Ok here is the WWS report... Please dissect and get back to me. I honestly want to know. Anything that I can do to improve is great.

Wow Web Stats

Edit: Now I know I said renew was my #1 spell and this WWS shows it at #2, but in my mind I add empowered renew to renew to get my total for that spell. If it is not correct, I would appreciate someone telling me without undue flames. TY

Edit2:"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."

I have thought about this spec, but I'm not really having mana problems atm, so I hate to give up anything...though if that is a better bang than holy concentration....worth thinking about!

Heal sniping is when you use inefficient/unnecessary instant heals to heal insignificant damage that could easily be dealt with in a more efficient fashion. Priests are excellent at this due to empowered renew and circle of healing. CoH'ing single targets just to get 'effective' healing. Anywho, doesn't really matter as my healing philosophy for my healers is just to keep everyone alive by any means necessary.

Which spec are you not running OOM? Because I can tell you that if you are never running OOM, you can heal harder. If you're disc, cast shields everywhere to prevent incoming damage; if you're holy then you just simply aren't healing enough if you aren't going OOM, and if you still somehow have mana start DPS'ing!

The 4-piece bonus is excellent for Disc as it is almost a free spell power bonus that is up very regularly (if you shield often as disc, which you should!). It is a sub-par bonus for holy as shielding is mainly used for Body & Soul (which now should be a staple talent), and oh shit situations.

I'd keep it for a while for disc, but I wouldn't even consider planning on getting the 4 piece for holy unless (like myself) you happen just to get it via the luck you've had.

edit:
I've been curious if anyone is running over 600 or 700 haste? I seemed to have lost a lot in the gear currently compared to my naxx level gear


Kilborne, I'll show you how I dissect WWS so you can see from here on in just how 'efficient' your renews are (you may be surprised!).

Total Renew's casted - 645
Total Renew ticks - 645 * 5 = 3225 or (2580 if glyphed)
Total Renews ticks landed - 1490 (or 46%) - and of those 1490 ticks that registered at least 1 point of effective healing, 11% was overhealed
Total Renew ticks landed for full health - 1490 * 89% (because 11% overhealed) = 1326

Therefore, your renews had 58.9% overheal. As any instant casts your empowered renew had around 20% overheal (21%) which is pretty standard in my opinon. Since I cannot see your armory (its down) I'll just comment that spending 6 talent points and possibly a glyph to a spell that did almost 60% overheal seems like kind of a waste to me. You are always better off leaving the HoT's to the druids and just stick with PoH/PoM/CoH/Flash for raid healing.

Figuring:

To find the total renews you cast over the night you just look at your empowered renew's landed (446) and crit (199) totaling 645 renews. To find the total ticks just multiple the total renews casted by the amount of ticks (5 or 4 if glyphed), then do the math from there.

I currently have 665 haste and I'm very happy with it. The faster I can top people up, the better.

This. As a holy priest, only way for you to go out of mana by casting single target heals is that you are healing the tank. And then you should change your spec to disc, because holy sucks at tank healing. Thus I find it very odd that you are comparing renew + flash glyphs based on what the efficiency is.

Let me give you an example. During this Iron Council hardmode kill I managed to generate total hps of 12,5k+ over a 5 minute 19 second fight. Efficient hps doesn't matter in this case, total does. Basically that equals to hps generated by spamming Prayer of Healing for 5 minutes 19 seconds non-stop, and I went out of mana only in the last 5-10 seconds.

My point is, if you are spamming flash heal or renew so much that you are in danger of going out of mana, you are using wrong spells. People are taking so much damage that you should most likely be using either prayer of mending, circle of healing or prayer of healing.

Efficiency is irrelevent when casting renew or flash heal. You cast flash heal because of it's cast time: you don't have time to cast a more efficient spell. Or because you are stacking up serendipity. You cast renew because 1)You may not be able to heal the damage that hits a person in next 15 seconds (ex: people moving around, in and out of range) 2)You want to increase the chance that your heals hit somebody (tank healing) 3)You are on the move. With my prayer of healing reaching almost 24hp/mana potential efficiency (5,812*5*1,2/1483= ~23,5) I see no reason to attempt heal with renew instead, because I believe there is no single target damage (not counting tank damage) that will bring you out of mana by casting of flash heal or renew.

