fetale

mm i believe holy as merit in a pvp environment,my reason by the time your rotation is in full swing and all the might of a spriest is on,if your not dead by a holy your ver very close,on a side note is sol bugged or it eats both the cooldown and the cast

 

HengeMaker

Just curious. How are you thinking this is accurate if you're not counting crits? One of the major strengths of a smite build is an extra 9 or 10% extra crit.

edit:
@Elimbras Its not a large point, but you don't seem to be including the 5% bonus from twin disciplines in your modeling of SoL procs.
edit2:You also seem to have left out inner focus(though that might be even more minor). Not even sure how to model it.

 

Elimbras

Indeed. Point 1 won't change a lot. Best way to bound it is to say that you won't gain more than 5% damage on crit Smites that triggers SOL. So, you gain less than a 2.5% more damage bonus on crit.

Inner focus is even more minor. I would linearize it : assuming pure smite spamm, it's 90 spells in 3 minutes. Then Inner focus is around 25/90 < 0.3% more crit chance... Linearization is not exact, but that gives the right order of the impact...

 

Kilee

I'm going into this discussion acknowledging a few things up front. I know that Holy DPS in its current form will never match the DPS of Shadow. I know that Holy DPS will never match the raid utility of Shadow. I will also agree with other posts, that the main problems with current Holy DPS are a lack of supported Glyphs, a lack of supported tier gear set bonuses, a lack of Spell Hit, and a lack of Crit and/or "execute" modifier. I also agree that it is a problem that holy priests do not give anything to the raid, and the raid in turn does not give much of anything back to the Holy Priest.

(All matters which I feel Blizzard could address if they really wanted to, but it appears to be the bottom line that Blizzard does not actually intend or even fathom for priests to raid as Holy DPS.)

Having fully admitted and conceded the afore-mentioned, I do feel that Holy DPS if done correctly would not be insignificant DPS, and would be... if not viable... a least a fun DPS spec to take in situations where you are not responsible for the success or failure of the group (in short, for 5-mans and casual raids).

As I see it, you have two options for Smite Spec:

Option #1: Pure Smite

Option #2: Hybrid Smite

With the first spec, you're giving yourself a tad more surviveability (stronger self-shields), and more mana regen. (Rapture gives you mana back when your shields are absorbed.) One of Holy DPS's overall weaknesses is that you cannot sustain a cast rotation indefinately (at least, not as long as Shadow). Also, with the second spec you are sacrificing range in order to close with the enemy and cast Shadow spells. It is my feeling for this reason that the first spec will turn out to be the easier one to use, and will (in reality) end up being a higher DPS spec than the hybrid (if not in theory, it will in practice where cast rotations involving refreshing dots would break up the synergy created by Surge of Light, the Holy Fire Glyph, Inner Focus, and Power Infusion).

In short I feel that adding Shadow Spells to a Holy DPS build's cast rotation is betraying the spirit and the point of the build. If you're going for maximum DPS, why spec into Holy DPS at all? However, I concede to people who are trying to legitimize the spec by adding a hybrid shadow talent organisation - I think that is a worthwhile annilization at the least.

I would also like to do a little cross-examination of people's calculations in regards to the value of smite in relation to stats. I will (generously) assume that a moderately well-geared priest has the following stats:

Normal Priest in iLevel 213 gear
Intellect: 960 + 15% (Mental Strength) = 1100
Spirit: 700 + 10% (Divine Spirit + Enlightenment + Spirit of Redemption) = 770
Hit: 14% (We'll assume that a Shadow Priest or Moonkin will be in the raid.)
Crit: 20% (from gear) + 8% (Focused Will + Holy Specialization) = 28%
Haste: 10% (from gear) + 6% (Enlightenment) = 16%
Spellpower: 2000 (from gear) + 770*.25 (Spiritual Guidance) = ~2200 (rounded for ease of calcuations)

I feel these are fairly realistic and fair numbers to use as a base.

