Just a few rough calculations for determining the relative power of different tank healing strats.

For a disc priest with 20% mastery bonus imp PWS, 2/2 grace (fully stacked) and twin disciplines. 3624sp, 18.33% haste.

Flash = 8553 --> 9.4k with 2pt10
Heal = 4394
Penance = 11405
PWS = 6917 (+1383 glyph)

Smite (5stacks) ~4200
Atonement heal (stacked grace) = ~4700
Heal sequence: PWS-penance-2xheal-PWS-2xheal-penance-PWS-fheal-2xheal

Total time @18.33% haste = 1.27*3(PWS)+1.5(BT-penance)+1.7(penance)+2.11*5(heal)+1.85(BT-Heal)+1.11(BT-fheal) = 20.52sec --> 6 heal, 3pws, 2 penance, 1fh in 20.62 seconds --> 6*4394+3*(6917+1383)+2*11405+8553 = 61876 healing and 20751 absorption over 20.52 seconds or 3015.4 HPS and 1011.5 ABS, without crit and aegis. Thus without aegis and crit it is 4026.9 overall HPS. With 25.73% crit and 2pT10 this is becomes 73578 healing and 30513 absorption --> 5073 overall HPS


Atonement sequence: penance-4xsmite-penance and PWS on CD --> penance, 4 smites and 0.567 pws every 8.5 seconds. Thus total healing is 11405+4700*4 = 30205 without crit or 34661 with 25.73% crit. With PWS and aegis this is 35545.9 healing, 3919.6 absorption PWS and 2734 absorption from aegis. Overall healing is 42682
every 8.5 seconds or 5021 overall HPS

In comparison straight PWS-FH-penance spam should produce 94265 overall healing in 10.46 seconds or ~9000 HPS.


Thus the atonement rotation is equivalent to the heal rotation without mastery and both provide slightly more than half the HPS of flash-penance-pws spam.

Atonement allows for a faster penance on the tank, while the heal rotation doubles the pws frequency and may double rapture procs depending on pws usage. I think both are just as good as flash spam in the current content and will almost certainly be the only viable strategies in later content. I expect the heal rotation to be superior for healing due to the frequent pws esp with mastery. Nevertheless, the added dps, mana income and smart heal from atonement may end up being preferred.

Do you use the 4-set bonus for pws?
As far as I know, Smite can also crit and create Aegis on people, that would increase the hps of the atonement sequence a little, but it's not really relevant to the end result.
The Problem I have with these two builds is, that don't think you'd heal in a real raid situation with such a rotation. And you don't consider hpm (of course in the current gear, Mana is not a real problem). I would also see a problem when you consider each Smite to hit the tank, since it's a smart heal it is also going to hit melee thus healing somebody without grace. You should also consider that a shield, penance sequence will also provide BT to your next smite.
When healing with atonement I somewhat prefer to use hasted penance - greater heal sequences, if there is need. You completely leave out gheal, but at the moment it's a lot better than heal, especially with BT. And remember that you can pop Archangel for more healing + mana (you lose heal on Smite, but you gain the heal for penance/ what else) If the tank is low in ICC I'd surely throw in a fheal.

I don't believe, Discipline healing is so much about rotations but rather choosing the right spells at the right time. (Or just plain Shield spamming if hps really counts, that's still where we rock)

@The people who don't see some Sanctuaries:
If it's your own Sanctuary you don't see, I can't provide a solution, if you don't see the Sanctuaries of other priests, there is a (imho useless) interface feature, that tunes other players spell effects down and is activated per default. You can revert the change under Interface -> Display -> Emphasize My Spell Effects (by un-checking this option). You have to reload the game for the change to take effect.

Im sitting at 44% at the moment.

Answered properly by Hegen, if anyone else would wonder: Cataclysm Healing Priest Theorycrafting

I do consider the 4-set bonus I get the PWS value from the tooltip and I have 4T10 on. I also take into consideration aegis from atonement and haste from BT in all rotations.

Why you would not tank heal with these rotations? I don't see why not. HPM Does not need to be considered, these are the most mana efficient rotations for each build. Especially heal/pws/penance is by far the best HPM you can get while healing the tank. Both smite (15%) and heal (9%) are considerably cheaper than flash (28%) and gheal (27%) and on top they get both an HPS and an HPM boost by their secondary effects on weakened soul and penance.

