I am sorry, but this is just a wrong statement in so many ways.

I just showed that Flash Heal with 3/5 EH, 0/3 BR will be 5232 and Flash Heal with 0/5 EH, 3/3 BR will be 5047. That means that chosing to put points in EH over BR will make your Flash Heal 5232/5047 = 3.6%.

Are you seriously telling me that ANYONE can be "certain" that they save lives from a 3.6% stronger flash heal??! How? Just by intuitive sense? How can it be possible to feel that a 3.6% stronger flash heal helps save more lives? How can you not analyze everything analytically and mathematically to determine the highest healing output for your chosen playstyle.

This is not about whether you like to use renew or not, whether you like to use Gheal or not, whether you like to have SoL procs or not.......... the point is no matter what your chosen playstyle is there must be some spec that maximizes your healing output with that chosen playstyle. One spec MUST be better than another. Period. Whatever way you decide to play your priest, there MUST be some spec that is the best for it. And I am providing math to back up that analysis.

Even if your role is to do a LOT of Flash Heals, my claim is that Fheal is not going to make up 45% of your total healing and hence you will be better off putting points in BR instead. You will still save as many lives with a ~3% weaker flash heal and your overall healing output will be higher. Can anyone dispute this?

Can you please elaborate on this? I don't understand. How is this relevant?

Basically, when you overheal the gain from the talents is lost anyway. So in reality on those heals which do not overheal benefit from the extra healing of the talents.

And, as others have said, it is not a healers job to output the most HPS, it is a healers job to keep people alive. For example, EH is simply superior to heal sag pot victims on Ignis. Sure, other healers might be better suited to do so, but perhaps the paladin healer is a 55 year old guy who is nice and all, but his reflexes are not that great any more. If you use FH to cover this, then EH might be better even if you do more group healing than single target healing.

On a more general note, this debate gave me the idea to write a simulation for this. Given a damage pattern and healing pattern, what is the survival rate of individual people. That way it would be possible to measure how often different builds/spell choices decide between life and death. It would not be so terribly difficult, but I fear that I will be to lazy so actually do so. Still I like the idea because it would quantify the "feel" we healers often express.

I do not agree with this statement: Even given that your healing mates have slow reflexes or whatever, and you are called to shoot around a couple of unnecessary FH in order to "cover" his target, the difference between life and death of a single person is really hardly made by a 3% stronger FHeal; Or, at least, in my ulduar experience just few times i saw people getting overkilled for less than 1k dmg after someone landed a direct heal on them; If they take damage twice is often due to their own error and really hardly a single heal of a single healer can save them; For instance, a situation where EH should win is mimiron p1 on napalm shells; but in this given situation most likely you will be supported by 3 other healers, and a slight improvement of your FH won't surelly make the difference in 99% of the cases, while that 3% more output will be really temptating during p2 and p4, even more if you are doin hardmode and you might run without a healer to match up the dps.
Of course there will be a situation where healing for 500 more would have saved a life, but it is irrational to downgrade your performance just for a not-so-much-likely-to-happen case;
Also because i see as a priest FH isn't the best situation often to save a life: generally i prefer to throw a shield on a single person who took a heavy spike (if there are no disc priests in raid ofc, but that's usually me so..) to allow him to run out of the aoe if damage is due to that and give other healers a bit more time to save him, but that's personal feelings.

This in actually the right approach. And depending on your damage and healing pattern, it may be mathematical tractable, in which case you even don't need any simulator.
However, you'll quickly find a limit of this approach : you need a damage (and healing) pattern, and results will be highly correlated to these patterns. How can you choose them accurately ? More importantly, damage pattern is bound to be valid only for one (or a very few) bosses. That's especially true for tank healing (where the frequency and size of hits on the tank is crucial), but that's also true for raid healing.

First of all, you can have "more than reasonnable" reason of this claim. Because you have enough AOE healing power, and never loose anyone during aoe (when you raid with four healing priest and 3 shamans, for example ;-) ). Or more likely, nearly never, compared to RST situations.

Or because you know that you use flash (or bind) heal when your target is low, and POH / COH only as a "top up" spells. Basically, you need to realize that not every point of healing has the same value. One point of healing is more important when it prevents immediate death, or heal a very low person, than when it put's your DK from 27k999 HP to 28k HP...

Ultimately, I perfectly agree with your conclusion. For anyone, there must be a spec that maximizes healing output. And they will be a spec that minimizes the death probability. The key point is that they are not necessarely the same, and computing mathematically one won't therefore give you the other (except of obvious points, like take meditation, SOR, COH...). Unless you prefer to play kikimeters, but that's another game.

