I really don't see what about our new talents makes the new Disc any better at Arena than it currently is. It seems to not really have changed at all (from a PvP perspective), at least not compared to the strong PvP-related buffs that many other specs and classes have been receiving.

Edit: To clarify, while the new PWS-related talents are great, the usefulness of PWS in PvP is greatly limited by the Weakened Soul effect, which makes most of the talent boosts we're getting situational at best. It's not clear to me that the intent was to buff the Disc tree for PvP at all.

Heh, I assume the novelty of the "new" stat is getting the worst out me but I can't wrap my head around this statement.
100 Spell power in beta = 188 Healing on live right,
Why would you then say: 1.1*1.88*100 > 1.2*188?
To clarify, you say the changes to Empowered Healing and Spell power/Healing result in an overall improvement to their current situation?

If your calculation is correct Empowered healing turns out even worse than what I made it out to be? (last time I looked into it I was pretty sure that 3/3.5 Spell coefficient or down rank tax did not apply to the additional healing gained from Empowered Healing tho).

---------------------------------

Update: Looks like this talent is getting changed again.
Wow-europe.com released WotLK talent trees, I can only assume that these are from a later build than current beta:
World of Warcraft Europe -> Info -> Classes -> Priest -> Wrath of the Lich King Beta Talent Calculator
WoW -> Info -> Classes -> Talent Calculators

Empowered Healing is back to 20% GH and 10% FH additional healing gained, Identical to how it's now on live.
Lightwell cooldown also changed back to 6min from 3min in current beta, the duration remains 3min.
I haven't found any other differences with the current Beta talent tree.

On a more in depth review I have to change my mind that this of a newer build than current beta. Improved Shadow Form still gives 100% pushback resistance on the wow-europe.com tree. So either there is a lot of flip-flopping going on with talent changes or these are trees from an old build.

The US version states where differences with beta may originate from:
Talent calculator stats may differ from those seen in the Wrath of the Lich King beta, as they may reflect more current information.

If that's correct, they also took off the +healing aspect of Imp Inner Fire.

Except that's not how Empowered Healing works. Empowered Healing is currently an additive 20% to your GH7 coefficient (not sure how it interacts with the downranking penalty, but for GH7 this is extremely easy to test). From that perspective, even 20% represents a nerf; you'd need it to be roughly 20% * 1.88, or Blizzard would have to define the healing coefficients in some strange way so that the additive effect applies before the healing multiplier.

If the damage reduction is applied before armor then isn't it reducing more? (although either way you cut it it's the same)

Penance alone can keep grace up on a single tank since the cooldown starts at the beginning meaning there are only 7 secs between penance. The 5sr counter also starts at the begining so you can effectively have 5 secs of iFSR and 5 secs oFSR while purely keeping grace up.

I have been attempting to find a nice rotation for keeping grace on 2 tanks 100% but the odd cooldowns of Penance and PWS is making it complex and will prevent good regen.

The current Cooldowns of Shield and Penance makes an awkward rotation especially considering you have to keep grace up which isn't refreshed by the shield.

IMO Grace needs to be 15 secs and be applied using Shield. Using just shield and penance you can keep 100% uptime on 2 tanks who will always be under the effect of weaken soul and have plenty of room for renew/PoM.

edit: spelling.

I am sorry but the numbers posted in no way justify your conclusions. Maximum HP is not necessarily the most important quality in a tank healer.

I am really curious as to what this 1.24 scaling factor is in your calculations for holy, but I will let it stand for now.

Your calculations fail to integrate overheal, which changes the picture completely. A closer to reality value of crit for holy priests is 0.3% per point. For disc priests is 0.73%, which is more than double. Also you have forgotten PWS.

While overheal of 30% + results in a direct 30% loss from heals, divine aegis, PWS and grace do not overheal.

Read the discussion already posted and you will find that what the discipline priest lacks in raw HPS he more than makes up for it by reducing tank damage by ~20% excluding inspiration.

Taking all that into account you will find that discipline has nothing to be jealous of from holy when it comes to single target HPS. Holy still wins over due to test of faith, and has better mana efficiency, but for healing the tank disc is very competitive.

Disc will be a great spec to have in a few select encounters, where the boss hits just about as hard as he can. The hit timer is immaterial. If a boss hits for truckloads every 2.5 seconds or hits 3 times for the same amount in 2.5 seconds is immaterial.

