JUST SAVED YOU from a death, by mitigating a crucial bit of damage. The difference between a wipe and just a scary few seconds.

I personally think Healing Prayers is still notably better for most people, but if you are one of the few healers that never goes OOM with your gear and playstyle, the saved mana from Healing Prayers is just going to waste. Better to grab a mitigation talent.

If I had to distribute the filler talents for use in heroic dungeons I would rather have a few points in Silent Resolve. In 25-man raids threat isn't that big an issue with subtlety-enchants and salvation providing threat reduction. In smaller groups on the other hand threat can really be an issue at times and I would choose that over being able to shield for just a little bit more.

What my guilds used to do was to spec an alt-priest for IDS and relog to that one to buff the raid, you can do the same for BoK if you lack paladin in your raid, just make sure to not remove them from the raidgroup.

Except for Focused Power - Spell - World of Warcraft when learning Felmyst I can not see how a IDS priest in the raidgroup itself would beat a priest that can go Empowered Healing - Spell - World of Warcraft and get CoH on top.

(And I have a priest that has IDS spec myself, and serves this purpose)

If you're really into min-maxing Zedd has a point, but I think it's too much hassle and always worth it to have 1 priest IDS spec, esp. if u have more than 2 regular priests, unless maybe you really lack shammies AND CoH priests. Esp. on a wipenight the hassle of relogging continuously can be time-consuming and annoying.

You guys are spastic. Notice how the last four posts go March -> June (nub) -> July (nub) -> July (nub)?

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t23790-p...2_wow-2_4_3_a/

Use the correct thread for future questions. The most current as of this post is http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t23790-p...2_wow-2_4_3_a/