In terms of what stat to stack:

Spirit? The only time I ever even come close to running OOM is maybe on the first pull of a healing-intensive boss, seeing as I have no idea what to expect or when I should be using my cooldowns. Or when I can take a few seconds to just regen because I know no hard-hitting abilities are coming. Sure, you get 25% of the spirit as Spell Power, but since I'm not running OOM to begin with I'll delay that argument to the SP suggestion below...

Intellect? Relatively same concept as Spirit: I don't run OOM. And I sure as hell don't need the Crit.

Crit? Considering that I don't go OOM, neither do my other healers, and we can spam all day, all of this would go into overhealing. Just from incidental crit rating on gear and raid buffs, I have too many Surge of Light procs as it is. And once again, I certainly don't need the Holy Conc procs for more mana.

Spell Power? When was the last time a single person you were spamming during a boss fight died because you just couldn't heal them enough? Now ask yourself, was that the fault of your spells not hitting hard enough, or were all of your other healers asleep and forgot to switch to a high-priority target that they knew needed healing? When was the last time you healed someone and they instantly turned around and took a hit that overkilled them by say 500? Which transitions nicely too my final argument...

Haste? Now then, think back to every death that wasn't someone idiotically standing in fire. What were you doing? Were you mid cast on someone else? GCD-locked? Just didn't switch to them fast enough? All of the above? Once I realized that these are the reasons people don't get heals in time, I began to stack Haste. I'm around 1150 when not in a raid. I'm not going to stop stacking until my GCD hits 1.0 second with full raid buffs (I believe this is around 1250 or so).

At the end of the day, it's about what allows you to save lives. Haste does that above all else.

Makes logical sense. Thank you. I have been debating on stacking haste. Your statement convinced me. However, how do you find it effects or benefits you when you switch back and forth from disc. We lost our disc priest, and I am finding myself switching back and forth between holy and disc quite often now. Would it be more realistic to collect a set attuned to each? What do you think about sp/haste gems?

Absolutely. Once you start stacking Haste your Holy set becomes completely inept for handling Disc. Disc only needs approximately 300 haste before full raid buffs to reach the hard GCD cap for spamming PW:S. It's almost impossible to not have 300 haste incidentally just from random pieces of gear. No need to gem for it specifically.

For Disc basically just pick up pieces your Shadow priests desire (high SP, high Crit). Gem for SP. After getting that easy Haste cap all you really want is for your shields to prevent more damage, which SP does. PW:S has an insane fully-talented coefficient, approximately 1.51 if I recall. Disc scales ridiculously by stacking SP.

If you're tank healing as Disc that's a different matter entirely, and one that I'd bring up with your healing officer more than anything else. Disc is bad at tank healing at the current level of gear compared to other healers. You're much more useful on the raid.

It's pretty safe to say that a priest who doesn't go oom on an encounter is either doing something very wrong or just isn't healing enough. Alternativly, You have too many healers in the raid. My guesses is that your guild STILL runs with 6 healers during most of the part of ICC.

Truth to be told, as valuable as haste is, unless you can cast constantly for 10minutes, you do not have enough mana regen, this talk I hear "I don't go oom ever" is just utter talk. Mana management is the biggest issue for a holy priest and it makes us a burst healer, I overcome this by picking up haste gear and gemming sp/spi, sp/int.

On Blood-Queen I act as a "raidtopper" meaning druids/shamans do the rough healing, I top the groups up with PoH. Now as we all know PoH is INSANE throughput but also very very mana expensive, therefor unless you can cast PoH for an entire fight with approx 3sec in between every cast you do NOT have enough mana regen, our first kill I had to go through two innervates and my shadowfiend, I finished the fight at approx 60% mana.

Conclusion: The more mana you have, the more you can heal. The more haste you have, the faster you cast thus making you oom quicker if you do nothing but stacking haste.
Your goal is not to heal fast whenever you see someone go low, your goal is to heal overcoming the fact that blizzard so stupidly revamped our keytalents just to make us either a gimped druid or a situational healer.


