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 whole idea was that we were going to lose downranking and get meaningfully more chances to have Clearcasts with Holy Concentration and -- especially -- with Improved Holy Concentration. In the original pass of the talents, that was achieved. In the current pass, it's really just not achieved.

Perhaps someone can go back to the drawing board and try again?

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)

It would appear as though the coefficient at 80 is now 59.8% of what it is on live, having suffered a 21.8% reduction in beta from what it was in the builds prior to 8962. I understand the motivation behind this change due to how much mages and warlocks are now able to utilize spirit, but I feel like we have wound up in a bad position because of our already existant mana problems. As Sarjin said, "We are supposed to be the Spirit class, yet out of all cloth classes are now the only one without any sort of regen while casting as baseline.". It feels very much as though our trees have not been reconstructed in accordance with Blizzard's more recent design strategies; synergy between useful talents is sparce at best, and even the trees as a whole don't seem to relate very closely to how Blizzard stated they wanted them to function.

Also I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but Shadowfiend on beta is no longer scaling with damage. Instead I am finding a consistent 4% mana restored when it lands a hit, and the amount of mana restored when I use it with a few pieces of gear off supports this figure.

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.

This already was in effect yesterday - I noticed the difference on my tooltip, that's weird. Perhaps just a visual bug, as I have frequently noticed stats/percentages not displaying proper values.

The coefficient is now ~0.0055 at 80.

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.

Blizzard seem to have the whole "selfless buffer" philosophy now. i.e. Misery increases spellhit by 3% for the raid, but also increases Mind Flay/Mind Blast/Mind Sear dmg. Perhaps Inspiration (and indirectly, Ancestral Healing) could be flagged under the same rule? i.e. give it a secondary effect, perhaps spell crit "to combine with" Holy Specialisation.

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.

Actually, what would have made me feel better is more explanation about where the numbers were coming from. I don't think a few percent difference in crit percent will amount to much either. However, I'd love to see more of the reasoning behind the numbers. I like going over the math in some detail. When all I see is 15% for one case and 25% for the other, it's a little confusing because I'm left to guess what you're thinking.

But yeah, renewed hope, mental strength, and possibly more holy specialization are all going to increase discipline's crit rate over holy's even in identical gear. Good points.

Perhaps I need to explain more. I understood you had taken both divine aegis and haste into account, and I don't really disagree with your estimates.

My point about divine aegis is just that it may be simpler to just consider it like an improvement to the size of your crits. In other words, consider it a talent that "increases the size of your critical heal effect by 30/60/90%". Many classes have very similar talents, and one generally deals with them mathematically by changing the coefficient you multiply by for crits. In this case, instead of your coefficient being 0.5, it would be 0.95. So the formula for a heal is then:

(Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*(1 + 0.95*crit)

which is equivalent to the formula you list above but simplified a bit. I am fully aware that a shield is not the same as a heal. Overhealing is effectively zero on a shield if you have significant ongoing damage that consumes the shield before its duration expires. However, that difference isn't significant when estimating peak HPS, so you can safely simplify the formula then.

Haste is a more complicated issue, mostly because cooldowns are not shortened by haste. That is to say, cooldown-limited spells are not cast more frequently as you add more haste and may be cast less frequently in order to avoid "dead time". I definitely understand that with more haste you can potentially fit more casts within a certain time period (e.g. a 30 second cycle), and so I understand why you'd want to come up with a 30 second spell rotation.

The problem with that is that it only works well for a specific spell haste and is fairly brittle to any changes in spell haste percentage. A specific rotation may work well for 10% haste but not for 15%. That's not a huge deal, but it also seems like working out a precise spell rotation is a lot of work for maybe not so much. How much is really gained over a more crude estimate?

Also, I do have a technical question about how you're fitting 8 GH + 3 Pen + 2 PWS + 2 FH + 1 PoM. The base cast time on all those adds to 33.5 secs, so how is that getting crunched into under 30 sec? In addition, the PoM is mentioned but does not seem to be included in the HPS total.

