Just read the following on wowraid.com

* New Shadowfiend ability, Shadowcrawl, teleports the Shadowfiend to an enemy target and increases its damage done by 15% for 5 seconds.

Am I right in thinking this won't effect the amount of mana returned as we get back a % of max mana per hit from the shadowfiend?

Speaking of the new Shadowcrawl ability, is it possible to work this into a macro for your shadowfiend?Manually clicking that will be quite annoying when trying to heal.

Would be nice if could macro your sfiend to attack your focus's target and use Shadowcrawl immediately to obtain the largest possible sfiend dps time. Any suggestions? I have a vague idea of how this would work but not sure if adding in the ability is entirely possible.

I would assume so, as each hit is now 5% (up from 4, whee!). I don't see how damage could effect that. Seems to be more of a dps increase for shadow priests when their sfiend is out (could add up a tiny percentage since their sfiend is on a shorter CD than us holy priests'). I could be wrong, though.

That is what I'll be using when servers come up (I currently use it without the cast shadowcrawl line). You could change target=targettarget to target=focustarget to have it cast it onto your focus' target.

I think the original macro is from ArenaJunkies. Basically on first click it summons the shadow fiend on your target (or, if your target is friendly, your target's target if it's hostile). Second click would tell it to attack/shadowcrawl. No idea if the first click would register a shadowcrawl properly or not, so you might need to double click the macro.


[e] cut down the size of the quote.

Just a note of information: I will be putting up the new 3.1 thread sometime this week (probably weekend; we're raiding T/W/Th), with help from Sinndir. If there's anything you think should be going into it, send me a PM. Don't start a new thread, or I'll just delete it and merge it into this one. That is, unless you think you have time to create something on the level of the OP of this thread; in that case, create away.

Will you include information related to discipline in the new thread, or ignore it because it has its own thread now? I think a lot of priests will be dual spec'ing disc/holy in 3.1, due to holy's mana issues with tank healing, so it might be nice if you continued to have information relating to both specs in the same thread.

P.S. Thanks a lot for making these threads, I've been following them since I was directed here around the time Sunwell came out and it's helped me a lot.

I'll definitely be integrating some Discipline stuff into my thread this time around. It's climbed significantly in importance since 3.0, when it was basically a toy spec because of the OP-ness of CoH in early raiding. In Ulduar, Disc is just as important, and I'm planning on giving it lots of face time.

If the author of the Disc thread wants to maintain it, I'm certainly not going to be upset; we can maintain two in parallel. I'll probably have a different perspective than someone who raids as Disc 100% of the time. I expect to be Disc maybe 30% of Ulduar, tops; we only run 1 resto shaman, so Wreath and I are typically holy.

As far as I see from Nibada armory entry, not only he did take all the renew talents, but also he took Body and Soul. Did PTR testing show that renew and on demand sprint is useful in some Ulduar encounters or is it just something that Constantius wants to test for now?

I'd like to know the answer to that as well, when I first saw Body and Soul I found it strange, since it seemed like a PvP talent to me.

I understand that the 3.1 thread will be coming later this week, possibly next week, but with regards to specs I've seen a lot of ifs and buts. This is probably a good thing, as we've finally got a talent tree that makes us choose where to spend points and where to take them. Does this mean it's harder to define a cookie cutter holy spec atm? Think this is something a lot of priests (including me, even though disc is my main spec) are looking for.

althougth B&S isn't a thoughput talent nor a regen one, his utility is wide and i'm pretty confidend that it could save more lives than a + X% healing done;
How many times a raidmate died in a lavawall in OS because he was dazed by whelps or whatever? How many times somebody couldn't escape a rain of fire, blizzard or any kind of aoe and died because the damage was unsustineable to heal?
At least, i have watched at B&S from this point of view and i find it definitely an attractive option to save lives, more than top off healing meters;
Also, i think we will be "forced" to use PWS more often than in past due to t8 4 pieces set bonus;

From the encounters I've seen, Body and Soul could be useful on Vezax. But PTR had well over half a second of latency for us, and live is nowhere near that, so it might not be a problem at all. Personally I think I'll try the heavy renew spec/glyphing and see how it turns out, and switch out the renew glyph with a PoM if I don't use renew any more than I do now.

B&S also conflicts if you have any discpriests in the raid, especially with the "throw a lot of shields around" thing going on.

In my case, our group is a 25-man group, we usually have at least one Disc and one Holy priest present, and Disc is my main spec. B&S and 'to Renew or not to Renew' are the biggest question marks I have right now in determining my Holy spec. Do I take Improved Renew? Empowered Renew (1/3 or 3/3)? Do I glyph it?

