Yes, I meant to say Spiritual Healing - Spiritual Guidance (Spirit -> Spellpower) does indeed affect PW:S in the same way it affects all spells that make use of spellpower.
Yes PWS applies the "healing" much quicker than any other spell but that only really matters on mages AoEing or reacting to big damage spikes, or even in PvP. Most of the time you want a steady HPS with decent mana efficiency.
PW:S doesn't only have the highest HpS it also is the most mana efficient heal of all, it generates mana. And besides that it can't overheal. In the "worst" case of the target not taking enough damage the shield increases the targets effective health by a huge chunk.
It would be an awesome spell if:
a) it didn't have a 4 second cooldown
b) it didn't have a 15 second 'Weakened Soul' effect
c) if it was dispelled, it would heal the person it was on for half the remaining absorption
Not necessary all 3, but at least some modifications. If it's supposed to be so useful to Disc priests, it needs to not have a 4 second internal cooldown on top of the 15 second WS effect.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein
The problem with borrowed time is that it makes the spell a decent, not great Oh Shit spell. The problem is that because of how Rapture interacts with it you are an idiot not to be casting it every time the cooldown is up. This makes the cast time reduction close to pointless as we have already agreed that a disc priest won't be spamming heals 100% of the time, and if it's part of a rotation it's not available in an emergency.
Look at it this way with this talent. It increases PWS power but is only 40% as efficient at that as points in T2 of the tree. It increases mana regen by interacting with Rapture but has only ~1/7th the power of a point in meditation. It speeds up your casting rotation a small amount. lets be generous and say it saves 1 second every 15 second cycle or ~6% haste overall. this is about 1% haste per talent point. (these numbers assume 2 shields every rotation) It does a lot of little things but all of them much worse than dedicated talents and as a result is week overall. I've been looking at it and if penance doesn't bring anything to the table you would probably get as good a result with a spec similar to this one. In my experience you generally have about 70% of your spellpower as your buffed spirit value so at 2k spellpower you will have ~1400 spirit or an extra 350 spellpower added to every single spell you cast. This gives a boost to PWS of 280 which is a loss of ~120 compared to borrowed time and it adds over 600 to the amount that your GH will land for! Now for me penance will need to be amazing for me to want to pass up on this build. Borrowed time certainly won't justify the loss.
The major benefits to Disc is the preventative healing. The major down side to rage generation is preventative healing. I was trying to look into a 10 man set up, and I have a hard time putting in myself as a Disc priest if some of my major tools create a threat cap.
I really think threat will be a non-issue for any decent tank out there. They are dumbing down the gear for tanking so that there are really no choices for tanking, which means no one can make the wrong one. Then they are integrating huge threat bonus' into the tanking trees and adding a very...vague...threat (mod) that only tells you whether you are high or low. Basically, it will be hard for tanks to mess up and blizz only wants threat to be an issue on the fights they choose.
While I may be completely wrong don't get mad at me yet because I have a question: Is anyone else considering at all getting reflective shield for a 10 man spec? Some people were referring to huge PWS numbers earlier in the thread, and if they truly are going to be 4k shields, 50% of that every 15 seconds (130 dps) is nothing to sneeze at for a spell you are casting anyway.
The spec I was considering was:
This one
I consider Inspiration a necessary tank healing talent, but that may change in wotlk, so I really didn't have enough points for 5/5 which dimishes this idea somewhat. All I really sacrificed was the regen of improved healing or mental agility, which I don't expect will be an issue if regen stays the same as it is now (It is impossible for me to go oom tank healing as disc even today). Anyone else feel that venturing here for the added dps may be worth it?
EDIT: I assumed the threat mod was so vague because they didn't expect dpsers to be riding the tanks threat as hard as they do today, however this could be wrong.
I believe it takes the thinking out of the game because it allows for spamming of heals. Spamming of anything is not skill based. It can be done with a mousewheel scroll or a G15 set to auto. You snipped out the context of my post. Sure, there are amazing healers that already use every spell they have to it's maximum potential on every fight. I find those healers to be few and far between. Down ranking promotes brainless activity, even if you use it as a cheap Flash Heal with a longer cast time. This creates another problem in that they have to balance mana regen and gear around that unintended use of the spells. Any way you look at it, the way WoW is designed down ranking heals isn't good for the game.
As for having to take points in the Holy tree as Disc. Blues have publicly stated that this is intended. They want every class to have a good reason to dabble in multiple trees rather than putting every single point they have into one. There isn't a class or spec in the game that is absolved of this.
