Holy Sheet

The new off spec

I have recently changed my off-spec to Holy because I no longer "need" to have a shadow spec for grinding daily quests to build up my guild rep and finally getting my 2500 daily quest achievement. I had specced dual-disc for times when I wasn't able to heal effectively with Atonement, but found that I simply wasn't using the non-Atonement spec. This week and last week, I'm working nights on the progression nights so am running with the bench/alt team which already has a Disc priest so decided to give Holy another bash as I haven't tried it seriously since December 2010 just after Cataclysm launched.

My initial task was to revisit the tree and decide how I wanted to spend my talents in the Holy tree.

Holy Spell Usage

Mostly the task was simple, I'd written a whole blogpost detailing how to spec Holy but with gear and new fights to think about the build has been modified slightly.

The big decision for me has been should I use Lightwell, Spirit of Redemption or both (and suffer a longer cooldown on my Shadowfiend). As you'll see from the large image at the top I opted to lose the Spirit of Redemption, simply because I'm usually one of the last to die on fights unless I screwed up big time in which case a few seconds of free healing isn't enough to save the day.

Lightwell Clickers

It has taken a few weeks to get back into the Holy rhythm once more, hell it has been almost 3 years since I played it properly, and it really is a lot less varied compared to disc. Granted it is early days yet and I have been mostly focusing on raid healing whilst keeping a secondary eye on the tanks while leading the Exhumed 10 man raiding team, which is a lot harder than primarily focusing on the tanks and leading the raid especially when trying to "learn" the spec again. My performance thus far has been OK at best but one think my World of Logs parses has shown is that the spec has one major flaw, I need 9 people to ask for heals in order to get bigger numbers. Ask for heals you say? Yes Lightwell, it is truly a great spell but I have no control on who is using it or when they use it and I'm sure that it isn't meant to be accounting for less than 2% of my heals, although props to our tank on the day Artherion who actually used the Lightwell a lot more than most. You'll also see another failing of mine in the spell usage breakdown, namely I don't abuse my 3 minute CD of Divine Hymn enough. For teh record Nick of Time is the proc from my lovely trinket, the Windward Heart and Cleansing Flames is from the Maw of the Dragonlord.

So it seems that either I fail at putting it down enough (a new power aura should fix that), I position it badly (I don't think so but will try to be smarter next raid) or I simply don't advertise it properly (more verbal nagging and Lightwell Buddy addon to be installed). If this fails I'll seriously consider dropping the talent completely, but it does seem like a seriously good raid cooldown and would be a shame to lose it.

If you have any tips on increasing the raids usage of Lightwell I'd love to hear them.

EDIT
Seems some nagging has increased usage as shown by this week's DW kill:

Although some people either didn't think they needed the extra healing or were too focused on DPS and the fact that we didn't lose anyone sort of backs that up. It was nice to finish atop the meters for a change on the fight too, I often spend much time DPSing and having heals go wasted

Need to look more into Holy, seems to be less boring than I remembered it and I may have to reforge next time as my mastery heavy/haste light gear isn't optimal.

Man I slacked on Prayer of Mending.