Latest patch notes update brings two nerfs to Discipline, both likely PvP related (with PvE side effects).

*Improved Power Word: Shield change reverted

*Strength of Soul now also causes the priest to become immune to silence, interrupt, and dispel effects for 2/4 seconds after using Inner Focus.


By "changes reverted", I assume they mean it is back to only increasing shields by 10%, and no longer gives us the 30% boost when cast on ourselves. This doesn't really surprise me, as with the base buff shield already got, I'm sure it made self bubbling fairly overpowered in PvP. Hopefully this doesn't mean they're going back on the overall buff to shields.

As for Strength of Soul, it turns Inner Focus into a PvP cooldown. When it triggered off our shield, I could see it being useful for PvE situations. Now, however, I don't see us intentionally saving it in PvE. We have to use Inner Focus on every time it's up for mana reasons, so getting the resistance to be worth it will end up being blind luck in most cases. I'm not shocked by either of these changes, and I'm still hoping they do a bit to slim our tree down slightly before all is said and done.

On the topic of whether haste is needed or not, it all depends on the fight mechanics at hand. For the Cho'gall log that was posted about (it looked liked you were raid healing), the fight has extremely predictable damage going out. Tank is getting beaten on constantly and the raid will take 3 consecutive ticks from the Shadow AOE every time it goes out. This shadow damage is never enough to kill the raid (assuming you have any reaction time) and there is no raid damage that goes out after it. This makes haste a non-issue for the fight, even during the final burn where the damage remains relatively low if the fight was executed properly in p1.

Nefarion is another fight (although I haven't killed him yet) where most damage is predictable. You can't get more predictable than 100k every 10%. You know when its coming and how much its coming, and you even have an Emote to let you know when to start casting. This lends itself away from haste since the damage isn't unpredictable. P2 if interrupts are happening then generally the raid isn't in danger of dying, at least not from the 10% haste you're missing since your crits will be making up in throughput from the shadow barrage.

Even if you are tank healing, especially with the new changes coming, haste will be un-needed. Shield > POM > Penance > Gheal x2 (maybe x3 depending on timing of WS) > Shield > repeat. Only 2/5 of your casts will benefit from haste in your normal tank healing "rotation", whereas crit/mastery will benefit all of them (especially if switching back to the PW:Shield Glyph which I intend to).

So if predictability is the factor of whether or not haste is needed, how does each boss stand up to a no haste build? (These will all be done from a raid healing perspective)

Blackwing Descent:
1. Magmaw: Predictable Fire AOE throughout the fight, although timing can be a little tricky (requires good knowledge of the fight).
2. Omnitron: The heavy AOE phases are all predictable (incineration is actually the only one that comes to mind).
3. Maloriak: Red Phase = Heavy AOE damage
4. Atramedes: Semi-predictable timing on the AOE damage, similar to Magmaw in the timing.
5. Chimaeron: Feud = Heavy AOE damage.
6. Nefarion: Every 10% = 100k damage, p2= AOE damage.

Bastion of Twilight:
1. Halfus: If you have the instant fireballs in the beginning, you know before the pull even happens so you can prepare for the dmg.
2. Valiona/Theralion: Blackout is controlled by the player. Dispel = Heavy AOE damage. Engulfing magic is on a timer which results in at least some burst AOE damage.
3. Ascendant Council: When the shield goes up = AOE damage. P3 = AOE damage, possibly haste would help here if falling behind.
4. Cho'gall: 3 ticks of shadow damage with no immediate danger of the raid damge. P2 easily controllable AOE damge.

So basically, knowing when the damage is going to occur is step 1 to being able to drop all haste from your gear. The second check is whether your throughput can keep the raid alive through that damage without haste.

If you follow/know both of those things, you can effectively drop haste from your gear and go for a crit > mastery build.

From my perspective, I really like haste in my AA spec and I am not sure why it is getting such a bad rap.

In Wrath, the main knock against haste was the fact that our bread and butter spell didn't benefit from it much after the "soft haste cap."

But examining the spells that disc uses, it seems like just about everything we cast now benefits from haste when looking at throughput.

PoH- because our only other way to speed up this cast is using PI and BT, haste itself is extremely useful, and if you are running in 25s, this becomes even more the case, as the longer cast times means more chances of our heals getting sniped.

Smite- The more haste, the faster it is to stack up Evangelism and trigger AA. Never mind the ability to fit in more Atonement heals.

GH- Our new bread and butter tank healing spell gets an enormous benefit from Haste. The overheal potential on GH is extremely high and haste helps mitigate that.

I understand that when comparing Haste to Mastery and Crit, Haste loses out when looking at HPM. But while I understand that mana is likely the primary limitation for a healer, there are plenty of situations in a fight where mana is not a consideration. Put it another way, ending a fight at 50% or more mana and dead raid members means something went wrong. (Aside from people standing in fires perhaps). So far, while I have had to keep an eye on my mana, I don't find myself struggling for it, and my mana pool is not eye boggling. (Depending on whether we use +90 food, my raid mana pool is at 115K or so). And if there is a resto shaman in my group and he calls out when he is about to drop mana tide, then mana is almost a joke.

