Fwing

For main tank healing you want to keep a Renew rolling, bounce PoM whenever you can and keep a GH in the pipe (use /stopcast) at all time - let it land when it's needed.
For raid healing you'll mainly use CoH but will end up using every tool in the box at one point or another.

The things that take practice as a Holy Priest are IMO:
1) Regen/5SR management including proper pet usage.
2) When and how to use your instant spells.
3) Binding Heal. Lots of priests drastically under-use this spell IMO. As soon as I take any damage my first instinct is to look for a Binding Heal target.
4) Reflexes. This touches on all of the above but also applies to Fade/Desperate Prayer. These will save your bacon.

I also swear by Clique and a 5-button mouse

 

Bjork

As you say, this isn't the UI section, but two things are very important.

1. Keybindings. Have everything binded.

2. Good raidframes in a central position on your screen. Good means that you can see in a glimps of a second who has aggro, who takes damage, where your PoM is, which targets you have Renew on, which targets that are in range, etc.

It's very obvious, but a lot of fail play is from just having a bad UI. Always work on improving it. Also switching your view to look at the boss as much as possible (and your other surroundings) is both important and makes the game more fun. It's actually possible to time a lot of healing just by looking at the boss and not at the healtbars.

Good luck.

 

lassenc

I have moved my raid and party frames so they appear in the center of my screen at the bottom. And then actionbars to right. I know all my binds by heart. I get what you say about looking at the boss itself (I assume to look at when he is going to use an ability?), however I don't feel confident enough yet to do so.

5mans in Outland was a walkover, but I find the damage here in Northrend alot more spiky and I can't really handle that.

I tend to use Greater Heal over Flash heal alot, I rarely use Flash heal because I am trying to conserve my mana. Maybe I should use flash heal more?

I am trying to use the 5sec rule (As I have understood it) as much as possible. Eg. casting all my instants just after each other instead of maybe doing them with 1-2 sec space in between, to have as much as possible not casting (In order to get out of the 5sec)

Is this correctly understood? And how can I optimize that with Inner Focus?
Please bear with me, I dinged 70 not long before exp.

I've read the compendium a few times, but me and math is not going very well. Would you know an addon like Druidstats that easily compares items to raw effect?

Hope you guys can cope with all my questions

 

• typobox

Flash Heal is surprisingly efficient with the glyph. With downranking effectively removed from the game, glyphed Flash Heal is your heal for anything in the <5k HP range. If you're trying to efficiently use only Greater Heal (with little overheal), you're going to find yourself losing tanks to spike damage far too often. This is just my opinion, but Flash Heal has become my primary heal in any situation where the tank isn't getting pounded. Using PoM liberally gives you a bit of a buffer there, too, plus a mana efficiency boost. Non-crit GH:9 will easily hit for well over 8k, with crits as high as 14k depending on spec as soon as you ding 80. That's a really big hammer, and not one that is going to be the best choice in many cases.

As for the 5 second rule - use it and love it. If you find yourself starting to run a bit dry on mana, get the tank topped off, hit Inner Focus, and start cancel-casting a GH until it's needed. Also, remember that Clearcasting/Surge of Light heals cost no mana, and therefore don't trigger the 5 second rule. This means that you can use Clearcasting procs in a very similar way - get the proc, start cancel-casting GH, and let it land when necessary, or when the Clearcast is about to fade. (As you can tell, I play deep Holy... if you go Discipline, Clearcasting/SoL aren't options for you.)

 

lassenc

As you can see from my spec I am disc at the moment, this was more for lvl/instance healing, and I love penance. This might be due to the fact that I did suffer from alot of spikes, I did not consider the Flash Heal Glyph but will now do so.

Always considered Flash healing a last resort.

 

Morgain

Do you guys have any suggestions for proffesions? I have been enchanter/tailor since I made my priest back at the very beginning. Atm I'm trying out disc for healing and I love it, and I still think enchanting is very usefull. However I have seen some comments about the tailoring stuff not worth making but instead getting the new badge rewards. So I'm wondering if I should drop tailoring for something more usefull. If so what?
I have considered inscription for the shoulder-enchants and offhands and alchemy. Any suggestions?

 

lassenc

My only argument for keeping tailoring would be valuable here in the beginning is for crafting of items when progressing in raids. But since Naxx should be a walkover, maybe there is no need to use time on craftings?

