Disc or Holy for 3.3

[Welund]

Holy for life baby!

[Surrenderpoint]

I used to be disc up to 3.3 on my Priest. Mostly because I didn't have enough Regen to support holy.

One of the things I started to hate about disc was there's only 2 things you can do: Heal a tank (Which a paladin would do better simply because he's healing both tanks or 1 tank + raid. And having 1 paladin healer in your raid makes you near obsolete in this area) or heal/shield the raid. When doing the 2nd part Your shields can put basically a 10k bubble on people with low health to prevent damage while SOMEONE ELSE heals them up. If your the last healer alive or you and a holy paladin are alive, both of you will hve a difficult time keeping the raid and tanks up.

As holy I can heal a tank with stronger Flash and greater heals. I miss the +30% shield on a crit. But my holy crit is pretty low at 29% raid buffed. So it's not a great loss. As holy I can push out 10.4k HPS on festergut 25 due to raid healing. As holy I can manage my mana much better. I can take it easy and just POM/COH to convserve mana. Or I can really pump out the heals burning my mana with POM/COH/POH spam.

Holy has alot more control over how much healing you can do. As Disc it's much more limited by GCD and haste than mana. In10 man ICC I was maxing out my healing 2healing with a resto druid. I was pushing my Limit spamming as much as I could and healing everyone including tanks and it was barely enough for marrowgar-festergut. At festergut it wasn't enough and I had to respec to holy. After respecing I fell in love with it simply because I control how much I heal based on how much mana I use up. I'm not limited as much as I am as disc. I can tank heal or raid heal and be good at both.

Please, format your post. No one wants to read walls of text. -- Kelesti

[supa]

Unless you are specced for it, or are in amazing regen gear, then spamming flash heal as holy will make you go /oom. It's in general not an effective heal. Holy was not meant to be disc, and if you try to play each spec the same then you will fail at both.

[Peacemoon]

All I would say is that in general Holy is not as efficient as Disc in terms of mana. This means that if you gear for Disc and switch to Holy, you will probably have mana issues. If you gear for Holy and switch to Disc (like I do) You have stupid amounts of mana that is unneeded.

As others have said though, ending the fight at 50% mana is not a bad thing. However as healers its easy to get obsessed with being able to theoretically heal forver, however in practice no one needs to heal forever. Also you can always use some restraint if its a long fight and let other, efficient healers such as Druids clean up some of the mess. This might seem a weakness, but I think of it as teamwork.

[Alaska]

Lakh: Alot of the time, you Flash Heal the tank, and keep Penance in reserve for when it's needed to help you play "catch up" but yes, pre-shielding can help. Going out of your way to maintain 5 people's weakened souls for maximum shield uptime is not necessarily the best way to handle that, though.

Lootasisew: The raid puzzle means nothing when you're the only one dishing out "heal" spells, in a 5-man dungeon.

Damaso: Those instances are designed to be kind of challenging, especially given the free gear out they handed to you that is ToC (both the 5 man and the normal 10/25 instance itself).

Tumdumdumdum: Rage has been generated through shields since either 3.0.8 or 3.1.

I play the same way. I mainly use flash heal and do penance to catch up or get a quick crit off for the aegis shield. (forgive my spelling if its wrong ; . I heard someone say in another thread something about not to use flash heal..which confused me...:x

Also...a question: does anyone take Divine Fury for the reduce cast time on greater heal? Or is it not worth it over the damage reduction talent?

[rubberbands]

Also...a question: does anyone take Divine Fury for the reduce cast time on greater heal? Or is it not worth it over the damage reduction talent?

This is one of the major points of contention in all priest debates/arguments. I would say its really something you have to decide for yourself. That being said take the following into consideration:
The current progression fight your guild is getting stumped on
Your raid compo, especially the abundance of holy pallies

And avoid these myths
-Divine fury or Divine fury with haste/BT is for "Gheal sniping"
-Spell warding is a "must-have" for survival

[Alaska]

This is one of the major points of contention in all priest debates/arguments. I would say its really something you have to decide for yourself. That being said take the following into consideration:
The current progression fight your guild is getting stumped on
Your raid compo, especially the abundance of holy pallies

And avoid these myths
-Divine fury or Divine fury with haste/BT is for "Gheal sniping"
-Spell warding is a "must-have" for survival

I'm currently the tank healer as disc in my 10 man group. If I do 25, I'll do what's needed, holy or disc. Honestly, I don't use greater heal that much...I never really have too...If I do it's only a few times. I mostly flash heal, penance, PoM, renew, and ofc bubble. I keep a haste trinket (snowflake, I hit 80 not too long ago -5 days ago, switched my main from resto shaman- on my priest all that has been available) for fights that have a lot of raid healing so I can pop that if I need to, to get some extra raid heals flying.