mlanewal

I'd like to chime in on Renew usage. After looking at pre-3.1 parses and playing around with my specs, I settled on Holy 14/57. I picked up none of the Renew talents, 2/2 B&S (which I found useful on XT, Council, and Kologarn), and 2/3 ToF. Our other holy priest for that night has picked up the Renew talents. Comparing the two of us, Renew was about 2% of my total healing and about 8% of his total healing. For some reason also, I did a lot more CoH healing, he did a lot more PoH healing (I think I'm blaming that on our XT strat).

Now, I haven't raided yet with the new Renew talents, but I sure didn't miss it last night. The B&S sprint was nice for getting people out of trouble, and the combination of Healing Prayers and Holy Reach was great for throughput and mana conservation (I only used one mana potion last night).

@ShrikeT: My Glyph of PoH ended up being about 1% of my total healing over the night, and 2% of the other holy priest's healing over the night. Our WWS is buggy and didn't split up by attempts last night, but here is the link: WWS

 

ShrikeT

Hmmm, that's a little disappointing, granted you didn't cast PoH nearly as much as I did. Here's our guild's parse.

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

Even dieing twice on Iron Council and once on Kologarn I did alright. Holy priests are in very good shape in this patch IMO.

 

Sjonkel

Empowered Renew seems very lackluster to me. Since I only use renew on people that are already topped up, it's almost always just pure overheal. 1/3 might be useful for HC procs, but I think even that is debatable. Basically, it seems to me that everyone needs to be topped up all the time because of all the raid damage, and that really makes renew fall behind. Since I'd rather flash or CoH if someone is at 90%, Empowered Renew doesn't work out for me. I'm doing what a lot of people are doing it seems, dropping all renew talents in favor of B&S and Test of Faith. Liking it much better so far.

 

Vada

I am sorry if this is answered already somewhere in this thread, but it is alot to read (perhaps a new 3.1 post is in order if anyone has time).

Now that meditation is 50%, what does 1 spirit equal of mp5?

 

seidinove

For the sake of discussion, let's say that I'm sold on the argument that six talent points into one spell (Renew) is too much to spend. I do need to put 2/3 into Renew to unlock the deeper levels of the talent chain, and I want to put 1/3 into Empowered Renew for the procs.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm sold on Holy Reach and its synergy with the CoH glyph and the 40% healing boost that 3.1 provides. I would settle for 1/2 in Holy Reach, but I need to spend one more talent point at that level anyway to get to the required 20 (I'm not a big fan of Desperate Prayer).

Let's assume further that the fights in Ulduar and the 3.1 changes to holy talents have also sold me on Healing Prayers, Test of Faith and Body and Soul (sorry, ShrikeT, I didn't notice when I first looked at your spec that you had 0/2 in B&S).

This leaves me short a couple of talent points in a 14/57 build. I personally get a lot of mileage out of Inner Focus, so I'm not going to steal any points from the 14 that I have in Disc.

I have always maxed out Spiritual Guidance in my holy builds, but if I stole two points from that I would have enough for this hypothetical "Ulduar holy" build. Is a reduction of +spellpower from 25% of Spirit to 15% of Spirit too much to give up? With the amount of Spirit that we have my gut reaction is yes, it is too much to give up.

Perhaps I steal one point each from B&S and Test and Faith to get Healing Prayers and leave the untouchable Spiritual Guidance untouched.

Thinking out loud

EDIT: The two points that I want to "steal" are for Healing Prayers. Sorry for not making that clear.

Seid

 

tedv

Seidinove: I went through a similar analysis, although ended up with different conclusions. Rather than repost what I wrote, here's the link: 3.1 PTR

On an administration note, two threads for discussing 3.1 holy builds (one with 3.0 in the title and one with 3.1 PTR in the title) is probably too much. And so much as changed since the original post. It's probably a good time to start a new thread, if only we had some conclusions for a clear "default" spec for people to start with. I suppose we'll have figured it out in a week or two though.

 

Zhaera

I was wondering, why is everyone insisting on picking up inspiration.
After all we are supposed to be raid healers, and I dont think we count on 1-2 emergency hasted Gheals that we cast once in a while on the tank to proc it.
Additionally you most likely have a Disc priest on the tank already proccing it all the time.

