So I have been AWOL for almost the first full month of Firelands due to family related emergencies. I am now “back in the saddle again”. All of 
my theory crafting, BIS lists, and making sure to know all the other healer classes strengths and weaknesses went on hold until now. I threw together a quick “how to” for the healers after watching a couple videos of firelands encounters but wasn’t really able to make sure they were effective for our raid. Hopefully they were!
Anyways I have had over a month of blogs and forum posts to sift through in the last week and let me tell you…ugh!
First off: Holy priest gear…where the eff is it? I suppose I should have went over the forum posts BEFORE I started to make my BIS list and the easiest way to obtain this gear. I thought to myself “why oh why can I not find the FULL list of gear? This cannot be everything, blizzard really doesn’t hate hpriests that much do they?”. Ha, so I went to the healer forums and started sifting…there were two main posts that had maxed out on replies QQing about the gear list. I could not begin to even read all of the “I am quitting wow, EFF you blizzard” vs “STFU the gear list is fine”. I found myself thinking about whether or not to QQ or just go with the flow. Blizzard has been known to in the past give you what you want after you whine enough but did I really want to take the energy to do that?
So I put my little BIS project on hold and just decided well I will try to get in on a couple of runs and see what drops. El oh El! It wouldn’t have mattered if I had made the list or not..everything that dropped was plate, leather, plate, more plate. And then there it was, a beautiful trinket from Majordomo Staghelm. I had no where near close the amount of dkp to compete with the other healers for it but it gave me the motivation to make my list. I am not going to make a list of BIS gear in this post, but there will be one shortly!
Secondly: This goes hand in hand with the gear, many many posts about holy priest mana regen. Shadow fiend not picking the right target to attack, hymn of hope only giving marginal returns..blah blah blah.
Lastly (for now): I know healers claim to “not watch meters”. Give me a break! Yes you do, there are just different things that we analyze than dps. So I was hearing all this “holy priests suck now” so I headed over to World of Logs. I am all for having good healers in my raid but all resto druids? Really? Of course there were a couple of holy pallies mixed in there but few and far between. For normal modes (25 man) that I looked through the top 150 healers; here is the spec for priests that do well:
Beth’tilac: Holy (This may change once they “fix” Holy Word: Sanctuary)
Shannox: Disc (hello smite spec!)
Rhyolith: Holy (PoH/PoM/CoH spam on stomps and P2)
Baleroc: Disc (super powerful bubbles)
Alysrazor: Disc BUT holy can also be viable if you can pump out the numbers for when everyone is grouped up
Majordomo: Disc (preventative healing rather that throughput for scythes is win)
Ragnaros: Holy (if you spam renews it appears holy is great for this fight)
So number wise it appears that holy and disc are pretty close on viability of healing per fight. I think that the gear check comes into play for the mana regen for holy, yes there is less gear for holy priests but with more intellect on pieces and the usefulness of reforging you can still reach a comfortable level for regen. The argument of “well I am sacrificing reforging to haste/mastery” is just something we are going to have to deal with.
So death to the holy priest? I don’t think it’s quite that extreme. We may not be as powerful as we once were but that’s just what happens. My advice is to learn both disc and holy so that you as a player can do what is needed to help your raid succeed rather than pouting in the corner saying “but I am a holy priest and my Holy Word: Serenity doesn’t scale with the flame buff on Baleroc.” Learn both specs and be a great PRIEST!
Up next: My late BiS gear list for both disc and holy and also as I become involved in more kills the “how to” heal each fight in each spec.