I fail to understand why you think that the existence of bad players who mindlessly spam a downranked heal implies that the downranking mechanic itself takes thinking out of the game. Those players are not healing correctly. They are not fulfilling the potential that their class has to offer in a raid. Even though they may never run out of mana doing what they're doing, they certainly aren't doing their jobs and wouldn't get a raid spot in any respectable end-game guild that cares about what its healers are doing. Should we remove Flash Heal from the game because plenty of bad priests spam Flash Heal? Does CoH deserve a cooldown because some people spam CoH mindlessly regardless of the situation?
It's also more a problem with encounter design than class design. It's not the fault of the class that certain encounter requires them to spam one spell or another (hi Brutallus and Felmyst). But even in these encounters, nobody's role can be done with "a mousewheel scroll or a G15 set to auto". It's also not the fault of the class that certain people don't play it correctly, nor is it the fault of a spell if people can't learn to use it in the right context. And as others have already mentioned: how is forcing everyone to spam a single, max rank of a spell solving the alleged problem in any way whatsoever?
And for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that downranking didn't exist in the current game. And as a result a lot of people are spamming Heal 4 mindlessly because that way they won't ever run out of mana. Does that mean the existence of Heal takes thinking out of the game? No - all it suggests is that there are a lot of players out there who would rather spam a single button and sit with a full mana bar than actually think about what they're doing. It's one thing to say that downranking is broken because an intermediate spell you get while leveling should not become a staple heal in the end-game. It's an entirely different thing to try to claim that downranking promotes bad play. The only thing promoting bad play is the fact that some guilds let their healers get away with not doing their jobs.
There are a good handful of classes and specs that pretty much do throw all their points into one tree. PvE Resto Druid is the one that comes to mind primarily - both in TBC and in WotLK with the way their talents are shaping up. Resto Shaman will likely be doing the same thing. There's also a fundamental difference between "dabbling" in trees to pick up useful abilities with leftover points vs. basically being required to go a certain number of points down a side tree in order to pick up some essential talent or another, at the cost of not being able to have some otherwise useful abilities in your main tree.
I really think threat will be a non-issue for any decent tank out there. They are dumbing down the gear for tanking so that there are really no choices for tanking, which means no one can make the wrong one. Then they are integrating huge threat bonus' into the tanking trees and adding a very...vague...threat (mod) that only tells you whether you are high or low. Basically, it will be hard for tanks to mess up and blizz only wants threat to be an issue on the fights they choose.
You are making a number of sweeping generalizations and ill-advised assumptions here. I'm assuming this is in response to the "PW:S gimps rage generation (and also Paladin tank mana regen, but that's a little different)" problem, and the contention that tanks may not see enough throughput in rage/mana-to-threat, and thus Disc may cause threat issues.
A) Your comment on gear suggests that differences in tank threat are caused by some tanks making bad gear choices. This can happen, but I'd feel confident in saying that the discussion centers around competent tanks, geared and talented for their role in raids/instances. If you assume a bad tank to begin with, it makes little difference what a healer does or doesn't do.
B) The threat bonuses were all removed from tanking talent trees and added into base abilities. For instance, Defiance used to increase threat by 15% in Defensive Stance; the base version of Defensive Stance now adds 15% more threat than it used to, and Defiance has been removed. This isn't a buff to tanks in general, only to tanks who aren't actually talented for tanking (Fury Warriors, Ret Paladins, whatever). Your Prot Paladin today will have the exact same threat modifiers the day WotLK goes live.
C) No idea what the threat display has to do with anything. The addition of a Blizzard threat meter is more likely to imply that they expect us to be concerned with and monitor threat than the opposite.
D) Rage/mana throughput affects the amount of threat a tank produces; this is not in question. The question is "How much will Disc abilities affect this throughput?" and that's not something that's definitely answerable right now. I lean toward "Probably not all that much on progression content," but that's an impression and not the result of calculations. Until you know what incoming damage will look like (and a host of other things), it's probably not worth trying to ascertain with math.
I think the question of Reflective Shield is one of "What is my role, and is this the best use of my talent points to fulfill that role?" Trading Improved Healing for Reflective Shield just isn't something I'd do, because it gimps my primary mission (more mana spent on heals means I either have to gear/gem for regen more so than otherwise, which means other stats take a hit) in favor of a less important mission (raid DPS simply isn't a healer's job). You can pull points from elsewhere to fund it, of course, I only used Improved Healing because that's what you dropped- but I don't believe that any points could be better spent on Reflective Shield than whatever they're currently allocated for.
Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:
Originally Posted by Malleus
Unless there's a reason to save it for a specific point in the fight, someone should be getting laid every single time it's up.
