Project Lore

1st

2nd ;D

I have my own holy priest level 70 and it pretty much rocks for me. I like being a healer and with this new specs i think i will do better at healing.

Just wanted to point out one more healing add on. Benecaster - I don't know what I'd do without it.

It has been updated for Wrath and I'm so happy. I've been using Benecast and then its successor, Benecaster for 2 years now. It puts buttons next to everyone's names in the groups. Totally whack-a-mole.

Thanks for all your posts. I just discovered your site. I love it!

Sathas, I am going to cut off your fingers and force feed them to you.

IMO the single point in SoR is extremely useful for 5% spirit, which will benefit not only your mp5, but also increases spellpower from spiritual guidance, on top of the actual spirit of redemption, which although situational has has kept many of my groups from wiping

I have not been lucky enough to play in Beta, but have been a healing priest for over three and a half years.

Looking at the talent trees as of 3.0, to me it seems obvious that Holy is going to be relatively underwhelming outside of raiding.

Historically the Holy tree has done the heavy lifting in regards to increasing our +heal and reducing cast times. In BC, it was made raid functional by buffing the snot out of CoH to make us the top AoE healers we were promised to be (at least until scaling brought CH past us once again)

And truthfully I hated CoH. Not only was it boring to do, but it seemed like the “tranq shot” of the expansion. The developers tossed out fights that justified bringing the holy priest to raid. And these forced mechanics made the spell absolutely OP in 5 man dungeons.

Does the new Holy tree add anything really to define the priest? No. Guardian Spirit is a neat gimmick for raiding, essentially providing the tank another shield wall on a 3 minute CD. How often is that going to be needed though? Honestly it would seem more suited for caster tanks than anything else.

Disc currently redefine’s the class specialty as not AoE healing, but in spike mitigation. With the number of instants and procs, a Disc priest is going to negate huge amounts of damage. Two of the glyphs already tie into this healing style, with the heals associated with shield and dispel. And PS, although not quite as powerful as Guardian Spirit in cases where a toon is below 20% health seems much more useful in every other situations.

Utility, protection, an extra buff all wrapped with better mana control (generation and lack of overheal) will make the healers go Disc in Wrath.

Holy will become the Arena build.

I pvp alot on my priest, in like S2 gear, 1k sp. I am really loving holy tbh. With 25% crit, i get searing light free heals alot, and clearcasting.

Guardian spirit i love, hit it just and someone is going to die, and chuck a POM on them, bam, they are at full hp if they die. Its great!

Lightwell is now really cool, and doesnt break in combat

Holy fire with 10% increase and is now 1.5 second cast, i do about 1.6-2k damage with. Proc searing light with a crit, and get a instant smite, giving me 3.5k damage, followed up with SW:D is a 4.5k damage bust, not to mention i could get another searing light with my POM flying about or the SW:D

I've been playing a holy priest in a PvE environment for 3 or 4 years now, so I feel qualified to comment on this.

Looking at your spec I would make the following suggestions: Dumping that many points into Holy right now is kind of a waste. In a 5-man, 10-man, or 25-man environment without having 3/3 Meditation you really have no staying power. My Priest CO in my guild tried dumping everything into Holy to be a "pure healing machine" and found himself OOM very very quickly. I would recommend dumping the 13 points into Disc for 3/3 Meditation (14 if you want Inner Focus, which can be extremely useful).

I read your reasoning for not taking SoR and agree that the actually "on death" effect is fairly useless. However, the 5% increase to Spirit is well worth the 1 talent point.

Improved Holy Concentration, at this point, is also fairly useless to have. Entering the clearcasting state is a proc dependent on a successful spell crit. In almost full Sunwell gear (and with the crit talent) I'm only rocking about 14.87% holy crit. As of right now our gear isn't itemized for crit, making Improved Holy Concentration kind of worthless. Indeed, the lack of crit on our gear makes going Disc for PvE healing kind of worthless, since much of the effectiveness of Disc comes from Crit (and PW:S). Assuming you have my crit (14.87%) and that you take 3/3 Improved Holy Concentration (granting an additional 15% to enter a clearcasting state, on top of the 30% from 3/3 Holy Conc), that only gives you a chance of 6.69% to enter a clearcasting state and make use of the effects of those 3 extra talent points.

I would recommend a spec along the lines of: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bVhbzhZfxtcc0qihVho

Swapping the 2 points from Surge of Light to Holy Reach is a viable change, but with Wrath less than a week away, the free/instant Smite or FH may be more beneficial.

h

As Gordo pointed out, Discipline seems to be the new trend in priest healing at the moment, focusing on damage reduction. I've even switched over to a Disc. build for now.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bVcbuhxtr0sicRtzx

(And will be changing the 3 points in Imp. Inner Fire over to Silent Resolve real soon, finding threat to once again be an issue.)

