True, I was thinking more for PvE since I am not much of a PvPer. The improved shield could perhaps add resistances? But again that could have implications when being used in PvP.

The first glimpse of talents from alpha looked really solid, I like the new borrow time amping up the power of it combined with lowering the GCD. I still think Rapture should be changed back.

Fort will always be desired, more HP in a raiding/dungeon/solo/group etc. setting is always welcome. Spirit, not so much. Granted they did add spirit functionality to warlocks and mages (correct me if I'm wrong please), there is still little to no gain for some mana using classes (Pally/Shaman/Hunter).

Combining Fort and Spirit into one buff would be awesome, great idea!

EDIT: Nogun building on your idea of the talent 'Fortunate Spirit' - As well as increasing spell power by 6% of spirit, you could add that your attack power is raised by X% of your stamina as well, making it an even more desirable buff for all classes (mana users or not).

There was never any mention about limiting healers in raid size to 5 that included any post by a blue. There was a pretty long thread about raiders wanting blizz to be more consistent in the raid make-up requirements for instances. None of this 8 healers for kalec, 7 for brut, 9-10 for twins, 6 for m'uru. It just makes it too difficult to retain a stable of healers when you need to have 12 for the 10 healer fights and then leave half of them on standby for the 6 healer fights. Most people said that 7-9 healers is what they'd like to see most fights balanced around.

And I know rapture sounded good as a return to group buff, but really I swear to you guys it was crap. It sounds like VT but it's not even close. VT is 5% of ALL your damage returned as mana. Rapture was 2% of your effective healing (which in a raid is like 2% of 60% of your total healing). It was burdensome and it wasn't sustainable, in fact it wasn't even fully controllable or predictable.

Oh, one other minor note on penance. You have to face the person you cast it on. It's not like other heals where what direction you face is irrelevant. Which so far means you can't cast it on yourself at all. Also, the blizz developers said that Sunwell healing was one of the things motivating them to change the mash one heal type of play style.

Edit: Also, all scrolls will be the same amount as the untalented buff available from the class. They posted this as an intended change. So Stam scroll is = to untalented fort, Spirit scroll = DS. Haven't seen a Kings scroll. There is a Scroll of Recall given to just inscriptionists that gives you a 15 min hearth though (as a totally off-topic tidbit).

With the change to Rapture, I honestly don't foresee deep Discipline making it into the "perfect raid." Sacrificing the combat regen bonuses of Holy Concentration talents, along with the stupid amount of +healing modifiers and aggressive raid healing benefits of Serendipity and Test of Faith, and CoH 2.0, IDS will probably get sidelined once again.

Grace looks awesome on paper, but it won't save a DPS from dying to the standard raid mob attack, at least no better than aggressively keeping the guy topped. Likewise, for tanks, it would essentially mimic shadow embrace , which isn't used at all in the common Sunwell setups; I think gear will make up for any possible need to have this. Divine Aegis isn't reliable enough, even with the crit modifiers to beat the control power gained by Guardian Spirit. Almost all the new holy talents give us more ways of controlling the sway of a raid encounter, whereas the Disc talents are largely based on chance and luck, which is more useful in arena matches, where RNG is your best weapon against sentient foes.

As this is now the holy and disc thread we have some interesting news from the beta forums.

This is a good move as at a 6 sec cooldown the spell lost a lost of it's lustre compared to the unchanged Chain heal.

It isn't at all clear that Disc is going to be "the" spec for PvP either. While Blessed Resilience is still inferior to the new Focused Will, the difference is much smaller than before. Guardian Spirit can substitute for Pain Supression, particularly when there is more than one healer on the team.

What Disc really has going for it in PvP is free Power Word: Shields. Penance in its currently form is incredibly subpar for PvP unless you are using it to do damage.

Holy has so much healing throughput, especially with the 60% hasted heals proc and Test of Faith. Lightwell also looks incredibly good, especially in smaller brackets; 40,000 healing for 440 mana every 3 minutes that can be used while a healer is locked out.

