Neferneith

Many thanks for the advices. I've swapped cloak embroidery and regem MP5 as soon as I can get my hands on a jewelcrafter.
I noticed every good (ie running HM) priest posting here went for 4pieces T9. But those priests are mostly dual speced Holy/Disc. I considered for granted that 4pieces bonus was weak for disc and settled for 2 pieces (triumph)+merlin+ony.
Was I wrong? Granted i'll never get regalia as other raiders would get a better benefit from it.

 

Nyad

Although I don't play that much as a healer anymore I'd say that the T9 4pieces is far better for Discs than for Holys. It's definitely a nice to have I guess.

 

Blümchen

TL;DR: What is the most difficult 5-man heroic to heal as a Holy skilled priest?


Long Version:

My main is a Warrior Tank, and now my little priest (Yarbarah, Blackhand-EU) finally hit 80. I started gearing up in heroics now, and healing is way more boring than I expected. So far I've done, in order of perceived difficulty, both Utgarde instances, Azjol-Nerub, Trial of Champions and Caverns of time 4.

Now, I only find myself casting renews most of the time, an occasional GHeal on the tank and some groupheals in caverns and during phase three in ToC (the groups where not totally overgeared or exceptional pro-players). Somehow I have a feeling this is not what raidhealing will be like. Or will it? Shadow, here I come! :p

What I'm asking for is what are good fights to practice for raidhealing? We got only one serious priest in our guild, and its hard for me to get a hold of him, so i thought maybe some of the more expierenced holys here could give me a hint.

 

Starfire

I don't think you can ever compare raid healing to 5-mans. It's just not there. The damage, the cross-healing, etc etc. 5-mans don't ever force you to use all the tools at your arsenal; however they do allow you to use other things sometimes (like mind sooth, mind control, psychic scream, etc... you can of course smite, mind sear, holy nova spam as well).

Best thing I can tell you to do is try AV. Maybe Wintergrasp.

 

saturned

<deleted>

 

Elimbras

In short, Occulus and ToC.

In long, you won't find anything similar to raid-healing in any 5-men dungeon. You don't have any cross-healing problem, you don't have the same kind of raid-damage, etc.
Try some raid with raid damage fights (XT, Ignis and Razorscale are good candidates for raid-damage fights that are quite accessible). Sapphiron is also a good one, but "late" in the instance.

 

• constantius

Counting Oculus as a hard dungeon to heal is a bit of a mislabel, since so much of the zone takes place entirely on the mounts, and doesn't involve healing at all. I found it far more difficult to heal Nexus(H) when we first hit 80 than to run through the first little bit, mount up, and mindlessly mash buttons from there in Oculus.

ToC is definitely the hardest, period, esp. if you're doing it with a tank who isn't wearing Ulduar+ tank gear. The DK phase of the Black Knight has some serious tank damage, and holy just doesn't have the tools available to heal it that Disc might.

Having said this: if you have raid gear, all 5-mans are doable / easy.

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

 

Elimbras

The boss I had in mind was the (3rd ?) one in the inner circle, just before the final boss.
His local aoe can be quite deadfull for un-experienced groups. But I agree with your conclusion.

 

Bergsten

I'm wondering about the relative value of [Nightmare Tear]. . .

As a holy priest, is it worth replacing one of my other epic gems with this, and if so, which should I replace?

What about as Disc?

 

Angelicai

No, not worth it as holy. I highly doubt it's worth it for disc but I don't know. SP > *.

 

Kashir

As Holy, it depends. A Nightmare Tear is basically an [Seer's Eye of Zul] with an extra +10 Sta tacked on. Spirit is the best stat for a blue socket, so there's no harm in using a Nightmare Tear to get the socket bonus (and the IED requirement). The alternative is to gem purely for SP, in which case you'd use a [Purified Dreadstone] and don't need a Nightmare Tear.

As Disc? The only reason to ever socket a blue gem is for the IED. A Nightmare Tear for that one slot isn't too bad; slightly less regen than a [Dazzling Eye of Zul], but +10 Sta. Again, only use it if you're still gemming for regen; otherwise you'd be better with a [Royal Dreadstone].

 

ildon

Are you not keeping abolish disease on the tank? I don't remember any significant damage during that phase unless you let him stack diseases.

 

• constantius

No, obviously you dispel the disease, but my point is that for a pug 5-man, he hits the hardest I've seen. With a raid-geared tank, it's a non-issue. With an alt tank, esp. if they're down around or under 30k HP, they can get wrecked pretty fast, especially if you happen to let Abolish fall off or stop to top up someone who doesn't know how to kite.

It still fits the original topic, which was 5-mans and which ones are the hardest for a holy priest to heal.

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

 

Zaq

I'd suggest that for 'fresh-80s' the hardest to heal is certainly toc, but that any of the 80instances (UP etc) turned heroic can be problematic just because of their usually larger, melee heavy pulls. It's pretty easy to outgear them drastically now, but I remember HoL and UP being madness when we were rocking blues.

