[7.0] Legion Discipline Priest Guide and Discussion

[Djriff]

We don't judge a player based on progression here.

To answer your questions,

1) Yes, the mana cost outweighs the benefits.
2) If your atonement is too late, then you were too slow. However if your group has strong spot healers (like a resto druid) then I honestly wouldn't worry about them and save your mana. I personally keep PW: S on CD, always good to throw on the tank.
3) It's better imo to let it drop and just prep for atonement healing. You're making the right choice.
4) I've seen some wild answers out there in regard to this, I don't have it so I can't give you an answer on that.
5) I think total has a trinket list floating around somewhere.
6) The fact that you understand that Flintoid's healing method is flawed and that his logs are skewed should answer that. It's not exactly viable, but at the same time if it's what your raid needs you to do, do it. Since you have strong spot healers already, this won't be an issue for you and you should stick with prepping atonements and healing in bursts.
7) That DPS is very low for a mythic +, it sounds like you hit the wall as a group. As shadow I pull ~220k DPS and I'm usually 2nd or 3rd DPS on serpent, and 350k+ on wrath (execute fight FTW). For mythic dungeons your healing style will be completely different from what you do in a raid. Essentially you'll be spamming Shadowmend to keep people topped off and DPS when you can. It helps loads if you spec into grace and ToF as it can boost your healing when you really need it. I think you could push higher in mythics, just have to adjust some talents and healing style.

Also as a tip, turn off your healing meter if you have one, especially for raids. If at the end of the fight you killed the boss and no one died due to a lack of healing, you did your job. Use a website like WCL and post here to see how you can heal better, but you have more important things to worry about mid pull.

[Saiyoran]

150k hps in raid (where I need to spend some time recovering mana and spreading atonement) seems a bit unreachable for me at the moment. Would you mind sharing some logs? I really do want to believe you (as it means disc can do quite higher dps than I currently do and I just need to practice). However so far every single priest who claimed these numbers was not able to back it up.

Only public logs are shown here [1], but it seems to me you would compete for number 1 spot. If we look at cenarius, everything above 90k dps would put you in top 300. Granted I don know you, you may indeed be that good.
[/url]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...4120487/latest

Those are my parses from first week. Obviously I'm not even that great at Disc (check my Ilgynoth parse rofl), but my dps is above 100k on every fight except Ilgynoth which I majorly fucked up on and Cenarius where I died around 15-20%. There's also a TON of room to improve here, like I said I was still getting used to the fights and disc healing in raids in general, since I spent 99% of my beta testing in 5mans with a different talent setup.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking...est#metric=hps

There's healing, which you can see is squarely middle of the pack or worse among Discs (except Ilgynoth RIP). We 6 healed so that accounts for some of it, I also didn't know the fights which is a huge disadvantage to Disc since most of your healing is proactive, and I spent some fights trying to minmax DPS by spamming Smite and being irresponsible with mana, and others letting myself sit on empty globals and then attempting to snipe the big burst mechanics (in mythics that will be coordinated but I wanted to get a feel for it). Again, I died on Cenarius and still ended up upwards of 230k hps, I was closer to 280k when I died as far as I remember.

Overall, these are pretty mediocre logs, and they're definitely breaking 100k dps/150k hps in most fights. Hope that helps.

[darkphiba]

Apologies if i missed something in previous pages, the guide or other places i may have not spotted.

Is there any current spreadsheet being shared through google docs? im assuming people have them somewhere, i know not everyone likes sharing their spreadsheets

No worries if not, the only one i can seem to find is from 2014, and a little out of date is all.

[Izzirez]

4) I've seen some wild answers out there in regard to this, I don't have it so I can't give you an answer on that.

In my signature is my mana regen trinket spreadsheet with the math for Amalgam's. It is based off of only PWS for my values, so its potentially more valuable if you use SMend, provided you don't refresh the buffs. It also scales with haste and doomsayer traits, which I have available in my spreadsheet.

[anon5123]

I'm getting some decent mileage out of an 855 Swarming Plaguehive, it's usually around 6-8% of my damage on individual encounters, and around 5-7% total damage throughout a dungeon.

Also, just got an 840 Heightened Senses from the mission table cache...is that any good?

[Totaltotemic]

I'm getting some decent mileage out of an 855 Swarming Plaguehive, it's usually around 6-8% of my damage on individual encounters, and around 5-7% total damage throughout a dungeon.

Also, just got an 840 Heightened Senses from the mission table cache...is that any good?

You got a log to point to for that? Unless something has changed it shouldn't be breaking more than ~3% of your DPS and I'm curious to see what happened.

[Djriff]

You got a log to point to for that? Unless something has changed it shouldn't be breaking more than ~3% of your DPS and I'm curious to see what happened.

@Swol noticed some stealth nerfs to some non caster trinkets today. Maybe there was some buffs for casters too?

[anon5123]

You got a log to point to for that? Unless something has changed it shouldn't be breaking more than ~3% of your DPS and I'm curious to see what happened.

Was just a regular mythic dungeon run. Checked my total damage afterward (yes I remember to reset at the beginning of the run) and Plague Swarm was 5.8% of my damage done.

