Hm, that's what I get for not looking at the talent in the last couple of months; it used to return significantly more on shields.

Renew generally has three uses:
(a) Put on a tank to add a small buffer before your next heal. Not a bad use, although generally it's a drop in the bucket when your Renew ticks for 1200 and the tank is taking 10k hits. In a 5 man situation, this might actually be all the healing you need, which makes it nice because you can either throw in some DPS or just stand there and regen mana.

(b) Put on random raid members taking slow, predictable damage, roughly on the order of Renew's HPS. If you're really in this situation (see: Sapphiron), Prayer of Mending is generally a better alternative, or CoH, or wait a few seconds and Flash Heal (see below).

(c) Put on random party/raid members who just took a ~5k spike but won't take any other damage in the near future. Flash Heal (presumably glyphed) beats Renew for this if you can cast it: it's nearly as effective in HPM and in HPS (even if you consider Renew's HPS to be over a GCD), but is less likely to get sniped by some other healer, heals more quickly to save people from various contingencies, and interacts much better with talents. Holy priests might get it free from Surge of Light, and if not the Flash Heal can crit (and proc Surge of Light/Clearcasting, or at the very least have a better chance to proc Serendipity). Discipline priests get returns from Rapture for Flash Heal but not Renew, it refreshes or applies Grace, and crits put up Divine Aegis for even more mana return.

The only real advantage Renew has over Flash Heal is that it's an instant cast, so if you're really in a situation where you can't cast and need to heal someone (basically, Malygos's Vortex in current content), it's a viable option after PW:S/CoH/PoM/instant Flash Heals.

(d) Put it on someone you know will be taking some indeterminate amount of damage in the near future, but you expect to not be able to heal them from it. Hope it's enough to keep them alive.

(read: ret paladins on Sarth+3.10, having blazes constantly hounding them)

as a disc priest Renew is quite useless, it's even on the edge of being removed from my main bar, but I'm used to have it here, even if not really useful. Priests are the jack-of-all-trades healers, even the least interesting tool can someday be necessary, so I keep Renew.

About raid healing as disc, I think that in pure theory Disc Raid healing through Flash Heal is more effective than Holy's one. The main reason is that in a configuration where Flash Heal generates low overheal it is very efficient in Disc, more than IHC that bring the casting time of FH below 1.5s very often but that won't affect the GCD and thus won't improved the output.

But in a raid configuration where CoH and the infamous Chain Heal are fired every half a second, it is barely possible to do less than 50% overheal with Flash Heal, because of this situation Disc cannot sustain a Flah Heal spam on raid for a very long period. Moreover a significant part of the mana regen comes from Divine Aegis + Rapture, but on raid it is not sure at all that the Aegis will be consumed before vanishing, it is a direct loss in our mana regeneration, this one of the reasons why tank healing is attractive for Disc.

Disc is a 2 in 1 approch of healing, it is both reactive and proactive.
Reactive : instant penance 1st tick, BT-fast heal
Proactive : Grace, Divine Aegis
Both reactive and proactive depending the case : PW:S, pain suppression

What is the main difference with holy priest ? holy priest is here to top raid life and be sure that nobody hits the red zone and dies because of further damages, it's a general task, far less connected to combat events, no special rules in this gameplay, use your hasted heals, instant FH, CoH in order to top life of raid as fast as possible.

I think that for T7 tier, the proactive aspect of Disc healing is quite useless, and this is the main reason why Disc is currently less than optimal in a raid setting, half of its gameplay is currently not needed.

Greeting fellow priests - I'we tried to read up on the 37 pages but did not find anything aimed at Malygos 10 man healing exept from the renew-tip.

My brain is currently prosessing the CoH CD we are about to recieve and a thought occured:

Malygos 10 man:
Even with a topped up raid; the raid will be in desperate need of instant-heals when thrown up in the air during Vortex.

Pre CoH CD: With no CD on CoH I healed the dmg with PoM+CoH+the occasional instant Flashheal from SoL proc+a rare shield.

Post CoH CD: With a 6 sec CoH CD incomming, will it still be possible to keep the raid up with 2 holypriests as raid-healers and still have the mana left for PoH spam when you land? I fear I will run oom from using Renew+Shields alot more.

We have only downed him once - without a single Replenisher - and managing mana was a great challenge.

Feedback appreciated.

@Jonny:

You should be using Prayer of Mending...

And to counter or lessen the range problem, try bunching up in the middle before you get thrown in the air.

When learning this fight, stack stamina. Try to have 2 priests. Everyone bunching up doesn't really help that much. The most important thing is to have everyone healed up to 20K.

I did the fight with all clothies over 18k, and good raid buffs, and it's difficult. I did the fight again the other day, with the clothies all around 16k (lol stamina they said), with no replenishment, and it's hard.

before the fight starts, look at all the clothies in the raid, (even some of the leather).. Who has the lowest HP of them? the second lowest? These people + yourself are the people you want to be sure to top off, and even possibly drop a shield/renew on them when you get a vortex warning.. Even if the plate gets hit with some dmg prior to the vortex, make sure the 2 lowest people are topped off.

Use PoM. it will bounce quite a bit, try to use 1 CoH, and then possibly a surge if you get lucky. The renew/shield will give those people who are lowest 1 extra tick of no dmg..

As soon as you land have the priests (who are in seperate groups), cast a PoH. If things get bad pop your Inner Focus, and use the surge as a instant bonus heal.

Although they intended to nerf both CoH and Wild Growth, the current raid encounters were designed with those spells not having a cooldown. Malygos' Vortex and Gluth's Decimate will probably get looked at in light of this new mechanic. It wouldn't surprise me to see Vortex damage being reduced. I'm not sure what they'd do to Decimate, since it reduces the raid to 5% of their health.

Decimate I don't see becoming overly difficult to heal, however, since the raid damage in the Gluth encounter is otherwise pretty minimal (unlike Malygos).

These fights where you have near-zero overhealing from Flash Heal spam do exist. Sapphiron, Kel´Thuzad are perfect examples for this. You can FH until eternity and be on par with a Shaman´s healing output (though, that does not really matter, anyways).

Also, maths has already been done in this thread concerning returns from Rapture. The vast amount of returns come from healing (about 70 - 80 %), so it´s not really a big deal if you lose returns from Aegis on random people (if you lose them at all - remember that in the case of high raid damage you will not).

Remember the dmg from Vortex will also get an adjusted nerf along side CoH/WG

I wouldnt worry too much about the dmg. Besides it gives you opportunitues to discover new ways of healing and absorb healing.

If vortex doesn't threaten to kill anyone, it becomes rather pointless. Perhaps they will have it do 20k over 15 seconds I guess to at least theoretically have it be able to kill someone.

I never felt it was one of those spots where CoH was needed. Target PoM, renew and PW:S on those that risk death and you should be fine. Most of the healing can be done after landing anyway.