Forgive me for the criticism, but how exactly do you expect someone to take both [Starshine Circle] and [Sunglimmer Cloak] for the holy BiS list when they are alternate rewards from the same quest?

On the subject of trinkets, [Eye of the Broodmother] is just hands down better than [Illustration of the Dragon Soul]. The stack is easier to rebuild and it provides more total throughput. [Spark of Hope] beats [Pandora's Plea] by a sizable margin, even for discipline. 100 spirit isn't too much worse than 108 int, and the 42 mana cost reduction helps far more than a random proc that increases your spell power at some moment when you may or may not need additional throughput.

If you are including item level 239 hard mode loot on the list, then the best in slot weapon has to be [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings]. I suppose a gear list is nice, but it's good to hear justification. Besides, stating that cloth pieces dropping from hard modes are best-in-slot isn't particularly ground shaking, and I suspect that most priests in guilds that are farming hard modes already know what items are best. A discussion between two alternatives at the same item level is the type of thing that generates value.

So all that said, can you explain what criteria you used to decide "best" and why it's a good heuristic to use?

I love to make mathematical models, but I think for a talent like serendipity, anecdotal evidence and thoughtful arguements constructed out of scenarios we have a common experience of make more sense.

People talk about preventing death as being the goal of healing, but how can we tell if Serendipity (or any other talent) prevented a death? We could parse the whole log given people's known max health and figure out exactly whether the heal landed in time to get ahead of lethal damage to anyone. But if it was healing for less, or if it was slower, maybe we would have behaved differently at a different time. Maybe the person we were healing was about to hit a health stone and decided they didn't have to. Maybe we *should* have hit a different heal at a different time but we just weren't good enough to know we had to do it.

How much can we expect from our talent points? If Serendipity is doing it's job, then it is probably going to save your raid from a wipe with an incredibly low frequency. I don't say that to complain about Serendipity, that's just what it's function is. Nature's Swiftness saves raids from wipes very rarely, but everyone agrees they should take it. What if you were bugged only had 68 talent points (and for some reason people brought you anyway). Do you think that suddenly the raid would be wiping all the time to fights it can normally handle? A raid probably brings 5 to 6 healers to any given fight, it is hard to believe that losing 3 of the 71 talent points from one of those healers would make much more than a 1% difference to the chance of a wipe? (If we carefully selected the most relevant and impactful talents it might, but Serendipity is a middle-of-the-pack talent, one that few people would cut but not GS, Soul Warding or Penance)

If doing something changes your chance of wiping by 1% then to get "hard data" of any statistical relevance, you would have to track hundreds of boss attempts both with and without the talent to see if it made a difference. And how would you account for the facts of different raid compositions and gear levels? What if one style ultimately outperforms the other with significantly more practice, but underforms until the first style has plateaued? What if one way of spending talents would make the whole raid better off if only they learned to use it properly but generally is worse because people don't? What if one style is skewed by the fact that it is superior in the general case but unviable for one fight?

There are many problems in this world that are too complicated to answer by making a model, plugging in the data and seeing what comes out. Brains, however, are great problem solving engines that often have to justify (after the fact with anecdotal arguments) conclusions that have been drawn from very complicated processes that are beyond the grasp of the person with the brain. And, yes, it's the same way we would decide which Jonas Brother is the cutest, but brains are the best thing we have to tackle problems of this kind of complexity, and we are going to have to live with that.

Our proposed tier-9 set bonus' are in:

• Priest T9 Shadow 2P Bonus (Devouring Plague) (Class: Priest) -- Increases the duration of your Devouring Plague spell by 6 sec.
• Priest T9 Shadow 4P Bonus (Mind Flay) (Class: Priest) -- Increases the critical strike chance of your Mind Flay spell by 5%.
• Priest T9 Healing 2P Bonus (Prayer of Mending) (Class: Priest) -- Decreases the cooldown on your Prayer of Mending spell by 2 sec.
• Priest T9 Healing 4P Bonus (Prayer of Healing) (Class: Priest) -- Increases the critical strike chance of your Prayer of Healing spell by 5%.

Very blah to me, considering that the PoM spell could bring us to a 5 second PoM with 5 charges, that is a lot of needed bouncing.

The 4 piece is 5% less crit than our tier 8 2 piece gives... pretty lack luster.

