Spirit vs. Crit Rating

[Calendra12345]

so lets say I can choose between having 90 spirit, or have 90 crit rating.

My opinion about this is:

PoH specc = Crit > spirit

Why? If you specc PoH you will want to have atleast 2, ideally 3 stacks of serendipity when you cast a PoH. Crit will give you more Serendipity speccs, and bigger hots of your PoH's

Renew specc = Spirit > Crit

Crit is basically worthless when you spam renew, it will give you bigger heals on POM/Circle of healing, but in the current damaging mechanism you will probably overheal with CoH anyway, assuming you have Test of Faith specced in renew specc.

Spirit will give you sp, meaning your hots will have bigger heals, meaning you can get rid of the renew glyph at some point, making blanketing more effective.


What is your opinion about this?

[Kelesti]

Or.... Surge of Light still wastes a global cooldown, and is quite frequently a sub-par heal; if you require another Prayer, cast Prayer.

The crit logic still doesn't translate evenly across 5 targets. Sure you get "more" crits (law of averages), but it doesn't crit on who may need it most when it's required. You're using the point of the glyph's HoT as a possible selling point of Crit, when if it actually mattered for more than one tick, they'd be healed up by alternate sources (Exception: Aura fights, but those already have a steady stream of incomings).

Crit is unreliable, it's not realistic. And Prayer's quite expensive, so you'd want to stick with Spirit; unlike Discipline, a well played Holy Priestess still can and does run her blue bar down quite easily.

Your build ideas really disgust me, but I'll keep my rant in the other topic, but let me just put it this way:

assuming you have Test of Faith specced in renew specc.

No spec should be without Test of Faith, period.


My opinion? Haste is key. Spirit's for mana, crit's ... for... yeah.

[tehmark]

There isn't really a poh spec, you just run out of mana if you attempt to cast it too much regardless of your spec.

Crit you prob want about 30% raid buffed, i wouldn't ever gem for it.

Surge of light is great no matter what anyone says, its a free heal for like 7k

[meddle]

The idea that there is a "POH spec" at all is a bit alarming; maybe back in Ulduar but certainly not in ICC. Unless your fellow healers are irl vegetables or you run with an odd healing comp with multiple Holy Paladins or something you'll be hard-pressed to be using POH effectively so much as to center your gearing and spec around the spell. Even then if you feel your POH needs to crit more I would question the amount of overhealing it's already doing in your raids.

[Zeuq]

I'm going to have to disagree too.

My opinion about this is:

PoH specc = Crit > spirit

Why? If you specc PoH you will want to have atleast 2, ideally 3 stacks of serendipity when you cast a PoH. Crit will give you more Serendipity speccs, and bigger hots of your PoH's

Sure, it would be nice to have 2-3 stacks of Serendipity, but if you need PoH, you need PoH, and you cast it regardless of the number of stacks you have. Beyond that, a lot of PoH casts don't benefit meaningfully from Serendipity (eg, Infest, Festergut Exhale) because you should be precasting in those situations. Worse, deliberately stacking Serendipity to make use of PoH will actually lose you some throughput because then you're using SoL procs or straight casting FH when you could probably do better with a higher throughput spell.

The more prevalent problem is that PoH is damn expensive, even with all relevant talents, and Spirit will do a lot more to help that situation than Crit will.

Renew specc = Spirit > Crit

Crit is basically worthless when you spam renew, it will give you bigger heals on POM/Circle of healing, but in the current damaging mechanism you will probably overheal with CoH anyway, assuming you have Test of Faith specced in renew specc.

Yes, Crit is pretty much worthless for Renew, but I don't follow the latter part here. Besides the part that every Holy Priest should have Test of Faith because it's better than Blessed Resilience and Empowered Healing point for point, triggering means you're highly unlikely to overheal with it except maybe when tossing a Greater Heal on a caster and it crits. You simply can't overheal with CoH and trigger ToF at the same time on the same target; it just doesn't hit that hard. You still shouldn't be overhealing with CoH much anyway unless you're always casting it on CD regardless of whether it's needed or not

Spirit will give you sp, meaning your hots will have bigger heals, meaning you can get rid of the renew glyph at some point, making blanketing more effective.

