Raid healing Inspiration Priest Talent Discussion

Currently raiding with a fairly standard 21/30 build always had 3/3 inspiration noticed if we wipe early in AQ and I lose dragon slayer that it barley procs at all. Considering I plan on replacing my bene soon and don’t use t2 gloves or empowered legs im going to be sitting on 0 crit rolls. Considering this and looking at it from a no dragonslayer perspective is it really worth me taking the talent? I typically get less than 4% uptime on tanks in AQ with a combine uptime on relevant targets at under 10% when I lose dragon slayer. Outside of one cooldown maybe letting me have a better chance but still less than 50% to proc at will it feels really underwhelming. I am considering replacing it with imp renew 3/3 for 145 more healing a cast. At about 120-150 casts a raid were looking at only gaining a meager 20k healing but considering its better in pvp and I only use one spec for both and how underwhelming inspiration feels this seems like it at least does what I want it to on demand. My only reservation despite not being able to ever see inspiration do anything relevant is the fact that every PVE healing guide in the world considers it an insanely good talent while almost no one uses imp renew. What are your guys thoughts?

Switch it up for a raid and see if you like it.

If you notice more spike damage on tanks—I would say go back. If it isn’t noticeable or doesn’t cause any wipes you should be alright with the new spec.

inspiration or ancestral fortitude can be considered mandatory. They will greatly reduce the chance of random tank deaths on at least 1 boss in every raid tier. So considering how awful it is to lose a tank, its mandatory. One thing a lot of guides won’t address is the difference between alliance and horde. alliance side, priests basically have no choice, but horde side might be more flexible. that all depends on how healing is handled in your raid. you’ll get decent uptime with 2 or more shaman/priest spamming the same target consistently. inspiration is usually most valuable in situations where you are spamming 1 target because they need a lot of healing, so the extra armor should come in handy when it counts.

improved renew is a pretty bad talent. a 28 stronger tick on your renew, somewhat decent for an individual parse if all you do is spam rank 10 renew, but the extra healing is virtually unnoticeable when it comes to real raid situations. you wont save a life with those stronger ticks. healing focus, holy reach, imp poh are vastly superior talents in the holy tree

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Yea that was my original thought process as well and I can even see it ring true on fights in bwl that we have on farm that we never wipe and I never lose my buffs for but when I look at my AQ logs the uptime on tanks is so abysmal without dragonslayer that it seems worthless and considering I’m actively trying to roll away another 15% of that uptime via dropping bene its just hard for me to justify using it. For example I get 7 relevant procs on my entire last twin emps kill at 9 mins. That feels like nothing but I think I have to begrudgingly agree while I don’t think its that relevant the upside of renew just is not large enough and considering it obviously better with dragon slayer since I double the uptime guess ill leave it be.

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I guess it’s worth testing in BWL/AQ40 since they are on farm now. I’d reckon you would want Inspiration in Naxx regardless.

Hard to say but yes if tanks are taking spike damage more often in naxx then yes.

Pros of inspiration

  • Less spike damage on tanks
  • More likely to save a tanks life than a renew
  • Better with dragonslayer

Cons

  • Procs almost never
  • Procs on non tanks are worthless
  • Most the relevant procs on warriors don’t save them since you already crit them to full HP

Pros renew

  • Better for pvp
  • more healing
  • controllable

Cons renew

  • Low impact talent overall
  • Doesn’t scale ever

I think I might give it a go just to test run it but it feels really bad to have a talent because 1 out of 100 times it might save a tank and ill never even notice it. Maybe ill go though logs and try and figure out how much damage I mitigate per raid but that might be time consuming.

This isn’t really true. AQ has a lot of physical damage to the raid. It definitely helps all melee in fights with increased adds or cleave.

I’ve never experienced a bad proc rate, although we have many shaman. Are your priests using their slowest heals? It would help using flash heal or other low rank speedy heals to proc.

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All priests should be P.I. For AQ/Naxx

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Well I’m talking about my personal proc rate if we talk overlap with others it make it slightly worse. Flash heal is both mana inefficient and has worse HPS than a 2.5 second heal also it would not matter at all as flash is for the raid. If I go through my logs and find exactly how many non tank players survived lethal damage due to my proc being up I bet that number is 0. for that to happen you have to crit someone to full and then they have to survive by less hp than the mitigation provided. this only looks at white armor so even on a tank with a shield with more than 7k armor we are talking about 12% mitigation tops. So less than 10% physical mitigation is gonna save a non tank from a physical hit after I crit heal them to full, seems unlikely.

Each raid is different. Mana inefficiency is moot for us when you can consume. Protecting world buffs is the priority.

AQ is mostly physical damage, +25% armor is huge. Be careful not to compare a singular crit heal with a duration effect.

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The more i thought about it the less I could justify it there are just not real places that renew is saving lives where we wipe and while its underwhelming most the time with low crit it is still better in those situations plus its way better with DS on.

Inspiration is strictly a raid healing talent, and it’s shared with other priests and shamans also healing the tank. At the very least, you’ll have a 5% chance to proc it per heal just from talents. Consider that the only target that matters for Inspiration is the tank, and there can only be one Inspiration up on the tank at a time. So if every Priest or Shaman in the raid has a small chance to put Inspiration on one target, even with low crit it leads to a decent uptime on a single tank or on two tanks.

In that sense, it’s a mandatory raid talent even if your personal crit chance is low.

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Might see more use in naxx. I remember having a priest spam r1 gheals on tanks during swp progression to keep inspiration up.

All things considered though, go PI, seriously.

The buff only matters for tanks. Any non tank getting hit by AQ/Naxx bosses should expect to die.

There’s more physical damage taken to raid than a direct attack from aggro in AQ.

It’s not raid only, is also good for pvp. For pve it had less value in BWL and MC.

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Inspiration talent is similar to Holy Nova spell in the sense that in order to get good scaling results you need crit. General guys, not specific.

You can only reasonably rely on the buff when several healers spec’d into it are healing the same target. It’s not super useful in PvP where you might only get a couple heal on a single target. It’s most applicable when multiple spec’d healers are focused on a single heal target.

Chain heal.

If it crits, it offers much needed physical protection. For a FC you will continue to pump, for another it may allow you to spread to other targets.

Especially in PVP, these are talents that are considerably worth taking over others.

Inspiration is mandatory. Your personal uptime is inconsequential because every Priest and Shaman should have it, making the overall uptime on the desired target higher.

If you’re primarily healing with Renew, but not wearing 5/5 T2.5 and in a guild that doesn’t use world buffs, you’re seriously wasting your raid slot.

Renew gets dispelled a lot as well I find.