I find the argument that we can drop haste completely from gear an interesting one, but as the previous poster points out it is predicated on 1) knowing when the damage will come, and also 2) Not having healers in the group who are faster than you. The first point is interesting, but it assumes a level of both knowledge and skill that is unrealistic. People in raids make mistakes, there will be people who will occasionally take more damage than they should, there is also RNG and Tanks and the like may take an unusually high amount of damage. Secondly, while I imagine 10 mans may be different, when there are 6-7 other healers in the raid, timing becomes extremely important. For instance, when I first started raiding this content and had eschewed haste, I found myself experiencing deja vu in finding myself having to stopcasts all the time. A raider would take damage, I would start a heal, whether it be GH or PoH (as I still reserved Penance for the tank for Grace purposes) and by the time I got 1/2 way through my heal, another healer did my job for me.

My guild has been working on heroic Halfus and it's abundantly clear that Atonement is the correct choice for that fight. I've started designing a Smite specific gear set for the fight (or any Atonement friendly fight), and in that situation, you really want as much Haste and Crit as you can find at the expense of Spirit and Mastery.

I did a bit of theorycrafting on [Glyph of Smite], and whether it's worth casting Holy Fire. The short summary is that if your Smite has a cast time of 1.4 seconds or less (43% haste), you should use Holy Fire. Otherwise keep casting Smite. Here's the math:

The opportunity cost of casting Holy Fire is 3/4ths of one smite, since Holy Fire has 3/4ths the cast time of a smite. The effect of a Holy Fire is 20% increased healing on your smites for the next 7 seconds, but because you have 0% extra hit ([Item not found!] doesn't effect Holy Fire), you only get this increase 83% of the time. This works out to an average increased healing of 16.6% per smite.

You can cast X smites each with 16.6% extra damage in 7 seconds, but lost 75% of one smites casting Holy Fire. You should cast Holy Fire when X * 16.6% > 75%.

X = 4.51

Which rounds up to 5 smites. You lose healing when you can only cast 4 smites and gain healing when you cast 5 smites. Casting 5 smites in 7 seconds requires a cast time of 1.4 seconds. From the base, post-talent cast time of 2 seconds, this requires 43% extra haste. Assuming you have a 5% spell haste as a baseline in your raid, that's an extra 38% to make up from gear and temporary buffs. Here are the haste thresholds you need to attain for Holy Fire to be worth using during certain buffs:

No buffs: 38% from gear
Power Infusion: 18% from gear
Bloodlust: 8% from gear
Power Infusion + Bloodlust: 0%

In swapping my gear around, I went from 11% haste to 21% haste, and it had a pretty noticeable on my total healing output for the fight. Also my mana bar.

So I don't think Haste is all bad. It's one of the best stats if you're doing Atonement heals, but clearly less useful in other situations.

By having a larger amount of haste than the other healer you make it more likely that your heal will land first, but aren't you simply making *their* heal now overheal? That is, you were overhealing before, and now you're simply transferring the problem to the other healer. The solution to this is coordination, not more haste.

I don't think you should be racing the other healers to land a heal, but viewing haste from the perspective of racing the mechanics of the fight. Can you get the target(s) above 10k quickly enough on Chimaeron? And so on.

Of course coordination is preferred. But, assuming that at least part of the time reactionary heals are necessary (and I mean see someone low on health -> heal someone low on health, rather than pre-casting), the question becomes, how much longer should I leave a raid member low on health? The longer a raid member is low on health, not only is it more likely that they will die, but it is more likely that another healer will go "off assignment" and try and help heal.

Now I don't mean to imply that the only reason haste is good is to make sure your personal heals don't get sniped. In wrath, the ultimate reactionary heal of PWS didn't care about haste at all. But now that we can't spam shields, there is a question about timing and increasing one's ability to react (at least intuitively) seems like a worthy goal.

As for Chim, well mastery is nearly junk for disc, since absorption is almost pointless, and crit's RNG becomes iffy to rely on getting a party or raid member's health above 10k. For Chim as disc, I would think haste is better, but let's be clear, Holy is in a much better spot for that fight. (As a matter of fact, I switched to Holy for our 25m Chim run last night and it was infinitely easier.)

Couple of questions...

Can someone show me how this was worked out? I would really appreciate it.

Next, I have been trying to figure out exactly how Enlightenment works but I must be missing something. When exactly is the 15% taken into account? If that makes sense.

Like when Power Torrent procs it's giving me +604 INT. I would figure it would be +575 INT since 15% of 500 is 75. Same for many of my items. When I put them on, I seem to get a decent amount more of INT than I would expect. I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong and don't know the proper formula.

Nope, I didn't have any buffs of that kind.

Also, thanks. I already knew the jist of it regarding what you told me, I guess what I want to know is exactly how ~150 SPR is 10 more MP5 than the ~135 INT for Discipline.

So does anyone know how Combat Regen calculated. It's certainly not 50% of my Mana Regen. I have also read that Mana Regen is supposed to be your Combat Regen and SPR Regen added together. I understand the formula to get SPR Regen, not sure how the game goes from there to Combat regen though.

After a little digging I found this.

Plugging in the numbers from my character sheet doesn't make these formulas work though.

I see it as stopping healing you are doing to cast holy fire in a fight where atonement is supposed to support the non-AI healers by picking up the lowest tanks.

I recommend you use a spec with Twisted Faith, then you won't need the glyph or hit gear at all.

All cloth casters gain a free 5% bonus to Intellect. 500*1.15*1.05 = 603,75.