I just got my alt priest to 80. I was wondering about spirit vs MP5.
Say a Neck has 34 spirit, the other one has 38 int but 13 mp5. Which should I go for?

If you're holy, spirit, if you're disc, int.

Holy gets more spirit out of the neck, and also spellpower from the spirit on it. Whereas for disc, spirit is largely useless and int is pretty much the best.

Edit: As was mentioned below, there's more to it then just just int > spirit for a given spec; it was late and I was lazy on my post.

Mp5 is generally very good, for either spec, but, as was noted, it's very expensive in terms of itemization.

Intellect is good for regen since it scales the amount you gain from spirit (I'm not sure on the exact math), while also giving you more mana to work with and crit to boot. Since discipline gains very little from spirit (aside from 30% of it while casting) because unlike holy, discipline will generally not have a lot of time spent OO5SR; holy has tricks to get OO5SR (clearcasting, inner focus, SoL, stopcasting). Discipline revolves around constantly healing or casting spells; Shields, penance, flash heal, and keeping grace up. This is much more true in cases of aoe damage - holy has CoH to help deal with it, which will usually proc a SoL; Discipline doesn't have many aoe tools outside of the party, and thus must single target cast to top up targets (also ProM) - it generally comes down to that Discipline is much more like a paladin and is chain casting, whereas holy can end up with some (very powerful) OO5SR mana regen.

To top it off, Holy gets spellpower from spirit, in addition to the regen (both discipline and holy have talents to increase the amount of spirit by 15%) so it generally makes spirit a more attractive option than Mp5, especially since at higher gear levels you won't have a lot of issues with mana regen, and spirit gives you more throughput.

Not exactly. Holy and Disc get the same amount of spirit from the neck. In general, for Holy int is better regen than spirit, but the spell power makes up for it, making int and spirit roughly equivalent. For Disc spirit is junk. Both specs love mp5, it's just too expensive. In this particular example, 38 int would beat 34 spirit for pretty much anyone even without the mp5. With the mp5 as well there's no comparison.

The first post in this thread explains the mechanics fairly clearly, I think.

On my priest, I actually try to time my gheal or fheal so that I do a tiny bit of overhealing. Since I am speced into Serendipity this helps me with my mana, while effectively healing the tank or injured dps. In this respect I see absolutely no problem with overhealing a target.

I found these, and with some preliminary testing they seemed accurate to me but feel free to correct this if it's wrong.


Ability Name & Spell Power Coefficient

Healing Abilities
Binding Heal 80.68% (100.68% with Empowered Healing)
Circle of Healing 40.20%
Desperate Prayer 80.68%
Flash Heal 80.68% (100.68% with Empowered Healing)
Greater Heal 161.35% (201.35% with Empowered Healing)
Holy Nova (Healing) 30.35%
Prayer of Healing 80.68%
Prayer of Mending 80.68% (per charge)
Renew 188% (37.60% per charge)

Offensive Abilities
Devouring Plague 18.49% (per tick)
Holy FireDD 57.11%
Holy FireDoT 2.40% (per tick)
Holy Nova (Damage) 16.06%
Mana Burn 0.0%
Mind Blast 42.80%
Mind Flay 25.70% (per tick)
Mind Sear 71.43%
Shadowfiend 65.0%
Shadow Word: Death 42.96%
Shadow Word: Pain 18.29% (per tick), 110% (overall)
Smite 71.40%
Vampiric Touch 0.0% (per tick)


I provided the following example on my guild's priest forum that might be helpful to the new priests. The experienced ones already know all of this

Example using GH9 (3950-4590 healing) with a spellpower (or HSE) of 2071 and assuming 5/5 Empowered Healing and a SPC of 201%

Base healing amt + (SPC * HSE)
3950 + (2.01 * 2071) = 8112
4590 + (2.01 * 2071) = 8752

Then don't forget to add the benefit from Spiritual Healing to the end (any deep holy priest should have this maxed at 5/5) which gives you:

3950 + (2.01 * 2071) = 8112 * 1.10= 8923
4590 + (2.01 * 2071) = 8752 * 1.10= 9627

So your max rank GH with 2071 spellpower and 5/5 Empowered Healing and 5/5 Spiritual Healing should heal between 8923-9627.

Just remember spellpower is essentially what used to be called Healing Spells & Effects (HSE) and everything that increases your healing/spellpower will go there including racials, Spiritual Guidance, food and elixer/flask buffs, and raid buffs like Gift of the Wild, Blessings of Kings, etc.