The problem with atonement not hitting the tank is certainly an issue, but I think that is slightly beside the point. One of the objectives of this exercise is to compare a heal and an atonement rotation. These are the basic rotations that you would tank heal with. Naturally other spells will be cast if needed, but as the encounter demands.

I left gheal out intentionally. It does not belong in the basic tank healing rotation. The basic rotations take advantage of two things a) Heal reducing the duration of weakaned soul b) smite reducing the CD on penance. Gheal does neither and it costs more mana. In fact discipline does not have much use for gheal.

I strongly disagree that discipline does not have a tank healing rotation and that you have to pick the best spell for the situation. The best spells for tank healing are pws and penance and you have a rotation based on which fillers to use in between. Heal and smite are the cheapest fillers, and they decrease the CD of penance and PWS. Gheal and fheal have higher HPS but also much higher burn rates.

PWS spam is raid healing. That is an entirely different senario. If you believe that you have a tank rotation that is better please post your numbers here.

A quick note on this.

We went to LK25 heroic last night and as previously mentioned by others my shields were fully absorbing infest with about 300-400 to spare. The best way I found to utilise Archangel was during the transitions, the other raid healers are more than capable of picking up the slack for 5 smite casts and you'll be able to smite your way back up to full mana without much hassle, as well as getting a few cheeky heals on the melee/tanks.

With the nerf to infest damage that aspect of the fight has been totally trivialized essentially, so long as you can manage your mana thought those phases.

I did some calculations for throughput stats. I have ignored regen, cause mana doesn't matter on live servers.
Gear level is mostly 277, you can check armory for details.

Flash Heal spam:
Haste: 2.45
Intellect: 2.02
Crit:1.29
Spell Power: 1.24
Mastery: 0.54

PW: Shield spam:
Mastery: 4.30
Haste: 2.62
Intellect: 1.15
Spell Power: 0.82
Crit:0.34

Has anyone taken into consideration that we can now have Engineering "double stacking" with Enchanting, 28 Spell power aswell as the haste Tinker from Engineering would make a comfortable difference on the HPS in certain parts of encounters.

These tank healing rotations/lists, while interesting, are too simplified in my opinion to allow for final conclusions. There's overheal to consider - especially from Renew - as well as effects from DA (including the DA cap) and not to forget impact from latency (brain and technical). I suggest to wait and model this for level 85 later when numbers have settled, perhaps a first Rawr model for cross-checking is available, and we're also looking at completely different tank healing scenarios.

Not wanting to prevent someone from doing work now - it's just that it needs to be done reasonably complete before we can really talk about "better" or "worse".

Synching pws, renew and penance, is not only difficult, it is also pointless given the time contraints. Even if you did pull it off every 15 seconds while tank healing it represents a 1% increase in casting time, but a certain loss overall due to inescapable renew cliping or reductions in pws/penance casting frequency. It might sound good, but think about it, a BT hasted renew is 1.1 sec for me and 1.27 without. 0.16 seconds every 15 sec, where I could get a total of 4 hasted heals per 15 seconds with pws/heal/penance spam. What you are describing is not really rotation. It is a suboptimal way to heal the tank, that has no real benefits, only added complexity. Your numbers are completely off btw.

Rotations that include Gheal and renew have higher HPS than than the rotations I propose but they are inferior in every other way. Heal/pws/penance spam as a basic tank healing rotation, maximises absorption (about 3 times the amount of absoprtion compared with any other rotation), while smite/pws/penance spam maximises heal granularity (i.e. the time between heals landing on the tank), while adding dps to the raid. Both rotations allow you to actually regenerate mana. Lets see what renew brings: 8325 over 12.7 seconds or 10360 on average with crits and aegis over 12.7 seconds. That is 816 HPS, you sacrifice 10% of your casting time, which means since the rotation has an HPS of @5k you gain ~300 HPS, which is significant, but unfortunately including renew in the rotation reduces the frequency at which you cast penance and PWS, which is an addition HPS reduction. Overall the gain of keeping renew up in either rotation is ~200 HPS, which is actually negligible when overheal is factored in. Renew with my values for disc produces no benefit at all when added to the rotations I proposed.

