Spell selection only has a very minor influence on the outcome.

Compare any couple of gear lists, based on reasonable stat weightings, and you arrive at the same point. That is that 90-95% of the same gear appears in each list and often in a similar/same rank order. This is because higher gear iLvl is almost always is better than lower gear iLvl and there are only a limited number of suitable items of each iLvl.

The only slot which seems to be an exception to this rule is trinkets. There is a lot more variability between trinkets than there is in other slots.

I think you misunderstand the fundamental concept of the spec. In EVERY situation that you would cast Flash Heal, cast Renew instead unless you have a SoL proc, or in the off-chance that you're prepping Serendipity stacks for predictable Raid-wide damage.

No, Renew will not *alone* save a raid member in immediately danger. However, the front-loaded 2k (Note: EDITED) Empowered Renew, combined with whatever spells your fellow healers are about to land WILL save him. Many people seem to forget that you're not the only healer focused on the raid, not by a long shot. The Renew spec is HoT and forget, but you have to have faith in your other healers. You're not there to desperately "save" someone, leave that to the other healers assigned to the raid. You're there to provide consistent healing to the entire raid at once.

The fact is, if someone does become in dire need of a heal (<20%), your fellow healers are going to tunnel vision that person, even if it's just for a second, until they're safe. That's how raid healers react. You do not need to do anything more than a Flash Heal. Yes, it takes a few raids to get out of the whack-a-mole habit of Flash Heal, replacing it with Renew in almost every circumstance. But guess what? Since then my effective healing has increased significantly, and I am always near the very bottom of the overhealing charts.

The style of Renew-centric healing works, so simply don't knock it until you've tried it.

Front-loaded 3k Empowered Renew, eh? I guess you have the super-secret version that heals for 2x as much as the rest of us. Last time I spec'd 3/3 with 3/3 Renew, I was getting 2.2k *crits*.

Could've swore I've seen 3k Emp Renews. Sorry about that, after reviewing WWS they only hit in the 1.5-2k range. Regardless, my points still stand that fully talented Renew is more worthwhile than Flash Heal in most all situations.

Since there's pages of posts debunking renew as a healing tool I won't bother. However

That's because a HoT doesn't get counted as healing if the entire tick is overheal. In reality your overhealing will be very high.

Renew is a situational raid healing spell that is great for things such as Kologarn's arms, slag pot, plasma bomb (mimiron), DoT on Yogg-Saron. It is just another tool in our kit; easily outdone by out AoE healing spells and it takes a lot (6 talent points and a glyph) to be 'feasible'.

I find it hard to imagine a raid environment where Renew would ever see the full potential use that could justify 6 talent points given what they could do in other places.

The odds of your renew getting sniped in most healing environments is extremely high. The fact is, it's not just at >20% that healers heal -- most healers will hit anything damaged and will not have time to look and say "oh, 3 renew ticks from now that person will be fine, so I can use this heal on someone else" -- there just is not that much reaction time. Now, if they really really prioritized renew that way they could show it on grid or something, but even then the time investment of status checking and then weighing the heal/not-heal decision is wasted time that they could be contributing something useful to a raid and is a moment of indecision that could result in the death of another raider.

Renews do not generally save lives and there are very few "Life Saving Heals" (Heals that had a player not received they would have died) delivered by renew. I have seen many logs where a flash heal pushed someone above the next incoming damage spike. I can't really say the same for renew. An earlier poster said that they had never seen someone say "oh thank God, that renew saved me" -- I have to agree with that sentiment. It's not a lifesaver spell and is at best a buffer on a target that will be taking continuous damage throughout the fight. Renew does not get people out of danger fast enough and often there are situations where you want to get a player to safety ASAP and not 15 seconds in the future. 15 seconds in the future is enough time for a lot to happen to a player, I wouldn't bank on it.

Renew can be good for precasting before predictable damage spikes come to help keep low hp people in stable condition while heals arrive (Before a Kologarn Obliterate, before the entry into P2 on Mimiron, before flame jets, etc etc) but I don't think that use will ever justify 6 talent points when those can go to PoH which has both a stabilizing and heavy recovery affect.

I would like to emphasize the part about Sinndir and others already mentioned: you can't create an accurate mathemathical model for healing. This is because of the human factor. No, you can't follow a model for "ideal envirioment". There is no such thing as ideal envirioment. People will fuck up, and it's the healers job to take them out of that mess.

Anyway, holy has a lot of useful talents. I've found renew to be very useful in some cases, and it's definately a permanent part of my toolbox. However, when looking at healing done over whole instance, Prayer of Healing, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending and Flash Heal take at least my top spots. I find renew quite useful, but I also find better use for those talent points. So I went for a compromise. I put 4 points into renew, instead of maximum 6. I took 3/3 for +15% healing done and last point I put to 1/3 empowered renew in order to get the crit clearcast proc from casting renew.