Also, for certain spells don't forget to add in other talent modifiers prior to using the spell coefficients. Examples for healing spells CoH and PoM are modified by both Twin Disciplines and Divine Providence. Prayer of Healing and Binding Heal get modified by Divine Providence only.

Am i the only one one (as holy) that finds the 4/4 heroes-valorous set a bit useless ?
I'm thinking of dumping my gloves or my pants (valorous) for haste equivalents shall i ?

And , yes like that i find overhealing (a bit) is useful or at least not that harmful

I'm definitely keeping 2-piece T7 for the duration, simply because when I *do* use the bonus, it's awesome. And T7 helm / T7 gloves are very close to BiS given my desire to keep haste above 12%. Obviously there are upgrades, but I don't like the way it drops haste from the helm slot (in favour of crit).

That's sort of not the question at hand. The question about overhealing generally goes like this: Assume you have a tank taking large spikes: for example, heroic Patchwerk. What is your threshold for canceling a heal, and when do you cancel? More generally, what is a reasonable percentage of overheal? And with particular regard to discipline healing, how do you account for "wasted" shields, and what is a reasonable percentage of shielding wasted?

In other words, it's an argument about mana (canceling heals which will be obviously wasted) vs. safety (the chance that 0.2 seconds after you cancel that heal, the tank takes a large spike and you're unprepared to react).

I'm beginning to think this might be a fertile topic for a separate thread entirely; I mean, we have this nice new forum and no one ever posts new threads.

Constantius, i always wondered where the 12% haste comes from? Is that a personal preference or is there an advantage with game mechanics (gheal as fast boss swing timer or something like that?) behind it?

I assume its 12% from gear + 3% from ret aura or boomkin aura and +5% from totem = 20%

For grater heal its:

2.5s..........100%
Xs.............20%

X=(20x2.5)/100
X=0.5s

So your grater heal becomes a 2 sec cast.

Basically the same amount of conclusion I have come to. For now, the only fight I use GHeal a truly significant amount of times is Patchwerk (We intend to do Sarth+3D this week, so can't comment on that yet). I have no mana problems there to begin with (some truly horrendous RNG luck aside), and even if I did I have a number of Heroes pieces to swap in (I have Valorous Legs/Shoulders and remainder from 10 man). As it is, there is no other fight I have done so far where the GHeal bonus feels meaningful enough to me to justify dropping superior stats for it. In all honesty right now I can't really claim to need the extra stats either for the current content, but at least they are typically more useful than the set bonus. I guess we will see the real value when more becomes known about Ulduar design and what Blizzard intends to do with us in 3.1.

Regarding the two piece bonus, I definitely do intend on keeping that one. Admittedly we dont' always get PoM to jump the full six times; however at the moment the more challenging fights in terms of healing have plenty of AoE damage which makes the full number of jumps very possible. (Vortex being a guarantee of course) As it is I am still debating which pieces to keep however. The [Valorous Gloves of Faith] are a given in the ideal combination for me without any clear upgrade available (Now I just need some luck with the drops, Conqueror being both the most rare and competitive token in our guild). Having picked up [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance] and [The Sanctum's Flowing Vestments] already, both of which are fairly consensus picks for best in slot, that leaves the head and shoulder slot for the second piece. At the moment I feel somewhat inclined to go with the shoulders as I already have those (my headpiece is still 10 man). Both are essentially 2nd best in slot from what I can see, behind the iLvl 226 Malygos loot.

i would have to say with the addition of patch 3.0.8 that haste to a priest is much more needed the fact that we cant just spam coh anymore makes it much more needed. And being able to drop some spirit by getting the h maly robes over t7 val robes for some haste and spell power is very nice. On my priest i have far to much mana regain i actually have to try very hard to make myself go oom on any boss fight with my shadow fiend arcane torent and hymn also a pot if i ever do need one taking some more haste is very nice and will help out with many of your other healing spells


IMO PoM on the vortex phase seems a little pointless everytime i cast it everyone is moving so fast that it doesnt have time to catch up to its intened target and trust me this is true i have checked it when me and a few guildies raided IF and stormwind. On that tram its fast enough to the point where PoM just floats next to you and doesnt hit your target

Don't forget that Holy gets Spirit of Redemption, which increases Spirit by 5%.

