1. #1

    Struggling Holy priest - gear advice?

    So I've been trying my best to gear my priest well enough to bring into raids but still feel relatively uncomfortable with my holy spec. My main is a holy paladin and I feel that I can't even compete with that kind of throughput.. it's kind of why I wanted to make another healer class. The paladin was a little too easy and a little too boring with only a few spells to choose from and efficiency that left me with 50% or more mana at the end of many fights. The priest on the other hand is I feel close to my paladin in terms of gear but I still struggle with some encounters in heroics both with trash and bosses in both keeping everybody alive or doing it without burning through all my mana. So please give me some gear advice? Am I going about this all wrong?

    us.battle.net/wow/en/character/garithos/elyssa/simple - sorry I can't post a link yet. this is my first post.

    A few quick notes -

    a) I know I'm missing my shoulder enchant. I'm one or two dungeon runs away from exalted with therazane so I'll be getting that soon.
    b) other epics - I have Gloves/legs available but couldn't justify gaining 60 sp for losing 200+combat regen? or should I be doing just that?
    c) I'll replace the inner fire glyph as soon as my AH has glyph I'm actually after, I think prayer of healing or something.

  2. #2
    Herald of the Titans Ynna's Avatar
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    Gear:
    You should try and gear consistently. The Holy stat priority is something like this: Intellect>Spirit until you are comfortable>Mastery or Haste>Haste or Mastery>Excess Spirit>Crit.
    You should pick either Haste or Mastery and reforge the one you don't pick. Say you like Mastery, you reforge your Haste and Crit to Mastery and pick the Artful Ember Topaz for you Yellow Slots. (Or you pick Haste and, well, it should be clear...)
    Spec
    First of all I'd remove the point out of Rapid Renewal, this you should definitely do. The rest looks more or less okay, but there are a few things I would change. Take the points out of Veiled Shadows and put them into Darkness. Veiled Shadows doesn't do what you want if you're running Heroic Dungeons (and even in raids it isn't too good) and even if you prefer Mastery the Haste is too good to pass on. I would also lose Divine Touch and put those points in Blessed Resilience.

    Now, you're saying your struggling. Is this struggling when people are screwing up, or even when others aren't doing things they're not supposed to do? On trash are people CC'ing?
    Also could you tell how you heal trash packs and bosses? If you're struggling with Mana a different spell selection can help a lot.
    Resurrected Holy Priest

  3. #3
    Yeah I realized also that I need to gem properly as I have some mastery, some haste. As far as the reforging has gone, I've put all the crit into haste rather than mastery because I feel like my mastery is usually pretty high (either 15 or 17 depending on the gear) and I share more than enough pieces for my shadow set and don't want to haste/mastery balance there as well. I'd been wondering if the 12.5% haste (or even 7.5) is worth shooting for as I really don't use renew often enough which is also why I hadn't reforged everything over to haste. last point regarding the gems, should I skip the socket bonuses and gem straight Brilliant Inferno? I think the overall gain from replacing the other gems with the exception of two to keep the meta bonus would be about 80 int.

    Thanks for the spec advice. I can tell i'm definitely not using shadow fiend in the heroics which kind of ruiins the whole point of having that talent, but I hadn't yet gone into a raid as a healer so wasn't sure if I would need it there.

    As far as the 5-mans. On a few packs without CC, yeah can be rather trying for my mana pool. I'd like to think that with my current gear I shouldn't be worrying about my mana quite as often. Generally I start pre-pull with PoM and a heal to enter Chakra State: Serenity, put a renew on the tank and spam heal. When that's not enough to keep them topped off I use Holy Word: Serenity and continue using heal and if starting to dip low greater heal. If tank gets really low I use 2x Flash Heal 1 Greater Heal. If the rest of the group is taking damage I use Circle of Healing and maybe throw out a renew or two and maybe HW:Serenity to top off the dps. I'd say I'm ok in most dungeons although the last random I had was GB with 3 melee dps so a lot of extra damage going out everywhere during the trash. It took me a while to get used to priest healing.. The lower mana costs on Flash and GH had me fooled into thinking I can cast them more often since the Pally equivalents are 2k more mana but when I first started healing using 2x Flash and GH a lot would run me out pretty quickly. If there's a lot of damage going out to everybody in the party that's when I really start to struggle... CoH on cooldown, a flash if somebody needs it and PoH to try and get everybody up while using HW:Serenity on the tank to keep renew rolling.