I haven't run the Renew glyph in quite a while precisely because of the need for blanketting. I think it's counter-productive for most current content and, besides, it's more or less mutually exclusive with the PoH glyph (since CoH and GS glyphs are effectively mandatory).



And to add to what others have said, there really isn't a "PoH spec". Pretty much any Holy Priest spec is inherently also a PoH spec. I suppose it's possible to deliberately pass on talents that help PoH, perhaps in favor of boosting both Renew and FH, but that just seems... dumb.

[harky]

Yes, there is a PoH spec that takes more regen talents. Yes, it's very strong. Yes, it has mana issues.

In regards to the OP: Spirit > Crit in all cases for Holy. PoH is no exception and is in fact the one setup that Priests have where Spirit is still very worthwhile due to being a regen stat.

Look up the top healers for fights like Blood Queen, Festergut, Putricide, or Sindragosa and you'll notice that in many, many cases their top heal is PoH. Gear levels are now high enough that PoH is no longer a big bursty heal like it was in Ulduar. It's now a filler spell that you use in place of Renew.

Also, OP... PoH specs do not have any points in Serendipity and even if they did they would never cast Flash Heals to stack Serendipity. Serendipity is meant for normal playstyles so that they can quickly swap healing styles to react to certain situations. Intentionally stacking Serendipity slows PoH down greatly. Properly geared you can get PoH down to a 2 second cast and work out rotations so that you never over-write the glyph HoT on groups. That's what the 18/53 specs are meant to do.

[Cemetary.]

I'm not going to quote it but read what Zeuq wrote

It is all about balance dude you want at least 25-30% crit but on a small scale I'd say go with Spirit man more spirit means more SP which means more healing from renew

[Calendra12345]

Your build ideas really disgust me

Enlighten me. Either dont say anything or give some details, its a forum after all.

[Calendra12345]

Sure, it would be nice to have 2-3 stacks of Serendipity, but if you need PoH, you need PoH, and you cast it regardless of the number of stacks you have. Beyond that, a lot of PoH casts don't benefit meaningfully from Serendipity (eg, Infest, Festergut Exhale) because you should be precasting in those situations. Worse, deliberately stacking Serendipity to make use of PoH will actually lose you some throughput because then you're using SoL procs or straight casting FH when you could probably do better with a higher throughput spell.

It depends really, in most cases the PoH normal casting time will be really ineffective, as most fights in ICC are actually aura fights. The SOL proccs should only be used when there is a target who is down 6k hp, also this will save you mana - which will always be a important factor, as holy priest when not played properly, go oom fairly fast. Ofcourse every situation changes, on some factors for example, do you have a disc priest in the raid? Infest will barely touch anyone with a skilled and especially geared disc priest in the raid. Pungeant Blight is a precast, but yes - thats 1-2 PoH's in a whole fight.

All I am saying about stacking up serendipity is that you should not waste it until you see a full group on less then 80%.

Yes, Crit is pretty much worthless for Renew, but I don't follow the latter part here. Besides the part that every Holy Priest should have Test of Faith because it's better than Blessed Resilience and Empowered Healing point for point, triggering means you're highly unlikely to overheal with it except maybe when tossing a Greater Heal on a caster and it crits. You simply can't overheal with CoH and trigger ToF at the same time on the same target; it just doesn't hit that hard. You still shouldn't be overhealing with CoH much anyway unless you're always casting it on CD regardless of whether it's needed or not

Test of Faith is a considerable talent - there is a lot of fights where you will not need it.

Yes, its better then blessed resilience, in some fights. And again, its about how skilled the other healers are in your group, there are alot of fights where people dont go under 50%

Nonetheless, I never said hpriests shouldnt have ToF, or that there is any reason you shouldnt have it - I just said considering you have it, as in my reasoning would be wrong if you dont.

Empowered healing is actually pretty usefull considering you have the 2p t10, where as the SoL's could be used on the procc - which saves you alot of mana, and it could leave up a sexy hot on the target aswell, even though its nothing you can rely on, its a factor.

I haven't run the Renew glyph in quite a while precisely because of the need for blanketting. I think it's counter-productive for most current content and, besides, it's more or less mutually exclusive with the PoH glyph (since CoH and GS glyphs are effectively mandatory).