I fail to understand why you think that the existence of bad players who mindlessly spam a downranked heal implies that the downranking mechanic itself takes thinking out of the game. Those players are not healing correctly. They are not fulfilling the potential that their class has to offer in a raid. Even though they may never run out of mana doing what they're doing, they certainly aren't doing their jobs and wouldn't get a raid spot in any respectable end-game guild that cares about what its healers are doing. Should we remove Flash Heal from the game because plenty of bad priests spam Flash Heal? Does CoH deserve a cooldown because some people spam CoH mindlessly regardless of the situation?
It's also more a problem with encounter design than class design. It's not the fault of the class that certain encounter requires them to spam one spell or another (hi Brutallus and Felmyst). But even in these encounters, nobody's role can be done with "a mousewheel scroll or a G15 set to auto". It's also not the fault of the class that certain people don't play it correctly, nor is it the fault of a spell if people can't learn to use it in the right context. And as others have already mentioned: how is forcing everyone to spam a single, max rank of a spell solving the alleged problem in any way whatsoever?
And for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that downranking didn't exist in the current game. And as a result a lot of people are spamming Heal 4 mindlessly because that way they won't ever run out of mana. Does that mean the existence of Heal takes thinking out of the game? No - all it suggests is that there are a lot of players out there who would rather spam a single button and sit with a full mana bar than actually think about what they're doing. It's one thing to say that downranking is broken because an intermediate spell you get while leveling should not become a staple heal in the end-game. It's an entirely different thing to try to claim that downranking promotes bad play. The only thing promoting bad play is the fact that some guilds let their healers get away with not doing their jobs.
There are a good handful of classes and specs that pretty much do throw all their points into one tree. PvE Resto Druid is the one that comes to mind primarily - both in TBC and in WotLK with the way their talents are shaping up. Resto Shaman will likely be doing the same thing. There's also a fundamental difference between "dabbling" in trees to pick up useful abilities with leftover points vs. basically being required to go a certain number of points down a side tree in order to pick up some essential talent or another, at the cost of not being able to have some otherwise useful abilities in your main tree.
A good handful is one or maybe two specs in high end raiding situations? Out of 27, soon to be 30 talent trees? This still does not change the fact that Blizzard has stated they do not want people to put all of their talent points into a single tree.
In any case, it was precisely my point that the down ranking of heals has led to the design of encounters where the use of that tactic is encouraged--if not required. In Molten Core, and BWL even, the encounters were perfectly healable without the necessity to down rank. I know my days spent their involved cast-canceling and healing/regen rotations. There wasn't even enough + healing on gear to be able to use anything but max ranks. Now we look at Brutallus, in which if you are not landing a (usually down ranked) heal on the tank at 1s intervals, you are probably going to wipe. This is why I feel down ranking promotes poor play. Perhaps you are different in that you consider this more skillful. If so, perhaps we need to agree to disagree.
With the addition of the new heals and utility spells coming in WotlK, I certainly wont miss encounters and classes being balanced around down ranking.
Am I obtuse and missed this the first time around?
If you did, so did I. Going by this post and a quick search, it looks like this is the first mention of it, so I'd say nice catch on that.
It's an interesting glyph, definitely worth taking. Makes shielding a tank look a lot better, especially considering that they're almost guaranteed to take hits big enough to get the full value of the heal.
Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:
Originally Posted by Malleus
Unless there's a reason to save it for a specific point in the fight, someone should be getting laid every single time it's up.
I can agree that the mana efficiency gained from downranking is too much (because too much bonus healing is applied to lower spell ranks), but you're also missing the other aspect, that downranking encourages decision making, flexibility and adaptation.
I don't mind at all if mana per point healed of my downranked spells is changed to be the same as that of my max rank spells, but I will miss being able to match health deficits. Yes, doing so will increase my efficiency but not because of a flaw in a formula but simply because of skill as player. This should be encouraged and even required in a raid setting.
Pain Suppression in PvE disc builds - worth it at all?
It takes 35 points to get to Rapture (which 35 to take I will not discuss), and there are 18 non-Pain Suppression points available beyond that point, all of which are considered extremely useful. With the remaining 18 points in Holy for Improved Healing, do you just skip Pain Suppression? Personally I see it much more as PvP tool, but it certainly can have a lot of PvE uses. The way the talents are set up though makes it much like Holy Nova is now: potentially useful, but not to the point I want to actually spend a talent point in it. Is it really all that useful in raids? I can't come up with situations myself where I'd really want to spend the GCD on it over PWS.