Unless I'm missing something regarding B&S, I think I won't take it for my Holy (which is basically my secondary) spec, spend 1 point in Improved Renew (to get further down the tree), 1 in Empowered Renew for HC proc, and the Glyph. It would mean something like this for my Holy spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

and spend the remaining 2 points either in Healing Prayers or Blessed Resilience, possibly 1 in each, I'm not sure.

Personally, I'm leaning away from a heavy renew spec. Took up 2/2 B&S and holy shit, this talent is amazing. So much utility. Not only does it absorb the incoming damage, it allows the target to run out of fire and shit (lol Razorscale) so fastttt. I was loving this so much last night. I don't regret taking some points out of Imp. Renew at all.

I didn't really find it necessary to throw out too many renews last night. Might mess around with it a bit until I find a happy medium.

And yes, 2/2 Healing Prayers is absolutely necessary. PoH is a mana hog as it is.

Also, dropping Inner Focus didn't hurt my healing at all (so far in Ulduar). I had it on the PTR but honestly the mana gained using it between phases or whatever is negligable. My mana regen seemed fine on the fights we did last night. I would suggest dropping this talent for something more useful (B&S ♥), unless it proves to be amazing in the later fights.

About renew it's fondamentally a personal choice i think, rely on your own playstyle. I personally manage to have it always on tank(s), but for spikes on raid i feel more confortable just using direct heals, and thus i won't go for glyph and will take 1/3 for both renew talents... i find hotting up pretty useless when the damage burst is huge, because or it won't be enought to keep the target alive or it will just overheal, after your raidmates topped him off with a direct heal. Also, glyphing means that you would have to "waste" a GCD more often to keep up a fairly weak spell.

About inner focus, i personally picked it up, but didn't really needed it most likely... will discover it in more manastressing encounters i guess

If used for PoH, it should be about 41 mp5 - and don't forget the benefits of the extra 25% crit. This already isn't bad for a single talent point (not amazing, but good), but don't forget that it can also get you out of the 5SR when used properly. That doesn't benefit you as much as it used to, but it's still likely better than any other place you could put that point.

e: fixed mp5, used level 70 base mana for calcuation. oops.

We were having trouble at first with all the raid damage on Razorscale, and not just people standing in fire, but the fireballs from the boss and chain lightning casts by the adds. I switched from my holy spec back to disc and was pretty much spam shielding everyone I could in between dropping big heals on the two tanks I was assigned. Even with rapture not always proccing the mana return I never came close to going OOM and it seemed to make things a lot easier. On a fight as spread out as that I found it much easier to keep the raid alive and not go run out of mana as disc when compared to holy.

Ravanor

Here would be my recommendations on changes you can make to your current holy build to make your raid healing a lot more robust. This is the holy spec I am using on my priest, and it has yet to let me down. I also have no mana issues with this build as long as I am strict about following the 5 second rule.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

My heal style relies heavily on keeping renew on the tanks, as well as tossing a renew to a DPS who was a little slow on getting out of environmental damage. With 2/3 empowered renew, the instant heal portion heals for around 2000-2500 (very nice considering it also has a HoT after that). I usually reserve greater heals for when the tank is below 60% HP and I have Serendipity up, so the 0.5 sec cast time reduction talent is kind of worthless compared to imp renew and empowered renew
B&S is also very helpful for the aforementioned DPS that didn't move fast enough to avoid AE damage or environmental damage. I would recommend creating a macro to cast renew and PWS (and PoM if you feel you need it) for those situations, let me know if you need help and I can link my macro for you, it's my "Oh Crap" button

I've played around with the new Empowered Renew 3/3, and kinda feel strange about it. I have 2/2 with Surge of Light, and I was critting A LOT. Needless to say, I was getting a instant cast, mana-free Flash Heal almost all the time, almost making Renew not really even needed, as it would waste more mana. I was thinking, would a spec like this be feasible regarding the new talents?

The World of Warcraft Armory

You'd still have a pretty decent Renew with 3/3 Improved Renew, so is the Empowered Renew even necessary? I was finding myself more or less wasting all the free Flash Heals I could of had with Surge of Light, just because my Renew was ticking so much (without glyph).

Any thoughts on this?

Oh don't go acting all modest now :P Healing throughput is raid benefit just as well, only in a different way.

