Related: Is anyone geared to the point where they're swapping Inner Will back to Inner Fire?

Thanks to improved dps ending fights quicker, tanks mitigating more, and my own escalating INT (yay rapture scaling) & spirit on my gear, I'm now at a point where I'm ending *some* fights with more mana than I need. What is the first port of call for testing how far I can swing back towards throughput instead of regen?

Taking points out of 3/3 Mental Agility would seem to be the first logical step as it's giving up ~3% cost reduction to select spells.. then perhaps reforging spirit on the odd piece of gear.. or do people like me (at the cusp between farming normal but not yet attempting heroic modes) generally swap between Inner Fire/Will on a per-fight basis? It's the largest individual change, but also the easiest to revert if it's not working out.

There is very little point to using Inner Will at all. If you're blanket Shielding maybe. The difference between the mana cost reduction and the throughput Inner Fire provides is just too large in almost every situation.

The healing done via Smite has a secondary benefit also (especially after the nerf to attonement scaling), Divine Aegis, which totaled around 20%+ of my total overall healing (extra 15-20k bubbles on multi tank fights are never wasted).

Might not be as worthless as Spirit for Smite encounters, but definately useful.

Just checked my spreadsheet. Using IF over IW gives me rougly a 3.3% HpS(HpCT) gain. Having ~30% Overheal from PoH IF accounts for ~+2.3% additional effective healing. (PoH being the most heavily used non-instant).

So we can compare 2.3% effective healing added with 15% Mana saved on instant casts and between 2% and 8% runspeed increase plus slightly stronger boot enchant.

If you have 3/3 IW for example and just use PoH your pure PoH healing exceeds the IF performance if you'll have to move more than 24-28% of the fight. (Rough number crunching and actual results may vary with your gear and boot enchant choices).

This does not even factor in any mana savings from IW nor the reduced likeliness of getting hit by aoe or having to stop casts between two or more phases of movement.

So: Yes, from a pure "throughput" perspective IF is slightly stronger most of the time. But even now it's closer than you might think intuitively.

Grace doesn't get put on targets from prayer of healing, however, and I doubt you'll be trying to "stack" grace before using prayer of healing on a group. The grace change really just allows us to use penance more freely on the raid without worrying about losing grace on the tank. There is more healing leeway now.

Personally, starting Tuesday I'm going to have a Crit set for tank healing and a Mastery set for raid healing. I honestly feel, though, that disc's strengths after the patch will be tank healing. Our longevity is going to be great as it always is single target healing. With the changes to power word: shield making it actually worth casting, gheal reducing the weakened soul debuff, Train of Thought encouraging gheal usage, and a stronger first tick of Prayer of Mending via glyph we're going to make exceptional tank healers I believe.

I'll have to see how mana works out from a shield perspective, but sparing use of shield blanketing before certain parts of encounters is also going to be a huge hps gain (although mana taxing). Timing Power Infusion with 10 shields that are going to be guaranteed to be used will a huge amount of healing done.

I really feel like I'll be assuming a tank healing role though, as I think I'll be able to safely keep up a single tank while spot healing raid with shields as needed and prayer of healing.

Grace change is really nice for encounters where you have to heal two tanks simultaneously (especially in 10s, in 25 men raids, there is usually more than a single tank healer, and you can usually focus on a single tank).

Ok, so am I doing the math correctly here for the new changes to Divine Aegis.

DA will create a 30% of the amount healed shield on the target. In addition, your mastery will grant an additional bonus.

The mastery bonus would be (mastery % * 30%) + #30% = total amount of shield awared by DA or am I mistaken?

4.0.6, which is expected to be deployed on Live servers this week, brings some interesting changes to Discipline Priests. Most notably, some of our spells have had their mana costs and values adjusted. On the whole, this is a buff to Discipline Priests.

Here are the theorycrafted numbers from the spreadsheet, which has been updated for patch 4.0.6. These numbers use the PTR tier 11 and equivalent gearset with the following stats on a Human:

Stamina	5223
Intellect	5345
Spirit	2785
Spell Power	7289
Haste	550
Critical	675
Mastery	1127

Glyphs used are Shield, Penance, and Prayer of Healing. Talent spec is 8/33/0, utilizing all talents that affect spell values. All raid buffs are included.


Direct Heal Spell Detail

Spell Name	Total Healing	Healing per Cast Time	Healing Per Mana
Penance	29027	15894	10.07
Shield	33795	24673	7.29
Heal	12558	5501	6.78
Binding Heal	36155	26395	6.27
Greater Heal	33500	14675	6.03
Flash Heal	25118	18337	4.36
Renew	11807	8620	3.75

AoE Heal Spell Detail

Spell Name	Total Healing	Healing per Cast Time	Healing Per Mana
Divine Hymn	125675	17203	16.95
Prayer of Mending	40125	29294	12.03
Prayer of Healing	57619	25239	10.76
Holy Nova	13036	13036	4.69

The biggest changes are the significant increases to Power Word: Shield and Penance. Shield becomes our best single target HPCT spell. Penance stays as our most efficient, but the HPCT is now better than Greater Heal.

