Holy Concentration also procs from Renew, which is the main reason for it. The other motivation is that if you are in a situation where you need to chain bomb Greater Heals for some reason, you're guaranteed virtually full uptime on Holy Concentration, giving you the mana regen when you need it most.

In other words, Holy Conc gives you less mana when you don't need it and more mana when you do. Besides, if you are spamming renew enough to get use from Mental Agility, Holy Concentration could have been up as well, due to Empowered Renew procs.

That's true, but I'm basing this off the numbers you initially posted regarding holy concentration. You were saying 100% uptime ends up being ~109mp5 given 1200 spirit and 1000 int.

I just took a quick look at our logs for Thorim, and while using renew almost exclusively while mending and circle were on cooldown, I didn't surpass a 50% uptime of holy concentration.

So using those numbers for spirit and int, it puts holy conc at ~55mp5 in a fight where I'm using renew a LOT. Whereas mental agility saves me on not only every renew, but also every circle and mending I cast.

I don't have the mana costs in front of me atm, but just going off memory, isn't circle somewhere around 850 mana? Mental agility would save ~85 mana on each cast alone, which is a savings of ~71 mp5 if you're keeping it on cooldown. That's before factoring in mending and renew.

That's the main reason I'm probably going to swap out holy concentration and lightwell for mental agility.

But if you're using holy as a raid heal spec and disc as the direct heal spec, doesn't it seem that giving up lightwell is a significant loss? (Thinking about XT, Kol, Mim)

Admittedly I've not really put lightwell to great use despite having the talent. I can say that I think it's unnecessary for XT and Kolo as the damage is all able to be healed up very quickly. I don't have experience with Mimiron though, so I can't say for sure there.

I've always tossed a point into it if I was able to spare the point, and if I had my heart set on having lightwell, I'd probably take the point from healing prayers or test of faith, but I can't really see a situation so far where we need people to worry about healing themselves. I have probably actually used lightwell more often to designate a spot or test range on something than people have actually used it to heal themselves. Though that's not a very good reason to not use the spell for something useful.

Lightwell has always seemed to be a talent that you get more use out of in 10mans than in 25mans. I use it a lot in a 10-man raid, but only really use it in a 25-man to heal myself or put a marker for my group ("don't get more than 36 yards from this or you will die to Tantrum you fools"). That said, I'm still addicted to the talent in an odd way.

I tend to agree with you about Empowered Healing and Improved Healing, though I think I'm a bit more hesistant to pick up Mental Agility. My problem with your spec: even when I focused on casting Renew a ton, it just didn't seem to make up a meaningful portion of my damage--worse in a 25man compared to a 10man. How much are you seeing renew heal on Recount/WWS? I basically capped out at 10%.

To me--10% healing does not justify more than one point in empowered renew, and only 2 points in improved renew (I prefer Holy Reach to get to tier 4). It's enough that I would seriously consider getting Blessed Resilence over additional points in Empowered Renew. Perhaps not having it Glyphed was detrimental to my renew-usage, though?

That said--20% off of Prayer of Mending (probably my most commonly cast spell) and Prayer of Healing is likely to solve my mana issues by itself, so I'm not sure it's worth giving up additional throughput to get Mental Agility.

Hey guys, haven't really posted here before, but i'll just share my thoughts about Ulduar.
First of all, very very nice instance,i like it much more than naxx.
About being discipline, we didn't have any in raid during our 25man Ulduar kill, don't really know any fight where it could be useful, maybe Razorscale, but that's 1 boss. 2nd holy priest is still very good, especially if you have 2set bonus of t8, +10% crit to PoH is crazy on some fights like XT, Mimiron, Ignis, or well any aoe healing fights, i really love it ( finally an awesome set bonus for us). Havent tested the 4set bonus, i only have 3 of it yet
What do you guys think of keeping the t7 2set bonus? I was thinking of taking it because PoM the spell which was the most useful for me on every fight, but i'm not sure, because i refresh it pretty often.

T7 2-set bonus is not worth the stat downgrade, in my opinion. Especially when you get the 4-piece t8 bonus which blows it away. While that bonus is worth a lot less for holy than disc, I'd still say the downgrade to t7 won't be worth it, maybe except for a sapphiron-style encounter. On the fights of Ulduar I've seen so far though, I haven't noticed my PoM being used up before it's cd was off, at which time I usually refresh it anyway.
So if there's 2 or 3 "jumps" left on it when I refresh it on a tank doesn't really matter, hence making the 6th bounce wasted in most situations.

On our Thorim kill, my renew ticks made up 12% of my healing and the empowered renew portion made up 7%, so 19% total. This was using a bare minimum of non-SoL flash heals and greater heals. Like I said before, I've been using renew to fill the time between CoH and PoM cooldowns.

I guess a lot of it will depend on what your other healers are doing. Despite about half my ticks going to waste from other healers topping people off, I'm able to get pretty good numbers from it. I have been using the renew glyph to try and get more healing out of the spell sooner.

This thread is rapidly devolving into spec and talent discussion, along with Glyphs. Let's try to keep it on-focus: raiding questions, raiding problems. There's another thread for theorycraft: this is for Ulduar fights, how you've approached them, and (typically) the problem you're having.

Long time lurker, first time poster.

TBC I was Holy, switched to Disc pre-3.1 and now i'm Disc and Holy pve dual specs.

After a week of Ulduar, I thought i'd share some of my experiences with the relevant specs and encounters (which matter).

We run with 7 healers usually and the split of classes can change from night to night. But we generally have at least one of each healing class.

