You also have to consider what you gain from dropping Divine Fury. Spell Warding, Improved Renew, Desperate Prayer (to name some possible candidates) are not very compelling talents either, so I'd rather keep Divine Fury for the occasional Greater Heal and Smite.

So in short there are three types of disc assignments :
- Tank-centric : shield tank, PoM tank, Penance on CD + GHeal/FHeal precast, this is more of a solo healer on tank raid assignment.
- Tank-reactive / raid-preventive : keep tank shielded (maybe renewed ymmv), PoM raid/tank appropriately, bubble spam on raid to keep BT up and smooth incoming raid dmg, keep Penance off cooldown to react to spike with hasted Penance + GHeal. This is ideal when paired on the tank with a druid or a FH-spamming paladin.
- Raid heal : while not as good as druids and holy priests, we can achieve some really good results if we manage to keep PoM on cd, spam shield before heavy raid damage, shield / hasted PoH during raid damage. The downside is that we are very dependant on good group positionning for the PoH portion.

Of those 3 different "typical" disc priest assignments, I consider number 2 - reactive healing on the tank(s) while bubblespamming and crosshealing the raid - to be the most effective on most encounters, by far. Having a disc priest smooth out the damage spikes on the tank and the raid, is our best contribution to most healing compositions. With "conventional" healing on the tank and raid, you'd need to dedicate vastly more raw healing power to prevent spike damage kills, but with a disc priest acting reactively on the tanks and the raid, you free up a good portion of that "extra" healing.

I see our role being more that of controlling the damage inputs and stabilising people so the other healers become more effective with what they do best - which is putting out the raw healing. It is my estimation that a good disc priest paired with effective raid healers can lower the amount of healers needed for most fights. This is why I actively pursue a more or less "carte blanche" healing assignment for myself. I'm well aware that my strong point is not raidhealing, and that I can more or less keep up with paladins on MT healing spam, but neither of those assignments make the best use of us. As of 3.1, with no cd on shields and targettable poh's, confining us to the "single target healer" stereotype of old, is just silly.

Hi, I've just completed a full Ulduar gear spreadsheet and I want to know if the current stat weights are still valid. Those weights that I know of are from The Doctor's original post in this thread. Please let let me know if these are still viable and if not, what the new stat weights are.... and I'm not so great at understanding equations so a boiled down version like the one I quoted would be most appreciated.
Thanks!

Hungtar, sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I do not consider Shield on the tank our only way to "smooth out the spikes". Our pre-emptive healing is very good indeed, but it is nothing compared to our reactive healing capabilities. I guess "smoothing out" is bad wording, as I don't actually mean consistently reducing the damage spikes, but rather that we're able to fill the tank back up again very fast.

BT'd Penance+flash or gheal is a lot of burst healing, and it is enough to make up for a healer that would otherwise have to spamheal the tank. For spells such as flame breath and fusion punch, you either have the option of running 2 healers full time on the tank, or one healer (preferably a pally imo) spamming him, with a disc priest ready to fill him up when needed. This of course also comes down to reaction times, but in my experience, there's usually well enough time to throw bubbles around and crossheal, and still jump in to save the tank when he takes a spike. I don't see other healers offering this capability (apart from when using their 3-minute cd's of course).

I never meant that you can use only sporadic raidhealing and a disc priest on the tanks alone - but our reactive healing is good enough to allow for less mindless spam on the tank. This also results in more effective healing from both the raid healers, (who will not have to single target heal as much to save people), as well as the MT healers, as you can now have, say 1 paladin bomb healing the MT, resulting in much less overhealing than if you used two healers dedicated on the tank.

If you are intent on using PW:S as pre-emptive measures for the so-called "i kill you" attacks, you can do so of course, but as you say, they often occur more frequently than 15s apart, and thus you won't be able to use them for all the attacks anyway. Since our very first sartharion kills, I haven't bothered much with coordinating the shields on tanks to his attacks for that precise reason, and I trust my own reactive healing + whichever healer is nuking the tank to cope with such attacks. Besides, not seeing the WS debuff on the tank all the time just makes my mousehand twitch erratically :>

TL;DR: Smoothing out the damage spikes on a tank is not limited to PW:S. Actually, shields is the least of it. Our burst healing is the key factor that allows a raid to save "those extra heals".

In that case, having enough crit to proc Divine Aegis off of every penance use is ideal. With enough crit, Penance has almost a guaranteed chance to crit with the 3 charges. So if PW:S won't do it, Divine Aegis will mitigate at least a small % of the damage. It might be enough to prevent the tank from dying.

