The biggest issue is Intellect surpassing Spirit for mana regeneration by quite a margin with Replenishment always active.

That is a problem for every caster since Spirit is supposed to be better for regeneration, and the itemization reflects that. This has barely gotten any atention yet from what I've seen.

Fair enough--still strong but not quite what it was. I suppose I looked at the previous poster's results of Rapture without paying close enough attention to what maximum mana at level 80 would be. Let me specify my complaints a bit more: I'm concerned that rapture returns from PW:S and Flash Heal, in Arena settings with PvP gear, will end up being sub-par--thus not addressing the horrendous mana consumption of priests in PvP.

If rapture returns a lot of mana from landing full Gheals in a raid setting--that's great and very valuable. But in PvP, it doesn't help if rapture returns only a little bit of mana relative to the massive cost of Flash Heal and Power Word: Shield.

Edit: By the wording of the talent, I would have expected a 100% effective Flash heal to return 2.5% max mana, just as a 100% effective Gheal seems right now to return 2.5% max mana. Not for a 100% effective flash heal to return 1% max mana because it heals for 40% (arbitrarily throwing out a number now) of what Gheal can possibly do.

Edit2: Abraham's data indicates that his flash heals hit for about 30% of his greater heals (Here), and Flash costs 18% base mana vs. Greater's 32% base mana. Either way--Rapture's efficacy with Flash Heal leaves a lot to be desired (as does its efficacy with PW:S). So if Rapture'ing a Flash Heal returns 30% of the mana of Gheal at 56% the mana cost....

Chirality, I agree that Rapture isn't that great in PvP, but I think this is somewhat intended to balance out the other cooldowns and shield power.

In PvE the benefits from it are pretty amazing if you take both Divine Aegis and have a high crit rate. A crit GHeal, even if the entire crit bonus is overheal, stands to return you the largest percentage of mana, since you get a separate proc from the Divine Aegis and from the effective heal you've just done.

There is more at play than simply overheal percentage. I was just on Beta trying it out. I jumped off a roof in Org, healed myself with a GHeal for ~5300 and it restored 147 mana (I forget the exact numbers). In either case, it was 1.3% of my max mana. I suspect Rapture is bugged or, at least, has an awful tooltip.

The theory that it restores (2.5 * X/10000) where X is the amount of effective heal is the model that seems to approximate the effect the closest at the moment.

Shen hits pretty much all my issues with lightwell perfectly.

The problem isn't whether or not it's worth a talent point - the raid can adapt to the heal and make it worth buying. The problem is that it's an extremely situational heal that provides marginal benefit and is not fun to use. As a melee DPS main (the group most likely to "benefit" from lightwell), I do not look forward to being expected to watch for whether lightwell is up when I need healing.

Furthermore, the comparisons to healthstones are 100% specious. One is a single charge consumable that is picked up before the fight, can be used at any time, can be used anywhere, is instant, cannot be used up by someone else, and can be placed on your bar. The other is a HoT that might or might not be up, based on the actions of raidmates, requires you to be next to it, and requires you to click on it - which might be under the boss, another player, unit frames, or even doodads (think trying to loot mobs on Mother trash). And to top things off, the number of times healthstones has, or would have, made a difference on whether I lived or died is pretty minimal.

You can certainly argue that lightwell has it's uses in enough fights to merit taking it. The problem is that it's still marginally useful and not fun for most players - both healers and healees.

Lightwell needs to be a small radius aura that heals up to 5 people. The "clicking" is the biggest issue with it.

Either that or it needs to be some sort of self-buff for the priest. (In the sense, I cast Lightwell, then when the priest clicks it, it self buffs t he priest to heal for +x more spellpower or something -- keeping the idea of drawing power from a well of light or something).

Also, did they fix the targetting issues lightwell has with... transparent surfaces? (I think thats the word I am looking for). Like in Al'ars room, its utter frustration to use lightwell in the center of the room (just an example, obviously you can use it on the side of the room... in that case, but in other cases its a pain in the ass -- like MEchanar's bridge).

Here's the bottom line for PvP: Penance might be amazing but I'm more concerned with "how fast I can heal myself" than I am "how fast can I heal my allies". The current disc tree invests a stupid amount of points making PW:S your best 'heal', but without a decent Rapture to back it up I might as well stop putting points in Disc after Focused Will and pick up Blessed Resilience from Holy.

Edit: Or say 'fuck it' to the disc tree beyond improved mana burn and perhaps focused power.

Edit: 37/34/0. Focused Will + Blessed Resilience + a Lightwell to click on while you're Silenced =)

Isn't that kind of the whole issue with Disc right now? They've got a heck of a lot of talents in there to specifically buff Penance and PW:S, but neither one is worth it when you shake everything out. For PvE, your best build is going to be to go in and grab Rapture, Divine Aegis and -maybe- Grace, depending on what exactly they end up doing with it (re: Koraa posting that they were changing it but not providing enough details to really know the exact mechanic) and then driving up the holy tree through Spiritual Healing. Gets you all the +stats boosts guarenteeing your regen, a shield on crits, and Rapture which is still fabulous. For PvP, you're not even going to go that far.

