Ranind

The only reason I value the Brooch of Nature's Mercy over the Teeth of Gruul is the nearly +30 healing you gain by switching to the Brooch. Since my +healing is kinda low at the moment (+1657 unbuffed) and my mp5 is, as far as I can tell, high (189 mp5 while casting unbuffed), I'm finding myself picking out gear that has larger +healing on it. Of course, I have to keep in mind that my main hand is severely under leveled with what content I'm healing (while paladins may think Shockwave Truncheon is awesome, I think it's just short of garbage).

The problem I have with haste is that it's only drastically effective when raid healing without circle of healing. Honestly, if you're in MH/BT and have access to this haste gear, you really should be using CoH anyway. As far as main tank healing, haste really doesn't do anything that proper /stopcasting can't do by itself.

 

Ivorr

Hi, thx a lot for this tread its great.

Can you help me make a resolution about IDS and Coh?


I am onlyone priest in the raid The World of Warcraft Armory

In the near future we will progress BT, its better take Coh and help with good aoe heal or take spirit .

We have 1 Saman, 1 priest,1 druid, and 4 paladins.

 

tedv

Please read the thread. From the very first section of the very first post:

So the answer is "Divine Spirit unless you are on Gurtogg or further into Black Temple".

 

Calya

The Gruul and Netherspite necks have the same amount of +heal though don't they? Really the main difference between them is stamina vs. mp5. I agree though that the Brooch is very nice. It's one of the only haste items I've ever considered picking up and using full-time aside from the Karabor ring and the BT cloak that I can't remember the name of. I'd be willing to save some of the less impressive pieces from being DEd and put together a haste set to play with, but that's about it.

I'm curious about how Blizzard's plans for haste in the long run. They must be aware that it's not that impressive for healers as it stands. I'm just wondering if they'll try to make it more attractive (maybe by rebudgeting it for healing spells?) or if they'll just drop the idea altogether.

 

• constantius

I should clarify: the reason I find [Shining Chain of the Afterworld] to be such a weak item is precisely because it has none of the benefits of [Teeth of Gruul] (moderate +heal, amazing regen) *or* [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] (moderate regen, amazing +heal).

It has stam. Wee.

 

Ranind

It'd definitely be nice if haste was reworked to allow for more effective budgeting, but in reality, that would make healing pretty easy in the long run. Imagine 2 second greater heals, but still having effective mana regen. Although perhaps we'll see some gear from Sunwell that provides both haste and regen. Item level 160+ has a lot of item budget to throw around, after all.

 

Finkum

I would add a proviso, in that if you regularly run ZA, CoH is so very handy on many fights -

- Eagle boss, when stacking for the storm channel phase and he lightning bolts someone
- Dragonhawk boss, if the hawks get out of hand and/or he flames a clump of people
- Lynx boss, if your melee group gets chain-lightninged
- Hex Lord, during his AoE shadow attack

- that it is (IMO) worth sacrificing iDS for. Although a lot of the instances where its really handy wouldn't occur with perfect execution (Dragonhawk clumping, especially), it is invaluable for Hex Lord no matter how skilled your group is - I don't think we would have got the Hex Lord down if I'd been iDS spec. (Although, if we'd had a resto shammy that reset it probably wouldn't have been as essential).

 

Thorongil

Yes, it comes quite handy in ZA, but it´s far from imperative for the 4 Shamans imo. But for Malacrass it´s just ultra-sexy. Given the fact that (at least for us) Malacrass is still the hardest boss (the animal-bosses are a joke with proper execution, and also Zul´jin, although that might vary if you run a group with less than 2 Pallys, which we normally don´t) in the instance by far. And one Priest with CoH can heal one entire group for the whole length of the fight (proper mana-reg is imperative, of course). I don´t know if any other healer-class is capable of that, regardless of group-setup (shamans probably with earth-shield and therefore no pushback; don´t really know if druids are capable of it reliably; for Paladins it´s very stressful).

So yeah, I´d say you should take CoH for ZA, as most struggles you normally face will come from Malacrass.

 

Ranind

As far as Hex Lord is concerned, my group's healing lineup is shaman/paladin/me. Shaman chain heals the melee group, and my group is kept up via Prayer of Healing (concentration aura from the paladin). It's how we healed that fight the night ZA came out, and it's worked for us ever since.