Razorscale: We had three tanks and two groups, one group (and tank) on each side taking the standard mobs while the third tank would hover in the middle picking up the WW mob. Ranged (generally on the left group) would switch to dps down the WW mob on the middle tank whenever it was up. I tried both Holy and Disc on this fight (pre-balancing the enrage time i'll add) and found Disc to be the superior. I was the only Disc priest in the raid however. I would also choose to heal the third tank and cover anyone hit by a fireball with a quick PWS & Penance assuming my tank wasn't taking damage.

Ignis: This is a fairly healing heavy fight, with raid wide damage which needs to be topped off. Holy is the obvious choice, but as we were losing people in the pot, I swapped from tank healer to pot / raid healer so opted for Disc to fire a PWS & Penance as necessary. I found that it was useful to stop using any non-instant casts when Ignis was close to casting the Jets and after they were cast would be to follow up with PoH (yes, as Disc) on 1-2 designated groups while the other priest (Holy) would do the same on another 1-2 designated groups. I personally found that Disc was great to keep the potted person alive (PWS, PoM, Renew as instants if Jets are incomming, otherwise PWS, Penance).

XT: I went Holy for this solely for Lightwell. We positioned XT on the bottom of the steps with the MT half way up the steps, melee were behind the boss and the ranged / healers positioned in a semi-circle behind. Lightwell was dropped just behind the melee ready for the Tantrum. While I was on tank healing, the Lightwell / CoH was useful for topping up the melee during tantrum if Lightwell was used up and on cd.

Kologarn: Opted for holy on this as was MT tank healing but wanted the benefits of Lightwell, CoH and Renew. Dropped the Lightwell just on the threshold of the door so that anyone getting the beams can run back and then across the doorway and top themselves up with the Lightwell. PoM was pretty nice on this fight too.

Iron Council: Two healers per tank - Steelbreakers tank had myself and a druid. I'd pre-warned the druid that when Fusion Punch was incomming I would stop healing and spam dispell to remove that nasty debuff asap. Once Steelbreaker was down, dps moved to Runemaster and myself and the druid helped out raid healing. I went Disc for this just because of the ability to pop a PWS on the Steelbreaker tank (and anyone in the Death Rune) just before Fusion Punch ready for dispell. Seemed to work fine.

Auriaya: Opted for Disc for faster Mass Dispell casts on the fear. Would keep myself Fear Warded (and i'm undead) so would Mass Dispell immediately. We had two priests (myself Disc and the other Holy). Pull: The Main tank would be out of LoS, the beast tanks would take two each (from two hunter MD's) and on the pull would get a Pain Supression / Guardian Spirit while getting spam healed. We would kill one beast on each tank to reduce the damange on those tanks. From then on it's easy enough.

Hodir: Oh how I love this fight. MT had a paladin, druid and shaman at all times. The other four healers (two of which were Holy priests) were spread in three rough ranged groups. I found that keeping PoM up all the time was awesome. I would generally save CoH for Flash Freeze as everyone was gathered and would regroup on full health ready for the Frozen Blows - PoM, Renews, Binding Heal and Flash Heal depending upon the requirement. Really loved this fight.

The Hodir fight is the only one which i've felt was really healing intensive (more so than Ignis as at least you know that people aren't going to die from one lot of Jets assuming they were topped off beforehand). Frozen Blows is the only ability that needs to be dealt with for 20 seconds.

Here's my WWS stats from our Hodir kill. WWS for Holy Priest on Hodir.

If people would like other WWS stats for the other kills, please let me know and i'll dig them out.

You made an error for the spirit regeneration rate:
using Constantius formula (which I checked on my character), you sould get 634 MP5 ooFSR with 1200 spirit and 1000 int, and 317 MP5 while casting. 100% uptime holy concentration leads to 158 MP5, and 40% uptime is 63 MP5.


So, point per point, Holy concentration grants 53 MP5 at 100%, and 21 MP5 at 40% uptime.
For my character, without any talent, POM cost 580 mana and POH 1850. Each point in healing prayers save 10% of these. Assuming one POM every 10s, that's around 30 MP5 saved. At 40% uptime, one point in healing prayers saves already more than one point in HC. For 100% uptime, you need an additional gain of 23 MP5, which is equivalent to 1 POH every 40 second.
For raid healing, I would consider HP as more important as HC therefore.

Now, let's try to evaluate the third available regen mana talent : Mental Agility. That's 10% less for each instant cast, for 4 points (I include the point needed to reach the tier).
Instant cast are POM, COH and renew.
POM is (assuming 2/2 HP, which you should have if you want to take MA) for me 464 mana per cast. COH is 21% of base mana. With 3k86 base mana, it's 811 mana. Renew is 656.
Each of the four point saves 2.5%, that's around 11 for POM, 20 for COH and 16 for renew.
Assuming 1 COH and 1 POM every 10s (over the whole fight), each point saves at least 15 MP5. If you throw 1 renew every 15s, then you beat, point per point, the 40% uptime of HC. You need two renews every 5s to beat the 100% uptime of HC.

For a summary, I would basically rank the regen talents as follows : Healing Prayers > Holy Concentration > Mental Agility. If you use a lot renew, you may prefer anyway MA to HC. Finally, one additionnal advantage of Holy Concentration is that it is also useful when you use a lot flash / gh (for example, as tank healing), and almost never COH / POM. But as my dual spec is Disc, I'm not often holy for such fights.

EDIT : I know it is not the right thread, as Nibada pointed. However, I thought it was better not to let the calculation error fool people, and reply in this thread. People do not usely question what they read. Move this post to any other thread, if you think it is appropriate.