Another couple of mods for the list.

Quartz: Neater castbars, built in buff tracker/timer (great for tracking renews) and at least until 2.3 shows casting latency for the /stopcasting game.

SCT: This is invaluable for instant visual fedback on when you have overhealed your target and makes the game feel more "involved" as you get much better feedback on your actions. Probably the best mod for helping if you have an overheal problem.

On the topic of overhealing I'm working on some notes about overhealing and some tips for healing with notable latency (400+ ping)

Final tip you may want to add is always backing instant casts onto the end of a greater heal to minimise GCDs and time inside the 5 second rule. If done right you should only see a single cast animation and save at least 1 second of 5sr time.

A couple extra mods that I find very useful:
- Hot Candy
- Mend Watch

Also, I disagree with your "cookie-cutter" COH build, but it's more personal preference as to talent point placement. I'd personally suggest something more like THIS. I've found Silent Resolve and Spell Warding to be negligible as I gained more experience; however I will definitely say that in the early days of SSC...invaluable. Dropping those two talents now has allowed me to pick up a lot more raid useful spells. Again, personal preference.

Anyway, it's looking good. Thanks for taking this on.

EDIT: If you do prefer to have Spell Warding and Silent Resolve in a COH build THIS is a pretty solid set up.

With only 1 point in silent resolve and COH do you ever have issues pulling aggro? I can pull aggro pretty easily, at least on trash, if I can hit all coh targets for no overheal a couple times.

Only if staying alive to heal the raid more is selfish. Spell Warding is useful at all fights where the raid takes magic damage, which is a lot.

Help keep the tank whom others usually also are healing get a little less damage in some fights or help yourself survive in almost all fights so that you can keep healing. In both cases it just increases your margin to react. Getting more stamina is one way, speccing into spell warding is another.

A healer surviving isn't selfish. A tank dying is worse, but if the tank really must have the armor buff to survive get someone in a crit gear to keep it up on him. At ~16% crit or so you won't be able to keep it up on him at all times regardless.

True, I guess it is more a question of Spell Warding vs Holy Spec. Or conversely if 3 points in inspiration is better for the raid than 1 point each in Holy Nova, Holy Reach and Healing Prayers.

I just logged in and checked and I have 7.6% crit in my healing gear without Holy Spec, which means you really can't count on having the buff up. A quick calculation gives me 38% odds of proccing another inspiration before the previous one fades if I'm spamming low-rank gheal. Not too bad anyway.

Off the top of my head it feels like Shamans are by far preferable if you really have to keep the armor buff up on a tank, since they generally love crit in their DPS gear anyway. In my DPS gear I have ~17% crit but I think the shamans in my guild have closer to 33%.

We've used a shaman in DPS gear on Morogrim and it does have its dangers. All was cool sailing until the shaman got watery tombed. Once the proc left the tank he took more damage and the healers weren't ready for it so we wiped. Moral of the story: Don't get complacent.

Who uses Holy Nova in any PvE encounters anyways? The only use I can think of for Holy Nova is pulling rogues out of stealth, keeping flags from being capped, and killing snake traps.

I'm also unconvinced of the usefulness of Holy Reach even for CoH specced priests. In fights where CoH shines (at least the ones I've seen so far), a 3yd diameter change really doesn't make a difference. People like to talk about it in terms of increased area, but the limiting factor is ultimately one of the straight-line distance between two members of the same party. The base range of CoH really needs to be increased dramatically in order for Holy Reach to even be considered a significant boost.

As for Healing Prayers - I think a lot of people get by with only one point in it. And if you really do want both points in it, losing ~40 healing (a very generous estimate that assumes 800 spirit raid buffed) by taking a point out of Spiritual Guidance is probably a lot better than losing a point from Inspiration.

I think the conclusion is ... a lot of our talents are good enough to argue over which is "best". I'll modify the talent section accordingly, maybe with a quick write-up of each, and a justification for why each is worth taking.

I'll also remove my "cookie-cutter 18/43/0" build, since most people seem to be thinking that 4% reduction on Renew, CoH, PoM, and PW:S beats 20% on PoM and PoH. I've always been of the mindset that reducing PoH by 20% is worth losing 4% on PW:S, CoH, and Renew, simply because if I have to use PoH, it's stupidly expensive. Anything to reduce that is a big help.

