Mearis

Apparently penance not working on self is intentional.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Iluminati

Of course obviously it's mediocre without the associated PWS talents, but if you're going for a PVP build why wouldn't you take those? At 80 I would likely take the renew glyph to further decrease the dependence on casted heals. I still see disc as the stronger pvp spec. Stronger instants, grace, clutch abilities, and possibly better dps assistance as well with penance.

The heals from the dispel/pws glyphs can also crit, as an aside.

 

Xtian

Given situation that requires a Gheal and a Penance, casting PW:S > Gheal > Penance is better most of the time, especially if you're only working on one target. However, PW:S > Penance is a great "oh shit" button, providing an incredibly fast buffer to a targets health, allowing other heals time to land.

Also, sometimes you're working with multiple targets. You can PW:S an off-tank > Penance on the main tank, for example. Or PW:S someone right before a big aoe and have a Penance ready to clean someone else up quickly after the aoe. Ultimately, BT needs to work on Penance, because otherwise we might as well be casting Gheal after PW:S, and as already noted, Penance is just the better spell.

 

Starfire

I think CoH is still the aoe tool for battlegrounds. Holy Nova only heals your party, CoH heals 5-6 targets in range.

As for Arenas, you could consider using Borrowed Time Prayer of Healing for your aoe heal. Don't get me wrong, Guardian Spirit is very good for pvp, but I do believe Discipline still has more tools. So if you're serious about pvp, why wouldn't you go Discipline? And if you are Discipline for pvp then Divine Fury becomes a much smaller issue.

Off the top of my head, I think our pvp specs will either be 51/11 (9) Disc/Holy or 34/34 (3) Disc/Holy, grabbing Focused Power and getting Lightwell + Blessed Resillience. I think overall though Discipline will always come out ahead on mana, and thus be the spec of choice for pvping.

I think too that Discipline might be able to get away without using the Flash Heal glyph, using the Renew glyph, Dispel glyph and Power Word: Shield glyph. I am not really sure there, but the Renew/PWS/Dispel combo should leave Discipline as being very nimble and fast. Borrowed Time will accelerate any other heals we need to cast. If you pick up Reflective Shield, then its mostly a win when people damage your team mates. And Grace is far more useful in pvp (imo) than in pve, since you most likely won't have Sanctuary (or Vigiliance) in pvp.

[e] I don't feel like spending 50g right (plus I am not near a computer with WoW), but is Guardian Spirit dispellable? Because if it is, that really increases the credibility of Pain Suppression vs. Guardian Spirit.

 

Isin

No, it is not dispellable. That being said, I think they are very clearly set up as PVP and PVE analogues.

 

Tainter

Perhaps this isn't the right place...

What makes you say that Disc will have more Mana than Holy? I think the available mana conservation/regeneration talents need to be contrasted before that can be stated. (Mental Strength + Enlightenment vs Holy Conc + Imp Holy Conc or something like that)

I also believe that Guardian Spirit is superior to Pain Suppression. Pain Suppression can only save someone if it's used early on during the burst. If you put it on someone with 1k HP left then they will die either way. Guardian Spirit on the other hand can save the target and once it has been cast there's nothing the enemy can do except for waiting for it to finish.

And just to round things off: Blessed Resilience is a lot better than Focused Will. The more crit your enemies have the better Blessed Resilience gets.

I'm not saying that Disc PvP is bad, but Holy probably gets understimated. In terms of raw output I'm pretty confident Holy is ahead. It is lacking in utility compared to Disc but when it's crunch-time what do you want? Output or utility?

Something else I've grown to like about Holy PvP is that I don't have to worry about dispels very much anymore. The majority of my healing is direct. Can anyone comment on how deep Disc fares against aggressive dispelling?

