We raid with 4 healing priests, one of whom is pretty much always disc. What part of 30% crit rate with 8-10 heals per 15 seconds you do not understand?
My views on SoL are well known in this forum. I have explained why its optional elsewhere and I dont like the mechanic.
Our raid uses lightwell well. For the fights we use it in has an excellent return and I am glad to have it. I dont miss the 1% healing I would gain from moving that point over to blessed resilience in the remaining fights.
My glyphs change depending on what I am doing at the moment. That may be raids or it may be dailies. I have an inexaustible source.

My guild atm in on Yogg-saron on 25 man (cleared on 10), we have done some medium modes (e.g. counci). This reset it took us 7 hours to clear to yogg. We should have him down this week and next week start on hard modes.

As for the rest to me you sound like one of those healers that fits snuggly into a healing team that rarely changes with raids that have already learned the encounter and thinks that because they are high on the meters they are god's gift to priests. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your style of healing fits only subsets of what priests can do and are good at in skilled hands, who understand that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Also healing meters in ulduar are purely a matter of the fight and assignment.

A) Theory is not practice especially on progression fights. On most occassions where I choose to single target heal a target low on health and in danger I am not going to use my GS even for fights where I have it glyphed. The reason is that if I have it glyphed its because there is a CD rotation on the tank I am not going to blow it on situations I can deal without it. Flash, gheal or PWS/PoM are my first port of call in emergencies. You may decide to leave it others. I am confident I can do is without compromising our job. Dont assume that your limitations apply to everyone.

B) Err perhaps your raid has everything on farm, but in my experience random spike damage to raid members is part of most of the non trivial fights, while people are learning the fight. Sunbeams and adds on freya, death runes and chain lightning on council, rapid bursts or hand pulse or napalms on mimiron.

C) This is exactly the part where we dont see eye to eye. In every fight there are abilities which are meant for single target heals and abilities which are meant for aoe heals. Single target healing is nearly always at the limits of what you can output, especially when people make a mistake, examples include mimiron, freya, hodir and thorim. AoE healing on the other had is usually well below your HPS threshold and the main determinant is not exactly how much they heal but whether you manage to hit all targets in time. 3% more healing on aoe heals which nearly always out HPS the incoming damage significantly is far less important than extra healing on single target heals which by design often have HPS at or below the incoming DPS.

Ultimately every healer no matter how specialised will have to deal with a single person taking massive damage, even if its rare. The 3% to blessed resilience will never make aoe healing easier, it will never make a difference between beating an encounter or losing. Underhealing on single target heals on the other had will kill ppl. Not in every encounter, not even in every raid, but it will happen. If you can justify to yourself that 1-2% extra healing on the healing meters is worth losing a DPS or a wipe somewhere along the line that is fine. That is a decision that is purely personal however and a player is equally justified to not make it, given how trivial the increase in healing from blessed resilience is.

Ofc in my case I could rearrange my talents to get both emp healing and blessed resilience, by losing convenience talents like lightwell, or inner focus, but the buff is so minor that I choose convenience over efficiency and I am not in the slightest ashamed to admit it.

On a side note the fact that you don't use gheal at all has nothing to do with gheal being a bad choice and everthing to do with your specific playstyle. I have both the awareness and the reaction time to heal with gheal and do not hesitate to use it, when I feel the situation calls for it. If I cast 1 gheal every 30 seconds, its 33 mp5 from improved healing or 11 mp5 per point instead of inspiration which contributes nothing at all. Something for nothing is always a no brainer.

Your uptime on HC will be terribly low with your playstyle and its return is not particularly brilliant in any case. You are not going to get anything more than 50mp5 from those 3 points by my guess. I would say blessed resilience is what you really want to get for those points.

Using only SoL procs I would estimate it will take you between 15 and 45 seconds to get a full serendipity stack most of the time with an average of 30. Its not a very reliably way to stack it.

The single target HPS of your being is terrible beyond description. If you are ever called to keep the tank up, you are better off taking on some targets from another healer and letting them do it, your contribution aside from GS will be negligible and more likely to add to the tank healer overheal than actually save the tank. If there is any chance of a wipe on plasma blast, use the GS glyph and use a cooldown rotation.

First of all, and most importantly,
I really don't think it is ever needed to use ad-hominem attacks.
You should convince people that blessed resilience is better by showing it, not by trying to say that your opponent has a bad spec...

