I have to agree that disc raid viability is currently lacking. With grace nurfed to hell and back your lack of power compared to holy is really starting to show badly. While they have made PWS worth casting they seem dead set on making it part of the bread and butter healing of disc and it still needs a lot of work to justify it. The biggest problem is that I can't see a spot for a disc priest now that they bring nothing special. Just bring more holy priests/druids/shamans. Personally I never liked Disc but I was hoping that it would be viable and interesting.

As things stands holy looks so much more enticing and every time they change somthing in disc they add it low down within range of a holy build as well. Currently I would spec this 17/54 and pass up guardian spirit and a point in test of faith to get improved inner fire. While many people love guardian spirit I have never liked clicky trinkets or "oh Shit" skills on long cooldowns as they never seem to be available when really needed or I just plain forget to use them as the crisis hits. Dropping a point in test of faith costs me 3% larger heals and 5% crit on low health targets but for this I get the 60% increase in spellpower from improved inner fire. Which is a constant extra 72 spellpower to all offensive and defensive spells or 145 added to your greater heal each and every time. This, in my opinion is worth the trade-off, especially at lower gear levels.

I am still not entirely certain what path Blizzard wants discipline to take. A lot of talents are present to improve PW:Shield, but even if you keep PW:S permanently on cooldown, you still have 16-4 = 12 seconds you need to fill with other heals. Penance has a 10 second cooldown, so you will get 1.5 penance, leaving you with about 9 seconds of greater heal and flash heal.

Thats 9 seconds of heals that scales very well with Spell Power, Haste and Critical. PW:Shield lacks any scaling from Haste (as you hit the GCD cap at 1s) and Crit. Penance scales poorly with haste because of cooldown.

Not to forget that Grace now no longer improves healing done, and requires a lot of babysitting with its 8 second duration.

If we focus on the fact that 9 out of 16 seconds is spent doing Heals, you would atleast want more efficient Greater Heal, forcing you 18 points into Holy. While already there, going you can compare Borrowed Time to Spiritual Guidance. Dropping Borrowed Time would reduce the time you can spend on other heals, but what if you do not try to or need to keep shields on 4 people?

This could lead to a 46/25 build. A build focused around haste, spell power and crit. You would have to drop PW:Shield from your rotation, and you also lose a very efficient Penance. Problem with this spec is that it pales compared to a 14+/50+.

The main arguements for bringing a Disc priest is normally Divine Spirit, Imp DS, Power Infusion, Pain Suppression and Grace. Grace is no longer spectacular. Imp. DS is the weakest of many buffs that do not stack with it. Divine Spirit however is still potentially the best buff for Spirit. Pain Suppression has to be measured against Guardian Spirit, and Power Infusion against Holy Concentration and its Improved form.

That more or less leaves Disc Priests with Divine Spirit. A buff nearly outdone by a consumable in the form of Scroll of Spirit.

[EDIT]: Discipline does have one big advantage. Its the fastest spec when it comes to changing heal target. A PW:Shield + Penance can be done within 3 seconds for a lot of healing/damage reduction.

If Blizzard wants Discipline to actively use PW:Shield, they will have to give Discipline more reasons to use it. Perhaps Grace could be changed to "Reduces damage taken by targets afflicted by YOUR weakened soul by 3%". Make Penance somehow interact with Weakened soul. "Every tick of Penance has a chance to remove Weakened Soul."

Disc needs some luvin.

8 second cooldown with Aspiration.

Confirmed. Bonus damage and bonus healing both increase on your character sheet.

I'm actually a comfortable now with Priests in the beta than I have been in the past simply because they've fucked things up so badly for Disc and Shadow both that they're going to change it and that's pretty much that.

As it stood before I could easily see them just letting everything slide by 'as is' and that bothered me. I look forward to seeing the new changes and I really hope Disc gets a major overhaul in consolidation/reorganization because god it needs one.

