I apologise for being very unclear here, I can see why you think I'm comparing priests to those classes instead of Holy and Disc.

Because of talents like Empowered Healing, Serendipity, Test of Faith, Spiritual Guidance, Spiritual Healing, even Surge of Light / the renew talents, Holy has outscaled Disc at Ulduar levels of gear in fights where you are the sole MT healer or MT healing in ten mans (although less often in 25 mans) and could be argued to be superior MT healing spec out of the 2 choices.

Divine Aegis/Imp Flash Heal are currently RNG based whereas the Holy talents are not and provide reliable MT healing with HPS output independent of crits. Disc obviously excels in fights where you have to shield a lot of raid targets - but as I said, sometimes you do a 10 man with a Ret paladin, and sometimes your shamans/paladins don't login!

My guild does Anub P3 25-HC healing in the same way as you're suggesting, with Disc priests easily able to "catch" 2 Penetrating Cold victims before the first ticks through PW:S. To be pedantic, yes, a paladin COULD do the same role with Holy Light (first target) + Holy Shock (second) but I'm not concerned about that. After this, I do alternate Flash Heals on each of these 2 people. However, last week, one of my 2 targets died 1s after taking a 4.8k Flash Heal (1.1s cast) from me. This is because one of my core talents, Grace, can only be on 1 target at once so the only "increased healing multiplier" I had on Flash Heal as Disc over being untalented (0/0/0) was 4% increased healing done. I had not critted so there was no Divine Aegis.

Admittedly, this was only an issue because he had not received support healing.

Sorry to go off-subject here, but I havn't seen much discussion on the Twins(Valkyr). This in paticular regards the 25man Hardmode encounter

We're having a lot of raid healing issues, people are literally just dropping off like flies, even though they arent hitting wrong orbs ect. We just can't seem to get the heals out and keep people topped off. Unfortunatley we don't have any resto druids, and I think not having the rolling hots is really hurting us. Our healing comp is

2 Holy Pallys
2 Resto Shamans
1 Holy Priest
1 Disc Priest

We've tried the door strat with the Holy Nova Glyphs, but we decided not to cheat the system, and went with the normal strat.

So I have three questions

Should the Disc priest go Holy?
Should we spec into Empowered Renew and try healing like that? My Chosen Renew Spec

And I guess last off, what healing comp did everyone else use? What strat did you use? I'm open to any and all suggestions.

It's all about controlling the balls. If people are eating the wrong colour balls, then you're not going to be able to heal through it consistently. If people are only taking aura ticks, and are resetting their debuffs, then it's almost trivial to heal.

If you want to run 6 healers total, then I do suggest getting your healers somewhat stationary positions (esp. the paladins and shamans), have the priests go holy (PoM is ridiculously good, and you really want the reduced cooldown and CoH for this fight), and adapt as needed. Part of the fun of Twins is the number of different ways the fight can be done.

What strats did you use? The strat they want to go with seems odd and requires 3 healers to basically be constantly be moving.

We have the healers stand evenly spread out around the middle in a circle. Myself a holy pally and and one of the resto shaman went Light, the melee Light, and the rest of the raid dark. The problem is that us 3 healers spent almost all of our time running away from dark orbs. And we can't have all of the healers go the same color for obvious reasons.

And for the Disc priest, would you agree more healing over mitigation for this encounter?

Here is my normal Holy Spec , but again, should myself and the other priest spec for empowered renew? and regem some gear?

Heres our World of Logs from tonight, maybe someone can figure out what we're doing wrong

FYI, but the Dark buff lasts 33% longer than the Light buff.

And actually, I see no issues with all of the healers going the same color. Tanks pop cooldown on the opposite Light Vortex, and the Holy Paladin bubbles himself and stands still nuke healing both tanks with HL/BoL.

As for Disc, I am normally Disc specs, but on this fight I don't feel Disc is very strong. The aura will eat most of the shields anyways, which; while making us look good on absorb meters, doesn't really counter the burst damage components.

On the otherhand, I felt when damage was coming it was always in bursts, and tends to be in aoe bursts as well (ie a ball hitting the melee camp, or people running to a portal) and CoH really shines here. Empowered Renew is better suited to counter the damage-aura than Power Word: Shield and Prayer of Mending should be perpetually bouncing. Body & Soul coupled with Guardian Spirit don't hurt at all either.

On a fight like Twin Valkyr, it's a matter of raw HPS.

PWS spam is capped at somewhere around 8.5k HPS (~7k shield, ~1.5k glyph, 1s GCD). On most fights, that's excellent, because (in WotLK raiding) you can be fairly certain that your shields will be absorbed, leading to extremely low "overhealing" for Disc Priest raid healers on most encounters.

