PvP Disc Spec Discussion
 

I've been blowing my gold respeccing to test different builds out lately and I figured this would be the best forum to start a discussion up.

This is what I have as the baseline spec with a few talents that I added for filler just to be able to fill out the rest of the tree.
- 3 points in Improved PW:S are not "necessary"
- 5 points in Spell Warding could also go in Divine Fury

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Initial points of interest:
1) Spell Warding vs Divine Fury (also Searing Light)? I see this argument going back and forth for the different brackets. Gheal's efficiency without improved healing and other deep holy talents is very lackluster. Using flash heal in its place should be the way to go for most pvp scenarios. The fact that divine fury affects smite & holy fire makes it interesting though, priests in 2s and even sometimes 3s will see a huge benefit from. It's also a prerequisite for searing light, which is useful in the same light.

2) Imp PW:S worth it? From what I've read, this talent is bugged and only affects the base value of shield, resulting in 3 points for ~300 absorbed increase on PW:S. Seems like a giant waste, but it needs to be replaced with something early in the tree for prereqs. Martyrdom? I'm leaning towards yes on martyrdom mainly for mana burns and the -20% duration on interrupts while people are on you.

3) Imp Renew? Renew is something that I almost always keep up in pvp. I'm not entirely sure how well this scales with spell power and such. Is it better than 3% crit? Or other talents in the disc tree?

4) Grace, Renewed Hope? Renewed hope seems like it's almost a static +4% crit on whoever you're healing, since weakened soul should be on anyone we're healing. Grace is a 9% swing in healing when it's stacked up. Plus it gives the target another 3 magic buffs that have to be eaten through by purge spammers.

6) Mental Agility? I dropped this mainly because I don't think longevity is going to be a problem, especially early in the season. Mental strength & rapture should be enough to get us through most games. HPS and survival talents are more important than mana reduction at this point imo.

Feel free to correct me or dispute anything I've said. These are the final specs I came up with for the different brackets:

2v2 - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
3v3 & 5v5 - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Divine Fury, I think, is mandatory if you ever want to play any hybrid-style role. A 1.5second Holy Fire is huge.

The way that crit tends to work on PvP (eventually) has always indicated to me that crit-based talents are only marginally useful in PvP. This extends to Divine Aegis, as well.

I agree on Mental Agility and Absolution--though with some hesistance. The mana costs of Abolish Disease and Dispel Magic are absurd.

To me though, the real question, at least in the beginning of the season when I have no PvP gear, is not individual talents in Disc but rather: "Blessed Resilience?!?!?!" Focused Will was nerfed....will Blessed Resilience be worth getting in addition to Focused Will just to survive? Assuredly Priests will be the first target in nearly every match, as we have less defenss at 80 then we did at 70.

Edit1: Hybrid max defense spec:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxIMuhMtMcsZsxth0baw0h

Edit2: Other talents of note

Improved Renew (and the Renew Glyph) will probably be pretty standard. More instant heals are always good.

I regard improved inner fire as required at this point, for the armor and extra charges, mostly. Silent Resolve and Martyrdom, as well. Assuming that Improved PW:S is actually not-bugged and useful, I think we have to get that as well...Which leaves little to no points left for Mental Agility or Absolution...and maybe not any left for Improved Mana Burn.

Reflective Shield is amazing at 3 points. But deeper down in the tree, something has to be left out. I tend to leave out a point in aspiration, and possibly renewed hope if I want Searing Light.


Edit 3:

mmo-champion reporting: Well....that's bullshit. Doubt I'll take reflective shield now.

Back in the day when we had 6-7% crit pre-talents I agree, it was pointless to rely on crit talents. Now that we're pushing 15-20%, I think crits will play a bigger role in our healing. Granted, I do agree with you to an extent since they're a proc based ability, making it kinda random.

With the way I play, I think absolution is a must have talent. We were doing a lot of in-guild 2v2 skirmishes last night and dispel was easily the ability I used the most, both offensively and defensively. I'm not looking forward to the dispel glyph nerf as I was relying on that for a lot of heals against mage teams.

That's actually a pretty interesting spec, haha. I may try it out over the weekend. You lose a bunch of deep disc talents, but it may be worth it with what you gain in holy. I remember reading about the procs of blessid resilience, blessed recover and focused will conflicting (ie. only getting 1 max per crit on you), is that still true, or was it ever true? I didn't really look into it too much back then since blessed recovery sucked and I stayed away from deep holy for pvp.

It's still a great dueling and small bracket talent, but I'm not so sure it's worth it in 3s and above now.

The other spec that might be very interesting is 50/0/21 for Silence over Pain Suppression. I absolutely loved playing Disc/Silence in s3/s4 with a Mage or Rogue partner, and the changes to Improved Fade (now Vieled Shadows) makes the spec even more interesting from a longevity standpoint.

As for Divine Aegis--the lack of Reflective Shield working with Divine Aegis, and Divine Aegis' sketchy behavior with Penance, make me think this talent is not particullarily useful. I would much prefer Grace. Furthermore, although most raid-based healing gear has crit now, the PvP Arena sets for healing priests do not have that much crit. And I would still prefer the spirit on the healing set to the crit on the shadow set.

