I agree that one should mostly gear to either longevity or throughput, rather than trying to come up with some combined metric. So why then offer a 60/40 throughput to logevity weight? That will imply (implicitly) that one should weigh thoughput more than longevity, which may be bad advice, especially at first. The general dogma is that for progression content, healers gear for longevity first then worry about throughput later. DPS is lower (relative to content), so longevity is more relevant. Unless there is in fundamental change in 3.1 content, that will almost certainly continue to be true.

Also, while it's fair enough to say that longevity beyond a certain point is not needed, throughput beyond that needed to heal spikes of incoming damage is also unnecessary. Of course having some margin for error on both fronts is good, but the itemization of healing gear is such that it requires no effort whatsoever to have enough throughput.

Fortunately. gearing for discipline is really quite easy. Spell power and intellect are very valuable but you don't have a lot of control over either, except when gemming or enchanting. Those two stats come on all cloth healer gear in about the same amounts on the same ilvl gear. You can optimize away if you like, but if you don't bother doing anything, you won't be far off. You can read long threads here on crit versus haste, which just proves it is a tough call and doesn't make a huge difference or else it wouldn't be controversial. Plus, unlike holy priests, disc priests do not value spirit much more than mp5, so that choice becomes non-issue as well. To me this is an advantage for discipline priests. If healer gear (i.e. no +hit cloth gear) drops, it's probably pretty good for you. That's pretty nice.

The debate is more about gemming. I like using orange, purple, and green gems since it makes fulfilling metagem requirements easy, and I only pick spell power, int, and either spirit or mp5 in some combination with each other. That's pretty simple and doesn't go far wrong. Others may like to add crit or haste, and that's reasonable if you're throughput starved, but intellect is better than either of those stats otherwise.


Regarding the haste "soft cap", with enlightenment and borrowed time, you reach the 1.0 second global cooldown cap with just another +13.2% haste, which is quite possible to reach.

I don't understand what you're talking about, to be honest. When PI'ing somebody we don't gain any SP. When we PI ourselves while spamming shields we don't gain anything but 20% less mana cost, as most discs are at the haste cap when Borrowed Time is up.
So taking it yourself while shielding is a bad thing to do.
Next: You don't need to Penance the target you put a PW:S on. So shielding someone that's probably going to take damage soon, then healing someone with BT up with Penance who needs the heal is a nice combo.
When talking about single-target healing, shielding makes sense still because we don't lose the BT buff after casting Penance (BT is only consumed by casts that are not instant and Penance is), so could cast another _very_ fast heal afterwards if needed. Penance on someone at full health after shielding him only makes sense if it's the MT/a tank to prevent Grace from falling off or to stack up DA (also works on overheal since 3.1 and stacks up to 10k), in my opinion.

PS is a lot more powerful than PW:S. AND you can put up both on the same target, since a shield might not be enough. It's an emergency button and never a wasted talent point. Whether you use it on yourself or on someone else is completely dependent on the situation.

Renew is nothing a disc priest would ever use unless he's forced to move and everyone taking damage has a Shield. We almost cannot talent it (besides Twin Disciplines), neither do we need to.
Most healers (non-holy priests/resto druids) don't track hots in their unitframes or just ignore them to make sure the person lives. It cannot proc DAs. The whole spell just doesn't fit into our toolbox, again, in my opinion.

Hope that makes things a little clearer little to you.

Edit: I haven't checked lately, does Penance still benefit from BT or is that fixed? If so, ignore the one line in the post up there.

First, Disc doesn't have the sustained healing power of a Holy Pally. Yes, factored in mitigation. Over a sustained period of time (i.e. longer than a few second ability), Holy Pallies are many thousand HPS ahead of Disc's combined HPS/Mitigation.

However, disc is much better at mitigating raid damage than a holy pally ever could be. Yes, I frequently use PoH (hasted) as disc. Yes, I bubble people who need a heal quick, and that bubble saves lives. My bubble absorbs about 7k damage, and heals the target as well. Instantly. That's almost as good as a Nature's Swiftness into Healing Touch, and I didn't blow any cooldowns to do it.

Given these two facts, why would you cripple a class by asking it to perform a role that another class performs better? It's like asking an elemental shaman to kite some adds when you have a hunter in the raid.

