It sounds like they'll let it stack with other mitigation like PW:S, but not with itself. So you still can't add a new crit heal DA on top of an old. Remains to be seen if you can stack it on top of another priest's DA.

Lytewish, can you please link your sources for this blue post? I have yet to see anything reguarding the mentioned fix. If this is true this will be an excellent buff, however your numbers are a bit funky there. An fully buffed disc priest's PWS will absorb ~5000 damage while your average DA proc will be off a ~5k penance tick or ~6k flash heal resulting in a 1500-1800 aegis. Gheals are a rarity for disc priests and will account for <5% of your DA procs.

It sounds like their intention is strictly for Divine Aegis to stack with PW:S, however it is clear that they do not intend for Divine Aegis to stack with itself.


To quote Ghostcrawler, Source thread.

By the way, I fail to see how stacking DA would lead to "crazy healing situations", or really why it would be that big a difference whether we get it or not. The only situations in which you'd be able to stack a new DA on top of an existing DA is:

A) You're healing somebody who is already at full health.
B) You're using multiple heals to top off a tank, and the tank takes no hits in between. (Which happens how often in a raid situation?)
C) You're using multiple heals to top off a single DPS who does not take intermediate damage. (Again, how often will a single disc priest be called on to spam 2x flash heals on a single dps? That's what AE heals are for)

In every other situation, the target that you've healed won't require another heal until the DA that you've already procced fulfills its mitigation.

Edit: I only realized after posting that both situations B and C may (often) occur when using Penance. So non-stacking DA can be seen as a limiting factor on the efficiency of penance, which is already a very efficient spell.

I'm assuming that the "crazy situation" would be something like "everyone spam Greater Heal on the tank pre-pull, then drink while pulling, so the tank takes no damage for the first 25 seconds of the fight".

His threat generation for those 25 seconds would suck too. And I know that good tanks are not bothered by absorption effects, but even good tanks will have trouble with 25 seconds of absorb effects.

I do appreciate, however, that limiting the stacking portion will limit the opportunities for exploitation in the future ("If you allow it, they will find a way to exploit it"). There are a number of PvP situations where it can be abused that I can think of as well; however, for the present raiding environment I don't see that it makes any difference whether it stacks or not. Unless they don't allow multiple priest stacking and your guild runs with more than 1 disc priest.

I'm sorry but each time I see people give uses for Renew I just think there are better ways to have that damage dealt with.

Putting it on a tank, sure that's fine. However, aside from Maexnna (where it really is good), most boss fights I'd rather just cast a flash heal with a chance to proc inspiration/IHC for if they take spike damage. Hell, I'd rather shield them too.

Nid, most likely that ret pally will have a druid HoT on them, which is stronger and better suited for that situation. Time and time again I just find that renew is great in 5-man dungeons, satisfactory (at best) in 10-man raids, and very poor/situational in 25-man raids. Also, I see no reason in anyone putting 3/3 in Improved Renew, unless you are doing 5-man dungeons/heroics only.

As you said Robble, the instant castability of Renew does give it an advantage. Heigan for example during the running phases, I'll renew those who have in the past been known to be hit by splashes (especially with the CoH cooldown coming). But then again, on the ends (zone 1 & 4) if you're quick you can get off a flash for sure, even a greater heal.

Druid hots require bringing a resto druid. Have you done Sarth+3.10 with 2 healers yet? HPriest/Rdruid is actually a very weak combination to bring, and I doubt anyone would do it unless it was already on farm (in which case, it's moot).

Concerning Disc in Patch (or respectively on PTR) 3.08: Basically, they´ll let Aegis stack with PW:S. Oh my god. Hooray. That´s nothing. In extreme cases it might give you an additional 3k absorb, however, the time you crit with a GH you´ll hardly really *need* the Aegis, so it´s kind of non-issue.

