Gearing/Gemming/Enchanting for PvE

Gearing and gemming for healing in PvE is not very complicated for a priest.

Holy

Gearing as Holy is pretty straight forward.  All the gear you will get will have Intellect and Stamina and Spellpower as base.  The variable stats are spirit, critical strike rating and haste rating.  All three of these stats are valuable to the Holy priest in the following ways:

Spirit

• Provides spellpower through Spiritual Guidance
• Provides mana regeneration through Meditation 

Critical Strike Rating (Crit)

• Provides extra free healing via critical heals (for 50% more healing)
• Provides mana regeneration through Holy Concentration.  This procs and lasts 8 seconds, providing 50% more mana regeneration based on spirit.  This has a cap on usefulness because you only need to crit every 8 seconds to be valuable

Haste Rating (Haste)

• Provides faster global cooldown (gcd) for more instant spells
• Provides faster casting for Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing and Greater Heal

While all three stats are very useful, some are more useful than others depending on your current gear, the encounter and your raid makeup.  On the current content, I do not have mana issues.  Typically between Hymn of Hope and Shadowfeind my mana is not a problem.  I run with about 450 mp5, 17% crit and 20-25% haste (about 700 to 800 rating) completely un-buffed as Holy.

Spirit and crit both provide mana regeneration and throughput, whereas haste is a throughput stat.  That being said, haste is THE throughput stat.  More GCDs means more renews, quicker response to damage and a much easier time dealing with incoming damage.  Haste is easy to quantify on paper, but in practice, it is much more useful than it seems.  It gives you breathing room to do things like Hymn of Hope or re-position yourself because you know when you do get back to healing you can toss heals out that much faster.

Gearing is pretty simple for a Holy Priest:  Gem for spellpower in red slots and use hybrid gems for the other slots.  Spirit/SP in blue slots and Intellect/SP in yellow slots.  Depending on your current gear, you may be better off using full Intellect in yellow slots, but I would always advocate using hybrid gems.  They give better returns on spellpower (12 spellpower in a hybrid gem and 23 in a red gem) and if the socket bonus is anything, even 4 spirit or 4 haste, that is just icing because spellpower, spirit, intellect, haste and crit are all pretty even on usefulness.  I always gem for socket bonuses.

Enchanting is pretty boring, use all the spellpower enchants and for helm/shoulders its pretty much up to you which one you want to use (sp/crit or sp/mp5).  We run 3 healers in 10 mans so usually I err on the side of mp5 because I would rather be able to spam the whole fight than have a small chance to crit.

Discipline

My Disc parts are never going to be that exciting because I am raiding mostly Holy these days.  Also Disc is very similar in many ways so most of the options are the same.  The only thing I would change is that spirit is not as useful for disc.  I would use those int/stam/sp/crit/haste pieces over the spirit pieces for Disc.  Since I play both, I mix and match since it doesnt matter that much for Holy, but it does matter for Disc. 

If your job as Disc is to spam shields (If, Hah), then spellpower is the most useful stat.  Haste is also good, but with Borrowed Time, haste becomes much less useful.  It is still good for having fast GCDs but you arent casting many heals as disc, mostly Penance, shield, renew and ProM.  That being said, disc is probably going to gem all spellpower unless there is a significant spellpower bonus (6 or more) and it is a yellow slot and not a blue slot (since Disc is not spirit friendly).  Disc is very intellect friendly via Mental Strength so Luminous and Runed gems are your friend.  Save your one Blue socket for a high spellpower bonus.  If your job is to help tank heal and raid heal you may end up using a lot of Flash Heals.  In this case, you can use full Intellect gems which not only give you mp5 but also scale better due to Blessing of Kings + Mental Strength but also through Replenishment.

Again, enchanting all spellpower is most useful.  The reason spellpower is so useful is because shields cannot crit (spare the Glyph heal but that is usually only 2-3k) and are not affected by haste outside casting more shields.  Spirit is still useful because of Meditation, but that is the only use without Spiritual Guidance.

In summary, gearing for Disc/Holy in PvE is not very complicated.  For Holy stick with socket bonuses and mix and match crit/haste/spirit on gear depending on what the fights require.  For Disc, try to stick with SP for gemming and mix and match gear.  Crit and Haste may not be AS useful for disc, but they are MORE useful than spirit typically since used shields are free thanks to Rapture and even GIVE you mana if you have enough intellect.

Speccing in Wotlk

While I am about to write this, you and I both know that these talents are going to change in Cataclysm. However,  for the next 6 months-ish this information is still valid.

For priests the two healing specs are Holy and Discipline.  While my initial foray into healing was 100% Discipline, I have recently gotten on the Holy train and ridden that straight to Funky Town.  Funky in a good way.

