Amalafrida, Holy Priest Uldaman, Shadows of the Emerald Isle.
My guild is now pretty overpowered for Undermine normal so my inexperience is masked but I would like to do better. I was swamped yesterday by two resto shamans. I looked at the logs, which I have little experience with, and apparently need to cast Apotheosis and Prayer of Mending more. With two shamans there was little routine healing to do and a few “emergencies.”
Would an experienced holy priest have time to look at our logs and make suggestions?
IMO Archon would be easier for an inexperienced holy priest to excel at, then work your way over to Oracle for more buttons to press.
With Archon and halo rolling, dish out your holy words liberally and flash heal and/or prayer of healing (if you go that route) for filler, using empowered renew/pom on cooldown.
The way you play will also depend on if you go the lightweaver route or answered prayers. If you go lightweaver, you take all of the talents that increase the length of apotheosis and help prayer of healing. If you go the answered prayers route, you’ll be using a lot more pom, so you make sure you’re belting them out when available and take the talent that turns divine hymn into a pom spitter. Both ways maximize the uptime of apotheosis. Using answered prayers, you’ll cast prayer of healing less often and only under prayer circle or with the talent that gives you 3 instant pohs from activating apotheosis. Archon will also give you a lot of surge of light procs while halo is rolling.
Ease into holy with archon and when you want more complexity, go Oracle.
Don’t worry about the shamans, they chain heal their way to victory quite easily. 
Parses mean nothing if the boss keels over, you did your job. 
Here is a link to my logs. Keep in mind, I’ve been playing Oracle for a few weeks now and my higher parses are from pugs usually.
~https://www.warcraftlogs.com/character/id/73267752?difficulty=4
Thanks for the help. I actually am not sure which build I am using. I copied it from Icy Veins and can’t remember.
Yes, we finished the raid pretty quickly. The raid team is (except for me) mostly ready for heroic.
I notice you use Prayer of Healing a lot, which has always seemed weak to me. I guess if it hits five people it works pretty well.
I am not new to Holy Priest, I think I made this character back in like 2010. But I have raided very little.
Prayer of healing is situational and depends on the build I’m running. If it’s lightweaver, then I’m casting PoH a lot more than if I’m running answered prayers. However, with Oracle, you get quite few instant cast CoH, 3 every apotheosis (if you pick that version) and 1 each time you use premonition.
There are many ways to play holy currently and succeed.
I just looked at your rik heal, I’m really not sure where you got that build, but I wouldn’t choose those talent choices at all (and I’m open for suggesting many talent choices, so I would double check your choices ) You need to cast more of everything you have 26 casts per minute, try to get that to 40, to start., I know damage taken is low for 5 healers, but things like prayer of mending and empowered Renew on cooldown will be a huge help and they’ll actually win the prio heal battle. Don’t sit on 2 charges of serenity and sanctify too long, if you are capped, be ready to use the first one liberally.
When you pop apoth, use even more liberally at 2 stacks, your mini game is to lengthen in as much as possible (which you aren’t doing anything with your talent choice 
) but it seriously does some massive healing keeping it up. Between all talent I can keep mine up at 50% or more on some fights. Our 4pc set bonus loves that too.
Next I wouldn’t try to do all of this at once, between fearras post and this. Pick some stuff, perhaps choosing a talent tree path, understanding how it works a bit better, and focus on always be casting/Casts per minute.
From there you will get better data on how to improve next
I am not good at reading logs so I will just say a few things that help me.
-stack mastery. Echo of light healing is amazing
-push pom on CD
-push renew on CD (if you are running things that it interacts with
-halo when it is up, use your free charges to help get serenity charges back
-use sanctify when people are stacked.
-don’t sit on CDs unless you have a plan for certain ones like hymn
As for the build I think I started with an icy veins build but I made some changes and probably messed it up.
There just wasn’t a lot of opportunity for Sanctify. The two shamans kept the melee crowd at 100% with two circles and four totems. The holy Paladin was struggling as well.
I read that renew is not good, but it is about all I have to compete with shamans and Druid’s casting four hots. I will look into builds that buff it.
I play all the healers, my first choice to max would be Druid or Mistweaver, but holy priest is what I have in this guild, which is a friendly and helpful bunch on a sparse server. I do like holy priest.
You want to grab all of the Prayer of Mending talents. Always cast Prayer of Mending whenever it’s up. If you take the Empowered Renew talent, cast Renew on cooldown as well.
Focus on making meaningful healing with your Holy Words. Cast Halo when (ideally just before) large damage comes out. Most fights line up with its cooldown fairly well. When you’re out of Holy Words you use Flash Heal or Prayer of Healing. Use Divine Hymn or Apotheosis when (or again, just before) big healing is required.
I highly recommend utilizing the built in Click Casting or having @mouseover macros for just about every healing spell.
You should have a good bit of Mastery. It does a lot of the work for you. If you’re in a raid with stronger healers make sure to check out your overhealing numbers on the meters. If you find it difficult to heal people in time just focus on doing as much overall healing as possible.
