What I find interesting about the "balance" between +heal, Mp5, and spirit ... is that there's very little work involved in actually getting all three to high levels, assuming you have access to raid gear.

In TBC, I set out to stack Mp5, because that's the only thing that seemed useful with my play style. I got it up to about 200 Mp5, and then in 2.1, finished crafting my PM gear (it was too good to pass up) and with a couple of tweaks, got my regen up to 445/235 O/I 5SR. In the process, I gained enough +heal to drop +81 off my weapon and get Spellsurge, which was even more regen.

What I find ironic is that I'm able to do this and in the process, without even trying, I have +1750 healing raid buffed, and almost 500 spirit. O.o

If I wanted to, it would be trivial for me to hit +2k healing by losing 30 or 40 Mp5 (trinkets and offhand, with a new weapon with a +81 enchant), or to hit 600-700 spirit by switching some items (Nightstaff, my Patchwerk cloak, switch both rings out, replace the trinket with Bangle, and probably put on T4 in place of Whitemend).

And I haven't even been TRYING.

I find the biggest issue with TBC is training myself to NOT heal people. I got so used to having near-infinite mana in AQ40 & Naxx, using Heal 2/3/4 and spot healing the raid while keeping the tank alive, that it's hard to NOT hit those people with a quick heal. As I train myself out of this habit, I'm finding I have more and more mana available. Last night on Gruul, with super mana pots (<3 my guild -- the melee provide the healers with pots) and my SF, I didn't go OOM, and I was healing the HS tank, offhealing the MT, renewing the melee as they hit cave-ins, and PoMing every time it came up. I finally feel like I'm hitting my stride in terms of gear/spec in TBC ... and it feels friggin' awesome.

I find this to be true.

There is one thing I will say.

Say a mob hits for 6k damage. (Which is what the trash in Magtheridon use to hit me for, off the top of my head).

I need 12k hp to be able to survive two hits. 18k hp to survive three hits.

That means from 6,001 hp to 11,999 hp are roughly the same.

I have enough stamina to survive and aoe, and about 1k in cushion damage. But if I am getting meleed on, I am dead, so why bother?

This pretty much happened to me post 2.1 And I am loving it. Yeah, paladins are more efficient, but with raid gear, I am just happy. xD I got hots and aoe heals, they don't. It works out.

I too am starting to hit a "healing stride" even though there are still a ton of upgrades for me out there. It's not uncommon for me (especially on fights like Mag) to suddenly realize I am still sitting at 80%+ mana and the boss is at 20 or 30%, at which time I usually throw mana conservation out the window and just start spam casting for fun (and why not take the sure kill, MUCH less chance of tank dying if I'm chain casting). I think blizzard did a good job with upgrading the gear, I definitely feel more or less where I should be now in terms of gear for the content my guild is working on.

I'm really glad a guildie told me to come to these forums and have a look, the WoW priest boards are not only ridiculous but depressing. Holy priests definitely still have a raid spot available when played correctly, and are especially good at MT healing.

As a side note, nobody has commented directly in response to my first post in this thread. Any help would be much appreciated.

I used to be in the "who cares about stamina" boat but I've reevaluated that recently. I've slowly been working on increasing my health while keeping my +healing and regen high and I've found that it actually has made a difference. I do think balance is good to strive for (to a point) and that sockets are a good way to approach it. I don't think it's a travesty to throw a stamina gem in a piece that already has very high +heal and regen; it's not that different from taking an item with stamina native to it and socketing it with a Royal Nightseye. Sockets ostensibly exist to allow for customization but they can also be a good way to make up for an item's weaknesses, especially when you're trying to acquire a set bonus (meaning that simply swapping the piece out for something with "better" stats may not be an option).

One thing that alternately amuses and frustrates me is how much intellect I have when it's the one stat I care very little about improving. After the patch and its item buffs I looked at my mana pool and almost keeled over when I realized I had almost 10K mana unbuffed when I make absolutely no effort to gear for it (save for a couple orange gems to activate my meta). It's amusing because, hey, tons of mana certainly never hurt anyone... but it's frustrating because intellect has absolutely no bearing on my efficiency or survivability, but there it is anyway.

On every piece of gear I own.

Taunting me.

:P

I agree that there is such a thing as too much stamina. My original point was one of balance. You need to have enough stats in each category to meet the needs of a particular challenge.

It's not that I think intellect is bad, it's that I don't have the option to drop some of it to pick up other stats that are more all-around useful. Nearly all cloth healing gear has int simply by default. A large mana pool is nice for heroics and trash, I agree with that, but on a long boss encounter it does very little for me.