While it does rely heavily on spell crit., talents such as Renewed Hope and Holy Specialization have served me well enough thus far. Though more would be better.
I've yet to see a problem with mana conservation either, as less damage means less healing, which means more time out of the 5 second rule. And mana return from Rapture is nice too.

But, as Phayte has pointed out, WotLK is less than a week away. As more talent points become available the Holy tree will open up as other complimentary talents (read: Meditation) become available.

hear me now guys. why do all you say that Guardian Spirit ? i have never seen so good a raiding skill in the history of wow, i have a lvl 70 priest with 4 t6 and some sunwell gear and i am using it all the time and it has also saved us a couple of time.

dont listen to what people say try using it, that is what makes the different.

priest

I've been playing my holy priest alot lately
got him to lvl 69(70today woo) and ive been healing a few instances a day, and i still havent fully wiped in a instance healing yet, hopefully i can keep it up!

When my priest was lvl 70 i was always holy spec untill the pre-patch came out.
I am now full discipline spec, imo it heals as good as holy spec for me, because the last talent of discipline: Penance rocks so hard
The big advantages of being disc priest is that you have more mp5 and haste and you can always go PvE or PvP, holy priest got only bigger and fasters heals, what is the point in that if you dont have any mp5?
But i will prolly go back to holy when i ding 80 in wotlk :)

I like your ideas of removing GS and SoR from your build. I find them kind of useless (although just recently, SoR saved us during the PVP boss in HMGT). I find SoR to be more useful in 5mans and PVP. In 5mans where things are heading very south (which is how I would have died in the first place), I just end up either spamming prayer of healing or healing circle to get my group up to max hp before I die (again). In PVP it's the same idea. I die yet for those few sec, I can still help in healing team mates (uninterrupted) trying to take a node or capture the flag.

Maybe it's because you're new to healing (not that you're a noob) but I don't have much of a problem with over healing. I've gotten to the point where I know how much my heals do, and I know which heal spell to use and when to minimize my over healing which is why I still think the serendipity points are wasted.

Now if only there was a way for me to get Meditation and DS/impDS I'd be set. I'm just waiting to see how things will change in WoTLK.

More thoughts:

I still suggest you remove the searing light points and put them into inspiration. It's my belief that if you're holy/healing spec (be it priest, pally, sham or druid) your duty is to heal. Usually in a raid or instance, I do nothing but heal (or throw up the occasional pain or plague). If everything is going great and everyone is staying healed, I usually just sit there and wait. I don't DPS as it takes up valuable mana that I could need in the end to heal. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing a healer doing DPS. All too often they forget what they're there to do and that causes wipes. You're a healer, leave the DPS to the DPS. The extra 1-2k dmg you might do is not worth the risk of missing a heal because you were casting your holy fire.

Also, the added bonus from inspiration is of great use during those oh shit moments. Not only did you just get a crit heal, but your target now has 25% more armor (that means a tank with 20k now has 25k). It's also useful because inspiration now procs off all crit heals (circle of light, holy prayer). It's just amazing the happy things that happen when you spam circle of light with ribbon of sacrifice on. It not only help you, but other healers who are trying to help raid heal as well.

I was also thinking about removing desperate prayer. I've found myself not using it all that much and it's not as useful because whenever I take damage, I just use binding heal.

BTW what glyphs are you using? I've put on that renew glyph and now I get over 1k/tic. The fact that it's shorter is not a problem for me as I like +heal more than the long time.

Priest,

I am not stating that Guardian Spirit is a “bad” talent, just that like so many of our Holy talents, it is situational. The situation it is useful for is basically “shield wall” moments. In PvE this will make it extremely useful in progression for raids and dungeons, but relatively useless on all normal or farmed content. PvP, especially arenas, simply have many more 10 second situations where the GS could be utilized.

Plus with the changes to threat, Pain Supression and the shaman soul link ability, it won’t be absolutely necessary.
If you enjoy Holy right now, then have fun. You will still be a very good healer. The build simply has too few spells in rotation to interest me. I have no urge to continue the 1-2 button spam of BC. And I question any design that promotes overhealing.

Personally, I think that Disc will be using a large number of spells that will save the raid/party more often. Holy will have a few big saves in very key situations. Both are valid and certainly the Holy priest will be more noticed because of when those “saves” occur. Disc will be like druids in BC listening to the tank congratulate the paladin on that clutch 7K heal, while the 3 HoT ticks that kept the tank alive during the HL cast time go unnoticed.

And of course I recommend right now that if you are a healing meter junkie then run away from Disc. Far, far away. You aren’t going to get any credit for the thousands of mitigated damage from shields and aegis procs.

As others have said, you need Meditation 3/3.