I don't really agree with 2/2 Healing Focus personally. The main post is in the process of being updated and the spec section will change somewhat. I don't agree with Tedv that "most" high end raiders have dropped DF it is still a valuable talent depending on your playstyle.

As Discipline there are 57 valuable points in the Discipline Tree and there are really only 8 points in the Holy Tree that are high value (of those readily attainable). Outside of Holy Specialization & Inspiration what you choose in the Holy Tree is preference, playstyle, or maybe specific to certain fights.

FH, Penance, PW:S, and PoM was the obvious choice with a shorter Penance CD.. In a lot of cases you might not have even needed FH very much. Though now with the longer CD on Penance I find myself considering BT'd GH much more than previously.

Asking for information is fair. I'm taking survey of the priests who raid as holy in the top 4 guilds on Mal'ganis (Juggernaut, Vigil, Elitist Jerks, and Aftermath). Here are the results:

Juggernaut:
Phenominal: Spell Warding
Tsigo: Both (This spec lacks inspiration)
Xandrine: Spell Warding
Horky: Spell Warding
Togarth: Spell Warding

Vigil:
Sholtez: Spell Warding
Sear: Divine Fury
Alvism: Both (This spec lacks inspiration)
Puresinette: Spell Warding

Elitist Jerks:
Siawyn: Spell Warding
Mhedic: Spell Warding
Hiroshima: Divine Fury

Aftermath:
Hope: Spell Warding
Devonn: Neither
Worldeater: Spell Warding
Kicksz: Spell Warding

Spell Warding frequency: 13 of 16 = 81%
Divine Fury frequency: 4 of 16 = 25%

That's pretty damning evidence for Divine Fury.

The point was for disc. priest, which do sometimes (or often) tank-healing. Not for holy priest.

For holy, gh is little use, as you never tank heal. For disc raid healing, gh is also not useful either, too slow and too big. I guess we pretty much all accord about this.
For disc. tank healing, the consensus is not so clear, as the recent debate showed in the disc. thread.

Personally, I keep Divine Fury for Smite more than Greater Heal. Though, to me it, it also depends on the fight and I am not opposed to respeccing on a per-a-fight-basis as needed. Now with Glyphs costing ~2g, it's superbly nice (Glyph of Smite).

I also have two PVE specs, I don't terribly mind the concession of 5 points. And if a fight demands it while being learned (or in the case of Algalon and Vezax, most weeks I use Imp. Healing) I just respec and get summoned back.

I am raiding Ulduar 10 as a Disc priest vor several month now (Equipment in the Range of 4pc T8, 2.2k spellpower). Not super but solid. My Healing UI is GRID which I configured to my personal needs. One thing I found handy was to show the "left over" part of my PW:S as a digit. So newly casted, the shield showed how many dmg points can still be adsorbed, and while the charakter takes damage the number decreases until used up. So far so good...

During patch 3.1 a newly casted shield showed up with approx. 6.5k "adsorption points". Since 3.2 is released my shields show up values in the range of 3.5 to 4k in GRID. I am not aware of any PW:S nervs or other changes that should influence my shields since they depend on my spellpower. So my question is, did GRID overetimate my PW:S before, or did I miss some important change (beside me jamming the key for penance after 10sec.). During raiding I did not change my casting style (approx. 30% PW:S) and neither my Druid, nor my Pala buddies did complain... .

Any suggestions would be great.

Check how much your Glyph of PWS heals for, and multiply by 5. (20%Absorb heal x 5 = ~amount absorbed) That said, 6-7k seems reasonable from my experience, I'd guess it's just a UI display error somewhere for you.

Could you post a screen shot of this setup? I am also a Grid user and I love seeing how other priests set up their grid to maximize awareness and efficiency in raids.

Hah! If only my mom knew I was being cited as a source on elitist jerks!

Anyway, a better idea would be to go through the WoL reports of top end guilds and see how many priests use GHeal during actual encounters.

My guess would be GHeal constitutes 0.01% of the healing of any holy priest; it's just a really mediocre ability for holy at this stage of the game.

I was writing my own spreadsheet to test which stat (int, spi, crit, mp5) gives most regen.

At the bottom of constantius' compedium, you mention spirit's mp5 value to be 0,362, but it only covers for the Meditation part, right? However, spirit and int both scale with Holy Concentration as they both grow the OO5SR regen number that scales the talent scales with.

I tried to model Holy Concentration with the following formula:
I've deducted the regular meditation away so it shows how much HC actually rises the regen. This is correct I think?

The formula I used for uptime was (from proc mechanics topic)
If this is correct, it gives extra value for spirit and intellect.

