cpkfolief

I see a couple things with your raid healing spec I would change. Here's what I'm looking at for maximum raid healing efficiency:

20/41 Raid Healing

The only change I might possibly make is dropping Desperate Prayer because it just seems too PvP-oriented for my liking. That would allow for 2/2 Holy Reach.

 

Kortar

This spec - along with the one you're replying to - has at least two major issues:

Silent Resolve vs. Improved Inner Fire - Improved Inner Fire is a pretty lousy talent. But it's an actual gain to your healing performance, whereas Silent Resolve is almost exclusively a PvP talent.

Empowered Healing vs. (lots of stuff) - Empowered Healing is a fairly weak talent. With Spiritual Guidance, it is the worst point-per-point investment you can make in the top end of the Holy tree - possibly excepting talents that aren't directly comparable in some way (the activated talents, Test of Faith). If you don't have full HC/IHC/DP, there is no excuse for putting points in this talent. Note: The same could be said for Spiritual Guidance. SG & EH are the two weakest talents at the top of the Holy tree, and you should be selecting between them as dump locations based on whether you're concentrating on BH/FH/GH or other heals - not choosing them as your primary talents.

 

cpkfolief

I just don't see much else to put points into disregarding HC beside maybe Searing Light.

 

constantius

I honestly can't conceive of any sort of situation where I would not pick up Spiritual Guidance. It's a defining talent, like Meditation. Without SG, we lose the entire reason to pick up spirit-based items, and might as well be paladins, taking crit+Mp5 with no spirit on every slot.

SoR+SG is play-style defining, because it promotes picking up Spirit, which promotes working OO5SR into your rotation. It's what makes us different from the other healing classes.

And what's with all the hate on Empowered Healing? 50%+ of our healing in WotLK will be GHeal; it's a direct +900-1300 points of healing done by our best, most efficient heal. It increases HpS, it increases HpM, and it helps our gear scale better with each piece.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

ilkori

Speaking of Holy dps, I've been looking at a 37/28/5 build with one point to go somewhere else. Before the big adjustment to spirit coefficients and improved spirit tap I was able to easily heal Nexus at 70 in my BT/Hyjal/badge gear (haven't played beta since, really). Not only was I able to heal, I also spent a good deal of my time doing damage.

Strengths
1) Good synergy with int and spirit
2) Mana efficiency with crit
3) Ability to heal, even if it is inefficient
4) AOE without threat and able to trigger inspiration within a party (hey! get that priest in the melee group)

Problems:
1) Lack of increased critical damage modifier
2) Lack of pushback resistance
3) Lack of improved hit chance
4) Worries about mana


With sufficient regen, it would be possible to pick up a utility healing role with a 43/28/0 spec. Pain Suppression and Grace would be mixed in with damage dealing.

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible." - Walt Disney

 

Tuftears

I miss Spiritual Guidance, speaking as a discipline priest. It seriously degrades the benefit of having Divine Spirit in the disc tree, now the only reason we're taking that is we're expected to provide it as a raid buff.

I've taken to alloting it just one point in the beta builds I've been doing - 80 spellpower may be a 5% buff based on the premade gear, but it's going to be less of a buff when casters gain more PvE gear that sends their spellpower soaring over the 1600 mark, and it doesn't compare favorably with the base Flametongue totem granting casters a 144 spellpower buff.

Is spirit still useful for a disc priest? Yes, since we have meditation. But that's about all it does for disc these days; means that disc priests will want a combination of spirit and crit to trigger Divine Aegis.

upstart feline miscreant (47 feral/14 resto)

 

Bendyr

What is your planned cast sequence? I am a little hesitant about Improved Spirit Tap, because I haven't found a good rotation that can include Mind Blast and Shadow Word Death; also, they don't get the benefit of the majority of your holy talents, so I feel like spending a large portion of your time casting them may be a waste.

Right now I keep Holy Fire, SW:P, and Devouring Plague on the mob whenever they're off cooldown, and fill the rest of the space with Smites. Whenever Inner Focus is off CD and I don't have a SoL proc, I use it. At around 80% of my mana, I drop Shadowfiend.

At 70, basically in my healing gear with some crit gear swapped in, I can put out about 800 dps on the dummy for 4 minutes, and then I'm oom. No matter how I slice it, I can't seem to inject a Mind Blast or a Shadow Word: Death without losing dps (but gaining dpm and sustainability).

