I mean someone reported that Grace and BoSanct do stack, I'll try to get it confirmed some day.

From what I have seen on other trinkets, Penance does indeed have 3 chances to proc any proc.

Naturally, we who are focused on health bars tend to have tunnel vision. While you do need to develop situational awareness (so you are not so focused on bars that you're standing in the fire all the time), here are a few things that can help:

1) Make your UI as efficient as you can. Tweak it until it is showing you all the information you need, in a compact and simple way, that you can understand at a glance, all in one area of the screen. Also use click-casting, or mouseover macros, or keybinds so you can easily cast anything you need to with minimal effort. These will demand less attention for healing, so you can spend more attention on things like positioning or phase changes or whatever.

2) If you consistently miss some event you need to be aware of, like a boss ability or AOE, try to bring it into your UI. It sounds silly, but if you have trouble being aware of when you're standing in a fire or when the boss has used a debuff, you can add those abilities to Grid or a unit frame or an SCT warning as a fallback.

3) Use sound as well as graphics. It is easy for Grid or timer bars to become overwhelming with info. Use mods to provide sound cues, especially for important procs and events, like a boss ability, clearcasting proc, etc. Your 5 senses can work in parallel, so take advantage of it.

Yes - if pure heals-per-mana is your concern, IH beats Aegis until you get to very high levels of crit. Aegis is obviously crit-dependent and also relies somewhat on synergy with Rapture, making it scale with your mana pool and spellpower; whereas IH provides an essentially fixed discount.

Assume you have 1600 spellpower, 20K mana, and 25% crit (that includes Renewed Hope and Holy Specialization), with most of your points in Disc talents:
Greater Heal baseline (non-crit) will heal for about 7500 and cost 1236 mana. Rapture will return 402 of that (non-crit) regardless of whether we choose IH or DA, for a cost of 834 mana (without IH) or 649 (with 3/3 IH). On a crit, we hit the rapture cap and get back 500 mana, for costs of 736 and 551 respectively.

Now we can calculate the average heals-per-mana that IH has with GHeal: (0.75*7500 + 0.25*11250)/(0.75*649 + 0.25*551) = about 13.5.

With DA, we get two additional benefits: Rapture returns mana when the shield absorbs damage, and the shield itself may be counted as healing above and beyond what we already got. The mana returned will be 181, the shield is just 3375 extra healing: So (0.75*7500 + 0.25*14625)/(0.75*834 + 0.25*555) = about 12.1.

You can mess with the numbers some (for example, see what happens if we assume that crit overhealing goes to waste), but they don't change the basic result. If you push the crit percentage up to 35% and also assume that overheals go to waste (but the aegis obviously does not), then DA starts to look competitive in terms of heals per mana.

However, I think that unless you're really feeling mana-starved you would still want to switch to DA around 25% crit, just for the superior average throughput, which is substantial. It's probably about 7%, which translates to an extra global cooldown every twenty seconds to do more stuff (if spamming heals) or maybe even a chance for OO5SR regen (if there's a lull).

Does Divine Hymn have any use at all?

1) Crowd control up to 10 mobs or players for 20 seconds. Works on everything but mechanical.
2) Heal for craploads

With 1736 spellpower:
586hp/sec for 6secs 10 targets equals total of 35 160 healing with 656 mana cost (flash heal = 625 with glyph) and 1,5 second cast.

1) This souns good but only in theory, as attacking one of the stunned mobs has a chance to break the stun on them all for some reason. Also, I am pretty sure I have seen a few regular mobs in heroics that were immune to the effect (berserkers in UP if I recall corectly, I can be wrong though).

2) Again, sounds good in theory but the number of fights where this would be of great use is very limited. I can think of Loatheb but not much else. Also the cooldown is so long you only can use it once per fight.

Perhaps I need to experiment with it a bit more...

Concerning Divine Hymn: Honestly, it´s pretty pointless in the present WotlK-world, where basically CCs aren´t required anymore. I could have seen some nice use for it in TBC, where you could´ve CCd all trashs but one and henceforth burn down consecutive mobs but that is not needed in WotlK. Any tank in blue tank gear can be healed while tanking complete trash packs on hero making hymn near-obsolete.

Concerning Disc-specc: Stick with the cookie-cutter, regardless of a Paladin or not. You don´t need healing focus, it´s pretty bad. Pushbacks will hardly every occur, and in cases you fear them simply shield yourself and toss a quick GH afterwards. Due to the new pushback system Healing Focus is far too odd-situational to have considerable use. Stick with Divine Fury, it´s quite handy. Especially when raiding you´ll find yourself casting a good amount of GH to cover the cooldown-phases of PoM, Penance and PW:S.

I think Healing Focus is now mainly a PvP talent. Under pressure in PvP even half a second on every heal cast will save lives.

As for Divine Hymn, it also looks more like a PvP ability. The ability to simultaneously inerrupt/incapacitate multiple enemies is powerful. The cast time makes the ability a bit tricky to use perhaps. But Disc Priests have a fair amount of haste going, making it easier. The long cooldown makes it somewhat of a clutch ability.

