Yeah, but then I'm starting to get worried about Rebirth and Innervate bringing huge utility to the raid and then getting left out for druids... but meh, maybe Guardian Spirit will have the same stackability pros.

Not action bars, life bars on your UI. Because of changing team comps and groups I don't have the position of every player memorised on my healing UI, especially not by name so finding "Joe" when someone yells out can be a bit tricky. Anyway, the big thing with GS and pain suppression is how much you like reactive Oh-Shit abilities that are hard to time. Some people love this sort of thing, others including myself hate them, yes latency does play into it but it's probably a personality thing. As a healer I've had four years of being trained to go for sure and steady over flashy and spiky. Just look at the non usage of LoH by lot of pallies who are already tank healing, and don't manage to use this ability successfully in raiding. This is why I consider long cooldown "Save me" abilities a poor choice for raid healing. Admittedly the cost of doing LoH is higher but it's still better than wiping and provides a more powerful tank save. Now if you can use these abilities successfully in raiding you have my respect but my experience of long cooldown abilities like this is that they are hard to time. For me the best use of GS is for predicted massive damage of the 10% life left time to go beserk type where the not dying bit is an added bonus on top of the healing gain.

It's not all about reflexes, it's mostly about predicting damage and that comes with experience.

I don't see Guardian Spirit as reactive, to me it's quite the opposite. Imagine having two holy priests on Brutallus when learning the encounter who both have Guardian Spirit on 3 min cd. That's a GS on pretty much every "difficult" Stomp (ie. after/before third splash). With some co-ordination you can use those four GS as a proactive way of doing the encounter much safer. That's just one example.

I was actually in Alpha and am now in Beta. We had a lot of discussions and ideas about increasing the healing power of Disc. Our largest complaint was that they put a strong PVE talent (grace) at the bottom of a tree that did almost nothing to increase healing throughput. The changes they made from Alpha to Beta included:

Twin Disciplines (did not exist before)
Adding the +heal increase to Imp Inner Fire
Changing Enlightenment to increase spellpower in addition to stats
They rethought rapture entirely and changed it's location to higher up in the tree. In alpha it provided mana to the party. In beta it now provides mana to the priest only. It's important to note that it's only on effective healing.
Grace was reduced from 9% to 6% (as mentioned earlier)
Penance can not be used to heal yourself (we aren't sure if it's a bug or not)

I spec'd into Disc to see if the changes to imp inner fire, enlightenment, and twin disciplines resulted in more healing power. At least enough to compensate for losing empowered healing and other holy talents. However, all the new disc talents are bugged and don't work. Serendipity is also bugged so it's impossibly to test the regen potential of disc vs. holy.

I was very underwhelmed w/ Borrowed Time. Probably because I have some haste already so I didn't really "feel" the benefit. Penance is also bugged, but doesn't appear to be useful for other then initially stacking grace. Because it's a dmg and heal hybrid spell it's not protected from spell push back by healing focus. Since it also has a 10 sec cd you can't just recast if you are interrupted.

They made a lot of really good changes to guardian spirit. The alpha form of that spell was really horrible. Increasing healing to the target by 40% (for all healers) and a final bloom that scales w/ the targets max health provides the protection after the sacrifice that we expressed concern over. In alpha if it sacrificed itself it just ended the effect and prevented death. But if you had 100 hp and it prevented the lethal hit, you'd just die from the next hit. Providing this bloom heal on sacrifice resolves that concern.

They also significantly buffed lightwell. Using one of the charges doesn't activate your gcd or interrupt your spell. So you can click to get heals w/out interrupting your healing or dps. It has 10 charges now and they only break on dmg that would be 30% of your hp (basically usable on anyone but tanks). It also lasts 3 mins and has a 3 min cd allowing you to keep it down all the time.

I would say my concern with the current state of our trees is that it will result in the hybrid spec'ing that all priests did before tbc. We didn't take any of the end tree talents. Instead we cherry picked from both disc and holy. I can imagine a lot of priests using a 42/29 build. Getting enough in disc to get grace then picking up early holy talents including SoR, Spiritual Guidance, and most of spiritual healing. I think this is unfortunate because a lot of talents in deep holy are interesting.

I will say maintaining grace goes against our priest healing methodology. You basically have zero time outside the FSR. Adding that to their desire for disc to utilize pw:shield a lot more it feels like a very spammy type of healing. And I'm continually saddened by their refusal to allow DS as a trainable spell (even in imp DS remains a talent). Esp since now Shadow priests also value spirit.