To me the nerf to grace means that blizzard are "forced" to make discipline alot better to be viable and in my opinion that's alot better than having discipline lackluster, but a must have due to grace. I really like what's happening with all the debuff and buff changes, because now most specs need to be buffed individually and that, my gentlemen will finally bring FUN to everyone!

Question: Isn't +6% crit essentially an average of +3% healing? So Grace was nerfed for non-Discipline healers but Discipline healers would keep the previous +healing boost?

My quick math was:
Assuming an average heal of 7500. A crit averages +3750. If you crit 1% of the time, you average +37.5 healing. 37.5/7500 is +0.5% healing. So 1% crit ~= 0.5% healing.

Given the option, Sanctuary is in all ways better than Grace. Not only does it have the additional effect of increasing rage/runepower/mana, it's also a 1 point talent, 20 points deep.

Not to mention you can have an alt paladin sit outside and buffbot Sanctuary.

Does Grace seem terribly underpowered and weak now? 3 talent points for 3% very deep in a tree?

The new Borrowed Time combined with the 20% healing Glyph seems very promising however.

Grace does seem totally worthless now. Given that it is a temporary buff on a single target that requires the priest to focus mainly on that target to maintain you would think it would be much better than a raid wide buff if they are not allowed to stack with each other.

The other Discipline changes look promising, and had Grace been left as it was I think Discipline would have had a home as a single target healer. Without it the healing throughput of a Discipline priest just isn't enough to beat Holy who can also heal the raid effectively aswell as single targets.

I agree on Inner Fire, but why 5/5 Divine Providence? To me this talent seems fairly lackluster, while increasing throughput on CoH, ProM is terrific I think I would personally prefer Mental Agility.

At least in the current environment (and I have not done Sunwell so perhaps I'm missing something), I feel CoH spam can overcome any raid healing need, it's simply a matter of sustaining it. To that effect I would still wear the Gruul trinket when using CoH heavily on a fight. So 10% more healing or 10% lower mana cost are about equal (with the 10% mana cost reduction being slightly better in the napkin math I've done), but Mental Agility also improves Renew and PW:S as a little bonus.

I don't realy consider Divine Providence's effects on Binding Heal, Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova because while the first two at least are really great spells, they're still a situational spell many times while Prayer of Mending or CoH are staples of the class.

So, while its been implied, I haven't gotten a concrete answer to this.

How does haste and borrowed time work in regards to the GCD? I did a quick search of this thread, but found nothing. Is haste reduction to GCD calculated first (and thus useful) or calculated after (and thus useless).

I assume it is useless. Talents like Divine Fury lower the cast time of the spell and then haste is applied. I would guess that this is also the case for the GCD. Borrowed Time is now much better with 40% increase to PW:S, which would put it at 120% scaling with spell power not taking into account Improved PW:S.

The new talent adds yet more bloat to the end of the disc tree. 2 more points to spend are points you have to remove from other talents that were vital for getting high HPS as disc.

Lets have a quick look at the maths

DA on total healing

If you heal for x without crits then with c crit rate the with crit its x*(1-c)+ 1.5x*c = x(1-c+1.5c) = x*(1+0.5c)

The shield adds is c*0.3*1.5x = 0.45x*c. Hence it adds 0.45x*c / x*(1+0.5c) = 0.45*c/(1+0.5c) of your total HPS.

At 0.25 crit you are looking at 10% your total HPS

Adding 6% more crit takes crit rate to 0.32 which now means aegis adds 12.4% of your total HPS.

At 20% crit DA adds 8.2% of total HPS

At 26% crit DA adds 10.4%

I would say in the crit region we can expect disc priests to be in 6% crit increases absorption via DA by 2.2-2.4% of your total HPS, with the assumption that DA feeds of total not effective heal. If your HPS ~ DPS on the tank the loss is relatively small. DA also returns mana at 0.55-0.6% of total HPS, which at say 2k HPS is actually a fairly significant 11-12 mana per second.

6% more healing would increase total HPS by 6% and hence would increase DA absorption in the same scenario by 6%.

Thus disc loses 3% DR on tank, ~4% absorption from aegis. In terms of actual healing 6% more crit is nowhere near as good for effective HPS as 6% healing.