Having an enemy healer stand still while Mana Burning him is cool. And because Mana Burn doesn't do much damage the effect is going to last for a few casts.

I have two questions about Divine Hymn though:
1) Which other effects does it share diminishing returns with (if any)?
2) Is it broken by Berserker Rage?

BoS and Grace do not stack their damage reduction effects. The kicker effects (mana/etc. regen and +3% healing) do stack.

MMO-Champion RaidComp
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Changes to Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking (check out the "Damage Reduction Percentage Buff").

If the damage reduction effects are stacking then it's either a bug or a stealth buff.

The point you make (respectively made in your former post) in skipping Grace is not really valid, though. Firstly, you will not want to rely on a single person (read *the specific Paladin*) to be in your raid all the time. By that rationality you would have to respecc anytime the Paladin was not present.

Secondly, it´s 6 % more healing. While that might not be huge it still is a very nice boost for 2 talent points (compare it to Empowered Healing, which only grants 4 % more healing for 2 points).

Lastly, as many who play disc will (or did already) confirm, you´ll hardly need the lowered mana cost if you play appropriately. The times you have to fire the relatively inefficient GHs (inefficient compared to a Holy´s GHs) there is need for them and you will hardly overheal totally thus granting you little to huge rapture returns that compensate for the 15 % higher mana cost. As far as Penance is concerned, it´s highly efficient in its normal state, you simply don´t need to push the mana cost lower.

I don't know what kind of Disc build you have in mind (that is, I don't know how many points you are proposing to put in Holy), but in general I think Divine Fury is a high priority and don't think it makes sense to put it so low on the list that you are wondering whether or not to max it. That is, even if you do decide you want 2/2 Healing Focus I think it makes sense to look somewhere else for those points.

As someone already pointed out, Healing Focus is kind of situational. But I do think the situation it helps you with comes up a fair amount, at least in 5-mans: your entire group is getting spammed with a lot of damage and you need to keep them up long enough to finish the job. Examples might be Zuramat the Obliterator and the shadowbolt AOE his invisible adds do, or Darkweaver Syth in Heroic Sethekk Halls and all of the damage from his summoned elementals. Or Hadronox and his AOE leech attack. In these cases you really want to cast Prayer of Healing (assuming you are Disc and don't have Circle of Healing). Having Healing Focus will help your throughput a lot - PW:S has two limitations as a way of preventing pushback

- first, you may not have a free GCD of time to cast it; if your group is taking 6K dps in aggregate, you need to spend as much time as you can on spells like PoH or PoM, that heal upwards of 5K per second of cast time. Casting PWS on yourself (maybe 2.5K damage prevented per second of cast time, with talents) lowers your throughput.
- second, even if you cast it it will only help pushback in these situations for a few seconds before it is gone.

At any rate, if you are primarily speccing for raid healing and not instances/heroics then Healing Focus is not going to be as much of a priority. But 5/5 Divine Fury still seems essential, you are talking about boosting the throughput of your highest-throughput spammable single-target heal by 20% (and improving your reaction time to boot). It would make more sense to take points from Holy Specialization (painful as that is) than to sacrifice Divine Fury.

@bbartlog: Your general thoughts are reasonable, yet from my experience they do not particularly fit to the present state of especially 5-man encounters (heroic ones, of course). True, group damage does occur, but not in such a constant manner as you describe it. At least I have yet to see a boss that does 6k aggregate dps to your group throughout the whole fight. Especially as Disc you mostly use quick heals or instants (Penance, FH, BT-hasted GHs, Shield, PoM, Binding Heal). I would strongly speak against taking 2 points out of something useful to put it in Healing Focus, even for 5-mans. Yet, it might be a matter of playstyle (especially positioning and aggro-management) - to some extent at least.

Edit: Speaking of Binding Heal I just wanted to remind the interested reader of this spell. While it has not really excelled in its original state and time, it is a totally viable spell for 5- and 10-mans at level 80. I normally use it more frequently than GH in 5-mans. While it sadly lacks some of discs benefits (read Rapture) it is still a reasonably efficient spell with vast throughput and low aggro. Be it a aggro-sensitive situation or just a situation with group damage where you still do not want to risk a tank spike, Binding Heal helps in many such situations quite neatly.

On a sidenote I have to say that I do *not* get paid any money if you use Binding Heal more often after reading this paragraph (I just realized it sounds a bit like an advertisement for some ill-tasting medicine).

You can use it for healing on sapphrion. That's the best use I've found so far. It doesn't seem that good on loatheb. In general on loatheb you want to precast hots before the healing window so that you don't have to waste casting time during the window. However, the cast time and duration of divine hymn prevent using it in conjunction with prayer of healing. When you're not using divine hymn, you can cast a prayer of healing so that it lands just as the debuff fades and then spam coh until it goes back up again. If you cast divine hymn before prayer of healing, you'll lose half of the healing to the aura. If you cast it instead of prayer of healing, you don't get the prayer of healing, which is a questionable trade, considering the window is smaller than divine hymn's duration. If you cast it after the prayer of healing, you'll only get one or two ticks, which is probably worse than coh spam.

