It's also a nice tool for healing in Thorims arena in P2 when having cast time debuff problems and/or threat issues with fresh add waves.

The answer to why people don't take Glyph of Holy Nova is obvious: why take a Glyph that simply gives you a smaller radius, instacast party-only version of Prayer of Healing? Glyph'd Holy Nova and Glyph Prayer of Healing are virtually identical in the two conventional performance metrics (efficiency, throughput), but the group-only restriction is a rather significant one.

However, let's question this logic. Just because the answer seems obvious doesn't mean it's right. Perhaps if we examine Holy Nova from a different standpoint, we'll see a different use.

Let's instead pretend that Holy Nova is a single target heal that can only be used on a group member.

First, what is the cost? Well, Holy Nova costs 773 mana to cast. But @30% critical, you'll also save 276 mana from a potential Surge of Light proc (if Surge of Light was already proc'd, we'd obviously be casting Flash Heal instead of using our 'single target' Holy Nova). This yields an actual cost of 497 mana. If we had 3/3 MA, this cost would be 419.

In contrast, our Glyph'd Flash Heal costs 626 mana to cast. It saves 94 mana from Surge of Light and 0 - 90 mana from Holy Concentration (1400/1200, for 751 oFSR). This yields an actual cost of 442 - 532 mana (note: this would be weighted towards the low end of the mana range).

So our single target Holy Nova isn't actually all that expensive. It's certainly comparable to just casting a Flash Heal.

In terms of total healing, our Holy Nova is dishing out 4169 healing. Alas, our Flash Heal is piling on with 6589. Or:
Holy Nova = 2779 hpm @ 8.39 hpm (9.95 w/ 3/3 MA)
Flash Heal = 4393 hpm @ 10.53 hpm

So we come down to the same question of 'how valuable is faster reaction?'. Without rehashing the same ground trod above, I'd suggest that in a situation where reaction speed is at a premium, the value of the instacast vs. 1.5s cast dwarfs the relatively minor distinctions above. Since such situations are the only time you'd think to cast non-SoL Flash Heal in the first place (even untalented Renew is a better choice in a non-critical situation for efficiency reasons), this gives us a credible reason to think favorably of Holy Nova.

In other words, our Glyph of Holy Nova isn't giving us a variant on Prayer of Healing. It's giving us a group-only instaheal. Now toss our Holy Priest in a group with a Retribution Paladin and a tank. Holy Nova is as efficient as any method of healing back Ret Paladin self-damage. When our tank gets clobbered down to 20% health there is a healer who can almost incidentally toss over 4500 points (recall Test of Faith) of healing without interfering with the big heals the actual tank healers are queue'ing up.

And, yes, I suppose you can save some mana in those situations where you might ordinarily cast Prayer of Healing on your own group.

"Serendipity is reason enough for making flash heal a better spell in almost all situations compared to renew. "

I get more serendipity stacks than I can ever use off of SoL. So I do not agree.

Also, I'm not suggesting removing flash from your toolset, I just generally use it less than renew. There are still circumstances in which I flash heal, they are just a lot rarer than they used to be with the changes to renew.

Big and bursty damage can sometimes argue for renew, depends on the frequency and pattern. By taking points out of empowered healing and putting them in empowered renew you have more tools to deal with different patterns. (I will always have max points in ToF, BR, and Serendipity, because I love those skills.)

What's more important about Glyph of Holy Nova is that it actually makes the burst healing of HN higher than even Serendipity PoH.

My HN hits for ~ 3050-3150 depending on gear and flask choices. It's instant, and with typical raid buffs, my GCD is around 1.20. That means if I have a 3-stack of Serendipity, and I choose to cast PoH, I can actually get off 2 HNs before the PoH will land. That's 6200+ healing on every person in my group and in-range (obviously the range limitation sucks, and requires setting up the raid to really use it properly) before my single PoH will hit.

Using numbers from Thursday evening, Mimiron hard-mode attempts, using the HN instantly and then following it up with either another HN or CoH ends up being 25,000 HpS (assuming my party is near me). Compare this to starting a (assuming Serendipity is pre-stacked) hasted PoH at 19,500 HpS.

Of course, this completely ignores crits; if you include those it becomes a comparison between 28,750 HpS (HN) and 23,400 (PoH). HN is still higher HpS for those first two casts, and is also (the most important part) not vulnerable to pushback. As well, it's front-loaded healing.

If the damage is sufficiently slow that Glyph of Prayer of Healing actually gets to tick, the HpS of the two spells becomes very comparable, assuming you only cast PoH with 3-stack Serendipity. If you are forced to heal more often than that, and can't guarantee Serendipity always being up, then HN becomes superior.

As mentioned several times in the last few pages: hard-modes are incredibly bursty damage. If you don't top someone up fast, they will die more likely than not. The DPS coming in to any one person on Mimiron can exceed 10,000 DPS. That means dead in under 3.0 seconds. If you start a PoH as Rapid Burst gets aimed at your group, you may have someone dead before the channel finishes.

