tedv

I tend to think that you are doing a good job with a bad spec while the other priests are doing a bad job with a good spec. I mean, the other priests had roughly 50% of their healing from Flash Heal and 10% to 20% from Greater Heal. That's really not mana efficient at all. The WWS doesn't list their armory links so I can't check for poor talent or itemization choices, but I highly doubt you relatively good healing is from the deep discipline talents. All you gain is 10% top end mana, which is a total of maybe 4% extra mana throughout the fight, and that won't account for more than 4% extra healing. Holy just gives better returns on each talent point spent.

 

Kazen

In response to Louiscypher's post earlier: I am also a 40/21/0 discipline priest, and I have found it to be a viable complementary healer's spec. I spec'd away from Holy when BC came around. Like most good healing priests, I was almost always at the top of the healing charts in guild raids pre-BC, and found myself lucky on a good day to be in the top 5 post-BC. After the whining, bitching, and crying in my cups phase, I came to accept that Pallies and Priests have had their roles switched in the BC world. Pallies have been transformed from supplementary healing buffbots into major Healadins (my former main was a pally, whom I abandoned when all I did in MC/BWL was buff and decurse). Conversely, Priests are no longer uber-healers in raids. Our HoTs aren't hot enough, and our big heals aren't big enough (or are too slow to cast).

Once I accepted this change, it became clear to me that I needed to be more useful in a raid than as primary healer, so I tuned out SW Stats and spec'd to 40/21. The benefits of Imp. Divine Spirit, Power Infusion, Reflective Shield, and the huge mana pool associated with a Disc. spec have been incredibly beneficial to my playing style. No, I can't compete with the Pallies and Droods in a raid for pure healing power, but I live long, heal long, and provide perks that can give the raid an edge. Once you get over the bizarre fact that Priests are not really primary healers in raids any more, it gets easier to credit the discipline tree for allowing a priest to become fairly useful beyond just healing the MT, despite the flaws in the tree.

Dropping Spirit of Redemption for Pain Suppression isn't such a bad thing (I've found that if I'm dying, its most likely a wipe anyway) and that could be a very beneficial spell for casters and rogues to have thrown their way once in a while.

8-)


-Kazen

 

Kasi

Pain suppression is quite handy for a couple of fights. Gurtogg and RoS come to mind. Although with Gurtogg it should be used near the end of the phase, when damage is coming in fastest. It can really help trivialize things.

 

Vurrin

This is almost entirely just my opinion, but here goes.

1) your mana regen over your fellows is a matter of gear choices not spec. If they chose to stack spirit/regen in the manner you did they should have exactly the same regen ( barring human spirit). if you had taken SoR AND the +5% spr/int/sta talent that might make a difference.

2) Not as good != not viable. Disc is simply not as advantageous as holy for various reasons that doesn't mean its so bad as to be un-workable. A common example is of the Korean guild who killed RoS/Illidan with a spattering of tier 5 and a lot of tier 3 to show how little you need to beat all content. Simply put the argument is that maximizing the strengths and advantages available to you makes for easier progression.

3) I wonder if with PI do you coordinate it with whomever you're buffing's trinkets and cooldowns? If not, you're not maximizing its effectiveness either.

4) as for hardyness you have 5% more staminia its true, but better play, proper positioning, and quicker use of HS/DP probably account for more "deaths avoided" than ~250 hp raid buffed. Your particular build doesn't have Pain Supression so thats not a factor here either.

5) Also your guild has only 1 SP ( in your WWS) but you are in the group. more than that you are in the place of a mage. this says to me despite your regen gear selection you have terrible mana problems. And looking at the WWS I can immediately tell you cast entirely too much flash heal, and with closer inspection looks like you don't cast PoM nearly enough.

6) Back on the flash heal thing... its very mana inefficient in longer encounters, its probably part of the reason why you require a SP to stay competitive, and while its certainly easier to use than proper use of Gheal/renew your 2.5k extra mana from disc doesn't really make such a difference that you can afford to spam it. Furthermore your gear is hevay on spirit but flash heal spam actually limits your oofsr rule time which effective gimps the regen you've been gearing and geming for.