So instead of putting 6 points into renew, I would suggest putting 4 points into renew and spend the 2 free talent points on +2% overall healing from blessed resilence, or something. I'm fairly sure +2% overall healing benefits you more than +10% initial heal to renew.

I use Renew pretty situationally, most of the scenarios described above really. Tanks when you have spare GCDs, people who are taking additional damage from a boss skill while my general attention is needed for raid healing big damage skills , etc.

I think the major problem though with a Renew lifestyle:
-The actual effective healing you get out of Flash Heal is immediately applied, and in many cases more effective due to the amount lost from Renew's ticks and people sniping heals. Additionally you get Serendipity stacks, which allow you to react rapidly to situations requiring burst.
-When it comes to a spell to save lifes, I don't think Renew is ever really part of the equation. If a target is low and something has to happen really fast, casting Power Word: Shield while assuming the other healers will use the time provided by it to bring the target to full is going to be more effective than casting a Renew.

Considering the massive amount of points required to fill out Renew in a tree where we are already lacking points to get all we need and the limited situational uses for Renew, I personally don't find the talents to be truly worth it.

Enhancing Renew involves two talents and a Glyph.

Improved Renew isn't a particularly great talent for improving your aggregate healing. However, it does have the virtue of not competing with much worth taking. In the first 4 tiers, Priests only have 11 points in truly desireable talents - Holy Specialization, Inspiration, Desperate Prayer and Holy Reach. The rest of the talent points emphasize non-PvE or little-used aspects of healing. So 3/3 Improved Renew isn't a bad investment (and is likely the 'cookie cutter').

Empowered Renew is considerably better than Improved Renew. The upfront heal is more likely to generate effective healing, so your per-talent-point result will likely be double what you received from Improved Renew. Unfortunately, Empowered Renew is at a point in the tree where talent points are difficult to come by. The benefit of the first point in Empowered Renew is enormous, since it generates procs for Surge of Light, Holy Concentration and Inspiration. So at minimum 1/3 Empowered Renew is probably the 'cookie cutter' selection. The other 2 points of Empowered Renew are unlikely to surpass the aggregate healing of talents such as Blessed Resilience.

Glyph of Renew is very hard to justify taking, no matter how much you cast Renew since it doesn't change the healing output of the spell. Nor does it significantly impact your aggregate healing. What we overlook is that while the first tick of Renew is the most likely to hit, this doesn't mean that the fifth tick is the least likely to hit. Indeed, the fact that the fifth tick often hits after an intervening period of full health for the target is precisely why HoT are a classic method for 'gaming the meters'. If you run the same content both with and without the Glyph, you'll likely notice no significant difference in the amount of healing you generate via Renew.

In terms of the Renew vs. non-SoL Flash Heal discussion, many players seem to be rejecting this theory out-of-hand. Perhaps the easiest way to start this discussion is to recognize that in any situation where the target isn't taking between 2k - 4.5k more damage than they have health within the next 1.5s, 3/3 ER Renew is superior to Flash Heal. We can expand that out to 0.5k - 4.5k with 1/3 ER. Stated this way, it should be apparent that the conditions under which Flash Heal is superior to Renew are awfully rare - a once-a-fight level incidence.

It should be apparent that the Renew v. Flash Heal decision is one dependent on player skill. If we found the one-best-Priest-in-all-of-WoW, we'd probably discover that they cast an enormous amount of Renew and almost no Flash Heal except when Surge of Light was active. Given this, it's likely that they'd also find 3/3 Empowered Renew a worthwhile investment.

But keep in mind that just because Michael Jordan dunks from the top of the key doesn't mean I'm better off trying to do the same. For me, a lay-up is a much higher percentage shot than a come-fly-with-me style move.

You forgot Spell Warding, possibly the most useful (for staying alive) talent in the bottom 3 tiers of Holy. I agree that dropping Divine Fury for possibly getting Spell Warding / Improved Renew makes sense, but for any real hard-mode (Freya, Mimiron), Spell Warding has amazing dividends.

If you are in fact able to get so much out of renew that it's more important than flash heal for you (let alone "basically replace"), then kindly provide a WWS to prove your point, as nobody else seems to be able to do that in 25 man.

Personally, I have tried hard in 10 man, and still do. It's difficult in most fights without a druid, and with a druid, renew is just about worthless in my experience (except for me looking better on the meters due to sniping grossly inefficient Empowered Renew instants when having spare GCDs).

