Ellyh

My take on a L70 raiding spec for T6/early sunwell.

Healing focus is a waste of points. You want to get 5/5 crit to help make up for the lack of procs on Holy Concentration/Imp holy conc. Divine providence is nice to have but hardly key and test of faith is of limited utility for a raid healer even with smart targeting (please let it be non retarded). Don't underrate desperate prayer It saved my ass countless times and will still be good even with a mana cost, the cooldown has also dropped from 10 mins to 2. Silent resolve is the "Least bad" option of T2 disc until we get spellpower on inner fire which is at 71.

 

Minko

Then what is the hype about SoL? Even with the free FoL (it being instant is a bit of a red herring as it still costs a GCD), the fact that it can't crit hurts your HPS in the long run. It is the same concept as using SoL in a Holy DPS build. After a certain amount of crit, the gain you could potentially net as a result of a Smite criting would be greater than the instant cast smite, thus hurting DPS. The same concept is also applied to FoL, the potential heal you could output as a result of the FoL criting would be greater than that of the free FoL.

The only difference is that the SoL proc can't get any effect from Serendipity. So you are left with a FoL that cannot proc Inspiration, gets no effect from Serendipity, hurts your HPS, but costs 0 mana. I believe the potential gain you could receive from a FoL critting outweighs the fact that the FoL is free.

So, what is with the hype over SoL? To me it still is a wasted talent. Am I missing something major?

 

François

In a Holy dps build, SoL hurts dps only if you have more than 66% crit, ie it never hurts with existing gear. That's because even if uncrittable, the free smite is hasted from 2s to a GCD.

For Flash Heal (I suppose that's what you call FoL, even if priest is not paladin), SoL is a HPS decrease, true, but it is still an incredible HPM gain, and it gets effect with heavy usage of PoM, CoH, PoH, when Serendipity and HC/IHC don't.

 

uh...ok

Ah, I didn't see the change to Conc Aura. But I'm still not convinced that a 35% reduction of pushback duration is going to render Healing Focus useless. So instead of a 0.5s pushback you get a 0.325s pushback. Think about how much haste it takes to reduce 0.3s from your GHeal - or worse yet, from your Flash Heal. And besides, if the effects of Healing Focus and Conc Aura are additive like they were pre-3.0, having both means you're immune to pushback 100% of the time, just like you would have been previously.

Edit: Although if someone does pick up 3/3 Imp Conc Aura, which a Holy Paladin probably should, I can agree that spending only 1 point in HF would be sufficient, since that would offer you 85% pushback reduction. 15% of a single pushback is a mere 0.075s, which is barely noticeable.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had people die on me during KJ learning because of pushback delaying a flash or a max rank GH from arriving on time. To quote a fellow resto shaman about KJ and pushback: "Pushback screws me over when I need to have quick casts the most." On M'uru, the pushback could be deadly if you're trying to play catchup on the Sent tank after an unlucky avoidance string, or if you're even just healing one of the adds tanks and they get hit with multiple flurries.

As for every other Sunwell fight, I think it goes without saying that the frequency of pushback from Novas on Twins is non-trivial, as are the Meteor Slashes on Brutallus and Arcane Explosions on Kalecgos.

I only mentioned Bloodboil because it's the only fight where the changes to pushback mechanics actually matters, i.e. if you get Fel Raged and Bloodboil is hitting you quickly while you're trying to get that GH7 off on yourself. But to name a few other BT fights where pushback matters: Shahraz if you need to get that Binding Heal off while other FA'd people are moving away from you (or running past you), RoS P3, Gorefiend shadowbolts (if you're tank healing), and even Naj'entus.

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Didn't know about the Inner Fire being past 70. If so, then I suppose you really don't have any choice but to take 3/3 SR. Kinda sucks to lose PWS in this case, but it's only level 70. It doesn't really matter to me how small Desperate Prayer is - it's saved my skin plenty of times during a lot of raids, even with a 10 minute cooldown. Though the mana cost is a bit offputting, I doubt that makes a big enough difference to stop me from using it.