    I'd really like to see how I perform in a raid environment as I think the aoe healing is where I should be stronger than my pally but my first attempt with magmaw had me at maybe half the healing of the two pally's in there. Granted that fight is generally good for pally's between using Beacon and HR on the group. I've never been one to keep an eye on HPS so much as total healing so I might need to start checking that out as well. Thanks for the quick reply, sorry for my slow reply, was rushing to go make a second Tsunami card for the pally : )

  4. #4
    Herald of the Titans Ynna's Avatar
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    Okay, spell selection:
    You are definitely on the right track when healing the tank, with only one comment. In Heroic Dungeons you should strive to use Flash Heal as little as possible, only when the tank is about to die RIGHT NOW! Try to anticipate so you can use Greater Heal instead.
    You're a bit off-track with AoE healing. Our go-to spell for AoE situations is Prayer of Healing. When 3 or more people need healing PoH is the most efficient thing you can do. If that's not enough follow up with a Circle of Healing. Something else to note is that Binding Heal is the same manacost as Flash Heal but heals both you and your target and also builds up Serendipity.
    Resurrected Holy Priest

  5. #5
    Thanks again for the response. I'll continue trying to go without using Flash Heal unless absolutely necessary. And to use binding heal more often I guess I'll have to pop that in a different keybind just to make it more accessible. I followed your advice with the re-spec and currently have one point left over. Is it worth it to drop that in the Improved PW:S talent? and for that matter should I perhaps go 2/3 in Mental Agility and 2/2 in Improved PW:S? I tend to not use PW:S too often altho I know the body and soul talent makes it quite useful at times. I tend to throw it on when somebody is low on health and I want an extra cushion to be able to bring them up safely as opposed to using it as a proactive healing tool just because I don't want to run through too much mana for a barrier I don't know will be used all the way.

  6. #6
    Personally, I'm comfortable with having 2500 spirit. I raised my haste enough to have 12.5%, enough to add a renew tick. After that I've stacked Mastery. I understand that it's a preference, but I see our mastery as free heals whereas stacking haste means you have to stack more spirit and be careful not to burn through your mana.

    On gemming, the most frequent recommendation I hear is to gem straight int unless the socket bonus has 20+ int, then you put a hybrid int/mastery or int/haste depending on how you roll into yellows, and int/spirit into blue sockets. The reason for this is by activating the socket bonus, you get as much int as you would have with a pure in gem +20 in another useful stat.
    If you want to make raiding content harder, turn off DBM. Voila! Your encounters will be much more challenging without bleeps and someone telling you to "run away, little girl."

  7. #7
    I'd been wondering about that regarding the gems. I figure I will go that route since none of my socket bonuses are that high and gain about 80 int at the loss of some haste/mastery/spirit. Regarding some of my other gear, would you recommend going for higher int at the expense of a lot of spirit? right now I can wear some 359 gloves/legs that would gain me maybe 60 int but -200 spirit, and once i get exalted with wildhammer (that'll take a while..) the pendant. Right now I'd been stacking spirit as much as possible because I'm still not comfortable with my mana. Part of that is my mana pool.. until I got the DMC:Tsunami I had about 80k mana 3500 combat mp5. Right now I"m wondering if I should have passed on the Mandala and get another int trinket like the Core of Ripeness? While I"m not a fan of on-use procs the 1960 int I gain for 10 secs from Mandala just makes me freak out for a second because I've gone from full mana to 60% when my max mana goes from 85k-> 127k with all procs up. I like to think that better throughput will cover for less spirit if you're casting less frequently. While the Mandala certainly looked nice while I was working towards buying it I now have buyer's remorse and wish I'd gotten the stump of time for shadow..

  8. #8
    Herald of the Titans Ynna's Avatar
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    If you have a point left put it wherever you like. I personally wouldn't put it in Improved Power Word: Shield, but I only use it for the speed increase.
    The reason the Mandala is that good is not because of the extra throughput (although that's nice as well), but because a lot of things affection mana regen go up with Intellect. First of all, because of the way regen is calculated Intellect increases your regen. Then, if you time your Shadowfiend or Hymn of Hope with the Mandala, they'll give you a lot of extra mana back. Replenishment also improves with a higher mana pool.
    Quote Originally Posted by Nartalath View Post
    Personally, I'm comfortable with having 2500 spirit. I raised my haste enough to have 12.5%, enough to add a renew tick. After that I've stacked Mastery. I understand that it's a preference, but I see our mastery as free heals whereas stacking haste means you have to stack more spirit and be careful not to burn through your mana.
    I'd like to comment on this, not because I favor Haste (because, really, whatever works for you.), but because this is a mistake a lot of people make. More Haste will not make you go out of mana faster.
    Resurrected Holy Priest

  9. #9
    I have noticed what you mean about the Mandala. Yes it scares me for a second when I suddenly look like I'm at 60% mana but on the rare occasion that absolutely everything procs (heartsong/lightweave/mandala/) my mana pool goes from 85-125k and my mana regen from 3500 to 8000 or so for the ten seconds it's active.

    Thanks again for all the feedback.

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