I went into BT holy specc'd. I decided to go deep down the tree to get Guardian spirit and other top tier talents. I willing gave up Inner Focus and Meditation. I could definitely tell the lack of regen I had. I started being more careful about who I healed and how I healed. I was able to get an innervate once, which was obviously spectacular.

My play style works a lot better for reactive healing of the holy tree. I just now need to find a way to figure out how to use all my new heal goodies.

The most important problem here is that you will not be able to mostly rely on CoH for raid healing. You will have range problems with CoH and in many places you won't have enough targets. Especially for raid healers, FH is going to play a major role as a replacement for GH1, and in order spam it, you will need the glyph and Serendipity. Gimping GH by using only 3/5 Divine Fury in favor of 3/3 Inspiration also makes no sense for a raid healer. Inspiration procs are rarely useful to targets that you heal when raid healing exclusively. Without looking at actual numbers or comparing with 5/5 DP build - this build is built on the premise that you mostly use CoH for raid healing, which I severely doubt will make sense.

It's pretty evident so far that we will have separate builds for "mostly raidhealing" and for "mostly tank healing". But that's it - we need to be able to play both roles reasonably well, that's what we as a class are for. We're just shifting focus by making talent choices. Now if we really need to optimize exclusively for AoE healing only, then something is seriously broken.

Divine Fury does not affect FH. However, I do agree that we are basically versatile and able to do both healing tasks with both speccs, though, with highly different means. I can only emphasize once again that spamming AoE-heals will not be viable anymore at level 80. Not only that it´s plainly boring to do so but it is also not manageable and *not* required anymore. CoH will not be worthless, far from it, but it will no longer be mandatory, also. From my viewing that´s a huge achievement for us Priests in Lich King. We are no longer restricted to a boring and unchallenging playstyle anymore, we finally can do what we´re made for - everything!

Once you get enough Naxx gear, with proper buffs in a 25-man raid, CoH will actually be our highest HpS spell. I'm sure we'll find ways to use it effectively; it just won't be the world of Felmyst or Twins anymore, where you do nothing but spam it all day long.

(6 targets, no overheal ~ 9k HpS)

It´s quite clear that CoH is the best throughput spell, nothing to argue about that (at least under the circumstance that you hit 6 people). But as I said it´s just boring as hell and after all, WoW is a game and a game should be fun to play, that´s the bottom line. While I agree that running a marathon or such also seems quite 'boring' to many, I also think that it can be exciting. However, I don´t think that anybody spams CoH with the same level of excitement, at least, I seriously do not want to know how such a person would look and behave in life. The point is that other means of dealing with AoE damage seem to exist now and I strongly hope that this will also be the case in the more challenging raids that are to be released as WotlK progresses.

Yet, the fear is somewhat valid, I suppose, that after the easy and quite forgiving encounters in the first instances they will focus on very specific tasks in the later ones again (like done in TBC: Karazhan/Gruul didn´t have real use for CoH, which did not prevent it from becoming mandatory in BT). However, I hope that Blizzard turns out to be more creative regarding encounter design in the end-game-to-come.

"Boring" is such a subjective term that it really has no place in this discussion. I don't see why a CoH spamming priest would be more boring than a 969 prot pally or a 5s/5r/5e rogue rotation.

You're still going to have to watch your mana, and CoH will not always be "the answer".

In terms of GH versus Penance I am working under the understanding that they have the same coefficient. 155% measured on live for penance (but not by me) against 85% * 1.88 (wrath spellpower unification) expected on GH. Using search I was not able to find better figures than these.

Mental strength "felt" better than it actually is. With 1K intellect that's an extra 37.5 mana on each replenishment tick and on every direct heal sufficient to reach the 6K rapture cap. However in total the 18.k mana that represents will give a replenishment / full rapture tick of 471 mana. I am assuming that heals not reaching 6380 will receive a refund based on the ratio they achieved rather than zero, which would make the talent punitively hard to satisfy. I'll see if I can come up with some way to test this behaviour if the actual mechanic is not confirmed.

As such serendipity at 70 gives 191 mana on a greater heal that overheals by any amount. This amount does not scale and a spell that does not overheal receives nothing. A direct heal needs to achieve 2.5k of effective healing to break even. As spellpower increases achieving this goal becomes easier. It also scales with intellect in terms of the mana returned. Finally serendipity scales downwards with lesser spells. A glyphed flash heal is returning 88.5 mana through serendipity in which case it only needs 1.1k of effective healing to break even with serendipity while having the potential to scale much higher.

