That discussion is here. The consensus is that the purpose of healing is to reduce the probability of player death, and the probability of player death increase as health decreases, therefore a heal delivered at lower health is more valuable than topping off the last few hundreds Hit Points.

I think the point he was making is that it's better to keep anyone from dropping to a low health level in the first place than it is to wait until they drop and then heal them back up. Keeping everyone as healthy as possible all the time is more important than minimizing overhealing, as long as you have enough mana to do so.

It's pretty obvious that if one person is at 80% and one person is at 20%, and those people are otherwise similar, you'll keep everyone alive more often by healing the person at 20% first.

Perhaps this hypothetical addon could also "penalize" a healer who takes too long between casts due to indecision or inattention. As far as not being able to distinguish the healer who fails to move from the fire, that is true of every healmeter existing now.

I do agree the concept of a healmeter that weights heals by approximating their actual reduction of the target's % chance of dying is hopelessly complicated and probably unattainable. But it's a neat thought and an admirable ultimate goal.

Alright, well it has been awhile since I have posted on these forums so here it goes. I recently got back into raiding and I'm having some trouble with something. I raid as a holy priest in my guild and I am trying to work renew into my healing. I know that it is a very good spell but on fights where I don't like to waste a gcd I cant find the right time to cast it always. I have been told that it works very well with procing SoL when you have impowered renew. I guess my question is when is a good time to cast it to maximize the chances of it procing SoL so that I can still keep the "rotation" of keeping Serendipity up so i can AoE heal effectively. As it stands right now I try to throw a renew in usually when i have 2 stacks of serendipity up hoping that i can get a crit with renew to proc a SoL. Any thoughts or how other holy priests use renew and when they use it.

Could you clarify what you mean with this: "but on fights where I don't like to waste a gcd I cant find the right time to cast it always". I assume that you're talking about fights where the load on you as a healer is very high and that you need to spend every GCD in a meaningful way? In that case I would recommend you prioritize your spells as follows:
PoM on cooldown
CoH on cooldown
SoL proc up? SoL flash
Renew people until PoM or CoH comes off CD
Repeat

Actually though, I'm not so sure I'd favor the SoL flash over renew, as the healing it provides is substantially lesser. I suppose it's better if someone needs a heal really quickly though. I wouldn't worry too much about serendipity with the way damage works now. PoH is not really seeing much action these days.
Basically, if you choose to go the "renew route", as many holy priests do now, renew becomes your main single target spell instead of FH, so I don't understand how it could be seen as "wasting a gcd". But maybe I misinterpreted you a bit.

Sorry about that. Yeah I mean fights where there is a lot of raid dmg and a lot of heals going out.

I guess in my eyes FH is still one of the main heals for a holy priest because not only does it do some healing but also the only way to keep up serendipity. Like I said I just got back into raiding and a lot has changed since my days in Ulduar 25. Im just trying to find a happy medium to where I can cast renew and not think I could have used that gcd on something better.

Yes a lot has definitely changed since Ulduar, where PoH and keeping serendipity stacked were the main concerns of a holy priest. Not so much these days. Like I said, both PoH and FH (albeit in a lesser way) have kind of taken a backseat to CoH, PoM and Renew.

Serendipity and hasted Prayer of Healing will still be good in a few fights in Icecrown, where the majority of the raid takes near lethal damage and needs to be topped up evenly before dying from an otherwise non-lethal amount of damage.

Lady Deathwhisper's Frostbolt Volleys, Festergut's Pungent Blight, and Blood Prince's Empowered Shock Vortex are times where a Holy Priest can still deliver some life-saving burst healing. To a lesser extent, Serendipitied Prayer of Healing can be used as a viable counter to the Lich King's Infest. However, for the majority of fights and the majority of damage patterns don't see much use for Prayer of Healing, and we're left wondering what to do with this occasional Serendipity stack from our Surge of Light procs.

I can often find the use of a GH with 3 stacks serependity. The cast time is about the cast time of a flash (I have the points in Divine Fury), for a heal that can quickly put a raid member (or a tank) out of danger when he is very low.

So in terms of priest healing now days it is all about rolling renews and using PoM and CoH when they are off cooldown to put it simply I guess? As for serendipity now days it is there as a skill used to level out healing with PoH when it is needed but not to be used every moment it is at 3 stacks.

ok, well crazy thought from left field. Looks like alot of holy priest are hardly using the serendipity adn PoH...so could these 3 points be used elsewhere?

Example, throw them into disc tree to get 2 points into mental agility which saves mana on instant casts which are the spells the renew holy p is using now....PoM, Renew, CoH, sol FH's...

or 3 points into Empowered Healing for additoinal bonus on the FH's?

The main reason I still have serendipity is for Valithria. I haven't really used prayer of healing a lot since Ulduar. Renew provides much smoother and safer raid healing on damage aura fights than serendipitying PoH. In most of the situations where prayer of healing would be good (large bursts of damage like ground tremor, black hole explosion, infest), going discipline and shield-spamming is better.

Concerning Dreamwalker, I am toying with a purely throughput spec for this fight specifically (heroic mode on the horizon.)

Something like this:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

That completely removes points from regen talents, and puts them into throughput talents. The playstyle of it will mostly be keep renew on the target, flash using SoL procs, and GH as the main hasted nuke. PoM and CoH on the raid where applicable.