I have never noticed a problem on the vortex with PoM's. In fact, I usually get one or two Surge of Light procs to go with it. Even if it only hits two times, it is still worth casting.

I think you're imagining things re: PoM and Vortex. I watch mine very carefully, and it uses up all the charges, and then I refresh it on a fresh target. I get 1-2 SoL procs per Vortex from it as well, so it's definitely going off.

Here's a parse of a random Malygos attempt from the other night, trimmed to just include start->end of the only Vortex phase:

Wow Web Stats

As you can see, PoM proc'd 7x, along with 10 Renew ticks and my oh-so-OP Devouring Plague self-healing. I can't be bothered to dredge the file for the PW:S absorbs: suffice it to say there were 5 of them, fully absorbed (2 pre-Vortex, and 3 during).

So i dont really need the 4/4 (totally imo) :
I was thinking of swapping my [Valorous Gloves of Faith] for [Gloves of Token Respect]

and my [Valorous Leggings of Faith] for [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance]

while keeping my 2/2 set with the Valorous helmet / shoulders.

The alrtenative is swapping either my Helmet + Pants (but i dont really wanna loose all that haste) or my shoulders + pants (but i like the look of my valorous shoulders ).

Any ideas / suggestions / objections ?

- I'm close to getting my current target gear , need the Os robes and the arcanic tramplers atm(they both are not dropping!) so keep in mind that my gear setup is almost like the on "Constantius" proposed in his theory craft with some changes in a couple of items / gems.

This appears to be a typo. For those who do not know, Vampiric Touch is 40% per tick, or 200% over the entire duration.

Those suggestions sound good. It definitely appears Blizzard will do *something* nice with IDS.
At the moment, my priest is still leveling (and uses IDS). If it were to remain the same, then I would end up dropping it at some point, but let's hope it will be changed to something like the all-in-one talent mentioned in the above quote.

Unless I missed it, here's the Blue info that mentioned the potential changes:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - GC: Direct Priest Questions ONLY

EDIT: One or two others mentioned it, but couldn't remember the source.

Thanks for catching that Leet

And Discipline gets Enlightenment, which is the same 5%, thus why the two specs gain the same amount of raw spirit from any given item. (The regen gain won't be the same, of course, but Lazare talks about that in the part of the post you cut out.)

I would, however, disagree with him that both specs "love" mp5. Both specs equally dislike it: holy because it's not spirit, and discipline because they generally don't need regen from gear (although given the choice, 1 mp5 is equal to or possibly slightly better than the same item-worth of spirit). But in a world where all of your items are going to have stamina, intellect, spell power, and two of {hit, crit, haste, spirit, mp5}, you don't always have the option of forgoing regen on gear entirely.

Yeah, any method using rapture returns is only going to be able to provide a "quick and dirty" estimate of absorbed damage. It won't be precisely correct. There is also still a bug where rapture returns on absorbs that break through a shield are too high (based on the amount absorbed + the breakthrough damage). In addition, it is not trivial to estimate a priest's maximum mana, which can definitely change throughout the course of a combat log.

In spite of those problems, I believe using rapture returns to estimate absorbed damage is more precise than using data from crit heals to estimate DA shield absorbs or using the PW:Shield glyph to estimate PW:Shield absorbed damage. Even if we look at tons of data and measure how often shields expire and how much on average they absorb, applying those averages to predict absorbed damage for an individual priest in an individual encounter is a stretch. You'd have to assume both the priest and the encounter is "average" ... whatever that means.

Unfortunately, although it's possible to go through and get a pretty accurate tally of absorbed damage, right now that's so time consuming that it's only really been done for research purposes -- it's not very feasible for most practical purposes.

Since the COH nerf, getting mana back should no longer be a concern as regen is plentiful with all the known holy talents. If you want to heal more conservatively, going after intel and crit with COH still specced into your build, one of those five heals will proc SOL and IHC almost every time you hit COH.

Since the COH nerf, I have respecced out of Serendipity and deeper into Disc to obtain Meditation, Mental Agility, Mental Strength and Focussed Power and built my base mana pool to almost 20k, dropped 200 spirit in gear changes in favour of intel and crit to ensure higher procs for SOL and IHC.

In both H OS and H MALYGOS, my mana never falls below 70% and I use COH every time its off cd thanks to cooldown watch for the procs. This is with constant healing rotations.

Respeccing and seeking stats that support a greater rate of mana free heals taking you OO5SR is definitely worth considering if you are having to overheal to "try" to get mana back.