Trying to actually get a fully buffed Penance eats all but two talent points (51 disc+18 holy just to synergize the thing) and short changes you far too much to make it worth it. Trying to max out your shield leaves everything else so gimped that it, too isn't worth it. The fact that you can't do shield and penance in the same build is just bizarre.

Assuming the 9332 target value for Rapture, a 7500 av Gheal (assumes +2800 healing) is going to return something like 360 mana on a 18k mana pool. By comparison, Serendipity at a 24% return is what... 196 mana? If that's really the mechanic, a crit gheal should theorycraft to under 100 mana considering you'll max out the Rapture return and you'll get the bonus return from Aegis. The really bizarre thing is that Rapture is going to make your heal cost scale down with gear.

I would be really surprised to see this go live. Gear scaling just makes this get stupid. My int goes up, my mana pool gets bigger, regen gets higher, and my spell costs go DOWN. That's exponential growth in the number of spells you can cast per encounter.

As I said - we used the old lightwell and were not completely unhappy with it. But my point is - it is too situational that it will you do learly no good in that situations where you realy would love to have a boost to all your other spells.

If you consider BC-instances lightwell also could be used and be usefull in ever regular and heroic instant and most encounters in kara, with gruul and maggi. It could help in some encounters in ZA. But if you go up in the content it simply gets less usable. You dont have mana-/time-/healpower-problems with the raid in most encounters where everybody can stand still and does not get much aoe-dmg. And lightwell is only usefull for raid/grouphealing.

With the exception of gruul and maggi which are not realy raid-instances but more singel bosses, there is only one final-boss-encounter in BC where lightwell could realy be usefull (ZA, bird-phase). Yes you could use it in others, too, but most times you would either not need it or not reach enough people who would need it.

Healing heroics or beginning instances should not be the problema. It should be healable with wide possibilities to speccs etc. It should not be realy on the edge.

That even goes for everybody who said that he loves to use it in beta now in every instance he has put a food in. - I would have said that in BC as well for the early content.

But if you consider harder bossfights - and blizz made it clear that there will be big difficulty differences between early raiding and raiding later on - you will get back something with much running around and unpredictable dmg and issues with spreading people around and much movement - maybe movement that cannot clearly predicted (because of some aoe-effects and stuff).

There is the point where you have to consider about everything you can do to your healing. And there you will be pressed hard to get the possibility to use lightwell. You have only one shot for it for a very long time. If you cannot put it to a position where the people who need to use it (because they will die otherwise!) can use it while maintaining their job you have wasted your talent-point.

Somebody said that the only reason it was not usefull in higher instances was that it broke on dmg and with the changes would not do so. In most encounters it would do so, since with actual aoe-raid-dmg you reach 30% of the life of most players very fast (something about 3k-4k in BC). But even if it would not break you would be left with the positioning-problem.

That combined with the very long CD and everything Shan wrote (I could not put it better) is the big problem of the lightwell. Not that it did not heal enough or that it broke or that it had to less charges (that even made it less usefull).

Not to change the subject, but I must have missed this during all the confusion over the last few days, and it didn't get mentioned on here past the quote of the blue post.
For pvp, this is really a healthy and fun change if I am understanding the mechanics correctly (and remembering how ignite works). In theory, it actually works amazingly well to counter the general silliness of mindless melee zergs sticking on priests pretty much constantly entire matches. Take enough crits and you get a little personal lifebloom.

Would be pretty funny for people to stop attacking priests for 6 seconds every once in a while if their BR stack gets too good :p

It will probably end up with a cap, I think anyone can see the obvious possible outdoor pve exploits. But, it still sounds pretty fun.

Yes that is a nifty change.

How does Ignite work exactly though?

Say Blessed Recovery is 3 ticks long, if a crit happens after the first tick, is 25% of it added to the remaining to ticks, or is 2/3 of those 25% added to them?

It's neither your maximum HP nor your maximum GHeal. I took off all of my clothes (except weapons an trinkets) for the third test with low mana and also had only 5.5k HP and 550 Spell Power instead of 9.5k HP and 1280 Spell Power at the second test. So it is most likely a fixed value only dependend on your Char Level.
The (only) EU Beta Server is unplayable between 08:00-03:00, so I won't level any higher. It's just no fun to play with a >2 second latency on a server for 10 minutes, until it crashes again and you have to wait another 5 minutes to be able to login.

I don't understand the problem with Lightwell in the current build. Yes, it has been the worst 31p talent in the game since someone came up with the idea for the first time, but now they've buffed it through the roof and we can't really complain. Yes, if your DPS is all about "zomg crit pewpew" you will have a trouble learning them how to utilize it, but you can't blame that on the spell. If bad players are punished by game mechanics, that's a good game mechanic in my book.

Tell me, what other healer can heal 10 ppl for 6-7000 hp over 6 seconds while being silenced/not there? Now, if no encounters in the game make that good, I will be very surprised.

I can think of atleast 5 encounters in just Naxx where lightwell is an amazing tool. I think it will be a very fun but small addition to the raid with a lightwell.