Empowered healing is an efficiency metric in that the spell does more for the same mana. But of course it also ceases to be an efficiency metric if that excess healing is being wasted to overhealing. If practical healing involves being able to land fully empowered greater heals the balance moves to holy, if you need to spam smaller heals on a tank to avoid excess overhealing then rapture dominates serendipity.

IHC is another factor though. 45% of your crit rating translating into free heals that do not proc serendipity. That can surely be averaged into a static reduction on the cost of the spell so 22% crit would mean 1 in 10 heals are free or an average 10% reduction. The tricky part is the oo5sr mana regeneration gained from a critical heal followed by not spending mana. For relative comparison purposes it should be possible to work backwards.

For my 1236 mana level 80 greater heals and 18k mana 1k intellect 500 spirit priest the best case rapture return is 471 mana while IHC + serendipity are a pleasing 432 (which is mostly serendipity). One tick of oo5SR is enough to make up the difference and more (+308 mana). This needs a gap between casts of 1.75 seconds or more which pretty much means as long as you are not mashing the button IHC wins through oo5SR.

Trying the same when spamming flash heal and assuming half the rapture return (235) against IHC + serendipity (182) still comes to less than 1 second oo5SR. This time you need a gap between casts of 2.25 seconds or better to break even because the gap created by the faster spell is less valuable. It's going to be environmental though. If you are really pounding the button and are well enough geared to have very large flash heals my discipline build works... but it's a very specialized niche and gives up a lot of flexibility.

Neither of them apply to CoH. A priest spamming CoH is fairly much designed to go out of mana.

tl;dr

1. Rapture is superior to serendipity and has more potential to scale. You can invent specialised builds to capitalise on this.

2. These builds depend on a fairly specific environment in which:
- you have very good gear (int + spellpower).
- are rapidly spamming a direct heal on a target where you can reliably land large effective heals.
- larger heal amounts through empowered healing would be partially or fully lost through overhealing.

3. If you are not spamming heals (< 3 seconds between casts of FH or GH) then oo5SR regeneration (enhanced by IHC and large heals) dominates both of these mechanisms rendering the whole issue academic.

4. None of this applies to CoH and neither spec is going to stop CoH running you out of mana if you spam it.

(Thank you for the patience of some of the posters here, I got to examine some assumptions and learn quite a bit in the process. Now I need wow to come up so I can respec again.)

Penance delivers significantly more HPS than gheal under any circumstances. Its also much cheaper

1) Rapture is only better than serendipity under certain conditions. Inverting a build is not an option. Deep holy results in much bigger gheals which also increase HPM and deep disc improves healing much more than mid holy and synergise better with rapture. So inverted builds are gimp builds. If you wanna use rapture, you are far better off being deep disc.

2) Even in this specific environment your disc/holy hybrid is worse off than a deep disc healer, who has talents that are not only better than SG/SH, but work with rapture on top. More importantly this is not a possible senario at lvl 70 and will probably not be a possible senario at level 80.

3) Holy can afford to cast heals slower because gheals are so large.

4) CoH is improved a lot more by deep holy than by taking disc talents and spamming CoH even at level 70 does not give you the best possible results. Any build which focuses exclusively on CoH spam, is a poor build and ignores single target healing is a poor priest build.

If you really want to compare talents. Aegis at 20% crit adds 9% of your total (including overheal) HPS and it works with every spell. Those 3 points on aegis give you a significantly better return than the 6 points you are sticking in spirtual healing. Then you also get renewed hope. Aegis also retuns extra mana from rapture. Then you also have renewed hope. That is 4% more crit for 2 talents, which is equivalent to 3% more healing, but also more mana return from rapture. No question that this is better than spirit of redemption. You also get penance, arguably one of the most powerful single target heals in the game. Then you also get grace you only need 1 point for 3% less damage 6% more healing. You are making a very large net loss by going holy instead of further down the tree with rapture.

AFAIK rapture returns 2.5% of base mana when you heal for like 8.5k. So most of your heals are going to return 2% mana at best for gheal and 1% mana for fheal. 1% of 18000 is 180 mana, which is the same as serendipity. [e] I found this formula: 0.01035*max mana/basemana*amount healed. That means in order to get 2.5% you need 2.5%*basemana/0.01035. At level 80 with 3863 base mana you need 9.3k effective healing to get 2.5% of your base mana.