This is an inherent problem with the concept of cookie-cutter builds - not everyone fits into the same exact cookie pattern.

I don't know about you guys, but my spec changes a lot based on the gear I currently have, the content I'm doing, and the status of my personal progress with said content. For example, I found that speccing 5/5 Spell Warding, 5/5 Mental Agility, and 2/2 Healing Prayers (by dropping a couple points from Spiritual Guidance) was immensely helpful for learning fights like Najentus (and subsequent kills as well), but I feel that as I start to get better healing gear and more regen, I might drop those points again for more raw healing power. Already I've dropped a point from Spell Warding back into Spiritual Guidance because I've gotten a decent amount of stamina from recent upgrades (even though I have yet to reach my personal goal of 8k unbuffed). And if I keep ending Najentus fights with >20% mana, I might drop a point out of Healing Prayers (or even Mental Agility) back into Spiritual Guidance.

Prior to stepping foot into Hyjal and BT, I can safely say that I used PoH maybe 5 times at most on any given raid night, and even less when I was specced for CoH. In the latter case, having 5/5 Mental Agility mattered even that much more, because the amount of mana I'd save from spamming CoH or dropping Renews and Bubbles far outweighed the ~1.2k mana I'd save from my PoHs. But later on, I looked at the WWS parses to find that I cast PoM at an average of 450 times a night, which nets me about 35k mana saved. So I'll probably keep some points in there until mana becomes an entire non-issue for me.

But if a cookie-cutter build fails to account for the fact that you won't benefit all that much from Healing Prayers (especially if you're not addicted to PoM spamming, or if the encounters you're facing simply does not benefit from it at all) unless you're doing T6 level content, then it's a pretty poor cookie-cutter build to begin with because most people aren't at that level just yet.

I've always been a bigger fan of general guidelines for picking up talents rather than cookie cutter builds - and I attempted to write something to this effect on the WoW priest forums in this post:
WoW Forums -> Best Raiding Holy Build

While cookie cutter builds provide a nice starting point, they should really come with the caveat of, "You must tune this further based on your healing style, your gear, and your progression level." Which ultimately means that "what cookie cutter build is best?" is rarely worth arguing about because they only provide a starting point more than anything else, and as long as it doesn't start you out in the middle of nowhere, it's good enough.

This is exactly what a guide shouldn't contain. The guide should be digest of facts about priest, talents, abilities and gear rather than opinions much less passing character judgment on people based on their talents.

You should simply say that Inspiration is indispensable when chain healing a target who is taking physical damage.

My thought is that it comes to experience and patience. I definitely noticed that in SSC and even parts of TK I struggled with aggro quite a bit. This was when I first picked up COH and used it constantly and immediately. At that time, I was specced 4/5 in Silent Resolve and had Subtlety enchanted on my cloak. Now in BT/Hyjal I usually go all night without a death. I'd like to say I felt trash were less controllable in SSC/TK but realistically it's not...particularly looking at some of the waves that come with Hyjal trash. Instead, I would say that I've changed my play style. I can't stress enough that there isn't an immediate need to top off a group during a trash plow in the first 5 seconds of a pull. Rather, I will typically let the CC'ers do their thing, tanks start building aggro and work more on the "immediately" necessary heals (single individuals in risk of dying) instead of just topping off an entire group that is sitting at 90%. A whole group isn't going to die at the outset of a pull, so there's no need to spam COH. Renews ticking do the trick until the pull is under control. Other than that, Banzai (aggro alert) and a trigger finger on Fade is always useful.

I see not taking Inspiration *as* selfish. It's on the same level as an enh shaman not bothering to drop WF for a warrior/rogue group because he wants to boost his own personal dps by using GoA. It's not a raid-benefit. It's a self-benefit. And that makes it selfish, by the very definition of the word.

If people would prefer that the guide pull punches, I'll modify it accordingly ... but I've always preferred being blunt, to get through to some people who otherwise would read your version of the statement as "eh, I can get away without it; it's not really worth taking", when, in fact, it's entirely worth taking.