It takes 35 points to get to Rapture (which 35 to take I will not discuss), and there are 18 non-Pain Suppression points available beyond that point, all of which are considered extremely useful. With the remaining 18 points in Holy for Improved Healing, do you just skip Pain Suppression? Personally I see it much more as PvP tool, but it certainly can have a lot of PvE uses. The way the talents are set up though makes it much like Holy Nova is now: potentially useful, but not to the point I want to actually spend a talent point in it. Is it really all that useful in raids? I can't come up with situations myself where I'd really want to spend the GCD on it over PWS.
Random secondary high damage dots (Burn) or to help reduce your top DPSers' threat. If the boss has a 10% Enrage type ability, then PS would be great to use on the tank if his threat is high enough. Also good for when the tank if stunned and is just a nice tool to have if the situation calls for it. Plus it has great out-of-raid utility for dailies, especially on a PvP server. I'd say it's a well spent 1 point even in a min-max build even if it's only for the threat component, your top DPS without a threat dump will love you for it.
Theorycrafting procedures per role:
DPS = Theory -> Spreadsheet -> Practice
Healing = Theory -> Practice -> Logs
Tanking = Theory -> Theory -> Theory
I can agree that the mana efficiency gained from downranking is too much (because too much bonus healing is applied to lower spell ranks), but you're also missing the other aspect, that downranking encourages decision making, flexibility and adaptation.
I don't mind at all if mana per point healed of my downranked spells is changed to be the same as that of my max rank spells, but I will miss being able to match health deficits. Yes, doing so will increase my efficiency but not because of a flaw in a formula but simply because of skill as player. This should be encouraged and even required in a raid setting.
I'm not disagreeing with any of that. I down rank. I always have at least 2 or 3 ranks of Greater Heal on my bars at all times. It would be silly not to. That doesn't change the fact that every time I use a Rank 4 or 1, I think of how flawed that model is in it's entirety.
Maybe this will give people looking for that mid-range heal some hope?
It would be an awesome spell if:
a) it didn't have a 4 second cooldown
b) it didn't have a 15 second 'Weakened Soul' effect
c) if it was dispelled, it would heal the person it was on for half the remaining absorption
Not necessary all 3, but at least some modifications. If it's supposed to be so useful to Disc priests, it needs to not have a 4 second internal cooldown on top of the 15 second WS effect.
The Weakened Soul effect is a very good limiter effect on the spell, and should definitely stay. Imagine Power Word: Shield in its current state if you could keep re-spamming it on yourself every four seconds, reflecting 50% of the damage taken, restoring mana every cast, and having time during those 4 seconds to cast other things.
You wouldn't die.
The only way you could die is a holy-school lockout, and it'd still be hard to kill a Discipline Priest even if their holy spells were out for merely 8 seconds at max.
In addition, Weakened Soul makes it more appealing as a "heal" to throw around the raid as a raid healer, because there is no cost to you other than the global cooldown, and no overheal. Without Weakened Soul, it would be encouraged to use all your global cooldowns specifically on shielding the tank.
Perhaps Borrowed Time should affect the 4-second cooldown, but Weakened Soul is PW:S's balancing factor.
Actually, the Holy Priest wouldn't intermix PW:S because their PW:S would be too weak. For a Discipline Priest, it's almost certain that a fully spec'd PW:S would be significantly higher throughput than Greater Heal - on the order of 50% greater throughput. The numbers I used were merely a demonstration of the mathematical principles involved, not representative of actual game design.
Spiritual Guidance has never - and does not currently in Live - affect Power Word: Shield. Did a recent beta change I missed occur?
And while a Holy Priest can certainly muster greater throughput, that's not the point. The point is that for a Discipline Priest, interleaving PW:S with conventional heals ramps up their throughput more than not interleaving it.
You're also missing the fact that while a Holy Priest will generate greater single target throughput, they won't do so predictably. This is a rather significant element in multi-healer environments for a tank healer.
As I pointed out, a holy priests PW:S is about 3% less effective than a fully talented Discipline priest PW:S. Yes the talents add that little. The 3% can vary based on how much spirit/healing a player has, but I would guess it would eventually reach about 5-6% since spellpower is usually higher than spirit values.
Spiritual Guidance (the 25% of spirit to +spellpower) will give over 50% of the effect that Borrowed Time gives to PW:S, but also improves all damage and healing spells a priest has. So in exchange for a 3-6% weaker PW:S, they gain a large improvement to all damage and healing spells instead.
Most of the benefits Discipline brings to PW:S are NOT throughput based but merely improve the efficiency and add additional effects to PW:S. The HPS of a holy priest using PW:S is only slightly less than a Discipline priest because of the huge improvements to the HPS of all healing spells instead of just ONE.
