Yes, haste effects are multiplicative with your haste rating being one of the multiplicative factors -- that's the way I remember it. I don't always have WoA and boomkin aura, and I'm sure others are in the same boat. Still, with just your own 6% haste from enlightenment and borrowed time, you hit the soft cap with 1.5 / (1.06 * 1.25) = 1.132, or 13.2% haste from rating.

Well, you have to differentiate between tankhealing and raidhealing (or maybe that should be called raidshielding these days). For tankhealing Borrowed Time will probably not always be aktiv as you would have to cast additional "random" shields into the raid and depending on how hard the tank get's hit it's not always possible or worthwhile to do that. So a little more haste is probably still good in this situation. On the other hand, if you are mainly shielding the raid, both crit and haste are only useful for the penance/prayer of healing between shields. But on most items you have to choose either haste or crit anyway. So in conclusion even a 4,3% haste cap with borrowed time still doesn't really mean that we will should mainly stack crit. Because crit is just as mediocre in situations where you use PW:S alot and subsequently have a high uptime of Borrowed Time.

The problem is that haste above 4.3% is also worthless when you are spamming PW:S. The only solution I can see is stacking spellpower instead.

Are we entirely certain of this? I'm fairly sure that with 12% haste from gear my flash heal cast time is something like 0.97s with Borrowed Time, 3/3 Enlightenment, WoA and the boomkin/ret 3% haste. I can't check this right now as I'm at work and don't have a raid group but I've spent a lot of time worrying about the haste cap so I don't think I'm wrong.

Whatever the maths says, testing in game is always more effective.

I am not sure either. I just linked a similar thread from a boomkin forum about haste. Can anyone confirm the above math about haste is the same ingame or not? Maybe ingame tooltip of casttime is not correct, who knows?

And I agree with you Glasswizard. T8 gear is a good mix between crit and haste also, so maybe they want us to mix it.

1 second is the global cooldown limit. You can still cast spell quicker than 1 second (for istance if you have enough haste to come down 1 second, you can cast them during Malygos vortex like an istant, at least from what I've read). The only limit is chain casting. Basically, suppose that you have enough haste to cast flash heal in 0.7 seconds, you must still wait 0.3 second before casting the next spell.

I scanned this thread since today will be my first day to really need my Disc-2nd-Specc in Ulduar. I stumbled over some things while reading.

About thread-issues of PS on tanks:
I'm a little bit crazy and tank in one raid with my warrior and heal in another with my priest. As a tank I cannot think about a single boss I've seen in Ulduar, where PS would be a problem on a tank. Given that it would not be applied at or shortly after the pull. Since there will be other CDs available (at least the tank will have at least one) it will not be needed on the pull so that should never be the case anyway.

A short note on today bosses: Unlike BC most bosses are tauntable. So even if a DD would pull aggro because of PS (or would come near to the 110/130%-mark the tank can simply taunt the boss so it should never even turn around. PS to safe a tank is possible at least if there are not 5 priests chain-PSing the tank.

About the theorie of stacking SP instead of crit:
Glasswizard mentioned something there. The same thing is discussed in the "WotLK Healing Compendium v3.1: Here There Be Theorycraft (and Dargons?)"-thread for holys.

You cannot do it with the given gear. SP is something like a fixed value for a given item-lvl on your gear (with the exception of trinkets and the decision between staff or mainhand-offhand-combo). The same goes for int. The only points where you can make a decision between SP and crit are gems, food and elexier/flask. And sometimes even there you may want to take a socket-bonus or maintain a meta. The difference for those options is somewhere between 100 and 300 points. Most of that decisions you would make anyway - so they are no gearing-decisions anyway.

So the gearing decision comes down to which 2 stats you would like to get: crit, haste, spirit or MP5 (or hit). So the question should not be if you would like more SP over more crit, or if you should get lost of something of your 30% crit to pick up more SP. The question should be if you would like to trade some crit for haste or spirit or MP5. Since spirit and MP5 only help you to get more mana they will not be the answer if you are looking for more throughput.

Sometimes you find both haste and crit on one item, in this cases you cannot trade crit for anything considering throughput. In all other cases the decision is between crit and haste - not crit and SP. Most of you may have reached the haste-softcap anyway. So more haste would help less than more crit, even if you already got 30% (or whatever) and use shield alot. (Especially then, because of BT.)

