[7.0] Legion Discipline Priest Guide and Discussion

[Totaltotemic]

Everyone keeps pointing out that the benefit to stacking haste is being able to squeeze in more casts into an atonement window and I'm pointing out that you can do that with 2 different talents without stacking haste. If hitting 18 atonements for LW/MB is the main reason people advocate haste then it's disingenuous to imply that it's possible only by stacking haste.

What 2 different talents? So far you have only mentioned Power Infusion, which is a 2 minute cooldown.

Furthermore, why are you so insistent that "hitting 18 atonements" is some magical thing that people are talking about for why haste is good? You can go up to 18 Atonements in 15 seconds with 0% haste, don't even need Power Infusion. Nobody has ever said that you can't have 18 Atonements out at once without Haste, so it seems your gross misconception about everybody else's understanding of the game is what is causing you so much trouble.

Seriously, point to any post made by anybody in this thread that states that the reason Haste is a higher value secondary stat is because you cannot possibly hit 18 Atonements simultaneously without it. There's being disingenuous, and then there's just outright lies which is what you're approaching now.

You also seem to have this laser focus on proving that individual spells do more healing with mastery than with other stats. Let me clear that up: that is 100% fact. However, nobody has said otherwise so all you're doing by repeatedly "disproving" this is building a strawman and then disproving it, and using that as a non-sequitur to say that the entire conclusion is wrong, when in reality nobody ever said that.

[Rife]

Seriously, point to any post made by anybody in this thread that states that the reason Haste is a higher value secondary stat is because you cannot possibly hit 18 Atonements simultaneously without it. There's being disingenuous, and then there's just outright lies which is what you're approaching now.

The only reason to stack haste is to cast more spells in a set amount of time. There are dozens of posts in this thread that say as much because everyone knows that's exactly what haste does.

So what are we stacking haste for?
To cast more Penances? No.
To cast more Light's Wraths? No.
To get more atonement healing from SW:P or PtW? No.
To spread more total simultaneous atonements? No.
To spread atonements faster? Must be this.

Why is spreading atonements faster a good thing? So that we have more time to spam smite I suppose?

it seems your gross misconception about everybody else's understanding of the game is what is causing you so much trouble.

Looks like it. I'm done anyway.

[Totaltotemic]

Why is spreading atonements faster a good thing? So that we have more time to spam smite I suppose?

Yes and no.

First, comparing individual spells as your only starting point is not seeing the forest for the trees. Does Mastery provide more healing-per-spell than Haste on damage spells? Yes, categorically. What does Mastery not do though? It does not increase healing done by non-damaging spells at all, so that 1.5% more healing that Mastery does for spells like SWP and Mindbender (taken from your previous post comparing SW:P theoretical damage) gets outweighed pretty quickly by the fact that it does nothing for PW:S, Plea, PW:R, or Halo.

Secondly, I will admit that saying that you can get up to 18 Atonements in 15 seconds with 0% haste was purely bait. In fact, it takes all 15 seconds to do that. The problem then is that you have no more time to cast anything else, PtW has lapsed, and you will have blown over 35% of your mana to do almost no healing.

People that don't grasp the value of haste generally take Penance, Light's Wrath, and Mindbender for granted and just assume they happen automatically. This becomes immediately obviously not the case if you either play Disc in a raid with Light's Wrath as an ability or just model out the cast sequence yourself. It turns out that you do not have 15 seconds to spread Atonement if your goal is to actually heal instead of just reaching an arbitrary Atonement count. You actually only have about 10 seconds to accomplish this, which is where haste comes in.

Spreading Atonement faster allows you to actually use the spells you want to use that aren't Smite, not just to Smite more. Light's Wrath, Penance, and Mindbender take a total of 6 seconds baseline to cast, and you need time for them to work.

Finally, while it is possible to reach that many Atonements on a completely static fight, that is actually often not the case. There is an un-quantifiable benefit to being able to not have to root yourself in place for the first 12-13 seconds of this process and being allowed to be a couple of seconds late because mechanics do exist outside of the realm of theoretical possibility.