Edit:
Divine Fury isn't a big issue for Holy PvP either. The Flash Heal glyph puts Flash Heal very close to Greater Heal in terms of efficiency. Flash heal is also aided by the fact that it has more crit chances per amount healed than Greater Heal. That in turn provides free hasted Greater Heals if it's necessary. It's not going to happen all the time but a free Greater or Binding heal along with a free Flash Heal off of one crit is pretty amazing. Crits kind of easy to set up to as holy by throwing a Holy Nova out there.

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Caligula

1) Disc will have more mana than Holy because Disc gets 15% more Int...

2) Guardian Spirit should be (and is) superior to PS as it's 2 tiers further down in the talent tree.

3) Just saying that "Blessed Resilience is better than Focused Will" is your opinion. Blessed Resilience reduces the burst you take from crits while FW reduces the total damage you take from crits and non-crits. FW also has the effect of increasing the healing done to you by yourself and others. They are both good.

The largest difference between Holy and Disc for PvP is, the bottom tier talents in both trees. Deep Holy talents are very PvE-centric while Disc is quite the opposite (or at least the talents are functional for both). Disc talents are focused around burst damage, while Holy talents focus on longevity and throughput.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...s/Caligula.png

 

Woozle

After playing with both deep disc and deep holy in BGs at 70, I have to say I much prefer deep discipline, and a large part of the reason is discipline's mana efficiency.

With regards to mana efficiency, several points.

First, it isn't just about the extra Int from Mental Strength. Combined with Rapture, all your main healing spells (except renew) return a percentage of your mana based on the amount healed. Generally pvp healing is not overhealing, so the regen from Rapture does actually occur. Further, since its percentage based, this keys into Mental Strength's int bonus, so the two talents dovetail nicely. That, and penance is cheap and has many positive side effects when cast (DA, Grace stacking, several chances to crit, instant hit-on-cast, short cast time) not to mention that it pairs well with renewed hope in terms of output. So when comparing talents, you cannot simply compare Mental Strength and enlightenment to the two Holy Concentration talents and call it a day, that comparison is missing all of the reactive abilities disc has to offer. Oh, that and Power Infusion, invaluable in burst situations.

With regards to mana savings from Holy Concentration x2 and Serendipity, I find I rarely have the time to stand still long enough to cast flash and gheal enough to see these procs and then effectively make use of them to save mana. Pvp is movement-centric, and despite the hasting bonus of IHC, its not conducive to things you also need to be doing in pvp, mainly positioning for a fear, setting up for a flag, getting behind a pillar, you name it.

With regard to pain suppression and guardian spirit, both are fantastic talents, I think they're just differently situated for timing and use, and I feel the zerg-fest that is 70 pvp at the moment (along with the tendancy away from mana burn and dispels, which will rise again at 80) make it hard to meaningfully compare them.

After playing deep holy, between lightwell, guardian spirit, and blessed resilience, its true that in terms of output you can survive some truly ridiculous burst situations. You can also output some serious healing for short periods of time if you remain uninterrupted. For my purposes, however, you dont have mana longevity and mobility that pvp requires, maybe that's just personal playstyle, but I feel the "mana issue" here matters a lot, especially given how many arena matches I've spent as rogue-disc vs. warrior-druid wishing I could extend my mana pool a little further.

 

Shatter Combo w/ Fries

Divine fury is good for other reasons. 1.5 second holy fires are a good offensive mechanism, one of our few now that mana burn and dispel are so downright silly.

Windows of opportunity are shrinking in 3.0, 3 seconds of a holy fire>mind blast>SW combo will win more games than any trivial amount of mana regen, trust me.

 

Woozle

delete this post

 

Tainter

1) Holy gets Holy Conc and cheaper more powerful heals. To prove either spec has more mana requires assumptions on situation and gear as well as maths.

3) Let's do the maths.

Imagine an enemy has 30% crit chance (pre 3.0, no idea about 80) and does double damage on crits.
So that enemy does:
(1 + crit) * (non-crit damage)

Let's assume (and I'd be happy to debate that assumption) that Focused Will is fully stacked and that both Focused Will and Blessed Resilience are permanently up.

