I was not totally convinced about t8 -t9 changes, i know that T8 4p set bonus is awesome, but wearing a full set give also stats not only a set bonus, so i did a comparison between the "old" T8 and the T9 (lev 245 items) using wowhead (not hard to do ).

The result is here:

Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

Gains

99 Int
99 Sta
54 Spi
67 Armor
98 Crit rating
77 Spell Power

Loss

34 Haste rating


My point is that 99 stam 99 int and 77 sp gains worth trading the t8 bonus 4p.

Things obviously go better with hardmodes set (item lev 258):

Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

Gains

156 Int
156 Sta
108 Spi
131 Armor
131 Crit rating
167 Spell Power

Loss

13 Haste rating

For the type of fight where you would be getting high uptime from the 4t8 bonus (and are thus tempted to use it) i.e. one where 50%+ of your healing done is via PW:S + glyph, like Freya + 3, then of those stat increases only the intellect and spellpower are really notable, assuming that your stamina is sufficient - and even the intellect is debatable if you don't have mana problems.

Then the tradeoff really becomes 250 spellpower vs. 99int and 77sp (for i245 gear), which is less clearcut.

Further, it's not clear from your post, but obviously you only need 4 pieces of t8 for the set bonus so if you haven't done so already it's probably worthwhile identifying the weakest t8 slot, and eliminating the t8/t9 pieces for that slot from the comparison.

The tradeoff include also 99 stam (not only int and sp ) that mean enhancement of survival, that is not bad if you consider the huge incoming damage on you in some hardmodes.

I did a comaparision between 5p to have a complete vision, of course T9 4p may be need (or not) and there are a lot of drops i245 that can be used instead of set piece.

I have to admit that i'm not still convinced, before all i have to see the hardmodes in Coliseum 25, if the inc damage on me will be too high, then can worth the t9, otherwise i have to evaluate the t8.

Edit: Anyway with hardmodes i258 gear there is no doubt so go for it

The T9 2-piece bonus has no sex appeal. It's not that it isn't solid -- it certainly is -- but it doesn't have the excitement that the T8 4-piece bonus has. So people focus on the stat differences (fair enough!) while essentially assuming the bonus is irrelevant. Don't omit the bonus itself! It's very good, even though it's passive and doesn't jazz up our favorite spells.

Some calculations were recently done that put the bonus at approximately 170 spellpower for fights where PoM accounts for 20% of your healing (more than reasonable). See this post.

I just caught up on the GH vs FH discussion and my take on it is this:
I think GH is just too slow, even with DF and the occasional haste buff. With the penance change I often found myself in a very uncomfortable spot and had to PS or PI to make up for the fact that penance and pw:shield was on CD.
This is especially true in pvp.
To work around it I don't use penance quite that often - at the cost of mana efficiency.
In a typical fight I would sometimes use FH up to 6-10 times more often than penance (pw:shield on cd of course).

Should I waste a penance cd just for the sake of efficiency or should I just cast FH as long as HPS is not the issue?

I like my playstyle in terms of really thinking about when to toss out a penance but on the other hand spamming FH with an occasional shield and PoM doesn't feel that great.
To make up for the hpm decrease, I heavily gem for Int. It has worked out pretty well and I rarely found my hps lacking.

I thought about that question too, if i should gem HASTE or get along with INT in the future. I came to the point, that haste is more efficiency.

My gear is almost BiS and i dont have any manaproblems at all with unbuffed haste"cap" (i say cap, cause my greater heal goes in 2sec now unbuffed - 18% without Enlightment in Charscreen/24% unbuffed with Enlightment).
I am almost every time tankhealer (except Twins or Freya3Adds) and it works fine. I like the way to play with Greaterheal much more than the playstyle with Flashheals. I hate the feeling to get 4.5k Flashs on my Tank, who gets immens more damage then i could outheal with FH+Penance+Pw:S. Now i can greater almost all the time, in addition to my penance/Pw:S ofcourse or flash if i have to move.

