Just a preface: I recently got back into wow having not played since BC and have been pouring over these forums trying to catch up on all the changes for priest healing. I pretty much skipped naxx and uld healing going straight from heroic gear into toc (our server is in need of tanks/heals). I know my gear is hap-hazard but all the raids that I am in are pugs, also leading towards the conclusion that I am shooting for more versitility than a specialized role.

I see the debate currently is about regen over output (spr+crit) and that most people are all in one or the other. For most raids after most fights I'm finding myself wishing my s-fiend CD was 5 seconds faster due to teh fact that my healing style is hardly ever os5sr. One question I have is that its suggested in the origional post to be at about 1200/1200 int spirit. I cannot fathom how to get that much spirit. I'm sitting almost comfortably around 900 spirit ub and its working out just fine. I have 2 pieces that i can interchange depending on which fight i'm looking for.

Now that the new T.9 gear is so easily accessable by just pugging, has anyone crunched the numbers with the set bonuses? Spell power and int would become more important with a direct 10/20% increase in the healing done by PoM/ renew. Also, I almost don't see the value in the 4set bonus holy if you don't spec for it.

Also, is disc aoe healing a valid idea? I'm thinking spamming HN in your group to proc aegis for short burst aoe may compare with holy CoH, PoH at least in the short term but I haven't checked any numbers on that yet.

Last I heard regarding the 4t9 bonus was that it's a relative rather than an absolute percentage boost i.e. your Divine Aegis shield goes from 30% to 33% and the emp. Renew instant heal from 15% -> 16.5% (in other words, it sucks). They may have fixed it in one of the recent mini-patches or on the 3.3 PTR, but if so I haven't seen the report.

When glyphed, Holy Nova should give better HPS and HPM than PoH, especially as Discipline, but obviously the additional positioning and self-group-only limitations are a big factor for many fights. Depending on the encounter mechanics you can do a lot of pseudo-AoE healing with preemptive shielding, but there aren't any fights in ToC that particularly favour this strategy.

I think you are incorrect here.
Northrend Beasts you have very predictable aoe damage. You can easily shield up all the melee prior to a stomp.
Jaraxxus you can shield up the melee right before the volcano spawns.
Twins you know when the next special is comming and can easily be throwing shields up on a group or two to help mitigate if the wrong vortex happens.

I'm not saying that preemptive PW:S shielding has no utility in ToC, just that there aren't attacks like Freya's Ground Tremor or (back when it was challenging) Ignis' Flame Jets, where it really shines. In ToC raid damage tends to be localised (Gormok stomp/Jaraxxus infernals), which affects 8 - 10 people typically, RSTS, or DoT effects (Penetrating Cold, Twins aura ticks).

I'm usually given free reign to heal the raid however I want, and I tend to only bother going Disc for Faction Champs, and the principle driver in that fight is a much faster cast time on Mass Dispel for the Bloodlust. Usually it misses 1 or 2, due to the lack of hit on my healing gear, and I can easily afford the second cast without batting an eyelash.

PW:S spamming does well on that fight. It also does well on Twins.

There isn't enough AoE dmg going on in Northern Beasts to be particularly useful as a prebubbler on that fight, imo.


My biggest beef with Disc is that ToC relies on multi target healing a lot more than Ulduar and Naxx did, even for tank healing, and losing your Grace stack hurts too much.

This is my biggest beef too. I have ended up using Binding Heal a lot of the times where I cannot afford to lose Grace but must have a heal out on a raid member.

The beauty of the shield is that it often allows your other healers to finish their casts before the low health target dies. As Holy it has happened to me a number of times that players have died because our Pala's Holy Shock was on cooldown and nobody else had any instants ready. Of course Disc has Penance too, which is great for upping people's health quickly.

Gemming Int is by far the best choice for a holy priest, and as far as your throughput loss....Its really quite insignficant tbh. As far as use of hymn of hope. While this may be convenient on fights like northrend beast with down time where you have the chance to use it, Twin valks heroic 25 doesent really allow you 6 seconds to cast the spell unless you like watching people die while you miss 5 globals that could be spent healing the raid.

Not only does gemming int give you regen but it imrpoves throughput by giving you more crit.