You are much better off by taking CoH/PoH/GS glyphs instead.

4) as a pre-heal for anticipated incoming damage to increase your healing output over a short time interval when weakened soul is already up or you aren't disc, and you have time to do it in addition to pom. The extra tick or two of healing on the spike isn't a ton (spike being defined as the time the tank drops low health percentage to the time they reach 100% again - and are safe to take another spike), but it can still help.

You can also add to 1) the instances where you are not able to heal them because your attention needs to be focused on something else, even if they are in range (i.e. dispelling fusion punch, healing a predictable boss cooldown abil on the tank, etc).

Ah yes, true on #4. However I did count the "attention somewhere else" into that "not able to heal damage that comes in next 15 seconds". The out of range was just the most obvious example. I tried to compress the uses as much as possible, since if I counted them all I'd most likely end up writing 20 pages worth text.

However, "because it's mana efficient" is never the criteria for casting it, for me. Or at least, it's very, very rarely. General Vezax is an exception to the rule. Even then I'm not sure if I really wanted to cast renew because of it's "efficiency".

Thorim hard mode has been an encounter were PoH really shines for me. As long as you have people in the same group standing in the same area, they are extremly likely to get hit by the same frost novas, frostbolt volleys, chain lightning and blizzards. Renew seems extremly weak for the encounter to me, it's just far too slow. If people die it's to a burst of getting hit by several of those abilities at in a very short period of time. A slow acting renew just seems like an awful waste of time when you could cast an aura of celerity hasted PoH. (Note that we haven't actually beaten it hard mode in 25 man just yet, but we're close and the kill should come sometime this week)

Right, and again I cannot stress this enough,

When people in the same group are damaged, Prayer of Healing is the spell of choice.

If the people hit by AoE on Thorim Hardmode are within the same group, all the power to you. However, my entire line of discussion stems from outlier damage either to a single person at a time, or a few spread across multiple groups, after CoH and PoM are already on cooldown. As a visual representation, if on Grid you see the following: (X indicated damage taken)

[X] [_] [_] [_] [X]
[_] [_] [_] [X] [_]
[_] [X] [_] [_] [_]
[_] [X] [_] [X] [_]
[_] [_] [X] [_] [_]

You've already cast CoH. All are equally damaged. None are in grave danger of dying (>=30%) Your Prayer of Mending is out bouncing around. Do you Flash Heal, or do you Renew? I say Renew. It's more efficient, and by the time you reach 3 simultaneously ticking Renews on targets that still need healing, you're beating FH's thoroughput.

(Napkin math: Assume on average your Flash Heal hits for 6000 in a raid environment. Given a generous overheal percentage of 25%, your avg effective FH hits your target for 4500. If it takes you 1.5 seconds to cast FH, pick a new target, and start casting another FH, your FH is coming out to an effective 3000 HPS. Now take your average Renew. Empowered Renew's frontloaded heal averages for 1500. Over the same 1.5 second cast and switch time-frame, that's 1000 HPS. So FH is winning by 2000 HPS at this point. Now account for the actual Renew ticks, averaging 2100 every 3 seconds. That's 700 HPS per Renew. 3 simultaneous Renews ticking away on targets that still need to be healed is 2100 HPS, greater than the lingering FH's 2000 after Emp Renew is factored in.)

Granted, I haven't gone through my parses to see precisely how much of the time I actually have 3 or more simultaneous effective Renews on raid members, but you get the idea.

Ok so a frost bolt volley hits 1 person in each group randomly (not likely but hey, thats what examples are for). You can renew them each and all that will likely land is your empowered renew initial instant heal, or you can flash heal them. If you have 5 healers you hopefully are choosing different targets based on assignments to prevent overhealing.

