"Eshen if you look at my post (the second one after Nid's main post); I have included the math on why Blessed Resilience and Test of Faith are a better combination than 5/5 Empowered Healing. As a holy priest, there is simply no reason to have empowered healing over those two talent."

Thank you for the advice, speced out of empowered healing, and picked up blessed resilience and my healing went up. I was surprised at how little empowered healing actually affected my GH numbers. With 5/5 empowered healing my GH hit for right around 8900, non-crit. Without points in either BR or EH, my greater hit for around 8100, adding the points back to BR brought the average GH hit to around 8500. That isn't a huge difference, and the +3% from BR affects all the heals I use much more often (CoH, PoH, ProM, renew, etc). There appeared to be little difference in flash heal from going from 5/5 EH 0/3 BR to 0/5 EH and 3/3 BR.

Thank you very much for the tip.

I understand your math, and agree with it based on the presumption that holy priests won't be using GH very often. If that's the situation you're in, I agree completely with what you're trying to say. I use GH often, and when I do use GH it's because I really need the heal. With full serendipity my GH casts in 1.54s compared to my FH which casts in 1.32s. There are times when I'm purely raid healing that being able to drop a large, powerful heal on a target prevents them from incoming death.

Also, for my guild and how we run things it's not as simple as "I only raid heal as holy and tank heal as disc". Iron Council, Freya, Thorim, Mimiron and YS, as examples, all have phases where I'm tank healing almost exclusively and then shift to raid healing afterwards. Perhaps the discrepancy is your belief that priests are "probably the worst healer" for tank healing. My experience has been different. It's perfectly reasonable to post the numbers that support your healing style and encourage other people to try it out. I just find it to be a bit disingenuous to say no priest should have Emp Healing.

Why is your FH taking 1.32 seconds to cast? You have plenty of haste. It should be 1.22 or less.

And in my experience on the same fights you're talking about, with the exception of YS, I've found being Disc to tank heal the phases where I have to tank heal, and then raid healing as Disc to be far superior to being holy for the whole thing. For one thing, mana isn't a problem. Trying to tank heal as holy tends to hit your mana pool pretty hard, and when you have to follow it up with burst raid healing, it's a lot harder. Meanwhile, Disc can transition from a tank healing segment @ 95% mana and no cooldowns burnt, and spam PW:S -> PoH -> PW:S -> PoH for a long, long time before going oom.

What is the math for the mana saving on Inner Focus compared to Healing Prayers. You mentioned only PoH but there's significant mana saving from using PoM almost on cooldown as well.

Also what about Spell Warding versus Divine Fury. If you know you won't cast Gheal............. why waste that 5 even.

I understand your point about taking 2/2 SOL makes it twice as likely to get SoL compared to 1/2. But it's not that simple. You won't be able to use SoL every time you get it. There are numerous such cases where you get SoL but can't consume it immediately because e.g. you need to cast another CoH/PoH. So while I agree that getting 2/2 SoL is basically twice as likely to proc SoL on any given cast I think it's more complicated about increased probability of SoL being up when you can consume it. Only simulations can give that answer.

Spellwarding is actually quite awesome for hardmodes. Both Thorim and Freya have abilites that have the potentional to burst you down very fast where 10% actually can be enough to save you. I have not worked on Mimiron hardmode yet, but I can see it being quite good there aswell.

Regarding 2), I tried 1/2 for two Ulduar IDs, then switched back to 2/2 and now consider 2/2 to be almost essential if one wants to rely on it being there regularly. 1/2 feels more like a gimmick to me, whereas 2/2 feels more like a regular spell.

Regarding 3), one example where I actively use it: Hodir, during Frozen Blows. When I have bad luck during Frozen Blows (need to run frequently), I stay a little longer in one place than usual, fire off 2 PoHs, then immediately move and heal myself with Desperate Prayer to compensate for the increased freeze damage I got.

personally i wouldn't eber specc out of divine fury to get spell warding, and the most obvious reason is that people dies;
Actually many times i was raidhealing as holy happened to a pally to die or whatever, and picking up his tank was biggest priority; Given our large number of istant casts for raidheal (coh, pom) i found myself able to keep tank up helping out on raidhealing aswell, but there is no way i could do it with a slow casted Gheal, also because i try to save serendipity for hasted PoH.

Another reason for getting Divine Fury is that from time to time we will be asked to help dps. Finishing off tentacles on Yogg-Saron or adding damage to the brain team, dpsing the first boss in the gauntlet on Thorim and adding some dps when Razorscale lands to name but a few examples.

