In beta, people used to go all the way down the ret tree when it was viable (as in, you could get both IoL and Sheath/JotW). They did it because of the infinite mana you could gain from it, as JotW used to give you 20% total mana, instead of 15% base mana. However, they moved it further down so this was not possible. With your build, you might be able to FoL spam like a champ, but I'm afraid that most heroics will not allow for just Flash spam. Looking at your spec, you essentially used 17 points of filler to get down to Sheath (17 points that will neither positively nor negatively affect your healing.)

If mana regen is your problem, I would also suggest checking out the Holy thread. If you're properly gemmed for regen (intellect or crit) then you shouldn't be having problems. A lot of encounters, even in heroics, are designed more for someone with either aoe or quick healing capability, and there are plenty of times where you will need to beacon someone, shock another, quick HL another, and flash the rest.

Why is this thread even here? Simply put, normal instances are easy, you can heal them as Ret spec in Ret gear, but that doesn't mean that it is a good idea to do so, or that it scales well at level 80. Hell, you can do some normal mode dungeons without a healer at all. That doesn't mean you should do it, or that it's a good idea. That doesn't mean you'll be able to keep an off-tank alive at patchwork on your own, which is pretty much your requirement to start raid healing. Read some of the other threads on this forum, and understand why intellect is such a powerful stat. In my humble opinion this thread warrants no further discussion.

I never, once, ever, stated that I would be a main healer.

In my opinion, neither are Discipline priests.

I stated that, at best, my role would be holding up the main tank, not holding up random people in the raid.

My dps is extremely piss poor, never planned on being a dpser. My mana regens as I hit things and as I cast judgements.

That much is extremely clear.

While running last night in HOL, and only because we had an awesome tank, we made it to Loken without any problems. I made 400 dps and 700 hps for the entire instance, as thats all the healing I needed to do at that time.

I might not be able to do heroics with this build, I can accept that, and I will end up gearing up differently if that truly is the case.

As for the wasted talents...I look at it as a price to pay for a very strong talent, sheath of light.
I consider it to be far stronger than people believe it is here on these forums.

I also never stated that I would stack attack power into any final builds. Whats the poitn of stacking attack power in a heal build?

For the 2 handed spec, that was for when I went off to solo, as are most of the other dps talents. My filler talents will change once I hit 80.

In any case, I'll be taking a much stronger look at Intellect shortly.

ALso: I should point out, I'm a -horrible- rep/gold farmer. Thus why I never had enchantes on equipment or when I did I had very questionable ones added.

Also also: SoL hots never overheal. If the target is not damaged, it does not proc for that step. I've had a lot of experience with how SoL works and its applications. I've managed to get it to heal 5000 per tick for twelve seconds straight. Probably could increase that if I had haste.......

If you want to trigger some nerd rage, keep on saying discipline priests aren't main healers. These boards are awesome, the official threads are always discussing how to improve builds and gameplay. It's at the very least a lack of respect to all the community work to say that what have been esablished AND TESTED IN GAME is not what it is.
I can argue that in my opinion, at least on a dk, a discipline priest is better than a pally as a tank healer. We could discuss why I'm wrong or why I'm not. But to go as far as to say a holy pally isn't intended to be a main healer would seem to go a bit far, don't you think?
If you wanna argue about discipline healing viability, after the community decided it's viable, at least show some proof or point out at some problem. Randomly mumbling about your opinion based on nothing but thin air (since you provided no basis for such opinion), it's only good to start off topic discussion. I suggest you go explain your opinion in the healing priest thread, since I'm sure there will be many people interested on the info only you seem to have.


Anyway, you think Sheath is stronger than we think it is. Fine. Let's just say it's the strongest talent ever and that would deserve to be nerfed because it's too OP. What counts is not if you have the strongest talent ever, it's how your build performs. As many pointed out, myself included, you waste a tons of talent points in talents you are not going to use.
Now, how would your spec perform compared to other healing specs for pallies? You compare to them in the strenght of your heals, but you lack in speed (JofP and Light's Grace), in aoe capability (Beacon of light) and in mana conserve. To be precise, you lack the int bonus to spellpower too, but let's not be too strict.

My question is: WHEN is your spec going to be used? And WHY is it going to be used over other specs?

You need to answer that question or this discussion isn't aimed at anything. Specs are developed for a goal. There are levelling specs, there are raid specs, pvp ones and so on. Where do you think your spec is better than others? What it need to accomplish better than other? We asked for you to tell us that, since it's still not clear.


As I wrote, I can see your spec useful only in a 10 man naxx. When we run 2 healers we need to ask one of our spriests to turn to healer for 4h, and eventually on sapphiron too (depending on the healers we have for that run). But mind, I'm not saying I would sacrifice a retri pally dps that much only to get a good healer for 4h (the spriest can do the work anyway, without losing in dps by speccing in strange ways).

Anyway, with the incoming dual specs the need of hybridization will be far less, since the retri (i.e.) can just have a holy second spec and thus being able to heal better than your build and to dps better than it. So, again, what is your spec meant to do?


P.S.
All this has been wrote having the game at lvl 80 in mind. I have nothing to say about it as a levelling spec.

I want to know how in the hell you were able to create a thread.