That, and the idea that in such a case you can just take PI instead is a little silly when ToF is almost always going to be more healing in Mythic progression. Taking a talent that will give you less healing just so that you can use a different stat to make yourself feel better seems silly at best.

[Franarok]

Well, with haste you will do more damage than with mastery. Do damage now is part of the reasons of carry a disc. Also faster radiances and shadow mend.

I even like more crit than mastery since it increase damage (and heals) and affect direct heals like the shield, shadow mend and the useless plea (on terms of healing). So, for me, after haste I will go for crit. Or even try keep a balance between crit and haste.

Damn, even versatility is hand to hand with mastery. The healing done by the damage increasing is not so high as the mastery equivalent... But you are helping with more damage. And the versatility will increase the shield.

Mastery need a rework of being buffed into op levels to be useful. Maybe a mastery that increase our damage could be interesting since will increase out heals and making disc more useful helping on damage

[Deleted]

Well, with haste you will do more damage than with mastery. Do damage now is part of the reasons of carry a disc. Also faster radiances and shadow mend.

I even like more crit than mastery since it increase damage (and heals) and affect direct heals like the shield, shadow mend and the useless plea (on terms of healing). So, for me, after haste I will go for crit. Or even try keep a balance between crit and haste.

Damn, even versatility is hand to hand with mastery. The healing done by the damage increasing is not so high as the mastery equivalent... But you are helping with more damage. And the versatility will increase the shield.

Mastery need a rework of being buffed into op levels to be useful. Maybe a mastery that increase our damage could be interesting since will increase out heals and making disc more useful helping on damage

I'm trying to look for Full Haste or Haste\Crit only equipment, and it's working for me, in both sense (dealing damage for WQ, healing with more damage & less SM)

More haste means also more chance to make crit proc if you think about that, so... i see Haste as a King stat right now, then Crit because is always useful, but Mastery is... meh

[FearDarkness]

Greetings. At the moment I'm getting ready for raids and have some questions I want to clerify.

1) Trinkets. As far as I understand we need a mana regen trinkets for raids. After looking at numbers in spreadsheets I found in this thread I came to conclusion that Alchemist stone + Darkmoon promises are the best choices and they are even better then Mythic EN trinkets. Am I understanding that correctly? Also what trinkets would I want to bring into high Mythic+ dungeons?

2) Raid bosses. I have no experience in playing new Disc Priest in raids. When I read information about it I learned that it can be quite bad on some bosses. I believe that are bosses with constant dmg to random people which we cant react to beforehand. My question is: is it a good idea to swap to holy for these 'bad' bosses? If so it would be great if those who tested EN on beta made a list like 1) Nythendra - bad for us. 2) Ursoc - amazing; and so on.

[Deleted]

By the way haste also scales way better than mastery. Lets consider that you use 7.5 seconds to apply atonements, and then 7.5 seconds to do damage.
We will also only consider atonement healing here. (where mastery should shine most)

Mastery scales linear, as in "if i have 100 points of mastery(150% more atonement healing) then my healing in these 15 seconds gets increased by 150%"
Now haste scales squared instead, meaning that 100% of haste (äquivalent to 150% mastery) grants you 100% more atonements, and 100% more damage in the atonement phase for a total of 300% more healing (200%*200% = 400* the original healing)

This does not consider the bad haste scaling of penenace but then again what total totemic said. With more haste you can sustain penance AND play more mechanics.
These values are obviously extreme and not reachable but they demonstrate the principle

[Franarok]

Damn, even versatility is better than mastery. In addittion to the increase damage and healing, it also increase the absorb from smite (tested with 2 pieces with same int, but one with ver and other with mastery).

Ok, smite absorb is meh, but is somethig xDDD

[davesignal]

Versatility affects everything, I think. It's just the 'more bigger' stat, like a poorly scaling version of intellect with a bit of armor tacked on.

