As of last night there were none on frostmourne alliance side.
Regarding 'best specs' - 2 things - 1 - A best spec can change fight to fight and what your role is - ie tank healing/raid assignment/all round assignment etc - and on certain boss mechanics certain talents are a stand out (body and soul on decon etc).
2. I think it also relies on your gear - you can take some talent points to really buff your gear - eg empowered healing in the old pure spellpower sets.
Ivraviel - your best specs are missing some pretty basic 'must takes' imo also.
I am very impressed with discipline healing this far. It is closer to 'jack of all trades' than holy is at the moment. Spamming shields on people as raid healing works fantastic, is sustainable and plays straight into the strengths of chain heal and wild growth. If disc had access to the 60% speed boost from PW:S I might not do anything else. I think even Prayer of Healing as disc is working well.
I am very hesitant about the new Serendipity. Either I have to spam Flash Heals (some redundant) to make sure I have the stacks up just in case I need a hasted Prayer of Healing or it is just a random effect that might be there when needed.
I am very impressed with discipline healing this far. It is closer to 'jack of all trades' than holy is at the moment. Spamming shields on people as raid healing works fantastic, is sustainable and plays straight into the strengths of chain heal and wild growth. If disc had access to the 60% speed boost from PW:S I might not do anything else. I think even Prayer of Healing as disc is working well.
I am very hesitant about the new Serendipity. Either I have to spam Flash Heals (some redundant) to make sure I have the stacks up just in case I need a hasted Prayer of Healing or it is just a random effect that might be there when needed.
You're doing it wrong. First, flash heals are things that you don't need to spam. You get them for free because you're casting PoM and CoH (You are, aren't you?) Monitor your SoL procs with Power Auras and you'll always use em.
Second PoH is NOT a spell that you just randomly cast. There has to be massive incoming raid damage - Frozen Blows, Tantrum, Kologarn Smash (okay, okay, I forget the name) you get the idea. The defining feature of those? You can predict them. Monitor the 3 stack, then when they come up CoH>Hasty PoH>Normal PoH (unless the bug goes off), Surge flash, PoM refresh (you did put up PoM before it, right), CoH.
Second PoH is NOT a spell that you just randomly cast. There has to be massive incoming raid damage - Frozen Blows, Tantrum, Kologarn Smash (okay, okay, I forget the name) you get the idea. The defining feature of those? You can predict them. Monitor the 3 stack, then when they come up CoH>Hasty PoH>Normal PoH (unless the bug goes off), Surge flash, PoM refresh (you did put up PoM before it, right), CoH.
I use Prayer of Healing much more than that. There are loads of situations where you have 3-4 in a group who are damaged where PoH is the most mana efficient way to heal them up. Saving it for the big raidwide boss abilities is underutilizing the spell.
And on Kologarn the spell you need to be saving is CoH, for when people get grabbed. That is by far the most critical moment in the fight.
Anyway, if you are going to use PoH as you describe, it is much easier to stack serendepity. But then PoH becomes a "oh sh-t" button more than a bulk healing spell, which it is perfect for these days.
I'm not sold on calling the PoH-Glyph bad. I find myself having more heal from PoH than from CoH/PoM on some encounters and on these the Glyph accounted for up to 10% of my overall healing.
Some examples where the Glyph shines:
Mimiron Phase 2: PoH-HoT + PoM on one group, CoH another, casted PoH on third. You can get a nice rotation running like that with SoL-procs for targets that drop low due to the machine gun.
Hodir: During Frozen Blows you can basically PoH away with CoH and PoM on cooldown.
Yes, it is pretty situational (it accounts for ~3-5% of overall healing on not so PoH-spammy fights) and I am not sure if it is worth taking over the Glpyh of Flash Heal (had the same thought process like Tedv there). You should keep in mind that it is a plus in throughput while the Glyph of Flash Heal is only a boost to your mana efficiency. So for maximum throughput PoH > Flash Heal.
I was running with a 3/3 Imp Renew + 1/3 Emp Renew build w/o the Glyph of Renew so far and tried to use it as often as possible. In the end it only healed effectively on tanks and the occasional SoL/HC-procs from it are quite nice. But running with 6-8 healers that have some kind of AE-heal (Wild Growth, Chain Heal, Holy Light-Glyph, etc) I didn't find my Renew effectively healing occasional raid damage (e.g. Razorscale-Breaths as mentioned earlier in the thread).