I considered making Whitemend awhile ago, but decided against it when I got Netherspite's pants. With the buffs to Tier 4 and equivalent gear I think Whitemend doesn't hold up quite as well as it did before. Although the set bonus does give a small amount of scaling to all that intellect I'm complaining about.

How is the renew spell calculated?

If you are referring to the way +heal is applied to Renew, the coefficient for that is 100%.

I have included the others, for both healing and damage. I got this information off the WoW forums, so I am unsure as to the accuracy. I also believe this is pre-Empowered Healing, which gives you an extra 20% to Greater Heal, and 10% to Flash/Binding Heal.

42.9% Binding Heal (per target)
14.3% Circle of Healing (per target)
42.9% Flash Heal
85.7% Greater Heal
28.6% Prayer of Healing (per target)
42.9% Prayer of Mending (per charge)
20.0% PW:Shield

75.0% Holy Fire direct damage
25.0% Holy Fire dot
0.00% Mana Burn
42.9% Mind Blast
57.2% Mind Flay
110% Pain
65.0% Shadowfiend
42.9% Shadow Word: Death
71.4% Smite
100% Vampiric Touch

Thanks for the response... actually, I wasn't really looking for that per se as I was aware of the coefficients. I was looking for how it is calculated.... considering factors such as imp renew, +healing, etc.

I'm being a little lazy about it as I could probably run tests to figure it out but I figured someone surely has worked it out already.

The question originally was if imp renew was calculated after bonus healing or before?

My general view on the matter is that it's best to balance your stats. Focusing too much on one thing or another can just lead to problems down the line. Sometimes you need to be able to land 5k+ greater heals on your tank, sometimes you need to be able to keep up spamming flash heal for an entire fight (if some paladins decided not to show up - screw you, solarian), and sometimes you have periods to sit back and regen between healing.

So as your gear gets better, all your stats should improve. I think it'd be a mistake to say fix your +healing at 1500 and then try to up spirit exclusively from then on.

As has been mentioned earlier, the 9 healing / 2 mp5 gem is currently the best available, so I just dump it into every gem slot as long as I'm not trying to meet a socket requirement. Apart from that, I just take what upgrades I can and things seem to work out ok :-)

one of my biggest complaints is that there isnt any gear that lacks intellect...

EVERYTHING has intellect and it really isnt necessary....stamina spirit and mp5 are all more important than intellect and we often have to choose gear that lacks one of the 3. i would give up 2000-3000 mana in a heart beat for 1k more hp, another 50-100 spirit, and another 40-50 mp5

stam, spirit, mp5, +heal, int

if there were one thing i would give up when looking at "four stat" gear it would be intellect hands down....it just doesn't exist though.

I have to disagree.

Mp5 is useful, no argument. And I love stacking it on my gear.
Spirit is useful. I love stacking it, and the flexibility it provides for quick "regen naps", or even a Clearcasting + Inner Focus (with Bangle and a spirit staff) 15 second 1k+ mana regen.
Stamina is useful, in a limited sense.

Now, let's look at intellect. It provides crit rating at a poor return (useful, but only minor), and it provides, straight-up, a mana base.

I *like* having close to 11k mana raid-buffed. It's nice to have that buffer. Would I trade 2000 mana for 40 Mp5? Probably not, at this stage. Yes, over the course of 4 minutes (+10 seconds or so) I would gain back that 2000 mana. And since most boss fights are built around 10 minute enrages these days, I'd actually gain *twice* the mana.

But I wouldn't be able to burst anywhere near as well. Sometimes, you really just need to dump 5000 mana into something to quickly restore some health to someone, or to keep a tank alive while the raid reforms around you, combat rezzing an essential healer. Or maybe something happens to another healer, and you have to cover. At that point, no amount of Mp5 in the world is going to allow you to do it. You just need a mana pool.

And you'll note that since the original ZG/MC days, our mana pool has gone up and down, but the trend has mostly been level. I remember breaking 10k mana raid-buffed in ZG, and thinking that was the coolest thing ever. I finished my T1 set, got a +int enchant on an int staff, got my Mar'li wand, and got to just over 11k! Then my mana pool started to dwindle.

First I dumped Mental Strength. Then I started getting +heal and Mp5 enchants. Then I started putting on pieces that had less stat emphasis for more Mp5 and +heal. And I was ok with a mana pool of 8.5k raid buffed. It started to climb as I got AQ40 pieces, and was back over 9k in Naxx.

But now that we're in TBC, I have more Mp5 than ever, more spirit than ever, more healing than ever (close to +1800 now, without emphasizing it at all) ... and you know, even without mental strength, I have close to 11k mana raid buffed.

I love it. I wouldn't trade that extra buffer for 40 Mp5. It's just too useful.