 

Isin

There is a great summary of perks for each profession here:
http://elitistjerks.com/831861-post41.html

Tailoring's perk for healers is an embroidery that is worth about 16.5 mp5 which is still quite a bit better than the non-tailor alternative, 10 spirit. Basically each profession's relative perks for a healer is:

Tailoring: +16.5 mp5 (at a loss of 10 spirit)
Leatherworkiing: +37 spellpower
Enchanting: +38 spellpower
Skinning: +25 crit rating
Jewelcrafting: +37 spellpower
Inscription: +37 spellpower
Blacksmithing: +24 spellpower and +20 intellect (2 extra sockets, socketed with in this example)
Alchemy: +37 spellpower or 13 mp5 depending on which flask you're using

All the other professions seem to augment non-optimal stats for healers. Out of all of them, I think tailoring/enchanting remain pretty strong. The only perk I would take over the enchanting one would be Blacksmithing, but you obviously lose some other synergies there. Tailoring may be a little weak in comparison to the other spellpower based perks, but it is the only one that will help with mana.

I didn't include the alchemy trinkets because they use a trinket slot, so it's hard to say what it is relative to, but of course the alchemy trinkets are very strong. Anyway, lets not derail this into the profession thread.

 

Bjork

Can't see Alchemy on the list...?

 

bbartlog

You have the right general idea about bunching up your spells, but one point about instants and non-instants that you are missing is that what you want to do when casting a cluster of spells is to start with a spell that has a cast time and finish with an instant spell, with (usually) other casts in between. This is so you can minimize the amount of time between the first and last mana expenditure, these being the points in time that determine your entry and exit from the five second rule.

Suppose that in a 12-second span of time you want to cast Prayer of Healing, Greater Heal, Renew and Prayer of Mending - a pretty common mix in a five-man situation if everyone is taking damage but the tank is taking more. First of all, it's easy to see that if you just sort of cast them ad lib you probably aren't going to spend any time OO5SR.
Best results are if you can lead off with the longest-cast spell (Prayer of Healing), then cast one of the instants and Greater Heal (in either order) and finish off with the other instant. In this case, total time between first and last mana expenditure is (theoretically) only 4 seconds - the 2.5 seconds spent casting GHeal plus one global cooldown. Add five seconds to that, and you have 9 seconds I5SR and 3 seconds OO5SR.
If you lead off with an instant and finish with a timed cast, the time between mana expenditures may be as high as 8.5 seconds, resulting in no time OO5SR (given a 12-second cycle). That's several hundred mana down the drain just from casting your spells in the wrong order.

 

toth

I just wanted to add that you can often use a Clearcasting proc in conjunction with Inner Focus to get a lot of OO5SR mana regen in. When you see your mana starting to drop wait a couple of casts to look for a clearcasting proc. Now do as typobox suggested and start stopcasting a GHeal. Let it land when the tank needs it or the clearcasting proc is going to fade, whichever comes first. Then hit Inner Focus and do the same thing. Finish off by stopcasting a GHeal until the tank needs another heal. Depending on how spiky the damage is, let him drop slightly lower than usual and bounce a ProM off him as you finish casting the GHeal. That's a lot of OO5SR regen that you're able to take advantage of.

 

Sadiem

Is there anywhere I can find theorycrafts, or maths of what stats does around what dps?

I still have problems to know if an item is better than another; how much spirit I need to equate 1 SP or 1 crit, etc.

Also, I think you are missing +hit, +crit, intel, spirit and mp/5 for jewelcrafting

 

Imua

+hit is meaningless for healers. And is the first thing you go for as shadow until you hit the cap after which you go for other stats. So discussion on +hit seems pretty useless overall.

On healing UI:
Get some sort of unitframe add-on. Grid, Pitbull, Xperl, whatever. (People will have their opinions) I suggest putting your raid health bars in the bottom center of your screen. Put your unitframes around it - this way you can see everything you need to in one spot. This should also free up a great deal of real estate for you to see the encounter.

On raid healing:
It is very important to understand how the damage is coming into the raid. Is it a 9k spike throughout the raid with a 10 second respite to allow you to fill it back up? Or is it a constant 1k a sec tick? You would obviously heal differently depending on the situation.
The details depend on the spec. Holy raid healing leans on CoH. Glyph of Flash Heal makes FHeal a very attractive filler if there's only one target or if there's a CD on CoH.
Disc wants to use alot of shields and quick FHeal and quick Penances.
Note that in general, Holy is considered more of the raid healer and Disc more of the tank healer. However, that does not mean, that they can ONLY do that. The primary strength of a priest healer is that they can do everything.

 

bbartlog

Looking at how Rapture works, I came across this formula for the mana returned:

0.01035[constant]*max mana/basemana(2620 at 70)*amount healed

...capped at 2.5% of your max mana. Substituting the base mana figure for lvl 80, I get

mana returned = (max mana * amount healed) / 373234 , to a maximum of max mana / 40 ( = 2.5%)

Looking at this, it would appear that there is a specific amount healed that corresponds to the mana return cap: 9330 health. If I heal this much, I get back 2.5% of max mana. Healing more than this gets no additional benefit from Rapture. Healing less than this will never hit the Rapture cap. Only Greater Heal seems like it can heal this much, and for Disc priests will probably only pass this mark on a crit.

