The following specs listed below are intended as a guideline to help you choose a proper spec for 3.3. Some of these specs are optimized to enhance a spell or a form of healing, or balance several options (ie, renew spec crossed with greater heal). The spec you choose will be dependent on your healing style or the task you are trying to accomplish. None of these specs should be seen as better then one other the other. In the following specs there are talents or points that some will want to move around, which is completely fine, but ensure the vital talents are selected.
Most holy specs listed below have many similarities with a few points shifted around to help optimize an ability. Many say that the Holy tree is flexible and from what we will see you may agree that this is a true statement.
The first spec listed here is an ideal renew spec with focus on raid healing (for reference we will call this the Raid-Renew spec). You will notice that any ability that enhances greater heal is not chosen as with this spec your focus will not be to use greater heal. Now I’ve put 4 points into Divine Fury which some prefer to place them into Spell warding (reduce damage taken from spells by 8%) and that is perfectly fine. However there are situations where a greater heal may come in handy. This doesn’t mean we want to modify the spec to enhance our greater heal, but having a quicker greater heal may come in handy. An example of the use would be in ToC on Lord Jaraxxus when a Mistress of Pain spawns and casts Spinning Pain Spike on a raid member (inflicts 50% health damage). Having the ability to dish out a quick greater heal might be the best choice in spells. Without having Divine Fury we could still achieve this but timing would need to be adjusted.
Again, anything that has to do with greater heal has been removed from this spec and instead all of our talent points are placed into talents that will increase our raid healing ability. Aside from the basic raid healing abilities we have also selected Improved Renew & Empowered Renew. Based on my personal experience renew is a great spell and every holy priest should learn to properly use it. Some may argue that renew isn’t worth the talent points and if you are not use to healing with renew that stay clear from it. Based on the talents chosen I would consider this a heavy raid healing spec as non raid healing specs have been excluded.
One thing I did not mention is the reason to choosing Blessed Resilience over Empowered Healing. In the WotLK Healing Compendium 3.3 (point 12) you will find some mathematical reasoning to how the combination of BR & ToF can be stronger then Empowered Healing towards Flash Heal. Aside from this you also need to realize that BR will increase the output of all of your spells and in theory increasing your overall throughput.
The next spec we are looking at is one intended for raid healing but with the ability to use greater heal more frequently (for reference we will call this the Raid-GH spec). This spec is picking any ability that will make our greater heals faster, stronger, and more mana efficient. This spec also includes talents to improve our raid healing abilities and is more ideal for those who do not wish to use renew. With this spec you are more then capable of raid healing and provide sufficient assistance with tank healing. In order to achieve this spec we have taken points from talents such as Blessed Resilience and Empowered Renew, and shifted these points into those greater heal friendly talents. We could also argue about the choice of BR over Test of Faith, 3% overall healing or 12% on targets at or below 50%, but the choice is up to you.
With this spec we are picking up Empowered Healing which could be considered better for Flash heal since we have also picked up Test of Faith, but of course we are loosing talents such as empowered renew and blessed resilience. Overall this is still a strong raid healing spec and gives us the ability to use Greater heal.
Now if your like me and can’t let go of Renew but need greater heal then this may be your choice (for reference we will call this the GH-ER spec). This spec will pickup both talents to improve Renew and those talents needed to make GH viable. Now in order to do this we must sacrifice a few raid healing talents such as Holy Reach and Healing Prayers, but neither of which are mandatory for raid healing. This would be a spec I’d consider if I needed to pickup GH for a raid such as ICC10 man where only 2 healers are in the group. Having the ability to toss out strong raid heals and strong tank heals will make most encounters easier. Now the good thing about say 10man ICC is that you don’t have a lot of raiders in the group and range shouldn’t be too much of an issue (making it more reasonable to not spec into Holy Reach). Now there are other specs which we could choose from but this spec will give us the benefits to renew and unless your a non renew user then this is a spec to consider.
Finally with this spec (which for reference we will call our GH spec) we are of course grabbing those talents to make our greater heals move viable but we are also taking Blessed Resilience for the 3% additional healing overall. This will make all of our spells stronger but at a cost of Holy Reach & Healing Prayers. Again HR & HP are not mandatory for a holy priest and if you want to have stronger heals then as always a sacrifice needs to be made. Comparing this spec to the previous we simply moved points away from Empowered Renew and place those into Blessed Resilience.