Spiritual Guidance at 70 isn't by any means "amazing" compared to one more spell in your arsenal that could prove to have a lot of utility in practically every fight in the game. There are plenty of opportunities outside of "the heat of battle" where Lightwell could be useful. To be honest, the spell has been so hyped up by the beta testers that this is one of the few things I'm really looking forward to trying in 3.0.

As for the pushback changes... you clearly missed my post about how the spell pushback changes has no effect on PvE whatsoever.

 

Havoc12

I am afraid you have completely failed to grasp the concept. "1.4*6+2.8*2 = 14s" WITH my 100 haste. But 1 PoM is cast a head of time, 1 PoH only takes 2 seconds because of precast and the last instant delivers its healing before the GCD, so 5 instants only take 5 GCDs

I do not use WWS I use recount, which is better.

Your point is missing the fact that instants are front loaded and that if you keep spamming PoH on one group, you will lose all your crits to overheal, while the other healer will simply struggle to keep his group up if he does not have AoE heals. You are also missing the points that you don't want to heal groups to full since (a) that means losing healing to overheal (b) you have a second healer there. Healing both groups to 90% is preferable to healing one group to full and helping out with the other group after the second healer and PoM have healed it no uniformly.

Because n instants take n-1 GCDs its best to precast channeled casts and fill as much of the remaining time as possible with instants to ensure maximum delivery of spells into a short window of opportunity.

Exactly, SoL is the equivalent of the automatic car. The mana return you get from SoL requires that you adopt a less efficient healing style and hold yourself back.

Think of it like this:

You have 3 targets each 3k down. You can either use an SoL proc and 2flash heals or 2 CoHs. In the first instance you get 470 mana retun from SoL which, but you also spend 940 mana healing the rest of the damage. If you use 2x CoH you supply the same amount of healing to those 3 targets in less time AND spend roughly the same amount of mana.

There is nothing incredible about the HPM gain from SoL. Most of it just ends up increasing your overheal when you are spamming AoE heals. Just because you see the proc and you fire free flashes it does not necessarily mean you are actually getting a large benefit. If the talent forces you to screw up effective healing sequences, its not worth the talent points.

Either you are going to do less healing or you are going to lose most of the benefit of SoL. That is why I am extremely unimpressed by the talent. Perhaps at 80 due to the altered relationship between our various spells and the differences in encounter design, might mean that SoL fares better. It remains to be seen.

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Healing focus will still be useful, but the problem is how useful. Limiting max pushback to 0.3 seconds or 0.15 seconds per hit, is really great, but not as good as no pushback in 70% of cases. Even 0.15 second pushback is enough to kill someone or to increase the cast time enough to get a second hit before the heal finishes. Also with the old system you could get a lot of pushback if you are hit frequently. Its not unusual to get delays that are longer then the cast time if you get take frequent damage (e.g. trash mobs with AoE attacks) without any pushback protection, but the new system puts a cap on pushback anyway.

Overall the value of healing focus is reduced quite a lot due to the new system, especially if you have access to conc aura, at the same time the value of crit is greatly increased. Thus 2 points in divine spec, which were a waste before now offer you a tangible advantage. Unless there are cases where 100% pushback resist is required (which with the new pushback system is unlikely) healing focus becomes less useful than divine specialisation.

You can potentially scrounge points from divine reach to get 2/2 healing focus, but healing focus just won't have the value it had before.

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Dont agree with this. I have never felt pressed for time on akil'zon in literally dozens of kills. The only fast heal I ever felt compelled to use there is binding heal.

There are fights where Flash is important but not this one. I would say archimonde is the best example of a fight where flash heal is a really important spell.

 

The Not So Evil

My Priest model for Rawr is now mostly complete, those of you who wishes to test it can find Rawr 2.0 here.