I am really excited about disc for getting to do something different and I really hope that the benefit of Grace and Divine Aegis on the tank along with utility spells such as PS and PI are enough to earn me a raid spot as some kind of deep disc build. I've never minded babysitting the tank and would be glad to do only that. Of course if it ends up being bad, holy also looks quite tasty, but I do enjoy variety and I've always liked the disc tree, oft broken as it is.

I have read this thread and I have a question about Pennance that maybe someone can answer. On the tooltip of the talent tree I read it was "Instant Cast" but in this thread I have seen people refer to it as a channeled spell. Is it just a mistake that some people are referring to it as "channeled"? It seems like an amazing ability to be able to instant cast and then immediately follow up with a GH to do some serious burst healing every 10 seconds. Of course a lot of that will depend on how much Pennance actually heals for and its mana cost. But if it's channeled it's significantly less powerful...

Also I think a lot of disc looks very strong but I see no place for Borrowed Time in a raiding build. I would have to echo those who have pointed out that PWS itself has a CD, and obviously that it applies the weakened soul effect. Reducing the GCD just doesn't seem like that effective a use of talent points, especially if the GCD is hard capped at 1.0 from the combination of talents/haste. I could see MAYBE dropping 2-3 points in but even then it doesn't seem that great a use of talent points because of the CD and weakened soul.

This is what I've been mulling over for raiding disc (I never take imp fort with a disc build because my focus is 25-man raiding and I'm never the only priest): http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

I was wondering about that. The bonus healing in Inner Fire just seemed small-ish (120?) 30% of that only being an extra 36 spellpower, which is hardly more than a food buff.

I am sure it is just really too soon to tell about most of these things. It is probably prudent to give it some more time before I get too excited OR disappointed about the prospective changes.

If pennance were instant cast, as suggested by the tool tip, it would be much more befitting of a 51 point talent IMO ad do the trick to push disc up to being able to compete with other healing specs.

You should note that the numbers floating around for Inner Fire (and improved Inner Fire) are spellpower, which is at least a 2:1 ratio with "Healing Spells & Effects", and if they follow the pattern from current gear (see: [Golden Staff of the Sin'dorei] or [Robes of Faltered Light] or [Hammer of Sanctification]) I can easily see the ratio being 3:1.

So if you see something that says "120 spellpower" that really means "120*3 HSE" (or "120*2 HSE" or whatever their ratio is).

Getting an extra ~ 400 HSE just for putting up Inner Fire is *huge*. And lovely.

I don't really mind Grace only lasting 8 seconds, if I'm healing a tank in need of Grace I land a heal in that window regardless of the buff. Main issue I have with disc (as said already) is the amount of talent points we need to spend in order to get "to the good stuff".

Let's look at this raiding build for lvl 80, I'm assuming you can't go below 18 points in Holy and that you can reduce GCD from PW:S below one second: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Now, they have changed Inner Fire and added Twin Disciplines so we don't waste that many talent points on completly useless things. But look at this:

5p in Twin Disciplines: Increasing SP by 5%
5p in Mental Strength: Increasing Intellect by 15%
4p in Enlightment: Increasing Stam, Intel, Spirit by 5% and SP by 5%.

15 points to get 20ish% more Intellect, 4% stam, 4% spirit and 9% sp. On top of this we're "forced" into 3 points in Improved Inner Fire (nothing else to spend it on?) which give us 30 (?) more SP - translates into 50ish more healing.

These talents do not increasing our utility or performance in any major way, they are "just" more stats and not even scaling that well compared to Holy that get 10% more healing across the board for 5 talent points in total. I'm not complaining about Twin Disciplines at all - it is an awesome for tier1, but when you add up the filler talents in disc before you reach the good stuff in the end it's very ... dull. Yes, you get a sexy mana pool, solid regen and a boost to Spell Power, but we're basically spending 53 talent points in one tree without getting any major buff to throughput because you lack modifier talents like Empowered Healing. It looks like a PvP tree to me, but with a major PvE buff misplaced at the bottom.

Disc is all about Grace, if it's not needed I can't imagine that tree making it into raids in competition with other healers. Grace is powerful though, so I guess we just have to wait and see.

As Ana is saying (thanks for very informative post) we may see builds not taking any 51p talent.

23/48: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (IDS holy, "new" 23/38)
43/28: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (Grace)

Both these specs would be a sad way of taking priests. It would be very nice to see either disc being revamped even more or moving IDS to holy/lower disc tier (I know this one is old).

Edit:

Eh, I think you've misunderstood this. The healing value of Spell Power has nothing to do with healing gear today getting 1/3 of healing as SP. WotLK version of hammer has 293 Spell Power, live version has 550 healing ... 1 SP=1,9 healing.