In a month or two, when my priest is more geared with arena-specialized gear, I expect to not worry much about Divine Aegis.

Gems: Resilience gems all the way?

I never found the silence hybrid to be particularly effective with a rogue, although I felt that it was (and that it likely will continue to be) viable with a mage, hunter, or warlock. That's not to say that I was entirely unsuccessful with a rogue as that spec, I think the utility of both silence and mind flay synergize better with the other comps mentioned. I would love to be able to pick up some of the talents in the tiers above silence such as improved fade, imp psychic scream, and blackout, however I don't think I could justify sacrificing desperate prayer or the lower-tier disc talents to do so.

I also do not plan to pick up divine aegis, as I don't believe that divine aegis is at all strong enough to compensate for the sacrifices that you must make in both your spec and gear in order to support it.

I agree with you that the Silence hybrids were not as good with rogues as they were mages, but that was primarily due to Pain Suppression and a few Holy Talents.

Now that you can get Pain Suppression and Borrowed Time and Silence, at the cost of pushback protection (no longer huge but it still matters a bit), improved renew, Divine Fury, and Desperate prayer, things are a bit different. I suppose it depends on how much glyphed/talented renew stays as a core healing ability in Arena.

Penance is an amazing spell for healing your partner, but it requires the right type of composition. I would surmise that Penance/Holy builds will do well in 2v2 with a Rogue, and Silence once again with a Mage.

But then again, what made those builds really viable was the change to s4 (or was it s3?) gloves (-3 second cooldown on Psychic Scream). The ability to get your Fear cooldown to 23 seconds was a huge part of making the hybrid disc/silence spec viable.

re:
 

I find silence to be a real one trick pony - the CD is so long that I tend to use it once and only once in a given battle.

I think you'll have a lot more mileage with PS, especially considering the kind of damage being thrown around now, and I don't think DA is worthwhile at all - you're going to have MS effects up pretty much always and those 1k-2k bubbles just won't mean much in the world of 7k crits.

Penance throughput is absolutely amazing for PVP but leaves you wide open for a lockout on your healing spells and I don't think Priests will be left alone much in S5.

With most classes able to do burst damage in the 20k range and able to sustain 5k dps, renew ticking away at around 500hps is hardly even visible in a fight these days.

As far as talents, I'm pretty much down to one question. Has anyone figured out a build that lasts through a stunlock yet? 18k health, ~450 resil, and I'm done before getting to push a button, let alone before anyone can peel off me. Is living long enough for the rogue to have to kick my heal too much to ask?

I wouldn't go so far to say that you'll survive through a stunlock with more than one person beating on you (or even just a rogue, depending on his gear), but in terms of pure survivability I've found this to give the best effect (and variants of it, such as this.)

Hoisiery's spec is by far the best one for pure survivability, but it is absolutely terrible at outlasting (which doesn't seem like a big deal now anyway).

I would go one step further and completely skip mana-saving talents, and go with this:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

max throughput and max burst, but you go OOM insanely fast. I think games over ~1 minute won't happen anyway for the first week or so.

As you said, it's hardly a build for outlasting, but I've found outlasting to be the least of my concerns at the moment. The reason I wasn't so inclined to pick up imp pw:s is that it's apparently only scaling from the base absorption of the spell again, making it a whole hell of a lot less appealing. I've gone back and forth in my head as to whether a 34/37 or 37/34 variant appeals to me more for the start of the season, but I'll probably just try them both before drawing any conclusions; enlightenment does appeal to me though.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I'll be using this spec.

Furthermore I believe this will be the most used spec among all brackets when looking at SK100 rankings after S5 has been in full swing for a few months.

This spec seems to lack focus to me, so I had a few questions for you.

Why improved fort? I've never considered it in a pvp build as dispels completely negate your talent points. Perhaps if we did not already have fort as a baseline skill, this might seem more reasonable to me.

Why no divine fury or borrowed time? Certainly penance is a great spell for healing your allies, but wouldn't you want the cast time reduction on gheal for yourself? Also, since it appears as though you're going for a build that sacrifices sustainability for temporary strength, it seems strange to me that these talents would be skipped, if for no other reason than their offensive utility.

If you're taking 5/5 holy spec and 2/2 renewed hope, why not pick up divine aegis? Personally I wouldn't opt for any of these because I feel DA is a weak talent, however if you are going to opt for a more crit-oriented build I'm not sure why you'd skip it.

Not exactly build discussion, but is there any reason at all to pick up the spirit PvP gear over the crit PvP gear? Seems like even a full spirit set would add a very small amount of regen (and discipline builds aren't that keen on spirit anyway), so adding more chance to crit would be more useful than bumping your regen from 450/100 to 600/150.

To be honest, back in the day alot of battles were decided purely by who ran out of mana first and very often not on who healed the most during the game.

Simply put, no matter how low your crit/spell power is you can usually keep someone alive anyway but without any mana the battle is 9/10 times already lost.

Then again, spirit is terribly weak in pvp stat economy wise. Also, I'm not sure but does rapture restore more mana on crits assuming you wouldnt already get the 2,5% from a hit?