Saving the shield is really only really necessary when the "big hit" you are talking about is enough to kill the tank and with the PW:S first they survive. This is definitely the case with some breaths during the Sarth3d encounter.

For Sarth you would want to put a PW:S up before each breath... In most cases though your WS downtime will be minimal even in this case. The breath CD is slightly less than the WS buff length and he normally uses it very soon after the CD is up. Which means you will either miss a breath and a shield following it prevents a melee swing death or you hit the shield before each. Net result still at or near 100% uptime.

My shield is good for ~6450 the glyph is another ~1100 in healing, so 7550/1.2 = ~6291.6.

Yeah, I basically had 2 tank healing modes when I was disc (recently switched to holy): either spamming--keeping weakened soul up 100% and spamming flash heal and penance--or reactive healing, like on Sartharion-3, where I would cast as many spells were needed to get through the ever-increasing melee damage, and wait till I saw a breath casting to use PW:S, then use the Borrowed Time to penance+GH after the breath.

Edit: He has a point though, I'm sure Weakened Soul was still up at least 75% of the time.

I agree that Sarth3D would be an exception to casting PWS every 15 seconds, but I have not seen a boss in Ulduar (from those tested so far) that would require us to save PWS for something, so as far as Ulduar is concerned I think that casting PWS every 15 seconds is optimal.

I'm far from a math genius, but how can FHx3 + GH be better HPS in it's nerfed condition than before? Is it supposed to be 5174.13 HPS? I'm at work and can't really insert the formula anywhere.

Edit: And to add a point. The optimal HPS must be from BHx1 + GH. BH gives you 2 stacks Serendipity since it effectively heals two people at the same time in one cast.

A very interesting calculation to see would be the HPS difference between doing 2x PoH in a row vs 1x BH + 1x PoH.

...Because I totally did it wrong, oops. One second and I'll fix it.

But then again two thirds of the bosses are as of yet unknown, hehe.

Alright, I obviously didn't pay enough attention. However, from the feedback on the PTR it looked like pretty much all the encounters were tuned to be fairly easy. I'd hazard to guess that they'll be harder on live, than they are on the PTR now. And then of course there'll be hard modes.

Factor in the BT buff you get (used with GH, or even better, instant / penance + gh) and the glyph, and that's fine ;-) Even better than fine.

Divine Aegis doesn't show up on the meters, for the Nth zillionth time.

Also mathematically, disc can output that much. That you post a method that deliberately hides at least 20% of disc's healing instead of arguing the math (which does not favor you) is telling. Please, post math, or cease to argue this silly, silly point. Holy cannot output Discs' HPS, either sustained, or burst. Holy conc is haste on random proc. Borrowed Time is haste on demand. Penance is a greater heal on crack. Divine Aegis makes your crits much, much better than Holy's crits.

If your job is mixed tank/raid healing, or mostly raid healing, holy is the far more viable of the two. CoH is very, very nice and disc loses a lot of throughput on raid heals.

I know shamans, priests and paladins can all keep a tank alive fairly trivially on Sarth right now (3.08). The difference is that priests are getting destroyed mana regen wise, paladins/shamans are getting no changes whatsoever to mana regen.

That's not quite fair. Paladins are getting some nerfs. The removal of Light's Grace and the changes to Divine Plea mean they *will* take some hit. The only question is whether or not it's going to be enough to balance them with shamans, who seem to be the baseline. For some reason, however, priests got hit about 2x as hard as they needed to for a "balance with shamans" mantra. On any content we've tested in Ulduar.25, the shamans end the fight with 40% mana. I don't. I run out much earlier, take an innervate, and then burn fiend again for the longer fights and *still* run out.

Their design team seems to have missed just how much IHC was worth to us. Removing it AND changing spirit regen in the same patch is a stupid idea. Adding the loss of Serendipity to the top is just icing on the cruel cake.

** Ya, I meant IoL, not LG for paladins.

Unless I'm mistaken, I'm pretty sure Nid meant Infusion of Light, and not Light's Grace. Which is still a hit to their HPS.

Pretty sure it is a very tiny one, with decent gear, paladins were already at the GCD cap with HL, all that holyshock + HL did is 'frontload' their healing very slightly.

What do you mean GCD cap? There is no way any paladin has their holy lights down to a 1.0 second cast time. The amount of haste to do that would be absurd.

No, what I meant was that holy shock + holy light < divine light *2. Holy shock just allowed you to frontload healing, it was never an HPS boost.