A big issue I have in Ulduar is spell pushback and looking at some of the hard modes I am quite sure it will get even worse. I consider going back and speccing 2/2 Healing Focus just so my PoH doesn't get delayed as much.
Like many others, I've been debating different holy specs. But I thought it best to reserve judgment until I had raided Ulduar at least a little.
For the truly lazy, here's the TL;DR spec I'm trying for now. But please read the post for my analysis on why I think this is a good choice: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Talent Builds:
These are the three base options I've been considering.
And my basic conclusion from Ulduar is that we should focus on throughput, not mana efficiency. There's so much random spirit on gear that I honestly just don't have mana issues. With the renew spec, I could get low on fights where Prayer of Healing got spammed, but I never ran out due to careful use of Shadow Fiend and the like. On a reasonable number of fights you can sneak some non-cast spirit regen time too, since many fights have the form "standard tank damage, okay massive AoE healing needed, okay back to the tank". Non-casting spirit regen isn't as good as it used to be but it's still good. As we get more Ulduar gear, I can only imagine that mana sustainability gets easier. So focusing the spec on throughput seems like the right choice.
This doesn't totally disqualify the Prayer of Healing focused spec, of course, but it's worth noting that it doesn't actually increase the amount of healing per second you do-- it just makes you run out of mana later. It's possible that some hard modes will involve a longer boss fight with more damage being tossed around. But from looking over the achievements, most of them seem to involve either A) a higher DPS threshold or B) receiving more incoming raid damage at once. In my mind, throughput trumps efficiency in these situations.
Now there's the question of spending 6 points on Renew versus some trash talents and 3% healing from Blessed Resilience. Before anyone gets funny ideas, let me be clear. All of the talents involved are bad talents. You really don't want to take any of them. Ideally we'd just spend 6 more points in Spiritual Healing, but that option isn't available.
At any rate, if you spend 6 points making Renew a good spell, then it's actually worth casting. Really. The problem is that Renew requires so many talents to beat Flash Heal or other alternatives. If you only spend 4 points on Renew, Flash Heal is still better, and you break even at the 5th in my estimation. So you're spending 6 talent points for a slightly better Flash Heal.
There is also the related issue of when you want to cast renew. Consider the following healing situations and their typical responses:
Tank with 20k+ damage: Guardian Spirit
Tank with 10k+ damage: Greater Heal
Tank with 5k+ damage: Prayer of Mending or nothing
Target with 10k+ damage: Greater Heal
Target with 4k+ damage: Surge of Light procced Flash Heal
Many targets with 3k+ damage: Circle of Healing
Many targets with 5k+ damage: Prayer of Healing
The one situation where Renew might be used is the "tank with 5k+ damage" one. In all other cases it's really not that good. When there's massive raid damage, Renew isn't enough healing per global cooldown. You need to use group heals. If there's just one or two targets taking damage, your renew HoT will probably get stomped by other healers (either intentionally or by smart heals). If the tank is taking a lot of damage, you want to drop a Greater Heal. If he's not taking a lot of damage and no one else in the raid is hurt, you should let other healers do the healing so you can get some spirit regeneration time.
In other words, even if you make Renew good, there just aren't that many situations where it's the right spell to cast. There will be some every fight, and it's good to keep it stacked on the tank, but it just doesn't help THAT much.
So this leaves me with the uncomfortable conclusion that the best place to spend talent points is Blessed Resilience, since it's at least 50% as good as Spiritual Healing, and the other options aren't. Put another way, if both Blessed Resilience and Healing Prayers were made twice as good (+2% healing versus -20% mana for Prayer of Healing), which would you pick? I'd still take 2% healing. So I feel bad that I have to spend 2 talent points for that benefit, but it's still better.
