Disc Priest - Mists of Pandaria - Page 6

Havoc12 · 12/14/12, 11:44 PM

There are plenty of fights where disc is much stronger than holy. Feng (both normal and hc), spirit kings, Elegon Hc, Gara'jat hc in mogu shan vaults.

In HoF, all fights except garalon are better as disc, but in particular, the 1st boss, blade-lord hc, windlord and empress, disc blows holy out of the water.

In ToES protectors and lei shi, disc is extremely strong.

There are a couple of fights though where holy is clearly the best spec. Garalon, elegon normal and tsulong. Garalon and tsulong are particularly bad for disc.

Sanctuary is a terrible spell. I don't understand why you think its amazing. For me it heals for like 3k per second. In many cases I find that not using it increases my HPS.

Getting good output from disc however is not very easy. Its easy to mess up very badly.

solace is pointless for disc. Also it is pointless for holy in fights with lots of down time.

urumii · 12/15/12, 8:26 AM

Originally Posted by Havoc12

There are a couple of fights though where holy is clearly the best spec. Garalon, elegon normal and tsulong. Garalon and tsulong are particularly bad for disc.

I'm curious how you came to these conclusions. Tsulong I agree with, but Elegon and Garalon I disagree.

Disc is faaar better for elegon, as evidenced by world of logs, and my personal experience.

On Garalon, if your raid stays close enough together, disc and holy are almost identical in HPS. Again this is evidenced by world of logs and experience.

I am not seeing how "holy is clearly the best spec" for those two fights.

royalpoet · 12/15/12, 12:02 PM

Does anyone know the timer on Lei Shi's Get Away ability, or if one exists at all? Is there a good way to get Spirit Shell up in advance of Get Away, or do you just try and get it up in advance of DBM's "Next special ability" (which seems to be unreliable, especially if she is in Protect mode when it should have gone off) and hope for the best?

Havoc12 · 12/15/12, 6:46 PM

Originally Posted by urumii

I'm curious how you came to these conclusions. Tsulong I agree with, but Elegon and Garalon I disagree.

Disc is faaar better for elegon, as evidenced by world of logs, and my personal experience.

On Garalon, if your raid stays close enough together, disc and holy are almost identical in HPS. Again this is evidenced by world of logs and experience.

I am not seeing how "holy is clearly the best spec" for those two fights.

Comparing world of logs parses is nonsensical. That depends entirely on what the other healers are doing and how your raid is organised. You can't really compare apples with oranges. Healers from different raids with different healing teams and different tactics are just not comparable. Having a good healing team with teamates that also rank regularly within the top 50 and a variable healer composition, means I have a great platform for comparing the two specs.

The highest rank in 25 man and 10man garalon for priests is holy not disc. The constant ticking damage, means its pretty much impossible to get decently large absorption stacks built, which is the whole point of the disc spec. On top of that although you might be able to hit a couple of full of nearly full groups that is in no way guaranteed especially if you have a mixed melee/ranged group. It is also a fight with significant movement, which affects disc more than holy.

The key difficulties in garalon are outhealing pheromones when its high stacks and keeping he kiters alive during the switch when the stacks are high. Holy cooldowns are better for this. Divine hymn can be channelled when the pheromone stacks begin to get high to keep everyone (including the kiter who is outside the raid) at high health. Guardian spirit is better at saving a kiter who is taking big hits from the pheromone if they fail at avoiding the boss cleave. Also holy requires less raid organisation to pull off high HPS. Overall Holy > Disc on garalon, because it has more mobility, is less dependent on raid staying grouped up and because its cooldowns are more useful.

Same situation on elegon. The highest rank is disc, but that is mainly due to the easily healable damage of p1. The part where healers really matter on elegon is the last burn phase. If the fight is close this is where its won or lost and holy is better than disc here, due to the healing buff not affecting spirit shell or barrier. This is obvious from looking at the logs. More importantly divine hymn is useful in pretty much every phase of the encounter, whereas barrier is only useful in p3.

Perkeyone · 12/15/12, 9:03 PM

Atonement scaling on Elegon

LEGEND
TOT  = touch of the titans  ( 50% damage and healing)
COE = curse of elements     (  8% damage            )
5E   = 5 stacks evangelism  ( 20% damage            )
AA   = archangel            ( 25%            healing)
TOF  = twist of fate        ( 15% damage and healing)

buffs                  | damage | healing
-----------------------+--------+--------
TOT                    |  1.5   |  2.25
TOT, COE               |  1.62  |  2.43
TOT, COE, 5E           |  1.94  |  2.92
TOT, COE, AA           |  1.62  |  3.04
TOT, COE, TOF          |  1.86  |  3.21
TOT, COE, AA, 5E       |  1.94  |  3.65
TOT, COE, TOF, 5E      |  2.24  |  3.86
TOT, COE, TOF, AA      |  1.86  |  4.02
TOT, COE, TOF, AA, 5E  |  2.24  |  4.82

Depending on the number of draw power stacks, atonement healing can out heal Divine Hymn, especially if you have the 4 piece cooldown reduction on penance. My group, for example, regularly gets 6 stacks (5 sets of adds killed) per phase, which means going into the last phase atonement can vary between 850% and 1060% healing depending on evangelism stacks and archangel cooldowns.

