I think the choice for talents ultimately boils down to one question that everyone needs to ask themselves. Do I need more regen or do I need more throughput?

It's a tight race between ToF and Blessed Resil. These are straight up througput talents.
SoL, on the otherhand, is in a roundabout way for regen.

Yes the glyph only affects the base healing not the talented healing. Thank you for spotting that. I misread the talent. I suspect that you are right and that the glyph will include empowered renew. I will amend the original post.

=========================

There is no logical error in SoL conficting with HC. It is quite clear that it will confict. As for ooFSR time, making up for that loss you are sadly mistaken. SoL even at very high crit rates has a neglible impact on ooFSR time. You are looking at something like 2% extra ooFSR time, and in most situations you can get the same ooFSR time by simply not casting a flash at all, as the absence of the SoL flash is highly unlikely to inconvenience the other healers or significantly reduce your HPS. That is what a lot of people fail to understand. The value of SoL is not is not always the difference between cast a free flash or a flash that costs mana. Its the difference between casting a free flash and between taking any other action including not casting anything.

The value of SoL is considerably lessened by the fact that it cant proc HC. Reducing 3 casts per 8 seconds to 2.2 casts per 8 seconds (i.e. 1 SoL per 10 seconds) results in a drop of 10% uptime at 25% crit and reduces the total value of HC by 20%. If you take SoL, HC might no longer be worth the points as the drop is very steep.

SoL gives you a free flash heal with a 50% proc when you heal. That means each crit has a 50% chance of awarding a free 5k heal. However this heal cannot crit and cannot proc IHC. Lets look at single target spells (gheal, renew, flash heal).

At 25% crit each of these spells has a 12.5% chance per cast to proc an SoL for about 5000 however this SoL cannot crit. A crit returns about 30% more effective healing on average, which for 5000 is 1500. In total this means 578 healing per cast of FH, GH and renew. Per point its 289 healing per cast. The amount of regen you fain from ooFSR regen per SoL proc is absoludely negligible and can be safely ignored. That about 5% more healing for flash heal and 2% more healing for gheal and renew. That is hardly what makes a build viable or not, especially when every other talent in tier 4 and 5 which competes with SoL, will also produce boosts in the order of 1-2%.

SoL does not give you extra mana, unless you use it to smite the boss for a JoW proc.

Still this is a fairly decent return. Its certainly higher than many tier 4 and tier 5 talents, but whereas other talents produce their benefit immediately SoL requires an extra cast.

If we turn to multitarget spells, then for both PoM and PoH healing prayers is better than SoL.

Here is why: Compare 5 PoHs with 2/2 healing prayers and 4 PoHs + 2 SoLs with 2/2 SoL instead of HP. The fact that a free flash heal is 626 mana, while healing prayers reduces the mana cost of PoH by 180 per point is of no consequence, because a PoH heals for roughly 5 times more than flash heal. Being able to cast 10% more PoHs is much more important than being able to cast 1 extra flash heal every 4 PoHs. The same holds true for PoM.

Also since multitarget spells heal for such large amounts. Test of faith can have exceedingly high return. 12% more healing on a PoH with 5 targets below 50% is a massive 3000 healing.

On tough fights where every hit a DPS takes can reduce them to below 50% health. Test of faith is much better return per point than SoL and it makes a difference between life and death.

SoL does not directly return mana, its free healing. You can save the same amount of mana by not casting flash heal when you dont have to and using that mana for another spell instead, which is boosted by the talents you took instead of SoL.

SoL certainly has a good return, but its nowhere near mandatory. The free serendipity procs may make SoL more attractive though.

============================
SoL is free healing not extra mana, in fact it probably reduces the amount of mana that is strictly available by interfering with HC.

Priests can't use CoH more it stil has the same CD. They will use more multitarget spells, but HP is much better return if you use lots of PoH and PoM. Also multitarget spells benefit tremendously from all scaling factors, including ToF, which yeild roughly the same healing as SoL, but without requiring the extra GCD and the healing is spread more equally. What use is a free SoL if a multitarget heal would heal it anyway?

