Why do you "need to stack aegis for the spikes"? This seems like a very inefficient method of healing.

If there's little to heal, you can let it to the other healers.
Sure you are 'stealing' their mana, but so what?

If you help them, which is not really needed, the global healing will remain the same anyway, since it's capped to damage income. But in that case, you do not improve your mana regen. So global mana regen suffers (unless all your colleagues are priests with solace too, or unless all your colleagues have such active manaregen spells).

Healing is teamwork.

If you are the only healer, little damage do not force you to cast heals all the time. You may cast Solace, then when the life bars are low enough, you heal them.

Arison mindbender provides ~15k mana per minute more than shadowfiend or roughly 1250mp5. 2.5 coasts of solace per minute add 5250 mana.

Why would you replace solace with a smite or holy fire? There is an optimum number of solaces that you can cast per fight. If you cast more or less you will cast less heals than the maximum possible.

Solace effectively allows you to trade some of your casting time in exchange for being able to spend a larger amount of mana in your remaining casting time.

You can either heal all the time and pace yourself so you dont run oom. Or you can cast solace until you have enough mana to go flat out for the rest of the encounter.
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Having little to heal for a long time often means there is more damage being done than a short strong spike lasting seconds. This is not true of every encounter, but it is true for many.

If you only heal the spikes your output will be very low, even in fights like feng or stone guardian, where there is more damage in the spikes than the rest of the encounter. My experience is that if you only heal the spikes your will never run oom even fi you dont cast a single solace. The difference between the top healer and the last healer is how much of the remaining damage they take, because spikes are cleared quickly by absorbs and instant/fast aoe casts. That is why solace kinda sucks on spikey fights. You can keep yourself chain casting practically with mindbender anyway. When solace shines is those fights with very high mana drain. Solace minimises your time spent oom, quite efficiently.

Ideally what you want in every single encounter is to maximise the time you spend casting and use as much mana with spells that are big and fat and high HPM.

I have not seen an encounter so far where you ignore the low damage phases and still produce an acceptable output.

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I have not found a way to produce a nice healing output with disc without stacking aegis. It might seem inefficient but remember everytimy ou PoH someone you leave an aegis shield. Since you will cast several PoHs after a spike during top-up, you end up with a lot of left over aegis. If you don't keep that alive you end up with a PoH that heals for 60% its normal amount. Also stacking mastery is a good idea for disc since so much of your healing is absorbs. Spirit Shells helps with that by turning spells into pure absorbs, but its just not enough on its own.

I find that spikes are healed extremely quickly by other healers and disc just can't compete. Most of what you get is what you absorb. If you are able to get good numbers without stacking aegis I would be delighted to know how you did it.

Shadowfiend is 27k (9 hits of 3%) mana per 3 minutes, or 9k mana per minute, or 750mp5. Mindbender is 16060 mana per minute (11 hits of 1.46%), or 1338mp5. And yes, the tooltip lies. It is 1.46% mana, not 1.3% mana.

My numbers for Shadowfiend were off in my original post, but I just tested it to confirm. So the difference is 588mp5, obviously in Mindbender's favor. So Havoc, you can't just say Mindbender provides "another" 15k mana because you still get some of it from Shadowfiend.

To compare regen, you have to look at the 588mp5 delta. 588mp5 is 7056 mana per minute, or ~10 casts of Solace ignoring the mana you'd gain by not casting mana-consuming spells. If you're using Solace instead of Heal, you lose the healing but also don't spend 1900 mana over 2.5 seconds (Heal's cast time, before being modified by haste, of course). Since PW:Solace benefits from haste, we can simply divide the cast times; in the time you cast one Solace, you could cast 0.6 Heals, which cost 1900 mana. So using Solace instead of heal gains 700 mana and prevents the spending of 1140 mana. With no haste, that's 1840 mana per 1.5s, aka 6133mp5.

So how many "packets" of 1840 mana do you need to match the regen of Mindbender (which is 588mp5, as above)? In 60 seconds, 588 mp5 is 7056 mana. So you need to 3.8 casts per minute (as opposed to my 2.5 number earlier).

Bottom line: mana not spent is mana regenerated. Only take Solace when you have downtime in a fight (significant time where you would otherwise not cast). Otherwise Mindbender, potentially with time not casting a spell when you might want to, is far superior regen and hps. In general when people say they like how Solace feels for regen, they likely aren't accounting for what would happen if they simply didn't heal during those times. Since you can always choose to not cast to "gain" most of the regen Solace provides, you really do need the full ~10 casts per minute of Solace to keep up with Mindbender's incremental mana over Shadowfiend.

Take Solace on fights where there are lulls where you otherwise wouldn't be doing much.

Szeretlek: Of course, pre-shielding will yield a higher hps in a fight where your raid has more than enough healing capability. That log shows what happens, then: your resto druid's hots were around 50% overheal. If I can spend 1 PoH to heal up a spike vs spending two PoH to build up the Aegis to absorb that spike in advance, the choice of what to do seems obvious to me. The mana inefficiency of pre-stacking Aegis could easily be translated into a movement of regen stats into throughput secondaries instead.