Focused Will reduces damage by 12%:
0.88 * (1 + crit) * (non-crit damage) = 1.144 * (non-crit damage)

Blessed Resilience eliminates crits:
(1 + 0) * (non-crit damage) = 1 * (non-crit damage)

So Blessed Resilience is actually the better damage mitigation talent. But Focused Will means the Priest gets more healing of course. 15% to be accurate. Sadly though PW:S and Penance can't be used here. The two staple Disc spells. That leaves you with Renew and PoM as instants that benefit or cast-time spells. And it would also take at least three cast-time spells to stack up Grace. If it's not pre-stacked then you won't get it there quickly.

Holy on the other hand has built in extra healing power with Spiritual Healing, Divine Providence and potentially Test of Faith.

I'm still not saying that Holy is outright better than Disc, but people really don't give it enough credit for PvP.


Edit:
Test of Faith works on the Priest himself. When I was below 50% my renew ticked for 879. It continued to tick for 879 until the end of its duration, even though I was then above 50%. If cast above 50% it ticked for 829.

829 * 1.06 = 879

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ld1938

I'd argue the "cheaper more powerful heals" point.. especially if you assume FW and Grace are stacked..

But also.. your math is wrong on a number of areas..

For one, you completely disregard resilience. If you're capped at resilience vs someone with a 30% crit like in your example.. BR is only preventing an attack with an 18% chance of occurring.. and it has to happen twice in 6 seconds (assuming the first crit beats the 40% chance to not proc) to have an effect (not counting procs from resilience). Also.. its only reducing the damage on a crit from 150% to 100%.. and again only on the crit that happens within 6 seconds of the proc.

So a normal hit is 1000 damage. A crit is 2000 damage(physical). A crit with resilience capped is 1500 damage. A crit with resilience capped in the 6 seconds after BR procs is 1000 damage.

So with resilience its not as great as you're making it out to be. It also puts essentially an internal cooldown on itself since it cant proc from a crit if its preventing crits from occurring (barring procs from resilience.) Whereas FW will proc on any crit.. period. Its not a 60% chance when the effect isnt already up.. its a constant 100% chance. So I'd say that overall FW will have a much higher uptime.

FW procs on 100% of crits, and lasts 8 seconds.. So as long as you're getting crit once every 8 seconds, you'll have a full stack of FW up.. which will than reduce the damage of ALL attacks(dots, white hits, yellow hits, pet hits) from 100% to 88%.. while also increasing all healing by 12%.

As for PS vs Guardian.. Guardian is effected by MS effects, PS is not. PS protects your buffs, GS does not.
Which is another relevant point.. that all those holy talents that increase +healing are reduced in effectiveness when MS is up. Talents that increase mitigation or the amount absorbed by PWS are not effected by MS.

 

Tainter

Go ahead and argue the cheaper more powerful heals. With numbers please. Do you permanently have Grace stacked on yourself? I'll just say if I really need my survival stuff then I have Test of Faith up. (Has anyone tested if that actually works on the Priest himself?)

Blessed Resilience (and all other abilities like that) can actually proc from normal hits. If you're around the resilience cap then you have a 7.5% chance to get BR from any normal attack like a pet hitting on you, or a Rogue off-hand attack or something. Whenever I'm being focus-fired by more than 1 dps I have BR up permanently.

Oh, and my math wasn't wrong. I just chose not to include resilience because I have no idea about the actual crit multiplier of the various classes at 80, nor their crit chances with group buffs, nor actual resilience numbers.

Thanks for telling us what Focused Will does. We already knew.

First you argue that Disc has more healing and then you argue that all talents and buffs that give healing aren't very effective. Which one is it?

If someone needs Pain Suppression then they also need healing. PS isn't affected by MS because it isn't a heal. PS alone almost never saves anybody. Guardian sometimes can.

