after this patch, and the raidwide buff change. Hey whom doesn’t have a shammy with a flametounge totem? *which cancels our IDS)

and now with those nice raid wide buffs, ret pallys, and mana spring totems… and shadow priests… screw IDS. and screw mana.

My guild isn’t great but I can walk into hyjal and spam coh like there is no end. while the holy pally rolls bombs on the MT. if need be np, back to rolling greaters on him.

Its actually mindless. I keep looking for ways to play like i used to with more thought, and planning. the best I can do is try to look for a tank that isn’t getting enough heals or an overzealous dps squishy who is about to die without a quick fix.

all while spamming coh. I’m not bitching. we are effective healers. and there is no reason to take IDS again.

but I do miss it. =( that style has been taken out of the game. Perhaps a deep discipline build, I’ve tried that too. and just wasn’t impressed, and contrary to what blizz thinks… TANKS DON”T WANT BUBBLES!!!! lmfao. anyway… COH time.

My guild also ran ZA — we would often struggle on the two animal bosses after bird and bear boss — but we’d usually be able to get them down without more then one or two wipes. After xpac we were able to very quickly get through the first 4 bosses but still had a lot of trouble on hexlord. The pally healer in our raid had a meter for me .. and where as before we use to be pretty much neck and neck for percent healed — he was healing about 20-25% more then me. Ouch.

Part of that came from me being more cautious about using my frisbee, because of the new threat mechanics of it. And also because my threat meter wasn’t working for the raid at all at that point and I was being cautious — but a big part of it I believe was just the overall difference in how much our heals land for.

To answer someone’s question about Disc trees. They fixed shields. They no longer prevent tanks from building aggro with them on. And there is a new glyph out that lets whatever damage is absorbed by the shield, heal the target of the shield. (That should help pally tanks with their mana).

I haven’t tried a deep discipline build yet .. but I’ve been thinking about it.. about the only thing positive I *can* say about priest healing .. is with IDS, the spirit from my mostly badge gear / t5 crafted gear .. and that new ‘over heal = mana talent’ i went through all of za drinking one mana pot the entire time until we starte to repeatedly wipe on hexlord.

I can also say that buffed with INT buff I was dragging around about 12k mana, added to the higher regen rate with IDS and rapture, no potions in either the heroic or ZA were quaffed.

Sorry to keep plagueing the thread.

Solaril

Mana-wise was a different story. The increase in mana cost for my spells was very noticeable. I never used to run out of mana (having 270mp5 while casting and 700mp5 out of 5 sec rule – this hasn’t changed with the patch) but I found myself saying more than once last night “oom”.

Also, I tossed out my frisbee as usual – before the pull – and the tank had no trouble keeping aggro at all. However, I agree in that it should be used with caution. The tank last night was quite exceptional and I would be hesitant to use it before the pull with many other tanks. I think that part is all about how well you know your raid members (the tank and I have been raiding together for 8 months now) and what you know you can get away with.

So, there’s still some exploring to do with the new changes and I’m sure it will all sort itself out in the end. Good luck all!

I believe I know which thread you’re discussing on EJ, and in response to the statement that PW:S isn’t quite as good as FH, someone posted some useful numbers (this can be found at http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t27943-priest_discipline_holy_wotlk_talent_preview_discussion/p92/#post939550 ). Here’s a quote of the relevant part of the post. Of particular note is the fact that he included crit in his calculations:

“Assumptions:
13525 Mana
56/5/0 Spec
20% raid buffed crit rate
FH Glyph and PW:S Glyph

PW:S — 541 Mana, 3100 Absorbed + 620 healed (Glyph) = (3100 + 620)/541 = 6.8 HpM
FH — 424 Mana, 2200 Healed = (2200*.8 + (2200*1.5 + 2200*1.5*.3)*.2)/424 = 6.2 HpM

Already PW:S is more mana efficient than casting a FH, and it has the benefit of being faster, and with Borrowed Time and Renewed Hope, it leaves the target in a better position to get a follow up heal from me if necessary. If you factor in that a non-crit overheal FH gets 0 benefit from Rapture, but a PW:S on a target that may take more damage in the next 30 seconds can result in up to 165 mana refunded, it seems clear to me that from an efficiency standpoint, you always rather use a shield on a target than an FH if you are a deep disc spec.”

The poster neglected to list the spellpower used in his calculations, but if they are correct, then PW:S has great utility in a Disc priest’s arsenal.

