When I originally read the tooltip for Divine Hymn, I perceived it was similar to Tranquility but raid wide and selected the three least healthy people and only healed them for the duration. After a little testing, I too have found that this is an invaluable spell for fights which have larges-scale, raid-wide damage. I.e. Ignis, XT, Kologarn, Hodir all as examples. I've macro'd Inner Focus with Divine Hymn to soak up that 2k+ mana cost and the +crit chance doesn't hurt either.

I'm also finding Prayer of Healing pretty godly on these fights too (less so on XT).

Here's some WWS stats from our Ulduar heroic opener the other night, The first six bosses down in the start of our raiding week. This link goes directly to our XT one-shotting and my healing just to show the single Divine Hymn effective healing of 134k+ for no mana.

As a side note, i'm stacking spell power these days and totally ignoring spirit or mp5 in any form. I'm not having mana issues and only a couple of occassions so far had to use a mana pot (Hodir being an example).

My primary spec is now Holy and only go Disc for encounters/roles which allow it to shine.

Why wouldn't holy spec affect it, that would make no sense. As for inner focus, that's another deal. My logs seems to indicate that it doesn't increase the crit % of it, but the sample size isn't big enough to say for certain.

Why is discipline so good for this fight? Does rapture work through the mana regeneration supression aura? Is it just because you can can very powerful shields while benefiting from the mana reduction of shadow crash?

We did it with two holy priests last week.

I'll list the reasons:

1) All damage is single-target.
2) PW:S is great HPM. PW:S with a 70% mana reduction is ungodly HPM.
3) Assume no illumination. Is there a single heal in the game more cost-effective than Penance?
4) Power Infusion - also reduces mana costs!
5) 15% Intellect Bonus

That being said, I did this fight holy to help out with the kiting, but I'd rather be disc in a heartbeat.

I've been raiding 10 and 25-man Ulduar with 14/57/0 Holy.

So far, I've found myself topping healing meters in every boss so far. My HPS has been around 3000 to 5200, thanks to PoH and CoH. Our raid usually includes 1 shammy, 2 priests, 2 holy paladins and 2 druids.

What I've noticed, is that haste becomes very, very important. After they repaired the PoH 2 fast cast bug, I've noticed that almost every fight benefits from haste. Especially Hodir and Kologarn. In Hodir, where you can have haste buff - you can really see how important haste is for Holy priest.

Currently I lack haste in my gear, but it will be changed after few upgrades. Mana hasn't been an issue in Ulduar for me, but I've used all CD's in every fight.

Sorry to change the subject dramatically, but is anyone having threat problems in Ulduar? On trash and every fight with adds, short of kologarn, I seem to find myself the object of desire for all the mobs. Having installed an aggro warner, fading as fast as I can I cant do anything more really short of not healing. It would be nice to know if anyone else is having these issues (which I have put down to threat from aoe healing) or if its a failure of our tanks.

Pretty much only on Ignis, and only if an add spawns just as I'm starting to heal a Flame Jets cast. I'm sure I've pulled aggro on other stuff, it's just not often enough that Fade can't take care of it.

Any advice for Thorim? I am holy and stay out in the Arena as one of 4 healers out there. Two of us get a tank while the other two are raid healing. The problem is that we are arguing over how to set up the arena. One strategy has us clustered in the middle with the tanks on the outside laying concentrate/D&D, however, the slow casting debuff hits us here and healing becomes nearly impossible to catch up on.

When I have moved to the outside, for the first couple of waves it is okay, however, at about the 3 minute mark the healers start drawing aggro and it's a domino effect, however we are not affected by the slow casting debuff.

I am an advocate of spreading around the arena with the tanks/dps in the middle in a triangle formation. This way even if a healer does get the slow casting debuff there are 3 others there that shouldn't be affected. The lightening orb is not that big a deal to heal through either.

So how are you guys standing in there? Because honestly the arena is what is killing us at the moment.

What healing setup are you using? Druids are fantastic for Arena healing because of that slow, along with disc priests shielding as often as possible. We stand on the outer edges of the middle, normally in a tank's death and decay or consecrate. I still have to fade on most cooldowns but it worked well on our first night on him kill.

We were running 2 holy priest, 1 paladin, 1 shaman in the arena

A disc priest and druid in the tunnel.

On the attempt that we had the druid in the arena and me in the tunnel as holy we seemed to work okay, but up top got overwhelmed.

On that note too, how many people do you guys normally send through the hallway? We have been sending 10 which is 1 tank, 2 healers and 7 DPS.

Do you need 3 healers in the guantlet? The damage seemed pretty light, but then we only made it up to the second boss before the big white ball of death came and killed us! The worst was the multiple WW's on the tank when he was stunned but it was easy to heal through.