Have you even been on a raid in wrath havoc? Or is all this complaining and generation of hypothetical scenarios that never actually happen in the game for 5 man content? Your example seems to have no bearing on any content in the game whatsoever.

You could try Raid Loot Lists - WotLK Loot.

It has Malygos 10 & 25 and Sarth 10 & 25 loot lists (and explains how the drakes change Sartharion's loot).

Hope it helps.

For some reason I forgot to check what the Rapture constant was for Level 80 until today. Anyway, it seems to be 0.00845'ish.

Is there a reason you changed your mind? I'm not meaning to sound like a smart ass -- I just want to clarify the contradiction.

So, to clarify, the formula for Rapture at level 80 is (amount healed or absorbed) x (maximum mana / 3863) x 0.00845, and the heal number to achieve 2.5% of max mana is 3863 / 0.00845 x 0.025 = 11428? Is this accurate? I remember my calculations working with the 0.01035 figure I'd seen earlier, but to be honest I might have done those calcualtions at level 70. It's been a while (more than a few hours at least).

This is an important consideration to make regarding the comparison between Druid AoE healing and Priest AoE healing.

I can't help but bring up the fact, however, that Circle of Healing is our 41-point Holy talent.

Wild Growth is a 51-point talent.

At the risk of sounding obvious, by definition, it would seem, Wild Growth *should* be a stronger spell, taking into consideration the relative "weight" of talent points. On top of that, we get many more talent points to invest in bettering our CoH, and we even get a glyph for it. Of course now, you could argue, that since CoH is getting a nerf, so are a lot of our other talents.

And on top of everything, Circle of Healing will still beat Wild Growth in ALL situations where that group heal is needed NOW.

I think I should make a reply here.

The senario is valid. Having two large aoe hits (more than 50% the average DPS hit points) on the raid within a short (5 second) period of time is a very valid senario. Which is why the 5 second mark is important.

Some people feel apprehensive about hypethetical senarios, but they work really well, when their limitations are understood.

The model was specifically chosen to show what the full extent of the nerf to CoH is. No other analysis short of actual data from a raid post nerf can give a more valid, relevant or accurate answer. I am sure some people will chose to not believe this analysis, but I am not really concerned.

Obviously the senario is specifically chosen to a) Demonstrate the full effect of the nerf b) Challenge a shaman who is the current benchmark to his absolute limits. Obviously for many other senarios there are mitigating factors. If the encounter allows the effective use of lightwell, PoH or PoM, holy priests will still be very competitive, despite the nerf, because they were so far ahead before that even this big a nerf is only enough to bring them in line with the other healers.

Also the senario demonstrates in full the weaknesses of the CD as a solution. Just look at the same senario with only two casts of CoH, but put both those casts in the very begining and follow up with some binding heals. Loss of the freedom to position CoH anywhere in a sequence is a big nerf in itself. Mixing instants with channelled casts results in long intervals so freedom to position the instants appropriately is a very important concern.

Test of Faith has been taken partially into account in the analysis as is the potential for crits to change the situation, so the analysis is quite watertight.

To be fair the senario clearly shows that if the holy priest is given a steady stream of suitable targets he can still produce very competitive HPS even with CoH at 6 seconds. The biggest nerf is in our ability to keep people alive in a multitarget senario.

At the end of the day however, we have to wait and see what blizzard has in store for us. Personally if this nerf comes without any mitigating factors, especially a long awaited fix to the current bugs with lightwell, I am not very confident about the future of priests in 25 man raids.

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Wildgrowth with a 6 second CD is better than CoH with a 6 second CD. There is no question of that. COH heals for a very small amount compared to the HP that raiders have these days. If the heal is needed NOW, then CoH won't make a difference and it only takes 2 seconds for WG to heal for a comparable amount to CoH. WG however has significant synergy with other aspects of druid healing and it will continue to play a much larger role in druid healing post nerf than CoH will for holy priests. Though a chunk of WG was being able to maintain it the hot on a very large number of people, its nowhere near as important for the spell as chaining is for CoH.

I think that any suggestion that a cooldown is going to affect Wild Growth in the same way as it affects Circle of Healing is ludicrous. A cooldown will always have less impact on a HoT than on a direct spell because spells that work over time automatically have a chance of recasts being redundant. This is *especially* true when the cooldown is less than the duration of the HoT, which it is in this case. Certainly a six second cooldown affects the usefulness of Wild Growth, but it hurts Circle of Healing much more.

I really don't think that this nerf is the end of the world, but it is poorly thought through in two ways, one is that applying the same cooldown to an instant burst and a HoT makes little sense, the other is that it goes against their stated goal of trying to make groups not matter by making groups matter because Prayer of Healing is a strong AoE heal. The solution to the second part, of course, is not to remove the cooldown but to fix Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova. The first part might not need a solution, but if it doesn't then there was probably a problem in the other direction in the first place.

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There's some good coh cooldown discussion, and some good numbers. But all of it is preparation for an eventual discussion of how raid encounter "NYI" is built in a way that is impossible for a priest to heal, making the priest class no longer as viable as it is now for 25 man content.

The numbers and discussion are good, but I think it's important to also consider that the situations discussed are hypothetical. Blizzard has already discussed the possible need to update existing content to coincide with this change, and I would take that to mean that future content would be built with this in mind also.

So.. I appreciate the work people have done in thoroughly understanding/working through the changes, there's a lot of good stuff on rotations, etc, but I'm ready to move on. If a situation does show up later that only the old CoH can address, we'll have this work to depend on to prove that this isn't and wasn't ever a good idea(and a few people being able to spout a few told you so's). But until that happens, I almost think we need a seperate thread for discussing the cooldown.. It seems like it's become the primary priest thing to discuss, and is 'taking over/drowning out' the other general healing discussion going on here.

It's your call, really. If you want a regen trinket, then 90 int >> 90 spirit as a static stat. If you want a "balanced" trinket, then 90 spirit > 90 int, because it provides some spellpower as well as regen (assuming you're holy, of course, which is the point of this thread).

90 spirit is the more "balanced" choice. I would make your decision (assuming you decide to spend 3000g to buy one, at my conservative estimates based on proc chance of getting the cards you want and the cost of Eternal Life atm) based on what your second trinket is.

If you have [Forethought Talisman], get the 90 int version. If you want to use it in conjunction with *another* regen trinket, get the 90 spirit version (so you at least get *some* spellpower).

And remember: that loot list is entirely arbitrary, and just what I decided, for myself, based on the context of my guild and our raids. YMMV, etc, etc, etc.. (and in case someone looks at my Armory, I have 2 chests (T7, Sanctum) and I wear them both on occasion, as well as 2 weapons (Spire of Sunset, Staff of Restraint) for similar reasons).

There's very few "wrong" choices when it comes to gearing. For example, I consider [Signet of Manifested Pain] to be the BiS healer ring. It's obviously a "dps ring", but it's still amazing compared to our other choices because it has so much haste, crit, and spellpower that we can afford to drop some spirit/Mp5 to get it. Similarly, my first choice for a neck is [Cosmic Lights], which thankfully is much less competitive because most dps casters are ending up using [Wyrmrest Necklace of Power] instead.