As for the overheal meter, it was already explained that you will only see partial overheals. If a tick overheals in full, it won't show. If you try to get a better number by looking at the number of Empowered Renew hits, you will probably see a number in excess of 50%.

Regarding the sniping: the only part that is going to hit sooner than a flash heal is the initial heal. The first tick will already land later than the flash heal.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Enjoy. I go Disc or Shadow sometimes on fights, but for the vast majority of parses there you can see me in my Holy Renew-centric spec.

And I really don't understand all this talk about heals being sniped. By that same account, you would tell every Resto Druid to never cast Rejuv, Regrowth, Lifeblood, or Wild Growth. What would you have them do, spam Healing Touch every fight? The fact of the matter is, HoTs are going to get sniped. If you've adapted yourself to completely replace Flash Heal with Renew in your style of healing, you also have to take note of what your fellow raid healers are doing. You already should be using Grid to monitor Druid HoTs on raid members. If you are, then you know not to snipe their HoT with a Flash Heal if that person isn't in danger of dying. The same logic applies to Renew, you should be HoT'ing those members with health deficit that aren't already HoT'ed yet first.

As others have stated before me, in a desperate moment sure, use Flash Heal to save someone. In all but this uncommon circumstance, I still see no reason not to use Renew over FH. It requires less of a talent point investment than Flash Heal (5 points in Empowered Healing vs 2 extra in Empowered Renew, you should already have the points in Imp. Renew to progress further in the tree), and lets you pick up Blessed Resilience, which according to EJ's own napkin math is better than EH to begin with.

To begin a new topic of discussion, how are you fellow Priests dealing with your 4 piece bonus. I rarely run OOM anymore on any Ulduar encounter, so I'm trying to fit in a regular PW:S into my cooldown rotation to keep the 4 second proc up. Do you think this is worth it for Holy? It's obviously quite nice for the Hard-Modes that you go Disc for, but what about on a regular basis. In the event that we acquire Crown of Luminescence, should we just break the 4 pc for the clear BiS item while Holy? Thoughts?

PW:S is a terrible use of a GC unless its someone whos going to die for certain before you can land a flash heal on them, and if you have a disc priest in the raid you shouldn't even consider using it even then. The small spell power bonus for a spell or two is never going to be worth it, on top of that PW:S costs quite a bit of mana when you don't have soul warding or mental agility. It's of some use on encounters were you might use PW:S for body and soul, like XT-002 or Freya, but other than that we might as well not have a 4 piece bonus.

It really bugs me that they leave the 4 piece bonus as it is when it's so terribly easy to fix, simply making CoH trigger the spell power bonus would get it perfectly in line with the 4 piece bonuses of other classes/specs. Ghostcrawlers response to the issue is so terribly stupid its not funny, it would be like changing the 2 piece mage bonus to only include frostbolts, and then tell mages of arcane/fire specs to change their gameplay to include frostbolt into their rotations. It would be a net loss of dps for them, just as using pw:s to any signifigant degree would never be beneficial for us, even with a tiny spell power bonus attatched to it.

Just had a look at your logs, looking up some fights where you use significantly more Renew than Flash Heal (ie, replace Flash Heal with it) and use it a high number of times in general:

Razorscale:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

The fact that the instant heal of Empowered Renew gave you more healing than the ticks should already be indicative of something not being optimal. Going into some more detail:

-You case a total of 111 Renews going by the figures. This means there should be in fact a total of 555 ticks from Renew.
-According to the log's limited numbers (due to the full overheal Renew ticks not being counted) your overheal from Renew was a total 18.81%.
-Your effective healing of Empowered Renew and Renew ticks combined was 340012.

For the actual overheal we need to find the total raw healing which Renew did:
-Your tick average was 2143.8. Multiply this with 555 ticks and we have a raw healing of 1189809.
-Your raw Empowered Renew healing was 210515.
-To double check the raw output of the ticks, if you eliminate crits your raw healing with Empowered Renew would have been about 1352.1 * 111 = 150080. This would correspond with 150080/0.15 = 1000500 raw healing. So it seems relatively roughly consistent with the previous figures.

Your total raw healing using the first method was 1400324, with the second method it was 1211015. Your effective healing was 340012.

Calculating your actual overheal percentage:
-With the first method: (1-340012/1400324)*100 = 75.72% with a HPM of 340012/(111*657) = 4.66
-With the second method: (1-340012/1211015)*100 = 71.92%

To achieve similar efficiency in this case with Flash Heal you would have had to heal for 3239 effective healing with Flash Heal.

I realize that Razorscale isn't exactly cutting edge healing, but for example your renew centric approach seems a rather bad idea here.