You do have several errors in the way you present things.



Here, you can't ignore that SoL procs just at the same time as HC. So, the free flash that can't crit is to be used while HC is still up for some time.

Here is a model taking that correlation into account.
Take n = 3. regularly spaced. (so, every 2.66 s), and 25% crit.
Uptime for HC without SoL is 1 - (1 - 0.25)^3 ~ 58%,

Now, I assume that the SoL is used within 3 after the proc. We might construct cases where it is not true. However, I am fairly confident with this assumption :

• We are speaking of cases where mana management is difficult, and healing not gcd constraint. You'll find a time to use SoL
• SoL is instant. meaning you can use also in emergency to buy you some time till next heal is available.
• SoL triggers serependity, which is also useful in "emergency threatening" case.

So, basically, what SoL does is that it decreases n by 1 when you already have HC buff (so, there is no impact), and for 3s longer.
With n = 2, you have 1 - 0.75^2 ~ 44% of chance to have HC.
So, for every SoL, you have 14% less chance for 3s to have HC.
Taking back 1 SoL every 10s, that's only 4.2% less uptime.


This doesn't hold in many cases, because you may not use POH or flash in some fights. For Patchwerk for example, you don't use POH, so healing prayers is not helpful at all, however good in paper comparison it appears. In other words, a huge increase in a cd every 5 minutes might be less desirable than a minor increase in a spam spell.

But there is also an efficiency question, ie, increases should be considered in a absolute value (healing done) and not relative value (percentage) when you want to compare them.

If you want to do compare them, you need to take into account how many of each spells you cast, and what you gain from each talent point precisely.
Having healing prayers don't mean you can cast 10% more POH. It means that the POH you cast cost you less, and you can last for a longer fight.
Basically, healing is decided by the damage pattern mainly, not the efficiency. You cast POH when you have a full group to top up (Malygos after Vortex, Sapphiron), not when you have the mana. Especially when you want to compare mono-target heals and group heals.

I don't have the time to run the full model, I'll do it if people find it useful. But you can take it, you just have to take into account one healing pattern, and express in absolute values (mana saved, or healing done) the gain of each talent with this pattern.

I very much disagree with you here.

1) SoL does not just proc from Flash, renew, gh and BH. Our aoe healing spells have much higher proc rates.

2) Again I strongly disagree. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Your healing pattern is not just decided by the fight but by how much mana you have available what spells you want to cast and most important of all by what talents you have. Healing pryaers and SoL are definately two talents that affect your healing pattern a lot.

You are not even considering the amount of over healing you'd be doing by casting PoH that much. Especially with the increase in healing to CoH, I just cannot see that many situations where you'd need to cast PoH enough to merit healing prayers over SoL. SoL is almost always utilized in someway. Healing prayers is throwing talent points at a situational spell.

Out of curiosity I ran some numbers on the value of one point in Spiritual Guidance ("SG") versus one point of Blessed Resilience ("BR") for various spells at typical raid-buffed levels of Spirit and Spellpower (Spellpower measured before application of SG bonus). In my calculations I used the spellpower coefficients posted at Wowwiki, I hope those are correct. To give BR its maximum chance I assumed 4 points already invested in SG, with the decision then being whether to spend one last point on SG or on BR.

Basically I found SG is clearly superior to BR at any Spirit/SP levels a raiding priest would bring to Ulduar.

E.g., at 1100 Spirit/2500 SP (before SG bonus), 1 more point of SG is 8% better than a point of BR when casting GH, 10% better when casting FH/BH, 2% better for PoH, and far superior for CoH, PoM and Renew (22%, 37%, 59%). (I did the calculation with untalented Renew, didn't bother to then calculate talented since the superiority of SG for Renew was so overwhelming.)

(However, because SG scales differently than BR, BR is a superior talent while leveling a holy priest. BR will plainly deliver better output than SG until a priest hits level 68 and gets PoM. Past level 68, for healing 5-mans it still probably remains better in its overall output until geared in Northrend dungeon blues or thereabouts. And the damage reduction aspect would arguably make it a preferable leveling talent all the way until 80.)

