Then you haven't looked at mages recently. Torment of the Weak is a 3 point talent in Arcane that gives a flat 12% dps boost under almost all conditions. It was added in 3.0, and buffed in 3.0.8 to work on bosses. It has severely impacted mage specs, forcing every raid-viable mage spec to go 18 points into Arcane. There is much QQ.

I agree that it's frustrating to have a mandatory 13 points in a separate tree, but priests are not the hardest hit in this respect.

My apologies for replying so much later, but I didn't see anyone else comment on this when I read through the thread.

Well, I wasn't using HoH before because it never felt like a good mana gegen even for others and now I feel like it could become more usefull.

Anyway, what's that "Maximum of 12 mana restorations" of HoH and "Maximum of 12 heals" of Divine Hymn? Did I miss an obvious way to extend channeled spells or it's just to make sure there is no accidental 5th proc on the 3 targets? The first time I read it I thought that there was a limit of how many times it could be used in an instance/raid. Just making sure.

edit: now I need to add the mana bars on my healing raid frame.

I don't know if I speak for the majority, but a problem with the new HoH is the fact that it's a random mana restore on a CD.

Someone else cited the fact that druids are routinely expected to provide Innervate at cost to their own healing[/DPS] time, and I agree this is good raid utility and good use of their time. Part of that, however, is exactly because they can choose who receives the Innervate. If a healer is OOM and healing is needed, it can be put on a healer; if DPS is needed, it can be put on a DPS.

HoH, however, shares with Replenishment an element of randomness. It could be that if healers are struggling with mana and healing is needed, they will gain Replenishment, but it also could be that the buff could end up on DPS and be (essentially) wasted. For Replenishment, however, this is fine, since a.) it is on a very short cooldown, and b.) it can be and often is applied by enough people that more people than not can be provided with Replenishment at any one time.

HoH, in contrast, is on a very long cooldown thus if the restore does not go on people who really need it it is a big hit to the viability of the ability. Let's say a healer that's not me is OOM and we're stretched thin on healing - do I really want to spend 8 sec. channeling an ability that may not even help them, especially since another healer would be taken out of the fight for that 8 sec.?

While I don't think it's horribly broken as is, I however do think that under most circumstances the chances of it being beneficial enough to warrant 8 seconds are small, and thus it will see situational use at best. (i.e. I may cast it if I have nothing else beneficial to do at that point.)

Maybe that would be true for a shadow-priest. But he would help much more peoples mana if he could cast normaly and so could procc replenishment. So if he cannot do it since he is oom, HoH would help the raidmana more if his own mana would be restored and not somebody elses mana since he could restore so much more mana afterwards.

If it is a healing-priest and the incoming damage is not trivial the healer would help the raid-dps much more if he would use that 8s to prevent deathes and not giving anybody some mana over all the other sources that restore mana without self-stunning anybody especialy a healer. What would help the raid - and so me - more: to prevent the death for 3 people or to give a little mana to 3 people who die while that 8s? True, the last thing will seldom be exactly the case, but that is how I feel with that spell.

If you can expect that you dont need the heal of said priest for about 6 GCDs you maybe should have put a DPS in that spot to begin with, if DPS is truly the problem. (Or told the priest to go shadow and DPS AND replenishment.) Its not "Sometimes the tank is lucky with his avoidance and I can stopcast for 8s so what's your problem with 8s". With such a long CD you should ONLY use it when you think you can use it to its end if you claim that the raid would benefit so hugely by it. And to do that you have to _know_ that your heal is not needed (but mana is needed).

I can see the grouping becoming something we instinctively do: you know there's a break in the fight coming, and the people in the "healing group" cluster up around the Mana Tide totem, and as they do, the priest(s) channel HoH. I'm certainly with Mavv in that I plan to use it *regardless* of who gets the mana, simply because it's there, it's a cooldown, and someone will benefit.

Obviously I'd prefer I was a guaranteed recipient, because I do tend to use it when I'm down some mana, but if I have 60% mana and a paladin is next to me with 20%, they need it more than I do. I just wish/hope it would pick the "real mana users" (read: no hunters, ret paladins, or enh shamans), since a percentage-based mana return is much more powerful when dealing with a 25k+ mana pool.

Both hymns look underwhelming to me. Their mechanisms are too complicated and counter-intuitive.

A short range channeled oh-shit heal with such a long cooldown is gimmick. It's powerful, but it only heals 3 person after 2 seconds, not when you press the key. Admittedly we already have other tools (pain sup, GS) so it somehow completes.
While I always had ideas for 3.08 divine hymn (1.5s cast, whole raid, two effects), I have trouble finding situation in the current content where I would use the new one, beside for its Hpm. Oh sorry: now we can stand with two dumb friends in a lava tsunami.