2/2 Healing Focus (Can also steal a point from Holy Reach for this one)
1/2 Healing Prayers
1/1 Lightwell
1/1 Inner Focus
I think that if Healing Focus is really required for some fights, we can get away with only have 33 yard Prayer of Healing instead of 36, so dropping a point from Holy Reach is the right choice. Prayer of Healing is a genuinely good spell, so I'm thinking this is actually the best place to put the point. The other option is Lightwell, which is occasionally amazing and otherwise useless. Given how hectic the Ulduar fights are, it's best to think of Lightwell as a self-heal that doesn't take a GCD to use. So I'm not convinced it's a good choice. But there could be some fight where it's amazing. I'm listing Inner Focus for completion's sake, but I'm certain Healing Prayers will beat it in mana efficiency in any difficult fight.
I'd also like to comment on the Body and Soul option. I find it really hard to justify this talent for general raid use. But like Lightwell, I concede that it could be occasionally amazing, and I raided with Lightwell through all of Naxxramas. Of course this is twice as many points for a "toy" talent. To me, the biggest benefit seems to be when cast on yourself. Normally the only time you shield is when you are running-- and after you cast Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and Flash Heal. If you have to run somewhere though, there's a real benefit in getting there as soon as possible so you can start casting "good" heals again like greater heal and prayer of healing. I don't think there's a single fight in the zone that works like Patchwerk, where you just stand in one spot and chain cast heals. So in theory the talent is useful. However, if you want the talent, you really want 2 points on it, which means you have to cut one from Blessed Resilience (and the other from your 1/2 Healing Prayers). To me, this is the path of failure, but I'm going to try it out anyway to see how genuinely useful it is.
Glyphs:
I think we can take it for granted that Glyph of Guardian Spirit is required. And given how much raid damage there is, Circle of Healing seems mandatory as well. This leaves the question of Glyph of Flash Heal versus Glyph of Prayer of Healing. While it's just anecdotal evidence, I had Glyph of Prayer of Healing account for over 5% of my healing on some fights. And since Flash Heal Glyph only increases mana efficiency, not throughput, I believe Prayer of Healing is the right choice.
2/2 Healing Prayers is not an optional talent for Ulduar.
I don't care what spec you are as Holy, if you didn't take 2/2 Healing Prayers, You're Not Doing It Right. It's the most expensive spell in our arsenal, and it's resulting in a huge proportion of our raid healing total at the moment. You have to reduce its mana cost, or you can't sustain it long enough to finish the fight. Make sure you've successfully killed Ignis, Kologarn, Aeriya, Assembly of Iron, and Hodir+Thorim before you make any conclusions re: talents, as well -- the first 3 bosses + XT can give a distorted picture of the style of encounters.
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
2/2 Healing Prayers is not an optional talent for Ulduar.
I don't care what spec you are as Holy, if you didn't take 2/2 Healing Prayers, You're Not Doing It Right. It's the most expensive spell in our arsenal, and it's resulting in a huge proportion of our raid healing total at the moment. You have to reduce its mana cost, or you can't sustain it long enough to finish the fight. Make sure you've successfully killed Ignis, Kologarn, Aeriya, Assembly of Iron, and Hodir+Thorim before you make any conclusions re: talents, as well -- the first 3 bosses + XT can give a distorted picture of the style of encounters.
That logic seems compelling, but if so, why do you treat Test of Faith as optional (as going from your armory spec)? I'd estimate that almost half of the healing we do is on targets below half health, especially when casting Prayer of Healing. So that's almost 2% extra healing per talent point spent, and it kicks in at the time you need it most. Also, why Inner Focus? Even best case it gives 1600 mana every 180 seconds, or 45 m/5. That's really not that exciting-- I feel like extra throughput will matter more. And for the record, I do disagree with only 1 point in Surge of Light. I find that proc simply isn't up as often as I want to be (which is "always").
I'm not saying your logic is wrong, but I'm having trouble reconciling it with your talent choices.
Basically, for progression content, throughput << regen. Always. Until you *know* you can complete the hardest encounters in the zone with your levels of regen, why would you drop regen talents? I don't use Inner Focus that much, so it's arguable that switching that point to +healing might make sense, but when it comes to HP or Improved Healing, those are mandatory.
If I really wanted to get ToF, I'd drop points from Renew before I dropped them from HP.
