Although it may be by design I am getting concerned that there are just too many talents in deep holy now. Previous blizzard comments have made it quite plain that they expect us to be spending 13 (14) points in discipline. Given how many talents we have in the last four tiers (23) compared with disc (19) or shadow (16) there is no way we can get everything we would like. Looking at other classes such as druids they may have as many talents but are not designed around a significant investment in another tree.

At this stage no matter how nice the new body soul or blessed resilience are I just cannot free up the points to pay for them. Does the tree need thinning or rearranging or does it promote interesting spec decisions? I also suspect that body and soul is too deep to allow for decent PvP builds

I can confirm that the Rapture returns for having a shield removed from you (the second part, as distinct from having a shield you cast removed) only works for other people, not shields you cast on yourself.

Definitely wasn't working in my Iron Council raid either, same with the other priest in the raid.

They broke Serendipity in a test build. Quel surprise. Hence beta. Were you expecting to get a live-quality experience of Ulduar, or test a patch?

The Old serependity was overpowered, but the new seems a bit weak now.

I mean, it's at most (3* 1,5 + 2.5 = 7s is now 3*1,5 + 2.5/1.12 = 6.7 s and 4s is now 3,9) 2.5% haste for the first point, till 4,5% haste for 3 points.
And that's assuming we are using the right rotation, which is not optimal...

I agree, when you compare it to tidal waves, it looks a bit under done now. Tidal waves is one cast for 2 casts hasted at 30%. Serendipity needs 3 casts for 36% haste, and only gets applied to one cast. The fact all 3 stacks get consumed by the one cast seems to weaken is a lot. If each cast just used one of the stacked charges not all of them, it might be more interesting. Mine is also bugged on the PTR since the last patch.

They changed the absolutely horrible Grace only sticking on one target mechanic.

For the extra point in improved healing, these are the options I see:

1/2 grace - discussed
4/5 Borrowed Time - loss of 8% spellpower to shield, 5% haste after shield
2/3 Rapture - 2% instead of 2.5%, 66% chance to energize instead of 100%. 0.5% still only 125 mana at 25k, maybe 40 MP5

Of the three, Borrowed time is probably the weakest overall, though grace has a large chance to be utterly negligable if you're single-target healing.

Grace was never single target only. All PTR builds I've seen did not have that in the tooltip of Grace nor did Grace act as such. It was on some Patchnotes once, yes, but that's not how it is on the PTR currently and I don't expect it to be so since Grace has been weakened to be only +9% healing from caster and no other effect when fully stacked.

From the new build (source mmo-champion):
Given that it doesn't cost any mana, hence doesn't invoke a GCD, this may finally make GotN usable enough to macro in somewhere.

I'm curious if mana will be in such surplus as it is now in 3.0.

Has anyone been able to get into anything resembling a successful raid yet? Every time we have tried we were unable to zone in.

If it is impossible to go oom like it is now on live. Has anyone thought of stacking an absurd amount of haste to compliment the single target healing of disc with the ability to spam PoH when its needed at a quick rate.

Or does borrowed time make that easy enough as it is?

I ask because my guild only runs 4 healers, and I will be expected to do most for the raiding healing as well as keep tanks up. So I'm tying to find a spec that is best capable to do both. Holy looks very promising, but I don't want to rule anything out until I have had the chance to test, or get information from other testers about any other options.

Last night on PTR since it was down for so long into the testing much of my guild gave up hope for a raid but we did get a 10 man in there. Again we were without replenishment like the last time we tested it (ironic that Blizz now says replenishment is integral and expected and we are having our worst luck with getting replenish on PTR raids). I was Healing tank on the big guy then tank on the medium guy after big guy went down as well as healing around on raid. Mana was only tight one attempt when we got unlucky on interrupts (we had resto shammies doing most of the interrupts). Our group set up was COMPLETELY unideal, so much so as to be about the worst comp we could have had really. Even with that we basically had a kill on the ten (mob got down to less then a percent an enraged on us because a mage went ADD and forgot to get outta an overload around 10%).
Anyways... even without replenish I bounced gear around a little adding some haste changing for some crit and bouncing between Soul of the Dead and Forethought Talisman just to try things out. I was never completely dry but you can very much feel the difference between live and PTR. I was using Hymn of Hope when the big dude died which helped me a bit but we had 2 moonkins specced for zero regen so they were always stopping dps because they ran oom -.-. Used shadowfiend half the attempts (only once did I need it though cause a shammy died early and couldn't stand). Overall, at least for this fight, mana feels about right for me as disc (haven't ran holy at all because I am solely a tank healer in my guild between me and a holy pally). If fights get much more mana intensive I would have to re-evaluate some gear choices and regem/chant a little probably. Do have the WWS if anyone wants to see it but it does not recognize Council as a boss yet so it all reads as a bunch of trash pulls lumped together =\ .

