5.2 Disc - go Mastery, Crit, ...?

[Noradin]

Adding up: 24.4% mana and some free heals at the cost of 5 extra gcds versus 14.6% mana from mindbender.

You counted the "free heals" twice. Its (using your numbers) 14% mana and some heals worth 10% mana, so you gain some heals at fixed intervals, but loose the freedom to spend those GCD as you please if you don't want to loose the mana. Sounds fair.

[Obfuscare]

The Solace change almost sounds like Holy Paladin Judging on CD Wrath/Cata.

[kouby]

I actually think Mistweavers are good. Hopefully the changes in 5.2 wont be limited primarily to PvP and we'll have a few PvE changes (Jab is getting nerfed unfortunately, increased mana cost) but the issue isn't that Disc is good in "certain" situations, Disc is good in every situation.

Sure, you could argue all I care about is a healing meter but let me ask you this question (and imagine you're doing heroic content). You need to bring 4 healers to a fight so that you have a chance to meet the hard enrage (in this tier, 6 encounters of 16 were 4 healed, 2 are 7+ healed, the rest can be done with 5-6 healers, but normally lower rather than more). Which healers do you bring to an encounter (ignoring the mechanics because each class practically works the same now)?

You can argue (rather effectively) that a healing meter doesn't matter much. That's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing the following:

> Disc has too many raid CDs
> Disc doesn't (and will continue not to) experience mana issues
> Absorbs are too powerful and ruin fights
> In a competitive scene you stack a class which is OP or shines on a certain fight (Will of the Emperor's 4 mage 3 DK tactic as an example)

As a healer who raids at a somewhat competitive and hardcore nature, I worry because when I look at a fight I try to think what my class does which no-one else can do (and to the credit of Blizzard a few fights in t14 have a niche for Monks): Shek'zeer with dispells (via Revival), Tsulong with dispells (via revival), Spirit Kings heroic (Meng's crazed state). As I stated previously, most of the 'high level' raiding Priests are saying these changes are pretty much negligible. The math for Rapture shows that using Rapture 2 or 3 more times in a fight will equal the exact same mana returns as current (even with stacked MTTs) and that the overall nerf to SS is nothing more than a 3-5% throughput nerf.

I'm merely comparing these nerfs to the nerfs Mistweavers took (and I agree that Mistweavers did need one).

As for the thread? The thread is stupid. Any Disc Priest who's intelligent will still go for Mastery because PoH and PW:S make up around 85-90% of a Priest's entire effective healing and both gain from the mastery 100% of the time, generally with 100% effectiveness.

One obnoxious player who doesn't know how to play so he trolls all the priest posts to try to make up for his lack of anything resembling skill. Gratz !

ps: things were actually much more funny when you were linking your wols, we could actually quantify the suck, now it's just lulz for the sake of lulz.

[Deleted]

It's really cute how you manage to ignore the majority of every post I write and yet end up being incorrect, you healed the tanks more than the priests in the logs you've provided. Now since you are entirely clueless regarding the mechanics of disc priests at least stay out of any thread discussing this, I would love if you just could stay away from our forum entirely but that seems impossible for you.

Disc is overpowered. It needs to be balanced, otherwise the next tier is going to be a boring Priest-fest.

I guess I could rest my case here really. Your posts have no place in this thread and (until you at least learn how priests function) no place in this forum section.

I actually think Mistweavers are good. Hopefully the changes in 5.2 wont be limited primarily to PvP and we'll have a few PvE changes (Jab is getting nerfed unfortunately, increased mana cost) but the issue isn't that Disc is good in "certain" situations, Disc is good in every situation.

We aren't good in every situation, and we are sure as hell not op in every situation. We aren't even topping the meters (which by design favors disc) on every fight, so we obviously aren't op regardless of the encounter design.