I see you are using level 85 values. If you want to do this properly you do it like this: Mindbender returns 11*1.46 = 16.06% of your max mana per minute and costs 1 GCD per minute. Shadowfiend returns 9% of your max mana per minute, with 0.33 GCDs per minute. The gain is 6.06% of your max mana and the cost is 0.67 GCDs per minute. You need to cast 6.06/0.7 = 8.657 solaces per minute to get equal return, but hat costs you an additional 8 GCDs per minute over shadowfiend. = 20% of your casting time in one minute must be used for solace, which is not a joke. As disc 27s of every minute are spent casting spirit shell or spamming heals with archangel, 16seconds stacking evangelism and you need to use PWS as well for rapture every 9seconds per minute. That means 27+16+9 = 52seconds. Not much time left for solace.

However that kind of thinking is not right for comparing solace with mindbender, I explained why in the other thread, where we modeled the whole thing.

There is a cap on how many solace casts are productive in an encounter based on the length on the encounter and your spell selection. You can cast that amount of solaces in practically every encounter.

Did you notice what I posted before. 1000 spirit traded for 1000 haste costs you 688mp5 and gains like 2% extra casting time. Trading spirit for intellect produces a similar result, except when its buff food/flash, where the trade is still bad but less so. If you do trade away spirit for throughput, what will happen is you will cut your healing out by a very large margin. Trading spirit for throughput before ~13k spirit is a terrible terrible idea.

Attempting to not stack aegis will leave you in the dust of other healers and probably kicked out of your raid, because you are not doing your job. The whole point of bring disc to the fight is to reduce incoming damage. Absorption stacks instantly "heal" part of the spike, so they deliver their healing much faster than actual heals and help minimise the time members of your raid spend in the "danger zone" after a spike.

Equally importantly, PoH your main aoe heal is slow and only hits 5 targets, so if you have to heal 5 groups, it will take you 10seconds to get the last one. In contrast monks other classes hit a lot more targets simultaneously and heal the fast. Having someone hitting each group with big fat heals also increases their overheal. You are also forgetting that 40% of PoH is aegis. In other words if you only cast it when there is something to heal you are healing them initially for 60% of the heal and then leaving behind an absorption shield. If you don't keep that alive until they take damage and you lose it you are only using 60% of your PoH.

If you only try to heal when PoH will actually heal something, you will only raise PoH mana efficiency slightly, but you will contribute very little to the raid and your personal healing will be utter shite.

None of the numbers change for 90 as they are all based on your total mana pool -- they scale equally. And while it is your opinion that your way of thinking is correct, that is a long way from being a fact. I find your logic and theorycrafting to be pretty obtuse and circuitous, but part of that is the formulas aren't appearing for me. Perhaps if you restate your viewpoint more concisely it will be clearer, but so far, I'm far from convinced your logic is correct. Saying things like Disc never having downtime because of building DA stacks is pretty silly, for instance (using PoH for pure DA pre-emption is horrible efficiency). It's also tough to

As near as I can tell, your logic is "if you use fast, high throughput spells, you have spare time to cast solace because you have to stop casting sometimes because otherwise go OOM." You also base much of your logic on earlier experiences in LFR/dungeons (before our spells were reduced) and seem to ignore base regen and opportunity cost of not using even lower efficiency spells (particularly Smite as Disc).

Basically I still think it comes down to fight mechanics. Each fight will present different regen opportunities. The problem with Solace is you can get most of the benefits simply by not casting, regardless of which talent you take from the tier. The 0.7% mana isn't that big a deal compared to not spending mana during the same time, but you can get that effect simply by sitting on your hands. Mana not spent is mana regenerated.

There is no loss in HPS due to the loss of casting time when there's nothing to heal at some point.
Any heal you'd do would overheal 100% in those cases.

There is only partial loss in HPS when there's almost nothing to heal at some point.
And there might be no loss at all, if you can cast one solace then one heal, and top everyone 100% with it (aka wait before healing, to make your heals more efficients).

HPS is limited to DPS income.

In order to be able to heal a fight, you need some amount of haste (reaction), power and mana regen. Usually, we have more than that, and all the stat we have more are to be chosen according to the comfort they give us.


edit: arison, I've made some web charts in the past. What would you think about giving numbers in % rather than absolute?
In your spell scaling table for instance, add columns with % for spellpower, crit, mastery and haste (and beware of roundings).
here's an (outdated) example:
Theorycraft priest

Depending on Mastery, 30-40% of PoH is in Mastery, the rest in the actual heal. This means if you use it only for preventative damage, you are less effective than if you use it only for healing an existing health deficit. Your own logic defeats itself; you say it's worth the DA but not worth just getting heals, despite the latter being larger.

Also, producing "high numbers" pretty much doesn't matter at all. If you think healing is about ranking and parsing, your priorities are busted. Healing is nothing like DPS; it's not about hitting the ideal HPS rotation. What matters -- and why we should care about spell HPS, HPM, etc -- is keeping people alive. Knowing how spells behave in terms of HPS and such is essential to know when to use certain spells but the goal isn't about parsing as high as possible. Healing is cooperative, not competitive. If your shields let other HoTs tick to topoff people, even if all of the shields aren't fully absorbed, that's a net win.

