A quick question: Would you recommend trying to whore arena points/rating to get the s4 mace, or does the bonus of the Spire outweigh the extra healing on the s4 mace?

PoM is fairly predictable. It will go off when someone takes damage and it will go to the person with the least health within range.

When the switch happens 4 adds spawn, that means healing aggro is divided by 8. If pom heals for 2000 it will generate 125 threat. That is assuming it will actually go off exactly at the right moment, which on its own is extremely unlikely. Its completely impossible to have PoM pull aggro on hydross. The first time we did it, we had two priests spamming their arse off PoM and we never even had a pom go off during the switch let alone pull aggro. I doubt it will even pull an untanked add tbh. If you are that worried about it, when its time for a switch just use it on yourself 2 sec before hydross crosses the line and fade.

If you don't wanna use it suit yourself, but you are missing out on a great heal for water tomb and your add tanks. Especially if you are undergeared for the encounter, healing from PoM is not something you can afford to miss. I am always very very far ahead of everyone in the healing meters in this encounter thanks to PoM. If you are not using PoM because you are afraid of the threat component, then let me put your fears to rest: PoM won't pull aggro on hydross. Feel free to abuse it.

Illidan mace beats S4 by a huge margin in my eyes.

Sorry for the tangent, but what meters are you using that can properly associate PoM healing with the original caster? I haven't seen any realtime meters with this capability.

Recount does it quite well.

When you run only one holy priest in a raid, as well, it's fairly simple to figure out how much healing PoM added. It actually adds up to a lot over the course of a night: I hit the MT with 296 PoMs (625k) on our BT clear last night (MH Glaive, omg, wtf, wow, weee!) and the secondary bounces added another 650k healing to that. It was enough to move me from 3rd in effective healing to 1st, if meter whoring was an issue.

As far as S4 mace: [Brutal Gladiator's Salvation] -- just be aware that "whoring points" isn't going to be an option this season. It has a Personal Rating requirement of 2050, as well as costing 3150 Arena Points. The only people using this mace will be people with 2k+ rated teams, or someone who can get to 1950 on their own and who has friends who can level them the last 100 PR points.

Personally, I'm planning on picking up a mace from KJ eventually (i.e. in 7 drops) to use in PvP; right now I use [Crystal Spire of Karabor], and the proc is extremely nice.

Thanks everyone for the PoM feedback. I use Recount as well, and by studying the WWS reports on raids where you are, and are not present, it is fairly easy to determine trends amongst the various priests on their usage of this spell. I've always considered it one of the best tools in our arsenal.

Hate to bring this up but for the Recount vs. SWStats debate, I have been using SWStats forever.

I enjoy it because if someone dies I can /swl to see what happened, why they died, if they used healthstones etc. etc.

I have a couple questions for you Recount users and for those of you who have used both:

Can Recount provide me with a similar function to /swl for SWStats?
Which uses more memory? Lags more etc.?
Does only recount keep PoM?
Which is more accurate with the WWS parses after the evening is done? (Looking at a kill attempt on WWS vs. on the meter).

To Const:

/mock

/swl: Recount has a "death meter" that tracks the number of deaths each person has in a raid. You can click on each player's bar to see the details behind each death, and adjust the log filters to show or exclude incoming and outgoing damage as well as incoming and outgoing heals.

Memory/lag: can't answer this, never used SWstats. Recount does tend to get laggy sometimes over the course of the night (and recent versions have been pretty buggy where it displays borked info). Pre-2.4, Recount never had any problems.

PoM: I'm sure other add-ons track PoM too, but Recount is the only one I know of that does.

Accuracy: depends ultimately on how your define "accurate". WWS is more faithful to the combatlog, while Recount incorporates real-time info that the logs don't show. IMHO, Recount is even more accurate than WWS because of this.

PoM and Aggro: I would use PoM especialy on aggro-sensitive fights. I will start it on the tank (that will be a warrior tank in those fights with our raid). PoM will push his aggro like his best aggro-gaining ability (SS) if he gets a hit. Most times this occurs very early in the encounter and I will give him PoM again as soon as possible. I try to set it before the pull so that I have a free CD when he pulls. The first thing I do after the pull is PoM when it just went off of him. Yes I will give up the other proccs this way, but the tank will get a big aggro-boost right at the beginning where he needs it most. After that I will let PoM jump freely.

For every PoM there will be at least 20 players who will not get a PoM-procc while the MT gets one. So his aggro will be better against those peaple with the PoM than without it.

Now consider the other 4 players: A warrior in defensive-stance will producre 30% more aggro with whatever he does (or is counted to him). Most not tanking players have a skill or pala-buff or both which reduces their aggro. At least the pala-buff reduces everything what is counted to them for 30%. So the 4 other player will get at most 70% of the PoM-aggro while the tank will geht 130% of its aggro in the first place. Thats nearly twice the aggro.

So PoM will give the MT a big aggro-boost against at least 20 players and a minor one on the other 4 if it is started on him. If it cannot procc exactly on that moment where nobody else should do anything on someone else but the MT you can only help the MT with his aggro by using PoM. Especialy in aggro-fights you should use PoM.

