Guys, I have been analyzing results of the discipline build on webstats log of Brutalus fight 19.10.2008.
It was a build without penance, withouth Aegis, but with fully improved shield, 5 points in Rapture and 2 points in Grace.
There are at least few facts observed that are not consistent with the expected behaviour:
2. PW:S was not triggering Rapture at all. I could asses effect of the shield as it was often the main source of absorbtion and it was consistently 2650 damage absorbed. But no Rapture numbers coresponding with it were present in the log. I would tend to think that it is a bug connected to the fact, that it is not possible to identify source of the absorbtion on the target.
Could you please comment?
Do you have Reflective Shield?
In beta, Reflective Shield was "turning off" Rapture for Power Word: Shields.
I have Reflective Shield and definitely get Rapture from my PW:S on others. It does overwrite PW:S on self. This may be a consequence of Reflective Shield only working on self? (Does it only work on self? I never see damage caused by PW:S on others.)
Glyph of PW:S can crit but still does not proc DA. Does it proc any other crit effects?
And a separate question, is Penance intended to have a facing requirement or is it an unintended consequence of a channeling spell? It is unprecedented for a healing spell, and really annoying when you want to randomly Penance a member of the raid only to get an error message.
I picked up a Surge of Light in a battleground like that. I think it was due to the Holy Priest's Prayer of Mending crit healing me--but that's just a guess...
I'm pretty sure that if there is another priest with Surge of Light in the same group as you, you get the effects from it. I haven't seen the same effect with Divine Aegis (haven't been in a raid/BG with a priest who had it), but it wouldn't surprise me.
I ran TK as a 56/5 Disc priest last Friday. It’s a lot of fun but the experience had me wondering if Disc is really good enough for Raids. I tried to come up with a situation where a Raid spot should go to a Disc priest over a Holy priest, and drew a blank. I think it really comes down to this: “Is the additional single target healing ability the Disc Priest brings to a raid worth sacrificing the AOE healing ability of a Holy Priest?”
It’s not enough that a Disc priest can heal a tank just as well or just a little better than a Holy priest. Disc has to be far and away the best single target healer in the game or it just not worth taking Disc over holy.
If you were running a raid, is there any empirical reason to choose Disc over Holy?
I ran TK as a 56/5 Disc priest last Friday. It’s a lot of fun but the experience had me wondering if Disc is really good enough for Raids. I tried to come up with a situation where a Raid spot should go to a Disc priest over a Holy priest, and drew a blank. I think it really comes down to this: “Is the additional single target healing ability the Disc Priest brings to a raid worth sacrificing the AOE healing ability of a Holy Priest?”
It’s not enough that a Disc priest can heal a tank just as well or just a little better than a Holy priest. Disc has to be far and away the best single target healer in the game or it just not worth taking Disc over holy.
If you were running a raid, is there any empirical reason to choose Disc over Holy?
With the upcoming dual-spec feature, this may be moot. I'd expect a substantial number of PvE holy priests to have disc as their alternate spec. Outside this, I suspect it'll be based on your raid composition. If you're lacking in tank healers or healers that can easily/quickly top up random single target attacks (think Rage ice bolt, Bloodboil fel rage, RoS spite), then disc becomes a very useful alternative.
At the moment I use FH and Shield-Glyph. The only minor I have is Levitate wich is great if you are running around getting your archivements but has nothing to do with (raid)healing.
Yes, the shield-glyph proccs right at the beginning. And I dont like it that way, so I will try Renew instead.
I myself am holy specced. I dont know how to put my points in the last available tiers since those talents are best if they can work together so I have some talents with not full points at the moment. Since there is no better holy-specc I can see for the stuff I'm doing I let them sit there and wait until I start leveling. In a raidsituation with only one replendishment I realy got manaproblems sometimes but out of raids I dont have much problems. I even start to do some "dmg" in heros and everywhere else I go. (We try to do a good chunk of the archivements with two holys.)
I never tried disc for myself since I need CoH for raiding at the moment (we are short on shamans but heavy on palas and druids). I may consider to try it for a hero but I dont think that disc is my style of healing. I think they gave diszi most of the things we asked for: difference from every other healing, new spells and you cannot overlook the "healing" the diszi does. Big glowing orbs are great. Anyway I love the jack of all trades fealing I have with holy. That is the reason I play a priest anyway. So I'm a little bit sad that there is nothing likewise for holy but its my own choice to stay holy.
