Has anyone taken a look at the 4 piece tier bonus for healing? It grants 250 Spellpower for 5 seconds after casting power word shield. With no cool down on our shields it seems Disc can almost keep this buff up forever.

Just wondering if from what others have seen so far is if the tier pieces are viable for Disc specs now. I know that the tier 7.5 pieces were largely ignored by disc players in favor of better non tier pieces.

It is indeed calculated at the time the heal lands. There's some gray area in the calculations of "what hits first" in terms of things like this triggering and exact health percentages, but the point of talents like this is that if when your heal lands and someone IS low, it'll be a bigger heal. It won't help you win the healing meter, but it'll help you land the heals that count.

On the larger topic, I'm still more of a believer in stacking mostly crit for a disc build. With PWS+Borrowed time, a pretty good chunk of your cast time heals should be done with huge haste already -- so much so that it seems to me that sacrificing divine aegis and inspiration uptime for it seems like a bad option.

25% additional armor is a lot for a tank in these hard hitting Ulduar fights, and being able to throw a Penance and have ( 1 - (chance to not crit 3 times in a row) ) = ( 1 - (.65 * .65 * .65) ) = 72% chance or so of proccing inspiration off of one penance is really the most significant buff the preist is bringing to the tank healing arena. Adding some Shields and Divine Aegis absorbs into the mix, and you get an idea of how the priest can leave the "healing meter" healing to the Holy Light turrets.

The way that I see the new disc fitting into the tank healing game is sort of like the way resto druids were for "additional help" on tank healing through most of the Burning Crusade. You still have plenty of time to help shield, spot heal, and do some group healing when needed even, while still helping out on one or all of the tanks -- a great way to heal 2 tanks through a lot of damage right now is to put a holy paladin on each beaconing the other tank, and a disc priest shielding, catching low health situations with shields and penance, bouncing prayer of mending between the two tanks, and keeping inspiration up on both tanks.

As a longtime healer, I'm pretty excited to be playing what feels like a really... different and unique healing play style, and it's fun to experiment with something that isn't so well refined and isn't so obvious how to utilize is pretty fun.