Sundai

(I tried to trim down the quote, there seemed to be a bit of assuming based on the critically wrong statements.)

Just about everything you said about Divine Aegis was wrong.
1) Aegis procs when you Crit the target with a spell, It has nothing to do with overheals.
2) As per my first point, a 7500 heal will not proc a 3375 shield unless that was a 7500 crit heal.
3) Divine Aegis shield procs will not overwrite one another, they both refresh the duration as well as adding the newest value to what was already on the target.

Smaller heals work better for DA for one reason, you have more chances to proc a shield to refresh it's duration. If you proc a DA shield with a Crit, you then have 12 seconds to proc another one to refresh it's duration. If you spent that time casting gheal, you'll have 4 (4x2.5=10) casts that could refresh the duration if you crit and it hasn't been eaten by damage. Flash Heal will get you 7 (8x1.5=12, round down to 7 casts accounting for lag) casts to crit. If you do a 6 flash heal 1 penance rotation, you'll Have 6 + 3(penance) = 9 chances to crit and proc a shield to keep that one you have up going.

 

gia

Divine Aegis does not work like that, the shields are supposed to stack and keep adding up if you proc multiple of them, there is no drawback when using small heals, the are actually better because they increase the chance of refreshing the stack so that it doesn't drop off if the target takes no damage. The cooldown on Penance is 10s and 8s when talented not 12s. Penance also has the added benefit of having multiple chances to proc inspiration and, whenever it becomes decent again, to instantly get a full stack of grace up.

Also the best thing about Divine Aegis isn't the shield, although it is very nice no doubt, it's that you get a good amount of mana back from it through rapture which works almost like illumination for paladins by giving mana back on crits. This turns critical strike rating into something like a regen stat.

Penance is great because it changes your healing style, in many encounters it gives you the chance to do other things besides mt healing because you can do a lot of spot heals and when the tank takes damage you can instantly stabilize his health with PW:S->Penance. Without it you can't do that because if you aren't precasting GH it's a much bigger gamble. You can also do the opposite sequence, chain GH the tank and if someone else gets low you Penance and then PW:S on tank and get back to healing him. The speed of Penance (and a buffed PW:S) combined with the 5% haste you get from Enlightenment really helps healing reactively and getting more actions done in a shorter time span, maybe players that are less twitchy won't be able to fully take advantage of it but I really enjoy it.

A bit of incoherent rambling but I hope some of my points are clear.

 

The Not So Evil

Have you actually tested this on the PTR/Beta yourself? Can you post a link to someone who has actually done the testing? I would have done this myself if the European Character PTR wasnt lagged by 5 days.

I see a potential problem if this is true. Stacking of Divine Aegis because it keeps on adding to itself could be borderline abuse. Gotta test this.

 

Sundai

I have tested out Disc healing on Beta. My point number two (one actually just that each point was to each of his paragraphs) is confirmed by the Talent itself:

Critical heals create a protective shield on the target, absorbing 30% of the amount healed. Lasts 12 sec.

My point three was either stated (a while ago) by a blue poster as going to be implemented or is implemented and was explained. Explicit testing of Divine aegis procs I didn't bother testing, and would be hard to test whether they do add together as intended.



Edit: Thanks to Poster below me for finding that, was just looking for it.

 

gia

 

cruumash

Lets not throw out the baby with the bath water. While Spirit of Redemption may not save you in many raids, it will save your group in many 5 mans and we will all need to be in 5mans. Not every talent need be useful in every situation nor need every talent have an end game usefulness.

 

Mideci

Even a significant nerf to Flourish isn't going to "fix" the imbalance. It's simply a hugely better spell than Circle of Healing at this point. If that's the intent, then it's working as intended. Someone can sit there and math it out but on a fight like, say, Najentus, you'd CoH 4 or 5 times and you'll Flourish once. It's just not even in the universe of comparable. Because CoH is global cooldown limited, the best you can do is get it cast twice in 1.5+ secs, 3x in 3.0+, or 4x in 4.5+ (slightly reduced by haste). You need to compare the throughput of Flourish over those windows but also consider the druid is not sitting around. After Flourish is cast they are off doing other things. Among them, rejuv + swiftmend... NS + healing touch... lifebloom stack renewing.. etc.. Yes, they all cost mana, but so does max rank CoH spamming.

 

Ellyh

And in the 10 seconds that it takes for that healing to occur to 5 players the priest could have applied a moderate ammount of heal to any 30 (36 with the glyph) players who are lowest on hp at any given moment. So you are not comparing apples with apples. Even for druids 32% base mana is prohibative to spam. The heal over time model also works against CoH type spam.