For comparison (not saying I'm so great either I overheal a lot and particularly for these early BT bosses I screw around a lot) you can look at how I approach healing these encounters Vurrin - WWS If you look at Najenuts you can see I used PoM about 9-10 times( and the resulting healing form that would increase my effective healing by almost 20%), and that the majority of my healing came from gheal/renews with a good chunk of binding heal. I did use a healthy amount of flash heals but almost all of those were right before a bubble break to top off the lower hp folks. Compared to you whom didn't cast a single PoM, and got the majority of his healing from PoH( which is good since your guild is set up for it and people aren't hitting their neighbors) and then relied on Flash heal extensively as his secondary heal. Furthermore our Flash heals had about the same average amount healed for... but I was using rank 6 ( maybe 7) and have 2300 healign raid buffed+ holy talents, so you're using at least 3-4 ranks higher than I was which burns mana even faster.

Anyway this isn't meant to be an attack on your playstyle or your spec, merely, as you asked, an opinion from the more traditional side of things of whats efficient and effective.

 

PSGarak

I hear that fight length in T6 content tends to be much shorter, which would cut down drastically on the efficacy of increased regen/mana pool talents. Being in burstier fights like that emphasizes the use of PS and PI more, but the regen matters less and CoH starts looking like a better and better alternative.

But yeah, if someone says "I'm disc/ret/feral/unhancement/shadow/affliction and I heal better than the rest of my guild" my initial interpretation is, your player ability is better than them head and shoulders but that provides approximately zero evidence that it's a useful/competitive/min-max healing spec. Math says it's quite simply way reduced healing throughput, and you need a lot of utility to make up for that. If played well Disc can offer some or most of that utility, especially on specific fights.

If you can make it work I respect you and give you mad props. I don't quite understand the spec completely but it seems like a more interesting one to play than holy healbot spec, so congratulations. Keep living the dream. Unless that dream includes flash heals. Friends don't let friends use flash heal.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Healranktwo

The only thing disc brings to a raid is PI, and you lose all the goodies of holy yo. Pain supression looks good on paper, but 9/10 times you can never use it at the right time or when it's actually needed. Reflective shield is useless, since I would hope PW:S is almost never used due to it's inefficiency. Enlightenment is an added int/stam version of Spirit of Redemption (but you miss out on spiritual guidance and all sorts of crap). 10% mana is lol. There's really nothing that disc adds over holy that makes you regen more/heal more/own everyone else more, and the good stuff you can already get with a full holy build like meditation, mental agility, etc.

There's no benefit to being full disc over holy/disc or disc/holy in a raid unless you are too cheap to pay respecs inbetween arenaing and raiding lol.

 

Bunni

I have to agree. Disc as the mana regen tree died when they did our big revamp (way back in the day) and moved DS down from the 31 point talent. More mana doesn't give you more regen and there are countless Holy Priests with everything up to Imp DS in Disc (and I would seriously question anyone without Meditation and Inner Focus no matter what their spec). It is also perfectly possible to outperform healers with better specs and gear simply by being a more effective healer than they are. Skill and technique has so much to do with success as a healer that it becomes hard to say what is and what isn't a "viable" choice. I think we should be able to agree however that Disc isn't the "ideal" choice for raid healing.

 

Vain

One direction that the Disc tree can be taken, that would make it a different and interesting support role, is something that someone who plays a Guild Wars monk would be familiar with; pre-protection.

In Guild Wars, the monks have a healing line, which pushes health bars up after player(s) take damage, and a protection line, which are pro-active buffs you put on *before* the player takes the damage, and lessen or prevent certain types of damage. WoW really only has healing-after-the-fact and doesn't have much in the way of pre-protection (Power Word: Shield would be an example of this, but PW:S is not at all efficient).

I'll give an example of a few GW prot spells below, although obviously they would have to work differently in WoW.

Big prots (these cost a lot of mana but have a 0.25 second cast time; they are used to handle very spiky damage):

Protective Spirit: For the next X seconds, target ally cannot lose more than 10% maximum health from a single attack or spell.

Spirit Bond: For the next 8 seconds, whenever target ally takes damage of more than X damage from an attack or spell, that ally gains Y health. (10 charges).

Small prots:

Reversal of Fortune (0.25s cast): For 8 seconds, the next time target ally would take damage, that ally gains that amount of health instead, (maximum X). (This is sort of an oh-shit spell, when you know you won't have enough time to cast a real heal, which is why it has a 0.25s sec cast).

