Nurru

Disc really has no reason to actively try to get Haste. You'll get plenty on your gear just via normal gearing when combined with raids buffs, Enlightenment and Borrowed Time.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Vindisama

Ok right, I'll probably get slapped around for this question but oh well.

I've been talking with a disc priest from my guild and the question came up whether one of two builds would be more viable(beneficial) for our raid, first spec is disc with renewed hope and the second is holy with circle of healing.
We currently have two other priests with circle of healing that are mostly in on every raid.

The question that I have is, is there any way to accurately determine which one of those specs for the third priest would be more beneficial to the raid?

 

windcape

No there is not. It completely depends on your needs. Up to Mimiron I would say Discipline is more efficient than Holy for every encounter, since the amount of AoE healing is limited (even on Hodir).

But for Mimiron and after you'll need more AoE healing depending on your current set-up. So if the rest of the raid is stacked with shamans and druids, you obviously don't need another AoE healer. But if it's all out paladins, the answer should be fairly obvious. Just remember that for Mimiron you're most likely going to need either Guardian Spirit or Pain Suppression.

So the conclusion is: there's no best choice, it all depends on your raid composition.

 

Sarjin

Depends on other issues, such as the amount of Paladins you are running with. Overall I find the best tank healing combo to be Holy Paladin + Disc priest, but if you are already running 2 Holy Paladins, you are usually not going to need any additional tank healers, and your Holy Paladins are kinda bad at anything not involving tank healing.

That said, all this is easily solved with the Dual Spec feature. One Disc spec, one Holy spec, and you can switch on the fly.


I kind of disagree regarding the early AoE healing need btw. I agree Discipline is better for Razorscale, and yesterday felt more useful for Thorim practise as well. (since our main issues seemed to be single target burst dmg in the arena, not raid wide dmg). For the rest however, Deconstructor you will be considerably more useful as Holy (even if the Tantrum nerf reduces that a little), Kologarn and Iron Council as well. (Considering a first kill with Brundir last, the key healing part is while Steelbreaker is up. Admittedly one disc priest is handy for the tank, but running with multiple priests there's little reason to have more than 1 Disc) Auriaya is a bit of a tossup really, Disc is better for the pull but in the later stages I'd prefer Holy. (And while the pull is the key, it was easy enough to get through as Holy... then again the rest of the fight is not too bad either)

I guess it's determined by own raid balance and experience though, and switching at will removes most of the 'problem'.

 

Celsius

The Discipline Healing Compendium v3.1 suggests that haste has a higher value than crit post 3.1, that's what I'm basing this question on.

 

Vindisama

I do understand it depends on the rest of the raid setup, sorry I think the question was a bit misleading as to what I actually wanted to ask.

But to put it differently, will the 3% reduced dmg on the raid from renewed hope be more beneficial than another circle of healing instant heal?

 

Elimbras

Answer is the same : do you badly need more AOE heals or not ?
COH is an extremely good spell, no doubt about it. But it won't change the world if you have enough AOE healers. 3% reduction is great also, but won't change the world either.

So, if you lack aoe heals, go for holy and COH. If you have enough aoe heals, you're probably better at Disc, because it's complementary to other heals.

 

mofidik

I'd like to ask a question regarding disc on Vezax, if I may.

Basically I'm having a (usually holy) priest respec for this particular fight, so with his mechanics in mind, what would an optimal Disc spec be?

e: 10man, if it matters.

¬(-.-¬) maek stabs!

 

tedv

I would take this spec: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...&version=9767#

It's not too different from other discipline specs-- the holy filler talents are skewed towards Vezax though. If he's used to Holy though, let him heal some other fights as Discipline to get a feel for how to play it. On Vezax the spec amounts to keeping Shield and Penance on cooldown, and using Flash Heal if the tank still needs heals when those other spells are on cooldown. Blow Power Infusion on a DPS caster standing in shadow crash.