Check your talents. Make meaningful choices down there at the bottom. Consider Dispursing Lights and focus on Flash Heal healing if you need to.
EDIT: I looked at your log for Stix. You should try Archon. Cast PoM on cooldown. Use your Holy Words when you need big heals. Spot heal with Flash Heal when you don’t know what else to do. Give that a try for a while.
You should not be casting Smite at all for what you’re healing. Don’t bother casting Power Word: Shield in raid. No Shadow Word: Pain, no Holy Fire, and probably better to not cast Holy Nova either.
EDIT 2: Archon is much more simple than Oracle. And the guy who posted below did a great job with his reply. Good job guy.
So I went and looked at your highest parse.
First, you’re never going to parse well in a raid that is 5 healing with 21 players. Healing is finite - you only need to heal so much damage. The more healers there are, the more you’ll get sniped. Your shamans, as an example, are all between 60 and 70% overhealing. I seriously have no idea what there even is for you to heal when stats like that exist in your raid.
That said, you’re doing a couple things here that are hurting you. From most to least severe:
You’re not casting your major spells/not casting often enough in general
Through the fight, you could have cast Prayer of Mending 25 times, but you casted it 5. This is your absolute most important spell if you’re playing Oracle Priest. If it helps, you can get a weakaura or addon to track the cooldown of it and make sure you’re always hitting it. People do not need to be hurt - you can just toss it on the tank. PoM’s best feature is it heals when that player takes damage, so it’s always ahead. You want the stacks out there even before the damage is happening.
You casted Renew 6 times out of a potential 21 casts. Renew reduces Sanc’s cooldown by 8 seconds, so that’s a loss of 120 seconds - so you could have had another 2 sanctify casts. Though realistically during Apotheosis Renew would be 24 seconds off, so you could have had significantly more.
You could have potentially used Apotheosis 3 times (though realistically you’d only get 2 good uses) but you never casted it. Alongside that you’ve casted only 8 serenity casts and 5 sanctifys. You actually did good considering you didn’t get a ton of CDR on them - but you should have been casting other spells to bring their CDs down more which would have allowed way more casts. Also, you only hit Prayer of Healing once despite taking that talent.
Your shamans are beating you here because they’re casting into people at like 90% health and just sucking up that healing - and you’re never even attempting to heal players that high with anything but flash heal (which is going to be too slow).
You spent a good 61% of the fight not healing at all, and 43% of the fight simply casting nothing (even damage). Always be casting is a general rule to learn. Even if you feel you can’t heal, you can Smite and that might get you some surge of light procs for free flash heals. 
Your Talent Build
I’m very much a ‘play what you want’ kind of player when it comes to talent builds, but your current setup doesn’t even make sense for that, really. You don’t have the max amount of points in the final tier of talents. You have a point in Prayer of Healing (and Prayer Circle) even though you’re never casting the spell. You have a point in Desperate times, but nobody in the raid is dropping below 50% for you to make use of it, etc.
You’re also only taking one capstone talent in Divine Image, but you’ve got pretty low uptime due to low holy word and apotheosis usage.
For reference, here, in raid our most powerful talent synergy is Eternal Sanctity (under apotheosis) and Answered Prayers (bottom right). You want to be getting free apotheosis procs and blasting out holy words during it. Especially if you’re playing Oracle, who gets extra PoM stacks. You should be thinking of your Holy Words as your first option in raid, rather than as emergency heals. Don’t wait for people to get low to use them. Just use them so that you can start building them back with your other casts.
For a build that’s close to yours and still Oracle, I would recommend swapping to: https://www.wowhead.com/talent-calc/priest/holy/oracle/DAQAEBVBUQRRREoVGkUDAFAPVRAVBVFVVFUCEFQCVAEFVVUCBA
With this build, your main goals are cast PoM off CD, cast Renew off CD, Cast Holy Words (even in light damage), and ESPECIALLY cast holy words when in Apotheosis. You also have Chastise in this build - which is good because of Divine Image. Make sure you use it to proc your naaru if you don’t have any other holy words.
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Have barely touched my Holy Priest this xpac, so I can’t comment on the specifics but I can offer general advice that might help.
If you use weak auras, I highly recommend getting one that puts the PoM icon on your mouse cursor whenever it’s off cooldown. It’s incredibly useful for getting the most out of that ability which you want to always cast on cooldown (unless that changed).
No addons needed: I recommend using a spare action bar to display your biggest cooldowns and procs in one row (extra helpful if you can move it, I limit mine to 6 key abilities). That way, at a glance, you can see immediately what’s available to you. Blizzard just introduced a cooldown manager which might help in a similar way (I haven’t tried it).
Nice analysis overall. I didn’t even see this, but that is so much overkill for normal, that most of the time you’re going to be twiddling your thumbs, OP.
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Try running the raid with 4 healers or even 3 for fights with more avoidable damage and see how you do. You will never learn to be a good healer when there is this much heal sniping going on.
In situations like this where there is nothing to heal you should be DPSing. Maybe write an assist macro for smite and holy fire so it nukes whatever your target is targeting and just keep the tanks selected and smite away.