Anyway - I never tried disc for myself, but I have a tanking alt (warrior) and did some heros together with a disc healer. If there were not those spheres and blinking buffs I would never have been able to tell if I was healed by a holy or a disc. So the fear that the tank gets rage-starved is not valid - at least for lvl70. If you like disc tell your tank to try it out if he is sceptical or simply dont tell him that you dont heal the way he thinks you will do.
There are no doubts at all that the Discipline tree offers a lot to tank healing, (and I definitely prefer it in 5-mans as Penance is cheap, gradual, and Grace is very useful around poorly geared puggers) none of these mechanics really scale in the same manner as 3.0 CoH. Nor does the gains from 3x Grace and Imp. DS outweigh the effective throughput of a CoH priest. The skills could be analogued closely with Warlock's Shadow Embrace and Malediction, which were both great buffs, but didn't warrant sacrificing the throughput of Destro as the better tanks' gear became, the less necessary it became to have a percentile damage reduction. They just don't seem to justify the losses.
I have a thread on the beta forums with a list of bugs that I've compiled from reports, but it might have some things that have been fixed already.
That's a nice thread but the Borrowed Time bug (applying the incorrect spell power bonus to the shield) is notably absent. Are the devs aware of this bug? Also, I've heard multiple reports of divine aegis not stacking with either itself nor with PW:S, and that is a significant bug as well.
Originally Posted by daslog
I ran TK as a 56/5 Disc priest last Friday. It’s a lot of fun but the experience had me wondering if Disc is really good enough for Raids. I tried to come up with a situation where a Raid spot should go to a Disc priest over a Holy priest, and drew a blank. I think it really comes down to this: “Is the additional single target healing ability the Disc Priest brings to a raid worth sacrificing the AOE healing ability of a Holy Priest?”
It’s not enough that a Disc priest can heal a tank just as well or just a little better than a Holy priest. Disc has to be far and away the best single target healer in the game or it just not worth taking Disc over holy.
If you were running a raid, is there any empirical reason to choose Disc over Holy?
To be honest, I think this is the wrong question. Holy and discipline are not really competing for the same spots, and I prefer to have both. Holy is mostly specialized in multitarget raid healing and as such competes against chain healing shammies and maybe even druids now, but not against discipline priests. You don't take a discipline priest to do raid healing as a general rule.
On the other hand, if you already have raid healing covered but need someone on main tank healing, discipline is better. Discipline priests are more realistically competing with pallies and maybe druids for raid spots.
While it is still too early to say for sure, I think raid leaders with an open mind would be silly not to take a discipline priest if they need a tank healer. It's outrageously silly for 5 and 10 mans, but even for 25 mans I think the skepticism about discipline builds is not really based on anything very concrete. It's not like having great tools for keeping a tank alive is useless once you go to 25 mans.
You will always need healers who are good at tank healing, and I am not convinced anyone else is better. Some say holy pallies are better, but I've had my eyes wide open, and in 25 mans so far (i.e. at 70, with nerfed content, and overgeared) I've not seen that at all. Since everything has been nerfed back, healing has been easy, it's not exactly a good testing environment, but I'm still not really worried about discipline viability at the moment. Maybe I'll be proven wrong later. If so, then I rebuild. It's no big deal.
As others have remarked. with dual specs coming, this may become a moot point. Keep one discipline build for when your raid needs tank healing, and one holy build for raid healing.
Originally Posted by Arrox
I find myself really just spamming shield on tanks, and use penance to to refresh the 3 stacks of grace. I find myself having to overheal quite a bit just to have 3xGrace keep running.
Basicly im asking how you others play deep disc, how is your cycle with spells.
I'm still refining that, but basically I use penance as much as possible, and I find I use flash heals a lot in between. A lot of that has to do with keeping grace up and often only needing a small amount of healing beyond penance. Especially with currently nerfed content at 70, I'm finding you're never stressed and hardly need anything beyond the odd flash heal besides penance.
When under more strain, I expect to use PW:S and greater heal more. I'm less sure about where renew fits in. So far I'm skipping it. I still put in PoM pretty liberally (if anyone else might be taking damage).
I currently have 2/2 in aspiration, and I like that. The cooldown drop on penance gives you a little more than 6 seconds of time to do "other stuff" which isn't a lot of time. It seems like a big difference compared to the 10 second cooldown. The effect on inner focus cooldown has also helped (inner focus + prayer of healing is very nice and tends to proc DA on most the party).
The above is really just early experience, and I'd be curious whether others are seeing similar changes in the spells they are using.
