the tier gear looks fantastic for a hybrid disc healer, one who works on tanks and raid. The stats on the max-throughput BiS gear are rotten for shield spam (haste would be way over the 150 cap for this role). Grabbing the tier pieces enables you to fill both roles very well, which is something many of us do. As I discussed in the link above, it has yet to be seen whether the throughput gain of the tier bonuses matches the throughput gain of the BiS offset pieces (for tank healing only, of course).
For the four set bonus to be "special" for disc priests I think that it would need to be a spell that we constantly keep on cd. In a hybrid healing situation I generally do not keep pennance on cd becuase I've found it to be much more effective in helping to deal with burst damage. When I'm dealing with burst damage I'd also much rather have a heal that lands faster and wouldn't be willing to sacrafice that haste for a chance to reset my pennance.
Generally when raid or hybrid healing I think we do best while anticipating incoming damange and helping to diffuse incoming burst.
An example of this would be on heroic beasts. In the first phase generally you could try to get shields up on melee before gormok stomps and time a poh to land just as it hits to wipe out almost all of the damage that it causes. When people are hit by firebombs a quick pennance on one that is in the worst situation followed by shields on the rest to stop damage and allow another healer to quick backfill is very effective. In that situation I can't see casting a fh to reset my pennance so I can cast it again as bringing a great deal to the table because by that point the other raid healers have been able to react to the damage. In raid healing I really feel disc priests bring the most to the table by limiting the amount of reaction that is necessary from the remainder of the healers.
Another example of this would be on Deathbringer where we can shield and try to proc an absorb on people effected with blood boil. Generally in that situation we are going to do best to get shields on all the effected people and then go back to try and proc an aegis on people as their shields fall off.
My playstyle isn't perfect by any means, thats just my 2 cents
I think many priest need to stop considering Borrowed Time as the best talent in the tree. Borrowed Time should be viewed as one more tool available to Disc Priests.
Example :
Massive damage incoming on a player (most of the time a Tank).
Shield the target if possible, if not shield any mid to low life player around. Shielding yourself is never a bad idea.
Be ready to cast ultra hastened spells to heal the target as fast as possible (Penance and the occasional Great Heal are good choices)
So in this situation, being over the haste soft cap is a waste of item points. But for all other situations, when you are raid healing most of you casts are not under Borrowed Time. Having haste at this point is often a boon rather than a curse we should absolutely avoid.
I understand that in some extreme gameplay (mass shielding) stacking haste is useless. But honestly the tree as not been designed in order to do only shield spam.
My gear is currently having 480 haste rating. For many disc priests it is far too much, but for me it is essential to perform my duty of life saver. Shields and 1.2s FHs are great for this job.
Concerning a more general point of view about gearing your toon, I think that having 3 pieces of stuff with crit+haste instead spirit is acceptable. Sacrificing more spirit to the altar of throughput is a probably a poor choice.
Healing priests are highly versatile healers with a very good toolbox, it seems logical to me that with so many tools available no healing stat should be avoided, even haste for Disc priests.
I understand that in some extreme gameplay (mass shielding) stacking haste is useless. But honestly the tree as not been designed in order to do only shield spam.
Regarding shield spamming: I'd like to add that we need to reevaluate this anyway. Shield spamming still has its uses, but it really no longer scales well enough with our gear to be a primary throughput spell. Assuming everyone is at the haste soft cap now, it scales with just 1 of our 3 throughput stats. Ok, the small glyph part profits from crit, but that's not what I would call "scaling".
And that's a good thing, too. Weaving effective spell sequences from shields and other spells to match the damage income is far more interesting than mind numbing shield spamming.
Originally Posted by Jeremy Clarkson
The simple fact is this. We are told to concentrate more. But we can only do that if we are allowed to go considerably faster.
For burst raid healing, Powerword: shield spamming on multiple targets is still going to give you the largest HPS boost. The increased spellpower we get off our new gear scales significantly better with our shields than with PoH, and even given the increased levels of crit and haste it still makes shield our most powerful raid tool.
I think that it is more a case of weaving in prayer of healing, holy nova and flash heal rather than the other way around.