Edit: I was running with http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...0&version=9658 as my build last night. First time trying extensive PTR healing without Imp Healing. I have also been running with Frost Wyrm because my healing is lower then it will be on live but I made 150sh dstilled wisdom for live for 3.1 release.

Edit 2: Linked WWS Wow Web Stats

Is anyone else that doesn't currently have Mental Agility in their holy build considering going 18/53/0 for it now that it has been reduced to a 3 point talent?

Successfully killed IC-10man on PTR last night. With the trouble getting a full compliment of people on the PTR that can actually zone in we haven't yet done 25man and in 10man we ran three healers probably would have gone 2 if we had any choice.

I could tell that my mana was more of a concern though I never was at extreme risk. I casted PW:S a lot trying to help out the other casters mana and to get as many self Rapture procs as possible. The last 30-50% of the third boss (Brundir) I was solo healing. Over the course of the fight I did mana fiend once and didn't mana pot, Rapture was worth 150mp5 for me though well below the theoretical maximum of 260mp5 (at my gear level).

Given that you can't get everything you want from deep holy to improve you healing in a 13/58 build I don't think anyone has seriously considered stripping from holy for mental agility. Also you won't get that much more efficiency and are forced to basically waste a talent point in improved shield. The real kicker is you almost certainly have to skip healing prayers which basically costs you all the mana you would have saved and you have to drop other points as well.

Serendipity reduces cast time this is not the same as haste.

a 12% reduction in cast time means 1/0.88 = 1.136363636364 haste
a 24% reduction in cast time means 1/0.76 = 1.315789473684 haste
a 36% reduction in cast time means 1/0.64 = 1.5625 haste

So the first stack is 13.6% haste, the second 31.6% and the 3rd one 56.25%. Notice that each time the amount of added haste increases because % reduction in cast time always removes the same amount of time, but each time the actual cast time gets smaller. Basically now 3 stacks of serendipity reduce gheal cast time to 1.6sec,2 stacks to 1.9 and 1 stack to 2.2.

Its true that the new serendipity is now very underpowered for single target healing. We need 3 casts of flash heal to get pretty much the same cast time reduction as a shaman gets with a single cast of riptide.

For PoH its now a 0.36 second reduction per stack without haste, that means PoH gets basically reduces to 1.92 seconds with 3 stacks of flash.

Basically there is no actual HPS benefit from serendipity.

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I dont understand why people are so comfortable assume that ooFSR time has low uptime. For long periods of ooFSR time it does not matter. For short ooFSR breaks in the middle of the fight this may not be true at all. Observe:

A simple sequence of I cast flash, but if I get a proc I time my next cast to land after 8 seconds. That basically means each proc gives me 8seconds of 150% regen 3 of which are ooFSR. I get 100% HC uptime during ooFSR time.

I did a simulation of this over 117 casts of 1.5 sec flash heal pver a period of 372 seconds which gave me a total of 30 crits and240 seconds of HC uptime. I also get 90 sec ooFSR time at 100% HC uptime. That means 24% ooFSR time, 64% HC uptime. The average number of casts every 8 seconds is 2.5. HC uptime while casting is only 40%. Notice the complete reversal of the assumption. uptime in ooFSR is much higher than in iFSR.

My theoretical calculation matches this exactly.

At 25% crit it will take on average 4 heals to proc HC. That gives us with this casting pattern 64% uptime and 2.56 casts per 8 seconds.

The average model with 2.56 casts per 8 seconds predicts 48% uptime.

