A short guide to notable changes for healing priests in 5.0.4

-Mana pools are fixed at 300k. The gnome racial and certain meta gems can increase this number.
-Intellect no longer affects regen, giving only spell power and critical strike chance.
-Spirit is mana regen for everyone (reminiscent of mp5).
-Rapture returns are based on your Spirit.

-Atonement and Archangel are now baseline for discipline priests.
-Evangelism is now baseline for all priests.
-Divine Fury is a passive, baseline ability for all priests. (Guaranteeing chance to hit with Smite, Holy Fire, Penance and PW:Solace)
-Archangel no longer returns mana, but the healing bonus has been increased.
-Penance now triggers an Atonement heal if used offensively, and gives a single stack of Evangelism.

-Divine Hymn is no longer available to Discipline and Shadow priests.
-Discipline priests have Spirit Shell instead. Knowledge of boss encounters will be vital in the effective use of Spirit Shell, but the ability can also be used on a smaller scale as an alternative to PW:Shield spamming for stacking shields on a party.

-Inner Focus is changed from removing the mana cost and increasing the crit chance of the next heal, to reducing the mana cost and guaranteeing a critical heal from the next eligible heal.
-Binding heal can no longer benefit from Inner Focus.


-Our dispel mechanics have changed:

-Purify (our friendly dispel and cure disease together) has an 8 sec. cooldown.
-Dispel Magic (the offensive dispel) has no cooldown.
-Mass Dispel has a 15 sec. cooldown.

-The Sinestra and Spine of Deathwing encounters have been adjusted to accommodate the new dispell mechanics.

-The Blood Corruption debuffs in the Spine of Deathwing now turn to the buffs after the first dispel.
-Dispelling Sinestra’s Wrack resets the cooldown of Purify, leaving the execution of the encounter unchanged.

Stat priorities for both discipline and holy will be very similar to what holy priests were doing at the beginning of Cataclysm.

-Stack spirit until you are comfortable with your mana regen.
-Haste to your chosen breakpoint.
-Holy priests and Disc tank healers will favor mastery.
-Disc priests will enjoy crit for the DA gains, holy does not gain as much from crit.

The old talent trees are gone, replaced with a completely new talent system. Every 15 levels a new tier of 3 talents is unlocked, and we choose one from each set. Each tier has a “theme.”

(15) Control	Void Tendrils	Useful cc for questing
	Psyfiend	semi-random, single target fear
	Dominate Mind	mind control that works on everything but mechanicals. fun!
(30) Movement	Body and Soul	we are used to this, but now disc priests can spam it
	Angelic Feather	placed with targeting circle, useable by anyone
	Phantasm	pvp talent
(45) Mana	From Darkness, Comes Light	mana conservation rather than mana restore, made for single-target healing
	Mindbender	replaces shadow fiend (so if you don’t choose this you still get SF), shorter cooldown means better returns for fights that don’t divide up neatly for SF’s cooldown
	Power Word: Solace	disc priests will find this mechanic familiar; greatest potential for mana returns, greatest effort required
(60) Defense	Desperate Prayer	good old reliable
	Spectral Guise	pvp/questing
	Angelic Bulwark	could easily see situational use for certain fights, passive so you don't need to remember to use it
(75) Throughput	Twist of Fate	another for certain situations/fight mechanics
	Power Infusion	self-only now
	Divine Insight	very interesting, should be very useful for both holy and disc

The glyph system has changed as well, with only Major and Minor glyphs remaining.

A few highlights:

Glyph of Holy Nova	where holy nova went (no longer baseline for priests)
Glyph of Holy Fire	now instant! (still consumes borrowed time, does not benefit from inner will)
Glyph of Penance	cast while moving (at increased mana cost)
Glyph of Lightspring	making lightwell obsolete since 2012

(a few raids will probably be coordinated enough to use lightwell’s ability to deliver all the healing at one time to good effect (lightspring doles out its healing at one heal per second), but most won’t bother)


More discussion of all these things is coming, this is just a quick overview to get people started in the right direction.


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SHADOW TALK
Shouldn't there be a per spec thread already for MoP :o?
Anyway. I peeked around because i did guess that Crit>Mastery with the new mastery but i also met this along the way.
Analysis of Talent Choices, DPS, and Stat Weights (MoP Beta Build 16004) | Shadow Orbs and Mind Spikes

It's a little obvious that SWI is slightly better than FDCL, but as the haste increases ticks of SW:P to 2 it gets a little trickier to get it right.
I play with an average of 90-120ms, would that cause FDCL to be better for my overall performance or should i try with SW:I?
Currently i am looking at a FDCL + DI comp. I am only worried about the instant MB triggering just as i cast the harmless MS so i lose the MS benefit. Shouldn't be that bad i suppose.

I am mainly a Holy/Disc Priest but i like reading and learning the whole class so please mind the irrelevant ignorance shown by me. :<

HOLY TALK
Out of the lvl 75 spells, i think my dilemma is going to be PI vs DI. As ToF is quite situational, it's going to be used in some... fights. DI sounds really interesting, but i have to try it out to be sure it's useful. Does look fun though.