My Holy spec:

 http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bVcbuZsEzcb0qihGhuAo:0Nf

The best thing about Holy is that while this spec works, this is not the only spec with which you can heal effectively.  Some priests swear by Serendipity specs.  Personally, I use so few Flash Heals and even fewer Prayer of Healing's (PoH) and Greater Heals (GH) that its basically 3 points down the toilet.  I would rather get Blessed Resilience or Test of Faith with the 3 points spent in Serendipity.  Both of these give passive healing benefits and are not something I have to keep track of like Serendipity.

Any talent that makes me better at what I am already doing is great in my book.  And what I do with this spec is basically use a rotation something like: Prayer of Mending->Circle of Healing->Renew->Flash Heal via Surge of Light.  I only run 10 man raids so we always have a holy paladin spamming the tanks.  Typically I keep a Renew on both tanks (or only one if only one tank takes damage at a time); then use the rotation above for raid healing.  There are a few caveats that make this rotation a little more complicated.

The first is that while ProM (As Prayer of Mending will be referred to from now on) is great healing per mana (HpM), if there is still one active and the raid is taking damage it is not mana efficient to just toss another one out and overwrite the previous. I keep track  of where my ProM is with Grid.  I am not a grid genius, so do not ask me any complicated questions :).  I will have a short grid discussion at the end.

The second is that one has to be careful using CoH (Circle).  While it is VERY mana efficient to use it on 6 people (or 5 without the glyph), you have to be careful on whom you are casting it.  For instance, on Festergut, you should never toss it on one of the ranged people, but you should ALWAYS cast it on the melee.

The third is that yes, this is a renew spam spec.  Empowered Renew + Glyph of Renew lead to some very hard-healing renews.  In ICC with the 25% buff, they can hit for 4500 at times.  Renew is typically 40%+ of my healing on raid damage fights.

The fourth and I believe final note I want to make on this spec is that Body and Soul is quite possibly the most interesting talent in the Holy tree.  As a holy priest in a 10 man guild, I do not have to worry about Weakened Soul being up, so I watch the raid for people who need some help moving. Just a few uses for BaS

• On Sindragosa for instance, I can save one person who is slow moving from the Blistering Cold.  
• On Dreamwalker I can save someone who is running from the exploding Zombie.  
• On Deathwhisper I can save someone who has a ghost chasing them.  

The list goes on and on.  I can understand not taking in a 25 man build because a disc priest is probably shield spamming, but in a 10 man raid, you absolutely need this talent.  It is too fun and too useful.

My Disc spec:

 http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bVcbuhhVRIoffRtcxtc:bAd

Unfortunately, Disc is not as exciting to spec as Holy because there are very few unnecessary talents.  I see some priests get Improved Flash Heal instead of Improved Renew which is definitely a good trade off.  Like I said I am not the tank healer in 10 mans; so as Disc I rarely flash heal.

My rotation depends greatly on the fight, but I am almost always Disc for LK and Holy for the rest.  Basically you keep ProM on cooldown just like Holy, but instead of renewing you put shields on the raid members taking damage.  Since you have no CoH, you can throw renews when people are still taking damage through a shield and have Weakened Soul.

Usually I save Penance for someone who has <50% health then follow it with a flash heal if needed.  Otherwise its shield+prom+renew on the raid for great justice.

For Priest specs that is pretty much all I can think of.  If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know.

As for Grid, I keep a few different buffs/debuffs active on Grid.  I do not have a screenshot so here is a MS Paint picture of what my raid frames look like:

I know I know, my paint skills are the stuff of legend!

Now that you are done making fun of this I will explain what it shows:

•  "Holy" is the first 4 letters of the person's name.
• The red box is a placeholder for the boss's signature debuff.  e.g. Threat debuff on Deathwhisper
• The black circle of the shield indicator
• The green squiggly is the renew indicator
• The brown star on the top left is ProM indicator
• The yellow and brown block below the shield is the Weakened Soul indicator
• The blue bar at the bottom is the mana/rage/energy bar
• The -7.5k is the amount of damage that needs to be healed.  
• What isnt shown is the white background is white because I am a priest.  The area where the 7.5k is located is actually black back ground and white text showing the amount of damage (white for everyone not just priests).

This shows the information I need to make informed decisions about who to heal, what heal to use and what buffs I already have rolling.

Next post: A short primer on Gearing/gemming/enchanting

Future Updates

I have decided to change the blog up a bit.  Typically I have mixed blog posts on three topics:  General interest, like the most recent post, updates about every day activity in my life, and World of Warcraft musings.

What I realized thanks to an article I read is that while all three of these are interesting to me personally, there is most likely not anyone else who is interested in all three outside of me, myself and I.  Also I have Facebook for life updates and general knowledge musings right?

So effective immediately, I will only be posting about WoW-related topics.  More specifically, I will be posting about Priest pve and pvp strategies for the current raid tier.  I will include talents, healer rotations/priorities, gearing and strategies for encounters.

Not only will this give more focus to the blog, but hopefully it will end up being better because honing in on one topic leads to better articles I believe.  The first post I think I will do an overview of priest healing (I will touch on DPS a bit but I am not really going to worry so much about that now) gear, specs and future changes.