Yes this is pretty much based on your gear though, the glyph will always give you less 20% healing considering every renew tick heals, on fights like bqueen this will be the case, and should heal it unglyphed, the same goes for sindra etc.

And to add to what others have said, there really isn't a "PoH spec". Pretty much any Holy Priest spec is inherently also a PoH spec. I suppose it's possible to deliberately pass on talents that help PoH, perhaps in favor of boosting both Renew and FH, but that just seems... dumb.

If you use PoH's without specced into serendipity, something is wrong IMO. I prefer tree's for the 2 ways of healing - that is all. Relying on renew's in raiding, with serendipity specced, is a waste. You could rather put them in Blessed Resilience.

[Callypso]

To the poster above me argueing that on some fights people don't go below 50% hp, so test of faith is useless there, making it an optional talent.....

.... if people don't go below 50% on a fight, you either outskill or outgear the fight completely, or you simply brought way more healers than you need. In those cases you could probably have healed in your pvp spec or shadow spec as well without losing anyone due to your choice of spec.

When discussing the 'best' spec, or discussing whether or not talents are mandatory or not, you should at least take fights as an example where choice of talents makes a difference.

[Zeuq]

It depends really, in most cases the PoH normal casting time will be really ineffective, as most fights in ICC are actually aura fights. The SOL proccs should only be used when there is a target who is down 6k hp, also this will save you mana - which will always be a important factor, as holy priest when not played properly, go oom fairly fast. Ofcourse every situation changes, on some factors for example, do you have a disc priest in the raid? Infest will barely touch anyone with a skilled and especially geared disc priest in the raid. Pungeant Blight is a precast, but yes - thats 1-2 PoH's in a whole fight.

All I am saying about stacking up serendipity is that you should not waste it until you see a full group on less then 80%.

There's a few parts here that you're not considering, especially given the context of aura damage type fights. Renew will almost always trump FH in an aura fight because it heals for roughly twice as much over time and those ticks are unlikely to be wasted. I will absolutely use a FH if someone is low, but generally that's what CoH/PoM will help do, and what Shamans and Paladins are watching out for. IOW, FH will generally result in the least amount of healing done with a GCD and, thus, should really only be used if it will save someone's life when another heal will not.

Now, of course, that doesn't consider that FH will help build stacks of Serendipity, but Serendipity is really more of a bonus for being force to use a suboptimal heal, it's far from necessary. Consider that a PoH heals 5 targets for roughly the same amount as a FH, thus, it's efficiency in terms of pure throughput vs GCD usage is anywhere from 2.5x to almost 5x better than FH (or more if you include the glyph). As such, even with zero stacks of Serendipity, it will often make more sense to cast it; it just becomes a better and better tool as you get more stacks. And even if it doesn't make sense, Renew is still roughly 2x more efficient than FH. So, really, the only reasons left to use FH are because it's more mana efficient--and that shouldn't be a huge concern--or if someone may die and need that instant SoL heal.

And mentioning Infest, I still generally cast at least one PoH for every Infest because it provides some margin of error for the Disc Priest and saves her mana. I'll end up casting a few more if the Disc Priest gets picked up by Val'kyrs. And, frankly, if you're only casting PoH 1-2 times on Festergut, you could be doing a lot more. I generally precast a PoH for Exhale, and often get off 1-2 more soon after. Also, like with any aura fight, PoH is a solid filler on that fight during 0-1 Inhales, especially based the positioning required for that fight.

Test of Faith is a considerable talent - there is a lot of fights where you will not need it.

Yes, its better then blessed resilience, in some fights. And again, its about how skilled the other healers are in your group, there are alot of fights where people dont go under 50%

Nonetheless, I never said hpriests shouldnt have ToF, or that there is any reason you shouldnt have it - I just said considering you have it, as in my reasoning would be wrong if you dont.