I'm not even going to bother trying to change your minds about raising your spellpower as high as possible because it's pretty obvious that you're going to want as much as you can get, anyone not seeing how spellpower is effective is either very stupid or just plain ignorant, Both of your absolute mainspells which should always be used every single cooldown in close to every fight, CoH and PoM has no benefit from haste whatsoever apart from casting them 0.1sec faster due to lower GCD.

The better throughput and longetivity you have, the less healers your guild has to bring, the less healers you bring, the more dps you can bring, the more dps you bring the shorter the fight becomes thus making int, spirit and spellpower all very desirable. I'm not saying you should ever ignore haste because truth to be told you want haste on every single piece of your gear, but gemming for haste just to make your casts faster and/or closer in sequence ignoring the fact that you can improve your raid by being able to spam constantly for 10minutes is just plain stupid.


Sorry for the rough language, I get sad when I see priests discussing against priest basics. It doesn't take a uni education in rocket science to see why Spellpower, intellect and spirit are all very valuable stats.

We also use 5 healers, except on new fights, but that isn't my choice. Out RL thinks more healers will fix stupid.
I wasn't trying to argue priest mechanics, or basics. I was just curious as to why more and more holy priests are stacking haste. I currently use sp/spirit, sp/haste or sp gems. I just want to up my game.

Previous post obviously touched a nerve, so I'll try to be more tact:

It's pretty safe to say that a priest who goes oom on an encounter is either doing something very wrong or just isn't healing correctly.

No fight requires you to heal for 10 minutes straight. On fights now that last 5 minutes, I never have to stop casting in full Haste stacked gear. I don't need Innervates, I know how to time my own cooldowns and procs.

I really disagree tbh... You make it sound like on every fight you know exactly what's going to happen, how much mana you're gonna need and what spells you're gonna use. For farm content or old content I agree that haste is the superior stat because of what you have pointed out, but on progress raids I believe that spellpower is king and crit has it's importance. How often is your first kill of a boss perfectly clean, with 25/25 people alive and your mana at 40%? I know 85% of the time our first kills are very messy and we've usually only got 10-20 people alive with 2-4 healers spamming their lives out to keep the raid alive for the last %'s.

In situations like this, I think a priest with heavy spellpower, moderate crit, moderate haste and good regen is superior to a pure haste priest for the following reasons:

1. The pure haste priest is only good at furiously spamming spells to snipe heals and achieve good throughput. If 1-3 healers die/run OOM because of the raid falling apart, this priest will quickly find himself running out of mana aswell.

2. On the other hand, the more balanced priest will have slightly better regen and thus will last longer, he will also have much more crit and spellpower and potentially save people's lives with big PoH or CoH crits even though it takes him 0.6 more seconds to cast.

The way I see it, haste and crit basically do the same thing... without making your base heal stronger, they make it better by either making it fire off faster or giving it a chance to heal for alot more. The difference is that critting doesn't cost more mana, casting faster does. Also, the argument that "crits lead to overhealing" is in my opinion irrelevant because casting faster can just as well lead to overhealing.

Shadow priests do not stack crit. Crit is ok, but haste is better. This has changed with patch 3.3.

Also note that discipline healing not only includes shield spamming, but also PoH where haste is hugely useful. And that's not the end of it.

The hard cap theory assumes that Borrowed Time is always up. It isn't. Pw:S isn't always the most recent cast.

Overall, haste beyond the cap (which is really a soft, not a hard cap) isn't useless. It just loses part of its value. Balanced against crit, which is a stat of medium usefulness as well, I find it very hard to say which stat really wins out in the end.

At blood queen Lana'thel 10 man, for example, where I probably still spam too many shields, spells always affected by haste beyond the soft cap make up around 25% of my healing. Without lots of effort, I cannot say how many other spells were done under effect of Borrowed Time and which were not. I can however, easily say that at least a third of my healing was affected by running haste beyond the soft cap. For reference, here's the log: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

As soon as I manage to use less shields (average hit of 2,5k indicates many were not fully consumed), haste will become even more useful on that fight.