I think the grace dilemma directly mirrors the warlocks malediction dilemma. If they take a malediction lock in a raid, they get a nice raid-wide buff. But at the cost of DPS, since the affliction-specced lock will do much less DPS, and the DPS gain from malediction doesn't make up for this in most cases. I feel it's much the same thing with grace. Sure, one might be very useful to the raid. But will its usefulness outweigh the loss of a deep holy priest? I doubt it.

I can see healing priests in WotLK being either 23/48/0 IDS specced, or 14/57/0 specced, or somewhere in between. But I don't really see a raid spot specifically for grace, for the same reason that most raids don't see malediction locks.

Requesting to have the title of the thread retitled to "[Priest]Discipline/Holy WotLK Talent Preview and Discussion" as per
stipulated aggreement in the Holy Priest Wotlk thread so that participants/viewers know where to go.

edit: I hit enter prematurely, fixing this up to make sense.

Again...why is it so bad for you to lose personal healing values for a MASSIVE tanking buff? Are you playing for yourself to top meters or for the raid? Because right now grace is more powerful than anything the holy tree has to offer, period. -6% incoming damage and +6% to all heals is huge. Comparing this to malediction is poor, because malediction loses ALOT of DPS for the mitigation. Grace on the other hand sacrifices personal HP/s [between 10-20% overall hp/s] to reduce incoming damage (a significant nerf to incoming DPS, the effects of which are hard to measure because it can prevent gibs, which no amount of HP/s can prevent) AND increases raid HP/s [6% times at least 2 healers + hots]. Add into that the potential to keep grace stacked on multiple tanks and I would say the trade off is more than fair.

5% spell damage and healing is rather big as well (enlightenment), not to mention the big effect 20% intellect will have on your mana regen. Rapture is very strong as well, possibly comparable to serendipity. Borrowed time makes PW:S give mana back while doing more effective HP/s than flash heal.

As it stands right now, the healing of Disc will be different from holy, but not worse. Sure, you may outgear an encounter and not need to prevent gibs anymore, in that case spec holy for more flexible healing and better personal HP/s whatever you like. But for progression content no amount of HP/s is going to prevent gibs like the combo of Grace / Divine Aegis / Borrowed time.

The generally accepted power loss is in the vicinity of 15-20% for disc and the changes between alpha and beta are as accessible to holy as to disc. As for being a massive buff. Remember that Grace is the core of disc, the other new skills and PI/PS are nice to have but are highly situational and a long way from critical, especially with the new hand of salv and Holy guardian effects from pallies/holy priests respectively.

As for grace being the lynchpin of Disc we can compare with aflocks who are within 1% of the damage mitigation, given that blizzard likes to apply damage reduction talents before factoring in armour. Can anyone in beta run some tests as to when the damage mitigation of grace is calculated, this is critical to a mathematical analysis of grace and currently I haven't seen such data. If Afflictions debuff is only desirable on Brut/patch style fights then we have a good ballpark for how much utility the 6% damage reduction of grace will give. The answer for warlocks is, fuck raid synergy it costs to much personal dps. On the other side of grace we have the healing boost. To counteract the loss of power from the disc priest you would need three, count em, three other healers (assuming they have equal single target power) to counteract the 15-20% loss the disc priest has incurred. I can't think of many times you have than many healers on a single target, so for most raid situations disc doesn't justify itself on raw numbers.

Now it is possible that the designers may come up with some way of making encounters favour the tricks disc brings over more raw power from other healers but damned it I can think of them right now. This analysis is focused on 25 mans and the loss of power just gets worse and worse as content gets smaller as grace works best in large scale situations because of the fundamental mechanics.

I agree with you on what you say. A lot of people are thinking in some sort of "well this won't be good once we're two tiers ahead of the content we're raiding!" way-ish. You have to look at it from the perspective of progression - discipline tools are simply amazing and they may even border on being a requirement for 25 man content.



Another thing to look at is this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
With a build like that, a Discipline Priest could have a PW:S Penance PW:S Healspellofchoice PW:S Healspellofchoice Penance PW:S. In short, the Priest spams PW:S on cooldown, keeps Grace up and does random healing (either on tank or raid, or just stays OO5SR). The idea behind PW:S spam is that if the recipient takes enough damage while shielded, you'll GAIN mana back and you'll do additional damage.

Could it work? Maybe on some encounters, maybe not as well on other encounters - but the possibility is there which is something new and something to consider.

