WoW Meters Online - Combatlog Replay

LK normal, with Disc + Pally on tanks (2 discs in raid). Early kill, basically tunneled the MT 95% of the fight. The numbers still run fairly close to 10%ish (throw in bonus healing from crits, on the proc's, gives you extra fluctuation). Was done before the 4pc change, but I don't think I had 4pc at the time. At the time, we were having issues with tanks getting near instagibbed, so was told to exclusively tunnel the tanks (which was what turned out to be needed tank swaps... or CD's... but ehh :P).

Funny, spamming Flash Heal, and Penance during bursts of dmg on 2 tanks, and I still end up with 35-40% of my effective healing, through PW:S on tanks.
Disc excels more at burst dmg, rather than sustained HPS. Druid's and Shaman both can put out higher sustained single target HPS than a Disc priest (Druid HoT stack + Nourish spam = 9-11k single target HPS, I think the resto sham rotation worked out to be like 7-10k depending on the proc's from Ancestral Awakening).

Another log for you - Blood Princes kill, with me chasing the orb tank around the room. The HoT accounted for about 1.8% of my healing even though I used relatively few flash heals over the course of the fight.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Shadowfiend doesn't really ever die directly on boss fights anymore (although exceptions are possible, on fights where there are newly spawned adds, and the fiend can actually target one of those that hit the priest with an attack, and pull aggro on it directly, and die). But, its a Minor Glyph slot, and seeing as there aren't really that many choices (choice between Fortitude mana cost reduction, Shadow Prot time extend, or Levitate reagent removal?). Doesn't hurt to keep it around, cause who knows, maybe it'll die 14 sec into its duration, and reward 50-60% from attacks and another 5% mana from dying heh.

This kinda went back to the same 'personal preference' talents like Renew, since way back in Naxx/Ulduar content. Comparing 5/5 Emp healing+0/3 ToF vs 3/3 BR+2/3 ToF isn't really accurate, since 98%? of Holy Priest's would be using 3/3 ToF, regardless of their choice.
I worked the math out in one of the other priest threads, and it more or less came down to which 'type' of Holy priest style you used. If your 'go-to' spell was Renew, then 3/3 BR would have a greater overall improvement on total healing, that 3 additional points into EmpH; but if that go-to spell was Fheal (at around 25% of total healing in a fight), those 3 points would yield a slightly higher total output with those points being spent on the Emp Healing talent.
But that goes back to personal preference to style, more so than hard numbers. I typically run with 2-3 Resto Druid's, so renew is pretty low on my priority list for healing abilities, and typically only gets applied to Tanks.

As for SoL proc's, I see those as 100% guaranteed effective healing abilities. A free/instant cast 6-7k raid heal, which probably 50-75% of the time, would benefit from ToF also (for any medium raid dmg fight, there should probably always be someone at low HP).

Since we got to Sindragosa I respecced to 5/5 empowered healing which I found also very useful in ICC10 Hardmode. We never run with a Holy Paladin, so it's quite useful if I have to tank heal or for stuff like mark of the fallen champion. In addition to that flashheal is the best cast to save someone's life, and greater heal with three stacks of serendipity is very efficient on low HP targets.

Therefore I have no problem giving up blessed resilience and test of faith. But if I ever respec and drop empowered healing I will be going to use test of faith over blessed resilience for one main reason: 12% on low HP targets is worth more than 3% on every heal in terms of saving lives.

This seems to be an artifact of the collection methodology of rewarding only the first heal. Let's suppose for a second we have a disc priest and holy priest who, ignoring overhealing, can generate identical amounts of raid healing (let's say 10k HPS). Now add in a resto druid who also does identical raid healing ignoring overheals. Finally, let's assume that the amount of healing required is 12k HPS.

