Just a quick tip for new Priests who don’t know about this powerful spell combination.
Inner Focus
Instant
3 min cooldownWhen activated, reduces the mana cost of your next spell by 100% and increases its critical effect chance by 25% if it is capable of a critical effect.
63% of base mana
40 yd range
Channeled
10 min cooldownYou recite a Holy hymn, summoning the power of the Divine to assist you in your time of need. Heals 3 nearby lowest health friendly party or raid targets for 3024 to 3342 every 2 sec for 8 sec, and increases healing done to them by 10% for 8 sec. Maximum of 12 heals. The Priest must channel to maintain the spell.
Individually, these abilities are great. Inner Focus helps provide a free spell every so often. Divine Hymn can be an emergency heal that helps stabilizes raids.
But combined together?
You get a free smart heal that automatically targets the weakest 3 friendly players and hits them with heals that have a 25% chance to crit.
It’s great for fights such as:
- Mimiron Phase 2
- Hodir’s Frozen Blows
- Deconstructor’s Tympanic Tantrum
Usable every 10 minutes. But still a cool setup regardless.
During repetitive damage, such as the tantrum, the channeled spell loses a few miliseconds of casting time and therefor 3 ticks or 25% of its performance. While a shield is definitely a help here, it’s doubtfull it can hold off the dmg for 6-7 seconds. Despite that it’s still a strong combo.
And yet.. I think this is where Disc priests may have an advantage. Shielding yourself would not only avoid some pushback, it would also provide borrowed time which, combined with Enlightment already pushes DH through in 6.3s before your own haste from gear is added. Checking Mallet’s haste (12.08%), this would boil down to 5.6s. A good Disc shield just might hold on that long. Still.. it wouldn’t be bad to first penance yourself to make sure. The amount of healing this extra tick on 3 targets gives may be worth it.
For Holies I would recommend doing it when either giving up the final tick is worth giving up or when the damage is less repetitive. In the latter it is smart to combine it with a spiritweapon/trinket/proc to maximize that OFSR regen.
Another point though: it works like a ‘smart’ heal in the sense it discards groups and only looks at healthbars within aoe range. While this is nice to make it effective, it might overlap with group-based assignments for AoE recovery (like we use in my guild). Sure it’s still nice, but if it snipes a heal or two then that imba power is just excessive power. Personally, I recommend announcing the activation of it so that healers can see this coming and act accordingly. Other smartheals work pretty well with it so… it works pretty well with another DH. Popping 2 DH’s simultaneously could literally provide all healers a small break in the healing for 6s.
Add a spoon of divine aegis to the mix and enjoy the compliments for saving the day 🙂
It’s not terribly powerful, but still useful to get you through one tough spot. Probably my favorite place as-of-late has been the phase transitions for Yogg-Saron. Either one provides a situation with a ton of damage going around that’s difficult to triage so it’s a great “Easy” button there.
The nice thing about IF + DH is how bloody expensive DH is, and Inner Focus solves that problem nicely. It’s especially useful when a Searing Flames goes through on Vezax. It’ll usually keep the tank up and not kill my mana in the process.
The other spell I have macro’d with IF is Desperate Prayer as it’s my personal panic button.
.-= Caladein´s last blog ..How Virtua Fighter 4 ruined fighting games for me. =-.
Speccing into healing focus and having a holy pala with concentration aura up removes the pushback entirely. It’s great to use on XT hardmode, I’m quite sure it has saved quite a few people there.
precise reason why I am spec’d for inner focus in my raid Shadow build, we make excellent emergency rescuers and that spell is awesome healing.
.-= Zahrah´s last blog ..BG Tards. =-.
I use a macro
#showtooltip Divine Hymn
/cast Inner Focus
/cast Berserking
/cast Divine Hymn
I’m not entirely sure if Berserking (or Power Infusion if I chose to include it) would speed up the Hymn, I just know I never click on Berserking otherwise so, why not /shrug.
.-= AnkiOfDraka´s last blog ..Link your Logs? =-.
I use Divine Hymn as an “OH sh*t” button when the tank and a few others are very low, and you are right is it a Raid Stabilizer.
as I channel it I can see HUGE heals popping up and see the healbot go back to full green..other healers can see the low people getting heals and switch to the medium low people…it saves the raid.
I will def setup a macro for IF+DH after reading this..Might as well /shrug.
(If IF is on CD will it still activate the DH?)
I’m pretty sure it’ll still activate if IF is on cooldown.
Easy way to test.
1) Build Macro
2) Manually fire off IF
3) Cast penance or something on self
4) Confirm that IF is on CD
5) Hit IF+DH macro
6) Profit
I just checked and, yep, DH fires off, and I get a message letting me know that IF was on CD. But DH did fire off.
.-= AnkiOfDraka´s last blog ..Ulduar Logs =-.
I am duel specced Disc/Holy…. And nothing fails more then forgetting which action bar is up…. Last night at the begining of 25 man hodir I accidentally Divine Hymn when I meant to Prayer of Mending…. Boooooo! What a waste!
I use healbot for ALL my healing spells, you need a mouse with 4 buttons:
LEFT click=Flash heal RIGHT click=GHeal
shift LEFT=Renew shift RIGHT=Shield
button 3=PoM button 4=PoH
then i mouse and click CoH on side bar next to Healbot, as well as a MACROed Guardian Spirit to GS the focus
Works great.
Yep yep. Use this trick for both holy and shadow specs. XT tantrums are pretty much negated on this, and can work quite well right after Flame Jets on Ignis.
I have a macro for this. It is a valuable tool for sure!
That’s pretty slick, Matt. Thanks for sharing.
.-= Chris Anthony | Duct Tape and a Prayer´s last blog ..Blizzard: Faction switching “in the works†=-.
My macro:
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=180 Inner Focus, Divine Hymn
Press once for inner focus, press twice for the combo. This way you don’t have to bind inner focus twice and if you end up using it on something else you can still hymn. When Inner focus comes off cooldown the macro allows you to use it again.
Hehe, I like how “new” was italicized.
I’ve been playing priest for years, and the one time I specced into Inner Focus, I never used it because I forgot it was there. The disc priest in our guild swears by that spell combo, though, and now it’s here too, so I’ll have to give it a try! =D
Thanks for the post!
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yeah , i use this combination for some time and its great 🙂 the one thing i have to remember after respeccing shadow is to put my macro back in my hotbar slot 😛
i see 5/6k flying around hehe. nice when things get a bit hectic. I do pop up a shield manually and then cast the spell cos a macro which included my shield too didnt work 🙁 ofc the castsequense will do but i dont like it that way..
So would you pick this combination over IF + PoH? I know that I am going to be using and benefiting from the PoH combo more than once in a fight like XT and sometimes DH just doesn’t get used. If you are doing hardmode XT you are probably going to see three free PoH’s. That doesn’t mean of course that DH+IF would preclude it, you would just have to make sure that you had a option to not use IF with PoH if it was needed prior to you using DH.