[Update: Argh, I was setting up my buttons for it just now and the PTR went down; I'll try this spec out later tonight].

 

Observer

As long as we're on the topic of DPS hybrids, how would Penance and a maxed-out Reflective Shield stack up against Surge of Light and Spiritual Guidance? I'd been considering something like this 54/17 build. The DPS rotation would be PW:S on the tank or any target that will guarantee DPS, Penance when it's up, Holy Fire when it's up, and Smite otherwise. (And maybe SW:P and DP, if those end up being efficient DPS increases.)

I first thought of it when Rapture made PW:S a mana-restorer, so it probably isn't sustainable any more, but it's something to think about since Penance and Reflective Shield do seem like relatively powerful DPS spells. And it would be competitive with other hybrids since the shields would provide significant extra healing.

 

Shatter Combo w/ Fries

Penance as a damage spell is not worth casting over smite DPS wise (unless it has been tweaked recently and I have not noticed)

There won't be an absolute cast sequence for holy dps, it will be just like shadow where it's all a priority system. The numbers simply don't mesh well (1.5, 2, 8, 10, 18, 24, etc...) especially when you factor in surge of light fucking up things by half a second every time it goes off.

I modeled a maximum dps cast sequence and there was no 'reset' by 60 seconds, even when I tried it with removing mind blast, it wasn't worth it and it definitely wouldn't fit in a castsequence macro anyways so I just gave up trying to figure out what the reset point was.

 

Observer

I was under the impression that Penance was a 2-second spell with the 3-second coefficient modifier, which would make it scale better than Smite. Is the base damage so low that it is not competitive?

Unfortunately, the most obvious way to give Holy/Disc strong DPS would be to allow Penance and Surge of Light to be obtained simultaneously, but it doesn't look very likely... until the next expansion ;P

Has it ever been established how Reflective Shield criticals work? I've heard several suggestions...
- It only crits when it absorbs a critical hit (I'm pretty sure this is false)
- It uses the base 5% crit chance
- It goes off the spell crit of the player it's protecting
- It uses the caster's spell crit (actually I have never heard this, but it still seems possible ;P)

 

Arvak-

I agree with many of these points, and especially with maxing out SG and ignoring SR. I thought they removed the spell power effect from IF, but if that's not the case, I'd take it back in a flash. While I agree that SG is a crux talent, it's also rather difficult to balance against other seemingly important choices; it exclusively increasing healing done and in my eyes is a valid sacrifice if you gun for pure efficiency since it doesn't scale quite as well as its brother talent Spiritual Healing. Desperate Prayer kind of falls into the "what's not as bad" category where choice lays between that and other "meh" talents, so I went with a self-preservation skill as a form of idiot insurance.

I always believed that the synergy between Meditation and SoR alone was enough of a justification to favor Spirit. Guidance is great, no doubts about it, but it once again comes down to balancing between throughput and efficiency and I think that early on, efficiency will be the winner until gear starts to compensate.

I'm 100% with you on Empowered Healing as well. I would really like to arrive at a build that integrates it fully. Especially if the role is going to be largely tank healing. A 1k mana spell seems kind of unwieldy in raid healing situations though.

 

Havoc12

There is no hasted spell stacking. IHC ovewrites itself. If your first heal procs IHC you get 2 new hasted spells but the one from the previous IHC is lost.

Its really this simple. The chance of having haste at any point in time is the chance that you have procd holy concentration on one of your last two holy conc procing spells.

Discipline gets a 15% boost to max HPS from crit. Holy gets an 11.5% boost to max HPS from crit. Thus if your non crit HPS is 1000, 20% will give you an extra 150 if you are disc or an extra 115 if you are holy. I.e. 24% more for disc.

Ofcourse when you compare 1150 to 1115, the difference seems smaller, but that is misleading, because the contribution of crit to the overall HPS is small to begin with. When you consider that the whole of your 20% crit gives you 11.5% more HPS, then 3.1% more HPS on one build is a HUGE difference.

