I have been reading this thread for some time now but just registered yesterday...I have just recently began Uld 10 with some friends and we have tried 3 healing it and have downed Kologarn, Razorscale, XT, and the vehicle boss. We are still practicing and our random pugs we bring in dont really have a clue so we have had some bad luck...

Anyways, we tried to 2 heal it like we do for most 10 mans. Myself as a Disc priest and my best friend as his Resto Sham. Both of us are geared very well. There are times where I find myself having too much mana but lacking to catch up on heals for a group if that makes sense. XT for example on his tantrum. I suppose I just never thought about pre-shielding the raid on a 10 man...

My stats seem unbalanced though and it seems to hurt my throughput. I have a huge mana pool, but I dont gem for int. I have 30pct crit unbuffed now but I gem for crit to hit that mark. However, after a few upgrades from naxx 25 last night I went down to 1830ish spell and had 32pct crit. I then regemed for 19sp gems and replaced some crit gems to get 1860. I am still lacking main hand and off hand because nothing has dropped for me and that would help with me throughput greatly.

With a main target with weakened on them I have 40pct crit chance with penance. That is more than enough imo...I just feel that my spell is very low and aside from getting torch/astral + my accursed spine i don't really know how to fix it.

Uld 10 is going to be hard 2 healing it =/

In my experience, disc has been amazing for two-healer operations in most of Ulduar. The only time we find ourselves dropping to three are circumstantial -- Mimiron hard in some configurations and Freya hard just because we have no compelling reason not to.

The thing with discipline is that you have to work really closely with your other healer. Admittedly I haven't done this with a resto shaman, only holy priest and resto druid, but I imagine the concept is still more or less the same. In any "serious" tank healing fight I focus almost solely on the tank, and "raid heal" with pws exclusively. If I have a spare gcd somewhere I'll sometimes use a spare penance to pull someone low up real fast, or a hasted poh.

It really seems to boil down to confidence -- you have the time to shield other people, but you don't have the time to actually _heal_ them. That's the other healer's job. The other healer needs to realize this and not assume that anybody's health, except for the tanks, is ever going to go up outside of their own efforts. In the meantime, you're buying enough time for the other healer to do their thing.

Also, pre-shielding is very important and useful on a number of fights. On Hodir, where poh is surely better throughput, you're probably going to be more worried (especially in early Ulduar runs) about simply keeping the tank alive in the onslaught. Therefore its imperative that you keep an eye on the timers and try to get a shield up on everybody before frozen blows even begins. Same with Ignis. Freya and Mimiron also have enough random raid damage going around that simply throwing a shield on _somebody_ with a spare gcd will almost always result in a good absorb rate.

Just have to be pro-active, and coordinate well with your second healer.

Uh, that said... if the second healer is ever a paladin... yeah not sure there.

Anecdotally, I can say that Discipline/Holy pala works very well for 2healing Ulduar 10.

The main strength of discipline is, as you noted, the ability to significantly increase the amount of time someone can survive with no heals if needed. This gives the paladin ample time to make with FoL spam on the raid, and Beacon of Light effectively means that the healing throughput on the tank remains bearable (ie, shield and penance is enough much of the time).

The only times that you will really want aoe heals are mimiron phase 2 (which *can* be done with shield spam and the occasional PoH) and possibly Hodir.

Conversely, Disc+HolyPal really shines as a combination on Council hard, Thorim hard and Vezax (I'm presuming Vezax hard mode is too, but I've never tried)

Anurok, your gear is not a million miles behind mine (Justian, Al'Akir EU) and the main difference between us is that you've gemmed Crit rather than Int. I find that for the spells I cast (40%+ PW:S) that crit isn't all that valuable, whereas int gives enormous returns from replenishment, shadowfiend and hymn of hope.

As a rule, if you've got excess mana and feel short on throughput, you probably should have started shielding 10 seconds ago. If you're still feeling short on throughput, drop power Infusion on yourself and alternate PoH and PW:S.

Thanks much for the advice. My shaman friend and I are fairly confident in each other and what we can do. Sometimes we get frustrated when relying on another healer because then we get lazy when there are three of us heh. I am sure we can work it out...maybe with our ret pally judging light.