Another way to look at this difference, which dps nearly never have : we play with finite horizon, when dps plays almost with nearly infinite horizon.
Basically, our horizon is the life of a person. With 20/ 30k HP, and the present damages in raid, players can die really quickly. On the contrario, dps tries to kill a boss, which last a few minutes, often more than 4. We all know that some specs are better on trash than others, but equivalent on bosses. The difference is really the fight lenght. When you need 15s to start your real dps, you're in bad position for trashes. For bosses, it doesn't really matters, that will be 4% of the fight length (for a 6 min fight). As long as healing is considered, we don't even speak of 15s time length, but more likely 5s.
If we had players with 300k hp, ie. if we have a long time for healing, then maximizing hps is equivalent to minimize death probability. That's the case when healing Razziavious adds, for example. But not for most bosses. The frontier conditions are not negligeable.

And we're starting to discuss healing granularity. This is not useful.

- Some classes have more hp than others.
- Some classes have talents that reduce magic & physical damage.
- Gear can change physical & magic damage taken.
- Some raids have another healer setup than yours.
- Some players stand in fire.

You CANNOT start talking about healing granularity except for the specific raid setup and fight you are working on. And even then it comes down to your own playstyle. Discussing this will just lead to 500 different viewpoints, most being correct, and it will just confuse the hell out of the people who don't already understand it.

I'll try to put it as simple as I can once more:
If entire raid is going down because they are too hard to hold up, you might want to take Blessed Resilience for the extra throughput. If single targets are going down but raid is being kept up fine, you might want to take those extra points in Emp. Healing and Test of Faith. Or just go Disc.

This is why I have implemented a more advanced calculator into the Rawr HolyPriest module (Custom Rotation). This lets you ask Rawr what it thinks given an EXISTING fight you had to deal with, with your raid variables. I have used this quite extensively myself, and it has really made me change some things around.

Please read carefully. I do not claim it to be so. I simply state that your conclusion is not valid. I am not sure I would make the claim that slightly larger FHs save more lives. But perhaps they do for them. Each raid is different. Perhaps they do for me, and I just don't know. Havoc12 hasn't backed up his claim by providing combat logs, true. But you haven't proven the contrary either. Personally, I think it's absolutely possible to provide combat logs to prove either point, and even for same boss fight.

The point here is that both ways of thinking are valid. Rating some spells as more important (read: life saving) than others is a totally valid methodology. You try to take that into account by looking at the amount healed - but that's not the whole story, and that's why your analysis won't provide an answer to the issue at hand.

Your question regarding the overheal has already been answered, but let me state that it's really the number of targets hit that you would have to analyse, not the amount overhealed, which makes it pretty difficult with current tools. Anyway, if you were to believe you in your methodology, you would need to take this into account. It think it's a waste of time, though.

We're really deep in simulator territory here, a flat model won't help anybody.

Just to clarify my position

1) BR will clearly have bigger return than empowered healing in the almost all cases (unless you have to support a tank healer or take over from a dead tank healer)

2) This return is in the order of 1-2% more healing.

3) Small increases in single target healing will not frequently save target lives, but they will save them occasionally. Very small increases in aoe healing, can save lives extremely rarely.

I justify this for the following reasons

a) The lower the amount of healing the lower the chance that it is significant and as you get below 5% of a DPS health the chance is no longer linear, as the ways you can get to such low health get reduced by the possibility of death (thus lowering the probability that under healing will kill).

b) DMG abilities which are meant to be healed by single target heals are generally designed to match or exceed single target HPS to make them challenging. Abilities which are designed to be tackled by aoe heals generally are well below HPS output of benchmark aoe spells ---> With single target heals the size of the heal is critical with aoe heals, hitting all the assigned targets is critical.

c) Single target healing often requires multiple repeats per occasion, aoe healing requires few repeats per occasion.

Thus maxing BR at the cost of empowered healing will increase your healing by a very small margin. Maxing EH instead of BR will increase the rate at which you save lives by a very small margin.

The amounted added by BR is significantly less than the normal variation in the amount our aoe heals hit for.

Incidentally can anyone confirm with data from PoM that BR stacks multiplicatively and not additively?

===========================================

On a side note I only have one example I clearly remember where EH has saved my life. I had to use binding heal to save me and another of my assigned targets who were low after heatwave and I got rapid burst in the middle of the heal. I hit myself with bh twice and after rapid burst I had 500 HP. Without empowered healing I would be dead.

