Now that the patch has gone live, I have to decide which way to spec... but I can't make up my mind between two different options:

A little background first: my guild is raiding Illidian right now, and we'll probably move on to SWP later til the expansion comes out. I've always had a holy/IDS build, and would like to keep DS (though probably not IDS) as the other priests are full holy so we already have enough CoH priests.

Basically, I'm facing two possibilities. Either maintain something similar to my current build, that would probably be something close to this 22/39 one. Or go full disc with an spec close to this 56/5 one.

Pros and cons of going full disc:

- Pro: Awesome utility... PI, PS, Grace, DS.
- Pro: Strong single target healing, which has always been my preferred style of healing.
- Con: I can already hear the warrior tank whining asking which priest put a shield on him. Grrrr.... I know, I know, threat building for tanks has changed a lot and PW:S is not supposed to hurt it too much now, but old habits die hard, and for just a meager month I have no intention of taking upon my shoulders the task of educating tanks about how good the old little shield is for them.

*shrug*

Any ideas?

I'm looking for feedback on this CoH spec
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Priest -> Talent Calculator

Here is a Spirit spec my counterpart will b using.
WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Priest -> Talent Calculator


My guild will be in BT exclusively until WothLK. I'm one of two holy priests on our team.

Ive heard and read a lot about how good penance is as a healing spell but has anyone tried it as a damage one?

Im at work till late so wont get a chance to try for a bit, can anyone give me details on penance dps?

I wanted to confirm with the holy priests something. Does CoH work more like Chain Heal now? It no longer targets by party, correct? It's the 5 people with the lowest HP within range of the initial target?

If so, it could potentially require a small tweak to some strategies that are based on groups, such as Bloodboil or Illidan P2, correct?

Rage is not a problem at all, just shield him _after_ he takes damage and not before. Also you can watch his rage bar when casting and avoid shield if he is too low.

As for your spec, I would still take Divine Fury (so 51/10). You have to give up something between Renewed Hope/Borrowed Time/Aspiration/Pain Suppression but it's worth it if you want max HPS.

Correct. But the only 'tweak' would be that overheal should be reduced. You could optimize a bit by having BB groups stay close together even when they're not in the back to catch the next bloodboil, but other than that I don't foresee any real changes needed. There is the issue of the higher mana cost for CoH, but I don't think this will be a dealbreaker, especially for groups who already outgear the fight.

I am also very torn between 56/5 and 51/10. Since both Flash Heal and Greater Heal scale the same given that 2 casts of FH and 1 cast of GH get 3 / 3.5 of SP, it comes down to Heal Pr Mana and base heal amount. FH is (1116+1295)/2 = 1205.5 * 2 = 2410, GH is (2414+2803)/2 = 2608.5. So GH has a slightly higher base heal. GH costs 32% of base mana, FH costs 18% of base mana. However, if we introduce Glyph of Flash Heal, FH suddenly costs 16.2% * 2 = 32.4% of base mana.

It has already been said earlier in the thread, that landing a heal 1 second earlier may be a good reason to always prefer FH over GH.

So now that we know FH may be preferrable over GH both HPS/HPM wise without 5/5 Divine Fury, we can move onto the question of 5/5 Divine Fury or not. The haste after a PW: Shield is 25%, which puts GH at 2.3s. 5/5 Divine Fury puts GH at 2.38s. This means you can put PW: Shield on a random target just to have the haste buff incase you need it. This haste buff also works on Penance and FH as well.

But the biggest kicker is that ANY heal above 6328 will NOT give full rapture returns, as it can NEVER exceed 2.5x Max Mana (Formula is Max Mana / 2620 * constant * healedamount, solving for healedamount you get 0.025*Max Mana / Max Mana * 2620 / constant = healedamount, or 0.025 * 2620 / constant, constant being 0.01035, 0.025 * 2620 / 0.01035 = 6328). Greater Heal crits will be greater than 6328 at (6328 / 1.5 / 1.06 / 1.04 - 2414) / 1.88 / 3 * 3.5 = 876.74 spell power.

TLDR;
51/10 - Better sustained HPS.
56/5 - Better burst HPS and better Efficiency.
They are fairly similar, and it may come down to preferred playstyle.
At 80 or while levelling to 80, 51/10 will probably win out due to increased dps through Smite and Holy Fire.

They have been listening to our complaints.

