>>> DISCIPLINE PRIEST TALENT SPEC  – Here is my current talent tree spec – (56/15/0) <<<

DISCIPLINE PRIEST TALENT NOTES

Soul Warding - wow! This one is nice and only costs 1 talent point.  Bargain!  You have to realise that your PW: Shield spell has a 4 second cooldown already, so by getting this talent, you effectively remove the cooldown.  You still can’t cast it on the same person straight away due to the Weakened Soul effect, but you can cast it on as many people in the raid as you want in quick succession now.

Improved Flash Heal is like the old holy talent for Test of Faith.  Disc priests get to increase the critical chance, while holy priests get to increase their healing in general by 4% for targets at or below 50% health

Focused Will which used to just be a PVP talent, has now been made useful for raiding thanks to the 3% spell critical chance increase.

Renewed Hope is great for damage mitigation.  100% chance to reduce ALL damage taken by 3% and for 20 seconds, when someone has recently had a shield on them.

Divine Aegis  – BUBBLES!!! This one is your best friend. 30% of your critical heal amount will become damage that is absorbed after you heal your target.

Borrowed Time now just gives you 25% spell haste straight up after casting PW: Sheild and it also improves the amount absorbed by your shield by a huge 40% of your spell power.

Holy Specialisation and Inspiration are still must haves for discipline priests since there are so many abilities that proc based on your spell criticals

 
Holy Priest Talent Spec – Just incase you’d like to try out healing as Holy with Circle of Healing (14/57/0)

Time to revisit the Holy priest talent spec after patch 3.1!

>>> HOLY PRIEST TALENT SPEC  – Here are the talents I’d choose now from the new 3.1 patch Holy tree talents (14/57/0) <<<

 If you want the Lightwell, remove a point from Divine Fury to spend it on the Lightwell.

HOLY PRIEST TALENT NOTES

Healing Focus is just not worth the 2 points.  I haven’t specced into this for a few months now as it’s just not needed.  If there is a specific fight where you specifically need this talent, just get a paladin to put up concentration aura instead.

Inspiration is a must have for all healing priests.

Desperate Prayer isn’t used as much, but it’s an awesome way of keeping yourself alive it’s definitely worth the 1 talent point.  Remember, if you die, the whole raid could tumble over shortly after. This talent saves you from that.

Holy Concentration  now increases your spirit regen by 50% for 8 seconds after a spell crit, if you spend 3 points on it.  With the nerf to mana regen, definitely have to learn this talent.

Empowered Renew is a brilliant talent.  15% of your healing effects are applied to your renew now and in addition, it will instantly heal the target for 15% of the total periodic effect! Nice!

Serendipity now just reduces the cast time of your next greater heal or prayer of healing spell. Not really worth it imo.

Body and Soul is very much a PVP talent and I would not take it for raid healing.  How often do you need to run fast or cleanse a disease or poison effect at the same time?

Discipline Priest Talent Spec - Just incase you’d like to try out my new favourite spec and the one I’m currently playing with (56/15/0)

Loatheb – Naxxramas Boss | Plague Quarter

Necrotic Aura 

A wave of necrotic energy fills the room, completely preventing all healing effects for 17 sec.

Inevitable Doom

Inflicts 4000 shadow damage to nearby enemies after 10 sec.

Tips for healing around the Necrotic Aura

• Shield people, especially mages and other characters who have lower hitpoints before the Inevitable Doom hits everyone which prevents them from taking too much damage
• Put hots on people who need healing before the Necrotic Aura is lifted. When the aura is lifted those hots will tick away giving them some health back
• Start casting your heals that take the longest to cast a few seconds before the aura is lifted, so your heal will land as soon as you can heal again
• If it’s mostly your party that needs healing, start casting your big party heal spell ie. Prayer of Healing (soon to be raid wide) 2 seconds before the aura is lifted and then just as it goes off, use some instant heals on the rest of the raid or on yourself

Just thought I would share with you the (4) set bonus on the new healing priests Valorous Sanctification Regalia – tier 8

Casting Power Word: Sheild also grants you 250 spell power for 5 seconds.

Source: http://ptr.wowhead.com/?new-items#items-4:1:5

This is great news for discipline priest who would tend to use more shields per raid than a holy priest, but it’s awesome for both parties really.  I can just see holy priests casting a shield to get the set bonus to proc, and then using circle of healing straight afterwards for maximum impact.

