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  1. #1

    Switching from Disc to Holy (Advice Seeking Thread)

    Hey folks,

    I've decided to switch my off-spec to a holy spec, to try it out for a while. I am originally MS disc, OS shadow (only for gearing up out of raids/dalies, which I'm largely done with.) so my gear is all tuned towards disc. I've read the EJ posts, and scanned a few of the posts for holy here. I've reforged to, unbuffed, 11.17% haste, 11.84% crit, and 14.72 mastery. I'm sitting at 2247 spirit without DMC:Tsunami stacked, 2647 with it stacked. In raid I have +5% haste and +5% crit when buffed.

    I just wanted to post here with my armory (below) to see what others are thinking with this spec/gear tuning. I'm woefully behind on what's going on with holy, but I'm switching because of the toolbox and utility for some fights (I run with 1-2 shaman healers, and raid strictly 10-mans). And just for a change of pace.

    So my main questions are:
    Am I going the right directions with this build, glyphs, and gear set up?
    What can I improve in terms of reforging before raiding?
    Is there a piece of gear that is just AMAZING for holy that I am missing because I've been gearing as disc?

    Thanks a ton for any help and constructive feedback. <3

    http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Azereil/simple

  2. #2
    Immortal Evolixe's Avatar
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    Look at my armory in the sig for a spec and glyphs.

    Gear for 15.5% haste on the charatersheet, it adds another tick to your renew and thats awesome for throughput. And it allows for some more triage aswell.

    Reforge to haste to that 15.5%, then go mastery.
    Amazing piece? 4set :P

    Talentchoice clarification:

    Divine touch is useless as is rapid renewal. Why? Because you will never cast renew on gcd and the healing from Divine Touch is pathetic.
    State of Mind is now meh aswell, theres better places to to those 2 points in than -6sec on chakra.

    Go for 5/31/5.

    I take Despirate prayer because i use it, costs no mana, and heals for about 70% of your total health when used in emergiency.
    I do not take Spirit of Redemption because i prefer to be alive on progress bosses rather than dying and only healing for another 12sec.
    I take Blessed resilience as replacement for State of Mind and Spirit of Redemption as it helps keeping me alive when its most needed.

    Veiled shadows is also a must as it gives nice manareturns. If you find yourself not running out of mana in a raid you are doing it wrong. Should reforge some spirit to something else (Haste/Mastery)
    Last edited by Evolixe; 2011-02-18 at 01:26 PM.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Holo View Post
    Look at my armory in the sig for a spec and glyphs.

    Gear for 15.5% haste on the charatersheet, it adds another tick to your renew and thats awesome for throughput. And it allows for some more triage aswell.

    Reforge to haste to that 15.5%, then go mastery.
    Amazing piece? 4set :P
    Thanks for that quick feedback!
    Quick question on your spec: Why 2/2 blessed resilience, but 0/2 Divine Touch, and 0/2 State of Mind? I can see where Veiled Shadows would be useful, but why dump more throughput talents to pick up a PvP talent?

    As for the haste, I thought that 12.XX% was the extra renew tick, and after that scaling was pretty much at discretion (the epic haste vs. mastery debate for "low gear" healing vs "high gear" healing compared to just raw throughput.) Why go all the way to 15%?

    Assuming 15% is the way to go, continuing to dump crit for it?

  4. #4
    Immortal Evolixe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Azelric View Post
    Thanks for that quick feedback!
    Quick question on your spec: Why 2/2 blessed resilience, but 0/2 Divine Touch, and 0/2 State of Mind? I can see where Veiled Shadows would be useful, but why dump more throughput talents to pick up a PvP talent?

    As for the haste, I thought that 12.XX% was the extra renew tick, and after that scaling was pretty much at discretion (the epic haste vs. mastery debate for "low gear" healing vs "high gear" healing compared to just raw throughput.) Why go all the way to 15%?

    Assuming 15% is the way to go, continuing to dump crit for it?
    Edited my post, lookup

    12.5% used to be the extra renew tick. But the in-game charactersheet now takes Darkness into mind. Making it 15.5% required.