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Shatter Combo w/ Fries

It's not hard to predict when to pain suppress someone before damage comes. Get a mod that tells you when your opponents use things like deathwish, icy veins, beastial wrath, wings, etc... and use it when they gain the buff. Also on kidney shots, deep freezes, etc...

Don't wait until someone is at 15% to pain suppress them.

 

ld1938

You sound a little defensive there hombre.. Lighten up a bit.

Meh.. half my post got deleted.


Edit: Section got deleted.. Basically the point was.. On efficiency Disc has rapture, MA along with a bigger mana pool, DS and Penance which is very efficient vs Holy which has Improved Healing for Gheals, IHC/HC for Gheal/Flash Heal/Bheal and Serendipity for Gheal/Fheal(if you take it for PVP)

On throughput Disc has more haste, Penance, 4% from focused power and 6%/15%(only on yourself) from Grace and FW respectively if they're stacked.. along with a much greater PWS and an increased crit multiplier through Divine Aegis, neither of which are effected by MS effects. Also 25% haste every 4/12 seconds fom Borrowed Time. And PI.

Holy has POM by 10% if you have 5/5 Dp. Flash heal by 20% of your spellpower, and SH which increases everything by 10%.


So for either.. they're very close depending on how you count Grace/Focused will, especially if you consider Ms effecting all holy heals but not PWS or Divine Aegis

Yes, thank you.. I explained this at least twice in the post you just quoted.

Whatever your reasons for not including resilience.. You stated the conclusion that Br > FW and attempted to prove it using a model thats very heavily biased for BR. I dont care WHY you chose not to include it.. but it makes your model.. and thus your conclusion.. basically worthless.. which was my point.

I was merely restating for comparison..
Disc has more mitigation and alot of its throughput comes from effects like DA and improving PWS. None of these talents are effected by MS. All of Holy's throughput talents are. That was my point. I thought I explained this clearly before but maybe I should have used sock-puppets

A good PVP'er doesnt wait till someone is at 10% before casting PS.. If they are and you're just now getting to them.. you cast PWS first, than PS, than whatever heal you can get off which will now be 25% faster. You've just absorbed 6k+ damage.. which isnt effected by MS, and you've got another hasted heal coming while PS is still up.

If you cast Gs when they're at 10%.. they die and are ressed at 25%.. Than are promptly executed/killshot/lolhammerred back into the ground.


PS > GS, Disc > Holy for PVP.
As it stands now anyway.

 

matt_x

Please excuse me as this is my first ever post here, no hard stats yet. I was checking the blues recently (GC) and noticed discussion about shaman aoe heal.
or CoH and WG
I do understand that CoH mana can be trouble while spamming at lvl80s and so; blizz keeping patching Divine Providence and playing with Glyphs, but do you think that blizz still have a different 'holy play-style' opinion in their minds? or is it just plain heads-up for expected shortcomings, based on opinions of a small sample of players, in near future? (sorry for de-railing subject here)

 

Havoc12

You have to actually play high level arena PvP with a holy spec before you can appreciate the differences between holy and disc.

Lets compare guardian spirit and pain suppression.

40% less dmg against 25% of your HP on death. If you get burst from half health down, pain suppression will return 0.4*0.5= 20% of your HPas avoided damage. Guardian spirit will return 25% of your HP back after preventing your death and a healing boost before the spirit is lost. If you get burst from 80% of your HP to 30% of your HP however, pain suppression will still return 20% of your HP, while guardian spirit will return almost nothing.

Unfortunately the biggest problem with guardian spirit, is that its biggest benefit comes when you are actually killed. While its active it may improve your healing, but if you are focused a big chunk of your healing comes from PWS, which is improved by Pain suppression but not by the healing bonus from GS. Also PS is insensitive to - healing debuffs. That is very important. If you use PS at relatively low health and PWS yourself, you effective gives your self a lot more HP for the other person to beat, but although this HP counts for PWS it does not count for GS. That means GS only has a bigger benefit if you are actually on the verge of death.

