Best Holy Talent Spec

[Ayag]

Never, Ever take Spirit of REdemption, Ever. Your #1 Goal should be to NOT DIE, EVER. If you are dying frequently enough for it to be viable you need to reevaluate what you are doing to cause yourself to die this much.

I don't totally agree. While, as I said earlier, it's not the most useful talents, it has it's uses in progression when you want to stay alive the longer possible. It will rarely happen but it can make or break a fight and this is not as garbage as people think.

I'm sure we all have those occasions where we wipe at a boss with a few HP left, keeping a few members alive for a few more seconds could mean the boss would be dead. I mean, try it, see how it feels, don't dismiss it straight away

There is one last thing I am questioning. You said that mental strength scales with buffs and gear. Does that include elixirs and distilled wisdom? If it includes ALL buffs then for sure mental strength is ALWAYS better than spiritual healing.

Yes it works on all buffs.
But I don't totally agree that it is always better than Spiritual Healing.
You can think of it this way : having +700-1000 mana is always compensable by using a potion or a mp5 buff if the fight is long enough. Also you will have a pretty good regen at some point and it will make up for some extra mana.
You however cannot compensate +healing by potions.
It is true that the more +hb you have, the less the "base spell" (healing part without healing bonus) is compared to the "bonus spell" (healing part from healing bonus).

But since spells like PoH or FH have a low coefficient (respectively 28,6% & 42,9%), Spiritual Healing does add a low of equivalent healing bonus (eg. 207 healing bonus for FH7). While FH is not the bread & better of a priest, you certainly must be using it quite a lot on trash. And some trashes are hard, so you want strong FHs.

I recently respecced from 26/25 to a classic 21/30 and I haven't noticed the loss of mana. However I did appreciate the healing bonus gained from the talents.

[Ayag]

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bxRhsVVoZfLxcc0V

are we better off looking at something like this?

There is one last thing I am questioning. You said that mental strength scales with buffs and gear. Does that include elixirs and distilled wisdom? If it includes ALL buffs then for sure mental strength is ALWAYS better than spiritual healing.

Yes this one is pretty good if you want +10% mana, very similar to the one I linked above.
You can swap one point imp renew into +1% crit. Personal preference.

[Imbaslap]

http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#bxRhsVVoZfLxcc0V

are we better off looking at something like this?

There is one last thing I am questioning. You said that mental strength scales with buffs and gear. Does that include elixirs and distilled wisdom? If it includes ALL buffs then for sure mental strength is ALWAYS better than spiritual healing.

mental strength is better.

the only thing spiritual healing gives is a 10% flat increase to your base healing spells. this will only increase the higher the rank of the spell.
IE, your max rank spells will get more from Spiritual healing then rank 1 would.

but lets be honest here.
who spams max rank spells?
I think its counter-productive over having a scaling 10% max mana that scales with gear overtime. whereas, this spiritual healing talent will only scale based on the rank of the spell, not the +healing you have. which means if you're near 1,000 + heals. it is a dead weight talent, because you could still be just as effective downrank healing with a loss of 80-100 min/max heals on your rank 1 spells overall. the benefit is having almost half a flask of distilled wisdom on with just gear and buffs. At tier 2 gear level, you're pretty much using mostly low rank heals anyway because of how much +healing you have.

imo, it doesn't really matter if I heal with a FH for 900-1000 with or without spiritual healing. most of the time it will probably be overhealing from other healers snipe healing that person. the benefit of this is I can pump out more if needed depending on the encounter.

but you could argue both ways I guess. spiritual healing might help the fresh 60's more then the max mana talent. they need the healing power first anyways.

[Ayag]

Well, we obviously don't agree on that point
I guess BoK makes the talent better but I don't have that luxury.
I also think there is a few encounters where you have to have Spiritual Healing.
As I said, at some point the mana gained is virtually covered by a Major Mana Potion wheras the healing bonus can't be compensated for (upranking is half a solution to me as the healing gained from talents is not equal to an uprank).

Fresh 60s definitely better more from +10% heal than +10% mana (makes up for the low +hb & less mana to scale).

[Jeniwyn]

Lets say that you have 11000 mana before MS just to portray it in max positive light

Lets assume 1000 effective healing (900+100 from spirit)
400 spirit
100 mp5
3 set T2
Crit is a pure modifier so we ignore it, it impacts both talents equally)

Somewhere around here is current BiS with full buffs and a flask.

You now get 1100 mana from MS. After this you will get 1800+1200 = 3000 mana from pots. At about the 3 min mark you have enough time to get the full benefit from an extra pot round so 3000 more (before the 3 min you have to discount it at least a bit) Add 1200 from mp5 and 1017 from spirit per min, plus 25.73 extra per min for each percentage of time you spend outside the fsr. Some bonus time outside fsr come from Inner Focus plus the mana saved should be added to the mana pool. At least 380.

All in all you will have about 20000 mana to play with in a 2 min fight and around 28000 in a 4 min fight.

In the 2 min fight MS has increased your mana by almost 6%. The thing is that the only way you are spending that mana is by casting max rank spells almost exclusively and those get about 7% bonus from SH, SH also provides you with more burst should you need it.

In the 4 min fight the mana gain from MS is down to about 4%. You need to go down to Heal Rank 3 to get that small a gain from SH and even at close to 100% uptime you would only spend about 2/3rds of your mana with that. There is no way SH will not outperform MS here.

MS is a decent talent. But SH is just better. Note that if we scale the fight longer MS will only get further and further behind. If we make it shorter you will end up with more mana than you can spend.

If you have less gear then the amount of mana from pots and buffs will increase as a fraction of total mana reducing the % gained of MS and if you increase gear even further the situation will be the same as with the shorter fight. More mana than you can spend an the comparison casts even more max rank heals with a high gain from SH for the same reason. I'd assume you'd need to conjure up fairly specifc conditions for MS to outperform SH and even then it will almost certainlybe super tight and not take into account the higher burst from SH.

[Ana]

MS outperforms SH when you're undergeared and require a functional spec that works both for raiding and for farming DME. The 6k mana needs to come from somewhere

[Jeniwyn]

I'm sceptical, what fight length and what gear are we talking about?

[Ayag]

MS outperforms SH when you're undergeared and require a functional spec that works both for raiding and for farming DME. The 6k mana needs to come from somewhere

I actually think it's the opposite. Undergear means low healing bonus & fairly low stats, so SH has a bigger impact than MS.

11k mana without MS is unreachable for horde so I'm assuming you're talking for alliance.
I reach around 10k mana with flask/ai/motw and no MS.
But all in all I agree with you Jeniwyn, MS can be compensated for, not SH.

[Garfunkel]

Personally I hardly ever use Flash Heal as it is such a waste of mana. I don't care if a paladin snipes there, I'll just cancel and heal someone else, or if ~ 50% of my heal would still be effective, I'll let it cast. So I use H4 or H1 most of the time. So far that has worked well with my talents and gear.

[Imbaslap]

I think its a personnel preference.
I havnt noticed much of a difference with MS talent tonight. but I did enjoy the high mana count on Nef.