After leveling my priest alt all the way to 70 as a smite priest, I respecced after the patch as a deep Disc. healer. In my current gear I’ve got 550 Int, 267 spirit, 881 spellpower (raid buffed), 20% spell crit chance, 90mp5 while casting. A couple of nights ago I healed a full Kara run with a holy priest, and last night I healed heroic Mech and heroic Bot to see how I did solo healing.

It was a lot of fun, (MUCH more fun than spamming chain heal pre-patch on my resto shaman), and a perfectly viable spec for healing. I wish I could give more objective feedback, but it seems that WoW Web Stats has not yet been updated for 3.0.2, so I could not analyze my combat log.

In the heroic 5-mans, I kept the raid up with PoM, shields & renew. I kept the tank alive with penance, shield, renew, cancel-casting g-heal, until it was time for penance again. In a pinch I used prayer of healing on the raid, but not very often.

I never had mana issues. I presume rapture was working as it should… however without my WWS analysis I don’t know the details. In all of Kara I used 2 mana pots (we had an enh. shaman with mana spring totem, but no raid members with replenishment were present).

I have never healed as holy so I can’t make any direct comparisons, although in Kara the holy priest was ROCKING circle of healing, so I rarely had to heal the raid and therefore mostly focused on the tanks.

Oh, and PW:Shield never seemed to interfere with either the warrior or the druid tanks’ ability to generate rage/threat. I used Shield whenever it was off cooldown, except at the beginning of pulls when the tanks’ rage bars were at zero.

Divine Aegis procs off of all crit heals (including POM, PoH, and Holy Nova) so as a disc. healer I am going to stack crit chance to about 25% or so unbuffed, maybe more depending on what consensus ultimately forms on the elitistjerks forums. The caster gear I collected as a smite priest seems to have transitioned nicely for the Disc. healer spec because of the generous amount of crit rating.

I can’t think of much else to say other than I’m using Glyph of PW:Shield and Glyph of Renew. So far so good!

Remember the triage quest in Arathi to learn Master First Aid? How awesome would be it be for Dalaran/SW/Org to have a triage event that allowed healers to practice healing. Shouldn’t be too hard to code a raid-wide damage scenario, a spikey tank damage scenario, and a tank + a little raid damage scenario for healers to work with.

Also, re: Disc healing – there are two ways to look PW:S. One is to use it as much as possible on the target taking most damage (tank) whenever Weakened Soul is down. Various talents improve your heals when you keep PW:S in your rotation, and as Onydan said, it doesn’t look to significantly impair threat gen.

However, I think one of the later EJ posts on the Holy/Disc thread calculated PW:S to being slightly more powerful and efficient than a flash heal, but never being able to crit. I’m not excited about keeping a flash heal in my non-emergency rotation, and plenty of beta testers have confirmed that a Disc priest can also use PW:S as a powerful emergency button (or maybe semi-emergency button) and do a good job using just Penance, Gheal, Renew, and PoM. Penance is good enough all on its own.

On the other note, did 3.02 takes away the ‘mouseover’ function in macro? I have macros that do mouseover targeting. I’ve noticed that it no longer works on the actual character but still works on the portrait.

Thanks

About Holy Nova vs. CoH, DwarfPriest did a great write-up on that very topic. You can find it at http://dwarfpriest.com/2008/10/13/showdown-noly-nova-vs-prayer-of-healing-vs-circle-of-healing/ . The short version is that since Holy Nova doesn’t effect anybody outside the party, it’s still not good enough to beat CoH, and Prayer of Healing crushes Holy Nova when it comes to healing a party.

As a side comment on PoM, yes it creates aggro now and can no longer be used as an opener, but atleast it can crit now!! Nothing like watching PoM tracker as those numbers rise up and now even better that is can crit. What other spell can have the ability to heal so much for such a small cost.

I would also like to get others opinions on Holy Nova used in conjuction with the Major Glyph. Makes Holy Nova heal for 40% more while lowering the damage by 40%. I never saw Holy Nova as a dps spell anyhow, but with +spellpower and an extra 40% to the healing it does at the cost of 500+ mana a shot and an instant cast to boot with no threat, should it be taken over CoH in a 5 man run? I admit I never took the talent in TBC, but with the glyph it has more possibilities…or am I incorrect and should once again pass over this talent?

Thanks again.