I've run into an issue where the Inner Focus cooldown is consumed but the activation and cooldown doesn't show up on my interface. I assumed it was my interface (Bartender, OmniCC) and ignore it, I have it macro'd to all the relevant abilities and it gets used nearly on cooldown, the macro works properly when Inner Focus is off cooldown.

Firstly maths isn’t my strong point so it would be appreciated if others could also test this with their own stats.

Let’s compare a combination of Heal and Penance to a combination of Smite and Penance (benefitting from Train of Thought) over a 60 second time period.

Heal and Penance

Firstly, we can cast at least 6 Penances in the 60 second time period. With my haste, the cast time of my Penance is 1.9608 seconds. So in a perfect scenario, we’d spend at least the following amount of time casting Penance:

1.9608*6 = 11.7648 seconds

This leaves us 48.2352 in which to cast Heal. The current cast time of my Heal is 2.451, meaning we’d be able to cast Heal the following number of times:

48.2352/2.451 = 19.6798

Putting this into the rotation tab on the spreadsheet gives us 6271.93 HPS and 6.99937 HPM. This is assuming a 100% Grace Uptime and without any benefit from Evangelism. All the relevant raid buffs and debuffs have also been applied. With a 70% Grace uptime, the HPM drops to 6.59 and the HPS to 5907.75.

Smite and Penance

The cast time of my Smite is currently 1.9608 seconds, so adding on the 0.5 seconds from Train of Thought, we can do the following number of Smites between each Penance:

10/ (1.9608 + 0.5) = 4.06372

To cast this many Smites, it takes:

4.06372*1.9608 = 7.96814 seconds

If we can cast 6 Penances per minutes, we can cast Smite for:

7.96814*6 = 47.8088 seconds

This gives us a total time spent casting of:


(6* 1.9608)+ 47.8088 = 59.5737

We therefore end up casting Penance for an additional:

60-59.5737 = 0.42634 seconds every minute

The total number of Smites casted would be:

4.06372*6 = 24.3823

The total number of Penances casted would be:

(0.42634/1.9608)+6 = 6.21743

Putting these numbers into the rotation tab on the spreadsheet gives 8032.64 HPS and 6.54395 HPM. This is assuming a 70% Evangelism uptime which is very favourable to Heal and a 100% Grace Uptime. This is with all the relevant raid buffs and debuffs as well as making Smite benefit twice from Twin Disciplines. It should also be noted the coefficient of Smite was changed to 0.854.

With a 100% Evangelism uptime, its HPS is 8328.78 and its HPM is 7.66. Penance does benefit from Grace and reducing the uptime of Grace to 70% provides HPS of 8189.07 and HPM of 7.53.

Conclusion

The HPM of a Penance and Heal based rotation is only superior to a Smite and Penance based one when Evangelism cannot be maintained. With the plethora of raid damage on most encounters, it’s unlikely that Grace can be maintained 100% of the time on a tank. With a 70% Grace Uptime, a Heal and Penance based rotation is about equal to a Smite and Penance based one in HPM. However, due to the superior HPS of a Smite and Penance based rotation, it would be preferable to use such. Finally using Smite over Heal provides the use of Archangel which provides a HPS and HPM boost to Prayer of Healing and other spells in a heavy damage period where Smite is not appropriate.

Edit: Updated the post to avoid confusion. It came across that Heal was the superior choice due to not considering Grace falling off and the fact a 70% Evangelism uptime is rather unfair on Smite.

Felt I had to help here, since last line could be shortened a lot:
1. "target=" was shortened to "@";
2. "exists" condition is excess;
3. Empty brackets condition will do the job of casting on target/self with default wow settings;

Same works for Prayer of Healing you mentioned or any other spell.

P.S.: linking my small macro sticky on plusheal.com if more people need help with macroses -> Handy macro sweeties for lazy healers! (hope its allowed here...)

Upcoming Priest change:

I'm assuming they mean proc from.

Will Surge of Light be a good talent for Disc Priests after this change?

I've had similar issues with the exact same macro, I believe its due to the new client-side spell queue. Also, there seems to be some unresolved issues with Train of Thought and the timer on Inner Focus.

This is indeed due to the client-side spell queue. If you manually set the spell queue to 0ms, macros with multiple spells won't be used out of order (ie. GHeal before IF).

edit: nm

Did a raid as disc today and managed to stay near the Holy priest on the heal meters, not including absorption numbers. A bulk of my heals was coming from Divine Aegis. I specced out of Archangel and picked up Inspiration.

I really wish PW:B was on a shorter cooldown or increased duration just a bit, either through glyph or buffing the talent. +10% healing bonus seems really weak glyph for our top tier talent.

From what's been posted here and in other threads, as well as from my own personal experience, AA specs seem to be useful up to 5mans and no further, with heroic 5mans being questionable at best. Raid utility (with the possible exception of Halfus) has been extremely underwhelming. I don't think Blizzard is expecting people to be smite healing in raids, hence the 2pc bonus.

AA is neato and fun, but Cata's healing has been all about "triage triage triage!". This is not possible when heals land willy nilly wherever they please, including pets and whatever else happen to be trundling past. Not really viable for situations where any sort of priority or assigned healing is needed.

Through 8/12 so far, I have been converted into an AA spec in raids. You don't use archangel for any amount of sustained healing (although all the buffs it has been given do make it heal fairly well), instead you charge up your Evangelism so you can unleash AA at full + healing potential.

Almost every fight I'll open up with 5 smites (while proccing heals on the tank), and the save the stacks for when I know aoe damage in the fight is going to occur. Magmaw for instance, is a great example of this. Charge up your stacks of Evangelism, when he does the aoe fire damage, pop your AA, PI yourself, and unleash Prayers of Healing upon the raid for impressive burst healing.

Once the aoe damage dies down, start building your stacks up again. This may be slower than the first time as there is more damage going out, but that is why I find disc best in a tank healing support role / raid healing. So my atonement heals help support our paladins on the tank, but allow me to charge up for my raid utility.

It requires you to know when damage is going to occur during the fight, which any good healer should know anyway. But it also gives you the utility to heal anyone in the raid, and in any type of situation.

Outside of low damage phases, I've also found it mildly useful to use PI during a high AoE damage phase, top up the tank and put PoM and PW:S on them, Smite 5 times (almost always hits the dps), then AA into Divine Hymn just as PI is about to fade (so you get the 20% haste and mana cost reduction). I haven't gotten into raiding yet, but I'm guessing that this particular use of AA is far too sparse to be worth the 5 talent points.

That said, the times where you need prioritized healing are usually high damage phases where you should be healing, not Smiting, and thus you should have popped AA on any Evangelism stacks you had before or during. The only exception I can think of are burn phases or situational damage buffs (Rage bubbles in VC) where Smite spam will work because of the damage increase.

SoL Flash heal already can crit for disc if it used under the Inner focus effect and/or on target with the Weakened soul debuff. I can't tell if it can crit without this conditions due to low proc rate and my personal crit rate.