I think it comes up to a fairly significant nerf.

If you have overheal too then the average crit is not 150% of the average normal heal and effective HPS is lower than total HPS. I estimate 7.1-8.9% of effective HPS (best case to worst case) at 25% crit. This rises to 8.9-11% of effective HPS at 32% crit. I.e. a 1.8-2.1% increase. I think 2% of effective HPS is probably a fair estimate. 6% healing would certainly translate to more than a 2% increase in effective HPS. Again the 6% healing from grace adds a better return for aegis than 6% more crit and on top we lose 3% DR on the tank.

On top of that consider that effective HPS < total HPS < tank HPS in any senario and in a multihealer on tank senario its effective HPS << total HPS < tank HPS.

Overal if aegis works on total HPS, then its a sizeable nerf. If aegis works on effective HPS its a huge nerf.

I honestly don't understand why blizzard decided to hit disc on the head with the nerfbat. Have beta reports shown that disc is too strong?

I have ofcourse overlooked the possibility that the 6% crit on weakened soul is universal for all tank healers. That might spice the talent up.

I think that the new talent + grace should be rolled into a single 2 pointer which adds 3% crit on weaked soul and 50% chance to apply the grace effect per point. The grace effect is a single 3% healing 3% DR effect lasting 15 seconds. 6% more crit on weakened soul and 3% healing 3% DR for 15seconds on each heal may be ok.

145 healing on a 8.5k heal is 1.7% before overheal. Losing a point from Test of faith means 5% less healing and 3% less crit on proc.

If we stipulate for gheal on the tank

x1 heals at <50% (test of faith procs should not significant overheal)
x2 heals with no overheals
and x3 heals with overheal

Then you have x1 heals that have 5% more healing and 3% more crit

vesus x2+x1 heals with 145 more healing.

if average heal is H then we have x1*H*(1.05*1.015 - 1) from test of faith and (x2+x1)*145 from imp inner fire.

Assuming 8k as the average heal we come up with 526*x1 compared with 145(x2+x1)

In order for 145*x2+145*x1 > 526*x1 we need 145*x2 > 381*x1 i.e. x2/x1 > 2.63. If you are getting 2.63 more heals without overheal than sub50% heals then 3 ranks of imp IF gives you more return than 1 rank in test of faith.

rank on rank you need 7.8 heals with no overheal for every sub50% heal to break even. Given how big heals are I would say this is a very very rare senario. Also remember that test of faith applies to all heals not just gheal and DPS are much more likely to receive sub50% heals.

I think maxing Imp InF before maxing test of faith is poor use of talents. The real question here is 2/2 healing prayers, 1/2 healing prayers + GS or 2/3 Imp InF. Personally I would go for 1/2 Healing prayers + GS.

I have a feeling the current Grace is very unfinished, it got normalized along with all the other buffs/debuffs but it's close to useless in its current state. The duration needs to be increased to at least 15 seconds and if they want to cap the damage reduction at 3% then fine but it also needs another secondary effect to at least make it competitive with the new Blessing of Sanctuary. 3% more healing doesn't seem enough.

On another note, I finally managed to get my hands on some priest glyphs, some impressions:

PW:Shield Glyph - "Your Power Word: Shield also heals the target for 20% of the absorption amount."
Doesn't work at all at the moment. I was curious if the heal applied was instant at the start or when you actually absorb damage. I'll keep it equipped waiting for a fix as in theory it is one of my favorite glyphs.

Renew Glyph - "Reduces the duration of your Renew by 3 sec. but increases the amount healed each tick by 40%."
Works as advertised. With 1455 spell power and 3/3 imp. renew I was getting 5x 959 ticks before the glyph and 4x 1292 ticks after. I have to recast renew more often but it has a lot more oomph, very nice.

Holy Nova Glyph - "Your Holy Nova spell heals for an additional 40%, but deals 40% less damage."
Also works as advertised. I'm Smite spec for leveling now and I've been using Holy Nova as a CoH substitute during instances. Not very efficient but 2k crits are nice and Prayer of Healing is way overkill for now. Not too bad but I wouldn't mind trying something else.

