I completely concur. I had about 15 more Mp5 than you when we started Mag, and I was just fine for the entire fight. Try to have a high spirit weapon: there's enough down-time in Phase 2 Mag that taking a "mana nap" is a useful way to supplement mana pots / etc.. We run the fight with 6 healers, so Phase 1 is a massive burn on your pool, and you need to take a break at some point in Phase 2 in order to have enough to last to the end.

(Depending on # of healers, your usage may vary. User discretion is advised.)

Thanks for the replies....another question.

none of our priests are currently running with CoH, but I've been thinking about making the switch to grab is since we have others with imp DS.....before doing so just wonding just how necessary it is because I do love having my imp DS for heroics.

edit: to the poster above, I have a staff of DI that I can throw a spirit enchant on for that.

I'm not entirely sure if the gear currently showing on your armory is your main healing set. If it is, you should really look to getting the healing thread on your legs and subtlety to your cloak (especially if you do pick up COH). I personally disagree with some of your other enchants, but enchants are oftentimes personal preference.

As for COH, I'm a huge proponent of the spell. We typically run with at least one complete "melee" group that I can guarantee a 5 hit on for almost every encounter. COH is not mana friendly over the long haul if you chain spam, but as a priest no spell really is. Nevertheless, it can be a very useful spell and incredibly effective if used and paired correctly with another healing class. If you find yourself MT healing a lot, I wouldn't suggest getting it, but if you find yourself OT healing quite a bit, or raid healing in general, it can be really useful. Just to give you an idea of where I've found it useful (based on how my guild handles encounters) for the encounters you're about to experience.

Maulgar - Not Useful
Gruul - Useful
Magtheridon - Useful
Hydross - Useful
Lurker - Not Useful
Morogrim - Useful (Love your fade button too)
Karathress - Useful
Leotheras - Hit or Miss
Vashj - Very Useful

Some people don't agree with picking up a talent that isn't 100% useful. For me, I rarely run heroics now, and our guild is done with Karazhan, so there isn't a need for more than one priest with Divine Spirit. IMO, give it a shot and see how you like it and if you can work it into something effective for your healing syle and your guild raid setups.

Best of luck!

Can't remember what I logged out in, but I think what you're seeing is probably my main healing gear. I've actually got a guildy making me a silver spellthread for my pants, definitly a big chant currently missing. I'm probably going to be replacing my cloak in the next few days, just need a couple more badges, so I've been holding off on that one but yes I agree on that one as well....thanks for the feedback, I tried CoH before 2.1 and generally didn't like it, probably because I wasn't in any content where it was that useful other than BGs, now that we've got Gruul on farm and are moving into Mag and SSC I'm gonna pick it up again and give it a shot....I hope it'll make the Eye of Gruul a little more useful when I'm hitting 5 targets at once to proc healing trance.

I'm pretty new to the healing thing, but I thought I'd add a few things.
A better way to do it is to macro all of your spells:

/stopcasting
/cast Greater Heal(Rank #)

This way, to stop casting, you simply hit the key to start casting again.
If you're currently casting the same spell that you're attempting to cast, you'll have to double-tap, but if you're casting Greater Heal Rank 7, and need to switch to Rank 1, using this macro will seamlessly change the cast in one hit.


10%

The gown is quite nice.. It proc's often enough to be useful in a raiding situation where you can sit out for the 10 seconds of full regen.

Based on what you've said, I don't believe we have similar positioning for Lurker. My comment was just based on how we position our raid for Lurker.

I rarely do much on Lurker anymore, though as it is.

Those numbers arent hypothetical, have you ever tested it? I have, and 5% is a real value.

Also, if "every priest" in the raid has inpiration......i dont know how many holy priests you raid with these days, but usually we have 1, 2 at most. being able to spec 4/5 crit and 0/3 inspiration allows you to pick up more beneficial talents like spiritual guidance and emp healing and imp spirit.

I don't think that math is correct. Suppose inspiration increases mitigation from 70% to 75%. So the tank takes 25% damage instead of 30% damage. This means they can last 30%/20% times as long, which is 1.2x. So this 5% increase in mitigation results in a 20% increase in survivability. That's huge, and I honestly can't imagine being a main tank healer without the talent.