Guardian: For X seconds, target ally has a 50% chance to block attacks.

If Blizzard could add one or two spells or talents to Disc, that enabled a priest to put an interesting and situational very short term buff on a target, that resulted in a greater efficiency than simply healing the damage after the fact (as long as you made the correct decision about what buff to use, and who to put it on), it could make for some interesting gameplay.

 

jjacko

Anyone knows if Reflective shield damage can proc surge of light ?

I know for a fact that :
- reflective shield damage can crit
- reflective shield damage is holy
so it *should* be able to proc it...

I dont have surge of light so i cant test it right now, thats why i am asking

If noone knows for sure, i ll respec and try it tonight...

Edit : typo

 

Psilux

In order to do that, you would only be able to take 3/5 in reflective shield. Is it really worth it to gimp your spec that much for a free smite now and again? It was already proven in another thread that the free smite can actually lessen your dps (because it doesn't have the ability to crit).

 

Iluminati

Reviving this slightly old thread with my own input.

A little background first -
In my guild the vast majority of healing on our main tanks comes from 1-2 druids rolling hots and a paladin chaining. So basically priests are brought (usually only 1, except on fights like bloodboil, illidan, or ros) for the added renew on the tanks, improved DS, pom, and prayer of healing on aoe fights. Chain heal is utterly ridiculous and with 2-3 good shaman makes prayer of healing almost superfluous. It's with this in mind that I believe 41 discipline builds are the "best" raiding heal priest build, to strengthen the role as a support healer.

When targetable pain suppression was revealed I really thought Disc would take over as the preferred raiding spec. However, I was shadow at the time, and for a long time before that (and I am once again, thankfully) so without much experience I did not say anything. During the winter holiday season, many of our healers took breaks/were absent, so I gladly took on healing duties for a few weeks (a nice change of pace after farming BT/Hyjal as lazarz pew pew spec). This is the spec I used:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I found it to be ideal for my raiding role. I put renews on the MT, pom on the MT, power infused warlocks when they had trinkets (+ heroism) up, spam low rank flash/gheal to proc inspiration, assist raid healing, and pain suppression either to avoid burst on the take, reduce threat on a lock, or to avoid a "gimp" boss ability (fel rage for example). If there was aoe damage I would poh.

To me, the loss of Empowered/Spiritual healing doesn't really matter, because priest HP/s ultimately is crap compared to paladin/druid hp/s. Healing prayers/circle of healing are AWESOME in late BT, but if you have 2-3 good resto shamans that show up for raids (hint hint - YOU SHOULD!), circle of healing really isn't necessary at all.

I found pain suppression to be particularly useful on fights like bloodboil, reliquary, and illidan to negate boss gib abilities - fel rage, enrage, and dark barrage respectively. On fights like Council it's simply AMAZING to pop on your main tank while Gathios has a seal up.

Power infusion is much better than you give credit for in the OP. Communicate with your warlocks. Wait for trinkets to be up, make sure they have mana, do it on a "weakness" phase, time it with heroism...etc.

If you find yourself frequently in a MT healing role this does not really apply, but I think at this point in raiding, Priests are the worst main tank healers and should never be assigned to that role as it doesn't really use priest abilities to their full potential. IMO a discipline priest brings much more to a raid than a holy one. A holy priest brings ONLY healing (direct heals that are strictly inferior to paladins, hots that are much weaker than druids, and aoe heals that are barely on par with chain heal), while a disc priest can essentially do everything a holy priest can (short of circle of healing, which is not awesome to begin with) AND brings PS/PI.

 

Vurrin

I'm going to have to disagree with some of your assumptions/methods/conclusions.

1) Since you weren't a healer originally you're not familiar with the kind of healing output you could do if fully spec'd, additionally and no offense to you, but experience can help in becoming a more effective healer... All in all I'd be interested in some WWSs,

2) You say priest HPS is crap, but you skip SG/SH/SoR which are easily 20% of your healing on pretty much every single spell. You claim you PoH'd... my PoH heals for 3k you're probably under 2400. I say my rank 1 gheal ( 3200 avg hit raid buffed on a tank) is 1200+ HPS more than a druids lifebloom and equally sustainable. Granted Lifebloom is extremely powerful for what it is, same with FoL spam, but to say we can't compete because of healing per second couldn't be farther from the truth. and I mean i haven't even talked about the outrageous HPS Binding Heal can put out or a rank of gheal above 1.