Sure, you could argue all I care about is a healing meter but let me ask you this question (and imagine you're doing heroic content). You need to bring 4 healers to a fight so that you have a chance to meet the hard enrage (in this tier, 6 encounters of 16 were 4 healed, 2 are 7+ healed, the rest can be done with 5-6 healers, but normally lower rather than more). Which healers do you bring to an encounter (ignoring the mechanics because each class practically works the same now)?

The healing classes don't function even close to the same way and their relative strength changes a lot depending on the encounter. That disc/hpala are the strongest healers on most encounters in t14 (esp. HoF) is something everyone agrees on. Balance changes made for t15 should obviously be based on the t15 encounters.

You can argue (rather effectively) that a healing meter doesn't matter much. That's not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing the following:

Then stop trying to link meters as proof for ANYTHING? You do this constantly.

> Disc has too many raid CDs

If you exclude spirit shell, which has significant differences from other 'raid cds' (has to be used 10+ seconds before the actual damage, isn't affected/improved by the other healers in any way), we are stuck with one of the most situational raid cd in the game (barrier). Spirit shell is also getting nerfed which brings it even further away from other generic raid cds.

> Disc doesn't (and will continue not to) experience mana issues

There's not a single healing class that has big mana issues at a solid gearlevel if they gem purely for spirit. Disc (and some other specs) can start focusing more on output stats after a stable amount of regen but the items/gems will still mainly be focused on this (the only exception to this were pre 5.1 mistweavers).

> Absorbs are too powerful and ruin fights

Immunities are too powerful and ruin fights, hybridhealing is too powerful and ruin fights, raidhealing is too powerful and ruin fights, utility is too powerful and ruin fights. The encounters are designed around all these things, that it'd be easier to balance the encounters if every class just had two buttons to press is quite obvious.

> In a competitive scene you stack a class which is OP or shines on a certain fight (Will of the Emperor's 4 mage 3 DK tactic as an example)

Really?! I never knew! How is that even remotely related? If a certain ability is considered too powerful for a certain fight it'll usually be tweaked in some way that doesn't make the class/spec suffer as a whole. Class stacking has been done since competitive raiding arrived and a class being too strong on one or a few fights doesn't warrant blanket nerfs.

As a healer who raids at a somewhat competitive and hardcore nature, I worry because when I look at a fight I try to think what my class does which no-one else can do (and to the credit of Blizzard a few fights in t14 have a niche for Monks): Shek'zeer with dispells (via Revival), Tsulong with dispells (via revival), Spirit Kings heroic (Meng's crazed state). As I stated previously, most of the 'high level' raiding Priests are saying these changes are pretty much negligible. The math for Rapture shows that using Rapture 2 or 3 more times in a fight will equal the exact same mana returns as current (even with stacked MTTs) and that the overall nerf to SS is nothing more than a 3-5% throughput nerf.

The rapture change is very insignificant if you aren't raiding with a resto shaman, otherwise it's matters a fair bit and will force us to focus on regen stats for a bit longer (in turn lowering our output). How big the SS nerf is depends on the implementation, if the DA part of PoH isn't factored into the SS calculation it's way more than a 5% overall output nerf. It also hurts our burst healing more than our consistent healing which is way more important. It makes us scale significantly worse. We also don't need bigger nerfs than something of this magnitude, before we got buffs of a similar magnitude we were considered awful. Most people are objective enough to realise that disc aren't that far ahead of the other healers, you aren't.

I'm merely comparing these nerfs to the nerfs Mistweavers took (and I agree that Mistweavers did need one).

Mistweavers were a way bigger outliner than discs pre 5.1, yet I feel that the nerfs were too big for one patch (even if the end result in quite appropriate, mists are in a decent spot and could possibly use a slight buff). Making smaller and more changes during a bigger period of time is way better for balancing and doesn't upset raidgroups as much.

As for the thread? The thread is stupid. Any Disc Priest who's intelligent will still go for Mastery because PoH and PW:S make up around 85-90% of a Priest's entire effective healing and both gain from the mastery 100% of the time, generally with 100% effectiveness.

