I will admit Grace is clunky, but I get the feeling Grace is sort of a backhanded way to nudge us towards using Power Word: Shield.

Imagine if all we did was Penance/Flash Heal/Power Word: Shield the tank. Grace would never fall off of our main target. But, we could still use Power Word: Shield on raid targets without losing Grace. And of course Prayer of Mending somewhere in there.

Of course, there might be issues if there are multiple Disc Priests in a raid, but at that point someone should just respec Holy anyways (imo).

As of 3.1, a Priest's DA will now be stackable. I was wondering if anybody had the skill, or knew of an addon, that could keep track of how much a DA could absorb. Using the priest's own crits ( would be too complicated to incorp. all disc priests crits) and the combat log to figuire out how much the DA has left in it.

No, it's pretty much been explained multiple times that not only is that mechanically impossible, it will remain mechanically impossible for the foreseeable future. Any addon that pretended to tell you that would be guessing (very similar to the addons that 'tell' you how much is left on your PW:S, then PW:S doesn't fall off when the addon thinks its entirely consumed).

Whether or not such an addon is a good idea - I think it would introduce a good chance of 'information overload' and just end up being of minimal use - right now you'd end up with somewhat inaccurate to wildly inaccurate results, depending on fight mechanics.

Just clarify one thing for me. Why is it important to know how much is left on a DA?

Currently on PTR as Disc I spam PWS around in low damage phases or when the tank isn't taking spikes. It puts preventative damage on them and a small heal, since there is a lot of aoe, and it gives me a small mana battery. Its not about keeping up the buff, its about utilizing the ability to a greater benefit for mana and shielding.

My statement was in response to raids not stacking disc priests, therefore self benefits in the form of mana regen, or PW:shielding the tanks (1 disc can easily do this sure) are somewhat off the point.

As for the issue of a mana battery, I haven't had a chance on the PTR to play around with Disc so I dont know if 2.5% mana>cost of talented PW:Shield. Considering the mana pool i can achieve in raid currently specced as disc, I'm pretty sure that the 2.5% will be greater; however, you have to ensure that the raid damage is sufficient that it breaks the PW:Shield (which considering everything should be around the order of 5-6k at the start of ulduar). Either ulduar has fights with a lot of medium raid damage going on (like Saph) or it has periodic big blast damage (something like a decimate). I only include these two situations because any other situation would probably result in mana loss if you shield more than 1 or 2 non-tanks, and even in the 2nd scenario the usefulness in bubbling the raid as a mana battery depends on how often the damage is done (and if the shield can prevent it). Granted if the timer is greater than 30seconds you can probably bubble every1 before it goes off and wow thats a lot of mana.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe every fight (short of course Flame Levi) has an AOE component that does more then 6k every 30 seconds ya? Could be wrong but pretty sure all of them (at least that the US has done, do not know the EU ones as well) have something to damage raid wide which a disc priest could use shield as a mana battery. Personally I did not stack int much going into PTR, not knowing what to expect, but even my shields are giving back mana. I grabbed JC and if I find mana an issue I will definitely stack int at which point these shields will definitely be a huge amount of mana. Imagine though, going into a place where one knows there will be lots of raid damage and maybe not a lot of tank damage, shielding a ton of people and popping hymn just long enough for all of the shields to go off. With the mana cap increase that equals a lot of mana. On my latest WWS parse which got some of the 25 council attempts in I had some Rapture ticks of 777 (while shield costs 532 I believe) which might have been during a Hymn pop, couldn't be sure as I didn't check the parse thoroughly.
Unfortunately on PTR the bosses are like trash mobs and don't parse separately but fight dependent I am keeping replenishment fairly close to my rapture numbers and this is only while running on test. I have a feeling disc can be in a very good place still, as far as mana return is concerned, come 3.1 if we have some GCD's to use for shield tossing. I just hope our throughput for MT healing can keep pace with Pallies as they seem to scale better then us and already start ahead in the race.

Downranking is not helpful. Rank 1: 55 base @ 903mp. Rank 14: 2564 base @ 799mp. You would lose mana, even with Rapture. And the shield would absorb an insignificant amount of damage.

Some numbers for those thinking of down-ranking. The numbers are numbers I could find on wowwiki and wowhead, I may be wrong on the down-ranked cost as well, I wasn't able to find a number other than the 26% listed on wowhead for a rank 1 PW:S, versus the 23% for a rank 13 or 14.

Assuming 3.1 talent build including 3/3 Mental Agility and 1/1 Soul Warding, which would reduce the mana cost by 40% (10% and 40% respectively).
Base Mana - 3863
Cost of PW:S (max rank) - 23% Base - 889
Cost of PW:S (rank 1) - 26% Base - 1005

40% Cost reduction from talents
889/0.6 = 534
1005/0.6 = 604

Break Even points for mana returns:
Max Rank - 534/0.025 = 21,336
Rank 1 - 604/0.025 = 24,160

Assuming 2400 sp (very easy number to reach raid buffed) with 3/3 Imp Shield and 5/5 Borrowed Time:
2400/0.8066 = 1936 (Spell Power applied to PW:S)
Max Rank - 1,936+2,564 = 4,500 ->Talents-> 6,525
Rank 1 - 1,936+55 = 1,990 ->Talents-> 2,886

If you are in a situation where raid damage is between 2,886 and 6,524 in a 30 second time frame and your mana pool is much greater than 24,160, go right ahead and spam rank one. On the other hand, if you are in a situation where raid damage will be nearing 6,500 (in 30 seconds) it would be much more prudent to be using max rank, especially since the mana gain will be much greater if you meet the requirement of Mana Pool >> 24,160.

[e] I would also assume that they would have rapture only work with spell ranks where you could attain rapture, so numbers are probably a moot point.

1. It is fairly easy to figure out how much a DA shield can absorb based on crit heal sizes.
2. It is not at all easy to figure out how much damage absorption a DA shield has left in it when it expires. There is no single line event in the combat log that tells you, and you have to bring to bear a lot of data to figure it out. No mod does this, and I expect none ever will since it's a big pain. Hopefully Blizz will change their logs to tell us how much charge a shield has in it when it is put on and when it is removed. But right now, they don't.
3. I don't think looking at #2 above (i.e. how much of DA shield potential expires) is crucial. The vast majority of DA shields will be absorbed, and many of the ones that are not are at the end of combat, where heals typically don't matter much either (but are still counted as effective heals).

If you're worried about accounting, my advice is just to track how big the shields are and report that. I already have tried showing others data just like that and explained clearly that "shields might not be fully absorbed in some cases, depending on the fight". That is easy to do, and so far no one has complained. It's a big step up from the alternative, which is people having no idea at all.

Also, as originally reported in this thread, a decent estimator of DA absorption is:



This formula may be slightly high, but the error is probably less than 10%.

I'm not interested in doing it either, just it is plausible when meeting the above criteria. I actually hoped to dissuade people from doing it and head off the theoretical conversations by having numbers available for people to look at. You have to have ~3k more mana to get the same return from a rank 1 versus a max rank. It seems kinda silly, exploitative, and too analytical of your surroundings to make me want to make it work.

I can also confirm that the 3.0 version of rapture does work with rank 1 shields, and that the 26% base mana for down ranked shield is correct.