I tested it with another shaman and we were not getting any mana spring or BoW stacking. If I did not have imp wisdom and he had imp mana spring, mana spring would remove the BoW buff. If we had imp BoW we would never get the imp mana spring buff.

On fights where you are also within totem range of a resto shaman Imp BoW isn't worth it. There are a decent amount of fights in Ulduar though where that is not that case, and there isn't really anything better to spend the two points on.

Actually, word from the shaman camp is that Healing Stream totem glyphed and talented is a huge contribution to raid healing, pushing out as much as 10% of a resto shaman's overall healing on a heavy raid damage fight like Kologarn. I don't know of any 2 talent points we could consider as replacements for Imp. BoW that would equate to 10% of another healer's HPS.

While it's true that if you have enough paladins you won't need to worry about it, the actual scenario where this is the case is rarer than one might think.

Preferably, a raid would have all four blessings available--Sanc, Kings, Might, Wisdom. And all of them at their highest talented benefit.

All paladins will have Kings.
Prot paladins will have Sanctuary.
Holy, Ret, & Prot paladins will potentially have BoM (talented to full potential).
Only Holy paladins will potentially have BoW (talented to full potential).

First off, assuming you bring 4 paladins to the raid is already tipping the balance scale in favor of us, as theoretically you should have 2-3 of each class. But we'll work with that. The point is, Holy paladins are the only of the three specs that have viable access to Improved Wisdom. Paradoxically, though, we are the spec that a raid receives the least benefit out of bringing more than one. Four ret paladins, two prot paladins, is totally fine--more than one holy paladin is really pushing it, since you typically only have one MT healing niche and the other healing slots would be better served by group healers.

The odds that a min-maxed raid will have more than one holy paladin are very slim. Thus, it's a necessity for that paladin to take Improved Wisdom to allow for Healing Stream totems. If, however, you end up with 2 holy paladins in a 25-man raid by God knows what coincidence, one could coordinate with the other about who takes it and who doesn't.

I, too, thought that the stacking change would mean we'd never have to waste points in I.BoW again since Resto Shamans are required to take Improved Mana Spring for Mana Tide. But I don't think any of us were expecting Healing Stream to actually become viable again. I'd say it's well worth the sacrifice.

my guild still tosses imp BoW out to make sure everyone has the mana buff, in case they go out of range of the totems.

All imp RF does (assuming you aren't attacking) is make your heals create the same aggro as other healers. It is a viable talent to get to reduce damage.


As others said, you cannot chain DiSac and HoS at the same time. Also DiSac cap makes it not all that game breaking in 25 mans (still very useful) except on a pull like Auriaya, where a few people take some huge hits as you are positioning.

Pretty much this, I also found Gl o HS a life saver when solo healing the brain areas

Even 100% healing->threat would make it very hard to pull aggro, as you'd need well over 6k effective HPS to beat a tank that does 6k TPS. So having righteous fury on is not a problem and is recommended if you're going down to DS anyway.

Don't get me wrong about imp wis, I do think you need to spec it - my point was that even though it's not a very useful talent, its benefits are better than the alternatives, though if you don't use it often, but you do LoH the tank often (spec 2/2 imp) and want aura mastery, then you can't afford 2/2 imp wisdom as well. Holy tree has 47 useful talent points (that require 51 points in the tree due to beacon being one of those 47 points) and 5 not-that-useful talent points (imp wis, imp loh, aura mastery), out of which you never get more than 4 since spending the remaining 20 points in prot/ret is much more beneficial regardless of how you spend it in those trees.

If you're running single-pally consistently, I'd get aura mastery / LoH.
If you're running with at least 1 other pally consistently then get imp wis and lose either aura mastery or 1 in LoH. Unless he sancs the whole raid (which is probably not worthwhile), in which case you can skip wis again.

Swapping points from prot to ret is possible to gain a little bit of efficiency (gain 5% crit lose 5% healing which is somewhat of a net efficiency gain) at a high cost to your burst healing (5% is high burst loss compared to the efficiency you gain). You can also trade 5% burst for 2.6% efficiency by swapping SoL to SoW. If you stick with Divinity you can lose movement speed to gain 2% crit.

Out of the holy talents I have 0 points in the only one that could possibly be of any use is blessed hands, but I'd only move points to it from one of the other three talents (AM/LoH/imp wis) if you find yourself never using them, as the benefit from a stronger salvation is quite tiny, transfering more damage to yourself might actually be bad sometimes (30% is already a lot), and reducing their mana costs is a joke. If you get to actually use the other 3 talents at all they would most likely benefit the raid more.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Something I'd like to see is a breakdown of fights where aura mastery can do any good (probably via resistances) to decide if it's really worth the point compared to imp LoH. As far as I can tell imp LoH is useful on certain fights where the tank takes a massive burst for a short, known period of time and the survivability increase is more important than the extra mana.