EDITED at least 5 times, sorry for any inconvenience

Havoc12 · 12/17/12, 1:02 PM

That is an odd calculation. I don;t see anyone getting 250k atonement hits. When I do it even with 12 stacks I get like 120k hits, but not double that. Lets revisit your assumption:

Having TOT, COE, TOF, 5E gives you a damage modifier of

1+0.5+0.08+.15+0.2 = 1.93

Elegon takes 120% increased damage so 2.18*2.2 = 4.246 times damage. That gets fully translated to healing and hte following modifier applies: 1+0.5+0.25+0.15 = 1.9 i.e the maximum possible modifier is 8.0.

First of all I question ToF, I was not aware that this was changed to benefit absorbs, which means PWS and spirit shell are not going to benefit from it and you will mainly get the buff for the last 15%, which is the smallest part of the fight.

Second this is only for penance and only for like one penance every 30s. This is not going even going to beat PoH spam. Holy fire and smite are also needed to maintain archangel and that means you are not constantly spamming with 5 stacks. You have on average 4 stacks overall. During archangel you have 3.6 stacks of archangel.

So taking ToF and the 5 stacks out out the damage buff is 1.58. During archangel you have 3.6 stacks on average and 25% increased healing so the damage buff becomes 1.76. The healing buff is 1.75. Taking it all together we get 1.76*2.2*1.75 = 6.776

Outside archangel you have 5 stacks and so your damage buff is 1.78 and your healing buff is 1.5. Together it adds up to 1.78*2.2*1.5 = 5.874.

Taking the average you get (5.874*12+6.776*18)/30 = 6.4152, which is a far cry from what you calculated and it agrees with the averages seen on various logs. It is also below the value of PoH for both holy and disc and well below the value of Divine Hymn, both of whom benefit from the 50% healing buff.

In other words For disc is it best to stack atonement then activate archangel and spam PoH instead of just spamming atonement. Even if it was true what you calculated would result in massive overheal. 250k heals concentrated on 1 target is not nearly as valuable as 60-70k hits on 5 targets + mastery.

ohcrocsle · 12/17/12, 3:31 PM

Originally Posted by royalpoet

Does anyone know the timer on Lei Shi's Get Away ability, or if one exists at all? Is there a good way to get Spirit Shell up in advance of Get Away, or do you just try and get it up in advance of DBM's "Next special ability" (which seems to be unreliable, especially if she is in Protect mode when it should have gone off) and hope for the best?

As far as I could tell, there's no reliable way to predict which spell will be used. It looked like the spell timing is at least partially based on the time passed since the end of the previous spell cast. When we started working on the boss, Spirit Shell was up for each spell, but as the raid got better at clearing Hide and Get Away, the cooldowns were no longer lining up and I was only able to get SpS up in preparation for every other spell. I use BigWigs and the timers were not accurate for anything after the first ability use, DBM may be different.

[sourceName = "Lei Shi" and spell != "Spray" and type=TYPE_AURA] if you want to investigate logs. The "Hide" aura fading shows up only sometimes in the logs.

Havoc12 · 12/17/12, 3:46 PM

Originally Posted by ohcrocsle

As far as I could tell, there's no reliable way to predict which spell will be used. It looked like the spell timing is at least partially based on the time passed since the end of the previous spell cast. When we started working on the boss, Spirit Shell was up for each spell, but as the raid got better at clearing Hide and Get Away, the cooldowns were no longer lining up and I was only able to get SpS up in preparation for every other spell. I use BigWigs and the timers were not accurate for anything after the first ability use, DBM may be different.

[sourceName = "Lei Shi" and spell != "Spray" and type=TYPE_AURA] if you want to investigate logs. The "Hide" aura fading shows up only sometimes in the logs.

isnt it better to use spirit shell on the tanks?

ohcrocsle · 12/17/12, 4:14 PM

Originally Posted by Havoc12

isnt it better to use spirit shell on the tanks?

Later in the fight, yes. Early in the fight, your SF soakers aren't drawing as many heals from your tank healers and Get Away is a more dangerous ability, so using spirit shell to get absorbs on your raid makes it much more difficult for anyone to die.

Perkeyone · 12/17/12, 6:26 PM

Having TOT, COE, TOF, 5E gives you a damage modifier of

1+0.5+0.08+.15+0.2 = 1.93

The buffs are multiplicative, not additive.

First of all I question ToF, I was not aware that this was changed to benefit absorbs, which means PWS and spirit shell are not going to benefit from it and you will mainly get the buff for the last 15%, which is the smallest part of the fight.

I wasnt advocating the use of spirit shell or pws there. I was talking about atonement in the 3rd phase. And the up time on TOF depends on how often you heal targets below 20% AND how often you attack things below 20%. You can maintain very high uptime on the buff through each phase via adds.

Second this is only for penance and only for like one penance every 30s.

1 penance every 6-10 seconds.