About role of Disc:
The comparison to druids is valid up to some point. When they do tank-healing most times they also do some raid-healing. (Or at least did it in BC - I'm not an expert on druids.) Because holy-paladins struggle to raid heal in many cases you do not need to define a tank healer as someone who can only heal one (or two) targets and ignores everybody else. Disc priests are good tank healers. The argument that sometimes (or given your raid-setup most times) they will be more useful if they concentrate more on the raid that don't make them less tank-healer.

Discs can be very valuable on the raid in some cases. But if they are the only ones on the raid they would have a much harder time than a holy priest or a shaman (or maybe a druid - again I'm not an expert on them) in most encounters.

So while their mitigation on the raid may make a huge difference they are not really raid healers.


Since I'm mostly holy I may have mixed something up. Please correct me there.

While this is true, it is also less of a factor for healers than DPS people. Someone in a DPS role is going to be hindered by the GCD limit much more than someone in a healing role. As a healer, you are not always chain casting, especially as a priest. Furthermore, while there is no benefit to say, pumping out Wrath as a druid in 0.7 seconds, there IS a benefit in pumping out a Flash Heal in 0.7 seconds as opposed to 1 second. Faster heals are always more likely to save someone's life, and they allow you to heal more reactively (thus saving mana).

Glyph of Penance: Now increases critical strike chance by 5% instead of its old effect.

* Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
* Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
* Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.

Let the QQ commence.

This is a back-of-envelope calculation, and I'm sure there are people here who can correct me if I'm wrong. I am leaving some things out, like HPS from spells cast between Penance casts and the extra healing from an actual Penance tick critting. But this should give a rough idea of what this change is going to do.

There's really no way that this is a buff. 5% crit increases the chance that each Penance tick will crit by 5%. This doesn't affect any other spells. Say your Penance is ticking for 4000 (a nice round number, might not be accurate, but I'll use the same number for both.) Each tick has an extra 5% chance to crit. Say you start with a base crit of 25%. This will give you a 73.4% chance of gaining at least 1 DA proc per Penance cast. Each DA proc is 30% of the damage healed. So for each penance cast you have a 73.4% chance of getting a 1200 health DA proc.

Adding an extra 5%, you get an 87% chance of getting a DA proc on a Penance cast. This is an improvement of 13%. And as this only works on Penance, with the regular cooldown of 8 seconds, you have an extra 14.3% chance of getting 1200 healing every 8 seconds. Let's assume that you will always get an extra DA proc 14.3% of the time. If we do this, you end up with effectively 21.45 HPS added by Glyph of Penance. I'll be charitable and call it 25 HPS.

Glyph of Penance, in its current form, will let you cast Penance 2 seconds earlier, shortening the cooldown to 6 seconds. With an 8 second cooldown, Penance is about 1500 HPS (with 4000 point ticks.) With a cooldown of 6 seconds, Penance is about 2000 HPS. (Both not considering DA procs.)

Decreasing the cooldown by 2 seconds thus yields you about 500 HPS on average for the contrived numbers I've picked.

I'd say 500 HPS >> 25 HPS. Glyph of Penance increases throughput roughly 20x more in its current form than it does on the PTR. This is a huge nerf. And probably not at all worth a major glyph slot if the change goes through. I'd rather glyph PoH or Holy Nova, to be honest.

EDIT: Even if we include the extra HPS from the extra 14.5% chance of Penance crits, this comes out to about 36 HPS, so total this ends up being about 62 HPS by glyphing the new Penance glyph. Still over 8x less than the one on Live, and it's probability based whereas simply shortening the cooldown is a guaranteed increase. I'm becoming more sad the more I think about this.

EDIT2: Corrected a math error which propagated through to other calculations.

Quick wowhead item list with your stat weights, TheDoctor - thank you for all the Disc-related info/math/research!

Wowhead Discipline gear list

One thing I noticed is that it doesn't seem to take slot bonuses into account - where there is a yellow slot with a +7 SP bonus, it still recommends a 19 SP gem instead of a 9 SP/8 Crit gem (or similar), so take the recommended gems with a grain of salt.