Another big issue with GS is that a smart target can work around it. They can keep DPSing you at no penalty, while the GS is active and just focus on preventing you from healing/dispelling your buffs, while GS is active. A kick during GS followed by a gouge at 3% HP = you are a dead man. GS does not stop you taking damage while its active, but the opponent can just stop DPS a couple of seconds and cc you when they get you low and then its over. You are dead. Pain suppression on the other hand actively stops them DPSing.

Lets compare a a rog+war senario. Rogue applies mindnumbling and you have the - healing debuff. You wait out CS amd trinket KS, mindnumbing means that your only chance as holy is CoH spam + SoL, which with mortal strke on is a joke. When are you going to use GS? If you use it early they will just burst you down at low health and gouge/intercept/blind/kick/pummel for the 2-3 seconds it takes for the buff to expire, then rape you with execute/fresh stunlock. You gained very little benefit from the extra healing due to the - healing debuffs and the interupts while they were bursting you. So what will happen is that at the tail end of the GS when you are low HP, the rog and war will simply focus on stoping your healing without dmging you much, until your GS expires (also giving your BR a chance to expire as well) then push you hard after it expires, while you are in execute range. That makes you a dead man. If you try to save it you will probably never get a chance to use it. A rog/war combo can easily burst you down from 50% health in a single stunlock.

Pain suppression on the other hand can be effectively used at high health or after you trinket CS, to make sure you stay at high HP longer. If your partner controls them well and you find you can survive for a little while without PS, you can still use it at low health, as a PWS gives you an extra instant damage buffer for PS to work on and you can pop PI to help yourself.

I love BR, but before 3.0.x it was no question that at high resilience FW was better. BR does reduce damage by more than FW when its active, but it has less uptime because the chance of procing it again before it expires is very low. So unless you are focused by multiple hard hitting targets with high crit rates its up time will be lower than FW. Also by being only 1 buff instead of a 3stack, it is very vunerlable to dispel. A spam purging shaman will signifncatly reduce BR uptime even when you get multiple ppl on you, but his effect on FW is much much smaller, because even a successfull purge will leave stacks behind. IF the shammy reduces a 3 stack to 1 stack for 20% of the time of the time, its a much smaller loss than being without BR at all for 20% of the time. Although FW was nerfed, I am still quite certain that its going to be better at high resi values than BR, especially now that resi reduces crit dmg by a greater amount.

There are very few occasions where BR is better than FW, namely against ret pallys. Ret pally burst is directly related to crits, and some of their abilities have very high crit rates, so resilience has a smaller impact on them, increasing the value of BR.

Although holy is much better at PvP now than it was, mostly due to SoL, serendipity and lightwell, disc has an even greater edge now as the addition of rapture, penance, aspiration and the PWS talents have more than matched the improvements in holy.

 

Tainter

You are right I haven't tried Holy at high rated arena, but then the game balance at 70 has been damaged quite badly and I doubt it would mean very much.

By how much does Resilience now reduce crit damage? Does it make up for the increased crit rates of dps classes?

Guardian Spirit is of course not free of weaknesses. But Pain Suppression isn't either. If you're low on self buffs because the Shaman has softened you up with purges while hitting someone else then Pain Suppression is going to be dispelled pretty easily. It more or less relies on the presence of other buffs to work against dispelling targets. And if someone is focused you don't often have the time to feed them (or yourself) buffs before popping Pain Suppression.

I would say that Disc is more vulnerable to dispel than Holy simply because it relies more on magic buffs to do its job. If a target has been stripped of buffs then PW:S suddenly isn't that great anymore. Divine Aegis won't be that awesome either. In that case Disc is left to heal with conventional heals, which will in turn be weaker than what Holy has to offer.

Guardian Spirit synergises pretty well with Lightwell, stronger glyphed Renew and PoM. Against multiple dps, when surviving is all that matters using Holy Nova to trigger SoL also works nicely and other than stuns is uninterruptiple.