With Gheal spam you get an HPS with crit and aegis of ~7462 HPS with a burn rate of @2600 mp5 and it is not sustainable even in the current content. Adding renew to gheal spam provides just 70 HPS. Basically whether you cast it or not is a matter of complete indifference. Comparing it with heal/pws/penance, which achieves an HPS of ~5k, but with 30% of it being absoprtion and every other heal being small compared with the massive 10-13k gheals and therefore having very low overheal, it is obvious that there is no point in gheal spam unless the tank is spiking, in which case its best to use fheal. Spamming gheal on the tank is only going to result in a lot of overheal, while producing very uneven healing. Gheal/pws/penance produces approximately 7.7k HPS, which is only a marginally higher gain than pure gheal spam and much lower than flash/pws/penance.

I think the problem is that you don't quite realise how the basic rotations I proposed would fit a disc priest on tank healing duty. You would spam flash/pws/penance during periods of heavy tank damage and regenerate your mana at other times using pws/penance/heal or pws/penance/smite. Or you could burn mana with pws/penance/flash and mix in as much heal/pws/penance or pws/smite/penance as you need to make your mana bar last the duration of the fight. You don't need to use renew or gheal while tank healing as disc. PoM needs only be used if it will bounce of the tank at least twice or if its useful for raid healing and the tank is not taking damage. This is going to be the optimal way to heal the tank. PWS/heal or smite/penance while the tank remains at high health and pws/flash/penance when tank health drops. Mixing in gheal and renew is either not necessary or suboptimal and adding PoM can be beneficial under some circumstances, but can just as well be ignored otherwise.

Overall tank healing at disc, whether now at 80 or later is going to work better by using one of the two basic rotations, which regenerate mana when you can and burning mana with high HPS spells when it is necessary. Renew is for raid healing and pom is not necessarily useful. PWS, penance, flash and heal or smite are the best spells for the job. The rotations you descibe are pointless. It burns a lot of mana but does not capitalise on the strengths of the spec.

Found out 3 easy ways to get massive rapture returns back on infests, if your shields are too strong (thanks to mastery and 277 gear + nerfed infest damage):

1. We drop 4set bonus, with downside of not being able to re-obtain it in the third phase;
2. We use Mojo flask instead of the Frost Wyrm one, with no actual downside, cause we can reflask in the third phase easily;
3. We unequip weapon till the second transition, where infests stop and we, most likely, will need heavy shields, both inside the shadowmourne room and on spirits, if our guild is progressing;

Choose yours and enjoy raptures, as before.

Reminder: try to never shield your tanks or melees (who aggro ghouls etc), because even with lowered internal rapture cooldown (6seconds now) - there still is a risk of losing massive return from infest by triggering single one just before infest lands.

Yes mana returns are quite the same for intell and spirit for a holy priest (with intell better by a small margin in most cases). Intell giving spellpower and crit on top.

- remove the skyflare and put an earthsiege diamond of perspicacity. In your case Skyflare gives 21 intell and ~22 mp5, while perspicacity 21 intell and 50-60 mp5.

- Think about the intell weapon's enchant from BC.

- If you find the regen from 10 esprit = the regen from 10 intell, don't put any 10 int / 10 spi gem (except for activating meta), since 20 intell gives same mana regen, but 10+ more spell, and crit. There is no 10+ socket spellpower bonus I know.

- If you mainly adopt a chakra : renovation gameplay, just ditch intell gems for haste if you want haste, do not lose mental agility. Taking darkness offers you less than 4% haste, 130 haste rating. Ditching 130 intell costs you 70 mp5 and 145 spell (and little 0.86% crit). Mental agility saves 81 mana each renov and circle of healing, 70 mana for each PoM. Casting 3 of those spell every 5 second (not very intensive) equals saving 234 mp5 (fast and ugly math but you understand). That's 145 spell + 40 crit rating vs 164 mp5. Seriously keep mental agility.

- At your level of stuff, one point in twin discipline is worth 250 spellpower (125 spellpower in the ancient system, spellpower is a little shitty now), think about your use of shadowfiel. But veiled shadows could be very interesting still for you if you have mana problems (the first thing to handle).

- There is never haste + spirit + something you could turn into mastery, I think.

- With a better haste / spirit oriented stuff, you could even aim for the next haste plateau, for yet again one additionnal renew's tick. I don't think that is achievable for you now though.


Others might add others things, good progression.