For the second point, I can find justification for such a spec. If you have a disc. priest or two in the raid, they will maintain inspiration.
Body and Soul is a good talent, but no way mandatory, especially again if you have disc. priest.
Surge of Light is a talent I indeed love. But it hardly qualifies as mandatory.
Lightwell is highly efficient, if your raid knows how to play with it. All numbers shows it. Yes, it requires a good raid and good people.
When arguing a choice between empowered healing and blessed resilience, you can hardly expect your opponent not to take the talents they advocate. And there are reasons also to take it. It's not mandatory, but it's really useful talents.
Improved healing is not very good, but if you don't take the renew route, you have points to use there. Or if you don't take inspiration. I like to throw fast gh on the tank, when I have serependity stacked and there is a need.
In short, I don't think such a spec disqualifies anybody. It's not the most common, but it's meaningful.


On the hard point of the debate, I would say I agree more with Havoc on this point. We have four healing priest and four healing shamans in my guild, and only 2 holy paladins and at most one healing druid. So raid damage is usely ok for us. Four priest spamming POH is insane healing throughput, whatever their spec. choice. We don't have always four priest in raid, but at least two, and often three. SOmetimes four. In most case, we have more than 5 priest + shamans anyway.
On the opposite side, damage on a random raid member is more problematic for us. And gh and fh are really the good tools for it. Finally, when somebody dies, I am often required to take back the tank healing duty (our shamans hate to heal tanks, I'm double-specced disc. and holy, so I like both, even if I obviously prefer to be disc for doing it). Empowered healing is needed in this case.

Blessed resilience is not a bad talent. It's not fantastic either, and there are other good talents with good reasons to take.

Tedv did not disqualify anbody. Most discussions here start from a baseline of expection of what a priest does in a raid and how he or she thinks. Havoc is arguing from a baseline that's quite different from many holy priests here. This was in fact helpful to point out. I would never have assumed that he argues in favor of flash heal to react towards random raid damage but not speccing SoL and inspiration.

It is, however, contradictory to argue that it's important to throw quick flash heals to random targets to save their virtual lifes and then not speccing at least SoL, especially when running at 30% crit. If it is that important, then it's also important to have an instant non-critting SoL flash. I'm not sure I see his point.

Edit:
Additional note: with the current progression phase in Ulduar, I think it's really important to have a clue about the baseline of the player. I can see that with every new boss I encounter in Ulduar, my perception on "how to heal" changes subtly. So it did for most priests far more progressed than I am. If someone talks about 3% more healing on AoE damage, this definitely carries a different weight if said person has at least worked on hard mode Mimiron.

Let's play this with open cards - actually, isn't it seriously enjoyable to have a very interesting healing class to play that allows and calls for different tactics depending on the encounter, progression phase and raid composition? Let's thrive on this and try to put on focus on understanding why someone has a very different view on this instead of focusing on how to prove he or she is incorrect.

Not one of us has seen it all, so far.

Havoc12: I've been posting arguments based on mathematical theory and a lot of your responses have the form "I feel". But the real measure is how well healers perform in a raid. Since we can't have a helpful discussion about our feelings as healers, can you instead post a WWS report of your raids? I think some concrete examples would do a better job of explaining your point than a reiteration of why you feel confident that a particular spell must be the right tool for a given situation.

I'm a bit afraid that this will spiral into a healing/damage granularity discussion. If your raids is having problems keeping the entire raid up (Too many too often on low HP), its probably better to take Blessed Resilience and Test of Faith. If single people die while rest are being kept up, its probably better to take Emp. Healing.

Troubles for healers is how you measure performance.
Our real performance is preventing death, which is not strictly equivalent to raw or effective hps. There is a correlation between both, but when speaking of the choices we are doing, the difference between both "performances" is really not negligeable...
I, for instance, have a rather good hps, at least compared to the other healers of my guild. However, I do not consider myself as better healer, because I tend to die more easily (I play more risquly), and because I'm less focus on keeping tanks alive when raid healing (our shamans do an excellent job of healing the tank if needed, on the fly).

A hiatus back to the SoL discussion.

Currently I am using 1/2 into Surge of Light. This is because:
a. I like the proc, it is handy for keeping my serendipty up until I need it,
b. it is handy for dropping a ~5k heal on someone who needs it right away, and
c. I am only 1/2 into it because I have noticed there is a bug with SoL. If you get a SoL proc while you are casting Flash Heal (from PoM usually, and other things in heavy latency situations), the SoL effect is consumed upon completion of the current Flash Heal, without being instant, or free.


I am definitely considering having SoL 2/2, barring the bug I have noticed.

------

On the matter of BR vs. Emp. Healing,


It's really a matter of a combination of things. i.e.:

- raid healer makeup. Ratio of shamans/priests/druids

- your roll as a raid healer. Are you on keeping the bulk of the damage suppressed, or being on top of those who are hp-critical?