I'm not convinced by the argument of, "4/5 crit and 0/3 inspiration lets you get spiritual guidance, etc". It's easy to get 3/3 inspiration AND all those good talents you listed with a build similar to this.

Im not following that math, 5% mitigation is 5%......and you are assuming its up 100% of the time.

Maybe we should go to ACE2 forums and request an inpiration timer, lol. would be interesting.....also, what i was saying about the talents includes 5/5 spell warding. Thats pretty much the foundation for my argument.

I agree inspiration is very useful, but 5% mitigation on somewhat rare crits compared to 10% mitigation all the time for your own survival. A tank with 99% mitigation will still die is his healers are dead, your own survival needs to be taken into account.

I think 4/5 crit, 0/3 inspiration allowing 4-5 points into spell warding. Spell damage is rampant starting in SSC so IMO, you get more out of your talent points this way.

I would shoot for 8k hp. We have several holy priests in the guild, and the ones with lower hp definitely die more often. But what you have right now is totally fine for Magtheridon (just remember to shield yourself at 30%).



On a different note, in regards to Inspiration: my main tank gained effectively 7-8% damage reduction from Inspiration. I do not remember how much his reduction went up in character screen but I calculated the damage taken to be 7-8% less than before, ie if he had taken 100 damage, with Inspiration he'd have only taken 92-93. In my opinion, Inspiration is something that justifies a priest main tank healer.

It's prevented more potential deaths for me than Inspiration ever did, even if you discount pre-BC examples like surviving Shadow Flame with 100 health (several times).

I have 5/5 Spell Warding, 3/3 Inspiration, and nothing in Holy Spec at the moment, but the Inspiration points are mostly because I had nothing else I wanted.

I wouldn't knock inspiration ever. It is a critical talent for tank mitigation, expecially if there's any kind of chance that your tank will take crushing blows. I also have 5/5 spell warding, 3/3 inspiration, 0 in holy spec. 5/5 spell warding is key but so is inspiration.

Because more often than not, the holy priest in your raid with 5.5k unbuffed hp is the one you have to worry about staying alive. I have 7k unbuffed, which is more than many raiding holy priests. The big difference is I spend almost no time healing/shielding/renewing myself.

Our second holy priest has around 1800 hp less than me raid buffed. On any given fight where hp isn't an issue(hydross, void reaver for example), he heals with me just fine. But when we do the fights with raid wide damage (al'ar, solarian, vashj), he doesn't come anywhere close to my raw output because he's constantly shielding himself, or wasting casted heals.

Spell warding is certainly a talent that allows you to "heal better", since a huge part of healing well is being alive yourself.

Ancestral Healing is something that justifies a Shaman main tank healer. Just playing Devil's Advocate.

Spell Warding means that you are having to heal yourself for a little less and can then focus on other targets more...thereby indirectly making you heal your assignments better.

Anyway, on a more focused note: It really all depends on healing assignments. If you find yourself assigned to the MT (Warrior) a lot...Inspiration is probably a good choice. If you find yourself assigned to raid or OT (Druid) healing a lot...I'd suggest putting points elsewhere, as Inspiration isn't going to save a clothie from being squashed by a charge/melee. My point is this...A Shaman can MT heal just as good as a Priest can, and both offer that 25% armor buff (which neither stacks with each other). Additionally, there comes a point where tanks (Druid OT's especially) hit the Armor Cap and Inspiration is not as useful as it was.

I'd suggest looking at not just your own gear, but that of your tanks to see if Inspiration still offers its benefit. Then determine your healer's individual strengths and work with those to build your healing assignments. Finally, build a spec around those assignments and your individual strengths.

I'm not sure if its talent based or not, but just from recap meters I notice that shaman, on average, have about 4-5% higher crit rates on healing wave/lesser healing wave than priests do with their casted heals.

This is from when I had 4 points in holy spec. I'd usually have greater heals fall into 12-13% crit range, while the shaman healers had healing waves around 16-17%. Just an interesting observation.

I mentioned that I thought Inspiration was worthwhile without stacking crit upthread, complete with a classical Proof by Vigorous Assertion, with use of the Handwaving Corollary. But, since the thread is named "Holy Priest Theorycrafting", I thought some actual numbers might be helpful, so I drummed some up. The conclusions are, unsurprisingly, not as clear-cut as I had previously thought, but I think the conclusion holds up.