Also a holy priests throughput is much higher and more constant than a discipline priest who is relying on a 15 second cooldown spell AND critical hits.
If PW:S don't have Weakened Soul debuff and you can spam it on yourself every 4 seconds, it will equivalent to about 500-510 HPS at lvl 70 with 2500 healing. On the other side, 3x LB stacks produce higher HPS (HPS 850 HPS at 2500 healing) than it with less casts and almost no mana cost (LB mana cost is laughable) and on top of this not dispelable, so I don't think it will be something that we never seen.
PS: the claculations are rough but are quite close to the real numbers.
The Weakened Soul effect is a very good limiter effect on the spell, and should definitely stay. Imagine Power Word: Shield in its current state if you could keep re-spamming it on yourself every four seconds, reflecting 50% of the damage taken, restoring mana every cast, and having time during those 4 seconds to cast other things.
You wouldn't die.
The only way you could die is a holy-school lockout, and it'd still be hard to kill a Discipline Priest even if their holy spells were out for merely 8 seconds at max.
In addition, Weakened Soul makes it more appealing as a "heal" to throw around the raid as a raid healer, because there is no cost to you other than the global cooldown, and no overheal. Without Weakened Soul, it would be encouraged to use all your global cooldowns specifically on shielding the tank.
Perhaps Borrowed Time should affect the 4-second cooldown, but Weakened Soul is PW:S's balancing factor.
I dont think they are suggesting removing the weakend soul, but just reducing the weakend soul through talents, and/or the 4 second cooldown.
Yes it needs weakend soul to prevent spamming, yes a Disicpline priests needs something to improve how often they can cast PW:S otherwise 13 (or 18) talent points are totally wasted.
A good handful is one or maybe two specs in high end raiding situations? Out of 27, soon to be 30 talent trees? This still does not change the fact that Blizzard has stated they do not want people to put all of their talent points into a single tree.
These aren't high end raiding specs at all. They're specs that are good for 5 man, heroics, and raiding at all levels, and even PvP to a certain degree. If we want to dig down to specifics, I can name a few more currently viable PvP/PvE specs, such as 61 point Frost Mages, 50+point ferals, 48 point pallies, and so on. Sure, these talent trees are changing in WotLK, but Feral druids will still have little reason to invest any points outside of their main tree, and with Blizz's attempts to make each Mage tree unique, I can easily foresee some 60+ point mages too.
It's certainly not arguable that Blizzard has stated that they don't want people to put all their points in a single tree... but they have stated many things in the past that rarely if ever got followed through upon. And it's hard to believe that the talent trees for the aforementioned classes will change very drastically between now and 3.0, so clearly there are still some classes where this doesn't hold true at all.
And, Blizzard's intentions aside, it's a rather silly mentality to try to force people out of whatever main tree they're trying to spec into anyway. There are two ways of doing this:
- fill up the main tree with worthless talents that nobody in their right mind would ever take (hai2u Imp Inner Fire)
- create 1 or 2 indispensable talents in some other tree, and place it just deep enough so that you have to invest a non-trivial amount of points to get there - points that would have otherwise bolstered the focus of your main tree
Calling this "choice" is merely a euphemism for bad design. It was what they used to justify the placement of DS/IDS (among other reasons) - I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now.
One of the major difficulties with Discipline as a tree is that all of it's core abilities - PW:S, Mana Burn, Dispels/Abolishes - have a rather severe PvP/PvE imbalance. If you push these abilities up to the point where they're truly strong PvE abilities, you've almost certainly pushed the beyond the point where they're overpowered in PvP.
You only get 25% of the mana back, not 100%.
In practical terms, Divine Aegis returns 11.25% of the healing in mana (150% critical * 30% Divine Aegis * 25% mana return) when you crit, presuming the shield is fully consumed. A level 80 Discipline Priest with +2k spellpower will likely be healing for around 8500 with Greater Heal (Rank 9), at a mana cost of around 1000 after Improved Healing. This means a Divine Aegis proc is in the same neighborhood as simply casting the spell for free.
So at 16% crit, you'd be matching the performance of Improved Holy Concentration. In this sort of spamming scenario, you'd need about 45% crit to match IHC + Serendipity.
Flash Heal has about a 30% lower hpm than Greater Heal, so it's cost reduction gains would be about 75% of your spell critical. However, Serendipity also procs on fewer casts, so the total Holy reduction in cost would only be around 33%. The combination ends up being about the same 45% crit to match IHC + Serendipity.