Simply put; in a 25-man raiding environment renew is a situational-at-best heal. I'm sorry but it just is not anything more than that. Renew people with Nature's Fury on Freya, Napalm on Mimiron, Stone Grip on Kologarn, Sara's DoT on Yogg. Other than that flash heal is superior in almost all ways, including stacking serendipity for when you need on demand haste.

First of all, there is no such thing as "bread and butter spells" or "primary spells" for healers. You use whatever and every mean you have to keep people alive. No spell is universally best.

Second, it seems there is some form of miscommunication here. My point was that saying "it's more efficient" has 0 (zero) value as an argument for "why I should use renew over flash heal". Let me rephrase that again:
My post was aimed at statements like these. Going with math like this does not increase your your healing abilities. Why? Because you simply can't run out of mana with those spells. My whole point was that only way for a holy priest to go out of mana is to have an extremely heavy damage fight. And if you are not in danger of going out of mana you can take efficiency out of the equation, leaving only the criteria of what spell will keep people alive better.

Not a manifesto to spam renew to your heart's content and ignore rest of your toolkit? I believe if one spends 3 points in empowered renew and 0 points in blessed resilence, you do exacly that, "ignore rest of your toolkit".

To answer your 3-4 people at once question, here is my answer. If they were all in my group, I will most likely prayer of healing them if it was ~3-5k or more, and if it was less CoH will take care of it. If they are in different groups, I will CoH, cast 1 flash heal on a random person and by the time I'm finished the other healers have healed the group up already. If they haven't, then there is heavier AoE damage going on, in which case I have prayer of mending bouncing around already and I will definately spam my ass off with flash heal/poh if several people are low.

Which brings me to my main point of why the flash heal versus renew debate seems very pointless to me. In Ulduar, anyone with less than 100% hp will die in less than 3 seconds. Actually 3 seconds is kinda slacking. Usually on harder modes that number is 1,5-2 seconds. If you don't go with that attitude into healing, people will start dying fast and will start dropping like flies when you start doing anything that's not normal mode. There simply isn't time to let renew tick for 12 seconds as a stand-alone heal. If there was, the encounter would be trivial mana-wise.

You don't have separate mana pools for expensive spells and cheap spells. It doesn't really matter where the mana savings comes from, you can spend that saved mana on any spell you like. The only way your argument makes sense if you're talking about specific content where you don't cast spot heals at all. Aside from such content being rare, it makes the whole discussion moot. Who cares whether you're not casting Renew instead of not casting Flash Heal?

In terms of the "...in Uldaur" portion of your comment, consider the difference in health between the highest and lowest non-tank members of your raid. In all likelihood, this difference is greater than a Flash Heal's worth of healing. Since all non-tank raid members are exposed to roughly the same risk, your assertion only makes sense if your low maximum health raid members are routinely getting alpha struck by damage.

You're also ignoring two aspects of Renew that are worth noting:
1. Renew is an instaheal. As the time sensitivity of healing increases, the value of reaction speed explodes. Half-a-heal landing on a living player is a lot more useful than a full heal landing on a dead one. Since we have multiple healers and we already know that those multiple healers will - if they succeed in keeping the target alive - overheal the otherwise-dearly-departed target substantially, why wouldn't you use your smaller (ignoring HoT portion) instaheal rather than your larger, normally cast heal?

2. Renew provides a future buffer of protection. A decent Resto Druid could explain this concept quite a bit better than I can, perhaps even demonstrating it quantitatively. However, what it boils down to is that there is some non-zero chance that a full health player with a HoT on them will get hit by damage. In the absence of that HoT, some healer has to waste a GCD/mana to cover that damage. With the HoT, some or all of that damage gets healed even though no healer is spending resources on it.

My sense is that a Glyphed, Talented Renew with Empowered Renew would be very similar to a talented Rejuv with the 4 piece druid set bonus (essentially empowered renew I believe, but without the 15% bonus to the later ticks). Both at 12 seconds I believe, and both with a front end direct heal, and both around 2400-2600 hp per tick. (not a druid expert).