Purpose:

So, the question is, how important is it to have high crit in order to take advantage of Inspiration? How much benefit in Inspiraton uptime do you get from a 1% crit increase? How worthwhile is Holy Specialization?

Model:

The best way I came up with to model Inspiration uptime is to ask the question: How likely is it that a heal has crit in the last 15 seconds? (If there has been a crit, Inspiration is up. If not, it isn't. Therefore, the percent chance of that being true is also your percent uptime.)

The answer to that question is:

1 - (chance that no heals have crit in 15s)
1 - (chance not to crit)^(number of heals in 15s)
1 - (1 - average crit chance)^(number of heals in 15s)

Assumptions:

Between base crit and the Int that all our gear seems to be drenched with, I'm assuming that a priest that doesn't gear or spec at all for crit has a 6% crit chance. Mine is 6.14 in PMC/Kara gear with the Kazzak staff, for reference.


Our GHeals are 2.5s to cast, but we usually don't spam. Accounting for pauses, I think it's pretty fair to say we land one heal per priest every ~3s, or 4 in a given 15 second window. (I know, you can land 5 heals at 3s intervals in a 15s period, but in any randomly selected 15s window, which is what this model is based on, the chance is infinitesimal. 4 heals per healer per 15 seconds covers all casting periods from 3s to 5s. We can go back and adjust this assumption to a more spammy one if anyone objects, with the effect of making crit less important to uptime.)

Results:

For a single priest with the talent, then, uptime is:

1 - (1 - .06) ^ 4
1 - .94^4
1 - .781
.219 = 21.9%


For 2 priests with no extra crit, average crit is the same but there are twice as many heals landed in the same window. Uptime is 39%.

For 3 priests with no extra crit, uptime is 52.4%.


Now, what if we increase our crit with Holy Spec or gear? Remember, we're using average crit chance in the formula, so a 1% increase in 1 priests crit is worth (1/number of priests)% average crit.

For 1 priest, 1% crit increases the uptime to 25.2%, which is +3.3%, for (3.3/21.9) = 15% more uptime.
If there are 2 priests, 1% crit increases the uptime to 41.5%, +2.5% for 6% more uptime.
If there are 3 priests, 1% crit increases the uptime to 54.3%, +0.9% for 1.7% more uptime.

That first point of crit is the most valuable, since the more you crit the more likely you are to be overwriting a proc and contributing less than its full value to the uptime.

To prove it, consider if all priest were full Holy Spec for 11% average crit.

1 priest = 37% uptime.
2 priests = 61%
3 priests = 75%

Conclusions:

A) The more Inspiration-enabled priests in the raid, the less important an individual's crit rate is to overall uptime. My thoughts upthread on Inspiration being worthwhile regardless of crit chance were leftover from analysis done on 40-man raids. With 5 Holy priests in a raid, as was not uncommon, individual crit was basically immaterial. As that thread in General notes, though, stacking Holy priests is becoming less and less common, and in the solo case, increasing crit has noticeable effects.

B) There are severe diminishing returns on crit percentage as a means of increasing uptime. This is mainly because you start overwriting your own procs, so you don't get the full 15s of uptime for each crit. So, as a solo healer, the first crit percentage you add nets you a 15% increase in uptime, (to be clear, 3.3% more uptime for a proportional increase of 15%) but each point after that gets you a little less.

C) Combining the two, if you find yourself as the only Holy Priest in the raid frequently and you are often on MT healing duty, consider putting a point or two in Holy Spec. (I stand by my assessment that, unless all your tanks are near-cap druids, Inspiration is one of our best tank healing talents regardless of crit.) The first point or two pay pretty good returns in uptime. I would certainly not recommend pursuing crit on gear or even maxing out Holy Spec for the purpose of keeping Inspiration up.

The spec is something of a relic, actually. I set it up when I still had only 1100 or so +heal and I didn't think Empowered Healing was worth the investment at that gear level. Now that I'm sitting around 1650, I should probably reconsider.