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
We've worked on deconstructor for 2 nights now. I'm normally disc, but I've been using my holy 2nd spec for this fight. I was just wondering whether you guys think spreading out, or grouping up makes for an easier kill. The first night, we were all grouped up, and we were unsuccessful because people weren't moving fast enough with the bombs. The second night, we were spread out--which obviously fixed that problem--but then it was more difficult to heal due to PoH only hitting 3 or 4 people in a group, and CoH not always hitting 6 people. Most of the raid seemed to like the spread out strat more, but I'm not convinced that grouping up wouldn't work just fine. Also, I picked up Body and Soul because it sounded amazing with the first strat, but then they changed the strat and I no longer saw a use for it, since people weren't moving with their bombs...
Which way have people found to be more conducive to an easy kill?
This might be a big heavy handed, but I'm tempted to go as far as to say you "have to" clump up. We used 3 clumps; treat it sort-of like Felmyst in Sunwell, and make 3 groups. One melee (at his butt), and two caster. Split your healers 50/50, and try to put a shaman and priest on each side. Keep the groups close enough together that you have range on everyone from your clump, and use Body and Soul to help the people with Light Bomb get out. Gravity Bomb is trivial; you have 9 seconds to get out before anyone takes damage. It's Light Bomb that's the key.
Setup designated directions for each group to run (left group left, right group right, melee either way but staying "forward" of the ranged groups), and just enforce good debuff mods. On top of that, run the latest push of BigWigs and setup Whispers to warn people who get the bomb. Then practice practice practice.
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
That logic seems compelling, but if so, why do you treat Test of Faith as optional (as going from your armory spec)? I'd estimate that almost half of the healing we do is on targets below half health, especially when casting Prayer of Healing. So that's almost 2% extra healing per talent point spent, and it kicks in at the time you need it most. Also, why Inner Focus? Even best case it gives 1600 mana every 180 seconds, or 45 m/5. That's really not that exciting-- I feel like extra throughput will matter more. And for the record, I do disagree with only 1 point in Surge of Light. I find that proc simply isn't up as often as I want to be (which is "always").
I'm not saying your logic is wrong, but I'm having trouble reconciling it with your talent choices.
I'm in total agreement with tedv after checking out your spec on the armory Nid I was a little boggled. I really wish there was a way to measure how much healing we do because of ToF but I believe it's much more than you're giving it credit for. I'm sure a lot of it depends on how good the other healers in your raid are but even with a full team of excellent healers it should be substantial. I tend to focus on the targets <= 50% and ToF effecting all of your heals at all the points where your HPS is stressed to the max from AE damage has to be worth it. It's just unfortunate that we can't accurately measure that value.
I've been skipping Inner Focus for awhile now as well, 1 underwhelming CD just isn't worth the point anymore, especially since mana is still not much of an issue when using CD's properly.
Ditto on SoL as well.
Overall out of the 6 fights I've completed in Ulduar on live so far, the biggest healing issue has been throughput, and I haven't even had to pop a mana pot yet because our CD's have been all I needed. Maybe things are different in later bosses but I'm sure I'll find that out soon.
I wouldn't want to drop Inner Focus if only for using it in conjunction with Divine Hymn.
I'm personally trying to settle on a holy spec that is focused pretty much exclusively on raid healing. I initially settled on this following spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft. I didn't grab inspiration because the amount of time I'd be spending on a tank while in this spec would be pretty minimal. Lightwell you can always argue as being unnecessary, and while I know it doesn't have a TON of use, I find the option to cast it is worth the 1 point spent.
However, I'm beginning to realize how nice of a talent Body and Soul is. I'm debating on the following spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft. My flash healing would be minimal and kept mostly to SoL procs, and I wouldn't really be casting greater heal that often with it. I would really only be missing out on bigger flash/greater heals. If my spec is supposed to be tailored to raid healing, I thought that seemed like a logical choice. Renews would replace my flash heals for the most part. Will I really miss having empowered healing if the spec is only used in fights like Kologarn? Is there some other talent I might want to consider dropping for it?