Faster casts on Holy Fire and Smite will make a slight difference and me and my raid will get more utility from 5/5 Divine Fury than 5/5 Spell Warding. For my holy spec I even put 2/2 in Searing Light since I didn't really need any points in Improved Healing (due to extremely low use of Greater Heal) and Improved Renew (due to extremely low use of renew). So my dps capacity is slightly higher which won't make a huge difference but makes me feel slightly more useful when called upon to help out.

The debate of Spell Warding vs Divine Fury is a good one. I'm seriously considering making that switch in my Holy off-spec. I think it adds a lot of value for hard modes, which all feature a good amount of spell damage. The very fact that I'm called on to switch to my Holy spec as opposed to Shadow means that I can't afford to die. And what's going to kill me on the 4 keeper hard modes? Spell damage.

I don't find myself using GHeal much at all, and it's certainly not in an emergency situation. Generally speaking, I'm not watching the tank, it's just not my job. My job is to focus on raid damage. I'm looking through our last Thorim hard mode pull in 25 this week, and I didn't cast a single GHeal. Flash was actually my biggest contributor at 38%, followed by CoH at 29%, PoH 16%, and PoM 7%.

Looking at our Hodir (normal kill), my distribution was PoH 37%, PoM 15%, CoH 14%, Glyph of PoH 10% (!). Full breakdown is here: WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

My experiences as Holy from the last several weeks is that at least in my perceived role, I just don't use Gheal often. For that matter, I don't use Renew terribly often either. In actuality I don't think Renew is *that* bad, it's more of a question of using my GCD's efficiently. Usually in these cases if someone can use a Renew, I can bounce a CoH/PoM off at them. Finally, I've noticed my overhealing on Gheal is really high. That indicates to me that when I see someone low that needs a big heal and I queue it up, it gets taken care of by other people before my Gheal lands. That tells me that I should be trusting the other healers to be taking care of that, and focus on my strengths. If the MT dies, it's not my problem in the grand scheme of things. That's a healing breakdown someplace else, although I do have GS in a true emergency situation.

The spec that I think I'm going to settle on for my role is: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

(upon reflection I may drop a point from HC for IF.)

I'd like to wrap this up with an observation though. Ultimately your spec is going to depend on the role you fill in your raid. The role I have never involves tank healing. If Gurg wanted that, he'd have one of the other shadow priests activate their Disc spec. My role is almost exclusively taking care of raid damage, so I'm going to tailor my talents that way, and trust the other healers to keep the tanks up. Certainly I'll occasionally help if the situation warrants (Bouncing a CoH/PoH off the MT, shielding, etc) but it's not my primary concern. But if your offspec is Shadow and you need to tank heal as Holy, then sure I can see the need for GHeal talents.

I'm holy with a disc 2nd-specc. So if I'm assigned tank healing I will not use my holy specc. However sometimes I have to help with tank healing. A tank healer may have died or cannot do his job at the moment because he is focused by something. Even if it is only for a very short period of time (runnig out of a fire f.e.) or while the healer is brezzed. There some talents for GH come in handy.

And even if I never hit a tank with something beside GS, PoM, renew and CoH/PoH in a given fight, I do use serendipity GHs to safe people. You cannot use serendipity PoH in every situation (because the dmg is spread over the groups). Why not use the stack to pull someone with low life up with it?

Maybe since you are shadow with your main-specc you only heal on some encounters with constant dmg to nearly the whole raid. But there are other encounters where the raid-dmg is only on few people who you have to heal up in time. If that is the case the switch in speccs may be a good idea for your special situation but I would not like it for my role.

I think GH is a part of our utility. Especially with serendipity. Since it is not our main spell anymore it is ok to not support it with everything we have if there are better options. But if somewhere people die due to heavy spell-dmg I don't think 5 points are a good investment to lessen the dmg-income on only one person for 10%.

Maybe it would be more helpful to switch to one or two items of FrR-Equip for Hodir (or stand next to a fire) than sacrificing 5 points into something that will lessen the raid-healing by such a small margin over the whole evening. I would hate to hurt my option to safe someone with my best single target heal in about the time of a FH if there were other options.

And what if the faster Greater Heal saves someone else's life? 0.5 seconds off our biggest heal can't just be ignored, in my opinion, even if we rarely cast it. It may not represent a significant portion of our healing done, but it is still a great tool for certain situations.