 

Squeakster

I agree with that spec and about PWSing the tank every 15 seconds on Vezax but I definitely don't keep Penance on cooldown. The hits on the tank are large and often very spread out, the best way to handle that is to just sit there, do nothing and stare at your tank's HP bar waiting for him to take a hit and them respond immediately with Penance. It is a waste to just cast it every 6.4 seconds.

Also, PI should be used on a caster standing in a Shadow Crash slime, not the green slime.

 

mofidik

Thanks, that helps a lot.

I kind of forgot though, what are you folk's ideas on glyphs for this specific case? Also the linked spec doesn't include PI for me, I reckon the one point in Imp. flash heal is meant to go there?

¬(-.-¬) maek stabs!

 

Nurru

You already should be using Glyph of Penance and Glyph of Flash Heal, so beyond that there aren't any glyphs you must have for Vezax.

< Aislinana> Why would it be my job to sleep with vontre? Don't I have standards?

 

Xaphania

He skipped PI and two points in Imp. Flash Heal, along with one point in Grace, to get Improved Healing in holy to help with mana efficiency on Vezax. The standard disc build looks more like mine, with the only variable being the "extra" point after getting 57/13, which I put in Healing Focus.

Edit: As for glyphs, the only 3 that are really nice for what disc does are Penance, FH, and PW:S. Prayer of Healing is nice too, but more holy-suited, and pretty pointless for Vezax anyway.

 

• constantius

If you have Vezax under control, mana is a non-issue for any healer. Just stand in saronite to 7, hop out, get topped up, then stand in it to 5-6 (basically until it expires). Bam, 10k mana per Saronite cloud.

Of course, if you're doing *hard mode*, it's a totally different concept. Really, the only time(s) I had mana issues on Vezax (as Disc) was on our first few learning attempts, before we started enforcing presence of our dps DK. Death Grip + Saronite = fun.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

moowalk

Just make sure you don't let inspiration fall off. With 2 priests it shouldn't be a problem, but with one it might be.

 

Celsius

Pardon my nagging, but I still feel I'm a bit confused about whether (and why) it's a good idea for me to keep stacking haste in favor of crit to reach those 11% recommended in the disc 3.1 compendium.

 

Glasswizard

Well I don't think that anybody here has really solved that crit/haste problem for disc till now. If that's even possible.

It depends on the Encounter. If you are more or less shield spamming most of the time, both haste and crit are not very useful stats and you will want spellpower and some regeneration. But stacking spellpower is limited to trinkets, foodbuff/flask, sockets as every "normal" heal item has spellpower on it anyway und you can't usally exchange the crit or haste from itemstat nr. 5 for even more spellpower.

So I guess you have to evaluate crit vs haste by using spells with longer base casttime than 1.5 seconds like Penance or Prayer of Healing.

I personally try to balance crit and haste but that is purely based on feeling and not proven mathematically.

By the way, if I understood it right, the recommended 11% are from a time when we still thought that you need 11% from items to reach a global cooldown of 1 second with all talents, borrowed time and raidbuffs. According to the last formula it's actually only ~4%. But you also have to remember that sometimes you will not have all the raidbuffs (due to range for example) and also borrowed time always up means that you are probably shield spamming so more crit won't help you much either.

So actually this is not a simple question.

 

Celsius

Thanks for that, it cleared up the issue a bit. Even though it is, as you say, far from clear. It would probably be worth adding a section the the Disc compendium about the problem with weighting crit vs haste for Disc.
I'll stick with my 6.92% unbuffed haste for the moment then, and work on redeeming some crit, methinks.

 

Healixor

I got a question about the General Vezax fight. Normal mana regen rules don't work, like spirit and mp5. I'm disc as primary spec and holy as secondary. Disc has no mana issues, but if there is no regen, what's build will last longer, what build has the highest HPM (or mitigation + health per mana).

Does Rapture work on the fight? And which trinkets should I use, I think [Je'Tze's Bell] won't work (mp5). Does [Soul of the Dead] work?

 

tedv

Actually it was from a slightly older talent setup when 11% haste on gear was enough to give exactly 20% haste while raid buffed. The 20% number is a purely fabricated value that the original compendium poster felt was "good to have", and that you could really notice when you dropped below it.