As a final point:
Someone said that Divine Aegis isn't affected by Healing Debuffs, but I can't find it anymore. It is because it works off effective healing. Does Rapture also suffer reduced effectiveness from Healing debuffs?

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ld1938

I'm not sure what you're talking about here at all? Do you just misunderstand how PS works?
Have you ever tried dispelling when PS is on? Your target has like a 95% chance to resist...
Gl with that. With PS up.. dispelling is a pretty futile effort.

PWS's biggest weakness is that it can be dispellied. but with 30% dispel resistance you'll pretty much have to be spam purged for it to be taken down consistantly.. and if a shaman or priest is spam purging you they're sacrificing GCD's they could be using somewhere ellse, like on earthshocks
Good players will use LOS and wont let themselves get spam-purged though in the first place.
I've already been through the strength of disc vs strength of holy heals.. but you seem to keep ignoring it.

Against multiple Dps, GS is even less effective compared to PS than against 1 dps.

LOL? a 400 hp heal isnt going to get you very far.. Spamming Holy Nova is NOT a good idea if you're being focused...


It depends on when the heal landed. The effect itself isnt affected by MS but the heal that triggered it would be.

 

Tainter

Alright, I knew it was a mistake. Let's stop this here, it's not the right thread. I'd be happy to debate some more in private messages.

I for one enjoy the post 3.0 Holy talents and find them very powerful in PvP at 70. So far I haven't seen any direct comparisons of the specs by the same player. I was Disc for Season 3 and 4 and the new Holy is better than the old Disc in my opinion. The biggest reason is probably that Lightwell let's me heal myself and others (if they are smart enough to use it) while I'm interrupted or crowd controlled. Guardian Spririt provides a fun alternative to Pain Suppression.

In order to see how well the specs do at 80 PvP we'll probably all have to wait and see.

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Ranc

Just a thought about PoM and its aggro. I just got wondering does anyone know if the aggro is generated based on where the priest is, or where the player whom PoM heals is standing - IE the extra aggro multiplier for within close mob proximity healing?

If calculated on where the tank/Pom target is it effectively gone from a negative aggro spell to be quite a high aggro spell due to it getting the melee range multiplier a lot.

If its on priest position (Id guess it is) its worth noting if you decide to reposition during a fight and have to pass close by a relatively low tapped mob you could get a bad timed PoM jump elsewhere in the party just as you were passing the mob and moving to a safer spot.

NOTE I know It doesnt make much diference at all with the new tank aggro nowadays, TBH Im desperately trying to find any way I can to make our job more complicated than Blizzard want it to be in the post 3.02 era :P

 

cruumash

AFAIK, there is no aggro multiplier. It is an aggro "tolerance" so to speak. That is to say, threat points are created at the same rate no matter where you are standing. But depending on whether you are in or out of melee range, the mob has a different threshold value to change his target to you.

You're scenario is a valid one, but nothing new. A stray renew tick and you have the same problem. Don't run next to mobs.

 

Starfire

Holding a discussion on a Discipline vs. Holy pvp spec seems appropriate for a threat labeled Discipline and Holy WotLK Talent Discussion.

Anyways, the ironic thing is, my main reasoning for making my first comment was the use of Penance in place of Flash Heal.

And on the topic of Burst, Borrowed Time (and Divine Fury) greatly increase our burst potential.

 

Maive

What does everyone think about the spellsurge enchant for either healing/dps casters?

 

Shatter Combo w/ Fries

3.0.3 bugs:

My inner focus is not being consumed on using penance at all, can cast infinite(?) penances at 0 mana cost until you cast something else, but it doesn't look like the +25% crit is being factored in. Obviously not that big of a deal since I think mana would regen to full in that downtime anyways for most gear levels. Maybe useful to exploit at very low mana.

Penance still has facing requirements.

Divine Aegis still not stacking, still applies to last crit.