Remember that to get ooFSR time you need to not cast for 5+ seconds, but you can't really wait too long in an active fight, so any ooFSR time you get in the middle of a fight can easily have very high HC uptime. Assuming 0% HC uptime on ooFSR time is completely unreasonable. On the contrary it is likely that you won't try to take an ooFSR break UNLESS you have HC procd, because the return is simply too low. So it is not reasonable at all to assume that ooFSR time will have lower HC uptime. It depends on the exact playstyle. If you only take an ooFSR break while HC is on whether you have a chance or not then uptime during ooFSR will be pretty high.

Even if I only take advantage of 1 in 4 ooFSR opportunities (25% chance of procing HC on the previous cast) I still get 6% ooFSR time with 100% HC uptime.

It basically takes fairly long ooFSR breaks to actually guarantee low HC uptime, but these are very uncommon unless its a forced break due to the fight mechanics.

All in all it not necessarily reasonable to assume lower HC uptime during ooFSR time. It depends on the fight and the exact casting pattern.

The standard resto druid spec has 14 points in balance, with some (including me) going as high as 18. In 3.1 the debate seems to be between 11 and 14 points, depending on the value of the new Nature's Grace.

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I haven't seen any discussion on the 3% crit gain Focused Will in Discipline builds. Mana is still not an issue for Discipline, so I would think that throughput would win out over efficiency talents (specifically, Imp Healing).

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...0&version=9658

Thoughts?

Eh yes, just that you take Divine Fury over Spell Warding for almost any encounter. I speced Improved Healing on General Vezax last night, but that was for obvious reasons because you don't have any manaregen during the encounter. Normally I would take 3% crit over Improved Healing, simply because disc doesn't really have many mana issues from my experience.

When it comes to holy, the Serendipity nerf was expected to be honest - one second PoH is too strong. The nerf makes the whole talent weak though - yes we will spec it but I don't understand why we can't have at least two charges. Three Flash Heals for one hasted PoH/GH, disc. have BT all the time if they want after just one PW:S. I'm not saying holy should be a copy of disc, but Serendipity is just too weak now for the place in the tree. A nice change would be to reduce Spiritual Guidance to two points (5% still) and just move Serendipity down there. That would solve a permanent headache for holypriests.

I just can't understand how they can nerf one talent from 20% cast time reduction per point to 4% per point.
That's a lot more than tweaking, it means that the "old" PTR-serenpidity was 5 times too much powerful to their eyes now, and they failed to see it ?

"Hey, we just tried some numbers at random, but they are obviously wrong. So we try other one, still at random".

It's not bugged. It's shadowstep. It teleports him behind his target. He won't cast it unless his target is out of melee range. Honestly I'd rather they take the bonus damage out so I don't feel obligated to macro it to every one of my primary spells in PvE.

For the record, I am not comfortable assuming ooFSR time has low uptime. I went through basically the same thought process you did and realized that if ooFSR time came in short stretches, a high percentage of HC uptime could be realized within that ooFSR time. This is what I meant when I said "you'll get short segments of OOFSR time which might have significant HC uptime" earlier. Moreover, a smart player will try to maximize ooFSR time while HC is up.

So "the percent of ooFSR time with HC up" may be highly variable from encounter to encounter and vary by playstyle, and I'd prefer not to make any assumptions about it at all. It could be near zero or near 100%.

However, "the percent of HC uptime outside the FSR" is a different thing. It's definitely not 0% either, but at least it is not ever going to be a majority of your HC uptime, and it will be quite low in cases where you assume n>2. Strictly speaking, the model assumes casting at constant intervals, which means ooFSR time is zero if n>2.

Keep in mind there are a LOT of things we don't know. We don't really know a realistic value for n since the casts per 8 seconds is going to vary a lot from encounter to encounter. We also know casting isn't going to be uniform, and this introduces an error which could overestimate HC uptime. We don't really know how n differs while inside the FSR and while outside it.

So my simple way of approaching all this uncertainty is to say the model is only reasonably accurate when spamming heals, and in those cases, your ooFSR time is relatively low and the vast majority of HC uptime will be inside the FSR. If you try to apply the model to cases where healing is more variable, all kinds of problems emerge. One of them is that you may get more HC uptime outside the FSR, but that's a smaller problem than n potentially varying by >100% in different portions of an encounter.