You also have the following modifiers due to talents or glyphs:

1.04 (Focused Power)
1.1 (Searing Light)
1.2 to Smite (Glyph of Holy Fire)

Given that a basic rank 12 smite does 750 damage average...

Smite w/o Holy Fire: (750+2200*.7143)*(1+.5*.28)*1.04*1.1 = 3,027
DPCT = 3,027/1.68 = 1,802
DPCT w/ Power Infusion: 3,027/1.34 = 2,259

Smite w/ Holy Fire: 3,027*1.2 = 3,632
DPCT = 3,632/1.68 = 2,162
DPCT w/Power Infusion: 3,632/1.34 = 2,710

Given that Holy Fire Does relatively the same amount of DPS (actually a little higher), Surge of Light will be occasionally be up, which will give you a slightly higher DPCT, and the occasional burst from Power Infusion.

Adding Shadow Word Pain and Devouring Plague to this, I can see this spec sustaining around 2.5k DPS unbuffed, occasionally hitting peeks of 3k. Taking a "Hybrid Smite" build should increase the overall DPS to a little.

(But on the whole, I still do not feel that adding shadow spells to this build is going to increase overall DPS, due to you running out of mana during extended fights. Smite is going to be significantly cheaper to cast, due to Surge of Light.)

My point being, in my epxerience this is not an insignificant amount of DPS. We have not factored in things like Meta Gems, Consumable Buffs, Raid buffs, etc... I would expect to see this Holy Smite Priest ranked lower-range on the DPS meters of a typical raid night on any given boss fight, but always above the tanks at the least.

But make no mistake, this is a far cry away from the beween 3.5k and 4k that an equally geared shadow priest would be doing.

 

Sinndir

One thing that holy priests (even disc) do well is provide damage when damage is needed. For example, on Yogg-Saron I go down to the brain as the healer and pump out about 250k damage to the brain in 3 phases. Is that a lot? No, not really but it is more than a resto druid would do who would be next best suited to go to the brain room.

We have a DPS spec, it is shadow. Holy / smite priests will never be a viable class to bring to a raid for the pure purpose of DPS.

 

porktoss

Why not skip the Holy tree altogether? I realize this is probably not within the scope of your vision, but wouldn't it be more effective to consider yourself a Discipline Priest first with damage on the side?

Before I get to my take on this a little background information is in order. I am a brand new naive Shadow Priest that has just started raiding. My dual-spec is Discipline and I find that I'm called upon to heal a few fights where our normal Paladin healers have some difficulty. Often it feels that I am just barely having to cast to keep the raid alive. Loatheb in particular is pretty silly if I'm just casting prayer of healing between necrotic auras. So I think to myself, why can't I do a little DPS until the heals are needed? Being primarily Shadow I've already got all the gear I need for DPS... and my improvised healing set is just DPS items without the hit rating.

Consider this spec: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...0&version=9733

You get +20% shadow damage on top of the normal Disc talents, Mind Flay, Improved Mind Blast, but most importantly a 3 minute Shadowfiend to keep your mana up. I'm not so good with the math so I won't suggest any numbers... but Imagine using Borrowed Time to boost your Mind Flay/Penance/Mind Sear. I believe that instant cast or channeled spells don't consume the BT, so I suppose if your haste was high enough you would be able to Penance > MF > MF before the buff wears off. Mind blast probably isn't necessary for this spec so if you found threat to be an issue you could move some points out of Improved MB into Shadow Affinity.

Good damage mitigation + DPS, and enough healing power when its needed. Would it work out better than holy smite? I'm tempted to try it out on my next raid.

Edit: I just tried out Mind Sear on some dummies. 4.4s normal cast speed. 3.5s with BT up. Casting Mind Sear twice in a row still gives the 3.5s cast speed but I can't determine if it lasts for the whole channel.