I do play as Disc primarily and am a little rusty playing as holy since I've been Disc since 3.0 hit. I played as Disc for our Razorscale this week, and couldn't agree more on how great it is in that particular fight. Giving people that 6k buffer alongside the small glyph heal after each fireball is pretty amazing. Now if we could only get a glyph for penance that added a knockback effect on the heals so I could babysit people not moving out of the fires.
2/2 Healing Prayers is not an optional talent for Ulduar.
I don't care what spec you are as Holy, if you didn't take 2/2 Healing Prayers, You're Not Doing It Right. It's the most expensive spell in our arsenal, and it's resulting in a huge proportion of our raid healing total at the moment. You have to reduce its mana cost, or you can't sustain it long enough to finish the fight. Make sure you've successfully killed Ignis, Kologarn, Aeriya, Assembly of Iron, and Hodir+Thorim before you make any conclusions re: talents, as well -- the first 3 bosses + XT can give a distorted picture of the style of encounters.
Kologarn, Aeriya, Assembly of Iron, and Hodir+Thorim dead with 0/2 Healing Prayers. Granted I was Disc for Aeriya.
I'm not having mana issues at the moment and I'm frequently spamming PoH. I've since respecced, and I agree it might be nice, but saying it's necessary is exaggerating quite a bit. Spiritual Healing is Necessary. Healing Prayers is nice.
Further updates: got to Mimiron 10 last night (last of the watchers). It was a little rough, but late-night raiding is always a little risky. Got him to 5%-all on Phase 4 and just couldn't seal the deal. Expect to see yogg this reset, but it'll depend on everyone's schedules.
The biggest news I have to offer you is just how much I used renew last night. I want to say on the full Mimiron attempts (especially phase 2 and 4), renew is INCREDIBLE. I started with more of a PoH/CoH approach, which was fine (one attempt, PoH was 50% of my healing, including the glyph, which really shines when you use PoH a lot), however I decided to see if I could streamline my healing for those phases, increase my mobility, and decrease the risk of pushback (since I don't take healing focus). The result was a renew+SoL strategy that would eventually stack serendipity so I could cast two consecutive, quick PoHs during heat waves. PoM goes without saying. If I fell behind a little bit, I'd binding heal (and then use PoH again when the serendipity was 2+).
As we went later into the night, renew+empowered renew became my top spell (40+% of total) (still not glyphed for it) and feels really controlled and stable. Heavy PoH was occasionally iffy if the positioning didn't quite come out right, and renew was incredibly reliable. We were running three healers for this, and the renew-centric strategy was very impressive. The PoH strategy was equally impressive, but using renews that crit and proc SoL, which then leads to fast PoHs was a nice little spell progression that I enjoyed using. I feel it is superior than a heavy flash heal strategy.
Mana recovery between phases is also fine, despite the spirit nerf. Transitioning to phase 3 was hymn of hope, and going into 4 I'd pot and fiend if I needed to (I never felt in danger of going oom).
Here are a couple of the late phase 4 attempts on Mimiron 10.
Anyway, still a lot of experimentation to do, different groups to heal. I expect my healing choices will be different in 25 man, but renew is a really great spell for 10-man so far. It finished #1 around 35% total (renew+emp) for the night (Thorim, Freya, Mimiron).
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Edit: And if you're wondering why I didn't use CoH in that image, I'm kind of shocked also. Our strategy, though, was to spread out a little wider than CoH could accommodate, so I must've decided against it. I can tell you, though, that I did use it for phase 2 if I felt like I could get hits on it, but it clearly wasn't necessary in those two attempts there. In a more group-centric, clumped up strategy for phase 2 (and I imagine on 25-man), it will be heavier PoH/CoH numbers. While I don't plan on trying Mimiron with two healers at the moment (though I think it could be possible with new positioning), I imagine that those higher group hps spells would be necessary. Even then, though, renew can exist on 5+ people at once, and every GCD I could afford, I'd cast it. I tried to roll them when I could during phase 2, and found success with it. The results above are mainly derived from that success.
Kologarn, Aeriya, Assembly of Iron, and Hodir+Thorim dead with 0/2 Healing Prayers. Granted I was Disc for Aeriya.
I'm not having mana issues at the moment and I'm frequently spamming PoH. I've since respecced, and I agree it might be nice, but saying it's necessary is exaggerating quite a bit. Spiritual Healing is Necessary. Healing Prayers is nice.