 

Paracelsus

1) I was unclear. Healers have traditionally been resistant to critical heals because the crit portion is unreliable. What Divine Aegis does is take that crit portion (which would normally be an overheal anyway) and turn it into a shield, preserving what would have been overhealing.
2) Again, I had expected you to follow the logic. If your greater heal heals for 7500 points of damage, then a critical heal will be 1.5 times that or an 11250 heal. The crit heal then has 30% applied as an Aegis, or 3375.
3) This is new information and doesn't reflect what was being seen. It bears testing. Should be able to do this by chain casting on a target and then hitting it and watching the combat log.

Both posters made this argument - is this really any kind of legitimate real world experience? I mean, think about what you're talking about here. You have a target - probably a main tank. This target isn't taking any damage and so the Aegis isn't coming down, but you're chain casting on a target with full health to keep the shield up? That seems ... surprising. If you're seeing large windows of time where your tank isn't taking any damage there's got to be better things to do than spam the heck out of him with flash heals. I think it would be far more relevant to ensure that you're keeping Grace up than an Aegis shield.

I was thinking it started after the end of the cast but I think I'm wrong on that.

Not anymore, unfortunately. Aegis just returns the same mana as the heal did now. The main benefit of Aegis is now just the shield.

Please note: the Penance build and the gheal/Aegis build are remarkably similar. If you get Penance, you are most likely going to be trying to also pick up Improve Healing. This means that the builds are effectively identical until you get 45 points into Disc and 18 points into Holy. The real question is what happens next. With Penance, you will probably get Renewed Hope, Aspiriation, and Penance giving you two points left over to pick up toys or improve your shield a little bit. If you throw it over into holy, you get finish out imp. renew, waste a point somewhere, pick up SoR (meaning 5% spirit and the ability to abuse the SoR glyph which is currently looking too powerful to last to live), add 4 points of Spritual Guidance and 2% multiplicative healing increase. It doesn't sound like much, but the healing bonuses synergize across the board meaning bigger heals, more mana returned from Rapture, and bigger shields. Does this justify the loss of a cheap front loaded 5k heal every 10s? I think that depends on what your opinion of cancel casting is.

 

Zorath

I guess the 25 man naxx tests will show us how much better flourish is. Though i still cant see how CoH can stand a chance against flourish, im sorry but i just dont see it.

In the 10 seconds that it takes for that healing to occur to 5 players, a CoH spamming priest HAS to spam CoH 5 times to apply the same amount of healing. thats 1 GCD (actually prolly 1.35 sec, due to gift of the earthmother, not sure that one applies to flourish though) compared to 5. thats 32% base mana compared to 21% times 5 = 105% base mana. Making us spend 5 times more time casting and using 3 times as much mana. And since its takes us 5 times more time casting, druids can cast 4 others HOTs or nourish/regrowths in the meantime. Im really hoping im just missing the big picture here.

Also Flourish is frontloaded and has just the same smart mech as CoH (which btw is totally broken still). so if they say do 1 flourish in a fight that has heavy raid dmg, chances are very good that the next flourish they do effect 5 other people.

If im in some way wrong in my statments, i wont be at all offended if you point them out to me. I will be happy and dancing, cause at this moment flourish and well the state of the holy tree is making me a very sad puppy.

 

Mideci

Zorath, you aren't wrong. People look at "32% base mana" and say "see" and then ignore that CoH is nearly as expensive (1/3 cheaper). Then they fail to grasp that the druid will be able to cast 4 different spells. They fail to grasp that the front loading of flourish is nearly as powerful as the first CoH cast. They fail to grasp -- as you did -- that one flourish is indeed 5 CoH-es worth of healing in a very tolerable time window because most of those burst-y AoE damage effects are not on ridiculously short cooldowns. And the few that are (the flame thing in Illidan Phase 2 for example that hits the group from the sky and requires a lot of burst-y group healing) will still often be well handled by Flourish as opposed to the priest constantly sitting there spamming CoH.

I mean, sure, is still a decent spell for what it can do. But Flourish will almost always be better. It heals more. It heals nearly as quickly if the total amount of the flourish is required (and really, how often are we CoHing when the damage is slight and in those cases are we really thinking "my goodness, CoH is powerful, it's letting me top up this tiny amount of damage!). It allows the druid to heal an entire raid in the same time the priest can heal just 5 people. It's heal per mana is a fraction of CoH. Etc. etc.