IMO, and I think most others here, ToF is absolutely a required talent. You may not "need" it on every fight, but it's extremely useful on just about every fight. The main point of it is that not only is it more healing when you really need it while a talent like BR is less all the time, but it plays well into the Holy Priest's strength of burst healing. Even in a relatively steady aura fight, you will still have some people that dip lower. For instance, it's extremely useful for vomits or multiple 2-3 inhales on Festergut or for air phase or pacts and other random spike damage on Blood Queen, even though those are aura fights and, theoretically, no one should be getting below 50% much. Same with Sindragosa, where people's debuffs dropping will often put people below 50%, especially in P3, and all the more important where other healers may have line of sight problems, are ice blocked, or simply can't heal because they're risking their stack getting to high.

Either way, I still don't understand how it supports your argument. By it's very nature, ToF will very seldom result in overhealing, even when Critting; if anything, ToF makes Crit more useful because the times when ToF procs are the same times when Crit is less likely to contribute to pure overhealing, and so they each increase the effect of the other.

Empowered healing is actually pretty usefull considering you have the 2p t10, where as the SoL's could be used on the procc - which saves you alot of mana, and it could leave up a sexy hot on the target aswell, even though its nothing you can rely on, its a factor.

I like Empowered Healing because it's still a throughput increase and gives some tank healing ability, albeit still pretty awful. The problem is the spells it affects just don't constitute enough of a Holy Priest's arsenal to make it better than than BR in most cases (Dreamwalker portals being the only real exception). Even with 2p T10 and 5 points in it, FH is still too weak and just doesn't lend itself to the types of damage patterns in ICC as well as Renew and FH do.

Yes this is pretty much based on your gear though, the glyph will always give you less 20% healing considering every renew tick heals, on fights like bqueen this will be the case, and should heal it unglyphed, the same goes for sindra etc.

It's not a gear issue as much as an encounter issue. The reason no glyph is better on aura fights is because it counteracts the aura just as well, but lets one have more Renews out at a time. Considering that this is the type of encounter that dominates ICC, it just generally doesn't make sense to glyph it. I'd consider glyphing it for a fight where pure HPS is more important than coverage, but as a Holy Priest, that really only occurs when we're forced to single target heal, and that just isn't our role.

If you use PoH's without specced into serendipity, something is wrong IMO. I prefer tree's for the 2 ways of healing - that is all. Relying on renew's in raiding, with serendipity specced, is a waste. You could rather put them in Blessed Resilience.

I'm not following your logic here. Serendipity and Blessed Resilience aren't mutually exclusive. I would say that the vast majority of Holy Priests ought to have both talents maxed out.

Sure, in Ulduar, we were encouraged to stack it on fights like Ignis and Freya because we couldn't precast the burst damage, damage was generally more random and spikey rather than aura based (Mimi and HM IC being the exceptions, not the rule) favoring FH over Renew and, IIRC, we didn't get Empowered Renew until 3.2. But times have changed. The benefit of Serendipity in a Renew based spec isn't to always expect to have a stack before casting it, but to get something in return for casting suboptimal spells. If you run the math, you'll find that PoH by itself does more healing than taking additional GCDs using FHs to stack Serendipity, even with 5/5 EH and 2pT10. Either way, if PoH is the right tool for the job, you should cast it, even if you have zero stacks.

Besides, if I did skip Serendipity, the only other talent where I could consider putting those points would be into Empowered Healing, so there just isn't a good reason not to have Serendipity in a Renew spec.

[harky]

Oy. People, listen, the PoH spec is a spec that goes deeper Disc to get a small assist on mana while skipping talents in Holy that never get used. IE: Surge of Light and Serendipity. These are skipped because on the fights where you would use a PoH build you should never be casting Flash Heal. Your spells used are: Prayer of Healing, Renew, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending and Desperate Prayer. That's it. The spec looks like this: 18/53/0. You take as many longevity talents as possible as well as any utility talents you can. The purpose is to be able to use PoH as often as possible. On a fight like Blood Queen you'll be needing to cast 70+ Prayers in a single fight.

You do not take Serendipity: You will never cast Flash Heal with this build. Stacking Serendipity slows down PoH, it does not speed it up.
You do not take Surge of Light: You will never cast Flash Heal with this build. Flash Heal, especially non-crit Flash Heals are a huge loss in HPS.

These are specialized builds meant for aura fights. They're meant for things like Twins, Blood Queen, Festergut, Putricide and Sindagosa. They're also effective on HM LK.