In 45 it's quite hard. Mindbender for intesive fights where i can't stop casting. Solace is looking very very promising for fights with mana breaks, i did envy Shams and Palas for their version of it for quite a while. while FDCL is quite situational.

How do you find that obvious, like at all? My first intuitive reaction when reading the talents was that FDCL is the best one, especially with the MSp glyph. However, from what I have read on HTP, most people seem to favor Mindbender as the highest DPS talent of the tier. The choice is far from "obvious" in my opinion and definitely needs solid testing.

Also, there seems to be a discussion around FDCL in conjunction with the legendary staff, specifically how a DTR proc on the MSp could potentially wipe your DoTs unintentionally. I'm not even sure if that is the case in this current build (it seemed to be on Beta, at some point at least) and it only matters for the next four weeks anyway, but it's something to keep in mind.

There's another thing about FDCL that I noticed. I did two heroics as Disc after the patch hit, healing pretty much exclusively with Smite/HF spam. On the first run, my FDCL proc-rate was at ~32%, on the second run it was at ~28%. Now I realize that two runs with only ~100 casts each isn't statistically significant, but it does raise a question as to the actual proc percentage of the talent.

My first choice when i first looked at the tree was also FDCL at all cases, but numbers are usually different.
Looking at those numbers which might be relatively old sims. SW:I looks slightly higher but not always.
I merely pointed to the numbers in link not my choice. (slightly)

Imho it's going to be very situational, respec that lvl 45 talent every boss, maybe every wipe. Heavy Movement+Add fights do switch emphasis away from FDCL and SW:I if only a little.

As for Disc... FDCL all the way.

The formula for Spirit Shell was posted in the Cataclysm compendium other beta forum
The SS formula should look like this (courtesy of Szeretlek from EJ):
For Direct Heals:
SS_Absorb=AvgHeal*(1+Crit)*(1+Mastery)*(1+0,3*Crit)
For PoH:
SS_Absorb=AvgHeal*(1+Crit)*(1+Mastery)*1.3

Yes mindbender is currently the better than FDCL.. especially if you use it with 2p H FL where your cd for mindbender is 36sec. It gives a huge increase in dps and unlimited mana

Thanks Genjala. So basically spirit shell is ignoring the Burning meta gem, and is slightly below what it "should" be if it was doing what it was trying to do (the last term should be 1 + .3 * (2*crit)/(1+crit) instead of just 1+.3*crit). It's a pretty huge throughput cooldown if you stack mastery.

A couple more notes on spirit shell. It is affected by Grace, but not Inner Focus. It does not prevent FDCL from proccing,

From what I hear, the CD reduction has been hotfixed.

As more data trickles in, FDCL is looking better and better. The issue with DTR is annoying, but preliminary testing suggests that we can probably live with it anyway. It's especially great at multi-DoT fights!

Another thing about Mindbender, that might seem counter-intuitive: it actually deals LESS damage than Shadowfiend, per activation. This is of course more than offset by many more activations over the course of the fight; however, it does mean that for strict, short-window burst, Shadowfiend will do more damage than Mindbender.

As Szeretlek is noting SS is incredibly strong right now, but it also ties into something that feels a little 'bad' for Discipline I feel.
Looking at logs so far most priests doing 25hc, myself included, have roughly 80-90% of their healing from the combination of PoH, DA and SS, which in essence have PoH as the only cast spell.
Now this might just be a symptom of DS with its heavy emphasis on aoe and standing still, but I can't help but think that it feels a little wrong that so much our healing comes from casting only a single spell.
Yes you have to manage your cds properly to make it work, but let's assume we know how to do that.

Looking at the fights in MoP, not all seem to have this heavy aoe focus, but they're still there.
We will, of course, be in blues when entering the first raid which might need us to utilize other spells too, but is that just until we have enough regen to sustain the current model.
I guess Blizz have let us have PoH/DA throughout DS so they might let it stay this way, but i can't help but wonder.

Since that was mainly a rant with speculations and no conclusion I'll add some flavour:
Seeing as Disc does not have DH anymore, does not renew (some might, but not to the extent holy does) and none of our other spells have haste breakpoints per se (disregarding Hymn of Hope), is it feasible to completely neglect haste in favor of crit/mast.
Which of those is best I'll leave to someone more capable. The fact that you get more mastery per point than crit might tilt the scale though.
I suppose it 'feels' right for a proactive healer not to be too reliant on haste

I've been working on a web-based Priest calculator rather than a spreadsheet like from 4.x. Mainly it's easier to use and easier for contributors to help out. Serrif has already jumped in and helped improve it. Right now, it's Disc only but once all of the numbers are solid, I plan on adding Holy as well, of course.

If you used the priest spreadsheet in 4.x, this is its replacement. Feedback is welcome, especially for formulas and such. It's layout and visuals will probably change quite a bit over time but right now the goal is to provide the information as accurately and densely as possible.

Most buffs etc are tuned for level 90, but the base calculations are currently correct and validated for my level 85 priest on live.

Priest Calulations