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.

^ 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.

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.

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.

Just for the record, only I had glyphed Holy Nova for Mimiron (I was disc), the holypriests used it as filler and had PoH, CoH, GS as glyphs. I had PoH, HN, Penance as far as I remember.

And yes, HN is probably underestimated by many people, it's very efficent (even more glyphed ofc) but you need people to stay close to their priest

I'm pretty sure the debuff increases the GCD too

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.