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My feeling on Renew has really always been that in 95% of cases, it's something to cast when you have some spare mana and nothing better to do. It'll always be useful to some extent. However, it's also the first thing to drop when things start getting hectic or mana gets tight. Another HoT on the tank is always good, and with Empowered Renew it's certainly appreciated for its ability to keep Holy Concentration up. It's just really not ever going to be a primary heal on its own.

 

Sinndir

Odd, I found XT to be easier to heal than Iron Council. Mind you, we did have a druid and a holy priest for XT making it laughable and a very good strat. Iron Council was a lot more movement where XT... well there wasn't. Thus the casting on the run was very beneficial.

I agree with you that our arsenal is vast, but still certain spells are better than others and more useful in certain situations.

Alas, bedtime.

 

Vihermaali

My problem with renew is that you can put 6 talent points into making a single spell better. 6 talent points in a tree that is already starving for more talent points, because there are so many useful talents. All right, empowered renew can proc holy conc. However, I have found many of the encounters in Ulduar pretty intense. Intense to a point where I have neither the extra mana or time to be casting renews. So while renew still is an ok spell, I will not dump 6 talent points into making it better.

The new Serendipity however..that combined with brand new Prayer of Healing & Glyph of Prayer of Healing enable us to do some insane AoE healing. I don't know how I could play without it in past. I also recommend getting healing prayers, because spamming Prayer of Healing puts you very quickly out of mana, as I noticed last night on Ignis the Furnace Master (& Mimiron on PTR).

And that brings me to Body & Soul. The utility and possibilities provided by this talent are amazing. Yesterday this made a real difference on XT-002, especially on people who got light bomb during (0,1sec before?) a tantrum. And from my PTR experience of Freya, Mimiron, General Vezax etc, I predict "The Sprint Shield" will be a permanent addition to my healing toolbox.

 

Sharajat

Huh, yeah, XT was a total pain in the neck for us (tantrum, tantrum, tantrum) but Iron Council was weak sauce.

Healing compliment was 2 holy priests, 2 holy pallies, resto druid, and resto shammy, which looking at it seems rather balanced.

Anyway... argh. We were probably screwing something up on XT.

Can't see the new Body and Soul helping much by the way. It seems a very PvP talent, and I think minus a bit of experimentation, it'll stay that way.

New Test of Faith is very nice.

 

Tainter

It's a shame really. On paper Renew is nice. It scales well (after an exorbitant talent point investment), can be very efficient and complements our arsenal nicely. Using Renew on someone who will take periodic damage soon is good, so is using Renew to top up cheaply while moving and more HoTs on the tanks are good too. "Front loading" healing during a slow moment before the big AoE comes is also great, like we probably all did for Vortex.

But sadly this nice list of benefits just drowns inmidst of all the quick reactive/smart heals of other classes. If someone's down enough health to warrant a Renew, but not in life-threatening danger then I'll pick Flash Heal. Otherwise another healer will almost without doubt duplicate heal the target and render my Renew pointless.

Perhaps Renew suffers from the damage being too high. If healing needs to be quick then Renew is the wrong tool. If you take lots of healers to be on the safe side then Renew will get sniped. Perhaps on some hard modes you can't bring that many healers (because you need the dps) and healing efficiency will matter and perhaps that will be enough to bring Renew back. But without very rigid healing assignments, will other healers ever stop sniping HoTs? I doubt I will.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Ravanor

I'd say that Disc should be especially good for tantrums. I should be able to try that tonight.

 

Doyne

The builds linked on the OP are mostly broken. They do not completely fill out the trees.

 

Celsius

Could a 21/50/0 build with both Soul Warding and Body and Soul actually be viable for "don't stand in the fire"-intense encounters?

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (12 points spare)

 

Celsius

That's because talent trees have changed since 3.1.

 

Athmet

Well, I think Blizzard was aiming to make healers think about their heals and in 25 about the assignement to avoid any OOM problem during fights. If someone got a HoT healing him/her, then I don't see the point of "wasting" mana on a heal to do the job which is going to be done in just a few secs.

I will go in Heroic Ulduar tomorrow night, but I think at some point (and surely for Hard modes) healers will have to be very careful and stick to some assignement for mana conservation purpose.

I would like to hear more about the mana during fights deeper in Ulduar. Not only about us Priests, but about your teammates : if they had any problems ?

 

Elimbras

You still have a problem with "intelligent" targetting spells, that are likely so snip your hots even if the players is aware of the hot. And I don't think that you would want to stop using COH and POM (or shamans chain heals) just because of your renews rolling.

 

Athmet

Indeed you are right about that. I guess I'll be looking closely to my WWS report and see how much overhealing was done by Renew on the Heroic run.

 

Chaja

Wasn't looking at overhealing of Renew pointless because it doesn't tick on targets at full health?