For example Algalon25: I heal our tanks with a shaman and a paladin on my side and its realy easier to know, that i CAN heal the damagespikes if my mates got to move (cause of blackhole explosion or cosmic smash) without any thoughts about the pre-Shield to get borrowed time up.

Last Algalon i used 1 manapot, my fiend and got tide after 2nd bigbang and left the fight with almost 20% mana left. The efficience of my heals jumped up to rarely 150% of what i healed before (in comparison to the last fights, with same healmates and Int-gemming)

In Addition i can reg much more then before, cause i can afford to heal with more precision and often gain more time to idle in 5second rule.

Having haste is definitely a good point because of paladin's illumination nerf, so you have to be able to throw some big heals once in a while, but still I'll never spam GH, that's not our spell

I absolutely love haste, trying to get a 1-ish second flash heal raid buffed, getting close, and the throughput (heal+mit) you get just for a normal disc sequence (FH/pom/pennance along with your PWS and hasted GH) is just fantastic, close and sometime higher than holy paladin's

We have too many advantages using flash heal not to do it, (improved flash heal kicks asses, along with the FH glyph, that's nearly a free spell and a lot of healing and mitigation), I didn't really look at the numbers, but I still think FH hps is higher than GH, and whenever you need big raw healing, you always have the option to power infuse yourself and cast some nasty 1.5 greaters, well anyway maybe there's just many good different playstyles, isn't that why we love it ?

Think of you holy friends, empowered renew ... ^^

Look at it from the bright side, since the 4 piece set bonus is worthless we can just fill it out with the normal 258 pieces. Since the tokens for ilvl 258 set pieces only drop from the tribute chest, they are going to be exceedingly rare. Well, possibly they could drop from Anub too i guess, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Wait what? I was under the impression that all 25-man hard mode bosses dropped one or more of the i258 tier tokens. It doesn't make sense to restrict the i258 tier so drastically.

In regard to the 4set bonus, it's so weak that I am half convinced it's a bug. Divine Aegis and Empowered Renew already account for such small amounts of my total healing done (~5% being typical, ~10% max if the fight mechanics are favourable) that a 3%/1.5% increase is laughable (especially compared to the 2-set).

Your impression is wrong. NRB Heroic drops i245 tier item.

Yeah heroic set tokens drop from the tribute chest, the more attempts you used the less token there are

About GH/FH I just did the math, tried it just self buff and found the hps was roughly the same (70 hps difference in favor of greater heal, might increase with the raid buffs as gh scales better with the bonus haste

Totally not worth the 30% mana cost increase, I'll stick to my cycle, by the way, must have been blind but I never realised that when you shield and gain borrowed time, you can cast a hasted pennance and the following spell will be hasted too, like pennance doesn't remove it, nice place to add a GH

First of all, who says Greater Heal is "not our spell"? Priests have the biggest toolbox of all the healers, there is no reason to throw one of those tools away.

Secondly, a 1 second or close to 1 second Flash Heal? A 1 second Flash Heal requires an equivalent of 1640 haste rating. Sure some of that is reduced by raid buffs and Enlightenment, but a 1 second GCD is not realistic right now unless you count BT haste. Also, the single target throughput a Discipline Priest can put out is certainly not higher than a Holy Paladin, it's not even close. Holy Light is a good 9k-10k HPS, even ignoring Beacon and the glyph heals. Penance rivals that in HPS, but of course it has a 12 second CD. None of our other spells (excluding PWS, which also suffers from an effective CD) are even close to that.

Improved Flash Heal is definitely a nice talent, I wont argue with that. But that talent + the glyph certainly does not make it "nearly a free spell," it is still 521 mana. You mention healing and mitigation, what you are getting at is effective HPS (healing and shielding included). And like Elimbras just posted, Flash Heal is significantly lower HPS than Greater Heal when Divine Fury is included - more than 1000 HPS lower. If you also have Improved Healing, Flash Heal is also lower HPM (although it is very close). See the math below.

I agree that in many cases the most imporant factor is personal style, including the makeup and personal styles of the other healers in your raid. Most of the time it doesn't really matter whether you prefer Flash Heal or Greater Heal, either one will get the job done. But if anyone is of the opinion that Greater Heal is no longer viable, I think they are mistaken and have thrown away a valuable tool.