Even worse this is just max HPS, the benefits of proc haste to effective healing are lost very quickly in any real senario where your max HPS is not challenged 100% of the time. There the benefit of haste is really squeezing more healing into windows of opportunity. For example a clearcast would allow you to spam a heal on another target and quickly return to your main one safely, but these windows of opportunity only a certain proportion of your total healing. IHC is very useful but when focusing a single target its impact is MUCH smaller than the boost it gives to max HPS under constant conditions.


1) Again you used 0.5 and 0.95 as your values, which makes this a meaningless arithmetic. When using 0.3 and 0.75, which though not necessary 100% accurate are going to be FAR more accurate than 0.5 and 0.95, which are only suitable for fairytales. If anyone can get more than 0.3 and 0.75% from crit I will eat my hat. When you consider the addition of serendipity.

2) I bet you any money you just looked at overall HPS not the contribution from crit, so what you think is a negligible difference is actually huge. Its like this: Holy gains a baseline haste and then a multiplicative 0.1-0.3% more healing per crit depending on overheal. Disc gains a baseline 0.45% per crit from aegis and an additive 0.1-0.3% more healing per crit. The contribution from the healing boost from crit is higher for holy than for disc and on top its multiplicative not additive. Although the healing boost is reduced in the same way, the % drop in the contribution is much larger for holy than for disc. Here is the numbers

at 0.1% healing boost per crit and 20% crit.

Holy gets 5.16% haste from IHC and 2% healing boost. Overal its 1.0516*1.02 = 7.3%

Disc gets 9% boost from aegis and 2% healing boost. Overal its 9%+2% = 11%.

15/11.5 = 1.30
11/7.2 = 1.53
9/5.16 = 1.74

Notice how the number increases as the healing boost evaporates? That is the effect of overhealing. At 40% average overheal the boost to healing from crit drops to less than 5% its max value and crit is worth nearly DOUBLE for disc than it is for holy. Because you are looking at overall HPS you are dismissing the differences as negligible but that is wrong. The important thing is how much each point of crit contributes and it always contributes more for disc than for holy.


======================================================
In the PTR I really found disc to be a very strong single target healing spec. It does not show on recount so much, but when you consider the chunk of disc healing that is just absorption it quickly becomes clear that they are well ahead of holy in single target healing. For Disc effective healing is significantly different from holy priest healing though. I am really curious to see what happens at 80. A lot about disc depends on making the correct use of cooldowns, so I can predict a lot of priests who are used to spamming flash heal and chain potting in encounters where you don't even need to use shadowfiend, are going to have serious trouble making the most out of disc's tools.


================================

2500 spell power translates to just about 4000 raw healing for gheal, which is 94% of its base value at 80. At such high contributions from spellpower empowered healing becomes really powerful. In this senario it adds 0.4*0.94/1.94 = 19.4% which is 3.9% per point to gheal/fheal. In comparison test of faith adds ~9% on sub50% heals, which means it does not add any more than 1.5% per point to all your healing spells. Especially when you consider serendipity, there is really no excuse for not maxing empowered healing before maxing test of faith and empowered healing is better than any talent below it including holy concentration. Its very true that empowered healing is no longer ridiculously overpowered due to the downranking removal. That does not make it useless by any stretch of the imagination.
The strength of priests is their ability to do everything. Not taking empowered healing is like not taking improved chain heal for a shaman.


Serendipity is just so extremely powerfull that it really justifies using gheal as much as possible. With my 2t5 bonus, a max rank gheal in the PTR costs 435 mana.

Of course level 80 is going to be different, but what I am planning is the biggest possible heals and as low ooFSR as I can.

Spiritual guidance may have a good return but its a scaling factor for spirit and as a result its necessary to take it, because it applies to so many stacking modifiers. At 1000 spirit and 2500 spell power, 25% more spell power from spirit is an 6-8% boost to the throughput of pretty much every spell we got. Since I think making your spells as big as possible is already the best strategy on the PTR and I expect it to be good at 80 too, I think that spiritual guidance is a key talent that can't be missed.

=================================================
I think this will be a better healing raid healing build for a number of reasons.

holy build

1) Throughput: Lets take CoH, pom 10% from spiritual healing, 5% from twin faiths, ~2% from test of faith, 8% from DP and approximately 0.9% from divine spec is

1.1*1.05*1.02*1.08*1.009 ~ 1.284. I.e. they get boosted by 28.4%. In comparison with a mental agi build it gets boosted by 1.1*1.05 = 1.155 i.e. 15.5%. That is an extra 13% in throughput, making a clear HPM gain over mental agi.