[Zeuq]

Yes, harky, one can make a PoH spec but, despite that the OP refers to a PoH spec, he also refers to having Serendipity. So, while it is possible, and in some cases advisable, to make a build centered around PoH being the primary filler, it really doesn't fit within the context of the OP, despite his terminology. I agree with you that a proper PoH-centric build shouldn't have Serendipity; hell, I've been arguing that even with Serendipity, PoH is still worth casting without having any stacks of it and it's counter-productive both in terms of throughput and mana to stack Crit to get mroe SoL procs to get more Serendipity stacks.

In short, on the point of the OP, which we have gotten side tracked from, if you're casting Renew, stacking Crit over Spirit sucks because Renew scales terribly with Crit. If you're casting PoH, stacking Crit over Spirit sucks because you'll need the mana and deliberate Serendipity stacking is a throughput loss.

[harky]

My point was to try (key word), to correct the bad terminology. But yes, crit bad, farblegarble.

[Antonne]

The one thing I'm curious about though, with the PoH spec, is this: Is there anything else you can do with the 3 points from Holy Concentration that would be more beneficial?

Considering what the spec is, you'll almost never be casting Flash Heal, Heal, or Greater Heal. Holy priests aren't tank healers - they shouldn't really need to cast a Greater Heal, right? The bonus from Empowered Renew is the only redeeming quality of that talent in this case (if this case is correct). I don't really see a place where it could work out, but if all your casting is PoH, CoH, Renew, and PoM, then Holy Concentration only procs when you're lucky enough to get a Renew crit.

This is, unless, you want to cast FH/Heal/GH enough just to get the proc and then not touch it again until the proc wears off. Is this wise?

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, these are my own questions that I hope to get answered.

[fabian]

The one thing I'm curious about though, with the PoH spec, is this: Is there anything else you can do with the 3 points from Holy Concentration that would be more beneficial?

Considering what the spec is, you'll almost never be casting Flash Heal, Heal, or Greater Heal. Holy priests aren't tank healers - they shouldn't really need to cast a Greater Heal, right? The bonus from Empowered Renew is the only redeeming quality of that talent in this case (if this case is correct). I don't really see a place where it could work out, but if all your casting is PoH, CoH, Renew, and PoM, then Holy Concentration only procs when you're lucky enough to get a Renew crit.

This is, unless, you want to cast FH/Heal/GH enough just to get the proc and then not touch it again until the proc wears off. Is this wise?

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, these are my own questions that I hope to get answered.

You're still going for GS, so taking 3 out of Holy Concentration means you'd have to spend at least 2 in holy. Not to mention, that is the last mana regen talent that can indirectly affect PoH. It is also the stronger of the mana regen talents left too.

[Zeuq]

The one thing I'm curious about though, with the PoH spec, is this: Is there anything else you can do with the 3 points from Holy Concentration that would be more beneficial?

Running off the build that harky posted which is probably what I would do if that were my goal, then really, what else would you do with the points in Holy Concentration? The only other talent that would help toward that goal would be Blessed Resilience, but really, mana will be a much bigger concern than 1% more throughput. Putting talents anywhere else either loses you mana or defeats the goal of the build.

Considering what the spec is, you'll almost never be casting Flash Heal, Heal, or Greater Heal. Holy priests aren't tank healers - they shouldn't really need to cast a Greater Heal, right? The bonus from Empowered Renew is the only redeeming quality of that talent in this case (if this case is correct). I don't really see a place where it could work out, but if all your casting is PoH, CoH, Renew, and PoM, then Holy Concentration only procs when you're lucky enough to get a Renew crit.

This is, unless, you want to cast FH/Heal/GH enough just to get the proc and then not touch it again until the proc wears off. Is this wise?

You'd still cast Renew a considerable amount because, well, it's still solid on aura fights and PoH isn't worth casting if you're not going to meet the efficiency threshold to make the time spent casting it worth it. But it still wouldn't be worth casting FH because you'd lose more mana than you gain, and it's even more of a penalty than it would be with a more traditional spec because you don't have Serendipity there to squeeze a little more beenfit out of it. And, really, FH just isn't useful in the type of role that this sort of build is aimed at.

Sorry, Zeuq, just fixing that boggled quote so we can actually read your post. <3 -- Kel