I don't think that's a bug necessarily- they still would benefit by having a reduced GCD.
Does it also work on trinket activations? I believe my Greater Heal is not always getting the bonus haste because there's a macro that activates my trinket when the cooldown is available... Can anyone confirm this?
I'm not currently raiding and not in beta so feel free to add appropriate salt, but experimenting with the talent calculators can happily occupy hours of time. I think i'm done now so I thought I'd collect my thoughts.
It seems to me that if I wanted to make a priest raid tank healer and that mana is a pressing issue a hybrid spec like 42/29/0 would have some real advantages. It trims off much of the non-stacking and cooldown bound new discipline spells and simply exploits the impressive and scaling mana regeneration that rapture represents. This build seems to have a good synergy since the holy 15% reduction on mana cost through improved healing does not reduce the returns from rapture. While the passive healing modifiers increase the efficiency on the heal and the return from rapture. Likewise the +15% to intellect further enhances rapture and replenishment. Combined with the flash heal glyph efficiency should be high and scale well. You don't have CoH but do have 10% mana reduction on holy nova, PoH and PoM. The build is free to basically stack int and haste as it doesn't require crit, spirit or mp5 to the same extent.
The holy tree can offer two things in comparison. Significantly larger direct heals through Empowered healing and CoH. The weakness of the tree is mana regeneration as serendipity is a static and conditional cost reduction which will not scale in nearly the same fashion as rapture. Instead the holy tree wants to maximize the time on Oo5SR through large and potentially free heals followed by a period of passive regeneration. Whether or not this is possible is going to be very situational. I would expect that in a raid environment being able to land very large heals and have extended passive regeneration is not terribly likely. The spirit reduction and the fact that replenishment does not interact with spirit further weakened this approach. The holy build wants int, spirit and crit so cannot stack int like disc can and will get less return on int in any case.
In practical terms the only real reason to spec deep holy seems to be to access CoH for raid healing in which case you'd build around it. The negative thing is that the holy mana regeneration model fairly much turns off once you start. Discipline is much better suited to this sort of casting with mental agility and mental strength being better longevity talents than anything Holy has to offer. I imagine something like 27/44/0 would be good. Many of the points in Holy are simply to get to the higher tiers.
These are probably the two builds I'd go with once dual specs are supported (so any comments / criticisms are welcome).
I have been a dedicated CoH priest post patch doing, but I find that the holy tree gives little new to my character in the recent patch (as you kinda need Meditation, and thus use relatively lots of points in the disc tree compared to shadow priests and resto druids). So I have also been exploring the 56/5 disc tree.
Pre patch we just downed Brutallus a day before the patch, content-wise. Me, I have been a holy priest since vanilla beta.
My biggest concern with disc is that it can appear so inferior on healing meters. When CoH specced I was constantly top 3 in a 7-8 mixed healing setup. Meters doesnt make the day, but it helps you to know if you made a difference.
One of the reasons that you may appear to heal less is if there are too many healers in the raid, as you dont have a powerfull all raid AOE heal spell, which means that your heals are drowned when too many just spam their one button "no brain" heal. With the recent changes it seems to me that 6 healers should be more than sufficient for BT like content.
After running quite a few heroics, which are kinda like zerg runs with a pally tank, Im very confident that disc healing is a way forward and you dont really have downtime.
After reading through some of the recent posts I initially tried to rotate in greater heals, but I often found those to be wasted due to the relatively long cast time, and it kinda gave me the feeling that I was slowed. One thing I have noticed is that your mana pool, which for me raid buffed is around 14k6, hardly ever is depleted, which is awesome. I too use the flash heal and the shield glyphs, so spamming flash heals around seems to be very viable, and rather two flash heals than one greater heal is what I rely on now, as penance is your fast big heal as disc.
So what I have come to use now is to always keep shields up on tanks (assuming they take dmg and have aggro), and throwing them around on people getting aggro or taking damage. I then add in penance usually when its off cd on the MTs or where it is in more need, also keeping in mind that grace should be maintained (I dont consider that overhealing per definition is bad, as long as you dont deplete your mana mindlessly or have no utility in critical situations). In between these two spells I fill up with PoM (your intelligent multitarget heal) either on MTs or on random raid members taking damage (melee or casters, depending on the situation), then I use flash heal a lot to fill in, as this spel allows me to cater for the 3 other cd's, if needed then add PoH for your group. I often forget BH though..