I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but the grace reduction is before armor is applied. I tested this on myself. Also the inner fire is healing spell power only. This isn't a bug. It's intended to be healing only. At level 80 the amount is 120 healing spell power.

Frankly because rapture is based on effective healing if you are spamming the tank w/ a pally or even a druids lb's you are probably going to eat more overheal then not. And grace is going to require you to land fairly consistent heals on the tank and just eat the overheal. If you are trying to maintain grace on two tanks you have even less ability to cast/cancel or regen. It feels like serendipity that rewards overheal and rapture that doesn't are kind of reversed, imo.

Well PSW on the tank is going to be really interesting from a numbers perspective. Depending on the coefficient and base value of the top rank shield you may find that the spell is totally self funding from the 25% absorbed refunded as mana clause in rapture. This is going to be necessary for PWS to be viable as it is currently horribly inefficient to cast pws.

The problem is that I can't see the reflective component being maxed out given that a discipline healer is going to be forced 18 points into holy to maximise gh efficiency and to pick up other essentials such as inspiration. I would assume this build. At this stage I can't see how GH can be left out of any serious Disc healing skill rotation.

Given the various cooldowns on penance 10 secs and the weakened soul debuff 15 secs and not forgetting PoM cooldowns you will need to be casting on a single tank...

Penance. 0 secs - 3 secs
PWS 3 secs - 4 secs (reduce gcd from borrowed time)
Greater heal 4 secs - 6.5 secs
PoM 6.5 secs - 8 secs.
renew. 8 secs- 9.5 secs
random haste gear means that even with latency we still have 1 sec before Penance is up and we need to pad out to the PWS cooldown
Greater heal 9 secs - 11.5 seconds.
Penance 11.5 secs-14.5 seconds
PWS comes off cooldown .5 secs later cast it again... repeat cycle ad nausium.

This gives you a nice rotation of heals that keep grace up and maximises the opportunity for PWS on the tank and also refreshes renew just as it's falling off. I have no idea if this is a viable rotation from the point of view of mana expenditure but it keeps all the essentials on cooldown and maximises the available buffs, PWS, PoM etc.

edit

Damn, grace applying before the armour buff is exactly analogous to the effect of maladiction. This makes the damage reduction part of grace rather bleah as proved by the maladiction experience where it is not really required for most fights.

Now we know how exactly Grace works lets run some numbers to see if it sounds good.

Boss hits for 20k per swing before armour.
Tank has 65% passive armour mitigation.

No grace: 20000 x .35 = 7000 point hit.
Grace: 20000 x .94 = 18800 x .35 = 6580

this is a difference of a whole 420 points a swing. Now assuming that warriors are still the be all and end all of progression tanking we have managed to provide extra mitigation which provides less oomph than the currently existing shield block value. So for gutting our Healing potential a conservative 15% we have managed to partially counteract the fact that the warrior has lost a shield block against every swing under the current system.

This does not exactly inspire me with confidence. Previous maths shows that for top rank Gheal and 3000 current healing equivalent gear the disc priest has 1500 points healed less on his greater heal so the boss will have to hit the tank approximately 3 times over the course of one greater heal (2.5 seconds) to do more damage than the difference in healing power on one! greater heal. The bad news in this scenario is that the tank still took 19740 damage inside that 2.5 second span which is going to be one hell of a beat down even for L 80 hp values.

The problem with comparing grace to malediction is that for grace you are swapping healing power for damage reduction which is a zero sum game. Compare the warlock who is trading a third dimension (dps) for damage mitigation on the tank and you see that the power of malediction is arguably greater as you get the damage reduction + maximum healing power. In most raid situations dps is easier to make up over the whole fight compared to lack of healing in a sharply limited time span which is what kills tanks.

I'm curious how you're casting PW:S on a tank every 4-6 seconds with Weakened Soul. Asking a Disc priest to raid heal is dumb -- basically, they're not built for it, they shouldn't be doing it, and if you have one in a raid, they're on the tank, full time, no question. You can't risk letting your 3-stack of Grace fall off.

Lots of assumptions there mate. What *FORCES* a Discipline Priest to be on the main tank full time in WotLK?


Grace has an 8 second duration, meaning that you only have to land a heal on the main tank every 8 seconds to keep the stack active. How a specific rotation might be applied is hard to discuss because even if we knew some of the raid encounters in WotLK, the rotation would still be largely affected by your other healers and the fight in question. Point is, if someone is going to take 3000+ dmg within 30 seconds, a PW:S from a Discipline Priest would most likely become one of the most efficient way of "healing" that dmg: the dmg prevention of PW:S has no overhealing, it does dmg and is mana efficient to the point of replenishing the Discipline Priest's mana pool.


