Sorry Havoc your scenario is not "Plausible" at all. As you have one healer responsible for all this damage we can safely assume that it is a 2 healer 10 man and that the other healer is full time on the tank. This gives us a good benchmark for raid damage to compare it to. Specifically the most high raid damage fights currently in the game Saph and Malagos.

In your 10 second window you have 5 people taking 1.666 times their total life pool in 10 second span. Saph is going to put out ~ 2/3 of your hypothetical squishies damage in the same time span. Malagos will do ~ 1.1 times the total life pool in the same span. This is only 2/3 of the individual damage you are throwing at the healers. Here's the kicker though. In both these situations you will have at least a small amount of support from your co-healer.

The only fight that would come even close to this level of healing stress would be KT with melee that totally suck and multiblock each other. In this case the correct conclusion isn't that priests need better healing tools but rather that the raid needs to play better. As others have pointed out there is no example in the game where there is non-avoidable RSTS on the raid even remotely on this scale that has to be healed by a single healer. If you know of one please point it out.

The closest thing I can think of to the example given is Sarth+3, Shadron and Vesperon both down, Vesperon Acolyte spawned, and the entire raid (dps) taking Twilight Torment for ~ 1500+ dps in. If you run Sarth+3 in 10-man and try to do it with 2 healers, you come pretty close to the example given. And no, it's not really healable; not sustainably, anyway. But that's rather the point: we don't argue cases where something isn't healable. We take moderately extreme *normal* cases and talk about those.

And those cases are things like Sapp (10-man, with 2 healers, 1 paladin Tank+Beacon himself, and 1 priest healing 8 people, including himself) or KT (10-man, with 2 healers, bad block situation) or Sarth+3 (3 healers, Twilight Torment activated).

I find the comparison of the trinkets very interesting, and a pleasant departure from the CoH/Pally vs. Priest ramblings that have plagued this thread for the last several pages. Regarding trinkets, and regen stats more broadly, it seems to me based on my experience healing (limited) that the only time I have mana issues and really want regen is when I'm healing like crazy, and therefore subject to the 5 second rule for 90%+ of the fight. In those situations, Int with replenishment is vastly superior to spirit (though I love spirit, don't get me wrong). The most obvious way to get more spirit regen in those situations is to proc IHC more (my gear is a bit lacking there).

With the exception of healers dying, the hardest hit my mana has taken is ranged tanking 4H with a lock and using Binding Heal. With no replenishment, no mana tide/mana spring, the possibility of my Shadowfiend eating a void zone, and me being too proud to call for an Innervate, this is the only fight where I think carefully about how to maximize regen. I'm sure as dps gets more geared, this will be a non-issue too. In the future I can only foresee mana issues with new content or with doing current content with fewer healers.

My gripe with spirit regen is like my gripe with Hymn of Hope. When you desperately need it, you can't take the time to benefit from it, unless you're completely OOM with no other alternatives.

Ghostcrawler has confirmed (MMO-Champion BlueTracker - CoH CD - What will it be and why?) that CoH will be receiving a 6 second cooldown. This does seem to increase the relative value of the discipline spec given the remaining AoE heals are not holy specific and that AoE raid damage may be balanced lower to account for reduced AoE healing.

First, Int is by no means vastly superior to Spirit at 90% FSR. Did some rough calculations and at 1000/1000 and .206 mp5 gain per Int from Replenishment, you gain about 1.5 mp5 by adding 100 Int over adding 100 Spirit (roughly a 10% difference).

Second, the "ramblings" of which you speak are are an attempt at modeling priest performance against other classes in extreme but plausible scenarios. The purpose of coming up with a reasonable model is to determine the potential performance of Holy priests with the proposed CoH CD. If a realistic and representative model is able to be derived from this recent "plague-like" discussion, and the Holy performance is found to actually be significantly below that of other classes (which I don't personally believe it will be, but that's tertiary to my point), then there's the potential for something to actually be done about it before the change goes live and we find ourselves in a situation where Holy has no niche (again, not what I believe will happen, but nevertheless).

So just because the discussion isn't trying to model something relatively simple (i.e. trinkets) please don't try and discount or deter those trying to work proactively to determine the viability of our class.

90 int scales with BoK (99 int) [ignoring MS; assuming holy spec]
90 spirit scales with BoK and SoR/Enlightenment (104 spirit)

Intellect gives us mana return through crit (marginal), replenishment (major), shadowfiend (moderate), mana pool size (moderate) and mana tide (moderate).
Spirit gives us mana return through Meditation and OO5SR ticks.