SoL Flash heal is adding a serendipity stack. I'm definitely taking it in live unless more talent changes occur in the course of testing.

edit: clarity

Once again, we are noting that they have two stated goals:

Make mana important
Make healing less spammy.

Assume that we are casting CoH. No matter the change to PoH, I don't think it can be used on an ongoing every fight. With less mana regen, there is simply no way in hell. The spell is already the only way priests can run out of mana regularly, short burn effects. And consider the best PoH situation possible - Malygos' vortex. Assuming he gets 3 vortex (2 seems better) and assuming that we cast 2 PoH each Vortex (mostly people are topped off by the time the first one is done) that's a whole 6 PoH per fight. I agree that healing prayers is a good talent, but lets not overstate it. We're never going to be spamming that skill.

So we cast CoH, and proc SoL. Ass you agree, this is the worst situation for SoL. HC has not procced (which it will do off non-aoe/PoM casts, thus rendering SoL free healing). and we immediately use it.

Now what just happened? First, we healed for 5k. Great. That's 5k no other healer spent mana on. Might it have been healed by AoE healing? Maybe. If it was going to be, why didn't you use it on the Tank? That's 5k less a tank healer had to do. If it was going to be healed by a single target heal, great. That's mana no other healer spent.

Now as you note, if SoL didn't happen, we probably wouldn't cast a flash heal. Okay. So we wouldn't have any chance of proccing HC. The chance of HC proccing off a flash heal we didn't cast is zero.

Maybe we'd cast another AOE heal. AOE heals don't proc HC.

You keep comparing SoL to ToF. I like ToF. Lets take it out of a different talent - Blessed Resiliance. 2/3 Blessed Resiliance is 2% healing. If we have 25% crit raid buffed (this is probably low) then we can lowball SoL proccing on 12% of all heals (it'll be higher if you cast any CoH, any PoH, or PoM procs more than once). Assuming (since we didn't cast any of those spells) all we were casting is Greater Heal and Renew, getting a free flash is about half of a greater heal or renew (it's higher than half a renew, certainly). Thus, Surge of Light accounts for 6% additional healing AT THE VERY LOWEST. That's 3 times what those talent points are giving us in Blessed Resiliance.

And this is a low side estimate. It's probably quite a bit higher. Remember, as you noted, GCDs are not an issue here. Blizzard's stated goal is to make healing less spammy, and that means more GCDs where we aren't casting anything. More GCDs where we aren't casting is more GCDs where we could be using a flash heal to top someone off, saving the entire raid mana.

Except that SoL is not a net increase in healing: it's a net decrease (the same effective cast time, and it cannot crit), as a tradeoff for a sizeable increase in regen. The new Holy Concentration changes that tradeoff somewhat, but it's still a tradeoff (and if anything the new Serendipity is better for SoL than the old; the new currently gives a stack for a SoL Flash Heal, while the old one did nothing on a free spell).

What you're assuming is that Blizzard is actually successful in making us not spam. But what that will probably mean is that we cast-cancel Greater Heals on the tank, thus doing something (and thus meaning you can't consider SoL a throughput increase, as it's only a throughput increase if you were doing nothing before); you can actually use a SoL instead of canceling a Greater Heal, but that doesn't mean it does anything terribly useful, and it's certainly not a 6% increase in HPS. So it makes no sense to compare a throughput talent (Blessed Resilience) to a regen talent (SoL).

Even if you manage to get 100% up time on holy concentration (which you won't), it a 146 mp5 bonus. If I use only 3 SoL procs a minute, I've saved more mana than that.

The more crit i stack the more regen I'll get from SoL and the less i'll get from HC due to uptime overlap, and just not enough gcd's for non SoL flash heals / emp renews / bindings / gheals.

If you take both talents I honestly don't think we're going to get a lot of regen from HC. It's nothing compared to what we lost with the old serendipity + IHC procs, and it doesn't even scale well with crit.

