Since the beta has started for MoP and there are alot of people with the annual pass, I think it's a good moment to start a thread for MoP beta. All the knowledge we can gather in there will help us once MoP comes out. I myself am not in the beta yet, but my guild is preparing to do raids in the beta once avialable.

Some links with usefull information:
Talent Calculator
Known Glyphs for MoP
Known items for MoP

While such a discussion will contain a lot of speculation by necessity, please remember that the forum rules still apply. Thought-out discussion is welcome, and please keep whining and wishlisting under wraps.

atm you can stack aegis on everyone in raid and thats not the problem actually. Spirit shell is single target spell, thats much lower gamebreaking stuff then stacking aegis =)

I tested the Spirit Shell stacking and it caps out at 40% of the priest's health, on yourself and other targets both. It's hard to say if it will see long lasting use though.
It absorbs 15191 damage for my transferred character, while GH heals for over 40k with 3 Grace stacks, has 0.5 seconds less cast time and can crit. GH costs thrice the amount of mana of course. The heal of the expired SS isn't affected by Grace either.

Using my priest with only Inner Fire (8029 int, 2190 haste, 979 crit, 1308 mastery - that's what I use life) as model:
average GH heal on a target with 3 stacks Grace, including crit and DA: 57 851 healing, 27 160 hps, 9.64 hpm
SS: 15 191 absorb, 5934 hps, 7.60 hpm
This means that GH is more efficient if you have less than about 21% overheal, for 4.5 times the throughput. Of course SS also gets 80% of the expired absorb as heal, but if that happens (at least on a tank) it will overheal with a high probability anyway.
I can't really see how we will use SS at the moment, unless there's a lull in the fight and we're needed later on. Smite is unfortunately quite expensive now (4k mana vs 6k GH).

On the upside, HF continues to be very nice (scales with Grace), even though the hit part of the glyph doesn't work currently. HF does 29 847 (no Grace, 5 stacks Evangelism, including crit and DA) healing for 2k mana and 1.71 seconds (could be instant and given the state of our other glyphs probably will).
That's 17 454 hps and 14.92 hpm without Grace and damage buffs/debuffs.
Smite heals for 20377 (no Grace, 5 stacks Evangelism, no glyph, with crit and DA); that's 9 567 hps and 5.09 hpm.

Renew should also be good now: 5 ticks (unglyphed) for 5164 (with Grace), that's 34 233 healing (with crit and DA) or 26 745 hps and 13.17 hpm.
Glyphed: 4 ticks for 6868: 36 426 healing, 28 458 hps, 14.01 hpm (6.4% better than unglyphed)
This could change depending on haste level, since the glyphed and the unglyphed version have different haste caps.

PW:S has a 6 second cooldown now (that I can't see a way of getting rid of) and absorbs 31 991 damage. That's 24993 hps and 5.16 hpm. Together with the missing BT and Rapture this means that you should need a good reason to cast a PW:S over GH. You'd need over 50% GH overheal to be more efficient with PW:S.

About glyphs (won't mention all of them):
Atonement is probably worth it, if just for HF and Archangel.
Desperation could be situationally useful (Halfus)
Fear Ward maybe, but I doubt they will add bosses like that again.
Holy Fire: Interesting and definitely useful if you have Atonement.
Inner Fire/Inner Sanctum: useful for fights with a lot of raid damage.
Mass Dispel is situational.
Penance: hard to say. Penance hps is in the ballpark of GH, but the hpm is better, so we probably want to use it as often as possible while tank healing (unless the tanks are about to switch). If we'd use only Penance and GH, it should work out to be detrimental, since we spend 20% less mana on the cheaper spell but 20% less time casting it. Obviously useless for raid healing.
PW:S: Useful for shielding low raid members if there is a chance that they won't take damage in the next 15 seconds, since you'd at least do 20% healing before the absorb expires. For tank healing it should be bad, since the absorb can't (realistically) overheal, but the heal can.
PoM: situational. If PoM jumps 5 times (aura damage/people with dots next to each other) it's bad, if you use it to have an extra instant while moving it's good.
Psychic Scream: probably useful for dungeons
Purify: probably too little effect for 1/3 of our useful glyphs, you'd have to dispel quite a lot to make that worthwhile.
Renew: I always feel uncomfortable using a gcd to apply a hot while tank healing, but the hpm of Renew is higher than that of GH and with this glyph the hps is better as well. It's also an interesting option for spot healing. We can't use PW:S for that any more and if you aren't likely going to return to the same target for a while, the Grace application of GH shouldn't push the efficiency of GH over that of Renew. In that scenario you'd probably have less overhealing with the glyph than without, in addition to the increased healing. It also 'adds' mobility by making an instant better and (more importantly) more often castable.
Smite: I'm really not sure if this is worth it. It depends a lot on how much more damage smite will do with raid buffs, but I doubt that Smite will become even moderately efficient with the current mana cost, so we probably won't use it much.