My sense is that Druids do a pretty decent job raid healing in certain situations with Rejuv with the 4 pc bonus, but generally that is only when there is enough AOE that the first CoH and PoH don't cover it all. When you have those gaps, as others here are saying, then an Empowered Renew may be just as good or better than a non-instant FH. Raids without a lot of Holy Priests (2 or less) probably have some gaps like this (we have 2 Holy, 1 Disc, and 3 Druids).

Phase 1 of Yogg sometimes has those damage patterns, as well as some other bosses. It won't get used everywhere, but it may not be as terrible as others think in between CoH, PoH and PoM. Whether its worth the 3 talent points (or 6) and the Glyph spot (in place of GS or HN probably) is debatable. If your spec has Mental Agility already, and you are not using Body and Soul, then there may be room for it. /shrug

Comparing to Druids is a bit sketchy. Nourish slightly worse than Flash Heal for spot-healing while Rejuvenation w/4pT8 is slightly better than Renew for spot-healing. So even if Rejuvenation > Nourish, it doesn't necessarily follow that Renew > Flash Heal. Two details can be gleaned from the trees, though:

#1: The initial heal is a 'gamechanger'. Resto Druids with the 4pT8 heal differently than Resto Druids without it. Since the actual increase in throughput/mana efficiency is relatively mild, this strongly indicates that Resto Druids view the initial instaheal as far more important than conventional metrics imply.

#2: Druids get Swiftmend. As a Priest, you're faced with the problem of casting a HoT and potentially not delivering enough healing fast enough compared to Flash Heal. As a Druid, this problem doesn't really exist because if you guess wrong, you can simply Swiftmend off the HoT. This constitutes a moral hazard that would likely put Rejuvenation > Nourish over-the-top even if it weren't already.

This discussion seems to be breaking down around what I like to term the 'hidden metric'. That is, there exists some function R(h,t) where:
R(Penance tick, 0s) + R(Penance tick, 1s) + R(Penance tick, 2s) > R(Flash Heal, 1.5s) > R(Greater Heal, 2.5s)

This metric explains why the consensus of Discipline Priests, in a task where reaction speed trumps mana efficiency completely, choose a counter-throughput healing methodology. (We'll reject the "Discipline Priests are all a bunch of noobs" explanation).

In effect, R(h,t) is a function related to the probability that the heal will land soon enough to matter.

Supposing R(h,t) looks like:

heal / e ^ (time for heal to land * C)

With C > ~0.7, this would explain why Discipline Priests prefer Flash Heal over Greater Heal (and Penance over either). It would also nicely demonstrate why Resto Druids change their healing style once they slip on a fourth piece of Conquerer's Nightsong Regalia.

Interestingly enough, it would also demonstrate that 3/3 ER Renew is about 5% better than Flash Heal for the very reason that people are suggesting that Flash Heal is better (as well as why Glyph of Renew is terrible).

Now, the obvious objection is that I'm just making up numbers here. Which, of course, I am. The above equation doesn't 'prove' anything since it's just something that "looks like" the right kind of equation with a constant chosen to make Discipline Priests look like they weren't just randomly favoring Flash Heal out of some irrational prejudice. But it provides a framework for thinking about the question of how much more valuable it is to land a heal in a timely manner.

An actual, precise value for R(h,t) is almost certainly unknowable. But just like the Dow Jones Industrial Average tells us something about the economy without being a precise measure of a complex phenomenon that can't be expressed by a single number, it is likely we can form better metrics than just mana efficiency and throughput for measuring the true worth of a given heal in situations where the answer isn't trivial.

Interesting way to value Risk, but simple enough even if the values are clearly debatable, unknowable, and differ by person and role.

One could argue that a raid healer has more tolerance for risk and that C is therefore different for them, but I agree in general with the principle that HPS and HPM don't accurately capture the risk element that your formula tries to envelope.

It is very similar to the time value of money: $100 today is worth more than $100 tomorrow. The same is essentially true for heals, of course.