PoH isn't affected by mastery to the same extent as PW:s and (the current) SS. We don't know exactly what calculation SS will end up with and if it doesn't take much (or any) advantage of mastery crit may very well end up superior than mastery. This is a very justified thread, unlike your crying which has no place here (you already made a thread for that so go use it).

[mcbubble]

Disc doesn't (and will continue not to) experience mana issues
There's not a single healing class that has big mana issues at a solid gearlevel if they gem purely for spirit. Disc (and some other specs) can start focusing more on output stats after a stable amount of regen but the items/gems will still mainly be focused on this (the only exception to this were pre 5.1 mistweavers).

I'm a holy paladin who 2 and sometimes 3 heals heroic modes in a 10m raiding environment. I would disagree with this. I go pure spirit as my #1 stat and I can go oom pretty easily (I mean very easily).

[Fismara]

You need to seperate 10man and 25man. I play in 25 man guild top25 only as poh bot for shell and any kind of absorb, but 10man its not same.

Disc is overpowered. It needs to be balanced, otherwise the next tier is going to be a boring Priest-fest.

Only on 25man, 10man required more dmg from priest via atonement and also single target spells like Penance(dont using it on every cd waste of time if i can pull 50k on each person)
In my opinion holy paladins are close to disc priest so 5.2 should be balanced on 25man with SS nerf, only a bit love to holy priest now

[HamSandwichFace]

In my opinion holy paladins are close to disc priest so 5.2 should be balanced on 25man with SS nerf, only a bit love to holy priest now

On which fight rofl?

[Deleted]

The current formula for Spirit Shell PoH scales linearly with mastery but its aegis correction factor is only 1.3 not 1.5.

I.e. currently spirit shell is base*(1+crit)*(1+mastery)*1.3 for PoH

In 5.2 what they are doing is returning spirit shell to its original form where it converted all interacting heals to absorb. It now does just that. Make a bigger shield but it is no longer an HPS increase.

So basically spirit shell absorb will now have the same formula as the normal spells i.e.

(base)*(1+crit)*(1 + 0.5*(1+mastery)) for PoH.

Thus the nerf is converting (1.3+1.3*mastery) to (1+0.5*(1+mastery)), which is the equivalent of turning (1.3+1.3*mastery) to (1.5+0.5*mastery)

At 60% mastery this is 1.8/2.08 = 0.865. Not really a humongous nerf.

Spirit shell still scales with mastery but the scaling is now slower (0.5*mastery instead of 1.3*mastery) but it starts at a slightly higher intercept (1.5 instead of 1.3).

However the real nerf is for single target heals, which lose well over 25%.

The main side effect of this however is that stat weights for disc have changed dramatically. For the people who think crit is good thing again. Crit is still a terrible stat. If you have say 60% mastery and you trade 10% mastery for 4% crit all that you will see is a 0.7% increase in PoH healing before overhealing is even taken into account. Basically mastery is still better than crit for PoH even after the nerf.

The best secondary stat for both single target and PoH is now haste and nothing else. People might think that crit scales better with single target heals, but they are wrong. Gheal scales better with haste than with anything else due to train of thought and because it is a *humongous* heal. Right now Gheal for me with grace stacked and archangel popd heals for over 150k and crits for well over 300k.

The only thing that scales slightly better with crit is atonement.

Overall for PWS and PoH under any reasonable circumstances mastery > crit. For gheal/fheal and penance crit > mastery.

What people fail to realise is that borrowed time and power infusion stack multiplicatively with haste. That is if you have say 10% haste then when you pop PWS borrowed time on your next spell is 1.1*1.15 instead of 1.1 + 0.15. If you have PI on top it is 1.1*1.15*1.2 instead of 1.1+0.15+0.2. Also haste increases the return from shadowfiend and mindbender and the proc rate from FDCL.

Overall the value of haste even now is definitely above crit. The only reason why haste is not a desirable stat right now is because it does not boost HPM and mastery is so much better than it is better to stack mastery instead.