By using the above rotation system scheme I actually managed to do quite good on healing, based on Recount, and I found that if focusing purely on tank healing with shield, PoM, Penance and flash heals you are extremely effective and very much in control of healing (due to shield and PoM) and damage income on the tank. However, wws tells a totally different story, but there seems to be a post up on their forum about healing not being counted correctly. But if wws tells the true story then I really dont know what to think of disc healing, real time via Recount I can top healing done on Illidan (flame tank healing) but via wws Im miles away. I am starting to like disc healing a whole lot, so I hope Recount tells a more true story.
Currently I have regemmed to a more conservative spi/int+sp, but Im actually considering grabbing haste again, but that would mean sacrificing int and I dont really want to do that. But considering the never ending (almost) mana I think haste is very attractive.
I have macroed IF to Shield and PoH, for mana saving, but to use it on a shield in a more controlled way is probably the way forward, as that saves the gcd, making your next spell even faster. For Power Infusion I have macroed that to penance (use on self), this is purely done to boost my speed, as I feel that disc healing is all about speed, and I tend to forget to use PI, I guess locks or mages would love me for using it on them.
Fast mass dispells on Felmyst are also very nice.
Holy Nova is now awesome, btw, for grinding achievements (Jenkins, low lvl dungeons), and also for helping out on aoe during the chaos that is now allowed in fights, as you dont pull aggro like other aoe'ers.
There are no doubts at all that the Discipline tree offers a lot to tank healing, (and I definitely prefer it in 5-mans as Penance is cheap, gradual, and Grace is very useful around poorly geared puggers) none of these mechanics really scale in the same manner as 3.0 CoH. Nor does the gains from 3x Grace and Imp. DS outweigh the effective throughput of a CoH priest. The skills could be analogued closely with Warlock's Shadow Embrace and Malediction, which were both great buffs, but didn't warrant sacrificing the throughput of Destro as the better tanks' gear became, the less necessary it became to have a percentile damage reduction. They just don't seem to justify the losses.
I'd argue that tank gear didn't have so much effect of shadow embrace and malediction as the fact that the difference between affliction and destruction really only became significant at T6 levels. 5% is always 5% and 3% is always 3%, no matter the level. The value of imp buff did diminish when gear improved but that's not a percentage based buff.
That said, I don't think you should directly compare disc and holy for most situations. It should be fairly evident that holy is much better at AoE healing while discipline seems to have a substantial advantage with tank healing (although discipline does have some of it's value tied to power infusion and pain suppression cooldowns). A more significant question is how discipline lines up against shaman, paladin and druid when it comes to tank healing. On the surface of it discipline should work very nicely with a paladin (or druid) tank healing or even solo in smaller damage environments due to inspiration. It's not nearly as valuable if there's already another disc priest or a shaman on the tank as that should give a decent uptime of 25% armor buff already with wotlk crit rates.
I found it hard to test anything regarding healing. ZA is certainly not a fit environment, because everything else than Renew and CoH is rarely needed. Heroics are a bit better, but even CoH-manainefficient-specced I'm unable to lose any mana which makes testing under 'real' conditions kind of hard.
Next time I have some left I'll try 5-manning Karazhan, maybe thats better. Has anyone else found a fitting environment aside from high 25-man-raids? Something that puts you under pressure, where speccs are relevant?
Not to myself: Exclude Rets and Shadows from any testing to prevent infinite mana O.o
I'm pretty sure that if there is another priest with Surge of Light in the same group as you, you get the effects from it. I haven't seen the same effect with Divine Aegis (haven't been in a raid/BG with a priest who had it), but it wouldn't surprise me.
Its not just priest abilities. I got spell reflection last night while playing with my paladin, when a war in the group used it.
Originally Posted by Hiiru
I'm not currently raiding and not in beta so feel free to add appropriate salt, but experimenting with the talent calculators can happily occupy hours of time. I think i'm done now so I thought I'd collect my thoughts.
It seems to me that if I wanted to make a priest raid tank healer and that mana is a pressing issue a hybrid spec like 42/29/0 would have some real advantages.
In practical terms the only real reason to spec deep holy seems to be to access CoH for raid healing in which case you'd build around it. The negative thing is that the holy mana regeneration model fairly much turns off once you start. Discipline is much better suited to this sort of casting with mental agility and mental strength being better longevity talents than anything Holy has to offer. I imagine something like 27/44/0 would be good. Many of the points in Holy are simply to get to the higher tiers.
These are probably the two builds I'd go with once dual specs are supported (so any comments / criticisms are welcome).
I like neither of your builds.