 

Incoherence

The assumption here is that all of the AoE damage taken is even between players. If it is uneven (any fight with elemental damage, any fight with RST abilities, even people with various levels of +spell damage or -spell damage talents or tapping warlocks), then you might have two players who are 2k down and a third player who's 3k or 4k down. In that case, you cast CoH once, you probably get a crit on someone, and you use the SoL on the player who's farther down. There's not even an option of casting CoH twice, because you'll be wasting it on the first two players. You could use Flash Heal itself, but now you really are saving mana (and frontloading the healing slightly more than casting Flash Heal, which might be useful on something like Naj'entus).

As a slightly extreme example, suppose that you have 9 people in your ZA raid who have BT shadow resistance, and one who does not. That one is going to take quite a bit more damage than the other nine. It makes no sense to cast CoH enough times to fill that person up, because you'll be wasting several casts. But using SoL allows you to make up the difference, something you'd have to do anyway, while saving mana.

 

Shylena

I am going to have to agree with your reasoning, My own present build is centered on CoH being a main heal, and I see Holy after the patch as even more of an AoE healing spec. What with Discipline being more of a single target healer, I want to change my spec with the free respec to even more of an AoE focused healing one, and so this is a build I am looking at for myself at 70:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...00000000000000

I could do w/o Inspiration I think until I hit WoTLK and started encountering higher mobs in light of our tanks' already high armor, ancestrial fortitude and the fact I expect to be even more of a raid healer, but I have to put those points somewhere. Renew is a possibility, but in the time before WoTLK I expect one or more Discipline priests in the raids to cover that. Once WoTLK goes live and I am doing 5 mans again, I might prefer the Renew to Inspiration at 70, and then add it back in as I level.

 

Havoc12

PoM and chain heal increase healing uniformity and now raid targeting CoH does the same thing. There is a good reason why on aoe heavy fights, little flash heal is cast. It heals mostly damage that would be healed anyway. Inteleaving lots of flash heals into your pattern in any of the level 70 aoe heavy fights is simply not worth it and thus the benefit you can get from SoL is mostly imaginary. Not using the procs would make a minor difference to your longevity and you will heal more in most fights. That is my experience from SoL in practice. I got lots of procs, but I simply found no real use for most of them. Actively trying to use as many procs as possible, simply did not give me any advantage at all, I simply healed less efficiently and lost HPS.

 

Crow

@Cookie cutter builds & Healing Focus - Apparently it will be possible to skip Healing Focus now. Still I would consider this rather a modification of a standard, lvl 70 'cookie cutter' rather than the base. Once you are ready to experiment a bit with your talents, know encounters well and got a good enough feeling of your char to not need cookie cutter builds you could swap the points for something else.

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I wonder if it is really worth it to already put 5 points in Holy Specialization. I guess it is not for IHC (Using 5 points to get a 2.25% proc chance increase so maybe 1 more IHC during a fight). It is also not for throughput (since we never aggressively aimed for it for that reason). You want it for better returns from Serendipity than? Or you simply feel there is not better place to put the points? Or all the reasons above combined make it good enough to sacrifice HF, Imp renew, Desperate Prayers, Holy reach, maybe new Lightwell or whatever you always used to take in that place?

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For the month of lvl 70 raiding I would actually love to drop HC at all. Too bad there is nothing good enough to put that points in. Maybe Holy Concentration if you didn't take it in first place...

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I also wonder if no of the forum veterans considers skipping IHC and 3 points in emp healing (the latter sucks, but than again those of us who raided as IDS are used to it...) to get MA on level 70? Constantius seemed to advocate strongly for this talent. Wouldn't you consider taking it before wotlk?

 

Liriel

I think there are more than one reason for Holy Specialization. My preferred one is Inspiration. Well we are working on Brutallus but it is a good thing to have everywhere. If I can get some serendepity-proccs over that, I will not complain. Above that I realy dont know where to put the points in the first tier anyway and HS looks like a good place for it.

