Ellyh

That works, using the 3 seconds in my model to cast a gh to ease up the rotation rather than trying to fit in a renew or PoM as Kopalec and I were does give you some more leeway for "random stuff happening"

Kopalec as we are discussing the spirit link scenario my personal feeling is that the spirit link damage soaks are not going to be taking enough damage to justify bothering to stack grace on them. Remember that the encounters will be designed around there being no spec being a "Must have" which is my interpretation of recent blizzard statements. This suggests that the soaks are not in fact taking a massive amount of damage. History suggests that non tanks have about 1/2 the hp of a tank and they will only be receiving 1/4 of the damage that a non linked tank would be. These will not be big numbers and the spirit link is most likely to break because of massive damage to the tank. This would be the equivalent of a single 60% of life hit on a non linked tank which is plausible for arching smash type mechanics. I suspect that a shield and a renew on the soaks should be close to enough to keep them standing, and that your time would be better spent guaranteeing that grace doesn't drop on the primary tank. Someone else, preferably a resto druid, can keep any damage you don't catch on the soakers under control with hots or quick heals. That is of course assuming that grace/defensive stance effect the damage that the soaks are taking, if it doesn't then stacking grace is pointless.

Relatively speaking the soaks and tank are taking damage at the same rate but the overall numbers on the soaks are far smaller making it easier to cover with hots and shields. Assume that the tank has 30k hp and the soaks have 15k. If the boss hits for 16k the tank takes 8k damage and the soaks take 4k each. % wise they have taken the same amount of damage. But the hit on the tank went right through your shield and did some major hurt but it's quite possible that the soaks shield still has a small amount of damage left to take. This is one of those cases where the absolute values taken by the soaks is more important than the % of life because we are using the same sized heals on both of them despite the fact that that one target is taking 2x the damage of either of the others.

Ironically if you do plan to run some sort of 3 target rotation haste is a bad stat for you as your flexibility is wrecked by the cooldowns of PWS. Unlike generic healing you can't take advantage of both haste and PWS without wasted downtime.

 

tasha

I am not sure about how rage generation from damage works with spirit link. But in the case the tank gets 50% less rage from damage, and you add in a shield every 15 seconds, I can see dps dieing ...

 

Shan

I don't think Spirit Link was intended to be used full time on a main tank, the "breaks on blows greater than 30% health" part is an indication of that. I think it's meant as an extra buffer on melee dps classes or squishy players.

That is of course unless that 30% becomes what would otherwise be 60% since half of it will be shared with two other players.

 

Kopalec

Tasha, this is a non factor for a Death Knight who uses rune cooldowns and runic power for tanking. I imagine Protadin's would also have little issue with outside sources of regen from the raid to go along with mana regen through healing received. That leaving Warriors and Druids, if I understand their tanking rotations correctly, they have one used for mitigation and one for generating threat. Perhaps in this scenario they would be able to forgo a mitigation rotation?

You don't see this setup possibly allowing the overall use of less healers for a raid? If the damage being taken is more easily handled by fewer healers, then your not only making healing more efficient, but allowing more Dps to speed up the raid's kill time no?

As for Blizzard not wanting "must have" specs, that is the intent surely. They obviously don't think of everything though and this could fall into the Demonic Sacrifice realm.

 

Kopalec

The amount needed to break the link will depend upon if the Grace stack applies before or after Spirit Link. If the linked soaks receive additional benefit from Grace, it could obviously perpetuate the link further.

 

Shan

In the original warcraft, the damage that was divided between linked targets was mitigated only once (when applied to the target that took the blow). Soul Link has the same mechanic if I'm not mistaken. We can pretty safely assume that Spirit Link will work the same.

 

Supermerkicus

Has there been any word on if they're going to look at the Disc tree any further?

Discipline was stated to be a big focus at Blizzcon '07, yet the tree has hardly been touched at all if ignore new talents, yet my Shaman, Druid, Warrior and Mage trees have seen some pretty big overhauls.

The changes are all warranted and very user-friendly, but I'm curious why Disc hasn't seen similar treatment when it was supposed to be a major focus of this expansion (at least for Priests).

 

Aeverius

Aside from this post yesterday? http://elitistjerks.com/868798-post836.html

There are obviously more changes coming, although they probably won't be as thorough as the rehauls on some of the other classes' trees.

Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:

 

Anedris

As long as a disc priest is smart with their heals, I doubt threat will be an issue. Generally, if the mob(s) hits hard enough that you need to use all your healing tools, rage will be a non-issue. If the mob hits weakly enough that rage starvation is an issue, you can forgo PW:S and use less efficient direct heals. In a low-incoming damage situation you can heal conservatively and have PW:S available if the tank spikes for any reason.

Hard-hitting raid bosses usually fill a tank's rage bar several times over with every hit, and tanks suffer rage starvation due to avoidance strings, not because they're mitigating (or being shielded from) too much damage.

 

Lanlaorn

Well, if Patchwerk is unchanged that's 3 tanks taking enough damage, but I sincerely doubt this kind of Flash Heal 3 tank rotation can be sustained for 6 minutes anyway. While Rapture reduces the mana cost by a substantial margin if your heals are effective (and this is a point I doubt will hold true at all because with that much spam most of it will be overheal), Flash Heal is a tremendous mana hog and you'll have zero OO5SR time, no clearcasting and no downranking.