Healing and specs are generally very subjective and depend on a huge amount of factors. However, in general 2/2 Healing Prayers is significantly better than other choices given the way fights are in Ulduar.
The serendipidy bug from ptr seems to have gone live.
If you cast greater heal or prayer of healing, and cast another one within the lag/queue window, both will get hasted.
Our strategy on XT-002 was to use the /range in DBM, and all healers/ranged stand far enough apart. Since you know who is in "the middle", you can still hit an entire group easily with PoH. If someone other than melee get Gravity Well or Light Bomb, we just stand entirely still. The Gravity Well explosion has a short range, and goes off before you get pulled in. So it's no big deal if you get pulled. Melee go to a predetermined spot.
Other than that, it's all strategy with nuking the heart and offtanking Pummelers.
Err. Best case use for Inner Focus (imo) is on Divine Hymn. I am not logged in right now, but I am relatively certain it costs slightly over 2100+ mana. Which is roughly 58 mp5. Granted, you can't use Divine Hymn for every Inner Focus, but you can certainly use it for the first one.
There is the additional benefit of regenerating OFSR mana while channeling Divine Hymn too. And, I am relatively certain the 25% crit affects Divine Hymn (not that it actually needs to crit in most cases, but hey).
Anyways, I find myself raiding as Discipline the majority of the time since the 3 other Priests in my guild dislike Discipline and all stay Holy. I find Discipline to be absolutely amazing on Mimiron. Power Word: Shield spammed on the raid in phase 2 its a god-send. I don't think a single shield is wasted, ever. And using Borrowed Time to haste up PoH is a good compliment.
I also can't see myself doing Razorscale as Holy. The shields as a pre-emptive heal to those fireballs just seem to good to pass up. The shields afford a good buffer to Fireball spam on the raid. Most raid members getting hit by 3 fireballs in a row is certain death.
My unbuffed shields are also absorbing 6.1k, so I actually heal the Stone Grip on Kologarn. Yeah, CoH is nice, but I can quickly shield all 3 targets, drop a PoM which bounces between them and then Penance/Flash Heal.
I honestly believe any raid not running with a Discipline Priest now is at a huge loss. I haven't found the awkward mechanics of Grace to be too much of an issue. Usually I keep to the main tank and only throw PWS/PoM on the raid, so my Grace is always up. And for absolute raid-healing-related emergencies, Imp. Flash Heal is just a god-sent. (Then re-cast Penance on the MT to re-apply Grace).
On another topic though, Hymn of Hope feels incredibly clumsy, the way it drops mana back down proportionally. It feels utterly useless unless you use it in conjunction with a Shadowfiend and/or a Mana Tide.
Divine Hymn seems buggy. I got myself killed while channeling it. Saw myself at 4k hp and reasoned Divine Hymn would target me and heal me, instead it targetted another Holy Priest and hit her for an 8k heal, 2k of which was overheal.
Originally Posted by arison
Everyone should start from the same place and rise based on their abilities, desires, and schedule. No one plays MMOs to *be* powerful, they play MMOs to *become* powerful. It's the journey, stupid. The rarer loot is, the more cherished it is when you get it, but only so long as there is a reasonable expectation to get it. The rarer loot is, the better it feels when you kill a boss or when $AWESOME_TRINKET drops.
This might be a big heavy handed, but I'm tempted to go as far as to say you "have to" clump up. We used 3 clumps; treat it sort-of like Felmyst in Sunwell, and make 3 groups. One melee (at his butt), and two caster. Split your healers 50/50, and try to put a shaman and priest on each side. Keep the groups close enough together that you have range on everyone from your clump, and use Body and Soul to help the people with Light Bomb get out. Gravity Bomb is trivial; you have 9 seconds to get out before anyone takes damage. It's Light Bomb that's the key.
Setup designated directions for each group to run (left group left, right group right, melee either way but staying "forward" of the ranged groups), and just enforce good debuff mods. On top of that, run the latest push of BigWigs and setup Whispers to warn people who get the bomb. Then practice practice practice.
