Lessons from 2025 (MFO)
I made this blog as a way to chronicle my insights as I improved and learned new things as a healer. I'm a self taught disc/holy priest main that swapped from DPS to healing at the start of Legion. Although I will start with guides when looking to quickly pick up an alt class, it's extremely important to have a direct understanding of how my main specs play, without relying on others to "solve" it for me first, if I want to be capable of breaking new ground and playing at the highest level.
With time I had less to post about - "new" thoughts don't come by as frequently as they did when I was just starting out. Much of learning is front-loaded, after all.
Before Midnight(/the addon apocalypse) hits, here is one final retrospective from MFO.
On S3 Holy
TWW S3 was one of my favorite iterations of holy. DF S3/4 takes the cake but TWW S3 hits many of the same notes (PoM uptime, high impact, efficient, instant cast GCDs, flexible healing/buff stacking, satisfying dps integration).
Holy priest has always had a reputation for being the "basic" "easy" healer spec but this tier there is enough complexity for it to have quite a skill ceiling, if you care to look for it.
Throughout this tier I have been quite surprised how many CE and even HoF hpriest mains I have observed either playing "wrong" (aka: too many PoHs) or not capitalizing on the multiple ways to min max the spec. I will go over some of them in this post.
On Premonition Crimes
Premonition works on just about everything except PI. This has enabled some unconventional CD timings. Although getting extra PoMs/Penances is generally understood to be the best use of insight charges, committing one of those charges to a major CD instead can sometimes also make the difference between having it up for a damage window or having to sit on it for a long time/losing an entire use. Is that really worth trading for 1 extra PoM? Some examples in MFO:
Evang/Fiend on Plexus Sentinel (reliably ramp 1st Matrices and 1st intermission, even if your guild doesn't stay in intermission for long)
2min Hymn on Nexus King (cover both the damage on pull at 0:03 and Invoke the Oath at 1:56)
various configurations of Apotheosis and Hymn on Dimensius, depending on your guild's push timings
Disc can also split premonition charges into multiple smaller ramps if machine-gunning Penance is overhealing too much on your big ramp, or if you see an obvious gap in other healers' CDs that you can cover with a stronger mini ramp.
While some of these may seem suboptimal on paper, it could be the correct play for your specific raid team. I've said this before and I'll say it again - tailoring your gameplay to the environment you are in is always going to be a better choice than blindly copying the timings of a top log. Even if you don't have confidence in your ability to make the right decision, it still gets you thinking about why - and that's the first step to being able to arrive at the best answer. It's fine to use lorrgs as a starting point but at the very least you should take the time to evaluate how applicable that log is to your reality (comp, push timings, strat, etc.)
To quote the front page of lorrgs:
Maximizing raw HPS is meaningless if too much of it goes to overheal. If you come at me talking about raw HPS I'm gonna roast you.
On Spell Sequencing
This section is the main reason I wanted to write this post. To be optimal is to take the most effective action at any given time, avoid waste, and taking the steps needed to prep for it beforehand. Naturally, this means optimization goes hand in hand with planning ahead. This is true for all of movement, survivability, and throughput.
Oracle Holy has two passive talents that make PoH instant. They are also regularly forgotten - and not even mentioned on the Icy Veins/Wowhead spec guides. (Wowhead briefly mentions Divinity but is essentially just reading off the tooltip.)
This may not sound terribly interesting right now but hear me out. Due to these buffs being linked to Premonition and Apotheosis respectively, it means you're dealing with them at the same time that you're prioritizing other important parts of your kit.
Not taking advantage of the instant cast portion of these buffs is a mistake I see regularly on logs, even from experienced priests. On paper this has no impact on HPS, but playing around these buffs to maintain uptime can be an optimization during periods of high movement.
(Waste no) Waste No Time
Whether it's due to pairing Piety with Apotheosis or intentionally using Premonition to CDR Apotheosis, it's possible to end up with both PoH buffs active at the same time. Your next cast of PoH will consume a charge from both buffs, so you end up with 1 fewer instant PoHs. The solution, if timers allow for it and there is healing available, is to consume WNT before activating Apotheosis.
(Not just) PoM after Premonition
Guides and common sense suggest spending the next 3/4 globals on PoM after activating Premonition, and you generally aren't wrong for doing so.. but suppose you know the raid will be topped off quickly, or PoM comes up a few seconds later than you want it?
PoH doesn't consume charges of Insight, meaning you can weave it (as well as Holy Nova, Flash/Heal, and Smite) as a filler global between or before PoMs! Keeping this option open can greatly increase your flexibility to adapt to different game states without missing a beat.
Consider 2:00 into M Dimensius. Alas, Premonition can't CDR itself, so we don't have time to cast all 4 PoMs prior to the burst of damage from Antimatter.
You can spend your next 2 globals spot healing 2 people with the 2pc effect and letting PoM bounce ..or.. you can PoH before consuming your remaining Premonition charge(s).
Doing so changes your healing profile into frontloaded aoe healing that is less likely to step on the toes your co healer if they've prepped a raid CD. (I play with either rsham or evoker - there's either Cloudburst into HTT or Dream Breath rolling for the entirety of the soak.) When there's no spot healing triage needed, it doesn't make sense to prioritize pushing a few targets to high health (& a shield). It also griefs Cloudburst since the totem is a single burst of healing divided evenly between all injured targets regardless of health, and results in the players you targeted with PoM being mostly overheal/less healing going to the more injured targets.
Leaving PoH for later also increases the chance that it will overheal against your cohealer's CDs in general, whereas PoM is always an efficient GCD regardless of when you cast it. Finally, while health pools should be high enough this late into the season that someone eating a Spatial Fragment (small stun circle) shouldn't ever be lethal, aoe healing provides more of a buffer against such avoidable damage compared to the hit or miss of spot healing.
The con of doing so is leaving PoM off CD for a few more seconds. How impactful is this compared to shaping your healing profile to the incoming damage? Something to consider.
As always, you should aim to get a feel for your cohealer's healing pattern and play around that. Understand that this is a tier with a lot of constant ticking damage, which PoM will always snipe. Balance this with ensuring your other spells are also efficient.
Feelycraft (responsibly)
When I write posts like this I'm often reverse engineering what was initially a gut feeling that I later tested and confirmed by comparing logs and/or napkin math. Sometimes it turns out to be wrong, but it's also resulted in me cooking up numerous new CD timings over the years that actually worked and were eventually validated & copied by other players.
Rather than trying to fully solve a boss before ever pulling it, I look at the results as I'm playing and think about what felt ineffective. Being sensitive to visual feedback as it happens (HP bars on raid frames) and maintaining an openness to experimentation goes a long way towards guiding me in the right direction, both when learning a new spec and when optimizing a spec I've played for years. Just remember to stay humble and check your work - and never forget that gut feelings draw upon (and are thus limited by) the extent of your accumulated knowledge and experience.