Note that I'm disregarding the greater out-of-FSR regen due to IHC.
Its true that lowering the cooldown would make the spell a lot more spammable in the 5v5 bracket, but that is a buff priests will need there. In the 2v2 and 3v3 brackets, it won't be that overpowered. Reducing the cooldown of weakened soul is already done though items in PvP, so there is certainly a precedent for its a given for PvP priests. You can give us another goodie on the gloves and incorporate that reduction into borrowed time.
Yes I forgot to add the 25% factor thank you for pointing that out I amended the calculations. Calculating DA is not that simple, unless it works on total heal not effective heal. If it works on effective heal then the conversion value is 0.32-0.4 depending on overheal and more importantly overheal distribution. My updated calculations suggest that the value of aegis is between 150-400 mana removed per greater heal, depending on your crit rate, overheal and effective HPS.
An important thing to realise however is that the higher the effective HPS, the higher the return, so the return a disc priest gets is effectively tied to expenditure. If you really have to spam gheal, because the tank trully needs it, then you are going to get a very large return from aegis/rapture, while in the same situation a holy priest will not get much out of serendipity (they will get a very large return from test of faith however).
I think we also should not forget PI, which should raise throughput and reduce mana cost by something like 4%.
Originally Posted by Kamakaze
As I pointed out, a holy priests PW:S is about 3% less effective than a fully talented Discipline priest PW:S. Yes the talents add that little. The 3% can vary based on how much spirit/healing a player has, but I would guess it would eventually reach about 5-6% since spellpower is usually higher than spirit values.
Spiritual Guidance (the 25% of spirit to +spellpower) will give over 50% of the effect that Borrowed Time gives to PW:S, but also improves all damage and healing spells a priest has. So in exchange for a 3-6% weaker PW:S, they gain a large improvement to all damage and healing spells instead.
Most of the benefits Discipline brings to PW:S are NOT throughput based but merely improve the efficiency and add additional effects to PW:S. The HPS of a holy priest using PW:S is only slightly less than a Discipline priest because of the huge improvements to the HPS of all healing spells instead of just ONE.
Also a holy priests throughput is much higher and more constant than a discipline priest who is relying on a 15 second cooldown spell AND critical hits.
Sorry but how did you come to that conclusion. Borrowed time should add 20% of spell power in its finished version and on top that gets modified by the 15% imp PWS talent so at 2000 spell power you are looking at 400*1.15 = 460 out of a spell that absorbs about 4.4k.That is 10% in my books. With the current situation where borrowed time adds less than 20% to the spell its about 8%. Although holy priests get a little more spell power from spirit, disc priests get improved divine spirit, which a holy priest can only access through a disc priest, so its only 15% more spirit from there. I would say something like 150 spell power, so its like 130 more absorption less if the disc priests invests a point in improved inner fire. Its not 3% but more like 8%. And that is not little its huge, because PWS for holy does not have the added perks it has for disc.
On top of that PWS only takes 1 second to cast, while it takes 1.5 seconds for a holy priest. Also a holy priest gets empowered healing and spiritual heaing/twin faiths which don't work with PWS. Thus for a holy priest looses bucketloads by weaving PWS. He loses an extra 3.3% of his available casting per PWS, he is using a spell with worse scaling and mana efficiency than flash heal, he loses clearcasting time, he loses mana from serendipity and possible returns from test of faith. Just the loss of 3.3% more casting time per target for the kind of HPS holy can push out, makes it patently stupid to burn mana weaving PWS. Holy will use PWS the way they always have: As part of an oh shit combo such as FH/PWS/PoM to buy other healers time to land heals.
You are looking at it from a very strange perspective.
Disc priests dont just get the PWS boost. They get rapture, grace, DA, PS, PI and improved divine spirit.
PWS, aegis and grace together, add ~12-15% reduced tank damage and 6% more healing for everyone firing a heal on the tank, which holy priests simply do not bring. If you are thinking that a holy priest can weave PWS in their spell sequence to get the same effect you are sorely mistaken. By doing so they will be burning bucketloads of mana reducing their output not increasing it. So the difference is not 8% on PWS, its PWS as a main heal compared to PWS as a spell that you use 5-10 times in a 10 minute fight.
You are also talking about a large stat investment. Well let me see, disc has to spend a total of 8 points on PWS to get 15% more effect, 20% better scaling and a 0.5 reduction in GCD. In a similar way a holy priest has to spend 5 points for 0.5 sec reduction in gheal cast time, 5 points for effectively the same scaling increase and 3 points for a 15% reduction in mana cost. That is 13 points. I honestly dont see your point.