You really need to play with deep disc/deep holy first and get a feeling for how they play before you start theorycrafting. I mean you can theorycraft a 20s casting time heal for 0 mana to be the best thing ever only to find out you can't keep anyone alive with it.

I've stated this many times already in this thread but by playing with them I can say with a good amount of certainty that the only viable specs will include either Penance or Circle of Healing. This is the very first choice you have to make when building a spec, everything else revolves around that. Also as stated in this page you are still quite versatile with both specs, you don't want to make an aoe healing only build or a mt healing only build if you want to play to a priest's strength.

The choice really comes down to how you want to play and what assignments you think you're going to get: Holy is about big single target heals, strong aoe healing and mana return on overheals, disc is about exceptional reactive healing, big shields to smooth out incoming damage and mana return on effective heals.

This is where you start to theorycraft, this is why a build that relies on just spamming GH is a thing of the past, it can look good on paper but actual playing is very different.

We did alot of Sunwell this past week, and I'm still trying to figure out how to best heal as Disc. FWIW, I went with a 51/10 build although now that I think about it - I really am not casting GHeal that much, so it may be quite possible to simply do some sort of 56/5 build. If you can Penance, you would do that instead of GHeal, and I'm usually casting a shield or a Flash Heal simply because it's the quickest way of getting heals out there.

In a raid setting, if you're "battling" against CoH priests and CHeal shammies and Beacon of Light paladins, my experience now is that it's very difficult to land even a 2.5 sec heal on someone that needs it. So I'm mostly out there Flash Healing.

I'm still not really running out of mana, though. Between Rapture and Replenishment, I'm spamming FHeal like a madman on trash and ending fights at 90%.

However, it still feels like Disc is rather sorely gimped, especially in a raid setting, especially in SWP. It may be because there is just so much raid damage going around and CoH priests and holy paladins got buffed in that area that it's just the way things are now.


I had a few questions:
Should I regem out of haste and more into Int?
Does taking 5 points out of Holy for the reduced casting time on GHeal and putting them into deep Disc make sense?
Am I really this impotent, or is that merely a feeling given the type of raiding that's happening now?

What?

I see pure CoH-builds as very viable after playing with paladins, druids and shamans at 80. There is nothing wrong about a build like this if you're doing 90%+ AoE-healing. Paladins landing 10k non-crit HoL on tanks every 1,7 seconds with 50% critrate and Holy Shock as backup with hots running is a lot better tankhealing than we can offer anyway. Guess it's down to playstyle and encounters, but I don't understand why every priest needs to be strong at single target-healing when you'll have better alternatives in almost any normal raidsetup.

We can obviously spec for both single target-healing and AoE-healing and do just fine (I'm not saying holypriests are weak single target-healers), but if I'm gonna AoE-heal on an encounter I spec for that, not for doing the occasional Greater Heal.

As many other people I really like the way Deep Disc is working out. There are still minor bugs and we are only at lvl 70 where the tree is half finished for us. Only at lvl 80 will it truely shine ( I hope )

Many of us are wondering - is it worth it? Do i make a difference? Am i saving lifes here or are someone actually doing a better job than me in holy? Id love to play deep disc but I would feel a bit sad if I knew that there would be holy priests performing just as good or better. People say deep disc is certainly viable for raid healing not as good as holy but still good enough. But that raid healing, what sort of raid healing are we talking about here. Cant be during trash because that is absolutely unpredictable. There would be no timer for inc. dmg. and your aoe healing spells is PoH/Holy nova and PoM? (anything else i forgot) These are group healing and im thinking that by the time you casted your PoH your group will already have been healed for an amount that when your PoH lands it has basicly turned into an unnecessary cast.

If its bossfight AoE where there will be a timer. You now actually have the time to coordinate a PoH and shield to absorb the dmg. But again I'm thinking, how many shields can you actually toss around to the raid before the aoe dmg? Cant be that many. 4sec CD on shield. 1 person, max 2 i'd say. And on top of that you gotta keep an eye on your MT. And if your in the raid healing a MT wont that mean that this boss would be something like brut and patchwerk which people say thats such fights would be the only reason to bring a deep disc priest into the raid and you wouldnt really have time to toss shields around? because afterall Deep disc is situational isnt it? People say it is but I wish to god it wasnt like that.