To post positive proof one would need to scan death logs and find cases where underhealing by fh, bh or gheal has lead to deaths and see what is the smallest deficit one can find.

Very nice OP constantius. Useful information for priests. Your Int/Spi numbers look spot on to me.

I disagree that Spell Warding is a useless talent. I prefer it to Divine Fury for my Holy spec. If i'm not casting Gheal why retain Divine Fury?

Lightwell is a strange one. Those raid teams that know how to use it get a lot of benefit from that 1 point. Unfortunantly most players do not even realise what to do with the 'lolwell'.

Renew or not to Renew seems to be a valid and personal preference decision, which adds good variety to cookie cutter builds.

Body and Soul looks a waste to me, but I don't have a lot of Uldar expereince to comment on. It would be excellent lower in the tree so Disc could get it, but as Holy I can't yet see the benefit being worth it.

You are right that in 3.1 Disc priests have less variability in their good builds than Holy.

Gobble gobble.

You might B&S isnt that awesome. But it is. Period. Get it, love it.
Lightwell, its a good talent for only 1 point. I put it at ppl who dont need to move and tank, warlock tank on mimiron. Off tank on Iron Council.

I really don't buy your idea of maximizing healing output axiomatically. We both agree that there is positive correlation between both and no equivalence. But this mean that small increases for one metric are not necessarily increases for the other. Big increases will be : you want to take the 10% more healing talents. But small increases, especially when they impact different spells, are another case. You suggest to stick to maximizing healing output, because it is mathematically tractable. But solving and sticking "blindly" to an approximative tractable model has never been a good idea of science. The model is useful, but only to indicate trends. Not little details / variation. Especially, you need to know when your model is nearly exact, and when it is only gross approximation. Therefore, you can't let the proof of better death mitigation on Havoc shoulder. You should also proof that 1.5% more healing output, with blessed resilience and w/o empowered healing, is better death mitigation. You're basically assuming equivalence where you know there is no equivalence.

About the second point, The Not So Evil doesn't say that granularity is a meaningless point. He just says that healing granularity is not mathematically tractable, because it depends on a lot of variables. But it plays a role, vital, and we can't ignore it. Read carefully his conclusion :
Basically, there are cases when Emp. Healing is better, and cases when BR is better. Do as your experience and feeling tells you.

I'm kinda curious as to what simulator's yall are using to come up with these numbers?

And regardless of how exact most of them are, isn't it kinda a matter of semantic's at this point?
Going back through a couple WMO reports, and using RAWR to estimate the actual values, EH is more closer to 10% healing lost on FH/GH/BH (although BH not used as much), which is after taking BR (IE if you took neither, it would be a 13% loss).
So on a WMO report for the night of all bosses (+attempts, short night in ulduar, First 4, + Kolo, and Sarth+3d, Maly):
CoH = 3,426,460
FH = 2,788,577
PoM = 2,390,309
Which = 8,605,346
(which those 3 total about 84% of my total healing)

Had I of taken BR, instead of EH, assuming I did exactly the same behavior in those fights:
CoH = 3,529,538
FH = 2,498,565 (Rawr says its a 10.4% loss)
PoM = 2,462,018
Which = 8,490,121 (and lets say all of the other 16% healing were spells benefiting from BR, so 16% x 3%+ = 0.4% bonus to those)
Which is a 1% (1.4% from 3 main, -4% gain from the other 16%) loss of overall healing.

We could do the same math, on a full night worth of Thorim Hard mode attempts, top 3 abilities = 79% of total healing:
CoH = 6,357,611 / 6,548,339
FH (23% btw) = 4,238,631/ 3,797,813
PoM = 3,669,084 / 3,779,156
14,265,326 vs 14,125,309 = 0.98% difference
And we'll say (there was a couple of Gheal's/Bindings, but less than 1%) all of the other 21% were abilities that gaining a bonus from BR: (21% + 3%)
18,057,374 Total / 18,031,118 (total, assuming the other 21% got the 3% bonus)= 0.1% difference

But what real difference does that make? Does it change gameplay style? Probably.
Does it drastically effect healing potential? Not really
Would taking BR over EH, drastically reduce your effectiveness when having to single target heal? yes
Would it be game breaking, or wipe causing? Probably not.

IMO, the priest class is the best healing class, because of our flexibility. No other healing class can do the variety of tasks, on the level that priests can. Priest's can adapt to any boss fight, and there's never any consequence to bring more of them, over another healer (you can't say that, about trying to bring 5 holy paladin's to a heavy AoE fight).