Simple questions:
- is my understanding of this mechanic correct?
- is the constant in the above formula correct?
- does this mean Discipline priests won't want to use Greater Heal as much?

 

Beliandra

Is there an addon anyone can recommend for displaying whether my Prayer of Mending is still "in play"? I tried one quite a while ago called MendWatch (now abandoned, it seems), but it didn't seem able to distinguish between my PoM and one that some other priest cast. That information may simply not be there, I don't know.

 

Sebalot

I'm using Dotimer (DoTimer - Addons - Curse) and it keeps track of PoM. Shows who it is on and what charge it is. Dotimer of course is also useful for SW:P uptime when you want to help dps a bit.

 

Penicilin

I use Grid. Set it as a bottom button. Everytime it jumps to new character small dot appears. Also it change colour according to number of charges.

 

Crow

It is also worth noticing (since he said he is discipline) that channeled spells (Penance) consume mana when they are cast (normal cast spells use mana when they land, just in case). So if you cast Penance and follow it with GH you are not spending mana through whole cast time of Penance and GH.

 

Tainter

Your understanding looks correct. Whether the constant is true or not I can't tell you, because I'm not 80 yet. But it was true at 70 as far as I remember.

As far as using Greater Heal in a Disc build goes: It's still a good spell to use. You can't fill your free time with Penance, Shield and PoM. Particularly not while tank healing. For 5-mans that means you get to regen some mana while doing nothing. For raids (and also PvP to some degree, even though there you can usually spend time on offensive abilities) it means you need to cast something else. You'd either be using Flash Heal to top people up, Prayer of Healing in heavy AoE moments or Greater Heal for more throughput on the tank.

The fact that a certain level of spell power adding more spell power doesn't increase rapture gains isn't really a problem. If you still want more regen you can starting grabbing more Int to boost your rapture gains. Int never stops increasing the current incarnation of rapture.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

dyelynn

shadowpriest.com &bull; View topic - Best Raiding Gear Available (WotLK)

PP is pseudo power, or an ambiguous term mean to apply to all dps increasing stats. This is a breakdown of how much each stat is worth in terms of PP.

 

Poor

Quick question on disc specs:

Is Aegis better than IH for a full disc build? I would think IH would be better for mana efficiency if you're non-stop healing the tank than aegis would.

IH build vs. Aegis build

Any thoughts?

 

Tainter

Maybe Improved Healing is better for efficiency for non-stop healing. I'm too lazy to do the maths. I never had mana problems with Disc so far. And I never had improved healing so far. However I haven't healed any 80 raids.

Aegis increases your output as well as your efficiency and it may allow you to take the occasional gap in healing if you've scored a Greater Heal crit.

In a way Aegis is part of the reason why crit is good for Disc. If you don't take it then your gear choice I suspect would be quite different. Your main stat would be spell power until your Greater Heal becomes "rapture capped" and then Int all the way.

Without Spiritual Guidance Spirit isn't going to be so great. Without Spiritual Healing/Divine Providence spell power is going to be somewhat worse. And without Aegis crit is going to be less valuable. But really ideally you want as many stats to be great for you as possible to spread the budget around.

Aegis all the way. It's a true signature talent for Disc I'd say. Aegis, Rapture and Penance make Disc work in my opinion.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

bbartlog

I don't think a Disc priest is going to be rapture-capped with non-crit GHeal until gear levels are quite high, like 2200 spellpower (which is even harder to achieve without Spiritual Guidance). And given the way Rapture works I doubt it makes sense to stack spellpower in preference to int if your aim is regen/endurance; the main reason for still getting spellpower is that ultimately you need throughput as well.
Of course, we're talking about a Disc build without Aegis which seems to me like a rare, rather theoretical construct. Anyone who goes deep enough into Disc is going to pick up this talent unless they're deliberately doing something weird.

 

Xtian

[In the event that you want IH over throughput,] Disc priests who run with Paladin tanks will want to siphon points from Grace instead of DA to get IH. Since Blessing of Sanctuary will override the 3% damage reduction from Grace, the 3% increased healing doesn't outweigh even the throughput contribution of DA. I would modify your earlier IH build by doing this.

EDIT: Added specificity about the situational nature of the post. See Thorongil's post for reasons why most Disc priest will prefer Grace over IH.

 

Krypt0s

Does Penance give 3 chances to proc "your healing spells have a chance" items like [Soul Preserver]?