I agree with this assessment of Disc synthesis. To me relegating a Disc priest to a standard "tank healer" role will limit the overall effectiveness of said priest in a 25 man environment. Honestly, Disc healing is insanely powerful in the hands of a player who possesses great healing instincts and understands the ebb and flow of particular boss fights. The ability to adapt to different healing demands is why I am so in love with Disc atm.

My personal healing habits in Ulduar literally change from boss to boss. Some fights my absorb hps outweighs my raw healing depending on the situation. On the whole, however, I have a few standard behaviors:

- Always keep a PW:S on yourself - besides the protection it is also 2% more mana for you when eaten
- Keep Weakened Soul and Renew on the MT for the extra healing benefit
- Cast PoM every CD on the MT - this keeps it bouncing in the melee and also will proc an extra DA shield on a crit
- Cast Penance on the MT at least every 15s - as Forces noted above, in a 25 you almost always see a crit somewhere in those 3 pulses, which means more DA shielding, but also a proc of Inspiration, and of course a triple Grace stack
- If you find yourself with nothing to do for a few seconds, cast a PW:S on a melee (ret pallies are a great choice), if for no other reason than to keep your BT buff up (and the T8 4pc bonus if you are lucky enough to have it!)

These things you can do every fight IMO no matter what your greater overall role is in the raid. With this behavior, and other healers tossing occasional HoTs/small heals to the MT, a single dedicated HL pally MT healer is typically enough. Again, it is all about awareness with Disc and being flexible enough to let your other healers shine in what they do best.

It depends what you mean by "valid", but the short answer is yes. There have not been any huge changes. All "boiled down" stat weights make several assumptions which are pretty much guaranteed to be untrue but hopefully end up with values which are close enough. I would say they are 95% likely to be within about 25% of the true value to you. If that is not good enough, then you will have to get into the details of how stat weights are derived.

Your math is right, but it looks like your conclusion is flawed. It's easier to see what is happening if you approach it from the front, the way the server would calculate the damage. The question we're trying to address is: which of the following three models is used to resolve a simultaneous resist, absorb, and damage reduction?

1. Damage*Reduction - Resist - Absorb
2. (Damage - Resist)*Reduction - Absorb
3. (Damage - Resist - Absorb)*Reduction
4. (Damage - Absorb)*Reduction - Resist (this makes no sense, but it's possible)

Normally the problem with doing this analysis forwards is that we don't know how much base damage an attack has, because most attacks have a range. Here, however, we are in business because we know that Razorscale's fireballs do exactly 7500 damage, every time. Plugging this in, along with the given numbers, shows that the correct model is 2 as you would expect. This actually agrees with your result; you computed that Damage = (FinalDamage + Absorb)/Reduction + Resist, which is just a rearrangement of model 2 and shows that the absorption is being applied AFTER the damage reduction. I think you then got confused and interpreted this result incorrectly, or something. I would be interested to see your data for testing other reduction and absorption effects, especially if they behave differently.

If the reported Absorbed number is decreased by Reduction from what was actually absorbed, your example indicates model 3, which as you say would be sort of unfortunate for Discipline priests. I see no reason for it to lie, but we can test it. Unfortunately it's relatively difficult to construct an absorption effect of a known value, but it is possible. Consider the following lines from a recent Heroic Ignis kill:

Zagral suffers 4516 Fire damage from nil Slag Pot. (1200 Resisted)
Mygrane Glyph of Power Word: Shield heals Zagral for 1292.
Zagral gains Power Word: Shield.
nil Slag Pot was absorbed by Zagral for a moment.
Zagral suffers 2852 Fire damage from nil Slag Pot. (600 Resisted) (2229 Absorbed)
Mygrane Prayer of Mending heals Zagral for 4962. (Critical)
Zagral gains Divine Aegis.
Zagral gains 1576 health from Cruellia Divine Storm.
Zagral suffers 2463 Fire damage from nil Slag Pot. (1800 Resisted) (1488 Absorbed)

I used myself because I know I don't have any other reduction effects from talents or resilience, and I'm not sure about other raiders. We'll take this line by line. The first one was the first tick of the slag pot, so I didn't have a shield up. It did exactly 6k base damage (it always does, every single time). 1200 resist means I took 4800 damage. This was reduced by 3% by Renewed Hope, which gives 4656. This confused me for a while until I realized that Blessing of Sanctuary now stacks (multiplicatively) with Renewed Hope, so this is reduced by another 3% for 4516.32, rounded down. So our current model for a resisted hit is (6000 - resist)*.97*.97. As far as why I had Blessing of Sanctuary, we had a lot of paladins in this raid, everyone got 3 blessings, and I'm not likely to want Wisdom, am I?