And if anyone has done similar stuff, i'd really like to see what kind of formulas you used for comparing "the next" int/spi/crit. Kinda stuck with the "how much regen will 1 int give for HC as it gives both more regen and more uptime" :P

Hello,

I play a resto druid normally, however I have a priest alt that is coming up in levels (76) that I'm interested in healing with.

I read in this compendium that raid healing with a holy priest uses very little if any renew. As a druid we cast rejuvenation liberally for preemptive healing. I was curious why holy priests use purely reactive healing (aside from PoM, which you have little control over anyways).

A druid uses rejuvenation, wild growth, and to a much lesser extent regrowth/nourish for raid heals. A priest using renew, CoH and PoM would be making use of similar mechanics.

Is the coefficient too low or the mana cost too high on renew to be cast in the way a druid casts rejuvenation? Or is a talent/proc issue? This isn't addressed in the original post and since renew has been a staple in the priest's repertoire since day 1 I was surprised to not see it mentioned but only in passing.

Thank you.

ps. A sample talent build for such a style would be something like this.

I ran into the exact same situation a few weeks ago - resto druid main learning to play a holy priest alt and wondering why I wasn't going to be using my hot. Here are the answers, as I understand them:

1) The "Oh, shit" factor - as a Druid, if we decide to Rejuv someone taking damage, and then realize that they're in a life-threatening situation, we can immediately follow up with a Swiftmend after our 1 second Rejuv GCD. As a Priest, if you Renew someone and then realize that it won't be enough, you've got 2-2.5 seconds after you started casting Renew before you can land any healing with a followup shield or Flash Heal.
2) Talent squeeze - Holy has a lot of good talents! Renew takes 6 points to be fully effective and some other talents end up stealing the spotlight; especially in raiding builds, where a buffed Renew is still redundant with trees bouncing around spamming Rejuv.
3) Stat synergy - Holy gears for a decent amount of crit and haste due to some of their other neat stuff. Renew benefits very minimally from either of those, and therefore is a less attractive spell relative to others in the priest toolkit.

Thanks for your comments malthrin,

1) While not as effective as swiftmend, a priest does have shield or (with that many renews being thrown out) an instant flash heal (from surge of light being constantly refreshed) as the emergency follower.
2) There isn't too many good talents in holy to not have enough in discipline. If you reference my spec I listed in my initial post you'll see what I mean. Sure it would be great to have mental strength, focused power, or enlightenment, but that should be true of any talent tree. You give up some things to get others. The 10% buff to CoH and PoM and 30% cooldown reduction on PoM is too good not to spec that deeply into holy.
3) Criticals from empowered rejuvenation proc holy concentration as well as surge of light. Also critical strike is still great for PoM and CoH of course. Haste also benefits this style in the same way it benefits druids by lowering the GCD. That being said, holy doesn't have gift of the earthmother so more haste would be needed, but in no way is haste being wasted on this casting style.

Resto druids certainly are out in force, but this could be a great choice for your raid heal spec in opposition to your disc tank healing spec. I would appreciate someone with greater knowledge of the class than myself and a passion for theory crafting to consider my thoughts and comment on them.

Thanks for listing all the modifiers. I didn't realize rejuvenation had so many modifiers in comparison.

The mana issue could be moot if you factor in mana free flash heals occasionally being cast from surge of light versus swiftmend. Also one question that might clear this up even further is does surge of light have a cooldown? If not it might be in some respects superior to swiftmend (mostly due to swiftmend's very long cooldown). If you have ~30% crit and are tossing out renews every GCD + 6 target CoH you have many chances to crit to gain the free flash heal more often than once per 15 seconds.

The one big drawback I can see is the shorter duration. 3 seconds difference seems small, except when you realize you can only cast renew on 12 people instead of 15 people (best case scenario, more likely 8-10).

I'll think about it and possibly try this setup and see how it goes. Thanks.

Surge of Light is much, much, worse than Swiftmend. It's not even in the same ballpark. Effective healing alone, assuming one use per 15 seconds, is worlds apart.

Not that it's a bad talent per se, but Swiftmend is a godly talent that synergizes extremely well with the druid mechanics.

Never been much of a renew fan, but a guild priest helped me see the light. Sure Healing-meters aren't everything, but he consistently beat the rest of us by 10-15%. After some investigation Renew turned out to be the culprit. Respecced to try it out, and now I'm right up there with him. And must say I enjoy this healing style aswell. I can pretty much keep the raid happy with the instaheals (PoM, CoH, Renew) and more or less only use flashes for stacking serendipity/inspiration. Had big problems during Hodir's Frozen Blows, but 2x renew specced priests solved the problem. (for us atleast)

Even went as far as to pick up Mental Agility, since renew spam can get rather costly manawise. (My spec)

Anyways, just wanted to offer some counterbalance to all the naysayers claiming Renew to be a marginal spell.

