Elimbras

Renew is not very useful as disc. priest. One of the very few times I like to use it is when I expect big spikes on a tank that has Weakened Soul debuff, and is topped. It's pre-emptive healing that can only help, provided no urgent heal is needed on someone else. But I don't think it will make a huge difference. It's also obviously useful as a hot, when you know you won't be able to heal the tank for some times, and he might not survive without healing. Maexxna Web Spray is one common example. If you have druids in your raid, then usually cover the needed hot in such a case. But renew can be a replacement sometimes.


Most of your "rank" on meters depends on your assignation. If you're tank-healing, you'll be bottom of the meter, just because there is not enough damage to heal, and because single-target heals have less hpm and less hps than group heals.
In your particular case, a holy-priest is a rather poor tank-healer, and should not be assigned to tanks (he's at least worst for that than paladins, disc. priest and druids).

If you're raid-healing, you should be in the upper part of meters. Holy priest are fairly good at it, and have no big troubles.
However, raid-healing is once again totally dependent on the king of damage. Holy priest are king when the whole raid is taking severe aoe damage (sapphiron, Mimiron P2, Hard-Mode Iron Council, etc.). He's best tools (COH, PoM, POH) are very efficient for whole packed groups (POH and COH) that take frequent little damage (POM). He's not best (but still acceptable) when the raid damage focus on a few different (and ungrouped) target at each time, and when COH / POH are less useful.
Finally, there is often also an implicit assignment between raid-healers. I know that in my raid, one of the raid-healers focus more on keeping low people alive, and use less groups heals. I tend to use more group heals to top up people, and let him heal the low-HP target that need immediate healing. As a consequence, I'm usually higher on meters (but I wouldn't say I'm a better healer).

 

Poyndexter

In Uld my only somewhat effective use of renew is IC Hard, in which it works great to counter the AoE debuff on ranged. PoM is of course better on melee.

 

Imua

If people aren't dying, then your healers are doing fine.

Assignments do matter - tank healers are not going to be near the top. But, holy should show up on meters alot more than disc does. It's really difficult to quantify a "good" healer. The simplest metric is: "Does their assignment die?" Other than that, because healing is *SO* situational, it is difficult to really say what you should be looking for. A healer that is able to consistently save the tanks and other dps in potentially bad situations and save wipes is a good healer but may not top the meters. Someone that's flash healing a lifetapping warlock in the corner, probably isn't as good a healer...

Give us a parse!

Tangent:
Do druid healers make good tank healers now? We've typically had them more on the raid, because well - they dominate meters like that. I was thinking pally, disc priest, then shaman for tank healers.

 

Elimbras

The few times we tried, druids were good tank healers. We usely put them on raid, because they excell at it. But they can keep a tank alive without much trouble. They might not be adapted (for example, they would have been poor Sarth3D MT healers, due to burst damage) for some fights, but they provide a good hps, and their hots are also good to stabilize tanks.

 

Neferneith

Hello,

4 simple questions from a Disco priest trying to be a good SP :

1) On encounters including adds to kill fast (Emalon, Hodir, Anubarak, Northrendbeast's frigbold) what spell should I use ?
Dots seems a bad choice to me because most of their ticks would be wasted once they die. So just MB, MF and SW ?
Should I take time to refresh Dots on the main target while doing so ?

2) When you already have 5 Shadow Weaves and must engage the main target (Anubarak surfacing, switching ValkyrTwin) what should be the top priority ? SW:P, MB, VT, DP, VE ?

3) For geming blue slots : 12sp 10 spi or 12sp 5mp5 (I like to respect colors unless it's for useless bonus like Hit/Endu) For yellow slots, I take 12sp 10 haste (Aiming for 500 hast unbuff)

4) Having not much choice on Gear Item's I get (I roll on disco stuff and scavenge whatever 's left after our casters) I'm bombing my Hitrating (360 or so) Should I let it slide ? Respec with less Hit Talents ?


Thanks in advance

 

tfp

1) Use MB and MF on very short living adds. If the add dies after 10 or more secs I will full DoT it but that's me. If the add will die fast enough, yes absolutely refresh DoTs on the Main target.

2) Normal cast priority. VT,DP,MB,SW: P, VE. If you have to move DP,SW: P, (VE), VT, MB

3) If you want to be a good shadow, don't do it. If you still want to do it use 12sp/10spi. And think about why you want to have so much haste. Haste will not buff your 3 DoTs. Try 12sp/10crit for yellow.