Arguments making sense?

To summarize:
Pro Mp5: from a sheer theorycraft perspective, yes, more MP5 > more int, so long as time scale allows. Spirit is also useful as regen.
Pro Int: theorycraft != real world (game world). Sometimes, a buffer is *far* more useful than Mp5. When you have to burst some heals, you're going to be more thankful you had enough mana to actually do it than knowing that you can regen that mana lost just a little bit faster. (Note: assuming that you have a reasonable amount of Mp5 already, like, say, 300 raid buffed [what I have atm])

Lots of good ideas and info, nice thread.

My healing style has changed over time as I upgrade my gear, and the guild tanks upgrade theirs too.

On our first Mag kill, the tank was taking substantial damage spikes. Some two months later, it just doesnt seem so critical for me to be ready to land a GH(7) anymore. Besides the tank taking less (%) spikes, he rarely seems to go under 75% for longer than a second.

I've come to terms with this by pretending to be a pally (kinda) and just spamming GH(1) and leaving it up to chance that i get some effective healing out of the frenzy.

For those who say they use renew less and less, I have actually found it to be my best chance to pick up additional effective healing. Especially if you have a, Use: increase healing by "a lot" , trinket. Pop that and renew 4-6 people who may take some damage. Then sit back and admire some big mana regen ticks along with the renew ticks.

In any case, being a good healer starts with knowing the encounter you are healing for. Using flash heal to ninja effective healing is childish. Mana pots are easier to make as of the recent patch, dont be afraid to use those, but dont be wasteful of your mana at the same time.

Views on Talents

5/5 spell warding is essential (kinda like people saying stam is important, its all about survivability) Constant 10% reduced spell damage taken, this talent is overlooked and underrated.

Inspiration, trash, holy priest itemization offers little to no crit chance. Damage mitigation from armor gives diminishing returns, so your average SSC geared tank will gain, at best, an additional 5% mitigation from your inspiration. Thats fine, but these talent points are better spent elsewhere (spell warding)

Imp Shield trash I dont think shield should be used very much to be honest. And its not very noticable on a MT during a boss fight, or a clothie who will almost always take a *crit* or a *crushing* melee blow, almost wondering if the shield absorbed any damage at all.


The rest of the talents are mostly obvious to holy priests, the only big decision left is:

CoH: depends on if your raid already has spir buff. Ive never personally used CoH, and after the recent patch it's become more efficient. It's uses are too limited in my opinion, and spirit, if not improved, is more desirable to a raid. From my experience, the best use of CoH would be on your AE group during murlock zergs on Tidewalker fight. Depending on your strat, you oculd use this before or after you have established the agro on murlocks.

I agree with you on spell warding, but not on inspiration.

First, armor does have diminishing returns on damage reduction, but since damage reduction has increasing returns to survival time, armor has a perfectly linear relationship with your tank's survival time or "effective HP." This is easy to prove, check out any tank thread.

Just using your hypothetical numbers, if the 5% that the "typical SSC tank" gains takes him from 70% to 75% mitigation, the player is now taking 25% of the full damage instead of 30%, for a 1/6 reduction in damage taken, or about 13% increased effective HP.

Second, when was the last time your tank died because all the healers were out of mana? Now, when was the last time he/she died to a spike? When Inspiration is up, hits are smaller, and tank-killing spikes are vastly less likely. If we're not about preventing tank deaths, what are we there for?

If we saw the damage prevented by an Inspiration proc pop up on our screens like a heal, I think this talent would be much more popular. If you're primarily healing a tank (who's going to take hits during the proc uptime), it's downright wasteful not to have this talent.

As to the fact that we can't (and shouldn't) gear for crit-- Insipiration uptime is actually not that sensitive to an individual priest's crit rate. I can work out some math if you'd like, but basically you're looking at, what, 7% crit without gearing for it. If every priest in the raid has the talent, you're looking at solid uptime without making significant gear considerations for crit, and actually not that much improvement if you do gear for it.

If you heal tanks and don't want them to die, take Inspiration.

Constantius, I agree with you that having a big mana pool and a "buffer" is very handy, but I think what Sunchips is unhappy about (and I agree with him on this) is that you will always have intellect on your gear whether you want it or not, which completely eliminates the concept of customizing your gear to suit your needs. You'll notice if you apply a filter on Wowhead with "four stats, no intellect" you get zero results. It's like the itemization team just assumes we want intellect on everything as though it's key to our healing performance in every situation, which just isn't quite true even though it is nice in some situations. This becomes a bigger problem when you realize that a lot of priests are struggling to have enough stamina to survive raid encounters.