  5. #5
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    It's only 12.5 % haste required for the extra renew tick :-) (about 516 haste rating iirc - with 3/3 darkness - the extra % you'll get from a SP/Moonkin/shammy)
    Last edited by mmocffd9287e90; 2011-02-18 at 01:31 PM.

  6. #6
    Yes, it's 12.5% on the character sheet what you need, not 15.5%

    Try it and see. Just cast renew on yourself and count the ticks.

  7. #7
    Immortal Evolixe's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ContentsMayVary View Post
    Yes, it's 12.5% on the character sheet what you need, not 15.5%

    Try it and see. Just cast renew on yourself and count the ticks.
    I did mate, didnt get further than 5

  8. #8
    I dont want to get to side tracked and go into a renew haste discussion (I know there are threads for that), but given that I'm at 12.43% (I reforged a bit more) and I get +5% from raids putting me at 17.43%, I think I'm pretty good with haste. If 12.5% is the extra tick, or 15% is the extra tick, I am still well over it raid buffed (which is all I really care about.

    Once I get the haste I feel comfortable with do I switch over to mastery/crit, mastery, or what?
    Also, in terms of reforging spirit: why? I thought most of holy's mana regen was from spirit?

  9. #9
    Without darkness my haste is 12.63% now that is 1618 haste rating, which seems alot so it must be 500+ with darkness.

  10. #10
    More haste is always better. With 2 shaman healers in a 10man you can definitely afford to go more throughput heavy which definitely means skipping veiled shadows. You should also be able to drop some spirit in favor of haste/mastery items.

    The little haste plateau you guys are arguing about doesn't require more than ~500 haste rating and is therefore a moot point (if you don't have 500 haste then there are other problems). After this point, haste doesn't get worse either.

  11. #11
    Thanks for the continued feedback! It's been very helpful.

    In terms of a healing priority for holy: as disc I've been spamming Greater Heal, and pretty much completely removed heal from my toolbox in raiding because of Inner Focus. As holy, is heal still something to be used in raids? Or is it largely greater heal?

    GH -> GH -> (Big damage inc) FH (Serendipity 1) -> FH (Serendipity 2) -> GH or PoH (depending on raid vs. tank damage) or is it Heal -> Heal -> FH... etc?

    I will be testing this myself a bit later via heroics, but I wanted to ask what people here use in terms of priority for healing as holy.

  12. #12
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    Just go to elitistjerks and read up, you'll see that all your crit should be completely dumped into haste then mastery, crit is almost useless as holy.

    I would not recommend blessed resiliance, it's a PvP talent. Sure it gives some survivability, but you're playing badly if you need it. As a holy priest, you shouldn't be taking any avoidable damage and anything else should easily be healed by your aoe. If it isn't, a few biding heals never hurt anyone.

    You should be using greater heal very sparingly. As a holy priest, you're off tank duty, now you get to play with the whole raid. You'll generally want to be in chakra: sanctuary and use aoe heals + renew. WHEN you're on tank duty though, you want to be in chakra: serenity and spam heal. Greater heal should generally not be needed, only use it after 2 flash heals if there's a BIG burst.

  13. #13
    A'ight, firstly, you're doing it wrong with haste. 5% raid buff/darkness/goblin racial (I'm aware you're dwarf, just for others) is all multiplicative, ie, your haste is 1.x * 1.05 * 1.03 * 1.01 (x = haste % from gear, assuming darkness and goblin). Given that the character pane now includes darkness/racials, you need the non-raid buffed value to be ((1.125/1.05) -1)*100 or 7.142% (ie, 7.15% to be safe from rounding errors) on your character pane. Doesn't matter on spec/race, that's how much you need outside raid to have a 5 tick renew. However, not what this thread is for, go read some theorycrafting either here or on EJ if you want to confirm that.


    In terms of spec, people above are right in that State of Mind is terrible now. You're right to not have Rapid Renewal as well, it's just not very beneficial while raiding (and I actually drop a fair few renews). I'd suggest dropping State of Mind and getting Desperate Prayer just to get the 31 points. Otherwise the holy tree in your spec looks fine, I definitely think Divine Touch over Blessed Resilience. It may not be much throughput, but it's still some throughput vs a pvp survival talent.