The other fights in ZA I haven't noticed CoH accomplishing more than it does in karazhan, so I would definitely say it's not mandatory or even "strictly better" to be 1x/4x than it is to be just plain 23/38. Especially considering how mana taxing these fights can be, IDS probably deserves a lot more credit than it's given.

 

Thorongil

The point where CoH steps into the game at the Hexlord is simply when you´re lacking a Paladin. In that case you might not get a single PoH out before half the raid is dead.

 

Helot

As a long time paladin raider, who was in charge of organizing all the buffs in a raid, I can tell you this.

You should have whichever buff *you* want. Don't accept the whole 'healers need salv' if you know your fine without it. You know your class better than the paladin, believe you me.

In order of preference, Priests should probably get them like this:
Wisdom
Kings
Salv
Light
Sanc(For AOE)

And if you have only 3 paladins, odds are they are buffing Wis/Might, Kings, Salv/Light. Or they should be.


By the way, as a healer, if your comfortable in your role in the raids, feel free to tell the RL the reasoning behind getting Kings over Salv. Even if it's just "I know i don't need salv, but i do need kings". They should be open to your suggestions, as the raid leader, more than anyone else. Otherwise bring it up on the forums after the raid, if you don't want to give them a headache during it.

Otherwise, you can always go with the consesus route. Get every priest to say they want kings over salv. If the majority are in favour, they should hardly be telling you that your not allowed to have it.

my 2c.

Excellent guide, by the way. Broadens the understanding of the priest class. IE. PW:S ain't a bad thing, which is always contrary to everything I thought before.

Chaith logs on
<zyl> Actually, I do like my paladin. He's fun to play, but don't tell Chaith.
<chaith> Looks like i logged in at the right time
<zyl> ....
<zyl> I pressed enter half a second after you logged on.

 

• constantius

The only situation where you can easily request no BoSalv is if you run with zero shadow priests in the raid. It's not fair to ask your paladins to skip giving you salv to get better buffs if you completely smack around the poor shadow priests in the raid; and it's not totally fair to ask for the SPs to get different (manual) buffs vs you. It might be worth it for some tough fights, but in general, it's a lot easier for paladins to just give you the same buffs.

Besides ... who doesn't run with 3 paladins Alliance-side? Really ... 3 paladins is fairly normal these days. We've *never* raided seriously without at least 3 in the raid; BoSalv, BoKings, and BoW, ftw.

 

Kaylee

Easy be damned, there's not many boss fights that last longer than ten minutes. There is no reason why a paladin can't put Salvation on the shadow priests and Wisdom on the holy priests, especially with UI mods like PallyPower which will do everything short of sending a guy to your house to click the damn button for you. And if you're running a raid low on paladins then chances are they're already doing the same thing for all of the enhancement shaman, feral druids, fury warriors and retribution paladins in the raid. If they aren't, then you need to find better paladins. The only reasonable exception is a situation where the paladin and their special buff targets are on opposite sides of the room for an extended period of time, usually due to different healing or tanking assignments. Even in that case, I'd prefer to have 10 minutes of Wisdom rather than a full fight with Salvation.

When I raided with my paladin and was setting raid blessings, it would always be individual blessings for the holy priests. Shadow priests are basically unable to function without Salvation and I wouldn't want to risk it dropping mid fight.

 

• Psykal

Does anyone know if [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] interacts with Circle of Healing in the same way that [Eye of Gruul] does? Does it have a separate chance to proc for each player your Circle of Healing hits?

 

Sithy

I haven't had CoH for a little while but with the new buff to the [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond] (5% over 2%) it has been procing a bunch more for me, at least while I was using it.

I would imagine the gem would proc on multiple spell hits, it seems that way when I'm talking to my CoH healer. I also have a feeling that it would be governed by the hidden cooldown as well, so you would only be able to get it to proc once every 45(?) seconds.

 

Glasswizard

I don't think so. The last time I compared my WWS Data (CoH Priest) with the other healing priest in the raid who mainly uses Greater Heal, proc rates were very similar. Just slightly higher for me as I of course usally cast more spells. Something like 13 procs for me and 11 procs for her on an average Illidan fight. And I spammed CoH alot in that fight because of phase 2. Of course a cooldown could also be the explaination for this, have to try that as soon as I get home. I really like that meta now, that proc ist worth about 20 mp5 now which is quite nice.

/edit Just checked WWS, shortest time difference between two procs was 17 secs (only checked 2 fights), so I doubt there is an internal cooldown.