3) Just because your raid is blessed with resto shamans/druids/paladins out the rear doesn't mean everyone's is, and CoH has several advantages over chain heal as well. to use bloodboil or p2 illidan as an example. CoH is much higher HPS, more controllable, and ultimately far more powerful.( since gererally people takign dmg do so by groups, rather than say by 3s or intermittently) Not to knock CH at all which is a great spell and covers a lot of the weaknesses of CoH perfectly.

4) while I don't deny the usefulness of PS in the situations referenced( except on Council) you need to be able to counter these abilities without it since after all PS won't be up every time a mage gets fel rage or for every dark barrage, or every enrage. And granted most of these abilities are limited to 2 or 3 times per encounter so PS effectively limits the dangers for a third of the encounter, but its not really accomplishing anything the raid couldn't do without, and you may have been able to make an equal difference with a proper spec. For example assuming an optimal PS on Dark barrage you're going to prevent 40% of 24000 dmg or just under 10k dmg. I've already established that on my lowest ranked gheals* I'm going to be healing for 600 or so more than you so it takes 17 casts to make up the difference. assuming gheals @ 2.5 seconds thats 41 seconds of casting.... and PSs CD is 120 seconds... so unless my oofsr time was approaching 30% I'td be more healing. Now granted there is much to be said for "front loading" or choosing where you apply your burst of effective healing, and overheal is a bit of a consideration ( but less so when the burst is huge and predictably so) but there are many encounters where PS will be worth much less ( and some where its worth a bit more), but by and large in terms of healing granted to a raid PS loses out in a major way, and so for dependable repeatable kilsl its not the short of thing you should rely on, and for learning... well I guess its up the raid leader whether he prefers an "oh shit" button or a solid dependable healer.

5) PI's effectiveness is reduced every second you delay its use. Yes its best to save for trinkets heroisms... but if you use it less per encounter as a result your net gain is drastically reduced. I'm not big on DPS theory crafting, but it seems to me optimal use for longer fights would be use it as close to immediately as possible ( with trinkets), use it immediately on CD ( no trinkets since they CD in 2 min and PI takes 3), and then use it again immediately on CD with trinkets + heroism 6 minutes into the fight. course most fights aren't long enough or predictable enough for it to eb so neat and clean, but its still an important factor to note that if you wait to use PI, you're weakening PI at the same time. even so lets say a Lock does 2k DPS during heroisms thats 15 seconds @ 2400m and 25 seconds @ 2000 Vs 40 seconds @ 2000. You know what the difference is? 6000 dmg... you know how many hp most bosses have ? 5million.. All in all 1 person out of 10-12 dps , for about 8% of the encounter basically equates to a less than 1% difference overall.

6) you say MT healing is not a role for priests yet one of your primary roles was MT healing ( albeit for inspiration instead of you know keeping him alive through making his HP go up). Should go without mentioning that a CoH spec priest can spec hoyl spec and inspiration just like you and do the same thing. And you say priests only bring direct healing, but inspiration is mitgation like PS, and PW:S, and I'd say the effect CoH has on a raid even with 2 shamans is greater than the effect PI would have.


Anyway long story short, I think your spec is perfect for a PS priest, I just think PS despite being a neat "toy" and a fun extra emergency tool simply gives up far more than you realize or even appreciate, for abilities limited effect on the overall course and effectiveness of a raid, or where they do have an appreciable benefit they CD and scope are too narrow to depend on, and the difference in healing is too great to depend on the PS priest for it ( assuming the content was bleeding edge).


*I used Priest Healing to compare gheal rank 1 with 2350 healingw/o the high end holy talents to 2500 healign with all the holy talents ( the extra 150 healing is form SG ( assumes 600 spirit but its close enough for an example) end result 2449 Vs 3118 = 669 difference per cast of gheal rank 1 not accounting for 4 pc t6.

 

Hadria

My personal experiance as RL and classleader is that CoH is the best possible thing a priest can bring to a raid.
We are currently using 3 holy (0 disc) priests in most raids and it made 2 BT fights a lot easier for us:
- Bloodboil is trivial with CoH.
- Illidan p2 raidhealing is a job for 2 CoH priests if you position ur grps right.

PS might be usefull but it should not be needed at all if ppl focus. A tanktransition is something that should not rely on this.