Next, Mygrane shields me for about 6200. It's relatively difficult to work out the actual value of the shield because I had a number of healing-increased effects such as Tree of Life aura and Improved Devotion Aura, which affect the heal from Glyph of PW:S. Unfortunately this entirely absorbed the next tick of the Slag Pot, so we can't use it to resolve our issue in any case. On the 2nd hit, I took 5400 after resist, *.97*.97 gives 5080.86, rounded up to 5081 which is exactly 2852+2229. This confirms the previous analysis from your example: either model 2 is correct, or model 3 is combined with some combat log shenanigans. Incidentally it almost certainly means that I got an 1800 resist on the tick we can't see.

This hit also procs Prayer of Mending, which crits giving me a Divine Aegis for 4962*.30 = 1488 or 1489 depending on rounding. (The rounding rules seem pretty random to me. I suspect this was actually 4961.5 rounded up, but the 30% is taken before rounding.) The Divine Storm doesn't affect this story (but thanks anyway, Cruellia). In the next hit, I'm affected by 4200 fire damage, reduced twice again for 3951.78, which rounds down to 2463+1488. As we can see, the DA is in fact absorbing for full value. I think this conclusively proves that the correct model is 2, not 3 with the combat log lying. I sincerely hope that the fact that Slag Pot is a DoT and Fireball isn't does not cause the combat log to start lying; that would make NO sense.

Good news for priests! You can trust your combat log, and Renewed Hope stacks with Blessing of Sanctuary. Previous testing indicated that BoS and old Grace did not stack, so I'm forced to assume it broke when Grace and RH were reimplemented.

I think missing from the crit vs. haste debate is the hidden regen cost of stacking haste. This especially comes into play when one calculates separate throughput and regen weightings and then takes a linear combination of them for a "combined weighting." The basic idea is that spellpower (SP) and crit rating increase throughput by increasing effective healing per cast, while haste increases throughput by allowing more casts per unit time thereby increasing mana consumption per unit time.

To illustrate this I will present a hypothetical untalented (0/0/0 build) priest who heals by spamming greater heal (GH). This analysis could be done considering talents and more realistic rotations (something I would like to undertake in the future), but for the sake of illustration, this should suffice. Starting stats are 2000 spellpower, 0 crit, 0 haste, and has a mana pool of 20k. We will also ignore spirit entirely.

This baseline priest will cast GH every 3 seconds, which hit for 4270 (base) + 3227 (from SP) = 7497 at 1263 mana/cast. This results in 2499 hps by spending 421 mana/sec.

If we add 100 SP, the throughput goes to 2552 and mana consumption stays the same.
If we add 100 crit (2.18%), the expected value of the heal goes to 7497 * (1 + .0218*.5) = 7579 resulting in 2526 hps with the same mana consumption.
If we add 100 haste rating (3.05%), the heal/cast remains at 7497 but the cast time goes to 2.91. This results in a throughput of 2575 (note that this is higher than SP only because we are untalented). However, over a period of time, more spells are cast (6 spells/10 mins), which works out to a loss of 10 mp5. Thus, for this build the weightings should be as follows.

Throughput:
1 SP = .53 hps
1 Crit = .27 hps
1 Haste = .76 hps

Longevity:
1 mp5 = 1 mp5
1 haste = -0.1 mp5

It is this negative longevity weight for haste that needs to be considered for both crit vs. haste and itemization discussions.

This might go better in the "Simple Q's/Simple A's" section, but I'm not sure if this is specific to the disc weighting calculation or not. I've just switched over from Rawr to the spreadsheet and I've been trying to work out the math required to get to the combined stats above (mainly because I don't plan to use a 60/40 split but I want to make sure that the split I *do* use is calculated correctly).

Here's the approach I took, (which didn't seem to work correctly). I'm hoping someone can find the flaws in my calcs.

First, I converted each set to be Int-based (since it's the only stat in common). I divided each value in each set by its value for Int. That gave me:

Thoughput stats...

• Intelligence - 1.0
• Spell Power - 6.25
• Crit Rating - 3.00
• Haste Rating - 3.69

Longevity stats...

• 1 Intelligence = 1.0
• 1 Spirit = 0.45
• 1 MP5 = 1.35

So now, I've got apples to apples, right? At this point, it seems like I could just multiply the weighting by the stats and combine them, right? IOW, for a 60/40 split, sp would work out to be: (60% * 6.25) + (40% * 0) = 3.75

This converts to:

• Intelligence - 1.0
• Spirit - 0.18
• Haste Rating - 2.21
• Crit Ratng - 1.80
• Spell Power - 3.75
• Mp5 - 0.54

Then, to make it SP-based, divide each one by SP:

• Intelligence - 0.26
• Spirit - 0.05
• Haste Rating - 0.59
• Crit Ratng - 0.48
• Spell Power - 1.0
• Mp5 - 0.14

Obviously, this doesn't work -- what am I doing wrong here?