"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali

 

saturned

I found H AN very difficult to heal initially as Holy. Back when we were all in questing blues and hadn't quite worked the kinks out yet for the dungeons. The poisons can be tricky since we don't have a reliable poison dispel outside of grabbing Body and Soul from the deep Holy tree. H UP (Gauntlet = Ew with a newer group) and HoL were some others that made me groan a bit. Old Kingdom is just unpleasant all the way around.

I think any type of fight is good enough to get you experience in learning how to raid heal. If a 5 man group is 2-dimensional space, then a 25 man raid is just cubed.

A decent place to play around with spells and situations can be in the larger pvp battlegrounds like AV or WG. Download Grid and make some mouseover macros for your key spells (CoH, PoM, Flash, Shield, Renew, etc) and see what happens.

If you find that you really don't like staring at health bars, then Shadow would probably be a better choice down the road for yourself.

 

Conflictiond

Planning to change my priest to horde, but having a hard time deciding which race to go. Any thoughts would be appreciated

 

• borisson_

Troll for pve, Undead for pvp.

 

Senres

If you really care about min/maxing then I'd say Troll for PvE Shadow (berserking), Blood Elf for PvE Holy/Disc (Arcane Torrent provides a decent amount of mp5), and Undead for PvP (WotF of course).

That said, play whichever race you think looks cooler or jives with your personality. The differences really don't matter all that much. I recently switched from Blood Elf to Undead just because I think they look cooler

 

c4tuna

If 3.3 hits as-is, Troll is going to be a significant (2-5% by my rough estimate) margin ahead of all the other races for shadow DPS.

 

Volpdiddy

I have been using the following stat weights since the beginning of ToTC:
Int--.58
Spi--.611
Haste--.35
Crit--.35
SP--.75
MP/5--1.0

These stats are, of course, for Holy.

To give you an idea of where my guild is at in progression, we have gotten to Anub in ToTGC the last 2 weeks with 49 attempts, but have yet to down him. I do not really have mana issues as long as I'm smart about using fiend/Hymn. I am, however, approaching what I guess would be the hard cap for holy haste. I'm currently at 728, which puts my FH at 1.14 seconds. I have no haste gems, and have reached this only thru natural gearing.

My gut feeling for my play style is that it would be better for me to keep pushing haste until I'm past the hard cap a little bit (to account for latency) and then look at switching pieces if the opportunity arises. Looking for a little guidance from some of the more experienced holy priests as to if I should start devaluing haste in comparison to sp/crit?

 

enqi

I've been thinking about this for a while now and i honestly can't come up with a proper answer for myself so i'm going to let you help me out here.

Some background:
I've always loved staves, i don't know why i just do.. After using 1H/OH for quite a while i've been longing to finally get myself a staff which can actually be better than a 1h/OH combo but blizzard doesn't approve. No matter how i bend it 1h/oh seems to get on the top even if you calculate additional spirit into sp and so on. Yes since i mentioned spirit you've probably figured out that i am indeed a holy priest. The weapons i've been looking at would be [Suffering's End] with a [Mystifying Charm] in offhand compared to [Sufferance]. It doesn't matter how i twist it the 1h/oh comes on top every single time due to the fact that the maces provides both haste and crit whilst the staff provides spirit, a minor chunk of int and crit, personally i'd pick haste above crit due to the fact that any non-clueless priest will with ease end up at 30-35% crit raidbuffed.

Staff versus 1h/OH
29 spirit, 36 crit, 22 int and two sockets versus 66 haste and 118 SP
Personally i'd go SP/Int and SP/Spi in the sockets which gives us
39 spirit, 36 crit (i'll disclude the int value), 32 int versus 66 haste and 94 sp

Can those values really make the staff somewhat comparable even due to the downgrade in terms of spellpower?
I find crit somewhat less appealing compared to haste, although the 32 int really is valueable.

Second thoughts please!

 

Hegen

In Wowhead, I see only a difference of 100 SP, not 118 SP. When socketing for SP + SP/Spi, you'd have a difference of "only" 76 SP.

Also note that the staff enchant gives 18 SP more than the regular 63 SP enchant, reducing the difference to 58 SP. The SP gains from spirit are another 12 SP or so. But you are still looking at 46 SP less.

That said, even for holy, in your place I would only take the staff if there's far less loot competition for it in your raid, except if you are GcD capped as holy or are really desperate for mana regen.

"Ferals are obscenely good at soaking balls." - Nidaba

 

enqi

Ah yea i calculated the enchant the wrong way. ^^ Thanks. Well, it certainly seems more appealing picking up the staff for the int and spirit compared to the 46sp.

 

TheBadger

For a holy priest who is Badge/Ulduar/Naxx geared, should I gem/enchant for spirit at all or go with spell power and intellect instead?

 

Senres

Go with spellpower and INT unless you need a blue gem to meet your meta requirement or a good socket bonus. In that case spellpower+spirit or int+spirit are good choices.