IS is a nice buff to regen and dps but I dont think you need it for any encounter in the game atm. We never had any regen or dps problems (more the l2p kind ).

Survivability is not really an issue. Once ppl get MH/BT gear priests have easily 10k HP buffed which is more then enough for any current fight.


Summary:
I really hope Blizz finds a way of giving the disc tree some love which makes it really usefull in raids!! Atm its not imo!

 

Iluminati

Thank you very much for the input! The reality is that my guilds paladins and druids are all very well geared and very good on top of that, and I was about 600+ healing behind yours (which is quite significant), so I was probably more a backup/buffbot than anything else for our farming runs.

I definitely see the advantages of circle of healing for all of those fights, but in my eyes, the loss of Divine Spirit is not worth it, and at that point you're better off bringing another shaman for chain heal.

If your raids normally only bring 1 healing priest, would you say that it is still optimal to spec 23/38? My guild literally only has one at the moment who is not too big on theorycraft, and the WoW forums are not the most intelligent place (-_-) so your input has been very helpful.

If my paladins stop showing up I'll be sure to try out a COH build next time >

 

Vurrin

Its worth noting even at 1300-1500 healing the difference in throughput on rank 1 gheal is still over 500 healing per cast. Granted not the same as the 700 per cast for people with a slew of gear, but hardly insignificant. I simply used my numbers for the sake of accuracy.

As for the single priest in raids debate. I guess it depends how much trouble your guild has farming BB and RoS. CoH is a huge power shift for those encounters and so if you want them to be easier CoH is a no brainer. If you want a marginally stronger raid on every encounter DS is the way to go.


Much like the discussion in the holy priest thread where people compare stacking + healing to a more regen focused approach I believe outside of encounters where CoH is a "must have" DS is less important when stuff is on farm or outgeared by your raid, because players on an individual level no longer need the slight boosts to eke through an encounters. healers have more mana, DPS does mroe dmg, there's less wasted movement and time etc. However on progression where execution is not yet 100% and raid healing is sufficiently covered by 2 shamans or other healers the extra cushion room DS provides is not at all a waste. Honestly,

In the end DS is not overwhelming or anything so if CoH makes 1-2 generally difficult fights easier for you; spec that. If you really have shamans in spades and raid/aoe healing is not a concern DS does provide a number of small benefits. I'm personally DS but we have a CoH also. I think at this point in farming if the CoH priest quit I'd go CoH myself, but while he's around you don't really need 2 CoH priests and 2-3 shamans, if that helps you at all.

It sucks being told both are good and viable, but a lot depends on your guild's needs/makeups and the players personal preference.

 

PSGarak

I don't really buy the whole "PS isn't necessary" arguement, because optimizing spec is about making content easier or faster or more reliable, not possible (in fact, making something possible is the same as making it easier to the point where your raid can do it). The entire point is that there are situations where PS makes itself really useful to the raid, not that what it does is so unique it can't be done any other way. By the same token Prot pallies aren't necessary because you can clear content without them, but having one around certainly makes a barrelload of fights much easier because of the advantages they have that other tanks don't, so a lot of guilds bring one along.

With regards to the scaling, it does seem like that's a potential niche for a disc build. If you're way undergeared compared to your raid for whatever reason (gearing an alt, recent respec, etc), it's probably better for you to heal as a disc build instead of a holy build, because your abilities can scale with other people's gear instead of your own if you so choose.

Also regarding PI: it's a discrete ability. Using it every cooldown as soon as it comes up only makes sense if the fight length is such that you can only barely get in the last one. If waiting fifteen seconds for a more opportune moment won't lose you an extra PI you're better off using waiting. If you really do want to look at the asymptotic case (probability of being able to use another one), it's worth wait n% of the cooldown if you can get >n% more damage by doing so. Waiting, say, thirty seconds (1/4 of the cooldown) for it to synch with bloodlust and icon of the silver crescent is worthwhile if the PI target does 25% more damage with those buffs than without. I think that it's direct equivalence in this case, the 3/4<->4/3 (25%<->33%) thing you often see happens twice in opposite ways and cancels itself out unless I'm totally off my rocker.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Vurrin

PSGarak you raise several good points, which can't be disregarded.