Just had a longer session on 8970 PTR to try out the Disc tree some.

Penance seems to scale the same as Greater Heal, 1.61*Spell Power. Each tick gets 1/3 of the scaling.

Twin Disciplines seems to affect Penance, increasing the healing done by Penance by up to 5%.

Grace also increased Penance's Healing by up to 6%.

1/2 Focused Power increased Penance's Healing by up to 2%.

2/2 Focused Power however, did not increase Penance's Healing at all. Seems to be bugged.

So with my 1085 Spell Power (Grace 3 stack, 5/5 Twin Disc, 1/2 Focused Power), Penance was doing 1576-1693 ticks, avg 4900 for entire Penance for 419 mana, where Greater Heal would do about 4700 for 838 mana.

[e] To the above poster: how on earth do you only have 1085 spellpower?? That's early T5-levels of gear. Even leveling should replace that with enough to get you to 1400+.

So I ran a few instances last night as pretty cookie-cutter holy (DS, CoH, 3/3 IHC, 3/3 Serendipity), and had no mana issues per se ... but it was a highly artificial situation. I had Replenishment, BoW, and BoK.

My worry is that there were definitely moments when I was running on fumes in heroic UP. The tank had 4/8 T6 and some Naxx pieces, and was running 27k HP, and especially on bosses, was getting *wrecked*, and my mana was getting burned. The only way I kept up was to use Runic Mana Potions with a Redeemer's Alchemist Stone for 6k mana return.

And this was with the Best Possible Situation. It will be extremely rare to have 2 paladin buffs *and* Replenishment in the same 5-man.

So while raid mana may be fine (running Naxx this weekend, should be fun), balancing everything around that situation, where you can assume paladin buff(s), shaman buff(s), full-time Replenishment, and all the bells and whistles that go along with it ... well, it's going to make heroic dungeons unpleasant until we outgear them significantly. And that's rather against the point.

I had 1200 spirit, 1860 spellpower, and ~ 12% crit. IHC procs were rare, and, as I said above, I was using mana pots on every major pull (the gauntlet, the last boss fight, etc.). I'm not impressed if this is what they consider balanced, given that I'm in BiS gear for TBC, and have regemmed and re-enchanted all of my gear to WotLK standards. There's no way a random priest in leveling blues / leftover T5/T6 epics is going to be able to keep up to that kind of healing, especially if their tank is less geared than the one I had.

I see most builds still take healing focus. Given the various changes to the overall pushback mechanic and to how holy focus works I'm starting to think that this is a talent we can skip completely in a deep holy build when not engaged in PvP. As I see it every spell can only be interrupted/pushed back a maximum of 1 second now and the 2 talent points will reduce this to 0.3 seconds pushback worst case. In my eyes it isn't worth spending 2 talent points that I will need for other things for a .7 sec pushback protection, holy spec is far more valuable as is improved renew. Ironically it retains it's value better for deep disc as it reduces the loss of ticks from penance.

He just said PTR, not beta, i.e. he's at level 70.
On healing focus: Depends entirely on raid damage. Constant ticks (i.e. Sapphiron) are likely to disrupt HPS rather heavily without it. 2.8 second GH down to 3.5 second GH drops HPS by around 25%, which is significant, and combined with Concentration Aura there's no lost time with two points in it.

Edit: Constantius, remember that the incoming damage on tanks is currently broken because of the crit chance of mobs (due to Warrior base chance being changed and most mobs using that as their base). Tanks shouldn't be getting destroyed quite as much in retail. Also, were you solo-healing? Most heroics I ran in early TBC we did with two healers, or at least a primary and secondary (moonkin/elemental shaman) for hard packs just due to gear requirements. That was before they fixed the broken itemisation though, so maybe it isn't quite comparable. It also sounds like you had minimal CC, which wouldn't help.