4) Use gear with as less hit as possible while maintaining 289 hit. Every point above it is useless and could have been more sp/crit/haste and help you more as anything else. Even gear with spirit should be mostly more useful than gear with excess hit.

 

Cor Unum

Hello guys,

I wanted to find out if disciple priest's abrorbs count toward efficient healing meters in recount or how they can be otherwise calculated.

 

tedv

These are the same question. What dots you cast depends primarily on how long the target will take DoT damage, and also a bit on how tight mana is. In general though, you should cast Vampiric Touch and Pain if they will get at least 9 seconds of uptime (3 ticks). Cast Plague if it will get at least 12 seconds. If mana is tight, add 3 seconds to each of those uptimes.

As far as the order in which you cast them, it barely matters. I do Touch -> Pain. And yes, I will refresh dots on the main target in most circumstances, including refreshing plague, unless it's an extreme burn situation. Things like Emalon's adds are not considered "extreme burn".

You should take either 10 spirit or 15 stamina as the blue half of your purple gems. Spirit is technically a DPS increase, as you gain a whopping 2 spell damage. If you think survivability will help more, get Glowing Dreadstones instead. Similar logic applies to your leg enchant. And naturally you should only use two purple gems, enough for the metagem socket bonus. All other blue slots should have Runed Cardinal Rubies.

You want to target 289 hit rating. Juggle around your gear so that you trade your excess hit rating for useful DPS stats. Don't respec to lose hit rating though.

 

Neferneith

Understood, only 2 purple/blue for Metagem requirement.
Spirit is a huge sp loss for now. (0.2 sp per spirit)

As for Haste, my assumption was to fill 2 MF between my MB.
Currently , I 'm trying as much as I can not to clip DP/VT and maintain them at max uptime. Hence, I tend to delay MB or clip MF.
I though getting more haste would allow me a steadier pace.
Bad choice ?

So on more question If i have a yellow slot with 7 sp bonus : 23sp ? 12sp 10crit ? 12sp 10haste ?
It feels a little weird to juste cram 23sp everywhere.

--------------
Disco and recount :
There is a extension to recount : Recountguessedabsorb.
Approximates your shields/aegis for a rather good guess.
As for Parser, World of Logs takes them into account too.
But HPS should always be read with great cautious, you can't compare healers as you compare dps.

 

moowalk

I don't clip mindflays. You might get a minor dps increase if you do but I don't find it's worth it. Currently my haste rating (including 4 piece t8) allows me 2 mf3 + 1 gcd in between mind blast cooldowns. Normally the 1gcd is used to refresh dp or VT. If neither of those spells need refreshing, I'll put up VE or use fiend if appropriate. If neither of those are needed, I SW:D to fill the space.

I think it would technically be higher dps to mf3 + mf2 + mf2 for me, but that requires much more attention to the cast bar than I'm willing to give during most fights.

Potent Ametrine's are the best for yellow sockets if the socket bonus is worth it. Shadowpriest.com rates 1 crit rating as 0.72 spellpower. This is with BiS T8 gear, and will change a small amount depending on your gear.

 

tfp

Rule of thumb:
If the socket bonus is >=9sp you can go for a blue slot with 12sp/10spirit (~= 14sp),
if it's >=4sp/6crit/6haste you can go for a yellow slot with 12sp/10crit (~=19sp) to make up the loss to a 23sp gem.

 

dorfpriestftw

I realize that gemming doesn't make as big of a difference for healers as it does for dps. However, I am gemming pretty much entirely for intellect, ignoring all socket bonuses except for the ones I use for my blue (int/spirit) and red (sp/int) gems for my meta.

1) Is it bad to gem entirely for int?

We don't typically have a resto shaman in the raid, so I'm not getting the benefit from mana tide from the int. I am getting benefit from replen, 2 priest's hymns of hope, and shadowfiend, though. I don't really have any mana issues, and I am typically top of the meters, but it still feels so wrong as a priest to gem all for int.

This leads into my next question:

2) How do I top the meters on the twins (regular mode)?

Here's our wowwebstats for the twins:

here

Here is the breakdown of the druid's spells:

here

Here is the breakdown of my spells (please ignore the divine aegis, we have a dpriest and for some reason, a bit of his DA absorbs splash over into my healing done):

here

Is there anything I can do differently to top the meters, or is this just a druid fight?

Btw: yes, yes, I know meters are not everything. I just think it's fun to try to top them :P.

 

Makale

Is tailoring still considered the best primary profession for PvE healing? If so, am I safe in assuming it is equally followed by JC/Ench/BS for secondary?