Disc also gets an improvement in healing spells, twin faiths for 5% and elightenment for 5%. They also get DA which improves HPS by 6 to 11% depending on the final DA implementation and they get grace which adds another 6% to all heals. The main benefits that holy gets on gheal, FH are clearcasting, test of faith and serendipity. There is nothing wrong with critical hits as the success of early TBC holy paladins has demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt. Also PWS does not have a 15 second cooldown, it has a 4 sec cooldown. You jjust have a 15 sec weakened soul on a 30 second buff. If you can predict the damage you can set up to 3 shields ahead of time, which you can refresh almost as soon as they are used up. So weakened soul is not the same as a 15 second cooldown. If you did not have the 4 second cooldown on PWS and with a 1sec GCD, you could effectively chain cast PWS on the entire raid. A great example is the tank healers on karathress. If say the raid is taking a 10 k damage hit every 25 seconds, as a disc priest you can generate a fairly massive output and gain craploads of mana back too, by just rolling PWS on the entire raid.
Sorry but how did you come to that conclusion. Borrowed time should add 20% of spell power in its finished version and on top that gets modified by the 15% imp PWS talent so at 2000 spell power you are looking at 400*1.15 = 460 out of a spell that absorbs about 4.4k.That is 10% in my books. With the current situation where borrowed time adds less than 20% to the spell its about 8%. Although holy priests get a little more spell power from spirit, disc priests get improved divine spirit, which a holy priest can only access through a disc priest, so its only 15% more spirit from there. I would say something like 150 spell power, so its like 130 more absorption less if the disc priests invests a point in improved inner fire. Its not 3% but more like 8%. And that is not little its huge, because PWS for holy does not have the added perks it has for disc.
When speccing into Discipline, you have the choice of Borrowed Time or going deeper in holy to get Spiritual Guidance.
Spiritual Guidance affects PW:S and is the only holy talent to do so, but imp PW:S is applied after spiritual guidance aswell meaning it affects both equally and has been taken into account.
Assuming 1000 spellpower and 500 spirit then PW:S gains the following (this is about what I have at 72):
From Borrowed Time:
Power Word: Shield would gain 20% of your spellpower. Assuming the bug is fixed and it does indeed increase it by 20% then it would give PW:S 200 more absorb, increased to 230 by imp PW:S.
Borrowed Time also lowers the global cooldown of PW:S by 0.5 seconds.
From Spiritual Guidance:
With 500 spirit, this will give +125 spellpower. 92% (80% and the extra 15% of imp PW:S) of that is added to PW:S which would add 115 to PW:S. Spiritual Guidance also increases the healing applied to ALL your other healing spells.
Both are 5 point talents, both are available to a priest with Divine Aegis and Grace.
Given how much PW:S base values are and base scaling being at 80% without talents, the % difference between a holy PW:S and a Discipline PW:S is very very small.
Assuming something like 2000 spellpower and 800 spirit, the difference will widen a bit but still would be relatively small compared to the base spell and base scaling, but it depends if that is even a reasonable assumption about what sort of values we have at 80. This does also not taking into account increases to spirit such as the human racial, enlightenment and Spirit of Redemption, or raid buffs such as BoK.
Taking into account base values and base scaling with my current PW:S -
With 1k spellpower and Imp PW:S it would absorb 2374
230 of 2374 is a 9% increase.
115 of 2374 is a 4% increase.
So a holy PW:S is about 5% weaker than a Discipline priest PW:S. Given that the base values of PW:S at 80 seem to go up a lot, the % increase will probably go down, but be offset by the increase +spellpower so would probably end up in a similar position.
Rewording the talents to include static values based on my current stats:
"Lowers the GCD of PW:S by 0.5 seconds and increases the absorption by 230"
"Increases healing of Flash heal by 100, Greater heal by 200, PW:S by 115, Prayer of Mending by 80, Renew by 200, binding heal by 100,....etc..."
When speccing into Discipline, you have the choice of Borrowed Time or going deeper in holy to get Spiritual Guidance.
Spiritual Guidance affects PW:S and is the only holy talent to do so, but imp PW:S is applied after spiritual guidance aswell meaning it affects both equally and has been taken into account.
Assuming 1000 spellpower and 500 spirit then PW:S gains the following (this is about what I have at 72):
From Borrowed Time:
Power Word: Shield would gain 20% of your spellpower. Assuming the bug is fixed and it does indeed increase it by 20% then it would give PW:S 200 more absorb, increased to 230 by imp PW:S.
Borrowed Time also lowers the global cooldown of PW:S by 0.5 seconds.
