Interesting. Have you considered dropping Improved Flash Heal and the Flash Heal glyph instead? Your point about landing a shield but not having a time for a Flash Heal on a raid member is well taken, and consistent with my experience. I've been looking for something new to try with my alt Priest after raiding as Holy for a couple months; I think I'll try your build.

edit: something like this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Here's some math comparing a Divine Fury'd, Improved Healing'd Greater Heal with a glyphed flash heal in a Discipline spec.

Greater Heal
Assuming 3000 spell power, ((3950+4590)/2[BaseHeal]+3000[SpellPower]*161.11%[Coefficent])*1.1[FocusedPower]=10366 heal
With 25% crit and Divine Aegis,
10366[HealAmount]*75%[Heal%]+10366*1.95[CritAmount]*25%[Crit%]=12827 average heal amount
With a 2 second cast assuming 11% haste from gear, raid buffs, 5/5 Divine Fury, and 2/3 Enlightenment
12827[AvgHealing]/1.96[CastTime]=6544 Healing per Second
12827[AvgHealing]/1050[ManaCost]=12.216 Healing per Mana, and 1050[ManaCost]/2.00[CastTime]=525 Mana per Second


Flash Heal
Assuming 3000 spell power,((1887+2197)/2[BaseHeal]+3000[SpellPower]*80.68%[Coefficent])*1.1[FocusedPower]=5074 heal
With 27% crit (2% more from Focused Will) and Divine Aegis,
5074[HealAmount]*73%[Heal%]+5074*1.95[CritAmount]*27%[Crit%]=6376 average heal amount
With a 1.16 second cast assuming 11% haste from gear, raid buffs, and 3/3 Enlightenment
6376[AvgHealing]/1.16[CastTime]=5496 Healing per Second
6376[AvgHealing]/521[ManaCost]=12.24 Healing per Mana and 521[ManaCost]/1.16[CastTime]=449 Mana per Second

You will have higher burst healing from using Greater Heal over Flash Heal, not figuring any overheal amounts, but with an increased mana cost. The increased burst comes from Divine Fury, but taking Improved Healing doesn't make Greater Heal more efficient than Flash Heal. I would recommend getting the best of both if you don't have mana issues, and drop Improved Healing for throughput but keep Divine Fury. You have your increased burst on demand, but flash heal will still be your filler.

Edit - Why trade throughput for mana efficiency, when the goal of this spec is more burst healing? Then, this argument is basically Divine Fury vs. Spell Warding and Greater Heal vs. Flash Heal, two of the most often debated topics here along with gemming Intellect vs. Spell Power. Also, 53/18/0 is discussed in the first post.

For a tanking build, I don't think I would personally drop Imp FH. I would drop Focused Will first. If I knew my tank wasn't going to take heavy hits, I would still probably FHeal them to ensure that I would never get behind in healing. The 25% reduced mana cost would be too great of a loss.

Don't know how you did your computations (especially for haste), but here are some more correct numbers :

I keep your assumptions (3000 spellpower, 11% gear haste, 2/3 enlightment, 25% crit (including every talent, except improved flash) ).

GH :



Mana cost : 1236 * 0.85 = 1050 MP

GH Hps : 5842 Hps
GH Hpm : 12.16 Hpm
GH Mps : 500 Mps


FH : (I keep your assumption of 2 added crit %, I add the Improved flash heal effect, in effect 50% of time, so 6% more crit) :


Mana cost : 695 * 0.85_{Talents} * 0.9_{Glyph} = 531 MP (I assume that both effects are multiplicative, I don't know)

FH Hps : 5271 Hps
FH Hpm : 12.5 Hpm
FH Mps : 421 Mps

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As a conclusion, FH is a little more efficient, and moderately less Hps than GH. GH is with 5/5 Divine Fury and 3/3 Improved Healing, and FH is with 3/3 Improved FH and 1 glyph. Note that this assumes a quite low crit rate (fully buffed), and that the difference will decrease (because of Improved flash heal relative decreasing interest) with crit rate. Note also that I kept the assumption that GH-build takes only 1 point Focused Will, when you can takes 3 if you don't cast a lot of flash heal.

For a disc spec, I would consider a GH-oriented spec, including improved healing, and drop improved flash heal talents (1/2 Grace). All other PvE talents can be included, and the FH-glyph can be kept (for lack of another interesting one).

I didn't include Grace's effect (neither did I include Tree of Life bonus effect, since they are target debuffs), and you didn't include Wrath of Air haste in your casting time. That's why your computed HPS and MPS are a little lower. The mana reduction percentage for the flash heal glyph and talents are removed from the % of base mana, my flash heal mana cost is correct.