This makes complete and total sense to me, especially keeping in mind 10-man raiding. It will be great to be able to buff spirit without having a disc or disc/holy priest in the raid. HOWEVER, there is a big difference between a consumable replacing a base class ability, and a consumable replacing a talented class ability. I have felt for a good while now that DS should be trainable, but this scroll being a DS replacement solidifies that sentiment tenfold. DS absolutely NEEDS to be changed to a base class ability if this scroll goes live. Surely Blizzard can think up a new 21-point talent for Disc. It's not as though such a change would take away from the potency of disc in any way, since everyone will have access to scrolls that do the exact same thing.

If people would like to propose talent changes, I'd be happy to pass along some. Reasonable ones we can all generally agree on! I'm not posting crazy ideas!

Hmmmm, sorry but the new changes to disc are really quite powerfull. Saying that PWS is limited by the 13second weakened soul effect is shortsighted. PWS is one of our most important spells in PvP. I don't think anyone will be skipping reflective shield anymore. The improved PWS that returns mana is by far the biggest change, but grace, penance (the channeling is not a problem for skilled players), rapture and the combined reduced CD on PI are fairly big changes.

Guardian spirit is never going to be as good for PvP as PS/PI, especially now that PI has such a short CD.

Penance is actually a very viable heal, in the 2v2 bracket, not for your self, but for both your partner and for off DPS.

Grace is also very improtant. 6% less damage/more healing on your partner is a very very big deal in arena and in hair moments it can help you as well.

The new lightwell is actually an important advantage though its hard to say without actually putting to the test as mobility is an issue.If its really good, we will see hybrid holy/disc specs, but I think borrowed time will make ppl go deep disc for PvP.


1) Maximal HPS never was and never will be a standard metric. Its a mostly academic premise. Sustained HPS is the standard metric. For a tank healer sustained HPS with suitable overheal is what matters, but equally important is how much this healers abilities, can help smooth out spikes and mitigate insta-gib possibilities. If you can't handle the math and modelling don't do it at all. Posting meaningless arithmetic then trying to draw conclusions from it, is wasting people's time.

3) I have no idea where you got this stuff.

a) Crit is 0.5% per point. This is patently false. Crit has higher overheal. That is the way it goes. From my own personal parses from ZA and SSC over several raids of having an elemental shaman, instead of a resto shaman in my group (3% more crit) I find that the real value of crit is 0.3% per point.

The only way for divine aegis to overheal is by overriting itself. We have every reason The chance that divine aegis will overwrite in a non trivial fight is the chance that you will get back to back crits (0.25*0.25 = 0.0625) multiplied by the chance that your tank won't get a hit in 2.5 seconds, which means it changes during each fight but will certainly be below 5%. That leads to a 0.7-0.75% value for disc crit.

b) Wasted healing. There is no such thing as wasted healing that is a fallacy. If you are trying to talk about heal competition then that is another matter entirely. Renew does not worsen heal competition, unless the other healers don't know how to do their job. Spells like renew, aegis and PWS do not increase the overheal of other healers. They smooth out damage, thus reducing the overheal safety margin. They are *good* for heal competition. An unpredictable 60% haste proc on the other hand is a killer for heal competition. Your argument is competely absurd. If you cant include overheal anddamage reduction in your calculations, don't do those calculations at all. They are less than useless.

c) Grace reduces tank damage by a % amount. If your tank is taking 1k HPS grace reduces tank damage by 60HPS. If your tank is taking 5k DPS it reduces tank damage by 300 HPS. So it helps bridge the gap. If you are stipulating tha you will need more than one healers and they will need their absolude maximum HPS, the DPS reduction from grace compared to the effective healing output of all priests is going to be huge.


Sorry this is not likely. 50% coefficient on a 1sec instant which returns more mana that it takes to cast it has nothing to do with flash heal. You fail to realise that the cast time reduction on cooldown abilities increases the burst potential of combinations. The 1 second cooldown allows PWS to be incorporated in a gheal sequence and INCREASE overall HPS rather than decrease it. This whole paragraph is a flight of fancy, not a real arguement.

1. Maximum theoretical HPS is scaled to parsed HPS when you're talking about the same basic heals used in the same basic way. Since we can't generated parsed HPS for content that is as-yet-unreleased, we can only discuss maximum theoretical HPS. And overheal is almost entirely a product of the healing structure being used - claiming that a spell has an 'inherent' amount of overheal is a fairly naive assumption.

a) Crit is literally 0.5% per point. And your personal parses from ZA/SSC have absolutely no bearing on the general structure of raiding in WotLK - you might as well be making up numbers off the top of your head.