    Personally I love Veiled Shadows, I'd drop to 2/3 Mental Agility and use the freed up point from State of Mind to get that (ie, 5/31/5). It allows you to fiend early on a fight and then use fiend again towards the end.


    Spell rotation wise, you want to sit in AoE chakra, but don't use the holy word (except on Chimaeron's feuds) it is horribly inefficient. Lots of PoH with CoH/PoM off of CD, I like to throw out a few renews to the lower hp people which is definitely possible after the mana cost reduction (altho I wouldn't suggest blanket renew-ing). Make sure you're using Lightwell as much as possible too (and train your raid to click it). If you have to tank heal then you can use single target chakra, renew the tank and just roll GHeals/Holy Word off CD with 2xFlash->GHeal if they need bursting, but you're not exactly the best choice for tank healer as a holy priest, your niche is raid healing.


    Of course, all this assumes cast based holy, after last nights raid I'm loving bubble holy, but it's a bit more gear/regen intensive than this build, so you might want a few upgrades first...

    ---------- Post added 2011-02-18 at 03:02 PM ----------

    Apparently I'm not allowed to edit my post

    But yeh, stat wise, get the 12.5% haste raid buffed for 5 tick renew (again, that's 7.15% outside of raid) then just stack mastery/spirit. Holy mastery is amazingly efficient as it increases your HPS and HPM, whereas haste only increases HPS and crit is terribly unreliable. (Haste does help deal with burst dmg better, but that really shouldn't be an issue in normal raids).

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by tobberoth View Post
    I would not recommend blessed resiliance, it's a PvP talent. Sure it gives some survivability, but you're playing badly if you need it. As a holy priest, you shouldn't be taking any avoidable damage and anything else should easily be healed by your aoe. If it isn't, a few biding heals never hurt anyone.
    Now I have been reading on these forums for over two years now, and this statement was the thing that made me register to post on this myopic point of view of a "pvp-talent".
    The whole statement of "you shouldn't get hit" simply doesn't apply anymore to the current raiding scene, let me spell it out if you are still not buying my point of view.
    *Halfus - The Aoe from the flying behemoth, unavoidable aoe damage
    *Theralion & Valione - The dispel damage from blackout - unavoidable aoe damage, as well as the meteor splash
    *Cho'Gall - Shadow stance aoe pulses, unavoidable damage, as well as increasing damage in P2

    *Magmaw - Aoe damage on the entire raid, unavoidable
    *Golem council - Magmatron's aoe damage, or if you get targeted by his flamethrower , unavoidable
    *Atramedes - His aoe sonic spell, unavoidable
    *Maloriak - Red phase fire cone, unavoidable (unless you got debuff, to move to the side)
    *Chimaeron - Massacre, unavoidable damage
    *Nefarian - Crackle and shadowbolt barrage in phase 2, unavoidable

    *Al'akir - his lightning cone, unavoidable unless you get "lucky" to never be targetted.

    Now on the two bosses currently in game you can still get "unlucky" and get hit by something that will drop you 10%, heck I can even be sure to say that everything that hits you in a raid will easily damage you 10% of your total health, which should be around 120k.
    Now to get 30% increased healing to you basically everytime you get hit, will save everyone more mana.

    I can verify that it works on all attacks, and basically my renew ticks for 4500-5000 and lightwell renew for almost 9k per tic. This just after a crackle or during the shadowbolt barrage in phase 2 on Nef saved me so much mana and made healing so much easier.

    The only thing I can say is those all non-believers out there who thinks this is a Pvp-only-talent should specc it and come back with their own realization.

    And to add on the haste discussion, well if you raid with a 5% haste character, I would stay at 7.5% (with darkness included) to get that 5:th renew tic, but to reforge haste just to get that 5:th tic you are not doing it right. And then drop everything into mastery, as stated above crit sucks for holy and should be avoided. But I have tried maximizing both haste and mastery and both works fine, it is just a different way of playing, try out what works best for you, but if you are going for haste it should be so you can cast more heals not to get one tic on renew.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Azelric View Post
    I dont want to get to side tracked and go into a renew haste discussion (I know there are threads for that), but given that I'm at 12.43% (I reforged a bit more) and I get +5% from raids putting me at 17.43%, I think I'm pretty good with haste. If 12.5% is the extra tick, or 15% is the extra tick, I am still well over it raid buffed (which is all I really care about.