Assume 90% I5SR, and 1000/1000 Spirit/Intellect *without trinket equipped*, raid buffed. Assume 6 minute fight.

90 spirit option
1104 spirit, 1000 intellect
Regen: 91.7 Mp5 OO5SR, or 34 Mp5 @ 90% I5SR + 26 Spellpower

90 intellect option
1000 spirit, 1099 intellect
Regen: +42.6 Mp5 OO5SR (or 15.7 Mp5 @ 90%) + Replenishment + Shadowfiend + Mana Pool Size + Mana Tide

Shadowfiend: assume one use, restores 40% of your mana pool, or 0.40 * 99 * 15 = 594 mana => 8.25 Mp5
Mana Tide: assume one, restores 28% of your mana pool, or 0.28 * 99 * 15 = 416 mana => 5.8 Mp5
Mana Pool Size: six minutes, 1485 mana => 20.6 Mp5
Replenishment: 0.25% per second, 1485 mana => 18.6 Mp5
Crit: 0.59% critical chance works out to a small ( ~ 5-8 Mp5) margin

Total: ~ 74 Mp5

The difference in the Spirit and Intellect choices for the Darkmoon Card, assuming typical raid buffs, is more than *double* the regen, for a loss of 26 spellpower. Easy call. And yes, Intellect is vastly superior to Spirit at a 1000/1000 level, assuming you actually use Shadowfiend / Mana Tide Totem / IHC.

With the 6s cd to CoH on it's way, it may be valid for holy priests to ignore regen and haste as much as possible. CoH will still do the most healing per mana in a raid-healing situation, but we can only cast it once every 6 seconds. Rather than waste your mana on inefficient heals during the cd, stack crit and spell power (at the expense of haste/regen) and make CoH hit as hard as possible. CoH, SoL fheal, PoM might be the only spells worth casting and it will be hard to go oom w/ that rotation.

Dude, you can't be serious. No offense, but... this is like ... the stupidest thing i've ever heard. This is not even about "what blizzard wants the classes to be"... it's about how the player plays his character in every possible way. To use the full bandwidth his class has to offer, and not "spam this... use that and mayyyybe keep this on cooldown". It's a shame what some people make of this awesome class.
Go play pingpong if you want something easy and cozy.

Sorry for this "outburst" ... but sweet dancing jehova, Priests aren't frickin' "spam one heal"-Machines!!!!!!

I'm looking, but I don't see a counter-argument anywhere in here.

In 10/25 man raids, CoH accounts for the majority of our healing. Adding a 6 sec. CD will no doubt change how much CoH is used in comparison to our other spells. Spamming CoH means your spending very little time if any OO5SR, thus a Priest in that scenario benefits more from mana regen mechanics like MP5, replenishment, etc.

However I don't see the need for a significant change. I would have to disagree with "it may be valid for holy priests to ignore regen and haste as much as possible". I would be wise to utilize the time between your CoH CD, as opposed to try to compensate for it by stacking crazy amounts of spell power/crit.

As long as they use their abilities that trigger Replenishment once every 15 seconds (easy for Judge and MB), and assuming at least 5 characters in the raid that don't use mana (warrior, rogue, feral druid, death knight), you need two to have a nigh 100% uptime. Three to make sure, or if you have a lot of mana bars in your raid. A well stacked raid includes at least two Replenishers for a 25 man, in my humble opinion.

Also, int/spi and sp comparisons are somewhat silly. One is longevity, the other is throughput. As has been said before in the thread, it's apples to oranges in comparisons. Both need to be balanced appropriately, but it's hard to give an exact "worth comparison" outside of benchmarks.

I'm aware of all that. The whole point of the math I did (and I know I didn't model SF or mana tide or IHC) was just to point out that, even though at 2200 int+spit, the next 1 intellect is more mp5 than the next 1 spirit, it might not be the case that the next 300 intellect > the next 300 spirit. This is at least conceivable since all spirit-based regen scales linearly, while the oo5sr rule component of int regen scales much more slowly. And so I just wanted to see whether extra replenishment or extra oo5sr rule would win.

Maybe it's a dumb question, but why isn't Replenishment + Shadowfiend + Mana Pool Size + Mana Tide counted in the spirit equation, as you do it with the Int?