 

Nayt

Couldn't find anything really on Macros, so I'll ask here, as it didn't warrant a new thread.

1. Is there a macro/way (aside from watching a HoT timer) to only cast renew on a target..say Rank 9, when Renew Rank 9 (from myself) isn't already up on the target. The reason I ask is because I swap L'sJ and SoV with +81 Healing and Spellsurge and they overwrite unless it's during a swap where my +Healing changes by ~70. I'm using HoT candy but I'm still double HoTing people because I use keybind and try to stay really sharp.

2. When healing on Rage Winterchill / Solarian ect. aside from watching ToTT's is there a macro to heal the frostbolt/arcane missles person. Currently I'm using (Yes we have other healers healing these people too):
/tar bossXX
/assist
/cast Flash Heal (Rank 7)

Usually when I do this I only get one heal off, and if I push the macro again it heals our MT, while the bolted person still takes damage. Do I need to set up a focus macro or something so I can stay on that person? We've killed Rage 6 times now, but my overall healing lacks because I just wait and watch him switch targets and try to spam that macro, while my spot healing is much lower.

"When Nate's in town a feast is down."
Pizza, Gold, Contests and Myself
Twits about School, Dating, Partying and Jackassery
Hunter / Priest / Shaman / Warrior

 

• giansm

We often have two paladins, and sometimes we have just one. They're accustomed to heavy use of single blessings, especially on warriors, druids, priests, and shamans (where the damage dealing ones want salv but the tanking and healing ones want light, kings, or wisdom). Now that they last ten minutes it isn't really that big of a deal, it's a little bit annoying for them but their blessings are so powerful that it's insane not to try to make the most of them. They use PallyPower to manage all of this, and my understanding is that it's capable of assigning greater blessings as well as overriding them with single blessings.

 

Ana

Nate if you are using Grid you can set it up to view aggro (it defaults to a red border). When Rage targets anyone to icebolt them or to cast frost nova or DnD they will light up. I just start healing that person as soon as I see it.

 

Vurrin

While I too simply watch aggro alerts for Rage. The other option is to use the macro until you start a heal, and then you have either A) 1.5 seconds to find that person and manually target him for the follow up OR B) your macro targeted for him ( and you didn't mash it to get it back on the tank after the boss switched back) so you can follow it up with a secondary heal cast by another hotkey or whatever you use.

I know personally for rage I like to lead with a PoM or even PW:S so other healers have ample time to react as opposed to a flash heal which in some circumstance might be too slow.

As for solarian I seem to recall she targets a player for the entire duration fo AM which should be enough time for 2 casts. The only time its like rage is when she bugs out after AMing a totem and she does almost no dmg when shes like that ( just wraths and I think melee on top aggro)

 

Merple

I'm coming back to the game after an absence, and would like some input on farming.

I'd like to do some daily farming and questing before I get back to raiding/healing, so I'll be respeccing shadow.

Considering the changes to meditation and 1/3 healing -> damage, as well as spirit tap, is it worthwhile to farm in high-spirit healing gear now, or is it still better to stick to +dmg?

My +dmg gear is mediocre at best, while my healing gear is good for where I was (just starting Kara).

I haven't resubscribed yet, so my armory still shows me in AV gear.

-In our country, any CBC reporter can dream of becoming head of state.

 

Vurrin

Spec'd Shadow with a decent weapon ( and enchanted) and some appropriate trinkets you'd do fine for farming with spirit tap and healing gear.

In general you'll do less dmg but farming is more about downtime than anything else and healing gear is good for reducing that so it evens out fairly well. If you do have any good pieces of dmg gear it would behoove you to wear them, but I wouldn't worry much about replacing your healing piece, and I wouldn't for example replace epic healing pieces with blue dmg pieces for farming.

And obviously if you wanted to gear up for raiding as a Shadow Priest + dmg > pretty much everything in a raiding environment so the healing pieces would be subpar there.

 

• Psykal

Both are excellent, which is better? Is the difference signifcant?

Obviously this depends on how often you cast Greater Heal and which ranks you use. I primarily cast GH1 and when the target has lost 4k+ health, GH4. GH7 has more HPS than any other priest spell but I find that GH4 is sufficient in most burst damage scenarios. I do sometimes cast this spell, just not very often.