I would die to know what sort of boss fights we would face in WotLK. blizzard have stated that deep disc is the kind of spec to heal MT so they must have made many fights where deep disc could show what it really is its all about. If there arent that many fights, then will people still spec deep disc and know that, really they are not providing the best they could to the raid?

What im trying to express here is. Will there be more fights in WotLK where Deep disc really is needed? Have we heard of any? And I'm really afraid that while Deep disc offers the best HPS healing spec of all healers, there just arent enough fights where its needed to have the max HPS and therefor nullifies the reason to have a disc priest in the raid at all.

I really want this spec to succeed but I for one would feel Id have to spec holy because I'd know I simply just dont offer enough to the raid as Deep disc. Sure there is the dual spec. But wont it then be holy as the spec you'd play the most and then disc whenever this bossfights pops up where keeping MT alive gets tough?

What on earth are you talking about? You absolutley want a priest doing almost nothing but spaming CoH for every encounter in sunwell right now. Granted, things just fall over dead but that doesn't change the fact that a priest spaming coh/pom is going to be on top of healing charts by so much it isn't funny. Things are going to be different when encounters last longer than ~3 mins and you have to worry about mana of course, but to just asume that there won't be any encounters with aoe damage were people are in range of eachother for coh isn't plausible. Even for encounters like KJ were people absoultely have to spread out I found the range much less of an issue now that it affects anyone in the raid group.

I wasn't using a pure CoH spec, but for the majority of the encounters it would probably have been better. And like Bjork says, respecing to fit the encounter in question shouldn't take you more than a minute or two.

All talents that affect CoHs scaling affects it's base value as well, I don't really see how it has "stupid scaling" now. Sure, the base heal of it is extremly low, but I don't really see what these talents changes.

I really dislike having heals, even ones as efficient as penance, on cooldown. But as Havoc12 has shown a penance build can reach the significant efficiency gain of improved healing while you can't reach the next block (IHC/serendipity) without sacrificing rapture. Spiritual guidance is noise and divine aegis is roughly equal to spiritual healing. So even if you are focusing on efficiency and boosting your non-cooldown heals as disc there's no real point investing in holy past improved healing making my build seriously suboptimal.

The question in my mind is whether the heuristic can be simplified to "if you want / need CoH go holy, if you don't go deep disc". If raid healing requires fast paced direct heals (spamming FH/GH) over the raid then the balance will move towards the efficiency and 5SR independence of deep discipline. And discipline still has a full suite of group heals other than CoH which are not affected by the big holy talents of improved healing, empowered healing, IHC and serendipity even if you are deep holy. I hadn't considered that penance as a channelled spell interacts better with the 5SR, that's a nice bonus as well.

I'm not terribly interested in working it out though because the one thing I've learnt is that talented efficiency is swamped by oo5SR regeneration. So saying "if you need CoH go holy, if you are running out of mana doing single target heals go disc, otherwise play whichever suits your style" seems to cover all the bases sufficiently and without a lot of mathematics.

I don't think max HPS is the reason to have a discipline priest. To me, the reason you want one in raid is that they have excellent tools to assure key targets (e.g. tanks) stay alive. Saying that's rarely relevant is suggesting single targets will rarely be subject to damage spikes or threatened in some way. If that turns out to be true, then I agree there's no great reason to have a disc priest, but I seriously doubt that will be the case.

The problem for discipline is that "prevented wipes" is harder to measure than HPS, which is generally going to be higher for AOE healing. This potentially creates a political problem because some raid leaders may think that anything that can't be easily measured simply doesn't exist... Or to be a bit more fair, they're skeptical of the value of anything they cannot measure objectively. A lot of times people will admit "Yeah, that has value, but I can't measure it, so I can't deal with it."

That is untrue, but it is an extremely common belief (not just in WoW, but in the real world too). It's really an issue of lazy management and abuse of statistical measures, which never tell the whole story. Smart raid leaders need to observe carefully and figure out what matters and how much. There's nothing inherently wrong with subjective assessment if it's made following careful observation. Throwing out "immeasurables" makes a tacit assumption that their impact is zero, and that is guaranteed to be wrong. An imprecise guess is better.

Frankly, this has never been an issue for me because I've had pretty good raid leaders who "get it" and trusted my judgement. However, if you're not so lucky, you may have a decision to make.