I "sacrifice" DP and HF for it and something out of Imp Renew. The reasoning behind that I posted above. I'm not sure if I should take Holy Reach over Imp. renew. I have it at the moment but I'm not sure if there are many encounters where I use it since most people are either standing in one spot anyway or spread as wide as possible so in both cases 3 yards more rang seldom make a difference.

Lightwell is another case. I'm not convinced that is it such a good spell to begin with. But even if it would be great I dont think that the first week(s) with new spells and trees for every raidmember is a good the time to teach everybody to use a golden something they learned to hate a year ago. If it is as great as many players say I will take it later on but not just now.

I thought about droping HC, too. But than I have to put points somewhere and there is nothing else that at least gives me a good chance to enter oofsr. I cannot see SoL helping me there as much as HC does. Even if it is not as good as I'm used to. (Or better phrased: even if it is worse than the low amount of proccs I'm used to.)

The thing with going MA is a hotly discussed issue here. To be honest I realy dont know how manareg will be on lvl 70 raiding content. If I see that I need MA to be able to do anything I will take it.

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To the discussion about usebility of CoH: The important thing is that it now is not groupwide but has an intelligent targeting function. So If everybody stands close together CoH will target the 5(6) persons with lowest health anyway. So if they start with uneven healthbars that is not a bad thing. It now synergizes with CH and PoM much nicer than it was used to do. So if you start with PoM precasting and a precasted PoH and the Shaman uses CH in most situations there will be uneven healthbars but CoH will pick the 5 lowest from both groups and fills them. And if there are not 3 targets who have low enough healthbars for CoH you would not concider to use the spell in the first place anyway.

 

Hegen

The shield suggestion is a good one, though with the exception of doing it once before the spirit bolts, you lose a Gcd, thus nullifying the HpS advantage of PoH. The range advantage remains, though. Overall, I'd probably go with CoH in that case (though maybe no longer, the patch notes say the 6s cooldown is back).

Regarding desperate prayer: whenever you want it instant and need to heal yourself for more than a CoH. In Zul'Aman, totems can be pretty lethal if you get stunned. You want to be back beyond 6k asap. Akil'zon, too, if you get thrown into the air. You can try to avoid fall damage using a feather, but you get a static discharge, breaking levitation. Then you have fall damage + static discharge damage. Now if you get just one peck by a bird, you're dead, making Desperate prayer pretty attractive while still being in the air. Same with Archimonde.

In my experience, it's best used if you have an emergency macros that invokes shield, health stones, and desperate prayer as a sequence. If it's not quick enough for me to use and I don't use it enough, I waste the potential of it being instant.

"The description is so unclear that no meaningful opinion could be formed."

 

Thorongil

Since a fair amount of number crunching has been going on the last few pages I´m going to hand over some experience from playing in the beta as Disc (haven´t really seen anyone doing so up to now):

Current Specc: 54/17/0

A few comments:
The crucial point in which many might tend to specc another direction is most definitely Renewed Hope. I do not specc it for some reasons.
I really feel very comfortable with 8-second-penance. It´s the defining spell of my healing style and I use it heavily. It´s highly efficient, the throughput is great, it has utility. Taking 2 seconds off its cooldown gives me a better feeling of being able to counter critical situations than I have with 4 additional percents of crit after a shield. Basically, the point is that I will cast a GH in about 1,8 seconds after shielding, if that´s not enough to save the person I would not like to rely on a further 4 % chance, I´d rather be able to toss a quick Penance.

Furthermore, many might also question those 2 points in impRenew and impHealing. To break it down, those are due to lacking gear. I feel not totally comfortable withouth impHealing, to go down so deep I need two more points in Holy which is were the Renew points come from (on a note, I use Renew quite a lot). Once I´m properly geared I plan to spend no more than 13 points in Holy and put the remaining 4 in Renewed Hope, Focused Power and maybe Absolution.

Lastly, there´s no real sense in impDS in my opinion. Shamans have the stronger buff, and even if I don´t have one around, 80 Spellpower is hardly enough to take it when I´m already short of points deep in the tree.