[Supliftz]

Vers doesn't actually scale better than mastery for healing in raids.

[Totaltotemic]

Vers doesn't actually scale better than mastery for healing in raids.

This. It's 233 Mastery for 1% Atonement healing, but 400 Vers for 1% [all healing]. The insignificant addition of the Smite absorb doesn't suddenly make Versatility amazing (although with enough Crit, Vers and Crit do even out at ~14% Crit).

Haste > Crit > Vers is pretty standard as they all affect everything in at least some way and Vers is really just very slightly worse Crit. Mastery is in an entirely different dimension.

For pure HPS gains in a 20 person raid setting, Mastery is just straight-up better than both Crit and Versatility (by about 10%). These are not exact numbers, but let's say 10k Crit increases your healing by 29% (it's not exactly that), Mastery would do the same by about 32%, meaning you would do about ~2.3% more healing by totally dumping all Crit and instead going with Haste/Mastery instead of Haste/Crit.

Now... why do you not really want to do this? First, that Crit that increased your healing by 29% also increased your DPS by 29%, whereas the 32% increased total healing from Mastery is a 0% increase to DPS. So how much value is that DPS really?

I will put forward the assumption that Discipline Priests do 100% of the healing of a "healer" (i.e. are perfectly average, not above or below) in a raid setting, and 33% of the DPS of a DPS role character. We can discuss the implications of such a figure later, but my support is my own healing experience for the former, and a telling exactly 33% reduction in single target damage trinket for Discipline. I believe such a number was chosen because Blizzard thinks that is how much damage Disc will do relative to a DPS spec (so that the trinkets would remain only that much of a percentage increase in damage if they give a flat amount of DPS). Again, don't get too caught up in what this might mean for overall balance, because that's not relevant to this post. Let's just accept that this is a thing for now.


So anyway, a 29% increase [value of Crit] to 33% of a DPS would be 9.57% of a "DPS" in extra damage, as opposed to 2.3% more of a "healer's" healing [difference of taking Mastery over Crit].

The former would be a 7.2% increase in "total output", while the latter would be a 1.7% increase in "total output", which is a very significant difference in Crit's favor. A simpler way to put it would be that Mastery is a 1.5% increase to ~75% of healing, whereas Crit is a 1% increase to 100% of [total output] which is 133%. It's still close, but slightly in Crit's favor (and we've already established Versatility as being relative to how much Crit you have to determine its relative worth).


So anyway, TL;DR not increasing damage is kind of a big deal when it comes to Mastery, and the amount that it is better for raid healing is a very, very small amount.

[anon5123]

Overloaded with Light 2 stronk

[Deleted]

Overloaded with Light 2 stronk

- You get it once in a dungeon, max.
- You can't plan for it.
- You lose it if you die or log out.
- It won't work in raids.
- Odyn.

Isn't there enough to talk about besides calling for nerfs for fun abilities?

[Deleted]

Those weights are incredibly far off. Weights also depend heavily on your stats. All our stats interact in a multiplicative way with each other and adding a point in a stat increases the weights of every other stat, while not effecting the weight for that stat itself.

It's pretty much impossible for crit to be twice as good as versatility. 1% versatility does pretty much the same as 1% crit which requires 400 and 350 rating respectively, the gap is not that big. And the gap only becomes smaller the more crit you have.

Here is a very basic calculator for weights where you can input your stats, although it isn't a proper sim and doesn't consider a lot of factors (especially with haste) it should give you a rough idea. https://jsfiddle.net/qu3Lv6o1/

Was looking for a while for some statweights but the calculator suggested confuses me:
My stats are:
var intellect = 29564;
var h = 9808;
var c = 2997;
var m = 4384;
var v = 274;
var atonementpercent = 0.5;

Which seems to tell me that my statweights atm are:
Int: 4.027728323155316
Haste: 2.814497497980483
Crit: 3.1338200422469527
Mast: 2.332501569922897
Vers: 2.9566410126863047

- making haste worse than versatility? Does it mean I went overboard with haste or the calculator is kinda off?