When picking a Holy spec, there's no doubt that I'd choose B&S over Blessed Resilience any day. When looking at your spec I found the most striking difference to be Test of Faith. Which, now that I think about it, is not that good a talent for 3 points. So now I've adjusted my Holy build to this, and will be trying it on Razorscale tonight:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I've put a few incomplete talent options in it, which I'm hoping you guys can give some feedback on. Only 4/5 Divine Fury, 2/3 Inspiration and 4/5 Empowered Healing. It does give me all the Renew talents, Holy Reach, less PoH cost, and Body & Soul. For Empowered Renew to really be effective, I guess you need Improved Renew as well.

If Renew doesn't turn out to be 'for me', or just won't work with our raid setup, I can always drop back to 1/3 Improved Renew, possible 1/3 Empowered Renew, and fill up the points I'm currently missing.

If PoH stresses your mana so that you consider Healing Prayers a must, then using Inner Focus for a PoH is the perfect way to save around 1500 mana (talented). That's around 25 MP5 in a 5 Minute fight. Not too shabby for a single talent point (ignoring the increased crit chance and time oo5sr).

At the moment I'd personally steer clear of Renew (and in fact I went Disc). From past experience I'd say that Renew becomes more powerful as the Priest understand the encounter better. Knowing when, how much and how often damage will occur is what makes Renew a powerful tool.

That's because Renew has a few limitations. It's not good at healing life threatening damage, as it is slow. It is not that effective at topping up targets because they will mostly be caught by AoE heals. Renew is good at healing periodic damage and topping up if you have to move a lot. And lastly fully 3.1 talented it is very efficient, but only if it actually provides effective healing.

I doubt most people already know the perfect spots for using Renew, so they are probably better off with the other talents until they find places where they wish they had a stronger Renew, to allow cutting back of healer numbers for example.

I'd like to just show some evidence of how renew is stacking up.

For anywho who has been here a while knows that I have been an advocate of not using renew; however, with our new talents I find it extremely useful to put 1 point into empowered renew for those times when you just cast it (out of boredom or to attempt to make some difference). The 1 point in empowered renew allows for a holy concentration or SoL proc, thus worth it.

After our guild was not able to zone in tonight (like many of you I assume) we did a late night 10-man. Clearing up to Hodir I decided I would parse the log and see what it was like. Please note that I am dual spec'd holy, this is to really cater my healing to the fight needs.

Here is a parse from the Iron Council (10-man) we did tonight, and this is the talent/glyph spec I used for it.

For those who may not be able to view at work or wherever here is the quick text version and my reasoning that renew is very inefficient (as Tainter stated).

Spell - % healing (% over-heal) - landed (in hits or ticks for renew)
Flash - 25.4% (11.3%) - 56 hits
CoH - 24.4% (41.7%) - 152 hits
PoM - 20.8% (18.8%) - 46 hits
Renew - 12.8% (18.2%) - 114 ticks *note discussed later
Bind - 12.5% (28.1%) - 30 hits
Emp R - 1.4% (13.8%) - 43 hits

Now since empowered renew goes off every time I renew, that means I cast renew 43 different times and thus the actual ticks of renew should be 215. Now of those 215 ticks, only 114 of them (or 53% of them) actually registered healing, the other 47% or 101 ticks were complete overheal.

Take into account that 18.2% of the 53% were overheal and my renew spell (not including empowered renew heals) was at a total overheal of 57%.

All in all, that is pretty bad

Or is it?

Flash heal - base cost 695 (626 with glyph)
Healing - (2040+2400*0.9068)*1.1*((1-0.3)+1.5*0.3) = 5333

HPM (11% overheal) = 7.58


Renew - cost 656
1/3 Emp Renew
Healing - (1400+2400*1.93)*1.1*1.15 = 7630
Initial heal = 7630*0.05 = 382


57% overheal
HPM = 5.25

As you say, you're hardly optimizing your usage of renew, but even so, it seems to be doing effective HPM. Clearly I'd rather be plugging your raid buffed numbers into here (for which I'd need your raw healing counts) but overall I don't see much evidence of it 'sucking it up.' Especially looking at the spellpower scaling, it's easily one of holy's best-scaling heals, and will only get more and more attractive as gear gets better.

BTW, I found Iron Council a HORRIBLE renew fight. Try it for XT. One of the dangers of a priest is there's literally so many tools in the toolbox that it's tempting to try and pin it down and say "THIS IS WHAT IT DOES" when really it's more like "This is what it does - in this one situation." Iron council did not challenge our healers much at all, and as a result, HOTs like Renew got sniped, whereas XT was much more intense on healing, leading to higher effectiveness for most classes (Pallies only had like 70% overhealing, so that's really effective I think... He was #1 on the meters, so he was doing something right (meters mean nothing - except when they mean something).