 

Kilee

Porktoss,

Well I think the point of the thread is to find a build whose main nuke is Holy-based damage. The build you have outlined would have it's bread and butter nuke be Mind Flay. Plus I don't really think there is such a thing as a true "dual role" spec in Raiding. You're either DPSing, or you're Healing, with one taking priority over the other.

Most Disc priests are going to be put on a main tank, and for main tank healing, Inspiration is basically a "must have" talent which kind of nixes your build. Plus, you don't really have a good "bread and butter" heal spell with the build you've made, since you can't cast Greater Heals fast enough to matter, and you can't pick up the flash heal talents either. (You're basically a watered-down priest either way you look at it with that spec.)

Now when I started reading your reply, I thought you were going to recommend something like this:

Penance DPS

Basically a healing build with a little extra damage thrown in, so that you can do holy DPS whenever you are not healing, while still being an effective MT healer. I could totally see a priest doing something like this and doing DPS during a raid with some measure of effectiveness.

I was also thinking maybe taking your idea and using:

Some Weird Disc Tri-Spec

Although it strikes me as weird not to take Penance and the increased Shield, I could see a person arguing that you don't really need those talents anyway to be an effective healer... (although not sure if he'd win that argument. lol.)

 

porktoss

From my point of view inspiration doesn't seem necessary. I still have it of course, but my guild is really heavy on Holy Paladins. At the moment I will never be called upon to be a main tank healer. We already have another main spec Disc Priest anyway.

I'm not sure that "Most Disc priests are going to be put on a main tank" is true either. The other Disc threads in this forum seem to indicate that Disc is just as useful in the raid healing department, especially in Ulduar.

Anyway I think my point is that the Shadow tree shouldn't be ignored when talking about the viability of weird damage hybrid specs for Priests.

 

Kilee

From what I've experienced in Ulduar, a holy-specced priest tends to heal about twice the numbers of a disc priest when raid healing. You can try to justify that shields don't count on the healing meters, but a) it's not like the holy priests aren't casting shields either and b) shields aren't ever going to account for half of a priest's effective healing. The only real advantage of a disc priest is for tank healing where they increase the amount of effective health a tank has with their bubbles, shields, and 3% weakened soul effect. As disc, if you aren't tank healing, you're basically a watered down holy priest with a nice shield. And yes, I realise that's just my opinion, but the raid healing has got to come from somewhere, and disc priests just don't cut it when it comes down to volume and throughput in heavy damage fights. You aught to be able to look at any average WWS report on the net and see this for yourself - I don't consider that to be something that needs "proof", it should be common knowledge.

Edit: Seeing that my post recieved an infraction. I wanted to clarify what I was trying to say.

I do feel that Inspiriation is a necessary talent if you are going to heal, especially if you are disc. One of the primary Disc threads in the EJ forums supports this claim as well (in saying that disc is primarily for tank healing, and that Inspiration is a good supportive talent for tanks). The larger point being that taking shadow talents in leui of holy talents stretches you very thin and makes you a sort of "master of none" priest, or perhaps a better term would be "priest of unfortunate proportion". It will be very difficult to pull equal weight in raids with such a spec compared to simialrly specced priests who go down the holy tree. I don't think it's that people have not thought of taking a healing/shadow hyrbrid spec before, but more that this spec does not mesh well and form a synergy and thus people do not want to take it.

In the same line of reasoning, doing holy DPS while healing allows you to take the other holy talents which form a synergy with healing (5% crit, and .5 seconts off of smite/greater heal both help healing and DPS equally). Basically you get more bang for your buck by going down the holy tree rather than the shadow.

 

Xaphania

Saying a disc priest has less raid healing output than a holy priest is irrelevant, in my opinion. The value of a disc priest watching the raid is the quick shields that buy time for the other healers to heal people up before they die. And a good disc priest will be tank healing, but shielding other raid members at the same time.