At 2800 SP, 30% crit and 25% haste, assuming 5/5 Divine Fury and 3/3 Improved Healing:

Flash Heal
(2040 + .81(2800))*1.04*1.09 = 4884
4884*.7 + 4884*.3*1.95 = 6276 average healing including criticals
6276/521mana = 12.0 HPM
6276/1.20seconds = 5230 HPS

Greater Heal
(4270 + 1.61(2800))*1.04*1.09 = 9951
9951*.7 + 9951*.3*1.95 = 12787
12787/1050mana = 12.2 HPM
12787/2.00seconds = 6394 HPS

Holy Light (with 50% crit and [Glyph of Seal of Wisdom])
(5166 + 1.66(2800))*1.05*1.12 = 11541
11541*0.5 + 11541*1.5*0.5 = 14427
14427/1210 mana = 11.9 HPM - before Illumination
14427/1.5 = 9618 HPS

We're probably playing different games. I am having around 350 haste from gear and my FH is about 1.21, so not really far from destination point.

No one ever argued that DP can replace HP, its just it brings synergy to MT healing, coupled with paladin.

Its sort of "out-of-nowhere" calculations based on idealistic environment where everything works for you.


I can't even remotely understand how could you get 1.2s FH cast-time with 25% haste (which is solely horrible to have as a discipline priest, combined with horribly low crit-rating).

Not looking on this heresy, you can safely overlook the talents and see that FH is also getting buffed from Grace and gets additional crit from improved FH.
Bonuses of FH/Penance healing tactic is that you're constantly producing high HPS and keeping the aegis uptime on tank. With long casts of GH you will not only be getting oom quite fast, you will also have lesser overall efficency due to high cast time and higher overhealing.

Well you gain 11% haste with talents and raid buffs, having 14% on your stuff is nothing exotic, especially if you use roughly the same stuff when you spec holy and there's plenty of gear with haste and crit around, I have around 500 haste and a 1.14 flash heal, planning to get lower if I can get my hands on good items but I won't sacrifice my life for it

What I meant, by "not our spell" is that it shouldn't be our main heal, not that we shouldn't use it, it is a great tool, just not as versatile to me as flash heal, and that's only my feeling, i have no numbers to throw around

What I do know is that your calculations must be wrong somewhere, and again that's a feeling, but on algalon 25 kills (which is the only fight I play as a pure MT healer) I've never seen paladins way above me like you're saying, shields are fantastic that way, they never overheal and val'anyr helps a lot too, but you need a world of logs kind of tool to see it for yourself

Far from the destination point? 1.21 seconds might as well be miles away from the destination point. When we are talking about changes to the GCD, 0.21 seconds is an eternity.


Au contraire, this is exactly what the poster I was quoting argued, that a Discipline Priest has the HPS of a Holy Paladin. I agree with you that it does not and instead brings a sort of complementary role.


Would you like to supply a "out-of-somewhere" calculation to refute mine? I don't profess to be an expert on Holy Paladin theorycrafting but I certainly take offense at the accusation that my calculations are not based in reality. If anything, the HPS of Holy Light is really much, much higher. The Holy Paladin that I raid with has a Holy Light cast time closer to 1.2 seconds than to 1.5 seconds.




A 1.2 second FH with 25% haste is not even remotely understandable? The haste calculation (for those not familiar) is as follows:

(1.5 seconds)/(1.25 haste) = 1.20 seconds, exactly.

Now I won't argue with you that a well geared Discipline Priest will be somewhere above 25% haste and 30% crit when fully raid buffed, but changing the crit and haste percentages to anything you would like will still result in the same outcome - Flash Heal is inferior in both HPS and HPM when compared to Greater Heal.

As to the fact that Flash Heal benefits from Grace, I have no response but - no shit? The 0.09 modifier is included in my calculations. Do not forget that Grace also modifies Greater Heal, not just Flash Heal. It is essentially a wash.