Which means that the only benefit you can possibly get from mental agi is for renew.

Binding heal gets boosted by ~2% in real terms from IHC and 8% from DP, and at 20% crit its 9% cheaper.

Overall its 1.02*1.08*1.1 = 21.1% boost in HPS and 33% boost in HPM.

The numbers on renew suggest that you should only keep max 2 active, unless its dots that tick every 3 seconds.

Its best to use flash/gheal/PoM instead of CoH when possible.

Overall gheal/gheal are crucial raid healing tools now and all your other raid healing tools except renew get a better benefit from deep holy than going mental agi in disc.

 

• Snowy

The first major issue I have with this build is no Guardian Spirit. It's incredibly powerful. It's not only Nature's Swiftness in a different way (except even better -- as a 51 talent should be) but it can be used in other interesting ways. Long fight where you need regen? Pop GS on the tank, take 10 seconds off, make your next heal with IF, reap the benefits. That's not even counting the obvious uses such as the last 5% on a boss, etc. If I have 51+ points in Holy, I think it's a crime not to take GS.

My build has scrubbed the points in improved Renew. I use it sometimes but not enough to justify those 3 points over talents such as Surge of Light and Guardian Spirit. Talents such as IF, SoL, HC/IHC and GS allow us to be very clever with manipulating our healing to take advantage of OO5SR regen.

I've been running with this build for raiding on beta and it's served me pretty well. In a 25 man raid, I really want to have Holy Specialization maxed out. Odds are there will be a moonkin, and crit stacks so well with IHC/SoL/Inspiration. With both of those, my crit rate in raids is north of 22%, and that's just with a mishmash of Naxx-10/Heroic gear running around 2000 spellpower with Inner Fire up.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

constantius

Consider that most of the raid will have over 20k HP 25-man-raid-buffed. If they're down 50%, you need to use GHeal to top them up. And 1k mana when I have 20k mana is 5% of my mana bar. Right now, GHeal(4) is roughly 5% of my mana bar. And heals for just under 50% of their life. The ratio works out to be the same.

Down 20k? GHeal(9)
Down 10k HP? GHeal(9).
Down 5k or less? Flash Heal or Renew.
Down 2k? Ignore.

[e] And I agree with Snowy: if I'm putting 51 points into Holy, I'm getting GS. It's the whole point of going that deep. I'm certainly not putting 51 points in to get Divine Providence.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Kortar

You keep making this same mistake. You cannot talk about both overhealing and maximum throughput because they are inherently contradictory concepts. It's like claiming that triangles don't have a 180 degree sum of angles in Euclidean geometry because lines can't really be parallel. Well, if you don't assert that lines can be parallel, then you're not talking about Euclidean geometry.

Ultimately, all you're doing is applying arbitrary weights to your numbers.

Also, keep in mind that while the "shields can't overheal" meme works well for certain concepts (e.g. Rapture mana return), it falls apart when you're talking about multi-healer environments since your "0% overheal" comes at the expense of other heals that will overheal more. Essentially you're "stealing" the low overheal from someone else, so its not really a net gain.

4270 + 2500 * 3 / 3.5 * 1.88 = 8299
4270 + 2500 * (3 / 3.5 * 1.88 + 0.08) = 8499
8499 / 8299 = 1.024%, or a 2.4% improvement per point.

Spiritual Guidance @ 1000 Spirit would provide:
4270 + 2500 * 3 / 3.5 * 1.88 = 8299
4270 + (2500 + 50) * 3 / 3.5 * 1.88 = 8379
8379 / 8299 = 1.0097, or a 0.97% improvement per point.

If you've already got 5/5 EH, Spiritual Guidance would be:
4270 + 2500 * (3 / 3.5 * 1.88 + 0.4) = 9299
4270 + (2500 + 50) * (3 / 3.5 * 1.88 + 0.4) = 9399
9399 / 9299 = 1.0108%, or 1.08% improvement per point.