If somehow Ellyh, you think it's interesting to heal 30 people for a little vs. healing 25 people for much more more well, so be it. But no matter how the druid uses the next 4 GCDs they can outdo the priest. Either on raid-wide or on utility.

 

Sarjin

The only situation in which I see CoH might be more powerful would be a situation where you have to get to people fast with small amount of heals to keep them up before some other mechanic with smaller raid wide damage kills them off, where a Druid might fail due to having 5 targets being healed each 10 seconds. Given that a priest will need 6 seconds (minus haste) to apply healing to all raids (if smart targetting works exactly that way) before that other skill would be allowed to hit while still allowing for survival, this seems an awfully gimmicky way of making it worthwile. I guess in raid topping situations CoH might still be a bit better since Flourish is overkill. Overall, comparing the two however seems a bit depressing.

 

Hegen

An experienced druid already can reach and outdo a CoH spamming priest, provided that he has enough targets. Witness tank healing druids in MH during trash.

Flourish as such is the wrong direction - it strengthens the druid in a way that has to be overpowered unless it s nerfed so far that it's useless. Or on a very long cooldown making it just an emergency feature.

As for CoH - it's still strong, however at 70, on PTR it feels nerfed to me due to being more expensive. It heals a bit more (around 1050 unbuffed for my priest as opposed to 980 on live). However, we can no longer realistically skill Mental Agility since we urgently need Serendipity and Holy Concentration. In addition, the base cost has been increased, making CoH around 25% more expensive in total. At 80, this may be different.

 

gia

5k heal? Based on what? You mentioned 7500 GH in another post so I have to assume you think Penance heals less than GH?

Here are some very quick numbers, averaged over 30 casts of each, with 1722 spellpower at level 80.

Penance: 2497x3=7491 for 525 mana in 2 seconds.
Greater Heal: 7021 for 1050 mana in 2.5 seconds.

According to some Rapture tests I did a couple days ago (with a mana pool of 17863) I would get 293 mana back from Penance assuming no crits and no overheal, this brings the mana cost down to 232. Greater Heal would give me 275 mana thus costing me 775 mana.

Penance: 32.3 hp/m and 3745.5 hp/s (front loaded)
Greater Heal: 9.1 hp/m and 2808.4 hp/s

 

Havoc12

fh, gh, penance and PWS are the main heals of disc and more than 1 point in grace is a waste. Paracelsus build may have 2 points in grace but he does not have penance, which pretty much means I can stack grace faster even with 50% chance. There is no difference in the spell selections between my build and a disc holy build. You will use essentially the same play style, xpt you will use PWS in the place of renew, which is good because PWS with all the disc talents is better than renew. There are no other limitations. Deep disc was vastly superior to disc/holy before this nerf. After this nerf the two builds are comparable but deep disc still wins.

I dont see how you see penance having such a high requirement. All the talents you use with penance also synergise with gheal and most of them with fheal, so your assertion that it takes 69 out of 71 points is wrong.

You can have BOTH a great penance AND a super PWS.

Aegis, PWS, penance and rapture are ALL the stars of disc. PWS fully talented at max rank and 2k spell power is over 5k and will return a significant amount of mana, also it takes a very small amount of your casting time due to borrowed time. Renewed hope also gives you a pretty much permanent 4% crit.

Aegis with gheal provides pretty much the same absorption per second as PWS.

Also you dont understand how aegis works. All spells that proc aegis work well with it and aegis in no way conflicts with PWS. Your build provides less synergy for aegis than renewed hope and penance. To maximise both the return from aegis and your effective HPS (including absorption on tank) you need to both keep PWS up and heal with penance/gheal.


Your last paragraph is a complete mystery to me. You have no justification for what you are saying. Not taking penance results in an extremely minor improvement in gheal. You get like 100-150 more spell power and 2% more healing but you lose PWS and 4% crit. The overeall difference is something like 1% more healing but, when you count divine aegis its actually a minor loss(!!).

So no decision is necessary. Disc has every reason to stack more int than spirit as int both increases mana pool and maximises regen, so divine guidance and SoR are really not great talents for disc. 1 point in spiritual healing and improved renew do not cut the mustard compared to renewed hope, penance and 5k PWS with reduced gcd.

Thus you can both have your supershield, gheal (with all essential improvements) and penance and use them all together. In fact you NEED to use them together because PWS is once every 15 seconds and you no longer have an incentive to keep more than 2 PWS up and penance has an 8-second cooldown. Thus under most circumstances you are looking at a 2PWS:3penance:8gheal to 4PWS:3penance:7 gheal ratio.