On a side note…

I’ve really enjoyed being a discipline priest in raids. Penance is just so much fun, especially when you see your target who is near death, suddently have plenty of health after three ticks of your penance. Plus your shields really do save people near death since they just absorb so much more damage than holy priest shields.

I’m holy at the moment, but only for the purpose of  seeing what it’s like when you have a full set of Teir 7.5 gear on and bucketloads of spell power.  I’ll probably stay holy for the first week after the patch as well but will go discipline from then on.  Weird because I was always such a holy priest lover.

Here’s my current WowArmory entry:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Frostmourne&n=Kikikins

Here’s an alternative for holy priests upset by the new CoH cooldown.

If you haven’t quite made it to raids yet, you may wish to install the Glyph of Holy Nova  on your character.

Glyph of Holy Nova
Your Holy Nova spell heals for an additional 40%, but deals 40% less damage.

Sure, Holy Nova only has a 10 yard range from yourself, but if you stand inbetween the tank and the ranged dps you can hit both instantly and repeatedly (if you are used to CoH spam) for the same amount of healing that CoH did.

Our guild finally began 25-man Naxx last night which just so happened to coincide with the release of patch 3.08.  

The new patch brought with it, what I originally thought of as an innocent change being the 6 second cooldown to Circle of Healing.  I thought, great! now those silly priests who just spam CoH all raid long and overheal like crazy will have to play properly like the rest of us! I always kept my overheal down only using CoH when there was masses of raid damage happening or at least 4 people who needed healing at the same time.  But I think I underestimated my own useage of CoH.  

It was during the raid with the new 6 second cooldown when I discovered that I was previously always using CoH twice in a row to top everyone off.  To watch the whole raid take aoe damage over 20-30 seconds, made me feel so helpless and basically disabled only being able to cast CoH once every 6 seconds.  I found I had to single target flash/greater heal people and bounce around prayer of mending with the futile hope it would bounce so much and people wouldn’t die. I think I even used prayer of healing for my own party.  It was then, that I came to the realisation that priests are weak aoe healers now.

So, my thoughts are that if I am now meant to act more like a pally healer, that I’ll need to stack alot more haste than I previously had.  I had favoured crit, spirit and int over stacking more haste pre patch 3.08, since I had enough instants that could get me through the difficult spots.  But a small 6 second cooldown has really hit home that I now need more haste as well. I currently have 203 haste but will probably need closer to 400 going forward.

I’m not sure if it was circumstantial or not, but in the heal meters on recount there were very obvious divisions with classes in the amounts of healing done.   Usually I’m sitting just after the pally healers but it went like this (top to bottom): Pally, pally, shammy, shammy, shammy, priest, druid.  As you know druids have also had a cooldown placed on their CoH equivalent.

Tell me your thoughts on this topic and how you coped with the new cooldown.  Maybe you even have some pointers for me?

I recently went deep into discipline just to try it out and to gain the spirit buff for my raid group.  
This was my spec: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bVcbuhhtrxoifRtfxoc 

Here are the pro’s and con’s as I saw being a discipline specced healing priest.

PROS

Penance. Penance heals the target three times in quick succession and replaces/exceeds the need to use prayer of mending as an instant quick heal. You just have to be careful that you are facing the target you want to heal as penance is a directional spell. (update 3.08: Penance is no longer directional,you will automatically pivot on the spot to face your target) 

Preventing Damage. You prevent damage to more than heal, your targets.  Thanks to the Divine Aegis talent which protects your target from 30% damage every time your heals crit on them. And also thanks to the Grace talent which procs everytime you use flash heal, greater heal or penance. It protects your target from an extra 1% damage and also increases the healing you do to them by 2%.

Improved Divine Spirit. Very handy when your raid group doesn’t have another class that produces the same effect.

No Issue with Mana Regen. I found that boss fights where I was usually running out of mana on as a holy priest, I had no troublewith it as discipline. Apart from having the talent to increase your intellect by 15%, you also get the talent Rapture which gives you 2.5% of your maximum mana back each time you heal with greater heal, flash heal or penance.  

Yes, you can still heal heroics! I thought I would put discipline to the test and take a bunch of guinea pigs down with me by trying to heal Halls of Lightning on heroic mode. I had around 1700 heals at the time (self buffed) and we all managed to survive without any major hiccups even through Loken. I did rely a little more than usual on Prayer of Mending to help keep up raid healing.