I like what they've tried to do in making crit + spirit combo good for us but it just hasn't worked, and atm it's a lot worse than I think it should be (2 point talent on the previous tier gives me more regen and utility).

To fix it imo they need to:
* Make SoL capable of crit but can't proc off itself
* Make HC an instant mana return based off spirit for around the same amount, solving the overlap issue. More like illumination only based off spirit rather then the base cost of the spell.

Also if you're worried about SoL not criting and losing throughput, don't cast it a use a 20/40/60% gheal you probably have in the bag.

I think that the comarision between SoL and HP cannot be done without considering the majority of fightes one will encounter. If it is much heavy raid-dmg or periodical raid-dmg, HP is a very interresting talent. PoM will be flowing around and is a good spend GCD. And you can heal several groups nearly alone if you use PoH in a somewhat regularly basis on different groups (with other spells in between, I'm not speeking about spamming). That may be especialy interresting in 10mans if you group with a holypaldin or disc. Such encounters are not uncommon and often occur in more difficult raids.

Another form of making fights difficult is movement. And there instants are king. SoL can give us another instant. An instant that maybe cannot replaced with any other cast if everybody has to move around (or is moved around or whatever). That is not about throughput. That is not about mana. That is about beeing able to do something while moving. Well, Improved Renew may be another interresting cast for such situations but renew does not give that much life instantly even with the talent.

I think the other interresting effect from SoL is the possible free Serendepity-stack. But if you think it through its something like Borrowed Time. PoH (or whatever cast would get the stack) would be off earlier if you would not cast the SoL before it anyway. But since the costs are minor you maybe would use the SoL-cast and do not suffer much with the spell you originally intended to cast since it is hasted somewhat.

Which of the two talents is the better one is hard to decide without knowledge of the difficulties of the encounters we will face.

Whatever one choose I cannot see the comparision to ToF. ToF is a lifesaver talent. For both tankhealing and raidhealing. Yes it gives you an enormous throughput if you can use it with PoH in the raid. But the most importent thing is that you can help people who are in danger if they will be hit again (especialy tanks or other persons focussed) with a big chunk of health. Yes all talents may be situational. But ToF is a talent that will help you in every fight where healing is interresting. For every other fight your talent-decisions are not as importent anymore. (That said - for every encounter a specc without ToF may be a better fitting talentbuild if you streamline your talents for it. But if ToF will help you everywhere where heals are actually needed.)

My thoughts are mostly with the new serendepity. I like Borrowed Time when I'm disc. I like Arcane Blast when I'm on my arcan mage. But I dont like the design of the new serendepity.

My first problem is that it only hastens the first spell in a row. If you will face heavy damage what you would like to have is that you can somewhat precast one spell and get another spell shortly after the first. That will never be possible with serendepity. It may be nice for some faster PoH in between FH/BH-spam. That may be interresting after a period where you cannot heal and you need a fast cast. You could build up your stack before. But that is not less situational than the other talents discussed.

My other problem is that I remember the 2nd T4-bonus. I was one of the few who tried it. For everybody who does not remember it: For every FH one did the next GH was hasted. The effect was stackable 5 times. That was a huge effect since one did not have anything else with haste on that gear-level. Yes, my heals did land more often than without it. But when I was on pressure with tankhealing my throughput was worse when I used a FH+GH-combo on the tank than when I only used GH. So the only use for it I can see is to give some bursthealing while raidhealing. I'm not sure if it is a comparable usefull tool as the other talents discussed here. (While it surely helps a lot with throughput if you can use your serendepity-stacks on targets who need that bigger heals than FH/BH.)

I am personally rather excited for the new Serendipity. One thing that crossed my mind that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that it seems to be a reliable HPS increase, as opposed to the random HPS increase of IHC.