Aura Mastery seems to have a use (not necessarily a worth-spending-one-talent-point use, but that will always be subjective) on

Razorscale -- Breaths during last X% with high buffet stacks
Ignis -- OTs standing in scorch / jets if it's changed to provide immunity to the interrupt
XT (maybe) -- Boombots reaching melee (are they fire damage? resistable?)
Auriaya (tentatively) -- Sentinel blast, although ideally this should interrupted, and immunity to interrupt from defender if you want to guarantee your next heal gets off (ie tank will die without it, etc)
Freya -- Elder Stonebark's Ground Tremor interrupts casting
Hodir -- Frozen blows
Mimiron -- Napalm shell
Vezax -- Animus' AoE

I haven't done Thorim's hallway so can't comment on its use there, but it's also technically useful in arena, since it's almost impossible to guarantee 100% add pickup, and some of them do kick. Like Auriaya though, it's just not predictable, and could easily have 0 effect.

It's something I'd definitely throw a point in, but I haven't done Ulduar as holy yet, so I can't say for certain.

edit -- it's technically advantageous on every fight, if used with devo aura, although if you're weighing up imp LoH vs AM, then imp LoH will obviously outshine it in this regard.

I'd also say that imp conc aura is potentially useful, even if only vs Auriaya / Freya, for the interrupt reduction. Freya's can be reliably avoided by cancelling casts, although Auriaya's are random.

I don't think you can live through the fight if you don't interrupt it. It ticks for 5k the first time, 10k the second and 20k the third. Pretty much useless to count after that. I doubt you're meant to resist it, and taking even one tick is pretty bad if you get feared into a void zone.
I do, however, believe AM (edit: Meant to say Improved Concentration Aura, as the OP said, AM is not all _that_ useful) is great for the stupid add that keeps interrupting your casting. That, and the Mimiron trash are the most annoying things in Ulduar so far. (The Ignis trash was bad as well, being chainhit by the whirlwinds, meh, but apparently they changed that.)
Edit: I was actually thinking about getting Improved Concentration Aura, and the first thing I would drop would be Infusion of Light, I think. I don't remember the last time I used HS+FoL.

Hi,

First - Divine Sacrifice. Concerns me much. Everyone knows, that damage transfered to pally is capped by 150% of his HP. I also read a lot, that if pally is using Divine Shield before Divine Sacrifice (i can't imagine atm. different usage) then cap does not work, and any 40% damage will be transfered (because pally gets 0 of this transfered damage). Is it really so? I'd say yes, because visually i see tons of damage transfered. If yes, then next question - is it intended? Or it is a kind of bug, which will be fixed one day? Personally i couldn't imagine value of this talent if it is always capped by my health ...

About Glyph of Holy Shock. I see one big advantage of taking it - it improves our mobility healing a lot.

The last 5+ pages of the 3.1 ret thread deal predominantly with this topic, including several logs, theories, ideas, etc. I'd suggest taking discussion there to avoid two parallel topics with the same basic content.

I must admit we never considered tank swaps on Razor, we simply burned her and chained CDs sub-20%, but that actually makes much more sense.

As gcbirzan noted, Sentinal Blast is pretty brutal if you take more than 2 ticks of it. It's a cast time->channelled ability though, and can be interrupted reliably, so AM isn't really super useful at mitigating it.

Still, I think AM is prob worth the talent point, although could probably be skipped once the instance is on farm.

From my experience, it's hard not to justify just one talent point to drop in AM--however, even with so many fights that benefit from it, it's still really not that good. Mostly because of the 2-minute cooldown.

On patch day, I specced into it and was all excited to try out my new toy. First fight I did it on was Ignis, with Flame Jets. (As I understand it was bugged at this time, but I didn't realize it.) Woohoo! And then we had to just dry-hump three more Flame Jets before it came off cooldown.

The problem is that heavy magic damage fights usually produce that extra magic oomph far more often than 2 minutes. For example, Saphirron's frost damage is constant, which makes 10 seconds of doubled frost resist useless for the other 110 seconds it's on cooldown.

Now, to use a more up-to-date example, and one that many others are using, consider Hodir's Frozen Blows. He gains it for 20 seconds after every Flash Freeze, with each Flash Freeze rocking an effective cooldown of 14 seconds. (Although I don't know of any reports of him having 100% uptime on Frozen Blows.) However, he does gain them noticeably often, meaning that AM can only buffer half the duration of one Frozen Blows per 2-minute time period. In 2 minutes we're likely to see anything between 3-6 Frozen Blows, which translates to 2-5 Frozen Blows that AM is completely void against.

The cooldown on this talent feels really harsh and prohibitive. It's not really the utility spell I was expecting it to be, but rather, just another domino you have to line up with your tank's own cooldowns. Personally I'd much prefer the talent if they dropped the interrupt immunity and put it on a 40-second or 1-minute cooldown.

All of that being said, I can't see me really speccing without it anytime soon. As long as you communicate with your tanks, it can be pretty decent. I.e., set up a rotation before the fight so you know AMS -> HoS -> IBF -> AM -> UA or whatever order you like to use them in.