For AOE healing in mythic+ (20keys) do you cast “prayer of healing” or just use “Heal” (flash concentration) with the talent trail of light? Usually AOE heals have more healing overall when you can hit 5 people but after doing some math “heal” actually has more healing overall with flash con, trailing light, and binding heals.
youre correct PoH is so bad most priests dont even have it on their hot bars.
PoH is only useful to occasionally reduce the cooldown of Sanctify.
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Prayer of Healing, bwa ha ha ha ha! I dont even have that spell bound. It’s useless. Lol!
No complaints here though. It’s one less button to worry about.
Flash concentration at five stacks with Trail of Light is extremely potent and very handy when the healing is heavy. It is amazing then. Otherwise you dont have to bother with it really.
heal, heal, heal, heal, heal
holy is kinda sad like that with FC… Strong! But sad…
Edit: Of course it’s an exageration, but its not that far from reality 
Haha it’s not that bad… PoM and CoH and maintaining the FC buff (preferably with SoL procs) plus the Resonant Words/tier weaving provides plenty of filler in between the Heal spam.
The one thing to like about FC is that if there is going to be a “spammy” spell at least it’s a spot heal that requires intelligent targeting and maintenance of a buff, rather than just spamming an AoE ability or HoTs all over the place blindly.
yeah yeah, I’m joking mostly 
Not a fan of FC but it’s not braindead like I make it look like It’s just not my thing, but if its fun for most, that’s totally ok!
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In one of the other patches I made the legendary FC after having played disc a ton. And I then ran a dungeon as Holy with FC, and my verdict was that is was really blah. I mean, to get the buff you have to spam flash heal, and then when it gets close to dropping you have to cast a flash heal. I dunno. I just didnt like it. Disc was WAY more fun in contrast. Anyhow, that was my conclusion.
But now, fast forwarded a year or so or whatever, and after six weeks or so of Holy and FC, to be honest, I dont even think about it anymore. I have healed enough as Holy + FC now that I just auto pilot most dungeons without paying any attention to the buff and it is no problem at all.
In the end, I dunno. I think you are good doing things your way if it works for you but sometimes things are not always exactly the way you think.
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In fairness it took us all a few weeks to figure out what to do with holy in 9.0… there were a lot of last-minute changes to the legendaries that hadn’t been tested and it wasn’t obvious on paper that FC would be so powerful as a spot heal.
Plus, in a year FC has just gotten better. The buff duration was extended, and the conduits/gear/etc. that empowered Heal/Flash Heal filler (like resonant words, the tier set bonus, ephemeral effusion, etc. etc.) also grew more powerful and impactful. With all that borrowed power, the borrowed power of FC feels a lot more smooth/natural ironically
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It was already solved in like week 1 by most the priest theorycrafters, to be fair.
You’re right that many changes were happening in the final patches of the beta builds, including effects literally just having terrible tooltips that were impossible to understand along with being untestable for one reason or another. Several bugs, etc.
The bigger problem is that most websites that put up guides pre-release were working off outdated info from the start. And many of them just didn’t update their info till a month or two in, for one reason or another. Add in the content creators scrambling to make healer tier lists before SL launched, not knowing about FC and therefore saying that holy had ‘bad single target’ in 9.0, and there wasn’t any positive out there. But if you were in discords, or talking to any priest player worth their salt, holy players all knew how strong FC was.
The problem in 9.0 was more that throughput wasn’t needed, Nathria’s damage was all on VERY good timers for disc, and holy did very little damage in M+ since boon’s cooldown was an immutable 3 mins and we didn’t have effusive from mikanikos not only reducing it to 1 minute most the time but also doing like a million damage on its own like we have now.
Flash Concentration wasn’t even listed as the BiS legendary on most of the Priest guides for quite a while. Also, everyone was saying Necrolord was the best 9.0 H Priest covenant when it was clearly Night Fae by leaps & bounds which lead to a lot of H Priests taking the wrong covenant early on. Holy Priests in general lack an actual organized community, people who streamed Holy early on, and it’s really been just Automaticjak writing everything about the spec. It’s just the symptom of being the underdog for so long.
I did my own prior research so I ended up picking the right stuff. I will say that Kyrian was the sleeper that slipped under the radar for quite a while because it’s damage potential wasn’t realized until 9.1.5.
9.0 wasn’t a good time to be Holy though. Disc was extremely OP and everyone was stacking 2 of them in their raid because you needed Spirit Shell to survive not getting one shot by early boss mechanics due to being undergeared. Also, damage mitigation was king… and healer damage mattered more.
SoD was more the middle ground. Nerfed Disc, but you still brought one. Holy was good, but not the best. There was less bursty raid damage.
Sanctum was a complete change from the other two raids. We now have large boss rooms with the group spread and almost exclusively RoT damage which goes counter against damage mitigation metas. Holy Priests became FOTM even though they aren’t even the best on HPS. I’m rarely #1 on the HPS meters compared to the last two patches to boot.
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Yeah, you were one of the first people highlighting this and I even remember messaging Automaticjak and him saying the reason for all the confusion was because deadlines on IcyVeins/Wowhead were weeks before the game launch, before numerous last-minute changes.
Still use your FC weakaura you wrote from back then btw!
Yeah, I agree. Websites were mostly listing things based on a week or two before the end of beta - which had constant changes. And they just… didn’t pay/ask their creators for updates, I think. There was also this idea that the intellect from Emeni would be too good to pass up. But oddly, for pure HPS even in raid - I’m pretty sure the numbers supported Kyrian in 9.0 with Pelagos being as strong as he was. You’d just oom yourself if the fight went too long.
But I do know that the warcraftpriests discord was singing FC’s praises in the first week. Which is probably why the raid statistics early that tier was like 30% FC and 70% HA and through the patch slowly shifted to the opposite.
Realistically, in 9.0 I woulda recommended Night Fae for most priests that wanted to raid, and Necrolord for anyone who just wanted to M+ (Nova really wasn’t bad for M+ damage back then when Boon was on its long CD, but was significantly easier to use). I eventually swapped off Disc after Nathria nerfs because I was leading and doing that alongside playing Disc was getting too much for me and went straight to NF.
Yep. It was definitely pointed out as potentially very good even beforehand; it’s the first legendary I targeted due to that. There was just that fuzziness about the the tooltip/reduction, and then the hotfix cemented it.
I very rarely us POH, its flash, build to heal, use heal only.