Some very rough math: at my gear level (2400 spellpower, 8.69% haste self buffed) my flash heals cast in 1.38s and hit for about 5k. My greater heals cast in 2.3s and land for about 10k. Therefore the HPS of greater heal spam is 10000 / 2.3 = 4347.8 HPS. A 3-stack of serendipity drops my greater heal cast time to 0.92s. Since that'll be limited by the GCD, I'll just call it 1s. A rotation of 3xFH, GH is 25k healing over 5.14s or 4863.8 HPS.

The reason I am most interested in it is the controlled haste. It gives us the freedoms to toss flash heals around the raid without always needing a greater heal in the queue for the tank as the haste will allow us to squeeze a greater heal in on time on the tank.

I can think of some other uses for it too. For example on Kel'Thuzad, always keep a 3-stack of Serendipity on in preparation for ice tombs. Then you can respond with a <1s greater heal followed up by a ProM or CoH.

Has anyone noticed that Empowered Renew isn't working properly? AKA, the "initial" portion of the HoT is not in effect?

Blue posted as that being a known bug.

Yeah. Empowered Renew not currently functioning at all, from what I can tell. It heals for a lot less than it should, and it doesn't have the initial component.

Serendipity is amazing. My unbuffed gheals are 2.25/1.75/1.35/0.88 seconds (0/1/2/3 serendipity). There is a LOT of flexibility here. Two stacks of serendipity makes gheal = fheal for cast time. One stack of serendipity already gives me a gheal equivalent to my IHC gheals. My PoH with three stacks is 1 second cast time. This bodes well for not only better single target healing, but also intermittent heavy raid healing (with flashes/gheals) AND heavy widespread raid healing (1 second 6k PoH plus instant 4k CoH with 3+ seconds to restack serendipity). The flexibility this gives us in switching from raid to direct healing is also incredible.

Very exciting change, if it stays through to release. I wonder, though, if it isn't a bit overpowered, but we'll see. It'll definitely affect our mana usage outlook, but I'm thinking this change allows us to drop haste for regen if we need to. Hard to say without more of an idea of how healing intensive Ulduar ends up being. I can say though that my first impression of serendipity makes me think 375 haste might be too much with the new changes, and new tier of gear coming.

I'll report more as it comes. I'll be testing everything on PTR.

p.s. Inc ase there was a doubt in previous posts, surge of light does stack serendipity.

As soon as I get a stable few minutes on the PTR I'll be on there (pending RL as well). However, is meditation also bugged? I didn't have a chance to snoop around as much as I would have liked, but my in combat MP5 is the same as it is currently, just my OOC regen was nerfed.

Also, I am quite worried about mana as a whole. With all of the hasted heals we seem to be getting, it seems as if we are turning into mini-pallys, without infinite mana (their regen still seems to be outrageous, simply from watching people in IF). In about 10 casts or so, I was down to half mana, and my shadowfiend seemed less than useful (another bug, perhaps?).

Granted, I could be missing the mark here quite a bit, I've only been on for a few minutes, but mana seems to be the #1 issue for me (behind healing being just plain boring anymore).

Ah, I think I understand. I must have misunderstood it. At first, I thought they were going to UP the in combat MP5 to compansate for the loss in OOC MP5, not realizing that in combat MP5 is calculated from OOC MP5 directly plus meditation.

All in all, I can't imagine doing sarth 3d with the new changes, I go OOM sometiems as is (depending on if the DPS feel like nubbing it up or the healers decide to slack off a bit)...I certainly WILL go oom about twice as fast with the new changes. Oh, my wishes of breaking 2K OOC regen are gone /cry.

Initial heal from empowered renew is working fine on EU PTR, there recently was a new patch applied there though. However, it still doesn't proc holy concentration when it crits. The increase to renews ticks seem fine as well, remember that its +15% of healing effects and not a straight +15% to renew.

Shadowfiend had ~12k health and an ability called shadowcrawl that instantly ports it behind your target and increases damage of next hit by 30%. It seems as if it was intended to autocast, but I never saw that happen. First swing from shadowfiend seems to never give you any mana for some reason. Survivability of the shadowfiend seems good, tried to get it killed a few times but it had no problems tanking normal non elite mobs, almost every swing missed.