While in a situation where content is on farm status gemming for more burst healing might be better, I would rather error on the side of knowing I'm not going to go OOM

Furthermore using a spreadsheet model or even rawr will let you know when your sustained healing is equal to your burst healing given the approximate encounter length(they also calculate hymn of hope, shadowfiend, and mana pot usage into the equation)

Therefore until your sustained healing and burst healing numbers are equal for a given encounter length(provided that you are never outside 5 second rule) you will always be better off gemming for int in yellow sockets, sp int in red sockets and int/spirit in blue sockets.

If I swapped my gemming from spellpower focused to int focused, I'd lose almost 200 spell power. That's about a 3% loss to CoH, FH and GH, and a 4% loss to Renew. If I gemmed int, I'd gain about 1% crit, which is less than half a percent gain in throughput for CoH, FH, and GH, and almost no gain for renew. None of my gems have any intellect on them, but I've never really had any kind of mana trouble in ToC that shadowfiend couldn't solve.

You simply don't need to sustain your "burst healing" pattern the whole fight for ANY fight. Even fights like Heroic Twin Val'kyr have sections where damage is going to be more predictably spiky than others, such as when a new set of orbs spawn (non-door strat) or the off-color vortex goes off (door strat). You want your throughput to be as high as it can be for those dangerous times, even that means you don't have enough mana to spam prayer of healing the whole fight.

Yeah i dont see losing 200 sp for me as being a big deal. I find being able to sustain my maximum potential healing more important than the 200 sp.

As i said i suppose it could be preference, however each guild is going to have varying levels of healer skill, and style for that matter. So this could readily change your outlook.

I find it interesting that you cast greater heal as a holy priest. I would think since you are concerned about throughput that you would be completely ignoring any and all talents related to greater heal in favor of talents that will boost all of your healing spells.

As holy i find greater heal is basically a waste of a global. You get virtually the same amount of healing out of 2 flash heals, double the odds of procing SOL, double the chances at proccing inspiration, and double the chances of proccing holy conc. On top of this if you are specced in a way that doesent augment greater heal (no empowered healing, no divine fury, no improved healing) Then you most certainly will get more out of 2 flash heals. And greater heal would only be useful for healing tanks anyways. As stated earlier why would you ever be tank healing as holy when you can just offspec Disc and be a much more efficient single target healer.

I didn't see you say it was a preference. "Gemming Int is by far the best choice for a holy priest," and "Therefore until your sustained healing and burst healing numbers are equal for a given encounter length(provided that you are never outside 5 second rule) you will always be better off gemming for int in yellow sockets, sp int in red sockets and int/spirit in blue sockets," seem to say the opposite.

I don't cast greater heal much. I was just using it as an example of what 200 spellpower does for you.

I do plan to cast it a lot on Valithria Dreamwalker though. A fully talented, serendpity-stacked greater heal does more than double the healing of flash heal in only 22% more time. On a fight like Valithria, Inspiration and Holy Concentration are largely irrelevant, and Surge of Light is a throughput loss while standing still, though it could be nice to allow you to heal while moving towards a portal.

Greater Heal is a great spell. There's no real reason not to take Divine Fury. Even if you need Healing Focus and Desperate Prayer you can still get 4/5 because Improved Healing is rather pitiful. I know that some people prefer Spell Warding. And while it does probably occasionally save my own life, I feel that a faster Greater Heal saves more lives.

Serendipity is a great talent not only because it allows burst AoE healing but also burst single target healing. Hasted Greater Heals are great for healing spiky, inhomogenous raid damage, like it occurs a lot on Faction Champions and Jaraxxus. It's also good for healing Incinerate Flesh on Jaraxxus. The output of a three stack Serendipity Divine Fury Greater Heal is somewhere in the region of 7k to 10k single target healing per second. And if I heal someone to full quickly, after they got Pain Spiked for example, then the other healers can focus on their tasks.

As always with Holy it's about having a big tool box and picking the right tool for the job. Having fast Greater Heals available is one such tool. Greater Heal has more throughput and is more efficient than Flash Heal, even untalented. It's not amazing on every fight, but it definitely has its uses.

The "problem" with Greater Heal is that you need to spend some specific talent points to make it worthwile and even then it's usefulness is debatable. The HPM and HPS of Greater Heal are both higher than Flash Heal assuming all healing done is effective healing, but we all know that overhealing happens alot especially when singletarget healing during our role as raidhealer. Due to the slower cast speed overhealing is simply inevitable and this hurts HPS and HPM alot.

