Apparently Reflective Shield is now working on Divine Aegis. It's not very significant in itself but it does hint at DA being rolled into the PW:S talents, which would certainly give disc a little more synergy.

I agree. Haste is more important for healing than its contribution to theoretical HPS. In practice, it shortens intervals between heals and that reduces the probability of a death, even if it doesn't improve your HPS. I think people forget that the real goal is to keep the tank alive, not maximize HPS. Sometimes maximizing HPS is a means to attaining your overall goal of keeping the tank up, but not always.

As an extreme example, if we had a super-duper heal with double the HPS throughput of a greater heal but with a 10 second cast time, would you use it frequently? Ever? Even though it doubles your HPS?

The point is that time is of the essence in healing, independent of its effects on HPS. In that sense, healing is totally different than DPS. There, if you had a 10 second cast that doubled your DPS, you'd spam it every boss fight. It follows that haste is more useful to healing than DPS.

In addition, I don't think you're healing well if you're too busy trying to conform to some optimized healing rotation. Rather than closely paying attention to your surroundings, you get tunnel vision. Next thing you know, you're standing in the fire, dogs and cats are living together, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man shows up.

Some people seem excessively bothered by cooldowns not being affected by haste, but I don't think the issue is that huge. It messes with set spell rotations, but you can work around that. On a practical level, we can borrow a page from Einstein's relativity and ask ourselves "What would the world look like if we were in a hastened universe?" From that reference frame, we wouldn't see our casting times change, but we would notice the cooldown clock ticks slower. So if you're living in a 50% hastened universe, you're cooldowns appear to take twice as long to cooldown, and in general your cooldowns are:

(base cooldown) / (1 - haste%),

which is fortunately simpler than the formulas for special relativity but serves a similar purpose. The advantage of that is that you can plan out your spell casting cycles using base cast times but with cooldown times as computed from the above formula. So with 5% haste, a 10 second cooldown is a little over 10.5 seconds (10 / 0.95 = ~10.53), so plan accordingly.

If you then want to figure your HPS (in the unhastened universe), and your spell rotation produces X HPS, then you just divide by the same time scaling factor:

Actual HPS = X / (1 - haste%).

So for example, if you can get 2000 HPS out of your rotation, with 5% haste your actual HPS would be ~2105 (= 2000 / 0.95). Hopefully that's not too confusing. It's really pretty easy once you do it a few times -- much easier than computing new casting times on all your spells and then trying to see what you can squeeze in between your cooldowns.

Here's my feeling on this:

1) I read the tooltip, and was like "OMG THEY BUFFED IT". Then when I linked it in /g, all my guild-mates told me it read "30%" for them. So it appears IHC is being rolled into HC (as it should be) so the HC tooltip is changing to reflect 30+15.

2) If it really is changed, it should start to be obvious over 500 casts. 10% crit rate, 500 casts, 50 crits, of those 22 should be IHC procs for the old 45% number. If it's 60%, then you should get 30. We really need a couple of people to run the test to confirm.

On Patchwerk(10) this evening, I definitely was getting a lot of IHC procs. It saved my butt several times, letting me regen massive chunks of mana.

Side note: got a piece of T7 this evening, which makes me happy in a completely irrational way. We've seen solid Conq tokens for 4 weeks of running Naxx, so it's slightly cool for me.

I never played Everquest, but didn't they have something like that? I seem to recall hearing about how the healers would have a casting rotation and the tank would get fully healed every time one landed.

I think the main argument in favor of spellpower over haste is not HPS, but HPM. Spellpower improves HPM, efficiency, and haste doesn't, at least not directly.

Mostly due to downranking though, which obviously won't apply very soon. We may find ourselves in a situation where we don't really want much more +heal depending on gear level and the tuning of encounters, even with serendipity.

While not strictly priest related they have basically confirmed that spec swaps aren't going to make launch so start thinking about your levelling spec. I have found that in T6 gear that I have been going great with a mixed disc/holy spec focused on dps and have been able to heal the early dungeons in a sleepwalk. I did try shadow and found that I killed just as fast in holy and actually went though mana faster and was less efficient as shadow. Your mileage may vary as I haven't played shadow since January 05 and am way beyond rusty.

Although I'm sure you're emphasizing efficiency, I actually currently prefer doing things like netherwing dailies as disc/holy in my best mana regen gear rather than shadow. The main reason is pretty much laziness. Shield Self (reflective) > Holy fire > SW:P > activate wand > alt tab for 15 seconds > loot > repeat. You stay at full health/mana every pull. I'm sure some spirit tap variant is actually the best spec for quickly grinding, but as disc you retain the luxury of being able to heal instances and being able to browse fine websites such as this one while the mob chips away at itself.

My current sequence is to use a mixed damage/healing gear and beat mobs down to DoTs will get them to SWD range, then I move on to another mob. All I do is spend max 10 seconds on each mob before moving on and letting the dots get it to SWD range at which point I just SWD it.