Be prepared for a long one:

Okay, so at the risk of sounding inflammatory, your post is complete garbage. First of all, the goal as a healer is most definitely not to go oom. It's actually quite a good sign if you complete a fight with surplus mana, because it indicates that you will be able to cope if something goes wrong in future (other healers die/dc/whatever proverbial shit hits the fan) and it also indicates that you are prepared for future encounters that will stretch your mana pool further. After informing us that a good priest healer goes oom, you then tell us that you weren't even close to oom on your first Blood Queen kill. Apart from completely contradicting yourself, your evidence is anecdotal at best and doesn't include enough specifics to the encounter you are referencing to even allow any limited analysis (did you have a resto shaman in your group? do you think you were in range of mana tide? did you use a mana restoring potion? how many healers did you use? Did you combo hymn of hope + shadowfiend? What trinkets did you use?).

Next, you inform us that our goal isn't to heal people quickly when they are at low health. Maybe I missed the memo, but I'm pretty sure that players that are low health are the ones that are most likely to die and need healing the most, preferably in a timely manner. I'm surprised that I have to state something like that, but the only other concept that I can possibly imagine you to be referencing is heal "sniping," which is also a ridiculous thing to bring up. Our discussions need to operate under the assumption that we are trying to min/max our performance in an endgame environment, not whoring meters in Naxx 25. This is quickly followed by your statement that haste benefits CoH and PoM in no way, except by reducing their cast times. Well, what exactly is the benefit that you expect haste to give to spells?

Finally, you wrap it up by telling us (still completely lacking any numbers or evidence) that we should buff our effective mana pools as much as possible, in order to maximize the number of dps players that can be brought in raids, with the end result being shorter fights. I'd really like to hear the reasoning and see some rough numbers that explain why stacking regen is a good idea, if you are intentionally reducing the amount of time (and damage) that you will have to heal for.

Please delete your post.

I agree that every healer needs a comfortable effective mana pool "buffer" worked into their gearing, so that they can cope with progress. That said, I personally prefer to gear myself for full throughput and keep regen + throughput trinkets in my bags, to easily adjust between fights. I really can't think of a single time I've wiped due to going oom, or been on the brink of being oom on a first kill in any encounter in WotLK. As rough estimates, I've usually gotten 0-1 innervates, 1-2 resto shaman in my group, I have the tailoring cloak enchant and I almost always combo shadowfiend with hymn of hope. I have completely average gear (a few hard mode drops, nothing to write home about) and I gem haste, but I think the difference in our experiences is due to trinkets. I'm guessing you haven't been lucky with Solace drops, which is obviously a very big upgrade over the alternatives in terms of regen. But as for the second choice of trinket, [Spark of Hope] provides a ridiculous amount of regen. I know it's been mentioned before, but I think that if we're still having the same old discussion over whether holy priests have major mana problems or not, the players complaining clearly haven't tried out or seen the math on [Spark of Hope]. So here goes:

Using my last Blood Queen 25 kill (spamming renew mostly, fight time 5:19) and assuming the spirit on Spark of Hope gives ~ 36.2 mp5 and ~ 28 spellpower fully raid buffed:

max theoretical mp5 from Spark of Hope on the fight

Raid Buffed GCD: ~ 1.1 sec
Total Heals cast = 319/1.1 = 290
Mp5 from effect = (42/1.1)(5) = 190.9 mp5
Total Mp5 = 190.9 + 36.2 = 227.1 mp5

Actual mp5 for the fight

Total Heals cast = 207
Mp5 from the effect = (207)(42)(5)/(319) = 136.3 mp5
Total Mp5 = 136.3 + 36.2 = 172.5 mp5

Now comparing [Spark of Hope] to [Sliver of Pure Ice] (assuming the sliver has ~70 mp5) and changing int gems for spellpower (using the op's estimates) we get:

172.5 - 70 = 102.5 mp5
Int required to achieve 102.5 mp5: 102.5/0.792 = 129.4 int
Converting to spellpower by changing gems: (129.4)(23)/20 = 148.8 spellpower
Total spellpower: 148.8 + 28 (from spirit) = 176.8 spellpower (18 spellpower more than the Sliver)

Therefore, if you have any int gems whatsoever, you can maintain your regen and increase your spellpower by using [Spark of Hope] + regemming, unless you're using a trinket that is reasonably superior to [Sliver of Pure Ice] (basically only Solace so far). My apologies if I slipped up anywhere in the numbers, but the conclusion should be about the same.

