Strength of Soul

Strength of Soul is a really rotten talent. It lets you cast a bad spell more often at the cost of casting another bad spell. There was really no reason to take it, and if you did take it, you were best off treating those talent points as a sunk cost and never making use of the bonus it gave you.

But of course I am writing this on the eve of 4.0.6, and given the coming changes, this talent deserves some reevaluation. As of tomorrow, instead of letting you cast a spell you don't want to cast more often by casting another spell you don't want to cast, Strength of Soul is going to let you cast a spell you desperately want to cast more often at the expense of casting a spell you want to cast anyway. That sounds like it has a lot more potential.

So I modified one of my old simulators to see what benefit Strength of Soul would give if you had the following casting priority on a single target:

Power Word: Shield
Penance
Renew (if Borrowed Time is up)
Greater Heal

With this priority, Strength of Soul results in a 10% increase in throughput with a 4% increase in efficiency for the two points. Of course this isn't a very realistic situation, so I modified the order to the following:

Power Word: Shield
Penance
Prayer of Mending
Renew (if Borrowed Time is up)
Prayer of Healing*
Greater Heal

In order to simulate sometimes using Prayer of Healing I gave it a random cooldown with each cast from 0-30 seconds, which roughly corresponds with how often I cast Prayer of Healing against bosses on my last raid. Since Strength of Soul isn't doing as much with this set up, the two points give a 5.4% throughput and 1.4% efficiency increase. That's still a good amount of work to be getting out of two talent points.

With a top end of 5% more healing per point and a midrange of 2.5% healing per point, I think these talent points are probably better than some of the others I currently have, but I don't have a lot of flexibility to move talent points around. I think my weakest talent in my current build that I can afford to get rid of is Surge of Light.

As a side note, for now I am going to be moving two points of Mental Agility to Soul Warding as a nod to the new strength of Power Word: Shield. Both talents get better with Power Word: Shield getting better, but I think Mental Agility goes from somewhat weak to mediocre while Strength of Soul goes from downright useless to situationally great. After I've actually raided with the changes I'll be able to reevaluate Mental Agility to see how much I'm getting out of those points.