Mimiron:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Calculated similarly as before:
-85 Renew casts, so 425 ticks. 326714 effective healing.
-171539 raw healing from Empowered Renew.
-2238.9 average ticks from Renew times 425 gives 951530 raw healing from the ticks.
-1123069 total raw healing.
-Actual overheal of (1-326714/1123069) * 100 = 70.91%. HPM = 326714/(83*657)= 5.85
-Similar efficiency with Flash Heal for 4066 effective healing per cast.

Assembly of Iron:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

-63 casts, 315 ticks. 243486 effective healing.
-128608 raw healing from Empowered Renew.
-2170.2 average healing per tick times 315 ticks is 683613 raw healing from ticks.
-812221 total raw healing.
-Actual overheal of (1-243486/812221)*100 = 70.02%. HPM = 243486/(63*657) = 5.88
-Similar efficiency with Flash Heal for 4088 effective healing per cast.


Thorim
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

-64 casts, 320 ticks, 228317 effective healing.
-113691 raw healing from Empowered Renew.
-1750.3 average healing per tick times 320 ticks gives 560096 raw healing from ticks.
-673787 total raw healing.
-Actual overheal of (1-228317/673787)*100 = 66.11%. HPM = 228217/(64*657) = 5.43
-Similar efficiency with Flash Heal for 3772 effective healing per cast.


Overall for these encounters where you use it a lot, Renew seems far from efficient for you and massively overheals.

Hmmm...
Concerning Renew effectiveness, I think Pewpewarrows would probably have casted the same or similar amount of FHs, if he had preferred them over Renews, that would have been a bit cheaper (16.2% vs 17% of base mana), but would they all have landed in time and not completely overhealed?
For me, as I am is searching just now and I'm experimenting with different builds, the 1/3ER and 3/5EH seems the most balanced choice which produces almost equal outputs of FH and Renew, situationally.

I'm not sure I agree with your numbers. A less complex method is to observe that Renew costs 17% base mana and Glyph'd Flash Heal costs 16.2% base mana, so each Renew needs to heal about 5% more than a comparable Flash Heal to beat it's efficiency.

Razorscale. 111 Renews for 172885 + 167217 = 340102, or 3064 per cast. Average Flash Heal was 3879. So Flash Heal >> Renew.

Mimiron. 85 Renews were cast for a total of 98350 + 228364 = 326714, or 3844 per cast. Average Flash Heal was 3454, so Renew > Flash Heal.

Assembly of Iron. 64 Renews for 89405 + 154081 = 243486, or 3804 per cast. Average Flash Heal is 2609 healing, so Renew >> Flash Heal.

Thorim. 64 Renews for 81294 + 147023 = 228317, or 3567 per cast. Average Flash Heal is 3132 healing, so Renew > Flash Heal.

We should note that the first two fights do not have any Flash Heal criticals at all, indicating that all (or nearly all) of the Flash Heal casts were via Surge of Light. The latter two fights had a more even mix, so they're probably more indicative of the comparison we want to make (we already know Surge of Light Flash Heal is preferable to Renew).

While the sample isn't really sufficient to make any grand pronouncements about Priest healing, the logs do generally support his contention that he can replace non-SoL Flash Heal with Renew and generate greater healing efficiency.

On a side note, if my casting pattern looked like those 4 fights, I'd seriously consider switching to 18/53. In three of the four fights, MA impacts 100% of the non-Flash Heal casting.

Thanks for the suggestion with regards to Mental Agility... I hadn't even considered it. Even on the fight that I did plenty of non-instants (Mimiron), Holy Concentration only provided me with approximately 5000 mana, while MA would have saved me just under 10k that entire fight duration. For the other parses where I do nearly exclusive instant casts, the difference is much greater. On Razorscale where I had a 50% Holy Conc uptime (approximately 7000 total mana if the math in my head is correct), MA's saved mana on Renew alone would have been over 7000, well worth the return on investment.

So clearly for a Renew-replacing-FH spec, MA is superior to HC talent-wise. The question remains though, do you take both, or place points in Blessed Resilience instead of HC. I'm not running OOM as is, so I'll probably end up going with BR for the increased healing. The spec I came up with is:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I know I'm still personally debating Serendipity's worth of a 3 talent point investment. Just about all of Ulduar's raid-wide damage can be predicted and pre-casted. By the time you cast PoH and then Circle, people will be topped off before you can build up enough Serendipity for a second Prayer. You might as well just do pre-casted PoH to CoH to another PoH, without any Flash Heals to separate. In that case I could definitely just place all 3 of those points into filling BR and go 2/3 Holy Conc. With 3/3 MA and 2/3 HC, mana would absolutely never be an issue, which would most likely lead to a nice increased in your total effective healing.

