Hasn't been this brought with 4.0.1? Although I admit it feels more sluggish then before, but PW:S having a 1-sec cooldown which is "baked" into the GCD doesn't change the fact it's still an instant, spammable spell.

While PW:S isn't as mana friendly as Heal, raid-bubbling might be viable in some fights (from watching Paragon's videos, Omnitron Defense System comes to my mind) with Inner Will reducing its cost from 19% to 16.15%. The whole reason priests' core spells like Heal, G.Heal etc. were buffed was [as I read from a blue post] that they thought priests weren't using them enough. I think it might be too early dissing situational PW:S spam...

The rotation for the 'heal' style build as opposed to AA build needs one important realisation: you must put the penance or GH before the second heal. You otherwise risk not having weakened soul on the target when it lands, thus loosing out on renewed hope crit chance.

Carnathagia, you state in another post to 'balance' haste/crit/mastery (which I agree with), but do you take renewed hope into these calculations or do you see it being a bonus ontop of the 'balanced' crit.

Haste for efficiency

Not really. When you are talking about a more efficient spell and haste, its generally the difference between Heal and Greater Heal. Greater Heal has 89% of the efficiency of Heal, but it has 2.6x the throughput. You can't begin to attain the amount of Haste you would need to equalize that difference. You will still have to use the correct spell at the correct time.

Renewed Hope

Remember that Renewed Hope also includes the target of your Grace effect, so as long as you maintain Penance and some direct heals in an Atonement rotation, you shouldn't have an issue with losing Renewed Hope.

Stat Balance

Critical rating is showing to be the best non-spirit secondary stat for a Disc healing rotation, despite being devalued by Renewed Hope and Inner Focus. Mastery increases the value of critical rating, and vice versa. Haste rating increases the value of both slightly, but has its own benefit due to Disc's longevity. The assumption to balance these stats considers buffs to critical and haste percentages, but the balancing I referred to is in the individual ratings.

There seems to be major discrepancies between the coefficients table and the actual healing values. For a disc profile, Heal should be (3390 + 0.3624 * 6760) * 1.15 * 1.06 = 7118, while it's listed as 12360. While this calculation doesn't include crit, it clearly won't make up for that difference. The healing table also dismisses Renew-5 while having a value for Renew-4, should be the opposite?
Regarding renew, it should tick for 2683 with IT and GoR. With 5 ticks it has 90% of Heal's HPM and the benefit of not moving Grace around. Once enough haste is available to gain 6 ticks with BT, which may be attainable in haste-oriented 372s, it will be extremely efficient.

Regarding haste and sustained throughput, I don't know how you computed it. But imho, the "best" way to do it is not to compute how much healing one can do until you get oom (with heal, that would be nearly infinite in fact), but how much healing one can do in a given time frame (let's say 6 minutes, for example).

If one uses this metric, and given the fact that we can (or at least should) be able to sustain Heal nearly infinitely, then haste shall have a strictly positive (albeit small) value for sustained throughput. This is because although mana is still the main constraint for this metric, time is also a constraint we can't neglect (by contradiction, if time is no constraint, then the best sequence is the spam of the most efficient heal, ie. Heal. As we can sustain it, then mana is no longer a constraint either...). In practice, the best sequence is (at least for a quick intuition) a mixture of Heal and Greater Heal and Renew.

The number of Renew is fixed, such as to keep it on target all time (well, in fact, it might change a little due to haste effect, but that won't change a lot). Then, we can determine the proportion of Heal and Greater heal such as :
1/ To drain the remaining mana in that time frame (ie. increase the number of GH as much as possible)
2/ To keep every GCD occupied (but it is better to spam Heal than being oom after too much spam of GH).

The correct way to see it is :
1/ The mana constraint forces us to use efficient spell;
2/ The GCD / time constraint prevents us from spamming only the most efficient spell.

Now, having more haste means that you have more free GCD, and hence, you can spend the same amount of mana with more spells, using more Heal and less Greater Heal. This new mixture is globally more efficient, and as the amount of available mana is kept identical, haste increases the sustained healing a little bit.