With a higher ratio of shamans to other healers, you're going to be seeing more Chain heals bouncing around, hitting the most hp-critical targets. In that situation the +300 vs +90 won't make much of a difference, which points towards BR.

If you are the healer who tends (or is assigned) to focus on lowest-hp people first, Emp. Healing wins out.

Note: Yes, it is every raid-healers responsibility to get the lowest hp people up, but in some situations it may be beneificial for a certain class/person to focus on them first, and let the raid-wide damage healers hit the low people with a CoH or Wild Growth or something.

For myself, I am looking at respeccing out of Emp. Healing healing and into BR, because with my latency, (consistently around 260ms) someone usually gets to those hp critical targets first, causing my Flash Heal to overheal a great deal.

I am looking at putting the extra 2 points into lolwell and something else. I may also just go 3/3 into BR, and 2/5 into Emp. Healing, leaving myself a bit more flexible, seeing as I do cast Flash Heal fairly often.


With BR vs. Emp. Healing, I believe it is almost-entirely situational, and the rest of the decision depends on the play style of the healer.

SoL proved very very useful on Freya + 3 - any instantheal is worth gold when she casts tremor. I always try to have CoH and PoM ready for it.

Also I can confirm that c. is absolutly correct - I hate that when it happens.

"c. I am only 1/2 into it because I have noticed there is a bug with SoL. If you get a SoL proc while you are casting Flash Heal (from PoM usually, and other things in heavy latency situations), the SoL effect is consumed upon completion of the current Flash Heal, without being instant, or free. "

Yeah I hate that too, but I thought it was non-instant, but mana free...maybe I wasn't paying enough attention though. Either way, it blows.

"If you are the healer who tends (or is assigned) to focus on lowest-hp people first, Emp. Healing wins out. "

True, IF you are going to focus on the lowest-hp people with flash or GH. Generally I am focused on the lowest hp people but end up using Prom, CoH, serendipity enhanced PoH, shield or renew (which I don't think gets enough credit now that it has an instant heal component, but that is another thread). This is especially true in Ulduar, where when raid damage hits, it is often multiple, multiple raid members.

"Blessed resilience returns 1% to all healing per point. Empowered healing returns roughly 2% per point to gheal, fheal and binding heal."

Doesn't Empowered healing return ~2% per point to GH, and more like ~1% to fheal and binding heal? That was what my own testing and the tooltip seemed to indicate, but just want to be sure.

I agree... but I don't think anyone has been saying it is that black and white. That is, the argument isn't that a slightly improved single target heal is always a lifesaver, nor that slightly improved multitarget heals never will be.

If I understand Havoc correctly, I believe the main point is that a single target heal is generally more likely to prevent a death than a multitarget one. At least that is my read of it. That isn't as crazy as saying it always will, and I tend to agree with the generality -- even though I know that isn't always true.

If you accept that, then it isn't crazy to enhance a few select single target heals even if you don't get as much "yield", measured as total healing done. That seems plausible, and that is more or less all I ask. As far as I know, no one has even presented a good mathematical model that explains how to place a value on the healing from a single target heal versus a multitarget one, so there is no great way to measure whether you gain more than you lose in the tradeoff.

I could not agree more. I think the usual healing metrics are perhaps useful for diagnosing problems. For instance, a raid leader in seeing disparities might shift around healing assignments. However, current healing metrics are poor performance metrics.

One of the main problems with healing done is that it is extremely correlated (unsurprisingly) with damage taken. That seems obvious yet somehow forgotten. I think if one reflects on this philosophically, it is hard to "believe in" healing done as a measure of healer performance. For instance, if "healing done" is good, that impies "damage taken" is good, which seems more than a little counterintuitive. So if your raid takes more damage, your healers are ... better?? Oh really?

Many try to get around that by only considering relative healing done -- i.e. look at the % of healing done that each healer does. That makes the problem less obvious, but healers are still mostly limited by how much damage their targets take relative to others. If you have healing assignments (and your healers diligently follow their assignments), then their healing done will once again be driven by how much damage their target(s) take. It doesn't particularly make sense to compare healers who were given different amounts of healing to perform. Maybe if you compare two healers on the same target, but comparing a tank healing pally to a raid healing shammy using their healing done makes little sense because each was limited by a different amount of damage that their respective targets took.

