I'm curious to know why Healing Focus isn't part of your recommended raid build. I always thought this talent was a necessity. Is there something I'm missing about the talent that makes it less valuable then, say, 2% crit from the Holy Spec talent?

It has been reported to me from people who tested it in-game that the Spell Power gained by IDS does actually stack with Flametongue/Wrath/Pact.
It does however not stack with the personal spirit scaling of a Warlock's Fel Armour.

Could be worth testing and/or reporting as it's not supposed to stack.
Maybe they changed their mind about buff stacking on this one?

Drop desperate prayer and get 1/2 divine reach. My experience is that people simply don't realise what divine reach does for CoH. Its not easy to spot the fact that you are missing a target every 5-10 CoH, but if you do (and there are very few enounters where you dont) its easily a drop of 2-5% healing. Everytime you don't use CoH because you are missing 1-2 targets every time you cast it, divine reach is worth gold.

There is no question that divine reach is better than desperate prayer in terms of healing output and efficiency. Desperate prayer only pays its divident everytime it saves your life.

This is what I will spec at 80: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

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SoL:

@lvl 70: SoL+CoH -->20% crit:

chance to proc SoL = 1-(1-0.20/2)^5 = 0.40951


@80: SoL + CoH --> 25% crit:

chance to proc SoL = 1-(1-0.25/2)^6 = 0.551204681


Obviously you will get a lot of procs, but what does each of them do. Each proc gives you a free flash heal, but this FH cannot crit, and cannot proc serendipity. So that means the mana value of the heal is the mana cost of an FH, minus the FH glyph, - serendipity return - clearcasting.

At 70 with say an average serendipity return of 80%, 20% crit, and the flash heal glyph, that means 360odd mana. With 20% crit chance you also get 6-9% clearcasting which further reduces cost to ~330 mana. To give SoL every benefit of doubt I am going to ignore the fact that a clearcast has a better return than just reducing cost.

At 80 rasing the crit to 25% each proc saves you ~500 mana.

At the very best of situations u can use an SoL every 5 seconds. That means 330mp5 at 70 and 500mp5 at 80, or 165/250mp5 per point.

It certainly looks like a lot of regen, especially considering that healing prayers returns 35mp5/48mp5 or so from PoM and maybe something similar from PoH if you use it.

This is the theory anyway and it paints a far rosier picture for SoL than it deserves. In practice getting 1 SoL flash off every 5 seconds, is very very tough indeed. In BT I barely got off 1 every 15 seconds, despite heavy CoH usage, simply because it was pointless to use it. In most cases the damage would get healed by the AoE healing anyway, so the SoL just wasted time.

I personally dont accept that SoL is worth anything more than 80mp5 per point at 70 (I can't say much about it at 80). Its still more than healing prayers, but healing prayers doesn't make me bleed HPS.

I consider this a classic case of ppl getting excited about a talent that is not actually that great, simply because it procs a lot.

Comparing lightwell with SoL, it would take 15 SoL procs to produce the same healing and I just can't see how its possible to get that in under 2 minutes. However 15 SoL procs also cost you 22.5 seconds of casting time, while the lightwell just costs you 1.5 seconds. My personal experience is that that even if only half the charges of lightwell are used, it has a better return than SoL.

SoL is not a musthave at all. It can have a decent mana return, but its not really any better than the alternatives. Its a great deal of micromanagement, for no good reason. Lightwell and healing prayers, not only give you overall the same return, they also take a lot less micromanagement on your part and make PoH more usable opening up another option. Less time monitoring procs = more time concentrating on what you have to do.
If Divine providence is also changed to reduce PoM cooldown, then healing prayers will be hands down better than SoL.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your post, but this is a bit silly. The game is played 1.5 seconds at a time. Not to sound like an e-thug, but if anyone is having trouble keeping up with that pace, it's time to find a new hobby. At the point in this game where it is worthwhile to care about the benefits of SoL compared to other things, when that tiny bit of mana you will or will not have will actually matter, if you can't keep track of if you have the SoL buff or not (which is quite easy to determine with any number of mods... or just by looking at the buff icon), then you should really be comfortable enough to where it is not a burden at all to 'micromanage' SoL, it will just be second nature.

