Spexperimenting

A topic I’ve touched upon in previous posts, is how much variety there is within the priest’s healing arsenal. We have more base healing spells than any other class, we have two healing trees, and then we have a variety of specs within those trees (moreso within holy pve healing than disc). These different holy specs lend themselves to different spell usage, roles, and gearing, in line with the chosen talents.

Given that I’ve come straight into holy from shadow, my gear is a bit lacking, and given that I am sometimes playing shadow in our raids, gemming out to  holy and back again would be unreasonably expensive (alas, I am not one of those 20k gold people that you see bragging in trade / guild chat – *coughaylia* – I think the most amount of gold I ever owned is just over 5k, and that was when I was saving for epic flight and an auction hit the same day). I’m still using a mish mash of healing gear – created by various emblem turn ins, naxx 25 off spec rolls, and some of my dps gear, which has hit on… It’s not ideal, but it provides at least decent testing for my first spec.

Unbuffed, in my current gear, I have:

2296 sp (relatively high, due to my shadow gems)
21698 mana
22.75% holy crit (excluding talents)
282 (8%) haste
303 mp/5 whilst casting

The spec I am trying with said gear is:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#bVcbuZfvzcbMqihhcuAo:N0fMVz

Note: I did not use the glyph of renew last night during testing, because I wasn’t sure how assignments were going to work. Instead I kept the Glyph of Flash Heal, in case I was on a tank, and moreover, given my relatively small mana pool in my gearset. Typically, I was on the raid all night (not that I’m complaining, this spec is BUILT for raid healing) and, with forethought, could have brought the Renew glyph with me just in case.

So how does this spec work?
Basically, it’s all about keeping renews and prom rolling, in order to get SoL up. SoL procs keep serendipity up, which I save for Prayer of Healing exclusively (although wonderful hpm, Greater Heal is generally outshined by flash heal, and when it comes to tank healing holy priests are outshined by pretty much any other healer out there). If Serendipity starts to drop off, then I will try to cast a Flash Heal to keep it up.

Basic breakdown from last night:
Circle of Healing: 28.1%
Renew: 18%
Prayer of Mending: 17.6%
Other: 16.1%
Prayer of Healing: 10.8%
Flash Heal: 9.1%

Good usage of a variety of spells. (Note: this is the actual percentage of what my healing was attributed to – it doesn’t mean I mashed Circle of Healing 28.1% of my evening, it means it healed 28.1% of my successful heals.). In actual *casts*, my most cast spells were Circle of Healing (with relatively overheal – so I wasn’t spamming it unecessarily), Empowered Renew,  Prayer of Mending, Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing etc. My general overheal was pretty low (42%), and this was bumped up by Flash Heal, Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing.

Overall, I’m very happy with this spec, and how it managed to perform on many encounters. I also had generally, low overheal. I attribute most of the flash heal overheals to me trying to keep Serendipity up with my relatively low haste (either I was healing targets that didn’t really need it to keep it up, or was beaten to the punch). Holy Nova overheals were down to me either trying to proc SoL to get flash heal -> x3 stacks serendipity -> hasted ProH, or being a bit thick, and spamming it to try and reach somebody in my party who was out of range of me. And the overheals on ProH are innate to the ridiculous healing power of the spell (I for one, anticipate the nerf with glee).

Over the course of the evening, I was at 1984hps. Not amazing as standalone hps, no, but good considering that we ran with 6 healers, a retadin (who heals more than some of our healers on certain attempts. NERF?). However, the figures get really interesting when I look at individual encounters: at XT 002 in particular, this spec was particularly formidable.

So, overall, on encounters where there is a fair amount of raid damage, and movement, this spec will perform well, and I personally enjoyed the very mobile playstyle that enabled me to bunny hop repeatedly. Given some more crit, spell power, and a renew glyph, it will be very strong, and the one thing that I would need to work on would be to use my SoL procs more, as the buff was dropping off at times.