Returning Holy Priest looking for some advice

[Miphon]

Hi all,
I've just recently reactivated my WoW account after being away from the game for just over a year, and I'm looking for some advice on how to spec and gear my holy priest for healing heroics as I'm not likely to raid anytime soon. The threads I've read on various forums are mostly focused on raid healing specs, but from the few heroics I've healed since returning, I'm not sure I can follow the advice those threads contain 100%...

Here's a link to my current spec and I hope to get some constructive feedback on how it might be improved.

In addition, most of my gear is outdated (I was raiding Naxx 10 & 25 when I stopped playing), and while I do have a few emblems I can use to start obtaining better gear with, I don't really know what pieces I should focus on getting first. Here's a link to my armory page and any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.

Thanks in advance...

[Danner]

As long as you're not planning on raiding, you don't really need much. Sign up for the new matchmaking heroic dungeon feature and enjoy. Buy some better gear from your badges as you earn them, and get some decent regen trinkets if you can. It really makes a large difference. The spirit-world glass really isn't that amazing anymore, although the really good manaregen trinkets are unfortunately aquired from raiding. You will need a lot of manaregen to heal raids, but not so for heroics.

As far as your specc goes... drop Improved Healing. The talent really really sucks, and it's not worth 3 talent points, or even 1 for that matter. You will not be using Greater Heal much at all, in raids or heroics alike. Not the same as not using it, but usually only 1-2 times / heroic run. Not worth it.

I would also replace 5/5 empowered healing with 3/3 blessed resilience and 2/5 empowered healing. This will make your fheals slightly weaker, but all your other spells slightly stronger. The tradeoff is always worth it unless you are spending an overwhelming amount of time spamming flash heal. And if you do, you really should reroll a paladin. In fact, more and more holypriests nowadays end up dropping empowered healing altogether... flash heal is still used a lot, but as a holy heroic healer, it's actually quite rare for me to spam single target heals much.

I will also personally recommend Body and Soul as one of the most fun parts of the holy tree. There are still people around who think this talent suck, but these people all smell, their mothers don't love them, and when they grow up they will become airport security personnel and customs inspectors. The rest of us love this talent to death because we love to have fun while playing ;D

And finally, get test of faith. It's awesome, being able to heal the targets needing it is much more useful than the overall stronger heals Blessed resilience can offer. But there is no reason why you can't get both. Drop inner focus if you have to, though it's still useful until you get slightly better gear, it will lose its value rather fast towards the endgame. The TBC reason to love this talent (OOFSR abuse) is gone.

As far as gear selection goes, aim for the tailor-crafted stuff. The robe of Merlin in Particular is amazing. It's quite cheap to come by now that you can get all the mats by running heroics (buy the rare mats from frozen orbs instead of spending badges on them).

[Minia]

Body of soul sucking kinda depends on the group setup. If theres a disc priest in the raid doing their job, it makes BaS kinda useless ;x imo anyway.

Another thing he shoulda mentioned is.. Spirit gemming.. Ew. Dont do that. Ever. 12SP + 10int gems are really nice for both spellpower AND regen. And fit the socket.

[Lysdexic]

I will also personally recommend Body and Soul as one of the most fun parts of the holy tree. There are still people around who think this talent suck, but these people all smell, their mothers don't love them, and when they grow up they will become airport security personnel and customs inspectors. The rest of us love this talent to death because we love to have fun while playing ;D

This! And spirit gems aren't our friends anymore!!

[Miphon]

Thanks for the feedback so far, I'm still learning to adjust my healing style from how I used to play, and consequently feel like I have a lot to catch up on...

Just to clarify one of the points above, am I correct that spirit has become less useful because OOFSR mana regeneration got nerfed? So while you can use the old tactics to maximise your time OOFSR, the gain to your mana regeneration from using these tactics has been diminished... I'm just trying to understand how the healing game has changed.

Thanks again.

[Lysdexic]

WotLK 'revolutionized' healing. In a raid, not only is mana not enough of an issue to warrant OOSFR time, the rules of the game just don't allow it. Stopcasting is dead. All these old habits have been thrown out the window in favor of intense button mashing. A lot of people want to get their haste up to 1000+ for the shorter GCDs and to be able to toss out PoH's and stuff faster.

Since, however, raiding is not really on your agenda anymore.... Depending on the group you can for sure still play the OOFSR game in heroics. The question is whether or not you will need to.

Spirit got nerfed to hell in the regen formula. If I'm not mistaken, if you're hurting for regen, intellect gemming is better than spirit, even as holy (still go for sp/int gems, as opposed to pure int). A healthy amount of crit is nice too, which can be anything like 23-28% Holy crit chance.

Last note on the OOFSR since I just remembered. Overall regen went waaaay down but meditation got brought up to 50%, so our mp5 in FSR stayed around the same but our OOFSR regen dropped significantly. Our gimmicky little regen talent, the revamped Holy Concentration requires spirit in order to provide any benefit at all. My rule of thumb is to try and have something like 2/3 of my pieces of gear with spirit (and it's a healthy source of sp).


Sorry wall of text

[Zeuq]

A few comments on what Danner said:

Body & Soul is a fun talent, and it has uses in many of the ICC encounters, but it really just isn't useful for running heroics. If you're a little bit undergeared and not raiding any time soon, I think you may be better off with focusing on more of the throughput talents instead and picking it up later when you have a little more gear or when you're looking to start raiding.

I also want to emphasize what he said in that basically Test of Faith > Blessed Resilience > Empowered Healing. That said, there's very little reason you can't maximize both Test of Faith and Blessed Resilience, so it's usually just deciding if points in Empowered Healing are better spent there or on other talents that improve your utility.



Regarding the usefulness of Spirit, it is a combination of things, but generally Intellect is just flatly better regen, although that may be different in heroics when you're not guaranteed Replenishment. Anyway, Spirit does eventually start to match up pretty well with Intellect since it scales better and, when including the Spell Power it grants, it starts to provide decent bang for the buck, but by that point, you should have little use for additional regen, so it's a moot point anyway. Read the stick on the value of Intellect for more specific information, but in general, Spirit is really only useful to gem as a hybrid gem when matching Blue sockets, although it is virtually always worth it as Holy.