Some simple math shows this is all psychological though:

GCD with 15% haste: 1.304
GCD with 20% haste: 1.250

So going from 11% haste on your gear to 6% haste resulted in your global cooldown being 46 milliseconds (0.046 seconds) slower, less than half the reaction time of someone with really good reactions (120 ms). Having more haste is clearly better, and on some fights it could be the number one stat to stack, but there's no magic 11% threshold that people need to reach.

On an editorial note, someone asks this question every couple of pages and we keep having to explain how it's just misinformation. The compendium post should really get updated to have that threshold removed.

 

meddle

Discipline is just flat-out superior for longevity on Vezax. The mana pool you can accrue with Mental Strength alone is enough to justify this. Power Infusion and Rapture are icing on the cake. Holy Priests cannot "last" as long. In theory though, assuming no one makes mistakes, the fight is simply about keeping your tank alive, and healing saronite vapor damage (which is trivial with PWS). Ideally longevity shouldn't really be an issue at all with the ability to get a ton of mana back from the saronite vapor, unless of course you are going for hard mode.

I can confirm that [Soul of the Dead] does not work, however some mana-returning procs such as Rapture do work under General Vezax's aura. I don't own a [Je'Tze's Bell] so I can't say if it works or not.

[e] The mana return from the insightful metagem does not work unless I was extremely unlucky.

 

Allesin

Neither [Je'Tze's Bell] nor [Soul of the Dead] return mana on General Vezax. You recieve an "Immune" message when mana-returning procs occur, and in the case of the bell, as it adds to your inherent regen, it is negated by your inherent regen being irrelevant.

 

Autorun

I’m not sure this is the explanation, I think Glasswizard was correct: the confusion here is to do with calculating the haste cap for Discipline. Nidaba’s Compendium (and thanks to him for another excellent resource) says:

But I think those suggesting less Haste is required to achieve this effect are correct. The 50% value in the compendium has been achieved additively, when those values are in fact multiplicative. This point was raised by Fayhand here in the Disc-specific Compendium.

Fayhand has the correct calculation, although unless my fingers are too fat to press my calculator keys I think that there is a typo in the result.

The calculation is:
Desired Haste Multiplier/Borrowed Time * Enlightenment * Wrath of Air * Ret/Moonkin * Haste on Gear

That is to say:
1.25*1.06*1.03*1.05*x=1.5
is solved to give a value of 4.67% haste needed on gear to reach the Haste cap as Discipline (when under Borrowed Time).

 

• constantius

It wasn't really a "purely fabricated number", and your continual insistence on making an issue of it is becoming old. It started in Sunwell, when you had the option to get roughly that much haste, and we first started to notice that we could get our GHeals down to "almost" paladin levels. It continued in WotLK when we saw that in BiS Naxx gear it was "easy" to reach 400 haste without sacrificing other stats, and beyond 500 it became prohibitively expensive in terms of crit and spellpower to continue stacking haste.

There's not necessarily anything magic about the number 21% haste by any means. However, the gearing levels required to pass that level of haste definitely lose crit and spellpower in the process. Rukli experimented with a heavy (700+) haste set, and found it to be quite useful ... in 3.0 talent terms. With the new HC, SoL, and the targeted PoH, crit is much more valuable now than it was, and stacking haste heavily inevitably hits your crit rating.

14% remains a good number to aim for as a first pass in your gearing. If you know enough to understand where you need more or less haste, the compendium really isn't for you anyway. There's nothing wrong with running less than 14%, and there's nothing wrong with running more. The 12-16% range is the ballpark within which you aren't sacrificing too much haste for crit, or crit for haste. Of course, this is in Holy terms; Disc needs far less haste from gearing thanks to the "free" 6% from Enlightenment.

To the above poster: I've updated the OP of the compendium to correctly reflect the multiplicative nature. I thought I had fixed that at one point, but apparently not. Thanks for the correction.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Headhuntress

Rapture does not work on Vezax but still the mana reduction talents of Discipline and Mental Strength are enough. Vezax only has single target damage if you are doing it right anyway.