"#2: Druids get Swiftmend. As a Priest, you're faced with the problem of casting a HoT and potentially not delivering enough healing fast enough compared to Flash Heal. As a Druid, this problem doesn't really exist because if you guess wrong, you can simply Swiftmend off the HoT. This constitutes a moral hazard that would likely put Rejuvenation > Nourish over-the-top even if it weren't already."

True, but that comes down to what we do as priests. Quickly look at the situation and pull the best option out of our bag of tricks. Which is EXACTLY why I like having a fully talented renew. It provides another tool set, insta healing when CoH is on CD. If someone is going to die in 1 second, the best flash heal in the world isn't going to save them. While the 1.5k+ of the renew might give enough buffer to allow that other priest's (or shaman,etc) heal to hit. So I don't think there are too many circumstances in which you can guess wrong with an insta cast spell. If someone is that close to death the other healers are coming, you just need to buy a second or two. (which is also why I love Guardian Spirit).

As a holy priest normally I am raidhealer or backup, if I ever need to keep up a tank all by myself, I go disc. Raid members are less healing intensive on a case by case basis. And taking points in renew talents doesn't preclude the use of flash, it just slightly reduces the effectiveness of flash while greatly improving (imo) the effectiveness of renew (assuming that you are taking the points out of empowered healing).

Listen, I very much respect the vast majority of posts you make on these forums. I find it very odd then that you would completely dismiss Renew despite all of the evidence that I have put forward, and just write it off as "situational-at-best." Why on earth would you believe that Empowered Renew is the only effective healing you would get from using Renew? There are dozens of logs posted to the contrary.

"Other than that flash heal is superior in almost all ways"... how? I've provided my theorycraft, you provide a counterpoint. My off the cuff math shows Renew being more HPM and more HPS in a raid environment. How is Flash Heal superior again?

Vihermaali, the Renew-centric spec does still take 3/3 Blessed Resilience. So no, I most certainly do not "ignore the rest of my toolkit." As for the rest of your post:

Yes, there are such things are "primary spells" for healers. For a specific situation, there is essentially one spell that you turn to every time. That spell differs based on the situation, yes, but it remains consistent. I did not imply that you only use one spell all the time. I was referring to the fact that, no matter how you choose to play, your reactions to raid damage should always be handled identically with use of PoM/CoH/PoH/BH. All Holy Priests should be using PoM on cooldown, CoH on cooldown with close proximity damaged targets, PoH and damaged groups, and BH when you yourself need heals. This does not change. This is about the third time I have to say this, but I'm talking about the downtime when the aforementioned is not occurring. Do you begin whack-a-mole with Flash Heal or Renew? That's what the discussion is about.

I find your 2 second duration for 100-0% comment rather humorous. Just what hard-mode are you referring to? Let's break them down one by one:

XT: Tantrum damage is predictable and covered by PoH. Gravity bombs can be shielded. Light bomb AoE is CoH'able, and Renew covers the actual target. Same goes for Spark AoE.
Iron Council: Raid-wide damage is constant for the fight's duration. As you yourself stated, PoH a thousand times over wins this fight.
Hodir: Frozen Blows damage is predictable and out-healed by PoH. The off chance of a clump of people being Nova'ed and hit by falling snow is not life-threatening, and CoH plus Renew covers them fine.
Thorim: Frost Bolt + Frost Nova + Chain Lightning RNG can hurt. A lot. If the damage is spread across groups such that PoH will not be helpful, I do agree Flash Heal is the spell of choice after CoH is on cooldown provided those individuals were already hit with 2 of the 3 above, and are in danger of being hit by the third. This does however fall under my "life-threatening situation: use FH" clause stated previously in this thread in regards to replacing FH with Renew.
Freya: Ground Tremor is predictable and PoH shines once more. For Iron Roots, throw out Renews, and after that you really do need Flash Heal's additional healing to keep targets alive. Assuming your raid moves out of Solar Flares, it's one-time damage that Renew after CoH handles just fine.
Mimiron: When you aren't saving your raid with PoH, I can only assume that the extremely high mobility factor in this fight will make Renew much, much more appealing than FH. Again, if a target is very low, use FH as a "save me" tool.
Vezax: You should be Disc and on the MT to begin with. If you are assigned to hold out to Phase 2 and then raid heal, then use your raid healing tools (need I say it again? PoH).
Yogg: Phases 1 and 2 are healer-lite. From my experience, if people die it was their own damn fault for doing things they shouldn't have. I'm pretty sure I'll end up going Disc for this.
Algalon: Given the selectiveneess and rarity of guilds attempting this, I won't comment either way.