Sorry, I posted that in haste and forget that people can't see my current spec, which indeed does not include Empowered Healing either. I meant Empowered Renew, and I'll edit that above - my bad.

Obviously the ultimate test is how it performs in raids - nobody is going to ignore that over theory. The talents were balanced (well, you know what I mean) around all the spells they affect and Blizz assumes a certain mix of those so that is what I mean by watered down. That doesn't, in and of itself, make them unworthy.

Either way, for me, in my current raids, I applied the same logic to both Serendipity and EH and deselected both of them. Mileage may vary for others. My % of FH has gone down as my Renews have gone up, thus watering down EH even further. /shrug

I hear that. Pretty disappointed with the 4 piece holy/disc bonus considering that this will be the third time we've seen the same bonus albeit with different percentages since vanilla. If they want to recycle bonuses I would like to see them bring back things like the 2 piece T5 bonus.

One can hope since the PTR is in it's infancy these set bonuses are placeholder and will be changed in the future.

You're being inconsistent then, since you list 4 pieces of tier 8 for discipline, which are only BiS if all 4 pieces are used.

Either it's a BiS complete list, in which case you can include one quest reward and should list 4 pieces of Tier 8.5. Or it's a BiS for each slot, in which case you can include both quest rewards but you shouldn't include the 4 piece bonus.

I disagree about the 2 piece bonus.

After a lot of experimentation I have found that the value of int in terms of spirit is grossly overestimated

Here is the numbers which fit my situation over many runs:

HC uptime: I have no real way of properly tracking this. The common method of estimating uptime from WWS reports is inaccurate. I use a simple simulation to calculate my uptime based on my casting pattern. I never take SoL so that greatly increases my overall uptime. The worst case senario is 4 eligible casts per 12 seconds. This may be anything between 2 and 5 casts depending on the exact pattern and the vast majority of hte time they come grouped up. Thus assuming an average of 4x1.3sec intervals and 4 possible procs, with a 28% crit rate this gives me an uptime of ~43%. However this is not the case for the entire fight. I estimate that 5% in any fight is non casting time i.e. a period of 15+seconds where I dont cast anything. This is 100% ooFSR time and 0% HC uptime. The rest is split between 95% iFSR with 43% HC uptime and 5% ooFSR time with 90%+ HC uptime. This gives me an overall factor for FSR and HC of ~0.667.

My raid buffed spirit and intellect are ~1400. I am not including the use of the darkmoon greatness card, which raises my overall spirit by about 100.

Regen from spirit = R



At my values this is 704.6810782 total mp5.

Adding 1 spirit raises this to 705.1844218 mp5, which is an increase of 0.503343627 mp5
Adding 1 int raises this to 704.9327051 mp5 which is an increase of 0.251626888 mp5

In an 8 minute fight it is not possible to cast HoH and fiend more than once without losing out overall and they are best used chained when your mana is lowish (Remember that the 20% max mana from HoH actually fills up your mana bar, so you gain say 4k max mana and 4k actual mana, making it easy to lose mana if you use it early). Chaining fiend with HoH increases fiend effectiveness by 16% raising its value to 58%. Getting 4 ticks of HoH gives you back 13.8% total mana for a total of 71.8% max mana once for an 8 minute fight.

Thus per point of int:

HoH+fiend = 0.718*16.5*5/8/60 = 0.12340625 mp5
Mana pool = 16.5/8/60*5 = 0.171875 mp5
Replenishment (95% uptime) = 0.1959375 soon to be nerfed to 0.15675

Overall values:
1 spi: 0.503343627
1 int: 0.742845638 soon to be nerfd to 0.703658138

This is a far cry from the 100% value that is normally being thrown around, at least for the circumstances I described, which are very accurate for my case. Even for people who take SoL, which can decrease spirit regen by as much 5-10%, its nowhere near 2x for intellect. Considering that spirit also gives spellpower, I would definately say that spirit and int are pretty close in overall value.


An important change in terms of regeneration in the new patch is that mp5 has apparently had its ilvl value decreased by 25%(at least on items, don't know if its the same on gems).

[edit] Misread patch notes its 25% increase [edit]

=================================================================

New patch.