Next to that it also matters how fast your heal lands. Most of the times Flash Heal is used to cover single target spike damage. In that scenario you want to heal the target as fast as possible to prevent any more possible incoming damage to kill the target. Flash Heal simply lands faster than Greater Heal and this can mean the difference between an alive and dead raid member, thus it's more safe to use than Greater Heal.

Furthermore Flash Heal gives Serendipity stacks contrary to Greater Heal even though that's not a big deal. However, the amount of total casts is also important. Flash Heal has a shorter cast time, so you will most likely also use it more often than Greater Heal. This means more Holy Concentration, Surge of Light and Inspiration procs obviously.

Of course there are some situations, like the mentioned Incinerate Flesh, where it is very useful because the "HPS" can't "overheal" there. Some people don't mind taking Divine Fury over Spell Warding, but each to their own. Personally I'm not missing Divine Fury (and Empowered Healing) at least.

I can see why people spec for Greater Heal supporting talents when they don't have a Disc offspec for tankhealing however, because it proves to be very useful in combination with Serendipity on huge singletarget spike dmg on tanks.

edit.

A 3-stack of Serendipity will make the cast time of Greater Heal equal to that of Flash Heal if you've taken 5/5 Divine Fury. If I've got a full stack of Serendipity and someone is at a 10k health deficit I see no reason to cast Flash Heal on them over Greater Heal. Every once in a while I'll toss a 3xSerendipity GH on a tank if the tank healers seem to be a bit behind.

Serendipity + GH make for some excellent single-target burst healing when needed. I don't cast a lot of PoH in ToC so I don't mind using my Serendipity stacks for a GH. I can't think of a fight in ToC25 or ToGC10 where we wiped because I died to spell damage. I'm often one of the last people alive when we wipe.. therefore I see no point to taking Spell Warding over Divine Fury. Perhaps things are different in ToGC25.

Greater Heal does not need any unattainable talents to be effective. The main talents talents affecting Greater Heal are:
- Serendipity, most Holy Priests have that
- Divine Fury, competes with Healing Focus (almost useless) and Spell Warding (same)
- Improved Healing, Greater Heal is already fairly efficient, not used often enough to justify three points
- Empowered Healing, would be taken for the Flash Heal benefit normally, not for Greater Heal

I don't have Empowered Healing, but Serendipity and Divine Fury are enough to make Greater Heal very powerful. Discounting the use of GH because it has the potential to overheal a lot is silly. Prayer of Healing has huge overhealing potential, yet it is thought an important part of Priest healing.

Yes, it often matters how quickly a heal lands. But fully hasted with Serendipity and Divine Fury GH lands in about 1.5s (0.3s - 0.4s slower than Flash Heal). If your target is at risk of dying in that 0.3s then you should probably cast PW:S.

The general problem is that many people are dead set on comparing GH and FH, even though they are for different situations. I neither propose (nor do) to fully talent GH and use it instead of FH. In most situations FH is the better spell to use because GH is too big. But in some situations GH is the better choice because it heals for more.

The spell isn't easy to use. A Priest has to consider the overhealing potential, the slight delay in heal landing, the extra mana expenditure and whether to keep or use a Serendipity stack. If you want to be as good as you can be then consider if not sometimes GH may be the spell of choice, rather than to automatically press that FH button.

If you're a healer and you're one of the last people alive when you wipe, you're doing it wrong.

One of the important things to keep in mind when you're discussing GHeal are holy paladins. Their nuke heal is faster and hits harder and will more likely crit than yours will. Does GHeal have a place in a priest's arsenal? Of course, it's just a really really small one.

Another bump for Spell Warding btw. You would be hard pressed to find a log where you didn't take 10% of a single spell and lived, but considering the vast amounts of spell AOE damage and the dubious advantage for DFury (because you don't use GHeal that much), Spell Warding is the better choice imo.

I don't know how you sense that the "tank healers are a little behind." In general, if your tank healers are behind, your tanks are dead. It's not like you have the time to feel a tank getting low and come off of your raid healing assignment to spend 1.5 sec or so, hit the tank for 12k and save the day.

On the fights where the tanks are getting hit hard, they get hit hard and fast and I don't see how a GHeal instead of a FH saves the day.

It doesn't if you take exact number, so you're litterally correct.
But the difference is very small.
Discounting haste (which will have the same multiplicative effect on both cast time), a divine-fury GH is 2.5s long. If serenpidity is stacked, that's 35% less, so it's 1.6s.
At the same time, FH is 1.5s cast. Difference is 0.1s, that seems quite negligible for me compared to the output difference (if needed).