Let´s get to more interesting stuff (read 'raiding'), though. So far I´ve done a ton of heroics, Naxxramas, Osidian Sanctum and Malygos (all in 10-man setup, with varying groups). I started with premade gear, which is not as bad as PvP-Gear would be on lvl70 (since there are Spirit-pieces at lvl80) but overall still lacks lots of stats, of course. Heroic-Gear is better in many cases and is a good preparation for raiding 10-mans.


Heroics as Disc:

It´s awesome as Disc. Full stop.
I mostly ran with groups featuring only permades. That basically means you have a tank with lots of hp (27 - 30k hp) but literally no avoidance (apart from being crit-immune due to resilience). Bosses hit hard, Trashpacks hit even harder on some occasions since 4 or 5 mobs can easily be held by any tank at the moment. By hitting hard I mean spikes of up to 15 - 20k in less than 4 seconds. The thing is that I really feel I can reasonably deal with such situations not only if they occur once in a while, but at nearly any time.

I´m basically using Penance to heal the tank, but also to heal random people if the tank is topped up (in case of a spike I can keep him up by other means in those ~6,3 seconds of CD). If someone gets spiked and needs really fast healing I use Penance or PW:S + GH, depending on whether the situation is stressful (in which case I tend to use the instant) and whether I feel I need the Penance for the tank the next moment. In a not-so-tight situation I use Renew to heal raid damage. Additionally I use PoM on nearly every cooldown (however, I don´t use it before pulls anymore, but about 2 - 3 seconds after the pull, normally after the first Penance). Environmental and especially melee-damage is very common still and PoM is fine to heal such likes.

Basically, the thing why I feel so positive about being able to handle critical situations with disc breaks down to two points:
First is Penance. It´s efficient, it´s high throughput, it´s utility (Grace), it´s fast. This spell is so good that I use it in any situation and it never ceases to amaze me. The fact that I apply more than 5k healing in under 1 second (first two ticks, and 5k only if it doesn´t crit) combined with its sheer efficiency is simply huge. The only limitation of Penance (one which the priest has to get used to) is that you have to be turned towards the target. This is no problem with the tank in any normal case, but can be annoying when trying to heal raid members beside or behind you.

Second thing is the inbuild oh-shit-mechanic of PW:S + GH (you can also insert any other spell, but GH makes most sense) that is also huge and usable any 4 seconds (respectively any 15 seconds on the same target). Note also, that Borrowed time also enables you to do 'split-healing' a lot better. In the scenario that I have two persons which are low I´ll have to decide who I´m going to heal. Shield one Haste-GH the other one then Penance the first. I´ve just healed both players for over 7k (non-crit) and provided a 4k+ shield for one in little more than 4 seconds (depending on haste), that´s huge also. Full stop.

Note that I haven´t even mentioned Pain Suppression up to now. Basically, I tend to say that its strength is fairly situational. You have to know a spike beforehand to be able to counter it with PS. The times I found it most useful is when adds get pulled. In the case I see another group running towards us I toss PS to the tank and those 8 seconds where I´m able to keep up the whole party are often enough to burn down one or two mobs which normally means you´ve won the fight.

Lastly, there´s the mana-issue. It´s not an issue for Disc, from my experience. I never wiped a group due to going oom so far, even in complete premade-gear. It´s close from time to time, but one pot and the new shadow-fiend normally is enough (I hardly need those, anyway). Penance and PoM are just too efficient to really suck your mana pool
dry if you use them adequately. I do not feel that I get lots of oofsr time (due to Penance and PoM 'spam') but it´s not necessary. Emptying a 16 - 18k mana-pool with spells that cost 500 - 600 mana takes some time, even with zero regen (I had about 550/150 when starting with premade gear).


Disc in 10-man-raids

To break it down: There´s nothing special about the 10-mans I´ve done so far. Due to the raid-wide buffs and the purpose of these instances (read 'due to them being designed for any moron to complete them') I feel that in many places heroics are harder than especially Naxxramas and OS (Malygos is not really hard to heal, either, though harder then the first two).

