I see where you are coming from on the use of GHeal. Though I personally would be concerned less with the DA in this scenario because as you point out it should average to even playing ground. My actual concern would be Inspiration up time at various amounts of crit. FH provides double the opportunity in a given period of time to proc Inspiration, with the increased CD on Penance it is no longer a reliable source of maintaining the buff on its own.

I doubt that's a big problem. The inspirationsbuff has a duration of 15 seconds. If your really pushing maximum hps onto the tank you will have - worst case (so only once penance during this timespan, weakened soul up) something around 8 chances to proc inspiration (1x penance and ~5x greater heal). With 35% crit that's ~97% chance of refreshing inspiration during this timespan (very sloppy napkin math, I know). Of course, if damage ist slow enough that you can employ cancelcasting, you wouldn't have that many, but in this case I'd rather switch back to flash heal anyway.

Actually might be time to think about a disc second spec, as I never seem to spec holy anymore these days, even when raidhealing.

Inspiration ist no problem, but many trinkets and enchants which have proccs or a per-cast application work much better with faster heals.
[Spark of Hope][Meteorite Crystal]etc.
And faster heals let you handle chaos and faults much better. GH wins only when the incoming dmg is to big for FH

Isn't that precisely what we're discussing? Flash Heal has never been able to keep up with tank damage on any hard-hitting bosses, and the increased cooldown of Penance makes it more dangerous to rely upon as a throughput tool.

You should also note in your comparison that 53/18 also frees up a glyph slot compared to 57/14. Prayer of Healing or Holy Nova glyphs can be rather useful (though not for tank healing, obviously).

Longer cast times also tend to favour high latencies. Playing in Australia using an SSH tunneling service, the best I can achieve is about 230. Without tunnelling, it's generally 350-450 with significant variability. The pre-casting patch (and previously /stopcasting) helps this somewhat, but it's not a perfect solution.

I completely agree that Disc excels in the raid triiage role, as PWS and Penance are amazing life-saving tools while both Flash Heal and Greater Heal are mediocre tank heals. However, a GH spec can perform this role just as well as a FH spec. My FH use really is quite minimal while raid healing.

We are, however, often assigned to tank healing. I'd argue that if you're one of multiple healers, 57/14 will generally be better for the faster heals and endurance, while 53/18 will generally be better for solo healing due to the significantly higher throughput of GH.

Of course it doesn't have to be one or the other. 57/14 with Divine Fury can use FH as the primary heal, and switch to GH when the tank is taking heavy hits. You can't sustain GH spam for long, but hopefully you don't need to.

I can't verify your numbers Aiel. Why is your average for gheal relatively lower than for fheal? I assume you use crit% to take a weighted average? As far as I know, you don't need to take haste, crit and DA into account as they have the same effect on flash and gheal.

More important thought: stop casting is far more effective when using gheal. It allows you to land a big heal early after a big hit, and top the tank back to full much quicker. Sarth310 back in January I was unable to solo heal the tank using only penance and flash. When penance was on CD, after a breath, flash isn't no where near good enough. You really need that 10k heal to land 1 second after the big hit. It's also far more mana efficient.

One more thing is lag. I have not been able to cast the theoretical max number of flash heals in a period of time. I can spam my flash key, but I won't ever make it. Gheal suffers slightly less from lag. Ties in with stop casting as well, as stop casting doesn't care for lag. Some of our DPS swears they can do it though. Must be me?

We'll have to wait and see what kind of damage patterns the bosses in TC use really...

AVG GH HPS without DF:
((4270+(3000*1.6135))*1.04*1.06*1.09) * ((1-0.35)+(1.95*0.35)) / (3/1,3)=6322.24 HPS

spellpower
SP coefficient
Focused Will
Tree of Life - Aura
Grace
crit multiplier + Divine Aegis
critical hit chance
casttime
haste

FH gains another 12% crit when your target is below 50% HP, which results in better avg HPS(0/5 Divine Fury)

How often have you stopped a heal and 0.1 sec later the big hit would have come? And I am not against the use of GH in crucial moments.

Some addons will calculate your lag and modify your castbar so you can see when your spell is already cast

The only potential difference between these two specs is the longevity when using GHeal not the throughput. Many standard 57/14 specs will have DF as the optional points over Spell Warding.


So far I am still MT healing and raid support shielding just fine. It does get a little scary when you don't have Penance when you really want/need it now. I have mostly used multiple flash heals and kept tanks alive. Though the first night in Ulduar HMs it took some getting used to the new Penance for sure.

I have only resorted to GHeal on a very few occassions and only with BT up. I run more haste than optimal for most Disc priests because I PoH a lot even while tank healing, so my Gheals take ~1.5sec. I have actually opt'd for keeping a renew ticking more than using GHeal because I can do PW:S->PoM->Renew and wait till the end of BT for a FH. That Renew runs till the next shield almost and I will have Penance to ensure the tank makes it there with solid health.

It seems like it to me. Priests in general have gotten used to never using the primary healing spell that a priest has, GHeal. It seems like Blizzard is wanting to change that for us...

I have yet to be tempted to use Gheal in 3.2. So far, I have healed MTs only on big fast damage situations, (NR beasts with 3-4 debuffs active on first phase), and bugged XT. Both scenarios i was using FlashHeal a lot more than pre-3.1, but that is to be expected i think. Without getting into a debate about FH v. GH, i still don't see the advantage of using GH unless it is for slow very hard hits.

It is kind of interesting to see how the conversation about greater heal use has evolved over the past several months.

I usually find myself MT healing, and I prefer to be the primary or sole MT healer. The holy paladins that I raid with prefer to beacon the tank and raid heal (this was true pre-3.2, and it's even more true now). Admittedly, I rarely use GHeal, but I refuse to give up DF because when I need GHeal, I need it as quickly as possible. Often utility is measured in average throughput, and having DF doesn't buy you much there. But when I think about how much DF allows me to prevent a tank death (and very probable raid wipe), it still seems more worth it.

I used GHeal in a very specific situation. Most of the time, tanks have pretty high avoidance and do not take double, triple, or worse hits often. The first big hit damaging the tank gets a penance, but if they tank gets hit again in the middle of penance and I know the tank will not be near topped after penance, I immediately go to Gheal next. After a string of avoidances, a first hit is almost completely taken care of by PW:S+PoM, so GHeal may not come up except on triple hits or maybe when you have 3 hits in four attacks. That is not very often percentage wise, but GHeal still has its place for me... at least for now.

I do think GHeal has a fairly tiny window of usefulness. When the tank is near full, it isn't useful unless you know a big, unavoiadable hit is inbound. When the tank is very low, it is too slow, and you flash heal despite a (slightly) lower HPS from FH because you may not survive the extra cast time. But when a tank gets hit in the middle of penance, the tank is often in good enough health he could survive the GHeal cast time and yet could also benefit from the larger heal, and that is when I use it. In that situation, it is great.

I think for tank healing, the issue of DF versus spell warding comes down to whether you are dying from spell damage much. If so, then maybe you have to go with spell warding, but I do not doubt that DF does allow you to pull out GHeal when needed and thereby improve your ability to keep a tank alive.