I suppose if I wanted to size up healers, I might want to know their peak single target and peak multitarget HPS, and I'd want to know how much mana and mana regen they had. In a pinch, all those things might be important limiting factors. But of course that doesn't tell me if they know where to be when, and when to use what ability, or even if they know not to stand in that stuff that is killing them. The only statistic I know of that gets at that is... deaths. So in the end, that's the only stat I really care about. If they and/or their targets die more often, they are not performing well.

Well, I'm not entirely sure about the not being free part, but I am certain about the not instant part.


I'll have to pay more attention on this Sunday's raid.

If you are very pressed for throughput and mana I definitely recommend glyphing for holy nova. Yes it has a huge drawback with the small radius and yes it only heals your own group. But if you know everybody in your groups is going to take damage and you are standing close enough to each other a glyphed holy nova is both cheaper and heals more than CoH and isn't bound by a cooldown.

Ok, here's a question (since my math is always considered inaccurate), can someone break the math down for me for the following situation for int vs spr regen (a mimiron w/ poor raid positioning, making PoH only hit 3 people max):

1400 Int/1450 Spr Assuming 30% uptime with Holy Conc (34% raid buffed crit, on a fight where flash heals are used often).

Fight length is 9 min 1 sec.
Replenishment ticked 308 times during this fight, which is 5.1 min uptime (out of 9 min 1 sec fight).

Can someone be kind, and do a breakdown for this? From everything I've seen on a 25 man, I've never seen 100% uptime for replenishment, even when there are 3-5 providers.

I've never directly intended to stack Spirit, over any other stat, more so due to the fact that I've never directly needed additional regen (IMO stack more Crit/Spell/Haste).
I see the same formula's from the 3.0 theory thread here, with the exception of the Old Improved Holy Concentration, which I never had to abuse the 5sr in Naxx. I'm just trying to understand with the small changes, how 1 thread can say Int=Spr, and the other saying Int>Spr.

I have found that as purely a raid healer role (we have downed hard mode hodir and are currently wiping on HM-freya and HM-thorim), I ended up with this odd spec that has worked for me. I have 1/2 SoL, 2/3 ToF, 5/5 emp healing, 1/3 emp renew, 0/3 BR. I'm going to drop points from empowered healing to get BR and max ToF next time. However, If I'm ever at all going to be supporting the tank healers (like in thorim), I'm conflicted on whether empowered healing would be useful to have or not. Technically, I shouldn't lose too much output assuming my targets are at or below 50%. I'll be trying both iterations (plenty of wipes to try them) and will see how I like either one.

Something like this perhaps (to add, I'm forbidden to drop body and soul to prevent qq's of huge proportions from tanks).

Well, me and the other priest (usually holy), are typically about even on a week in/week out basis (in overall healing, and typically in average healing per spell), yet both of us have completely different choices in spec's. He takes Blessed Resil+Emp Renew+B&S, but I take ToF/Emp Healing/Holy reach. There isn't a huge difference between the 2 of our individual heals (although mine do have higher crits, due to ToF crit's on low health players). But as for CoH, even with his 3% (which I don't have, and we both are within 20-30 Spellpower, depending on fight, endurance/output), both of our CoH's heal for about the same on normal hit's.

But, isn't our flexibility the key factor, for the Priest class being the best healing class? Wouldn't not taking Emp Healing, reduce our single target potential? 20% off 3k spellpower. Thats a good 600 less (IE 10%).

The reason I'm considering it is partially based on my flash heal overheal. It was approaching 50% on our hm-hodir kill (you can assume that I was mashing my buttons unnecessarily harder perhaps !) . One can argue that the potential for more healing is there but if my flashes were overhealing with 4 healers in a 25 man raid, I can afford to lose output when the life of the person is greater than 50%. Thorim will be another story, because I'm supposed to help with tank healing once the debuff has stacked high enough and the tanks are in larger danger of dying.

Is Serindipity nesssacary for holy raiding spec? I use to always have it in my spec but now my guild needs me to have body and soul and to get everything i want i must drop serindipity. I dont use flash heal very often anyway but the spellhaste is nice for prayer of healing after you get 3 stacks. Thanks

I don't understand why people ignore 99% of a post, and only string 2 words out of an entire post together, in some unreasonable compilation.
Crit was only mentioned once in that entire post, and crit had absolutely nothing to do with the comment about ToF. The only thing even close, was saying that a crit, on a person with lower than 50% hp, granted a higher max crit for FH.

I interpreted what you said the same way Rootbreaker did, perhaps it's the way you phrased "(although mine do have higher crits, due to ToF crit's on low health players)".

Serendipity is nice when learning fights in my opinion, I almost always need every GCD, unless it's not a hard mode encounter.