Either way, I definitely believe spreading out lots of Renews around the raid will top off more people faster than Flash Heal, and will definitely leave more mana left over for you to go about your normal business once the real heavy damage starts incoming.

I'm trying my best not to be argumentative here, just fueling the discussion as the case may be.

I've never denied that Flash Heal is by and far the superior "save me" spell. Given Freya, Thorim, Mimiron, and XT's tendency to kill individuals very quickly, I do use Flash Heal. My position is not to completely remove Flash Heal from your action bars and never use it ever again, just that in a majority of cases toss your target a Renew instead.

In regards to unilateral generalizations, I hope I didn't come off as such. As a note, just because someone has not defeated a hard-mode does not mean that they have never seen it. Quite the contrary, I have attempted most hard-modes in Ulduar at the moment. I cannot control the actions of my fellow 24 raid members, and we may not have downed the hardmodes as of yet, but that does not mean I don't know what it's like to heal them. I do.

On the topic of talent points spent, the Renew-spec takes both ToF and BR. What "better things" is it exactly missing out on?

One thing I think people forget about renew in this discussion is that if you lose a raid healer or two (or substitute a dps for a raid healer), you will get more and more ticks as the raid becomes more unstable. Renew's healing per global/HPM can more than double once you start getting 3-5 ticks. Again, it comes down to granularity. But this is a bit of circumstantial robustness in the renew build and functionality that you can't get from flash heal that shouldn't be ignored.

On the side of Flash Heal, I also see no mention of Serendipity. Renew does not make that PoH cast any faster, Flash Heal does. It's another consideration that should be taken into account in this debate.

^ Yeah, one could argue that the 3 points for Emp Renew could come from Serendipity, since a Holy Priest isn't using GH a lot, and many times in an AOE attack you only get one hasted PoH anyway. It's still very nice, but perhaps not critical. My ER build has Blessed Resilience instead of Serendipity for that reason. Just kicking the tires with it atm since we can dual spec and I don't PvP much.

Serendipity is reason enough for making flash heal a better spell in almost all situations compared to renew. Yes renew is fantastic at Iron Council hardmode, yes renew is definitely a spell to use in many situations. Still a hasted PoH is just so amazingly valuable in hardmodes it's crazy. Every single Ulduar reset I can be pretty confident I've saved atleast 4-5 lives just because I had 3 stacks of Serendipity instead 0-1.

Also I don't understand the debate around glyphed renew/FH when CoH and GS are mandatory and PoH/HN are so insane. Especially glyph of Holy Nova is the most underestimated glyph out there. As a haste monster with pretty low SP and ridiculous amounts of haste (900 with food and elixir) my Holy Nova heals for more per person than CoH (although CoH doesn't have group limitation, heals 6 people and is smart).

If you are a priest struggling with hard mode Iron Council, Freya, XT, Mimiron, Hodir you'll LOVE glyph of Holy Nova, just try it.

This is probably the first pro-renew argument that I can actually consider a valid point. A situation where you have to heal a low HP, Weakened Soul'd target, and you don't have access to neither CoH nor SoL is far from rare (Thorim/Hodir and especially Mimiron HMs), and an instant 2k-crit-possible heal, which is also guaranteed to tick for effective healing a few more times, sounds quite good.

Rest of the points, I'm sorry to say, can be summed up as "In an environment where healing has a low intensity, 6/6 Renew is marginally better than FH". Considering Ulduar's Hard-Modes damage patterns (big and bursty), this simply doesn't cut it.