I agree everything depends on the content we see, and I reserve the right to change my mind, but for the moment I don't have the slightest doubt both discipline and holy priests are useful for raids. As far as I'm concerned, though, pretty much any sensible healer build is valuable if the healer can manage to move out of the fire.

Well, judged purely on those requirements, it looks like an ideal spec for Heroics early in WotLK where tanks are undergeared and spikey and reactive healing is king. I'm still considering whether to switch to a disc healer in LK because I like the 'fast & furious' playstyle of managing cooldowns, however I'm also concerned, like you, as to disc's viability when it comes to working with others healers. Oh, and I'm eyeing restoration druids with envy.

An important point is managing your healing assignments. The arguments for disc might no be obvious, at least as long as you think in terms of TBC-healing. However, I highly doubt from what I´ve seen now, that those massive amounts of pure AoE-healers will still be needed. Apart from that, if you have a disc priest around and you can use 2 healers for the MT(s) instead of 3 thus freeing up one healer for other tasks, that would be an example of a benefit a disc specc could provide. Disc is not only strong at healing one target, but it is particularily strong at healing one and another target (read: MT + OT) through the capability of handling spikes and its high mana-efficiency.

Sorry, but topping the charts does not make it the most effective strategy. The best strategy is one that does the job while keeping HPM to a maximum and the new talents/glyphs have produced a very large boost to the efficiency of other spells that the damage senarios where CoH/PoM spam is the winner are more limited now.

Being at the top of the healing charts on an encounter where neither HPS, nor HPM is challenged and where healers have to actually compete for healing each single point, can never tell you what the most effective strategy is. In every single encounter in the black temple, xpt RoS, its better HPM to use other heals in addition to CoH.

Its not a question of range, but a question of efficiency. Your other heals are now more efficient on 3 targets than CoH is. If you have 3 targets to heal its naturally extremely easy to use CoH for the job, but you should be able get a better return out of using other heals in many situations.

It does not matter whether these effects boost the base value, that is constant. The important thing is that it scales about 15% better than gheal with 5/5 DP and 5/5 Twin faiths. The difference only gets larger when you add ToF to the picture and healing boosts from raid abilities/auras

I think this is a solid explanation of one of Disc's possible roles: the utility infielder. This Disc priest is first and foremost in charge of handling crisis situations. They shuffle targets around depending on who is taking spike damage. In the event that a healer dies or OOMs, they step into that role.

I guess the other one would be a tank healer, similar to an early TBC pally. Dedicated tank healing Disc priest would use Penance, Renew, PoM, FH to keep a tank going and toss in a PW:S + Gheal whenever the damage spikes.

I am not well geared nor particularly experienced, but I have come around to liking disc quite a bit for tank healing. It has been said that disc healing is like "healing with no talent points" when penance and PWS are on cooldown, and this does convey the relative lack of power I feel when specced disc as compared to holy.

What made me come around, however, was when I actually started to save penance rather than use it every cooldown. With a high crit rate, and a greater heal tuned to do about 2/3 the cutoff for rapture returns, your non-penance healing can be quite mana efficient. I have found that flash heal (presumably greater heal when i get divine fury) is quite a bit of power during normal non-spike situations, and having penance available any time the tank's health drops is worth its reduced use.

What I believe will be key for disc gearing will be to reach that +heal level to get maximum mana return on a crit (the 2/3 cutoff), then stack crit and int as much as possible. If course you can't always rely on crit and might get a string without critting, but this is where the penance you've saved comes in.

I do not believe that PWS and Gheal will be useful for tank spikes, as you should always have weakend soul on the tank. PWS and Gheal/Fheal will be very useful for panic raid healing, however.

What kinda troubles me is that Im not in a very very serious community. Sure we raid like 4-5times a week and we are in sunwell ( not killed KJ ) But its impossible to tell healers to lay off a MT. Either they think that they need to help healing otherwise MT dies or they simply just do because.. why not. And also when an emergency comes. Oh my god.. tank suddenly down at 20% guess whats gonna come first, penance or a instant heal from a shammy or a druid?

Of course there are gonna be more than just that one spike but yea. I fear the most and I really hope for the best.

If anyone is playing around with heavy crit builds, I just noticed that [Plans: Adamantite Weightstone] now does indeed increase spell crit as well (by .63% at 70).