    Once I get the haste I feel comfortable with do I switch over to mastery/crit, mastery, or what?
    Also, in terms of reforging spirit: why? I thought most of holy's mana regen was from spirit?
    If you have more mana than you use, there is no longer a point in having spirit, so you can reforge it into something more useful

    ---------- Post added 2011-02-18 at 04:22 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Ihu View Post
    Now I have been reading on these forums for over two years now, and this statement was the thing that made me register to post on this myopic point of view of a "pvp-talent".
    The whole statement of "you shouldn't get hit" simply doesn't apply anymore to the current raiding scene, let me spell it out if you are still not buying my point of view.
    *Halfus - The Aoe from the flying behemoth, unavoidable aoe damage
    *Theralion & Valione - The dispel damage from blackout - unavoidable aoe damage, as well as the meteor splash
    *Cho'Gall - Shadow stance aoe pulses, unavoidable damage, as well as increasing damage in P2

    *Magmaw - Aoe damage on the entire raid, unavoidable
    *Golem council - Magmatron's aoe damage, or if you get targeted by his flamethrower , unavoidable
    *Atramedes - His aoe sonic spell, unavoidable
    *Maloriak - Red phase fire cone, unavoidable (unless you got debuff, to move to the side)
    *Chimaeron - Massacre, unavoidable damage
    *Nefarian - Crackle and shadowbolt barrage in phase 2, unavoidable

    *Al'akir - his lightning cone, unavoidable unless you get "lucky" to never be targetted.
    And thats not even all of it, it activates whenever you get hit for more than 10% of total hp (or a crit, nomatter howmuch dmg)

    Think about targeted spells, like omnotron lightning etc. Any and every single form of spike dmg doing more than 14k damage will activate BR.

    Oh and im sorry on my misleading haste renew statement, even i can learn something at times :s
    Last edited by Evolixe; 2011-02-18 at 03:25 PM.

  16. #16
    Deleted
    No one said BR wouldn't activate. I said it wasn't needed. It's a 30% buff to heals you receive.. so you will go from topping yourself to doing a good peice of overhealing, doesn't sound so awesome to me. Frankly, how often do we as holy priests heal ourselves outside of binding heal?

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Ihu View Post
    Now I have been reading on these forums for over two years now, and this statement was the thing that made me register to post on this myopic point of view of a "pvp-talent".
    The whole statement of "you shouldn't get hit" simply doesn't apply anymore to the current raiding scene, let me spell it out if you are still not buying my point of view.

    <snip>

    Now to get 30% increased healing to you basically everytime you get hit, will save everyone more mana.

    <snip>

    The only thing I can say is those all non-believers out there who thinks this is a Pvp-only-talent should specc it and come back with their own realization.
    OK, I will concede that calling it 'just a pvp talent' is slightly unfair, given the damage patterns in current content then it will proc a lot. But even so, I don't think it's that useful. When you take these hits then you can either be healed up (relatively) slowly and efficiently, somewhat negating the mana savings or you need to be burst healed back up and a chunk of that 30% saving is going to be lost to over healing. While I agree it's far from completely useless in raids, I would rather have an extra 10% healing on one of my more efficient spells, especially front loaded so that it's less likely to go into over healing. Even if it was perfectly utilised, that's only saving 35-40k healing, depending on who's doing it that's not that much mana saved.

    Yes, automatically dimissing it has become a somewhat unthinking, automated response and is unfair on the talent. But I'd still rather have divine touch. Probably comes down to how much you use renew tho.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ihu View Post
    And to add on the haste discussion, well if you raid with a 5% haste character, I would stay at 7.5% (with darkness included) to get that 5:th renew tic, but to reforge haste just to get that 5:th tic you are not doing it right. And then drop everything into mastery, as stated above crit sucks for holy and should be avoided. But I have tried maximizing both haste and mastery and both works fine, it is just a different way of playing, try out what works best for you, but if you are going for haste it should be so you can cast more heals not to get one tic on renew.
    Yeh, don't gimp yourself to hit that 'magic' 5 tick renew number, it's not that worth it. But if you're in raiding gear, then you probably have more haste than that anyway. It's more a case of, this is how much haste you reforge down to once you're over it, not an amount to kill yourself to get.
    Last edited by tawa; 2011-02-18 at 03:40 PM. Reason: grammar