I guess casting it before the PoH does actually net you a little more healing than not using it at all, but I haven't found Loatheb healing to be particularly tight anyway (especially compared to Sapphiron or Patchwerk).

Does anyone here use lootrank.com?

I am trying to find some base values to assign stats untill i am comfortable coming up with my own.

Here are the values i have come up with the very limited knowledge i have.

haste - 1 - I dont really see much use in it for my playstyle, i use PoM, CoH, and flash the majority of the time. G-Heal only counts for about 8% of my total healing.

Crit Rating - 9 - This might be to high, but I can see having a high crit being very valuable for a holy priest. And This is the lowest i found i could set it to start really showing crit items in my rankings.

MP5 - 24 - I figure this is worth about 3 times a int and spirit.

Spellpower - 4 - Probally to low, but with the way blizz does they items, this stat will come even if i put a 0 here.

Int - 8 - About on par with spi. Atleast from what i can tell.

Spi - 8 - Baseline for creating the other values.

Loot Rank for WOLTK

There is a preset template with my settings.

I don't think those values are good. Obviously your weights are going to depend on what situation you are trying to prepare for; the last time I did a full analysis (pre-3.0.2) my chosen goal was to maximize total healing in a 5-minute fight. But doing it that way will tend to make haste look worthless, which it isn't.

Second, the changes to talents in 3.0.2 mean that you need different weightings for Disc and Holy priests. Pre-3.0.2, you could probably get by with one set of weightings that covered Holy and hybrid Disc/Holy, and assume that deep Discipline was purely a PvP spec. Now that's no longer the case.

Anyway, some more specific criticisms of your weights; I'll assume you have a deep holy spec since you mention using CoH.

- valuing mp5 three times as high as spirit is probably wrong. If you assume that you are never outside the 5-second rule during a fight, this value might be about right (though spirit also gets you some spellpower, with Spiritual Guidance); however most models of a long fight assume you can get some OO5SR regen (like 15%; sometimes I assume 20%), and in this case mp5 is only worth maybe 5/3 as much as spirit.
- Int is pretty good. With Replenishment and changes to Shadowfiend, it's as good as spirit even for a deep Holy spec, and much better for Disc priests. People also sometimes forget just how much having a big mana pool to start with will help you.

Valuing spellpower at 1/6 as much as mp5 is low. It's worth about 1/4 as much as mp5 just considering total throughput in endurance healing - roughly, 1 mp5 will let you heal another 720 health in 5 minutes, while 1 spellpower will give you an extra 180. And it may be worth tweaking it a little higher given that it also helps your burst throughput.

So I would use the following weights:
MP5 - 8
Int - 5
Spi -5
Crit - 6 (I have no idea whether this makes sense, I haven't analyzed its value post-3.0.2; just following your preference here)
Spellpower - 2
Stamina - 2 (you can't neglect this stat totally, you will be a soap bubble)

Leaving haste off entirely is probably about the same as setting it to 1. I am not sure how I would weight it, but you should keep in mind that it also helps the global cooldown - so using a lot of instants does not necessarily make it worth less.

If you use PoM, CoH, and Flash Heal the majority of the time you should see more benefit from haste than you may actually notice. Just because you are not seeing the cast time reduction you do on a Greater Heal that is hasted to 2.0 your global cooldown can still be lowered and the lower it goes the higher your output will be.

I'm not sure on the exact haste calculation but if anyone would be kind enough to post it for level 80, I'll do the HPS increase of a single point of haste.

The old one can be seen in this excerpt from my guilds healing forums:

Does Fel puppy aura stack with buffs?

Please check out the search function or at least read the entire thread (plus the holy compendium) where it was already said that they aren't worth crafting.

I don't believe they stack with Intel or Divine Spirit but take the place of them if they are missing (as Fel Intel is slightly weaker than both).

While healing Utgarde Keep last night as this spec, I noticed that Flash Heal seemed to have significantly more HPM/HPS than Greater Heal did(max ranks). Is this really the case even if I was using a more 'proper' spec? If so, is there any use for GHeal atm?(If I wanted to spam fast heals, I'd play a paladin).

Hello.
I also have a question. I got a problem, dont know, whether its a bug or not:
I used to play Holy, but respecced to Disc at 70 for levelling and maybe forever
After few days of questing i decided to do an instance. In the middle of it i suspected something wrong, took my eyes off the unitframe and started to look at the tank. I noticed, that even when PW:S and Aegis shields were on and shining, the tank was still taking damage, and i had to throw more heals on him instead of relaxing and gaining mana. Do these shields absorb only part of the damage? Seems weird, because they absorb 100% when cast on myself. Or was it just a bug?

Shields absorb not partly, but fully. What you encountered is probably shields getting slammed away with one hit and some extra damage that is not absorbed getting through. However, that´s normal. You can never sit back and relax as a healer in an instance even if you shield somebody.

Off the top of my head, your lack of Empowered Healing is what's making your FH better than GH. With the glyph they are about, base, equal HPM I believe, but Empowered Healing is what makes GH start to scale much better than FH.