All I've got as I post this is a couple of norm Ursoc wipes, one 2:34 and the other 2:57.

[Totaltotemic]

Oh yeah that's not the trinket being good. That's just absurdly low damage for a Disc Priest (55k DPS in the 2nd picture).

[anon5123]

Well yeah, if I go full ham on DPS I'm going to be OOM when the boss is still at 50%.

And there was only 1 other healer, so I can't DPS all that much to begin with.

I'm still completely baffled at how I'm burning through mana so fast as Disc. I have 0 mana issues as Holy, but as Disc, I can't do anything but Plea and Smite or I'll OOM myself.

[Totaltotemic]

You do 80k+ DPS just using Penance, Mindbender, and Halo on CD and using your DoT. Running out of mana without doing decent healing and doing less than 60k DPS are probably linked.

[anon5123]

Running out of mana without doing decent healing and doing less than 60k DPS are probably linked.

"without doing decent healing"

I was around 220k HPS, a good deal ahead of the other healer, who was a Paladin.

Also not sure how doing less healing and less DPS equates to OOMing. Explain? Judging from other posts I'm seeing around the official forums, I'm not the only one having mana issues.

[Totaltotemic]

People have issues with mana because they are bad at healing, not even just Disc. I don't really engage in the "how do I not run out of mana" conversation anymore because I tried that a few times and many players just refuse to look at the obvious answer, which is not using so much mana. Doesn't even have anything to do with Disc.

Anyway, the point was that the Swarming Plaguehive trinket is still not good. It will not do 6% of a Disc's DPS unless that Disc player is doing something fundamentally very wrong. It didn't get stealth buffed and its numbers are still the same as they were 2 months ago, but if you fail to do normal amounts of DPS, something that adds a flat amount will appear higher than it really ought to be.

[Vampiregenesis]

Im not sure how iam supposed to play as disc , does anyone have a good vid to take some ideas? i want to try it for first time on the raid today since we farm the boss , how do you handle a fight like cenarius where the raid takes consistent dmg? when you do you cast radiance? what attonement spells do you use and when?

[Krbl]

Watching replays on Warcraftlogs of the highest ranked discs helped me a lot.

[Deleted]

Vial of the Nightmare Fog does @5% of my healing usually, with very low overhealing.
I continue to suck at Ursoc >.<. I'm not amazing at anything but I literally suck at a fight that should be good for me.

I also feel like my dps could be higher. I need better uptime on SWP. Do you tend to use Mindbender on cd more or less for mana or keep it for burst dmg?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...4&type=healing
Stuff just seems to get healed up in seconds.

[Vampiregenesis]

Watching replays on Warcraftlogs of the highest ranked discs helped me a lot.

Nice , warcraftlogs are helpfull indeed , didnt know about that site.

From what i see disc is a smitebot with an occasional plea , shield on cd and halo , they would use radiance once every now and then , they would use radiance on super obvious bosses like ursoc but none on a fight like cenarius , interesting overall.

[Deleted]

Nice , warcraftlogs are helpfull indeed , didnt know about that site.

From what i see disc is a smitebot with an occasional plea , shield on cd and halo , they would use radiance once every now and then , they would use radiance on super obvious bosses like ursoc but none on a fight like cenarius , interesting overall.

Not a representative of good disc priests myself, but pretty sure we're not smite bots. Smite is actually our lowest priority in terms of what we cast.
Mostly we consist of 2 kinds of "phases" for healing - a conservation one in which we keep atonement on targets that need healing and dps, and one in which we prepare for incoming raid dmg by building 12-15 atonements and following up with penance/mindbender/LW for burst healing. Radiance is used within mana limits, but it is used a fair bit in raids. Plea is used as much as its mana cost doesn't outweigh radiance. PWS is on cd, Penance is generally on cd. The amount of dps we dish outside needing to heal through it depends on how much we try to conserve mana.

In some way, disc feels to me like the arcane mage of healers.

edit: also, no radiance on cenarius? where did you see that? Top parse for cenarius hc disc casted 35 of them. Considering the mana cost, that is a lot.

[Krbl]

Yes @Saphiramoon, I absolutely agree, disc healing consists of the two phases you describe.

The challenge is to figure out the right moment to start blanketing the raid with atonements and then following up with burst damage.

You want to use PI and MB to burst in the atonement phase, but you also want to use them pretty much every time they come of CD, as it is a DPS/HPS loss otherwise.

If you watch a replay look for the timing of the atonement phases in relation to boss abilities.

If you aren't puging, you should also know which 3 min CDs other healers use when - no point in starting an atonement phase if your druid is about to pop tranquility.

[anon5123]

People have issues with mana because they are bad at healing, not even just Disc.

I've been maining healing priest since BC, so...no, I don't think I'm "bad at healing".

I don't really engage in the "how do I not run out of mana" conversation anymore because I tried that a few times and many players just refuse to look at the obvious answer, which is not using so much mana.

"mana problems? just use less mana!"

wow so helpful

The problem is, you can't "cast less" when there's only 2 healers. What, am I supposed to just slack and let the other healer work harder?