My personal view is after 5.2, get all the permanent spirit (proc spirit has lower value) you can get. Regem everything to spirit and intellect, reforge all crit to haste and then reforge as much mastery to haste as you can support.

Spirit on gear has ridiculously high value for disc right now. Assuming you have enough spirit to make PWS mana neutral, each additional point of spirit gives you 2.5 extra mana from rapture proc. If you get 1 proc every 15s that is 50 mana in a 6 minute fight. So 1 point of spirit can give up to 50 mana just from rapture, which is a bit ridiculous. So spirit for disc was good before, but its kinda ridiculous now.

Stacking spirit+haste obsessively is now the way to go methinks.

[Urumii]

In 5.2 what they are doing is returning spirit shell to its original form where it converted all interacting heals to absorb. It now does just that. Make a bigger shield but it is no longer an HPS increase.

This will indeed be a nerf to Spirit Shell, the extent is still being debated, but I would like to add a little to this.

Even if spirit shell is not an HPS increase over PoH in theory, it will still be a very good spell. PoH is always very high in overhealing, due to the nature of having to use it on a group. If you use Spirit Shell, the full amount will be absorbed, so you won't be hit by the 20-50% overhealing that PoH frequently does.

[Deleted]

I was speaking about HC.

Atonement (for the Priest who topped with 100k ehps, likewise the other Mistweaver and I did 65k ehps) healed for 2.9% total. SS, DA and PoH made up 82% of her overall healing done with PW:S pulling in 8.1% and PoM pulling in 2.4%.

It must be fun playing a class which does 90% of it's entire healing with 2 spells.

HamSandwichFace, you obviously don't know anything about disc gameplay. Disc is currently the most difficult healer to play with. You have a massive amount of things to watch out for:

Rapture 12s proc must notice when your PWS was absorbed, must keep track of proc spirit/spirit link to maximise returns.
archangel 30s CD
Evangelism (must get it to 5 stacks before archangel CD is over) 20s buff you must not lose it once you started casting it.
Spirit shell 1min CD must synch with power infusion and borrowed time from PWS, must synch it with boss damage cooldowns, watch out for overcapping. Must try to synch with archangel and inner focus)
Weakened soul on critical targets (15s CD modified by single target heal casts)
Penance 10s and holy fire 10s (must use those on CD + 1 smite to stack evangelism)
Grace 15s CD must be permanently stacked to 3 if you are expected to look after a tank while raid healing (nearly always the case)
Divine Aegis (15s must keep alive and build it up, must plan ahead to not waste it if you are going to stack spirit shell, watch the cap)
Inner fire/Inner will stance dancing
Inner focus 45s CD modified by train of thought
Mindbender/shadowfiend
FDCL/Solace for those that use them
Power Infusion/DI/ToF
Cascade 25s CD (delayed healing so you need to cast it ahead of time and pick the right target to maximise healing).
Barrier 3min CD
Void shift 5min CD
Pain suppression 3 min CD

We have more bloody stuff to watch out than the tanks and DPS, on top of that you gotta to watch healthbars and raid mechanics like everyone else, you need to watch the boss timers carefully and plan ahead because you need to set things up well ahead of time and you need to keep an eye on where people actually are because PoH is group limited. You put two decent players on any other class and you will get reasonable results. Do the same with disc and even small differences in skill and experience produce dramatically different results.

Spirit shell and DA is not one spell, the first is a cooldown affecting 4 different spells and the 2nd is our mastery and procs from practically every heal. This is like saying that the biggest spell holy palas use is illuminated healing.

I have had tons of laughs with various ppl compaining that disc is OP then trying disc on their alts and getting roflpwnd by experienced druids/holy palas/mistweavers on fights where disc is supposed to be faceroll.

Disc requires the most attention, the most focus, the most effort and the most skill from any other healer out there. My UI looks like a blooming lightshow circus with all the power auras and timers I have just for keeping track of shit. Before we got buffed, which was very recently, disc was in a terrible place exactly because of this reason. Double and triple the effort compared to other classes for less output.