I like the 2 points in Holy Spec because of the diminishing returns on Inspiration that I talked about-- the first couple crit points are more valuable than later ones. There's no direct way to compare Spell Warding to Holy Spec, so I just picked a balance that felt good to me.

Thought I would ask the following in this thread any feedback is appreciated.(A bit of a long reading ahead)


Background, freshly re-rolled from a hunter to a priest.


I've had a chat with one of druids last night and general opinion was I am under-performing which I would agree to an extent partly due to my gear(its not optimal). We usually run with 2-3 Paladins, 3 Shamans, 1 Druid and 1-2 Priests.

My method of healing is dependent on mob/s raid is facing. I will open up with PoM on a tank picking up the first mob. While tanks are positioning trash mobs I keep an eye out on whatever secondary damage goes through. On trash mobs I will stick with Flash Heals PoM and an occasional Renew(I did not favour using Renew due to low healing power it provided coming from me). On boss fights I am usually baby-sitting MT and knowing what kind of damage boss will do to the tank is what I usually depend upon. So on HK Maulgar I watch for Arcing Smash it either hits the tank or doesn't. I am assisted by a Paladin and a Shaman on that fight. So I knew that going in to the boss 1/2 of it is knowing what damage to expect on the tanks.

Also for the raid last night I tried testing out CoH. It seems like great way to spread healing for 405 Mana over 5 people but I am not overly impressed with it. However our group 3 is streamlined melee group (1-2 Rogues, 1 DPS Warrior, 1 Enhancement Shaman, 1 Feral Druid and sometimes MM hunter). That group loves the CoH. and PoM. I know they will take extra damage so I have my eye on them all the time.

Now, I am most likely overdoing PoM(up to 70+ casts per night), but I love how easy is to have that predictable heal up at all times. I know tanks will get hit and it will bounce around until it expires. I am using MendWatch so I never waste PoM. Too bad that PoM is never attributed to my healing meters and some people get obsessive about HPS.

I am also leaning towards a lot of healers being obsessed with meters and some of them not trusting others to do the task. So after the night of raiding whenever I look over the WWS I see that people are not only overhealing their assigned targets but also rest of the raid. And most of the time I find myself outside of FSR which regens my mana greatly.

So to sum up.
I use PoM a lot, I am going to start using Renews a lot more now that my +healing has improved, I tend to favour Greater Heal over Flash Heal for some of the tanks due to lack of gear.

I have almost every macro slot used up by something like this:
/stopcasting
/cast Greather Heal (Rank 2)

I am still learning nuances of healing and which player will take most damage and when so with that in mind. What should I focus on to improve my overall HPS?

You should be getting an addon like quartz casting bar, or another addon that can show you the 'modified' cast bar with Latency taken into account.

I don't care if your constantly at 40 latency, as the battle heats up, and your client starts to interact with the game more upload/download, your casting bar actually SLOWS DOWN. With a modified casting bar, you can see where it's ok to start casting again. You will get HPS from being able to see when the game will allow you to start another spell even though your client has finished casting the old one.

PoM is a great spell.. In the right situation. remember it's like PoH, you need to get some bounces for it to be really efficient.

Nomad, I am using Quartz actually and I do try and look at the latency measurements. PoM usually bounces about 4 out 5 times 80% of the time and it is usually between 2 off-tanks off to the side by themselves(on trash). I did some quick adding and my PoM healed about 300K total last night among all the bounces.

Like I said our group 3 is melee group and on Lurker attempts last night in scalding water it was all over the place. And thanks for the feedback.

PoM is amazing and efficient, and great in many circumstances. But if your primary duty is healing a tank, I feel that PoM's primary use is adding to tank threat early in the pull. Later on, I just am not sure you get enough healing on the main tank from your PoM to warrant the global cooldown use, unless you're lucky and it bounces back to the MT once or twice.

I'm not sure I follow that logic, unless you really don't have any global cooldowns to spare while keeping your tank up.

The additional healing from PoM will happen where it's needed, with no additional effort from you. I don't see any difference between it healing the tank and 4 other people, or healing the tank 3 times. If it bounces at all, it's helpful and efficient, and I see no reason not to use it.

If you can't find the time to throw it out and still accomplish your assignment, then don't do it. Otherwise, in any fight with distributed damage, keep it up.