Given that tanks are doing 2k dps raid-buffed now, they seem to be generating full rage bars (for the two classes that have rage) just from their own dps. Or, at least, enough that they shouldn't notice any momentary loss in rage from a single melee hit getting eaten by a PW:S.

We certainly don't worry about shields and rage gen in Fusion. And if it *was* adversely effecting Bazz's tps, he'd yell at us. He loves his tps like a mother loves her child.

I may be wrong, but I've heard that Shielding no longer mitigates rage generation.

Thanks for the responses. I'll just plead ignorance and hoping people will set me straight and I worded it as a clarification question. I am still under the belief that when a mob hits the tank regardless of class, it generates some threat and that when a shield is put on the tank, that potential threat generation is lost.

Here's an example: Now that I think about it more there was a retribution pally friend I grouped with all the time at lower level. One day we were in ZF and a boss dropped a rare purple weapon that proc'd a shield. As soon as he started equipping it, I found that whenever the damn thing proc'd I had a good chance of peeling it off of him (when playing a dps shadow priest). Doesn't that prove that I'm on to something here?

DKs do have the one weakness that they don't have an immediate AOE taunt like warriors, pally's and druid bears do. I'm unholy specced and I get 2 decent AoEs + blood boil, but that isn't necessarily enough to keep them from peeling onto high dps givers over time. Even our guild warrior tank jokes about the outrageous DPS taking threat away from him too. We're all geared similarly -- but some of our guild moonkins, mages, and hunters are doing incredible dps. But a few of our dps are geared just a little better than our tanks are.

I definitely don't appreciate the tone of your response, given I was asking for clarification on a stereotype I inherited. I asked the original question because I wasn't sure if it was the best thing to do.

Nope. The PW:S argument is entirely about rage generation: warriors/druids take hits, they gain rage, this rage turns into threat. Paladins have an indirect version of the same problem because they run out of mana unless someone heals them, and PW:S doesn't count as a heal, so by casting PW:S you're costing them mana from Spiritual Attunement. Death knights have no such problem... well, come to think of it, I'll have to go check to see what happens if you have both PW:S up and AMS up, but AMS is on a long enough timer that it shouldn't be a large effect.

This is from the "theorycrafting think tank" on these forums:

So absorbing damage actually does directly reduce threat generated by a warrior or druid because they wont generate rage from damage taken. DK's and Paladins however do not generate runic power and mana directly from taking damage as far as I know, so no, the act of a mob hitting a DK or paladin tank does not directly generate threat.

Even for a warrior or a druid the threat directly generated from taking damage is pretty small. My PWS absorbs roughly 7000 damage, and using the conversion from damage taken into rage:

Rage = 2.5(Damage)/320.6

320.6 is the conversion factor for level 80. For 7000 damage this equals about 55 rage, which at 5 threat per rage equals 275 threat. If a warrior or druid tank is worried about 275 threat every 15 seconds then he/she has bigger problems. The lost 55 rage might be a concern at the beginning of a fight, but generally tanks are not having trouble keeping aggro once they get past the first 10-20 seconds, so problems are easily avoided by not shielding prior to pulls.


Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything, especially if it is from Zul'Farrak.

Yes. Not long after hitting 80, I tried out Disc in some heroics. Had a few tanks who were still in the old pre-3.0 mentality, chastising me for shielding them. But in every case, by the end of the run, they were in love with the disc priest mechanics, and had no rage problems.

Yes, I have breakdowns for PW:S vs DA (relative to healing done):

For bosses:

• 13% from DA
• 20% from PW:S

For trash mobs:

• 12% from DA
• 11% from PW:S

I don't have a total PW:S count immediately available. There were 215 events in the log segment I examined where a PW:S buff was either applied or removed... not sure how useful that is.

Any comment about the breakdowns per encounter is really anecdotal. Since n=1 for each of them, I do not have a valid statistical sampling to do that. That is, I'd have to have multiple runs of the same encounter to sort out effects related to the encounter itself. However, I did look at the extreme cases out of curiousity. Anub'Rekhan had the highest % of absorbed damage, totalling 58% of healing done for that encounter. This is a quirk of circumstance IMO. Healing done was really low because we had a disc priest and pally on the MT and that was overkill. Noth had the lowest absorbed damage at 12% and had only 3% from PW:S. Wish I could tell you why, but I can't. For whatever reason, I wasn't casting PW:S and again it is probably a result of an exceptional circumstance and not due to the encounter itself.