So got around to doing some 2p t10 testing tonight and here are the results from one round of testing. This is one full mana bar. This is not an RNG simulation either this was recreated 6 times in my initial testing.
My first thought was to go for the Shadow set, to be a little cheap, however that got me thinking.
I've seen a few BiS sets around, and most of them says to get crit/haste gear, and lose the spirit.
The reason being you want throughput.
But if you only choose gear without spirit, aren't you forced to put int gems in your sockets, therefore loosing throughput for longevity.
Isn't that just 2 steps back and 2 steps forward?
I guess what my question boils down to is this:
How to gear optimally (read, spend frost emblems), considering you don't know too much about upcoming content, hardmodes and what kinda requirements they put to your gear.
My first thought was to go for the Shadow set, to be a little cheap, however that got me thinking.
I've seen a few BiS sets around, and most of them says to get crit/haste gear, and lose the spirit.
The reason being you want throughput.
But if you only choose gear without spirit, aren't you forced to put int gems in your sockets, therefore loosing throughput for longevity.
Isn't that just 2 steps back and 2 steps forward?
I guess what my question boils down to is this:
How to gear optimally (read, spend frost emblems), considering you don't know too much about upcoming content, hardmodes and what kinda requirements they put to your gear.
Nah, a good disc priest can avoid spirit and gem for spellpower without having mana issues. Mana pools are already so huge with 245 gear, it's not really necessary to gem for int. If you have mana issues, use a flask of distilled wisdom instead of frost worm. As a greater heal specced disc priest, I'll buy a couple shadow pieces then get the non-set BiS gear.
My first thought was to go for the Shadow set, to be a little cheap, however that got me thinking.
I've seen a few BiS sets around, and most of them says to get crit/haste gear, and lose the spirit.
The reason being you want throughput.
But if you only choose gear without spirit, aren't you forced to put int gems in your sockets, therefore loosing throughput for longevity.
Isn't that just 2 steps back and 2 steps forward?
I guess what my question boils down to is this:
How to gear optimally (read, spend frost emblems), considering you don't know too much about upcoming content, hardmodes and what kinda requirements they put to your gear.
Not necessarily. With out Putricide attempts yesterday, I can say that I am in a comfortable place with my mana pool. I wasn't running short and I never had a full mana bar. Using your regen abilities/talents and having raid replenishment, you shouldn't be crying for mana with the loss of spirit. Don't get me wrong-- Spirit is nice to have, but as a Disc priest, I would take Crit/Haste any day.
If you are having trouble, using the 245 Int trinket may help until you can find a nice balance to swap it out with a more throughput trinket.
No. You are right that once you get a Blessed Healing proc the buff starts at 9 seconds, has its first tick at 6 seconds, followed by ticking at 3 and at 0 seconds. Where you are mistaken is in how the buff refreshes. If you get further procs, their values are added to the first and the timer is reset to 9 seconds; it isn' separate BH buffs overlapping, but one buff getting refreshed with an accumulating value. While this means that you wont see a heal until the buff manages to go unrefreshed for long enough to count down to 6 seconds, the good news is that the size of the HoT is increasing each time the buff is refreshed. I'm sure of this because I've seen ticks of up to 8k, which wouldn't be possible to achieve through overlapping 9 second buffs.
My first thought was to go for the Shadow set, to be a little cheap, however that got me thinking.
I've seen a few BiS sets around, and most of them says to get crit/haste gear, and lose the spirit.
The reason being you want throughput.
But if you only choose gear without spirit, aren't you forced to put int gems in your sockets, therefore loosing throughput for longevity.
Isn't that just 2 steps back and 2 steps forward?
I guess what my question boils down to is this:
How to gear optimally (read, spend frost emblems), considering you don't know too much about upcoming content, hardmodes and what kinda requirements they put to your gear.
First you need to know what part you play in the healing scene of your raid.
After that you mold your gear,enchants and gems to fit that part.
Its not needed to gem spirit, unless you sometimes switch to holy spec and dont have alternative gear.