Even outside those encounters disc is a perfectly viable healer. Not as good as holy but compared with today's disc, which is outperformed by holy in practically everything. Its ofcourse best to wait until bugs are ironed out in the beta and disc priests are actually put to the test, but I have little doubt this will be the case.

If raids want improved spirit, they will eventually figure out that a deep disc priest is actually better than a disc/holy priest, as borrowed time and rapture is the only thing that can outweigh the loss in deep holy talents. At the very least rapture at 1k effective HPS (which is box standard) is 125mp5.


==============================
It makes no difference because its %. Putting first or second gives you exactly the same value. The important bit is that its two separate effects.

Yes the current cooldowns make things a little awkward, but remember that grace has a 8 second duration. Since penance is a 3 second cast and assuming that the current behaviour of the spell is a bug then the cooldown starts ticking while you are casting the spell. That means at the end of the spell with 8 seconds of grace you have 7 seconds left on your penance CD.

Spell rotations including PWS currently mean you get 1 PWS off eery 16 seconds and 1 grace off every 11 seconds. That makes it impossible to maintain grace just by using penance. However you will certainly have to use gheal, so that is not an issue. If penance applies a 3 stack buff, then it wont he a problem to keep grace up on two tanks.

O_o
ignore the downranking modifier
(Base Heal +(Spellpower*(3/3.5+.1)*1.88*1.05))*1.1
.1*1.88*1.05*1.1
Empowered Healing Contributes .217 Damage per Spellpower

Or if they changed it back to 20%...
(Base +(Spellpower*(3/3.5*1.88+.2)*1.05))*1.1
.2*1.05*1.1
Empowered Healing Contributes .231 Damage per Spellpower

Old way Healing = spellpower *1.88
(base+(Spellpower*1.88)*(3/3.5+.2)*1.05)*1.1
1.88*.2*1.05*1.1
Empowered Healing Contributes .3948 Damage per Spellpower

Thats a nerf. And they would need to increase the talent to get it back to the old way.

Now if the revert back to .2 also included the change in formula then it would be identical to the old empowered healing. (base+(Spellpower)*(3/3.5+.2)1.88*1.05)*1.1

edit: because representing Damage/Attribute as a percent is dumb and confusing I fixed it.

edit2: clarified again.

You can calculate the shields as a incoming dps reduction if you like but I dislike smoothing it out as it it is highly erratic, especially at lower crit values. Short version: you can count grace as consistent damage reduction as it applies to each swing but you will frequently get extended periods 10-15 seconds of constant healing where you get NO crits at all and so you get no Aegis. In this situation you can't calculate Aegis as equivalent to consistent damage reduction because you can't rely on it being there. Instead all you can do is credit it as healing equivalent.

Allow me to explain using the example of boss thrash. This is what kills tanks most of the time.

Assume we have a 22k tank who takes, after armour mitigation, a boss thrash moment of 7000, 10,000 and 7000. This is 24000 damage over less than one second and currently the tank is pushing up daisies.

Grace reduces this to 22560 which is still a dead tank. Under Havocs proposed modelling of Aegis as consistent damage reduction the tank would have lived as on average the shields should have reduced the damage below 22k. However the disc priest cast PWS on the tank 10 seconds ago and hasn't had a crit since then so our poor tank is still smeared over the floor. Do you want the RNG on crit heals to decide if the tank lives?

This is why I don't think it is appropriate to model Aegis/PWS as damage reduction but instead model it as healing done.

Also the model used supposes that the tank is taking 2.5k dps which even by current standards isn't very high. For a typical endgame tank with 22k life it will take the boss approximately 9 seconds to kill the tank without heals. lets ramp this incoming dps up a bit and see how the damage mitigation model fares there and how much the Aegis and Shield are lowering incoming dps.

Assume the boss has 4.5k incoming dps, add grace, 4230 dps. lets say that you have a 3k shield every 10 seconds for 300 dps reduction to take us to 3930 dps and the 3k PWS every 15 seconds taking us to 3730 incoming dps. 3730/4500 = 82% this is in fact only a 18% damage reduction and I have greatly boosted the assumed efficacy of Aegis to hold the difference down. Using the original numbers it would be 15% damage reduction.

Now lets model patch2.0 for 25 mans and assume the tanks have 30k hp and they are getting smacked down for 6000 incoming dps. Running through the maths we get 87% or a 13% damage reduction. But as shown above your tanks are at grave danger of not getting an Aegis for an extended period and they get maimed.

What we see from this is that the damage mitigation effect of PWS/Aegis/Grace gets smaller and smaller as we ramp up the incoming dps. Thus we can't use damage reduction calculations to justify the power loss as it depends on the situation, the correct way to model it is to call it equivalent healing and compare the throughput.