1. Loatheb, you get fizzled when using healing spells... all spells but lightwell!

2. Heigan. Get teleported without a healer? Np, you've got a little lightwell there.

3. 4HM, DPS get a mark wrong? Your guild using the middle as a safespot out of LoS for healers? Lightwell sits in middle.

4. Faerlina. Silenced? Rain of fires occupying most healers and the badass priest mind controlling a mob? Lightwell does the trick.

5. Sapphiron. Damn you've lost a few people, curses running around and you're getting short on mana... need I say more? Lightwell will be super helpful healing up that steady stream of small damage.

I don't get it. Lightwell has never been fun for me. It's mostly the clicking and that one has to be near it. I'm a fast player and have everything hotkeyed, having LW exluded from that is something I don't like. I also move according to the raids needs and don't like to be bound to one spot just to be able to use LW. I'm sure it's the same for most other players.

And Lambi that all sounds nice and good but I'll just point to what I've said about Lightwell being unreliable to deal with periodic AOE damage.

So you can survive a rain of fire more easily with it, great the next few ones are gonna have to be survived without lightwell.

Same deal with teleport, healers not being there etc. Lightwell is just some charges every few minutes. It is useful but you have to be able to do without anyway, and in the end it boils down to saving mana. Yes not only as there are some situation where it's truly useful but I think you're giving it way too much credit.

A druid casting Flourish twice does the same as Lightwell without all its restrictions. Lightwell requires 10 people to take action, Flourish just requires one resto druid to cast it. If you still can't do it without Lightwell then you won't be able to do it the rest of the fight either.

Well Shanaya, to me it's fun because of the strategic use of it, not anything else. And in WotLK it's actually a powerful spell.

Actually, the new ignite does stack up, but only for the one mage.

So, the way it would work is (i'm using entirely theoretical numbers here)

You heal for 300 over 2 seconds (out of say 900, normally over 6 seconds), you get crit again.
You add the 600 remaining to the new 900, meaning 1500 over 6 seconds.

This is the way the new ignite works, it just doesn't stack for more than the one mage.

Not true.

If Blessed Recovery would mirror Ignite, this case you would have 600 healing remaining from the existing Blessed Recovery, add 600 to that from the new crit for a total of 1200, meaning 3 ticks of 400.

Ignite was changed in two ways in TBC, one being that each mage gets an individual ignite, the other being that the rolling mechanic which would reset the timer after a new crit and lead to every increasing ticks was eliminated. Yes, the tick amount you get when you crit will go up, to reflect a new amount of crit damage being added to the ignite. However, if you add up the ticks you get from an Ignite, it's total magnitude will be equal to 40% of each crit which contributed to it. In case of the old Ignite, the resetting of the counter meant that the total bonus damage from the Ignite in the end was considerably higher than adding up 40% of the individual spellcrits.

This also means that 'backing off' from a Priest to let the Blessed Recovery run is a non issue. Blessed Recovery will until it runs out always deliver 25% of the damage done by crits to the priest (assuming it mirrors Ignite exactly). The total health return would not increase due to rolling mechanics of multiple crits over a short period of time. This mechanic has been dead since TBC was released.

About crits.

Disc is about mitigation, shields.
On crit they put a shield on the target for 30% of the heals value.

Druids they use HoTs and bloom effect.
On crit they put a living seed (bloom effect) on the target for 30% of the heals value.

Paladins have always been known for the lasting power.
On crit they get mana back.

Shamans
ok i have to pass on shamans for now. they seem to have changed what i was looking for.

Any how.

Holy Priests are aoe healers.
Would it be very odd if we had an on crit effect that put a aoe heal (Circle of Heal type effect) on the target for 30% of the heals value?

Maybe this is just old stuff, if so im sorry.

Zorath the problem is that in most cases that AoE will probably be useless overheal, while the other crit effects have been specifically designed to not overheal. Also, Shaman consume a water shield orb on crit (200ish mana returned?) and heal the lowest health raid member by some amount.

If they change IHC correctly crit could be worth it for us. For example an outright ripoff of the old Elemental Shaman version of clearcasting, where on a crit you enter the clearcasting state. That would probably be far too powerful though (although it certainly would make crit a worthwhile stat, heh!) and I personally expect something along the liens of "when you critically heal with a spell there is a 10% chance to enter the clearcasting state". Now obviously a 10% chance would be very terrible, so hopefully it'll be more like 50% but who knows. Koraa seems clueless and past experience leaves me very pessimistic.

My guess is "You gain 10/15/20% of critical strike chance as a bonus to your Holy Conc rate." That would keep the Holy Conc proc rate right about where they have it now (+1/+2/+3) but allow it to grow as you gear up.

I think Shamans get: Ancestral Awakening
When you critically heal with your Healing Wave or Lesser Healing Wave, you summon an Ancestral spirit to aid you, instantly healing the lowest health friendly target within 40 yards for 7/13/20% of the amount healed.

Less benefit from crit, but the smart targetting is a nice touch which decreases any overhealing chance.