More importantly, I'm pretty certain that different discipline priests cast PW:S at different rates, and that's going to mess predictions up. I think I'm rather "middle of the road", but I suppose I don't really know. What I can say with reasonable confidence is that if a priest almost never casts PW:S, their absorbed damage may be as low as 10-15% of their healing done. If one casts PW:S very frequently then it may be possible to see averages over 40% or even 50%. However, I think the "normal" values are probably more in the range of 20%-40%.

saw the post about disc and threat problems for tanks, The only class that have problems that i've seen is a good geared pally since he won't get mana from heals, and that's just in 5 mans all other classes tend to love a disc healer.

When I heal a pally i usually just take off as much crit i can and stack up haste, not that it's needed unless it's good geared pally..

I definitely agree with [Signet of Manifested Pain] being one of the better items, but we have yet to see it drop and I would definitely pass it to an dps if they really needed it.

I'm not really concerned about getting gear that's ilevel 226... I just want the gear to be useful. At this point in time, mana regen isn't too big of a problem, but then... it just depends on the fight. I've had some guildies mention last night during a raid asking if I ever run out of mana. The answer would be yes, but I manage my cooldowns well enough to never run into that problem. I rarely dip below 30% mana even on healing intensive fights.

I do have to say... haste made a world of difference last night when we did 20 man Malygos (for the achievement). We ran with 4 healers (1 of each class) and phase 2 is absolutely crazy in the beginning with tanks taking damage, people getting hit by those flying scions. Despite that, I STILL wasn't even close to being out of mana (no vate, no pot and I mistimed by fiend... Maly flew up in the air ><). So, you can definitely heal a 5 minute attempt with... 5 healers at the least. Any lower and people will start dying in Phase 2.

I think I'll start switching some gems around... maybe change all my spirit gems to some green ones (like haste + spirit). Mmm...

I have an 80 prot pally alt and the mana lost from spiritual attunement with a disc priest healing are actually quite noticeable in a 5-man. However, after swapping BoK for BoSanc and using Divine Plea on every cooldown, I was fine, and didn't have to drink at all after I got used to it.

There's several pages that discuss glyphs (both major and minor) throughout this topic. In fact, if you do a search for "glyph" a plethora of information comes up. You'll find the information that you are seeking has already been posted.

The pieces Nidaba referenced in concern with dropping Faith's bonuses are pretty easy to guess: [Mantle of Dissemination], [Leggings of Mortal Arrogance], and [Hood of Rationality]. [Lost Jewel]/[Signet of Manifested Pain] have also been mentioned as a possible "best in slot" ring options instead of [Ring of Decaying Beauty]; [Staff of Restraint] has been brought up as an option instead of [Spire of Sunset]. All of which have been discussed prior in this thread, as well.

While I don't mean to sound catty and apologize if it appears as such, there's so much information to be found here. Recent responses suggest that many do not bother to read through the previous posts which is, of course, not surprising... but, really, do try it. You'll find what you're looking for. :)

To reiterate what was said earlier in this thread, best in slot lists are subject to change based on the fight, and, moreover, from person to person. While I value Nidaba's list, its not what I would use for every fight (obviously). I'm usually assigned to heal the raid, therefore 4pc t7 (hell, even 2pc) is nigh-useless. I will only use 4pc on Patchwerk kills, for reasons that should be clear.

That's not to say that the BiS lists are useless, but they don't take into consideration your healing assignment and the fight in question. Another glaring example is Sartharion + 3D where your setup could change entirely.

Hello, does anyone know values to use with Pawn for shadow raid dps and holy builds? Thanks in advance.

Promethia: thanks again. What I'm hoping to get is a number on overheal for PW:Shield and DA. Seems hard to get

A coder by the name of para11ax over at WoWhead has developed a version of recount that includes shield absorbs.

Documentation:
Discipline Priest Recount - Priest - Wowhead Forums

Addon:
RecountDisc.zip - Curse

Here are some results from Naxx (construct quarter)


According to this recount...

Power Word: Shield accounted for 32.9% of my healing.
Divine Aegis accounted for 15% of my healing.
(~48% difference from normal recount)

Compared to the basic version of recount, I moved from 5th place in healing to first.

An interesting thing I noticed during trash pulls is that my shields would "block out" other healers from healing the tank. Obviously they cant heal if the target has taken no damage


There is a potential probelm with this version, as the glyph heal amount is multiplied by a flat 5 to come up with the shield amount (crits are normalized into nonncrit before multiplying)
I have requested this factor be changed to 3-4 as to take a more conservative approach in this calculation as many talents and modifiers affect the healing portion of the glyph but NOT the actual shield.

However, even using a factor of 3 for conservativsm, PW:S has more "healing" done than the next highest heal.

PW:S was NOT spammed on random targets. It was kept up primarily on the 2-3 tanks, on any raid members who were an inch from death, placed on anyone with mutation injection during grob, thrown on the kiters during gluth, and on priorirty targets during thadius.

Priest in 7 position dropped raid early on. Druid in #2(no shields), #3(with) took his place.