If someone is interested in a particular glyph I could try getting some more crafted.

The Inner Fire glyph is quite nice for PvE as it saves some time recasting it, but it should really be at least 30 minutes in duration by default. This glyph is unfortunately a major glyph though, meaning no one will actually choose to use it if they can simply cast it between fights. From a PvP point of view it is totally worthless as Inner Fire will be lucky to last 1 minute.

I like the idea behind this glyph but I wish it increased the damage by 40% and reduced the healing by 40%. Priests do not need another area of effect healing spell, especially one that is still party only. Not to mention it breaks CC aswell, even with 40% reduced damage.

I can confirm that the PW:S glyph does not work currently, it does not heal when cast and it does not heal when damage is absorbed. I did have rapture though, which means it could be a similar bug to reflective shield+rapture where only one effect can occur from the damage absorbed.

I tried respeccing out of Rapture and it still doesn't work.

I really like it so far. More HpS, more HpM and more scaling. Awesome.

The numbers seem a bit funny though. Per tick I would imagine:
1.4 * 959 = 1343

Am I missing something?

Discipline at the moment does seem a tad 'gutted' as a holy player for once I looked at it and went OOOO shiny, I'm peronsally hopeful they will fix disc before Wrath, but who knows.

At the moment Sernedipity is also not workin, but holy is looking preety good, I'm not convinced with the top talent, doesnt feel very usable, but time and riading will tell.

At the moment Grace is in serious need of work. A Protadin T5 talent is better than out T10 talent? How does that work? Imp DS is also underpowered in comparision to its 'buff group' and on top of that, we have a serious amount of bloat.


Anyway, I'll keep posting on the EU forums, but we don't see much blue there tbh

Holy is a lot better at this than Discipline since it can throw a Flash Heal every 1.2 seconds over time (due to IHC).

In terms of Discipline overall, I think they're still groping for a core role. Priests have two roles and two schools, meaning that the standard ways of dividing up trees just don't work. Realistically, Discipline should be a 'dps' tree rather than a healing tree - even if they manage to 'fix' Discipline as a healing tree, they'll just en up 'breaking' Holy Paladins as a healing tree. Unfortunately, Shadow is effectively a separate class from the rest of the Priest trees, so it's awfully tough to support two different viable dps specs.

My prediction? Discipline will remain a purely PvP spec in WotLK just like in BC.

Looking at the way its going atm, I have to agree.

Assuming Sernedipity a) gets fixed and b) is as good as it looks like it will be, a single target throughput holy is going to be excellent, which was what disc was going to be.

However, going to wait a bit then give a bit more of a look at, fingers crossed it will get some more changes

If Blizzard wants Deep Disc to be the Single Target healer spec, and deep Holy to be the AoE healer spec, then GHeal throughput/efficiency talents should be at the top of the Disc Tree to replace the "Inner Fire" talents, etc. In turn, the initial tier Holy talents should modify Holy Nova / Circle of Healing and other miscellaneous aoe healing.

Frankly, the biggest problem is that deep Holy GHeal is the best single target healing possible, and skews any comparison between Disc and Holy single target healing post WotLK.

Vit agree and disagree. Let me explain.

The benefits offered to the raid (pre-nerf) from Grace, along with excellent single target healing made deep disc a superb choice, as it buffed not just the caster, but also all other tank healing.

However as it stands....

I always envisioned the Discipline tree as the tree where the Priest would put points in to help Prevent damage from occuring, where Holy fixes damage and Shadow Deals damage.

The big buffs to PW:Shield and addition of Divine Aegis and Grace goes a long way towards reaching that, but there is a lack of tools to use between cooldowns. Also the tree defining talent (Penance) doesn't supplement the tree as well as I'd hope.

They are looking into Shadow soon, and hopefully they will deal with Disc later, so it doesn't end up as a spec mostly used for PvP.