Notice how you have all the time in the world to use all your spells and each of them synergises well with the discipline talents. It also means you can stack more int, which gives you a better return than spirit.

Sorry but I think your argument comes mostly from misunderstanding some of the key synergies of the disc tree.

- Spirit is much worse for disc priests than int due to the 15% modifier and rapture/replenishment working of max mana.
- Divine aegis is not the only star of the disc tree. And maximising return from aegis does not preclude you from getting penance or improving PWS and renewed hope/borrowed time improve the return from aegis more than spending the equivalent points in the holy tree
- Renewed hope is better for disc priests point for point than SoR, Div Guidance or Spi Healing.
- You have not run the numbers on penance and PWS properly.

 

koetjeka

Hey guys, I'm leveling my own priest for WotLk and I had an idea to make the disc tree a bit more appealing for priests.

As I understood, PW:S is bad for the threat of a tank. We have a talent called Reflective Shield in the disc tree, it causes no threat. Wouldn't it be nice to let it generate threat for the tank? So the disadvantage of the shield is gone?

 

Liriel

Shield may be hurt the tank with his thread if he does not get enough rage (or mana) for holding up his tanking-rotation. That is only the case if he cannot generate the rage needed with his own hits and gets not hurt enough for everything else. With WotLK tanks should do much more dmg - so they should generate much more rage while doing so. I dont know if that alone will be enough for holding up a good rotation - especialy in the case of the paladin. But most bosses should hurt the tank enough to give him more rage - even if you use normal shields. I'm not sure what it does if a disc-priest holds up big shields all the time. But I think that should be on an equal route as avoidance tanks go at the moment.

The thing is that blizz has not finished the numbers for all that so you cannot really tell if a shields hurts or helps them more thread-wise.

 

Thorongil

The point is that this does hardly apply if you use your shield intelligently.

Not even considering the buffed damage (and thus buffed tank-inherent threat generation) there is either the case where a tank gets hit heavily (in this case the loss in rage won´t matter since a tank won´t be rage starved when being hit hard) or the case where incoming damage is low (in this case you do not have to shield since you are able to simply outheal the damage). Personally I think it wouldn´t really matter if the shield´s damage did generate threat since you will not specc Reflective Shield in a disc-PvE-specc at all. The talent is purely PvP-focused and threat does not matter in this environment.

 

Shan

I did a run yesterday as disc on Coldarra, with a T6 geared pala tank. I wanted to see how badly the shields affected his mana generation, and the tank went oom after 2 pullsat which point I was asked to stop casting that divine aegis spell.

Granted, this was a worst case scenario (me actively trying to prevent as much damage as possible) and him overgearing the instance heavily, but I was still surprised that I could completely shut off his mana generation on all but the harder pulls and bosses.

Luckily he had Blessing of Sanctuary which solved his mana issues completely.

After this experience I find it hard to believe that mana/rage starvation won't be an issue in some way. Perhaps not in 25 mans, but it will definitely start affecting tanks when they start overgearing 5 man instances, maybe even when they just do them in appropriate gear.

Also some observations on disc mechanics

- Divine Aegis is based off raw healing (will proc even when people are at full health)
- Rapture mana gain is 2.5% in total for each of your shields, regardless of how many hits it takes to break the shield. At least that's how it seemed to work. I was definitely not getting 2.5% mana from each absorbed hit on the tank.

Disc seems to have a lot of potential but is far too bloated in my opinion.

 

Paracelsus

Oh my - OK I see what I was doing. I was only pulling out two ticks from the combat log I was working from. /facepalm Yea, that makes it a bigger heal.

Even with the glyph? The renew glyph is amazing. Sure your shield is now 5k, but renew ticks for 1500 per tick and the scaling is crazy here. It'll be up to 70% of your SP for the shield and renew is getting right around that same value per tick with the glyph. That said - I suspect I'll agree with you when the nerf bat lands.

I suspect you're right here, although with 10 talents increasing instacasts there's a part of me that wants to see a PW:S/Penance/ProM/Renew/Gheal cycle. If you don't have both grace points, though, you are probably going to be having grace fall off since that adds two more spells into the rotation that won't proc it (and unfortunately they can't crit either). Between shield, Aegis, and ProM, the other healers start to really believe the tank isn't taking any significant amounts of damage, which is pretty amusing.