42/29: A gimp build. No penance, no divine aegis, no empowered healing, no serendipity, no holy concentration. This build is worse tank healer than both full holy and full disc AND a worse raid healer than holy. Full holy is already a very good raid healer and a very strong tank healer. What is also very interesting is that you specing 5/5 divine specialisation without SoL/HC-IHC/Divine aegis. This is very poorly thought out IMO. Also divine aegis is a better boost than spiritual healing for multitarget heals.
27/44: This is simply awful. This build is centered around spamming CoH, but single target healing is very weak (no serendipity 3/5 divine fury, no empowered healing, no IHC). Focusing exclusively on CoH is a pretty bad mistake even in lvl 70 raids.
Where on earth did you get the idea that holy mana regeneration turns off once you start? Serendipity refunds 25% of mana cost on gheal/fheal everytime you overheal and holy concentration results in a minimum cost reduction of 6%. This is regardless of overheal or ooFSR time. Also full holy builds are able to get more spirit thus having inherently higher regeneration. The mana regeneration of full holy and full disc builds are pretty much equivalent.
14/x holy and 51+/x discipline builds are better than hybrids without question at level 70. Discipline PvE builds without divine aegis and penance at the very least are a waste of space. Divine aegis and penance are the keys that make discipline a strong tank healer and crit a desirable stat.
I think a lot of people are confusing the relative powers of holy and disc for tank healing. Holy is still very very strong at tank healing. Try something that stresses your healing power like solo healing the bear boss in ZA and you will see just how powerful holy is. The biggest advantage of discipline in tank healing is that shields don't overheal and that with penance/aegis disc lands an impressively high frequency of heals without sacrificing HPS or mana efficiency.
I have a question about Disc priest dps spell rotation.
Are you using both spw and DP in the rotation?
Ive tried both HF/RS/SWP/DP and then wand and also HF/RS/smite/smite and wand but i cant determine which i like best whilest doing dailies or if another healer is there and i switch to dps.
To be honest, I think this is the wrong question. Holy and discipline are not really competing for the same spots, and I prefer to have both. Holy is mostly specialized in multitarget raid healing and as such competes against chain healing shammies and maybe even druids now, but not against discipline priests. You don't take a discipline priest to do raid healing as a general rule.
This is clearly what Blizz is hoping for in the design of the holy and disc trees, but I'm not sure they are there yet. Many people have touched on this earlier in the thread but now that we've had the opportunity to play around with our characters and raid a bit with the new talents, I'm still in the camp that feels you sacrifice too much healing power to run as disc.
The problem is that in an effort to meet their goal of "Bring the player, not the class", Blizzard has had to make changes to all healers to make them strong single target healers. It's evident in the changes they've made to resto shaman (lots of buffs to HW and LHW, very few to CH) and resto druids (Nourish, lower cast time on HT and folding HT into Tree form).
A holy priest (14/57 or some variation) has pretty decent tank healing tools (Strong GH/FH, Serendipity, IHC and GS) and fantastic raid healing tools (CoH, lower CD PoM). A Disc priest (51/20 or some variation) has great tank healing tools (Penance, DA/Strong PW:S, Rapture, Grace) but pretty mediocre raid healing tools (Strong PW:S).
Blizzard can't make single target healing hard enough to shut out holy, without shutting out other classes. With so many buffs to throughput on our tank healing spells (GH, Renew and even glyphed FH) in holy, it's just too strong at single target healing to make disc obviously better. You may not take a discipline priest to do raid healing, but you could sure take a holy priest to do tank healing. In the world of dual-specs, this may be a moot point, but I'd be more inclined to use my second spec for shadow or PvP, since I can't imagine that it would benefit my raid enough to change from holy to disc to single target heal.
42/29: A gimp build. No penance, no divine aegis, no empowered healing, no serendipity, no holy concentration. This build is worse tank healer than both full holy and full disc AND a worse raid healer than holy. Full holy is already a very good raid healer and a very strong tank healer. What is also very interesting is that you specing 5/5 divine specialisation without SoL/HC-IHC/Divine aegis. This is very poorly thought out IMO. Also divine aegis is a better boost than spiritual healing for multitarget heals.
27/44: This is simply awful. This build is centered around spamming CoH, but single target healing is very weak (no serendipity 3/5 divine fury, no empowered healing, no IHC). Focusing exclusively on CoH is a pretty bad mistake even in lvl 70 raids.