In my opinion its better to put points in healing focus + holy reach.

 

Mycharactér

Why wouldn't you have holy reach already?

Ive been contemplating the same thing Zhaera. "Do I want Inspiration or.. focus.. / renew... " esp with having other priests that spec'd it.
And if your going to get Improved Renew... why wouldn't you get Empowered Renew? [unless they are just filler points]
(But then comes the question, how often is renew used?) IMO don't like it in my rotation. except pre-fight

 

• constantius

As stated back several pages, Sinndir and I will be posting the new 3.1 thread this weekend sometime. Be patient; we're busy people.

[e] I created a new thread, and locked it. Hopefully this will keep the questions / concerns down until we actually have a chance to finish it.

As far as Inspiration goes, you're highly limited in choices at the bottom tier of talents. You could drop Inspiration for 3+ points in Spell Warding, or max out Renew and put a point into Healing Focus, but even as a raid healer, you'll be throwing top-up heals onto tanks. If that procs Inspiration, you've just reduced that tank's damage for the next few seconds. That seems valuable to me.

Tier 3 Holy is the last remaining crap tier we have in any tree. Anything below Tier 6, it doesn't matter if it's crap or not because there's so much available from Tiers 1-6 that you can easily backfill. Taking the first 3-4 tiers of all 3 trees, the only ones that has "wut" talents is Holy: for Disc, Divine Fury isn't that useful, and for Holy-raid, Inspiration and possibly even Divine Fury aren't that useful. C'est la vie; we've still improved drastically since 2.4 and Sunwell.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Vada

If you are not using renew much at all, why not go something like this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

You would cut the mana cost of your Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Power Word:Shield, Holy Nova, and whatever other instants we have.

 

Mycharactér

"Divine shield"
hahah. That one was a good laugh.
That spec may be viable tho.
- constantius looking at your spec does body and soul come in handy? or just for fun/filler?

 

• constantius

As I've stated above somewhere at least twice, Body and Soul is possibly the best new talent we've received since Circle of Healing. It's incredible, and I can't see raiding without it.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

mlanewal

I have to agree. The other healing priests I raid with were dubious, but so far (we're up to Kologarn) it's a great talent. Moving Light Bombs out of the way (especially with Grid showing the debuff for fast pickup), the lightning storm thing on Council easy mode, running from Kologarn's lasers...it's just super useful.

Speaking of Kologarn's lasers, anyone know if there's a way to see who he's aiming it at besides visually seeing who is under the beam? I had him focus targeted so I could watch if he switched, but with so much raid damage I didn't really get a chance to see.

EDIT: Wrong quote.

 

• constantius

As far as I could tell, there was no visual indicator of the target of the beams. However, it's very easy to deal with: you get at least a second to react, it doesn't do that much damage (compared to PTR, it's been nerfed somewhat), and if the people start moving just slap a PW:S onto the moving target.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Glasswizard

No, unbuffed I have around 25% (holy) crit. Or did you mean without holy concentration? But point taken, I will test how I fare if I wear my disc equip which has quite a bit more crit before I try my holy + mental agility/strength spec. Thankyou very much.

 

Tainter

I was gonna suggest to you to use regen trinkets, but saw that you have Soul of Dead and the Greatness. Personally I'm using my Majestic Dragon Figurine and Spirit-world Glass. It probably won't make much difference, but the increase in regen I get with those two trinkets is quite noticeable. How do you find your Greatness working now?

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Sebalot

About the value of Inspiration for a holy spec. Even if you rarely throw Greater Heals on the tank it also procs from CoH and PoH. It means you will hit the tanks quite often as a raid healer. Many fights often require multiple tanks, meaning a disc priest will struggle to maintain Inspiration on them. Especially if he fills dead spots shielding people. I think it is a mandatory talent for all priest healers.

 

• typobox

To add to this, stealing the numbers from a warrior tank in my guild, Inspiration is about a 5% physical damage mitigation buff for 3 talent points. This is a really efficient use of points and there's really no reason I could ever conceive of for dropping it, barring an armor-capped tank.