I do not understand why ppl are tripping over the nerf to PoH. Its no big deal. The HPS of PoH is currently so far above incoming DPS that you can nerf it even further without affecting the ability of priests to heal any encounter. All that the nerf is going to do, is decrease the position that priests have in the healing meters and probably not by much. PoH is like 35-45% of our healing.

Blizzard has clearly moved away from the HPS limited aoe healing design. AoE healing is now time limited. That means the crucial factor in determining aoe healing success is how many targets you can hit with a 3k+ heal within a given window of opportunity, that generally lasts less than 10 seconds. Although this heal might not save them on its own it will almost certainly guarantee that they will live long enough for another heal to save them. If you hit anyone ONCE with PoH, nerf or not, they can be effectively considered saved for the immediate present.

I am quite surprised to hear ppl arguing about blessed resilience over serendipity. Blessed resilience is a talent that has no value other than a non-visible increase in healing meter output. It does not help you heal more ppl within the window of opportunity and its so small it does nothing to help with underhealing, which is already a very minor issue with aoe healing. Serendipity on the other hand can increase the number of heals you can land quite significantly, by allowing a different spell sequence:

No serendipity
Precast PoH (it lands after 1.5-2 seconds).
PoM/CoH 4.5-5 seconds
PoH 7.5-8 seconds.

If you do get another CoH at 8 seconds you will sacrifice more PoM ticks, if you maximise PoM then the second CoH is going to land at 9+ seconds


Alternative:

Precast PoM, and CoH when the damage hits (1.5 seconds and you have a PoM jump already).
Hasted PoH, (3.5 seconds)
PoH+CoH (6.5 seconds)

The difference between the two solutions is vast. In the first one you deliver a quick heal, but then there is a lag phase, while you stick PoM on and wait out the GCD and long cast time of the second PoH.

With the second solution you have a PoM ticking already and deliver an instant CoH and a hasted PoH, which will land relatively early after the burst begins (3.5 seconds) and you have time to land a second big fat PoH, CoH combo while it still matters.

Even better you also have the option of adding in a binding heal+PoH combo if you needed it, which only takes 3.5 instead of 3 for a single unhasted PoH.

Blessed resilience is a talent whose only function is to raise your position in the healing meters. Serendipity is a core talent that greatly boosts the your burst aoe HPS.

In my view there are only four talents in the entire holy tree that are mandatory: Serendipity, GS, divine providence and spiritual healing. A lack of any of these 4 talents results automatically in a significantly inferior holy build. The remaining talent choices are very flexible and a matter of playstyle. Blessed resilience is a talent of no consequence.

My mistake, I misread patchnotes. I amended.

I have difficulties to understand your model and assumptions.
If I try to rewrite what I understands, it reads as follows:

1. Your crit rate is about 28%
2. When casting, you cast about 2 "HC eligible" spells per 8 sec.
3. 5% of the time is standing still, which means ooFSR and without HC
4. 95% 95% of the time (ie 90.25%), you assume being iFSR, and with 2 "HC eligible" cast in 8s, you get 48% HC uptime
5. For the rest of the time (5% * 95%, ie 4.75%), you assume being ooFSR, with 90% (or plus) HC uptime ?

What questions me the most is the 4th assumption: why do you assume such a high HC uptime when ooFSR ? It would mean you actively take beaks after HC procs, and you're able to do it (ie., no healing is needed right-now). It might be the case, but I like to have it clearly stated, and if possible, explained and argumented.

1) Yes my crit rate is 28%, its too high for my liking, but I dont have a wide choice of gear. Though other healers might have less or more crit rates, the results are roughly the same as long as they have a crit rate of 25%+

2) My casting pattern gives me an average of 4 HC procing casts per 12 seconds (not 2 per 8 seconds). Notice I say casts not spells, because binding heal is one spell but it has 2 casts.

3) Yes. 5% of the time I have to take a long enforced break. For example like in between the phases at mimiron. Its rough, but it does not need to be exact. Its in this ballpark.

4) That is correct 90.25% of the time I am iFSR and have an HC uptime of 43% with this casting pattern.

5) I do not actively take breaks during HC, I simply choose not to take a break UNLESS I have HC. That means if an opportunity for a break arises I will not take it unless HC is up. If HC is not up I will continue casting until it IS up and then see if I can take a break.

Guess they really don't want us using it as a CoH substitute. Oh well.