WOTLK TALENT REGEN MECHANICS

Mental Strength/Enlightenment

MS+Enlighten give 1.2075% int and 1.05% Spirit

When plugged into the regen formula sqrt(1.2075)*1.05=1.153%

You will see a 15.3% increase in your regen although this drops down to 9.88% if you are trading SoR for enlightenment.



New Shield Mechanic

This is based on the formula:

if this is wrong I apologize.

Using the level 70 Shield as a base-

Shield becomes free after 291.8 Spellpower and quickly rises.

1000 - 84.2 MP5
1500 - 143.77 MP5
2000- 203.27 MP5
2500 - 262.7 MP5

Assuming 1500 Spellpower you are gaining 143.77 MP5 per tank since you can cast it on multiple tanks with it's 4 sec cooldown.

1 Tank 143
2 Tanks 287
3 Tanks 431
4 Tanks 575 MP5

This means you are throwing out 4k Absorbs on several tanks each of them giving you a decent chunk of mana back.

Healed:3885
Net Cost: -431 or 143 MP5 Gained
HPM: infinite
HPS:259

Serendipity

Using lvl 70 GHeal

2590 Base
825 Cost
1500 Spellpower

Refund=420 every 2.5 Secs 840 MP5
Heal=2928.2
Net Mana Spent=280.5 every 2.5 or 561 MP5
HPM=10.4
HPS=1131.28


Improved Holy Concentration

16% of all Gheals are free ~16% reduction in cost

60% haste on next 3 Gheals=1.5625 sec Heal
Assume 80% uptime Average Cast Time~ 1.75sec

825*.16*.85=112.2 Mana

MP5=70/1.75*5=320.54 MP5


*More to be added later but I'm tired.

You know, I feel that anyone going Discipline is just being selfish and wanting an "All in one" sort of heal, pvp/farming spec.

That said, as I was having a discussion with my guildies today... is it really fair to be discussing all this without seeing the encounters?

I mean, think about this... would you ever use CoH on an encounter like Prince? I mean like, ever? Or Chain Heal? Gurgthog said it best... the only reason people think Chain Heal and Circle of Heal are so powerful is because of the encounters.

What if we had more fights like Leothras? Then perhaps Discipline would be the best priest spec possible, with its ability to do damage. Or what about Reliquary of Souls, but with a tighter enrage timer forcing healers to dps for an entire phase.

Maybe this doesn't belong on this thread, but I just think people are getting to worked up without seeing the encounters at hand.

On a side note, am I the only one bothered that Circle of Healing now has a targetting circle =( This sort of disappoints me. I am sure some people might think its cool and nifty... (-peers at some Spirit Whore)... but I rarely even look at the screen to begin with -- I mean to things more than 10 yards away from me.

this may be true but there isn't much a holy priest can do in the same situation unless the priest knows ahead of time when the boss is going to thrash but then the disc priest could throw out a 5k shield or a PS while the Holy priest can use GS. Using the extreme weakness of an ability to prove a the point doesn't show much if holy also cannot thrive under such conditions.

We consider it Mitigation the same way Spell Resist is. Even at Max spell resist you have a chance that the spell will not resist at all in fact you can have a long string of zero resist or low resist. Stoneshield potions are only up a fraction of the time and they are mitigation, as is inspiration. If Aegis was like the druid's Living Seed then it would be a heal. Inconsistent Mitigation is still mitigation.


I would assume as the dps of bosses increase so does the disc priest's crit/Spellpower.

No there isn't anything that the holy priest can do to prevent it. However it does speak directly to the argument that Disc is providing great utility by reducing incoming boss dps. I don't call it utility if it only helps in a bad situation if your are lucky enough to get a big crit just before the bad situation occurs. It also undermines the argument that encounters are based about the presence of this big damage mitigation ability. People would rightly complain if boss burst was designed about a best case mitigation scenario.


On a different note if the new talent calculators are true they have reverted all the decent changes to lightwell and it is back to break on direct damage and 6 mins cooldown so It gets added back to the meh pile.

I'm 95% certain that they have just forgotten to update some of the existing talents (see: VT still returning 5% of your dps as mana, for example).

Edit:

This is news to me. If true, this certainly does make CoH slightly more cumbersome to use (like Mass Dispel right now). It also means that you can't use CoH with Grid/Clique, as I do currently. In its favor it does mean that you can position it more effectively (if that's an issue what with smart targeting and whatnot).