Divine Aegis overheals by either reaching the end of duration or overwriting itself. In any case, your math is incorrect. A Divine Aegis gets overwrites another if you had a critical within the past 12s. For 2.5s chain-cast and 25% critical, this is about 75% chance. For 1.5s, it's about 90%. It's impossible to know how many Aegis' will simply expire without being consuming without dealing with some very specific factors in tanking/content.

Also, you don't seem to understand tank healing patterns very well. The chance that your tank won't get hit at all over the next 2.5s is actually very high due to avoidance abilities. Bursts of damage followed by periods of no damage is the standard. How high it is depends on tank gear and content. Arbitrarily assigning "5%" to this value is silly. If you actually want to make an argument, try linking to a WWS parse and calculating the value instead so we can see where you're coming from.

b) 'Wasted healing'. What you term 'smoothing' is actually a form of risk management. And they work due to their predictability. Unpredictable surges in such healing that don't mirror anything going on with the damage pattern aren't of much use since other healers can't depend on them. To understand what is going on, imagine healing a tank by lining up 5 healers and having them activate their large heals at random, unsynchronized intervals. It should be relatively obvious that your tank would die quite often with this sort of healing structure - you'd have peaks of massive overhealing coupled with valleys of massive underhealing.

And this is precisely why Divine Aegis isn't all that great for 25-man raids. It mimics the random, uncoordinated healing that creates unsynchronized surges/gulfs.

c) Grace's damage reduction on the tank is meaningless in the sense you describe. It is trivially easy to generate 6% more steady, continuous healing on the tank to compensate for increased average dps. The only value in that damage reduction is in how it reduces bursts, and for this purpose it's almost an exact analogue of increasing tank maximum health. Given that Horde tanks have 5% more maximum health than Alliance tanks, it seems very unlikely that Grace will be 'mandatory' in this sense. If it was, raids would be unwinnable by Alliance (or Horde using non-Tauren tanks).

Completely ignoring talents for a moment, Ringlet of Repose - Items - WOWDB is the first dropped item that actually surpasses a Sunwell item, namely [Ring of Harmonic Beauty]. Every other cloth/healing item I've seen so far has been slightly sub-par (or drastically sub-par).

It seems that socketed items will have more 'lifetime' than anything else, lasting until we hit the level 80 "set" (like the Tier 3.5 Hallowed blue set in TBC). So far none of the cloth has been even close to the socketed versions we have available from BT+, although they definitely surpass SSC/TK-- gear.

In any nontrivial fight diving aegis won't be overwritten also crits give inspiration which you are completely forgetting with your numbers.

This is particularly true because the green gems in WotLK are a step above the current epic gems (and they add some modifiers that don't exist on crafted gems: haste/spirit, int/spirit, a whole bunch of */resilience gems), so just by knowing a jewelcrafter you'll pick up 2 spirit or 2 spell power or 2 haste or some combination thereof per gem slot.

1. In order for max HPS to scale with parsed HPS you will need to be spamming your max rank gheal constantly and do nothing else. Paladins have much higher maximal HPS than priests especially with the t5 bonus, but when tank healing they do not necessarily produce higher numbers.
You see healing structure is a vague term that can be interpreted in many different ways. I will do your work for you and say that overhealing is a function of the variability in incoming DPS. The number and type of healers on the tank is of far lesser importance and in many situations irrelevant. Small fast heals have lower overheal than slow big heals. Instants, reactive heals like PoM, have much lower overheal than delayed burst heals like the lifebloom burst. Take any WWS parse you like and you will see that the idea that different heals have different "inherent" overheal, far from naive as you suggest is exactly what happens in reality. The only naivette here comes from yourself, if you think that you can equate max HPS to effective healing.

a) What part of crits have greater overheal than non crit heals don't you get. Its not rocket science. If crits have more overheal then a greater proportion of crits is lost into non effective healing and hence the value of crit reduces faster with more overheal then the value of non crits. Even if you want to assume that overhealing is equal on crits as on non crits which is frankly preposterous then here is some interesting math:

H = non crit heal
x% = overheal

A non crit heals for H*(1-x).