Nothing comes for free. In the first build aimed for sustained healing taking penance will require you to remove 9 points from holy or 11 if you want aspiration. So lets assume you are losing spiritual healing (+8% heal), healing prayers (20% of your group heals), spirit of redemption, spiritual guidance (let's say +40 on GH) and 2 of the 3 points in improved healing. That's quite a lot of efficiency lost to all other spells in the toolbox. You do gain a boosted power word shield but weakened soul and scaling limits that for single target healing. Certainly penance itself has monstrous mana efficiency which is why it has a 8-10 second cooldown which you gloss over but which has to be taken into account.
(I have removed everything that applies to both abilities equally, it's still simplified even so).
So level 80 penance is 618 mana for a 3160 heal.
- reduced by 1/3 of improved healing (5%)
- heal amount enhanced by Aegis (assume 20% crit of +30% heal value for +6%)
gives 587 for 3349 healing. The matching (level 78, not sure how it scales up) GH is 1174 for 4526
The greater heal I'll be using is 1236 for 4270 healing.
- reduced by 3/3 of improved healing.
- boosted by +40 due to spiritual guidance.
- boosted by 8% due to spiritual healing
gives 1050 for 4655 healing.
Assuming a rotation of Penance + 2 GH against 3 * GH (GH casting time is not too far off thanks to divine fury):
2935 for 12401 (4.22 hpm) healing with penance and 3150 for 13965 (4.43) simply using GH. In short the efficiency of penance is diluted by the spells you have to cast while in cooldown. This also doesn't model the fact that aegis is much more spiky in terms of healing provided which I don't consider an advantage.
In practice it will of course resolve down to what rotation is actually required. If you can keep the tank up with only penance it will dominate although you have lost power on a lot of your utility heals including your group heals (PoM / PoH).
The rest of the build (as I stated) is based on having to make a choice between rapture and the higher tiers of the holy tree. Rapture offering a 2.5% of max mana (also boosted by +15% from mental strength and further from not having to gear for crit / spirit) return per spell cast offers extremely pleasing efficiency which stacks wonderfully with replenishment. Even then I would consider the heals being delivered to be excessive in terms of avoiding overhealing. If it turns out wrath raiding is not mana limited and is throughput limited then the central goal of the build (efficient spammable heals) is of course flawed and you would never spec this way.
As for your second argument I would never spec CoH unless that was my raid role as I consider the top tier of the holy tree inefficient compared to the first build I presented. This is an entirely CoH centered build seeking to gain longevity from CoH casting reduction (Mental agility) and replenishment enhancement (Mental strength) which forces a deep investment in discipline. This precludes the talents you mention which themselves have no value for CoH. This sort of specialised build only really becomes sensible if there is content needing intense raid healing but is more practical when dual specs are implemented.
In short I am not convinced by your arguments. However I do agree that if the game proves to be throughput limited rather than efficiency constrained and there is a need for occasional use of CoH then a more balanced holy build would be increasingly desirable.
This is clearly what Blizz is hoping for in the design of the holy and disc trees, but I'm not sure they are there yet. Many people have touched on this earlier in the thread but now that we've had the opportunity to play around with our characters and raid a bit with the new talents, I'm still in the camp that feels you sacrifice too much healing power to run as disc.
The problem is that in an effort to meet their goal of "Bring the player, not the class", Blizzard has had to make changes to all healers to make them strong single target healers. It's evident in the changes they've made to resto shaman (lots of buffs to HW and LHW, very few to CH) and resto druids (Nourish, lower cast time on HT and folding HT into Tree form).
A holy priest (14/57 or some variation) has pretty decent tank healing tools (Strong GH/FH, Serendipity, IHC and GS) and fantastic raid healing tools (CoH, lower CD PoM). A Disc priest (51/20 or some variation) has great tank healing tools (Penance, DA/Strong PW:S, Rapture, Grace) but pretty mediocre raid healing tools (Strong PW:S).
I think that disc has some very nice advantages over holy when it comes to tank healing. The main one being a much larger number of heals per second landing on the tank, shields not overhealing and great reactive tools (borrowed time).
I really don't understand why people have trouble raid healing as a disc priest. You can raid heal decently enough, using PoH/PoM, PWS, FH and penance. I have had no trouble keeping a bloodboil group up without being in their group. PWS x2 and PoM before the bloodboil begins, then PWS/FH + PoM and chase the lowest health with penance, if things get tight pop PI and having a PS to toss on the fel raged target is a godsend. 2PWS+4FH + 1pom+ 1 penance every 10seconds or so give you >2200 HPS. I was also quite satisfied with raid healing on RoS. PoH on my group, PoM on CD, PWS on a meleer every 4 seconds penance on a high DPS output target every 10 seconds, fill in the rest with flash heal.