Because those abilities do not scale with spirit but only with intellect - he is trying to calculate the delta in mana regen, not the absolute mana regen. Spirit does offer other advantages though, since 90 ISR is very very high and a single innervate pretty much gives spirit the edge.

I think they fucked things up with intellect, paladins really risk becoming infinite like shadowpriests once gear reaches a certain level which will be very very very soon.

Constantius calculated the increase/difference of int or spi. Having more int means having larger mana pool and thus getting more mana from all percentage mana base effects, one of which is the shadowfiend. You can add as much spi you want, your shadowfiend will not restore more mana, but if you increase int, your pool increases and so does the return from shadowfiend, or gains by replenishment, mana tide, etc.

Or to put it differently, the 8.25 MP5 is the increase in mana regeneration calculated as mp5 over the time with 90 more intellect. The increase is exactly 0 with 90 more spirit, agility, stamina or strength and therefor omitted for spirit.

My fault ofc I just read it as the full effect was calculated in the regen.

While I might agree on how haste doesn't seem to be worth to take as a raid holy (and that's presuming there are proper target healers in the raid group), to say that anything else than CoH is inefficient is, well, rather weak. Care to present us a wws-sheet of your healing, Johnsen?

Whatever it is that Blizz decides to do with CoH, I think it can't hurt to start practising healing using CoH as little as possible, and that requires using those "inefficient heals". Renew, PoM and PWS are all instant cast and with proper glyphs and talents anything but inefficient.

Only inefficient healers say their spells are inefficient.

No, only people who have taken the time to actually study what the heals do say that.

Renew is very rarely useful. It is a special use, situational spell that you should generally only cast when you need to heal damage that hasn't occurred yet but will occur at some point within 15s where you will be otherwise busy casting some other spell.

Greater Heal is a tank-only heal you'd generally only use in 5-mans and maybe 10-mans.

In a 25-man setting, Flash Heal is primarily useful only when it can be insta-cast. Otherwise it's relatively slow speed will mean it gets sniped. In other content, it's more of a universal heal for non-multi-target/non-tank damage due to its efficiency.

Binding Heal is less useful than in BC due to the efficiency of other multi-target heals.

Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing are really just variations on each other. If you don't need instacast or you do need range, you use Prayer of Healing. Otherwise you use Holy Nova.

Prayer of Mending is one of your mainline heals in any content due to its scaling; it should be your first choice for a direct heal in most cases unless its on cooldown.

Lightwell and Desperate Prayer are both good heals with extremely narrow situational uses.

Circle of Healing is your "bread n' butter" heal in almost all 25-man raiding situations.

PW:S is a last resort instaheal - it's both low throughput and low efficiency, and absolutely should not be cast if there's a Discipline Priest around.

All of these conclusions are a result of carefully studying not just what Holy Priests can do, but what other healers can do as well. It may not match your desired playstyle, but it matches how the game mechanics actually work. WotLK brought some significant changes for Holy Priests - simplying continuing to heal like you were in BC without identifying and adapting to these changes will make you a sub-optimal healer.

Binding Heal was awesome in BC as it got patched very early. Right now it is the best hps and hpm spell we have (PoM and procs excluded).

I was a little surprised that the 6 second cooldown on CoH came with no changes to our other talents. I have points in Holy Reach, Divine Providence, and Mental Agility that now seem not as great.

Is this going to change anyone else's spec?

It's a big surprise that they didn't give us anything. It's actually hilarious that they gave some shadowbuffs which are plain out stupid and didn't compensate holy at all (no mana cost on VE must be biggest joke ever made in a patch note - great sense of humour, Blizz ).

As said earlier, it's all down to content from now on. That includes what spec to use (who don't spec for the encounter here?). If Ulduar is Chain Heal-heaven and Guardian Spirit hardly is useful, then of course we will lose our raidspots to Shamans. If Prayer of Healing is possible to utlize (imagine 7k dmg to the whole raid with a cast time every 10. seconds with some instagib ability right after if you're not at 100% - there you have holypriest stacking) and Guardian Spirit is "encounter breaking", then we still have our two or three spots in 25 man.

This is exactly why COH has been nerfed.... It makes everything else look bad. TBH I'm glad they're doing it but COH could have done with a little buff to compensate some. Regardless I'm looking forward to actually using those SoL procs i get almost every CoH but rarely use (unless I'm conserving mana or something), because, hell just CoH again!

And how does flash heal have "relatively slow speed"?