Smite is, of course, far from useless. It's a reasonably efficient spell, does damage (which certainly matters in some progression fights), reduces the cooldown on Penance, and stacks Evangelism much quicker than HF alone (or HF and Penance, though Penance is quite strong as a direct heal, so relying on the smart heal behavior of it is often not ideal).

As for producing high numbers with DA stacking, that's just silly. Sure, in current gear, with current raid nerfs, you can waste mana on DA stacking. But higher parses tend to come from PW:S stacking, not DA stacking, as you get higher HPCT from a shield than from DA that doesn't provide any actual healing. The HPM even becomes relatively close at that point, too. The main advantage of DA is you can chain it longer, though there are relatively few fights with long enough periods of zero damage to let you get it maxed on many people at once.

Well, I think absolutes make it much easier to verify that they are correct (blizzard often changes spells but can't update tooltips, thought his is more common in beta rather than release). I think it is an interesting number to show in general, though. I'll think about a way to factor it in (the calculator is already way, way full of data!).

[edit] Serrif pointed out correctly that I am making a mistake with the amount that PoH heals. I am dividing aegis by the amount healed by PoH, not the amount healed + the absorb. Aegis is actually 30% of a PoH. I edited the calculations below

How does my logic defeat itself. You cast 3 PoHs which heal each for 70% of the amount. They leave behind a 30% aegis. You waste most of it. Casting another 3 PoHs at 30% each to keep aegis alive leaves you with a net efficiency of 130/2 = 65%. With 6 extra PoHs that is 160/3 = 53%. Practically the same as casting the healing PoHs and leaving aegis to expire. 9 extra PoHs = 190/4 = 47.5%. With 12 extra PoHs its 220/5 = 42%.

If you can't understand the pattern still you are probably the only one in the thread.

Smite is as useless as your ideas. 18237 spellpower 5% crit 30% mastery: PoH applies 19194*(.05*0.9*1.3+0.3*1.3) = 8 608*5 = 43k and keeps alive previous aegis stacks it costs 13500 --> 3.18 HPM regardless of overheal

Smite with 5 evangelism stacks heals for 21000*(1+0.05(1+0.6*1.3)) = 22869 and costs 5670 mana --> 4 HPM with zero overheal.

When you factor in overheal PoH on 5 targets with just aegis ignoring anything else is almost the same HPM as a smite but more HPS. When you factor in keeping other aegis alive, PoH on 5 targets with 100% overheal is better than smite with zero overheal.

Because its instantly absorbed at spikes PoH with 100% overheal is massively more HPS in real terms than smite.

Who wants to stack evangelism faster? You want to stack if efficiently. Every smite you cast loses you some of the HPS benefit of archangel.

In any case, have you actually done any raids at 90? If so please post the logs so we can see whether your assumption is true. I am happy to post skada/recount shots of my fights.

What I have found is that unless you keep aegis alive you suck. You say you don't, please show us, instead of pretending that I don't know what I am talking about.

PW:S is pw:shield or pw:solace. If its PW:Shield you can forget it. Even in the current content before 5.0.4 Aegis was often above PoH healing itself and PWS is usually 3rd. Not all PoHs are 100% overheal but many are, because they keep aegis from other PoHs alive though they are useful.

Feel free to try to get your share of the healing from spikes with PoH. In an environment with instant smart heals or fast ticking hots, what you will get is mostly nothing.

DA stacking is critical for mitigating damage. You can't just rely on spirit shell. That saves more lives than you trying to heal people with a 2.5k cast for 20k (the rest is aegis) during a big aoe spike.

Here is an example: On Feng epicenter lasts ~4s and comes roughly every 30s. After those 4s the raid is at very low health. First one is spirit shell, but there will still be healing left over. You can expect an extra 2PoHs, Both of which will leave aegis that is unlikely to be absorbed. Second one you will probably get 3 PoHS with no OH and maybe 2-3more with partial OH. Only one of those will have its aegis used up by the epicenter damage. After spirit shell you can cast up to 4 PoHs with 100% overheal and still about as as well as leaving the aegis to expire. Without spirit shell you can cast 5 PoHs and [edit: do slightly worse] or 10 PoHs [edit: with a noticeable loss in HPM, but an increase in HPS] compared with leaving aegis to expire. That is a lot of extra absorb to keep ppl alive during epicenter and a greater amount of healing overall than you actually got with the healing part of the PoH. If you ignore that and just cast smite or heal on the tank you will just cost yourself a massive amount of absorbs and the mana used to build it. The benefit would be small. There is plenty of time to both stack aegis and stack evangelism until its useful to have it so faster evangelism stacks have a tiny tiny benefit.

We can discuss every fight out there all you like, I am certain I can demonstrate that even a 100% overhealing PoH is useful if it keeps aegis from a previous PoH alive.