On council disc can do a great job in any position. You can also do a great job raid healing on all phases xpt p2 on illidan. Disc priest is excellent at raid healing in almost all MH bosses, but especially rage and anethereon.
There is no question that a holy priest is better at raid healing than a disc priest, but the difference is like 20% not 100%. The main problem is the bloat, making it really inconvenient.
This is IMO the only build who has the raw power to beat holy on single target healing.
Notice the absence of pain suppression and the 1/2 grace+aspiration. This has a slightly better throughput on a single target, when aegis/PWS and grace are taken into account than holy, but the difference is slim. What makes it a better tank healer however is that shields, grace and aegis do not overheal and a much larger number of heals/shields landing on the tank per second.
You can further improve this by skimping on 1 point in improved holy to make it a 54/17 build.
A serious problem with disc is that the healing bonuses are spread over many talents. Renewed hope is 3% (and more importantly 4% more crit rate increasing aegis proc rate), grace is 6%, focused power is 4%, aegis is 6-9% of max HPS (i.e. 8-15% of effective HPS), Enlightenment adds 5% more haste and PI adds 2% more haste overall.
A disc priest needs all of these AND penance to be a better than holy by a significant margin, but the most important thing to boost is crit rate and haste as much as you can from talents.
I think disc needs a bit of attention still. I would make grace a 15 buff, renewed hope 3/6% crit and reduce grace to a 1 pointer.
The spec I like the best at lvl 70 the only build that can push out the same HPS as a holy build is:
[quote=Hiiru;945720]Nothing comes for free. In the first build aimed for sustained healing taking penance will require you to remove 9 points from holy or 11 if you want aspiration. So lets assume you are losing spiritual healing (+8% heal), healing prayers (20% of your group heals), spirit of redemption, spiritual guidance (let's say +40 on GH) and 2 of the 3 points in improved healing. That's quite a lot of efficiency lost to all other spells in the toolbox. You do gain a boosted power word shield but weakened soul and scaling limits that for single target healing. Certainly penance itself has monstrous mana efficiency which is why it has a 8-10 second cooldown which you gloss over but which has to be taken into account.
Sustained healing without penance by disc is a joke. Holy is downright better.
Fatal flaw 1: You did not include spellpower. If you are trying to say that greater heal without empowered healing comes anywhere close to penance you are badly mistaken.
Fatal flaw 2: Rapture works off effective healing
Fatal flaw 3: Let me give you a hint. Sit down and calculate just how much benefit you get from mental strength ~1000 intellect.
Fatal flaw 4: Rapture max rank heals for 1676*3 --> 5028, but it has a 2 second channel time and scales like a 3 second spell. Max rank gheal heals for ~4300 average and costs more. Without empowered healing IHC, penance blows gheal out of the water.
Penance heals for about as much as a max rank gheal only it has a 2 second cast time instead of 2.5.
The fact that intellect is good for regeneration does not make discipline a more mana efficient spec than holy. Serendipity and IHC together are a 40%+ reduction in the cost of greater heal and flash heal at a very minimum. A holy priest is MUCH better at tank healing compared to any disc build without penance.
I think you need to rethink how penance works.
As for your second argument I would never spec CoH unless that was my raid role as I consider the top tier of the holy tree inefficient compared to the first build I presented. This is an entirely CoH centered build seeking to gain longevity from CoH casting reduction (Mental agility) and replenishment enhancement (Mental strength) which forces a deep investment in discipline. This precludes the talents you mention which themselves have no value for CoH. This sort of specialised build only really becomes sensible if there is content needing intense raid healing but is more practical when dual specs are implemented.
In short I am not convinced by your arguments. However I do agree that if the game proves to be throughput limited rather than efficiency constrained and there is a need for occasional use of CoH then a more balanced holy build would be increasingly desirable.
The reason you are not convinced is because you don't have a good understanding of how all the talents work. The numbers have already been run countless times in this very thread. I have no intention to run them again. All I can say is your gut instinct is wrong. Rapture and mental strength are weaker than serendipity+HC/IHC. Penance, borrowed time and aegis are required to get the disc priest at the same level as a full holy priest.
A holy priest not only has better HPS he has better mana regeneration, too as without penance and aegis rapture does not cut the mustard.
The loss of Penance, Empowered Healing, Serendipity and Divine Aegis cannot make up for that spec Hiiru.