Just a little something to look at about Disc healing.

The disc recount mod is interesting to be sure, I'll probably use it to assess my alt disc priests performance. One needs to be careful however in taking the results as gospel, since the potential for inflating the numbers artificially are there. From the wowhead post by the mod author:

Assumes all Shields are fully consumed.
Because of how the combat log reports damage absorption, there is no good way of isolating a specific effect's absorbed damage. Therefore all Shields and DAs are considered fully consumed; implying no "overhealing".

Oh, so you're wanting to know how much of a shield isn't used. I didn't look at that in great detail this time around, but I did a couple months ago in this post.

I just quickly went over all the PW:S events from the more recent Naxx run and found that 78% of all PW: Shields were completely absorbed. Some of the remaining 22% were partially absorbed too, I'm sure, but that's a little more time consuming to figure out. From previous data, though, I know most shields that expire don't absorb any damage. Some of those are just shields thrown before the pull, for instance. I know that happens to me a lot when preshielding -- I throw a shield up because I think we're pulling soon and then someone isn't ready, so the shield expires having absorbed nothing, and then I just recast it. I saw in my log this happened several times -- enough to be a significant chunk of those 22% that weren't fully absorbed, although I can't give you a precise number easily. Obviously, those cases are mostly artifacts, and I believe "almost all" shields that matter are fully absorbed.

Incidentally, for PW: shields that did get consumed, they lasted an average of 6.87 seconds.

A factor of 3 rather than 5 probably is fairly close, based on what I've measured directly using much more thorough (and painstaking) methods. I'm wondering about the math on the meter you posted, though, which had the glyph healing for 4.1% but then shield being over 32% of your healing? Shouldn't those differ by a factor of 5? But 5 times 260293 is 1301465, which is a lot less than the over 2 million posted. Any idea what is going on there?

Also, do you know how it is computing DA shield absorbs?

Yeah, the numbers from the mod seem like a high estimate, and it obviously won't work if you do not have the PW:Shield glyph. Also, I disagree with the author's choice of words: there are good ways of isolating each specific effect's absorbed damage -- there are just not easy ways.

However, even though the estimated absorb for PW:Shield is certainly high (possibly 150% of the "true" value or so), it should still be much closer than the unmodded meter, which assigned a value of zero to all shields.

Also from a practical political point of view, anything that helps people who don't know much appreciate that discipline priests are valuable is probably a good thing. In other words, I don't see a big risk of discipline priest healing getting artificially overvalued by people who are meter watchers. Multitarget raid heals are still going to generate the huge and impressive numbers there. This just might help stop the "partially informed" from flat out concluding discipline sucks based on meter numbers that significantly and systematically undervalue discipline priests.

The meter is only showing effective healing for the glyph, meaning that it's not counting any overheal. So if you PW:S someone when they're at full health (or only missing a tiny bit), the healing from the glyph won't be factored into the recount numbers.

Given Promethia's numbers, does anyone dare to make a guestimate of how close disc and holy will become in 3.08? Right now I'm lucky to squeeze out half the healing I can do in holy spec. (make that 65-ish %, given the shield numbers from Promethia).

How much will that gap change once CoH cd comes into play? I've been trying to get some numbers from live play making a castsequence macro that puts my CoH on a voluntary 6sec cd, problem is it resets every time I tap it. So if I tap it to early it really messes up the amount of CoH's.

It depends on how much you use CoH... And honestly I don't use CoH that much. Depends on the fight, but on most bosses CoH is not the majority of my heals.

It'll definitely change things on fights like Malygos or Sartharion-3 though, but less so on things like say Kel'Thuzad or Maexnna.

The absolute worst part about this change is, we'll be juggling 2-3 freaking cooldowns on the fights we need CoH. Sartharion-3 will suddenly become a "how many FH can you fit in between CoH casts.

And on a side note, I suddenly feel a great need to re-evaluate haste. Seems like haste will only be [more] useful in certain intervals. E.g. with no haste you should be able to do 3 Flash Heals in between CoH. But at haste cap you can get 5 Flash Heals in. But a smidgen of haste won't increase your 3 to 4.

We have all been trained to look at Recount and WWS and say "he who does the most healing is clearly the best", and that is simply incorrect. We must look more closely at the data and differentiate between tank healing and raid healing. Raid healers will always blow away tank healers on the meters because there is simply more damage available to heal. The handful of tanks can only take so much damage, but the raid as a whole can take much more.

For that reason it is both unfair and pointless to compare the healing meter performances of a CoH priest with a discipline priest. Discipline priests should be compared to other tank healers in the raid to make sure they are performing up to par, and both Recount and WWS can be used to do this if you just dig a bit deeper. Both show data for healing received, and that is what we should look at in regards to discipline priest performance.