DPS. I was doing the Sons of Hodir dailies and found it delightfully quicker to complete as discipline spec compared with holy spec. I found I was also sporadically doing around 400 dps on top of healing in a naxxramas raid when there were three healers (including myself). Also handy in heroics when the tank isn’t taking too much damage.

CONS

Poor Raid Healing.  Sadly as discipline, you are not very effective as a raid healer since you no longer have the instant cast circle of healing spell.

Pain Suppression is a poor substitute for Guardian Spirit.  It just doesn’t quite have the same effect and while it is very useful in similar situations it’s just not as, lets say… stress-relieving(!) as guardian spirit is!  

No Spirit of Redemption.  Gone are the “after death” heals that make or break the fight.  I didn’t realise how much I use the spirit as a time when I can freely cast and hot up the raid while throwing out prayer of mending at the last second in the hopes that everyone stays alive while you are dead.  

Bottom of the Heal Meters.  If you don’t care about anything but getting to the top of the healing meters, then you won’t enjoy discipline healing.  While you don’t necessarily come in at the bottom, you aren’t anywhere near the top either.  As I mentioned in the pros section above, discipline healing is more about shielding and protecting your targets rather that outright healing them. If you add up all the damage you prevented on top of your healing, then maybe you’d be back up the top of the heal meters, but unfortunately that’s not included in the ‘effective heals’ in the add-on Recount, so it just looks like you didn’t do much healing.

I hadn’t read a great deal about what was to come, preferring to be excited when it was released and so far, I’m loving it.

Talents

There’s a two point talent called Surge of Light which procs 50% of the time after one of your spells crits.  Combined with the 5 points in the Holy Specialisation talent which increases your spell critical effect chance, it’s absolutely awesome.  When Surge of Light procs, your next smite or flash heal is instant cast and costs you no mana.

But that’s not where it ends, combine these two talents with 3 points in Improved Holy Concentration and you’re suddenly a crit happy healer!  When Holy Concentration procs, you also gain some spell haste which sometimes happens at the same time as Surge of Light proc’ing. So not only do you instant cast your next flash heal, but for 20 seconds you can also cast it faster than the standard 1.5 seconds.

And if that still wasn’t enough…

• Prayer of Mending is now capable of a critical hit.
• Inner focus now also increases the next spells critical effect chance by 25%
• With the merging of spell dmg and heals into spell power, we can now get spell power + crit gems

Yay for spell criticals!

Circle of Healing Improvement
My beloved circle of healing spell has now been made even better, by healing not just party members in range of your target, but raid members in range of your target.  Thank you bliz!

The Simple Things

I also freaked out when I first went to raid buff everyone with PW Fortitude. For a split second I thought there was another priest in the raid who had buffed the other party at the exact same moment as I did on my own party… but no.  No other priest and no freaky coincedence. Yup.. that’s right, the simple change of raid-wide buffing with one click made me SO HAPPY that I blurted out my findings to everyone else in the raid, who then proceeded to laugh at me and say ‘yes kiki dear’.

Oh well… I guess I just appreciate the small things in life.

Tell me about your own findings, I’d love to hear about them.

It’s been some time since I have looked at the Wrath of the Lich King beta talents and some things have changed.

HOLY +HEAL TALENT TREE

Here’s what I think I would choose out of the talents available at the moment (14/57/0).

I’ve secretly always wanted to be a spell critical holy priest instead of spell haste priest, especially since in raids you need as much mana as you can get and in my opinion, having haste just makes you lose your mana faster.

That’s why I love this new talent Test of Faith which increases healing and spell critical chance by 6% when the target is at or below 50% health.  What a blessing!

INNER FIRE IMPROVEMENT

I also discovered something about our trusty Inner Fire armour buff we have.  Instead of just giving us more armour, it’s now also going to be giving us an extra 120 spell power at rank 9. Sweet! Thanks Blizz.  I don’t have enough talent points to spend on the Improved Inner Fire talent, though I may switch to it after I give the Serendipity talent a trial as I’m not entirely sure Serendipity will really be worth it yet, since I try to avoid overhealing my targets.

HOLY MANA REGEN TALENT TREE

If I was going for all out mana regen instead of maximising my +heal my talent tree might look a little more like this (23/48/0).

CIRCLE OF HEALING FOR ALL

Finally, there’s no excuse now for the Divine Spirit loving priests to NOT have Circle of Healing!  This will make such a difference to raiding now that all holy priests will be able to put a point into this talent.  I guess now we’ll be split between Guardian Spirit priests and Divine Spirit priests.