To calculate Casting time with a given haste is CastTime/1+([Haste%FromGear]*[Hastebuff1]*[HasteBuff2]*[HasteBuffn]/100)

In fact, they are nearly irrelevant, since they are a multiplicative bonus. But I didn't understood why you included Power Infusion as 10% bonus, and not Grace.

Ok, that was really the part I had trouble to understand, and that's ok. I forgot about Wrath of Air totem.
As for mana cost, I don't know how they interact, and I'm not at home to test. I just know that for cd's, Penance cd's is decreased from talents after the glyph has been taken into account (meaning that with the glyph, the cd is first lowered to 10s, then the talents reduce it by 20% to 8s). I assumed the same would hold for mana cost.

One use of Empowered Renew, which I didn't really consider until putting 3 points into it with 4pc T9, is using it as an instant heal, particularly while moving. For a fight like Faction Champs, I use most every instant spell in my book. When Shield and Circle of Healing is on cooldown, it's nice to get a 2.8k Empowered Renew instant heal (crit). There are times where the Empowered Renew heal has kept someone alive when they would have otherwise died from a Prayer of Mending cast, since mending has to travel to the target.

Not only does PoM have travel time but it will never save someone from 'lethal damage'. Since it requires you to take damage to be active. You are always better off using FH/Empowered Renew/Shield/CoH to try to save someone who looks about to die.

I have always been a large advocate of spec'ing against empowered renew/improved renew. Since returning to raid for Icecrown Citadel (and laughing my way through ToC), one thing I definitely have noticed is I don't need Healing Prayers. Similar to some others here saying they don't need that regen, I did about 2 weeks ago but not anymore. Since dropping those points and finishing empowered renew I decided to drop 1 point from spellwarding and finish off improved renew. I must say, gathering enough spellpower to make that initial instant heal 2000+ is pretty nice.

Renew works well on Marrowgar and on Saurfang. If the trend of it being useful on 50% of the bosses keeps up it may become a much better option than it was in Ulduar and beyond.

Here's are two screenshots that I've uploaded to show that the snowflake does proc off Penance and Renew

WoWScrnShot_122109_185621.jpg

WoWScrnShot_122109_190534.jpg

Sadly, I could not get it to proc with VE when in shadow form as previously mentioned.

I believe it has something to do with the hotfix: "The Ephemeral Snowflake now has a tiny internal cooldown to keep it from being overpowered on spells such as Vampiric Embrace (when dotting multiple targets) and Wild Growth. It will still return mana as expected in most cases."

Tedv, I've seen you and a few others say it works like a flip of the coin.

Do you guys have any logs that can back this up yet?

Does the hot tick at all if it's being constantly refreshed? It doesn't look like it from the log.

Yeah, that seems to be the behaviour. It does not tick if it is refreshed before 3 seconds into the hot. It ticks only if it hits the 3,6 or 9 second duration point.

After some reflection, realistically, I cannot imagine refreshing the hot more than 3-4 times given the likelihood of it falling off when you're casting something other than flash heal or target switching. Because it doesn't tick when refreshed it wouldn't really be worth spamming flash heal to keep it up anyway.

Same information I got except never got the hot component to tick that high. The only problem I see though flash heal is lower on the priority scale to Penance, Pom, & PW:Shield. So the reality of spamming flash just isn't there as filler. And the moment you switch to a different spell or target, the 33% proc chance and 9 second tick time makes it very improbable you will keep the hot refreshed on a single target.

I have a link on the disc priest compendium to a Lord Marrowgar 10 man and the amount of healing was less than 1% of my total. My recount numbers including trash were 1-2%. So a very minor bonus at best even with the refresh.

The first post of the "WotLK Healing Compendium v3.3" thread contains lots of information, including a suggestion of best in slot gear. I suppose that gear is for holy priests only.

Do you guys have a suggestion of best in solt items for Disc Priest Tank healing and another one for Disc Priest Raid healing?

There's a discussion of that in the discipline thread, also here: Penance Priest: Planning for Tier 10
At least for some of the items.

Ouhh.. I really hope you don't use PoM in phase 3. But to come back to the 2 piece T10 bonus, I think it can be quite useful in some situations.

One way to think of it is that it can be used to ramp up a big hot on a target for some bad situations in which you need a maximum amount of healing for a short period of time. For example take a boss like Brutallus with his stomp ability, where your tank needs massive healing for 10 seconds afterwards. You could flash heal a tank until the stomp occurs and switch to shield/penance/gheal after that.
A more recent example would be Mimiron phase 1 and plasma blast. That's an example where I use renew on the tank as a discipline priest, because you really want every possible healing to be up for that short amount of time on the tank. Building up a strong flash heal hot for plasma blast seems like a good idea to me.
I am absolutely sure that there will be situations like this in Icecrown Citadel as well.