Disc healing is somewhat bursty, and overall lower than a holy pally's. On the other hand, with the removal of IoL haste, a holy pally has limited burst healing capacity to handle big hits.

Why WOULDN'T you assign a holy pally to healing the tank, and let the disc priest do his thing? And why WOULDN'T the disc priest's thing be to supplement raid healing by mitigating incoming predictable damage bursts, saving people who are near death with fast bursts of healing, and supplementing tank healing with fast bursts of healing as required (that outheal a Holy pally, for a few seconds (Shield>Penance>G. Heal is far higher HPS than a pally)?

Saying you ain't a tank healer and you ain't a raid healer is silly. You're a 'keeping people alive' healer. Be the people tanks, DPS, or other healers.

Finally, if I PW:S someone who took a huge hit, then they don't take another hit for 30 seconds, I don't consider the shield wasted compared to a flash heal on them. Why? Imagine that you could guarantee, 100% that a person wouldn't be hit for 30 seconds. Would you heal them in a raid? Probably not. At some point a Chain Heal jump, WG heal, CoH heal, splash from Holy Light, or something else is going to bring them up to full without particularly impacting anything else. Yet I'd bet dollars to donuts that at that when someone takes an 11k hit, there's healers in your raid immediately dumping heals on him. And you'd consider this a good thing.

Given all of this, why, why, why would you shackle the disc priest to the tank when their best role is to keep people alive? It's a weird niche, but Disc priests have, bar none, the best ability of any healer in the entire game to keep people alive in "OH @#$!" situations. Remember, even if they're bubbling the raid, the GCD on bubble is 1 second. So they're never, ever, ever more than 1 second away from dropping a shield then a penance then a nice big heal on the tank. Ever. Mostly you're about half a second away.


P.S. Blizzard might nerf bubble in the future. Or they might give disc priests power word barrier. Or they might remove the cooldown on penance. Or they might make shields scale with crit instead of pure spellpower (which is something I consider necessary, moving forward, but that's an aside). They might make Grace a buff that makes Disc equal holy pallies and then nerf the bubble spam down. They could do absolutely anything. They might not like Disc's role at all, they might change them to fit their vision for the class. I don't particularly care. I'm playing the game they made, not the game that they might make in the future at some point.

I think I see what you're saying. You're right in that I have never seen the tank healing capacities of Disc in full force because we run with at least one holy pally at all times. In addition, our holy pallies are very good players.

I'm merely proposing an alternate role for disc that it is quite strong in. I've never seen disc's full tank healing capacity in action because we were on Mimiron before our server discovered the Penance Glyph. We'll see in the coming months how it evolves, but I've seen first hand what disc can do in a raid healing role, and it's quite, quite strong - and compliments holy pallies exceptionally well. Since I think most guilds will be running with a holy pally, I suggest strongly that disc priests master that role as well as tank healing.

What I disagree with is that disc is not a new type of healer. Until Discipline, the only proactive healing you could do was HoTs and Prayer of Mending (okay, and SS, but they nerfed that). Everyone remembers HoT casting before vortexes, etc. What disc can do there is provide healing for events that haven't occured yet.

Until Discipline, the longest you had to think ahead was the cast time of your longest heal, so you could be casting before the damage lands. With discipline you can plan for events that are 20 seconds away. Moreover, the class plays suboptimally if you're NOT planning for events 20 seconds in the future. I'm finding it very different from Holy Priest, where my 'preparation' was all mental (developing a plan for the event). With discipline, I need to slot the shield spam into my cast order without endangering the tank.

Perhaps this is not new, perhaps if I played druids enough I would have a better grip on how to do this. Certainly their HoTs seem to fill a similar (though not identical) purpose. But it is very new for any priest.

In conclusion, I'd just like to say that I think the roles of tank/raid healer is mostly dead. At the moment I see one 'pure' tank healer (although pallies can be pretty effective on Raid, they're not really optimized for it) and one 'pure' raid healer (though I think Serendipity was theoretically supposed to give Holy Priests something, but it failed rather spectacularly, even with the bug). Shaman can lay heavy bursts on the tank and support with earthshield, druids can tank and raid at the same time, and so can discipline.