Edit: I originally missed the fact that this was related to a disc dps discussion. If a disc priest came to a raid and was doing a significant amount of DPS, I'd think that the heals that they did toss out would be mostly on the tank, and therefore Inspiration would still be a "required" talent.

 

Kilee

I was commenting on Porktoss' comment that a disc priest is not necessarily going to be a tank healer and therfore doesn't need Inspiration, which is relevant to this discusion in the context of what talents form a synergy together for trying to maintain both a healing spec with added DPS. You've incidentally supported my stance that a disc priest should be a tank healer (which would support a need, or at least a logical conclusion, to take the Inspiration talent). I do not disagree with anything you've said about Disc priests being useful or contributing to the raid, as long as you agree that they are best-suited to tank healing.

 

Jazzer

The goal with doing DPS as holy/disc should be that you are also a very capable healer. Anyone who wants to DPS as a priest should be shadow. If you are doing DPS as holy and not be healing whatsoever, then you should just be shadow. At least that's true for the current state of the game.

There are times when doing damage as a holy/disc spec priest is certainly useful though. For example, there's no reason to not toss in a few nukes on the heart for XT-002 while the bots stroll in. Also, if you are the brain room healer in the Yogg fight, helping out with nukes on the brain is still very useful.


Anyway, I wanted to share this spec I came up with which is mostly tailored to being the brain room healer in the Yogg fight.

After our initial night of tries on Yogg (a little as disc, a little as holy), I was finding the ability to sprint not only the tanks moving around the guardians to be useful, but also getting the brain-room people into the brain room after killing the tentacles. On top of that, I did have quite a bit of time to help out with DPS on the brain. This got me to thinking of a spec that was pretty much tailored to the role I was playing in the fight.

Here's what I came up with: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
2 points are left over which can go to either Imp Flash, Empowered Healing, Focused Will, etc.. I would personally lean toward Imp Flash due to it being the healing spell I used most often during the fight.

I did feel significantly gimped for straight up healing, but the role I played didn't require a ton of healing output. Being able to sprint everyone to the brain after the tentacles died coupled with the damage I contributed to the brain ended up saving us from having a 4th set of portals on what turned out to be our kill.

I probably won't be speccing like this for any future Yogg kills, but I actually did get to test this spec out in that scenario, and if you don't need any more healing for P1 or P3 and are the brain room healer, I'd say this spec works really well for that.

Every wipe is a learn.

 

CuriousPriest

On the note of hoping for changes, I would love to see lightwell replaced with a holy form or something. If it did get implemented it would be difficult to tune it to affect both healing and dpsing, so it probably couldn't help make up for some of the % increased damage that shadow gets because it would likely end up being a healing talent. The only change i couldn't see Blizzard making would have to be to Surge of Light. It would lead to some brokenness for healing, if it turned into something more fluid, like sudden doom is for death knights right now (correct me if that wasn't what you meant), but as I have ended up viewing this topic: nothing but wishful thinking

 

Aëdes

but so was Shadow DPS a while back, so were a lot of specs.

I often hear shadow priests noting they they seem to be lacking the the single target DPS department, which may or may not be true. Maybe a non-shadow DPS spec could be a remedy for that. The Discipline tree is already on the verge of become a tree with 2 viable specs in it, much like Feral for Druids. A non-shadow based DPS priest would need a +hit talent like every other caster class in the game has, and then it would also need some mana pool help of some kind.

Bliz has been talking about adding a replenishment effect to more classes. It seems like a spec like this would be a good cantidate. Holy Fire still doesn't have a glyph, so it's not hard for me to imagine a glyph that gives Holy Fire some kind of mana booster. Even a JoW-type effect would probably be enough to get this spec over the hump, so imagine a Holy Fire that returned 2% mana from attacks while the DoT was ticking.

It is just wishful thinking at the moment, but it wouldn't really take a lot of work to get the spec off the ground--and Bliz might be inclined to supply it if there was enough demand.