Has anyone else considered skipping Serendipity?

"As for the overheal meter, it was already explained that you will only see partial overheals. If a tick overheals in full, it won't show. If you try to get a better number by looking at the number of Empowered Renew hits, you will probably see a number in excess of 50%."

Yeah I understand the way HoTs are treated in terms of overhealing, and since it was discussed on this page I didn't want to hit that nail again...(admittedly bad move on my part to bring up overhealing at all)
I will prod a guildie for a WWS report, I'm curious myself as this week is the first time that I noticed recount having renew as my #1 healing spell (it has been in the top 3 since I respec'ed a month ago).

But honestly, you can't discuss overheal without efficiency. If your actual overhealing on renew is 50% it is still more mana efficient than flash heal, and that is assuming a 0% overheal on flash. Also, if overall raid overhealing is a problem, you are going to start thinking about dropping healers. Renew gets better in this case, flash won't get as much of a bump.

Also, there are times when a 2K instant heal might save someone that a 4.5K heal 1.5 seconds later might not. Don't underestimate the power of instant (it is what makes CoH great). And there are times when you have to heal on the run, and not being constrained to just ProM, SoL procs, and CoH is nice.

I would just like people have an an open mind about it, I still think too many holy priests are conditioned to 'spam and sit' to take advantage of the 5 second rule. It was what we were trained to do for years, and I still think a lot of us have strats and habits that go back to that era.

In a thread where competent players are seriously thinking about exchanging Divine Fury for Spell Warding, I think it's safe to ignore the Greater Heal impact of Serendipity.

With talents such as Empowered Healing (or Empowered Renew), the argument goes that an X% increase to a spell that only affects Y% of your healing is actually only worth X * Y% in comparison to a more generalized talent.

I see no reason we can't extend this same argument to Serendipity. Assuming Serendipity is always triple-stacked with no requirements, it provides about 56% haste to Prayer of Healing only. However, the 'Y%' we need to examine here isn't effective healing - it's casting time.

So if we spend 50% of our casting time throwing 56% hasted Prayer of Healing, the 'value' of Serendipity is actually 28% haste.

Consider your Mimiron parse. You probably cast 20 Prayer of Healing in that fight (98 hits), which lasted 9:57. So Prayer of Healing consumed ~10% of your casting time. 10% of 56% is 5.6%. In other words, you gained less benefit from Serendipity than you would have from half of Enlightenment (which I realize isn't an actual spec option). Indeed, the benefit was almost certainly much less since you didn't cast nearly enough Flash/Binding Heals to triple stack Serendipity for each of those Prayer of Healing. The actual benefit was probably closer to an aggregate of 2% haste for your three talent points - in a fight where over a quarter of your healing came from Prayer of Healing.

The other issue with speeding up your Prayer of Healing would be reaction time. Reducing the time it takes to land a spell can be quite useful. Let's imagine a situation where that ~1 second casting time reduction matters.

The first observation is that unless you're only damaging three targets in the same group, you've just imagined a situation that Paladins, Druids and Shaman simply can't heal. Prayer of Healing's 5-target healing throughput is so staggeringly large that stressing it in this manner requires content that is well beyond the capabilities of non-Priest healers. Since Prayer of Healing really needs 3+ targets to be an effective heal, those targets need to be in the same group, and any more than 3 targets generates dps numbers beyond the capabilities of non-Priests, we've got a pretty narrow set of situations.

Our second observation is that Prayer of Healing heals a fairly small portion of each individual player's health. Since repeated castings of Prayer of Healing rapidly eliminate the reaction benefits of Serendipity, this means that not only is our content likely unhealable by non-Priest, but it's likely unhealable except by raids with 4+ Holy Priests firing off their Serendipity-fueled Prayer of Healing.

I submit that no such raid event currently - or will ever - exist.

As heretical as it may seem, it doesn't appear to me that Serendipity is a particularly decent investment if your primary concern is Prayer of Healing. (For Greater Heal, reaction time is enormously important, so not taking Serendipity would likely place you somewhere behind Retribution Paladins for tank healing chores).

I was looking at the Algalon 10 man loot and noticed this: Meteorite Crystal.

If we assume a non-stop spam of Flash Heal (hasted to 1.3s) right after using the trinket, I calculated a best case scenario of 2160 mana per use. That works out to ~90mp5 (obviously not counting the +111 Int).

Can anyone confirm if those numbers are correct?

Seems like a pure regen version of [Pandora's Plea].

Looks more like [Pendant of the Violet Eye]'s big brother.