Going to have to agree with CheshireCat on Inspiration. Even aside from its tangible benefits, I think I've always valued it quite highly because, well, tanks love it. Anything that makes my tank feel safer when I'm healing him is worth the talent points to me. Aside from that, it's one of the only forms of stackable utility that healing priests bring to the table (I know the buff itself doesn't stack, but the more priests with the talent, the more likely it is to be up at any given time).

I have been using the my same playstyle both pre BC and now. Simply speaking, I stack my +healing without severly gimping myself of other stats. Curently when I am healy spec and in my healy gear, I am sitting at 1800+ healing self buffed and my spirt is around 475. The +healing allows me to down rank a pretty good amount and the spirit helps to regen it. My main spell is GH rank 3 and if/when the tank takes spike damage, I will throw a rank 7 at him and then continue back to spamming rank 3. I find that PoM helps a ton when used properly and renews on most everyone aside from the tank usually gets the job done. I dont have mana issues thus far so, for me, this has been my favorite style.

I had to quote that b/c it's probably one of the things said in this thread that I agree with the most. Learn the encounters, learn which heals will best be used on the encounter, and know how to adjust mid encounter if shit hits the fan.

5/5 Spell Warding - This talent becomes more and more important as you progress through TBC content. I can think of several encounters where the only damage I take is Spell Damage and having the talent will allow me a little freedom with my gear. I've not, not had this talent since Sapphiron days.

Inspiration - Picking up this talent really depends on your typical healing assignment. I posted above, but I'll mention it again...Druids are really close to the armor cap, so proccing this on a Druid OT is almost unnecessary. If you find you're healing the MT on most encounters, then it might be nice to have, but spending 8 points to really make the full use of it seems like a waste of talent points to me. Finally, Shaman can proc their AC buff and as far as I recall, the two don't stack. In all, this talent really depends on how your guild sets up healing assignments. I'm just glad I don't have to take up 8 points for it.

Circle of Healing - This is by far one of my favorite spells. We usually run 2 priests in the raid, so it's no problem that I don't have Improved Spirit. I will agree that it is a very "situational" heal, but if you really start to look for those situations, it's actually a pretty incredible spell.

For me, COH has been a great compliment to heal alongside a Shaman (Chain Healing) that is also designated to Raid Heal. I can guarantee exactly who my heals hit (unlike Chain Heal), and my initial heal is instant - which sometimes does save a life. One thing to remember, Chain Heal is a 2.5 second cast, and COH is instant. Where COH outshines CH is in the predictibility of where the heals will land and its instant reliability. Other than that, Chain Heal is still amazing.

Here's some WWS of COH in action:
Void Reaver - Example 1: http://www.juggernautguild.com/wws/2.../kassaria.html
This is a pretty realistic example of COH paired with a Shaman and both assigned to raid healing. You should be able to navigate to the main page showing our compared healing.

Void Reaver - Example 2: http://www.juggernautguild.com/wws/2.../kassaria.html
The Void Reaver Example 2 kill was a pretty extreme situation. We lost 3 healers pretty early on (one of which was a Shaman paired with me). Had I not had COH, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to keep up with my assignment. I'm not going to lie, it is a mana hog; however, in this situation I didn't prepare myself properly (wrong trinket, and poor use of Shadowfiend macro...i.e. forgot that it was broken).

Anyway, my point to COH - As long as there's another priest willing to spec to Improved Divine Spirit...I'll always have COH (and always find a place to use it).

I agree on intellect. It's never *bad* but when I value stats, it's the lowest of the 5. Back in the day on my human priest, I has psychotically low levels of mana, especially compared to the other priests I hung with. But I didn't have problems running OOM. The only thing I couldn't do was spam a bunch of PoHs after Huhuran's enrage.
Having the option, or some pieces of gear that offer an alternative to high intellect stats would be nice. Like stacking int? Here's some int gear, the mental strength talent, and power power to you, but as someone who has never liked, geared for, or played with a high int healing style, I would like the ability to give up intellect for more regen or healing.

My guild is just about to start on Mag and will be in SSC soon so I'm looking around for some hard numbers I should be shooting for gear wise from priests currently doing this content.

Fully buffed I'm at:
1562 +heal
421 Mana Regen, 208 MP5
10k mana
7100 HP

I feel like I've got enough to get started, but am wondering what an "ideal" set of numbers would look like for both a MT Healer as well as Raid Support Healers.

i recently just picked this up for raiding. After our first night of vashj attempts, and then solarian the next day..it became obvious that this is a great pvE talent..not just a pom pyro saver for pvp

Sounds like more than sufficient numbers, really. Think you have a pretty solid gear base and shouldn't have too many issues in whatever healing role you are assigned to.