With that Spec, your Gheal will hit for 5837-6296 (before imp. ToL/Devotion Aura = 6187-6673). The cap for 2.5% gain from Rapture at 70 is 6380. This means any crit heal will not give additional returns from GHeal. If you are good/lucky you can expect that atleast 50% of your heals do not overheal. That means in average with 14000 mana you are receiving 14000*2.5%*50% = 175 mana/heal.
On the other hand, if you consider Serendipity, you will gain 712*25% = 178 mana back every overheal.
I think you can trust Havoc12 on his assessment of that Spec.
I understand that the release of 3.0.2 has turned the discussion away from level 80 back to the current state at level 70 but keep in mind that this is a very temporary state. Why, it simply does not matter whether you specc holy or disc anymore when healing (even raids) at level 70. Probably, you´ll be better off with holy since you have infinite mana and thus can afford to play the old CoH-spam (and also since you can´t specc inspiration with a serious disc spec hence nerfing the specc heavily).
However, I would strongly advise anybody to get away from regarding mana as a non-issue. This is due to level 70 values and the still partly broken mechanic and will not be the case anymore at level 80. However, the raid design has also altered to contribute to this. There are no more Felmyst-like fights where you simply need to spam AoE-heals in order to survive. Anything I´ve seen so far in beta strongly suggests that group damage can be dealt with by many other means and tools healers offer. From my understanding the differentiation between AoE-healers and single target healers will by far not be as heavy as it has been in TBC.
On a last note: A disc specc without Penance is plain stupid, especially at level 70. Penance is *the* defining spell of disc, not speccing it makes the whole disc specc near-worthless. It takes much of the versatility and utility disc offers otherwise, specc it, or don´t specc deep disc.
Once again I'm forced to read so much nonsense about rotations and massive aoe specialisation, when playing a priest is all about your versatility as a healer.
If the damage incoming was 100% steady damage, no spikes, just steady damage incoming every 0.5-1 seconds you could start talking about rotations and ideal HPM / HPS but we're talking about healing now, not DPS. It's the same in the resto shaman thread I just read, they start comparing lifebloom to riptide as if you can compare an instant cast heal with a HoT to a HoT with a finish.
I'll give you a small explanation of how you can use discipline to it's max: Discipline is best played as reactive healing, where you can frontload mitigation and heals on hard hitting bosses and then you pump 3 ticks of fast penance on the tank the instant he takes damage. PW:shield, PoM, (renew if the boss hits fast), penance when the tank gets hit is going to save you tons of mana since you might get out of the 5SR and the mana you get back is only from effective healing.
This is the ideal scenario for a discipline priest, but this isn't how healing in WoW works most of the time. Most of the time other people will take damage too and as discipline you have many inventive ways of dealing with this:
1. Glyphed Holy Nova let's you heal your group on the run.
2. Prayer of healing can be used for anticipating big incoming damage (think Kil'Jaeden), deal with steady raid damage when people are standing very spread out (think Felmyst and Sapphiron) or as a big group heal with a Borrowed Time buff.
3. Shields are your best friends as Disc. Even though you're on MT healing duty, you can save a raid member with a PW:Shield since your next spell on the MT will be hasted through Borrowed Time.
4. PoM is always your friend, and you can throw it on a person close to the MT or on the MT himself for some raid healing in melee.
From this information you get to spec for your healing style, there is no real cookie cutter (\o/ yay!) and you get to deal with raid members fuckups while still not having to lose focus on the MT. This is to me why discipline is the best MT healing spec, not because it actually has super throughput, but because it let's you see the whole fight and react to it accordingly.
I found it hard to test anything regarding healing. ZA is certainly not a fit environment, because everything else than Renew and CoH is rarely needed. Heroics are a bit better, but even CoH-manainefficient-specced I'm unable to lose any mana which makes testing under 'real' conditions kind of hard.
Next time I have some left I'll try 5-manning Karazhan, maybe thats better. Has anyone else found a fitting environment aside from high 25-man-raids? Something that puts you under pressure, where speccs are relevant?
Not to myself: Exclude Rets and Shadows from any testing to prevent infinite mana O.o
Any fight that's long enough really. The main reason that it's hard to test healing is that the damage has scaled up so much, and mob health is down 30% that it's hard to find a fight that really makes you think about regen at all. I did a pug Kael'thas Run and really found myself having to manage mana towards the end; moreso than I've seen in any of the Hyjal or BT fights post-patch.
10/20/08, 1:01 PM