 

Lambi

I don't use it. For the fights where damage mitigation is very important I spec disc or have a shaman cover it. For the other fights I'm more needed raid healing as holy. In the old days inspiration as holy was a big deal because you simply didn't have so much crit so inspiration uptime was alot smaller than today. Now we get so much crit from raidbuffs and holy gear, you can have one person applying inspiration on demand.

SNAKE!

 

• typobox

I guess if you absolutely know that it's going to be covered by others in your raid, it's not so necessary. However, it's already been mentioned that a Disc priest will have serious issues keeping it up in any situation with multiple tanks. Also, considering that it procs off of CoH and PoH, you don't even have to be tank healing to get it up. Beside all this, I just don't see where else you could put those points. If you really want to go the heavy renew route, there's other places that it'd likely be better to steal the points from.

On a side note, wasn't it bugged before to apply itself on Prayer of Mending crits even though the tooltip doesn't list it? Is that still true in 3.1?

 

Sokaris84

Well I'm not sure why there is such a discussion on Inspiration. The fact is that there is simply nothing else in the tree that's worth having. =\ I keep a renew on the tank whenever possible, but it still doesn't warrant spending points on it. I've got one point in empowered renew to proc Holy Conc. but that's it. Definately taking Healing Focus this patch.

Anyways, constantius you've convinced me to pick up Body and Soul. I can definately see it's uses. I was wondering how 1 point in surge of light was working out for you, rather than 2? Regarding your current spec, do you think that many points spent on improving ur renew is worth it?

EDIT: I can confirm that PoM crits are certainly proc'ing Inspiration. For the record Empowered Renew crits are not, as expected.

 

Ayreon

I have been trying Body and Soul for a few days now and to be honest, I still can't see its worth. Sure, it's fun and all to run (or make someone else run) superfast for 4 seconds but I can't recall a single encounter this talent would make a difference on (done eveything up to Yogg p2 on normal, Kologarn, Auriaya, Hodir and Ignis on heroic). On the other hand, seeing the Sunwell level raid damage being dished out by virtually all the bosses, I'm thinking Test of Faith would be alot more useful (and also would make our disc priest hate me less for shielding people).

 

MavSteele

The value of this talent is very dependent on raid strategy so it's a clear case of your mileage may vary. With that said it's fundamentally valuable in three scenarios: a raid member needs to get clear of the raid quickly because of some kind of debuff, it can help tanks move to mobs (or away from mobs) faster and it can help a DPS get to their target faster. All of these things could be done without it, clearly, as we've done without it for years. For two talent points, though, when properly used and integrated into your strategy it can cut down on incoming raid damage, help with mob movement and increase raid DPS. Not bad.

 

• constantius

So we killed Mimiron, Vejax, and Yogg last night, and it only cemented my belief that Body and Soul is awesome. It actually ends up lowering my effective healing by quite a bit, but the amount of control and aid it gives to the raid isn't really measurable in numbers.

For example, on Yogg, I used it on every single P1 spawn as the tanks spun it out into the middle, allowing them to move faster. Both tanks indicated that it was incredibly useful to them. On P2, as we were running for tentacles, I'd hit the person who was the farthest behind. If someone got slowed (either magic or disease), I'd go find them (using it on myself for speed to reach them), cleanse them, then shield them to get them moving faster.

On Mimiron, I used it on the hunter kiters in P3, and on anyone in range when we were dodging Arcane Barrage.

It gets used on tanks constantly to aid in moving mobs around, and I can't see ever removing it from my spec. Now, you probably only need one priest to have it in the raid, but it's as close to mandatory as I can see for a deep holy build, since it adds so much value-added for 2 points.

And on top of the shield buff, being able to remove your own poisons is awesome-sauce for Yogg P2. You'll see why when you get there.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

MavSteele

One of our main tanks had to be out of town this week so he missed all of the raiding up to Yogg, but managed to come on just before we got our kill. We dropped him right into the fire and had him tanking P1. On PTR we'd never used BaS so he wasn't familiar with it. The first time he had to pull a nearly dead add around the cloud and I hasted him down to Sara just in time he asked on vent what had just happened because it was awesome.

Just a little anecdote but my point is that it was such a noticeable benefit that someone who had never even heard of the talent had it used on him and immediately recognized the value. This is one of those talents which can't show up on paper how useful it is in practice.