From Spiritual Guidance:
With 500 spirit, this will give +125 spellpower. 92% (80% and the extra 15% of imp PW:S) of that is added to PW:S which would add 115 to PW:S. Spiritual Guidance also increases the healing applied to ALL your other healing spells.
Both are 5 point talents, both are available to a priest with Divine Aegis and Grace.
Given how much PW:S base values are and base scaling being at 80% without talents, the % difference between a holy PW:S and a Discipline PW:S is very very small.
Assuming something like 2000 spellpower and 800 spirit, the difference will widen a bit but still would be relatively small compared to the base spell and base scaling, but it depends if that is even a reasonable assumption about what sort of values we have at 80. This does also not taking into account increases to spirit such as the human racial, enlightenment and Spirit of Redemption, or raid buffs such as BoK.
Rewording the talents to include static values based on my current stats:
"Lowers the GCD of PW:S by 0.5 seconds and increases the absorption by 230"
"Increases healing of Flash heal by 100, Greater heal by 200, PW:S by 115, Prayer of Mending by 80, Renew by 200, binding heal by 100,....etc..."
You dont just lose borrowed time, you need an extra 3 points to get 5.5 DG.
Also are you sure that spiritual guidance increases spell power? Currently it works like damage/healing, which approximately 50% the value of spell power for healing.
I would still take pain suppression, aspiration and borrowed time over DG. The benefit of borrowed time on my available casting time far outweights the gain in healing power from DG. 200 more healing out of 8500 modified by overheal
is just about 2% more, but for every PWS I cast I lose 3.3% of my available casting time by skipping borrowed time and an additional 0.4% benefit in throughput and mana cost from aspiration. Not to mention I actually get less on PWS by going for DG. I am better off going borrowed time and stacking int due to the combined bonus from enlightenment and mental strength.
Borrowed time is a scaling factor of about 23%, so assuming spell power and spirit increase by the same factor the advantage of borrowed time gets higher. At 2000 spell power, 1000 spirit and assuming 2 targest to maintain PWS on. Borrowed time is a lot better than DG.
Also we are forgetting penance. The tripple grace stack in 3 seconds, frees up a lot of time allowing me to cast-cancel without fear of grace dropping off. Also being a 51 pointer with a CD, I would expect penance to be a pretty good spell when its finalised.
So no DG/imp renew is certainly not going to be a better option.
Did you forget what you will be casting between PW:S??
Flash heal and Greater Heal. You need to do something to keep grace up and something to cast that can actually crit to trigger Divine Aegis. Even as full Discipline you are still going to be casting flash heal or greater heal MUCH more than PW:S, heck even if you had Penance you will be casting GH or FH more than PW:S or Penance.
Borrowed Time is NOT a lot better than SG. It is slightly better at increasing the scaling of PW:S but is worse for every other spell you have. Spiritual Guidance increases your HPS across the board. I would prefer not to repeat what I said, but it does seem like you didn't understand just how little BT improves your healing output.
Have you tried these talents in the beta? I am theorycrafting but I have also tested these talents and my output is so much higher with SG than with BT, and the maths backs that up.
PS is a PvP talent, cooldown is too long for sensible PvE use and Aspiration does not do a lot to help that given that the cooldown was bumped up so that it is longer than it was in TBC even with Aspiration.
Taking SG over BT will provide more healing output. It might take time to people to realise this but unless something is done this is where "discipline" priests are going to end up.
The problem with borrowed time is that it makes the spell a decent, not great Oh Shit spell. The problem is that because of how Rapture interacts with it you are an idiot not to be casting it every time the cooldown is up. This makes the cast time reduction close to pointless as we have already agreed that a disc priest won't be spamming heals 100% of the time, and if it's part of a rotation it's not available in an emergency.
Borrowed Time does so much more. It increase Shield HpS by more than 33%. Imp PW:S is weaker. Plain and simple. It's awesome. It means you spend less time casting and more time regenerating. Everything's fine.
If you need to spam heals to keep someone up, Brutallus style, then Shield is good for you.
If you don't then you get mana for little time spent. While it's not available for "emergencies" if part of a rotation it does help to prevent emergencies from happening by increasing effective tank health every so often for a while.
If you've got time then you probably want to cast GH, Shield, Penance, wait and repeat. Lots of mana, lots of procs, keeping grace up, quite efficient and so on. If Shield can't be refreshed yet then slot a Renew in. It's nice how the two both have 15s cooldowns, so they can be staggered.
Lots of options for discs, but Borrowed Time is good.
08/21/08, 2:38 PM