Are you implying that we're going to be using rank 5 divine spirit at level 80 for the spellpower bonus or is it the new rank of totem of wrath that will stop them from stacking?

Sorry but I dont heal like that at all. Most of my concentration goes onto predicting who will take damage and thinking ahead which spell to use where.

Its not a question of whether you have the SoL buff, but where to use it and when . Lets say you cast CoH, you notice a proc (which you won't until you have already cast another instant if you are spamming) and you just hit the first person you see with a deficit, now if your next CoH overheals on that target because only 5 targets are damaged now instead of 6, you have just wasted your time.

Yeah we get that you don't like SoL; you've made like 20 posts to that effect. I don't see how this specific case you've crafted here adds to the argument though. I suppose that yes, if exactly only 5 targets were taking the exact same amount of damage for a constant period of time, then CoH spam without using your SoL procs would be the right thing to do, but in general you can react to the effects of your CoH in the 1.5 seconds in between casts and change your plan accordingly. I have not personally had a problem inserting instant flash heals into a CoH spam cycle in a 25 man raid, and have found that using a SoL and inner focusing my next CoH is a nice way to get some O5SR time.

To provide some data for our discussions, I am posting wowwebstats for usage of FH and GH either naked, or with 1317 spell power.

Wow Web Stats

Talent tree was World of Warcraft Europe -> Talents

Notice that there are some procs of MH ring in data so filter it for proper results.

There is couple of points visible from it:
- 1 Spell power seems to be 1.85 healing
- Empovered healing coeficient with some haste gear on is not 3/3.5 for GH but 2.8/3.5 where 2.83 is spell duration after spell haste is applied (6% haste)
- Casting time with included spell hast is probably rounded to nearest 1/10 second as for FH with the same haste coeficient 1.5/3.5 looks ok

I am not sure about the coeficients for Empovered Healing but measured data seem to be in accordance with the calculation.

Inserting a free cast does not mean it actually did anything. You get your shiny proc, you get your instant flash, but are you quite certain that you have actually gained any benefit. There rest of your post makes no sense to me.

CoH/PoM provides very uniform healing even when the targets are taking unequal damage. Also you are forgetting CoH crits.

As for inner focus/CoH/SoL, getting 1 second of FSR and using your 3 min CD IF with a relatively cheap spell that just goes to show how easily people can be fooled into thinking something is useful when its not, just because they get a shiny proc.

Also the fact that "you have had no trouble" inserting free flash heals in your CoH spam sequence, does not mean they are actually doing anything. Are you quite sure that the flash heals you insert are necessary? That is exactly what I am talking about, when I say people only look at whether they are getting any procs and not at what the procs do.

Some examples where SoL performs very poorly is hexlord malacrass and blooboil. Using the procs here has very strong negative impact on HPS for a negligible increase in HPM.


Alright I will give you that its useful to have an extra instant in some fights. However you really to use SoL at least once every 15 seconds for it to be worth taking.

178 procs over a BT clear, is actually very unimpressive. Assuming you used 50% which is a very tall order and 60min total fight time (which is very reasonable), its something like 1 proc every 40 seconds, or 40odd mp5. I call that very underwhelming.

Why where the procs useful. Do you mean to say that people would have died if you did not have it? Are you sure that casting another instant like PoM would not have had the exact same effect?

SoL is great for cheating the FSR without slacking on raid healing.

After using your first proc and while out of the FSR, a new SoL (generated through PoM that jumps like a charm) can proc while you use hymn of hope. Add inner focus + some aoe heal and you proc another SoL which you can use to stay out the FSR as well.

Thats a lot of mana gain.

I really don't see where else you'd even spend those points. There's really not anything left in the Discipline tree, and getting anything useful in Holy requires moving more than just those two points. Power Infusion can be a nice boost to have for DPS check fights, especially if it's timed with cooldowns/Heroism. Pain Suppression can be used to mitigate predictable damage bursts that come at inconvenient times, as a sort of preemptive emergency button.