Initially I thought I could take the number of GHs I cast in a fight and use it to calculate a straight mp5 value, assuming every heal brings my target to 100% - not a perfect assumption but the majority do. Typically I seem to cast ~5 per minute when I'm not Circle of Healing specced (I use Renew and PoM often and cancel-cast). Anyway, if they all bring my target to 100% that's 42mp5, and less each time one doesn't. If they are all GH4 then they will heal for 257 more with 4-set T6 and 166 more if they are GH1, so the "+healing equivalent" is about 240. Yes, I realise I'm making a lot of assumptions here but the numbers roughly hold true. Just comparing 42 mp5 to 240 +healing the T6 bonus seems a lot better but I don't think it's that simple.

Here is a table showing how much mana my GHs cost, how much they currently hit for raid buffed and what their health healed/mana ratio is. I'm using this site to obtain these values.

GH7 - 701 - 5922 - 8.45
GH6 - 637 - 5539 - 8.70
GH5 - 603 - 5360 - 8.89
GH4 - 556 - 5137 - 9.24
GH3 - 463 - 4476 - 9.67
GH2 - 386 - 3872 - 10.03
GH1 - 314 - 3318 - 10.57

The same table with 2-set T5, assuming my target is topped off,

GH7 - 601 - 5922 - 9.85
GH6 - 537 - 5539 - 10.31
GH5 - 503 - 5360 - 10.66
GH4 - 456 - 5137 - 11.27
GH3 - 363 - 4476 - 12.33
GH2 - 286 - 3872 - 13.54
GH1 - 214 - 3318 - 15.50

and with 4-set T6.

GH7 - 701 - 6218 - 8.87
GH6 - 637 - 5816 - 9.13
GH5 - 603 - 5628 - 9.33
GH4 - 556 - 5394 - 9.70
GH3 - 463 - 4700 - 10.15
GH2 - 386 - 4066 - 10.53
GH1 - 314 - 3484 - 11.10

Now, with the T6 bonus GH4 costs 556 mana. With the T5 bonus I can use GH6 instead, only costing 537 mana and healing for 145 health points more than GH4 with T6. Alternatively I might decide that 5137 is enough for my biggest heal and continue to use GH4 with T5. The T6 equivalent is GH3 and this both costs more mana and heals for much less. In fact, for the range of heals that I care about (GH3-GH6) there is a version in the T5 table that is directly superior in all ways to its T6 equivalent. Less mana, heals for more.

I think T6 is only (potentially) superior when dealing with extremes -- GH7 and GH1. While GH7 is the least efficient GH, there is nothing that gives more HPS than with 4-set T6. Since I hardly use this spell I don't care much for that but I'm only 3/5 MH and 4/9 BT so maybe it's really useful in some encounter that I've never seen before. Is it?

GH1 is 214 mana for 3318 or 314 mana for 3484. I think this spell is the least likely to top up my target so with T5 it might be 314 mana for 3318 healed, not really optimal. When I do receive the bonus, and most of the time I would, I prefer the T5 version.

You could argue that T6 is better anyway because of the raw stat increase on individual pieces but it's actually not that large a gap and you're only losing it on 2 pieces. Perhaps it is better. I only have one T5 piece so I don't know how fair it is to assume GH almost always tops up my target, I'm just going by anecdotal experience. I'm not saying it's better in every scenario but 2-set T5 is much easier to get hold of than 4-set T6. I'm trying to work out if it might be better to pass these pieces for other classes if T5 is better or the difference is marginal, assuming I get another piece of T5 sometime in the future.

Has anyone else thought about this? Am I very wrong to make these assumptions?

 

Elfenrir

In the last 10 or so raids Efficiency has only proc'd on about 60-70% of my Greater Heals, if that gives you any reference. It seems odd that you only cast 5 Gheals per minute though.. I'm a very proactive Renew'r and PoM'r and I definitely get in more than that.

 

• Psykal

I've noticed 90-95% from the guys in my guild who have it, but then again I haven't analysed this in much depth and it could just mean they are only using max rank and overhealing more than you are, or some other reason that they would be more qualified to explain than me. I can only really comment on my own healing and I don't currently have the set bonus. 60-70% is a little disheartening though.

Indeed, the average could probably be higher, it depends on how often you use other stuff like Flash Heal and Binding Heal and how often you spend moving/not casting, which is all encounter specific. It would probably be higher if assigned to MT healing. This doesn't matter too much though, I'm more interested in how each set bonus affects specific ranks.