 

ildon

The strength of tank/DPS hybrid trees can largely be controlled by "stances" and the requirement of defense rating. Look at how overpowered DK's were (and arguably continue to be) in PvP due to being able to grab defensive talents and offensive talents in the same tree so easily. Feral druids are pretty strong, too, and were bordering on overpowered when the expansion came out, but DKs/Ret paladins eclipsed them so greatly it was mostly overlooked. Warriors aren't in this position as often because it's much more costly for them to change stances (both in rage and in ability to deal/take damage).

Priests have always been on the verge of being overpowered, especially in small group PvP, due to their combination of CC, utility, and offensive output combined with their healing. The only thing that has really kept them under control is that they wear cloth armor, and that their utility spells are highly mana inefficient. Note that when Paladins got nerfed, priests immediately became the dominant healer. I believe if druids had been strongly nerfed in S3 or S4, it would have been priests that ended up on top then, too. (Well, maybe paladins again. Priests were getting owned pretty hard by warglaives/double 4pc rogues and hunters. But my point is priests were still extremely strong back then, too.)

Now take either healing tree and add in the talents required to make it do viable raid DPS. Unless they have to make some HUGE tradeoff to do that kind of damage and you're looking at an extremely overpowered PvP healer. "Holy Form" would probably not be enough. When a shadow priest drops shadowform, he has ZERO talents supporting his healing spells. If our theoretical holy/disc priest dropped holy form to heal, he would potentially have the full support of an entire healing tree behind his healing.

Can Blizzard solve this problem and make a viable DPS/Healing hybrid tree out of either Holy or Disc? I believe so. Is the design/balance effort worth the result? I don't think so. Shadow is a fun, viable, and interesting DPS playstyle. It now requires extremely minimal re-gearing to swap and do "good" DPS. And with dual specs now available another barrier of entry (respec cost) has been erased. Remember, if there was a DPS-viable version of one of the healing trees, you would still be respeccing/reglyphing between "holy dps" and "holy healing" for raids.

 

CuriousPriest

The dps for shadow came at a pretty steep price in my opinion. The shadow priest lost a lot of raid utility in order to gain its dps (the original replenishment, shadow weaving for raid, original misery). So i suppose it would have been better to state that the main reason holy dps is wishful thinking, as has been pointed out earlier, is that it would lead to some unbalancing of the class, and might end up nerfing the healing aspect of holy priests. I am still annoyed with how the mana regen has played out and do not want to deal with further nerfs......

 

elf-boy

I have been playing around with:

The World of Warcraft Armory

Both doing quests, farming, and on several heroics. My standard build is a traditional shadow spec. Results have been interesting and mixed. Killing mobs, one or two at a time, the holy/smite is superior. It kills them faster. It also runs out of mana. With Shadow I kill slightly slower (onset of dots to tick is my guess) and with dispersion and lower recharge on my mana chicken I don’t ever have to stop and drink.

Another thing to note is reflective shield. Recount is not capturing damage done. I do see significant results solo. It also can proc my darkmoon death card. In group I have been keeping a shield on any non-rage based tanks but don’t know how much DPS this is adding.

When power infusion is up I do very good DPS. then for the rest of the 1.6 min to get it back I don’t.

I see just a few small things that could make this a viable spec. A holyfire glyph increasing the DOT to 12 seconds and allowing it to crit. (more surge of light procs and the ability to keep the DOT all the time). As others have mentioned a talent to increase crits to 200% from 150%.

And something to extend mana. Best bet would be a talent/glyph to decrease the cost of smite.

As it stands, I can do 700-900 more DPS on Boss type targets with shadow (if I pay close attention to my DOT timer) and have much less worry about mana.

The strength I am seeing for the Holy/Smite is that you can start healing at the drop of a hat with better heals then shadow.

I'd like to see blizz make holy/smite viable. With a few glyphs or very careful talent changes it would not change healing specs.