Somewhere in the tank-threads was a post where they showed that PoM (and I think lifebloom and earthshield) can do 20% of the tanks aggro in a normal raid-setting. That is a big difference which should not be wasted.

About PoM discussion.

In my case, we got alot of agro-problems on Gurtogg and PoM doing there really great job.
We uses 3 holy priests on that fight, letting all three tanks to get DoT, and letting a PoM to jumping around of tanks, really great threat stuff and HPS aswell

Recount has an exellent "death" function, showing you the combat log entries for that person up to the point where they were killed. Recount is a resource hog, especially due to its real time capabilities, but it really tracks an insane amount of stuff.

I do not know if SW stats tracks pom, but recount certainly does. I have not had a look at how recount tracks pom.

Recount is really very accurate when you have a couple of people using it in the raid. Very similar results to wws.

I'm interested in knowing exactly how Recount does it. I'm pretty sure that when you run two or more holy priests it's some kind of "random" factor who gets the credit for the majority of PoMs. (One holy priest credited for 100+ PoM on one try, other for 20ish - next try the other way around.) I don't know where I have this idea from, but I think Recount takes +healing into account and see how much PoM is hiting for and then giving credit to the "corrrect" priest - anyone?

Recount still miss some PoMs though, "No one" gets credit sometimes.

On a slightly different note, I think many underestimated Holy Priest's healing in the beginning of TBC because of lack of PoM tracking. It can be anything from 10-50% of my total healing, needless to say it was very unfair when lots of people used meters to judge player performance. Imagine the riot if Sinister Strike wasn't added to a Rogue's damage in WWS - that's actually a comparable percentage.

I am pretty sure they dont track it through the +heal bonus. I did see someone suggesting this, but its going to be only one of the factors. Personally I have a feeling that they are doing something similar to addons like MendWatch. They are probably using the events that fire when PoM is cast and when PoM is gained then storing the data in a custom library, so they can trace each pom to the original caster. I do not know how the WoW engine works very well, so I am only speculating.

The randomness in PoM usage may come from a number of things (e.g. PoM being overwritten by the one with higher healing), or PoM jumping to a target that is not taking damage due to the other PoM getting the 2nd active damage source faster. My experience is that simultaneous, but unsync'd use of PoM by two priests is not very effective.

Its very often the case that WWS strongly understimates priest healing by not including PoM.

There is an addon called POMTracker which was far better pre 2.4 but is still useful in gaging the value of a single POM cast.

Prayer of Mending Tracker | World of Warcraft Addons | Curse

I run POMTracker alongside Mend Watch since it does lag in telling me where my prayer of mending is. The benefit of POMTracker is that it quantifies the healing done by each prayer of mending set. The data isn't stored and will erase with reapplication of POM, but you can see the value of each cast by looking at the small window it provides. It isn't particularly useful, for the most part I just like having more than a single POM tracker. If you're curious about the value of your POM casts, this is the only addon I've seen that will tell you what a single cast was worth after completing its five full bounces or expiring.

Perhaps at that point it doesn't matter. Both PoMs bounced, both people got credit for it. Both priests may have gotten the wrong amount of healing credited to them, but the difference is typically negligible.

Hate to derail this but I've been looking at UI's for the last week (I'm wanting to design a new one/use a new one) and I haven't found anything appealing yet.

For some of you regular posters (Or new ones!) could you send me a PM with a screenshot of your UI.

I know it is a lot to ask but I hate scrolling through Hunter UI's and shit. Gotta stick with the people who know our class.

To be fair at the end of our night/on killing attempts to analyze healing and what not I take all the healing done by PoM.

Subtract a portion for our two shadow priests (usually a generous amount but it doesn't matter), then the overhealing however usually the damage people take is about as much as a PoM if not more so I discount it.

We have 2 holy priests so I take the effective healing value (after Spriest reduction) and half it, adding the halves to each priests effective healing.

Almost always it puts the two priests 1 and 2.

Interesting tidbit too from our final night of Felmyst learning attempts to the killshot:

The two priests get bumped up 1.25 million healing each putting them at 5.418 million and 5.396 million respectively.

Quite the jump if you ask me.

Actually now that I think about it, the game must have some kind of live information on which PoMs belong to which casters regardless of when they were cast. After all, how else would unit frame addons be able to tell apart your own PoM buff on someone vs. someone else's? (i.e. you see a timer on yours but not on theres)

If this information is located somewhere in the UI's API but not in the combatlog, then it's entirely conceivable for Recount/Mendwatch/PoMTracker to be 100% accurate about the healing done by PoM.

The aura gain/lost events have information about the caster in there. I think its more complicated than that with PoM, but ppl obviously have a workaround. This info is not recorded in the combat log however, so its only info that can be collected live.
Apparently there is a bug with the new combat system and sometimes event don't fire. So recount and PoM tracker are not 100% accurate, they do miss a few jumps, 100% accuracy is not really necessary though. Recount and PoM tracker are accurate enough.

Did you add earthshields and healing stream totem to shammys and lifebloom procs to druids?