In the Resto+Holy scenario, they will be equally as likely to overheal. Thus they will both have 40% overhealing, to make the total healing equal to 12k HPS (6k HPS each). However, in the Resto+Disc scenario, half (for the sake of argument) of the heals from the disc priest are shields, which do 0 overhealing. As a result, there are only 7k remaining damage to split among the two healers. If we assume a 2:1 split in favor of the druid here (based on the remaining unaccounted-for HPS), we would see 2.67K HPS get credited to the disc priest, and 4.33K HPS get credited to the druid. As a result, the disc priest gets 7.67K HPS, and the resto druid gets 4.33K HPS.

Does that make the disc priest better at handling raid damage? Hardly. It just means they're better at sniping heals.

You correctly note that this reverses when there is no overhealing, which seems to suggest that the maximum HPS of a holy priest raid-healing is larger than for disc.

As you noticed, section "VI.b) Raiding as Discipline" is - like many of the sections - still labeled as outdated. Most of these sections were written sometime between the start of Ulduar and ToGC.

The strengths of classes and builds have changed since then due to equipment scaling and of course new encounters, making some non-theorycrafting sections outdated or even useless.

Regarding the description of the discipline healing style - this is a rare case where I haven't agreed with this compendium even at Ulduar times. When healing tanks in 10 man, it was very clear in comparison that as soon as a holy paladin entered the raid, the discipline priest's role as tank healer was over, because he was just utterly inferior. On encounters where it mattered, like Steelbreaker P3, or Thorim hard, not running a holy paladin was a major setback for every 10 man raid.

The role that then existed and in my opinion still exists today, is what I would call a tank healer support. A discipline priest is an ideal solution to smooth a paladin's tank healing by supplying shields, inspiration, and penance for damage spikes. When thinking about beacon's healing delay and renewing beacons now and then, this applies to a paladin healing two tanks, too.

That said, the question is when this becomes relevant, because the first discipline priest in a 25 man raid will surely be tasked to spam shields. So, in my opinion, this niche of tank healer support only applies when running as the second discipline priest in a raid, which currently is a rarity.

Regarding the rewrite of said sections of the guide, I will mostly deal with the raid healing role. The tank healing role will be more targeted towards 10-man where you might be tasked to heal tanks, and the guide just wouldn't be complete without describing how to do that.

I do not agree with this reasoning. Due to the damage prevention nature of shields, we cannot say disc has more throughput, just because it looks better on meters. It is, however, a valid argument to say a shield of size X is worth more than a heal of size X because it can be applied before the damage hits, making it even better than an instant heal of size X.

This argument alone is enough to make the first priest in a 25 man raid a discipline priest, and for the second priest, things change. So, for the rewrite of these sections, there's no need to get into opinionated territory of who's the better raid healer. The answer is, in 25 man you want both, and in 10 man, it depends on the raid composition and on how much HPS exactly is required. 2-healing BQL as disc with a holy paladin in early 10 man gear and without aura was no fun - at all. You just switched in a 3rd healer because the HPS to do it safely just wasn't there. 10% more throughput did it, however: the same thing today, with better gear and aura, is a piece of cake.

Since raid dmg for current HM content, is for the most part, a fixed constant; the only variable is how much of that effective healing is done by individual healers.
Example:
Festergut's Pungent Blight.
If this ability is going to do 18k raid dmg per player, x 25 (450k) / number of raid healers (lets say 4, of 6 total).
If the Disc priest shields 15 of those players with a 10k shield (aura isn't ticking during that time), thats 150k of that 450k AoE, that is completely negated (doing 1/3 of the healing, for 1/4 of the healer slots, before the AoE even happens), and that assumes the Disc is only able to get 15 shields up (which would likely be more, depending on raid assignment), and still doesn't figure in the reactive healing done after the fact (Granted, in the above scenario, the disc priest should actually continue to spam shields, because the aura tick is now back, so should continue around where he left off on shield spam, at least until those players recieve healing from the other raid healers, to stabilize the raid).

Does a HPriest have higher sustained HPS than a Disc? Probably not.
Does a HPriest have higher burst HPS than a Disc? Definately.