For example. Yes PS does make say Fel Rage, or RoS Enrage vastly more manageable, and I'd even go so far as to say if all or even most encounters had a seriously threatening ability of this nature that could be readily countered by PS the viability of the spec would go up dramatically ( not saying I'd spec it but I'd consider it much more seriously). But Unless you swap in a PS spec for RoS/BB and then switch out for a a real healing priest you're hurting yourself in the long run by trading a small advantage in say 25% of the encounters for a rather hefty disadvantage in every other encounter. And I could even argue that in the case of RoS the loss of HPS could make Phase 3 RoS significantly more challenging even after you made phase 1 trivialized, and to further complicate it I'd say yes the loss of healing is more important than say the DPS gained by a well timed PI in phase 3 due to 1 person DPS being a small overall part of the encounter and the threat cap, but without numbers I can't prove that and RoS's short duration and large percentage of time spent heroism'd coupled with the damage boost is as close to ideal for PI as it gets.

hell you might even be able to eke by by PIing yourself at a timely moment to make up the difference in specs for at least 15 seconds.

Also you're absolutely right that there are good and bad times to delay PI and such. But PI has a 3 minute Cooldown ( which causes it to DE-sync from click trinket) and a 30 second delay is closer to 17% of its CD, and we haven't proven or shown any math that trinkets would for example be 20% more dmg to justify waiting 30 seconds ( and not to mention that you'd be waiting 1 minute to properly sync up if the mage/lock was trinketing each CD).

 

ObservingLife

I don't think people see the point of this arguement...ironically, to me it seems very similar to the "better for the raid > better than personal DPS" arguements on DPS class threads.

Looking at a lot of the data across forums and from raiders, most endgame content wipes do not come from lack of healing throughput or the incremental advantage of perfect specs, but from failed execution and/or alignment of multiple bad "luck" events. While the incremental throughput from all the deep holy talents may be the deciding factor, from what i've seen PS will save your ass in those bad "luck" events much more. Bad fears/knockbacks, bad combinations or locations of environemental/area damage, bad pulls even that are generally only salvagable by a shield-wall-esque ability simply because even if HPS in = DPS in, high DPS situations means the gap between spells landing can easily put the tank to 0. No set of talents or incrimental healing upgrades will give you the 66.67% more healing that would be required in that situation, not to mention how much more (if even possible, due to max HP on a tank) you would need to effectively heal a tank to stop death for what a PS would do in an "oh shit" situation. And most situations where PS would be helpful are high damage bosses or bad trash where threat is not an issue, making the 5% threat downside almost a non-issue.

This is not to bash getting every incremental upgrade and talent optimization possible, but if PS saved one wipe a night, and you can still do the content with little if any additional difficulty, you've gained much more by being PS than by upping your +healing (especially a Hyjal wipe which could cost you upwards of 30 minutes). Abstact valuation and screaming "but all the +healing I lose" doesn't mean you can't still do your job well enough.

With 5% stamina in Disc spell warding is much less painful to lose, getting full 5/5 holy specialization is a much less difficult choice. While not amazing for the consistant throughput, it helps a ton if you are tasked to keep Inspiration up on a tank (which when its a warrior or pally is a very significant mitigation increase). You lose the least raid-wise spamming low/mid rank flash to maintain insp as you will have the worst individual healing of anyone in the raid, so this meshes well. PoM, dispelling, maintaining inspiration, and maintaining renews on tanks or handing them out to raid can easily occupy all of your time, mitigating the loss somewhat from losing the deep holy talents.

For single target healing you're fighting the other three classes (druid hots, shammy chain heal on tank, pally spam), arguably the best thing healing priests can bring to the raid is inspiration, PoM, CoH, and probably renew. Not saying GH isn't a very good tool, but it does what many others can do, often more effeciently. Having your IDS priest bringing PS is another very solid tool, and lets the other priest(s) bring CoH and slightly incrementally better GH with 5/5 empowered.

 

• Tauftamir

In most situations where it would be useful in the manner you suggested, it would mean you would have had to anticipate the string of bad luck to some degree in order to react to it before the situation was unrecoverable. I think it's conceivable to argue that if you have anticipated this then the chances you can recover without resorting to Pain Suppression are also high - speaking as a tank, if a Priest can notice I need PS now or I will die, a Paladin could just as easily use a timely on a Lay on Hands, as an example.