So basically, if you want to be an AoE healer, drop GS Glyph, and pick up PoH, HN, and CoH. Then go to town.

From your description, the impression I get is that your raid starts fighting Mimiron, then 4 out of 5 groups get annihilated midway through the fight because only the one with the Glyph'd Holy Nova has any hope of staying alive.

Somehow I suspect this isn't actually how your raid fights Mimiron. Nor do I think that everyone who can beat hard-mode Mimiron can only do so because they brought 5 Holy Priests with Glyph'd Holy Nova.

So for the task you're describing Prayer of Healing is obviously sufficient. Since you can use either Prayer of Healing or Holy Nova to handle the content, essentially you're recommending that players consume one of their Glyph slots to generate marginally more overhealing in the relatively rare situations when they need to heal their entire group.

Can you post a log where the situation you're describing actually occurs?

I suggest that:
a) You try hard-mode Mimiron yourself. Bring 6 healers.
b) You look at the screenshots of all of the guilds that have completed the fight, and see how many priests they brought.
c) You re-think your argument based on the premise that you *will* have melee groups that will not be taking anywhere near that level of damage.

Premonition and Method both used the HN method of healing ranged groups. And yes, we're currently using it, and it's remarkably smoother and entirely better than the alternative. 3 priests with Glyph'd Holy Nova takes care of the majority of the ranged damage in P2; all we lose is either Glyph of GS (which isn't really needed for the fight) or Glyph of Flash Heal.

You don't need a log to see why just PoH is a bad idea. Go to Wowhead and look up Rapid Burst (25-man version) and Heat Wave. Do some rudimentary math.

[e] I'm not saying it's only possible to beat the fight using Glyphed Holy Nova and 3+ priests. However, when you look at the people who've beat the fight, the only one I know of that didn't do it was Ensidia. And they used *6* priests (3 shadow, for VE) and double-JoL.

I'm pretty sure the debuff increases the GCD too

Deafening Thunderclap only increases *casting time*, hence doesn't affect instants.

I might be mistaken but I noticed the increase of GCD in arena P2. I'm disc specced and shielding by gcd is my way to mitigate raid damage so I couldn't miss the fact it was longer.

I'm mostly trying to avoid this whole discussion, but just as a mathematical point, R(h,t) probably would not drop off immediately as the formula you have implies. A Gaussian-like function might work well, though. For example:



Squaring the exponent keeps the function flat for a bit before it takes a dive and drops off to zero, which should model "the probability that the heal will land soon enough to matter" reasonably well. The "C" would quantify how much time you have, i.e. it should be low if you have very little time and high when you have plenty of time.

Just some food for thought...

I am not absolutely sure (I more involved with getting pesky mobs off me in the arena), but I suppose you are right with that. If I remember the tooltip correctly, it's a spell haste debuff. As such, it would probably increase the GcD.

That aside, if my group is affected, I prefer Holy Nova just for the front loading aspect. The first HN lands around 5s before a PoH with haste debuff. The next will land at (roughly) the 2.5s mark, the third lands when the first and only PoH strikes. So that's three HN in the time of one PoH, which I think is far safer in the arena. Of course, it's only a solution for one out of 3-4 groups in the arena.

Could anyone explain to me why [Leash of Heedless Magic] is a better choice over [Cord of the White Dawn]?

Probably not the best thread for this question, but hey.

Short answer - it's not necesarily better. While they both have the same iLvl and the Leash has less stamina (hinting towards a better budget allocated on "useful" stats), in reality, you have two sockets (and a 7sp bonus) to cover up for 14 rating and 22 sp. In practice, it comes down to how you separately value Crit and Haste.

About Thorim - the tooltip on Deafening Thunder reads

"Inflicts 4625 to 5375 Nature damage to enemies standing in close proximity to a Stormhammer strike, increasing spell casting times by 75% for 8 sec. 50000 yd range, Instant"

I'm a PW:S spammer myself, and I'm quite sure there's absolutely no increase in GCD time.

Constantius,

I was looking at your current holy spec and I couldnt help but notice that you are not following most of your own OP guidelines on Holy Talents anymore

So, don't you practise what you preach, priest?
or has that part become outdated?

Brings up the point of whether or not it's worthwhile to put "hard mode" specs in the OP, or at least mention the talents you'd want to take for those attempts/kills. Spell Warding and Desperate Prayer just seem like no-brainers for hard modes (especially when Divine Fury just isn't all that appealing anymore). I can only assume Constantius has a hard mode spec.

Ironically I've been thinking about the three topics of debate for the past few weeks. These topics are Renew, Holy Nova, and Serendipity.