  18. #18
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    Well it is up to one own's preference and what portfolio of percentage your renew lands in.
    To get 1500-2000 on instant cast on renew, sure that is nice indeed. But with the engineering of "smart aoe-heals" i.e. CoH, divine hymn and so on it will be easier and faster to top others up when everyone is taking damage.
    I don't know about how you deal with massive aoe-damage, I guess that would be crackle or maybe the feud-phase on chimmy, during these circumstances it would be considered ideal for everyone to pop self-survivability cooldowns, ice block, dispersion, feint and so on to help with the healing on everyone. When a raid takes 1million damage, I for one strongly encourage the philosophy of "do what you, yourself can to get the kill".
    This for me is a clear choice of always having 30% more healing recieved on me, and when it works from every other healer, I just cannot see that 1500 extra "hit" on impact from renew outweighing that.

    But I will agree that it is a very personal choice, and with the new renew changes in mana cost, I will play around with getting 3/3 in mental agility and drop 1 point from veiled shadows to see how much healing renew can help with (ofcourse speccing into DT)

    anyway at OP, holy is just amazing, I mean just look at the repliers here "debating" about how to heal as holy, it is just really fun to play and much more versatile than disc.
    have fun!

    Edit
    Yes renew counts as maybe 20% of your healing, but I can almost guarantee that atleast 50% of that is from rolling renews on the tanks, and as of such it has made me realise that the 10% on impact renew will not go into overhealing but maybe the last tic will, since that target is more than likely to get another HoT from some other healer.
    And honestly how well does a dead priest heal (assuming we are outside of the SoR duration) so for me that 30% survivability on basically every hit I get has greatly improved the outcome of raid encounters, cause the fight can keep going longer if more healers are alive.
    Last edited by mmoc831bd1160d; 2011-02-18 at 04:18 PM.

  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by tobberoth View Post
    No one said BR wouldn't activate. I said it wasn't needed. It's a 30% buff to heals you receive.. so you will go from topping yourself to doing a good peice of overhealing, doesn't sound so awesome to me. Frankly, how often do we as holy priests heal ourselves outside of binding heal?
    It activates when most needed, granting 30% increased healing when you can really use it.

    So yeah, its awesome.

  20. #20
    Yeh, smart heals are definitely better, especially when there's raid wide damage going. I mean, I'm not advocating blanket renew, far from it, CoH/PoH/Divine Hymn are all better tools for dealing with whole raid damage spikes, possibly even HW:Sanc (I use it on feuds, don't use it on crackles, I find even with the dps pushing nef's health, you have enough time that you don't need the 'omg HPS' to make the Sanc mana cost worthwhile). In those situations, yeh, I can see that Blessed Res is probably a better talent to have.

    However, examples of when I like to use renew are say on Cho'gall when we're running back to the main group after killing an add, it's nice to use after I've put CoH on CD just on the add tank and any dps who have taken a bit of damage while I run back, it's good mobile spot healing. Or if someone is slightly loud on atramedes, it's useful just to give them that little bit extra healing while you aoe heal up the raid (or any other fight where someone is just a little lower hp than the group). After the reduction in mana cost especially, I find it a very usable spell.

    I think it's very fight dependant as to which would be the better choice, I'll play around with using BR instead of DT, especially since we're only just moving into heroics (I enjoy stalling because the tank goes on holiday... sadface) and I can see it being very useful on Chimaeron and to a slightly lesser extent Halfus HC. Ideally you'd have 2 holy specs with these points swapped for different fights, but my offspec is my arena disc spec with different binds/ui and reconfiguring that several times a week for raids just isn't appealling (yeh, I'm not being 'the best I can be' for raiding, but it's a pretty minor difference and it improves my overall wow experience ;)


    But yeh, holy is a great spec, have fun learning to use it OP (and hopefully love it). While I think the shield cost nerf was badly designed and clumsy, I'm kinda glad they did it so I can play a spec that I find a lot more enjoyable without feeling like I'm harming my raid.

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