As far as my gemming goes...I guess I am thinking like I was pre 3.1 where 30pct crit was key simply because of how rapture worked back then and how critting Penance and your flash heals DID increase your throughput. Have Penance crit every single time on each volley gives it a huge boost. However, during a raid my crit chance on my tank target has a 40pct chance from penance, which is imo 5-10pct too much. I did gem for crit to hit that 30 mark but stupidly did not take some talents, boomkin/elemental shaman auras into consideration. I raid 10 mans almost exclusively and have geared for it.

I also never gemmed for Int because I NEVER find myself starving for mana. I seem to manage my mana fairly well with shadowfiend. It returns about 60-70pct of my mana pool during battle while keeping his special attack on cool down and only using instant casts to heal to keep me out of the 5SR. With Hymm of Hope and Crazy Alchemist potions...20k mana is plenty for me.

I think that gemming more so for spell power and straight through put will indeed help me with "raid healing" through shields. I never quite considered how much shield spam is a part of my raid healing. Maybe I will drop down to 25pct crit unbuffed and gem yellows with Int from now on or straight 19sp...

This is going to get interesting. Now to get a freaking main hand...15KT kills and counting.

I was wondering how the RecountGuessedAbsorb addon or the WoW-logs count absorbtion from DA.
I mean DA can stack up to a certain amount, but it can be stacked from multiple Disc Priests.
So how does it know which priest to count the amount of absorbtion for? Divide among them? First priest to proc the DA? Last priest to stack up the DA?

Also when both DA and PW:S are up, which one is absorbing damage first?

The Disc Priest Spreadsheet on the first page seems to be gone off filefront -- is there another source for it?

Penance cooldown has been increased by 2 seconds, up from 10 seconds to 12, on the 3.2 PTR.

Which puts the cooldown about where it was in 3.0, but this time we lose a glyph slot to get there.

I guess we should have been happy with that stupid Penance glyph change they tried to make in 3.1. It would have been better than what we're getting in 3.2, at least.

Well, if that penance change goes live I suspect that GH will be getting more of a workout when tank healing as flash heal really doesn't have the hitting power that GH does. In my gear I would say that GH heals for about 1000 more in 1/2 a second less compared to casting 2 flash heals. I strongly suspect that this is related to the PVP situation of penance being self healing. Lobbying on the general forums for a change to the glyph to remove the self heal part but leave the penance cooldown where it is may be required.

The reduction on the PoH co-efficient seems like a reasonable solution to the fact that compared to chain heal it is probably rather to good at the moment.

Looks like this should be a substantial buff. Is the only thing this stacks with the shaman ability?

Damn the penance nerf sucks

It's not a "substantial buff", it's a minor buff that fixes scaling issues.

Currently, on a DK or a Druid, properly geared, Inspiration is worth about ~ 9% reduced damage taken. Physical.

This buffs it up to 10% across the board (regardless of your AC, which is nice for tanks with slightly lower AC). Pretty minor overall change, but nice that it starts ignoring AC, which means that tanks can continue stacking it without capping out in a raid setting.

My most common tank has about 28k armor. This gives 62.7% damage reduction, meaning he takes 37.3% of the damage done.

With +25% armor he would have 35k armor. This would give 67.8% damage reduction, meaning he takes 32.3% of the damage done.

32.3/37.3 = 86.6%. That means that inspiration is currently about a 13.4% damage reduction to physical attacks. This change is a nerf, not a buff.

I have a question about this statement:
Insightful Earthsiege Diamond - The highest regen meta available until extreme levels of Int. A 45-second ICD proc that restores 600 mana and 21 intellect.

Exactly what would be considered an extreme level of Int.? Right now I am a tiny bit over 21k mana unbuffed and I am using this meta.

I also do a 10 man Ulduar each with with a Holy Paladin (I'm disc). I think it's a great combo, although maybe if I was holy it would be even better. We can 2 heal everything in the zone on easy mode and the only hard modes we need a third healer for (or haven't killed yet) are Mimiron, General and Yogg. For the most part the paladin handles the MT and I handle the raid/OT/whatever with the paladin helping out when he can. We both gem mostly for int but we rarely have mana problems so I'm thinking about switching to spell power gems.

The math will be skewed now with the changes to Replenishment coming in 3.2, but I believe that this comment is referring to a comparison to the [Ember Skyflare Diamond]. The 2% int bonus matches the IED int bonus at 1050 int. So then the question becomes how much int does it take to equal 600 mana/45 sec (67MP5). Sticking with the compendium math, 1 int = 0.1045 mp5, so it takes 67/0.1045 == 622 int to match the IED proc.