[Deleted]

Discipline is not the hardest healing spec in the game. You do not have the luxury of claiming that crown with two spells and a passive being the overwhelming majority of your healing (90%). Stop lying to yourself, I am sure once 5.2 you will find the bottom of the ladder just as comfortable as us Mistweavers have the past weeks.

[HPLathus]

Disc is BY FAR.. THe easiest healing spec in the game as well as the most simply designed.

Spirit shell has ruined this spec by a long shot, what they could have done was just made spirit shell a raid wide cooldown similar to aura mastery with a long cooldown (3 minutes)

FOr example, instead of turning your heals into absorbs, it acts like aura mastery and for 6 seconds it absorbs 50k from any damage done to players in the raid.


Right now disc is a 1 trick pony and I hate playing it, but know if I don't we won't down most heroic content.

[Deleted]

Playing disc at an 'okay' level is quite simple (just a slightly bigger need to know the encounter than other healers) while it's challenging or even close to impossible to play it perfectly (same can be said for most healers though, but I know that I need to keep track of more stuff on my disc than when I played a resto druid).

[Deleted]

Playing disc at an 'okay' level is quite simple (just a slightly bigger need to know the encounter than other healers) while it's challenging or even close to impossible to play it perfectly (same can be said for most healers though, but I know that I need to keep track of more stuff on my disc than when I played a resto druid).

This is plain and simple bollocks, any healer worth a raid spot should be paying attention to the encounter.

[Simulacrum]

HamSandwichFace, you obviously don't know anything about disc gameplay. Disc is currently the most difficult healer to play with. You have a massive amount of things to watch out for:

blah blah blah

We have more bloody stuff to watch out than the tanks and DPS, on top of that you gotta to watch healthbars and raid mechanics like everyone else, you need to watch the boss timers carefully and plan ahead because you need to set things up well ahead of time and you need to keep an eye on where people actually are because PoH is group limited. You put two decent players on any other class and you will get reasonable results. Do the same with disc and even small differences in skill and experience produce dramatically different results.

Spirit shell and DA is not one spell, the first is a cooldown affecting 4 different spells and the 2nd is our mastery and procs from practically every heal. This is like saying that the biggest spell holy palas use is illuminated healing.

I have had tons of laughs with various ppl compaining that disc is OP then trying disc on their alts and getting roflpwnd by experienced druids/holy palas/mistweavers on fights where disc is supposed to be faceroll.

Disc requires the most attention, the most focus, the most effort and the most skill from any other healer out there. My UI looks like a blooming lightshow circus with all the power auras and timers I have just for keeping track of shit. Before we got buffed, which was very recently, disc was in a terrible place exactly because of this reason. Double and triple the effort compared to other classes for less output.

Dude are you kidding? The only thing even remotely hard about playing a disc is making sure you hit 5 targets with your PoH on some fights. Everything else is just the same old "use your cooldowns and procs when appropriate and keep important buffs and debuffs active" that every other class does, and is stuff that you should be perfectly capable of doing without having to think about it after having played a char at the level cap through a few raids. If you wanna talk a tedious healer, go look at shamans. They seem to be built around making you irritated with how the abilities interact with each other and behave inconsistently.

I did a couple of pugs on my alt priest a few days ago, since there's not a lot else to do this week with the holidays and all, and while I'm not gonna swap from holy pally to disc priest anyime soon (I personally think holy pally is stronger in 10m; at least with my healing set-up) it was completely uncomplicated to preform extremely well. The only thing I had trouble with was dealing with sustained, heavy single-target dps on the tanks (something like lei shi with bad taunting, or will during titan gas), since that doesn't really happen outside of raids so I had no experience with it, but it only took one wipe and a little bit of thinking to figure out a playstyle to adopt for those situations in order to deal with it.