The basic problem is (and stays) that Aegis doesn´t stack with itself. Especially a problem for Penance which will often crit multiple times. Anyways, I can see the problem that Blizzard wants to avoid. It´s not a PvE- but a PvP-issue. They want to prevent Disc Priests from stacking Aegis in the preparation time (where all spells are free) to just rush the enemy with additional HP through Aegis. As far as I understand the buff system that WoW has it is impossible to let the game compute every single Aegis itself (since it is the same buff in the first place). That´s okay with me (to some extent at least). Also, it´s no *real* big deal for PvE, it only means that Penance doesn´t really profit from Aegis as much as it should.

The bigger point definitely is and stays the Rapture-issue which hasn´t been adressed at all. For that I´m very ungrateful, it does not sound like a big deal for me to adress it, yet, Blizzard does not have the time/interest to do it although it would be quite a deal for PvE (and also for PvP) combat.

I can see why they want to do that, but wouldn't a simpler solution be to reduce the duration of Divine Aegis to 6 seconds instead? It really bugs me because of the way Penance works. However, I can live with this IF they make sure a lower DA does not overwrite a larger DA, but just refreshes duration. Now I just need to get on PTR and see if Rapture via absorbs on others functions properly.

Ahh I thought you meant 25 man, makes much more sense then yeah.

Nid, have you found it the best way to do 10-man 3 drake is with 2x healers?

Actually, I measured 87% of my rapture returns were from healing, if I recall correctly. Others' mileage may vary of course. However, part of the reason that is so high is because of the rapture-absorb bug. I'm not certain but I'd estimate rapture returns from DA and PW:S will double or treble when they fix that bug, which if true would extrapolate to 69% - 77% of rapture returns coming from healing instead of 87%. That's still a significant majority, though.

Someone also asked earlier about wowhead's stat weights for discipline, which I did find were quite weird. I entered my own (rather arbitrary but hopefully more informed) weights of:

Int -- 100
SPP -- 80
Crit -- 75
Haste -- 70
Spirit -- 50
MP5 -- 120

I'm not saying these are ideal weights, but they fit with your rankings. Perhaps we're both wrong.

The only mathematical backing I really can cite is that I have looked at how much mp5 a point of int generates. Because rapture can return a lot of mana and it scales with int, I figured every point of int is worth a good 0.75 Mp5. Again, your mileage may vary, but I have little doubt that int is very valuable to discipline priests. The other weights are more controversial. Wowhead's are terrible, though. Don't use those.

Yes, I think you're right that this mostly affects penance ticks. A little while ago, I measured how long DA shields were up, and the average lifetime was between 1-2 seconds. That's not long, and I was surprised how many were up for less than 1 sec. This makes me think that the non-stackability of DA shield might not be as horrible as we fear. Most DA shields will be down before the next one procs. However, penance ticks are very close together, and definitely many of those DA procs will be lost. If I ever get the time and inclination, I may parse through some combat logs and try to get an actual measurement. Right now we're all guessing how bad that is.

This issue does affect stat weightings a bit. It downgrades the utility of crit and haste and makes spell power a little more attractive for throughput (the logic being that less frequent but bigger shields do not suffer from this non-stacking problem so much).

edit: wrong thread, delete this please

That's kind of the point I was making. Renew only really makes sense in a raid when you're either out of other instant heals to use (PoM/PW:S/surged Flash Heal/CoH), or Constantius' example of expecting incoming damage you won't be able to spend a GCD to heal (that PW:S can't cover for whatever reason). The latter is actually a good reason NOT to take Glyph of Renew, not that many people are taking it in the first place.

That's actually a non-issue: as of 3.0, when Arena Preparation expires, it takes off any buff with a duration less than 30 seconds (except for Invisibility), which would strip your giant Divine Aegis. Unless you really want to burn mana during the "stare at the other team" phase of the fight fishing for crits, this wouldn't cause a PvP issue.