The new HoH is only slightly better than the old one: it's still something to do only when you are sure they're nothing to heal, and nowhere to run. Best plan would be to cast it near someone who had been revived, reincarnated or mana-burned. Of course again, assuming you have the time and the position...

These changes seem to be very shy and careful, as if blizzard doesn't really want to give us more spells.

But blablabla... I don't know the new content.

After testing XT-002 again last night, I'm struck by the direction Blizzard has decided to go with some of these encounters. During the discussion on the CoH/WG nerf, it really seemed to me that Blizzard felt that Holy priests were too powerful at raid healing (which was pushing shaman out of their niche a bit) and that subsequently raid damage was tuned to such a high level that other classes weren't able to heal the encounters as effectively. Malygos' vortex phase was commonly cited as a failure, because it was extremely difficult for under geared shaman/paladins but almost trivial for druids/priests.

So far on the US PTR, 3 of the bosses that we've been able to test have a phase with similar raid damage to the vortex phase. There are some key differences, most notably there is no interrupt so I think a shaman/paladin should be able to heal through the damage reasonably well, but the amount of incoming damage followed by the high damage RSTS attacks mean that burst raid healing is important.

With the changes to PoH priests, and more specifically holy priests with serendipity, are so effective at this that it would seem to make a significant difference in the difficulty and risk of the encounter. On all 3 fights, I use exactly the same healing strategy for the burst phase, which is as simple as stacking serendipity and then spamming PoH on half the raid while the other holy priest in my raid does the other half. With the current serendipity latency bug and Glyph of PoH, both of us are routinely putting out over 5k effective HPS on these fights and are doing well over 50% of the healing. If we don't make mistakes and the raid is properly grouped up the combination of PoHs and the smart heal effect of PoM/CoH mean that no one gets particularly low and there is no real need for additional raid healers to help us out. After these burst phases, healing is usually calm enough that we can switch back to raid healing the RSTS damage, assist on healing tanks or even channel HoH (sorry, couldn't resist).

As a holy priest, I realize this may just be an example of "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" but we've managed to have some success on PTR simply by stacking priests (2 holy/1 disc or 3 holy) and brute forcing healing with PoH. I realize I'm talking of 3 of 14 encounters, but considering 1 requires no healers (Flame Leviathan) and no one has seen YS/Alganon, that's a pretty decent percentage of encounters where PoH is almost overpowered compared to the tools other classes have to heal the same damage.

I'll admit I have no experience with any of these encounters in 10 man and I understand that we're still in testing phases so any of these encounters could change but in the most recently tested 25 man versions, my experience has been that 2 holy priests are the most effective way to handle this burst damage. Worse, if they ever do fix the serendipity latency bug, that would encourage us to bring 3 holy priests. I realize this is neither the time nor the place to discuss healing strategies for these bosses but I'm curious if other priests on the PTR feel the same way, or if I'm just too focused on our abilities and ignoring the power of the other healers.

Basically everything you just said Mavv.

I had our disc priest go Holy last night for hard mode XT-002 and it made a noticeable difference. It'll be interesting to see how our healing stacks up on fights with multi-tanks, utilizing druids a bit more. Right now though, Holy priests are putting out a ton of raid healing at the drop of a dime. We seem to be leaving shamans in the dust.

I don't understand this logic. If a Ret paladin has a smaller portion of his/her mana pool left why shouldn't (s)he be entitled to the mana? Although he might be getting less mana in an absolute sense he is getting the exact same amount relative to the "real mana users."

Ret paladins are especially the spec that doesn't need tons of mana. They get one third of their manapool every 10s, when they judge their target. They consume it also, but giving them 12% mana is ridiculous compared to this mechanism.

Similarly, hunters and shamans are less worried when they are oom. They do have a dps nerf, but it's a short one, and soon, they are back to full mana (for hunters, it takes between 10 and 30 seconds to go from 0 mana to full mana, doing roughly half dps during this time). Warlocks can also lifetap to get mana back.

For all these classes, it's usefull to have more mana. But they are less hurt than others if they have no more mana : they'll recover largely faster than mages (with evocation on cd / druids / priest / holy paladins / (non-enhanced) chamans) will do.

Currently PW:Barrier isn't implemented on PTR and rumor is that it may not be coming or at least in this patch. With that said a disc priest spamming PW:S and BT-hasted PoHs is also very effective at raid healing. So far on PTR we've been using a disc priest/paladin combo for tank healing and as currently implemented there isn't as much direct tank damage during the burst AoE damage phases which allows the disc priest to switch to raid healing a bit.