Let 's presume we have 880 mp5 from Spirit (~1k each Spirit/Int) with the same numbers as above. Each time you proc clearcasting, you save the cost of our Greater Heal (1051) plus get 2.5s of FSR (880 * (100% - 30%) * (2.5 / 5) = 308), for a net 'gain' of 1359 mana. At various levels of critical, this translates into a percentage mana savings per point of:
10% = 1.72%
15% = 2.58%
20% = 3.44%
25% = 4.30%
30% = 5.16%

You also have to consider that throwing lots of little heals is inherently better than throwing a small number of large heals if all else is equal because you can fine-tune your overhealing more and switch targets more often.

Most of the commentary from beta has been precisely the opposite: that mana is the key issue, not the size of heals. If, in fact, size of heals is the key issue, then Discipline Priests are really pointless since they have no hope of coming even to close to matching what Holy Paladins do single-target.

 

Kortar

I'd argue that if they're down this far, you should throw Binding Heal. Over time, the improved proc rate coupled with DP make Binding Heal essentially the same throughput as Greater Heal. Given the choice of throwing a heal that lands in 1.5s and a heal that lands in 2.5s in such a pressure situation, it's pretty easy to see why you'd choose the 1.5s heal. Also keep in mind that the faster your heal lands, the more likely you are to proc Test of Faith. You're also not particularly concerned about losing Serendipity (since you have no chance of overhealing).

Note: The Binding Heal methodology I'm suggesting may match throughput, but it is considerably less mana efficient. However, unless you're habitually keeping people low on health to annoy them, the "nearly dead, so Binding Heal instead of G/F Heal" strategy isn't going to put all that a serious a hurting on your mana.

 

constantius

Using Binding Heal in hopes of triggering a IHC proc is like spending $30,000 to enter a lottery to win $50,000. It's a dumb idea.

If they're down 10k HP, I'm going to use a 10k heal, not a 5k heal that *might* crit, but happens to cost almost as much mana. Now, if I've taken a bit of damage, sure, Binding Heal has its uses. But not as a trigger for IHC. You want to trigger Surge of Light, use CoH (6 targets, maximum chance to proc); you want to trigger IHC, use Flash Heal. It's the least mana output per cast, with the lowest overheal. Spending extra mana for an extra chance to proc IHC is silly, esp. if it's 100% overheal. It defeats the purpose of getting IHC procs, which is to save mana.

Also, the size of heals do matter on Beta, but it's such a small difference compared to mana consumption that we haven't been emphasizing it. Basically, you're going to want 2500+ spellpower when you can get it, just to make your GHeals hit for 33% of the tank's life (tanks running 36k+ at the end of Naxx.10, no less .25).

[e] Here's some rough math:
- let's assume that I'm basically looking to get as many procs as I can to save mana
- let's assume that Method #1 uses lots of Flash Heals, switching to GHeals when a crit happens for more healing
- assume Flash Heal is 5k healing, GHeal is 10k. It's close enough for our purposes
- assume 20% crit rate
- assume Method #2 uses Binding Heal to proc IHC, switching to GHeals
- assume Method #3 uses half and half: Flashes half the time, Bindings half the time
- 100 'trigger' casts per test
- base mana is 4000

Method #1
100 Flash Heals cast, 20 crit.
Total Mana Spent: 100 * 18% * 0.85
Total Healing Done: 100 * 5k + 20 * 10k * 1.1 = 720k
HpM: 11.8

Method #2
100 Binding Heals cast, 36 crit on yourself or your target
Total Mana Spent: 100 * 27%
Total Healing Done: 100 * 5k + 20 * 5k + 36 * 10k * 1.1 = 996k (assume 20% of the healing on yourself was not overheal; not always true, but for sake of argument)
HpM: 9.2

Method #3
50 Binding, 50 Flash, 28 crit
Total Mana Spent: 50 * 18% * 0.85 + 50 * 27%
Total Healing Done: 50 * 5k + 50 * 5k + 10 * 5k + 28 * 10k * 1.1 = 858k
HpM: 10.1

The only possible advantage of Binding Heal is increasing HpS slightly by increasing the chance of getting IHC procs. But realistically, if you need to increase HpS, use GHeal in the first place.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

cpkfolief

Reflective Shield DPS is so bad I immediately closed and didn't save my calculations on it. You get around 100DPS being fully spec'd for every single shield talent from the base damage absorbed, but it scales incredibly bad with +healing (+100healing for 1DPS if my calculations were close).