I have to say that I somehow agree. You guys are making an interesting point about the decreased utility of Renew. Still I frequently use it, skilled 3/3 IR and use the Glyph of Renew. The Reason for this is that imo it still is a very good buffer to heal out tank damage spikes, since I am mostly a Tankhealer renew is an excellent spell to increase my hps on a target.
Furthermore, i stronly believe that it will have its usefulness increased once CoH has been nerfed. This would make renew a great tool to keep the group on a more or less constant HP-Level in groupdamage situations (for instance malygos -> vortex), though in this particular situations, depending on the duration of such a "phase" its definatly arguable whether to use the renew glyph or some other.
Anyways. In my opinon blizzard should remove the "Stun-Effect" on Divine Hymn (maybe by a glyph) , lower the cooldown and maybe increase the healing, making it an even better hot for situations mentioned above.

We've been running HPriest/RSham, and I'll honestly admit I would much rather run with a holy paladin. Beacon is an insanely amazing throughput spell for Sarth+3, and doing 2-healer .10+3 without a paladin is just nasty. We came *so* close to a kill numerous times on Monday with that setup, while the paladin+priest group just breezed right through, and got the kill in no time.

It's a situation where it's really not about efficiency or sustaining mana or any of that. It's a question of sheer GCDs and throughput to keep multiple tanks alive while a *lot* of stuff is going on. I really appreciate why Method used 3 healers for their comp on the first kill: if you don't have a highly synergized raid (which with 10 people & 3 tanks is almost impossible to do well), it's worth bringing the extra healer and just healing through the damage.

I much prefer a caster-all-ranged group with a prot paladin bringing a 2nd blessing for the 2-healer setup. We had 3 melee (ret+2 rogues), a DK AE tank, and then 2 hunters. It just wasn't enough.

Ye, agree with what you're saying. The encounter is slightly different with two healer as you avoid tons of damage (I've done both setups), but it's still obviously a lot more demanding in a two healer setup - I even had Innervate running three healers which was a luxury, not that it was really needed. The fight is also textbook material for when a holypaladin will shine.

What I was trying to say is that rolling Renews - which I think a holypriest is forced to on that encounter with two healers - is something that only works in smaller enviorments or when you have really strict assignement. I remember when we first approached KJ, we ended up having druids healing Fire Bloom-damage on the raid and me yelling at people if they "overhealed lifeblooms". A priest could certainly throw a FH on someone with a 3k deficit and two stacks of LB and win the meter, but making sure that PoH hit right after that Fire volley is far more important. To make hots viable as a raidhealing tool you can't really have healers competing to get most healing done, but let the hots do their work and know when someone is in danger or not.

This is the main issue with healing so far in the expansion, content is too easy most of the time and most guilds bring far too many healers - which leads to instantheals like CoH snaping everything. While on more challenging content, Wild Growth and Chain Heal (and Renew to a certain extent) will win because of efficency (Renew because of healing / GCD). But unless you have assignements to allow it and the content is pushing your limits, I don't see much reason for using Renew a lot as a priest these days, I normally would bounce a fresh PoM instead of a Renew.

for Divine Fury: *shrug* I have it myself, despite the fact that I rarely use GHeal. But I use Renew even less and Healing Focus is ftl imo. So I personally have Divine Fury rather than the other two Tier 1 talents.

Holy Reach for Grace seems like an unwise choice, though.

How come? It's overridden in my raid setup with a resto druid and a prot pala.

I thought that once the Grace stacked to the point it was reducing damage more than the BoSanc it overwrote it. So, basically, if you keep a Grace stack up, it become better DR than BoSanc.

Unless this has changed?

BoSanc is 3% and a 3 stack Grace is 3% damage mitigation. I fail to see where Grace becomes better. Originally Grace increased by 2% per stack up to 6% total but that never went live. BoSanc also has additional effect (Grace does too, but only for the casting Priest) on the target, restoring rage, mana or rp.

BoSanc is better and should therefor overwrite Grace. However unless you have a Prot Paladin tank or you are raiding very Paladin-heavy, your Paladins probably apply other more benefical blessings to the raid.

If I'm not mistaken this has already been handled by removing all "less than 30 sec's"-buffs from the players as soon as the Arena-match starts.