There is one nice piece of info for CoH priests. There is a new item in COT:Stratholme called the Soul Preserver that is basically an updated Eye of Gruul. At least according to wowhead, it's the same mechanic as the Eye of Gruul, but it reduces your next spell cast by 800 mana. CoH at 80 should cost 811 mana, so with at least 2 points in mental agility, if you get it below 800, then you can get this to proc and get a free CoH cast and stay within the FSR. The proc chance may be even higher, since you can glyph CoH to hit an extra target.

The new Rapture is really starting to bother me.

Since Rapture scales your mana return based on a large, arbitrary, and unobtainable number for all but Greater Heal. On PTR right now a Flash Heal returns 0.8% or so of my maximum mana on a 100% effective heal, Penance might return something like 1.6%--(note that this is in PvP gear, about 900 spellpower). Power Word: Shield would return about 1.1% or so, except that it seems bugged right now and doesn't return mana.

I have two problems with this mechanism:

(1) Spells that cannot possibly heal for 7k (or whatever the scaling number is at 70) regardless give mana back based on this number, making 100% effective Flashes and Shields return 30-40% of the mana advertised. In my view, Flash Heal should be scaled by an obtainable number, like 2.5k or so (in PvP gear my Flash hits for 2k average).

(2) The mechanism makes Rapture return significant mana only on Penance and Greater Heal, and thus essentially punishes Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield, the main spells of a Discipline Priest in my mind (especially at 70 when getting Divine Fury with Penance isn't worth it).

I almost feel as though the talent description is lieing to me--advertising mana returns that I will never, ever realize.

With full SoL/HC/IHC, you have 6 possible states:
A: no SoL/no HC
B: no SoL/HC (haste and mana)
C: no SoL/HC (haste only)
D: SoL/no HC
E: SoL/HC (haste and mana)
F: SoL/HC (haste only)

For single target healing only, I'd suggest you explore the possibility of using Flash Heal whenever you're in states D&F, Greater Heal when you're in states B&E, and Binding Heal in states A&C. Calculating this requires a fairly hefty bit of math, but I suspect you'll discover that SoL really is worth it.

Note: Binding Heal is larger at base than Flash Heal, gets another +10% over Flash Heal, and has two chances to proc both SoL and HC/IHC.

For multi-target healing, SoL is monstrously good. It allows you to spend a GCD to gain ~170 mana without interrupting your FSR. Or to land an instant heal. Or, more likely, both.

If you spam Flash Heal, you have a cost reduction of 0.725 * critical (higher than 0.6 * critical from Illumination). If you spam Binding Heal you have 1 - (1 - (critical * 0.45)) ^ 2 cost reduction (at 20% critical, this would be equivalent to 0.8595 * critical from Illumination). The only spell where Priests don't beat Paladins for critical mana reduction would be Greater Heal, and it's still fairly close there. And if you properly sequence your casting, you beat Paladins on Greater Heal (since you're exploiting Binding Heal procs to cast Greater Heal).

I'm not sure why you're bringing up Light's Grace. Light's Grace is basically just a more narrow form of Divine Fury. Priests get both -0.5s off their large heal and a proccable haste. Paladins only really get the former.

Also bear in mind that SoL/HC/IHC give you something far better than Divine Aegis does: an ability that is always useful. These abilities save mana and time. Divine Aegis just throws up extra 'healing' at the least useful time to get extra healing - namely, right after a crit.

In terms of points invested, who cares? Paladins get +12% to all healing for 3 points, while Priests get +10% for 5 points. That seems like a much better starting point for a whine about point-for-point imbalance. And then I'm sure the Paladins will come back and whine about how they have to spend 5 points to get the same effect as the 2-point Healing Focus.

New patch, not much worth talking about:

-Desperate prayer cost went up another 2% base mana

-Healing focus now reduces the actual pushback by 70%

-Focused power increases your spell power flat out now i guess.

Shadow wise, dispersion lost the 25% damage buff

And I guess it's worth mentioning in here since we will be balanced against it, resto shamans lost spirit link and got a new heal:
Heals a friendly target for 481 to 519 and another 500 over 15 sec sec. Your next Chain Heal cast on that primary target within 15 sec sec will consume the healing over time effect and increase the amount of the Chain Heal by 25%. (21% of base mana, 40 yd range, Instant cast, 6 sec cooldown)

By
do you mean our Int+Spirit OO5SR regen number has been hammered that much? I haven't logged in today, but yesterday it was still at the 0.0072-ish coefficient by my envelope numbers.

If we're losing that much regen, they really are trying to force us to take Mp5, which is a moronic decision to make. We were the only class that truly made use of spirit -- if this change goes live, it just removes the impetus for us to take all those spirit-heavy pieces.

I like being a spirit-based class. It's elegant, and easy to model.

My ooc regen went from 1450ish to 1150ish when raid buffed, I thought I was just missing some buffs because it wasn't something I had been paying too much attention to, but I guess the change mentioned explains it.

Ouch, I had a feeling they would end up changing the system because it was too strong in 2.4 and beyond, but that's still not enjoyable to know.
I hadn't thought to check before though.

I saw a blue beta post few weeks ago in which they stated that mana regeneration was overall too good at the moment. No-one was having any mana troubles (with the exception of Retri palas maybe, he mentioned). I think they are trying to nerf overall mana regeneration rather than spirit one specifically.

I guess it depends on the content. I was randomly running around doing 5-man dungeons last night, and most of them were trivial - to - moderate. I actually went oom once in Stratholme, largely because we weren't familiar with the pulls yet and kept chaining from packs into bosses. But that was completely without buffs: no BoW, no BoK, and no Replenishment.

What I fear is that this change will make us *dependent* on Replenishment. Call me a traditionalist, but I've always gemmed and geared heavily towards the assumption that I won't be getting all the available buffs, so that I'm largely self-sufficient. A nerf of 24% of my mana regen is a hefty chunk and feels way overdone, especially when we already lost 25% as we leveled. This puts us at (as said above) approximately half our personal regen levels per point of spirit from TBC -> WotLK.

I'm running Naxx for the first time this weekend, so I'll post some feedback after I get a feel for what raiding is like. From what I've seen of 5-mans, a heroic is almost going to require Replenishment if this change holds. I don't like that -- it's eerily similar to the TBC requirements of "bring a mage to every heroic", only slightly expanded to "bring a survival hunter, shadow priest, or ret paladin to every heroic". The total availability of those classes vs mages in TBC release will be roughly the same. My guild has 1 ret, 1 survival, and 3 shadow priests, one of whom (at least) will be changing mains in WotLK. Hopefully I'm crying wolf; we'll see.

Totally agree. Asd someone going disc, I would be surprised if the holy priests didn't drop inspiration and take extra holy spec.

One of the interesting problems we have at the moment is both trees have mandatory talents.

Holy - Healing Focus, Divine Fury and Improved Healing (well scrap IH, disc priests can't realistically reach it)

Disc - Meditation

After reading about all the number crunching of intellect being a new regen stat (especially for discipline priests), why not change it so that replenishment ticks for a percentage of our highest regen stat? (int or spirit) This way spirit is still the stat it should be for both druids and priests and at the same time replenishment still works as it should for all the other mana based classes.