Archangel also makes up for 15% increased healing on PoH and the corresponding Aegis (or all your other heals, for that matter), making all your other spells better most of the time (if you're not bubble spamming 24/7), increasing their HPM as well.

Also, "getting a stack of Evangelism up" does something in addition to costing mana, namely healing for a quite a bit, and with the raidbuffs like +crit dmg or +8% received spelldamage a considerable amount.

Read again, I did account for that, but let's clarify this again:

Smite costs 2k/cast when benefits from Archangel are accounted for. Based on Paragons logs and the average Smite damage of Jhazrun over an entire evening was 14k per cast. This means the heal through atonement is about 7-8 HPM and about 8k HPS.

So we know Archangel is not a regen mechanic, and Atonement is not an efficient heal. Therefor the benefit has to come from the Archangel buff. However:
-This buff does not apply to PW:Sheild.
-PW:Shield + Glyph make up ~80% of disc healing on hard mode encounters.
-A 15% buff to 20% of your healing is a 3% buff to total healing, for the price of 5 talent points and 1 glyph slot.

Put simply, this is not a regen mechanic, putting it up reduces your short term HPS and the benefits are far from consistent. It's a situational talent at best for predictable PoH buffing, and should be treated as such.

I *thought I would find this completely overblown. I just saw the WoL rankings and do indeed see the top ranked disc priests with 71%+ of their heals from PWS and 12% from the glyph.

In fact, the top healers on nearly all of the heroic 25 man fights now have disc priests at the top, and them spamming PWS.


This is disheartening. I thought the only thing that would completely move us to PWS spam will depend on raid encounter mechanics, and apparently because raid dmg is just so high, PWS has once again taken over.

It depends on your goal. There is nothing interesting or skillful about absorbing completely non-fatal raid damage with a shield, and getting big numbers because you sniped all of the healing that no one else had a chance to attempt to heal with a comparably efficient spell. Big numbers mean nothing when you can't save someone from impending death because they already have Weakened Soul from a Shield cast on them at 100% health. That said, Shields are great for saving people's lives, provided they are used as such.

All a regen nurf or Max mana nurf will do is push the problem back into the next tier while having bad unintended consequences in PvP, 5mans and levelling.

The core of the problem is that mastery is lumping all of it's power into one spell that is spammable. Look at all the healing other classes masteries give them spread over 4-5 spells and lump all of that onto one spell. That is what is wrong with disc right now and it can't be fixed by changing stuff round the edges such as regen or total mana pool.

Right now Mastery causes PWS to scale over twice as fast as other spells as you gain gear. E.G. if going from T11 gear to T12 gear is a 5% stat increase then you might get a 2% increase in flash heal, renew and greater heal. The same gear (assuming a mastery focus) will give a 4-5% increase in potency to PWS. Thus as gear increases PWS becomes exponentially better and better and the gap between it and all other tools in the disc arsenal will become bigger and bigger.

There are 2 ways of addressing this. One is short term and is focussed on reducing the spamability of PWS such that it is not out of control. This is where suggestions such as removing/changing soul warding or capping the number of simultaneous shields come from. This will solve the problem this tier and maybe next tier but eventually PWS will just be so powerful it becomes an issue again.

The second solution revolves arround the mastery. You could brute force it and just drop the mastery conversion ratio but this actually makes mastery even more of a 1 spell trick pony as Aegis becomes irrelevant. Alternativly you find some way of spreading the mastery to other spells via the PoH Aegis model. This would be my personal preferred option but is obviously somthing that requires major investment of developer resources to effect.

Doesn't Mastery already get spread to all heal spells via DA and crit?

On the topic of Renew - would the 2 points be better used in Darkness to make extra renew ticks more attainable? Or is 10% to each tick a better use of the points?

Are you using Renew enough to justify spending any talent points on it alone? I only find myself casting it when I'm on the move, PoM is on CD and I can't find a target I'd rather bubble. Between the two I'd spend 2 points in Darkness but I'm not finding haste especially useful at the moment. Veiled Shadows might be a stronger option, especially if the extra fiend lets you move further away from spirit.

Don't forget the improved Surge of Light now and Desperate Prayer is essentially a second Healthstone. Our holy priest said that his SoL FH procs have been re-proccing SoL!

The reason PW:S spam is so favorable compared to other heals is that Mastery improves PW:S 100% of the time where it only improves DA on your Crit%. This results in a PW:S which is already a very good spell scale much better.

The balance for which PW:S rides is also tough. Premptive "healing" which lasts for as long as PW:S does creates a level of ease and allows for a high level of effective absorption. An effective PoH is just slightly better than a much easier to use and more forgiving PW:S spam on the same targets. Not to mention that you can shield in expectation of heavy damage, and be PoH'ing during the time other healers just started healing making a Disc priest capable of handling the same damage over a longer period of player time.

The easiest way IMO to limit PW:S spam if Blizzard cares to do it is to reduce the duration of PW:S... For tanks and saving people during or immediately prior to damage the duration doesn't need to be quite so long. The strength with PW:S is having >250k in shields outstanding with plenty of time for them to get consumed. If you couldn't pre-shield so many people PW:S would become a more effective during damage tool for weaving in on lower health or at risk players.

The changes to discipline are/were much needed. PW: S went from a spell that no one would cast, not even at the beginning of a fight, to actually usable (abusable). The question comes in whether or not it breaks game content with it's effectiveness. I have not really seen a fight where raid shielding does break content. H.Chimaeron is close during the final phase, but absorption affects are in game to circumvent times when healing is less than optimal.

If some sort of reduction in effectiveness is warranted, reducing the duration of the pw: S would work well. Having the weakened soul debuff reduced through Strength of Soul allows for great single target healing and is almost needed to maintain the effectiveness of the single target healer. The duration of the buff of Power Word: Shield could be reduced from 30 seconds to 25 or 20 seconds to limit the amount of raid spam. Increasing the mana cost, as above posters have stated will only hinder pvp and push the problem into the next tier of content.

As it is now, when I try to raid spam, I usually can only cover 3 groups, mainly because I'm having to cast other spells to heal.

Log for H. Chimaeron kill

Frankly speaking through, it makes good sense to utilize PW: S exclusively because of the lack of overheals and the EHP the tanks get.

Pashark: thanks, the link is fixed now

Personally, I'm fine with using shields sparingly or only on the tank except in emergencies. The question I have now is how does this effect rapture returns? Will the mana cost increase trivialize the mana gained through rapture, and will it still be worth reapplying after every rapture ICD? Does the new mana cost actually exceed the amount you get back, or essentially just make the occasional PW:S mana neutral?