They also 'fixed' our problem with the not-spirit-scaling Rapture by taking it away from us and Holy Concentration away from holy. I hope they also did that for the other healing speccs, but I can't check that now. The official talent calculator is old and outdated.

There's at least one way to raise mana. Metagems do give you (currently) the extra 2% mana. Though that really just work's out to 1/3rd of a Flash Heal/Greater Heal.

Oh and Greater Heal / Flash Heal / Prayer of Healing all cost roughly 6k mana. Penance can be lowered even further via Evangelism; Archangel is fairly straightforward as well.

All priests I've seen on the beta so far had exactly 100 000 mana and the spellcosts are very 'neat' compared to live (mostly even thousands, the rest with even hundreds). I'd assume that this part (minus some adjustments in spell costs) is pretty much final.
What this doesn't do is tell us how those numbers will be at 90 though. We'll have to wait a bit for that information.
At 85 I can cast 28.69 GH with my mana pool alone on life, on beta it's only 16.67. This behaviour is similar in other spells, if not as severe for all. Worst case is PW:B, which costs 26 400 mana on beta. The upside is that all spells also heal for more compared to life, so we can continue to clear old content once the prelaunch patch hits. We'll heal for more per spell, but have very limited max mana and the spells will be more expensive (except for PoH, Renew and HF). At least with the current numbers.

The new spirit to mp5 formula is apparently very simple as well (at 85): 1 spi = 2 mp5 out of combat and 1 mp5 in combat. We also get 5000 mp5 in and out of combat baseline.
source: my naked Troll with 199 spirit has 5199 mp5 ooc and 5099 ic.
507 spirit: 5507 ooc, 5253 ic
1109 spirit: 6109 ooc, 5554 ic
1788 spirit: 6788 ooc, 5894 ic
2184 spirit: 7184 ooc, 6092 ic

I could imagine that this would stay the same for higher levels as well, since Blizzard mentioned somewhere that they were dissatisfied with the complexity of the current mana regeneration formula. All they would have to do is increase mana costs and total mana in relation to the increased item level each time we level up.
For my priest (who has very little spirit) this increased passive regen is not enough to offset the loss of Replenishment, Rapture, Archangel (which doesn't return mana any more) and the weakening of HoH. 2% mana then is about 80% less than 2% now for my priest and the 15% max mana will be useless, unless you are so oom that you can't cast heals.
On the other hand: spirit brings more mp5 now, so we can just reforge for it.

Aoe healing is going to be very boring, you can basically only use PoH and there aren't even repercussions for casting it on the same group, since the glyph doesn't exist any more. The range is still only 30 y.

Agreed here. Personally, I'm hoping they add some new mechanics, not just to Prayer of Healing, but to other spells as well, if only to kill the monotony. Some time ago they mentioned that Discipline would be healing with Holy Nova, but it seems that that's been scratched since. Such a shame too, I was definitely looking forward to using it. They could add a glyph or talent or something that would make it actually viable to use. Speaking of which, I'd like to hear some thoughts regarding the talents. Personally, while I find the glyphs very disappointing, I think the talents are really amazing. Definitely looking forward to seeing how they play out, especially Path of the Devout. I could see myself using it on certain encounters, but it just seems to be very... questionable, I guess, in the way it works. You're getting a buff to help you move out of damage, but as long as you don't take any damage? It's unlikely to be the final version, but if it does make it on the live servers, I'm really wondering on what players' thoughts on it would be. I also noticed that Mind Control (now Dominate Mind) is a level 15 talent. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It was never really particularly useful, I'm sure we can agree on this, but this could be a sign that Blizzard will be implementing encounters where it would be good (which I would absolutely love). The last one was Razuvious as far as I can recall?

I'm thinking they'll make Inner Focus a talent again, since otherwise, holy priests will have to rely on spirit-based regen alone (aside from Shadowfiend). Without Train of Thought though, even it seems rather mediocre. My best guess is that Blizzard wants a lot portion of our regen (or rather mana conservation) to come from Divine Insight/Serendipity. On the bright side though, I can see Renew being used a lot more with the new glyph, especially with Serenity. I'm just hoping we get Rapid Renewal back

I dont see a diffirence between Holy and Disc in terms of mana regen. Thats not good, because at the moment skilled players can achive more regen with Disc with their ACTIVE mana regen idea. And holy priest have PASSIVE mana regen (I dont count shadowfiend, its more like one-time cooldown). Bad Disc regen less then Holy and good Disc regen more then Holy. Thats how it works now.
They talked much about Active tanking (blood dk) and want that all other passive tanks (prot-war, prot-pal) can mitigate more if they are skilled enough, not just stack armor and avoidance. And now they just blow up good active regen system for disc. Thats so dumb.
Tell me, is there something in beta like Rapture?

is the Heavenly Voice used for DH in MoP? The 3 min cooldown has been stated, but what about the +100% healing?