Let's raise ourselves to the point where we do not rage like kids and rather discuss the issue at hand.
You so niftily mention "whoring meters" but after skimming through your guilds World of Logs I still do not see how haste outperform my mentioned way of gemming in the current gear level when I so clearly manages to not only push out more heals, but also more powerful heals and in addition allowing my guild to bring one extra dps rolling with 5 healers instead of 6. Am I the ignorant one or the priest at fault here?

I discuss on these forums mainly to prove my point, offer an alternative way of thinking to those who seek knowledge and I expect every single priest present in this thread to know how to maximize their mana gained, using the proper flask, mana pots, shadowfiend/HoH and alike. Like mentioned in the EJ FAQ's we're not here to hold your hand but rather give you an alternative way of playing and/or a way to minmax your gear thus improving your performance.


The point of raising your regen as high as possible has always been, since way back in Vanilla to reach the peak where your guild can bring the absolute minimum amount of healers but still being able to perform the raid without any obstacles related to the raisetup. It's true, the more dps you bring the less important your mana pool becomes, But to reach that point you still have to aim for the sky and once you're at the top you slowly back off and later on find a suitable balance between throughput and regen. Standard procedure.

Then you should also know that we don't run 25s wiith full mains. We go in there with maybe a handful of them, and the rest are alts so that we can funnel gear and Tier tokens to our core roster for Hardmodes and Arthas. Thus, we use 6 healers to smooth things over a bit. Although let me tell you, I LOVE lesser progressed guilds telling us what bringing one less healer means to raid comp performance. We definitely have no idea what we're doing.

Let me repeat it again: I don't go OOM. Neither does my fellow Holy priest who stacks Haste and spams all day along with me. Neither does our Disc Priest, Resto Druid, or Holy Paladin making up our core healing roster. We never have to stop casting. Why would I stack regen when I Never. Go. OOM. Why do you think Paladins don't stack spellpower? Because at this gearlevel, it goes to overheal. Haste lets heals get off faster and lets me move to a new target that needs attention that much faster. On the bleeding edge content that we approach, that's all that matters.

You completely miss the argument once again: I don't go OOM. I am GCD capped. If a healer dies, I can't mash my buttons any harder: I cast as many spells as I did before they died, because I physically cannot cast any more. I don't stack Haste to snipe heals, I stack Haste to keep people alive. You'll find out when you actually do difficult content, but in Wrath if people don't get heals right now they are in extreme danger of dying. And in fights where that's not the case? I could be completely ungemmed and unenchanted because the healing is so lax.

Yes, in the case of us losing a healer I would like to have that extra Spellpower and possibly Crit because my heals need to make up for what they would have cast. Haste works just as well though, since I'd be getting off many more heals than I would if I stacked SP/Crit. Our healers are also typically the last to die on wipes, so this is largely a non-issue for us.

My apologies, I haven't really examined stat weights for Shadow Priests since the patch, so I just assumed they went with SP and Crit as usual.

In terms of casting PoH as Disc, it'd have to be almost completely effective healing to match spamming PW:S' throughput. On fights where you don't want to spam PW:S because they barely get used? The healing on it is so trivial that there's no point in adjusting your gearing or gemming for it to begin with. This includes 10 mans. I'm not going to re-examine my whole weight of stats as Disc because it might be a little sub-optimal for a 10 man boss.

My general line of thought is that healers need to min/max for the fights that need to be min/maxxed for. For example, healing on Saurfang can be soloed. I can fall asleep at the start and it wouldn't make a damn difference. On Blood Queen though, if I'm not at the top of my game someone is going to die. I choose to min/max for the BQL type of fights rather than those that I can literally slap my <AFK> tag on.