The glyph choice also goes along with this spec, faster renew (hand waving) is more healing over the fight (as more renews can be cast, and none of them are overheal.) Guardian Spirit glyph for the obvious reasons, and CoH for the raid output.

Questions: Has anyone noticed CoH hitting Dreamwalker, and/or PoM bouncing to her? (The PoM is just a curiosity, it won't be bouncing from her.)

I am not sure why you would want to flash using SoL procs. The SoL cannot crit which means it would be a loss of thoroughput. You're flat out better casting Flash Heal than using Surge of Light. Further, as stated above by another poster, Binding Heal is a better spell to use since DP gives it 10% more healing and it already has a higher base heal than Flash Heal.

Also, "more Renews" is not necessarily better. You should also look at "healing per execution time". This is not to say you are wrong, but more on how you should be looking at it.

I imagine though for maximum thoroughput, you'd want to be using Binding Heal, Serendipity Greater Heal and using Renew and Surge of Light while running to portals.

By the way, Divine Hymn does affect the Dreamwalker. (I am unable to confirm if the 10% DH healing bonus stacks with GS, does anyone know?).

2 piece T10 makes up most of the difference between flash heal and binding heal. When you have 5 stacks or more (at least with 4400 sp and full empowered healing) of the orb debuff, it more than makes it up by double dipping on the debuff bonus.

Also, if you're dropping regen to maximize throughput, you should definitely drop holy concentration before dropping meditation.

Don't mean to be sarcastic, but the best you can do is stay out-side, heal the raid and let the Paladin / Shamans do the boss healing.


If you have no other choice, meaning you will be the one healing the boss, drop out the renew talents all together and stick to a GH heal spec with regen talents that could serve you well in other encounters.

Mixing renew and GH talents makes no sense, you are gimping both or not using the 'better', pending the situation, to its fullest effect. Casting renew's with the healing buff, is a wasted GH casting time on the boss.

I do value the SoL proc. But I don't always use it when it's up and that may be your problem. Take Blood Queen for example. If everyone is at 75%+ then there is no point in using the SoL, I'd rather keep renews rolling. Though I have to say, this might vary with your Healer setup. If there is a Disc that can Penance the wounded back to a comfortable level SoL loses some value.
If not then it is the way to go when someone drops really low. The thing about SoL is not that it can't crit, but it's speed. If I don't need the instant - or the mana - I hesitate to use it when I could keep the group stabilized.

On a more general Renew vs PoH debate I had with my raid lead:
I don't think a PoH Priest can keep up with a Renew Priest. PoH is really nice on Algalon, but for a fight like Twins or Blood Queen other healer's smart heals will interfere with your group healing. Encounter design has very little predictable big raid hits, where a hasted PoH would really matter. And the best thing about Renew is the movability with Body and Soul while still keeping the heals coming.

COH is healing her yes. Prayer of mending is a no from the combat logs I've searched amongst my own.

Our guild has had several attempts on 25m LK this last week - all of which couldn't get far enough into the Val'kyr phase to understand it. That's not my question, however. As the guild disc priest, I am gemmed for doing it all: tank healing and raid healing (not just shield spamming). I've come to like haste as disc along with all the other stats that disc priests thrive on - I feel I have a decent balance of all. However, when we are doing LK, I've understood that shield spamming is a good idea for Infest. On 10m I've had absolutely no problem shielding the raid. In 25m, I try to do the ranged and let the raid healers focus on the melee. We have 2 and 1/2 groups of ranged folks, and I have found myself burning through my mana like crazy trying to do this. I contemplated regemming for straight intellect, but I wanted to know if it's worth it to do that for one fight out of many others that I do not shield spam on. Would it be better to have PoH ramped up and ready for when Infest hits instead? What are some of you other fantastic disc priests doing on this fight?

This is also discussed in the Discipline Compendium. If you can get multiple Rapture procs by having your shields break together while Rapture isn't on cooldown, it can help sustain your mana. However, this generally would require you to not shield people like the tanks that will take damage outside of Infest. Phase 2 and 3 are more difficult to pull this off with Defile, Vile Spirits, and Harvest Soul having a higher chance of procing your Rapture.

Make sure you have PWS and weakened soul displayed on Grid (I usually have it at the top right and bottom right corner). The biggest thing that you can do on this fight to save mana is to not spend it. Infest damage is pathetically low, which means a single shield will last more than 1 Infest. I personally have never had a problem keeping shields on 3+ groups of people on LK, and the use a Borrowed Time PoH to clear the 4th/5th group. There's practically 0 raid damage in p1 and p2 which means your shield should not be used up by anything other than Infest.

I still prefer holy for this fight. If you get picked up by a Val'kyr in phase 2 your raid is basically fucked unless your other healers can pick up the slack. Disc may be great at pre-emptively preventing Infest damage, but once it starts rolling it has very poor options to catch up.

Jumping into the LK discussion, a holy priest who isn't scared of using shields can comfortably manage the raid almost by themselves, which is important for unlucky valkyr pick ups. My guild runs the fight with two holies, each of us a PoH group in case a PoH is needed, and we each put up a couple of shields and poms on different targets. Add to that CoH and we can easily each cover 5(poh cast during infest cast) + 2 (shields) + 1 (pom) +6 (coh) = 14 people if the situation calls for it.