The most reasonable use seems to be to prevent or trivialise damage that has been anticipated (to some degree), and Gurtogg's Fel Rage is a great example of this. Unlike the DPS "better for the raid" specs, like Expose Weakness, or Blood Frenzy which are active all the time, there are only a couple of situations named in this thread where PI and PS would trivialise the content. Additionally in the remainder of the content your raid is very much hindered by your lack of healing throughput relative to a Holy spec (unless you out gear it).

 

Anedris

I think my issue with PS saving a wipe from a failed execution or bad luck moment is that usually those kinds of things happen so fast that the tank will already be dead before PS can land or take effect. Usually if you can react in time, you can save the situation, even if you're only reacting with PW:S rather than PS (PS is better, of course, but most of the time you only need to buy a second before more heals land and so on). PS's long cooldown means that you won't be able to use it every time the tank dips a bit, but if you wait too long the tank is going to die anyways (even with PS up the tank is still taking 60% damage, which is a huge reduction but not a complete one). Assuming a boss hits for 6k, PS is saving 2.4k off the next hit while PW:S saves about 2k (depends on +heal obviously). PS of course has the advantage of making the tank almost certain to not die as soon as a solid heal lands, whereas PW:S is just a one hit buffer.

And I would say most wipes do not come from lack of throughput or longevity *because* healers have enough throughput and longevity (and the throughput part of that is a little debatable... if all but one MT healer get incapacitated by an AoE or something the throughput of the remaining healer becomes rather important). I ran a ZA run without a shadow priest or druid and the disc priest we had along had a lot of trouble keeping up towards the ends of many of the encounters.

 

Dagny

We run 2 healing priests per raid. 1 CoH, and I take Imp.DS. When we hit GBB and had a string of bad attempts when one of our 3 mages (QQ@that) got Fel Rage, I specc'd 41/20 and we killed him on our second night of attempts.

While the spec hasn't gimped us yet, and I see that it could be beneficial to hang on to through RoS (we'll find out tonight)... I'm not sure if it will continue to be worth more than throughput on say, a fight like Illidan. I can handle chain potting and working my butt off to keep up with where I was pre-Disc/Holy, but only if PS will have the potential to be useful in the fights to come.

Keep it for fights GBB-Illidan, or pitch it after RoS and never look back?

 

Nobs

I am currently in TK/SSC. I was Imp DS for T4 content and respec'd CoH when ZA came out. I tried Imp DS once or twice in TK/SSC and felt useless so I went CoH.

We have 2 CoH priests and 3 Resto Shamans. Our meters usually show 1 shaman about 5% above the next healer, he is just OP. Then tied for 2nd are the 2 CoH priests and another shaman. CoH is insanly useful on AoE fights. I'm going to try and do a 41/20 spec this week just to see how useful I feel. I honestly feel that another CoH priest is still of more use than an Imp DS priest and for that matter a Disc priest, but I want to exprience first hand before I make a final judgement.

 

Sharcel

I have to disagree with you here. Luck is only bad when you can't recover from it, and chalking wipes to it is like blaming a car for hitting you when you should have jumped out of the way instead of standing frozen in its path. The top guilds of the world face the same randomness in encounters that the rest of us do, but they wipe less and outperform the rest of us. And it's not because they have better gear, because that would not explain why a handful of guilds consistently get world-first kills. It's because their players are better at reacting and revising to changing conditions. Talents like Pain Suppression, Lightwell, and Shield Wall are useful, there is no doubt about it, but they only do so under stressful circumstances where the raid needs time to readjust itself. You are absolutely right when you say that PS is a godsend when random circumstances causes extra burst damage that the healers are not prepared for. But when your players are good enough to adjust to it and are in fact prepared for it PS is superfluous and a waste of a talent point. All it does is make the healers soft and less responsive.

Ultimately, talent points cannot compete with talented individuals, and that is the real issue here. Do you admit to yourself that your raid needs the extra crutch to get through encounters, or do you work through it and perhaps come out a bit more skilled than you were when you went in?

 

Havoc12

- Mental Strength


Lets assume that you manage to fill your mana bar once in a long fight. That means you get 20% of your mana with mental strength. With a benchmark of 10k mana this is 2k mana.