 

Celsius

To reiterate a point that's been made many times:

If you feel you need more regen, gem for int.
If you're fine for regen, increase your throughput by gemming for spellpower.
Divert from this rule when you need a blue gem to activate a socket bonus, and go for your choice of blue hybrid gem.

There really isn't much more to it than this. In your case, I'd be going for spellpower, as you claim to be fine for regen.

 

Poyndexter

I believe JC, Ench, LW, BS, Inscription, and Alchemy all provide a 37ish spellpower bonus.

Given that, I prefer Alchemy (additional 37 SP from [Flask of the Frost Wyrm]) as a second to Tailoring. It will give you the same SP but your flasks will now last two hours and you gives you the option of using [Crazy Alchemist's Potion].

Also for generic grinding, instancing, and PVP you can use [Flask of the North] when you dont want to blow a real flask.

 

Skullbash

Our meters last night were topped by a Resto Sham primarily, it all depends on which strat your guild runs and specifically the positioning. There is enough damage from the Touch of Light/Touch of Darkness that your PoM will get all its jumps off easily if you let it.

I was in Hardmode, and for that the Touchs are non-dispellable, regular mode this may be different because much of the damage is preventable. But I see no reason why a Holy Priest couldn't out-perform a druid. Heck if you count the absorbtion, I was within .2% on a Disc Priest, I feel like for raid healing Disc is the way to go on this fight, mainly because I was seeing almost 100% use of all of my shields everytime I cast them and having 20+ up on the raid trivializes raid damage a bit.

 

ildon

Anecdotally, I completely crushed our regular healers primarily using renew spam between PoM's with the occasional CoH on the melee. Unfortunately we don't currently have a raiding resto druid for me to compare. Adding in absorbs the disc priest beat me, I think (if so, barely). This was also non-heroic mode. It's primarily of interest because my main spec is shadow so my holy gear is lacking epic gems and is usually a tier or so behind (for example, I just got 4 pc t8 healing the week before 3.2, and have gotten zero items specifically for healing in ToC 10 or 25, so far). I also have 3/3 emp. renew, so it could just be a case of "sniping" the heals.

 

willem11

Today we killed twins on heroic mode in TotGC 10 man. When I uploaded the combatlog to worldoflogs I didn't believe my eyes.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I believe in the past there has been some discussion about how reliable 'absorbtion tracking' logs/addons are but I have been unable to find it. Is world of logs showing appropriate values for absorbs done or is there something behind it that makes it not really reliable?

 

Squeakster

I have found World of Logs to be pretty accurate on most fights in the past, but it has a big problem with this particular encounter. The problem is Light Essence and Dark Essence, which cause players to absorb damage from the orbs floating around, among other things. World of Logs incorrectly tends to attribute those absorbs to Discipline Priests, which causes the huge numbers you see.

For example, the disc priest in that log only cast 62 Power Word: Shield (there were 62 glyph heals), and they supposedly absorbed more than 1.6 million damage. That is an average of 26k per PWS, a good 19k-20k above realistic levels.

For most other fights you can trust World of Logs to be pretty reliable with tracking absorbs.

 

Tiana

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the "WotLK Healing Compendium v3.2" thread. I suspect the latter, but it seems implicitly raid focused and my questions are about 5-man heroics. Specifically, it's about HC TotChampion.

The short story is that I'm really unsure what to spec. I've tried standard disc tank healer and a couple of holy variants. I find that as disc I cannot keep the party topped up and as holy I have difficulty with a DK tank. Specced Holy with a Druid or Paladin tank has worked fine, but it wasn't a walk in the park (depending on the party's DPS).

Given that I'm not well geared (but geared enough to complete the heroic with other tank classes) I'd like to get some feedback. I did witness one fully Ulduar-geared priest attempt the same encounter with a 30k HP DK tank and fail (twice in a row). I went DPS spec and he went Healer. He was also specced Holy (cookie cutter raid Holy). Boss matrix was possibly the worst (warrior, rogue, mage) with lots of DPS against the tank and the party. Our party was all melee DPS.

1. Healing DK tanks in Heroic ToC as a priest - something you've tried? The druid and paladin tanks I've run with have been higher & I think better geared. It may simply be the DK tanking nerf, but I'd like a sanity check. They also seemed to have much worse mitigation.

