If you have a disc priest throwing shields against this predictable damage, throwing holy shields is not a good idea. Another case of "your mileage will vary", I guess.

See, I think this is flawed logic. There is certainly room for multiple Priests to apply Shields, it's just on assignments. And perhaps certain rules e.g. Holy priests never shield the tanks, or person taking "special" damage (some debuff/focus, etc), those are reserved exclusively for the Disc priests. But in the case of raid-wide AoE damage (for example, Flame Jets [before being nerfed]) the Holy priests can easily apply their weaker shields on other targets in the raid.

It's absolutely worth it to get the Shield off and then use the spellpower boost to power a Prayer of Healing / Circle of Healing.

This is something I definitely want to aim for; I really don't think its too much to ask of our disc priest to let me get a shield in every so often. But you really have to communicate and pay attention to Grid (every Priest tracks weakened soul, I hope). In many situations a holy priest's shield (granted they have Body and Soul) is just infinitely better than a disc priest's shield. Our tanks love B&S. And, as you pointed out, there is ample justification for letting a holy priest have a single weakened soul; realistically speaking is our disc priest going to be able to shield *everyone*? Probably not.

As Nidaba pointed out, there's a situation in almost every fight where Body and Soul can be amazing. The question now is if the utility of the sprint justifies throwing out additional shields (without the intent to sprint) to keep up the t8 four-piece buff during an encounter.

Shielding not for the sake of the shield but just for the spell power seems viable: there are obviously moments where our disc priest won't be spamming shields on everyone. Before a pull, toss a shield up and get a boosted PoM bouncing or Renew going. There are lulls in fights too, obviously, where setting this up may be beneficial.

I didn't think I would like Body and Soul for pve. After testing it for some time, it has grown on me. Also, it seems that I can't drop it from my spec since all our tanks absolutely *love* it. We don't run with a disc priest in our raid yet (we run with three holy priests), a situation I'm trying to rectify. If I am successful in my campaign to get a disc priest in our raid, we'll probably just discuss on when a body and soul would be more useful than a more powerful bubble.

i dont see the need for it either. its been hyped so much here, ppl calling it mandatory even. i mean who actually dies of nature's fury or light bombs?
we used it at general on the tank for our 1st kill, same for yogg phase 1. But it never was needed.
IMO ppl take it cause they just really enjoy it (as do the ppl who receive the buff), and that would be fair enough ofc. I just don't see the need for it. the points spend or not filler points.

I think people are missing (part of) the point with Body & Soul. Sure, it removes people from danger that they otherwise might have been able to get out of without a sprint. It helps people do what they should normally be able to do without help. Sure, it's valuable to have, and, as people have asserted, it's not absolutely necessary. But I think people see the "helps people get out of fire" aspect of the talent (what the "hype" seems to be centered around) and base their judgments purely on that.

Consider that while it allows people to avoid dangerous situations faster, it also allows DPS to get back to their targets faster, increasing damage done over the course of a particular fight. A similar effect can be achieved with sprinting tanks to mobs to bring them back to the melee more quickly (a la Yogg-Saron). Even when there is no danger to avoid, a speed increase is a DPS increase in many ways (I'm sure many have seen the theorycrafting behind DPS enchanting their boots with Tuskarr's Vitality). Sprinting our enhancement shaman to Yogg's brain inside the portal (after the tentacles have been killed) won't be drastically raid-altering but it will most certainly result in more damage done. In this sense I think the spell is overlooked.

I'm not saying that this is what merits all the hype. I just think the spell is more useful than just a "get raid member out of the fire" button.

I would like to get back to the exact point. We were discussing a very specific issue, which was adding Pw:S "to the rotation you'd use when predicting a high amount of damage". If I understand you correctly, we already share the opinion that in many of these cases a disc shield is the better solution.

Now for an AoE damage situation: in cases where we need to run, like the mentioned Hodir scenario, self shielding to get B&S is a no brainer anyway.

As for Ignis, I think that's a special situation. When flame jets start, you cannot use anything but instants anyway, so shielding someone to get the 4pc bonus, followed by a CoH while landing seems good to me.

As for other AoE damage scenarios: we shall see once more people have experience with 4pc bonus when healing as holy. Do I use the GcD for the shield or for a half of a PoH? I'm undecided so far.

I played around with it a bit. The 5 second duration really is painfully short. Pulling of a PW:S, Penance, Gheal combo required button spamming (and a nochanneing macro for the Gheal). And that was at 2AM on a workday, on a medium population server that never had real issues with latency.

I'm sorry, you lost me way back at the beginning there with the encouragement of taking blessed resilience OVER Test of Faith...... You even point out that the majority of the consequential damage in Ulduar, is more than 50% of a players HP.. Not to mention the fact that ToF is 100% effective healing, for any spell other than Gheal.....

And your figures for Holy Concentration are way off... I even went back through a couple of WWS's, and checked the % breakdowns. (using flask as a baseline, as for some reason it shows it as only 74% uptime, but it was up 100% of boss attempts... not sure where its info gets scewed...). For a full night of Council Hard mode attempts, Holy Concentration had a 43% uptime (68% of the time that the flask was up, this was based off of about 30-31% raid buffed crit). We both know that particular fight, there are more times of spamming PoH, than there are FH, FH, FH, PoH. More like FH/FH/PoH/PoH/PoH/FH/FH/PoH, giving a lot fewer casts of FH in the given fight.
Fights like say XT/Yogg/Mimiron, are much higher FH friendly fights (true you may still cast PoH 3-4x in a row depending, but not always, probably would be closer to 3x FH 2x PoH), but on those the % uptime is a lot higher.

And your 'math' for factoring in the value of spirit, doesn't even account for the high uptime of HC... You included lots of breakdowns for Int, but for most non-exclusive AoE fights, HC should probably have 80%+ uptime, so when you factor in probably an average bonus of 40% to casting regen (true Int does give a bonus to spirit based regen as well, at these gear levels, its still about half or less, spirit still is an equally important stat to stack (obviously not to an extreme, but your guide basically says to ignore it completely, which I think is probably the absolute worst possible choice).

I've typically agreed with most of the guideline's yall have generated in the past, and I hate to be the 'squeaky wheel' here, but my expierence tells me otherwise. Had bad lag tonight so raid was called early, but I did find an addon that tracks uptime's of particular buffs, and will come back with average (and maybe particular boss averages).

From my expierence, there are several different types of players, and several different gameplay styles. Different gearing/talents/ect, do play a big part in performance (I've personally be a crit whore since SW:P Pre-nerf's, and I've never met a priest that could match me, assignment:assignment, except for pure randomness healing like patchwerk.... 1 day/attempt your 2x the healing of next, because of lucky timings/crits, the next your half the top healers, ect)

A stupid question perhaps - but did Body&Soul and Soul Warding nerfs went through already, or is that waiting for patch? With current "we hotfix things but leave tooltips intact" trend, I'm bit lost.

B&S also helps by wipe recovery, you run faster be at your spot so you can alt tab and read EJ!