Yep 180k HPS with a good chunk of it being renew. Over the 2:27 minutes renew did more healing than divine hymn and like 15% less healing than PoM (with EoL included)!!. Rather than inaccurate this is a great 2minute simulation with constant ticking damage on the raid. Rather than go its the zerg method it don't count you should be thinking hold on, its two minutes with pretty high damage. He can cast whatever he wants, but he chooses to use renew. What does that tell you?
- - - Updated - - -
What are you on about? Smite efficient? It has rubbish HPM and hits for 50k, where CoH hits on a single target for 30k with another 8k as a HoT in 6 seconds. On top of that holy gets divine insight and 18% more healing on PoM.
The point of smite is that it may be rubbish as a heal, but its quite good for combined damage and healing. I mean seriously who gets topped off by a 50k heal.
Use Renew. This post is wrong.
Who doesn't get topped off by a 50k heal!? There's a reason you only use Smite in low-damage phases. The 50k will be more than enough to get people to 100%, but more importantly, by the time you (a non-priest healer) register the damage is dealt, Smite will have already sniped the heal off of you. And it's not that "lol smite I'm steelin ur healz i has hgih hps", it's more that with Smite, a priest is saving you the cost and cooldown of a spell because his filler spell is a smart heal, and one that will probably proc Divine Aegis.
I've played both, and frankly both are viable at any level right now and will be in 5.4. I think it's to Blizzard's credit that they've given both healing trees such a well defined & differentiated core that you actually have so many people who love one playstyle and hate the other!
Too many people focus solely on the HPS and don't realize that higher Disc HPS isn't necessarily adding overall healing, it's just sniping (turning other healers heals into overheal). That's not to say that DA/smite smart healing doesn't add utility - it certainly does. You just have to understand the strengths and weaknesses of that utility and not get mesmerized by the HPS numbers. Part of what Disc doesn't have is reactive healing - something Holy excels at.
In the end, you should play whatever you feel better about. If that's Holy, your HPS may be a bit lower at times, but you'll notice your co-healers' numbers will be higher in turn (you're sniping less heals). If you play Disc, there may be times when you feel the strain of not being able to pump out ridiculous amounts of reactive healing, but you'll remember that you can (and probably should have) plan ahead for that damage spike and use your tools accordingly.
TLDR: Play what you want, and understand there's more to it than HPS. We're not DPS after all.
I don't care about hps really, the part of disc i don't like is the smite aa specc,feels like a dps class that just isn't for me.
5.4 isn't that good in terms of healing priest, I've seen some logs from the ptr and Isheria's word that we aren't going to be as strong as we are right now, maybe that will change, but knowing blizzard holy is usually the specc they look at the last, who knows i'll find out next week
All I can say is "It's about time."Holy Word: Sanctuary mana cost reduced to 3.8% (down from 6.3%), and now functions like a smart heal, healing the 6 most injured friendly targets within range, and minor guardians are no longer targeted (Wild Imps, Bloodworms, Snakes from Snake Trap, etc.). There has been no change to the total amount of healing granted by the ability.
It's not fair but... with the amount of aoe crazy heroic fights and the ability to be an antonement whore and add to the dps, at the moment, Disc is in a highly desirable place. But if you're adamant that Holy is what you enjoy... and you'll quickly get tired of the game if you don't play it just go Holy.
Our healing priest is that stubborn as well, and I just have to heal around any faults not having a shielding priest around offers up. It's fine. It's not un-doable. But in the short time I had a Disc priest around to share healing duties... just, goddamn wasn't even comparable. The raid health barely fluctuates between the two of us. (Hpala/Disc combo is nutty)
However as we're leaving ToT Behind and entering into SoO we just don't know how valuable aoe shield spam is going to be... The devs really need to ease off a bit on: 'OKAY ITS HEROIC WHAT DO WE DO DIFFERENTLY? ...HARDER HITTING AOE DAMAGE... GENIUS!' For healers. It's getting terribly tiresome.
I am sure you can play admirably as holy though. But keep a disc spec 'around' for those moments.
I have eaten all the popcorn, I left none for anyone else.