Disc priest should be the last person to go oom in a raid, even if you nonstop cast your main spells. This said you can safely gem spellpower and loose everything else, items tend to give haste or crit, it dont matter, pick the highest spellpower combinations, and you still have around 800+ haste 245+++ geared.
My first thought was to go for the Shadow set, to be a little cheap, however that got me thinking.
I've seen a few BiS sets around, and most of them says to get crit/haste gear, and lose the spirit.
The reason being you want throughput.
But if you only choose gear without spirit, aren't you forced to put int gems in your sockets, therefore loosing throughput for longevity.
Isn't that just 2 steps back and 2 steps forward?
I guess what my question boils down to is this:
How to gear optimally (read, spend frost emblems), considering you don't know too much about upcoming content, hardmodes and what kinda requirements they put to your gear.
We can make some assumptions, without knowing exactly how hard modes and upcoming content will affect our builds. Stat weights should remain close to what they are. In the last tier, we did see a major change with mp5, i would be suprised if we saw something similar before expansion . The next major change would be at the expansion, with Blizzard 'simplifying' stats. At that time, tier gear will be irrelevant, and you can easily choose what tier gear to carry through the expansion.
I am of the opinion that balanced stats is what makes a Disc priest, and that you should gear based on what stat you feel is lacking. Most BiS lists will discount hit, assigning it a large negative value so it will never appear in a list. Does this mean that you should run out and grab [Sandals of Consecration]? I could argue that a priest that doesn't have mana issues in current content should be able to discount spirit in their BiS list.
That said, I do plan on increasing my regen where possible, as I can make an assumption that heroic ICC fights will require it. If i were choosing tier gear, that decision would be made for me as it has spirit all over it. As I am not taking tier gear, I can easily bump regen by swapping in a trinket, or choosing mp5/spirit gear ([Corp'rethar Ceremonial Crown] for example). In any case, a lot of gear will be replaced when heroic gear becomes available, and any upgrade now will help then.
This helped me make my decision of crafting [Pattern: Deathfrost Boots] in lieu of the sandals. The difference between the Deathfrost and Sandals basically being 80 spirit = 64 hit + 16 crit. I can use the crit, but in current content, spirit for me is useless (and a shadow offspec helped make my decision too). I ended up spending my frost emblems on shoulders (not a lot of choices here), cloak, and boots, with boots being a major upgrade mine where ilvl 226.
Hurrah! Holy Smite DPS viability thread is closed!
Time to delete your [Drape of the Righteous], oh wait..
I have a question? Can anyone tell me is there a addon or mod that can tell the raid or party that spells or on cool downs and/or spell locked.
At the moment i am rolling with DBM SpellTimers from their website as an addition to raiding with Deadly Boss Mods. Although it can be a pain sometimes as you will have to adjust some of the basic durations by hand it also means you can add anything you want to aswell.
I think Disc scaling is lacking. I'm feeling like a BC Shadow that doesn't want anything besides SP.
As pointed out, Shield spamming is our most efficient way of healing. There are many fights with 65-75% PW:Shield healing which kept me thinking why did I select my items for those 35-25%?
First I tried 2 T10 Holy - decided it wasn't worth it, bought T10 Shadow and now I'm realizing all i really need is:
- a little bit of haste (when you're 80 you got it. :>)
- Spellpower, gem for it, ignore most socket bonuses
- Mp5/Spirit so you don't go oom when spamming those shields.
- Crit is nice for your PoM and PW:Shield glyph that doesn't scale particularly well with haste
- Haste for your occasional Penance/FH
That leads to SP+Mp5/WP+X items, maybe one should get the T10 Holy after all, so you can at least profit from the bonus?
If Disc would also get 25% SP for their spirit it would definatly improve the bad scaling. Don't get me wrong though, i think Disc is pretty strong. Making haste undesirable through BT is a problem when all high end gear is stacked with it.
I don't see Disc tank healing when there are paladins healing two simultaniously. Tank damage seems less spiky in ICC, so I rarely switch on to the tanks.