Ghostcrawler A good move, I'm not sure if it is enough to swing me from a regen/efficiency spec with ~25 in disc to start with but it does make the grind to our 51 pointer less painful.

Edit: Oops, sorry. I didn't see the "also" part. Thanks for the heads up. In which case, yay! But it still may not be enough to push me over to take it. But I personally would still rather that they simply redesigned the talent rather than just tacking something else onto it.

Ehhhh honestly that change makes me want to take the talent even less. There are only a handful of fights where you're guaranteed that your PoM will be fully consumed within the first few seconds of its cast. In most other cases, 10 seconds is just about enough time for all the charges to run out.

So while having a 7s PoM cooldown is nice for a fight like Eredar Twins (then again, not really; the Sears happen on a roughly 10 second interval anyway), I can't really see a reason for investing 5 talent points into it. Think about it: you're spending 5 talent points for a 3 second cooldown reduction. Compare that with any other cooldown reduction talent and you'll realize how horribly broken that is.

In fact, I'd much prefer the old Divine Providence over this one, the more I think about it. Oh well, all the more reason to pick up Mental Agility, which I can view as a good thing.

Divine Providence now also reduces the cooldown of Prayer of Mending by 6/12/18/24/30%.

Please notice the bolded part.

I was able to do my SSO dailies using penance as a damage spell, with my gear (750 spell power, PMC Set and mixed ilvl 115 blues/epics) penance was hitting for about 650 (non-crit) per tick. My take on it is it's not greatly better or worse then the other damage spells available to a disc priest. I generally used it in-leu of mind blast. So many factors changed in the patch it's hard to separate out without more playtime but I did notice much less downtime in general post patching.

Anyone interested in how Penance fares as a damage spell might be interested in this thread:

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Once and for all: Penance's DPS

Basically Penance does 15-20% more damage than Smite but it has a small cooldown.

Looking at the tooltips, Circle of Healing says 'party or raid members', whereas Holy Nova only says party members. May just be an inconsistency in the tooltips, though.

I am doing pretty much exactly that. Ran a couple heroics last night with a warlock of spec I wasn't paying attention to, a zealous moonkin, a bm hunter with an underleveled pet and a warrior tanking with lionheart and a shield.

Even with the titans grip miss in effect, rage wasn't really an issue. Sometimes it was tight, but it was acknowledged pretty quickly that in an actual raid setting rage is going to be a non-issue. Rage-starving never cost us any wipes or deaths or anything -- the most dangerous thing in the party was the moonkin going nuts with starfall and hurricane. Not even pain suppression could fix that.

I will be going up to inspiration (and through divine fury) at 80 I am sure, but for now I am pretty confident this is completely serviceable, as was discussed somewhat earlier in the thread. Due to the DPS upgrades gamewide and the HP/Damage nerfing of TBC raid stuff it is completely serviceable. I think with my current haste my GH is around 2.5 seconds, which is 'base', and is workable. With the moonkin I was at 2.4 which, while still a far cry from my 2.1, was pretty fine. It was only a really intense situation where I had to back-to-back greater heals in order to keep somebody alive. Usually PWS was coming available again, or penance was coming back up, et cetera. GH was 1.9 seconds with borrowed time + moonkin.

It's a lot of fun, regardless. Any hesitance I have in recommending it is due mostly to the fact that it "feels" very different and some people might just not like the style of healing disc is directing you towards. Give it a try!

[E] Afterthoughts, I forgot to mention. My one really, really big complaint, is that instant cast spells were eating the Borrowed Time charge and it was driving me nuts. I eventually learned to work around it but it'd be nice if instant spells just avoided it entirely.

Has anyone tested [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] with Penance?

I have tested [Pendant of the Violet Eye], which surprisingly procs on every tick of Penance. I wonder if Penance can proc procs on a per tick basis... This requires research.

If Penance does have a chance to proc on each tick, that guarantees higher uptime on procs as disc than holy. Not sure how to directly quantify that.

[Scarab of the Infinite Cycle] procs on (2nd and 3rd) ticks of penance.

Tip of the day: Never spec penance without aspiration, the rotation is just so much easier with 6 second downtimes.

How about something that makes taking Meditation a real choice, not a requirement? E.g. have 5/5 DP substantially reduce the cooldown on Shadowfiend?

Interesting, though having a Holy talent that impacts a shadow ability... I don't know just doesn't seem fit.