 

François

I see you use Extase as a mana saving tool. For pure grinding build, Spirit tap is better, it guarantees you never run oom, as long as you have some spirit oriented gear.

Reflective shield does damage only when YOU absorb damage, not on damage absorbed py party or raid members.

Edit : Extase is the french name of Rapture talent. I followed the armory link given, it lead to the page in french on my computer, and I forgot to translate back.

 

Tunga

Edit: Above post appeared while typing and said most of the same stuff.

Reflective shield is self-only, and rage generation now ignores shields (both ways).

For grinding I've used a very similar build to yours but I put a couple of points in Spirit Tap for virtually unlimited mana. Obviously this isn't effective in raids though.

 

elf-boy

I very much appreciate the information about shields and the suggestion for using spirit tap. Good info and a good idea.

I am not familiar with the term "Extase" Could you please help me with the definition? I am also tempted to try something along these lines, The World of Warcraft Armory .

My idea here would be to SW:P, Dev Plague, then Holy fire each time it comes up, Mind Blast (to proc surge of light and boost spirit) and then Mind Flay when none of those are up. The Idea that between Mind Blast and Mind Flay there should be much more chances for crits, allowing more surge of lights. Solo, Farm, I might even Just Mind flay, and use procs. If I get bored enough I'll spec my second build over and try it out. I know this build is going to be far less healing friendly. Please feel free to give any and all constructive feedback. Maybe go with the Glyphs of Smite, SW:P, and not sure what to use for the 3rd. probably stick with PW: S)

 

Makapuu

He means the talent Rapture. Extase is Ecstasy in French.

 

graahl

I'm currently leveling my priest in a disc/holy build. And my dps, in healing gear, is usually just as good as other classes.
Take a look at this site, might be posted earlier
Holy Fire Spec: Smite Leveling Build Lvl 70 to 80 [3.1 Edition]

 

CuriousPriest

Once raid content starts appearing though, you will quickly see that the dps specs and classes will start outperforming the spec you posted. The fact that your wasting points on reflective shield (which if your getting hit by a boss to cause it to actually affect your dps something is wrong) actually takes points away that could be used on marginally useful talents.

I recently tried a 25m naxx run with a spec similar to the one i posted earlier, and was able to sustain around 3100dps with a mix of ulduar and naxx gear. Considering the items I had were not quite choice, i could see a much crazier person who actually collected the more suitable pieces reaching 3500 if not higher. Granted I then promptly got scolded since the other healers were having difficulty keeping up the tanks during patchwerk (sigh at alts).

Edit: And to show I'm not crazy Wow Web Stats

 

elf-boy

I very quickly came to the conclusion that rapture is really only good for trying to recoup the cost of having cast the shield.

I'm in a 52/19/0 at the moment with my second spec. Next time I try a disc/holy smith build I am going to rethink where I put those points.... unless there just isn't another good place to put them.

I may try the holy/shadow smite build. See how that works in the next week or so.

 

Xel2

Reflective shield is not a waste of talent points in his case as it is clearly stated on the spec that it is a leveling build, not a full dps build.

If you want to get a little more serious about smite, try 37/27/7. I have seen wws report of a smite priest reaching over 3.8k using only naxx 25 gear. Comparing with shadow or any other dps spec it is not that impressive, but you must know that the spec is only for fun by now right? It's not efficient.

Anyway, you probably know this already but if you want to bump up your dps slightly, make sure you have 3/3 Enlightenment and 214 spell haste ratings, you will need more due to latency etc. This will allow exactly 4 smite to be casted for every 7 seconds duration of holy fire dot. Each smite will only take 1.75 seconds to cast. If you don't have the amount of haste rating required, you will only be able to cast 3 smite, this will gimp your dps in the long run. Also, don't use Holy Nova for aoe pulls, HN may give you a free SoL smite but its dps still sucks regardless. PI + Inner Focus + Mind Sear = KaBoOm.