 

RootBreaker

Sinndir showed above how you can use your empowered renew count to determine how many tics of your renew were complete overheal (as long as you weren't refreshing renew before it expired).

 

Ravanor

Just came back from a lot of wipes on XT. I'd say that Holy would be the best spec for that fight in general. Especially B&S helps on Light Bomb targets, the extra speed does save a lot of damage. Means I'm keeping it in my Holy spec for now anyways. Tantrums kept killing us though. We were running with 4 healing priests so tried a lot of PoH's, but bombs would just mess things up completely.

On a spread out strategy, I'd say Disc is 'less bad', simply because CoH won't do much good on tantrums (nor PoH for that matter) and maybe Imp. FH would help a little. But we didn't kill him yet, bombs on healers that are expected to keep a group up during tantrum causes wipe after wipe.

How do you guys heal XT?

 

Svena

Renew seems to be 50% effective pre 3.1. I spent time looking at Web Stats logs from various guilds. Even on Patchwerk tanks the rate is only marginally higher.
3.1 will improve this, however I don't feel we will ever go back to the days of Vanilla WOW renew effectiveness on bandaging rogues. In those days healing was scraping enough mana together to keep people alive-not necessarily healthy. These days its getting a heal out fast enough before something else kills them.

 

Sjonkel

Ravanor, PoH is king on XT. With Holy Reach it has a 36 yard range, which should be more than enough to heal up a group. Just make sure every group is close. Divine Hymn works wonders as well.

You can always be unlucky with Gravity Well og Light Bombs, but generally 2 PoH will be enough to heal the entire group. If you have Serendipity at 3 stacks, which you should, then 2 PoM will take around 5 seconds, and since it takes 10 seconds to kill a topped up person, that gives you time to save anyone from wells or bombs.

We had quite a few wipes because people would generally panic, some would go outside healer range to kill adds and so on.

I'm a bit curious on people reporting +10% total heal from renew. I just can't see how renew can be so much used. I've done Ulduar up until Kologarn, and almost all fights require everyone to be topped up as fast as possible. Razorscale, you can't risk people getting 2-shot with fireballs. Ignis, have to heal them all up fast, and people in the slag pot obviously. XT-002, if people aren't topped up before tantrum, you have a problem. Kologarn, again, people can be gripped, need everyone at 100% hp immediatly. Same with Iron Council.

I personally liked the renew in TBC, which was useful, but even with 6 talents to improve renew, I still hardly use it for anything but tank healing. I'd very much like to hear how you use it so efficiently when raiding.

 

Falim

Yea, I'm thinking of dropping the renew centric talents from my holy spec. I can just never see much of a use for the spell expect on tanks.

 

Suhné

After trying out the new talent trees in Ulduar, this are my current thoughts on healing talents:

- Regarding discipline, I find there is a much more definite cookie cutter spec than that of holy: the typical 57/14. The only point that still gets me doubting is whether to pick up divine fury or other holy talents to reach inspiration (spell warding, or maybe healing focus and improved renew). Probably once the penance glyph becomes widely available I will be dropping divine fury for another option, as a cast time reduction in GH will be of little use, given Penance strength and disc haste via borrowed time and enlightenment.

- In holy I believe there are a wider range of choices to make: whether to pick a renew spec or not, B&S vs. pure healing throughput talents, the diminished priority of tank healing talents with dual specs and the nerf to mana regen talents... All in all, I'm leaning towards a build with just 1/3 Empowered renew, to let it proc holy concentration and loving the utility of B&S. The jury is still out about the usefulness of divine fury and inspiration now that I have a second spec that is much better suited for tank healing (besides, there's serendipity too), I'm keeping them for the moment, more because the alternatives are not very appealing than because I believe them to be essential, but I think this is something that could be discussed.

 

Tainter

It would be nice if you elaborated on that, rather than to just throw a talent spec into the room.

Did you run out of mana despite using Potion, Hymn and Fiend?
If so, did you wipe because of that, or because people were taking too much damage?
Are you gemmed for Int? Do you have a lot of Haste?

There is a lot to discuss regarding how much mana and how much throughput is required. From what I've seen the damage is (entirely expected) quite a lot higher than before. Therefore a higher level of throughput is required than was required before.

I've been in situations (multiple badly damaged healing targets) where I lacked the output to save them all. However, there's a lot of avoidable raid damage, so I wouldn't instantly jump to the conclusion that I require more output to be able to recover other people's gross mistakes.

Similarly when I run out of mana I ask myself what happened. Did I not use my mana cooldowns optimally? Was my healing too wasteful? Was the dps too slow? Did people take too much avoidable damage? Did a healer die?

There are so many things that can, but ultimately shouldn't, drain your mana. After the first few nights of mana-intense fights I doubt respeccing will solve any of your problems personally.



