Holy raid healing.Follow

So my new guild has asked me to go Holy a couple of times now.

The first time was for Valithria. That went fine. We did the achievement, so kept it on normal and used 4 healers, which meant healing was really quite relaxed.

The second time was in Ulduar 10 hard modes. It went fine, considering that half the raid had never been past Ignis, and on normal at that.
Firefighter is... I think it still requires people to try and do their best, and I'm not sure how well I'm doing as Holy. I unfortunately didn't log any of it, but I'm just not sure how to prioritise spells.
I cast Renew on the tanks and other people taking damage. ProM on cooldown, as usual. CoH as often as possible when it's viable to cast - but I still need to get used to who the secondary targets are. Then I use FHeal when Searing Light procs.
Right. I don't feel nearly as powerful as I do as Disc, and there are moments where I just don't know which spell to cast or let a Renew fall off or make some other mistake. I'm really really uncertain how I should prioritise.

I also do worse on the meters (who would've thought?). Went Holy in VoA25 this week as well, and the really horrible Disc priest in the group, well, he did 60% of my healing but that was more due to inexplicable downtime than low HPS and he had much worse gear than me. I realise that Holy priests have their place, but I'm just not feeling as confident with it as I'd like and I honestly think that most encounters in ICC are much more Disc friendly, some (hello LK25 heroic!) even to the point where you want two Disc priests.

I'm not sure what I'm seeking. Advice? A rotation? A slap in the face for considering to abandon Disc (and Aethien)?

Also, should I cast CoH more frequently to get more Searing Light procs?


I'm just lost here. And it looks like I'll be at least part time Holy simply because it can secure me a raid spot and I think most other priests are at least as uncomfortable with switching to another seemingly inferior healing style.

BLASPHEMY

Fo sho.

I realize Serendipity is a good talent, but it ruined Holy for me. I find it too constricting now.

PoH/Serendipity spec is really underpowered, and GHeal/Serendipity spec is too tank healing focused when you've got an abundance of Holy paladins. I can just refer to the specs of the high end raiding priests, as well. :P

Plus, I was asked to go Renew spec and it's quite honestly what I wanted when going Holy.

Wait wait wait, so you're saying Renew is the spell you should spam at all times, but you shouldn't spec into it?

Test of Faith is fine. It's better than many other options.

Even with Serendipity and stacking Haste, PoH is still slow, and very limited. I mean, if the whole raid is taking damage, chances are other healers will have topped off half the group your PoH targeted before it goes off, making it extremely inefficient. Plus if we need it, we have at least one priest with that offspec in our setup.

Places such as EJ (no matter how crappy they are for healers) point out that Renew spec is perfectly reasonable, and if you look at the logs of some of the better guilds in the world (say, world top 25) that many Holy priests at that level barely ever use PoH.

I'm more comfortable with the spec I've got now, probably in part because it's at least somewhat akin to Disc, and I don't see any evidence why it's worse.

Holy priests are not as rare as you think simply because quite a few guilds run with a Disc/disc setup and more than half of ICC doesn't work with that, so one of those priests will go holy for most of the raid.

And it's not that they don't spec into Serendipity, it's that their logs say (for the ones I've looked at anyway) that they rarely ever cast it. Rarely meaning maybe 2 or 3 CoH's during an encounter that lasts anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes. Mind you, there are exceptions, but I am keeping my Disc spec, leaving me only room for one holy spec and that's the one I have now.


The thing you're arguing is that those people don't have to have Serendipity to efficiently cast PoH, right? The way I see it, PoH is a very, very problematic spell. I think I highlighted the reasons above. Even if you have it down to 1.5 seconds, that's 1.5 seconds during which half the people you're targetting with it can get topped off and if you have, say, a Restoration shaman, in the raid, that is quite likely to happen. Communication and understanding and skill among the healers has to be very high to get PoH off in a fashion that makes it actually better than other spells you could have used in that time. Or at least that's how I feel.

I might just be really crappy with my PoHs.


I think it comes down to preference anyway. I think I prefer not to have to deal with a spell I can't handle when I don't feel like I have much control over the spec to begin with.

It's better as Holy if you have Serendipity, I think.

In any case, it's kind of broken and just interferes with the other healers too much. Or gets interfered with.

I still hold it's pretty hard to pull that off in a 25man raid situation.
In heroics, sure. In raids there's too many pallies and shammies stacking haste and clipping heals left and right. They greatly decrease the chance for success with PoH.

As for sort of solid maths, if we assume PoH heals 4 targets without overheal, that puts us at something like 19.2k at ~30% crit raidbuffed with 4k SP. Under hastecap and with Serendipity up (which requires us to use GCDs on Fheals that heal for much less), PoH will be slightly shorter than 2 GCDs. 2 GCDs could give us two Renews which can amount to some 23k or so healing. If raid damage is high enough to make PoH viable at all, the Renews are not likely to do as much overhealing as usual, either.

Edited, Jul 13th 2010 1:00am by Kalivha

Actually, I made some wrong assumptions there. Not knowing the exact inner workings of Serendipity, I was actually pretty far off.

So one PoH takes about as much time as 1.3 GCD's. Fair enough. That makes it a lot better.

There is, however, still the issue that you need to use Flash Heals before you have three stacks of Serendipity, and Flash Heal is really not all that efficient. It does not matter if that's instant with SoL, it takes one GCD anyway and while having anything cast at the start of that makes everything more predictable, it's still not all that efficient, considering FHeal's HPET is roughly half that of Renew (if you have Emp. Renew).

You'd lose about 12k potential healing and gain some 14k or so, but PoH is awfully hard to manage and you need to greatly adjust your healing style and somewhat adjust your talent build to properly utilise it.