One minor note on Disc: If Disc will be highly dependent on PW:S for it's rotations, it means that it will scale badly with crit.

Due to the gear homogenization that will take place, Blizzard have been working to make all specs and all classes have use for stats such as crit. Hence itemization will make these stats appear more frequently on gear intended for priests.

Thus, if Disc scales badly with crit, it will mean Disc will have a scaling problem (similar to Aff locks and shadow priests in TBC) as we progress through the tiers. Won't be class breaking, but might mean that Disc priests will less viable towards Arthas after being invaluable at Patchwerk.

If CoH will require a targetting circle that will definitely be the nail in the coffin for that spell as it means it will not, in effect, be "instant" (in a meaningful way). (Healers really need to be able to heal in a 360 degrees around them, not just the area their GUI is facing, aside from the problem with not being able to use Grid/Clique). I'd rather not panic about this until I see it confirmed though

A targeting circle is totally redundant, you just pick someone in the middle of the pack and fire it off, I guess they are coding it to literally target the 5 eligible players with the greatest HP deficit but they should have continued on the CH model and had an initial target +4 others at lowest health. A targeting circle easily double the effective GCD of the spell as it is so freaking unwieldy.

I find all this a very common misconception.

The chance that a boss spike will happen without either aegis or PWS being active, or a big heal landing are remote. The chances that a big heal will land in the middle of a big boss spike are moderate. Exactly because aegis and PWS go all at once instead of being spread over time is what takes the chance of tank death during a nasty spike like this from moderate to remote. Adding spirit link, guardian spirit and pain suppression, the chance becomes non existent.

You are thinking of it from exactly the wrong perspective. You are thinking that you have a CD on PWS and an unpredictable factor on aegis so the effect is that you won't necesarily have it when you need it. In fact you are guaranteed to have aegis or PWS or both (assuming they stack) at least in some of the times when its critical to have them on and which would have been a wipe had you just had another healer channeling a bigger heal. If you want to think of it in terms of heals Aegis and PWS significantly increase the number of heals landing per second, which is by far the most critical factor for tank survival.

Raiding Disc Priests won't be wasted points on pvp stuff, although they may fork over the points to get stronger smites/penance/HF.

Crit wasn't strong before because overheal is worthless. Now suddenly 30% of those crit heals shields the tank with 100% effective healing/mitigation. It's more of the utility than the healing that makes it good.

We also now have a spell that has a chance to crit 3 times meaning we will probably have 80-90% uptime on Inspiration and a solid amount of Aegis shields going up. More shields and armor means less required healing. I'm sure you can quantify X crit= Y Spellpower at Z armor if you really wanted to.

A line formed in my spreadsheet from 1600 SP/0% crit down to 2500/35%

Edit: Typos in spreadsheets make me cry

Think of the following spell sequence, PWS, penance, gheal gheal, gheal, penance, PWS, gheal gheal gheal penance, gheal PWS. Notice that you get 2 PWS for 3 penance and 7 gheals and penance gets 3 chances to crit. Including PWS in the spell rotation still results in firing 5 critable spells (including 1.5 with 3 chances to crit) for every PWS. So no PWS won't significantly reduce crit scaling for disc.

In my estimation aegis raises the value of crit from 0.3% to 0.7-0.75%. Assuming 40% overheal that is actually pretty competitive with +heal, though haste is still better. A disc priest won't directly itemise for crit, but without holy concentration and without spiritual guidance, disc priests will be itemising more for intellect instead of spirit and will be using +int/+crit consumables and taking divine specialisation. The fact that they also get 20% more intellect from talents really means a difference of more than a few %.

Hmmm can you post your calculations, that does not sound right to me. I find it strange that you get a non-horizontal line as the limit above which crit is better. I did not actually do it properly when I did it, but my impression was that only the absolute amount of how much a spell heals that determines whether crit is more valuable than +heal.

Here is an example. Lets take gheal. Assuming 1.16 scaling with +healing then with 10% crit and enough +healing for the spell to heal for 6000 non crit. With 0.3% per crit point you get the following if you use the formula

healing = (A + 1.16*H)*(1+C*0.3), where A is the non crit amount the spell heals for at the current +healing value, H is additional +healing and C is crit%. I.e. A = 6000, H = 0 and C = 10-19%

As you can see at this value of A, 1% crit results in 18 more healing i.e. it is always equal to 18/1.16 = 15.5 +healing.

