Schism has no real impact on movement because you’re just replacing cast-time spells with it. At best you could argue that if you’re constantly at a dead-run, Schism is useless because you aren’t using any cast-time spells. However, what we’re primarily discussing is replacing part of a Power Word: Radiance buried in the middle of a wall of Power Word: Radiance that need to be cast in rapid succession. So saying “but Schism means you can’t move!” sounds like a particularly strange argument since you can’t move anyway using that model.
I think in dungeons Schism can be problematic for this very reason - every bit of non-mobile cast time you have is often consumed with Shadow Mend. But the entire point of the healing model you’re championing is to generate aggregate healing while not concerning yourself with keeping people alive - letting the other healers worry about spot-healing so you can sit in an ideal inflection point and maximize aggregate healing.
Then quantify it. I did and I came to the opposite conclusion.The mana burned with 3 extra atonements (which would just be 1 more PW: R) would be worth it IMO.
I mentioned mana in an entirely different paragraph that wasn’t even part of the bullet list containing the Plea/Smite example. The very beginning of that particular bullet read ‘disregarding mana’. So it’s not unreasonable to expect that someone wouldn’t blunder in without reading and say “but what about mana!”.You flat out mentioned mana when you explained above so I considered it on the table for debate.
This is a qualitative argument for PW:S. But you need to be aware of the quantitative repercussions. In terms of total damage healed/mitigated, PW:S isn’t significantly better than Plea but - at low numbers of Atonement - is significantly more expensive. You’re probably keeping up Atonement on the tanks - are you sufficiently worried that your full health tank is going to get hit for his entire health bar (but not his entire health bar + 2%) that it’s worth spending the mana?Well of course, but PW: S is just more valuable for reasons I said above. The bulk of Disc healing comes from atonement in raids, Smend in dungeons, I'm not debating that. The true strength of PW: S over Plea is inflating someone's health pool, we can look at it overall, but if it saves someone's life in a pinch then it's more valuable than anything else we could have casted.
I think it would be clear that, in most situations, we’re not talking about staving off imminent death but simply adding some extra healing to the raid. Even it’s not clear, to make the argument you’re trying to make you first need to assert a value for ‘shielding over healing’.
Theorycraft is a precursor to any rational debate. Before you can hold an opinion about how to play the spec, first you have to understand the mechanics of the spec. That’s why we theorycraft.What's the point of not being able to use a real raid scenario in your logic? Every other disc discussion I've seen at least takes it into consideration. We can't theorycraft and debate in a vacuum.
Later, once people understand the mathematical origins of all these elements, only then do they form opinions and test them. What I’m seeing is that some Discipline Priests skipped the entire “understand how the spec works” part and just jumped straight to the “form opinions” step - and are thus unable to actually test anything.
Bear in mind, I have zero vested interest in the outcome here. I could care less how people decide to play their Discipline Priests. I’m not advertising my stream or website. I’ve got entire classrooms of people who think I’m pretty damn smart, so I don’t really need the ego boost of random Internet strangers praising my wisdom. My only interest is in getting it right. I was actually surprised when I started looking at rotations and saw Schism saving mana over Castigation - it was (as I stated) a counter-intuitive result that I had to figure out after-the-fact.