We found this strategy significantly harder than the way we downed him. We made sure all of the ranged / healers were spread out 10 yards away from each other, with 2 healers on each side (left / right), 3 in the middle-ish. Light bombed people were meant to stay put, and NOT move (10 yard range on damage), and gravity bombed people ran out of the raid, away from the stairs.
Honestly, people were too slow to stack up, DCed too much, or tantrum + gravity + light bomb = dead raid.
Tantrum + Bombs is supposedly nerfed now, so it shouldn't be a problem.
I wondered about Healing Prayers myself, since there's couple fights where PoH is really useful and spammed quite a bit. But then again, only on Hodir it really hurt my mana - and "hard mode" will be faster, so less straining regen-wise.
One major problem with Discipline is completely unrelated to spec itself - it's the Penance glyph availability and currently, it's pretty lacking. I found it superior to Holy in 10 man, not yet convinced about 25 - perhaps due to lack of experience. Shield spamming is quite good against various AOEs and burst single target healing is superior to Holy, as you pretty much have 3 stack Serenpidity GH on demand, with shield. CoH lost a lot of its power with targeted PoH, and while PS is inferior to GS, it's still a decent cooldown to use.
This morning at 3:00 am, my guild successfully killed Yogg-Saron and we're placed 56 worldwide on wowprogress. Initially I started off with a spec containing Lightwell but after Ignis, Deconstructor, Razorscale and Auriaya, I soon noticed that there just isn't any situation where people could use it. And if there is a short downtime, it's most of the time before a spiky raid damage spell which would break the HoT effect anyways. I then respecced into holy mainspec and disc dualspec.
I decided to not go for any renew talents for a few reasons: holy priests are probably the best raid healers out there and they are great at one thing (among others), which is that they can put out an insane amount of HPS for a sufficient time. There are fights like Kologarn, Hodir, Mimiron or even Yogg-Saron phase 1 where we need to keep the raid alive at all cost. This is when the raid relies on us to put out enough healing for no one to go down. I usually prepare with 3 stacks serendipity, PoM and then go all out with CoH, hasted PoH and then either Flash Heal or casted PoH again.
A few talents that I find noteworthy:
- Desperate Prayers: it keeps you from dieing a lot, either when you land in Ignis Crotch Pot or when you get hit by some kind of random damage. Ulduar generally has a lot of single high damage incomes that take away 80-90% of your HP. You want to be back to 100% asap
- Holy Reach: a lot of fights require the raid to be spread out. I want my heals to land
- Test of Faith: A few encounters will make your healers sweat and blow every CD to keep the raid barely alive. DPS will constantly be floating below 50% HP, which is an ideal situation for this talent.
- Body and Soul: I'm not wasting my talent points to make up for other people mistakes. They should get their stuff together themselves
Overall, Ulduar is a very challenging instance for healers (finally) and I can use my dual-specs to the fullest. I use holy for a lot of fights but I know there are a lot of situations where I will single-target heal someone or concentrate on a few select people and where disc is superior. I'm looking forward to hard modes next week.
- Body and Soul: I'm not wasting my talent points to make up for other people mistakes. They should get their stuff together themselves
I agree with the rest of your post, but I'm not sure I understand this... why would Body and Soul be to make up for people's mistakes? "Making a mistake" to me implies not moving out of something they should be moving out of, in which case Body and Soul isn't going to help them. If they're a little late in moving, then fine, I guess that could be a "mistake", but it's something that's going to happen to everyone. A successful progression raid is all about dealing with mistakes, and turning wipes into first kills.
And besides, the talent is also useful for giving to anyone if they have to move to switch targets. And that has nothing to do with mistakes.
I finally have the GS glyph and I kid you not, I use it 5 times a fight.
Phase one Mimiron I can get 2 of them off, every frozen blows on Hodir, countless times on trash. I really like how if it goes off, it was put to good use saving a death and if it doesn't go off then you simply can use it a minute later.
The GS glyph is amazing indeed. It allows you to GS the tank so that you can throw out a few PoH/CoH's on the raid. Not that it couldn't be done without the glyph, but I do it often and casually now.
And yes, normally you'd run with dedicated tank healers, but I tend to pug often where the total healing is mostly done by just a few focused people.
04/17/09, 2:53 AM