On a fight with massive ongoing AOE, the "overhealing" advantage evaporates. PWS will have close to zero overhealing, but so too will Renew, Holy Nova, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending and all the other spells which allows Holy to absolutely shine. Simply spamming Renew is likely to be higher HPS (~13k healing, 1.3s GCD, ~= 10k HPS ), and as Holy that's your filler spell between CoH and PoM.

There's also no advantage to burst mitigation for Disc, since your shields will be eaten on a regular schedule about 4-6 seconds after you cast each one. You can't pre-shield in anticipation of an orb explosion.

Unfortunately it's impossible to actually measure the relative contribution, since WoL simply can't handle absorbs for this particular fight. Logically however, there's no way PWS spam should be able to compete with Holy AOE healing potential.

Well, I used 4pc t8 + the highest possible spellpower value I could get as a disc priest in this fight and did very well. Including demonic pact I had >3500 spellpower which means ~8.1k shields + 1.6k glyph heals. Please also take into account that the healing of the glyph often crits, which increases hps further. Using Prayer of Mending will also increase your hps so that you can easily achieve >10k hps as a disc priest in this fight as well.

It's a matter of taste I think. Both specs are perfectly fine for this boss.

This sort of situation was what made me swap to Holy for 10-man anub hard. I found that sometimes the penetrating cold targets died even though I was exclusively dedicating myself to keeping them alive. I wrote a little simulator of healing through penetrating cold with my discipline spec and found out that if I shield both targets then proceed to alternate flash heals then there is about a 3% chance someone dies. 3% might be unacceptably high if there was only one penetrating cold cast, but there are numerous ones, and this just adds up to a rather extreme chance of losing people. I think james is dead on here, discipline is still a fantastic healing spec, but if you are going to assign a single healer to take care of a large amount of damage to one or two targets, discipline is falling behind holy because of a lack of scaling talents and, I think, very clearly behind all the other classes.

Fortunately I don't think that scaling is any cause for worry. There is only one more tier of content in this expansion, a tier where presumably discipline priests will continue to be great for many fights thanks to shields. After that all talent trees will have a significant redesign thanks to the mastery system, and the discussion of who is good for what will get a reset.

My guild just downed Twin Valks on 10-man hard mode last night. We two healed it with myself as Holy and a Holy Paladin.

I've been mostly playing Discipline in ToC and made a few attempts as Disc but I went Holy for this encounter. Discipline's shields can absorb a lot of damage on that fight but I felt pretty ineffectual as Disc compared to Holy. As Disc I had two potential strategies: shield spamming with Penance/FH/PoH while Weakened Soul is up on everybody or Penance/FH/PoH and use shields for bursts. I wasn't happy with shield spamming because it left me powerless during bursts because of Weakened Soul. I wasn't happy with heal spamming because I couldn't really keep up with the damage aura without tossing out a lot of shields. Also, even if I use shields to protect people hit with a burst I still have to top them up. The damage aura will deplete their shields pretty quickly which didn't leave me much time to do that.

The fight seemed to go much more smoothly with me playing Holy. As Holy PoM heals for more damage and can be thrown out more often. PoM is incredibly powerful in this fight. CoH and PoH are incredible for getting people up if a few orbs pop. Renew is incredibly efficient and effective in this fight. Plus I think Guardian Spirit is a much better cooldown for this fight especially if glyphed. In short, this fight was made to let a Holy Priest shine.

Eve: I would recommend going with a renew centered spec. Here is the spec I used. Unfortunately I don't have a WoL report to link to. As I recall from Recount, though, approximately 30% of my healing was Prayer of Mending, 30% was Circle of Healing, 30% was Renew, and the remaining 10% was a mixture of Prayer of Healing, Flash Heal, and Empowered Renew.

Looking at your log I think you must not be casting PoM on cooldown -- you definitely should be. You're also casting way too many flash heals. Replace those with talented Renews. Myself I really only bothered with Flash Heal on Surge of Light procs.

My personal experience with healing anub10 on hard has been much more favorable to Disc than Holy.

Not only do I find shields useful to maintain low health, but a disc Holy Nova (with some DA procs) is perfect to help keep up my entire party without much help even in the face of penetrating cold. Besides, when things get hairy, and this applies to both specs, I usually pop DH and by itself that spell (with inner focus) can keep up with the dmg in phase 3.

I wouldn't worry about regemming just yet. Besides, since haste lowers the GCD, haste should be fine for Renew. And crit still powers Surge of Light / Holy Concentration, so it's not exactly bad.