It would be cool if they could tie regeneration into Divine Providence. Though there would be problems at 80 as you could double dip from Divine Providence and Meditation to gain (probably) imbalanced regen statistics.

I agree 100%, I just cannot think of ways to fill the gap when it is at 8 seconds. The more I can cast Penance when Disc spec, the better it feels. Not to mention it also makes keeping grace up easier as there is less chance a slight lag spike could remove the last second (or so) you have on Grace.

The healing aspect of Holy Nova is strictly group only. I have verified this in patch 2.4 and today. The tooltip is correct.

After respeccing and doing some test yesterday evening, I'm really happy with deep disc!
Only thing is my low crit value of ~18% unbuffed.

Since I have some red/orange gem slots I was thinking of putting some crit/spellpower oder int/spellpower gems into my gear, which would rise my crit value about ~1-2%

My question to those, who love the numbers:

Which gem would be better?

crit/spell or int/spell?
Does anyone have some numbers about how much +crit is 1% crit and how much int gives 1% crit?

I would tend to use the int/spell 'cause it gives you a higher manapool, some reg, crit AND a higher max mana.

My calculations tend to tell me that Intellect is worth about twice as much as Critical Rating.

I was coming out with roughly the same numbers, and then running Rawr I was seeing roughly the same thing. After running 56/5/0 through BT last night a couple of quick thoughts:

-- For the month of 70 raiding, my basic BT/SWP gear offers more than enough regen (through rapture, replenishment and meditation) in a raid setting. I had originally considered regemming for spell power/int, but after running heroics all day, and then doing a BT speed clear, it just isn't necessary for me. With how fast things are dying and how little damage tanks are taking, this month of raiding really won't require a change in gear/gems/enchants for most people.

-- Discs's mana efficiency feels very dependent on limiting the number of healers healing the main tank. Considering I get roughly 300 mana back on a non-crit Penance, it really hurts my sustainability if I have druids swiftmending or paladins HSing my target. As someone who has been a raid healer in most fights from SSC-SWP, it felt weird to be annoyed when the first tick of my Penance would land and then someone would insta-heal the tank and send all of my healing into overheal. In the past that may be annoying from a healing meters point-of-view, but now it's more important in a situation where sniping a disc priest's heals hurts his mana efficiency.

-- I don't miss Divine Fury much. There just weren't many times where I needed to cast a GH and Penance was on CD. This is probably just a function of how little damage the tanks were taking, but I spent a lot of my time raid healing. It feels very much like raid healing as 23/38, except Penance means I can be even more aggressive about tossing out raid heals with the knowledge that if my tank did spike at all, I can PW:S/Hasted Penance him back to safety incredibly fast. I didn't SS my Recount, but PoM was 32% of my healing, Renew was 23% and Penance was 22%. I did miss Imp Renew, and I wasn't using the Renew glyph, but I think I may switch to it.

-- Disc is going to look terrible on meters. This is pretty obvious to anyone who looks at the talents, but just how terrible was evident last night. As 20/41 or 23/38 I'm used to being top 3 or top 5 respectively based on the fight, and last night I was consistently dead last on every fight except RoS. My general healing style for the night was to keep PW:S on CD as much as possible, keep PoM on CD, keep Renew on the tank and then cast Penance or FH on any target that was taking DD. I don't particularly care about meters, as my guild knows what I'm doing, but I can see this being a downside for some people. Blizzard has even made a concession to meters with some of the changes to PoM, so while EJ readers may dismiss this point, I think many people will avoid disc.

-- Finally, disc is a lot of fun to play, but I'm just not sure if it's "necessary" in a 25-man raid. I felt like I brought some tools to the table with Penance, Grace and DA, and DS/PI are nice to have, but a paladin easily could have done my job as well as I could. With the changes to HS, it's arguably more powerful than Penance and it's mana return isn't dependent on actually landing the heal. As others in this thread have pointed out, I'm also not sure that Disc has enough tank healing superiority to sacrifice the healing power of Holy. Even if I were in a 2 healer 10 man with a resto shaman, it feels like Holy has more than enough healing power to tank heal, with the added flexibility to raid heal in a pinch. Blizzard has worked really hard to make sure that all of the healers have enough tools to tank heal (just look at the changes to resto shaman and druids for proof), so I can't see giving up the ability to raid heal to make myself a "better" MT healer.

I realize this is all in nerfed level 70 content, but I don't see that there will be dramatic changes to the play style at 80.