There is currently no Rapture in the beta, nor is there Holy Concentration. The other healing classes kept their mana regeneration mechanics except for shaman's Telluric Currents (or at least my lvl1 chars on beta did).

About talents: The wowhead talent calculator is updated at the moment, or at least as close to as I cared to check, maybe I missed something.
Tier 1:
I tested Void Tendrils against some low level boars and they weren't able to attack the tendrils themselves. That means most likely that it's a valid CC in PvE.

Dominate Mind = Mind Control with a cooldown and not only on humanoids.

I didn't get to test Psyfiend, but that sounds even more situational than the rest. 6-7 30 second long fears... I don't know what to do with that. It would be insanely overpowered in PvP (my opinion, haven't played PvP in 2 expansions), but the duration is probably shorter there. We need to test if the Psyfiend pulls other mobs in dungeons.
Altogether: unless then encounter requires something specific this tier doesn't matter at all.

Tier 2:
Body and Soul is the same old, except that PW:S has a 6 second cooldown now.

Path of the Devout could be very interesting, if there's not too much aoe damage going around and you need to move a lot. Since it lasts or 30 seconds even after Levitate breaks, it's usable as an semi-emergency sprint as well. The only downside is, that B&S would be much better for that (and castable on others), unless you need to run longer.

Phantasm can be very useful to break roots/slows and we'd have to test what "ranged attacks" mean. I'd guess things like Hour of Twilight and the like won't count, because that would be too powerful. Maybe you could 'fade' random targeted range attacks like Rohash or Hagara though.

Tier 3:
Not much to say until we learn what the third talent is going to be, but for the moment I'd say as a raid healer Archangel is better (simply because we won't cast the SoL triggering heals enough) and as a tank healer it depends on whether we can manage to get Evangelism stacks without endangering the tank. That worked really well for healing the Nef tank in p1 for example, but in most fights it probably won't.

Tier 4:
Desperate Prayer and Angelic Bulwark are very similar, but if you ignore overhealing, utility and availability:
DP is 0.25% max hp per second and AB is 0.22% max hp per second. Now AB is passive and can save you even if you don't react, but on the other hand it could trigger when you don't want it to (because you now you'd survive this but would need it later on). DP on the other hand can be used for pure mana efficiency (it's a free heal) on fights where you aren't in danger of dying. I'd say it depends on the fight.

Void Shift is a very great cooldown in my opinion, even if we'd have to test how fast the 25% heal triggers. If there's a long delay it could be dangerous if there's a lot of raid damage going around. Otherwise it's an insane tank cooldown, right in line with paladin's LoH. Imagine this for Decimation Blade on Baleroc.

Tier 5:
PI is the same old, still very solid and still in danger of getting snatched by pesky dps.

Twist of Fate depends on the damage pattern. If the target(s) we are healing are low very often (Anub p3) it's very powerful. Assuming the health percentages of people we heal would be uniformly distributed, it would boost our overall healing by 3% (0.15*0.2). PI boost our healing, assuming 1% haste = 1% increase in healing, by 2.5%. Now those assumptions are certainly unrealistic for most fights and PI has the advantage of delivering burst when needed. Does anyone know if the shamans have collected data on the average health percentage of people? I wouldn't know where to start and I'm fairly certain that can't be easily computed from combatlog, unless you know how much health each person has at the beginning and track every single event for the fight. I have a gut feeling that PI will be more powerful in most fights though, even if that little napkin math pointed in the different direction.
On the other hand ToF boost our heals exactly WHEN they are needed. It doesn't work for PW:S though and I think that's still going to be our 'oh shit' heal.

Divine Insight is probably very useful for small scale content where you can use a lot of BH, but I don't see much potential for 25man raids, unless the fight requires that you heal a small group of people or a tank and yourself. The reason for that is simply because BH (or FH, which is much worse) has lower hps and hpm than straight PoH spam. We do get a reduction of PoH cast time and the final throughput of BH-BH-PoH is 11% higher than pure PoH spam, but that's at a loss of 37% hpm, which is ridiculous, at least at the start of the expension. That doesn't even take into account that we'd overheal ourselves like crazy with all the BH.


Tier 6:
Vow of Unity sounds strange. I can't really see a situation where that might be truly useful. If we use it on someone else during high damage phases we'd basically direct smart heals away from those two people and they would still stay high from the VoU heal. That would be a healing increase of 100% minus missing smart heals for all healers on those two targets, which is very hard to quantify.

Divine Star sounds awesome, but let's see how the numbers and the targeting works out.

Altogether I can say that I'll carry a lot of the Dust of Disappearance equivalent around and change glyphs/talents from boss to boss. I believe that was their intention to begin with: To go away from one build to a modular system where you choose on the fly what you need for the next part. Or rather to make this easier, since most of use respecced/reforged/reglyphed for progress anyway.