Pondering some change
I’d pondered some adjustment with the new patch. It really tempted me…
I’ve been committed to IDS for a long time. And I’m the only priest in the guild that has it. Of the other priests, only one is a healpriest, and she’s almost never in the same raid as me. (we were together for SSC last night. Usually when I’m there she’s not for the 25 man stuff – more my issue than hers.) The rest of the priests are shadow.
Shadowpriests, druids and shamans are all running in the 170 or so spirit. My IDS adds 40 and gives them +10% of the total – +20/21 – to spelldamage and +heal. For that matter, the mages and warlocks aren’t too far off that number either.
So if I drop IDS, I’m dropping ~+20 spelldamage from all the caster DPSers when I’m in the party. Assuming 10 of them in a 25-man raid, and using the standard rule of divide by 3.5 for dps — I’d be gimping raid damage by a bit less than 60 dps.
Importantly, I’d be gimping myself by almost 50 +heal as well. The other priest… about 45. And the other healers, +20 or so heal bonus.
sigh – I’d almost talked myself into this change, but those numbers are nice. So, what do I gain?
I get 2 more empowered healing, which I’ve shown before to be not worth the trade for the IDS. But I also get Circle of Healing. And at the levels I’m reaching that’s not a bad spell. More importantly, it’s been tweaked so that healbonus applies.
According to Blizzard, you need 1338 heal to get the same benefit as you did from the old spell. According to the math I see, that’s… off a bit. 22% of 1338 is 294, which added to the new average of 430 becomes ~724 per person healed. That’s a bit better than 530. Instant heal gets the ‘instant heal bonus’ benefit from mental agility, making this a 410 mana spell that will heal a group of people (say, after an aoe) for an amount of health that’s less than half what they’d get individually from a flash heal.
sigh. AoE heal, but oh so tiny.
To be honest, I want that AoE heal. But it’s not good enough – not even with the additional Empowered Healing – to make it worth giving up IDS. I will keep that talent.
Priestly Endeavors - a gaming blog 
First of all I would like to thank you Zingiber on your simple but powerfully accurate and well researched blog. I am no where near you in raiding but I feel we can all benefit from an experienced end-game priest such as your self. My toon name is Crusard. I hail from Argent Dawn US. We have a teeny-tiny guild “The Namesakian Raiders” in which we do our best to raid Kara on a weekly basis. I am a Hybrid 31/30/0 IDS priest. I too am a fan and do not plan on ever changing back to full holy for insignificant AOE effects and better crit chances. I crit often enough to satisfy my healing ego. I have managed to build a pretty tough [errr…tough-talking]priest with some decent digs. I have meticulously socketed everything that I have managed to acquire to maximize +healing and mana quantity. In the end I wound up with 13,000 mana and +1700 healing. I get lots of good feedback in pugged heroics on my healing prowess despite the fact that I am wearing absolutely no Tier equipment…too include many “how do you have so much mana/+healing?” questions from T4 priests that I inspect and think [what were they thinking]…lol! I would appreciate any advice directly that you might have on my character (if you do armory look-ups on your blog repliers that is). Once again, thank you for going so much further with your mathematical equations and valuable insider tips on playing the class that I have loved since I first started playing the game.
~Crusard
All I can say is PLEASE!!!!!!! Don’t get rid of IDS. Thanks
Interesting build, thanks for giving the info to consider it. It’s close to one of my alternate builds (I experiment a fair amount with specs), and frankly the differences are in the “fun” rather than “gotta have” areas.
I took IDS around 60, and I’ll never look back. It’s an extra buff, and as your numbers show, it’s great for healing. Combined with Spiritual Guidance, how could anyone ignore that talent?
I switched from IDS to CoH once we started Essence of Souls and its proven to be invaluable for the final stages of BT.
Most of the healing intensive fights in BT are fought with the whole raid positioned in close proximity to each other (Bloodboil, EoS, Gorefiend, Illidian(Phase 2)). Once you eliminate the problem of CoH’s radius restriction its extremely nice.
Even with spread-out positions (TK/SSC/Hyjal) its still useful as a melee-dps heal as they should be in the same party for the shared auras anyway.
Ultimatly CoH makes the business of healing more interesting and that should be big factor in your decision. This is a game remember!
Thanks for going over this.
After our first serious time in Maggy’s… I was really thinking of doing this. I’m the only raiding healy priest at the moment… It’s awesome to see all these things like spelled out (even if my eyes did go semi-glossy at all the math 😉 )
~<3 Cay, Teh Squeakie