The crit from Improved Flash Heal? I will be generous and say how about fully 50% of your Flash Heals are on targets below 50% and therefore benefit from the improved crit chance. This results in a HPS benefit of 190 with the numbers I supplied, still nowhere near the 1164 HPS deficit of Flash Heal compared to Greater Heal. And lets be honest, nowhere near half of one's Flash Heals are on targets below 50%.

You cite "constantly producing high HPS" as a benefit to a Flash Heal + Penance rotation as opposed to using Greater Heal. What part of my math leads you to believe Flash Heal + Penance is higher HPS than Greater Heal + Penance? The opposite is in fact true - Greater Heal is much higher HPS than Flash Heal.

You also mention "Aegis uptime." This is a common misconception on these boards - that somehow simply having a DA shield present is the only important fact and the size of that DA shield is irrelevant. This idea is absurd. Yes, Flash Heal will provide more opportunites to proc a DA shield than Greater Heal, but the size of the DA shield is also important. The key idea behind DA shields is the average DA shield procced per second, which just so happens to be directly proportional to the HPS of the healing that is responsible for proccing that DA shield. Let me remind you that Greater Heal is higher HPS than Flash Heal and therefore leads to a higher DA shielding per second.

You claim that the "long casts of GH" will cause one to run out of mana faster than using Flash Heal. This is simply not true - Greater Heal has a similar if not better HPM than Flash Heal. Your claim that Greater Heal has "lesser overall efficiency due to high cast time and higher overhealing" is likewise absurd, although more difficult to prove. In the past it has been argued that a heal which heals for a million HP for very little mana but has a 10 second cast time is worthless compared to Flash Heal is true. There is definitely a point at which a cast time simply becomes too long to be useful. But 2 seconds is not that cutoff. If using a spell with a 2 second cast time is so extremely difficult that one gets massive overhealing, then maybe one should practice a little bit more.

So, has anyone else tested the 4-pc T9 bonus? I really don't want to believe that the proc is that bad.

Scroll up the page a bit. Discipline Healing Compendium v3.1

If you want confirmation, I've tested it as well and it's indeed the worthless 3% extra divine aegis and 1.5% to empowered renew.

Anyone ELSE. I wanted to see if a second person had tested it.

Thanks, this is what I wanted. Not what I wanted to hear, though.

Haste isn't as bad as you think and Crit isn't as good as you think. If you only use BT'd FH then you have a much lower amount of haste before you are limited on what haste to have prior to BT without reducing casts below the GCD. However, if you use BT to cast GH/PoH then you can stack much more haste effectively. I am always keeping the melee in the group with my tank healed, as well as hitting multiple tanks through a good use of PoH.

Going OOM with the use of GH will only happen if you fully replace FH. GH is better HPS and provides the same DA shields over the period. GH is far superior when used in conjunction with BT, mana supporting. The only risk with GH is that your heals will be spaced too far apart., which isn't a problem for every encounter.

Your stats are incredibly unrealistic. Geared enough to be at 2800 spellpower, but only 30% crit? I'm only at 2500 spellpower (2700 with innerfire) and I have 31% crit and 16% haste unbuffed. Raid buffed I'm sitting at ~50% crit and ~20% haste (and I'm nowhere near BIS gear either- looking to up my haste atm).

Penance may have a cd, but that's only because it'd be too overpowered without one. No priest only spams GH and FH, it's a combo of penance/pws/fh/gh or more of those. Paladins don't only spam Holy Light either, they use a combination of HL/FOL/SS/Judgement. Your argument only looks at a single spammable spell, which is flawed. When you take into account their "rotation", the single target hps of both classes is roughly equal.

Also the GH vs FH argument is very talent dependant. For example, with the huge amounts of raid-wide damage, I consider spell warding a must have, which I've taken instead of Divine Fury (and without DF, GH is not only not worth casting at all, but FH > GH in terms of HPM/HPS).

But imo Improved healing is definitely not worth taking despite the mana saved through it. Disc has such incredibly powerful regen that when I'm only tank healing, it feels like I'm gaining more mana than I'm spending. Even when I'm helping with raid healing (PWS spamming and random POH), I drop below 50% mana once in a blue moon.