Grace is an additional 24% bonus, while the effect of Critical, with RH and DA is another 26%. However, the Spellpower in that example should be 7482 (8535 raid buffed) from the same gear set with Discipline's 15% increase to Intellect. That gives you the 12360 figure.

The spreadsheet shows glyphed and talented, Renew5 at 5.38 HPM, which is still worse than Heal, Greater Heal, and Binding Heal for single target, but slightly better than Shield. Assuming that an encounter will never require more HPS than Greater Heal spam, it wouldn't make sense to use any of your casting time for a less efficient, lower HPCT spell like Renew as Disc unless you had to move and could spare the mana. And although that will likely happen, it doesn't seem to me to justify the last 2 points in our Disc spec over some of the other attractive options, or for a glyph slot over Barrier or Prayer of Healing. Perhaps after more experience with the raid encounters, that can be determined empirically.

It doesn't seem worth using even for raid healing, since even Holy Nova5 is slightly better, and Prayer of Healing is much better.

Permalink from "Surviving Until Dec. 7th" thread. I'm skeptical that Cataclysm encounters would encourage such heavy use of GH, but I figured I'd reference it in hopes it would get added to the regen section. It is effectively free mana, and I feel the value of the combat regen should be noted. Which I'd post, but I'm not exactly sure how to calculate it.

Hello priest friends, a guildmate asked me to create an addon to deal with Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis. I thought it might be a good idea for you to have a look at it in case you find it useful:

Link on WoWinterface
Link on Curse



It show you the realtime value of both shields for your target and for mousehovered friendly player units. You can choose to enable or disable any of theses two.
Leave me any comments on either pages and i'll add features if requested.

Are the points in Mental Agility really worth it?

We could happily be specced into SoS, Inspiration and Archangel/Atonement without them and there's even a spare point for a 4% decrease if you really want it.

Those points just seem like the easiest to move and seem a lot better than not taking Inspiration if we still want to spec into AAA.

Maybe I'm wrong but that's the most logical shift for the build to me.

Do we have any more information on which secondary stats are 'the best', or is it still a case of keeping everything pretty much even?

I'm mainly asking from a tank-healing perspective, since I'm the main tank-healer for our guild. At the moment, I'm actually finding Crit to be the most valuable, since it procs DA and gives a chunk of 'free' healing. Mastery's decent, but, aside from PW:S, it's largely effected by crit, since the only other thing it boosts is DA. I'm not valuing Haste at the moment - I don't find myself needing to cast quickly, and it seems like more Haste just means OoM comes quicker.

While this is true theoretically, in practice it doesn't work. Greater Heal is ~260% more throughput for 90% of the efficiency of Heal. Think of Greater Heal as a buff that increases Haste by 260%, mana cost by 10%, and then casts 2.6 Heals. This means it would take a very high amount of Haste to replace even 1 Greater Heal with Heal in a fight.

Hopefully, this example makes it clear:
Using a healing rotation over 6 minutes with 133 Heals and 2 Greater Heals, how much Haste would it take to achieve the same throughput over the same duration with 134 Heals and 1 Greater Heal? Using the example Tier 11 gearset, rotation 1 would give us 5700 HPS and take 299.9 seconds. With the 2nd rotation, we would need 168 Haste rating to match the throughput. So each point of Haste rating lets us replace .006 Greater Heals over a 6 minute fight. To put that into perspective, tank deaths don't occur over 6 minutes, they happen in about 10-15 seconds. So, shortening the rotation to 5 Heals and 2 Greater Heals vs. 6 Heals and 1 Greater Heal, we would need 2614 additional Haste rating to equalize the throughput and save the tank from death. In practice, that means that we need to use Greater Heal when its appropriate, and Heal when it's appropriate.

Also, the math has been done for Critical vs. Haste for Disc throughput. It's not a gut feeling, critical gives more throughput with only 235 Mastery rating, while also giving efficiency.