Serendipity is absolutely necessary for holy. By all means, do not drop Serendipity if you know what you're doing. If you need Body and Soul, drop points from Empowered Renew. With some fights in Ulduar requiring intense healing, the extra second saved from Serendipityx3 on a PoH might be the difference between killing the boss and wiping.

Guys, here I am going to settle this debate once and for all.

BLESSED RESILIENCE VS EMPOWERED HEALING.

The thing to note is that this is not a debate of 5/5 EH vs 3/3 BR. That's stupid. This is a debate of 3/5 EH vs 3/3 BR. If you think 3/3 BR > 3/5 EH then feel free to get BR and put the next 2 pts into EH so you can 2/5 EH 3/5 BR. If you think the 3/5 EH > 3/3 BR then go ahead and put 5/5 EH 0/3 BR. The point is to compare 3/5 EH versus 3/3 BR.


Here's the math comprehensive and undeniable.

Flash Heal with Spiritual Healing, 3000 Spellpower and ....

No talent points to spend into EH/BR
0/5 EH, 0/3 BR: (2049.5 + .8057*3000)*1.1 = 4913

3 Talent points to spend into EH/BR
3/5 EH, 0/3 BR: (2049.5 + .9024*3000)*1.1 = 5232
0/5 EH, 3/3 BR: (2049.5 + .8057*3000)*1.13 = 5047

Now compare these cases. Either you can improve your flash heal by 5232/4913 = 6.5% or improve all your heals by 3%. The breakeven case is when 6.5% * x = 3.0% => x = 46.2%.

So if Flash Heal is 46% or more of your total healing then 3/5 EH, 0/3 BR will be better but if Flash Heal is less than 50.6% of your total healing than 0/5 EH, 3/3 BR is better. End of discussion. And I don't know any scenario where Flash Heal is more than 46% of total healing.

Note this is regardless of your playstyle, whether you use FHeal or Renew or PW:S or whatever. Use whatever you want or play however you play. End of the day unless your Fheal is more than 46% of your total healing (which is never) you should put 3 pts in BR.

The math is similar if you have 5 talent points to spend in EH/BR.

5 Talent points to spend into EH/BR
5/5 EH, 0/3 BR: (2049.5 + .9669*3000)*1.1 = 5445
2/5 EH, 3/3 BR: (2049.5 + .8702*3000)*1.13 = 5266

In this case your Fheal will be 5445/4913 = 10.8% bigger or it will be (5266/4913) = 6.4% bigger and non-Flash heals will also be 3% bigger. Breakeven case is 10.8% * x = 6.4% * x + (1 - x)* 3% => x = 40.2%.

Binding Heal...........
Note all the analysis for Binding Heal is almost exactly the same but even slightly more favorable to BR due to the multiplicative effect of BR with Divine Providence but basically almost the same.

Greater Heal..........

No talent points to spend into EH/BR
0/5 EH, 0/3 BR: (4300.5 + 1.6114*3000)*1.1 = 10048

3 Talent points to spend into EH/BR
3/5 EH, 0/3 BR: (4300.5 + 1.9982*3000)*1.1 = 11325
0/5 EH, 3/3 BR: (4300.5 + 1.6114*3000)*1.13 = 10322

So the Gheal is either 11325/10048 = 12.7% bigger or all heals are 3% bigger. Breakeven case is 12.7% * x = 3% => x = 23.6%

CONCLUSION

If you never use Gheal then your FHeal + Binding Heals need to heal more than 45% of total healing for you to justify 3 pts in EH compared to BR. If you mix in some Gheals ........ lets say 20% of your total Gheal + Fheal + BHeal comes from Gheal, then you can lower the threshold to 23.6% * .2 + 46.2% * .8 = 41.6%. You still need to be doing atleast this much with Gheal, Fheal, Bheal to justify points in EH. And it's hard to do even this much Gheal.

Basically BR wins

Nice work putting the numbers together, though I do not agree with your conclusion. As Havoc12 and others have pointed out, the conclusion will depend on what value (in terms of benefit to the raid) you assign to each spell.

Also, you do not factor in individual overheal for each spell - this can shift the numbers quite a bit. If 50% of your flash heals overheal (which is not the same as 50% overheal, of course), and only 25% of your PoH or CoH hits overheal, then your break even point will be different.

Now, to get back to the main point: if you are certain that you can frequently save lives by making flash heals a few percent larger, then it's irrelevant how much more statistical healing BR provides, because it provides the additional healing in a place where it is worth less to you.

This is why you are not going to settle this issue - you can only provide a mathematical and/or statistical model as a basis for individual conclusions.