So lets get a total of HPriest abilities over a 15 sec time
CoH: 4001 (plus crit %, which is +(crit x 50%, or 800 HPS for 40%) = 4801 x6 hits x 3 used
Renew: 3568 per 3 (/w glyph)x 4) / 12 + 2141 Direct = 3330 x 13 casts
PoM: Variable.. Lets say 1 proc per 3sec, which is the aura tick for most fights. 6038 +crit = 7245 x5 ticks
Totals (using that same Putricide HM25 for overheal values):
CoH: 86,418 OH 54.2% = 46,838
Renew: 213,369 OH 65% = 138,689
PoM: 36,225 OH 49.7% = 18,003
Raw Healing: 336,012, EfHeal: 203,503

VS

Disc PW:S Spam: 11.5k PW:S + 20% Glyph of PW:S
PW:S 172,500
Glyph of PW:S: 34,500 OH 48%= 16560
Raw Healing: 207,000 EfHeal: 189,060
(this also doesn't factor Aegis proc's from GoPW:S either, but those are the odd-balls..)
Granted, this is assuming the Holy Priest doing ONLY the exact thing thats the absolutely most effective HPS, and that at all times, when a CD came up, it was time to use that. In this scenario, the Hpriest is also recieving 2/3 of their effective healing, through Renew, which is about DOUBLE the typical breakdown for a Hpriest (typically 20-30%).

And even in the best case scenario, there isn't even a 10% difference from the max HPS of a Hpriest, to the indefinately sustained output of the Disc priest (Disc = blue energy bar vs Holy = I need another Innervate).

In regards to the disc vs holy HPS discussion: by not factoring in the DA procs you are also gimping the disc priest out of a significant amount of healing.

Some of my ideas and views on if the shadowfiend glyph is necessary.
We have very few options that really aid us in our minor glyphs. Levitate and fading are typically taken along with fiend. Even if the pet dies only 5% of the time, that's still more beneficial than lowering the cost of Prayer of Fortitude in my opinion. Typically you can avoid letting the pet die, don't use it during Pungent Blight, during LK phase change, ect.
In a perfect world, if you could time it perfectly to have the pet die to raid damage right before his own 15 second life expires, then you would be gaining yourself an additional 5% mana, but raid environments are not perfect vacuums.

Before Pungent Blight, Festergut hits like a truck, and most healers will be healing the tanks.
I prefer our Disc priest to be also on the tank at that time : shields / divine aegis will smooth a little the damage, the fast flash heal spam will also smooth the health, and inspiration is goodly good when most of the raid damage is physical damage on 1 tank. I can see tanks dying between 2 holy lights casts at that time.
Pungeant blight is not deadly at all if the raid used correctly the spores. It's pretty easy for 1/2 holy priest, and shamys / druids to top up the raid after it.

I do not see the point of the whole "holy vs disc" discussion. I have two PvE Speccs, one for holy and the other for disc, and also some items to change out when switching speccs. I healed both disc and holy for whole IDs, depending on what was missing. And I can say that that they are nearly equal in terms of hps, each of them with strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, my hps as disc is higher, mostly because of the fact that shields don't overheal. But yeah, disc is lacking burst, I often have the feeling that power infusion + prayer of healing is not enough sometimes. Unfortunately there are only few fights in ICC where I would say holy > disc: Lanathel and Sindragosa (and Dreamwalker boss healing of course). Maybe also Festergut. On every other encounter there is no unpredictable burst aoe that I can't handle being disc and beside the mentioned bosses shields are way better than renew/pom/coh. I'd love to see an encounter with high burst damage like Ignis, XT, Kologarn or Hodir again. These were bosses where holypriests could reach their full potential. Maybe Ruby Sanctum...

Another one is Rotface in fact. The OT takes rare burst damage, which disc is king to heal. And disc also has perfect tools to take over MT healing duty when MT healers need to move. In fact, I love this reactive healing part of disc, in order to save tanks. I think it's their best use : no other healer can do it, and up to now, I've not seen any fight where the HP-buffing role is crucial (as it was with Freya).