Udain · 12/18/12, 2:29 AM

Holy vs Disc at Garalon, I think this argument is a slight non issue tbh, and the answer lies in Shaarra's comment brushing on tactics.
When we kill Garalon ranged tend to stay as a group and rotate round as the tanks move the boss, pheremones are handled by a single dedicated healer, I always use disc on this fight (I did do it as holy on beta) I find that as we have a loosely stacked group PoH/SS work well on ranged, melee tend to attack a leg at a time and using PwS on them along with PoM/PoH also works well, even Barrier is useful as you can place ahead of crush for ranged to use.
The critical point to all this is timing SS ahead of crush and again this comes down to controlled and communicated calls for pheremone changeovers making it predicatable

The key to disc now is always having "predicatable" incoming damage, once your raid achieves that by good comms and tactics then disc works well here

That said - I havent as yet tried holy, if you check my guilds logs you will see that in our last kill I only did 70khps and that boiled down to groups getting a little over dispersed and me mis-timing a few crushes - but the time before I did 102hps Healing done - 09-12 20:06 - Starlight - World of Logs

I do note Shaarra your last kill was in disc spec ;-) ?

Hamsda · 12/18/12, 7:56 AM

I think Garalon heavily depends on raid size and difficulty.

For our 10H kills, holy is much more preferable in my opinion due to several factors:
1.) I am lucky if I can hit 3 people in one group with a PoH because there are just 2 groups which will be all over the place (2 in front of the boss, 1 kiting, healers centered but one rather drawn to the rest of the raid another to the kiter, and so on)
2.) With crushes being based on a timer and happening more often, there are less crushes which I could use spirit shell on (and it wouldnt be as effective, see 1)
3.) DH is much more effective in that spread out scenario to either get people up before or after a crush than reducing the damage on maybe 5 people with PW:B.

Chakra: Sanctuary and 4pt14 is pretty awesome for Cascade and CoH in that scenario, thats why my choice was holy for this fight.

kouby · 12/19/12, 8:10 AM

Originally Posted by Hamsda

I think Garalon heavily depends on raid size and difficulty.

For our 10H kills, holy is much more preferable in my opinion due to several factors:
1.) I am lucky if I can hit 3 people in one group with a PoH because there are just 2 groups which will be all over the place (2 in front of the boss, 1 kiting, healers centered but one rather drawn to the rest of the raid another to the kiter, and so on)
2.) With crushes being based on a timer and happening more often, there are less crushes which I could use spirit shell on (and it wouldnt be as effective, see 1)
3.) DH is much more effective in that spread out scenario to either get people up before or after a crush than reducing the damage on maybe 5 people with PW:B.

Chakra: Sanctuary and 4pt14 is pretty awesome for Cascade and CoH in that scenario, thats why my choice was holy for this fight.

But Garalon's raid damage is entirely predictable, even more so than other fights, especially with crush being on a timer in heroic mode. The raid damage output is essentially a see-saw with some crushes thrown in there to make it a bit more fun.
At first I must admit I preferred Holy just because it was easier to have renews all over the place being refreshed by heals & such, but now that I've nagged my ranged dps enough to stay more or less clumped, I really prefer disc.

One point is the spirit shells before the crush that totally cancel out at least one out of 2 crushes, and the second point is that atonement healing is very effective when you're running along in the blue circles (which I'll admit is a LOT more easier once you get the 4piece set bonus).

my group setup for Garalon is all casters in second group, both healers, both tanks and 1 melee in the first group. the second healer stands near the front leg so I can aim my poh at him and hit everyone (except for the 1 melee who occasionally is on the back leg) and the second group will always get 4 people poh'd as one of the casters will often be kiting. 4 guaranteed hits on a poh is more than enough for me to stay disc.

But as it's been said before, disc vs holy for Garalon is more of a non-issue and has probably much more to do with personal preference. And as long as chakra stances have 30 second cooldowns, my personal preference will never go to holy, whatever the fight.

Udain · 12/19/12, 9:21 AM

Just as an aside on the issue of grouping and PoH - do try gridstatuspriestaoe addon - its a bit old but still works as long as your libmapdata addon is up to date.

It will offer you a better choice of your best fit target to place your PoH on as (and this is my preference) an Icon. Esp useful when placing SS

It also works in Holy and offers your best fit target for CoH in that spec as well

I havent tried heroic 25 man yet - but as per a prior reply Crush is even more predictable there
The question over choices of specs seems to me missing slightly the point of a healing team (less so in 10 man with just 2 healers) 25 man healing imo is all about the synergy of a team of healers each maximising strengths and working together - Disc mitigates, Holy aoe heals fast, Druids HoT etc etc all compliment each other - this is one of the reasons I get annoyed by statements of x class is better than y - really it should focus on whats the "strongest" combination of healers....

urumii · 12/19/12, 3:14 PM

Originally Posted by Udain

Just as an aside on the issue of grouping and PoH - do try gridstatuspriestaoe addon - its a bit old but still works as long as your libmapdata addon is up to date.

I had no idea a thing like this existed. I would have loved this when I used to do 25mans. In 10mans it's easier to yell at people to stay close together, but this will still be useful as there are still some fights where it's hard to stay grouped up enough. Thanks!