Another Monday, and another WoWWeek has comes to pass. We attained our magic number to get our Furious Tier1 weapons tomorrow, so we're reveling in that victory. Additionally, I caught a Darkmoon Card: Death on the cheap for my PvP set, which is an upgrade against most comps, so that's good too. We hit the arena rating we needed on Wednesday last week, so Guntir IMs me at work as says:

We're just going to BG-grind this week without any more arena matches, right? If so, I'd like to try out this Holy PvP build I have been toying with for the last couple of weeks... I doubt it will work, but I want to try it to prove that to myself. We can do bg grinding with it and if it's terrible, I'll respec Disc; if it's good, we should do some skirmishes, and if that works, we'll try it next wekk in the actual arena. - Guntir

This is bonkers, but what the hell... bg grinding is boring anyway, right? Might as well try and get some testing done. We were raiding all night, so he didn't get a chance until Thursday, and I don't really play on Thursdays because I spend time with my girlfriend (and it's our 8-year anniversary today, so I'm supposed to be extra-good all week up till today). So, I didn't hear about his experiments until Friday night. I have a bowling league I do and I don't get out until 9:30 or so at night, then we go to Carl's Jr. with our parents and hang around after they leave talking about WoW.

Anyway, Friday night comes, parents leave, and we start talking. He says "this Holy spec hasn't shown me any obvious flaws yet. The mana conservation might be an issue in the arena, but with how quickly our matches go, maybe it won't be." He also makes mention that the ability to remove Poisons on himself is completely ridiculous against rogues because Body and Soul gives his target a 60% speed buff whenever he uses PW:S on someone, so he gets jumped by a rogue, waits for his Abolish Disease to knock of Crippling, hits PW:S and gets away from the rogue who is standing there looking rather confused.

Another bonus that this spec has is Blessed Resilience. The best part about Blessed Resilience is the anti-false-positive support. We talked about this before in threads long ago: a false positive attack is an attack made against a target who reduces the opponents' chance to strike them critically, but has bonuses gained from being struck critically. Instead of those abilities scaling inversely to resilience, they made the false-positive checks... example just works best in describing how this goes:

Rogue has 30% crit chance.
Guntir has -10% chance to be crit.
Normally, this would mean that his resilience is lowering his chance to proc abilities like Blessed Resilience by 10%... however...
20% of the time, the rogue will strike critically and proc Blessed Resilience.
10% of the time, the rogue will NOT strike critically when he SHOULD have but didn't because of Guntir's resilience.
Therefore, 10% of the time when the rogue DOESN'T crit, Blessed Resilience is still proc'd.

More the point, Blessed Resilience makes it so that Guntir CANNOT be crit during it's 6 second duration. However, this talent also gets the false-positive treatment and allows defensive crit-based abilities to proc while it is up. Going over the same example:

0% of the time, the rogue will strike critically and proc Blessed Resilience (and perhaps other on-crit talents/abiltiies).
30% of the time, the rogue will NOT strike critically when he SHOULD have but didn't because of Guntir's Blessed Resilience talent.
Therefore, 30% of the time when the rogue DOESN'T crit and Blessed Resilience is up, Guntir will proc a new Blessed Resilience (the other 70% of the hits aren't crits and don't proc anything... but they aren't crits... which is nice).

Blessed Resilience is THE best talent in the entire Holy tree for PvP. Guardian Spirit is pretty good (when glyphed properly), Body and Soul is definitely going to make it easier for Guntir to get away from rogues (with both Abolishes up, he removes 2 poisons every 3 seconds, allowing him to PW:S himself and 'sprint' away), and Lightwell is still an awesome heal for when Guntir is CC'd or stunned/silenced and someone needs some healing, but the real kicker is Blessed Resilience. You take that talent out of the tree, and you kill Holy's only PvP viability.

Anyway, we're going to try out some arena matches this week as Holy+Feral, and we'll see how that goes. I'll report back either way, obviously, but we are hopeful that it will make any team with a rogue/dk/ret/feral on it an easier win for us. The only thing left up in the air is the mana longevity: Holy BLEEDS mana. On the other hand, Guntir's GHeal in PvP gear can critically heal me for ~24,000... so the spec MIGHT work in getting him out of the 5 second rule, and even if it doesn't, he can still wind up the cheese-heals and drink (there still exists a bug where one can wind up a heal with a cast time while they aren't in combat and start mashing their drink button, as soon as the heal goes off, the priest starts drinking THEN is immediately marked as 'in combat'... but he's already drinking, so it doesn't matter).