I could obviously improve my preformance, having done nothing but LFR up to this point, but the difference between an extremely skilled disc priest and a merely decent one is not as large as you pretend that it is. Most fights I just spam penance/hfire on the boss on cooldown, use mindbender on cooldown, cast PW:S when my rapture tracker tells me it's about to be able to proc again, and macro archangel to abilities that prelude heavier healing (inner focus, spirit shell, PI, etc). PainSupp and Barrier when appropriate and void shift as a panic button. Doing this, I was completely destroying the other healers in relative preformance on the healing meters, though that was probably just an artifact of there not really being very much to heal in a normal mode and my shields simply being better suited to meter whoring in such an environment. I would be quite easy to 1-heal everything in MSV normal (except maybe will, at least with my skill level) in sub-ilvl 480 as a disc priest, if it were not for fights like spiritbinder demanding more than one healer (I wouldn't count somebody else contributing significant off-healing, as would have to be the case for spiritbinder, as a fight being "1-healed").

Anyway... it's not perfect play, but it's also not even remotely any more difficult than the other healers out there, and don't sit here in the priest forum and preach to the choir that it is, because it's not. If you ask me, disc's extremely lax mana conservation concerns, and the luxury of being able to stack shields in preparation for incoming damage, rather then being limited to merely reacting to it as it happens, makes disc easier than most.

[HamSandwichFace]

FYI:

Rapture is getting buffed in 5.2 and SS isn't really getting nerfed at all. I can post the math to support this if you want.

Disc is the hardest healing spec.

I laughed.

[twistedmynd]

Before this turns into another troll thread, these are my early findings for how to stack secondaries for 5.2: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...714?page=5#100 and http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...714?page=6#101

Those were done with the entirety of my spell choices in the listed encounters. The argument can still be made that the "more important" heals are what you should stack secondary stats for. Either way, we're just going to have to sit tight until the ptr hits for anything definitive.

[Deleted]

You counted the "free heals" twice. Its (using your numbers) 14% mana and some heals worth 10% mana, so you gain some heals at fixed intervals, but loose the freedom to spend those GCD as you please if you don't want to loose the mana. Sounds fair.

I'm not sure what you mean, but as free heals I meant the atonement ones from solace, which, unlike holy fire, doesn't cost mana - so they are free. Mindbender doesn't heal, atonement from solace would. I compared solace and mindbender, not solace and holy fire, so where did I add them twice? Yes, you do loose the gcds, as I said "at the cost of 5 gcds". I am getting an idea at what you are hinting, but I'm seeing the whole holy fire more from the point of view of stacking evangelism than from the heals, so I guess I was seeing it more from this point of view: the heals from holy fire might have been needed or not, but you still spent mana to keep evangelism up, but solace wont put a penalty on that, making the heals actually free.

The mistake I made in the calculation was actually different: evangelism also decreases the cost of smite/holy fire, so some of those holy fires would actually be cheaper, therefor the gain is a bit lower.

[HamSandwichFace]

Would you really trade Mindbender (1 global, fire and forget) for Solace? I don't think you will. When you're moving as a Disc Priest you have a bunch of stuff to do anything:

> throwing around PW:S
> penance
> PoM
> cascade

I simply cannot see a playstyle where someone would take Solace over Mindbender, Mindbender is just "too good" (in that it's so damn easy to use).

[Deleted]

Would you really trade Mindbender (1 global, fire and forget) for Solace? I don't think you will. When you're moving as a Disc Priest you have a bunch of stuff to do anything:

> throwing around PW:S
> penance
> PoM
> cascade

I simply cannot see a playstyle where someone would take Solace over Mindbender, Mindbender is just "too good" (in that it's so damn easy to use).

I'm obviously talking about the new Solace, that is instant and does what holy fire does too - aka stack evangelism and proc archangel. Since I am using HF on cd anyway, yes, I consider it a viable choice for at least some fights.

Also, thank you for pointing out to me what to do while moving as disc. Playing the specc for a couple of years, I'd have never guessed.