Hey, look at the bright side. It went from a 40% decrease in damage to a 20% increase in damage.

And it still has it's niche. The glyph is still worth it if you are using it for it's proper niche. (No threat, can be spammed while running, does damage and healing (mostly relevant for proccing SoL)).

I always assumed Holy Nova had a high mana cost solely for the fact it generated no threat.

With your numbers 9.6 seconds down to 9 seconds is 6.7% haste, which due to overheal is significantly better (~3x) than 3% healing, but this comparison is misleading and suggests BR is much closer to Serendipity than it actually is.

Later PoHs don't have the same value as groups tend to be healed unevenly. Also remember people are taking potentially lethal damage and you have to land heals on as many of them as possible in the smaller possible interval. With serendipity the priest is landing every heal in his sequence half a second earlier. That is a massive advantage both because he has less chance to lose healing due to overhealing from other spells landing on his chosen targets and because his targets have to wait less before getting healed. The earlier targets which get the most benefit are also the crucial ones which probably need the most urgent healing. The 3% healing of blessed resi is meaningless in the begining of the window when the faster heals from serendipity let the priest snatch up the best "piece of the action". Later on when the impact of serendipity becomes diluted, BR gets diluted even more, since at this point its mostly topping up and a lot of the extra healing is simply overheal. Remember the important bit is getting to everyone before they die, rather than how much your heal hits for. Having every spell in the sequence land 0.5 seconds earlier, is the difference between life and death when we are talking about a challenging encounter.

Also 25% haste is quite excessive. 15%-20% haste is what you can expect ppl to have, so CoH-PoH-PoH which even at 25% haste takes 6.3 seconds is not going to be a good idea. THat is why its best to put CoH first, so you can minise the loss of CoH CD, when casting 2x PoHs with the hasted PoH. At 10% haste, this will fit perfectly into the CoH 6 second CD, at 15% haste you will lose 0.18 seconds.

I believe the fastest HPS you can have with serendipity is alternating BH/PoH combos, but also a very effective sequence is CoH-BH-FH-PoH, which at 15% haste fits perfectly into the 6 second CD. So the serendipity priest can also use a hasted PoH-CoH-BH-FH-hasted PoH-CoH combo. BH and FH heal ~4 PoH Heals so this combo is worth 4.4 PoHs, instead of 4.6 PoHs for the 2 CoH 3 PoH combo, but they take 7.74 sec at 15% haste instead of 9.13sec without serendipity or 8.43 with serendipity. As a consequence the full serendipity sequence delivers 4% more HPS compared to the 3 PoH combo and ~13% better HPS than the non serendipity 3 PoH sequence. When you count in the loss of healing on latter PoHs due to overheal and possible heal sniping or perhaps the need to move prematurely its quite obvious that serendipity blows BR out of the water. After the nerf it will be even more. Chaining yourself to long casts is a bad idea in many situations too.

In my view serendipity is a core talent and should have higher priorty than BR, which is simply an optional and non-essential talent.

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It appears there was an error in a formula in my excel spreadsheet. The actual uptime value is 55% for that sequence and the overall values are

Total regen
spi: 0.524
int: 0.763 (0.723 after nerf)

I don't know how you can get 43% uptime with 4 casts every 12s, with 28% crit. Or more precisely, you either have here a computation error, or you're assuming a weird cycle you don't specify.

HC duration is 8s, so what matters is how many cast you had in the last 8s.
4 cast every 12s can be simplified into 2.666 cast every 8s, leading to an uptime 58.3%.

If casts are assumed to be evenly distributed, then it's a cast every 3s, so at any time, you have 33% of chance of heaving only 2 casts in the last 8s, leading to an uptime of 48%, and 66% of chance of having 3 casts in the last 8s, leading to 63% uptime. So, the final uptime is 57.8% (for those who are sceptical about this kind of "time decomposition", read the theory of Palm probability).

The only way to get 42% of uptime is to consider that your 4 casts happen at the same time (or mathematically, you have 66% chance to have 4 casts in 8s, and 33% chance of having zero cast in the last 8s).

Hi, I pop in here once in a while to check out new priest stuff, but I love comparing gear with other priests.

So... I'm having a problem with my current setup right now.

I see these other priests with similar gear with about 5% more crit than I do (I'm even gemmed for crit... but I'm in the process of switching all my monarch topazes to luminous).

Does armory show people with raid buffs? I thought they fixed it so that all characters only show unbuffed stats. I'm obviously failing really badly here so any help to... make me not fail as much would be great

Thanks.