Hence there is a certain value of +healing (which is actually never reached in TBC) above which crit gives more return than +healing, regardless of how much crit you got. There is no balance point between crit and +healing. Above a certain +healing crit is always better (regardless of how much crit you got) and below a certain +healing, crit is always worse.

If you have divine aegis with 0.72% per crit point then 1% crit equals 43.2 healing or 37.2 +healing, if you have enough healing for gheal to hit for 6000. This is means that crit is already competitive for +healing with TBC values if you have DA.

What I did was compared the rise of 1 SP to X crit percent by setting them equal to one enough and solving for X. The using the variables (Spellpower before the 1) and Crit (before the added X) and put it into a spreadsheet

Formula:
The item value of 1 spellpower 0.846
the item value of 1% crit is 22.08

X=0.623(1+.95C)/(B+SA)*22.08*100%
Anywhere X<0.846 crit is cheaper

edit: /cry how did I not see that typo before. I handwrite all my equations before entering them into spreadsheets and somewhere along the line .95 got turned back into 1.95. Thank you for pointing that out as my spreadsheets usually echo into eternity; it would be a horrible way to start a penance sheet.

Ahhh yes... ofc the value of extra healing depends on the current value of crit. That would make it a non horizontal line. An important point: (1+1.95C) modifier looks incorrect to me. If crit is C% and A is current non crit healing value and k is crit value/A (i.e. 1.95 for DA priest), then Total healing = sum of non crit heals + sum of crit heals = A*(1-C)+k*A*C = A(1+(k-1)C). For a DA priest this is equal to A(1+0.95C).

So lets redo your calculations:

extra healing from X% crit = I = (B+SA)fX, where f is (crit modifier - 1).

To achieve the same increase with spell power you need Sn = I/(A(1+fC)) since A(1+fC) is the scaling factor for the spell including crit.

Thus the value of Sn/x = f(B+SA)/(A(1+fC))

So if Sn/x is higher than the itemvalue ratio you get a better deal from crit. This is doubly dependent on f. If you use f=1.95 you are using 295% scaling, so that produces a very large difference. With f = 0.5 the curve is pretty close to a horizontal line with something like a 200 spell power difference between 0 and 30% crit. With f= 1.95 the curve is not close to a horizontal line at all.

Since the item value equivalent is 26.1 healing for each crit%, if Sn/X > 2610 then crit will give you a better return.

CoH doesn't have a targeting circle and there hasn't been a build of alpha or beta yet where it did have one. I wouldn't get too flustered about spell labeling at this point. They are still changing a lot of the text tooltips and many of them are wrong. Improved holy conc had mislabeled ranks of the same talent all through alpha. Also, remember that a good number of the new talents aren't fully functional yet so it's still difficult to test anything.

Improved inner fire does have the +heal modifier on the current build of beta. The text for empowered healing is also 10% and 5% but has had no impact on the actual spell amounts (meaning they are the same as live). For what it's worth regarding the crit debate, the developers during alpha mentioned that they felt crit was not integral to priest healing. They view crit as a function of pally/shaman healing.

I still think disc is suffering from too many people (including the developers) wanting disc to serve too many masters. And the role of the tree just keeps getting more convoluted as a result.

What is the possible justification for this, except that they are damage reduction talents. However given just how much damage reduction is flying around, damage reduction is likely to play a big part in the PvE environment.

As for the value of GS you are forgetting just how many reduction talents there are now in the game. If the tank survives a killing hit, there is no way he will die again, especially with the 10% base HP heal and when taking into account that cheat death will probably negate the killing blow completely. He will get holy shock, use a healthstone, get spirit link, PWS, PoM a spirit link bubble, swiftmend, nature's swiftness+big heal, 20% from blessing of sacrifice and possible 30% from bubble, pain suppression, he may get a chain heal or healing wave 2nd target hit, the tank can also pop last stand/shield wall and so on.

Its like saying that ice block and CloS are PvP only talents, when in fact they are *extremely* usefull in PvE.

DPS gets aggro --> GS/FH --> GH spam. 40% healing and test of faith means that second FH is going to be *huge* and then GS greatly increases the chance that your GH will land. Instead of your DPS being two shooted, he has a good chance of living through 3 hits.

Think of an encounter like the big bad wolf. GS is effectively a guarantee that the first red riding hood will live due to the 40% more healing and the cheat death aspect. You can save it for an imporatant raid member that must survive or the raid wipes or you can use it to increase the time your raid can survive against this guy. I suspect the equivalent fights of WotLK will be very unforgiving for raids who don't have these talents available.