DPS

and farm like the energiser bunny.

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Currently crit is better than haste for holy when all things are considered, but for healing haste is king as long as your mana regeneration can afford it.

A thing to remember about haste is that many times damage comes in a pattern and to heal it the best possible you have to use a sequence. An example is healing the mage tank in council. Having 100 haste (about 0.15 seconds off gheal) meant for me that I was able to replace a downrank gheal with a full rank, eliminate some waiting time and cast an additional gheal on the raid. No reasonable amount of crit or +healing can replace the utility of those 0.45 seconds shaved off my sequence by having a 2.35 second gheal instead of 2.5. Even if you dont consciously fall into a pattern the damage will often force you into one.

Healing is a little bit like chess, insofar that the best healers are the ones able to recognise a particular pattern instantly and react with an optimised sequence without having to think much about it.

This is the case in the vast majority of fights from gruul to illidan. Of course it means the benefits of haste are discontinuous. You see a small improvement until a certain small zone, where you get a stupidly huge improvement, then it drops off again.


At level 70 I see no reason at all to switch to crit rating. Its a decent mana regn

Leaning more heavily toward 60% for sure, but not close enough to be definitive. I'll run some tests this weekend for sure; if someone wants to jump in and do it earlier, please go ahead.

I'm definitely taking 2/2 healing focus atleast... I promise you guys the first time someone dies an instant before your heal lands and you've had some pushback on your flash heal / binding heal / greater heal you're going to HS and spec it. To me I see that talent as an extra ~0.5 seconds worth of haste in a major pushback fight, it might be very very coincidental but you can trust me on it being vital when it happens.

Ofcourse during extreme progress raids you might swap those 2 points back and forth a bit depending bosses, but since I'm not taking inspiration for a holy build (if we're going with a disc priest that is), I'll probably always keep it.

Edit: The BIG question is since that spell power is such a trivial stat now (you'll get plenty enough from tier gear anyway), how much is spiritual guidance really worth?

I'm thinking: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...00000000000000

I've respecced many many times while leveling from 70 to 80 and I found this to be the most effective spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The spirit tap + spiritual guidance synergy is the most important part of the spec, once you get a killing blow and proc spirit tap you can basically keep chain killing stuff and you get a significant damage boost.

The remaining points while leveling go in Enlightenment and then in Rapture and/or Surge of Light + Spiritual Healing. I'm not fond of SoL but others seem to like it, if you want to do a bit of aoe grinding then Holy Nova + SoL is fairly effective.

Edit: sorry for the redundancy, I opened this page 3 hours ago and forgot to refresh it before posting.

In my level 80 gear (which is full ilvl 200 epics, 5/5 T7) Spiritual Guidance is worth over 260 spell power, I don't think it's worth skipping.

I haven't had Healing Focus since Black Temple. Managed just fine through entire BT without it. Didn't need it in NAX 40 much either. The big dog (my memory is bad for names) stands out, but for example Faerlina did not. For things like Rain of Fire I always move out. Renew, maybe shield myself while I run for 10 yards. I also always enchant run speed on boots.

I find it's never worth standing still in aoe damage and healing through it. Even if you take less damage than you heal for, it's not worth it. Creates more chaos. Chaos is the doom of many complex fights.

We also haven't seen hordes of non-elites mobs since NAX 40. Getting hit by an elite is instant death too often, just make sure you fade before they hit you.

Ah we have over 1000 spirit at lvl80... gdamn. Yeah it does sound worth it then, especially since it's spell power and not healing power :s

Yeah but I had interrupts of my healing spells killing people 3-4 times on M'uru (unnerfed version), and after that I so want healing focus!

Oh geez they just changed Spiritual Guidance to read 25% of total spirit added to spellpower?? That's a secret 1.88 boost to the talent, lolz. Totally imba if we're gonna get good amounts of spirit

I ran a heroic ramparts with a prot pally alt yesterday on the PTR. His gear is not super but its sufficient enough to tank things up to bloodboil in BT atleast. I ran with a 51/10 spec.

So far you are probably thinking "So what?". We did it 2 man, and I had no problems at all keeping him alive while he tanked and did DPS. (Except the times we accidentally pulled 3 packs, and the boss that summoned the mana burning fel hounds stopped us.)

Healing as disc feels really awkward to start with, as its very different from what I was used to. Basically, it went a lot like: PW: Shield -> Renew -> ProM .... wait for shield to be broken -> Penance -> Gheal -> PW: Shield .. wait...

As I started to get more used to it, I got the feeling that Penance is simply too strong. It more or instantly heals 6000 hp, and as holy, you never try to let someone drop that far. While as disc, if you dont let them drop that far, you are going to have your Penance more or less wasted. The cooldown itself is not really an issue.

Improved Devotion Aura (+6% healed) did stack with Grace, so until further I'll assume Grace and Tree of Life aura stacks, but that Imp. Devo Aura and Tree of Life do not stack.