To get the full benefit out of the hot we have to change our rotation and have to spec into greater heal again since we don't want to delay the hot with a new flash heal proc but still want to maximize our hps. It has been proven that specced greater heal offers more hps than flash heal anyway and depending on how important spell warding turns out be we, we will probably spec into greater heal again if we want to fully control our hot.

Maybe I put a little bit too much hope into the hot, but when it comes down to maximizing our hps for a short amount of time, I can definitely see the potential of this hot.

I think that this is a good way to look at how the hot could be useful to the disc priest; however, my feeling would be that there is probably something more beneficial that we could be doing than spamming flash heals in order to roll the hot. Thinking of things in terms of firefighter or the other hardmode content where its important for us to get as much healing done as possible, I dont think of many situations where we would want to waste the globals to get the hot rolling. Assuming that you are running in a 25 man raid with a holy paladin focused on tank healing in the time you are getting that hot ready to roll you are going to be causing the paladin / yourself to be doing a lot of over healing and throwing your mana and effective hps away. Specifically to firefighter i think that time period prior to the plasma blast could be better spent throwing shields on people hit by napalm shells or heck just on anyone because of the randomness of the fire, thats going to do more to keep the raid going and making it to the next phase.

I'd could also argue that becuase of the cooldowns available to help keep tanks up now the hot really isn't going to make that big of a difference. On a firefighter for example with a holy / disc priest in the raid you could easily set up a Guardian Spirit (1 min glyph if not used), Pain Supression, Guardian spirit cooldown rotation that should be able to keep any tank up if your healers and tank are on the ball. Throw in the tanks survival cooldowns and I just dont see the additional utility from the hot and the globals wasted to get it rolling.

If you are doing normal mimi though or normal icc so far you could generally spend time to get the hot rolling because there really isn't anything all that intense that you NEED to spend the globals on, except for mabye shield spam / mark of the fallen champion duty on saurfang - even that though is pretty manageable with a disc priest in the raid due to the lack of runic power gains he gets.

Tedv posted some tests with holy nova a long time ago and I have tried the same thing in a 5 man group with 3 pets. 23% crit rate 8 targets but ~50% proc rate with 2/2 SoL. Multiple crits per spellcast appear to count as one crit for SoL purposes.

Two comments

1) ToF is not exactly equivalent to a straight + heal talent as you need to consider overheal and fight mechanics. If you really assume a 50% chance of hitting an under 50% health target then ToF is more than 2% per point due to the fact that ToF heals are unlikely to overheal. A 2% straight healing talent is less than 2% in real terms due to overheal

2) Did you consider the overwrite frequency for SoL? Its not possible to automatically use all SoL procs as soon as they become available, which means spells cast after the proc might overwrite the buff. Overwrite frequency does not increase linearly with crit rate. In addition if the second point increases the frequency of "inconvenient SoL procs" it might further increase the overwrite frequency. Although the 2nd point in SoL increases the proc chance exactly as much as the 2nd point, that does not mean that both points have the same value, as depending on playstyle.

The 2-piece bonus is the kind of bonus Blizzard get rid of in since 3.3.
They might also want to modify it, in order to work like most of other "added dots", which is "rolling", meaning that the different applications of the bonus get merge in a single one, which is precisely the sum of independent dots/hots.

Personally, I hope they will change it: this mechanism is too weird and specific to be interesting to play, especially since it relies on a 33% proc-chance that is far from "almost sure".

This is a good point. Basically Test of Faith should be better than 2% extra healing per point but less than 4%. Still, that makes it one of the best talents in the entire tree, and it should not be skipped under any circumstances.

No I didn't, and I think that's a really good point. More and more, my holy play style has shifted towards all instants, generally in the order Circle -> Mending -> Surge'd Flash Heal -> Renew. And the occasional Prayer of Healing to blow a serendipity stack. The stack generally refreshes itself in under 10 seconds.

I watch the Surge of Light buff aggressively, and there are definitely times where it procs, but my Circle and Mending are off cooldown, and I know it's better to cast one of those instead. Less often, there are times where the only hurt targets already have renew on them and I don't have Surge of Light up. Usually I'll Prayer or Greater Heal in these situations though.

It's purely anecdotal, but I'd estimate that maybe a third of my surge procs are overwritten. Going down to 1/2 surge would obviously reduce this, but to what benefit? There aren't any other useful throughput talents you can take in holy. In my spec I'd take 4/5 Empowered Healing I guess, but that talent is only good when Surge of Light procs, so what's the point? I also suspect that surge would not be up a lot of times when I wish it was, as that already happens occasionally with 2/2 Surge of Light.

Normal and heroic version of rings/trinkets from ICC will be unique-equipped