Personally, I'll stay with EH 5/5 BR 0/3, just because it fits into the gameplay style that I've always used. IMO, just take what benefit's your gameplay the most.

Maybe you compared 5/5 EH to 3/3 BR, not 3/5 EH. 13% loss from skipping 3/5 EH sounds too much, this would require a pretty high GH quota.

Regarding the fight comparions: the problem is that even if we assume the same behavior (that's acceptable, I guess), overheal will affect results a lot. If we really want numbers on this, we need to determine how many of each of the casts would actually profit in terms of effective healing from 3/5 EH vs 3/3. Even if the overheal quota (in terms of number of casts) is only a few percent off, this can easily shift the balance fully towards either EH or BR.

Say i have both Darkmoon Card: Greatness(+90 Spirit) and Spark of Hope. If you were in my position would you even want to replace greatness with anything or is it good enough asfar as a regen trinket?

I swapped my darkmoon card with a jez bell and noticed a nice increase in mana. mainly due to its but being slowed by the 50% spirit regen in 5 sec cast time issue.

[Pandora's Plea], [Soul of the Dead] or Greatness (Int) are all better regen trinkets than Greatness (Spirit). Depending on luck, even [Majestic Dragon Figurine] could pull ahead (180 constant vs ~190 proc-based).

Darkmoon Card: Greatness (intellect) is much better for regen than the spirit version, and probably BiS for regen after Spark of Hope.

Ty for info. will get Int version

According to Rawr (Holy Priest model, using FH/CoH/PoM/PoH), the highest regen/endurance trinket is Soul of the Dead, followed closely by Pandora's Plea and Spark of Hope. Following those 3, is Greatness/Spr and then Greatness/Int (very close, but Spirit still above Int on their scale using my gear set).
Although Pandora's Plea is also near the top for HPS burst on their stat wieght, so probably the best choice.

And yea, I guess I left that part out. Yea, that was assuming you had 3/3 BR 2/2 B&S vs 5/5 Emp Healing (if you aren't taking all the points in EH, might as well take none is my logic to that). That also assumes 3/3 Test of Faith on both, which another 3% on top of ToF, when they are just barely under the 50% mark, is going to be all overheal anyways, PoH is already hitting 9-9.5k on good crits, not counting any +bonuses, so when they are under 50%, its potentially healing for 10k+ (plus the glyph, which rocks :p).

Before you go any further, I'd like to say that please don't trust Rawr in your arguments on what item is better and what is not. With my custom spell usage (using a real log as a template, of a certain fight what I consider the benchmark for me) Pandora's plea beats soul of the dead by miles, in every respect. Rawr is an accurate tool, but also subject to very different views, so in order to use Rawr well you have to ask the right questions. Soul of the dead definately is not the best regen trinket. The crit mechanism for regen sucks (in my opinion, compared to other trinkets).

I'm thinking there is something very wrong with the Rawr calculations; is it ignoring the initial mana pool contribution or something?.

Using the calculations outlined in the OP for Int and Spirit (which assumes 1400 Int, 1200 Spirit, 6 minute fight, 1 shadowfiend, no Mana Tide or HoH):

Soul of the Dead is at best (assuming it procs on the dot every 45 seconds) worth 100mp5. In practice, it's going to offer somewhere around 85 mp5.

Pandora's Plea is ~85 mp5.

Spark of Hope varies depending on your casting rate. Assuming a conservative 2 spells per 5 seconds with a 10% healing discount, the equip is worth 76 mp5. With the +100 spirit valued at 36 mp5, the total regen value is ~112 mp5.

Greatness (Spirit) is ~190 spirit average, or ~69 mp5.

Greatness (Int) is 90 int + ~100 spirit average, or ~107 mp5.

Ranked in order, you end up with:

~1. Spark of Hope
~1. Greatness (Int)
~3. Soul of the Dead
~3. Pandora's Plea
5. Greatness (Spirit)

Funny note: absolute best case for Spark of Hope (Disc Priest spamming 1s GCD PWS on the raid), it's about 225 mp5. Hot!

Edit: Actually, this is assuming a Spirit proc on both the Greatness cards. I'm not quite sure how to model an Int proc; Replenishment and spirit-based regen is easy enough, but how would you go about bringing Mana Tide / HoH / Shadowfiend into the picture?

Edit2: As pointed out by The Not So Evil (next page), I've neglected the +crit Holy Concentration regen on Soul of the Dead. This would bring it to ~110 mp5, or equal first position.