Concerning Holy priest raid healing capabilities:

I'm glad to see I am not the only one who thinks that raid healing as a Holy priest now is clunky and feels odd. Since Naxx doesn't really have a lot of AoE damage (apart from perhaps Kel'Thuzad's frost blasts as we tend to run melee heavy) you don't really feel it there, while Sartharion with drakes up and Malygos P2 have become a bit of a pain to heal for me.

I have considered whether stacking haste is a way to get more efficient with "filling", which seems to be basically flash heal spam. Or maybe getting a crit set for tank healing in order to keep Inspiration up? Both seem a bit contrived, and I am struggling to find something that feels useful and efficient.

My guild is working on perfecting our execution of Sarth2D and will start on Sarth3D once our 2D take downs are smoother. I'm worried about being put on raid healing there though, as I felt unfomfortable already with raid healing the two drake scenario after the patch.
If you've done this pre and post patch, are the changes affecting your healing style? Are you filling a different role to before? Did you have to rethink your gear/gem choices?

I even tried out Lightwell as a solution to stabilise raid healing, but it's hard to spot in a fight where you have so many AoE effects and adds around, plus due to raid movement, it's too often far away from where people are standing.

The best offtanking spec is 23/48/0 (possibly move deathchill to lichborne but I like deathchill). It's 1-2% off the min/max frost dps spec and gets everything but the 5% in anticipation as a tank. If Stalagg/Feugen are the problem, stick the DK in tank gear (full t7.5 is ~70% avoidance in this spec) and have him burn a cooldown ever time he's on that side. He should easily be able to pull 3k dps (pre +- buff) with a weapon/sigil swap on Thaddius. It's not like you'll need the dps to beat the Thaddius enrage. Now this all assumes a certain gear level, but if you're doing crazy stuff like solo healing/tanking naxx, then gear expectations aren't unreasonable.

@Lambi:
I'm actually really curious how you pulled Thaddius and Gothik off. I would think a lightwell on Feugen's side would cover most of it with you on Stalagg sending the tank over with a pom, but I'd like to know how you actually did it.

Wouldn't that be vice versa? Feugen has the aura - or does Stalagg hit harder? There is the possibility he had an offspec heal the one side though.

I'd be interested as well - I was at the point in our 10m where I was pretty much able to solo heal most of it. Gothik would of course pose the largest issue, next in line being 4H. It was hectic enough with only 2 healers. But I think on those fights they could be negated by having an offspec healer. Kel'thuzad would be impossible unless you got really lucky, if you didn't have someone who could throw a quick heal on you if you got hit. And sapphiron wouldn't be too fun either, to be honest.

Something that came to mind in regards to Kel solo, even without an offspec healer, is if you managed to keep yourself topped up and with a PWS running at full (would still require luck for it not to be depleted by an aoe frostbolt) is that the shield would save you from death (especially as discipline) thus making the encounter, while difficult, still possible to solo.

Warning, slightly OT: I was thinking of current priest gear. In TBC post-Karazhan there were loads of gaps in peoples gear but in WotLK people have tonnes of crit, haste and spell power already. Where are they going to go gearwise for Ulduar and beyond? Are we going to end up with 40% crit and 30% haste? Or is the gear going to push spellpower and AP only, to keep haste and crit at reasonable levels? If so, what will that do with the scaling of spells when we gain lots of spell power.

This development (ie, being well rounded very early) is even more noticable for my warlock. I am hitcapped, have 25% crit and 10% haste already in addition to a good amount of spell power. In TBC destro was out of the question at the equivalent level due to not enough crit available.

Anyway, hope we don't get to see a lot of future 'healing gear' with loads of mp5 on it, just because they didn't want to give us too much of the other stats. I do feel there is a risk they gave us too much too fast initially and will have to hold back quite a bit in the future, making upgrades feel small.

Alternately, they may create new stats (like how haste and resilience were news stat in TBC) and just sprinkle that on higher iLevel gear.

However at this point it's difficult to think of new stats that aren't either 1) highly specialised or 2) a random hodge-podge of different effects *cough* resilience *cough*.

ok got bored and started to convert the key buffs in to ilvl points for the healers...

Not sure it means much now there is less stacking - but is interesting any way. It kinda points to what we all know. They did not really level the buffs when they leveled the healing.



Are there other buffs that should be counted?

thoughts?

They could just start adding resistance back on gear like the old wow tier sets, then make more fights need it.

I don't know about everyone else's gear sets but I am approaching 30% crit, 30% haste, 3000 spell power raid buffed (25%, 25%, 2950 respectively). The only thing I don't have that high yet is 1600 spirit (which I recently dumped gemming for it for more throughput stats). In my ideal gear set, I'll be at 25.4% crit, 27.1% haste, and 3056 spell power.

I think come the end of Ulduar I'll be pushing 3500 if not 4000 spellpower (assuming items give upgrades of 25-50 spellpower and some change in spirit here and there). As well, once your Warlocks get over 2800 spellpower (pre-totem of wrath) then the demonology buff for 10% of their spellpower becomes better for you than Totem of Wrath.

[edit]
Thanks gsman20 for the clarification.

Aren't the +10% SP based on the Warlock's Spellpower?

Demonic Pact

And this is why I keep saying that a regen nerf (in particular, a Replenishment nerf seems like the logical outcome) is inevitable. We're in T7 gear and sitting on about as much sustainability as we had in mid-T6.

Ive killed 3Drakes10 before the CoH nerf and after, with various healer set ups. Holy Priest and Holy Pala, and also Holy Priest and Resto Druid; always 2 primary healers. We recently killed it for the achievement for some guildies, using a Holy Priest (me) and Resto Druid. I healed the drake tank (war), adds tank (prot pala) and raid, while the resto druid focused on the Sarth tank, a DK. Our set up was melee heavy.

My feeling was that the fight was much the same pre the CoH nerf, until twilight torment really started to bite; ie when we were finishing off Shadron. The tactic I used was to use CoH on almost each CD, use SoL procs on any low HP player (CoH is great for generating these), keep a PoM bouncing around, use the odd renew (but few) while having a GH in the pipe for the drake tank. At the same time the resto druid used the odd Wild Growth on melee, but I believe not that often, because he needed to keep a close eye on the MT. The timing of all of this is a little hard to define, as you need to react very fast if the drakes tank takes a breath, as the tank has 2 drakes on him (Shadron and Vesperon).

I also asked dps to watch their HP really carefully as we finished Shadron off, and if needed take a quick pause. I assured them I would heal them, but needed make sure the drake and adds tanks were stable before. I feel this latter part of the fight, with melee watching their HP and stopping dps for a moment if needed was helpful. Previously, I just used to slam some CoH's in, but now a little more care is needed at that juncture. It all worked fine, delivering us a lovely kill.