I have a feeling that we are going to see encounters with big breaks between phases and with alternating phases of intensive and slow healing. This is prob why blizzard nerfed ooFSR regen. Priests and druids would have a full mana bar before every healing intensive phase. I think it will mostly come down to mana conservation during the slow phases and high HPM during the intensive ones. Will be interesting to see. I hope I manage to get a character copied onto the PTR by the time ulduar is released.


=======================================
Here is how I calculate SoL.
A flash at 2500 non crit is about 5k. An SoL flash heals for 5000 but a non SoL flash can also give you some free healing when it crits. Its on average 30% of its value in effective healing so about 1500 effective healing per crit. That means a casted flash with 25% crit also has a chance to give you 375 healing. Thus SoL has a 12.5% chance to give you 4625 free healing on average. That is 578 healing per cast for 2 points. Since it also reduces HC uptime lest make that 550 healing or 275 healing per cast per SoL point. A crit flash heal heals on average for 5400 with 30% boost on effective healing on crit. That means a boost of 10% in effective healing. At the same level Gheal heas for 11000 and renew heals ~9300. That is 5% more healing for gheal and 6% for renew. Per point its 5% for flash, 2.5% for gheal and 3% for renew. For PoH its about 1100 healing per point per cast, but PoH heals for 26000 per cast, which comes out to about 4% per point.

Its good return, but its nothing game breaking. Skipping SoL results in a 1-5% less healing depending on your choices. Hardly required and hardly game breaking.

As I mentioned in my original post however, serendipity is a big bonus for SoL.

Granted for 1). I forgot about it, you're right.

I am still conviced by your second point. Yes, I know that you use some or other spells according to your talents and their efficiency. But there a few fights where you can replace flash heals with POH. POH is a group-limited raid heal, it requires everyone in a group taking damage. And predictable, if possible, so that you can pre-cast. Or you use serependity to lower the cast time, but then, SoL procs serependity...

I haven't had a chance to go on the PTR yet, but the spec I'll probably be trying is some variation of this. I think at least 1 point in healing prayers is valuable, or even 2 by dropping a point from test of faith.

Dropping Inner Focus is a tough decision. With the change to OO5SR and HC, it's only use now is as an emergency heal when you're OOM, and I think the constant return from a point in Healing Prayers is more useful. How useful ToF is will depend on the encounter design, but I'm anticipating less frequent/higher damage instead of the constant low damage that we have to deal with now.

I don't think SoL is optional at all. When you look at the only 2 "new" encounters in WotLK, mobility is a large of part of the raiding game now and you have to figure Ulduar will continue that trend. That's really where SoL shines to me, the mana savings is just a bonus.

I am a little annoyed by the changes though. I've been gearing with a heavy skew towards haste and spirit, and the value of both of those stats took a hit with this patch. I think spirit is still considerably better than pure MP5 (for holy priests at least), but more crit would be useful to increase the up time of the HC proc. Also, the new serendipity gives you fast greater heals without requiring any haste on your gear. Definitely thinking about swapping out some haste pieces for more crit. The changes to renew are killer though, I'm looking forward to making that spell a regular part of my rotation now.

As this is my first post, I would like to thank all of you for the discussions you guys have. I've been reading this thread since the beginning of WotLK and it's been a huge help.

There are certainly decisions to be made in a holy build, and some talents you will have to skip. I'm currently 13/58 on the PTR, but haven't had a real chance to play with it. I'm concerned that with the regen changes that Inner Focus will be even more useful than before. Imagine using Inner Focus on a PoH for raid healing. That's a pretty big mana savings (2000?) For the same reason the decreased mana cost of PoH will be important if PoH becomes a large part of our healing profile. I'm convinced that even 2/3 Serendipity will provide incredible benefits.

Serendipity gives a retarded amount of options to a holy build. At best, it probably means we can do all of the healing roles extremely well (tank, raid, float). At worst, it might mean we get a little carried away with our healing power and get into trouble with mana.

Must. Test. In. Ulduar.