The following spec has been brought to my attention by Zusterke and I can clearly see how this spec could be yet another ideal spec for those who don’t use greater heal and wish to focus more on raid healing. Based on personal experience flash heal is definitely one of our primary spells and having a spec which enhances that spell is not a bad choice at all. The new tier 10 2pc bonus also adds a little punch to the use of our flash heals, making the use of flash heal more beneficial. Below is Zusterke’s comment on this spec:
The allround FHeal spec. The very same WotLK compendium should explain why you’d pick 2/5 EH + 3/3 BR over 5/5 ER. What’s unique about this spec is that it still delivers strong single target healing but has all the goodies for superior AoE healing. The Renew, while not fully talented, is still strong enough to make Renew heavy strategies work, but you can switch to FHeal strategies should the situation call for it. If I would not be taking a Renew heavy spec, this would be my preferred spec. Its weaknesses are slim, and a good mix of Renew and FHeal is all you need to overcome that… something an experienced priest could enjoy 
Now if we look at all of the previous specs shown you will see that the majority of them are similar. Some specs place points into a certain ability to help optimize it for a certain situation. As far as Holy Reach is concerned I don’t feel that it’s a mandatory talent to have however this really depends on the types of raids you are doing. If your simply running 5mans then its by no means necessary and could possibly be a loss of points. If your focus is 10mans then you could see it as not mandatory to have but wouldn’t hurt to have. For a 25man raid you now have to realize that there are a lot more raid members in an area and chances are they need to be further spread out. This is where having HR would benefit us if our main purpose is to raid heal. Healing prayers is another story and will depend on how often you cast PoH and PoM and whether you find yourself having mana issues or not. The spec you choose will be dependent on your healing style. Also if you never cast renew then you may consider moving the points I’ve placed into Improved Renew (tier 1) into Healing Focus and you would be left with 1 point to play around with.
To quickly summarize lets take a look at all 4 specs listed.
Raid Renew
- Optimal for Raid Healing
- Strong Renew
- No Greater Heal support
Raid-Greater Heal
- Optimal for Raid Healing
- Full GHeal support
- Limited or no use of Renew
Greater Heal w/Empowered Renew
- Full GHeal Support
- Strong Renew
- Shorter range AoE heals
- Less mana efficiency with PoM + PoH
Greater Heal
- Full GHeal Support
- Stronger overall heals (BR)
- Weak Renew
- Shorter range AoE heals
- Less mana efficiency with PoM + PoH
Last but not least the Cookie cutter Disc spec. There isn’t much wiggle room in the discipline tree as there is for holy and trying to move points around may not be a great idea. Some disc specs try to incorporate Improved Healing by removing points from Focused Will, but the crit you gain is vital to proc those bubbles if you don’t have the sufficient gear for it. My best advice is to stick with the spec listed above as it has all the important parts for a disc priest. One thing you could change is the points from Improved Renew and Desperate Prayer into either Spell Warding or Divine Fury.
As far as Glyphs are concerned here are my recommendations (with the Holy choices being a little more flexible then the Disc choices):
Holy
- Glyph of Flash Heal – Reduces mana cost by 10%.
- Glyph of Circle of Healing – Heals an additional target.
- Glyph of Guardian Spirit – Resets the CD on GS if the target does not activate the spirit.
- Glyph of Fading – Reduces mana cost on fade.
- Glyph of Shadowfiend – Receive 5% of max mana if fiend dies.
- Glyph of Levitate (or something else) – Fun Fun Fun 
Disc
- Glyph of Flash Heal – Reduces mana cost by 10%.
- Glyph of Penance – Reduces the CD on Penance by 2 secs.
- Glyph of Power Word: Shield – Heals the target for 20% of the absorb amount.
- Glyph of Fading – Reduces mana cost on fade.
- Glyph of Shadowfiend – Receive 5% of max mana if fiend dies.
- Glyph of Levitate (or something else) – Fun Fun Fun x2
Well that is all, if you have any comments/questions leave a comment. If you have your own spec which you feel is better then drop me an email or comment with some reasoning and I’ll include it here. Good luck =)
I’ve dreaded this moment but I think its time to call it quits (for now). As some of you may have noticed I haven’t been updating my blog and I just don’t have the time to dedicate to it anymore. I have also started to disklike the game quiet frankly and although I don’t want to I may need to take a break 
. Of course the feature is out now but has been buggy to say the least. Don’t get discouraged as there is plenty more being tossed our way. Take gear for example, the regular dungeons will be dropping iLvL 219 and heroic mode iLvL 232. Sounds to me like Ulduar 10/25 gear, not bad.
Icecrown Citadel: Well we only get to see a total of four bosses and are unable to do the heroic mode until the Lich King himself has been put to rest. So in the mean time we get to play around with these four new bosses which haven’t been too difficult. We went in and in about 2 hours killed all four bosses without a great knowledge of the encounters. The encounters weren’t difficult at all, infact trash was more exciting (in terms of difficulty, since we pulled like 3 groups at once on accident). I suppose on a positive note we’ll be able to learn these encounters well enough to make the heroic modes go smoother. They just seemed really easy as I was hoping for ICC to be the new BT/Sunwell dungeon as far as difficulty goes. /sigh, but at least the boat ‘boss’ was really fun and I won’t mind doing it over and over in the weeks to come. Too bad you can’t keep the jumper pack.