My personal experience is that Disc can heal the tank up much faster after each breath and the large shield really does make a difference with breath survivability. The problem with holy is that if you put the PWS when the breath starts, your Gheal is not going to land right after the breath hits. There are ~3.5 seconds between PWS and gheal landing. If for some reason you are late, because you have to move the gheal is going to land even later. Typically my gheals as holy land about 0.5-1sec after the breath hits. A major issue with holy is also that a holy build won't normally have pushback protection. An add hitting you or a meteor hitting you at a crucial moment and adding an extra 0.5 sec to your gheal can easily kill off the tank here. As disc your response to breath is real simple keep the tank at full health until you see breath, then PWS and penance. Penance will give your tank 5k health in under a second and then you can follow with either a very fast flash or a very fast gheal from borrowed time. Another important concern is that disc has PI. If I am disc on this fight, I PI myself as soon as the first twighlight torment is up. This pretty much takes care of the first twilight torment and a good chunk of the toughest part of the fight.

An additional bonus is that you can PWS another raid target if they need it and save them while getting BT to help return to the tank. An instant 6.5k "heal" is nothing to scoff at.

Disc does not have a huge advantage, if you know the fight really well and the tank is very well geared, but if you are learning the fight, it really gives you an edge that can save you many many wipes.

And an add hitting you as Disc, unless you shield yourself, means that you lose Penance ticks. I agree with some of what you've stated, but I'm not sure what the pushback protection bit is all about, as most Disc builds I see don't take Holy Concentration (mine certainly doesn't). Is there an ability I missed in Disc? It's somewhat a moot point, as every time I've had an add on me during MT heals for Sarth, I've always had Fade up to get rid of them. Sure, it's a GCD loss, but 100% pushback resist doesn't exist anyway as far as I can tell, and I certainly can't tank an enraged add for a prolonged period of time. It's usually more of an issue that they stick on the tank, rather than me.

The Borrowed Time addition to reactivity is very powerful as well, though from my experience, the breaths come more than once every fifteen seconds, so while PW:S is a very, very important tool in that fight, unless something changes by adding that third drake, assuming it is always there to catch the breath doesn't seem to be grounded in reality.

[e] BT will always, in theory, be up to aid in recovery, however.

I always take pushback protection when I am tank healing, but even without it, losing the last tick of penance, is not the same as pushing back a gheal 0.5 seconds. 2 ticks from penance are 5k+ healing that comes more or less instantaneously. And you will follow up with borrowed time+channelled spell. 100% pushback protection most certainly exists with talent+conc aura.

You are telling me that while you are channeling a gheal timing it for a breath and an add comes and gives you a hit you are going to cancel your heal and fade? There is really no choice except taking the hit and possibly a second one if you are unlucky, then you will fade as soon as gheal is cast. This has happened to me as holy much more often that I would like. Meteor strikes can also cause pushback. A delayed heal definately increases the chance of a gib. Especially when your raid is learning the fight you really really dont want some random event like that ruining a good try. In dangerous fights with a lot of incidental damage, tank healing without 100% pushback protection is a liability IMO.

It appears that crit will become more valuable than before when compared to haste, because of Holy Concentration uptime, and the new Serendipity making haste less necessary to reduce GH casting time.

Other than that, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going to definitely be gemming/enchanting for heavy regen. I might even start skipping socket bonuses to just gem pure int, if it seems necessary after healing a bit in 3.1 (I'm unable to get on the PTR).

Crit will be good up to a certain point, then again haste and spell power will be better. We'll have to wait for number crunching but as long as you have 1/3 Empowered Renew then you have 4 of 7 (FH, GH, PoH, PoM, Renew, Binding, CoH) spells that can proc Holy Concentration.

One you reach a certain point with the crit where you can be pretty sure to have one cast in 8 seconds critting (of the right spells) then it is just pointless to keep stacking it (in my opinion). And we'll see how hard the regeneration really is when we're all raiding ulduar full swing. I personally am really interested in seeing how hard the General Vezax hard mode fight is in terms of regeneration.

No such thing as 100% pushback protection. Talent and conc aura do NOT stack any more. This is a change from the previous model.

This is why many people avoid it - the 15% difference in pushback is frequently less important than whatever else you did with the two points.

Should the regen nerf hit us as hard as it looks now (especially in 10 mans, where we don't always have someone else to heal the tank), stacking a bit further may still be useful as it would allow us to take points out of the holy crit talent (sorry, don't know what the english name is) until Renew is at 3/3.