A crit heals for 150%*H(1-x).

If you replace all crits with normal heals (i.e. 0% crit) what you lose is 150%*H(1-x) - H, because replacing a crit with a non crit heal still heals for H.

Hence each crit adds 0.5H-1.5*x*H

Thus crit increases your healing by (0.5*H-1.5*x*H)/(H*(1-x) = (0.5-1.5x)/(1-x).

This means that even under the absurd circumstances where crits have the same amount of overheal as non crits, the value of crit does not scale linearly. Of course this is a simple model and it does not accurately reflect the value of crit. Its only value is to illustrate that the value of crit reduces as overheal increases. It is not fixed to 0.5% per point. To really do this well one must assume a certain overheal distribution (assuming a bell curve is good enough) and then integrate the value of overheal over the entire range. This is because not all heals have the same overheal as the avearge.

This conclusively shows that the value of crit is only 0.5% at 0% overheal. At any amount of overheal higher than 0%, overheals have reduced value even under the preposterous assumption that crits have exactly the same overheal as non crits.

I afraid you are the one who does not understand tank damage patterns. Tanks have different avoidance abilities. Parry and dodge are the only ones resulting in complete mitigation. Block results in reduced damage. With 50% parry/dodge and 25% crit its aegis loss to overwriting is about 3%. 3% or 5% it makes very little difference in the end. The take home message is that its very small. Loss of the buff with a 12 second timer is a joke.

b) Sorry but the only thing I can say is your concept of how tank healing works is awfully skewed. 5 healers landing heals on the tank landing them at completely random intervals of 2-5 seconds means that the probability of not having a heal landing for an interval longer than 1.5 seconds is actually pretty small. Aegis and PWS unlike healing reduce damage taken after they go on and all at once, rather than later on. Aegis and PWS effectively increase the number of heals landing on the tank per second. You never provide healing equal to the maximum possible hit on every hit. If you could do that the encounter would be absoludely trivial. Spikes are nearly always the result of underhealing. Because aegis and PWS stay on the target until used. Hence every incidence of PWS and aegis that occurs before an underhealing incidence will effectively mitigate a spike. Any spike being mitigated means the tank has an increased chance of survival. This is not possible with other type of heals.

c) That shows exactly how little understanding you have. 6% more healing does not under any circumstances equal 6% damage reduction. Damage reduction is better, because a) healing comes after damage is taken and b) you have overheal to account for. If the tank is taking 5k damage 6% of that is 300 HPS. Grace comes from a single healer so its the equivalent of a single healer adding an extra 300 HPS. Saying that increasing healing by 6% is trivial shows you exactly how foolish it is to talk about max HPS. Max HPS is rarely used and never sustained.

How do you come to this 3% number, given typical boss attack speeds of ~1.5 seconds between swings it seems unexpectedly low. my raid tank frequently puts together 5-10 secs avoidance runs and back to back crits aren't that uncommon even with a poxy 11% crit rate. Now this may be the human minds ability to remember edge cases as more frequent than they actually occur but I am genuinely interested in how you calculated this number as it is important to modelling the value of Aegis.

Edit

It looks like what you have calculated here is the chance of any combo of 2 random heals and once boss hit generating an overwrite .25*.25*.5 . However that's not what we are trying to calculate. We want to know what happens once a shield has been applied, so we should start the calculation from the moment the shield is applied so there is a 50% chance of avoiding the hit (assuming an average swing speed of 1.5-2 seconds means only swing before the next heal lands with a 25% crit chance. 50% x 25% = 12.5% chance for a shield overwrite in this situation). Paradoxically hard hitting slow swinging bosses generate more overwrite than very fast weak hitting bosses as there is more chance of an avoidance streak. Experience also says that these bosses generate the worst overheal as well.

Can we all agree that spikes kill tanks?