My likely level 80 build:
13/58/0

Of course, I'm thinking that Holy Priests will primarily use Flash/Binding Heal as single target heals, Circle of Healing for multi-target heals and Greater Heal generally only to recover mana via Serendipity. Renew will be used when you want to the Resto Shaman to laugh at your pathetic attempts to use HoT spells. And we'll gear for spell critical > spellpower, int > spi, and spell haste not all.

And I really wish I could explain why without burying people under a blizzard of math, strategy and theory. I don't believe it's the intent of Blizzard for Holy Priests to be crit-heal spammers who defiantly misuse a multi-target heal when they need to ramp up their single target healing performance or purposefully overheal for mana restoration purposes. But I do believe that right now that's what they are - and that most of the angst from Holy Priests is due to obsolete gearing/playstyle decisions that made a lot of sense in BC but don't in WotLK.

Some concepts to think about that might lead you down the same train of thought:
1. There's such a thing as 'too much' healing now. The downranking nerf goes way beyond just mana management issues. Optimizing your healing output for maximum throughput used to be a pretty good idea because you could transform that transform into mana efficiency. With the downranking nerf, extra throughput is simply wasted. So you really want the "right amount" of throughput - which is very likely a lot less than you're actually going to generate with a standard selection of gear. Remember, solo-healing content has to be scaled against classes that aren't quite as good as Holy Priests at solo-healing.

2. Test of Faith might as well read: "+6% healing/+6% spell crit". Ignore the limitation, because it doesn't really matter. It provides the benefit only when you actually need the benefit. Or think about how useless the reverse of Test of Faith would be - a talent that provided bonuses only when the target was high health. Such a talent's main virtue would be pumping up your overhealing numbers, right?

3. Binding Heal is good as a single target heal. WotLK Binding Heal is natively higher single throughput than Flash Heal (BC is the same throughput) and it gets an extra 10% from Divine Providence. More importantly, it has a double chance to proc Holy Concentration/Surge of Light. If you're feeding those HC procs into almost-certain-to-overheal-someone Greater Heals, that goes a long way towards compensating for the lower mana efficiency of using Binding Heal as a single target heal.

4. Renew is pretty terrible. Priests used to be a distant second to Resto Druids in HoT performance. They're now a distant third to Resto Shaman - who are themselves a distant second to Resto Druids. Heck, I'm not sure that Priests aren't fourth behind Retribution Paladins at this point. The fact that in a raid setting it's likely to be less mana efficient than your Flash Heal should speak volumes about WotLK Renew.

5. The law of averages is a powerful ally. One of the reasons healers don't like criticals is that you can't depend on them. But if you're casting quickly enough, this doesn't really matter. You'll eventually get some average number of crits. So for anyone casting 'micro-heals', critical is a lot more powerful than someone who is depending on large, slow heals. I direct you to the enormous cost savings Flash Heal gets from criticals and the spell Circle of Healing as exhibits 'A' and 'B'.

6. Spirit is no longer king. It's not even queen. It's more like court jester. With 3/3 Meditation you have to run about 78% FSR to make Spirit match mp5 in terms of itemization cost. Run more than about 85% FSR and you should junk your Spirit gear for mp5 gear, even accounting for the spellpower bonus from Spiritual Guidance. Add in that pretty much every mana regen effect works off your total mana (and thus your Intellect) or is non-scaling and you're looking at a situation where one of the core mechanics that has defined Priestdom is severely lacking. Note: If you're one of those people who were thinking "how can he possibly generate numbers like that without assigning a value to Intellect?" you'd be right. I used 1k rather arbitrarily. However the square root scaling means that even pumping your Intellect obscenely doesn't increase the value of Spirit all that greatly.

Was mentioned in the other threat, but I didn't see it here. Shadowfiend hits apparently restore 4% of your mana, and no longer scales with +damage. Further diminishing spirit.

[e] Since I wasn't explicit. This change makes int more valuable. Assuming all 11 hits land (which begs to question if priest +hit affects shadowfiend), we should get back 44% of our mana per a use.