Renew:

Everyone is in agreement that Renew is a great heal if it doesn't overheal. The real question is how often will a renewed player get topped off, wasting the remainder of the renew. And the answer is "it depends". In my experience though, the more stressful the raid healing is, the less often renew gets sniped. That means the value of renew increases as you are doing more hard modes, and that's exactly what I've experienced in Ulduar. It's almost useless in easy fights like Razorscale and Freya, but its invaluable in a situation like hard mode Mimiron or Thorim. For example, in our hard mode Mimiron 10 kill, Renew was just under 30% of my effective healing. (Prayer of Mending was first with 36%.) There's the argument that perhaps I was just using the wrong heal, but it very much seemed like the right choice given the nature of damage pulses in the fight.

The fact that renew is an instant cast is also meaningful. Lots of Ulduar fights require movement, especially hard modes. You can't just stop healing. Once you've refreshed your mending and cast a circle of healing, it's nice to have other useful spells to cast. So I believe that the more you are working on hard modes, the more important and useful a talented Renew is. I don't see a compelling reason to spend the points in other places.

Holy Nova:

I've primarily been using this as a threatless AoE during trash sections of boss fights. It procs a surge of light 49% of the time, meaning its actually more mana efficient than just outright casting flash heal. But looking at the numbers, it provides a decent amount of healing as well. The 12 yard radius is a challenge if you want to heal the entire group, but you only need to heal three people with it before it beats single target heals on healing per second.

The question in my mind is whether its worth sacrificing a glyph for this spell, and how often positioning should be rearranged to make it work. On fights like Mimiron and Hodir hard modes it seems disgustingly good. Similar comments apply for the animus phase of Vezax. The glyph I'm most likely to cut is actually Prayer of Healing, as the Guardian Spirit glyph adds a kind of flexibility that a third AoE healing glyph cannot match. There's also the argument that as you cast more Holy Novas, you'll cast less Prayer of Healing. Holy Nova won't beat a Serendipity hasted Prayer of Healing, but it does beat an unhasted one, so it's likely you'll use the two in tandem, whereas before you'd cast two Prayers in a row.

Serendipity:

The argument to cut this talent makes sense, but I'm still uneasy about it. Hasting Greater Heals is almost completely worthless. Even when it's an option, its usually better to save the Serendipity stack in case you need a fast Prayer of Healing later. This logic makes me think Serendipity still holds its weight as a talent. It's not as simple as saying "most of the raid damage comes at well defined, predictable moments, so you should be able to precast your prayer of healing". During a hard mode Freya ground tremor, for example, you can't pre-cast the heal or you will get silenced. During Hodir, there's a big difference between standing still for 1.5 seconds and 2.5 seconds during Frozen Blows. Kologarm's Oblivion is not on a predictable timer, and so on.

There's also the argument that if you ever need to cast multiple prayers in a row, the raid healing requirements are so high that the extra haste is clearly useful. Ultimately though, the real question is what you gain by giving up Serendipity. Assuming you spend 6 points boosting renew, your options are some combination of Mental Agility, Holy Concentration, Empowered Healing, Blessed Resilience, and Healing Prayers. Basically some bad throughput talents and some average mana efficiency talents. I can see how you'd spec out of Serendipity for a number of fights, but for general purpose raiding, it seems like the flexibility it offers beats the meager offerings from the alternatives.

My post was not meant as an attack on Constantius, on the contrary.
I thought it might provoke a nice re-evaluation of those talents.

My current spec is entirely built for Mimiron, ya, as Snowy said. I normally don't take 5/5 Spell Warding, and *do* take 5/5 Divine Fury. I also normally don't max out Renew talents, and *do* take B&S. If you check my spec on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday, or Monday night, you'll see up to 5 different specs popping up depending on what I just completed. I have a Vezax spec, a Mimiron spec, a "normal" hard-mode Holy spec, a "normal" hard-mode Discipline spec, and a specialized Discipline spec for Freya. I don't always hit every one in a week, but I definitely tweak my Holy spec for Mimiron. I'd be stupid not to, given how much damage is flying around.

The cookie-cutter spec remains just that: cookie-cutter. You can always optimize, and that's the point of the *thread*, not the OP.

[e] For anyone curious, here's the parse from our kill on Monday, with all 3 of us using Glyph of HN. Tiaran is Discipline, and when you include his PWS absorbs, he ends up edging me out slightly in effective healing done.

Wow Web Stats

Can you please go deeper in this? I'm playing disc priest 99% of the time and would be very interested to see what specific changes you made for Freya.

Probably no divine fury, 5/5 Spell Warding.

The fight in hard mode is basically a PW:S spam while keeping PoM on cooldown and eventually an emergency Penance.

Reducing the magic damage helps a lot to survive for no cost at all in the talent tree.

This is what I run for Freya:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

No need for Divine Fury, Healing Focus, or Inspiration (since I'm spamming the raid with PWS). You could technically argue for dropping Grace entirely as well, since it's rare to be healing the same person for more than 1-2 spells at a time. Unfortunately, there's really nothing to pick up with those points.

If you're not casting renew, couldn't the improved renew points get shifted to Reflective shield? It won't be a ton of extra damage, but at least it would be marginally useful. I suppose at this point it's just nitpicking though.