Your last PoH lands at 8 seconds and while it's conjecture, I'd imagine that any Prayer of Healing done 6 seconds after spike damage is likely to be mostly overheal. If the damage is ongoing, like in Mim ph2 then the 3% gain is a solid competitor to the ever diminishing value of the first hasted PoH of a maximum hps rotation.
Therein lies the true value of the spell. If a group of people are about to die within 2 (meaning 2.5 seconds is too long) then Serendipity is the best talent.
25% haste requires 510 haste rating from gear (according to Rawr which seems to get 1.25% from somewhere...) which is accessible in Uld25 gear. My gear's not amazing and I can hit it. Though I'd agree the further you are from 25% haste the greater the value of Serendipity becomes.

Btw, changing the rotation to add binding+flash pushes your second PoH to land at 7.5 seconds which is 1.5 seconds later than the other rotation. At that point you're likely to have a lot more overhealing, where it'd be better to front load as many of the PoH's as possible. Also I find it odd that you consider Bind+Flash preferrable to PoH considering you only get 3 heals in the same span of time that the other rotation gets 5. The total healing would be similar, but you've distributed it across 2 fewer players, which should not be your goal.

Honestly I think there are only a handful of absolutely essential talents for Holy. Meditation, Twin Disciplines, Spiritual Healing, Divine Providence and Guardian Spirit, with everything else coming down to what's optimal for your playstyle and gear.

It only shows completely unbuffed stats.

It seems to be on gems as well.

Wowhead has [Dazzling Forest Emerald] with 4 MP5 on its PTR site with the Dazzling Eye of Zul at 5 MP5.

I raid as Disc 100% of the time so I was already on the fence about switching from Int/Spi to Int/MP5 in my blue socket(s). This definitely does it.

Basically, I evaluate most or our holy talents as giving roughly 1% more "healing" when all things are considered.
That's what makes the difference between BR and SH. SH is a talent that is superior to most other talents in terms of throughput. BR is just in the mean, depending on the scenario you consider.

1% is the stated goal from Blizzard, but in reality pretty much every tree has a small number of good talents (2%+) and a good deal of "bad" talents (.5%-)

Talents, obviously, have to be evalutated based on their place in the tree. For example, we all know Twin Disciplines can't possibly be 1% per point (and is probably around 0.6% per point) and we all take it anyway. But because we know we are spending a lot of points on sub-par talents, without additional information, I would tend to select talents that are known to give 1% over talents with more difficult to gauge effects or that come into play rarely, since historically many of those talents have ended up being quite weak (Of course, this rule works better for dps than for healing, and I think the tide of history is turning a bit on this one).

At any rate, if you think 1% is lackluster and 2% is great, then it's important to note that the difference between 2% and 1% is 1%, so since 1% changes weak to great, we shouldn't be discounting 1%'s. If 3% actually never saves anyone, then it should be just as good to put 2 points in SH and 3 in BR as 5 in SH (actually only 2.69% behind). But we all know that it's better to do 3% more healing than not to do 3% more healing, even if it is rather banal (not that the above post says its not, but the idea that it's not seems to be floated around in a lot of posts about BR).

I'm not saying that 3% more healing is not better.
What I was saying is that when you evaluate roughly talents at 1% each (which is an approximation, we all know that some are better, some are worst), there is a huge difference between BR and SG. SG is a "BIS" talent, or a must-have, as it is clearly better than most talent. BR is in the average, depending on your play-style and the fight.

In other words, in all (or most) situation, an optimal holy tree will take SG, and any tree without SG won't be optimal.
On the opposite side, I guess we can construct cases where you get better results with other talents than BR. Not that BR is bad, it's a good talent. But it's not among the best we should take blindly in all cases...

You're overestimating the value of SG. Exactly how much you get from it depends a lot on your gear choices, high spirit and low spell power will increase its power compared to other throughput talents. Your spell selection has a very big impact as well. For most spells, the value of BR and SG is quite even with a small edge for SG, but nowhere near as big as you seem to think. ~1.1% benefit or so would be a fairly standard value. A few spells deviate from this though, most noteable renew for which SG blows BR out of the water. For PoM SG is also signifigantly stronger. However, for PoH BR is a bit better already now, and once the spell power coefficent gets nerfed with 3.2 the gap is going to be huge.

Overall, SG is the better talent. But I really wouldn't go as far as saying that its something you just have to pick if you think the 1% healing from BR is questionable.