So, if you consider regen alone, you'd need 1050 + 622 == 1672 int for the ESD to match the regen value of the IED.

Err, you've missed some rather important things here.

First; Int is far more than 0.1045 mp5. I'm guessing you've taken one of the figures from the OP, but forgotten all the other ways Int buffs regen. A better figure (assuming a 6 minute fight) is taken from the general healing compendium:

Intellect: 0.817 Mp5 per point

Thus, 67 mp5 ~= 82 Intellect.

ESD only grants 2% of total intellect, not 100%. In order for that 2% bonus to equal 82 Intellect you need 4100, +1050 for the base intellect bonus of IED.

ESD regen = IED regen when you have 5150 Intellect. Yeah, that ain't gonna happen. The only reason you should ever consider using ESD is if you have some massively skewed throughput / regen ratio, in which case you'd probably be better to use the +crit meta.

// Edit: With the Replenishment changes in 3.2, this figure will rise slightly. Probably about a 5% increase or so; I haven't done the exact figures.

GC commented on the Penance nurf:

I personally think he hasn't quite grasped why most disc priests are unimpressed but I'll leave it to the denizens of the WOW forums to flame him. Given that they seem dead set on this should we be abusing the hell out of Borrowed time to drop GH on the tanks and would this make the cost reduction for GH viable as a talent spec? From non hard mode fights it seems that there should be enough time to be using raid shields to keep BT up as a reactive heal, 9k heals with a 1.6 sec cast time allow for far more reactive healing. Is this still viable in hard modes or does the "Boss hitting like a runaway train loaded with lead" factor lead to non-stop tank spamming a-la Brutallus healing?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that 10% damage reduction is additive with current armor damage reduction, so instead of their current reduc which is 62.7%, they'd have 72.7% with inspiration up.

As of right now, they have 67.8% with inspiration, so that's a 5.1% flat damage reduction increase. If I'm correct, this is a pretty significant buff for that tank.

No, unfortunately not. Damage mitigation from different sources never stacks; it always multiplies. Otherwise you could hit 100% DR with a trivial number of buffs.

The reasoning behind the Penance nerf is really silly. He's arguing that we were using these three abilities but he ignores the fact that all three abilities have a cooldown(technically if you are single target healing PW:S has a 15s cooldown). Discipline is so badly designed that it's better to spam PW:S on the raid than actually tank heal. FH and GH are either slow or not strong enough. Penance was our only ability on par with HL and I'm afraid our throughput was enough just because we were usually tank healing with a Paladin. With paladin longevity nerfed and possibly HL spam reaching an end I don't know how it's gonna be. Personally since when I'm Discipline I tank heal I rarely ever cast FL and replaced all FHs with GHs because FH's throughput just doesn't cut it. I'm considering regemming full Intellect so I can spam GH with breaks for Penance, ProM and PW:S without mana problems as FH while it is efficient it's just isn't enough when bosses hit for 15-20k at the same time you cast a FH.

I'm fine with Penance nerf as long as they fix the throughput of FH or GH since even if DA helps with our throughput it's not reliable at all.

It is my understanding that damage reduction is on unmitigated (by armor) damage. Based on that assumption, it looks like the difference would be something along these lines.

25k armor:
10k hit reduced by 6005 based on armor
10k hit reduced by 6526 with current inspiration
10k hit reduced by 6404 with new inspiration

Looks like a mild nerf to me, but has the advantage of being of some use to tanks that have a risk of being armor capped.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying about the int buff portion of the metas.

ESD grants a 2% int buff. IED grants a fixed 21 point int buff. In order for the int buff portion of the metas to be equal, you need to have 1050 int.

IED: 1050 + 21 = 1071 int
ESD: 1050 * 1.02 = 1071 int

You're correct about where I got the regen value. If you don't agree with it, that's fine -- basically you can plug in whatever regen value fits your situation (given replenishment/innervate uptime, 3.2 changes, shadowfiend effectiveness) and do the math.

The point is that the proc on the IED is worth a giant chunk of regen that you lose if you go with the ESD. To balance the two, you would need ~ 5k intellect. This will never happen, so IED is best unless you absolutely can't spend your mana.