It can be more than that, if someone procs a trinket and uses a cooldown (e.g. icy veins) when they get PI. Lets call it 2.2%

- Reflective Shield
PW:S is very mana inefficient, so constant usage is not viable. Over your average 8 minute fight, you can't really expect more than 10k damage blocked from PW:S. That means 5k damage from RFS or about 10 DPS.

- Enlightenment
5% spi is counteracted by SoR. I presume that 5% mana stacks with mental strength resulting in 15.5% more mana. with the same assumptions as mental stregth this means a total 3100 mana.

- Healing Prayers
PoH and PoM are on average 5-10% of my mana consumption. 20% reduced mana cost is 25% better mana efficiency here equates to 1.25-2.5% overal mana efficiency. Lets call it 1.7%


- Spiritual Guidance
7.5% more +healing and nearly 20% more + damage. The +damage component is significant due to shadowfiend. Better return from shadowfiend. I think for a good estimate I would take +150 damage/healing. For gheal specifically this is just about a 3% mana efficiency. For prayer of mending its about 3.7%. For renew its 5% better man efficiency. Lets call it an overal 3% as a good estimate. I Do not know how much more mana the fiend will return from the increased +damage. Lets just assume its 5%. On average fiend returns to me 4k damage, so that is an extra 200 mana.

- Spiritual Healing
Increases amount healed by 2% per point up to 5 points. That is a 10% improved mana efficiency.

- Lightwell
Lightwell due to thelong cooldown and the nature of the heal ends up saving you less mana than inner focus. Any point spent in any other holy talent gives you more bang for your buck than lightwell.

Even just 6% of your casts being free equates immediately to a 6.3% increase in the mana efficiency of flash heal and gheal. In actuality clearcasting is an exeptionally powerfull mana regeneration mechanism for healers. I made another post about it [Priest] Holy Raiding Compendium (2.3.x)

By my reckoning clearcasting equates to an overal 6% increase in mana efficiency in addition to an extra 5mp5. Over an 8 minute fight that 5mp5 returns 480 mana.

- Empowered Healing
12% more bonus heal on gheal with 2k bonus healing is 240more +heal. Overal this is another 5% increase in the mana efficiency of gheal and another 3% or so increase in overal mana efficiency.

Lets tally everything:

Discipline gets: 2.2% increase in DPS for one person in the raid (or 22DPS for someone with 1000DPS). 10 or so DPS from reflective shield. 3100 more mana on long fights (a generous estimate) and maybe 500 more HP. They also get Pain suppression.

Holy gets: 1.7% better mana efficiency from healing prayers, 3% from spiritual guidance, 10% from spiritual healing, 6% from holy concentration and another 3% from empowered healing. That is about 20% better mana efficiency. Also gets something like 680 mana over the course of a long fight. Bear in mind that this is a very conservative estimate and its probably underestimated. You also have nearly 400+healing added to gheal from spiritual guidance and empowered healing and on top of that you get a stacking 10% bonus to all healing. So holy has in addition 16% higher HP/sec on the main heal.




Every buff is usefull and wanted. The real question is what do we lose to get it.

Personally I think that having a healer which is underperforming, by the above margin usually means you have to bring an extra healer. If you are running a raid with the minimum possible number of healers, then having one person that is underperforming is unacceptable. Hence often the choice of bring a discipline priest along will result, in bring an extra healer or an extra DPS. I cannot see the utility the disc priest brings outweighing the value of one more DPS.

 

Dagny

Spec vs. spec, there's no arguing that Disc is very lackluster in comparison to Holy. What do you lose to get it? A lot. Personal healing numbers, and some longevity go down the tubes to be sure.

However, I think that rather than a broad "No" on the spec, each healer would do well to evaluate their own core of healers, and determine whether on the whole you'd gain more than you would lose, if it would be a wash, or if you would be losing a lot.

I believe the spec is very viable in a situation where you're learning something new (say GBB and beyond, in BT) and you'd like a buffer for "ohemmgee that's not the kind of damage we were prepared for" moments. It tends to be like a shield on targets with MS, it's a heal you can give at the moment the person you need to heal needs it.

If you can pull that spec into the team, without having to sub in another healer to cover the loss, which you shouldn't if the spec is played correctly imo, then it can be very beneficial. I hate the spec on farm content tbh. But, unlike most "situational" abilities, there is actually a lot of use for PS in end-game if you can justify the loss of everything else... which will vary greatly from one guild to the next.