 

Havoc12

Yes but you forgot the 400 mana back every 10 seconds from 2x PWS + mana return from aegis. You only need to cast 2FH per 10 seconds, the rest is 1x penance and 1x GH. I am fairly sure its maintainable.

An imporatant thing to remember is that if the boss is only attacking one tank at a time, then you can just keep PWS up on the 3 tanks and focus healing one, then stack grace up with penance immediately on every tank switch. If these new changes to grace go live it will take only 2 seconds to stack grace.

 

Supermerkicus

Tigole:
This gives me a little bit of hope that Disc will see some de-bloating and consolidation rather than just improving Penance before the WoTLK patch goes live.

Frankly, I'd also like to see Surge of Light and Searing Light either replaced or combined with something healer related - those talents have no place in the realm of min/maxing that is WoW as they stand now because there is no viable 'smite spec'. I don't think that being a fun gimmick or helping to solo as a healer really justifies their presence either.

 

Shan

Agreed on all points.. however Surge of Light could be reworked to actually be worth it. CoH gives lots of crits which in turn gives you Surge of Light procs. The problem is the global cooldown. The net effect of SoL is small, I'd immagine that there will be better ways to spend a GCD most of the time.

The idea isn't bad, but (as usual) the implementation is shoddy.

 

cruumash

I can't believe you're asking WoW to nerf your class just because of a few optional talents. I can't speak for anyone else, but I enjoy the extra damage while I'm soloing/grinding primals while still having a viable healing build.

 

Shan

I'd call it refining the class. I don't have a problem with superfluous things being removed, and farming is easy enough and will be even easier with spellpower.

Now this talk about SoL has made me curious so I'll try it in SWP tonight. Let's see how works there.

 

Supermerkicus

You're not alone - a lot of people like having SoL and Searing Light -That's why I suggest combining those talents into other healing talents so that the smite talents are basically a freebie.

Otherwise they're just out of place - like the old tanking talents in the Shaman tree - I'm sure there were Shaman players out there who vouched for toughness, shield spec, and anticipation too :P They may be optional, but they also take the place that something else could fill, like talents that make Holy Nova un-suck.

 

cruumash

I guess I'd need to better understand your definition of bloat then because it seems like you want to un-bloat Disc and bloat Holy. Don't we end up right back where we started? =)

 

Vitalay

I think the main difficulty people are having with Blizzard's approach is that they are targeting a specific HPS for Disc Priests that they do not want to exceed. The "bloating" therefore may be the result of talents which are too powerful, leaving left-over unspent talent points. Since they want to equalize the talent point distribution amongst the trees, they just toss in some extra talents which they count on being useless from an HPS/HPM perspective.

Keep in mind that pure HPS and DPS (in addition to HPM and DPM) talents have very precise guidelines from a balancing perspective. They want you to only be able to pump out X hit points per second.

 

Lanlaorn

Even completely ignoring the PvE aspect the tree is far too bloated. The Disc tree is a point hog even today for PvP and adding Twin Disciplines and making Enlightenment good doesn't help at all.

 

Supermerkicus

I think the best way to define what I mean when I say bloat is to have you do a couple of things with the talent calculator.

Try to spec a PVP Disc build and you'll probably observe that you end up spending too many points on talents that do too little. Then try to spec a healing build, either disc or holy, and take note of all the pointless talents that you skip or talents that could be consolidated into 3 points instead of 5.

After you're finished, go spec resto on the Druid calculator as if you were a druid and you should notice a difference in terms of the quality of talents, the point costs required, and the overall return-per-talent point.

Though we have two healing trees, we're still ultimately balanced with the other healers that have one, so the end result is having two trees filled with mediocrity that we cherry pick from as best as we can. (although deep Holy is pretty solid now)

I really like what they've done with streamlining a lot of the other class trees - they're all great changes and I'd just like to see the same thing done to Disc and Holy.

Shadow looks great and the only complaints I have with Shadow is 1) poor scaling 2) no benefit to dots from spell crit 3) the horror and fade-escape talents are deep in shadow rather than being accessible by all Priests.

 

Vitalay

If you ever try speccing pure healing in the Druid Resto tree you'll see the same "bloated" aspect. In addition, it has the same problem with off-spec talents hanging out in the deeper areas of the tree.

If anything, the Restoration tree for Druids is relatively anemic with too few talents affecting their core spells.

 

Starfire

I would pick up SoL and SL, but only to level from 70 to 80. That way it would improve my soloing capabilities while retaining my healing power for 5 mans.

 

Nitz

The restoration tree for druids is far from bloated. There are certain very mediocre talents (Naturalist - Spell - World of Warcraft and Empowered Touch - Spell - World of Warcraft) and they are totally skipable. This spec, for example.

 

Vitalay

I should have clarified that I meant for PvP.

 

Supermerkicus

This very sentence alone is enough justification for the talent being consolidated into something that benefits healing.

I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't want any talents to be "leveling only" if they can avoid it - the new Spirit Tap, Wand Spec getting tossed, and the Shaman Stoneclaw talent come to mind as examples of this.

(Stoneclaw being pretty useless outside of leveling, given a cooldown reduction in grounding totem which is great for PVP)