Willpower? I think you mean mana or int? I opted straight from the get-go to use 3 pieces of shadow tier. As my guild is currently working on the Lich King, I've found that I really like it. I have the haste, crit, sp and mana that I need. I ignore spirit and mp5 when choosing gear, but still partially gem int. I'd have to say though that I probably only shield spam ~50% of the time, and find my haste to be very valuable for my flash/penance/g heals. Haste is what you gain by taking shadow tier over holy.
Oops, I meant spirit of course. Since there are almost no mp5 items you have to take it plus another stat that isn't Spellpower.
The times when I am not shield spamming the raid I tend to switch to Holy instead.
It is pointless to seek out items with spirit on them, that is the whole point in Not taking holy tier gear. Your mana returns from rapture are based off of total mana. Spellpower isn't the end all be all of disc, you still need the mana to be able to support the shield spamming.
Well, the only way you can get more mana is through gems or trinkets.
Asuming 20 yellow int gems you end up with 1,25*400 int = 7500 additional mana. Rapture will return an extra of 187,5 mana every 12 seconds = 78,1 mp5.
Calculating the mana gained by meditation depends on your int and spirit, but let's asume 1800 int 600 spi.
MP5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(1800) * 600 * 0.005575) * 0.60 * 0.5 = 214
Fully socketed:
MP5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(2300) * 600 * 0.005575) * 0.60 * 0.5 = 250
Thats an overall gain of 114 mp5.
If you take a trinket like solace/lunar dust the effect is probably worth even more. Add the insightful metagem and you can maintain spamming while enjoying larger shields.
edit: I did calculate with kings and mental strength, but only for the added int, the result is still a good aproximation.
Well, the only way you can get more mana is through gems or trinkets. Asuming 20 yellow int gems you end up with 1,25*400 int = 7500 additional mana. Rapture will return an extra of 187,5 mana every 12 seconds = 78,1 mp5.
Calculating the mana gained by meditation depends on your int and spirit, but let's asume 1800 int 600 spi.
MP5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(1800) * 600 * 0.005575) * 0.60 * 0.5 = 214
Fully socketed:
MP5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(2300) * 600 * 0.005575) * 0.60 * 0.5 = 250
Thats an overall gain of 114 mp5.
If you take a trinket like solace/lunar dust the effect is probably worth even more. Add the insightful metagem and you can maintain spamming while enjoying larger shields.
edit: I did calculate with kings and mental strength, but only for the added int, the result is still a good aproximation.
Where does that calculation stem from? If you are having multiple shields go off at once, you are returning much more mana than 187.
Honestly, I can't see why anyone would gem +20 int at all, when you can gem hybrid gem or straight sp and still sit at over 30k, where most dpriests sit more like 26-28k. I'm only getting 1950 mana from my gems. I don't oom, have fairly low regen, and well balanced stats that suit my raids needs. I cannot see why any disc priest would socket +20 int, over sp, over hybrid gems. Generally disc priests are not concerned or lacking in regen during fights. Fiend+hymn+pot should be ample enough to keep you afloat.
Generally disc priests are not concerned or lacking in regen during fights. Fiend+hymn+pot should be ample enough to keep you afloat.
Yes, this is why I'd socket pure SP anytime.
The rapture gain is based on mental strength and kings which add another 25% to your returned mana. I purposely took pure int. Yes, 12 SP 10 Int means only ~60 mp5 through gems.
Relying on multiple shields to go off at the same time can backfire when there's lag involved. To profit from it you have to stop shielding a good 15-20s beforehand - works good on Icehowl or Kologarn but haven't seen any ICC equivalent.
Relying on multiple shields to go off at the same time..haven't seen any ICC equivalent.
The Lich King's Infest is the great for this since they are all absorbed at once, and it negates the debuff entirely. The multiple shield effect is diminished if you also shield the tanks, which can eat your Rapture cooldown.
Don't forget the larger manapool effect also.
That's 15 more MP per 1 Intellect, to divide on total fight length (let's say 300s for easy computation, that's then 0.25MP5 per Intellect point, or 10MP5 per 20 Int gem).
Take also into account fiend, (hymn of hope) and resplenishment.
12/30/09, 2:20 PM
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