Let's take two hypothetical examples, where scenario one is a raid damage heavy fight and scenario two is a fight where only two or three toons take any substantial and predictable dmg. In both examples, the healing strategy encompasses the way the Discipline Priest heals.

In the first raid heavy dmg scenario, the Discipline Priest tries to do the following: keep Grace active on the main tank as much as possible, keep PW:S up on the main tank as often as Weakened Soul permits and spend the rest of his time spamming PW:S on the raid.

In the second scenario, the Discipline Priest focuses on main tank healing, with the help of the Gheal related Holy Talents and Penance. PW:S could be thrown around when needed.


What does it mean? With the PW:S changes, it gives the Discipline Priest a much needed versatility when it comes to raid healing. It would let Discipline Priest be more viable as raid healers than they are in TBC, and they would still be able to perform exceedingly well as main tank healers. The key thing though is versatility: you spec Discipline and you can keep your raid spot when you get to the AoE boss instead of being forced to spec Holy or sit out for a Flourish bot or a Resto Shaman.

I explained it earlier. Read up on the previous posts. Divine aegis and PWS absorb damage after it is reduced by inspiration and grace.

Crit is important for inspiration and aegis. Spell power is important for grace and PWS.

As for the damage reduction point of view. The idea that having a flat amount of reduction every few seconds is somehow very different from having a contant % reduction is quite frankly wrong. Due to the short cooldown (15 secs) The graph of health deficit vs time, is not all that different. The most important thing about damage absorption however is how it combines with damage reduction.

Its not bad news and when its applied is not important.

10k damage: apply 50% from armor = 5k damage, apply 6% from grace = 4700

10k damage: apply 6% from grace = 9400, apply 50% from armour = 4700

10k damage: apply 56% reduction = 4400

This is nothing new. The order in which the effects are applied does not mean anything. What is important is that they are separate effects. Separate DR effect stack multiplicatively not additively. I.e. (1-50%)*(1-6%) rather than (1-50%-6%)

You are forgetting the absorption from PWS, aegis and inspiration. When you add all 4 and because absorption stacks additively unlike DR, you are going to get 20% or more reduction in incoming tank damage.

Disc priests are also very useful in places where you have deadly RST abilities. Or when there are heavy dots flying around.

A holy priest is an equal tank healer to disc as things stand, xpt disc priest reduces damage instead of healing more.

I think the Healing to Spellpower conversion (for TBC items) will be done in a way as to keep the ilevels on the items the same. Assuming that and taking a look at how item levels are calculated we get the conversion ratio of .86 /.45 ~ 1.886

Source: Formulas:Item values - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

PWS and Aegis are just heals under another name. 4000 points of shield is the same as 4000 points of healing for a given armour value. They do however allow a temporary boost to total hit points. You can't count inspiration as a plus for disc as it can be maintained just fine by holy priests or shamans.

Tank with 4k shield is hit for 7000 damage and ends up 3000 hp down.
Tank with no shield is hit for 7000 damage and is immediatly healed for 4000 points ends up 3000 points down.

Assuming a 25% crit rate and a base greater heal of 7000 for a disc spec we get crits of 10500 for a shield of 3150. this gives one free 3150 shield every 10 seconds if spamming. This is 4 greater heals so we can work out that the value of Aegis is 787.5 or an effective average heal of 7787, However aegis is not 100% effective as you will get overlapping shields cancelling each other out so lets make an educated guess and say 20% of the aegis value is wasted on overlapping shields. Dropping the average value to 7630 the effect of grace interacting with shields then bumps it back to 7667. Unfortunately the average holy priest heal is 8500 or approximately 900 points more. On our 65% mitigation tank this is still 2 7000 point hits every 2.5 seconds to generate mitigation equivalent to the throughput of an equivalently geared holy priest.

I assume Aegis and PWS stack, can anyone confirm this? otherwise you can PWS or Aegis and loose out even worse to holy priests.

I'm not sure why you think a disc priest is better than a holy priest for heavy hitting RSTS or dots, can you please explain in more detail as I currently can't see what they bring that the holy priest doesn't.

Finally I would point out that a disc priest healing the tank will result in more health yo-yoing as shields and rng Aegis spikes bump tank health over 100% so you will end up overhealing more and being even less mana efficient because rapture only returns health based on actual healing not overhealing, this gives a very strong edge in endurance to the holy priests clearcasting and serendipity. Finally a holy priest is more flexible, he has better AoE healing and will be able to generate more througput on demand if needed.