I'm a big advocate of taking Test of Faith over most of the Renew talents. When your guild is learning fights, they will make mistakes and drop low in health. That is inevitable. Test of Faith helps you to recover better from that. When people know what they're doing and your healers are ready for incoming damage then Test of Faith will lose value. Until you're farming at least the non-hard mode bosses though Test of Faith will probably help you.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Glasswizard

Holy specced I wear about 450 haste and equip mostly for regen (so yes, int gemmed, two regen trinkets, etc.). You can see the spec if you click on my charname on the left (If the armory decides to work of course). Just in disc right now, so I exchange some crit for more haste when I switch over to holy. We were wiping yesterday alot due to healers going oom from too much raiddamage (e.g. ignis). I used my mana cooldowns. Don't have Inner Focus right now but that won't happen again. Of course not everybody played perfectly, you can always improve more or less everything else and healing will become easier automatically but the questions for me are usually:

a) would more throughput really help to save more chars from dying? imo the situations where you actually fall behind while already casting on someone and that person dies are really seldom (as a raid healer). Normally it's about landing any heal at all and not if that heal is 10% more or less powerful. So that's why giving up Divine Providence seems possible for me. If Divine Providence were 10% haste, I wouldn't even think about it.
b) can I increase the overall hitpoints healed per fight if I give up some throughput for regen talents? I think Mental Agility + Mental Strength could do just that but I honestly haven't done the numbers.

I acually already have experience with this spec right at the start of naxxramas wearing Sunwell gear (so no infinite regen yet) and it worked well. In my opinion of course.

 

meddle

Well... in theory, yes. But I suppose it depends on the other healers in the raid, too. Especially now so early in the game and with the gear we're wearing... I find I'm doing very little overhealing and thus any throughput I can get through talents or otherwise is not going to go to waste. As Sharajat and Tainter already commented about, I'm considering taking Test of Faith now since this is really the first time in a while where I've been having those "oh shit" moments where the entire raid is at 10% health and I'm struggling to keep everyone alive. "Healing for more" seems quite potent in fights like XT where Tympanic Tantrum chains into bombs exploding on the raid and gravity wells and light bombs. Your armory link doesn't work at the moment so I don't know what spec you're running, but it seems that, for now at least, throughput is king. Ignis is definitely proving that for me. XT, as mentioned, too.

Mana hasn't really been an issue at all. It's certainly not infinite by any means, but definitely manageable using Shadowfiend on cooldown, Hymn of Hope, Mana Tides, Mana Potions, etc. "Your mileage may vary."

 

Tainter

I can't imagine you have much crit with so much haste. Unbuffed you're what 20% crit at most? How's your Holy Concentration uptime? My guess would be that there's a lot of room for improvement.

Sometimes people say that more haste can save people, while more crit just leads to more overheal, but it's not hat simple. If many people are heavily damaged and are possibly taking periodic damage then crit can be every bit as good as haste. If you crit you can stop worrying about that person for a little while longer, so you saved some mana and some time. More crit also leads to more SoL, which is a pretty nifty efficiency talent. Crit also quite considerably boosts CoH output, which haste does nowhere near as much. A combination of many people on low health, Test of Faith, high crit and Circle of Healing can produce an amazing amount of healing.

I don't think running with all the ilevel 226 haste items from Malygos/wherever is wise. Having a few pieces with haste is nice because it makes you more reactive, but unless you can sustain it, it's probably not worth it.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

ShrikeT

Cleared through Kologarn last night with this 14/57 spec. Mana was definitely tight, but I made it by without healing prayers. I wouldn't trade Test of Faith for anything, that extra 12% healing is nuts when there are AOE boss abilities that drop the entire raid to 50% or below. Empowered renew was great for keeping people topped off and also helping with tank healing. The only "wasted talent" imo is Divine Fury, as I just don't cast GH that much when I'm on raid healing duty. I was honestly expecting mana problems to be much more prevalent but it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Shadowfiend being much more reliable helps a lot.

Also how much is Glyph of Prayer of Healing ticking for you guys with ~2300sp? Wondering if it's worth replacing the CoH or Renew Glyph with it since I'm casting it way more than either of those two spells.

 

seidinove

I'm torn between that exact build and my current alternative, in which I trade Test of Faith for 2/2 in both Holy Reach and Healing Prayers.

The combination of Holy Reach and the CoH glyph has been quite powerful, and it can only get better with the 3.1 boost in CoH healing. Also, in Ulduar I got comfortable very quickly with monitoring Serendipity stacks and casting hasted Prayers of Healing in AoE damage situations such as XT-002's Tympanic Tantrum.

Still, your build is on my short list. I see your point about Test of Faith getting many opportunities in Ulduar.

Seid