[laplacedemon]

Seems like if you get a 'Power of the Dark Side' buff while channeling Penance, instead of buffing your next Penance, buff gets consumed instantly and only remaining ticks get the benefit. I wonder if it's intended or a bug.

[Deleted]

Was looking for a while for some statweights but the calculator suggested confuses me:
My stats are:
var intellect = 29564;
var h = 9808;
var c = 2997;
var m = 4384;
var v = 274;
var atonementpercent = 0.5;

Which seems to tell me that my statweights atm are:
Int: 4.027728323155316
Haste: 2.814497497980483
Crit: 3.1338200422469527
Mast: 2.332501569922897
Vers: 2.9566410126863047

- making haste worse than versatility? Does it mean I went overboard with haste or the calculator is kinda off?

Actually you didn't go overboard with haste as much as went "underboard" with other stats, in particular versatility. This calcuator looks at the derivates of your HPS in which all stats are connected with cross terms. The moment you neglect one stat, it will become stronger while stacking a stat weakens its value. The point this happens depend on what is commonly called "stat weights".

So yes, when looking from a pure (averaged!) HPS perspective, versatility is currently slightly stronger for you.

[Disciplined]

Was looking for a while for some statweights but the calculator suggested confuses me:
My stats are:
var intellect = 29564;
var h = 9808;
var c = 2997;
var m = 4384;
var v = 274;
var atonementpercent = 0.5;

Which seems to tell me that my statweights atm are:
Int: 4.027728323155316
Haste: 2.814497497980483
Crit: 3.1338200422469527
Mast: 2.332501569922897
Vers: 2.9566410126863047

- making haste worse than versatility? Does it mean I went overboard with haste or the calculator is kinda off?

Getting 30% haste does improve the value of your other stats by 30%. The only thing with haste is that how good is it really depends on the situation.
What does 100% crit do? Doubles your output
What does 100% versa do? Doubles your output
What does 100% haste do? Speed up everything x2, doubling your output. Except it doesn't speed up everything x2, and these things arn't considered in that because it's too complex to put a weight on it, atonement duration isn't halved, giving you more time to cast other spells, same goes for swpain and mindbender, they both are effected positively with haste. Your other cooldowns don't scale well with haste though, you'll still be casting the same exact amount of penances as with 0 haste. Then there are factors like mana, sometimes it won't matter, sometimes it will. Can't really put a accurate number on haste.

Also i forgot we had 6% base crit, which increase the value of the other stats

[Deleted]

Actually you didn't go overboard with haste as much as went "underboard" with other stats, in particular versatility. This calcuator looks at the derivates of your HPS in which all stats are connected with cross terms. The moment you neglect one stat, it will become stronger while stacking a stat weakens its value. The point this happens depend on what is commonly called "stat weights".

So yes, when looking from a pure (averaged!) HPS perspective, versatility is currently slightly stronger for you.

Well, only so many stats in my current gear, and I actively chased pieces with haste - which obviously meant i left other stats aside. This is why I wanted some statweights, to know how to balance things . I'll try applying these weights (with a grain of salt), and get more crit? As it looks like the highest on my list.

[Deleted]

I'll try applying these weights (with a grain of salt), and get more crit? As it looks like the highest on my list.

I'm currently at 9677 haste, 7093 crit, 1203 mastery (weapon+legendary, would try to get rid of it otherwise) and 0 versatility and it plays extremely well in heroics/mythics and solo. So yes, I would say try to swap some mastery for crit.

[anon5123]

- You get it once in a dungeon, max.
- You can't plan for it.
- You lose it if you die or log out.
- It won't work in raids.
- Odyn.

Isn't there enough to talk about besides calling for nerfs for fun abilities?

Why so serious?

I wasn't calling for nerfs.

Calm the fuck down.