Dark Glare

Written by Vyssele - vyssele@darkglare.com .

So, recently I’ve found a fair amount of priests asking me for advice, and that a few people either ask me about my talent spec, or generally comment on it, so I thought I’d write this, as a bit of a insight to my spec, and why I have picked the talents that I currently have.

My current talent spec is very different to the holy priest ‘cookie-cutter’ kind of spec, you can see it here. Firstly, you should know it’s aimed towards maximum raid/AoE healing, I personally, hardly ever tank-heal as holy, we have paladins for that, we’d only need to cover the tanks if our paladins can’t heal for some reason. This spec really works best for ICC, especially hardmodes. If I was needed to focus more on tanks, I would go disc, that’s why I raid with two healing specs.

Rather than going over the full spec, which would be rather pointless, since some of the talents just take common sense to spec, I’ll talk about the more ‘abnormal’ parts, and cover some of the questions I’m asked often.

• No Divine Fury or Improved Healing– There’s a few reasons behind this, the main one would be, how often would a holy priest in ICC use Greater Heal? Hardly ever, really rare that we’d need to cast it. Secondly, if we do, it’s already heavily hasted from Serendipity, so reducing the cast time is meh. So in short, spending up to 8 points to improve a spell that I’d don’t use often – Not worth it.

• Spell Warding So we need some ‘filler’ to reach other talents, I take Spell Warding due to the fact that our current progress is hard modes, where everything hits for insane amounts, this talent provides a nice chunk of survivability. You could argue to spend 5 points in it, instead of Desperate Prayer, but I personally like to have the extra cool down for if I need to keep myself alive while I need to move.

• Healing Prayers I see a lot of priests skip this, I don’t understand why anyone would. A massive amount of our healing in raids, comes from the two spells that this talent covers. Prayer of Healing is very costly on mana, two points in this talent reduces the cost by 370 – a massive amount. Prayer of Mending is pretty much our most efficient spell, this talent makes it even more efficient. What’s not to love with this talent? – A must have in my opinion.

• Blessed Resilience Now this talent gets me no end of whispers along the lines of “Lol why you spec’d PvP talent?” It only takes a quick bit of math to see why it’s worth taking, and why I consider it part of a holy raid/AoE talent spec.

I’ll use Circle of Healing as a example here: With my current spell power level (about 4000 self-buffed) 3 points in this talent, will add ~200 per Circle of Healing hit, which is ~1200 total (For glyphed CoH). So in short, it’s only 3 points, to improve the spells that use the most – really worth it.

• No Empowered Healing This is another thing that I get lots of questions/comments about, Greater Heal, as I mentioned above, and Flash Heal to a lesser extent, are spells that we just don’t use a lot, and even when we do, considering current gear levels plus the ever increasing ICC buff, the spells already heal for massive amounts. So this talent really just ends as over-heal. Five points to improve spells that aren’t use often/don’t need improving? So not worth it, invest these points elsewhere, like Blessed Resilience/Test of Faith, you get much more useful throughput that way.

• Test of Faith I see many holy priests skipping this talent, in my opinion, it’s a must-have, especially for hard modes, it’s a pretty big increase to your healing, when it’s needed the most, at crucial points.

• Inner Focus Yeah, okay, it’s rather useless since the five-second-rule changes/etc, but I still spec it out of habit. Why? – To macro along with Divine Hymn, it offsets the massive mana-cost of the hymn, and what most people don’t realise is, the 25% crit-chance stays for the entire channel of the hymn. So I find it a nice improvement to a spell which is wonderful for crucial/’Oh crap!’ moments.

I think that is about all I feel is worth talking about talent wise, the rest are mostly self-explanatory.

I will quickly mention my glyph choices though:

Glyph of Circle of Healing and Glyph of Prayer of Healing these are the best two for raid healing, best increase of throughput.
There aren’t really many choices worth considering other than these.

Glyph of Guardian Spirit For raiding, and especially hard modes, I see this glyph as a ‘must-have’ It makes our already great cool down, even better and more useable, since with the glyph, you can use it more proactively. Using it more of when someone needs more healing, rather than when they might die, thus getting a shorter time before you can use it again, a really good choice.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment, if you have any questions about this, or in general, feel free to reply to this on the forums, or poke me in-game. Thanks for reading, hope I didn’t bore you too much.