If healers had to ability to spam high hps, sub 1.5 second heals from start to finish of a fight this would not be the case. However, tank healing is about stability and reducing reation time (read time till next heal lands, whether or not it was started before the hit occured). Substantiate exact heal/overheal/throughput values all you want but it won't change the fact that what the disc talents do is reduce the chance that the RNG will insta-gib your tank. In nearly all boss strategies, stability is more important than perfectly matching your maximum output. For dpsers, if your max damage output leads to pulling aggro....reduce your damage output so as to not create instability. It may mean cancelling a cast to step away from a damage zone a momment sooner or running out of the whirlwind area 2 seconds to soon.

So even though Disc may produce less maximum output it will produce more stability. Two things wipe raids in my experience:
1.) Player mistakes/ineptitude. Strategy refinement, practice, and better players can negate this.
2.) The RNG: Not much you can do about this bastard...but Blizz has given Disc a decent shot at protecting your raid from the RNG monster. Use it. Love it.

P.S. Kortar seems bent on stirring up arguments in all the heal threads. See the WotLK Resto Sham thread.

I like it - maybe changing CoH to a more mana intensive spell (non spammable for extended periods) would keep in line with the current playstyle changes that seem to be made to healing priests. Giving us a burst of CoH then back to our other healing tools might be a nice balance between insane CoH spamm-a-thons and very situational use long CD spell.

Just as a sidenote: Could either this thread be renamed (since basically Holy is discussed here as well) or the Holy Thread re-opened again? Things are starting to get a bit messy in here, in my opinion at least.

Hehehe this is one of the most common mistakes in statistics . What you are doing is calculating the probability that an ovewrite will occur given that a crit has just occured. Even though it seems intuitive it is not correct. A probabilty is simply a proportion of all total outcomes leading to a particular result. If you fix an event (I.e. P of event A given event B = P(a)b) then you need to take into account the probability that this event will actually occur in the first place. In other words Pab = Pb*P(a)b. Feel free to open a statistics book and check it out. If you want I can type in the theory from my old text books for you.

In other words you cannot calculate overwrite that way. What you need to do is calculate what the probability of back to back criticals is and the determine what chance the tank has to avoid not being hit in between like I have done.

Fast hitting bosses, are generally not that great for aegis. Its not really an ability like aegis that you need against those, since damage is fairly constant you just suitably high HPS, since the damage is fairly predictable due to the large frequency of hits. Aegis is most usefull against slow, but very hard hitting bosses, where its very easy for a tank to spike due to underheal. In these cases aegis will mitigate a certain proportion of the spikes, because it will be there just when an unexpectedly large hit occurs. PWS will mitigate some more spikes like that in the same way and the rest will hopefully be mopped by by large heals landing fortuitously on time and use of cooldowns. Any drop in one of these abilities against a boss like this increases the chance of a tank gib. If you reduce the probablity that your tank will die to 10% from 5%, you are saving your raid an arseload of wipes. Unless I have grossly overestimated the power of hte new disc talents or grossly underestimated those of holy, in such difficult to heal encounters, a raid who does not run with a disc priest will probably get one to respec to it.

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Since the 20% haste buff now only applies to gheal/BH and FH I also think that the removal of the CD from CoH was a wellcome addition. Not having haste globally is unfortunate. I think we need to calculate however what kind of HPS one can achieve with all these spells. Although it would be interesting to see whether we will actually need to use CoH as much as we did before. After all PoM/BH/GH and FH should now provide very competitive HPS at a much higher mana efficiency.

I still suspect that we might be doing a lot of raid healing with single target heals.

If you wanted to open up the other thread, I would be more than willing to keep it updated.

The OP here has not updated with the new/changed talents since July 5th...

To be honest, I don't think the first post needs to be updated as much as the title changed. I don't check the first post at all; I'm only really interested in the discussion.

I'll send a PM to the OP and see if he's going to step up. If not, we can have Snowy or one of the other Mods lock this and start a new one that someone will keep updated. That is, if people actually think having an updated first post is meaningful?

I think it is Nid, can be used as a quick reference for changes made to talents and abilities.

That way people can come to one place for information and discussion.

Just tagging it "Holy/Disc" for a title should at least stop people from posting into the wrong threads just because they can't find a Holy WotLK thread. Updating the first post to have a place to point people to wouldn't hurt, but it's not really a necessity at this point, I don't think.