Also that Divine Aegis does not stack sometimes made me abort Penance casts. I did an 8k Greater Heal crit and had already Penance queued, and first tick of Penance crit, and overwrote the Divine Aegis. Really really annoying.

My general healing style as disc at 80 is much simpler: wait for 5-10k damage on tank -> Shield -> Penance -> cancel cast GH/FH until Penance cd is up -> when weakened soul wears out reset the sequence. With the 25% haste Borrowed Time buff you can often find space to spot heal/shield other people too without risking the tank. Also sometimes you might want to keep Penance off cd in case you need it to heal up a damage spike. Don't worry about Grace dropping, if the tank is at full health just take the time to regen and then cast Penance to restack as soon as his health bar moves.

Try not to use Renew because it doesn't proc Rapture/DA/Inspiration/Grace, unless you're just topping someone off for 1-2k health (you don't get full Rapture anyway in that situation and if he takes further damage the hot will still be ticking) or it's a fight that requires a lot of moving and or is interrupted like Maexxna.

Skip ProM unless you expect it to bounce (which is quite often I admit), its less bad than Renew because it does benefit from crit talents though.

Penance is very strong, I would argue that it's equivalent to Circle of Healing in terms of strength, kinda hard to compare them directly though. If what you mean is that the heal is too big not to overheal then I don't really see the problem, it costs less mana than a FH and heals more than twice as much, even if you overheal by 50% it's no big deal and you also get the added benefit of stacking grace and proccing DA/Insp. For this reason even on a full health target it's not entirely wasted.

Some bosses have raid wide periodic damage. If it hits in the middle of a critical heal someone can die.

The bird boss in ZA for example once the little birds come you are guaranteed to get pushback from them. You are in the middle of an important gheal on one of the aoers and jan'alai decides to fire breath you ---> your target will die. You get a lynx rush. Instead of you managing to heal yourself with binding heal you have to use consumables. Council, you are healing someone about to die when veras decides to attack you. No healing focus = dead target. Not having healing focus kills off targets, not in every raid, not all the time. Not even frequently, but without question it saves lives.

Healing focus was always really useful but with the new changes you still get guaranteed pushback even healing focus. The benefit of the talent was 70% chance of no pushback at all.

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I tested HC: The tooltip says 30% with 0/3 IHC 35% with 1/3, 40% with 2/3 and 45% with 3/3 IHC.

I did another round of casts and also got a 6.9% clearcast frequency. I have 12% crit which at 45% clearcasting should be 5.4%. So again I have a greater clearcasting chance than I expect.

I alos dug out a previous attempt when I was comparing clearcasting with SoL I got 6.4%, which again is 1% higher than I expect.

It was called Complete Heal, and it was the primary heal for tanks. Note that healing in the early days of WoW worked like this as well - you had Druids and Priests using Healing Touch/Greater Heal in rotation for tank healing, so you could sit them out for Spirit Regen.

However, in both situations, the issue was mana limitations not throughput.

Remember, while we talk about throughput since it is an easily calculated metric, a 'throughput-limited' fight would be mind-numbingly dull. Basically, it would be a fight where the tank has such an enormous pool of health that he can be safely sitting at half health while you cast large, slow heals without any worry about him dying.

A better way to look at this is that as, an individual healer, you'll probably heal about 25% of what your average dps player is doing. So Reflective Shield/DA will be dealing about 1.05% of what a regular dps class would do.

My DPS build is essentially the same except I dont have SoR and I skip DS for enlightenment. I understand why you chose SoR + DS, and it certainly makes sense as spirit is key to the build. I know that at the equivalent build on live its possible to have improved spirit tap procd 100% of the time effectively, for a fairly large spellpower boost, but I think enlightenment and inspiration are worthwhile for healing isntances along the way. Is there a reason why you skip enlightenment at first? Enlightenment is going to be a bigger boost than SoR and impDS imo.

It's funny because I had the exact same thought. We would setup Complete Heal rotations on the main tank between however many clerics we needed to keep the tank up. Kortar is right that it was mostly done for mana efficiency reasons. All heals in those days were inefficient compared to Complete Heal, but they were inefficient to the point of going out of mana long before a boss would die.

Kortar: what you say about a 'throughput-limited' fight is not entirely correct. In many ways healing in EQ was throughput limited as well. Tanks could often die in just a couple of seconds against raid bosses, and yet Complete Heal rotations were always used. The difference is that if you didn't have enough healing throughput to keep the tank up you simply decreased the time between CHeals. E.g. I recall it being common to have one cleric start casting CHeal 3 seconds after the previous cleric in the rotation. If you needed more throughput you'd drop that down to 2 seconds. If your clerics ran out of mana, or the wait time was short enough that your first cleric was still casting CHeal when it was their turn to start another, you just added another cleric to the rotation.

You can have all of them by level 74 anyway, you may be right about the order, I hadn't read your post before submitting mine. I think Inspiration is pointless for leveling though, the instances before 80 are fairly easy so it won't really help you much.