Basically, the same things apply that also applied for Heroics when raiding as disc. You won´t be strongest the raid healer, of course, but it´s perfectly doable to heal the raid without CoH in many cases. I´ll comment on several specific fights that I feel might be of interest:

- Razuvious: Easy, of course, but it´s so incredibly easy with a paladin and a disc-priest. After the fight we felt we could have gone on forever healing those adds (seriously, we probably really could have).

- Loatheb: Incredible as Disc. Strong Shields help, of course, but also the sequence of PoH your Group + Penance MT enables you to literally heal a complete group as well as the MT on your own throughout the whole fight, which is a good asset in my opinion.

- Patchwerk: Easy to heal a tank as Disc. I admit, I´ve never done it with a premade MT which might put a bigger strain on healing but I e.g. healed both tanks for about 20 % of the bosse´s hp while running it in a PuG, due to the Paladin going oom (don´t ask me how he managed to) and even that was doable.

- Sapphiron: Perfectly able to heal the tank alone (while still tossing Renews through the raid). On the other hand I also healed the group yesterday since the paladin wanted to do the MT and I wanted to try. Note, that in this latter run we had a 3-healer-setup, so I wasn´t the only one raid-healing (a druid also did).

I feel 3 healers make any fight in Naxxramas fairly trivial and boring concerning personal performance of each healer. A 2 healer setup is much more enjoyable and I advise anyone to push for only 2 healers.


On an overall note I really feel that Disc is a viable specc and I appreciate that it´s so much fun to play. You have an arsenal of spells that you can use and if you do so properly you really see the improvements. Also, the problem of raid-healing in 10-mans is non-issue in my opinion. Due to the high HP-pools raid damage can reasonably be dealt with without button-mashing (read 'without CoH'). Of course, 25-mans might turn out to be different, but from my present point of view disc is not only viable, to me it´s a heal-specc that is totally on-par with other healers.

 

Vvandort

Thanks Thorongil, great post. I'd add that PI is a really good disc tool as well. I've had several situations where PI'ing myself saved the day in an unplanned situation (group added etc.), otherwise I could not have provided the necessary burst HPS.

And if you know you won't need it, just throw it on a mage every 1,5 minutes. He'll love you.

 

Thorongil

True, of course. Yet, I spared out all those gimmicks that disc brings along (PS, PI, Grace, DA) on purpose. I wanted to show the vast power that you have available any time, even without cooldowns.

 

Kortar

Healing for 0 @ 314 mana is less efficient than healing for 3000 @ 470 mana. The difficulty with Greater Heal is that there is a good likelihood that you'll just end up wasting your time and mana because something else will slip underneath.

But keep in mind that we've seen 3 logs. All 3 of them demonstrate that Flash Heal creates greater mana efficiency and throughput than Greater Heal when used as a non-tank heal due to overhealing. Two of those logs are ones that you yourself presented as 'counterarguments' to this premise.

Yet, oddly enough, Resto Shamans do precisely this as a matter of course - the 'standard' breakdown is about 85/15 CH/LHW. And while they cannot cast many of the Priest spells, the raid they're in still gets the benefit from them - so they're reacting to healing situations based on the same set of healing/damage your Priest is.

It seems you're having the same problem a lot of Priests had at the beginning of BC with respect to CoH. Because they were so accustomed to healing a certain way, they couldn't conceive of anything but the most obvious situations for using CoH - and this lead them to severely undervaluing what was, in fact, a very useful spell.

 

Awina

Just a quick note to thank Evil for all his work on Rawr (and others if they pass through here). That is a great tool and I appreciate your hard work enabling the rest of us to benefit. It's fairly complex and tedious work to get it right.

EDIT: Rawr is a good tool and I suggest people check it out. Definitely worth it for looking at new gear as it comes out with Wotlk, considering stat values have changed considerably.

With INT scoring so strong, it clearly makes MS more interesting even as a Holy build (at the expense of DP, though).