I'm including these stat weights below, but take them with a grain of salt. Discipline is difficult to formulate, since there are a lot of temporary buffs such as Borrowed Time and Archangel, and how you use them will affect your results. The general rule is still Intellect is the absolute best, Spirit is very, very good until you don't run out of mana (it gets better the longer the fight lasts), Haste is very good unless you run out of mana (it gets worse the longer the fight lasts), Mastery is very, very good for Shields, but weak for single target spell, while Critical is good for single target spell and weak for Shields. The best way to use these stat weights are to use the spreadsheet and enter your own gearset and spell rotations. Otherwise, look at your parse spell breakdowns and weight the weightings accordingly.

Heal Spam - Time to Heal of 1403 seconds

Stat	Burst	Sustained
Intellect	0.41	2.94
Spirit		4.69
Spell Power	0.33	0.33
Critical	0.22	0.22
Haste	0.41
Mastery	0.05	0.05

Greater Heal Spam - Time to Heal of 128 seconds

Stat	Burst	Sustained
Intellect	1.09	3.44
Spirit		1.14
Spell Power	0.88	0.88
Critical	0.59	0.59
Haste	1.10
Mastery	0.14	0.14

Shield Spam - Time to Heal of 84 seconds

Stat	Burst	Sustained
Intellect	1.62	5.63
Spirit		1.24
Spell Power	1.49	1.49
Critical	0.20	0.20
Haste	1.85
Mastery	2.57	2.57

Direct Healing (Penance > Shield > Heal/Greater Heal) - Time to Heal of 274 seconds

Stat	Burst	Sustained
Intellect	0.92	3.94
Spirit		2.10
Spell Power	0.76	0.76
Critical	0.44	0.44
Haste	0.95
Mastery	0.33	0.33

PoH Spam - Time to Heal of 135 seconds

Stat	Burst	Sustained
Intellect	1.78	5.86
Spirit		2.06
Spell Power	1.52	1.52
Critical	0.65	0.65
Haste	1.89
Mastery	0.66	0.66

Smite Spam - Time to Heal of 392 seconds

Stat	Burst	Sustained
Intellect	0.81	2.21
Spirit		1.49
Spell Power	0.70	0.70
Critical	0.27	0.27
Haste	0.47
Mastery	0.05	0.05

I will send the new spreadsheet (version 1.2) to Rosin today. There is also an awesome macro which does the tedious work of calculating stat values, for which all credit goes to kaylefice.

//edit: obv. the mechanics I discussed were already included in previous analysis//

I have a quick question regarding the [Darkmoon Card: Volcano]. I grabbed it yesterday for Shadow but have been playing around with it today with Disc and wondering if anyone's done any math as to the practicality of using it for raids. The card has a 45 second internal cooldown, and I've been testing it in heroics using TellMeWhen to monitor the internal cooldown and trying to time as many Archangel, Power Torrents, Shadowfiend, and Hymn of Hopes as I can with it. With the slew of abilities we have dependant on total mana being able to time them based on procs like this seems very nice. I'm also an engineer/tailor and have power torrent, so my mana literally doubles when the stars align for the volcano proc, lightweave, power torrent and synapse springs into the 170k range.

With Kings, the int proc is worth around 350int if you can proc it on average every 60 seconds. Wwith a 45 second ICD I think it's reasonable if you try to squeeze in smites at that time as it's a 30% proc chance, sometimes it procs 1st cast usually no more than 6 or so. This is obviously not hard napkin math as that's definitely not my forte, but has any theorizing been done on using this trinket for Disc? It stands to reason being able to time certain abilities with such a high int proc especially layered with other int procs is nice, and with Archangel up at the same time it can account for some serious burst healing as well. Would the 300-350int average plus the 321 mastery (reforgeable) on top of being able to time some abilities with the proc make it viable at all or am I just crazy.

What has been scaring me out of haste stacking pre-patch was my less-than-optimal use of direct heal spells on targets without grace. This caused me to favor PoH and any other non-direct heal spell. Probably not the best choice, due to the weakness of shields atm, but that will all be fixed post patch. Without fearing grace dropping off my tank, I will much more often throw in direct heals after hasted penances.

The issue now is that with the shield buff, it really is a tossup for me. Spreadsheet tests do not lie and are quite useful to reflect upon, add in changes, alter priorities, etc. In the end, though, it comes down to specific raid comps/needs and your style. The way I play favors mastery setups over haste. This also balances having a resto druid in our 10man, giving his HoTs more time to tick and allowing less overheal. If you are not OCD about using direct heals without grace, or play exactly how the spreadsheet tells you, the haste setup seems to technically have a better response.
Your math seems reasonable, but the variability of not being able to smite until it procs every minute during different raid fights seems to jump out at me. The added benefit of timing shadowfiend, synapse and HoH with it sounds INCREDIBLE, but unless you have a fight on farm this will leave you in the position of either having to get lucky or having some really great other healers. If these benefits are not maxed out, it is better to get the Darkmoon Card: Tsunami, Fall of Mortality, TB trink, etc.