P.S In order to afford MA, I dropped Empowered Healing. Never looked back. Can hardly feel the difference, and it's 5 points saved. Only real issues in my eyes is mana-consumption, and loss of Glyph PoH.

I'm surprised there hasn't been much discussion here yet in the way of gear. On the surface of things, regarding our tier set bonuses, the 2-piece T9 bonus seems particularly strong (Increases the healing done by your Prayer of Mending spell by 20%) and our 4-piece (Increases the shield from your Divine Aegis and the instant healing from your Empowered Renew by 10%) again seems rather weak for Holy.

A 10% increase to the Empowered Renew heal, which, based on my latest parses amounts to somewhere in the ~140 range (non-crit) for extra healing done, is very lackluster.

I'm at a loss as to which pieces I'll pick up first so far, but it appears as though wearing 2-piece T8.5 and 2-piece T9.5 will be potent for some time.

I hesitate to try my hand at creating my own BiS list just yet; anyone care to weigh in about what they'll pick up?

I'm planning on a full gear review sometime in the next week; just got back from vacation and I'm still getting up to speed on all the 3.2 stuff that I didn't notice on the PTR. Anyone else who wants to make up one is more than welcome to begin the discussion, although there isn't a great deal of depth to the ToC drops, so I'm not predicting a lot of variance.

Seeing as it's unique, I would be greatly surprised if you could equip both. It would appear to be BiS for both Disc and Holy at this point, though.

They're two different items, however.

Eagerly awaited Constantius, I enjoy reading your thoughts/perspectives on gear with each patch.

While I'm here, I'm noticing from alot of your armory's that you all roll with about 450 haste rating. Is there some kind of hidden reason for this that I am not aware of? I'm raiding with about 550 haste atm.. As far as my maths tells me I still have a ways to go before the deminishing return on haste makes the stat noticably lighter in weight.

Obviously even with that much haste, I'm still nowhere near the GCD cap. I'm at about 17.5% crit unbuffed (not including holy spec obviously). Would you say I'm gimping myself somehow by having this much haste? Honestly I very rarely encounter mana troubles, even on some of the more mana intensive hard modes.

(I usually have SP+Haste gems, but I subbed in a few sp+int gems while we work on Vezax hard)

I replaced my Spark of Hope with Solace of the Fallen/Defeated last week. As it stands, the normal version is worth 128 mp5, which is most likely worth less regen than Spark of Hope in most cases, but the 150 spellpower on it (compared to the 20ish from 100 spirit) makes up for whatever additional regen Spark might offer imo. The 258 version with 168 spellpower is worth 144 mp5 which is more comparable to Spark, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or both are contenders for BIS trinket options. I'm currently using Sif's and Solace, and I haven't run into the mana problems that I thought I would from the loss of Spark. Mana-wise, it's been more or less been the same so far (in current content). Definitely worth it. (I'm still hanging onto my Spark though of course.)

@Sokaris84: to my understanding, 450 is a good number to sit at in general because with raid buffs (WoA/Ret or Moonkin aura) it helps you reach some "cutoff" numbers for cast times (refer to opening post). For me, it simply "feels" more comfortable to play with, after having experimented with lower levels of haste and not really liking it (personal preference). Also, it's a good number to aim for while still balancing an appropriate amount of spellpower and crit for throughput and regen. I don't feel that we need to stack too much haste as we have our share of instant spells. Personally, I switch out pieces depending on the fight and usually have haste numbers ranging from 400 to 529. I wouldn't say having too much haste is gimping yourself. But it might not always be necessary to have so much.

Solace of the Defeated is definitely on my list. Now I'm just trying to decide if it's worth my while to get [Royal Moonshroud Robe] crafted, or to wait for the ilvl258 [Velen's Robe of Triumph]. Because there are heroic and normal ToC versions I'm finding I have to think more strategically about how to bid on gear. It's a very strange place to be in. It's no longer quite as simple as just taking a simple upgrade. Makes compiling a loot list a bit more difficult. Of course, I'm happiest when overanalyzing my priest and her gear so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

A not so obvious thing about 258 tier badges is that there will be very few of them. If we assume that a hardmode boss drops only a single tier armor like normal bosses do, it'll take a guild of only 30 active raiders 6 weeks for everyone to get a single one. That's 6 months for 4 pieces for everyone. So most likely you will have to mix 245 and 258 tier armor for the set boni, which creates interesting choices for gearing up.