Now, haste will divide both cast time by the same number, so the difference will be divided by the same number.
That leads to a difference of 0.1s with 0%haste, 0.091 with 10% haste, 0.83s with 20% haste, 0.76s with 30% haste. I can buy the "a serendity stacked divine-fury talented greatheal takes the same time to cast as a flash-heal" argument. It doesn't rigorously, but the difference is nearly negligible.

Yes I can see your point. But the question about it's usefulness still remains. You will only cast it if the hp deficit of the target you are casting it on exceeds the healing a FH would do (unless the target has aggro perhaps for safety measure), else there would be no point to use it as it will most likely overheal.

But... Is it possible that other raidhealers are also healing the same target at the same time? If yes, is GH even worth casting or will it overheal or overheal only for a part? If the latter is the case, what will the HPM be compared to a (simple) FH? Would your GH make others overheal their whole heal? And at the end, is this situational use enough to spend 5 points in Divine Fury?

Another thing, I guess we can agree on that GH is only used when Serendipity is up with 3 stacks, right? So let's see what the difference is between a full Serendipity-stacked GH with and without Divine Fury.

GH + DF + 3x Serendipity = 1.6 sec
GH + 3x Serendipity = 1.92 sec

The difference is 0.32 sec for 5 talent points. Along with the fact that it is very situational in the first place I personally drew the conclusion that it is far too expensive for that matter.

I don't understand this, could you elaborate? I am certainly very often one of the last people to die. Obviously, with low boss threat, ranged class and numerous spells like Binding Heal, PW:S, Desperate Prayer to save myself.

Concerning Anub Phase 3 and Spell Warding: I don't see where it's supposed to be useful there. We set up the raid in such a way that some totem or shadow priest heals the group vs the aura, AE heals are forbidden. The rest is all about landing any heal/shield before the first PC tick, rest is a piece of cake anyway. The first tick will kill me anyway if I don't get something, with or without spell warding. So where is it useful here? (Ok, except if you tank healing - where you should be disc skilled anyway - Greater Heal won't be very useful on this encounter, either)

Thank you for clearing that up. No, the cast times are not exactly the same. In typical raid gear, unbuffed, I run with 616 haste. At that haste level my Flash heal is at 1.26s and my GH is at 1.35s. Quartz reports both as 1.3s which is why I said what I said. For all intents and purposes they are the same cast time. My apologies for not being exact..

You're right, it is a small benefit for 5 talent points. Then again, so is 10% reduction in spell damage taken in my opinion.

Agreed. I'm not sure where his/her comment came from. In my opinion you are doing something wrong if you are one of the first ones to die as a priest. Priests have a lot of spells to help keep them alive.

For all intents and purposes it seems as if the conclusion is greater heal is good with 3 stacks of serendipity for healing incinerate flesh, and for healing tanks when it seems as though the tank healers are behind. O and on faction champs for when a target is taking enormous amounts of burst dmg.

I find greater heal useless because i never encounter these scenarios.

We have one Pally healer for all of TOGC (aside from anub) and on anub we use 2. This one pally healer is specifically on tanks for every fight. He alone sustains our tanks with our other healers just hotting and POM/earthshield on them. The tanks are never in a situation health wise that would demand a priest to throw a greater heal on them period.

The same gos for incinerate flesh. Our one paladin healer heals it as his primary job while the other healers maybe toss 1 or 2 quick heals at them and its off within a few seconds.

For faction champs its the same story. If someone is taking sustained burst dmg then the paladin heals them. In a case where that's not enough Guardian spirit glyphed is a 1 minute cool down and is far superior to greater heal for any and all cases where people are in that sort of danger. And if people are in that type of danger more than 1 time in a minute then your raid needs to learn situational awareness or the CC has been assigned incorrectly.

People are right in that we have a ton of spells and many of them are situational and a top notch holy priest uses each one accordingly.

However for me as a raid healer i find 5 spells in my arsenal that pretty much cover every single situation in this order. POM,COH,RENEW,Surge of light FLASH HEAL, and POH.

That does not set in stone that these are all that should be used but what a holy priest excels at is healing burst dmg to a raid. And these spells are what you use to do that.

I find it strange that so many priest do not use renew all the time. On most hard mode toc fights i find that renew,coh,pom, and poh generally share a pretty close percentage of my healing done for basically every encounter with the exception of anubarak.