Shadowfiend is "nice" now; it's restoring about 40-45% of my mana bar from what I recall from last night. I was using it quite often, and it was nice to see such solid chunks of mana. Remember: I had almost 14k mana without any mana scaling buffs (no AI, no GotW; just BoK), and I was still getting percentages, which was hawt.

To Dukes: ya, no CC. However, Heroic UP doesn't really seem like a "CC place". I didn't feel like there were packs where CC would have helped. However, if the crit chances are borked, that could explain why the tank was getting wrecked.

Basically, though, I have to assume that "balanced" means "ridiculous to moderately trivial" (for me). If it's not, then it's going to be way too hard for most priests to handle solo. Not trying to be arrogant with a statement like that; just noting that I have way more gear than most priests have access to, and am able to run with similarly outgeared people. When I walk into a heroic with a tank in full Sunwell gear, and a random level 80 priest walks in with a DK in blues from regular dungeons ... world of difference.

If anyone else is at 80 and running heroics, I'd love to hear a rough feeling of how you think they're tuned. I never brought a second healer along in TBC for the early heroics, even the nasty ones. More CC, yes. More healing, no. If I can't solo heal a 5-man, there's something seriously wrong with the tuning/setup/expectations. If I can't solo heal a heroic without Replenishment, then they've shot themselves in the foot (again), repeating the mistake of TBC.

Remember how you would almost never do a heroic without serious CC? Like, "mage/druid-or-warrior/healer + 2 dps". Well, now it's "tank/healer/Replenishment Bitch/CC + dps". That leaves a lot of people out in the cold, and really doesn't seem interesting to me.

[e] To the above poster: Spirit and Intellect are still king. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but the item budget on Mp5 is so ridiculous, especially when you factor in that you also have to add spellpower because you're losing the scaling from SoR, BoK, and SG ... I'm still planning on stacking it heavily, or as heavily as possible, and I never see myself using a Mp5-based gem. Pure intellect over pure spirit? Yes. Mp5? Never. It's a horrible horrible stat. And it doesn't scale AT ALL.

Take a look at chest, for example. Which would you rather have: +10 all stats, or +8 Mp5? Assume my stats as stated above for a regular 5-man, with BoK : 700 int, 1200 spirit. If I get +10 all stats, then I get an additional +10*1.05*1.1 spirit, and +10*1.1 intellect. I lose 2 Mp5 I5SR, but gain 12 outside, and also gain increased regen from Replenishment, increased healing (only +3 spellpower, but it adds up), and a slightly increased mana pool.

To make it clear: stats almost always win over Mp5. Almost always. There are situations where, yes, the odd piece of Mp5 is going to be ok simply because of item budget setups. However, if you're looking at enchants, use spellpower or intellect to bracers; +10 all stats to chest; +spellpower to gloves, etc.. The only enchants or gems you should end up using Mp5 on are helm and shoulders, since we don't have much of a choice if we want regen on those slots. Alternatively, stack a bit more regen elsewhere and use the spellpower/crit options that seem to be available now.

Don't assume you're so much better geared than an average level 80 priest. The priest I'm using in beta was a friend's pvp alt, he only had s1 gear so I scrapped it all shortly after entering northrend. You mentioned having 14k mana, well in northrend blues and heroic/nax10 epics (and disc spec) I have over 22k buffed, that is a fairly large difference considering that so many mechanics scale off total mana. Also heroic pulls are fairly short and you have a chance to drink at the end so total mana is > than regen in that situation (not that I've ever had to drink with rapture and penance being so efficient).

Though I've always played as disc so far except 1 instance run and 1 patchwerk kill as holy just to try it out so I won't claim to know how holy plays particularly well.

Also as far as how heroics are tuned, they are still in a very raw state at the moment, some are much harder than others. Second and third boss in Utgarde Pinnacle are fairly hard, rest of the instance is much easier in comparison.