Seidinove: I went through a similar analysis, although ended up with different conclusions. Rather than repost what I wrote, here's the link: 3.1 PTR

On an administration note, two threads for discussing 3.1 holy builds (one with 3.0 in the title and one with 3.1 PTR in the title) is probably too much. And so much as changed since the original post. It's probably a good time to start a new thread, if only we had some conclusions for a clear "default" spec for people to start with. I suppose we'll have figured it out in a week or two though.

Why wouldn't you have holy reach already?

Ive been contemplating the same thing Zhaera. "Do I want Inspiration or.. focus.. / renew... " esp with having other priests that spec'd it.
And if your going to get Improved Renew... why wouldn't you get Empowered Renew? [unless they are just filler points]
(But then comes the question, how often is renew used?) IMO don't like it in my rotation. except pre-fight

As stated back several pages, Sinndir and I will be posting the new 3.1 thread this weekend sometime. Be patient; we're busy people.

[e] I created a new thread, and locked it. Hopefully this will keep the questions / concerns down until we actually have a chance to finish it.

As far as Inspiration goes, you're highly limited in choices at the bottom tier of talents. You could drop Inspiration for 3+ points in Spell Warding, or max out Renew and put a point into Healing Focus, but even as a raid healer, you'll be throwing top-up heals onto tanks. If that procs Inspiration, you've just reduced that tank's damage for the next few seconds. That seems valuable to me.

Tier 3 Holy is the last remaining crap tier we have in any tree. Anything below Tier 6, it doesn't matter if it's crap or not because there's so much available from Tiers 1-6 that you can easily backfill. Taking the first 3-4 tiers of all 3 trees, the only ones that has "wut" talents is Holy: for Disc, Divine Fury isn't that useful, and for Holy-raid, Inspiration and possibly even Divine Fury aren't that useful. C'est la vie; we've still improved drastically since 2.4 and Sunwell.

If you are not using renew much at all, why not go something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

You would cut the mana cost of your Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Power Word:Shield, Holy Nova, and whatever other instants we have.

As I've stated above somewhere at least twice, Body and Soul is possibly the best new talent we've received since Circle of Healing. It's incredible, and I can't see raiding without it.

I have to agree. The other healing priests I raid with were dubious, but so far (we're up to Kologarn) it's a great talent. Moving Light Bombs out of the way (especially with Grid showing the debuff for fast pickup), the lightning storm thing on Council easy mode, running from Kologarn's lasers...it's just super useful.

Speaking of Kologarn's lasers, anyone know if there's a way to see who he's aiming it at besides visually seeing who is under the beam? I had him focus targeted so I could watch if he switched, but with so much raid damage I didn't really get a chance to see.

EDIT: Wrong quote.

As far as I could tell, there was no visual indicator of the target of the beams. However, it's very easy to deal with: you get at least a second to react, it doesn't do that much damage (compared to PTR, it's been nerfed somewhat), and if the people start moving just slap a PW:S onto the moving target.

I was gonna suggest to you to use regen trinkets, but saw that you have Soul of Dead and the Greatness. Personally I'm using my Majestic Dragon Figurine and Spirit-world Glass. It probably won't make much difference, but the increase in regen I get with those two trinkets is quite noticeable. How do you find your Greatness working now?

About the value of Inspiration for a holy spec. Even if you rarely throw Greater Heals on the tank it also procs from CoH and PoH. It means you will hit the tanks quite often as a raid healer. Many fights often require multiple tanks, meaning a disc priest will struggle to maintain Inspiration on them. Especially if he fills dead spots shielding people. I think it is a mandatory talent for all priest healers.

To add to this, stealing the numbers from a warrior tank in my guild, Inspiration is about a 5% physical damage mitigation buff for 3 talent points. This is a really efficient use of points and there's really no reason I could ever conceive of for dropping it, barring an armor-capped tank.

I guess if you absolutely know that it's going to be covered by others in your raid, it's not so necessary. However, it's already been mentioned that a Disc priest will have serious issues keeping it up in any situation with multiple tanks. Also, considering that it procs off of CoH and PoH, you don't even have to be tank healing to get it up. Beside all this, I just don't see where else you could put those points. If you really want to go the heavy renew route, there's other places that it'd likely be better to steal the points from.

On a side note, wasn't it bugged before to apply itself on Prayer of Mending crits even though the tooltip doesn't list it? Is that still true in 3.1?