2. My main question is what the hell to spec for this encounter. I suspect my best bet is Holy with a focus on throughput (and assume I have enough regen). I greatly prefer Disc for the tank, but the party ends up taking a lot of damage and I find that Disc doesn't really have effective tools to keep the party up at the same time as the tank. I think it's fairly obvious the problem could be solved by being vastly overgeared for the encounter. Assume that isn't an option. I've tried with full renew talents (+glyph) and giving up 3 points in Divine Fury. I ended up with 'not enough HPS to keep the DK up'. Generally, I find that I cannot build up a full stack of Serendipity before casting a GHeal (or I need to use it for a PoH). Spamming GHeal just plain sucks. My current best guess build is to give up renew talents and get 5/5 Divine Fury & 2/2 SoL.

Anyone run (challenging) heroics as solo healer? Anything you think I should try that I haven't mentioned? Apologies if this is covered elsewhere, but I've searched pretty carefully for 5-man heroic talent specs/builds post-3.2, and I don't see anything current to 3.2.

Thanks!

 

itsmekp

Well seeing as my guild lost 16 Frags and we have like a .01% of them dropping off anyone other than yogg...I'm finally gonna finish my mace this week...and was wondering if I should shift my gear and gems towards sp/haste. I have decent gear right now, being in full 25 uld and 10 man hardmode ToC and some 25 ToC gear. Just wondering if I should go to a power healing itemization.

 

Miarose

In regards to healing H ToC, either generic disc/holy spec should be perfectly viable to heal it. If you're having problems getting enough stacks of serendipity, flash heal the tank twice, and binding heal yourself if you're taking damage with a dpser. Then you should be able to cast the hasted gheal or PoH when needed. Utilize your cool downs if you're still having trouble. Everyone is low? Use Guardian Spirit on your tank then PoH heal.

Healing this instance as disc almost seems to trivialize it. Keeping sheilds up on everyone, penance for big hits on the tank, Power infusion for yourself, and Pain Suppression for your tank.

Divine hymn, can really help you in the times where you may be struggling. As disc, power infuse yourself, pop inner focus, then hymn.

These are just some generalized healing suggestions, or maybe the tank is just extremely undergeared.

In regards to DK's. I found that they were much more squishy than the pallies and warriors at lower gear levels. They seemed to take more spike damage in my opinion.

 

• mutagen

I'd agree that Disc makes healing H ToC easy. You have great saving abilities every 10 (Pennance) or 15 (PW:S) seconds that can be used on both the tank and the group. Strong PW:S on DPS gives the bads some leeway to stand in poison and whirlwinds. BT hasted PoH is reasonable to top the group up. It is a different healing style than Holy though and may take some time and practice to get the best out of Disc.

I'd lean towards something like the old cookier cutter Holy for healing small scale content. 2 points in Holy Reach could be moved to Renew if you're exclusively in 5 mans but I like the range for raid sized healing. The single point in Empowered Renew to proc HC. The full five points in Divine Fury is debatable but if you find yourself wanting to chain cast GH without stacking Serendipity you'll probably appreciate it.

I've found the best approach with Holy is to aggressively stay ahead of the incoming tank damage. Your strong save is on a 1 or 3 minute cooldown and you don't have the great 'catch-up' tools like Disc so you have to be more aggressive about stacking up the Serendipity and / or cast canceling GH. Don't be afraid to use a pre-emptive GS to get caught up, especially glyphed.

An undergeared tank of any class might not have the reflexes to move as quickly or be as good about positioning mobs in front of him. The diseases in HToC are also dangerous, you've got to find time to keep Abolish on the tank and others during Black Knight and everyone has to stay out of Desecration. The rest of your group can make a difference as well, is the Shaman dropping Cleanse Totem? Is the Ret or even the Prot Paladin helping with Cleanse? And of course bad DPS means you're OOM too soon.

 

drisana

I also find the encounter very doable as discipline. The only time i feel insecure in that encounter is the transition from mounted to normal combat, before the tank has scooped all the mobs. I normally run TotC with a warrior tank who is very experienced; your problem may be that you've pugged an..'I'm deathknight..I can tnak anything..why I dead, crap healer' type of dk. Same as the poster above, shield everyone, keep pom bouncing, penance etc. On final phase of the Black Knight, I stand slightly apart from the group and spam Prayer of Healing - hasn't let me down yet. Good luck in future tries

 

WildWill

I found healing ToC HC a pain at first as disc, but it takes some forward thinking to help keep people up. The final boss is easy enough once you get the hang of it. When healing p3, I find PWS a target then PoH as you gain the BT buff, and then repeat this by PWS on another target to keep up the BT buff. If you really struggle, PI yourself for a bit more haste and you shouldnt have a problem.